ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 IN ACCOUNT WITH 
 
 RELIGION 
 
 EDWARD MORTIMER CHAPMAN 
 
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 OF THE 
 
 University of California, 
 
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 ENGLISH LITERATURE IN ACCOUNT 
 WITH RELIGION. Large cr. 8vo, $2.00 «^/. 
 Postage extra. 
 
 THE DYNAMIC OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 A Study of the Vital and Permanent Element 
 in the Christian Religion. i2mo, J1.25 n^i. 
 Postage 12 cents. 
 
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 IN ACCOUNT WITH RELIGION 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 IN ACCOUNT WITH 
 
 RELIGION 
 
 1800-1900 
 
 BT 
 
 EDWARD MORTIMER CHAPMAN 
 
 BOSTON Airo NEW TOEK 
 
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 
 (ttie Stibet^tie pte^^ Cambniige 
 
 1910 
 
COPYRIGHT, T9IO, BY EDWARD M. CHAPMAN 
 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
 Published March iqio 
 
<Lt-< 
 
 To 
 R. C. 
 
 AND 
 
 M. G. C. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 Many writers of late years have undertaken to ex- 
 pound the ^ religion ' of this poet or to define the 
 * faith ' of that novelist. I have no charter to essay 
 so high an adventure ; but have tried rather to set 
 forth something of the debt which Literature owes 
 to Religion for its subjects, its language, its antag- 
 onisms and inspirations, as well as in many cases 
 for the training of its writers ; while on the other 
 hand I have wished to suggest the debt which Re- 
 ligion as indisputably owes to Literature for the 
 extension of its influence and the humanizing of 
 its ideals. My treatment of Religion has therefore 
 been very broad and quite as really objective as 
 subjective — to use a pair of threadbare adjectives 
 which have been denied entrance to the following 
 chapters. 
 
 Two lectures delivered at Yale in 1906, and en- 
 titled " The Influence of Religion upon English 
 Literature during the Nineteenth Century," con- 
 tained the germ of this book and were indeed a sort 
 of prefatory syllabus ; but no page of them is re- 
 produced in it. Portions of the Introduction and of 
 Chapter XIV have appeared in Reviews, but these 
 also have been recast. 
 
 The form of certain words upon the following 
 
 21CG83 
 
▼iii PREFACE 
 
 pages will be found to accord itself to the second- 
 ary rather than to the primary spelling of our Amer- 
 ican dictionaries. Should any friend committed to 
 ^Spelling Reform' discover this and be 'vext/ I 
 shall be, so far forth, sorry. The choice of these 
 forms has not been made in mere gratification of a 
 whim or with any desire to seem singular ; but with 
 a very strong conviction that unless the freedom to 
 use an elder spelling be sometimes asserted it is 
 likely soon to be denied. I say an elder spelling, 
 not a better, because in determining the orthogra- 
 phy of many of these words, individual taste seems 
 to me to have, within due limits, a perfect right to 
 consideration. Freedom of thought and a more or 
 less gracious refusal to be bound by the dogmas of 
 mere authority have ever been chief characteristics 
 of vital religion and of enduring literature. Neither 
 has felt, however, at least for very long, that in 
 order to serve to-morrow it was necessary to con- 
 temn yesterday. 
 
 So much time and pains have gone to the verifi- 
 cation of quotation, reference, and allusion that I 
 venture to hope — rather against hope, to be sure 
 — that they may be found free from errors grave 
 enough to mislead the reader or to embarrass the 
 writer. 
 
 Since some of the later chapters were written 
 Death has been urgent with many eminent and well- 
 beloved names in them ; and Meredith, Swinburne, 
 Francis Thompson, and John Davidson in England, 
 
PREFACE ix 
 
 with Sarah Orne Jewett, R. W. GUder, and T. T. 
 Munger in America, must be added to his roll. 
 Though dead they yet speak with Hving voice, how- 
 ever, and I have not, in general, felt obhged to 
 change my mode of reference to them. 
 
 E. M. C. 
 
 Old Lyme, Connecticut, 
 25 January t 1910. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. Religion and Litebatube. Inteoddction • . 1 
 
 II. The Dawn of the New Day 30 
 
 CJowper — Crabbe — Bums — Blake. 
 
 III. Sons of the Morning 61 
 
 Wordsworth and Coleri<^e. 
 
 IV. The Apostles of Revolt 91 
 
 Byron and Shelley. 
 
 V. The " Edinburgh *' and the ** Quarterly " . 127 
 
 The Reviewers of the " Edinburgh," " Quarterly," " Black- 
 wood's," and " Cockney " groups. 
 
 VI. Clapham and Oxford 161 
 
 Evangelical and Tractarian — The Clapham Sect — Thorn- 
 ton — Wilberf orce — Milner — Venn — Lord Teignmouth 
 
 — Henry Martyn — Zachary Macaulay — James Stephen 
 and his Family — The Trevelyans — Keble — Newman — 
 Tractarian Literature. 
 
 VII. Eluah and Elisha 199 
 
 Carlyle and Ruskin. 
 
 VIII. The Masters of Fiction. I 236 
 
 Dependence of Humour upon Faith — Maria Edgeworth — 
 Jane Austen — Scott — Cooper — Marryat — Poe — The 
 Brontes — Hawthorne. 
 
 IX. The Masters of Fiction. II 272 
 
 Dickens — Thackeray — Bulwer-Lytton — Mrs. Gaskell 
 
 — The Kingsleys — Charles Reade — Trollope — Gteorge 
 Eliot. 
 
zii CONTENTS 
 
 X. The New Radicalism 311 
 
 Priestley — Godwin — Bentham — James Mill — John Stuart 
 Mill— Cobbett— Elliott— Cooper— Mazzini— The Broad 
 Churchmen — Maurice — Horace Bushnell — Martineau — 
 Emerson — The New England Poetg. 
 
 XI. The Great Twin Brethren 349 
 
 Tennyson and Browning. 
 
 'XII. Darwin and his Ploughshare 394 
 
 Romanes and his Experience — Charles Darwin — Huxley 
 and the Agnostics — Agassiz — Gray — Le Conte — Fiske 
 
 — Drummond. 
 
 XIII. The Doubters and the Mystics 423 
 
 Songs of Doubt and Disillusion generally sung by Young 
 Men — Clough — Matthew Arnold — The Relation between 
 Doubter and Mystic — The True Mystic — Christina Ros- 
 setti — D. G. Rossetti— William Morris — Edward Fitz- 
 Gerald. 
 
 XIV. The Heyday of Minor Poetry 460 
 
 A Dubious Title introduced by Two Great Names — George 
 Meredith — Swinburne — James Thomson and *' The 
 City of Dreadful Night" — John Davidson — " Bard 
 of the Dimbo-Vitza " — Henley — W. V. Moody — Rolle- 
 ston — Austin Dobson — Mrs. Meynall — C. G. D. Rob- 
 erts — Francis Thompson — Walt Whitman — William 
 Watson — Stephen Phillips — T. E. Brown — Stevenson 
 
 — Kipling. 
 
 XV. The Newer Fiction. I 495 
 
 The Reaction of Philosophy upon the Historian — Upon the 
 Novelist — Possible Unreality of Realism — The ' Reli- 
 gious ' Novel — Sunday School Books — The Novel of 
 Religion and Manners — The Novel of Manners — The 
 * Early Christian ' Novel — The Theological Novel — George 
 Maedonald — " Robert Elsmere " — " Ships that Pass in 
 the Night " — " The Story of an African Farm " — " Mark 
 Rutherford" — The 'Social Problem' Novel — George 
 Gissing. 
 
 XVI. The Newer Fiction. II 533 
 
 The Novel of Life as touched by Faith or Doubt — Mere- 
 dith — Stevenson — Kipling — Thomas Hardy — Eden 
 Phillpotts — Conclusion. 
 
 Index 563 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 IN ACCOUNT WITH RELIGION 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 IN ACCOUNT WITH RELIGION 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 BELIGION AND LITERATURE 
 
 Mazzini, upon being asked what he would have 
 taught in school, is said to have replied : " Some 
 knowledge of Astronomy. A man learns nothing if 
 he has n't learned to wonder, and Astronomy better 
 than any science teaches him something of the 
 mystery and grandeur of the universe." ^ 
 
 He spoke with the insight and the exaggeration 
 of genius. As a suggestion his dictum is profoundly 
 true ; and its truth is as significant for criticism as 
 for education. Great literature takes account of the 
 Universe with its mystery and grandeur; not of 
 course in any pedantic or grandiloquent fashion, 
 but with an implicit realization of it. The genuine 
 poet or creative novelist always writes with a keen 
 sense of the interrelation of events. To say this is 
 in no sense to imply that literature is usually the 
 product of a bland and contented acceptance of the 
 scheme of things; great literature almost never 
 
 * Letters of J. R. Greeny Leslie Stephen, editor, p. 326. 
 
2 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 springs of such lineage, but it none the less relates 
 itself vitally to the scheme of things ; it may be by 
 way of acceptance and illustration ; it may be by way 
 of refusal and revolt ; it may be even more often by 
 way of quest and search and wonder. A small man 
 is prone to be effusive in emphasizing his acceptance 
 and professing his allegiance. The sense of the uni- 
 versal finds quick and cheap utterance at his lips. 
 The great man is less easily moved to confession of 
 the faith which animates him because of its very 
 greatness and his sense of the world's inevitableness 
 and mystery. " I accept the Universe," cried Mar- 
 garet Fuller in a moment of ecstasy. They told 
 Carlyle. " Gad ! " growled he, with characteristic 
 grimness; ^^Gad! she'd better." 
 
 In all this the path of literature lies parallel to 
 that of religion. They are old and dear companions 
 — brethren indeed of one blood ; not always agree- 
 ing, to be sure ; squabbling rather in true brotherly 
 fashion now and then; occasionally falling out 
 very seriously and bitterly ; but still interdependent 
 and necessary to each other. It is my purpose in 
 the following chapters to illustrate this interrelation 
 from the literary history of the last century. This 
 seems worth doing for several reasons : in the first 
 place the period covered by our proposed study was 
 in a very notable degree a period of unrest and 
 transition in religious thought. The third and per- 
 haps most characteristic quarter of the century 
 might properly be designated, indeed, as a time of 
 
RELIGION AND LITERATURE 3 
 
 theological revolution. The foundations of faith 
 were shaken. Sober-minded men to whom the past 
 was sacred, the long-established institutions of the 
 present dear, and who felt an unselfish responsibility 
 for the future, looked out upon a scene which gave 
 them grave concern. Even some champions of the 
 new order of things in the realm of thought, grew 
 serious as they contemplated the possible extent of 
 their own influence. They were by no means men of 
 destructive habit or ambition ; but it seemed for a 
 time during those five and twenty years as though 
 the negative result of their work might prove to be 
 so mordant and far-reaching as to preclude the 
 chance of reconstruction in the realms of ethics 
 and religion. The last quarter of a century was 
 characterized by a temper somewhat less truculent 
 on the one side and less anxious on the other. 
 Neither the priests of ^ natural ' science nor those 
 of ^ revealed ' religion were quite so much inclined 
 to dogmatism in their mutual affirmations and de- 
 nials. Thus, by the year of grace 1900, it had be- 
 come pretty evident that religion's lease of life was 
 to be a longer one than the secularist of 1875 had 
 been disposed to admit. 
 
 This general agreement that religion is likely to 
 prove a permanent concern of mankind constitutes 
 a second reason for undertaking such a study as I 
 propose. Instead of attempting to explain religion 
 away, the scientific spirit of to-day would seem to 
 require that we observe it, that we make record of 
 
4 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 its experience, that we account for it at least to the 
 extent of tracing its secondary causes, and that we 
 make some attempt to determine its probable course 
 in the future. 
 
 It is to be noted, furthermore, that a study of 
 the religious import of English literature during 
 this extraordinary transition century is likely to 
 prove of especial significance. In the first place the 
 range and wealth of this literature have been enor- 
 mous — greater probably than those of any other 
 period in any language ; though the Elizabethan 
 age may have surpassed it in the intrinsic worth of 
 its relatively restricted product, and Goethe's mar- 
 vellously long day suf&ced for a work by himself and 
 his contemporaries of two generations comparable 
 to it. In the second place, this English literature 
 has been a literature of the people in a new and 
 significant measure. It has appealed to a public 
 numerically greater than any other literature has 
 known ; and that public has been avid and acquisi- 
 tive of knowledge in a unique degree. A very large 
 and appreciative section of this public, distinctly 
 the most alert and plastic portion of it, has spent 
 the century in one of the noblest of human adven- 
 tures — the building of a nation. It has conquered 
 a wilderness ; founded and brought to maturity 
 commonwealths of vast extent, population, and 
 wealth ; fought the greatest of civil wars for the 
 sake of an idea, and survived the conflict because 
 of that idea's vital force ; devoted itself with un- 
 
RELIGION AND LITERATURE 5 
 
 precedented effectiveness to the development of the 
 natural resources of a peculiarly endowed country ; 
 and, with it all, striven, as no people ever strove be- 
 fore, so to organize its experience and knowledge as 
 to make them available for its children by a system 
 of free public education. It was inevitable that this 
 effort should often be as crude as it was honest and 
 eager, but none the less it has succeeded in making 
 a multitude of keen and facile minds amenable to 
 the influences of literature. One would go too far 
 in claiming that the public-school system of America 
 has acquainted its pupils with literature; and of 
 course it has not bred a literature. Its failure in 
 these respects for several generations was probably 
 unavoidable. The Day's Work has generally been 
 too ready, near, and appeaHng to the young Ameri- 
 can to permit his mind to turn in upon itself. He 
 quickly forms the busy habit, and literature is jeal- 
 ous of preoccupation by so-called practical matters. 
 A thoughtful observer is the more reconciled to 
 this condition of affairs, however, as he remembers 
 the shallow and silly cry which has arisen from time 
 to time in America for a distinctively national lit- 
 erature. Attempts have been made — once or twice, 
 I believe, by teachers in universities — to indicate 
 the characteristics which should differentiate the 
 American from the English literary product, as 
 though the spirit of Truth could become the crea- 
 ture of custom-house, tariff, and provincial preju- 
 dice. America can afford to wait and learn until 
 
 I 
 
6 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 the brief day of such treason to her own past is 
 over — a past which gives her part and lot in every 
 century of English literature save one, and waits 
 to give her an abundant share in that if she will 
 claim it. Nineteenth-century literature was unique 
 in its privilege of immediate appeal to a world-wide 
 public, without necessity of suffering any sea-change 
 or paying tribute of translation at any boundary. 
 Britain has naturally been the great contributor to 
 its volume, but she has neither claimed nor wished 
 to claim any exclusive sovereignty over sound Eng- 
 lish speech. The worth of Emerson, Poe, and Whit- 
 man has been as generously appraised in England 
 as in America ; while Carlyle, Ruskin, and Brown- 
 ing have found as quick response here as at home. 
 It is therefore scarcely necessary to say that in the 
 chapters which follow I shall consider English lit- 
 erature as connoting the product of a great language 
 and a great religious, social, and political experience, 
 common in its essence to the whole Anglo-Ameri- 
 can race. " Cursed be he that removeth his neigh- 
 bour's landmark," saith the Deuteronomist. Thrice 
 cursed let him be who would reenact Babel, and 
 introduce schism into his mother-tongue. 
 
 An exercise in definition is no part of my present 
 purpose, but it is necessary here to indicate the 
 scope and range which will be permitted to some 
 words of frequent occurrence in our inquiry. The 
 etymology of ^religion' still eludes us. Cicero 
 preferred the derivation from relegere, to read over 
 
/ 
 
 RELIGION AND LITERATURE 
 
 again, as children might con a lesson.* Modern 
 scholars like better to connect the word with reli- 
 gare, to bind, in the effort to find a definition and 
 a sanction. Religion is that bond which connects 
 our lives with God, and lays the sense of obligation^ 
 upon us. ^11 great words of this sort are certain 
 to increase and enrich their content as human 
 experience pays tribute to them ; and ' religion ' 
 is a notable example of such growth. Upon the"/ 
 one side it looks toward conduct ; upon another ) 
 toward observance or worship. Within, its office^ 
 is to search the heart, that it may remain contrite 
 and humble, and at the same time to uplift and 
 cheer it by assurance of life's kinship with the di- 
 vine. Thus, as the thought and life of last century 
 developed, * reHgion ' in an increasing degree came 
 to signify that faith or experience which should 
 suf&ce to make life coherent and harmonious. Re- 
 ligion not only links man to God ; it binds the in- 
 cidents of his experience into a vital whole — a true 
 " bundle of life," to use the quaint Scripture phrase. 
 While taking account of all the phenomena of the 
 inward realm of thouo:ht and the outward realm of 
 conduct, it insists upon the possibiHty and the worth 
 of a true consistency. 
 
 Religion is the enemy of all discord except such 
 temporary unrest as the ploughshare causes in its 
 preparation of the encrusted and fallow field for 
 fruitful n ess. It convicts of sin without troubling 
 
 1^ Cf. New English Dictionary (Murray's). 
 
8 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 itself overmuch about definitions of sin. With a 
 singular persistence it holds a mirror up to man's 
 nature, in which he cannot help but see the things 
 that mar his individual and social peace. While en- 
 gaged in such duty, Eeligion's ears know very well 
 the old cry of man's demoniac seizures : " What 
 have we to do with thee " ; yet she is not disheart- 
 ened. Quite as well she knows the obduracies and 
 obstinacies behind which men hide themselves ; the 
 superstitions which creep in at the window when 
 she is banished from the door ; all the infelicity, 
 pettiness, and hypocrisy which mar life's wholeness. 
 She has reason for discouragement in view of the 
 sad imperfection of her best human instruments; 
 yet with divine humility she still works cheerfully 
 with obdurate materials. Her worst enemies are too 
 often those of her own household; yet she outlives 
 their misrepresentations. She speaks many lan- 
 guages ; visualizes herself in many forms ; by a mys- 
 terious alchemy transmutes base metal into gold; 
 feeds upon persecution ; makes allies of those who 
 threaten the sources of her very existence, and so 
 endures with something of the power of an endless 
 life. Like the Psalmist she is a wonder unto many ; 
 a reproach to some, an object of wistful but hope- 
 less desire to others, a joy to such as heed her mes- 
 sage ; at least these so report, and with such per- 
 sistence and conviction as to make it worth while 
 to inquire a little more closely into the basis of 
 their confidence. 
 
/ 
 
 RELIGION AND LITERATURE 9 
 
 When we ask for a succinct statement of this 
 message of wholeness and peace, our ears may well 
 be deafened by the multitude, volume, and seeming 
 conflict of the replies. The chorus of believers is ill 
 trained in concerted effort. Yet some things sound 
 reasonably clear and intelligible. 
 
 Keligion believes in and proclaims the Universe. 
 All her life is based upon faith in cosmos rather 
 ihan chaos. There is a scheme and plan in Man 
 and Nature, so that the two belong to each other ; 
 and though this plan transcends a man's ability to 
 grasp and subdue it to his purposes, because it is 
 so great, it is still cognate to his mind ; it is amen- 
 able to expression in terms of thought, so far as 
 experience can compass it. Phenomena do not put 
 us to permanent confusion. They mystify us often 
 enough, but it is with a challenge tot)ur curiosity 
 and spirit of adventure rather than with a tyran- 
 nous and insane denial. All our experience leads 
 us to live upon the hypothesis that there is a reason 
 and a cause for every event — a cause which may 
 conceivably be made manifest, and, if manifested, 
 will prove to be in harmony with the scheme of 
 causation underlying other phenomena. 
 
 This is Keligion's way of saying that the Uni- 
 verse has a Soul ; and that at the source of things 
 there dwells a Vital Force, of such nature that all 
 its outflowings and ongoings belong together, even 
 when men are unable to perceive their relation. 
 Yet the fact that man can perceive so much coher- 
 
10 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 ence, and that, as he pursues his research into the 
 world without and his own heart within, the field 
 of intelligibility constantly grows, is a matter of 
 prime significance to him. It means nothing less 
 than that this Cosmic Power is mirrored in his own 
 soul. He discovers that the little world of his per- 
 sonal experience is cognate to the great world of 
 universal experience, and that while he is in one 
 sense the product of Nature, he is in another the 
 reader of her secrets, and fitted to be the master of 
 her forces. Quite naturally he reaches the conclu- 
 sion that the attributes of Mind and Will belono^ to 
 this Vital Force, which operates in a fashion so 
 orderly and so coherent as to be intelligible when 
 he can isolate a portion of its workings, and which 
 is mysterious as to the rest only because the multi- 
 tude of phenomena is so vast and intricate. 
 
 A necessary consequence follows. Man cannot 
 treat such a conclusion as this, to which the experi- 
 ence of the race, the appeal of his own heart, and 
 the trend of his thinking lead him, as a mere curi- 
 ous phenomenon, to be acknowledged — and ne- 
 glected. He is impelled by a sort of instinctive 
 honour to admit that a force which vitalizes the Uni- 
 verse after such a fashion as to imply the presence 
 and activity of mind and will must be a Person as he 
 understands the term. Man names him — God. It 
 is a word which, like every personal name, transcends 
 definition; all names of persons being, indeed, but 
 counters or symbols which stand for experience, 
 
RELIGION AND LITERATURE 11 
 
 meaning much or little according as personal rela- 
 tions have been intimate or remote. The meaninor 
 
 o 
 
 of no name can be adequately communicated by 
 hearsay. 
 
 Religion takes up this experience of man, seek- 
 ing, finding, and following God, as the Spirit of 
 power and truth, who vitalizes the Universe, and 
 describes the relation in one pregnant phrase : " And 
 God created man in his own image; in the image 
 of God created He him." Out of the same Hebrew 
 tradition she chooses another phrase to characterize 
 man's history and the promise of his future : "And 
 God said, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish 
 the earth and subdue it." The fact that such a word 
 is of uncertain date and dubious authorship in no 
 sense invalidates its worth ; because since the begin- 
 ning, man's adventure in the earth has been pre- 
 cisely that which Genesis outlines — the struggle 
 for his own life, for the life of his offspring, for a 
 subjugation of the earth's material resource, and 
 for an ultimate mastery of circumstance. Man re- 
 mains the one indomitable creature. This man or 
 that may seem to go down before hostile chance ; 
 but Man refuses to be permanently subjugated. 
 The elemental forces of Nature terrify him tempo- 
 rarily, and occasionally overwhelm a multitude of 
 individuals. But Man is of such a sort that ulti- 
 mately they must serve him. The constellations 
 wheeling in their orbits represent an insoluble mys- 
 tery, in one aspect of it; but none the less they are 
 
12 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 harnessed to man's watch-wheels and clock-weights. 
 It has become a part of their diurnal task to tell 
 him the time or to reveal his position in mid-ocean ; 
 the very ocean itself^ meanwhile, trackless as its 
 waste is, and ungovernable as its fury seems, having 
 been subdued into his chief beast of burden. 
 
 So Keligion is always calling men to a considera- 
 tion of the greatness of their life upon the earth. 
 She speaks of sin as a marring of man's chance — 
 an interruption of the natural relation which should 
 exist between him and God. She treats him always 
 as though he were endowed with a will to choose, 
 if not his path, at least the direction in which he 
 would fain strike out a path if he could. The im- 
 memorial metaphysical debate about free will is not 
 of quite so much moment to Religion as it seems to 
 be, since she 'bases her call to men upon the phe- 
 nomena of daily experience rather than upon the 
 premisses and conclusions of a merely formal logic. 
 Though free will be a delusion and sin a shadow, 
 still the shadow is of a fatal sort and must be reck- 
 oned with in a world where shadows sometimes have 
 more meaning than the substances which cast them. 
 
 Of Salvation, too. Religion has much to say, 
 meaning by it a possession of the place and power 
 of mastery which belong to man of right — a place 
 and power into which, to be sure, he was never 
 thrust by any creative violence, but which have 
 always been his in some degree, and which in their 
 perfection represent the goal of his development. 
 
RELIGION AND LITERATURE ^ 
 
 It is in the exercise of the great divine-human func- 
 tions of faith, hope, and love that salvation is air 
 tained. Religion indeed cares little enough whether 
 man thinks of this condition as attained or con- 
 ferred, — her greatest literature uses both forms of 
 speech, — since it consists in the entrance of the 
 Divine Spirit, the Vital Creative and Sustaining 
 Power, into a man's life as its regnant influence; 
 and it results in a peace which comes of a conscious 
 mastery of circumstance by the man himself. He is 
 no longer debased by poverty; he is no longer 
 afraid of to-morrow; he is no longer killed by 
 death. Great thoughts become his companions and 
 great deeds his ambition — the greatest of all, per- 
 haps, being the realization of the worth of small 
 things, and the doing of them patiently. 
 
 It will be readily admitted that here we have the 
 material of literature ; for literature like religion 
 depends upon vision and sympathy. Both deal with 
 matters of the common day ; but neither stops in 
 the common, or counts it to be unclean. The burn- 
 ing wayside shrub suddenly becoming vocal and 
 transforming its neighbourhood into sacred ground 
 because the spirit of truth inflames it, is the sym- 
 bol of religious and literary inspiration — yes, and 
 of scientific inspiration, too, as we shall delight 
 to acknowledge when we have become more truly 
 clairvoyant. Both literature and religion deal with 
 the elemental things in man and nature ; both are 
 gifts to the imagination and make corresponding 
 
14 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 demands upon it. The poet takes of the things of 
 life and shows them to us, whether they be the Sat- 
 urday evening happenings in the cottage of a Scots 
 peasant, or the struggle of a soul climbing the 
 Mount of Paradise. The prophet looks upon a bas- 
 ket of summer fruit, and in its over-ripeness sees 
 the doom which threatens Israel ; or he has a vision 
 of the lot of such as wait upon the Lord, uplifted 
 on eagle's wings, running without weariness, and 
 walking the dustiest ways without fainting — ever 
 masters of fate. All these things, little and great 
 alike, are taken up by religion and literature and 
 shown to us under their universal aspect : the Past 
 is made Present, and the Present is related indis- 
 solubly to the Past; indeed hunger, want, love, 
 hate, joy, sorrow, sin, penitence, and forgiveness 
 cease to be either old or new and become perennial 
 when touched by the hand of the Spirit's inter- 
 preter. Thus the wonder of the stars above and of 
 the instincts of the heart within is renewed in each 
 generation. Hence, despite the fact that there is 
 nothing new under the sun, neither literature nor 
 religion ever palls, becomes obsolete, or bygone. 
 Their forms of expression change but the substance 
 remains fresh and vital. The longer our experience 
 of the Universe in which God dwells and through 
 th« avenues of which His Spirit enters into touch 
 with man, the more our wonder grows at man's lit- 
 tleness and greatness, his limitations and his chance. 
 " What is man, that thou art mindful of him, and 
 
RELIGION AND LITERATURE 16 
 
 the son of man, that thou visitest him ? " asked the 
 Hebrew poet, face to face with this contrast ; con- 
 scious of the brevity of his life's span, but equally 
 assured that it sufficed to set him face to face with 
 God. Stevenson voiced the same wonder and im- 
 plied the same faith in exclaiming : — 
 
 " What a monstrous spectre is this man, the dis- 
 ease of the agglutinated dust, lifting alternate feet 
 or lying drugged with slumber ; killing, feeding, 
 growing, bringing forth small copies of himself; 
 grown upon with hair like grass, fitted with eyes 
 that move and glitter in his face ; a thing to set 
 children screaming ! — and yet, looked at nearlier, 
 known as his fellows know him, how surprising are 
 his attributes ! Poor soul, here for so little, cast 
 among so many hardships, filled with desires so in- 
 commensurate and so inconsistent, savagely sur- 
 rounded, savagely descended, irremediably con- 
 demned to prey upon his fellow lives : who should 
 have blamed him had he been of a piece with his 
 destiny and a being merely barbarous ? And we 
 look and behold him instead filled with imperfect 
 virtues ; infinitely childish, often admirably valiant, 
 often touchingly kind ; sitting down, amidst his 
 momentary life, to debate of right and wrong and 
 the attributes of the Deity ; rising up to do battle 
 for an egg or die for an idea; singling out his 
 friends or his mate with cordial affection ; bringing 
 forth in pain, rearing with long-suffering solicitude 
 his young. To touch the heart of his mystery, we 
 find in him one thought, strange to the point of 
 lunacy : the thought of duty ; the thought of some- 
 
16 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 thing owing to himself, to his neighbour, to his God ; 
 an ideal of decency, to which he would rise if it 
 were possible ; a limit of shame, below which, if it 
 be possible, he will not stoop." ^ 
 
 The development of so much that is great in 
 language from the written oracles of religion has 
 therefore been a natural one, and it is fitting that 
 German should be under such obligation to the 
 Gothic Scriptures of Ulfilas and to the Bible of 
 Martin Luther ; even as English is debtor to Wick- 
 liffe, the Book of Common Prayer, and the King 
 James Version. It is fitting, too, that we should 
 emphasize as the present generation is doing the 
 extraordinary literary quality of the matter as 
 well as the manner of Hebrew and Christian 
 Scripture. These deal, as has been already im- 
 plied, with common human experiences, but they 
 conceive these experiences under universal forms. 
 The traditions of the Old Testament are in this 
 sense ageless. It is only when pulled about and 
 tortured by some unimaginative critic on the one 
 hand, or by some nervous and faithless apologist 
 on the other, that they lose their charm. Their 
 utter naturalness and simplicity, their candour, their 
 artistic restraint, their frequent pathos and occa- 
 sional humour, all fit them to be the vehicles of a 
 
 * Across the Plains; Pulvis et Umbra. Cf. Pascal : Thoughts, cha^. 
 X. " What a chimera, then, is man ! What a novelty, what a chaos, 
 what a subject of contradiction, what a prodigy I " 
 
RELIGION AND LITERATURE 17 
 
 divine message. In view of this fact there is some- 
 thing almost pitiable in the anxiety with which 
 the question of the inspiration of the Old Testa- 
 ment is discussed. If a man have not spiritual and 
 literary sense enough to perceive this inspiration, 
 I do not see how it is to be proved to him, any 
 more than the glories of a sunset can be proved to 
 a blind man ; or if, on the other hand, the critic 
 or the literalist have such a notion of inspiration 
 as to fancy that imagination can play no part in 
 an inspired writing, that sacred history must of 
 necessity be a collection of miraculously inerrant 
 annals, and that in a book calculated to perform 
 a peculiar religious office no place can be found 
 for the traditions, legends, and poetry of a pecu- 
 liarly endowed people, again it is hard to discover 
 any language which shall be mechanical and plod- 
 ding enough for the purposes of argiunent with 
 him. 
 
 In point of fact, however, argument is super- 
 fluous here, either for offence or defence. The 
 Spirit speaks through Genesis, and would still 
 speak to such as have ears to hear, though it were 
 robbed of every claim to historicity. Discerning 
 men feel instinctively the appeal of Abraham 
 turned out of doors by his faith, the conflict of 
 good and evil in shifty Jacob, the moral integrity 
 of exiled Joseph, the long patience and high states- 
 manship of Moses building a nation out of a horde 
 of slaves, the constancy of Ruth, the tragedy of 
 
18 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Saul trading faith for superstition, the warfare of 
 flesh and spirit in David, who, like Milton's lion, 
 lived partly in the air of God's new day even 
 while his body was still chained to the old world of 
 mire and dust, — all these, to say nothing of the 
 great line of prophets, are of every time and for 
 all men. They translate the experience of religion 
 into a lingua franca which each man understands 
 and wherein he sees his own hopes and struggles 
 prefigured. 
 
 It is not difficult, therefore, to establish the 
 legitimate relation between religion and that liter- 
 ature which deals with the adventures of the soul 
 in its aspiration toward God, or its rebellion against 
 Him. What shall we say concerning the very vo- 
 luminous literature, some of it among the choicest 
 possessions of our speech and some of it base and 
 sorry enough, which deals primarily with the rela- 
 tion of the sexes and the passion of love? It has 
 been customary to treat this as belonging to the 
 'secular' rather than to the 'religious' side of ex- 
 perience. Yet religion is the great unifier — the 
 great healer of schism ; moreover, its natural rela- 
 tion to human love has been made plainer and 
 clearer than ever before by the advance of modern 
 science and the general acceptance of the theory 
 of development. We can afford to admit, at least 
 for the purposes of argument, that the highest and 
 purest affection between man and woman is of the 
 lineage — distant perhaps, but none the less real 
 
RELIGION AND LITERATURE 19 
 
 and legitimate — of mere physical affinity. Chris- 
 tianity recognizes all human instincts as significant 
 both for the individual and for the race. Its appeal 
 to men is not the appeal of asceticism, which exalts 
 the partial, but the appeal of an expanding and 
 growing life, whose goal is completeness. When it 
 uses the language of asceticism, advocating even 
 the plucking out of an eye or the cutting away of 
 an offending hand, it is with the express statement 
 that formal schism in the physical body is better 
 than real schism between the soul and God. Holi- 
 ness implies wholeness ; salvation means mastery of 
 circumstance; and this mastery must begin within 
 before it can be enforced without. Rehgion there- 
 fore recognizes all interplay of human passion as 
 one of its chief concerns. All efforts toward the 
 orderly development, the chastening and sublima- 
 tion of the great elemental instincts of mankind, 
 are germane to it. Hence love and hunger are two 
 of the principal themes of religion and literature. 
 Their ramifications are as infinitely varied as life 
 itself. Love begins, let us say, as the sexual instinct 
 which leads a primitive man and woman to pair as 
 the animals pair, or as a semi-gregarious instinct 
 which leads men to associate themselves tempo- 
 rarily for defence or adventure. By degrees Cre- 
 ative Power worked out His vast purposes through 
 the use of such primitive material as this. The 
 family emerged in some rudimentary fashion. 
 Children must needs be cared for and nourished 
 
 I 
 
20 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 through a term of infancy whose length seemed to 
 be out of all proportion to man's place and impor- 
 tance as a mere animal. This meant common self- 
 denial, restriction of freedom, increase of mutual 
 interest, growth of sympathy between father and 
 mother, parent and child. Thought, toil, peril for 
 the sake of one another, wrought their natural 
 effects. These things would seem at first sight to 
 have set limits to experience and to have narrowed 
 life. In point of fact they gave it a new dimension, 
 adding depth and height to its former length. Men 
 began to live by deeds, not years. The greatest 
 and most enduring of Christian virtues began to 
 be. Of course the path of this development must 
 have been strewn with the wrecks of tragedy and 
 enlivened with the play of comedy. It is a long 
 way from the mere instinct of sexual affinity to the 
 love stronger than death which leads a man and a 
 woman to 
 
 walk this world 
 Yoked in all exercise of noble ends, 
 
 but the path is continuous. It is an arduous climb 
 from the temporary and jealous association into 
 which the passing needs of a primitive day once 
 brought two men, to the mutual devotion which 
 leads a man to lay down his life for his friend ; but 
 the ascent has been made. The office of religion is 
 to inspire and to empower these travellers ; it is 
 the part of literature to tell the story of the jour- 
 ney. In it must needs appear every phase of expe- 
 
RELIGION AND LITERATURE 21 
 
 rience, since the race has even yet accomplished its 
 redemption so imperfectly that love is dogged by 
 lust, fealty by treachery, and joy by tears. The way 
 is long ; some wander and are lost ; some fall to 
 rise again, and some to rise no more ; some turn 
 back in frank rebellion ; some help and some hin- 
 der; some are always hopeful of the adventure's 
 outcome ; and some are fearful lest, after all the 
 struggle, it shall appear that their path leads no- 
 whither. For all these religion has its high message ; 
 of them all literature takes careful and sympathetic 
 note. 
 
 The literature, therefore, which has in it the 
 deepest and most significant religious element will 
 be by no means always the most ' pious ' in form. 
 As Dr. T. T. Hunger has recently put it with 
 characteristic grace and cogency : — 
 
 " The Christian value of an author is not to be 
 determined by the fulness of his Christian asser- 
 tion. There is, of course, immense value in the 
 positive, fuU-statured believers like Dante and 
 Bacon and Milton and Browning. . . . But Chris- 
 tianity is all the while in need of two things : 
 correction of its mistakes and perversions, and 
 development in the direction of its universality. 
 . . . An earnest skeptic is often the best man to 
 find the obscured path of faith. . . . Goethe taught 
 Christianity to think scientifically, and prepared the 
 way for it to include modern science." * 
 
 » T. T. Hunger, Essays for the Day, pp. 82-83. 
 
22 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 In view of these facts it remains to indicate in a 
 cursory and general way some of the interrelations 
 between religion and literature which seem signifi- 
 cant enough to be the objects of our quest. 
 
 In the first place, literature often avowedly makes 
 religion its chief material. This is true in the case 
 not only of sermons and works of formal divinity, 
 which belong to special rather than general litera- 
 ture, but of the great literary monuments. The idea 
 of tragedy which animated ^schylus and Sophocles 
 was primarily religious. Lucretius was a theologian. 
 
 Lucretius — nobler than his mood ; 
 
 Who dropped his plummet down the broad 
 
 Deep universe, and said " No God," 
 
 Finding no bottom : he denied 
 Divinely the divine, and died 
 Chief poet on the Tiber-side 
 
 By Grace of God ! his face is stern 
 As one compelled, in spite of scorn, 
 To teach a truth he would not learn. 
 
 The adjective divina, to which Dante gives a 
 chief place on his title-page, is the most significant 
 and descriptive word to be found there. Spenser 
 sang the soul's adventures in a great allegory. Mil- 
 ton's avowed purpose in '' Paradise Lost " was to 
 justify the ways of God to man ; and so masterful 
 was his genius that, for weal or woe, he may almost 
 \^. be said to be the creator of the heaven and hell of 
 English-speaking folk. Pope filled our commonplace 
 
RELIGION AND LITERATURE 23 
 
 books with quotations when he essayed to study 
 man in his moral and spiritual aspect — a theme 
 as religious as Pope's day and style would permit. 
 Johnson's gigantic capacity for prejudice was frankly 
 enlisted upon the side of the religion of the Church 
 of England ; yet the veriest cynic who follows his 
 noble and pathetic, even if somewhat grotesque, 
 figure through the pages of the " Life," which is, 
 after all, Johnson's chief contribution to English 
 literature, must admit it to be in the larger sense 
 a profoundly religious book — a book for the soul's 
 instruction and reproof as well as a fountain of 
 humour and all intellectual delights. 
 
 I need not carry my illustrations on into the 
 special field which we are about to traverse. Enough 
 have been cited to indicate the large place which 
 leaders and inspirers of human thought have seen 
 fit to give to religion. The religious problem has 
 seemed to be the one to which great and clear minds 
 have turned instinctively in an attempt to voice a 
 message to their own generation, and, perhaps, if 
 fate were kind, to reach generations then unborn. 
 
 An even more interesting bond connecting reli- 
 gion and literature discovers itself as we consider 
 the literature of implicit or avowed unbelief. I shall 
 have occasion to remark upon the fact at some 
 length in dealing with one of the most fascinating 
 and significant sections of last century's literary 
 product. Suffice it to say here that, while the 
 scoffer and the cynic have usually but small chance 
 
24 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 of even a literary life beyond the grave, the occa- 
 sional exceptions very often owe their quasi-immov' 
 tality to the fact that they dealt with religious 
 questions. About the only title to remembrance 
 that Lucian can be said to have, beyond the doubt- 
 ful value of his unique Greek to college class-rooms, 
 is the fact that he saw fit to exercise his nimble 
 wit upon the gods. Tom Paine's services to the 
 cause of American independence were real, even 
 though not very great ; yet they seem likely to be 
 forgotten in spite of all that disinterested historians 
 and vehement apologists can do to perpetuate their 
 memory. Paine will be remembered, however, be- 
 cause he has associated his name with religion — 
 probably not with hostile intent, for there is a posi- 
 tive as well as negative side to his " Common 
 Sense " ; the negative side, however, was the one 
 upon which posterity has fastened its regard, and 
 according to its instinctive habit, which is either to 
 forget such a man altogether or else to remember 
 him as persona non grata, Paine has attained to a 
 sorry sort of fame. He must be reckoned with, for 
 better for worse, by the historian of his century, 
 mainly on the ground of his theological works. 
 
 So upon a far higher plane, while Tyndall and 
 Huxley won their deserved repute among scientific 
 men by their originality and industry as investi- 
 gators in the field of pure science, they were even 
 more indebted for the prominence and influence 
 which were finally theirs to the fact that both be- 
 
RELIGION AND LITERATURE 25 
 
 came theologians of eminence ; so quick is the world 
 to recognize the word of any man who speaks upon 
 the subject of religion as one having authority, to 
 be a matter of immediate moment. 
 
 What I am obliged, for lack of a better phrase, 
 to call, rather awkwardly, the precedent influence 
 of religion upon literature is worth at least a pass- 
 ing glance. Monasteries and convents were for 
 generations the home and refuge of letters. The 
 Church has always been the nursing mother of 
 literature — often enough unwise, petulant, over- 
 anxious and sometimes even cruel in her fear, but 
 yet fostering and passing on from generation to 
 generation, if not sound learning itself, yet the 
 tools and means for its development. The interest- 
 ing studies of Mr. Galton in the antecedents and 
 circumstances of men of talent or genius showed a 
 notably large percentage of them to have come 
 from the families of ministers of religion. This is 
 natural enough, since, whatever their circumstances, 
 the clergy are, as a class, peculiarly ambitious to 
 provide the best educational advantages for their 
 children. The remotest missionaries covet university 
 training for their sons, and obtain it in an astonish- 
 ing number of cases. Furthermore, the training of 
 clerical homes is generally of a sort fitted to impress 
 the minds of children with the worth of large and 
 generous ideas, the impression being often all the 
 more vivid because the amplitude of parental inter- 
 ests has very likely been attained in spite of circum- 
 
26 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 stances so narrow as to make daily threats of sor- 
 didness. The books which make up the family 
 library, though often all too few, are sure to contain 
 some genuine literature ; the newspapers and maga- 
 zines which find their way to the reading-table are 
 chosen with discrimination; and the whole atmo- 
 sphere of the home is relatively congenial to obser- 
 vation and thought. Let it be added, too, that it is 
 likely to be illuminated with a play of humour which 
 stimulates the imagination, and lightens while it en- 
 courages intellectual activity ; since, as I shall have 
 occasion to show somewhat later on, humour is of 
 the household of faith, — a sister sitting by right, 
 and not by mere sufferance, at Religion's table. 
 
 This brief reference will suffice to suggest the 
 relation which naturally exists between the office 
 of the minister of religion and the production of 
 literature. He is called, and his business is to call 
 others, to love God with the mind as well as with 
 the heart. All human experience should therefore 
 interest him. As a confessor and adviser the secrets 
 of many hearts are opened to him, and thus the 
 choicest material of literature is placed at his hand. 
 Honour forbids him to use it, to be sure, as it forbids 
 one who has but a life interest in an estate to im- 
 pair its integrity ; but there is none the less an 
 inevitable and legitimate increment of profit inur- 
 ing to him. The business of his soul within and of 
 his profession without makes him sympathetic with 
 literature and a more or less keen student of the 
 
RELIGION AND LITERATURE 27 
 
 literary product of his day. It is not strange, there- 
 fore, that the majority of our higher institutions of 
 learning should have been founded by men com- 
 mitted to the interests of religion ; or that clergy- 
 men and their children, unto the third and fourth 
 generation, should so often be numbered among 
 the writers of books. 
 
 So every great religious movement leaves its 
 mark in letters. ^Literary men' are proverbially 
 prone to sneer at religious revival ; yet the sneer ill 
 becomes those who love good literature. The literary 
 prowess of Germany is inextricably linked to the 
 spirit of the Reformation. The achievements of 
 Queen Elizabeth's day in letters cannot be divorced 
 from the searchings of heart and the awakenings 
 of imaofination and ambition which marked the 
 reign of her father. The Evangelical Revival and 
 its inevitable counterpart, the Oxford Movement, 
 left ineffaceable imprints upon the English literature 
 of last century. The famous Clapham sect might 
 serve as a concrete example. Here were a group of 
 highly intelligent families, committed heart and 
 soul to the principles of the Evangelical faith, and 
 living in sufficiently close touch for frequent social 
 intercourse and constant interchange of ideas. Who 
 shall measure the literary influence of the Wilber- 
 forces, the Macaulays, and two generations of the 
 Trevelyans, together with Stephen and his sons 
 Sir James FitzJames and Sir Leslie, to say nothing 
 of the Venns and Gisbornes? It does not matter 
 
 
28 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 from our present standpoint that the children in 
 several instances departed widely from the faith of 
 the fathers ; the thesis might conceivably be main- 
 tained that the wider the departure the more clearly 
 marked was the religious impulse ; but whether this 
 be the case or not, it suffices for our present pur- 
 pose to note the undeniable precedent religious ele- 
 ment in the literature produced by this group of 
 families. I am content to indicate the phenomenon. 
 My only claim at present is that it is significant 
 enough to challenge investigation. 
 
 As our discussion proceeds, some further inter- 
 relations between religion and literature will be 
 pointed out. Though not necessarily of minor im- 
 portance, they are less likely to demand constant 
 attention than the three already indicated. It is no 
 part of my purpose to sketch the whole course of 
 English literature during the fruitful century to be 
 considered, or to treat the work of any of its great 
 contributors exhaustively. In many cases I shall 
 prefer to choose, always I hope with fairness, some 
 one work of an author as significant of the religious 
 element in his writing ; nor shall I hesitate to turn 
 aside now and then to consider the productions of 
 some writers whose claim to a place among con- 
 tributors to permanent literature is in grave doubt, 
 if only they seem to be representatives of their day. 
 I especially desire to givQ generous treatment to 
 the large and eminently characteristic group of 
 writers whose attitude toward Christianity in par- 
 
RELIGION AND LITERATURE 29 
 
 ticular, or toward religion in general, has appeared 
 to be one of searching criticism if not of positive 
 hostility. It may be that these will prove to be the 
 most significant witnesses of all to the ineradicable 
 fascination which religion seems to exercise over 
 the mind of man. Wherever the mystery of life and 
 death asserts itself a door stands open to the en- 
 trance of religion^ and the material of literature is 
 ready. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE DAWN OF THE NEW DAY 
 
 Mr. Watts-Dunton, in his essay on " The Renas- 
 cence of Wonder in Poetry," has characterized the 
 eighteenth century as a period of acceptance; in 
 contrast wherewith he considers the nineteenth cen- 
 tury to have been a period of reawakening wonder. 
 There is something more than a half-truth in his 
 suggestion. It is as difficult to define an age as to 
 define a person — and the definition of persons is 
 frankly impossible. All attempts even to characterize 
 them are attended with well-nigh equal danger and 
 fascination. Character is so elusive and yet so mo- 
 mentous a thing that clever talk about it possesses 
 unfailing interest ; we are so prone, on the other 
 hand, to jump at conclusions which eventually prove 
 to be our own condemnation, as to make all gos- 
 sip perilous, and all personal judgement doubtful. 
 Within limits, however, we may admit ' acceptance ' 
 to have been a characteristic note of the eighteenth 
 century, especially as voiced in its poetry and po- 
 liter letters. That last adjective indeed was the bane 
 of its literature. Things that would not submit to 
 polish were anathema to Pope and his school. An 
 atmosphere of literal urbanity surround-ed their 
 
THE DAWN OF THE NEW DAY 31 
 
 writing, nowhere more evidently than when nature 
 or the country was the theme. A partial exception 
 may be made in favour of Thomson, whose "Sea- 
 sons " were in some real sense the seasons which we 
 know. But, in general, when the sights and sounds 
 of rural life were dealt with, it was with half-veiled 
 apology and patronage, or with a sentimental af- 
 fectation for which great literary gifts and exquisite 
 workmanship could ill atone. Goldsmith had a 
 tender heart and an acquaintance at first hand with 
 the sorrows and struggles of the poor ; yet there is 
 something about " Sweet Auburn " which irresisti- 
 bly recalls Marie Antoinette's high-heeled shepherd- 
 esses playing at country life in the gardens of 
 Versailles. None the less it was mightily to the 
 taste of Goldsmith's day, and most pronouncedly 
 so, one suspects, when it was most sentimental. " I 
 shall never be tired of Goldsmith's * Deserted 
 Village ' — I shall never look again into Crabbe's 
 ^ Village,' " said Mrs. Barbauld characteristically 
 enough to Crabb Robinson ; who, it must be added, 
 had himself so much of the spirit of acceptance 
 that he declined to read the later works of this 
 great poet of the poor.^ 
 
 I have elsewhere maintained^ that the nineteenth 
 century has been very largely characterized by the 
 emphasis which it has put upon accomplishment — 
 upon the Deed as contrasted with the Word, the 
 
 1 Diary, Dec. 29, 1835. 
 
 ' Dynamic of Christianity ^ chap. ii. 
 
32 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 form instead of the spirit of revelation. It has 
 been an age of enormously significant discovery, 
 but the results have remained to a large extent in the 
 form of facts, instead of resolving themselves into 
 digestible and assimilable truth. Mr. Watts-Dunton 
 calls it an age of wonder ; but it seems rather to have 
 been an age when the capacity for wonder had just 
 begun to awake. The wealth of material which nat- 
 ural science and industrial invention have supplied 
 to life has been so great as to reduce the capacity 
 for reverent wonder in those very regions where we 
 should expect it to have been enhanced. The third 
 quarter of the century wondered truly — but less at 
 the mystery of life, death, and human personality 
 than at its own marvellous achievements. Hence 
 has arisen a sort of scientific dogmatism not infre- 
 quently approaching Pharisaism. This sophomoric 
 phase of experience shows signs of passing away, 
 with the realization that mystery is still as great 
 an element as ever in human life, and that the 
 extension of our radius of experience has served 
 only to enlarge — and, be it noted, in proportion 
 to the square of our progress — its already mighty 
 horizon. 
 
 It was but natural, therefore, that the great liter- 
 ature of the century should be the product of its 
 earlier half. The sense of a humble and more seemly 
 wonder was upon men then. They had passed 
 through a great political and social transition. Many 
 of them felt the approach of further changes not less 
 
THE DAWN OF THE NEW DAY 33 
 
 significant than those associated with the French 
 Revolution, although they could not say where these 
 would manifest themselves. But some, looking out 
 with the eye of true clairvoyance, discerned enough 
 of the future to thrill their own and later generations 
 with their prophecies. I do not see how any one can 
 read Tennyson's anticipations of the spiritual sig- 
 nificance of Evolution, or contemplate Goethe's vi- 
 sion of the character which the thoug^ht of the cen- 
 tury was to assume, or even note De Tocqueville's 
 extraordinary prescience of America's opportunity 
 and danger, without acknowledging that a spirit 
 of genuine prophecy was still active in the world's 
 affairs. These seers were not only endowed with 
 the literary gift, but were also entrusted with a mes- 
 sage fitted to their day, capable of assimilation by 
 life, and of transformation into goodness. Since, 
 then, it is to the former half of the century that we 
 must look for its greatest and most significant litera- 
 ture, we have now to inquire as to the forerunners 
 and heralds of this new day. 
 
 Revolution is proverbially hard to account for. 
 We no sooner think our discovery of its origins to 
 be satisfyingly complete than a new set of causes 
 reveal themselves and must in turn be dealt with. I 
 shall not attempt, therefore, to run to earth the lit- 
 erary influences which finally made Wordsworth, 
 Coleridge, Byron, and Shelley possible, but shall be 
 content rather to note four siofnificant fiofures be- 
 longing primarily to the eighteenth century, but into 
 
34 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 the heritage of whose influence the nineteenth cen- 
 tury richly entered. 
 
 William Cowper was the last man in the world 
 whom those who knew him in his lifetime could 
 have thought to be a revolutionist ; nor does he 
 act the part any better when he is looked at in 
 retrospect : so used have we become to associate 
 the inception of revolution with plots, and its overt 
 acts with gunpowder barrels, guillotines, or dyna- 
 mite. 
 
 In Cowper's case the weapon was a sofa, and his 
 fellow conspirators two eminently respectable mid- 
 dle-aged widows. No life could have seemed milder 
 or less likely to make a stir in the world than Cow- 
 per's, whether we find him in youth " giggling 
 and making giggle" with his pretty cousins in 
 Southampton Row ; or thrown into a panic of 
 shyness by the prospect of qualifying as a reader 
 in the House of Lords, where he might easily have 
 attained to a modest, but in all probability a life- 
 long, competence ; or as a man fleeing to his refuge 
 with the kind Unwins in Huntingdon, and later 
 still retiring to the isolation and busy idleness of 
 Olney, there to become the neighbour of Newton 
 and the permanent ward of Mary Unwin. No ca- 
 reer could have been more monotonous in its out- 
 ward seeming ; no career in reality was ever more 
 truly adventurous. A pathos that is real and free 
 from sentimentality attaches to the thought of the 
 snugness and delightful monotony of home em- 
 
THE DAWN OF THE NEW DAY 35 
 
 ploy men ts, when they are remembered in loneliness 
 or peril as some castaway attempts upon his isolated 
 rock to frame the semblance of them out of such 
 flotsam and jetsam as he can rescue from the sea. 
 Yet this was Cowper's life experience. He had the 
 material furnishings of domesticity about him from 
 the cradle to the grave ; but his capacity to enjoy 
 them was fearfully intermittent. Amid his flower- 
 pots, rabbit-hutches, and carpenter's tools; his walks 
 by Ouse and tea-drinkings at home; his books and 
 correspondents, he was still a hunted man. None 
 could tell when morning broke whether the day 
 were marked for peace and light, or whether the 
 sun would go down at noon to be succeeded by a 
 horror of great darkness. 
 
 Much has been made of the seclusion and quiet 
 amid which Cowper did his work ; of the half-ef- 
 feminate willingness which he showed to live thus 
 under shelter, and apart, not merely from the world's 
 hubbub, but from its responsibilities. In point of 
 fact, that Olney house and garden were like the 
 fastness in a child's story hidden in a mountain 
 valley or behind a screen of palms upon some coral 
 island ; delightful in its seclusion and seeming peace, 
 but yet the abode of fear ; because savage marauders- 
 threaten and means of defence are pitifully inade- 
 quate. The tragedy of such tales is often nine- 
 tenths comedy, so sure are we that the deus ex 
 machina will appear in the moment of crisis. In 
 Cowper's life the tragic element was as constant as 
 
36 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 it was real, and in the supreme moment there was 
 no relief but that of death. " What can it signify ? " 
 are reported to have been his last words in response 
 to an offer of nourishment ; but after the change 
 had come, those who stood about him noted that 
 from the hour of death until the coffin was closed 
 " the expression into which his countenance had 
 settled was that of calmness and composure, min- 
 gled as it were with holy surprise."^ 
 
 Here are all the elements of adventure and of 
 tragedy. To see this man sleeping well after a 
 life whose unavailing struggle for calm had made 
 it indeed a fitful fever, may easily have seemed to 
 illuminate his fine countenance with the light of a 
 holy surprise. 
 
 In spite of a general impression to the contrary, 
 Cowper's madness was in the first place no more re- 
 lated to religion than to the binomial theorem, as 
 Mr. Birrell has happily reminded us. His mind was 
 unhinged by the excitement and worry of his ex- 
 pected appearance at the bar of the House of Lords 
 to qualify for a readership. The resultant shock, re- 
 acting upon a nervous system always delicate and 
 already diseased, reduced it to a condition of chronic 
 instability. Fits of pronounced insanity recurred, 
 and there were several attempts at self-destruction. 
 Yet during the greater portion of his life Cowper 
 was sufficiently master of himself to go his own way 
 and to do his own work, proving himself to be one 
 
 * Wright, Life of William Cowper, p. 657. 
 
THE DAWN OF THE NEW DAY 37 
 
 of the best of companions and perhaps the very best 
 of correspondents. One dare not dogmatize here, 
 but year in and year out, on week-days and Sundays 
 ahke, his letters maintain a place beside Boswell^s 
 " Life" in the first rank among publications of their 
 own type, — books to take upon a journey, even to 
 carry into exile, and yet to reopen with a new delight 
 after returning to one's fireside. Where else are good 
 breeding, good sense, good taste, affectionate rail- 
 lery, a quick appreciation of beauty, a genuine and 
 unobtrusive piety, and a deliciously keen and natu- 
 ral humour to be found in so perfect a combination? 
 No one can hope to compose letters to-day in Cow- 
 per's style, but every one who must write at all 
 would surely be not only a better writer but a bet- 
 ter man for numbering this recluse of Olney in his 
 list of friends. 
 
 There used to be a child's story with appropriate 
 illustrations representing a reformed pirate who took 
 a vine-clad cottage by the sea, and whose wont it 
 was, when fits of Berserker rage threatened, to sit 
 at his door and knit antimacassars. Cowper would 
 have appreciated its drollery, for he had a keen 
 sense of the absurd, and spent a night that was well 
 nigh sleepless for laughter after hearing the adven- 
 ture of John Gilpin, which he immortalized in verse 
 the next day ; yet behind the extravaganza he might 
 well have seen a sombre picture of himself fighting 
 the fiends with his pen. "Doomed, yet debonnaire," 
 as Mr. Birrell calls him, he took to verse to save his 
 
38 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 life, and threw his poems out that the diversion 
 which their production and reception caused might 
 grant him at least a respite from the wolves of his 
 despair. The more quiet and commonplace the 
 theme, the more suited was it to its purpose ; fancy 
 might the better play about it without danger of 
 over-excitement, and Cowper's fancy was of just 
 the sort to illuminate the commonplace and to give 
 it significance. This is not strictly true, perhaps, 
 of the " Table-Talk," where he was hampered by 
 his acceptance of the rhymed couplet in which all 
 would-be poets of his century aspired to jingle. But 
 when Lady Austen came to Olney, bringing a new 
 element of clever companionship into the poet's life, 
 and set him to the task of writing a poem upon the 
 sofa in their sitting-room, English literature had 
 good cause to note the day. Forthwith this middle- 
 aged writer of excellent verse, ^ commenced poet,' 
 as the cant phrase goes, in good earnest. He not 
 only rejuvenated blank verse ; he brought back the 
 notes of reality and simplicity to English poetry. 
 With facile pen, quick wit, and devout reverence 
 for all that was true, just, pure, and lovely, whether 
 as yet it were of good report among men or not, he 
 wrought with glad diligence to fulfil his friend's 
 behest. He sang of fireside joys, of the gracious 
 companionships of home, of winter nights and 
 noons, of walks abroad by Ouse, of ploughmen in 
 the fields and woodmen in the forests, of wild birds, 
 tame hares, and grazing cattle. 
 
THE DAWN OF THE NEW DAY 39 
 
 Nor rural sights alone, but rural sounds, 
 Exhilarate the spirit, and restore 
 The tone of languid Nature. Mighty winds, 
 That sweep the skirt of some far-spreading wood 
 Of ancient growth, make music not unlike 
 The dash of Ocean on his winding shore, 
 And lull the spirit while they fill the mind.^ 
 
 That last line might serve as motto for a large 
 part of Cowper's work. He who would know the 
 poet must make acquaintance with " The Task." 
 It is the window which permits us now to look out 
 with him upon the world, and now to look in upon 
 a troubled spirit seeking rest, and a mind which 
 must needs be filled with less disquieting cargo than 
 self-contemplation afforded, if it were to keep a 
 straight course or avoid ultimate shipwreck. A dis- 
 cerning critic has called attention to the fact that 
 
 " his playful satire and tender admonition, his de- 
 nunciation of slavery, his noble patriotism, his devo- 
 tional earnestness and sublimitv, his tenderness to 
 animals, his affection for his pets, his warm sympa- 
 thy with his fellow-men, and his exquisite paintings 
 of domestic peace and happiness are all so much 
 self-portraiture, drawn with the ripe skill of a mas- 
 ter and the modesty and good taste of the man. 
 The very rapidity of his transitions, where things 
 light and sportive are ranged alongside the most 
 solemn truths, is characteristic of his temperament 
 in ordinary life." 
 
 » TTie Tosh, bk. i, vv. 181-187. 
 
40 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 To sketch even in outline the extent and variety 
 of Cowper's poetry is beside my present purpose. 
 Limitations of space forbid me to say anything fur- 
 ther of the inimitable letters — which may after all 
 be well, since they constitute a sort of land of the 
 lotus-eaters and threaten the further progress of 
 him who begins to linger there. It remains there- 
 fore to speak of religion as an element in his work. 
 It has become the fashion to divide responsibility 
 for Cowper's mental anguish between Calvinism and 
 John Newton. Critics have implied, when they have 
 not argued, that if the tenets of the former had 
 been less arduous, and the friendship of the latter 
 more judicious, the poet might have known placid 
 days and quiet nights in place of his fearful expec- 
 tation of judgement. I have already noted the fact 
 that religion had nothing to do with the first access 
 of insanity. After that, and its accompanying at- 
 tempt at suicide, physical conditions undoubtedly 
 existed which doomed a man of Cowper's tempera- 
 ment to recurrent attacks of extreme nervous de- 
 pression. Under these circumstances it was almost 
 inevitable that something should become an obses- 
 sion — preferably some very great and remote, or 
 else some near but insignificant, matter. In Cow- 
 per's case the prevalent Calvinism of his day fur- 
 nished in its doctrine of reprobation a theme 
 precisely fitted to take tyrannous possession of his 
 unquiet mind. It is reasonably certain that John 
 Newton kept this doctrine among the weapons of 
 
THE DAWN OF THE NEW DAY 41 
 
 his theological arsenal ; it is most improbable that 
 he ever used it against William Cowper, in spite of 
 the tradition that once he gave a partial and halting 
 assent to the poet's fear concerning himself. Cal- 
 vinists of the extreme sort have always been better 
 than their creeds. The doctrine of reprobation has 
 been too awful to be launched even at the heads of 
 one's enemies, to say nothing of its hasty applica- 
 tion to one's friends. It is reasonable to suppose 
 that Newton felt this. He was called to preach sal- 
 vation; if damnation were to be dealt out, that 
 was God's prerogative. Newton was a brave, kind- 
 hearted, sane, strong man, as little addicted to 
 hysteria as John Wesley himself. There is a world 
 of evidence to show that he was a support and stay 
 to Cowper's troubled soul ; very little to indicate 
 that he ever wrought him up to an undue pitch of 
 excitement. Perhaps he was somewhat too thick- 
 skinned and masculine to deal with a temperament 
 so delicately constituted as was the poet's ; but on 
 the other hand the sturdiness of his robust faith 
 was better fitted to Cowper's need than the fussy 
 sympathy of a sentimentalist could have been. It 
 is worthy of note, too, that Newton's criticism of 
 Cowper's literary work has something to commend 
 it, and that his judgement upon the attempt to 
 translate Homer has been approved by posterity, 
 though upon different ground from that which he 
 maintained. This ex-slave-captain was something 
 of a prodigy ; but I incline to believe that the in- 
 
42 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 tricacies and probable contradictions in his life and 
 character have been more clearly discerned and far 
 more judiciously estimated by Sir James Stephen 
 than by Mrs. Oliphant/ 
 
 Let this be as it may, however, it remains true 
 of Cowper that, if a theological obsession were his 
 bane, religion was his blessing. He was the son of 
 a clergyman. His "Lines to my Mother's Picture" 
 — lines which Tennyson professed himself unable 
 to read without tears — remain to assure us of his 
 filial piety. They speak, too, in vivid terms of his 
 own religious hope and fear. He pictures himself 
 as a ship voyaging toward the haven to which his 
 parents had attained, thwarted by head winds, buf- 
 feted by the waves, vexed by confused and confus- 
 ing currents. 
 
 Yet oh the thought, that thou art safe, and he ! 
 That thought is joy, arrive what may to me. 
 
 Thus, as through the bars of a prison-house, 
 which the theology of his day had built around 
 him, — a magnificent and terrible structure, for as 
 an artist Calvin is comparable only to Michael An- 
 gelo, — we seem to hear a spirit in touch with the 
 heart of Christianity. So, in his hymns, there is to 
 be caught now and then this same note of possible 
 but scarcely to be expected joy. 
 
 Sometimes a light surprises 
 The Christian while he sings ; 
 
 * Cf. Stephen, Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography, ii, 99-121 ; 
 Oliphant, Literary History of Englandf i, 43-49. 
 
THE DAWN OF THE NEW DAY 43 
 
 It is the Lord who rises 
 
 With healing in his wings ; 
 WTien comforts are declining, 
 
 He grants the soul again 
 A season of clear shining, 
 
 To cheer it after rain.^ 
 
 It IS like honest Thomas translated from the 
 first into the eighteenth century, — a man who 
 forecast evil, but whom blessing always surprised. 
 Yet it would be very misleading to suppose that 
 the note of religious melancholy is dominant in 
 Cowper's poetry. The faith which it voices is gen- 
 erally calm and strong, if not robust. Sometimes 
 it approaches the dogmatic, as in the celebrated 
 lines upon " Voltaire and the Lace-Worker," who 
 
 Just knows, and knows no more, her Bible true — 
 A truth the brilliant Frenchman never knew ; 
 And in that charter reads, with sparkling eyes, 
 Her title to a treasure in the skies. 
 
 There is also a passage in " Hope " presaging in 
 notably vigourous verse the great missionary adven- 
 ture which was to characterize the next century. 
 
 That sound bespeaks salvation on her way, 
 The trumpet of a life-restoring day ; 
 'T is heard where England's eastern glory shines, 
 And in the gulfs of her Cornubian mines. 
 And still it spreads. See Germany send forth 
 Her sons to pour it on the frozen north ; 
 
 * This hymn has sometimes been ascribed to Newton, but prob- 
 ably only because it is to be found in tbe volume of Olney Hymns. 
 The evidence for Cowper's authorship seems conclusive. 
 
M ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Fired with a zeal peculiar, they defy 
 The rage and rigour of a polar sky, 
 And plant successfully sweet Sharon's rose 
 On icy plains and in eternal snows. 
 
 A spark of adventure glowed in the poet's soul to 
 which the heroism of the Moravians sent back a 
 kindred gleam. He was a diligent and delighted 
 reader of books of travel, speaking somewhere in 
 his letters of how wide the range of his vicarious 
 wandering had been ; and everywhere he carried 
 his love of God, together with a devoted but can- 
 did patriotism. 
 
 England, with all thy faults, I love thee still, 
 
 is a line not less characteristic than noble. 
 
 It is indeed in this atmosphere of candour and 
 courage, warmed and sweetened by faith, hope, 
 and love, lightened by the play of keen yet kindly 
 humour, and invigourated by an ever-present rev- 
 erence for duty, that the genuine religious element 
 in Cowper's work is to be found. The explicit piety 
 is never to be overlooked as a natural expression 
 of religious sentiment ; but the implicit reverence 
 for all good things and sympathy with all right 
 endeavour is the main evidence of it. " Is not ' The 
 Task' a glorious poem?" enquired Robert Burns, 
 who knew what pure and undefiled religion was, 
 however half-hearted his own attempts to incarnate 
 it may sometimes have been. "The religion of ^The 
 Task/ bating a few scraps of Calvinistic divinity, 
 is the religion of God and Nature; the religion 
 
THE DAWN OF THE NEW DAY 45 
 
 that exalts, that ennobles man." * No less competent 
 a judge and notable an heretic than George Eliot 
 pays similar and even more explicit tribute to the 
 same poem. " Where," she asks, " is the poem 
 that surpasses the ' Task ' in the genuine love it 
 breathes, at once towards inanimate and animate 
 existence — in truthfulness of perception and sin- 
 cerity of presentation — in the calm gladness that 
 springs from a delight in objects for their ovm 
 sake, without self -reference — in divine sympathy 
 with the lowliest pleasures, with the most short- 
 lived capacity for pain. . . . No object is too small 
 to prompt his song — not the sooty film on the 
 bars, or the spoutless teapot holding a bit of 
 mignonette that serves to cheer the dingy town 
 lodging with a ' hint that Nature lives ' ; and yet 
 his song is never trivial, for he is alive to small ob- 
 jects, not because his mind is narrow, but because 
 his glance is clear and his heart is large." ^ 
 
 There is profit in setting these judgements of two 
 persons whose critical competence in literary matters 
 will not be lightly questioned beside the dictum of 
 the historian of the Evangelical Revival. 
 
 " It would be scarcely claiming too much," says 
 Canon Overton, "if we set down the whole of 
 Cowper's original poetry ... as belonging to the 
 literature of the Evangelical Revival. ... In the 
 
 * Letter to Mrs. Dunlop, Dec. 25, 1793 ; Robert Bums and Mrs. 
 Dunlopf ii, 265. 
 
 ' Essay on Worldliness and Other-Worldliness. 
 
4» ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 productions of his elegant pen we should, under 
 any circumstances, have recognized at least the 
 disjecta membra i^oetce. But, as a matter of fact, 
 his Christian convictions were the mainspring which 
 set the whole machinery of his poetical work in 
 motion. It was this which gave coherence and 
 symmetry and soul to it all. Abstract the religious 
 element from his compositions, and they all fall to 
 pieces ; but, in fact, it is impossible to do so. With 
 the exception of one or two lighter pieces, there is 
 an undercurrent of Christian sentiment running 
 through and inseparable from them all." ^ 
 
 No doubt the question has arisen in some minds 
 as to the source of Cowper's delightful sense of 
 humour, and the legitimacy of its association with 
 his profound religious convictions on the one hand 
 and his haunting melancholy upon the other. The 
 association between humour and melancholy is nat- 
 ural enough, since the latter may be said to be lit- 
 tle more than the former hypertrophied and passed 
 into an obsession. ' A sense of humour,' as I shall 
 have occasion to note at some length in a later 
 chapter, is but a phrase for a keen appreciation of 
 life's little incongruities and a disposition to hold 
 them resolutely subject to a larger plan. The hu- 
 mourous man consents to be amused and desires to 
 amuse others by casual attention bestowed upon 
 small interruptions of the normal order of his 
 thought or of his day, especially when an element 
 
 ^ Evangelical Revival in the Eighteenth Century, p. 127. 
 
THE DAWN OF THE NEW DAY 47 
 
 of the unexpected or the absurd appears in them. 
 Most good-tempered people know what it is to 
 meet a succession of insignificant contretemps, at 
 the first and second of which they are disposed to 
 give way to vexation; but as the number grows, 
 the sense of being in a ^plight' grows, too. If 
 the plight be merely absurd, victory over threat- 
 ened sourness of temper is won with an honest 
 laugh at one's self. If it be serious, the disturbance 
 of mind may deepen into melancholy. When the 
 incongruities of life come to be regarded as ironies, 
 purposeful and cruel contradictions of fate, then 
 the sense of humour atrophies and practically dies ; 
 as witness the later novels of Mr. Hardy, from 
 which all the radiance of humour which illuminated 
 '*' Far from the Madding Crowd" and " Under the 
 Greenwood Tree " seems to have evaporated. The 
 reason is that, when all life's little incongruities 
 have become signs of Fate's malevolence, the Uni- 
 verse grows too grim for laughter or for that quiet 
 amusement which is even better. Indeed, in such 
 circumstances, one no longer has a right to speak 
 of the Universe, since cosmos has given place to 
 chaos once again. Humour of a sane, good-tem- 
 pered, gracious sort is indissolubly hnked to faith. 
 It need not, of course, be a perfectly coordinated 
 or confessed faith ; but the relation is sufficiently 
 close, define it as we may, to leave wholesome mirth 
 without support or stay when faith in God and man 
 is overthrown. Illustrations of this will not be 
 
48 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 wanting as we go on together. It is sufficient now 
 to note the fact that Cowper's humour, evident 
 enough in his verse, but shining with an effulgence 
 of perpetual delight in his letters, belongs to his 
 faith.^ 
 
 Of course this is only another way of saying that 
 he was gifted with a fine and true sense of propor- 
 tion, doing all things, when he was himself, de- 
 cently and in order. Thus he was able to dignify 
 little matters and commonplace occurrences into 
 proper subjects for verse, introducing thereby a new 
 note into the poetry of his century. The thing has 
 perhaps never been better put than by Anne Grant 
 in a letter written some five and twenty years after 
 the poet's death. " Yet there are blockheads . . . 
 that will say, ' What do the public care for his 
 stockings, or for his oysters, or for the cake that 
 came in its native pans, or the heartless hens that 
 refused to lay eggs to make another cake?' I 
 would have such persons know that a Cowper mov- 
 ing in the light of his mental beauty and modest 
 sanctity irradiates every object that is in contact 
 with him ; it is their oysters and cakes that are in- 
 significant, because they are so themselves." ^ 
 
 * I do not forget the late T. E. Brown's strictures upon what he 
 is pleased to think Cowper's tendency to sit in Pharisaical judge- 
 ment upon those who differed from him; but that gifted Manxman's 
 equal capacity for prejudice and strong language practically rules 
 him out of court in such a case as this. 
 
 2 Memoir and Correspondence of Anne Grant. Quoted from Moul- 
 ton's Library of Literary Criticism, iv, p. 383. 
 
THE DAWN OF THE NEW DAY 49 
 
 A century of letters bears testimony to the sig- 
 nificance of Cowper's life and work. He reintro- 
 duced in a perfectly simple and natural manner the 
 religious note into literature. He became the inspi- 
 ration of more than one later poet, as Mrs. Brown- 
 ing's " Cowper's Grave/' and the passionate verses 
 of Anne Bronte testify. More than this, he became 
 the accepted poet of the English Evangelicals, bring- 
 ing sweetness and light into many middle-class 
 English homes where reawakened piety, threatening 
 to degenerate into a new asceticism, needed him 
 sorely enough. To become the poet of a school or 
 sect is one of the severest tests to which an author 
 can be put. It is significant of the genuine quality 
 of Cowper's poetic gift and the soundness of his 
 piety that practically all his verses still ring clear 
 and true ; and that we would not sacrifice even 
 such tragic lines as those wrung out of his despair 
 by the story of Anson's sailor swept overboard in 
 mid-ocean to a fate which seemed but a mild pre- 
 sage of his own. There is perhaps no sadder stanza 
 in EngHsh poetry than — 
 
 No voice divine the storm allay'd, 
 
 No light propitious shone, 
 When snatched from all effectual aid. 
 
 We perished, each alone ; 
 But I beneath a rougher sea, 
 
 And whelm'd in deeper gulfs than he.^ 
 
 The voice is Cowper's and the hand that wrote was 
 
 * Poems, X, 98, Southey's edition. 
 
50 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 his ; but the inspirer of the verse was that strange 
 spirit of despair who plagued him for so long, cast- 
 ing him, like the demoniac of old, into the water 
 and the fire, and forcing him, in efforts to rid him- 
 self of such possession, to perform some of the most 
 significant and telling work of his own century ; 
 work which was destined moreover to prove to be 
 an emancipation proclamation to the next. 
 
 A well-known critic not long since began a re- 
 view of the poet whom we are next to consider with 
 the words, "We are done with Crabbe." He very 
 likely intended to state a lamentable fact rather 
 than a judgement ; otherwise the phrase would de- 
 serve to be pilloried beside the " This will never 
 do," wherewith Jeffrey greeted Wordsworth. Even 
 as a statement of fact, however, one may take issue 
 with Professor Woodberry's dictum ; for there is 
 scarce a poet of his century whose keenness of ob- 
 servation, sense of human values, and conscious- 
 ness of what we rather blindly call ' the Social 
 Question,' render him so germane to our own day 
 as this "Pope in worsted stockings." Some one has 
 sketched his sturdy figure as in old age he came in 
 from a botanizinor excursion with his hands full of 
 wayside flowers or weeds. Nothing could be more 
 significant or characteristic than those weeds in 
 Crabbe's firm and sympathetic grasp. There was no 
 touch of sentimentality in the interest which they 
 aroused ; but they grew beside his path ; there was 
 meaning, explicit or latent, in them ; and Crabbe 
 
THE DAWN OF THE NEW DAY 51 
 
 cared. He cared to know what they were ; to inquire 
 into the bane or blessing of which they were capa- 
 ble; it may be that he cared just because other peo- 
 ple did not seem to care. That at least appears 
 often to have been his principle of selection in choos- 
 ing the subjects for his poems. Life's highways and 
 hedges furnished him with tragedy and comedy — 
 though with far more of the former than the latter. 
 Crabbe knew the lot of the poor at first hand. 
 Bred to drudgery in a little east-coast fishing town, 
 and later apprenticed to a surgeon or apothecary, 
 his first attempts to get on in the world met with 
 bitter discouragement. His rash adventure in at- 
 tempting London life with little more than the tra- 
 ditional shilling in his pocket, was an invitation to 
 disaster ; and irretrievable disaster might have come 
 had it not been for the aid of Edmund Burke in 
 his extremity. None of that great man's good deeds 
 becomes him better than the help he gave this 
 struggling poet. Crabbe finally took orders and be- 
 came a diligent, if not a zealous, minister of the 
 Church of England. His " Village," which is far re- 
 moved from Goldsmith's " Sweet Auburn," and the 
 " Parish Register " give us a picture of the pathos 
 and tragedy of humble life worth setting beside the 
 great work of his contemporary Sir Frederick Eden 
 on " The State of the Poor." Even in his later 
 poems, like " Tales of the Hall," in which he seems 
 to deal with the more fortunate classes, Crabbe is 
 still keen to perceive and quick to sympathize with 
 
62 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 poverty. When the two brothers who are the pro- 
 tagonists of the simple drama approach their meet- 
 ing after many years of separation, the younger 
 soliloquizes : — 
 
 " How shall I now my unknown way explore, 
 He proud and rich — I very proud and poor ? " 
 
 When they have met, grown accustomed to each 
 other, and sit at ease over wine and walnuts in the 
 elder's well-appointed dining-room, the talk recurs to 
 old schoolmates or village acquaintances who have 
 felt the world's rough hand. There is no blemish 
 of condescension or patronage. All is direct, simple, 
 and honestly sympathetic, as well as sane with a 
 sanity which will not permit a trace of false senti- 
 ment. The tears in the story of Kuth are genuine 
 lachrymoB rerum ; and nothing could be truer to 
 life than the narrative of the poor boy of moderate 
 talent, patronized and partly educated by a noble- 
 man who cast him off when the youth began to 
 think himself a genius and to nurse an ambition 
 for an artist's career. 
 
 Years passed away, and where he lived, and how, 
 
 "Was then unknown — indeed we know not now ; 
 
 But once at twilight walking up and down. 
 
 In a poor alley of the mighty town, 
 
 Where, in her narrow courts and garrets, hide 
 
 The grieving sons of Genius, Want and Pride, 
 
 I met him musing : sadness I could trace. 
 
 And conquer'd hope's meek anguish, in his face.^ 
 
 It is doubtful if our speech contains another phrase 
 
 * Tales of the Hall, book iii. 
 
THE DAWN OF THE NEW DAY 53 
 
 SO competent to sum up the tragedy of ambitious 
 and disappointed mediocrity as that "conquer'd 
 hope's meek anguish." 
 
 Crabbe's poetry, it will be seen, is not exactly 
 diverting according to modern standards, — though 
 he was a chief favourite with such potent lords of 
 literature as Byron, Scott, and Newman, — but it is 
 none the less interesting and profitable for any one 
 who would know the world in which he lives and 
 who would grapple with the problem of its inequali- 
 ties of privilege. It is religious in the deep sense 
 in which the prophecy of Amos or the parable of 
 Dives and Lazarus may be called religious ; and it 
 shares their convicting power. Even at this dis- 
 tance it is hard to read the story of the Village 
 Workhouse, with its portrayal — 
 
 Of the cold charities of man to man, — 
 
 or the sketch of Isaac Ashford in the "Parish 
 Register," without an awakening of the ^social 
 conscience ' ; or, let it be added, an honest thanks- 
 giving that we have made some progress in the 
 intervening century. Ashford is a noble and pa- 
 thetic figure which none but a country clergyman 
 could have drawn. Although his life had been one 
 of strict and industrious integrity, — 
 
 At length he found, when seventy years were run, 
 His strength departed and his labour done ; 
 When he, save honest fame, retained no more, 
 But lost his wife, and saw his children poor : 
 'T was then, a spark of — say not discontent — 
 Struck on his mind, and thus he gave it vent : — 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 " Kind are your laws ('t is not to be denied), 
 That in yon House, for ruin'd age, provide, 
 
 Why then this proud reluctance to be fed, 
 To join your poor and eat the parish-bread ? " 
 
 Such were his thoughts, and so resign'd he grew ; 
 Daily he placed the Workhouse in his view ! ^ 
 
 Grave economic objections can be made against 
 any general scheme of old-age pensions ; American 
 experience with military pensions leads even the 
 friendly critic to look askance at the system just 
 inaugurated in Great Britain ; but those of its ad- 
 vocates who know their Crabbe will never lack a 
 telling argument; nor will their opponents fail to 
 discover a considerable burden of proof laid upon 
 their shoulders whenever they are called upon to 
 face Isaac Ashf ord. He helps us to understand what 
 Tennyson meant when, in expressing his liking for 
 Crabbe, he said, " There is a tramp, tramp, tramp, 
 a merciless sledge-hammer thud about his lines 
 which suits his subjects." 
 
 The moment that we turn to Burns all this is 
 changed, though the change is, after all, of manner 
 rather than of matter. One may advance this claim 
 without forgetting that in literature, and especially 
 in poetry, manner is much, and that in passing 
 from Crabbe to Burns we seem to master a new 
 element and to spring from earth to air. Crabbe 
 was a realist and inspired to plod, though after 
 
 ^ The Parish Register, part iii. 
 
THE DAWN OF THE NEW DAY 56 
 
 such a fashion that something of the beauty and 
 terror of an army with banners attends his march. 
 Burns was inspired to sing and fly, and is most 
 master of himself as well as of his art while exer- 
 cising his lyric gift. 
 
 Never perhaps has a great poet revealed himself 
 so unreservedly in his verse. Except for the fact 
 that much which the world has seen was never 
 meant for its eye, but written for himself alone, as 
 his brother Gilbert assures us, whole sections of his 
 poetry would scarce be endurable. As it is, the 
 reader not infrequently sympathizes with Keats, 
 who shrank from such excess of self-revelation 
 while he felt its fascination to the full. " We can 
 see horribly clear in the work of such a man," he 
 wrote in one of his letters, " his whole life as if we 
 were God's spies." 
 
 That life is too well known to require any sketch 
 of its incidents here. It reminds us anew of the 
 mysterious catholicity which the Spirit of all Truth 
 exercises in the choice of his instruments, using 
 sometimes the weak, sometimes the obdurate, and 
 always the partial. Burns was as far as possible 
 from being obdurate or stubborn ; but he was weak, 
 and the manliness which is one of his noblest and 
 sweetest characteristics sometimes failed him lam- 
 entably. To claim that "The Cottar's Saturday 
 Night" represents his best gift to literature might 
 lay me open to the accusation of subordinating criti- 
 cal faculty to the convenience of my present theme. 
 
66 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Yet the testimony of no less a critic than Scott's 
 biographer can be cited for the defence. Lockhart 
 is very confident that the loss of this one poem 
 would be perhaps the most serious that the poet's 
 fame could endure, were such loss possible. The 
 reader needs but to recall it to feel how representa- 
 tive it is of the best in Burns's experience and how 
 profound and genuine was the religious feeling 
 which inspired it. In his sanest moments there 
 never was a saner man. He knew where the hidings 
 of Scotland's power lay, and whence the source of 
 his own largest opportunities came — out of the 
 sturdy, independent, godly training received from 
 his parents, and which was in a sense characteristic 
 of the Scots Presbyterian peasantry. That training 
 in self-respecting manliness, with the Scriptures and 
 the Shorter Catechism to vouch for its validity, 
 Burns never forgot. When at his best, he generally 
 echoes the spirit of it. To be sure, — 
 
 He feels the force, 
 The treacherous undertow and stress, 
 Of wayward passions, and no less 
 
 The keen remorse. 
 
 At moments, wrestling with his fate, 
 His voice is harsh, but not with hate ; 
 
 The brushwood hung 
 Above the tavern door lets fall 
 Its bitter leaf, its drop of gall, 
 
 Upon his tongue. 
 
 But still the music of his song 
 Rises o'er all, elate and strong ; 
 
THE DAWN OF THE NEW DAY 57 
 
 Its master chords 
 Are Manhood, Freedom, Brotherhood ; 
 Its discords but an interlude 
 
 Between the words.^ 
 
 As SO often happens in both literature and life, 
 the religious element in Burns shows to best advan- 
 tage when it is implicit. He hated hypocrisy, and, 
 like many a conscience-smitten man, exalted his 
 hatred into a special virtue. " Holy Willie's Prayer," 
 for instance, is a diatribe acrid enough to have come 
 from the pen of Churchill or of Junius. It is an 
 attack upon ultra-Calvinism in general, — which was 
 sufficiently justifiable ; and upon a certain William 
 Fisher in particular, — which nothing could justify. 
 So in the " Holy Fair," with its innuendoes and 
 personalities, there is far less Christian spirit than 
 in the rollicking stanzas of the " Jolly Beggars," a 
 poem which for genuine inspiration must take pre- 
 cedence of the far more famous " Tam o' Shanter." 
 But the "Lines to a Mountain Daisy," to the mouse 
 whose poor home was invaded by his ploughshare, 
 the closing stanzas of his " Address to the Unco 
 Guid," and especially — 
 
 A man's a man for a' that 
 
 are instinct with the very spirit of the Gospel. Some- 
 where this man 
 
 ^ H. W. Longfellow, Robert Bums. 
 
 As originally printed in Harper^ s Magazine for 1880, the last stanza 
 began,— 
 
 But still the burden of his song 
 Is love of right, disdain of wrong. 
 
68 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 learned the touch that speeds 
 Right to the natural heart of things ; 
 Struck rootage down to where Life feeds 
 At the eternal Springs. 
 
 It is not without hesitation that one writes down 
 William Blake as a mystic ; not but that mysticism 
 of a sort played a part in his strange mental and 
 spiritual experience, but because we have fallen into 
 the notion that such experience is typical of mysti- 
 cism. The genuine mystic is simply a person of 
 keen spiritual perceptions to whom the Immanent 
 Soul of the Universe seems very near and real. He 
 looks askance at trances on the one hand, as he 
 extends but a dubious welcome to rituals upon 
 the other, and always he is suspicious of hysteria, 
 though possibly willing to admit that life subject 
 to hysterical seizures is better than stark death. 
 The genuine mystical element in Blake consists in 
 his God-consciousness rather than in his tendency 
 to dream dreams, to see visions, and to babble with 
 tongues. His claim to sanity may be questioned ; so 
 may his claim to the possession of the clear flame of 
 genius ; yet sparks of genius illumine his work both 
 in literature and art. He has aroused some enthusi- 
 asms and inspired some disciples — at least to ap- 
 propriate his ideas. He was a man of weird visions, 
 ecstasies, and revelations, which were never quite 
 plain to him and which he could therefore never 
 adequately reveal to others. Possessed as he was 
 by a sort of religious demon, he wrote some poetry 
 
THE DAWN OF THE NEW DAY 59 
 
 and made some drawings which are wonderfully 
 suggestive in their partial and inchoate state ; and 
 he left two or three exquisite lyrics which can 
 scarcely fail of immortality. In the "Reeds of 
 Innocence " he incorporates with something of 
 Stevenson's naturalness and simplicity that child- 
 like spirit which is the essence of religion. 
 
 Piping down the valleys wild, • 
 Piping songs of pleasant glee, 
 
 On a cloud I saw a child, 
 And he laughing said to me : 
 
 " Pipe a song about a Lamb ! " 
 So I piped with merry cheer. 
 
 " Piper, pipe that song again " ; 
 So I piped : he wept to hear. 
 
 "The Tyger" suggests in inimitable phrase the 
 mystery of cruelty and death in Nature. 
 
 Tyger, Tyger, burning bright 
 In the forests of the night, 
 What immortal hand or eye 
 Dare frame thy fearful symmetry ? 
 
 When the stars threw down their spears, 
 And watered Heaven with their tears, 
 Did He smile His work to see ? 
 Did He who made the Lamb, make thee ? 
 
 Perhaps the best characterization of Blake is that 
 contained in the little poem bearing his name by 
 James Thomson. 
 
 He came to the desert of London town, 
 Grey miles long ; 
 
60 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 He wandered up and he wandered down, 
 
 Singing a quiet song. 
 He came to the desert of London town, 
 
 Mirk miles broad ; 
 He wandered up and he wandered down, 
 
 Ever alone with God. 
 
 Thus, at what may seem to be somewhat dispro- 
 portionate length, I have sketched the dawn of the 
 new day in English poetry. These four men, of whom 
 Cowperand Crabbe seem to belong to the eighteenth 
 century, as Burns and Blake do to the nineteenth, 
 all suggest in their different ways the opportunity 
 lying before the student of the religious implications 
 of our literature, — its religious implications, I re- 
 peat, because in literature, as elsewhere in life, it is 
 the implicit religion which counts and which finally 
 determines religious expression. 
 
 Cowper with his keen eye, humourous smile, and 
 tender heart ; Crabbe, the realist, — 
 
 Nature's sternest painter, yet the best, — 
 
 (to quote again Lord Byron's rather hackneyed 
 tribute), depicting life in low and sombre lights, 
 yet never cynically; Burns, singing his new song; 
 and Blake, piping his thin but haunting melody, 
 all bear witness to the ineradicable influence of re- 
 ligion upon literature. I am not concerned just now 
 to attempt the definition of that influence, but am 
 content to note it as we pass on to observe two great 
 leaders in the literary achievement of the new cen- 
 tury. 
 
CHAPTER m 
 
 SONS OF THE MORNING : WORDSWOBTH AND 
 COLERIDGE 
 
 Matthew Arnold once observed that, while 
 Wordsworth's poetry had failed of the recognition 
 it deserves, still it had not wanted eulogists ; " and 
 it may be said to have brought its eulogists luck, 
 for almost every one who has praised Wordsworth's 
 poetry has praised it well." No better illustration 
 of the truth of this remark could be cited than the 
 filial and illuminating estimate wherewith Matthew 
 Arnold himself prefaced the little volume of Words- 
 worth selections edited by him some five and twenty 
 years ago. It is so sane and rare a bit of criticism 
 that I could perhaps best attain my present purpose 
 by asking the reader to renew acquaintance with it, 
 and then to draw his own conclusions concerning 
 the poet's testimony to my thesis ; for it is only 
 honest to confess that I cannot bring myself to 
 speak of Wordsworth with the detachment and 
 coolness of judgement becoming to the present 
 task. That very edition of his poems is the volume 
 which, next perhaps to the Bible, Shakespeare, and 
 Boswell's Johnson, I should choose to take into ex- 
 ile with me, unless indeed I threw discretion to the 
 
62 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 winds, and chose instead the poems which Matthew 
 Arnold did not choose; since the true Words- 
 worth lover would not willingly give up the " Pre- 
 lude " and " Excursion.'* I remember the famous 
 anecdote of Macaulay's challenge to the company 
 of ' literary persons ' who were praising the " Pre- 
 lude," which resulted in the discovery that he him- 
 self was the only man in the room who had read 
 the poem ; nor do I forget the dubious praise which 
 the sprightly Elizabeth, of " German Garden " fame, 
 bestows upon it in her '' Adventures in Riigen." 
 She commends it as an ideal companion for the 
 traveller, inasmuch as the reading can be begun at 
 any point without special effort and interrupted 
 with as little disappointment. Both it and the " Ex- 
 cursion " are poems which unquestionably minister 
 to composure rather than to excitement, and doubt- 
 less there have been readers whose composure 
 has deepened into slumber. Wordsworth is not in- 
 frequently prosaic and occasionally commonplace. 
 None but a Words worthian fanatic — by which I 
 mean that type of devotee who seems bent upon 
 spoiling poetry by making it the theme of toilsome 
 study, exaggerated comment, and indiscriminate 
 praise ; the type that is forever organizing ' clubs,' 
 and at whose hands Browning has suffered so many 
 things — can overlook his famous line, — 
 
 A Mr. Wilkinson, a clergyman, 
 
 which another great poet used to quote as perhaps 
 
SONS OF THE MORNING 63 
 
 the feeblest in literature. He was unquestionably 
 deficient in humour. He was possibly deficient in 
 passion, though such as know him best do not feel 
 the lack. But none the less his eyes saw the bea- 
 tific vision, — 
 
 Of truth, of grandeur, beauty, love and hope, 
 And melancholy fear subdued by faith, 
 Of blessed consolations in distress, 
 Of moral strength and intellectual power, 
 Of joy in widest commonalty spread. 
 
 He had the faculty of perceiving the universal 
 significance of common things. Less gifted than his 
 contemporary Coleridge in respect of pure fancy, his 
 imagination was, I believe, more exactly attuned to 
 the music of life as it is than that of any other Eng- 
 lish poet with the possible exception of Shakespeare : 
 
 The still sad music of humanity, 
 
 Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power 
 
 To chasten and subdue. 
 
 One hesitates to quote again lines already in such 
 danger of being worn threadbare ; yet there is some- 
 thing about them which, like great and familiar pas- 
 sages of Scripture, assures perennial renewal of 
 their youth. However hardly used, they seem com- 
 monplace only in the mouths of shallow and shifty 
 persons whose main intellectual resource is the 
 catchword of a day ; restored to their rightful con- 
 text the floods of the Spirit once more pulse through 
 them and their old soul-compelling power returns. 
 To set these well-known lines in the forefront of 
 
64 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Wordsworth's message is not to imply that either 
 his thinking or his writing was mainly in a minor 
 key. The subdued and sombre has its frequent 
 place, but the dominant note is that of calm and 
 patient confidence, — the victory which overcometh 
 the world being his faith. Who else has ever inter- 
 preted Nature with so clear a perception of the dis- 
 tinction between the body and soul of it? He de- 
 lights in the outward semblance, in the nodding and 
 beckoning of the daffodils to the welcome Spring, 
 and yet gains from the meanest flower that blows 
 thoughts too deep for tears. Thus Nature is never 
 divorced from life. It always has, when rightly read, 
 an immediate and normal influence — 
 
 On that best portion of a good man's life, 
 His little, nameless, unremembered acts 
 Of kindness and of love. 
 
 Men who touch it with the finger of faith find it to 
 be the very garment of God whose hem shall heal 
 them ; and sometimes it is swept aside for a moment 
 in order that the Eeal Presence may appear. This is 
 
 that blessed mood, 
 In which the burden of the mystery. 
 In which the heavy and the weary weight 
 Of all this unintelligible world. 
 Is lightened ; that serene and blessed mood, 
 In which the affections gently lead us on, — 
 Until, the breath of this corporeal frame 
 And even the motion of our human blood 
 Almost suspended, we are laid asleep 
 In body and become a living soul. 
 
SONS OF THE MORNING 66 
 
 Such is the mysticism of Wordsworth. He sees 
 things as they are ; he feels the common human 
 joys and griefs : the song of the highland reaper, 
 like Ruth of old among the sheaves; the burden 
 upon the bent shoulders of the poor leech-gatherer 
 gleaning a precarious hvelihood from the moorland 
 pools ; the tragedy of Michael, the pathos of which 
 appeals to the reader as deeper and more compelling 
 than that of Enoch Arden by so much as the story 
 itself lies more clearly within the range of common 
 experience; the loneliness of the heath after the 
 passing of the child whose solitary playground it 
 has been; the haunting intimations of a higher 
 destiny and a richer life than this world can make 
 room for; and the clear tones in which through the 
 mysteries of present experience the voice of duty 
 speaks, — of all these diverse yet related things he 
 is wonderfully conscious. They belong together in 
 his thought, and their unifying principle is the 
 Reason and the Love of God. 
 
 The secret of Wordsworth is not far to seek; 
 and yet, when found, one is tempted to say that its 
 full significance can be appreciated only by those 
 whose experience has taught them the charm as 
 well as the ache of loneliness. Whether this loneli- 
 ness be that of solitude, or the yet more poignant 
 isolation sometimes felt in cities and strange assem- 
 blies, is of no particular moment. Wordsworth's 
 poetry more frequently voices the former ; though 
 the sonnet upon Westminster Bridge breathes 
 
66 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 something of the latter. But, whether alone or 
 amid a throng, the poet always felt himself to be 
 a living soul in vital touch with the soul of Nature. 
 This is the answer, the more than sufficient answer, 
 to be made to those who talk of Wordsworth's 
 "pantheism." No word could well be further from 
 expressing his religion and philosophy. In panthe- 
 ism the deity is so identified with Nature that he 
 can be said to live only in the visible activities of 
 the world and to be conscious only in the con- 
 sciousness of man. Wordsworth shows no trace of 
 sympathy with so narrow and partial a scheme of 
 thought. On the contrary, the great bulk of his 
 work is so inspired by faith in a Personal Power 
 resident in the world and at work through its 
 activities, that in a peculiar sense he stands related 
 at once to the Greek with his haunting idea of 
 the genius loci, and to the modern Christian re- 
 joicing in his faith in an Immanent God. 
 
 In "The Excursion" he has set forth with fine 
 sympathy and discrimination the naturalness of the 
 old pagan view — which was, after all, but partly 
 wrong. Greek polytheism was a partial and inade- 
 quate attempt to express the soul's instinctive con- 
 sciousness of the wealth of personal life in the 
 Universe. The Greeks felt that, wherever events 
 took place, — especially notable, essential, and re- 
 current events like the sun's rising, setting, and 
 stately progress through the zodiac, — there was 
 an interplay of cause and effect which bespoke 
 
SONS OF THE MORNING 67 
 
 the presence of will. The presence of will neces- 
 sarily implied the presence of a person. They were 
 right. The world of law to which we have been 
 introduced by modern science is but a restate- 
 ment in terms of general and scientific interrela- 
 tion of what their mythology attempted to express 
 in terms of real but unrelated experience. They 
 ascribed the steadfast glory and beneficence of 
 the sun's progress to Apollo ; the phenomena of the 
 sea to the will of Poseidon ; the waxing and wan- 
 ing of the moon to the virgin huntress. They 
 failed to be true to the principle of religious de- 
 velopment in too completely isolating these divini- 
 ties and swamping the deeper significance of their 
 religion in the intrigues and devices of Olympus. 
 The relation of events thus hinged upon the inter- 
 relation of passionate and often petty people ; and 
 no doubt the intricacy of phenomena which appear 
 sometimes to make up a sort of " cosmic weather," 
 might lend some justification to their scheme. Sci- 
 ence has resolved these contradictions and diver- 
 sities. She assures us that there is no room in 
 the Universe for whim or prejudice, — no commit- 
 tee of gods who may agree upon a certain course, 
 or may break up in petulant confusion and go 
 their several ways to visit their favourites with 
 such blessing, and their enemies with such bane, 
 as are possible to their strength and cleverness. 
 The cosmic scheme of science is one of — 
 
 Interdependence, absolute, foreseen, ordained, decreed. 
 
68 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 It tends to express itself in the formulas of me- 
 chanics ; its ideal is that of a perfectly articulated 
 machine. Hence modern science is contemptuous 
 toward Greek thought, and especially toward Greek 
 thought upon religion. It too often proceeds upon 
 the implicit hypothesis if not the blatant dogma 
 that the Universe has no room for personality. What 
 seems to be a person is a delusion and free will is a 
 snare. 
 
 Against such belittling of life as this Words- 
 worth resolutely set his face. The world in which 
 he found himself was more than a dead machine. 
 The men and women who inhabited it were more 
 than empty and insignificant phenomena. The 
 foundation of his joy in the goodly frame of earth 
 which he observed so closely was laid in his con- 
 fidence that a Spirit inhabited and pervaded it. So 
 far from being a pantheist in the technical sense, 
 he was simply clairvoyant to God's immanence. His 
 child playing upon the heath — 
 
 Shall feel an overseeing power 
 To kindle or restrain. 
 
 The mountain crags and caves give similar testi- 
 mony to his Wanderer : — 
 
 Even in their fixed and steady lineaments 
 He traced an ebbing and a flowing mind, 
 Expression ever varying ! 
 
 Most notable of all, perhaps, is the passage in Book 
 IV of " The Excursion," in which he pictures the 
 
SONS OF THE MORNING 69 
 
 child far inland, holding to his ear the shell whose 
 murmur speaks of its bond of union with the dis- 
 tant sea. 
 
 Even such a shell the Universe itself 
 Is to the ear of faith. 
 
 It would be wearisome to multiply instances so 
 easily recalled by every chance acquaintance of the 
 poet whose reading has included " Tintern Abbey"; 
 but the impression that personality is the ultimate 
 fact in a rational world grows upon the reader as 
 he notes the place which Wordsworth gives to men 
 and women in his theory and practice of poetry. 
 As has been suggested, he was a lonely man. 
 The very traditions preserved among the Cumber- 
 land peasants show him to us in his walks so ab- 
 sorbed in his thought and art as to be oblivious 
 to those about him. Like Mr. Eapling's hero, he 
 went forth — 
 
 For to possess, in loneliness, 
 The joy of all the earth.^ 
 
 But this joy of the earth is never quite perfect ex- 
 cept as it is related to the living soul. Wordsworth 
 loved nothing better than some field or heath, val- 
 ley or mountain, which, beautiful in itself, should 
 yet take on a higher beauty though framing a soul's 
 experience. 
 
 He was less a poet of the village than of the iso- 
 lated cottage; of the group of playing children 
 * To ike True Romance. 
 
70 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 than of the lonely but contented girl upon her 
 heath, whose very ghost, returning to its old haunts 
 after her death. 
 
 Sings a solitary song 
 That whistles in the wind. 
 
 He rarely depicts, except incidentally, any com- 
 pany of workers in the fields, but loves the shep- 
 herd upon the hills, facing sun and storm with 
 equal mind, and the solitary reaper singing at her 
 
 work. 
 
 Alone she cuts and binds the grain, 
 And sings a melancholy strain. 
 
 Yet " melancholy " is too pronounced a word. There 
 is nothing sad in the picture. It stands rather as a 
 perpetual reminder of autumn sunlight, wholesome 
 toil, and honest contentment. Let the song of the 
 girl be what it will, — 
 
 Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow 
 For old, unhappy, far-off things, 
 
 And battles long ago : 
 Or is it some more humble lay 
 Familiar matter of to-day ? 
 Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain 
 That has been, and may be again ? 
 
 Still it is as soothing as the crooning of a child, 
 alone but happy in its play. Sometimes, to be sure, 
 the loneliness is tragic, as in the case of Michael, 
 sitting lamentably by the unfinished sheepfold of 
 which his only son had laid the cornerstone before 
 leaving home for the city that was to be his ruin ; 
 
SONS OF THE MORNING 71 
 
 or of Margaret, in her desolate and decaying house 
 on the wide common over which her half-crazed 
 eyes were strained in search of the soldier-husband 
 who did not come ; but not less often there is the 
 cheer of health and heartiness in these pictures. 
 The reader finds himself wondering whether a more 
 wholesome figure was ever painted than that of the 
 old woodman in Book VII of " The Excursion," 
 the man "of cheerful yesterdays and confident 
 to-morrows." 
 
 It is significant that Wordsworth not only felt 
 the physical health of this sturdy soul but realized 
 that there was a genuine spiritual quality in his 
 cheerfulness. 
 
 Nor will, I trust, the Majesty of Heaven 
 Reject the incense offered up by him, 
 Though of the kind which beasts and birds present 
 In grove or pasture ; cheerfulness of soul, 
 From trepidation and repining free. 
 
 Even more notable is the fashion in which here and 
 always the lonely human creature dominates and 
 gives character to the landscape in which he is set. 
 For Wordsworth the Soul remains to the end the 
 significant thing. Nature is after all a setting for 
 the life of man. Granting for the moment that it be 
 a machine, man is still the pulse of it and bound to 
 dominate its existence in increasinsf measure ac- 
 cording as he cultivates and exercises reason and 
 will.^ 
 
 » " She was a Phantom of Delight." 
 
72 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Thus it comes to pass that the high ethical qual- 
 ity of Wordsworth is a natural outflow of his faith 
 in God and man ; and didactic passages, when they 
 occur, are recognized as incidents in the stream of 
 his song. The inspired peddler in " The Excursion " 
 sometimes mounts the pulpit, to be sure ; and now 
 and then, as in the " Parable for Fathers," the 
 generally sweet simplicity of the poet becomes fairly 
 stolid in its persistent thrusting of a moral upon 
 the unwilling reader. It is needless to say that un- 
 imaginative souls are not wanting, to whom these 
 occasional lapses into homiletic prose have provided 
 weapons which it is their delight to wield. Matthew 
 Arnold's witness to this is that of one who had 
 suffered. He is speaking of the apostrophe to edu- 
 cation in the latter part of " The Excursion," which 
 
 begins, — 
 
 O for the coming of that glorious time 
 When, prizing knowledge as her noblest wealth, etc. 
 
 " One can hear them being quoted," he continues, 
 " at a Social Science Congress ; one can call up the 
 whole scene. A great room in one of our dismal 
 provincial towns; dusty air and jaded afternoon 
 daylight ; benches full of men with bald heads and 
 women in spectacles ; an orator lifting up his face 
 from a manuscript written within and without, to 
 declaim these lines of Wordsworth ; and in the soul 
 of any poor child of nature who may have wandered 
 in thither an unutterable sense of lamentation and 
 mourning and woe." 
 
SONS OF THE MORNING 73 
 
 It is not in such passages as these that Words- 
 worth makes his deepest ethical impress upon us. 
 His best teaching is incidental. His mind possessed 
 in a notable degree — 
 
 that apprehensive power 
 By which she is made quick to recognize 
 The moral properties and scope of things. 
 
 Hence his plain men and women serve to find our 
 souls. Take for instance this picture of three score 
 and ten : — 
 
 but his was now 
 
 The still contentedness of seventy years. 
 
 Calm did he sit under the wide-spread tree 
 
 Of his old age ; 
 
 and put beside it the beauty and serenity of the deaf 
 dalesman's story as told in Book VH of " The Ex- 
 cursion." Here is a man cut off from intercourse 
 with his fellows through infirmity, who grew up — 
 
 From year to year in loneliness of soul, 
 
 Yet, by the solace of his own pure thoughts 
 Upheld, he duteously pursued the round 
 Of rural labours. 
 
 There is nothing sordid about the picture. The 
 daily drudgery is relieved by the companionship of 
 books, and the whole round of himible life is digni- 
 fied by a resolution of soul which made cheerful 
 conquest of adverse circumstance. 
 
 "It is wholesome as maize," said Emerson, of 
 Longfellow's "Hiawatha." The figure is apt to 
 
74 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Wordsworth's ethical teaching. He was not blind 
 to life's puzzle and contradiction. In " The Red- 
 breast and the Butterfly" appears a characteristic 
 notice of the problem of struggle and death in Na- 
 ture. It is the problem of Blake's " Tjger, Tyger," 
 yet with this difference, that Wordsworth's hunter 
 is no fierce and bloodthirsty carnivore, but the most 
 gentle and neighbourly of birds. He saw also, al- 
 though at some distance and not too vividly, the 
 essential factors in the complicated social problem 
 of his own and every day. Sometimes his comment 
 is dry and general, seasoned with a spice of irony, 
 as when one of his characters is robbed of " compe- 
 tence, and her obsequious shadow, peace of mind." 
 Again, he utters a clear and unmistakeable note of 
 protest against the intolerable conditions of child- 
 labour in the factories whose smoke was then begin- 
 ning to blacken England. He was responsive to the 
 world-shaking politics of his day, and there is a pas- 
 sage in Book VII of " The Excursion " which sets 
 forth the phenomenon of Napoleon, — a plough- 
 share rending the encrusted sward of an old and 
 barren field in order that new harvests might be 
 sown and garnered there, — which is worth com- 
 parison with Goethe's famous estimate of Napoleon 
 as a daemonic power, to which I shall have occasion 
 to recur in the next chapter. 
 
