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Title: Shelburne Essays, Third Series

Author: Paul Elmer More

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Language: English

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Shelburne Essays

By

Paul Elmer More

Third Series

Τίνι χρὴ κρίνεσθαι τὰ μέλλοντα
καλὢς κριθήσεσθαι;
ἄρ' οὐκ ἐμπειρίᾳ τε καὶ φρονήσει καὶ
λόγῳ;
Plato, Republic.

G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press
1905

Copyright, 1905
BY
PAUL ELMER MORE

The Knickerbocker Press, New York

ADVERTISEMENT

The last essay in this volume,
though written several years ago, has
never before been printed. For
permission to reprint the other essays

thanks are due to the publishers of the
Atlantic Monthly, the Independent,
and the New York Evening Post.

CONTENTS
PAGE
The Correspondence of William Cowper 1
Whittier the Poet 28
The Centenary of Sainte-Beuve 54
The Scotch Novels and Scotch History 82
Swinburne 100
Christina Rossetti 124
Why is Browning Popular? 143
A Note on Byron's "Don Juan" 166
Laurence Sterne 177
J. Henry Shorthouse 213
The Quest of a Century 244

SHELBURNE
ESSAYS
THIRD SERIES

THE CORRESPONDENCE
OF WILLIAM
COWPER
If, as I sometimes think, a man's interest in letters is almost the surest
measure of his love for Letters in the larger sense of the word, the busy
schoolmaster of Olney ought to stand high in favour for the labour he has
bestowed on completing and rearranging the Correspondence of William
Cowper.[1] It may be that Mr. Wright's competence as an editor still leaves
something to be desired. Certainly, if I may speak for my own taste, he has
in one respect failed to profit by a golden opportunity; it needed only to
print the more intimate poems of Cowper in their proper place among the
letters to have produced a work doubly interesting and perfectly unique.
The correspondence itself would have been shot through by a new light, and
the poetry might have been restored once more to its rightful seat in our
affections. The fact is that not many readers to-day can approach the verse
of the eighteenth century in a mood to enjoy or even to understand it. We
have grown so accustomed to over-emphasis in style and wasteful effusion
in sentiment that the clarity and self-restraint of that age repel us as
ungenuine; we are warned by a certain frigus at the heart to seek our
comfort elsewhere. And just here was the chance for an enlightened editor.
So much of Cowper's poetry is the record of his own simple life and of the
little adventures that befell him in the valley of the Ouse, that it would have
lost its seeming artificiality and would have gained a fresh appeal by
association with the letters that relate the same events and emotions. How,
for example, the quiet grace of the fables (and good fables are so rare in
English!) would be brought back to us again if we could read them side by
side with the actual stories out of which they grew. There is a whole
charming natural history here of beast and bird and insect and flower. The
nightingale which Cowper heard on New Year's Day sings in a letter as well
as in the poem; and here, to name no others, are the incidents of the serpent
and the kittens, and of that walk by the Ouse when the poet's dog Beau
brought him the water lily. Or, to turn to more serious things, how much the

pathetic stanzas To Mary would gain in poignant realism if we came upon
them immediately after reading the letters in which Cowper lays bare his
remorse for the strain his malady had imposed upon her.
A still more striking example would be the lines written On the Receipt of
My Mother's Picture. By a literary tradition these are reckoned among the
most perfect examples of pathos in the language, and yet how often to-day
are they read with any deep emotion? I suspect no tears have fallen on that
page for many a long year.

Oh that those lips had language! Life has passed
With me but roughly since I heard thee last.
Those lips are thine—thy own sweet smile I see,
The same that oft in childhood solaced me;
Voice only fails, else how distinct they say,
"Grieve not, my child, chase all thy fears away!"

Short-lived possession! but the record fair,
That memory keeps of all thy kindness there,
Still outlives many a storm that has effaced
A thousand other themes less deeply traced.
Thy nightly visits to my chamber made,
That thou mightst know me safe and warmly laid;
Thy morning bounties as I left my home,
The biscuit or confectionary plum:
The fragrant waters on my cheeks bestowed
By thy own hand, till fresh they shone and glowed:
All this, and more enduring still than all,
Thy constant flow of love, that knew no fall,—

do you not feel the expression here, the very balance of the rhymes, to stand
like a barrier between the poet's emotion and your own susceptibility? And
that confectionary plum—somehow the savour of it has long ago
evaporated. Even the closing lines—

Me howling blasts drive devious, tempest-tost,
Sails ripped, seams opening wide, and compass lost—

need some allowance to cover their artificial mode. And it is just this
allowance that association with the letters would afford; the mind would
pass without a shock from the simple recital in prose of Cowper's ruined
days to these phrases at once so metaphorical and so conventional, and

would find in them a new power to move the heart. Or compare with the
sentiment of the poem this paragraph from the letter to his cousin, Mrs.
Bodham—all of it a model of simple beauty:

The world could not have furnished you with a present so acceptable to me, as the picture you
have so kindly sent me. I received it the night before last, and viewed it with a trepidation of nerves
and spirits somewhat akin to what I should have felt, had the dear original presented herself to my
embraces. I kissed it and hung it where it is the last object that I see at night, and, of course, the first
on which I open my eyes in the morning. She died when I completed my sixth year; yet I remember
her well, and am an ocular witness of the great fidelity of the copy. I remember, too, a multitude of
the maternal tendernesses which I received from her, and which have endeared her memory to me
beyond expression.

To read together the whole of this letter and of the poem is something more
than a demonstration of what might be accomplished by a skilful editor; it is
a lesson, too, in that quality of restrained dignity, I had almost said of self-
respect, which we find it so difficult to impress on our broken modern style.
Some day, no doubt, we shall have such an interwoven edition of
Cowper's prose and verse, to obtain which we would willingly sacrifice a
full third of the letters if this were necessary. Meanwhile, let us be thankful
for whatever fresh light our Olney editor has thrown on the correspondence,
and take the occasion to look a little more closely into one of the strangest
and most tragic of literary lives. William Cowper was born at Great
Berkhampstead in 1731. His father, who was rector of the parish, belonged
to a family of high connections, and his mother, Anne Donne, was also of
noble lineage, claiming descent through four different lines from Henry III.
The fact is of some importance, for the son was very much the traditional
gentleman, and showed the pride of race both in his language and manners.
He himself affected to think more of his kinship to John Donne, of poetical
memory, than of his other forefathers, and, half in play, traced the irritability
of his temper and his verse-mongering back to that "venerable ancestor, the
Dean of St. Paul's."[2] It is fanciful, but one is tempted to lay upon the old
poet's meddling with coffins and ghastly thoughts some of the responsibility
for the younger man's nightly terrors. "That which we call life is but
Hebdomada mortium, a week of death, seven days, seven periods of life
spent in dying," preached Donne in his last sermon, and an awful echo of
the words might seem to have troubled his descendant's nerves. But that is
not yet. As a boy and young man Cowper appears to have been high-
spirited and natural. At Westminster School he passed under the instruction

of Vincent Bourne, so many of whose fables he was to translate in after
years, and who, with Milton and Prior, was most influential in forming his
poetical manner.

I love the memory of Vinny Bourne [he wrote in one of his letters]. I think him a better Latin poet
than Tibullus, Propertius, Ausonius, or any of the writers in his way, except Ovid.... He was so good-
natured, and so indolent, that I lost more than I got by him; for he made me as idle as himself. He
was such a sloven, as if he had trusted to his genius as a cloak for everything that could disgust you
in his person.... I remember seeing the Duke of Richmond set fire to his greasy locks and box his ears
to put it out again.

After leaving Westminster he spent a few months at Berkhampstead, and
then came to London under the pretext of studying law, living first with an
attorney in Southampton Row and afterwards taking chambers in the
Middle Temple. Life went merrily for a while. He was a fellow student with
Thurlow, and there he was, he "and the future Lord Chancellor, constantly
employed from morning to night in giggling and making giggle, instead of
studying the law. Oh, fie, cousin!" he adds, "how could you do so?" This
pretty "Oh fie!" introduces us to one who was to be his best and dearest
correspondent, his cousin Harriet Cowper, afterwards Lady Hesketh, and
who was to befriend him and cheer him in a thousand ways. It may
introduce us also to Harriet's sister, Theodora, with whom Cowper, after the
fashion of idle students, fell thoughtlessly in love. He would have married
her, too, bringing an incalculable element into his writing which I do not
like to contemplate; for it is the way of poets to describe most ideally what
fortune has denied them in reality, and Cowper's task, we know, was to
portray in prose and verse the quiet charms of the family. But the lady's
father, for reasons very common in such cases, put an end to that danger.
Cowper took the separation easily enough, if we may judge from the letters
of the period; but to Theodora, one fancies, it meant a life of sad memories.
They never exchanged letters, but in after years, when Lady Hesketh
renewed correspondence with Cowper and brought him into connection
with his kinsfolk, Theodora, as "Anonymous," sent money and other gifts to
eke out his slender living. It is generally assumed that the recipient never
guessed the name of his retiring benefactress, but I prefer to regard it rather
as a part of his delicacy and taste to affect ignorance where the donor did
not wish to be revealed, and think that his penetration of the secret added a
kind of wistful regret to his gratitude. "On Friday I received a letter from
dear Anonymous," he writes to Lady Hesketh, "apprising me of a parcel that

the coach would bring me on Saturday. Who is there in the world that has,
or thinks he has, reason to love me to the degree that he does? But it is no
matter. He chooses to be unknown, and his choice is, and ever shall be, so
sacred to me, that if his name lay on the table before me reversed, I would
not turn the paper about that I might read it. Much as it would gratify me to
thank him, I would turn my eyes away from the forbidden discovery."
Could there be a more tactful way of conveying his thanks and insinuating
his knowledge while respecting Theodora's reserve?
But all this was to come after the great change in Cowper's life. As with
Charles Lamb, a name one likes to link with his, the terrible shadow of
madness fell upon him one day, never wholly to rise. The story of that
calamity is too well known to need retelling in detail. A first stroke seized
him in his London days, but seems not to have been serious. He recovered,
and took up again the easy life that was in retrospect to appear to him so
criminally careless. In order to establish him in the world, his cousin, Major
Cowper, offered him the office of Clerk of the Journals to the House of
Lords. There was, however, some dispute as to the validity of the donor's
powers, and it became necessary for Cowper to prove his competency at the
bar of the House. The result was pitiable. Anxiety and nervous dread
completely prostrated him. After trying futilely to take his own life, he was
placed by his family in a private asylum at St. Albans, where he remained
about a year and a half. His recovery took the form of religious conversion
and a rapturous belief in his eternal salvation. Instead of returning to
London, he went to live in the town of Huntingdon, drawn thither both by
the retirement of the place and its nearness to Cambridge, where his brother
John resided. Here he became acquainted with the Unwins:

... the most agreeable people imaginable; quite sociable, and as free from the ceremonious civility
of country gentlefolks as any I ever met with. They treat me more like a near relation than a stranger,
and their house is always open to me. The old gentleman carries me to Cambridge in his chaise. He is
a man of learning and good sense, and as simple as Parson Adams. His wife has a very uncommon
understanding, has read much to excellent purpose, and is more polite than a duchess. The son, who
belongs to Cambridge, is a most amiable young man, and the daughter quite of a piece with the rest
of the family. They see but little company, which suits me exactly; go when I will, I find a house full
of peace and cordiality in all its parts.

The intimacy ripened and Cowper was taken into the family almost as one
of its members. But trouble and change soon broke into this idyllic home.
Mr. Unwin was thrown from his horse and killed; the son was called away

to a charge; the daughter married. Meanwhile, Mrs. Unwin and Cowper had
gone to live at Olney, a dull town on the Ouse, where they might enjoy the
evangelical preaching of that reformed sea-captain and slave-dealer, the
Rev. John Newton.
The letters of this period are filled with a tremulous joy; it was as if one
of the timid animals he loved so well had found concealment in the rocks
and heard the baying of the hounds, thrown from the scent and far off. "For
my own part," he writes to Lady Hesketh, "who am but as a Thames wherry,
in a world full of tempest and commotion, I know so well the value of the
creek I have put into, and the snugness it affords me, that I have a sensible
sympathy with you in the pleasure you find in being once more blown to
Droxford." Books he has in abundance, and happy country walks; friends
that are more than friends to occupy his heart, and quaint characters to
engage his wit. He finds an image of his days in Rousseau's description of
an English morning, and his evenings differ from them in nothing except
that they are still more snug and quieter. His talk is of the mercies and
deliverance of God; he is eager to convert the little world of his
correspondents to his own exultant peace; and, it must be confessed, only
the charm and breeding of his language save a number of these letters from
the wearisomeness of misplaced preaching.
Cowper removed with Mrs. Unwin to Olney in 1767. Six years later
came the miraculous event which changed the whole tenor of his life and
which gave the unique character to all the letters he was to write thereafter.
He was seized one night with a frantic despondency, and again for a year
and a half, during all which time Mr. Newton cared for him as for a brother,
suffered acute melancholia. He recovered his sanity in ordinary matters, but
the spring of joy and peace had been dried up within him. Thenceforth he
never, save for brief intervals, could shake off the conviction that he had
been abandoned by God—rather that for some inscrutable reason God had
deliberately singled him out as a victim of omnipotent wrath and eternal
damnation. No doubt there was some physical origin, some lesion of the
nerves, at the bottom of this disease, but the peculiar form of his mania and
its virulence can be traced to causes quite within the range of literary
explanation. He was a scapegoat of his age; he accepted with perfect faith
what other men talked about, and it darkened his reason. Those were the
days when a sharp and unwholesome opposition had arisen between the

compromise of the Church with worldly forms and the evangelical
absolutism of Wesley and Whitefield and John Newton. Cowper himself, on
emerging from his melancholia at St. Albans, had adopted the extreme
Calvinistic tenets in regard to the divine omnipotence. Man was but a toy in
the hands of an arbitrary Providence; conversion was first a recognition of
the utter nullity of the human will; and there was no true religion, no
salvation, until Grace had descended freely like a fire from heaven and
devoured this offering of a man's soul. To understand Cowper's faith one
should read his letter of March 31, 1770, in which he relates the death-bed
conversion of his brother at Cambridge. Now John was a clergyman in good
standing, a man apparently of blameless life and Christian faith, yet to
himself and to William he was without hope until the miracle of
regeneration had been wrought upon him. After reading Cowper's letter one
should turn to Jonathan Edwards's treatise on The Freedom of the Will, and
follow the inexorable logic by which the New England divine proves that
God must be the source of all good and evil, of this man's salvation and that
man's loss: "If once it should be allowed that things may come to pass
without a Cause, we should not only have no proof of the Being of God, but
we should be without evidence of anything whatsoever but our own
immediately present ideas and consciousness. For we have no way to prove
anything else but by arguing from effects to causes." Yet the responsibility
of a man abides through all his helplessness: "The Case of such as are given
up of God to Sin and of fallen Man in general, proves moral Necessity and
Inability to be consistent with blameworthiness." Good Dr. Holmes has said
somewhere in his jaunty way that it was only decent for a man who
believed in this doctrine to go mad. Well, Cowper believed in it; there was
no insulating pad of worldly indifference between his faith and his nerves,
and he went mad.
And he was in another way the victim of his age. We have heard him
comparing his days at Huntingdon with Rousseau's description of an
English morning. Unfortunately, the malady also which came into the world
with Rousseau, the morbid exaggeration of personal consciousness, had laid
hold of Cowper. Even when suffering from the earlier stroke he had written
these words to his cousin: "I am of a very singular temper, and very unlike
all the men that I have ever conversed with"; and this sense of his
singularity follows him through life. During the Huntingdon days it takes
the form of a magnified confidence that Heaven is peculiarly concerned in

his rescue from the fires of affliction; after the overthrow at Olney it is
reversed, and fills him with the certainty that God has marked him out
among all mankind for the special display of vengeance:

This all-too humble soul would arrogate
Unto itself some signalising hate
From the supreme indifference of Fate!

Writing to his mentor, John Newton (who had left Olney), he declares that
there is a mystery in his destruction; and again to Lady Hesketh: "Mine has
been a life of wonders for many years, and a life of wonders I in my heart
believe it will be to the end." More than once in reply to those who would
console him he avers that there is a singularity in his case which marks it
off from that of all other men, that Providence has chosen him as a special
object of its hostility. In Rousseau, whose mission was to preach the
essential goodness of mankind, the union of aggravated egotism with his
humanitarian doctrine brought about the conviction that the whole human
race was plotting his ruin. In Cowper, whose mind dwelt on the power and
mercies of Providence, this self-consciousness united with his Calvinism to
produce the belief that God had determined to ensnare and destroy his soul.
Such was the strange twist that accompanied the birth of romanticism in
France and in England.
The conviction came upon Cowper through the agency of dreams and
imaginary voices. The depression first seized him on the 24th of January,
1773. About a month later a vision of the night troubled his sleep, so
distinct and terrible that the effect on his brain could never be wholly
dispelled. Years afterwards he wrote to a friend:

My thoughts are clad in a sober livery, for the most part as grave as that of a bishop's servants.
They turn upon spiritual subjects; but the tallest fellow and the loudest among them all is he who is
continually crying with a loud voice, Actum est de te; periisti! You wish for more attention, I for less.
Dissipation [distraction] itself would be welcome to me, so it were not a vicious one; but however
earnestly invited, is coy, and keeps at a distance. Yet with all this distressing gloom upon my mind, I
experience, as you do, the slipperiness of the present hour, and the rapidity with which time escapes
me. Every thing around us, and every thing that befalls us, constitutes a variety, which, whether
agreeable or otherwise, has still a thievish propensity, and steals from us days, months, and years,
with such unparalleled address, that even while we say they are here, they are gone.

That apparently was the sentence which sounded his doom on the night of
dreams: Actum est de te; periisti—it is done with thee, thou hast perished!

and no domestic happiness, or worldly success, or wise counsel could ever,
save for a little while, lull him to forgetfulness. He might have said to his
friends, as Socrates replied to one who came to offer him deliverance from
jail: "Such words I seem to hear, as the mystic worshippers seem to hear the
piping of flutes; and the sound of this voice so murmurs in my ears that I
can hear no other."
But it must not be supposed from all this that Cowper's letters are morbid
in tone or filled with the dejection of melancholia. Their merit, on the
contrary, lies primarily in their dignity and restraint, in a certain high-bred
ease, which is equally manifest in the language and the thought. Curiously
enough, after the fatal visitation religion becomes entirely subordinate in his
correspondence, and only at rare intervals does he allude to his peculiar
experience. He writes for the most part like a man of the world who has
seen the fashions of life and has sought refuge from their vanity. If I were
seeking for a comparison to relieve the quality of these Olney letters (and it
is these that form the real charm of Cowper's correspondence), I would turn
to Charles Lamb. The fact that both men wrote under the shadow of insanity
brings them together immediately, and there are other points of
resemblance. Both are notable among English letter-writers for the exquisite
grace of their language, but if I had to choose between the two the one
whose style possessed the most enduring charm, a charm that appealed to
the heart most equally at all seasons and left the reader always in that state
of quiet satisfaction which is the office of the purest taste, I should name
Cowper. The wit is keener in Lamb and above all more artful; there is a
certain petulance of humour in him which surprises us oftener into laughter,
the pathos at times is more poignant; but the effort to be entertaining is also
more apparent, and the continual holding up of the mind by the unexpected
word or phrase becomes a little wearisome in the end. The attraction of
Cowper's style is in the perfect balance of the members, an art which has
become almost lost since the eighteenth century, and in the spirit of repose
which awakens in the reader such a feeling of easy elevation as remains for
a while after the book is laid down. Lamb is of the city, Cowper of the
fields. Both were admirers of Vincent Bourne; Lamb chose naturally for
translation the poems of city life—The Ballad Singers, The Rival Bells, the
Epitaph on a Dog:

Poor Irus' faithful wolf-dog here I lie,

That wont to tend my old blind master's steps,
His guide and guard; nor, while my service lasted,
Had he occasion for that staff, with which
He now goes picking out his path in fear
Over the highways and crossings, but would plant
Safe in the conduct of my friendly string,
A firm foot forward still, till he had reached
His poor seat on some stone, nigh where the tide
Of passers-by in thickest confluence flowed:
To whom with loud and passionate laments
From morn to eve his dark estate he wailed.

Cowper just as inevitably selected the fables and country-pieces—The
Glowworm, The Jackdaw, The Cricket:

Little inmate, full of mirth,
Chirping on my kitchen hearth,
Wheresoe'er be thine abode,
Always harbinger of good,
Pay me for thy warm retreat,
With a song more soft and sweet;
In return thou shalt receive
Such a strain as I can give.

Though in voice and shape they be
Formed as if akin to thee,
Thou surpassest, happier far,
Happiest grasshoppers that are;
Theirs is but a summer song,
Thine endures the winter long,
Unimpaired, and shrill, and clear,
Melody throughout the year.

Neither night nor dawn of day
Puts a period to thy play:
Sing, then—and extend thy span
Far beyond the date of man;
Wretched man, whose years are spent
In repining discontent,
Lives not, agèd though he be,
Half a span, compared with thee.

There is in the blind beggar something of the quality of Lamb's own life,
with its inherent loneliness imposed by an ever-present grief in the midst of
London's noisy streets; and in the verses to the cricket it is scarcely fanciful

to find an image of Cowper's "domestic life in rural leisure passed." Lamb
was twenty-five when Cowper died, in the year 1800. One is tempted to
continue in the language of fable and ask what would have happened had
the city mouse allured the country mouse to visit his chambers in Holborn
or Southampton buildings. To be sure there was no luxury of purple robe
and mighty feast in that abode; but I think the revelry and the wit, and that
hound of intemperance which always pursued poor Lamb, would have
frightened his guest back to his hiding-place in the wilderness:

. . . me silva cavusque
Tutus ab insidiis tenui solabitur ervo!

Cowper, in fact, was the first writer to introduce that intimate union of
the home affections with the love of country which, in the works of Miss
Austen and a host of others, was to become one of the unique charms and
consolations of English literature. And the element of austere gloom in his
character, rarely exposed, but always, we know, in the background, is what
most of all relieves his letters from insipidity. Lamb strove deliberately by a
kind of crackling mirth to drown the sound of the grave inner voice;
Cowper listened reverently to its admonitions, even to its threatenings; he
spoke little of what he heard, but it tempered his wit and the snug comfort
of his life with that profounder consciousness of what, disguise it as we
will, lies at the bottom of the world's experience. We call him mad because
he believed himself abandoned of God, and shuddered with remorseless
conviction. Put aside for a moment the language of the market place, and be
honest with ourselves: is there not a little of our fate, of the fate of mankind,
in Cowper's desolation? After all, was his melancholy radically different
from the state of that great Frenchman, a lover of his letters withal, Sainte-
Beuve, who dared not for a day rest from benumbing labour lest the
questionings of his own heart should make themselves heard, and who
wrote to a friend that no consolation could reach that settled sadness which
was rooted in la grande absence de Dieu?
It is not strange that the society from which Cowper fled should have
seemed to him whimsical and a little mad. "A line of Bourne's," he says, "is
very expressive of the spectacle which this world exhibits, tragi-comical as
the incidents of it are, absurd in themselves, but terrible in their
consequences:

Sunt res humanæ flebile ludibrium."

Nor is it strange that he wondered sometimes at the gayety of his own
letters: "It is as if Harlequin should intrude himself into the gloomy
chamber, where a corpse is deposited in state. His antic gesticulations
would be unseasonable, at any rate, but more especially so if they should
distort the features of the mournful attendants into laughter." But it is not
the humour of the letters that attracts us so much as their picture of quiet
home delights in the midst of a stormy world. We linger most over the
account of those still evenings by the fireside, while Mrs. Unwin, and
perhaps their friend Lady Austen, was busy with her needles—
Thy needles, once a shining store,
For my sake restless heretofore,
Now rust disused, and shine no more,
My Mary!—

and while Cowper read aloud from some book of travels and mingled his
comments with the story of the wanderer:

My imagination is so captivated upon these occasions that I seem to partake with the navigators in
all the dangers they encountered. I lose my anchor; my mainsail is rent into shreds; I kill a shark, and
by signs converse with a Patagonian, and all this without moving from the fireside.

And here I cannot but regret again that we have not an edition of these
letters interspersed with the passages of The Task, which describe the same
scenes. I confess that two-thirds at least of that poem is indeed a task to-
day. The long tirades against vice, and the equally long preaching of virtue,
all in blank verse, lack, to my ear, the vivacity and the sustaining power of
the earlier rhymed poems, such as Hope (that superb moralising on the
poet's own life) and Retirement, to name the best of the series. But the
fourth book of The Task, and, indeed, all the exquisite genre pictures of the
poem:
Now stir the fire, and close the shutters fast,
Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,
And while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn
Throws up a steamy column, and the cups
That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each,
So let us welcome peaceful evening in—

all this intimate correspondence with the world in verse is not only
interesting in itself, but gains a double charm by association with the letters.
"We were just sitting down to supper," writes Cowper to Mrs. Unwin's son,
"when a hasty rap alarmed us. I ran to the hall window, for the hares being
loose, it was impossible to open the door." It is fortunate for the reader if his
memory at these words calls up those lines of The Task:

One sheltered hare
Has never heard the sanguinary yell
Of cruel man, exulting in her woes.
Innocent partner of my peaceful home,
Whom ten long years' experience of my care
Has made at last familiar; she has lost
Much of her vigilant instinctive dread,
Not needful here beneath a roof like mine.
Yes—thou mayst eat thy bread, and lick the hand
That feeds thee; thou mayst frolic on the floor
At evening, and at night retire secure
To thy straw couch, and slumber unalarmed;
For I have gained thy confidence, have pledged
All that is human in me, to protect
Thine unsuspecting gratitude and love.
If I survive thee, I will dig thy grave;
And when I place thee in it, sighing say,
I knew at least one hare that had a friend.

How much of the letters could be illustrated in this way—the walks about
Olney, the gardening, the greenhouse, the lamentations over the American
Rebellion, the tirades against fickle fashions, and a thousand other matters
that go to make up their quiet yet variegated substance. For it must not be
supposed that Cowper, in these Olney days at least, was ever dull. I will
quote the opening paragraph of one other letter—to his friend the Rev.
William Bull, great preacher of Newport Pagnell, and, alas! great smoker,[3]
"smoke-inhaling Bull," "Dear Taureau"—as a change from the more serious
theme, and then pass on:
Mon aimable et très cher Ami—It is not in the power of chaises or chariots to carry you where my
affections will not follow you; if I heard that you were gone to finish your days in the Moon, I should
not love you the less; but should contemplate the place of your abode, as often as it appeared in the
heavens, and say—Farewell, my friend, forever! Lost, but not forgotten! Live happy in thy lantern,
and smoke the remainder of thy pipes in peace! Thou art rid of Earth, at least of all its cares, and so
far can I rejoice in thy removal.

Might not that have been written by Lamb to one of his cronies—by a
Lamb still of the eighteenth century?
But the Olney days must come to a close. After nineteen years of
residence there Cowper and his companion (was ever love like theirs, that
was yet not love!) were induced to move to Weston Lodge, a more
convenient house in the village of Weston Underwood, not far away.
Somehow, with the change, the letters lose the freshness of their peculiar
interest. We shall never again find him writing of his home as he had
written before of Olney:

The world is before me; I am not shut up in the Bastille; there are no moats about my castle, no
locks upon my gates of which I have not the key; but an invisible, uncontrollable agency, a local
attachment, an inclination more forcible than I ever felt, even to the place of my birth, serves me for
prison-walls, and for bounds which I cannot pass.... The very stones in the garden-walls are my
intimate acquaintance. I should miss almost the minutest object, and be disagreeably affected by its
removal, and am persuaded that, were it possible I could leave this incommodious nook for a
twelvemonth, I should return to it again with rapture, and be transported with the sight of objects
which to all the world beside would be at least indifferent; some of them perhaps, such as the ragged
thatch and the tottering walls of the neighbouring cottages, disgusting. But so it is, and it is so,
because here is to be my abode, and because such is the appointment of Him that placed me in it.

Often while reading the letters from Weston one wishes he had never turned
the key in the lock of that beloved enclosure. Fame had come to him now.
His correspondence is distributed among more people; he is neither quite of
the world, nor of the cloister. Above all, he is busy—endlessly, wearisomely
busy—with his translation of Homer. I have often wondered what the result
would have been had his good friends and neighbours the Throckmortons
converted him from his rigid Calvinism to their own milder Catholic faith,
and set him in spiritual comfort to writing another Task. Idle conjecture! For
the rest of his life he toiled resolutely at a translation which the world did
not want and which brought its own tedium into his letters. And then comes
the pitiful collapse of Mrs. Unwin, broken at last by the long vigil over her
sick companion:

The twentieth year is well-nigh past,
Since first our sky was overcast;
Ah would that this might be the last!
My Mary!

Thy spirits have a fainter flow,
I see thee daily weaker grow—

'T was my distress that brought thee low,
My Mary!

The end is tragic, terrible. In 1794, Cowper sank into a state of
melancholia, in which for hours he would walk backward and forward in
his study like a caged tiger. Mrs. Unwin was dying. At last a cousin, the
Rev. John Johnson, took charge of the invalids and carried them away into
Norfolk. The last few letters, written in Cowper's ever-dwindling moments
of sanity, are without a parallel in English. The contrast of the wild images
with the stately and restrained language leaves an impression of awe,
almost of fear, on the mind. "My thoughts," he writes to Lady Hesketh, "are
like loose and dry sand, which the closer it is grasped slips the sooner
away"; and again to the same faithful friend from Mundesley on the coast:
The cliff is here of a height that it is terrible to look down from; and yesterday evening, by
moonlight, I passed sometimes within a foot of the edge of it, from which to have fallen would
probably have been to be dashed in pieces. But though to have been dashed in pieces would perhaps
have been best for me, I shrunk from the precipice, and am waiting to be dashed in pieces by other
means. At two miles distance on the coast is a solitary pillar of rock, that the crumbling cliff has left
at the high-water mark. I have visited it twice, and have found it an emblem of myself. Torn from my
natural connections, I stand alone and expect the storm that shall displace me.

There is in this that sheer physical horror which it is not good to write or to
read. Somewhere in his earlier letters he quotes the well-known line of
Horace: "We and all ours are but a debt to death." How the commonplace
words come back with frightfully intensified meaning as we read this story
of decay! It is not good, I say, to see the nakedness of human fate so
ruthlessly revealed. The mind reverts instinctively from this scene to the
homely life at Olney. Might it not be that if Cowper had remained in that
spot where the very stones of the garden walls were endeared to him, if he
had never been torn from his natural connections—might it not be that he
would have passed from the world in the end saddened but not frenzied by
his dreams? At least in our thoughts let us leave him, not standing alone on
the crumbling cliff over a hungry sea, but walking with his sympathetic
companion arm in arm in the peaceful valley of the Ouse.

WHITTIER THE POET
Last month we took the new edition of Cowper's Letters as an occasion to
consider the life of the poet, who brought the quiet affections of the home
into English literature, and that may be our excuse for waiving the
immediate pressure of the book-market and turning to the American poet
whose inspiration springs largely from the same source. Different as the two
writers are in so many respects, different above all in their education and
surroundings, yet it would not be difficult to find points of resemblance to
justify such a sequence. In both the spirit of religion was bound up with the
cult of seclusion; to both the home was a refuge from the world; to both this
comfort was sweetened by the care of a beloved companion, though neither
of them ever married. But, after all, no apology is needed, I trust, for
writing about a poet who is very dear to me as to many others, and who has
suffered more than most at the hands of his biographers and critics.
It should seem that no one could go through Whittier's poems even
casually without remarking the peculiar beauty of the idyl called The
Pennsylvania Pilgrim. It is one of the longest and, all things considered,
quite the most characteristic of his works. Yet Mr. Pickard in his official
biography brings the poem into no relief; Professor Carpenter names it in
passing without a word of comment; and Colonel Higginson in his volume
in the English Men of Letters Series does not mention it at all—but then he
has a habit of omitting the essential. Among those who have written
critically of American literature the poem is not even named, so far as I am
aware, by Mr. Stedman or by Professors Richardson, Lawton, Wendell, and
Trent. I confess that this conspiracy of silence, as I hunted through one
historian and critic after another, grew disconcerting, and I began to distrust
my own judgment until I chanced upon a confirmation in two passages of
Whittier's letters. Writing of The Pennsylvania Pilgrim to his publisher in
May, 1872, he said: "I think honestly it is as good as (if not better than) any
long poem I have written"; and a little later to Celia Thaxter: "It is as long
as Snow-Bound, and better, but nobody will find it out." One suspects that
all these gentlemen in treating of Whittier have merely followed the line of
least resistance, without taking much care to form an independent opinion;

and the line of least resistance has a miserable trick of leading us astray. In
the first place, Whittier's share in the Abolition and other reforming
movements bulks so large in the historians' eyes that sometimes they seem
almost to forget Whittier the poet. And the critics have taken the same cue.
"Whittier," says one of them, "will be remembered even more as the
trumpet-voice of Emancipation than as the peaceful singer of rural New
England."
The error, if it may be said with reverence, can be traced even higher, and
in Whittier we meet only one more witness to the unconcern of Nature over
the marring of her finer products. The wonder is not that he turned out so
much that is faulty, but that now and then he attained such exquisite grace.
Whittier was born, December 17, 1807, in East Haverhill, in the old
homestead which still stands, a museum now, hidden among the hills from
any other human habitation. It is a country not without quiet charm, though
the familiar lines of Snow-Bound make us think of it first as beaten by
storm and locked in by frost. And, notwithstanding the solace of an
affectionate home, life on the farm was unnecessarily hard. The habits of
the grim pioneers had persisted and weighed heavily on their dwindled
descendants. Thus the Whittiers, who used to drive regularly to the Quaker
meeting at Amesbury, eight miles distant, are said to have taken no pains to
protect themselves from the bleakest weather. The poet suffered in body all
his life from the rigour of this discipline; nor did he suffer less from
insufficiency of mental training. Not only was the family poor, but it even
appears that the sober tradition of his people looked askance at the limited
means of education at hand. Only at the earnest solicitation of outsiders was
the boy allowed to attend the academy at Haverhill. Meanwhile, he was a
little of everything: farm worker, shoemaker, teacher—he seems to have
shifted about as chance or necessity directed. There were few—he has told
us how few—books in the house, and little time for reading those he could
borrow. But if he read little, he wrote prodigiously. The story of his first
printed poem in the Free Press of Newburyport and of the encouragement
given him by the far-sighted editor, William Lloyd Garrison, is one of the
best known and most picturesque incidents in American letters. The young
poet—he was then nineteen—was launched; from that time he became an
assiduous writer for the press, and was at intervals editor of various country
or propagandist newspapers.

The great currents of literary tradition reached him vaguely from afar and
troubled his dreams. Burns fell early into his hands, and the ambition was
soon formed of transferring the braes and byres of Scotland to the hills and
folds of New England. The rhythms of Thomas Moore rang seductively in
his ears. Byron, too, by a spirit of contrast, appealed to the Quaker lad, and
one may read in Mr. Pickard's capital little book, Whittier-Land, verses and
fragments of letters which show how deeply that poison of the age had
bitten into his heart. But the influence of those sons of fire was more than
counteracted by the gentle spirit of Mrs. Hemans—indeed, the worst to be
said of Whittier is that never, to the day of his death, did he quite throw off
allegiance to the facile and innocent muse of that lady. It is only right to add
that in his later years, especially in the calm that followed the civil war, he
became a pretty widely read man, a man of far more culture than he is
commonly supposed to have been.
Such was the boy, then—thirsting for fame, scantily educated, totally
without critical guidance or environment, looking this way and that—who
was thrust under the two dominant influences of his time and place. To one
of these, transcendentalism, we owe nearly all that is highest, and
unfortunately much also that is most inchoate, in New England literature.
Its spirit of complacent self-dependence was dangerous at the best, although
in Whittier I cannot see that it did more than confirm his habit of uncritical
prolixity; it could offer no spiritual seduction to one who held liberally the
easy doctrine of the Friends. But to the other influence he fell a natural
prey. The whole tradition of the Quakers—the memory of Pastorius, whom
he was to sing as the Pennsylvania Pilgrim; the inheritance of saintly John
Woolman, whose Journal he was to edit—prepared him to take part in the
great battle of the Abolitionists. From that memorable hour when he met
Garrison face to face on his Haverhill farm to the ending of the war in 1865,
he was no longer free to develop intellectually, but was a servant of reform
and politics. I am not, of course, criticising that movement or its
achievement; I regret only that one whose temper and genius called for
fostering in quiet fields should have been dragged into that stormy arena. As
he says in lines that are true if not elegant:

Hater of din and riot,
He lived in days unquiet;
And, lover of all beauty,
Trod the hard ways of duty.

It is not merely that political interests absorbed the energy which would
otherwise have gone to letters; the knowledge of life acquired might have
compensated and more than compensated for less writing, and, indeed, he
wrote too much as it was. The difficulty is rather that "the pledged
philanthropy of earth" somehow militates against art, as Whittier himself
felt. Not only the poems actually written to forward the propaganda are for
the most part dismal reading, but something of their tone has crept into
other poems, with an effect to-day not far from cant. Twice the cry of the
liberator in Whittier rose to noble writing. But in both cases it is not the
mere pleading of reform but a very human and personal indignation that
speaks. In Massachusetts to Virginia this feeling of outrage calls forth one
of the most stirring pieces of personification ever written, nor can I imagine
a day when a man of Massachusetts shall be able to read it without a
tingling of the blood, or a Virginian born hear it without a sense of
unacknowledged shame; in Ichabod he uttered a word of individual scorn
that will rise up for quotation whenever any strong leader misuses, or is
thought to misuse, his powers. Every one knows the lines in which Webster
is pilloried for his defection:

Of all we loved and honoured, naught
Save power remains;
A fallen angel's pride of thought,
Still strong in chains.

