CORNELL
UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

 

FROM.

Wm. Sulzer

 

 

 

 

 
a University Library
PR 85.F

Twenty-five letters on English authors

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

olin
TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

ON

ENGLISH AUTHGRS'

BY

MARY FISHER

CHICAGO
S.C. GRIGGS AND COMPANY

1895 {

1 \ t
f 11 t
COPYRIGHT, 1895 /

By S. C. GRIGGS AND COMPANY

The Lakeside Iress
|/, §) BB: DONNELLEY & SONS CO,
TO
MISS ELIZA HOSMER,

TO WHOSE TEACHING,
WISE COUNSEL, AND AFFECTIONATE FRIENDSHIP,
I ACKNOWLEDGE A DEBT
I CAN NEVER REPAY,
THIS BOOK IS
LOVINGLY DEDICATED
CONTENTS.

LETTER I.

INTRODUCTORY - =
LETTER II.

How To Stupy ENGLISH LITERATURE
LETTER III.

ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE
LETTER IV.

CHAUCER
LETTER V,

Str THoMAS MORE AND THE REFORMATION
LETTER VI.

SPENSER; DAWN OF THE ENGLISH DRAMA
LETTER VII.

MARLOWE; SHAKESPEARE

LETTER VIII.

BEN JONSON AND CONTEMPORARIES; HISTORICAL OuT-
LINE OF THE TIMES; LoRD BACON

LETTER IX.
METAPHYSICAL POETS
LETTER X.
MILTON - :
LETTER XI.

Bunyan; MINOR CONTEMPORARIES; PEPYS
5

13

18

28

36

49

56

78

86

98
6 CONTENTS.

LETTER XII.

DRYDEN é & 2 3
LETTER XIII.

Pore; ADDISON - - - -
LETTER XIV.

SwIFT
LETTER XV.

EARLY NOVELISTS: RICHARDSON, FIELDING, STERNE—

GIBBON z

LETTER XVI.

JOHNSON -

LETTER XVII.
GOLDSMITH; CHATTEKTON; COWPER; GRAY - -

LETTER XVIII.
BuRNS; SCOTT x

LETTER XIX.
ByRON; SHELLEY; KEATS

LETTER XxX.
THE BROWNINGS; MOORE -

LETTER XXI.
WORDSWORTH; SOUTHEY; COLERIDGE

LETTER XXII.

MOopDERN CrITIcs: MacauLay, CARLYLE, DE QUINCEY,
Lams, MATTHEW ARNOLD

LETTER XXIII.
Maria EDGEWORTH; JANE AUSTEN; CHARLOTTE BRONTE
LETTER XXIV.

_ THACKERAY; DICKENS; GEORGE ELIoT; Mrs. Warp

LETTER XXV.
Dr. JoHN BROwN; RUSKIN; TENNYSON

118

128

145

157
167

180

199

224

236°

257

286

335

374

389
PREPACE,

The following letters are the result of a genuine
correspondence, and I have been induced to publish
them from the consideration that they will help
toward an answer to that often repeated question,
“What shall I read?”

I have no apology to offer for the easy, familiar
style in which they are written, nor for the use of
the first person. Such a direct and personal appeal
was unavoidable in a real letter, and the attempt
to eliminate it for publication would, I felt, destroy
much of the spontaneity of the originals.

These letters were written as a supplement to
text-book work on the part of the pupil. I found
that such work was for the most part mere skeleton
work, facts of date and birth, and catalogues of
work accomplished. This skeleton work I tried to
fill in with vital facts, living flesh and blood,
gleaned from a wider reading. I care little about
the mere external facts of an author’s life in so
far as they do not help me to get at the living
man; at what he thought and felt; at his way of

+

/
8 PREFACE.

looking at life, receiving its experiences, and deliv-
ering his message to the world. For this reason,
the letters abound in quotations, chosen in every
case not only for their intrinsic value, but for their
evidence of the individuality of the author in
question.

In so far as was compatible with my pupil’s
experience, I tried to lay down the canons of a
sound criticism. There are incontestable principles
by which the value of a book is to be decided,
and an acquaintance with these principles is the
first condition of culture. It is owing to ignorance
of them that the reading world is carried away
every season by some ephemeral production, of no
value whatever beyond that of enriching its author
at the expense of general good taste.

But I have not aimed at being profound or
sagacious, startling or original. JI have simply
wished to be understood easily. I have simply
wished to be of some service, not only to young
people, but to teachers and the general reader, in
the way of guiding them to the “‘ best that has been

thought ard said in the world.”
THE AUTHOR.
TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

ON

ENGLISH AUTHORS.

LETTER I.

Y DEAR YOUNG FRIEND:

Miss H—— prepared me for the letter
which I received from you yesterday, and I assure
you that I shall be very glad to give you a course
in English Literature, if you can continue in the
spirit in which you enter upon it.

You ask what I shall require of you. The work
on my part will consist of a letter to you weekly, in
which I shall give you an outline of the work I wish
you to prepare for me, suggest to you what you
should read, and give you the benefit of my own
reading and reflection on the subject in question,
and, what is more important to you, carefully cor-
rect your work.

Now, as to your work. I shall require you to
study thoroughly the lessons I assign you, then to
close your book and write me what you have learned,
in the best English at your command. You will
also add your own opinions on the subject in ques-
tion, and you will ask me to help you with any
difficulty you have met. I shall require your letters
10 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

to be written to me on a certain day of the week, so
that they may reach me regularly. You will find
that in a matter of this kind, there must be absolute
regularity. Please regard your letter-day as one on
which you have an engagement you cannot break.

I think I have an idea of what you wish this
year’s work to do for you. You wish it to make
you acquainted, so far as possible, with “the best
that has been thought and said in the world.” That
is Matthew Arnold’s definition of culture, and, in
wishing culture, you are wishing for that indefinable
charm which is the only true basis of class distinc-
tion. I respect this wish of yours very much, for
you are wishing for the development of the best
that isin you. You are wishing for the deep, wide
heart, the broad, clear, generous mind in which all
thoughts find hospitality and entertainment. You
are wishing to be a source of light and joy and
strength to all who meet you. Consider for a
moment. How many persons do you know to
whom you can speak naturally and frankly all you
think? How many in whom you do not find some
weakness to conciliate, some prejudice against which
you can make no headway? With how many can
you share a daring thought and have no fear of
shocking or alienating them? Where do you find
that range and breadth of intellect that is “up to
everything and down to everything,” as Charles
Lamb has it.

Have you ever put out your hand, expecting to
feel the warm, living grasp of another hand, and
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. II

felt, instead, three or four cold finger-tips flabbily
touch yours with no more responsive pressure
than you would have received from the tail of a
fish? You recall the little shudder of, physical
repulsion that ran over you as you dropped the
limp, wet-rag hand, and felt with a chill at your
heart that any idea of friendship between you was
all over with from that moment. Well, the disap-
pointment, the shuddering repulsion you felt at
this encounter, are not to be compared in point of
pain with the desolate feeling that a quick, bright,
aspiring, growing human soul feels in the presence
of another soul, dull, passive, uncomprehending.

You dropped some germ of thought; you looked
to see it spring up, blossom and bear fruit, and you
dropped it into a mind as incapable of a new
thought as an ash-heap is incapable of a spear
of grass. You thought to find a great, roomy mind
in which you could wander without fear of stumbling,
and you can’t turn round without running your head
against some narrow wall of a prejudice or worn-out
creed. You thought to drink from living springs of
feeling and you find a soul as dry as a sun-bleached
bone. You thought to be stimulated, lifted out of
yourself, set higher, to feel tonic breezes and inhale
balsamic odors, and you are shown into a little,
dark, stuffy back-shop full of ideas, dusty, faded,
old-fashioned, and are blinded and stupefied.

I would have you eager to escape this narrow-
ness, and you can escape it in no other way than by
turning to the best thought we have recorded in
12 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

human speech, and setting yourself the task of
knowing and understanding it. And I warn you
that I shan’t send you to the public library to ask
for the latest thing out, the very newest novel, hot
from the press. I shall bid you ask for the best
books, the old books, that have stood the test
of years, and have been pronounced classic by that
test. Before you trouble yourself about Trilby’s
foot, be sure you know what was in that wise little
Scotch head of Jeanie Deans, or what love and ten-
derness beat in the heart of little Nell. It is with
the great hearts and the great heads in English
literature that we are to concern ourselves. We
are to learn what they thought and what they felt.
‘We have a noble and beautiful task before us, and a
profitable one, too. You know where the squirrel
has been by the nuts he heaps in his hollow tree,
you know where the bee has been by the liquid
amber he stores in his hive, and you know where a
human soul has been by the sweet, brave thoughts
he has, by the gentleness, simplicity, and quiet
dignity of his bearing, by the strength and joy
you feel in his presence.
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 13

LETTER II.

HE first subject I wish you to study is that of the
development of the English language. Allow

me to tell you how I wish you to study it. First, take
your geography and open it at a map of England.
Notice what a narrow sheet of water separates it from
the European continent; see how thickly it isstudded
with cities; try to recall, if even ina vague and general
way, the part that this little island has played in the
history of civilization; think of the great names it
has contributed to the world of literature; then ask
yourself these questions: What is the origin of this
race of sturdy doers and thinkers? Is the language
they speak a pure, unmixed one, or is it the result
of a corruption and blending of several tongues?
Take. down your dictionary; open it anywhere—
here, for instance, at the word wixdow,and you see
that it is of Teutonic origin. It was originally wend-
auge (pronounce auge in two syllables, au like ow in
how, g hard, ow-ge) or wind-eye, an eye for the
wind, the first windows being simply holes in thick
walls for the admission of air and light. Turn the
pages again. Here is another common word, hus-
band, of Anglo-Saxon origin, from hus (house) and
duandi (abiding), meaning literally house-dweller.
The word J/ady, too, is of the same racial origin,
meant at first the loaf-maker or kneader of bread,
14 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

while Jord was the loaf-keeper, or warden of bread.
How far these two little words have gone astray
from their simple, early meaning I will leave you
to consider, also whether they have gained or
lost in real dignity of meaning. Castle comes from
a Latin diminutive of castrum, meaning camp. The
old castles were fortified houses built in the most
inaccessible places, to withstand attacks and sieges.
The word clan is of Celtic origin. Demure is from
the French de mocurs, having manners. Enthusiasm
is from the Greek and literally means God in us—
beautiful meaning, isn’t it? Carnival is from the
Italian, carne (flesh), vale (farewell), farewell to
flesh, because the carnivals preceded Lent.

Bonfire was first done-fire. When the monas-
teries of England were sacked, during the Protestant
Reformation, the bones of saints, adored as relics,
were burned, making, of course, a Jdone-fire. The
word homely once meant homelike, and had there-
fore a complimentary significance. Villain once
meant the inhabitant of a w/a or farm house, hence
a villain was rustic and uncouth in manners. Then
the word gradually came to have an opprobrious
meaning, very different from its early one.

Now close your dictionary, and let us sum up
what you have noticed. You notice that the Eng-
lish language is composite. There enter into it Celtic,
Anglo-Saxon, Danish, French, Latin, Greek, Italian
elements. You see, too, that words do not always re-
tain their original meaning ; that, in short, language
can grow, develop; have its periods of infancy,
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 15

youth, maturity, and old age, just as anything else
that lives, a plant or an animal, for example. Hav-
ing learned this fact, now ask yourself who were
the early inhabitants of Great Britain? How were
these different tongues blended into one? Open
your text-book now and learn the answer to these
questions, and, in your next letter to me, tell the
story of this language growth as simply and clearly
as you can, and entirely in your own words. You ~
need on:y mention the earliest works in old Eng-
lish, om'tting details.

Let me ask you also to study with your diction-
ary at hand. Never pass by a single word the
meaning of which is doubtful or unknown to you.
I must insist upon this, for I am constantly shocked
at the helpless confusion of mind in the majority of
young men and young women, a confusion that re-
sults entirely from a misapprehension of even the
most ordinary words.

The other day a girl of sixteen, in my class, de-
fined abbot as a sailor, and abbess, a sailor’s wife.
She also defined vitals as victuals, and when I ob-
jected, corrected herself by saying, ‘‘O no, I mean
bottles;”’ she was evidently thinking of phials.
Another girl defined vespers as a kind of snake, and
when I said, ‘You are thinking of vipers,” she re-
plied, with a decision not to be shaken, ““O no,
ma’am, I’ve heard snakes called vespers.” A young
woman of twenty in my literature class defined
tabor as a place to put a candle in. She was
thinking no doubt of taper, and had not a clear idea
16 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

of what taper means. She also said bigoted means
in a big way. Another girl, asked to compose a
sentence with the word chandelier, said, ‘‘ Benjamin
Franklin was the son of a chandelier.” Another
thought swine meant a kind of bird. Now all
these definitions sound incredibly absurd, and yet
they are genuine blunders made by girls who pass
in society for being bright girls, good company, etc.

You tell me that you wish to learn to talk well.
Now the first characteristic of good talk is the right
word said in the right place. Every word in your
vocabulary must stand for a distinct conception in
your mind, and not for a vague, blurred idea. Few
persons define words well. A noun is defined by a
verb of kindred meaning, or an adjective by a noun,
etc. Remember that a noun can only be defined by
a noun, an adjective by an adjective, a verb by
a verb, etc. Accustom yourself to notice closely
the relations of all unusual words you meet with in
reading.