 But his clearest and most characteristic note was 
 sounded when he sang of the progress which man 
 was making in the subjugation of the world. Se- 
 
SONS OF THE MORNING 75 
 
 eluded as his own life was, he yet watched with 
 keen interest the victories of invention and the ad- 
 vance in industrial arts. He did not rail at the 
 changes in the face of England, where villages 
 w^ere growing into cities, while the footpaths and 
 shady lanes were in process of transformation into 
 roads. More keen-eyed and catholic than Ruskin in 
 this respect, he recognized all these to be the bitter- 
 sweet incidents of genuine human growth and self- 
 fulfilment. He could not share the complacency 
 of those who rejoiced in these signs of temporal 
 prosperity in themselves. Yet he exulted, " casting 
 reserve away," in man's mastery of the elementary 
 forces of nature. It was a splendid struggle which 
 his fellows were waging with the powers of matter ; 
 and the victory seemed assured as, in increasing 
 degree earth, air, and water yielded their secrets 
 and listened to the commands of their new over- 
 lord. But — and here the Wordsworthian note re- 
 curs and recurs again — the victory over matter can 
 never be genuine and complete until man learns — 
 
 though late, that all true glory rests, 
 All praise, all safety, and all happiness. 
 Upon the moral law. 
 
 This is something far more comprehensive and 
 natural to man than any rules of conduct codified 
 and enjoined upon him by external authority. It is 
 the recognition of that kinship which exists be- 
 tween man and God, the realization of the divine 
 image in human life. Conscience is — 
 
76 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 God's most intimate presence in the soul, 
 And His most perfect image in the world. 
 
 Hence a science which " simply remarking outward 
 things, with formal inference ends/' ^ can never do 
 for man all that is needful. It can never supply 
 the place even of a partial and somewhat super- 
 stitious religion. Man, in spite of all, will still per- 
 sist in the inquiry as to what he shall do to be 
 saved. Unless his soul be fed, he will still find him- 
 self inadequate to the demands of life and death. 
 These can be met only as he recognizes his relation 
 to God and consents to do God's will. Having made 
 this momentous decision as the law of duty thrusts 
 it upon him, his soul — 
 
 can therefore move 
 Through each vicissitude of loss and gain 
 Linked in entire complacence with her choice. 
 
 There can be no question but that Wordsworth 
 felt his own mission as a poet to be profoundly re- 
 ligious. He somewhere says that he cannot hope 
 for wide popularity, simply because nineteen out of 
 every twenty people are so anxious for the consid- 
 eration of society that they have no eyes or ears for 
 any other divinity ; while poetry, in his understand- 
 ing of the term, can never be felt or rightly estimated 
 ^' without love of human nature and reverence for 
 God." Thus it is that in Wordsworth's world — 
 
 * In some editions of The Excursion these lines read, — 
 Where knowledge, ill begtin in cold remark 
 On outward things, with formal inference ends. 
 
 Book iv, 11. 622-623. 
 
SONS OF THE MORNING 77 
 
 The primal duties shine aloft — like stars ; 
 The charities that soothe, and heal, and bless. 
 Are scattered at the feet of Man — like flowers. 
 
 The puzzle of genius which presents itself in 
 Burns, as we contrast his clearness of spiritual 
 vision with his defective manhood, recurs in Cole- 
 ridge. It has been said — by Matthew Arnold, and 
 with characteristic incisiveness and flippancy — 
 that Coleridge had no morals ; and there is just 
 truth enough in the gibe to give it place in the 
 world's none too charitable memory ; yet few makers 
 of literature placed the nineteenth century under so 
 deep a debt ; and none, perhaps, wrought with more 
 singleness of purpose — Matthew Arnold himself 
 being witness — to discover and to expound the 
 truth which lay at the heart of the problems of his 
 day/ Something of this incoherence of life was 
 suggested in his appearance and bearing. The 
 splendid forehead and fine eyes, the eloquent and 
 somewhat sensual mouth, together with a nose too 
 small, as Hazlitt quaintly observed, to be the rud- 
 der to such a face, all serve to introduce us to a 
 man of singular strength and feebleness. This con- 
 trast extended to personal manners and to habits 
 of thought. The hands were carefully tended and 
 scrupulously clean, but coat and waistcoat snuff- 
 bestrewn. The walk to and fro while he talked was 
 so vigourous and incessant as to give Hood the im- 
 pression that he must be qualifying himself for an 
 * Arnold, Essays in Criticism^ " Joubert." 
 
78 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 itinerant preacher — and yet there was a slight 
 shuffle in it. The talk itself was the marvel of his 
 generation, as it has been of the generations since; 
 yet when most inspiring it was rarely altogether 
 comprehensible, and even when least comprehensi- 
 ble it did not fail to be inspiring. That it was pro- 
 digious in volume and scope admits of no doubt 
 whatever. "What do you think of Dr. Channing, 
 Mr. Coleridge ? " asked a young neighbour at the 
 tea-table. " Before entering upon that question, 
 sir/' replied Coleridge, with the air of a man be- 
 ginning an evening's discourse, " I must put you 
 in possession of my views, in extenso, on the ori- 
 gin, progress, present condition, future likelihoods, 
 and absolute essence of the Unitarian controversy, 
 and especially the conclusions I have — upon the 
 whole — come to, on the great question of what 
 may be termed the philosophy of religious differ- 
 ence." 
 
 There is scarce any tribute to his genius more 
 unanswerable than the fact that such a man should 
 be remembered otherwise than as the most porten- 
 tous of bores. He was, as might have been expected, 
 but an indifferent husband and father ; yet clear- 
 eyed, patient, altogether admirable Southey, upon 
 whose heavy-laden shoulders the care of his family 
 rested for many years, did not cease to love him — 
 although to be sure, he used his well-earned privi- 
 lege of occasionally quarrelling with him. He must 
 have been the most difficult of guests ; but Words- 
 
SONS OF THE MORNING 79 
 
 worth, who once had him as an inmate of his house 
 for a year and six months, could write, — 
 
 O capacious Soul ! 
 Placed on this earth to love and understand ; 
 
 and he remained with the Gilmans of Highgate for 
 eighteen years/ 
 
 This is the man who was recognized to be one of 
 the great intellectual and spiritual forces of his 
 century by witnesses as diverse as Sir Walter Scott, 
 F. D. Maurice, and Algernon Charles Swinburne. 
 As Principal Tulloch put it, — 
 
 " Our business is not so much to attempt any 
 criticism of the value of Coleridge's thought as to 
 describe it as a new power. That it was such a 
 power is beyond all question. It is not merely the 
 testimony of such men as Archdeacon Hare and 
 John Sterling, of Newman and of John Stuart 
 Mill, but it is the fact that the later streams of 
 religious thought in England are all more or less 
 coloured by his influence. They flow in deeper 
 and different channels since he lived. Not only 
 are some of these streams directly, traceable to 
 him, and said to derive all their vitality from his 
 principles, but those which are most opposed to him 
 have been moulded more or less by the impress of 
 his religious genius. There was much in the man 
 Coleridge himself to provoke animadversion ; there 
 may have been aspects of his teaching that lend 
 themselves to ridicule ; but if a genius seminal as 
 
 ^ I shall be reminded that the date of Wordsworth's tribute is 
 prior to that of Coleridge's visitation ; but none the less, in 1805 
 Wordsworth knew his man. 
 
80 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 his has been in the world of thought and of criti- 
 cism as well as poetry, is not to excite our reverence, 
 there is little that remains for us to reverence in 
 the intellectual world. And when literature regains 
 the higher tone of our earlier national life, the tone 
 of Hooker and of Milton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge 
 will be again acknowledged, in Julius Hare's words, 
 as ' a true sovereign of English thought.' He will 
 take rank in the same line of spiritual genius. He 
 has the same elevation of feeling, the same profound 
 grasp of moral and spiritual ideas, the same wide 
 range of vision. He has, in short, the same love of 
 wisdom, the same insight, the same largeness — 
 never despising nature, or art, or literature for the 
 sake of religion, still less ever despising religion 
 for the sake of culture." ^ 
 
 All this is true ; and when we attempt to measure 
 Coleridge's influence in the field of poetry, as well 
 as in that of religion and philosophy, the wonder 
 grows. In the Introduction to the " Lay of the 
 Last Minstrel " Scott makes the " acknowledgment 
 due from the pupil to his master " ; while to men 
 like Rossetti, Coventry Patmore, and Swinburne, 
 his lyric gift has been a genuine brook in the way 
 — the inspiration and refreshment of their song. 
 " The living Coleridge," says Mr. Dykes Campbell, 
 "was ever his own apology, — men and women 
 who neither shared nor ignored his shortcomings, 
 not only loved him, but honoured and followed 
 him." 
 
 * TuUoch, Movements of Religious Thought in Britain, pp. 7-8. 
 
SONS OF THE MORNING 81 
 
 Coleridge still lives not merely in his poetry but 
 in works in criticism, philosophy, and religion. We 
 do not often take the " Aids to Keflection '' or " The 
 Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit" from their 
 shelves and sit down with them to-day, — it were 
 better perhaps for our faith and conduct if we did, 
 — but, however thick the dust may He upon the 
 books themselves, their doctrine is as valid as ever, 
 and we are unconsciously absorbing the best of it 
 through other channels. 
 
 What is this doctrine ? In a word I am tempted 
 to call it the doctrine of God as a living spiritual 
 Presence in the world, and of a " genial mind " in 
 man. I use that phrase because it is Coleridge's 
 own. He bespeaks a " genial mind " for every 
 reader or would-be critic of the Bible, and means 
 thereby that Scripture will never reveal itself except 
 to the man who approaches it vitally and generously. 
 As a record of human experience it is not suscepti- 
 ble of merely mechanical treatment. Like men of a 
 true sort, it welcomes candour but deserves sym- 
 pathy. So the divine element in life is latent and 
 hidden except to the man of an " understanding 
 heart." However ill Coleridge exemplified some of 
 his own doctrines, faith and practice were corre- 
 spondent in this matter of a genial mind. It was he, 
 for instance, who saw the significance of German 
 learning for English thought, and who, better still, 
 interpreted it constructively. The great difficulty 
 with many of the results of Continental speculation 
 
82 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 in philosophy and theology as they have found 
 their way to England and America is that they have 
 been imported bodily, and upon arrival have been 
 gorged so greedily — their value seeming to have 
 been artificially enhanced by their crossing of the 
 sea — as to preclude the possibility of digestion. 
 Now there is, or at least there was, enough differ- 
 ence between the English and the German habit to 
 make such a process fruitful of almost as much 
 ill as good. For years Englishmen and Americans 
 were slow to understand the real significance of 
 German work. Especially when dealing with the 
 most sacred themes the German attitude and method 
 of approach filled them with a doubt which tended 
 toward panic. This is to be seen very notably in the 
 work of such a forerunner of the Oxford Move- 
 ment as Hugh James Rose, and to a certain extent 
 in the far better instructed Dr. Pusey. 
 
 From all such petty doubt Coleridge was de- 
 livered and wrought nobly to free his countrymen. 
 His imagination and sympathies were singularly 
 catholic. " It has been my habit, and, I may add, 
 the impulse of my nature," he says in the " Bio- 
 graphia Literaria," " to assign the grounds of my be- 
 lief, rather than the belief itself ; and not to express 
 dissent, till I could establish some points of com- 
 plete sympathy, some grounds common to both sides, 
 from which to commence its explanation." * Lack- 
 ing the gifts of method or system, he was possessed 
 
 * Biographia Literariay chap. iii. 
 
SONS OF THE MORNING 83 
 
 in an extraordinary degree by a genius for insight. 
 Hence what he has left us is a series of splendid 
 fragments. They are of a seminal sort, however : 
 they abide, take root, grow, and bear fruit after 
 their kind. 
 
 He felt keenly the vital connection between eth- 
 ics or religion and literature — which is but another 
 way of saying that he recognized the relation of art 
 to life. In a criticism of the poet Claudian, found 
 among his note-books and published many years 
 after his death, he makes this plain. " Every line, 
 nay, every word, stops, looks full in your face, and 
 asks and hegs for praise ! . . . I am pleased to 
 think that when a mere stripling, I had formed the 
 opinion that true taste was virtue, and that bad 
 writing was bad feeling." ^ 
 
 This sound doctrine may serve to introduce a 
 somewhat more specific inquiry as to just the ele- 
 ments of religious influence implicit if not expressed 
 in his work. More than in the case of most great 
 writers, Coleridge's poetry distinguishes itself from 
 his prose. No English poet has given to his verse 
 more of genuine witchery, the quality which at 
 once delights, haunts, and amazes the reader, than 
 he when at his best. Perhaps it might be added, 
 that in no English poet of eminence is there a more 
 puzzling gap between his best and his second best. 
 " The Pains of Sleep" and "Dejection" show the 
 possession of poetic gifts so high and rare that 
 
 » Anima PoeUE (1895), p. 165. 
 
m ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 many critics are disposed to put them in the first 
 class; and to the first class they might have be- 
 longed in the work of almost any other writer ; 
 but the suffrage of posterity tends more and more 
 definitely to reserve that high distinction for " The 
 Ancient Mariner/' " Kubla Khan," and " Christa- 
 bel." It is characteristic that two of these should 
 be fragments. "The Ancient Mariner" probably 
 comes as near to exemplifying in the concrete the 
 mysterious gift which we call genius, as anything 
 in English. It glorifies the humble ballad form; 
 the story itself swims in a golden haze of witchery 
 comparable to that which so often at once illumi- 
 nates figures while it obscures detail in Turner's 
 painting. And, besides all this, it has a distinct 
 ethical quality so wondrously wrought into the 
 very texture of the poem as never to obtrude itself 
 yet never to suffer itself to be overlooked. Every 
 young girl's commonplace book or autograph al- 
 bum contains, "He prayeth best who loveth best"; 
 yet what reader of the "Ancient Mariner" ever 
 felt the stanza to be other than an integral part of 
 a perfect whole? 
 
 It is perhaps even more important to note the 
 service which Coleridge renders to life as well as 
 letters by the reintroduction of the atmosphere of 
 wonder and mystery into English verse. ^ As was 
 suggested in the Introduction, the capacity to won- 
 der is essential to complete mental and spiritual 
 
 * Cf. J. C. Shairp, Aspects of Poetry. 
 
SONS OF THE MORNING 86 
 
 development. It is as needful to science as it ever 
 can be to religion. Without the sense of mystery, 
 science is in danger of becoming dry and conceited, 
 — a pseudo-science, which — 
 
 simply remarking outward things, 
 With formal inference ends, — 
 
 ethics degenerates into academic exercise ; while 
 faith buries itself in the whited sepulchre of Phari- 
 saism. 
 
 In Coleridge's prose this element of the fanciful 
 and mysterious does not appear. The play of fancy 
 gives place to the exercise of a very richly endowed 
 imagination. It is doubtful if any man ever wrote 
 upon exalted philosophical and critical questions 
 who was so easy to follow and comprehend. There 
 is a superabundance of classical phrases, — a prov- 
 erb seems without honour or application except it 
 be in Latin, — but the English reader need never 
 be in doubt concerning the general trend of the 
 argument ; while the wealth of cogent illustration, 
 and the frequent occurrence of memorable sen- 
 tences, keep weariness at bay. There is a tradition 
 that Wordsworth and Samuel Kogers once sat three 
 hours with Coleridge, who talked uninterruptedly 
 about poetry during their entire stay; and that, 
 upon leaving, each confessed to the other that he 
 could make neither head nor tail of the discourse. 
 It is credible ; but our knowledge of Coleridge's 
 written prose — even of so abstruse an essay as the 
 partial "Hints towards the Formation of a More 
 
86 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Comprehensive Theory of Life," forbids us to be- 
 lieve that the morning could have been barren of 
 either pleasure or profit ; for to a singular degree 
 in his published communings upon the highest 
 themes, Coleridge is at once suggestive and memo- 
 rable. He himself said that Wordsworth was dis- 
 tinguished for the '' union of deep feeling with 
 profound thought; the fine balance of truth in ob- 
 serving with the imaginative faculty in modifying 
 the objects observed; and above all the original 
 gift of spreading the tone, the atmosphere, and 
 with it the depth and height of the ideal world 
 around forms, incidents, and situations of which, 
 for the common view, custom had bedimmed all 
 the lustre, had dried up the sparkle and the dew- 
 drops." * 
 
 The words can fairly be applied to his own 
 "Aids to Reflection " and " Confessions of an In- 
 quiring Spirit." The latter may serve as an ex- 
 ample of a service rendered by Coleridge to his 
 own generation, and in no sense outgrown by ours. 
 The Christian thought of his day was in bondage 
 to a dogma of Inspiration whose lustre had indeed 
 grown dim. It plagued the thoughtful and con- 
 scientious, hampered Biblical research, and pro- 
 voked the scorn of the graceless. The inerrancy of 
 Scripture had become a superstition. No question 
 of ordinary literary interest could be raised con- 
 cerning the style or content of the Bible, without 
 ' Biographia Literaria, chap. iv. 
 
SONS OF THE MORNING 87 
 
 danger of incurring the charge of blasphemy. To 
 these conditions Coleridge applied two principles 
 of criticism. One was, that in all superstition there 
 is a heart of unbelief ; the other, that the figure of 
 dictation to an amanuensis was, and must ever be, 
 hopelessly inadequate to represent the inspiration 
 of a good man or a sacred literature. " Why should 
 I not believe the Scriptures throughout dictated, 
 in word and thought, by an infallible Intelligence ? 
 . . . For every reason that makes me prize and 
 revere these Scriptures. . . . Because the Doctrine 
 in question petrifies at once the whole body of 
 Holy Writ with all its harmonious and symmetrical 
 gradations. . . . This breathing organism . . . the 
 Doctrine in question turns at once into a colossal 
 Memnon's head, a hollow passage for a voice." 
 
 That phrase, " this breathing organism," is highly 
 significant for the understanding of Coleridge's 
 philosophy and criticism. He had a keen sense and 
 a high respect for the organic. The attempt to 
 account for life or literature upon a mechanical 
 basis was in his eyes not only to fail in criticism, 
 but to commit sacrilege. His lectures upon Shake- 
 speare and Milton are vitalized by this sense of 
 organic form. There is a something in the whole 
 which cannot be obtained by the mere addition of 
 the parts. So he discovered the Bible to be a spirit- 
 ual world in which each man found his own indi- 
 vidual experience prefigured. Psalm XXHT means 
 one thing if we conceive it to be the product of a 
 
88 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 divine mandate issued to a human automaton with 
 no choice but to record it. It bears a different 
 and very much richer message to him who sees it 
 wrought out of the stress and struggle of a fallible 
 but believing human soul, — a man who, threatened 
 by peril in the wilderness, has found, under divine 
 guidance, green pastures and waters of comfort; 
 whose enemies have not been able to rob him of 
 the sources of sustenance which God has made 
 sure and imperishable; and who has learned to 
 contemplate with calmness even the dark adventure 
 of death, assured that for this also God will enable 
 him. Coleridge recognized with characteristic can- 
 dour that this more reasonable doctrine of inspira- 
 tion as a presence of the Spirit in human life, 
 sanctifying all experience, and making it the natu- 
 ral means of revelation, might work temporary em- 
 barrassment and loss of authority to theologians 
 of the dogmatic school. But none the less his hope 
 stood sure in the validity of his doctrine and its 
 application to the need of man. Some might wrest 
 it to their own hurt, picking and choosing wilfully 
 such Scripture as comported with their taste rather 
 than that which met their need ; but this is ever 
 man's privilege in every department of Hfe. Others 
 might raise embarrassing questions — at least they 
 seemed embarrassing in the second and third de- 
 cades of last century — concerning the degree and 
 quality of inspiration to be assigned to great and 
 worthy extra-Biblical writings. Still he had his 
 
SONS OF THE MORNING 89 
 
 answer ready. Among these other worthies the 
 Bible would maintain its place like the sheaf which 
 stood upright and received the obeisance of the 
 other sheaves. What need to make hard and fast, 
 or petty and peddling, distinctions ? Were they 
 not sheaves of the same harvest; the sheaves of 
 brethren ; and was not the bread of life in all ? ^ 
 
 This is not to maintain that Coleridge's position 
 was precisely that of the best instruc^Jied scholars of 
 to-day ; but it had this distinction, which put his 
 own and later decades in debt to him, that, while 
 it maintained a doctrine of inspiration which ac- 
 corded with the nature of man as made in God's 
 image, and with man's experience of God as a 
 Spirit, — the Lord and Giver of Life, to Whom all 
 avenues of nature are open, — it yet interpreted 
 this new view constructively and vitally, so that he 
 who accepted it felt himself to be twice the believer 
 that he was before. 
 
 It was Coleridge's conviction that "in energetic 
 minds truth soon changes by domestication into 
 power." ^ He had entire confidence that the new 
 views of great things to which his eyes were open 
 would accord with all that was highest and best in 
 man's past experience ; and that whatever tempo- 
 rary confusion they might import into received 
 opinions, their ultimate result must be the supply 
 of a more abundant charter for faith than ever. He 
 
 * Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, letter vi. 
 ' Biographia Literaria, chap. iv. 
 
90 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 has placed the world in his debt by the consistency 
 with which, throughout a somewhat inconsequent 
 and fragmentary career, he clung to two or three 
 principles of life and criticism. He believed that 
 God was in His world in so intimate and real a sense 
 that fearless investigation in any direction must 
 ultimately serve to strengthen religious faith. He 
 believed in the validity of man's religious experience, 
 and that the highest literature was that which went 
 deepest into the realm of the spiritual ; but that, in 
 criticism as in life, it is needful to remember that man 
 is an organism not to be accounted for upon merely 
 mechanical principles, not to be understood except 
 by the " genial mind." To him the doubts and fears 
 of men were scarcely less significant than their 
 hopes and aspirations. Thus these two poets, Words- 
 worth with his sense of the significance of the 
 goodly frame of earth and the plain people in it, 
 and Coleridge with his eldritch fancy, his insatiable 
 curiosity concerning the nature and origin of ex- 
 perience, and his consummate mastery of the art 
 of expression, since both were men of faith, belong 
 among — 
 
 the happy few 
 
 Who dwell on earth, yet breathe empyreal air, 
 
 Sons of the morning. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE APOSTLES OP BEVOLT : BYRON AKD SHELLEY 
 
 When the natural history of revolutions comes to 
 be written it will probably appear that Mirabeau, 
 Danton, and Napoleon represent something more 
 than individuals who played a great part in the 
 most notable of political and social upheavals. 
 They stand for types. Mirabeau represents the 
 better element of the Past, suddenly come to it- 
 self, conscious of its danger, in some degree per- 
 haps conscious of its shortcomings and guilt, and 
 resolute to atone for them by a recognition of the 
 new order of things; but anxious to guide the 
 forces of change along immediately constructive 
 channels — to save the fabric of the state from 
 wreck. There is a story, very possibly apocryphal, 
 that Mirabeau once mounted the Assembly's trib- 
 une, and, impelled by a sense of his own inade- 
 quacy to the demands of the moment, owing to the 
 general lack of confidence in his character, cried 
 out, "Oh that I had a different past!" He was 
 thinking of his own misspent youth ; but he spoke 
 for France and that element in her life which he 
 represented. 
 
 Danton, on the other hand, stands for the revolu- 
 
92 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 tionary impulse, pure and simple, upon its destruc- 
 tive side. His are the fire, the sword, the plough- 
 share, all those implements whose office is to con- 
 sume, to destroy, to overturn, to leave nothing 
 as it has been. The antithesis of Lord Strafford 
 in manner and purpose, ^thorough' is no less his 
 motto. 
 
 To the work of these there succeeds the career 
 of the soldier and builder, himself in some respects 
 a mightier clearer-away of rubbish than either of 
 his predecessors, but primarily a man of ambitions 
 and plans whose fulfilment is made possible no less 
 by the new day of which they have been heralds, 
 than by his own genius. He is sure to be a great 
 and striking figure in history, and to leave an in- 
 effaceable stamp upon institutions. His influence 
 is so portentous moreover, good and ill are so 
 strangely and inextricably mingled in it, that his 
 character remains long, perhaps permanently, in 
 debate. He is not to be accounted for by ordinary 
 rules; but he exercises a compelling fascination 
 upon the minds of men, and goes far toward 
 forming the ideals of multitudes. 
 
 It is scarcely too much to say that Lord Byron 
 united in himself something that was most char- 
 acteristic of these three graces or furies of Revolu- 
 tion. With the aristocratic connections and predi- 
 lections of a Mirabeau, he possessed that lion-like 
 man's native force of mind and body, and, still 
 like him, wasted much of it in debauchery, though 
 
BYRON AND SHELLEY 93 
 
 retaining always, as his letters show, a generous 
 modicum of strong common sense. At war with 
 society and its recognized conventions, he, as one 
 of his latest biographers has observed, adopted 
 Danton's motto, " L'audace, Taudace, toujours 
 Taudace,"* and was pretty consistent in his appli- 
 cation of it to life ; while his admiration of Napo- 
 leon was almost an obsession, as the great coach 
 built upon the lines of Napoleon's travelhng car- 
 riage, and with similar arrangements for eating and 
 sleeping en route, long bore witness. 
 
 But it is when we come to account for his 
 place and influence that the Napoleonic parallel 
 most clearly asserts itself. It was Napoleon whom 
 Goethe undoubtedly had in mind when, in his 
 Autobiography, he confessed his faith in "dae- 
 monic influence." He had noticed the phenomenon 
 in looking about for a satisfying religious system. 
 "It was not divine, for it seemed unintellectual ; 
 nor human, for it was no result of understanding; 
 nor diabolic, for it was of beneficent tendency; nor 
 angeHc, for you could often notice in it a certain 
 mischievousness. . . . Everything which fetters 
 human agency seemed to yield before it ; it seemed 
 to dispose arbitrarily of the necessary elements of 
 our existence." It is but rarely that those who ex- 
 ert this influence recommend themselves by good- 
 ness of heart; "but a gigantic force goes out of 
 them, and they exercise an incredible power over 
 
 * John Nichol, Byron, chap. xi. 
 
94 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 all creatures, nay, even over the elements them- 
 selves; and who can say how far this influence 
 may reach? All moral forces are powerless against 
 them. The masses are fascinated by them. They 
 are only to be conquered by the universe it- 
 self."^ 
 
 Lord Byron presents a cognate phenomenon in 
 the world of literature. He was a sort of portent, a 
 comet that for a while fixed men's gaze to the ex- 
 clusion of the faithful and beneficent stars, but 
 whose orbit and real significance are not easily cal- 
 culated. He did his work at a time when the prin- 
 ciples of literary revolution had been pretty well 
 established by Cowper, Crabbe, and Burns. The 
 best work of Wordsworth and Coleridge had been 
 done and was struggling for the recognition which 
 it deserved and was finally to obtain. A new hun- 
 ger for romance was awakening in Britain. Chat- 
 terton had been its herald. The crude inventions 
 of Mrs. Kadcliffe and Horace Walpole had fed it, — 
 but upon husks. Scott and South ey provided meat 
 far more convenient for it; until in Byron's day it 
 had reached, not a critical maturity, but an adoles- 
 cence capable of great enthusiasms and insane ex- 
 travagances. Byron's extraordinary career is not to 
 be understood, probably it was not possible, apart 
 from this public, excited by the political and social 
 overturnings of the last two decades, stirred to its 
 
 ^ Cf. the reference to this passage by the late R. H. Hutton : 
 " Goethe and his Influence," Literary Essays, pp. 1-2. 
 
BYRON AND SHELLEY 95 
 
 depths by the portent of Napoleon, alternately 
 amused and angered by the new literary impulse 
 which was voicing itself in the " Edinburgh/' the 
 "Quarterly," and "Blackwood's," and ready, as 
 perhaps a British public never was ready, before or 
 since, for a new and mad enthusiasm. Upon such 
 a morning as this Byron could wake and find him- 
 self famous ; and in a day fittingly introduced by 
 such a morning, he was able to eclipse men so su- 
 perior in every attribute of manhood as Sir Walter 
 Scott, and poets like Coleridge and Wordsworth. 
 
 It is with a sort of half-nauseated amusement 
 that the reader of to-day toils through the mass of 
 Byronic literature. He dutifully notes the slightly 
 deformed foot, the teeth of exquisite brilliance and 
 regularity, the hands gloved indoors as well as out 
 to keep them white, and the temples, shaved, as 
 Byron said, to preserve the vigour of the hair — 
 although incidentally of course the process height- 
 ened a ' marble brow ' ; and wonders whether out- 
 side a library of three-volume novels so much space 
 were ever before given to sentimental nonsense. 
 Sir Walter Scott was lame, and bore his infirmity 
 like a Christian and a gentleman. Coleridge — it 
 surprises us a little — kept his hands with scrupu- 
 lous neatness. Wordsworth dressed like a peasant, 
 and sometimes drove abroad in a dung-cart, with a 
 plain deal board laid across the sides for a seat. 
 Cowper wore a night-cap which has, alas, been per- 
 petuated by Romney. Crabbe, in his old age, grew 
 
96 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 beautifully grey, so that a little child in his parish 
 said quite simply when told of his death, "We 
 shall never see his good white head going up into 
 the pulpit any more." These matters are incidents 
 in notable careers which possess a certain interest 
 if we stumble upon them casually, but are in no 
 way essential to our understanding of the career 
 itself. In Byron's case they are of the essence of 
 his make-up. 
 
 I am resolute to exclude the judgement of Mr. 
 Saintsbury here because of his well-known anti- 
 Byronic views ; but none the less, in reminding us 
 that the light of Byron's muse, so far from being 
 that which never was on land or sea, is the light 
 which shines nightly on the front of the stage, he 
 speaks words of truth and soberness. Byron was 
 the great \iteT3iTj poseur of the century. No esti- 
 mate of his character or his work can be adequate 
 which leaves his consuming vanity out of account ; 
 nor does the memory recall any mind of a high 
 order of ability the ideals of whose vanity were so 
 perverse. Egotism could scarce go further in the 
 direction of that perversity which is close allied to 
 madness, than in the attempt, made again and 
 again in his writings and conversation, to represent 
 himself as the hero of all sorts of dubious adven- 
 tures ; unless it were in an endeavour to appear the 
 victim of melancholy induced by remorse. This 
 " pageant of his bleeding heart " was wonderfully 
 effective. It brought multitudes of readers and ad- 
 
BYRON AND SHELLEY 97 
 
 mirers; but it came perilously near to justifying 
 Mr. Mallock's recipe for writing " a Satanic poem 
 like the late Lord Byron." 
 
 " Take a couple of fine deadly sins and let them 
 hang before your eyes until they become racy. Then 
 take them down, dissect them, and stew them for 
 some time in a solution of weak remorse ; after which 
 they may be devilled with mock despair." 
 
 It is impertinent, of course, but then, so was Lord 
 Byron, and most free from taint or suspicion of 
 hypocrisy when he was impertinent, as in his early 
 "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers," — though 
 even here one is forced to add a postscript to the 
 effect that this satire was almost certainly composed 
 with a view merely to the English Bards, and only 
 launched at the Scotch Reviewers after the famous 
 criticism in the "Edinburgh" had opened the way 
 for a little more extended and telling insolence than 
 the poet had originally contemplated. 
 
 It will readily be imagined that any one who looks 
 for a unifying principle, philosophic, religious, or 
 political, in the mass of Byron's verse wiU look in 
 vain. The centre of all is Himself. With Protean 
 facility he appears and reappears as Childe Harold, 
 as Manfred, as Don Juan. This is not for a moment 
 to question his possession of extraordinary poetic 
 gifts ; it is not to impugn the courage which he 
 undoubtedly possessed, or the generosity of which 
 he was occasionally capable, or the sincerity of his 
 attachment to the cause of liberty, or the enormous 
 
98 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 obstacles which heredity, early training, and later 
 environment opposed to the development of any 
 consistent and satisfying manhood. The broken 
 sentence, which he interrupted when he found him- 
 self likely to be betrayed into sincere and earnest 
 expression, was characteristic of his conversation ; 
 and it was necessary that his general attitude toward 
 men and things fitted to dwarf the central figure 
 of himself should have been one of denial or scorn. 
 Hence his cynicism not only becomes him, but is 
 essential to him. There is no need to formulate its 
 gospel into the code of perversity which Macaulay 
 attributed to him, " Thou shalt hate thy neighbour, 
 and thou shalt love thy neighbour's wife." Byron 
 was not the man to own allegiance to anything, not 
 even to a person of his own choosing or a creed of 
 his own making. He was no unbeliever, as Shelley 
 thought himself to be. Indeed, if the testimony of 
 his valet Fletcher is to be received at anything like 
 face value, he maintained a pretty consistent claim 
 to faith in the fundamentals of Christianity. Had 
 he been a frank and devoted apostle of revolution, 
 as Shelley was, he might conceivably have placed 
 us under a genuine debt : the note of scorn may 
 help when it ministers to something higher ; though 
 unruly and treacherous, it sometimes proves a useful 
 servant; but as a master its tyranny is hopeless and 
 fruitless, and Byron was more completely its slave 
 than Swift had ever been. There is a trace of tonic 
 quality in the sceva indignatio of the latter. The 
 
BYRON AND SHELLEY 99 
 
 mockery of the former would, if no corrective were 
 supplied, poison the very fountains of moral and 
 spiritual health. 
 
 On the other hand we may admit Byron's genuine 
 love for this goodly frame of earth. His pessimism 
 does not extend, like Thomson's,* to sea or sky. It 
 is the latter who sings, — 
 
 For I am infinitely tired 
 With this old sphere we once admired, 
 With this old earth we loved too well, 
 And would not mind a change of Hell. 
 
 Byron felt the freedom of the open sea and re- 
 sponded to the strange influence — half uplift, half 
 oppression — of the mountains. Most of all, per- 
 haps, he took joy of the meeting of sea and land 
 upon the picturesque Italian coast, where it was 
 his custom after bathing to climb to some point of 
 observation and sit for hours in thought. There 
 is no affectation in his feeling for nature, although 
 there is sometimes a trace of bombast in his versi- 
 fication of it, even the famous — 
 
 Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean, roll ! 
 
 containing just a suggestion of Ossian. But when 
 men begin to move and dream and suffer on the sea 
 or in the hills, then at once the motive of sincerity 
 grows mixed. Manfred in the Alps is hopelessly 
 melodramatic : — 
 
 » The reference is, of coarse, to " B. V." of The City of Dread' 
 f\ji Night ; not to him of The Seasons. 
 
100 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 " The mists boil up around the glaciers ; clouds 
 Rise curling fast beneath me, white and sulphury, ' 
 
 Like foam from the roused ocean of deep Hell, 
 Whose every wave beats on a living shore, 
 Heap'd with the damn'd like pebbles. — I am giddy,'* 
 
 The reader does not wonder that the chamois- 
 hunter who appears in time to prevent Manfred's 
 own plunge into this ocean cries, — 
 
 " This is convulsion and no healthful life." 
 
 It is the ultimate criticism to be passed, not only 
 upon this particular play, but upon the Byronic 
 idea of tragedy. The element of misanthropy was 
 inevitable to Byron, in view of his character and 
 the manner of his passionate and chaotic life ; but 
 he only serves to illustrate again what every true 
 student of life and literature must have observed, 
 that tragedy of a genuine sort is beyond the reach 
 of a misanthrope. The deeper and graver contra- 
 dictions of circumstance require correspondently 
 deep and grave sympathies for their interpretation. 
 Here Byron fails, falling upon mere sound and fury 
 to perform an office in which the heart must be 
 honestly enlisted if it is ever to be adequately done. 
 So, on the other hand, when the poet launches out 
 into the deep, I, for one, prefer the rather common- 
 place descriptive poem of " The Island," built as it 
 is upon the framework of the famous Bounty mu- 
 tiny, to the much lauded shipwreck in " Don Juan." 
 There is no doubt whatever that the second canto 
 of "Don Juan" shows that Byron possessed an 
 
BYRON AND SHELLEY 101 
 
 extraordinary facility in the translation of prose 
 into verse — some of it extremely bad verse. The 
 whole shipwreck scene bears testimony which can- 
 not be gainsaid to his acquaintance with the sea, 
 to his knowledge of its dangers and its ways, to his 
 laborious study of narratives of storm and wreck, 
 to an almost unrivalled rhetorical gift, and to as 
 complete an absence of good taste and a true sense 
 of tragedy. 
 
 Sir Walter Scott, in one of those Philistine out- 
 bursts which testify so conclusively to his frank 
 and genuine humanity, remarked that Lord Byron 
 handled his pen with the careless ease of a man of 
 quality; and no doubt Byron liked to spread the 
 impression abroad that he never drudged at verse- 
 making. It was his boast that " Lara" was composed 
 while undressing on his return from masques and 
 balls, while the " Bride" and the "Corsair" were 
 written in four and ten days respectively. Be this 
 as it may, a careful study of the shipwreck scene 
 in " Don Juan " shows it to be a paraphrase of 
 fragments taken bodily from stories of famous dis- 
 asters and pieced together with amazing inventive- 
 ness and skill. It should be remembered that these 
 were authentic accounts of heroic struggle in which 
 men matched their puny strength against the mighti- 
 est forces of nature; of long-continued suffering 
 often borne with sublime patience ; and of genuinely 
 tragic death. Yet Byron has deliberately set him- 
 self to the transformation of this material into a 
 
102 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 conglomerate, not merely of tragedy and comedy, 
 — which might conceivably be true to life, — but 
 of sentimentality varied with burlesque. It is very 
 likely done as well as it could be done saving the 
 crudity of some stanzas ; but it was none the less a 
 barbarous thing to do at all, a thing impossible to 
 a man of fine and high feeling. Literature will, I 
 hope, always have a place for " Bab Ballads " and 
 the like. It is no grudging immortality which one 
 concedes to — 
 
 " Oh, I am a cook, and a captain bold, 
 And the mate o' the Nancy, brig." 
 
 The process whereby the singer attained to his 
 strange eminence, involving as it did the cooking 
 and eating of his companions, is told with a par- 
 ticularity at once so grewsome and delicious as to 
 give it high place in farce. But suppose Mr. Gil- 
 bert had gone through the Admiralty archives and 
 searched the records of Lloyd's in order to burlesque 
 some of the moving incidents of shipwreck, while 
 to others he accorded the meed of rather sentimen- 
 tal homage ; suppose, to be specific, that he had 
 retold the loss of the Birkenhead in the manner of 
 Sir Francis Doyle, but had introduced some jocose 
 quip, or played some clever metric prank, at the 
 end of each alternate stanza. To suppose such a 
 thing involves the necessity of apologizing to Mr. 
 Gilbert's memory; yet it is a fair parallel to Lord 
 Byron's performance in this famous canto. 
 
 Mr. Swinburne, in his memorable and character^ 
 
BYRON AND SHELLEY 103 
 
 istically extravagant essay upon Wordsworth and 
 Byron, has specified imagination and harmony as 
 two indispensable elements in genuine poetry. Both 
 of these are notably lacking in most of Byron's 
 work. Inventiveness and ingenuity he has in high 
 degree; he is passed-master in that art of quick 
 transition, which gives the form and often the soul 
 of smartness — if smartness have a soul — to verse. 
 But that imagination which sees into the heart of 
 men and things, which puts one's self in another's 
 place, and perceives particulars in their universal 
 aspect, he assuredly lacked; and with it the sense 
 of harmony, whether as applied to the mere music 
 of verse, or given that wider application which en- 
 ables the music of verse to echo the deeper harmo- 
 nies of life. He could be melodious enough at times, 
 and some of his lyrics will be long remembered.^ 
 
 I have expressed this general opinion of Byron 
 with a little hesitation because of a fear lest my 
 theme should seem to have inoculated me with anti- 
 Byronic prejudice. So far from being conscious of 
 such prejudice, I felt, as not long ago I undertook 
 to renew and extend acquaintance with him after 
 
 * So, the reader will remind me, will the tributes of Continental 
 critics, especially Goethe, Mazzini, and Castelar. It is unquestionably 
 a notable thing that these representatives of three great Continental 
 literatures should have been so ready to pay tribute to Byron. They 
 are eminent names and their dicta are not to be set aside lightly ; 
 but what is needful to be said in answer has been said with so great 
 aptness, fairness, and conclusiveness by Mr. Swinburne {Nineteenth 
 Century, vol. xv) as to relieve all later critics of responsibility and 
 opportunity alike. 
 
104 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 many years of relative neglect, a distinct expecta- 
 tion of interest and uplift. There was no especial 
 anticipation of agreement ; but I was entirely ready 
 to appreciate, — to admire strength and vital force 
 in themselves even where I could not approve the 
 manner or the object of their expenditure. The 
 first long poem to be read continuously was " Cain/' 
 and from it I passed on, by way of the " Hebrew 
 Melodies " and other miscellanies, to " Childe Har- 
 old," " Don Juan," " The Island," and " Manfred." 
 But alas for my expected impulse either pro or con ! 
 For about this same time I was reading Shelley's 
 "Prometheus Unbound," and discovered that be- 
 side him Byron's Lucifer grew stale and unprofit- 
 able indeed. Since that experience, I have chanced 
 upon a remark by Mr. Saintsbury which is exactly 
 descriptive of it. " The really great poets do not 
 injure each other in the very least by comparison, 
 different as they are. Milton does not ' kill ' Words- 
 worth ; Spenser does not injure Shelley ; there is no 
 danger in reading Keats immediately after Cole- 
 ridge. But read Byron in close juxtaposition with 
 any of these, or with not a few others, and the ef- 
 fect, to any good poetic taste, must surely be dis- 
 astrous." 
 
 Where lies the secret of this? In the fact, I 
 think, that there is no room in the circle of the 
 greatest poets for the mocker, no place in the 
 greatest poetry for the sneer. Yet the sneer and 
 mocking question may be said to comprise Byron's 
 
BYRON AND SHELLEY 105 
 
 whole arsenal of negative weapons in "Cain." 
 There are some powerful lines — though none too 
 many of them; there are one or two powerfully 
 painted scenes ; there is a certain beauty and pathos 
 in the pleading of Cain's wife ; but intellectually 
 Cain is almost as feeble as the late Robert Elsmere ; 
 while Lucifer himself exhibits few characteristics 
 which either promise or threaten to give him per- 
 manent hold upon the minds of men. A most sym- 
 pathetic critic has remarked that " bare rebellion 
 cannot endure, and no succession of generations can 
 continue nourishing themselves on the poetry of 
 complaint, and the idealization of revolt." ^ 
 
 It would be difficult to characterize better By- 
 ron's service to his age and his failure to attain the 
 place for which the possession of his unquestionably 
 great powers seemed to destine him. I have called 
 him an apostle of revolution. " Complaint, and the 
 idealization of revolt " gave to his whole life and 
 work an almost tragically disjointed and negative 
 aspect. He loved freedom — yet it was a freedom 
 not merely from tyranny, but from all restraint, 
 whether exercised by society or himself. Let us be 
 generous here. It is hard to realize to-day how 
 much, in the reaction following upon the Napole- 
 onic wars, there was to revolt against, in social and 
 domestic life, in politics and religion. The age de- 
 served its Byron, and conceivably his ill-ordered 
 life and incoherent message may have been better 
 
 * John Morley, Critical Miscellanies, First Series, p. 254. 
 
106 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 fitted to the needful work than a finer and more 
 artistic instrument. So, too, in reply to Matthew 
 Arnold's friendly criticism of a lack of matter, and 
 Mr. Morley's eminently fair though searching re- 
 mark that Byron was weak upon the reflective side 
 and lacked intellectual means of satisfying himself 
 in respect of his visions and aspirations/ Carlyle's 
 outburst upon the poet's death may always be cited, 
 " Byron — good generous hapless Byron ! And yet 
 when he died he was only a Kraftmann [powerman, 
 as the Germans call them). Had he lived he would 
 have been a poet." He seems indeed like a youth 
 of extraordinary gifts and equally extraordinary 
 vanity whose development has halted in his sopho- 
 more year — the age of sporadic generosity and 
 epidemic perversity. 
 
 No man can illustrate better the need which Lit- 
 erature has of some comprehensive and coordinating 
 principle upon which to feed her soul. In letters 
 as in life the word of the Apostle stands, " By faith 
 are ye saved." Without it tragedy sickens into 
 melodrama, and comedy degenerates into wearisome 
 burlesque. There is no room to doubt the tragic 
 element in life ; its rudiments appear in every con- 
 tradiction offered to human hope and aspiration. 
 As little can one question the element of comedy, 
 implicit as it is in the multitude of life's queer in- 
 congruities. The great poet sees both elements and 
 fuses them in the alembic of his mind. This natural 
 
 ^ Critical MisceUanies, First Series, p. 275. 
 
BYRON AND SHELLEY 107 
 
 mingling of tears and laughter is possible to him 
 according as he has faith in man as God's son 
 reflecting the universe in petto ; equal, because of 
 his divine origin and destiny, to the ultimate mas- 
 tery of fate, and therefore able to beguile the way 
 with honest mirth at the play of circumstance. 
 
 In passing from Byron to Shelley, I am reminded 
 of a criticism by Coleridge upon the characters of 
 Caliban and Ariel. 
 
 " The character of Caliban is wonderfully con- 
 ceived : he is a sort of creature of the earth, as 
 Ariel is a sort of creature of the air. . . . Still, 
 Caliban is in some respects a noble being : the poet 
 has raised him far above contempt, — he is a man 
 in the sense of the imagination : all the images he 
 uses are drawn from Nature, and are highly poeti- 
 cal ; they fit in with the images of Ariel. Caliban 
 gives us images from the earth, Ariel images from 
 the air. . . . No mean figure is employed (by Cali- 
 ban), no mean passion displayed, beyond animal 
 passion and repugnance to command." ^ 
 
 I would not have my readers think that I pro- 
 pose a comparison between Lord Byron and Cali- 
 ban, — a comparison which would be no less im- 
 pertinent than artificial, and which, if Byron were 
 still capable of wrath, must needs rouse him to an 
 anger beside which the fabled ire of Juno would 
 seem tame. And yet — and yet, the words of Cole- 
 ridge haunt us. When we set Byron and Shelley 
 
 * Lectures upon Shakespeare and Miltotij Lecture IX. 
 
108 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 side by side, this Caliban- Ariel picture will recur. 
 One seems '^ a sort of creature of the earth " as 
 the other is " a sort of creature of the air." This 
 creature of the earth is moreover "in some respects 
 a noble being ; the images he uses are drawn from 
 Nature and are highly poetical." Few mean figures 
 are employed, few mean passions displayed "beyond 
 animal passion and repugnance to command." The 
 secret of Byron's perversity is to be sought in the 
 strength of his passions, and in an idea of freedom 
 which would defy all constituted authority, whether 
 of a king above him or a society about him, in the 
 interests of an untrammelled individualism. It is 
 here that the reader has an abundant right to ask, 
 " Did not Shelley show an equal perversity ? Was 
 not his first publication which attracted notice a 
 pamphlet upon the ^ Necessity of Atheism,' and is 
 not the very ' Prometheus Unbound,' which has 
 just been cited to the disadvantage of Byron, a poem 
 of rebellion and negation ? " To which I answer : 
 No doubt Shelley thought himself to be an atheist; 
 no doubt he was expelled from college for his sup- 
 posedly atheistic pamphlet ; no doubt the " Pro- 
 metheus " is a poem of revolt. As little can it be 
 denied that Shelley was a very iconoclast among 
 the sacred social conventions of his time, smashing, 
 along with much trash and lumber, some very pre- 
 cious vases filled with priceless ointment. He, too, 
 often spoke and acted as though freedom consisted 
 primarily in absence of control, whether by consti- 
 
BYRON AND SHELLEY 109 
 
 tuted authority above, society around, or self within. 
 Yet none can read the man's life, note the impres- 
 sion which he has made upon high-minded men and 
 women of his own and later times, and study his 
 work, after making due allowance for the imma- 
 turity of " Queen Mab " and the eariy pamphlets, 
 without a consciousness of the essential rightness 
 of purpose which not only persisted but grew 
 through the thirty turbulent years. It is a strange 
 story, this of the poet's impetuous, contradictory, 
 unsatisfying life. The three short decades were long 
 enough for tragedy and comedy, purity and what 
 society at least called lewdness, reverence and a 
 most unholy boldness, to mingle in seemingly inex- 
 tricable confusion. Every person is a mystery pass- 
 ing our power of definition. In Shelley's case the 
 mystery is so deep that I for one would contem- 
 plate it with a wonder as little mingled as may be 
 with curiosity. 
 
 A sympathetic critic has remarked that Shelley 
 carried the Protestant spirit to its ultimate ex- 
 treme. "He was, moreover, in haste; he could 
 not rest in a doubt, he could not suspend his judge- 
 ment, he could not wait for fuller knowledge." * 
 This is well said. Whatever Shelley thought, he 
 was impelled to say, without waiting to bring his 
 theory to the test of the world's previous experi- 
 ence to see whether it possessed the notes of truth 
 or not. Perceiving some of the limitations and in- 
 
 * G. E. Woodberry, Makers of Literature^ p. 188. 
 
no ' ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 felicities of the current orthodoxy, he must needs 
 rush into callow print with an essay whose title 
 absurdly overstated his real position. Although 
 free, as it would seem, from taint of low sensuality, 
 and impressing some who knew him well with a 
 conviction of his essential purity, he yet held and 
 practised views about marriage which were bound 
 to be as subversive of decent society as they were 
 fatal to his own individual peace. Let those who 
 complain of the sordidness of the commonplace 
 family relation re-read the story of Shelley's fool- 
 ish marriage with Harriet Westbrook, his elopement 
 with Mary Godwin, his absurd yet apparently hon- 
 est suggestion that the two women live as friends 
 and neighbours, the natural suffering and not un- 
 natural suicide of Harriet, and the blight which 
 the whole hopeless complication brought upon 
 Shelley's later life, and say whether, after all, the 
 elder fashion, wrought out of long centuries of 
 human experience, whereby a man and woman are 
 joined for better for worse until death part them, 
 have not much to commend it even in a day of 
 revolution. However ^ sordid ' the common lot of 
 husband, wife, and children may be, it assumes a 
 halo of grace as well as dignity when contrasted 
 with these pitiable details of weariness, infelicity, 
 unfaithfulness, controversy over the custody of chil- 
 dren, and the sorry train of crimination and re- 
 crimination which has dragged itself over almost a 
 century of English letters in the case of Shelley. 
 
BYRON AND SHELLEY 111 
 
 The poet's general integrity of life and honesty of 
 speech are not to be gainsaid. His utterances in 
 behalf of ' freedom ' would carry greater weight, 
 however, if they could be cleared of the suspicion 
 that once at least the zeal of his preaching was 
 heightened by a desire to practise. 
 
 The significance of his life does not require the 
 justification of this miserable and essentially un- 
 justifiable episode in it. One does not need to prove 
 that Shelley was one of the best of men in order to 
 substantiate his claim to a place in the chief choir 
 of English singers, or in the company of those who 
 have uplifted and inspired the moral nature of their 
 fellows. Here, once more, is to be noted the catho- 
 licity of inspiration. Precisely as it is one of man's 
 prerogatives to rise not merely in spite of, but by 
 means of, the forces which oppose him, so the flame 
 of the Spirit seems sometimes enhanced in brilliancy 
 through its ability to conquer and feed upon the 
 very things that might have been expected to quench 
 it. "Art for art's sake" is so poor a member of 
 the family of cant phrases that we wonder at its 
 vitality. Yet, like most cant phrases, it contains an 
 element of truth, in its recognition of the fact that 
 God can often find place and use for agents which 
 society must reject. Art is for life's sake ; but the 
 Spirit of Truth and Beauty, from whose inspiration 
 all art proceeds, does not necessarily contemn an 
 instrument because it seems little adapted to the 
 purposes of life in general. Man has made as yet 
 
112 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 such halting development that we rarely find a 
 representative of the race big enough to bear the 
 consciousness of unusual powers and gifts without 
 being thrown into unstable social equilibrium by 
 it. The man of genius is likely to be so intense an 
 individualist as to be a very indifferent member of 
 society. His service is not therefore to be judged 
 by a special rule. He is simply to be treated with 
 the same large charity which alone can make human 
 relations tolerable in common life. To proclaim his 
 absolution from the ordinary obligations of the 
 family and community simply because of his singu- 
 lar endowment as a man, is as self-contradictory 
 and absurd as to excuse a fountain for playing 
 muddy water, on the ground of its singular distinc- 
 tion of design. It may be plausibly contended that 
 the design of the fountain is a matter quite apart 
 from the quality of the water, and that the fountain 
 would be no less a work of beauty and delight 
 though it played ink ; which is half, and perhaps 
 three quarters, true. None the less a base or per- 
 verted product is bound eventually to obscure the 
 distinction of the misused means, either by debas- 
 ing, disfiguring, or destroying them. Poets and 
 artists are born to see truth and beauty and then 
 to interpret them truly and beautifully. Squinting 
 or astigmatic eyes have never been regarded as 
 other than disadvantages to them. Strabismic moral 
 vision is quite as little likely to enhance their power 
 or the quality of their interpretation of Nature. 
 
BYRON AND SHELLEY 113 
 
 Nor can men be trusted to reflect the truth and 
 beauty of life who themselves utterly fail to fulfil 
 their own manhood. Their art is in grave danger 
 of infection from their debility of character. This 
 is not to claim for a moment that great natures 
 are to be crammed into little moulds or judged by 
 merely conventional standards. One of their chief 
 services is to show men how petty and inadequate 
 such moulds and standards are. But the question 
 as to their fulfilment of some worthy manhood is a 
 fair one, because it bears directly in the great ma- 
 jority of cases upon their ability to see and tell the 
 truth, and scarcely less upon the trustworthiness 
 and probably permanence of their ideas of beauty. 
 Hence the possession of the fundamental virtues 
 of courage, reverence, simplicity and purity of heart 
 are of moment to the poet. None will venture to 
 question Shelley's moral and physical courage; 
 while his simplicity — a childlike simplicity and 
 freedom from affectation, which sometimes led him 
 into strange and ludicrous adventures — is as little 
 to be gainsaid. There is no lack of those who will 
 deny outright, upon the other hand, his claim to 
 any semblance of reverence, and who stand ready 
 to cast grave doubts upon his cleanness of heart. 
 They will cite his attitude toward Christianity and 
 toward his father in support of their former claim, 
 and buttress their position by reference to the 
 notes to " Queen Mab." To substantiate the latter 
 they will have recourse to Shelley's abandonment 
 
114 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 of Harriet Westbrook, his elopement with Mary 
 Godwin, his susceptibiHty to the influence of Emi- 
 lia Viviani, who inspired the " Epipsychidion/' and 
 some passages in his poems, most notably, perhaps, 
 the original scheme of " Laon and Cythna," which 
 made the two brother and sister, and the sixth canto 
 of the same poem as it was finally published under 
 the title of " The Revolt of Islam." This evidence 
 is not to be altogether rebutted ; but on the other 
 hand a clear and charitable view of all the circum- 
 stances of the poet's life goes far toward temper- 
 ing and mitigating it. Shelley impressed competent 
 judges, I repeat, as a man of singular purity of 
 thought and life. He could not endure obscene or 
 suggestive stories, and seems to have felt all a 
 gentleman's natural aversion to the Irishman, Cur- 
 ran, because of the part which they played in his 
 conversation. His verse, moreover, while eminently 
 sensuous at times, is upon the whole singularly free 
 from taint of sensuality. Shelley was no disem- 
 bodied spirit, as he is sometimes represented to have 
 been ; but a man of vigourous (and awkward) phy- 
 sique, after the early threats of pulmonary trouble 
 had been outlived. He loved bathing, boating, rid- 
 ing, pistol-shooting, though reckless and somewhat 
 inefficient in them all. His target practice was a 
 menace to his friends, his bathing put his life in 
 frequent jeopardy, and his yachting finally ended 
 it. Characteristically enough, he entered heartily 
 into the spirit of these sports, but persisted in ig- 
 
BYRON AND SHELLEY 115 
 
 noring their physical conditions and requirements. 
 Getting once beyond his depth in Arno, he lay per- 
 fectly quiet at the bottom of a pool, until fished out 
 by Trelawny ; and then, upon catching his breath, 
 greeted his rescuer in this wise : — 
 
 " I always find the bottom of the well, and they 
 say Truth lies there. In another minute I should 
 have found it, and you would have found an empty 
 shell. . . . Death is the veil, which those who live 
 call life : they sleep and it is lifted." ^ 
 
 Such an incident suggests the impossibility of 
 judging the man by ordinary standards; not be- 
 cause his extraordinary parts grant him immunity, 
 but because the basis upon which ordinary judge- 
 ment can rest is lacking as really, if not as com- 
 pletely, as in the case of an insane person. So it 
 must be considered that, while Shelley was inexcus- 
 ably guilty in deserting his first wife for Mary 
 Godwin, there is some reason to suppose that evi- 
 dence may yet be forthcoming which would have 
 justified separation if not divorce ; his theories con- 
 cerning marriage — theories which none can doubt 
 he held with perfect honesty — are to be taken into 
 account, and it must be remembered further that, 
 barring this lapse, Shelley impresses the reader of 
 to-day, as he impressed his companions, as a man 
 chaste in act, speech, and thought. He believed 
 that the facts of experience must be faced, and that 
 even the most shocking facts are legitimate material 
 
 » Trelawny's Recollections of Shelley and Byron, p. 40. 
 
116 ENGLISH LITEKATURE 
 
 for literary treatment. Granting such justification 
 for the subject of a tragedy like " The Cenci," it is 
 hard to see how nameless outrage could be treated 
 ■with higher reserve, or finer feeling for the decencies 
 as well as for the genuine tragedies of life. 
 
 Shelley's claim to the possession of reverence is 
 not less the subject of conflicting testimony. His 
 treatment of his father was bad, though Sir Timo- 
 thy is so grotesquely Philistine a figure, with his 
 merely formal morality, his conventional religion, 
 his confidence in the protection of the "exalted 
 mind " of the Duke of Norfolk, and all the rest of 
 it, as to foreordain that the two should never under- 
 stand each other. There is a something half ludi- 
 crous, half pathetic, about his proposition to read 
 " Palley's " (so he called the name) " Natural The- 
 ology " with his son, in hope of converting him 
 from the views of " The Necessity of Atheism " 
 and the notes to " Queen Mab." How far this in- 
 fluence could go in the direction of integrity of 
 faith and life may be judged from the pretty well 
 authenticated belief that at the same time he was 
 assuring Shelley of his implacability toward any 
 mesalliance on his part, but of his entire readiness 
 to provide for the issue of any irregular connections 
 he might form.^ This does not excuse, though it 
 may account for, the language of disrespect which 
 at times the poet used toward his father. If any 
 excuse is to be made it must rest upon Shelley's 
 
 * Cf. J. A. Symonds, Shelley ^ cbap. i, p. 6. 
 
BYRON AND SHELLEY 117 
 
 later possession by at least a trace of the mania 
 of distrust and fear of Sir Timothy which certainly 
 oppressed one period of his boyhood. Be all this 
 as it may, however, the secret of Shelley's rever- 
 ence and irreverence is to be sought in the words 
 of Orsino in " The Cenci " : — 
 
 " Words are but holy as the deeds they cover : 
 A priest who has forsworn the God he serves ; 
 A judge who makes Truth weep at his decree ; 
 
 A father who is all a tyrant seems, 
 Were the prof aner for his sacred name." ^ 
 
 It is scarcely too much to say that Shelley's 
 whole life with all his work must be brought to the 
 test of this passage before it can be adequately 
 understood. " The Anarch Custom " was his arch- 
 enemy. Like a true disciple of revolution, he was 
 little versed in history and had no taste for investi- 
 gation into custom's growth. He could never realize 
 the extent in which it represents the aspirations, 
 struggles, and achievements of earlier generations, 
 which, to be sure, have hardened into relative use- 
 lessness, like the bread too thickly encrusted in the 
 baking, or the good soil of the footpath worn barren 
 by many passing feet. Enough for him to feel that 
 custom was tyrannous in the present ; it need not be 
 generally tyrannous ; if only it should seem oppres- 
 sive in specific cases, it must forthwith be arraigned, 
 convicted, and most eloquently sentenced. This is 
 
 * The Cencif act ii, scene 2. 
 
118 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 the open secret of Shelley's negative influence, his 
 so-called atheism, irreverence, and immorality. 
 
 Upon the other hand his positive doctrine, in the 
 proclamation of which he is very bold and which 
 will, perhaps in his own despite, give him a perma- 
 nent place among leaders and inspirers of religious 
 and social thought, may be suggested by a passage 
 from the preface to " Alastor " : — 
 
 " They who, deluded by no generous error, . . . 
 duped by no illustrious superstition, loving nothing 
 on this earth and cherishing no hopes beyond, yet 
 keep aloof from sympathies with their kind, . . . 
 these and such as they have their apportioned curse; 
 . . . they are morally dead ; they are neither friends, 
 nor lovers, nor fathers, nor citizens of the world, 
 nor benefactors of their country. . . . Those who 
 love not their fellow-beings live unfruitful lives and 
 prepare for their old age a miserable grave." 
 
 Shelley not only preached this doctrine but abun- 
 dantly illustrated it in practice. The " regeneration 
 of mankind " was not only the theme of " Laon " 
 and " Prometheus," it was the subject of the poet's 
 own contemplation day by day. He refused on 
 principle the proposition of his father and grand- 
 father to entail the family estates, — worth £20,000 
 a year at his grandfather's death, — although his 
 consent would have brought him an immediate an- 
 nual income of £2000, and his need was pressing. 
 He was a persistent and sympathetic visitor among 
 the poor, showing at times a far more practical in- 
 
BYRON AND SHELLEY 119 
 
 sight into the true conditions of distress than could 
 have been expected. Even his descent upon Ireland 
 when he was scarcely twenty, with his girl-wife, 
 Harriet, and his sister-in-law, Eliza, who had their 
 common stock of money hid in some nook or corner 
 of her dress, — " we are not dependent upon her al- 
 though she gives it out as we want it," he says with 
 delicious simplicity, — and his " Address to the Irish 
 People'' are further removed from farce-comedy 
 than appears at first glance. Among the physicians 
 at whose hands Ireland has suffered so many things, 
 none was ever freer from taint of quackery than 
 this impulsive boy ; nor have many been able to 
 furnish a prescription better related to the funda- 
 mental needs of a distracted people ; though, with its 
 insistence upon the necessity of toleration, calmness, 
 mildness, patience, and the formation of " habits of 
 Sobriety, Regularity, and Thought," its form was so 
 ill adapted to Irish taste as to leave little chance 
 that it would ever be taken/ Throuofh all his works 
 and days Shelley seems to have been loyal to the 
 resolution taken in his boyhood at Eton as he heard 
 
 From the near school-room, voices, that alas ! 
 Were but one echo from a world of woes — 
 The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes. 
 
 So without shame I spake : — "I will be wise, 
 And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies 
 Such power, for I grow weary to behold 
 
 * For a brief abstract of this Address see Symonds's Shelley ^ chap. 
 
120 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 The selfish and the strong still tyrannize 
 Without reproach or check." I then controlled 
 My tears, my heart grew calm, and I was meek and bold." ^ 
 
 It is only in the light of this intense feeling of 
 hostility to tyranny, of sympathy with the hopes and 
 fears of suffering man, and of faith in a universe 
 created and animated by such a Spirit that this 
 human struggle must finally avail, that we begin to 
 realize Shelley's testimony to the place and power 
 of religion. It voices itself in many forms. He had 
 a keen sense for the mystery of things and that im- 
 pulse to keep putting the deepest and most searching 
 questions to life which is the essence of religion. 
 
 Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown ; 
 
 Why fear and dream and death and birth 
 
 Cast on the daylight of this earth 
 
 Such gloom ; why man has such a scope 
 
 For love and hate, despondency and hope ! * 
 
 He had, too, and that in high degree, a sense of 
 the largeness and seriousness of life. It is here that 
 his ^ atheism ' shows itself to be far more deeply 
 and sincerely religious than the half -believing cyni- 
 cism of Byron. The very titles that the two poets 
 chose accentuate the contrast. As Mr. Swinburne 
 has said with characteristic assurance, but some- 
 thing less than his habitual exaggeration : — 
 
 " When Shelley threw himself upon poetry as his 
 organ, his topics were not ^ Hours of Idleness,' and 
 
 1 The Revolt of Islam, Dedication, stanzas 3 and 4. 
 ' Hymn to Intellectual Beauty. 
 
BYRON AND SHELLEY 121 
 
 ^ Hints from Horace/ and ^ The Waltz ' ; they were the 
 redemption of the world by the martyrdom of right- 
 eousness, and the regeneration of mankind through 
 ' Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom and Endurance ' ; they 
 were the heroism of Beatrice and the ascension of 
 Adonais, and they were the resurrection of Italy and 
 of Greece, and they were the divinest things of na- 
 ture, made more divine through the interpretation 
 of love infallible and the mastery of insuperable 
 song/'^ 
 
 Moreover, while Shelley, as became a true son of 
 revolution, was deficient in the historic sense and had 
 little appreciation of the slow but sure growth of 
 the race " in wisdom and stature and in favour with 
 God and man," the story of which makes the Past 
 sacred and every real history a book of revelation, 
 he did have in a more or less dim way a sense of 
 that ultimate wholeness and integrity of life which 
 is the root idea in holiness. Just as in " Alastor " 
 he sets forth the inappeasable hunger of his soul for 
 the key and secret of life, so in the " Hymn to In- 
 tellectual Beauty " he communicates to us something 
 of his confidence in the existence of a Spirit, which, 
 living at the heart of things, has power to reconcile 
 life's contradictions. 
 
 Love, hope, and self-esteem, like clouds depart 
 
 And come, for some uncertain moments lent. 
 Man were immortal and omnipotent. 
 
 Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art, 
 Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart. 
 
 1 u Wordsworth and Byron," Nineteenth Century f vol. xv, p. 609. 
 
122 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Along each of these convergent Hnes he was bring- 
 ing his burden of testimony to the reality of religion 
 as a prime concern of man. It remained in a lyrical 
 drama of the greatest distinction to touch the heart 
 of the Gospel. 
 
 The " Prometheus Unbound" is without question 
 a poem of revolt ; but it is as far as possible from 
 being a poem of negation. On the contrary it sets 
 forth, somewhat mystically and ideally of course, or 
 it would not be Shelley's, the necessary and inevi- 
 table victory of the vital principle of Christianity. 
 The Jove whose reign is threatened is a tyrant seated 
 upon a throne of irresponsible and unreasonable 
 power. Prometheus is the Titan whose heart has 
 been touched by the sorrow and the need of man, 
 and who would fain deliver him. For his rebellion 
 against tyranny and his refusal even when van- 
 quished to give in his allegiance to the despot, he 
 is chained on Caucasus and tormented by the furies, 
 who come — 
 
 with hydra tresses, 
 And iron wings that climb the wind. 
 
 Thus the poem deals with — 
 
 Fate and Chance and God and Chaos old, 
 And Love, and the chained Titan's wof ul doom, 
 And how he shall be loosed, and make the earth 
 One brotherhood. 
 
 Prometheus in his anguish curses Jove, but later, — 
 and this is a touch impossible, I think, to any modern 
 
BYRON AND SHELLEY 123 
 
 poet except Shelley, — bethinking himself that such 
 tyranny is by its very nature doomed, recants his 
 curse and finds something very like pity filling the 
 void in his heart that hate has made. The furies 
 taunt him with the infernal gospel that — 
 
 Those who do endure 
 Deep wrongs for man, and scorn, and chains, but heap 
 Thousand-fold torment on themselves and him. 
 
 They mock him further with their picture of the 
 confusion and hopelessness of the world's affairs : — 
 
 The good want power, but to weep barren tears. 
 The powerful goodness want : worse need for them. 
 The wise want love ; and those who love want wisdom ; 
 And all best things are thus confused to ill. 
 
 Through it all Prometheus endures with heavenly 
 patience, saying, — 
 
 " And yet I feel 
 Most vain all hope but love. . . . 
 
 ... I would fain 
 Be what it is my destiny to be, 
 The saviour and the strength of suffering man." 
 
 I may not stop to sketch in Shelley's words, as I 
 should like to do, the coming of Demogorgon, " a 
 tremendous gloom," before whom the tyrant sit- 
 ting upon his seat of injustice trembles and falls. 
 Jupiter has been rejoicing in sheer power. 
 
 " All else has been subdued to me ; alone 
 The soul of man, hke unextinguished fire, 
 Yet burns toward heaven with fierce reproach, and doubt, 
 And lamentation, and reluctant prayer, 
 Hurling up insurrection, which might make 
 
124 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Our antique empire insecure, though built 
 On eldest faith, and hell's coeval, fear." 
 
 Finally, before the power of love working by faith, 
 of love incarnate in a great nature making willing 
 sacrifice of self for man, of love joined to Eter- 
 nity,* that tyranny is overthrown, fear has its sting 
 plucked away, — 
 
 And Conquest is dragged captive through the deep. 
 
 But I hope to have sketched the great poem in 
 sufficient outline to indicate how far it is from 
 being a work of mere negation and how immedi- 
 ately related it is to Christianity. A poem of re- 
 volt it may indeed be called; but it is revolt 
 against the tyranny of mechanical mythologies and 
 ecclesiasticisms ; against theories of atonement, if 
 one pleases, which would represent Christ as com- 
 ing to deliver man from a fierce and savage God. 
 
 Precisely as the other poems depict the hunger 
 of the mind after some source of efficient and 
 beneficent control in the world's affairs, — a hun- 
 ger which Beatrice voices when she expresses her 
 despair: — 
 
 " If there should he 
 No God, no Heaven, no Earth in the void world ; 
 The wide, grey, lampless, deep, unpeopled world ! " 
 
 SO the " Prometheus " sets forth the appeal which 
 the sacrifice of Christ made to Shelley's heart, 
 
 * I believe that this interpretation of the stupendous figure of 
 Demogorgon comports best with the general scheme of the drama. 
 
BYRON AND SHELLEY 125 
 
 however unwilling he may have been to express it 
 in terms of conventional piety. How compelling 
 this appeal was in some of its aspects is witnessed 
 further by the memorable chorus from "Hellas": — 
 
 A power from the unknown God, 
 
 A Promethean conqueror, came ; 
 Like a triumphal path he trod 
 The thorns of death and shame. 
 
 A mortal shape to him 
 
 Was like the vapour dim 
 Which the orient planet animates with light. 
 
 Hell, sin, and slavery came, 
 
 Like blood-hounds mild and tame 
 Nor preyed until their Lord had taken flight. 
 
 The moon of Mahomet 
 
 Arose, and it shall set : 
 While, blazoned as on heaven's immortal noon, 
 
 The Cross leads generations on. 
 
 When this stanza is put beside the one which 
 follows it with a lament over the dispeopling of 
 hills, streams, and woods of their ancient divinities, 
 the reader begins to feel the significance of Shel- 
 ley's religious instinct. He was in revolt against 
 an idea of religion which made God a despot; he 
 felt, on the other hand, the appeal of a faith which 
 made Love not a mere sentiment of good-nature, 
 but an impulse of sacrifice, — a vital and regnant 
 force in the world. He was quite as truly repelled 
 by an idea of religion which robbed the earth of 
 its soul and expelled divinity to heaven ; he had a 
 sure instinct for that Divine Principle which works 
 
126 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 in men and things to will and to do of His good 
 pleasure : — 
 
 . . . that sustaining Love 
 Which, through the web of being blindly wove 
 By man and beast and earth and air and sea, 
 Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of 
 The fire for which all thirst, now beams on me, 
 Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.^ 
 
 No claim that Shelley ever organized his reli- 
 gious instinct and thought into a system is made 
 or could be maintained; but none the less the 
 witness of much that he wrote is all the more sig- 
 nificant, because it testifies unconsciously to man's 
 need of a Divinity Whose activities shall be as 
 closely identified with the common concerns of 
 humanity and nature, as His being and attributes 
 transcend them. 
 
 ' Adonais. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE "Edinburgh" and the "quarterly" 
 
 To attempt a chapter upon the religious element 
 in the work of the writers for whom this title 
 stands may seem like undertaking an essay upon the 
 Greek Kalends or the seacoast of Bohemia. The 
 reader's first thought is likely to be that, whatever 
 may have been the personal religious convictions of 
 these men, their published works have " no religion 
 to speak of " ; certainly no religious significance for 
 a later day. Has not Mr. Bagehot specifically noted 
 the fact? 
 
 " A curious abstinence from religious topics [he 
 says] characterizes the original Review. There is a 
 wonderful omission of this most natural topic of 
 speculation in the lives of Horner and Jeffrey. In 
 truth, it would seem that, living in the incessant 
 din of a Calvinistic country, the best course for 
 thoughtful and serious men was to be silent — at 
 least they instinctively thought so. They felt no 
 involuntary call to be theological teachers them- 
 selves, and gently recoiled from the coarse admoni- 
 tion around them." ^ 
 
 Yet Bagehot has himself answered his own im- 
 
 ^ Bagehot, "The First Edinburgh Reviewers," Literary Studies, 
 Tol. i, pp. 183-184. 
 
128 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 plied question; for in a memorable estimate and 
 criticism of the Whig character in the essay just 
 quoted, he has frequent recourse to the similes, 
 figures, and general language of religion for the 
 illustration of his theme. This necessity has its 
 ground in nature ; since all great intellectual, moral, 
 and political movements have their religious impli- 
 cations, and the literary awakening of which the 
 " Edinburgh " and " Quarterly " reviews, with 
 "Blackwood's " and the " London " magazines were 
 the fruit was preeminently such a movement. It 
 was either inspired on the one hand or necessitated 
 on the other by the Revolution. The " Edinburgh" 
 was as natural an outcome of revolutionary impulse 
 as the " St. Bartholomew of Abuses " or the guillo- 
 tine ; as the " Lyrical Ballads" or the " Ode to Na- 
 poleon " ; while the " Quarterly " followed as logi- 
 cally as Napoleon himself, or the "Letters on a 
 Regicide Peace." 
 
 After a hundred years it seems to us as though 
 the Revolution suffered a material sea-change in 
 crossing the Channel. Most of its English advo- 
 cates have long since found their places among the 
 respectabilities of literature; and so far as the 
 changes for which they contended can be called 
 revolutionary at all, it is revolution clothed and in 
 its right mind, revolution not only Anglicized but 
 be-Whigged, that they represent. It did not seem 
 so, however, to English and Scots men of letters in 
 the first decade of the new century. 
 
THE EDINBURGH AND THE QUARTERLY 129 
 As Hazlitt put it : — 
 
 ** There was a mighty ferment in the heads o£ 
 statesmen and poets, kings and people. According 
 to the prevailing notion, all was to be natural and 
 new. Nothing that was established was to be tol- 
 erated. . . . Kings and queens were dethroned from 
 their rank and station in legitimate tragedy and 
 epic poetry, as they were decapitated elsewhere. 
 . . . The world was to be turned topsy-turvy ; and 
 poetry, by the good-will of our Adam-wits, was to 
 share its fate and begin de novo" ^ 
 
 This represents, however, the impending change 
 which a radical like Godwin might have hoped for, 
 or a reactionary like Gifford feared, rather than the 
 actual state of the case. A new poetry had indeed 
 arisen with Wordsworth and Coleridge, to which 
 Byron and Shelley had imparted a distinctly revo- 
 lutionary character. It was natural, therefore, that a 
 new criticism should arise, not merely of literature, 
 but of life in its social and political aspects; and 
 equally natural that this criticism should divide it- 
 self into two camps, one forward-looking and hope- 
 ful, the other reactionary and doubtful. 
 
 The " Edinburgh " and " Quarterly " reviews, 
 dating their origin from 1802 and 1809 respect- 
 ively, stand as the protagonists of these two forces. 
 Late in the next decade they were followed by two 
 monthly magazines, one of which, " Blackwood's," 
 has for ninety years maintained a great conservative 
 
 1 The English Poets, Lecture VIII. 
 
130 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 reputation with brilliant success ; while the other, 
 known as the " London Magazine," lived a life so 
 brief and chequered as scarcely to justify mention 
 in company with its three contemporaries, were it 
 not for the significance of the so-called " Cockney 
 School " of writers, whose organ it practically be- 
 came. Among the first Edinburgh Reviewers whom 
 the world cares to remember were Horner, Jeffrey, 
 Brougham, and Sydney Smith, of whom I take the 
 last to be, upon the whole, the most significant 
 and characteristic figure for our present purpose. 
 The " Quarterly " numbered Gifford, Southey, 
 Scott, and Lockhart among its early contributors, 
 and two of them among its editors. Preeminent in 
 the "Blackwood's" group were Lockhart, Wilson, 
 and Maginn. The " London " could, for at least a 
 brief period, look to a company of writers which 
 comprised Lamb, De Quincey, Leigh Hunt,^ Hood, 
 and Hazlitt. 
 
 I am not disposed to assume the judgement-seat 
 and to divide these men into groups of believers 
 and unbelievers. It would be " to consider too curi- 
 ously to consider so"; yet critics were not wanting 
 in their own day to undertake the task. They of 
 course saw in the " Quarterly " the recognized and 
 confessed champion of a high Tory faith in Church 
 and State as then established. Each number of the 
 Review as it issued from the press was like incense 
 
 ^ I do not know that Leigh Hunt was himself a contributor ; but 
 he was in close association with those who were. 
 
THE EDINBURGH AND THE QUARTERLY 131 
 
 in the nostrils of the great god, Status Quo. The 
 " Edinburgh " was the organ, not of revolution, as 
 its " Quarterly " rivals would have it, but of the 
 new Liberalism, which represented in some degree 
 the effect of revolution upon independent and 
 courageous, but none the less eminently conserva- 
 tive, British minds. In both politics and religion, 
 the blue and buff of the " Edinburgh " stood for 
 orthodoxy, but it was the Whig orthodoxy of rea- 
 son rather than the Tory orthodoxy of tradition. 
 " Blackwood's," which did not appear until the im- 
 mediate stress of the great French wars was over, 
 ranged itself on the Conservative side ; but, as be- 
 came a monthly magazine whose purpose was to 
 amuse and instruct rather than to argue, defend, or 
 convert, it exercised its partisanship after a some- 
 what tricksy and irresponsible fashion. The " Lon- 
 don Magazine " as a periodical publication would, 
 as I have intimated, have no especial claim upon 
 our attention ; but the Cockney School, which it 
 may be said to represent, had some right to the 
 name of radical. Hunt and Hazlitt held admittedly 
 unorthodox opinions, while Lamb and De Quincey, 
 though the latter aspired to be a defender of the 
 current religious faith, were Hterary innovators. 
 
 Yet the reader who blows the dust from the tops 
 of these early volumes and runs his eye over their 
 pages finds himself wondering how they could have 
 made so great a stir. Their politics are sufficiently 
 various, but their references to religion are in gen- 
 
132 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 eral studiously respectful and commonplace, the 
 single exception worth noting to-day being the fa- 
 mous Chaldee Manuscript article in "Blackwood's," 
 which takes somewhat daring liberties with the 
 phraseology of the Book of Revelation. A brief 
 glance at such titles as relate to religious topics will 
 illustrate my meaning. The first volume of the 
 "Edinburgh" discusses very temperately a sermon 
 by Dr. Parr, and William Godwin's reply to it. It 
 also criticises with a favour in which the note of calm 
 reserve seems dominant, Paley's ^^ Natural Theol- 
 ogy." Only when Volume III undertakes a review 
 of Necker's " Cours de Morale Religieuse " does the 
 tone of trenchant criticism, which is a part of the 
 "Edinburgh" tradition, sound with unmistakable 
 clearness. In Volume IV the sermons of a certain 
 Dr. Brown are reviewed, and the fact that, though 
 a Presbyterian, he has seen fit to dedicate his book 
 to the Archbishop of Canterbury, is selected for 
 especially favourable mention. 
 
 The record for the early volumes of the " Quar- 
 terly " is almost equally colourless. Volume I under- 
 takes a defence of the " Credibility of the Jewish 
 Exodus . . . against Edward Gibbon, Esq.," which 
 duly reaches its foregone conclusion. Volume II 
 offers more religious and theological variety, in two 
 articles which review in an excellent spirit " The 
 Transactions of the Missionary Society in the South 
 Sea Islands " and Paley's " Sermons and Memoirs " ; 
 while a third, dealing with a work entitled " Intol- 
 
THE EDINBURGH AND THE QUARTERLY 133 
 
 erance the Disgrace of Christians, not the Fault of 
 their Religion," sounds the Tory note with greater 
 distinctness. The Alexandrian School and its in- 
 fluence upon the Established Church are likewise 
 discussed. A leader of the Clapham sect, to whom 
 I shall have occasion to recur in the next chapter, 
 falls under review in Volume IV, where a fairly 
 liberal essay may be found dealing with " Lord 
 Teignmouth and the British and Foreign Bible 
 Society." It is evident from the tone of this article 
 that the Society, synonym for respectability though 
 it has since become, was then an object of scorn 
 and derision in some quarters — a state of affairs 
 fit to make one believe Sydney Smith's claim that 
 he once heard Jeffrey speak disrespectfully of the 
 Equator. 
 
 " Blackwood's " first volume ^ begins with a re- 
 port of the proceedings in the House of Commons 
 upon the death of the admirable Francis Horner, 
 who had been one of the first writers in the " Edin- 
 burgh," and is as generous as need be. Further on 
 it reviews favourably the work of Dr. Chalmers on 
 " Christian Revelation viewed in Connexion with 
 the Modern Astronomy " ; and, as though to con- 
 vince a later generation that there is nothing new 
 under the sun, the article begins with the lament : 
 " One of the worst features of the present times is 
 
 * I refer here to the number for April, 1817, some months before 
 the leadership of Lockhart and Wilson began its real career with 
 the publication of the Chaldee Manuscript. 
 
134 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 the separation that has taken place between science 
 and religion." As early therefore as 1817 this ven- 
 erable plaint had grown familiar. 
 
 It must be evident even to the casual reader that 
 the religious significance of these publications — 
 if indeed they have any — lies deeper than the 
 rather complexionless titles just cited. In a general 
 way it may be maintained that in religion as in 
 politics the liberals of the day were the true con- 
 servatives, while the ultra-orthodox, the worship- 
 pers of tradition and the status quo, were in un- 
 conscious league with revolution. This is simply to 
 state a general proposition. Even if the Universe 
 be not an organism, our experience of it is such 
 that we are at least obliged to treat it as though it 
 were. The great interests and relations of men as 
 individuals and as societies seem to be of an organic 
 sort. They never continue in one stay. Either they 
 avail themselves of passing opportunity to adapt 
 their frames and forms to their environment, as 
 living creatures do by conquest and assimilation of 
 some portion of circumstance ; or else in refusing 
 to do this they become themselves the food of cir- 
 cumstance, — their vital integrity is impaired ; time 
 and the hour have their will of them. The phrase 
 ^ adaptation to environment ' is itself a partial and 
 faulty one, because the process of life is in so real 
 a sense mutual. The organism endures, not by a 
 mere slavish adaptation of self to surroundings, but 
 quite as truly by an adaptation of surroundings to 
 
THE EDINBURGH AND THE QUARTERLY 135 
 
 the interests of self. This is true even in organisms 
 of the lowest sort ; while as we go up the scale and 
 the mystery of will develops, the domestication and 
 cultivation of otherwise hostile or savage surround- 
 ings becomes a prime factor in organic history. 
 The organism which exerts its power to put com- 
 pulsion upon events, thus organizing inevitable 
 change in the interests of life, not only lives but 
 grows. The organism which through feebleness, 
 sloth, obduracy, or lack of faith declines this task 
 does not thereby inhibit change. It simply becomes 
 its unwilling victim, and invites its approach in a 
 hostile guise. 
 
 The Tory attitude was one of formal and ultra 
 conservatism, based, as one trenchant critic has 
 said, on " genuine, honest, craven fear." Lord 
 Eldon has been generally recognized as its most 
 characteristic exponent. His regard for the past 
 was less that of an intelligent student of history 
 bent upon appropriating its lessons for the future, 
 than that of a blind worshipper of the thing that 
 was, because it had been, because life had proved 
 tolerable — at least for him as an individual — in 
 connection with it, and because the least change 
 might serve to loosen the keystone of the arch 
 spanning the deep of chaos. When Sir Samuel 
 Romilly proposed to mitigate the savage criminal 
 code that prescribed death for over two hundred 
 offences, he was frankly told that there was no tell- 
 ing where such a course would end. If he sue- 
 
136 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 ceeded in abolishing the death penalty for picking 
 pockets, there was nothing to prevent a similar step 
 in favour of the thief who stole cloth from a bleach- 
 field ; and so on indefinitely, until the gallows 
 should rot, the hangman starve, and society disin- 
 tegrate. "I am for hanging all," was the memo- 
 rable retort of one young squire to some new pro- 
 posal of this apostle of mercy and justice. It was 
 the shortest way, and it is ever a characteristic of 
 " Hell's coeval, fear " to deal hurriedly with symp- 
 toms rather than dare a genuine investigation into 
 causes. 
 
 No very penetrating insight is needed to discover 
 how revolutionary such a course is bound to prove. 
 It tends towards death and destruction, like every 
 path where fear and doubt are guides, because it 
 inhibits the one absolutely necessary function of 
 life; since life means perpetual change in the adap- 
 tation of means to the ends of its own continu- 
 ance. While the tree lives its innate vital principle 
 enables it to feed upon 'weather.' As soon as its 
 trunk is felled, every alternation of heat and cold, 
 moist and dry, becomes the enemy of its fabric 
 and hastens its decay. True conservatism consists, 
 therefore, not in fending off change, but in foster- 
 ing vitality and welcoming all change that accords 
 with it. 
 
 The mere radical, on the other hand, is in danger 
 of falling in love with change for its own sake and 
 of rendering as superstitious a reverence to the 
 
THE EDINBURGH AND THE QUARTERLY 137 
 
 sword and ploughshare as his neighbour accords to 
 the symbols of settled order. So far from looking 
 back to the past and wishing to perpetuate its con- 
 ditions, he forgets that there has been any past, or, 
 if he remembers, it is only with a sort of scorn and 
 hatred. Things seem to him to be so bad that mend- 
 ing them would be a waste of time ; he would rather 
 build anew from the foundations. He neglects two 
 great facts. One is that all the foundation upon 
 which he has to build comes out of this very past of 
 which he is so contemptuous. The other is that he 
 himself is more often ruled by hatred of what is 
 than by love of what might be, and thus envy, 
 malice, and uncharitableness are bound to obscure 
 the clearness of his vision. He can build nothing 
 that will stand until his astigmatism and strabismus 
 are corrected. 
 
 Here as elsewhere the Via Media is the practi- 
 cable way because it is based upon the truth of ex- 
 perience and lighted by the fundamental virtues 
 of faith, hope, and love. It doubtless loses some- 
 thing in distinction, because it is so often the way 
 of prudence and caution. The ultra-conservative 
 clinging to the outgrown raiment of an elder time 
 is a more conspicuous and a far more romantic 
 figure than the plain man in modern clothes going 
 about to-day's business. The ultra-radical makes a 
 similar appeal to the spirit of untried adventure, 
 and always strikes a responsive chord in some 
 hearts. The weakness of the former lies in his 
 
138 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 cynicism and selfishness ; that of the latter in his 
 bitterness. Both lack faith. One is contemptuous 
 of past and future both, and of man's ability to 
 profit by them. The other is contemptuous of his- 
 tory and discerns in its successive stages of ex- 
 perience barriers to human happiness, instead of 
 platforms by means of which the fabric of human 
 welfare may be enlarged and confirmed. 
 
 It is no part of my purpose to claim that any of 
 these new publications proved to be a consistent 
 embodiment of any one of these theories. Political 
 and social theories are rarely perfectly consistent, 
 whether they be good or bad ; and their confessors 
 are pretty sure to prove in practice better than the 
 worst and worse than the best of their creeds. It 
 was so in the period of which we speak. The Tory 
 idea meant a cynical disregard of the rights of the 
 masses in the interests of privilege ; but the Tory 
 party was not lacking in high-minded and honour- 
 able men, as will be abundantly illustrated in the 
 next chapter. The Radicals held and proclaimed 
 views that seemed subversive of society and religion ; 
 but did not always cease, therefore, from being good 
 husbands and fathers. The Whigs maintained the 
 worth of freedom ; the right of each man to think, 
 work, and worship as he was conscientiously inclined 
 to do. They not only went upon the theory that 
 these rights were sacred and that the welfare of 
 society was bound up with their preservation, but 
 they felt half instinctively that the masses of men 
 
THE EDINBURGH AND THE QUARTERLY 139 
 
 were destined to possess an increasing influence in 
 government ; and they strove, not always without 
 difficulty, to regard this future with hope. Their 
 main concern, theoretically, was the application to 
 the present of the experience of the past, with a 
 view to the amelioration of life's conditions in the 
 future. It is to be noted, however, that the Whigs, 
 although in possession of a generous creed, were 
 not always therefore exempt as individuals from 
 social and political prejudice or meanness ; while, 
 when it came to literary criticism. Whig and Tory 
 both were quite capable of the most anarchic indi- 
 vidualism. The whole matter has been admirably 
 summed up by Bagehot in his famous estimate of 
 the Whig ideal. 
 
 " The first wish of the Whigs is to retain the 
 constitution ; the second — and it is of almost equal 
 strength — is to improve it. They think the body 
 of laws now existing to be, in the main and in its 
 essence, excellent; but yet that there are exceptional 
 defects which should be remedied, superficial incon- 
 sistencies that should be corrected. The most op- 
 posite creed is that of the skeptic, who teaches that 
 you are to keep what is because it exists ; not from 
 a conviction of its excellence, but from an uncer- 
 tainty that anything better can be obtained." ^ 
 
 It is hard to realize at this distance of time the 
 real conditions which the Tories sought to perpetu- 
 ate and the Whigs to improve. 
 
 * Literary Studies^ vol. i, p. 162. 
 
140 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 " To appreciate the value of the * Edinburgh Re- 
 view' [says Sydney Smith], the state of England 
 at the period when that journal began should be 
 had in remembrance. The Catholics were not eman- 
 cipated. The Corporation and Test Acts were unre- 
 pealed. The game-laws were horribly oppressive; 
 steel-traps and spring-guns were set all over the 
 country ; prisoners tried for their lives could have 
 no counsel. Lord Eldon and the Court of Chancery 
 pressed heavily on mankind. Libel was punished 
 by the most cruel and vindictive imprisonments. 
 The principles of political economy were little un- 
 derstood. The laws of debt and conspiracy were on 
 the worst footing. The enormous wickedness of the 
 slave-trade was tolerated. A thousand evils were in 
 existence which the talents of good and noble men 
 have since lessened or removed : and these efforts 
 have been not a little assisted by the honest bold- 
 ness of the ' Edinburgh Review.' " ^ 
 
 So it is that when the " Edinburgh " for July, 
 1804, published the article entitled "A Concise 
 Statement of the Question regarding the Abolition 
 of the Slave Trade," we may claim that a distinctly 
 religious note was sounded in so far as this discus- 
 sion ministered directly to that doing of justice and 
 love of mercy which are of the essence of religion. 
 Its closing paragraph is so clear and wholesome 
 that at the risk of a surfeit of quotation I venture 
 to cite it. 
 
 "It appears to us, in short, that the Parliament 
 of England have it now in their power to do a more 
 * Quoted by Bagehot, op. ci(., p. 156. 
 
THE EDINBURGH AND THE QUARTERLY 141 
 
 magnificent act of humanity and justice than was 
 ever before in the gift of a legislative assembly ; 
 and that by this one law, they may, without injury 
 to their country, deliver more men from suffering 
 and exert a far more lasting, extensive, and benefi- 
 cial influence on the fortunes of mankind, than by 
 all the triumphant campaigns and successful nego- 
 tiations of a century." ^ 
 
 I would not assert that this note of humanity 
 and magnanimity is consistently characteristic of 
 the " Edinburgh Review." In literary matters, as 
 has been already intimated, it was not; still, wher- 
 ever the voice of Sydney Smith was heard, soon or 
 late it was sure to be sounded with a clearness and 
 emphasis which could not be ignored. This jocund 
 parson, with his fondness for good living, his dis- 
 like of ^enthusiasm,' and his contentment with the 
 ways of the world, was yet after all a sort of Great- 
 heart — a champion of the oppressed, and a guide 
 along the way to the Celestial City. He was not so 
 constituted as to appreciate Wesley or the Metho- 
 dists. He probably could not have used — perhaps 
 he could not altogether have understood — the lan- 
 guage of Simeon and his fellow Evangelicals. They 
 on their side might have claimed that, since spiritual 
 things must be spiritually discerned, so gross and 
 palpable a worldling was not likely to see very far 
 into the mysteries of faith. Nor would they have 
 been altogether wrong. The man was doubtless 
 
 * Edinburgh Review j vol. iv, p. 486. 
 
142 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 blind to some things that are best worth seeing; 
 but it is no less true that he was spiritually endowed 
 with a courage, a capacity for self-sacrifice, a sym- 
 pathy with the oppressed, and a passion (which he 
 would very likely have denied) that made him a 
 sort of apostle of essential Christianity. Critics have 
 been divided, like teeth, into incisors and molars, 
 and Sydney Smith included in the latter class. How- 
 ever true this may be with reference to his criticism, 
 his passion for righteousness and fairness of dealing 
 was of the molar sort. Its processes were relatively 
 deliberate, as compared with the enthusiastic pas- 
 sion of his Methodist contemporaries for souls ; but 
 a passion it was none the less. Now and then he 
 recognized its existence and reverently acknow- 
 ledged its source. "If," he said, "you ask me who 
 excites me, I answer you, it is that Judge Who stirs 
 good thoughts in honest hearts — under Whose 
 warrant I impeach the wrong, and by Whose help 
 I hope to chastise it." * 
 
 It is difficult to think of a prophet as ^ buxom'; 
 yet were not that adjective the prerogative of ro- 
 bust and comfortable women, it is precisely the 
 word which one would choose to characterize, not 
 only Sydney Smith's person but his faith as it 
 translated itself into good works through nearly 
 two generations. His championship of the slave, 
 his valiant exposure of the awful condition of mad- 
 houses, or hospitals for the insane, his persistent 
 
 » Quoted by G. W. E. Russell, in Sydney Smith, p. 225. 
 
THE EDINBURGH AND THE QUARTERLY 143 
 
 claim that the Catholics should be emancipated, and 
 his serene assurance that, despite the evil he had 
 seen and exposed, his own lot and that of his fel- 
 lows was gradually growing better, were all fruits 
 of a faith that was essentially religious. The com- 
 fortable optimism of a robust mind and a well-nur- 
 tured body fails to account for it. There was a 
 deeper element of spiritual and ethical conviction, 
 which shows sometimes through^ the veil of humour- 
 ous allusion wherewith he loved to conceal it. One 
 may find illustration of this in his whimsical but 
 unquestionably sincere advocacy of temperance, — 
 for considerable periods of his life he was a pretty 
 consistent water-drinker, — and in the frank thank- 
 fulness with which he recognized the deepening 
 seriousness of the clergy among whom his later 
 days were spent. " Whenever you meet a clergy- 
 man of my age," he told Mr. Gladstone in 1835, 
 "you may be quite sure he is a bad clergyman." ^ 
 
 The religious element that was most notably in- 
 comprehensible and even antipathetic to the Edin- 
 burgh Reviewers was the mystical. They had some 
 understanding of the worth of doing justice ; some 
 inkling at least of a love of mercy; but the walk- 
 ing humbly with God, at least as multitudes of 
 devout souls understood the act of personal com- 
 munion with an ever-present Deity, was beside 
 their experience. Hence it came to pass that in the 
 
 ^ Gladstone's Gleanings, vol. vii, p. 220 ; quoted by Bassell, in 
 Sydney Smith, p. 163. 
 
144 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 realm of literature Jeffrey proved blind to the 
 deeper significance of Wordsworth; while in that 
 of religion more narrowly considered, Sydney Smith 
 could not understand his Methodist and Evangeli- 
 cal neighbours, and, stranger still, failed to respond 
 to the heroic adventure of the early foreign mis- 
 sionaries — an adventure which will finally be recog- 
 nized as conferring upon his century one of its chief 
 marks of distinction. There was ground enough for 
 a little good-natured raillery at the worthy souls 
 who inaugurated a special packet service between 
 London and Margate, and ordained that upon their 
 hoy there should be nothing but serious conversa- 
 tion, — readers of Leigh Hunt's Autobiography 
 will remember his youthful adventure upon the 
 craft ; but William Carey should have been spared. 
 No doubt his journal, taken by itself, may contain 
 passages calculated to raise a smile, so naively and 
 intimately does he use terms of sacred and tre- 
 mendous import. The fact is, however, that the 
 journal never can be taken by itself. At a cen- 
 tury's distance we behold in it the narrative of an 
 apostle not unworthy to rank with the first great 
 Twelve. The secret of this blindness in one direc- 
 tion, which contrasts so vividly with exceptional 
 clearness and breadth of view in others, has been 
 discerned and set forth so admirably by Mr. Bage- 
 hot, that once more I must have recourse to his 
 words. In speaking of the Whig aversion to mys- 
 ticism he says : — 
 
THE EDINBURGH AND THE QUARTERLY 145 
 
 "A clear, precise, discriminating intellect shrinks 
 at once from the symbolic, the unbounded, the in- 
 definite. The misfortune is that mysticism is true. 
 There certainly are kinds of truth, borne in as it 
 were instinctively on the human intellect, most in- 
 fluential on the character and the heart, yet hardly 
 capable of stringent statement, difficult to limit by 
 an elaborate definition." 
 
 Thus we have the phenomenon of Jeffrey's 
 criticism of Wordsworth, which Bagehot interprets 
 in its representative and universal significance. 
 
 "Nature ingeniously prepared a shrill, artificial 
 voice, which spoke in season and out of season, 
 enough and more than enough, what will ever be 
 the idea of the cities of the plain concerning those 
 who live alone among the mountains; of the frivo- 
 lous concerning the grave, ... of the common 
 concerning the uncommon; the notion of the 
 world of those whom it will not reckon among the 
 righteous, — it said, ' This won't do.' And so in all 
 time will the lovers of polished Liberalism speak 
 concerning the intense and lonely prophet." ^ 
 
 Among the " Quarterly " group there was rather 
 more room for such things of the spirit as were 
 content to find expression in conventional forms. 
 Religion was a part of the Tory stock in trade. It 
 was forced to live in the uncongenial company of 
 great narrowness and bigotry on the one hand; but 
 on the other it proved true to its nature by occasion- 
 ally rearing, even in such thorny soil, flowers and 
 
 * Literary Studies^ " The First Edinburgh Reviewers," p. 174. 
 
146 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 fruits of rarest beauty. Of men like Gifford, even 
 at this stretch of time, when the bitterness of pre- 
 judice has been assuaged, not much can be made. 
 His was a narrow nature, and he stands out as 
 almost the only literary adversary to whom Leigh 
 Hunt in his charitable old age could not pay some 
 kindly tribute. Concerning the greatness and whole- 
 someness of Walter Scott's faith in God and man I 
 shall have to speak in a later chapter ; as well as 
 of the company of High Church enthusiasts, true 
 sons of the Romantic movement, who stirred all 
 England by their zeal, the purity and devotion of 
 their lives, their consummate literary gifts, the 
 cogency of their logic — and the woful inadequacy 
 of their theological and ecclesiastical premisses. 
 
 Of Southey, however, more needs to be said. He 
 played a larger part in the literary history of the 
 period now under review than it is quite easy to 
 realize to-day. It would doubtless have surprised and 
 pained him could he have seen his present undistin- 
 guished place in the firmament of literature ; for, 
 though free from silly vanity, he thought of him- 
 self as a star of very nearly the first magnitude, and 
 spoke repeatedly of his assurance of an immortality 
 of fame. He was not altogether wrong in this latter 
 conclusion, although he mistakenly based it upon 
 his poetry, much of which is but rhythmical prose 
 and is already forgotten, instead of upon his essays, 
 biographies, and letters, which are still worth read- 
 ing and occasionally read, and upon his brave, gra- 
 
THE EDINBURGH AND THE QUARTERLY 147 
 
 cious, and extraordinarily toilsome life, the memory 
 of which is to-day as fragrant as ever. I am aware 
 that it signifies little in criticism to say that a poet 
 was a good man, — the character of the late Mr. 
 Tapper was doubtless as unimpeachable as that of 
 his " Proverbial Philosophy," — but in Southey's case 
 the character of the man, his patience, unselfishness, 
 and devotion, his rare sense of honour and consistent 
 reverence, his unobtrusive yet quietly masterful 
 piety, are of the essence of his work in letters. They 
 must be taken into account in summing up the in- 
 fluence of the essayists and reviewers of his day ; 
 and they go far toward justifying and in some re- 
 spects redeeming the influence of the " Quarterly." 
 Southey had the gift, much needed in his camp, of 
 perceiving and appreciating the better side of men. 
 He could not have sympathized with the relations 
 of Nelson and Lady Hamilton ; but he could see 
 that the famous signal flown from the Victory on 
 the morning of Trafalgar was a truer commentary 
 upon the essence of Nelson's manhood than the cry 
 of " Poor Lady Hamilton ! " which so closely prefaced 
 his last words. " Consecrated cobblers," especially 
 among Dissenters, were probably almost as far be- 
 yond his comprehension as they were beyond that 
 of Sydney Smith ; and as Churchman and Tory he 
 was by no means an ideal biographer for John 
 Wesley. But none the less the essential greatness 
 of Wesley, his embodiment of faith, hope, and 
 charity, together with the enormous industry which 
 
148 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 he brought to their translation into terms of com- 
 mon goodness, were too close akin to all that 
 Southey reverenced, to escape recognition and hon- 
 our. Religion was recognized in all he thought and 
 wrote as a great and vital concern of life ; and with 
 characteristic boldness of design he at one time laid 
 a plan to make every great mythology the basis of 
 a narrative poem. Conservative though he became 
 in his reaction from the French Revolution, he 
 never lost faith in his fellows or degenerated into 
 practical skepticism of the Eldon type, but kept to 
 the end his love of liberty and his sympathy with 
 all good men. Now and then, as in " Goody Blake 
 and Harry Gill," or the " Battle of Blenheim," and 
 even more notably in his wife's^ "Tales of the 
 Factories," and " The Pauper's Deathbed," is heard 
 a clear premonition of the ' Social Question ' which 
 was destined to exert so powerful an influence upon 
 the religious and literary history of the later half of 
 the century. 
 
 Reference has already been made to the " Chaldee 
 Manuscript" with which "Blackwood's" made its 
 second and effectual appeal to the notice of the read- 
 ing public. Whenever the secondary and inciden- 
 tal influences of religion upon literature come to be 
 reckoned up, this clever bit of irreverence must needs 
 be remembered. It was a keen and impertinent char- 
 acterization of some of the best-known men in the 
 
 * His second wife, Catherine Bowles, whom Southey married late 
 in life, but with whom he had long been in affectionate sympathy. 
 
THE EDINBURGH AND THE QUARTERLY 149 
 
 literary circles of Edinburgh. The genius which Wil- 
 son and Lockhart unquestionably possessed for the 
 new journalism would, under any circumstances, 
 have conferred a sort of dubious distinction upon the 
 article. Their daring choice of the framework and 
 style of the Book of Kevelation gave it notoriety. 
 Both of these writers, as well as Blackwood himself, 
 who retained for some time the practical editorial 
 management of the new monthly, were men whose 
 irreverence was incidental rather than essential, and 
 the experiment was not spoiled by repetition. Wil- 
 son's name is the one most intimately associated 
 with the early days of the magazine, and his robust, 
 full-voiced style gave it a characteristic tone. It 
 would be an artificial and perhaps less than candid 
 task to attempt to trace any especial religious influ- 
 ence which "Blackwood's" may have exerted; but 
 it is true that Wilson and his compeers did some- 
 thing — it is probable that they did a good deal — 
 toward making possible a freer treatment of religious 
 topics in the essay form. The most casual glance at 
 the contents of our more thoughtful contemporary 
 reviews will show how large a place and how free 
 a treatment is given to religious and ethical ques- 
 tions. Equal rights are accorded to believer and to 
 skeptic, though with a sHghtly warmer welcome, 
 perhaps, for the beHever in one magazine and for 
 the skeptic in another. There is no denying the wide 
 influence of such discussions as that between Mr. 
 Huxley and Mr. Lilly in the eighties ; and the way 
 
150 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 toward this " fair field and no favour " seems to have 
 been blazed by the " Blackwood's " group, though 
 they themselves did not reach it, and, had they done 
 so, would perhaps have been at some loss how to 
 comport themselves there. 
 
 Midway between this Edinburgh set and those 
 who were at first contemptuously called the " Cock- 
 neys " stands De Quincey ; but it suits my pre- 
 sent purpose to group him with Lamb, Hunt, and 
 Hazlitt. They form a very notable quartette ; for 
 Hazlitt's place is preeminent among English critics ; 
 Lamb's mastery of the essay was and is unique ; 
 Hunt was jpar excellence the journalist, a lord of 
 the special article, one who could be interesting if 
 not authoritative upon compulsion of the hour and 
 the printer's devil ; while De Quincey may fairly be 
 called the great rhetorician of the former half of 
 his century. 
 
 Hazlitt was of Unitarian antecedents and marked 
 by the more imlovely Unitarian characteristics. 
 There can be no question of the debt under which 
 this particular sect has laid the world of thought 
 in general and the world of literature in particular. 
 But it has been singularly fruitful in spiritual 
 Ishmaelites. Its ' liberalism,' instead of creating an 
 atmosphere in which the positive worth of all hon- 
 est belief is clear to see and easy to assimilate, 
 has too often degenerated into a sort of Pharisaic 
 distemper with all such men and things as will not 
 pronounce its particular shibboleths of negation. 
 
THE EDINBURGH AND THE QUARTERLY 151 
 
 As a clever and good-natured critic has recently- 
 put it : — 
 
 " It is quite proper for one to hope that he is 
 liberal, — we ought all to hope it, — while in our 
 more sanguine moments we might even confide 
 to an intimate friend or two that we believe we 
 were liberal, but none of us have any more right 
 to go around publicly proclaiming that we are lib- 
 eral than we have to go around saying, ' I am a 
 gentleman,' or ^ I am good-looking.' This decision 
 must in the nature of things rest wholly with our 
 neigrhbours." ^ 
 
 There was, however, in Hazlitt a measure of 
 truly discerning liberality. He has put upon record 
 his fascination by Coleridge and the influence 
 which that most fructifying thinker exerted upon 
 his mind. Whether he derived his liberality from 
 Coleridge or not, it reflected much that was best 
 in Coleridsfe's attitude towards men and books — 
 the attitude of the 'understanding heart.' In a 
 day when criticism, having revolted from the classic 
 norms of the eighteenth century, had faUen a prey 
 to individual whim and party passion as represented 
 by the critical free lances of the " Edinburgh "and 
 "Quarterly" reviews, Hazlitt did much to organize 
 a saner and more generous method. He understood 
 the true office of a critic to be that of interpreta- 
 tion, and he brought a singularly discerning mind 
 and trenchant style to its fulfilment. So far forth 
 
 ^ J. S. Zelie, in an essay upon Our Denominational Paradoxes. 
 