All else is gone; from those great eyes
The soul has fled;
When faith is lost, when honour dies,
The man is dead!

Then pay the reverence of old days
To his dead fame;
Walk backward, with averted gaze,
And hide the shame!

It is instructive that only when his note is thus pierced by individual
emotion does the reformer attain to universality of appeal. Unfortunately
most of Whittier's slave songs sink down to a dreary level—down to the
almost humorous pathos of the lines suggested by Uncle Tom's Cabin:

Dry the tears for holy Eva,
With the blessed angels leave her. . . .

What he needed above everything else, what his surroundings were least
of all able to give him, was a canon of taste, which would have driven him
to stiffen his work, to purge away the flaccid and set the genuinely poetical
in stronger relief—a purely literary canon which would have offset the
moralist and reformer in him, and made it impossible for him (and his
essays show that the critical vein was not absent by nature) to write of
Longfellow's Psalm of Life: "These nine simple verses are worth more than
all the dreams of Shelley, and Keats, and Wordsworth. They are alive and
vigorous with the spirit of the day in which we live—the moral steam
enginery of an age of action." While Tennyson and Matthew Arnold were
writing in England, the earlier tradition had not entirely died out in America
that the first proof of genius is an abandonment of one's mind to
temperament and "inspiration." Byron had written verse as vacillating and
formless as any of Whittier's; Shelley had poured forth page after page of
effusive vapourings; Keats learned the lesson of self-restraint almost too
late; Wordsworth indulged in platitudes as simpering as "holy Eva"; but
none of these poets suffered so deplorably from the lack of criticism as the
finest of our New England spirits. The very magnificence of their rebellion,
the depth and originality of their emotion, were a compensation for their
licence, were perhaps inevitably involved in it. The humbler theme of
Whittier's muse can offer no such apology; he who sings the commonplace
joys and cares of the heart needs above all to attain that simplex munditiis
which is the last refinement of taste; lacking that, he becomes himself
commonplace. And Whittier knew this. In the Proem to the first general
collection of his poems, he wrote:

Of mystic beauty, dreamy grace,
No rounded art the lack supplies;
Unskilled the subtle line to trace,
Or softer shades of Nature's face,
I view her common forms with unanointed eyes.

Nor mine the seer-like power to show
The secrets of the heart and mind;
To drop the plummet line below
Our common world of joy and woe,
A more intense despair or brighter hope to find.

But at this point we must part company with his confession. His reward
is not that he showed "a hate of tyranny intense" or laid his gifts on the

shrine of Freedom, but that more completely than any other poet he
developed the peculiarly English ideal of the home which Cowper first
brought intimately into letters, and added to it those homely comforts of the
spirit which Cowper never felt. With Longfellow he was destined to throw
the glamour of the imagination over "our common world of joy and woe."
Perhaps something in his American surroundings fitted him peculiarly for
this humbler rôle. The fact that the men who had made the new colony
belonged to the middle class of society tended to raise the idea of home into
undisputed honour, and the isolation and perils of their situation in the
earlier years had enhanced this feeling into something akin to a cult.
America is still the land of homes. That may be a lowly theme for a poet; to
admire such poetry may, indeed it does, seem to many to smack of a
bourgeois taste. And yet there is an implication here that carries a grave
injustice. For myself, I admit that Whittier is one of the authors of my
choice, and that I read him with ever fresh delight; I even think there must
be something spurious in that man's culture whose appreciation of Milton or
Shelley dulls his ear to the paler but very refined charm of Whittier. If truth
be told, there is sometimes a kind of exquisite content in turning from the
pretentious poets who exact so much of the reader to the more immediate
appeal of our sweet Quaker. In comparison with those more exalted muses
his nymph is like the nut-brown lass of the old song—

But when we come where comfort is,
She never will say No.

And often, after fatiguing the brain with the searchings and inquisitive
flight of the Masters, we are ready to say with Whittier:

I break my pilgrim staff, I lay
Aside the toiling oar;
The angel sought so far away
I welcome at my door.

There, to me at least, and not in the ballads which are more generally
praised, lies the rare excellence of Whittier. True enough, some of these
narrative poems are spirited and admirably composed. Now and then, as in
Cassandra Southwick, they strike a note which reminds one singularly of
the real ballads of the people; in fact, it would not be fanciful to discover a

certain resemblance between the manner of their production and of the old
popular songs. Their publication in obscure newspapers, from which they
were copied and gradually sent the rounds of the country, is not essentially
different from the way in which many of the ballads were probably spread
abroad. The very atmosphere that surrounded the boy in a land where the
traditions of border warfare and miraculous events still ran from mouth to
mouth prepared him for such balladry. Take, for example, this account of
his youth from the Introduction to Snow-Bound:

Under such circumstances story-telling was a necessary resource in the long winter evenings. My
father when a young man had traversed the wilderness to Canada, and could tell us of his adventures
with Indians and wild beasts, and of his sojourn in the French villages. My uncle was ready with his
record of hunting and fishing, and, it must be confessed, with stories, which he at least half-believed,
of witchcraft and apparitions. My mother, who was born in the Indian-haunted region of
Somersworth, New Hampshire, between Dover and Portsmouth, told us of the inroads of the savages,
and the narrow escape of her ancestors.

No doubt this legendary training helped to give more life to Whittier's
ballads and border tales than ordinarily enters into that rather factitious
form of composition; and for a while he made a deliberate attempt to create
out of it a native literature. But the effect was still deeper, by a kind of
contrast, on his poetry of the home. After several incursions into the world
as editor and agitator, he was compelled by ill health to settle down finally
in the Amesbury house, which he had bought in 1836; and there with little
interruption he lived from his thirty-third to his eighty-fifth year, the year of
his death. In Snow-Bound his memory called up a picture of the old
Haverhill homestead, unsurpassed in its kind for sincerity and
picturesqueness; in poem after poem he celebrated directly or indirectly
"the river hemmed with leaning trees," the hills and ponds, the very roads
and bridges of the land about these sheltered towns. On the one hand, the
recollection of the wilder life through which his parents had come added to
the snugness and intimacy of these peaceful scenes, and, on the other hand,
the encroachment of trade and factories into their midst lent a poignancy of
regret for a grace that was passing away. Mr. Pickard's little guide-book, to
which I have already referred, brings together happily the innumerable
allusions of local interest; there is no spot in America, not even Concord,
where the light of fancy lies so entrancingly:

A tender glow, exceeding fair,

A dream of day without its glare.

For it must be seen that the crudeness of Whittier's education, and the
thorny ways into which he was drawn, marred a large part, but by no means
all, of his work. There are a few poems in his collection of an admirable
craftsmanship in that genre which is none the less difficult—which I
sometimes think is almost more difficult—because it lies so perilously near
the trivial and mean. There are others which need only a little pruning,
perhaps a little heightening here and there, to approach the same perfection
of charm. Especially they have that harmony of tone which arises from the
unspoiled sincerity of the writer and ends by subduing the reader to a restful
sympathy with their mood. No one can read much in Whittier without
feeling that these hills and valleys about the Merrimac have become one of
the inalienable domiciles of the spirit—a familiar place where the
imagination dwells with untroubled delight. Even the little things, the
flowers and birds of the country, are made to contribute to the sense of
homely content. There is one poem in particular which has always seemed
to me significant of Whittier's manner, and a comparison of it with the
famous flower poems of Wordsworth will show the difference between
what I call the poetry of the hearth and the poetry of intimate nature. It was
written to celebrate a gift of Pressed Gentian that hung at the poet's
window, presenting to wayside travellers only a "grey disk of clouded
glass":

They cannot from their outlook see
The perfect grace it hath for me;
For there the flower, whose fringes through
The frosty breath of autumn blew,
Turns from without its face of bloom
To the warm tropic of my room,
As fair as when beside its brook
The hue of bending skies it took.

So from the trodden ways of earth
Seem some sweet souls who veil their worth,
And offer to the careless glance
The clouding grey of circumstance. . . .

There is not a little of self-portraiture in this image of the flower, and it may
be that some who have written of Whittier patronisingly are like the hasty
passer-by—they see only the grey disk of clouded glass.

And the emotion that furnishes the loudest note to most poets is subdued
in Whittier to the same gentle tone. To be sure, there is evidence enough
that his heart in youth was touched almost to a Byronic melancholy, and he
himself somewhere remarks that "Few guessed beneath his aspect grave,
What passions strove in chains." But was there not a remnant of self-
deception here? Do not the calmest and wisest of us like to believe we are
calm and wise by virtue of vigorous self-repression? Wordsworth, we
remember, explained the absence of love from his poetry on the ground that
his passions were too violent to allow any safe expression of them. Possibly
they were. Certainly, in Whittier's verse we have no reflection of those
tropic heats, but only "the Indian summer of the heart." The very title,
Memories, of his best-known love poem (based on a real experience, the
details of which have recently been revealed) suggests the mood in which
he approaches this subject. It is not the quest of desire he sings, but the
home-coming after the frustrate search and the dreaming recollection by the
hearth of an ancient loss. In the same way, his ballad Maud Muller, which is
supposed to appeal only to the unsophisticated, is attuned to that
shamelessly provincial rhyme,

For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: "It might have been!"

It is a little so with us all, perhaps, as it was with the judge and the maiden;
only, as we learn the lesson of years, the disillusion is likely to be mingled
strangely with relief, and the sadness to take on a most comfortable and
flattering Quaker drab—as it did with our "hermit of Amesbury."
If love was a memory, religion was for Whittier a hope and an ever-
present consolation—peculiarly a consolation, because he brought into it
the same thought of home-coming that marks his treatment of nature and
the passions. Partly, this was due to his inherited creed, which was tolerant
enough to soften theological dispute: "Quakerism," he once wrote to Lucy
Larcom, "has no Church of its own—it belongs to the Church Universal and
Invisible." In great part the spirit of his faith was private to him; it even
called for a note of apology to the sterner of his brethren:

O friends! with whom my feet have trod
The quiet aisles of prayer,
Glad witness to your zeal for God

And love of man I bear.

I trace your lines of argument;
Your logic linked and strong
I weigh as one who dreads dissent,
And fears a doubt as wrong.

But still my human hands are weak
To hold your iron creeds:
Against the words ye bid me speak
My heart within me pleads. . . .

And the inimitably tender conclusion:
And so beside the Silent Sea
I wait the muffled oar;
No harm from Him can come to me,
On ocean or on shore.

I know not where His islands lift
Their fronded palms in air;
I only know I cannot drift
Beyond His love and care.

O brothers! if my faith is vain,
If hopes like these betray,
Pray for me that my feet may gain
The sure and safer way.

And Thou, O Lord! by whom are seen
Thy creatures as they be,
Forgive me if too close I lean
My human heart on Thee!

Not a strenuous mood it may be, or very exalted—not the mood of the
battling saints, but one familiar to many a troubled man in his hours of
simpler trust. We have been led to Whittier through the familiar poetry of
Cowper; consider what it would have been to that tormented soul if for one
day he could have forgotten the awe of his divinity and leaned his human
heart on God. It is not good for any but the strongest to dwell too much
with abstractions of the mind. And, after all, change the phrasing a little,
substitute if you choose some other intuitive belief for the poet's childlike
faith, and you will be surprised to find how many of the world's
philosophers would accept the response of Whittier:
We search the world for truth; we cull

The good, the pure, the beautiful,
From graven stone and written scroll,
From all old flower-fields of the soul;
And, weary seekers of the best,
We come back laden from our quest,
To find that all the sages said
Is in the Book our mothers read.

Such a rout of the intellect may seem ignominious, but is it any more so
than the petulance of Renan because all his learning had only brought him
to the same state of skepticism as that of the gamin in the streets of Paris?
Our tether is short enough, whichever way we seek escape. It is worth
noting that in his essay on Baxter (he who conceived of the saints' rest in a
very different spirit) Whittier blames that worthy just for the exaltation of
his character. "In our view," he says, "this was its radical defect. He had too
little of humanity, he felt too little of the attraction of this world, and lived
too exclusively in the spiritual and the unearthly."
And if Whittler's faith was simple and human, his vision of the other
world was strangely like the remembrance of a home that we have left in
youth. There is a striking expression of this in one of his prose tales, now
almost forgotten despite their elements of pale but very genuine humour
and pathos, as if written by an attenuated Hawthorne. The good physician,
Dr. Singletary, and his friends are discussing the future life, and says one of
them:

"Have you not felt at times that our ordinary conceptions of heaven itself, derived from the vague
hints and Oriental imagery of the Scriptures, are sadly inadequate to our human wants and hopes?
How gladly would we forego the golden streets and gates of pearl, the thrones, temples, and harps,
for the sunset lights of our native valleys; the woodpaths, where moss carpets are woven with violets
and wild flowers; the songs of birds, the low of cattle, the hum of bees in the apple-blossoms—the
sweet, familiar voices of human life and nature! In the place of strange splendours and unknown
music, should we not welcome rather whatever reminded us of the common sights and sounds of our
old home?"

It was eminently proper that, as the poet lay awaiting death, with his
kinsfolk gathered about him, one of them should have recited the stanzas of
his psalm At Last:
When on my day of life the night is falling,
And, in the winds from unsunned spaces blown,
I hear far voices out of darkness calling
My feet to paths unknown,

Thou who hast made my home of life so pleasant,
Leave not its tenant when its walls decay;
O Love Divine, O Helper ever present,
Be Thou my strength and stay!

I have but Thee, my Father! let Thy spirit
Be with me then to comfort and uphold;
No gate of pearl, no branch of palm I merit,
Nor street of shining gold.

Suffice it if—my good and ill unreckoned,
And both forgiven through Thy abounding grace—
I find myself by hands familiar beckoned
Unto my fitting place.

I would not call this the highest religious poetry, pure and sweet as it may
be. Something still is lacking, but to see that want fulfilled one must travel
out of Whittier's age, back through all the eighteenth century, back into the
seventeenth. There you will find it in Vaughan and Herbert and sometimes
in Marvell—poets whom Whittier read and admired. Take two poems from
these two ages, place them side by side, and the one thing needed fairly
strikes the eyes. The first poem Whittier wrote after the death of his sister
Elizabeth (who had been to him what Mrs. Unwin had been to Cowper) was
The Vanishers, founded on a pretty superstition he had read in Schoolcraft:
Sweetest of all childlike dreams
In the simple Indian lore
Still to me the legend seems
Of the shapes who flit before.

Flitting, passing, seen, and gone,
Never reached nor found at rest,
Baffling search, but beckoning on
To the Sunset of the Blest.

From the clefts of mountain rocks,
Through the dark of lowland firs,
Flash the eyes and flow the locks
Of the mystic Vanishers!

Now Vaughan, too, wrote a poem on those gone from him:

They are all gone into the world of light,
And I alone sit lingering here;

Their very memory is fair and bright,
And my sad thoughts doth clear.

It glows and glitters in my cloudy breast,
Like stars upon some gloomy grove,
Or those faint beams in which this hill is dress'd,
After the sun's remove.

I see them walking in an air of glory,
Whose light doth trample on my days:
My days, which are at best but dull and hoary,
Mere glimmering and decays.

It is not a fair comparison to set one of Whittier's inferior productions
beside this superbest hymn of an eloquent age; but would any religious
poem of the nineteenth century, even the best of them, fare much better?
There is indeed one thing lacking, and that is ecstasy. But ecstasy demands
a different kind of faith from that of Whittier's day or ours, and, missing
that, I do not see why we should begrudge our praise to a genius of pure and
quiet charm.
I have already intimated that too complete a preoccupation with the
reforming and political side of Whittier's life has kept the biographers from
recognising that charm in what he himself regarded as his best poem. In
1872, in the full maturity of his powers and when the national peace had
allowed him to indulge the peace in his own heart, he wrote his exquisite
idyl, The Pennsylvania Pilgrim. Perhaps the mere name of the poem may
suggest another cause why it has been overlooked. Whittier has always
stood pre-eminently as the exponent of New England life, and for very
natural reasons. And yet it would not be difficult to show from passages in
his prose works that his heart was never quite at ease in that Puritan land.
The recollection of the sufferings which his people had undergone for their
faith' sake rankled a little in his breast, and he was never in perfect
sympathy with the austerity of New England traditions. We catch a tone of
relief as he turns in imagination to the peace that dwelt "within the land of
Penn":

Who knows what goadings in their sterner way
O'er jagged ice, relieved by granite grey,
Blew round the men of Massachusetts Bay?

What hate of heresy the east-wind woke?
What hints of pitiless power and terror spoke

In waves that on their iron coast-line broke?

It was no doubt during his early residence in Philadelphia that he learned
the story of the good Pastorius, who, in 1683, left the fatherland and the
society of the mystics he loved to lead a colony of Friends to Germantown.
The Pilgrim's life in that bountiful valley between the Schuylkill and the
Delaware—

Where, forest-walled, the scattered hamlets lay
Along the wedded rivers—

offered to Whittier a subject admirably adapted to his powers. Here the
faults of taste that elsewhere so often offend us are sunk in the harmony of
the whole and in the singular unity of impression; and the lack of elevation
that so often stints our praise becomes a suave and mellow beauty. All the
better elements of his genius are displayed here in opulent freedom. The
affections of the heart unfold in unembittered serenity. The sense of home
seclusion is heightened by the presence of the enveloping wilderness, but
not disturbed by any harsher contrast. Within is familiar joy and retirement
unassailed—not without a touch of humour, as when in the evening, "while
his wife put on her look of love's endurance," Pastorius took down his
tremendous manuscript—

And read, in half the languages of man,
His Rusca Apium, which with bees began,
And through the gamut of creation ran.

(The manuscript still exists; pray heaven it be never published!) Now and
then the winter evenings were broken by the coming of some welcome
guest—some traveller from the Old World bringing news of fair Von
Merlau and the other beloved mystics; some magistrate from the young city,

Lovely even then
With its fair women and its stately men
Gracing the forest court of William Penn;

or some neighbour of the country, the learned Swedish pastor who, like
Pastorius, "could baffle Babel's lingual curse,"
Or painful Kelpius, from his forest den

By Wissahickon, maddest of good men.

Such was the life within, and out of doors were the labours of the
gardener and botanist, while

the seasons went
Their rounds, and somewhat to his spirit lent
Of their own calm and measureless content.

The scene calls forth some of Whittier's most perfect lines of description.
Could anything be more harmonious than this, with its economy of simple
grace,

Slow, overhead, the dusky night-birds sailed?

No poem would be thoroughly characteristic of Whittier without some
echo of the slavery dispute, and our first introduction to Pastorius is, indeed,
as to a baffled forerunner of John Woolman. But the question here takes on
its most human and least political form; it lets in just enough of the outside
world of action to save the idyl from unreality. Nor could religion well be
absent; rather, the whole poem may be called an illustration through the
Pilgrim's life of that Inner Guide, speaking to him not with loud and
controversial tones, as it spoke to George Fox, but with the still, small voice
of comfortable persuasion:
A Voice spake in his ear,
And lo! all other voices far and near
Died at that whisper, full of meanings clear.
The Light of Life shone round him; one by one
The wandering lights, that all misleading run,
Went out like candles paling in the sun.

The account of the grave Friends, unsummoned by bells, walking meeting-
ward, and of the gathered stillness of the room into which only the songs of
the birds penetrated from without, is one of the happiest passages of the
poem. How dear those hours of common worship were to Whittier may be
understood from another poem, addressed to a visitor who asked him why
he did not seek rather the grander temple of nature:

But nature is not solitude;
She crowds us with her thronging wood;

Her many hands reach out to us,
Her many tongues are garrulous;
Perpetual riddles of surprise
She offers to our ears and eyes.

And so I find it well to come
For deeper rest to this still room,
For here the habit of the soul
Feels less the outer world's control;
The strength of mutual purpose pleads
More earnestly our common needs;
And from the silence multiplied
By these still forms on every side,
The world that time and sense have known
Falls off and leaves us God alone.

For the dinner given to Whittier on his seventieth birthday Longfellow
wrote a sonnet on The Three Silences of Molinos—the silence of speech, of
desire, and of thought, through which are heard "mysterious sounds from
realms beyond our reach." Perhaps only one who at some time in his life
has caught, or seemed to catch, those voices and melodies is quite able to
appreciate the charm of Whittier through the absence of so much that calls
to us in other poets.

THE CENTENARY OF
SAINTE-BEUVE
It is a hundred years since Sainte-Beuve was born in the Norman city that
looks over toward England, and more than a generation has passed since his
death just before the war with Germany.[4] Yesterday three countries—
France, Belgium, and Switzerland—were celebrating his centenary with
speeches and essays and dinners, and the singing of hymns. At Lausanne,
where he had given his lectures on Port-Royal, and had undergone not a
little chagrin for his pains, the University unveiled a bronze medallion of
his head,—a Sainte-Beuve disillusioned and complex, writes a Parisian
journalist, with immoderate forehead radiating a cold serenity, while the
lips are contracted into a smile at once voluptuous and sarcastic, as it were
an Erasmus grown fat, with a reminiscence of Baudelaire in the ironic mask
of the face. It is evidently the "Père Beuve" as we know him in the portraits,
and it is not hard to imagine the lips curling a little more sardonically at the
thought of the change that has come since he was a poverty-stricken hack
and his foibles were the ridicule of Paris.
Yet through all these honours I cannot help observing a strain of
reluctance, as so often happens with a critic who has made himself feared
by the rectitude of his judgments. There has, for one thing, been a good deal
of rather foolish scandal-mongering and raking up of old anecdotes about
his gross habits. Well, Sainte-Beuve was sensual. "Je suis du peuple ainsi
que mes amours," he was wont to hum over his work; and when that work
was finished, his secretary tells us how he used to draw a hat down over his
face (that face dont le front démesurément haut rayonne de sérénité froide),
and go out on the street for any chance liaison. There is something too
much of these stories in what is written of Sainte-Beuve to-day; and in the
estimate of his intellectual career too little emphasis is laid on what was
stable in his opinions, and too much emphasis on the changes of his
religious and literary creed. To be sure, these mutations of belief are
commonly cited as his preparation for the art of critic, and in a certain sense
this is right. But even then, if by critic is meant one who merely decides the

value of this or that book, the essential word is left unsaid. He was a critic,
and something more; he was, if any man may claim such a title, the maître
universel of the century, as, indeed, he has been called.
And the time of his life contributed as much to this position of Doctor
Universalis as did his own intelligence. France, during those years from the
Revolution of 1830 to the fall of the Second Empire, was the seething-pot
of modern ideas, and the impression left by the history of the period is not
unlike that of watching the witch scenes in Macbeth. The eighteenth century
had been earnest, mad in part, but its intention was comparatively single,—
to tear down the fabric of authority, whether political or religious, and allow
human nature, which was fundamentally good, though depraved by custom,
to assert itself. And human nature did assert itself pretty vigorously in the
French Revolution, proving, one might suppose, if it proved anything, that
its foundation, like its origin, is with the beasts. To the men who came
afterward that tremendous event stood like a great prism between
themselves and the preceding age; the pillar of light toward which they
looked for guidance was distorted by it and shattered into a thousand
coloured rays. For many of them, as for Sainte-Beuve, it meant that the old
humanitarian passion remained side by side with a profound distrust of the
popular heart; for all, the path of reform took the direction of some
individual caprice or ideal. There were democrats and monarchists and
imperialists; there was the rigid Catholic reaction led by Bonald and de
Maistre, and the liberal Catholicism of Lamennais; there was the socialism
of Saint-Simon, mixed with notions of a religious hierarchy, and other
schemes of socialism innumerable; while skepticism took every form of
condescension or antagonism. Literature also had its serious mission, and
the battle of the romanticists shook Paris almost as violently as a political
revolution. Through it all science was marching with steady gaze, waiting
for the hour when it should lay its cold hand on the heart of society.
And with all these movements Sainte-Beuve was more or less intimately
concerned. As a boy he brought with him to Paris the pietistic sentiments of
his mother and an aunt on whom, his father being dead, his training had
devolved. Upon these sentiments he soon imposed the philosophy of the
eighteenth century, followed by a close study of the Revolution. It is
noteworthy that his first journalistic work on the Globe was a literary
description of the places in Greece to which the war for independence was

calling attention, and the reviewing of various memoirs of the French
Revolution. From these influences he passed to the cénacle of Victor Hugo,
and became one of the champions of the new romantic school. Meanwhile
literature was mingled with romance of another sort, and the story of the
critic's friendship for the haughty poet and of his love for the poet's wife is
of a kind almost incomprehensible to the Anglo-Saxon mind. It may be said
in passing that the letters of Sainte-Beuve to M. and Mme. Hugo, which
have only to-day been recovered and published in the Revue de Paris, throw
rather a new light on this whole affair. They do not exculpate Sainte-Beuve,
but they at least free him from ridicule. His successful passion for Mme.
Hugo, with its abrupt close when Mme. Hugo's daughter came to her first
confession, and his tormented courtship of Mme. d'Arbouville in later years,
were the chief elements in that éducation sentimentale which made him so
cunning in the secrets of the feminine breast.
But this is a digression. Personal and critical causes carried him out of
the camp of Victor Hugo into the ranks of the Saint-Simonians, whom he
followed for a while with a kind of half-detached enthusiasm. Probably he
was less attracted by the hopes of a mystically regenerated society, with
Enfantin as its supreme pontiff, than by the desire of finding some rest for
the imagination in this religion of universal love. At least he perceived in
the new brotherhood a relief from the strained individualism of the romantic
poets, and the same instinct, no doubt, followed him from Saint-Simonism
into the fold of Lamennais. There at last he thought to see united the ideals
of religion and democracy, and some of the bitterest words he ever wrote
were in memory of the final defalcation of Lamennais, who, as Sainte-
Beuve said, saved himself but left his disciples stranded in the mire.
Meanwhile this particular disciple had met new friends in Switzerland, and
through their aid was brought at a critical moment to Lausanne to lecture on
Port-Royal. There he learned to know and respect Vinet, the Protestant
theologian and critic, who, with the help of his good friends the Oliviers,
undertook to convert the wily Parisian to Calvinism. Saint-Beuve himself
seems to have gone into the discussion quite earnestly, but for one who
knows the past experiences of that subtle twister there is something almost
ludicrous in the way these anxious missionaries reported each accession and
retrogression of his faith. He came back to Paris a confirmed and satisfied
doubter, willing to sacrifice to the goddess Chance as the blind deity of this
world, convinced of materialism and of the essential baseness of human

nature, yet equally convinced that within man there rules some ultimate
principle of genius or individual authority which no rationalism can explain,
and above all things determined to keep his mind open to whatever currents
of truth may blow through our murky human atmosphere. He ended where
he began, in what may be called a subtilised and refined philosophy of the
eighteenth century, with a strain of melancholy quite peculiar to the baffled
experience of the nineteenth. His aim henceforth was to apply to the study
of mankind the analytical precision of science, with a scientific method of
grouping men into spiritual families.
Much has been made of these varied twistings of Sainte-Beuve's, both for
his honour and dishonour. Certainly they enabled him to insinuate himself
into almost every kind of intelligence and report of each author as if he
were writing out a phase of his own character; they made him in the end the
spokesman of that eager and troubled age whose ferment is to-day just
reaching America. France scarcely holds the place of intellectual supremacy
once universally accorded her, yet to her glory be it said that, if we look
anywhere for a single man who summed up within himself the life of the
nineteenth century, we instinctively turn to that country. And more and
more it appears that to Sainte-Beuve in particular that honour must accrue.
His understanding was more comprehensive than Taine's or Renan's, more
subtle than that of the former, more upright than that of the latter, more
single toward the truth and more accurate than that of either. He never, as
did Taine, allowed a preconceived idea to warp his arrangement of facts,
nor did he ever, at least in his mature years, allow his sentimentality, as did
Renan, to take the place of judgment. Both the past and the present are
reflected in his essays with equal clearness.
On the other hand, this versatility of experience has not seldom been laid
to lightness and inconsistency of character. I cannot see that the charge
holds good, unless it be directed also against the whole age through which
he passed. If any one thing has been made clear by the publishing of Sainte-
Beuve's letters and by the closer investigation of his life, it is that he was in
these earlier years a sincere seeker after religion, and was only held back at
the last moment by some invincible impotence of faith from joining himself
finally with this or that sect. And he was thus an image of the times. What
else is the meaning of all those abortive attempts to amalgamate religion
with the humanitarianism left over from the eighteenth century, but a

searching for faith where the spiritual eye had been blinded? I should
suppose that Sainte-Beuve's refusal in the end to speak the irrevocable word
of adhesion indicated rather the clearness of his self-knowledge than any
lightness of procedure. Nor is his inconsistency, whether religious or
literary, quite so great as it is sometimes held up to be. The inheritance of
the eighteenth century was strong upon him, while at the same time he had
a craving for the inner life of the spirit. Naturally he felt a powerful
attraction in the preaching of such men as Saint-Simon and Lamennais, who
boasted to combine these two tendencies; but the mummery of Saint-
Simonism and the instability of Mennaisianism, when it came to the test,
too soon exposed the lack of spiritual substance in both. With this revelation
came a growing distrust of human nature, caused by the political
degeneracy of France, and by a kind of revulsion he threw himself upon the
Jansenism which contained the spirituality the other creeds missed, and
which based itself frankly on the total depravity of mankind. He was too
much a child of the age to breathe in that thin air, and fell back on all that
remained to him,—inquisitive doubt and a scientific demand for positive
truth. It is the history of the century.
And in literature I find the same inconstancy on the surface, while at
heart he suffered little change. Only here his experience ran counter to the
times, and most of the opprobrium that has been cast on him is due to the
fact that he never allowed the clamour of popular taste and the warmth of
his sympathy with present modes to drown that inner critical voice of doubt.
As a standard-bearer of Victor Hugo and the romanticists he still maintained
his reserves, and, on the other hand, long after he had turned renegade from
that camp he still spoke of himself as only demi-converti. The proportion
changed with his development, but from beginning to end he was at bottom
classical in his love of clarity and self-restraint, while intensely interested in
the life and aspirations of his own day. There is in one of the recently
published letters to Victor Hugo a noteworthy illustration of this
steadfastness. It was, in fact, the second letter he wrote to the poet, and goes
back to 1827, the year of Cromwell. On the twelfth of February, Hugo read
his new tragi-comedy aloud, and Sainte-Beuve was evidently warm in
expressions of praise. But in the seclusion of his own room the critical
instinct reawoke in him, and he wrote the next day a long letter to the
dramatist, not retracting what he had said, but adding certain reservations
and insinuating certain admonitions. "Toutes ces critiques rentrent dans une

seule que je m'étais déjà permis d'adresser à votre talent, l'excès, l'abus de la
force, et passez-moi le mot, la charge." Is not the whole of his critical
attitude toward the men of his age practically contained in this rebuke of
excess, and over-emphasis, and self-indulgence? And Sainte-Beuve when
he wrote the words was just twenty-three, was in the first ardour of his
attachment to the giant—the Cyclops, he seemed to Sainte-Beuve later—of
the century.
But after all, it is not the elusive seeker of these years that we think of
when Sainte-Beuve is named, nor the author of those many volumes,—the
Portraits, the Chateaubriand, even the Port-Royal,—but the writer of the
incomparable Lundis. In 1849 he had returned from Liège after lecturing for
a year at the University, and found himself abounding in ideas, keen for
work, and without regular employment. He was asked to contribute a
critical essay to the Constitutionnel each Monday, and accepted the offer
eagerly. "It is now twenty-five years," he said, "since I started in this career;
it is the third form in which I have been brought to give out my impressions
and literary judgments." These first Causeries continued until 1860, and are
published in fourteen solid volumes. There was a brief respite then, and in
1861 he began the Nouveaux Lundis, which continued in the Moniteur and
the Temps until his last illness in 1869, filling thirteen similar volumes.
Meanwhile his mother had died, leaving him a house in Paris and a small
income, and in 1865 he had been created a senator by Napoleon III. at the
instigation of the Princesse Mathilde.
In his earlier years he had been poor and anxious, living in a student's
room, and toiling indefatigably to keep the wolf from the door. At the end
he was rich, and had command of his time, yet the story of his labours while
writing the latest Lundis is one of the heroic examples of literature. "Every
Tuesday morning," he once wrote to a friend, "I go down to the bottom of a
pit, not to reascend until Friday evening at some unknown hour." Those
were the days of preparation and plotting. From his friend M. Chéron, who
was librarian of the Bibliothèque Impériale, came memoirs and histories
and manuscripts,—whatever might serve him in getting up his subject. Late
in the week he wrote a rough draft of the essay, commonly about six
thousand words long, in a hand which no one but himself could decipher.
This task was ordinarily finished in a single day, and the essay was then
dictated off rapidly to a secretary to take down in a fair copy. That must

have been a strenuous season for the copyist, for Sainte-Beuve read at a
prodigious rate, showing impatience at any delay, and still greater
impatience at any proposed alteration. Indeed, during the whole week of
preparation he was so absorbed in his theme as to ruffle up at the slightest
opposition. In the evening he would eat a hearty dinner, and then walk out
with his secretary to the outer Boulevards, the Luxembourg, or the Place
Saint-Sulpice, for his digestion, talking all the while on the coming Lundi
with intense absorption. And woe to the poor companion if he expressed
any contradiction, or hinted that the subject was trivial,—as indeed it often
was, until the critic had clothed it with the life of his own thought. "In a
word," Sainte-Beuve would cry out savagely, "you wish to hinder me in
writing my article. The subject has not the honour of your sympathy. Really
it is too bad." Whereupon he would turn angrily on his heel and stride
home. The story explains the nature of Sainte-Beuve's criticism. For a week
he lived with his author; "he belonged body and soul to his model! He
embraced it, espoused it, exalted it!"—with the result that some of this
enthusiasm is transmitted to the reader, and the essays are instinct with life
as no other critic's work has ever been. The strain of living thus
passionately in a new subject week after week was tremendous, and it is not
strange that his letters are filled with complaints of fatigue, and that his
health suffered in spite of his robust constitution. Nor was the task ended
with the dictation late Friday night. Most of Saturday and Sunday was given
up to proofreading, and at this time he invited every suggestion, even
contradiction, often practically rewriting an essay before it reached the
press. Monday he was free, and it was on that day occurred the famous
Magny dinners, when Sainte-Beuve, Flaubert, Renan, the Goncourts, and a
few other chosen spirits, met and talked as only Frenchmen can talk. Every
conceivable subject was passed under the fire of criticism; nothing was held
sacred. Only one day a luckless guest, after faith in religion and politics and
morals had been laughed away, ventured to intimate that Homer as a canon
of taste was merely a superstition like another; whereupon such a hubbub
arose as threatened to bring the dinners to an end at once and for all. The
story is told in the Journal of the Goncourts, and it was one of the brothers,
I believe, who made the perilous insinuation. Imagine, if you can, a party of
Englishmen taking Homer, or any other question of literary faith, with
tragic seriousness. Such an incident explains many things; it explains why

English literature has never been, like the French, an integral part of the
national life.
And the integrity of mind displayed in the Lundis is as notable as the
industry. From the beginning Sainte-Beuve had possessed that inquisitive
passion for the truth, without which all other critical gifts are as brass and
tinkling cymbals. Nevertheless, it is evident that he did not always in his
earlier writings find it expedient to express his whole thought. He was, for
example, at one time the recognised herald of the romantic revolt, and
naturally, while writing about Victor Hugo, he did not feel it necessary to
make in public such frank reservations as his letters to that poet contain. His
whole thought is there, perhaps, but one has to read between the lines to get
it. And so it was with the other men and movements with which he for a
while allied himself. With the Lundis came a change; he was free of all
entanglements, and could make the precise truth his single aim. No doubt a
remnant of personal jealousy toward those who had passed him in the race
of popularity embittered the critical reservations which he felt, but which
might otherwise have been uttered more genially. But quite as often this
seeming rancour was due to the feeling that he had hitherto been compelled
to suppress his full convictions, to a genuine regret for the corrupt ways into
which French literature was deviating. How nearly the exigencies of a hack
writer had touched him is shown by a passage in a letter to the Oliviers
written in 1838. His Swiss friend was debating whether he should try his
fortunes in Paris as a contributor to the magazines, and had asked for
advice. "But where to write? what to write?" replied Sainte-Beuve; "if one
could only choose for himself! You must wait on opportunity, and in the
long run this becomes a transaction in which conscience may be saved, but
every ideal perishes,"—dans laquelle la conscience peut toujours être sauve
mais où tout idéal périt. Just about this time he was thinking seriously of
migrating with the Oliviers to this country. It would be curious to hear what
he might have written from New York to one who contemplated coming
there as a hack writer. As for the loss of ideals, his meaning, if it needs any
elucidation, may be gathered from a well-known passage in one of his
books:

The condition of man ordinarily is no more than a succession of servitudes, and the only liberty
that remains is now and then to effect a change. Labour presses, necessity commands, circumstances
sweep us along: at the risk of seeming to contradict ourselves or give ourselves the lie, we must go on
and for ever recommence; we must accept whatever employments are offered, and even though we

fill them with all conscientiousness and zeal we raise a dust on the way, we obscure the images of the
past, we soil and mar our own selves. And so it is that before the goal of old age is reached, we have
passed through so many lives that scarcely, as we go back in memory, can we tell which was our true
life, that for which we were made and of which we were worthy, the life which we would have
chosen.