I shall feel myself called upon to correct any
violation of a grammatical or rhetorical rule I find
in your letters, and I commence by cautioning you
against the use of veal as an adverb. You made
use of the expresssion, real good. Remember
that real is an adjective and means true, genuine, ond
cannot be properly used except before a noun;
therefore never say, real nice, real pretty, real
good. Very is the right word to be used in such
cases,

In addition to your study of English authors, I
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 17

should like you to read some good work on English
History, Green’s Short History of the English People,
for instance. I ask you to do this because every
man is in some degree the product of the age in
which he lives; he may be great enough to escape
its littlenesses, pure enough to shun its vices, and
seer enough to anticipate its future, but he cannot
altogether escape the subtle influences of its honored
traditions and its present customs. He may repudi-
ate the faiths of his fathers, but the unconscious
assimilation of them in childhood tinctures thought
and action throughout his life, and are no more to
be denied than the blood that runs in his veins.
Luther the reformer was identical with Luther the
monk, and left an inky record of his personal inter-
view with the devil. Sir Matthew Hale, one of the
most pious and cleanest-handed judges that ever
sat on English bench, tried and condemned innocent
women for witchcraft. Thus you see that the com-
plete understanding of a man involves a knowledge
of his environments and his century.
18 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

LETTER III.

| AM very sorry to hear that you have been ill, and

am beginning to feel enough interest in you to
wish to preface my letter to-day with some sugges-
tions about the care of your health, which I sincerely
hope you will not think impertinent, but will be
good enough to take in the spirit in which I give
them, especially when I assure you that your health
has more to do than you think with your views of
life and the impression which external things make
upon you.

‘‘Measure your health,” says Thoreau, “by your
sympathy with the morning.” I should extend that
measurement by adding, Measure your health by
your sympathy with everything that is living, beau-
tiful, and good; measure it by your optimism, by
your joy in life, and your resolute facing of its hard-
ships as you would face a frosty morning with a
quicker step and a livelier flow of blood in your veins.
Do you know that bone, muscle, sinew, and quick,
warm blood, good digestion, and fine yet strong
nerves go to the making of what is finest and strong-
est in literature? It is a fact. The weak, doctor-
book kind of literature in which anemic people de-
light to read the symptoms of their own diseases is
the product of ill-health or weakness, Ishall return
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 19

to that subject later; at present let me catechize you
a little, for I want you strong and well.

Are you sure that you never sit in draughts just
to “cool off,” that you never wear thin shoes on
cold, damp ground, or expose yourself to the chance
of taking cold by submitting yourself unprotected
to sudden changes of temperature? Do you take
long walks in the fresh air, every day? Do youeat
good, wholesome food and not too many bon-bons
and pickles? Do you go to bed early? If you
don’t, I wonder if you haven’t often the ‘‘ blues,”
certain days when you cry easily, when everything
hurts you and nobody understands you, when a
secret oppression weighs upon you, a presentiment
of some impending trouble haunts you, and life just
doesn’t seem worth living? Do you know what
these uncomfortable feelings really mean? They
mean that something is the matter with your body—
that your stomach or liver or some other organ is
having a hard time doing its work and is complain-
ing about it in this dumb way. These feelings are
purely physical in their origin, not mental. Serenity
or joy are the natural states of mind in a healthy
body. Watch young lambs or young colts in a pas-
ture ona spring day. What leaping and jumping
and frisking and saying as plain as these words,
“How happy I am, and what an ecstasy it is to
live!”’

All young people should think of life as these
healthy animals do. Simply to breathe, to live, and
to enjoy this beautiful world should be gladness to
20 TWENTY-FIVE. LETTERS

them. There! I’m not going to say any more about
this; I’ll leave you to think out the other side of the
question—our relations to others, the extra care
we give them im sickness, the duty of giving our
strength, not our weakness, the lessening of our pow-
ers, physical and mental. In short, I want you to
think that health is beautiful because it is strength,
success, and joy, and that disease is hideous because
it is weakness, failure, and misery, and I want you to’
take good care of yourself, now and always.

Now for your lesson. First of all, I must tell
you that I find much to praise in your letter. You
have told me what I wanted to know very clearly,
and in good English, but you wrote the common
noun decomposition with a capital, and the proper
adjective French with a small letter. Do not for-
get that proper adjectives, that is, adjectives derived
from proper nouns, such as French, German, English,
ftahan, always begin with capitals.

But while you wrote clearly and grammatically,
you were not always accurate in your statements.
You told me, it is true, that the first inhabitants of
Great Britain were savages called Celts. By the
way, it would be well for you to remember that these
Celts had a religion called Druidism; that their
priests or Druids sometimes offered their gods sacri-
fices of human beings whom they burned in large
wicker cages; that they regarded the mistletoe as a
sacred plant and gathered it with solemn religious
ceremonies; and, lastly, that they have left some in-
teresting relics of their worship in circular groups of
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 21

upright stones, or in rows of these stones, notably at
Stonehenge, in the south of England and in Brittany
in northern France.

You next told me that these Celts were subdued
by the Romans under Julius Cesar, 55 B. C.; that,
subsequently, they threw off the Roman yoke and
then fell under the power of the Angles and Saxons.
All this is true, so far; but you say, next, that the
Celts were completely exterminated by these Teu-
tonic tribes. This is not true. Part of them, those
living in the plains and accessible districts of the
country, were exterminated; but there lived in the
rugged parts of Wales, Ireland, and Scotland some
bold Celts who never were subdued by the Teutons,
who therefore continued to live their separate life,
and whose descendants live to this day and preserve
the Celtic tongue in the Welsh language, the Gaelic
or Highland Scotch, old Irish, and Manx, (language
of the inhabitants of the Isle of Man). There
existed among the Celts a literary and hereditary
order known as bards. These bards or minstrels
were poet-singers who preserved the national tradi-
tions. They were held in high honor. They cele-
brated the deeds of gods and heroes and recited
their poems to the accompaniment of the harp, either
at religious solemnities or at the festivities of princes
and nobles. Competitions in minstrelsy called Eis-
teddfods were held at stated intervals among the
Welsh bards, and the judges at these Eisteddfods
were appointed by the prince. These competitions
still continue in Wales, and, if you followed the daily
22 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

newspaper accounts of the World’s Fair proceedings
at Chicago, you may remember that an Eisteddfod
was held there. Matthew Arnold’s Study of Celtic
Literature will give you some valuable information
on this subject. I may as well tell you here, that
one of the most successful literary impostures that
ever deceived a credulous public is a pretended
translation of the poems of a Celtic bard known as
Ossian. A Scotchman by the name of Macpherson
pretended to translate them from the Gaelic. You
see therefore that the Celts were not exterminated
by the Teutons, and that consequently your next
statement, that the small number of Celtic words in
our tongue is to be accounted for by the extermina-
tion of the Celts, is not true. It is to be accounted
for by the fact that there was no further intercourse
between the Celts and Teutons, no chance, therefore,
for the blending of tongues.

From this point, you go on correctly to speak of
the invasion of the Danes. Just here, let me call
your attention to the famous story of King Alfred
and the peasant woman. Do you know it? You
next speak of the invasion of the Normans under
William the Conqueror, A. D., 1066, and the conse-
quent introduction of the French element into our
tongue. Then you quote from your text-book that
this new speech was ‘‘one of two closely related dia-
lects of the Romance language,” and you ask me
what Romance means in thisconnection. I amglad
you asked me that question. It shows me that you
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS, 23

are not willing to be a parrot, but wish to under-
stand what you talk about.

The word Romance, in this case, relates to those
languages that are derived from the Romar or Latin
tongue. The principal Romance languages are the
Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Wallachian,
Provengal, Rhaeto-Romanic. Wallachian means, of
course, the language of Wallachia, formerly one of
the Danubian principalities, now known as Roumania.
The Provencal language was spoken by the inhabit-
ants of the extreme south-east corner of France, bor-
dering the Mediterranean. This is the tongue known
as the dangue @’oc, the tongue in which the Trouba-
dours, or early French minstrels of the south, wrote.
The minstrels of northern France were known as
Trouvéres, and their language as the langue d’oil.
This is the language which the Normans took with
them to England, and which afterward became
united with that of the Anglo-Saxons. The Trou-
véres are considered superior to the Troubadours.

You mention the works of our earliest writers.
You notice that our literature begins in poetry, the
old poem of Beowulf, and you notice that the
greatest name in our early literature is that of a poet,
Geoffrey Chaucer. Have you ever thought that all
literatures begin with poetry? It is true. England
has her bards and her Chaucer as her first represent-
atives; France, her Trouvéres and her Troubadours ;
Germany, her Minne-singers (Minne means love)
and her Mibelungenlied ; Italy, her Dante. So uni-
versal a fact must be founded on some peculiarity of
24 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

the human mind. In short, there is a reason for it.
Can you find it? At any rate try, and let me hear
your explanation in your next letter. In addition to
this explanation you may write me what you have
learned of Chaucer. As for reading Chaucer, I
should not advise you to do so yet. You will get
more good from reading about him. You will find
a very excellent essay on Chaucer in Lowell’s My
Study Windows, and a very exhaustive review of his
works in Taine’s History of English Literature. A
careful reading of these articles will put you in sym-
pathy with Chaucer, help you to understand his value
to literary students, and help you to enjoy him later
on in life, when your knowledge of human nature has
broadened and deepvi.ed, for Chaucer is no recluse.
He loves his kind, and loves them impartially, as
Shakespeare does. He is not afflicted with the liver
complaint and so has no woes to translate into
emotions. He is as healthy and joyous and as much
in love with life as those lambs and colts I spoke to
you about as frisking and running in the meadow on
a spring morning. A\ll his critics will tell you that.
And just here, let me make very plain to you what
is meant by healthy literature. I said to you, in
speaking of your own health, that if you ever had
the ‘blues’ it was a sign that some organ of your
body was out of order. What is true of you is no
less true of our great geniuses. Some of the most
touching poetry we have has its origin in disease,
just as the pearl originates from an irritation in the
oyster. A perfectly sound oyster gives you no
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 25

pearl, and a perfectly sound body is equally incapa-
ble of giving you the kind of poetry I mean, that
of Byron, for instance. And just as the pearl is so
beautiful that it seems to justify the irritation that
produced it, so we often feel that a poet's songs are
worth the pain they cost. But all irritations in ani-
mal life do not produce pearls, neither do all dis-
eases make poets, by a very great deal. On the con-
trary, they often fill the press with trashy, morbid,
corrupt literature that is as offensive to sound taste
as the putrid exhalations of a small-pox patient. It
is not hard to distinguish that sort of literature. It
is full of images of death and disease. It panders
to the lower nature, not the higher. It hates life,
hates humanity, loves only self, self, self, and
preaches license in the name of freedom. Of course
there are all sorts of degrees of worthlessness and
wickedness in this literature, corresponding to the
violence and nature of the diseases that produce it.
Some of it is only poor, weak, anemic, flabby stuff,
like that silly, littlkR—I don’t know what to call it,
for it hasn’t character or story enough to be called
a novel, but the author called it S/zps that Pass in
the Night. You've seen it lying on the counters of
the book department in dry-goods stores and in the
stalls in railway stations. You'll never find it in a
good library. Notice, please, the immature concep-
tion of character as displayed in the ‘disagreeable
man.” The author says he is a naturalist, and yet
she ‘represents him as a puling, sickly man-woman,
who was only restrained from committing suicide by
26 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

the thought of his mother. The truth is that natu-
ralists are too fond of this beautiful old world, so rich
in themes for contemplation and study, to wish to
leave it soon. They want to stay here as long as
they can. Instead of being whining and sickly,
they take so much fresh air in pursuit of their favor-
ite studies, they are so thoroughly interested in
other things beside themselves, that they are usually
our strongest and most vigorous men.

I believe you know, now, what I mean by healthy
literature. It is simply the literature of health,
literature that quickens the intellectual life with
images and thoughts that make us happy or strength-
en and calm us, that make us love each other,
love life and its crosses and homely duties as well as
its pleasures and successes, and make us love, too,
this beautiful green earth. How Chaucer loved it!
He is always finding some apt image from its flowers
and meadows, as when he describes the young squire
in the Canterbury Tales.

“ Embroidered was he as it were a mead,
All full of fresh flowers, white and red,
Singing he was, or fluting all the day;

He was as fresh as is the month of May.”

Have you ever noticed the vivid crimson of
young oak shoots in spring? Chaucer has noted
that, too. In his Flower and the Leaf, a lady rises
before dawn to visit a grove and describes it in this
way:

“And toa plexsant grove I par te pass,

Long ere the brighte sun uprisen was;
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 27

In which were oakés great, straight as a line,
Under the which the grass, so fresh of hue,
Was newly sprung: and an eight foot or nine
Every tree well from his fellow grew,

With branches broad, laden with leavés new,
That sprangen out against the sunné sheen;
Some very red, and some a glad light green.”

Can’t you see them, so soft and velvety and red?
I can, but I must stop citing proofs of Chaucer's
love for nature, or I shall not finish to-day. I shall
only add that his old English, which is the great
barrier to his enjoyment among general readers, is
the delight of the linguist, who thus gets at the
ancestry of the common words. we use. The anti-
quarian finds old customs and manners recorded in
him, and the humanist learns that the weaknesses,
follies, and vices, as well as virtues, of men are much
the same now as they were four hundred years ago.
28 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

LETTER IV.