152 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 he was generous in purpose and in act. But there 
 remained a mordant, atrabilious temper which led 
 him to think and boast of himself as a radical. As 
 has been intimated, the radical is a very necessary 
 member of society. His uses are manifold until he 
 becomes enamoured of his own radicalism; when 
 his self-conceit and general viciousness prove just 
 as disagreeable and dangerous to society as any 
 other manifestation of conceit and folly. 
 
 The contrast in this respect between Hazlitt and 
 Leigh Hunt is interesting and instructive. Hunt 
 was a radical whose trumpet of heresy gave forth 
 no uncertain sound. He held views upon the ques- 
 tions of marriage and the relation of the sexes that 
 seemed to align him with Godwin and Shelley. Yet 
 he proved himself to be an affectionate and devoted 
 husband and father ; not very wise or efficient, to 
 be sure, in his headship of the family, but free from 
 all taint of conjugal unfaithfulness. He was more- 
 over an incidental preacher of Universalism. No 
 one can read his " Autobiography " — and all lovers 
 of literature ought to read it — without a half- 
 amused sense of his assurance upon the final des- 
 tiny of all the race. There were to be no exceptions. 
 By hook or by crook, by grace or by violence, Leigh 
 Hunt would have all men to be saved. He had all 
 the weakness as well as the strength of that rather 
 futile good-nature which rushes blindly to this con- 
 clusion. His creditors clamoured for their just dues, 
 the bailiff struggled with the wolf for a place at 
 
THE EDINBURGH AND THE QUARTERLY 153 
 
 his door, his household gods were habitually in 
 slovenly disarray, — how slovenly, Carlyle has told 
 us in a passage as cruel as it is unforgettable, — 
 his boys were growing up to be bad copies of their 
 father's less lovely aspect ; while with serene be- 
 nevolence and unflagging industry Leigh Hunt 
 toiled on to old age, a book or a pen ever in his 
 hand, cheerful, improvident, loveable to the last. 
 No man in the literary history of his century bet- 
 ter illustrated that grace which suffereth long and 
 is kind. He wielded a sharp pen, but never an 
 ill-natured one. The keenest criticism to which he 
 was subjected, and even the reputed caricature as 
 Harold Skimpole by his friend Dickens, could not 
 sour his temper or long depress his spirits.^ His 
 " Autobiography " is redolent of peace and good- 
 will. He understood Shelley ; he was so loyal to 
 the memory of Keats as to cry " Peccavi" and burn 
 his faggot pubHcly, when he discovered that Keats 
 thought him remiss as a champion, although his 
 offence seems to have been a sin of omission dis- 
 cernible by no eye less keen than that of the in- 
 valid poet's own captiousness ; and he was charitably 
 just to the strange mixture of iron and clay in the 
 figure of Byron. Without Hazhtt's power to see 
 into the deepest things of literature, he was vastly 
 
 ' In view of Dickens's express disclaimer, it would seem unjust to 
 charge him with this lapse of a by no means faultless taste. There 
 is a distinction, and a broad one, between deliberate caricature and 
 the ascription to an imaginary character of certain traits that may 
 have been suggested by a real one. 
 
154 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 more humane and gracious in his dealings with the 
 makers of literature ; and it is a matter of thanks- 
 giving that.a journalist of such notable powers and 
 such radical convictions should have maintained 
 upon the whole an attitude of such consistent rev- 
 erence toward all things pure, lovely, and of good 
 report. 
 
 This same spirit of deep reverence for the essence 
 as contrasted with the temporary forms and phrases 
 of religion characterized Hunt's elder and greater 
 friend, Charles Lamb. He is perhaps the best-loved 
 figure in all English letters ; and when we come to 
 put the question why, we are driven for answer to 
 the dutif ulness, self-sacrifice, and unfailing affection 
 which graced the life, as truly as to the unique 
 genius for the intimate essay and epistle which made 
 the man of letters. The daily walk and conversation 
 was in one aspect of it unlovely enough. There is 
 nothing especially winsome about the India House 
 drudgery, honourable as it was ; and there is much 
 that is positively painful in the growing thirst for 
 and dependence upon gin and brandy. Let us keep 
 the sordid words ; they comport best with the seamy 
 side of the man's life. How seamy it sometimes 
 looked may be inferred again, as in Leigh Hunt's 
 case, from the pitiless revelations of Carlyle, though 
 it must be remembered that in such matters Carlyle 
 had the beak and claws of a harpy. Yet, in spite 
 of all. Lamb's place remains secure, the " Letters " 
 not less than the " Essays " buttressing it with every 
 
THE EDINBURGH AND THE QUARTERLY 155 
 
 semblance and promise of perpetuity. The secret 
 of it has been discerned by many but best set forth, 
 perhaps, by Mr. Birrell. Readers of his " Obiter 
 Dicta " — may their tribe increase ! — will remember 
 the essay upon " Truth-hunting," and the passage 
 which its author quotes from " Elia " as illustrating 
 the attitude which Mary Lamb took toward the 
 revolutionary opinions of her brother's friends. 
 
 " It has been the lot of my cousin, of tener, per- 
 haps, than I could have wished, to have had for 
 her associates and mine free-thinkers, leaders and 
 disciples of novel philosophies and systems, but she 
 neither wrangles with nor accepts their opinions." 
 
 Then follows the memorable comparison with 
 Coleridge sitting upon Highgate Hill, and asking, 
 " What is truth ? " while Lamb, abiding in his al- 
 ways anxious and sometimes agonized home, con- 
 tents himself with the humbler query, "What are 
 trumps?" It is put with wondrous cleverness, 
 though with somewhat scant justice — at least one 
 hopes so — to Coleridge. Be that as it may, how- 
 ever. Lamb will always remain an appeahng and 
 inspiring figure to such as realize the measure of 
 his devotion to a father who was half imbecile and 
 a sister who periodically became wholly insane. No 
 English writer has better claim upon our attention 
 when he exhorts us " to cultivate the filial feelings " ; 
 and through all his work there runs an undercur- 
 rent of influence toward the cherishing of the great 
 
166 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Christian graces. He rarely preaches; but he is 
 always taking them for granted as the only reli- 
 able props and supports of life ; they make it bear- 
 able when otherwise its perplexities and burdens 
 would be too great for us. Thus Lamb's humour is 
 at once robbed of all cynical bitterness and takes 
 on a sort of haunting, wistful quality, as though he 
 saw at once the incongruity and possibility of life, 
 and was inspired by a confidence that experience 
 here or elsewhere would somehow suffice to make 
 the ideal plan complete. 
 
 De Quincey occupies a position midway between 
 the Edinburgh and the Cockney groups. His " Con- 
 fessions of an Opium-Eater " appeared in the " Lon- 
 don Magazine " ; but the far larger portion of his 
 most characteristic and significant work was pro- 
 duced and published in Edinburgh. Of the group 
 of essayists whom I have individually characterized, 
 he is the only one who set himself definitely to the 
 defence of current Christianity. He had a certain 
 zeal for religion which led him to wrestle with 
 Hume's time-worn and hoary argument against 
 miracles, — not very successfully, be it said, owing 
 to the plain fact that Hume's argument has a cer- 
 tain validity against a very false but almost equally 
 prevalent notion of what a miracle may be. De 
 Quincey hated Frenchmen, too, which may have 
 commended him to the straiter sects of the godly 
 as a fit defender of the faith. He lived and wrote 
 in the heyday of suspicion of France and all her 
 
THE EDINBURGH AND THE QUARTERLY 157 
 
 works ; when she had ceased to be an armed antag- 
 onist whom England was bound to respect, and had 
 relapsed into the position of a remembered anxiety 
 — the cause of former stress and sorrow. The whole 
 system of her religion, philosophy, politics, and 
 morals — so far as she was supposed to have mor- 
 als — was under the ban. " Statesmen saw its ab- 
 surdity, holy men were shocked by its impiety, 
 mercantile men felt its effects upon the five per 
 cents." ^ Yet, in spite of De Quincey's adventure as 
 a defender of the faith, he has perhaps less signifi- 
 cance for our immediate purpose than his contem- 
 poraries. More than almost any other man in our 
 literature, with the possible exception of Sir Thomas 
 Browne, his eminence and claim upon our memories 
 are due to his mastery of rhetoric. Ruskin vied with 
 him, to be sure, but Ruskin made other claims upon 
 his readers than those of a rhetorician, and it may 
 be questioned whether Ruskin were in any such 
 sense the master — as distinguished from the ser- 
 vant — of the art of expression as De Quincey . Of 
 course the latter is at times merely flamboyant ; but 
 when he is at his best there is a power in his gor- 
 geous phrasing which the veriest ascetic in literary 
 taste and habit must acknowledge. Indeed, for my- 
 self, I am quite capable of a severely critical atti- 
 
 * I trust that the slight anachronism involved in this paraphrase 
 of Bagehot's words — for the quotation is not quite exact — may 
 be forgiven me. He was speaking of a somewhat earlier day ; but 
 the British habit described is not yet outgrown. 
 
158 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 tude toward him and all other rhetoricians after a 
 decent period of separation and neglect ; but if by 
 chance the "Confessions*' open at some of the 
 greater visions, or an excerpt from " Our Ladies of 
 Sorrow" beguile me in turning the pages of a 
 cyclopedia, his foot is on my neck — I am his man 
 again. 
 
 In one or two respects, however, De Quincey ad- 
 mirably illustrates the indebtedness of literature to 
 the language and the deeper emotions of religion. 
 As in the case of Sir Thomas Browne and Ruskin, 
 he has constant recourse to the Bible for the fram- 
 ing of his most splendid periods. Take for instance 
 the well-known passage from the "Philosophy of 
 Roman History," commenting upon Gibbon's de- 
 scription of the scope of a Caesar's sway; from 
 which he turns to the lot of the later emperors 
 themselves. 
 
 " The imagination of man can frame nothing so 
 awful — the experience of man has witnessed no- 
 thing so awful — as the situation and tenure of the 
 Western Caesar. The danger which threatened him 
 was like the pestilence which walketh in darkness, 
 but which also walketh in noon-day. Morning and 
 evening, summer and winter, brought no change 
 or shadow of turning to this particular evil. In 
 that respect it enjoyed the immunities of God — it 
 was the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. After 
 three centuries it had lost nothing of its virulence ; 
 it was growing worse continually : the heart of man 
 ached under the evil and the necessity of the evil. 
 
THE EDINBURGH AND THE QUARTERLY 159 
 
 Can any man measure the sickening fear which 
 must have possessed the hearts of the ladies and 
 the children composing the imperial family? To 
 them the mere terror, entailed like an inheritance 
 of leprosy upon their family above all others, must 
 have made it a woe like one of the evils of the 
 Revelation, — such in its infliction, such in its in- 
 evitability." ' 
 
 Or turn to the " Suspiria de Prof undis," and re- 
 read the passage describing Our Ladies of Sorrow. 
 It is too long for quotation, though its earlier sec- 
 tions, dealing with Madonna, Our Lady of Tears, 
 and Our Lady of Sighs would reenforce the effect 
 of the quotation just made, so alive are they with 
 the language and imagery of Scripture. The clos- 
 ing paragraph, however, deals with a yet more ur- 
 gent application of religious impulse to the power 
 and purpose of letters. 
 
 "But the third sister, who is also the young- 
 est — ! Hush ! whisper whilst we talk of her ! Her 
 Kingdom is not large or else no flesh should live; 
 but within that kingdom all power is hers. Her 
 head, turreted like that of Cybele, rises almost be- 
 yond the reach of sight. She droops not; and her 
 eyes, rising so high, might be hidden by distance. 
 But, being what they are, they cannot be hidden ; 
 through the treble veil of crape which she wears, 
 the fierce light of a blazing misery, that rests not 
 for matins or for vespers, for noon of day or noon 
 of night, for ebbing or for flowing tide, may be 
 
 » De Quincey's Works, Riverside Edition, vol. vii, p. 333. 
 
160 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 read from the very ground. She is the defier of 
 God. She also is the mother of lunacies, and the 
 suggestress of suicides. Deep lie the roots of her 
 power; but narrow is the nation that she rules. 
 For she can approach only those in whom a pro- 
 found nature has been upheaved by central convul- 
 sions; in whom the heart trembles and the brain 
 rocks under conspiracies of tempest from without 
 and tempest from within. Madonna moves with un- 
 certain steps, fast or slow, but still with tragic 
 grace. Our Lady of Sighs creeps timidly and 
 stealthily. But this youngest sister moves with in- 
 calculable motions, bounding, and with a tiger's 
 leaps. She carries no key ; for though coming rarely 
 amongst men, she storms all doors at which she is 
 permitted to enter at all. And her name is Mater 
 Tenebrarum — Our Lady of Darkness."* 
 
 We shall have occasion to recur to this weird 
 Spirit of Unbelief in commenting upon some of the 
 most characteristic utterances of the latter half of 
 the century. De Quincey limned her features with 
 strange foresight, as though in the light of her eyes 
 he had caught a prophetic glimpse of Thomson's 
 "City of Dreadful Night," Tennyson's "Despair," 
 and John Davidson's " Ballad in Blank Verse," — 
 each in its way the epic of such as find themselves 
 without hope and without God in the world. He 
 witnesses anew to the interdependence of literature 
 and religion, and the fact that for the purposes of 
 the former " Gods are needed, if only to be defied." 
 
 » De Quincey's Works^ Riverside Edition, vol. i, pp. 244-245. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 CLAPHAM AND OXFORD 
 
 "You seem a very temperate people here," said 
 Mr. Birrell to a Cornisliman, when on a walking 
 tour in that delectable duchy ; " how did it happen ?" 
 The miner raised his hat reverently as he made 
 answer, " There came a man amongst us once, and 
 his name was John Wesley." ^ The smoke of secta- 
 rian battle is still too thick for men to see quite 
 clearly how much that is most substantial, whole- 
 some, and therefore permanently influential in her 
 life, England owes to the Wesleys and the revival 
 of religion which they did so much to promote. 
 The profit of their work is somewhat more freely 
 acknowledged in America than in England, though 
 even there Methodism is too often known by its 
 accidents rather than its essence. Mr. Kipling's 
 verses upon a great national celebration are of no 
 less telling application to periods of religious 
 awakening : — 
 
 The tumult and the shouting dies — 
 The captains and the kings depart ; 
 Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice, 
 An humble and a contrite heart. 
 
 * Res Judicatce, " Cardinal Newman." 
 
162 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 It is a little difficult for the plain man to see why 
 tumult and shouting should be counted so essential 
 to political and patriotic rejoicing that their absence 
 throws doubt upon its sincerity, while at the same 
 time their presence in the case of widespread and 
 deeply stirred religious feeling is reckoned equally 
 suspicious. In point of fact they represent but the 
 expression of a passing mood in either case — a 
 mood which moreover is often the creature of some- 
 thing close akin to the mob-spirit, and marked by 
 its epidemic character and liability to quick revul- 
 sion. The fire and the earthquake having passed, 
 the attentiveness with which the still, small voice 
 of genuine revelation is heard and heeded deter- 
 mines the value of the whole experience. That is 
 measured in terms of humility, contrition, and ser- 
 vice. 
 
 In attempting to reckon up the account in the 
 case of Wesley, the Anglican is still prone to be 
 supercilious and the Methodist bumptious. The 
 mismanagement of the whole matter by those in 
 ecclesiastical authority in Wesley's day was as ex- 
 pensive to the Church of England as the Revocation 
 of the Edict of Nantes proved to France. Both re- 
 sulted in the practical banishment, in one case from 
 the Church and in the other from the nation, of 
 great numbers in whom the hope of the future 
 dwelt. Institutions, hke trees, receive their most 
 substantial sustenance from beneath ; they cannot 
 afford to ignore or oppose these agitations in the 
 
CLAPHAM AND OXFORD 163 
 
 earth about their roots, which, while they often 
 disturb the accustomed order and form of mere cir- 
 cumstance, and sometimes threaten the rootlets of 
 the upper soil, always give more than they take by 
 bringing air, light, and moisture to the roots them- 
 selves. 
 
 There is of course a sense in which the Church 
 of England is the mother of Methodism. The Wes- 
 leys belonged to her by birth, training, conviction, 
 and affection. They were loath to quit her ministry : 
 but they had their vocation ; the day's work must 
 needs be done ; and when church doors were closed 
 they had necessary recourse to fields and commons. 
 That which is barred from the door, however, some- 
 times makes its entrance through the window, and 
 Methodism did its work upon the Church. The zeal 
 of Anglican writers to prove that the Evangelical 
 movement was not of Methodist or Wesleyan origin 
 is a little hard to understand. The Wesley s and 
 Whitefield were men of whose work any church 
 and any university might well be covetous ; but for 
 my present purpose I am content to allow the dis- 
 claimer. The fact seems to be that the Wesleyan 
 influence upon life and thought in the Anglican 
 communion was similar to that which an electrical 
 current induces in an adjacent coil. The induced 
 current is not an integral part of the original move- 
 ment ; but none the less the latter is accountable 
 for it. So, while the Evangelicals may not look to 
 the great Itinerants as to their spiritual fathers, 
 
164 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 still, the new life which began to appear in the 
 establishment toward the close of the eighteenth 
 century was a phase of the same awakening. In so 
 far as this awakening was theological, the Evan- 
 gelicals within the English Church generally sided 
 with the Calvinism of Whitefield and Toplady as 
 opposed to the Arminianism of the Wesleys. So 
 far forth the Evangelicals may be said to have car- 
 ried on the great Puritan tradition ; so far forth, 
 too, they may seem to represent the sterner and 
 less lovely aspects of the revival. 
 
 Certain reservations must, however, be made at 
 this point. With singular unanimity it seems to 
 have been admitted that the Puritans were not only 
 deficient in a sense of humour, but lacked it alto- 
 gether. Deficient they may have been in some de- 
 gree ; though I incline to believe the deficiency to 
 have been apparent rather than real. That they were 
 without the sense of humour altogether is not for a 
 moment to be admitted by any one who looks beneath 
 the surface of their life or studies the characteristics 
 of their descendants. It is entirely true that the 
 Puritans of the seventeenth century and the Evan- 
 gelicals of the nineteenth lived in a world of tre- 
 mendous realities upon which their thoughts were 
 trained to dwell, and about which they spoke and 
 wrote. All their public utterances were pitched to 
 this key. Life was too great a business to afford 
 much scope for levity. The eye of the Great Task- 
 master, the Atonement through which appeared 
 
CLAPHAM AND OXFORD 165 
 
 the conflict of God's love and justice, the profound 
 moral issues of daily life, and the sure expectation 
 of a final Assize whereat these issues were to be for- 
 ever determined to each soul, — these were among 
 the realities of Puritan life. No wonder that, being 
 what they were, they became its transcendent reali- 
 ties. No wonder, either, that the solemnity which 
 necessarily attached to their contemplation gave a 
 generally sober and occasionally sombre hue to the 
 life and words of these men as the world saw them. 
 This attention to the detail of walk and conversa- 
 tion was doubtless over-scrupulous sometimes, and 
 it afforded a cover for incidental hypocrisy. The 
 misfortune is that the occasional formalist and yet 
 more occasional hypocrite should have been accepted 
 by too many careless writers as typical. In point of 
 fact the self-control which was the Puritan's habit 
 gave him a generally clear eye ; the contemplation 
 of high themes helped him toward vigour of mind ; 
 and the belief in great mysteries stirred his imagi- 
 nation. From such a man life could not hide her 
 little incono^ruities and her amusing: contrasts. To 
 be sure, there were great incongruities, too, and 
 contrasts that were terrible. These overshadowing 
 matters must needs have due reverence paid them; 
 but in the shadows there were rifts of sunlight 
 where children might play and friends laugh to- 
 gether. 
 
 Colonel Hutchinson, for instance, was a Puritan, 
 but no morose stifler of mirth. An ancestor of the 
 
166 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 present writer came to New England in 1635, a 
 soldier of nineteen. His companion-in-arms and 
 lifelong friend was a young engineer officer who 
 had served his apprenticeship in the Low Countries. 
 Together they were shut up in a little seaboard fort 
 and close beleaguered by the savages. Both were 
 godly men after the Puritan fashion. Both lived to 
 old age, and in later years, when settled upon their 
 separate grants of land, occasionally corresponded. 
 Fragments of this correspondence still survive ; and 
 it is interesting to notice that after a score or two 
 of years one of the things of which they remind 
 each other is the heartiness of their old-time laugh- 
 ter in the very mid- winter of distress, when " Captain 
 Hunger" had already effected an entrance into 
 their entrenchments and the savages were hard upon 
 his heels. Nor can any one familiarize himself with 
 the traditions of Puritan communities without ob- 
 taining abundant evidence of the clear vision, the 
 alert imagination, and the gift of succinct and 
 shrewd expression which characterized their peo- 
 ple. In the older New England villages it is no un- 
 common thing to find sayings of certain families 
 handed down from generation to generation,^ which 
 testify by their keenness of observation, their whim- 
 
 ^ One of these sayings of a good-naturedly cynical old maid re- 
 lates to the venders of kitchenware with whom she sometimes dealt 
 and against whom she as often took up her parable. " She had never 
 bought anything of a tin-peddler," she was wont to declare, " that 
 failed to leak, but once — and that was a strainer." A small joke 
 to be sure, but significant of a humourous habit. 
 
CLAPHAM AND OXFORD 167 
 
 sical exaggeration, and their gently sub-acid qual- 
 ity, to the abounding humour of the elder days. 
 
 A similar caveat needs to be entered against the 
 general ascription of gloom and inhumanity to the 
 Evangelical character as it appeared in England 
 during the first three decades of last century. The 
 Evangelicals were, to be sure, serious people ; but 
 a modicum of seriousness whets the appetite for 
 many of life's most wholesome pleasures, precisely 
 as temperance and a taste for plain food garnish 
 the dinner-table with a zest which the epicure may 
 seek in vain. It is true that the forms of this seri- 
 ousness were easy to imitate ; and that a good deal 
 of Philistinism as well as some downright hypocrisy 
 was enrolled under the Evangelical banner ; but it 
 is none the less a pity that the literary treatment 
 of the Evangehcals should so often have been by 
 way of caricature. The professional 'literary per- 
 son' seems especially prone to illiberality in matters 
 of religion. Desirous of cultivating lightness of 
 touch, and very conscious of the general appetite 
 for ridicule, the hypocrite and the religious poseur 
 play no small part upon his page. So enamoured of 
 them does he sometimes become as to forget that 
 men do not counterfeit bad money. The hypocrite 
 and formalist of fiction is often but the distorted 
 reflection in an imperfect mirror of some honour- 
 able and constructive life. 
 
 This digression is due to the fact that the Evan- 
 gelicals seem to the present writer to have been 
 
168 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 seriously wounded in the house of their friends. 
 Their contribution, either direct or indirect, to Eng- 
 glish literature is very considerable, and they de- 
 serve better treatment at its hands. It has been 
 contended by one eminently competent to maintain 
 his point, that a chief distinction between Newman 
 and Wesley was the lack of charm in the case of 
 the latter as contrasted with the confessed fascina- 
 tion of the former.^ The contention may be admit- 
 ted ; but we must beware about wholesale admissions 
 of the sort when we come to an estimate of the later 
 Evangelicals. The group about Clapham Common, 
 which Sydney Smith nicknamed the " Clapham 
 Sect," is a case in point. I shall use the term broadly, 
 as representative rather than definitive, since it 
 may fairly include men like Simeon and Milner of 
 Cambridge and possibly even a Unitarian, like 
 Clarkson of anti-slavery fame. 
 
 When a man is accused of diametrically opposite 
 vices, there is considerable ground for hope that his 
 life may have been guided by sweet reasonableness. 
 The Evangelicals of the Clapham type have been 
 thus accused of a severity and sternness which 
 seemed to put the goal of true religion at the end 
 of a long and forbidding vista of asceticism ; they 
 have also been regarded as adepts in the gentle art 
 of reconciling a stern and rugged creed with a very 
 considerable indulgence in the good things of this 
 world. The villas about Clapham Common were un- 
 
 * Res Judicatce, ^ Cardinal Newman." 
 
CLAPHAM AND OXFORD 169 
 
 questionably the scenes of many serious conferences, 
 much debate upon high and awful themes, and oc- 
 casional prayer meetings. They also had their mod- 
 est interludes of cakes and ale. Yet few of those 
 who have undertaken to portray them seem able to 
 see more than one side of the whole experience — 
 with the single great exception of Sir James Stephen. 
 I have elsewhere ventured upon an estimate of 
 the high place in English letters belonging to the 
 " Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography."^ Those who 
 would make a friend of one so eminently friendly as 
 Sir James Stephen always shewed himself when he 
 took up the reviewer's pen must seek him there ; 
 and those who would learn what manner of men the 
 leading Evangelicals of the early century were, and 
 gain some inkling of their influence upon English 
 life and letters, will give especial heed to the three 
 essays upon " The Evangelical Succession," " Wil- 
 liam Wilberforce," and " The Clapham Sect." 
 
 * See The Dynamic of Christianity^ p. 186. Since that page was 
 written ray attention has been called to Sir Leslie Stephen's refer- 
 ence to these essays in the Life of his brother, Sir James FitzJames 
 Stephen. 
 
 " I will not," he says, " express any critical judgement of their 
 qualities ; but this I will say : putting aside Macaulay's Essays, 
 which possess merits of an entirely different order, I do not think 
 that any of the collected essays re-published from the Edinburgh 
 Review indicate a natural gift for style equal to my father^s. Judg- 
 ing from these, which are merely the overflowing of a mind em- 
 ployed upon other most absorbing duties, I think that my father, 
 had he devoted his talents to literature, would have gained a far 
 higher place than has been reached by any of his family." — Life of 
 Sir James FitzJames Stephen^ p. 55. 
 
170 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Coteries are by their nature self-centred ; and 
 there can be little question that, in form at least, 
 the frequenters of Henry Thornton's oval drawing- 
 room by Clapham Common — a room designed by 
 William Pitt — deserved the name and reputation 
 of a sect. But they were saved from the sectarian 
 fate of meagreness of soul by the character and the 
 ambitions of the sectaries. It is difficult for the 
 writer of to-day to attempt a characterization of 
 these men without having recourse to Sir James 
 Stephen's words, so graphic are they and grouped 
 in such sonorous periods. 
 
 John Thornton, a rich and benevolent London 
 merchant, is known to all lovers of Cowper as a 
 consistent friend of the poet, and one who dis- 
 tributed considerable sums in charity through his 
 hands and those of his neighbour, John Newton. 
 Thornton's son, Henry, inherited his benevolence, 
 his wealth, and his attachment to Evangelical princi- 
 ples. He entered Parliament and represented there 
 not only his immediate constituents, but that best 
 type of independent legislator who takes conscience 
 as well as party into account and insists that con- 
 science shall speak the determining word. However 
 easily his Hps may have framed the Evangelical 
 watchwords, his life forbade any candid critic from 
 denying that they were rich in content. Memoranda 
 discovered after his death shewed that during his 
 earlier life not less than six-sevenths of his income 
 had been given in benevolence. Later on, when 
 
CLAPHAM AND OXFORD 171 
 
 increasing family cares and expenses forced him to 
 reduce this portion to one-third, he yet seems never 
 to have given in charity less than two thousand 
 pounds a year. Twice at least he made large de- 
 mands, not upon income only but upon capital as 
 well, in order that he might satisfy creditors of 
 embarrassed firms who could have no legal claim 
 upon him, but who might have been influenced, he 
 thought, to trust their debtors by the countenance 
 which he or his partners had given them. He made 
 it a rule not to increase his estate but to distribute 
 its surplus yearly. How wisely this was done, in the 
 view of modern scientific charity, I do not know; 
 but the consistent generosity of his heart and life 
 is beyond doubt. " As a legislator," says Sir James 
 Stephen, " he had condemned the unequal pressure 
 of the direct taxes on the rich and the poor ; but 
 instead of solacing his defeat with the narcotic of 
 virtuous indignation combined with discreet parsi- 
 mony, he silently raised his own contribution to 
 the level of his speech." 
 
 Intimately associated with Thornton in residence, 
 humanitarian endeavour, and religious sympathy, 
 was William Wilberf orce. No estimate of the Evan- 
 gelicals of Clapham can be genuinely honest which 
 does not take into account the character and work 
 of this extraordinary man. Whatever opinion may 
 be had of his learning, his eloquence, or the disin- 
 terestedness of his philanthropy, the fact of his 
 personal charm seems beyond cavil. It is as well 
 
172 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 established as that of Cardinal Newman himself; 
 and while he has left us nothing for a moment 
 comparable to Newman's work in letters whereby 
 to judge him at first hand, the verdict of those who 
 came into social touch with him, including so com- 
 petent a critic as Madame de Stael, is practically 
 unanimous. Yet he was not without fame as an 
 author ; for his " Practical View of the Prevailing 
 Keligious System of Professed Christians in the 
 Higher and Middle Classes of this Country con- 
 trasted with real Christianity," notwithstanding its 
 portentous title, passed through some fifty editions 
 in as many years, and exerted, we are compelled to 
 believe, a considerable influence upon its multi- 
 tudes of readers. Not least among its claims upon 
 our gratitude is the comfort which, in his last 
 hours, it brought to Edmiind Burke.^ 
 
 Nor was the charity of this good man narrowed 
 by considerations of personal creed or pet philan- 
 thropy. He was a zealous Evangelical Protestant, 
 converted by an experience which must have satisfied 
 the straitest of his sect ; and there is little reason to 
 suppose that he rejected the orthodox Evangelical 
 interpretation of the Scarlet Woman. This could 
 not blind him, however, to the burdens which op- 
 pressed his Catholic countrymen ; nor did he make 
 his lifelong championship of the African and pre- 
 occupation by it a pretext for silence when silence 
 would have seemed politic. 
 
 ^ Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography, vol. ii, pp. 252-253. 
 
CLAPHAM AND OXFORD 173 
 
 " He was a zealous advocate of the claims of the 
 Roman Catholics, not only in 1797, when men's 
 hearts were failing them for fear, and in 1805 and 
 1808, when even his own gallant spirit partook of 
 the general consternation, but in 1813 and 1821, 
 when the baser motives for conciliating that part 
 of our fellow-countrymen had ceased to operate. For 
 at each successive period he was guided by the same 
 immutable conviction that Christian truth must be 
 independent of any such human policy as that which 
 fettered the Roman Catholics, and was far too high 
 and holy a thing to be defended by an offensive 
 and irritating exclusion of its opponents from the 
 exercise of any political franchise." ^ 
 
 When the alleg^ed narrowness of the Evano^elicals 
 is af&rmed, and legitimate fun is made of Granville 
 Sharpens disquisition upon the Little Horn in the 
 prophecy of Daniel, it is for the candid student to 
 recall Wilberforce's consistent generosity of creed 
 and life, Granville Sharpens loyal comradeship in 
 service with a Unitarian like Clarkson, and Thomas 
 Gisborne's delight in country life, and the zeal for 
 ' natural history ' with which he matched his devo- 
 tion to his parish and his interest in the multifarious 
 Clapham philanthropies. 
 
 I cannot stop to deal in any detail with Isaac Mil- 
 ner, the robust president of Queen's College, Cam- 
 bridge, upon whom as a conversationalist something 
 of Johnson's mantle seems to have fallen. He was 
 a scholar of repute, a mathematician of contempo- 
 
 ^ Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography, vol. ii, p. 267. 
 
174 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 rary eminence, and an Evangelical of deep convic- 
 tions, though of somewhat humourous and lethargic 
 habit. Nor can I do more than mention in this con- 
 nection Zachary Macaulay and the Trevelyans, John 
 Shore (Lord Teignmouth), Charles Simeon, who with 
 Milner led the Evangelicals at Cambridge, James 
 Stephen, father to Sir James Stephen of the Colonial 
 Office and the " Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography," 
 Henry Martyn, and the Venns. A volume might 
 well be written upon the last-named family — a fam- 
 ily of clergymen since Elizabethan days, of sturdy 
 faith and steady zeal, fearless, practical, shrewd, 
 godly men/ The Henry Venn of Huddersfield was 
 a contemporary of Wesley, a mighty cricketer in his 
 youth, and the author of the " Complete Duty of 
 Man," which is to be reckoned as one of the origi- 
 nal documents of English social and religious history, 
 so profound was its influence upon three generations 
 of English clergymen. John, his son, was Rector of 
 Clapham, the immediate spiritual guide of the Sect, 
 and one of the founders of the Church Missionary 
 Society. His son, another Henry, maintained the 
 family traditions, and has been commemorated by 
 no less competent a judge than Sir Leslie Stephen 
 for his industry, piety, cheerfulness, shrewdness, and 
 abounding humour, — a matter all the more ger- 
 mane to our present inquiry because Sir LesHe takes 
 
 * I understand that such a volume has been published by a de- 
 scendant of the house within a year or two ; but mj acquaintance 
 with it is only by way of a review. , 
 
CLAPHAM AND OXFORD 175 
 
 pains to note that this humour was resolutely kept 
 out of his writing, as though putting pen to paper 
 were too solemn a business to allow of it/ 
 
 It is at this juncture that an impatient reader 
 might well ask what these good men have to do 
 with English literature. Among them all there is 
 no name of first-rate importance to letters. The 
 answer must be that the first generation of the 
 Clapham Evangelicals had a deal to do with Eng- 
 lish thought, and that whatever profoundly influ- 
 ences the thought of a people is bound to tell in a 
 generation or two upon letters. Sir James Stephen 
 said of Charles Simeon that " he waged inexorable 
 war with the slumbers and the slumberers of his 
 age"; and the alertness of his crowded Cambridge 
 congregation which hung upon words so earnest 
 and heart-searching that no grotesqueness of the 
 preacher's form or manner could belittle them, 
 admirably illustrates the statement. Indeed it is 
 well-nigh as applicable to the Sect in general as to 
 Simeon in particular. The religion and the benevo- 
 lence of these men refused to rest in generalities. 
 They insisted upon coming to particulars, some- 
 times to such minute particulars as to seem ped- 
 dling and irreverent to men of keener aesthetic 
 sense. But the promoters of the anti-slavery agita- 
 tion, the Church Missionary Society, the British 
 and Foreign Bible Society, and the inaugurators of 
 that conscientious concern for the welfare of others 
 ^ Life of Sir James FitzJames Stephen^ pp. 33-41. 
 
176 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 which mitigated the severity of the criminal code, 
 passed the Factory Acts, and organized the multi- 
 farious charities for which in the next generation 
 Lord Shaftesbury stood sponsor, could afford some 
 infelicities of form and manner. Their substance 
 was genuine and has stood the test of time. 
 
 Their immediate words, as committed to paper by 
 their own hands, have little claim to literary perma- 
 nence. Yet even these are no negligible factor in 
 English and American history. The works of Sim- 
 eon consist mainly of sermons, sometimes but the 
 ghastly skeletons of sermons, and such books as are 
 rarely seen and never read outside of clerical libra- 
 ries. But for his disciples the breath of the Spirit 
 caused these bones to live and made a wonderfully 
 effective army of them. Their message spoke again 
 in thousands of English and American pulpits and 
 homes. A corresponding influence was exerted by 
 the " Church History " of Joseph Milner, as revised 
 and carried on by his brother Isaac, whom a pupil 
 once characterized as a " sort of Ajax- Andromache, 
 combining such might with such sensibility as to 
 make him at once admirable, loveable, and in- 
 efficient." It is in no sense a critical work ; yet it 
 possessed qualities which gave it a deserved pop- 
 ularity, portions of it were translated into Ger- 
 man and widely read upon the Continent,* while 
 it is scarcely too much to say that during the first 
 half of last century it was the generally accepted 
 * See Life of Dean Milnerf by his niece, pp. 334, 335. 
 
CLAPHAM AND OXFORD 177 
 
 authority o£ English-speaking Protestants upon the 
 Reformation. The popularity and influence of Wil- 
 berforce's " Practical View " has already been noted, 
 and a hasty reference made to Granville Sharpens 
 love of expounding apocalyptic Scriptures. These 
 expositions are among the curiosities of literature, 
 and one would give much for a detailed and authen- 
 tic account of the interview in which that good man 
 and valiant paladin undertook to convince Charles 
 James Fox that Napoleon's career was already fore- 
 told in the Little Horn of the Book of Daniel. No 
 one, however, can better afford a smile at his ec- 
 centricities than this apostle of freedom, in whom, 
 as in Henry Marty n, the age of chivalry was rein- 
 carnate. His genuine contributions to history and 
 literature are the pamphlets which he made the 
 means of a courageous championship of the cause 
 of America during Lord North's administration, the 
 conversion of Lord Mansfield to an interpretation 
 of English law which made slavery impossible at 
 home, and the persevering advocacy of the aboli- 
 tion of the trade abroad. 
 
 A wider and somewhat different influence upon 
 letters was exerted by Lord Teignmouth and Henry 
 Martyn. John Shore, Lord Teignmouth, had spent 
 a laborious life in the service of the East India 
 Company, and had advanced by degrees from the 
 humble position of "writer" to the governor-gen- 
 eralship, when the newly organized British and 
 Foreign Bible Society called him to a place which 
 
178 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 was destined to assure him a measure of fame de- 
 nied to the ruler of India. As president, he brought 
 something more than his presence and name to the 
 councils of the society. His identification of himself 
 with its interests was as real as it was sympathetic. 
 His faith in Scripture was as unquestioning as 
 that of Lord Shaftesbury himself ; and his oriental 
 scholarship gave him a fitness for the post which 
 Lord Shaftesbury must have lacked. He was the 
 master of a ready but uninspired pen, and no- 
 thing of his own composition ever threatened long 
 to survive his day. But the work of the society 
 whose policy he directed is of distinct moment. 
 The Sacred Books of nations exert a peculiar in- 
 fluence upon their literatures, and the missionary 
 teacher and translator is one of the most signifi- 
 cant figures in the history of letters — how sig- 
 nificant let Ulfilas among missionaries, or Wick- 
 liffe and Luther among translators, bear witness. 
 
 Henry Martyn was the beau ideal of missionary 
 adventurers. I use the term advisedly, and in its 
 worthier sense of one who dares something for a 
 great cause. He was a youth of romantic temper and 
 unusual abilities, who, after a distinguished univer- 
 sity career which brought him under the influence of 
 Simeon, went out to India as a chaplain of the East 
 India Company. Measured by years, his life was 
 so brief as to seem thrown away, for he died in 
 Persia, at the age of thirty-one. But, reckoned by 
 character and deeds, it proved to be one of the 
 
CLAPHAM AND OXFORD 179 
 
 notable careers of the new century ; for there was 
 a certain distinction about it — an unusual capacity 
 for ^earthly' enjoyment, held subject to a celestial 
 ambition, the evidence of keen intellectual powers 
 devoted to the highest good of others, a very hu- 
 man romance, too, of heartily requited love to which 
 circumstance denied the consummation of marriage, 
 that made Martyn's life singularly influential in the 
 history of Christian missions. It served to inspire a 
 multitude of those who followed him in the work of 
 preaching, teaching, and translating the literature 
 of Christian civilization. 
 
 As I have before intimated, it is yet too early to 
 estimate at its true worth the sio^nificance of Chris- 
 tian missions to literature. The missionary is sup- 
 posed to be generally a man of fair natural abilities 
 and of good average training. He is often a man 
 of the keenest intelligence heightened and inspired 
 by the most benevolent of ambitions. His very 
 purpose in going out leads him into sympathetic 
 acquaintance with the deeper things in the life of 
 those among whom he labours. It is the almost 
 universal rule that barbarous or savage peoples find 
 their most valiant champions and most sympathetic 
 interpreters among missionary workers. Further- 
 more a prime duty of the missionary consists in the 
 translation of the Christian Scriptures, together 
 with works upon ethics, medicine, grammar, and 
 elementary science, into the vernacular, wherever 
 this has already reached the dignity of a written 
 
180 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 language. If it have not, then its development into 
 grammatical form becomes one of his first tasks. 
 Only as the reader ponders upon this vast world- 
 movement, with its direct influence upon the speech 
 and incipient literature of a thousand languages 
 or dialects, and its reflex influence — no less real 
 though as yet but partly realized — upon letters at 
 home, can he grasp the significance of such un- 
 dertakings as the Bible Society, over which Lord 
 Teignmouth presided, the Church Missionary Soci- 
 ety, of which John Venn was the projector, and the 
 adventure to which Henry Martyn gave his life. 
 Martyn's "Journal" belongs to English literature 
 by the influence which it has exerted, if not by 
 reason of its purely literary quality ; as does the 
 journal of David Brainard, and the lives of men 
 like Selwyn, Livingstone, and Coleridge-Pattison, 
 to say nothing of some missionary hymns, which, 
 like those of Bishop Heber, have literally sung 
 themselves around the world. 
 
 A far more patent and generally recognized be- 
 quest of the Clapham brotherhood to letters appears 
 as we consider the two families of Zachary Macaulay 
 and James Stephen, connected as they were, or as 
 they soon became by marriage, with the Venns and 
 Trevelyans. Macaulay is, of course, one of the most 
 widely known names in English literature. The 
 most famous exponent of it had the good fortune, 
 as essayist, historian, conversationalist, and poet, 
 to build his popularity upon so substantial a foun- 
 
CLAPHAM AND OXFORD 181 
 
 dation of talent and attainment as to possess every 
 reasonable assurance of permanent fame. The "Lays 
 of Ancient Rome" may not be great poems; but 
 their claim to popularity is genuine rather than 
 specious. They possess the true martial lilt, the 
 gallant note, that leads boyhood captive at the first 
 assault, and surprises the cooler blood of middle 
 age into a boyish warmth. Withal they possess a 
 homely quality which, without rubbing any of the 
 bloom from romance, still brings the classic legend 
 into touch with modern life, so that the plain man 
 of to-day perceives in Horatius and his fellow heroes 
 men of like passions with himself. Something of 
 this same quality of perfect perspicuity combined 
 with a romantic sense shows in the " Essays " and 
 the " History," Lord Macaulay, whether he speaks 
 by the book or at the bidding of a most eloquent 
 prejudice, is always intelligible, and generally logi- 
 cal. His prejudice, too, is almost invariably gener- 
 ous in so far as it attaches itself to the cause of 
 freedom and the rights of the many as opposed to 
 the privileges of the few. He is no cynic, — though 
 he may occasionally turn a cynical phrase at the 
 bidding of a tyrannous literary instinct, — but, as 
 his biography shows, a very tender-hearted man ; 
 though the man is, to be sure, sometimes lost in 
 the reviewer and the Whig. 
 
 In what degree did Macaulay inherit the Clap- 
 ham tradition or illustrate the Clapham influence? 
 The most valiant special pleader must hesitate to 
 
182 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 number him among the Evangelicals. Tender as 
 was his attachment to his family, it would be difl&- 
 cult to think of him as at home in a conference of 
 his elders upon theological or missionary topics. 
 Yet after all, he is his father's son. The Evangelical 
 watch- words are not congenial to him ; they seem 
 threadbare and jejune ; none the less he knows the 
 sound of shibboleth and can say it, if he chooses. 
 His characterization of Bunyan is suffused with 
 Evangelical intelligence, if not warmed by Evangeli- 
 cal sympathy ; and his definition of Protestantism 
 in the essay upon Ranke's " History of the Popes " 
 bears the Clapham hall-mark plain upon it.^ Nor 
 can any adequate estimate be formed of the quality 
 of Macaulay's style without taking into account his 
 training in the Bible and his saturation with Scrip- 
 ture phraseology. His infant outburst against the 
 maid who had disarranged the pebbles marking off 
 his little garden-plot : " Cursed be Sally ! For it is 
 written. Cursed be he that removeth his neighbour's 
 landmark ! " is prophetic of the terrible and rheto- 
 rically exaggerated indictment of Barere at the close 
 of the essay upon that worthy. 
 
 "This makes the character complete. Whatso- 
 ever things are false, whatsoever things are dis- 
 honest, whatsoever things are unjust, whatsoever 
 things are impure, whatsoever things are hateful, 
 whatsoever things are of evil report, if there be 
 
 1 For a brief criticism of this definition, see The Dynamic of Chm- 
 tianity, Introduction. 
 
CLAPHAM AND OXFORD 183 
 
 any vice, or if there be any infamy, all these things, 
 we know, were blended in Barere." 
 
 The passage shows Macaulay's ase of Scripture 
 at its worst, but it illustrates how deeply he had 
 drunk of the spring which refreshed Clapham 
 speech, even though in this instance he seems to 
 have caught but little of its essential spirit. The 
 temptation to turn a sounding phrase was always 
 liable to betray his judgement; but upon the whole, 
 one is bound to admit that in his books, his 
 speeches, and his talk, he strove to follow the more 
 generous Clapham traditions. After all, his was a 
 sort of reforming eloquence, enhanced and refined 
 by the broadest literary cultivation and by much 
 contact with the world. In it there was always 
 something of the humanitarian bent of his father, 
 Clarkson, and Granville Sharpe, though the eager 
 zeal which characterized them had been bereft of 
 its crudity — and of something of its convicting 
 power as well — by passing through the sieve of 
 Cambridge and the " Edinburgh Review." In other 
 words, Clapham was to Macaulay as the enthusi- 
 asm of Exeter Hall at its best was to the benevo- 
 lence of the more enlightened of the Whigs. 
 
 England and America have equal reason for grati- 
 tude that the best traditions of the family have been 
 continued in our own day by Sir George Otto Trevel- 
 yan, in the memorable "Life of Lord Macaulay," 
 the " Early History of Charles James Fox," perhaps 
 the most brilliant historical and poHtical monograph 
 
184 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 in the language, and in the "American Revolu- 
 tion/' a study of this momentous quarrel which is as 
 sympathetic and intelligent in spirit as it is fascina- 
 ting in style. Nor does the younger generation of 
 this distinguished house lack its worthy represen- 
 tative in the field of letters, as the growing work 
 and repute of Mr. George Macaulay Trevelyan 
 abundantly attest. 
 
 As we turn to consider the contribution which 
 the Clapham Sect made to life and letters through 
 the family of James Stephen, a new problem pre- 
 sents itself. Some of the straiter Evangelicals brought 
 the accusation against Sir James, son of the Clap- 
 ham James, that the orthodoxy of his " Essays in 
 Ecclesiastical Biography " was open to suspicion, 
 especially with reference to the doctrine of eternal 
 punishment, "a doctrine which at that time en- 
 joyed considerable popularity," as Sir Leslie Stephen 
 somewhere says. Could they have lived to read the 
 works of his two sons, James Fitz James and Leslie, 
 they might well have thought that the nemesis of 
 heresy had indeed overtaken him. It should be re- 
 membered that these two brothers, both of whom 
 exerted a marked, even though a somewhat tempo- 
 rary, influence upon the thought of their century, 
 had a double claim to the Clapham heritage; for 
 their mother, who was a daughter of John Venn 
 and a woman of great beauty and distinction of 
 character as well as of person, was native to the 
 Common. She lived to see — and to see with a 
 
CLAPHAM AND OXFORD 185 
 
 composure equal to that of Charles Lamb's cousin 
 Bridget — her sons not only accept but promulgate 
 opinions which to their grandparents must have 
 been anathema. 
 
 Concerning the vaKdity of these views I am not 
 at present concerned to express any judgement. The 
 term ' rationahstic ' ^ is hopelessly loose and lacking 
 in definite content ; yet it was, I suppose, dear to 
 both these representatives of an Evangelical family, 
 and I venture to maintain that their attachment to 
 it marked the legitimacy of their spiritual descent. 
 For the Calvinism of the Evangelicals was essentially 
 a rationalistic system of thought and faith. True, 
 the fundamental assumptions were assumptions in- 
 deed; but then, so are the ultimate premisses of 
 every system — even of mathematics. The true mean- 
 ing of Omnia aheunt in mysteriis is, " All things 
 start in metaphysics as well as issue in mystery!" 
 The premisses having been assumed, however, the 
 true Calvinistic method had primary reference to the 
 processes of logic rather than the experiences of 
 life. It loved God with a passion which was almost 
 exclusively mental, if such a phrase may be admitted. 
 Thus it prepared the way for a school of theolo- 
 gians whose influence should seem to be altogether, 
 and should really be in part, hostile to Christian 
 faith, though they were, as the present writer at 
 
 * How " Rationalism " has become a cant term, sacred to a sect, 
 may be seen by any casual reader of the Introduction to Mr. Benn*s 
 recent History of English Rationalism in the Nineteenth Century. 
 
188 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 rian Movement is so great that its very gossip has 
 enjoyed a currency denied to the history of the 
 earlier school, the gleaning of the grapes of Ox- 
 ford seeming more to the public taste than the 
 vintages of Clapham. In spite of Mr. Benn's re- 
 cent attempts to prove the contrary, the Oxford 
 Movement was essentially romantic. It accorded 
 well with the new spirit which breathed upon the 
 dry bones of English poetry and fiction. This 
 breath of revolution could not fail ultimately to 
 reach the Church and popular thought upon mat- 
 ters of faith. The question which Oxford faced 
 was whether its influence should take the form of 
 German criticism and what the Common Rooms 
 called "neology," or whether it should be turned 
 into institutional and conservative channels. The 
 institutional bent of the English mind when deal- 
 ing with matters of religion has been repeatedly 
 exemplified, from the days of Hooker's "Ecclesias- 
 tical Polity" to those of Maurice's "Kingdom of 
 Christ." The Englishman is ever a lover of the 
 concrete and tangible. Even the Clapham Evan- 
 gelicals could not rest until their vision of truth 
 was incarnate in an Anti-Slave-Trade agitation, 
 a Church Missionary Society, a Bible Society, and 
 a well-organized attack upon the brutality of the 
 criminal code. Just as naturally the new spirit at 
 Oxford drove those whom it possessed to an en- 
 deavour to realize anew the life of the ancient 
 church, and to accord modern Anglicanism with it. 
 
CLAPHAM AND OXFORD 189 
 
 Yet the typical Tractarian was something more 
 than a mere laudator temporis acti. He found him- 
 self in a period of transition, as one who had sud- 
 denly awaked from sleep and opened his eyes upon 
 strange and half-sinister surroundings. Nothing in 
 such a case is more welcome than a voice of stalwart 
 and confident authority. This he set himself to seek 
 and was long in finding. It was conspicuously lack- 
 ing in the earlier Oriel School, composed of intelli- 
 gent and liberal-minded men, who seemed content, 
 however, to take the new day as it came, without 
 much concern as to its definitions or the ultimate 
 trend of its influences. This is not to characterize 
 Hawkins, Whately, Hampden, and Arnold as men 
 of little faith. Instead, their attitude toward the 
 future was confident enough, but it was in some 
 measure the attitude of the opportunist. They were 
 content to see the future come in an assurance that 
 the Spirit of Truth would supply strength and wis- 
 dom adequate to its day. That is the attitude of 
 courage and hope, but men who take it not infre- 
 quently fall into the error of seeming to ignore the 
 past, to be a little contemptuous of defining their 
 position in the present, and to treat authority cava- 
 lierly. Such was the situation which Keble, Hurrell 
 Froude, and Newman faced at Oxford in the early 
 thirties. 
 
 Newman himself represents an immediate link 
 between the Tractarians and the Evangelicals. His 
 early training had been of a distinctly Evangelical 
 
186 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 least ventures to believe, not only necessary conse- 
 quences of the artificiality which had characterized 
 earlier systems of religious thought, but no less 
 necessary cleavers of the ground for the reconstruc- 
 tion of faith that was bound to follow. 
 
 FitzJames Stephen was a lawyer, journalist, and 
 judge; Leslie Stephen was preordained to letters, 
 though in an extraordinary passage in his auto- 
 biography he seems to express a half -whimsical 
 doubt whether he ought not to have pocketed his 
 scruples and followed his earlier purpose of taking 
 orders. As it was, he became a most useful servant 
 of his own and later generations through his ca- 
 pacity for an exalted kind of hack-work, by which 
 it is safe to say he will be gratefully remembered 
 long after his more original contributions to nine- 
 teenth-century theology and ethics have been for- 
 gotten. Some one called FitzJames Stephen a Cal- 
 vinist with the bottom knocked out. In his younger 
 brother's case not only the bottom went, but a ma- 
 jority of the staves as well; yet the significant 
 thing in both cases is rather that which remained 
 than that which was taken. To the very end it 
 seemed as thouofh neither could dissociate the 
 thought of Christianity from the theology of Clap- 
 ham. While the casual reader is noting the points 
 of difference, his more thoughtful neighbour is pon- 
 dering upon the notes of direct spiritual descent. 
 
 "Did you ever know your father do a thing be- 
 cause it was pleasant?" asked Lady Stephen one 
 
CLAPHAM AND OXFORD 187 
 
 day of FitzJames. '* Yes/' answered the boy, " once 
 — when he married you"; and Sir Leslie records 
 the fact that his father once smoked a cigar but 
 found it so deUcious that he never smoked again/ 
 Something of this same contempt for selfish indul- 
 gence, the same exaltation of personal responsi- 
 biHty, the practical deification of Duty, appears in 
 the life and work of the elder son. It seems natu- 
 ral that. Utilitarian though he had become, and 
 inclined to base all action finally upon the desire 
 for happiness, he should still reply to his own 
 question, "Can you love such a Being?" (i, e. as 
 the God in Whom he believes), " Love is not the 
 word I should choose, but awe " ; while elsewhere 
 he records his conviction that " conscience is that 
 which lies deepest in a man." No better instance 
 could perhaps be cited to illustrate the degree in 
 which Calvinism is a translation of Stoicism into 
 the terms of Christianity, or how pervasive and 
 haunting its majestic form continues to be long 
 after its vital fire has grown cold. To the end, 
 despite their habitual girding at theology, both 
 brothers seem to find their deeper interests bound 
 up with questions of religion, either upon its theo- 
 logical or upon its ethical side. 
 
 So large a portion of this chapter has been given 
 to the Evangelicals that I must deal but briefly 
 with their Oxford successors. There is the greater 
 justice in this because the fascination of the Tracta- 
 
 ^ Life of Sir FitzJames Stephen, pp. 61-63. 
 
190 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 type, and a thorough grounding in the Bible had 
 an influence upon his style as marked in its different 
 way as in the case of Macaulay. He has himself set 
 forth his indebtedness to Walter Mayers of Pem- 
 broke College, who put into his hands one of Ro- 
 maine's works which was instrumental in confirming 
 if not in causing his conversion. To Thomas Scott, 
 the famous Evangelical commentator, he says, that, 
 humanly speaking, he almost owed his soul. Joseph 
 Milner supplied him with his earlier ideas of Church 
 history, and Newton convinced him that the Pope 
 was Anti-Christ.^ It was only by degrees that the 
 conviction grew upon him that " Antiquity was the 
 true exponent of the doctrines of Christianity and 
 the basis of the Church of England." ^ Granting 
 this conviction, the student of the Oxford Move- 
 ment at once catches a glimpse of one secret of 
 its authority, its charm, and its incidental literary 
 quality. With liberal ideas making distinct way 
 in the University, while debate upon Catholic 
 Emancipation and the Reform Bill raged without, 
 it was but natural that there should be reaction in 
 so conservative an atmosphere as Oxford habitu- 
 ally breathed. 
 
 Moreover, the romantic movement, though it had 
 pretty nearly spent its first influence among men of 
 letters, was in the heyday of its power among the 
 people. Wordsworth and Coleridge were coming to 
 
 * Apologia pro Vita Sim^ pp. 4-7. 
 2 Ibid., p. 26. 
 
CLAPHAM AND OXFORD 191 
 
 their own, Sir Walter Scott, just dying, was at the 
 zenith of his fame, Byron, just dead, was a name to 
 conjure with. It was an opportune moment for the 
 revival of the spirit of antiquity in religion ; and 
 the fact that the protagonists of this revival were 
 men of uncommonly active imaginations and alert 
 minds, as well as masters of the peculiar cultivation 
 which Oxford affords, gave further assurance of the 
 influence which the movement was bound to exercise 
 upon letters. 
 
 A passing glance at the characters of Keble and 
 Newman will suffice to illustrate this. They were 
 foreordained to sympathy and cooperation, though 
 the circumstances of their several trainings were 
 sufficiently diverse to keep them apart for a time. 
 Keble came up to Oxford from a High-Church home, 
 and while little more than a boy, captured nearly 
 all the honours that the University could give him. 
 Though incapable of self-seeking or any cheap bid- 
 ding for influence, he had become a power in Oxford 
 when Newman with his Evangelical training and 
 his liberal tendencies matriculated, in 1817. It was 
 a memorable day when a friend with whom the fresh- 
 man was walking suddenly cried, " There's Keble ! " 
 and, although nothing then promised an intimacy 
 between the two, Newman was already cherishing 
 such reports of Keble and his ways as were going 
 about the University. Gradually they drew together, 
 until, when Keble preached his famous sermon on 
 " National Apostasy," in July, 1833, the Oxford 
 
192 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Movement, which was to enlist their common sym- 
 pathy and command their united support for the 
 next twelve years, was fairly launched. Keble was 
 then Professor of Poetry. His " Christian Year " 
 had been published in 1827. Newman was Fellow 
 of Oriel, Vicar of St. Mary's, and a preacher whose 
 life and words were making him one of the notable 
 formative influences among a group of brilliant un- 
 dergraduates and scholars. He had published little. 
 His first book, " The Arians of the Fourth Cen- 
 tury," was just about to appear, and most of the 
 poems by which he is best known had been written 
 in the previous winter. 
 
 The progress of the Tractarian Movement as a 
 revival of religion, theology, and ecclesiasticism is 
 a little beside our present task. It remains to point 
 out somewhat more explicitly, however, the singular 
 place which it has occupied in English letters. The 
 " Tracts for the Times " have long been grey with 
 well-deserved dust ; but the *^ Christian Year " has 
 gone wherever English is read. Like every collection 
 of verse written to complete a cycle, it bears here 
 and there the stamp of task-work; yet it distinctly 
 raised the tone of religious poetry. Hazlitt once 
 criticised Campbell's " Pleasures of Hope " for its 
 amiable but general debility, as though the author 
 had mistaken the decomposition of prose for the com- 
 position of poetry,^ and Bagehot echoes the gibe in 
 his reference to " sacred poets " as those who thrive 
 
 » The English Poets, p. 288. 
 
CLAPHAM AND OXFORD 193 
 
 by translating the weaker portions of Wordsworth 
 and Coleridge into the speech of women/ 
 
 The Oxford Movement is not guiltless in this 
 respect; no revival which finally assumed so pro- 
 nounced a ritualistic form could fail of degeneracy, 
 or miss the day when, in its literature as in its wor- 
 ship, the stress of appeal to the senses must stifle 
 instead of stimulate the appeal to the heart and 
 will. But at the beginning it was not so. Even the 
 hectic zeal of Hurrell Froude had its literary quality. 
 Ill-balanced as he was, and i^terly ephemeral as his 
 influence promised to be, his life still makes its ap- 
 peal to literature. It is characteristic of him and the 
 movement which he did so much to inaugurate, that 
 as this chapter is written a stately volume by an ac- 
 complished American lady should appear, to tell 
 again the story of his brief career, and that the pub- 
 lishers should announce a new history of the Re- 
 vival as a whole. I chanced the other day to take 
 down from the shelves of a university library the 
 same copy of Mozley's " Reminiscences " which, as 
 an undergraduate, I had read upon its first publi- 
 cation. The stamp of untrustworthiness was plain 
 on almost every chapter — yet the volumes were as 
 beguiling as ever. 
 
 The secret of this undeniable charm begins to 
 appear as we turn back to the " Christian Year," 
 the " Lyra Apostolica," and the " Parochial Ser- 
 
 ^ Literary Studies, vol. i, essay on the " Early Edinburgh Re- 
 viewers." 
 
194 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 mons." Keble and Newman were men of great in- 
 tellectual gifts, fired by an intense but controlled 
 zeal for what they thought to be a great cause. The 
 former combined a fine boyishness, which put him 
 at once into sympathy with his pupils, with so deep 
 a seriousness that his lightest reproof was sometimes 
 long remembered. " Froude," said he once, after 
 his pupil had entered the coach to leave him, " you 
 thought Law's ' Serious Call ' was a clever book ; 
 it seemed to me as if you had said the Day of Judge- 
 ment will be a pretty sight." The implied rebuke 
 could as little be resented as forgotten, and pro- 
 duced a profound effect upon Froude's life. It is of 
 value to us as illustrating the keenness of insight 
 and delicacy of touch which characterized these two 
 leaders of Oxford thought. Both were responsive 
 to the appeal of Nature, Keble, as the " Christian 
 Year " shows, preeminently so. Both were men of 
 very considerable subtilty of mind, combined with 
 great simplicity and directness of address. Though 
 neither seems to have sought a following, or aspired 
 to be the leader of a party, their zeal and purity of 
 life, combined with their discernment of hearts and 
 their quick sympathy with those who were in travail 
 of soul through intellectual doubts, brought friends 
 and disciples to them. Keble, however, remained 
 relatively in the background. His ideal life seems to 
 have been that of the country clergyman, preaching 
 to rustics, visiting in cottages, keeping the flame of 
 worship alight on the altar of a quiet village church, 
 
CLAPHAM AND OXFORD 195 
 
 teaching such pupils as might seek him in his re- 
 tirement, and touching the great world without 
 through the medium of his university connections 
 and by his verses. Such gifts and qualities as these, 
 enlisted in the service of a fine imagination and a 
 very genuine piety, were bound to work memorable 
 results. Memorable seems exactly the word, for there 
 is a haunting quality about the best work both of 
 Keble and Newman which grapples the memory as 
 with hooks of steel. Such a passage as the two stan- 
 zas beginning — 
 
 Why should we faint and fear to live alone, 
 Since all alone, so Heaven has will'd, we die ? 
 
 will illustrate my meaning in the case of Keble; 
 while Newman's " Lead, Kindly Light " has become 
 one of the best-known hymns in the language, 
 though no more worthy of universal appreciation 
 than the jubilant, — 
 
 Praise to the Holiest in the height, — 
 written many years later ; nor any more marked by 
 a discernment of the depths of human experience 
 than the exquisite verses entitled " Sensitiveness," 
 or the lines upon his sister's death, beginning — 
 Death was full urgent with thee, Sister dear. 
 
 English prose has, perhaps, owned no master who 
 was Newman's equal in the art of lucid succinctness. 
 A volume of commentary upon the sadly misunder- 
 stood Beatitude concerning the meek might con- 
 ceivably say less than his one sentence, " Sheep are 
 
196 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 defenceless creatures ; wolves are strong and fierce : 
 yet the wolves go hungry, and the sheep are fed." 
 Keaders who are very little in the way of reading 
 sermons may well give a half hour to the " Parting 
 of Friends/' with its poignant text, "Man goeth 
 forth unto his work and to his labour until the 
 evening," — a text which at once aligns the im- 
 pending personal separation which the preacher 
 had in mind with the universal, age-long expe- 
 rience of Man, the Pilgrim of the Universe. The 
 single phrase "poisoning the wells," whereby, in 
 his Introduction to the " Apologia," he characterizes 
 certain charges of his opponents, is worth reams 
 of elaborate argument ; while the " Apologia " 
 itself is a great ' human document ' worth almost 
 as much to psychology as to literature, and at least 
 half justifying Mr. Birrell's charitable extravagance 
 when he spoke of Newman as one whose " long life 
 has been a miracle of beauty and grace, and who 
 has contrived to instill into his very controversies 
 more of the Spirit of Christ than most men can 
 find room for in their prayers." ^ 
 
 To attempt any enumeration of the works which 
 owe their origin to the Oxford Kevival would be as 
 far beyond my power as it is beside my purpose. 
 Volumes grew out of it like the works of Hugh 
 James Eose, Charles Marriott, and Dr. Pusey, which 
 have no place in literature at all. Other volumes, 
 like Ward's "Ideal of a Christian Church," make a 
 
 1 outer Dicta, First Series, " Truth-Hunting." 
 
CLAPHAM AND OXFORD 197 
 
 sort of dubious claim upon the reader because of 
 the unique character of the author as well as the 
 equally unique experience of the book. Public con- 
 demnation by a great English University represents 
 a title to fame not easily gained during the last 
 century ; but it was grotesque enough to comport 
 well both with the physical and mental equipment of 
 William George Ward. In memoirs the Movement 
 has been as prolific as in controversies ; its " Lives " 
 are legion ; while its echoes, in " The Oxford Move- 
 ment " of Dean Church, and the " Oxford Coun- 
 ter Reformation " of J. A. Froude, represent distinct 
 contributions to literature as well as to the history of 
 English thought. Something of the mysticism which 
 was sure to accompany so romantic a religious awak- 
 ening may conceivably have touched the spirit of the 
 Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, and certainly inspired 
 some of the poetry of Christina Rossetti. It brought 
 into being the splendid translations of John Mason 
 Neale, and occasioned the more popular and some- 
 what sentimental hymns of Father Faber, to whom 
 must also be accorded the dubious fame of writings 
 upon the doctrine of Eternal Punishment so lurid, 
 that for the moment not only Newman's terrible 
 arraignment of the " Sinner before the Judgement- 
 Seat" seems mild, but even the worst (and, alas, 
 best-known) sermon of Edwards pales its ineffectual 
 fires .^ Nor should the student overlook the influence 
 
 ^ The reader who is so ill adyised as to desire further acquaintance 
 with this phase of Father Faber's work will find matter to his taste 
 
196 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 of the movement upon a considerable number of 
 men, who, though never immediately identified with 
 it, yet found their sympathies awakened by its ideals. 
 England has profited inestimably by the personal 
 character of such men as Mr. Gladstone and Roun- 
 dell Palmer among her statesmen and judges. The 
 fact that they were less exceptional than eminent 
 in the purity of their lives and the worthiness of 
 their ambitions, constitutes one of the most notable 
 elements of contrast between the public life of the 
 third quarter of the nineteenth and that of the 
 corresponding portion of the eighteenth centuries, 
 when so very mundane a saint as the Earl of Dart- 
 mouth could win a sort of fame because he prayed, 
 and men like Sandwich and Grafton exemplified 
 the too general tone of public and private moral- 
 ity among the upper classes. Whenever this unde- 
 niable advance in life and letters comes to be 
 appraised, no small portion of the inspiration and 
 influence which caused it will have to be referred 
 to the two great movements of religious thought 
 for which Clapham and Oxford stand. 
 
 in an article entitled, " Rationalism and Apologetics " in the Edin- 
 burgh Review for July, 1906. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 ELIJAH AND EUSHA : CARLYLE AND RUSKIN 
 
 *^ Do make religion your great study, Tom ; if you 
 repent it, I will bear the blame forever." So, in 
 1819, wrote Carlyle's mother to her gifted son. 
 She hoped, as only a Scottish mother could, to see 
 him one day in a pulpit ; but she longed with a yet 
 deeper longing to make sure of his part and lot in 
 her own faith. He had just confessed to some negli- 
 gence in his reading of the Bible, but added the 
 reassuring fact that he had spent the evening before 
 with his favourite Job, and hoped to do better in 
 the future. That picture of the restless and half- 
 distraught young teacher, conscious of powers which 
 must enable him to go far, but terribly in doubt as 
 to the direction whither, dwelling upon the afflic- 
 tions, contradictions, patience, and integrity of Job, 
 is significant. One wonders whether, as he reached 
 the later chapters, which set forth the marvels of 
 earth-shaking behemoth and man-defying leviathan, 
 any whimsical inkling of their application to his 
 own future character and fame could have dawned 
 upon him. Were this credible, it would be safe 
 to aver that the hyperbolic imagery which depicts 
 the wonders of great and unrestrained power must 
 
200 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 have chimed with his grim humour. He is the de- 
 spair of critics, unless, indeed, they be cock-sure 
 and shallow; and to these, as they turn their little 
 phrases, one is tempted to cry, — 
 
 " Wilt thou play with him as with a bird ? or wilt 
 thou bind him for thy maidens ? I will not conceal 
 his parts, nor his power, nor his comely proportion. 
 Out of his mouth go burning lamps, and sparks of 
 fire leap out. He beholdeth all high things ; he is 
 a king over all the children of pride." 
 
 In his "Reminiscences" Carlyle says of his 
 father : — 
 
 " In anger he had no need of oaths : his words 
 were like sharp arrows that smote into the very 
 heart. The fault was that he exaggerated (which 
 tendency I also inherit), yet . . . for the sake 
 chiefly of humourous effect." 
 
 So ingrained was this humour and so incorrigi- 
 ble and often unrestrained was the habit of exag- 
 geration, that it is only in terms of half-whimsical 
 hyperbole that the man can be set forth. Words of 
 measured truth and soberness take hold upon him 
 as little as arrow and spear upon the armour of 
 leviathan. Hence I incline to credit our greatest 
 master of rhetorical extravagance with the most 
 comprehensive and approximately just verdict upon 
 his character. Carlyle, says Mr. Swinburne, was a 
 typical sturdy peasant, " brave, honest, affectionate, 
 laborious, envious, ungrateful, malignant, and self- 
 
ELIJAH AND ELISHA 201 
 
 ish." * The list is as portentous as a group of Mr. 
 Swinburne's adjectives must always be, but, if there 
 be libel here, it is in the implied estimate of the 
 peasant in general rather than in the expressed 
 judgement upon Carlyle in particular. 
 
 To call him selfish is only to reiterate a fact that 
 lies patent upon the pages of his own reminiscences 
 and his wife's journal ; and the adjective must still 
 stand, after all allowance has been made for her 
 somewhat ungracious nature, the greatness of the 
 tasks that absorbed him, and the fact that most 
 husbands engaged in preoccupying duties seem 
 selfish to their wives, — who shall say without just 
 cause ? " Malignant " is a heavy word and not to be 
 lightly used. So good a man as Thomas Arnold 
 blotted a page of his own biography by writing the 
 "Oxford Mahgnants" for the "Edinburgh." But 
 even he did not venture to call the author of the 
 " Christian Year " an ass. Carlyle did so, and went 
 on not only to designate Keats as a " Vessel of 
 Hell," but to characterize his biography as a " Fricas- 
 see of dead dog." ^ 
 
 No other man of his day, not even Hazlitt, could 
 have brought himself to be so consistently con- 
 
 * Nineteenth Century^ vol. xv, p. 604. 
 
 ' Justice perhaps requires a citation of the paragraph, though to 
 lovers of Keats it may intensify rather than mitigate Carlyle's of- 
 fence. " The kind of man he [i. e. Keats] was gets ever more hor- 
 rible to me. Force of hunger for pleasure of every kind, and want 
 of all other force . . . such a structure of soul, it would once have 
 been very evident, was a chosen ' Vessel of HelL' " 
 
202 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 temptuous or so incidentally nasty — there seems 
 to be no other word — toward Coleridge and Lamb, 
 as was Carlyle. Nor is it possible to explain away 
 the exasperating patronage with which he endured 
 men and women of eminence whom he could find 
 no cause to damn, or the faint praise wherewith he 
 did damn Mill, except upon the ground of a self- 
 conceit that made him envious of all abilities and 
 powers comparable to his own. He could not see his 
 wife shine at her brilliant best in company without 
 irritation, nor could she quite do her best apparently 
 without some whetting of her wits at his expense ; 
 a mutual attitude which lends point to the remark 
 '^ that after all it is well they married each other ; 
 since, had they not, there might have been four 
 unhappy people in the world instead of two." The 
 famous phrase, ^'mostly fools," whereby he chose 
 to designate twenty or thirty millions of his fellow 
 citizens, has its humourous side, and may easily be 
 forgiven him ; yet, like the little Book in the Apo- 
 calypse, its dubious sweetness in the mouth speedily 
 turns to bitterness; while his exasperating refer- 
 ences to Miss Martineau as "the good Harriet" 
 after her unwearied and successful efforts in his 
 service; the contempt with which he loved to 
 characterize the authorities by whose aid he had 
 built the great structures of the " Revolution " and 
 " Frederick " ; to say nothing of his attitude toward 
 people who, like the BuUers, had honestly striven 
 to befriend him in a day when friends were worth 
 
ELIJAH AND ELISHA 203 
 
 his having, all suggest a starveling sense of grati- 
 tude. 
 
 On the other hand, what student can fail to pay- 
 homage to the enormous labour which went to the 
 making of his books — books, be it remembered, 
 which, even when historical, were still works of the 
 poetic imagination in such degree as would have 
 seemed to justify a less diligent man in treating the 
 toil of research lightly. 
 
 " The French Revolution stands pretty fair in 
 my head, nor do I mean to investigate much more 
 about it, but to splash down what I know in large 
 masses of colours, that it may look like a smoke 
 and flame conflagration in the distance." ^ 
 
 Thus he describes, and with wonderful truth, the 
 scheme of his great impressionist panorama; but 
 he does not say, though the world knows to-day, 
 how mightily he had toiled at his ^ sources,' nor 
 with what general good effect, in spite of all that 
 later critics have striven to show to the contrary. 
 Affectionate, too, he was, in his own fashion, no less 
 than laborious ; and the fashion was a good one in 
 some cases, as in his relations with his parents and 
 the old home circle ; while in others it took too 
 much, far too much, for granted, as he finally 
 learned in the case of his wife. As for his honesty 
 and courage, it would be superfluous almost to the 
 point of impertinence to go about to prove them, 
 so plainly do they speak through both his works 
 1 Quoted by Nicol, Thomas Carlyle, p. 73. 
 
201 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 and days. " I will not quit the game while faculty 
 is given me to try playing," is the characteristically 
 picturesque utterance of his resolve again to attack 
 the " French Kevolution " after the burning of the 
 first volume in manuscript ; and it is pleasant to 
 remember that his consideration for the distress of 
 his friend Mill, in whose house the disaster had oc- 
 curred, was as admirable as the courage wherewith 
 he girded himself to repair the loss. 
 
 His honesty is as plainly written on his life's 
 work as his courage. He liked to dignify the word 
 with a capital initial, and to proclaim as his gospel 
 to the age his scorn and hatred of all that loved or 
 made a lie. Whether it were possible for the finest 
 sense of honour to dwell in the same mind with 
 prejudices so portentous as those he harboured, I 
 do not undertake to say ; but it is indubitable that 
 no man of genius was ever further from consenting 
 to conceal or modify his convictions for the sake 
 of popular favour or any material advantage which 
 might conceivably issue from it. 
 
 Upon the whole the millions of his readers, and 
 the other millions whose thought has been uncon- 
 sciously moulded by his influence — " mostly fools " 
 be it remembered — have dealt well with him. Mr. 
 Froude will yet come to his own in the matter of 
 the " Reminiscences " and the " Life." There is 
 a sense in which just such a literary executor was 
 needed. Carlyle was true to himself in permitting 
 or enjoining the publications that have tried his 
 
ELIJAH AND ELISHA 205 
 
 admirers most sorely ; Mr. Froude was never more 
 loyal to his master or to truth than when he ful- 
 filled the behest ; for Carlyle's life was too great to 
 make a prettily consistent story. Even a little man, 
 in so far as he is a man at all, defies our definitions 
 and puts our formulas to shame ; personality being 
 impatient of such things. In Carlyle's case, the 
 attempt to sum him up, label or number him, and 
 assign him to his appropriate shelf, is as hopeless 
 as an effort to describe the varied year in terms of 
 any given week in it. The things said may be true ; 
 it is in point of scope and application to the whole 
 that they are impotent. 
 
 He who would tell the truth about Carlyle must 
 make large demands upon his vocabulary of dis- 
 junctive particles, ^but,' 'yet,' and though.' He 
 did not like the Jews ; yet his attitude of mind and 
 his literary style were both Hebraistic. He could 
 not endure Scottish Presbyterianism, except perhaps 
 as embodied in his parents; yet in many respects 
 he was the most eloquent and consistent Calvinist 
 of his generation. Scarce any contemporary was so 
 keen to discern the joints in an adversary's armour 
 of dialectic, or so sure to pierce them ; yet he was 
 no ' logician,' and esteemed too lightly a conviction 
 induced by close reasoning. His arsenal was doubt- 
 less well stored with syllogisms; but for aught he 
 cared they might rot unused^ while he wielded wea- 
 pons — always of offence — more to his mind. 
 
 Critics and expositors have not been wanting who 
 
206 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 have undertaken to articulate Carlyle's faith into a 
 system and to appraise his religious influence. The 
 task is frankly impossible, in large part for a reason 
 which lay very close to the secret of his influence, 
 as I shall try to indicate. 
 
 His was an intensely religious soul. He was a 
 true son of his parents, a legitimate scion of the 
 Calvinistic stock. Its fundamental idea, the Sov- 
 ereignty of God, was ineradicably ingrained in him. 
 There is about that idea a certain majesty, whole- 
 someness, and freedom from sentimentality that 
 appealed to, and at the same time fed the deeper 
 tastes of, his essentially wholesome nature. In keep- 
 ing, too, with the Calvinistic austerity of conscience 
 was a fierce hunger and thirst after righteousness, 
 whereby, as Mr. Andrew Lang has finely said, his 
 life was almost physically vexed. There is indeed 
 no accounting for Carlyle except upon the basis of 
 religion. This I think he would have granted em- 
 phatically, because he was always preaching it. Only 
 when you attempted to show that it was your es- 
 pecial type or definition of religion that accounted 
 for him, would he as indubitably have turned and 
 rent you ; for here he was an individualist almost 
 without qualification. To his own master he and 
 every other man stood or fell. For the religion 
 which was wrought out of each man's experience, 
 in so far as it was honestly inspiring and subduing, 
 he had vast respect. Toward men's necessary at- 
 tempts to formulate their experience and to organize 
 
ELIJAH AND ELISHA 207 
 
 its results into some body like the Church, with its 
 worship and its confession, he was critical to the 
 point of hostility. Indeed he seems to have had little 
 sense of the worth of corporate religion, as he had 
 little practical sense of the problems involved in any 
 form of corporate life or government. Despite his 
 outcry against art in general he was a great artist ; 
 but in the fundamental art of living with his fellows 
 he was a novice to the end. 
 
 In many respects, as has been already intimated, 
 he stood in the succession of the Hebrew prophets. 
 Not long after his death Professor Seeley wrote : — 
 
 "I admire as much as others this striking re- 
 appearance of the Hebrew prophet in the modern 
 world. No mere echo or literary imitation of Hebrew 
 prophecy, but the thing itself : the faculty of seeing 
 moral evils which others are too drowsy to see, and 
 of seeing them as distinctly as if they were material 
 objects, the sublime impatience, the overwhelming 
 denunciation . . . this is what I see in his best 
 writings, — in ' Past and Present,' and some of the 
 ' Latter-Day Pamphlets.' " ^ 
 
 But the likeness extended further. The vision of 
 this latter-day seer was partial as well as vivid. To 
 use the well-worn figure, he stood like a watcher 
 upon some mountain-top overlooking a wide ex- 
 panse of misty landscape. The valleys beneath his 
 feet, with great stretches of the lands beyond, 
 
 ^ J. R. Seeley, "Political Somnambulism," Macmillan*s Maga* 
 zine. Cf. Scribner^s Magazine^ vol. xxii, p. 142. 
 
208 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 were hidden ; but some peaks, with here and there 
 a larger expanse of upland, loomed clear. Upon 
 these he fixed an intense regard; concerning them 
 he made report with a rugged and vehement elo- 
 quence that caused the ears of two generations to 
 tingle. He was perfectly confident of some things 
 of utmost import; he could discern certain goals 
 worth attainment at whatever cost, certain pitfalls 
 and snares which it was as needful to shun ; but it 
 was beyond his power to map the way in any de- 
 tail. 
 
 This does not imply that he is worthless as a guide; 
 for the very fact of his own consciousness that so 
 much of human fate is hid in mystery led him to 
 declare with true Carlylean emphasis — one could say 
 no more — a few great principles for the soul's 
 guidance in all exigencies. Keligion was a funda- 
 mental necessity to man. No soul could complete its 
 life even here in this present world without it ; since 
 atheism is the practical denial, not of God only, but 
 of the most significant attributes of man. The truth 
 is always of God, and no true man will fail to accept 
 it or fear its consequences : a lie is as inevitably of 
 the Devil ; however fitted to the moment's need its 
 fruits promise to be, they will upon trial mock the 
 soul's hunger like apples of Sodom. The great God 
 Circumstance, whom the majority worship, — so far 
 forth deserving his contemptuous "mostly fools," 
 — is after all but a despicable deity, to be subjected 
 to the hewing of man's wood and the drawing of his 
 
ELIJAH AND ELISHA 209 
 
 water. Man would seem to be meant to be Captain 
 of his Soul and Master of Fate ; but even if the plan 
 miscarry and Fate overcome him, he can at least 
 defy mere circumstance to the end. There is a good 
 deal of this latter teaching, by implication if not by 
 precept, in Carlyle. He reminds us sometimes of an 
 Indian warrior bound to the stake and conscious of 
 inevitable doom, but solacing his pain by hurhng 
 defiance at his executioners ; and characteristically 
 enough the reminiscence is most vivid when with 
 voluminous and eloquent verbosity he chants the 
 worth of silence in face of Fate's blows and hfe's 
 contradiction. 
 
 The inconsistency which appears here is one of 
 his most notable characteristics, and its Hebrew type 
 will be recalled by every reader of the Old Testa- 
 ment. The Hebrew prophet rarely qualified his state- 
 ments. In teaching he spoke as though there were 
 nothing more to be said upon that particular point. 
 Much of the New Testament, too, needs to be read 
 in the light of this principle, or it must remain a 
 mass of exaggerated and strangely contradictory 
 apothegms. In point of fact the contradictions of 
 Scripture are among the most significant and neces- 
 sary features of its literary style. The truth was re- 
 vealed to the prophet in general outUne and mass. 
 He in turn revealed it to his hearers ; yet not so 
 much by an effort to assemble its details into a con- 
 sistent whole, as by a succession of clear and some- 
 times startling glimpses, now from this side and now 
 
210 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 from that, so that in the result his words often seem 
 contradictory. They are so only as the views of a 
 harbour or a coastline, toward which one is labori- 
 ously beating up against a head-wind, change with 
 the different tacks. Thus the prophet sings of mercy 
 and judgement, not qualifying one by the other, but 
 thrusting them into a juxtaposition which at first 
 sight seems hopelessly unnatural. The Sermon on 
 the Mount, when set side by side with the other teach- 
 ings of Christ, needs to be interpreted in the light 
 of this fact. Christ was a stranger to theological di- 
 alectic. There is no single discourse of His which 
 bears the mark of careful and laboured logical ar- 
 rangement. On the other hand, after the true East- 
 ern fashion, He abounds and seems to delight in ex- 
 treme statements and injunctions almost impossible 
 of fulfilment ; nor does He hesitate to contradict 
 Himself at times. The attempts to soften Scripture 
 phraseology are really attempts to emasculate it. 
 Ruggedness, strenuousness, and a sort of exaggera- 
 tion, are of its essence. We are to take no thought 
 for the morrow, — one half regrets its qualification 
 into " anxious thought," — but on the other hand we 
 are expected to discern the signs of the times and 
 lay our plans to profit by them. We are to "hate " 
 father and mother if need be for the Gospel's sake ; 
 but it is no less true that the man who makes religion 
 an excuse for slackness in filial duty or respect is a 
 hypocrite of hypocrites. The man smitten upon one 
 cheek is exhorted to turn the other also ; but no less 
 
ELIJAH AND ELISHA 211 
 
 strenuously exhorted to sell his cloak if need be and 
 buy a sword. The twistings and turnings of commen- 
 tator and apologist in their fruitless endeavours to 
 harmonize these contradictory passages would be 
 amusing if they did not threaten the deeper integ- 
 rity of Scripture. The Gospel is not a body of in- 
 junctions laid upon men with a view to the prede- 
 termination of conduct in every possible exigency 
 of life. It is rather an introduction to the Spirit 
 Who is meant to inhabit and inspire a man in such 
 degree as to insure his development along right lines, 
 and make him, under all circumstances, equal to life's 
 demands. Hence the general religious sense of men 
 has been right in insisting upon the supremacy 
 of the Law of Love to God and fellow-man, and 
 equally right in refusing to permit the exaltation 
 of any isolated utterance into an instrument of 
 tyranny. 
 
 No word of this apparent digression has been 
 written with a view to suggesting a comparison 
 between Carlyle's message and that of the Gospels. 
 Yet it is true that his approach to his readers is 
 after the Scripture manner. He, "like Ruskin, 
 keeps himself right not by caveats, but by contra- 
 dictions of himself, and sometimes in a way least 
 to be expected."* It was never his lot "to see life 
 steadily and see it whole." He saw life fitfully, 
 and saw its disjecta membra rather ; but his vision 
 was amazingly vivid, and he was haunted by a 
 
 » Nicol, Thomas Carlyle, p. 215. 
 
212 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 sense that these fragments were meant to go to- 
 gether if only one might discover the secret of 
 integrity. That, if it were ever revealed to him, he 
 never taught in its fulness; though he did teach 
 with almost unexampled cogency and power cer- 
 tain essential factors in its formula. 
 
 It is here that the distinctive difference between 
 his teaching and that of Scripture lies. The latter, 
 beneath its surface contradictions, rests upon a 
 fundamental principle of unity, which comes to 
 the surface in Christ and visualizes itself for all 
 time and all men. Carlyle grasped the Old Testa- 
 ment elements of this and strove to exploit them, 
 in season and out of season, for the benefit of a 
 day which sorely needed exactly that message. His 
 century was just awakening to a sense of its oppor- 
 tunity and the promise of its material advance. It 
 was prone to prophesy smooth things to itself when 
 Carlyle's eloquent discord smote upon its ear : " I 
 do not want cheaper cotton; swifter railways; I 
 want what Novalis calls ^God, Freedom, and Im- 
 mortality.' Will swift railways and sacrifices to 
 Hudson^ help me toward that?" One does not 
 wonder that he impressed Emerson with his posses- 
 sion of " The strong religious tinge you sometimes 
 find in burly people. That, and all his qualities, 
 
 * Hudson's once famous name has passed into such oblivion that 
 the reader, especially the American reader, may need to be re- 
 minded that he was the railway * promoter ' par excellence of Car- 
 lyle's day. 
 
ELIJAH AND ELISHA 213 
 
 have a certain virulence, coupled though it be in 
 his case with the utmost impatience of Christendom 
 and Jewdom and all existing presentments of the 
 good old story." ^ With this general judgement 
 such different men as Chalmers and Newman sub- 
 stantially agree. The former was quick to recog- 
 nize Carlyle's fundamentally religious nature and 
 his considerable rehgious influence ; but his mature 
 verdict was "He is a lover of earnestness rather 
 than a lover of truth." Newman wrote to his sister 
 in 1839, " The writer [i. e. Carlyle] has not very 
 clear principles and views, but they are very deep," 
 a criticism as characteristic of Newman as it was 
 true of Carlyle. 
 
 In view of the rugged and fragmentary nature 
 of his teaching, its frequent note of denial and 
 scorn, his utter inability to map out a coherent 
 and practicable scheme for the conduct of individ- 
 ual or social life, and his almost unintermittent 
 wail of weariness and self-pity, as though life were 
 an agony without significant "why" or "where- 
 fore," one is tempted to repeat Carlyle's own ques- 
 tion about John Sterling: "Why has a Biography 
 been inflicted on this man; why has not No-biog- 
 raphy and the privilege of the weary been his 
 lot?"^ The answer is that there is something 
 titanic and Dantesque about his spiritual experi- 
 ence. Its fragmentary character enhances its vivid- 
 
 * " Impressions of Thomas Carlyle," Scribner's Magazine, 1881. 
 ' Life of Sterlingf p. 5. 
 
214 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 ness. There is a sense in which the testimony of a 
 man who antagonized and scorned the prim ortho- 
 doxies of his day so vehemently is worth more 
 to religion than the well-considered witness of 
 many saints. His immediate debt to religion was 
 very great. Notable as was his capacity for scorn, 
 there were depths of reverence in him, and the 
 picture which he has himself drawn of a visit to 
 the Ecclefechan cottage late one evening, and his 
 waiting at the door in quiet, almost prayerful grati- 
 tude, because he heard his father's voice within 
 "making worship," is as fine in its way as "The 
 Cottar's Saturday Night." Carlyle, like Burns, dis- 
 cerned the hidings of Scotland's power. Though 
 far less dependent than his great disciple, Ruskin, 
 upon the language of religion and its oracles for 
 rhetorical effect, he none the less drew largely 
 upon the recognized forms of religious experience 
 and expression in the voicing of his message. The 
 story of the conversion in Leith Walk, which of 
 itself must have sufficed to make " Sartor" memo- 
 rable, might unquestionably have been differently 
 phrased; but the fact that it was told under the 
 forms of religion heightened its significance be- 
 cause it revealed its deeper truth. To call it a 
 "conversion" was no mere convention of speech; 
 a fact which Carlyle realized far better than some 
 of his more orthodox critics; for the essence of 
 religious conversion is a yielding of the life to the 
 guidance and companionship of the Spirit of Truth 
 
ELIJAH AND ELISHA 215 
 
 — the Divine resident in the world of nature and 
 in the heart of man so far as man will admit Him. 
 In a very real sense the deeper integrity of Car- 
 lyle's life and influence hinges upon the revelation 
 made to him that day and his allegiance to its im- 
 port and its Author. It is beside the mark to say 
 that he did not always sound the note of this new 
 message clear and strong ; few human servants fail 
 to be occasionally unprofitable, and few human in- 
 struments always keep in tune. The struggle for 
 the " Everlasting Yea " was not immediately success- 
 ful ; indeed, like the battle of the prophet's vision, 
 it was sometimes with confused noise and garments 
 rolled in blood; yet, the idea of it never passed 
 into permanent eclipse. The seer chose to write his 
 message in many different and seemingly contra- 
 dictory forms, — one is tempted to say that Carlyle 
 liked to give his very blessing suh specie damna- 
 tionis, — but soon or late he always struck a posi- 
 tive note. 
 
 I have said that an attempt to systematize this 
 message would appear to be an almost gratuitous 
 impertinence, inasmuch as it never revealed itself 
 to the messenger himself in systematic form ; yet 
 a writer in the "St. James's Gazette" soon after 
 Carlyle's death presented the main points in it at 
 once so fairly and so clearly, that I venture to quote 
 a part of his summary. 
 
 " He also thought that the truths which Calvin- 
 ism tried to express, and succeeded in expressing 
 
216 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 in an imperfect or partially mistaken manner, were 
 the ultimate governing principles of morals and 
 politics, of whose systematic neglect in this age 
 nothing but evil could come. . . . What then was 
 his creed ? . . . First, he believed in God ; secondly, 
 he believed in an absolute opposition between good 
 and evil ; thirdly, he believed that all men do, in 
 fact, take sides more or less decisively in this great 
 struggle, and ultimately turn out to be either good 
 or bad ; fourthly, he believed that good is stronger 
 than evil, and by infinitely slow degrees gets the 
 better of it, but that this process is so slow as to 
 be continually obscured and thrown back by evil 
 influences of various kinds — one of which he be- 
 lieved to be specially powerful in the present day. 
 . . . The great fact about each particular man is 
 the relation, whether of friendship or enmity, in 
 which he stands to God. . . . All (i. e. good and 
 bad men) pass alike through this mysterious hall of 
 doom called life; most show themselves in their 
 true colours under pressure. . . . Let us bring out 
 as far as may be possible such good as man has had 
 in him since his origin. Let us strike down the 
 bad to the hell that gapes for him. This, we think, 
 or something like this, was Mr. Carlyle's transla- 
 tion of election and predestination into politics and 
 morals. . . . There is not much pity and no salva- 
 tion worth speaking of in either body of doctrine ; 
 but there is a strange, and what some might regard 
 as a terrible, parallelism between these doctrines 
 and the inferences that may be drawn from physi- 
 cal science. The survival of the fittest has much in 
 common with the doctrine of election, and philo- 
 sophical necessity, as summed up in what we now 
 
ELUAH AND ELISHA 217 
 
 call evolution, comes practically to much the same 
 result as predestination." ^ 
 
 Whether the reader accept this interpretation of 
 Carlyle's message or not, none can deny the inspira- 
 tion which it brought to great numbers of thought- 
 ful young men who were to become the leaders of the 
 two generations which passed across the stage be- 
 tween the date of "Sartor Kesartus " and the end of 
 the century. At first sight it seems strange that a 
 message which was so often wrapt in the forms of 
 doubt and denial should have proved so generally 
 positive. Its positive essence lay in Carlyle's glorifi- 
 cation of Duty ; in his emphasis upon work as a 
 necessity to the completion of man's physical and 
 moral stature ; and perhaps most of all in his un- 
 shaken behef that men themselves, as Professor 
 Wallace has said, "are but earthly vestures of spirit- 
 ual forces." This proved a truth of fundamental 
 import to a day which was in danger of measuring 
 all things by material standards, and of denying 
 reahty itself to everything that was not susceptible 
 of expression in the formulas of physics, mechanics, 
 or chemistry. On the other hand, a considerable 
 portion of Carlyle's negative deliverances were due 
 to his ingrained and essential non-conformity.^ He 
 was by nature an eminently otherwise-minded man, 
 
 * This article may be found at greater length in the appendix to 
 Prof. John Nicol's admirable Thomas Carlyle of the English Men 
 of Letters Series, pp. 255-257. 
 
 » Prof. Nicol, Thomas Carlyky p. 71. 
 
218 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 a radical, set against the prevalent Toryism of his 
 youth, who changed to a worshipper of wilful force 
 at almost equal variance with the democracy of his 
 old age. This type of character is quickly discerned, 
 and its whimsies pretty generally discounted, by a 
 patient world, used to a good deal of chaff with 
 its wheat, and indisposed to murmur if only the 
 wheat be of pronounced and unmistakable qual- 
 ity. Carlyle's extravagances misled few of his dis- 
 ciples into anything worse than a temporary imi- 
 tation of his style. His genuine love of truth, his 
 emphasis upon the vital relation of work to man- 
 hood, his idea of history as a vision of judgement, 
 and his insatiable longing for " God, Freedom, 
 Immortality " strengthened the faith of multitudes. 
 He exerted a deep and lasting influence upon the 
 religious thought of his day ; and remains an out- 
 standing witness to the eagerness with which men 
 listen to the voice of genuine authority when it 
 speaks upon the deepest themes. 
 
 I should be quite unwilling to attempt any elab- 
 orate justification of the title of this chapter. Pro- 
 fessor Henry Jones has suggested in his recent 
 essays upon the " Working Faith of a Social Re- 
 former," ^ that we are in great danger of being led 
 astray in debate upon sociological matters by our 
 use of physical similes and figures. The attempt to 
 reach definitions by way of metaphors is no less 
 
 * Hihhert Journal, vol. iv. 
 
ELIJAH AND ELISHA 219 
 
 dangerous throughout the whole realm of personal 
 relations, as we shall find renewed occasion to note 
 when we approach the Great Twin Brethren of the 
 century's poetry, Tennyson and Browning. The 
 reader is not to suppose, therefore, that any elabo- 
 rate likeness is to be traced here between the pre- 
 exilic prophets whose names introduce the chapter 
 and the masters of Victorian prose whose expe- 
 rience and influence make up its substance. 
 
 Yet the Tishbite elements in Carlyle are very 
 plain to see. His rude but devout uprearing, his 
 training in the desert of poverty and doubt, his im- 
 patience with the conventional forms of life and 
 speech, his almost brutal force of utterance and 
 contempt of compromise, fitted him in rare degree 
 to be the spokesman of a certain type of truth to 
 an age that seemed bent upon the service of false 
 gods. The breath of his nostrils was denunciatory, 
 and, like all mastery of the dangerous art of curs- 
 ing, it reacted upon him, plunging him at times into 
 such depths of gloom that his most characteristic 
 seat seems to many to be the throne of despair 
 beneath the juniper. The oft repeated "Ay de 
 mi " was simply his translation into less dignified 
 terms of the old " It is enough ; now, O Lord, 
 take away my life ; for I am not better than my 
 fathers." 
 
 A large, if not a double, portion of this spirit 
 fell upon his great disciple, who yet seemed to the 
 world to be a sunnier and more gracious character. 
 
220 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 To say that Ruskin was more conventional than 
 Carlyle would be to over-shoot the mark ; since in 
 many ways he bade defiance all his life long to some 
 of society's most cherished bye-laws. But he was 
 gently reared ; tenderly sheltered from rude circum- 
 stance ; led up to his life's work by pleasant paths, 
 and the heir to a goodly material heritage. There 
 was a touch of natural grimness in the elder prophet 
 which accorded well with the raiment of camel's 
 hair, the leathern girdle, and the desert cry of the 
 Elijah-John Baptist tradition ; though he was in 
 point of fact a more habitual frequenter of great 
 houses and aristocratic company than Ruskin ever 
 became ; but, through his talk even there, we dis- 
 cern the northern hurr and the rude strength of a 
 hard-headed peasant's speech. 
 
 The pupil and interpreter, who popularized much 
 of his doctrine that might otherwise never have 
 gained the world's ear, was as pronouncedly middle- 
 class in origin. Yet, precisely as the peasant family 
 of Ecclefechan showed a degree of industrial, ethi- 
 cal, and spiritual cultivation which marked them 
 among other households of their neighbourhood, so 
 the rich sherry-importer of Billiter Street, and his 
 wife ruling her household at Heme Hill, are to be 
 explicitly distinguished from the ordinary Philistine 
 type of middle-class family. The elder Ruskin was 
 a man of considerable natural refinement, distinct, 
 though by no means exceptional, artistic gifts, and 
 good education. Mrs. Ruskin represented the best 
 
ELIJAH AND ELISHA 221 
 
 tjrpe of British matron, cast in a rather large and 
 placid mould, — the very personification of good 
 sense, firm household authority, and devout religious 
 conviction. If under these circumstances their son 
 fell heir to Carlyle's mission, it was at least with 
 some of the differences which gentler nurture, ample 
 opportunities for travel, a keen though wilful aes- 
 thetic sense, and the experience of a gentleman com- 
 moner of Christ Church naturally tended to pro- 
 duce. The later prophet might well seem therefore 
 to be the more gracious in the general tenor of 
 his message ; yet like Ehsha he was subject to gusts 
 of wintry anger, under the stress of which he could 
 curse those who dared to mock him with all his 
 master's unction. 
 
 In the case of both, religion may be said to have 
 entered into the very substance of their pre-natal 
 life. Like Hannah of old, Euskin's mother dedi- 
 cated her son to the service of religion by antici- 
 pation ; and both parents long cherished the hope 
 that he would take orders — and incidentally office 
 — in the Church of Engfland. As a child Ruskin 
 seems to have looked upon this as a sufficiently 
 natural and welcome prospect. He has himself told 
 the story of a childish sermon in the drawing room 
 at home whose burden was, " People, be good." 
 Unexceptionable doctrine, to be sure, and worthy of 
 all acceptation, though the picture of the religiously 
 precocious child is a little painful, and the taste 
 which could give such priggishness permanence is 
 
222 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 characteristically dubious. Yet it would be the 
 greatest of mistakes to suppose that Ruskin's pro- 
 nouncedly religious home training was mawkish or 
 sentimental. The evangelical faith of his parents, 
 especially of his mother, had far too much twist in 
 its fibre to tolerate flabbiness or sentimentality. The 
 boy was taught his Bible as many a contemporary 
 was taught his Latin grammar, verbatim et litera^ 
 tint, with less regard to his immediate ability to 
 grasp its significance than to his future acquaintr 
 ance with the text in a day when wider experience 
 of life might clothe manner and matter both with 
 meaning. So his mother, careful to the verge of 
 prudishness though she seemed in some things, took 
 him squarely through both Testaments, exercising 
 a wise choice as to the chapters to be memorized, 
 but blinking not a syllable, as it would seem, of the 
 less lovely or profitable portions of the narratives. 
 Hard names and doubtful actions were all manfully 
 read out, until the whole book became wellnigh as 
 familiar as a household word. 
 
 His own testimony to the worth of this experience 
 is memorable. 
 
 " Her unquestioning evangelical faith in the 
 literal truth of the Bible placed me, as soon as I 
 could conceive or think, in the presence of an 
 unseen world; and set my active analytic power 
 early to work on the questions of conscience, free- 
 will, and responsibility, which are easily determined 
 in days of innocence ; but are approached too often 
 
ELIJAH AND ELISHA 223 
 
 with prejudice, and always with disadvantage, after 
 men become stupefied by the opinions, or tainted 
 by the sins, of the outer world : while the gloom 
 and even terror with which the restrictions of the 
 Sunday, and the doctrines of the ' Pilgrim's Pro- 
 gress,' the ' Holy War,' and Quarles's ' Emblems ' 
 oppressed the seventh part of my time, was useful 
 to me as the only form of vexation which I was 
 called on to endure ; and redeemed by the other- 
 wise uninterrupted cheerfulness and tranquillity of 
 a household wherein the common ways were all of 
 pleasantness, and its single and strait path, of per- 
 fect peace." ^ 
 
 Both Carlyle and Ruskin must have become emi- 
 nent among their fellows under almost any con- 
 ceivable circumstances of training. It seems safe to 
 aver, however, that neither would have developed 
 the great literary and ethical power that each finally 
 exerted without this early familiarity with Scripture 
 thought and language. We may go further and as- 
 cribe no small portion of their influence to the evan- 
 gelical faith in which both were reared and some- 
 thing of whose essence remained with them, even 
 in their most heterodox days. One of the essen- 
 tial features of evangelical Protestantism has been 
 its insistence upon the value of a faith which should 
 be at once positive, individual, strenuous, and un- 
 compromisingly confessed. Frequently enough this 
 has bred dogmatic and unlovely characters ; but it 
 has rarely failed to produce effective men. Of all 
 
 1 PrcBterita, vol. i, chap. 7. 
 
224 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 its children none had a clearer claim to legitimacy 
 than Carlyle and Ruskin. Both disappointed their 
 parents by failing to enter the formal ministry of the 
 Church ; though Carlyle, as a student of divinity, 
 once pronounced a sermon in college, and Ruskin, 
 as has been said, exercised his infant gifts in the 
 nursery. Yet both came to be known as preachers 
 to a greater audience than their mothers' wildest 
 dreams had pictured for them. Both kept a great 
 deal of the manner and much of the essence of the 
 religious faith in which they had been trained. The 
 most popular works of both breathed an ardent 
 Protestantism ; and both, Carlyle certainly, seem to 
 have retained an evangelical distaste for the con- 
 fessed Unitarians ; ^ though they themselves might 
 be adjudged to be Unitarians by a stickler for theo- 
 logical definition. 
 
 The religious burden of both was the old evan- 
 gelical watchword, "By faith ye are saved" ; and 
 no less strenuously did they voice its complement, 
 "Faith without works is dead." Both were emi- 
 nently non-conformist in a general rather than a 
 sectarian sense, in so far as they discovered the 
 seat of religion in the personal relation of the in- 
 dividual to God and to his fellows, rather than in 
 any tradition or institution. Both remained rela- 
 
 1 The reader will recall the letter in which Carlyle confesses to 
 Emerson the fact that he was the only Unitarian whom he could 
 thoroughly like ; while his dislike of Strauss and Renan was sincere 
 and pronounced. Nicol, Thomas Carlyle, p. 225. 
 
ELUAH AND ELISHA 225 
 
 tively indifferent to the organized Church with her 
 worship, sacraments, system of instruction, and 
 social helpfulness ; yet this was at least partly be- 
 cause of their recognition of the scope and range 
 of personality. " The earthly vesture of spiritual 
 forces " ; such was the definition of man which 
 underlay Ruskin's thought, as it has already been 
 shown to have animated Carlyle's. The latter illus- 
 trated it in the realms of history, politics, and phi- 
 losophy. Ruskin carried it on into the criticism 
 of art, which in his hands became of necessity the 
 criticism of life ; and into a romantic assault upon 
 the current political economy. Utterly quixotic as 
 this last adventure must have seemed to the Eng- 
 land of Cobden and the Manchester School ; dan- 
 gerous as the orthodox economists may have thought 
 it, in spite of its quixotism, so eloquent was the 
 form of its strange gospel ; vague and chimerical 
 as many of its specific recommendations undoubt- 
 edly were ; the last half-century has gone far to 
 justify Ruskin's entrance upon this field. Paladin 
 born out of due time as he was, and all too ready 
 to set his lance in rest against sheep and wind- 
 mills, he yet won his way to a place of unques- 
 tioned eminence among the leaders of his century 
 because of his insistence upon the relationship be- 
 tween art and life, political economy and ethics, 
 the common weal and the welfare of each indi- 
 vidual worker. Like his great contemporary, Lord 
 Shaftesbury, he employed a definition of manhood 
 
226 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 which included and took account o£ the downmost 
 man. That both framed some of their definitions 
 rather blunderingly is not to the point. The office 
 of the preacher is often less to tell his hearers what 
 to do, than to arouse them to the necessity of 
 doing something, and to the inquiry what it shall 
 be. When society at large puts this question men 
 are so constituted in their likeness and relation to 
 God that an answer is never long delayed. 
 
 Ruskin's preaching was of precisely this convict- 
 ing and arousing sort : grotesque, exaggerated, 
 emotional, oftentimes beyond what was seemly, like 
 much evangelistic arraignment and exhortation ; 
 but wonderfully fitted to its purpose of shattering 
 prosperous self-complacency, waking a sluggish 
 social conscience, and inciting a hunger and thirst 
 after truer economic righteousness. It has been 
 commonly taken for granted that his doctrine 
 lacked continuity and system ; and the extraordi- 
 nary nimbleness of his wit, together with an ana- 
 lytic faculty as overworked as it was over-developed, 
 has seemed to justify the belief. He was forever 
 turning aside at the appeal of a new interest, 
 illuminated as it always was by his sanguine im- 
 agination. Thus the third and fourth volumes of 
 " Modern Painters " were so long postponed to the 
 " Seven Lamps of Architecture," the " Stones of 
 Venice," and the " Lectures on Architecture and 
 Painting," that the work as a whole is thrown out 
 of joint by the ten-year interval ; while the further 
 
ELIJAH AND ELISHA 227 
 
 delay of four years before the final volumes ap- 
 peared, together with the diversion of Raskin's in- 
 terest in the meantime to political economy, served 
 to heighten the sense of incongruity. Indeed the 
 casual reader is tempted to say that most of his 
 pilgrimage was a more or less enthusiastic flitting 
 to and fro in Bye-path Meadow. 
 
 Yet the student who has learned Ruskin's lan- 
 guage and caught a glimpse of the manner in which 
 his heart, mind, and will coordinated their activi- 
 ties, will not be deceived. Bye-path Meadow un- 
 questionably had its pleasant way with him at 
 times, and led him into its characteristic difficulties. 
 But it never succeeded in changing the general 
 direction of his march, interrupting the continuity 
 of his humane interests, or making him forget the 
 guiding principles of his faith. 
 