Those were the words with which he had closed his chapters on
Chateaubriand; yet through all his deviations he had borne steadily toward
one point. In after years he could write without presumption to a friend: "If
I had a device, it would be the true, the true alone; and the beautiful and the
good might come out as best they could." There are a number of anecdotes
which show how precious he held this integrity of mind. The best known is
the fact that, in the days before he was appointed senator, and despite the
pressure that was brought to bear on him, he still refused to write a review
of the Emperor's History of Cæsar.
Both the sense of disillusion, which was really inherent in him from his
youth, and the passion for truth hindered him in his "creative" work, while
they increased his powers as a critic. He grew up, it must be remembered, in
the midst of the full romantic tide, and as a writer of verse there was really
no path of great achievement open to him save that of Victor Hugo and
Lamartine and the others of whose glory he was so jealous. Whatever may
have been the differences of those poets, in one respect they were alike:
they all disregarded the subtle nuance wherein the truth resides, and based
their emotions on some grandiose conception, half true and half false; nor
was this mingling of the false and true any less predominant in one of
Hugo's political odes than in Lamartine's personal and religious
meditations. Now, the whole bent of Sainte-Beuve's intellect was toward the
subtle drawing of distinctions, and even to-day a reader somewhat
romantically and emotionally inclined resents the manner in which his
scalpel cuts into the work of these poets and severs what is morbid from
what is sound. That is criticism; but it may easily be seen that such a habit
of mind when carried to excess would paralyse the poetic impulse. The
finest poetry, perhaps, is written when this discriminating principle works in
the writer strongly but unconsciously; when a certain critical atmosphere
about him controls his taste, while not compelling him to dull the edge of
impulse by too much deliberation. Boileau had created such an atmosphere
about Molière and Racine; Sainte-Beuve had attempted, but unsuccessfully,
to do the same for the poets of the romantic renaissance. His failure was due

in part to a certain lack of impressiveness in his own personality, but still
more to the notions of individual licence which lay at the very foundation of
that movement. There is a touch of real pathos in his superb tribute to
Boileau:

Let us salute and acknowledge to-day the noble and mighty harmony of the grand siècle. Without
Boileau, and without Louis XIV., who recognised Boileau as his Superintendent of Parnassus, what
would have happened? Would even the most talented have produced in the same degree what forms
their surest heritage of glory? Racine, I fear, would have made more plays like Bérénice; La Fontaine
fewer Fables and more Contes; Molière himself would have run to Scapins, and might not have
attained to the austere eminence of Le Misanthrope. In a word, each of these fair geniuses would
have abounded in his natural defects. Boileau, that is to say, the common sense of the poet-critic
authorised and confirmed by that of a great king, constrained them and kept them, by the respect for
his presence, to their better and graver tasks. And do you know what, in our days, has failed our
poets, so strong at their beginning in native ability, so filled with promise and happy inspiration?
There failed them a Boileau and an enlightened monarch, the twain supporting and consecrating each
other. So it is these men of talent, seeing themselves in an age of anarchy and without discipline,
have not hesitated to behave accordingly; they have behaved, to be perfectly frank, not like exalted
geniuses, or even like men, but like schoolboys out of school. We have seen the result.

Nobler tribute to a great predecessor has not often been uttered, and in
contrast one remembers the outrage that has been poured on Boileau's name
by the later poets of France and England. One recalls the scorn of the young
Keats, in those days when he took licence upon himself to abuse the King's
English as only a wilful genius can:

Ill-fated, impious race!
That blasphemed the bright Lyrist face to face,
And did not know it,—no, they went about,
Holding a poor decrepit standard out
Marked with most flimsy mottoes, and in large
The name of one Boileau!

I am not one to fling abuse on the school of Dryden and Pope, yet the
eighteenth century may to some minds justify the charge of Keats and the
romanticists. Certainly the critical restraint of French rules, passing to
England at a time when the tide of inspiration had run low, induced a
certain aridity of manner. But consider for a moment what might have been
the result in English letters if the court of Elizabeth had harboured a man of
authority such as Boileau, or, to put it the other way, if the large inspiration
of those poets and playwrights had not come before the critical sense of the
land was out of its swaddling clothes. What might it have been for us if a

Boileau and an Elizabeth together had taught Shakespeare to prune his
redundancies, to disentangle his language at times, to eliminate the relics of
barbarism in his dénouements; if they had compelled the lesser dramatists
to simplify their plots and render their characters conceivable moral agents;
if they had instructed the sonneteers in common sense and in the laws of the
sonnet; if they had constrained Spenser to tell a story,—consider what this
might have meant, not only to the writers of that day, but to the tradition
they formed for those that were to come after. We should have had our own
classics, and not been forced to turn to Athens for our canons of taste. There
would not have been for our confusion the miserable contrast between the
"correctness" of Queen Anne's day and the creative genius of Elizabeth's,
but the two together would have made a literature incomparable for richness
and judgment. It is not too much to say that the absence of such a
controlling influence at the great expansive moment of England is a loss for
which nothing can ever entirely compensate in our literature.
Such was the office which Sainte-Beuve sought to fulfil in the France of
his own day. That conscious principle of restraint might, he thought, when
applied to his own poetical work, introduce into French literature a style
like that of Cowper's or Wordsworth's in England; and to a certain extent he
was successful in this attempt. But in the end he found the Democritean
maxim too strong for him: Excludit sanos Helicone poetas; and, indeed, the
difference between the poet and the critic may scarcely be better defined
than in this, that in the former the principle of restraint works unconsciously
and from without, whereas in the latter it proceeds consciously and from
within. And finding himself debarred from Helicon (not by impotence, as
some would say, but by excess of self-knowledge), he deliberately
undertook to introduce a little more sanity into the notions of his
contemporaries. I have shown how at the very beginning of his career he
took upon himself privately such a task with Hugo. It might almost be said
that the history of his intellect is summed up in his growth toward the sane
and the simple; that, like Goethe, from whom so much of his critical
method derives, his life was a long endeavour to supplant the romantic
elements of his taste by the classical. What else is the meaning of his attack
on the excesses of Balzac? or his defence of Erasmus (le droit, je ne dis des
tièdes, mais des neutres), and of all those others who sought for themselves
a governance in the law of proportion? In one of his latest volumes he took

the occasion of Taine's History of English Literature to speak out strongly
for the admirable qualities of Pope:

I insist on this because the danger to-day is in the sacrifice of the writers and poets whom I will
call the moderate. For a long time they had all the honours: one pleaded for Shakespeare, for Milton,
for Dante, even for Homer; no one thought it necessary to plead for Virgil, for Horace, for Boileau,
Racine, Voltaire, Pope, Tasso,—these were accepted and recognised by all. To-day the first have
completely gained their cause, and matters are quite the other way about: the great and primitive
geniuses reign and triumph; even those who come after them in invention, but are still naïve and
original in thought and expression, poets such as Regnier and Lucretius, are raised to their proper
rank; while the moderate, the cultured, the polished, those who were the classics to our fathers, we
tend to make subordinate, and, if we are not careful, to treat a little too cavalierly. Something like
disdain and contempt (relatively speaking) will soon be their portion. It seems to me that there is
room for all, and that none need be sacrificed. Let us render full homage and complete reverence to
those great human forces which are like the powers of nature, and which like them burst forth with
something of strangeness and harshness; but still let us not cease to honour those other forces which
are more restrained, and which, in their less explosive expression, clothe themselves with elegance
and sweetness.

And this love of the golden mean, joined with the long wanderings of his
heart and his loneliness, produced in him a preference for scenes near at
hand and for the quiet joys of the hearth. So it was that the idyllic tales of
George Sand touched him quickly with their strange romance of the
familiar. Chateaubriand and the others of that school had sought out the
nature of India, the savannahs of America, the forests of Canada. "Here," he
says, "are discoveries for you,—deserts, mountains, the large horizons of
Italy; what remained to discover? That which was nearest to us, here in the
centre of our own France. As happens always, what is most simple comes at
the last." In the same way he praised the refined charm of a poet like
Cowper, and sought to throw into relief the purer and more homely verses
of a Parny: "If a little knowledge removes us, yet greater knowledge brings
us back to the sentiment of the beauties and graces of the hearth." Indeed,
there is something almost pathetic in the contrast between the life of this
laborious recluse, with his sinister distrust of human nature, and the way in
which he fondles this image of a sheltered and affectionate home.
But the nineteenth century was not the seventeenth, neither was Sainte-
Beuve a Boileau, to stem the current of exaggeration and egotism. His
innate sense of proportion brought him to see the dangerous tendencies of
the day, and, failing to correct them, he sank deeper into that disillusion
from which his weekly task was a long and vain labour of deliverance. He
took to himself the saying of the Abbé Galiani: "Continue your works; it is

a proof of attachment to life to compose books." Yet it may be that this very
disillusion was one of the elements of his success; for after all, the real
passion of literature, that perfect flower of the contemplative intellect,
hardly comes to a man until the allurement of life has been dispelled by
many experiences, each bringing its share of disappointment. Only, perhaps,
when the hope of love (the spes animi credula mutui) and the visions of
ambition, the belief in pleasure and the luxury of grief, have lost their sting,
do we turn to books with the contented understanding that the shadow is the
reality, and the seeming reality of things is the shadow. At least for the
critic, however it may be for the "creative" writer, this final deliverance
from self-deception would seem to be necessary. Nor do I mean any
invidious distinction when I separate the critic from the creative writer in
this respect. I know there is a kind of hostility between the two classes. The
poet feels that the critic by the very possession of this self-knowledge sets
himself above the writer who accepts the inspiration of his emotions
unquestioningly, while the critic resents the fact that the world at large
looks upon his work as subordinate, if not superfluous. And yet, in the case
of criticism, such as Sainte-Beuve conceived it, this distinction almost
ceases to exist. No stigma attaches to the work of the historian who
recreates the political activities of an age, to a Gibbon who raises a vast
bridge between the past and the present. Yet, certainly, the best and most
durable acts of mankind are the ideals and emotions that go to make up its
books, and to describe and judge the literature of a country, to pass under
review a thousand systems and reveries, to point out the meaning of each,
and so write the annals of the human spirit, to pluck out the heart of each
man's mystery and set it before the mind's eye quivering with life,—if this
be not a labour of immense creative energy the word has no sense to my
ears. We read and enjoy, and the past slips unceasingly from our memory.
We are like the foolish peasant: the river of history rolls at our feet, and for
ever will roll, while we stand and wait. And then comes this magician, who
speaks a word, and suddenly the current is stopped; who has power like the
wizards of old to bid the tide turn back upon itself, and the past becomes to
us as the present, and we are made the lords of time. I do not know how it
affects others, but for me, as I look at the long row of volumes which hold
the interpretation of French literature, I am almost overwhelmed at the
magnitude of this man's achievement.

Nor is it to be supposed that Sainte-Beuve, because he was primarily a
critic, drew his knowledge of life from books only, and wrote, as it were, at
second hand. The very contrary is true. As a younger man, he had mixed
much with society, and even in his later years, when, as he says, he lived at
the bottom of a well, he still, through his friendship with the Princesse
Mathilde and others of the great world, kept in close touch with the active
forces of the Empire. As a matter of fact, every one knows, who has read at
all in his essays, that he was first of all a psychologist, and that his
knowledge of the human breast was quite as sure as his acquaintance with
libraries. He might almost be accused of slighting the written word in order
to get at the secret of the writer. What attracted him chiefly was that middle
ground where life and literature meet, where life becomes self-conscious
through expression, and literature retains the reality of association with
facts. "A little poesy," he thought, "separates us from history and the reality
of things; much of poesy brings us back." Literature to him was one of the
arts of society. Hence he was never more at his ease, his touch was never
surer and his eloquence more communicable, than when he was dealing
with the great ladies who guided the society of the eighteenth century and
retold its events in their letters and memoirs,—Mme. du Deffand, Mme. de
Grafigny, Mlle. de Lespinasse, and those who preceded and followed.
Nowhere does one get closer to the critic's own disappointment than when
he says with a sigh, thinking of those irrecoverable days: "Happy time! all
of life then was turned to sociability." And he was describing his own
method as a critic, no less than the character of Mlle. de Lespinasse, when
he wrote: "Her great art in society, one of the secrets of her success, was to
feel the intelligence (l'esprit) of others, to make it prevail, and to seem to
forget her own. Her conversation was never either above or below those
with whom she spoke; she possessed measure, proportion, rightness of
mind. She reflected so well the impressions of others, and received so
visibly the influence of their intelligence, that they loved her for the success
she helped them to attain. She raised this disposition to an art. 'Ah!' she
cried one day, 'how I long to know the foible of every one!'" And this love
of the social side of literature, this hankering after la bella scuola when men
wrote under the sway of some central governance, explains Sainte-Beuve's
feeling of desolation amidst the scattered, individualistic tendencies of his
own day.

There lie the springs of Sainte-Beuve's critical art,—his treatment of
literature as a function of social life, and his search in all things for the
golden mean. There we find his strength, and there, too, his limitation. If he
fails anywhere, it is when he comes into the presence of those great and
imperious souls who stand apart from the common concerns of men, and
who rise above our homely mediocrities, not by extravagance or egotism,
but by the lifting wings of inspiration. He could, indeed, comprehend the
ascetic grandeur of a Pascal or the rolling eloquence of a Bossuet, but he
was distrustful of that fervid breath of poesy that comes and goes
unsummoned and uncontrolled. It is a common charge against him that he
was cold to the sublime, and he himself was aware of this defect, and
sought to justify it. "Il ne faut donner dans le sublime," he said, "qu'à la
dernière extrémité et à son corps défendant." Something of this, too, must
be held to account for the haunting melancholy that he could forget, but
never overcome. He might have lived with a kind of content in the society
of those refined and worldly women of the eighteenth century, but, missing
the solace of that support, he was unable amid the dissipated energies of his
own age to rise to that surer peace that needs no communion with others for
its fulfilment. Like the royal friend of Voltaire, he still lacked the highest
degree of culture, which is religion. He strove for that during many years,
but alone he could not attain to it. As early as 1839 he wrote, while staying
at Aigues-Mortes: "My soul is like this beach, where it is said Saint Louis
embarked: the sea and faith, alas! have long since drawn away." One may
excuse these limitations as the "defect of his quality," as indeed they are.
But more than that, they belong to him as a French critic, as they are to a
certain degree inherent in French literature. That literature and language, we
have been told by no less an authority than M. Brunetière, are pre-
eminently social in their strength and their weakness. And Sainte-Beuve
was indirectly justifying his own method when he pointed to the example of
Voltaire, Molière, La Fontaine, and Rabelais and Villon, the great ancestors.
"They have all," he said, "a corner from which they mock at the sublime." I
am even inclined to think that these qualities explain why England has
never had, and may possibly never have, a critic in any way comparable to
Sainte-Beuve; for the chief glory of English literature lies in the very field
where French is weakest, in the lonely and unsociable life of the spirit, just
as the faults of English are due to its lack of discipline and uncertainty of
taste. And after all, the critical temperament consists primarily in just this

linking together of literature and life, and in the levelling application of
common sense.
Yet if Sainte-Beuve is essentially French, indeed almost inconceivable in
English, he is still immensely valuable, perhaps even more valuable, to us
for that very reason. There is nothing more wholesome than to dip into this
strong and steady current of wise judgment. It is good for us to catch the
glow of his masterful knowledge of letters and his faith in their supreme
interest. His long row of volumes are the scholar's Summa Theologiæ. As
John Cotton loved to sweeten his mouth with a piece of Calvin before he
went to sleep, so the scholar may turn to Sainte-Beuve, sure of his never-
failing abundance and his ripe intelligence.

THE SCOTCH NOVELS
AND SCOTCH
HISTORY
Like many another innocent, no doubt, I was seduced not long ago by the
potent spell of Mr. Andrew Lang's name into reading his voluminous
History of Scotland. Being too, like Mr. Lang, sealed of the tribe of Sir
Walter, and knowing in a general way some of the romantic features of
Scotch annals, I was led to suppose that these bulky volumes would be
crammed from cover to cover with the pageantry of fair Romance. Alas, I
soon learned, as I have so often learned before, that a little knowledge is a
dangerous thing; and I was taught, moreover, a new application of several
well-worn lines of Milton. Amid the inextricable feuds of Britons, Scots,
Picts, and English; amid the incomprehensible medley of Bruces, Balliols,
Stuarts, Douglases, Plantagenets, and Tudors; amid the horrid tumult of
Roberts, Davids, Jameses, Malcolms (may their tribes decrease!), Mr.
Lang's reader, if he be of alien blood and foreign shores, wanders helpless
and utterly bewildered. On leaving that selva oscura I felt not unlike
Milton's courageous hero (in courage only, I trust) before the realm of
Chaos and eldest Night, where naught was perceptible but eternal anarchy
and noise of endless wars. Yet with this bold adventurer it might be said by
me:

I come no spy,
With purpose to explore or to disturb
The secrets of your realm; but by constraint
Wandering this darksome desert, as my way
Led through your spacious empire up to light.

For throughout the labyrinth of all this anfractuous narrative there was
indeed one guiding ray of light. As often as the author by way of anecdote
or allusion—and happily this occurred pretty frequently—mentioned the
works of Scott, a new and powerful interest was given to the page. The very
name of Scott seemed providentially symbolical of his office in literature,

and through him Scots history has become a theme of significance to all the
world.
On the other hand, one is equally impressed by the fact that the novels
owe much of their vitality to the manner in which they voice the spirit of
the national life; and we recognise the truth, often maintained and as often
disputed, that the final verdict on a novelist's work is generally determined
by the authenticity of his portraiture, not of individuals, but of a people, and
consequently by the lasting significance of the phase of society or national
life portrayed.
The conditions of the novel should seem in this respect to be quite
different from those of the poem. We are conscious within ourselves of
some principle of isolation and exclusion—the principium individuationis,
as the old schoolmen called it—that obstructs the completion of our being,
of some contracting force of nature that dwarfs our sympathies with our
fellow-men, that hinders the development of our full humanity, and denies
the validity of our hopes; and the office of the imagination and of the
imaginative arts is for a while to break down the walls of this narrowing
individuality and to bestow on us the illusion of unconfined liberty.
But if the end of the arts is the same, their methods are various, and this
variety extends even to the different genres of literature. The manner of the
epic, and in a still higher degree of the tragedy, is so to arouse the will and
understanding that their clogging limitations seem to be swept away, until
through our sympathy with the hero we feel ourselves to be acting and
speaking the great passions of humanity in their fullest and freest scope; for
this reason we call the characters of the poem types, and we believe that the
poet under the impulse of his inspiration is carried into a region above our
vision, where, like the exalted souls in Plato's dream, he beholds face to
face the great ideas of which our worldly life and circumstances are but
faulty copies. In this way Achilles stands as the perfect warrior, and
Odysseus as the enduring man of wiles; Hamlet is the man of doubts, and
Satan the creature of rebellious pride. It may be that this effort or inspiration
of the poet to represent mankind in idealised form will account in part for
the peculiar tinge of melancholy that is commonly an attribute of the artistic
temperament,—for the brooding uncertainty of Shakespeare, if as many
think Hamlet is the true voice of his heart, for the feeling of baffled despair
which led Goethe to create Faust, and for the self-tormenting of Childe

Harold. It is because the dissolving power of genius and the personality of
the man can never be quite reconciled; he is detached from nature and
attached to her at the same time. On the one hand his genius draws him to
contemplate life with the disinterestedness of a mind free from the
attachments of the individual, while on the other hand his own personality,
often of the most ardent character, drags him irresistibly to seek the
satisfaction of individual emotions. Like the Empedocles of Matthew
Arnold, baffled in the ineffable longing to escape themselves, these bearers
of the divine light are haled unwillingly

Back to this meadow of calamity,
This uncongenial place, this human life.

What to the reader is merely a pleasant and momentary illusion, or a
salutary excitation from without, is in the creative poet a partial dissolution
of his own personality. Shakespeare was not dealing in empty words when
he likened the poet to the lover and the lunatic as being of imagination all
compact; nor was Plato speaking mere metaphor when he said that "the poet
is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until
he has been inspired and is out of his senses and the mind is no longer in
him." In the hour of inspiration some darkened window is opened on the
horizon to eyes that are ordinarily confined within the four walls of his
meagre self, a door is thrown open to the heaven-sweeping gales, he hears
for a brief while the voice of the Over-soul speaking a language that with all
his toil he can barely render into human speech;—and when at last the door
is closed, the vision gone, and the voice hushed, he sits in the darkened
chamber of his own person, silent and forlorn.
I would not presume to describe absolutely the inner state of the poet
when life appears to him in its ideal form, but the means by which he
conveys his illusion to the reader is quite clear. The rhythm of his verse
produces on the mind something of the stimulating effect of music and this
effect is enhanced by the use of language and metaphor lifted out of the
common mould. Prose, however, has no such resources to impose on the
fancy a creation of its own, in which the individual will is raised above
itself. On the contrary, the office of the novel—and this we see more clearly
as fiction grows regularly more realistic—is to represent life as controlled
by environment and to portray human beings as the servants of the flesh.
This, I take it, was the meaning of Goethe in his definition of the genres:
"In the novel sentiments and events chiefly are exhibited, in the drama
characters and deeds." The procedure of the novel must be, so to speak, a
passive one. It depicts man as a creature of circumstance, and its only
method of escape is so to encompass the individual in circumstance as to
lend to his separate life something of the pomp of universality. It effects its
purpose by breadth rather than by exaltation. Its truest aim is not to
represent the actions of a single man as noteworthy in themselves, but to
represent the life of a people or a phase of society; in the great sweep of

human activity something of the same largeness and freedom is produced as
in the poetic idealisation of the individual will in the drama. Thus it happens
that the artistic validity of a novel depends first of all on the power of the
author to portray broadly and veraciously some aspect of this wider
existence.
Balzac, in some respects the master novelist, was clearly conscious of
this aim of his art; and his Comédie Humaine is a supreme effort to grasp
the whole range of French society. Nor would it be difficult in the case of
the greater English novelists to show that unwittingly—an Englishman
rarely if ever has the same knowledge of his art as a Frenchman—they
obeyed the same law. We admire Fielding and Smollett not so much for
their individual characterisations as for the joy we feel in escaping our
conventional timidity in the old-time tumultuous country life of England,
with all its rude strength and even its vulgarity. By a natural contrast we
read Jane Austen for her picture of rural security and stability, and are glad
to forget the vexations and uncertainties of life's warfare in that gentle
round of society, where greed and passion are reduced to petty foibles, and
where the errors of mankind only furnish material for malicious but
innocent satire. With Thackeray we put on the veneer of artificial society
which was the true idealism inherited by him from the eighteenth century;
and we move more freely amidst that gai monde because there runs through
the story of it such a biting satire of worldliness and snobbishness as flatters
us with the feeling of our own superiority. In Dickens we are carried into
the very opposite field of life, and for a while we move with those who are
the creatures of grotesque whims and emotions: caricatures we call his
people, but deep in our hearts we know that each of us longs at times to be
as humanity is in Dickens's world, the perfect and unreflecting creature of
his dearest whim—for this too is liberty. Thus it is that the interest of the
novel depends as much, or almost as much, on the intrinsic value of the
national life or phase of society reproduced as on the skill of the writer. The
prose author is in this respect far less a free agent than the poet and far more
the subject of his environment; for he deals less with the unchanging laws
of character and more with what he perceives outwardly about him. It is this
fact which leads many readers to prefer the English novelists to the French,
although the latter are unquestionably the greater masters of their craft.

Now the peculiar good fortune of Scott in this matter was most strongly
brought home to me in reading the narrative work of Mr. Lang. Fine and
entertaining as are Scott's more professedly historical novels, such as
Ivanhoe and Quentin Durward, I do not believe they could ever have
resisted the invasion of time were they not bolstered up by the stories that
deal more directly with the realities of Scotch life. There is, to be sure, in
the foreign tales a wonderfully pure vein of romance; but romantic writing
in prose cannot endure unless firmly grounded in realism, or unless, like
Hawthorne's work, it is surcharged with spiritual meanings. Not having the
power possessed by verse to convey illusion, it lacks also the vitality of
verse. Younger readers may take naturally to Ivanhoe or The Talisman,
because very little is required to evoke illusion with them. More mature
readers turn oftenest to Guy Mannering and those tales in which the
romance is the realism of Scotch life, finding here a fulness of interest that
is more than a compensation for the frequent slovenliness of Scott's
language and for the haphazard construction of his plots.
These negligences of the indifferent craftsman might, perhaps, need no
such compensation, for we have grown hardened at last to slovenliness in
fiction. But there are other limitations to Scott's powers that show more
clearly how much of his fame rests on the substratum of national life on
which he builds. An infinite variety of characters, from kings in the council
hall down to strolling half-witted gaberlunzies, move through the pages of
his novels; but, and the fact is notorious, the great Scotchman was little
better at painting the purple light of young desire than was our own Cooper.
There is something like love-making in Rob Roy, and Di Vernon has been
signalised by Mr. Saintsbury as one of his five chosen heroines; but in
general the scenes that form the ecstasy of most romance are dead and
perfunctory in Scott. And this is the more remarkable since we know that he
himself was a lover—and a disappointed lover, which is vastly more to the
point in art, as all the world knows. But in fact this inability to portray the
softer emotions is not an isolated phenomenon in Scott; he skims very
lightly over most of the deeper passions of the heart, seeming to avoid them
except in so far as they express themselves in action. His novels contain no
adequate picture of remorse or hatred, love or jealousy; neither do they
contain any such psychological analysis of the emotions as has made the
fame of subsequent writers. But there is an infinite variety of characters in
action, and a perfect understanding of that form of the imagination which

displays itself in whimsicalities corresponding to the "originals" or
"humourists" of the Elizabethan comedy.
The numberless quotations from "old plays" at the head of Scott's
chapters are not without significance. At times he approaches closer to
Shakespeare than any other writer, whether of prose or verse. In one scene
at least in The Bride of Lammermoor, where he describes the "singular and
gloomy delight" of the three old cummers about the body of their
contemporary, he lets us know that he has in mind the meeting of the
witches in Macbeth, and I think on the whole he excels the dramatist in his
own field. After all is said, the Shakespearian witch-scene is an arbitrary
exercise of the fancy, which fails to carry with it a complete sense of reality:
the illusion is not fully maintained. The dialogue in the novelist, on the
contrary, is instinct with thrilling suggestiveness, for the very reason that it
is based on the groundwork of national character. The superstitious awe is
here simple realism, from the beginning of the scene down to the warning
cry of the paralytic hag from the cottage:

"He's a frank man, and a free-handed man, the Master," said Annie Winnie, "and a comely
personage—broad in the shouthers, and narrow around the lunyies. He wad mak a bonny corpse; I
wad like to hae the streiking and winding o' him."
"It is written on his brow, Annie Winnie," returned the octogenarian, her companion, "that hand of
woman, or of man either, will never straught him; dead-deal will never be laid on his back, make you
your market of that, for I hae it frae a sure hand."
"Will it be his lot to die on the battle-ground then, Ailsie Gourlay? Will he die by the sword or the
ball, as his forbears hae dune before him, mony ane o'them?"
"Ask nae mair questions about it—he'll no be graced sae far," replied the sage.
"I ken ye are wiser than ither folk, Ailsie Gourlay. But wha tell'd ye this?"
"Fashna your thumb about that, Annie Winnie," answered the sibyl. "I hae it frae a hand sure
eneugh."
"But ye said ye never saw the foul thief," reiterated her inquisitive companion.
"I hae it frae as sure a hand," said Ailsie, "and frae them that spaed his fortune before the sark gaed
ower his head."
"Hark! I hear his horse's feet riding aff," said the other; "they dinna sound as if good luck was wi'
them."
"Mak haste, sirs," cried the paralytic hag from the cottage, "and let us do what is needfu', and say
what is fitting; for, if the dead corpse binna straughted, it will girn and thraw, and that will fear the
best o' us."

But more often Scott approaches the lesser lights of the Elizabethan
comedians, whose work is in general subject to the same laws as the novel,
and who filled their plays with whimsical creatures—

Bawd, squire, impostor, many persons more,
Whose manners, now called humours, feed the stage.

You cannot read through the dramatis personæ of one of these plays
(Witgood, Lucre, Hoard, Limber, Kix, Lamprey, Spichcock, Dampit, etc.)
without being reminded of the long list of originals that figure in the Scotch
novels; and in one case at least, Baron Bradwardine of Waverley, Scott goes
out of his way to compare him with a character of Ben Jonson's. And you
cannot but feel that Scott has surpassed his models on their own ground,
partly because his genius was greater and partly because the novel is a
wider and freer field for such characters than the drama—at least when the
drama is deprived of its stage setting. But Scott's greatest advantage is due
to the fact that what in England was mainly an exaggeration of the more
unsociable traits of character seems in Scotland to reach down to the very
foundation of the popular life. His characters are not the creation of
individual eccentricities only, but spring from an inexhaustible quaintness
of the national temper. From every standpoint we are led back to consider
the greatness of the author as depending on his happy genius in finding a
voice for a rare and noteworthy phase of society.
Much of the Scotch temperament, its self-dependence, clan attachments,
cunning, its gloomy exaltations relieved at times by a wide and serene
prospect, may be traced, as Buckle has so admirably shown, to the physical
conditions of the land; and in reading the history of Scotland, with its
stories of the adventures of Wallace and Bruce and its battles of
Bannockburn and Prestonpans, it seems quite fitting that the wild scenery of
the country should be constantly associated with the deeds of its heroes.
There is something of charm in the very names of the landscape—in the
haughs, corries, straths, friths, burns, and braes. The fascination of the
Scotch lakes and valleys was one of the first to awaken the world to an
admiration of savage nature, as we may read in Gray's letters; and Scott,
from Waverley's excursion into the wild fastnesses of highland robbers and
chiefs to the lonely sea-scenes of Zetland in The Pirate, has carried us
through a succession of natural pictures such as no other novelist ever

conceived. And he has maintained always that most difficult art of
describing minutely enough to convey the illusion of a particular scene and
broadly enough to evoke those general emotions which alone justify
descriptive writing. Perhaps his most notable success is the visit of Guy
Mannering to Ellangowan, where sea, sky, and land unite to form a picture
of strangely luminous beauty. He not only succeeded in exciting a new
romantic interest in Scotch scenery, but he has actually added to the market
price of properties. It is said that his descriptions are mentioned in the title
deeds of various estates as forming a part of their transmitted value.
But the scenery depicted by Scott is only the setting of a curious and
paradoxical life, and it is the light thrown on this life that lends the chief
interest to Mr. Lang's History. Owing in part to the peculiar position and
formation of the land, and in part to the strain of Celtic blood in the
Highland tribes, there was bred in the Scotch people an unusual mingling of
romance and realism, of imagination and worldly cunning, that sets them
quite apart from other races; and this paradoxical mingling of opposite
tendencies shows itself in the quality of their politics, their religion, and in
all their social manners.
Not the least interesting of Mr. Lang's chapters is that in which he
analyses the feudal chivalry of Scotland, and explains how it rested on a
more imaginative basis than in other countries; how the power of the chief
hung on unwritten rights instead of formal charters, and how the loyalty of
the clansmen was exalted to the highest pitch of personal enthusiasm. But to
complete the picture one should read Buckle's scathing arraignment of a
loyalty which was ready to sell its king and was no purer than the faith that
holds together a band of murderous brigands. So, too, in religion the Scotch
were perhaps more given to superstition, and were more ready to sacrifice
life and all else for their belief than any other people of Europe, except the
Spaniards, while at the same time their bigotry never interfered with a vein
of caution and shrewd worldliness. There is in Waverley an admirable
example at once of this paradoxical nature, and of the true basis of Scott's
strength. In the loyalism of Flora MacIvor he has attempted to embody an
ideal of the imagination not based on this national mingling of qualities—
though, of course, isolated individuals of that heroic type may have existed
in the land; and as a result he has produced a character that leaves the reader
perfectly cold and unconvinced. But the moment Waverley comes from the

MacIvors and descends to the real life of Scotland, mark the change. We are
immediately put on terra firma by the cautious reply of Waverley's guide
when asked if it is Sunday: "Could na say just preceesely; Sunday seldom
cam aboon the pass of Bally-Brough." Consider the mixture of bigotry and
worldly greed in Mr. Ebenezer Cruikshanks, the innkeeper, who compounds
for the sin of receiving a traveller on fastday by doubling the tariff. In any
other land Mr. Ebenezer Cruikshank would have been a hypocrite and a
scoundrel; in Scotland his religious fervour is quite as genuine as his
cunning; and the very audacity of the combination carries with it the
conviction of realism.
The same contrast of qualities will be found to mark the lesser traits of
character. Consider the long list of servants and retainers with their stiff-
necked devotion and their incorrigible self-seeking. In one of his notes
Scott relates the story of a retainer who when ordered to leave his master's
service replied: "In troth, and that will I not; if your honour disna ken when
ye hae a gude servant, I ken when I hae a gude master, and go away I will
not." At another time, when his master cried out in vexation: "John, you and
I shall never sleep under the same roof again!" the fellow calmly retorted,
"Where the deil can your honour be ganging?" In like manner the mixture
of devotion and self-seeking in that quaintest of followers, Richie
Moniplies, is worth a thousand false idealisations. To read almost on the
same page his immovable loyalty to Nigel and his brazen treachery in
presenting his own petition first to the King, is to gain at once an entrance
into a new region of psychology and to acquire a truer understanding of
Scotch history. At another time, when catechised about the alleged spirit in
Master Heriot's house, the good Moniplies gives an example of combined
superstition, scepticism, and cunning, which must be read at length—and all
the world has read it—to be appreciated. Perhaps the most useful
illustration to be gained from this same Moniplies is the strange contrast of
solemnity and humour, of reverence and familiarity, exhibited by him. I
need not repeat the description of that "half-pedant, half-bully," nor quote
the whole of his account of meeting with the King; let it be enough to call
attention to the curious mingling of mirth and solemnity in the way he
apostrophises the royal James: "My certie, lad, times are changed since ye
came fleeing down the backstairs of auld Holyrood House, in grit fear,
having your breeks in your hand without time to put them on, and Frank
Stewart, the wild Earl of Bothwell, hard at your haunches." There is in the

temper of worthy Moniplies something wholly different from the boisterous
humour of England and from the dry laughter of America; and this is due to
the continually upcropping substratum of imagination and romance in his
character. He would resemble the grotesque seriousness of Don Quixote,
were it not for a strain of sourness and suspicion that are quite foreign to the
generous Hidalgo.
So we might follow the paradox of Scotch character through its union of
gloomy moroseness with homely affections, of unrestrained emotionalism
with cold calculation, of awesome second-sight with the cheapest
charlatanry. In the end, perhaps, all these contradictions would resolve
themselves into the one peculiar anomaly of seeing the free romance of
enthusiasm rising like a flower—a flower often enough of sinister aspect—
out of the most prosaic grossness. Certainly it is the chief interest of Scotch
history—by showing that these contradictions actually exist in the national
temperament and by explaining so far as may be their origin—to confirm
for us our belief in what may be called the realism of Scott's romance. This
is that guiding thread which leads the weary voyager through the mists and
chaotic confusions of Caledonian annals up to light. And in that region of
light what wonderful cheer for the soul! Here, if anywhere in prose, the
illusions of the imagination may take pleasant possession of our heart, for
they come with the authority of a great national experience and walk hand
in hand with the soberest realities. Even the wild enthusiasm of a Meg
Merrilies barely awakens the voice of slumbering scepticism in the midst of
our secure conviction. And sojourning for a while in that world of strange
enchantment we seem to feel the limitations that vex our larger hopes and
hem in our wills broken down at the command of a magic voice. It is as if
that incompleteness of our nature, which the schoolmen called in their
fantastic jargon the principium individuationis and ascribed to the bondage
of these material bodies, were for a time forgotten, while we form a part of
that free and complex existence so faithfully portrayed in the Scotch novels.

SWINBURNE
It is no more than fair to confess at the outset that my knowledge of
Swinburne's work until recently was of the scantiest. The patent faults of his
style were of a kind to warn me away, and it might be equally true that I
was not sufficiently open to his peculiar excellences. Gladly, therefore, I
accepted the occasion offered by the new edition of his Collected Poems[5]
to enlarge my acquaintance with one of the much-bruited names of the age.
Nor did it seem right to trust to a hasty impression. The six volumes of his
poems, together with the plays and critical essays, have lain on my table for
several months, the companions of many a long day of leisure and the relish
thrown in between other readings of pleasure and necessity. Yet even now I
must admit something alien to me in the man and his work; I am not sure
that I always distinguish between what is spoken with the lips only and
what springs from the poet's heart. Possibly the lack of biographical
information is the partial cause of this uncertainty, for by a curious anomaly
Swinburne, one of the most egotistical writers of the century, has shown a
fine reticence in keeping the details of his life from the public. He was, we
know, born in London, in 1837, of an ancient and noble family, his father,
as befitted one whose son was to sing of the sea so lustily, being an admiral
in the navy. His early years were passed either at his grandfather's estate in
Northumbria or at the home of his parents in the Isle of Wight. From Eton
he went, after an interval of two years, to Balliol College, Oxford, leaving
in 1860 without a degree. The story runs that he knew more Greek than his
examiners, but failed to show a proper knowledge of Scripture. If the tale is
true, he made up well in after years for the deficiency, for few of our poets
have been more steeped in the language of the Bible. In London he came
under the influence of many of the currents moving below the surface; the
spell of that master of souls, Rossetti, touched him, and the dominance of
the ardent Mazzini. Since 1879 he has lived at "The Pines," on the edge of
Wimbledon Common, with Mr. Watts-Dunton, in what appears to be an
ideal atmosphere of sympathetic friendship. Mr. Douglas's recent
indiscretion on Theodore Watts-Dunton tells nothing of the life in this
scholarly retreat, but it does contain many photogravures of the works of

art, the handicraft of Rossetti largely, which adorn the dwelling with
beautiful memories.
Such is the meagre outline of Swinburne's life, nor do the few other
events recorded or the authentic anecdotes help us much to a more intimate
knowledge of the man. Yet he has the ambiguous gift of awakening
curiosity. Probably the first question most people ask on laying down his
Poems and Ballads (that péché de jeunesse, as he afterwards called it) is to
know how much of the book is "true." Mr. Swinburne has expressed a
becoming contempt for "the scornful or mournful censors who insisted on
regarding all the studies of passion or sensation attempted or achieved in it
as either confessions of positive fact or excursions of absolute fancy." One
does not like to be classed among the scornful or mournful, and yet I should
feel much easier in my appreciation of the Poems and Ballads if I knew
how far they were based on the actual experience of the author. The reader
of Swinburne feels constantly as if his feet were swept from the earth and
he were carried into a misty mid-region where blind currents of air beat
hither and thither; he longs for some anchor to reality. In the later books this
sensation becomes almost painful, and it is because the earlier publications,
the Atalanta and the first Poems and Ballads, contain more of definable
human emotion, whatever their relation to fact may be, that they are likely
to remain the most popular and significant of Swinburne's works.
The publication of Atalanta at the age of twenty-eight made him famous,
Poems and Ballads the next year made him almost infamous. The alarm
aroused in England by Dolores and Faustine still vibrates in our ears as we
repeat the wonderful rhythms. The impression is deepened by the
remarkable unity of feeling that runs through these voluble songs—the
feeling of infinite satiety. The satiety of the flesh hangs like a fatal web
about the Laus Veneris; the satiety of disappointment clings "with sullen
savour of poisonous pain" to The Triumph of Time; satiety speaks in the
Hymn to Proserpine, with its regret for the passing of the old heathen gods;
it seeks relief in the unnatural passion of Anactoria—

Clothed with deep eyelids under and above—
Yea, all thy beauty sickens me with love;

turns to the abominations of cruelty in Faustine; sings enchantingly of rest
in The Garden of Proserpine—

Here, where the world is quiet,
Here, where all trouble seems
Dead winds' and spent waves' riot
In doubtful dreams of dreams;
I watch the green field growing
For reaping folk and sowing,
For harvest-time and mowing,
A sleepy world of streams.