HAVE just come in from an hour’s walk through

the woods and fields. I have been skirting a
creek to see where it led to. I’ve been creeping under
barb-wire fences and leaping ditches; stopping to
admire the coral-berry, the only bright thing to be
seen in the woods now except a belated red-bird
and the scarlet hips of the wild rose; pausing to
moralize over a dead hawk; then lifting my eyes
again, wondering if, after all, the variety of spring
tints in a wood is any more beautiful than these rich,
varied browns, with their smoky-purple shadows,

And while I walked I thought of you, and
wished you with me, and when I tell you that there
are very few people with whom I am willing to share
my wood walks, you may be sure that your last letter
made a good impression on me. Then you are not
one of those flighty, sickly, hysterical persons who
laugh and cry in the same breath, and at nothing,
who always want what they can’t have, and don’t
want what they can. Well, it is-a relief to know
that you are not. I shall feel now that I shan’t be
obliged to introduce any more personal appeals into
my letters. You evidently live sensibly and are not
in need of moral tonics; but I fear you still have
some need of grammar and spelling.

You spelled the adverb Zoo in the phrase “too
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 29

busy”? with only one 0. To is a preposition and
is correctly used in such sentences as, “Come to
me,” “TIT went to see her.” Zwo is an adjective that
always signifies number, as two apples, two books,
while foo is an adverb, and, consquently, never
used except to modify a verb, adjective, or other
adverb, as, ‘She will go too,” ‘‘You were too sick
to study,” ‘‘She speaks too indistinctly to be heard.”

Your next mistake is a very common one. You
have used the auxiliary verb w2/ in the first person
to represent futurity. You should have used shall,
as “I shall be glad when, etc.,” not ‘I will be glad,”
and “I shall go home next week,” not ‘I will go,”
etc. The proper forms in the future tense for the
three persons are:

I shall We shall
Thou wilt You will
He will They will

On the contrary, wzé/ .n the first person and shail
in the second and third, denote resolution or deter-
mination on the part of the speaker.

You have told me all that I expected you to tell
me of Chaucer. The man is to be found in his books
and not in biographies of him; but while you are on
this subject I should like you to remember that
though Chaucer’s is the first great name in English
literature and a name that does not appear until the
fourteenth century, Italy already boasted that of
Dante, who died seven years before Chaucer was born,
and that her great sonnet writer Petrarch and her
great novelist Boccaccio (pronounce Bok-kat’-cho)
30 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

were contemporaries of Chaucer. The former was
twenty-four years his senior, the latter fifteen. You
have learned that Chaucer modeled his Canterbury
Tales after Boccaccio’s Decameron, and that the
Knight's Tale is to be found originally in the De-
cameron. But Chaucer is not the only poet indebted
to Boccaccio. Shakespeare took from him the plot
of Cymbeline and All’s Well That Ends Well.

Perhaps you may think that this literary borrow-
ing is hardly a creditable performance, but credit or
discredit depends entirely upon the skill of the bor-
rower in turning what he borrows to account. If
you should borrow a rusty old carving knife from
me and give it back to me polished, keen-edged,
with a new and exquisitely carved handle, so that in
place of the rusty, unsightly old knife I should have
a beautiful object that was the delight of all who saw
it, ] am sure I should be the gainer, and that you
would deserve praise for the skill you had shown in
the transformation. Well, that is just what such
geniuses as Chaucer and Shakespeare do when they
borrow. Their borrowing is equal to creation. They
breathe the spirit of life into dead matter, and they
are not for a moment to be confounded with those
dull plagiarists who simply appropriate what pleases
them, without any thought of paying back, or any
power to do it if they had the inclination.

There is yet another fact in connection with your
lesson on Chaucer which I wish you to keep in mind.
It is an historical fact indissolubly bound up with
the Canterbury Tales. The prologue to the tales opens
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 31

with a much-admired description of spring, at the
conclusion of which Chaucer says that pilgrims are
wending their way from every shire in England to
_ Canterbury, “the holy, blissful martyr for to seek.”

Now, I want you never to lose an opportunity of
learning an interesting or important fact in history,
and here is a good chance to make the acquaintance
of Thomas a Becket, born 1117, chancellor of Eng-
land under Henry IJ., and afterward Archbishop of
Canterbury, whose murder in Canterbury cathedral
made a martyr-saint of him and a shrine of the
cathedral. But as to his being a “holy, blissful
martyr” I am not.so ready to say as Chaucer. You
will find a simple and detailed account of Thomas
a Becket in the twelfth chapter of Dickens’s Child’s
’ LMistory of England. 1 am sure you will enjoy the
romance in the life of his father and mother, and
will not soon forget the brave Saracen lady seeking
her lover in England and knowing but two English
words, Gilbert and London.

Your answer to my inquiry concerning the reason
that all literatures begin in poetry is not correct, but
I am glad that you ventured an answer. It shows
me that you have been thinking about the matter.
The reason is this: In early ages and among
ignorant people the imagination is the ruling mental
faculty. Reason is developed from experience and
observation, and is necessarily of a later period.
Imagination and feeling are the basis of the poetical
faculty; reason and calmness, the basis of the scien-
tific one. These two faculties are antagonistic and
32 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

mutually destructive. They cannot exist together.
One belongs to childhood, the other to the maturity
of the nation or the individual.

To enjoy poetry it is necessary to revive the
illusions and emotions of childhood and youth. You
cannot carry your Gradgrind, matter-of-fact frame of
mind into poetry. You must not look at things in
the sunlight, but in the moonlight, when outlines
are softened to indistinctness and give rise to guésses
rather than certainties, to reverie rather than to
thought. For this reason every child is more or less
of a poet. Do you not remember imagining that
the trees and flowers could think and feel with you?

I have a very distinct recollection of feeling cer-
tain that they could. When I was a little girl, there
used to be a rosebush in the front yard at home from
which I could not resist pulling a rose when I went
to school. I wore it pinned on my frock until it
withered; then I carefully unpinned it, put it in my
pocket, and carried it home to lay it under the bush
where it had grown. I could not bear to throw it
away, because I was sure it would feel so lonesome
and heart-sick if it were anywhere else than with its
sister roses at home. You see I was incapable of
reasoning that if these sentiments and feelings really
existed on the part of the rose, I had been barbar-
ously cruel in plucking it. When one wants
anything very much, one does not reason; one simply
wants. Well, this is a humble illustration of the
character of poetry. It is all feeling, desire, imagin-
ation. It finds fairies under the flowers, hama-
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 33

dryads in the trees, mermaids in the sea, spirits in
the wind, and is called superstition when, instead of
beneficent and lovable beings, it creates witches and
wizards, hobgoblins and ghouls. Do you not see,
then, that the age in which it can flourish to the best
advantage must be an early and unscientific one?
Undoubtedly poetry has seen its best days. Botany
drives the hamadryads from the trees, and finds cells
and sap and endosmosis instead. Zodlogy and com-
parative anatomy have killed the sphynx, the dragon,
and the griffin; and astronomy has driven the man
from the moon and the music from the spheres.

In the decline of his life, Darwin regretted that
he had not read a little poetry every day, and so
kept alive one of the richest sources of mental pleas-
ure, because the faculty for such enjoyment had
completely died in him for want of exercise.

If you wish to read any further on this subject,
you will find it admirably discussed in Macaulay’s
Essay on Milton.

Your next lesson will include Sir Thomas More
and his times, and the answers to the following

questions :

Who was Chaucer’s most distinguished contem-
porary ?

Who has been called the ‘‘Father of English
prose?”

Who made the first complete translation of the
Scriptures into English ?
What is the date of this translation ?
34 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

What other translations of the Scriptures followed?

Who introduced printing into England, at what
date, and what is the name of the first English work
published there ?

Who were Wyatt and Surrey? Roger Ascham ?

Who was the most brilliant poet of the fifteenth
century?

Concerning this latter poet you will find a charm-
ing little article in Irving’s Sketch-book, entitled, “A
Royal Poet.” Read it if you can get it.

Please answer these questions as briefly as possi-
ble. I ask that because I wish you to put most of -
your time on More. The age in which he lived saw
the dawn of the great Reformation, and I wish you
to be familiar with the main facts of the history of
this time as well as with the literature. |

The books you mention as having access to are
all first-class, and you can read them as your inclina-
tion guides you. I am not a believer in set courses
of reading. One should read as one eats, with appe-
tite, only.

I am glad you are reading The Mill on the Floss;
Maggie is a great favorite of mine. She was a girl
who loved books for books’ sake. I have always
particularly enjoyed her among her books in Chapter
III, Book IV.

You must tell me your opinions of what you
read. It is only by thinking that you can get any
real good from reading, for reading is not neces-
sarily an intellectual process, that is,a real exercise
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 35

of the mind, any more than riding in a carriage is
exercise of the body. One gets a change of scene
and fresh air in both cases, that is all. But think-
ing, like walking, gives us the three essentials of
strength, namely, variety, freshness, and exercise.
36 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

LETTER V.

HAD hoped that you would give me a fuller

account of Sir Thomas Moreand his times. The
topic deserves more attention than you gave it, but
it is probable that you had not access to books on
the subject, so I shall try to give you some idea of
its importance.

In a former letter I grouped the great names of
Italy inthe fourteenth century around that of Chaucer.
In the same manner I wish you to link with the
name of Sir Thomas More the names of three of his
greatest European contemporaries, Luther, Erasmus,
and Melancthon.

Erasmus was the oldest member of this group.
He was born at Rotterdam, 1467, and, by the way,
the story of his birth, somewhat idealized but true in
the main facts, is to be found in Charles Reade’s
novel, The Cloister and the Hearth. 1480 is the
date of Sir Thomas More’s birth; 1483 that of
Luther’s; while Melancthon’s is 1497. Melancthon
was Professor of Greek in the Wittenberg University,
where Martin Luther was Professor of Theology.
Melancthon assisted Luther in the work of the
Reformation; 1517 is the date of the Reformation in
Germany. The Reformation in England dates seven-
teen years later. The Reformation in the two coun-
tries arose from widely different causes. The im-
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 37

mediate cause of the German Reformation was the
protests of Luther against the sale of indulgences
throughout the Catholic world of Europe.

Pope Leo X. wanted money to complete the build-
ing of the great cathedral of St. Peter’s at Rome,
and in order to get the necessary funds he author-
ized the sale of pardons for offences committed or
about to be committed. Out of men’s sins walls
were to be exquisitely frescoed and beautiful spires
were to rise toward heaven. Think of it! These
sales took place in the churches. A monk by the
name of Tetzel went from town to town selling these
licenses to sin, and these pardons for condemned
souls in purgatory.

Do not imagine that this enormity, based upon so
vile a superstition, conveys a fair idea of what the
Catholic church was at its best, or is at its best.
Above all things, I would have you recognize the
fact that no form of religion ever existed and ‘kept
its hold upon men without containing in it some
germ of truth, or some helpful influence that
answered to the needs of the human heart.

Froude says of the Catholic church: ‘‘ Never in
all their history, in ancient times or modern, never
that we know of, have mankind thrown out of them-
selves anything so grand, so useful, so beautiful as
the Catholic church once was . . . . Brave
men do not fall down before their fellow-mortals
for the words which they speak or for the rites they
perform. Wisdom, justice, self-denial, nobleness,
purity, high-mindedness, these are the qualities be-
38 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

fore which the free-born races of Europe have been
contented to bow; and in no order of men were such
qualities to be found as they were found six hundred
years ago in the clergy of the Catholic church.
They called themselves the successors of the Apos-
tles. They claimed in their Master’s name universal
spiritual authority, and they made good their pre-
tensions by the holiness of their own lives.”

Had this remained true of them there would
have been no Luther known to history, and no such
Reformation as rent the Catholic church in twain.
But when the wealth and power of the Catholic
clergy increased, the spirit of true religion died out
in formulas; its authority degenerated into tyranny,
supported by ignorance and superstition; the mon-
asteries, once famous seats of piety and learning,
now sheltered rapacity, ignorance, luxury, indolence,
and vice, anda pure and upright life was deemed
less acceptable to God than a kiss given to the tat-
tered rags and dirty handkerchief of a Thomas a
Becket.

The hour for protesting had come with Tetzel
and his indulgences, and the Protestant was not long
in appearing. I will say nothing further of this
grand Protestant, Luther, except that he is well
worth your admiration and study, and that the one
man in England who was likest him in love of truth
and firm adherence to duty in the face of death and
danger, and ought to have admired him most, was
his bitterest enemy. That man was Sir Thomas
More. Strange contradiction, isn’t it? And I am
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 39

about to ask you to admire him for what would have
been sin in Luther, his loyalty to the Pope. But
you must remember that the virtue or sin of an action
lies in the motive of it, in what you put of yourself
into it or keep out of it, and in the circumstances
that determine it.

Sir Thomas More was a devout Catholic of the
old type, and when King Henry VIII. of England
(staunch Catholic himself at heart and proud of his
title, ‘Defender of the Faith’’) imitated Luther in
his defiance of the Pope, but for far different reasons
—‘ all for love of a brown girl with a wen on her
throat and a sixth finger’’—the devout Catholic hero
refused to give his sanction to the defiance of his
king. A new Protestant church was to be born in
England because the Pope refused to divorce Henry
from Katherine. The English king was to be
declared ‘Chief Protector, the only supreme Lord
and Head of the Church and Clergy of England.”

This declaration is the famous ‘‘ Act of Suprem-
acy” which More as Lord Chancellor of England
was required to support. Such a declaration was
sacrilege to him. What mattered it that all Eng-
land submitted to the blasphemous assumptions of
the King? He could not do it; he must refuse
though he die for it. Like Luther, he could do no
other, God help him! And he had to die for it.
He, too, was a hero ; he simply could not live a lie.

From the life of More by his grandson, and the
accounts of Erasmus, who spent some time with him
in England, we get delightful glimpses of his house-
40 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

hold ; of the garrulous step-mother, the studious
daughters, the clever fool Pattison, and the genial
and witty host, whose person Erasmus describes as
being ‘rather below than above the middle size,
his skin spare, his complexion pale, yet in no re-
spect sickly, but slightly tinged throughout with a
delicate transparent red; his beard thin, his eyes
light-grey, interspersed with specks.”