 With the doctrine of Personality, or of the place 
 and power of the Person, so forcefully, though 
 often so perversely expounded by Carlyle in his 
 " Heroes and Hero-Worship," " Cromwell," and 
 " Frederick," Ruskin found himself in hearty ac- 
 cord. But he approached it at a different angle and 
 emphasized a different aspect of it. Carlyle's inter- 
 est centred in the Leader, or King, of men ; cen- 
 tred so completely there, indeed, as to confound 
 his etymological instinct and lead him to worse 
 than dubious sources for the derivation of some of 
 his words. Ruskin was quite as devout a worshipper 
 of order, though a less subservient admirer of force. 
 
228 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 He proclaimed his Toryism from the housetops. 
 But ^ in the last analysis ' (as the current phrase 
 goes), his interest in the social order centred in the 
 Person as a worker and therefore a creator, whether 
 poet or artisan. The famous chapter on the " Na- 
 ture of Gothic" in Volume II of the "Stones of 
 Venice," with its memorable emphasis upon the 
 worth of a right attitude on the part of the worker 
 toward his work, sets this forth. The strain recurs 
 in Volume III of "Modern Painters," where great- 
 ness of style, and false and true ideals, are dis- 
 cussed quite as really from the standpoint of the 
 religious and ethical teacher as from that of the 
 art critic. 
 
 Indeed the third chapter of this volume might 
 with perfect fitness be incorporated into the course 
 in homiletics in any school of the prophets. Bus- 
 kin makes true greatness of style in art — and the 
 application is general to all artistic composition, 
 whether in word, line, or colour — to consist in 
 the first place in the choice of noble subjects ; that 
 is in the habitual selection " of subjects which in- 
 volve wide interests and profound passions, as op- 
 posed to those which involve narrow interests and 
 slight passions." Two pitfalls lurk, however, in the 
 path of him who would develop a noble subject — 
 both dug by vanity. He will be tempted on the 
 one hand to supersede expression by an attempt at 
 technical excellence which will lead him, if he be a 
 preacher, let us say, into the reading of admirably 
 
ELIJAH AND ELISHA 229 
 
 finished but painfully inefficient essays ; or in his 
 zeal for effective expression he may on the other 
 do such despite to the technique of his art as to 
 smother his theme and nauseate his hearers by a 
 flood of unregulated and sentimental passion. In 
 the second place, this art consists in a love of 
 beauty, which must, however, be true in its purpose 
 to represent things as they are, never arbitrarily 
 omitting the ugly, but keeping it in subjection to 
 the pure and lovely. " Great art dwells on all that 
 is beautiful ; but false art omits or changes all that 
 is ugly." The third essential to him who would be 
 a great artist is sincerity ; an essential so obvious, 
 whatever the medium of the art may be, as to make 
 comment needless. Not only, however, must the 
 choice of noble themes be sincere, but since all 
 truth cannot be presented, so varied and multifa- 
 rious is it, the artist must be honest in his choice 
 between what can be taken and what must be left. 
 " The inferior artist chooses unimportant and scat- 
 tered truths ; the great artist chooses the most 
 necessary first and afterwards the most consistent 
 with these, so as to obtain the greatest possible 
 and most harmonious sum'^ Finally, great art must 
 always be inventive, and like poetry in this respect, 
 that it is never content with bald narrative, or a 
 mere copy of external nature, or a didactic utter- 
 ance of the truth, to be accepted or rejected at the 
 onlooker's whim ; all its material is made the art- 
 ist's own, passes into the alembic of his personal- 
 
230 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 ity, and after being transfused by his imagination, 
 reappears in living forms calculated to arouse true 
 emotion and to compel acceptance. Thus in a pic- 
 ture the painted forms are transfigured into men 
 and women of like passions with ourselves ; and no 
 less in a sermon, the truth which seemed external 
 and remote yesterday, to-day searches the heart, 
 compels the will, and is transformed into good- 
 ness. 
 
 I have cited this chapter simply to indicate how 
 applicable Ruskin's criticism of art is to the guid- 
 ance of the writer, teacher, or preacher; the fact 
 being that he recognizes the fundamental identity 
 of principle underlying all worthy human activi- 
 ties, uniting them to one another, and joining all 
 to the creative processes of God. 
 
 This constitutes the principle of unity and cohe- 
 rence which runs through all his work. The work 
 itself often seems fragmentary; the active mind 
 was so capable of vagaries and the ebullient im- 
 agination was so liable to fly off for the time at 
 new tangents; yet the man himself remained true 
 to his central doctrines of the worth of the Person ; 
 of the absolute necessity of the worker's identifi- 
 cation of self with his work before that work could 
 become true ; as well as the equal necessity under 
 which society rested of respecting this Person, 
 whether king or peasant, and assuring to him his 
 full share of privilege, before the chief human art 
 — that of living together — could ever be developed 
 
ELIJAH AND ELISHA 231 
 
 to its full capacity. I have already shown how this 
 doctrine is suggested in the "Stones of Venice" 
 and the mid-volumes of "Modern Painters." Be- 
 fore he was thirty, he tells us in " Praeterita," ^ the 
 problem of the Andalusian peasantry, whose labours 
 produced the sherry so necessary and profitable to 
 his father's business, and the nearer puzzle pre- 
 sented by the contrast between his own fortunate 
 lot and that of his cousins in Perth and Croydon, 
 had become matters first of interest and then of 
 concern to him. Under the influence of the great 
 question thus presented, the joyous and romantic 
 grace of his earlier writings lost something of its 
 bloom; but the prophetic note deepened until 
 Ruskin's voice became, if not the most authorita- 
 tive, at least one of the most haunting and con- 
 victing of his day. The message which he uttered 
 in "Unto this Last," and "Munera Pulveris" was 
 like a reiteration of the prophecy of Amos done 
 into latter-day English. The former began its 
 appearance in the "Cornhill" Magazine, under 
 Thackeray's editorship, in 1860; but the outcry 
 against it was so general that the publication was 
 discontinued. Almost precisely the same fate befell 
 the latter, which "Eraser's," then edited by Eroude, 
 began to print in 1862, but was forced to discon- 
 tinue in like manner. 
 
 It was at this juncture that he seems unre- 
 servedly to have assumed the prophet's mantle and 
 
 » Vol. ii, chap. 9. 
 
232 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 resigned himself to the prophet's fate. As Mr. 
 Mackail has put it: "Now the task before him 
 was to break down his own popularity, to be re- 
 garded by the world with a mixture of pity and 
 contempt, to see even his friends fail him and fall 
 away from him." It was hard for the reading pub- 
 lic of the early sixties to see any natural bond 
 of continuity relating the political and religious 
 heresy of the economist to the highly improving 
 eloquence of the evangelical champion of Turner. 
 Time was needed before his central doctrine of the 
 preeminence of the Person should be clearly dis- 
 cerned by the public and bring to light such har- 
 mony as really existed between Ruskin's earlier 
 and later work. Meanwhile it must be remembered 
 that it was but imperfectly discerned by the prophet 
 himself. Both Ruskin and Carlyle caught glimpses 
 of it which were vivid and compelling enough to 
 give direction and distinction to their work; but 
 neither enjoyed the clear and constant vision. 
 Both believed in God ; but to the end both seemed 
 to think of the Divine Power and Presence as 
 manifested by interference with the natural order 
 rather than as resident in it and working through 
 it. So much of the truth as Ruskin saw, inspired 
 — and teased him. Hence it happened that — 
 
 " Stimulating and fascinating beyond all writers 
 of his generation in detached utterances, he was 
 less like a builder than a sower scattering seed to 
 right and left with careless hand. Some of his seed 
 
ELIJAH AND ELISHA 233 
 
 fell on the wayside, some among thorns, much in 
 shallow soil. What fell on good ground has pro- 
 foundly influenced the movement of the world for 
 the last half -century." 
 
 Again the words are Mr. Mackail's, and upon the 
 whole we may give hearty assent to them. 
 
 Ruskin's strength and weakness have both con- 
 tributed in their several degrees to confirm his hold 
 upon the last two generations. He has always the 
 manner of a sincere man, — sincere no less in his 
 prejudices and whims than in his great convictions. 
 There is a frankness about his very irritabihty that 
 is engaging, as when for instance he confesses that 
 on one occasion, as he approached the Alps, the long- 
 expected rapture of his first glimpse of their snows 
 was spoiled by the fact that at the last halting-place 
 his man had neglected to provide butter for the 
 bread. The facts are set down with a whimsical 
 enjoyment of their incongruity, which the reader 
 shares. Perfectly temperate and even abstemious 
 though he was, he repeatedly makes epistolary cap- 
 ital of the temptations lying in wait for a traveller's 
 appetite. The following passage from a rhymed let- 
 ter to Mrs. Severn illustrates this, and shows at the 
 same time his extraordinary facility in verse-making. 
 The reader may need to be reminded that his father's 
 crest was a boar's head, and that Ruskin, who had 
 grave doubts about the vaHdity of the family coat- 
 of-arms, used sometimes to refer to himself on dys- 
 peptic occasions as " little pigs." 
 
234 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 If little pigs — when evening dapples, 
 With fading clouds, her autumn sky — 
 Set out in search of Norman chapels, 
 And find, instead, where cliffs are high, 
 Half way from Amiens to Etaples, 
 A castle, full of pears and apples, 
 On donjon floors laid out to dry, — 
 Green jargonelles and apples tenny, — 
 And finds their price is five a penny, 
 If little pigs then buy too many. 
 Spare to those little pigs a sigh. ^ 
 
 It is odd that his sense of humour, which was so 
 keen and wholesome, should not oftener have come 
 to his aid when tempted, as he frequently was, to j ump 
 from uncertain premisses to dogmatic conclusions. 
 There was a mischievous little boy upon W ailing- 
 ford Bridge whose intentness of regard, fastened 
 as it seemed to be upon the parapet, convinced the 
 passing Ruskin that here was a young naturalist 
 whose interest in stone or insect gave token of a 
 better day for British youth. Suddenly the child 
 darted across the roadway and assumed the same at- 
 titude of intense watchfulness upon the other side 
 — when it became evident that his purpose was, not 
 merely to spit upon a laden pleasure-boat passing 
 beneath, but with impish zeal to spit upon it twice. 
 The disillusionment was complete enough to have 
 
 ^ Prceteritaf vol. ii, chap. 8, p. 294. Even more succinct is the 
 apothegm: — 
 
 When little pigs have muffins hot 
 And take three quarters for their lot, 
 Then little pigs — had better not. 
 
ELIJAH AND ELISHA 235 
 
 justified an inward chuckle even while it necessitated 
 an outward rebuke. But to Ruskin it seemed to break 
 the seal of a prophetic scroll upon which was written 
 the doom of a people whose youth were thus lost to 
 all sense of gentleness and reverence. " Dear but 
 peppery Mr. Ruskin," began some unknown corre- 
 spondent one morning, when the letters were brought 
 in at Brantwood. It was impertinent, as unknown 
 correspondents are wont to be, but it summed up 
 succinctly the judgement of his day — especially its 
 feminine judgement — upon a teacher who could be 
 equally zealous in great and little matters, but who 
 was always true-hearted, pitiful, and devout. He has 
 proved to be one of the most effective preachers of 
 his generation ; singularly indebted to religion for 
 the character of his parents, for his training at home, 
 and for his command of a highly ornate but still 
 honestly eloquent style, formed as it was, partly with 
 set purpose upon that of the judicious Hooker, and 
 yet more largely and naturally upon the Bible and 
 the language of devotion which has sprung from 
 it. It is under the forms of religion that we most 
 naturally describe his experience of acceptance, re- 
 jection and re-acceptance as a prophet. And it is to 
 terms of essential Christianity that we must have re- 
 course in order to express the abiding elements in 
 his message. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE MASTERS OF FICTION. I 
 
 The title of this chapter suggests one of the most 
 difficult questions which I shall have to face. It is 
 comparatively easy to appraise the significance of 
 religion to the man who boldly writes about it, 
 even when, as often happens, we are forced to go 
 behind his words. The poet, for instance, whose 
 art compels him, unless he be a very minor poet 
 indeed, to scale the heights of aspiration and to 
 sound the depths of experience, usually states the 
 case with relative plainness even when its problems 
 are not easy of solution. The modern novelist of 
 the ^ psychological' school, whose too often meagre 
 and exiguous, even though painfully elaborated, art 
 occupies itself with some acute crisis in life's fever, 
 is given to such definite pronouncement upon re- 
 ligion as to obviate the danger of serious mistake 
 concerning his view of it or its influence upon him. 
 But the great names in nineteenth-century fiction, 
 until we reach that of George Eliot, decline to be 
 thus explicit. What religion meant to them, what 
 they meant by it, and what place they assigned 
 to it in the life which their novels portrayed, are 
 questions whose answers must be distilled rather 
 
THE MASTERS OF FICTION 237 
 
 than extracted bodily from their work. This neces- 
 sity lays the writer upon such a theme as mine 
 open both to temptation and to misunderstanding. 
 The temptation is to express by violence from their 
 "writings opinions which he has himself introduced 
 by subtilty ; while even if he be wholly honest in 
 his plan of treatment, those whose prejudices are 
 enlisted for or against a given author may, upon 
 that very ground, accuse him of indifference or 
 partiality. 
 
 Hence it becomes necessary at this juncture to 
 remind the reader of the religious significance im- 
 plied in the very form of the novel. The novel is 
 a picture of life. Unlike history, which — at least 
 until recently — concerned itself primarily with 
 annals and the ascertainment of events recognized 
 to be passed and gone, the novel pictures life in 
 progress, with its expectations, passions, and ideals. 
 History deals with communities, or with leaders of 
 men in their representative capacities. The novel 
 puts us in touch with individuals, and, if it be a 
 great novel, reveals ^characters' — which is but 
 another way of saying that it introduces us to the 
 soul as an ultimate subject of experience. In the 
 Introduction I undertook to show that all experi- 
 ences of the soul are germane to religion. They 
 are not less significant to the writer of genuinely 
 human tales. The novelist deals with the souls of 
 men under the aspect of their earthly pilgrimage 
 of three-score years and ten. Religion regards 
 
-238 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 them sub specie ceternitatis. It follows that the 
 range of fiction is legitimately wider than that of 
 any critical school or sect. Nothing could well be 
 more parochial than the claims of the so-called 
 ^ realists ' to a monopoly of the art. The genuinely 
 catholic critic will rejoice in Jane Austen's " two 
 inches square of ivory"; but at the same time he 
 will remember that not all painting can be done in 
 miniature, and that a microscope is by no means 
 an adequate instrument for observation of the sun. 
 In the development of life the adventures of the 
 imagination play as real a part as love and hun- 
 ger; the thing striven for and missed may conceiv- 
 ably enter more largely into experience than the 
 thing attained. 
 
 What I aspired to be, 
 
 And was not, comforts me. 
 
 The romantic element, which feeds gratefully upon 
 the adventures of others and aspires to adventures 
 of its own, is fundamental; and the ^realist' who 
 ignores or cavils at it does so at grievous peril to 
 his own artistic integrity. 
 
 It follows further that, just as every field of 
 real life has treasure in it for the student of reli- 
 gion, and sometimes the treasure under barren 
 surfaces proves richest, so all honest fiction — by 
 which I mean every sincere attempt to portray 
 life, whether commonplace or extraordinary, as dis- 
 tinguished from that writing which aims at mere 
 sensational effect — bears its message to him; and 
 
THE MASTERS OF FICTION 239 
 
 again, the message that seems to concern itself 
 least explicitly with religion is frequently of more 
 religious significance than the word of the man 
 who is always crying, "Lord! Lord!" 
 
 One thing more needs to be clearly understood in 
 this connection. By a general consensus of uncritical 
 opinion it seems to have been taken for granted that, 
 while tragedy may be allowed some legitimate claim 
 to a place in the temple of faith, comedy, if not as- 
 signed to the outer darkness, can only stand humbly 
 in a distant court of the Gentiles. Pathos is sup- 
 posed to be naturally pious ; humour is thought to 
 be of the world and must be converted. At the risk 
 of seeming dogmatic, I steadfastly maintain that no 
 heresy ever better deserved bell, book, and candle. 
 For consider how deep into the heart of imbelief it 
 inveigles the unwary. Grant its premisses and athe- 
 ism is assured. 
 
 Humour I take to be a quick sense of life's lesser 
 incongruities. They appear in every phase of expe- 
 rience, — in the soul's aspiration and the fancy's 
 dream, as well as in the day's work. The practical 
 joker, who is rarely a person of genuine humour, 
 being just able to discern the fact that humour and 
 incongruity are related, goes about to drag in his 
 * accidents ' with cart-ropes, or lays traps to catch 
 mirth unawares. He fails because his artificial mis- 
 haps are gross and cruel. Smiles are too wary to be 
 caught with guile, though now and then a lumber- 
 ing and small-witted laugh may be trapped. Purpose- 
 
240 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 ful indignities cannot from their very nature be 
 genuinely humourous, though the casually undigni- 
 fied may be funny enough in a rather poor and tem- 
 porary way. 
 
 True humour, then, — whereby I mean that which 
 not only tickles the fancy's palate to quiet mirth, but 
 also leaves so sweet a taste as to make rumination 
 pleasant, — must depend for its wholesomeness upon 
 faith. A mischance or contradiction, to seem funny, 
 must of necessity be casual; the moment that it 
 threatens to become normal or permanent, mirth 
 changes to a seriousness of more than common grav- 
 ity. The sudden eclipse of recently installed electric 
 lights in a public building, just as a speaker had 
 completed a period in which their wonder and con- 
 venience was set forth, emphasized as it all was by 
 the dim progress of a solitary lamp toward the plat- 
 form in order that the meeting might proceed, had 
 its distinctly humourous side which the audience ap- 
 preciated. But their real enjoyment depended upon 
 confidence that the interruption was temporary; 
 that the system was fairly and adequately installed ; 
 and that it would go on to do its work again after 
 a little. Had the mishap signified a permanent ces- 
 sation of service, a dishonest or careless installation 
 of apparatus, or even a foolish trick, the humour of 
 the thing must have been correspondingly dimin- 
 ished until it vanished or gave place to concern and 
 indignation. It is true that the honestly mirthful man, 
 whose appreciation of life's lesser incongruities gives 
 
THE MASTERS OF FICTION 241 
 
 variety to his experience and lightness to his touch, 
 is not infrequently subject to attacks of depression 
 and gloom. His faith is equal to the lesser contra- 
 dictions ; but the keen sense of the unexpected which 
 merely serves as sauce to his usual equanimity, re- 
 veals no less the great and baf&ing problems of life 
 with a clearness which sometimes throws faith into 
 temporary shadow. Then, when for the moment he 
 doubts the integrity of the general scheme of things, 
 not only is laughter stricken dumb, but — what can 
 far less be spared — the quiet smile of a soul at 
 peace with God and man fades out, and, for at least 
 a little, a horror of great darkness threatens. With- 
 out faith a man may conceivably be a wit ; he may, 
 if he have great intellectual endowments, become a 
 master of satire ; but honest humour grows best in 
 the soil of faith, hope, and love. Mr. Shorthouse 
 once elaborated the thesis that it is of the nature and 
 family of pathos.^ He pushed his claim too far; 
 but it is and must always be true that the heart most 
 keenly alive to the humour in this oddly compounded 
 life of ours will never be blind or indifferent to the 
 tears of things. 
 
 Of course humour is a comprehensive term, and 
 not all humourous minds are equally catholic. The 
 enjoyment of farce depends so much upon tempera- 
 ment that now and then a man who is quickly re- 
 sponsive to those rays in the spectrum of humour 
 
 ^ In MacmiUan's Magazine^ vol. xlvii, p. 363. Cf . R. H. Hutton, 
 Brief Literary CriticismSy p. 69. 
 
242 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 which reach up toward the actinic violet of wit is 
 relatively insensitive to the broader effects in the 
 region of red ; and it is always to be remembered 
 that, just as humour may on the one hand vanish 
 as wit develops into malevolent satire, so upon the 
 other it may degenerate through farce into mere 
 grotesquerie^ in which, as Ruskin once showed, 
 there is always at least a suggestion of something 
 evil ; very much as pathos may harden on this side 
 into bitterness and cynicism, or degenerate upon that 
 into flabby and mawkish sentimentality. Within his 
 limits, however, — and they are very wide ones, — 
 the true humourist strengthens our confidence in a 
 rational world by showing the incongruities of expe- 
 rience for what they are — ripples upon the surface 
 of life's tide. In so far as he helps us to see that 
 these things lend variety and facility to the art of 
 living, and that even when the ripples grow to bil- 
 lows of threatening size and aspect they are power- 
 less to thwart a man's progress so long as he is true 
 to himself and to what he believes to be the divine 
 purpose in his life, the humourist ministers to faith 
 and becomes an ally of religion. 
 
 The two women who, late in the eighteenth cen- 
 tury and early in the nineteenth, broke away from 
 the blood-and-mystery type of novel which Mrs. Rad- 
 cliffe and Monk Lewis had popularized, will serve 
 to illustrate my point. Miss Edgeworth is, I suppose, 
 little read to-day ; but Jane Austen's popularity has 
 waxed rather than waned in the last score of years ; 
 
THE MASTERS OF FICTION S13 
 
 indeed, her charm seems to have given good proof 
 of its perennial quality. Though significant figures, 
 they must not detain us long. Both are eminently 
 genial in their outlook upon life. Both proceed 
 upon the basis of an assured faith in God above, and 
 in the worth of truth, chastity, and honour among 
 men below. It is into such a soil as this that the 
 roots of their humour thrust themselves and are 
 strongly nourished. If my memory serve me aright, 
 John Foster once wrote an essay whose burden was 
 that Maria Edgeworth's novels were practically ir- 
 religious, because worldly, books ; and it is not to 
 be denied that their author found herself very much 
 at home for more than four-score years in this Val- 
 ley of Achor. It is equally undeniable, however, 
 that she managed to find place and time in her 
 pilgrimage for the cultivation of some graces of the 
 Spirit, which even John Foster might have envied, 
 " God made man upright," saith the Scripture, 
 and Richard Lovell Edgeworth we may hope was no 
 violent exception to the rule ; but scarce any man of 
 his generation sought out more inventions — literal 
 inventions, like telegraphs, velocipedes, and pedo- 
 meters, or tropical, like the four wives and nineteen 
 children who eventually made up his family. The 
 novelist's place was among the eldest of this horde, 
 and one of her claims to grateful remembrance is 
 that she had gifts and virtues sufficient to enable 
 her to be a dutiful and loving daughter to her father, 
 the affectionate friend and companion of her three 
 
244 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 stepmothers, and a devoted teacher of their suc- 
 cessive broods. Unquestionably the situation at 
 Edgeworthtown might readily have lent itself to the 
 ^ problem ' novelist's purposes. Here were all the 
 elements of irritation, passion, and sordid tragedy ; 
 the eccentric and wilful father, the unfailing pro- 
 cession of wives, the jungle of olive-branches ; and 
 among them the gifted daughter with her ambitions, 
 her impulse toward literary expression, her one great 
 personal romance — and her burden of daily cares. 
 What wonder if she had broken with it all, or re- 
 mained only to beat her life out against the bars 
 of her prison-house ! But Maria Edgeworth either 
 lacked some of the qualities which distinguish the 
 modern heroine, or else possessed gifts denied to 
 that strenuous person. She did not strive or cry; but 
 went about her multifarious tasks with a cheerful 
 equanimity the tonic influence of which has not yet 
 evaporated ; went about them, too, with eyes wide 
 open to features of Irish life which others may have 
 seen, but of which none, until her time, had found 
 means to tell. She never forgot M. Edelcrantz, the 
 faithful Swede who would have married her could 
 she have been brought to leave Ireland and her 
 father's house ; nor did she show signs of much self- 
 pity on the score of blighted affection, though she 
 could never hear any sudden reference to him or his 
 people without emotion ; but from the time when, 
 a mere girl, she convoyed her younger brothers and 
 sisters from Edgeworthtown to Bristol, to the ex- 
 
THE MASTERS OF FICTION 246 
 
 treme old age which busied itself in relieving the 
 miseries of the great Famine, she lived a life whose 
 sensibility never degenerated into sentimentality 
 and whose regard for the world about her was 
 shrewd, sane, and kind. Much of her work was di- 
 dactic — too evidently didactic, no doubt, for the 
 highest artistic effect, and, perhaps, for the most 
 lasting influence ; but generally speaking, it was 
 ^^ wholesome as maize," with that kind of health- 
 fulness which is founded upon confidence in the 
 Scheme of Things. Like Margaret Fuller, she "ac- 
 cepted the Universe," but without any heroic calling 
 of heaven and earth to witness. 
 
 The same judgement may be passed upon Jane 
 Austen, whose general attitude toward life is not 
 unlike Miss Edgeworth's. Her years were scarcely 
 half as many, her work much less voluminous, her 
 art of a distinctly finer quality. She had none of 
 the encouragement to write and publish which the 
 eccentric Master of Edgeworthtown supplied to his 
 daughter ; but wrought quietly at her desk in the 
 common sitting-room, keeping her own counsel, 
 covering her work from curious eyes, and, after it 
 was done, laying it away altogether for a decade. 
 When at last this discipline of obscurity was over, 
 the world of letters entered into possession of the 
 most exquisite gallery of miniatures which English 
 readers have ever seen or are ever likely to see. 
 Indeed it is doubtful if what may be called the 
 miniature method is capable of clearer and more 
 
246 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 suggestive effects than those which she made it 
 produce. Her people, plots, and methods harmo- 
 nize with the Hampshire landscape which she knew 
 so well. There is a trimness and eminent decency 
 about them all which might easily have become 
 smug and commonplace under a less skilful hand. 
 But Jane Austen not only had a deft hand; she 
 had a keenly observant eye which, while peculiarly 
 sensitive to the formalities and pomposities of pro- 
 vincial life, saw behind this curtain into its variety 
 of character ; and she tempered the activity of 
 both eye and hand by the generous impulses of a 
 tolerant heart. Macaulay, who, while quite capable 
 of extravagance, rarely indulged in extravagant 
 eulogy, compared her work to that of Shake- 
 speare. It is dangerous praise because the reader 
 begins at once to enumerate the mighty Shake- 
 spearian qualities to which Jane Austen can lay 
 no claim; but it has this saving remnant of 
 truth, that she understands her people after a 
 Shakespearian fashion. The little group who ap- 
 pear upon her ivory tablet are instinct with as real 
 a life as the larger company upon Shakespeare's 
 stage. Many of them are typical ; they have a 
 similar faculty for self-revelation, requiring little 
 description beyond that which their own speech 
 supplies; and toward them all their creator mani- 
 fests a similar generosity of attitude. It is the 
 tolerance not of mere indulgence or indifference, 
 but of faith. The little man, hot upon some vil- 
 
THE MASTERS OF FICTION 247 
 
 Iain's trail and terribly afraid lest, if he be not 
 damned to-day he may miss damnation altogether, 
 is a sufficiently familiar figure in the world. The 
 author who is never satisfied except when plung- 
 ing his villain in the ink-pot, or his fellow of quite 
 as irritating a type who must needs insist that his 
 villain is a hero, are both men of little wit because 
 of little faith. The masters of song and story must 
 have enough of God's creative faculty to use it 
 after the divine manner. Their sun shines and 
 their rain falls upon the evil and the good. Their 
 wheat and tares are permitted to grow together 
 until the harvest. They are not hurried and exigent 
 in judgement. 
 
 Miss Austen's men and women usually reveal 
 their characters early in our acquaintance with 
 them, but after such a manner that we feel, if we 
 be wise people, that much further converse is 
 needed before any trustworthy estimate can be 
 made. Meanwhile she is tolerant of them and asks 
 us to be so. Let the reader open his "Pride and 
 Prejudice" to the conversation between Mr. and 
 Mrs. Bennet relative to the new tenant of Neth- 
 erfield Park, and he will see what I mean. Mr. 
 Bennet' s satiric humour and the general fatuity 
 of his wife become evident at the first interview. 
 These traits give complexion to the characters of 
 both throughout the story; yet with such general 
 truth to life that neither quite bores us, while each 
 becomes a recognized type, and develops after va- 
 
24S ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 rious adventures into a person whom, in spite of 
 selfishness and limitation, we accept into the circle 
 of our friends. Let it be admitted that the women 
 of the creator of Elizabeth Bennet are better than 
 her men ; it still remains true that her men — Mr. 
 Bennet, for instance, and the Reverend but other- 
 wise unspeakable Mr. Collins in the novel under 
 discussion — are not unworthy to appear beside 
 them. Together, her characters form a group of 
 unimpeachable witnesses to the interest of com- 
 mon life : to the variety underlying the everyday 
 affairs of everyday people, if the observer have an 
 eye capable of penetrating a thin disguise of hum- 
 drum; to the abiding worth of truth, simplicity, 
 and kindness; and to the wholesome appetite for 
 living which such qualities develop. These are pre- 
 cisely the characteristics which religion tends to 
 foster when accepted and cultivated in a large and 
 generous way. They as surely atrophy and give 
 place to a sort of bitterness, sometimes cynical, 
 sometimes querulous, and again passionately tragic, 
 when faith fails. 
 
 Sir Walter Scott is perhaps the greatest exemplar 
 of the truth which Maria Ed ofe worth and Jane Aus- 
 ten thus illustrated. He was a chief of the romantic 
 movement, which touched them only lightly if at 
 all. He was a poet of considerable distinction and 
 almost unexampled popularity, while they wrote lit- 
 tle more than occasional verses. He was moreover 
 an essayist and historian whose work in these de- 
 
THE MASTERS OF FICTION 249 
 
 partments of letters is still remembered and some- 
 times read. But it was a true instinct which led him 
 with characteristic humility to acknowledge his in- 
 debtedness to Miss Edgeworth and his admiration of 
 Miss Austen ; for he was to achieve a colossal emi- 
 nence — I do not think the adjective extravagant 
 — through the application to Hterature of the same 
 general romantic principles and convictions which 
 animated them. He has left a record of the ambi- 
 tion with which a reading of Miss Edgeworth's 
 "Castle Rackrent/' "The Absentee," and "Or- 
 mond " inspired him. " I felt that something might 
 be attempted for my own country of the same kind 
 with that which she has so fortunately achieved 
 for Ireland." His comment upon Miss Austen's 
 work after a third reading of " Pride and Prejudice " 
 is so well known as to be almost hackneyed. " The 
 Big Bow-wow strain I can do myself like any 
 now going ; but the exquisite touch, which renders 
 ordinary commonplace things and characters inter- 
 esting, from the truth of the description and the 
 sentiment, is denied to me." ' A host of the humbler 
 children of his own imagination, who are known to 
 a wider circle of readers than Miss Austen can ever 
 expect, rise up to question the sweep of this dis- 
 claimer ; but the generosity which breathes through 
 both these tributes was perfectly characteristic, and 
 introduces us at once to the nobler and more spirit- 
 ual side of Sir Walter's nature. To say that this 
 * Diary, March 14, 1826. Lockhart's Life of Scott, vol. vi, chap. 7. 
 
 rr-THE 
 UNIVERSITY II 
 
250 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 generosity was always impartially exercised would 
 be to claim too much. Like most rich and romantic 
 natures, he was capable of strong prejudices which 
 were never concealed and rarely very rigidly re- 
 pressed. The pageants of warfare, the sound of drum 
 and trumpet, the gallant pomp and circumstance of 
 chivalry, the mingled majesty and pettiness of courts, 
 fascinated him. Foreordained from the foundation 
 of the world to be a Loyalist and to cast in his lot 
 with what may be called the Stuart element in life, 
 he yet did it all nobly enough to escape the super- 
 cilious narrowness and conceit of mere Toryism. A 
 lover of the past, and especially of the Middle Ages, 
 which he painted " as we should have wished them 
 to have been," he was yet no mere reactionary, but 
 a full-blooded and warm-hearted man among men. 
 If we cannot sympathize with his reverence for king- 
 ship when kingship was embodied in George IV, 
 we can at least remember that he was one of those 
 believers in rank who can make honest friends in a 
 class beneath their own, as the memory of Tom Pur- 
 die and the mutual affection which existed between 
 him and his master bear witness to this day. It 
 also remains true that some of the characters whom 
 Scott chose from among the poor, like Davie Deans 
 and his daughter, or Caleb Balderstone, are quite 
 as sure of immortality as the rather complexion- 
 less though very gentlemanly Guy Mannering and 
 Edward Waverley. 
 
 As contrasted with the religious and philosophic 
 
THE MASTERS OF FICTION 251 
 
 doubters, Scott was so pronounced a believer that 
 he felt under little obligation to make explicit con- 
 fessions of faith ; but the truth which seemed most 
 self-evident to him was that God made man in His 
 own image and endowed him with something of 
 His own creative power ; while the command which 
 made immediate appeal to his nature was that which 
 directed him to replenish and subdue the earth and 
 to have dominion in it. 
 
 Here in the realm of creative faculty Scott 
 wrought by authority of genuine inspiration. He 
 was a poet in the old Greek sense of ' maker/ and 
 by a better right than his verse-making could con- 
 fer, spirited as the verses are. It is when we think 
 of him in this aspect of creator that our patience is 
 most sorely tried by the swarm of critics who have 
 condescended to him, patronized him, and assured 
 us that he did as well as could be expected in view of 
 the imperfect understanding of the art of fiction 
 prevalent in his day. To name, with reluctance in 
 this connection, the best of them, one wonders 
 how so good and generally sensible a critic as Mr. 
 Howells — the master of so pretty an art of his own 
 withal — could have brought himself to comfort 
 readers who were a little perturbed at being told that 
 Sir Walter's day was passed, with the assurance that 
 after all " he can still amuse young people." It is 
 well said rather than well meant. Balaam-like, Mr. 
 Howells has blessed when he thought to curse ; for 
 not only has Sir Walter Scott amused young people 
 
252 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 for more than four-score years : during no small por- 
 tion of that time they have been the same people, who 
 have found their youth renewed and their pulses 
 genially quickened as they rode across the Border 
 or went on pilgrimage with him. " We did not one 
 of us go to bed last night ; nothing slept but my 
 gout," said Lord Holland when asked his opinion of 
 " Old Mortahty " after a night with it ; and though 
 the day for such enthusiasm is doubtless gone, the 
 stimulus and tonic of Scott's presence are still real. 
 He is accused of failure to make his people speak in 
 character, and Mr. Brander Matthews opines that 
 the stories most likely " to retain readers in the first 
 quarter of the twentieth century are perhaps those 
 in which he best withstands the comparison with 
 Miss Edge worth." Now I am altogether disposed to 
 admit that Miss Edgeworth knew her art — and her 
 place ; and he who runs may still read the letter to 
 Ballantyne in which she praises the author of " Wa- 
 verley " " for the perfect manner in which character 
 is ever sustained in every change of situation from 
 first to last, without effort, without the affectation 
 of making the persons speak in character." * From 
 the standpoint of the photographer. Turner is un- 
 questionably erratic; and many a clever moulder 
 in clay is, when face to face with Michael Angelo, 
 abundantly competent to criticise the symmetry of 
 Moses's horns; yet the glory of Turner's colour does 
 
 » Letter to the Author of " Waverley," ^w< Scotus^aut Didbolus ; 
 Oct 23, 1814. 
 
THE MASTERS OF FICTION 253 
 
 not fade nor does Michael Angelo's grotesque and 
 mistaken literalism rob Moses's face of majesty. It 
 is not true that the possession of great creative 
 faculty sets men above the immutable laws of right 
 and wrong ; but it does give them a charter to 
 speak their own language and to contemn, if they 
 choose, the latest fashions in literary and artistic 
 phylacteries. 
 
 Perhaps the most significant criticism of the re- 
 ligious element in Scott's work is that by Walter 
 Bagehot, who not only illuminated economic mat- 
 ters by the play of a lusty imagination, but brought 
 to the criticism of literature and religion the trained 
 sagacity of a financier. He notes in his admira- 
 ble essay on the Waverley Novels,* that creeds are 
 among the author's data. They are taken for granted. 
 Each character has his faith and keeps it. There is no 
 doubt, no unbelief, scarce any shadow upon faith 
 cast by the turning of circumstance. This means, 
 not that Scott was indifferent to religion ; but rather 
 that his own faith was of the sort which he depicts, 
 — sturdy, unshaken, careless of definition, equally 
 careless of perfect consistency perhaps, but accepted 
 as the necessary background of a sane and whole- 
 some life. He does not often care to inquire into 
 the fundamental pro and con of it ; but when he 
 does picture the soul face to face with its great ques- 
 tions, as in the case of the camp-followers in " Quen- 
 tin Durward " under condemnation of death and 
 
 * Literary StudieSy vol. ii. 
 
254 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 discussing their possible future, the reader feels his 
 power. He chose ordinarily to treat religion in its 
 outward aspects, as a part of the gear or furnishing 
 of every normal life. Only with difficulty could he 
 understand the Puritan, because the Puritan based 
 his religion very largely upon, or perhaps, better, 
 built it up about, a great, central, personal experi- 
 ence, and it was no part of Scott's general plan to 
 enter life's holy of holies. He Hked better the inter- 
 play of character and incident as it appeared in the 
 outer courts, where men dealt with one another, 
 than the transactions of the confessional or the altar, 
 where they dealt with God. Indeed he has the preju- 
 dice of a man of the world against much reference 
 to closet and altar. 
 
 One of the grounds of complaint against the Pu- 
 ritan is that he emphasized so pronouncedly this 
 personal relation of accountability to God. Ever 
 conscious of the Great Taskmaster's eye, the Puri- 
 tan's main concern was to meet its approval ; this 
 gained, he could afford to be indifferent to all else. 
 Conscious too that his soul was naked and open be- 
 fore Him with whom he had to do, he too often stood 
 spiritually naked and unashamed before his fellows. 
 Not only was this naturally unpleasant to a man of 
 Scott's character and tastes, but the Puritan speech 
 which grew out of these deep experiences and which 
 was vividly coloured by them must have proved 
 equally repulsive to him ; especially and rightfully 
 so when its great terms became commonplace and 
 
THE MASTERS OF FICTION 255 
 
 degenerated, as it were, into the small change of 
 daily and worldly business. Here lay the snare of 
 hypocrisy in which the feet of Puritanism were too 
 often entangled. The outstanding, purposeful hypo- 
 crite whom ill-natured critics so generally clothe in 
 Puritan garb was no more likely to appear in conven- 
 ticle than in cathedral ; probably less likely, since, 
 from the standpoint of worldly advantage, the cathe- 
 dral has usually had more to offer; but there is 
 danger lest the soul, ploughed deep and made fruit- 
 ful by experience, shall, if too often thrown open to 
 curiosity-seekers, or even to those bent on profit and 
 instruction, be beaten back into its old encrusted 
 barrenness again ; danger, too, lest terms once warm 
 with vital meaning shall become cold and insig- 
 nificant as they grow common ; until the unwary, 
 having learned to say the words, are deceived into 
 fancying that they possess the thing. 
 
 Scott never learned to observe these great distinc- 
 tions ; never seemed to remember that there cannot 
 be an arrant hypocrisy without an equally eminent 
 reality from which to copy ; but loved to make his 
 Puritan and Covenanter types extreme. It is not 
 here that his genuinely religious sense — a sort of 
 religious common-sense — appears to best advan- 
 tage. This product of religion furnished him much 
 material which he used with considerable effect, 
 though the type of character forged from it does 
 not always ring artistically true. Now and then, 
 however, as in " The Heart of Mid-Lothian," he 
 
256 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 "went deeper into reality. Those who say that Scott 
 always worked from without and never sounded the 
 depths of human passion must reckon with Jeanie 
 Deans ; as must the other critics who are dubious 
 of his ability to paint a genuine woman. The fig- 
 ures of David and Jeanie Deans deserve a place 
 in the same gallery which preserves the " Cottar's 
 Saturday Night." Like Burns before and Carlyle 
 after him, Scott discerned the source of his coun- 
 try's power. He knew that it lay in no small measure 
 in the " pure religion breathing household laws " 
 which these groups exemplify, and which Davie 
 illustrates the more perfectly as we observe the 
 struggle between love, pride, and reverence for law 
 in his nature. The love and fear which lay at the 
 heart of genuine Puritan character were never meant 
 to be antagonistic. Their final purpose is mutual 
 enrichment; and if one struggle to cast out the 
 other it is like the wrestling of Jacob with his guard- 
 ian angel. In the better balanced Puritan natures 
 the fear — which simply represented a believer's 
 sense of the majesty and exigence of Law in the 
 spiritual world, corresponding thus to the similar 
 revelation which science has made of late in the 
 realm of physical phenomena — kept the love from 
 degenerating into sentimentality; while the love tem- 
 pered the fear into reverence. Of course it has not 
 often suited a romancer's purpose to represent the 
 better balanced Puritan natures, and it certainly did 
 not suit Scott's. He could make profit of the super- 
 
THE MASTERS OF FICTION 257 
 
 stition and fanaticism which are among the diseased 
 by-products of the spiritual nature, and in " Old 
 Mortality" has given us an ever-memorable picture 
 of religious ferocity. Even here, however, he scarce 
 attempts to deal with the soul, but contents himself 
 with the outward phenomena of Habakkuk Muckle- 
 wrath and his insanity. 
 
 There is therefore some ground for Bagehot's 
 criticism of Scott for his neglect to give us "a de- 
 lineation of the soul." 
 
 " We have mind, manners, animation, but it is the 
 stir of this world. We miss the consecrating power ; 
 and we miss it not only in its own peculiar sphere, 
 which, from the difficulty of introducing the deepest 
 elements into a novel, would have been scarcely mat- 
 ter for a harsh criticism, but in the place where a nov- 
 elist might most be expected to deHneate it," 
 
 that is, in the love affairs of his heroes and hero- 
 ines. Bagehot, keen and, in the main, just as his 
 criticism is, seems to me inclined to push it too far. 
 It is doubtful if the Waverley Novels would have 
 profited by more psychology ; they might have been 
 enriched by a wider and deeper sympathy with re- 
 ligious experience. Yet even this measure of fault- 
 finding must be qualified by grateful recognition of 
 the fact that Scott's world was after all essentially 
 divine. A great, mysterious, far-reaching, and, as 
 he dared to believe, ultimately benevolent Power 
 wrought in it at His task of reward and retribu- 
 tion. Whatever life might be, — and he made small 
 
268' ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 attempt to define it, — honour, courage, mercy, and 
 reverence fitted its needs and ministered to its 
 development. Whatever death might be, — and 
 through all his work the fascination of its mystery 
 appears, — nothing so well prepared a man for its 
 adventure as that goodness which is religion's best 
 fruit. " My dear, be a good man . . . be a good man. 
 Nothing else will give you any comfort when you 
 come to lie here." There may be those who fail to 
 discern a distinctly religious, to say nothing of a 
 Christian, element in this. By so much they miss 
 the deeper import of Christianity's Founder. 
 
 Something of the same enterprise upon which 
 Scott embarked when he revived the romantic novel 
 and gave it an historic setting, was undertaken 
 along different lines by Cooper and Marryat. They 
 could lay no claim to Scott's genius ; nor did they 
 attempt his elaborate historical framework. Both 
 however showed originality and ability in depicting 
 scenes and phases of life which were eminently 
 characteristic of their youth, and which were threat- 
 ened with supersession, if not with extinction, by the 
 material progress of the century. Cooper's interest 
 in the Frontier was as real and natural as Scott's in 
 the Border. Both Cooper and Marryat knew the sea 
 at first hand, and felt as keen a relish for perpetu- 
 ating those features of its life which were threatened 
 by steam, as Scott felt for the loyalties and feuds of 
 the Highlands into which southern civilization was 
 making fatal inroads. In the spirit which animated 
 
THE MASTERS OF FICTION 259 
 
 them and the wholesome atmosphere wherein their 
 stories all develop, they are worthy of their elder 
 and greater brother. Any detailed criticism of their 
 work is denied to us here ; but it is worth while to 
 notice that not only were both sympathetic with the 
 commonly received Christianity of their day, but 
 both could go out of their way to support pet theo- 
 logical or ecclesiastical tenets. Cooper, who lacked 
 a highly developed sense of humour, was capable 
 in the " The Crater " of almost swamping a capital 
 sea-story by overloading it with dissertations upon 
 the advantages of episcopacy and the dangers inhe- 
 rent in democracy ; Marryat, whose humour was as 
 natural and sometimes as effervescent as that of 
 Dickens, avoids these grosser pitfalls, but even he 
 likes to mount the pulpit now and then, especially 
 in such a book as "Masterman Keady." Indeed, one 
 unfeeling editor of this classic ventures a sigh of 
 relief at the old sailor's death, exhibiting thereby 
 his own lack of insight into the hearts of seamen 
 and of boys. For, though neither Cooper nor Mar- 
 ryat was a perfect artist, both knew that the disci- 
 pline and peril of the sea breed not only recklessness 
 and desperation, but deep and beautiful reverences 
 as well. Life on shipboard is no school for saints of 
 the ascetic type; but like life upon the frontier or 
 in the forests, it sometimes nurtures a faith at once 
 humble and robust. Long Tom Coffin and old Ready 
 have the hearts of little children ; the courage, en- 
 durance, and staunchness of heroes ; not a little of 
 
260 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 the gentleness which becomes heroism so well ; and 
 an implicit faith in God above, in His guidance of 
 mundane affairs, and in a merciful but retributive 
 justice which shall one day declare itself, to the con- 
 fusion of all dishonour and the exaltation of right- 
 eousness. They recognized and did reverence to the 
 nearer and more obvious mysteries which inhere in 
 life and death. But the subtler dilemmas which both 
 faced in the warfare waged against their fellow-men 
 — a struggle in which Tom Coffin rejoiced, and 
 which, when forced upon Ready, he undertook in 
 self-defence without a qualm — play no larger part 
 in either story than they played in the life of its 
 author's day. It is as well. There are deeps in ex- 
 perience which may be sailed upon with profit long 
 before we find ourselves able to sound them. Cooper 
 and Marryat are sure of an abiding though mod- 
 est fame, because they describe a life in which the 
 capacity of man to compel the service of nature's 
 rudest forces is most brilliantly illustrated, and be- 
 cause their story is instinct with reverence for great 
 and wholesome things, — God, fatherland, truth, 
 honour, duty, and clean love. 
 
 The transition from Cooper and Marryat to Poe 
 is like a plunge from noon to midnight; though it 
 may be added that the noon is of ordinary day- 
 light, while the midnight is of unique mystery, as 
 though the sun were not only turned to darkness, 
 but the moon to blood, and the very stars to bale- 
 fires. Much good paper has been soiled by the con- 
 
THE MASTERS OF FICTION 261 
 
 troversy over Poe's character — or lack of it. Suf- 
 fice it to say here that he was capable on the one 
 hand of great virtues and great vices, and that he 
 tested his capacity; but that, on the other hand, he 
 seemed incapable of the measure of self-control 
 necessary to a mastery of the art of living with his 
 fellows. His career was a tragedy for which no 
 one but himself can be held responsible ; his death, 
 following upon a debauch encouraged if not in- 
 duced by a gang of base politicians in order that 
 they might use him as a " repeater " in a Baltimore 
 election, is well-nigh as grotesque a horror as any 
 which he ever imagined. What his personal atti- 
 tude toward faith may have been it is probably 
 useless to inquire. He did not choose in his pub- 
 lished writings to say much about it beyond what 
 is contained in his strange "Eureka," from which 
 those who can are welcome to extract a coherent 
 utterance. His conversation filled one man with 
 admiration not merely for the gifts of his mind 
 but for the graces of his heart; while another 
 heard only the words of defiance, blasphemy, and 
 reprobation. Perhaps both are right. Poe was not 
 only many-sided like most men; he seems — unlike 
 most men — to have been gifted with the ability 
 permanently to impress the stamp of his different 
 phases upon different groups of people. 
 
 To-day his place as the high-priest of all who 
 worship the grotesque is secure. They are not an 
 altogether wholesome company; yet their existence 
 
2^ ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 and their cult is significant. In a sense Poe's work 
 constitutes a genuine religious apologetic; his tes- 
 timony to the abiding place and power of faith is 
 real if not great; it is convincing so far as it goes 
 even if it do not go very far. The tribute which he 
 pays to faith is comparable to that which supersti- 
 tion pays to religion. Superstition has this basis in 
 truth, that it arises out of a consciousness of the 
 mystery of life and of the proximity of forces 
 which from the standpoint of present experience 
 are to be feared. 
 
 Sin brings judgement; death introduces evident 
 confusion into life here, and may introduce a yet 
 more poignant suffering into some life beyond; so 
 the man of primitive religious culture reasons, or 
 feels if he does not reason. The untamed forces of 
 nature suggest sin and death to him. Seeing the 
 part which selfishness and arbitrary whim play in 
 the life about him, he leaps to the conclusion that 
 the ultimate powers of the universe are susceptible 
 of a similar but vastly more significant petulance, 
 and hence they must be propitiated in strange and 
 whimsical ways ; and since there is always cause for 
 fear in dealing with selfish and petulant natures, 
 lest one should not do enough or should do the 
 wrong thing, and since fear is cruel, superstition 
 issues naturally in cruel and horrid rites. Amid a 
 thousand grotesque or dreadful forms one feature 
 of superstition remains constant. The superstitious 
 paan is always the inadequate man; he is never 
 
THE MASTERS OF FICTION 263 
 
 master of his fate; he has no key to experience; 
 by so much as he doubts the sanity of the uni- 
 verse, his own sanity and self-control are weakened. 
 It is the office of rehgion to reassure him by its 
 insistence upon the ultimate solvency of the scheme 
 of things. It speaks of the power and the love of 
 God. It exhorts a man to cultivate those graces of 
 power and love which are the image in himself 
 of the divine nature; to get rid of sin by way of 
 repentance and forgiveness ; to cast in his lot with 
 the forces that make for righteousness; and then 
 to rejoice in the assurance of faith. Religion always 
 makes for courage because it assures a man that, 
 having thus cast in his lot with God, he is ade- 
 quate to all experience. Mysteries remain ; but their 
 sting of fear is plucked away. Sin has still to be 
 reckoned with; but like a foul disease which for- 
 giveness can purge. Death waits ; but to serve in- 
 stead of to conquer the forces of highest life. The 
 superstitious and the religious man look out upon 
 the same scene; they behold and bear witness to 
 the same untamed elements in experience. Yet with 
 this difference : the superstitious man creeps in fear 
 under hedges, or shakes with horror in corners, 
 not daring to look experience squarely in the face, 
 exaggerating its possible fearfulness because he 
 has caught but glimpses of it, and making ready, 
 should it finally seek him out, to propitiate it by 
 wild and dreadful homage. The religious man is 
 in the saddle on life's main highway; looking out 
 
264 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 of clear eyes; armed as he believes adequately for 
 such conflict as may be required of him ; and very 
 confident that, unless he grow boastful and self- 
 satisfied, strength will be supplied not only to en- 
 able him to give a good account of himself, but to 
 tame and turn to friendly use these very enemies 
 which his neighbour fears. He meets in the sun- 
 shine, with a brave front, and to his profit, that 
 which the other dreads and shuns. 
 
 The grotesque in literature smacks usually either 
 of humour or of horror. It may be the product of 
 a robust faith's play, as in the humour of Kabelais, 
 Dickens, or "Mr. Dooley." This is sometimes 
 coarse and even gross, as Eabelaisian humour 
 proverbially is; it is sometimes farcical, like that 
 of Pickwick ; or again good-naturedly satirical, like 
 that of the Archey Road philosopher. But its gro- 
 tesqueness, being born of exaggeration which, how- 
 ever absurd, is still open and all in the daylight, 
 remains relatively sound and wholesome. It is the 
 exaggeration of patent and perhaps commonplace 
 realities. 
 
 The grotesqueness of horror, on the other hand, 
 comes of the exaggeration of mystery. It catches 
 the shadows, which lengthen as the sweet and 
 wholesome sun goes down into creatures of dusk 
 and phantoms of midnight. To these things which 
 commonly inspire doubt in the mind, even while 
 they half fascinate the imagination, it gives a sort 
 of dreadful validity. To assign them a local habita- 
 
THE MASTERS OF FICTION 265 
 
 tion and a name would be to go too far and to rob 
 them of something of their power. The master of 
 the grotesquely dreadful strives to make a Presence 
 felt — a Presence undefinable as the obscurity which 
 frames it, but near and real as conscience, subtly 
 powerful as the breath of pestilence, inevitable and 
 sinister as fate. 
 
 Poe's best work is a telling reminder of man's 
 powerlessness and misery in the realm where faith 
 is denied to him. His Tales of Conscience, like 
 "William Wilson" and "The Man of the Crowd," 
 are significant of the inevitable nature of remorse. 
 There is little condemnation in them, but there is 
 absolutely no hope. To make the contrast between 
 superstition and faith complete they need to be 
 read in conjunction with the first chapter of Isaiah, 
 whose hope is as reasonable and indomitable as its 
 indictment of sin is explicit. But the Tales of Con- 
 science are neither the most artistic nor the most 
 significant to religion of Poe's work. It is in the 
 even more dreadful and enthralling narratives, like 
 the "Fall of the House of Usher," the "Masque 
 of the Red Death," the "Facts in the Case of M. 
 Valdemar," and the "Narrative of A. Gordon 
 Pym"^ that his power to marshal the forces of 
 terror comes into full play. Here we find men face 
 
 ^ I do not claim that this " Narrative " stands upon the artistic 
 level of the shorter " Tales ; " but it is at once of great interest and 
 much significance to those who either know the sea or wish to 
 know Foe. 
 
^65 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 to face with the mystery of sin, or disease, or 
 death; mystery which is moreover girt about with 
 power and wrapped in a cloud of haunting fear. 
 Nor can the fear be resolved. The man is in thrall 
 to it. He is reft out of his natural element of light, 
 reason, and faith. Anything may come to pass — 
 except the normal and healthy. Pym and his com- 
 panions are helpless in the grip of fate, which will 
 not let them profit by their sailor's skill and mas- 
 tery of circumstance, but mocks them with doom. 
 The experimenter with the corpse of Valdemar ap- 
 proaches the verge of miraculous success; resus- 
 citation seems imminent. But all the while Poe's 
 demon is working his dreadful will upon the tis- 
 sues. The dead man's apparent response to mag- 
 netic influence is a ghastly mockery, to be kept up 
 only during the term of their relative integrity. 
 Its period reached, decay asserts itself instanta- 
 neously, and what was once the form of a man 
 becomes a thing to be fled from with fear and 
 loathing. 
 
 This is the underlying motive of the '^ Tales of 
 the Grotesque and Arabesque." Man is taken out 
 of the realm of light, reason, and capacity for do- 
 minion, in which God set him, and made subject to 
 weird and baleful dsemonic influences. Death, sin, 
 and mystery are, to be sure, in man's world ; but 
 they need never tyrannize over any man who will 
 claim his birthright of faith. Indeed he never looms 
 so large as when asserting his claim to manhood in 
 
THE MASTERS OF FICTION 267 
 
 their apparent despite. Take this away, make him 
 subject to these great servants of his, and he not 
 only shrinks into relative impotence himself, but 
 the sight of him thus harassed and haunted sends 
 a thrill of fear to the heart of the beholder. " Thus 
 it might be in the world," he says to himself, " should 
 the sun of God's reason suffer eclipse, or His image 
 in man fade out." 
 
 A very different manifestation of the grimness 
 which verges upon the grotesque of terror appears 
 in the work of Charlotte and Emily Bronte, induced 
 no doubt, upon the one hand, by the disappoint- 
 ments and contradictions of their lives, and upon 
 the other by the bleakness of the great uplands amid 
 which they dwelt. It would be easy to illustrate this 
 from " Jane Eyre " or " Shirley." No one who has 
 read the former will be likely to forget the night 
 of Jane's introduction to Rochester's house, with 
 its " characteristics of sad sky, cold gale, and con- 
 tinued small, penetrating rain " ; while the often 
 quoted passage from the latter, picturing the autumn 
 storm beating upon Jessy's grave, is its worthy com- 
 panion. Wind, rain, and winter bring something 
 more than weather into the work of the Brontes ; 
 they dominate and give essential complexion to it, 
 as Egdon Heath rules Mr. Hardy's " Return of the 
 Native " ; and it is for this reason that I should 
 choose the " Wuthering Heights " of Emily Bronte 
 as representing most vividly the characteristics of 
 their thought. The very name is but the Yorkshire 
 
268 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 form of ' Weathering ; ' yet the storms which assault 
 the outside of these grim stone walls are a mere 
 shadow of the elemental conflict within, as Heath- 
 cliff works out his lifelong scheme of revenge. The 
 life at Wuthering Heights has its times and seasons 
 like the moor outside ; but, still like the moor, it 
 is never genial. The best that these passionate lives 
 can do in the interests of peace reaches only to the 
 extent of a brief armed neutrality, behind whose 
 screen the forces of scorn, hate, and half-insane 
 love rearrange themselves for a new outbreak. The 
 reader will remember that at the last, when Heath- 
 cliff is found dead, it is not only with the marks of 
 scorn and hate still stamped upon his features, but 
 with hair and raiment sodden by the rain which has 
 beaten through the open window beside which he 
 died. The incident is more than accident. After such 
 a fashion was this man's nature the plaything of sav- 
 age and sinister influence from childhood. Master 
 — and ruthless master — of every creature that dwelt 
 with him, he was never master of his own soul. Hav- 
 ing played his game with fate and been defeated, 
 he bids fair at the last — it is almost the only gleam 
 of warm sunshine that the book contains — to be 
 balked in his ultimate revenge by the wakening of 
 sweet and natural love between Earnshaw and Cath- 
 erine, whom his malice has robbed, the one of his 
 patrimony and the other of her free and happy girl- 
 hood. 
 
 Hawthorne was a greater artist than Emily Bronte, 
 
THE MASTERS OF FICTION 269 
 
 though it is doubtful if he had her keen sense of the 
 sweep and play of passion. Indeed he may almost 
 be said to begin where she leaves off, since he usu- 
 ally deals with the fruit and consequence of passion. 
 The Bronte world is at least well defined. It is artic- 
 ulate even though the roar of storm, oaths, and the 
 snarl of savage dogs are necessary for its utterance. 
 Hawthorne introduces us into the realm of burdened 
 conscience, longing for peace with groans that cannot 
 be uttered. It has become a fashion to speak of his 
 world as unreal. Nothing could be further from the 
 truth. His world is as real as Defoe's ; but his reali- 
 ties are at once too intimate and too closely bound 
 up with personality to be easily defined. The near- 
 est and best-known things, like light, love, and con- 
 science, are often the most truly mysterious, because 
 they hurry us at once, when we stop to contemplate 
 them, behind the veil of phenomena, into the world 
 of ' Things as they Are,' where as yet we are not 
 quite at home. Mystery is an essential element in 
 Hawthorne's work because he is so true to life. The 
 weird and fanciful may readily enough find a play- 
 ground there, for his imagination is almost preter- 
 naturally active ; but we do not miss, though we may 
 sometimes fail to measure, his meaning, and the 
 ways along which he guides us are the main trav- 
 elled roads of the soul. It is here that we contrast 
 him with Poe. Poe takes us by the hand, leads us 
 into a darkened theatre, and there displays a scene 
 at which we wonder and shudder. Such mastery of 
 
270: ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 mechanism, such intricacy of plot, such command 
 of dreadful grotesquerie, which is yet self-command 
 in that it respects the borders of the absurd and 
 does not trespass there, we feel that we have never 
 seen. The cleverness wherewith stage properties are 
 contrived and manipulated passes our understand- 
 ing. This magician is no purveyor of blood-and- 
 thunder clap-trap ; he is a man of genius to whom 
 we do glad homage. But when we catch our breath 
 it is to remind ourselves that after all we are watch- 
 ing something upon the stage; though something 
 significant of what life might be if the human will 
 were to abdicate its throne and become subject to 
 the vagaries of mere circumstance. It comforts us 
 to remember that the human mind contrived them. 
 Poe shows us little that is worthy to be called con- 
 duct, since his stage is ruled so tyrannously by cir- 
 cumstance and he moves so generally in the sphere 
 of the physical. Emily Bronte on the other hand 
 pictures conduct, and conduct primarily. It seems 
 in one aspect almost impossible in the grotesqueness 
 of its passion and malice; but she compels our 
 hearts to whisper a warning against unbelief, and 
 to be mindful of their own perverse capacities. 
 
 Hawthorne takes little heed of stage properties ; 
 he hurries over the chapter of conduct upon which 
 the world will sit in judgement, and then with mar- 
 vellous art weaves an almost transparent veil of lim- 
 pid speech through which we look with him into 
 the souls of men ; or now and then substitutes for 
 
THE MASTERS OF FICTION 271 
 
 it a mirror in which we see our own. As Mr. Brander 
 Matthews has somewhere said, " Hawthorne's effects 
 are moral where Poe's are merely physical." Yet 
 Poe, as I have tried to indicate, has moral implica- 
 tions. Emily Bronte lays her scene in Hell and 
 teaches all that doom can teach. Hawthorne's sphere 
 in his most characteristic work is Purgatory. " His 
 chief theme was the play of conscience under a sense 
 of sin and guilt." ^ But whether in " The Scarlet 
 Letter," with its story of Hester's sin which, be- 
 cause impossible of concealment, found half its sting 
 plucked away, as contrasted with Dimmesdale's seven 
 years of torment which could only work atonement 
 through confession ; or in " The House of Seven 
 Gables," with its study of heredity and its great 
 lesson that wrong done in one generation may have 
 to be expiated and may also be purged by the work 
 of grace upon another ; or in " The Marble Faun," 
 with its mysterious suggestions of a human soul 
 brought to its birth through the pangs of a great 
 moral crisis, — everywhere we are reminded that all 
 true life is to be expressed in the terms of the spirit. 
 The great ultimate question is a moral one. Sin is 
 an intimate and a dreadful reality, however it be de- 
 fined ; but it is not hopeless so long as men feel it. 
 Hawthorne was no Churchman ; but his instinct 
 as an artist guided him at once to the most signifi- 
 cant things, not merely in Puritanism but in life ; 
 and they proved to be the things of religion. 
 
 » T. T. Munger, Essays for the Day, p. 109. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE MASTERS OF FICTION. II 
 
 Among the demons — and their name is Legion — 
 who possess literary critics, none is more ubiquitous 
 or vicious than the Demon of Comparison. His spe- 
 cial province would appear to be the encouragement 
 of partisanship, prejudice, and all that makes against 
 catholicity of taste. His most facile tool is the de- 
 votee whom he can arm in behalf of a favourite 
 writer or school with the weapons of disparagement. 
 The platitude that there is no accounting for tastes, 
 with its corollary that, within large Hmits, every man 
 is welcome to his own, smacks to his ears of heresy ; 
 while the theory that life is so varied and person- 
 ality so intricate as to justify an almost infinite va- 
 riety of treatment is anathema itself. 
 
 I am led to these rather trite observations by our 
 approach to a group of great men who are paired, 
 not so often in natural conjunction as in suspicious 
 if not hostile contrast. They are, of course, Dickens 
 and Thackeray in the realm of fiction, Tennyson 
 and Browning in that of poetry. It may not be un- 
 justifiable to attempt an estimate of their compara- 
 tive influence to-day, or of their prospective fame a 
 hundred years hence. The office of constructive and 
 
THE MASTERS OF FICTION 273 
 
 interpretative criticism is of course to characterize 
 the quality of each, and in so doing some references 
 to the work of his fellow is inevitable. But the criti- 
 cism whose instinct is to exalt one at the expense 
 of the other immediately proclaims its pettiness and 
 throws just suspicion upon its validity. There is a 
 note sometimes discernible in our praise of dogs 
 which challenges the bystander to speak of cats if 
 he dare ; while those who respond quickly to the high 
 distinction and inscrutable grace of feline beauty, 
 are too often repelled by the dog's effusiveness. 
 Such fools are we, and so slow of heart to perceive 
 the wealth of Being from which Nature is ever 
 offering delight and enrichment to us in these 
 common things, that it. is little wonder if we re- 
 main meagre and narrow in our spiritual apprecia- 
 tions. 
 
 We must remember that men are spiritually in- 
 commensurable. We may compare their bulk and 
 stature; note the general direction in which their 
 choices trend ; estimate in some rough and fragmen- 
 tary way their influence upon their fellows : but the 
 essence of personality escapes us. We lack its for- 
 mula. What we cannot define, we cannot accurately 
 compare ; and it is probably true that the things 
 we know most intimately are most impossible of 
 exact definition, — personality and genius among 
 them. I shall be reminded that this is precisely 
 the doctrine of Mr. Squeers : " She 's a rum 'un is 
 Natur'. . . . Natur' is more easier conceived than 
 
274 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 described " ; * and that it affords a too comfortable 
 refuge for our ignorance ; which is very true if our 
 iofnorance be contented and slothful. No less cer- 
 tainly does it guide the feet of self-convicted and 
 alert ignorance into the ways of truth, because it 
 keeps the heart humble and stands as a defence 
 against the proverbial danger of a little learning. 
 
 There was not only abundant room, there was also 
 distinct need in the early Victorian era for two 
 painters of life with the diverse gifts of Dickens and 
 Thackeray. The man who proclaims his allegiance 
 to one through disparagement of the other thereby 
 declares his own insensibility to certain aspects of 
 life ; while he who would characterize either by any 
 epithet or label discovers how inadequate a phrase 
 is for the expression of a man. We call Dickens an 
 idealist, only to be reminded upon the next reading 
 of a chapter that his mind was perhaps the most per- 
 fect photographic plate to which the life of middle 
 and lower-class England has ever been exposed, and 
 
 ^ I owe this quotation to the Charles Dickens of Mr. G. K. Ches- 
 terton, who uses it for quite another purpose ; and I may take this 
 opportunity to express my further indebtedness to Mr. Chesterton 
 for some light, much amusement, and considerable vexation. Study- 
 ing a serious theme with him is a little like viewing a landscape by 
 the aid of a boy's fireworks. The occasional rocket is not only mem- 
 orable in itself, but really illuminates the scene ; the intervening 
 squibs are numerous and distracting. They splutter merrily, but do 
 little to further the main purpose. Or, to change the figure for a 
 worthier, Mr. Chesterton seems to me to be, like Ruskin, an enter- 
 taining companion if one know the way, but an uncertain guide. His 
 characterization of Dickens is undeniably clever, sometimes very 
 penetrating, and quite as often a little perverse. 
 
THE MASTERS OF FICTION 275 
 
 that the impression has been indelibly fixed. One 
 is tempted to think that there was scarce a cruet- 
 stand in a humble English cupboard that Dickens 
 did not know. He saw and makes us see the very 
 stains and crumbs upon the table in dingy inn-par- 
 lours where we must dine with him. Indeed this 
 mastery of dinginess which our modern realists covet 
 so was a chief characteristic of his. No one, not 
 even Mr. Gissing, has seemed to be more at home 
 amid the dust and squalor of London. Yet in one 
 respect Dickens, like Thackeray, though perhaps in 
 an even higher degree, differentiates himself from 
 the ^ realist ' of the modern school. His hand refused 
 to be permanently subdued to the hue of that in 
 which it wrought. He was incorrigibly given to let- 
 ting his dust dance sometimes in a sunbeam ; and 
 he insisted to the end that even puddles might re- 
 flect the stars. Thackeray is as glibly assigned to the 
 ranks of the ^ realists,' and has of course his place 
 there ; but it would be better for modern ' realism ' 
 if it were content to measure itself by its master's 
 standard instead of compelling him to reflect its own 
 theories. Thackeray is relentless in pursuit and ex- 
 posure of selfish motive ; but he is as certainly a 
 preacher of the possibility and the need of a better 
 basis for Kfe in the soul and in the world than self- 
 ishness can offer ; as must appear to any unpreju- 
 diced reader who will follow him from the opening 
 chapter of " Catherine " to the conclusion of the 
 ^' Adventures of Philip." Indeed there are times, as 
 
276 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 in these very opening scenes of ^^ Catherine/' before 
 his art had perfected itself, when his satire becomes 
 so homiletic as to affect us a Httle hke the too ex- 
 plicit moral of a fable. It was needed, however, in 
 that day of " Paul Clifford " and the rascal-hero's 
 vogue, and one reason why it seems superfluous now 
 is that its work was done so well. 
 
 The appeal of religion to Dickens was inevitable; 
 and it was quite as inevitable that his response 
 should be somewhat unconventional. He might have 
 characterized it as the answer of his heart to the 
 all-inclusive humanity and charity of Christ. Of the 
 dogmatic formulas of Christianity he made small 
 account, and of the Christian Church as a great 
 development in history he was half-oblivious. Yet 
 radical though he liked to think himself, he was re- 
 sponsive to the Church of England and duly con- 
 temptuous of Dissenters. The grey beauty of old 
 church fabrics touched his feeling for the romantic, 
 and the music of the ritual found ready answer 
 in his own highly developed, though too little 
 chastened rhetorical sense. In his somewhat elab- 
 orate will he exhorted his children to pattern their 
 lives upon the precepts of the Gospel, and it will 
 be remembered that, with characteristic assurance, 
 he once edited the New Testament for their use. 
 
 In his novels, however, what may be roughly called 
 organized religion plays no very large part. Minis- 
 ters of religion rarely appear conspicuously, unless 
 it be in caricature, as in the cases of Stiggins and 
 
THE MASTERS OF FICTION 277 
 
 Chadband. Mr. Crisparkle in " Edwin Drood " is 
 meant to appeal to the reader as a Christian and a 
 gentleman. Opinions differ as to his success, and, 
 since the book in which he figures remains a frag- 
 ment, no especial significance attaches to his charac- 
 ter. Toward all asceticism this great apostle of meat, 
 drink, and good comradeship was, of course, consti- 
 tutionally unsympathetic. He was preeminently a 
 man of crowds and cities. The bustle of the streets 
 and the stimulus of their restlessness were needful 
 conditions, he thought, to his own best work ; and 
 he was probably right. Life, in his view of it, was 
 the life of multitudes ; yet no student of the mass, 
 if, indeed, student be not too cold and detached a 
 word to use of him, was ever more conscious of the 
 individual or quicker to catch and fix his character- 
 istics. Here we approach the key to such religious 
 significance as the work of Dickens possesses. 
 
 He was eminently, almost divinely, humane. A 
 great creator, like his predecessor, Scott, and his 
 contemporary, Thackeray, he may have shown less 
 than they of the creative patience which permits 
 wheat and tares to approach the harvest undisturbed ; 
 but he entered into his creatures' life of good or ill 
 with well-nigh unexampled self -abandon. Thus and 
 thus only can we account for the inevitable cogency 
 of his appeal upon the one hand, and for his too fre- 
 quent extravagance upon the other. So sane a critic 
 as Mr. P. E. More has said that, despite his own ex- 
 perience of poverty, Dickens viewed the poor man 
 
278 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 from a superior standpoint and treated him from the 
 outside, not, like George Gissing, as though poverty 
 were bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. There 
 is an element of truth in this, but I incline to think 
 it truer that Dickens refused to feel that even pov- 
 erty was a sufficiently masterful circumstance per- 
 manently to rule a man's character. The Gissings ^ 
 and Gorkys are after all the real materialists — the 
 true devotees of the great god Circumstance. In 
 depicting the poor they too often cease to paint 
 men ; and Mr. Chesterton has very justly pointed 
 the contrast by his discovery in it of one large ele- 
 ment of Dickens's power not only to charm two gen- 
 erations of readers, but to effect practical reforms. 
 Both Gissing and Dickens, he says, " agreed that 
 the souls of the people were in a kind of prison. 
 But Gissing said that the prison was full of dead 
 souls. Dickens said that the prison was full of liv- 
 ing souls. And the fiery cavalcade of rescuers felt 
 that they had not come too late." ^ This humanity 
 displays two characteristics that align Dickens with 
 the deeper religious forces of his age. It shows a 
 third which is at once more conventional and more 
 * practical.' The first two I shall call his childlike- 
 ness and his essential purity \ the last, his reform- 
 ing purpose. 
 
 The rather supercilious admission that Sir Walter 
 
 * This is true of Gissing only in his occasional and lesser aspect. 
 There is a greater side, to which I try to do justice in a later chapter. 
 2 G. K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens, pp. 279-280. 
 
THE MASTERS OF FICTION 279 
 
 Scott will for some time continue to amuse young 
 people has already been noted. In something the 
 same tone we are reminded from time to time of 
 the appeal which Dickens makes to childhood. The 
 charge, if charge it be, is true. The delight with 
 which intelligent children read their Dickens is 
 unique ; they feel his power ; they see eye to eye with 
 him; the fountain of their ready tears responds alike 
 to his humour and his pathos. They do not stop 
 to ask how it is done, because they do not care. 
 Upon their return to him in later life the quality of 
 this appeal is found to be somewhat changed. If the 
 spirit of inquiry into the mechanism of things be 
 dominant in them, they are likely to be oppressed 
 by the glaring lapses of his art. Unless they retain 
 something of a child's capacity to find enjoyment 
 in an episode or in a character, much of his charm 
 must have fled. But over those whose eyes are still 
 open to the wonder of common life he rules as of 
 old ; though less by reason of his story, whose faulti- 
 ness is now too patent, than by his extraordinary 
 capacity to catch some impulse of the heart, some 
 episode in experience, or some strongly individual 
 trait of character, and not only to incarnate it but 
 to endow it with something of the appeal and power 
 of endless life. 
 
 Take a character — or the shadow of a character 
 — like Mr. F.'s Aunt. Why is she immortal? Why 
 do we feel a great pity stirring within us for the 
 occasional wretch who sees in her nothingr but an 
 
280 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 irrelevant parrot? I am less disposed to answer the 
 question than to remind my reader of the fact. If 
 he will tell me why a very clever boy of my acquaint- 
 ance once lifted his hand in the school-room to at- 
 tract his teacher's eye, and on being asked what he 
 wanted simply answered, " There 's milestones on the 
 Dover road," we shall perhaps be upon the trail of 
 a reason. I knew this boy after he had come up to 
 the University and developed marked mathematical 
 ability. Few men of his day in college showed 
 greater capacity for consecutive thought ; none per- 
 haps had higher respect for reason and its exercise ; 
 none certainly felt more keenly the appeal of this 
 inspired phantom of Dickens's brain, or would have 
 known a more genuine delight had a stranger stopped 
 him on the street to remark, "When we lived at 
 Henley, Barnes's gander was stole by tinkers." 
 
 So I chanced once to see an undertaker making 
 his final preparations for a funeral service which 
 was to be performed an hour or two later. The body 
 of a singularly beautiful young girl, an only child, 
 arrayed for burial, lay upon a bier of somewhat un- 
 usual design and of great costliness. The circum- 
 stances of seemingly blighted promise and bitter 
 loss were such as might have impressed the most 
 careless. Even this man of many funerals seemed 
 touched to more than professional sympathy. While 
 we were alone for a few minutes I saw him approach 
 the bier, lay his hand almost reverently upon its 
 elaborate side and murmur more to himself than to 
 
THE MASTERS OF FICTION 281 
 
 me, " Beautiful thing ! beautiful thing ! " The note 
 of subdued ecstasy was real, and I knew that I be- 
 held a reincarnation of Mr. Mould. It is safe to say- 
 that every genuinely interested observer of life who 
 is glad to take account not merely of its background 
 of mystery, its interplay of good and evil passion, 
 and its ultimate subjection to law, but also of its 
 surface incongruities and irrelevancies, will find his 
 experiences prefigured by Dickens more often than 
 by any other master of English speech. In this re- 
 spect he is the supreme realist, and one reason why 
 children respond so quickly to him is that he pos- 
 sesses precisely their faculty for seizing quickly upon 
 salient features of the people he sees and focussing 
 attention upon them. Let it be granted that these 
 are not always the most significant features and that 
 he sometimes errs in over-emphasizing them ; as, for 
 instance, when he makes far too much in " Great 
 Expectations" of Jaggers's habitual biting of his 
 big forefinger. None the less this is a feature of his 
 intense realization of his world, where he lives with 
 all a child's exuberance of vitality. 
 
 This same characteristic explains to a considerable 
 degree the lack of restraint in his pathos. No apol- 
 ogy is to be made for the bad blank verse in which 
 he sings the elegies of little Nell or Paul Dombey ; 
 any more than it is to be denied that elements of 
 genuine pathos appear in both cases. The difficulty 
 is that, child-fashion, he permits his sense of tears 
 to feed upon itself until the exaggeration repels us. 
 
282 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Even this exaggeration, however, although all too 
 often it crosses the borders of melodrama, and though 
 Dickens himself, it is to be feared, gave melodra- 
 matic emphasis to it in his readings, contains a posi- 
 tive and vital element. Its naivete consists in a love 
 of thorough-going experience. Grief is not hinted 
 at ; it is brought home to the heart, enlarged upon 
 and made much of with all a child's unreserve and 
 lack of sense of proportion. Hence it is that the 
 pathos of Dickens which makes appeal to adults, 
 most often appears in such passages as that in 
 " Great Expectations" which shows Pip spelling out 
 the inscriptions upon the tomb-stones of his parents, 
 and building upon their conjectured meanings his 
 childish theories of life, death, and loneliness ; or 
 in the account of David Copperfield's sense of min- 
 gled grief and importance after being told of his 
 mother's death. 
 
 The essential cleanness of Dickens needs but a 
 passing reference, because it is so obvious. He 
 knew life in its vicious and criminal aspects well 
 enough ; in Oliver Twist his chief object was to de- 
 pict it, partly perhaps in protest against the prevail- 
 ing vogue of the rogue-novel, but more out of sym- 
 pathy with unfortunates of Oliver's class. Here the 
 work-house boy, the blundering and heartless parish 
 authorities, the pickpocket, the burglar, and the har- 
 lot appear for what they are; yet, as in the case of 
 the betrayal of Em'ly, or the sin of Lady Dedlock, 
 there is a certain dignity of restraint about it all 
 
THE MASTERS OF FICTION 283 
 
 which is the more effective because it is natural to 
 the point of unconsciousness. Dickens never feared 
 to call a spade a spade, — he was as far as man might 
 be from prudishness ; coarseness, indeed, was by no 
 means impossible to him, — but in the essentials and 
 fundamentals of decency he was sound. Nowhere 
 do we find him guilty of that Pharisaism which in 
 the name of art makes its bid for popularity by pan- 
 dering to unworthy curiosity. 
 
 He had an appetite for life and its story which 
 sometimes betrayed him into a sort of artistic glut- 
 tony, but in itself the appetite was wholesome ; for 
 that perversion of faculty which we have come to 
 call decadent he had no taste at all. Recognizing 
 sin and sorrow for what they were, he exaggerated 
 the place of neither, though doubtless over-elaborat- 
 ing his treatment of the latter ; but even were it true 
 that he sometimes " wallowed naked in the pa- 
 thetic," the question would still remain as to whether 
 this unseemliness be not preferable, from the stand- 
 point both of art and health, to the mud-bath of 
 frenetic passion which so many of the later realists 
 have offered to us. 
 
 This is not the place to discuss the artistic status 
 of the novel with a purpose ; nor is it needful to say 
 much about Dickens as a practical reformer ; suffice 
 it to remark that the highest fiction will always dif- 
 ferentiate itself from the mere essay in ^ local col- 
 our,' not only by depicting but by interpreting life, 
 precisely as portrait-painting will refuse to be con- 
 
284 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 tent with the exact but momentary transcript which 
 the camera supphes ; and wherever the element of 
 interpretation appears there the idea of purpose is 
 at least implied. Only where this idea becomes so 
 masterful as to dominate the whole work, dictating 
 its scheme, arbitrarily selecting its material, and de- 
 termining beforehand its result, does it prove to be 
 an artistic blemish. In " Hard Times " Dickens per- 
 mits this to happen in such degree as to make a 
 tract of what should have been a novel, with the 
 result that the book is perhaps the least readable 
 of any that he wrote. But generally speaking the 
 moral of his work is vital rather than homiletic : it 
 issues naturally from the picture of life as a whole, 
 instead of appearing as an ulterior motive ; and 
 though often frankly acknowledged, it is rarely per- 
 mitted to tyrannize over the situation to the exclu- 
 sion of humane and common charity. " Nicholas 
 Nickleby" was fatal to some of the cheap York- 
 shire schools. But Dickens was not upon a mere cru- 
 sade ; he could stop to paint the most delectable of 
 madmen tossing his tribute of vegetable marrows 
 to Mrs. Nickleby over the garden wall. "Martin 
 Chuzzlewit " found a fair target for satire in the 
 hypocrisy of British Philistinism and the bombastic 
 crudity of life in America ; but it also gave us in 
 Sarah Gamp the sister of Falstaff. " Dombey and 
 Son" contains a sermon — not too skilfully devel- 
 oped — against self-centred pride ; but its faults in 
 construction are all forgiven as soon as those im- 
 
THE MASTERS OF FICTION 285 
 
 mortal mariuers, Cap'n Cuttle and Jack Bunsby, 
 with the redoubtable MacStinger, lift up their voices 
 in its cause. The hypercritical tell us that these 
 creatures are out of character and impossible ; to 
 which the answer is ready that Mrs. MacStinger 
 haling her offending offspring into another room, 
 whence speedily issue "sounds as of applause," is 
 as perfect an incarnation of one sort of parental 
 discipline as Cuttle and Bunsby are of a correspond- 
 ing type of marine simplicity. " Bleak House " and 
 " Little Dorrit " dealt a memorable blow at Circum- 
 locution Offices and the injustice for which the 
 Marshalsea stood ; they pass, but Mr. F.'s Aunt and 
 the Milestones on the Dover Eoad abide. 
 
 These are in one sense only incidental features 
 of Dickens's work; but, like the postscripts and 
 parentheses in our letters, they contain some of his 
 most significant matter. In them there speaks his 
 keen sense of both the variety and the puzzle of 
 existence, chastened and sweetened by an unwaver- 
 ing faith that he who plays the man will ultimately 
 justify his life to himself and to the world. He 
 gives added illustration to the fundamentals of 
 Christ's Gospel. The law of love, unpretentiously 
 applied, fits man's need like wholesome bread. 
 After making every allowance for the artistic 
 shortcomings of such figures as the Cheerybles, 
 the converted Scrooge, or Joe Gargery, — though 
 I am personally sorry for the critic who can find 
 fault with Joe, — the fact remains that they ex- 
 
286 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 emplify in unmistakable fashion the great princi- 
 ples of the art of living together. They illustrate 
 the spirit of mutual service ; and it is to be noted 
 that their very faults are the faults of exuberant 
 vitality. They, like most of Dickens's characters, 
 are so full of life as occasionally to run over; 
 whatever else may be charged to their account, 
 they are not meagre. Never did a man stretch out 
 both hands to the fire of life with greater zest; 
 and so far from elbowing less happily situated 
 mortals away, probably no man of his century did 
 more to extend the hearth and the glow. The 
 practical beneficence of his work is written upon 
 the pages of our statute books and in the increased 
 humanity of our treatment of children and the 
 poor; his essential cleanness of purpose and method 
 in dealing with vice or crime shines out in refresh- 
 ing contrast to the theory that, in order to abate 
 a nuisance, one must first wallow in it; and the 
 freshness of his approach to life, which age might 
 temper but could not stale, speaks of the heart of 
 a child that beat in him. He kept into manhood's 
 estate and introduced into his work a thousand 
 childish faults; but no less truly did he first learn 
 and then teach the fundamental law of the King- 
 dom of Heaven. 
 
 An interesting and significant study might be 
 made of Thackeray's use of Scripture language in 
 his great scenes. Here for instance is a paragraph 
 
THE MASTERS OF FICTION 287 
 
 from the famous return of Esmond. Lady Castle- 
 wood speaks. 
 
 " ^ And to-day, Henry, in the anthem, when- they 
 sang it, " When the Lord turned the captivity of 
 Zion, we were like them that dream," I thought, 
 yes, like them that dream — them that dream. 
 And then it went, " They that sow in tears shall 
 reap in joy ; and he that goeth forth and weepeth 
 shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing 
 his sheaves with him" ; I looked up from the book 
 and saw you. I was not surprised when I saw you. 
 I knew you would come, my dear, and saw the gold 
 sunshine round your head.' 
 
 " She smiled an almost wild smile as she looked 
 up at him. The moon was up by this time, glitter- 
 ing keen in the frosty sky. He could see, for the 
 first time now clearly, her sweet careworn face. 
 
 "^Do you know what day it is?' she continued. 
 ^It is the 29th of December — it is your birthday! 
 But last year we did not drink it — no, no. My 
 lord was cold, and my Harry was likely to die ; and 
 my brain was in a fever; and we had no wine. 
 But now — now you are come again, bringing your 
 sheaves with you, my dear.' She burst into a wild 
 flood of weeping as she spoke: she laughed and 
 sobbed on the young man's heart, crying out 
 wildly, ^Bringing your sheaves with you — your 
 sheaves with you ! '" 
 
 A moving passage, and composed with an art 
 worthy of the deep feeling which animated it. The 
 language in its grace and simplicity harmonizes 
 with the words of the Psalter, which, in their turn, 
 
288 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 express as no other speech has ever been able to 
 do the autumn mingling of joy and tears at the 
 close of a great chapter in the souFs experience. 
 It is moreover a passage to be earnestly com- 
 mended to such as are tempted to call Thackeray 
 a cynic; for it is eminently characteristic of his 
 conclusions at the end of the play, and scarcely 
 less of the means which he uses to present and 
 define the players. This indebtedness of his to the 
 language of religion is not generally appreciated, 
 though but a moment's thought is needed to show 
 how great it was. The "Adventures of Philip on 
 His Way through the World," for instance, is in 
 its very title an echo of the Parable of the Good 
 Samaritan, since it is to show "Who robbed him, 
 Who helped him, and Who passed him by" ; and 
 the preacher is always recurring to his text, as 
 for instance in the character of the lodging-house 
 keeper, Madame Smolensk, just returned from 
 bearing Charlotte's message to the despairing hero. 
 
 " How brisk she is ! How good-natured ! How she 
 smiles! How she speaks to all her company, and 
 carves for her guests ! You do not suppose she has 
 no griefs and cares of her own? You know bet- 
 ter. I dare say she is thinking of her creditors; of 
 her poverty ; of that accepted bill which will come 
 due next week, and so forth. The Samaritan who 
 rescues you, most likely, has been robbed and has 
 bled in his day, and it is a wounded arm that 
 bandages yours when bleeding." ^ 
 
 * Adventures of Philip, part ii, chap. ii. 
 
THE MASTERS OF FICTION 289 
 
 These illustrations are characteristic rather than 
 exceptional. The title of "Vanity Fair" is taken 
 from the most widely read religious volume in 
 English next to the Bible, while its motto and re- 
 frain is from the Bible itself. " Vanity of vani- 
 ties/' cries this modern preacher as insistently as 
 Koheleth of old. But they are a short-sighted crew 
 who see in his use of the text nothing but Kohe- 
 leth's cynicism. As though he foresaw the public's 
 blindness, Thackeray explicitly confessed his apos- 
 tolic purpose to his mother: " What I want is to 
 make a set of people living without God in the 
 world (only that is a cant phrase)." How well he 
 succeeded let Lord Steyne, Sir Pitt Crawley, poor 
 stupid Jos Sedley, old Major Pendennis, and the 
 immortal Becky answer in their different ways. No 
 unfair advantage of his words is taken in saying 
 that Thackeray's aim was to translate the Apostle's 
 statement into terms of Stuart and Georgian Eng- 
 lish, and to show that to be without God was to 
 be without hope in the eighteenth or nineteenth 
 century as truly as in the first. In the case of 
 "Catherine," as I have already indicated, he pro- 
 claimed this as from a pulpit ; in " Vanity Fair," 
 when his art had perfected itself, he was better 
 content to let it remain implicit ; but after such a 
 manner as to make it bone of his history's bone 
 and flesh of its flesh. In their different ways, Pen- 
 dennis praying by his dying mother, Colonel New- 
 come with his memorable Adsum, and old Baron- 
 
290 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 ess Bernstein, in whom one can just discern the 
 splendid Beatrix of other days, take up the parable 
 and point the inevitable moral. 
 
 But I incline to believe that Thackeray's debt to 
 religion and the religious significance of his work 
 are both to be sought a little deeper beneath the 
 surface, rich though the surface be. He is perhaps 
 the most truly epic of English prose-writers and 
 therefore the most sincerely pathetic. To call him 
 a cynic is so completely to miss his secret that no 
 time need be wasted in exposing the shallowness 
 of such criticism. He was as cynical as a boy who 
 under stress of strong emotion must needs assume 
 a nonchalant manner or else give way to tears. 
 Like most men of deep feeling, he shrank from its 
 display lest it might master and make a spectacle 
 of him. But none the less, through what I have 
 termed the epic quality in his picture of life, his 
 feeling calls to ours as deep to deep. 
 
 There is an almost Homeric, certainly a Yirgilian, 
 amplitude to his art. Without crowding his canvas 
 or his stage with characters as Dickens sometimes 
 does, he represents them in the scope and range of 
 their lives rather than in the light of an episode or 
 a series of episodes. If they are sowing he looks 
 upon them with the eye of a painter of harvests. 
 Through all the follies of Pendennis one seems to 
 catch glimpses of the day when he shall kneel in 
 tears by his mother's bedside. The cleverness of 
 Becky is equal to most of life's exigencies, but 
 
THE MASTERS OF FICTION 291 
 
 it cannot avail to fend off the time when her angry 
 husband shall strip her of her jewels and fling 
 them in Lord Steyne*s face. The jaded Bern- 
 stein eyes leer at us now and then behind the glo- 
 rious front of Beatrix, as though they were the 
 ultimate reality and the beauty but a mask. The 
 selfishness and treachery of Catherine are evidently 
 busy in preparation for the night of terror when 
 she shall be confronted by the countenance of her 
 murdered husband ; while the pride and passion of 
 Philip move toward a final reckoning with life which 
 shall bring him to his knees in thanksgiving for a 
 very simple act of kindness, and show him to be a 
 truer man in his humility than he had been in his 
 self-confidence. 
 
 It is in the light of such judgements that the cre- 
 ator sees his creatures, and it is toward such issues 
 that their careers inevitably move ; meanwhile, if he 
 call them puppets and picture two children packing 
 them away at the story's end because the play is 
 played out,* that is only his way of half conceaKng 
 a poignant sense of the certain mystery and the seem- 
 ing fatuity of much that men busy themselves about 
 under the impression that it is life. How far he was 
 from regarding his greater characters as puppets 
 is evidenced by such a meeting as that with Lowell 
 when he was completing the Newcomes. 
 
 " ^ Come into Evans's,' said he, ^ and I '11 tell you 
 all about it. / have killed the ColoneL^ So they 
 
 * Cf . Thackeray's tailpiece to .Vanity Fair. 
 
292 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 walked in [says Mr. F. H. Underwood] , and took a 
 table in a remote corner, and then Thackeray, draw- 
 ing the fresh sheets of MS. from his breast pocket, 
 read through that exquisitely touching chapter which 
 records the death of Colonel Newcome. When he 
 came to the final Adsum, the tears which had been 
 swelling his lids for some time trickled down his face, 
 and the last word was almost an inarticulate sob."^ 
 
 I hesitate to set this down for fear some ill-advised 
 reader may leap to the conclusion that Thackeray 
 is then to be numbered among the sentimentalists. 
 He was as far from sentimentality as from cynicism : 
 but he did feel to the full the pathos of common 
 life ; and the action of his greater novels always de- 
 mands time enough to distinguish the end of an 
 experience from its beginning. Both the humour 
 and pathos of Dickens are lush and full of sap ; the 
 exuberance of May and June is in them and they 
 infect us with the exhilaration of early summer. 
 Thackeray's season is rather a harvest time which 
 tells us that not every bud of the expectant spring 
 has come to fruition. His story is told from the 
 standpoint of its last chapter ; sometimes, we might 
 almost say, from the last chapter of a sequel, so well 
 did he love to carry his characters on through the 
 term of their natural lives. A realist indeed he was, 
 as Professor Cross has happily called him, a " real- 
 ist of the Spirit," who dwells much upon the great 
 human experiences of "pardon, renunciation, for- 
 
 * Article on J. R. Lowell, Harper^ s Magazine ^ vol. xii, pp. 265-266. 
 
THE MASTERS OF FICTION 293 
 
 giveness, reconciliatioiij disinterested friendship, 
 and the separation of parents and children by sea 
 and death ; and bows his head in awe before the in- 
 explicable course of events and the mysteries of life 
 and death." * The conclusion of the matter is that 
 amid all the selfishness, meanness, and contradiction 
 of life, as well as in its mystery, faith, hope, and love 
 abide ; and that the greatest of these is love.^ 
 
 One great name remains to be dealt with in this 
 chapter. But before I pass on to George Eliot con- 
 fession must needs be made of the embarrassment 
 of riches occasioned by the memory of Disraeli, 
 Bulwer-Lytton, Mrs. Gaskell, Charles and Henry 
 Kingsley, Charles Reade, and Anthony Trollope ; 
 to whose names should perhaps be added that of 
 Mrs. Beecher Stowe. It has become the fashion in 
 certain quarters to treat this mid-century fiction 
 
 » W. L. Cross, The Development of the English Novely p. 206. 
 
 ' Had space sufficed, I should have tried to say something of 
 Thackeray's illustrations and the influence that they have had in 
 fostering the popular notion of his cynicism. Admirably fitted as his 
 drawings are to the purposes of burlesque, they unquestionably de- 
 tract from the consistency of his greater works. Almost always sane 
 and self-restrained in the use of his pen, he can out-Dickens Dick- 
 ens in extravagance when he takes his pencil. One would not of 
 course lightly give up the tailpiece to Vanity Fair^ or " Venus pre- 
 paring the Arms of Mars " ; and if Thackeray had confined himself 
 to depicting the charms of Peggy O'Dowd all might have been 
 well; but the caricatures — for they are nothing more — of Beatrix, 
 Laura, and even Becky Sharp, are a heavy price to pay for them. 
 The late Mr. Shorthouse has dealt with the matter fairly though by 
 no means exhaustively, in his article entitled " The Humourous in 
 Literature," Macmillan's Magazine, vol. xlvii. 
 
^94 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 cavalierly, and to assume that we have outgrown it. 
 Assumption is a necessity if we are to be supercili- 
 ous, since proof is, and is likely to remain, wanting. 
 The group is a very notable one and contains some 
 figures of real significance to our present purpose ; 
 a fact which makes it the more difficult to accord 
 them but a paragraph apiece. Bulwer-Lytton and 
 Disraeli, to be sure, do not greatly concern us; 
 though any one who will blow the dust from " Pel- 
 ham" may discern at a glance one characteristic 
 which distinguishes the earlier work of its author 
 from that of his greater contemporaries and assigns 
 it at once to an inferior rank. The hero tells his 
 story in two sentences: "Before that time, the 
 little ability I possessed only led me into acts which 
 I fear, most benevolent reader, thou hast already 
 sufficiently condemned ; my good feelings — for I 
 was not naturally bad — never availed me the least 
 when present temptation came into my way. I had 
 no guide but passion ; no rule but the impulse of the 
 moment." ^ 
 
 Of course all this misrule of passion is frowned 
 upon in the proper places, and duly pronounced to 
 be naughty. A pinch of incense to Mrs. Grundy is 
 a part of the game; but the game's essence is the 
 melodrama and mock-heroics of lawlessness. It is 
 not great and terrible revolt, like that of Milton's 
 Satan or Shelley's Prometheus, but dandiacal and 
 Byronesque. The reader feels the aptness of Long- 
 
 * Pelham, chap, xxxvii. 
 
THE MASTERS OF FICTION 295 
 
 fellow's comment upon " The Caxtons " : " The 
 style produces upon me the effect of a flashy waist- 
 coat festooned with gold chains." The passion is 
 thin and the worldly-wisdom sophomoric. Hence, 
 since self-control is essential to manhood, these he- 
 roes of the twilight prove to be like Falstaff's men 
 in buckram — they find the day unwholesome and do 
 not last. It should of course be noted that Bulwer- 
 Lytton in some respects outgrew his foppishness, 
 and that his later are also his better works. The 
 posthumous Kenelm Chillingly is, like Pelham, con- 
 scious of the footlights and the gallery ; but there 
 is man-stuff in him. 
 
 It was Mrs. GaskelFs lot to deserve, and in consid- 
 erable measure to win, the sympathy and affection of 
 her day. Since that day a more genuine homage has 
 been paid to her novels by the critics than by the 
 public. " Cranf ord " has, to be sure, become a house- 
 hold word, but " Mary Barton" is to most of us only 
 a dim and uncertain name. Yet it remains a name 
 worth entering upon one's list of friends ; for though 
 the book is somewhat crude in places, it has human- 
 ity, beauty, force, and plot enough to ensure a good 
 old age. Mrs. Gaskell could scarcely have written it 
 but for her experience as a clergyman's wife in the 
 manufacturing districts; nor could she have made 
 the book appeal as it did to the public of Cobden's 
 day, had it not been for the genuinely prophetic 
 note in her descriptions of the poor — their suffer- 
 ings, their patience, their charity, and their passion. 
 
296 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Charles Kingsley should by rights have a chapter 
 to himself, and give his brother Henry a generous 
 page in it. The rectory at Eversley will long con- 
 tinue to be a place of pilgrimage to many who are 
 by no means blind to Kingsley's notable limita- 
 tions and outstanding faults. But those who go 
 ought not to forget that here Henry wrote the 
 " Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn." If the story 
 be still unknown to them, they should return 
 thanks for a happiness yet in store; and when 
 they find the book, look for its fellow, "Raven- 
 shoe," as well. 
 
 Charles Kingsley doubtless thought of himself, 
 and has been regarded by most of his admirers, 
 as an essentially virile person. The judgement is a 
 just one. But there is a nemesis waiting upon man- 
 liness which condemns it, as soon as it comes to be 
 pursued for its own sake and sought as though it 
 were an entity, to a measure of deterioration. The 
 virility upon which men pride themselves and of 
 which they boast is more often than not touched 
 with a subtle taint of effeminacy. This is not the 
 effeminacy of softness or lack of fibre ; but rather 
 that of shrillness and the impulse to jump to a 
 conclusion without calculatinor the distance. The 
 fault — if fault it be — is a generous rather than 
 a mean one, since the impulse of which it is an 
 expression is the secret of woman's frequent e£&- 
 ciency and occasional absurdity as a reformer. 
 
 Kingsley's nature was warm and rich. Emo- 
 
THE MASTERS OF FICTION 297 
 
 tional in the best sense, rather than logical, he 
 hated sentimentality honestly enough in theory 
 and sometimes betrayed himself into it in practice. 
 But his instincts were generally true, and at a 
 certain period of masculine development he often 
 exercises an influence over young men as profound 
 as it is wholesome. They like him the better for 
 his prejudices and his exuberant vitality; indeed, 
 some of them in after life find the remnants of a 
 grudge against Cardinal Newman abiding in their 
 hearts for his infliction of such condign punish- 
 ment upon Kingsley's ill-advised attack; though 
 on the other hand some incidental credit ought 
 to accrue to the victim as the unwilling occasion 
 of the enrichment of English literature by the 
 "Apologia." 
 
 A country parson, devoted to the service of his 
 people in things physical as well as spiritual, and 
 keenly alive to the social problems pressing for 
 solution in town and country both; an amateur of 
 considerable distinction in science, and a sincere 
 lover of outdoor life and rural sports, Kingsley 
 attempted to fuse all these interests in his books. 
 The fire of his zeal was hot enough to effect a sort 
 of amalgamation, but his patience was scarcely equal 
 to the perfection of any highly artistic design. 
 
 " Yeast " dealt with conditions among agri- 
 cultural labourers, and "Alton Locke" with the 
 corresponding situation in the towns, after a fash- 
 ion which fascinated while it shocked and en- 
 
298 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 raged the complacent middle class. Both are too 
 formless, and too distinctly tracts for the time, to 
 maintain the place in literature to which their 
 genuine literary quality might otherwise entitle 
 them. Like all Kingsley's work they are essen- 
 tially and fundamentally religious. He was never 
 more a teacher and preacher of religion than when 
 he took up a pen. He was a Broad Churchman, 
 too, in something better than a technical sense. 
 His influence was due in good measure to a con- 
 viction that Christianity was capable of application 
 to every need and phase of human life. In his 
 earlier books he aimed to translate it into terms of 
 what would now be called sociology; in "Hypatia" 
 he dealt with the religious doubts which had played 
 so large a part in his own mental and spiritual de- 
 velopment, and with certain dangers of ecclesias- 
 ticism. " Westward Ho ! " set forth the elements 
 of loyalty, courage, humility, and outspoken piety 
 which seemed to him needful to the making of a man; 
 and however open to criticism these two books may 
 be in respect of form and historical setting, their 
 right to a high place in the literature of their day 
 is not to be gainsaid ; so human is their interest, so 
 perennially vital are the problems with which they 
 concern themselves, and so genuine is their literary 
 distinction. 
 
 Of " Two Years Ago " one cannot speak quite 
 so positively. More than twenty have elapsed 
 since I read and reread it in college. Its imperf ec- 
 
THE MASTERS OF FICTION 299 
 
 tions in structure show clearer now than then ; but 
 somethino: of the charm of wholesome outdoor life 
 iv-hich cholera could not taint, and the general good- 
 will which even hopeless misapprehension of the is- 
 sue between North and South in America could not 
 embitter, survives them. It seems a good book still, 
 whose characters live and whose thews and sinews 
 are yet sound, even though Tom Thurnall be not 
 quite so masterful as of yore. As in "Hereward," 
 ^' Glaucus," " The Water-Babies," and the memo- 
 rable songs, — which in form approach perfection 
 more nearly than anything else their author ever 
 did, — one of its chief characteristics appears to be 
 a fundamentally religious tone. Kingsley's place in 
 literature is due in no small measure to his appre- 
 ciation of the vitality and significance of religion ; 
 for as Professor Masson has put it, " There is not 
 one of his novels which has not the power of Chris- 
 tianity for its theme." 
 
 Charles Reade is not particularly significant for 
 this discussion, nor, with the probable exception of 
 " The Cloister and the Hearth," does his work seem 
 likely to advance any very sound title to remem- 
 brance ; but Anthony TroUope could not be thus 
 summarily dismissed even if he had less claim upon 
 the writer's affectionate gratitude. I believe there 
 are some people who do not care for Trollope, and 
 in whom the mention of " Framley Parsonage " 
 wakes no responsive thrill. Indeed, one of the few 
 disappointing letters in Professor Maitland's admi- 
 
300 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 rable life of Sir Leslie Stephen is that in which con- 
 fession is made to Mr. Norton that Trollope grew 
 dull in Sir Leslie's last years. Much may, however, 
 be forgiven the critic in this time of his weakness, 
 for he had loved much in the day of his power. Trol- 
 lope's work is probably the best example in our lit- 
 erature of what I may call the incidental debt of 
 fiction to religion. Though essentially reverent, he 
 was far from being what is commonly known as 
 ^ pious.' Had you called him so, he would almost 
 indubitably have sworn at you, for he had sad gifts 
 in that direction which ought to have made him in- 
 teresting to Sir Leslie Stephen even to the end ; but 
 no man of his own rank in English letters ever drew 
 so extensively or so profitably upon the Church for 
 his material. The group of stories included between 
 ^^The Warden" and the "Last Chronicle of Bar- 
 set '' represent one of the most notable contributions 
 to the literature of manners made by any author, in 
 any language or in any age. The wonder of it grows 
 in view of Trollope's procrustean methods of com- 
 position, which condensed, or more often expanded, 
 the day's story to the limits of so many words in so 
 many hours ; and it is further heightened as we re- 
 member that he had no extended circle of clerical 
 acquaintances. The Bishop and Mrs. Proudie, Arch- 
 deacon Grantley, the Warden, the inmates of Fram- 
 ley Parsonage, and even the ineffable Slope, were 
 all creatures of his imagination. But Trollope's 
 fency in certain reaches of its play was almost as 
 
THE MASTERS OF FICTION 301 
 
 Circumstantial as Defoe's. He had inherited a faculty 
 for observation from his mother ; he had travelled 
 considerably, and upon what may be termed dis- 
 tinctly middle-class errands; he understood men, 
 and reasoned logically enough that the black coat 
 of the parson clothed human nature not essentially 
 different from that sheltered by his own favourite 
 pink. He was neither cynical nor sentimental ; he 
 neither soared nor sank ; demigods and reprobates 
 were equally out of his range. He moved upon — 
 
 The level of every day's 
 Most quiet need, by sun and candle light. 
 
 But he moved there with a very sure and confident 
 step, at the bidding of a true creative instinct ; and 
 he treated his characters with an admirable even- 
 handedness which is one of the most desirable as it 
 is one of the rarest embodiments of charity. It is 
 easy to sneer at his ideal of morality as Philistine ; 
 but it is idle and silly to do so simply because in 
 the large sense that ideal is sound, wholesome, and 
 fitted to human need. His Grantleys and Proudies 
 not only amuse but instruct us with their picture of 
 the overgrowth of worldliness, sometimes merely 
 petty and sometimes mordant and corrupting, upon 
 natures that mean to be as honourable as they cer- 
 tainly are narrow. His " Three Clerks," though by 
 no means great figures, yet offer a highly significant 
 object-lesson of the worth to life of loyalty, veracity, 
 and trustworthiness — especially in the matter of 
 
302 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 other people's money. " Framley Parsonage " is far 
 from being a startling tale ; no moving incidents by 
 flood or field enliven it; but it is not therefore a dull 
 book ; nor will it be while the ^ domestic virtues/ 
 toward which contemporary fiction chooses to be so 
 patronizing, have significance for us. Let us grant 
 that it is plain prose. In the same breath we must 
 admit that it is good prose, worth writing, and bound 
 to be worth reading so long as it shall concern one 
 generation to know how its predecessors lived. 
 
 Trollope, then, not only relates himself to insti- 
 tutional religion by drawing his most notable char- 
 acters from its service ; he shows a more intimate 
 kinship to its spirit in the ethical tone which per- 
 vades his work. The moral is rarely obtruded; it 
 is never absent. 
 
 No writer of English fiction — certainly no writer 
 of the first rank — is more distinctly and confess- 
 edly the historian of conscience than George Eliot. 
 Wordsworth's " Ode to Duty " might well serve as 
 headpiece to her collected works. The theory might 
 conceivably be defended that her emphasis upon 
 ethical problems was due, at least in part, to her de- 
 partures from evangelical orthodoxy and the formal 
 irregularity of her relation to G. H. Lewes. She had 
 been of a strait sect. She was convinced of the funda- 
 mental connection between ethics and religion. Fol- 
 lowing, even in her most heterodox days, the gen- 
 eral bent of her youth, she was concerned to show 
 that a change of views such as she had experienced 
 
THE MASTERS OF FICTION 303 
 
 in no way invalidated the essential appeal of religion 
 or the soundness of moral life. She illustrates again 
 a truth as old as Socrates and St. Paul, that those 
 who are accused of corrupting youth have sometimes 
 the deepest concern with morality, and those who 
 break with the formal faith of the fathers have often 
 the liveliest sense of religion. It is by no means a 
 universal truth and may easily be put to base uses ; 
 but, such as it is, George Eliot exemplified it. 
 
