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Title: Books and Habits, from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn

Author: Lafcadio Hearn

Editor: John Erskine

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BOOKS AND
HABITS, FROM THE LECTURES OF LAFCADIO HEARN ***

Books and Habits

from the lectures of

Lafcadio Hearn
Selected and Edited with an Introduction by

John Erskine

Professor of English Columbia University

1922
London: William Heinemann

Contents
Introduction
I The Insuperable Difficulty
II On Love in English Poetry
III The Ideal Woman in English Poetry
IV Note Upon the Shortest Forms of English Poetry
V Some Foreign Poems on Japanese Subjects
VI The Bible in English Literature
VII The “Havamal”
VIII Beyond Man
IX The New Ethics
X Some Poems about Insects
XI Some French Poems about Insects
XII Note on the Influence of Finnish Poetry in English Literature
XIII The Most Beautiful Romance of the Middle Ages
XIV “Ionica”
XV Old Greek Fragments
Index

Introduction
Return to Table of Contents

These chapters, for the most part, are reprinted from Lafcadio Hearn’s
“Interpretations of Literature,” 1915, from his “Life and Literature,” 1916,
and from his “Appreciations of Poetry,” 1917. Three chapters appear here
for the first time. They are all taken from the student notes of Hearn’s
lectures at the University of Tokyo, 1896-1902, sufficiently described in the
earlier volumes just mentioned. They are now published in this regrouping
in response to a demand for a further selection of the lectures, in a less
expensive volume and with emphasis upon those papers which illustrate
Hearn’s extraordinary ability to interpret the exotic in life and in books.

It should be remembered that these lectures were delivered to Japanese
students, and that Hearn’s purpose was not only to impart the information
about Western literature usually to be found in our histories and text-books,
but much more to explain to the Oriental mind those peculiarities of our
civilization which might be hard to understand on the further side of the
Pacific Ocean. The lectures are therefore unique, in that they are the first
large attempt by a Western critic to interpret us to the East. That we shall be
deeply concerned in the near future to continue this interpretation on an
even larger scale, no one of us doubts. We wish we might hope for another
genius like Hearn to carry on the work.

The merit of the chapters printed or reprinted in the present volume seems
to me their power to teach us to imagine our familiar traditions as foreign
and exotic in the eyes of other peoples. We are accustomed, like every one
else, to think of our literature as the final product of other literatures—as a
terminal in itself, rather than as a channel through which great potentialities
might flow. Like other men, we are accustomed to think of ourselves as
native, under all circumstances, and of other people at all times as foreign.
While we were staying in their country, did we not think of the French as
foreigners? In these chapters, not originally intended for us, we have the
piquant and salutary experience of seeing what we look like on at least one

occasion when we are the foreigners; we catch at least a glimpse of what to
the Orient seems exotic in us, and it does us no harm to observe that the
peculiarly Western aspects of our culture are not self-justifying nor always
justifiable when looked at through eyes not already disposed in their favour.
Hearn was one of the most loyal advocates the West could possibly have
sent to the East, but he was an honest artist, and he never tried to improve
his case by trimming a fact. His interpretation of us, therefore, touches our
sensitiveness in regions—and in a degree—which perhaps his Japanese
students were unconscious of; we too marvel as well as they at his skill in
explaining, but we are sensitive to what he found necessary to explain. We
read less for the explanation than for the inventory of ourselves.

Any interpretation of life which looks closely to the facts will probably
increase our sense of mystery and of strangeness in common things. If on
the other hand it is a theory of experience which chiefly interests us, we
may divert our attention somewhat from the experience to the theory,
leaving the world as humdrum as it was before we explained it. In that case
we must seek the exotic in remote places and in exceptional conditions, if
we are to observe it at all. But Lafcadio Hearn cultivated in himself and
taught his students to cultivate a quick alertness to those qualities of life to
which we are usually dulled by habit. Education as he conceived of it had
for its purpose what Pater says is the end of philosophy, to rouse the human
spirit, to startle it into sharp and eager observation. It is a sign that dulness
is already spreading in us, if we must go far afield for the stimulating, the
wondrous, the miraculous. The growing sensitiveness of a sound education
would help us to distinguish these qualities of romance in the very heart of
our daily life. To have so distinguished them is in my opinion the felicity of
Hearn in these chapters. When he was writing of Japan for European or
American readers, we caught easily enough the exotic atmosphere of the
island kingdom—easily enough, since it was the essence of a world far
removed from ours. The exotic note is quite as strong in these chapters. We
shall begin to appreciate Hearn’s genius when we reflect that here he finds
for us the exotic in ourselves.

The first three chapters deal from different standpoints with the same
subject—the characteristic of Western civilization which to the East is most
puzzling, our attitude toward women. Hearn attempted in other essays also

to do full justice to this fascinating theme, but these illustrations are typical
of his method. To the Oriental it is strange to discover a civilization in
which the love of husband and wife altogether supersedes the love of
children for their parents, yet this is the civilization he will meet in English
and in most Western literatures. He can understand the love of individual
women, as we understand the love of individual men, but he will not easily
understand our worship of women as a sex, our esteem of womankind, our
chivalry, our way of taking woman as a religion. How difficult, then, will he
find such a poem as Tennyson’s “Princess,” or most English novels. He will
wonder why the majority of all Western stories are love stories, and why in
English literature the love story takes place before marriage, whereas in
French and other Continental literatures it usually follows marriage. In
Japan marriages are the concern of the parents; with us they are the concern
of the lovers, who must choose their mates in competition more or less open
with other suitors. No wonder the rivalries and the precarious technique of
love-making are with us an obsession quite exotic to the Eastern mind. But
the Japanese reader, if he would understand us, must also learn how it is
that we have two ways of reckoning with love—a realistic way, which
occupies itself in portraying sex, the roots of the tree, as Hearn says, and the
idealistic way, which tries to fix and reproduce the beautiful illusion of
either happy or unhappy passion. And if the Japanese reader has learned
enough of our world to understand all this, he must yet visualize our social
system more clearly perhaps than most of us see it, if he would know why
so many of our love poems are addressed to the woman we have not yet
met. When we begin to sympathize with him in his efforts to grasp the
meaning of our literature, we are at last awakened ourselves to some notion
of what our civilization means, and as Hearn guides us through the
discipline, we realize an exotic quality in things which formerly we took for
granted.

Lecturing before the days of Imagism, before the attention of many
American poets had been turned to Japanese art, Hearn recognized the
scarcity in our literature of those short forms of verse in which the Greeks
as well as the Japanese excel. The epigram with us is—or was until recently
—a classical tradition, based on the brief inscriptions of the Greek
anthology or on the sharp satires of Roman poetry; we had no native turn
for the form as an expression of our contemporary life. Since Hearn gave

his very significant lecture we have discovered for ourselves an American
kind of short poem, witty rather than poetic, and few verse-forms are now
practised more widely among us. Hearn spoke as a prophet or as a shrewd
observer—which is the same thing—when he pointed out the possibility of
development in this field of brevity. He saw that Japan was closer to the
Greek world in this practice than we were, and that our indifference to the
shorter forms constituted a peculiarity which we could hardly defend. He
saw, also, in the work of Heredia, how great an influence Japanese painting
might have on Western literature, even on those poets who had no other
acquaintance with Japan. In this point also his observation has proved
prophetic; the new poets in America have adopted Japan, as they have
adopted Greece, as a literary theme, and it is somewhat exclusively from
the fine arts of either country that they draw their idea of its life.

The next chapters which are brought together here, consider the origin and
the nature of English and European ethics. Hearn was an artist to the core,
and as a writer he pursued with undivided purpose that beauty which, as
Keats reminded us, is truth. In his creative moments he was a beauty-lover,
not a moralist. But when he turned critic he at once stressed the cardinal
importance of ethics in the study of literature. The art which strives to end
in beauty will reveal even more clearly than more complex forms of
expression the personality of the artist, and personality is a matter of
character, and character both governs the choice of an ethical system and is
modified by it. Literary criticism as Hearn practised it is little interested in
theology or in the system of morals publicly professed; it is, however,
profoundly concerned with the ethical principles upon which the artist
actually proceeds, the directions in which his impulses assert themselves,
the verdicts of right and wrong which his temperament pronounces
unconsciously, it may be. Here is the true revelation of character, Hearn
thinks, even though our habitual and instinctive ethics may differ widely
from the ethics we quite sincerely profess. Whether we know it or not, we
are in such matters the children of some educational or philosophical
system, which, preached at our ancestors long ago, has come at last to
envelop us with the apparent naturalness of the air we breathe. It is a
spiritual liberation of the first order, to envisage such an atmosphere as what
it truly is, only a system of ethics effectively inculcated, and to compare the
principles we live by with those we thought we lived by. Hearn was

contriving illumination for the Japanese when he made his great lecture on
the “Havamal,” identifying in the ancient Northern poem those precepts
which laid down later qualities of English character; for the Oriental reader
it would be easier to identify the English traits in Thackeray or Dickens or
Meredith if he could first consider them in a dogmatic precept. But the
lecture gives us, I think, an extraordinary insight into ourselves, a power of
self-criticism almost disconcerting as we realize not only the persistence of
ethical ideals in the past, but also the possible career of new ethical systems
as they may permeate the books written to-day. To what standard will the
reader of our contemporary literature be unconsciously moulded? What
account will be given of literature a thousand years from now, when a later
critic informs himself of our ethics in order to understand more vitally the
pages in which he has been brought up?

Partly to inform his Japanese students still further as to our ethical
tendencies in literature, and partly I think to indulge his own speculation as
to the morality that will be found in the literature of the future, Hearn gave
his remarkable lectures on the ant-world, following Fabre and other
European investigators, and his lecture on “The New Ethics.” When he
spoke, over twenty years ago, the socialistic ideal had not gripped us so
effectually as it has done in the last decade, but he had no difficulty in
observing the tendency. Civilization in some later cycle may wonder at our
ambition to abandon individual liberty and responsibility and to subside
into the social instincts of the ant; and even as it wonders, that far-off
civilization may detect in itself ant-like reactions which we cultivated for it.
With this description of the ant-world it is illuminating to read the two
brilliant chapters on English and French poems about insects. Against this
whole background of ethical theory, I have ventured to set Hearn’s
singularly objective account of the Bible.

In the remaining four chapters Hearn speaks of the “Kalevala,” of the
mediæval romance “Amis and Amile,” of William Cory’s “Ionica,” and of
Theocritus. These chapters deal obviously with literary influences which
have become part and parcel of English poetry, yet which remain exotic to
it, if we keep in mind the Northern stock which still gives character, ethical
and otherwise, to the English tradition. The “Kalevala,” which otherwise
should seem nearest to the basic qualities of our poetry, is almost unique, as

Hearn points out, in the extent of its preoccupation with enchantments and
charms, with the magic of words. “Amis and Amile,” which otherwise
ought to seem more foreign to us, is strangely close in its glorification of
friendship; for chivalry left with us at least this one great ethical feeling,
that to keep faith in friendship is a holy thing. No wonder Amicus and
Amelius were popular saints. The story implies also, as it falls here in the
book, some illustration of those unconscious or unconsidered ethical
reactions which, as we saw in the chapter on the “Havamal,” have a lasting
influence on our ideals and on our conduct.

Romanticist though he was, Hearn constantly sought the romance in the
highway of life, the aspects of experience which seem to perpetuate
themselves from age to age, compelling literature to reassert them under
whatever changes of form. To one who has followed the large mass of his
lectures it is not surprising that he emphasized those ethical positions which
are likely to remain constant, in spite of much new philosophy, nor that he
constantly recurred to such books as Cory’s “Ionica,” or Lang’s translation
of Theocritus, in which he found statements of enduring human attitudes.
To him the Greek mind made a double appeal. Not only did it represent to
him the best that has yet been thought or said in the world, but by its
fineness and its maturity it seemed kindred to the spirit he found in ancient
Japan. Lecturing to Japanese students on Greek poetry as it filters through
English paraphrases and translations, he must have felt sometimes as we
now feel in reading his lectures, that in his teaching the long migration of
the world’s culture was approaching the end of the circuit, and that the
earliest apparition of the East known to most of us was once more arriving
at its starting place, mystery returning to mystery, and its path at all points
mysterious if we rightly observe the miracle of the human spirit.

BOOKS AND HABITS

Chapter I

The Insuperable Difficulty
Return to Table of Contents

I wish to speak of the greatest difficulty with which the Japanese students of
English literature, or of almost any Western literature, have to contend. I do
not think that it ever has been properly spoken about. A foreign teacher
might well hesitate to speak about, it—because, if he should try to explain it
merely from the Western point of view, he could not hope to be understood;
and if he should try to speak about it from the Japanese point of view, he
would be certain to make various mistakes and to utter various
extravagances. The proper explanation might be given by a Japanese
professor only, who should have so intimate an acquaintance with Western
life as to sympathize with it. Yet I fear that it would be difficult to find such
a Japanese professor for this reason, that just in proportion as he should find
himself in sympathy with Western life, in that proportion he would become
less and less able to communicate that sympathy to his students. The
difficulties are so great that it has taken me many years even to partly guess
how great they are. That they can be removed at the present day is utterly
out of the question. But something may be gained by stating them even
imperfectly. At the risk of making blunders and uttering extravagances, I
shall make the attempt. I am impelled to do so by a recent conversation with
one of the cleverest students that I ever had, who acknowledged his total
inability to understand some of the commonest facts in Western life,—all
those facts relating, directly or indirectly, to the position of woman in
Western literature as reflecting Western life.

Let us clear the ground it once by putting down some facts in the plainest
and lowest terms possible. You must try to imagine a country in which the
place of the highest virtue is occupied, so to speak, by the devotion of sex to
sex. The highest duty of the man is not to his father, but to his wife; and for
the sake of that woman he abandons all other earthly ties, should any of
these happen to interfere with that relation. The first duty of the wife may
be, indeed, must be, to her child, when she has one; but otherwise her
husband is her divinity and king. In that country it would be thought

unnatural or strange to have one’s parents living in the same house with
wife or husband. You know all this. But it does not explain for you other
things, much more difficult to understand, especially the influence of the
abstract idea of woman upon society at large as well as upon the conduct of
the individual. The devotion of man to woman does not mean at all only the
devotion of husband to wife. It means actually this,—that every man is
bound by conviction and by opinion to put all women before himself,
simply because they are women. I do not mean that any man is likely to
think of any woman as being his intellectual and physical superior; but I do
mean that he is bound to think of her as something deserving and needing
the help of every man. In time of danger the woman must be saved first. In
time of pleasure, the woman must be given the best place. In time of
hardship the woman’s share of the common pain must be taken voluntarily
by the man as much as possible. This is not with any view to recognition of
the kindness shown. The man who assists a woman in danger is not
supposed to have any claim upon her for that reason. He has done his duty
only, not to her, the individual, but to womankind at large. So we have
arrived at this general fact, that the first place in all things, except rule, is
given to woman in Western countries, and that it is given almost religiously.

Is woman a religion? Well, perhaps you will have the chance of judging for
yourselves if you go to America. There you will find men treating women
with just the same respect formerly accorded only to religious dignitaries or
to great nobles. Everywhere they are saluted and helped to the best places;
everywhere they are treated as superior beings. Now if we find reverence,
loyalty and all kinds of sacrifices devoted either to a human being or to an
image, we are inclined to think of worship. And worship it is. If a Western
man should hear me tell you this, he would want the statement qualified,
unless he happened to be a philosopher. But I am trying to put the facts
before you in the way in which you can best understand them. Let me say,
then, that the all-important thing for the student of English literature to try
to understand, is that in Western countries woman is a cult, a religion, or if
you like still plainer language, I shall say that in Western countries woman
is a god.

So much for the abstract idea of woman. Probably you will not find that
particularly strange; the idea is not altogether foreign to Eastern thought,

and there are very extensive systems of feminine pantheism in India. Of
course the Western idea is only in the romantic sense a feminine pantheism;
but the Oriental idea may serve to render it more comprehensive. The ideas
of divine Mother and divine Creator may be studied in a thousand forms; I
am now referring rather to the sentiment, to the feeling, than to the
philosophical conception.

You may ask, if the idea or sentiment of divinity attaches to woman in the
abstract, what about woman in the concrete—individual woman? Are
women individually considered as gods? Well, that depends on how you
define the word god. The following definition would cover the ground, I
think:—“Gods are beings superior to man, capable of assisting or injuring
him, and to be placated by sacrifice and prayer.” Now according to this
definition, I think that the attitude of man towards woman in Western
countries might be very well characterized as a sort of worship. In the upper
classes of society, and in the middle classes also, great reverence towards
women is exacted. Men bow down before them, make all kinds of sacrifices
to please them, beg for their good will and their assistance. It does not
matter that this sacrifice is not in the shape of incense burning or of temple
offerings; nor does it matter that the prayers are of a different kind from
those pronounced in churches. There is sacrifice and worship. And no
saying is more common, no truth better known, than that the man who
hopes to succeed in life must be able to please the women. Every young
man who goes into any kind of society knows this. It is one of the first
lessons that he has to learn. Well, am I very wrong in saying that the attitude
of men towards women in the West is much like the attitude of men towards
gods?

But you may answer at once,—How comes it, if women are thus reverenced
as you say, that men of the lower classes beat and ill-treat their wives in
those countries? I must reply, for the same reason that Italian and Spanish
sailors will beat and abuse the images of the saints and virgins to whom
they pray, when their prayer is not granted. It is quite possible to worship an
image sincerely and to seek vengeance upon it in a moment of anger. The
one feeling does not exclude the other. What in the higher classes may be a
religion, in the lower classes may be only a superstition, and strange
contradictions exist, side by side, in all forms of superstition. Certainly the

Western working man or peasant does not think about his wife or his
neighbour’s wife in the reverential way that the man of the superior class
does. But you will find, if you talk to them, that something of the
reverential idea is there; it is there at least during their best moments.

Now there is a certain exaggeration in what I have said. But that is only
because of the somewhat narrow way in which I have tried to express a
truth. I am anxious to give you the idea that throughout the West there
exists, though with a difference according to class and culture, a sentiment
about women quite as reverential as a sentiment of religion. This is true;
and not to understand it, is not to understand Western literature.

How did it come into existence? Through many causes, some of which are
so old that we can not know anything about them. This feeling did not
belong to the Greek and Roman civilization but it belonged to the life of the
old Northern races who have since spread over the world, planting their
ideas everywhere. In the oldest Scandinavian literature you will find that
women were thought of and treated by the men of the North very much as
they are thought of and treated by Englishmen of to-day. You will find what
their power was in the old sagas, such as the Njal-Saga, or “The Story of
Burnt Njal.” But we must go much further than the written literature to get a
full knowledge of the origin of such a sentiment. The idea seems to have
existed that woman was semi-divine, because she was the mother, the
creator of man. And we know that she was credited among the Norsemen
with supernatural powers. But upon this Northern foundation there was
built up a highly complex fabric of romantic and artistic sentiment. The
Christian worship of the Virgin Mary harmonized with the Northern belief.
The sentiment of chivalry reinforced it. Then came the artistic resurrection
of the Renaissance, and the new reverence for the beauty of the old Greek
gods, and the Greek traditions of female divinities; these also coloured and
lightened the old feeling about womankind. Think also of the effect with
which literature, poetry and the arts have since been cultivating and
developing the sentiment. Consider how the great mass of Western poetry is
love poetry, and the greater part of Western fiction love stories.

Of course the foregoing is only the vaguest suggestion of a truth. Really my
object is not to trouble you at all about the evolutional history of the

sentiment, but only to ask you to think what this sentiment means in
literature. I am not asking you to sympathize with it, but if you could
sympathize with it you would understand a thousand things in Western
books which otherwise must remain dim and strange. I am not expecting
that you can sympathize with it. But it is absolutely necessary that you
should understand its relation to language and literature. Therefore I have to
tell you that you should try to think of it as a kind of religion, a secular,
social, artistic religion, not to be confounded with any national religion. It is
a kind of race feeling or race creed. It has not originated in any sensuous
idea, but in some very ancient superstitious idea. Nearly all forms of the
highest sentiment and the highest faith and the highest art have had their
beginnings in equally humble soil.

Chapter II

On Love in English Poetry
Return to Table of Contents

I often imagine that the longer he studies English literature the more the
Japanese student must be astonished at the extraordinary predominance
given to the passion of love both in fiction and in poetry. Indeed, by this
time I have begun to feel a little astonished at it myself. Of course, before I
came to this country it seemed to me quite natural that love should be the
chief subject of literature; because I did not know anything about any other
kind of society except Western society. But to-day it really seems to me a
little strange. If it seems strange to me, how much more ought it to seem
strange to you! Of course, the simple explanation of the fact is that marriage
is the most important act of man’s life in Europe or America, and that
everything depends upon it. It is quite different on this side of the world.
But the simple explanation of the difference is not enough. There are many
things to be explained. Why should not only the novel writers but all the
poets make love the principal subject of their work? I never knew, because I
never thought, how much English literature was saturated with the subject
of love until I attempted to make selections of poetry and prose for class use
—naturally endeavouring to select such pages or poems as related to other
subjects than passion. Instead of finding a good deal of what I was looking
for, I could find scarcely anything. The great prose writers, outside of the
essay or history, are nearly all famous as tellers of love stories. And it is
almost impossible to select half a dozen stanzas of classic verse from
Tennyson or Rossetti or Browning or Shelley or Byron, which do not
contain anything about kissing, embracing, or longing for some imaginary
or real beloved. Wordsworth, indeed, is something of an exception; and
Coleridge is most famous for a poem which contains nothing at all about
love. But exceptions do not affect the general rule that love is the theme of
English poetry, as it is also of French, Italian, Spanish, or German poetry. It
is the dominant motive.

So with the English novelists. There have been here also a few exceptions
—such as the late Robert Louis Stevenson, most of whose novels contain

little about women; they are chiefly novels or romances of adventure. But
the exceptions are very few. At the present time there are produced almost
every year in England about a thousand new novels, and all of these or
nearly all are love stories. To write a novel without a woman in it would be
a dangerous undertaking; in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the book
would not sell.

Of course all this means that the English people throughout the world, as
readers, are chiefly interested in the subject under discussion. When you
find a whole race interested more in one thing than in anything else, you
may be sure that it is so because the subject is of paramount importance in
the life of the average person. You must try to imagine then, a society in
which every man must choose his wife, and every woman must choose her
husband, independent of all outside help, and not only choose but obtain if
possible. The great principle of Western society is that competition rules
here as it rules in everything else. The best man—that is to say, the
strongest and cleverest—is likely to get the best woman, in the sense of the
most beautiful person. The weak, the feeble, the poor, and the ugly have
little chance of being able to marry at all. Tens of thousands of men and
women can not possibly marry. I am speaking of the upper and middle
classes. The working people, the peasants, the labourers, these marry
young; but the competition there is just the same—just as difficult, and only
a little rougher. So it may be said that every man has a struggle of some
kind in order to marry, and that there is a kind of fight or contest for the
possession of every woman worth having. Taking this view of Western
society not only in England but throughout all Europe, you will easily be
able to see why the Western public have reason to be more interested in
literature which treats of love than in any other kind of literature.

But although the conditions that I have been describing are about the same
in all Western countries, the tone of the literature which deals with love is
not at all the same. There are very great differences. In prose they are much
more serious than in poetry; because in all countries a man is allowed, by
public opinion, more freedom in verse than in prose. Now these differences
in the way of treating the subject in different countries really indicate
national differences of character. Northern love stories and Northern poetry
about love are very serious; and these authors are kept within fixed limits.

Certain subjects are generally forbidden. For example, the English public
wants novels about love, but the love must be the love of a girl who is to
become somebody’s wife. The rule in the English novel is to describe the
pains, fears, and struggles of the period before marriage—the contest in the
world for the right of marriage. A man must not write a novel about any
other point of love. Of course there are plenty of authors who have broken
this rule but the rule still exists. A man may represent a contest between two
women, one good and one bad, but if the bad woman is allowed to conquer
in the story, the public will growl. This English fashion has existed since the
eighteenth century. since the time of Richardson, and is likely to last for
generations to come.

Now this is not the rule at all which governs making of novels in France.
French novels generally treat of the relations of women to the world and to
lovers, after marriage; consequently there is a great deal in French novels
about adultery, about improper relations between the sexes, about many
things which the English public would not allow. This does not mean that
the English are morally a better people than the French or other Southern
races. But it does mean that there are great differences in the social
conditions. One such difference can be very briefly expressed. An English
girl, an American girl, a Norwegian, a Dane, a Swede, is allowed all
possible liberty before marriage. The girl is told, “You must be able to take
care of yourself, and not do wrong.” After marriage there is no more such
liberty. After marriage in all Northern countries a woman’s conduct is
strictly watched. But in France, and in Southern countries, the young girl
has no liberty before marriage. She is always under the guard of her brother,
her father, her mother, or some experienced relation. She is accompanied
wherever she walks. She is not allowed to see her betrothed except in the
presence of witnesses. But after marriage her liberty begins. Then she is
told for the first time that she must take care of herself. Well, you will see
that the conditions which inspire the novels, in treating of the subjects of
love and marriage, are very different in Northern and in Southern Europe.
For this reason alone the character of the novel produced in England could
not be the same.

You must remember, however, that there are many other reasons for this
difference—reasons of literary sentiment. The Southern or Latin races have

been civilized for a much longer time than the Northern races; they have
inherited the feelings of the ancient world, the old Greek and Roman world,
and they think still about the relation of the sexes in very much the same
way that the ancient poets and romance writers used to think. And they can
do things which English writers can not do, because their language has
power of more delicate expression.

We may say that the Latin writers still speak of love in very much the same
way that it was considered before Christianity. But when I speak of
Christianity I am only referring to an historical date. Before Christianity the
Northern races also thought about love very much in the same way that
their best poets do at this day. The ancient Scandinavian literature would
show this. The Viking, the old sea-pirate, felt very much as Tennyson or as
Meredith would feel upon this subject; he thought of only one kind of love
as real—that which ends in marriage, the affection between husband and
wife. Anything else was to him mere folly and weakness. Christianity did
not change his sentiment on this subject. The modern Englishman, Swede,
Dane, Norwegian, or German regards love in exactly that deep, serious,
noble way that his pagan ancestors did. I think we can say that different
races have differences of feeling on sexual relations, which differences are
very much older than any written history. They are in the blood and soul of
a people, and neither religion nor civilization can utterly change them.

So far I have been speaking particularly about the differences in English
and French novels; and a novel is especially a reflection of national life, a
kind of dramatic narration of truth, in the form of a story. But in poetry,
which is the highest form of literature, the difference is much more
observable. We find the Latin poets of to-day writing just as freely on the
subject of love as the old Latin poets of the age of Augustus, while Northern
poets observe with few exceptions great restraint when treating of this
theme. Now where is the line to be drawn? Are the Latins right? Are the
English right? How are we to make a sharp distinction between what is
moral and good and what is immoral and bad in treating love-subjects?

Some definition must be attempted.

What is meant by love? As used by Latin writers the word has a range of
meanings, from that of the sexual relation between insects or animals up to

the highest form of religious emotion, called “The love of God.” I need
scarcely say that this definition is too loose for our use. The English word,
by general consent, means both sexual passion and deep friendship. This
again is a meaning too wide for our purpose. By putting the adjective “true”
before love, some definition is attempted in ordinary conversation. When an
Englishman speaks of “true love,” he usually means something that has no
passion at all; he means a perfect friendship which grows up between man
and wife and which has nothing to do with the passion which brought the
pair together. But when the English poet speaks of love, he generally means
passion, not friendship. I am only stating very general rules. You see how
confusing the subject is, how difficult to define the matter. Let us leave the
definition alone for a moment, and consider the matter philosophically.

Some very foolish persons have attempted even within recent years to make
a classification of different kinds of love—love between the sexes. They
talk about romantic love, and other such things. All that is utter nonsense. In
the meaning of sexual affection there is only one kind of love, the natural
attraction of one sex for them other; and the only difference in the highest
for of this attraction and the lowest is this, that in the nobler nature a vast
number of moral, aesthetic, and ethical sentiments are related to the
passion, and that in lower natures those sentiments are absent. Therefore we
may say that even in the highest forms of the sentiment there is only one
dominant feeling, complex though it be, the desire for possession. What
follows the possession we may call love if we please; but it might better be
called perfect friendship and sympathy. It is altogether a different thing. The
love that is the theme of poets in all countries is really love, not the
friendship that grows out of it.

I suppose you know that the etymological meaning of “passion” is “a state
of suffering.” In regard to love, the word has particular significance to the
Western mind, for it refers to the time of struggle and doubt and longing
before the object is attained. Now how much of this passion is a legitimate
subject of literary art?

The difficulty may, I think, be met by remembering the extraordinary
character of the mental phenomena which manifest themselves in the time
of passion. There is during that time a strange illusion, an illusion so

wonderful that it has engaged the attention of great philosophers for
thousands of years; Plato, you know, tried to explain it in a very famous
theory. I mean the illusion that seems to charm, or rather, actually does
charm the senses of a man at a certain time. To his eye a certain face has
suddenly become the most beautiful object in the world. To his ears the
accents of one voice become the sweetest of all music. Reason has nothing
to do with this, and reason has no power against the enchantment. Out of
Nature’s mystery, somehow or other, this strange magic suddenly
illuminates the senses of a man; then vanishes again, as noiselessly as it
came. It is a very ghostly thing, and can not be explained by any theory not
of a very ghostly kind. Even Herbert Spencer has devoted his reasoning to a
new theory about it. I need not go further in this particular than to tell you
that in a certain way passion is now thought to have something to do with
other lives than the present; in short, it is a kind of organic memory of
relations that existed in thousands and tens of thousands of former states of
being. Right or wrong though the theories may be, this mysterious moment
of love, the period of this illusion, is properly the subject of high poetry,
simply because it is the most beautiful and the most wonderful experience
of a human life. And why?

Because in the brief time of such passion the very highest and finest
emotions of which human nature is capable are brought into play. In that
time more than at any other hour in life do men become unselfish, unselfish
at least toward one human being. Not only unselfishness but self-sacrifice is
a desire peculiar to the period. The young man in love is not merely willing
to give away everything that he possesses to the person beloved; he wishes
to suffer pain, to meet danger, to risk his life for her sake. Therefore
Tennyson, in speaking of that time, beautifully said:

Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with might,
Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, pass’d in music out of sight.

Unselfishness is, of course, a very noble feeling, independently of the
cause. But this is only one of the emotions of a higher class when
powerfully aroused. There is pity, tenderness—the same kind of tenderness
that one feels toward a child—the love of the helpless, the desire to protect.
And a third sentiment felt at such a time more strongly than at any other, is

the sentiment of duty; responsibilities moral and social are then
comprehended in a totally new way. Surely none can dispute these facts nor
the beauty of them.

Moral sentiments are the highest of all; but next to them the sentiment of
beauty in itself, the artistic feeling, is also a very high form of intellectual
and even of secondary moral experience. Scientifically there is a relation
between the beautiful and the good, between the physically perfect and the
ethically perfect. Of course it is not absolute. There is nothing absolute in
this world. But the relation exists. Whoever can comprehend the highest
form of one kind of beauty must be able to comprehend something of the
other. I know very well that the ideal of the love-season is an illusion; in
nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of the thousand the beauty of the
woman is only imagined. But does that make any possible difference? I do
not think that it does. To imagine beauty is really to see it—not objectively,
perhaps, but subjectively beyond all possibility of doubt. Though you see
the beauty only in your mind, in your mind it is; and in your mind its ethical
influence must operate. During the time that a man worships even
imaginary bodily beauty, he receives some secret glimpse of a higher kind
of beauty—beauty of heart and mind. Was there ever in this world a real
lover who did not believe the woman of his choice to be not only the most
beautiful of mortals, but also the best in a moral sense? I do not think that
there ever was.

The moral and the ethical sentiments of a being thus aroused call into
sudden action all the finer energies of the man—the capacities for effort, for
heroism, for high-pressure work of any sort, mental or physical, for all that
requires quickness in thought and exactitude in act. There is for the time
being a sense of new power. Anything that makes strong appeal to the best
exercise of one’s faculties is beneficent and, in most cases, worthy of
reverence. Indeed, it is in the short season of which I am speaking that we
always discover the best of everything in the character of woman or of man.
In that period the evil qualities, the ungenerous side, is usually kept as much
out of sight as possible.

Now for all these suggested reasons, as for many others which might be
suggested, the period of illusion in love is really the period which poets and

writers of romance are naturally justified in describing. Can they go beyond
it with safety, with propriety? That depends very much upon whether they
go up or down. By going up I mean keeping within the region of moral
idealism. By going down I mean descending to the level of merely animal
realism. In this realism there is nothing deserving the highest effort of art of
any sort.

What is the object of art? Is it not, or should it not be, to make us imagine
better conditions than that which at present exist in the world, and by so
imagining to prepare the way for the coming of such conditions? I think that
all great art has done this. Do you remember the old story about Greek
mothers keeping in their rooms the statue of a god or a man, more beautiful
than anything real, so that their imagination might be constantly influenced
by the sight of beauty, and that they might perhaps be able to bring more
beautiful children into the world? Among the Arabs, mothers also do
something of this kind, only, as they have no art of imagery, they go to
Nature herself for the living image. Black luminous eyes are beautiful, and
wives keep in their tents a little deer, the gazelle, which is famous for the
brilliancy and beauty of its eyes. By constantly looking at this charming pet
the Arab wife hopes to bring into the world some day a child with eyes as
beautiful as the eyes of the gazelle. Well, the highest function of art ought to
do for us, or at least for the world, what the statue and the gazelle were
expected to do for Grecian and Arab mothers—to make possible higher
conditions than the existing ones.

So much being said, consider again the place and the meaning of the
passion of love in any human life. It is essentially a period of idealism, of
imagining better things and conditions than are possible in this world. For
everybody who has been in love has imagined something higher than the
possible and the present. Any idealism is a proper subject for art. It is not at
all the same in the case of realism. Grant that all this passion, imagination,
and fine sentiment is based upon a very simple animal impulse. That does
not make the least difference in the value of the highest results of that
passion. We might say the very same thing about any human emotion; every
emotion can be evolutionally traced back to simple and selfish impulses
shared by man with the lower animals. But, because an apple tree or a pear
tree happens to have its roots in the ground, does that mean that its fruits are

not beautiful and wholesome? Most assuredly we must not judge the fruit of
the tree from the unseen roots; but what about turning up the ground to look
at the roots? What becomes of the beauty of the tree when you do that? The
realist—at least the French realist—likes to do that. He likes to bring back
the attention of his reader to the lowest rather than to the highest, to that
which should be kept hidden, for the very same reason that the roots of a
tree should be kept underground if the tree is to live.

The time of illusion, then, is the beautiful moment of passion; it represents
the artistic zone in which the poet or romance writer ought to be free to do
the very best that he can. He may go beyond that zone; but then he has only
two directions in which he can travel. Above it there is religion, and an
artist may, like Dante, succeed in transforming love into a sentiment of
religious ecstasy. I do not think that any artist could do that to-day; this is
not an age of religious ecstasy. But upwards there is no other way to go.
Downwards the artist may travel until he finds himself in hell. Between the
zone of idealism and the brutality of realism there are no doubt many
gradations. I am only indicating what I think to be an absolute truth, that in
treating of love the literary master should keep to the period of illusion, and
that to go below it is a dangerous undertaking. And now, having tried to
make what are believed to be proper distinctions between great literature on
this subject and all that is not great, we may begin to study a few examples.
I am going to select at random passages from English poets and others,
illustrating my meaning.

Tennyson is perhaps the most familiar to you among poets of our own time;
and he has given a few exquisite examples of the ideal sentiment in passion.
One is a concluding verse in the beautiful song that occurs in the
monodrama of “Maud,” where the lover, listening in the garden, hears the
steps of his beloved approaching.

She is coming, my own, my sweet,
Were it ever so airy a tread,
My heart would hear her and beat,
Were it earth in an earthy bed;
My dust would hear her and beat,
Had I lain for a century dead;

Would start and tremble under her feet,
And blossom in purple and red.

This is a very fine instance of the purely idea emotion—extravagant, if you
like, in the force of the imagery used, but absolutely sincere and true; for
the imagination of love is necessarily extravagant. It would be quite useless
to ask whether the sound of a girl’s footsteps could really waken a dead
man; we know that love can fancy such things quite naturally, not in one
country only but everywhere. An Arabian poem written long before the time
of Mohammed contains exactly the same thought in simpler words; and I
think that there are some old Japanese songs containing something similar.
All that the statement really means is that the voice, the look, the touch,
even the footstep of the woman beloved have come to possess for the lover
a significance as great as life and death. For the moment he knows no other
divinity; she is his god, in the sense that her power over him has become
infinite and irresistible.

The second example may be furnished from another part of the same
composition—the little song of exaltation after the promise to marry has
been given.

O let the solid ground
Not fail beneath my feet
Before my life has found
What some have found so sweet;
Then let come what come may,
What matter if I go mad,
I shall have had my day.

Let the sweet heavens endure,
Not close and darken above me
Before I am quite, quite sure
That there is one to love me;
Then let come what come may
To a life that has been so sad,
I shall have had my day.

The feeling of the lover is that no matter what happens afterwards, the
winning of the woman is enough to pay for life, death, pain, or anything
else. One of the most remarkable phenomena of the illusion is the supreme
indifference to consequences—at least to any consequences which would
not signify moral shame or loss of honour, Of course the poet is supposed to
consider the emotion only in generous natures. But the subject of this
splendid indifference has been more wonderfully treated by Victor Hugo
than by Tennyson—as we shall see later on, when considering another
phase of the emotion. Before doing that, I want to call your attention to a
very charming treatment of love’s romance by an American. It is one of the
most delicate of modern compositions, and it is likely to become a classic,
as it has already been printed in four or five different anthologies. The title
is “Atalanta’s Race.”

First let me tell you the story of Atalanta, so that you will be better able to
see the fine symbolism of the poem. Atalanta, the daughter of a Greek king,
was not only the most beautiful of maidens, but the swiftest runner in the
world. She passed her time in hunting, and did not wish to marry. But as
many men wanted to marry her, a law was passed that any one who desired
to win her must run a race with her. If he could beat her in running, then she
promised to marry him, but if he lost the race, he was to be killed. Some say
that the man was allowed to run first, and that the girl followed with a spear
in her hand and killed him when she overtook him. There are different
accounts of the contest. Many suitors lost the race and were killed. But
finally young man called Hippomenes obtained from the Goddess of Love
three golden apples, and he was told that if he dropped these apples while
running, the girl would stop to pick them up, and that in this way he might
be able to win the race. So he ran, and when he found himself about to be
beaten, he dropped one apple. She stopped to pick it up and thus he gained a
little. In this way he won the race and married Atalanta. Greek mythology
says that afterwards she and her husband were turned into lions because
they offended the gods; however, that need not concern us here. There is a
very beautiful moral in the old Greek story, and the merit of the American
composition is that its author, Maurice Thompson, perceived this moral and
used it to illustrate a great philosophical truth.

When Spring grows old, and sleepy winds

Set from the South with odours sweet,
I see my love, in green, cool groves,
Speed down dusk aisles on shining feet.
She throws a kiss and bids me run,
In whispers sweet as roses’ breath;
I know I cannot win the race,
And at the end, I know, is death.

But joyfully I bare my limbs,
Anoint me with the tropic breeze,
And feel through every sinew run
The vigour of Hippomenes.

O race of love! we all have run
Thy happy course through groves of Spring,
And cared not, when at last we lost,
For life or death, or anything!

There are a few thoughts here requiring a little comment. You know that the
Greek games and athletic contests were held in the fairest season, and that
the contestants were stripped. They were also anointed with oil, partly to
protect the skin against sun and temperature and partly to make the body
more supple. The poet speaks of the young man as being anointed by the
warm wind of Spring, the tropic season of life. It is a very pretty fancy.
What he is really telling us is this:

“There are no more Greek games, but the race of love is still run to-day as
in times gone by; youth is the season, and the atmosphere of youth is the
anointing of the contestant.”

But the moral of the piece is its great charm, the poetical statement of a
beautiful and a wonderful fact. In almost every life there is a time when we
care for only one person, and suffer much for that person’s sake; yet in that
period we do not care whether we suffer or die, and in after life, when we
look back at those hours of youth, we wonder at the way in which we then
felt. In European life of to-day the old Greek fable is still true; almost
everybody must run Atalanta’s race and abide by the result.

One of the delightful phases of the illusion of love is the sense of old
acquaintance, the feeling as if the person loved had been known and loved
long ago in some time and place forgotten. I think you must have observed,
many of you, that when the senses of sight and hearing happen to be
strongly stirred by some new and most pleasurable experience, the feeling
of novelty is absent, or almost absent. You do not feel as if you were seeing
or hearing something new, but as if you saw or heard something that you
knew all about very long ago. I remember once travelling with a Japanese
boy into a charming little country town in Shikoku—and scarcely had we
entered the main street, than he cried out: “Oh, I have seen this place
before!” Of course he had not seen it before; he was from Osaka and had
never left the great city until then. But the pleasure of his new experience
had given him this feeling of familiarity with the unfamiliar. I do not
pretend to explain this familiarity with the new—it is a great mystery still,
just as it was a great mystery to the Roman Cicero. But almost everybody
that has been in love has probably had the same feeling during a moment or
two—the feeling “I have known that woman before,” though the where and
the when are mysteries. Some of the modern poets have beautifully treated
this feeling. The best example that I can give you is the exquisite lyric by
Rossetti entitled “Sudden Light.”