I am tired of tears and laughter,
And men that laugh and weep,
Of what may come hereafter
For men that sow to reap:
I am weary of days and hours,
Blown buds of barren flowers,
Desires and dreams and powers
And everything but sleep.

Now the acquiescence of weariness may have its inner compensations,
even its sacred joys; but satiety with its torturing impotence and its
hungering for forbidden fruit, is perhaps the most immoral word in the
language; its unashamed display causes a kind of physical revulsion in any
wholesome mind. My own feeling is that Swinburne, when he wrote these
poems, had little knowledge or experience of the world, but, as sometimes
happens with unbalanced natures, had sucked poison from his classical
reading until his brain was in a kind of ferment. While in this state he fell
under the spell of Baudelaire's deliberate perversion of the passions, with
results which threw the innocent Philistines of England into a fine
bewilderment of horror. That the poet's own heart was sound at core, and
that his satiety was of the imagination and not of the body, would seem
evident from the abruptness with which he passed, under a more
wholesome stimulus, to a very different mood. Unfortunately, his maturer
productions are lacking in the quality of human emotion which, however
derived, pulsates in every line of the Poems and Ballads. There is a certain
contagion in such a song as Dolores. Taking all things into consideration,
and with all one's repulsion for its substance, that poem is still the most
effective of Swinburne's works, a magnificent lyric of blended emotion and
music. It is a personification of the mood which produced the whole book, a
cry of the tormented heart to our Lady of Satiety. It is filled with regret for a
past of riotous pleasure; it pants with the lust of blood; it is gorgeous and
heavily scented, and the rhythm of it is the swaying of bodies drunken with
voluptuousness:

Fruits fail and love dies and time ranges;
Thou art fed with perpetual breath,
And alive after infinite changes,
And fresh from the kisses of death;
Of languors rekindled and rallied,
Of barren delights and unclean,
Things monstrous and fruitless, a pallid
And poisonous queen.

Could you hurt me, sweet lips, though I hurt you?
Men touch them, and change in a trice
The lilies and languors of virtue
For the raptures and roses of vice;
Those lie where thy foot on the floor is,
These crown and caress thee and chain,
O splendid and sterile Dolores,
Our Lady of Pain.

No doubt you will find here in germ all that was to mar the poet's later
work. The rhythm lacks resistance; there is no definite vision evoked out of
the rapid flux of images; the thought has no sure control over the words.
Dolores is almost in the same breath the queen of languors and raptures; she
is pallid and rosy, and a hostile criticism might find in the stanzas a
succession of contradictions. Compare the poem with the few lines in Jenny
where Rossetti has expressed the same idea of man's inveterate lust:
Like a toad within a stone
Seated while Time crumbles on;
Which sits there since the earth was cursed
For Man's transgression at the first—

and the difference is immediately apparent between that concentration of
mind which sums up a thought in a single definite image and the
fluctuating, impalpable vision of a poet carried away by the intoxication of
words. All that is true, and yet, somehow, out of this poem of Dolores there
does arise in the end a very real and memorable mood—real after the
fashion of a mood excited by music rather than by painting or sculpture.
The Poems and Ballads are splendid but malsain; they are impressive
and they have the strength, ambiguous it may be, of springing, directly or
indirectly, from a genuine emotion of the body. The change on passing to
the Songs Before Sunrise (published in 1871) is extraordinary. During the
five years that elapsed between these volumes the two master passions of

Swinburne's life laid hold on him with devastating effect—the passion of
Liberty and the passion of the Sea. Henceforth the influence of Mazzini and
Victor Hugo was to dominate him like an obsession. Now, heaven forbid
that one should say or think anything in despite of Liberty! The mere name
conjures up recollections of glory and pride, and in it the hopes of the future
are involved. And yet the very magnitude of its content renders it peculiarly
liable to misuse. To this man it means one thing, and to another another, and
many might cry out in the end, as Brutus did over virtue: "Thou art a naked
word, and I followed thee as though thou hadst been a substance!" Certainly
nothing is more dangerous for a poet than to fall into the habit of mouthing
those great words of liberty, virtue, patriotism, and the like, abstracted of
very definite events and very precise imagery. To Swinburne the sound of
liberty was a charm to cast him into a kind of frothing mania. It is true that
one or two of the poems on this theme are lifted up with a superb and
genuine lyric enthusiasm. The Eve of Revolution, for instance, with which
the Songs Before Sunrise open, rings with the stirring noise of trumpets:

I hear the midnight on the mountains cry
With many tongues of thunders, and I hear
Sound and resound the hollow shield of sky
With trumpet-throated winds that charge and cheer,
And through the roar of the hours that fighting fly,
Through flight and fight and all the fluctuant fear. . . .

But even here the reverberation of the words begins to conceal their
meaning, and such abstractions as "the roar of the hours" lead into the worst
of Swinburne's faults. Many of the longer hymns to liberty are nearly
unreadable—at least if any one can endure to the end of A Song of Italy, it is
not I. And as one goes through these rhapsodies that came out year after
year, one begins to feel that Swinburne's notion of liberty, when it is not
empty of meaning, is something even worse. Too often it is Kipling's gross
idolatry of England uttered in a kind of hysterical falsetto. It was not pretty
at a time of estrangement between England and France to speak of "French
hounds whose necks are aching Still from the chain they crave"; and one
needed not to sympathise with the Boers in the South African war to feel
something like disgust at Swinburne's abuse:

. . . the truth whose witness now draws near
To scourge these dogs, agape with jaws afoam,

Down out of life.

Probably the poet thought he was giving voice to a righteous and Miltonic
indignation. The best criticism of such a sonnet is to turn to Milton's
"Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints."
I have read somewhere a story of Swinburne's driving up late to a dinner
and entering into a violent altercation with the cabman, to the vast
amusement of the waiting guests within the house. That incorrigible wag
and hanger-on of genius, Charles Augustus Howell, was of the party and
acted as chorus to the dialogue outside. "The poet's got the best of it, as
usual," drawls the chorus. "He lives at the British Hotel in Cockspur Street,
and never goes anywhere except in hansoms, which, whatever the distance,
he invariably remunerates with one shilling. Consequently, when, as to-day,
it's a case of two miles beyond the radius, there's the devil's own row; but in
the matter of imprecation the poet is more than a match for cabby, who,
after five minutes of it, gallops off as though he had been rated by
Beelzebub himself." Really, 'tis a bit of gossip which may be taken as a
comment on not a few of Swinburne's dithyrambs of liberty.
Not less noble in significance is that other word, the sea, which
Swinburne now uses with endless reiteration. In his reverence for the
weltering ocean ways, the bulwark of England's freedom, he does of course
only follow the best traditions of English poetry from Beowulf to The Seven
Seas of Kipling, who is again in this his imitator. Nor is it the world of
water alone that dominates his imagination, but with it the winds and the
panorama of the sky ever rolling above. Already in the Poems and Ballads
there is a hint of the sympathy between the poet and this realm of water and
air. One of the finest passages in The Triumph of Time is that which begins:
I will go back to the great sweet mother,
Mother and lover of men, the sea.
I will go down to her, I and none other,
Close with her, kiss her and mix her with me.

But for the most part the atmosphere of those poems was too sultry for the
salt spray of ocean, and it is only with the Songs Before Sunrise, with the
obsession of the idea of liberty, that we are carried to the wide sea "that
makes immortal motion to and fro," and to the "shrill, fierce climes of
inconsolable air." Thenceforth the reader is like some wave-tossed mariner

who should take refuge in the cave of Æolus; at least he is forced to admire
the genius that presides over the gusty concourse:

Hic vasto rex Æolus antro
Luctantis ventos tempestatesque sonoras
Imperio premit ac vinclis et carcere frenat.
Illi indignantes magno cum murmure montis
Circum claustra fremunt.

The comparison is not so far-fetched as it might seem. There is a picture
of Swinburne in the Recollections of the late Henry Treffry Dunn which
almost personifies him as the storm-king:

It had been a very sultry day, and with the advancing twilight, heavy thunder-clouds were rolling
up. The door opened and Swinburne entered. He appeared in an abstracted state, and for a few
minutes sat silent. Soon, something I had said anent his last poem set his thoughts loose. Like the
storm that had just broken, so he began in low tones to utter lines of poetry. As the storm increased,
he got more and more excited and carried away by the impulse of his thoughts, bursting into a torrent
of splendid verse that seemed like some grand air with the distant peals of thunder as an intermittent
accompaniment. And still the storm waxed more violent, and the vivid flashes of lightning became
more frequent. But Swinburne seemed unconscious of it all, and whilst he paced up and down the
room, pouring out bursts of passionate declamation, faint electric sparks played round the wavy
masses of his luxuriant hair.... Amidst the rattle of the thunder he still continued to pour out his
thoughts, his voice now sinking low and sad, now waxing louder as the storm listed.

The scattered poems in his later books that rise above the Poems and
Ballads with a kind of grandiose suggestiveness are for the most part filled
with echoes of wind and water. That haunting picture of crumbling
desolation, A Forsaken Garden, lies "at the sea-down's edge between
windward and lee." One of the few poems that seem to contain the cry of a
real experience, At a Month's End, combines this aspect of nature admirably
with human emotion:

Silent we went an hour together,
Under grey skies by waters white.
Our hearts were full of windy weather,
Clouds and blown stars and broken light.

And the sensation left from a reading of Tristram of Lyonesse is of a vast
phantasmagoria, in which the beating of waves and the noise of winds, the
light of dawns breaking on the water, and the floating web of stars, are
jumbled together in splendid but inextricable confusion. So the coming of

love upon Iseult, as she sails over the sea with Tristram, takes this
magnificent comparison:

And as the august great blossom of the dawn
Burst, and the full sun scarce from sea withdrawn
Seemed on the fiery water a flower afloat,
So as a fire the mighty morning smote
Throughout her, and incensed with the influent hour
Her whole soul's one great mystical red flower
Burst. . . .

Further on the long confession of her passion at Tintagel, while Tristram has
gone over-sea to that other Iseult, will be broken by those thundering
couplets:

And swordlike was the sound of the iron wind,
And as a breaking battle was the sea.

But even to allude to all the passages of this kind in the poem—the
swimming of Tristram, his rowing, and the other scenes—would fill an
essay. In the end it must be confessed that this monotony of tone grows
fatiguing. The rhythmic grace of the metre is like a bubble blown into the
air, floating before our eyes with gorgeous iridescence—but when it touches
earth, it bursts. There lies the fatal weakness of all this frenzy over liberty
and this hymeneal chanting of sky and ocean; it has no basis in the homely
facts of the heart. Read the account of Tristram and Iseult in the wilderness
bower; it is all very beautiful, but you wonder why it leaves you so cold.
There is not a single detail to fix an image of the place in the mind, not a
word to denote that we are dealing with the passion of individual human
beings. Then turn to the same episode in the old poem of Gottfried von
Strassburg; read the scene where the forsaken King Mark, through a
window of their forest grotto, beholds the lovers lying asleep with the
sword of Tristram stretched between them:

He gazed on his heart's delight, Iseult, and deemed that never before had he seen her so fair. She
lay sleeping, with a flush as of mingled roses on her cheek, and her red and glowing lips apart; a little
heated by her morning wandering in the dewy meadow and by the spring. On her head was a chaplet
woven of clover. A ray of sunlight from the little window fell upon her face, and as Mark looked
upon her he longed to kiss her, for never had she seemed so fair and so lovable as now. And when he
saw how the sunlight fell upon her he feared lest it harm her, or awaken her, so he took grass and
leaves and flowers, and covered the window therewith, and spake a blessing on his love and
commended her to God, and went his way, weeping.

It is good to walk with head lifted to the stars, but it is good also to have
the feet well planted on earth. If another example of Swinburne's
abstraction from human interest were desired, one might take that rhapsody
of the wind-beaten waters and "land that is lonelier than ruin," called By the
North Sea. The picture of desolate and barren waste is one of the most
powerful creations in his later works (it was published in 1880), yet there is
still something wanting to stamp the impression into the mind. You turn
from it, perhaps, to Browning's similar description in Childe Roland and the
reason is at once clear. You come upon the line: "One stiff, blind horse, his
every bone a-stare," and pause. There is in Swinburne's poem no single
touch which arrests the attention in this way, concentrating the effect, as it
were, to a burning point, and bringing out the symbolic relation to human
life. Yet I cannot pass from this subject without noticing what may appear a
paradoxical phase of Swinburne's character. Only when he lowers his gaze
from the furies and ecstasies of man's ambition to the instinctive ways of
little children does his art become purely human. It would be easy to select
a full dozen of the poems dealing with child-life and the tender love
inspired by a child that touch the heart with their pure and chastened beauty.
I should feel that an essential element of his art were left unremarked if I
failed to quote some such examples as these two roundels on First
Footsteps and a A Baby's Death:

A little way, more soft and sweet
Than fields aflower with May,
A babe's feet, venturing, scarce complete
A little way.

Eyes full of dawning day
Look up for mother's eyes to meet,
Too blithe for song to say.

Glad as the golden spring to greet
Its first live leaflet's play,
Love, laughing, leads the little feet
A little way.

The little feet that never trod
Earth, never strayed in field or street,
What hand leads upward back to God
The little feet?

A rose in June's most honied heat,
When life makes keen the kindling sod,
Was not more soft and warm and sweet.

Their pilgrimage's period
A few swift moons have seen complete
Since mother's hands first clasped and shod
The little feet.

Despite the artificiality of the French form and a kind of revolving dizziness
of movement, one catches in these child-lyrics a simplicity of feeling not
unlike Longfellow's cry, "O little feet! that such long years." Swinburne
himself might not relish the comparison, which is none the less just.
It is not often safe to attempt to sum up a large body of work in a phrase,
yet with Swinburne we shall scarcely go astray if we seek such a
characterisation in the one word motion. Both the beauty and the fault of his
extraordinary rhythms are exposed in that term, and certainly his first claim
to originality lies in his rhythmical innovations. There had been nothing in
English comparable to the steady swell, like the waves of a subsiding sea, in
the lines of Atalanta and the Poems and Ballads. They brought a new
sensuous pleasure into our poetry. But with time this cadenced movement
developed into a kind of giddy race which too often left the reader belated
and breathless. Little tricks of composition, such as a repeated cæsura after
the seventh syllable of the pentameter, were employed to heighten the
speed. Moreover, the longer lines in many of the poems are not organic, but
consist of two or more short lines huddled together, the effect being to
eliminate the natural resting-places afforded by the sense. And occasionally
his metre is merely wanton. He uses one verse, for example, which with its
combination of gliding motion and internal jingles is uncommonly
irritating:

Hills and valleys where April rallies his radiant squadron of flowers and birds,
Steep strange beaches and lustrous reaches of fluctuant sea that the land engirds,
Fields and downs that the sunrise crowns with life diviner than lives in words,—

a page of this sets the nerves all a-jangle.
And if Swinburne is one of the obscurest of English poets, it is due in
large part to this same element of motion. A poem may move swiftly and
still be perfectly easy to follow, so long as the thought is simple and

concrete; witness the works of Longfellow. Or, on the other hand, the
thought may be tortuous and still invite reflection, so long as the metre
forces a continual pause in the reading; witness Browning. Now, no one
will accuse Swinburne of overloading his pages with thought; it is not there
the obscurity lies. The difficulty is with the number and the peculiarly
vague quality of his metaphors. Let me illustrate what I mean by this
vagueness. I open one of the volumes at random and my eye rests on this
line in A Channel Passage:

As a tune that is played by the fingers of death on the keys of life or of sleep.

If one were reading the poem and tried to evoke this image before his mind,
he would certainly need to pause for a moment. Or I open to Walter Savage
Landor and find this passage marked:

High from his throne in heaven Simonides,
Crowned with mild aureole of memorial tears
That the everlasting sun of all time sees
All golden, molten from the forge of years.

The sentiment is simple enough, and it might be sufficient to feel the force
of this in a general way, were it not that the metaphorical expression almost
compels one to pause and form an image of the whole before proceeding.
Such an image is, no doubt, possible; but the mingling of abstract and
concrete terms makes the act of visualisation slow and painful. At the same
time the rhythm is swift and continuous, so that any pause in the reading
demands a deliberate effort of the will. The result is a form of obscurity
which in many of the poems is almost prohibitive for an indolent man—and
are not the best readers always a little indolent? And there is another habit
—trick, one might say—which increases this vagueness of metaphor in a
curious manner. Constantly he uses a word in its ordinary, direct sense and
then repeats it as an abstract personification. I find an example to hand in
the stanzas written At a Dog's Grave:

The shadow shed round those we love shines bright
As love's own face.

It is only a mannerism such as another, but it recurs with sufficient
frequency to have an appreciable effect on the mind.

Indeed, if this vagueness of imagery were only an occasional appearance,
the difficulty would be slight. As a matter of fact, no inconsiderable portion
of Swinburne's work is made up of a stream of half-visualised abstractions
that crowd upon one another with the motion of clouds driven below the
moon. He is more like Walt Whitman in this respect than any other poet in
the language. Whitman is concrete and human and very earthly, but, with
this difference, there is in both writers the same thronging procession of
images which flit by without allowing the reader to concentrate his attention
upon a single impression; they are both poets of vast and confused motion.
Swinburne is notable for his want of humour, yet he is keen enough to see
how close this flux of high-sounding words lies to the absurd. In the present
collected edition of his poems he has included The Heptalogia, or Seven
against Sense, a series of parodies which does not spare his own
mannerisms. Some scandalised Philistines, I doubt, might even need to be
told that Nephelidia was a parody:

Nay, for the nick of the tick of the time is a tremulous touch on the temples of
terror,
Strained as the sinews yet strenuous with strife of the dead who is dumb as the
dust-heaps of death:
Surely no soul is it, sweet as the spasm of erotic emotional exquisite error,
Bathed in the balms of beatified bliss, beatific itself by beatitude's breath.

Pretty much all the traits of Swinburne's style are there—the long
breathless lines with their flowing dactyls or anapæsts, the unabashed
alliteration, the stream of half-visualised images, the trick of following an
epithet with its own abstract substantive, the sense of motion, and above all
the accumulation of words. Of this last trait of verbosity I have said
nothing, for the reason that it is too notorious to need mentioning. It may
not, however, be superfluous to point out a little more precisely the special
form his tautology assumes. He is never more graphic and nearer to nature
than when he describes the ecstasy of swimming at sea. He is himself
passionately fond of the exercise, and once at least was almost drowned in
the Channel. Let us take, then, a stanza from A Swimmer's Dream:

All the strength of the waves that perish
Swells beneath me and laughs and sighs,
Sighs for love of the life they cherish,
Laughs to know that it lives and dies,
Dies for joy of its life, and lives

Thrilled with joy that its brief death gives—
Death whose laugh or whose breath forgives
Change that bids it subside and rise.

Pass the fault of beginning with the abstraction "strength"—the first two
lines are graphic and reproduce a real sensation; the second two lines are an
explanatory repetition; the last four dissolve both image and emotion into a
flood of words. It is the common procedure in the later poems; it renders the
regular dramas (with the exception of the earlier Chastelard) almost
intolerably tedious.
And what is the impression of the man himself that remains after living
with his works for several months? The frankness with which he parodies
his own eccentricities might seem to indicate a becoming modesty, and yet
that is scarcely the word that rises first to the lips. Indeed, when I read in
the very opening of the Dedicatory Epistle that precedes the present edition
of his poems such a statement as that "he finds nothing that he could wish
to cancel, to alter, or to unsay, in any page he has ever laid before his
reader," I was prepared for a character quite the contrary of modest, and as I
turned page after page, there became fixed in my mind a feeling that I
should hesitate to call personal repulsion—a feeling of annoyance at least,
for which no explanation was present. Only when I reached Atalanta in
Calydon, in the fourth volume, did the reason of this become evident. That
poem, exquisite in many ways, is filled with talk of time and gods, of love
and hate, of life and death, of all high-sounding words that lend gravity to
poetry, and yet in the end it is itself light and not grave. The very needless
reiteration of these words, their bandying from verse to verse, deprives
them of impressiveness. No, a true poet who respects the sacredness of
noble ideas, who cherishes some awe for the mysteries, does not buffet
them about as a shuttlecock; he uses them sparingly and only when the
thought rises of necessity to those heights. There is a lack of emotional
breeding, almost an indecency, in Swinburne's easy familiarity with these
great things of the spirit.
And this judgment is confirmed by turning to his prose. I trust it is not
prejudice, but after a while the vociferous and endless praise of Victor Hugo
in his essays had a curious effect upon me. I began to ask: Is the critic really
thinking of Hugo alone, or is half of this frenzied adulation meant for his
own artistic methods? "Malignity and meanness, platitude and perversity,

decrepitude of cankered intelligence and desperation of universal rancor,"
he exclaims against Sainte-Beuve; and over the other critics of his idol he
cries out, "The lazy malignity of envious dullness is as false and fatuous as
it is common and easy." Can one avoid the surmise that he has more than
Hugo to avenge in such tirades? It is the same with every one who is
opposed to his own notions of art. Of Walt Whitman it is: "The dirty,
clumsy paws of a harper whose plectrum is a muckrake." Of a French
classicist: "It is the business of a Nisard to pass judgment and to bray." And
of those who intimate (he is ostensibly defending Rossetti) that beauty and
power of expression can accord with emptiness or sterility of matter: "This
flattering unction the very foolishest of malignants will hardly in this case
be able to lay upon the corrosive sore which he calls his soul." Sometimes, I
admit, this manner of invective rises to a sublimity of fury that sounds like
nothing so much as a combination of Carlyle and Shelley. For example:
"The affection was never so serious as to make it possible for the most
malignant imbecile to compare or to confound him [Jowett] with such
morally and spiritually typical and unmistakable apes of the Dead Sea as
Mark Pattison, or such renascent blossoms of the Italian renascence as the
Platonic amorist of blue-breeched gondoliers who is now in Aretino's
bosom." It's not criticism; it's not fair to Mark Pattison or to John Addington
Symonds, but it is sublime. It is a storm of wind only, but it leaves a
devastated track.
Enough has been said to indicate the trait of character that prevails
through these pages of eulogy and vituperation. It is not nice to apply so
crass a word as conceit to one who undoubtedly belongs to the immortals of
our pantheon, yet the expression forces itself upon me. Listen to another of
his outbursts, this time against Matthew Arnold: "His inveterate and
invincible Philistinism, his full community of spirit and faith, in certain
things of import, with the vulgarest English mind!" Does not the quality
begin to define itself more exactly? There is a phrase they use in France,
épater le bourgeois, of those artistic souls who contrast themselves by a
kind of ineffable contempt with commonplace humanity, and who take
pleasure in tweaking the nose, so to speak, of the amiable plebeian. Have a
care, gentlemen! The Philistine has a curious trick of revenging himself in
the long run. For my own part, when it comes to a breach between the
poetical and the prosaic, I take my place submissively with the latter. There
is at least a humble safety in retaining one's pleasure in certain things of

import with the vulgarest English mind, and if it were obligatory to choose
between them (as, happily, it is not) I would surrender the wind-swept
rhapsodies of Swinburne for the homely conversation of Whittier.

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI
Probably the first impression one gets from reading the Complete
Poetical Works of Christina Rossetti, now collected and edited by her
brother, Mr. W. M. Rossetti,[6] is that she wrote altogether too much, and
that it was a doubtful service to her memory to preserve so many poems
purely private in their nature. The editor, one thinks, might well have shown
himself more "reverent of her strange simplicity." For page after page we
are in the society of a spirit always refined and exquisite in sentiment, but
without any guiding and restraining artistic impulse; she never drew to the
shutters of her soul, but lay open to every wandering breath of heaven. In
comparison with the works of the more creative poets her song is like the
continuous lisping of an æolian harp beside the music elicited by cunning
fingers. And then, suddenly, out of this sweet monotony, moved by some
stronger, clearer breeze of inspiration, there sounds a strain of wonderful
beauty and flawless perfection, unmatched in its own kind in English
letters. An anonymous purveyor of anecdotes has recently told how one of
these more exquisite songs called forth the enthusiasm of Swinburne. It was
just after the publication of Goblin Market and Other Poems, and in a little
company of friends that erratic poet and critic started to read aloud from the
volume. Turning first to the devotional paraphrase which begins with
"Passing away, saith the World, passing away," he chanted the lines in his
own emphatic manner, then laid the book down with a vehement gesture.
Presently he took it up again, and a second time read the poem through,
even more impressively. "By God!" he exclaimed at the end, "that's one of
the finest things ever written!"

Passing away, saith the World, passing away:
Chances, beauty, and youth, sapped day by day,
Thy life never continueth in one stay.
Is the eye waxen dim, is the dark hair changing to grey,
That hath won neither laurel nor bay?
I shall clothe myself in Spring and bud in May:
Thou, root-stricken, shalt not rebuild thy decay
On my bosom for aye.
Then I answered: Yea.

Passing away, saith my Soul, passing away:
With its burden of fear and hope, of labour and play,
Hearken what the past doth witness and say:
Rust in thy gold, a moth is in thine array,
A canker is in thy bud, thy leaf must decay.
At midnight, at cockcrow, at morning, one certain day
Lo the Bridegroom shall come and shall not delay;
Watch thou and pray.
Then I answered: Yea.

Passing away, saith my God, passing away:
Winter passeth after the long delay:
New grapes on the vine, new figs on the tender spray,
Turtle calleth turtle in Heaven's May.
Though I tarry, wait for Me, trust Me, watch and pray:
Arise, come away, night is past and lo it is day:
My love, My sister, My spouse, thou shalt hear Me say.
Then I answered: Yea.

And Swinburne, somewhat contrary to his wont, was right. Purer
inspiration, less troubled by worldly motives, than these verses cannot be
found. Nor would it be difficult to discover in their brief compass most of
the qualities that lend distinction to Christina Rossetti's work. Even her
monotone, which after long continuation becomes monotony, affects one
here as a subtle device heightening the note of subdued fervour and
religious resignation; the repetition of the rhyming vowel creates the feeling
of a secret expectancy cherished through the weariness of a frustrate life. If
there is any excuse for publishing the many poems that express the mere
unlifted, unvaried prayer of her heart, it is because their monotony may
prepare the mind for the strange artifice of this solemn chant. But such a
preparation demands more patience than a poet may justly claim from the
ordinary reader. Better would be a volume of selections from her works,
including a number of poems of this character. It would stand, in its own
way, supreme in English literature,—as pure and fine an expression of the
feminine genius as the world has yet heard.
It is, indeed, as the flower of strictly feminine genius that Christina
Rossetti should be read and judged. She is one of a group of women who
brought this new note into Victorian poetry,—Louisa Shore, Jean Ingelow,
rarely Mrs. Browning, and, I may add, Mrs. Meynell. She is like them, but
of a higher, finer strain than they (ϰαλαὶ δέ τε πᾶσαι), and I always think of
her as of her brother's Blessed Damozel, circled with a company of singers,

yet holding herself aloof in chosen loneliness of passion. She, too, has not
quite ceased to yearn toward earth:

And still she bowed herself and stooped
Out of the circling charm;
Until her bosom must have made
The bar she leaned on warm,
And the lilies lay as if asleep
Along her bended arm.

I have likened the artlessness of much of her writing to the sweet
monotony of an æolian harp; the comparison returns as expressing also the
purely feminine spirit of her inspiration. There is in her a passive surrender
to the powers of life, a religious acquiescence, which wavers between a
plaintive pathos and a sublime exultation of faith. The great world, with its
harsh indifference for the weak, passes over her as a ruinous gale rushes
over a sequestered wood-flower; she bows her head, humbled but not
broken, nor ever forgetful of her gentle mission,—

And strong in patient weakness till the end.

She bends to the storm, yet no one, not the great mystics nor the greater
poets who cry out upon the sound and fury of life, is more constantly
impressed by the vanity and fleeting insignificance of the blustering power,
or more persistently looks for consolation and joy from another source. But
there is a difference. Read the masculine poets who have heard this mystic
call of the spirit, and you feel yourself in the presence of a strong will that
has grasped the world, and, finding it insufficient, deliberately casts it away;
and there is no room for pathetic regret in their ruthless determination to
renounce. But this womanly poet does not properly renounce at all, she
passively allows the world to glide away from her. The strength of her
genius is endurance:

She stands there like a beacon through the night,
A pale clear beacon where the storm-drift is—
She stands alone, a wonder deathly-white:
She stands there patient, nerved with inner might,
Indomitable in her feebleness,
Her face and will athirst against the light.

It is characteristic of her feminine disposition that the loss of the world
should have come to her first of all in the personal relation of love. And
here we must signalise the chief service of the editor toward his sister. It
was generally known in a vague way, indeed it was easy to surmise as much
from her published work, that Christina Rossetti bore with her always the
sadness of unfulfilled affection. In the introductory Memoir her brother has
now given a sufficiently detailed account of this matter to remove all
ambiguity. I am not one to wish that the reserves and secret emotions of an
author should be displayed for the mere gratification of the curious; but in
this case the revelation would seem to be justified as a needed explanation
of poems which she herself was willing to publish. Twice, it appears, she
gave her love, and both times drew back in a kind of tremulous awe from
the last step. The first affair began in 1848, before she was eighteen, and ran
its course in about two years. The man was one James Collinson, an artist of
mediocre talent who had connected himself with the Pre-raphaelite
Brotherhood. He was originally a Protestant, but had become a Roman
Catholic. Then, as Christina refused to ally herself to one of that faith, he
compliantly abandoned Rome for the Church of England. His conscience,
however, which seems from all accounts to have been of a flabby
consistency, troubled him in the new faith, and he soon reverted to
Catholicism. Christina then drew back from him finally. It is not so easy to
understand why she refused the second suitor, with whom she became
intimately acquainted about 1860, and whom she loved in her own retiring
fashion until the day of her death. This was Charles Bagot Cayley, a brother
of the famous Cambridge mathematician, himself a scholar and in a small
way a poet. Some idea of the man may be obtained from a notice of him
written by Mr. W. M. Rossetti for the Athenæum after his death. "A more
complete specimen than Mr. Charles Cayley," says Mr. Rossetti, "of the
abstracted scholar in appearance and manner—the scholar who constantly
lives an inward and unmaterial life, faintly perceptive of external facts and
appearances—could hardly be conceived. He united great sweetness to
great simplicity of character, and was not less polite than unworldly." One
might suppose that such a temperament was peculiarly fitted to join with
that of the secluded poetess, and so, to judge from her many love poems, it
actually was. Of her own heart or of his there seems to have been no doubt
in her mind. Even in her most rapturous visions of heaven, like the yearning

cry of the Blessed Damozel, the memory of that stilled passion often breaks
out:

How should I rest in Paradise,
Or sit on steps of heaven alone?
If Saints and Angels spoke of love,
Should I not answer from my throne,
Have pity upon me, ye my friends,
For I have heard the sound thereof?

She seems even not to have been unfamiliar with the hope of joy, and I
would persuade myself that her best-known lyric of gladness, "My heart is
like a singing-bird," was inspired by the early dawning of this passion. But
the hope and the joy soon passed away and left her only the solemn refrain
of acquiescence: "Then I answered: Yea." Her brother can give no sufficient
explanation of this refusal on her part to accept the happiness almost within
her hand, though he hints at lack of religious sympathy between the two.
Some inner necessity of sorrow and resignation, one almost thinks, drew
her back in both cases, some perception that the real treasure of her heart
lay not in this world:

A voice said, "Follow, follow": and I rose
And followed far into the dreamy night,
Turning my back upon the pleasant light.
It led me where the bluest water flows,
And would not let me drink: where the corn grows
I dared not pause, but went uncheered by sight
Or touch: until at length in evil plight
It left me, wearied out with many woes.
Some time I sat as one bereft of sense:
But soon another voice from very far
Called, "Follow, follow": and I rose again.
Now on my night has dawned a blessed star:
Kind steady hands my sinking steps sustain,
And will not leave me till I go from hence.

It might seem that here was a spirit of renunciation akin to that of the
more masculine mystics; indeed, a great many of her poems are,
unconsciously I presume, almost a paraphrase of that recurring theme of the
Imitation: "Nolle consolari ab aliqua creatura," and again: "Amore igitur
Creatoris, amorem hominis superavit; et pro humano solatio, divinum
beneplacitum magis elegit." She, too, was unwilling to find consolation in

any creature, and turned from the love of man to the love of the Creator; yet
a little reading of her exquisite hymns will show that this renunciation has
more the nature of surrender than of deliberate choice:

He broke my will from day to day;
He read my yearnings unexprest,
And said them nay.

The world is withheld from her by a power above her will, and always this
power stands before her in that peculiarly personal form which it is wont to
assume in the feminine mind. Her faith is a mere transference to heaven of a
love that terrifies her in its ruthless earthly manifestation; and the passion of
her life is henceforth a yearning expectation of the hour when the
Bridegroom shall come and she shall answer, Yea. Nor is the earthly source
of this love forgotten; it abides with her as a dream which often is not easily
distinguished from its celestial transmutation:

O dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet,
Whose wakening should have been in Paradise,
Where souls brimful of love abide and meet;
Where thirsting longing eyes
Watch the slow door
That opening, letting in, lets out no more.

Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live
My very life again though cold in death:
Come back to me in dreams, that I may give
Pulse for pulse, breath for breath:
Speak low, lean low,
As long ago, my love, how long ago.

It is this perfectly passive attitude toward the powers that command her
heart and her soul—a passivity which by its completeness assumes the
misguiding semblance of a deliberate determination of life—that makes her
to me the purest expression in English of the feminine genius. I know that
many would think this pre-eminence belongs to Mrs. Browning. They
would point out the narrowness of Christina Rossetti's range, and the larger
aspects of woman's nature, neglected by her, which inspire some of her
rival's best-known poems. To me, on the contrary, it is the very scope
attempted by Mrs. Browning that prevents her from holding the place I
would give to Christina Rossetti. So much of Mrs. Browning—her political

ideas, her passion for reform, her scholarship—simply carries her into the
sphere of the masculine poets, where she suffers by an unfair comparison.
She would be a better and less irritating writer without these excursions into
a field for which she was not entirely fitted. The uncouthness that so often
mars her language is partly due to an unreconciled feud between her
intellect and her heart. She had neither a woman's wise passivity nor a
man's controlling will. Even within the range of strictly feminine powers
her genius is not simple and typical. And here I must take refuge in a
paradox which is like enough to carry but little conviction. Nevertheless, it
is the truth. I mean to say that probably most women will regard Mrs.
Browning as the better type of their sex, whereas to men the honour will
seem to belong to Miss Rossetti; and that the judgment of a man in this
matter is more conclusive than a woman's. This is a paradox, I admit, yet its
solution is simple. Women will judge a poetess by her inclusion of the
larger human nature, and will resent the limiting of her range to the qualities
that we look upon as peculiarly feminine. The passion of Mrs. Browning,
her attempt to control her inspiration to the demands of a shaping intellect,
her questioning and answering, her larger aims, in a word her effort to
create,—all these will be set down to her credit by women who are as
appreciative of such qualities as men, and who will not be annoyed by the
false tone running through them. Men, on the contrary, are apt, in accepting
a woman's work or in creating a female character, to be interested more in
the traits and limitations which distinguish her from her masculine
complement. They care more for the idea of woman, and less for woman as
merely a human being. Thus, for example, I should not hesitate to say that
in this ideal aspect Thackeray's heroines are more womanly than George
Eliot's,—though I am aware of the ridicule to which such an opinion lays
me open; and for the same reason I hold that Christina Rossetti is a more
complete exemplar of feminine genius, and, as being more perfect in her
own sphere, a better poet than Mrs. Browning. That disconcerting sneer of
Edward FitzGerald's, which so enraged Robert Browning, would never have
occurred to him, I think, in the case of Miss Rossetti.
There is a curious comment on this contrast in the introduction to
Christina Rossetti's Monna Innominata, a sonnet-sequence in which she
tells her own story in the supposed person of an early Italian lady. "Had the
great poetess of our own day and nation," she says, "only been unhappy
instead of happy, her circumstances would have invited her to bequeath to

us, in lieu of the Portuguese Sonnets, an inimitable 'donna innominata'
drawn not from fancy, but from feeling, and worthy to occupy, a niche
beside Beatrice and Laura." Now this sonnet-sequence of Miss Rossetti's is
far from her best work, and holds a lower rank in every way than that
passionate self-revelation of Mrs. Browning's; yet to read these confessions
of the two poets together is a good way to get at the division between their
spirits. In Miss Rossetti's sonnets all those feminine traits I have dwelt on
are present to a marked, almost an exaggerated, degree. They are
harmonious within themselves, and filled with a quiet ease; only the higher
inspiration is lacking to them in comparison with her Passing Away, and
other great lyrics. In Mrs. Browning, on the contrary, one cannot but feel a
disturbing element. The very tortuousness of her language, the straining to
render her emotion in terms of the intellect, introduces a quality which is
out of harmony with the ground theme of feminine surrender. More than
that, this submission to love, if looked at more closely, is itself in large part
such as might proceed from a man as well as from a woman, so that there
results an annoying confusion of masculine and feminine passion. Take, for
instance, the twenty-second of the Portuguese Sonnets, one of the most
perfect in the series:

When our two souls stand up erect and strong,
Face to face, drawing nigher and nigher,
Until the lengthening wings break into fire
At either curvèd point,—What bitter wrong
Can earth do to us, that we should not long
Be here contented? Think. In mounting higher,
The angels would press on us, and aspire
To drop some golden orb of perfect song
Into our deep, dear silence. Let us stay
Rather on earth, Beloved,—where the unfit
Contrarious moods of men recoil away
And isolate pure spirits, and permit
A place to stand and love in for a day,
With darkness and the death-hour rounding it.