 With her the era of the ' serious person ' in fic- 
 tion may be said fairly to have begun. Scott, Dick- 
 ens, and Thackeray had been serious writers in all 
 good conscience ; yet they had treated their art with 
 a sort of masterful gaiety ; a profession of letters 
 they might have recognized — scarcely a profession 
 of fiction-writing. With George Eliot men and wo- 
 men began to realize that the writing of novels was 
 a very grave business. Literatures must be ran- 
 sacked for the sake of " Romola " ; Spain visited that 
 " The Spanish Gypsy " might have her due ; Sugden 
 pored over and Mr. Frederic Harrison consulted 
 that the law of " Felix Holt" might prove impecca- 
 ble. It was all very well ; I suppose that it was all 
 inevitable ; but it was none the less a pity : because 
 the fact is that when the canons of an art are all 
 discovered and its very bye-laws codified, the art it- 
 self materializes into a craft. The work of the crafts- 
 man may easily be superior in detail to that of the 
 artist ; but there remains this distinction, that art is 
 the expression of a person, and so far forth its pro- 
 
304 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 duct is related immediately to life's ultimate and in- 
 definable sources ; the product of the craft, however 
 highly wrought and useful, is always a mediate and 
 derived thing, relating itself primarily to a rule 
 rather than to a soul. How true this is will be 
 abundantly illustrated in a later chapter, where we 
 shall find busy little men sweating over the details 
 of ' local colour ' on the one hand, or, on the other, 
 rushing into artificial extravagances in the vain hope 
 of establishing their originality. They only adver- 
 tise their bondage, the one by his acquiescence, the 
 other by his revolt. 
 
 I am not prepared to say that the cloud which ob- 
 scured the religious faith of Marian Evans is ac- 
 countable for the somewhat stilted nature of George 
 Eliot's later books. It is a quality not easy to define; 
 but for lack of a better term I must call it feeble- 
 ness of life. Her men and women are cast in a suf- 
 ficiently generous mould ; she does not stint them 
 in body or in mind; but circumstances seem to 
 thrust them too easily into the background, where 
 they are in danger of being mistaken for automata. 
 Their life is thin, and none the less thin when pas- 
 sionate. This does not appear in the " Scenes from 
 Clerical Life," " Adam Bede," or " Silas Marner," 
 as in " Romola." Nor for me is it so oppressive even 
 in "Middlemarch" as in the "Mill on the Floss." 
 
 But I do venture the conjecture that the religious 
 experience through which she passed affected her 
 sense of humour. This was less by way of extinc- 
 
THE MASTERS OF FICTION 305 
 
 tion, which in her case was fortunately impossible, 
 than by way of limitation. George Eliot was a great 
 humourist ; but the reader may safely challenge any 
 student of her works to cite a half-dozen humourous 
 incidents in them. She was mistress of the humour- 
 ous phrase and the clever apothegm, as Mrs. Poy- 
 ser, Mrs. Cadwallader, and Miss Priscilla Lammeter* 
 shall long hve to testify. In the handling of her 
 choruses, like the rustic gathering in the bar of the 
 Eainbow, or the onlookers at Squire Cass's New 
 Year ball in " Silas Marner," the humourous inci- 
 dent appears for a moment, but only realizes itself 
 as a setting for comment upon life. 
 
 However this may be, there is no accounting for 
 George Eliot except upon the ground of her reli- 
 gious experience, Evangelical, Unitarian, and Com- 
 tist. The most casual acquaintance with her work is 
 sufficient to show her large dependence for material 
 upon the characters and problems of religion. The 
 titles of "Scenes from Clerical Life" and "Janet's 
 Kepentance," which brought her into fame, are sig- 
 nificant. Dinah, the Methodist preacher, is the he- 
 roine, if not indeed the central figure, of " Adam 
 Bede." Savonarola is to be held accountable for 
 
 ^ Priscilla's humour does not of course compare in volume with 
 Mrs. Poyser's ; but its quality is every whit as good. She is bound 
 to stay upon the farm with her father, for if anything turns out 
 wrong, as it can 't *' but do in these times, there 's nothing kills a 
 man so soon as having nobody to find fault with but himself." She 
 must also keep up her herd of cows, inasmuch as " there 's nothing 
 like a dairy if folks want a bit o' worrit to make the days pass." 
 
306: ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 " Eomola," since it was the Florence of his day that 
 she set herself with painful conscientiousness to 
 depict. No one does more to redeem " Felix Holt " 
 from failure than the Rev. Rufus Lyon, nor to en- 
 liven the somewhat sombre landscape of " Middle- 
 march " than the sprightly Mrs. Cadwallader. Nor 
 is this constant reference to the official representa- 
 tives of religion a mere superficial accident. The 
 problems of her novels are preeminently problems 
 of the soul. Janet ' finds herself ' through the influ- 
 ence of the Evangelical Tryan. The story of " Silas 
 Marner" is a narrative of restoration to faith and 
 therefore to life. The old weaver's heart, which had 
 been withering into insensibility under the influ- 
 ences of injustice, misunderstanding, neglect, and 
 selfishness, becomes again as the heart of a little 
 child under the burden and the joy of Eppie's adop- 
 tion. The sermon of Dinah on the village common 
 might have been a veritable utterance of George 
 Eliot's Methodist aunt had there been any need to 
 look abroad for it. In point of fact it was her own 
 in a deeper sense than almost anything she ever 
 wrote ; produced, as she has told us, with tears, and 
 representative in the highest degree of her deep 
 religious nature and her keen homiletic instinct. 
 
 Parallel to these questions of religious faith, which 
 find such large place in the studies of Janet, Dinah, 
 and Silas Marner, move the great ethical problems 
 from which they can never long be separated. These 
 latter may almost be said to represent the bulk o£ 
 
THE MASTERS OF FICTION 307 
 
 George Eliot's work. They appear in the relations 
 of Donnithorne and Hetty ; in the duplicity of God- 
 frey Cass — if duplicity be not too harsh a term for 
 the concealment of one unworthy and unfortunate 
 rather than criminal episode in a generally upright 
 life ; in the progress of Romola toward self-know- 
 ledge, and in that of Tito toward self -conviction ; as 
 well as in the remarkable embodiment of hypocrisy, 
 half-premeditated, half-unconscious, in Bulstrode. 
 Whatever may be said of George Eliot's failure to 
 retain faith in any formulated doctrine of grace, 
 there can be no question of her grasp upon a doc- 
 trine of judgement. No greater exemplar of the so- 
 called Nonconformist conscience ever Hved and wrote. 
 It is quite true that she insisted upon her privilege 
 and obligation to distinguish between the conven- 
 tional and the fundamentally ethical. She was by 
 no means insensitive to criticism of her relation with 
 Lewes, as the letter to Mrs. Bray in which such em- 
 phasis is laid upon her own view of it as a real and 
 sacred marriage remains to testify. Yet she was no 
 mere contemner of convention, as was shown by her 
 regular marriage to Mr. Cross and the consequent 
 wrath of those whom Mr. Jeaffreson calls the " ex- 
 treme Shelleyan Socialists." However these episodes 
 in her experience may be interpreted, the fact re- 
 mains that no writer of the first rank has more in- 
 sistently or ably rung the changes upon the great 
 ethical principle of Christianity, "Whatsoever a 
 man soweth,that shall he also reap." 
 
308 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 One other characteristic of George Eliot's work 
 in fiction which relates it closely to religion is her 
 appreciation of the worth of common life and her 
 keen sense of its pathos and mystery. Her best 
 work is provincial. She is most at home when de- 
 scribing commonplace, middle-class people with the 
 humbler folk who surround them ; and her know- 
 ledge of their life was thorough enough to render this 
 description immune from the contagion of cheap 
 contempt and shallow cynicism. In literature as in 
 religion contempt is usually a product of disease. 
 The work which embodies it, however clever it may 
 seem for the moment, is marked for early death. I 
 am aware that Swift may be quoted against me 
 here ; so may Lucretius ; but in the sceva indig- 
 natio of such genius there are positive elements 
 capable of survival, despite the worst that the malig- 
 nant influences of contempt can do. The people 
 of George Eliot's villages and provincial towns may 
 lead limited lives, but they move nevertheless in 
 a large world. 
 
 " ' Ah [says Dolly gravely to Silas, wondering 
 whence Eppie could have come to him], ah, it's like 
 the night and the morning, and the sleeping and the 
 waking, and the rain and the harvest — one goes 
 and the other comes, and we know nothing how or 
 where. We may strive and scrat and fend, but it's 
 little we can do arter all — the big things come and 
 go wi' no striving o' our'n — they do, that they do.* " * 
 
 ' Silas Marnery chap. xiv. 
 
THE MASTERS OF FICTION 309 
 
 It was in the same spirit that, in a letter to Black- 
 wood, George Eliot exhorted him to open his eyes 
 to the poetry and pathos, the tragedy and comedy 
 of common life, and it was characteristic of her that 
 " Middlemarch " should end with such a confession 
 of faith as the following : " That things are not so 
 ill with you and me as they might have been is half 
 owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden 
 life and rest in un visited tombs."* 
 
 Later writers are not lacking in this same sense 
 of mystery and pathos; they have too often striven 
 for distinction, however, by treating it, as Sir Leslie 
 Stephen has somewhere said, either as a grievance 
 which can be summarily removed, or as an oppor- 
 tunity for exhibiting their own sensibility. George 
 Eliot did neither. She recognized grievances to 
 be removed, and in "Felix Holt" came perilously 
 near writing a three-volume tract upon them. She 
 possessed sensibility and may occasionally have in- 
 dulged it. But she did not rail at fate or treat life 
 as an evil. On the contrary, she everywhere recog- 
 nizes the need of some generous coordinating prin- 
 ciple, if it is to be quite* sane or wholesome. The 
 instinct which kept her from proselyting in the 
 name of ^rationalism' was therefore a true one, 
 inasmuch as it warned her that to pull out a main 
 prop of life without putting some equivalent stay 
 
 ^ These two passages are set in a similar relation by Mr. Herbert 
 Paul in his Stray Leaves, p. 43. His essay upon George Eliot in that 
 volume is especially notable for its appreciation of Middlemarch. 
 
310 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 in its place was an essentially irrational proceeding. 
 Whether Evangelical or Positivist, she remained 
 in some real sense religious and was always the 
 apostle of some gospel or other. The distinctively 
 Christian note is often in abeyance, as she held it 
 honestly in abeyance in her experience ; but none 
 the less it remains the subject of a sort of wistful 
 concern to her and to her characters, as though it 
 were meant for life and only the disjointed times 
 kept life from claiming it. 
 
 Dolly Winthrop and Silas sum the matter up in 
 their last conversation. 
 
 ^^ ' I shall never know [says the latter, referring 
 to the false accusation brought against him many 
 years before] whether they got at the truth o' the 
 robbery. . . It 's dark to me, Mrs. Winthrop, that 
 is ; I doubt it '11 be dark to the last.' 
 
 " ^ Well, yes, Master Marner,' said Dolly, who sat 
 with a placid listening face, now bordered by grey 
 hairs; ^ I doubt it may. It's the will o' Them above 
 as a many things should be dark to us ; but there 's 
 some things as I 've never felt i' the dark about, 
 and they 're mostly what comes i' the day's work. 
 You were hard done by that once. Master Marner, 
 and it seems as you '11 never know the rights of 
 it; but that doesn't hinder there being a rights, 
 Master Marner, for all it's dark to you and me.' 
 
 "^No,' said Silas, ^no; that doesn't hinder. 
 Since the time the child was sent to me and I 've 
 come to love her as myself, I 've had Hght enough 
 to trusten by ; and now she says she '11 never leave 
 me. I think I shall trusten till I die.' " 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 THE NEW RADICALISM 
 
 "Some day," wrote Sir Leslie Stephen to Mr. 
 C. E. Norton, in 1889, " I shall remark upon the 
 extraordinary phenomenon that Mill and Newman 
 and Carlyle all lived in the same century."* It is a 
 tribute to the intellectual wealth of the early Vic- 
 torian decades, which might have been enhanced 
 by the inclusion of Ruskin in the group; since in 
 spite of his relation to Carlyle he represents a 
 fourth line of influence. The connection of New- 
 man and Ruskin with the Evangelicals has already 
 been noted, together with Carlyle*s temporary pur- 
 pose to prepare himself for the Presbyterian minis- 
 try. James Mill not only entertained such a pur- 
 pose but accomplished it. Though a shoemaker's 
 son, he became an excellent scholar, entered the 
 pulpit, and maintained himself as a minister for 
 several years. He seems, however, never to have 
 had much heart for his profession, and by the time 
 of his settlement in London in 1802 had already 
 developed violent anti-religious prejudices which 
 were destined to play a large part in the education 
 * Life and Letters of Sir Leslie StepTien, p. 397. 
 
312 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 of his famous son. How much of James Mill's 
 hostility to religion was due to the influence of 
 Bentham may not now be determined. Bentham 
 himself presents a figure full of seK-contradiction, 
 with his genuinely humane instincts, his just dis- 
 content with the shape of British jurisprudence, — 
 
 If shape it might be called, that shape had none, 
 
 and his untiring efforts to give it form and real ap- 
 plication to the people's needs ; efforts which, as 
 Mill said, " found the philosophy of law a chaos, 
 and left it a science " ; and at the same time his vio- 
 lent prejudices, his capacity for a sort of learned 
 Billingsgate, his intolerance of all difference from 
 his opinions, and his dogmatic denial of many things 
 apparently upon the sole ground that they had not 
 chanced to fall within the limits of his own expe- 
 rience. His Biblical criticism, though incompetent 
 enough in other respects, has at least the merit of 
 being humourous, since he numbers St. Luke among 
 the twelve Apostles, and refers to Priscillaand Aquila 
 as two female disciples of St. Paul. ^ 
 
 Beside him among the radical influences of the 
 early century must be set Priestley and William God- 
 win. The former was a Presbyterian-Unitarian min- 
 ister who suffered many things at the hands of the 
 Birmingham mob, for the sake of what he believed 
 to be his faith and what his enemies thought to be 
 
 ' Benn, History of English Rationalism in the Nineteenth Century, 
 vol. i, p. 302. 
 
THE NEW RADICALISM 313 
 
 his lack of it. A consistent and valiant champion 
 of the French Revolution, he was even elected a 
 deputy to the National Convention ; though he has 
 become better known to later generations for his 
 distinofuished achievements as a chemist. A friend 
 of Franklin, moreover, to whom he was indebted 
 for aid in the preparation of his " History of Elec- 
 tricity," he carried all of Franklin's enhghtened 
 curiosity and impatience of mere tradition into chemi- 
 cal speculation and experiment. He has a good claim 
 to first place in the new science which displaced the 
 old phlogiston theories, and he disputes with La- 
 voisier the discovery of oxygen, while the Utilitari- 
 ans are no less under obligation to him for their 
 watchword, " The greatest happiness of the greatest 
 number." He died in America in 1804, roundly de- 
 nounced as an infidel by many of the orthodox, but 
 "believing himself to hold the doctrines of the 
 Primitive Christians, and looking for the second 
 coming of Christ." 
 
 Godwin was a man of different type : one of those 
 anarchists in theory who live an ill-ordered and half- 
 parasitical, yet upon the whole a laborious and hum- 
 drum life ; a radical of radicals, who would submit 
 to the form of marriage with his first wife only for 
 the sake of legitimizing their child, but who was 
 mightily perturbed when the child herself a. few 
 years later ran away with Shelley, to make practical 
 application of her father's theories. It is a question 
 whether he ever quite forgave this evidence of dis- 
 
314 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 cipleship, though some solace was to be found in the 
 very considerable sums which he extracted from 
 Shelley's complaisant purse. The pointing of amoral 
 is no part of my purpose in this brief reference to 
 Godwin's career ; but a tale might be highly adorned 
 by the lives and adventures of the group who made 
 up his family after the second marriage. There were 
 Fanny Imlay, the illegitimate child of his first wife, 
 destined to die by her own hand some fifteen years 
 later, and a month to the day after the suicide of 
 Shelley's first wife; the daughter Mary, who, having 
 been legitimized by the tardy marriage of her parents 
 as above related, was herself by a yet tardier cere- 
 mony to become the second Mrs. Shelley; a daughter 
 of Godwin's second wife by a former marriage, who 
 in her turn, as Lord Byron's mistress and the mother 
 of " AUegra," was to illustrate the family emanci- 
 pation from conventionality ; and William Godwin, 
 Junior, the son of this second marriage and a youth 
 of promise which was blighted by his death at the 
 age of twenty-nine.' 
 
 Godwin has been characterized as " largely a blend 
 of Micawber and Pecksniff," and there is some 
 ground for the charge. Yet he had a kind of gen- 
 ius, as he showed a species of industry, and has en- 
 tered into a sort of fame. Whether or not honesty 
 
 * The extraordinary composition of this group is noted by the 
 writer of an excellent sketch of Godwin in Chambers' Encyclopedia 
 of English Literature, vol. ii, p. 703. Cf. also, the rather dreary Life 
 by Kegan Paul. 
 
THE NEW RADICALISM 315 
 
 and benevolence of purpose admit of similar quali- 
 fication I do not undertake to say ; but there is no 
 doubt that he did something to further the objects 
 of the Utilitarians, as he may also have helped at 
 once to propagate and mitigate the principles of the 
 Revolution. A practical anarchist, in so far as he 
 would have had the doctrine of laissez faire carried 
 to its extreme conclusions, he yet was no advocate of 
 violence. Agreeing on the other hand with Bentham 
 in his utilitarian aim, he differed widely from him 
 in respect of means ; and it was not until Herbert 
 Spencer's day that the two lines of influence repre- 
 sented by Bentham and Godwin were caught up and 
 woven together.^ Godwin too began life as a minis- 
 ter of religion, and preached with some degree of 
 regularity for a half-dozen years. Later on he be- 
 came, or thought that he became, an atheist; but 
 under the influence of Coleridge he seems to have 
 passed out of this region of denial into a somewhat 
 misty theism. Yet even in the days of "Political 
 Justice " he was able to rouse in young men an im- 
 pidse that was close akin to the spirit of Christianity. 
 " I had never before," said Crabb Robinson after 
 reading it, " nor, I am afraid, have I ever since, felt 
 so strongly the duty of not living to one's self, but 
 of having for one's sole object the good of the com- 
 munity." ^ 
 
 * Benn, History of English Rationalism in the Nineteenth Century ^ 
 Tol. ii, pp. 206-207. 
 ' Reminiscences f vol. i, chap, iii (1795). Eobinson was equal, how- 
 
316 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Among the many assaults which so-called ^ ration- 
 alism' makes upon the validity of religion, one is 
 based upon its Protean character. Religion, these 
 critics allege, faced with new obstacles, is always 
 changing its form, realigning its battalions, zigzag- 
 ging toward its goal when the straight path seems 
 blocked. Such a writer as Mr. Benn, in his recent 
 " History of English Rationalism," is almost as con- 
 temptuous of the willingness shown by progressive 
 Christian teachers to welcome new scientific discov- 
 eries as he is toward the ultra-conservatives. The 
 latter are obscurantists, theology's normal product; 
 the former are pretenders whose charlatan facility 
 in the Chinese art of ' saving one's face ' is equally 
 characteristic of the baneful tendency inseparable 
 from religious thought and practice. The argument 
 appears to be that revelation is, from its very nature, 
 a fixed, complete, and stable sum of truth ; that the- 
 ology is really as incapable of growth as Macaulay 
 represented it to be when he seated his New Zea- 
 lander — long since become a prince of bores — 
 upon a pier of London Bridge to sketch the ruins 
 of St. Paul's ; that a period of general scientific ad- 
 vance by which other regions of human experience 
 profit must of necessity prove fatal to faith , and 
 
 ever, to distinguishing between Godwin the philosopher and Godwin 
 the man of business. Some years later he was with Coleridge when 
 Godwin and a certain Mr. Rough met for the first time. The next 
 morning both called upon Robinson within an hour, each with the 
 inquiry as to whether the other would be likely to lend him £50. 
 Ibid.f chap, xv, Feb. 26, 1812, note. 
 
THE NEW RADICALISM 317 
 
 that only another proof of ingrained clerical pre- 
 sumption and insincerity is given by those teachers 
 of reliofion who maintain that older theologfies were 
 false only in so far as they were partial or dogmatic, 
 that they took account of real experiences and an- 
 swered to essential needs, and that the cry for a 
 living God still sounds in the world, — that it is 
 significant, that the attempt to answer it is worth 
 while and can be made most effectively in terms of 
 modern speech. The difficulty of the 'rationalist's' 
 argument lies in its major premiss. His claim that 
 revelation is incapable of development is not only 
 open to contradiction, — it has been explicitly de- 
 nied by the greatest Christian teachers. This denial 
 was indeed a chief article in the faith of Christian- 
 ity's Founder. According to the Christian tradition, 
 He began his ministry with the assurance that the 
 national religious expectation was in process of ful- 
 filment, and therefore of advance and uplift to a 
 higher stage. He ended it with the solemn promise 
 that though it had become expedient for Him to go 
 away, the Spirit whose exponent He had been would 
 make his continued abode with believers, introdu- 
 cing them by degrees into all truth. Change, develop- 
 ment, and capacity to make gain of new knowledge 
 are of the essence of religion. In so far as Chris- 
 tianity exhibits these, it but attests its possession of 
 the ' notes ' of a genuine and lively faith. Religion 
 may easily enough be marred and wounded, starved 
 into grotesque forms of superstition or temporarily 
 
318 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 excited into fanaticism, persecuted to apparent death 
 in some isolated cases and buried in a tomb made 
 doubly sure against resurrection. But it refuses to 
 stay there. Grant it a generation in the grave and 
 it only comes forth refreshed. The impatience of its 
 enemies is justified, and the not infrequent note of 
 petulance in Mr. Benn's interesting volumes ought 
 therefore to be borne with a large charity. For the 
 ^ rationalist's ' labor is Sisyphean ; the one thing cer- 
 tain about it is that, however successful it may seem 
 to-day, it will all have to be done over again to- 
 morrow; upon no other field of conflict than that 
 where men think to kill religion is it necessary so 
 many times to slay the slain. 
 
 John Stuart Mill fell heir to a pretty consistent 
 atheism. Bentham is commonly reckoned as an 
 atheist, but there were fine inconsistencies in him 
 which do much to humanize his life and something 
 to mitigate his creed. With James Mill, however, 
 the negation of belief seems to have hardened into 
 a sort of dogmatism.^ Few men of honourable life 
 and very great intellectual gifts have ever left a 
 more unlovely picture of themselves to posterity, 
 and this in spite of the fact that we see him 
 through the eyes of filial devotion. John Mill's 
 admiration for his father seems to have been sec- 
 
 * I would not imply that he was dogmatic in his assertion of 
 atheism, but only in his claim that nothing valid and significant 
 can be known or believed in the realm of religion. Cf . J. S. Mill's 
 Autobiography, chap. ii. 
 
THE NEW RADICALISM 319 
 
 ond only to that which he had for his wife, and 
 leads the reader of the "Autobiography" to ques- 
 tion a little whether the same tendency to almost 
 passionate exaggeration may not have coloured it. 
 Yet posterity has much to thank James Mill for. 
 It would be ungenerous to minimize the service to 
 clear thought as well as to practical reform ren- 
 dered by this most consistent and unpleasant of the 
 Utilitarians; but it sinks into second place when 
 compared with the daring experiment which he 
 made in the education of his son. The opening 
 pages of the "Autobiography" tell the story of a 
 prodigy at once so fascinating and so abnormal as 
 well-nigh to threaten even an experience-philoso- 
 pher's disbelief in miracle. Few children can have 
 been born into the world with purely intellectual 
 endowments of a higher class than those of John 
 Mill; none, it is safe to say, ever found greater 
 demands made upon his powers during infancy. 
 This picture of a boy beginning Greek at the age 
 of three, and reading, before Latin was begun in hi8 
 eighth year, ^sop, Xenophon's "Anabasis," "Cy- 
 ropsedia," and "Memorials of Socrates," the whole 
 of Herodotus, with parts of Diogenes Laertius, 
 Lucian, and Isocrates ; then passing on, at eight, 
 to grapple with six dialogues of Plato, is as pain- 
 ful as it fortunately is unparalleled. "My father, 
 in all his teaching," says the son, quite as much in 
 gratitude as in criticism, " demanded of me not 
 only the utmost that I could do, but much that I 
 
320 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 could by no possibility have done." I have no 
 space and as little need to remind the reader of 
 the beginning of Latin and mathematics ; the un- 
 remitted teaching of the younger children; the 
 long list of grotesquely mature volumes read and 
 reported upon to his father during their daily 
 walks. It is an oft-repeated story ; but the wonder 
 grows. Amid it all two things are eminent by their 
 absence, — the natural play of childhood and the 
 equally normal and necessary speculations about, 
 and constructive training in, the rudiments of reli- 
 gion. " I am thus," he tells us in a familiar passage 
 of the ^'Autobiography," "one of the very few ex- 
 amples in this country of one who has not thrown 
 off religious belief, but never had it." 
 
 This is the feature of John Stuart Mill's train- 
 ing that gives to the exercise of his great powers 
 a peculiar interest for us, as it gave a peculiar sig- 
 nificance to his teaching in the middle of last cen- 
 tury. Here was a man of first-rate, if not unique 
 and transcendent gifts, heir to a distinguished 
 philosophic and economic heritage, who had not 
 only accumulated great stores of learning, but had 
 also mastered himself in such degree as to bring 
 an almost unexampled measure of fairness and 
 generosity to the consideration of questions whose 
 discussion often develops more heat than light. 
 Abundantly capable of taking a side and main- 
 taining a position against all comers ; no stranger 
 either to the joy of battle or to the worth of 
 
THE NEW RADICALISM 321 
 
 battle-cry and epithet, especially when the strife 
 is political and economic; a convinced confessor 
 of the experience-philosophy, moreover, he was 
 singularly fitted to become the high priest of that 
 Utilitarianism which, in their several generations, 
 Bentham, James Mill, and Grote exalted into a sub- 
 stitute for rehgion ; and he had no other religion 
 of which to rid himself. Like Gladstone among 
 the Tories, he was the rising hope of the stern and 
 unbending Radicals ; and he was destined to spread 
 a somewhat similar dismay in the ranks of his 
 friends. He did not, of course, become a Tory as 
 his great contemporary became a Liberal, though 
 there were elements in his political creed which 
 the most conservative might regard complacently; 
 and no man of his day was more outspoken and 
 fearless in his exposure of the vices of democracy. 
 Nor have I the least desire to claim him as a con- 
 vert to any particular religious cult or sect. There 
 is a sense in which he remained true to his early 
 training until the end. He was as unsparing in his 
 criticism of religious as of philosophic or economic 
 dogma; but no man of his, or perhaps of any, 
 generation illustrated better the fascination of re- 
 ligion for the human mind or the hunger of the 
 heart for God. Grote stood more exactly in the 
 strict Utilitarian succession. He was the obedient 
 son of the family, who kept not only its laws but 
 its tradition. John Mill was its enfant terrible, 
 — though the words sound like sacrilege, — who, 
 
322 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 while remaining true to the genuine principle of 
 life which gave to Utilitarianism and the experi- 
 ence-philosophy such validity as they possessed, 
 yet scandalized his more orthodox brethren by the 
 scant respect he paid to the family conventions.* 
 
 The truth is that Mill was far too great a man to 
 be confined within the strait barriers erected by his 
 father and Bentham. Consistent in his belief that 
 all knowledge depends upon experience, he was 
 clear-eyed enough to see, and candid enough to 
 admit, that there is an experience of the heart as 
 well as of the head, and that life demands some cul- 
 ture of the feelings as well as of the reasoning fac- 
 ulties. He discerned too that thoughtful people are 
 more likely to be right in what they affirm than in 
 what they deny, and that the fatal weakness of so- 
 called ' systems ' of thought lies in their very com- 
 pleteness and consistency, inasmuch as truth always 
 proves to be a richer and more varied thing than 
 the system-builder fancies. The leaven of it is ever 
 fermenting in the logical mass, disarranging its neat 
 categories, and contradicting its boasted finality.^ 
 
 * The brethren who suffered most were, I suppose, Mr. and Mrs. 
 Grote ; but I keep the masculine noun in memory of the saying 
 attributed to Samuel Rogers, that he always enjoyed " dining at 
 their house. Mr. Grote was so ladylike, and Mrs. Grote was such 
 a gentleman." The needful pinch of salt is supplied by Rogers 
 himself. When asked by some one why he said so many disagree- 
 able things, he answered, "The fact is I have a very weak voice; 
 and unless I say disagreeable things nobody will hear me." 
 
 2 Cf . Mill's Essay on Coleridge ; also Tulloch, Religious Thought 
 in Britain^ p. 273 ; and MacCunn, Six Radical Thinkers, pp. 86-87. 
 
THE NEW RADICALISM 323 
 
 Mr. Benn complains, though rather in sorrow than 
 in anger, that although Mill had thus been brought 
 up without religious belief and in habitual associa- 
 tion with unbeHevers, he showed all his life long a 
 "persistently conciliatory" attitude toward theo- 
 logy.* The further insinuation of an unduly prudent 
 truckling to popular opinion to the extent of con- 
 cealing his views in order to save his influence if 
 not his office, seems to me quite unworthy.^ It is 
 not cowardice which leads a man whose views are in 
 the process of formation to avoid thrftsting them 
 violently down his neighbour's throat. Such a pro- 
 ceeding forbids all hope of legitimate acceptance and 
 assimilation ; it assures misunderstanding and justi- 
 fiable resentment. If the principles of a man's phi- 
 losophy or theology are candidly avowed, there is no 
 dishonesty, but only common decency and sense in 
 keeping conclusions to himself until he is assured 
 that they are conclusions indeed instead of wayside 
 fancies. No one can say that Mill ever hesitated to 
 proclaim the principles which guided his thought ; 
 or that he feared to stand for unpopular views which 
 were clearly right in his eyes. But he was too true 
 a philosopher to treat with mere easy contempt con- 
 victions which had entered deep into the life expe- 
 rience of multitudes of his intelligent fellow-men. 
 
 It is easy to imagine the dissatisfaction of his fa- 
 ther with some of the companions whom John Mill 
 
 * Benn, History of English Rationalisnif vol. i, p. 439. 
 ' Op. cit, p. 441 and elsewhere. 
 
S94 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 found in the Utilitarian and Speculative Societies ; 
 and it is by no means difficult to understand Mrs. 
 Grote's evident desire to box his ears when, to the 
 scandal of the straiter members of the Bentham- 
 ite sect, he suddenly appeared as an expositor of 
 the philosophy of Coleridge. The brilliant disciple 
 had broken his leading strings; and though a Util- 
 itarian still, had entered into strange relations with 
 idealism and the poetry of Wordsworth, which to 
 the Grotes were as the daughters of Heth to Isaac 
 and Eebekah. 
 
 More than this, he fell into an incorrigible habit 
 of using the phrases and forms of religious expres- 
 sion to illustrate his experience or to bring home his 
 teachings. The period of mental stress through 
 which he passed in the winter of 1826-7 was marked 
 by something which he chose to compare to ' convic- 
 tion of sin.' Ambition failed, the imagined realiza- 
 tion of his dreams lost its charm, life became dull, 
 vacuous, and poor in significance. No doubt reac- 
 tion from the extraordinary strain to which his mind 
 had been subjected during almost the entire period 
 of childhood and adolescence was the immediate oc- 
 casion of this crisis ; but none the less was it a spirit- 
 ual crisis. Mr. Birrell has somewhere exclaimed over 
 the fact that of all books, Marmontel's Memoirs 
 should have opened the flood-gates of Mill's long- 
 pent feelings, and thus become the instrument of 
 his ^ conversion' ; for in a psychological if not a tech- 
 nically religious sense a conversion it seems to have 
 
THE NEW RADICALISM 325 
 
 been. But the reader of the " Autobiography " will 
 remember that the particular passage which brought 
 Mill peace related to the young Marmontel's deci- 
 sion, upon the death of his father, to do what he 
 might by devotion and self-sacrifice to supply the 
 family loss. This is an essentially religious motive, 
 and its appeal to Mill is significant. Marmontel's 
 ^ inspiration ' — the word is Mill's — proved conta- 
 gious. It not only brought tears to his reader's eyes 
 but awakened a new life in his heart. Wordsworth's 
 poetry helped to develop and enrich the new elements 
 thus introduced into experience and to encourage 
 that ' conciliatory attitude ' toward religion over 
 which the faithful still grieve ; even as they grieve 
 over Comte's worship of the memory of " Clotilde," 
 and Buckle's persistence in holding with " passion- 
 ate conviction " (the phrase is Mr. Benn's) to the 
 immortality of the soul. As life went on this reli- 
 gious note — or semi-religious, if the reader please, 
 since I would not claim too much — deepened. 
 Critical as ever of specific dogmas, the language 
 not of religion merely but of Christianity seems to 
 have become an instinctive resource in some of his 
 most significant utterances ; as for instance in the 
 letter to Miss Fox in which he urges the impossi- 
 bility of rendering worthy service to one's age ex- 
 cept a man resolve " to take up his cross and bear 
 it." ' 
 
 With his marriage Mill's deeper life, which his 
 1 Cf. MacCunn, Six Radical Thinkers^ p. 58. 
 
326 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 father had done so much to starve, and which 
 he himself had repressed until he seemed to Car- 
 lyle like a logic-chopping machine and to some of 
 his more vulgar contemporaries like a "book in 
 breeches," came to its own ; and his wife's death 
 seven years later left him a memory which, he tells 
 us, became a religion. Theological speculation seems 
 to have made an increasing appeal to him, and when, 
 after his death, the " Three Essays on Religion " 
 appeared, the world realized how far he had wan- 
 dered from the grace of utilitarian orthodoxy. With 
 engaging and characteristic candour Lord Mor- 
 ley, in his review of these essays, admits that the 
 author's conclusions, and " what is even more impor- 
 tant, the spirit of the conclusions, are a rather keen 
 surprise." This was more than thirty years ago ; but 
 Lord Morley's distinction is still valid. It is the spirit 
 of the essays, rather than their specific conclusions, 
 which is significant. They are as sternly critical as 
 ever of commonly received theological notions ; but 
 their trend toward religion is unmistakable. Not 
 only does Mill emphasize its place and value in his- 
 tory ; he goes further in stating with clearness and 
 cogency the distinction between positive and nega- 
 tive truth and the general value of the former for 
 the satisfaction of man's deeper needs. His purpose 
 thus becomes constructive and he casts about to dis- 
 cover and coordinate such religious experiences and 
 beliefs as may prove their right to live. Into that 
 discussion we have no time to follow him ; suffice 
 
THE NEW RADICALISM 327 
 
 it to say that he finds a place if not a necessity 
 for religion among the highest human activities ; 
 that Theism becomes under his hand a term with 
 real, even though limited, content ; that the Argu- 
 ment from Design is exalted to a position of influ- 
 ence and dignity which must ever place these essays 
 under the ban of orthodox 'rationalists ' ; ^ that he 
 discovers room in the world for such a messenger 
 as Christ charged with an express mission " to lead 
 mankind to truth and virtue " ; and that it would 
 be difficult " even for an unbeliever to find a better 
 translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract 
 into the concrete, than to endeavour so to live that 
 Christ would approve our life." ^ 
 
 Disraeli, with a flippancy and presumption which 
 were all the more characteristic because they may 
 in this instance have been unconscious, once pro- 
 claimed himself " upon the side of the angels." Mill 
 in these three essays comes near to doing the same 
 thing, though with this difference : that his sincerity 
 and reverence for all true and noble things leaves us 
 in far less doubt as to his fitness for their company. 
 
 While Mill and his circle were thus working out 
 the conclusions of philosophical radicalism, vast so- 
 cial and economic changes were taking place in Eng- 
 
 * I am prepared to sympathize with not a little rationalistic criti- 
 cism of Mill's application of the argument ; but onlj because of 
 my conviction that the development of science since his day has 
 given to it a validity and scope which makes his use of it seem 
 meagre. 
 
 » Three Essays on Religion^ *' Theism," part v, p. 255, Amer. ed. 
 
328 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 land. True to their traditions and to their genius 
 for the via media, Englishmen were assimilating 
 the results of the Revolution even while they con- 
 demned its methods. We have caught a glimpse of 
 the reforms of the century's first three decades in 
 an earlier chapter. The Reform Bill introduced a 
 new era of economic and social, as distinguished from 
 mere political, development. Fifty years were yet 
 to elapse before suffrage should become practically 
 universal ; but the principle involved was granted 
 and progress toward democracy was henceforth in- 
 evitable. No less inevitable was it that the masses 
 of the people, as soon as they were assured of politi- 
 cal rights, should go on to demand an uplift of their 
 economic and social status. It is doubtful if we yet 
 realize how profound and far-reaching were the ele- 
 ments of social change contained in the agitation 
 for Free Trade, the growth of the great factory dis- 
 tricts, the passage of the Factory Acts, the rise and 
 development of Trade Unions, Chartism, and the 
 Cooperative Movement, together with the crusade 
 against slavery which, in the United States, over- 
 shadowed all other questions. 
 
 These movements are all more or less vividly re- 
 flected in the books of the day, although so far 
 as this literature related itself immediately to the 
 passing phase of a social question it was generally 
 ephemeral. Cobbett, for instance, is little likely to 
 be read to-day for anything he said as a political 
 and social radical ; though his spirited sketches of 
 
THE NEW RADICALISM 329 
 
 English woods and fields are as vivid as ever. Dust 
 and oblivion might threaten even " Uncle Tom's 
 Cabin " were it not for the perennial elements of 
 human tragedy and comedy which it contains. All 
 these great movements made their appeal to reli- 
 gion, and most of them voiced their protest against 
 what seemed to the agitators to be the apathy and 
 indifference of the Church. Cobbett, who of course 
 touched this period only at its beginning, is loud in 
 his denunciation of the " Hampshire Parsons," with 
 their Toryism and predilection for vested rights. 
 Ebenezer Elliott, the Corn-Law Rhymer, introduces 
 a telling irony into the pious resignation of his song, 
 — to the tune of " Robin Adair," — 
 
 Child, is thy father dead ? 
 
 Father is gone ! 
 Why did they tax his hread ? 
 
 God's will be done ! 
 Mother has sold her bed ; 
 Better to die than wed ! 
 Where shall she lay her head ? 
 
 Home we have none ! ^ 
 
 Thomas Cooper, the Chartist poet, imprisoned for 
 conspiracy and sedition, became a skeptic during his 
 confinement, and went out upon his release as an 
 apostle of unbelief. These men and the tone of their 
 protest may be taken as representative of a cer- 
 tain type of religious and poHtical radicalism. Yet 
 upon the other hand is to be noted the fact that 
 
 * Works, edited by his Son, vol. i, p. 381. 
 
330 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 such reforms as they advocated have never failed 
 to make their appeal to religion finally, or to find 
 among believing men their most faithful and stead- 
 fast champions. It is of the essence of faith to be 
 constructive; and a careless or frightened — and 
 therefore cruel — world listens sometimes to the 
 voice of the reformer who is bent upon ultimate 
 construction when it would arm itself against the 
 mere revolutionist. It is not too much to say that 
 the influences of permanent beneficence exerted dur- 
 ing this period generally related themselves to the 
 sources of faith rather than of unbelief. Among 
 the aristocracy, no one gave himself more whole- 
 heartedly to the service of the forlorn and needy 
 than Lord Ashley, afterward Earl of Shaftesbury, 
 an Evangelical of Evangelicals. It avails little to 
 reply that he was a Tory and generally out of sym- 
 pathy with the political aspirations of the poor ; and 
 that some of his methods savour too much of institu- 
 tionalism and patronage. The fact remains that he 
 probably did as much as any man of his generation, 
 as he certainly did more than any man of rank, to, 
 fasten the attention of his countrymen upon the 
 needs of the dependent classes. Ebenezer Elliott was 
 a man of piety ; while Cooper, who before his prison 
 experiences of Strauss and skepticism had been a 
 preacher, subsequently recanted his skeptical opin- 
 ions and utterances, became a convinced believer, 
 and a Baptist minister. Mrs. Gaskell, who knew at 
 first hand the lot of the poor and the mingled feel- 
 
THE NEW RADICALISM 331 
 
 ings of bitterness and hope which animated the 
 early Trade-Unionists, makes much of the religious 
 element in "Mary Barton." Kingsley's "Yeast" 
 and "Alton Locke," together with his essays and 
 speeches upon social topics, are saturated with reli- 
 gion. Cobden, while primarily, of course, a practical 
 politician and economist, was no stranger to those 
 ideals which relate themselves intimately to the re- 
 ligious life. He is commonly regarded as the pro- 
 tagonist of the Manchester School and, ipso facto y 
 a somewhat mitigated Mr. Gradgrind. In point of 
 fact he was a paladin chivalrously bent upon the 
 delivery of a captive. Trade, whom his imagination 
 endowed with the charms and graces as well as the 
 wrongs of an imprisoned princess. He was zealous 
 in repudiating the charge that his eye was fixed 
 solely upon the ' main chance.' He maintained that, 
 while the material gain from the success of his 
 principle must be great, the moral gain would be 
 so much greater as to reduce it to relative insig- 
 nificance. "I see," he said in 1846, "in the Free 
 Trade principle that which shall act on the moral 
 world as the principle of gravitation in the uni- 
 verse — drawing men together, thrusting aside the 
 antagonism of race and creed and language, and 
 uniting us in the bonds of eternal peace." ^ 
 
 Mazzini's long residence in England, his intimate 
 
 * I am indebted for this quotation as well as for several sugges- 
 tions upon the influence of Mill, Cobden, and especially Mazzini, to 
 the admirable essays of Professor John MacCunn, recently published 
 under the title Six Radical Thinkers. See p. 121. 
 
332 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 association with many British writers, and the large 
 influence exerted by his genius for literature as well 
 as politics forbid that we should pass him by in si- 
 lence. Certain elements in his radicalism, such as 
 his apology for political assassination and his refusal 
 to give any countenance to the policies of Cavour 
 because the Italian unity toward which they looked 
 was monarchical rather than republican, were too ex- 
 treme and doctrinaire to enlist Anglo-Saxon sympa- 
 thy. They savoured too much of the uncompromis- 
 ing spirit animating extreme Abolitionists in New 
 England to appeal to British or even to American 
 conservatism. But, on the other hand, Mazzini's con- 
 viction that if democracy were first to triumph and 
 then to endure it must be through its recognition 
 of religious obligation and its acceptance of faith, 
 was of a sort to win a much quicker and heartier as- 
 sent among English-speaking peoples than upon the 
 Continent. He was far enough from being an ortho- 
 dox Churchman. But there is no reason to doubt 
 that the motto " God and the People " represented 
 his creed as well as his war-cry ; and that his alle- 
 giance to the former article was as loyal as to the lat- 
 ter. He was as like Carlyle in his dependence upon 
 intuition, and his hatred of the balder forms of Utili- 
 tarianism, as he was unlike him in his fellow-feeling 
 for the aspirations and ambitions of the masses. Rus- 
 kin and Carlyle could have counted upon him in 
 their protest against what the former calls Mill's 
 substitution of patriotism for religion. 
 
THE NEW RADICALISM 333 
 
 "Actually," cried Carlyle, " the most paltry rag 
 of " — here followed a stream of vituperation too 
 rapid for Ruskin to note — " it has fallen to my lot 
 to come in with. Among my aquaintance I have not 
 seen a person talking of a thing he so little undei> 
 stood." ' 
 
 Utilitarianism was not calculated to produce he- 
 roes, — though in the famous passage from the 
 "Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philoso- 
 phy " where Mill professes his determination to go 
 to Hell rather than enter Heaven at the price of his 
 convictions, there is a note of the heroic, — and 
 Mazzini was as romantic in his love of heroes as 
 Carlyle ; indeed, from his exhortations to the Ro- 
 man Republic in 1849, and to the United States 
 in 1854, it would seem as though his mind dwelt as 
 fondly upon the development of hero-states as of 
 individual hero-men. His better known writings not 
 only have this ethical and religious complexion ; 
 they have a hortatory if not a homiletic form. Be- 
 hind the Old Testament directness and fervour of 
 his prophecy there was a conviction corresponding 
 to the Hebrew ^ Thus saith the Lord.' If it hoped 
 to succeed, democracy must find its ground in 
 theism, and if it were to endure it must keep the 
 faith.^ 
 
 The radicalism of which we have been speaking 
 in the field of philosophy and politics had its coun- 
 
 * PrcRterita, vol. ii, chap. xii. 
 
 » MacCunn, Six Radical Thinkers^ pp. 191, 196, 209 sqq. 
 
' ^334 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 terpart in a liberal movement within the Church of 
 England. The so-called Early Oriel School had been 
 its forerunner. Men like Whately, Hampden, and 
 Arnold, the betes noires of the Catholic party, had 
 fostered it. Milman, in his " History of the Jews '* 
 and "Latin Christianity," had gone beyond his pre- 
 decessors and sacrificed ecclesiastical preferment by 
 venturing to call Abraham "a sheik." Mansel — 
 though himself a Tory and far from sympathetic 
 toward either the Low or the Broad Church — in 
 his famous Bampton Lectures was at once admitting 
 the change which impended in religious thought, 
 and, by the use of Sir William Hamilton's philosophy, 
 unwittingly forging blades for later agnostic sword- 
 play. Baden Powell in his " Unity of Worlds," 
 " Christianity without Judaism," and " The Order 
 of Nature " was anticipating, though with less op- 
 position and alarm on the part of conservatives than 
 might have been expected, many of the chief con- 
 troversies of the third quarter of the century. Jowett 
 and Stanley were meanwhile introducing the results 
 of German criticism and philosophy, the one by 
 means of his commentaries and the other by his ex- 
 ceedingly popular work in the realm of Jewish and 
 Christian history. 
 
 Perhaps the greatest mediating influence, how- 
 ever, between Religion and Literature during this 
 period was Frederick Denison Maurice. His own 
 work was in the main too distinctively theological 
 to be classed under the head of general literature. 
 
THE NEW RADICALISM 335 
 
 Indeed he gloried in a term which many religious 
 writers prefer to thrust into the background, and 
 openly preferred the word ' theology ' to ' religion/ 
 since the latter, as he maintained, savoured a little 
 of paganism. But he was the heir of Coleridge in 
 things religious and philosophical, and wherever the 
 leaven of Coleridge's influence has had fair chance 
 to work, some of the results have always found true 
 and often high literary expression. Maurice's early 
 novel, "Eustace Conway," seems scarcely to have 
 won notice enough to justify a critic in saying that 
 it has been forgotten ; and eveu his best-known 
 writings are, I suppose, little read to-day. They lack 
 the universal quality which in " The Confessions of 
 an Inquiring Spirit " and " Aids to Keflection," as 
 well as in parts of the " Biographia Literaria," still 
 makes its quick appeal to the modern man. Bred a 
 Unitarian and passing thence in his early maturity 
 into the communion and service of the Established 
 Church, Maurice's work reflects his surroundings. It 
 is marked, if not marred, by a certain institutional 
 habit of mind. His famous book on the Kingdom 
 of Christ, for instance, bears as its sub-title, " Hints 
 on the Principles, Ordinances, and Constitution of 
 the Catholic Church, in Letters to a Member of the 
 Society of Friends." On the other hand, he main- 
 tained with steadfastness and distinguished ability 
 certain principles of immediate fitness to the need 
 of the time, and capable of application to the need 
 of all times. Many men of deeply religious nature 
 
336 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 found themselves in a strait between the hardness 
 of Evangelical Calvinism and the artificiality of the 
 new sacerdotalism for which the Oxford Movement 
 stood. For them Maurice had a genuine gospel. Nor 
 did he fail to influence John Mill in a degree suffi- 
 cient abundantly to justify his father's fears. 
 
 One of the two great ideas which gave him power 
 may be found set forth in a letter written in De- 
 cember, 1833, to his mother, who had passed from 
 the family Unitarianism into the position of a some- 
 what extreme Calvinist. In it he argues that, instead 
 of being an object of God's just anger because of 
 his inherited sinfulness, "every man is in Christ," 
 and has but to claim and make his own a heritage 
 of blessing. The second principle related to the 
 brotherhood of believers. Like many converts to a 
 highly organized and historic church, Maurice had 
 no liking for Dissent and could be eloquent if not 
 bitter against what he thought to be schism. But 
 he was no worshipper of conformity for its own sake. 
 The basis of unity was to be discovered in the posi- 
 tive elements common to the faith of all Christians. 
 Wherever truth was found, though it had been never 
 so sadly twisted to a sectarian purpose, something 
 of its positive and universal character could still be 
 discerned, developed, and redeemed.^ Here were the 
 elements of a liberality at once rational and reli- 
 gious, which might not only make it possible for 
 men of different theological views to live together, 
 
 » Cf. Tulloch, Religious Thought in Britain, pp. 269-278. 
 
THE NEW RADICALISM 337 
 
 but had no less direct a bearing upon the new world 
 of rapidly developing science and the old world of 
 sadly sick society. " Nature and life were from God 
 at a time when science on the one hand and asceti- 
 cism on the other tended to sever them from His 
 presence." ^ 
 
 It is easy to discern how such a teacher as this, 
 anointed as he was with a true prophet's unction, 
 should have stirred the hearts of men like Kings- 
 ley, Thomas Hughes, and Robertson. He thus be- 
 came a chief power in the movement known as 
 " Christian Socialism," although he would not 
 own the name and disliked even the semblance of 
 founding a school or sect. From him and his disci- 
 ples may be traced an influence which has not only 
 embodied itself in many institutions of the ' social 
 settlement' type, but has proved to be a vital 
 motive in literature on both sides of the Atlantic. 
 In America, moreover, it is safe to say that the 
 reinterpreters of religious thought who have given 
 to their writings at once a positive tone and a 
 literary form, — men like Mulford and T. T. Hun- 
 ger, — would accord to Maurice a chief place 
 among their sources of inspiration ; while the rank 
 and file of preachers of the more cultivated type 
 owe him as real a debt, although, as years have 
 passed, his message has most often reached them 
 at second hand. 
 
 Horace Bushnell and James Martineau deserve 
 
 » Op. cit., p. 294. 
 
338 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 to be mentioned with him, although each is sepa- 
 rated from the other as he is from Maurice by 
 gulfs of distinction. Both were radicals, but of 
 constructive sympathy and purpose. Both, in the 
 best sense of a dubious word, were rhetoricians, and 
 developed to a high degree of perfection styles of 
 marked individuality, which were not only singu- 
 larly fitted for the task of self-expression, but in 
 themselves would possess great value as objects of 
 study were it not for their fatal tendency to in- 
 duce imitation. It was the happy lot of both these 
 writers to help deliver their fellows from the 
 tyranny of the set phrase. Both became in turn 
 the authors of phrases as haunting as anything in 
 St. Augustine's "Confessions" or Newman's Ser- 
 mons. " Low grades of being want low objects ; 
 but the want of man is God," is Bushnell's paral- 
 lel to St. Augustine's "Thou hast made us for 
 Thyself " ; while Martineau's " God has so ar- 
 ranged the chronometry of our spirits that there 
 shall be a thousand silent moments between the 
 striking hours," reflects life well enough to have 
 been chosen by Mr. Eden Phillpotts for the name- 
 text of a characteristic book. Bushnell was further- 
 more a student of the philosophy of human speech, 
 and the " Dissertation on Language," with which he 
 introduced one of his most influential works, de- 
 serves a far wider reading than it has ever had. Its 
 doctrine of the symbolic nature of all speech, while 
 in one sense it is evident enough to be generally 
 
THE NEW RADICALISM 339 
 
 recognized, finds in his hands its psychological 
 application to the common needs of literature and 
 religion. Bushnell recognized as few theologians 
 have done the poetic elements in religion and the 
 essentially tentative character of religious speech. 
 A man with so discerning an eye and so rich an 
 experience could not permit his theology — to say 
 nothing of his religion — to degenerate into a mere 
 exercise in definition. 
 
 The fact that so many of the apologists and the 
 assailants of Christianity have agreed to regard it 
 as a system of doctrines authoritatively given, 
 highly developed, and capable not only of exact but 
 of final definition, is accountable for the major 
 part of religious controversy. This was eminently 
 true of the warfare accompanying the Unitarian 
 schism in New England early in last century. The 
 Unitarians were right in their protest against the 
 elaborate and artificial scheme whereby the ortho- 
 dox undertook not merely to account for, but to 
 label and docket, the inscrutable thoughts of God 
 and the multiplied needs of man. They were wrong 
 in carrying their protest so far as often to give a 
 negative complexion to their whole attitude and 
 sometimes to throw contempt upon religion as an 
 experience. The question might indeed be raised 
 whether this overdoing of their Protestantism 
 which resulted in a semi-starvation of the religfious 
 nature has not been accountable for the grotesque 
 and weird radicalisms that in some parts of Amer- 
 
340 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 ica have threatened to make their societies veri- 
 table Caves of Adullam ; since it is a pretty well 
 recognized principle of experience that religious 
 neglect results in the perversion rather than the 
 death of the religious faculty, and that the ulti- 
 mate choice lies, not between belief and no-belief, 
 but between faith and superstition/ 
 
 The orthodox, on the other hand, were for a time 
 incited to renewed fervour of definition and to 
 greater elaboration of system. Here they were hope- 
 lessly wrong, just as they were fundamentally right 
 in maintaining that religion was a great individual 
 and social experience, to be defined anew in terms 
 of each man's speech and of each generation's cor- 
 porate life. They were right too in their belief that 
 religion is essentially an outreaching and adventur- 
 ous experience, which must decay if the spirit of 
 adventure languish. Hence sprung their missionary 
 activity, which, as I have already indicated, is likely 
 ultimately to be one of the distinctive and outstand- 
 ing marks of the century. It has already produced 
 very considerable results in the way of contributions 
 to the literature of geography, ethnology, language, 
 and general science. As the period of crude misun- 
 derstanding and contempt of missionary enterprise 
 
 * I would not seem to imply that the better qualified Unitarian 
 leaders have ever welcomed the conditions here referred to; my 
 impression is that they have, at least among themselves, acknow- 
 ledged them as dangers incident to their history and position as a 
 radical party. Of late the positive and oonstructive note has been 
 sounded far more clearly. 
 
THE NEW RADICALISM 341 
 
 passes and the generally high quality, not only of 
 the adventure itself hut of the men and women who 
 undertake it, appears, the vast literary possibilities 
 which it presents are bound to make themselves 
 manifest. Practical idealism has always been and is 
 likely still to prove the prolific mother of literature. 
 The idealism of the mystic is often too vague and 
 undefined to submit to the forms necessary for lit- 
 erary expression. But let the Quaker, for instance, 
 enter upon some genuine quest which compels him 
 into militancy, as did George Fox when upon the 
 saner of his preaching tours and in his protests 
 against crying social evils, or as Whittier did when 
 championing the abolition of slavery ; or let him be 
 touched by the spirit of some great historic church 
 as Shorthouse was before he wrote " John Inglesant," 
 and his mystic idealism becomes at once a source 
 and instrument of literary power. On the other hand, 
 a somewhat similar phenomenon appears when ideal- 
 ism, which has long been at once nourished and re- 
 pressed within the borders of a fixed system, finds 
 its bonds broken and its wings set free. In the realm 
 of ideas, as in that of hydraulics, a measure of re- 
 pression is necessary to significant and useful ex- 
 pression ; the place for the wheel lying at the foot 
 of the penstock. 
 
 The most fruitful period in the history of Ameri- 
 can letters illustrates what I mean. Emerson, Bry- 
 ant, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, and 
 Holmes were all New England men. All, with the 
 
342 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 possible exception of Whittier, and in his case the 
 exception is apparent rather than real, were heirs to 
 the Puritan heritage. Their forefathers' Calvinism 
 had, to be sure, become greatly mitigated on its way 
 to them. Its husk had burst, but its kernel was yet 
 sound. Emerson was not only a minister, but the 
 son of generations of ministers ; and although his 
 opinions were too radical even for the Unitarians 
 whom he set himself to serve, a New England Con- 
 gregational minister of the better type he remained 
 all his life long, in his serene dignity, his humour, 
 his independence, his interest in local civic afPairs, 
 his essential piety, and his keen regard for the ethi- 
 cal values of life.^ Holmes, also a minister's son, 
 seems to have been the only one of the company 
 whose revolt from Calvinism was marked by any 
 bitterness, and his bitterness is that of a humour- 
 ist whose sense of the ludicrous I believe to have 
 been a legitimate Puritan heirloom. 
 
 These men were delivered from the tyranny of 
 the Calvinistic forms of thought. They profited in- 
 expressibly, however, by the fact that the thought 
 which these forms first strove to express, and finally 
 threatened to smother, was of a very real and in- 
 
 ^ This fact has recently been interestingly and repeatedly em- 
 phasized by Prof. Woodberry. It is also to be remembered that 
 Emerson's official service in the churches, which is commonly sup- 
 posed to have ended on his withdrawal from his Boston pulpit, 
 really outlasted that event by a considerable time. He preached 
 often in New Bedford, and for some three years supplied a church 
 in East Lexinirtou. 
 
THE NEW RADICALISM 343 
 
 tense sort. For generations it had concerned itself 
 with matters of great and sometimes awful import. 
 However cramped the conclusions at which it arrived 
 might seem to be, the fields through which it ranged 
 in search of them were nobly ample. To say, as we are 
 wont to do, that the new wine of this generation 
 burst the old bottles, is to do violence to an already 
 sadly overworked figure. The old forms gave way, 
 to be sure, but only that the wholesome substance 
 pent in by them might reach and serve a larger 
 world. Calvinism had been essentially rationalistic, 
 though mysticism of a repressed type was always 
 latent in it. Emerson seemed to throw logic to the 
 winds, avowed himself to be a frank intuitionalist, 
 and spoke often with the voice of the oracle who is in 
 mystic and immediate communication with the Source 
 of Truth. Hence comes the insufferably irritating 
 quahty of his style in some of the Essays, where 
 he seems to patronize God and Man alike, — a fault 
 of condescension from which in personal intercourse 
 he was beautifully free, — and yet here lay no doubt 
 something of the secret of his power. Calvinism 
 furthermore dealt with the race, and with man as 
 an integral element in it ; endowing him, however, 
 with an imperishable individuality. Emerson is du- 
 bious of personality in theory, and goes far at times 
 toward dogmatic denial of it; but yet — and the 
 contradiction is a very striking one — he was one 
 of the most potent forces of his century making for 
 the integrity and autonomy — that is, the true free- 
 
344 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 dom — of the individual. The key of the mystery 
 is to be most hopefully sought, whether it is to be 
 found or not, in the fact that Emerson was no sys- 
 tematic philosopher, but only a man as profoundly 
 conscious of a nature made in the divine image as 
 he was careless of mere consistency. Call him mystic, 
 transcendentalist, egoist,^ irrational optimist, what 
 you will — his value for the world at large lies in 
 the fact that after all he is so incurably religious. 
 He taught the youth of the latter half of his cen- 
 tury two things that every man must learn before 
 he can complete his life : first self-reliance ; second, 
 God-reliance.^ The one question which made him 
 of use to orthodox and heterodox alike, and which 
 he was always asking, is simply an echo of Christ's 
 great inquiry, " What shall it profit a man if he 
 shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul ; 
 or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" 
 The spiritual quality of the work of Bryant, 
 Whittier, Longfellow, and Lowell is akin to that 
 which characterizes Emerson. They are less tran- 
 scendental and more specifically Western, as con- 
 trasted with the curiously Oriental type of mind 
 and style which Emerson sometimes reveals. They 
 move more naturally in the realm of the concrete 
 
 * One of the finest illustrations in literature of the immemorial 
 debate between Pot and Kettle is the passage in which Ruskin crit- 
 icises Emerson on the ground that " his egoism reiterates itself to 
 provocation." 
 
 2 Cf. James Freeman Clarke, Nineteenth Century Questions, pp. 
 278-279. 
 
THE NEW RADICALISM 345 
 
 and the particular. Bryant's faith expressed in his 
 " To a Waterfowl/' even though rather limited in 
 content, is as definite as it is beautifully phrased. 
 Whittier found precisely the stimulus which his 
 gently militant nature needed in championship of 
 the unpopular Abolitionist cause. His muse threat- 
 ened to prove but puerile and futile until it was 
 converted to the service of fellow-man as well as to 
 the love of God. Longfellow is the most consistently 
 urbane and kindly of the group, moving habitually 
 upon what may be termed the domestic plane. His 
 briefer tales are fitted to their setting in a Wayside 
 Inn; " Hiawatha" and " Evangeline " to the family 
 fireside ; while the songs which have sung themselves 
 around the world and made him one of the most 
 popular of poets have just the range of family joys 
 and sorrows. This gentleness, — one might almost 
 call it meekness, — which holds the poet in its gra- 
 cious thrall even when he essays semi-militant themes, 
 has obscured in the eyes of too many critics his real 
 mastery of form. A trace of the bully is inherent in 
 criticism, which loves either to belabour or to pat- 
 ronize those whom it is not forced to praise. Few 
 have had the heart to offer any violence to Long- 
 fellow ; but the attitude of half-contemptuous pat- 
 ronage has become almost a fashion. In point of 
 fact he was an exceptionally deft craftsman, whose 
 imagination supplied him with material of high 
 quality and whose purity of heart gave to his work 
 the odour of a genuine sweetness and sanctity. 
 
341^ ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 " Hiawatha " is a very notable achievement, in spite 
 of the dreadful facility of its metre ; and there is 
 enough of the divine afflatus in " Evansreline " to 
 assure it a good old age, which is all that anything 
 in English hexameters should dare or wish to ask ; 
 since even Kingsley, who had the deftest hand, 
 could make them barely tolerable. Many of his trans- 
 lations are among the best in the language. But 
 after all this has been said, the fact remains that 
 the hiding of Longfellow's power — and power he 
 has — Hes in his discernment of the secrets of the 
 plain man's heart, and his application to them of 
 the appeal of conscience and the comfort of reli- 
 gion. 
 
 LowelFs speech and perhaps his faith are of a 
 somewhat robuster type. Far inferior to Longfellow 
 in his sense of rhythm and the deftness of his handi- 
 work in verse, — like Emerson he was essentially a 
 master of prose, — and not quite free at times from 
 the taint of sentimentality, he is upon the whole an 
 admirable exponent of New England shrewdness, 
 humour, and virile right-mindedness. The "Big- 
 low Papers " are unique. Their exaggeration is of 
 the sort which Dickens employed to etch his types; 
 Their philosophy and their use of whimsical under- 
 statement on the one hand, or grotesque overstate- 
 ment on the other, to give effect to their humour, 
 are Yankee to the life. And with it all there is the 
 unmistakable moral purpose, neither thrust pug- 
 naciously forward nor allowed to lapse into obliv- 
 
THE NEW RADICALISM 347 
 
 ion, but as constant in the poet's " Biglow Papers," 
 " Sir Launfal," and the " Commemoration Ode," 
 as it had ever been in his father's pulpit. This is 
 not for a moment to imply that any element of the 
 mere ^ tract ' is permitted to obtrude itself. The 
 ethical import of Lowell's poetry is simply the nat- 
 ural expression of his convictions. He was, as Mr. 
 Watts-Dunton has finely said, " in courage, in truth- 
 fulness, in everything, the type of the Puritan idea 
 in its most bracing expression." His brother poet, 
 Whittier, voiced the same thought in calling him — 
 
 . . . the New World's child 
 Who in the language of their farm-fields spoke 
 The wit and wisdom of New England folk, 
 Shaming a monstrous wrong.^ 
 
 This positive note may sometimes escape the reader's 
 first glance, in view of Lowell's capacity for giving 
 a humourous turn to the most sacred themes. But 
 the negative suggestion of — 
 
 John P. 
 Robinson he 
 Sez they did n't know everythin* down in Judee, 
 
 is apparent rather than real. In fact it is a whimsi- 
 cal echo of Christ's own frequent warning lest the 
 forms of one age should fetter the freedom of the 
 Spirit in another. So Hosea Biglow's sapient — 
 
 An* you 've gut to git up airly 
 Ef you want to take in God,— 
 
 * J. G. Whittier, James Russell Lowell. 
 
348 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 is as sound in its religious and ethical content as it 
 is racy of the soil/ 
 
 The secret of the matter was suggested by Lowell 
 himself when he wrote, after a reading of the late 
 Sir Leslie Stephen's "English Thought in the 
 Eighteenth Century/' — 
 
 " I am very much in the state of mind of the Bretons 
 who revolted against the revolutionary government, 
 and wrote upon their banners, ^ Give us back our 
 God.' I suppose I am an intuitionalist, and there 
 I mean to stick. I accept the challenge of common 
 sense and claim to have another faculty, as I should 
 insist that a peony was red though twenty colour- 
 blind men denied it." ^ 
 
 1 am not concerned here to defend the soundness 
 of Lowell's apologetic method. Their philosophical 
 validity apart, however, his words bear significant 
 testimony to the value of faith for the sort of work 
 which he had set himself to do ; and in this respect 
 he may without violence be regarded as represent- 
 ative of the whole group of American essayists and 
 poets who have just passed in review. 
 
 ' Mr. Andrew Lang expressed this feeling in his article in Tlie 
 Sign of the Ship soon after Lowell's death. " Mr. Lowell's religious 
 faith (if one may mention such matters) had a solidity and fervour 
 which surprised some, and might well convert others of a wavering 
 temper " (Longman's Magazine, vol. xviii, p. 666). 
 
 2 Cf . article on " The Outgrown Agnosticism," in Boston Tran- 
 script of Feb. 26, 1904. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE GREAT TWIN BRETHREN: TENNYSON AND 
 BROWNING 
 
 *^ Death, death ! It is this harping on death I de- 
 spise so much. . . . This idle and often cowardly 
 as well as ignorant harping ! Why should we not 
 change like everything else ? In fiction, in poetry, 
 in so much of both French as well as English, 
 and, I am told, in American art and literature, the 
 shadow of death — call it what you will, despair, 
 negation, indifference — is upon us. But what 
 fools who talk thus ! . . . Without death, which is 
 our crape-like, church-yardy word for change, for 
 growth, there could be no prolongation of that 
 which we call life." ^ 
 
 Mr. William Sharp records the words as uttered 
 by Browning in his presence. They vouch for them- 
 selves not less by their brusqueness, involution, and 
 demand upon the reader's breath for transport 
 through the parentheses, than by their wholesome 
 tone and savour of good physical and spiritual di- 
 gestion. It was the Browning of the familiar por- 
 traits who uttered them, though they have a certain 
 verve and sparkle which the composed, eupeptic face 
 scarcely promises. I have set them at the head of 
 
 1 William Sharp, Life of Brovmingy pp. 195-196. 
 
350 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 this chapter to justify its title ; for their sentiment 
 is no less characteristic of Tennyson than of their 
 author. He would not, to be sure, have chosen to 
 phrase his feeling in precisely this form, though his 
 prose could at times be as rugged as Browning's; 
 indeed, he seems to have cultivated in conversation 
 a little of the style which his brother-poet so often 
 overdid in verse. 
 
 In an earlier chapter I have marked the tendency 
 of critics to contrast great contemporary names in 
 literature, as though Dickens must needs be meas- 
 ured in terms of Thackeray, or a common denomina- 
 tor be determined for Emily Bronte and George 
 Eliot. Criticism of this order is sure to become ped- 
 dling and ungenerous. It is a commonplace that one 
 star differeth from another star in glory, but the task 
 of the intelligent observer is a far larger one than 
 the mere determination of their magnitudes ; indeed, 
 when this classification is complete, the scientific 
 student will be the first to remember that these ap- 
 parent magnitudes are matters of relative distance 
 as truly as of size; that there is a glory of constel- 
 lation as well as of star ; and that one of the most 
 fascinating of celestial phenomena consists in the 
 great binary stars where two suns revolve about a 
 common centre, each supplementing the mass and 
 the light of its fellow. 
 
 This frequent mistake of criticism is, however, but 
 a tribute to the extraordinary abundance of its ma- 
 terial during the mid-Victorian years. It is only as 
 
THE GREAT TWIN BRETHREN 351 
 
 .we draw away from the period that the vision of its 
 wealth grows clear. To have had at once two such 
 novelists as Dickens and Thackeray, two such 
 preachers as Carlyle and Ruskin, and two such poets 
 as Tennyson and Browning, was enough to tempt 
 the critical faculty of any age into arrogance and 
 self-sufficiency. Small wonder that little men have 
 contended over questions of their relative prece- 
 dence. This is the rule while the contemporary pro- 
 cession files by; later on, time offers us an horizon 
 where we discover that there is not only room but 
 need for such large figures side by side. 
 
 To ask which is the greater of these two poets is 
 like inquiring into the relative importance of Spring 
 and Autumn. Indeed, I venture to go further and 
 assert that their relation to each other and their 
 value to life are not unlike the relation and value of 
 Spring and Autumn. Spring stirs the blood, while 
 Autumn grips the heart. To the question whether 
 May's half-ecstatic ebullience is better than Octo- 
 ber with its crisp air, ripe fruit, and undertone of 
 pathos, what answer is to be returned except " De 
 gustibus non . . . "? The suffrage of the major- 
 ity of poets will perhaps be given to May ; but Oc- 
 tober has its following of devotees whom it haunts 
 not so much with ecstasy as with peace. 
 
 Browning was one of those poets in whom, to use 
 his own fine phrase, "God renews His ancient rap- 
 ture," the rapture of springtime's life. Tennyson 
 was as truly a poet of life, but it was life face to 
 
352 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 face with its great climacteric mysteries of change. 
 He was very conscious that — 
 
 God fulfils Himself in many ways 
 Lest one good custom should corrupt the world ; 
 
 and he knew, none better, that a multitude of these 
 ways are past our finding out. Both poets held one 
 course through life, and spoke one truth, though 
 in widely different accents ; both were keenly alive 
 to the trend of contemporary philosophic thought, 
 and were at once inspired and puzzled by the enor- 
 mous strides of scientific discovery ; both knew by 
 instinct and experience the power and prevalence 
 of religious doubt ; both were heirs to great relig- 
 ious traditions and convictions. Each acknowledged 
 the necessity of recasting the traditions; neither 
 could rid himself of the convictions. These were 
 recognized to have grown up out of experience ; to 
 be the products of a true evolutionary process ; to 
 belong to life ; and therefore to be worth a man's 
 reverent and scientific regard. 
 
 It has become the fashion to say that Browning's 
 approach to his art was that of a great harmonist ; 
 Tennyson's, that of an equally great melodist. The 
 epigram does somewhat scant justice to Tennyson, 
 while it rather over-praises Browning. Tennyson 
 had a respect for the medium in which he wrought 
 amounting almost to reverence. He rarely cared to 
 ply his ingenuity merely for the sake of seeing what 
 he could do. Large as his facility and his power of 
 
THE GREAT TWIN BRETHREN 353 
 
 condensation were, he preferred to exercise himself 
 in great rather than in little matters of form. It 
 was better to master blank verse until, with equal 
 fitness of sound to sense, it could tell the heroic 
 storj of Arthur's Passing or depict Enoch Arden's 
 boyish play with Philip and Annie, than it was to 
 invent a new metre. Hence, in the midst of abun- 
 dant variety, there is a notable uniformity of excel- 
 lence. Not only was he great as a lyric and elegiac 
 poet, but the popularity of the " Idylls " has a 
 deeper and sounder basis than the romantic story 
 or the half-hidden allegory can supply. Although 
 they are something too fragmentary and disjointed 
 to form a true epic, the epic note is sounded with 
 entire clearness and an inevitable appeal, which is 
 all the more compelling because Tennyson had now 
 wrought his blank verse into an instrument perhaps 
 the most nearly perfect for epic purposes of any 
 metre since the hexameters of Virgnl. 
 
 While Tennyson was thus exercising a mastery 
 over his art as legitimate as it was unquestioned, 
 Browning had become its tyrant. No doubt exists 
 as to his lordship — no more doubt than attaches 
 to the vast wealth of his intellectual and spiritual 
 resources. The difficulty lies in the fact that he could 
 not bring himself to treat the English language and 
 the poetic forms in which he proposed to express 
 his thought with a decent respect. Much can be 
 forgiven to creative genius conscious of a message 
 and impatient for its utterance. It is not only the 
 
354 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 privilege, it is doubtless sometimes the duty, of such 
 a man to drive his coach and four through ham- 
 pering conventions ; but if he be an artist, he must 
 respect his art on the one hand and his public on 
 the other. Browning seems to have done neither. 
 A supreme master of English, he appears never to 
 have felt the sacred character of his servant. 
 
 Drop heart's blood where life's wheels grate dry, 
 
 he says in '^ Dis Aliter Visum." The great symbols 
 of speech — and no language can be properly used 
 until its essentially symbolic character is under- 
 stood — have been fashioned by just this method. 
 They represent far more than ingenious attempts at 
 definition. Generations of experience comprising 
 thought, prayer, and tears are sometimes summed 
 up in common words, and our speech gains signifi- 
 cance and facility from the heart's blood that has 
 been mingled with it. 
 
 Tennyson wrought very reverently, if sometimes 
 a little too curiously, with language ; Browning too 
 often treated it like a mighty slave whose duties 
 ranged from the making of great music to the rat- 
 tling of pots and pans, but whose rights were an 
 altogether negligible quantity. There was something 
 almost literally Philistine in the perversity with 
 which he loved, having duly blinded his Samson, 
 to set him now to grinding verse which proved to 
 be mere bad prose, and again to the yet more pain- 
 ful task of making Gargantuan sport. The thing is 
 
THE GREAT TWIN BRETHREN 356 
 
 never commonplace ; Browning does not deny him- 
 self ; but the pity remains that he should descend to 
 such un worthiness, even though able to illuminate 
 it with genius. 
 
 What other poet would have dared to write the 
 following passage as rhymed verse ? 
 
 " 'T was obviously as well to take the popular 
 story — understanding how the ineptitudes of the 
 time, and the penman's prejudice, expanding fact 
 into fable fit for the clime, had, by slow and sure 
 degrees, translated it into this myth, this Indivi- 
 duum." ' 
 
 It is a great poem — " The Soliloquy of the Span- 
 ish Cloister " — which begins, — 
 
 Gr-r-r — there go, my heart's abhorrence ! 
 Water your damned flower-pots, do ! 
 
 In some editions the opposite page contains a stanza 
 originally entitled "Beer," which ends with the 
 lines : — 
 
 He says that at Greenwich they point the beholder 
 To Nelson's coat, still with tar on the shoulder : 
 For he used to lean with one shoulder digging, 
 Jigging, as it were, and zig-zag-zigging 
 Up against the mizzen-rigging. 
 
 I do not forget Tennyson's occasional lapses from 
 
 the plane of dignity and power. " darling room " 
 
 is secure of a long and banal life ; while the stanza 
 
 in the second " Locksley Hall," beginning, — 
 
 Poor old Heraldry, poor old History, poor old Poetry, 
 
 > Christmas Eve. 
 
356 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 has more than a touch of the feebleness of age. Yet 
 even in these there is a grace of sound which serves 
 too vrell to keep in mind the meagreness of sense. 
 He was incapable of thumping cacophonic tom-toms 
 for mere exercise. 
 
 Browning could occasionally do this; or, to use a 
 worthier figure, he permitted himself sometimes to 
 write poetry as other men lay brick or saw wood. It 
 has been my privilege to know two men of light and 
 leading who were voluminous writers upon great, 
 though somewhat abstruse, themes. Both were es- 
 teemed as scholars and teachers. Both were gener- 
 ally voted by discerning pupils to be hopelessly un- 
 readable authors. The would-be reader caught a 
 glimpse between the lines of an industrious hand 
 beginning its daily task at a certain hour, pursuing 
 it through a stated period, and covering its allotted 
 pages. These men wrote a volume with ease while 
 others sweated over a chapter — and the burden 
 of unprofitable books was by so much increased. 
 Browning's work sometimes reflects this method — 
 but with an unhappy difference. The mere son of 
 literary toil, who puts his thought of the day into 
 his manuscript because the hour for writing it has 
 come, is generally a negligible though an irritating 
 factor in the world of letters. Browning, even at 
 his worst, will not be thus dismissed. His genius is 
 so masterful in general that, even when he is unin- 
 telligible, — not by reason of profundity of thought 
 but through sheer refusal to take pains enough to 
 
THE GREAT TWIN BRETHREN 357 
 
 make himself understood, or through a cloudiness 
 in the thought itself, which time, had he been pa- 
 tient, might have cleared up, — we are teased with 
 the suspicion that great treasure may lurk in the 
 rubbish heap. Sometimes it is found there — and 
 we are the less able to neglect the next tangle of 
 parentheses. Sometimes all the wealth we discover 
 has evidently been brought in from without — the 
 votive offering of some Browning Society. No great 
 English poet has ever suffered or deserved so much 
 at the hands of commentators; none has ever shown 
 Browning's capacity for sweet revenge by inocu- 
 lating them with some of his own worst faults ; nor 
 can any rival dispute with him the distinction of 
 having been seriously translated into his native 
 tongue. Mr. David Duff has recently turned " Sor- 
 dello " into English, and published his translation 
 in an attractive form. Further comment upon 
 Browning's alleged obscurity is needless, beyond 
 the statement that for the average reader of " Sor- 
 dello " such a volume will be no less necessary a 
 companion than is a glossary of terms to the un- 
 derstanding of the " Canterbury Tales." No Mrs. 
 Carlyle of the future can read the poem without 
 discovering whether Sordello was a man, a city, or 
 a book ; nor need any convalescent Douglas Jerrold 
 be seized with apprehensions of idiocy because its 
 opening sentences refuse to yield a rational idea. 
 
 It would be unfair to judge Browning by " Sor- 
 dello " ; but it is necessary to put the poem in thq 
 
358 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 forefront of his works before we can adequately 
 realize the literary anomaly presented by its au- 
 thor's style. "Sordello" is a marvel, and the better 
 it is known the more the wonder grows. Much is 
 to be said for Mr. Sharp's claim that its obscurity 
 is due to a "warped anxiety for irreducible con- 
 cision." ^ Concise Browning often is, to the lowest 
 terms ; and he is no less often as diffuse as a wilder- 
 ness of disjointed parentheses can make him. But 
 under no conceivable circumstances could "Bor- 
 dello " have been made an ^ easy ' poem. 
 
 " Thoughts may he 
 Over poetical for poetry," 
 
 says Naddo to Sordello in Book III, and in his 
 youthful treatment of the soul's development 
 Browning illustrates his own words. In the "Pre- 
 lude" Wordsworth essayed a cognate task; and 
 by common consent wrote the least readable of 
 his longer poems. He illustrated the growth of a 
 poet's mind ; Browning, the rebirth of a poet's 
 soul. Without inquiring too curiously into their 
 several definitions of ' mind ' and ^ soul,' readers of 
 the two poems will feel instinctively the difference 
 between Wordsworth's philosophic detachment and 
 Browning's identification of Sordello's self with 
 the world of nature and of man through which he 
 not only moves but of which he becomes a part.^ 
 
 ^ William Sharp, Life of Browning, p. 106. 
 
 2 I would not imply, however, that Wordsworth was a stranger 
 to the mystic's rapture. In a letter included in Tennyson's Life 
 
THE GREAT TWIN BRETHREN 359 
 
 The closing sentences of the Dedication of " Sor- 
 dello" offer us a key to the poet's work as a 
 whole. 
 
 " The historical decoration was purposely of no 
 more importance than a background requires; and 
 my stress lay on the incidents in the development 
 of a soul; little else is worth study. I, at least, 
 always thought so; you, with many known and 
 unknown to me, think so; others may one day 
 think so. 
 
 >> 1 
 
 The path along which we follow Sordello from 
 careless boyhood, through selfishly ambitious youth, 
 to the premature age in which he realizes the 
 bitter lot of the people about him and the petty 
 evanescence of all accomplishment or fame which 
 does not take account of their need and represent 
 exertion in their service, may be hard to follow, 
 but its direction and its goal are sure. A man 
 never fulfils himself until he realizes that the 
 greatest thing in the world is its life, as evidenced 
 first in his own soul and then in the souls of 
 men about him, with whom he must live service- 
 ably. 
 
 Prof. Tyndall says that Wordsworth, walking one evening with a 
 friend, seized a gate which they were approaching, and remarked 
 to his companion as he held it firmly, " My dear sir, to assure my- 
 self of the existence of my own body, I am sometimes obliged to 
 grasp an object like this and shake it " (^Alfredf Lord Tennyson^ 
 vol. ii, p. 474). 
 
 ^ It should be remembered that this is not the utterance of 
 Browning's youth, but of his mature conviction. The Dedication 
 was not written until 1860. 
 
360 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Tennyson was always exclaiming against the cant 
 phrase " Art for Art's sake " and amended it to " Art 
 for Art — and Man's sake." ^ 'Browning in " Bor- 
 dello " takes up his dark though mighty parable ex- 
 actly to the same effect. Here both were at one with 
 the deeper message of the Christian faith. Both 
 were essentially religious men from youth to age. 
 Neither can be accounted for in respect of heredity 
 except by giving large place to the influence of family 
 religion. Tennyson's father was a clergyman as well 
 as a poet ; and through all the son's life and work 
 there runs a certain Church of England strain. One 
 hesitates to write the words lest they should seem to 
 connote sectarianism with its attendant narrowness. 
 Tennyson was a very intense Englishman and, in 
 my own view, the better poet for it. He was not 
 free from the prejudices of the class into which birth 
 introduced him ; his occasional references to France 
 and the French are humourously insular; and he 
 looked askance at Dissenters. But upon the whole 
 he kept his prejudices for private conversation and 
 dedicated his verse to larger uses. Like many another 
 of her greater sons, it was the Church as an element 
 in the national life, bound up with the hearts and 
 homes of long generations, symbolizing man's aspira- 
 tion after forgiveness, vision, and immortality, that 
 he loved. Through these avenues rather than by 
 the authority of article or creed, her deeper influ- 
 ences reached him ; and in these aspects he presented 
 
 * Alfred, Lord Tennyson, vol. ii, p. 92. 
 
THE GREAT TWIN BRETHREN 361 
 
 her to the world. There is a certain elegance — to 
 use a dubious word — about Tennyson's poetry ; a 
 fineness of grain, a purity alike of thought and of 
 expression, an essential high-mindedness that avoids 
 mere austerity without sacrifice of simplicity, which 
 the world has come to associate with a type of man 
 bred in an English parsonage-house and trained at 
 an English university under the old classical tradi- 
 tions. Such breeding, when permitted to have its way 
 with great natural gifts, inevitably begets a distinc- 
 tion far higher and more comprehensive than mere 
 manner. It ministers to the development of an art 
 which by its grace, wholesomeness, and humanity, 
 is secure of long life. 
 
 At the risk of making a distinction which to some 
 will seem invidious, I should say that in very much 
 the same degree Browning represents the non-con- 
 forming element in English life and verse. The 
 analogy must not be pressed too far; but even a 
 casual reader will recall abundant illustrations of 
 what I mean. In the best sense Browning was a 
 man of the world, conventional, with the common 
 serviceable conventionality of a gentleman who meets 
 other men upon their own plane, respecting their 
 rights as he would have his own respected ; yet this 
 very thing he carried to the point of unconvention- 
 ality. He was as cosmopolitan as Tennyson was 
 national. No great English poet has been so little 
 British. This is not to say that he was unpatriotic ; 
 — " Home Thoughts from Abroad," " to be in 
 
362 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 England," and perhaps even more the satisfaction 
 which he seems to have found in a drama of English 
 History like " Strafford/' or of English life like " A 
 Blot in the 'Scutcheon/' would refute that charge ; 
 — but none the less Italy rather than England seems 
 to be his home ; and it is the Italy, not merely of 
 the Italians, but of the expatriates of every clime 
 and tongue, — the Italy where men touch the life 
 of all nations through their representatives. Shake- 
 speare, too, loved Venice and Verona ; but as an 
 Englishman gifted with transcendent insight and 
 sympathies might love them — from London or 
 Warwickshire. Universal as Shakespeare's genius 
 was, there was an honest English flavour of common 
 sense about its expression. If he went abroad for a 
 theme it was that he might bring it home and illus- 
 trate it in the light he knew the best. Byron also 
 gloried in what he supposed to be his cosmopolitan 
 divorce from all things insular ; yet he was haunted 
 to the last by Mrs. Grundy. Britain, and what his 
 jaundiced eyes mistook for British respectability, 
 were necessary to him in order that they might be 
 perpetually mocked or defied ; without their stimu- 
 lus half his inspiration must have fled. Such sopho- 
 moric perversity was of course impossible to Brown- 
 ing. The lines to Edward FitzGerald remain to show 
 us how cruel his wrath could be; but his was quite 
 too broad and sane a nature to be betrayed into 
 any echo of Cain's dyspepsia or Manfred's mock- 
 heroics. 
 
THE GREAT TWIN BRETHREN 363 
 
 His treatment of men and things was essentially 
 reverent, yet he loved a manner of approach which 
 the habitually conforming mind found it hard to 
 understand. " Fifine at the Fair " may illustrate 
 what I mean. The subject, like the scene, is French 
 rather than English. A man, accompanied by his 
 wife whom he respects as well as loves, sees in a 
 travelling show a buxom performer whose physical 
 charms appeal to him no less than the curious prob- 
 lem presented by her occupation. It is from the 
 standpoint of this struggle between a permanent 
 attachment and a passing fancy, that the poet dis- 
 cusses the question of man's relation to the tem- 
 poral and the eternal. The problem is essentially 
 ethical and religious ; the method of approach is 
 unusual enough to have given Mrs. Grundy some 
 pain, had not the poem itself been so unconscion- 
 ably difficult as to keep her from acquaintance with 
 more than its title. 
 
 It is this " clashing complexity of human life," 
 involving problems which no mere conventional 
 explanations suffice to solve, that brings Browning 
 to the threshold of rehgion ; and his exhortation in 
 the Prologue to " Pacchiarotto," — 
 
 Hold on, hope hard in the subtle thing 
 That 's spirit, — 
 
 goes far to explain not merely where he found his 
 poetic material and inspiration, but how, in spite of 
 defects which must have swamped a lesser poet, 
 
364 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 he has managed to win an ever-increasing number 
 of readers and disciples. The facts that at the be- 
 ginning of his career Browning owed much to the 
 favourable criticism of Mr. W. J. Fox, a Unitarian 
 minister of high literary gifts, that later on in life 
 he worshipped statedly in a Congregational Chapel, 
 and that his ^ orthodoxy ' often brought him into 
 conflict with 'rationalistic' friends, are perhaps 
 worth noting in this connection, although they are 
 not of the first importance.^ 
 
 No adequate estimate can be made of the material 
 which these two poets wrought into verse, without 
 taking serious account of the Bible. Professor van 
 Dyke, who has published a list of over four hundred 
 passages in which Tennyson reflects the thought or 
 echoes the language of Scripture texts, remarks upon 
 the bond of sympathy which the Bible forms be- 
 tween the most cultivated and the simplest people.^ 
 Tennyson's saturation with the thought of the Bible 
 and his intimacy with its literary style go far to 
 account for his immediate appeal to multitudes of 
 readers. The problems of Scripture are universal, 
 and its solutions, whether men hear or forbear, of 
 universal interest. In both English and German it 
 
 * The late Mr. Moncure Conway used to say that Browning 
 once joined debate with an itinerant atheist preacher whom on one 
 of his walks he found haranguing a crowd, and vehemently upheld 
 the Faith. It was not unlike him. Cf. Mrs. Sutherland Orr's Life 
 and Letters, vol. ii, pp. 630-632. 
 
 2 The Poetry of Tennyson^ tenth ed., p. 247. See the whole chap- 
 ter, pp, 245-279. » 
 
THE GREAT TWIN BRETHREN 365 
 
 has exercised a profoundly formative influence upon 
 the national tongue. Into its language has been 
 poured so much of man's deepest f eeHng and noblest 
 aspiration as to make it symbolic in very high de- 
 gree ; and, as has been already noted, the worth of 
 language is largely determined by its symbolic power. 
 Hence poets and orators, however little concerned 
 they may be with religion, have natural recourse to 
 Scripture language in their endeavour to touch the 
 heart or reflect the experience of men. 
 
 Tennyson and Browning, however, not only had 
 this natural tendency to use the speech and figures 
 of the Bible : they were both intensely interested 
 in the problems of ethics and religion with which 
 the Bible deals; and however ^orthodox' or ^het- 
 erodox' they may have thought themselves, the 
 Scriptural approach to these questions seemed to 
 them to be of large moment. Into " Ferishtah's 
 Fancies " Browning characteristically enough intro- 
 duced some Hebrew quotations which, as he wrote 
 to a friend, " are put in for a purpose, as a direct ac- 
 knowledgement that certain doctrines may be found 
 in the Old Book, which the concocters of Modern 
 Schemes of Morality put forth as discoveries of their 
 own."^ 
 
 Considerable space might easily be given to this 
 common debt which both poets acknowledge. Thus 
 in " Locksley Hall, Sixty Years After " Tennyson 
 quotes, — 
 
 * Sharp, Life of Browning, p. 182. 
 
366 ENGLISH LITERATUREi 
 
 Love your enemy, bless your haters, said the Greatest of the 
 Great ; ^ 
 
 while in " A Blot in the 'Scutcheon " Browning 
 sums up the play, and voices a similar Scriptural 
 command in Thorold Tresham's dying words, — 
 
 Vengeance is God's, not man's. Remember me ! 
 
 Both were fascinated by the story of Lazarus risen 
 from the dead, and both have enshrined it in verse 
 almost as haunting and as sure of remembrance as 
 the original chapter in St. John's Gospel ; Browning 
 in " An Epistle," and Tennyson in Section xxxi of 
 '^ In Memoriam." Browning, too, loved to echo the 
 old prophetic preaching of sin and the need for re- 
 pentance, touching it with a gleam of characteristic 
 humour often, but yet content to leave it in a form 
 that would bear pulpit utterance. Such, for instance, 
 is the first section of " Ben Karshook's Wisdom." 
 
 " Would a man 'scape the rod ? " 
 
 Rabbi Ben Karshook saith, 
 " See that he turn to God 
 
 The day before his death ! " 
 
 " Ay, could a man inquire 
 
 When it shall come ! " I say. 
 The Rabbi's eye shoots fire — 
 " Then let him turn to-day ! " 
 
 In very much more musical as well as tragic verse 
 Tennyson adapts the language of Scripture to the 
 
 ^ In less tragic form the same lesson is inculcated as explicitly 
 in Sea Breams, 
 
THE GREAT TWIN BRETHREN 367 
 
 purpose of his famous sermon in " Aylmer's Field " 
 from the text, " Behold, your house is left unto you 
 desolate." The poem is so compact of Biblical ref- 
 erence, phrase, and feeling as to make illustration 
 difficult except one quote the whole. It would admi- 
 rably serve the purposes of a college examination in 
 ability to recognize and verify allusions to Scripture. 
 A few verses must suffice. 
 
 Then came a Lord in no wise like to BaaL 
 
 The babe shall lead the lion. Surely now 
 
 The wilderness shall blossom as the rose. 
 
 Crown thyself, worm, and worship thine own lusts ! 
 
 In such a shape dost thou behold thy God. 
 Thou wilt not gash thy flesh for him ; for thine 
 Fares richly, in fine linen, not a hair 
 Ruffled upon the scarfskin, even while 
 The deathless ruler of thy dying house 
 Is wounded to the death that cannot die ; 
 And tho' thou numberest with the followers 
 Of One who cried, " Leave all and follow me." 
 
 Thee shall thy brother man, the Lord from Heaven 
 Bom of a village girl, carpenter's son, 
 Wonderful, Prince of peace, the Mighty God, 
 Count thee more base idolater of the two ; 
 Crueller : as not passing thi'o' the fire 
 Bodies, but souls — thy children's — thro' the smoke. 
 
 Friends, I was bid to speak of such a one 
 
 By those who most have cause to sorrow for her — 
 
 Fairer than Rachel by the palmy well. 
 
 Fairer than Ruth among the fields of com, 
 
 Fair as the Angel that said, " Hail ! "she seem'd, 
 
 Who entering filled the house with sudden light. 
 
368 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Tennyson was little disposed to choose explicit 
 Scripture themes, though his "Rizpah" is a noble 
 modern paraphrase of a Biblical episode. Browning, 
 on the other hand, did some of his most memorable 
 work, and appeals perhaps to his largest audience, 
 in three great poems upon Bible characters, " Saul," 
 Lazarus in " An Epistle," and St. John in " A 
 Death in the Desert." 
 
 It is no part of my purpose, however, to make 
 overmuch of this connection between Scripture 
 themes or language and the work of these poets. 
 The connection exists, and suggests the worth, to 
 a poet's manner and matter both, of the world's 
 greatest religious Hterature, to say nothing of the 
 wider public assured to a writer who will express 
 himself with skill upon great themes in language 
 dear and sacred to multitudes of thoughtful people. 
 The contact between relio^ion and such literature as 
 Browning and Tennyson represent becomes at once 
 vital and essential instead of formal or incidental, 
 when we begin to consider the themes to which 
 they turned and the spirit in which they approached 
 them. Both were philosophers; which is simply 
 another way of saying that both looked out open- 
 eyed upon the mysteries of experience and wel- 
 comed a challenge to their investigation. Both were 
 essentially pure-minded and reverent men. This is 
 not to deny in them the presence of nature's deeper 
 physical instincts or a warmth of blood which often 
 colours their verse. There was a rich vein of the 
 
THE GREAT TWIN BRETHREN 369 
 
 sensuous in both. "Lucretius" vouches for Ten- 
 nyson here, as does " Fifine " for Browning ; and 
 there are passages in the latter' s work which sug- 
 gest his capacity as a painter of the horrible had he 
 chosen to follow lower instead of higher instincts ; 
 so close akin are the sensuous and the cruel. Read- 
 ers of " Sordello/' for instance, will remember Sa- 
 linguerra's fight with mob and fire at the gate of 
 Vicenza, and how — 
 
 The blood fries 
 And hisses on your brass gloves as they tear 
 Those upturned faces choking with despair. 
 
 This is perhaps the least unquotable of three 
 episodes in the poem which for me are among the 
 most grisly in our literature, fit to set beside the 
 murder in Le Fanu's " Uncle Silas," Poe's " Facts 
 in the Case of M. Valdemar," and Kipling's " End 
 of the Passage." That these two poets should have 
 held such power to exalt and amplify the fleshly in 
 strict control is a tribute at once to their individual 
 characters and to their common art. It was possible 
 to them because of their intense interest in life's 
 greater issues. 
 
 I do not propose to attempt an exposition of the 
 religious and ethical views set forth in their works. 
 I desire, rather, roughly to appraise the value of 
 religion to them as poets. Both, as I have indicated, 
 were deeply occupied with problems of the soul. 
 Tennyson won a great public by his essentially 
 modern treatment of death, grief, doubt, and in ex- 
 
370 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 pugnable hope in ''In Memoriam"; but it was a 
 public which he had in some measure prepared to 
 receive his message by such earlier work as " The 
 Palace of Art/' " St. Simeon Stylites," " The Two 
 Voices/' and " The Vision of Sin." These four 
 early poems, with the " Ulysses," which in some 
 respects I should place at their head, form an abun- 
 dant answer to the critics who complain of Tenny- 
 son's lack of substance and accuse him of sacrificing 
 matter to form. If there are greater themes than 
 those suggested here, I do not know what they can 
 be. " Ulysses " may fittingly head the list, because 
 its haunting verse not only depicts shore, sea, night, 
 and stars with exquisite beauty, but makes of the 
 whole a setting for the figure of a symbolic man. 
 Ulysses is not merely the dubious hero of the 
 Odyssey ; he is far more. Schelling somewhere says 
 that " the Spirit has its Iliad, its tale of struggle 
 with brutal and natural forces, and then its Odyssey, 
 when out of its painful wanderings it returns to 
 the Infinite."^ The place of Ulysses in classical 
 literature is comparable to that of Abraham in Holy 
 Writ. Each represents man as the Pilgrim of the 
 Universe. Abraham was turned out of doors by his 
 vision of a higher faith, and went forth, "not 
 knowing whither he went " ; Ulysses, in Tennyson's 
 poem, feels this same impulse to seek a larger 
 world. The same spirit of adventure animates both 
 
 * I owe this quotation to Dr. A. M. Fairbairn. See The Place of 
 Christ in Modem Theology^ p. 212. 
 
THE GREAT TWIN BRETHREN 371 
 
 heroes; in one case exalted into the realm of 
 religion, in the other moving upon what we blindly 
 call a more ^material' plane; but none the less 
 bespeaking the existence of a divine image or like- 
 ness in man. To use the old phrase, man " cannot 
 be holden " permanently by mere circumstance. 
 Ulysses is face to face with age ; but there are still 
 so many seas to be sailed, so many lands to be 
 visited, so much to do and bear in the world, that 
 he is impatient of rest and security. The very fact 
 that there are dangers in the unknown for the lover 
 of mere life to fear, adds an incentive to his rest- 
 lessness. Many a man has achieved a difficult enter- 
 prise from a haunting fear in his heart lest he be 
 afraid to undertake it ; he has attacked it to justify 
 himself to himself. It is the instinctive self-asser- 
 tion of the regal element in human will. This cry 
 of Ulysses, — 
 
 I am a part of all that I have met, — 
 
 is underrun with the assurance that he is, after all, 
 the regnant part. He is so conscious of the brevity 
 of life's chance as to lament his three years' rest at 
 home : — 
 
 And this gray spirit yearning in desire 
 To follow knowledge like a sinking star, 
 Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. 
 
 It is to be acknowledged that death closes all ; 
 and yet — and yet, there is something in Ulysses 
 that challenges even that patent fact : — 
 
372 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 For my purpose holds 
 To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths 
 Of all the western stars, until I die. 
 It may be that the gulfs will wash us down ; 
 It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, 
 And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. 
 Tho' much is taken, much abides ; and tho* 
 We are not now that strength which in old days 
 Moved earth and heaven ; that which we are, we are : 
 One equal temper of heroic hearts, 
 Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will 
 To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. 
 
 This, early in life, was Tennyson's statement of 
 a fundamental article in his faith which goes far 
 to account for the wholesomeness of his influence. 
 As a boy my acquaintance with the poem began 
 when reading the late Sir Henry M. Stanley's 
 address to his men as they set out upon their un- 
 tried way through Africa. The adventure was a 
 great and doubtful one ; and inevitably the words 
 of a courageous leader, dedicating himself as well 
 as encouraging his followers, took on something 
 of the complexion of the " Ulysses." The incident 
 suggests the universal quality in Tennyson's best 
 work, its unfailing soundness, its heartening power, 
 and its fundamental kinship with religion. Practi- 
 cally all that he wrote from the day of " Ulysses " 
 to that of ^^De Profundis " is instinct with this high 
 notion of personality. That personality is a mystery 
 does not disturb him ; that it should always prove 
 too big for the compass of our definitions rather en- 
 
THE GREAT TWIN BRETHREN 373 
 
 hances its dignity and worth. The fact that we can- 
 not altogether comprehend so great yet intimate a 
 thing, only makes it better worth our while to grasp 
 at least the outskirts of its ways and learn what we 
 may of its capacities and powers. As a philosophical 
 riddle the question of free will may remain indefi- 
 nitely beyond us ; as a fact of experience we are 
 obliged to treat man's will as a creative power. For 
 the purposes of our life together we must suppose 
 it to be free, at least within large limits. To Tenny- 
 son it seemed reasonable in the strictly scientific 
 sense to recognize this mastery of circumstance as 
 a legitimate attribute of a man's soul. The hypo- 
 thesis which best fits life and conduct upon the 
 present stage of existence is — 
 
 This main-miracle, that thou art thon, 
 With power on thine own act and on the world. 
 
 This is no less the burden of Christianity, which 
 never makes light of the paradoxes of speculation 
 or the puzzles of experience, but simply asks men 
 to use the powers they have for the discipline of 
 their instincts and passions and for the attainment 
 of the highest ends. The essence of Christ's Gospel 
 was that man should practically recognize and ful- 
 fil his relationship to God, and his power over a 
 world which is meant to become a kingdom of 
 God. 
 
 The early poems of "The Two Voices" and 
 "St. Simeon Stylites " are admirable paraphrases 
 
374 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 in modern language of the old cry of St. Paul con- 
 scious of the war in his members. " The Vision of 
 Sin " is a replica of the Scriptural " mystery of in- 
 iquity." " Aylmer's Field," " Locksley Hall," and 
 " Maud " all remind us of the miserable and often 
 suicidal fraud perpetrated by him who would ap- 
 praise his own life or that of another in terms of 
 material possessions. "The Princess," though in 
 lighter vein, is still inspired with something of the 
 same thought that every life, without distinction of 
 sex, should have scope for growth and self-fulfil- 
 ment; but the poet's sound English sense speaks 
 throuofh it to remind his readers that this self-ful- 
 filment is most likely to develop along the lines of 
 that human experience which has become a second 
 human nature. 
 
 " In Memoriam " is like a magic mirror held up 
 to the heart and mind of its century. The fact that 
 it is really a mass of related fragments may possibly 
 have enhanced rather than diminished its power to 
 reflect the broken lights which fell upon it. Those 
 who base Tennyson's popularity upon his command 
 of a mere prettiness of phrase, cannot, it seems to 
 me, have looked beneath the surface of this poem. 
 Here is man face to face with the world-old mystery 
 of death ; and with the no less compelling mystery 
 of disappointed hopes and shattered plans, since 
 death has broken in violently upon a life of promise 
 instead of coming in the course of nature and in 
 fulness of time. Moreover the integrity of such life 
 
THE GREAT TWIN BRETHREN 375 
 
 as remains is doubly threatened ; first, by the fact 
 of loss, and then by the revolution which the age 
 has wrought upon faith. Elegy which sets forth 
 death's sadness and sorrow's poignancy is as old as 
 poetry ; but it remained for Tennyson to depict the 
 desolation of a heart not only bereaved of the object 
 of its love, but threatened with bereavement of all 
 sources of its hope. No poet of his century seemed 
 to have so keen a sense for the inner meanings of 
 its mighty scientific and critical revolutions. Ten- 
 nyson makes good his claim here to a place among 
 the great prophets and seers. Before the " Origin 
 of Species " had made men conversant with ^natural 
 selection ' and the ' survival of the fittest,' and while 
 the idea of evolution was yet general and undefined, 
 he seems to have discerned by instinct the confu- 
 sion which impended over the faith of his genera- 
 tion. Evolution was not yet the name to conjure 
 with which it became in the sixties and seventies ; 
 but the shadow of its coming was discernible to 
 Tennyson's eye. First among poets he saw the 
 place which biological studies were to claim in the 
 thought of the century and their family relation 
 to religion. 
 
 " In comparing him with Carlyle," says Professor 
 Tyndall, " I notice that the latter drew his imagery, 
 for the most part, from what we call inorganic na- 
 ture. Physics and chemistry were well advanced 
 when Carlyle wrote, but modern researches in bi- 
 ology had scarcely begun. These latter fell into 
 
376 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 your father's hands, and he has made noble use of 
 them from ' In Memoriam ' onward." * 
 
 Moreover the note of faith in " In Memoriam" is 
 as truly modern as the picture of its doubt. There 
 is no argument of the scholastic sort. The problem 
 is approached more often after the traditional man- 
 ner of Cambridge than of Oxford ; the poet showing 
 himself to be of closer kin to the Platonists than to 
 Bishop Butler.^ 
 
 Both Tennyson and Browning, in their dealing 
 with religious problems, prefigure what is best and 
 most suggestive in modern Pragmatism. The be- 
 reaved man finds his dearest ties broken, his hopes 
 for the future in this world a mass of fragments, 
 and his faith in another a chaos of uncertainties. 
 What shall he do? Whence shall he seek comfort? 
 Nature, viewed with the partial vision of the new 
 biology, seems " to shriek against his creed." Man, 
 speaking through the lips of M. Comte and the 
 Positivists, would mock him with an abstract con- 
 tinuance of racial life wherein are to be found no 
 traces of that personal entity which was his friend. 
 Blank dogmatic atheism is but another and, if 
 possible, an uglier name for madness. He is forced 
 therefore to approach the problem of life's recon- 
 
 * " A Glimpse of Farringford," by John Tyndall, in Alfred ^ Lord 
 Tennyson, vol. ii, p. 475. 
 
 ' Those familiar with the Life will remember Tennyson's con- 
 versation with Mr. Gladstone upon the two Universities, vol. ii, 
 pp. 490-491. 
 
THE GREAT TWIN BRETHREN 377 
 
 struction from the side of life's needs. In homely 
 phrase, he must decide whether or not what he does 
 know is to be worsted and put to confusion by what 
 he does not know. Christianity has always given a 
 simple but very positive and cheerful answer to this 
 question. Man is meant to dominate the world ; to 
 read its record, to possess its substance, to set in 
 order its confusions. Tennyson once said to Tyn- 
 dall that, if he believed he were here simply to 
 usher in something higher than himself in which 
 he could have no personal part or lot, he should 
 feel that a liberty had been taken with him.^ The 
 phrase is a pregnant one. No one can think with 
 equanimity of men Hke Hallam and Tennyson, and 
 no one is willing to think of himself, as represent- 
 ing nothing but a transitory crop planted merely to 
 be ploughed in for the sake of enriching the earth 
 which may then bear a better, — a sort of high- 
 grade cosmic fertihzer. There is a spirit in man 
 which resents this. " In Memoriam " evokes this 
 spirit, questions it, makes it bear what witness it 
 can to man's experience as well as to his needs ; 
 and then, with full recognition of the illimitable 
 scope of the unknown, decides that, in light of the 
 known, faith is the rational hypothesis for the guid- 
 ance of life. 
 
 That life is ever Lord of Death 
 And love can never lose its own. 
 
 * Alfred f Lord Tennyson, vol. ii, p. 474. 
 
378 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 This is, roughly speaking, Tennyson's constructive 
 argument, not only in " In Memoriam," but through- 
 out the remainder of his work. Only very rarely does 
 any dogmatic note sound in his utterance of it. Quite 
 as often it is only implicit ; though as time passed 
 he felt the natural impulse of age explicitly to em- 
 phasize his convictions. Hence poems like " De Pro- 
 fundis," "Despair," "In the Children's Hospital," 
 — although it would not be fair to ascribe the ar- 
 gument of the Hospital Nurse unreservedly to the 
 poet, — and most notably " The Ancient Sage," 
 are primarily religious and even theological in their 
 motive. 
 
 O worms and maggots of to-day 
 Without their hope of wings ! 
 
 Thus " The Ancient Sage " restates the poet's con- 
 viction that the things of the Spirit are life's ulti- 
 mate realities and that he who neglects them walks 
 in a vain show. These poems set forth with com- 
 pelling eloquence the truth that life depends on 
 faith, and, lacking it, is bound to pine and dwindle 
 on the one hand, or else go mad with hopelessness 
 upon the other. 
 