I have been here before,
But when or how I cannot tell:
I know the grass beyond the door,
The sweet keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.

You have been mine before,—
How long ago I may not know:
But just when at that swallow’s soar
Your neck turn’d so,
Some veil did fall,—I knew it all of yore.

Has this been thus before?
And shall not thus time’s eddying flight
Still with our lives our loves restore
In death’s despite,

And day and night yield one delight once more?

I think you will acknowledge that this is very pretty; and the same poet has
treated the idea equally well in other poems of a more complicated kind.
But another poet of the period was haunted even more than Rossetti by this
idea—Arthur O’Shaughnessy. Like Rossetti he was a great lover, and very
unfortunate in his love; and he wrote his poems, now famous, out of the
pain and regret that was in his heart, much as singing birds born in cages
are said to sing better when their eyes are put out. Here is one example:

Along the garden ways just now
I heard the flowers speak;
The white rose told me of your brow,
The red rose of your cheek;
The lily of your bended head,
The bindweed of your hair:
Each looked its loveliest and said
You were more fair.

I went into the woods anon,
And heard the wild birds sing
How sweet you were; they warbled on,
Piped, trill’d the self-same thing.
Thrush, blackbird, linnet, without pause
The burden did repeat,
And still began again because
You were more sweet.

And then I went down to the sea,
And heard it murmuring too,
Part of an ancient mystery,
All made of me and you:
How many a thousand years ago
I loved, and you were sweet—
Longer I could not stay, and so
I fled back to your feet.

The last stanza especially expresses the idea that I have been telling you
about; but in a poem entitled “Greater Memory” the idea is much more fully
expressed. By “greater memory” you must understand the memory beyond
this life into past stages of existence. This piece has become a part of the
nineteenth century poetry that will live; and a few of the best stanzas
deserve to be quoted,

In the heart there lay buried for years
Love’s story of passion and tears;
Of the heaven that two had begun
And the horror that tore them apart;
When one was love’s slayer, but one
Made a grave for the love in his heart.

The long years pass’d weary and lone
And it lay there and changed there unknown;
Then one day from its innermost place,
In the shamed and ruin’d love’s stead,
Love arose with a glorified face,
Like an angel that comes from the dead.

It uplifted the stone that was set
On that tomb which the heart held yet;
But the sorrow had moulder’d within
And there came from the long closed door
A dear image, that was not the sin
Or the grief that lay buried before.

There was never the stain of a tear
On the face that was ever so dear;
’Twas the same in each lovelier way;
’Twas old love’s holier part,
And the dream of the earliest day
Brought back to the desolate heart.

It was knowledge of all that had been
In the thought, in the soul unseen;

’Twas the word which the lips could not say
To redeem or recover the past.
It was more than was taken away
Which the heart got back at the last.

The passion that lost its spell,
The rose that died where it fell,
The look that was look’d in vain,
The prayer that seemed lost evermore,
They were found in the heart again,
With all that the heart would restore.

Put into less mystical language the legend is this: A young man and a young
woman loved each other for a time; then they were separated by some great
wrong—we may suppose the woman was untrue. The man always loved her
memory, in spite of this wrong which she had done. The two died and were
buried; hundreds and hundreds of years they remained buried, and the dust
of them mixed with the dust of the earth. But in the perpetual order of
things, a pure love never can die, though bodies may die and pass away. So
after many generations the pure love which this man had for a bad woman
was born again in the heart of another man—the same, yet not the same.
And the spirit of the woman that long ago had done the wrong, also found
incarnation again; and the two meeting, are drawn to each other by what
people call love, but what is really Greater Memory, the recollection of past
lives. But now all is happiness for them, because the weaker and worse part
of each has really died and has been left hundreds of years behind, and only
the higher nature has been born again. All that ought not to have been is
not; but all that ought to be now is. This is really an evolutionary teaching,
but it is also poetical license, for the immoral side of mankind does not by
any means die so quickly as the poet supposes. It is perhaps a question of
many tens of thousands of years to get rid of a few of our simpler faults.
Anyway, the fancy charms us and tempts us really to hope that these things
might be so.

While the poets of our time so extend the history of a love backwards
beyond this life, we might expect them to do the very same thing in the
other direction. I do not refer to reunion in heaven, or anything of that sort,

but simply to affection continued after death. There are some very pretty
fancies of the kind. But they can not prove to you quite so interesting as the
poems which treat the recollection of past life. When we consider the past
imaginatively, we have some ground to stand on. The past has been—there
is no doubt about that. The fact that we are at this moment alive makes it
seem sufficiently true that we were alive thousands or millions of years ago.
But when we turn to the future for poetical inspiration, the case is very
different. There we must imagine without having anything to stand upon in
the way of experience. Of course if born again into a body we could
imagine many things; but there is the ghostly interval between death and
birth which nobody is able to tell us about. Here the poet depends upon
dream experiences, and it is of such an experience that Christina Rossetti
speaks in her beautiful poem entitled “A Pause.”

They made the chamber sweet with flowers and leaves,
And the bed sweet with flowers on which I lay,
While my soul, love-bound, loitered on its way.
I did not hear the birds about the eaves,
Nor hear the reapers talk among the sheaves:
Only my soul kept watch from day to day,
My thirsty soul kept watch for one away:—
Perhaps he loves, I thought, remembers, grieves.

At length there came the step upon the stair,
Upon the lock the old familiar hand:
Then first my spirit seemed to scent the air
Of Paradise; then first the tardy sand
Of time ran golden; and I felt my hair
Put on a glory, and my soul expand.

The woman is dead. In the room where her body died, flowers have been
placed, offerings to the dead. Also there are flowers upon the bed. The ghost
of the woman observes all this, but she does not feel either glad or sad
because of it; she is thinking only of the living lover, who was not there
when she died, but far away. She wants to know whether he really loved
her, whether he will really be sorry to hear that she is dead. Outside the
room of death the birds are singing; in the fields beyond the windows

peasants are working, and talking as they work. But the ghost does not
listen to these sounds. The ghost remains in the room only for love’s sake;
she can not go away until the lover comes. At last she hears him coming.
She knows the sound of the step; she knows the touch of the hand upon the
lock of the door. And instantly, before she sees him at all, she first feels
delight. Already it seems to her that she can smell the perfume of the
flowers of heaven; it then seems to her that about her head, as about the
head of an angel, a circle of glory is shaping itself, and the real heaven, the
Heaven of Love, is at hand.

How very beautiful this is. There is still one line which requires a separate
explanation—I mean the sentence about the sands of time running golden.
Perhaps you may remember the same simile in Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall”:

Love took up the glass of Time, and turn'd it in His glowing hands;
Every moment, lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands.

Here time is identified with the sand of the hour glass, and the verb “to run”
is used because this verb commonly expresses the trickling of the sand from
the upper part of the glass into the lower. In other words, fine sand “runs”
just like water. To say that the sands of time run golden, or become changed
into gold, is only a poetical way of stating that the time becomes more than
happy—almost heavenly or divine. And now you will see how very
beautiful the comparison becomes in this little poem about the ghost of the
woman waiting for the coming step of her lover.

Several other aspects of the emotion may now be considered separately.
One of these, an especially beautiful one, is memory. Of course, there are
many aspects of love’s memories, some all happiness, others intensely
sorrowful—the memory of a walk, a meeting, a moment of good-bye. Such
memories occupy a very large place in the treasure house of English love
poems. I am going to give three examples only, but each of a different kind.
The first poet that I am going to mention is Coventry Patmore. He wrote
two curious books of poetry, respectively called “The Angel in the House”
and “The Unknown Eros.” In the first of these books he wrote the whole
history of his courtship and marriage—a very dangerous thing for a poet to
do, but he did it successfully. The second volume is miscellaneous, and
contains some very beautiful things. I am going to quote only a few lines

from the piece called “Amelia.” This piece is the story of an evening spent
with a sweetheart, and the lines which I am quoting refer to the moment of
taking the girl home. They are now rather famous:

… To the dim street
I led her sacred feet;
And so the Daughter gave,
Soft, moth-like, sweet,
Showy as damask-rose and shy as musk,
Back to her Mother, anxious in the dusk.
And now “Good Night!”

Why should the poet speak of the girl in this way? Why does he call her feet
sacred? She has just promised to marry him; and now she seems to him
quite divine. But he discovers very plain words with which to communicate
his finer feelings to the reader. The street is “dim” because it is night; and in
the night the beautifully dressed maiden seems like a splendid moth—the
name given to night butterflies in England. In England the moths are much
more beautiful than the true butterflies; they have wings of scarlet and
purple and brown and gold. So the comparison, though peculiarly English,
is very fine. Also there is a suggestion of the soundlessness of the moth’s
flight. Now “showy as damask rose” is a striking simile only because the
damask-rose is a wonderfully splendid flower—richest in colour of all roses
in English gardens. “Shy as musk” is rather a daring simile. “Musk” is a
perfume used by English as well as Japanese ladies, but there is no perfume
which must be used with more discretion, carefulness. If you use ever so
little too much, the effect is not pleasant. But if you use exactly the proper
quantity, and no more, there is no perfume which is more lovely. “Shy as
musk” thus refers to that kind of girlish modesty which never commits a
fault even by the measure of a grain—beautiful shyness incapable of being
anything but beautiful. Nevertheless the comparison must be confessed one
which should be felt rather than explained.

The second of the three promised quotations shall be from Robert
Browning. There is one feeling, not often touched upon by poets, yet
peculiar to lovers, that is here treated—the desire when you are very happy
or when you are looking at anything attractive to share the pleasure of the

moment with the beloved. But it seldom happens that the wish and the
conditions really meet. Referring to this longing Browning made a short
lyric that is now a classic; it is among the most dainty things of the century.

Never the time and the place
And the loved one all together!
This path—how soft to pace!
This May—what magic weather!
Where is the loved one’s face?
In a dream that loved one’s face meets mine,
But the house is narrow, the place is bleak
Where, outside, rain and wind combine
With a furtive ear, if I try to speak,
With a hostile eye at my flushing cheek,
With a malice that marks each word, each sign!

Never can we have things the way we wish in this world—a beautiful day, a
beautiful place, and the presence of the beloved all at the same time.
Something is always missing; if the place be beautiful, the weather perhaps
is bad. Or if the weather and the place both happen to be perfect, the woman
is absent. So the poet finding himself in some very beautiful place, and
remembering this, remembers also the last time that he met the woman
beloved. It was a small dark house and chilly; outside there was rain and
storm; and the sounds of the wind and of the rain were as the sounds of
people secretly listening, or sounds of people trying to look in secretly
through the windows. Evidently it was necessary that the meeting should be
secret, and it was not altogether as happy as could have been wished.

The third example is a very beautiful poem; we must content ourselves with
an extract from it. It is the memory of a betrothal day, and the poet is
Frederick Tennyson. I suppose you know that there were three Tennysons,
and although Alfred happened to be the greatest, all of them were good
poets.

It is a golden morning of the spring,
My cheek is pale, and hers is warm with bloom,
And we are left in that old carven room,
And she begins to sing;

The open casement quivers in the breeze,
And one large musk-rose leans its dewy grace
Into the chamber, like a happy face,
And round it swim the bees;

I know not what I said—what she replied
Lives, like eternal sunshine, in my heart;
And then I murmured, Oh! we never part,
My love, my life, my bride!

And silence o’er us, after that great bliss,
Fell like a welcome shadow—and I heard
The far woods sighing, and a summer bird
Singing amid the trees;

The sweet bird’s happy song, that streamed around,
The murmur of the woods, the azure skies,
Were graven on my heart, though ears and eyes
Marked neither sight nor sound.

She sleeps in peace beneath the chancel stone,
But ah! so clearly is the vision seen,
The dead seem raised, or Death has never been,
Were I not here alone.

This is great art in its power of picturing a memory of the heart. Let us
notice some of the beauties. The lover is pale because he is afraid, anxious;
he is going to ask a question and he does not know how she may answer
him. All this was long ago, years and years ago, but the strong emotions of
that morning leave their every detail painted in remembrance, with strange
vividness After all those years the man still recollects the appearance of the
room, the sunshine entering and the crimson rose looking into the room
from the garden, with bees humming round it. Then after the question had
been asked and happily answered, neither could speak for joy; and because
of the silence all the sounds of nature outside became almost painfully
distinct. Now he remembers how he heard in that room the sound of the

wind in far-away trees, the singing of a bird—he also remembers all the
colours and the lights of the day. But it was very, very long ago, and she is
dead. Still, the memory is so clear and bright in his heart that it is as if time
had stood still, or as if she had come back from the grave. Only one thing
assures him that it is but a memory—he is alone.

Returning now to the subject of love’s illusion in itself, let me remind you
that the illusion does not always pass away—not at all. It passes away in
every case of happy union, when it has become no longer necessary to the
great purposes of nature. But in case of disappointment, loss, failure to win
the maiden desired, it often happens that the ideal image never fades away,
but persistently haunts the mind through life, and is capable thus of making
even the most successful life unhappy. Sometimes the result of such
disappointment may be to change all a man’s ideas about the world, about
life, about religion; and everything remains darkened for him. Many a
young person disappointed in love begins to lose religious feeling from that
moment, for it seems to him, simply because he happens to be unfortunate,
that the universe is all wrong. On the other hand the successful lover thinks
that the universe is all right; he utters his thanks to the gods, and feels his
faith in religion and human nature greater than before. I do not at this
moment remember any striking English poem illustrating this fact; but there
is a pretty little poem in French by Victor Hugo showing well the relation
between successful love and religious feeling in simple minds. Here is an
English translation of it. The subject is simply a walk at night, the girl-bride
leaning upon the arm of her husband; and his memory of the evening is thus
expressed:

The trembling arm I pressed
Fondly; our thoughts confessed
Love’s conquest tender;
God filled the vast sweet night,
Love filled our hearts; the light
Of stars made splendour.

Even as we walked and dreamed,
’Twixt heaven and earth, it seemed
Our souls were speaking;

The stars looked on thy face;
Thine eyes through violet space
The stars were seeking.

And from the astral light
Feeling the soft sweet night
Thrill to thy soul,
Thou saidst: “O God of Bliss,
Lord of the Blue Abyss,
Thou madest the whole!”

And the stars whispered low
To the God of Space, “We know,
God of Eternity,
Dear Lord, all Love is Thine,
Even by Love’s Light we shine!
Thou madest Beauty!”

Of course here the religious feeling itself is part of the illusion, but it serves
to give great depth and beauty to simple feeling. Besides, the poem
illustrates one truth very forcibly—namely, that when we are perfectly
happy all the universe appears to be divine and divinely beautiful; in other
words, we are in heaven. On the contrary, when we are very unhappy the
universe appears to be a kind of hell, in which there is no hope, no joy, and
no gods to pray to.

But the special reason I wished to call attention to Victor Hugo’s lyric is
that it has that particular quality called by philosophical critics “cosmic
emotion.” Cosmic emotion means the highest quality of human emotion.
The word “cosmos” signifies the universe—not simply this world, but all
the hundred millions of suns and worlds in the known heaven. And the
adjective “cosmic” means, of course, “related to the whole universe.”
Ordinary emotion may be more than individual in its relations. I mean that
your feelings may be moved by the thought or the perception of something
relating not only to your own life but also to the lives of many others. The
largest form of such ordinary emotion is what would be called national
feeling, the feeling of your own relation to the whole nation or the whole
race. But there is higher emotion even than that. When you think of yourself

emotionally not only in relation to your own country, your own nation, but
in relation to all humanity, then you have a cosmic emotion of the third or
second order. I say “third or second,” because whether the emotion be
second or third rate depends very much upon your conception of humanity
as One. But if you think of yourself in relation not to this world only but to
the whole universe of hundreds of millions of stars and planets—in relation
to the whole mystery of existence—then you have a cosmic emotion of the
highest order. Of course there are degrees even in this; the philosopher or
the metaphysician will probably have a finer quality of cosmic emotion than
the poet or the artist is able to have. But lovers very often, according to their
degree of intellectual culture, experience a kind of cosmic emotion; and
Victor Hugo’s little poem illustrates this. Night and the stars and the abyss
of the sky all seem to be thrilling with love and beauty to the lover’s eyes,
because he himself is in a state of loving happiness; and then he begins to
think about his relation to the universal life, to the supreme mystery beyond
all Form and Name.

A third or fourth class of such emotion may be illustrated by the beautiful
sonnet of Keats, written not long before his death. Only a very young man
could have written this, because only a very young man loves in this way—
but how delightful it is! It has no title.

Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priest-like task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—

No—yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel forever its soft fall and swell,
Awake forever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

Tennyson has charmingly represented a lover wishing that he were a
necklace of his beloved, or her girdle, or her earring; but that is not a
cosmic emotion at all. Indeed, the idea of Tennyson’s pretty song was taken
from old French and English love songs of the peasants—popular ballads.
But in this beautiful sonnet of Keats, where the lover wishes to be endowed
with the immortality and likeness of a star only to be forever with the
beloved, there is something of the old Greek thought which inspired the
beautiful lines written between two and three thousand years ago, and
translated by J.A. Symonds:

Gazing on stars, my Star? Would that I were the welkin,
Starry with myriad eyes, ever to gave upon thee!

But there is more than the Greek beauty of thought in Keats’s sonnet, for we
find the poet speaking of the exterior universe in the largest relation,
thinking of the stars watching forever the rising and the falling of the sea
tides, thinking of the sea tides themselves as continually purifying the
world, even as a priest purifies a temple. The fancy of the boy expands to
the fancy of philosophy; it is a blending of poetry, philosophy, and sincere
emotion.

You will have seen by the examples which we have been reading together
that English love poetry, like Japanese love poetry, may be divided into
many branches and classified according to the range of subject from the
very simplest utterance of feeling up to that highest class expressing cosmic
emotion. Very rich the subject is; the student is only puzzled where to
choose. I should again suggest to you to observe the value of the theme of
illusion, especially as illustrated in our examples. There are indeed
multitudes of Western love poems that would probably appear to you very
strange, perhaps very foolish. But you will certainly acknowledge that there
are some varieties of English love poetry which are neither strange nor
foolish, and which are well worth studying, not only in themselves but in
their relation to the higher forms of emotional expression in all literature.
Out of love poetry belonging to the highest class, much can be drawn that
would serve to enrich and to give a new colour to your own literature of
emotion.

Chapter III

The Ideal Woman in English Poetry
Return to Table of Contents

As I gave already in this class a lecture on the subject of love poetry, you
will easily understand that the subject of the present lecture is not exactly
love. It is rather about love’s imagining of perfect character and perfect
beauty. The part of it to which I think your attention could be deservedly
given is that relating to the imagined wife of the future, for this is a subject
little treated of in Eastern poetry. It is a very pretty subject. But in Japan and
other countries of the East almost every young man knows beforehand
whom he is likely to marry. Marriage is arranged by the family: it is a
family matter, indeed a family duty and not a romantic pursuit. At one time,
very long ago, in Europe, marriages were arranged in much the same way.
But nowadays it may be said in general that no young man in England or
America can even imagine whom he will marry. He has to find his wife for
himself; and he has nobody to help him; and if he makes a mistake, so
much the worse for him. So to Western imagination the wife of the future is
a mystery, a romance, an anxiety—something to dream about and to write
poetry about.

This little book that I hold in my hand is now very rare. It is out of print, but
it is worth mentioning to you because it is the composition of an exquisite
man of letters, Frederick Locker-Lampson, best of all nineteenth century
writers of society verse. It is called “Patchwork.” Many years ago the
author kept a kind of journal in which he wrote down or copied all the most
beautiful or most curious things which he had heard or which he had found
in books. Only the best things remained, so the value of the book is his taste
in selection. Whatever Locker-Lampson pronounced good, the world now
knows to have been exactly what he pronounced, for his taste was very fine.
And in this book I find a little poem quoted from Mr. Edwin Arnold, now
Sir Edwin. Sir Edwin Arnold is now old and blind, and he has not been
thought of kindly enough in Japan, because his work has not been
sufficiently known. Some people have even said his writings did harm to
Japan, but I want to assure you that such statements are stupid lies. On the

contrary, he did for Japan whatever good the best of his talent as a poet and
the best of his influence as a great journalist could enable him to do. But to
come back to our subject: when Sir Edwin was a young student he had his
dreams about marriage like other young English students, and he put one of
them into verse, and that verse was at once picked out by Frederick Locker-
Lampson for his little book of gems. Half a century has passed since then;
but Locker-Lampson’s judgment remains good, and I am going to put this
little poem first because it so well illustrates the subject of the lecture. It is
entitled “A Ma Future.”

Where waitest thou,
Lady, I am to love? Thou comest not,
Thou knowest of my sad and lonely lot—
I looked for thee ere now!

It is the May,
And each sweet sister soul hath found its brother,
Only we two seek fondly each the other,
And seeking still delay.

Where art thou, sweet?
I long for thee as thirsty lips for streams,
O gentle promised angel of my dreams,
Why do we never meet?

Thou art as I,
Thy soul doth wait for mine as mine for thee;
We cannot live apart, must meeting be
Never before we die?

Dear Soul, not so,
For time doth keep for us some happy years,
And God hath portioned us our smiles and tears,
Thou knowest, and I know.

Therefore I bear
This winter-tide as bravely as I may,
Patiently waiting for the bright spring day

That cometh with thee, Dear.

’Tis the May light
That crimsons all the quiet college gloom,
May it shine softly in thy sleeping room,
And so, dear wife, good night!

This is, of course, addressed to the spirit of the unknown future wife. It is
pretty, though it is only the work of a young student. But some one hundred
years before, another student—a very great student, Richard Crashaw,—had
a fancy of the same kind, and made verses about it which are famous. You
will find parts of his poem about the imaginary wife in the ordinary
anthologies, but not all of it, for it is very long. I will quote those verses
which seem to me the best.

Wishes

Whoe’er she be,
That not impossible She,
That shall command my heart and me;

Where’er she lie,
Locked up from mortal eye,
In shady leaves of Destiny;

Till that ripe birth
Of studied Fate stand forth,
And teach her fair steps to our earth;

Till that divine
Idea take a shrine
Of crystal flesh, through which to shine;

Meet you her, my wishes,
Bespeak her to my blisses,
And be ye called my absent kisses.

The poet is supposing that the girl whom he is to marry may not as yet even
have been born, for though men in the world of scholarship can marry only
late in life, the wife is generally quite young. Marriage is far away in the
future for the student, therefore these fancies. What he means to say in short
is about like this:

“Oh, my wishes, go out of my heart and look for the being whom I am
destined to marry—find the soul of her, whether born or yet unborn, and tell
that soul of the love that is waiting for it.” Then he tries to describe the
imagined woman he hopes to find:

I wish her beauty
That owes not all its duty
To gaudy ’tire or glist’ring shoe-tie.

Something more than
Taffeta or tissue can;
Or rampant feather, or rich fan.

More than the spoil
Of shop or silk worm’s toil,
Or a bought blush, or a set smile.

A face that’s best
By its own beauty drest
And can alone command the rest.

A face made up
Out of no other shop
Than what nature’s white hand sets ope.

A cheek where grows
More than a morning rose
Which to no box his being owes.

Eyes that displace
The neighbor diamond and outface

That sunshine by their own sweet grace.

Tresses that wear
Jewels, but to declare
How much themselves more precious are.

Smiles, that can warm
The blood, yet teach a charm
That chastity shall take no harm.

Life, that dares send
A challenge to his end,
And when it comes, say “Welcome, friend!”

There is much more, but the best of the thoughts are here. They are not
exactly new thoughts, nor strange thoughts, but they are finely expressed in
a strong and simple way.

There is another composition on the same subject—the imaginary spouse,
the destined one. But this is written by a woman, Christina Rossetti.

Somewhere or Other

Somewhere or other there must surely be
The face not seen, the voice not heard,
The heart that not yet—never yet—ah me!
Made answer to my word.

Somewhere or other, may be near or far;
Past land and sea, clean out of sight;
Beyond the wondering moon, beyond the star
That tracks her night by night.

Somewhere or other, may be far or near;
With just a wall, a hedge between;
With just the last leaves of the dying year,
Fallen on a turf grown green.

And that turf means of course the turf of a grave in the churchyard. This
poem expresses fear that the destined one never can be met, because death
may come before the meeting time. All through the poem there is the
suggestion of an old belief that for every man and for every woman there
must be a mate, yet that it is a chance whether the mate will ever be found.

You observe that all of these are ghostly poems, whether prospective or
retrospective. Here is another prospective poem:

Amaturus

Somewhere beneath the sun,
These quivering heart-strings prove it,
Somewhere there must be one
Made for this soul, to move it;
Someone that hides her sweetness
From neighbors whom she slights,
Nor can attain completeness,
Nor give her heart its rights;
Someone whom I could court
With no great change of manner,
Still holding reason’s fort
Though waving fancy’s banner;
A lady, not so queenly
As to disdain my hand,
Yet born to smile serenely
Like those that rule the land;
Noble, but not too proud;
With soft hair simply folded,
And bright face crescent-browed
And throat by Muses moulded;

Keen lips, that shape soft sayings
Like crystals of the snow,
With pretty half-betrayings
Of things one may not know;
Fair hand, whose touches thrill,

Like golden rod of wonder,
Which Hermes wields at will
Spirit and flesh to sunder.
Forth, Love, and find this maid,
Wherever she be hidden;
Speak, Love, be not afraid,
But plead as thou art bidden;
And say, that he who taught thee
His yearning want and pain,
Too dearly dearly bought thee
To part with thee in vain.

These lines are by the author of that exquisite little book “Ionica”—a book
about which I hope to talk to you in another lecture. His real name was
William Cory, and he was long the head-master of an English public school,
during which time he composed and published anonymously the charming
verses which have made him famous—modelling his best work in close
imitation of the Greek poets. A few expressions in these lines need
explanation. For instance, the allusion to Hermes and his rod. I think you
know that Hermes is the Greek name of the same god whom the Romans
called Mercury,—commonly represented as a beautiful young man, naked
and running quickly, having wings attached to the sandals upon his feet.
Runners used to pray to him for skill in winning foot races. But this god had
many forms and many attributes, and one of his supposed duties was to
bring the souls of the dead into the presence of the king of Hades. So you
will see some pictures of him standing before the throne of the king of the
Dead, and behind him a long procession of shuddering ghosts. He is nearly
always pictured as holding in his hands a strange sceptre called the
caduceus, a short staff about which two little serpents are coiled, and at the
top of which is a tiny pair of wings. This is the golden rod referred to by the
poet; when Hermes touched anybody with it, the soul of the person touched
was obliged immediately to leave the body and follow after him. So it is a
very beautiful stroke of art in this poem to represent the touch of the hand
of great love as having the magical power of the golden rod of Hermes. It is
as if the poet were to say: “Should she but touch me, I know that my spirit
would leap out of my body and follow after her.” Then there is the
expression “crescent-browed.” It means only having beautifully curved

eyebrows—arched eyebrows being considered particularly beautiful in
Western countries.

Now we will consider another poem of the ideal. What we have been
reading referred to ghostly ideals, to memories, or to hopes. Let us now see
how the poets have talked about realities. Here is a pretty thing by Thomas
Ashe. It is entitled “Pansie”; and this flower name is really a corruption of a
French word “Penser,” meaning a thought. The flower is very beautiful, and
its name is sometimes given to girls, as in the present case.

Meet We No Angels, Pansie?

Came, on a Sabbath noon, my sweet,
In white, to find her lover;
The grass grew proud beneath her feet,
The green elm-leaves above her:—
Meet we no angels, Pansie?

She said, “We meet no angels now;”
And soft lights stream’d upon her;
And with white hand she touch’d a bough;
She did it that great honour:—
What! meet no angels, Pansie?

O sweet brown hat, brown hair, brown eyes,
Down-dropp’d brown eyes, so tender!
Then what said I? Gallant replies
Seem flattery, and offend her:—
But—meet no angels, Pansie?

The suggestion is obvious, that the maiden realizes to the lover’s eye the
ideal of an angel. As she comes he asks her slyly,—for she has been to the
church—“Is it true that nobody ever sees real angels?” She answers
innocently, thinking him to be in earnest, “No—long ago people used to see
angels, but in these times no one ever sees them.” He does not dare tell her
how beautiful she seems to him; but he suggests much more than
admiration by the tone of his protesting response to her answer: “What! You

cannot mean to say that there are no angels now?” Of course that is the
same as to say, “I see an angel now”—but the girl is much too innocent to
take the real and flattering meaning.

Wordsworth’s portrait of the ideal woman is very famous; it was written
about his own wife though that fact would not be guessed from the poem.
The last stanza is the most famous, but we had better quote them all.

She was a phantom of delight
When first she gleamed upon my sight;
A lovely apparition, sent
To be a moment’s ornament;
Her eyes as stars of twilight fair;
Like twilight’s, too, her dusky hair;
But all things else about her drawn
From May-time and the cheerful dawn;
A dancing shape, an image gay,
To haunt, to startle, and waylay.

I saw her upon nearer view,
A Spirit, yet a Woman too!
Her household motions light and free,
And steps of virgin liberty;
A countenance in which did meet
Sweet records, promises as sweet;
A creature not too bright or good
For human nature’s daily food;
For transient sorrows, simple wiles,
Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears and smiles.

And now I see with eye serene
The very pulse of the machine;
A being breathing thoughtful breath,
A traveller betwixt life and death;
The reason firm, the temperate will,
Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill;
A perfect woman, nobly plann’d,
To warn, to comfort and command;

And yet a Spirit still, and bright
With something of angelic light.

I quoted this after the Pansie poem to show you how much more deeply
Wordsworth could touch the same subject. To him, too, the first apparition
of the ideal maiden seemed angelic; like Ashe he could perceive the
mingled attraction of innocence and of youth. But innocence and youth are
by no means all that make up the best attributes of woman; character is
more than innocence and more than youth, and it is character that
Wordsworth studies. But in the last verse he tells us that the angel is always
there, nevertheless, even when the good woman becomes old. The angel is
the Mother-soul.

Wordsworth’s idea that character is the supreme charm was expressed very
long before him by other English poets, notably by Thomas Carew.

He that loves a rosy cheek,
Or a coral lip admires,
Or from star-like eyes doth seek
Fuel to maintain his fires:
As old Time makes these decay,
So his flames must waste away.

But a smooth and steadfast mind,
Gentle thoughts and calm desires,
Hearts with equal love combined,
Kindle never-dying fires.
Where these, are not, I despise
Lovely cheeks or lips or eyes.

For about three hundred years in English literature it was the fashion—a
fashion borrowed from the Latin poets—to speak of love as a fire or flame,
and you must understand the image in these verses in that signification. To-
day the fashion is not quite dead, but very few poets now follow it.

Byron himself, with all his passion and his affected scorn of ethical
convention, could and did, when he pleased, draw beautiful portraits of

moral as well as physical attraction. These stanzas are famous; they paint
for us a person with equal attraction of body and mind.

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellow’d to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impair’d the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

It is worth noticing that in each of the last three poems, the physical beauty
described is that of dark eyes and hair. This may serve to remind you that
there are two distinct types, opposite types, of beauty celebrated by English
poets; and the next poem which I am going to quote, the beautiful “Ruth” of
Thomas Hood, also describes a dark woman.

She stood breast-high amid the corn,
Clasp’d by the golden light of morn,
Like the sweetheart of the sun,
Who many a glowing kiss had won.

On her cheek an autumn flush,
Deeply ripen’d;—such a blush
In the midst of brown was born,

Like red poppies grown with corn.

Round her eyes her tresses fell,
Which were blackest none could tell,
But long lashes veil’d a light,
That had else been all too bright.

And her hat, with shady brim,
Made her tressy forehead dim;
Thus she stood among the stooks,
Praising God with sweetest looks:—

Sure, I said, Heav’n did not mean,
Where I reap thou shouldst but glean,
Lay thy sheaf adown and come,
Share my harvest and my home.

We might call this the ideal of a peasant girl whose poverty appeals to the
sympathy of all who behold her. The name of the poem is suggested indeed
by the Bible story of Ruth the gleaner, but the story in the poem is only that
of a rich farmer who marries a very poor girl, because of her beauty and her
goodness. It is just a charming picture—a picture of the dark beauty which
is so much admired in Northern countries, where it is less common than in
Southern Europe. There are beautiful brown-skinned types; and the flush of
youth on the cheeks of such a brown girl has been compared to the red upon
a ripe peach or a russet apple—a hard kind of apple, very sweet and juicy,
which is brown instead of yellow, or reddish brown. But the poet makes the
comparison with poppy flowers and wheat. That, of course, means golden
yellow and red; in English wheat fields red poppy flowers grow in
abundance. The expression “tressy forehead” in the second line of the
fourth stanza means a forehead half covered with falling, loose hair.

The foregoing pretty picture may be offset by charming poem of
Browning’s describing a lover’s pride in his illusion. It is simply entitled
“Song,” and to appreciate it you must try to understand the mood of a
young man who believes that he has actually realized his ideal, and that the
woman that he loves is the most beautiful person in the whole world. The
fact that this is simply imagination on his part does not make the poem less

beautiful—on the contrary, the false imagining is just what makes it
beautiful, the youthful emotion of a moment being so humanly and frankly
described. Such a youth must imagine that every one else sees and thinks
about the girl just as he does, and he expects them to confess it.

Nay but you, who do not love her,
Is she not pure gold, my mistress?
Holds earth aught—speak truth—above her?
Aught like this tress, see, and this tress,
And this last fairest tress of all,
So fair, see, ere I let it fall?

Because you spend your lives in praising;
To praise, you search the wide world over;
Then why not witness, calmly gazing,
If earth holds aught—speak truth—above her?
Above this tress, and this, I touch
But cannot praise, I love so much!

You see the picture, I think,—probably some artist’s studio for a
background. She sits or stands there with her long hair loosely flowing
down to her feet like a river of gold; and her lover, lifting up some of the
long tresses in his hand, asks his friend, who stands by, to notice how
beautiful such hair is. Perhaps the girl was having her picture painted. One
would think so from the question, “Since your business is to look for
beautiful things, why can you not honestly acknowledge that this woman is
the most beautiful thing in the whole world?” Or we might imagine the
questioned person to be a critic by profession as well as an artist. Like the
preceding poem this also is a picture. But the next poem, also by Browning,
is much more than a picture—it is very profound indeed, simple as it looks.
An old man is sitting by the dead body of a young girl of about sixteen. He
tells us how he secretly loved her, as a father might love a daughter, as a
brother might love a sister. But he would have wished, if he had not been so
old, and she so young, to love her as a husband. He never could have her in
this world, but why should he not hope for it in the future world? He
whispers into her dead ear his wish, and he puts a flower into her dead
hand, thinking, “When she wakes up, in another life, she will see that

flower, and remember what I said to her, and how much I loved her.” That
is the mere story. But we must understand that the greatness of the love
expressed in the poem is awakened by an ideal of innocence and sweetness
and goodness, and the affection is of the soul—that is to say, it is the love of
beautiful character, not the love of a beautiful face only, that is expressed.

Evelyn Hope

Beautiful Evelyn Hope is dead!
Sit and watch by her side an hour.
That is her book-shelf, this her bed;
She plucked that piece of geranium-flower,
Beginning to die too, in the glass;
Little has yet been changed, I think:
The shutters are shut, no light can pass
Save two long rays through the hinge’s chink.

Sixteen years old when she died!
Perhaps she had scarcely heard my name;
It was not her time to love; beside,
Her life had many a hope and aim,
Duties enough and little cares,
And now was quiet, now astir,
Till God’s hand beckoned unawares,—
And the sweet white brow is all of her.

Is it too late, then, Evelyn Hope?
What, your soul was pure and true,
The good stars met in your horoscope,
Made you of spirit, fire and dew—
And just because I was thrice as old
And our paths in the world diverged so wide,
Each was naught to each, must I be told?
We were fellow mortals, naught beside?

No, indeed! for God above,
Is great to grant, as mighty to make,

And creates the love to reward the love:
I claim you still, for my own love’s sake!
Delayed it may be for more lives yet,
Through worlds I shall traverse, not a few:
Much is to learn, much to forget,
Ere the time be come for taking you.

But the time will come,—at last it will,
When, Evelyn Hope, what meant (I shall say)
In the lower earth, in the years long still,
That body and soul so pure and gay?
Why your hair was amber, I shall divine,
And your mouth of your own geranium’s red—
And what you would do with me, in fine,
In the new life come in the old one’s stead.

I have lived (I shall say) so much since then,
Given up myself so many times,
Gained me the gains of various men,
Ransacked the ages, spoiled the climes;
Yet one thing, one, in my soul’s full scope,
Either I missed or itself missed me:
And I want and find you, Evelyn Hope!
What is the issue? let us see!

I loved you, Evelyn, all the while!
My heart seemed full as it could hold;
There was space and to spare for the frank young smile,
And the red young mouth, and the hair’s young gold.
So, hush,—I will give you this leaf to keep:
See, I shut it inside the sweet cold hand!
There, that is our secret: go to sleep!
You will wake, and remember, and understand.

No other poet has written so many different kinds of poems on this subject
as Browning; and although I can not quote all of them, I must not neglect to
make a just representation of the variety. Here is another example: the chief

idea is again the beauty of truthfulness and fidelity, but the artistic
impression is quite different.

A simple ring with a single stone,
To the vulgar eye no stone of price:
Whisper the right word, that alone—
Forth starts a sprite, like fire from ice.
And lo, you are lord (says an Eastern scroll)
Of heaven and earth, lord whole and sole
Through the power in a pearl.

A woman (’tis I this time that say)
With little the world counts worthy praise:
Utter the true word—out and away
Escapes her soul; I am wrapt in blaze,
Creation’s lord, of heaven and earth
Lord whole and sole—by a minute’s birth—
Through the love in a girl!

Paraphrased, the meaning will not prove as simple as the verses: Here is a
finger ring set with one small stone, one jewel. It is a very cheap-looking
stone to common eyes. But if you know a certain magical word, and, after
putting the ring on your finger, you whisper that magical word over the
cheap-looking stone, suddenly a spirit, a demon or a genie, springs from
that gem like a flash of fire miraculously issuing from a lump of ice. And
that spirit or genie has power to make you king of the whole world and of
the sky above the world, lord of the spirits of heaven and earth and air and
fire. Yet the stone is only—a pearl—and it can make you lord of the
universe. That is the old Arabian story. The word scroll here means a
manuscript, an Arabian manuscript.

But what is after all the happiness of mere power? There is a greater
happiness possible than to be lord of heaven and earth; that is the happiness
of being truly loved. Here is a woman; to the eye of the world, to the sight
of other men, she is not very beautiful nor at all remarkable in any way. She
is just an ordinary woman, as the pearl in the ring is to all appearances just a
common pearl. But let the right word be said, let the soul of that woman be
once really touched by the magic of love, and what a revelation! As the

spirit in the Arabian story sprang from the stone of the magical ring, when
the word was spoken, so from the heart of this woman suddenly her soul
displays itself in shining light. And the man who loves, instantly becomes,
in the splendour of that light, verily the lord of heaven and earth; to the eyes
of the being who loves him he is a god.

The legend is the legend of Solomon—not the Solomon of the Bible, but
the much more wonderful Solomon of the Arabian story-teller. His power is
said to have been in a certain seal ring, upon which the mystical name of
Allah, or at least one of the ninety and nine mystical names, was engraved.
When he chose to use this ring, all the spirits of air, the spirits of earth, the
spirits of water and the spirits of fire were obliged to obey him. The name
of such a ring is usually “Talisman.”

Here is another of Browning’s jewels, one of the last poems written shortly
before his death. It is entitled “Summum Bonum,”—signifying “the highest
good.” The subject is a kiss; we may understand that the first betrothal kiss
is the mark of affection described. When the promise of marriage has been
made, that promise is sealed or confirmed by the first kiss. But this refers
only to the refined classes of society. Among the English people proper,
especially the country folk, kissing the girls is only a form of showing mere
good will, and has no serious meaning at all.

All the breath and the bloom of the year in the bag of one bee:
All the wonder and wealth of the mine in the heart of one gem:
In the core of one pearl all the shade and the shine of the sea:
Breath and bloom, shade and shine,—wonder, wealth, and—how far
above them—
Truth, that’s brighter than gem,
Trust, that’s purer than pearl,—
Brightest truth, purest trust in the universe—all were for me
In the kiss of one girl.

There is in this a suggestion of Ben Jonson, who uses almost exactly the
same simile without any moral significance. The advantage of Browning is
that he has used the sensuous imagery for ethical symbolism; here he
greatly surpasses Jonson, though it would be hard to improve upon the

beauty of Jonson’s verses, as merely describing visual beauty. Here are
Jonson’s stanzas:

The Triumph

See the Chariot at hand here of Love,
Wherein my Lady rideth!
Each that draws is a swan or a dove,
And well the car Love guideth.
As she goes, all hearts do duty
Unto her beauty;
And enamoured do wish, so they might
But enjoy such a sight,
That they still were to run by her side,
Through swords, through seas, whither she would ride.

Do but look on her eyes, they do light
All that Love’s world compriseth!
Do but look on her hair, it is bright
As love’s star when it riseth!
Do but mark, her forehead’s smoother
Than words that soothe her;
And from her arch’d brows such a grace
Sheds itself through the face,
As alone there triumphs to the life
All the gain, all the good, of the elements’ strife.

Have you seen but a bright lily grow
Before rude hands have touched it?
Have you mark’d but the fall of the snow
Before the soil hath smutch’d it?
Have you felt the wool of beaver
Or swan’s down ever?
Or have smelt o’ the bud o’ the brier,
Or the nard in the fire?
Or have tasted the bag of the bee?
O so white, O so soft, O so sweet is she!