That is noble verse, undoubtedly. The point is that it might just as well have
been written by a man to a woman as the contrary; it would, for example, fit
perfectly well into Dante Gabriel Rossetti's House of Life. There is here no
passivity of soul; the passion is not that of acquiescence, but of
determination to press to the quick of love. Only, perhaps, a certain falsetto
in the tone (if the meaning of that word may be so extended) shows that,

after all, it was written by a woman, who in adopting the masculine pitch
loses something of fineness and exquisiteness.
A single phrase of the sonnet, that "deep, dear silence," links it in my
mind with one of Christina Rossetti's not found in the Monna Innominata,
but expressing the same spirit of resignation. It is entitled simply Rest:

O Earth, lie heavily upon her eyes;
Seal her sweet eyes weary of watching, Earth;
Lie close around her; leave no room for mirth
With its harsh laughter, nor for sound of sighs.
She hath no questions, she hath no replies,
Hushed in and curtained with a blessed dearth
Of all that irked her from the hour of birth;
With stillness that is almost Paradise.
Darkness more clear than noonday holdeth her,
Silence more musical than any song;
Even her very heart has ceased to stir:
Until the morning of Eternity
Her rest shall not begin nor end, but be;
And when she wakes she will not think it long.

Am I misguided in thinking that in this stillness, this silence more musical
than any song, the feminine heart speaks with a simplicity and consummate
purity such as I quite fail to hear in the Portuguese Sonnets, admired as
those sonnets are? Nor could one, perhaps, find in all Christina Rossetti's
poems a single line that better expresses the character of her genius than
these magical words: "With stillness that is almost Paradise." That is the
mood which, with the passing away of love, never leaves her; that is her
religion; her acquiescent Yea, to the world and the soul and to God. Into that
region of rapt stillness it seems almost a sacrilege to penetrate with
inquisitive, critical mind; it is like tearing away the veil of modesty. I will
not attempt to bring out the beauty of her mood by comparing it with that of
the more masculine quietists, who reach out and take the kingdom of
Heaven by storm, and whose prayer is, in the words of Tennyson:

Our wills are ours, we know not how;
Our wills are ours, to make them Thine.

It will be better to quote one other poem, perhaps her most perfect work
artistically, and to pass on:

UP-HILL

Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day's journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.

But is there for the night a resting-place?
A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.
May not the darkness hide it from my face?
You cannot miss that inn.

Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?
Those who have gone before.
Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?
They will not keep you standing at that door.

Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?
Of labour you shall find the sum.
Will there be beds for me and all who seek?
Yea, beds for all who come.

The culmination of her pathetic weariness is always this cry for rest, a
cry for supreme acquiescence in the will of Heaven, troubled by no personal
volition, no desire, no emotion, save only love that waits for blessed
absorption. Her latter years became what St. Teresa called a long "prayer of
quiet"; and her brother's record of her secluded life in the refuge of his
home, and later in her own house on Torrington Square, reads like the
saintly story of a cloistered nun. It might be said of her, as of one of the
fathers, that she needed not to pray, for her life was an unbroken
communion with God. And yet that is not all. It is a sign of her utter
womanliness that envy for the common affections of life was never quite
crushed in her heart. Now and then through this monotony of resignation
there wells up a sob of complaint, a note not easy, indeed, to distinguish
from that amari aliquid of jealousy, which Thackeray, cynically, as some
think, always left at the bottom of his gentlest feminine characters. The
fullest expression of this feeling is in one of her longer poems, The Lowest
Room, which contrasts the life of two sisters, one of whom chooses the
ordinary lot of woman with home and husband and children, while the other
learns, year after tedious year, the consolation of lonely patience. The spirit
of the poem is not entirely pleasant. The resurgence of personal envy is a
little disconcerting; and the only comfort to be derived from it is the proof

that under different circumstances Christina Rossetti might have given
expression to the more ordinary lot of contented womanhood as perfectly as
she sings the pathos and hope of the cloistered life. Had that first voice,
which led her "where the bluest water flows," suffered her also to quench
the thirst of her heart, had not that second voice summoned her to follow,
this might have been. But literature, I think, would have lost in her gain. As
it is, we must recognise that the vision of fulfilled affection and of quiet
home joys still troubled her, in her darker hours, with a feeling of
embittered regret. Two or three of the stanzas of The Lowest Room even
evoke a reminiscence of that scene in Thomson's City of Dreadful Night,
where the "shrill and lamentable cry" breaks through the silence of the
shadowy congregation:

In all eternity I had one chance,
One few years' term of gracious human life,
The splendours of the intellect's advance,
The sweetness of the home with babes and wife.

But if occasionally this residue of bitterness in Christina Rossetti recalls
the more acrid genius of James Thomson, yet a comparison of the two poets
(and such a comparison is not fantastic, however unexpected it may appear)
would set the feminine character of our subject in a peculiarly vivid light.
Both were profoundly moved by the evanescence of life, by the
deceitfulness of pleasure, while both at times, Thomson almost continually,
were troubled by the apparent content of those who rested in these joys of
the world. Both looked forward longingly to the consummation of peace. In
his call to Our Lady of Oblivion Thomson might seem to be speaking for
both, only in a more deliberately metaphorical style:

Take me, and lull me into perfect sleep;
Down, down, far hidden in thy duskiest cave;
While all the clamorous years above me sweep
Unheard, or, like the voice of seas that rave
On far-off coasts, but murmuring o'er my trance,
A dim vast monotone, that shall enhance
The restful rapture of the inviolate grave.

But the roads by which the two would reach this "silence more musical than
any song" were utterly different. With an intellect at once mathematical and
constructive, Thomson built out of his personal bitterness and despair a

universe corresponding to his own mood, a philosophy of atheistic revolt.
Like Lucretius, "he denied divinely the divine." In that tremendous
conversation on the river-walk he represents one soul as protesting to
another that not for all his misery would he carry the guilt of creating such a
world; whereto the second replies, and it is the poet himself who speaks:

The world rolls round forever as a mill;
It grinds out death and life and good and ill;
It has no purpose, heart or mind or will. . . .

Man might know one thing were his sight less dim;
That it whirls not to suit his petty whim,
That it is quite indifferent to him.

There is the voluntary ecstasy of the saints, there is also this stern and self-
willed rebellion, and, contrasted with them both, as woman is contrasted
with man, there is the acquiescence of Christina Rossetti and of the little
group of writers whom she leads in spirit:

Passing away, saith the World, passing away. . . .
Then I answered: Yea.

WHY IS BROWNING
POPULAR?
It has come to be a matter of course that some new book on Browning
shall appear with every season. Already the number of these manuals has
grown so large that any one interested in critical literature finds he must
devote a whole corner of his library to them—where, the cynical may add,
they are better lodged than in his brain. To name only a few of the more
recent publications: there was Stopford Brooke's volume, which partitioned
the poet's philosophy into convenient compartments, labelled nature, human
life, art, love, etc. Then came Mr. Chesterton, with his biting paradoxes and
his bold justification of Browning's work, not as it ought to be, but as it is.
Professor Dowden followed with what is, on the whole, the best vade
mecum for those who wish to preserve their enthusiasm with a little salt of
common sense; and, latest of all, we have now a critical study[7] by Prof. C.
H. Herford, of the University of Manchester, which once more unrolls in all
its gleaming aspects the poet's "joy in soul." Two things would seem to be
clear from this succession of commentaries: Browning must need a deal of
exegesis, and he must be a subject of wide curiosity. Now obscurity and
popularity do not commonly go together, and I fail to remember that any of
the critics named has paused long enough in his own admiration to explain
just why Browning has caught the breath of favour; in a word, to answer the
question: Why is Browning popular?
There is, indeed, one response to such a question, so obvious and so
simple that it might well be taken for granted. It would hardly seem worth
while to say that despite his difficulty Browning is esteemed because he has
written great poetry; and in the most primitive and unequivocal manner this
is to a certain extent true. At intervals the staccato of his lines, like the
drilling of a woodpecker, is interrupted by a burst of pure and liquid music,
as if that vigorous and exploring bird were suddenly gifted with the
melodious throat of the lark. It is not necessary to hunt curiously for
examples of this power; they are fairly frequent and the best known are the
most striking. Consider the first lines that sing themselves in the memory:

O lyric Love, half-angel and half-bird,
And all a wonder and a wild desire—

there needs no cunning exegete to point out the beauty of these. Their
rhythm is of the singing, traditional kind that is familiar to us in all the true
poets of the language; the harmony of the vowel sounds and of the
consonants, the very trick of alliteration, are obvious to the least critical; yet
withal there is that miraculous suggestion in their charm which may be felt
but cannot be converted into a prosaic equivalent. They stand out from the
lines that precede and follow them in The Ring and the Book, as differing
not so much in degree as in kind; they are lyrical, poetical, in the midst of a
passage which is neither lyrical nor, precisely speaking, poetical. Elsewhere
the surprise may be on the lower plane of mere description. So, throughout
the peroration of Paracelsus, despite the glory and eloquence of the dying
scholar's vision, one feels continually an alien element which just prevents a
complete acquiescence in their magic, some residue of clogging analysis
which has not quite been subdued to poetry—and then suddenly, as if some
discordant instrument were silenced in an orchestra and unvexed music
floated to the ear, the manner changes, thus:
The herded pines commune and have deep thoughts,
A secret they assemble to discuss
When the sun drops behind their trunks which glare
Like grates of hell.

And, take his works throughout, there is a good deal of this writing which
has the ordinary, direct appeal to the emotions. Yet it is scattered, accidental
so to speak; nor is it any pabulum of the soul as simple as this which
converts the lover of poetry into the Browningite. Even his common-sense
admirers are probably held by something more recondite than this
occasional charm.

You see one lad o'erstride a chimney-stack;
Him you must watch—he's sure to fall, yet stands!
Our interest 's on the dangerous edge of things—

says Bishop Blougram, and the attraction of Browning to many is just
watching what may be called his acrobatic psychology. Consider this same
Bishop Blougram's Apology, in some respects the most characteristic, as it
is certainly not the least prodigious, of his poems. "Over his wine so smiled

and talked his hour Sylvester Blougram"—talked and smiled to a silent
listener concerning the strange mixture of doubt and faith which lie snugly
side by side in the mind of an ecclesiastic who is at once a hypocrite and a
sincere believer in the Church. The mental attitude of the speaker is subtile
enough in itself to be fascinating, but the real suspense does not lie there.
The very balancing of the priest's argument may at first work a kind of
deception, but read more attentively and it begins to grow clear that no man
in the wily bishop's predicament ever talked in this way over his wine or
anywhere else. And here lies the real piquancy of the situation. His words
are something more than a confession; they are this and at the same time the
poet's, or if you will the bishop's own, comment to himself on that
confession. He who talks is never quite in the privacy of solitude, nor is he
ever quite conscious of his listener, who as a matter of fact is not so much a
person as some half-personified opinion of the world or abstract notion set
against the character of the speaker. And this is Browning's regular
procedure not only in those wonderful dramatic monologues, Men and
Women, that form the heart of his work, but in Paracelsus, in The Ring and
the Book, even in the songs and the formal dramas.
Perhaps the most remarkable and most obvious example of this
suspended psychology is to be found in The Ring and the Book. Take the
canto in which Giuseppe Caponsacchi relates to the judges his share in the
tangled story. It is clear that the interest here is not primarily in the event
itself, nor does it lie in that phase of the speaker's character which would be
revealed by his confession before such a court as he is supposed to
confront. The fact is, that Caponsacchi's language is not such as under the
circumstances he could possibly be conceived to use. As the situation forms
itself in my mind, he might be in his cell awaiting the summons to appear.
In that solitude and uncertainty he goes over in memory the days in Arezzo,
when the temptation first came to him, and once more takes the perilous
ride with Pompilia to Rome. He lives again through the great crisis,
dissecting all his motives, balancing the pros and cons of each step; yet all
the time he has in mind the opinion of the world as personified in the judges
he is to face. The psychology is suspended dexterously between self-
examination and open confession, and the reader who accepts the actual
dramatic situation as suggested by Browning loses the finest and subtlest
savour of the speech. In many places it would be simply preposterous to
suppose we are listening to words really uttered by the priest.

We did go on all night; but at its close
She was troubled, restless, moaned low, talked at whiles
To herself, her brow on quiver with the dream:
Once, wide awake, she menaced, at arms' length
Waved away something—"Never again with you!
My soul is mine, my body is my soul's:
You and I are divided ever more
In soul and body: get you gone!" Then I—
"Why, in my whole life I have never prayed!
Oh, if the God, that only can, would help!
Am I his priest with power to cast out fiends?
Let God arise and all his enemies
Be scattered!" By morn, there was peace, no sigh
Out of the deep sleep—

no, those words were never spoken in the ears of a sceptical, worldly
tribunal; they belong to the most sacred recesses of memory; yet at the same
time that memory is coloured by a consciousness of the world's clumsy
judgment.
It would be exaggeration to say that all Browning's greater poems
proceed in this involved manner, yet the method is so constant as to be the
most significant feature of his work. And it bestows on him the honour of
having created a new genre which follows neither the fashion of lyric on the
one hand nor that of drama or narrative on the other, but is a curious and
illusive hybrid of the two. The passions are not uttered directly as having
validity and meaning in the heart of the speaker alone, nor are they revealed
through action and reaction upon the emotions of another. His dramas, if
read attentively, will be found really to fall into the same mixed genre as his
monologues. And a comparison of his Sordello with such a poem as
Goethe's Tasso (which is more the dialogue of a narrative poem than a true
drama) will show how far he fails to make a character move visibly amid
opposing circumstances. In both poems we have a contrast of the poetical
temperament with the practical world. In Browning it is difficult to
distinguish the poet's own thought from the words of the hero; the narrative
is in reality a long confession of Sordello to himself who is conscious of a
hostile power without. In Goethe this hostile power stands out as distinctly
as Tasso himself, and they act side by side each to his own end.
There is even a certain significance in what is perhaps the most
immediately personal poem Browning ever wrote, that One Word More
which he appended to his Men and Women. Did he himself quite understand

this lament for Raphael's lost sonnets and Dante's interrupted angel, this
desire to find his love a language,

Fit and fair and simple and sufficient—
Using nature that's an art to others,
Not, this one time, art that's turned his nature?

It would seem rather the uneasiness of his own mind when brought face to
face with strong feeling where no escape remains into his oblique mode of
expression. And the man Browning of real life, with his training in a
dissenting Camberwell home and later his somewhat dapper acceptance of
the London social season, accords with such a view of the writer. It is, too,
worthy of note that almost invariably he impressed those who first met him
as being a successful merchant, a banker, a diplomat—anything but a poet.
There was passion enough below the surface, as his outburst of rage against
FitzGerald and other incidents of the kind declare; but the direct exhibition
of it was painful if not grotesque.
Yet in this matter, as in everything that touches Browning's psychology, it
is well to proceed cautiously. Because he approached the emotions thus
obliquely, as it were in a style hybrid between the lyric and the drama, it
does not follow that his work is void of emotion or that he questioned the
validity of human passion. The very contrary is true. I remember, indeed,
once hearing a lady, whose taste was as frank as it was modern, say that she
liked Browning better than Shakespeare because he was more emotional
and less intellectual than the older dramatist. Her distinction was somewhat
confused, but it leads to an important consideration; I do not know but it
points to the very heart of the question of Browning's popularity. He is not
in reality more emotional than Shakespeare, but his emotion is of a kind
more readily felt by the reader of to-day; nor does he require less use of the
intellect, but he does demand less of that peculiar translation of the intellect
from the particular to the general point of view which is necessary to raise
the reader into what may be called the poetical mood. In one sense
Browning is nearly the most intellectual poet in the language. The action of
his brain was so nimble, his seizure of every associated idea was so quick
and subtile, his elliptical style is so supercilious of the reader's needs, that
often to understand him is like following a long mathematical
demonstration in which many of the intermediate equations are omitted.

And then his very trick of approaching the emotions indirectly, his
suspended psychology as I have called it, requires a peculiar flexibility of
the reader's mind. But in a way these roughnesses of the shell possess an
attraction for the educated public which has been sated with what lies too
accessibly on the surface. They hold out the flattering promise of an
initiation into mysteries not open to all the world. Our wits have become
pretty well sharpened by the complexities of modern life, and we are ready
enough to prove our analytical powers on any riddle of poetry or
economics. And once we have penetrated to the heart of these enigmas we
are quite at our ease. His emotional content is of a sort that requires no
further adjustment; it demands none of that poetical displacement of the
person which is so uncomfortable to the keen but prosaic intelligence.
And here that tenth Muse, who has been added to the Pantheon for the
guidance of the critical writer, trembles and starts back. She beholds to the
right and the left a quaking bog of abstractions and metaphysical
definitions, whereon if a critic so much as set his foot he is sucked down
into the bottomless mire. She plucks me by the ear and bids me keep to the
strait and beaten path, whispering the self-admonition of one who was the
darling of her sisters:

I won't philosophise, and will be read.

Indeed, the question that arises is no less than the ultimate distinction
between poetry and prose, and "ultimates" may well have an ugly sound to
one who is content if he can comprehend what is concrete and very near at
hand. And, as for that, those who would care to hear the matter debated in
terms of Idee and Begriff, Objektivität and Subjektivität, must already be
familiar with those extraordinary chapters in Schopenhauer wherein
philosophy and literature are married as they have seldom been elsewhere
since the days of Plato. And yet without any such formidable apparatus as
that, it is not difficult to see that the peculiar procedure of Browning's mind
offers to the reader a pleasure different more in kind than in degree from
what is commonly associated with the word poetry. His very manner of
approaching the passions obliquely, his habit of holding his portrayal of
character in suspense between direct exposition and dramatic reaction,
tends to keep the attention riveted on the individual speaker or problem, and

prevents that escape into the larger and more general vision which marks
just the transition from prose to poetry.
It is not always so. Into that cry "O lyric Love" there breaks the note
which from the beginning has made lovers forget themselves in their song
—the note that passes so easily from the lips of Persian Omar to the mouth
of British FitzGerald:

Ah Love! could you and I with Him conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits—and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire!

Is it not clear how, in these direct and lyrical expressions, the passion of the
individual is carried up into some region where it is blended with currents
of emotion broader than any one man's loss or gain? and how, reading these
words, we, too, feel that sudden enlargement of the heart which it is the
special office of the poet to bestow? But it is equally true that Browning's
treatment of love, as in James Lee's Wife and In a Balcony, to name the
poems nearest at hand, is for the most part so involved in his peculiar
psychological method that we cannot for a moment forget ourselves in this
freer emotion.
And in his attitude towards nature it is the same thing. I have not read
Schopenhauer for many years, but I remember as if it were yesterday my
sensation of joy as in the course of his argument I came upon these two
lines quoted from Horace:

Nox erat et cælo fulgebat luna sereno
Inter minora sidera.

How perfectly simple the words, and yet it was as if the splendour of the
heavens had broken upon me—rather, in some strange way, within me. And
that, I suppose, is the real function of descriptive poetry—not to present a
detailed scene to the eye, but in its mysterious manner to sink our sense of
individual life in this larger sympathy with the world. Now and then, no
doubt, Browning, too, strikes this universal note, as, for instance, in those
lines from Paracelsus already quoted. But for the most part, his description,
like his lyrical passion, is adapted with remarkable skill towards

individualising still further the problem or character that he is analysing.
Take that famous passage in Easter-Day:

And as I said
This nonsense, throwing back my head
With light complacent laugh, I found
Suddenly all the midnight round
One fire. The dome of heaven had stood
As made up of a multitude
Of handbreadth cloudlets, one vast rack
Of ripples infinite and black,
From sky to sky. Sudden there went,
Like horror and astonishment,
A fierce vindictive scribble of red
Quick flame across, as if one said
(The angry scribe of Judgment), "There—
Burn it!" And straight I was aware
That the whole ribwork round, minute
Cloud touching cloud beyond compute,
Was tinted, each with its own spot
Of burning at the core, till clot
Jammed against clot, and spilt its fire
Over all heaven. . . .

We are far enough from the "Nox erat" of Horace or even the "trunks that
glare like grates of hell"; we are seeing the world with the eye of a man
whose mind is perplexed and whose imagination is narrowed down by
terror to a single question: "How hard it is to be A Christian!"
And nothing, perhaps, confirms this impression of a body of writing
which is neither quite prose nor quite poetry more than the rhythm of
Browning's verse. Lady Burne-Jones in the Memorials of her husband tells
of meeting the poet at Denmark Hill, when some talk went on about the rate
at which the pulse of different people beat. Browning suddenly leaned
toward her, saying, "Do me the honour to feel my pulse"—but to her
surprise there was none to feel. His pulse was, in fact, never perceptible to
touch. The notion may seem fantastic, but, in view of certain recent
investigations of psychology into the relation between our pulse and our
sense of rhythm, I have wondered whether the lack of any regular systole
and diastole in Browning's verse may not rest on a physical basis. There is
undoubtedly a kind of proper motion in his language, but it is neither the
regular rise and fall of verse nor the more loosely balanced cadences of
prose; or, rather, it vacillates from one movement to the other, in a way

which keeps the rhythmically trained ear in a state of acute tension. But it
has at least the interest of corresponding curiously to the writer's trick of
steering between the elevation of poetry and the analysis of prose. It rounds
out completely our impression of watching the most expert funambulist in
English letters. Nor is there anything strange in this intimate relation
between the content of his writing and the mechanism of his metre. "The
purpose of rhythm," says Mr. Yeats in a striking passage of one of his
essays, "it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment of
contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is
the one moment of creation, by hushing us with an alluring monotony,
while it holds us waking by variety." That is the neo-Celt's mystical way of
putting a truth that all have felt—the fact that the regular sing-song of verse
exerts a species of enchantment on the senses, lulling to sleep the individual
within us and translating our thoughts and emotions into something
significant of the larger experience of mankind.
But I would not leave this aspect of Browning's work without making a
reservation which may seem to some (though wrongly, I think) to invalidate
all that has been said. For it does happen now and again that he somehow
produces the unmistakable exaltation of poetry through the very
exaggeration of his unpoetical method. Nothing could be more indirect,
more oblique, than his way of approaching the climax in Cleon. The ancient
Greek poet, writing "from the sprinkled isles, Lily on lily, that o'erlace the
sea," answers certain queries of Protus the Tyrant. He contrasts the
insufficiency of the artistic life with that of his master, and laments bitterly
the vanity of pursuing ideal beauty when the goal at the end is only death:

It is so horrible,
I dare at times imagine to my need
Some future state revealed to us by Zeus,
Unlimited in capability
For joy, as this is in desire for joy.
. . . . . . . . . . But no!
Zeus has not yet revealed it; and alas,
He must have done so, were it possible!

The poem, one begins to suspect, is a specimen of Browning's peculiar
manner of indirection; in reality, through this monologue, suspended
delicately between self-examination and dramatic confession, he is
focussing in one individual heart the doom of the great civilisation that is

passing away and the splendid triumph of the new. And then follows the
climax, as it were an accidental afterthought:

And for the rest,
I cannot tell thy messenger aright
Where to deliver what he bears of thine
To one called Paulus; we have heard his fame
Indeed, if Christus be not one with him—
I know not, nor am troubled much to know.
Thou canst not think a mere barbarian Jew,
As Paulus proves to be, one circumcised,
Hath access to a secret shut from us?
Thou wrongest our philosophy, O King,
In stooping to inquire of such an one,
As if his answer could impose at all!
He writeth, doth he? well, and he may write.
Oh, the Jew findeth scholars! certain slaves
Who touched on this same isle, preached him and Christ;
And (as I gathered from a bystander)
Their doctrine could be held by no sane man.

It is not revoking what has been said to admit that the superb audacity of the
indirection in these underscored lines touches on the sublime; the individual
is involuntarily rapt into communion with the great currents that sweep
through human affairs, and the interest of psychology is lost in the elevation
of poetry. At the same time it ought to be added that this effect would
scarcely have been possible were not the rhythm and the mechanism of the
verse unusually free of Browning's prosaic mannerism.
It might seem that enough had been said to explain why Browning is
popular. The attitude of the ordinary intelligent reader toward him is, I
presume, easily stated. A good many of Browning's mystifications,
Sordello, for one, he simply refuses to bother himself with. Le jeu, he says
candidly, ne vaut pas les chandelles. Other works he goes through with
some impatience, but with an amount of exhilarating surprise sufficient to
compensate for the annoyances. If he is trained in literary distinctions, he
will be likely to lay down the book with the exclamation: C'est magnifique,
mais ce n'est pas la poésie! And probably such a distinction will not lessen
his admiration; for it cannot be asserted too often that the reading public to-
day is ready to accede to any legitimate demand on its analytical
understanding, but that it responds sluggishly, or only spasmodically, to that
readjustment of the emotions necessary for the sustained enjoyment of such

a poem as Paradise Lost. But I suspect that we have not yet touched the real
heart of the problem. All this does not explain that other phase of
Browning's popularity, which depends upon anything but the common sense
of the average reader; and, least of all, does it account for the library of
books, of which Professor Herford's is the latest example. There is another
public which craves a different food from the mere display of human
nature; it is recruited largely by the women's clubs and by men who are
unwilling or afraid to hold their minds in a state of self-centred expectancy
toward the meaning of a civilisation shot through by threads of many ages
and confused colours; it is kept in a state of excitation by critics who write
lengthily and systematically of "joy in soul." Now there is a certain
philosophy which is in a particular way adapted to such readers and writers.
Its beginnings, no doubt, are rooted in the naturalism of Rousseau and the
eighteenth century, but the flower of it belongs wholly to our own age. It is
the philosophy whose purest essence may be found distilled in Browning's
magical alembic, and a single drop of it will affect the brain of some people
with a strange giddiness.
And here again I am tempted to abscond behind those blessed words
Platonische Ideen and Begriffe, universalia ante rem and universalia post
rem, which offer so convenient an escape from the difficulty of meaning
what one says. It would be so easy with those counters of German
metaphysicians and the schoolmen to explain how it is that Browning has a
philosophy of generalised notions, and yet so often misses the form of
generalisation special to the poet. The fact is his philosophy is not so much
inherent in his writing as imposed on it from the outside. His theory of love
does not expand like Dante's into a great vision of life wherein symbol and
reality are fused together, but is added as a commentary on the action or
situation. And on the other hand he does not accept the simple and pathetic
incompleteness of life as a humbler poet might, but must try with his reason
to reconcile it with an ideal system:

Over the ball of it,
Peering and prying,
How I see all of it,
Life there, outlying!
Roughness and smoothness,
Shine and defilement,
Grace and uncouthness:
One reconcilement.

Yet "ideal" and "reconcilement" are scarcely the words; for Browning's
philosophy, when detached, as it may be, from its context, teaches just the
acceptance of life in itself as needing no conversion into something beyond
its own impulsive desires:

Let us not always say,
"Spite of this flesh to-day
I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole!"
As the bird wings and sings,
Let us cry, "All good things
Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul!"

Passion to Shakespeare was the source of tragedy; there is no tragedy,
properly speaking, in Browning, for the reason that passion is to him
essentially good. By sheer bravado of human emotion we justify our
existence, nay—

We have to live alone to set forth well
God's praise.

His notion of "moral strength," as Professor Santayana so forcibly says, "is
a blind and miscellaneous vehemence."
But if all the passions have their own validity, one of them in particular is
the power that moves through all and renders them all good:

In my own heart love had not been made wise
To trace love's faint beginnings in mankind,
To know even hate is but a mask of love's.

It is the power that reaches up from earth to heaven, and the divine nature is
no more than a higher, more vehement manifestation of its energy:

For the loving worm within its clod
Were diviner than a loveless god.

And in the closing vision of Saul this thought of the identity of man's love
and God's love is uttered by David in a kind of delirious ecstasy:

'T is the weakness in strength, that I cry for! my flesh, that I seek
In the Godhead! I seek and I find it. O Saul, it shall be
A Face like my face that receives thee; a Man like to me,

Thou shalt love and be loved by, forever: a Hand like this hand
Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! See the Christ stand!

But there is no need to multiply quotations. The point is that in all
Browning's rhapsody there is nowhere a hint of any break between the
lower and the higher nature of man, or between the human and the celestial
character. Not that his philosophy is pantheistic, for it is Hebraic in its vivid
sense of God's distinct personality; but that man's love is itself divine, only
lesser in degree. There is nothing that corresponds to the tremendous words
of Beatrice to Dante when he meets her face to face in the Terrestrial
Paradise:
Guardami ben: ben son, ben son Beatrice.
Come degnasti d' accedere al monte?
Non sapei to the qui è l'uom felice?

(Behold me well: lo, Beatrice am I.
And thou, how daredst thou to this mount draw nigh?
Knew'st thou not here was man's felicity?)—

nothing that corresponds to the "scot of penitence," the tears, and the plunge
into the river of Lethe before the new, transcendent love begins. Indeed, the
point of the matter is not that Browning magnifies human love in its own
sphere of beauty, but that he speaks of it with the voice of a prophet of
spiritual things and proclaims it as a complete doctrine of salvation. Often,
as I read the books on Browning's gospel of human passion, my mind recurs
to that scene in the Gospel of St. John, wherein it is told how a certain
Nicodemus of the Pharisees came to Jesus by night and was puzzled by the
hard saying: "Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of
God." There is no lack of confessions from that day to this of men to whom
it has seemed that they were born again, and always, I believe, the new
birth, like the birth of the body, was consummated with wailing and
anguish, and afterwards the great peace. This is a mystery into which it is
no business of mine to enter, but with the singularly uniform record of these
confessions in my memory, I cannot but wonder at the light message of the
new prophet: "If you desire faith—then you've faith enough," and "For God
is glorified in man." I am even sceptical enough to believe that the vaunted
conclusion of Fifine at the Fair, "I end with—Love is all and Death is
naught," sounds like the wisdom of a schoolgirl. There is an element in
Browning's popularity which springs from those readers who are content to

look upon the world as it is; they feel the power of his lyric song when at
rare intervals it flows in pure and untroubled grace, and they enjoy the
intellectual legerdemain of his suspended psychology. But there is another
element in that popularity (and this, unhappily, is the inspiration of the
clubs and of the formulating critics) which is concerned too much with this
flattering substitute for spirituality. Undoubtedly, a good deal of restiveness
exists under what is called the materialism of modern life, and many are
looking in this way and that for an escape into the purer joy which they hear
has passed from the world. It used to be believed that Calderon was a bearer
of the message, Calderon who expressed the doctrine of the saints and the
poets:

Pues el delito mayor
Del hombre es haber nacido—

(since the greatest transgression of man is to have been born). It was
believed that the spiritual life was bought with a price, and that the desires
of this world must first suffer permutation into something not themselves. I
am not holding a brief for that austere doctrine; I am not even sure that I
quite understand it, although it is written at large in many books. But I do
know that those who think they have found its equivalent in the poetry of
Browning are misled by wandering and futile lights. The secret of his more
esoteric fame is just this, that he dresses a worldly and easy philosophy in
the forms of spiritual faith and so deceives the troubled seekers after the
higher life.
It is not pleasant to be convicted of throwing stones at the prophets, as I
shall appear to many to have done. My only consolation is that, if the
prophet is a true teacher, these stones of the casual passer-by merely raise a
more conspicuous monument to his honour; but if he turns out in the end to
be a false prophet (as I believe Browning to have been)—why, then, let his
disciples look to it.

A NOTE ON BYRON'S
"DON JUAN"
It has often been a source of wonder to me that I was able to read and
enjoy Byron's Don Juan under the peculiar circumstances attending my
introduction to that poem. I had been walking in the Alps, and after a day of
unusual exertion found myself in the village of Chamouni, fatigued and
craving rest. A copy of the Tauchnitz edition fell into my hands, and there,
in a little room, through a summer's day, by a window which looked full
upon the unshadowed splendour of Mont Blanc, I sat and read, and only
arose when Juan faded out of sight with "the phantom of her frolic Grace—
Fitz-Fulke." I have often wondered, I say, why the incongruity of that
solemn Alpine scene with the mockery of Byron's wit did not cause me to
shut the book and thrust it away, for in general I am highly sensitive to the
nature of my surroundings while reading. Only recently, on taking up the
poem again for the purpose of editing it, did the answer to that riddle occur
to me, and with it a better understanding of the place of Don Juan among
the great epics which might have seemed in finer accord with the sublimity
and peace of that memorable day.
In one respect, at least, it needed no return to Byron's work to show how
closely it is related in spirit to the accepted canons of the past. These poets,
who have filled the world with their rumour, all looked upon life with some
curious obliquity of vision. We, who have approached the consummation of
the world's hope, know that happiness and peace and the fulfilment of
desires are about to settle down and brood for ever more over the lot of
mankind, but with them it seems to have been otherwise. Who can forget
the recurring minynthadion of Homer, in which he summed up for the men
of his day the vanity of long aspirations? So if we were asked to point out
the lines of Shakespeare that express most completely his attitude toward
life, we should probably quote that soliloquy of Hamlet wherein he
catalogues the evils of existence, and only in the fear of future dreams finds
a reason for continuance; or we should cite that sonnet of disillusion: "Tired

with all these for restful death I cry." And as for the lyric poets, sooner or
later the lament of Shelley was wrung from the lips of each:

Out of the day and night
A joy has taken flight:
Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar
Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight
No more—oh, never more!

This, I repeat, is a strange fact, for it appears that these poets, prophets
who spoke in the language of beauty and who have held the world's
reverence so long—it appears now that these interpreters of the fates were
all misled. Possibly, as Aristotle intimated, genius is allied to some vice of
the secretions which produces a melancholia of the brain; something like
this, indeed, only expressed in more recondite terms, may be found in the
most modern theory of science. But more probably they wrote merely from
insufficient experience, not having perceived how the human race with
increase of knowledge grows in happiness. Thus, at least, it seems to one
who observes the tides of thought. Next year, or the next, some divine
invention shall come which will prove this melancholy of the poets to have
been only a childish ignorance of man's sublimer destiny; some discovery
of a new element more wonderful than radium will render the ancient
brooding over human feebleness a matter of laughter and astonishment;
some acceptance of the larger brotherhood of the race will wipe away all
tears and bring down upon earth the fair dream of heaven, a reality and a
possession for ever; some new philosophy of the soul will convert the old
poems of conflict into meaningless fables, stale and unprofitable. Already
we see the change at hand. To how many persons to-day does Browning
appeal—though they would not always confess it—more powerfully than
Homer or Milton or any other of the great names of antiquity? And the
reason of this closer appeal of Browning is chiefly the unflagging optimism
of his philosophy, his full-blooded knowledge and sympathy which make
the wailings of the past somewhat silly in our ears, if truth must be told. I
never read Browning but those extraordinary lines of Euripides recur to my
mind: "Not now for the first time do I regard mortal things as a shadow, nor
would I fear to charge with supreme folly those artificers of words who are
reckoned the sages of mankind, for no man among mortals is happy."
Θνητῶν γὰρ οὐδείς ἐστιν εὐδαίμων, indeed!—would any one be shameless

enough to utter such words under the new dispensation of official
optimism?
It is necessary to think of these things before we attempt to criticise
Byron, for Don Juan, too, despite its marvellous vivacity, looks upon life
from the old point of view. Already, for this reason in part, it seems a little
antiquated to us, and in a few years it may be read only as a curiosity.
Meanwhile for the few who lag behind in the urgent march of progress the
poem will possess a special interest just because it presents the ancient
thesis of the poets and prophets in a novel form. Of course, in many lesser
matters it makes a wider and more lasting appeal. Part of the Haidée
episode, for instance, is so exquisitely lovely, so radiant with the golden
haze of youth, that even in the wiser happiness of our maturity we may still
turn to it with a kind of complacent delight. Briefer passages scattered here
and there, such as the "'T is sweet to hear," and the "Ave Maria," need only
a little abridgment at the close to fit them perfectly for any future anthology
devoted to the satisfaction and the ultimate significance of human emotions.
But, strangely enough, these disturbing climaxes, which will demand to be
forgotten, or to be rearranged as we restore old mutilated statues, do,
indeed, point to those very qualities which render the poem so extraordinary
a complement to the great and accepted epics of the past. For the present it
may yet be sufficient to consider Don Juan as it is—with all its enormities
upon it.
And, first of all, we shall make a sad mistake if we regard the poem as a
mere work of satire. Occasionally Byron pretends to lash himself into a
righteous fury over the vices of the age, but we know that this is all put on,
and that the real savageness of his nature comes out only when he thinks of
his own personal wrongs. Now this is a very different thing from the
deliberate and sustained denunciation of a vicious age such as we find in
Juvenal, a different thing utterly from the sæva indignatio that devoured the
heart and brain of poor Swift. There is in Don Juan something of the
personal satire of Pope, and something of the whimsical mockery of
Lucilius and his imitators. But it needs but a little discernment to see that
Byron's poem has vastly greater scope and significance than the Epistle to
Dr. Arbuthnot, or the spasmodic gaiety of the Menippean satire. It does in
its own way present a view of life as a whole, with the good and the evil,
and so passes beyond the category of the merely satirical. The very scope of

its subject, if nothing more, classes it with the more universal epics of
literature rather than with the poems that portray only a single aspect of life.
Byron himself was conscious of this, and more than once alludes to the
larger aspect of his work. "If you must have an epic," he once said to
Medwin, "there's Don Juan for you; it is an epic as much in the spirit of our
day as the Iliad was in that of Homer." And in one of the asides in the poem
itself he avows the same design:

A panoramic view of Hell's in training,
After the style of Virgil and of Homer,
So that my name of Epic's no misnomer.