 The " Idylls " represent the ethical or practically 
 religious side of this truth. They have the same 
 relation to a completely developed epic that "In 
 Memoriam " has to a perfect elegy. Both are poems 
 made up of related fragments, the difference being 
 that the elegy bears this treatment better than the 
 epic. The allegorical element in the " Idylls," more- 
 
THE GREAT TWIN BRETHREN 379 
 
 over, doubtless interferes in some degree with the 
 development of the epic as a whole ; but I do not 
 think that the allegory was so overworked by Ten- 
 nyson as the criticism of it has been by his critics. 
 That the poems show "sense at war with soul" 
 is so evident as scarcely to need statement. The 
 reader will best catch their meaning and learn their 
 lesson who contents himself with this simple an- 
 nouncement of their purpose and rests in it. All 
 effort to identify characters with specific institu- 
 tions or qualities befogs both the literary and the 
 moral issues. No doubt the Lady of the Lake may 
 represent the Church, but she is far more effective 
 artistically and ethically as an incidental figure in 
 Arthur's story than she can be as an Institution. 
 
 Meanwhile the "Idylls'' justify their hold upon 
 the world with every fresh reading. They are ro- 
 mantic in the best sense; pathetic, too, with much 
 of the true Virgilian tears-of -things; musical be- 
 yond expression except by their own words; clean 
 with an essential purity, although dealing explicitly 
 with a tragedy in which a harlot and an adulteress 
 have large part; and seasoned always with a com- 
 mon sense which, if it cannot supply the spice of 
 humour, at least saves sentiment from degenerat- 
 ing into mawkishness. Much might be said upon 
 this last point; because it has become the fashion 
 to treat the "Idylls" as though their ideal were 
 a sort of bloodless austerity. There are some to 
 whom a red flower seems to offer as fitting a sym- 
 
380 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 bol of blameless life as a white flower ; and I con- 
 fess to membership in that company; yet, barring 
 the literal fact of the symbol's use, — and he must 
 be captious indeed who really begrudges the lily 
 its time-honoured office, — it seems to me that the 
 preeminent lesson of the "Idylls" is very much 
 the lesson of a robust and rational Christianity. A 
 man's life consisteth neither in the thino^s which 
 he possesseth, nor yet in the things which he re- 
 nounces ; neither in luxurious wealth nor in ascetic 
 poverty, but in self-fulfilment according to the will 
 of God and the need of men. Arthur is a very 
 high type of man; but his limitations are patent 
 to us, and before he passed became evident to 
 himself. 
 
 " I found Hira in the shining of the stars, 
 I marked Him in the flowering of His fields, 
 But in His ways with men I find Him not." 
 
 " Self -reverence, self-knowledge, self-control," Ten- 
 nyson's early trinity of virtues, are highly devel- 
 oped in Arthur, but he lacks exactly this vision 
 of God immanent in man, making all life sacred. 
 Merciful he is, and humane in the narrower sense ; 
 but not with the humanity which flowers into sym- 
 pathy and quick understanding of man's tempta- 
 tions and pettinesses. Hence it is — and the touch 
 is a stroke of pure genius — that Arthur is some- 
 times thrown by Lancelot when jousting, but is 
 always mightier than he in the field of genuine 
 
THE GREAT TWIN BRETHREN 381 
 
 battle. He represents the righteous man, pure in 
 heart, a lion in courage, absolute in his allegiance 
 to duty, whose goodness is yet touched with pallor. 
 With a little of Lancelot's capacity for passion, 
 the tragedy of his Round Table and his Queen 
 might have been averted; but to have added this 
 to all the rest would have been to write something 
 other than the " Idylls." 
 
 In the poems as they stand we have a faithful 
 and a marvellously beautiful picture of the higher 
 man striving to dominate complex circumstance 
 and bend it to the highest purposes. The complex- 
 ity is as Protean and baffling as that of weather; 
 the very forces which seem fair to-day beat him 
 back to-morrow. The tragedy and the pathos ap- 
 pear less in the wilfulness wherewith evil men, and 
 most notably one evil woman, Vivian, oppose all 
 of good that the King can devise, than in the per- 
 versity of fate whereby, on the one hand, Guine- 
 vere and Lancelot are thrown together and led to 
 mutual and widespreading ruin, and, on the other, 
 the flower of the Round Table Knights are dis- 
 persed in a time of grievous need upon a chase 
 after wandering fires. 
 
 The mystic vision of the Grail is not life's end. 
 Ethereal souls like Galahad and Perci vale's sister 
 may see and profit by the revelation ; it may come 
 as a great reward to Sir Bors, willing to be blind 
 to it if only Lancelot might see and be comforted ; 
 and a distant glimpse is vouchsafed to faithful Per- 
 
382 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 civale : but better upon the whole seems the lot of 
 the homely priest to whom Percivale tells his tale, 
 and better far the lot of Arthur ; since to him in the 
 midst of his toilsome career there come — 
 
 " Moments when he feels he cannot die. 
 And knows himself no vision to himself, 
 Nor the high God a vision, nor that One 
 Who rose again. 
 
 " So spake the King : I know not all he meant," 
 
 says Percivale, acknowledging half unconsciously 
 that, while the ascetic may hear an inspiring echo, 
 the Voice itself speaks most often to the man in the 
 midst of life's conflict. 
 
 Much might be made of the extent to which Ten- 
 nyson lays Scripture scenes and language under 
 tribute in the "Idylls." Sometimes a line like — 
 
 If I lose myself, I save myself ! 
 
 runs like a refrain through a poem, and sometimes 
 an episode hinges upon the less explicit teaching of 
 the Gospels. The Duke of Argyll was once walking 
 in the poet's garden, when Tennyson, who had pre- 
 ceded him along a path, suddenly turned and blurted 
 out, " I hate scorn." ^ Twice at least in the " Idylls" 
 the same feeling that no man is to be treated with 
 mere contempt,^ finds utterance; once when Lance- 
 lot detects Modred playing spy, and again when 
 Guinevere in her penitence says of Arthur, — 
 
 1 Alfred, Lord Tennyson^ vol. ii, p. 614. 
 « Cf. St. Matthew, v, 22. 
 
THE GREAT TWIN BRETHREN 383 
 
 " but he never mocks, 
 For mockery is the fume of little hearts." 
 
 So too, in Ulysses, the modern idea of faith as 
 moulded by experience is illustrated by the lines : — 
 
 Yet all experience is an arch wherethro' 
 
 Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades 
 
 For ever and for ever when I move ; 
 
 and better still perhaps, though unconsciously, by 
 the twelve windows in Merlin's great hall at Came- 
 lot which were emblazoned with the story of Arthur's 
 wars : — 
 
 And all the light that falls upon the board 
 Streams thro' the twelve great battles of our King. 
 
 The subject cannot be left without some reference 
 to Tennyson's pathos. A word however must suffice, 
 not merely because of limitations of space but because 
 the quality is too delicate to bear formal discussion. 
 I should hesitate to say that Tennyson had a ^ com- 
 mand of the pathetic' If such a phrase mean any- 
 thing it would seem to imply that he sometimes sat 
 down with deliberate purpose to reach and wring 
 men's hearts. Dickens, at his worst, was capable of 
 this, and his facility at it would have damned him 
 almost irretrievably had he not possessed very great 
 redeeming qualities. Tennyson hated sentimentality, 
 although the circumstances of " The May Queen " 
 and " Enoch Arden " beguiled him into the edge of 
 its territory. The appeal of "Enoch Arden" — 
 and it has been more often and widely translated, 
 
384 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 I believe, than any other of Tennyson's poems — 
 is, however, the honest appeal of genuine tragedy 
 very simply and naturally portrayed/ Tennyson's 
 command of our hearts is far more potent than any 
 mere ability to tell a pitiful story could justify. He 
 had the mystic's sense of the fleeting unreality of 
 the seen and temporal. Sometimes this finds ex- 
 plicit utterance, as in the words of one who — 
 
 hath heard 
 Time flowing in the middle of the night 
 And all things creeping to a day of doom.^ 
 
 Again, as in " The Palace of Art," he propounds to 
 
 us — 
 
 The riddle of the painful earth, — 
 
 and does it graciously enough to stir our hearts ra- 
 ther than our bile. But he is most genuinely poignant 
 when simply echoing his own deep sense of the 
 mystery of time's passing and earth's common joys, 
 sorrows, and fidelities. Here, better than any other 
 modern poet, he deserves his own tribute to Virgil, 
 
 * Walter Bagehot, whose critical touch is generally so firm and 
 sure, certainly blunders in his criticism of Tennyson for endowing 
 a fisherman-sailor with Enoch Arden's high qualities. Tennyson, like 
 FitzGerald, knew the East Coast, and knew too that it is exactly 
 among simple and often rude sea-faring folk that fine feeling and 
 capacity for heroism are latent. As illustrating the poet's dread of 
 effusive praise or too searching an inquiry into his private views, 
 may be cited his first conversation with Frederick Robertson. He 
 had already learned to admire the preacher and his work ; but fear- 
 ful of too intimate an interview on this occasion he obstinately re- 
 fused to discuss any other subject than Beer, 
 
 ' Brooke, Poetry of Tennyson, p. 68. 
 
THE GREAT TWIN BRETHREN 385 
 
 All the charm of all the Muses often flowering in a lonely 
 word. 
 
 It is this consciousness of himself as " in the world 
 but not of it " that breathes through a song like — 
 
 Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, 
 Tears from the depth of some divine despair 
 Rise in the heart and gather to the eyes, 
 In looking on the happy autumn fields, 
 And thinking of the days that are no more. 
 
 Little as such beauty lends itseK to analysis the 
 most careless reader notes the lack of bitterness in 
 the poet's sorrow. The tears are distilled from a 
 beating heart rather than wrung from a broken one; 
 and the despair, if despair it be, is still divine. Dis- 
 tance, loneliness, the flight of time, all things that 
 accentuate a man's individual existence haunt this 
 poet — but in the breast of their sorrow, hope al- 
 ways beats. The lines from " The Ancient Sage " 
 are now familiar: — 
 
 for oft 
 On me, when boy, there came what then I call'd 
 
 In my boy phrase " The Passion of the Past.** 
 
 The first gray streak of earliest summer-dawn, 
 
 The last long stripe of waning crimson gloom, 
 
 As if the late and early were but one — 
 
 A height, a broken grange, a grove, a flower 
 
 Had murmurs, " Lost and gone and lost and gone ! " 
 
 A breath, a whisper — some divine farewell — 
 
 Desolate sweetness — far and far away — 
 
 What had he loved, what had he lost, the boy ? 
 
386 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 One cannot but contrast this Sense of the Past, 
 with its consciousness of loss but its instinctive in- 
 sistence upon a gain to come out of the future which 
 shall redress it, — 
 
 As if the late and early were but one — 
 
 with the exquisite hopelessness of such verse as Mrs. 
 Meynell's Threnody : — 
 
 Beloved, thou art like a tune that idle fingers 
 
 Play on a window-pane, 
 The time is there, the form of music lingers ; 
 
 But O, thou sweetest strain, 
 Where is thy soul ? Thou liest i' the wind and rain. 
 
 Tennyson's demand and expectation of life, from 
 " Ulysses " to " Crossing the Bar," is, on the other 
 hand, — 
 
 The wages of going on and not to die. 
 
 With his brother poet he nobly illustrates the truth 
 of F. W. H. Myers's remark that, " In an epoch of 
 transition and bewilderment great souls make the 
 surest harbourage." * 
 
 Exactly these same wages for life's toil were de- 
 manded and expected by Browning. This view of 
 life and death was implicit in all his work, and clearly 
 uttered at its close in "Asolando." The difference 
 in manner between the two poets is so marked and 
 so easily emphasized to the point of contrast, as to 
 blind the casual reader to their practical identity of 
 
 * " Modern Poets and the Meaning of Life," Nineteenth Century, 
 January, 1893. 
 
THE GREAT TWIN BRETHREN 387 
 
 conviction and substance. Browning's humour, for 
 instance, is as rich and frequent as Tennyson's is 
 rare. Sometimes it fairly overdoes itself and becomes 
 farcical, as in the section of " Sordello " in which 
 St. John mistakes his own poor portrait for a pic- 
 ture of the Devil. Yet even in these cases, where we 
 could desire greater restraint, the farce is a natu- 
 rally luxuriant growth; it is never manufactured 
 and then dragged in for effect. The two poets also 
 stand side by side in the possession of lyric powers 
 whose exercise could melt men's hearts. Browning 
 used his gift less frequently than Tennyson, but 
 when he chose to exercise it, the result was unfor- 
 gettable. 
 
 O lyric Love, half angel and half bird, 
 And all a wonder and a wild desire — 
 
 remains at the end of the first section of " The Ring 
 and the Book " to bear him witness. He, too, knew 
 the " Passion of the Past " and prays, — 
 
 That still, despite the distance and the dark, 
 What was, again may be. 
 
 Generally, however, his recollection of the past is 
 brisk and cheerful with assurance that its essence 
 is still extant and remains his unfailing possession. 
 
 May's warm, slow, yellow, moonlit summer nights ; — 
 Gone are they, but I have them in my soul. 
 
 These words, whatever their setting in "Pippa 
 Passes," will describe his general attitude toward 
 
388 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 past experience, as the other lines from "James 
 Lee's Wife" represent his splendid confidence in 
 the present and the future : — 
 
 Rejoice that man is hurled 
 
 From change to change unceasingly, 
 
 His soul's wings never furled ! 
 
 Of his pathos, I suppose that Pompilia, the child- 
 wife and mother, is commonly reckoned to be the 
 great exemplar. The heart must be hard indeed 
 which fails to yield its reverent sympathy to her 
 youth, innocence, suffering, and untimely death. Yet 
 there is a certain softness of physical fibre about her 
 that somehow manages to reach over into the realm 
 of character ; she is faintly touched with the negative 
 quality which that other child-wife in " David Cop- 
 perfield " incarnates so wof ully. This is not to insti- 
 tute a comparison between Pompilia and Dora; the 
 former of whom is one of the significant features in a 
 great poem, while the latter is a chief blemish in a 
 great novel. But the fate of Pompilia inspires a phy- 
 sical shudder ; it is horrid rather than pathetic. One 
 could have borne, perhaps, to see Mildred Tresham 
 stabbed, had it been necessary to the tragedy of 
 " A Blot in the 'Scutcheon " ; she was of tragic 
 mould ; but Pompilia ! — it is like reenacting the 
 Massacre of the Innocents ! Browning's pathos is 
 most poignant when it is gentlest and simplest. The 
 passing of St. John in " A Death in the Desert " 
 makes no special demand upon us for any feeling 
 beyond a gracious and thankful sadness ; but the 
 
THE GREAT TWIN BRETHREN 389 
 
 poor Bactrian, who kept watch by the cave's mouth, 
 grazing his goat upon the rags of herbage, and fully 
 intent upon yielding up his life, if need arose, to 
 shelter those within the cave — this man is secure 
 of his meed of fame and tears. He was not equal 
 to perpetuating the tradition of John's death ; but 
 he could for a moment interpose a humble life in 
 order that the master might pass in peace, and his 
 disciples gain time to receive his dying words. 
 
 The Bactrlan was but a wild childish man 
 And could not write nor speak, but only loved. 
 
 The closing lines of the story, too, are marked by 
 so sweet a simplicity as to compel the reader to 
 wish that Browning had oftener exercised his gift 
 in this direction : — 
 
 Believe ye will not see him any more 
 About the world with his divine regard ! 
 For all was as I say, and now the man 
 Lies as he lay once, breast to breast with God. 
 
 Browning's friend " Waring " ^ once called him 
 the " subtlest assertor of the soul in song," and the 
 saying is as true as it is sibilant. No further answer 
 than the multitude of Browning Societies need be 
 given to those who assert or fancy that theology's 
 day is past and that religion ceases to hold the at- 
 tention of the thoughtful. Whatever tempted or in- 
 spired men ; everything that enhanced or debased 
 their personality; the mystery of their three score 
 
 » Mr. Alfred Domett. 
 
390 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 and ten years and their insistent claim upon a life 
 beyond that term, — all these things fascinated him 
 and wrought themselves over into poetry in the 
 alembic of his mind. " Paracelsus " and " Sordello" 
 represent in their several ways the element of spir- 
 itual adventure to which religion invites us, and 
 without which it degenerates into mere formality. 
 " Saul " and " Cleon " speak of the inappeasable 
 hunger of the soul for God and immortality. " An 
 Epistle" and " A Death in the Desert " remind us 
 of the inevitable appeal made by Jesus Christ even 
 though He be considered as a mere incident or 
 phenomenon of history. "Christmas Eve" and 
 "Easter Day" are as frankly theological as New- 
 man's " Apologia " or " Grammar of Assent." 
 " Pippa Passes" and " The King and the Book " are 
 far too great and comprehensive to be characterized 
 in a sentence ; but in them both, sometimes explicitly, 
 and more often by suggestion, the poet echoes St. 
 Paul's reasoning of " righteousness, temperance, and 
 judgement to come." 
 
 Pippa's song, so often and unintelligently quoted 
 as though it numbered Browning among the dog- 
 matic optimists, really has a far deeper significance 
 than that. It is the chance unreasoning utterance 
 of a happy little working girl upon the morning of 
 a holiday ; it penetrates not the ears only but the 
 fleshly hearts of an adulteress and the paramour 
 who has just murdered her husband. Here lies the 
 wonder of the thing ; that this child's thoughtless 
 
THE GREAT TWIN BRETHREN 391 
 
 assertion, moved as she is to utter it by the appeal 
 of springtime to her innocent heart, — 
 
 " God 's in His heaven — 
 All 's right with the world ! " — 
 
 should bring a murderer to himself, so that Sebald 
 echoes breathlessly, — 
 
 " God 's in His heaven ! Do you hear that ? Who spoke ? '* 
 
 and a little later, speaking both of and to Ottima, 
 he sets forth inimitably the old attempt of the flesh 
 to strangle the spirit. 
 
 <* To think 
 She would succeed in her absurd attempt, 
 And fascinate by sinning, show herself 
 Superior — guilt from its excess superior 
 To innocence ! That little peasant's voice 
 Has righted all again. Though I be lost, 
 I know which is the better, never fear, 
 Of vice OP virtue, purity or lust, 
 Nature or trick ! I see what I have done, 
 Entirely now ! Oh, I am proud to feel 
 Such torments — " 
 
 It is not exactly the sorrow of repentance, but 
 rather the reassertion of manhood after a term of 
 bondage to greed and lust. This is typical of Brown- 
 ing's method in using religious and ethical material. 
 The two are inextricably mingled by nature, repre- 
 senting indeed but different aspects of one experi- 
 ence. They are among the fundamental things for 
 "which man has innate appetite. Every man when 
 he is most himself recognizes that they concern him. 
 
392 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 The poet rarely cares to assert this dogmatically^ 
 preferring to show it by example in taking such 
 themes for his most telling work. He is careful, too, 
 to admit the subtle complexities and difficulties as 
 well as the great simplicities of religion. Sometimes 
 the matter is dealt with half whimsically, as in the 
 marvellously clever monologue of Bishop Blougram 
 over his wine and walnuts ; sometimes grotesquely 
 almost to the point of caricature, as in " Caliban 
 upon Setebos "; and yet again with a high and wist- 
 ful seriousness, as by Cleon, and the Pope in " The 
 Ring and the Book." 
 
 One great reason of Browning's early neglect and 
 later vogue has been that he anticipated with so sure 
 an instinct the analytical tendency of the latter half 
 of his century, when science strove to bring all things 
 in heaven and earth to the dissecting table.^ An- 
 other lies in an extraordinary insight into the depths 
 of man's soul which makes the reading of some of 
 his poems seem like an anticipation of the day when 
 the secrets of all hearts shall be revealed. A third 
 is to be found in his large use in argument of a phi- 
 losophical method now particularly known as Hu- 
 manism or Pragmatism. In " A Death in the Desert " 
 St. John argues, to be sure, that if man were as 
 certain of the worth of Christ as he is of the worth 
 of fire, all would accept Him, there would be no 
 room for doubt or question, and — 
 
 * This fact has been interestingly developed by Mr. Stopford 
 Brooke in bis Poetry of Robert Browning^ p. 8. 
 
THE GREAT TWIN BRETHREN 393 
 
 Man's probation would conclude, his earth 
 Crumble. 
 
 Yet, after all, the poet is always recurring to exactly 
 this argument. Religion is as necessary and whole- 
 some to a man's soul as bread to his body. Some 
 faith in God, Duty, Immortality, is as needful to 
 the breath of his soul's life during this present 
 winter of his discontent as is fire to his household's 
 health. Bishop Blougram is a somewhat doubtful 
 ally, to be sure, but he reaches a fundamental ex- 
 perience in saying, — 
 
 Belief's fire, once in us, 
 Makes of all else mere stuff to show itself ; 
 We penetrate our life with such a glow 
 As fire lends wood and iron — this turns steel, 
 That burns to ash — 
 
 The secret of Browning's widespread and benefi- 
 cent influence, as well as the guarantee of his fame, 
 lies not merely in his art, grotesque and wilfvd as 
 it often was; nor in his unique power of analy- 
 sis ; nor yet in his happy choice of a philosophical 
 method which was about to become popular; nor 
 even in the robust and good-humoured cheerful- 
 ness which gives a glow of genuine health to his 
 work as a whole; but rather in the fact that, 
 though a poet endowed with transcendent gifts, 
 he was yet so representative a man in his feeling 
 upon the deepest matters of doubt and faith. 
 
 The sum of all is — yes, my doubt is great, 
 My faith 's still greater, then my faith *8 enough. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 DARWIN AND HIS PLOUGHSHARE 
 
 George John Romanes was the son of a Scots 
 Presbyterian clergyman, resident in Kingston, Can- 
 ada, as Professor of Greek in Queen's College. 
 Following his birth, in 1848, the family left America 
 and after several years of travel settled in London. 
 Romanes received a rather desultory education, 
 and finally went to Cambridge with the idea of 
 fitting himself to take orders in the Church of 
 England. This purpose he cherished for several 
 years, but before taking a degree, found his inter- 
 est enlisted so heartily by scientific studies as to 
 change his plans, win a scholarship in science, and 
 turn more or less definitely toward the profession 
 of medicine. It was in the field of biology, how- 
 ever, that he was finally to do his life-work and 
 gain a considerable recognition. I use his name to 
 introduce this chapter, not because he is to be re- 
 garded as a Darwinian of unique gifts or authority, 
 — although his gifts were exceptional and his au- 
 thority eminent, — but because of a representative 
 if not typical element in his experience. His first 
 acquaintance with Darwin's books marked an epoch 
 in his life. Circumstances eventually brought the 
 
DARWIN AND HIS PLOUGHSHARE 395 
 
 two men together, and, until the master's death in 
 1882, he had no more devoted disciple. This inti- 
 macy was indeed close enough to put us in Ro- 
 manes's debt for some glimpses of Darwin's gra- 
 cious simplicity of character which could ill have 
 been spared. The younger man was, however, no 
 unquestioning devotee. He accepted Darwin's great 
 hypothesis as he accepted Herbert Spencer's phi- 
 losophy, with a willing yet critical mind; and in 
 due time made his own contribution to the doc- 
 trine of development under the title of "Physi- 
 ological Selection." I have no especial competence 
 to appraise its value, nor, indeed, to estimate the 
 importance of any portion of Romanes's investiga- 
 tions in the field of nervous function and compara- 
 tive intelligence. 
 
 It is less difficult to characterize his quality as a 
 man ; for he was singularly happy, not only by 
 natural endowment, but in the circumstances of 
 his short life. Well born and well bred, happily 
 married and entirely well-to-do, with a rich nature 
 which drank life in from all pure sources and im- 
 parted it generously, not only to his family and a 
 host of friends but to a wider circle whose claims 
 some men would have ignored, he represents al- 
 most uniquely the human er side of that singular 
 mixture of idol and bogey known to the modern 
 world as a ^man of science.' His especial claim 
 upon our attention is due to the significant cycle 
 through which within about a score of years his 
 
396 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 opinions seem to have passed. In 1873, in his 
 twenty-fifth year, Romanes won the Burney Prize 
 at Cambridge with an essay upon " Christian Prayer 
 and General Laws." This was his first pubHshed 
 book, and in it, almost as a matter of course, he 
 upheld the orthodox views of the day. The book 
 was, however, a herald of revolution. Its author 
 had already become a convert to the great develop- 
 ment theory then going forth conquering and to 
 conquer ; but though acquainted with Spencer's 
 general exposition of it, he had not yet pondered 
 the special application and illustration which it had 
 received at the hands of Darwin. As this grew upon 
 him, a profound change took place in his views. 
 Five years after winning the Burney Prize he pub- 
 lished, anonymously, " A Candid Examination of 
 Theism," which had, however, been written several 
 years earlier. In it he frankly faced the necessity 
 of atheism, though with the confession that for 
 himself it could be accepted with no equal mind. 
 
 The passage which laments his lost faith has 
 been quoted so often as to be almost hackneyed ; 
 yet a repetition here is justified by its eloquent 
 suggestion of the relation which is bound to de- 
 clare itself between every great discovery in the 
 field of science and man's religious nature. 
 
 " So far as I am individually concerned," he says, 
 "the result of this analysis has been to show that, 
 whether I regard the problem of Theism on the 
 lower plane of strictly relative probability, or on 
 
DARWIN AND HIS PLOUGHSHARE 397 
 
 the higher plane of purely formal considerations, it 
 equally becomes my obvious duty to stifle all belief 
 of the kind which I conceive to be the noblest, and 
 to discipline my intellect with regard to this matter 
 into an attitude of the purest scepticism. And, for- 
 asmuch as I am far from being able to agree with 
 those who affirm that the twilight doctrine of the 
 'new faith' is a desirable substitute for the waning 
 splendour of ' the old/ I am not ashamed to con- 
 fess that with this virtual negation of God the 
 universe to me has lost its soul of loveliness ; and 
 although from henceforth the precept to 'work 
 while it is day ' will doubtless but gain an intensi- 
 fied force from the terribly intensified meaning of 
 the words that 'the night cometh when no man 
 can work/ yet when at times I think, as think at 
 times I must, of the appalling contrast between the 
 hallowed glory of that creed which once was mine, 
 and the lonely mystery of existence as now I find 
 it, — at such times I shall ever feel it impossible 
 to avoid the sharpest pang of which my nature is 
 susceptible." * 
 
 A distinguished journalist, Mr. W. J. Stillman, 
 has left on record his belief that in the majority of 
 cases a man will return, if time enough be granted, 
 to the essential substance if not to the form of the 
 religious faith in which his youth was nourished, 
 however wide may have been his intermediate 
 departure from it. To this law, if law it be, the 
 ' rationalists ' who still grieve over Romanes's course 
 must go for comfort. He could not rest in the 
 
 * Romanes's Thoughts on Religion^ Editor's Preface, pp. 28-29. 
 
398 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 conclusions of his own " Candid Examination." 
 While his interest in scientific study continued un- 
 abated, and his assurance of the value of Darwin's 
 great hypothesis was never shaken, he found him- 
 self instinctively seeking a wider platform for 
 thought and life than that from which he had 
 proclaimed his scepticism. He made, or supposed 
 himself to have made, an arrangement with his 
 publishers by which no second edition of the " Can- 
 did Examination " should be published ; ^ and by 
 the time his Rede Lecture was delivered, in 1885, it 
 became evident that his views had undergone con- 
 siderable chansfe.^ 
 
 In 1889 he delivered an address at Toynbee Hall 
 upon the Ethical Teaching of Christ, which con- 
 tained these words : " Whatever answers different 
 persons may give to the questions, ' What think 
 ye of Christ ? Whose Son is He ? ' Every one must 
 agree that ^ His name shall be called wonderful.' " 
 It seems a sufficiently harmless conclusion even for 
 a sceptic, in view of the history of nineteen at least 
 partially Christian centuries; but it was too much 
 for some of the faithful, and brought Romanes a 
 letter from an earnest agnostic lady protesting 
 against attaching so much importance to the ^^ Pea- 
 sant of Nazareth."^ His course was now pretty 
 clearly determined, and it is scarcely too much to 
 
 * See Thoughts on Religion^ p. 104, note. 
 2 Thoughts on Religion^ p. 31. 
 
 * Life and Letters of G. J. Romanes, pp. 231-232. 
 
DAKWIN AND HIS PLOUGHSHARE 399 
 
 say that the chief interests of his remaining five 
 years of life centred upon the work of which his 
 " Thoughts on Keligion " represent a rough but 
 suggestive outline. His conclusion is thus stated : — 
 
 I know from experience the intellectual distrac- 
 tions of scientific research, philosophical specula- 
 tion, and artistic pleasures ; but am also well aware 
 that even when all are taken together and well sweet- 
 ened to taste, in respect of consequent reputation, 
 means, social position, etc., the whole concoction is 
 but as high confectionery to a starving man. ... I 
 take it then as unquestionably true that this whole 
 negative side of the subject proves a vacuum in the 
 soul of man which nothing can fill save faith in 
 God."^ 
 
 Romanes's experience has value for the student 
 of Darwinism in relation to religious thought, owing 
 to certain typical and universal elements in it. As 
 the embryo during its few days or months of pre- 
 natal life roughly sketches the progress of organic 
 development up to the plane upon which it is to five, 
 so the three stages of his spiritual history at once 
 reflected the general attitude of man face to face 
 with new and embarrassing discoveries, and prefig- 
 ured, at least in some degree, the spiritual history of 
 his generation. The world at large may well take 
 a century for the journey which this intense life 
 
 * TTiotights on Religion, pp. 160-162. I say nothing above about 
 the return of Romanes into the communion of his Church, because I 
 am unwilling to seem to make capital of him as a convert. His case 
 is cited, as I have indicated, for quite another purpose. 
 
400 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 effected in two decades. In saying this, I would not 
 imply a prediction that the long expected 'recon- 
 ciliation of science and religion' — one's gorge 
 rises at the threadbare phrase — is to take place 
 precisely as in Romanes's case. But it requires no 
 very uncommon powers to discern that religion and 
 physical science are likely not only somehow to sur- 
 vive, but to cultivate the art of living together. A 
 modus Vivendi has already been reached. The won- 
 der really is, not that a state of fear and hostility 
 so long existed between the theologian and the bi- 
 ologist, but that it was not more pronounced and 
 prolonged. Each is illustrating the truth in the He- 
 gelian formula. Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis. Both, 
 in the earlier stages of the evolution propaganda, 
 were inclined to be dogmatic in stating their doc- 
 trines; each saw, or thought he saw, in the claims 
 of his fellow the opposite and enemy of his own. 
 It sometimes happens, however, that men oppose 
 one another until a certain community of interest 
 and mutual understanding springs up out of the 
 conflict. An old and worthy adversary grows to be 
 as necessary and almost as highly esteemed as an 
 old and valued friend; until Bellona turns peace- 
 maker in her own despite, and wins at least a mo- 
 mentary place among the children of God. 
 
 In the present case the conflict has been a source 
 of education to both parties. The theologian has 
 learned that the destruction of ideals and the ex- 
 tinction of life's beacons has no place in the plan 
 
DARWIN AND HIS PLOUGHSHARE 401 
 
 of physical science ; while its pursuit of truth is 
 an eminently spiritual exercise, indissolubly linked 
 to the health and well-being of religion. The fair- 
 minded devotee of physical science has generally 
 come to recognize in the persistence of religion a 
 fact so significant as to be worthy of respect. If he 
 be genuinely scientific in habit he must admit that 
 the history and present experience of religion are 
 matters bound to exercise the minds of thoughtful 
 men ; and that thus the theologian finds an abun- 
 dant charter for his occupation. Even the extraor- 
 dinary agility with which religious faith has adapted 
 itself to new conditions, and the degree of success 
 with which it has striven to assimilate new truth, 
 are facts which have meaning. Granting for the 
 moment that its agility has been sometimes almost 
 acrobatic, and its assimilation but partial and dys- 
 peptic, still the fact remains that such adaptation to 
 changed circumstances is one of the notes of strong 
 and deep-rooted life. No doubt all this is trying to 
 a certain type of ^secular' mind. One cannot but 
 feel for the vexation which introduces into secidar- 
 ist literature so much of the note of the common 
 scold. Having laboriously slain religion at night, 
 it is of course harrowing to meet him in the morn- 
 ing, coming with smiling front, as a bridegroom 
 out of his chamber, and rejoicing as a strong man 
 to run a race. Yet it is a fact for the scientific 
 mind to take due account of; and as time has passed 
 there has been an increasing disposition to do this 
 with fairness and good temper. 
 
402 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Darwin himself set his disciples a great example 
 here. No one accorded a more searching criticism 
 to the theology of Romanes's " Candid Examina- 
 tion " than his father in the Gospel of Evolution. 
 
 " With regard to your great leading idea," wrote 
 Darwin in 1878, "I should like sometime to hear 
 . . . what you would say if a theologian addressed 
 you as follows : — 
 
 " ' I grant you the attraction of gravity, persist- 
 ence of force (or conservation of energy), and one 
 kind of matter, though the latter is an immense 
 admission ; but I maintain that God must have 
 given such attributes to this force, independently 
 of its persistence, that under certain conditions it 
 develops or changes into light, heat, electricity, 
 galvanism, perhaps even life. . . . 
 
 " ' Again, I maintain that matter, though it may 
 in the future be eternal, was created by God with 
 the most marvellous affinities, leading to complex 
 definite compounds and with polarities leading to 
 beautiful crystals, etc., etc. You cannot prove that 
 matter would necessarily possess these attributes. 
 Therefore you have no right to say that you have 
 " demonstrated " that all natural laws necessarily 
 follow from gravity, the persistence of force, and 
 existence of matter. If you say that nebulous matter 
 existed aboriginally and from eternity with all its 
 present complex powers in a potential state, you 
 seem to me to beg the whole question.' 
 
 " Please observe, it is not I, but a theologian 
 who has thus addressed you, but I could not answer 
 him.^" 
 
 * Life and Letters of G. J. Romanes^ pp. 88-89. 
 
DARWIN AND HIS PLOUGHSHARE 403 
 
 This passage is so characteristic in its frankness, 
 modesty, fairness, and a simplicity so naive as often 
 to produce the effect of the most delicate irony, that 
 it may serve to introduce its author into our discus- 
 sion. The main outlines of his generally unevent- 
 ful life are soon sketched. A grandson of the poet 
 and philosopher Erasmus Darwin, and the son of 
 a distinguished and highly successful Shrewsbury 
 physician, Charles Darwin grew to young manhood 
 without giving his family much assurance that he 
 would attain to any position in the world higher 
 than that of an amiable amateur in the lesser fields 
 of science. Reversing the order of Romanes's plans, 
 he began with his brother Erasmus the study of 
 medicine, and afterward, on going to Cambridge, 
 looked for some time toward the Church. It was 
 his good fortune, however, to form a warm friend- 
 ship with Henslow, Professor of Botany, who was 
 not only a man of wide learning and progressive 
 habit of mind, but of so keen a vision and generous 
 a nature that he at once discerned something of 
 Darwin's quality and did much to rouse his enthu- 
 siasm. Through the avenue of this friendship came 
 the opportunity to join Captain FitzRoy and the 
 Beagle in their memorable voyage around the world. 
 The five years spent upon this expedition represent 
 Darwin's sole physical adventure. After his return 
 in 1836, his happy marriage, and his settlement at 
 Down in 1842, he proceeded to justify his early 
 statement to Captain FitzRoy: "My life goes on 
 
404 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 like clock-work, and I am fixed on the spot where 
 I shall end it." ' 
 
 Here he gave to his " Naturalist's Voyage " the 
 form which has won for it place and fame in English 
 Literature^; here too he pursued researches, the 
 results of which, when finally published as the 
 " Origin of Species " in 1859, and the " Descent of 
 Man '' in 1871, went so far to revolutionize the 
 forms of human thought. The phrase ^epoch-mak- 
 ing book ' has of late been generally given over to 
 publishers' advertisements and to reviewers of the 
 superlative sort; but it must needs be recovered 
 and rededicated whenever reference is made to 
 Darwin's work. Even now, when the results of his 
 labours have so entered into the substance of our 
 thought that in all departments of knowledge we 
 take instinctive account of them, we find ourselves 
 too near the period of upheaval to see its changes 
 in exact proportion. Some idea of their magnitude 
 may however be gained by any intelHgent person 
 who will reread the Recapitulation and Conclu- 
 sion of the " Origin of Species," or the twenty-first 
 chapter of Part II of the " Descent of Man," con- 
 trasting, as he does so, his own peace of mind with 
 the mingled exhilaration and dismay caused by their 
 first appearance. 
 
 1 Life and Letters of Charles Dartoin, vol. i, p. 287, American 
 edition. 
 
 2 Its substance was published as Volume III of the Journal and 
 Remarks in 1839 ; but the book which we know is the product of 
 the revisions of 1845 and 1860. 
 
DARWIN AND HIS PLOUGHSHARE 405 
 
 The idea of derived instead of ^created' species 
 had of course been more or less familiar to scien- 
 tific students since the day of Lamarck. Indeed, one 
 might go much further back, as Darwin does in a let- 
 ter to Sir Charles Lyell : " Plato, Buffon, my grand- 
 father, before Lamarck, and others, propounded the 
 obvious view that if species were not created 
 separately, they must have descended from other 
 species." ^ Robert Chambers, in his " Vestiges of 
 Creation," had done something to popularize the 
 idea, though with grace and facility rather than 
 accuracy ; while Baden Powell had argued that the 
 " Order of Nature," which was the title of his 
 book, represented an unbroken series of events 
 linked each to each by natural causes.^ He also 
 bore glad witness to the significance of Darwin's 
 work when the " Origin " appeared. The central 
 thought of Herbert Spencer's evolutionary philoso- 
 phy had already been foreshadowed in his " Social 
 Statics" and "Principles of Psychology," though 
 the formal announcement in the "First Principles" 
 waited until 1862. 
 
 Under these circumstances of preparation Darwin 
 in 1859, all unconscious of the magnitude of im- 
 pending results, put his ploughshare into the field. 
 The figure is too mild, although admirably suited 
 
 * Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, vol. ii, pp. 198-199. 
 
 2 This book was published in the same year with the Origin of 
 Species ; but its main positions had been announced in the writer's 
 earlier works, especially in the Plurality of Worlds (1856). 
 
406 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 to the temper of the man. One might perhaps 
 better say that he fired a train which was eventu- 
 ally to explode a multitude of cherished conven- 
 tions in the world of thought. There is indeed a 
 trace of Fate's irony in the fact that this man, 
 who spent a lifetime of quiet toil in disclosing Na- 
 ture's orderly consecutiveness, should have proved, 
 in spite of himself, to be an agent of catastrophe. 
 The intervening half-century has gone far toward 
 silencing the turmoil. Its dust has settled and men 
 discover, some to their comfort and others with 
 chagrin, that the stars still shine and the pillars 
 of earth are unshaken ; but at the time and for 
 long afterward many who were neither bigots nor 
 fanatics feared that their dearest possessions were 
 threatened. Some found a momentary satisfaction 
 in the thought that a moral law which had proved 
 too strait for their convenience was likely to go 
 down in the confusion; others of honester and more 
 constructive habit felt or tried to feel the elation of 
 those who find themselves upon the site of an unbuilt 
 city or the shore of a rich but unmapped land. 
 
 Darwin himself can scarcely be numbered in any 
 one of the three groups. He had lived with his 
 theory too long and intimately to be fearful of its 
 consequences upon the one hand, or greatly elated 
 over its prospects upon the other. His was a singu- 
 larly gracious as well as judicial temper. None knew 
 the objections better ; none more frankly admitted 
 the necessary limitations of the argument or the 
 
DARWIN AND HIS PLOUGHSHARE 407 
 
 gaps in its completeness ; none consented to be in- 
 structed with a more exquisite humility ; and none 
 could be less dogmatic in stating, or declining to 
 state, the philosophical and religious implications 
 of his views. The Saints of Science are commonly 
 supposed to be but a meagre company ; yet while the 
 old prophetic test of " doing justly, loving mercy, 
 and walking humbly with God" has application, 
 this man would seem to be worthy of a place among 
 that or any other chorus of the Blessed. He has con- 
 fessed that absorption in scientific studies robbed 
 him, as life went on, of his natural taste for music 
 and poetry ; until the time came when he could 
 scarce read even Shakespeare without effort. Since 
 he was a preeminently truthful witness, we are forced 
 to take his word for it, though not without a pro- 
 test ag^ainst the ungrenerous use which has often been 
 made of the confession. Darwin's self-depreciation 
 must have seemed insincere in a less humble and 
 candid man. As it is, we can only smile when we 
 find him writing to a friend that facts compel him to 
 conclude that his brain was never formed for much 
 thinking,^ and not long before his death, a similar 
 note recurs in his reference to a recent journey 
 through the Lake Country. " The scenery gave me 
 more pleasure than I thought my soul, or whatever 
 remains of it, was capable of feeling." ^ The simple 
 
 1 Letter to W. D. Fox, Life and Letters, vol. i, p. 506. The 
 reference is apparently to quantity rather than quality of thought, 
 a Life and Letters of G. J. Romanes, p. 103. 
 
408 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 fact seems to be that Darwin was no absolute ex- 
 ception to the rule that one's — 
 
 nature is subdued 
 To what it works in, like the dyer's hand. 
 
 He unquestionably sacrificed much to his intense 
 application to one line of study ; and his conclusion 
 that it would have been better for him had he kept 
 up a daily acquaintance with music and poetry, is 
 doubtless a sound one ; but to make much of these 
 confessions, or to infer from them that his nature 
 shrank or grew meagre as time went on, would be 
 as grossly unjust as the attempt which has some- 
 times been made to belittle Komanes's later experi- 
 ence by the false assertion that his mind became 
 impaired. 
 
 It is true, however, that Darwin himself avoided 
 so far as possible all discussion of philosophy and 
 metaphysics ; only by force, as it were, could he be 
 dragged into correspondence upon the religious 
 bearings of his theories. Yet he clearly foresaw that 
 religion would of necessity be involved in the popu- 
 lar approach to his positions. He was unwilling to 
 present the substance of the " Origin of Species " 
 at the meeting of a learned society, because of his 
 confidence that in the discussion which must follow 
 the subject of religion would be brought in^; and 
 in planning with Lyell for the book's publication 
 he frankly raised the question of its "unortho- 
 
 1 Life and Letters, vol. i, p. 499. 
 
DARWIN AND HIS PLOUGHSHARE 409 
 
 doxy."* His foresight was abundantly justified. 
 Stevenson somewhere remarks, in speaking of Talk 
 and Talkers, that " you can keep no men long, nor 
 Scotchmen at all, off moral or theological discus- 
 sion." Darwin himself had pondered upon the deri- 
 vation of species and natural selection long enough 
 to perceive that, in themselves considered, they 
 were no more subversive of religious faith than were 
 the " Principles " of Lyell, to which believers had 
 in some measure accommodated themselves; and 
 he would gladly have postponed this phase of the 
 discussion. But the majority of his readers and the 
 mass of those who gained their knowledge of his 
 theories at second hand were all as Scotchmen in 
 the matter. They would not be put off. When, 
 at the famous Oxford meeting of the British As- 
 sociation, Bishop Wilberforce arraigned the new 
 theory with characteristic assurance and rudeness, 
 Huxley had some right to his exultant cry, "The 
 Lord hath delivered him into our hand." 
 
 Both sides saw that the real issue before the 
 mass of thoughtful people was a religious one. 
 Many professional students of science, less com- 
 bative by nature than Huxley, doubtless felt deep 
 regret that the matter must be thus complicated. 
 It was, they claimed, fundamentally a problem in 
 biological method ; a matter for unbiassed observa- 
 tion, experiment, and generalization; every ques- 
 tion of a philosophical or religious nature which 
 
 * Life and Letters^ vol. i, p. 507. 
 
410 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 arose in the minds of investigators or expositors 
 only beclouded the issue and clogged the path of 
 progress. Their view was that of the mere pro- 
 fessional man, and therefore cramped and inade- 
 quate. It is of course true that merely as a theory, 
 the doctrine which the "Origin of Species" set 
 forth needed the service of a candid and unbiassed 
 biologist, and it was its singular good fortune to 
 find in Darwin a student of this type; but it is no 
 less true that, if a biological theory is to gain gen- 
 eral acceptance and exercise a universal influence, 
 it must show its importance to the wider interests 
 of men. Biology in itself considered is no doubt 
 a fascinating subject. Its conclusions excite a rela- 
 tively mild interest among large numbers of men. 
 But the interest is generally that which attaches 
 to curious facts. It lacks the haunting and fruit- 
 ful quality which belongs to far-reaching philo- 
 sophical principles. Even discoveries like those 
 associated with the names of Pasteur or Lister, 
 which bear immediately upon the preservation of 
 property or life, excite but a nine days' wonder, 
 and then drop quietly into their places in the 
 world of accepted circumstance. With matters 
 which involve origin and destiny it is not so. 
 These at once arouse man's deeper interests; 
 though their terms be physical, they are felt to 
 involve those elements in his being which he calls 
 personal, ethical, and spiritual. They reach down 
 to the conduct of life and up to its aspirations. 
 
DARWIN AND HIS PLOUGHSHARE 411 
 
 Though few men discuss them intelligibly, and in 
 logically correct propositions, many argue over 
 them and are subtly influenced in life by the con- 
 clusions — often erroneous enough — at which they 
 arrive. 
 
 The debt of the Darwinians to the Bishop of 
 Oxford is only less than that to Mr. Huxley. To 
 argue, as Bishop Wilberforce did, against Natural 
 Selection and the Derivation of Species, because 
 the man who accepted these theories must look 
 back to a monkey as his grandfather, was mere 
 pitiable buffoonery; and yet, under the rude and 
 unworthy speech, there was an element of saving 
 truth, of even greater importance to the Darwin- 
 ians than to their adversaries. The mere study of 
 variation, emphasized and made permanent by 
 Nature's breeding, until a new variety of marked 
 distinction was evolved from the primitive rock- 
 pigeon, must have excited but a languid interest 
 in the world. Rules governing, and in a limited 
 fashion explaining, these variations, might have 
 been formulated without disturbing the public 
 peace. But when the investigation touched man 
 himself and seemed to involve him altogether, 
 body and soul, past and future alike, at once 
 there was widespread concern. All the time-hon- 
 oured faiths and institutions of society seemed 
 threatened ; the most sacred instincts of the heart 
 were in danger of denial ; and as a result the 
 theories of Darwin found both the publicity and 
 
412 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 the criticism which they deserved. Darwin's work 
 was great enough to merit and profit by attack. 
 It is of course to be regretted that the attack 
 should so often have been petty and prejudiced; 
 but it is to be remembered that the defence and 
 counter-attack were as frequently unworthy. The 
 orthodox theologians had no monopoly of dogma- 
 tism; bell, book, and candle are soldiers of for- 
 tune, — they were enlisted in this controversy as 
 eagerly upon the side of atheism and materialism 
 as they had ever been in behalf of creation by 
 divine fiat in six solar days. ^ Scientists ' were not 
 wanting who stood ready to excommunicate all 
 believers in religion from the congregation not 
 merely of intelligent but of sincere men.^ 
 
 The real leaders in the controversy were of larger 
 calibre and higher type. Some, like Huxley, Tyn- 
 dall, and Spencer were confessed ^ agnostics ' ; others, 
 like Wallace, Asa Gray, and Agassiz, not only re- 
 cognized religion's claims but believed in its positive 
 content. Among men of the first rank outspoken 
 
 * It is with much surprise and some genuine pain that the reader 
 finds this note recurring persistently in so learned and in many 
 ways so charming a book as Mr. Benn's recent History of English 
 Rationalism in the Nineteenth Century. Mr. Benn is perfectly capa- 
 ble of presenting views or facts unfavourable to his own position, 
 and sometimes does so with admirable fairness; but his method of 
 dealing with great names like those of Mill, Darwin, and a host 
 of others, and his repeated insinuations that their caution in pro- 
 mulgating unpopular views was due to fear, or their boldness to 
 the security of assured position or private means, are in a tone 
 worthy of Vivian. 
 
DARWIN AND HIS PLOUGHSHARE 413 
 
 preachers of unbelief like Clifford were few ; and 
 one cannot but wonder whether Clifford, had he 
 lived, could have maintained his attitude of mili- 
 tant negation through middle age. But this is true 
 of them all, — that it was their position with refer- 
 ence to religion which gave them their widest if 
 not always their most intelligent public. The circle 
 of readers who really grasped Tyndall's argument 
 in the Belfast Address was small indeed in com- 
 parison with the multitude who were impressed by 
 what they supposed to be its attack upon rehgion. 
 The really competent students of Darwin's "De- 
 scent of Man " were but a handful in contrast with 
 those who grieved with Miss Frances Power Cobbe 
 over his theory of the origin of Conscience. Hux- 
 ley's remark upon the " Origin of Species " holds 
 true of the whole literature to which it gave rise. 
 '' The immense popularity which the ^ Origin ' at 
 once acquired was no doubt largely due to its many 
 points of contact with philosophical and theological 
 questions in which every intelligent man feels a 
 profound interest." ^ 
 
 Mr. Huxley's own fate is a case in point. Though 
 a biologist of great attainments, he is known as a 
 theologian to multitudes who would be puzzled to 
 state a single contribution which he made to pure 
 science. They know him as the promulgator of the 
 hard-used word ' agnostic ' ; they remember his col- 
 loquy with Bishop Wilberforce; they have watched 
 
 » T. H. Huxley, Darwiniana, p. 286. 
 
414 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 his truculent joy in slaying once more the much- 
 enduring Gadarene swine; and in it all they have 
 seen a theological controversialist of the keenest 
 type, — one of the most bumptious and at the same 
 time fascinating of preachers. It was a true instinct 
 which led him to preach and print his " Lay Ser- 
 mons." On the other hand the opposition of so 
 eager and receptive a mind as that of Agassiz to 
 the Darwinian hypothesis has commonly been as- 
 cribed to its preoccupation with certain religious 
 views. There is truth in the claim, and one of Ag- 
 assiz's most brilliant and influential pupils, himself 
 an ardent Darwinian, has gone so far as to ascribe 
 especial honour to his master upon exactly this 
 ground. His reasoning is that the religious convic- 
 tions of Agassiz were something far more than pre- 
 judices in favour of dogma, as they were certainly 
 something higher than superstition. Religion was 
 a great experience into which years of his life had 
 gone. The fundamental articles in it had proved 
 their value by practical experiment. The new view 
 seemed to be so at variance with these articles that 
 he could not admit its validity.* There has been a 
 considerable tendency to deride such an attitude 
 as timid and unscientific ; and a corresponding de- 
 mand upon men to enroll themselves beneath the 
 banner of ' agnosticism ' or else be branded as reac- 
 tionaries. Agnosticism became a part of what Dr. 
 
 * Le Conte, Evolviion and its Relation to Religious Thought, p. 45, 
 2d edition. 
 
DARWIN AND HIS PLOUGHSHARE 415 
 
 Johnson used to call the "clamour of the time/' 
 and spoke with the authority of fashion. The 
 fashion is likely, however, to prove a passing one. 
 Huxley's adjective ^agnostic' has its useful place, 
 but it is too feeble and complexionless a term for 
 the designation of thoughtful men. No word the 
 most significant syllable in which is negative can 
 hold the allegiance of the wise for very long. ^ Al- 
 pha privative ' may serve as motto for the protest of 
 a decade ; it can scarcely lead the progress of a cen- 
 tury. "Do not let what you do know be overthrown 
 by what you do not know," is an old and well-ap- 
 proved dictum of experience, to which the gospel 
 of ' agnosticism ' ran counter. It was a counsel of 
 negation, and common sense could not remain sub- 
 ject to it. Religion stood for something so real and 
 vital that men had been found to live by it and to 
 die for it in every generation. They could not dis- 
 miss it at the word of a scientific dogmatist; nor 
 could they rest in presence of a theory presented 
 even with the sweet reasonableness of Darwin's 
 until its philosophical and religious implications 
 had been examined. 
 
 The hesitation which men showed in presence of 
 Darwin's conclusions was therefore not altogether 
 unreasonable. Two things were necessary before 
 Evolution could do its needed work. One was that 
 its evidences should be recanvassed and its argu- 
 ments restated under the stress of acute and search- 
 ing criticism ; the other that time should be given 
 
416 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 for men to see what was and what was not implied 
 in its acceptance. 
 
 The insistance of religious writers upon this latter 
 point was in itself right. Their manner of insisting 
 was often altogether wrong. Sometimes they were 
 timid, as though the evolutionist might undermine 
 the foundations of faith by catching God in self- 
 contradiction ; sometimes bold with an uncharitable 
 assumption that the new theories were committed to 
 atheism and materialism. The timidity and the bold- 
 ness were alike unprofitable and baseless. " The 
 doctrine of Evolution, therefore, does not even come 
 into contact with Theism, considered as a philo- 
 sophical doctrine. That with which it does collide is 
 the conception of creation, which theological specu- 
 lators have based upon . . . the opening of the 
 Book of Genesis." Such is Mr. Huxley's claim as 
 set forth in the chapter which he contributed to 
 Darwin's " Life." ' 
 
 Quite as baseless was the assertion that Evolution 
 was but another name for ^ materialism,' if indeed 
 that term have any intelligible meaning. Here again 
 we may call Darwin and Huxley to witness. The 
 reader will remember the former's searching ques- 
 tions to Romanes upon the publication of the " Can- 
 did Examination." The latter is even more specific. 
 He claims that, while the old doctrine of design and 
 purpose in nature is quite inadequate, there is a 
 wider teleology which is not antagonized by the doc- 
 » Vol. i, p. 556. 
 
DARWIN AND HIS PLOUGHSHARE 417 
 
 trine of Evolution but is actually based upon its 
 fundamental proposition/ He would substitute the 
 word ' powers ' for ' forces ' in speaking of the po- 
 tency seemingly resident in the molecules, and in- 
 sists that ' matter ' and ^ spirit ' are but names for 
 the ultimate cause of the things we see.^ 
 
 Nor has any one presented more forcibly than 
 Huxley himself the inevitable suspicion with which 
 thoughtful men saw the first advances of the theory 
 of development to its place of dominance. Its ap- 
 parent conclusions, he said in 1868, weigh — 
 
 " like a nightmare, I believe, upon many of the best 
 minds of these days. They watch what they con- 
 ceive to be the progress of materialism, in such fear 
 and powerless anger as a savage feels, when, during 
 an eclipse, the great shadow creeps over the face of 
 the sun. The advancing tide of matter threatens to 
 drown their souls ; the tightening grasp of law im- 
 pedes their freedom ; they are alarmed lest man's 
 moral nature be debased by the increase of his wis- 
 dom."^ 
 
 There is a common notion that Huxley himself 
 felt this fear to be justified. He showed so much of 
 the joy of conflict in argument with his fellow the- 
 ologians of more conservative habit, as to lead care- 
 less readers to the conclusion that he was a ' mate- 
 riahst,' and a denier of all spiritual function or life. 
 
 ^ Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (chapter by Professor Hux- 
 ley), vol. i, pp. 554-555. 
 
 2 Lay Sermons, Addresses f and Reviews ^ p. 143. 
 
 3 Ibid., pp. 142-143. 
 
418 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 This is far from the truth. His disclaimer of ^ ma- 
 terialism' was emphatic. His attitude upon the 
 great question of man's freedom and responsibility 
 may again be best suggested by his own words. 
 
 " Philosophers gird themselves for battle upon the 
 last and greatest of all speculative problems : Does 
 human nature possess any free, volitional, or truly 
 anthropomorphic element, or is it only the cunning- 
 est of all Nature's clocks ? Some, among whom I 
 count myself, think that the battle will forever re- 
 main a drawn one, and that, for all practical pur- 
 poses, this result is as good as anthropomorphism 
 winning the day." 
 
 •> 1 
 
 In another connection he speaks of the " definite 
 order of the Universe — which is embodied in what 
 are called, by an unhappy metaphor, the laws of 
 Nature."^ 
 
 There is a deep significance in this recognition of 
 the fact that language does not cease to be meta- 
 phorical and figurative when summoned to the ser- 
 vice of science. The " laws of Nature " are but meta- 
 phorical and figurative statements after all, as really, 
 even though not so largely, anthropomorphic as any 
 principle of the theologian. The mind and the ex- 
 perience of man is still the measure of the world. 
 He cannot be forbidden to speculate in what he 
 terms the realm of the spirit without suffering from 
 limitation in the world of so-called science ; and 
 
 » Lay Sermonst « The Scientific Aspect of Positivism," p. 164. 
 2 if,id,^ p. 17, 
 
DARWIN AND HIS PLOUGHSHARE 419 
 
 science in its turn will always be indebted, for its 
 introduction to multitudes of men, to those teachers 
 who insist upon discussing its principles in their re- 
 lations to man's present conduct and future destiny. 
 The great popularizers of science are always in some 
 degree theologians. No Darwinians in America have 
 had a wider or more respectful hearing than Asa 
 Gray, Joseph Le Conte, and John Fiske. All dealt 
 constructively with the relation between the new 
 theories and the genuineness of man's religious 
 needs. Scientists, of the sort who insist upon their 
 right to a capital S, are inclined to resent the inclu- 
 sion of the late Professor Drummond in their com- 
 pany. They prefer that he be remembered in the 
 words of the Saturday Reviewer as one " who af- 
 fected checked tweeds and the society of Lord Aber* 
 deen." The fact remains, however, that Drummond 
 was a keenly intelHgent student of science ; that he 
 was gifted with unusual powers of exposition ; that 
 he had an almost unique experience of the ethical 
 and spiritual struggle which, during his short career, 
 marked the university life of both Britain and Amer- 
 ica; and that he brought to his work as a popular 
 teacher and preacher very genuine convictions of 
 the significance of modern scientific theories upon 
 the one hand, and of the reality of religious experi- 
 ence upon the other. " Natural Law in the Spiritual 
 World" and the "Ascent of Man" may continue 
 to be treated rather cavalierly by professional stu- 
 dents of science ; none the less these volumes, with 
 
420 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 such books as Professor Fiske's " Nature of God '* 
 and " Destiny of Man," and Professor Le Conte's 
 "Evolution and its Relation to Religious Thought," 
 have done an incalculable service in familiarizing 
 men with the methods and the general conclusions 
 of modern science in such a way as to connect these 
 discoveries rationally with the great underlying ex , 
 periences of life. The gain to the cause of rehgion 
 itself has been equally obvious. A thoughtful writer 
 has recently observed that " the only thing that is 
 fatal to a religion is the conviction that it has no 
 basis in the nature of things." * The fear which ar- 
 rayed some religious men against the new theories 
 was largely due to a suspicion that religion was 
 threatened with precisely this divorce. Time has 
 gone far to reassure all except those who fancy re- 
 ligion to be immune from the necessities of change 
 and growth. 
 
 Under the changed conditions induced by scien- 
 tific thought men have refined and enlarged their 
 idea of God. They thought of Him once as a 
 Wonder-worker, or Creator-by-fiat, and they were 
 jealous for Him as one might be jealous for the skill 
 and mysterious resource of a sleight-of-hand per- 
 former. They feared lest God might be ' found out.' 
 The last half-century has taught them that the love 
 of rational processes and a determination to use the 
 slow methods of growth are divine attributes wor- 
 thier of adoration than any mere ability to amaze 
 
 * Prof. John Watson, Philosophical Basis of Religion^ p. 174. 
 
DARWIN AND HIS PLOUGHSHARE 421 
 
 and mystify. So far from finding God out, the re- 
 search of the student has tended rather to widen the 
 horizon of mystery ; but to assure him at the same 
 time that wherever he goes along the well-worn paths 
 of the known, or out upon his voyages of adventure 
 into the unknown, he may confidently expect to find 
 Creative Power at work in orderly and reasonable 
 fashion. 
 
 This assurance has reacted upon man's estimate 
 of himself in the interests of a higher and saner faith. 
 The discovery that the earth was among the most 
 insignificant of planets tended for a time to make 
 man the object of his own contempt. It seemed the 
 height of presumption that he, who represented but 
 a pinch of cosmic dust, able to retain corporeal shape 
 and unity amid the flux of circumstance for a few 
 brief days, should aspire to knowledge and domin- 
 ion, or should lay claim to a destiny. Yet the very 
 century which accentuated man's Httleness at the 
 same time demonstrated the range of his powers. 
 His mastery of physical nature during the last hun- 
 dred years will long serve to distinguish that epoch. 
 Its bridging, mining, and tunnelling, its reduction 
 of the sea to a universal highway which men can 
 travel with assurance and in safety, its harnessing 
 of steam and its annihilation of time and space 
 through its very partial acquaintance with electricity, 
 are indubitable history. The inevitable conclusion 
 is being borne in upon him that he will find no re- 
 gion of the Universe foreign to his reason. Whether 
 
422 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 he continue to dwell in this little planet, or be trans- 
 planted to some more dignified abode, the world 
 about him is likely to see itself still reflected in his 
 mind. Whatever the Creative Power immanent in 
 the world may be. His methods of working appear 
 to be cognate to the mind of man. They often puz- 
 zle men by their greatness; they always yield to the 
 mind's attack, however, when a sufficient founda- 
 tion of experience has been laid for it to stand upon. 
 This assurance which man has won out of the 
 adventure of science emboldens him to renew cer- 
 tain old claims upon the Universe. He feels that he 
 has a right to his own integrity ; that is, to a certain 
 wholeness of life and experience for which three score 
 and ten years do not suffice. Having once tasted 
 food for mind and soul he is as little disposed as was 
 Oliver Twist to be put off with a single helping. 
 Though the beadles of science and religion stare, 
 and conventional voices cry out upon his audacity, 
 he will, often no doubt awkwardly enough, insist 
 that he was made for life instead of death, for faith 
 instead of unbelief, for conquest rather than defeat. 
 He will refuse to be put to confusion by circumstance. 
 He will reiterate as his Magna Charta the passage 
 in Hebrew tradition which bids him " replenish the 
 earth and subdue it " ; and persist in regarding his 
 claim to the venture of religion as strengthened 
 rather than invalidated by the teaching of science. 
 
CHAPTER Xm 
 
 THE DOUBTERS AND THE MYSTICS 
 
 It 18 said that preachers are most inclined toward 
 themes of loss and sorrow in their youth. Then, 
 more than in later years, they aspire to set forth 
 the contradictions and uncertainties of life, and to 
 bring mourners into vital touch with springs of 
 comfort. In this attempt they sometimes illustrate 
 one of the very contradictions that oppress them, 
 as out of their seemingly unharassed experience 
 they essay to deal with deep and harrowing things. 
 The incongruity, humourous as it often seems, is, 
 however, more apparent than real. Many men who 
 have had a full share of danger and defeat may be 
 found to confess that their days of deepest anxi- 
 ety came in the relatively sheltered and outwardly 
 placid period of youth. The fears of childhood are 
 often unique in their intensity ; its burdens heavier 
 than those of later life ; its loneliness more desolat- 
 ing. Nor is the reason far to seek. It is the intel- 
 ligent child who feels most keenly his inadequacy 
 to circumstance, and it is the youth who is most 
 conscious of the uniqueness of experience. Later 
 on the man learns how great a store of resources 
 and compensations life may furnish ; and he per- 
 
424 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 ceives at the same time that the problems which 
 baffle him are the problems of every age, his bur- 
 dens are those under which other men have stas*- 
 gered, and his path, however rugged and lonely, 
 yet proves to be — 
 
 Worn of frequent feet. 
 
 The difficult situations of youth bode irrevocable 
 disaster; those of maturity, with its more philoso- 
 phic mind, as often whisper between their threats 
 the old Yirgilian solace, "Perhaps even these things 
 it will some day be helpful to remember." Children 
 within speaking distance of their parents still some- 
 times fear the dark ; and youth, with years of 
 goodly life before it, has as naturally and as per- 
 versely sung of death, parting, and faith's eclipse. 
 It is a part, one suspects, of that revulsion of feel- 
 ing which all men know who try their 'prentice 
 hand at a new trade, — even the trade of living, — 
 only to find the easy tricks of it transformed into 
 vexations at the touch of their inexperience. 
 
 Be this as it may, however, the fact remains that 
 the most haunting songs of doubt and disillusion 
 have been sung by men well under forty. Clough 
 and Matthew Arnold in their different styles are 
 eminent illustrations of what I mean. One cannot 
 pass to a consideration of their work and the sources 
 of their influence, however, without regret that lack 
 of space excludes a group of half-forgotten poets, 
 like the Chartist, Ernest Jones, whose " Songs of 
 
THE DOUBTERS AND THE IVIYSTICS 425' 
 
 Democracy " deserve a place beside, if not above, 
 Elliott's "Corn-law Rhymes"; Charles Mackay, 
 whose simplicity still retains some power of real 
 refreshment ; the irreproachable Tupper, with his 
 sure faith in the popular appetite for platitude, and 
 his facility in feeding it; and "Festus" Bailey. 
 The last named antedated, as he outlived, his fel- 
 lows, and still advances claims to the notice of pos- 
 terity. In a recent critical notice Mr. James Doug- 
 las has collected a considerable number of passages 
 from " Festus," which certainly help to bolster his 
 enthusiastic praise of the poem. 
 
 And age but presses with a halo's weight, 
 
 may be admitted to be a worthy line, which Mr. 
 Douglas has succeeded in matching with a fair ar- 
 ray of peers. Yet " Festus " as it has come down 
 to us, expanded by numerous additions, fattened, 
 as it were, upon the choicer morsels of younger 
 and less successful brethren, is likely to remain an 
 essentially unreadable poem. There are fine Hues ; 
 the poetic adventure essayed is inspiring; the style 
 is often worthy the attempt; — still the thing is 
 dreary. The reader finds himself wondering at the 
 reason for twelve English and thirty American edi- 
 tions ; and is driven to seek his answer in the fact 
 that Bailey dealt in a large, free, and forceful way 
 with the perennial theme of man's origin, destiny, 
 and accountability to God. A comparison with 
 Milton is inevitable — and of course disastrous. 
 
426 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 The " DeviFs Sermon " in Book Five reminds the 
 reader of the address of Satan to Beelzebub ; but it 
 is Satan modernized, belittled, and robbed of his 
 steadfast philosophy of rebellion. 
 
 Think ye your souls are worth nothing to God ? 
 Are they so small ? What can be great with God ? 
 The sun and moon he wears on either arm, 
 Seals of his sovereignty. 
 
 There is good reasoning — by suggestion — here; 
 the metaphor is bold and fine, after a barbaric sort ; 
 but the design as a whole lacks Milton's large epic 
 quality as completely as its expression misses the 
 majesty of Miltonic blank verse. "Festus" pro- 
 claimed a goodly number of little heresies — at least 
 they were thought to be heresies in 1840 — out of 
 which many readers doubtless snatched a fearful 
 joy; and it set forth a genuine evangel, defined 
 by the author himself as a " belief in the benignant 
 providence of God, in the immortality of the soul, 
 in the harmonized gospel of faith and reason com- 
 bined, and in the just, discriminative, and equitable 
 judgement of the spirit after death by Deity." * 
 
 It was the possibility of such truth as this that 
 haunted Clough. In some respects he seems to me 
 to embody uniquely the higher traits of English 
 character. The late R. H. Hutton was insistent upon 
 his essential kinship to Chaucer; and Clough has 
 indeed much of Chaucer's tolerant, humourous, 
 
 ^ Quoted by J. H. Brown in Miles's Poets and Poetry of the Cen- 
 tury, p. 474. 
 
THE DOUBTERS AND THE MYSTICS 427 
 
 brotherly outlook upon the works and ways of men. 
 But almost as good a case could be made out for 
 his spiritual relationship to Bunyan as the inspired 
 Tinker uncovers his soul in " Grace Abounding." 
 Professor James, in his recent lectures upon " Prag- 
 matism," would divide his fellow-men into two 
 groups according to their possession of a ^ tough ' or 
 ' tender ' conscience. The division is at once sugges- 
 tive and unsatisfying; but granting its vaHdity, both 
 Bunyan and Clough must find place, side by side, 
 among the men of not merely sensitive but hyper- 
 sensitive conscience. Both possessed wholesome na- 
 tures. Both were humane in the Chaucerian sense. 
 But Bunyan, convicted of sin, found himself under 
 necessity of bringing each commonest affair of life 
 to the test of Sinai with its thunders. God's frown 
 darkened the ground where he played tip-cat, and 
 the lightnings of Heaven's wrath threatened to 
 course down the very bell-ropes with which he 
 loved to ring. There was no question of doubt in 
 the modern sense. The Seat of Authority was sure, 
 and he lived in such close relation to it as gave aw- 
 ful import to the minutest incident of life. If ever 
 a man stood consciously " naked and opened unto 
 the eyes of Him with whom we have to do," Bun- 
 yan was that man. 
 
 Nearly two hundred years had elapsed when 
 Clough found himself in the midst of another period 
 of religious unrest no less momentous than that of 
 the seventeenth century. The difference was that, 
 
428 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 while Bunyan gave a singularly responsive con- 
 science over to excess of belief, Clough lent his to 
 excess of doubt. In matters of the spirit, Clough 
 was like a naturally hearty and full-blooded man 
 who should become so convinced of the septic peril 
 lurking in all food and raiment as to go hungry and 
 cold. At times he was filled with a desire to proceed 
 even further, and there are some utterances which 
 make him seem like a counterpart of the St. Bar- 
 tholomew in Milan Cathedral, standing, a grewsome 
 wonder of quivering muscle and tendon, flayed, and 
 with his skin over his arm. Yet he was saved from 
 the sentimentahty of Rousseau, the querulousness 
 of Heine, and the self-pity of Amiel, by his humour 
 and his love of physical exercise. Since it was his 
 to be — 
 
 brought forth and rear*d in hoars 
 Of change, alarm, surprise, — 
 
 it was well that he should have been a runner and 
 swimmer of distinction, as well as one of the best 
 goal-keepers on record ; and it was very well that he 
 should have had an eye clear and sane enough to 
 discern the whimsical as well as the heart-rending 
 incongruities of life. The note of spiritual strain 
 and stress reaching to the point of agony is ever 
 recurrent. 
 
 To spend uncounted years of pain, 
 Again, again, and yet again. 
 In working out in heart and brain 
 The problem of our being here ; — 
 
THE DOUBTERS AND THE MYSTICS 429 
 
 this was the occupation of no small part of his life ; 
 the lines may almost be said to codify his strenuous 
 creed of doubt. But it was not, after all, the ultimate 
 and really determinative thing in either mind or 
 heart. As beyond the gods of Olympus there existed 
 a half-discerned Fate which finally overruled them, 
 so behind Clough's doubt and self -questioning there 
 lay an instinctive trust in the veracity and sanity 
 of man's experience. Compelled by circumstance to 
 doubt, he yet recognized faith to be the soul's nor- 
 mal and healthy exercise. It is not well, however, 
 that life's great problems should be settled tyran- 
 nously or by force. He felt the temptation to this 
 solution, and asked, — 
 
 O may we for assurance' sake, 
 Some arbitrary judgement take, 
 And wilfully pronounce it clear, 
 For this or that 't is we are here ? 
 
 No, we assuredly may not ; — and yet, — 
 
 When all is thought and said, 
 The heart still overrules the head ; 
 Still what we hope we must believe, 
 And what is given us receive ; 
 
 Must still believe ; for still we hope 
 That in a world of larger scope, 
 What here is faithfully begun 
 Will be completed, not undone. 
 
 The same thought was uttered with great beauty 
 and feeling in his prayer ^' Qui Laborat Orat" ; it 
 
430 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 came to rather daring and sarcastic speech in his 
 modern version of the Commandments ; — 
 
 Thou shalt not kill ; yet needst not strive 
 Officiously to keep alive ; 
 
 and it bloomed into such humour and tenderness 
 in a Httle poem entitled " The Existence of God," 
 as to give it an almost unique place in our litera- 
 ture. 
 
 " There is no God," the wicked saith, 
 " And truly it 's a blessing, 
 For what He might have done with us 
 It 's better only guessing." 
 
 " There is no God, or if there is," 
 
 The tradesman thinks, " 't were funny 
 If He should take it ill in me 
 To make a little money." 
 
 But country folks who live beneath 
 The shadow of the steeple ; 
 
 The parson and the parson's wife, 
 And mostly married people ; 
 
 Youths green and happy in first love, 
 
 So thankful for illusion ; 
 And men caught out in what the world 
 
 Calls guilt, in first confusion ; 
 
 And almost every one when age, 
 Disease, or sorrows strike him. 
 
 Inclines to think there is a God, 
 Or something very like Him." 
 
THE DOUBTERS AND THE MYSTICS 431 
 
 With the same "wide and luminous view" he 
 surveys the life pictured in his long poem "The 
 Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich"; to judge at least 
 from so much of it as the intolerable hexameters 
 and the barbarous title permit us to read. 
 
 He weDt ; his piping took a troubled soand 
 Of storms that rage outside our happy ground ; 
 He could not wait their passing, he is dead. 
 
 It was fitting that Clough should have been thus 
 commemorated by Matthew Arnold in his noblest 
 elegiac poem, " Thyrsis " ; for between the two men 
 there was not only a warm friendship but a wide 
 community of experience. Both have been jauntily 
 numbered among ' unbelievers ' ; yet it is doubtful 
 if any two poets of their century better illustrate 
 the vital connection between literature and religion, 
 or bear more unimpeachable testimony to the fact 
 that, however poetry may seem to regard the forms 
 of faith, it can never get on for very long without 
 faith's essence. No candid reader of their writings 
 is likely to deny that rehgion was a paramount 
 concern of both and a chief source of inspiration 
 in their work. To Clough it — 
 
 Was great comfort and yet greater grief. 
 
 There was something almost passionate in his ad- 
 herence to the themes of faith, whether for affirma- 
 tion or denial. Arnold was capable of more marked 
 detachment of manner, especially in his poetry. 
 The plaintive note is frequent; the poet's voice 
 
432 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 seems thin, and his complexion touched with pallor. 
 Yet the plaint is so restrained and so free from 
 exaggeration ; it is voiced with such admirable art, 
 and with such genuine poignancy, as to give to 
 some stanzas place among the most haunting verses 
 in our language. Unlike Clough, however, Arnold 
 was able to wait the passing of the mid-century 
 storms. It is true that, after Clough' s marriage and 
 settlement in a drudging public office, his life flowed 
 on so serenely as to give promise that he too had 
 at last found harbour; but he died at forty-three. 
 Arnold lived to sixty-five and did the greater por- 
 tion of his positive work in prose after forty. 
 
 In many respects he was the true spiritual son of 
 his father. Thomas Arnold had little lightness of 
 touch. The smarting cuticle of erring Rugby boys 
 and the famous paper on "The Oxford Malignants" 
 testified to his policy of ' thorough ' alike with cane 
 and pen. Yet his discipline was as free from all 
 taint of cruelty as was his scholarship from pedan- 
 try. He was simply a good and exceedingly able 
 man so mightily in earnest as to be in some slight 
 danger of cultivating energy for its own sake. His 
 eldest son, as often happens, swung to the other 
 extreme in manner, though he never forfeited alle- 
 giance to the ideals of his childhood. Indeed in 
 some respects he may be said to have supplied the 
 necessary complement to his father. Arnold pere 
 would have contended that if a bush were to be 
 beaten to start a hare it should be done seriously, 
 
THE DOUBTERS AND THE MYSTICS 433 
 
 and with a zeal which it was no affectation to call 
 religious. Arnold fils loved to say that he found 
 the serious people of his day "beating the bush 
 with deep emotion, but never starting the hare " at 
 all; and, as Mr. Gosse has happily remarked, he 
 made the discovery of the hare his object/ 
 
 It was all done so blithely, however, that multi- 
 tudes of serious people questioned his sincerity of 
 intent. But it is interesting and quite germane to 
 our present purpose to observe that this note of 
 blithesomeness so eminently characteristic of his 
 later prose is almost wholly lacking in his poetry. 
 One need only contrast his more serious prose works 
 like "Culture and Anarchy," or "Literature and 
 Dogma," with the Obermann poems to see at a glance 
 what is meant; while the fooling of "Friendship's 
 Garland " is among the most excellent in the lan- 
 guage. He loved to quote his critics when they 
 thought themselves to be keenest upon him. One 
 ponderously accused him of lacking " a philosophy 
 with coherent, interdependent, subordinate and de- 
 rivative principles" — a charge which the object 
 of it delightedly admitted, and turned gleefully to 
 his own purposes. No doubt his playfulness and 
 gift of irony sometimes carried him well beyond 
 the lines of good taste, and occasionally over the 
 bounds of decency. A man need not be very ortho- 
 dox to feel the gravity of his offence in the matter 
 
 1 Illustrated History of English Literature, Glarnett and Gosse, 
 vol. iv, p. 307. 
 
434 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 of the " Three Lord Shaf tesburys/' for instance ; 
 yet the lapses were mere incidents after all in the 
 exercise of a very great and rare literary gift. 
 
 The most casual reader of the early poetry or the 
 later prose must perceive how natural was Arnold's 
 use of the themes and language of religion. At least 
 eight of the fourteen sonnets included in his collected 
 poems deal with religious subjects ; and among them 
 "East London" is perhaps the most characteristic. 
 
 ' T was August, and the fierce sun overhead 
 Smote on the squalid streets of Bethnal Green, 
 And the pale weaver, through his windows seen 
 In Spitalfields, look'd thrice dispirited. _, 
 
 I met a preacher there I knew, and said : 
 " 111 and o'erwork'd, how fare you in this scene ? " — 
 " Bravely ! " said he ; " for I of late have been 
 
 Much cheer'd with thoughts of Christ, the living bread** 
 
 O human soul ! as long as thou canst so 
 Set up a mark of everlasting light, 
 Above the howling senses' ebb and flow, 
 
 To cheer thee, and to right thee if thou roam — 
 Not with lost toil thou labourest through the night ! 
 Thou mak'st the heaven thou hop'st indeed thy home. 
 
 Beside such verses as these there should be set 
 the well-known stanzas from " The Grande Char- 
 treuse," " Obermann," and " Obermann Once More," 
 which depict faith's eclipse ; though it is always to 
 be remembered that some of the saddest, most 
 haunting, and most often quoted of these lines are 
 put by the poet into the mouth of the author of 
 
THE DOUBTERS AND THE MYSTICS 435 
 
 *^ Obermann " ; they do not profess to voice his own 
 personal views. His moods no doubt reflected them ; 
 they seemed to be in some sense an echo of the 
 doubting mid-century mind whose influence the poet 
 felt so keenly ; yet it would be a grave mistake to 
 fancy that even in the most negative period of his 
 poetry Arnold thought of himself as a preacher of 
 negation. 
 
 " My poems represent, on the whole," he wrote to 
 his mother in 1869, " the main movement of mind 
 of the last quarter of a century, and thus they will 
 probably have their day as people become conscious 
 to themselves of what that movement of mind is, 
 and interested in the literary productions which re- 
 flect it." ' 
 
 The next generation justified his prophecy. It 
 took a haK-morbid satisfaction in thinking of itself 
 as — 
 
 Wandering between two worlds, one dead, 
 The other powerless to be born. 
 
 When men would picture to one another the change 
 that was passing upon faith they naturally had re- 
 course to Arnold's simile, — 
 
 Achilles ponders in his tent, 
 The kings of modern thought are dumb ; 
 Silent they are, though not content, 
 And wait to see the future come. 
 They have the grief men had of yore, 
 But they contend and cry no more. 
 
 » LetterSf vol. ii, p. 10 ; June 5, 1869. 
 
436 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 It is but partly true, since the " kings of modern 
 thought " have been as communicative, nay, some- 
 times as vociferous, as thinkers of an elder day ever 
 showed themselves ; not least so when, like Carlyle, 
 staggered by the greatness of our mortal way, they 
 have seen fit to fill volumes with their cries of " Si- 
 lence ! " Yet after all, it is an admirable picture of 
 a mood which most thoughtful people have known 
 as they looked out upon the welter of new experi- 
 ence wherein, during the last fifty years, old land- 
 marks threatened to be either buried or swept away 
 forever. This same prophet, however, saw quite as 
 clearly that on our modern journey through the wil- 
 derness the true leader and saviour must be a man 
 of faith. 
 
 Servants of God ! — or sons 
 
 Shall I not call you ? because 
 
 Not as servants ye knew 
 
 Your Father's innermost mind, 
 
 His, who unwillingly sees 
 
 One of his little ones lost — 
 
 Yours is the praise, if mankind 
 
 Hath not as yet in its march 
 
 Fainted, and fallen, and died ! 
 
 The lines are taken from " Rugby Chapel," and 
 might be matched by passages from his letters, to 
 show in how real a sense Arnold felt himself to 
 be his father's son. Thomas Arnold's treatment of 
 verbal inspiration was thought by many to be quite 
 as revolutionary as Matthew Arnold's views of justi- 
 fication by faith, in "St. Paul and Protestantism." 
 
THE DOUBTERS AND THE MYSTICS 437 
 
 Yet the latter was sure that his view would prevail 
 against like opposition and, as he wrote to his mo- 
 ther, "with a like safety to true religion."^ 
 
 These letters abound in expressions of an ambi- 
 tion to give more intelligence and reality to the reli- 
 gious convictions which play so great a part in 
 human affairs. 
 
 "It will more and more become evident how 
 entirely religious is the work I have done in ' Lit- 
 erature and Dogma' [he wrote to his sister in 1874]. 
 . . . For it is my belief, at any rate, that I give 
 something positive, which to a great many people 
 may be of the very greatest comfort and service. 
 And this is in part an answer to what you say about 
 treating with lightness what is matter of life and 
 death to so many people. There is a levity which 
 is altogether evil ; but to treat miracles and the com- 
 mon anthropomorphic ideas of God as what one may 
 lose, and yet keep one's hope, courage, and joy, as 
 what are not really matters of life and death in the 
 keeping or losing of them, this is desirable and 
 necessary, if one holds, as I do, that the common 
 anthropomorphic ideas of God and the reliance on 
 miracles must and will inevitably pass away. . . 
 When I see the conviction of the ablest and most 
 serious men round me that a great change must come, 
 a great plunge must be taken, I think it well . . . 
 instead of simply dilating ... on the plunge's utter- 
 ness, tremendousness, and awfulness, to show man- 
 kind that it need not be in terror and despair, that 
 everything essential to its progress stands firm and 
 unchanofed."^ 
 
 1 Nov. 13, 1869 ; Letters, vol. ii. 
 
 » Letters of Oct. 2 aud November (?), 1874 ; vol. ii 
 
43» ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 As the title of " Literature and Dogma " suggests, he 
 recognized the vital relation which literature bears 
 to religion, and illustrated the matter by a very co- 
 gent criticism upon the late Lord Salisbury. 
 
 "Religion he knows and physical science he 
 knows, but the immense work between the two, which 
 is for literature to accomplish, he knows nothing of, 
 and all his speeches at Oxford pointed this way. On 
 the one hand, he was full of the great future for 
 physical science, and begging the University to make 
 up her mind to it, and to resign much of her literary 
 studies ; on the other hand, he was full, almost de- 
 fiantly full, of counsels and resolves for retaining 
 and upholding the old ecclesiastical and dogmatic 
 form of religion. From a juxtaposition of this kind 
 nothing but shocks and collisions can come. . . . All 
 this pressed a good deal upon my mind at Oxford, 
 and made me anxious, but I do hope that what in- 
 fluence I have may be of use in the troubled times 
 which I see are before us as a healing and reconcil- 
 ing influence.*" 
 
 For this office of peacemaker he had some very 
 high qualifications : an earnest purpose, a keen in- 
 telligence, genuine good temper, a quick sense of 
 humour, and a rare turn for banter in which the 
 sting of irony was generally, though not always, 
 mitigated by kindliness. No English essayist of his 
 century has better illustrated those felicities of style 
 which we ascribe to the French : keenness, swiftness, 
 aptness, and lucidity ; and the lesson was needed in 
 To his Mother, June 25, 1870 ; Letters, vol. ii. 
 
THE DOUBTERS AND THE MYSTICS 439 
 
 a day when Anglo-Saxons in general and Americans 
 in particular were in danger of exalting German 
 clumsiness and ineptitude into a sort of fetich. Re- 
 petitious he may sometimes have seemed to be ; but 
 the repetitions were generally of phrases which served 
 him as a refrain or chorus. They were significant in 
 themselves and perfectly adapted to grip the memory. 
 Hence he became the master phrase-maker of his 
 generation. " Sweetness and light " ; "The Philis- 
 tines "; the doctrine of " the remnant "; the com- 
 pany "of those who would live in the Spirit"; 
 " Hebraism and Hellenism ": these phrases suggest 
 how keen was his insight, and how ethical his tem- 
 per ; but rich as many of them are in rehgious con- 
 tent, they fail to measure the saturation of his mind 
 with Biblical and devotional thought, or the degree 
 in which his style reflected it. " St. Paul and Pro- 
 testantism," or " Literature and Dogma," might be 
 expected to utter the language of religion ; but its 
 speech proved just as needful to the purposes of 
 *' Culture and Anarchy." There the devotional pre- 
 cepts of Bishop Wilson recur so frequently that an 
 eminent scientific reader supposed Wilson to be a 
 figment of the author's own imagination ; and the 
 concluding words of the Introduction, written when 
 the essays were published in a volume, sums up the 
 whole matter both for Literature and for Life. 
 
 ** * If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do 
 them ! ' — the last word for infirm humanity will 
 always be that. For this word, reiterated with a 
 
440 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 power now sublime, now affecting, but always ad- 
 mirable, our race will, so long as the world lasts, 
 return to Hebraism ; and the Bible, which preaches 
 this word, will forever remain, as Goethe called it, 
 not only a national book, but the Book of the Na- 
 tions. Again and again after what seem breaches 
 and separations, the prophetic promise to Jerusalem 
 will still be true : Xo, thy sons come, whom thou 
 sentest away ; they come gathered from the west 
 unto the east by the word of the Holy One, rejoic- 
 ing in the remembrance of God.'' ^ 
 
 It is difficult to pass on to the concluding section 
 of this chapter without a word concerning James An- 
 thony Froude. His literary career furnishes both a 
 parallel and a contrast to that of Matthew Arnold. 
 It was as stormy as Arnold's was placid and urbane, 
 and grew out of a violent spiritual struggle to which 
 Arnold seems to have been upon the whole immune. 
 Froude was like Arnold, however, in his recognition 
 of religion's fascination. He could not let it alone. 
 The " History of England " is a great Protestant 
 pamphlet, in which his case is so overstated as to 
 invite a revulsion of feeling. The " Short Studies " 
 are shot through, now with genuinely religious, and 
 now with sectarian feeling; and even a fragmentary 
 book of travel like " Oceana " — another pamphlet, 
 be it remembered, though in the interests of impe- 
 rialism — does not escape the religious influence. 
 Froude seemed to be an incurable spiritual dyspep- 
 tic, with all a dyspeptic's perverse and abnormal 
 
 * Culture and Anarchy j p. be. 
 
THE DOUBTERS AND THE MYSTICS 441 
 
 appetite for the things most certain to disagree with 
 him. There was much in the orthodoxy of his day 
 that Arnold could neither stomach for himself nor 
 abide for others ; but he had a sure discernment 
 ^^for the things by which men live "; ^ he saw them 
 in a high light, and he gave them positive and lucid 
 expression. This happy faculty was denied to Froude. 
 Keligion, and the principles of individual and na- 
 tional conduct, claimed his keenest interest. He 
 could dogmatize about them very eloquently; he 
 probably could have died for his convictions with 
 respect to them ; but he could not keep them in the 
 light, or discover the elements of their comfort. He 
 always saw the pillar of cloud and fire so near as 
 to find himself either befogged or daunted ; Arnold 
 viewed it in sufficiently true perspective to catch its 
 guiding purpose. 
 
 The relation between the doubter and the mys- 
 tic is entirely a natural one. Just as one of the 
 by-products of the work of ' rationalist ' and ^ secu- 
 larist ' associations is likely to be an occasional out- 
 burst of superstition, so the age which makes much 
 of dubious inquiry into the sources of faith is bound 
 to breed a certain non-rational, if not irrational, 
 type of faith. Heart and will refuse to be put per- 
 manently out of commission by the tyranny of the 
 
 ^ He loved to quote bits of the Old Testament like this in his fa- 
 miliar letters. Cf. Letter to M. Fontanes, June 29, 1883 ; Letters, 
 vol. ii. 
 
442 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 reasoning faculty, especially when, from inadequate 
 premisses, it insists upon moving toward negative 
 conclusions. I am aware that modern psychology 
 declines to recognize this three-fold division of the 
 soul ; but there is a something in experience which 
 corresponds to it, and drives us, either to these ex- 
 pressions, or to attempt the discovery of their par- 
 allels. " Low grades of being want low objects ; but 
 the want of man is God." Man may dispute until the 
 end of time about his definitions of God and his 
 methods of approach to Him; but he pretty stead- 
 fastly declines to be satisfied with the modern creed 
 of agnosticism : " God is so great — if there be a 
 God — that He is none of my business." The more 
 dogmatic the negation, the more absurd the form 
 of assertion is likely to prove. Now and then the 
 contradiction is emphasized by some delightful 
 inconsistency in a single character, and one finds 
 Matthew Arnold himself guilty of the irreverence 
 of the " Three Lord Shaf tesburys " on the one hand, 
 and on the other resolutely turning to the East dur- 
 ing the Creed, when worshipping in Harrow Chapel,^ 
 even though the clergy neglected the observance. 
 It was not a meaningless or uncandid act. Arnold 
 felt deeply the appeal of services of worship. They 
 stood for something real and vital in the experience 
 of men. He believed that some of the ideas un- 
 derlying them, however, were mistaken and inade- 
 quate. These he did not hesitate to criticise ; but he 
 
 » Matthew Arnold, by G. W. E. Russell, p. '261. 
 
THE DOUBTERS AND THE MYSTICS 443 
 
 was at the same time so confident that the impulse 
 toward faith and its expression was normal and 
 necessary, that he begrudged the giving up of well- 
 established forms as heartily as he deplored the ex- 
 cesses of the ritualists. His attitude raises a smile 
 because the world at large knows him as a critic so 
 much better than it knew him as a worshipper. 
 
 The very fact of the emphasis placed by him 
 and his generation upon criticism would lead us to 
 expect a corresponding emphasis by others upon 
 unquestioning behef. Sometimes this was frankly 
 dogmatic, as in the case of Lord Shaftesbury, and 
 the straiter sects of Evangelicals, Dissenters, and 
 High Churchmen. Occasionally it was instinctive 
 and mystical, as in the case of Christina Rossetti. 
 Her contributions to literature were neither of an 
 extent nor of a type to justify large notice here. 
 Yet she not only illustrates the haunting power 
 which reHgious mysticism gives to poetry, but 
 serves as a connecting link between the mysticism 
 of religion and that new influence in art and liter- 
 ature represented by her brother Gabriel and the 
 Pre-Raphaelites. A mystic may be a person of 
 clearly defined or of utterly hazy religious con- 
 victions. The word 'mysticism' has been vulgar- 
 ized, as so many great words are, until in news- 
 paper parlance it has degenerated into a term of 
 half-patronizing contempt. The clairvoyant, the 
 medium, and the wizard who peeps and mutters, 
 are supposed to represent it. So are those who seek 
 
444 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 strange gods and rites out of the ^mystic East.' 
 The dreamer of dreams and seer of visions, espe- 
 cially if he be given to exploiting his revelations for 
 the sake of gain or notoriety, is assigned to the same 
 company. These misrepresent mysticism, however, 
 very much as fanaticism and superstition misrepre- 
 sent religion. Exactly as some men have what we 
 call a * genius * for physics, chemistry, or mathe- 
 matics, which enables them to reach at a bound 
 conclusions toward which other men must needs 
 plod, so in the realm of spirit some would appear to 
 possess a discernment which gives to the spiritual a 
 reality denied to the visible and tangible. There are 
 men whose instincts with reference to the possible 
 applications of a mysterious force like electricity are 
 more significant than the laboured formulas of their 
 fellows. The instinct reaches its conclusion by a 
 leap; but, having arrived, it will, if it be sane and 
 serviceable, begin to look at once for the rational 
 connection between its points of arrival and depar- 
 ture ; It gladly awaits the endorsement of experi- 
 ence ; yet not always. A mechanic may sometimes 
 be found whose questioning finger moves with mys- 
 terious assurance to the seat of trouble in a halting 
 machine, and who treats the plodding reasoner with 
 a sort of contempt. The measure of his contempt is, 
 of course, the measure of his limitation. If he de- 
 spise reason and the processes of logic, he is so far 
 forth to be regarded with suspicion ; but such are 
 the contradictions of personality that he does not 
 
THE DOUBTERS AND THE MYSTICS 445 
 
 therefore invalidate his use as a mechanic. He 
 may combine exceptional gifts for the swift com- 
 prehension of a mechanical problem with a very 
 meagrely developed nature. Understanding ma- 
 chines with almost uncanny sympathy, he may un- 
 derstand little else adequately. It is neither neces- 
 sarily nor commonly so, but the thing is conceivable. 
 The mystic in his simplest form is the man with 
 an instinct for the realities that underlie appearance. 
 His instinct may be true, deep, and keen, leading 
 him to momentous conclusions ; or it may prove so 
 fatuous and ill regulated as to end simply in dab- 
 bling and pretence. There are little and great souls 
 here as elsewhere. The great souls, like St. John or 
 St. Theresa, trust their instincts at the same time 
 that they insist upon their coordination with large 
 and well-defined principles of life. St. John exulted 
 in his vision of the Word made Flesh ; but no vision 
 was worth much, except the man who saw it loved 
 his brother, and translated his love into brotherly 
 acts. St. Theresa sat at times before a window which 
 seemed to open into Heaven itself ; but when she 
 arose from beholding the glory, it was to prove to 
 the world her possession of great and beneficent 
 practical gifts. In true mysticism there is rarely any 
 element of the grotesque or the bizarre ; never any 
 strangeness for the sake of the strange ; but rather 
 a reahzation of that larger world of which the visi- 
 ble and tangible frame of our experience is but the 
 husk. Sometimes the realization is intense and over- 
 
446 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 powering ; sometimes but a haunting conviction at 
 the heart of life. The risen Lazarus in Browning's 
 "Epistle/' with his abnormal sensitiveness to the pos- 
 sible issues of his boy's chance word, and his relative 
 indifference to the gathering Roman armies, is an 
 extreme instance of the former ; Wordsworth, with 
 his keen sense of the frame of things wherein his 
 daily life was set, — the mountains, streams, flowers 
 and weather of Westmoreland, — and his occasional 
 glimpses through it of — 
 
 A motion and a spirit, that impels 
 
 All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
 
 And rolls through all things, 
 
 represents a far more normal type. 
 
 The appeal of mysticism to the imagination is 
 of course immediate ; its large use of the symbolic 
 belongs to its very nature; and its tendency toward 
 literary expression is therefore natural. 
 
 The mysticism of Christina Rossetti represents a 
 somewhat extreme form of the nineteenth-century 
 type. Inheriting aesthetic talent of a high order, 
 almost as naturally she seems to have entered into 
 possession of an unquestioning faith. She was ex- 
 ceptionally gifted, too, in respect both of imagi- 
 nation and an eye which observed the world of 
 flower, bird, and insect with keenness and humour. 
 
 The mouse paused in his walk 
 And dropped his wheaten stalk ; 
 Grave cattle wagged their heads 
 In rumination ; 
 
THE DOUBTERS AND THE MYSTICS 447 
 
 The eagle gave a cry 
 From his cloud station ; 
 Larks on thyme beds 
 Forbore to mount or sing ; 
 Bees drooped upon the wing ; 
 The raven perched on high 
 Forgot his ration ; 
 The conies in their rock, 
 A feeble nation, 
 Quaked sympathetica! ; 
 
 all this in fellow-feeling with Eve's penitential 
 grief. The connection between sorrow of heart for 
 sin and the wonder of nature's interrupted course 
 is characteristic of the mystics in general, and of 
 Christina Rossetti in particular. Practically all her 
 work is religious ; " Goblin-Market " is a sort of 
 parable, and so colloquial a piece as "No thank 
 you, John " has its reference to the mystery of 
 Earth's sorrow and its need of cure. A poem like 
 " From House to Home " serves as an admirable 
 illustration of the response which so many poets 
 have made to the music of Scripture language, 
 and the skill which Miss Rossetti had in versify- 
 ing it. 
 
 Although to-day I walk in tedious ways, 
 
 To-day His staff is turned into a rod, 
 
 Yet will I wait for Him the appointed days 
 
 And stay upon my God. 
 
 Even in " Sing-Song," the nursery-rhyme book 
 dedicated to the infant son of Professor Cay ley of 
 Cambridge, verses may be found which breathe 
 the very breath of the Spirit. 
 
448 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Who has ever seen the wind ? 
 
 Neither I nor you : 
 But when the leaves hang trembling, 
 
 The wind is passing thro'. 
 
 Who has ever seen the wind ? 
 
 Neither you nor I : 
 But when the trees bow down their heads, 
 
 The wind is passing by. 
 
 There is sometimes, too, a tendency toward over- 
 wrought humility that may seem to accord better 
 with the intensity of her Italian blood than with 
 her English speech. 
 
 Give me the lowest place : or if for me 
 That lowest place too high, make one more low 
 Where I may sit and see 
 My God and love Thee so, 
 
 savours a little of exaggeration and of feeling cul- 
 tivated for its own sake ; just as the question and 
 answer, — 
 
 Does the road wind up-hill all the way ? 
 
 Yes, to the very end. 
 Will the day's journey take the whole long day ? 
 
 From morn to night, my friend, 
 
 seem to overemphasize the sombre and unrelenting 
 features of experience. 
 
 Both the Rossettis tended to make too much of 
 the dreamy and anaemic side of mysticism, and 
 so far forth represented a decadent phase of it. 
 Christina's religious faith was, to be sure, vigour- 
 ous enough upon the dogmatic side. Her brother, 
 
THE DOUBTERS AND THE MYSTICS 449 
 
 Dante Gabriel, was careless of dogma, but respon- 
 sive to the art values of religion, and to some of 
 those features in experience which welcome reli- 
 gion's appeal. His " Death Parting " for instance, 
 which begins, — 
 
 Leaves and rain and the days of the year 
 
 ( Water-willow and wellaway) , 
 All these fall and my soul gives ear, 
 Ajid she is hence who once was here 
 
 ( With a wind blown night and day) , — 
 
 not only illustrates the old poignancy of the sor- 
 row of parting, which has been the theme of poet 
 and preacher since literature began, but exempli- 
 fies too the half-mystical device (one is tempted to 
 call it pseudo-mystical) of symbolizing this feeling 
 by a refrain whose meaning, if it have any, is only 
 that of a rhythmic sigh. The whole Pre-Raphael- 
 ite school tended in this direction of musical but 
 fragile languor. The frequent beauty of the result 
 could not permanently keep it from decay, and the 
 thing finally degenerated into the absurdities of 
 aestheticism and the sinister grotesquerie of Aubrey 
 Beardsley and the "Yellow Book." But this was 
 not until it had produced notable results of a sub- 
 stantial and beneficent tj^e, both in literature and 
 art. To speak of the work of Holman Hunt, Watts, 
 and B urn e- Jones is beside my present purpose. Nor 
 can I stop to characterize the contributions of Mr. 
 Watts-Dunton to poetry and criticism, beyond re- 
 marking that his Essay upon the " Renascence of 
 
450 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Wonder" is one of the sanest and most generous 
 appreciations of the deeper relations between lit- 
 erature and the life of man's soul which the clos- 
 ing century produced. 
 
 In " Soothsay " Kossetti exhorts his fellow-mys- 
 tics in this fashion : — 
 
 To God at best, to chance at worst, 
 Give thanks for good things, last as first. 
 But windstrown blossom is that good 
 Whose apple is not gratitude. 
 Even if no prayer uplift thy face, 
 Let the sweet right to render grace 
 As thy soul's cherished child be nurs'd. 
 
 The doctrine is wholesome; the simile in the 
 third and fourth lines obscure, with a sort of la- 
 boured obscurity for which the whole school had 
 a perverse appetite. They preached simplicity, and 
 then elaborated it, sometimes ruggedly and some- 
 times daintily, until it ceased to be simplicity at 
 all. 
 
 Among the brethren of the ^rugged' school 
 William Morris stands preeminent, — a fine and 
 often noble, though not always gracious figure, 
 amid the literary and social leaders of his day. 
 He had, what every revolutionist ought to have, 
 Tennyson's ^Passion of the Past' — though it was 
 not Tennyson's Past. It would be going much too 
 far to claim for him any clear historic sense, or 
 any literary gift of quite the first order. He saw 
 the past of Northman and early Saxon by the 
 
THE DOUBTERS AND THE MYSTICS 461 
 
 glamour of the Saga's light; and even the later 
 English life of the historic middle age he ideaHzed. 
 This was done partly at the instance of his zeal for 
 handicraft, and partly, it would seem, from his 
 intense love of the material face of England, her 
 woods, streams, and fields, which led him to dream 
 of them as they must have existed in other days, 
 with a sort of ecstasy. The most casual reader of 
 " The Folk-mote by the River," with its description 
 of the sturdy mowers going forth long before dawn 
 to cut the grass upon the Elders' Mound, about 
 which the oppressed people were to gather and plan 
 local revolution, will remember how redolent it is 
 both of morning's freshness and of a people's need. 
 The inspiration is as real as that of Shelley's " Sky- 
 lark," though of mundane instead of celestial 
 quality. 
 
 So what I have called his "Passion of the Past" 
 has little of the Tennysonian poignancy. It is gen- 
 erally so robust as to suggest the robustious. Hall- 
 biorn and Snaebiorn, for instance, both love Hall- 
 gerd. Hallbiorn wins her ; but finding her still 
 cherishing a fondness for his rival, and loth to 
 leave her father's for her husband's home, trans- 
 fixes her with his sword and rides away. Snaebiorn 
 pursues, overtakes, and slays him after a mighty 
 struggle ; and then himself seeks refuge in saihng 
 westward from the Iceland which is the scene of 
 such tragedy to — 
 
 A grave beneath the Greenland snow. 
 
452 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 The tragedy is real enough. There is the inevitable 
 refrain to mark time's passing and sorrow's pre- 
 sence, — 
 
 So many times over comes summer again, 
 
 What healing in summer if winter be vain ! 
 
 But in spite of this the fighting goes with such 
 gusto, and the ^business' of the tragedy is so heartily 
 managed, that the effect of slaying men is almost 
 as cheerful as that of mowing grass. Morris was 
 so tremendously energetic as Poet, Socialist, and 
 Handicraftsman, that his product too often bore the 
 marks of haste. He impressed himself in the man- 
 ner of a devoted steam-engine rather than by the 
 haunting power of the still small voice. His was one 
 of those natures which seem to have little time for 
 religious thought and no patience with religious 
 observance. It would be an affectation to attempt 
 to trace a ^religious element' in his work. Yet the 
 place which Greek and Norse mythology occupied 
 in his poems, and the influence of the Sagas upon 
 his style are worth noting ; while his overmastering 
 zeal as a champion of the oppressed, a reformer of 
 bad industrial conditions, and a social revolutionist, 
 brought him into vital touch with essential religion. 
 It is here that he illustrates my thesis of the literary 
 worth of the religious impulse; for among the most 
 memorable work that Morris did is that in which 
 he sets forth the burdens, the rights, and the hopes 
 of plain people. " The Burghers' Battle " is a war- 
 
THE DOUBTERS AND THE MYSTICS 453 
 
 song, but one which Peace Societies might well 
 reprint. 
 
 Thick rise the spear-shafts o'er the land 
 
 That erst the harvest bore ; 
 
 The sword is heavy in the hand, 
 
 And we return no more. 
 
 Across our stubble acres now 
 
 The teams go four and four ; 
 
 But out-worn elders guide the plough, 
 
 And we return no more. 
 
 And now the women heavy-eyed 
 Turn through the open door, 
 From gazing down the highway wide, 
 Where we return no more. 
 
 And crops shall cover field and hill 
 Unlike what once they bore, 
 And all be done without our will. 
 Now we return no more. 
 
 Look up ! The arrows streak the sky, 
 The horns of battle roar ; 
 The long spears lower and draw nigh. 
 And we return no more. 
 
 In poems like " The God of the Poor/' " The Day 
 of Days," " A Death Song," and ^' Hope Dieth ; Love 
 Liveth," he preached his gospel of social revolution, 
 and usually with a spirit of confidence and good 
 temper. The temper is stern, however, but all the 
 more effective in its sternness because it refuses to 
 be violent. Here, for instance, is the arraignment of 
 the rich by the poor, and the refrain which voices 
 
464 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 their determination to strive until the end for more 
 equal conditions. 
 
 We asked them for a life of toilsome earning, 
 They bade us bide their leisure for our bread ; 
 We craved to speak to tell our woeful learning ; 
 We come back speechless, bearing back our dead. 
 Not one, not one, nor thousands must they slay. 
 But one and all if they would dusk the day. 
 
 They will not learn ; they have no ears to hearken ; 
 They turn their faces from the eyes of fate ; 
 Their gay-lit halls shut out the skies that darken. 
 But, lo ! this dead man knocking at the gate. 
 Not one, not one, nor thousands must they slay, 
 But one and all if they would du^k the day. 
 
 Mazzini somewhere says that there can be no re- 
 ligion without a new sense of the unity and solidarity 
 of the human race.^ In poems like " The March of 
 the Workers " Morris gives his own stirring version 
 of the same truth. It is not expressed in the accepted 
 formulas of religion ; but it echoes the preaching 
 of Christ, and its real though broken music finely 
 symbohzes the troubled efforts of society toward a 
 better harmony. 
 
 On we march then, we the workers, and the rumour that ye hear 
 Is the blended sound of battle and deliv'rance drawing near ; 
 For the hope of every creature is the banner that we bear, 
 And the world is marching on. 
 Hark the rolling of the thunder ! 
 Lo the sun ! and lo thereunder 
 Riseth wrath, and hope, and wonder. 
 And the host comes marching on ! 
 1 C£. G. A. Johnstone Ross, in Hibbert Journal, July, 1908, p. 763. 
 
THE DOUBTERS AND THE MYSTICS 455 
 
 In writing down the name of Edward FitzGerald, 
 one is very conscious that he refused to be included 
 in any formal class or category. Yet there is a 
 sense in which he belongs to this chapter, since his 
 real introduction to the world was by means of 
 Omar^ doubter and mystic both. There is some- 
 thing almost ludicrous in the enormous vogue which 
 FitzGerald's quatrains won. Their workmanship, 
 subtlety, and boldness merit all that can be said 
 in their praise ; their future is secure ; but the 
 true FitzGerald lover is tempted to think that this 
 must be in spite rather than because of the extrava- 
 gant fashion in which Omar Khayyam Clubs have 
 been formed, variorum editions and Latin transla- 
 tions issued, and levant bindings crushed into the 
 service of publicity. I have been asked strange 
 questions about the puzzling little book in drawing- 
 rooms where it lay for ornament's sake; and I 
 could wish that FitzGerald might have lived to 
 hear of the commercial traveller who confessed 
 that, despite all efforts, he could not keep clear the 
 distinction between Omar Khayyam and Hunyadi 
 Jan OS. 
 