It is the portrait of a manall alive with energy,
of a blithe cheery man who carried his own sunshine
about with him, a sunshine that suffered no eclipse
even under the shadow of the scaffold and the exe-
cutioner’s axe, but shone forth in the gay jest,
“T pray you, Mr. Lieutenant, see me safe up, and
for my coming down, I will shift for myself.” It is
the portrait of a generous, loving man, whose broad
sympathies leveled social distinctions; of a humble
man, who literally obeyed the teachings of his
Master, having ‘‘no desire. to walk in long robes,
who did not love greetings in the market, nor the
highest seats in the synagogues and the chief rooms
at feasts.” Itis related of him that even when he
was Lord Chancellor he wore a surplice and sang
with the singers at matins and high mass in his
parish church at Chelsea, and that the Duke of
Norfolk on one such occasion reproved him, saying,
‘“Good God! Good God! My Lord Chancel-
lor a parish clerk ! You disgrace the king and your
high office.”

“Nay,” said Sir Thomas, ‘Your Grace may
not think I dishonor my Prince in my dutiful-
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 41

ness to his Lord and ours.” Evidently, this was
living one’s religion, not mouthing it; something
new to the Duke of Norfolk and the world at large.

Sir Thomas More was gifted with the finest in-
tellect of his time in England, an intellect sword-
like, keen, bright, strong, penetrating. His temper-
ament was naturally joyous, sunny, full of mirth
and music, yet strangly mingled and darkened with
asceticism ; his heart was warm, loving, tender as a
child’s, yet in some directions narrowed and embit-
tered by intolerance. One might say that the warp
of the man was bright, many-colored, radiant, but
that the woof of his time was black and gave its
sombre tinge to the pattern.

At atime when religious fanaticism was only just
beginning to decline from its height he wrote: “If
a man ought to advance the welfare and comfort of
the rest of mankind, there being no virtue more
proper and peculiar to our nature than to ease the
miseries of others, to free from trouble and anxiety
in furnishing them with the comforts of life in
which pleasure consists, nature much more vigor-
ously leads him to do all this for himself. A life of
pleasure is either a real evil, and in that case we
ought not to assist others in pursuit of it, but on the
contrary to keep them from it all that we can, as
from that which is most hurtful and deadly, or, if it
is a good thing, so that we not only may but ought
to help others to it, why then ought not a man to
begin with himself? Since no man can be more
bound to look after the good of another than after
42 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

his own, for Nature cannot direct us to be good and
kind to others, and yet at the same time to be cruel
and unmerciful to ourselves.”

The man who wrote this lived not plainly but
abstemiously, drank no wine in his youth, and but
little and that well diluted in later life, dressed in
arude and homely fashion, flogged himself every
Friday with a whip of knotted cords, wore a hair-
shirt next his lacerated skin, and spent the day in
fasting and prayer. The man who wrote this in an
age of bribery and corruption resigned the seals of
the chancellorship poorer than when he had taken
them, and went cheerfully to the scaffold to die for
an idea. The same hand that penned a declaration
of the right of every man to be of what religion he
pleased penned the severest anathemas against Tyn-
dale’s translation of the Bible and the coarsest de-
nunciations of Luther, and the lips that could pray
for “love toward God and charity toward men won
the reputation of having the best knack in Europe
at calling bad names in good Latin.”

The explanation of these contradictions lies, as I
hinted before, in the characteristics of the age; for
no man, however great he may be, can entirely es-
cape the influences of the time in which he lives.

Sir Thomas More was twice married, his first wife
being the elder daughter of Mr. John Colte. It is
said that he married the elder daughter while secret-
ly preferring the younger, lest the former should
feel slighted in seeing her sister chosen before her.
But his wife proved to be an amiable and interesting
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 43

companion, whom it was his great delight to teach
and to have instructed in music, an art to which he
himself was much devoted. She bore him four
children, three daughters and a son, and died in the
sixth year oftheir marriage. Usopia was written during
the years of their marriage and reflects a genial
mood, there being in it nothing of the coarseness
and intolerance that marks his later polemical
writings.

Two years after the death of his first wife he
married again. The woman he had chosen was Mrs.
Alice Middleton, a widow of mature years, vulgar in
manners and ignorant in mind. The story of their
courtship is an anticipation of that of John Alden.
He had wooed this ancient Priscilla for a friend, and
had been naively informed that he might speed the
better should he speak for himself, upon which hint
he spoke, though, as it subsequently appeared, with
more success than good fortune. But that compan-
ionship which he failed to find in his wife he was
blessed with in his children, of whom Margaret
Roper, the eldest, most resembled him in intellect
and character. She is said to have been an almost
perfect woman, whose rare natural gifts of mind
were no less remarkable than her extraordinary
learning,

I have dwelt on More’s character because I feel
it good to know a brave, strong, true soul. Suchan
acquaintance is a mental tonic, bracing us for a purer,
healthier life. His own life and influence were bet-
ter than anything he wrote. His place in English
44 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

literature is not among the great creative geniuses.
He wrote poetry in his youth, but it is forgotten;
his polemical writings have not survived the occa-
sions that gave them birth; and his greatest work,
Utopia, is written in Latin. But he introduced that
word into our language, and he was the first social-
ist of modern times. The liberal spirit of Usopia,
its acute sarcasms, leveled at courtiers and courts,
seem of the nineteenth, not the fifteenth, century.

He was indebted to Plato and to Plutarch’s Life
of Lycurgus for the conception of his Utopia, but it
required nothing short of genius to reproduce and
embellish the ideal Greek republic for the England
of his day, just as it required a soul singularly pure,
far-seeing, and reverential to follow the religion of
Christ amidst the hollow Catholic mummeries of the
same period.

I should like you to be familiar with More’s ideal
of good government because many of these old
ideas are turning up again and becoming fashionable
among us just now, much as the huge sleeves of the
1830 dresses have done. Many people do not know
this, but think them quite new and progressive, and
so put them on as we women sew these old sleeves
into our new dresses.

Utopia is an imaginary island, crescent-shaped,
and some two hundred miles broad in the middle.
There are fifty-four cities in it, situated within easy
distance of one another, and exhibiting the same
manners and customs. The governor of the island
is called a Prince and is elected for life by city
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 45

magistrates, who are the chosen representatives of
the different cities.

There is no such thing as rank or caste in Utopia.
It is the socialist’s paradise. All the inhabitants
work, even the Prince and the chief magistrates, and
everything is shared in common. Land is public
property. The people dine in public. Six hours is
an allotted day’s work, and at eight o’clock the cur-
few bell rings all to bed. Every one, womanas well
as man, must know something of agriculture, and, be-
sides this universally common knowledge, every man
must learn some trade or calling. There are no
lawyers in Utopia because where everything is com-
mon there is no occasion for disputes of possession
or legal interference. There are no almshouses be-
cause there are no poor, and no prisons because
criminals are few and are punished by being reduced
to slavery, in which condition they perform all the
disagreeable and heavy tasks and wear as a badge
of servitude a peculiar dress, have their hair
cropped a little above their ears, and a piece of one
of their ears cut off.

There are no public taverns because every man’s
house is his neighbor’s, to enter as he choses. There
is no change in fashion. The people all wear the
same kind of dress,made of leatherand skins. They
value iron and the useful metals, but despise gold
and silver, which they degrade by hanging orna-
ments made of them on the persons of their slaves.
They are tolerant of one another’s religious beliefs
and are eager and ardent in their pursuit of learning.
46 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

They count themselves the happiest among nations,
and their customs and manners are recommended as
a sovereign remedy for the national evils of poverty,
wretchedness, and crime.

That More should have actually attributed such
potency to his Utopian suggestion does not seem
singular when we remember that private ownership
in land was in his time a particular grievance—vast
estates monopolized by the nobility, immense
grants of land to the clergy, pitiful evictions of
wretched dependants that pasturage might be in-
creased (for a man’s life went fora sheep’s in “ Merry
England” then). What a monstrous wrong it was !
No wonder it seemed impossible to right it except
by striking at its very roots. Monopoly was wrong,
grievously wrong. It meant squalor and misery to
the toiling masses, that a titled few might revel in
luxurious idleness. There was enough and to spare
for all if wealth were equally distributed; therefore
right meant absolute equality, Spartan simplicity, and
total abolition of private ownership in everything.

If you read the magazines, newspapers, and cur-
rent fiction of the present day, you must have seen
these same ideas cropping out in various forms.
Henry George’s Progress and Poverty and Edward
Bellamy’s Looking Backward have given an impulse
to social questions in this country, and would carry
us, not forward into new, broad, progressive, and
helpful views of sociology, but backward to More’s
Utopia; backward to the fatal experiments of the
first Virginia colonists that resulted in the terrible
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 47

“starving time;’’ backward to those of the Ply-
mouth colonists that resulted so disastrously; to
good, old Utopian General Oglethorpe’s ideal com-
monwealth and home for ruined debtors at Savan-
nah, Georgia; to the beautiful bubble of Brook Farm
and other equally hopeless failures to found a
society of human beings, equally perfect in every
particular—the same physical strength, the same
mental gifts, the same morality, the same desires.
Only under these conditions can the socialist’s
dream be realized. If we were all moral, mental,
and physical twins we might live with machine-like
regularity and order; but making land common
property, dining in common, and living in huge
families will never alter human nature any more
than planting oaks and willows in the same ground
and tending them with the same hoe will make them
one kind of tree. No form of go ernment can
make the indolent industrious, the imbecile a man
of sense, the cripple sound, the imprudent thrifty,
the vicious pure. It is these individual peculiarities
that ultimately determine a man’s happiness or
misery in this world, and not his social conditions.
The socialist would relieve a man of this responsi-
bility for his own happiness, but Nature refuses to
do it, and, fortunately for us, after all, Nature is
right, and Nature is invincible. The same inequal-
ity that exists among men reigns through all her
kingdoms, animal, vegetable, mineral, reigns even
in the starry worlds above us. They are not equal,
some are larger and more brilliant than the others,
48 TWENTY-FIVE. LETTERS

they are in various stages of progress towards their
most perfect condition. Who shall dare say that
this inequality is not right?

I do not know whether these questions interest a
young person like you or not, but they interest every
thinking man and woman, and will some day con-
front you, too, and demand to be thought about and
answered. And as no one is entitled to give an
opinion on any subject without due thought, delibera-
tion, and study, you will be better prepared for your
future answer if you begin to read about it now.

In quitting More and his age I should like to
add that Erasmus, the greatest scholar, the most
brilliant wit, the most gifted and eloquent writer of
his day, took aneutral position in the great contro-
vetsy of his time, and died abused by everybody.
He might have used his gifts to help the cause of
Luther, but he did not love truth so much as he loved
his ease, and therefore he accomplished nothing
worthy of himself.

Your next lesson will include the subjects of
Spenser and the rise of the drama in England.
\

ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 49

LETTER VI.

OUR last letter interested me very much. I
see that you are growing. You are not con-
tented with what you are, nor with “used to be’s,”
but, setting your face to the future, you are trying to
keep step with progress. I like that. I like your
reading alone, too, and not being required to follow
where others lead. I want you to have all English
literature for a pasture to run in, freely. I don’t
want you forced to take to the covert when you're
wanting sunlight, nor to loiter about in the beaten
paths when it is your pleasure to gather fresh flowers
by the brook-side.

I was reading John Burrough’s /ndoor Studies
yesterday, and in the essay he calls “An Egotistical
Chapter” I came upon this sensible paragraph: ‘I
was born of and among people who neither read
books nor cared for them, and my closest associa-
tions since have been with those whose minds have
been alien to literature and art. My unliterary
environment has doubtless been best suited to me.
Probably what little freshness and primal sweetness
my books contain is owing to this circumstance.
Constant intercourse with bookish men and literary
circles, I think, would have dwarfed or killed my
literary faculty. This perpetual rubbing of heads

4
50 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

together as in the literary clubs seems to result in
literary sterility.”

To my mind it not only results in a “literary ster-
ility,” but in an actual dulling of that sharp appetite
for books which it is meant to stimulate. And it
does so because it interferes with spontaneity. A
genuine lover of books reads as his interest or
curiosity dictate. He does not take up a work on
political economy when he is hungry for a good biog-
raphy or wants the distraction of a work of fiction
any more than a pedestrian starts out for a walk
when he is tired and needs rest.

You were right to give up reading The Mill on
the Floss when you found it so little to your taste.
I am surprised to find that you did not like it, but
glad that you aren’t afraid to say so in the face of
its reputation. When you were a mite of a child,
just learning to walk, the rosebush was a mammoth
tree to you. You could not reach its roses; they
had to be gathered for you. To-day you can bend
over the bush and gather them for yourself. Well,
it is the same way with your enjoyment of George
Eliot. Some day you will grow big enough to under-
stand and appreciate her, and won't need to be told
that she is a great writer. You will feel it yourself,
and perhaps it would be just as well for me to let
you wait to gather your own roses from her books
as to gather them for you. However, I can not help
saying that the contrast of character in Maggie and
Tom, one standing for ideality and the other for
all that is practical and real, their mutual misunder-
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 51

standings and jarrings, their incompletness one with-
out the other, and their consequent intense but un-
satisfied love for each another, is one of the finest
and truest portrayals of its kind in all fiction.