Hardly the style of those stately writers, to be sure, but an epic after its own
fashion the poem certainly is. That Byron's way is not the way of the older
poets requires no emphasis; they

reveled in the fancies of the time,
True Knights, chaste Dames, huge Giants, Kings despotic;
But all these, save the last, being obsolete,
I chose a modern subject as more meet.

Being cut off from the heroic subjects of the established school, he still
sought to obtain something of the same large and liberating effect through
the use of a frankly modern theme. The task was not less difficult than his
success was singular and marked; and that is why it seemed in no way
inappropriate, despite its occasional lapse of licentiousness, to read Don
Juan with the white reflection of Mont Blanc streaming through the
window. Homer might have been so read, or Virgil, or any of those poets
who presented life solemnly and magniloquently; I do not think I could
have held my mind to Juvenal or Pope or even Horace beneath the calm
radiance of that Alpine light.
I have said that the great poets all took a sombre view of the world. Man
is but the dream of a shadow, said Pindar, speaking for the race of genius,
and Byron is conscious of the same insight into the illusive spectacle. He
has looked with like vision upon

this scene of all-confessed inanity,
By Saint, by Sage, by Preacher, and by Poet,

and will not in his turn refrain "from holding up the nothingness of life." So
in the introduction to the seventh canto he runs through the list of those who
have preached and sung this solemn, but happily to us outworn, theme:

I say no more than hath been said in Dante's
Verse, and by Solomon and by Cervantes.

It must not be supposed, however, because the heroic poems of old were
touched with the pettiness and sadness of human destiny, that their
influence on the reader was supposed to be narrowing or depressing; the
name "heroic" implies the contrary of that. Indeed their very inspiration was
derived from the fortitude of a spirit struggling to rise above the league of
little things and foiling despairs. It may seem paradoxical to us, yet it is true
that these morbid poets believed in the association of men with gods and in
the grandeur of mortal passions. So Achilles and Hector, both with the
knowledge of their brief destiny upon them, both filled with foreboding of
frustrate hopes, strive nobly to the end of magnanimous defeat. There lay
the greatness of the heroic epos for readers of old,—the sense of human
littleness, the melancholy of broken aspirations, swallowed up in the
transcending sublimity of man's endurance and daring. And men of lesser
mould, who knew so well the limitations of their sphere, took courage and
were taught to look down unmoved upon their harassed fate.
Now Byron came at a time of transition from the old to the new. The
triumphs of material discovery, "Le magnifiche sorti e progressive," had not
yet cast a reproach on the earlier sense of life's futility, while at the same
time the faith in heroic passions had passed away. An attempt to create an
epic in the old spirit would have been doomed, was indeed doomed in the
hands of those who undertook it. The very language in which Byron
presents the ancient universal belief of Plato and those others

Who knew this life was not worth a potato,—

shows how far he was from the loftier mode of imagination. In place of
heroic passion he must seek another outlet of relief, another mode of

purging away melancholy; and the spirit of the burlesque came lightly to his
use as the only available vis medica. The feeling was common to his age,
but he alone was able to adapt the motive to epic needs. How often the
melancholy sentimentality of Heine corrects itself by a burlesque
conclusion! Or, if we regard the novel, how often does Thackeray in like
manner replace the old heroic relief of passion by a kindly smile at the brief
and busy cares of men. But neither Heine nor Thackeray carries the
principle of the burlesque to its artistic completion, or makes it the avowed
motive of a complicated action, as Byron does in Don Juan. That poem is
indeed "prolific of melancholy merriment." It is not necessary to point out
at length the persistence of this mock-heroic spirit. Love, ambition, home-
attachments, are all burlesqued; battle ardour, the special theme of epic
sublimity, is subjected to the same quizzical mockery:

There was not now a luggage boy, but sought
Danger and spoil with ardour much increased;
And why? because a little—odd—old man,
Stripped to his shirt, was come to lead the van.

In the gruesome shipwreck scene the tale of suffering which leads to
cannibalism is interrupted thus:

At length they caught two Boobies, and a Noddy,
And then they left off eating the dead body.

The description of London town as seen from Shooter's Hill ends with this
absurd metaphor:

A huge, dun Cupola, like a foolscap crown
On a fool's head—and there is London Town!

Even Death laughs,—death that "hiatus maxime defiendus," "the dunnest of
all duns," etc. And, last of all, the poet turns the same weapon against his
own art. Do the lines for a little while grow serious, he suddenly pulls
himself up with a sneer:

Here I must leave him, for I grow pathetic,
Moved by the Chinese nymph of tears, green tea!

I trust, however, it has been made sufficiently clear that Don Juan is
something quite different from the mere mock-heroic—from Pulci, for
instance, "sire of the half-serious rhyme," whom Byron professed to imitate.
The poem is in a sense not half but wholly serious, for the very reason that
it takes so broad a view of human activity, and because of its persistent
moral sense. (Which is nowise contradicted by the immoral scenes in
several of the cantos.) It is not, for example, possible to think of finding in
Pulci such a couplet as this:

But almost sanctify the sweet excess
By the immortal wish and power to bless.

He who could write such lines as those was not merely indulging his
humour. Don Juan is something more than

A versified Aurora Borealis,
Which flashes o'er a waste and icy clime.

Out of the bitterness of his soul, out of the wreck of his passions which,
though heroic in intensity, had ended in quailing of the heart, he sought
what the great makers of epic had sought,—a solace and a sense of uplifted
freedom. The heroic ideal was gone, the refuge of religion was gone; but,
passing to the opposite extreme, by showing the power of the human heart
to mock at all things, he would still set forth the possibility of standing
above and apart from all things. He, too, went beyond the limitations of
destiny by laughter, as Homer and Virgil and Milton had risen by the
imagination. And, in doing this, he wrote the modern epic.
We are learning a new significance of human life, as I said; and the
sublime audacities of the elder poets in attempting to transcend the
melancholia of their day are growing antiquated, just as Byron's heroic
mockery is turning stale. In a few years we shall have come so much closer
to the mysteries over which the poets bungled helplessly, that we can afford
to forget their rhapsodies. Meanwhile it may not be amiss to make clear to
ourselves the purpose and character of one of the few, the very few, great
poems in our literature.

LAURENCE STERNE
A number of excellent editions of our standard authors have been put
forth during the last two or three years, but none of them, perhaps, has been
of such real service to letters as the new Sterne edited by Professor Wilbur
L. Cross.[8]
Ordinarily the fresh material advertised in these editions is in large
measure rubbish which had been deliberately discarded by the author and
whose resuscitation is an impertinence to his memory. Certainly this is true
of Murray's new Byron; it is in part true of the great editions of Hazlitt and
Lamb recently published, to go no further afield. But with Sterne the case is
different. The Journal to Eliza and the letters now first printed in full from
the "Gibbs manuscript" are a genuine aid in getting at the heart of Sterne's
elusive character. Even more important is the readjustment of dates for the
older correspondence, which the present editor has accomplished at the cost
of considerable pains, for the setting back of a letter two years may make all
the difference between a lying knave and an unstable sentimentalist. In the
spring of 1767, just a year before his death, Sterne was inditing those rather
sickly letters and the newly published Journal to Eliza, a susceptible young
woman who was about to sail for India. "The coward," says Thackeray,
"was writing gay letters to his friends this while, with sneering allusions to
his poor foolish Brahmine. Her ship was not out of the Downs, and the
charming Sterne was at the 'Mount Coffee-House,' with a sheet of gilt-
edged paper before him, offering that precious treasure, his heart, to Lady P
——." It is an ugly charge, and indeed Thackeray's whole portrait of the
humourist is harshly painted. But Sterne was not sneering in other letters at
his "Brahmine," as he called the rather spoiled East India lady, and it turns
out from some very pretty calculations of Professor Cross that the particular
note to Lady P[ercy] must have been written at the Mount Coffee-House
two years before he ever knew Eliza. "Coward," "wicked," "false,"
"wretched worn-out old scamp," "mountebank," "foul Satyr," "the last
words the famous author wrote were bad and wicked, the last lines the poor
stricken wretch penned were for pity and pardon"—for shame, Mr.
Thackeray! Sterne was a weak man, one may admit; wretched and worn-out

he was when the final blow struck him in his lonely hired room; but is there
no pity and pardon on your pen for the wayward penitent? You had
sympathy enough and facile tears enough for the genial Costigans and the
others who followed their hearts too readily; have you no Alas, poor Yorick!
for the author who gave you these characters? You could smile at Pendennis
when he used the old songs for a second love; was it a terrible thing that
Yorick should have taken passages from his early letters (copies of which
were thriftily preserved after the fashion of the day) and sent them as the
bubblings of fresh emotion at the end of his life? "One solitary plate, one
knife, one fork, one glass!—I gave a thousand pensive, penetrating looks at
the chair thou hadst so often graced, in those quiet and sentimental repasts
—then laid down my knife and fork, and took out my handkerchief, and
clapped it across my face, and wept like a child"—he wrote to Miss Lumley
who afterwards became Mrs. Sterne; and in the Journal kept for Eliza when
he was broken in spirit and near to death, you may read the same words, as
Thackeray read them in manuscript, and you may call them false and lying;
but I am inclined to believe they were quite as genuine as most of the
pathos of that lachrymose age. The want of sympathy in Thackeray's case is
the harder to understand for the reason that to Sterne more than to any other
of the eighteenth-century wits he would seem to owe his style and his turn
of thought. On many a page his peculiar sentiment reads like a direct
imitation of Tristram Shandy; add but a touch of caprice to Colonel
Newcome and you might almost imagine my Uncle Toby parading in the
nineteenth century; and I think it is just the lack of this whimsical touch that
makes the good colonel a little mawkish to many readers. And if one is to
look for an antetype of Thackeray's exquisite English, whither shall one
turn unless to the Sermons of Mr. Yorick? There is a taint of ingratitude in
his affectation of being shocked at the irregularities of one to whom he was
so much indebted, and I fear Mr. Thackeray was too consciously appealing
to the Philistine prejudices of the good folk who were listening to his
lectures. Afterwards, when the mischief was done, he suffered what looks
like a qualm of conscience. In one of the Roundabout Papers he tells how
he slept in Sterne's old hotel at Calais: "When I went to bed in the room, in
his room, when I think how I admire, dislike, and have abused him, a
certain dim feeling of apprehension filled my mind at the midnight hour.
What if I should see his lean figure in the black-satin breeches, his sinister
smile, his long thin finger pointing to me in the moonlight!" Unfortunately

the popular notion of Sterne is still based almost exclusively on the picture
of him in the English Humourists.
It is to be hoped that at last this carefully prepared edition will do
something toward dispelling that false impression. Certainly, the various
introductions furnished by Professor Cross are admirable for their fairness
and insight. He does not attempt a panegyric of Sterne, as did Mr.
Fitzgerald in the first edition of the Life, nor does he awkwardly overlay
panegyric with censure, as these are found in the present revised form of
that narrative; he recognises the errors of the sentimentalist, but he does not
call them by exaggerated names. And he sees, too, the fundamental
sincerity of the man, knowing that no great book was ever penned without
that quality, whatever else might be missing. I think he will account it for
service in a good cause if, as an essayist taking my material where it may be
found, I try to draw a little closer still to the sly follower of Rabelais whom
he has honoured by so elaborate a study.
Possibly Professor Cross does not recognise fully enough the influence of
Sterne's early years on his character. It is indeed a vagrant and Shandean
childhood to which the Rev. Mr. Laurence Sterne introduces us in the
Memoir written late in life for the benefit of his daughter Lydia. The father,
a lieutenant in Handaside's regiment, passed from engagement to idleness,
and from barrack to barrack, more than was the custom even in those
unsettled days. At Clonmel, in the south of Ireland, November 24, 1713,
Laurence was born, a few days after the arrival of his mother from Dunkirk.
Other children had been given to the luckless couple, and were yet to be
added, but here and there they were dropped on the wayside in pathetic
graves, leaving in the end only two, the future novelist and his sister
Catherine, who married a publican in London and became estranged from
her brother by her "uncle's wickedness and her own folly"—says Laurence.
Of the mother it is not necessary to say much. The difficulties of her life as
a hanger-on in camps seem to have hardened her, and her temper
("clamorous and rapacious," he called it) was in all points unlike her son's.
That Sterne neglected her brutally is a charge as old as Walpole's
scandalous tongue, and Byron, taking his cue from thence, gave piquancy to
the accusation by saying that "he preferred whining over a dead ass to
relieving a living mother." Sterne's minute refutation of the slander may
now be read at full length in a letter to the very uncle who set the tale

agoing. The boy would seem to have taken the father's mercurial
temperament, though not his physique:

The regiment [he writes] was sent to defend Gibraltar, at the siege, where my father was run
through the body by Capt. Phillips, in a duel (the quarrel began about a goose!): with much difficulty
he survived, though with an impaired constitution, which was not able to withstand the hardships it
was put to; for he was sent to Jamaica, where he soon fell by the country fever, which took away his
senses first, and made a child of him; and then, in a month or two, walking about continually without
complaining, till the moment he sat down in an armchair, and breathed his last, which was at Port
Antonio, on the north of the island. My father was a little smart man, active to the last degree in all
exercises, most patient of fatigue and disappointments, of which it pleased God to give him full
measure. He was, in his temper, somewhat rapid and hasty, but of a kindly, sweet disposition, void of
all design; and so innocent in his own intentions, that he suspected no one; so that you might have
cheated him ten times in a day, if nine had not been sufficient for your purpose.

Lieutenant Sterne died in 1731, and it would require but a few changes in
the son's record to make it read like a page from Henry Esmond; the very
texture of the language, the turn of the quizzical pathos, are Thackeray's.
Laurence at this time was at school near Halifax, where he got into a
characteristic scrape. The ceiling of the schoolroom had been newly
whitewashed; the ladder was standing, and the boy mounted it and wrote in
large letters, Lau. Sterne. The usher whipped him severely, but, says the
Memoir, "my master was very much hurt at this, and said, before me, that
never should that name be effaced, for I was a boy of genius, and he was
sure I should come to preferment." From Halifax Sterne went to Jesus
College, Cambridge, at the expense of a cousin. An uncle at York next took
charge of him and got him the living of Sutton, and afterwards the
Prebendary of York. Just how he came to quarrel with this patron we shall
probably never know. Sterne himself declares that his uncle wished him to
write political paragraphs for the Whigs, that he detested such "dirty work,"
and got his uncle's hatred in return for his independence. According to the
writer of the Yorkshire Anecdotes, the two fell out over a woman—which
sounds more like the truth. Meanwhile, Laurence had been successfully
courting Miss Elizabeth Lumley at York, and, during her absence, had been
writing those love-letters which his daughter published after the death of
her parents, to the immense increase of sentimentalism throughout the
United Kingdom. They are, in sooth, but a sickly, hothouse production,
though honestly enough meant, no doubt. The writer, too, kept a copy of
them, and thriftily made use of select passages at a later date, as we have
seen. Miss Lumley became Mrs. Sterne in due time, and brought to her

husband a modest jointure, and another living at Stillington, so that he was
now a pluralist, although far from rich. The marriage was not particularly
happy. Madam, one gathers, was pragmatic and contentious and
unreasonable, her reverend spouse was volatile and pleasure-loving; and
when, in the years of Yorick's fame, they went over to France, she decided
to stay there with her daughter. Sterne seems to have been fond of her
always, in a way, and in money matters was never anything but generous
and tactfully considerate. A bad-hearted man is not so thoughtful of his
wife's comfort after she has left him, as Sterne's letters show him to have
been; and even Thackeray admits that his affection for the girl was "artless,
kind, affectionate, and not sentimental."
But the lawful Mrs. Sterne was not the only woman at whose feet the
parson of Sutton and Stillington was sighing. There was that Mlle. de
Fourmantelle, a Huguenot refugee, the "dear, dear Kitty" (or "Jenny" as she
becomes in Tristram Shandy), to whom he sends presents of wine and
honey (with notes asking, "What is honey to the sweetness of thee?"), and
who followed him to London in the heyday of his fame, where somehow
she fades mysteriously out of view. "I myself must ever have some
Dulcinea in my head," he said; "it harmonises the soul." And, in truth, the
soul of Yorick was mewed in the cage of his breast very near his heart, and
never stretched her wings out of that close atmosphere. Charity was his
creed in the pulpit, and his love of woman had a curious and childlike way
of fortifying the Christian love of his neighbour. Most famous of all was his
passion—it seems almost to have been a passion in this case—for the
famous "Eliza." Towards the end of his life he had become warmly attached
to a certain William James, a retired Indian commodore, and his wife, who
were the best and most wholesome of his friends. At their London home he
met Mrs. Elizabeth Draper, and soon became romantically attached to her.
When the time drew near for her to sail to India to rejoin her husband, he
wrote a succession of notes in a kind of paroxysm of grief for himself and
anxiety for her, and for several months afterwards he kept a journal of his
emotions for her benefit some day. He was dead in less than a year. The
letters she kept, and in due time printed, because it was rumoured that Lydia
was to publish them from copies—a pretty bit of wrangling among all these
women there was, over the sentimental relics of poor Yorick! The Journal is
now for the first time included in the author's works—a singular document,
as eccentric in spelling and grammar as the sentiment is hard to define, a

wild and hysterical record. But it rings true on the whole, and confirms the
belief that Sterne's feelings were genuine, however short-lived they may
have been. The last letter to Eliza is pitiful with its tale of a broken body
and a sick heart: "In ten minutes after I dispatched my letter, this poor, fine-
spun frame of Yorick's gave way, and I broke a vessel in my breast, and
could not stop the loss of blood till four this morning. I have filled all thy
India handkerchiefs with it.—It came, I think, from my heart! I fell asleep
through weakness. At six I awoke, with the bosom of my shirt steeped in
tears." All through the Journal that follows are indications of wasted health
and of the perplexities of life that were closing in upon him. Only at rare
intervals the worries are forgotten, and we get a picture of serener moments.
One day, July 2nd, he grows genuinely idyllic, and it may not be amiss to
copy out his note just as he penned it:

But I am in the Vale of Coxwould & wish You saw in how princely a manner I live in it—tis a
Land of Plenty—I sit down alone to Venison, fish or wild fowl—or a couple of fowls—with curds,
and strawberrys & cream, (and all the simple clean plenty wcḥ a rich Vally can produce)—with a
Bottle of wine on my right hand (as in Bond street) to drink yṛ health—I have a hundred hens &
chickens [he sometimes spelt it chickings] abṭ my yard—and not a parishoner catches a hare a rabbit
or a Trout—but he brings it as an offering—In short tis a golden Vally—& will be the golden Age
when You govern the rural feast, my Bramine, & are the Mistress of my table & spread it with
elegancy and that natural grace & bounty wtḥ wcḥ heaven has distinguish'd You...
—Time goes on slowly—every thing stands still—hours seem days & days seem Years whilst you
lengthen the Distance between us—from Madras to Bombay—I shall think it shortening—and then
desire & expectation will be upon the rack again—come—come—

But Eliza never came until Yorick had gone on a longer journey than
Bombay. In England once more, she traded on her relation to the famous
writer, and then reviled him. She associated with John Wilkes, and
afterwards with the Abbé Raynal, who writ an absurd, pompous eulogy on
"the Lady who has been so celebrated as the Correspondent of Mr. Sterne."
It is engraved on her tomb in Bristol Cathedral that "genius and
benevolence were united in her"; but the long letter composed in the vein of
Mrs. Montagu and now printed from her manuscript belies the first, and her
behaviour after Sterne's death makes a mockery of the second.
All this new material throws light on a phase of this matter which cannot
be avoided in any discussion of Sterne's character: How far did his
immorality actually extend? To Thackeray he was a "foul Satyr"; Bagehot

thought he was merely an "old flirt," and others have seen various degrees
of guilt in his philanderings. Now his relation to Eliza would seem to be
pretty decisive of his character in this respect, and fortunately the evidence
here published in full by Professor Cross leaves little room for doubt. There
is, for one thing, an extraordinary letter which is given in facsimile from the
rough draft, with all its erasures and corrections. It was addressed to Daniel
Draper, but was never sent, apparently never completed. The substance of it
is, to say the least, unusual:

I own it, Sir, that the writing a letter to a gentleman I have not the honour to be known to—a letter
likewise upon no kind of business (in the ideas of the world) is a little out of the common course of
things—but I'm so myself, and the impulse which makes me take up my pen is out of the common
way too, for it arises from the honest pain I should feel in having so great esteem and friendship as I
bear for Mrs. Draper—if I did not wish to hope and extend it to Mr. Draper also. I am really, dear sir,
in love with your wife; but 'tis a love you would honour me for, for 'tis so like that I bear my own
daughter, who is a good creature, that I scarce distinguish a difference betwixt it—that moment I had
would have been the last.

Follows a polite offer of services, which is nothing to our purpose.
Now it is easy to say that such a letter was written with the hypocritical
intention of allaying Mr. Draper's possible suspicions, and certainly the last
sentence overshoots the mark. Against the general innocence of Sterne's life
there exist, in particular, two damaging bits of evidence—that infamous
thing in dog-Latin addressed to the master of the "Demoniacs," whose
meaning must have been quite lost upon the daughter who published it, and
a pair of brief notes to a woman named Hannah. Of the Latin letter one may
say that it was probably written in the exaggerated tone of bravado suitable
to its recipient; of both this and the notes one may add that they do not
incriminate the later years of Sterne's life. As an offset we now have that
extraordinary memorandum in the Journal to Eliza, dated April 24, 1767,
which states explicitly, and convincingly, that he had led an entirely chaste
life for the past fifteen years. It is not requisite, or indeed possible, to enter
into the evidence further in this place, but the general inference may be
stated with something like assurance: Sterne's relation to Eliza was purely
sentimental, as was the case with most of his philandering; at the same time
in his earlier years he had probably indulged in a life of pleasure such as
was by no means uncommon among the clergy of his day. He was neither
quite the lying scoundrel of Thackeray nor the "old flirt" of Bagehot, but a
man led into many follies, and many kindnesses also, by an impulsive heart

and a worldly philosophy. It is not his immorality that one has to complain
of, and the talk in the books on that score is mostly foolishness; it is rather
his bad taste. He cannot be much blamed for his estrangement from his
wife, and his care for her comfort is not a little to his credit; but he might
have refrained from writing to Eliza on the happiness they were to enjoy
when the poor woman was dead—as he had already done to Mlle.
Fourmantelle, and others, too, it may be. Mrs. Sterne, not long after the
departure of Eliza, had written that she was coming over to England, and
the Journal for a time is filled with forebodings of the confusion she was to
bring with her. One hardly knows whether to smile or drop a tear over the
Postscript added after the last regular entry:

Nov: 1sṭ All my dearest Eliza has turnd out more favourable than my hopes—Mrṣ S.—& my dear
Girl have been 2 Months with me and they have this day left me to go to spend the Winter at York,
after having settled every thing to their hearts content—Mrṣ Sterne retires into france, whence she
purposes not to stir, till her death.—& never, has she vow'd, will give me another sorrowful or
discontented hour—I have conquerd her, as I wḍ every one else, by humanity & Generosity—& she
leaves me, more than half in Love wtḥ me—She goes into the South of france, her health being
insupportable in England—& her age, as she now confesses ten Years more, than I thought being on
the edge of sixty—so God bless—& make the remainder of her Life happy—in order to wcḥ I am to
remit her three hundred guineas a year—& give my dear Girl two thousand pdṣ—wtḥ wcḥ all Joy, I
agree to,—but tis to be sunk into an annuity in the french Loans—
—And now Eliza! Let me talk to thee—But What can I say, What can I write—But the Yearnings
of heart wasted with looking & wishing for thy Return—Return—Return! my dear Eliza! May
heaven smooth the Way for thee to send thee safely to us, & joy for Ever.

So ends the famous Journal, which at last we are permitted to read with
all its sins upon it. And I think the first observation that will occur to every
reader is surprise that a master of style could write such slipshod, almost
illiterate, English. The fact is a good many of the writers of the day were
content to leave all minor matters of grammar and orthography to their
printer, whom it was then the fashion to abuse. More than one page of
stately English out of that formal age would look as queer as Sterne's hectic
scribblings, could we see the original manuscript. But the ill taste of it all is
quite as apparent, and unfortunately no printer could expunge that fault,
along with his haphazard punctuation, from Sterne's published works. In
another way his incongruous calling as a priest may be responsible for a
note that particularly jars upon us to-day. Too often in the midst of very
earthly sentiments he breaks forth with a bit of religious claptrap, as when

in the Journal he cries out, "Great God of Mercy! shorten the Space betwixt
us—Shorten the space of our miseries!"—or as when, in that letter to Lady
Percy which so disgusted Thackeray, he dandles his temptations, and in the
same breath tells how he has repeated the Lord's Prayer for the sake of
deliverance from them. Again, I say, it is a matter of taste, for there is no
reason to believe that Yorick's religious feelings were not just as sincere,
and as volatile, too, as his love-making. They sometimes came to him at an
inopportune moment.
"Un prêtre corrumpu ne l'est jamais à demi"—a priest is never only half
corrupt—said Massillon, and there are times when such a saying is true. It
is also true, and Sterne's life is witness thereof, that in certain ages, when
compassion and tenderness of heart have taken the place of religion's
austerer virtues, a man may preach with conviction on Sunday, and on
Monday join without much disquiet of conscience in the revelries of a
"Crazy" Castle. There is not a great deal for the moralist to say on such a
life; it is a matter for the historian to explain. At Cambridge Sterne had
made the acquaintance of John Hall Stevenson, the owner of Skelton, or
"Crazy," Castle, which lay at Guisborough, within convenient reach of
Sterne's Yorkshire homes. An excellent engraving in the present edition
gives a fair notion of this fantastic dwelling before its restoration. On a
fringe of land between the edge of what seems a stagnant pool and the foot
of some barren hills, the old pile of stone sits dull and lowering. First comes
a double terrace rising sheer from the water, and above that a rambling,
comfortless-looking structure, pierced in the upper story by a few solemn
windows. Terraces and building alike are braced with outstanding
buttresses, as if, like the House of Usher, the ancient edifice might some
day split and crumble away into the lake. At one end of the pile is a heavy
square tower erected long ago for defence; at the other stands a slender
octagonal turret with its famous weathercock, by whose direction the owner
regulated his mood for the day. The whole bears an aspect of bleakness and
solitude, in startling contrast with the wild doings of host and guests. A
study yet to be made is a history of the clubs or associations of the
eighteenth century, which, in imitation, no doubt, of the newly instituted
Masonic rites, were formed for the purpose of adding the sting of a fraternal
secrecy to the commonplace pleasures of dissipation. Famous among these
were the "Monks of Medmenham Abbey," and the "Hell-Fire Club," and to
a less degree the "Demoniacs" whom Hall Stevenson gathered into his

notorious abode. If Sterne found his amusement in this boisterous assembly,
it is charitable (and the evidence points this way) to suppose that he enjoyed
the jovial wit and grotesque pranks of such a company rather than its
viciousness. It is at least remarkable that Hall Stevenson, or "Eugenius," as
Sterne called him, seems to have tried to steady the eccentric divine by
more than one piece of practical advice. Above all, there lay at Skelton a
great collection of Rabelaisian books, brought together by the owner during
his tours on the Continent; and to this Sterne owed his eccentric reading and
that acquaintance with the world's humours and whimsicalities which were
to make his fortune.
Here, then, in the library of his compromising friend, he gathered the
material for his great work, Tristram Shandy; and, indeed, if we credit some
scholars, he gathered so successfully that little was left for his own creative
talents. It is demonstrably true that he made extraordinary use of certain old
French books, including Rabelais, whom he counted with Cervantes as his
master; and from Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy he borrowed
unblushingly, not to mention other English authors. We are shocked at first
to learn that some of his choicest passages are stolen goods; the recording
angel's tear was shed, it appears, and my Uncle Toby's fly was released long
before that gentleman was born to sweeten the world; so too the wind was
tempered to the shorn lamb in proverb before Sterne ever added that text to
the stock of biblical quotations. But after all, there is little to be gained by
unearthing these plagiarisms. Tristram Shandy and the Sentimental Journey
still remain among the most original productions in the language, and we
are only taught once more that genius has a high-handed way of taking its
own where it finds it.
The fact is that this trick of borrowing scarcely does more than affect a
few of those set pieces or purple patches by which an author like Sterne
gradually comes to be known and judged. These are admirably adapted for
use in anthologies, for they may be severed from their context without
cutting a single artery or nerve; but let no one suppose that from reading
them he gets anything but a distorted view of Sterne's work. They are all
marked by a peculiar kind of artificial pathos—the recording angel's tear,
Uncle Toby's fly, the dead ass, the caged starling, Maria of Moulines (I
name them as they occur to me)—and they give a very imperfect notion of
the true Shandean flavour. In their own genre they are no doubt

masterpieces, but it is a genre which gives pleasure from the perception of
the art, and not from the kindling touch of nature, in their execution. They
are ostensibly pathetic, yet they make no appeal to the heart, and I doubt if a
tear was ever shed over any of them—even by the lachrymose Yorick
himself. To enjoy them properly one must key his mind to that state in
which the emotions cease to have validity in themselves, and are changed
into a kind of exquisite convention. Now, it is easier by far to detect the
inherent insubstantiality of such a convention than to appreciate its
delicately balanced beauty, and thus it happens that we hear so much of
Sterne's false sentiment from those who base their criticism primarily on
these famous episodes. For my part I am almost inclined to place the story
of Le Fevre in this class, and to wonder if those who call it pathetic really
mean that it has touched their heart; I am sure it never cost me a sigh.
No, the highest mastery of Sterne does not lie in these anthological
patches, but first of all in his power of creating characters. There are not
many persons engaged in the little drama of Shandy Hall, and their range of
action is narrow, but they are drawn with a skill and a memorable
distinctness which have never been surpassed. Not the bustling people of
Shakespeare's stage are more real and individual than Mr. Shandy, my
Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim, and Dr. Slop. Even the minor characters of the
servants' hall are sketched in with wonderful vividness; and if there is a
single failure in all that gallery of portraits, it is Yorick himself, who was
drawn from the author and is foisted upon the company somewhat
unceremoniously, if truth be told. Nor is the secret of their lifelikeness hard
to discern. One of the constant creeds of the age, handed down from the old
comedy of humours, was the belief in the "ruling passion" as the source of
all a man's acts. The persons who figure in most of the contemporary letters
and novels are a succession of originals or grotesques, moved by a single
motive. They are all mad in England, said Hamlet, and Walpole enforces the
sentence with a thousand burlesque anecdotes. Now in Sterne this ruling
passion, both in his own character and in that of his creations, was softened
down to what may be called a whimsical egotism, which does not repel by
its exaggeration, yet bestows a marvellous unity and relief. It is his
hobbyhorsical philosophy, as he calls it. At the head of all are Tristram's
father and uncle, with their cunningly contrasted humours—Mr. Shandy,
who would regulate all the affairs of life by abstract theorems of the mind,
and my Uncle Toby, who is guided solely by the impulses of the heart.

Between them Sterne would seem to have set over against each other the
two divided sources of human activity; and the minor characters, each with
his cherished hobby, are ranged under them in proper subordination. The art
of the narrative—and in this Sterne is without master or rival—is to bring
these characters into a group by some common motive, and then to show
how each of them is thinking all the while of his own dear crotchet. Take,
for example, the tremendous curse of Ernulphus in the third book. Mr.
Shandy had "the greatest veneration in the world for that gentleman, who,
in distrust of his own discretion in this point, sat down and composed (that
is, at his leisure) fit forms of swearing suitable to all cases, from the lowest
to the highest provocation which could possibly happen to him." That is Mr.
Shandy's theorising hobby, and accordingly, when his man Obadiah is the
cause of an annoying mishap, Mr. Shandy reaches down the formal curse of
Bishop Ernulphus and hands it to Dr. Slop to read. It might seem tedious to
have seven pages of excommunicative wrath thrust upon you, with the
Latin text duly written out on the opposite page. On the contrary, this is one
of the more entertaining scenes of the book, for at every step one or another
of the listeners throws in an exclamation which intimates how the words are
falling in with his own peculiar train of thought. The result is a delightful
cross-section of human nature, as it actually exists. "Our armies swore
terribly in Flanders, cried my Uncle Toby—but nothing to this.—For my
own part, I could not have a heart to curse my dog so."
But it is not this persistent and very human egotism alone which makes
the good people of Shandy Hall so real to us. Sterne is the originator and
master of the gesture and the attitude. Like a skilful player of puppets, he
both puts words into the mouths of his creatures and pulls the wires that
move them. No one has ever approached him in the art with which he
carries out every mood of the heart and every fancy of the brain into the
most minute and precise posturing. Before Corporal Trim reads the sermon
his exact attitude is described so that, as the author says, "a statuary might
have modelled from it." Throughout all the dialogue between the two
contrasted brothers we follow every movement of the speakers, as if we sat
with them in the flesh, and when Mr. Shandy breaks his pipe the moment is
tense with expectation. But the supreme exhibition of this art occurs at the
announcement of Bobby's death. Let us leave Mr. Shandy and my Uncle
Toby discoursing over this sad event, and turn to the kitchen. Those who
know the scene may pass on:

——My young master in London is dead! said Obadiah.—
——A green sattin night-gown of my mother's, which had been twice scoured, was the first idea
which Obadiah's exclamation brought into Susannah's head....
—O! 'twill be the death of my poor mistress, cried Susannah.—My mother's whole wardrobe
followed.—What a procession! her red damask,—her orange tawney,—her white and yellow
lutestrings,—her brown taffata,—her bone-laced caps, her bed-gowns, and comfortable under-
petticoats.—Not a rag was left behind.—"No,—she will never look up again," said Susannah.
We had a fat, foolish scullion—my father, I think, kept her for her simplicity;—she had been all
autumn struggling with a dropsy.—He is dead, said Obadiah,—he is certainly dead!—So am not I,
said the foolish scullion.
——Here is sad news, Trim, cried Susannah, wiping her eyes as Trim stepp'd into the kitchen,—
master Bobby is dead and buried—the funeral was an interpolation of Susannah's—we shall have all
to go into mourning, said Susannah.
I hope not, said Trim.—You hope not! cried Susannah earnestly.—The mourning ran not in Trim's
head, whatever it did in Susannah's.—I hope—said Trim, explaining himself, I hope in God the news
is not true—I heard the letter read with my own ears, answered Obadiah; and we shall have a terrible
piece of work of it in stubbing the Ox-moor.—Oh! he's dead, said Susannah.—As sure, said the
scullion, as I'm alive.
I lament for him from my heart and my soul, said Trim, fetching a sigh.—Poor creature!—poor
boy!—poor gentleman!
—He was alive last Whitsontide! said the coachman.—Whitsontide! alas! cried Trim, extending his
right arm, and falling instantly into the same attitude in which he read the sermon,—what is
Whitsontide, Jonathan (for that was the coachman's name), or Shrovetide, or any tide or time past, to
this? Are we not here now, continued the corporal (striking the end of his stick perpendicularly upon
the floor, so as to give an idea of health and stability)—and are we not—(dropping his hat upon the
ground) gone! in a moment!—'T was infinitely striking! Susannah burst into a flood of tears.—We
are not stocks and stones.—Jonathan, Obadiah, the cookmaid, all melted.—The foolish fat scullion
herself, who was scouring a fish-kettle upon her knees, was rous'd with it.—The whole kitchen
crowded about the corporal.

There is the true Sterne. A common happening unites a half-dozen people
in a sympathetic group, yet all the while each of them is living his
individual life. You may look far and wide, but you will find nothing quite
comparable to that fat, foolish scullion. And withal there is no touch of
cynical satire in this display of egotism, but a kindly, quizzical sense of the
way in which our human personalities are jumbled together in this strange
world. And in the end the feeling that lies covered up in the heart of each,
the feeling that all of us carry dumbly in the inevitable presence of death, is
conveyed in that supreme gesture of Corporal Trim's, whose force in the
book is magnified by the author's fantastic disquisition on its precise nature
and significance.