The first of the above stanzas is a study after the Roman poets; but the last
stanza is Jonson’s own and is very famous. You will see that Browning was
probably inspired by him, but I think that his verses are much more
beautiful in thought and feeling.

There is one type of ideal woman very seldom described in poetry—the old
maid, the woman whom sorrow or misfortune prevents from fulfilling her
natural destiny. Commonly the woman who never marries is said to become
cross, bad tempered, unpleasant in character. She could not be blamed for
this, I think; but there are old maids who always remain as unselfish and
frank and kind as a girl, and who keep the charm of girlhood even when
their hair is white. Hartley Coleridge, son of the great Samuel, attempted to
describe such a one, and his picture is both touching and beautiful.

The Solitary-Hearted

She was a queen of noble Nature’s crowning,
A smile of hers was like an act of grace;
She had no winsome looks, no pretty frowning,
Like daily beauties of the vulgar race:
But if she smiled, a light was on her face,
A clear, cool kindliness, a lunar beam
Of peaceful radiance, silvering o’er the stream
Of human thought with unabiding glory;
Not quite a waking truth, not quite a dream,
A visitation, bright and transitory.

But she is changed,—hath felt the touch of sorrow,
No love hath she, no understanding friend;
O grief! when Heaven is forced of earth to borrow
What the poor niggard earth has not to lend;
But when the stalk is snapt, the rose must bend.
The tallest flower that skyward rears its head
Grows from the common ground, and there must shed
Its delicate petals. Cruel fate, too surely
That they should find so base a bridal bed,
Who lived in virgin pride, so sweet and purely.

She had a brother, and a tender father,
And she was loved, but not as others are
From whom we ask return of love,—but rather
As one might love a dream; a phantom fair
Of something exquisitely strange and rare,
Which all were glad to look on, men and maids,
Yet no one claimed—as oft, in dewy glades,
The peering primrose, like a sudden gladness,
Gleams on the soul, yet unregarded fades;—
The joy is ours, but all its own the sadness.

’Tis vain to say—her worst of grief is only
The common lot, which all the world have known
To her ‘tis more, because her heart is lonely,
And yet she hath no strength to stand alone,—
Once she had playmates, fancies of her own,
And she did love them. They are past away
As fairies vanish at the break of day;
And like a spectre of an age departed,
Or unsphered angel woefully astray,
She glides along—the solitary-hearted.

Perhaps it is scarcely possible for you to imagine that a woman finds it
impossible to marry because of being too beautiful, too wise, and too good.
In Western countries it is not impossible at all. You must try to imagine
entirely different social conditions—conditions in which marriage depends
much more upon the person than upon the parents, much more upon
inclination than upon anything else. A woman’s chances of marriage depend
very much upon herself, upon her power of pleasing and charming.
Thousands and tens of thousands can never get married. Now there are
cases in which a woman can please too much. Men become afraid of her.
They think, “She knows too much, I dare not be frank with her”—or, “She
is too beautiful, she never would accept a common person like me”—or,
“She is too formal and correct, she would never forgive a mistake, and I
could never be happy with her.” Not only is this possible, but it frequently
happens. Too much excellence makes a misfortune. I think you can
understand it best by the reference to the very natural prejudice against

over-educated women, a prejudice founded upon experience and existing in
all countries, even in Japan. Men are not attracted to a woman because she
is excellent at mathematics, because she knows eight or nine different
languages, because she has acquired all the conventions of high-pressure
training. Men do not care about that. They want love and trust and
kindliness and ability to make a home beautiful and happy. Well, the poem
we have been reading is very pathetic because it describes a woman who
can not fulfil her natural destiny, can not be loved—this through no fault of
her own, but quite the reverse. To be too much advanced beyond one’s time
and environment is even a worse misfortune than to be too much behind.

Chapter IV

Note Upon the Shortest Forms of English
Poetry
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Perhaps there is an idea among Japanese students that one general
difference between Japanese and Western poetry is that the former
cultivates short forms and the latter longer ones, gut this is only in part true.
It is true that short forms of poetry have been cultivated in the Far East
more than in modern Europe; but in all European literature short forms of
poetry are to be found—indeed quite as short as anything in Japanese. Like
the Japanese, the old Greeks, who carried poetry to the highest perfection
that it has ever attained, delighted in short forms; and the Greek Anthology
is full of compositions containing only two or three lines. You will find
beautiful translations of these in Symonds’s “Studies of Greek Poets,” in the
second volume. Following Greek taste, the Roman poets afterwards
cultivated short forms of verse, but they chiefly used such verse for satirical
purposes, unfortunately; I say, unfortunately, because the first great English
poets who imitated the ancients were chiefly influenced by the Latin
writers, and they also used the short forms for epigrammatic satire rarely for
a purely esthetic object. Ben Jonson both wrote and translated a great
number of very short stanzas—two lines and four lines; but Jonson was a
satirist in these forms. Herrick, as you know, delighted in very short poems;
but he was greatly influenced by Jonson, and many of his couplets and of
his quatrains are worthless satires or worthless jests. However, you will find
some short verses in Herrick that almost make you think of a certain class
of Japanese poems. After the Elizabethan Age, also, the miniature poems
were still used in the fashion set by the Roman writers,—then the
eighteenth century deluged us with ill-natured witty epigrams of the like
brief form. It was not until comparatively modern times that our Western
world fully recognized the value of the distich, triplet or quatrain for the
expression of beautiful thoughts, rather than for the expression of ill-
natured ones. But now that the recognition has come, it has been discovered
that nothing is harder than to write a beautiful poem of two or four lines.

Only great masters have been truly successful at it. Goethe, you know,
made a quatrain that has become a part of world-literature:

Who ne’er his bread in sorrow ate,—
Who ne’er the lonely midnight hours,
Weeping upon his bed has sate,
He knows ye not, ye Heavenly Powers!

—meaning, of course, that inspiration and wisdom come to us only through
sorrow, and that those who have never suffered never can be wise. But in
the universities of England a great deal of short work of a most excellent
kind has been done in Greek and Latin; and there is the celebrated case of
an English student who won a prize by a poem of a single line. The subject
given had been the miracle of Christ’s turning water into wine at the
marriage feast; and while other scholars attempted elaborate composition on
the theme, this student wrote but one verse, of which the English translation
is

The modest water saw its Lord, and blushed.

Of course the force of the idea depends upon the popular conception of
wine being red. The Latin and Greek model, however, did not seem to
encourage much esthetic effort in short poems of English verse until the
time of the romantic movement. Then, both in France and England, many
brief forms of poetry made their appearance. In France, Victor Hugo
attempted composition in astonishingly varied forms of verse—some forms
actually consisting of only two syllables to a line. With this surprisingly
short measure begins one of Hugo’s most remarkably early poems, “Les
Djins,” representing the coming of evil spirits with a storm, their passing
over the house where a man is at prayer, and departing into the distance
again. Beginning with only two syllables to the line, the measure of the
poem gradually widens as the spirits approach, becomes very wide, very
long and sonorous as they reach the house, and again shrinks back to lines
of two syllables as the sound of them dies away. In England a like variety of
experiments has been made; but neither in France nor in England has the
short form yet been as successfully cultivated as it was among the Greeks.
We have some fine examples; but, as an eminent English editor observed a
few years ago, not enough examples to make a book. And of course this

means that there are very few; for you can make a book of poetry very well
with as little as fifty pages of largely and widely printed text. However, we
may cite a few modern instances.

I think that about the most perfect quatrains we have are those of the
extraordinary man, Walter Savage Landor, who, you know, was a rare
Greek scholar, all his splendid English work being very closely based upon
the Greek models. He made a little epitaph upon himself, which is
matchless of its kind:

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife;
Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art;
I warmed both hands before the fire of life:
It sinks; and I am ready to depart.

You know that Greeks used the short form a great deal for their exquisite
epitaphs, and that a considerable part of the anthology consists of epitaphic
literature. But the quatrain has a much wider range than this funereal
limitation, and one such example of epitaph will suffice.

Only one English poet of our own day, and that a minor one, has attempted
to make the poem of four lines a specialty—that is William Watson. He has
written a whole volume of such little poems, but very few of them are
successful. As I said before, we have not enough good poems of this sort for
a book; and the reason is not because English poets despise the short form,
but because it is supremely difficult. The Greeks succeeded in it, but we are
still far behind the Greeks in the shaping of any kind of verse. The best of
Watson’s pieces take the form of philosophical suggestions; and this kind of
verse is particularly well adapted to philosophical utterance.

Think not thy wisdom can illume away
The ancient tanglement of night and day.
Enough to acknowledge both, and both revere;
They see not clearliest who see all things clear.

That is to say, do not think that any human knowledge will ever be able to
make you understand the mystery of the universe with its darkness and
light, its joy and pain. It is best to revere the powers that make both good

and evil, and to remember that the keenest, worldly, practical minds are not
the minds that best perceive the great truths and mysteries of existence.
Here is another little bit, reminding us somewhat of Goethe’s quatrain,
already quoted.

Lives there whom pain hath evermore passed by
And sorrow shunned with an averted eye?
Him do thou pity,—him above the rest,
Him, of all hapless mortals most unblessed.

That needs no commentary, and it contains a large truth in small space.
Here is a little bit on the subject of the artist’s ambition, which is also good.

The thousand painful steps at last are trod,
At last the temple’s difficult door we win,
But perfect on his pedestal, the God
Freezes us hopeless when we enter in.

The higher that the artist climbs by effort, the nearer his approach to the
loftier truth, the more he understands how little his very best can achieve. It
is the greatest artist, he who veritably enters the presence of God—that
most feels his own weakness; the perception of beauty that other men can
not see, terrifies him, freezes him motionless, as the poet says.

Out of all of Watson’s epigrams I believe these are the best. The rest with
the possible exception of those on the subject of love seem to me altogether
failures. Emerson and various American poets also attempted the quatrain—
but Emerson’s verse is nearly always bad, even when his thought is
sublime. One example of Emerson will suffice.

Thou canst not wave thy staff in air,
Or dip thy paddle in the lake,
But it carves the bow of beauty there,
And the ripples in rhyme the oar forsake.

The form is atrociously bad; but the reflection is grand—it is another way
of expressing the beautiful old Greek thought that “God geometrizes
everywhere”—that is, that all motion is in geometrical lines, and full of

beauty. You can pick hundreds of fine things in very short verse out of
Emerson, but the verse is nearly always shapeless; the composition of the
man invariably makes us think of diamonds in the rough, jewels uncut. So
far as form goes a much better master of quatrain is the American poet
Aldrich, who wrote the following little thing, entitled “Popularity.”

Such kings of shreds have wooed and won her,
Such crafty knaves her laurel owned,
It has become almost an honour
Not to be crowned.

This is good verse. The reference to “a king of shreds and patches”—that is,
a beggar king—you will recognize as Shakespearean. But although this
pretty verse has in it more philosophy than satire, it approaches the satiric
class of epigrams. Neither America nor England has been able to do very
much in the sort of verse that we have been talking about. Now this is a
very remarkable thing,—because at the English universities beautiful work
has been done in Greek or Latin—in poems of a single line, of two lines, of
three lines and other very brief measures. Why can it not be done in
English? I suspect that it is because our English language has not yet
become sufficiently perfect, sufficiently flexible, sufficiently melodious to
allow of great effect with a very few words. We can do the thing in Greek or
in Latin because either Greek or Latin is a more perfect language.

So much for theory. I should like to suggest, however, that it is very
probable many attempts at these difficult forms of poetry will be attempted
by English poets within the next few years. There is now a tendency in that
direction. I do not know whether such attempts will be successful; but I
should like you to understand that for Western poets they are extremely
difficult and that you ought to obtain from the recognition of this fact a new
sense of the real value of your own short forms of verse in the hands of a
master. Effects can be produced in Japanese which the Greeks could
produce with few syllables, but which the English can not. Now it strikes
me that, instead of even thinking of throwing away old forms of verse in
order to invent new ones, the future Japanese poets ought rather to develop
and cultivate and prize the forms already existing, which belong to the
genius of the language, and which have proved themselves capable of much

that no English verse or even French verse could accomplish. Perhaps only
the Italian is really comparable to Japanese in some respects; you can
perform miracles with Italian verse.

Chapter V

Some Foreign Poems on Japanese Subjects
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The Western poet and writer of romance has exactly the same kind of
difficulty in comprehending Eastern subjects as you have in comprehending
Western subjects. You will commonly find references to Japanese love
poems of the popular kind made in such a way as to indicate the writer’s
belief that such poems refer to married life or at least to a courtship relation.
No Western writer who has not lived for many years in the East, could write
correctly about anything on this subject; and even after a long stay in the
country he might be unable to understand. Therefore a great deal of Western
poetry written about Japan must seem to you all wrong, and I can not hope
to offer you many specimens of work in this direction that could deserve
your praise. Yet there is some poetry so fine on the subject of Japan that I
think you would admire it and I am sure that you should know it. A proof of
really great art is that it is generally true—it seldom falls into the
misapprehensions to which minor art is liable. What do you think of the fact
that the finest poetry ever written upon a Japanese subject by any Western
poet, has been written by a man who never saw the land? But he is a
member of the French Academy, a great and true lover of art, and without a
living superior in that most difficult form of poetry, the sonnet. In the time
of thirty years he produced only one very small volume of sonnets, but so
fine are these that they were lifted to the very highest place in poetical
distinction. I may say that there are now only three really great French poets
—survivals of the grand romantic school. These are Leconte de Lisle,
Sully-Prudhomme, and José Maria de Heredia. It is the last of whom I am
speaking. As you can tell by his name, he is not a Frenchman either by birth
or blood, but a Spaniard, or rather a Spanish Creole, born in Cuba. Heredia
knows Japan only through pictures, armour, objects of art in museums,
paintings and carvings. Remembering this, I think that you will find that he
does wonderfully well. It is true that he puts a woman in one of his pictures,
but I think that his management of his subject is very much nearer the truth
than that of almost any writer who has attempted to describe old Japan. And
you must understand that the following sonnet is essentially intended to be

a picture—to produce upon the mind exactly the same effect that a picture
does, with the addition of such life as poetry can give.

Le Samourai

D’un doigt distrait frôlant la sonore bîva,
A travers les bambous tressés en fine latte,
Elle a vu, par la plage éblouissante et plate,
S’avancer le vainqueur que son amour rêva.

C’est lui. Sabres au flanc, l’éventail haut, il va.
La cordelière rouge et le gland écarlate
Coupent l’armure sombre, et, sur l’épaule, éclate
Le blazon de Hizen ou de Tokungawa.

Ce beau guerrier vêtu de lames et de plaques,
Sous le bronze, la soie et les brillantes laques,
Semble un crustace noir, gigantesque et vermeil.

Il l’a vue. Il sourit dans la barbe du masque,
Et son pas plus hâtif fait reluire au soleil
Les deux antennes d’or qui tremblent à son casque.

“Lightly touching her biva with heedless finger, she has perceived, through
the finely woven bamboo screen, the conqueror, lovingly thought of,
approach over the dazzling level of the beach.

“It is he. With his swords at his side he advances, holding up his fan. The
red girdle and the scarlet tassel appear in sharply cut relief against the dark
armour; and upon his shoulder glitters a crest of Hizen or of Tokungawa.

“This handsome warrior sheathed with his scales and plates of metal, under
his bronze, his silk and glimmering lacquer, seems a crustacean, gigantic,
black and vermilion.

“He has caught sight of her. Under the beaver of the war mask he smiles,
and his quickened step makes to glitter in the sun the two antennæ of gold
that quiver upon his helmet.”

The comparison of a warrior in full armour to a gigantic crab or lobster,
especially lobster, is not exactly new. Victor Hugo has used it before in
French literature, just as Carlyle has used it in English literature; indeed the

image could not fail to occur to the artist in any country where the study of
armour has been carried on. But here the poet does not speak of any
particular creature; he uses only the generic term, crustacean, the vagueness
of which makes the comparison much more effective. I think you can see
the whole picture at once. It is a Japanese colour-print,—some ancient
interior, lighted by the sun of a great summer day; and a woman looking
through a bamboo blind toward the seashore, where she sees a warrior
approaching. He divines that he is seen; but if he smiles, it is only because
the smile is hidden by his iron mask. The only sign of any sentiment on his
part is that he walks a little quicker. Still more amazing is a companion
picture, containing only a solitary figure:

Le Daimio (Matin de bataille)

Sous le noir fouet de guerre à quadruple pompon,
L’étalon belliqueux en hennissant se cabre,
Et fait bruire, avec de cliquetis de sabre,
La cuirasse de bronze aux lames du jupon.

Le Chef vêtu d’airain, de laque et de crépon,
Otant le masque à poils de son visage glabre,
Regarde le volcan sur un ciel de cinabre
Dresser la neige où rit l’aurore du Nippon.

Mais il a vu, vers l’Est éclaboussé d’or, l’astre,
Glorieux d’éclairer ce matin de désastre,
Poindre, orbe éblouissant, au-dessus de la mer;

Et pour couvrir ses yeux dont pas un cil ne bouge,
Il ouvre d’un seul coup son éventail de fer,
Où dans le satin blanc se lève un Soleil rouge.

“Under the black war whip with its quadruple pompon the fierce stallion,
whinnying, curvets, and makes the rider’s bronze cuirass ring against the
plates of his shirt of mail, with a sound like the clashing of sword blades.

“The Chief, clad in bronze and lacquer and silken crape, removing the
bearded masque from his beardless face, turns his gaze to the great volcano,

lifting its snows into the cinnabar sky where the dawn of Nippon begins to
smile.

“Nay! he has already seen the gold-spattered day star, gloriously
illuminating the morning of disaster, rise, a blinding disk, above the seas.
And to shade his eyes, on both of which not even a single eyelash stirs, he
opens with one quick movement his iron fan, wherein upon a field of white
satin there rises a crimson sun.”

Of course this hasty translation is very poor; and you can only get from it
the signification and colour of the picture—the beautiful sonority and
luminosity of the French is all gone. Nevertheless, I am sure that the more
you study the original the more you will see how fine it is. Here also is a
Japanese colour print. We see the figure of the horseman on the shore, in the
light of dawn; behind him the still dark sky of night; before him the crimson
dawn, and Fuji white against the red sky. And in the open fan, with its red
sun, we have a grim suggestion of the day of blood that is about to be; that
is all. But whoever reads that sonnet will never forget it; it burns into the
memory. So, indeed, does everything that Heredia writes. Unfortunately he
has not yet written anything more about Japan.

I have quoted Heredia because I think that no other poet has even
approached him in the attempt to make a Japanese picture—though many
others have tried; and the French, nearly always, have done much better
than the English, because they are more naturally artists. Indeed one must
be something of an artist to write anything in the way of good poetry on a
Japanese subject. If you look at the collection “Poems of Places,” in the
library, you will see how poorly Japan is there represented; the only
respectable piece of foreign work being by Longfellow, and that is only
about Japanese vases. But since then some English poems have appeared
which are at least worthy of Japanese notice.

Chapter VI

The Bible in English Literature
Return to Table of Contents

It is no exaggeration to say that the English Bible is, next to Shakespeare,
the greatest work in English literature, and that it will have much more
influence than even Shakespeare upon the written and spoken language of
the English race. For this reason, to study English literature without some
general knowledge of the relation of the Bible to that literature would be to
leave one’s literary education very incomplete. It is not necessary to
consider the work from a religious point of view at all; indeed, to so
consider it would be rather a hindrance to the understanding of its literary
excellence. Some persons have ventured to say that it is only since
Englishmen ceased to believe in the Bible that they began to discover how
beautiful it was. This is not altogether true; but it is partly true. For it is one
thing to consider every word of a book as the word of God or gods, and
another thing to consider it simply as the work of men like ourselves.
Naturally we should think it our duty to suppose the work of a divine being
perfect in itself, and to imagine beauty and truth where neither really exists.
The wonder of the English Bible can really be best appreciated by those
who, knowing it to be the work of men much less educated and cultivated
than the scholars of the nineteenth century, nevertheless perceive that those
men were able to do in literature what no man of our own day could
possibly do.

Of course in considering the work of the translators, we must remember the
magnificence of the original. I should not like to say that the Bible is the
greatest of all religious books. From the moral point of view it contains
very much that we can not to-day approve of; and what is good in it can be
found in the sacred books of other nations. Its ethics can not even claim to
be absolutely original. The ancient Egyptian scriptures contain beauties
almost superior in moral exaltation to anything contained in the Old
Testament; and the sacred books of other Eastern nations, notably the sacred
books of India, surpass the Hebrew scriptures in the highest qualities of
imagination and of profound thought. It is only of late years that Europe,

through the labour of Sanskrit and Pali scholars, has become acquainted
with the astonishing beauty of thought and feeling which Indian scholars
enshrined in scriptures much more voluminous than the Hebrew Bible; and
it is not impossible that this far-off literature will some day influence
European thought quite as much as the Jewish Bible. Everywhere to-day in
Europe and America the study of Buddhist and Sanskrit literature is being
pursued not only with eagerness but with enthusiasm—an enthusiasm
which sometimes reaches to curious extremes. I might mention, in example,
the case of a rich man who recently visited Japan on his way from India. He
had in New Zealand a valuable property; he was a man of high culture, and
of considerable social influence. One day he happened to read an English
translation of the “Bhagavad-Gita.” Almost immediately he resolved to
devote the rest of his life to religious study in India, in a monastery among
the mountains; and he gave up wealth, friends, society, everything that
Western civilization could offer him, in order to seek truth in a strange
country. Certainly this is not the only instance of the kind; and while such
incidents can happen, we may feel sure that the influence of religious
literature is not likely to die for centuries to come.

But every great scripture, whether Hebrew, Indian, Persian, or Chinese,
apart from its religious value will be found to have some rare and special
beauty of its own; and in this respect the original Bible stands very high as a
monument of sublime poetry and of artistic prose. If it is not the greatest of
religious books as a literary creation, it is at all events one of the greatest;
and the proof is to be found in the inspiration which millions and hundreds
of millions, dead and living, have obtained from its utterances. The Semitic
races have always possessed in a very high degree the genius of poetry,
especially poetry in which imagination plays a great part; and the Bible is
the monument of Semitic genius in this regard. Something in the serious,
stern, and reverential spirit of the genius referred to made a particular
appeal to Western races having certain characteristics of the same kind.
Themselves uncultivated in the time that the Bible was first made known to
them, they found in it almost everything that they thought and felt,
expressed in a much better way than they could have expressed it.
Accordingly the Northern races of Europe found their inspiration in the
Bible; and the enthusiasm for it has not yet quite faded away.

But the value of the original, be it observed, did not make the value of the
English Bible. Certainly it was an inspiring force; but it was nothing more.
The English Bible is perhaps a much greater piece of fine literature,
altogether considered, than the Hebrew Bible. It was so for a particular
reason which it is very necessary for the student to understand. The English
Bible is a product of literary evolution.

In studying English criticisms upon different authors, I think that you must
have sometimes felt impatient with the critics who told you, for example,
that Tennyson was partly inspired by Wordsworth and partly by Keats and
partly by Coleridge; and that Coleridge was partly inspired by Blake and
Blake by the Elizabethans, and so on. You may have been tempted to say, as
I used very often myself to say, “What does it matter where the man got his
ideas from? I care only for the beauty that is in his work, not for a history of
his literary education.” But to-day the value of the study of such relations
appears in quite a new light. Evolutional philosophy, applied to the study of
literature as to everything else, has shown us conclusively that man is not a
god who can make something out of nothing, and that every great work of
genius must depend even less upon the man of genius himself than upon the
labours of those who lived before him. Every great author must draw his
thoughts and his knowledge in part from other great authors, and these
again from previous authors, and so on back, till we come to that far time in
which there was no written literature, but only verses learned by heart and
memorized by all the people of some one tribe or place, and taught by them
to their children and to their grandchildren. It is only in Greek mythology
that the divinity of Wisdom leaps out of a god’s head, in full armour. In the
world of reality the more beautiful a work of art, the longer, we may be
sure, was the time required to make it, and the greater the number of
different minds which assisted in its development.

So with the English Bible. No one man could have made the translation of
1611. No one generation of men could have done it. It was not the labour of
a single century. It represented the work of hundreds of translators working
through hundreds of years, each succeeding generation improving a little
upon the work of the previous generation, until in the seventeenth century
the best had been done of which the English brain and the English language
was capable. In no other way can the surprising beauties of style and

expression be explained. No subsequent effort could improve the Bible of
King James. Every attempt made since the seventeenth century has only
resulted in spoiling and deforming the strength and the beauty of the
authorized text.

Now you will understand why, from the purely literary point of view, the
English Bible is of the utmost importance for study. Suppose we glance for
a moment at the principal events in the history of this evolution.

The first translation of the Bible into a Western tongue was that made by
Jerome (commonly called Saint Jerome) in the fourth century; he translated
directly from the Hebrew and other Arabic languages into Latin, then the
language of the Empire. This translation into Latin was called the Vulgate,
—from vulgare, “to make generally known.” The Vulgate is still used in the
Roman church. The first English translations which have been preserved to
us were made from the Vulgate, not from the original tongues. First of all,
John Wycliffe’s Bible may be called the foundation of the seventeenth
century Bible. Wycliffe’s translation, in which he was helped by many
others, was published between 1380 and 1388. So we may say that the
foundation of the English Bible dates from the fourteenth century, one
thousand years after Jerome’s Latin translation. But Wycliffe’s version,
excellent as it was, could not serve very long: the English language was
changing too quickly. Accordingly, in the time of Henry VIII Tyndale and
Coverdale, with many others, made a new translation, this time not from the
Vulgate, but from the Greek text of the great scholar Erasmus. This was the
most important literary event of the time, for “it coloured the entire
complexion of subsequent English prose,”—to use the words of Professor
Gosse. This means that all prose in English written since Henry VIII has
been influenced, directly or indirectly, by the prose of Tyndale’s Bible,
which was completed about 1535. Almost at the same time a number of
English divines, under the superintendence of Archbishop Cramner, gave to
the English language a literary treasure scarcely inferior to the Bible itself,
and containing wonderful translations from the Scriptures,—the “Book of
Common Prayer.” No English surpasses the English of this book, still used
by the Church; and many translators have since found new inspiration from
it.

A revision of this famous Bible was made in 1565, entitled “The Bishops’
Bible.” The cause of the revision was largely doctrinal, and we need not
trouble ourselves about this translation farther than to remark that
Protestantism was reshaping the Scriptures to suit the new state religion.
Perhaps this edition may have had something to do with the determination
of the Roman Catholics to make an English Bible of their own. The Jesuits
began the work in 1582 at Rheims, and by 1610 the Roman Catholic
version known as the Douay (or Douai) version—because of its having
been made chiefly at the Catholic College of Douai in France—was
completed. This version has many merits; next to the wonderful King James
version, it is certainly the most poetical; and it has the further advantage of
including a number of books which Protestantism has thrown out of the
authorized version, but which have been used in the Roman church since its
foundation. But I am speaking of the book only as a literary English
production. It was not made with the help of original sources; its merits are
simply those of a melodious translation from the Latin Vulgate.

At last, in 1611, was made, under the auspices of King James, the famous
King James version; and this is the great literary monument of the English
language. It was the work of many learned men; but the chief worker and
supervisor was the Bishop of Winchester, Lancelot Andrews, perhaps the
most eloquent English preacher that ever lived. He was a natural-born
orator, with an exquisite ear for the cadences of language. To this natural
faculty of the Bishop’s can be attributed much of the musical charm of the
English in which the Bible was written. Still, it must not be supposed that
he himself did all the work, or even more than a small proportion of it.
What he did was to tone it; he overlooked and corrected all the text
submitted to him, and suffered only the best forms to survive. Yet what
magnificent material he had to choose from! All the translations of the
Bible that had been made before his time were carefully studied with a view
to the conservation of the best phrases, both for sound and for form. We
must consider the result not merely as a study of literature in itself, but also
as a study of eloquence; for every attention was given to those effects to be
expected from an oratorical recitation of the text in public.

This marks the end of the literary evolution of the Bible. Everything that
has since been done has only been in the direction of retrogression, of

injury to the text. We have now a great many later versions, much more
scholarly, so far as correct scholarship is concerned, than the King James
version, but none having any claim to literary importance. Unfortunately,
exact scholars are very seldom men of literary ability; the two faculties are
rarely united. The Bible of 1870, known as the Oxford Bible, and now used
in the Anglican state-church, evoked a great protest from the true men of
letters, the poets and critics who had found their inspirations in the useful
study of the old version. The new version was the work of fourteen years; it
was made by the united labour of the greatest scholars in the English-
speaking world; and it is far the most exact translation that we have.
Nevertheless the literary quality has been injured to such an extent that no
one will ever turn to the new revision for poetical study. Even among the
churches there was a decided condemnation of this scholarly treatment of
the old text; and many of the churches refused to use the book. In this case,
conservatism is doing the literary world a service, keeping the old King
James version in circulation, and insisting especially upon its use in Sunday
schools.

We may now take a few examples of the differences between the revised
version and the Bible of King James. Professor Saintsbury, in an essay upon
English prose, published some years ago, said that the most perfect piece of
English prose in the language was that comprised in the sixth and seventh
verses of the eighth chapter of the Song of Songs:

Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm:
for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave; the
coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement
flame.

Many waters can not quench love, neither can the floods
drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house
for love, it would utterly be condemned.

I should not like to say that the Professor is certainly right in calling this the
finest prose in the English language; but he is a very great critic, whose
opinion must be respected and considered, and the passage is certainly very
fine. But in the revised version, how tame the same text has become in the
hands of the scholarly translators!

The flashes thereof are flashes of fire, a very flame of the
Lord.

Now as a description of jealousy, not to speak of the literary execution at
all, which is the best? What, we may ask, has been gained by calling
jealousy “a flame of the Lord” or by substituting the word “flashes” for
“coals of fire”? All through the new version are things of this kind. For
example, in the same Song of Songs there is a beautiful description of eyes,
like “doves by the rivers of waters, washed with milk, and fitly set.” By
substituting “rivers” only for “rivers of waters” the text may have gained in
exactness, but it has lost immeasurably, both in poetry and in sound. Far
more poetical is the verse as given in the Douai version: “His eyes are as
doves upon brooks of waters, which are washed with milk, and sit beside
the beautiful streams.”

It may even be said without any question that the mistakes of the old
translators were often much more beautiful than the original. A splendid
example is given in the verse of Job, chapter twenty-six, verse thirteen: “By
his spirit he hath garnished the heavens; his hand hath formed the crooked
serpent.” By the crooked serpent was supposed to be signified the grand
constellation called Draco, or the Dragon. And the figure is sublime. It is
still more sublime in the Douai translation. “His obstetric hand hath brought
forth the Winding Serpent.” This is certainly a grand imagination—the hand
of God, like the hand of a midwife, bringing forth a constellation out of the
womb of the eternal night. But in the revised version, which is exact, we
have only “His hand hath pierced the Swift Serpent!” All the poetry is dead.

There are two methods for the literary study of any book—the first being
the study of its thought and emotion; the second only that of its
workmanship. A student of literature should study some of the Bible from
both points of view. In attempting the former method he will do well to
consider many works of criticism, but for the study of the text as literature,
his duty is very plain—the King James version is the only one that ought to
form the basis of his study, though he should look at the Douai version
occasionally. Also he should have a book of references, such as Cruden’s
Concordance, by help of which he can collect together in a few moments all
the texts upon any particular subject, such as the sea, the wind, the sky,

human life, the shadows of evening. The study of the Bible is not one which
I should recommend to very young Japanese students, because of the
quaintness of the English. Before a good knowledge of English forms is
obtained, the archaisms are apt to affect the students’ mode of expression.
But for the advanced student of literature, I should say that some knowledge
of the finest books in the Bible is simply indispensable. The important
books to read are not many. But one should read at least the books of
Genesis, Exodus, Ruth, Esther, the Song of Songs, Proverbs,—and, above
all, Job. Job is certainly the grandest book in the Bible; but all of those
which I have named are books that have inspired poets and writers in all
departments of English literature to such an extent that you can scarcely
read a masterpiece in which there is not some conscious or unconscious
reference to them. Another book of philosophical importance is
Ecclesiastes, where, in addition to much proverbial wisdom, you will find
some admirable world-poetry—that is, poetry which contains universal
truth about human life in all times and all ages. Of the historical books and
the law books I do not think that it is important to read much; the literary
element in these is not so pronounced. It is otherwise with the prophetic
books, but here in order to obtain a few jewels of expression, you have to
read a great deal that is of little value. Of the New Testament there is very
little equal to the Old in literary value; indeed, I should recommend the
reading only of the closing book—the book called the Revelation, or the
Apocalypse, from which we have derived a literary adjective “apocalyptic,”
to describe something at once very terrible and very grand. Whether one
understands the meaning of this mysterious text makes very little
difference; the sonority and the beauty of its sentences, together with the
tremendous character of its imagery, can not but powerfully influence mind
and ear, and thus stimulate literary taste. At least two of the great prose
writers of the nineteenth century, Carlyle and Ruskin, have been vividly
influenced by the book of the Revelation. Every period of English literature
shows some influence of Bible study, even from the old Anglo-Saxon days;
and during the present year, the study has so little slackened that one
constantly sees announcements of new works upon the literary elements of
the Bible. Perhaps one of the best is Professor Moulton’s “Modern Reader’s
Bible,” in which the literary side of the subject receives better consideration
than in any other work of the kind published for general use.

Chapter VII

The “Havamal”
Old Northern Ethics of Life
Return to Table of Contents

Then from his lips in music rolled
The Havamal of Odin old,
With sounds mysterious as the roar
Of billows on a distant shore.

Perhaps many of you who read this little verse in Longfellow’s “Saga of
King Olaf” have wished to know what was this wonderful song that the
ghost of the god sang to the king. I am afraid that you would be very
disappointed in some respects by the “Havamal.” There is indeed a magical
song in it; and it is this magical song especially that Longfellow refers to, a
song of charms. But most of the “Havamal” is a collection of ethical
teaching. All that has been preserved by it has been published and translated
by Professors Vigfusson and Powell. It is very old—perhaps the oldest
Northern literature that we have. I am going to attempt a short lecture upon
it, because it is very closely related to the subject of Northern character, and
will help us, perhaps better than almost anything else, to understand how
the ancestors of the English felt and thought before they became Christians.
Nor is this all. I venture to say that the character of the modern English
people still retains much more of the quality indicated by the “Havamal”
than of the quality implied by Christianity. The old Northern gods are not
dead; they rule a very great part of the world to-day.

The proverbial philosophy of a people helps us to understand more about
them than any other kind of literature. And this sort of literature is certainly
among the oldest. It represents only the result of human experience in
society, the wisdom that men get by contact with each other, the results of
familiarity with right and wrong. By studying the proverbs of a people, you
can always make a very good guess as to whether you could live
comfortably among them or not.

Froude, in one of his sketches of travel in Norway, made the excellent
observation that if we could suddenly go back to the time of the terrible sea-
kings, if we could revisit to-day the homes of the old Northern pirates, and
find them exactly as they were one thousand or fifteen hundred years ago,
we should find them very much like the modern Englishmen—big, simple,
silent men, concealing a great deal of shrewdness under an aspect of
simplicity. The teachings of the “Havamal” give great force to this
supposition. The book must have been known in some form to the early
English—or at least the verses composing it (it is all written in verse); and
as I have already said, the morals of the old English, as well as their
character, differed very little from those of the men of the still further
North, with whom they mingled and intermarried freely, both before and
after the Danish conquest, when for one moment England and Sweden were
one kingdom.

Of course you must remember that Northern society was a very terrible
thing in some ways. Every man carried his life in his hands; every farmer
kept sword and spear at his side even in his own fields; and every man
expected to die fighting. In fact, among the men of the more savage North
—the men of Norway in especial—it was considered a great disgrace to die
of sickness, to die on one’s bed. That was not to die like a man. Men would
go out and get themselves killed, when they felt old age or sickness coming
on. But these facts must not blind us to the other fact that there was even in
that society a great force of moral cohesion, and sound principles of
morality. If there had not been, it could not have existed; much less could
the people who lived under it have become the masters of a great part of the
world, which they are at the present day. There was, in spite of all that
fierceness, much kindness and good nature among them; there were rules of
conduct such as no man could find fault with—rules which still govern
English society to some extent. And there was opportunity enough for
social amusement, social enjoyment, and the winning of public esteem by a
noble life.

Still, even in the “Havamal,” one is occasionally startled by teachings
which show the darker side of Northern life, a life of perpetual vendetta. As
in old Japan, no man could live under the same heaven with the murderer of

his brother or father; vengeance was a duty even in the case of a friend. On
the subject of enemies the “Havamal” gives not a little curious advice:

A man should never step a foot beyond his weapons; for he
can never tell where, on his path without, he may need his
spear.

A man, before he goes into a house, should look to and espy
all the doorways (so that he can find his way out quickly
again), for he can never know where foes may be sitting in
another man’s house.

Does not this remind us of the Japanese proverb that everybody has three
enemies outside of his own door? But the meaning of the “Havamal”
teaching is much more sinister. And when the man goes into the house, he is
still told to be extremely watchful—to keep his ears and eyes open so that
he may not be taken by surprise:

The wary guest keeps watchful silence; he listens with his
ears and peers about with his eyes; thus does every wise man
look about him.

One would think that men must have had very strong nerves to take comfort
under such circumstances, but the poet tells us that the man who can enjoy
nothing must be both a coward and a fool. Although a man was to keep
watch to protect his life, that was not a reason why he should be afraid of
losing it. There were but three things of which a man should be particularly
afraid. The first was drink—because drink often caused a man to lose
control of his temper; the second was another man’s wife—repeatedly the
reader is warned never to make love to another man’s wife; and the third
was thieves—men who would pretend friendship for the purpose of killing
and stealing, The man who could keep constant watch over himself and his
surroundings was, of course, likely to have the longest life.

Now in all countries there is a great deal of ethical teaching, and always has
been, on the subject of speech. The “Havamal” is full of teaching on this
subject—the necessity of silence, the danger and the folly of reckless talk.
You all know the Japanese proverb that “the mouth is the front gate of all

misfortune.” The Norse poet puts the same truth into a grimmer shape: “The
tongue works death to the head.” Here are a number of sayings on this
subject:

He that is never silent talks much folly; a glib tongue, unless
it be bridled, will often talk a man into trouble.

Do not speak three angry words with a worse man; for often
the better man falls by the worse man’s sword.

Smile thou in the face of the man thou trusteth not, and
speak against thy mind.

This is of course a teaching of cunning; but it is the teaching, however
immoral, that rules in English society to-day. In the old Norse, however,
there were many reasons for avoiding a quarrel whenever possible—reasons
which must have existed also in feudal Japan. A man might not care about
losing his own life; but he had to be careful not to stir up a feud that might
go on for a hundred years. Although there was a great deal of killing, killing
always remained a serious matter, because for every killing there had to be
a vengeance. It is true that the law exonerated the man who killed another,
if he paid a certain blood-price; murder was not legally considered an
unpardonable crime. But the family of the dead man would very seldom be
satisfied with a payment; they would want blood for blood. Accordingly
men had to be very cautious about quarreling, however brave they might
personally be.

But all this caution about silence and about watchfulness did not mean that
a man should be unable to speak to the purpose when speech was required.
“A wise man,” says the “Havamal,” “should be able both to ask and to
answer.” There is a proverb which you know, to the effect that you can not
shut the door upon another man’s mouth. So says the Norse poet: “The sons
of men can keep silence about nothing that passes among men; therefore a
man should be able to take his own part, prudently and strongly.” Says the
“Havamal”: “A fool thinks he knows everything if he sits snug in his little
corner; but he is at a loss for words if the people put to him a question.”
Elsewhere it is said: “Arch dunce is he who can speak nought, for that is the
mark of a fool.” And the sum of all this teaching about the tongue is that

men should never speak without good reason, and then should speak to the
point strongly and wisely.

On the subject of fools there is a great deal in the “Havamal”; but you must
understand always by the word fool, in the Northern sense, a man of weak
character who knows not what to do in time of difficulty. That was a fool
among those men, and a dangerous fool; for in such a state of society
mistakes in act or in speech might reach to terrible consequences. See these
little observations about fools:

Open-handed, bold-hearted men live most happily, they
never feel care; but a fool troubles himself about everything.
The niggard pines for gifts.

A fool is awake all night, worrying about everything; when
the morning comes he is worn out, and all his troubles are
just the same as before.

A fool thinks that all who smile upon him are his friends, not
knowing, when he is with wise men, who there may be
plotting against him.

If a fool gets a drink, all his mind is immediately displayed.

But it was not considered right for a man not to drink, although drink was a
dangerous thing. On the contrary, not to drink would have been thought a
mark of cowardice and of incapacity for self-control. A man was expected
even to get drunk if necessary, and to keep his tongue and his temper no
matter how much he drank. The strong character would only become more
cautious and more silent under the influence of drink; the weak man would
immediately show his weakness. I am told the curious fact that in the
English army at the present day officers are expected to act very much after
the teaching of the old Norse poet; a man is expected to be able on occasion
to drink a considerable amount of wine or spirits without showing the
effects of it, either in his conduct or in his speech. “Drink thy share of
mead; speak fair or not at all”—that was the old text, and a very sensible
one in its way.