Since you really are interested in socialism, you
might try reading Mrs. Ward’s Marcella. It is
rather a cooling salve to the present eruption of
socialism than an immortal contribution to literary
fiction. But it has its value, for the salve is really
needed. It is an excellent rebuke to those senti-
mental, inexperienced, and ambitious young women
who set about reforming the world with no idea that
they ought to begin on themselves, and that the
world has managed not only to exist but to progress
in a remarkable way before they came into it.

But we must return to our lesson. I am glad
you enjoyed studying the dawn of the drama. No
wonder you were surprised to learn that the
drama had its origin in religion; that the early play
was an object lesson to the layman, a means of
giving him religious instruction in the most forci-
ble and unforgetable way. The performance of
these early religious dramas, mysteries, moralities,
and miracle plays did not cease until after the
Reformation, and even then persisted a long time in
the remoter and secluded villages of Germany, and
still exists in one notable instance, the passion play
of Oberammergau. As youmay not be able to get
any book on the subject at once, let me tell you
something about it. Oberammergau is a small vil-
lage in Bavaria, Germany, about four hours’ ride by
52 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

rail from Munich. The inhabitants, numbering
about 1,200, are engaged for the most part in the
work of wood-carving. The subjects of this work
are crucifixes, madonnas, saints, etc.

In 1633-a plague broke out in that part of the
country and raged with such virulence that in the
course of a month eighty-four persons died from it
in the small village of Oberammergau. The terror-
stricken villagers thought it an evidence of the
wrath of God, and to avert it they made a vow
that if the plague were stayed they would perform
a play every ten years in commemoration of the
passion of Christ. This vow has been faithfully
kept by their descendants. The last performance
took place in 1890, and attracted visitors from all
parts of the world, so that what was once a simple
act of devotion and acknowledgment of gratitude
to God has become the world’s grandest apeciae:
ular drama.

So far the villagers have refused the most tempt-
ing pecuniary offers from enterprising theatrical
managers to repeat the play elsewhere, but it is cer-
tain that the fame it has acquired and the influx of
curious, irreverent visitors must in time degrade it
to a mere commercial enterprise.

The highest honor a villager of Oberammergau
can aspire to is the performance of the réle of
Christ. Those who have witnessed the play say that,
far from seeming sacrilegious, as the bare idea of it
appears, it is the most solemn and impressive of
spectacles, and invests, with a touching sacredness
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 53

and forcible reality, the scriptural narrative of
Christ’s life.

Undoubtedly, the hold of the early church on the
minds of her members was due to this custom of
enacting the lives of the saints and of Biblical heroes
before their very eyes.

We learn through the eye better and more unfor-
getably than through the ears. We understand in
a fuller and stronger way. Are we not accustomed
to say of anything we understand, ‘‘O yes! I see it
now ?”

The early church forbade her members to read
the Bible, but she made them see and consequently
feel and understand what she chose to teach them.
No such certainty of religious belief; no such utter
possession by it, not of it, is possible now. The
drama in ceasing to be the handmaid of the church
deprived her of her most powerful assistant.

As a matter of general information, it is not out
of place to tell you here that music, painting, sculp-
ture, and even dancing, originated like the drama in
the religious sentiment. ‘All early paintings and
sculptures throughout Europe,” says Herbert Spen-
cer, ‘‘were religious in subject,—represented Christs,
crucifixions, virgins, holy families, apostles, saints.
They formed integral parts of church architecture,
and were among the means of exciting worship,
as in Roman Catholic countries they still are.”

As for poetry, music, and dancing, the same
author remarks that in the early record of historical
races, we find these three forms of metrical action
54 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

united in religious festivals. ‘In the Hebrew writ-
ings we read that the triumphal ode composed by
Moses on the defeat of the Egyptians was sung to
an accompaniment of dancing and timbrels

There was an annual dance in Shiloh on
the sacred festivals and David danced before the ark.”

Singular, is it not, that in the course of time the
original sentiment should have disappeared leaving
us the bare form of it so entirely disassociated
from its origin, that we conceive of it as being con-
trary to that origin, not at all in harmony with it,
irreligious, in fact. So much for the spirit in
which things are done and the emptiness of forms
without it.

You did not tell me much of Spenser, but there
is little to tell. You will be glad to know that Lowell
discredits the story of his child’s perishing in the
flames of Kilcolman Castle, and of his subsequent
poverty and distress in London. He says that Ben
Jonson told the story to Drummond of Hawthorne-
den (a Scotch poet with whom he visited a fortnight
in the poet’s home near Edinburgh, walking all the
way from England to do it), and that there is little
or no foundation for it.

“A little man who wore short hair,’’—this is all
his contemporaries tell us of his personal appear-
ance. A gentleman, undoubtedly, and a man pas-
sionately alive to beauty in any form, we know from
his books. ‘The poet’s poet,” he has been called,
and for that reason I do not know whether to advise
you to read him or not. If you enjoy vivid and
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 55

beautiful pictures in words, and are not easily sur-
feited with the music of rhyme and rhythm, you will
enjoy him; if not, you will find him tedious. Walter
Scott writes of his boyish enthusiasm for him in these
words: ‘Spenser, I could have read forever. Too
young to trouble myself about the allegory, I con-
sidered all the knights and ladies and dragons and
giants in their outward and exoteric sense, and God
only knows how delighted I was to find myself in
such society.”

It is in this spirit of youthful abandonment that
one must read Spenser to enjoy him. The moral and
the allegory are no less superfluous to the mature
mind, as Lowell confesses when he says, ‘‘So en-
tirely are beauty and delight in it the native element
of Spenser, that whenever in the Fairy Queen you
come suddenly on the moral, it gives you a shock of
unpleasant surprise, a kind of grit, as when one’s
teeth close on a bit of gravel in a dish of strawber-
ries and cream. ; . : To read him is
like dreaming awake without even the trouble of
doing it yourself, but letting it be done for you by
the finest dreamer that ever lived, who knows how
to color his dreams like life and make them move
before you in music.”

Your next lesson includes the subjects of Mar-
lowe and Shakespeare.

You misspelled the word holiday. It has only
one l. Its derivation is a clue to its spelling. It
meant originally a saint’s day and was called holy-
day, and spelled with y instead of i.
56 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

LETTER VII.

SHOULD like you to write more freely your opin-
ions of what youread. Do not be afraid of my
criticism. I want you to doubt, wonder, admire, or
reject as your taste dictates. It would be wonderful
if you were always right; it would be equally won-
derful if you were always wrong. The main thing is
to have a genuine opinion and an open mind hungry
for truth and willing to give up an opinion as soon
as its weakness is made manifest. Never be afraid
of changing your mind. I think it was Lincoln who
said that the great difference between a man and a
donkey is that one can change his mind and the
other can not.

I assigned you Christopher Marlowe with Shake-
speare because, among all the contemporaries of the
latter, he possessed the greatest native dramatic
genius.

Then, too, he chose for the subject of his most
powerful drama the old myth of Dr. Faustus, from
which Goethe (the Shakespeare of Germany) elab-
orated the finest poem of the nineteenth century,
Faust. You may be familiar with the story of it in
the operatic version, so I need not tell it, but I
should like you to understand its central idea, and
to know that the myth originated in a singular biog-
raphy of a German magician, Dr. Faustus, who was
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 57

a contemporary of Martin Luther. The biography
was written by a Protestant clergyman fifty years
after Faustus’s death and published at Frankfort-on-
the-Main. Marlowe was indebted to this biography
for the theme of his drama.

The central idea of the two dramas based on this
narrative is the revolt of the body against the exact-
ing demands of the intellect. A scholar, an Alex-
ander of the intellectual world, comes to the end of
his conquests and, finding himself neither wiser nor
more content with all his knowledge, chooses to sate
his hunger for happiness by knowing the joys of the
flesh and sells his soul to the devil to know them.

You can see that there are chances for powerful
declamation in the working out of such a subject,
and Marlowe is equal to them. Of the drama of
Faustus, Taine writes: ‘The whole English drama
is here, as a plant in its seed, and Marlowe is to
Shakespeare what Perugino is to Raphael.”

Have you a clear idea of what England was like
in Shakespeare’s time? If you haven't perhaps it
will interest you to know that its entire population
then wasn’t greater than the present population of
London, and that its chief cities were separated by
long stretches of wild lands and bad roads, that
made them practically farther apart than if seas had
separated them. There was no postal service. It
cost $6.40 to carry a letter a distance of ninety miles.
The people enjoyed few or no material comforts.
Houses were rudely furnished. Rushes were strewn
over the floor in place of carpets. In the humbler
58 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

houses the smoke found its way out through a hole
in the roof, in lieu of a chimney: Window glass
was, for the most part, unknown. Anthony Been
and John Cove were the first to begin making win-
dow glass in London in 1567.

In respect to eating, the general rule was two
good meals a day, and they were mostly flesh meals.
Vegetables were very little used, and beer was drunk
in great quantities. Forks were unknown until 1611,
and were rare for many years after, and, since Shake-
speare died in 1616, it is probable that he never saw
or used one. The custom of using forks came from
Italy, and a jeweled fork was among the New Year's
gifts of Queen Elizabeth. The very latest fashion
was tobacco-smoking, brought from America by Sir
Walter Raleigh. There is not an allusion to this,
however, to be found in Shakespeare.

The favorite indoor amusements were cards,
draughts, dice, and dancing. Extravagant dressing
prevailed among the higher classes, as you must
know from the portraits of Queen Elizabeth and the
statesmen and noblemen of her time. Huge ruffs
were worn about the neck. Very high-heeled shoes
or chopines were worn. Men dressed quite as gaily
as women. They wore velvet coats trimmed with
lace and having gold clasps. Their hose were made
of silk or velveteen and made to puff out by the use
of wires. Their shoes were gay with silver buckles,
their half-boots with fringes of lace, and their high
or low-crowned hats with feathers or buckles. They
wore rings on their fingers and in their ears and
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS, 59

chains and ruffs about their necks. The hair and
beard were variously cut, but dandies wore a love-
lock under the left ear, that is, a long piece of hair
usually tied with a silk rose.

Dense ignorance prevailed among. the people.
Harvey, who first discovered and announced the cir-
culation of the blood, commenced his lectures at
Oxford in 1600. There was no science of medicine;
there was only superstition and the apothecary and
the barber. Bleeding was one of the universal
remedies, and when people wanted bleeding they
went to a barber shop. You know that is why the
barber’s pole has a red stripe around it. If they
needed medicine the apothecary was consulted. All
sorts of charms were believed in and used for the
cure of diseases—powders made of mummies, of
dead men’s skulls, a draught of spring water from’
the skull of a murdered man, the oil of scorpions, .
blood of dragons, entrails of wild beasts, etc. Chips
from a hangman’s tree worn about the neck were a
sure cure for ague. Tumors were supposed curable
by the stroke of a dead man’s hand. The touch
of a king was a sure cure for scrofula, hence it was
knownas the “‘ King’s Evil.””. Dr. Johnson mentions, as
one of his earliest recollections, being taken to Queen
Anne for the cure of scrofula. So, you see, this
belief lingered a long time in England.

The schools were poor. If you are a reader of
Shakespeare you will recall how he loves to ridicule
the schoolmasters of his time. The first grammar
of the English language was not published till 1586,
60 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

so that if Shakespeare saw one it must have been
after his majority.

A poor, meagre time, and a poor, meagre country
for the bringing forth of a great man, one might
think at first sight. But the truth is that material
comforts and material luxuries form a very effectual
cushion between man and nature, and shield him from
the deepest and most instructive experiences of life.

Poussin, the celebrated landscape painter, once
said to a nobleman who showed him one of his
pictures, ‘You only need a little poverty, sir, to
make you a good painter.” And Jean Paul Frederich
Richter, the great German humorist, said, ‘I would
not for much that I had been born richer. The
canary bird sings sweeter the longer it has been
trained in a darkened cage.”

You may be sure that our “ honie-tongued Shakes-
peare,”’ as one of his contemporaries called him, had
some such training back of his sweet singing.

You must have been disappointed, as all lovers of
Shakespeare are, at the meagre account we have of
his life. Emerson finely expresses this disappoint-
ment in these words: ‘There is somewhat touching
in the madness with which the passing age mis-
chooses the object on which all candles shine and
all eyes are turned; the care with which it registers
every trifle touching Queen Elizabeth and King
James, and the Essexes, Leicesters, Burleighs, and
Buckinghams; and lets pass without a single valuable
note the founder of another dynasty, which alone
will cause the Tudor dynasty to be remembered,
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS 61

the man who carries the Saxon race in him by the
inspiration which feeds him, and on whose thoughts
the foremost people of the world are now for some
ages to be nourished, and minds to receive this and
not another bias. A popular player—nobody sus-
pected he was the poet of the human race, and the
secret was kept as faithfully from poets and intellec-
tual men as from courtiers and frivolous people.
Bacon, who took the inventory of the human under-
standing for his times, never mentioned his name.
Ben Jonson, though we have strained his few words
of regard and panegyric, had no suspicion of the
elastic fame whose first vibrations he was at-
tempting.”