It begins to grow clear, I think, that we have here something more than an
ordinary tale in which a few individuals are set apart to enact their rôles.
Somehow, this quaint household in the country, where nothing more
important is happening than the birth of a child, becomes a symbol of the
great world with all its tangle of cross-purposes. There is a philosophy, a
new and distinct vision of the meaning of life, in these scenes, which makes
of Sterne something larger than a mere novelist. He was not indulging his
author's vanity when he thought of himself as a follower of Rabelais and
Cervantes and Swift, for he belongs with them rather than with his great
contemporaries, Fielding and Smollet, or his greater successors, Thackeray
and Dickens. Nor is his exact parentage hard to discover. In Rabelais I seem
to see the embryonic humour of a world coming to the birth and not yet
fully formed. Through the crust of the old mediæval ideals the new
humanism was struggling to emerge, and in its first lusty liberty mankind,
with the clog of the old civilisation still hanging upon it, was like those
monsters that Nature threw off when she was preparing her hand for a
higher creation. There is something unshaped, as of Milton's beast
wallowing unwieldy, in the creatures of Rabelais's brain; yet withal one
perceives the pride of the design that is foreshadowed and will some day
come to its own. Cervantes arose in the full tide of humanism, and there is
about his humour the pathetic regret for an ideal that has been swept aside
by the new forms. For this young civilisation, which spurned so haughtily
the ancient law of humiliation and which was to be satisfied with the full
and unconfined development of pure human nature, had a pitiful
incompleteness to all but a few of Fortune's minions, and the memory of the
past haunted the brain of Cervantes like a ghost vanquished and made
ridiculous, but unwilling to depart. He found therein the tragic humour of
man's ideal life. Then came Swift. Into his heart he sucked the bitterness of
a thousand disappointments. Even the semblance of the old ideals had
passed away, and for the fair promise of the new world he saw only
corruption and folly and a gigantic egotism stalking in the disguise of
liberty. Savage indignation laid hold of him and he vented his rage in that
mocking laughter which stings the ears like a buffet. His was the sardonic
humour. But time that takes away brings also its compensation. To Sterne,
living among smaller men, these passionate egotisms are dwindled to mere
caprices, and a jest becomes more appropriate than a sneer. And after all,
one good thing is left. There is the kindly heart and the humble

acknowledgment that we too are seeking our own petty ends. It is a world
of homely chance into which Sterne introduces us, and there is no room in it
for the boisterous mirth or the tragedy or wrath of his predecessors. His
humour is merely whimsical; his smile is almost a caress.
I can never look at that portrait of Sterne by Sir Joshua Reynolds, with
the head thrown forward and the index finger of the right hand laid upon the
forehead, but an extraordinary fantasy enters my mind. I seem to see one of
those pictures of the Renaissance, in which the face of the Almighty beams
benevolently out of the sky, but as I gaze, the features gradually change into
those of Yorick. The mouth assumes the sly smile, and the eyes twinkle with
conscious merriment, as if they were saying, "We know, you and I, but we
won't tell!" Possibly it is something in the pose of Sir Joshua's picture
which lends itself to this transformation, helped by a feeling that the
Shandean world, over which Sterne presides, is at times as real as the
actualities that surround us. That portrait at the head of his works is, so to
speak, an image of His Sacred Majesty, Chance, whom a witty Frenchman
reverenced as the genius of this world.
It may be that we do not always in our impatience recognise how artfully
the caprices of Sterne's manner are adapted to creating this atmosphere of
illusion. Now and then his trick of reaching a point by the longest way
round, his wanton interruptions, the absurdity of his blank pages, and other
cheap devices to appear original, grow a trifle wearisome, and we call the
author a mountebank for his pains. Yet was there ever a great book without
its tedious flats? They would seem to be necessary to procure the proper
perspective. Certainly all these whimsicalities of Sterne's manner fall in
admirably with the central theme of Tristram Shandy, which is nothing else
but an exposition of the way in which the blind goddess Chance, whose
hobby-horse is this world itself, makes her plaything of the lesser caprices
of mankind. "I have been the continual sport of what the world calls
Fortune," cries Tristram at the beginning of his narrative, and indeed that
deity laid her designs early against our hero, whose troubles date from the
very day of conception. "I see it plainly," says Mr. Shandy, in his chapter of
Lamentation, when calamity had succeeded calamity—"I see it plainly, that
either for my own sins, brother Toby, or the sins and follies of the Shandy
family, Heaven has thought fit to draw forth the heaviest of its artillery
against me; and the prosperity of my child is the point upon which the

whole force of it is directed to play."—"Such a thing would batter the whole
universe about our ears," replies my Uncle Toby, thinking no doubt of the
terrible work of the artillery in Flanders. Mr. Shandy was a man of ideas,
and Tristram was to be the embodiment of a theory. But alas,—"with all my
precautions how was my system turned topside-turvy in the womb with my
child!" There is something inimitably droll in this combat between the
solemn, pedantic notions of Mr. Shandy and the blunders of Chance. The
interrupted conception of poor Tristram, his unfortunate birth, the crushing
of his nose, the grotesque mistake in naming him,—all are scenes in this
ludicrous and prolonged warfare. Nor is my Uncle Toby any the less a
subject of Fortune's sport. There is, to begin with, a comical inconsistency
between the feminine tenderness of his heart and his absorption in the
memories of war. His hobby of living through in miniature the campaign of
the army in Flanders is one of the kindliest satires on human ambition ever
penned. And it was inevitable that my Uncle Toby, with his "most extreme
and unparalleled modesty of nature," should in the end have fallen a victim
to the designs of a woman like the Widow Wadman. It is, as I have said, this
underlying philosophy worked out in every detail of the book which makes
of Tristram Shandy something more than a mere comedy of manners. It
shatters the whole world of convention before our eyes and rebuilds it
according to the humour of a mad Yorkshire parson. And all of us at times, I
think, may find our pleasure and a lesson of human frailty, too, by entering
for a while into the concerns of that Shandean society.
Sterne, on one side of his character, was a sentimentalist. That, and little
more than that, we see in his letters and Journal. And in a form, subtilised
no doubt to a kind of exquisite felicity, that is the essence of his Sentimental
Journey, as the name implies. He was indeed the first author to use the
word "sentimental" in its modern significance, and for one reason and
another this was the trait of his writing that was able, as the French would
say, to faire école. It flooded English literature with tearful trash like
Mackenzie's Man of Feeling, and, in a happier manner, it influenced even
Thackeray more than he would have been willing to admit. It is present in
Tristram Shandy, but only as a milder and half-concealed flavour, subduing
the satire of that travesty to the uses of a genial and sympathetic humour.
Probably, however, the imputation of sentimentalism repels fewer readers
from Sterne to-day than that of immorality. It is a charge easily flung, and in

part deserved. And yet, in all honesty, are we not prone to fall into cant
whenever this topic is broached? I was reading in a family edition of
Rabelais the other day and came across this sentence in the introduction:
"After wading through the worst of Rabelais's work, one needs a thorough
bath and a change of raiment, but after Sterne one needs strychnine and iron
and a complete change of blood." It does not seem to me that the case with
Sterne is quite so bad as that. Rabelais wrote when the human passions
were emerging from restraint, and it was part of his humour to paint the
lusty youth of the world in colours of grotesque exaggeration. Sterne,
coming in an age of conventional manners, pointed slyly to the gross and
untamed thoughts that lurked in the minds of men beneath all their stiffened
decorum. It was the purpose of his "topside-turvydom," as it was of
Rabelais's, to turn the under side of human nature up to the light, and to
show how Fortune smiles at the social proprieties; but his instrument was
necessarily innuendo instead of boisterous ribaldry, Shandeism in place of
Pantagruelism. Deliberately he employed this art of insinuation in such a
way as to draw the reader on to look for hidden meanings where none really
exists. We are made an unwilling accomplice in his obscenity, and this
perhaps, though a legitimate device, is the most objectionable feature of his
suggestive style.
One may concede so much and yet dislike such broad accusations of
immorality as are sometimes laid against him. I cannot see what harm can
come to a mature mind from either Rabelais or Sterne. And if the pueris
reverentia be taken as the criterion (the effect actually produced on those
who are as yet unformed, for good or ill, by the experience of life) I am
inclined to think that the really dangerous books are those like the Venus
and Adonis, which throw the colours of a glowing imagination over what is
in itself perfectly natural and wholesome; I am inclined to think that
Shakespeare has debauched more immature minds than ever Sterne could
do, and that even Pantagruelism is more inflammatory than Shandeism. So
far as morals alone are concerned there is a touch of what may be called
inverted cant in this discrimination between the wholesome and the
unwholesome. Sir Walter Scott, in his straight-forward, manly way, put the
matter right once for all: "It cannot be said that the licentious humour of
Tristram Shandy is of the kind which applies itself to the passions, or is
calculated to corrupt society. But it is a sin against taste if allowed to be
harmless as to morals." The question with Sterne's writings, as with his life,

is not so much one of morality as of taste. And if we admit that he
occasionally sinned against these inexorable laws, this does not mean that
his book as a whole was ill or foully conceived. He merely erred at times by
excess of his method.
The first two volumes of Tristram Shandy were written in 1759, when
Sterne was forty-six, and were advertised for sale in London on the first day
of the year following. Like many another too original work, it had first to
go a-begging for a publisher, but the effect of it on the great world, when
once it became known, was prodigious. The author soon followed his book
to the city to reap his reward, and the story of his fame in London during his
annual visits and of his reception in Paris reads like enchantment. "My
Lodging," he writes to his dear Kitty in the first flush of triumph, "is euery
hour full of your Great People of the first Rank, who striue who shall most
honor me;—euen all the Bishops have sent their Complimtṣ to me, & I set
out on Monday Morning to pay my Visits to them all. I am to dine wḥ Lord
Chesterfield this Week, &c. &c., and next Sunday Lḍ Rockingham takes me
to Court." Nor was his reward confined to the empty plaudits of society.
Lord Falconberg presented him with the perpetual curacy of Coxwold, a
comfortable charge not twenty miles from Sutton. The "proud priest"
Warburton sent him a purse of gold, because (so the story ran, but it may
well have been idle slander) he had heard that Sterne contemplated
introducing him into a later volume as the tutor of Tristram.
Sterne planned to bring out two successive volumes each year for the
remainder of his life, and the number did actually run to nine without
getting Tristram much beyond his childhood's misadventures. At different
times, also, he published two volumes of Sermons by Mr. Yorick, which, in
their own way, and considered as moral essays rather than as theological
discourses, are worthy of a study in themselves. They are for one thing
almost the finest example in English of that style which follows the
sinuosities and subtle transitions of the spoken word.
But soon his health, always delicate, began to give way under the strain
of reckless living. Long vacations in Paris and the South of France restored
his strength temporarily, and at the same time gave him material for the
travel scenes in Tristram Shandy and for the Sentimental Journey. But that
"vile asthma" was never long absent, and there is something pitiable in the

quips and jests with which he covers his dread of the spectre that was
pursuing him. We have seen how the travail of his broken body wails in the
Journal to Eliza; and his last letter, written from his lodging in London to
his truest and least equivocal friend, was, as Thackeray says, a plea for pity
and pardon: "Do, dear Mrs. J[ames], entreat him to come to-morrow, or
next day, for perhaps I have not many days, or hours to live—I want to ask
a favour of him, if I find myself worse—that I shall beg of you, if in this
wrestling I come off conqueror—my spirits are fled—'tis a bad omen—do
not weep my dear Lady—your tears are too precious to shed for me—bottle
them up, and may the cork never be drawn.—Dearest, kindest, gentlest, and
best of women! may health, peace, and happiness prove your handmaids.—
If I die, cherish the remembrance of me, and forget the follies which you so
often condemn'd—which my heart, not my head, betray'd me into. Should
my child, my Lydia want a mother, may I hope you will (if she is left
parentless) take her to your bosom?"—I cannot but feel that the man who
wrote that note was kind and good at heart, and that through all his
wayward tricks and sham sentiment, as through the incoherence of his
untrimmed language, there ran a vein of genuine sweetness.
He sent this appeal from Bond Street, on Tuesday, the 15th of March,
1768. On Friday, the 18th, a party of his roistering friends, nobles and
actors and gay livers, were having a grand dinner in a street near by, when
some one in the midst of their frolic mentioned that Sterne was lying ill in
his chamber. They dispatched a footman to inquire of their old merry-
maker, and this is the report that he wrote in later years; it is unique in its
terrible simplicity:

About this time, Mr. Sterne, the celebrated author, was taken ill at the silk-bag shop in Old Bond
Street. He was sometimes called "Tristram Shandy," and sometime "Yorick"; a very great favourite of
the gentlemen's. One day my master had company to dinner, who were speaking about him; the Duke
of Roxburgh, the Earl of March, the Earl of Ossory, the Duke of Grafton, Mr. Garrick, Mr. Hume,
and Mr. James. "John," said my master, "go and inquire how Mr. Sterne is to-day." I went, returned,
and said: I went to Mr. Sterne's lodging; the mistress opened the door; I inquired how he did. She told
me to go up to the nurse; I went into the room, and he was just a-dying. I waited ten minutes; but in
five he said, "Now it is come!" He put up his hand as if to stop a blow, and died in a minute. The
gentlemen were all very sorry, and lamented him very much.

We have seen Corporal Trim in the kitchen dropping his hat as a symbol
of man's quick and humiliating collapse, but I think the attitude of poor
Yorick himself lying in his hired chamber, with hand upraised to stop the

invisible blow, a work of greater and still more astounding genius. It was
devised by the Master of gesture indeed, by him whose puppets move on a
wider stage than that of Shandy Hall.

J. HENRY SHORTHOUSE
Probably few people expected a work of more than mediocre interest
when they heard that Mrs. Shorthouse was preparing her husband's Letters
and Literary Remains for the the press.[9] The life of a Birmingham
merchant, who in the course of his evenings elaborated one rather mystical
novel and then a few paler and abbreviated shadows of it, did not, indeed,
promise a great deal, and there is something to make one shudder in the
very sound of "literary remains." Nor would it have been reassuring to
know that these remains were for the most part short essays and stories read
at the social meetings of the Friends' Essay Society of Birmingham. The
manuscript records of such a club are not a source to which one would
naturally look for exhilarating literature, yet from them, let me say at once,
the editor has drawn a volume both interesting and valuable. Mr.
Shorthouse contributed to these meetings for some twenty years, from the
age of eighteen until he withdrew to concentrate his energies upon John
Inglesant, and it is worthy of notice that his early sketches are, on the
whole, better work than the more elaborate essays, such as that on The
Platonism of Wordsworth, which followed the production of his
masterpiece. He was to an extraordinary degree homo unius libri, almost of
a single thought, and there is a certain freshness in his immature
presentation of that idea which was lost after it once received the stamp of
definitive expression. Hawthorne, we already knew, furnished the model for
his later method, but we feel a pleasant shock, such as always accompanies
the perception of some innate consistency, on opening to the very first
sentence in his volume of Remains, and finding the master's name: "I have
been all my life what Nathaniel Hawthorne calls 'a devoted epicure of my
own emotions.'" That, I suppose, was written about 1854, when
Hawthorne's first long romance had been published scarcely four years, and
shows a remarkable power in the young disciple of finding his literary
kinship. Indeed, not the least of his resemblances to Hawthorne is the fact
that he seems from the first to have possessed a native sense of style; what
other men toil for was theirs by right of birth. In the earliest of these
sketches the cadenced rhythms of John Inglesant are already present,

lacking a little, perhaps, in the perfect assurance that came later, but still
unmistakable. And at times—in The Autumn Walk, for instance, with its
"attempt to find language for nameless sights and voices," in Sundays at the
Seaside, with their benediction of outpoured light upon the waters, offering
to the beholder as it were the sacrament of beauty, or in the Recollections of
a London Church,—at times, I say, we seem almost to be reading some lost
or discarded chapter of the finished romance. This closing paragraph of the
Recollections, written apparently when Shorthouse was not much more than
a boy—might it not be a memory of King Charles's cavalier himself?—

Certes, it was very strange that the story of this young girl whom I have never seen, whom I knew
so little of, should haunt me thus. Yet for her sake I loved the church and the trees and even the dark
and dingy houses round about; and as with the small congregation I listened to the refrain of that
sublime litany which sounded forth, word for word, as she had heard it, I thought it all the more
divine because I knew so certainly that in her days of trouble and affliction it had supported and
comforted her:
By Thine agony and bloody sweat; by Thy cross and passion; by Thy precious death and burial; by
Thy glorious resurrection and ascension; and by the coming of the Holy Ghost, Good Lord deliver
us.

And the Life, too, in an unpretentious way, is decidedly more interesting
than might have been expected. The narrative is simply told, and the letters
are for the most part quiet expositions of the idea that dominated the writer's
mind. Here and there comes the gracious record of some day of shimmering
lights among the Welsh hills;—"a wonderful vision of sea and great
mountains in a pale white mist trembling into blue," as he writes to Mr.
Gosse from Llandudno, and we know we are with the author of John
Inglesant. Joseph Henry Shorthouse was born in Birmingham on September
9th, 1834. His parents belonged to the Society of Friends, and the boy's first
schooling was at the house of a lady who belonged to the same body. He
was, however, of an extremely sensitive and timid disposition, and even the
excitement of this homelike school affected him deplorably. "I have now,"
says his wife, "the old copy of Lindley Murray's spelling book which he
used there. His mother saw, to her dismay, when she heard him repeat the
few small words of his lesson, that his face worked painfully, and his little
nervous fingers had worn away the bottom edges of his book, and that he
was beginning to stammer." He was immediately taken from school, but the
affection of stammering remained with him through life and cut him off
from much active intercourse with the world. He acknowledged that

without it he would probably never have found time for his studies and
productive work, and the eloquence of his pen was due in part to the
lameness of his tongue. At a later date he went for a while to Tottenham
College, but his real education he got from tutors and still more from his
own insatiable love of books.
It appears that all his family associations were of a kind to foster the
peculiar talents that were to bring him fame. His father while dressing used
to tell the boy of his travels in Italy, and so imbued him with a love for that
wonderful country which he himself was never to see. In after years, when
the elder Shorthouse came to read his son's novel, he was surprised and
delighted to find the scenes he had described all written out with
extraordinary accuracy. Even more beneficial was the influence of his
grandmother, Rebecca Shorthouse, and her home at Moseley, where every
Thursday young Henry and his four girl cousins, the Southalls, used to
foregather and spend the day. One of the cousins has left a record of this
garden estate and of these weekly visits which might have been written by
Shorthouse himself, so illuminated is it with that subdued radiance which
rests upon all his works. I could wish it were permissible to quote at even
greater length from these pages, for they are the best possible preparation
for an understanding of John Inglesant:

The old house at Moseley ... was surrounded by a large extent of garden ground and ample lawns.
The gardens were on different levels—the upper was the flower garden. No gardener with his dozens
of bedding plants molested that fragrant solitude, but there, unhindered, the narcissus multiplied into
sheets of bloom, the little yellow rose embodied the summer sunshine, the white roses climbed into
the old apple trees, or looked out from the depths of the ivy, and we knew the sweet-briar was there,
though we saw it not.
Below, but accessible by stone steps, lay the low garden, surrounded by brick lichen-covered
walls, beyond which rose banks of trees. [The "blue door" in this garden wall is introduced in the
Countess Eve, and another part of the garden in Sir Percival.] On these old walls nectarines, peaches,
and apricots ripened in the August sun. In the upper part of this walled garden stretched a winding
lawn, made in the shape of a letter S, and surrounded on all sides by laurels. This was a complete
seclusion. In the broad light of noon, when the lilacs and laburnums and guelder-roses were full of
bees, and each laurel leaf, as if newly burnished, reflected the glorious sunshine, it was a delicious
solitude, where we read, or talked, or thought, to our hearts' content. But as night fell, when "the
laurels' pattering talk was over," there was a deep solemnity in its dark shadows, and in its stillness
and loneliness.

Qualis ab incepto! Are we not in fancy carried straightway to that scene
where the boy Inglesant goes back to his first schoolmaster, whom he finds
sitting amid his flowers, and who tells him marvellous things concerning

the search for the Divine Light? or to that other scene, where he talks with
Dr. Henry More in the garden of Oulton, and hears that rare Platonist
discourse on the glories of the visible world, saying: "I am in fact 'Incola
cœli in terrâ,' an inhabitant of paradise and heaven upon earth; and I may
soberly confess that sometimes, walking abroad after my studies, I have
been almost mad with pleasure,—the effect of nature upon my soul having
been inexpressibly ravishing, and beyond what I can convey to you."
Indeed, not only John Inglesant, but all of Mr. Shorthouse's stories could
not be better described than as a writing out at large of the wistful memory
of that time when men heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the
garden in the cool of the day—and were still not afraid. But we must not
pass on without observing the more individual traits of the boy noted down
in the record:

That which strikes one most in recalling our intercourse with our cousin at this time is that our
conversation did not consist of commonplaces; we talked for hours on literary subjects, or, if persons
were under discussion, they were such as had a real interest; the books we were reading were the
chief theme. The low garden was generally the scene of these conversations, and it was here we read
and talked all through the long summer afternoons ... Nathaniel Hawthorne had a perennial charm,—
his influence on our cousin was permanent,—and we turned from all other books to Hawthorne's
with fresh delight. There is in existence a well-worn copy of the Twice-Told Tales that was seldom
out of our hands. [It is in the Preface to this book that Hawthorne boasts of being "the obscurest man
of letters in America."]....
Our cousin was at this and all other times very particular about his dress and appearance; it seemed
to us then that he assumed a certain exaggeration with regard to them; we did not understand how
consistent it all was with his idea of life....
He was not at all fond of walking, and it is doubtful if he cared for mountain scenery for its own
sake. He responded to the moods of Nature with a sensitiveness that was natural to him, but it was
her quiet aspects which most affected him. He was a native of "the land where it is always
afternoon."

But life was not all play with young Shorthouse. At the age of sixteen his
father took him into the chemical works which had been founded by the
great-grandfather, and, although his father and later his brother were
indulgent to him in many ways, the best of his energies went to this
business until within a few years of his death. There is something
incongruous, as has been remarked, in the manufacture of vitriol and the
writing of mystical novels. In 1857 he married Sarah Scott, whom he had
known for a number of years, and the young couple took a house in
Edgbaston, the suburb of Birmingham in which they had both grown up and
where they continued to live until the end. Mrs. Shorthouse tells of the

disposition of his hours. He went regularly to business at nine, came home
to dinner in the middle of the day, and returned to town till nearly seven.
The evenings, after the first hour of relaxation, were mostly devoted to
studying Greek, reading classics and divinity, and the seventeenth-century
literature, which had always possessed a peculiar fascination for him.
During the years from 1866 to 1876 he was slowly putting together his
story of John Inglesant, and with the exception of his wife, no one saw the
writing, or, indeed, knew that he had a work of any such magnitude on
hand. For four years he kept the completed manuscript, which was rejected
by one or two publishers, and then, in 1880, he printed an edition of a
hundred copies for private distribution. One of these fell into the hands of
Mrs. Humphry Ward, and through her the Macmillans became interested in
the book, and requested to publish it. No one was more amazed at the
reception of the story than was the author himself. He was immediately a
man of mark, and the doors of the world were thrown open to him. Other
stories followed, beautiful in thought and expression, but too manifestly
little more in substance than pale reflections of his one great book; his
message needed no repetition. He died in 1903, beloved and honoured by
all who knew him, and it is characteristic of the man that during his last
years of suffering one or another of the volumes of John Inglesant was
always at his side, a comfort and a consoling voice to the author as it had
been to so many other readers.
Religion was the supreme reality for him as a boy, and as a man nearing
the hidden goal. His family were Quakers, but in 1861 he and his wife
became members of the Church of England, and it was under the influence
of that faith his books were written. Naturally his letters and the record of
his life have much to say of religious matters, but in one respect they are
disappointing. It would have been interesting to know a little more precisely
the nature of his views and the steps by which he passed from one form of
belief to the other. That the anxiety attendant on the change cost him
heavily and for a while broke down his health, we know, and from his
published writings it is easy to conjecture the underlying cause of the
change, but the more human aspect of the struggle he underwent is still left
obscure.
Nor is his relation to the three-cornered embroglio within the Church
itself anywhere set forth in detail. Almost it would seem as if he dwelt in

some charmed corner of the fold into which the reverberations of those
terrific words Broad and High and Low penetrated only as a subdued
muttering. To supplement this defect I have myself been reading some of
the literature of that contest, and among other things a series of able papers
on Le Mouvement Ritualiste dans l'Église Anglicane, which M. Paul
Thureau-Dangin has just published in the Revue des Deux Mondes. The
impression left on my own mind has been in the highest degree
contradictory and exasperating. One labours incessantly to know what all
this tumult is about, and I should suppose that no more inveterate and
vicious display of parochialism was ever enacted in this world. To pass
from these disputes to the religious conflict that was going on in France at
the same time is to learn in a striking way the difference between words and
ideas; and even our own pet transcendental hubbub in Concord is in
comparison with the Oxford debate vast and cosmopolitan in significance.
The intrusion of a single idea into that mad logomachy would have been a
phenomenon more appalling than the appearance of a naked body in a
London drawing-room, and it is not without its amusing side that one of
Newman's associates is said to have dreaded "the preponderance of intellect
among the elements of character and as a guide of life" in that perplexed
apologist. Ideas are not conspicuous anywhere in English literature, least of
all in its religious books, and often one is inclined to extend Bagehot's
cynical pleasantry as a cloak for deficiencies here, too: the stupidity of the
English is the salvation of their literature as well as of their politics. For it is
only fair to add that this ecclesiastical battle, if paltry in abstract thought,
was rich in human character and in a certain obstinate perception of the
validity of traditional forms; it was at bottom a contest over the position of
the Church in the intricate hierarchy of society, and pure religion was the
least important factor under consideration.
Two impulses, which were in reality one, were at the origin of the
movement. Religion had lagged behind the rest of life in that impetuous
awakening of the imagination which had come with the opening of the
nineteenth century; it retained all the dryness and lifeless cant of the
preceding generation, which had marked about the lowest stage of British
formalism. Enthusiasm of any sort was more feared than sin. Perhaps the
first widely recognized sign of change was the publication, in 1827, of
Keble's Christian Year, although the "Advertisement" to that famous book
showed no promise of a startling revolution. "Next to a sound rule of faith,"

said the author, "there is nothing of so much consequence as a sober
standard of feeling in matters of practical religion"; and certainly, to one
who reads those peaceful hymns to-day, sobriety seems to have marked
them for her own. Yet their effect was undoubtedly to import into the
Church and into the contemplation of churchmen something of that
enthusiasm, trained now and subdued to authority, which had been the
possession of infidels and sectaries.

What sudden blaze of song
Spreads o'er the expanse of Heaven?
In waves of light it thrills along,
The angelic signal given—
"Glory to God!" from yonder central fire
Flows out the echoing lay beyond the starry choir;—

such words men read in the hymn for Christmas Day, and they were thrilled
to think that the imaginative glow, which for a score of years had burned in
the secular poets, was at last impressed into the service of the sanctuary.
Another impulse, more definite in its nature, was the shock of the reform
bill. In his Apologia, Cardinal Newman, looking back to the early days of
the Tractarian Movement, declared that "the vital question was, How were
we to keep the Church from being Liberalised?" and in his eyes the sermon
preached by Keble, July 14, 1833, on the subject of National Apostasy, was
the first sounding of the battle cry. Impelled by the fear of the new
democratic tendencies, which threatened to lay hold of the Church and to
use it for utilitarian ends, the leaders of the opposition sought to go back
beyond the ordinances of the Reformation, and to emphasise the close
relation of the present forms of worship with those of the first Christian
centuries; against the invasions of the civil government they raised the
notion of the Church universal and one. The first of the famous Tracts,
dated September 9, 1833, puts the question frankly:

Should the Government and the Country so far forget their God as to cast off the Church, to
deprive it of its temporal honours and substance, on what will you rest the claim of respect and
attention which you make upon your flocks? Hitherto you have been upheld by your birth, your
education, your wealth, your connexions; should these secular advantages cease, on what must
Christ's ministers depend?

A layman might reply simply, On the truth, and Shorthouse, as we shall
see, had such an answer to make, though couched in more circuitous

language. But not so the Tract:

I fear we have neglected the real ground on which our authority is built—OUR APOSTOLICAL
DESCENT.

That was the Tractarian, or Oxford, Movement, which united the claims
of the imagination with the claims of priestcraft, and by a logical
development led the way to Rome. In the Church at large, the new leaven
worked its way slowly and confusedly, but in the end it created a tripartite
division, which threatened for a while to bring the whole establishment
down in ruins. The first of these, the High Church, is indeed essentially a
continuation, and to a certain extent a vulgarisation, of the Oxford
Movement. What had been a kind of epicurean vision of holy things,
reserved for a few chosen souls, was now made the vehicle of a wide
propaganda. The beautiful rites of the ancient worship were a powerful
seduction to wean the rich from worldly living and no less a tangible
compensation for the poor and outcast. At a later date, under the stress of
persecution, the leaders of the party formulated the so-called Six Points on
which they made a final stand: (1) The eastward position; (2) the eucharistic
vestments; (3) altar candles; (4) water mingled with the wine in the chalice;
(5) unleavened bread; (6) incense—without these there was no worship;
barely, if at all, salvation. The Low Church was, in large part, a state of pure
hostility to these followers of the Scarlet Woman; it was loudly Protestant,
confining the virtue of religion to an acceptance of the dogmas of the
Reformation, distrusting the symbolical appeal to the imagination, and
finding the truth too often in what was merely opposition to Rome.
Contrary to both, and despised by both, was the Broad Church, which held
the sacraments so lightly that, with the Dean of Westminster, it joined in
communion with Unitarians, and which treated dogma so cavalierly that,
with Maurice, it thought a subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles the
quickest way to liberty of belief. Yet I cannot see that this boasted freedom
did much more than introduce a kind of license in the interpretation of
words; it transferred the field of battle from forms to formulæ.
From this unpromising soil (intellectually, for in character it possessed its
giants) was to spring the one great religious novel of the English language. I
have thought it worth while to recall thus briefly, yet I fear tediously, the
chief aspects of the controversy, because only as the result of a profound

and, in many respects, violent national upheaval can the force and the inner
veracity of John Inglesant be comprehended. Mrs. Shorthouse fails to dwell
on this point; indeed, it would appear from her record that the noise of the
dispute reached her husband only from afar off. Yet during the years of
composition he was dwelling in a house at Edgbaston within a stone's throw
of the Oratory, where, at that time and to the end of his life, Cardinal
Newman resided, having found peace at last in the surrender of his doubts
to authority. The thought of that venerable man and of the agony through
which he had come must have been often in the novelist's mind. And it was
during these same ten years of composition that the forces of Low and High
were lined up against each other like two hostile armies, under the banners
of the English Church Union and the Church Association. The activity of
this latter body, which was founded in 1865 for the express purpose of
"putting down" the heresy of ritualism, may be gathered from the fact that
at a single meeting it voted to raise a fund of some $250,000 for the sake of
attacking High Church clergymen through the processes of law. Not without
reason was it dubbed the Persecution Company limited.
Now it may be possible with some ingenuity of argument—Laud himself
had aforetime made such an attempt—to regard the Battle of the Churches
as a contest of the reason; in practice its provincialism is due to the fact that
it was concerned, not with the truth, but with what men had held to be the
truth. That Mr. Shorthouse was able to write a book which is in a way the
direct fruit of this conflict, and which still contains so much of the universal
aspect of religion, came, I think, from his early Quaker training and from
his Greek philosophy. It would be a mistake to suppose that, on entering the
Church of England, he closed in his own breast the door to that inner
sanctuary of listening silence, the innocuæ silentia vitæ, where he had been
taught to worship as a child. At the time of the change he could still write to
one who was distressed at his decision: "I grant that Friends, at their
commencement, held with a strong hand perhaps the most important truth
of this system, the indwelling of the Divine Word." In reality, there was no
"perhaps" in Mr. Shorthouse's own adherence to this principle, both before
and after his conversion; only he would place a new emphasis on the word
"indwelling." The step signified to him, as I read his life, a transition from
the religion of the conscience to that of the imagination, from morality to
spiritual vision. This voice, which the Quakers heard in their own hearts
alone, and which was an admonition to separate themselves from all the

false splendours of the world, he now heard from stream and flowering
meadow and from the decorum of courtly society, bidding him make
beautiful his life, as well as holy. Henceforth he could say that "all history is
nothing but the relation of this great effort—the struggle of the divine
principle to enter into human life." And in the same letter in which these
words occur—an extraordinary epistle to Matthew Arnold, asking him to
embody the writer's ideas in an essay—he extends his Quaker inheritance so
far as to make it a cloak for humour, a humour, as he says, in "a sense
beyond, perhaps, that in which it ever has been understood, but which, it
may be, it is reserved to you to reveal to men." One would like to have Mr.
Arnold's reply to this divagation on Don Quixote. Mr. Shorthouse had,
characteristically, adapted the book to his own spiritual needs as a
representation "of the struggles of the divine principle to enter into the
everyday details of human life."
It was, I say, his unforgotten discipleship to George Fox and to Plato
which preserved Mr. Shorthouse from the narrowness of the movement
while permitting him to be faithful to the Church. In the Introduction to the
Life an ecclesiastical friend distinguishes him from the partisan schools as a
"Broad Church Sacramentarian." I confess in general to a strong dislike for
these technical phrases, which always savour a little of an evasion of
realities, and bear about the same relation to actual human experience as do
the pigeonholes of a lawyer's desk; but in this case the words have a useful
brevity. They show how he had been able to take the best from all sides of
the controversy and to weld these elements into harmony with the
philosophy of his inheritance and education. The position of Mr. Shorthouse
was akin to that of the Low-Churchmen in his hostility to the Romanising
tendencies and his distrust of priestcraft, but he differed from them still
more essentially in his recognition of the imagination as equally potent with
the moral sense in the upbuilding of character. To the Broad-Churchman he
was united chiefly in his abhorrence of dogmatic tests. One of his few
published papers (reprinted in the Life) is a plea for The Agnostic at
Church,—a plea which may still be taken to heart by those troubled
doubters who are held aloof by the dogmas of Christianity, yet regret their
lonely isolation from the religious aspirations of the community:

There is, however, one principle which underlies all church worship with which he [the agnostic]
cannot fail to sympathise, with which he cannot fail to be in harmony—the sacramental principle. For

this is the great underlying principle of life, by which the commonest and dullest incidents, the most
unattractive sights, the crowded streets and unlovely masses of people, become instinct with a
delicate purity, a radiant beauty, become the "outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual
grace." Everything may be a sacrament to the pure in heart.... Kneeling in company with his fellows,
even if all recollection of a far-away past, with its childhood's faith and fancies, has faded from his
mind, it is impossible but that some effect of sympathy, some magic chord and thrill of sweetness,
should mollify and refresh his heart, blessing with a sweet humility that consciousness of intellect
which, natural and laudable in itself, may perhaps be felt by him at moments to be his greatest snare.

But he separated himself from the Broad Church in making religion a
culture of individual holiness rather than a message for the "unlovely
masses of people," in caring more for the guidance of the Inner Voice than
for the brotherhood of charity or the association of men in good works. In
his idea of worship he was near to the High Church, but he differed from
that body in ranking sacerdotalism and dissent together as the equal foes of
religion. The efficacy of the sacrament came from its historic symbolism
and its national acceptance, and needed not, or scarcely needed, the
ministration of the priest. He thus extended the meaning of the word far
beyond the narrow range of ecclesiasticism. "This sunshine upon the grass,"
he wrote, "is a sacrament of remembrance and of love." When, in his early
days, Newman visited Hurrell Froude's lovely Devonshire home, there
arose in his mind a poignant strife between his loyalty to created and to
uncreated beauty. In a stanza composed for a lady's autograph album he
gave this expression to his hesitancy:
There strayed awhile, amid the woods of Dart,
One who could love them, but who durst not love;
A vow had bound him ne'er to give his heart
To streamlet bright, or soft secluded grove.
'T was a hard humbling task, onward to move
His easy-captured eye from each fair spot,
With unattached and lonely step to rove
O'er happy meads which soon its print forgot.
Yet kept he safe his pledge, prizing his pilgrim lot.

No such note is to be found in the letters written by Mr. Shorthouse during
his holidays among the Welsh hills; he looked upon the inherited Church as
the instrument chosen by many generations of men for their approach to
God, but he was not afraid to see the communion service on the ocean
waters when the heavenly light poured upon them, even as he saw it at the
altar table.