 That Fate which the quatrains celebrate could 
 scarce have devised a more whimsical irony than 
 the disinterring of this recluse, with his petulance 
 and patience, his rudeness and tenderness, his dole- 
 ful marriage and his steadfast affiance to the fisher- 
 man, "Posh," his admiration for Dickens and his 
 loyal friendship with Thackeray, his wholesome 
 
406 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 and never-to-be-forgotten love of the German Ocean 
 and George Crabbe's poems ; his plaid shawl, low 
 shoes, short trousers, shuffling gait, and incompar- 
 able letters. So determined was the man himself 
 upon burial alive in the seclusion of the East 
 Anglian coast towns that Mr. Aldis Wright, with 
 his library of letters, and Mr. Thomas Wright, with 
 his volumes of biography, seemed at first like body- 
 snatchers. Yet of all the poets discussed in this 
 chapter, his, it is safe to say, is the most affection- 
 ately remembered name, unless we except Clough, 
 and FitzGerald will be known to a thousand where 
 Clough is read by a score. No doubt his eccentricity 
 adds spice to the feast he spreads before his guest. 
 But beyond that there was a personality which, 
 speaking occasionally through the poems, and 
 habitually through the letters, tempts the reader to 
 share Thackeray's confession that FitzGerald was 
 his best-loved friend. 
 
 There is no need to inquire curiously into the 
 secret of his charm ; but certain elements of it are 
 described in saying that he had an ^ understanding 
 heart.' Recluse though he was, he saw, with some- 
 thing of a mystic's instinct, into the pervading 
 trouble of his time ; not only saw it, but felt for it 
 with a deeper sympathy than any sentimentalist 
 could fathom. The note of pathos is not unlike 
 that in his friend Thackeray ; sounded only occa- 
 sionally, but then with such simplicity and restraint 
 as to make it doubly memorable. There is a stanza 
 
THE DOUBTERS AND THE MYSTICS 467 
 
 in " Bredfield Hall " not readily forgotten by those 
 who know old houses and something of the ties 
 that in country places bind home and church and 
 passing generations to one another. The various 
 occupants of the Hall are made to live and go their 
 appointed ways before us, — 
 
 Till the Bell that not in vain 
 
 Had summoned them to weekly prayer, 
 
 Called them one by one again 
 
 To the Church — and left them there ! 
 
 This same instinct for the deeper experience 
 and meaning of common days led FitzGerald, in 
 his adaptation of Omar, to depict inimitably the 
 strangely mingled zest and satiety of the third 
 •quarter of his century. Men had their old-time 
 appetite for the Wine and Song of Life ; yet Life's 
 contradictions thrust their way more persistently 
 than ever to the banquet table. Their curiosity was 
 at once fed and whetted by physical discoveries 
 that were making the age famous ; yet the ultimate 
 and really significant questions of the heart were as 
 clamant as of old ; though their utterance was ham- 
 pered, and their burden therefore increased, by a 
 school of thinkers who would, if they could, have 
 denied them utterance at all. It is when men are 
 told that the instincts of their hearts are nonsense 
 and should be foregone, that they fall into a mood 
 wherein Omar's jovial cynicism seems like a gos- 
 pel to them; not because he brings them any par- 
 ticular news of deliverance, but rather because he 
 
458 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 diagnoses their ailment and voices their inarticulate 
 feelings. In a day when men still thought about 
 religion, but did not know whether as intelligent 
 men they could claim the right to think about it 
 very much longer, it chimed admirably with their 
 humour to hear this old-new poet singing, ■ — and 
 with rare music, — 
 
 Myself when young did eagerly frequent 
 Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument 
 About it and about : but evermore 
 Came out by the same door wherein I went. 
 
 Some among them found their recurrent moods in- 
 terpreted by the poem's fatalism ; others were glad 
 to hear their feelings of blind rebellion voiced by 
 such stanzas of defiance as that which flings Man's 
 forgiveness at Fate's head. Volumes of so-called 
 theology, the natural children of a too lusty Calvin- 
 ism, were summed up in — 
 
 *' Why," said another, " some there are who tell 
 Of one who threatens he will toss to Hell 
 The luckless Pots he marred in making — Pish ! 
 He 's a Good Fellow, and 't will all be well." 
 
 FitzGerald's day produced no more telling argument 
 against sheer materialism than the humourous per- 
 versity of this poem. I would not debase it to a beast 
 of burden by loading it with a moral, yet none who 
 knew FitzGerald could have read the " Rubaiyat " 
 without seeing in them the finer original of W. E. 
 Henley's rather coarse — 
 
THE DOUBTERS AND THE MYSTICS 459 
 
 Let us be drunk, and for a while forget, 
 Forget, and ceasing even from regret. 
 Live without reason and in spite of rhyme. 
 
 What Henley meant, if indeed he meant anything 
 beyond the perverse face-value of his words, I do not 
 undertake to say; but FitzGerald was clear-eyed and 
 large-hearted enough to appreciate the grim banter 
 of his own work — perhaps the most telling example 
 of reductio ad ahsurdum in our literature. 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 
 THE HEYDAY OF MINOB POETRY ' 
 
 This title sounds like an ungracious introduction to 
 a study of recent English poetry; and when the 
 reader perceives that such masters of their art as 
 Swinhurne and George Meredith must consent to 
 introduce it, he may even count it sacrilegious. 
 The phrase ^ minor poetry' is never, I believe, 
 quite grateful to the ears of poets. Mr. William 
 Archer eschews it altogether as a "supercilious 
 catchword," and entitles his interesting study of 
 contemporary verse, "Poets of the Younger Gen- 
 eration." He is certain that the taint of contempt 
 attaches to it and that it has a depressing and ster- 
 ilizing effect.^ 
 
 From all suspicion of contempt I would at once 
 purge myself. ' Minor poetry ' represents a condi- 
 tion rather than a critical aspersion ; or, if criticism 
 he implied, its object is as likely to be the critic or 
 the public as the poet. There is great authority for 
 the wisdom of choosing at first an inconspicuous 
 ' place, and the young poet has no worse enemy than 
 
 * Incorporated in this chapter are portions of an article by the 
 author published some years ago in the Bibliotheca Sacra, under 
 the title, " The Religious Significance of Recent English Verse." 
 
 ' Poets of the Younger Generation, Introduction, pp. 1-2. 
 
THE HEYDAY OF MINOR POETRY 461 
 
 the eulogist, who, upon the strength of a slender 
 volume or two, would thrust him unbidden into the 
 choir of Immortals ; since nothing is more fatal to 
 poets or poetry than anti-climax. 
 
 He is indeed an unappreciative reader who de- 
 nies or belittles the extraordinary wealth of poetic 
 gifts which the last half-century has put at his dis- 
 posal. Here are verses to delight and to amuse ; to 
 instruct, to soothe, and to inspire, — most of them, 
 moreover, the work of finished craftsmen as well 
 as of inspired singers. The thing they lack is — to 
 use a hackneyed phrase — the power to compel. I 
 would not deny that this note of compulsion is 
 sometimes sounded and the power exercised. Who 
 of us has not been compelled to go his mile with 
 some new poet, and rejoicingly girded his loins for 
 twain, — only to discover, however, that his guide 
 was the pilot of a stage in life's journey, rather 
 than the Greatheart who sees pilgrims through. 
 Let due honour be paid to these men. They are 
 no "idle singers of an empty day." Their seri- 
 ousness, and the real distinction with which they 
 play their parts, are beyond cavil. Yet they im- 
 press us as generally with their limitations as with 
 their powers. Sometimes it is a limitation of range, 
 and sometimes of vision ; but more often it is a 
 lack of depth. 
 
 Let me cite at once the two names which offer 
 the chief exceptions to this criticism, — the names 
 already mentioned of Mr. Swinburne and Mr. 
 
462 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Meredith. In the case of George Meredith, I 
 believe the exception to be real if not apparent ; 
 in the case of Mr. Swinburne somewhat more ap- 
 parent than real ; and for these reasons. When we 
 apply our test questions to the scope of their work, 
 — and here the volume of it is to be taken into ac- 
 count ; to the extent of their vision, which should 
 include the width of their sympathies ; and to their 
 ability to sound the depths of experience, Mr. 
 Meredith answers the last two triumphantly and 
 the first respectably. The volume of his verse is 
 not great, and some of that is scarcely poetry ; but 
 his range is still considerable, while the width of 
 his sympathies, the extent of his vision, and the 
 depths of experience which he has sounded, make 
 him one of the great masters of life's secrets. The 
 limitations of Meredith's power and fame run par- 
 allel to those of Browning. There are some who 
 would ask no higher praise; but the fact remains 
 that the limitations are real. They are, moreover, of 
 a sort to hamper a poet's power in the present, and 
 they are preeminently fitted to limit his fame in 
 the future. 
 
 Mr. Meredith is reported to have said once upon 
 a time that henceforth he would write for himself, 
 since the public of that early day would none 
 of what he had tried to write for it. An even 
 greater poet said in his haste that all men were 
 liars ; but he fortunately thought better of it, and 
 continued to use their language in the expression 
 
THE HEYDAY OF MINOR POETRY 463 
 
 of truth, for which three or four score generations 
 have proved hungry. It is Meredith's misfortune 
 that he too could not find leisure to repent his 
 haste, and gain the upper hand of his contempt. 
 Contemptuous of men and women in general he 
 certainly is not; and one of the secrets of his 
 power as a novelist is that he sees such possibili- 
 ties half realized in them. Nor does he doubt man's 
 command of his destiny and ability to make it a 
 high one. 
 
 I take the hap 
 
 Of all my deeds. The wind that fills my sails 
 
 Propels ; but I am helmsman.^ 
 
 It is rather the common medium of English speech 
 that he dishonours by a style which at times almost 
 ceases to be language, and becomes a sort of hiero- 
 glyphic picture-writing, a huddling together of the 
 salient — and often greatly significant — features of 
 his thought, leaving his vexed reader to supply the 
 gaps as best he may. Let any intelligent person, 
 after his first, or for that matter his fourth, un- 
 aided reading of " The Sage Enamoured and the 
 Honest Lady," attempt to put upon paper his idea 
 even of the poem's general drift, and he will 
 understand me. The charge to be brought against 
 it is, that in too many respects it is the lesser 
 counterpart of " Sordello " ; a mighty verbal fog- 
 bank, illumined here and there by lightning flashes 
 of memorable meaning. One is tempted at times 
 
 * Modem Love, xx. 
 
464 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 to quote Meredith against himself, especially in the 
 love poems : — 
 
 Now seems the language heard of Love as rain 
 To make a mire where fruitfulness was meant.^ 
 
 It needs to be straightway added, however, that 
 the fruitfulness does not really fail, and that the 
 mire bears no taint of filthiness; it is simply good 
 soil too curiously tilled. Plain spoken, with a sort 
 of bucolic breadth, Mr. Meredith can be, as, for 
 instance, in the " Teaching of the Nude," or once 
 and again in his "Reading of Earth"; but it is a 
 wholesome and honest plainness, uncorrupted by 
 dubious suggestion. 
 
 The greatness of George Meredith's poetry is 
 proclaimed, then, quite as much in spite of as by 
 means of his craftsmanship; which, though often 
 graceful and melodious to a degree, is as often 
 curious and sometimes merely grotesque; but it is 
 proclaimed none the less, and its elements are to 
 be discerned by the most casual reader of his 
 titles. "Modern Love," "Ballads and Poems of 
 Tragic Life," "A Reading of Earth," and "To 
 the Comic Spirit" may serve to suggest these. 
 Taken together and viewed in the light of the 
 sympathy which speaks through his treatment of 
 them, these titles place him among the great lit- 
 erary forces making for sanity in the ethics and 
 religion of to-day. Practically all great poetry 
 
 * The Promise in Disturbance. 
 
THE HEYDAY OF MINOR POETRY 466 
 
 deals with religion, and Mr. Meredith appears at 
 once to exemplify this in his use of mythological 
 subjects like the " Appeasement of Demeter/' or 
 legends of the saints like the "Song of Theodo- 
 linda" branding her bosom with the red-hot nail 
 from the Cross, or the phenomena of modern reli- 
 gious hysteria in " Jump-to-Glory Jane," or so 
 well-worn and orthodox a theme as "A Faith on 
 Trial." But, as generally happens, the real reli- 
 gious significance of his work lies implicit in his 
 treatment of many themes rather than explicit in 
 the titles of a few. 
 
 Keligion has a keen ear for life's discords, but it 
 is of the essence of the Christian rehgion to inter- 
 pret them in terms of possible harmony. Its object 
 is the doing of one Perfect Will on earth and in 
 heaven, and the lifting of man's soul up to a plane 
 where he shall be so adequate to all circumstance 
 as to make even life's contradictions serve him. 
 The introductory sonnet to " Modern Love," already 
 quoted, closes with three ungraceful but significant 
 lines which suggest their author's conception of this 
 truth. 
 
 In labour of the trouble at its fount, 
 
 Leads Life to an intelligible Lord 
 
 The rebel discords up the sacred mount. 
 
 These rebel discords play a large part in " Modern 
 Love." It is a story of mutual suspicion between 
 two married, childless, and self-centred lovers, work- 
 
466 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 ing to an issue of tragedy. Neither was deliberately 
 unfaithful to the other ; but — 
 
 each applied to each that fatal knife, 
 Deep questioning, which probes to endless dole. 
 
 Mr. Meredith is himself passed-master in the use of 
 this same knife, " deep questioning " ; yet with this 
 difference from his brethren who boast of their real- 
 ism, that they so generally probe to show their skill, 
 or from sheer professional satisfaction in cutting — 
 even to death; while he seems always to have in 
 view the true surgeon's ideal of sounder and more 
 wholesome life. This confusion of good and evil 
 haunts all he does. 
 
 Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul 
 When hot for certainties in this our life ! ^ 
 
 The real suffering and confusion to which man's 
 hearts and plans are put by circumstance make up 
 life's tragedy; the strange fashion by which pro- 
 gress is effected from year to year in nature, and 
 from experience to experience in man, constitutes his 
 " reading of earth " ; and the frequent incongruity 
 in all this process, as beauty marches cheek-by-jowl 
 with ugliness, the subhme with the ridiculous, the 
 spiritual with the carnal, suggests life's comedy. 
 Reference has already been made to "Jump-to- 
 Glory Jane." It is a title which no other but Brown- 
 ing would have ventured, and it is doubtful if even 
 he could have compassed Meredith's treatment of it. 
 
 » Modem Love, l. 
 
THE HEYDAY OF MINOR POETRY 467 
 
 The seizure of a labourer's widow by a fantastic re- 
 ligious conviction which led her not only to gro- 
 tesque skips and hops upon her own account, but 
 to the infection of her neio^hbours with the same 
 jumping habit, would have become, in the hands of 
 most poets, a theme for burlesque treatment and 
 naught else. The opening stanzas remind one of the 
 late Mr. Gilbert's delectable Bishop of Rum-ti-foo 
 in the " Bab Ballads." Necessarily the comedy is 
 broad; but even the careless reader soon becomes 
 aware of an under-running view of seriousness and 
 sympathy. Jane, as has been said, infected her neigh- 
 bourhood with ecstasy; neither men nor maidens 
 were immune ; before the Vicar's door they leaped 
 to extra heights — but no man could accuse them 
 of any theft; they took to a vegetable diet and 
 slept in the fields — but no immorality stained their 
 fervour ; they bore their testimony to a shrew, who 
 jumped with the rest — and forebore scolding; 
 until, flying at higher game, Jane jumped before 
 the 'Bishop, who came upon a visit to the Squire. 
 My Lord was naturally amazed, and his host scan- 
 dalized. They put her, not unkindly, from the mano- 
 rial park, and she jumped away, — to die at last by 
 the roadside, in full assurance of her peculiar faith. 
 
 Her end was beautiful : one sigh. 
 
 She jumped a foot when it was nigh. 
 
 A lily in a linen clout 
 
 She looked when they had laid her out. 
 
 It is a lily-light she bears 
 
 For England up the ladder-stairs. 
 
468 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Mr. Le Gallienne is reported to have found a gos- 
 pel in this final stanza which almost converted him, 
 and is laughed at for his pains by Mr. de Selincourt/ 
 who treats the whole thing as pure fun. I venture 
 the assertion that both are wrong. " Jump-to-Glory 
 Jane " is no sermon ; but neither is it mere bur- 
 lesque, nor a piece of Gilbertian nonsense. It is 
 Meredith's characteristic testimony to the Comic 
 Spirit's breadth of sympathy ; his recognition of the 
 intimate relation between laughter and tears ; of the 
 marvel of life's incongruities ; and of the vitality of 
 a religious instinct which persists, not only in spite 
 of, but perhaps by means of, the formality of aproned 
 bishops and the fanaticism of Jumping Janes. 
 
 It is a somewhat less confident answer that Mr. 
 Swinburne returns to the three questions just pro- 
 pounded to Mr. Meredith, as to the scope of his 
 work, the clearness of his vision, and the depth of 
 his experience. So far as the amount of his poetry 
 is concerned, there can be no doubt of his claim to 
 a chief place in our choir; but it is to be remembered 
 that "Festus " Bailey — on whom be peace ! — was 
 prolific, and that Mr. George Barlow's published 
 works run, and very musically too, to more than fif- 
 teen volumes. Few poets in any age have, however, 
 had Mr. Swinburne's excuse for voluminous writing ; 
 and it might be reasonably maintained that no Eng- 
 lish poet has ever shown such complete and natural 
 mastery of lyric metres, and of the language whose 
 » In Mrs. M. S. Henderson's George Meredith, p. 220. 
 
THE HEYDAY OF MINOR POETRY 469 
 
 •wealth they were, in his hands, not only to exhibit 
 but to enhance. This is not to say that his lyric gift 
 is richer or choicer than Shelley's, or that his crafts- 
 manship is equal to Tennyson's ; it is simply to give 
 him due credit for the possession of transcendent 
 powers as a Lord of Speech. It would be too much to 
 ask that his song should have the haunting ^ spirit- 
 ual ' quality of Shelley's ; or that its form should 
 undergo the drastic self-criticism to which Tenny- 
 son's was subjected. We are content that he sings, 
 and with such melody and grace as to disarm us when 
 we say that he sings too much. Sure of the fact 
 though the critic may be, he falls into confusion 
 and begins to think criticism a rather poor and un- 
 worthy business when asked to say what songs he 
 would wish away. Furthermore, it is to be said in 
 Mr. Swinburne'sbehalf that he respects the medium 
 in which he works. English is his servant, to be sure ; 
 but he exalts it to the place of friend. If he spend 
 its resources somewhat extravagantly at times, that 
 is because he sees as few have ever seen what those 
 resources are. He loves, and doubtless loves too well, 
 to exhibit its charms ; but he refrains from compel- 
 ling it to the playing of mere pranks. Any one who 
 has, in an exhibition of trained beasts, seen the grave 
 might of an elephant, or the splendid grace of a 
 tiger, subdued to the performance of curious and 
 pitiful tricks, has passed his own judgement upon 
 one of the most serious blemishes in the work of 
 Browning and Meredith. Widely to change the fig- 
 
470 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 ure, their treatment of their mother tongue at times 
 not only threatens parricide, but parricide by torture. 
 
 As a master of poetry's form and music Swin- 
 burne's place is, then, not only secure but high. It 
 is when we proceed to test the field of his vision, the 
 width of his sympathy, and his ability to sound the 
 depths of man's experience, that our answers grow 
 less confident and positive. Mr. Arthur Symons has 
 somewhere characterized the poetry of Swinburne's 
 early prime as directed chiefly against God, priests, 
 and kings. 
 
 As to the portion of it which seems to be directed 
 against God, all that needs to be said was crowded 
 generations ago into the single sentence, — 
 
 He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh. 
 
 The divinities that aspiring poets overthrow may be 
 necessary to literature ; but they bear very much 
 the same relation to life as do the plaster casts 
 copied by art classes in our schools for young la- 
 dies, — they are fragile things, serving art's hum- 
 bler needs, and not greatly missed when broken in 
 the process. 
 
 Against priests and kings, so ardent a republican 
 as Mr. Swinburne makes out a better case. He states 
 it of course with characteristic exaggeration, but 
 there can be no question of his sincerity in enter- 
 ing the lists on behalf of intellectual and political 
 liberty. There is a distinctly religious element in such 
 championship, as he might have learned, had he 
 
THE HEYDAY OF MINOR POETRY 471 
 
 chosen, from Mazzini, whom he greatly admired ; 
 and I shall presently have occasion to show that the 
 social consciousness of the last half -century is one of 
 the many forms in which religion expresses itself, 
 and, of all the guises assumed by Christianity, the 
 one perhaps most characteristic of the day. Some- 
 thing of man's solidarity and of society's need Swin- 
 burne has felt deeply and expressed with power; but 
 the main characteristics of his verse beyond those 
 already mentioned may be said to be pretty frankly 
 pagan. His love of merely sensuous beauty in word 
 and thing, and his content to rest in graceful forms 
 of thought without much inquiry as to the substance 
 behind them, disappoint the reader's mind even 
 while his ears are charmed with the melody. We 
 bear with Meredith's roughness because of our faith 
 in some underlying harmony of thought which shall 
 resolve it. We delight in Swinburne's melody, only 
 in too many cases to experience a feeling of revul- 
 sion at a lack, not merely of harmony, but of any 
 real substance to harmonize. Take for instance the 
 two wonderful and characteristic poems, "Aholi- 
 bah " and " The Masque of Queen Bersabe." The 
 latter is a miracle-play in which, with a delicious 
 simplicity. King David and Nathan quote scraps 
 of Latin, while one of the soldiers swears "by 
 Mahound" and another by the head of St. Paul. 
 Finally the great queens of love who have lived in 
 history and legend, Herodias, Aholibah, Cleopatra, 
 Azubah, and the rest, " all that were fair and foul," 
 
472 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 are summoned by Nathan ; they come and each 
 bears testimony to her own beauty, after this man- 
 ner: — 
 
 " I am the Queen Hesione. 
 The seasons that increased in me 
 
 Made my face fairer than all men's. 
 I had the summer in my hair ; 
 And all the pale gold autumn air 
 
 Was as the habit of my sense. 
 My body was as fire that shone ; 
 God's beauty that makes all things one 
 
 Was one among my hand-maidens." 
 
 Their testimony and the knowledge of God's 
 judgement on them smites Bathsheba with fear, and 
 leads David, not to repentance, but to a justifica- 
 tion of his conduct which is one of the curiosities 
 of literature. As a miracle-masque the whole thing 
 is admirably done ; and yet here, as in the kindred 
 poem '^ Aholibah," and in " Laus Veneris," there is 
 such involution and redundance of the sensuous that 
 one is tempted to judge Mr. Swinburne out of Mr. 
 Meredith's mouth. " I seem to be instructed in one 
 of the mysteries of erotic esotery, yet on my word 
 I am no wiser," cried pompous Dr. Middleton, 
 plagued with his daughter's love-affairs, in " The 
 Egoist." The ponderous phrase recurs as one reads 
 Swinburne's most characteristic work. He is fasci- 
 nated with the mystery of '' erotic esotery," and of 
 all English poets succeeds in enduing it with the 
 most exquisite grace; but it remains a grace of 
 body, — there is little soul. 
 
THE HEYDAY OF MINOR POETRY 473 
 
 There are, to be sure, passages like the speech 
 of St. Dorothy, beginning, — 
 
 Christ King, fail* Christ, that knowest all men's wit 
 And all the feeble fashion of my ways, — 
 
 "which indicate how great an interpreter of the heart 
 he might have become, had he chosen. With stead- 
 fast perversity, however, he has kept the path 
 marked out in his " Hymn to Proserpine : " — 
 
 Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean ; the world has grown 
 
 grey from thy breath ; 
 We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fulness 
 
 of death. 
 
 Again he recurs to the same thought in another 
 poem, " Pilgrims," — 
 
 We have drunken of Lethe at last, we have eaten of Lotus ; 
 
 What hurts it us here that sorrows are born and die ? 
 We have said to the dream that caressed and the dread that 
 smote us, 
 
 Good-night and good-bye. 
 
 This is not the stuff whereof great poetry is made, 
 though it lends itself perfectly to the adornment 
 of a kind of hectic beauty. It is a pleasure to con- 
 trast with it Mr. Swinburne's wholesome love of the 
 sea and his treatment of its moods ; the generous 
 though often exaggerated criticism to be found in 
 his essays; and much that he has said in behalf of 
 liberty; yet the fact remains that his sympathy 
 scarcely reaches to some of the most human of ex- 
 periences, and he fails to sound the depths of those 
 which it does touch. He recognizes religion and 
 
474 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 makes much of the material it offers ; but his per- 
 sistent attempt to pose as a pagan, smacks of some- 
 thing so like affectation as to rob much of his best 
 work of half its power and assurance of immortality. 
 
 It is almost with relief, therefore, that we turn 
 from the melodious but not quite natural paganism 
 of Mr. Swinburne, in which despair lies latent, to 
 the utterly sincere pessimism of James Thomson 
 and " The City of Dreadful Night." Thomson was 
 a friend of the late Mr. Bradlaugh. He began life 
 as a regimental schoolmaster, and sustained it by 
 more or less fitful employment in journalism and 
 business. Opium, alcohol, and insomnia played their 
 sorry parts in it, and the end came in University 
 College Hospital in 1882, while Thomson was in his 
 forty-eighth year. "The City of Dreadful Night" 
 was published in 1874, and was so little known, or 
 else so speedily forgotten, that when a few years 
 ago an enterprising publisher attempted, without 
 their author's permission, to reprint some of Mr. 
 Kipling's fugitive newspaper articles relating to 
 Calcutta, he chose this same title, apparently un- 
 aware that it had been appropriated ; so wilHng is 
 the world to let that which has a manifest savour 
 of death in it go to its own place, however brilHant 
 its conception and execution may be. 
 
 The City of Dreadful Night is the abode of 
 Melancholia, — a city vast and sombre, lying beside 
 a tideless sea, nobly built, well inhabited, but upon 
 which no sun ever rises. Its life, Prometheus-like, 
 
THE HEYDAY OF MINOR POETRY 475 
 
 IS always renewed, and always eaten out by quench- 
 less sorrow. In the Proem, with its text from Leo- 
 pardi, the poet tells us why he wrote : — 
 
 Why break the seals of mute despair unbidden, 
 And wail life's discords into careless ears ? 
 
 Because a cold rage seizes one at whiles 
 
 To show the bitter, old, and wrinkled truth 
 Stripped naked of all vesture that beguiles, 
 
 False dreams, false hopes, false masks and modes of youth ; 
 Because it gives some sense of power and passion 
 In helpless impotence to try to fashion 
 
 Our woe in living words, howe'er uncouth. 
 
 The traveller enters the City, and passes up and 
 down its streets, following one who seems intent on 
 some sad errand. This proves to be a pilgrimage 
 to the ruined shrines of Faith, Love, and Hope. 
 Here Faith was poisoned, there Love died by vio- 
 lence, and yonder Hope starved. The seeming de- 
 spair of his guide moves him to question : — 
 
 *' When Faith and Love and Hope are dead indeed, 
 Can Life still live ? By what doth it proceed ? " 
 
 As whom his one intense thought overpowers, 
 He answered coldly, " Take a watch, erase 
 
 The signs and figures of the circling hours, 
 Detach the hands, remove the dial-face ; 
 
 The works proceed until run down ; although 
 
 Bereft of purpose, void of use, still go." 
 
 He circled thus forever tracing out 
 
 The series of the fraction left of life ; 
 Perpetual recurrence in the scope 
 Of but three terms, dead Faith, dead Love, dead Hope. 
 
476 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 This last reference is, of course, to the fantastic 
 mathematical formula of pessimism, obtained by- 
 dividing threescore and ten by the persistently re- 
 curring Three: that is by 33.3, representing the 
 years of a generation, or by 333, representing, as 
 in the poem, dead Faith, Hope, and Love; the 
 quotient in either case resulting in an infinite 
 series of the figures 2, 1, 0. 
 
 The City lays its charm upon its visitor : — 
 
 Poor wretch ! who once hath paced that dolent city 
 Shall pace it often doomed beyond all pity, 
 With horror ever deepening from the first. 
 
 All this, however, is but the outward seeming of 
 the City's life. The visitor soon becomes aware of a 
 throng in the streets pressing toward what appears 
 to be a cathedral ; and there he hears its philosophy 
 expounded. The great church is a splendid habita- 
 tion of gloom, wherein a vast multitude hang wist- 
 fully upon an earnest preacher's lips, if haply he 
 will show them any good. This is his introduc- 
 tion : — 
 
 " O melancholy Brothers, dark, dark, dark. 
 O battling in black floods without an ark ! 
 
 O spectral wanderers of unholy Night ! 
 My soul hath bled for you these sunless years, 
 With bitter blood-drops running down like tears ; 
 
 O dark, dark, dark, withdrawn from joy and light.*' 
 
 Then follows the doctrine : — 
 
 " And now at last authentic word I bring. 
 Witnessed by every dead and living thing ; 
 Good tidings of great joy for you, for all : 
 
THE HEYDAY OF MINOR POETRY 477 
 
 There is no God ; no fiend with names divine 
 Made us and tortures us ; if we must pine, 
 It is to satiate no Being's gall. 
 
 " I find no hint throughout the universe 
 Of good or ill, of blessing or of curse ; 
 
 I find alone Necessity supreme ; 
 With infinite mystery, abysmal, dark, 
 Unlighted ever by the faintest spark, 
 
 For us the flitting shadows of a dream." 
 
 And here is his application : — 
 
 " O Brothers of sad lives ! they are so brief ; 
 A few short years must bring us all relief ; 
 
 Can we not bear these years of labouring breath ? 
 But if you would not this poor life fulfill, 
 Lo, you are free to end it when you will, 
 Without the fear of waking after death." 
 
 Here a lamentable voice was raised from among 
 the congregation in confirmation of the preacher's 
 message, although between the words of every 
 sentence of it there sounded the inappeasable 
 human desire for comfort. It closes thus : — 
 
 " Speak not of comfort where no comfort is. 
 
 Speak not at all : can words make foul things fair ? 
 Our life 's a cheat, our death a black abyss : 
 Hush and be mute, envisaging despair." 
 
 And this the preacher in his turn reaffirms: — 
 
 " My Brothers, my poor Brothers, it is thus : 
 This life holds nothing good for us. 
 
 But it ends soon and nevermore can be ; 
 And we knew nothing of it ere our birth 
 And shall know nothing when consigned to earth ; 
 
 I ponder these thoughts and they comfort me." 
 
478 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 This is the philosophy of the City of Dreadful 
 Night, and the poem leaves us without the city 
 gates, beside the giant statue of its genius, Melan- 
 cholia. 
 
 The moving sun and stars from east to west 
 
 Circle before her in the sea of air ; 
 Shadows and gleams glide round her solemn rest. 
 
 Her subjects often gaze upon her there : 
 The strong to drink new strength of iron endurance, 
 The weak new terrors ; all, renewed assurance 
 
 And confirmation of the old despair. 
 
 It is needless to point out the literary value to 
 this true poet of his religious theme ; but it seems 
 worth while to set in contrast with it the words of 
 another poet picturing a widely different city. 
 
 " And I, John, saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, 
 coming down from God out of heaven, prepared 
 as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard 
 a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the 
 tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell 
 with them, and they shall be his people, and God 
 himself shall be with them, and be their God. And 
 God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes ; and 
 there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor 
 crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for 
 the former things are passed away." 
 
 Before leaving Thomson, it is worth while to 
 notice the resultant attitude of his philosophy 
 toward Nature. One passage in the poem called 
 "Vane's Story" will illustrate my meaning, al- 
 
THE HEYDAY OF MINOR POETRY 479 
 
 though due allowance must be made for its jocose 
 bitterness. Vane speaks : — 
 
 " For I am infinitely tired 
 With this old sphere we once admired, 
 With this old earth we loved too well, 
 And would not mind a change of Hell. 
 The same old stolid hills and leas, 
 The same old stupid, patient trees. 
 The same old ocean, blue and green, 
 The same sky, cloudy or serene ; 
 The old two-dozen hours to run 
 Between the settings of the sun, 
 The same three hundred sixty-five 
 Dull days to every year alive ; 
 Old stingy measure, weight, and rule, 
 No margin left to play the fool ; 
 The same old way of getting born 
 Into it, naked and forlorn ; 
 The same old way of creeping out 
 Through death's low door, for lean and stout." 
 
 I have felt justified in giving this important place 
 to Thomson, because scarce any one else has so 
 eloquently expressed the philosophical conclusion 
 of a pure Necessitarianism, when once its influ- 
 ences have oozed down into the stratum of life's 
 commonplace. 
 
 An interesting variant of the same general type 
 is to be found in John Davidson's ^'Ballad in 
 Blank Verse," which portrays the experience of a 
 rather sensual young Scotsman whose parents are 
 deeply concerned for his spiritual welfare, and 
 who plead with him. His father speaks : — 
 
480 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 " My son, reject not Christ ; he pleads through me ; 
 The Holy Spirit uses my poor words. 
 How would it fill your mother's heart and mine 
 And God's great heart with joy unspeakable, 
 Were you, a helpless sinner, now to cry, 
 * Lord, I believe ; help thou my unbelief.* " 
 
 But the boy, whose blood — 
 
 fulfilled 
 Of brine, of sunset, and his dreams, exhaled 
 A vision, 
 
 would not hear. He broke his mother's heart, and 
 then, to please his father and if possible to atone 
 for the past, professed conversion and came to the 
 Lord's Table with him. We cannot follow the 
 tragedy in detail. He finds — 
 
 like husks of corn 
 The bread, like vitriol the sip of wine ! 
 I eat and drink damnation to myself 
 To give my father's troubled spirit peace. 
 
 Of course he ends by renouncing all that he has 
 confessed, shouting forth in one breath his deter- 
 mination to have no creed, and in the next his ac- 
 ceptance of a creed compact of pantheism and posi- 
 tivism, and concludes with the determination to be 
 a poet, finding comfort and inspiration in Nature. 
 
 " No creed for me ! I am a man apart : 
 A mouthpiece for the creeds of all the world. 
 A soulless life that angels may possess 
 Or demons haunt, wherein the foulest things 
 May loll at ease beside the loveliest ; 
 A martjrr for all mundane moods to tear ; 
 The slave of every passion." 
 
THE HEYDAY OF MINOR POETRY 481 
 
 This " Ballad in Blank Verse " is less logically 
 complete than the "City of Dreadful Night." It 
 states the premisses, but forbears to draw Thom- 
 son's bitter conclusion. One feels in reading it, 
 however, that hopelessness waits at the end of the 
 story, even though the concluding chapters be yet 
 unwritten. 
 
 It was to be expected that the social problem in 
 its varied ramifications would prove a fruitful theme 
 for the more serious of the minor poets. Crabbe and 
 Goldsmith gave the eighteenth century some little 
 foretaste of it; Hood grew sentimental over it; 
 Kingsley shocked his comfortable age into at least 
 thinking of it between whiles : but about all these 
 there was a suggestion of the reformer. There was 
 something of the teacher, not to say of the preacher, 
 in their manner. It remained for the poets of the 
 present generation to state the bald factors of the 
 question with a bitterness of realism that sometimes 
 scoffs at the problem as a whole, and treats the re- 
 flection of its painful elements as an end of art in 
 itself. Not from the tragedy of life as a soul-stirring 
 thing, but rather from its dulness, pallor, sorrow, 
 and bitter monotony, have some of the truest artists 
 drawn their inspiration. Take, for instance, John 
 Davidson's " A Northern Suburb : " — 
 
 Roused by the fee'd policeman's knock, 
 And sad that day should come again, 
 
 Under the stars the workmen flock 
 In haste to reach the morning train. 
 
482 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 For here dwell those who must fulfil 
 Dull tasks in uncongenial spheres, 
 
 Who toil through dread of coming ill, 
 And not with hope of happier years. 
 
 The lowly folk who scarcely dare 
 
 Conceive themselves perhaps misplaced, 
 
 Whose prize for unremitting care 
 Is only not to be disgraced. 
 
 The same theme is dealt with by A. Mary F. 
 Robinson, Madame Darmesteter, in her " New Ar- 
 cadia," but with a distinct recognition of its ethical 
 side. 
 
 Others shall learn and shudder and sorrow and know 
 
 What shame is in the world they will not see. 
 They cover it up with leaves, they make a show 
 
 Of Maypole garlands over, but there shall be 
 A wind to scatter their gauds, and a wind to blow 
 
 And purify the hidden, dreaded thing 
 
 Festering underneath ; and so I sing. 
 
 Yet she is far from disregarding the extremely com- 
 plicated nature of the problem, as is shown in the 
 " Scapegoat," where she tells the story of a beauti- 
 ful child who grew up in wretched surroundings to 
 develop a miserable life. 
 
 Yet now when I watch her pass with a heavy reel, 
 
 Shouting her villanous song. 
 Is it only pity or shame, do you think, that I feel 
 
 For the infinite sorrow and wrong ? 
 
 With a sick, strange wonder I ask, Who shall answer the sin, 
 
 Thou, lover, brothers of thine ? 
 Or he who left standing the hovel to perish in ? 
 
 Or I ; who gave no sign ? 
 
THE HEYDAY OF MINOR POETRY 483 
 
 All things considered, however, I am inclined to 
 think that John Davidson has given at once the 
 grimmest and most searching statement of one 
 phase of the ever-present question in his poem en- 
 titled " Thirty Bob a Week/' in which a London 
 clerk opens his heart concerning his struggle to 
 live upon a weekly wage of thirty shillings, and ex- 
 pounds something of the philosophy to which that 
 struggle has led him. The Clerk says ; — 
 
 " I face the music, sir ; you bet I ain't a car ; 
 Strike me lucky if I don't believe I *m lost ! 
 
 " For like a mole I journey in the dark, 
 
 A-travelling along the underground 
 From my Pillar'd Halls and broad Suburbean Park, 
 
 To come the daily, dull, official round ; 
 And home again at night, with my pipe all alight, 
 
 A-scheming how to count ten bob a pound. 
 
 " And it 's often very cold and very wet, 
 
 And my misses stitches towels for a hunks ; 
 
 And the Pillar'd Hall is half of it to let — 
 
 Three rooms about the size of travelling trunks. 
 
 And we cough, my wife and I, to dislocate a sigh, 
 When the noisy little kids are in their bunks." 
 
 Then he goes on to say: — 
 
 " So p'r'aps we are in Hell, for all that I can tell, 
 And lost and damn'd and served up hot to God. 
 
 " I ain't blaspheming, Mr. Silver-tongue ; 
 I 'm saying things a bit beyond your art : 
 Of all the rummy starts you ever sprung, 
 Thirty bob a week 's the rummiest start ! 
 With your science and your books, 
 And your theories about spooks, 
 Did you ever think of looking in your heart ? 
 
484 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 "I didn't mean your pocket, Mr., no; 
 
 I mean that having children and a wife, * 
 With thirty bob on which to come and go, 
 Is n't dancing to the tabor and the fife : 
 When it does n't make you drink, 
 By Heaven ! it makes you think, 
 And notice curious items about life. 
 
 ** It 's a naked child against a hungry wolf ; 
 
 It 's playing bowls upon a splitting wreck ; 
 It 's walking on a string across a gulf 
 
 With mill-stones fore-and-aft about your neck ; 
 But the thing is daily done by many and many a one. 
 
 And we fall, face forward, fighting, on the deck.'* 
 
 It is doubtful if the bitter monotonies of life, its 
 grim realities of poverty, anxiety, and suffering, its 
 sordid necessities even, ever before found so large 
 place in the material which is wrought over by the 
 highest art into poetry. The age seems to have 
 awakened to a new sense of the influence of envi- 
 ronment upon philosophy, and there is a note of 
 insistence in the " Why " which the world of toil- 
 ing poor is always uttering, that meets quick re- 
 sponse from the poet. 
 
 The question is worth raising, whether this con- 
 stant contemplation of life's sordidness may not 
 account in some degree for the growing love of 
 the cynical and the grim which has been so mani- 
 fest during the last score of years. Poetry has gone 
 out of its way to collect and interpret the night- 
 mares of folk-lore and folk-song. A typical instance 
 of this endeavour is to be found in Alma Strettel 
 
THE HEYDAY OF MINOR POETRY 486 
 
 and Carmen Sylva's "Bard of the Dimbo-Vitza." 
 It is an anthology of Koumanian folk-songs, of 
 which the little poem called " The Comforters " is 
 as typical and familiar as any. 
 
 My father is dead and his cap is mine, 
 His cap of fur and his leathern belt — 
 
 Mine, too, his knives. 
 When I fall asleep, when I slumbering lie, 
 Then the knives spring forth, from their sheaths they fly 
 
 And roam the fields. 
 I know not whither the knives have strayed, 
 
 But when morning dawns, at my window-pane 
 I hear a tapping — I fling it wide, 
 
 And there are my knives come home again. 
 " Where have ye been ? '* I ask them then, 
 And they make reply : " In the hearts of men ! 
 There was one so sick for love and torn — 
 
 We healed its wound ; 
 And another was weary and travel-worn — 
 
 We gave it rest. 
 For dear to us are the hearts of men, 
 
 And dear their blood ; 
 We drink it as furrows drink the rain, 
 Then tapping come to thy window-pane : 
 Make way for thy knives, they have done their work ; 
 Now wipe the blood with thy sleeve away — 
 Thy sleeve with the dusk-red, broidered flowers — 
 And wash the sleeve in the river clean. 
 Then thrust us once more our sheaths between, 
 
 The sheaths on the leathern belt ! " 
 
 The defiant attitude toward Fate was character- 
 istic of the late W. E. Henley. Sometimes this is 
 nobly put, as in his famous verses " To R. T. H. B." 
 
486 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Out of the night that covers me, 
 Black as the pit from pole to pole, 
 
 I thank whatever gods may be 
 For my unconquerable soul. 
 
 But he contradicts himself in such lines as those 
 quoted at the close of last chapter : — 
 
 Let us be drunk, and for a while forget/ 
 Forget, and ceasing even from regret, 
 Live without reason and in spite of rhyme. 
 
 This note of defiance, however, rarely persists in 
 poetry, since it is essentially inharmonious; and 
 even in the poetry of unbelief it tends to fade into 
 plaintiveness. 
 
 Mr. William Vaughn Moody, in his "Fire- 
 Bringer," describes the singing of Pandora to the 
 yet soulless creatures that sprang from the stones 
 and clods thrown by Deukalion and Pyrrha to re- 
 people the earth after the flood. It was — 
 
 a doubtful song, 
 Its meaning faint or none, but mingled up 
 Of all that nests and housekeeps in the heart. 
 Or puts out in lone passion toward the vast 
 And cannot choose but go. 
 
 There was a beauty in its very wistfulness; and 
 there is a similar mingling of sweetness and shadow 
 in much of the most melodious recent English verse. 
 Hear Mr. Rolleston of the Rhymers' Club, for 
 instance, sighing for Nirvana. 
 
 For others, Lord, Thy purging fires, 
 The loves reknit, the crown, the palm. 
 
 For me the death of all desires 
 In deep, eternal calm. 
 
THE HEYDAY OF MINOR POETRY 487 
 
 Mr. G. A. Greene is less easily reconciled. 
 
 They have taken away my Lord ; 
 
 They have shattered the one great Hope, 
 
 They have left us alone to cope 
 With our terrible selves : . . . 
 
 The strength of immortal love ; 
 
 The Comfort of millions that weep ; 
 
 Prayer and the Cross we adored — 
 All is lost ! There is no one above ; 
 
 We are left like the beasts that creep — 
 
 They have taken away my Lord. 
 
 Mr. Austin Dobson, who generally eschews the- 
 ology in his graceful verses, has however furnished 
 an admirable illustration of this same restiveness 
 under a scheme of things which starves the soul or 
 denies its rights, in his " Prayer of the Swine to 
 Circe." These are, of course, the companions of 
 Ulysses changed by magic into swinish shape and 
 condemned to live as swine ; but with men's hearts 
 still beating in them, and mocked at every turn by 
 human longing and aspiration. 
 
 " If swine we be — if we indeed be swine, 
 
 Daughter of Pers^, make us swine indeed, 
 Well-pleased on litter-straw to lie supine, 
 
 Well-pleased on mast and acorn-shales to feed, 
 Stirred by all instincts of the bestial breed ; 
 
 But O Unmerciful ! O Pitiless ! 
 Leave us not thus with sick men's hearts to bleed. 
 
 To waste long days in yearning, dumb distress 
 And memory of things gone, and utter hopelessness." 
 
 The illustrations of literature's debt to faith^ 
 
488 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 both in its victories and its defeats, throng upon the 
 memory in such multitudes as almost to compel too 
 lavish quotation. Impatience with the accepted esti- 
 mate of Old Testament characters and their deeds 
 seems to have inspired a very notable poem in Lord 
 de Tabley's " Jael"; Mr. W. S. Blunt's group of 
 sonnets upon his own imprisonment begins daringly 
 enough, — 
 
 " From Caiaphas to Pilate was I sent " ; 
 
 a selection from the poems of the late J. A. Sy- 
 monds is introduced by his Hues upon *^The 
 Temptation in the Wilderness " ; and it is doubtful 
 if Robert Buchanan ever did more memorable work 
 than is to be found in his "Ballad of Judas 
 Iscariot." The problem which Death propounds to 
 Life also haunts poetry to-day as persistently as 
 ever ; and the three quotations which follow sug- 
 gest three diverse approaches to it. The first is the 
 stanza already quoted from Mrs. Meynell's "To 
 the Beloved Dead " : — 
 
 Beloved, thou art like a tune that idle fingers 
 
 Play on a window-pane. 
 The time is there, the form of music lingers ; 
 
 But O, thou sweetest strain, 
 Where is thy soul ? Thou liest i' the wind and rain. 
 
 Here the sorrow verges on despair. In Mr. C. G. D. 
 Roberts' "Falling Leaves " the wistfulness remains, 
 but it has grown more restful, as though touched 
 at least with the finger-tip of Faith. 
 
THE HEYDAY OF MINOR POETRY 489 
 
 Lightly He blows, and at His breath they fall, 
 
 The perishing kindreds of the leaves ; they drift, 
 Spent flames of scarlet, gold aerial, 
 
 Across the hollow year, noiseless and swift. 
 Lightly He blows, and countless as the falling 
 
 Of snow by night upon a solemn sea. 
 The ages circle down beyond recalling, 
 
 To strew the hollows of Eternity. 
 He sees them drifting through the spaces dim, 
 
 And leaves and ages are as one to Him.^ 
 
 Francis Thompson treats the same experience; 
 but he has advanced to the point where faith enables 
 him to grapple with it upon equal terms, and even 
 with a sort of whimsical playfulness. 
 
 Life is a coquetry 
 Of Death, which wearies me, 
 Too sure 
 Of the amour. 
 
 A tiring-room where I 
 Death's divers garments try 
 Till fit 
 Some fashion sit. 
 
 It seemeth me too much 
 I do rehearse for such 
 A mean 
 And single scene. 
 
 The climax might be capped by a verse or two 
 
 of Mr. Kipling's poem, "To Wolcott Balestier," 
 
 surely the most rollicking of threnodies, but yet 
 
 significant of a certain vigour which faith lends to 
 
 ^ Archer, Poets of the Younger Generation^ p. 365. 
 
^0 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 poetry, and which, though doubtless in more chas- 
 tened form, is necessary to poetry's higher develop- 
 ment. So long as faith is lacking, even the well- 
 endowed poet will not only tend to write his music 
 in a minor key, but be forced to content himself 
 with a place in the second or third rank of the 
 world's singers. ^ 
 
 On the other hand, the note of faith, even when 
 awkwardly or rudely struck, always finds its echo 
 in men's hearts. Walt Whitman can scarce be 
 credited with a particularly exalted mind ; while 
 his taste, if it existed at all, can often be repre- 
 sented only by a negative quantity, his own phrase, 
 ^^ barbaric yawp," pretty exactly characterizing the 
 greater part of his poetry; yet there was in the 
 man himself, and there still speaks through his 
 writings, a certain robustious ^acceptance of the 
 Universe,' which has given him place and fame 
 among the inspirers of men. There was a time 
 when great things were expected of Mr. William 
 Watson, and very admirable things have been done 
 to fulfil the expectation ; but yet on the mass of his 
 work there rests a sort of blight, which, while some- 
 times enhancing its beauty, condemns it to relative 
 ineffectiveness, because man's natural taste is bound 
 finally to refuse the negative and fretful. Mr. 
 Stephen Phillips has inspired like expectations and 
 achieved memorable successes. A master of phrase, 
 who may sometimes be suspected of making phrases 
 for sheer love of the trade, he has seemed to yield 
 
THE HEYDAY OF MINOR POETRY 491 
 
 to the fashion of his day in " Christ in Hades/' a 
 very notable sketch rather than a great poem ; ^ on 
 the other hand, for delicacy, sweetness, and power 
 to reveal all that is deepest and highest in the human 
 heart, his " Marpessa " will, it seems to me, bear to 
 be set beside any English poem of the last fifty 
 years, without fear of the comparison. His later 
 dramatic work has been too extravagantly praised 
 to make any fair estimate of it quite practicable. 
 Suffice it to say that no recent poet has attempted 
 dramatic tragedy with a better literary equipment 
 or more reasonable hope of fame. 
 
 Meanwhile, amid the thousand musical voices that 
 have been raised upon both sides of the Atlantic to 
 sing of life and love and death, it is interesting to 
 note how often a poet is distinguished by some 
 haunting word upon religion. The late Francis 
 Thompson could never have been a popular writer, 
 so fanciful, involved, and even grotesque was much 
 of his work. Yet his " Hound of Heaven " has not 
 only become widely known, but has been chosen for 
 special and elaborate publication in America as his 
 most characteristic utterance. It begins : — 
 
 I fled Him down the nights and down the days ; 
 
 I fled Him down the arches of the years ; 
 I fled Him down the labyrinthine ways 
 
 Of my own mind ; and in the midst of tears 
 I hid from Him, and under running laughter. 
 
 * Compare the criticism of Mr. William Archer, in Poets of the 
 Younger Generation, pp. 328-329. 
 
492 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Up vistaed hopes I sped ; 
 
 And shot precipitated 
 Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears, 
 From those strong feet that followed, followed after. 
 
 But with unhurrying chase, 
 
 And unperturbed pace, 
 Deliberate speed, majestic instancy. 
 
 They beat — and a Voice beat 
 
 More instant than the Feet — 
 " All things betray thee, who betrayest Me." 
 
 Probably more people know Mr. R. W. Gilder by 
 his two quatrains, beginning — 
 
 If Jesus Christ is a man, 
 
 than by anything else that he has written. The 
 quaint dogmatism of the late T. E. Brown's " My 
 Garden " is likely to be remembered far longer than 
 that gifted Manxman's inspiring " Letters." 
 
 A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot ! 
 
 Rose plot. 
 
 Fringed pool, 
 
 Ferned grot — 
 
 The veriest school 
 
 Of peace ; and yet the fool 
 
 Contends that God is not — 
 
 Not God ! in gardens when the eve is cool ? 
 
 Nay, but I have a sign ; 
 
 'T is very sure God walks in mine. 
 
 This same assurance of the essential soundness of 
 the Universe, its possession by a rational Spirit, and 
 man's capacity to dominate it in the interests of his 
 completer life, goes far to account for the appeal 
 which Robert Louis Stevenson and Mr. Kipling have 
 
THE HEYDAY OF MINOR POETRY 493 
 
 made to the present generation. Stevenson, though 
 the master of prose, was but an indifferent poet ; 
 he had his share of contact with the world's rough 
 hand, to say nothing of his long struggle to make 
 an ailing body do a full day's work. Yet it would 
 be hard to surpass the buoyancy and zest with which 
 he met experience, or to overemphasize his assur- 
 ance that faith was needful to life. His confession 
 of this faith is famous : — 
 
 For still the Lord is Lord of might ; 
 In deeds, in deeds, He takes delight ; 
 The plough, the spear, the laden harks, 
 The field, the founded city marks ; 
 He marks the smiler of the streets, 
 The singer upon garden seats ; 
 He sees the climber in the rocks ; 
 To Him the shepherd folds his flocks. 
 For those He loves that underprop 
 With daily virtues Heaven's top, 
 And bear the falling sky with ease, 
 Unfrowning caryatides. 
 
 Mr. Kipling's McAndrew singing to his engine's 
 music of — 
 
 " Law, Order, Duty an' Restraint, Obedience, Discipline ! " 
 
 joins in the same chorus ; and even the common sol- 
 dier with his inappeaseable hunger — 
 
 For to admire and for to see, 
 
 bears witness to man's power to rule circumstance, 
 if he have faith enough. 
 
 The conclusion of the whole matter has been 
 
494 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 luminously stated by Mr. A. H. Crauford in his 
 " Enigmas of the Spiritual Life." 
 
 "Poetry is as music come to itself, rallying from 
 its divine trance, and vainly endeavouring to por- 
 tray those sacred and awful things which it is not 
 lawful for a man to utter. The very root or spring 
 of poetry is an abiding discontent with the actual 
 and a quenchless longing for the Ideal. . . . Ke- 
 volt against what is thought to be religion may in- 
 spire a great poem, as it inspired Lucretius and 
 Shelley ; but acquiescence in the vanishing of reli- 
 gion is fatally depressing to poets. Gods are needed 
 if only to be defied. The Sublime may live in ap- 
 parent antagonism to the Infinite ; but it cannot live 
 in the absence of the Infinite. Poetry must invent 
 a God if none really exists." 
 
 And so must Life. 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 
 THE NEWER FICTION. I 
 
 At a recent meeting of the American £[istorical 
 Association, the learned President, Professor G. B. 
 Adams of Yale, chose as the theme of his annual ad- 
 dress, " History and the Philosophy of History." The 
 speaker belongs to a school of investigators many of 
 whom have gone so far in their suspicion of generali- 
 zation, their contempt of style, and their worship of 
 bare ' facts,' as to hasten a reaction that was bound 
 to come. Let me not however seem to bring a railing 
 accusation against Professor Adams himself. The 
 significant thing about the address was his recogni- 
 tion of the impending change, and the welcome, al- 
 beit a lugubrious welcome, which he extended to it. 
 With real generosity, though it was the generosity of 
 a much-enduring and chastened spirit, he admitted 
 the gnawing hunger of men for the meaning of 
 things. Caspar at his cottage door reiterating the fact 
 of Marlborough's triumph can no longer quite ignore 
 little Peterkin, with his insistent " What good came 
 of it at last ? " Nay, he must even be civil on occa- 
 sion to Wilhelmine's dogmatic, " Why, 't was a very 
 wicked thing ! " Neither Peterkin nor Wilhelmine 
 is, if I interpret this address aright, persona grata 
 
496 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 to Professor Adams and his fellows ; but the time 
 is coming when they must be not merely endured 
 but recognized. History must take account of them, 
 perhaps be delivered for a time into the hands of 
 those who share their possession by the demons of 
 philosophy ; as St. Paul delivered Hymenseus and 
 Alexander unto Satan — until they should learn not 
 to blaspheme. 
 
 I would not speak lightly of the labours of the his- 
 torical investigator. His research is of course a prime 
 factor in the great and too little esteemed branch of 
 learning to which he devotes himself. But the fact 
 remains that it is a part of the historian's duty to in- 
 terpret as well as to depict ; and, if he insist upon re- 
 maining a mere annalist or editor, he will have no 
 reason to complain when the mass of intelligent men 
 desert him for the sociologist and political economist. 
 Every intellectual calling tends to develop the 
 scribe, and to degenerate under his hand into a sort 
 of game which none but the initiated can play. The 
 field of Biblical criticism offers perhaps the most 
 notable illustration of this tendency to-day ; but 
 every path of technical learning is likely to lead us 
 into a similar desert of professionalism, where we 
 shall cease to be the masters of ideas and become 
 mere servants of convention. The danger which 
 lurks in "settling Hoti's business" is that there 
 shall seem to be no worthy business but Hoti's in 
 the world.^ 
 
 ^ In general, explanatory notes are fatal to the force of literary 
 
THE NEWER FICTION 497 
 
 All art faces this peril, which comes with the 
 formation of a ' school '; and the art of story-telling 
 is no exception to the rule. A great artist may found 
 a school ; he can rarely be shut up to the terms and 
 rules of one. We have seen in earlier chapters how 
 persistently the Masters of Fiction transcend the 
 limits of the professional labels wherewith critics 
 would tag them. The quality of genius does not 
 adapt it to residence in pigeon-holes, and satisfac- 
 torily to define a man generally means his assignment 
 to the third or fourth rank. To call Scott a roman- 
 ticist, as though he were nothing more, is to focus 
 attention upon the mere framework of his novels ; 
 and to speak of Thackeray as a realist — at least in 
 the technical sense of that hard-used term — is to 
 penetrate little deeper than the surface of his work. 
 One cannot think of Dickens as sitting down de- 
 liberately to construct a novel in accordance with 
 certain approved rules of the art ; and when George 
 Eliot is caught mapping out an elaborate fiction- 
 scheme and working up ' local colour,' she shows her 
 lesser rather than her greater side. ' Local colour,' 
 indeed, when sought for itself, generally proves to 
 be a poor thing enough. What goes by that name 
 in " Adam Bede '* is really almost as universal as the 
 sunlight ; and in so far as its tints are governed by 
 the neighbourhood in which the scene is laid, the 
 
 allusions and impertinent to the reader as well ; but Browning is an 
 exception to all rules, and so if any reader has difficulty here, let him 
 turn to The GrammariarCs Funeral. 
 
498 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 realism is not a thing the author sought, but a nat- 
 ural part of her experience ; she was not so much 
 possessed of it as by it. Later on she began in the 
 more modern manner to make journeys, to consult 
 lawyers, and to institute research, in order that her 
 pictures of life might gain an exacter verity ; with 
 the result that something of her vital quality de- 
 parted ; and had a few more years been granted her, 
 she would have seen, and deserved to see, among 
 the monstrosities of book-making, a " Romola " il- 
 lustrated with half-tone photographs of Florence. 
 
 The camera, with its so-called ' truth to nature,' 
 is a tool of great convenience ; but it has infected 
 some little men with madness. In fact, the camera 
 may prove as untruthful as an epitaph. Any one 
 who will take the trouble to reverse his photo- 
 graphic film in the process of printing may repro- 
 duce the features of a horseman, for instance, with 
 perfect distinctness and verisimilitude ; yet the rider 
 will be guiding his horse with the right instead of 
 the left hand ; his girths will be secured upon the 
 wrong side ; every detail of his equipment is liable 
 to like whimsical reversal ; and should he be caught 
 in the act of mounting, it will be by aid of the 
 ^ off ' stirrup, like Mr. Winkle in the immortal Pick- 
 wick episode. The initiated will possibly discover 
 the trick as such a picture is examined ; but to the 
 ignorant nothing will seem wrong ; he may recog- 
 nize both man and horse, and exclaim upon the 
 excellence of the likeness; he might conceivably 
 
THE NEWER FICTION 499 
 
 form his own horsemanship upon this model and 
 wonder why he is a laughing-stock, until told that 
 while each ' fact ' and ' feature ' of reality is cor- 
 rectly depicted in the photograph, the relations are 
 so topsy-turvy as to make the whole thing a pecu- 
 liarly dangerous, because a remarkably consistent, 
 lie. 
 
 I am not contending that ability to paint exactly 
 the less conspicuous and dignified facts of life is of 
 little moment to the writer of fiction. By all means 
 let the presentment of the parish pump be lifelike ; 
 but let it be remembered at the same time that too 
 great dependence upon parish pumps sets parochial 
 limits to the work in which they figure. There is a 
 something — 
 
 far more deeply interfused, 
 Whose dwelling is the light of setting snns, 
 And the round ocean, and the li\dng air, 
 And the blue sky, and in the mind of man : 
 A motion and a spirit. 
 
 I would not dogmatize here. If any reader prefer 
 to say that there only seems to be something, I am 
 content for the moment to have it so ; simply re- 
 marking that the seeming is one of the vital facts 
 of life and a fact of utmost moment to the pro- 
 duction of great imaginative literature. It is hard 
 to believe that either " A Winter's Tale " or " As 
 You Like It " could have gained much had the sea- 
 coast of Bohemia been charted or an ordnance map 
 of the Forest of Arden lain at Shakespeare's hand. 
 
500 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Writers of fiction are bound to take account of 
 Religion; partly upon general principles, because 
 of the place which religious views and institutions 
 hold in the life of all ages and races ; and partly 
 because each new generation has its own religious 
 experiences and problems, which often seem of tran- 
 scendent importance to its day. Chaucer's Pilgrims, 
 for instance, illustrate the instinctive recourse of 
 early literature to institutional religion for the natu- 
 ral setting or frame of a work of the imagination. 
 The Pilgrimage is itself formally religious ; a large 
 number of the Pilgrims are more or less closely — 
 and unworthily — identified with the service of the 
 Church ; the characters who figure in the Tales are 
 often Churchmen ; and few scraps of Chaucer's verse 
 are better or more deservedly remembered than that 
 which portrays the godly parish priest. 
 
 Butler's "Hudibras," on the other hand, illus- 
 trates what the religious controversies of some par- 
 ticular generation may do for a clever author who 
 IS as far as possible from planning a religious work ; 
 just as " The Pilgrim's Progress" has enshrined in 
 imperishable form the older Puritan theology as 
 well as the deep perennial experiences of man's heart. 
 The distinction between the two is one which has 
 application to the literature of our own day. "Hudi- 
 bras" remains the greatest burlesque in English — 
 a marvel of cleverness ; yet to the general reader it 
 is likely to be known only by shreds and patches ; 
 which in turn may be said to live by their wits. The 
 
THE NEWER FICTION 501 
 
 same fate must have overtaken " The Pilgrim's Pro- 
 gress " had it been designed primarily to maintain 
 or to oppose some current theological scheme ; but 
 because Bunyan told the story of his own religious 
 experience and developed its universal qualities, his 
 allegory lives with a vitality so abundant as to gal- 
 vanize its very raiment and baggage into at least 
 the semblance of life. Butler depicts, though con- 
 troversially and in terms of burlesque, the habit 
 of a day ; Bunyan interprets the experience of the 
 race. 
 
 In attempting to apply these principles to a study 
 of recent fiction, one is almost overwhelmed in the 
 first place by its mass, and considerably hampered 
 in the second by the effort of a certain school of 
 writers to resolve the telling of tales into a thing of 
 rules and conventions. The latter tries the critic's 
 temper ; the former daunts him, not merely by the 
 amount of reading needful for adequate acquaint- 
 ance with the field which he is traversing, but by 
 the fact that so much time must be given to books 
 which, like the prophet's gourd, spring up with vast 
 luxuriance in a night to wither in a day. Some of 
 these are veriest trash and give point to Lamb's say- 
 ing that when a new book appeared he liked to read 
 an old one. Others, by their genuineness, insight, 
 careful construction, and excellent style, claim every 
 right to live, but cannot, simply because their num- 
 bers are so great, and the flowing tide of successors 
 so overwhelming. These volumes, though abundantly 
 
/ 
 
 602 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 able to maintain themselves in a fair field, often 
 seem, like the cavalry in Victor Hugo's legend of 
 Waterloo, to be ridden down by those behind them 
 before they ever find it. Since, therefore, many 
 worthy names must be passed by with a bare men- 
 tion, while others are omitted altogether, I shall try 
 to do little more than indicate certain classes into 
 which the novels of the last thirty years naturally 
 fall with reference to their use of the themes or 
 the spirit of religion. 
 
 The first of these is the distinctively ^ religious ' 
 / novel, — a work of fiction, that is, whose purpose is 
 either to plead a religious or theological cause, or 
 else to purvey amusement so seasoned with piety as 
 to adapt it to religious times and tastes. The insti- 
 tution known as the Sunday School Library has in 
 America caused a large demand for this type of 
 writing, which busy pens have been quick to supply. 
 That the product should be of mediocre quality or 
 worse was to have been expected. Yet here, as so 
 often happens, it is probable that the ' clamour of 
 the time' has been upon the whole unjust in its criti- 
 cism. A ^ Sunday-School book ' has commonly stood 
 in newspaper parlance and in the talk of the street 
 for a story in which the good are preternaturally 
 good and the bad without redeeming traits. If 
 the former die, it is upon a public death-bed and in 
 the most pungent odour of sanctity ; while the way 
 of the wicked is turned upside down. No doubt the 
 appointed Sunday reading of an elder day gave 
 
THE NEWER FICTION 303 
 
 some justification to the mockers. It was apt to be 
 either priggish and stilted, or else substantial and 
 dull. Of late years such efforts have been made to 
 avoid the mawkish and unnatural that these defects 
 have been in a considerable degree overcome. These 
 libraries have found larger space upon their shelves 
 for biography of a popular sort, for entertaining 
 and well-illustrated * nature-books,' for volumes of 
 travel and stories of adventure; still the chief de- 
 mand is for fiction ; and some fiction produced to 
 meet it has had enormous vogue. 
 
 An American author, E. P. Roe, wrote and sold 
 by the tens of thousands books like " Barriers 
 Burned Away," in which true love and true piety, 
 after passing through fire and flood, — the fire be- 
 ing the conflagration which in 1871 destroyed Chi- 
 cago, — triumphed gloriously together. It was far 
 enough from being literature, and yet much human 
 nature with some genuine humour and pathos found 
 expression. The worst that can be said of it is that 
 it was somewhat lush and sentimental. J. G. Hol- 
 land, a journalist and magazine editor of distinction 
 in his day, is another writer whose later fiction must 
 be included here, though it is characterized by much 
 firmer fibre and a far truer literary sense. A book 
 like " Arthur Bonnicastle " could scarcely have 
 been written, or must have missed a large part of 
 its multitude of readers, but for the moral and reli- 
 gious purpose which speaks so honestly through 
 it. Critics of literature do not stop to discuss the 
 
504 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 numerous volumes of " A. L. 0. E." The author of 
 '• The Schonberg-Cotta Family " finds scant grace 
 at the hands of cyclopedia-makers ; Mrs. Ewing is 
 dismissed with a paragraph ; Miss Charlotte Yonge 
 and Mrs. Craik with a column. Though the two 
 last-named belong to an elder generation, the qual- 
 ity of their work has given it not only wide popu- 
 larity, but such distinction as primacy in the class 
 which we are discussing can confer. " John Hali- 
 fax, Gentleman " and " A Noble Life " are no 
 doubt a little surcharged with sentiment ; yet the 
 large place which they and their compeers have 
 held in the ' Sunday reading ' of the last thirty 
 years affords matter for congratulation to lovers of 
 literature as well as to guardians of morals. The 
 late Dean Farrar's "Eric," and other stories of 
 school-life, are better than those fancy who know 
 them only as the objects of Mr. Kipling's contempt ; 
 but their lack of the quality which has made " Tom 
 Brown " a classic is evident enough. 
 
 More recently there has arisen a type midway be- 
 tween the distinctively religious novel and the story 
 of adventure or of manners, which may serve to con- 
 nect this class with that which follows it. Mr. C. W. 
 Gordon's " Sky Pilot," and some of Mr. Norman 
 Duncan's stories, in their successful appeal to 
 readers, make almost equal use of the conditions 
 of frontier-life and the experiences of missionary 
 preachers or medical men. The instant acceptance 
 of Mr. J. M. Barrie's " Auld Licht Idylls " and the 
 
THE NEWER FICTION 505 
 
 late John Watson's "Beside the Bonnie Brier-Bush" 
 was due to something more than a clever literary 
 device. A story of humble life, told with genuine 
 skill and out of first-hand knowledge, will always 
 find readers; charge such a tale with sentiment 
 which upon the whole is true and sane, spice it 
 with humour, sweeten and light the whole with the 
 faith of wayfaring men who seek a celestial city, 
 and it at once develops the elements of the widest 
 if not the most permanent popularity. 
 
 The second of the classes above referred to com- 
 prises some eminent names and books, which must, 
 however, be rather summarily dismissed, because they 
 do not fall immediately within the field of our view. 
 It includes the novels of contemporary manners into 
 1 which religion enters as an incident — sometimes 
 L merely as an accident — of life. How much Mr. 
 W. D. Ho wells and Mr. Henry James owe to the 
 mystical Swedenborgian doctrines of their fathers 
 I have no means of estimating. Both have been 
 prolific writers, and each has exerted a considerable 
 influence upon literary faith and practice. Both 
 know New England at first hand and have done 
 much to interpret it to the world ; but neither has 
 had the intimate and deep experience of its religious 
 life needful for an entirely true picture. The outer 
 framework of meeting-house, parsonage, Sunday 
 school, prayer-meeting, and all the rest, has been 
 treated by too many writers as if it were the only 
 index of Puritan religious life that they needed to 
 
506 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 consult. Miss Mary E. Wilkins (Mrs. Freeman) saw 
 with clearer vision, but has chosen to occupy her- 
 self too exclusively with the development of its 
 sombre and often tragic elements. Others with less 
 literary skill have made cheap sport of it. In the 
 realm of the short story it has remained for Miss 
 Sarah Orne Jewett to interpret it with an understand- 
 ing heart. To her its finer features have been re- 
 vealed, and her charming tales of a people to whom 
 she belonged by sympathy as well as blood, are 
 unmarred so far as I remember by any blemish of 
 caricature or condescension. It is not necessary to 
 the New Englander of Puritan type that the world 
 think well of him, though he does not despise its 
 esteem ; he can bear, because he is used to bear- 
 ing, misunderstanding and caricature, even the con- 
 descension of literary people' sometimes having 
 its amusing side ; the thing which he cannot bear is 
 self-revelation of the depths in his thought and 
 experience to those who would misunderstand, or, 
 worse still, tell cheap tales of sacred things which 
 they had partly seen. The writer who will do justice 
 to the religious life of New England, especially to 
 its depths of tenderness, its intense idealism, its 
 capacity not so much for ascetic as for hidden 
 sacrifice, and perhaps most of all to its unfailing 
 humour, — a humour essentially related to its faith, 
 — and who will do this in a work of sustained power, 
 will go far toward producing ^ the great American 
 novel.' 
 
THE NEWER FICTION 607 
 
 The late Edward Eggleston, who before his death 
 had become known as a historian rather than as a 
 novelist, is quite as likely to be remembered by the 
 sketches of life in the Middle West to which itiner- 
 ant preaching introduced his youth, as by the pains- 
 taking research of his maturity. " The Circuit 
 Rider " and " The Hoosier Schoolmaster " have an 
 historical value quite as real as " The Beginnings 
 of a Nation." Bret Harte has done a similar sei^ 
 vice to the Pacific slope and the days of the Argo- 
 nauts ; and in the doing it has shown talents of so 
 unusual a quality as probably to win a secure place 
 for his work. Not only does an indefinable distinc- 
 tion attach to his manner, but a very genuine hu- 
 manity appears in his matter. He would doubtless 
 have resented the accusation of preaching in his 
 novels ; yet, apart from his deliciously farcical verse, 
 and his parodies, to the making of which he brought 
 almost unique gifts, the bulk of his most signifi- 
 cant prose is one long and ingenious endeavour to 
 show the image of God, as it persisted, sometimes 
 altogether hidden, more often badly defaced and 
 obscured, in the souls of rude, profane, and even 
 criminal men. Mrs. Margaret Deland has not only 
 contributed a portrait to the gallery of modern 
 theological martyrs, — a rather sickly crew upon the 
 whole, — in her "John Ward, Preacher," but has 
 put the reading public in her permanent debt by 
 acquainting them with the Reverend Dr. Lavender 
 of Chester. Mrs. Edith Wharton, who has chosen 
 
508 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 to depict Vanity Fair in various modern guises, has 
 also chosen to go to Scripture for her titles, as 
 "The House of Mirth" and "The Fruit of the 
 Tree" bear witness. Mr. Archibald Marshall, in 
 "Exton Manor," has followed Trollope, though 
 with no lack of originality, in a latter-day story of 
 clerical life and parochial tragi-comedy. Maxwell 
 Gray will be longest and best remembered by her 
 very charming picture of life in a country parson- 
 age, and her not very convincing Dean Maitland. 
 Du Maurier's " Peter Ibbetson " is not to be under- 
 stood except as drawn against the background of 
 Pentonville with its respectability and its Sabbata- 
 rianism ; though the reader all the time suspects his 
 author of doing less justice to Pentonville than 
 Thackeray in " Vanity Fair " did to Clapham. 
 
 A significant note of revolt is sounded in work 
 like Lucas Malet's " Sir Richard Calmady," which, 
 while purporting to be a novel of the day rather 
 than a Tendenzschrift, still shows unmistakably 
 the author's impatience with commonly accepted 
 standards of belief and morals, — the most nota- 
 ble feature of the book being, not any partic- 
 ular doctrine of faith or unbelief explicitly stated 
 in it, but the grotesque deformity which haunts 
 the whole story. Now a physical misfortune may 
 exert the same ennobling influence upon a work of 
 fiction that it does in real life, calling out that 
 ability to conquer hostile circumstance which is 
 man's highest quality. Sir Richard shows in the 
 
THE NEWER FICTION 609 
 
 physical sphere something of this power ; but the 
 author never lets its spirit blow through her book 
 as a whole. That remains unwholesome and sallow ; 
 its appeal, in spite of the writer's probable inten- 
 tion, being of the macabre order, striking the im- 
 agination and gripping the attention like a dance 
 of death. On the other hand Mr. William De Mor- 
 gan, in a group of novels which have recently de- 
 lighted many readers, brings a cathoHc taste and 
 an admirable digestion to life's table. He finds 
 it spread with a strange assortment of sweet and 
 bitter ; with some things indeed that have gener- 
 ally been counted poisonous beyond the power of 
 antidote; yet ^agnostic' though one suspects Mr. 
 De Morgan himself to be, he still has faith in life 
 and love and truth, which comes so near to having 
 faith in God, that in a literary sense at least he is 
 saved by it, as his abounding humour, which is one 
 of the sure notes of literary salvation, witnesses. 
 
 It was to be expected that the rising tide of ro- 
 manticism in the early part of last century should 
 finally make itself felt in the realm of religion. 
 The Oxford Movement shows how profoundly it in- 
 fluenced certain branches of theological thought. 
 The poetry and prose of Newman are equally in- 
 stinct with it; while the fact that Newman's most 
 strenuous antagonist among men of letters turned 
 it to account in " Hypatia," serves to remind us how 
 catholic the romantic influence was. The first at- 
 tempts to introduce sacred scenes and persons into 
 
r 
 
 610 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 fiction were regarded with grave suspicion; but 
 these qualms soon passed, and before the century 
 ended the ^ Early Christian Novel' grew so common 
 as to become a sort of literary nuisance. Any 
 'prentice hand was liable to essay one, with results 
 equally disastrous from the standpoint of good 
 literature and of good taste. Yet this kind of 
 writing found multitudes of readers : sometimes 
 because it was genuine literature, not merely set- 
 ting forth the circumstances of an early day, but 
 interpreting universal problems and experiences in 
 terms of them; sometimes because of its dramatic, 
 or more often melodramatic, quality; occasionally 
 because the hearts of men were honestly warmed 
 as they heard sacred stories retold in common 
 speech and saw the men of Scripture at their ordi- 
 nary occupations; and sometimes, it is to be sus- 
 pected, because the writers of these tales permitted 
 themselves a larger latitude in showing the seamy 
 side of ancient life than would have been possible 
 but for their introduction of a sacred character or 
 two; the presence of Jemima, Keren-Happuch, or 
 Kezia serving as antidote to many an impropriety 
 of Zophar or Bildad. 
 
 Some of these books seem to have been com- 
 posed with the idea of revolutionizing the received 
 estimate of Bible characters; some because a ^shil- 
 ling shocker' was more easily achieved in this than 
 in any other way; and some have doubtless found 
 place in the list of permitted Sunday reading under 
 
THE NEWER FICTION 611 
 
 pretences no less dubious than those which in Mr. 
 BirrelFs youth opened Sorrow's "Bible in Spain" 
 to him on that day. Nor has English enjoyed any 
 monopoly in this sort of writing; other languages 
 have borne similar fruit, and much of it has been 
 for export. Swedish has given us Victor Rydberg's 
 gloomy and powerful "Last Athenian/' and Polish 
 has yielded Sienkiewicz's "Quo Vadis." The late 
 Lew Wallace's " Ben Hur " proved enormously 
 popular in America, and has doubtless gone to 
 Sweden and Poland to help keep the balance true. 
 [Walter Pater made use of one form of this same 
 'device in "Marius the Epicurean," and of course 
 conferred literary distinction upon it. At the risk 
 of giving offence in some quarters I should incline 
 also to include here Kenan's "Vie de Jesus," 
 which has had a wide reading in English ; for it is 
 essentially a romance, marked by great Hterary 
 charm, and occasional lapses into history. 
 
 Mr. Andrew Lang wrote a characteristic essay 
 upon this class of novels a few years ago * in which 
 he maintained that they answer in our day to the 
 Miracle and Mystery Plays of the Middle Ages. 
 Their popularity certainly goes far to show the 
 worth of religion as a * literary asset'; whether 
 they will leave any abiding mark upon literature 
 remains to be seen. It seems to me doubtful. 
 \ "John Inglesant" represents fiction of yet a 
 fourth type, and is perhaps the best of its class. 
 » " The 'Early Christian' Novel," Longman's Magazine^ 1898. 
 
612 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 The reading world of the early eighties wondered 
 that a book at once so intense, so delicate, so alive 
 too with the spirit of chivalry and religion, should 
 have come out of Birmingham. It is the fashion 
 thus to sneer at great industrial centres as ' mate- 
 rialistic ' and lacking in ideals. In point of fact it 
 is in just such hives of industry that large ideas 
 often find welcome, and that great enthusiasms 
 are born and trained for service; man being of 
 such a nature that well-organized activity along 
 one line of his interest is likely to wake sympathetic 
 life in another. He cannot even invent looms or 
 speculate about tariffs indefinitely without coming 
 upon some matter which involves his spirit. One 
 generation, or at the utmost two, may immure 
 themselves within the walls of ' business ' ; with the 
 third, at least, some rebel is likely to appear. He 
 may revolt against the family scheme of things 
 which has provided his coign of material vantage; 
 or he may on the other hand accept his surround- 
 ings as so much scaffolding to aid him in building 
 a mansion for his soul. Peel, Gladstone, and Rus- 
 kin, for instance, all came from the commercial 
 class, and all in their own ways were idealists, 
 though with this difference, that while Peel seemed 
 the legitimate and normal product of his environ- 
 ment, endowed to be sure with great qualities which 
 m turn were highly developed, Gladstone brought 
 even more brilliant gifts to the contradiction as 
 often as to the acceptance of the norms of life 
 
THE NEWER FICTION 513 
 
 under which he had been bred, and Kuskin con- 
 tradicted them altogether. 
 
 Granted Mr. Shorthouse's Quaker ancestry, with 
 its almost equal gifts for practical efficiency and 
 mystic vision, and there was no place whence 
 "John Inglesant " might more fittingly have 
 sprung than Birmingham. With its feehng for 
 spiritual values, its respect for the convictions of 
 an elder day, its joy in dwelling upon the half- 
 ascetic life at Little Gidding, its sense of the pa- 
 thos, mystery, one is tempted to say unreality, of 
 ordinary human experience, its absolute assurance 
 not merely of the Being but of the Immanence 
 of the Divine, this book was a sort of portent, 
 arising as it did in the heyday of physical science. 
 To sell eighty thousand copies of a novel in a 
 score of years no doubt seems a poor achievement 
 enough in these days of widely advertised ' best- 
 sellers ' and single editions running into the tens 
 of thousands; but that eighty thousand copies of 
 such a book as this should be sold showed that the 
 appetite for spiritual things was still alive, since 
 few will read "John Inglesant" for mere amuse- 
 ment. Yet those who go a mile with its author 
 will feel a gentle compulsion to be his companion 
 for twain. The haunting quality of the book is not 
 to be denied. It has the power, the eloquence, and 
 the limitations of religion presented upon its mys- 
 tical side. There are few passages in modern liter- 
 ature, for instance, more likely to fix themselves 
 
5U ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 in the reader's memory than the vision of the blind 
 friar in Rome, who, on Christmas Eve, saw Christ 
 coming again. 
 
 "Nature seemed to rally and to grow beneath 
 Him, and heaven to bend down to touch the earth. 
 A healing sense of help and comfort like the gentle 
 dew, visited the weary heart." Such sentences — 
 and the whole passage is as musical and significant 
 — make up something more than a purple patch of 
 rhetoric. They never give themselves over to sound 
 and fury, or degenerate into mere bad blank verse, 
 but suggest, with a sort of restrained passion, not 
 so much the vision and dream of the mystic as the 
 great realities which these foreshadow. 
 
 In some of Mr. Shorthouse's other books, " Sir 
 Percival," for instance, the fibre of both thought 
 and style relaxed a little and his manner of treat- 
 ment approached. the sentimental. Yet he remained 
 true upon the whole to the better traditions of that 
 delicate mysticism whence his inspiration came. 
 
 It is the fortune of mysticism to be generally 
 misinterpreted and misunderstood. Appealing in 
 reality to the highest and most rational in man, its 
 false presentment makes appeal to that which is near 
 to the lowest — those superstitions and curiosities 
 that snatch a fearful joy from the shadows in which 
 wizards peep and mutter. At the opposite end of this 
 class of books among which " John Inglesant " 
 stands so high, we may look for the type represented 
 by Miss Corelli's " Barabbas " and " Sorrows of 
 
THE NEWER FICTION 616 
 
 Satan." It would perhaps be unfair to place Mr. 
 Hall Caine's " The Christian" beside them, since it 
 makes no considerable use of the pseudo-mystical. 
 Yet the two authors seem in contrasting ways to 
 make a similar appeal to the public — to which the 
 public has somewhat greedily responded. The sen- 
 timental and bizarre treatment of awful or sacred 
 themes has its reward in the gape or shudder of a 
 day, in notoriety, and in dollars ; and to such treat- 
 ment the themes of religion are preeminently fitted; 
 but literature knows its own and time brings its 
 revenges. 
 
 The two classes which follow are especially char- 
 acteristic of the last third of the century. The first 
 
 \ of these is pretty frankly theological rather than re- 
 
 i ligious ; sometimes indeed theological in order that 
 it may be anti-religious. The second occupies itself 
 with giving social or sociological expression to a 
 faith which is essentially, even though not often 
 
 i confessedly, religious. 
 
 The late George Macdonald may be said to have 
 achieved the first great success in adapting theology 
 to the needs of fiction, or, as some would say, in 
 fashioning the novel into an engine of theological 
 controversy. Other popular writers had of course 
 
 , dealt incidentally with theological doctrines, and 
 Kingsley had touched them with the light of genius ; 
 but it remained for Macdonald to make them his 
 principal theme. Few men owe a heavier debt to 
 John Calvin, and it is one of the tributes to Calvin's 
 
516 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 unquestionable greatness that so many lesser, though 
 by no means little, men should have found name and 
 fame in battling with him. Macdonald was predes- 
 tined to the pen, and must in any event have written 
 books ; but it is hard to imagine what sort of books, 
 had he not found Scottish notions of Fate and Hell 
 to be antagonized. This is not to belittle his gener- 
 ous equipment for any literary task which life might 
 have set him. " St. George and St. Michael," for 
 instance, is a story of genuine charm, into which 
 the elements of theology do not largely enter ; and 
 " At the Back of the North Wind " bears testimony 
 to the quality of his imagination. But his charac- 
 teristic books are of the " David Elginbrod " and 
 I" Robert Falconer " type, and perhaps his most 
 characteristic verses — although he wrote many that 
 had a grace and charm which these wholly lack — 
 made up the famous epitaph, — 
 
 Here lie I, Martin Elginbrod, 
 Ha'e mercy on my soul, O God ; 
 As I would do, were I Lord God, 
 And ye were Martin Elginbrod. 
 
 This bumptiousness of self-assertion in the greatest 
 matters always has a popular quality, though of the 
 cheaper sort, as some of W. E. Henley's better- 
 known verses remain to witness ; and it is a literary 
 device in the use of which Scotsmen seem to show 
 peculiar deftness. Characteristic of George Mac- 
 donald though it be, other and better-conditioned 
 qualities appear to modify and sweeten it : notably 
 
THE NEWER FICTION 517 
 
 his humour, his essential moral wholesomeness, his 
 effective command of Scottish speech, and his sym- 
 pathetic insight into Scottish hearts. 
 
 The interest excited by "David Elginbrod's" 
 appearance as the antagonist of Calvinism in the 
 sixties was very considerable ; but it was insignifi- 
 cant when contrasted with the sensation produced 
 \a, little more than twenty years later by the advent 
 {of "Robert Elsmere" as the protagonist of *ag- 
 /nosticism/ Bunyan, the reader will remember, has 
 a character called Little-faith, who was robbed in 
 Dead-man's Lane by Faint-heart, Mistrust, and 
 Guilt, " three sturdy rogues." They bade him stand, 
 at which he " looked as white as a Clout, and had 
 neither power to fight nor fly." They took his 
 money, at which he sang out lustily, and was 
 promptly knocked down. They, in turn, while stand- 
 ing by and doubtless meditating further mischief, 
 were put to flight by the approach of Great-grace 
 from the City of Good-confidence, although he came 
 alone. Then after a while Little-faith " came to him- 
 self, and getting up, made shift to scrabble on his 
 way," bereft of his money, but — and Bunyan makes 
 much of this — still in possession of his jewels, 
 which the thieves in their hurry had overlooked. 
 He missed the money for the day's convenience 
 more than he might have missed the jewels; but 
 the jewels were the really precious things, and so 
 he finally discovered them to be. 
 
 One is reminded of this serio-comic experience 
 
"518 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 , of Little-faith as he sees Mrs. Humphry Ward's 
 rather feeble hero trembling before the inexorable 
 Squire, who robs him of his faith in the authenticity 
 of the Fourth Gospel and some other convenient 
 cash, yet leaves him his essential loyalties to the 
 ideals and the Person of Christianity. But when 
 the scene is transformed, and Elsmere takes the 
 
 I road as a swashbuckler himself, robbing Little-faiths 
 
 ' in turn, the play approaches farce. Nothing is much 
 more significant of the progress which less than 
 five-and-twenty years have wrought in distinguish- 
 ing our change from our jewels, than a remembrance 
 of the mighty pother which this man of straw raised 
 upon religion's highway. I would not speak lightly 
 of the spiritual struggle which Mrs. Humphry 
 Ward portrayed ; many a man found the valley 
 which separated the land of an authority dependent 
 upon the authenticity of documents, from the land 
 where he lives to-day in a religion of the Spirit, 
 organically joined to the old and yet free from its 
 mechanisms and its fears, to be a very Valley of 
 the Shadow of Death. He has fought Apollyons 
 upon its borders far more redoubtable than Els- 
 mere's Squire ; and he wonders from the standpoint 
 of present experience how that worthy could in the 
 
 i eighties have managed so earth-shaking a tread that 
 prime ministers and bishops must needs be mar- 
 shalled to oppose him. 
 
 The book's popularity owed much to literary 
 qualities which have given Mrs. Ward a deservedly 
 
THE NEWER FICTION 519 
 
 high place among contemporary writers ; but it 
 owed as much to her skilful choice and treatment 
 of a religious question which was a part of the 
 ' clamour of the time/ For that very reason it has 
 had its day, and is pretty secure against revival, 
 since nothing is surer of repose than a book deal- 
 ing with some over-emphasized phase of a period 
 of transition. Yet the volume raises one significant 
 question of literary ethics, and leaves the thought- 
 ful reader querying how far it is justifiable to use 
 a novel as a weapon in theological controversy. 
 Robert Elsmere was not a very virile thinker ; and 
 the Squire, backed by his library, made short work 
 of him. The wonder is what that library could have 
 contained, and whether it would have had its way 
 quite so invincibly with a man of better twisted 
 intellectual fibre or more thorough grounding in 
 philosophy. Granting impregnable premisses and 
 invincible arguments, one can, of course, prove any- 
 thing; but one has a right to ask that the libraries 
 of fiction in which these are contained should be 
 catalogued — at least in an appendix. In spite of 
 these necessary strictures, perhaps because of them, 
 I may be permitted to add a word of personal grati- 
 tude to this particular book and its author. For in 
 the height of its popularity it came from a uni- 
 versity friend to my camp in a great wilderness, 
 was read by dim lights in intervals of hunting or 
 of work, and found the sauce of hunger for men 
 and books awaiting it. 
 
520 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Lesser novels of a somewhat similar type have 
 been legion since the rise of the gospel of agnosti- 
 cism. None of them has had any such significance as 
 the work of George Meredith or Mr. Hardy, which 
 stands in another class, and has been separately con- 
 sidered. Yet some have had a wide reading and have 
 doubtless exerted at least a temporary influence, due 
 in no small degree to the part which religion plays 
 in them. Miss Beatrice Harraden's " Ships that Pass 
 in the Night" and Olive Schreiner's (Mrs. Cron- 
 wright) "Story of an African Farm" may serve 
 as types. The former can be pretty summarily dis- 
 missed as a debauch of sentiment. Its brief popu- 
 larity is not so hard to understand. Mr. William 
 James somewhere has a fine passage in which he 
 describes the ethical inspiration that came to him 
 from reading a story of martyrdom. The vogue of 
 martyrdom is indeed eternal. Our fathers read the 
 grewsome details of pagan and papist persecution 
 in Foxe, partly no doubt from piety, partly too be- 
 cause of their frank appeal to sensation ; and, rude 
 though it all was, there was also something virile in 
 the effect. Hearts were warmed and blood reddened. 
 They took their pleasure sadly in traditional English 
 fashion ; but it was gaiety itself as compared with 
 the exercise of reading Miss Harraden ; for here 
 are no martyrs, no captains of their souls, but swim- 
 mers in a sea of blind circumstance, — the figure of 
 the ship is too vital, — with barely energy enough 
 to make their moan before they sink. Such books 
 
THE NEWER FICTION 521 
 
 have sweetness — but it is the sweetness of over- 
 ripe fruit; and tenderness — but it is the softness 
 of decay. 
 
 " The Story of an African Farm " is a bundle of 
 strange contradictions, far better calculated to rouse 
 a sensation than to produce an intelligible effect, 
 though its author is too true an artist to seek sensa- 
 tion for its own sake. The African Farm itself is 
 nobly portrayed and wins the reader's heart ; but 
 the canvas is better painted than the picture. That 
 is in the main a dance of grotesques. Tant' Sannie, 
 the Boer woman, is a mountain of flesh animated 
 by little but fleshly instincts ; BonaparJ;e the hypo- 
 crite outdoes Tartuffe and Pecksniff in the extrava- 
 gance of his Pharisaism ; while Lyndall is less human 
 than Undine herself. She has all of Undine's beauty, 
 but instead of Undine's pensive longing for a soul, 
 her elflike person houses only a bundle of nerves 
 tortured into madness by unregulated vanity and 
 passion. Gregory Rose, who loves her, leaves the 
 faithful Em for her, and finally assumes woman's 
 garb to nurse her through a fatal illness, is an 
 effeminate cad whose one attempt to be heroic does 
 not escape the ridiculous. 
 
 If the old German overseer be numbered among 
 this impossible company, it must be reverently done, 
 and only because he is too good to be true, with 
 a childlike, Joe-Gargery^ sort of goodness, which 
 
 ^ Of course he lacks Joe's humour. For reasons to be indicated 
 later, it is impossible that the Story of an African Farm should have 
 the humour of Great Expectations. 
 
522 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 warms the heart and touches the fountains of tears. 
 Waldo, the uncouth boy, with his mechanical genius, 
 his dreams, his love, his great adventures of the soul, 
 and his tragedy, might conceivably have lived; and 
 he, with Em — sturdy, patient, necessary Em — and 
 the Farm itself, redeems the book. It could not have 
 been written except in a time of religious transition. 
 The problems of a baffled faith are of its essence. 
 It is reasonably safe to conclude that the author 
 had at least a little of controversial purpose in writ- 
 ing it, and that it is in some measure an agnostic 
 tract. If this be so there is no denying the power 
 with which some incidents are told and some argu- 
 ments presented ; nor any escape from the con- 
 clusion that in a battle with hostile circumstance 
 the only persons who really seem adequate to the 
 struggle, whether it involve life or death, are the 
 old German whose faith touched ecstasy, and Em 
 with a trust simply reaching — 
 
 to the level of every day*s 
 Most quiet need, by sun and candle light. 
 
 " The Autobiography of Mark Eutherf ord " repre- 
 sents another type of theological character, intro- 
 jspective and morbid, yet sketched with a delicate 
 hand. It is the story of a dissenting minister who 
 runs a course parallel to that of Robert Elsmere in 
 respect of his opinions, but differs widely from him 
 in the circumstances of his life. Nervous, self-con- 
 scious, anaemic, this man drifts from one parish to 
 
THE NEWER FICTION 523 
 
 another, finding each less lovely than the last ; find- 
 ing, what is strangest of all, nothing in the people 
 to whom he ministers really worthy of love, laughter, 
 or tears ; swayed by doubt, the force of which is 
 however hard to measure, because there is so little 
 to sway ; hungering for friendship, but rarely able 
 to show himself friendly; pulling himself together 
 at last with a modified and altruistic stoicism which 
 serves him for faith, and building a sort of man- 
 hood, for the construction of which his career as an 
 orthodox believer seems to furnish neither clay nor 
 straw. It is safe to say that no greater triumph of 
 drabness has ever been achieved in English than 
 this Autobiography. Peter Ibbetson's residence in 
 Pentonville presents a riot of colour beside it. Yet 
 it is the work of a genuine literary artist whose 
 purpose one may presume was to narrate a soul's 
 tragedy. This purpose is accomplished ; the tragedy 
 is as real as any of Mr. Gissing's ; but the whole 
 effect is weakened by the inherent flabbiness of the 
 hero. If one venture to pity (Edipus, it is with the 
 pity so close akin to love. Pity flows easily enough 
 into the wounds of Robert Elsmere and Mark Ruth- 
 erford, each of whom faces a situation as full of 
 genuine tragic possibility ; but, alas ! it is the pity 
 which verges on contempt. 
 
 Of Mr. Mallock, who has chosen to cast numer- 
 ous clever discussions of theology into the form of 
 novels, I may not stop to speak, nor of the growing 
 school of Modernists who, with Fogazzaro at their 
 
624 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 head, are translating new theories of religious faith 
 and practice into the speech of current literature, 
 and finding in English an increasing host of Catho- 
 lic as well as Protestant readers. 
 
 A word must, however, be accorded those who 
 within recent years have made one phase or another 
 of the ^ social problem ' the subject of their novels. 
 The device is of course an old one. " Uncle Tom's 
 Cabin " went round the world ; Yorkshire schools 
 and the Circumlocution Office felt the influence of 
 Dickens ; and nowadays no abuse need be so poor 
 as to fail of its pamphlet in the form of a novel. 
 The Chicago stock-yards have thus produced an 
 elaborate horror known as " The Jungle '' ; while 
 Mr. Jack London periodically prescribes to a sick 
 world his purge of elemental blood and thunder. 
 Much of this writing is hopelessly crude and tem- 
 porary ; indeed it remains crude and temporary even 
 when produced by a man of large literary ability and 
 experience like the late John Hay, as his " Bread- 
 winners" remains to testify. But it is none the less 
 significant both for literature and religion. It sug- 
 gests the channel in which religious ideas and efforts 
 are likely to flow in steadily growing volume. The 
 meaning of Christianity for the mind, heart, and 
 conduct of the individual in his relation to God 
 and his neighbour, has been a subject of the first 
 interest to multitudes of men for centuries. Its 
 influence in the world has wroug^ht immeasurable 
 progress. Yet in all this time men have but partly 
 
THE NEWER FICTION 525 
 
 explored the content of Christ's message. The cur- 
 rent religious unrest is largely due to the fact that 
 new discoveries which will one day furnish food for 
 man's soul have appeared and been greedily swal- 
 lowed somewhat faster than they could be digested. 
 It is an axiom of religion and physical science that 
 all truth is wholesome. But truth is something more 
 than facts, just as speech is something more than 
 words. Truth comes from facts in right relation; 
 and the mistake against which religion and physical 
 science must both be on their guard, is the hasty 
 assumption that every new and significant hypothesis 
 is the truth. In all probability, if it be very signifi- 
 cant and seem to chime well with great experiences 
 that have hitherto been mysterious, it is a happy 
 and really scientific guess to be generously but still 
 tentatively accepted and modified in the light of 
 further experience. At times there come a succes- 
 sion of such hypotheses in notable conjunction in 
 the realm of science ; and we know that we are upon 
 the verge of great advance. So there come times 
 when the attention of thoughtful men is focussed 
 upon some problem of ethics or philosophy; and 
 we are confident that, however difficult it be, new 
 and significant steps toward its solution are to be 
 taken. 
 
 It is such a condition as this that we face in 
 religion, politics, and literature. Christians are dis- 
 cerning the wider social meanings of their faith; 
 statesmen are considering problems of social welfare 
 
526 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 as problems of the state, which had hitherto seemed 
 foreign to it ; and literature is concerning itself 
 with human brotherhood or the lack of it as never 
 before/ 
 
 The crudeness of much of this work, upon which 
 I have already remarked, was to be expected, partly 
 because men's passions were so deeply involved as 
 to render balance and restraint difficult. Kingsley's 
 " Yeast " deserved its name, so thoroughly did its 
 social ferment infect the writer's style. But as time 
 has passed, a few men of large intellectual and moral 
 stature have undertaken, or been driven by circum- 
 stances, to work in this medium. Of these the late 
 George Gissing is perhaps the most significant 
 among English writers. Robert Elsmere and Mark 
 Rutherford found refuge for their heresies in some 
 form of ' social-settlement ' work ; so far forth faith- 
 fully reflecting the trend of religious thought in 
 their day. Mr. Gissing's " The Nether World " — 
 for I shall let that book represent him — seems at 
 first glance to be without God and without hope ; 
 indeed he might have said that the first glance gave 
 the true index to its state. The land to which he 
 invites his reader is a " land of darkness, as dark- 
 ness itself ; and of the shadow of death, without any 
 order, and where the light is as darkness." It is 
 darkness beyond the power of social settlements to 
 
 * In a suggestive article in the Hihbert Journal for October, 1908, 
 Prof. A. C. McGifPert has discussed at length the religious signifi- 
 cance of the recent social awakening. 
 
THE NEWER FICTION 627 
 
 dissipate, and even the rush-light of the occasional 
 charity-worker but serves to make it visible. 
 
 The story's texture is too close and firm to make 
 any sketch of it quite intelligible ; yet, since it is 
 never likely to be ' popular,' a word about its sahent 
 features is necessary. Almost without relief the 
 reader haunts the more dismal streets of London ; 
 or, if he be permitted to visit provincial towns, it is 
 to find them drearier still. Even when he goes holi- 
 day-making, it is to the Crystal " Paliss," in a superb 
 chapter whose character may be gathered from its 
 title, " lo Saturnalia ! " Only once is there a glimpse 
 of gracious country quiet, and this is but the calm 
 preceding a storm of sordid tragedy. We discern the 
 heroine in a child, Jane, an under-fed, half -clothed, 
 kitchen drudge, who is treated with heart-breaking 
 cruelty by her two mistresses, a Mrs. Peckover and 
 her daughter Clem. The latter comes close to being 
 a great character ; of the panther type, with her 
 full-bodied sensuous beauty, her stealth, cruelty, and 
 savage power to love or hate, she almost kills poor 
 Jane. The child is first befriended by a young 
 artisan, and then rescued by her grandfather, who 
 hides his possession of wealth behind the semblance 
 of poverty while he dreams great dreams of social re- 
 generation which his money shall finally accomplish. 
 With this end in view he rears his granddaughter in 
 a sort of austere comfort, until she appears before 
 us as a working-girl of the finest type, unassum- 
 ing, gentle, serious, of keen intelligence, and high 
 
528 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 though modest purpose. She has been thrown much 
 with the young workingman who befriended her 
 wretched childhood, and a natural love wakes in 
 each. It looks for one bright moment as though an 
 eminently fitting match might come of it, for Sidney 
 is a man of character and sterling worth. But the 
 father of Jane — an oily rascal of the cheap com- 
 mercial type — comes back from America ; is put 
 upon the trail of his father's secret fortune, and 
 schemes to get it. Temporary misunderstanding 
 separates Jane and Sidney; the latter learns of the 
 money and regards it as an obstacle ; there re- 
 enters, too, a girl whom he had once loved and 
 whose family he had befriended — a girl then as 
 beautiful as she was vain and intensely ambitious. 
 She had sacrificed her honour, partly in a sort of 
 desperate protest against the misery of her family 
 life, and partly as a possible means of getting ou 
 along the path to the stage, where she had the am- 
 bition, and presumably the power, to shine ; but 
 just as success seemed to hold out the hand of in- 
 vitation, an angry rival threw vitriol in her face and 
 balked her hopes forever. There were no large re- 
 sources in her nature, though all the old elements 
 of restlessness and vanity remained ; and she went 
 back to her father's house in black despair. The 
 story of her family, the Hewetts, is one of the great 
 features of the book, with its poverty, its bitterness, 
 its patience in the character of the mother, its rebel- 
 lion against fate in that of the father, its contribu- 
 
THE NEWER FICTION 629 
 
 tion to the criminal classes in the person of the clever 
 but self-willed brother, Bob, and the half-humour- 
 ous and altogether pathetic figure of Bob's wife, 
 Penny loaf. 
 
 Sidney, partly from chivalrous pity and partly 
 from a reawakening of the old affection, marries the 
 disfigured Clara. Hewett, who through misfortune, 
 nervous stress, bad food, and somewhat irregular 
 habits, is now nearly past work, but who still has 
 two young and ill-trained children dependent on 
 him, becomes with them dependent on his son-in- 
 law; who in his turn finds the demands of an 
 increasing and wasteful family, presided over by a 
 wife with neither the experience nor the character to 
 be a genuine housekeeper, not only outrunning his 
 earnings but dissipating his savings. Yet through 
 it all he struggles to keep his courage and to make 
 his life of use, even though the old ambitions must 
 be forever dismissed and a future of poverty deepen- 
 ing to distress faced. Jane's grandfather meanwhile 
 had died ; her graceless father has gained possession 
 of the property and lost it ; and she, without regret, 
 except perhaps that her grandfather's dreams have 
 vanished, takes up quietly and with womanly dignity 
 the task of winning her daily bread again. 
 
 The last pages of the book find Jane and Sidney 
 standing beside the old visionary's grave in Abney 
 Park Cemetery, where they had met by chance. 
 
 "When they had stood in silence for a while,^ 
 Jane told of her father's death and its circum- 
 
530 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 stances. She told him, too, of Pennyloaf 's humble 
 security. 
 
 " ^ You have kept well all the year ? ' he asked. 
 
 " ' And you, too, I hope? ' 
 
 " Then they bade each other good-bye. . . 
 
 " In each life little for congratulation. He with 
 the ambitions of his youth frustrated ; neither an 
 artist nor a leader of men in the battle of justice. 
 She, no saviour of society by the force of a superb 
 example; no daughter of the people, holding wealth 
 in trust for the people's needs. Yet to both was 
 their work given. Unmarked, unencouraged save 
 by their love of uprightness and mercy, they stood 
 by the side of those more hapless, brought some 
 comfort to hearts less courageous than their own. 
 Where they abode it was not all dark. Sorrow cer- 
 tainly awaited them, perchance defeat in even the 
 humble aims that they had set themselves ; but at 
 least their lives would remain a protest against those 
 brute forces of society which fill with wreck the 
 abysses of the nether world." 
 
 " Where they abode it was not all dark '' ; this 
 is the one ray of everlasting light which pierces the 
 abyss. Mr.Gissinghas been called the " Spokesman 
 of Despair." It is a mistake. He is rather, when at his 
 best, a great master of tragedy, the essence of which 
 consists in picturing a soul contending against floods 
 of hostile circumstance and retaining its essential 
 integrity. 
 
 Here, and in his deep feeling for the misery of 
 submerged life, is to be found the religious signifi- 
 cance of Gissing and some of the lesser authors of 
 
THE NEWER FICTION 531 
 
 his type. His explicit references to religion are rare ; 
 though in " The Nether World " there is a madman 
 who loves to sing the praises of the Lord in squalid 
 alleys as though to point life's irony. Mad Jack has 
 just a trifle too much method in his madness to be 
 convincing as a lunatic ; but as a literary device he 
 does his author's bidding perfectly; and the reader 
 is not likely to forget the scene where the coun- 
 terfeiter and would-be murderer, Bob, under arrest 
 and dying, is borne on a stretcher from his misera- 
 ble lodging, while Mad Jack chants by the wayside, 
 "All ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord; 
 praise Him and magnify Him forever ! " 
 
 Mr. Bernard Shaw has said that we must make 
 a religion of socialism.^ This may be, although Mr. 
 Shaw himself seems somewhat unfitted by nature 
 for the role of a self -forgetful apostle. Yet whether 
 it be or not, there is no question that certain re- 
 ligious elements appear in Gissing's treatment of 
 society and the problems which oppress it. Once 
 at least he expressed regret that he could not give 
 larger place to religious aspiration and motive in 
 his work. " If I could write a book that recoofnized 
 the spiritual side of man, where I now appeal to 
 one reader, I should then speak to thousands,"^ he 
 confessed to a friend. There is, however, an ethi- 
 cal and even spiritual note in his most significant 
 
 1 Atlantic Monthly, February, 1909, p. 234. 
 
 2 "Some Recollections of George Gissing," Gentleman's MagO' 
 dncj Febmaxy, 1906, p. 14. 
 
532 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 work, which might have reassured him. At least 
 one critic of " The Whirlpool " (Mr. H. G. Wells) 
 has felt the change in Rolfe's way of thinking to be 
 emblematic of a like wholesome change for society. 
 
 "It is the discovery of the insufficiency of the 
 cultivated life and its necessary insincerities ; it is a 
 return to the essential, to honourable struggle as 
 the epic factor in life, to children as the matter of 
 morality, and the sanction of the securities of civi- 
 lization.' '^ 
 
 ^ "The Novels of Mr. George Gissing," Contemporary Review, 
 August, 1897. 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 
 THE NEWER FICTION. U 
 
 One class remains. It includes those novels or other 
 works of the imagination which deal ostensibly per- 
 haps with adventure or manners, but really with 
 Life, and after a fashion so touched by faith or 
 doubt as to leave a definite religious and ethical 
 impression. The great names here are those of 
 George Meredith ^ and Mr. Thomas Hardy ; and 
 their bare mention seems like the proffer of good 
 wine at the feast's end. With Meredith I should 
 group Robert Louis Stevenson and Mr. Rudyard 
 Kipling; while Mr. Eden Phillpotts seconds Mr. 
 Hardy. 
 
 Much that has been said of George Meredith's 
 poetry might be repeated concerning his prose. It 
 is characterized by the same courage, insight, sanity, 
 and vigour; it is marred by similar mannerisms, 
 self-assertions, and wilful obscurities ; the reader of 
 prose as well as poetry being sure of more or less 
 contemptuous treatment at his author's hand. It is 
 
 * Measured by the calendar Mr. Meredith belongs, of course, with 
 the mid- Victorians ; but his popular recognition came so late, and 
 the sources of his youth seem so perennial, that there is no ana- 
 chronism in placing him here. 
 