The trouble with not knowing certainly is that
conjecture is set to work, and often enough so un-
profitably. One biographer, for example, tells with
unction the deer-stealing episode, and looks upon
the scurrilous verses nailed upon Sir Thomas Lucy’s
park gate as an unerring prophecy of the youth's
future greatness. Another more fastidious critic
scornfully rejects them as unworthy a noble mind,
even in its immaturity, and triumphantly settles the
argument with the assertion that Sir Thomas Lucy
never had a park and never kept any deer. One
writer cherishes the tradition that Shakespeare’s first
service, in connection with a theatre, was that of
holding the horses of gentlemen who patronized the
same. Another refuses to accept the tradition, be-
cause of the unlikelihood of gentlemen requiring
such services at that time, or, if they did, of their
62 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

unwillingness to trust their horses with a raw youth.
One writer believes him to have been a lawyer’s
apprentice, by reason of his familiarity with legal
terms. Another thinks he must have been an apothe-
cary’s clerk, because he was so widely acquainted
with the medicinal virtues of certain herbs. One
argues he was a Roman Catholic, another that he
was a Protestant, and yet another that he held no
religious creed whatever, and each supports his view
by readings from the author’s works. Some conjec-
ture his marriage to have been unhappy, and argue
his indifference to his wife from the trifling bequest
in his will, and believe he was putting his own bitter.
experience into the mouth of the amorous duke
when he said to the disguised Viola:
“Too old, by heaven; let still the woman take

An elder than herself; so wears she to him,

So sways she level in her husband's heart;

For, boy, however we.do praise ourselves,

Our fancies are more giddy and unfirm,

More longing, wavering, sooner lost and won

Than women’s are.”

Other biographers see in these things no argu-
ment at all for marital infelicity or neglect, since the
wife was legally entitled to a fair share of his prop-
erty, and the bequest may have been made in con-
sideration of her partiality for that particular “‘second-
best bed;” and, furthermore, of all writers, Shakes-
peare has left the fewest traces of his personality in
his works; he has effaced the individual in the uni-
versal, and to look for such traces in his plays is as
foolish as to search the wide ocean for the fresh
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 63

waters of the gentle stream that strayed thither by
many winding nooks.

But, after all, the outward circumstances of the
man’s life are comparatively little to us so long as
we have the eye, the ear, the heart, the tongue, and
brain of him. And what an eye, what an ear, what
a heart and tongue and brain he had!

Nothing escaped him; neither the daffodil that
comes before the swallow dares, and takes the winds
of March with beauty, nor the cloud-capped towers,
the gorgeous palaces, yea, the great globe itself;
neither the strain that had a dying fall, that came
o’er the ear like the sweet south that breathes upon
a bank of violets, stealing and giving odor, nor the
dreadful marches of grim-visaged war; neither the
agony of Lear nor the mirth of Falstaff. He saw,
heard, and felt everything. He so diligently reaped
the main harvest of thought that he has left only
broken ears for the gleaners who came after him. His
works have been called a ‘‘lay Bible.” He was acon-
summate artist, a wholly rounded, a complete man.
“He had,” said Leigh Hunt, “animal spirits, wit,
fancy, judgment; understanding like Bacon, feeling
like Chaucer, mirth like Rabelais, dignity like Milton.
What a man!”

Of Shakespeare’s English it is impossible to
speak too highly; strong, flexible, idiomatic, it is
eminently the people’s tongue in the mouth of a
poet. It is the language which Shakespeare hears
in the streets, the coffee houses, the inns. It was
alive then and it is living now. You are familiar
64 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

enough with the more beautiful and poetical pas-
sages, but did you ever notice what a modern street-
corner ring to them some of the phrases from the
mouth of the people have? Here are a few ex-
amples gathered at random from his plays :

‘“When I was sick you gave me bitter pills.”

‘‘O jest inscrutable, invisible as the nose on a
man’s face.”

“O sweet, bully Bottom.”

‘“‘ Let the world slide.”

“My cake is dough.”

‘I have been in such a pickle since I saw you
last.”

“A kind heart he hath,a woman would run
through fire and water for such a man.”

‘“How green you are, and fresh in this old
world.”

“T tell you, he that can lay hold of her shall
have the chinks.”

“Thou, like a kind fellow, gavest thyself away.”

“ As fat as butter.”

“He hath eaten me out of house and home.”

‘All the other gifts appertinent to man, as the
malice of this age shapes them, are not worth a
gooseberry.”

You recognize the current slang of the day in
these phrases, and slang they doubtless were in
Shakespeare’s, but there was something living and
perennial inthem. They show us, if indeed we needed
showing, that the man was no mere book-worm, and
they tell us, too, where he learned that sweet simple
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 65

tongue that charms us in all his works, but most
particularly in his sonnets. It is true that he had so
tropical an imagination, such turbulent passions,
such an exuberance of thought, that he could not but
often err in the direction of excess. ‘ His wood
notes wild,” says Hunt, ‘surpass Haydn and Bach.
His wild roses are all twenty times double. He
thinks twenty times to another man’s once, and
makes all his serious characters talk, as well as him-
self, with a superabundance of wit and intelligence.”’

But we certainly ought not to quarrel with him
for enriching our thought at the expense of rhetori-
cal rules and dramatic proprieties. As well quarrel
with Niagara for being too great to turn a mill-
wheel. Turning mill-wheels is not Niagara’s mission,
neither is illustrating rhetorical rules that of Shakes-
peare.

He is as great as Nature, and like Nature is as un-
conscious and impartial, as rudely strong and as
exquisitely beautiful. He is like one of our magnifi-
cent American forests, in which oak and willow,
hickory and hazel, delicate wild flowers and flaunt-
ing weed grow promiscuously; in which is to be
seen ‘the creamed and mantling standing pool” as
well as ‘“ the pretty brawling brook, making sweet
music with the enamell’d stones;” where one may
meet the perfume of the wild rose and the smell of
carrion, the bursting bud and the sere and yellow
leaf. And who that loves Nature better than art,
and rugged truth better than a smooth lie, does not
infinitely prefer such a grand wood, touched by no

5
66 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

other hand than God’s, to the artificial park, with its
level lawns and its symmetrically trimmed trees, its
mimic grottoes and its showy flower-beds, laid out
in geometrical patterns ?

Like Nature, too, Shakespeare is neither moral
nor immoral. He takes menand women as he finds
them, not as they ought to be. He represents life
as it is, not as the moralist would have it. Virtue is
not always sure of its reward, and vice frequently es-
capes the whipping post. .

“He did not mean his great tragedies for’ scare-
crows,” says Lowell, “ as if the nailing of one hawk
to the barn-door would prevent the next from com-
ing down souse into the barn-yard. No, itis not the
poor, bleeding victim, hung up to moult its drag-
gled feathers in the rain, that he wished to show
us. He loves the hawk nature as well as the hen
nature, and if he is unequaled in anything it is in
that sunny breadth of view, that impartiality of reason,
that looks down on all ranks and conditions of men,
all fortune and misfortune, with the equal eye of
the pure artist.”

You will hardly agree with me Pate 1 sini t

understand you if you did) when I say that of all

Shakespeare’s characters I am inclined to think Fal-
staff the greatest triumph of his genius, and, indeed,
the greatest piece of character-sketching in all fic-
tion. j

He is an irredeemable sensualist, a notorious liar,
a reputed coward, an immense braggart, but he has
such an inexhaustible fund of wit, such marvelous
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 67

dexterity in getting out of a difficulty, so much good
nature, and such a deep, broad substratum of common
sense, that I never weary of his company, and read
of his death with a genuine heaviness of heart that
is hardly relieved by Dame Quickly’s assertion,
“Nay, sure he’s not in hell. He’s in Arthur’s.
bosom. ’A made a finer end and went away an’ it
had been any Christian child.”

Ruskin says that Shakespeare has no heroes,
only heroines; whether that be true or not, Shakes-
peare’s women have always been greatly loved and
admired. Mrs. Jameson is an admirable and appre-
ciative critic of them, and, when you have made their
acquaintance at first hand, you may enjoy looking at
them through her eyes.

Beatrice and Rosalind are my favorites. ‘‘ There
was a star danced,” says Beatrice, ‘and under that I
was born.” JI can well believe her, such a merry
heart, quick brain, nimble wit, and sharp tongue she
has. But I am not sure that I should have liked her
for a constant companion. There is a shrewish
flavor in her wit sometimes, and a confident fearless-
ness in her that allows no one to escape the tingle
of its lash. She enlivens a dull hour, but it is by
letting off pistols and putting match to powder,
instead of giving you a harmless display of fire-works.
“She speaks poniards and every word stabs.”

How different is the wit of Rosalind. ‘By this
hand it will not hurt a fly,” she says, and neither
will it. She has the same perfect health, buoyant
youth, high spirits, and keen intellect as Beatrice, but
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she has more of the exquisite half-playful, half-tender
coquetry of a woman. She is as full of pretty whims
and fancies as June of roses. She is frank and
unconventional, and plays at being a boy with such
charming grace that I can hardly think of her in
petticoats without a sigh. To be in her company is
like taking atonic. The digestion is quickened and
the blood flows freer.

And now I’ve nothing more to say of Shakespeare
except that I’ve read somewhere that he had brown
eyes. Asan actor, he played the characters of the
English kings, the ghost in Hamlet, and Adam in
As You Like I.

Your next lesson will cover the following ques-
tions:

Who wrote A New Way to Pay Old Debts?

What are the main facts in Ben Jonson’s life?

What two dramatic poets wrote their works to-
gether?

Upon what work does Sir Walter Raleigh’s liter-
ary fame rest, and under what circumstances was it
written?

Who was Richard Hooker?

The name Jonson when it means Ben Jonson is
spelled without an #. It is Samuel Johnson who has
that extra letter in his name.
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 69

LETTER VIII.

 

ENJOYED hearing about Mrs. . Iamvery

glad that you have a friend in a well-educated,
well-read woman. All young people need the inspi-
ration that comes from contact with cultivated men
and women. They need to feel a response to the best
that isin them. There is nothing more suicidal to
intellectual growth than constant association with
frivolous, pleasure-loving people; and yet there are
so many of that sort in the world that it is a great
temptation to dwarf one’s spirit to the height of the
lower ones around us, simply to avoid being peculiar.
But we ought to be ashamed to be anything lower
than we can be.

I can add nothing to what you have said of Ben
Jonson unless it be to give you his portrait in these
words of Taine: ‘A vigorous, heavy, and uncouth
person; a broad and long face, early disfigured by
scurvy; a square jaw, large cheeks; his animal organs
as much developed as those of his intellect; the sour
aspect of a man in a passion or on the verge of a
passion; to which add the body of an athlete, about
forty years of age, mountain belly, ungracious gait.
Such was the outside, and the inside is like it. He
was a genuine Englishman, big and coarsely framed,
energetic, combative, proud, often morose, and prone
to strange splenetic imaginations.”
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You find this coarseness and uncouthness re-
flected in his dramas. You would gain nothing
by reading him, and yet he is not without his fine-
ness, too, or he would not be “rare Ben Jonson,”
you may be sure of that. I have always very much
admired these lines of his:

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

There! were ever all the sweet, white, soft things
in the world collected in a prettier picture than that?
I don’t think so. Then, too, all that critics have
ever said of Shakespeare is but a paraphrase of what
Jonson said in his tribute to Shakespeare, entitled,
“To the memory of my beloved, the author, Mr.
William Shakespeare, and what he hath left us.”

Lest you shouldn’t have this tribute at hand, I
quote the best of it:

3 Soul of the age,
The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage,
My Shakespeare, rise, I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer and Spenser or bid Beaumont lie
A little further to make thee a room;
Thou art a monument without a tomb,
And art alive still while thy book doth live,
And we have wits to read and praise to give.
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For if I thought my judgment were of years
Ishould commit thee surely with thy peers;

And tell how far thou dids’t our Lyly outshine,

Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe's mighty line.

And though thou had’st small Latin and less Greek,
From thence, to honor thee, I would not seek

For names; but call forth thundering CEschylus,
Euripides and Sophocles to us

‘To live again to hear thy buskin tread
And shake a stage.

He was not of our age but for all time,
And all the muses still were in their prime,
When, like Apollo, he came forth to warm
Our ears, or like a Mercury, to charm.

Yet must not I give nature all; thy art,
My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part.

For a good poet’s made as well as born,
And such wert thou
Sweet swan of Avon!”

You are now to prepare alesson on Lord Bacon.
You say you have read Macaulay’s essay on Bacon.
Iam glad of it. Many writers are inclined to palli-
ate Bacon’s offences. Macaulay regards them as
does every unprejudiced thinker who believes that
where “ much is given, much is required.”

The man who knows what is right and won’t do
it is certainly a bigger scoundrel than the man who
is in doubt about it and blunders into the wrong.
Bacon knew very well what was right. He:was not
only one of the most enlightened men of his time,
but he was gifted with that incommunicable creative
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power we call genius. His mistakes were not the
rash, unpremeditated irregularities of passion touched
with genius. They were the cold-blooded, well-
thought-out basenesses of a mean, narrow, selfish,
worldly spirit.

When I think of Lord Bacon I seem to see the
owner of a magnificent palace adorned with the
greatest skill that art and luxury can devise, delib-
erately choosing to desert his beautiful rooms in
order to live in the cellar with the rats, in a mouldy
atmosphere, and in darkness. Lord Bacon’s palace
—that is his works and the nobler parts of his mind.
His essays are packed with fine sentiments. They
teach contempt for the vanities of the world, regard
for the studious and contemplative spirit. His
heavier works, though by no means scientific in the
modern sense of the word, have had a profound in-
fluence in directing students to proper methods of
investigation. He was the first man of weight to
protest vigorously against the uselessness and folly
of mere speculation.. He wanted facts; he wanted
fruits. He believed in using eye, ear, and hand to
find them out and to profit by them. Before him,
men shut their eyes and fell to imagining how things
are, and they called their vain imaginings learning.
Lord Bacon’s cellar—that is his life, so stained with
baseness, cruelty, and corruption. He prosecuted
and brought to death the man to whom he owed the
commencement of his worldly prosperity, and he
pursued that friend with vindictive harshness after
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his death. He betrayed the trust his country laid
upon him. He sold his judgments to the man who
paid the biggest price for them. He employed the
rack to torture confessions from an innocent old
clergyman.