Laughter was also condemned, if indulged in without very good cause.
“The miserable man whose mind is warped laughs at everything, not
knowing what he ought to know, that he himself has no lack of faults.” I
need scarcely tell you that the English are still a very serious people, not
disposed to laugh nearly so much as are the men of the more sympathetic
Latin races. You will remember perhaps Lord Chesterfield’s saying that
since he became a man no man had ever seen him laugh. I remember about
twenty years ago that there was published by some Englishman a very
learned and very interesting little book, called “The Philosophy of
Laughter,” in which it was gravely asserted that all laughter was foolish. I
must acknowledge, however, that no book ever made me laugh more than
the volume in question.

The great virtue of the men of the North, according to the “Havamal,” was
indeed the virtue which has given to the English race its present great
position among nations,—the simplest of all virtues, common sense. But
common sense means much more than the words might imply to the
Japanese students, or to any one unfamiliar with English idioms. Common
sense, or mother-wit, means natural intelligence, as opposed to, and
independent of, cultivated or educated intelligence. It means inherited
knowledge; and inherited knowledge may take even the form of genius. It
means foresight. It means intuitive knowledge of other people’s character. It
means cunning as well as broad comprehension. And the modern
Englishman, in all times and in all countries, trusts especially to this faculty,
which is very largely developed in the race to which he belongs. No
Englishman believes in working from book learning. He suspects all
theories, philosophical or other. He suspects everything new, and dislikes it,
unless he can be compelled by the force of circumstances to see that this
new thing has advantages over the old. Race-experience is what he
invariably depends upon, whenever he can, whether in India, in Egypt, or in
Australia. His statesmen do not consult historical precedents in order to
decide what to do: they first learn the facts as they are; then they depend
upon their own common sense, not at all upon their university learning or
upon philosophical theories. And in the case of the English nation, it must
be acknowledged that this instinctive method has been eminently
successful. When the “Havamal” speaks of wisdom it means mother-wit,

and nothing else; indeed, there was no reading or writing to speak of in
those times:

No man can carry better baggage on his journey than
wisdom.

There is no better friend than great common sense.

But the wise man should not show himself to be wise without occasion. He
should remember that the majority of men are not wise, and he should be
careful not to show his superiority over them unnecessarily. Neither should
be despise men who do not happen to be as wise as himself:

No man is so good but there is a flaw in him, nor so bad as
to be good for nothing.

Middling wise should every man be; never overwise. Those
who know many things rarely lead the happiest life.

Middling wise should every man be; never overwise. No
man should know his fate beforehand; so shall he live freest
from care.

Middling wise should every man be, never too wise. A wise
man’s heart is seldom glad, if its owner be a true sage.

This is the ancient wisdom also of Solomon “He that increases wisdom
increases sorrow.” But how very true as worldly wisdom these little
Northern sentences are. That a man who knows a little of many things, and
no one thing perfectly, is the happiest man—this certainly is even more true
to-day than it was a thousand years ago. Spencer has well observed that the
man who can influence his generation, is never the man greatly in advance
of his time, but only the man who is very slightly better than his fellows.
The man who is very superior is likely to be ignored or disliked. Mediocrity
can not help disliking superiority; and as the old Northern sage declared,
“the average of men is but moiety.” Moiety does not mean necessarily
mediocrity, but also that which is below mediocrity. What we call in
England to-day, as Matthew Arnold called it, the Philistine element,

continues to prove in our own time, to almost every superior man, the
danger of being too wise.

Interesting in another way, and altogether more agreeable, are the old
sayings about friendship: “Know this, if thou hast a trusty friend, go and see
him often; because a road which is seldom trod gets choked with brambles
and high grass.”

Be not thou the first to break off from thy friend. Sorrow
will eat thy heart if thou lackest the friend to open thy heart
to.

Anything is better than to be false; he is no friend who only
speaks to please.

Which means, of course, that a true friend is not afraid to find fault with his
friend’s course; indeed, that is his solemn duty. But these teachings about
friendship are accompanied with many cautions; for one must be very
careful in the making friends. The ancient Greeks had a terrible proverb:
“Treat your friend as if he should become some day your enemy; and treat
your enemy as if he might some day become your friend.” This proverb
seems to me to indicate a certain amount of doubt in human nature. We do
not find this doubt in the Norse teaching, but on the contrary, some very
excellent advice. The first thing to remember is that friendship is sacred:
“He that opens his heart to another mixes blood with him.” Therefore one
should be very careful either about forming or about breaking a friendship.

A man should be a friend to his friend’s friend. But no man
should be a friend of his friend’s foe, nor of his foe’s friend.

A man should be a friend with his friend, and pay back gift
with gift; give back laughter for laughter (to his enemies),
and lesing for lies.

Give and give back makes the longest friend. Give not
overmuch at one time. Gift always looks for return.

The poet also tells us how trifling gifts are quite sufficient to make friends
and to keep them, if wisely given. A costly gift may seem like a bribe; a
little gift is only the sign of kindly feeling. And as a mere matter of justice,
a costly gift may be unkind, for it puts the friend under an obligation which
he may not be rich enough to repay. Repeatedly we are told also that too
much should not be expected of friendship. The value of a friend is his
affection, his sympathy; but favours that cost must always be returned.

I never met a man so open-hearted and free with his food,
but that boon was boon to him—nor so generous as not to
look for return if he had a chance.

Emerson says almost precisely the same thing in his essay on friendship—
showing how little human wisdom has changed in all the centuries. Here is
another good bit of advice concerning visits:

It is far away to an ill friend, even though he live on one’s
road; but to a good friend there is a short cut, even though he
live far out.

Go on, be not a guest ever in the same house. The welcome
becomes wearisome if he sits too long at another’s table.

This means that we must not impose on our friends; but there is a further
caution on the subject of eating at a friend’s house. You must not go to your
friend’s house hungry, when you can help it.

A man should take his meal betimes, before he goes to his
neighbour—or he will sit and seem hungered like one
starving, and have no power to talk.

That is the main point to remember in dining at another’s house, that you
are not there only for your own pleasure, but for that of other people. You
are expected to talk; and you can not talk if you are very hungry. At this
very day a gentleman makes it the rule to do the same thing. Accordingly
we see that these rough men of the North must have had a good deal of
social refinement—refinement not of dress or of speech, but of feeling.

Still, says the poet, one’s own home is the best, though it be but a cottage.
“A man is a man in his own house.”

Now we come to some sentences teaching caution, which are noteworthy in
a certain way:

Tell one man thy secret, but not two. What three men know,
all the world knows.

Never let a bad man know thy mishaps; for from a bad man
thou shalt never get reward for thy sincerity.

I shall presently give you some modern examples in regard to the advice
concerning bad men. Another thing to be cautious about is praise. If you
have to be careful about blame, you must be very cautious also about praise.

Praise the day at even-tide; a woman at her burying; a sword
when it has been tried; a maid when she is married; ice when
you have crossed over it; ale when it is drunk.

If there is anything noteworthy in English character to-day it is the
exemplification of this very kind of teaching. This is essentially Northern.
The last people from whom praise can be expected, even for what is worthy
of all praise, are the English. A new friendship, a new ideal, a reform, a
noble action, a wonderful poet, an exquisite painting—any of these things
will be admired and praised by every other people in Europe long before
you can get Englishmen to praise. The Englishman all this time is studying,
considering, trying to find fault. Why should he try to find fault? So that he
will not make any mistakes at a later day. He has inherited the terrible
caution of his ancestors in regard to mistakes. It must be granted that his
caution has saved him from a number of very serious mistakes that other
nations have made. It must also be acknowledged that he exercises a fair
amount of moderation in the opposite direction—this modern Englishman;
he has learned caution of another kind, which his ancestors taught him.
“Power,” says the “Havamal,” “should be used with moderation; for
whoever finds himself among valiant men will discover that no man is
peerless.” And this is a very important thing for the strong man to know—
that however strong, he can not be the strongest; his match will be found

when occasion demands it. Not only Scandinavian but English rulers have
often discovered this fact to their cost. Another matter to be very anxious
about is public opinion.

Chattels die; kinsmen pass away; one dies oneself; but I
know something that never dies—the name of the man, for
good or bad.

Do not think that this means anything religious. It means only that the
reputation of a man goes to influence the good or ill fortune of his
descendants. It is something to be proud of, to be the son of a good man; it
helps to success in life. On the other hand, to have had a father of ill
reputation is a very serious obstacle to success of any kind in countries
where the influence of heredity is strongly recognized.

I have nearly exhausted the examples of this Northern wisdom which I
selected for you; but there are two subjects which remain to be considered.
One is the law of conduct in regard to misfortune; and the other is the rule
of conduct in regard to women. A man was expected to keep up a brave
heart under any circumstances. These old Northmen seldom committed
suicide; and I must tell you that all the talk about Christianity having
checked the practice of suicide to some extent, can not be fairly accepted as
truth. In modern England to-day the suicides average nearly three thousand
a year; but making allowance for extraordinary circumstances, it is certainly
true that the Northern races consider suicide in an entirely different way
from what the Latin races do. There was very little suicide among the men
of the North, because every man considered it his duty to get killed, not to
kill himself; and to kill himself would have seemed cowardly, as implying
fear of being killed by others. In modern ethical training, quite apart from
religious considerations a man is taught that suicide is only excusable in
case of shame, or under such exceptional circumstances as have occurred in
the history of the Indian mutiny. At all events, we have the feeling still
strongly manifested in England that suicide is not quite manly; and this is
certainly due much more to ancestral habits of thinking, which date back to
pagan days, than to Christian doctrine. As I have said, the pagan English
would not commit suicide to escape mere pain. But the Northern people
knew how to die to escape shame. There is an awful story in Roman history

about the wives and daughters of the conquered German tribes, thousands
in number, asking to be promised that their virtue should be respected, and
all killing themselves when the Roman general refused the request. No
Southern people of Europe in that time would have shown such heroism
upon such a matter. Leaving honour aside, however, the old book tells us
that a man should never despair.

Fire, the sight of the sun, good health, and a blameless life
these are the goodliest things in this world.

Yet a man is not utterly wretched, though he have bad
health, or be maimed.

The halt may ride a horse; the handless may drive a herd; the
deaf can fight and do well; better be blind than buried. A
corpse is good for naught.

On the subject of women there is not very much in the book beyond the
usual caution in regard to wicked women; but there is this little observation:

Never blame a woman for what is all man’s weakness. Hues
charming and fair may move the wise and not the dullard.
Mighty love turns the son of men from wise to fool.

This is shrewd, and it contains a very remarkable bit of esthetic truth, that it
requires a wise man to see certain kinds of beauty, which a stupid man
could never be made to understand. And, leaving aside the subject of love,
what very good advice it is never to laugh at a person for what can be
considered a common failure. In the same way an intelligent man should
learn to be patient with the unintelligent, as the same poem elsewhere
insists.

Now what is the general result of this little study, the general impression
that it leaves upon the mind? Certainly we feel that the life reflected in
these sentences was a life in which caution was above all things necessary
—caution in thought and speech and act, never ceasing, by night or day,
during the whole of a man’s life. Caution implies moderation. Moderation
inevitably develops a certain habit of justice—a justice that might not

extend outside of the race, but a justice that would be exercised between
man and man of the same blood. Very much of English character and of
English history is explained by the life that the “Havamal” portrays. Very
much that is good; also very much that is bad—not bad in one sense, so far
as the future of the race is concerned, but in a social way certainly not good.
The judgment of the Englishman by all other European peoples is that he is
the most suspicious, the most reserved, the most unreceptive, the most
unfriendly, the coldest hearted, and the most domineering of all Western
peoples. Ask a Frenchman, an Italian, a German, a Spaniard, even an
American, what he thinks about Englishmen; and every one of them will
tell you the very same thing. This is precisely what the character of men
would become who had lived for thousands of years in the conditions of
Northern society. But you would find upon the other hand that nearly all
nations would speak highly of certain other English qualities—energy,
courage, honour, justice (between themselves). They would say that
although no man is so difficult to make friends with, the friendship of an
Englishman once gained is more strong and true than any other. And as the
battle of life still continues, and must continue for thousands of years to
come, it must be acknowledged that the English character is especially well
fitted for the struggle. Its reserves, its cautions, its doubts, its suspicions, its
brutality—these have been for it in the past, and are still in the present, the
best social armour and panoply of war. It is not a lovable nor an amiable
character; it is not even kindly. The Englishman of the best type is much
more inclined to be just than he is to be kind, for kindness is an emotional
impulse, and the Englishman is on his guard against every kind of
emotional impulse. But with all this, the character is a grand one, and its
success has been the best proof of its value.

Now you will have observed in the reading of this ancient code of social
morals that, while none of the teaching is religious, some of it is absolutely
immoral from any religious standpoint. No great religion permits us to
speak what is not true, and to smile in the face of an enemy while
pretending to be his friend. No religion teaches that we should “pay back
lesing for lies.” Neither does a religion tell us that we should expect a return
for every kindness done; that we should regard friendship as being actuated
by selfish motives; that we should never praise when praise seems to be
deserved. In fact, when Sir Walter Scott long ago made a partial translation

of the “Havamal,” he thought himself obliged to leave out a number of
sentences which seemed to him highly immoral, and to apologize for others.
He thought that they would shock English readers too much.

We are not quite so squeamish to-day; and a thinker of our own time would
scarcely deny that English society is very largely governed at this moment
by the same kind of rules that Sir Walter Scott thought to be so bad. But
here we need not condemn English society in particular. All European
society has been for hundreds of years conducting itself upon very much the
same principles; for the reason that human social experience has been the
same in all Western countries. I should say that the only difference between
English society and other societies is that the hardness of character is very
much greater. Let us go back even to the most Christian times of Western
societies in the most Christian country of Europe, and observe whether the
social code was then and there so very different from the social code of the
old “Havamal.” Mr. Spencer observes in his “Ethics” that, so far as the
conduct of life is concerned, religion is almost nothing and practice is
everything. We find this wonderfully exemplified in a most remarkable
book of social precepts written in the seventeenth century, in Spain, under
the title of the “Oraculo Manual.” It was composed by a Spanish priest,
named Baltasar Gracian, who was born in the year 1601 and died in 1658;
and it has been translated into nearly all languages. The best English
translation, published by Macmillan, is called “The Art of Worldly
Wisdom.” It is even more admired to-day than in the seventeenth century;
and what it teaches as to social conduct holds as good to-day of modern
society as it did of society two hundred years ago. It is one of the most
unpleasant and yet interesting books ever published—unpleasant because of
the malicious cunning which it often displays—interesting because of the
frightful perspicacity of the author. The man who wrote that book
understood the hearts of men, especially the bad side. He was a gentleman
of high rank before he became a priest, and his instinctive shrewdness must
have been hereditary. Religion, this man would have said, teaches the best
possible morals; but the world is not governed by religion altogether, and to
mix with it, we must act according to its dictates.

These dictates remind us in many ways of the cautions and the cunning of
the “Havamal.” The first thing enjoined upon a man both by the Norse

writer and by the Spanish author is the art of silence. Probably this has been
the result of social experience in all countries. “Cautious silence is the holy
of holies of worldly wisdom,” says Gracian. And he gives many elaborate
reasons for this statement, not the least of which is the following: “If you do
not declare yourself immediately, you arouse expectation, especially when
the importance of your position makes you the object of general attention.
Mix a little mystery with everything, and the very mystery arouses
veneration.” A little further on he gives us exactly the same advice as did
the “Havamal” writer, in regard to being frank with enemies. “Do not,” he
says, “show your wounded finger, for everything will knock up against it;
nor complain about it, for malice always aims where weakness can be
injured…. Never disclose the source of mortification or of joy, if you wish
the one to cease, the other to endure.” About secrets the Spaniard is quite as
cautious as the Norseman. He says, “Especially dangerous are secrets
entrusted to friends. He that communicates his secret to another makes
himself that other man’s slave.” But after a great many such cautions in
regard to silence and secrecy, he tells us also that we must learn how to
fight with the world. You remember the advice of the “Havamal” on this
subject, how it condemns as a fool the man who can not answer a reproach.
The Spaniard is, however, much more malicious in his suggestions. He tells
as that we must “learn to know every man’s thumbscrew.” I suppose you
know that a thumbscrew was an instrument of torture used in old times to
force confessions from criminals. This advice means nothing less than that
we should learn how to be be able to hurt other men’s feelings, or to flatter
other men’s weaknesses. “First guess every man’s ruling passion, appeal to
it by a word, set it in motion by temptation, and you will infallibly give
checkmate to his freedom of will.” The term “give checkmate” is taken
from the game of chess, and must here be understood as meaning to
overcome, to conquer. A kindred piece of advice is “keep a store of
sarcasms, and know how to use them.” Indeed he tells us that this is the
point of greatest tact in human intercourse. “Struck by the slightest word of
this kind, many fall away from the closest intimacy with superiors or
inferiors, which intimacy could not be in the slightest shaken by a whole
conspiracy of popular insinuation or private malevolence.” In other words,
you can more quickly destroy a man’s friendship by one word of sarcasm
than by any amount of intrigue. Does not this read very much like sheer
wickedness? Certainly it does; but the author would have told you that you

must fight the wicked with their own weapons. In the “Havamal” you will
not find anything quite so openly wicked as that; but we must suppose that
the Norsemen knew the secret, though they might not have put it into
words. As for the social teaching, you will find it very subtly expressed
even in the modern English novels of George Meredith, who, by the way,
has written a poem in praise of sarcasm and ridicule. But let us now see
what the Spanish author has to tell us about friendship and unselfishness.

The shrewd man knows that others when they seek him do not seek “him,”
but “their advantage in him and by him.” That is to say, a shrewd man does
not believe in disinterested friendship. This is much worse than anything in
the “Havamal.” And it is diabolically elaborated. What are we to say about
such teaching as the following: “A wise man would rather see men needing
him than thanking him. To keep them on the threshold of hope is
diplomatic; to trust to their gratitude is boorish; hope has a good memory,
gratitude a bad one”? There is much more of this kind; but after the
assurance that only a boorish person (that is to say, an ignorant and vulgar
man) can believe in gratitude, the author’s opinion of human nature needs
no further elucidation. The old Norseman would have been shocked at such
a statement. But he might have approved the following: “When you hear
anything favourable, keep a tight rein upon your credulity; if unfavourable,
give it the spur.” That is to say, when you hear anything good about another
man, do not be ready to believe it; but if you hear anything bad about him,
believe as much of it as you can.

I notice also many other points of resemblance between the Northern and
the Spanish teaching in regard to caution. The “Havamal” says that you
must not pick a quarrel with a worse man than yourself; “because the better
man often falls by the worse man’s sword.” The Spanish priest gives a still
shrewder reason for the same policy. “Never contend,” he says, “with a man
who has nothing to lose; for thereby you enter into an unequal conflict. The
other enters without anxiety; having lost everything, including shame, he
has no further loss to fear.” I think that this is an immoral teaching, though a
very prudent one; but I need scarcely to tell you that it is still a principle in
modern society not to contend with a man who has no reputation to lose. I
think it is immoral, because it is purely selfish, and because a good man
ought not to be afraid to denounce a wrong because of making enemies.

Another point, however, on which the “Havamal” and the priest agree, is
more commendable and interesting. “We do not think much of a man who
never contradicts us; that is no sign he loves us, but rather a sign that he
loves himself. Original and out-of-the-way views are signs of superior
ability.”

I should not like you to suppose, however, that the whole of the book from
which I have been quoting is of the same character as the quotations. There
is excellent advice in it; and much kindly teaching on the subject of
generous acts. It is a book both good and bad, and never stupid. The same
man who tells you that friendship is seldom unselfish, also declares that life
would be a desert without friends, and that there is no magic like a good
turn—that is, a kind act. He teaches the importance of getting good will by
honest means, although he advises us also to learn how to injure. I am sure
that nobody could read the book without benefit. And I may close these
quotations from it with the following paragraph, which is the very best bit
of counsel that could be given to a literary student:

Be slow and sure. Quickly done can be quickly undone. To
last an eternity requires an eternity of preparation. Only
excellence counts. Profound intelligence is the only
foundation for immortality. Worth much costs much. The
precious metals are the heaviest.

But so far as the question of human conduct is concerned, the book of
Gracian is no more of a religious book than is the “Havamal” of the heathen
North. You would find, were such a book published to-day and brought up
to the present time by any shrewd writer, that Western morality has not
improved in the least since the time before Christianity was established, so
far as the rules of society go. Society is not, and can not be, religious,
because it is a state of continual warfare. Every person in it has to fight, and
the battle is not less cruel now because it is not fought with swords. Indeed,
I should think that the time when every man carried his sword in society
was a time when men were quite as kindly and much more honest than they
are now. The object of this little lecture was to show you that the principles
of the ancient Norse are really the principles ruling English society to-day;
but I think you will be able to take from it a still larger meaning. It is that

not only one form of society, but all forms of society, represent the warfare
of man and man. That is why thinkers, poets, philosophers, in all ages, have
tried to find solitude, to keep out of the contest, to devote themselves only
to study of the beautiful and the true. But the prizes of life are not to be
obtained in solitude, although the prizes of thought can only there be won.
After all, whatever we may think about the cruelty and treachery of the
social world, it does great things in the end. It quickens judgment, deepens
intelligence, enforces the acquisition of self-control, creates forms of mental
and moral strength that can not fail to be sometimes of vast importance to
mankind. But if you should ask me whether it increases human happiness, I
should certainly say “no.” The “Havamal” said the same thing,—the truly
wise man can not be happy.

Chapter VIII

Beyond Man
Return to Table of Contents

It seems to me a lecturer’s duty to speak to you about any remarkable
thought at this moment engaging the attention of Western philosophers and
men of science,—partly because any such new ideas are certain, sooner or
later, to be reflected in literature, and partly because without a knowledge of
them you might form incorrect ideas in relation to utterances of any
important philosophic character. I am not going to discourse about
Nietzsche, though the title of this lecture is taken from one of his books; the
ideas about which I am going to tell you, you will not find in his books. It is
most extraordinary, to my thinking, that these ideas never occurred to him,
for he was an eminent man of science before writing his probably insane
books. I have not the slightest sympathy with most of his ideas; they seem
to me misinterpretations of evolutional teachings; and if not
misinterpretations, they are simply undeveloped and ill-balanced thinking.
But the title of one of his books, and the idea which he tries always
unsuccessfully to explain,—that of a state above mankind, a moral
condition “beyond man,” as he calls it,—that is worth talking about. It is
not nonsense at all, but fact, and I think that I can give you a correct idea of
the realities in the case. Leaving Nietzsche entirely alone, then, let us ask if
it is possible to suppose a condition of human existence above morality,—
that is to say, more moral than the most moral ideal which a human brain
can conceive? We may answer, it is quite possible, and it is not only
possible, but it has actually been predicted by many great thinkers,
including Herbert Spencer.

We have been brought up to think that there can be nothing better than
virtue, than duty, than strictly following the precepts of a good religion.
However, our ideas of goodness and of virtue necessarily imply the
existence of the opposite qualities. To do a good thing because it is our duty
to do it, implies a certain amount of resolve, a struggle against difficulty.
The virtue of honesty is a term implying the difficulty of being perfectly
honest. When we think of any virtuous or great deed, we can not help

thinking of the pain and obstacles that have to be met with in performing
that deed. All our active morality is a struggle against immorality. And I
think that, as every religion teaches, it must be granted that no human being
has a perfectly moral nature.

Could a world exist in which the nature of all the inhabitants would be so
moral that the mere idea of what is immoral could not exist? Let me explain
my question more in detail. Imagine a society in which the idea of
dishonesty would not exist, because no person could be dishonest, a society
in which the idea of unchastity could not exist, because no person could
possibly be unchaste, a world in which no one could have any idea of envy,
ambition or anger, because such passions could not exist, a world in which
there would be no idea of duty, filial or parental, because not to be filial, not
to be loving, not to do everything which we human beings now call duty,
would be impossible. In such a world ideas of duty would be quite useless;
for every action of existence would represent the constant and faultless
performance of what we term duty. Moreover, there would be no difficulty,
no pain in such performance; it would be the constant and unfailing
pleasure of life. With us, unfortunately, what is wrong often gives pleasure;
and what is good to do, commonly causes pain. But in the world which I am
asking you to imagine there could not be any wrong, nor any pleasure in
wrong-doing; all the pleasure would be in right-doing. To give a very
simple illustration—one of the commonest and most pardonable faults of
young people is eating, drinking, or sleeping too much. But in our
imaginary world to eat or to drink or to sleep in even the least degree more
than is necessary could not be done; the constitution of the race would not
permit it. One more illustration. Our children have to be educated carefully
in regard to what is right or wrong; in the world of which I am speaking, no
time would be wasted in any such education, for every child would be born
with full knowledge of what is right and wrong. Or to state the case in
psychological language—I mean the language of scientific, not of
metaphysical, psychology—we should have a world in which morality
would have been transmuted into inherited instinct. Now again let me put
the question: can we imagine such a world? Perhaps you will answer, Yes,
in heaven—nowhere else. But I answer you that such a world actually
exists, and that it can be studied in almost any part of the East or of Europe
by a person of scientific training. The world of insects actually furnishes

examples of such a moral transformation. It is for this reason that such
writers as Sir John Lubbock and Herbert Spencer have not hesitated to say
that certain kinds of social insects have immensely surpassed men, both in
social and in ethical progress.

But that is not all that it is necessary to say here. You might think that I am
only repeating a kind of parable. The important thing is the opinion of
scientific men that humanity will at last, in the course of millions of years,
reach the ethical conditions of the ants. It is only five or six years ago that
some of these conditions were established by scientific evidence, and I want
to speak of them. They have a direct bearing upon important ethical
questions; and they have startled the whole moral world, and set men
thinking in entirely new directions.

In order to explain how the study of social insects has set moralists of
recent years thinking in a new direction, it will be necessary to generalize a
great deal in the course of so short a lecture. It is especially the social
conditions of the ants which has inspired these new ideas; but you must not
think that any one species of ants furnishes us with all the facts. The facts
have been arrived at only through the study of hundreds of different kinds
of ants by hundreds of scientific men; and it is only by the consensus of
their evidence that we get the ethical picture which I shall try to outline for
you. Altogether there are probably about five thousand different species of
ants, and these different species represent many different stages of social
evolution, from the most primitive and savage up to the most highly
civilized and moral. The details of the following picture are furnished by a
number of the highest species only; that must not be forgotten. Also, I must
remind you that the morality of the ant, by the necessity of circumstance,
does not extend beyond the limits of its own species. Impeccably ethical
within the community, ants carry on war outside their own borders; were it
not for this, we might call them morally perfect creatures.

Although the mind of an ant can not be at all like to the mind of the human
being, it is so intelligent that we are justified in trying to describe its
existence by a kind of allegorical comparison with human life. Imagine,
then, a world full of women, working night and day,—building, tunnelling,
bridging,—also engaged in agriculture, in horticulture, and in taking care of

many kinds of domestic animals. (I may remark that ants have domesticated
no fewer than five hundred and eighty-four different kinds of creatures.)
This world of women is scrupulously clean; busy as they are, all of them
carry combs and brushes about them, and arrange themselves several times
a day. In addition to this constant work, these women have to take care of
myriads of children,—children so delicate that the slightest change in the
weather may kill them. So the children have to be carried constantly from
one place to another in order to keep them warm.

Though this multitude of workers are always gathering food, no one of
them would eat or drink a single atom more than is necessary; and none of
them would sleep for one second longer than is necessary. Now comes a
surprising fact, about which a great deal must be said later on. These
women have no sex. They are women, for they sometimes actually give
birth, as virgins, to children; but they are incapable of wedlock. They are
more than vestals. Sex is practically suppressed.

This world of workers is protected by an army of soldiers. The soldiers are
very large, very strong, and shaped so differently from the working females
that they do not seem at first to belong to the same race. They help in the
work, though they are not able to help in some delicate kinds of work—they
are too clumsy and strong. Now comes the second astonishing fact: these
soldiers are all women—amazons, we might call them; but they are sexless
women. In these also sex has been suppressed.

You ask, where do the children come from? Most of the children are born of
special mothers—females chosen for the purpose of bearing offspring, and
not allowed to do anything else. They are treated almost like empresses,
being constantly fed and attended and served, and being lodged in the best
way possible. Only these can eat and drink at all times—they must do so for
the sake of their offspring. They are not suffered to go out, unless strongly
attended, and they are not allowed to run any risk of danger or of injury The
life of the whole race circles about them and about their children, but they
are very few.

Last of all are the males, the men. One naturally asks why females should
have been specialized into soldiers instead of men. It appears that the
females have more reserve force, and all the force that might have been

utilized in the giving of life has been diverted to the making of aggressive
powers. The real males are very small and weak. They appear to be treated
with indifference and contempt. They are suffered to become the
bridegrooms of one night, after which they die very quickly. By contrast,
the lives of the rest are very long. Ants live for at least three or four years,
but the males live only long enough to perform their solitary function.

In the foregoing little fantasy, the one thing that should have most
impressed you is the fact of the suppression of sex. But now comes the last
and most astonishing fact of all: this suppression of sex is not natural, but
artificial—I mean that it is voluntary. It has been discovered that ants are
able, by a systematic method of nourishment, to suppress or develop sex as
they please. The race has decided that sex shall not be allowed to exist
except in just so far as it is absolutely necessary to the existence of the race.
Individuals with sex are tolerated only as necessary evils. Here is an
instance of the most powerful of all passions voluntarily suppressed for the
benefit of the community at large. It vanishes whenever unnecessary; when
necessary after a war or a calamity of some kind, it is called into existence
again. Certainly it is not wonderful that such a fact should have set
moralists thinking. Of course if a human community could discover some
secret way of effecting the same object, and could have the courage to do it,
or rather the unselfishness to do it, the result would simply be that sexual
immorality of any kind would become practically impossible The very idea
of such immorality would cease to exist.

But that is only one fact of self-suppression and the ant-world furnishes
hundreds. To state the whole thing in the simplest possible way, let me say
the race has entirely got rid of everything that we call a selfish impulse.
Even hunger and thirst allow of no selfish gratification. The entire life of
the community is devoted to the common good and to mutual help and to
the care of the young. Spencer says it is impossible to imagine that an ant
has a sense of duty like our own,—a religion, if you like. But it does not
need a sense of duty, it does not need religion. Its life is religion in the
practical sense. Probably millions of years ago the ant had feelings much
more like our own than it has now. At that time, to perform altruistic actions
may have been painful to the ant; to perform them now has become the one
pleasure of its existence. In order to bring up children and serve the state

more efficiently these insects have sacrificed their sex and every appetite
that we call by the name of animal passion. Moreover they have a perfect
community, a society in which nobody could think of property, except as a
state affair, a public thing, or as the Romans would say a res publica. In a
human community so organized, there could not be ambition, any jealousy,
any selfish conduct of any sort—indeed, no selfishness at all. The
individual is said to be practically sacrificed for the sake of the race; but
such a supposition means the highest moral altruism. Therefore thinkers
have to ask, “Will man ever rise to something like the condition of ants?”

Herbert Spencer says that such is the evident tendency. He does not say, nor
is it at all probable, that there will be in future humanity such physiological
specialization as would correspond to the suppression of sex among ants, or
to the bringing of women to the dominant place in the human world, and the
masculine sex to an inferior position. That is not likely ever to happen, for
reasons which it would take very much too long to speak of now. But there
is evidence that the most selfish of all human passions will eventually be
brought under control—under such control that the present cause of
wellnigh all human suffering, the pressure of population, will be practically
removed. And there is psychological evidence that the human mind will
undergo such changes that wrong-doing, in the sense of unkindly action,
will become almost impossible, and that the highest pleasure will be found
not in selfishness but in unselfishness. Of course there are thousands of
things to think about, suggested by this discovery of the life of ants. I am
only telling the more important ones. What I have told you ought at least to
suggest that the idea of a moral condition much higher than all our moral
conditions of today is quite possible,—that it is not an idea to be laughed at.
But it was not Nietzsche who ever conceived this possibility. His “Beyond
Man” and the real and much to be hoped for “beyond man,” are absolutely
antagonistic conceptions. When the ancient Hebrew writer said, thousands
of years ago, “Go to the ant, thou sluggard, consider her ways,” he could
not have imagined how good his advice would prove in the light of
twentieth century science.

Chapter IX

The New Ethics
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Before leaving the subject of these latter-day intellectual changes, a word
must be said concerning the ethical questions involved. Of course when a
religious faith has been shaken to its foundation, it is natural to suppose that
morals must have been simultaneously affected. The relation of morals to
literature is very intimate; and we must expect that any change of ideas in
the direction of ethics would show themselves in literature. The drama,
poetry, romance, the novel, all these are reflections of moral emotion in
especial, of the eternal struggle between good and evil, as well as of the
temporary sentiments concerning right and wrong. And every period of
transition is necessarily accompanied by certain tendencies to
disintegration. Contemporary literature in the West has shown some signs of
ethical change. These caused many thinkers to predict a coming period of
demoralization in literature. But the alarm was really quite needless. These
vagaries of literature, such as books questioning the morality of the
marriage relation, for example, were only repetitions of older vagaries, and
represented nothing more than the temporary agitation of thought upon all
questions. The fact seems to be that in spite of everything, moral feeling
was never higher at any time in Western social history than it is at present.
The changes of thought have indeed been very great, but the moral
experience of mankind remains exactly as valuable as it was before, and
new perceptions of that value have been given to us by the new philosophy.

It has been wisely observed by the greatest of modern thinkers that mankind
has progressed more rapidly in every other respect than in morality. Moral
progress has not been rapid simply because the moral ideal has always been
kept a little in advance of the humanly possible. Thousands of years ago the
principles of morality were exactly the same as those which rule our lives
to-day. We can not improve upon them; we can not even improve upon the
language which expressed them. The most learned of our poets could not
make a more beautiful prayer than the prayer which Egyptian mothers
taught to their little children in ages when all Europe was still a land of

savages. The best of the moral philosophy of the nineteenth century is very
little of improvement upon the moral philosophy of ancient India or China.
If there is any improvement at all, it is simply in the direction of knowledge
of causes and effects. And that is why in all countries the common sense of
mankind universally condemns any attempt to interfere with moral ideas.
These represent the social experience of man for thousands and thousands
of years; and it is not likely that the wisdom of any one individual can ever
better them. If bettered at all it can not be through theory. The amelioration
must be effected by future experience of a universal kind. We may improve
every branch of science, every branch of art, everything else relating to the
work of human heads and hands; but we can not improve morals by
invention or by hypothesis. Morals are not made, but grow.

Yet, as I have said, there is what may be called a new system of ethics. But
this new system of ethics means nothing more than a new way of
understanding the old system of ethics. By the application of evolutional
science to the study of morals, we have been enabled to trace back the
whole history of moral ideas to the time of their earliest inception,—to
understand the reasons of them, and to explain them without the help of any
supernatural theory. And the result, so far from diminishing our respect for
the wisdom of our ancestors, has immensely increased that respect. There is
no single moral teaching common to different civilizations and different
religions of an advanced stage of development which we do not find to be
eternally true. Let us try to study this view of the case by the help of a few
examples.

In early times, of course, men obeyed moral instruction through religious
motives. If asked why they thought it was wrong to perform certain actions
and right to perform others, they could have answered only that such was
ancestral custom and that the gods will it so. Not until we could understand
the laws governing the evolution of society could we understand the reason
of many ethical regulations. But now we can understand very plainly that
the will of the gods, as our ancestors might have termed it, represents divine
laws indeed, for the laws of ethical evolution are certainly the unknown
laws shaping all things—suns, worlds, and human societies. All that
opposes itself to the operation of those universal laws is what we have been
accustomed to call bad, and everything which aids the operation of those

laws is what we have been accustomed to think of as good. The common
crimes condemned by all religions, such as theft, murder, adultery, bearing
false witness, disloyalty, all these are practices which directly interfere with
the natural process of evolution; and without understanding why, men have
from the earliest times of real civilisation united all their power to suppress
them. I think that we need not dwell upon the simple facts; they will at once
suggest to you all that is necessary to know. I shall select for illustration
only one less familiar topic, that of the ascetic ideal.

A great many things which in times of lesser knowledge we imagined to be
superstitious or useless, prove to-day on examination to have been of
immense value to mankind. Probably no superstition ever existed which did
not have some social value; and the most seemingly repulsive or cruel
sometimes turn out to have been the most precious. To choose one of these
for illustration, we must take one not confined to any particular civilization
or religion, but common to all human societies at a certain period of their
existence; and the ascetic ideal best fits our purpose. From very early times,
even from a time long preceding any civilization, we find men acting under
the idea that by depriving themselves of certain pleasures and by subjecting
themselves to certain pains they could please the divine powers and thereby
obtain strength. Probably there is no people in the world among whom this
belief has not had at some one time or another a very great influence. At a
later time, in the early civilizations, this idea would seem to have obtained
much larger sway, and to have affected national life more and more
extensively. In the age of the great religions the idea reaches its acme, an
acme often represented by extravagances of the most painful kind and
sacrifices which strike modern imagination as ferocious and terrible. In
Europe asceticism reached its great extremes as you know during the
Middle Ages, and especially took the direction of antagonism to the natural
sex-relation. Looking back to-day to the centuries in which celibacy was
considered the most moral condition, and marriage was counted as little
better than weakness, when Europe was covered with thousands of
monasteries, and when the best intellects of the age deemed it the highest
duty to sacrifice everything pleasurable for the sake of an imaginary reward
after death, we can not but recognize that we are contemplating a period of
religious insanity. Even in the architecture of the time, the architecture that
Ruskin devoted his splendid talent to praise, there is a grim and terrible

something that suggests madness. Again, the cruelties of the age have an
insane character, the burning alive of myriads of people who refused to
believe or could not believe in the faith of their time; the tortures used to
extort confessions from the innocent; the immolation of thousands charged
with being wizards or witches; the extinction of little centres of civilization
in the South of France and elsewhere by brutal crusades—contemplating all
this, we seem to be contemplating not only madness but furious madness. I
need not speak to you of the Crusades, which also belonged to this period.
Compared with the Roman and Greek civilizations before it, what a horrible
Europe it was! And yet the thinker must recognize that it had a strength of
its own, a strength of a larger kind than that of the preceding civilizations. It
may seem monstrous to assert that all this cruelty and superstition and
contempt of learning were absolutely necessary for the progress of
mankind; and yet we must so accept them in the light of modern
knowledge. The checking of intellectual development for hundreds of years
is certainly a fact that must shock us; but the true question is whether such a
checking had not become necessary. Intellectual strength, unless supported
by moral strength, leads a people into the ways of destruction. Compared
with the men of the Middle Ages, the Greeks and Romans were
incomparably superior intellectually; compared with them morally they
were very weak. They had conquered the world and developed all the arts,
these Greeks and Romans; they had achieved things such as mankind has
never since been able to accomplish, and then, losing their moral ideal,
losing their simplicity, losing their faith, they were utterly crushed by
inferior races in whom the principles of self-denial had been intensely
developed. And the old instinctive hatred of the Church for the arts and the
letters and the sciences of the Greek and Roman civilizations was not quite
so much of a folly as we might be apt to suppose. The priests recognized in
a vague way that anything like a revival of the older civilizations would
signify moral ruin. The Renaissance proves that the priests were not wrong.
Had the movement occurred a few hundred years earlier, the result would
probably have been a universal corruption I do not mean to say that the
Church at any time was exactly conscious of what she was doing; she acted
blindly under the influence of an instinctive fear. But the result of all that
she did has now proved unfortunate. What the Roman and Greek
civilizations had lost in moral power was given back to the world by the
frightful discipline of the Middle Ages. For a long series of generations the

ascetic idea was triumphant; and it became feeble only in proportion as men
became strong enough to do without it. Especially it remodelled that of
which it first seemed the enemy, the family relation. It created a new basis
for society, founded upon a new sense of the importance to society of
family morals. Because this idea, this morality, came through superstition,
its value is not thereby in the least diminished. Superstitions often represent
correct guesses at eternal truth. To-day we know that all social progress, all
national strength, all national vigour, intellectual as well as physical, depend
essentially upon the family, upon the morality of the household, upon the
relation of parents to children. It was this fact which the Greeks and
Romans forgot, and lost themselves by forgetting. It was this fact which the
superstitious tyranny of the Middle Ages had to teach the West over again,
and after such a fashion that it is not likely ever to become forgotten. So
much for the mental history of the question. Let us say a word about the
physical aspects of it.

No doubt you have read that the result of macerating the body, of depriving
oneself of all comfort, and even of nourishing food, is not an increase of
intellectual vigour or moral power of any kind. And in one sense this is true.
The individual who passes his life in self-mortification is not apt to improve
under that regime. For this reason the founder of the greatest of Oriental
religions condemned asceticism on the part of his followers, except within
certain fixed limits. But the history of the changes produced by a universal
idea is not a history of changes in the individual, but of changes brought
about by the successive efforts of millions of individuals in the course of
many generations. Not in one lifetime can we perceive the measure of
ethical force obtained by self-control; but in the course of several hundreds
of years we find that the result obtained is so large as to astonish us. This
result, imperceptibly obtained, signifies a great increase of that nervous
power upon which moral power depends; it means an augmentation in
strength of every kind; and this augmentation again represents what we
might call economy. Just as there is a science of political economy, there is
a science of ethical economy; and it is in relation to such a science that we
should rationally consider the influence of all religions teaching self-
suppression. So studying, we find that self-suppression does not mean the
destruction of any power, but only the economical storage of that power for
the benefit of the race As a result, the highly civilized man can endure

incomparably more than the savage, whether of moral or physical strain.
Being better able to control himself under all circumstances, he has a great
advantage over the savage.