If he differed from the Broad Church mainly in his loyalty to Quaker
mysticism, it was Platonism which made the bounds of the High Church too
narrow for his faith. He did not hesitate at one time to say that Plato
possessed a truer spiritual insight than St. Paul, and it was in reality a mere
extension of the sphere of Platonism when, in what appears to be the last
letter he ever wrote (or dictated rather, for his hands were already clasped in
those of beneficent Death), he avowed his creed: "That Image after which
we were created—the Divine Intellect—must surely be able to respond to
the Divine call. The greatest advance which has ever been made was the
teaching, originally by Aristotle, of the receptivity of matter.... I should be
very glad to see this idea of John Inglesant worked out by an intelligent
critic." Beauty was for him a kind of transfiguration in which the world, in
its response to the indwelling Power, was lifted into something no longer
worldly, but divine; and he could speak of our existence on this earth as
lighted by "the immeasurable glory of the drama of God in which we are
actors." It was not that he, like certain poets of the past century, attempted
to give to the crude passions of men or the transient pomp of earth a power
intrinsically equivalent to the spirit; but he believed that these might be
made by faith to become as it were an illusory and transparent veil through
which the visionary eye could penetrate to the mystic reality.
For the particular act in this drama, which he was to write out in his
religious novel, he went back to the seventeenth century, when, as it seemed
to him, the same problem as that of the nineteenth arose to trouble the
hearts of Englishmen, but in nobler and more romantic forms. There was, in
fact, a certain note of reality about the earlier struggle of Puritan,
Churchman, and Roman Catholic, which was lacking to the quarrel of his
own day. John Inglesant is the younger of twin sons born in a family of
Catholic sympathies. A Jesuit, Father Hall, who reminds one not a little of
Father Holt in Henry Esmond, is put in charge of the boy and trains him up
to be an intermediary between the Church of England and the Church of
Rome. To this end his Mentor keeps his mind in a state of suspense between
the faiths, and the inner and real drama of the book is the contest in
Inglesant's own mind, after his immediate debt to Rome has been fulfilled,
between the two forms of worship.
In part the actual narrative is well conducted. Johnnie's relations to
Charles I., and especially his share in that strange adventure when the King

was terrified by a vision of the dead Strafford, are told with a good deal of
dramatic skill. So, too, his own trial, the murder of his brother by the
Italian, his visits to the household of the Ferrars at Little Gidding, and some
of the events in Italy—these in themselves are sufficient to make a novel of
unusual interest. On the human side, where the emotions are of a dreamy,
half-mystical sort, the work is equally successful; in its own kind the love
of Inglesant and Mary Collet is beautiful beyond the common love of man
and woman. But the novel fails, it must be acknowledged, in the expression
of the more ordinary motives of human activity. Johnnie's ingrained
obedience to the Jesuit is one of the mainsprings of the plot, yet there is
nothing in the story to make this exaggerated devotion seem natural. In the
same way Johnnie's attachment to his worldly brother is unexplained by the
author, and sounds fantastic. A considerable portion of the book is taken up
with Inglesant's search for his brother's murderer, and here again the
vacillating desire of vengeance is a false note which no amount of
exposition on the part of the author makes convincing. Mr. Shorthouse's
hero burns for revenge one day, and on the next is oblivious of his passion,
in a way that simply leaves the reader in a state of bewilderment. Curiously
enough, it was one of the incidents in this hide-and-seek portion of the
story, found by Mr. Shorthouse in "a well-known guide-book," that actually
suggested the novel to him. For my own part, the sustained charm of the
language, a style midway, as it were, between that of Thackeray and that of
Hawthorne, not quite so negligently graceful as the former nor quite so
deliberate as the latter, yet mingling the elements of both in a happy
compound—the language alone, I say, would be sufficient to carry me
through these inadequately conceived parts of the story. But I can
understand, nevertheless, how in the course of time this feebleness of the
purely human motives may gradually deprive the book of readers, for it is
the human that abides unchanged, after all, and the divine that alters in form
with the passing ages. Hawthorne, in this respect, is better equipped for the
future; his novels are not concerned with phases of religion, but with the
moral consciousness and the feeling of guilt, which are eternally the same.
And yet it will be a real loss to letters if this nearest approach in English
to a religious novel of universal significance should lose its vitality and be
forgotten. Almost, but not quite, Mr. Shorthouse has gone below the shifting
of forms and formulæ to the instinct that lies buried in the heart of each
man, seeking and awaiting the light. I have already referred to those early

chapters, the most perfect in the book I think, wherein is told how Johnnie,
a grown boy now, visits his childhood's masters and questions them about
the Divine Light which he would behold and follow amid the wandering
lights of this world. Mr. Shorthouse believed, as he had been taught at his
mother's knee, that such a Guide dwelt in the breasts of all men, and that we
need only to hearken to its admonition to attain holiness and peace. He
thought that it had spoken more clearly to certain of the poets and
philosophers of Greece than to any others, and that "the ideal of the Greeks
—the godlike and the beautiful in one"—was still the lesson to be practised
to-day. "What we want," he said, "is to apply it to real life. We all
understand that art should be religious, but it is more difficult to understand
how religion may be an art." And this, as he avows again and again in his
letters, was the purpose of his book; "one of many failures to reconcile the
artistic with the spiritual aspect of life," he once calls it.
But if, intellectually, the vision of the Divine Light was vouchsafed to
Plato more than to any other man, historically it had been presented to the
gross, unpurged eyes of the world in the life and death of Jesus. The
precision of dogma, even the Bible, meant relatively little to Mr.
Shorthouse. "I do not advocate belief in the Bible," he wrote; "I advocate
belief in Christ." Somehow, in some way beyond the scope of logic, the
idea which Plato had beheld, the divine ideal which all men know and
doubt, became a personality that one time, and henceforth the sacraments
that recalled the drama of that holy life were the surest means of obtaining
the silence of the world through which the Inner Voice speaks and is heard.
To some, of course, this will appear the one flaw in the author's logic—
this step from the vague notion of the Platonic ideas dwelling in the world
of matter, and shaping it to their own beautiful forms, to the belief in the
actual Christian drama as the realisation of the Divine Nature in human life.
Yet the step was easy, was almost necessary, for one who held at the same
time the doctrines of the Friends and of Plato; their union might be called
the wedding of pure religion and pure philosophy, wherein the more bigoted
and inhuman character of the former was surrendered, while to the latter
was added the power to touch the universal heart of man. As Mr.
Shorthouse held them, and as Inglesant came to view them, the sacraments
might be called a memorial of that mystic wedding. They brought to it the
historic consciousness and the traditional brotherhood of mankind; they

were the symbolism through which men sought to introduce the light into
their own lives as a religious art. Now an art is a matter to be perceived and
to be felt, whereas a science, as Newman and others held religion to be, is a
subject for demonstration and argument. How much religion in England
suffered from the attempt to prove what could not be caught in the mesh of
logic, and from the endeavour to make words take the place of ideas, we
have already seen. You may reason about abstract truth, you cannot reason
about a symbolism or a form of worship. The strength of John Inglesant lies
in its avoidance of rationalism or the appeal to precedent, and in its frank
search for the human and the artistic.
It was in this sense that Mr. Shorthouse could speak of his book as above
all an attempt "to promote culture at the expense of fanaticism, including
the fanaticism of work": but we shall miss the full meaning of his intention
if we omit the corollary of those words, viz.: "to exalt the unpopular
doctrine that the end of existence is not the good of one's neighbour, but
one's own culture." I do not know, indeed, but this exaltation of the old
theory that the chief purpose of religion is the worship and beatitude of the
individual soul, in opposition to the humanitarian notions which were even
then springing into prominence, is the central theme of the story. Certainly
with many readers the scene that remains most deeply impressed in their
memory is that which shows Inglesant coming to Serenus de Cressy at the
House of the Benedictines in Paris, and, like the young man who came to
Jesus, asking what he shall do to make clear the guidance of the Inner
Light. There, in those marvellous pages, Cressy points out the divergence of
the ways before him: "On the one hand, you have the delights of reason and
of intellect, the beauty of that wonderful creation which God made, yet did
not keep; the charms of Divine philosophy, and the enticements of the poet's
art; on the other side, Jesus." And then as the old man, who had himself
turned from the gardens of Oxford to the discipline of a monastery, sees the
hesitation of his listener, he breaks forth into this eloquent appeal:

I put before you your life, with no false colouring, no tampering with the truth. Come with me to
Douay; you shall enter our house according to the strictest rule; you shall engage in no study that is
any delight or effort to the intellect; but you shall teach the smallest children in the schools, and visit
the poorest people, and perform the duties of the household—and all for Christ. I promise you on the
faith of a gentleman and a priest—I promise you, for I have no shade of doubt—that in this path you
shall find the satisfaction of the heavenly walk; you shall walk with Jesus day by day, growing ever
more and more like to Him; and your path, without the least fall or deviation, shall lead more and
more into the light, until you come unto the perfect day; and on your death-bed—the death-bed of a

saint—the vision of the smile of God shall sustain you, and Jesus Himself shall meet you at the gates
of eternal life.

We are told that every word went straight to Inglesant's conviction, and
that no single note jarred upon his taste. He implicitly believed that what
the Benedictine offered him he should find. But he also knew that this was
not the only way of service—nor even, perhaps, the highest. He turned
away from the monastery sadly, but firmly, and continued his search for the
light in that direction whither the culture of his own nature led him; he
showed—though this neither he nor Mr. Shorthouse, perhaps, would
acknowledge—that at the bottom of his heart Plato and not Christ was his
master, and that to him practical Christianity was only one of the many
historic forms which the so-called Platonic insight assumes among men. To
some, no doubt, this attempt to make of religion an art will savour of that
peculiar form of hedonism, or bastard Platonism, which Walter Pater
introduced into England, and John Inglesant will be classed with Marius
the Epicurean as a blossom of æsthetic romanticism. There is a certain
show of justification in the comparison, and the work of Mr. Shorthouse
quite possibly grants too much to the enervating acquiescence in the lovely
and the decorous; it lacks a little in virility. But the difference between the
two books is still more radical than the likeness. Though absolute truth may
not be within the reach of man, nevertheless the life of John Inglesant is a
discipline and a growth toward a verity that emanates from acknowledged
powers and calls him out of himself. The senses have no validity in
themselves. He aims to make an art of religion, not a religion of art; the
distinction is deeper than words. The true parentage of the work goes back,
in some ways, to Shaftesbury, with whom an interesting parallel might be
drawn.
In the end Inglesant returns to England, after years spent in France and
Italy among Roman Catholics, and accepts frankly the religious forms of
his own land. His character had been strengthened by experience, and in
following the higher instincts of his own nature he had attained the
assurance and the sanctity of one who has not quailed before a great
sacrifice. The last scene in the book, the letter which relates the
conversation with Inglesant in the Cathedral Church at Worcester, should be
read as a complement to the earlier chapters which describe his boyish
search for what he was not to find save through the lesson of years; the

whole book may be regarded as a link between these two presentations of
the hero's life. It would require too many words to repeat Inglesant's
confession even in outline. "The Church of England," says the writer of the
letter, "is no doubt a compromise, and is powerless to exert its discipline....
If there be absolute truth revealed, there must be an inspired exponent of it,
else from age to age it could not get itself revealed to mankind." And
Inglesant replies: "This is the Papist argument, there is only one answer to it
—Absolute truth is not revealed. There were certain dangers which
Christianity could not, as it would seem, escape. As it brought down the
sublimest teaching of Platonism to the humblest understanding, so it was
compelled, by this very action, to reduce spiritual and abstract truth to hard
and inadequate dogma. As it inculcated a sublime indifference to the things
of this life, and a steadfast gaze upon the future, so, by this very means, it
encouraged the growth of a wild unreasoning superstition."
It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that those words, taken with the plea
which follows, express the finest wisdom struck out of the long and for the
most part futile Battle of the Churches; they were the creed of Mr.
Shorthouse, as they were the experience of the hero of his book. I would
end with that image of life as a sacred game with which Inglesant himself
closed his confession of faith at the Cathedral door:

The ways are dark and foul, and the grey years bring a mysterious future which we cannot see. We
are like children, or men in a tennis court, and before our conquest is half won the dim twilight
comes and stops the game; nevertheless, let us keep our places, and above all things hold fast by the
law of life we feel within. This was the method which Christ followed, and He won the world by
placing Himself in harmony with that law of gradual development which the Divine Wisdom has
planned. Let us follow in His steps and we shall attain to the ideal life; and, without waiting for our
"mortal passage," tread the free and spacious streets of that Jerusalem which is above.

THE QUEST OF A
CENTURY
[The scientific part of this essay, indeed the central idea which makes it anything more than a
philosophic vagary, is borrowed from an unpublished lecture of my brother, Prof. Louis T. More, who
holds the chair of Physics in the University of Cincinnati. If I have printed the paper under my name
rather than his, this is because he, as a scientist, might not wish to be held responsible for the general
drift of the thought.]

The story is told of Dante that in one of his peregrinations through Italy
he stopped at a certain convent, moved either by the religion of the place or
by some other feeling, and was there questioned by the monks concerning
what he came to seek. At first the poet did not reply, but stood silently
contemplating the columns and arches of the cloister. Again they asked him
what he desired; and then slowly turning his head and looking at the friars,
he answered, "Peace!" The anecdote is altogether too significant to escape
suspicion; yet as The Divine Comedy is supposed to contain symbolically
the history of the human spirit in its upward growth and striving, so this
fable of the divine poet may be held to sum up in a single word the aim and
desire of the spirit's endless quest. So clearly is the object of our inner
search this "peace" which Dante is said to have sought, and so close has the
spirit come again and again to attaining this goal, that it should seem as if
some warring principle within ourselves turned us back ever when the
hoped-for consummation was just within reach. As Vaughan says in his
quaint way:

Man is the shuttle, to whose winding quest
And passage through these looms
God ordered motion, but ordained no rest.

It is possible, I believe, to view the ceaseless intellectual fluctuations of
mankind backward and forward as the varying fortunes of the contest
between these two hostile members of our being,—between the deep-lying
principle that impels us to seek rest and the principle that drags us back into
the region of change and motion and forever forbids us to acquiesce in what
is found. And I believe further that the moral disposition of a nation or of an

individual may be best characterised by the predominance of the one or the
other of these two elements. We may find a people, such as the ancient
Hindus, in whom the longing after peace was so intense as to make
insignificant every other concern of life, and among whom the aim of saint
and philosopher alike was to close the eyes upon the theatre of this world's
shifting scenes and to look only upon that changeless vision of

central peace subsisting at the heart
Of endless agitation.

The spectacle of division and mutation became to them at last a mere
phantasmagoria, like the morning mists that melt away beneath the
upspringing day-star.
Again, we may find a race, like the Greeks, in whom the imperturbable
stillness of the Orient and the restless activity of the Occident meet together
in intimate union and produce that peculiar repose in action, that unity in
variety, which we call harmony or beauty and which is the special field of
art. But if this harmonious union was a source of the artistic sense among
the Greeks, their logicians, like logicians everywhere, were not content until
the divergent tendencies were drawn out to the extreme; and nowhere is the
conflict between the two principles more vividly displayed than in that
battle between the followers of Xenophanes, who sought to adapt the world
of change to their haunting desire for peace by denying motion altogether,
and the disciples of Heraclitus, who saw only motion and mutation in all
things and nowhere rest. "All things flow and nothing abides," said the
Ephesian, and looked upon man in the midst of the universe as upon one
who stands in the current of a ceaselessly gliding river. The brood of
Sophists, carrying this law into human consciousness, disclaimed the
possibility of truth altogether; and it is no wonder that Plato, while avoiding
the other extreme of motionless pantheism, regarded the sophistic
acceptance of this law of universal flux as the last irreconcilable enemy of
philosophy and morality alike. "The war over this point is indeed no trivial
matter and many are concerned therein," said he, not without bitterness.
It is, when rightly considered, this same question that lends dramatic
unity and human value to the long debate of the mediæval schoolmen. Their
dispute may be regarded from more than one point of view,—as a struggle
of the reason against the bondage of authority, as an attempt to lay bare the

foundation of philosophy, as a contest between science and mysticism; but
above all it seems to me a long conflict in words between these two warring
members within us. The desire of infinite peace was the impulse, I think,
which drove on the realists to that "abyss of pantheism," from the brink of
which the vision of most men recoils as from the horror of shoreless
vacuity. In this way Erigena, the greatest of realists, spoke of God as that
which neither acts nor is acted upon, neither loves nor is loved; and then, as
if frightened by these blank words, avowed that God though he does not
love is in a way Love itself, defining love as the finis quietaque statio of the
natural motion of all things that move. On the other hand it was the impulse
toward unresting activity which led the nominalists to deny reality to the
stationary ideas of genera and species, and to fix the mind upon the shifting
combinations of individual objects. In this direction lay the labour of
accurate observation and experimental classification, and it is with prefect
justice that Hauréau, the historian of scholastic philosophy, closes his
chapter on William of Occam, the last of the schoolmen, with these words:
"It is then in truth on this soil so well prepared by the prince of the
nominalists that Francis Bacon founded his eternal monument,"—and that
monument is the scientific method as we see it developed in the nineteenth
century.
The justification of scholastic philosophy, as I understand it, was the
hope of finding in the dictates of pure reason an immovable resting-place
for the human spirit; the recoil from the abyss of pantheism and absolute
quietism was the work of the nominalists who in William of Occam finally
won the day; and with him scholastic philosophy brought an end to its own
activity. But a greater champion than William was needed to wipe away
what seems to the world the cobwebs of mediæval logomachy. Kant's
Critique of Pure Reason accomplished what the nominalistic schoolmen
failed to achieve: it showed the impossibility of establishing by means of
logic the dogma of God or any absolute conception of the universe.
Henceforth the real support of metaphysics was taken away, and the study
fell more and more into disrepute as the nineteenth century waxed old. Not
many men to-day look to the pure reason for aid in attaining the
consummation of faith. That consummation, if it be derived at all from
external aid, must come henceforth by way of the imagination and of the
moral sense. We say with Kant: "Two things fill the mind with ever-new
and increasing admiration and reverence, the oftener and the more

persistently they are reflected on: the starry heaven above me, and the moral
law within me."
But neither the imagination nor the conscience alone, any more than
reason, can create faith. They may prepare the soil for the growth of that
perfect flower of joy, but they cannot plant the seed or give the increase; for
they, both the imagination and the conscience, are concerned in the end with
the light of this life, and faith looks for guidance to a different and rarer
illumination. Faith is a power of itself; fidem rem esse, non scientiam, non
opinionem vel imaginationem, said Zwingle. It is that faculty of the will,
mysterious in its source and inexplicable in its operation, which turns the
desire of a man away from contemplating the fitful changes of the world
toward an ideal, an empty dream it may be, or a shadow, or a mere name, of
peace in absolute changelessness. Reason and logic may have no words to
express the object of this desire, but experience is rich with the influence of
such an aspiration on human character. To the saints it was that peace of
God which passeth all understanding; to the mystics it was figured as the
raptures of a celestial love, as the yearning for that

Passionless bride, divine Tranquillity.

To the ignorant it was the unquestioning trust in those who seemed to them
endowed with a grace beyond their untutored comprehension.
Even if the imagination or the conscience could lift us to this blissful
height, they would avail us little to-day; for we have put away the
imagination as one of the pleasant but unfruitful play-things of youth, and
the conscience in this age of humanitarian pity has become less than ever a
sense of man's responsibility to the supermundane powers and more than
ever a feeling of brotherhood among men. Of faith, speaking generally, the
past century had no recking, for it turned deliberately to observe and study
the phenomena of change. We call that time, which is still our own time, the
age of reason, but scarcely with justice. The Middle Ages, despite the
obscurantism of the Church, had far better claim to that title. One needs but
to turn the pages of the doctors, even before the day of Abelard who is
supposed first to have been the champion of reason against authority, to see
how profound was their conviction that in reason might be discovered a
justification of the faith they held. And indeed Abelard is styled the
champion of reason because only with him do men begin to perceive the

inability of reason to establish faith. Better we should call ours an age of
observation, for never before have men given themselves with such
complete abandon to observing and recording systematically. By long and
intent observation of the phenomenal world the eye has discovered a
seeming order in disorder, the shifting visions of time have assumed a
specious regularity which we call law, and the mind has made for itself a
home on this earth which to the wise of old seemed but a house of bondage.

For life is but a dream whose shapes return,
Some frequently, some seldom, some by night
And some by day, some night and day: we learn,
The while all change and many vanish quite,
In their recurrence with recurrent changes
A certain seeming order; where this ranges
We count things real; such is memory's might.

From this wealth of observation and record the modern age, and
especially the century just past, has developed two fields of intellectual
activity to such an extent as almost to claim the creation of them. Gradually
through accumulated observation the nineteenth century came to look on
human affairs in a new light; like everything else they were seen to be
subject to the Heraclitean ebb and flow; and history was written from a new
point of view. We learned to regard eras of the past as subject each to its
peculiar passions and ambitions, and this taught us to throw ourselves back
into their life with a kind of sympathy never before known. We did not
judge them by an immutable code, but by reference to time and place. Nor
is this all. Within the small arc of our observation we observed a certain
regularity of change similar to the changes due to growth in an individual,
and this we called the law of progress. History was then no longer a mere
chronicle of events or, if philosophical, the portrayal and judgment of
characters from a fixed point of view; it became at its best the systematic
examination of the causes of progress and development. And naturally this
attention to change and motion, this historic sense, was extended to every
other branch of human interest: in religion it taught Christians to accept the
Bible as the history of revelation instead of something complete from the
beginning; in literature it taught us to portray the development of character
or the influence of environment on character rather than the interplay of
fixed passions; in art it created impressionism or the endeavour to
reproduce what the individual sees at the moment instead of a rationalised

picture; in criticism it introduced what Sainte-Beuve, the master of the
movement, sought to write, a history of the human spirit.
But history, like Cronos of old, possessed a strange power of devouring
its own offspring. Gradually, from the habit of regarding human affairs in a
state of flux and more particularly from the growth of the idea of progress,
the past lost its hold over men. It became a matter of curiosity but not of
authority, and history as it was understood in Renan's day has in ours almost
ceased to be written. Science on the other hand is the observation of
phenomena regarded chiefly in the relation of space—for it is correct, I
believe, to assert that the laws of energy may be reduced to this point—and
as such is not subject to this devouring act of time. It frankly discards the
past and as frankly dwells in the present. It is not my purpose, indeed it
would be quite superfluous, to reckon up the immense acquisitions of the
scientific method in the past century: they are the theme of schoolboys and
savants alike, the pride and wonder of our civilisation. Nor need I dwell on
the new philosophy which sprang up from the union of the historic and the
scientific sense and still subsists. Not the system of Hegel or Schopenhauer
or of any other professor of metaphysics is the true philosophy of the age;
these are but echoes of a past civilisation, voices and præterea nil.
Evolution is the living guide of our thought, assigning to the region of the
unknowable the conceptions of unity and perfect rest, and building up its
theories on the visible experience of motion and change and development.
It has reduced the universal flux of Heraclitus to a scientific system and
assimilated it to our inner growth; it has become as essentially a factor of
our attitude toward the natural world as Newton's laws of gravitation.
But if our thoughts are directed almost wholly to the sphere of motion,
yet this does not mean that the longing after quietude and peace has passed
entirely from the mind of man; the thirst of the human heart is too deep for
that. Only the world has learned to look for peace in another direction. In
place of that faith which would deny valid reality to changing forms, we
have taught ourselves to find a certain order in disorder, which we call law,
—whether it be the law of progress or the law of energy,—and on the
stability of this law we are willing to stake our desired tranquillity.
In this way, through what may be called the offspring begotten on the
historic sense by science, the mind has turned its regard into the future and
seemed to discern there a continuation of the same law of progress which it

saw working in the past. Hence have arisen the manifold dreams and
visions of socialism, altruism, humanitarianism, and all the other isms that
would fix the hope of mankind upon some coming perfectibility of human
life, and that like Prometheus in the play have implanted blind hopes in the
hearts of men. It is indeed one of the most curious instances of the
recrudescence of ideas to see the mediæval visions of a city of golden
streets and eternal bliss in another existence brought down to the future of
this world itself. What to the mystic of that age was to come suddenly, with
the twinkling of an eye, when we are changed and have put away mortal
things, when the angel of the Apocalypse has sworn that time shall be no
longer,—all this, the heavenly city of joy and endless content, is now to be
the natural outcome here in this world of causes working in time. The
theory is beautiful in itself and might satisfy the hunger of the heart, even
though its main hope concerns only generations to come, were it not for a
lingering and fatal suspicion that progress does not involve increased
capability of happiness to the individual, and that somehow the race does
not move toward content. Physical comfort has perhaps become more
widely distributed, but of the placid joy of life the recent years have known
singularly little; we need but turn over the pages of the more representative
poets and prose writers of the past sixty years to discover how deep is the
unrest of our souls. The higher literature has come to be chiefly the "blank
misgivings of a creature moving about in worlds not realised"; and missing
the note of deeper peace we sigh at times even for

A draught of dull complacency.

Alas, those who would find a resting-place for the spirit in the relations of
man to man seem not to reckon that the very essence—if such a term may
be used of so contingent a nature—that the very essence of this world's life
is motion and change and contention, and that Peace spreads her wings in
another and purer atmosphere. One might suppose that a single glance into
the heart would show how vain are such aspirations, and how utterly dreary
and illusory is every conceived ideal of progress and socialism because
each and all are based on an inherent contradiction. He who waits for peace
until the course of events has become stable is like the silly peasant by the
river side, watching and waiting while the current flows forever and will
ever flow.

Not less vain is the hope of those who would find in the laws of science a
permanent abiding place—perhaps one should say was rather than is, for
the avowed gospel of science which was to usurp the office of olden-time
religious faith is already like the precedent historic sense, itself becoming a
thing of the past. Yet the much discussed war between science and religion
is none the less real because to-day the din of battle has ceased. It does not
depend on criticism of the Mosaic story of creation by the one, nor on
hostility to progress offered by the other. These things were only signs of a
deeper and more radical difference: religion is the voice of faith uttering in
symbols of the imagination its distrust of the world as a scene of deception
and unreality, whereas science is the attempt to discover fixed laws in the
midst of this very world of change. If to-day the strife between the two
seems reconciled, this only means that faith has grown dimmer and that
science has learned the futility of its more dogmatic assumptions.[10]
The very growth of science is in fact a gradual recognition of motion as
the basis of phenomena and an increasing comprehension of what may be
called the laws of motion. When motion was regarded as simple and
regular, it seemed possible to explain phenomena by correspondingly
simple and regular laws; but when each primary motion was seen to be the
resultant of an infinite series of motions the question became in like manner
infinitely complex, or in other words insoluble. But to be clear we must
consider the matter more in detail.
From the days of the old Greek Heraclitus, who built up his theory of the
world on the axiom of eternal flux and change, the Doctrine of Motion as a
distinct enunciation has lingered on in the world well-nigh unnoticed and
buried from sight in the bulk of suppositions and guesses that have made up
the passing systems of philosophy. Now and then some lonely thinker took
up the doctrine, but only to let it drop back into obscurity; until during the
great burst of scientific enquiry in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it
assumed new significance and began to grow. From that time to this its
progress in acceptance as the basis of phenomena may be regarded as a
measure of scientific advance.
By a strange fatality Kant, who had been so efficient as an iconoclast in
metaphysics, was perhaps with his nebular hypothesis, followed later by the
work of Goethe on animal and plant variations, the one most largely
responsible for the new hope that in science at last was to be found an

answer to the riddle of existence which had baffled the search of pure
reason. The achievement of Kant both destructive and constructive is well
known, if vaguely understood, by the world at large; but it is not so well
known that a contemporary of Kant did precisely for science what the sage
of Königsberg accomplished in metaphysics. In the very decade in which
The Critique of Pure Reason saw the light, Lagrange, a scholar of France,
published a work which carried the analytic method, or the method of
motion, to its farthest limit. In this work, the Mécanique Analytique,
Lagrange develops an equation from which it can be proved conclusively
that to explain any group of phenomena measured by energy an infinite
number of hypotheses may be employed. So, for instance, if we establish
any one theory which will sufficiently account for the known phenomena of
light, such as reflection, refraction, polarisation, etc., there will yet remain
an infinite number of other hypotheses equally capable of explaining the
same group of phenomena. Or to use the words of Poincaré: "If then we can
give one complete mechanical explanation of a phenomenon, there will also
be possible an infinite number of others which will account equally well for
all the particulars revealed by experiment." That is to say, no experimentum
crucis can be imagined which will reveal the truth or error of any given
theory. This restriction on the finality of our knowledge is borne out in all
physical reasoning,—and I venture also to say in the other sciences; thus in
optics we can perform no experiment which will establish as finally true the
theory that light is caused by the motion of corpuscles of matter emitted
from a luminous body, or that it is due to vibrations propagated through a
medium by a wave motion, or that it is generated by certain disturbances in
the electrical state of bodies. Each of these hypotheses has its advantages
and disadvantages; and in our choice we merely adopt that theory which
explains the greater number of phenomena in the simplest way.
If any one should here ask: Granted that from phenomena expressed in
terms of energy no ultimate law can be educed, yet may not some other
view of phenomena lead to other results? We answer that no other view is
possible. Not that the system of the universe, if we may use such an
expression, is necessarily constructed on what we call energy, but that our
minds can conceive it only in terms of energy. An analysis of the concepts
which enter into the idea of energy must make it evident that in our
understanding of nature we cannot go beyond this point.

There is an agreement among philosophers and scientists that the concept
of space is not derived from external experience, but is inherently intuitive.
As stated by Kant:

The representation of space cannot be borrowed through experience from relations of external
phenomena, but, on the contrary, those external phenomena become possible only by means of the
representation of space. Space is a necessary representation, a priori, forming the very foundation of
external intuitions. It is impossible to imagine that there should be no space, though it is possible to
imagine space without objects to fill it.

The concept of space therefore makes possible the intuition of external
phenomena; but these phenomena to be realised must appeal to one of our
senses, and this connecting link between the outer world and our
consciousness is the concept which we call time. Quoting again from Kant:

Time is the formal condition, a priori, of all phenomena whatsoever. But, as all representations,
whether they have for their objects external things or not, belong by themselves, as determinations of
the mind, to our inner state;... therefore, if I am able to say, a priori, that all external phenomena are
in space, I can, according to the principle of the internal sense, make the general assertion that all
phenomena, that is, all objects of the senses, are in time, and stand necessarily in relations of time.

It follows, then, that our simplest possible expression for phenomena will
be in terms of space and time, and that beyond this the human mind cannot
go.
Turning here from metaphysical to scientific language, we speak of space
and time as the fundamental units from which we deduce the laws of the
external world. The fact that space appeals to us only through time
furnishes us with our concept or unit of motion, which is the ratio of space
to time. The external phenomena so revealed to us we call the
manifestations of mass or energy, thus providing ourselves with a second
unit. It must be observed, however, that mass or energy is not a new
concept, but bears precisely the same relation to motion as Kant's Ding-an-
sich bears to space and time: it is the unknowable cause of motion—or
more properly speaking it is the ability residing in an object to change the
motion of another object and is measured by the degree of change it can
produce. And I say mass or energy, advisedly, for the two are merely
different names or different views of the same thing; we cannot conceive of
matter without energy or of energy without matter. Our choice between the
two depends solely on the simplicity and convenience with which

deductions may be made from one or the other. From a physical standpoint
the concept energy is rather the simpler, but mathematically our deductions
flow more readily from the concept mass.
If then our explanations of phenomena must ultimately involve the two
units of motion and of energy or mass, and if it can be demonstrated that on
this basis we may account for any group of phenomena in an infinite
number of ways, what shall we say but that the attempt to attain any resting-
place for the mind in the laws of nature is, and must always be, futile?
Further than this, any given law is itself only an approximate explanation of
phenomena, and must be continually modified as we add to our
experimental knowledge. In all cases a law must be considered valid only
within the limits of the sensitiveness of the instruments by which we get our
measurements. With more delicate instruments variations will be observed
that must be expressed by additional terms in the formula. Thus we
maintain that the law of gravitation is true only within the range of our
observation; it does not apply to masses of molecular dimensions. Another
formula, the well-known law of the pressure of gases, can be shown by
experiment to be merely an approximation, because the variations in it are
not of a dimension negligible in comparison with the sensibility of our
instruments. As the pressure increases the error in the formular equation
becomes constantly greater. To remedy this a second approximation, which
is still inadequate, has been added to the equation by Van der Waals; yet
greater accuracy will require the addition of other terms; and a complete
demonstration would demand an infinite series of approximations.
The meaning of all this is quite plain: there is no reach of the human
intellect which can bridge the gap between motion and rest. Our senses are
adapted to a world of universal flux which is, so far as we can determine,
subject to no absolute law but the law of probabilities. He who attempts to
circumscribe the ebb and flow of circumstance within the bounds of our
spiritual needs, he who attempts to find peace in any formula of science or
in any promise of historic progress, is like one who labours on the old and
vain problem of squaring the circle:

Qual è'l geomètra, che tutto s'affige
Per misurar lo cerchio, e non ritrova,
Pensando, quel principio ond' egli indige.

The desire of peace, as the world has known it in past times, signified
always a turning away from the flotsam and jetsam of time and an attempt
to fix the mind on absolute rest and unity,—the desire of peace has been the
aspiration of faith. And because the object of faith cannot be seen by the
eyes of the body or expressed in terms of the understanding, a firm grasp of
the will has been necessary to keep the desire of the heart from falling back
into the visible, tangible things of change and motion. For this reason, when
the will is relaxed, doubts spring up and men give themselves wholly to the
transient intoxication of the senses. Yet blessed are they that believe and
have not seen. It was the peculiar quest of the nineteenth century to
discover fixed laws and an unshaken abiding place for the mind in the very
kingdom of unrest; we have sought to chain the waves of the sea with the
winds.
And how does all this affect one who stands apart, striving in his own
small way to live in the serene contemplation of the universe? I cannot
doubt that there are some in the world to-day who look back over the long
past and watch the toiling of the human race toward peace as a traveller in
the Alps may with a telescope follow the mountain-climbers in their slow
ascent through the snows of Mont Blanc; or again they watch our labours
and painstaking in the valley of the senses and wonder at our grotesque
industry; or look upon the striving of men to build a city for the soul amid
the uncertainties of this life, as men look at the play of children who build
castles and domes in the sands of the seashore and cry out when the
advancing waves wash all their hopes away. I think there are some such
men in the world to-day who are absorbed in the fellowship of the wise men
of the East, and of the no less wise Plato, with whom they would retort
upon the accusing advocates of the present: "Do you think that a spirit full
of lofty thoughts, and privileged to contemplate all time and all existence,
can possibly attach any great importance to this life?" They live in the
world of action, but are not of it. They pass each other at rare intervals on
the thoroughfares of life and know each other by a secret sign, and smile to
each other and go on their way comforted and in better hope.

FOOTNOTES

[1] The Correspondence of William Cowper. Arranged in chronological order,
with annotations, by Thomas Wright, Principal of Cowper School, Olney. Four
volumes. New York: Dodd, Mead, & Co., 1904.
[2] In a newly published volume of the letters of William Bodham Donne (the
friend of Edward FitzGerald and Bernard Barton), the editor, Catharine B.
Johnson, throws doubt on this supposed descent of Cowper's mother from the
Poet Dean.
[3] How refreshing is that whiff of good honest smoke in the abstemious lives
of Cowper and John Newton! I have just seen, in W. Tuckwell's Reminiscences
of a Radical Parson, a happy allusion to William Bull's pipes: "To Olney, under
the auspices of a benevolent Quaker.... I saw all the relics: the parlour where
bewitching Lady Austen's shuttlecock flew to and fro; the hole made in the wall
for the entrance and exit of the hares; the poet's bedroom; Mrs. Unwin's room,
where, as she knelt by the bed in prayer, her clothes caught fire. The garden was
in other hands, but I obtained leave to enter it. Of course, I went straight to the
summer-house, small, and with not much glass, the wall and ceiling covered with
names, Cowper's wig-block on the table, a hole in the floor where that mellow
divine, the Reverend Mr. Bull, kept his pipes; outside, the bed of pinks celebrated
affectionately in one of his letters to Joseph Hill, pipings from which are still
growing in my garden."—The date of the Rev. Mr. Tuckwell's visit to Olney is
not indicated, but his Reminiscences were published in the present year, 1905.
[4] Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve was born at Boulogne-sur-Mer, December
23, 1804, and died at Paris, October 13, 1869.
[5] The Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne. In six volumes. New York:
Harper & Brothers. 1904.
[6] The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti. With Memoir and
Notes, etc. By William Michael Rossetti. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1904.
[7] Robert Browning. By C. H. Herford. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1905.
[8] The Complete Works of Laurence Sterne. Edited by Wilbur L. Cross.
Supplemented with the Life by Percy Fitzgerald. 12 volumes. New York: J. F.
Taylor & Co. 1904.
[9] Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of J. H. Shorthouse. Edited by his wife.
In two volumes. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1905.
[10] Yet even while I read the proof of this page there lies before me an article
in the Contemporary Review (July, 1905), in which Sir Oliver Lodge utters the
old assumptions of science with childlike simplicity. "I want to urge," he says,
"that my advocacy of science and scientific training is not really due to any wish
to be able to travel faster or shout further round the earth, or to construct more
extensive towns, or to consume more atmosphere and absorb more rivers, nor
even to overcome disease, prolong human life, grow more corn, and cultivate to
better advantage the kindly surface of the earth; though all these latter things will
be 'added unto us' if we persevere in high aims. But it is none of these things
which should be held out as the ultimate object and aim of humanity—the gain
derivable from a genuine pursuit of truth of every kind; no, the ultimate aim can
be expressed in many ways, but I claim that it is no less than to be able to
comprehend what is the length and breadth and depth and height of this mighty

universe, including man as part of it, and to know not man and nature alone, but
to attain also some incipient comprehension of what the saints speak of as the
love of God which passeth knowledge, and so to begin an entrance into the
fulness of an existence beside which the joy even of a perfect earthly life is but
as the happiness of a summer's day." The sentiment is beautiful, but what shall
we say of the logic? To speak of attaining through science a comprehension,
even an incipient comprehension, of that which passeth knowledge, is to fall into
that curious confusion of ideas to which the scientifically trained mind is subject
when it goes beyond its own field. "Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will
demand of thee, and answer thou me. Where wast thou when I laid the
foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding." Has Sir Oliver
read the Book of Job?

THE END.

Shelburne Essays
By Paul Elmer More

3 vols. Crown octavo.
Sold separately. Net, $1.25. (By mail, $1.35)

Contents

First Series: A Hermit's Notes on Thoreau—The Solitude of
Nathaniel Hawthorne—The Origins of Hawthorne and
Poe—The Influence of Emerson—The Spirit of Carlyle
—The Science of English Verse—Arthur Symonds:
The Two Illusions—The Epic of Ireland—Two Poets of
the Irish Movement—Tolstoy; or, The Ancient Feud
between Philosophy and Art—The Religious Ground of
Humanitarianism.

Second Series: Elizabethan Sonnets—Shakespeare's
Sonnets—Lafcadio Hearn—The First Complete Edition
of Hazlitt—Charles Lamb—Kipling and FitzGerald—
George Crabbe—The Novels of George Meredith—
Hawthorne: Looking before and after—Delphi and
Greek Literature—Nemesis; or, The Divine Envy.

Third Series: The Correspondence of William Cowper—
Whittier the Poet—The Centenary of Sainte-Beuve—
The Scotch Novels and Scotch History—Swinburne—
Christina Rossetti—Why is Browning Popular?—A
Note on Byron's "Don Juan"—Laurence Sterne—J.
Henry Shorthouse—The Quest.

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Shelburne Essays
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