Bacon finds many biographers who overlook his
glaring defects of character in blind admiration for
his genius. But, so long as ingratitude, cruelty, and
corruption in office are regarded with horror, he
will never want his condemners. A man gifted with
the noble and commanding intellect that Bacon
possessed is in duty bound to make his moral con-
duct conform to it. He should not lend it to the
gilding or excusing of vice.

I should like you to read his essays. Taine
says, ‘‘ There is nothing in English prose superior
to his diction.” But you would hardly profit by
any further reading from him. With all his learning
and genius he did not outgrow the superstitions of
hisage. He rejected the Copernican system, ex-
pressed contempt for Gilbert’s investigations in mag-
netism, believed in witchcraft, and held fast the
old Aristotelian belief that all nature is alive with
instincts and desires, appetites and repulsions, like
human beings.

We owe to him no discovery of science, but he
prepared the way for science by destroying the
authority of speculation. Before new buildings can
go up in the place of old ones, the old ones must be
torn down. The man who tears down is rarely a
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builder, but his work is no less: important, for it
makes the builder’s work possible. Bacon’s work in
science was that of the man who tears down..

You may take Milton asthe subject of your next
study, but before you begin it you ought to be famil-
iar with the history of' the period in which he lived,
for Milton was Cromwell’s Latin secretary and the
finest type of Puritanism.

I shall content myself with giving you the barest
possible outline of the history of England from the
time of Henry VIII. to the accession of Charles II.,
and you can fill in the outline by further reading at
your leisure.

Henry VIII. had three children who in turn suc-
ceeded to his throne; Edward VI. (son of Henry’s
third wife, Jane Seymour) was his immediate suc-
cessor. He died when but sixteen, after a brief
reign of six years, and was succeeded by his half-
sister Mary, daughter of Henry’s first wife Katherine,
whom he divorced to marry Anne Boleyn.

Mary was a fanatical Catholic and by her bloody
persecutions of the Protestants won the title of
‘Bloody Mary.” Foxe’s Book of Martyrs is an
account of the Marian persecutions. It was during
her reign that Lady Jane Grey was beheaded ona
charge of treason. Mary was married to Philip of
Spain. Her reign lasted but five years. |

Elizabeth, daughter of Anne Boleyn, eee
her half-sister Mary. Elizabeth wasa Protestant and
the Catholics, refusing to regard her as a legitimate
heir to the throne, supported the claim of Mary, Queen
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of Scots, who was a grand-niece of Henry VIII. The
romantic story of this beautiful woman forms one of
the most thrilling chapters in history, and if you are
not acquainted with its details you have a treat in
store for yourself. Read Schiller’s drama, Mary
Stuart, in addition to your historical reading.on the
subject. Mary was beheaded at Fotheringay Castle,
England, after an imprisonment of eighteen years.

Elizabeth reigned forty-five years and named as
her successor the son of Mary, Queen of Scots,
James VI. of Scotland, who thus became James I. of
England and, by his legitimate claim to the throne
of both countries, united them under one govern-
ment.

James I. had the short-sightedness to proclaim and
insist upon the maintenance of that absurd doctrine,
the divine right of kings. He once uttered that
doctrine in a speech in the Star Chamber in the fol-
lowing words: ‘As it is atheism and blasphemy to
dispute what God can do, so it is presumption and
a high contempt in a subject to dispute what a king
can do, or to say that a king cannot do this or
that.”

James carried out this theory in various acts of
injustice and tyranny. He was extravagant himself,
and the tool of extravagant favorites. He ex-
hausted the treasury and tried to fill it by unjust
taxation and the base sale of peerages to those who
could ‘bid high enough for them. It was during
his reign that Raleigh was beheaded, and it. was dur-
ing his reign that Lord Bacon touched the summit
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of his worldly prosperity by arts no less base than
those of his king, and, it was under the same rule
that he was impeached and deprived of his honors.

James transmitted his absurd theories and his
obstinacy, as well as his crown, to his son Charles I.
But this unfortunate monarch had to pay for his
inheritance with his life. The Puritan party that
arose during the reign of Elizabeth gradually grew
stronger and stronger until at this time it repre-
sented the most virtuous and serious part of the
nation. It counted among its members such men
as Hampden, Pym, Cromwell. This Puritan party
arrayed itself against the king and his unjust de-
mands. The result was the Civil War, in which the
Royalists were defeated and Charles I. beheaded on
a charge of treason.

Hampden had been killed during the early part
of the struggle, and Cromwell was left to represent
the brain and will of the Puritan party. He was
quite great enough for the task set him, and, as
Lord Protector, ruled England as a despot for five
years. At his death his son Richard Cromwell
succeeded him for a period of five months. But
by this time England was tired of the austerity of
Puritan rule, and recalled the Stuarts to the throne
in the person of Charles II., son of Charles I. This
event is known as the Restoration, and its date is
1660.

Carlyle has written a remarkably fine life of
Cromwell which may interest you.

You will now be better able to understand the
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historical allusions in your study of Milton’s life.
He did not stand aloof from the exciting interests
of his day. He manfully took his part in them; in
fact, lost his eye-sight in the service of his party.

I hope you will not weary of being sent again to
Macaulay to read his fine essay on Milton. This was
the essay that made Macaulay famous and the first
of that remarkable series that has established his
fame. Channing has also written a fine essay on
Milton, and Lowell in Among My Books has made
some pithy contributions to our understanding of
him.

Read, too, Milton’s shorter poems, Lyczdas, L’ Al-
legro, and [1 Penseroso, and those fine sonnets, the first
of which opens thus, ‘‘How soon hath Time, the
subtle thief of youth,” and the second thus, ‘When
I consider how my light is spent.” This latter son-
net closes with the often quoted lines, ‘They also
serve who only stand and wait.”
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LETTER IX.

T OUGHT to be as easy to write on poetry this
morning as “woodland nooks send violets up and
paint them blue;” for all out-doors is a picture-gal-
lery,a poem as Nature writes it, and I’ve but to
look out of my window to read it.

Yesterday, we had one of those heavy, low, gray
skies that threaten to do something disagreeable,
and never forget to keep the promise. First, we
had a steady, persistent sleet, that drove against the
window panes with a light, crisp rattle, and covered
the earth with asheet of ice. Every twig and branch
got well coated and the limbs curved exquisitely
under it; and then the sleet suddenly changed into
a snow-storm—first, a few, huge, stray flakes, like
tufts of wool, and then a perfect storm of them, un-
til all the world was white except the sheltered side
of tree-trunks, that looked jet-black by contrast.
This morning the sun shines out on all this ice and
snow, and we are living in an incomparably white,
jeweled, rain-bowed world, that nobody but Whittier
ever could or ever did do justice to.

So I shan’t try it. I can only mention the bare
facts, and, like a stupid moralist who can’t see a
beautiful thing without tagging an ethical truth to
it, I mean to turn this beautiful world-picture to
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 79

some account. Apollo shall tend the flocks of
Admetus again.

Will you please notice, then, that this combina-
tion of snow, sunlight, and ice is not ordinary. It is
not the face that Nature wears every day. It is:a
rare and happy exception, a mood, a supreme moment
of beauty, as transitory as it is exquisite. Even
while I write, the sun is beginning to melt the
jewels; in a few hours these glittering branches
will be black, naked, dripping.

Now, real poetry, the poetry that “lives and is a
joy forever,” is the catching and fixing in words
of the supreme moments of beauty and feeling in
human life, those. full, passionate, blossoming mo-
ments, when we live, not by hours, but by heart-
throbs. These moments are as rare as is this jew-
eled world this morning. Some of us never feel
them; we have only hints, suggestions of them, that
help us to enter, more or less, into the spirit of the
poet who feels them. If he does not feel them
more than we, he is not a poet, he is only a verse-
writer.

The metaphysical poets, of whom I am going
to speak this morning, Donne, Cowley, Waller,
Davenant, Quarles, Herbert, Denham, Herrick, and
Suckling, were just such men. They were clever
writers of verse, not poets in the highest sense of
the word, and, because they were simply that, the
world has forgotten them. . Careful students of lit-
erature read them, once, just because they are
obliged to do it. But their pages are not thumb-
80 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

marked, nor do their bindings fray at the edges and
get loose at the back. They are as safely preserved
as mummies are. They are men whom one reads
about and refuses to read. You will find some
good reading about them in Johnson’s Lives of the
Poets.

They were men of various characters and profes-
sions, clergymen, courtiers, recluses, men of the
world, but they agreed in one particular—they
knew how to be superlatively dull in verse and to
call it poetry. But they had their gleams of bright-
ness, too, a ray just faint enough to come down to
us in such pleasant little verses as these of Sir John
Suckling:

“Why so pale and wan, fond lover?

Pr’y thee, why so pale ?

Will, when looking well can’t move her,
Looking ill prevail ?
Pr’y thee why so pale ?

Why so dull and mute, young sinner ?
Pr’y thee why so mute?

Will, when speaking well can’t win her,
Saying nothing do’t ?
Pr’y thee why so mute?

If, of herself she will not love,

Nothing can make her,
The devil take her!”

As a foil to this brightness, let me give you an
example of absurdity and dullness from Donne, the
founder of the metaphysical school. He and his
sweetheart had been bitten by a flea, one and the
same flea, and he commemorates this decidedly
unpoetical event in these ridiculous verses:
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 81

“This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed and marriage temple is.
Though parents grudge, and you, we’re met
And cloistered in these living walls of jet.
Though use make you apt to kill me,
Let not to that, self-murder added be,
And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.”

Herrick has much of Suckling’s lightness, and
Cowley much of Donne’s heaviness. Cowley wrote
better prose than poetry, and I have a warm side for
him because he loved flowers. Botany was his
favorite study. He was a royalist in sentiment and,
after the regicide, accompanied Queen Henrietta,
widow of Charles I., to France, where he remained
during the Commonwealth.

Herbert is the only one of these metaphysical
poets whose pure, austere sentiment has kept his
poetry sweet and bracing. He was a devout clergy-
man of great sincerity, and he is probably the only
one of the poets of this group whose verses are still
read with any degree of enjoyment. I should like
you to learn by heart his little poem on Virtue, begin-

ning,
“ Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridal of the earth and sky.”

These metaphysical poets were all learned men,
not men of feeling, imaginative force, and originality,
and their learning helped them not a whit toward
being poets. It rather hindered them. Learning
should not shackle a man as it shackled them. It
should not be an armor that weighs down and con-
ceals the flesh and blood. It ought rather to bea

6
82 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

store-house of arms, at a moment’s access; not
something that hinders, but something that aids;
wings, not weights. With all his learning, a man
ought to keep the same suppleness of mind that a
child has, capable, if need be, of catching his joy
from a butterfly’s flight or the song of a bird. He
should not get microscopic, but telescopic eyes.
It is a bad plan to look at the grain of life too
closely. What we need to see is not its coarseness
in particulars but its beauty asa whole. These poets
caught no glimpses of this larger beauty of life.
They were occupied with its trivialities, its shallow
emotions. They were wanting in simplicity and so
fell into abominable affectations, and corrupted the
taste of their age.

The theologians of this period, Chillingworth,
Browne (a Norwich physician, whose serious writ-
ings put him under this classification), Thomas
Fuller, Jeremy Taylor, Richard Baxter, were men of
greater power than the poets mentioned above.
Browne isa mine of good things, but you will hardly
be able to enjoy him yet. As for Jeremy Taylor,
the force and beauty of his imagination have made
him likened to Shakespeare. There was really more
of the poet in him than in his poetical contempo-
raries. ;

His life was fuller of incident than that of most
clergymen. He married a natural daughter of Charles
I., and as an ardent royalist suffered the reverses of
his party. He was chaplain to the king’s army,
was twice imprisoned, but after the Restoration he
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 83

became a bishop, a member of the Privy council, and
vice-chancellor of the university of Dublin. He was
a great reader, a great thinker, a great observer, as
well as a man of strong feelings and brilliant imag-
ination. He loved Nature like a poet, and drew his
illustrations from her at first hand. He never enun-
ciated a truth as a bare fact. He clothed it in some
apt image, gave it form, color, life.

He wishes, for example, to give his hearers an
idea of the prayer of a good man. He might have
contented himself with saying that it began hope-
fully, but that, as the remembrance of his own weak-
ness pressed upon the petitioner, the uttered words
became stammering, indistinct, confused, until he
quite broke down. Restored to calmness again, by
faith in the love and mercy of God, his words re-
cover force and end in triumphant gratitude and
praise. He might have made these bald statements,
and they would have died with the ears that heard
them. But he remembers a morning in early spring,
dew on the grass, and a lark singing as it rises from
the earth, “hoping to get to heaven and climb above
the clouds.” He draws a picture of the bird’s
struggles against the wind, he follows it panting to
the earth again, to stay till the storm is past, and,
when it rises once more to make its prosperous
flight, he makes all his listeners hear and see with
him that lark-music and motion that might have
been “‘learned from an angel.”

That is the poetic touch, the Midas power of
transmuting what it touches into gold. That lark
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rising from its bed of grass sings just as sweetly to
us to-day as it did to Jeremy Taylor more than two
centuries ago. We still remember what a good
man’s prayer is like, and we should know or care
nothing about it told in any other way.

Your letter, with its work on Lord Bacon, has
just been handed to me. There is more of buoy-
ancy in it than you have shown for some time —
the mark of good health, you are rested. You
attribute your good spirits to having had your fill
of sleep lately. I’ve no doubt of it. To keep the
mind and body vigorous there is no substitute for
happiness and sleep.