That which is going on in the new teaching of ethics is really the
substitution of a rational for an emotional morality. But this does not mean
that the value of the emotional element in morality is not recognized. Not
only is it recognized, but it is even being enlarged—enlarged, however, in a
rational way. For example, let us take the very emotional virtue of loyalty.
Loyalty, in a rational form, could not exist among an uneducated people; it
could only exist as a feeling, a sentiment. In the primitive state of society
this sentiment takes the force and the depth of a religion. And the ruler,
regarded as divine, really has in relation to his people the power of a god.
Once that people becomes educated in the modern sense, their ideas
regarding their ruler and their duties to their ruler necessarily undergo
modification. But does this mean that the sentiment is weakened in the
educated class? I should say that this depends very much upon the quality
of the individual mind. In a mind of small capacity, incapable of receiving
the higher forms of thought, it is very likely that the sentiment may be
weakened and almost destroyed. But in the mind of a real thinker, a man of
true culture, the sense of loyalty, although changed, is at the same time
immensely expanded. In order to give a strong example, I should take the
example not from a monarchical country but from a republican one. What
does the President of the United States of America, for example, represent
to the American of the highest culture? He appears to him in two entirely
different capacities. First he appears to him merely as a man, an ordinary
man, with faults and weaknesses like other ordinary men. His private life is
apt to be discussed in the newspapers. He is expected to shake hands with
anybody and with everybody whom he meets at Washington; and when he
ceases to hold office, he has no longer any particular distinction from other
Americans. But as the President of the United States, he is also much more
than a man. He represents one hundred millions of people; he represents the
American Constitution; he represents the great principles of human freedom
laid down by that Constitution; he represents also the idea of America, of
everything American, of all the hopes, interests, and glories of the nation.
Officially he is quite as sacred as a divinity could be. Millions would give
their lives for him at an instant’s notice; and thousands capable of making

vulgar jokes about the man would hotly resent the least word spoken about
the President as the representative of America. The very same thing exists
in other Western countries, notwithstanding the fact that the lives of rulers
are sometimes attempted. England is a striking example. The Queen has
really scarcely any power; her rule is little more than nominal. Every
Englishman knows that England is a monarchy only in name. But the
Queen represents to every Englishman more than a woman and more than a
queen: she represents England, English race feeling, English love of
country, English power, English dignity; she is a symbol, and as a symbol
sacred. The soldier jokingly calls her “the Widow”; he makes songs about
her; all this is well and good. But a soldier who cursed her a few years ago
was promptly sent to prison for twenty years. To sing a merry song about
the sovereign as a woman is a right which English freedom claims; but to
speak disrespectfully of the Queen, as England, as the government, is
properly regarded as a crime; because it proves the man capable of it
indifferent to all his duties as an Englishman, as a citizen, as a soldier. The
spirit of loyalty is far from being lost in Western countries; it has only
changed in character, and it is likely to strengthen as time goes on.

Broad tolerance in the matter of beliefs is necessarily a part of the new
ethics. It is quite impossible in the present state of mankind that all persons
should be well educated, or that the great masses of a nation should attain to
the higher forms of culture. For the uneducated a rational system of ethics
must long remain out of the question and it is proper that they should cling
to the old emotional forms of moral teaching. The observation of Huxley
that he would like to see every unbeliever who could not get a reason for his
unbelief publicly put to shame, was an observation of sound common sense.
It is only those whose knowledge obliges them to see things from another
standpoint than that of the masses who can safely claim to base their rule of
life upon philosophical morality. The value of the philosophical morality
happens to be only in those directions where it recognizes and supports the
truth taught by common morality, which, after all, is the safest guide.
Therefore the philosophical moralist will never mock or oppose a belief
which he knows to exercise a good influence upon human conduct. He will
recognize even the value of many superstitions as being very great; and he
will understand that any attempt to suddenly change the beliefs of man in
any ethical direction must be mischievous. Such changes as he might desire

will come; but they should come gradually and gently, in exact proportion
to the expanding capacity of the national mind. Recognizing this
probability, several Western countries, notably America, have attempted to
introduce into education an entirely new system of ethical teaching—ethical
teaching in the broadest sense, and in harmony with the new philosophy.
But the result there and elsewhere can only be that which I have said at the
beginning of this lecture,—namely, the enlargement of the old moral ideas,
and the deeper comprehension of their value in all relations of life.

Chapter X

Some Poems about Insects
Return to Table of Contents

One of the great defects of English books printed in the last century is the
want of an index. The importance of being able to refer at once to any
subject treated of in a book was not recognized until the days when exact
scholarship necessitated indexing of the most elaborate kind. But even now
we constantly find good books severely criticized because of this
deficiency. All that I have said tends to show that even to-day in Western
countries the immense importance of systematic arrangement in literary
collections is not sufficiently recognized. We have, of course, a great many
English anthologies,—that is to say, collections of the best typical
compositions of a certain epoch in poetry or in prose. But you must have
observed that, in Western countries, nearly all such anthologies are
compiled chronologically—not according to the subject of the poems. To
this general rule there are indeed a few exceptions. There is a collection of
love poetry by Watson, which is famous; a collection of child poetry by
Patmore; a collection of “society verse” by Locker-Lampson; and several
things of that sort. But even here the arrangement is not of a special kind;
nor is it ever divided according to the subject of each particular poem. I
know that some books have been published of late years with such titles as
“Poems of the Sea,” “Poems of Nature”—but these are of no literary
importance at all and they are not compiled by competent critics. Besides,
the subject-heads are always of much too general a kind. The French are far
in advance of the English in the art of making anthologies; but even in such
splendid anthologies as those of Crépet and of Lemerre the arrangement is
of the most general kind,—chronological, and little more.

I was reminded to tell you this, because of several questions recently asked
me, which I found it impossible to answer. Many a Japanese student might
suppose that Western poetry has its classified arrangements corresponding
in some sort to those of Japanese poetry. Perhaps the Germans have
something of the kind, but the English and French have not. Any authority
upon the subject of Japanese literature can, I have been told, inform himself

almost immediately as to all that has been written in poetry upon a
particular subject. Japanese poetry has been classified and sub-classified
and double-indexed or even quadruple-indexed after a manner
incomparably more exact than anything English anthologies can show. I am
aware that this fact is chiefly owing to the ancient rules about subjects,
seasons, contrasts, and harmonies, after which the old poets used to write.
But whatever be said about such rules, there can be no doubt at all of the
excellence of the arrangements which the rules produced. It is greatly to be
regretted that we have not in English a system of arrangement enabling the
student to discover quickly all that has been written upon a particular
subject—such as roses, for example, or pine trees, or doves, or the beauties
of the autumn season. There is nobody to tell you where to find such things;
and as the whole range of English poetry is so great that it takes a great
many years even to glance through it, a memorized knowledge of the
subjects is impossible for the average man. I believe that Macaulay would
have been able to remember almost any reference in the poetry then
accessible to scholars,—just as the wonderful Greek scholar Porson could
remember the exact place of any text in the whole of Greek literature, and
even all the variations of that text. But such men are born only once in
hundreds of years; the common memory can not attempt to emulate their
feats. And it is very difficult at the present time for the ordinary student of
poetry to tell you just how much has been written upon any particular
subject by the best English poets.

Now you will recognize some difficulties in the way of a lecturer in
attempting to make classifications of English poetry after the same manner
that Japanese classification can be made of Japanese poetry. One must read
enormously merely to obtain one’s materials, and even then the result is not
to be thought of as exhaustive. I am going to try to give you a few lectures
upon English poetry thus classified, but we must not expect that the lectures
will be authoritatively complete. Indeed, we have no time for lectures of so
thorough a sort. All that I can attempt will be to give you an idea of the best
things that English poets have thought and expressed upon certain subjects.

You know that the old Greeks wrote a great deal of beautiful poetry about
insects,—especially about musical insects, crickets, cicadas, and other
insects such as those the Japanese poets have been writing about for so

many hundreds of years. But in modern Western poetry there is very little,
comparatively speaking, about insects. The English poets have all written a
great deal about birds, and especially about singing birds; but very little has
been written upon the subject of insects—singing insects. One reason is
probably that the number of musical insects in England is very small,
perhaps owing to the climate. American poets have written more about
insects than English poets have done, though their work is of a much less
finished kind. But this is because musical insects in America are very
numerous. On the whole, we may say that neither in English nor in French
poetry will you find much about the Voices of rickets, locusts, or cicadæ. I
could not even give you a special lecture upon that subject. We must take
the subject “insect” in a rather general signification; and if we do that we
can edit together a nice little collection of poetical examples.

The butterfly was regarded by the Greeks especially as the emblem of the
soul and therefore of immortality. We have several Greek remains, picturing
the butterfly as perched upon a skull, thus symbolizing life beyond death.
And the metamorphosis of the insect is, you know, very often referred to in
Greek philosophy. We might expect that English poets would have
considered the butterfly especially from this point of view; and we do have
a few examples. Perhaps the best known is that of Coleridge.

The butterfly the ancient Grecians made
The soul’s fair emblem, and its only name—
But of the soul, escaped the slavish trade
Of earthly life! For in this mortal frame
Ours is the reptile’s lot, much toil, much blame,
Manifold motions making little speed,
And to deform and kill the things whereon we feed.

The allusion to the “name” is of course to the Greek word, psyche, which
signifies both soul and butterfly. Psyche, as the soul, was pictured by the
Greeks as a beautiful girl, with a somewhat sad face, and butterfly wings
springing from her shoulders. Coleridge tells us here that although the
Greeks likened the soul to the butterfly, we must remember what the
butterfly really is,—the last and highest state of insect-being—“escaped the
slavish trade of earthly life.” What is this so-called slavish trade? It is the

necessity of working and struggling in order to live—in order to obtain
food. The butterfly is not much of an eater; some varieties, indeed, do not
eat at all. All the necessity for eating ended with the life of the larva. In the
same manner religion teaches that the soul represents the changed state of
man. In this life a man is only like a caterpillar; death changes him into a
chrysalis, and out of the chrysalis issues the winged soul which does not
have to trouble itself about such matters as eating and drinking. By the
word “reptile” in this verse, you must understand caterpillar. Therefore the
poet speaks of all our human work as manifold motions making little speed;
you have seen how many motions a caterpillar must make in order to go
even a little distance, and you must have noticed the manner in which it
spoils the appearance of the plant upon which it feeds. There is here an
allusion to the strange and terrible fact, that all life—and particularly the
life of man—is maintained only by the destruction of other life. In order to
live we must kill—perhaps only plants, but in any case we must kill.

Wordsworth has several poems on butterflies, but only one of them is really
fine. It is fine, not because it suggests any deep problem, but because with
absolute simplicity it pictures the charming difference of character in a little
boy and a little girl playing together in the fields. The poem is addressed to
the butterfly.

Stay near me—do not take thy flight!
A little longer stay in sight!
Much converse do I find in thee,
Historian of my infancy!
Float near me; do not yet depart!
Dead times revive in thee:
Thou bring’st, gay creature as thou art!
A solemn image to my heart,
My father’s family.

Oh! pleasant, pleasant were the days,
The time, when, in our childish plays,
My sister Emmeline and I
Together chased the butterfly!
A very hunter did I rush

Upon the prey: with leaps and springs
I followed on from brake to bush;
But she, God love her, feared to brush
The dust from off its wings.

What we call and what looks like dust on the wings of a butterfly, English
children are now taught to know as really beautiful scales or featherlets, but
in Wordsworth’s time the real structure of the insect was not so well known
as now to little people. Therefore to the boy the coloured matter brushed
from the wings would only have seemed so much dust. But the little girl,
with the instinctive tenderness of the future mother-soul in her, dreads to
touch those strangely delicate wings; she fears, not only to spoil, but also to
hurt.

Deeper thoughts than memory may still be suggested to English poets by
the sight of a butterfly, and probably will be for hundreds of years to come.
Perhaps the best poem of a half-metaphorical, half-philosophical thought
about butterflies is the beautiful prologue to Browning’s “Fifine at the Fair,”
which prologue is curiously entitled “Amphibian”—implying that we are
about to have a reference to creatures capable of living in two distinctive
elements, yet absolutely belonging neither to the one nor to the other. The
poet swims out far into the sea on a beautiful day; and, suddenly, looking
up, perceives a beautiful butterfly flying over his head, as if watching him.
The sight of the insect at once suggests to him its relation to Greek fancy as
a name for the soul; then he begins to wonder whether it might not really be
the soul, or be the symbol of the soul, of a dead woman who loved him.
From that point of the poem begins a little metaphysical fantasy about the
possible condition of souls.

The fancy I had to-day,
Fancy which turned a fear!
I swam far out in the bay,
Since waves laughed warm and clear.

I lay and looked at the sun,
The noon-sun looked at me:
Between us two, no one
Live creature, that I could see.

Yes! There came floating by
Me, who lay floating too,
Such a strange butterfly!
Creature as dear as new:

Because the membraned wings
So wonderful, so wide,
So sun-suffused, were things
Like soul and nought beside.

So much for the conditions of the poet’s revery. He is swimming in the sea;
above his face, only a few inches away, the beautiful butterfly is hovering.
Its apparition makes him think of many things—perhaps first about the
dangerous position of the butterfly, for if it should only touch the water, it is
certain to be drowned. But it does not touch the water; and he begins to
think how clumsy is the man who moves in water compared with the insect
that moves in air, and how ugly a man is by comparison with the exquisite
creature which the Greeks likened to the soul or ghost of the man. Thinking
about ghosts leads him at once to the memory of a certain very dear ghost
about which he forthwith begins to dream.

What if a certain soul
Which early slipped its sheath,
And has for its home the whole
Of heaven, thus look beneath,

Thus watch one who, in the world,
Both lives and likes life’s way,
Nor wishes the wings unfurled
That sleep in the worm, they say?

But sometimes when the weather
Is blue, and warm waves tempt
To free oneself of tether,
And try a life exempt

From worldly noise and dust,
In the sphere which overbrims

With passion and thought,—why, just
Unable to fly, one swims!

This is better understood by paraphrase: “I wonder if the soul of a certain
person, who lately died, slipped so gently out of the hard sheath of the
perishable body—I wonder if she does not look down from her home in the
sky upon me, just as that little butterfly is doing at this moment. And I
wonder if she laughs at the clumsiness of this poor swimmer, who finds it
so much labour even to move through the water, while she can move
through whatever she pleases by the simple act of wishing. And this man,
strangely enough, does not want to die, and to become a ghost. He likes to
live very much; he does not yet desire those soul-wings which are supposed
to be growing within the shell of his body, just as the wings of the butterfly
begin to grow in the chrysalis. He does not want to die at all. But sometimes
he wants to get away from the struggle and the dust of the city, and to be
alone with nature; and then, in order to be perfectly alone, he swims. He
would like to fly much better; but he can not. However, swimming is very
much like flying, only the element of water is thicker than air.”

However, more than the poet’s words is suggested here. We are really told
that what a fine mind desires is spiritual life, pure intellectual life—free
from all the trammels of bodily necessity. Is not the swimmer really a
symbol of the superior mind in its present condition? Your best swimmer
can not live under the water, neither can he rise into the beautiful blue air.
He can only keep his head in the air; his body must remain in the grosser
element. Well, a great thinker and poet is ever thus—floating between the
universe of spirit and the universe of matter. By his mind he belongs to the
region of pure mind,—the ethereal state; but the hard necessity of living
keeps him down in the world of sense and grossness and struggle. On the
other hand the butterfly, freely moving in a finer element, better represents
the state of spirit or soul.

What is the use of being dissatisfied with nature? The best we can do is to
enjoy in the imagination those things which it is not possible for us to enjoy
in fact.

Emancipate through passion
And thought, with sea for sky,

We substitute, in a fashion,
For heaven—poetry:

Which sea, to all intent,
Gives flesh such noon-disport,
As a finer element
Affords the spirit-sort.

Now you see where the poet’s vision of a beautiful butterfly has been
leading his imagination. The nearest approach which we can make to the act
of flying, in the body, is the act of swimming. The nearest approach that we
can make to the heavenly condition, mentally, is in poetry. Poetry,
imagination, the pleasure of emotional expression—these represent our
nearest approach to paradise. Poetry is the sea in which the soul of man can
swim even as butterflies can swim in the air, or happy ghosts swim in the
finer element of the infinite ether. The last three stanzas of the poem are
very suggestive:

And meantime, yonder streak
Meets the horizon’s verge;
That is the land, to seek
If we tire or dread the surge:

Land the solid and safe—
To welcome again (confess!)
When, high and dry, we chafe
The body, and don the dress.

Does she look, pity, wonder
At one who mimics flight,
Swims—heaven above, sea under,
Yet always earth in sight?

“Streak,” meaning an indistinct line, here refers to the coast far away, as it
appears to the swimmer. It is just such a word as a good Japanese painter
ought to appreciate in such a relation. In suggesting that the swimmer is
glad to return to shore again and get warm, the poet is telling us that
however much we may talk about the happiness of spirits in heaven—

however much we may praise heaven in poetry—the truth is that we are
very fond of this world, we like comfort, we like company, we like human
love and human pleasures. There is a good deal of nonsense in pretending
that we think heaven is a better place than the world to which we belong.
Perhaps it is a better place, but, as a matter of fact, we do not know
anything about it; and we should be frightened if we could go beyond a
certain distance from the real world which we do know. As he tells us this,
the poet begins again to think about the spirit of the dead woman. Is she
happy? Is she looking at him—and pitying him as he swims, taking good
care not to go too far away from the land? Or is she laughing at him,
because in his secret thoughts he confesses that he likes to live—that he
does not want to become a pure ghost at the present time?

Evidently a butterfly was quite enough, not only to make Browning’s mind
think very seriously, but to make that mind teach us the truth and
seriousness which may attach to very small things—incidents, happenings
of daily life, in any hour and place. I believe that is the greatest English
poem we have on the subject of the butterfly.

The idea that a butterfly might be, not merely the symbol of the soul, but in
very fact the spirit of a dead person, is somewhat foreign to English
thought; and whatever exists in poetry on the subject must necessarily be
quite new. The idea of a relation between insects, birds, or other living
creatures, and the spirits of the dead, is enormously old in Oriental
literature;—we find it in Sanskrit texts thousands of years ago. But the
Western mind has not been accustomed to think of spiritual life as outside
of man; and much of natural poetry has consequently remained
undeveloped in Western countries. A strange little poem, “The White
Moth,” is an exception to the general rule that I have indicated; but I am
almost certain that its author, A.T. Quiller-Couch, must have read Oriental
books, or obtained his fancy from some Eastern source. As the knowledge
of Indian literature becomes more general in England, we may expect to
find poetry much influenced by Oriental ideas. At the present time, such a
composition as this is quite a strange anomaly.

If a leaf rustled, she would start:
And yet she died, a year ago.

How had so frail a thing the heart
To journey where she trembled so?
And do they turn and turn in fright,
Those little feet, in so much night?

The light above the poet’s head
Streamed on the page and on the cloth,
And twice and thrice there buffeted
On the black pane a white-winged moth:
‘Twas Annie’s soul that beat outside,
And “Open, open, open!” cried:

“I could not find the way to God;
There were too many flaming suns
For signposts, and the fearful road
Led over wastes where millions
Of tangled comets hissed and burned—
I was bewildered and I turned.

“Oh, it was easy then! I knew
Your window and no star beside.
Look up and take me back to you!”
—He rose and thrust the window wide.
‘Twas but because his brain was hot
With rhyming; for he heard her not.

But poets polishing a phrase
Show anger over trivial things;
And as she blundered in the blaze
Towards him, on ecstatic wings,
He raised a hand and smote her dead;
Then wrote “That I had died instead!”

The lover, or bereaved husband, is writing a poem of which a part is given
in the first stanza—which is therefore put in italics. The action proper
begins with the second stanza. The soul of the dead woman taps at the
window in the shape of a night-butterfly or moth—imagining, perhaps, that
she has still a voice and can make herself heard by the man that she loves.

She tells the story of her wandering in space—privileged to pass to heaven,
yet afraid of the journey. Now the subject of the poem which the lover
happens to be writing inside the room is a memory of the dead woman—
mourning for her, describing her in exquisite ways. He can not hear her at
all; he does not hear even the beating of the little wings at the window, but
he stands up and opens the window—because he happens to feel hot and
tired. The moth thinks that he has heard her, that he knows; and she flies
toward him in great delight. But he, thinking that it is only a troublesome
insect, kills her with a blow of his hand; and then sits down to continue his
poem with the words, “Oh, how I wish I could have died instead of that
dear woman!” Altogether this is a queer poem in English literature, and I
believe almost alone of its kind. But it is queer only because of its rarity of
subject. As for construction, it is very good indeed.

I do not know that it is necessary to quote any more poems upon butterflies
or moths. There are several others; but the workmanship and the thought are
not good enough or original enough to justify their use here as class texts.
So I shall now turn to the subject of dragon-flies. Here we must again be
very brief. References to dragon-flies are common throughout English
poetry, but the references signify little more than a mere colourless mention
of the passing of the insect. However, it so happens that the finest modern
lines of pure description written about any insect, are about dragon-flies.
And they also happen to be by Tennyson. Naturalists and men of science
have greatly praised these lines, because of their truth to nature and the
accuracy of observation which they show. You will find them in the poem
entitled “The Two Voices.”

To-day I saw the dragon-fly
Come from the wells where he did lie.

An inner impulse rent the veil
Of his old husk; from head to tail
Came out clear plates of sapphire mail.

He dried his wings; like gauze they grew;
Thro’ crofts and pastures wet with dew
A living rush of light he flew.

There are very few real poems, however, upon the dragon-fly in English,
and considering the extraordinary beauty and grace of the insect, this may
appear strange to you. But I think that you can explain the strangeness at a
later time. The silence of English poets on the subject of insects as
compared with Japanese poets is due to general causes that we shall
consider at the close of the lecture.

Common flies could scarcely seem to be a subject for poetry—disgusting
and annoying creatures as they are. But there are more poems about the
house-fly than about the dragon-fly. Last year I quoted for you a remarkable
and rather mystical composition by the poet Blake about accidentally
killing a fly. Blake represents his own thoughts about the brevity of human
life which had been aroused by the incident. It is charming little poem; but
it does not describe the fly at all. I shall not quote it here again, because we
shall have many other things to talk about; but I shall give you the text of a
famous little composition by Oldys on the same topic. It has almost the
simplicity of Blake,—and certainly something of the same kind of
philosophy.

Busy, curious, thirsty fly,
Drink with me and drink as I;
Freely welcome to my cup,
Couldst thou sip and sip it up:
Make the most of life you may,
Life is short and wears away.

Both alike are mine and thine
Hastening quick to their decline:
Thine’s a summer, mine’s no more,
Though repeated to threescore.
Threescore summers, when they’re gone,
Will appear as short as one!

The suggestion is that, after all, time is only a very relative affair in the
cosmic order of things. The life of the man of sixty years is not much longer
than the life of the insect which lives but a few hours, days, or months. Had
Oldys, who belongs to the eighteenth century, lived in our own time, he
might have been able to write something very much more curious on this

subject. It is now known that time, to the mind of an insect, must appear
immensely longer than it appears to the mind of a man. It has been
calculated that a mosquito or a gnat moves its wings between four and five
hundred times a second. Now the scientific dissection of such an insect,
under the microscope, justifies the opinion that the insect must be conscious
of each beat of the wings—just as a man feels that he lifts his arm or bends
his head every time that the action is performed. A man can not even
imagine the consciousness of so short an interval of time as the five-
hundredth part of one second. But insect consciousness can be aware of
such intervals; and a single day of life might well appear to the gnat as long
as the period of a month to a man. Indeed, we have reason to suppose that
to even the shortest-lived insect life does not appear short at all; and that the
ephemeral may actually, so far as felling is concerned, live as long as a man
—although its birth and death does occur between the rising and the setting
of the sun.

We might suppose that bees would form a favourite subject of poetry,
especially in countries where agriculture is practised upon such a scale as in
England. But such is not really the case. Nearly every English poet makes
some reference to bees, as Tennyson does in the famous couplet—

The moan of doves in immemorial elms,
And murmuring of innumerable bees.

But the only really remarkable poem addressed to a bee is by the American
philosopher Emerson. The poem in question can not be compared as to
mere workmanship with some others which I have cited; but as to thinking,
it is very interesting, and you must remember that the philosopher who
writes poetry should be judged for his thought rather than for the measure
of his verse. The whole is not equally good, nor is it short enough to quote
entire; I shall only give the best parts.

Burly, dozing humble-bee,
Where thou art is clime for me.

Zigzag steerer, desert cheerer,
Let me chase thy waving lines;

Keep me nearer, me thy hearer,
Singing over shrubs and vines.

Insect lover of the sun,
Joy of thy dominion!
Sailor of the atmosphere;
Swimmer through the waves of air;
Voyager of light and noon;
Epicurean of June;
Wait, I prithee, till I come
Within earshot of thy hum,—
All without is martyrdom.

Thou, in sunny solitudes,
Rover of the underwoods,
The green silence dost displace
With thy mellow, breezy bass.

Aught unsavory or unclean
Hath my insect never seen;

Wiser far than human seer,
Yellow-breeched philosopher!
Seeing only what is fair,
Sipping only what is sweet,
Thou dost mock at fate and care,
Leave the chaff, and take the wheat.

This is really the poetry of the bee—visiting only beautiful flowers, and
sucking from them their perfumed juices—always healthy, happy, and
surrounded by beautiful things. A great rover, a constant wanderer is the bee
—visiting many different places, seeing many different things, but stopping
only to enjoy what is beautiful to the sight and sweet to the taste. Now
Emerson tells us that a wise man should act like the bee—never stopping to
look at what is bad, or what is morally ugly, but seeking only what is

beautiful and nourishing for the mind. It is a very fine thought; and the
manner of expressing it is greatly helped by Emerson’s use of curious and
forcible words—such as “burly,” “zigzag,” and the famous expression
“yellow-breeched philosopher”—which has passed almost into an American
household phrase. The allusion of course is to the thighs of the bee, covered
with the yellow pollen of flowers so as to make them seem covered with
yellow breeches, or trousers reaching only to the knees.

I do not of course include in the lecture such child songs about insects as
that famous one beginning with the words, “How doth the little busy bee
improve each shining hour.” This is no doubt didactically very good; but I
wish to offer you only examples of really fine poetry on the topic. Therefore
leaving the subject of bees for the time, let us turn to the subject of musical
insects—the singers of the fields and woods—grasshoppers and crickets.

In Japanese poetry there are thousands of verses upon such insects.
Therefore it seems very strange that we have scarcely anything on the
subject in English. And the little that we do have is best represented by the
poem of Keats on the night cricket. The reference is probably to what we
call in England the hearth cricket, an insect which hides in houses, making
itself at home in some chink of the brickwork or stonework about a
fireplace, for it loves the warmth. I suppose that the small number of poems
in English about crickets can be partly explained by the scarcity of night
singers. Only the house cricket seems to be very well known. But on the
other hand, we can not so well explain the rarity of composition in regard to
the day-singers—the grasshoppers and locusts which can be heard, though
somewhat faintly, in any English country place after sunset during the warm
season. Another queer thing is that the example set by Keats has not been
imitated or at least followed even up to the present time.

The poetry of earth is never dead:
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun, etc.

In this charming composition you will have noticed the word “stove”; but
you must remember that this is not a stove as we understand the term now,
and signifies only an old-fashioned fireplace of brick or tile. In Keats’s day
there were no iron stoves. Another word which I want to notice is the word
“poetry” in the first line. By the poetry of nature the poet means the voices

of nature—the musical sounds made by its idle life in woods and fields. So
the word “poetry” here has especially the meaning of song, and corresponds
very closely to the Japanese word which signifies either poem or song, but
perhaps more especially the latter. The general meaning of the sonnet is that
at no time, either in winter or in summer, is nature silent. When the birds do
not sing, the grasshoppers make music for us; and when the cold has killed
or banished all other life, then the house cricket begins with its thin sweet
song to make us think of the dead voices of the summer.

There is not much else of note about the grasshopper and the cricket in the
works of the great English poets. But perhaps you do not know that
Tennyson in his youth took up the subject and made a long poem upon the
grasshopper, but suppressed it after the edition of 1842. He did not think it
good enough to rank with his other work. But a few months ago the poems
which Tennyson suppressed in the final edition of his works have been
published and carefully edited by an eminent scholar, and among these
poems we find “The Grasshopper.” I will quote some of this poem, because
it is beautiful, and because the fact of its suppression will serve to show you
how very exact and careful Tennyson was to preserve only the very best
things that he wrote.

Voice of the summer wind,
Joy of the summer plain,
Life of the summer hours,
Carol clearly, bound along,
No Tithon thou as poets feign
(Shame fall ’em, they are deaf and blind),
But an insect lithe and strong
Bowing the seeded summer flowers.
Prove their falsehood and thy quarrel,
Vaulting on thine airy feet
Clap thy shielded sides and carol,
Carol clearly, chirrups sweet.
Thou art a mailéd warrior in youth and strength complete;
Armed cap-à-pie,
Full fair to see;
Unknowing fear,

Undreading loss,
A gallant cavalier,
Sans peur et sans reproche.
In sunlight and in shadow,
The Bayard of the meadow.

The reference to Tithonus is a reference of course to a subject afterwards
beautifully elaborated in another poem by Tennyson, the great poem of
“Tithonus.” The Bayard here referred to was the great French model of
perfect chivalry, and is sometimes called the last of the feudal knights. He
was said to be without fear and without blame. You may remember that he
was killed by a ball from a gun—it was soon after the use of artillery in war
had been introduced; and his dying words were to the effect that he feared
there was now an end of great deeds, because men had begun to fight from
a distance with machines instead of fighting in the old knightly and noble
way with sword and spear. The grasshopper, covered with green plates and
bearing so many little sharp spines upon its long limbs, seems to have
suggested to Tennyson the idea of a fairy knight in green armour.

As I said before, England is poor in singing insects, while America is rich in
them—almost, perhaps, as rich as Japan, although you will not find as many
different kinds of singing insects in any one state or district. The singing
insects of America are peculiar to particular localities. But the Eastern states
have perhaps the most curious insect of this kind. It is called the Katydid.
This name is spelt either Katydid, or Catydid—though the former spelling
is preferable. Katy, or Katie, is the abbreviation of the name Catherine; very
few girls are called by the full name Catherine, also spelt Katherine;
because the name is long and unmusical, their friends address them usually
as Katy, and their acquaintances, as Kate. Well, the insect of which I am
speaking, a kind of semi, makes a sound resembling the sound of the words
“Katie did!” Hence the name—one of the few corresponding to the names
given to the Japanese semi, such as tsuku-tsuku-boshi, or minmin-semi. The
most interesting composition upon this cicada is by Oliver Wendell Holmes,
but it is of the lighter sort of verse, with a touch of humour in it. I shall
quote a few verses only, as the piece contains some allusions that would
require explanation at considerable length.

I love to hear thine earnest voice,
Wherever thou art hid,
Thou testy little dogmatist,
Thou pretty Katydid!
Thou mindest me of gentlefolks,—
Old gentlefolks are they,—
Thou say’st an undisputed thing
In such a solemn way.

Oh tell me where did Katy live,
And what did Katy do?
And was she very fair and young,
And yet so wicked, too?
Did Katy love a naughty man,
Or kiss more cheeks than one?
I warrant Katy did no more
Than many a Kate has done.

Ah, no! The living oak shall crash,
That stood for ages still,
The rock shall rend its mossy base
And thunder down the hill,
Before the little Katydid
Shall add one word, to tell
The mystic story of the maid
Whose name she knows so well.

The word “testy” may be a little unfamiliar to some of you; it is a good old-
fashioned English term for “cross,” “irritable.” The reference to the “old
gentlefolks” implies the well-known fact that in argument old persons are
inclined to be much more obstinate than young people. And there is also a
hint in the poem of the tendency among old ladies to blame the conduct of
young girls even more severely than may be necessary. There is nothing
else to recommend the poem except its wit and the curiousness of the
subject. There are several other verses about the same creature, by different

American poets; but none of them is quite so good as the composition of
Holmes. However, I may cite a few verses from one of the earlier American
poets, Philip Freneau, who flourished in the eighteenth century and the
early part of the nineteenth. He long anticipated the fancy of Holmes; but he
spells the word Catydid.

In a branch of willow hid
Sings the evening Catydid:
From the lofty locust bough
Feeding on a drop of dew,
In her suit of green arrayed
Hear her singing in the shade—
Catydid, Catydid, Catydid!

While upon a leaf you tread,
Or repose your little head
On your sheet of shadows laid,
All the day you nothing said;
Half the night your cheery tongue
Revelled out its little song,—
Nothing else but Catydid.

Tell me, what did Caty do?
Did she mean to trouble you?
Why was Caty not forbid
To trouble little Catydid?
Wrong, indeed, at you to fling,
Hurting no one while you sing,—
Catydid! Catydid! Catydid!

To Dr. Holmes the voice of the cicada seemed like the voice of an old
obstinate woman, an old prude, accusing a young girl of some fault,—but to
Freneau the cry of the little creature seemed rather to be like the cry of a
little child complaining—a little girl, perhaps, complaining that somebody
had been throwing stones at her, or had hurt her in some way. And, of
course, the unfinished character of the phrase allows equally well either
supposition.

Before going back to more serious poetry, I want—while we are speaking
of American poets—to make one reference to the ironical or satirical poetry
which insects have inspired in some minds, taking for example the poem by
Charlotte Perkins Stetson about a butterfly. This author is rather a person of
note, being a prominent figure in educational reforms and the author of a
volume of poems of a remarkably strong kind in the didactic sense. In other
words, she is especially a moral poet; and unless moral poetry be really
very well executed, it is scarcely worth while classing it as literature. I
think, however, that the symbolism in the following verses will interest you
—especially when we comment upon them. The composition from which
they are taken is entitled “A Conservative.”

The poet, walking in the garden one morning, sees a butterfly, very
unhappy, and gifted with power to express the reason of its unhappiness.
The butterfly says, complaining of its wings,

“My legs are thin and few
Where once I had a swarm!
Soft fuzzy fur—a joy to view—
Once kept my body warm,
Before these flapping wing-things grew,
To hamper and deform!”

At that outrageous bug I shot
The fury of mine eye;
Said I, in scorn all burning hot,
In rage and anger high,
“You ignominious idiot!
Those wings are made to fly!”

“I do not want to fly,” said he,
“I only want to squirm!”
And he drooped his wings dejectedly,
But still his voice was firm:
“I do not want to be a fly!
I want to be a worm!”

O yesterday of unknown lack!

To-day of unknown bliss!
I left my fool in red and black,
The last I saw was this,—
The creature madly climbing back
Into his chrysalis.

Of course the wings here represent the powers of the mind—knowledge,
reason, will. Men ought to use these in order to reach still nobler and higher
states of life. But there are men who refuse to use their best faculties for this
end. Such men are like butterflies who do not want to take the trouble to fly,
but prefer the former condition of the caterpillar which does nothing but eat
and sleep. As applied to certain forms of conservatism the satire is strong.

Something may now be said as to poems about spiders. But let me remind
you that a spider is not an insect. Scientifically it has no relation to the great
family of true insects; it belongs to the very distinct family of the
arthropoda or “joint-footed” animals. But as it is still popularly called an
insect in most European countries, we may be excused for including it in
the subject of the present lecture. I suppose you know that one of the
scientific names for this whole class of creatures is Arachnida,—a name
derived from the Greek name Arachne. The story of Arachne is interesting,
and everybody studying natural history ought to know it. Arachne was a
young girl, according to the Greek story, who was very skilful at weaving.
She wove cloths of many different colours and beautiful patterns, and
everybody admired her work. This made her vain—so vain that at last she
said that even the goddess of weaving could not weave better than she.
Immediately after she had said that, the terrible goddess herself—Pallas
Athena—entered the room. Pallas Athena was not only the goddess of
wisdom, you know, but especially the goddess of young girls, presiding
over the chastity, the filial piety, and the domestic occupations of virgins;
and she was very angry at the conceit of this girl. So she said to her, “You
have boasted that you can weave as well as I can; now let me see you
weave!” So Arachne was obliged to sit down at her loom and weave in the
presence of the goddess; and the goddess also wove, far surpassing the
weaving of Arachne. When the weaving was done, the goddess asked the
girl, “Now see! which is the better, my work or yours?” And Arachne was
obliged to confess that she had been defeated and put to shame. But the

goddess was not thoroughly satisfied; to punish Arachne, she touched her
lightly with the distaff, saying, “Spin forever!” and thereupon Arachne was
changed into a spider, which forever spins and weaves perishable films of
perishable shiny thread. Poetically we still may call a spider Arachne.

I have here a little poem of a touching character entitled “Arachne,” by
Rose Terry Cooke,—one of the symbolic poems which are becoming so
numerous in these days of newer and deeper philosophy. I think that you
will like it: a spinster, that is, a maiden passed the age of girlhood, is the
speaker.

I watch her in the corner there,
As, restless, bold, and unafraid,
She slips and floats along the air
Till all her subtile house is made.

Her home, her bed, her daily food,
All from that hidden store she draws;
She fashions it and knows it good,
By instinct’s strong and sacred laws.

No tenuous threads to weave her nest,
She seeks and gathers there or here;
But spins it from her faithful breast,
Renewing still, till leaves are sere.

Then, worn with toil, and tired of life,
In vain her shining traps are set.
Her frost hath hushed the insect strife
And gilded flies her charm forget.

But swinging in the snares she spun,
She sways to every wintry wind:
Her joy, her toil, her errand done,
Her corse the sport of storms unkind.

The symbolism of these verses will appear to you more significant when I
tell you that it refers especially to conditions in New England in the present

period. The finest American population—perhaps the finest Anglo-Saxons
ever produced—were the New Englanders of the early part of the century.
But with the growth of the new century, the men found themselves attracted
elsewhere, especially westward; their shrewdness, their energies, their
inventiveness, were needed in newer regions. And they wandered away by
thousands and thousands, never to come back again, and leaving the women
behind them. Gradually the place of these men was taken by immigrants of
inferior development—but the New England women had nothing to hope
for from these strangers. The bravest of them also went away to other states;
but myriads who could not go were condemned by circumstances to stay
and earn their living by hard work without any prospect of happy marriage.
The difficulty which a girl of culture may experience in trying to live by the
work of her hands in New England is something not easily imagined. But it
is getting to be the same in most Western countries. Such a girl is watching
a spider weaving in the corner of the same room where she herself is
weaving; and she thinks, “Am I not like that spider, obliged to supply my
every need by the work of my own hands, without sympathy, without
friends? The spider will spin and catch flies until the autumn comes; then
she will die. Perhaps I too must continue to spin until the autumn of my
own life—until I become too old to work hard, and die of cold and of
exhaustion.”

Poor sister of the spinster clan!
I too from out my store within
My daily life and living plan,
My home, my rest, my pleasure spin.

I know thy heart when heartless hands
Sweep all that hard-earned web away;
Destroy its pearled and glittering bands,
And leave thee homeless by the way.

I know thy peace when all is done.
Each anchored thread, each tiny knot,
Soft shining in the autumn sun;
A sheltered, silent, tranquil lot.

I know what thou hast never known,—

Sad presage to a soul allowed—
That not for life I spin, alone,
But day by day I spin my shroud.

The reference to the sweeping away of the spider’s web, of course, implies
the pain often caused to such hardworking girls by the meanness of men
who employ them only to cheat them—shopkeepers or manufacturers who
take their work without justly paying for it, and who criticize it as bad in
order to force the owner to accept less money than it is worth. Again a
reference may be intended to the destruction of the home by some legal
trick—some unscrupulous method of cheating the daughter out of the
property bequeathed to her by her parents.

Notice a few pretty words here. The “pearled” as applied to the spider’s
thread gives an intimation of the effect produced by dew on the thread, but
there is also the suggestion of tears upon the thread work woven by the
hands of the girl. The participle “anchored” is very pretty in its use here as
an adjective, because this word is now especially used for rope-fastening,
whether the rope be steel or hemp; and particularly for the fastening of the
cables of a bridge. The last stanza might be paraphrased thus: “Sister
Spider, I know more than you—and that knowledge makes me unhappy.
You do not know, when you are spinning your little web, that you are really
weaving your own shroud. But I know this, my work is slowly but surely
killing me. And I know it because I have a soul—at least a mind made
otherwise than yours.”

The use of the word “soul” in the last stanza of this poem, brings me back
to the question put forth in an earlier part of the lecture—why European
poets, during the last two thousand years, have written so little upon the
subject of insects? Three thousand, four thousand years ago, the most
beautiful Greek poetry—poetry more perfect than anything of English
poetry—was written upon insects. In old Japanese literature poems upon
insects are to be found by thousands. What is the signification of the great
modern silence in Western countries upon this delightful topic? I believe
that Christianity, as dogma, accounts for the long silence. The opinions of
the early Church refused soul, ghost, intelligence of any sort to other
creatures than man. All animals were considered as automata—that is, as

self-acting machines, moved by a something called instinct, for want of a
better name. To talk about the souls of animals or the spirits of animals
would have been very dangerous in the Middle Ages, when the Church had
supreme power; it would indeed have been to risk or to invite an accusation
of witchcraft, for demons were then thought to take the shape of animals at
certain times. To discuss the mind of an animal would have been for the
Christian faith to throw doubt upon the existence of human souls as taught
by the Church; for if you grant that animals are able to think, then you must
acknowledge that man is able to think without a soul, or you must
acknowledge that the soul is not the essential principle of thought and
action. Until after the time of Descartes, who later argued philosophically
that animals were only machines, it was scarcely possible to argue
rationally about the matter in Europe.