534 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 hurt too by an excess of subtlety which seems like 
 the exercise of ingenuity for its own sake/ and by 
 an almost intolerable tendency to indulge in apho- 
 rism. There has been in English just one writer who 
 could afford to make a business of coining aphorisms 
 — and that man was Tupper. T upper was an honest 
 son of toil who made proverbs as other men dig po- 
 tatoes or mend roads. If at times he mounted the 
 tripod and invited a sort of mantic fury, or assumed 
 the bearing of a seventh son of a seventh son, no- 
 body thought the less of him ; to open his mouth in 
 parables and to utter dark sayings of old was a part 
 of the day's work ; and even when the dark saying 
 proved — as it generally did — to be a platitude, this 
 too was borne with as belonging to the lot of proverb- 
 makers. Jewels are one of nature's by-products; 
 the best of them are found, not made ; the process 
 of fabrication is a suspicious one ; and even profes- 
 sional search for them is a precarious occupation. 
 It requires the whole of Emerson's moral and spirit- 
 ual power to make even his artificial multiplication 
 of aphorisms tolerable. With George Meredith it 
 frankly ceased to be tolerable at all, his frequent 
 recourse to the " Pilgrim's Scrip" in "Richard Fev- 
 erel " heavily penalizing the reader of that admira- 
 ble book. This is not to say that his aphorisms are 
 
 ^ Cf. the criticism of Prof. J. M. Manly in his English Poetry ^ 
 1170-1892 : " But the gods gave him also the fatal gift of excessive 
 intellectual ingenuity and a delight in the exercise of it ; while 
 the sole gift they denied him was self-restraint." 
 
THE NEWER FICTION 535 
 
 of the Tapper sort. Many of them are extremely 
 clever, and many others sound as though they might 
 be if their meaning could be discovered ; but the 
 fact remains that their pursuit or fabrication for 
 their own sake is always a blemish on the work of 
 genius. It is the antithesis of Shakespeare's method ; 
 gorgeously adorned though his style often is, the 
 jewels seem all to be turned up naturally in the field 
 which he is cultivating. They are of the essence of 
 his matter. So much of George Meredith's wealth 
 comes in the same legitimate way, that it is the 
 greater pity to find him so often indulging in 
 adornments of manner which, however splendid 
 they may be, must still remain artificial. 
 
 Something of this same tendency to overdo what 
 he might do almost perfectly appears occasionally 
 in his love-scenes and his accompanying descrip- 
 tions of Nature. The love-making of Richard Fev- 
 erel and Lucy is deservedly famous; yet the sum- 
 mer and the maid both suffer from a luxuriance of 
 sweetness that comes perilously near to a surfeit. 
 
 When all this has been said, however, we have to 
 acknowledge in George Meredith a great creator of 
 character, a true master of life's secrets, and a trust- 
 worthy guide along the way to such triumphs as 
 are possible to man. He is no professional preacher; 
 yet the religious and ethical note is sounded on 
 nearly every page of his most characteristic work. 
 This work may perhaps be best represented by " The 
 Ordeal of Richard Feverel" and "The Egoist." The 
 
536 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 former is, no doubt, the better story. It moves with 
 force and vigour ; its tragedy and comedy alike be- 
 long to life; its chief characters remain as com- 
 panions* after the book has been laid aside. Every 
 father instinctively takes warning by Sir Austin and 
 his system ; every would-be man of the world by 
 Adrian, whose clever selfishness, without abating 
 jot or tittle of its spirit, is unmasked with complete 
 effectiveness ; every boy who would master circum- 
 stance finds in Richard a comrade whose great 
 chance for victory is frustrated because he has not 
 learned that self -conquest must come first; and this 
 is still true, whether the fault be assigned to Rich- 
 ard himself or to Sir Austin and the System. To the 
 "Pilgrim's Scrip" I have already paid my disre- 
 spects ; but this too is a mine of wisdom for those 
 who can stomach the soil in which they have to dig. 
 The average reader and the critic alike are dis- 
 posed to balk at a too frank display of the moral in 
 a fable. Yet he must be hypercritical indeed who 
 does not admire the perfect frankness and the con- 
 summate ability of the chapter in which Sir Austin 
 Feverel, visiting London in search of a bride for 
 Richard, confers incidentally with two old friends. 
 Both were Members of Parliament, " useful men, 
 though gouty, who had sown in their time a fine 
 crop of wild oats, and advocated the advantage of 
 doing so, seeing that they did not fancy themselves 
 the worse for it." He found one with an imbecile 
 son and the other with consumptive daughters. " So 
 
THE NEWER FICTION 637 
 
 much," he wrote in the Note-book, " for the Wild 
 Oats ' theory.' " He meets the eldest of the charm- 
 ing but hectic girls, and the degenerate boy ; who 
 almost persuade him to mount the pulpit and cry 
 aloud his convictions upon wild oats and their 
 harvest. " This universal igfnorance of the inevita- 
 ble consequence of sin is frightful," he says to him- 
 self. " The wild oats plea is a torpedo that seems 
 to have struck the world and rendered it morally 
 insensible." 
 
 Though Mr. Meredith is rarely so explicit, this 
 whole chapter entitled " The System Encounters 
 the Wild Oats Special Plea," is fairly representa- 
 tive of his ethical tone. It is as wholesome as ripe 
 nuts, possessing at once substance and flavour. 
 
 " Richard Feverel" deals with life as a thing of 
 deeds and ethical relations; " The Egoist" searches 
 the hearts and tries the reins of the children of 
 men. It is in some respects less possible than " Rich- 
 ard Feverel" ; in others it is more intimate and 
 real. No fool could ever be so wise, nor any wise 
 man such a fool, as Sir Willoughby Patterne; and 
 yet the reader who fails to see at times that he is 
 looking in a mirror, as he traces the processes of 
 Sir Willoughby 's respectable folly, has cause to 
 distrust his eyesight. He will feel the exaggeration 
 of the character and be often on the point of ex- 
 claiming against it, only to discover that all uncon- 
 sciously a window has been opened into his own 
 soul, and that the thing which he is about to decry 
 
538 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 has the most intimate and indubitable reality. To 
 read " The Egoist " discerningly is to undergo 
 conviction of sin, but in a warm bath of humour 
 which mitigates its rigour. The whole realm of fic- 
 tion scarcely contains so humbling and yet so good- 
 natured a book. It is a book to dwell upon ; its 
 minor characters and features all have significance ; 
 even though thrown into an unduly high light for 
 the moment, they generally bear examination and 
 justify themselves under it. The sprightliness of 
 Colonel DeCraye and the pedantic pomposity of 
 Dr. Middleton, are, to be sure, somewhat too con- 
 tinuous and self-consistent ; but who dare bring 
 any charge against the hero-worship of the ladies, 
 Eleanor and Isabel, and the maiden-aunt agility 
 with which they execute a volte-face at Sir Wil- 
 loughby's bidding ; it being true, of course, that 
 this loyalty to another is itself but a refined and 
 glorified egoism, since he is their Nephew, they his 
 Aunts, and all together live, move, and have their 
 being in the sacred and sustaining medium of the 
 Family. Laetitia and Clara are both women whom 
 the reader writes down gladly in his list of friends ; 
 not so much because they are wholly admirable, as 
 because their very faults are those of an altogether 
 human and feminine inconsistency. Crossjay is a 
 real and engaging boy, and Mrs. Mountstuart Jen- 
 kinson, though far too infallibly clever, is, as Cho- 
 rus, worthy of a place beside Mrs. Cadwallader in 
 " Middlemarch." 
 
THE NEWER FICTION 539 
 
 Here, too, as in " Kichard Feverel," there is no 
 concealment of the ethical — I should even venture 
 to add the spiritual — significance of the story as a 
 whole. Vernon Whitford is no prig ; he is simply 
 a plain man with excellent intellectual equipment, 
 high courage, and an honest conviction or two. 
 These convictions, singularly enough, seem close 
 akin to those of a Teacher Who said, " Blessed are 
 the meek," — though never, as some seem to sup- 
 pose, "Blessed are the mawkish," — and again, 
 " What is a man profited if he shall gain the whole 
 world, and lose his own soul ? " They appear, more- 
 over, to be the convictions, not of Vernon Whitford 
 merely, but of his creator and author. He does not 
 translate them into conventional relio^ious or ethical 
 speech, but in his own fashion he is ever setting his 
 readers face to face with new incarnations of their 
 truth. The men and women who people his novels 
 are characters instead of puppets ; they have wills 
 to use and use them ; choices to make and make 
 them; wherever they are, their presence is signifi- 
 cant; the scene which they people gains reality and 
 takes on meaning from them ; they dominate in- 
 stead of merely adorning it. Tragedy and comedy 
 are possible, because personality is real. The reader 
 feels the will to live, and to control circumstance in 
 the interests of the larger life of himself and his 
 fellows, refreshed in him. 
 
 This same message — if ^ message ' be not too 
 homiletic a term — is delivered by Stevenson and 
 
540 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Kipling. Neither is a great novelist. " Treasure 
 Island," the story of pure adventure, retains its pri- 
 macy for me among Stevenson's novels ; and, with 
 the exception of "Kim," Mr. Kipling can scarcely 
 be said to have written novels at all. But in both the 
 will to live appears; the dominion of man over cir- 
 cumstance asserts itself. So strong is this assertion 
 indeed that in one instance the former laid himself 
 open to criticism by seeming to dwarf a character 
 in order to give circumstance a chance.^ 
 
 It is in the essays, tales, and letters, however, 
 that Stevenson reveals the finer qualities of his 
 imagination ; to which, at the risk of being laughed 
 at, I should unhesitatingly add one of the Fables. 
 Their author suspected his possession of a special 
 gift for this sort of writing, which of itself might 
 lead us to look askance at it; and some critics 
 would gladly rule the Fables out of the canon of 
 his works. They are, to be sure, fragmentary and 
 somewhat crude ; yet " The House of Eld "remains 
 a thing of singular, though as yet half-recognized, 
 power. The casual reader may accept or reject it 
 as a grim setting forth of the burden which reli- 
 gion often lays on men ; a second glance should suf- 
 fice to show that the emphasis really falls upon the 
 inevitable affinity of the soul for faith. Religion 
 may indeed become a fetter ; in the Fable, Jack, 
 to be rid of it, slays his father, mother, and uncle. 
 
 * The younger brother in The Master of Ballantrae. Compare 
 Sir Leslie Stephen's criticism, in his essay on Stevenson. 
 
THE NEWER FICTION 641 
 
 The gyve drops from his leg; but almost in his own 
 despite he stoops, Hfts it, and lays it in his bosom. 
 As he returns along the highway, it is to discover 
 that the people whom he meets have been delivered, 
 even as he, from the shackle upon the right ankle, 
 but only to lose no time in clasping another upon 
 the left ; and to his questions they reply, " that 
 was the new wear, for the old was found to be a 
 superstition." Then he looked at them again and 
 saw that the new fetter was eating like an ulcer into 
 the left ankle, while the wound upon the right was 
 not yet healed. 
 
 Old is the tree and the fruit good, 
 Very old and thick the wood. 
 Woodman, is your courage stout ? 
 Beware ! the root is wrapped about 
 Your mother's heart, your father's bones ; 
 And like the mandrake, comes with groans. 
 
 So, in characteristically lame verse, he points his 
 fable's moral. The thing is true within the limits 
 which he sets it. Faith with its fruitage of good 
 works is for man's sustenance ; it is as germane to 
 his experience and his need as bread; yet it may be 
 treated, not as the living source of deeds, but as a 
 dead and completed system of beliefs or forms, 
 when it becomes a burden for his shoulders and a 
 shackle upon his freedom. If then he tries to get 
 rid by violence of the whole thing, behold it is only 
 to exchange a burden of formal rehgion for a bur- 
 den of superstition, or to shift a shackle from one 
 
542 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 leg to the other. Even the man who seems to suc- 
 ceed in complete emancipation, yet carries the old 
 fetter as a memento in his bosom, and sits down in 
 a lone house sometimes to weep beside the bodies 
 of those whom his iconoclastic zeal has slain. 
 
 The truth is almost savagely put in the parable ; 
 but it is echoed in more gracious terms again and 
 again in poem, essay, and letter. Stevenson was as 
 true a Scotsman as ever lived in his appetite for 
 reHgious discourse. His expression of it was of 
 course unconventional, but his taste for its sub- 
 stance was sound. 
 
 For still the Lord is Lord of might ; 
 In deeds, in deeds, he takes delight, 
 
 was, no doubt, of the essence of his faith. Yet he 
 was no mere Son of Thunder singing the praises of an 
 almighty demon of energy. There is a spirit in man, 
 born of God, which welcomes life's adventure, its 
 bitter with its sweet, confident that some secret of 
 mastery exists for such as can discern it. 
 
 His ears were always open to the more sombre 
 notes in " the still sad music of humanity " ; and in 
 the "Memoirs of an Islet" there is explicit refer- 
 ence to his youthful sensibility to the Franco-Prus- 
 sian war, then in progress, and its suggestion of 
 " that other war which is as old as mankind, and is 
 indeed the life of man : . . . the grinding slavery of 
 competition ; the toil of seventy years, dear-bought 
 bread, precarious honour, the perils and pitfalls, 
 and the poor rewards." This is exactly the vision 
 
THE NEWER FICTION 643 
 
 which seems to have driven so many generous minds 
 mad with pessimism ; but Stevenson was rescued, as 
 he thought, by his own experience of suffering and 
 acquaintance with an ever-hovering death. 
 
 "I used myself to rage when I saw sick folk 
 going by in their Bath-chairs ; since I have been 
 sick myself (and always when I was sick myself), I 
 found life, even in rough places, to have a property 
 of easiness. That which we suffer ourselves, has 
 no longer the same air of monstrous injustice and 
 wanton cruelty that suffering wears when we see it 
 in the case of others."^ 
 
 This consciousness of a something in man that 
 dominates the body and can transmute all experi- ^ 
 ence into good or ill, was part and parcel of every- 
 thing he wrote ; even his dreams were haunted by 
 it, as " Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," which was the 
 elaboration of a dream, remains to testify. This is of 
 course a latter-day echo, in rather grewsome tones, 
 of Plato's two daemons, and its essential truth to 
 experience was demonstrated b}'^ its welcome not 
 merely from those who coveted a shudder, but from 
 thoughtful folk who saw in it a mirror held up to 
 nature — a magic mirror with power to reflect even 
 the spectres which haunt our souls. 
 
 No one can read Stevenson or Kipling without 
 sharing, at least for the time, their conviction of a 
 creative and masterful power underlying appear- ^ 
 ances. Whether it be called human or divine, men- 
 
 1 Letter to William Archer, October 30, 1885. 
 
544 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 tal or spiritual, makes relatively little difference ; 
 it is characterized by a self-conscious will, which, 
 even while transcending our definitions, impinges 
 most significantly upon our experience. This makes 
 on the one hand for reverence and on the other 
 for courage, since it at once humbles and embold- 
 ens men. In Kipling, for instance, the might of 
 the sea is always asserting itself against the phys- 
 ical impotence of man, who yet overcomes and 
 subdues it to his service. He may of course be 
 physically beaten in the conflict, but, even so, wins 
 a genuine victory so long as he maintains the in- 
 tegrity of his soul. Hence the interest of both 
 writers in such adventures as Gloucester fishermen 
 or the builders of the Northern Lights experienced; 
 hence, too, Stevenson's essays " JEs Triplex " and 
 ^*The English Admirals." 
 
 Their common love of the ghostly is but a mood 
 of the same feeling for the spiritual, and ranges 
 from the horror of " Thrawn Janet" or "At the 
 End of the Passage " to the delicate beauty of 
 " The Brushwood Boy " and " They." The highly 
 figurative language of Scripture has had its way 
 with both, and both in turn have made their con- 
 tributions to the literature of devotion, Stevenson 
 in the " Vailima Prayers" and Kipling in his 
 " Recessional." 
 
 Widely as I feel compelled to differ from the 
 bitter philosophy which undermines so much of Mr. 
 
THE NEWER FICTION 545 
 
 Hardy's work, it is well-uigh as difficult to point 
 a critical pen at him as at Wordsworth himself; 
 and for a similar reason. Other writers may have 
 painted as charming landscapes, or 'described Na- 
 ture ' with as great accuracy, or framed their work 
 as elaborately in its surroundings of earth, sky, and 
 season ; but these two stand together and preeminent 
 in their identification of Nature with the lot of man. 
 When Wordsworth thinks of the sheepfold which 
 Michael reared with such painful art and finally left 
 unfinished, he sees in it something more than a pic- 
 ture of a broken life. The rough ground and waiting 
 stones seem instinct with a spirit which consorts with 
 that of the broken-hearted shepherd. So, when the 
 poet listens to the sea, it is more than a rolling and 
 breakinor surf that he hears : — 
 
 Listen ! the mighty Being is awake. 
 And doth with his eternal motion make 
 A sound like thunder — everlastingly. 
 
 In like manner Mr. Hardy, looking at the grey up- 
 land where Tess and her girl companion work in the 
 turnip-field, sees something more than the spacious 
 bleakness portending snow ; he communes with the 
 very Spirit of Winter, which not merely possesses 
 the fields but struggles for possession of the wo- 
 man's life. In " The Dynasts," a work whose gen- 
 uine power goes far toward atoning for the essential 
 feebleness and extravagance of " Jude," Mr. Hardy 
 introduces certain Phantom Intelligences who act 
 
546 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 as chorus. They comprise the Spirit of the Tears, 
 the Spirit of the Pities, with Spirits Sinister and 
 Ironic. The reader at once recognizes in them old 
 acquaintances, now for the first time, it may be, 
 acknowledged by the author himself, but who have 
 long spoken through him from their haunts in Eg- 
 don Heath, or The Chase, or the glades where the 
 Woodlanders dwelt. Yet to speak of heath and 
 glade as the haunts of these Spirits is to understate 
 the truth. Others have told us of haunted woods 
 or moors. In Mr. Hardy's work such features of the 
 landscape are bodies, half for the hiding and half 
 for the expression and achievement of these souls. 
 But they do not therefore cease to be real ; no 
 writer of recent fiction has surpassed Mr. Hardy in 
 the art of making a country-side live before the 
 reader's eye, and its very weather play upon his 
 hearthstone. 
 
 Perhaps the fact that the human experience de- 
 picted in his books is itself so often little more 
 than a sort of " cosmic weather " — either with- 
 out law or else the sport of some law the formula 
 of whose working is beyond us — has skilled him 
 in the transfusion of his scenes with atmosphere. 
 Spring, for instance, when it comes to heath and 
 moor, is by no means unconscious of its struggle 
 with hard natural conditions, and for some of us 
 gains welcome from the fact. Summer brings light 
 and warmth, to be sure, but little of that exuberant 
 lush n ess in which Richard Feverel met Lucy. It 
 
THE NEWER FICTION 547 
 
 tends as often to express itself in terms of the strong, 
 glowing weather in which Clym Yeobright cut furze 
 on Egdon Heath ; or the scene grows torrid as Mrs. 
 Yeobright takes her tragic and fatal journey across 
 the moor to her son's cottage. Autumn is, however, 
 Mr. Hardy's season. Its moods are many, but his 
 chime with them all. The sweet September weather, 
 with its " dry and rustling undergrowths of spear- 
 grass," its general sense of the fulness of time, 
 and its air of resignation, brings into his work per- 
 haps the nearest approach to peace that appears 
 there. Its sterner moods are, however, so germane 
 to his purposes that, if Autumn be his season, No- 
 vember is as certainly his month. It is in Novem- 
 ber twilight — one suspects the Saturday afternoon 
 to be an unconscious touch — that " The Return 
 of the Native " opens, and the face of Egdon Heath 
 reveals itself to us. Mr. Hardy is chary of provid- 
 ing his characters with souls ; but he is lavish in 
 furnishing them to his high places ; and the spirit 
 of Egdon Heath might fairly be called his tutelary 
 genius. Nothing could be more characteristic than 
 the three chapter headings with which this novel 
 opens : I. "A Face on which Time makes but little 
 Impression " (the face of the Heath) ; II. " Human- 
 ity appears upon the Scene, Hand in Hand with 
 Trouble " ; IE. " The Custom of the Country." 
 These three things, the grave, quiet face of Nature, 
 the trouble, to which man is born as the sparks 
 fly upward, and the established fashion of a coun- 
 
548 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 try-side, its paths, speech, traditions, — all that men 
 pass on from one generation to another to distin- 
 guish and give character to a district, — are of the 
 essence of his manner and matter both. Busy lit- 
 tle people who hurry from place to place pursuing 
 ^ local colour' might well take knowledge of him. 
 The pursuit of local colour for its own sake is as 
 futile as the pursuit of ' culture.' Neither is an en- 
 tity to be run to earth, captured, and brought home 
 in triumph. The so-called ^ local colour' of Mr. 
 Hardy is that in which experience has dyed him 
 like his own reddleman of the Heath. 
 
 A remarkable dual movement has characterized 
 the development of Mr. Hardy's art. In his abil- 
 ity to construct and tell a story, — to portray the 
 changeful face of Nature, and to reveal in it the coun- 
 terpart of man's constant struggle, with its small 
 successes and great defeats, — he has shown almost 
 uninterrupted progress ; indeed he may be said com- 
 pletely to have outgrown and sloughed off the cru- 
 dities of such early attempts as " A Pair of Blue 
 Eyes," " Two on a Tower," and " A Laodicean." 
 On the other hand, his art has deteriorated in so far 
 as he has become a well-nigh passionate preacher 
 of pessimism. One can almost count the pulpit 
 stairs as he has climbed them between " Far from the 
 Madding Crowd " and ^^ Tess." I choose "Tess" 
 rather than " Jude " to mark this climax, because 
 " Tess " is a great defiant arraignment of life and 
 its contradictions, while " Jude " is the utterance of 
 
THE NEWER FICTION 549 
 
 a preacher who has wrought himself so far beyond 
 the point of self-control as to absolve his hearers 
 from seriously weighing what he says. As this pro- 
 gress toward special and almost impassioned plead- 
 ing has gone on, two elements of Mr. Hardy's 
 power have diminished and even threatened to dis- 
 appear. One is his use of the rustic chorus ; the 
 other is his humour. In the earlier Wessex novels 
 the chorus is frequently in evidence and its humour- 
 ous philosophy always rewards the reader. Life in 
 " Far from the Madding Crowd" had its tragedies, 
 but was not yet altogether tragic. Joseph Poorgrass, 
 — the never-to-be-forgotten Joseph, who in the pas- 
 sion of his meekness rivals the curate of Asses- 
 milk-cum-Worter in the " Bab Ballads " — sums up 
 the philosophy of the book. Its closing paragraph 
 runs, — 
 
 " Then Oak laughed, and Bathsheba smiled (for 
 she never laughed readily now), and their friends 
 turned to go. ' Yes, I suppose that 's the size o 't,' 
 said Joseph Poorgrass, with a cheerful sigh as they 
 moved away ; ' and I wish him joy o* her ; though I 
 were once or twice upon saying to-day with holy 
 Hosea, in my Scripture manner, which is my sec- 
 ond nature, " Ephraim is joined to idols ; let him 
 alone." But since 'tis as 'tis, why, it might have 
 been worse, and I feel my thanks accordingly.' " 
 
 Joseph's " cheerful sigh " fairly depicts the tem- 
 per of Mr. Hardy's work at this period. Now and 
 then the cheer quite chases the clouds away, as in 
 
560 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 the series of early sketches called " Under the 
 Greenwood Tree." " The Return of the Native," 
 " The Mayor of Casterbridge," and " The Wood- 
 landers " mark the next stage. There are elements 
 of genuine tragedy in them all — tragedy of the 
 classic Greek type in " The Mayor of Casterbridge," 
 in which a strong man is overborne by Fate; 
 though Michael Henchard's strength is really physi- 
 cal rather than moral. 
 
 " The Return of the Native " and " The Wood- 
 landers " represent perhaps their author's most 
 characteristic work. As the former introduces us 
 to the great presence of Egdon Heath in Novem- 
 ber, so the latter opens " upon the lowering even- 
 ing of a by-gone winter's day." The essential 
 dignity of such children of the soil as Giles Winter- 
 borne and Marty South shows in fine contrast 
 with the moral cheapness of men like Wildeve and 
 women like Felice Charmond. Mr. Hardy rarely 
 succeeds in giving a heroine either mind or soul 
 enough to balance her big and passionate body, 
 unless she be of Marty South's humble type. The 
 women who pretend to place and power upon his 
 stage, like Felice, Bathsheba Everdene, Eustacia 
 Vye, and Tess, are cast in one mould : it is physi- 
 cally generous, almost voluptuous indeed, and the 
 passion which sways the character and so often 
 rules the story is correspondingly fleshly; some- 
 times indeed it is frankly gross. Their fate is, 
 to be sure, foreordained as certainly as the failure 
 
THE NEWER FICTION 651 
 
 of Winterborne's party : " If so 't were doomed to 
 be so," says old Creedle. But the depths of pessi- 
 mism are not yet sounded. "A soul's specific gravity 
 is permanently less than that of the sea of troubles 
 into which it is thrown/' comments Mr. Hardy, in- 
 cidentally. Hence, since men in some degree at 
 least control events, either in the interest of confu- 
 sion or of order, tragedy and comedy are still pos- 
 sible ; there is room for the rustic chorus, with its 
 note of passing events, and its humourous philoso- 
 phy. The " cheerful sigh " still finds place. 
 
 With the advent of " Tess " and " Jude," how- 
 ever, Mr. Hardy's gloom deepens. 
 
 There is a tide in the affairs of men 
 Which, taken any way you please, is bad, 
 
 once sang Mr. Kipling; and it fl^oods these two 
 books. To recur to the figure of the preacher, Mr. 
 Hardy is fairly in the pulpit at last and the text is 
 from Ecclesiastes. The chorus with its comment 
 and implication is discarded. The preacher speaks 
 directly, and with a clearness that is unmistakable. 
 There seems at first to be a deepening of the tragic 
 note; but maturer thought reveals the fact that, 
 while the superstructure of tragedy is here in richer 
 measure than ever, half its foundation has been dug 
 away. " It is then " (when the constraint of day 
 and the suspense of night neutralize each other) 
 " that the plight of being alive becomes attenuated 
 to its least possible dimensions." To such a pass has 
 
552 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Mr. Hardy come. And later on, when the black flag 
 which signalled the execution of Tess for murder 
 rose over her prison tower, he comments, " 'Justice' 
 was done, and Time, the Archsatirist, had had his 
 joke out with Tess." This is rather the tragedy of 
 a disordered liver than of a contradicted and van- 
 quished life ; for its mood is at once petulant and 
 dogmatic. 
 
 It is here that a common issue must be joined 
 with Mr. Hardy and Mr. Phillpotts. Both have 
 great gifts; both are keenly responsive to the ap- 
 peal of earth, sky, and season ; both are quick to 
 discern the humour of little incongruities and the 
 tragedy of great contradictions ; both appreciate 
 the place and play of sexual instinct, sometimes as 
 mere fleshly passion and again sublimated into a 
 love stronger than death, in human affairs ; both 
 find almost too frank a delight in dwelling upon 
 its less seemly accessories and incidents ; both have 
 shown a notable command of simple pathos in such 
 characters as Mr. Hardy's Marty South and Mr. 
 Phillpotts's Nicholas Edgecombe; both have de- 
 picted tragedy of the most genuine sort ; and each 
 has upon occasion set an obstacle in the path to 
 his own greatest achievement by assuming the dress 
 and manner of a high-priest of Fate. This special 
 pleading in Fate's behalf is strewn plenteously 
 through "Tess" and " Jude." It will be enough 
 for readers of Mr. Phillpotts to turn back to 
 "The Secret Woman" and its chapter on "The 
 
THE NEWER FICTION 553 
 
 Talking Men." But the surplusage of theology is 
 after all a minor blemish ; the larger harm befalls 
 when they introduce a malevolent Chance into the 
 place of rule in their stories and by so much sap 
 the personality of their characters. To rob a man 
 of character, by which I mean will, vital personal 
 force, and the moral power to dominate events, — 
 all, in short, that is understood by the Image of 
 God in him, — and thereby to further the dominion 
 of a malignant demon, is not the path to tragedy's 
 greater heights. Yet it is a divinity of this type who 
 shapes the ends of Jude. Tess seems a better de- 
 veloped character physically and morally, and worth 
 Fate's hunting. The episode of her undoing in the 
 Chase, although somewhat too largely dwelt upon, 
 is honest tragedy; but when it comes to the long 
 chapter of malevolent events which divorced her 
 from the man she loved and gave her over again 
 to the man she finally murdered, the note under 
 Clare's door which he must needs miss, and the 
 letter to Brazil which must needs miscarry, the dia- 
 holus ex machina becomes an obsession. 
 
 Mr. Phillpotts admirably illustrates the same ten- 
 dency in "The Secret Woman," a book which, in 
 spite of grave faults, develops a high degree of 
 tragic power; but it is tragedy which is robbed of 
 half its rights by the sheer malice of Chance. " The 
 Wind Bloweth where it Listeth " is the title of a 
 chapter in which a gust of wind shaking a case- 
 ment, and a dash of rain upon its panes, drown a 
 
554 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 wronged wife's offer of forgiveness to her erring 
 husband. He did not hear ; she supposed him to have 
 heard without any reply, and the iron fastened 
 itself deeper in her soul. A little later, while the 
 storm still raged, — a magnificent storm, for which 
 all readers who love weather for its own sake must 
 bless Mr. Phillpotts, — she, so crazed with grief and 
 anger as to be deaf in turn to his penitent words, 
 found him at the curb of the deep farm-well. Tears 
 of sorrow stood in his eyes, but these she could not 
 see; she only heard him whistling, as was his wont 
 in times of agitation. She struck him across the 
 neck, in anger certainly, but with no thought of 
 what was to ensue; when he lost his balance and 
 plunged to his death below. No paraphrase can do 
 justice to Mr. Phillpotts's narrative ; but not even 
 his ability as a narrator can hide the assumption 
 of a malevolent demon working his will upon these 
 puppets under cover of the storm. It is no mere 
 happening : the wind really bloweth not where it 
 listeth, but where this evil genius compels. Hence 
 the tragic force of the story at this point is seri- 
 ously weakened ; but swells again, not only to re- 
 ality, but to a high degree of power, as the course 
 of Ann Redvers's later life develops through re- 
 morse and pain to a penitence which leads her not 
 only to give herself up to punishment, but to labour 
 after her imprisonment is over, for the spiritual 
 recovery of her husband's paramour, Salome West- 
 away. The latter speaks : — 
 
THE NEWER FICTION 655 
 
 " ^ There are things too small for God to heed, 
 Ann. My broken life is one of them/ 
 
 "^ Never — never! All — to the pattern of the 
 frost on these dear graves — be the thought-out in- 
 vention of our God. Nought 's too small for Him, 
 Salome ; an' nought 's too great. If He 's suffered 
 even me — if He 's let the candle of hope flicker 
 even yet in my evil heart — how much more you ! 
 Be your sad soul a small thing to Him ? . . . Be- 
 lieve there 's no darkness on earth that God an' man 
 working together can't turn into light. I 've lamed 
 that ; an' I 've lamed what God's forgiveness means. 
 Ours be but the shadow of His. He comes three 
 parts of the way. The haste of God, Salome ! 
 Quicker 'n the lightning. A sigh of sorrow brings 
 Him, or one humble thought.' " 
 
 Now it chances that Mr. Phillpotts is — or re- 
 cently was — an active member of an aggressive 
 Rationalist Society ; and in justice to himself, must 
 be regarded as speaking solely in character here. 
 The fact which I wish to point out is, that for his 
 really victorious characters, — for those, that is, 
 who seem adequate to circumstance, — he still has 
 recourse to men and women of faith. Their rela- 
 tive orthodoxy or heterodoxy matters little enough. 
 Uncle Chirgwin in "Lying Prophets," Nicholas 
 Edgecombe in " The River," Ann Redvers in " The 
 Secret Woman," and Humphrey Baskerville in 
 " The Three Brothers," are all characters instead of 
 marionettes. In fiction as in life some faith or other 
 seems needful to ultimate conquest of circumstance. 
 
556 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 It is also eminently needful to humour, for rea- 
 sons that have been repeatedly indicated in the 
 foregoing chapters ; since the essence of humour 
 is a fairly confident attitude toward the confusion 
 of events. These cross-currents of experience may 
 simply amuse, they may absorb the serious atten- 
 tion, or they may threaten utter loss. The man 
 who can maintain his integrity in face of their 
 wrath because of his faith in a Power with whose 
 plan of beneficence his life is mysteriously bound 
 up, is also the man who can best afford to smile 
 at their play. Take away this man's faith in God 
 and his own soul, supply its place with a theory of 
 the malignant lordship of Chance, and his laughter 
 must lose its heartiness, while his smile fades into 
 wistfulness or scorn. 
 
 Not too much should be made of the fact that 
 the admirable choruses of Mr. Hardy and Mr. 
 Phillpotts are generally composed of simple-hearted 
 and believing men. This is of course a necessity. 
 But it is worth while to note that the rustic phi- 
 losophy which seasons these novels like salt is largely 
 a product of religious teaching and finds its best 
 expression in Scripture language. From Mr. Hardy's 
 Joseph Poorgrass, "sorrowing like a man in trav- 
 ail," to Mr. Phillpotts 's Thomas GoUop, specu- 
 lating upon his reception at the Judgement Seat 
 should he cut his throat and appear untimely like 
 one who might go to a party " afore you 'm in- 
 vited, — a very presumpshuss and pushing thing to 
 
THE NEWER FICTION 557 
 
 be sure," these men not only fall back naturally 
 upon the words and thoughts of religion to express 
 their views of life, but their humour gains a sort 
 of wholesome force from the contact. They practi- 
 cally disappear from the precincts of ^^Jude" and 
 ^' Tess," whose bitterness must be their poison ; 
 but in " The Dynasts " the reader is permitted to 
 welcome them again. Here, in his latest and in some 
 respects his noblest work, Mr. Hardy arrays a great 
 stage and summons great figures to play upon 
 it. It seems to have occurred to him that if there 
 be justification for the malignant demons who 
 haunt his later novels, an equal right exists for 
 the occasional introduction of beneficent powers ; 
 indeed, toward the close one half suspects him of 
 making room for God. He dare not go further than 
 the neuter pronoun *It' in his references to this 
 mysterious Power; but he has succeeded in creat- 
 ing men and women with enough semblance of 
 the divine image to compel events. Oddly enough, 
 he calls them puppets here, and reveals the demon 
 at whose behests they move. In " Jude " he called 
 them men and women and the malignant presences 
 were hidden. Yet in "The Dynasts" his puppets 
 prove to be men, as in "Jude" his men shrink to 
 forlorn dolls: perhaps because in "The Dynasts ' 
 he is portraying a veritable world-drama ; perhaps, 
 too, because upon and behind the curtain of events 
 there moves an Immanent Will that is already jus- 
 tifying the presage of Mr. Hardy's final Chorus. 
 
558 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 But — a stirring thrills the air 
 Like to sounds of joyance there 
 That the rages 
 Of the ages 
 Shall he cancelled, and deliverance offered from the darts that 
 
 were, 
 Consciousness the "Will informing, till It fashion all things fair ! 
 
 We have at last arrived at the end of a way some- 
 what longer than I expected upon setting out. In 
 the journey my endeavour has been, not so much to 
 prove a thesis as to point out certain things by the 
 wayside which seem to have significance and to be- 
 long together. We have seen, for instance, that a 
 time of religious revival is generally followed by a 
 period of literary activity ; and that great literature 
 relates itself by a sort of instinct to the themes of re- 
 ligion, though the relation may be byway of protest 
 or revolt instead of acceptance. Furthermore, this 
 interest in religion has shown a singular vitality, 
 despite all attempts to eradicate it by violence, to 
 starve it by neglect, to belittle it with contempt, or 
 to weaken it by patronage. James Mill, for instance, 
 was as successful as any man could hope to be in 
 treating religion as though it were a nonentity in 
 the rearing of his famous son ; but he could not 
 preclude John Mill from finally developing an in- 
 tense interest in religious problems, or from writing 
 essays in theology, which are among the most 
 memorable of his works. It has appeared, moreover, 
 that whenever new scientific theories upon questions 
 
THE NEWER FICTION 559 
 
 of human origin or destiny were developed, it has 
 been impossible to prevent a canvassing of their 
 religious significance. The literature of these sub- 
 jects, as distinguished from mere technical treatises 
 or essays upon them, has often been distinctly theo- 
 logical, — some of Huxley's " Lay Sermons," and 
 Romanes's " Candid Examination " may serve as 
 illustrations, — and has owed its appeal to the gen- 
 eral public in no small degree to this fact. 
 
 The stress of such a period of doubt and read- 
 justment has also coloured much of the century's 
 later poetry and fiction. The ever-present 'social 
 problem' can never be discussed for very long, either 
 in essay or novel, without implicating religion, and 
 no candid reader will deny the religious element in 
 works as different as Ebenezer Elliott's poems and 
 Georo:e Gissino^'s " The Nether World." I have not 
 hesitated to accord a wide range to religion here; 
 but it is no wider than the explicit definition of the 
 prophet, "to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk 
 humbly with thy God"; or than the two inclusive 
 Commandments of Christ. To have limited the scope 
 of religion to the accepted sway of any dogmatic 
 system would have been to belittle our discussion 
 beyond reason, since it has ever been a prerogative 
 of religion, as cheering to her disciples as it is vex- 
 ing to her foes, willingly to leave the forms of one 
 generation as soon as they have hardened, for some 
 more vital if not more stately mansion in the next. 
 
 I have further thought it right and germane to 
 
560 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 my theme to point out the significant number of 
 men of letters who have been bred in the homes of 
 ministers of religion, or who have received at least 
 a part of their training in preparation for the min- 
 istry. When the fact is noted that in the latter class 
 are met such diverse types as George Crabbe, Cole- 
 ridge, James Mill, Carlyle, and Kingsley, some of 
 my readers may be moved to question whether this 
 influence of religion upon letters has been for better 
 or for worse, and I have declined to dogmatize ; al- 
 though my own conviction is that here the debt of 
 literature to religion is both real and great. 
 
 No such doubt will arise, however, with reference 
 to the part which the language of religion has played 
 in the making of literature. The taste of the indi- 
 vidual author in his use of religious phrase or ref- 
 erence may be questioned,^ but the adaptation of 
 religious language to the purposes of poet, essayist, 
 historian, and novelist, when these are at their best, 
 is not to be gainsaid. No other field has proved so 
 fertile in literary allusions of universal import as the 
 Old and New Testaments. 
 
 The debt has been mutual ; and while literature 
 has gained in depth, range, and power of utterance 
 from religion, religion has as truly profited in hu- 
 manity, balance, and ability to accord its message to 
 the needs of men from the influence of letters. The 
 popular study of the Bible as literature is a product 
 
 ^ As for instance Thackeray's use of Psalm CXXVI in Henry 
 Esmond. Cf. anie^ chap. ix. 
 
THE NEWER FICTION 661 
 
 of the century which we have traversed ; in certain 
 directions the result has seemed revolutionary, and 
 has been attended by the disorder and loss always 
 incident to revolution ; but faithful men are con- 
 fident of ultimate gain, and much of this gain along 
 the lines indicated has already been realized. 
 
 Great literature can spring only from the deeper 
 experiences of life. It can gain imperishable form 
 only through high and sustained flights of the 
 trained imagination. Religion searches the depths 
 of man's heart; while at the same time it has been 
 a chief inspirer of his imagination, holding visions 
 before his eyes and fixing his thoughts upon themes 
 of origin and destiny. It has led him moreover to 
 think of these things, not as mere idle dreams or 
 curious problems, but as personal concerns of vital 
 moment. The influence of religion upon literature 
 has been great, because the experience of religion 
 has upon the whole been real. 
 
INDEX 
 
 *'A. L. 0. E.,"504. 
 
 Abraham, 17. 
 
 Accomplishment, emphasis put 
 upon, in the 19th century, 31. 
 
 Adams, Prof. G. B., his address 
 History and the Philosophy of 
 History, 495. 
 
 * Adaptation to environment,' 134. 
 
 Adonais, Shelley's, quoted, 126. 
 
 Aeschylus, animated by religious 
 idea of tragedy, 22. 
 
 Agassiz, L. J. R., 414. 
 
 Agnosticism, and agnostics, 412-415, 
 442 ; novels of, 517-524. 
 
 Alastor, Shelley's, preface to, quot- 
 ed, 118. 
 
 Alton Locke, Kingsley, 297. 
 
 Ancient Mariner, The, CoUridge's, 
 a work of genius, 84. 
 
 Anti-slavery agitation, 175. 
 
 Aphorisms, the making of, 534, 
 535. 
 
 Apologia, Newman, 196. 
 
 Archer, William, cited, 460, 489 n., 
 491 n. 
 
 Ariel and Caliban, Coleridge's crit- 
 icism upon the characters of, 107. 
 
 Arnold, Matthew, on Wordsworth, 
 61, 72; on Coleridge, 77; his 
 criticism of Byron, 106; under 
 forty when he wrote of doubt 
 and disillusion, 424; religion a 
 chief source of his inspiration, 
 431 ; compared with Clough, 431, 
 432; compared with his father, 
 432, 433 ; note of blithesomeness, 
 almost wholly lacking in his po- 
 etry, 433 ; his use of themes and 
 language of religion, 434 ; what 
 his poems represent, 435 ; reli- 
 gion in his writings, 437 ; has 
 French felicities of style, 438 ; 
 master phrase -maker, 439; his 
 mind saturated with Biblical and 
 devotional thought, 439; com- 
 
 pared with Froude, 440, 441 ; in- 
 consistency in, 442. 
 
 Arnold, Thomas, 432, 436. 
 
 'Art for art's sake,' 111. 
 
 Ashford, Isaac, in Crabbe's The 
 Parish Register, 53, 54. 
 
 Ashley, Lord, 330. 
 
 Austen, Jane, and Maria Edge- 
 worth, 242, 243 ; her gallery of 
 miniatures, 245 ; her characters 
 instinct with a real life, 246 ; tol- 
 erant of her characters, 246, 247 ; 
 the characteristics of her work 
 those which religion tends to fos- 
 ter, 248 ; her influence on Scott, 
 248, 249. 
 
 Autobiography of Mark Butherford, 
 The, 522,523. 
 
 Aylmer^s Field, Tennyson, quoted, 
 367. 
 
 Baden Powell. See Powell, Baden. 
 
 Bagehot, Walter, on the First Ed- 
 inburgh Reviewers, 127 ; his es- 
 timate of the Whig ideal, 139; 
 on the Whig aversion to mysti- 
 cism, 144, 145 ; on Jeffrey's criti- 
 cism of Wordsworth, 145 ; para- 
 phrased, 157 ; on sacred poets, 
 
 - 192; on Scott, 253, 257; on 
 Tennyson's Enoch Arden, 384 n. 
 
 Bailey, P. J., " Festus," 425, 426. 
 
 Barbauld, Mrs., Diary, quoted, 31. 
 
 Bar6re, Macaulay on, 182. 
 
 Barrie, J. M., 504. 
 
 Beagle, the, 403. 
 
 Benn, A. W., his History of English 
 Rationalism in the Nineteenth Cen- 
 tury, 185 n. ; cited, 312 n., 315 n., 
 316 , 318, 323 ; his insinuations 
 against men of science, 412 n. 
 
 Bentham, Jeremy, 312, 318. 
 
 Bible, its influence upon the na- 
 tional language and literature, 
 16, 364, 365 ; its influence on 
 
564 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Browning and Tennyson, 364-369, 
 382 ; quoted, 478. See Scripture. 
 
 Biglow Papers^ Lowell, 346, 347. 
 
 Biology, 410. 
 
 Birrell, Rt. Hon. A., Obiter Dicta 
 cited, 155 ; on Newman, 196. 
 
 Blackwood'' s, on the Conservative 
 side, 129, 131 ; writers for, 130 ; 
 early volumes of, moderate tone 
 in, 132, 133; blazed the way for a 
 fair reception for believers and 
 skeptics, 148-150. 
 
 Blake, William, mystical element 
 in, 58 ; perhaps not wholly sane, 
 58 ; his Reeds of Innocence, 59 ; 
 The Tyger, 59 ; James Thomson's 
 poem on, 59, 60. 
 
 Blunt, W. S., 488. 
 
 Book of Common Prayer, 16. 
 
 Bronte, Charlotte and Emily, 267, 
 268, 270, 271. 
 
 Brooke, Stopford A., Poetry of 
 Tennyson cited, 384 n. ; cited, 
 392 n. 
 
 Brown, T. E., his strictures on 
 Cowper, 48 n. ; his My Garden, 
 492. 
 
 Browning, Robert, quotation from, 
 on death, 349 ; compared and 
 contrasted with Tennyson, 351- 
 356, 360, 361, 365-369, 376, 386, 
 387; did not treat the English 
 language with a decent respect, 
 353, 354 ; his perverse cacopho- 
 nies, 355, 356 ; treasures some- 
 times appear in his worst verse, 
 356, 357 ; has suffered and de- 
 served much at the hands of com- 
 mentators, 357 ; his alleged ob- 
 scurity, 357; his Sordello trans- 
 lated into English by David 
 Duff, 357; Sordello could not 
 have been made an ' easy ' poem, 
 358; the key to his work, 359; 
 essentially religious, 360 ; repre- 
 sents the non-conforming ele- 
 ment in English life and verse, 
 361; cosmopolitan, 361, 362; his 
 non-conforming manner of ap- 
 proaching a subject, 363 ; his con- 
 nection with religion, 363, 364; 
 his relation to the Bible, 364- 
 369; prefigures something of 
 Pragmatism, 376 ; his pathos, 388, 
 
 389 ; religious poems, 389, 390 ; 
 Pippa Passes, 390, 391 ; his me- 
 thod in using religious and ethi- 
 cal material, 391, 392 ; reason for 
 early neglect and later vogue, 
 392 ; secret of his influence, 393. 
 
 Bryant, W. C, heir to the Puritan 
 heritage, 341,342; moved in the 
 realm of the concrete, 344, 345. 
 
 Buchanan. Robert, 488, 
 
 Bulwer-Lytton, Sir Edward, 294, 
 295. 
 
 Bunyan, John, compared with 
 Clough, 427, 428; cited, 517; a 
 living allegory, 500, 501, 
 
 Burke, Edmund, comforted by 
 Wilberforce's Practical View, 
 etc., 172 ; on Wilberforce, 173. 
 
 Burns, Robert, on Cowper's The 
 Task, 44, 45 ; inspired to sing 
 and fly, 55 ; revealed himself un- 
 reservedly in his verse, 55 ; was 
 weak, 55 ; The Cottar^s Saturday 
 Night his best poem, 55, 56 ; re- 
 ligious feeling in, 55-57 ; Long- 
 fellow's verses on, .56, 57. 
 
 Bushnell, Horace, 337^339. 
 
 Butler, Samuel, Hudibras, a bur- 
 lesque, 500, 501. ^ 
 
 Byron, Lord, combined something 
 of Mirabeau, Danton, and Napo- 
 leon in himself, 92, 93; his career 
 not to be understood apart from 
 the public of the day, 94, 95 ; pe- 
 culiarities of, 95 ; a poseur, 96 ; 
 impertinent in English Bards and 
 Scotch Reviewers, 97 ; the centre 
 of all is himself, 97 ; his cynicism 
 becomes him and is essential to 
 him, 98 ; felt the freedom of the 
 open sea, 99 ; his tragedy spoiled 
 by his element of misanthropy, 
 100 ; his shipwreck scenes, 100- 
 102; his inventiveness and ingenu- 
 ity, 103 ; tributes of Goethe, Maz- 
 zini, and Castelar to, 103 n. ; the 
 author's feelings on re-reading, 
 
 103, 104 ; use of the sneer and 
 the mocking question in Cain, 
 
 104, 105 ; an apostle of revolu- 
 tion, 105, 106 ; contrasted with 
 Shelley, 107, 108 ; the secret of his 
 perversity, 108 ; Britain neces- 
 sary to him, 362. 
 
INDEX 
 
 565 
 
 Caine, Hall, 515. 
 
 Caliban and Ariel, Coleridge's crit- 
 icism upon the characters of, 
 107. 
 
 Calvinism, and Cowper, 40, 41 ; of 
 the Evangelicals, 185 ; a trans- 
 lation of Stoicism into terms of 
 Christianity, 187 ; had been es- 
 sentially rationalistic, 343 ; dealt 
 with the race, 343 ; and George 
 Macdonald, 515-517. 
 
 Camera, may prove untruthful, 498. 
 
 Campbell, J. Dykes, on Coleridge, 
 80. 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas, his remark upon 
 Byron's death, 106 ; and Job, 
 199; on his father, 200; Swin- 
 burne on, 200 ; was selfish, 201 ; 
 on Keats, 201 ; self -conceited, 
 202 ; had little sense of gratitude, 
 202, 203; laborious, 203; affec- 
 tionate, 203 ; his honesty and 
 courage, 203, 204; hopeless to 
 try to sum him up, 205 ; impos- 
 sible to articulate his faith into a 
 system or to appraise his religious 
 influence, 206; intensely relig- 
 ious, 206 ; stood in the succession 
 of the Hebrew prophets, 207 ; 
 his vision partial, 207, 208, 211, 
 212 ; his few great principles, 
 208, 209; his teaching contrast- 
 ed with that of Scripture, 212 ; 
 reason for his biography, 213, 
 214 ; drew upon recognized forms 
 of religious experience and ex- 
 pression in the voicing of his mes- 
 sage, 214 ; his message summa- 
 rized, 215-217 ; inspired and in- 
 fluenced others, 217, 218 ; Tish- 
 bite elements in, 219; religion 
 entered into the substance of his 
 pre-natal life, 221 ; much of his 
 influence due to his evangelical 
 training, 223 ; and Ruskin, simi- 
 larity of their bringing up and 
 belief, 224, 225 ; and Mazzini,.332, 
 333; and Tennyson, Tyndall's 
 comparison of, 375. 
 
 Castelar, Emilio, on his tribute to 
 Byron, 103 n. 
 
 Cenci, The. Shelley's, quoted, 117. 
 
 Chaldee Manuscript^ a clever bit of 
 irreverence, 148, 149. 
 
 Chalmers, Thomas, on Carlyle, 213. 
 
 Chambers, Robert, his Vestigts of 
 Creation, 405. 
 
 Chaucer, relioious setting of his 
 Canterbury Tales, 500. 
 
 Chesterton, G. K., an entertaining 
 companion, but an uncertain 
 guide, 274 n. ; on Dickens and 
 Gissing, 278. 
 
 Childhood, the period of greatest 
 fears and burdens, 423, 4^. 
 
 Christian Socialism, 337. 
 
 Christian Year, 192, 193, 194. 
 
 Christianity, capable of develop- 
 ment, 317 ; the dogmatism of, ac- 
 countable in great measure for 
 religious controversy, 339; the 
 Unitarians and the orthodox, 339, 
 340 ; missionary activity, 340, 341; 
 the burden of, 373 ; its essence, to 
 interpret life's discords in terms 
 of possible harmony, 465. 
 
 Church, the nursing mother of lit- 
 erature, 25. 
 
 Church of England, and Methodism, 
 163 ; strain of, runs through Ten- 
 nyson's life and work, 360 ; liberal 
 movement within, 3:34. 
 
 Church History, Milner, 176. 
 
 Church Missionary Society, 175. 
 
 Circumstance, man's mastery of, 11, 
 13, 19. 
 
 City of Dreadful Night, The, Thom- 
 son, 474-478. 
 
 Clapham, tradition or influence, in 
 Macaulay family, 181-184; in 
 Stephen family, 184-187. 
 
 Clapham sect, the, 27; use of the 
 term, 168. 
 
 Clapham Evangelicals, their influ- 
 ence on literature, 175. 
 
 Clarke, J. F., cited, 344 n. 
 
 Clarkson, Thomas, 168. 
 
 Clergy, the training of their homes, 
 of a sort to foster literature, 25-27. 
 
 Claudian, Coleridere on, 83. 
 
 Clifford, W. K., 413. 
 
 Clough, A. H., under forty when he 
 wrote of doubt and disillusion, 
 424; embodies higher traits of 
 English character, 426; com- 
 pared with Bunyan, 427, 428; 
 lent his conscience to excess of 
 doubt, 428 ; had a trust in the 
 
566 
 
 INDEX 
 
 veracity and sanity of man's ex- 
 perience, 429 ; on doubt and faith, 
 429, 430 ; religion a chief source 
 of his inspiration, 431 ; compared 
 ■with Matthew Arnold, 431, 432. 
 
 Cobbe, Frances Power, 413. 
 
 Cobbett, William, 328, 329. 
 
 Cobden, Richard, 331. 
 
 ' Cockney School,' 130, 131. 
 
 Coleridge, S. T., the contrasts in, 77, 
 78 ; his talk, 78 ; one of the great 
 intellectual and spiritual forces 
 of his century, 79, 80 ; his influ- 
 ence in the field of poetry, 80 ; 
 still lives in works in criticism, 
 philosophy, and religion, 81; his 
 religious doctrine, 81 ; saw the 
 significance of German learning 
 for English thought, 81, 82; his 
 imagination and sympathies 
 catholic, 82; had genius for in- 
 sight, 83 ; felt the connection of 
 religion and literature, 83 ; on 
 Claudian, 83; distinguishes be- 
 tween poetry and prose, 83 ; The 
 Ancient Mariner, 84 ; reintroduced 
 atmosphere of wonder and mys- 
 tery into English verse, 84, 85 ; 
 his prose easy to comprehend, 85, 
 86 ; on Wordsworth, 86 ; his two 
 principles of criticism of Scrip- 
 ture, 87 ; had a keen sense for the 
 organic, 87 ; his attitude toward 
 the Bible, 87-89; believed that 
 investigation would strengthen 
 religious faith, 90; kept his 
 hands with neatness, 95 ; his crit- 
 icism upon the characters of Cali- 
 ban and Ariel, 107. 
 
 Comedy and tragedy, the great poet 
 sees both, 106. 
 
 Comparison, demon of, in criticism, 
 272 ; impossible where definition 
 is impossible, 273. 
 
 Conservatism, represented by the 
 Quarterly, 130 ; by Blackwood'' s, 
 131 ; true, consists in fostering vi- 
 tality, 136. 
 
 Conservatives, Liberals of early nine- 
 teenth century the true, 134 ; ul- 
 tra, their weakness lies in cyni- 
 cism and selfishness, 137. 
 
 Contrast, tendency of critics to in- 
 dulge in, 350, 351. 
 
 Conway, Moncnre, on Browning, 
 
 364 n. 
 
 Cooper, J. F., 258-260. 
 
 Cooper, Thomas, 329, 330. 
 
 Corelli, Marie, 514. 
 
 Cosmos, religion based upon faith 
 in, 9. 
 
 Cowper, William, his life, in out- 
 ward seeming, monotonous, but, 
 in reality, adventurous, 34-36 ; 
 his madness in the first place not 
 related to religion, 36 ; his letters, 
 37 ; why he took to verse, 37, 38 ; 
 The Task, 38, 39 ; quotation on, 
 39 ; his theological obsession, 40, 
 41 ; religion his blessing, 42 ; his 
 Lines to my Mother^ s Picture, 42 ; 
 his hymns, 42, 43 ; his Voltaire 
 and the Lace- Worker, 43 ; his 
 Hope, 43, 44 ; the religious ele- 
 ment in his work, 44-46 ; the poet 
 of the English Evangelicals, 45, 
 49 ; source of his sense of humour, 
 46--48; dignified little matters, 
 48; lines on Anson's sailor, 49, 
 50. 
 
 Crabbe, George, keen of observa- 
 tion, 50 ; life's highways fur- 
 nished him with tragedy and com- 
 edy, 51 ; knew the lot of the poor 
 at first hand, 51-53 ; his poetry 
 religious, 53; The Parish Register^ 
 53, 54 ; a realist, 54 ; grew grey 
 in his old age, 95, 96. 
 
 Craik, Mrs., 504. 
 
 Crauford, A. H., 494. 
 
 Criminal code, mitigation of the 
 severity of, 176. 
 
 Criticism, new, of early part of nine- 
 teenth century, 129; spirit of 
 comparison in, 272, 273, 350. 
 
 Cronwright, Mrs. See Schreiner, 
 Olive. 
 
 Cross, W. L., on Thackeray, 292. 
 
 Dante, 22, 
 
 Danton, stands for the revolutionary 
 impulse upon its destructive side, 
 91, 92. 
 
 Darwin, Charles, letter to Romanes 
 quoted, 402 ; his early life, 403 ; 
 his 'epoch-making book,' 404; 
 idea of derived species not origi- 
 nal with, 405 ; the magnitude of 
 
INDEX 
 
 667 
 
 the results of his work, 405, 406 ; 
 his self -depreciation, 407 ; his dis- 
 like of religious discussion, 408, 
 409 ; his theory involved a reli- 
 gious question, 409, 410 ; his in- 
 vestigation, as touching man, 
 found publicity and criticism, 
 411-413; hesitation of men in 
 presence of his conclusions, 414- 
 416; his doctrine not identical with 
 materialism, 416, 417. 
 
 Darwin, Erasmus, 403. 
 
 David, 18. 
 
 Davidson, John, his Ballad in Blank 
 Verse, 479-^1 ; his A Northern 
 Suburb, 481 ; his Thirty Bob a 
 Week, 483, 484. 
 
 Death, Browning on, 349. 
 
 Deland, Margaret, 507. 
 
 De Morgan, William, 509. 
 
 De Quincey, Thomas, set himself 
 definitely to the defence of current { 
 Christianity, 156 ; his eminence 
 and claim upon our memories due 
 to his mastery of rhetoric, 157 ; 
 has recourse to the Bible for the 
 language of his most splendid pe- 
 riods, 158 ; witnesses to the inter- 
 dependence of literature and re- 
 ligion, 160. 
 
 De Selincourt, Basil, cited, 468. 
 
 De Tabley, Lord, 488. 
 
 Deuteronomy quoted, 6. 
 
 Dickens, Charles, and Leigh Hunt, 
 153 ; called an idealist, but quite 
 as much a realist, 274, 275 ; the 
 appeal of religion to, 276 ; minis- 
 ters of religion in his works, 276 ; 
 unsympathetic toward asceticism, 
 277 ; eminently humane, 277 ; 
 attitude toward poverty, 277, 278 ; 
 his childlikeness, 278 ; his appeal 
 to childhood, 279-281 ; his power 
 of seizing upon salient features, 
 281 ; his lack of restraint in pa- 
 thos, 281, 282 ; his essential clean- 
 ness, 282, 283 ; his reforming pur- 
 pose, 283-285 ; gives added illus- 
 tration to the fundamentals of 
 Christ's Gospel, 285, 286; the 
 character of Dora in Copperjield, 
 388. 
 
 Dobson, Austin, 487. 
 
 Domett, Alfred, quoted, 389. 
 
 Don Juaitf Byron's, shipwreck In, 
 
 100. 
 Doubters, 423-440. 
 Douglas, James, 425. 
 Duff, David, his translation of 
 
 Browning's Sordello, 357. 
 Du Manrier, George, 508. 
 Duncan, Norman, 504. 
 Dynamic of Christianity, The, dted, 
 
 31 n., 169 n., 182 n. 
 Dynasts, The, Hardy, 545, 557. 
 
 * Early Christian' Novel, 510, 511. 
 
 Elarly Oriel School, 334. 
 
 Edgeworth, Maria, and Jane Aus- 
 ten, 242, 243 ; circumstances of 
 her life, 243, 244; her work 
 wholesome, 245 ; her influence on 
 Scott, 248, 249 ; quoted on Scott, 
 252. 
 
 Edict of Nantes, 162. 
 
 Edinburgh Review, apparent lack of 
 religious element in, 127 ; an out- 
 come of revolutionary impulse, 
 128 ; protagonist of forward-look- 
 ing criticism, 129 ; organ of the 
 new Liberalism, 131 ; early vol- 
 umes of, moderate tone in, 132 ; 
 Sydney Smith on, 140 ; religious 
 note struck in A Concise State- 
 ment of the Question regarding the 
 Abolition of the Slave Trade pub- 
 lished in, 140; its aversion to 
 mysticism, 143. 
 
 Eggleston, Edward, 507. 
 
 Egoist, The, George Meredith, 537- 
 539. 
 
 Eldon, Lord, Conservative, 135. 
 
 Eliot, George, on Cowper's The 
 Task, 45 ; the historian of con- 
 science, 302 ; the ' serious person ' 
 in fiction begins with, 303 ; her 
 humour, 305 ; her dependence for 
 material upon the characters and 
 problems of religion, 305-307; 
 her appreciation of the worth of 
 common life and sense of its 
 pathos and mystery, 308; her dis- 
 tinctively Christian note, 310 ; her 
 ' local colour,' 497, 498. 
 
 Elizabeth, Adventures in RUgen, on 
 Wordsworth's Prelude, 62. 
 
 Elliott, Ebenezer, 329, 330. 
 
 Emerson, R. W., on Hiawatha^ 73; 
 
668 
 
 INDEX 
 
 on Carlyle, 212 ; heir to the Pu- 
 ritan heritage, 341, 342; was 
 incurably relig-ious, 343, 344 ; 
 Kuskin on, 344 n. ; his artificial 
 multiplication of aphorisms just 
 tolerable, 534. 
 
 England, assimilated the results of 
 the Revolution, 328. 
 
 English language, debtor to religion, 
 16. 
 
 Enoch Arden, Tennyson, 883, 384. 
 
 Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography, 
 Sir James Stephen, 169. 
 
 Evangelicals, English, Cowper the 
 poet of, 45, 49 ; due to Wesleyan 
 origin, 163 ; to an extent carried 
 on the great Puritan tradition, 
 164 ; not lacking in humour, 167, 
 169; often caricatured, 167; 
 characterization of, 167-170 ; 
 their contribution to English lit- 
 erature is considerable, 1G8 ; al- 
 leged narrowness of, 173 ; the 
 Calvinism of, 185. See Clapham 
 Sect. 
 
 Evangeline, Longfellow, 345, 346. 
 
 Evolution, doctrine of, hesitation of 
 men in presence of, 414-416 ; not 
 identical with materialism, 416, 
 417. 
 
 Excursion, The, Wordsworth, 66, 
 68, 71, 72, 74-77. 
 
 Faber, Father, 197. 
 
 Factory acts, 176. 
 
 Fairbairn, Dr. A. M., cited, 370 n. 
 
 Faith, humour linked to, 47, 240, 
 556 ; of its essence to be con- 
 structive, 330; literature's debt 
 to, 487-494; in Phillpotts's 
 works, 555. 
 
 Family, development of the, 19. 
 
 Farrar, Dean, 504. 
 
 "Festus," Bailey, 425, 426. 
 
 Fiction, compared with history, 
 237 ; range of, wider than that 
 of any critical school or sect, 
 238 ; when honest, bears its mes- 
 sage, 238 ; becomes a craft and 
 faces the danger of '^schools,' 
 303, 497 ; ' local colour' in, 497- 
 499 ; writers of, bound to take ac- 
 count of religion, 500 ; recent, 
 601, 502 ; religious, 502-504 ; the 
 
 'Early Christian' Novel, 510, 
 
 511 ; theological, blb-b24 ; of 
 
 the ' social problem,' 524-532. 
 Fijine at the Fair, Browning, 363. 
 Fiske, John, 419, 420. 
 FitzGerald, Edward, 455-459. 
 FitzRoy, Captain, of the Beagle, 
 
 403. 
 Foreign Bible Society, 133. 
 Fox, W. J., 364. 
 Framley Parsonage, Trollope, 299, 
 
 302. 
 Freeman, Mrs. See Wilkins, Mary 
 
 E. 
 Free-will, doctrine of, 12. 
 Froude, Hurrell, 193. 
 Fronde, James Anthony, 204, 440, 
 
 441. 
 Fuller, Margaret, 2. 
 
 Galton, Francis, his studies about 
 men of genius, 25. 
 
 Gaskell, Mrs., Cranford and Mary 
 Barton, 295; religious element 
 in, 331. 
 
 Genesis, quoted, 11 ; mentioned, 17. 
 
 Genius, men of, not to be judged 
 by a special rule, 112, 113. 
 
 German language, its obligation to 
 religion, 16. 
 
 Gifford, Wm., a narrow nature, 146. 
 
 Gilder, R. W., 492. 
 
 Gisborne, Thomas, 173. 
 
 Gissing, George, 278 ; Chesterton 
 on, 278; The Nether World, 
 526-531 ; a great master of tra- 
 gedy, 530 ; the ethical and spirit- 
 ual note in his work, 531, 532. 
 
 Gladstone, W. E., Gleanings, cited, 
 143 n. 
 
 God, the name given by Man to the 
 Vital Force that dwells at the 
 source of things, 10 ; the object 
 of search of religion, 11; idea 
 of, refined and enlarged by sci- 
 ence, 420, 421. 
 
 Godwin, Mary, 314. 
 
 Godwin, William, 313-315. 
 
 Godwin, William, Jr., 314. 
 
 Goethe, J. W. von, mentioned, 21 ; 
 his faith in daemonic influence, 
 93 ; on his tribute to Byron, 103 n. 
 
 Goldsmith, Oliver, 31. 
 
 Gordon, C. W., 504. 
 
INDEX 
 
 569 
 
 Gosse, Edmnnd, on Matthew 
 
 Arnold, 4:33. 
 Gothic Scriptures, 16. 
 Grant, Anne, on Cowper, 48. 
 Gray, Asa, 419. 
 Gray, Maxwell, 508. 
 Greek polytheism, 66-68. 
 Green, J. iJ., Letters of, referred to, 
 
 In. 
 Greene, G. A., 487. 
 Grote, George, 321, 322 n. 
 Grotesque, the, worshippers of, Poe 
 
 the high-priest of, 261 ; smacks 
 
 of humour or of horror, 264, 265 ; 
 
 of terror, grimness which verges 
 
 upon, in works of Charlotte and 
 
 Emily Bronte, 267. 
 
 Hampden, R. D., 334. 
 
 Hardy, Thomas, his later novels 
 lacking in humour, 47, 549, 557 ; 
 identifies nature with the lot of 
 man, 545 ; his Spirits, 545, 546 ; 
 The Dynasts, 545, 557 ; the at- 
 mosphere of his scenes, 546-548 ; 
 has outgrown his crudities, but 
 has become more pessimistic, 548, 
 649 ; his use of rustic choruses 
 and his humour have decreased, 
 549, 557; The Return of the 
 Native and The Woodlanders re- 
 present his most characteristic 
 work. 550, 551 ; Tess and Jude, 
 551, 552 ; compared with Phill- 
 potts, 552 ; his introduction of a 
 malevolent chance, 553 ; religfion 
 in, 556. 
 
 Harraden, Beatrice, 520. 
 
 Harte, Bret, 507. 
 
 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, his work not 
 unreal, 269 ; mystery an essential 
 element in his work, 269 ; takes 
 little heed of stage properties, 
 270 ; teaches that true life is to 
 be expressed in terms of the 
 spirit, 271 ; heir to the Puritan 
 heritage, 341, 342. 
 
 Hay, John, 524. 
 
 Hazlitt, Wm., on the French Revo- 
 lution, 129; marked by more un- 
 lovely Unitarian characteristics, 
 150 ; had a measure of truly dis- 
 cerning liberality, 151 ; had a 
 mordant, atrabilious temper, 152. 
 
 Hebrew prophet. See Prophet, 
 
 Hellas, Shelley's chorus from, 125. 
 
 Henderson , Mrs. M. S., cited, 468 n. 
 
 Henley, W. E., quoted, 458, 459; 
 his defiant attitude toward Fate, 
 485, 486 ; his bumptiousness of 
 self-assertion, 516. 
 
 Henslow, J. S., Professor of Botany, 
 403. 
 
 Hiaicatha, Longfellow, 345, 346. 
 
 Historians, must interpret as well as 
 depict, 496. 
 
 History, compared with the novel, 
 237. 
 
 Holland, J. G., 503. 
 
 Holmes, O. W., heir to the Puritan 
 heritage, .341, 342. 
 
 House of Eld, The, Stevenson, 540- 
 542. 
 
 Howells, W. D., on Scott, 251 ; as a 
 depicter of New England life, 505. 
 
 Humour, and melancholy, associa- 
 tion between, 46 ; in Hardy, 47, 
 549, 557 ; linked to faith, 47, 240, 
 556 ; not lacking in the Puritan 
 character, 164-167 ; a quick sense 
 of life's lesser incongruities, 239 ; 
 man of, sometimes depressed, 241; 
 a comprehensive term, 241 ; minis- 
 ters to faith and becomes an ally of 
 religion, 242 ; in George Eliot, 305. 
 
 Hunger, a theme of religion and 
 literature, 19. 
 
 Hunt, Leigh, a radical, 152 ; illus- 
 trates that grace which sufFereth 
 long and is kind, 153. 
 
 Hutchinson, Colonel, no morose sti- 
 fler of mirth, 165. 
 
 Hutton, R. H., cited, 94 n., 241 n. ; 
 on Clough, 426. 
 
 Huxley, T. H., his prominence and 
 influence partly due to fact that 
 he became a theologian, 24, 25 ; 
 quoted, 409, 413, 416, 417; a 
 theological controversialist of the 
 keenest type, 413, 414; on doc- 
 trine of Evolution, 416, 417 ; dis- 
 claimed materialism, 418. 
 
 Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, Shel- 
 ley's, quoted, 120, 121. 
 
 Hypatia, Kingsley, 298. 
 
 Idealism, influence upon literature, 
 341. 
 
570 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Idylls, Tennyson, 378-383. 
 Imlay, Fanny, 314. 
 In Memoriam, Tennyson, 374-377. 
 Industrial centres, large ideas often 
 
 find welcome in, 512. 
 Inspiration, of the Old Testament, 
 
 17, 18 ; of the Bible, Coleridge's 
 
 view of, 87-89. 
 
 Jacob, 17. 
 
 James, Henry, as a depicter of New 
 
 England life, 505. 
 James, William, 427. 
 Jane Eyre, Bronte, 267. 
 Jeffrey, Francis, on Wordsworth, 
 
 144, 145. 
 Jewett, Sarah Orne, 506. 
 John Inglesantf Shorthouse, 511, 
 
 513, 514. 
 Johnson, Samuel, 23. 
 Jones, Ernest, 424. 
 Jones, Professor Henry, 218. 
 Jowett, Benjamin, 334. 
 Jungle, The, Sinclair, 524. 
 
 Keats, John, on Bums, 55 ; Carlyle 
 on, 201. 
 
 Keble, John, 191, 192, 194, 195. 
 
 King James Version of the Bible, 16. 
 
 Kingsley, Charles, thought of as an 
 essentially virileperson, 296 ; emo- 
 tional in the best sense, 297 ; 
 Yeast and Alton Locke, 297, 298 ; 
 Hypatia and Westward Ho ! 298 ; 
 Two Years Ago, 298 ; his place in 
 literature due greatly to his ap- 
 preciation of vitality of religion, 
 299 ; religion in, 331. 
 
 Kingsley, Henry, 296. 
 
 Kipling, Rudyard, quoted, 69,161 ; 
 gives evidence of the vigour which 
 faith lends to poetry, 489, 492, 
 493 ; not a great novelist, 540 ; in 
 him the will to live appears, 540 ; 
 has conviction of power under- 
 lying appearances, 543, 544 ; his 
 love of the ghostly, 544 ; has con- 
 tributed to the literature of devo- 
 tion, 544. 
 
 Lamb, Charles, best-loved figure in 
 English letters, 154 ; a seamy side 
 to his life, 154 ; his works have an 
 undercurrent of influence towaxd 
 
 the cherishing of the gfreat Chris- 
 tian graces, 155. 
 
 Lang, Andrew, on Lowell, 348 n. ; 
 on the ' Early Christian ' Novel, 
 511. 
 
 Language, development of, through 
 religion, 16; of religion, part it 
 has played in the making of litera- 
 ture, 560. 
 
 Laws of Nature, 418. 
 
 Lays of Ancient Bomef Macaulay, 
 181. 
 
 Le Conte, cited, 414 n. ; popularizer 
 of evolution, 419, 420. 
 
 Le Gallienne, Richard, cited, 468. 
 
 Liberalism, represented by the 
 Edinburgh, 131. 
 
 Liberals of early nineteenth cen- 
 tury, the true Conservatives, 134. 
 
 Literature, great, takes account of 
 the Universe, 1 ; and religion, old 
 and dear companions, 2 ; cry for 
 a national, 5 ; close relation be- 
 tween religion and, 13, 18; de- 
 pends upon vision and sympathy, 
 but deals with the matters of the 
 common day, 13 ; a gift of the 
 imagination, 13, 14 ; the Scriptures 
 as, 16 ; love how related to, 18-21 ; 
 religion sometimes the chief ma- 
 terial of, 22, 23; of implicit or 
 avowed unbelief, relation to reli- 
 gion, 23-25; precedent influence 
 of religion upon, 25-28 ; relation 
 between the office of the minister 
 of religion and the production of, 
 25-27 ; activity in, often follows 
 religious revival, 558 ; great, can 
 spring only from the deeper ex- 
 periences of life, 561. 
 
 Literature, English, of the nineteenth 
 century, its range and wealth enor- 
 mous, 4; its public numerically 
 great, with keen, facile mind, 4, 5 ; 
 includes the product of America, 
 as well as that of England, 5, 6 ; in 
 the eighteenth and nineteenth cen- 
 turies, characteristics of, 30, 31 ; 
 great, product of earlier half of the 
 century, 32 ; influence of religion 
 upon, as seen in Cowper, 4CM8, 
 60 ; in Crabbe, 53, 60 ; in Bums, 
 56, 57, 60; in Blake, 58, 59, 60; 
 in Wordsworth, 66-77; in Cole- 
 
INDEX 
 
 571 
 
 ridge, 79-90; in Shelley, 120- 
 126 ; in De Quincey, 158-160; in- 
 fluence of Claphara Evangeli- 
 cals on, 175 ; significance of Chris- 
 tian missions to, 179, 340, 341 ; 
 place which the Tractarian Move- 
 ment occupies in, 192-198 ; abun- 
 dance of material in mid-Victorian 
 years, 350, 351 ; and religion, con- 
 tact between, in Browning and 
 Tennyson, 364-369 ; part the lan- 
 guage of religion has played in 
 the making of, 560 ; religion has 
 profited from, 560, 561. 
 
 * Local colour,' 497-i99, 548. 
 
 London, Jack, 524. 
 
 London Magazine, writers for, 130 ; 
 of radical tendency, 131. 
 
 Longfellow, H. W., his verses on 
 Burns, 56, 57 ; heir to the Puri- 
 tan heritage, 341, 342 ; the do- 
 mestic character of his poems, 
 344-346 ; a deft craftsman, 345. 
 
 Love, how related to religion and 
 literature, 18-21 ; orig^ and de- 
 velopment of, 19-21. 
 
 Lowell, J. R., heir to the Puritan 
 heritage, 341, 342 ; moves in realm 
 of concrete, 344 ; shrewd, hu- 
 mourous, and right-minded, 346 ; 
 the ethical import of his writings 
 was the natural expression of his 
 convictions, 347 ; the secret of the 
 ethical import of his writings, 
 348. 
 
 Lucian, his claim to remembrance, 
 24. 
 
 Lucretius, verses on, 22. 
 
 Luther, Martin, 16. 
 
 Lyell, Sir Charles, letter of Darwin 
 to, quoted, 405. 
 
 Macaulay, T. B., and Wordsworth's 
 Preludej 62 ; his literary fame, 
 180, 181; extent to which the 
 Clapham tradition or influence 
 is traceable in, 181-183 ; quoted, 
 182, 18S ; on Jane Austen, 246. 
 
 Macaulay, Zachary, 174. 
 
 MacCunn, John, cited, 322 n., 331 n. 
 
 Macdonald, George, 515-517. 
 
 Mackail, J. W.. on Ruskin, 232, 233. 
 
 Mackay, Charles, 425. 
 
 Malet, Lucas, 508. 
 
 Mallock, W. H., his recipe for writ- 
 ing a Satanic poem, 97. 
 
 Man, and Nature, belong to each 
 other, 9; his life work, 11; his 
 mastery of circumstances, 11, 13 ; 
 refuses to be permanently sub- 
 jugated by the Universe, 11 ; his 
 littleness and greatness, 15 ; sci- 
 ence has improved his estimate of 
 himself, 421, 422. 
 
 Manly, Prof. J. M., on Qeorge Mere- 
 dith, 534 n. 
 
 Mansel, H. L., his Bampton Lec- 
 tures, 334. 
 
 Marmontel, J. F., Memoirs, 324,325. 
 
 Marryat, Captain, 258-260. 
 
 Marshall, Archibald, 508. 
 
 Martineau, James, 337-339. 
 
 Martyn, Henry, 174, 178, 179, 180. 
 
 Mary Barton, Mrs. Gaskell, 295. 
 
 Mas&on, Prof., on Kingsley, 299. 
 
 Materialism, 416-418. 
 
 Matthews, Brander, on Scott, 252 ; 
 on Hawthorne and Poe, 271. 
 
 Maurice, Frederick Denison, his 
 preference for the word ' theo- 
 logy,' 335 ; the heir of Coleridge 
 in things religious and philosophi- 
 cal, 335 ; his gospel, 335, 336 ; let- 
 ter to his mother, 336 ; a chief 
 power in the " Christian Social- 
 ism " movement, 337. 
 
 Mazzini, on the study of astronomy, 
 1 ; his tribute to Byron, 103 n. ; his 
 radicalism, 331, 332 ; " God and 
 the People," his creed, 332 ; and 
 Carlyle, 332, 333 ; the ethical and 
 religious complexion of his writ- 
 ings, 333 ; on religion, 454. 
 
 McGiffert, Prof. A. C, cited, 526 n. 
 
 Melancholy, and humour, associa- 
 tion between, 46. 
 
 Meredith, George, one of the great 
 masters of life's secrets, 462 ; his 
 literary style, 463 , his sanity in 
 ethics and religion, 464, 465 ; 
 Modern Love, 465, 466 ; Jump-to- 
 Glory Jane, 466-468 ; " erotic eso- 
 tery," 472; his prose has same 
 characteristics as his poetry, 533 ; 
 his artificial multiplication of 
 aphorisms intolerable, 534, 535; 
 his tendency to overdo, 535 ; Rich- 
 ard Feverel, 534-537 ; a great ere- 
 
572 
 
 INDEX 
 
 ator of character, 535 ; The Egoist, 
 537-539. 
 
 Methodism, too often known by its 
 accidents rather than its essence, 
 161 ; a sense in which the Church 
 of England is the mother of, 163; 
 originated Evangelical move- 
 ment, 163. 
 
 Meynell, Mrs., quoted, 386, 488. 
 
 Mill, James, 311, 312, 318, 319. 
 
 Mill, J. S., an heir to atheism, 318, 
 321 ; his education, 319, 320 ; illus- 
 trates the fascination of religion 
 for the human mind, 321 ; saw 
 that there is an experience of the 
 heart as well as of the head, 322 ; 
 did not truckle to popular opinion, 
 323 ; his spiritual crisis, 324 ; used 
 forms of religious expression, 324, 
 325 ; and Marmontel's Memoirs, 
 324, 325 ; his marriage, 325, 326 ; 
 his Three Essays on Religion, 326 ; 
 finds a place for religion, 326, 
 327 
 
 Milman, H. H., 334. 
 
 Milner, Isaac, 168. 173, 176. 
 
 Milner, Joseph, his Church History, 
 176. 
 
 Milton, John, mentioned, 18 ; his 
 purpose in Paradise Lost was to 
 justify the ways of God to man, 
 22. 
 
 Ministers of religion, relation be- 
 tween their office and the produc- 
 tion of literature, 25-27, 560. 
 
 * Minor poetry,' 460, 461. 
 
 Mirabeau, represents the better ele- 
 ment of the Past, 91. 
 
 Misanthropy, incompatible with 
 genuine tragedy, 100. 
 
 Missionary activity, 340, 341. 
 
 Missions, significance to literature, 
 179. 
 
 Moody, William Vaughn, 486. 
 
 Morley, Lord, on Byron, 105, 106 ; 
 on Mill's Three Essays on Religion, 
 326. 
 
 Monis, William, 450-454. 
 
 Moses, 17. 
 
 Mozley, Thomas, Reminiscences, 193. 
 
 Munger, T. T., on the Christian 
 value of literature, 21 ; quoted, 
 on Hawthorne, 271. 
 
 Myers, F. W. H., quoted, 386. 
 
 Mystery, in Poe, 266 ; in Haw- 
 thorne, 269. 
 
 Mysticism, element of, in William 
 Blake, 58 ; of Wordsworth, 65 ; 
 Whig aversion to, 143-145 ; and 
 mystics, 441-450, 455, 456, 514. 
 
 Napoleon, the soldier and builder, 
 92. 
 
 Nature, and Man, belong to each 
 other, 9 ; elemental forces of, 
 must serve man, 11. 
 
 Necessitarianism, in Thomson, 479. 
 
 Nether World, The, Gissing, 526- 
 531. 
 
 New England, novelists who depict 
 the life of, 505, 506. 
 
 Newman, Cardinal, cited, 161 n., 
 168 n.; an immediate link between 
 the Tractarians and the Evangel- 
 icals, 189, 190 ; character of, 191, 
 192, 194; his poetry, 195; his 
 prose, 195, 196 ; on Carlyle, 213. 
 
 Newton, John, and Cowper, 40, 41. 
 
 Nichol, John, cited, 93 n., 203 n., 
 224 n.; quoted, 211. 
 
 Novel, compared with history, 237. 
 See Fiction. 
 
 Omar Khayyam, FitzGeraJd, 455, 
 
 457. 
 
 Ordeal of Richard Feverel, The^ 
 George Mereditli, 534-537. 
 
 Orr, Mrs. Sutherland, cited 364 n. 
 
 Overton, Canon, on the religious ele- 
 ment in Cowper, 45, 46. 
 
 Oxford Movement, essentially ro- 
 mantic, 188; its place in English 
 letters, 192-198. 
 
 Paine, Thomas, his name associ- 
 ated with religion, 24. 
 
 Pantheism, 66. 
 
 Pascal, Thoughts, quoted, 16 n. 
 
 " Passion of the Past," 385, 387, 450, 
 451. 
 
 Pater, Walter, 511. 
 
 Paul, Herbert, Stray Leaves, 309 n. 
 
 Paul, Kegan, 314 n. 
 
 Pessimism, 474-484. 
 
 Phillips, Stephen, 490, 491. 
 
 Phillpotts, compared with Hardy, 
 552 ; his introduction of a male- 
 volent chance, 553, 554; The 
 
INDEX 
 
 573 
 
 Secret Woman, 553-555 ; the part 
 that faith plays in his works, 555- 
 557. 
 
 Pippa Passes, Browning, 390, 391. 
 
 Pitt, William, 170. 
 
 Poe, E. A., his character, 260, 201 ; 
 his personal attitude toward faith, 
 261 ; the high-priest of all who 
 worship the grotesque, 261 ; his 
 work a religious apologetic, 262 ; 
 his tales without hope, but full 
 of a haunting fear, 265-267 ; his 
 mastery of mechanism, 269, 270, 
 271. 
 
 Poet, the great, sees both the tra- 
 gedy and the comedy, 106, 107. 
 
 Polytheism, Greek, 66-68. 
 
 Pope, Alexander, 22, 23. 
 
 Powell, Baden, 334, 405. 
 
 Pragmatism, 376, 392. 
 
 Pre-Raphaelites, 443, 449. 
 
 Priestley, Joseph, 312, 313. 
 
 Prometheus Unbound, Shelley% not 
 a poem of negation, 122-124. 
 
 Prophecy, spirit of, active in the 
 world's affairs in first half of nine- 
 teenth century, 33. 
 
 Prophets, Hebrew, rarely qualified 
 their statements and, therefore, 
 often seemingly contradictory, 
 209-211. 
 
 Psalms, quoted, 14, 15. 
 
 Puritanism, of Emerson, Bryant, 
 and others, 341, 342, 347- 
 
 Puritans, by no means without a 
 sense of humour, 164-167 ; the 
 realities of their life were solemn, 
 164, 165 ; understood with diffi- 
 culty by Scott, 254 ; Scott's de- 
 piction of, 256, 257. 
 
 Quarterly Peview, apparent lack of 
 religious element in, 127; pro- 
 tagonist of reactionary criticism, 
 129 ; champion of high Tory faith 
 in Church and State, 130 ; early 
 volumes of, moderate tone in, 132, 
 133 ; contributors expressed reli- 
 gion in conventional form, 145. 
 
 Radicalism, of Mazzini, 332 ; coun- 
 terpart of, within the Church of 
 England. 3:^; of Bushnell and 
 Martineau, oSS, 339. 
 
 Radicals, the mere, in danger of 
 falling in love with change for 
 its own sake, 136-138 ; their views 
 and practice, 138. 
 
 Rationalism, of the Evangelicals, 
 185; its assault upon religion, 
 316-318. 
 
 Reade, Charles, 299. 
 
 Religion, and literature, old and 
 dear companions, 2 ; the last cen- 
 tury a time of theological revolu- 
 tion, 2, 3 ; science takes account 
 of, 3, 4 ; derivation of the word, 
 6, 7 ; increase of the content of 
 the word, 7; its characteristics, 7, 
 8; binds the incidents of man's 
 life into a vital whole, 7 ; speaks 
 many languages, and a joy to such 
 as heed its message, 8 ; believes 
 in and proclaims the Universe, 9 ; 
 seeks and follows God, 11 ; calls 
 men to a consideration of the 
 greatness of their life upon the 
 earth, 12; its understanding of 
 salvation, 12, 13; depends upon 
 vision and sympathy, but deals 
 with the matters of the common 
 day, 13 ; close relation between 
 literature and, 13, 14, 18, 22 ; a 
 gift of the imagination, 13, 14; 
 and development of language, 
 16 ; human love how related to, 
 18-21 ; sometimes the chief ma- 
 terial of literature, 22, 23; re- 
 lation of literature of implicit 
 or avowed unbelief to, 23-25; 
 precedent influence of, upon lit- 
 erature, 2.5-28; element of, in 
 Cowper, 40-48, 60 ; in Crabbe. 53, 
 60 ; in Burns, 56, 57, 60 ; in Blake, 
 58, 59, 60; connection of, with 
 literature, in Wordsworth, 66-77 ; 
 in Coleridge, 79-90; in Shelley, 
 120-126; questions of, moder- 
 ately touched upon in early vol- 
 umes of the Reviews, 131-134; 
 note of, struck in the Edinburgh, 
 140 ; part of the Tory stock in 
 trade, 14.5 ; in words and thoughts 
 of Southey, 148 ; and the Chaldee 
 Manuscript, 148, 149 ; of De Quin- 
 cey, 158-160 ; revival of, under 
 Wesley, 161 ; Clapham and Ox- 
 ford Movements, 161-198 ; of Car- 
 
674 
 
 INDEX 
 
 lyle, 206; of Scott, 253, 254; 
 office of, to reassure, 263 ; always 
 makes for courage, 263 ; appeal 
 of, to Dickens, 276 ; of Kingsley, 
 298, 331; of Trollope, 300; of 
 George Eliot, 302-310 ; the ration- 
 alist's assault upon, 316-318; in 
 Mrs. Gaskell, 330 ; Mazzini's, 332, 
 333; of Maurice, 334-336; of 
 Bushnell and Martineau, 338, 339; 
 religious controversy due in great 
 measure to the dogmatism of 
 Christianity, 339 ; attitude of the 
 orthodox, 340 ; missionary activ- 
 ity, 340, 341 ; and literature, con- 
 tact between, in Browning and 
 Tennyson, 364-369 ; value of, to 
 Browning and Tennyson, as poets, 
 369 ; and science, can live to- 
 gether, 400, 401 ; has a keen ear 
 for life's discords, 465 ; unrest in, 
 largely due to many new undi- 
 gested discoveries, 525 ; note of, 
 in George Meredith, 535, 539 ; in 
 Stevenson, 540-544; in Phillpotts, 
 555-557 ; in Hardy, 556 ; revival 
 of, generally followed by period 
 of literary activity, 558; science 
 has sometimes given rise to dis- 
 cussions about, 558, 559 ; ' social 
 problem ' implicates, 559 ; wide 
 range accorded to, in this book, 
 559 ; ministers of, men of letters 
 bred in the homes of, 560; lan- 
 guage of, part it has played in the 
 making of literature, 560; has 
 profited by its connection with 
 literature, 560, 561 ; reason for 
 its influence upon literature, 561. 
 
 Renan, J. K, 511. 
 
 Hevelation, capable of development, 
 317. 
 
 Revivals, religious, 161, 162, 558. 
 
 Revolt of Islam, The, Shelley's, 
 quoted, 119. 
 
 Revolution, French, three types of 
 men in, 91, 92 ; either inspired or 
 necessitated the literary awaken- 
 ing of which the Edinburgh, etc., 
 were the fruit, 128 ; seems to have 
 BufPered a sea-change in crossing 
 the channel, 128 ; Hazlitt on, 129. 
 
 Robert Elsmere, Mrs. Humphry 
 Ward, 617-519. 
 
 Roberts, C. G. D., 488. 
 
 Robinson, A. Mary F., Madame 
 Darmesteter, 482. 
 
 Robinson, Crabb, quoted, 315. 
 
 Roe, E. P., 503. 
 
 Rogers, Samuel, anecdote of, 322 n. 
 
 RoUeston, Mr., 486. 
 
 Romanes, George John, goes to 
 Cambridge and becomes a Dar- 
 winian, 394 ; his Physiological Se- 
 lection, 395 ; as a man, 395 . his 
 loss of faith, 396, 397 ; further 
 change of view and last years, 
 398, 399 ; his experience typical, 
 399 ; letter of Darwin to, quoted, 
 402. 
 
 Ross, G. A. Johnstone, cited, 454 n. 
 
 Rossetti, Christina, 443, 446-448. 
 
 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 449, 450. 
 
 Ruskin, John, gently reared, 220; 
 middle-class in origin, 220 ; more 
 gracious than Carlyle in the gen- 
 eral tenor of his message, 221 ; 
 religion entered into the substance 
 of his pre-natal life, 221 ; religious 
 home training, 221, 222 ; his own 
 testimony to the work of his re- 
 ligious home training, 222 ; much 
 of his influence due to his evan- 
 gelical faith, 233 ; and Carlyle, 
 similarity of their bringing up 
 and belief, 224, 225 ; his preach- 
 ing, grotesque, exaggerated, emo- 
 tional, 226 ; commonly taken for 
 granted that his doctrine lacked 
 continuity and system, 226 ; true 
 to guiding principles, 227 ; in ac- 
 cord with doctrine of personality, 
 227, 230, 232; his doctrine of 
 greatness of style in art, 228-230 ; 
 Unto this Last, and Munera Pul- 
 veris, 231 ; resigns himself to the 
 prophet's fate, 232 ; has always 
 the manner of a sincere man, 233 ; 
 his frankness, 233 ; his sense of 
 humour, 234 ; an effective preach- 
 er, 235 ; on Emerson, 344 n. 
 
 Russell, G. W. E., cited, 142 n., 143 
 n., 442 n. 
 
 Ruth, 17. 
 
 Rydberg, Victor, 511. 
 
 Saintsbury, Prof. G. E. B., on Byron, 
 
 96, 104. 
 
INDEX 
 
 575 
 
 Salvation, religion has much to say 
 upon, 12 ; a possession of the 
 place and power of mastery which 
 belong to man of right, 12 ; how 
 attained, 13 ; means mastery of 
 circumstance, 19. 
 
 Saul, 18. 
 
 Schelling, quoted, 370. 
 
 * Schools ' of literature, 497. 
 
 Schreiner, Olive, 520-522. 
 
 Science, takes account of religion, 
 3, 4 ; has resolved the contradic- 
 tions of the Greek polytheism, 67 ; 
 and religion, can live together, 
 400, 401 ; great popularizers of, 
 always in some degree theolo- 
 gians, 419; idea of God refined 
 and enlarged by, 420, 421; has 
 improved man's estimate of him- 
 self, 421, 422 ; has sometimes 
 given rise to religious discussions, 
 558, 559. 
 
 Scott, Sir Walter, on Coleridge, 79, 
 80 ; his lameness, 95 ; on Byron, 
 101 ; his indebtedness to Maria 
 Edge worth and Jane Austen, 248, 
 249; not a reactionary, 250; a 
 believer, 251 ; a ' maker,* 251 ; 
 Howells' criticism of, 251 ; Bran- 
 der Matthews on, 252 ; Bagehot's 
 criticism of, 253, 257 ; his religion, 
 253, 254 ; understood the Puritan 
 with difficulty, 254 ; made Puri- 
 tan and Covenanter types ex- 
 treme, 255 ; discerned the source 
 of his country's power, 256 ; his 
 depiction of the Puritan, 256, 
 257 ; his world essentially divine, 
 257, 258. 
 
 Scripture, extraordinary literary 
 quality of, 16 ; the inerrancy of, 
 a superstition, in Coleridge's time, 
 86; Coleridge's attitude toward, 
 87-89. See Bible. 
 
 Seeley, J. R., on Carlyle, 207. 
 
 Shairp, J. C, cited, 84 n. 
 
 Shakespeare, William, 362, 535. 
 
 Sharp, William, cited, 349, 365; 
 quoted, 358. 
 
 Sharpe, Granville, not narrow, 173 ; 
 his exposition of apocalyptic 
 Scriptures, 177 ; his contributions 
 to history and literature, 177. 
 
 Shaw, Bernard, cited, 531. 
 
 1 Shelley, P. B., contrasted with By- 
 
 ! ron, 107, 108 ; an iconoclast among 
 social conventions, 108 ; his essen- 
 tial rightness of purpose, 109; 
 carried the Protestant spirit to 
 its extreme, 109; could not sus- 
 pend his judgement, 109; his 
 relations to Harriet Westbrook 
 and Mary Godwin, 110; a great 
 poet in spite of his morals. 111 ; 
 morally and physically coura- 
 geous, 113; pure in thought and 
 life, 114, 115; loved sports, but 
 reckless and somewhat inefficient, 
 114 ; anecdote of his getting be- 
 yond his depth in Arno, 115 ; not 
 to be judged by ordinary stan- 
 dards, 115; believed that facts of 
 experience must be faced, 115; 
 his claim to the possession of 
 reverence, subject of conflicting 
 testimony, 116; had little sym- 
 pathy with custom, 117; his posi- 
 tive doctrine, 118; the regenera- 
 tion of mankind, subject of his 
 contemplation, 118; his descent 
 upon Ireland, 119; his testimony 
 to the place and power of religion, 
 120-126 ; had sense of largeness 
 and seriousness of life, 120 ; had 
 sense of ultimate wholeness and 
 integrity of life, 121 ; Prometheus 
 Unbound not a poem of negation, 
 122-124; chorus from Hellas, 125. 
 
 Ships that Pass in the Night, Harra- 
 den, 520. 
 
 Shirley, Bronte, 267. 
 
 Shore, John, Lord Teignmouth, 
 174, 177, 178. 
 
 Shorthouse, on humour, 241 ; cited 
 on Thackeray's illustrations, 293 
 n. ; John Inglesant, 511, 513, 514. 
 
 Sienkiewicz, Henryk, 511. 
 
 Simeon, Charles, mentioned, 168; 
 Sir James Stephen on, 175; his 
 works, 176. 
 
 Sin, an interruption of the natu- 
 ral relation between man and 
 God, 12. 
 
 Sinclair, Upton, The Jungle, 524. 
 
 Small things, worth of, 13. 
 
 Smith, Sydney, on the Edinburgh, 
 140; a sort of Greatheart, 141; 
 his passion for righteousness and 
 
676 
 
 INDEX 
 
 fairness, 142; might be called 
 buxom, 142 ; had deep element of 
 spiritual and ethical conviction, 
 148 ; failed to respond to the he- 
 roic adventure of the early for- 
 eign missionaries, 144 ; cited, 168. 
 
 * Social problem,' 524-532, 559. 
 
 Sophocles, animated by religious 
 idea of tragedy, 22. 
 
 Sordello, Browning, 357-360. 
 
 Southey, Robert, played a larger 
 part in the literary history of his 
 period than it is easy to realize, 
 146 ; patient, unselfish, devoted, 
 147 ; could perceive and appre- 
 ciate the better side of men, 147 ; 
 religion recognized in all he 
 thought and wrote as great and 
 vital concern in life, 148. 
 
 Spencer, Herbert, central thought 
 of his philosophy foreshadowed 
 in early works, 405. 
 
 Spenser, Edmund, 22. 
 
 Stanley, A. P., 334. 
 
 Stanley, Sir Henry M., 372. 
 
 Stephen, FitzJames, Clapham heri- 
 tage in, 184, 186, 187. 
 
 Stephen, Sir James, his portrayal of 
 the Evangelicals, 169 ; his liter- 
 ary style, 169 n. ; on Henry Thorn- 
 ton, 171 ; on Charles Simeon, 175. 
 
 Stephen, Sir Leslie, on his father's 
 literary style, 169 n. ; Clapham 
 heritage in, 184, 186, 187 ; on the 
 intellectual wealth of the nine- 
 teenth century, 311; Lowell's re- 
 marks on reading his English. 
 Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 
 348 ; on Stevenson, 540 n. 
 
 Stevenson, R. L., on the contrast in 
 Man, 15 ; his testimony to the ne- 
 cessity of faith, 492, 493 ; not a 
 g^eat novelist, 540; in him the will 
 to live appears, 540 ; The House 
 of Eld, 540-542 ; religious note 
 in, 540-542 ; his ears open to ' the 
 still sad music of humanity,' 542, 
 543; his consciousness of some- 
 thing in man that dominates the 
 body, 543 ; has conviction of 
 power underlying appearances, 
 543, 544 ; his love of the ghostly, 
 544 ; has contributed to the liter- 
 ature of devotion, 544. 
 
 Stillman, W. J., on religious belief, 
 
 .397. 
 
 Story of an African Farm, The, 
 Schreiner, 520-522. 
 
 Strettel, Alma, 484. 
 
 ' Sunday-School books,' 502, 503. 
 
 Superstition, 262, 263. 
 
 Swinburne, C. A., his testimony to 
 the influence of Coleridge, 79, 
 80 ; on imagination and harmony 
 in poetry, 102, 103 ; on Shelley, 
 120 ; a master of poetry's form 
 and music, 468-470 ; his poetry 
 as directed against God, 470 ; his 
 poetry as directed against priests 
 and kings, 470 ; the paganism of 
 his verse, 471, 473, 474; often 
 lack of substance behind his 
 melody, 471 ; fascinated with the 
 mystery of "erotic esotery," 472 ; 
 on Carlyle, 200. 
 
 Sylva, Carmen, 485. 
 
 Symonds, J. A., cited, 116 n.; The 
 Temptation in the Wilderness, 488. 
 
 Symons, Arthur, cited, 470. 
 
 Task, The, Cowper's, 34, 39. 
 
 Teignmouth, Lord. See Shore, John. 
 
 Tennyson, Alfred, on Crabbe, 54 ; 
 ruggedness of his prose and his 
 conversation, 350 ; compared and 
 contrasted with Browning, 351, 
 356, 360, 361, 365-369, 376, 386, 
 387 ; notable uniformity of ex- 
 cellence in, 353 ; his blank verse, 
 353 ; his verse sometimes feeble, 
 but still with a grace of sound, 
 355, 356 ; essentially religious, 
 360 ; the elegance of his poetry, 
 361; his relation to'the Bible, 364- 
 369, 382 ; Aylmer's Field, quoted, 
 367 ; his Ulysses, 370-372 ; his no- 
 tion of personality, 372, 373 ; The 
 TwoVoices, St. Simeon Stylites,and 
 other poems, 370,^ 373, 374 ; In 
 Memoriam, 374-377 ; prefigures 
 something of Pragmatism, 376 ; 
 his constructive argument, 377, 
 378 ; religious or theological 
 poems, 378 ; the Idylls, 378-383 ; 
 his pathos, 383-386. 
 
 Testament, Old, literary quality of, 
 16, 17; sense in which it is in- 
 spired, 16-18. 
 
INDEX 
 
 677 
 
 Thackeray, W. M., called a realist, 
 275 ; his use of Scripture lan- 
 gfuage in great scenes, 286, 287 ; 
 The Adventures of Philip, 288 ; 
 Vanity Fair, 289 ; his aim to 
 show that to be without God was 
 to be without hope, 289 ; some- 
 thing other than a cynic, 290 ; an 
 almost Homeric amplitude to his 
 art, 290 ; did not regard his char- 
 acters as puppets, 291 ; not a sen- 
 timentalist, 292 ; his story told 
 from standpoint of last chapter, 
 292 ; his illustrations, 293 n. 
 
 Thomson, James, his Seasons, 31. 
 
 Thomson, James [B. V.], his poem 
 on Blake, 59, 60 ; quoted, 99 ; his 
 career, 474 ; his pessimism in The 
 City of Dreadful Night, 474-478 ; 
 Vane's Story, 478, 479. 
 
 Thompson, Francis, 489, 491. 
 
 Thornton, Henry, hia generosity, 
 170, 171. 
 
 Thornton, John, 170. 
 
 Tories, represented by the Quarterly, 
 130 ; not lacking in high-minded 
 and honourable men, 138- 
 
 Toryism, religion part of its stock 
 in trade, 145. 
 
 Tractarian Movement. See Oxford 
 Movement. 
 
 Tractarians, early, had something 
 of the attitude of opportunists ,- 
 189. 
 
 Tragedy, genuine, beyond the reach 
 of a misanthrope, 100 ; and 
 comedy, the great poet sees both, 
 106. 
 
 Trelawny, E. J., on Shelley, 115. 
 
 Trevelyan, G. M., 184. 
 
 Trevelyan, Sir G. O., 183. 
 
 Trevelyans, the, 174. 
 
 Trollope, Anthony, 299-302. 
 
 TuUoch, Principal, on Coleridge, 
 79, 80 ; cited, 322 n., 336 n. 
 
 Tupper, M. F., the irreproachable, 
 425 ; the only English writer 
 who could afford to make a busi- 
 ness of coining aphorisms, 534. 
 
 Two Tears Ago, Kingsley, 298. 
 
 Tyndall, John, his prominence and 
 influence partly due to fact that 
 he became a theologian, 24, 25 ; 
 on Wordsworth, 358 n. ; his com- 
 
 parison of Tennyson and Carlyle, 
 375. 
 
 Ulfilas, 16. 
 
 Ulysses, Tennyson, 370-372. 
 
 Unbelief, 23. 
 
 Underwood, F. H., on Thackeray, 
 291, 292. 
 
 Unitarianism has been fruitful in 
 spiritual Ishmaelites, 150. 
 
 Unitarians, of nineteenth century, 
 wherein they were right and 
 wherein they were wrong, 339. 
 
 Universe, has a soul, 9 ; Man refuses 
 to be permanently subjugated by, 
 11; forces of, must serve man, 
 11, 12 ; to be treated as an organ- 
 ism, 134. 
 
 Utilitarianism, Mill the high priest 
 of, 321 ; in how far heroic, 333. 
 
 Van Dyke, Prof., cited, 364. 
 
 Vanity Fair, Thackeray, 289. 
 
 Venn, Henry, 174. 
 
 Venn, Henry, son of John, 171. 
 
 Venn, John, 174. 
 
 Venns, the, 174. 
 
 Vital Force, dwells at the source of 
 things, 9 ; Mind and Will belong 
 to, 10 ; called God, 10 ; its entrance 
 into a man's life, 13. 
 
 Wallace, Lew, 511. 
 
 Ward, Mrs. Humphry, 517-519. 
 
 Ward, W. G., Ideal of a Christian 
 Church, 196, 197. 
 
 Watson, John, 420. 505. 
 
 Watson, William. 490. 
 
 Watts-Dunton, his characterization 
 of the eighteenth and nineteenth 
 centuries, 30, 32 ; Renascence of 
 Wonder, 449. 
 
 Wells, H. G., on Gissing, 532. 
 
 Wesleys, the, and the Evangelical 
 Movement, 163 ; difficult to tell 
 how much England owes to, 161- 
 163 ; and Newman, compared, 168. 
 
 Westward Ho ! Kingsley, 298. 
 
 Wharton, Edith. 507, 508. 
 
 Whately, Archbishop, 3.34. 
 
 Whig aversion to mysticism, 143- 
 145. 
 
 Whigs, their views and practice, 
 138, 139. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Whitman, Walt, 490. 
 
 Whittier, J. G., heir to the Puritan 
 heritage, 341, 342 ; moved in the 
 realm of the concrete, 344, 345 ; 
 on Lowell, 347. 
 
 Wickliffe, 16. 
 
 Wilberforce, William, his personal 
 charm, 171 ; had fame as an au- 
 thor, 172 ; a zealous Evangelical 
 Protestant, 172; generosity of 
 creed and life, 173. 
 
 Wilberforce, Bishop, and the evolu- 
 tionary movement, 409, 411. 
 
 Wilkins, Mary E., 506. 
 
 Wilson, John, his name most inti- 
 mately associated with the early 
 days of Blackwood^s, 149. 
 
 Wonder, is the basis of learning, 1 ; 
 the nineteenth century an age of, 
 32 ; capacity for, essential to com- 
 plete mental and spiritual devel- 
 opment, 84, 85. 
 
 Woodberry, G. E., on Crabbe, 50 ; 
 on Shelley, 109 ; cited, 342 n. 
 
 Wordsworth, William, Prelude and 
 Excursion, 62, 358 ; sometimes 
 prosaic and commonplace, 62 ; 
 deficient in humour, 63 ; perceived 
 the universal significance of com- 
 mon things, 63 ; his imagination 
 exactly attuned to the music of 
 life, 63 ; his dominant note that 
 of calm and patient confidence. 
 
 64 ; his interpretation of Nature, 
 64 ; his mysticism, 65 ; his poetry 
 as voicing loneliness, 65, 66 ; his 
 * pantheism,' 66 ; in The Excursion 
 he sets forth the pagan view of 
 God, 66 ; confident that a Spirit 
 inhabited the earth, 68 ; a lonely 
 man, 69 ; the poet of the isolated 
 cottage and the solitary reaper 
 69-71; the Soul the significant, 
 thing for, 71 ; his lapses into 
 homiletic prose, 72 ; his best 
 teaching incidental, 73 ; saw the 
 essential factors of the social 
 problem, 74 ; watched the ad- 
 vances in industrial arts and man's 
 subjugation of the world, 74, 75 ; 
 recognizes kinship between man 
 and God, 75, 76 ; felt his mission 
 to be religious, 76 ; and Coleridge, 
 and Samuel Rogers, anecdote of, 
 85 ; Coleridge on, 86 ; drove abroad 
 in a dung-cart, 95 ; Jeffrey on, 144, 
 145 ; not a stranger to the mys- 
 tic's rapture, 358 n. ; identifies 
 Nature with the lot of man, 545. 
 Wuthering Heights, Bronte, 267. 
 
 Yeasi, Kingsley, 297. 
 Yonge, Charlotte, 504. 
 
 Zelie, J. S., Our Denominational 
 Paradoxes quoted, 151. 
 
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