Nevertheless, we shall soon perceive that this explanation will not cover all
the facts. You will naturally ask how it happens that, if the question be a
question of animal souls, birds, horses, dogs, cats, and many other animals
have been made the subject of Western poems from ancient times. The
silence is only upon the subject of insects. And, again, Christianity has one
saint—the most beautiful character in all Christian hagiography—who
thought of all nature in a manner that, at first sight, strangely resembles
Buddhism. This saint was Francis of Assisi, born in the latter part of the
twelfth century, so that he may be said to belong to the very heart of the
Middle Ages,—the most superstitious epoch of Christianity. Now this saint
used to talk to trees and stones as if they were animated beings. He
addressed the sun as “my brother sun”; and he spoke of the moon as his
sister. He preached not only to human beings, but also to the birds and the
fishes; and he made a great many poems on these subjects, full of a strange
and childish beauty. For example, his sermon to the doves, beginning, “My
little sisters, the doves,” in which he reminds them that their form is the
emblem or symbol of the Holy Ghost, is a beautiful poem; and has been,
with many others, translated into nearly all modern languages. But observe
that neither St. Francis nor any other saint has anything to say on the subject
of insects.

Perhaps we must go back further than Christianity to guess the meaning of
these distinctions. Among the ancient races of Asia, where the Jewish faith

arose, there were strange and sinister beliefs about insects—old Assyrian
superstitions, old Babylonian beliefs. Insects seemed to those early peoples
very mysterious creatures (which they really are); and it appears to have
been thought that they had a close relation to the world of demons and evil
spirits. I suppose you know that the name of one of their gods, Beelzebub,
signifies the Lord of Flies. The Jews, as is shown by their Talmudic
literature, inherited some of these ideas; and it is quite probable that they
were passed on to the days of Christianity. Again, in the early times of
Christianity in Northern Africa the Church had to fight against superstitions
of an equally strange sort derived from old Egyptian beliefs. Among the
Egyptians, certain insects were sacred and became symbols of divinity,—
such as the beetle. Now I imagine that for these reasons the subject of
insects became at an early time a subject which Christianity thought
dangerous, and that thereafter a kind of hostile opinion prevailed regarding
any literature upon this topic.

However, to-day things are very different. With the development of
scientific studies—especially of microscopic study—it has been found that
insects, far from being the lowliest of creatures, are the most highly
organized of all beings; that their special senses are incomparably superior
to our own; and that in natural history, from the evolutional standpoint, they
have to be given first place. This of course renders it impossible any longer
to consider the insect as a trifling subject. Moreover, the new philosophy is
teaching the thinking classes in all Western countries the great truth of the
unity of life. With the recognition of such unity, an insect must interest the
philosophers—even the man of ordinary culture—quite as much as the bird
or any other animal.

Nearly all the poems which I have quoted to you have been poems of very
modern date—from which we may infer that interest in the subject of
insects has been developing of late years only. In this connection it is
interesting to note that a very religious poet, Whittier, gave us in the last
days of his life a poem upon ants. This would have seemed strange enough
in a former age; it does not seem strange to-day, and it is beautiful. The
subject is taken from old Jewish literature.

KING SOLOMON AND THE ANTS

Out from Jerusalem
The King rode with his great
War chiefs and lords of state,
And Sheba’s queen with them;

Comely, but black withal,
To whom, perchance, belongs
That wondrous Song of Songs,
Sensuous and mystical,

Whereto devout souls turn
In fond, ecstatic dream,
And through its earth-born theme
The Love of Loves discern.

Proud in the Syrian sun,
In gold and purple sheen,
The dusky Ethiop queen
Smiled on King Solomon.

Wisest of men, he knew
The languages of all
The creatures great or small
That trod the earth or flew.

Across an ant-hill led
The king’s path, and he heard
Its small folk, and their word
He thus interpreted:

“Here comes the king men greet
As wise and good and just,
To crush us in the dust
Under his heedless feet.”

The king, understanding the language of insects, turns to the queen and
explains to her what the ants have just said. She advises him to pay no

attention to the sarcasm of the ants—how dare such vile creatures speak
thus about a king! But Solomon thinks otherwise:

“Nay,” Solomon replied,
“The wise and strong should seek
The welfare of the weak,”
And turned his horse aside.

His train, with quick alarm,
Curved with their leader round
The ant-hill’s peopled mound,
And left it free from harm.

The jewelled head bent low;
“Oh, king!” she said, “henceforth
The secret of thy worth
And wisdom well I know.

“Happy must be the State
Whose ruler heedeth more
The murmurs of the poor
Than flatteries of the great.”

The reference to the Song of Songs—also the Song of Solomon and
Canticle of Canticles—may require a little explanation. The line “Comely
but black withal,” is borrowed from a verse of this song—“I am black but
beautiful, oh, ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the
curtains of Solomon.” In another part of the song the reason of this
blackness is given: “I am black, because the sun hath looked upon me.”
From which we can see that the word black only means dark, brown, tanned
by the sun. Perhaps you do not know that as late as the middle of the
eighteenth century it was still the custom in England to speak of a person
with black hair and eyes as “a black man”—a custom which Charles Lamb
had reason to complain of even at a later day. The tents referred to in the
text were probably tents made of camel-skin, such as the Arabs still make,
and the colour of these is not black but brown. Whether Solomon wrote the
so-called song or not we do not know; but the poet refers to a legend that it
was written in praise of the beauty of the dark queen who came from Sheba

to visit the wisest man of the world. Such is not, however, the opinion of
modern scholars. The composition is really dramatic, although thrown into
lyrical form, and as arranged by Renan and others it becomes a beautiful
little play, of which each act is a monologue. “Sensuous” the poet correctly
calls it; for it is a form of praise of woman’s beauty in all its details, as
appears in such famous verses as these: “How beautiful are thy feet in
shoes, O prince’s daughter; the joints of thy thighs are like jewels, the work
of the hands of a cunning workman. Thy two breasts are like two young
roes that are twins which feed among the lilies.” But Christianity, instead of
dismissing this part of the Bible, interpreted the song mystically—insisting
that the woman described meant the Church, and the lover, Christ. Of
course only very pious people continue to believe this; even the good
Whittier preferred the legend that it was written about the Queen of Sheba.

I suppose that I ought to end this lecture upon insect poetry by some
quotation to which a moral or philosophical meaning can be attached. I
shall end it therefore with a quotation from the poet Gray. The poetry of
insects may be said to have first appeared in English literature during the
second half of the eighteenth century, so that it is only, at the most, one
hundred and fifty years old. But the first really fine poem of the eighteenth
century relating to the subject is quite as good as anything since composed
by Englishmen upon insect life in general. Perhaps Gray referred especially
to what we call May-flies—those delicate ghostly insects which hover
above water surfaces in fine weather, but which die on the same day that
they are born. He does not specify May-flies, however, and we may
consider the moral of the poem quite apart from any particular kind of
insect. You will find this reference in the piece entitled “Ode on the
Spring,” in the third, fourth, and fifth stanzas.

Still is the toiling hand of care:
The panting herds repose:
Yet hark, how through the peopled air
The busy murmur glows!
The insect youth are on the wing,
Eager to taste the honied spring,
And float amid the liquid noon:
Some lightly o’er the current skim,

Some show their gaily-gilded trim
Quick-glancing to the sun.

To Contemplation’s sober eye
Such is the race of man:
And they that creep, and they that fly,
Shall end where they began.
Alike the Busy and the Gay
But flutter through life’s little day,
In fortune’s varying colours dressed:
Brushed by the hand of rough Mischance,
Or chilled by Age, their airy dance
They leave, in dust to rest.

Methinks I hear in accents low
The sportive kind reply:
Poor moralist! and what art thou?
A solitary fly!
Thy joys no glittering female meets,
No hive hast thou of hoarded sweets,
No painted plumage to display:
On hasty wings thy youth is flown;
Thy sun is set; thy spring is gone—
We frolic, while ’tis May.

The poet Gray was never married, and the last stanza which I have quoted
refers jocosely to himself. It is an artistic device to set off the moral by a
little mockery, so that it may not appear too melancholy.

Chapter XI

Some French Poems about Insects
Return to Table of Contents

Last year I gave a lecture on the subject of English poems about insects,
with some reference to the old Greek poems on the same subject. But I did
not then have an opportunity to make any reference to French poems upon
the same subject, and I think that it would be a pity not to give you a few
examples.

Just as in the case of English poems about insects, nearly all the French
literature upon this subject is new. Insect poetry belongs to the newer and
larger age of thought, to the age that begins to perceive the great truth of the
unity of life. We no longer find, even in natural histories, the insect treated
as a mere machine and unthinking organism; on the contrary its habits, its
customs and its manifestation both of intelligence and instinct are being
very carefully studied in these times, and a certain sympathy, as well as a
certain feeling of respect or admiration, may be found in the scientific
treatises of the greatest men who write about insect life. So, naturally,
Europe is slowly returning to the poetical standpoint of the old Greeks in
this respect. It is not improbable that keeping caged insects as pets may
again become a Western custom, as it was in Greek times, when cages were
made of rushes or straw for the little creatures. I suppose you have heard
that the Japanese custom is very likely to become a fashion in America. If
that should really happen, the fact would certainly have an effect upon
poetry. I think that it is very likely to happen.

The French poets who have written pretty things about insects are nearly all
poets of our own times. Some of them treat the subject from the old Greek
standpoint—indeed the beautiful poem of Heredia upon the tomb of a
grasshopper is perfectly Greek, and reads almost like a translation from the
Greek. Other poets try to express the romance of insects in the form of a
monologue, full of the thought of our own age. Others again touch the
subject of insects only in connection with the subject of love. I will give one

example of each method, keeping the best piece for the last, and beginning
with a pretty fancy about a dragonfly.

MA LIBELLULE

En te voyant, toute mignonne,
Blanche dans ta robe d’azure,
Je pensais à quelque madone
Drapée en un pen de ciel pur.

Je songeais à ces belles saintes
Que l’on voyait au temps jadis
Sourire sur les vitres peintes,
Montrant d’un doigt le paradis:

Et j’aurais voulu, loin du monde
Qui passait frivole entre nous,
Dans quelque retraite profonde
T’adorer seul à deux genoux.

This first part of the poem is addressed of course to a beautiful child, some
girl between the age of childhood and womanhood:

“Beholding thee, Oh darling one, all white in thy azure dress, I thought of
some figure of the Madonna robed in a shred of pure blue sky.

“I dreamed of those beautiful figures of saints whom one used to see in
olden times smiling in the stained glass of church windows, and pointing
upward to Paradise.

“And I could have wished to adore you alone upon my bended knees in
some far hidden retreat, away from the frivolous world that passed between
us.”

This little bit of ecstasy over the beauty and purity of a child is pretty, but
not particularly original. However, it is only an introduction. Now comes
the pretty part of the poem:

Soudain un caprice bizarre
Change la scène et le décor,
Et mon esprit au loin s’égare
Sur des grands prés d’azure et d’or

Où, près de ruisseaux muscules
Gazouillants comme des oiseaux,
Se poursuivent les libellules,
Ces fleurs vivantes des roseaux.

Enfant, n’es tu pas l’une d’elles
Qui me poursuit pour consoler?
Vainement tu caches tes ailes;
Tu marches, mais tu sais voler.

Petite fée au bleu corsage,
Que j’ai connu dès mon berceau,
En revoyant ton doux visage,
Je pense aux joncs de mon ruisseau!

Veux-tu qu’en amoureux fidèles
Nous revenions dans ces prés verts?
Libellule, reprends tes ailes;
Moi, je brulerai tous mes vers!

Et nous irons, sous la lumière,
D’un ciel plus frais et plus léger
Chacun dans sa forme première,
Moi courir, et toi voltiger.

“Suddenly a strange fancy changes for me the scene and the scenery; and
my mind wanders far away over great meadows of azure and gold.

“Where, hard by tiny streams that murmur with a sound like voices of little
birds, the dragon-flies, those living flowers of the reeds, chase each other at
play.

”Child, art thou not one of those dragon-flies, following after me to console
me? Ah, it is in vain that thou tryest to hide thy wings; thou dost walk,
indeed, but well thou knowest how to fly!

“O little fairy with the blue corsage whom I knew even from the time I was
a baby in the cradle; seeing again thy sweet face, I think of the rushes that
border the little stream of my native village!

“Dost thou not wish that even now as faithful lovers we return to those
green fields? O dragon-fly, take thy wings again, and I—I will burn all my
poetry,

“And we shall go back, under the light of the sky more fresh and pure than
this, each of us in the original form—I to run about, and thou to hover in the
air as of yore.”

The sight of a child’s face has revived for the poet very suddenly and
vividly, the recollection of the village home, the green fields of childhood,
the little stream where he used to play with the same little girl, sometimes
running after the dragon-fly. And now the queer fancy comes to him that
she herself is so like a dragon-fly—so light, graceful, spiritual! Perhaps
really she is a dragon-fly following him into the great city, where he
struggles to live as a poet, just in order to console him. She hides her wings,
but that is only to prevent other people knowing. Why not return once more
to the home of childhood, back to the green fields and the sun? “Little
dragon-fly,” he says to her, “let us go back! do you return to your beautiful
summer shape, be a dragon-fly again, expand your wings of gauze; and I
shall stop trying to write poetry. I shall burn my verses; I shall go back to
the streams where we played as children; I shall run about again with the
joy of a child, and with you beautifully flitting hither and thither as a
dragon-fly.”

Victor Hugo also has a little poem about a dragon-fly, symbolic only, but
quite pretty. It is entitled “La Demoiselle”; and the other poem was entitled,
as you remember, “Ma Libellule.” Both words mean a dragon-fly, but not
the same kind of dragon-fly. The French word “demoiselle,” which might
be adequately rendered into Japanese by the term ojosan, refers only to
those exquisitely slender, graceful, slow-flitting dragon-flies known to the

scientist by the name of Calopteryx. Of course you know the difference by
sight, and the reason of the French name will be poetically apparent to you.

Quand la demoiselle dorée
S’envole au départ des hivers,
Souvent sa robe diaprée,
Souvent son aile est déchirée
Aux mille dards des buissons verts.

Ainsi, jeunesse vive et frêle,
Qui, t’égarant de tous côtés,
Voles ou ton instinct t’appele,
Souvent tu déchires ton aile
Aux épines des voluptes.

“When, at the departure of winter, the gilded dragon-fly begins to soar,
often her many-coloured robe, often her wing, is torn by the thousand
thorns of the verdant shrubs.

“Even so, O frail and joyous Youth, who, wandering hither and thither, in
every direction, flyest wherever thy instinct calls thee—even so thou dost
often tear thy wings upon the thorns of pleasure.”

You must understand that pleasure is compared to a rose-bush, whose
beautiful and fragrant flowers attract the insects, but whose thorns are
dangerous to the visitors. However, Victor Hugo does not use the word for
rose-bush, for obvious reasons; nor does he qualify the plants which are
said to tear the wings of the dragon-fly. I need hardly tell you that the
comparison would not hold good in reference to the attraction of flowers,
because dragon-flies do not care in the least about flowers, and if they
happen to tear their wings among thorn bushes, it is much more likely to be
in their attempt to capture and devour other insects. The merit of the poem
is chiefly in its music and colour; as natural history it would not bear
criticism. The most beautiful modern French poem about insects, beautiful
because of its classical perfection, is I think a sonnet by Heredia, entitled
“Épigramme Funéraire”—that is to say, “Inscription for a Tombstone.” This
is an exact imitation of Greek sentiment and expression, carefully studied
after the poets of the anthology. Several such Greek poems are extant,

recounting how children mourned for pet insects which had died in spite of
all their care. The most celebrated one among these I quoted in a former
lecture—the poem about the little Greek girl Myro who made a tomb for
her grasshopper and cried over it. Heredia has very well copied the Greek
feeling in this fine sonnet:

Ici gît, Etranger, la verte sauterelle
Que durant deux saisons nourrit la jeune Hellé,
Et dont l’aile vibrant sous le pied dentelé.
Bruissait dans le pin, le cytise, ou l’airelle.

Elle s’est tue, hélas! la lyre naturelle,
La muse des guérets, des sillons et du blé;
De peur que son léger sommeil ne soit troublé,
Ah, passe vite, ami, ne pèse point sur elle.

C’est là. Blanche, au milieu d’une touffe de thym,
Sa pierre funéraire est fraîchement poseé.
Que d’hommes n’ont pas eu ce suprême destin!

Des larmes d’un enfant la tombe est arrosée,
Et l’Aurore pieuse y fait chaque matin
Une libation de gouttes de rosée.

“Stranger, here reposes the green grasshopper that the young girl Helle
cared for during two seasons,—the grasshopper whose wings, vibrating
under the strokes of its serrated feet, used to resound in the pine, the trefoil
and the whortleberry.

“She is silent now, alas! that natural lyre, muse of the unsown fields, of the
furrows, and of the wheat. Lest her light sleep should be disturbed, ah! pass
quickly, friend! do not be heavy upon her.

“It is there. All white, in the midst of a tuft of thyme, her funeral monument
is placed, in cool shadow; how many men have not been able to have this
supremely happy end!

“By the tears of a child the insect’s tomb is watered; and the pious goddess
of dawn each morning there makes a libation of drops of dew.”

This reads very imperfectly in a hasty translation; the original charm is due
to the perfect art of the form. But the whole thing, as I have said before, is
really Greek, and based upon a close study of several little Greek poems on
the same kind of subject. Little Greek girls thousands of years ago used to
keep singing insects as pets, every day feeding them with slices of leek and
with fresh water, putting in their little cages sprigs of the plants which they
liked. The sorrow of the child for the inevitable death of her insect pets at
the approach of winter, seems to have inspired many Greek poets. With all
tenderness, the child would make a small grave for the insect, bury it
solemnly, and put a little white stone above the place to imitate a grave-
stone. But of course she would want an inscription for this tombstone—
perhaps would ask some of her grown-up friends to compose one for her.
Sometimes the grown-up friend might be a poet, in which case he would
compose an epitaph for all time.

I suppose you perceive that the solemnity of this imitation of the Greek
poems on the subject is only a tender mockery, a playful sympathy with the
real grief of the child. The expression, “pass, friend,” is often found in
Greek funeral inscriptions together with the injunction to tread lightly upon
the dust of the dead. There is one French word to which I will call attention,
—the word “guérets.” We have no English equivalent for this term, said to
be a corruption of the Latin word “veractum,” and meaning fields which
have been ploughed but not sown.

Not to dwell longer upon the phase of art indicated by this poem, I may turn
to the subject of crickets. There are many French poems about crickets. One
by Lamartine is known to almost every French child.

Grillon solitaire,
Ici comme moi,
Voix qui sors de terre,
Ah! réveille-toi!
J’attise la flamme,
C’est pour t’égayer;
Mais il manque une âme,

Une âme au foyer.

Grillon solitaire,
Voix qui sors de terre,
Ah! réveille-toi
Pour moi.

Quand j’étais petite
Comme ce berceau,
Et que Marguerite
Filait son fuseau,
Quand le vent d’automne
Faisait tout gémir,
Ton cri monotone
M’aidait à dormir.

Grillon solitaire,
Voix qui sors de terre,
Ah! réveille-toi
Pour moi.

Seize fois l’année
A compté mes jours;
Dans la cheminée
Tu niches toujours.
Je t’écoute encore
Aux froides saisons.
Souvenir sonore
Des vieilles maisons.

Grillon solitaire,
Voix qui sors de terre,
Ah! réveille-toi
Pour moi.

It is a young girl who thus addresses the cricket of the hearth, the house
cricket. It is very common in country houses in Europe. This is what she
says:

“Little solitary cricket, all alone here just like myself, little voice that comes
up out of the ground, ah, awake for my sake! I am stirring up the fires, that
is just to make you comfortable; but there lacks a presence by the hearth; a
soul to keep me company.

“When I was a very little girl, as little as that cradle in the corner of the
room, then, while Margaret our servant sat there spinning, and while the
autumn wind made everything moan outside, your monotonous cry used to
help me to fall asleep.

“Solitary cricket, voice that issues from the ground, awaken, for my sake.

“Now I am sixteen years of age and you are still nestling in the chimneys as
of old. I can hear you still in the cold season,—like a sound—memory,—a
sonorous memory of old houses.

“Solitary cricket, voice that issues from the ground, awaken, O awaken for
my sake.”

I do not think this pretty little song needs any explanation; I would only call
your attention to the natural truth of the fancy and the feeling. Sitting alone
by the fire in the night, the maiden wants to hear the cricket sing, because it
makes her think of her childhood, and she finds happiness in remembering
it.

So far as mere art goes, the poem of Gautier on the cricket is very much
finer than the poem of Lamartine, though not so natural and pleasing. But as
Gautier was the greatest master of French verse in the nineteenth century,
not excepting Victor Hugo, I think that one example of his poetry on insects
may be of interest. He was very poor, compared with Victor Hugo; and he
had to make his living by writing for newspapers, so that he had no time to
become the great poet that nature intended him to be. However, he did find
time to produce one volume of highly finished poetry, which is probably the
most perfect verse of the nineteenth century, if not the most perfect verse
ever made by a French poet; I mean the “Emaux et Camées.” But the little
poem which I am going to read to you is not from the “Emaux et Camées.”

Souffle, bise! Tombe à flots, pluie!

Dans mon palais tout noir de suie,
Je ris de la pluie et du vent;
En attendant que l’hiver fuie,
Je reste au coin du feu, rêvant.

C’est moi qui suis l’esprit de l’âtre!
Le gaz, de sa langue bleuàtre,
Lèche plus doucement le bois;
La fumée en filet d’albàtre,
Monte et se contourne à ma voix.

La bouilloire rit et babille;
La flamme aux pieds d’argent sautille
En accompagnant ma chanson;
La bûche de duvet s’habille;
La sève bout dans le tison.

Pendant la nuit et la journée
Je chante sous la cheminée;
Dans mon langage de grillon
J’ai, des rebuts de son aînée,
Souvent console Cendrillon.

Quel plaisir? Prolonger sa veille,
Regarder la flamme vermeille
Prenant à deux bras le tison,
A tous les bruits prêter l’oreille,
Entendre vivre la maison.

Tapi dans sa niche bien chaude,
Sentir l’hiver qui pleure et rôde,
Tout blême, et le nez violet,
Tachant de s’introduire en fraude
Par quelque fente du volet!

This poem is especially picturesque, and is intended to give us the
comfortable sensations of a winter night by the fire, and the amusement of
watching the wood burn and of hearing the kettle boiling. You will find that
the French has a particular quality of lucid expression; it is full of clearness
and colour.

“Blow on, cold wind! pour down, O rain. I, in my soot-black palace, laugh
at both rain and wind; and while waiting for winter to pass I remain in my
corner by the fire dreaming.

“It is I that am really the spirit of the hearth! The gaseous flame licks the
wood more softly with its bluish tongue when it hears me; and the smoke
rises up like an alabaster thread, and curls itself about (or twists) at the
sound of my voice.

“The kettle chuckles and chatters; the golden-footed flame leaps, dancing to
the accompaniment of my song (or in accompaniment to my song); the
great log covers itself with down, the sap boils in the wooden embers
(“duvet,” meaning “down,” refers to the soft fluffy white ash that forms
upon the surface of burning wood).

“All night and all day I sing below the chimney. Often in my cricket-
language, I have consoled Cinderella for the snubs of her elder sister.

“Ah, what pleasure to sit up at night, and watch the crimson flames
embracing the wood (or hugging the wood) with both arms at once, and to
listen to all the sounds and to hear the life of the house!

“Nestling in one’s good warm nook, how pleasant to hear Winter, who
weeps and prowls round about the house outside, all wan and blue-nosed
with cold, trying to smuggle itself inside some chink in the shutter!”

Of course this does not give us much about the insect itself, which remains
invisible in the poem, just as it really remains invisible in the house where
the voice is heard. Rather does the poem express the feelings of the person
who hears the cricket.

When we come to the subject of grasshoppers, I think that the French poets
have done much better than the English. There are many poems on the field
grasshopper; I scarcely know which to quote first. But I think you would be
pleased with a little composition by the celebrated French painter, Jules
Breton. Like Rossetti he was both painter and poet; and in both arts he took
for his subjects by preference things from country life. This little poem is
entitled “Les Cigales.” The word “cigales,” though really identical with our
word “cicala,” seldom means the same thing. Indeed the French word may
mean several different kinds of insects, and it is only by studying the text
that we can feel quite sure what sort of insect is meant.

Lorsque dans l’herbe mûre ancun épi ne bouge,
Qu’à l’ardeur des rayons crépite le frement,
Que le coquelicot tombe languissament
Sous le faible fardeau de sa corolle rouge,

Tous les oiseaux de l’air out fait taire leur chants;
Les ramiers paresseux, au plus noir des ramures,
Somnolents, dans les bois, out cessé leurs murmures
Loin du soleil muet incendiant les champs.

Dans le blé, cependant, d’intrépides cigales
Jetant leurs mille bruits, fanfare de l’été,
Out frénétiquement et sans trève agité
Leurs ailes sur l’airaine de leurs folles cymbales.

Trémoussantes, deboutes sur les longs épis d’or,
Virtuoses qui vont s’eteindre avant l’automne,
Elles poussent au del leur hymne monotone
Que dans I’ombre des nuits retentisse encore.

Et rien n’arrêtera leurs cris intarissables;
Quand on les chassera de l’avoine et des blés.
Elles émigreront sur les buissons brulés
Qui se meurent de soif dans les deserts de sable.

Sur l’arbuste effeuillé, sur les chardons flétris
Qui laissent s’envoler leur blanche chevelure,

On reverra l’insecte à la forte encolure,
Pleine d’ivresse, toujours s’exalter dans ses cris.

Jusqu’à ce qu’ouvrant l’aile en lambeaux arrachée,
Exasperé, brulant d’un feu toujours plus pur,
Son oeil de bronze fixe et tendu vers l’azur,
II expire en chantant sur la tige séchée.

For the word “encolure” we have no English equivalent; it means the line of
the neck and shoulder—sometimes the general appearance of shape of the
body.

“When in the ripening grain field not a single ear of wheat moves; when in
the beaming heat the corn seems to crackle; when the poppy languishes and
bends down under the feeble burden of its scarlet corolla,

“Then all the birds of the air have hushed their songs; even the indolent
doves, seeking the darkest part of the foliage in the tree, have become
drowsy in the woods, and have ceased their cooing, far from the fields,
which the silent sun is burning.

“Nevertheless, in the wheat, the brave grasshoppers uttering their thousand
sounds, a trumpet flourish of summer, have continued furiously and
unceasingly to smite their wings upon the brass of their wild cymbal.

“Quivering as they stand upon the long gold ears of the grain, master
musicians who must die before the coming of Fall, they sound to heaven
their monotonous hymn, which re-echoes even in the darkness of the night.

“And nothing will check their inexhaustible shrilling. When chased away
from the oats and from the wheat, they will migrate to the scorched bushes
which die of thirst in the wastes of sand.

“Upon the leafless shrubs, upon the dried up thistles, which let their white
hair fall and float away, there the sturdily-built insect can be seen again,
filled with enthusiasm, even more and more excited as he cries,

“Until, at last, opening his wings, now rent into shreds, exasperated,
burning more and more fiercely in the frenzy of his excitement, and with
his eyes of bronze always fixed motionlessly upon the azure sky, he dies in
his song upon the withered grain.”

This is difficult to translate at all satisfactorily, owing to the multitude of
images compressed together. But the idea expressed is a fine one—the
courage of the insect challenging the sun, and only chanting more and more
as the heat and the thirst increase. The poem has, if you like, the fault of
exaggeration, but the colour and music are very fine; and even the
exaggeration itself has the merit of making the images more vivid.

It will not be necessary to quote another text; we shall scarcely have the
time; but I want to translate to you something of another poem upon the
same insect by the modern French poet Jean Aicard. In this poem, as in the
little poem by Gautier, which I quoted to you, the writer puts his thought in
the mouth of the insect, so to say—that is, makes the insect tell its own
story.

“I am the impassive and noble insect that sings in the summer solstice from
the dazzling dawn all the day long in the fragrant pine-wood. And my song
is always the same, regular as the equal course of the season and of the sun.
I am the speech of the hot and beaming sun, and when the reapers, weary of
heaping the sheaves together, lie down in the lukewarm shade, and sleep
and pant in the ardour of noonday—then more than at any other time do I
utter freely and joyously that double-echoing strophe with which my whole
body vibrates. And when nothing else moves in all the land round about, I
palpitate and loudly sound my little drum. Otherwise the sunlight triumphs;
and in the whole landscape nothing is heard but my cry,—like the joy of the
light itself.

“Like a butterfly I take up from the hearts of the flowers that pure water
which the night lets fall into them like tears. I am inspired only by the
almighty sun. Socrates listened to me; Virgil made mention of me. I am the
insect especially beloved by the poets and by the bards. The ardent sun
reflects himself in the globes of my eyes. My ruddy bed, which seems to be
powdered like the surface of fine ripe fruit, resembles some exquisite key-
board of silver and gold, all quivering with music. My four wings, with

their delicate net-work of nerves, allow the bright down upon my black
back to be seen through their transparency. And like a star upon the
forehead of some divinely inspired poet, three exquisitely mounted rubies
glitter upon my head.”

These are fair examples of the French manner of treating the interesting
subject of insects in poetry. If you should ask me whether the French poets
are better than the English, I should answer, “In point of feeling, no.” The
real value of such examples to the student should be emotional, not
descriptive. I think that the Japanese poems on insects, though not
comparable in point of mere form with some of the foreign poems which I
have quoted, are better in another way—they come nearer to the true
essence of poetry. For the Japanese poets have taken the subject of insects
chiefly for the purpose of suggesting human emotion; and that is certainly
the way in which such a subject should be used. Remember that this is an
age in which we are beginning to learn things about insects which could not
have been even imagined fifty years ago, and the more that we learn about
these miraculous creatures, the more difficult does it become for us to write
poetically about their lives, or about their possible ways of thinking and
feeling. Probably no mortal man will ever be able to imagine how insects
think or feel or hear or even see. Not only are their senses totally different
from those of animals, but they appear to have a variety of special senses
about which we can not know anything at all. As for their existence, it is
full of facts so atrocious and so horrible as to realize most of the
imaginations of old about the torments of hell. Now, for these reasons to
make an insect speak in poetry—to put one’s thoughts, so to speak, into the
mouth of an insect—is no longer consistent with poetical good judgment.
No; we must think of insects either in relation to the mystery of their
marvellous lives, or in relation to the emotion which their sweet and
melancholy music makes within our minds. The impressions produced by
hearing the shrilling of crickets at night or by hearing the storm of cicadæ in
summer woods—those impressions indeed are admirable subjects for
poetry, and will continue to be for all time.

When I lectured to you long ago about Greek and English poems on insects,
I told you that nearly all the English poems on the subject were quite
modern. I still believe that I was right in this statement, as a general

assertion; but I have found one quaint poem about a grasshopper, which
must have been written about the middle of the seventeenth century or,
perhaps, a little earlier. The date of the author’s birth and death are
respectively 1618 and 1658. His name, I think, you are familiar with—
Richard Lovelace, author of many amatory poems, and of one especially
famous song, “To Lucasta, on Going to the Wars”—containing the
celebrated stanza—

Yet this inconstancy is such
As you too shall adore;
I could not love thee, Dear, so much,
Loved I not honour more.

Well, as I said, this man wrote one pretty little poem on a grasshopper,
which antedates most of the English poems on insects, if not all of them.

THE GRASSHOPPER

O Thou that swing’st upon the waving ear
Of some well-filled oaten beard,
Drunk every night with a delicious tear
Dropt thee from heaven, where now th’art rear’d!

The joys of earth and air are thine entire,
That with thy feet and wings dost hop and fly;
And when thy poppy works, thou dost retire
To thy carved acorn-bed to lie.

Up with the day, the Sun thou welcom’st then,
Sport’st in the gilt plaits of his beams,
And all these merry days mak’st merry men
Thyself, and melancholy streams.

A little artificial, this poem written at least two hundred and fifty years ago;
but it is pretty in spite of its artifice. Some of the conceits are so quaint that
they must be explained. By the term “oaten beard,” the poet means an ear of
oats; and you know that the grain of this plant is furnished with very long

hair, so that many poets have spoken of the bearded oats. You may
remember in this connection Tennyson’s phrase “the bearded barley” in the
“Lady of Shalott,” and Longfellow’s term “bearded grain” in his famous
poem about the Reaper Death. When a person’s beard is very thick, we say
in England to-day “a full beard,” but in the time of Shakespeare they used
to say “a well filled beard”—hence the phrase in the second line of the first
stanza.

In the third line the term “delicious tear” means dew,—which the Greeks
called the tears of the night, and sometimes the tears of the dawn; and the
phrase “drunk with dew” is quite Greek—so we may suspect that the author
of this poem had been reading the Greek Anthology. In the third line of the
second stanza the word “poppy” is used for sleep—a very common simile
in Elizabethan times, because from the poppy flower was extracted the
opiate which enables sick persons to sleep. The Greek authors spoke of
poppy sleep. “And when thy poppy works,” means, when the essence of
sleep begins to operate upon you, or more simply, when you sleep. Perhaps
the phrase about the “carved acorn-bed” may puzzle you; it is borrowed
from the fairy-lore of Shakespeare’s time, when fairies were said to sleep in
little beds carved out of acorn shells; the simile is used only by way of
calling the insect a fairy creature. In the second line of the third stanza you
may notice the curious expression about the “gilt plaits” of the sun’s beams.
It was the custom in those days, as it still is in these, for young girls to plait
their long hair; and the expression “gilt plaits” only means braided or
plaited golden hair. This is perhaps a Greek conceit; for classic poets spoke
of the golden hair of the Sun God as illuminating the world. I have said that
the poem is a little artificial, but I think you will find it pretty, and even the
whimsical similes are “precious” in the best sense.

Chapter XII

Note on the Influence of Finnish Poetry in
English Literature
Return to Table of Contents

The subject of Finnish poetry ought to have a special interest for the
Japanese student, if only for the reason that Finnish poetry comes more
closely in many respects to Japanese poetry than any other form of Western
poetry. Indeed it is supposed that the Finnish race is more akin to the Tartar
races, and therefore probably to the Japanese, than the races of Europe
proper. Again, through Longfellow, the value of Finnish poetry to English
poetry was first suggested, and I think you know that Longfellow’s Indian
epic, “The Song of Hiawatha,” was modelled entirely upon the Finnish
“Kalevala.”

But a word about the “Kalevala,” which has a very interesting history. I
believe you know that at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the
“Kalevala” was not known to exist. During the first half of the century,
Finnish scholars in the University of Helsingfors (where there is now a
great and flourishing university) began to take literary interest in the
popular songs of Finland. For years the people had been singing
extraordinary songs full of a strange beauty and weirdness quite unlike any
other popular songs of Europe; and for centuries professional singers had
been wandering about the country teaching these songs to the
accompaniment of a kind of biwa called Kantela. The scholars of the
University began to collect these songs from the mouths of the peasants and
musicians—at first with great difficulty, afterwards with much success. The
difficulty was a very curious one. In Finland the ancient pagan religion had
really never died; the songs of the peasants were full of allusions to the old
faith and the old gods, and the orthodox church had often attempted in vain
to prevent the singing of these songs, because they were not Christian. So
the peasants at first thought that the scholars who wanted to copy the songs
were government spies or church spies who wanted evidence to justify
punishments. When the fears of the people had been removed and when

they came to understand that the questioners were only scholars interested
in literary beauty, all the secret stores of songs were generously opened, and
an immense collection of oral literature was amassed in the University at
Helsingfors.

The greatest of the scholars engaged in the subsequent work of arranging
and classifying was Doctor Lönnrot. While examining the manuscript of
these poems he was struck by the fact that, put together in a particular order,
they naturally made one great continuous story or epic. Was it possible that
the Finnish people had had during all these centuries an epic unknown to
the world of literature? Many persons would have ridiculed the idea. But
Lönnrot followed up that idea, and after some years’ study he disengaged
from all that mass of song something in the shape of a wonderful epic, the
epic of the “Kalevala.” Lönnrot was probably, almost certainly, the only one
who had even understood the idea of an epic of this kind. The peasants did
not know. They only had the fragments of the whole; parts of the poem
existed in one province, parts in another; no Finnish musician had ever
known the whole. The whole may have been made first by Lönnrot. At all
events he was the Homer of the “Kalevala,” and it was fortunate for Finland
that he happened to be himself both a scholar and a poet—qualifications
seldom united in the same person.

What is the “Kalevala” as we now possess it? It is an epic, but not like any
other epic in the world, for the subject of it is Magic. We might call it the
Epic of Magic. It is the story of how the world and the heaven and the sun
and the moon and the stars, the elements and the races of living creatures
and all other things were created by magic; also how the first inhabitants of
the world lived, and loved, and fought. But there is another thing to be said
in a general was about this magic. The magic of “Kalevala” is not like
anything else known by that name in European literature. The magic of
“Kalevala” is entirely the magic of words. These ancient people believed in
the existence of words, by the utterance of which anything might be
accomplished. Instead of buying wood and hiring carpenters, you might
build a house by uttering certain magical words. If you had no horse and
wanted to travel rapidly, you could make a horse for yourself out of bits of
bark and old sticks by uttering over them certain magical words. But this
was not all. Beings of intellect, men and women, whole armies of men, in

fact, might be created in a moment by the utterance of these mystical words.
There is the real subject of the “Kalevala.”

I told you that the epic is not like anything else in European literature and
not like anything else in the world as to the subject. But this is not the case
as regards the verse. The verse is not like Japanese verse, indeed, but it
comes nearer to it than any other European verse does. Of course even in
Finnish verse, accents mean a great deal, and accent means nothing at all in
Japanese verse. But I imagine something very much like Finnish verse
might be written in Japanese, provided that in reciting it a slight stress is
thrown on certain syllables. Of course you know something about
Longfellow’s “Hiawatha”—such lines as these:

And the evening sun descending
Set the clouds on fire with redness,
Burned the broad sky like a prairie,
Left upon the level water
One long track and trail of splendour,
Down whose stream, as down a river,
Westward, westward Hiawatha
Sailed into the fiery sunset,
Sailed into the purple vapours,
Sailed into the dusk of evening.

You will observe this is verse of eight syllables with four trochees to a line.
Now it is perhaps as near to Finnish verse as English verse can be made.
But the Finnish verse is more musical, and it is much more flexible, and the
rules of it can be better carried out than in English. There is much more to
be thought about than the placing of four trochaic feet to a line. Not only
must the verse be trochaic, it must also be alliterative, and it must also be,
to some extent, rhymed verse—a matter which Longfellow did not take into
consideration. That would have doubled his difficulty. To make verse
trochaic, alliterative and rhymed, is very difficult indeed—that is, to do it
well. Only one liberty is allowed; it is not necessary that the rhyme shall be
regular and constant; it is necessary only that it should be occasional. But
the interest of Finnish verse does not end here. I have not yet mentioned the
most important law of Finnish poetry—the law of parallelism or repetition.

Parallelism is the better word. It means the repetition of a thought in a
slightly modified way. It is parallelism especially that makes so splendid the
English translation of the Bible, and the majesty of such passages in the
Book of Common Prayer as the Funeral Service. So that Finnish poetry is
anything but very simple. We may now sum it up thus—trochaic verse of
eight syllables, with alliteration and rhyme, a caesura in the same part of
every line, and every line reiterated in parallelism.

A little above I mentioned the English of the Bible. Long ago I explained
why that English is so beautiful and so strong. But remember that much of
the best of the Bible, in the original Hebrew, was not prose but verse, and
that the fine effects have been produced by translating the verse into
musical prose. The very effect can be produced by translating the
“Kalevala” into prose. Occasionally the passages are of surprising beauty,
and they are always of surprising strangeness.

It is in parallelism especially that Finnish poetry offers a contrast to
Japanese, but there is no reason whatever why, in the longer poems of
Japanese poetry, parallelism could not be used. All things have value
according to place and time, and this has value—provided that it has a
special effect on a special occasion. All through the “Kalevala,” all through
five hundred pages, large pages, the parallelism is carried on, and yet one
never gets tired. It is not monotonous. But that is because the subject is so
well adapted to this form of poetry. See how the poem opens, when the poet
begins to talk about what he is going to sing:

“Anciently my father sang me these words in hewing the handle of his ax;
anciently my mother taught me these words as she turned her spindle. In
that time I was only a child, a little child at the breast,—a useless little
being creeping upon the floor at the feet of its nurse, its cheek bedaubed
with milk. And there are other words which I drew from the spring of
knowledge, which I found by the wayside, which I snatched from the heart
of the thickets, which I detached from the branches of the trees, which I
gathered at the edges of the pastures—when, In my infancy, I used to go to
guard the flocks, in the midst of the honey-streaming meadows, upon the
gold-shining hills, behind the black Murikki, behind the spotted Kimmo,
my favourite cows.

“Also the cold sang the songs, the rain sang me verses, the winds of heaven,
the waves of the sea made me hear their poems, the birds instructed me with
their melodies, the long-haired trees invited me to their concerts. And all the
songs I gathered together, I rolled them up in a skin, I carried them away in
my beautiful little holiday sledge, I deposited them in the bottom of a chest
of brass, upon the highest shelf of my treasure house.”

Now when a poem opens that way we may be sure that there are great
things in it; and some of these great things we shall read about presently.
The “Kalevala” is full of wonderful stories, But in the above quotation, I
want you to see how multiple it is, and yet it is beautiful. Now there is a
very interesting thing yet to tell you about this parallelism. Such poems as
those of the “Kalevala” have always to be sung not by one singer but by
two. The two singers straddle a bench facing each other and hold each
other’s hands. Then they sing alternately, each chanting one line, rocking
back and forward, pulling each other to and fro as they sing—so that it is
like the motion of rowing. One chants a line and pulls backward, then the
other chants the next line and pulls in the opposite direction. Not to be able
to answer at once would be considered a great disgrace; and every singer
has to be able to improvise as well as to sing. And that is the signification of
the following verse:

“Put thy hand to my hand—place thy fingers between my fingers—that we
may sing of the things which are.”

The most beautiful story in this wonderful book is the story of Kullervo. It
was after reading this story that Longfellow imagined his story of the
Strong Man Kwasind. Kullervo is born so strong that as an infant he breaks
his cradle to pieces, and as a boy he can not do any work, for all the tools
and instruments break in his grasp. Therefore he gives a great deal of
trouble at home and has to go out into the world to seek his fortune. In the
world, of course, he has just the same trouble; for nobody will employ him
very long. However, the story of Kullervo’s feats of strength, though
interesting, need not now concern us. The great charm of this composition
is in the description of a mother’s love which it contains. Kullervo brought
misfortune everywhere simply by his strength and by his great passions—at
last committing a terrible crime, causing the death of his own sister, whom

he does not recognize. He goes back home in desperation and remorse; and
there everybody regards him with horror, except only his mother. She alone
tries to console him; she alone tells him that repentance may bring him rest.
He then proposes to go away and amend his wrong-doing in solitude. But
first he bids them all goodbye, and the episode is characteristic.

Kullervo, the son of Kalervo, gets him ready to depart; he goes to his old
father and says: “Farewell now, O my dear father. Wilt thou regret me
bitterly, when thou shalt learn that I am dead?—that I have disappeared
from among the multitude of the living?—that I no longer am one of the
members of thy family?” The father answered: “No, certainly I will not
regret thee when I shall hear that thou art dead. Another son perchance will
be born to me—a son who will grow up better and wiser than thou.”

Kullervo, son of Kalervo, answered: “And I also will not be sorry if I hear
that thou art dead. Without any trouble I can find me such a father as thou—
a stone-hearted father, a clay-mouthed father, a berry-eyed father, a straw-
bearded father, a father whose feet are made of the roots of the willow tree,
a father whose flesh is decaying wood.” Why does Kullervo use these
extraordinary terms? It is a reference to magic—out of stone and clay and
straw, a phantom man can be made, and Kullervo means to say that his
father is no more to him than a phantom father, an unreal father, a father
who has no fatherly feeling. His brothers and sisters all questioned in turn if
they will be sorry to hear that he is dead, make the same cruel answer; and
he replies to them with the same angry words. But it is very different when
he speaks to his mother.

For to his mother he said—“Oh my sweet mother, my beautiful nurse, my
loved protectress, wilt thou regret me bitterly when thou shalt learn that I
am dead, that I have disappeared from the multitude of the living, that I am
no longer one of the members of thy family?”

The mother made answer: “Thou does not comprehend the soul of the
mother—thou canst not understand the heart of the mother. Assuredly will I
regret thee most bitterly when I shall learn that thou art dead, that thou hast
disappeared, from among the multitude of the living, that thou hast ceased
to be one of the members of my family. Floods of tears shall I weep in my
chamber. The waves of tears will overflow on the floor. And upon the

stairway lamentably shall I weep; and in the stable loudly shall I sorrow.
Upon the icy ways the snow shall melt under my tears—under my tears the
earth of the roads shall melt away; under my tears new meadow grass shall
grow up, green sprouting, and through that grass little streams shall murmur
away.” To this mother, naturally, Kullervo says no unkind words. He goes
away, able at least to feel that there is one person in the world who loves
him and one person in the world whom he loves. But how much his mother
really loves him he does not yet know; he will know that later—it forms the
most beautiful part of the poem.

“Kullervo directed his steps once more to the home of his fathers. Desolate
he found it, desolate and deserted; no person advanced to salute him, no
person came to press his hand, to give him welcome.

“He drew near to the hearth: the embers were extinguished. By that he
knew that his mother had ceased to be.

”He drew near to the fire-place, and the stones of the fire-place were cold.
By that he knew that his father had ceased to be.

“He turned his eyes upon the floor of his home; the planks of the floor were
covered with dirt and rubbish. By that he knew that his sister had ceased to
be.

“To the shore of the sea he went; the boat that used to be there was there no
longer. By that he knew that his brother had ceased to be.

“Then he began to weep. For a whole day he wept, for two whole days he
wept; then he cried aloud: ‘O my mother, O my sweet mother, what didst
thou leave thy son yet in the world? Alas! now thou canst hear me no
longer; and it is in vain that I stand above thy tomb, that I sob over the place
of thine eyebrows, over the place of thy temples; it is in vain that I cry out
my grief above thy dead forehead.’

“The mother of Kullervo awakened in her tomb, and out of the depth of the
dust she spake to him: ‘I have left the dog Mastif, in order that thou mayst
go with him to the chase. Take therefore the faithful dog, and go with him
into the wild forest, into the dark wilderness, even to the dwelling place, far

away, of the blue-robed Virgins of the wood, and there thou wilt seek thy
nourishment, thou wilt ask for the game that is necessary to thy existence.’”

It was believed that there was a particular forest god, who protected the
trees and the wild things of the wood. The hunter could be successful in the
chase only upon condition of obtaining his favour and permission to hunt.
This explains the reference to the abode of the forest god. But Kullervo can
not go far; his remorse takes him by the throat.

“Kullervo, son of Kalervo, took his faithful dog, and directed his steps
toward the wild forest, toward the dark wilderness. But when he had gone
only a little way he found himself at the very place where he had outraged
the young girl, where he had dishonoured the child of his mother. And all
things there mourned for her—all things; the soft grass and the tender
foliage, and the little plants, and the sorrowful briars. The grass was no
longer green, the briars no longer blossomed, the leaves and the plants hung
withered and dry about the spot where the virgin had been dishonoured,
where the brother had dishonoured his sister.

“Kullervo drew forth his sword, his sharpedged sword; a long time he
looked at it, turning it in his hand, and asking it whether it would feel no
pleasure in eating the flesh of the man thus loaded with infamy, in drinking
the blood of the man thus covered with crime.

“And the sword knew the heart of the man: it understood the question of the
hero. And it made answer to him saying: ‘Why indeed should I not gladly
devour the flesh of the man who is loaded with infamy? Why indeed should
I not drink with pleasure the blood of the man who is burdened with crime?
For well I devoured even the flesh of the innocent man, well can I drink
even the blood of the man who is free from crime.’

“Then Kullervo fixed his sword in the earth, with the handle downwards
and the point upwards, and he threw himself upon the point, and the point
passed through all the depth of his breast.

“This was the end of all, this was the cruel destiny of Kullervo, the
irrevocable end of the son of the heroes—the death of the ‘Man of
Misfortune.’”

You can see how very much unlike other Western poetry this poetry is. The
imagination indeed is of another race and another time than those to whose
literary productions we have become accustomed. But there is beauty here;
and the strangeness of it indicates a possible literary value by which any
literature may be more or less enriched. Many are the particular episodes
which rival the beauty and strangeness of the episode of Kullervo; and I
wish that we could have time to quote them. But I can only refer to them.
There is, for example, the legend of the invention of music, when the hero
Wainamoinen (supposed to represent the Spirit of the Wind, and the sound
of the name indicates the wailing of the wind) invents the first musical
instrument. In no other literature is there anything quite like this except in
the Greek story of Orpheus. Even as the trees bent down their heads to
listen to the song of Orpheus, and as the wild beasts became tamed at the
sound, and as the very stones of the road followed to the steps of the
musician, so is it in the “Kalevala.” But the Finnish Orpheus is the greater
magician. To hear him, the sun and moon come nearer to the earth, the
waves of the sea stop short, bending their heads; the cataracts of the rivers
hang motionless and silent; the fish raise their heads above the water. And
when he plays a sad melody, all nature weeps with him, even the trees and
the stones and the little plants by the wayside. And his own tears in falling
become splendid pearls for the crowns of kings.

Then very wonderful too is the story of the eternal smith, Ilmarinen, who
forged the foundations of the world, forged the mountains, forged the blue
sky, so well forging them that nowhere can be seen the marks of the pincer,
the marks of the hammer, the heads of the nails. Working in his smithy we
see him all grime and black; upon his head there is one yard deep of iron
firing, upon his shoulders there is one fathom deep of soot—the soot of the
forge; for he seldom has time to bathe himself. But when the notion takes
him to get married, for the first time he bathes himself, and dresses himself
handsomely, then he becomes the most beautiful of men. In order to win his
wife he is obliged to perform miracles of work; yet after he wins her she is
killed by wild beasts. Then he sets to work to forge himself a wife, a wife of
silver, a bride of gold. Very beautiful she is, but she has no heart, and she is
always cold, and there is no comfort in her; even all the magic of the world-
maker can not give her a warm heart. But the work is so beautiful that he
does not like to destroy it. So he takes the wife of silver, the bride of gold,

to the wisest of heroes, Wainamoinen, and offers her to him as a gift. But
the hero will have no such gift, “Throw her back into your forged fire, O
Ilmarinen,” the hero makes answer—“What greater folly, what greater
sorrow can come upon man than to love a wife of silver, a bride of gold?”

This pretty story needs no explanation; the moral is simply “Never marry
for money.”

Then there is the story of Lemminkainen (this personality suggested the
Pau-puk-keewis of Longfellow)—the joyous, reckless, handsome,
mischievous pleasure-lover,—always falling into trouble, because he will
not follow his mother’s advice, but always loved by her in spite of his
follies. The mother of Lemminkainen is a more wonderful person than the
mother of Kullervo. Her son has been murdered, thrown into a river—the
deepest of all rivers, the river of the dead, the river of hell. And his mother
goes out to find him. She asks the trees in the forest to tell her where her
son is, and she obliges them to answer. But they do not know. She asks the
grass, the plants, the animals, the birds; she obliges even the road upon
which he walked to talk to her, she talks to the stars and the moon and the
sun. Only the sun knows, because he sees everything and he answers, “Your
son is dead, torn to pieces; he has been thrown into the river of Tuoni, the
river of hell, the river of the dead.” But the mother does not despair.
Umarinen, the eternal smith, must make for her a rake of brass with teeth
long enough to reach into the world of the dead, into the bottom of the
abyss; and out of the abyss she brings up the parts of the torn body of her
son; she puts them together; she sings over them a magic song; she brings
her son to life again, and takes him home. But for a long time he is not able
to remember, because he has been dead. After a long time he gets back his
memory—only to get into new mischief out of which his mother must help
him afresh.

The names of the three heroes quoted to you represent also the names of
three great stories, out of the many stories contained in the epics. But in this
epic, as in the Indian epics (I mean the Sanskrit epic), there is much more
than stories. There are also chapters of moral instruction of a very curious
kind—chapters about conduct, the conduct of the parents, the conduct of the
children, the conduct of the husband, the conduct of the bride. The

instructions to the bride are contained in the twenty-third Rune; there are
altogether fifty Runes in the book. This appears to me likely to interest you,
for it is written in relation to a family system not at all like the family
system of the rest of Europe. I think you will find in it not a little that may
remind you of Chinese teaching on the same subject—the conduct of the
daughter-in-law. But there are of course many differences, and the most
pleasing difference is the tone of great tenderness in which the instructions
are given. Let us quote some of them:

“O young bride, O my young sister, O my well beloved and beautiful young
flower, listen to the words which I am going to speak to you, harken to the
lesson which I am going to teach you. You are going now very far away
from us, O beautiful flower!—you are going to take a long journey, O my
wild-strawberry fruit! you are about to fly away from us, O most delicate
down! you are about to leave us forever, O velvet tissue—far away from
this habitation you must go, far away from this beautiful house, to enter
another house, to enter into a strange family. And in that strange house your
position will be very different. There you will have to walk about with care,
to conduct yourself with prudence, to conduct yourself with thoughtfulness.
There you will not be able, as in the house of your father, as in the dwelling
of your mother, to run about where you please, to run singing through the
valleys, to warhle out your songs upon the roadway.

“New habits you must now learn, and forget all the old. You must abandon
the love of your father and content yourself with the love of your father-in-
law; you must bow very low, you must learn to be generous in the use of
courteous words. You must give up old habits and form new ones; you must
resign the love of your mother and content yourself with the love of your
step-mother: lower must you bow, and you must learn to be lavish in the use
of kindly words.

“New habits you must learn and forget the old: you must leave behind you
the friendship of your brother, and content yourself with the friendship of
your brother-in-law; you must bow lower than you do now; you must learn
to be lavish of kindly words.

“New habits you must acquire and forget the old ones; you must leave
behind you the friendship of your sister, and be satisfied with the friendship

of your sister-in-law; you must learn to make humble reverence, to bow
low, to be generous in kindly words.

“If the old man in the corner be to you even like a wolf, if the old woman in
her corner be to you even as a she-bear in the house, if the brother-in-law be
to you even as a serpent upon the threshold, if the sister-in-law be to you
even as a sharp nail, none the less you must show them each and all exactly
the same respect and the same obedience that you have been accustomed to
display to your father, to display to your mother, under the roof of your
childhood home.”

Then follows a really terrible list of the duties that she must perform every
day from early morning until late at night; to mention them all would take
too long. I quote only a few, enough to show that the position of a Finnish
wife was by no means an easy one.

“So soon as the cock crows in the morning you must be quick to rise; you
must keep your ears awake to hear the cry of the cock. And if there be no
cock, or the cock does not crow, then let the moon be as a cock for you, let
the constellation of the great Bear tell you when it is time to rise. Then you
must quickly make the fire, skilfully removing the ashes, without sprinkling
them upon the floor. Then quickly go to the stable, clean the stable, take
food to the cattle, feed all the animals on the farm. For already the cow of
your mother-in-law will be lowing for food; the horse of your father-in-law
will be whinnying; the milch cow of your sister-in-law will be straining at
her tether; the calf of your brother-in-law will be bleating; for all will be
waiting for her whose duty it is to give them hay, whose duty it is to give
them food.”

Like instructions are given about feeding the younger animals and the fowls
and the little pigs. But she must not forget the children of the house at the
same time:

“When you have fed the animals and cleaned the stables come back quickly,
quickly as a snow-storm. For in the chamber the little child has awakened
and has begun to cry in his cradle. He cannot speak, poor little one; he
cannot tell you, if he be hungry or if he be cold, or if anything extraordinary

has happened to him, before someone that he knows has come to care for
him, before he hears the voice of his own mother.”

After enumerating and inculcating in the same manner all the duties of the
day, the conduct to be observed toward every member of the family—
father-in-law, mother-in-law, sister, and brother-in-law, and the children of
them—we find a very minute code of conduct set forth in regard to
neighbours and acquaintances. The young wife is especially warned against
gossip, against listening to any stories about what happens in other people’s
houses, and against telling anybody what goes on within her own. One
piece of advice is memorable. If the young wife is asked whether she is well
fed, she should reply always that she has the best of everything which a
house can afford, this even if she should have been left without any proper
nourishment for several days. Evidently the condition of submission to
which Finnish women were reduced by custom was something much less
merciful than has ever been known in Eastern countries. Only a very
generous nature could bear such discipline; and we have many glimpses in
the poem of charming natures of this kind.

You have seen that merely as a collection of wonderful stories the Kalevala
is of extraordinary interest, that it is also of interest as describing the social
ethics of a little known people—finally that it is of interest, of very
remarkable interest, merely as natural poetry—poetry treating of wild
nature, especially rivers and forests and mountains, of the life of the fisher
and hunter and wood-cutter. Indeed, so far as this kind of poetry is
concerned, the “Kalevala” stands alone among the older productions of
European poetry. You do not find this love of nature in Scandinavian poetry,
nor in Anglo-Saxon poetry, nor in old German poetry, much less in the
earlier form of French, Italian, or Spanish poetry. The old Northern poetry
comes nearest to it; for in Anglo-Saxon composition we can find at least
wonderful descriptions of the sea, of stones, of the hard life of sailors. But
the dominant tone in Northern poetry is war; it is in descriptions of battle,
or in accounts of the death of heroes, that the ancient English or ancient
Scandinavian poets excelled In Finnish poetry, on the other hand, there is
little or nothing about war. These peaceful people never had any warlike
history; their life was agricultural for the most part, with little or no
violence except such as the excitement of hunting and fishing could

produce. Therefore they had plenty of time to think about nature, to love
nature and to describe it as no other people of the same period described it.
Striking comparisons have been made between the Anglo-Saxon Runes, or
charm songs, and Finnish songs of the same kind, which fully illustrate this
difference. Like the Finns, the early English had magical songs to the gods
of nature—songs for the healing of wounds and the banishing of sickness.
But these are very commonplace. Not one of them can compare as poetry
with the verses of the Finnish on the same subject. Here are examples in
evidence. The first is a prayer said when offering food to the Spirit of the
forest, that he might aid the hunter in his hunting.

“Look, O Kuntar, a fat cake, a cake with honey, that I may propitiate the
forest, that I may propitiate the forest, that I may entice the thick forest for
the day of my hunting, when I go in search of prey. Accept my salt, O
wood, accept my porridge, O Tapio, dear king of the wood with the hat of
leaves, with the beard of moss.”

And here is a little prayer to the goddess of water repeated by a sick man
taking water as a medicine.

“O pure water, O Lady of the Water, now do thou make me whole, lovely as
before! for this beg thee dearly, and in offering I give thee blood to appease
thee, salt to propitiate thee!”

Or this:

“Goddess of the Sea, mistress of waters, Queen of a hundred caves, arouse
the scaly flocks, urge on the fishy-crowds forth from their hiding places,
forth from the muddy shrine, forth from the net-hauling, to the nets of a
hundred fishers! Take now thy beauteous shield, shake the golden water,
with which thou frightenest the fish, and direct them toward the net beneath
the dark level, above the borders black.”

Yet another:

“O vigorous mistress of the wild beasts, sweet lady of the earth, come with
me, be with me, where I go. Come thou and good luck bring me, to happy
fortune help me. Make thou to move the foliage, the fruit tree to be shaken,

and the wild beasts drive thither, the largest and the smallest, with their
snouts of every kind, with their paws of fur of all kinds!”

Now when you look at these little prayers, when you read them over and
observe how pretty they are, you will also observe that they make little
pictures in the mind. Can not you see the fish gliding over the black border
under the dark level of the water, to the net of a hundred fishers? Can you
not see the “dear king of the wood,” with his hat of leaves and his beard of
moss? Can you not also see in imagination the wild creatures of the forest
with their snouts of many shapes, with their fur of all kinds? But in Anglo-
Saxon poetry you will not find anything like that. Anglo-Saxon Rune songs
create no images. It is this picturesqueness, this actuality of imagery that is
distinctive in Finnish poetry.

In the foregoing part of the lecture I have chiefly tried to interest you in the
“Kalevala.” But aside from interesting you in the book itself as a story, as a
poem, I hope to direct your attention to a particular feature in Finnish
poetry which is most remote from Japanese poetry. I have spoken of
resemblances as to structure and method; but it is just in that part of the
method most opposed to Japanese tradition that the greatest interest lies. I
do not mean only the use of natural imagery; I mean much more the use of
parallelism to reinforce that imagery. That is the thing especially worthy of
literary study. Indeed, I think that such study might greatly help towards a
new development, a totally new departure in Japanese verse. In another
lecture I spoke as sincerely as I could of the very high merit in the
epigrammatic forms of Japanese poetry. These brief forms of poetry have
been developed in Japan to perfection not equalled elsewhere in modern
poetry, perhaps not surpassed, in some respects, even by Greek poetry of
the same kind. But there can be no doubt of this fact, that a national
literature requires many other forms of expression than the epigrammatic
form. Nothing that is good should ever be despised or cast aside; but
because of its excellences, we should not be blind to the possibility of other
excellences. Now Japanese literature has other forms of poetry—forms in
which it is possible to produce poems of immense length, but the spirit of
epigrammatic poetry has really been controlling even these to a great
degree.

I mean that so far as I am able to understand the subject, the tendency of all
Japanese poetry is to terse expression. Were it not well therefore to consider
at least the possible result of a totally opposite tendency,—expansion of
fancy, luxuriance of expression? Terseness of expression, pithiness,
condensation, are of vast importance in prose, but poetry has other methods,
and the “Kalevala” is one of the best possible object lessons in the study of
such methods, because of the very simplicity and naturalness with which
they are followed.

Of course there was parallelism in Western poetry, and all arts of repetition,
before anybody knew anything about the “Kalevala.” The most poetical part
of Bible English, as I said, whether in the Bible itself or in the Book of
Common Prayer, depends almost entirely for its literary effect upon
parallelism, because the old Hebrews, like the old Finns, practised this art
of expression. Loosely and vaguely it was practised also by many poets
almost unconsciously, who had been particularly influenced by the
splendour of the scriptural translation. It had figured in prose-poetry as
early as the time of Sir Thomas Browne. It had established quite a new idea
of poetry even in America, where the great American poet Poe introduced it
into his compositions before Longfellow studied the “Kalevala.” I told you
that the work of Poe, small as it is, had influenced almost every poet of the
great epoch, including Tennyson and the Victorian masters. But the work
even of Poe was rather instinctive than the result of any systematic idea.
The systematic idea was best illustrated when the study of the “Kalevala”
began.

Let us see how Longfellow used the suggestion; but remember that he was
only a beginner, dealing with something entirely new—that he did not have
the strength of Tennyson nor the magical genius of Swinburne to help him.
He worked very simply, and probably very rapidly. There is a good deal of
his song of “Hiawatha” that is scarcely worthy of praise, and it is difficult to
quote effectively from it, because the charm of the thing depends chiefly
upon its reading as a whole. Nevertheless there are parts which so well
show or imitate the Finnish spirit, that I must try to quote them. Take for
instance the teaching of the little Indian child by his grandmother—such
verses as these, where she talks to the little boy about the milky way in the
sky:

Many things Nokomis taught him
Of the stars that shine in heaven;
Showed him Ishkoodah, the comet,
Ishkoodah, with fiery tresses;
Showed the Death-Dance of the spirits,
Warriors with their plumes and war-clubs,
Flaring far away to northward
In the frosty nights of Winter;
Showed the broad, white road in heaven,
Pathway of the ghosts, the shadows,
Running straight across the heavens,
Crowded with the ghosts, the shadows.

Or take again the story of the origin of the flower commonly called
“Dandelion”:

In his life he had one shadow,
In his heart one sorrow had he.
Once, as he was gazing northward,
Far away upon a prairie
He beheld a maiden standing,
Saw a tall and slender maiden
All alone upon a prairie;
Brightest green were all her garments
And her hair was like the sunshine.
Day by day he gazed upon her,
Day by day he sighed with passion,
Day by day his heart within him
Grew more hot with love and longing
For the maid with yellow tresses.

Observe how the repetition served to represent the growing of the lover’s
admiration. The same repetition can be used much more effectively in
describing weariness and pain, as In the lines about the winter famine:

Oh, the long and dreary Winter!
Oh, the cold and cruel Winter!
Ever thicker, thicker, thicker

Froze the ice on lake and river,
Ever deeper, deeper, deeper
Fell the snow o’er all the landscape,
Fell the covering snow, and drifted
Through the forest, round the village.
Hardly from his buried wigwam
Could the hunter force a passage;
With his mittens and his snow-shoes
Vainly walked he through the forest,
Sought for bird or beast and found none,
Saw no track of deer or rabbit,
In the snow beheld no footprints,
In the ghastly, gleaming forest
Fell, and could not rise from weakness,
Perished there from cold and hunger.
Oh, the famine and the fever!
Oh, the wasting of the famine!
Oh, the blasting of the fever!
Oh, the wailing of the children!
Oh, the anguish of the women!
All the earth was sick and famished;
Hungry was the air around them,
Hungry was the sky above them,
And the hungry stars in heaven
Like the eyes of wolves glared at them!

This is strong, emotionally strong, though it is not great poetry; but it makes
the emotional effect of great poetry by the use of the same means which the
Finnish poets used. The best part of the poem is the famine chapter, and the
next best is the part entitled “The Ghosts.” However, the charm of a
composition can be fully felt only by those who understand something of
the American Indian’s life and the wild northwestern country described.
That is not the immediate matter to be considered, notwithstanding. The
matter to be considered is whether this method of using parallelism and
repetition and alliteration can give new and great results. I believe that it
can, and that a greater Longfellow would have brought such results into
existence long ago. Of course, the form is primitive; it does not follow that

an English poet or a Japanese poet should attempt only a return to primitive
methods of poetry in detail. The detail is of small moment; the spirit is
everything. Parallelism means simply the wish to present the same idea
under a variety of aspects, instead of attempting to put it forward in one
aspect only. Everything great in the way of thought, everything beautiful in
the way of idea, has many sides. It is merely the superficial which we can
see from the front only; the solid can be perceived from every possible
direction, and changes shape according to the direction looked at.

The great master of English verse, Swinburne is also a poet much given to
parallelism; for he has found it of incomparable use to him in managing
new forms of verse. He uses it in an immense variety of ways—ways
impossible to Japanese poets or to Finnish poets; and the splendour of the
results can not be imitated in another language. But his case is interesting.
The most primitive methods of Finnish poetry, and of ancient poetry in
general, coming into his hands, are reproduced into music. I propose to
make a few quotations, in illustration. Here are some lines from “Atalanta
in Calydon”; they are only parallelisms, but how magnificent they are!

When thou dravest the men
Of the chosen of Thrace,
None turned him again,
Nor endured he thy face
Close round with the blush of the battle, with light from a terrible place.

Look again at the following lines from “A Song in Time of Revolution”:

There is none of them all that is whole; their lips gape open for breath;
They are clothed with sickness of soul, and the shape of the shadow of
death.

The wind is thwart in their feet; it is full of the shouting of mirth;
As one shaketh the sides of a sheet, so it shaketh the ends of the earth.

The sword, the sword is made keen; the iron has opened its mouth;
The corn is red that was green; it is bound for the sheaves of the south.

The sound of a word was shed, the sound of the wind as a breath,

In the ears of the souls that were dead, in the dust of the deepness of death.

Where the face of the moon is taken, the ways of the stars undone,
The light of the whole sky shaken, the light of the face of the sun.

Where the sword was covered and hidden, and dust had grown in its side,
A word came forth which was bidden, the crying of one that cried:

The sides of the two-edged sword shall be bare, and its mouth shall be red,
For the breath of the face of the Lord that is felt in the bones of the dead.

All this is indeed very grand compared with anything in the “Kalevala” or
in Longfellow’s rendering; but do you not see that the grandeur is also the
grandeur of parallelism? Here is proof of what a master can do with a
method older than Western civilization. But what is the inference? Is it not
that the old primitive poetry contains something of eternal value, a value
ranging from the lowest even to the highest, a value that can lend beauty
equally to the song of a little child or to the thunder of the grandest epic
verse?

Chapter XIII

The Most Beautiful Romance of the Middle
Ages
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The value of romantic literature, which has been, so far as the Middle Ages
are concerned, unjustly depreciated, does not depend upon beauty of words
or beauty of fact. To-day the immense debt of modern literature to the
literature of the Middle Ages is better understood; and we are generally
beginning to recognize what we owe to the imagination of the Middle Ages,
in spite of the ignorance, the superstition and the cruelty of that time. If the
evils of the Middle Ages had really been universal, those ages could not
have imparted to us lessons of beauty and lessons of nobility having
nothing to do with literary form in themselves, yet profoundly affecting
modern poetry of the highest class. No; there was very much of moral
goodness as well as of moral badness in the Middle Ages; and what was
good happened to be very good indeed. Commonly it used to be said
(though I do not think any good critic would say it now) that the fervid faith
of the time made the moral beauty. Unless we modify this statement a great
deal, we can not now accept it at all. There was indeed a religious beauty,
particularly mediæval, but it was not that which created the romance of the
period. Indeed, that romantic literature was something of a reaction against
the religious restraint upon imagination. But if we mean by mediæval faith
only that which is very much older than any European civilization, and
which does not belong to the West any more than to the East—the profound
belief in human moral experience—then I think that the statement is true
enough. At no time in European history were men more sincere believers in
the value of certain virtues than during the Middle Ages—and the very best
of the romances are just those romances which illustrate that belief, though
not written for a merely ethical purpose.

But I can not better illustrate what I mean than by telling a story, which has
nothing to do with Europe, or the Middle Ages, or any particular form of
religious belief. It is not a Christian story at all; and it could not be told you

exactly as written, for there are some very curious pages in it. But it is a
good example of the worth that may lie in a mere product of imagination.

There was a king once, in Persia or Arabia, who, at the time of his accession
to power, discovered a wonderful subterranean hall under the garden of his
palace. In one chamber of that hall stood six marvellous statues of young
girls, each statue being made out of a single diamond. The beauty as well as
the cost of the work was beyond imagination. But in the midst of the
statues, which stood in a circle, there was an empty pedestal, and on that
pedestal was a precious casket containing a letter from the dead father of
the king. The letter said:

“O my son, though these statues of girls are indeed beyond all praise, there
is yet a seventh statue incomparably more precious and beautiful which I
could not obtain before I died. It is now your duty, O my son, to obtain that
statue, that it may be placed upon the seventh pedestal. Go, therefore, and
ask my favourite slave, who is still alive, how you are to obtain it.” Then
the young king went in all haste to that old slave, who had been his father’s
confidant, and showed him the letter. And the old man said, “Even now, O
master, I will go with you to find that statue. But it is in one of the three
islands in which the genii dwell; and it is necessary, above all things, that
you do not fear, and that you obey my instructions in all things. Also,
remember that if you make a promise to the Spirits of that land, the promise
must be kept.”

And they proceeded upon their journey through a great wilderness, in which
“nothing existed but grass and the presence of God.” I can not try now to
tell you about the wonderful things that happened to them, nor about the
marvellous boat, rowed by a boatman having upon his shoulders the head of
an elephant. Suffice it to say that at last they reached the palace of the king
of the Spirits; and the king came to meet them in the form of a beautiful old
man with a long white beard. And he said to the young king, “My son, I will
gladly help you, as I helped your father; and I will give you that seventh
statue of diamond which you desire. But I must ask for a gift in return. You
must bring to me here a young girl of about sixteen years old; and she must
be very intelligent; and she must be a true maiden, not only as to her body,
but as to her soul, and heart, and all her thoughts.” The young king thought

that was a very easy thing to find, but the king of the Spirits assured him
that it was not, and further told him this, “My son, no mortal man is wise
enough to know by his own wisdom the purity that is in the heart of a
young girl. Only by the help of this magical mirror, which I now lend you,
will you be able to know. Look at the reflection of any maiden in this
mirror, and then, if her heart is perfectly good and pure, the mirror will
remain bright. But if there be any fault in her, the mirror will grow dim. Go
now, and do my bidding.”

You can imagine, of course, what happened next. Returning to his kingdom,
the young king had brought before him many beautiful girls, the daughters
of the noblest and highest in all the cities of the land. But in no case did the
mirror remain perfectly clear when the ghostly test was applied. For three
years in vain the king sought; then in despair he for the first time turned his
attention to the common people. And there came before him on the very
first day a rude man of the desert, who said, “I know of just such a girl as
you want.” Then he went forth and presently returned with a simple girl
from the desert, who had been brought up in the care of her father only, and
had lived with no other companion than the members of her own family and
the camels and horses of the encampment. And as she stood in her poor
dress before the king, he saw that she was much more beautiful than any
one whom he had seen before; and he questioned her, only to find that she
was very intelligent; and she was not at all afraid or ashamed of standing
before the king, but looked about her with large wondering eyes, like the
eyes of a child; and whoever met that innocent gaze, felt a great joy in his
heart, and could not tell why. And when the king had the mirror brought,
and the reflection of the girl was thrown upon it, the mirror became much
brighter than before, and shone like a great moon.

There was the maid whom the Spirit-king wished for. The king easily
obtained her from her parents; but he did not tell her what he intended to do
with her. Now it was his duty to give her to the Spirits; but there was a
condition he found very hard to fulfil. By the terms of his promise he was
not allowed to kiss her, to caress her, or even to see her, except veiled after
the manner of the country. Only by the mirror had he been able to know
how fair she was. And the voyage was long; and on the way, the girl, who
thought she was going to be this king’s bride, became sincerely attached to

him, after the manner of a child with a brother; and he also in his heart
became much attached to her. But it was his duty to give her up. At last they
reached the palace of the Spirit-king; and the figure of the old man came
forth and said, “My son, you have done well and kept your promise. This
maiden is all that I could have wished for; and I accept her. Now when you
go back to your palace, you will find on the seventh pedestal the statue of
the diamond which your father desired you to obtain.” And, with these
words, the Spirit-king vanished, taking with him the girl, who uttered a
great and piercing cry to heaven at having been thus deceived. Very
sorrowfully the young king then began his journey home. All along the way
he kept regretting that girl, and regretting the cruelty which he had practised
in deceiving her and her parents. And he began to say to himself, “Accursed
be the gift of the king of the Spirits! Of what worth to me is a woman of
diamond any more than a woman of stone? What is there in all the world
half so beautiful or half so precious as a living girl such as I discovered?
Fool that I was to give her up for the sake of a statue!” But he tried to
console himself by remembering that he had obeyed his dead father’s wish.

Still, he could not console himself. Reaching his palace, he went to his
secret chamber to weep alone, and he wept night and day, in spite of the
efforts of his ministers to comfort him. But at last one of them said, “O my
king, in the hall beneath your garden there has appeared a wonderful statue
upon the seventh pedestal; perchance if you go to see it, your heart will
become more joyful.”

Then with great reluctance the king properly dressed himself, and went to
the subterranean hall.

There indeed was the statue, the gift of the Spirit-king; and very beautiful it
was. But it was not made of diamond, and it looked so strangely like the girl
whom he had lost, that the king’s heart leapt in his breast for astonishment.
He put out his hand and touched the statue, and found it warm with life and
youth. And a sweet voice said to him, “Yes, it is really I—have you
forgotten?”

Thus she was given back to him; and the Spirit-king came to their wedding,
and thus addressed the bridegroom, “O my son, for your dead father’s sake
I did this thing. For it was meant to teach you that the worth of a really pure

and perfect woman is more than the price of any diamond or any treasure
that the earth can yield.”

Now you can see at once the beauty of this story; and the moral of it is
exactly the same as that of the famous verse, in the Book of Proverbs,
“Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies.” But it
is simply a story from the “Arabian Nights”—one of those stories which
you will not find in the ordinary European translations, because it is written
in such a way that no English translator except Burton would have dared to
translate it quite literally. The obscenity of parts of the original does not
really detract in the least from the beauty and tenderness of the motive of
the story; and we must remember that what we call moral or immoral in
style depends very much upon the fashion of an age and time.

Now it is exactly the same kind of moral charm that distinguishes the best
of the old English romances—a charm which has nothing to do with the
style, but everything to do with the feeling and suggestion of the
composition. But in some of the old romances, the style too has a very great
charm of quaintness and simplicity and sincerity not to be imitated to-day.
In this respect the older French romances, from which the English made
their renderings, are much the best. And the best of all is said to be “Amis
and Amile,” which the English rendered as “Amicus and Amelius.”
Something of the story ought to interest you.

The whole subject of this romance is the virtue of friendship, though this of
course involves a number of other virtues quite as distinguished. Amis and
Amile, that is to say Amicus and Amelius, are two young knights who at the
beginning of their career become profoundly attached to each other. Not
content with the duties of this natural affection, they imposed upon
themselves all the duties which chivalry also attached to the office of friend.
The romance tells of how they triumphed over every conceivable test to
which their friendship was subjected. Often and often the witchcraft of
woman worked to separate them, but could not. Both married, yet after
marriage their friendship was just as strong as before. Each has to fight
many times on account of the other, and suffer all things which it is most
hard for a proud and brave man to bear. But everything is suffered
cheerfully, and the friends are such true knights that, in all their trials,

neither does anything wrong, or commits the slightest fault against truth—
until a certain sad day. On that day it is the duty of Amis to fight in a trial
by battle. But he is sick, and can not fight; then to save his honour his friend
Amile puts on the armour and helmet of Amis, and so pretending to be
Amis, goes to the meeting place, and wins the fight gloriously. But this was
an act of untruthfulness; he had gone into battle under a false name, and to
do anything false even for a good motive is bad. So heaven punishes him by
afflicting him with the horrible disease of leprosy.

The conditions of leprosy in the Middle Ages were of a peculiar kind. The
disease seems to have been introduced into Europe from Asia—perhaps by
the Crusaders. Michelet suggests that it may have resulted from the
European want of cleanliness, brought about by ascetic teachings—for the
old Greek and Roman public bath-houses were held in horror by the
mediæval Church. But this is not at all certain. What is certain is that in the
thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries leprosy became very prevalent.
The disease was not then at all understood; it was supposed to be extremely
contagious, and the man afflicted by it was immediately separated from
society, and not allowed to live in any community under such conditions as
could bring him into contact with other inhabitants. His wife or children
could accompany him only on the terrible condition of being considered
lepers. Every leper wore a kind of monk’s dress, with a hood covering the
face; and he had to carry a bell and ring it constantly to give notice of his
approach. Special leper-houses were built near every town, where such
unfortunates might obtain accommodation. They were allowed to beg, but it
was considered dangerous to go very near them, so that in most cases alms
or food would be thrown to them only, instead of being put into their hands.

Now when the victim of leprosy in this romance is first afflicted by the
disease, he happens to be far away from his good friend. And none of his
own family is willing to help him; he is regarded with superstitious as well
as with physical horror. There is nothing left for him to do but to yield up
his knighthood and his welfare and his family, to put on the leper’s robe,
and to go begging along the roads, carrying a leper’s bell. And this he does.
For long, long months he goes begging from town to town, till at last, by
mere chance, he finds his way to the gate of the great castle where his good

friend is living—now a great prince, and married to the daughter of the
king. And he asks at the castle gate for charity and for food.

Now the porter at the gate observes that the leper has a very beautiful cup,
exactly resembling a drinking cup belonging to his master, and he thinks it
his duty to tell these things to the lord of the castle. And the lord of the
castle remembers that very long ago he and his friend each had a cup of this
kind, given to them by the bishop of Rome. So, hearing the porter’s story,
he knew that the leper at the gate was the friend who “had delivered him
from death, and won for him the daughter of the King of France to be his
wife.” Here I had better quote from the French version of the story, in
which the names of the friends are changed, but without changing the
beauty of the tale itself:

“And straightway he fell upon him, and began to weep greatly, and kissed
him. And when his wife heard that, she ran out with her hair in disarray,
weeping and distressed exceedingly—for she remembered that it was he
who had slain the false Ardres. And thereupon they placed him in a fair bed,
and said to him, ‘Abide with us until God’s will be accomplished in thee,
for all that we have is at thy service.’ So he abode with them.”

You must understand, by the allusion to “God’s will,” that leprosy was in
the Middle Ages really considered to be a punishment from heaven—so that
in taking a leper into his castle, the good friend was not only offending
against the law of the land, but risking celestial punishment as well,
according to the notions of that age. His charity, therefore, was true charity
indeed, and his friendship without fear. But it was going to be put to a test
more terrible than any ever endured before. To comprehend what followed,
you must know that there was one horrible superstition of the Middle Ages
—the belief that by bathing in human blood the disease of leprosy might be
cured. Murders were often committed under the influence of that
superstition. I believe you will remember that the “Golden Legend” of
Longfellow is founded upon a mediæval story in which a young girl
voluntarily offers up her life in order that her blood may cure the leprosy of
her king. In the present romance there is much more tragedy. One night
while sleeping in his friend’s castle, the leper was awakened by an angel
from God—Raphael—who said to him:

“I am Raphael, the angel of the Lord, and I am come to tell thee how thou
mayst be healed. Thou shalt bid Amile thy comrade that he slay his two
children and wash thee in their blood, and so thy body shall be made
whole.” And Amis said to him, “Let not this thing be, that my comrade
should become a murderer for my sake.” But the angel said, “It is
convenient that he do this.” And thereupon the angel departed.

The phrase, “it is convenient,” must be understood as meaning, “it is
ordered.” For the mediæval lord used such gentle expressions when issuing
his commands; and the angel talked like a feudal messenger. But in spite of
the command, the sick man does not tell his friend about the angel’s visit,
until Amile, who has overheard the voice, forces him to acknowledge whom
he had been talking with during the night. And the emotion of the lord may
be imagined, though he utters it only in the following gentle words—“I
would have given to thee my man servants and my maid servants and all
my goods—and thou feignest that an angel hath spoken to thee that I should
slay my two children. But I conjure thee by the faith which there is between
me and thee and by our comradeship, and by the baptism we received
together, that thou tell me whether it was man or angel said that to thee.”

Amis declares that it was really an angel, and Amile never thinks of
doubting his friend’s word. It would be a pity to tell you the sequel in my
own words; let me quote again from the text, translated by Walter Pater. I
think you will find it beautiful and touching:

“Then Amile began to weep in secret, and thought within himself, ‘If this
man was ready to die before the King for me, shall I not for him slay my
children? Shall I not keep faith with him who was faithful to me even unto
death?’ And Amile tarried no longer, but departed to the chamber of his
wife, and bade her go to hear the Sacred Office. And he took a sword, and
went to the bed where the children were lying, and found them asleep. And
he lay down over them and began to weep bitterly and said, ‘Has any man
yet heard of a father who of his own will slew his children? Alas, my
children! I am no longer your father, but your cruel murderer.’

“And the children awoke at the tears of their father, which fell upon them;
and they looked up into his face and began to laugh. And as they were of
age about three years, he said, ‘Your laughing will be turned into tears, for

your innocent blood must now be shed’; and therewith he cut off their
heads. Then he laid them back in the bed, and put the heads upon the
bodies, and covered them as though they slept; and with the blood which he
had taken he washed his comrade, and said, ‘Lord Jesus Christ! who hast
commanded men to keep faith on earth, and didst heal the leper by Thy
word! cleanse now my comrade, for whose love I have shed the blood of
my children.’” And of course the leper is immediately and completely
cured. But the mother did not know anything about the killing of the
children; we have to hear something about her share in the tragedy. Let me
again quote, this time giving the real and very beautiful conclusion—

“Now neither the father nor the mother had yet entered where the children
were, but the father sighed heavily because they were dead, and the mother
asked for them, that they might rejoice together; but Amile said, ‘Dame! let
the children sleep.’ And it was already the hour of Tierce. And going in
alone to the children to weep over them, he found them at play in the bed;
only, in the place of the sword-cuts about their throats was, as it were, a
thread of crimson. And he took them in his arms and carried them to his
wife and said, ‘Rejoice greatly! For thy children whom I had slain by the
commandment of the angel, are alive, and by their blood is Amis healed.’”

I think you will all see how fine a story this is, and feel the emotional force
of the grand moral idea behind it. There is nothing more to tell you, except
the curious fact that during the Middle Ages, when it was believed that the
story was really true, Amis and Amile—or Amicus and Amelius—were
actually considered by the Church as saints, and people used to pray to
them. When anybody was anxious for his friend, or feared that he might
lose the love of his friend, or was afraid that he might not have strength to
perform his duty as friend—then he would go to church to implore help
from the good saints Amicus and Amelius. But of course it was all a
mistake—a mistake which lasted until the end of the seventeenth century!
Then somebody called the attention of the Church to the unmistakable fact
that Amicus and Amelius were merely inventions of some mediæval
romancer. Then the Church made investigation, and greatly shocked,
withdrew from the list of its saints those long-loved names of Amicus and
Amelius—a reform in which I cannot help thinking the Church made a very
serious mistake. What matter whether those shadowy figures represented

original human lives or only human dreams? They were beautiful, and
belief in them made men think beautiful thoughts, and the imagined help
from them had comforted many thousands of hearts. It would have been
better to have left them alone; for that matter, how many of the existent
lives of saints are really true? Nevertheless the friends are not dead, though
expelled from the heaven of the Church. They still live in romance; and
everybody who reads about them feels a little better for their acquaintance.

What I read to you was from the French version—that is much the more
beautiful of the two. You will find some extracts from the English version in
the pages of Ten Brink. But as that great German scholar pointed out, the
English story is much rougher than the French. For example, in the English
story, the knight rushes out of his castle to beat the leper at the gate, and to
accuse him of having stolen the cup. And he does beat him ferociously, and
abuses him with very violent terms. In fact, the English writer reflected too
much of mediæval English character, in trying to cover, or to improve upon,
the French story, which was the first. In the French story all is knightly
smooth, refined as well as simple and strong. And where did the mediæval
imagination get its material for the story? Partly, perhaps, from the story of
Joseph in the Bible, partly from the story of Abraham; but the scriptural
material is so admirably worked over that the whole thing appears
deliciously original. That was the great art of the Middle Ages—to make
old, old things quite new by the magic of spiritual imagination. Men then
lived in a world of dreams. And that world still attracts us, for the simple
reason that happiness chiefly consists in dreams. Exact science may help us
a great deal no doubt, but mathematics do not make us any happier. Dreams
do, if we can believe them. The Middle Ages could believe them; we, at the
best, can only try.

Chapter XIV

“Ionica”
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I am going now to talk about a very rare kind of poetry in a very rare little
book, like fine wine in a small and precious flask. The author never put his
name to the book—indeed for many years it was not known who wrote the
volume. We now know that the author was a school teacher called William
Johnson who, later in life, coming into a small fortune, changed his name to
William Cory. He was born sometime about 1823, and died in 1892. He
was, I believe, an Oxford man and was assistant master of Eton College for
a number of years. Judging from his poems, he must have found pleasure in
his profession as well as pain. There is a strange sadness nearly always, but
this sadness is mixed with expressions of love for the educational
establishment which he directed, and for the students whose minds he
helped to form. He must have been otherwise a very shy man. Scarcely
anything seems to be known about him after his departure from educational
circles, although everybody of taste now knows his poems. I wish to speak
of them because I think that literary graduates of this university ought to be
at least familiar with the name “Ionica.” At all events you should know
something about the man and about the best of his poems. If you should ask
why so little has yet been said about him in books on English literature, I
would answer that in the first place he was a very small poet writing in the
time of giants, having for competitors Tennyson, Browning and others. He
could scarcely make his small pipe heard in the thunder of those great organ
tones. In the second place his verses were never written to please the public
at all. They were written only for fine scholars, and even the titles of many
of them cannot be explained by a person devoid of some Greek culture. So
the little book, which appeared quite early in the Victorian Age, was soon
forgotten. Being forgotten it ran out of print and disappeared. Then
somebody remembered that it had existed. I have told you that it was like
the tone of a little pipe or flute as compared with the organ music of the
larger poets. But the little pipe happened to be a Greek pipe—the melody
was very sweet and very strange and old, and people who had heard it once
soon wanted to hear it again. But they could not get it. Copies of the first

edition fetched extraordinary sums. Some few years ago a new edition
appeared, but this too is now out of print and is fetching fancy prices.
However, you must not expect anything too wonderful from this way of
introducing the subject. The facts only show that the poems are liked by
persons of refinement and wealth. I hope to make you like some of them,
but the difficulties of so doing are considerable, because of the extremely
English character of some pieces and the extremely Greek tone of others.
There is also some uneven work. The poet is not in all cases successful.
Sometimes he tried to write society verse, and his society verse must be
considered a failure. The best pieces are his Greek pieces and some
compositions on love subjects of a most delicate and bewitching kind.

Of course the very name “Ionica” suggests Greek work, a collection of
pieces in Ionic style. But you must not think that this means only repetitions
of ancient subjects. This author brings the Greek feeling back again into the
very heart of English life sometimes, or makes an English fact illustrate a
Greek fable. Some delightful translations from the Greek there are, but less
than half a dozen in all.

I scarcely know how to begin—what piece to quote first. But perhaps the
little fancy called “Mimnermus in Church” is the best known, and the one
which will best serve to introduce us to the character of Cory. Before
quoting it, however, I must explain the title briefly. Mimnermus was an old
Greek philosopher and poet who thought that all things in the world are
temporary, that all hope of a future life is vain, that there is nothing worth
existing for except love, and that without affection one were better dead.
There are, no doubt, various modern thinkers who tell you much the same
thing, and this little poem exhibits such modern feeling in a Greek dress. I
mean that we have here a picture of a young man, a young English scholar,
listening in church to Christian teaching, but answering that teaching with
the thought of the old Greeks. There is of course one slight difference; the
modern conception of love is perhaps a little wider in range than that of the
old Greeks. There is more of the ideal in it.

MIMNERMUS IN CHURCH

You promise heavens free from strife,

Pure truth, and perfect change of will;
But sweet, sweet is this human life,
So sweet, I fain would breathe it still;
Your chilly stars I can forego,
This warm kind world is all I know.

You say there is no substance here,
One great reality above:
Back from that void I shrink in fear
And child-like hide myself in love;
Show me what angels feel. Till then
I cling, a mere weak man, to men.

You bid me lift my mean desires
From faltering lips and fitful veins
To sexless souls, ideal choirs,
Unwearied voices, wordless strains;
My mind with fonder welcome owns
One dear dead friend’s remembered tones.

Forsooth the present we must give
To that which cannot pass away;
All beauteous things for which we live
By laws of time and space decay.
But oh, the very reason why
I clasp them, is because they die.

The preacher has been talking to his congregation about the joys of Heaven.
There, he says, there will be no quarrelling, no contest, no falsehood, and
all evil dispositions will be entirely changed to good. The poet answers,
“This world and this life are full of beauty and of joy for me. I do not want
to die, I want to live. I do not wish to go to that cold region of stars about
which you teach. I only know this world and I find in it warm hearts and
precious affection. You say that this world is a phantom, unsubstantial,
unreal, and that the only reality is above, in Heaven. To me that Heaven
appears but as an awful emptiness. I shrink from it in terror, and like a child
seek for consolation in human love. It is no use to talk to me about angels
until you can prove to me that angels can feel happier than men. I prefer to

remain with human beings. You say that I ought to wish for higher things
than this world can give, that here minds are unsteady and weak, hearts
fickle and selfish, and you talk of souls without sex, imaginary concerts of
perfect music, tireless singing in Heaven, and the pleasure of conversation
without speech. But all the happiness that we know is received from our
fellow beings. I remember the voice of one dead friend with deeper love
and pleasure than any images of Heaven could ever excite in my mind.”

The last stanza needs no paraphrasing, but it deserves some comment, for it
is the expression of one great difference between the old Greek feeling in
regard to life and death, and all modern religious feeling on the same
subject. You can read through hundreds of beautiful inscriptions which were
placed over the Greek tombs. They are contained in the Greek Anthology.
You will find there almost nothing about hope of a future life, or about
Heaven. They are not for the most part sad; they are actually joyous in
many cases. You would say that the Greek mind thought thus about death
—“I have had my share of the beauty and the love of this world, and I am
grateful for this enjoyment, and now it is time to go to sleep.” There is
actually an inscription to the effect, “I have supped well of the banquet of
life.” The Eastern religions, including Christianity, taught that because
everything in the world is uncertain, impermanent, perishable, therefore we
ought not to allow our minds to love worldly things. But the Greek mind, as
expressed by the old epigraphy in the cemeteries, not less than by the
teaching of Mimnermus, took exactly the opposite view. “O children of
men, it is because beauty and pleasure and love and light can last only for a
little while, it is exactly because of this that you should love them. Why
refuse to enjoy the present because it can not last for ever?” And at a much
later day the Persian poet Omar took, you will remember, precisely the
same view. You need not think that it would be wise to accept such teaching
for a rule of life, but it has a certain value as a balance to the other extreme
view, that we should make ourselves miserable in this world with the idea
of being rewarded in another, concerning which we have no positive
knowledge. The lines with which the poem concludes at least deserve to be
thought about—

But oh, the very reason why
I clasp them, is because they die.

We shall later on take some of the purely Greek work of Cory for study, but
I want now to interest you in the more modern part of it. The charm of the
following passage you will better feel by remembering that the writer was
then a schoolmaster at Eton, and that the verses particularly express the love
which he felt for his students—a love the more profound, perhaps, because
the circumstances of the teacher’s position obliged him to appear cold and
severe, obliged him to suppress natural impulses of affection and
generosity. The discipline of the masters in English public schools is much
more severe than the discipline to which the students are subjected. The
boys enjoy a great deal of liberty. The masters may be said to have none.
Yet there are men so constituted that they learn to greatly love the
profession. The title of this poem is “Reparabo,” which means “I will
atone.”

The world will rob me of my friends,
For time with her conspires;
But they shall both, to make amends,
Relight my slumbering fires.

For while my comrades pass away
To bow and smirk and gloze,
Come others, for as short a stay;
And dear are these as those.

And who was this? they ask; and then
The loved and lost I praise:
“Like you they frolicked; they are men;
Bless ye my later days.”

Why fret? The hawks I trained are flown;
’Twas nature bade them range;
I could not keep their wings half-grown,
I could not bar the change.

With lattice opened wide I stand
To watch their eager flight;
With broken jesses in my hand
I muse on their delight.

And oh! if one with sullied plume
Should droop in mid career,
My love makes signals,—“There is room,
O bleeding wanderer, here.”

This comparison of the educator to a falconer, and of the students to young
hawks eager to break their jesses seems to an Englishman particularly
happy in reference to Eton, from which so many youths pass into the ranks
of the army and navy. The line about bowing, smirking and glozing, refers
to the comparative insincerity of the higher society into which so many of
the scholars must eventually pass. “Smirking” suggests insincere smiles,
“glozing” implies tolerating or lightly passing over faults or wrongs or
serious matters that should not be considered lightly. Society is essentially
insincere and artificial in all countries, but especially so in England. The old
Eton master thinks, however, that he knows the moral character of the boys,
the strong principles which make its foundation, and he trusts that they will
be able in a general way to do only what is right, in spite of conventions and
humbug.

As I told you before, we know very little about the personal life of Cory,
who must have been a very reserved man; but a poet puts his heart into his
verses as a general rule, and there are many little poems in this book that
suggest to us an unhappy love episode. These are extremely pretty and
touching, the writer in most cases confessing himself unworthy of the
person who charmed him; but the finest thing of the kind is a composition
which he suggestively entitled “A Fable”—that is to say, a fable in the
Greek sense, an emblem or symbol of truth.

An eager girl, whose father buys
Some ruined thane’s forsaken hall,
Explores the new domain and tries
Before the rest to view it all.

I think you have often noted the fact here related; when a family moves to a
new house, it is the child, or the youngest daughter, who is the first to
explore all the secrets of the new residence, and whose young eyes discover
things which the older folks had not noticed.

Alone she lifts the latch, and glides,
Through many a sadly curtained room,
As daylight through the doorway slides
And struggles with the muffled gloom.

With mimicries of dance she wakes
The lordly gallery’s silent floor,
And climbing up on tiptoe, makes
The old-world mirror smile once more.

With tankards dry she chills her lips,
With yellowing laces veils the head,
And leaps in pride of ownership
Upon the faded marriage bed.

A harp in some dark nook she sees
Long left a prey to heat and frost,
She smites it; can such tinklings please?
Is not all worth, all beauty, lost?

Ah, who’d have thought such sweetness clung
To loose neglected strings like those?
They answered to whate’er was sung,
And sounded as a lady chose.

Her pitying finger hurried by
Each vacant space, each slackened chord;
Nor would her wayward zeal let die
The music-spirit she restored.

The fashion quaint, the timeworn flaws,
The narrow range, the doubtful tone,
All was excused awhile, because

It seemed a creature of her own.

Perfection tires; the new in old,
The mended wrecks that need her skill,
Amuse her. If the truth be told,
She loves the triumph of her will.

With this, she dares herself persuade,
She’ll be for many a month content,
Quite sure no duchess ever played
Upon a sweeter instrument.

And thus in sooth she can beguile
Girlhood’s romantic hours, but soon
She yields to taste and mood and style,
A siren of the gay saloon.

And wonders how she once could like
Those drooping wires, those failing notes,
And leaves her toy for bats to strike
Amongst the cobwebs and the motes.

But enter in, thou freezing wind,
And snap the harp-strings, one by one;
It was a maiden blithe and kind:
They felt her touch; their task is done.

In this charming little study we know that the harp described is not a harp; it
is the loving heart of an old man, at least of a man beyond the usual age of
lovers. He has described and perhaps adored some beautiful person who
seemed to care for him, and who played upon his heart, with her whims,
caresses, smiles, much as one would play upon the strings of a harp. She did
not mean to be cruel at all, nor even insincere. It is even probable that she
really in those times thought that she loved the man, and under the charms
of the girl the man became a different being; the old-fashioned mind
brightened, the old-fashioned heart exposed its hidden treasures of
tenderness and wisdom and sympathy. Very much like playing upon a long
forgotten instrument, was the relation between the maiden and the man—

not only because he resembled such an instrument in the fact of belonging
emotionally and intellectually to another generation, but also because his
was a heart whose true music had long been silent, unheard by the world.
Undoubtedly the maiden meant no harm, but she caused a great deal of
pain, for at a later day, becoming a great lady of society, she forgot all about
this old friendship, or perhaps wondered why she ever wasted her time in
talking to such a strange old-fashioned professor. Then the affectionate
heart is condemned to silence again, to silence and oblivion, like the harp
thrown away in some garret to be covered with cobwebs and visited only by
bats. “Is it not time,” the old man thinks, “that the strings should be broken,
the strings of the heart? Let the cold wind of death now come and snap
them.” Yet, after all, why should he complain? Did he not have the beautiful
experience of loving, and was she not in that time at least well worthy of
the love that she called forth like music?

There are several other poems referring to what would seem to be the same
experience, and all are beautiful, but one seems to me nobler than the rest,
expressing as it does a generous resignation. It is called “Deteriora,” a Latin
word signifying lesser, inferior, or deteriorated things—not easy to
translate. Nor would you find the poem easy to understand, referring as it
does to conditions of society foreign to anything in Japanese experience.
But some verses which I may quote you will like.

If fate and nature screen from me
The sovran front I bowed before,
And set the glorious creature free,
Whom I would clasp, detain, adore,—
If I forego that strange delight,
Must all be lost? Not quite, not quite.

Die, Little Love, without complaint,
Whom honour standeth by to shrive:
Assoilèd from all selfish taint,
Die, Love, whom Friendship will survive.
Not hate nor folly gave thee birth;
And briefness does but raise thy worth.

This is the same thought which Tennyson expressed in his famous lines,

’Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

But it is still more finely expressed to meet a particular personal mood. One
must not think the world lost because a woman has been lost, he says, and
such a love is not a thing for any man to be ashamed of, in spite of the fact
that it has been disappointed. It was honourable, unselfish, not inspired by
any passion or any folly, and the very brevity of the experience only serves
to make it more precious. Observe the use of the words “shrive” and
“assoiled.” These refer to the old religious custom of confession; to “shrive”
signifies to forgive, to free from sin, as a priest is supposed to do, and
“assoiled” means “purified.”

If this was a personal experience, it must have been an experience of
advanced life. Elsewhere the story of a boyish love is told very prettily,
under the title of “Two Fragments of Childhood.” This is the first fragment:

When these locks were yellow as gold,
When past days were easily told,
Well I knew the voice of the sea,
Once he spake as a friend to me.
Thunder-rollings carelessly heard,
Once that poor little heart they stirred,
Why, Oh, why?
Memory, memory!
She that I wished to be with was by.

Sick was I in those misanthrope days
Of soft caresses, womanly ways;
Once that maid on the stair I met
Lip on brow she suddenly set.
Then flushed up my chivalrous blood,
Like Swiss streams in a mid-summer flood.
Then, Oh, then,
Imogen, Imogen!
Hadst thou a lover, whose years were ten.

This is evidently the charming memory of a little sick boy sent to the
seaside for his health, according to the English custom, and unhappy there,
unable to play about like stronger children, and obliged to remain under the
constant care of nurses and female relatives. But in the same house there is
another family with a beautiful young daughter, probably sixteen or
eighteen years old. The little boy wishes, wishes so much that the beautiful
lady would speak to him and play with him, but he is shy, afraid to
approach her—only looks at her with great admiring loving eyes. But one
day she meets him on the stairs, and stoops down and kisses him on the
forehead. Then he is in Heaven. Afterward no doubt she played with him,
and they walked up and down by the shore of the sea together, and now,
though an old man, whenever he hears the roar of the sea he remembers the
beautiful lady who played with him and caressed him, when he was a little
sick child. How much he loved her! But she was a woman, and he was only
ten years old. The reference to “chivalrous blood” signifies just this, that at
the moment when she kissed him he would have given his life for her,
would have dared anything or done anything to show his devotion to her.
No prettier memory of a child could be told.

We can learn a good deal about even the shyest of the poets through a close
understanding of his poetry. From the foregoing we know that Cory must
have been a sickly child; and from other poems referring to school life we
can not escape the supposition that he was not a strong lad. In one of his
verses he speaks of being unable to join in the hearty play of his comrades;
and in the poem which touches on the life of the mature man we find him
acknowledging that he believed his life a failure—a failure through want of
strength. I am going to quote this poem for other reasons. It is a beautiful
address either to some favourite student or to a beloved son—it is
impossible to decide which. But that does not matter. The title is “A New
Year’s Day.”

Our planet runs through liquid space,
And sweeps us with her in the race;
And wrinkles gather on my face,
And Hebe bloom on thine:
Our sun with his encircling spheres
Around the central sun careers;

And unto thee with mustering years
Come hopes which I resign.

’Twere sweet for me to keep thee still
Reclining halfway up the hill;
But time will not obey the will,
And onward thou must climb:
’Twere sweet to pause on this descent,
To wait for thee and pitch my tent,
But march I must with shoulders bent,
Yet further from my prime.

I shall not tread thy battlefield,
Nor see the blazon on thy shield;
Take thou the sword I could not wield,
And leave me, and forget.
Be fairer, braver, more admired;
So win what feeble hearts desired;
Then leave thine arms, when thou art tired,
To some one nobler yet.

How beautiful this is, and how profoundly sad!

I shall return to the personal poetry of Cory later on, but I want now to give
you some examples of his Greek work. Perhaps the best of this is little more
than a rendering of Greek into English; some of the work is pure
translation. But it is the translation of a very great master, the perfect
rendering of Greek feeling as well as of Greek thought. Here is an example
of pure translation:

They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead,
They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.
I wept, as I remembered, how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.
And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,
A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest,
Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;
For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.

What are “thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales”? They are the songs which
the dear dead poet made, still sung in his native country, though his body
was burned to ashes long ago—has been changed into a mere handful of
grey ashes, which, doubtless, have been placed in an urn, as is done with
such ashes to-day in Japan. Death takes away all things from man, but not
his poems, his songs, the beautiful thoughts which he puts into musical
verse. These will always be heard like nightingales. The fourth line in the
first stanza contains an idiom which may not be familiar to you. It means
only that the two friends talked all day until the sun set in the West, and still
talked on after that. Tennyson has used the same Greek thought in a verse of
his poem, “A Dream of Fair Women,” where Cleopatra says,

“We drank the Libyan sun to sleep.”

The Greek author of the above poem was the great poet Callimachus, and
the English translator does not think it necessary even to give the name, as
he wrote only for folk well acquainted with the classics. He has another
short translation which he accompanies with the original Greek text; it is
very pretty, but of an entirely different kind, a kind that may remind you of
some Japanese poems. It is only about a cicada and a peasant girl, and
perhaps it is twenty-four or twenty-five hundred years old.

A dry cicale chirps to a lass making hay,
“Why creak’st thou, Tithonus?” quoth she. “I don’t play;
It doubles my toil, your importunate lay,
I’ve earned a sweet pillow, lo! Hesper is nigh;
I clasp a good wisp and in fragrance I lie;
But thou art unwearied, and empty, and dry.”

How very human this little thing is—how actually it brings before us the
figure of the girl, who must have become dust some time between two and
three thousand years ago! She is working hard in the field, and the constant
singing of the insect prompts her to make a comical protest. “Oh, Tithonus,
what are you making that creaking noise for? You old dry thing, I have no
time to play with you, or to idle in any way, but you do nothing but
complain. Why don’t you work, as I do? Soon I shall have leave to sleep,
because I have worked well. There is the evening star, and I shall have a
good bed of hay, sweet-smelling fresh hay, to lie upon. How well I shall

sleep. But you, you idle noisy thing, you do not deserve to sleep. You have
done nothing to tire you. And you are empty, dry and thirsty. Serves you
right!” Of course you recognize the allusion to the story of Tithonus, so
beautifully told by Tennyson. The girl’s jest has a double meaning. The
word “importunate” has the signification of a wearisome repetition of a
request, a constant asking, impossible to satisfy. Tithonus was supposed to
complain because he was obliged to live although he wanted to die. That
young girl does not want to die at all. And she says that the noise of the
insect, supposed to repeat the complaint of Tithonus, only makes it more
tiresome for her to work. She was feeling, no doubt, much as a Japanese
student would feel when troubled by the singing of semi on some very hot
afternoon while he is trying to master some difficult problem.

That is pure Greek—pure as another mingling of the Greek feeling with the
modern scholarly spirit, entitled “An Invocation.” Before quoting from it I
must explain somewhat; otherwise you might not be able to imagine what it
means, because it was written to be read by those only who are acquainted
with Theocritus and the Greek idylists. Perhaps I had better say something
too, about the word idyl, for the use of the word by Tennyson is not the
Greek use at all, except in the mere fact that the word signifies a picturing, a
shadowing or an imagining of things. Tennyson’s pictures are of a purely
imaginative kind in the “Idyls of the King.” But the Greek poets who first
invented the poetry called idyllic did not attempt the heroic works of
imagination at all; they only endeavoured to make perfectly true pictures of
the common life of peasants in the country. They wrote about the young
men and young girls working on the farms, about the way they quarrelled or
rejoiced or made love, about their dances and their songs, about their
religious festivals and their sacrifices to the gods at the parish temple.
Imagine a Japanese scholar of to-day who, after leaving the university,
instead of busying himself with the fashionable studies of the time, should
go out into the remoter districts or islands of Japan, and devote his life to
studying the existence of the commoner people there, and making poems
about it. This was exactly what the Greek idylists did,—that is, the best of
them. They were great scholars and became friends of kings, but they wrote
poetry chiefly about peasant life, and they gave all their genius to the work.
The result was so beautiful that everybody is still charmed by the pictures
or idyls which they made.

Well, after this disgression, to return to the subject of Theocritus, the
greatest of the idylists. He has often introduced into his idyls the name of
Comatas. Who was Comatas? Comatas was a Greek shepherd boy, or more
strictly speaking a goatherd, who kept the flocks of a rich man. It was his
duty to sacrifice to the gods none of his master’s animals, without
permission; but as his master was a very avaricious person, Comatas knew
that it would be of little use to ask him. Now this Comatas was a very good
singer of peasant songs, and he made many beautiful poems for the people
to sing, and he believed that it was the gods who had given him power to
make the songs, and the Muses had inspired him with the capacity to make
good verse. In spite of his master’s will, Comatas therefore thought it was
not very bad to take the young kids and sacrifice to the gods and the Muses.
When his master found out what had been done with the animals, naturally
he became very angry, and he put Comatas into a great box of cedar-wood
in order to starve him to death—saying, as he closed and locked the lid,
“Now, Comatas, let us see whether the gods will feed you!” In that box
Comatas was left for a year without food or drink, and when the master, at
the end of the year, opened the box, he expected to find nothing but the
bones of the goatherd. But Comatas was alive and well, singing sweet
songs, because during the year the Muses had sent bees to feed him with
honey. The bees had been able to enter the box through a very little hole. I
suppose you know that bees were held sacred to the Muses, and that there is
in Greek legend a symbolic relation between bees and poetry.

If you want to know what kind of songs Comatas sang and what kind of life
he represented, you will find all this exquisitely told by Theocritus; and
there is a beautiful little translation in prose of Theocritus, Bion and
Moschus, made by Andrew Lang, which should delight you to read.
Another day I shall give you examples of such translations. Then you will
see what true idyllic poetry originally signified. These Greeks, although
trained scholars and philosophers, understood not only that human nature in
itself is a beautiful thing, but also that the best way to study human nature is
to study the life of the peasants and the common people. It is not to the rich
and leisurely, not to rank and society, that a poet must go for inspiration. He
will not find it there. What is called society is a world in which nobody is
happy, and in which pure human nature is afraid to show itself. Life among
the higher classes in all countries is formal, artificial, theatrical; poetry is

not there. Of course no kind of human community is perfectly happy, but it
is among the simple folk, the country folk, who do not know much about
evil and deceit, that the greater proportion of happiness can be found.
Among the youths of the country especially, combining the charm of
childhood with the strength of adult maturity, the best possible subjects for
fine pure studies of human nature can be found. May I not here express the
hope that some young Japanese poet, some graduate of this very university,
will eventually attempt to do in Japan what Theocritus and Bion did in
ancient Sicily? A great deal of the very same kind of poetry exists in our
own rural districts, and parallels can be found in the daily life of the
Japanese peasants for everything beautifully described in Theocritus. At all
events I am quite sure of one thing, that no great new literature can possibly
arise in this country until some scholarly minds discover that the real force
and truth and beauty and poetry of life is to be found only in studies of the
common people—not in the life of the rich and the noble, not in the
shadowy life of books.

Well, our English poet felt with the Greek idylists, and in the poem called
“An Invocation” he beautifully expresses this sympathy. All of us, he says,
should like to see and hear something of the ancient past if it were possible.
We should like, some of us, to call back the vanished gods and goddesses of
the beautiful Greek world, or to talk to the great souls of that world who
had the experience of life as men—to Socrates, for example, to Plato, to
Phidias the sculptor, to Pericles the statesman. But, as a poet, my wish
would not be for the return of the old gods nor of the old heroes so much as
for the return to us of some common men who lived in the Greek world. It
is Comatas, he says, that he would most like to see, and to see in some
English park—in the neighbourhood of Cambridge University, or of Eton
College. And thus he addresses the spirit of Comatas:

O dear divine Comatas, I would that thou and I
Beneath this broken sunlight this leisure day might lie;
Where trees from distant forests, whose names were strange to thee,
Should bend their amorous branches within thy reach to be,
And flowers thine Hellas knew not, which art hath made more fair,
Should shed their shining petals upon thy fragrant hair.

Then thou shouldst calmly listen with ever-changing looks
To songs of younger minstrels and plots of modern books,
And wonder at the daring of poets later born,
Whose thoughts are unto thy thoughts as noontide is to morn;
And little shouldst them grudge them their greater strength of soul,
Thy partners in the torch-race, though nearer to the goal.

Or in thy cedarn prison thou waitest for the bee:
Ah, leave that simple honey and take thy food from me.
My sun is stooping westward. Entranced dreamer, haste;
There’s fruitage in my garden that I would have thee taste.
Now lift the lid a moment; now, Dorian shepherd, speak;
Two minds shall flow together, the English and the Greek.

A few phrases of these beautiful stanzas need explanation. “Broken
sunlight” refers, of course, to the imperfect shade thrown by the trees under
which the poet is lying. The shadow is broken by the light passing through
leaves, or conversely, the light is broken by the interposition of the leaves.
The reference to trees from distant forests no doubt intimates that the poet is
in some botanical garden, a private park, in which foreign trees are
carefully cultivated. The “torch race” is a simile for the pursuit of
knowledge and truth. Greek thinkers compare the transmission of
knowledge from one generation to another, to the passing of a lighted torch
from hand to hand, as in the case of messengers carrying signals or athletes
running a mighty race. As a runner runs until he is tired, or until he reaches
the next station, and then passes the torch which he has been carrying to
another runner waiting to receive it, so does each generation pass on its
wisdom to the succeeding generation, and disappear. “My sun is stooping
westward” is only a beautiful way of saying, “I am becoming very old; be
quick, so that we may see each other before I die.” And the poet suggests
that it is because of his age and his experience and his wisdom that he could
hope to be of service to the dear divine Comatas. The expression, “there is
fruitage in my garden,” refers to no material garden, but to the cultivated
mind of the scholar; he is only saying, “I have strange knowledge that I
should like to impart to you.” How delightful, indeed, it would be, could
some university scholar really converse with a living Greek of the old days!

There is another little Greek study of great and simple beauty entitled “The
Daughter of Cleomenes.” It is only an historical incident, but it is so related
for the pleasure of suggesting a profound truth about the instinct of
childhood. Long ago, when the Persians were about to make an attack upon
the Greeks, there was an attempt to buy off the Spartan resistance, and the
messenger to the Spartan general found him playing with his little daughter,
a child of six or seven. The conference was carried on in whispers, and the
child could not hear what was being said; but she broke up the whole plot
by a single word. I shall quote a few lines from the close of the poem,
which contain its moral lessons. The emissary has tried to tempt him with
promises of wealth and power.

He falters; for the waves he fears,
The roads he cannot measure;
But rates full high the gleam of spears
And dreams of yellow treasure.
He listens; he is yielding now;
Outspoke the fearless child:
“Oh, Father, come away, lest thou
Be by this man beguiled.”
Her lowly judgment barred the plea,
So low, it could not reach her.
The man knows more of land and sea,
But she’s the truer teacher.

All the little girl could know about the matter was instinctive; she only saw
the cunning face of the stranger, and felt sure that he was trying to deceive
her father for a bad purpose—so she cried out, “Father, come away with
me, or else that man will deceive you.” And she spoke truth, as her father
immediately recognized.

There are several more classical studies of extraordinary beauty; but your
interest in them would depend upon something more than interest in Greek
and Roman history, and we can not study all the poems. So I prefer to go
back to the meditative lyrics, and to give a few splendid examples of these
more personal compositions. The following stanzas are from a poem whose

Latin title signifies that Love conquers death. In this poem the author
becomes the equal of Tennyson as a master of language.

The plunging rocks, whose ravenous throats
The sea in wrath and mockery fills,
The smoke that up the valley floats,
The girlhood of the growing hills;

The thunderings from the miners’ ledge,
The wild assaults on nature’s hoard,
The peak that stormward bares an edge
Ground sharp in days when Titans warred;

Grim heights, by wandering clouds embraced
Where lightning’s ministers conspire,
Grey glens, with tarns and streamlet laced,
Stark forgeries of primeval fire.

These scenes may gladden many a mind
Awhile from homelier thoughts released,
And here my fellow men may find
A Sabbath and a vision-feast.

I bless them in the good they feel;
And yet I bless them with a sigh;
On me this grandeur stamps the seal
Of tyrannous mortality.

The pitiless mountain stands so sure.
The human breast so weakly heaves,
That brains decay while rocks endure.
At this the insatiate spirit grieves.

But hither, oh ideal bride!
For whom this heart in silence aches,
Love is unwearied as the tide,
Love is perennial as the lakes.

Come thou. The spiky crags will seem
One harvest of one heavenly year,
And fear of death, like childish dream,
Will pass and flee, when thou art here.

Very possibly this charming meditation was written on the Welsh coast;
there is just such scenery as the poem describes, and the grand peak of
Snowdon would well realize the imagination of the line about the girlhood
of the growing hills. The melancholy of the latter part of the composition is
the same melancholy to be found in “Mimnermus in Church,” the first of
Cory’s poems which we read together. It is the Greek teaching that there is
nothing to console us for the great doubt and mystery of existence except
unselfish affection. All through the book we find the same philosophy, even
in the beautiful studies of student life and the memories of childhood. So it
is quite a melancholy book, though the sadness be beautiful. I have given
you examples of the sadness of doubt and of the sadness of love; but there
is yet a third kind of sadness—the sadness of a childless man, wishing that
he could have a child of his own. It is a very pretty thing, simply entitled
“Scheveningen Avenue”—probably the name of the avenue where the
incident occurred. The poet does not tell us how it occurred, but we can
very well guess. He was riding in a street car, probably, and a little girl next
to him, while sitting upon her nurse’s lap, fell asleep, and as she slept let her
head fall upon his shoulder. This is a very simple thing to make a poem
about, but what a poem it is!

Oh, that the road were longer
A mile, or two, or three!
So might the thought grow stronger
That flows from touch of thee.

Oh little slumbering maid,
If thou wert five years older,
Thine head would not be laid
So simply on my shoulder!

Oh, would that I were younger,
Oh, were I more like thee,
I should not faintly hunger

For love that cannot be.

A girl might be caressed
Beside me freely sitting;
A child on knee might rest,
And not like thee, unwitting.

Such honour is thy mother’s,
Who smileth on thy sleep,
Or for the nurse who smothers
Thy cheek in kisses deep.

And but for parting day,
And but for forest shady,
From me they’d take away
The burden of their lady.

Ah thus to feel thee leaning
Above the nursemaid’s hand,
Is like a stranger’s gleaning
Where rich men own the land;

Chance gains, and humble thrift,
With shyness much like thieving,
No notice with the gift,
No thanks with the receiving.

Oh peasant, when thou starvest
Outside the fair domain,
Imagine there’s a harvest
In every treasured grain.

Make with thy thoughts high cheer,
Say grace for others dining,
And keep thy pittance clear
From poison of repining.

There is an almost intolerable acuity of sadness in the last two mocking
verses, but how pretty and how tender the whole thing is, and how gentle-
hearted must have been the man who wrote it! The same tenderness
reappears in references to children of a larger growth, the boys of his
school. Sometimes he very much regrets the necessity of discipline, and
advocates a wiser method of dealing with the young. How very pretty is this
little verse about the boy he loves.

Sweet eyes, that aim a level shaft,
At pleasure flying from afar,
Sweet lips, just parted for a draught
Of Hebe’s nectar, shall I mar
By stress of disciplinal craft
The joys that in your freedom are?

But a little reflection further on in the same poem reminds us how necessary
the discipline must be for the battle of life, inasmuch as each of those
charming boys will have to fight against evil—

yet shall ye cope
With worlding wrapped in silken lies,
With pedant, hypocrite, and pope.

One might easily lecture about this little volume for many more days, so
beautiful are the things which fill it. But enough has been cited to exemplify
its unique value. If you reread these quotations, I think you will find each
time new beauty in them. And the beauty is quite peculiar. Such poetry
could have been written only under two conditions. The first is that the poet
be a consummate scholar. The second is that he must have suffered, as only
a great mind and heart could suffer, from want of affection.

Chapter XV

Old Greek Fragments
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The other day when we were reading some of the poems in “Ionica,” I
promised to speak in another short essay of Theocritus and his songs or
idyls of Greek peasant life, but in speaking of him it will be well also to
speak of others who equally illustrate the fact that everywhere there is truth
and beauty for the mind that can see. I spoke last week about what I thought
the highest possible kind of literary art might become. But the possible
becoming is yet far away; and in speaking of some old Greek writers I want
only to emphasize the fact that modern literary art as well as ancient literary
art produced their best results from a close study of human nature.

Although Theocritus and others who wrote idyls found their chief
inspiration in the life of the peasants, they sometimes also wrote about the
life of cities. Human nature may be studied in the city as well as in the
country, provided that a man knows how to look for it. It is not in the courts
of princes nor the houses of nobles nor the residences of the wealthy that
such study can be made. These superior classes have found it necessary to
show themselves to the world very cautiously; they live by rule, they
conceal their emotions, they move theatrically. But the ordinary, everyday
people of cities are very different; they speak their thoughts, they keep their
hearts open, and they let us see, just as children do, the good or the evil side
of their characters. So a good poet and a good observer can find in the life
of cities subjects of study almost as easily as in the country. Theocritus has
done this in his fifteenth idyl. This idyl is very famous, and it has been
translated hundreds of times into various languages. Perhaps you may have
seen one version of it which was made by Matthew Arnold. But I think that
the version made by Lang is even better.

The scene is laid in Alexandria, probably some two thousand years ago, and
the occasion is a religious holiday—a matsuri, as we call it in Japan. Two
women have made an appointment to go together to the temple, to see the

festival and to see the people. The poet begins his study by introducing us
to the chamber of one of the women.

Gorgo. “Is Praxinoe at home?”

Praxinoe. “Dear Gorgo, how long is it since you have been here! She is at
home. The wonder is that you have got here at last! Eunoe, come and see
that she has a chair and put a cushion on it!”

G. “It does most charmingly as it is.”

P. “Do sit down.”

How natural this is. There is nothing Greek about it any more than there is
Japanese; it is simply human. It is something that happens in Tokyo every
day, certainly in houses where there are chairs and where it is a custom to
put a cushion on the chair for the visitor. But remember, this was two
thousand years ago. Now listen to what the visitor has to say.

“I have scarcely got to you at all, Praxinoe! What a huge crowd, what hosts
of carriages! Everywhere cavalry boots, everywhere men in uniform! And
the road is endless; yes, you really live too far away!”

Praxinoe answers:

“It is all for that mad man of mine. Here he came to the ends of the earth
and took a hall, not a house, and all that we might not be neighbours. The
jealous wretch, always the same, ever for spite.”

She is speaking half in jest, half in earnest; but she forgets that her little boy
is present, and the visitor reminds her of the fact:

“Don’t talk of your husband like that, my dear girl, before the little boy,—
look how he is staring at you!—Never mind, Zaphyrion, sweet child, she is
not speaking about papa.”

P. “Our Lady! (Persephone) The child takes notice!”

Then the visitor to comfort the child says “Nice papa,” and the conversation
proceeds. The two talk about their husbands, about their dresses, about the
cost of things in the shops; but in order to see the festival Praxinoe must
dress herself quickly, and woman, two thousand years ago, just as now,
takes a long time to dress. Hear Praxinoe talking to her maid-servant while
she hurries to get ready:

“Eunoe, bring the water and put it down in the middle of the room,—lazy
creature that you are. Cat-like, always trying to sleep soft! Come, bustle,
bring the water; quicker! I want water first,—and how she carries it! Give it
me all the same;—don’t pour out so much, you extravagant thing! Stupid
girl! Why are you wetting my dress? There, stop, I have washed my hands
as heaven would have it. Where is the key of the big chest? Bring it here.”

This is life, natural and true; we can see those three together, the girlish
young wife hurrying and scolding and chattering naturally and half
childishly, the patient servant girl smiling at the hurry of her mistress, and
the visitor looking at her friend’s new dress, wondering how much it cost
and presently asking her the price. At last all is ready. But the little boy sees
his mother go out and he wants to go out too, though it has been decided not
to take him, because the crowd is too rough and he might be hurt. Here the
mother first explains, then speaks firmly:

“No, child, I don’t mean to take you. Boo! Bogies! There is a horse that
bites! Cry as much as you please, but I cannot have you maimed.”

They go out, Praxinoe and Gorgo and the maid-servant Eunoe. The crowd is
tremendous, and they find it very hard to advance. Sometimes there are
horses in the way, sometimes wagons, occasionally a legion of cavalry. We
know all this, because we hear the chatter of the women as they make their
way through the press.

“Give me your hand, and you, Eunoe, catch hold of Eutychis,—for fear lest
you get lost…. Here come the kings on horses! My dear man, don’t trample
on me. Eunoe, you fool-hardy girl, will you never keep out of the way? Oh!
How tiresome, Gorgo, my muslin veil is torn in two already…. For
heaven’s sake, sir, if you ever wish to be fortunate, take care of my shawl!”