I knew that General Lew Wallace wrote Ben Hur
in Santa Fe while he was governor of New Mexico,
but I did not know that the vandal relic-hunter and
tourist pilfer from the room in the old adobe palace
where he wrote. It interested me very much as a
new phase of that singular relic-mania that makes us
value trash for the mere sake of association. But I
confess that to steal a pin-cushion, vase, or toilet article
from a room furnished and occupied by some ordin-
ary person, simply because it was once occupied by
some extraordinary one, is a stretch of association
quite beyond my comprehension. How vulgar it is!
Only persons absolutely devoid of imagination, ap-
preciation, or common honesty could possibly do it.

The subject of your lesson after Milton will be
John Bunyan. Read, if you have not done so, The
Pilgrim’s Progress. shall make the minor contem-
poraries of the great dreamer the subject of a letter,
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 85

so that you can confine yourself to answering these
questions in addition to your work on Bunyan

Who wrote Hudibras?

What author wrote a noted book on his favorite
pastime, fishing ?

What is the name of the book ?

For what literary work is the Earl of Clarendon
famous ?

Who was Samuel Pepys ?

Who is known as the Philosopher of Malmes-
bury ?
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LETTER X.

H~™ very much I thank you for the kind ex-
pressions of appreciation and love in your last
letter. Few of us, I suppose, ever get beyond the
weakness (if it be weakness) of wishing to please,
and few of us, I think, are ever bold enough to take
it for granted that we do please. We needto be told
it in order to be sure of it, and we need not only to be
told of it, but to be made to feel it, which feeling does
not always come even with the most effusive telling.

I often think that much of the secret estrange-
ment and misunderstanding in families might be
avoided by a little more expansiveness, a little more
freedom in telling and showing one another that
there is real love in our hearts. We forget that
there is not a window in our breasts. We say to
ourselves, ‘‘ They know I love them,” and half the
time “ they” don’t know anything of the sort, but
are breaking their hearts in pitiful self-distrust and
mute appealing for bread while receiving a stone. I
confess to having done a good deal of this mute ap-
pealing and have suffered much from this self-dis-
trust in my life, and knowing all the pain of it, I am
the quicker to feel and appreciate the exquisite kind-
ness of love freely given. So I thank you again for
those sweet words of yours.

I have always felt that year a lost one in which
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 87

I made no new friend. And this year I am the
richer for your friendship. Is it not so? You are
not merely a voice coming to me froma distance. I
know you, I have tested your character in a good
many ways and I have not found you wanting yet.
You have never yet said to me, ‘ Don’t give me so
much to do. I can’t find time to read all that. Is
it necessary to do this? I don’t see the good of it.”

You haven't given up, even through the head-
aches and bad colds, and the lost days in a sick-bed.
Your determination to learn, to grow, has not weak-
ened. You haven’t made physical weakness a pre-
text for mental inertness. I like that, and I like it
the more emphatically because I so constantly meet
with exactly the contrary spirit, with machine girls,
who need winding as regularly as clocks do. They
absolutely can’t go of themselves. They must be
wheedled and coaxed, and patted on the head, or
reprimanded and spurred to their tasks, and some-
times the wheels clog up or break, and then all the
winding in the world can’t make them go. They
just stand still forever. They’re alive, because they
can wear fine clothes, and eat and giggle and chat-
ter gibberish like magpies, but that’s all. They
never do anything unless it be to make life a burden
to all who know them.

It is a pitiful comment on human weakness that
every gang of workmen needs its overseer or ‘‘boss’’
to watch and see that each one is diligent. It isa
pitiful comment on human short-sightedness that
we cannot understand that all the heroic qualities,
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strength, courage, persistence, grow out of difficul-
ties met and vanquished, out of pleasures denied and
duties performed in the face of disinclination. There
is an unhappy theory in practice at present that
everything should be made pleasant for young
people, that their tasks shonld be turned into
play, and that the seriousness of life must be
studiously concealed from them. It is my opinion
that when a child learns to walk by being carried
about in its mother’s arms, or a youth learns to
swim by riding in a merry-go-round, he may also
learn to be a thoughtful, energetic man from being
a thoughtless, idle, pleasure-seeking youth.

Ruskin has a good word to say on thoughtless-
ness in youth which I can’t forbear quoting: ‘In
general, I have no patience with people who
talk about the thoughtlessness of youth indulgently.
I had infinitely rather hear of thoughtless old age,
and the indulgence due to that. When a man has
done his work, and nothing can any way be mate-
rially altered in his fate, let him forget his toil and
jest with his fate if he will, but what excuse can you
find for wilfulness of thought at the very time when
every crisis of future fortune hangs on your deci-
sions? A youth thoughtless! when the career of all
his days depends on the opportunity of a moment.
A youth thoughtless! when his every act is a foun-
dation-stone of future conduct, and every imagina-
tion a fountain of life or death. Be thoughtless in
any after years, rather than now, though, indeed, there
is only one place where a man may be nobly
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thoughtless, his death-bed. No thinking should
ever be left to be done there.”

We need more of this seriousness and thought-
fulness among our youth, more of the spirit that
faces an obstacle with no intention of yielding to
it, but meets it as a river does a mountain. The
river can’t go over the mountain. Very well, then,
it can goround it. At any rate, it will not run back
to its source. Any way to get onward, onward,
but never once backward. That is the heroic spirit.
That is the spirit of John Milton.

I am glad we have that hero for our subject to-
day. He fits exactly into the spirit of what I’ve
been saying. You cannot find in all history so per-
fect an example of a man who lived so wholly above
the vulgarities and annoyances of life, and yet at the
same time shirked no duty, however distasteful, that
came to him; never once turned aside from his
lofty ideas; never once yielded to discouragement,
but turned his very trials, his obstacles, his sorrows,
into stepping-stones of glory.

I want to call your attention to this greatness of
his character asa man. It will do you more good
than to dwell upon his greatness as a poet, and yet
I shall speak of that, too. I shouldthink your work
in English literature of small value if it simply filled
your memory with the names of great writers, a cat-
alogue of their works, and the details of their lives.
These are interesting facts, but a fact must be more
than interesting in order to develop us. It must be
inspiring, it must become a part of our moral being.
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It must leave us better than it found us, by an added
courage to meet our own trials, and by a loftier aim,
a more ardent wish never to tire and never to grow
cold in the pursuit of truth, virtue, duty.

The inspiring spiritual fact of Milton’s life is
this, a serious, lofty purpose in life adhered to un-
flinchingly, untiringly, and proving its right to be
and its nobility by the immortality of its fruits.

In Paradise Regained Milton makes Christ say:

“When I was yet a child, no childish play
To me was pleasing; all my mind was set
Serious—to learn and know and thence to do
What might be public good; myself, I thought
Born to that end, born to promote all truth,
All righteous things.”

The poet might have written that of his own
childhood. Indeed, he does say of himself, “And
long it was not after when I was confirmed in this
opinion, that he who would not be frustrated of his
hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought
himself to be a true poem.”

That is not fine prose, but it is fine sentiment, is
it not? And did he not live it out? His life is as
truly an epic poem as is Paradise Lost. You remem-
ber that in his youth he traveled in Italy, and that
his learning, his courtliness, his genius introduced
him, wherever he went, to the most distinguished
men of his time. How thoroughly he must have
enjoyed this intercourse, and this opportunity of
seeing with his own eyes the places his classic
reading had made familiar to his fancy. How
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ardently he must have wished to prolong this pleas-
ure, and yet, at the first news of England’s troubles,
he was ready to give up his own personal comfort
and delight for the sake of being useful to his coun-
try, deeming it “base,” he says, to be “traveling
for amusement abroad while my fellow-citizens were
fighting for liberty at home.”

This is the key-note of his whole life, this flee-
ing what is “base.” His native place is on the
heights. He cannot breathe freely anywhere else,
and he never descends unless it be to fight with some
enemy to human progress, as he fought against the
assailants of liberty during the commonwealth, losing
his eyes in that struggle. Do you realize all that
this loss meant to him? First think what it would
mean to you or me, who open our eyes every morn-
ing in this beautiful world, with some delight in its
beauty, it is true, but with nothing of that thrilling
ecstasy the poet feels and sings to us again in verse.
What should we do blinded, you and I who love
books, it may be, but who do not feed on them,
hunger and thirst for them, as does the eager, cre-
ative mind of genius? What should we do? Sit in
the corner with our hands in our lap, weep and
bemoan our fate, I’ve no doubt. Not so did Milton,
for eyes that served him so much better than ours
do us. The great purpose of his life was not yet
attained, and the means of attaining it seemed to be
lost to him.

“O dark, dark, dark amid the blaze of noon!”
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And yet there was no despair in him, nor relin-
quishing by jot or tittle of that great purpose. If he
were to be enveloped in outer darkness,

“So much the rather, thou celestial light,

Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate; there, plant eyes, all mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell

Of things invisible to mortal sight.”

Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes,
are the answers to that prayer. They are the proof
of that inward vision in comparison with which the
outer one is darkness. That is why, with all his sor-
rows, we never think of pitying Milton. He is
above pity. His sightless eyes look beyond ours.
Their vision is limitless. It is we who need pity.
Is not that the very transfiguration of affliction? Is
not that turning an obstacle into a stepping-stone?
into a vantage point of view? Is not that

“The courage never to submit or yield
And what is else not to be overcome.”

I know nothing like it anywhere else. It was
from his own indomitable, mighty heart that he
drew those magnificent speeches of Satan. If you
read nothing else of Paradise Lost, read them in order
to know Milton, the man. In one of them are to be
found those powerful lines so indicative of Milton’s
spirit:

“The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”

Yet with all his greatness, nay, because of it, Mil-
ton was not an easy man to live with. I should
like to have been his friend Elwood, who read to
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him, who listened to him, who heard him at the
organ, but I should not like to have been his wife or
his daughter. He lived habitually, as I said before,
‘on the heights,” but it is a little too cold, too soli-
tary, too silent, there, for the vast majority of men
and women. We need a little more warmth, more
sunlight, more of the sound of mirthful human
voices to make us happy. This imperative need
may be a weakness, but it is an ineradicable one,
and we must make the best of it. Milton did not
try to make the best of it. He ignored it. He not
only made great demands upon himself, but he made
great demands upon all who came in contact with
him. He measured values by a superhuman stand-
ard. He made that pretty, chatting, little country
girl he took to wife so mute and miserable that she
ran away from him before the honey-moon was well
over. She came back to him after awhile and bore
him three daughters, Anne, (who was deformed),
Mary, Deborah, then died, poor thing.

Milton was twice married afterward, as you know,
and it was on the occasion of one of these mar-
riages that his daughter Mary made the heartless,
unnatural speech, that to hear he was married wasno
news, to hear of his death would be the best thing.
Back of that frightful speech we find some coldness
and lack of sympathetic understanding in the father.

These daughters were required, we are told, to
read aloud to their father in languages they did not
understand (‘one tongue,” he said, “ was enough
for a woman’’), but, tedious as that task may have
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been, it should have been no hardship to dutiful
daughters.

Taine speaks of Milton’s habits and person in the
following terse lines: ‘Every morning he had a_
chapter of the Bible read to him in Hebrew, and
remained for some time in silence, grave, in order to
meditate on whathe hadheard. Henever went toa
place of worship. Independent in religion as in all
else, he was sufficient to himself, finding in no sect
the marks of the true church; he prayed to God
alone, without needing other’shelp. He studied till
mid-day, then, after an hour’s exercise, he played the
organ or the bass-violin. Thenhe resumed his studies
till six, and in the evening enjoyed the society of his
friends. When any one came to visit him he was
usually found in aroom hung with old green hangings,
seated in an arm-chair and dressed neatly in black.
His complexion was pale, says one of his visitors,
but not sallow; his hands and his feet were gouty ;
his hair, of light brown, was parted in the midst
and fell in long curls; his eyes, gray and clear,
showed no signs of blindness. He had been very
beautiful in his youth, and his English cheeks, once
delicate as a young girl’s, retained their color almost
to the end. His face, we are told, was pleasing ;
his straight and manly gait bore witness to intre-
pidity and courage. Something great and proud
breathes out yet from all his portraits, and certainly
few men have done so much honor to their kind. Thus
went out his noble life, like a setting sun, bright and
calm. Amid so many trials, a pure and lofty joy
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altogether worthy of him had been granted to him;
the poet buried under the Puritan had reappeared,
more sublime than ever,to give to Christianity its
second Homer.”

As for Milton’s great epics, they make the same
demands upon the average reader that he made upon
himself and his associates in life. In the first place,
you cannot read them understandingly unless you
know your Bible as he knew it ; unless you have lived
in the myths of the ancients as he lived in them, and
unless you are familiar with the learning of his age.
These requirements will always make him more or less
inaccessible tothe average reader. But even he who
can bring this preparation to the reading of Milton
will not find him easy. To read him is like looking
at the starry sky. The eye, lost in wonder and
ecstasy at first, wearies after awhile and turns to earth
again for rest. It is not that the heavens are not
always sublime, but that the eye cannot bear the
strain. Milton’s sustained sublimity keeps the mind
in the same unnatural state of strain, and soon
wearies it. I should as soon think of setting out
for New York on foot as to think of sitting down to
read through Paradise Lost without stopping. I
believe that ninety-nine persons out of a hundred
would say the same thing, but that is not an argu-
ment against Milton’s greatness. It is simply a
proof of the reader’s limitations.

I noticed that you spoke of Milton’s Arianism in
your letter. Did you know the meaning of the
word when you used it, or did you simply repeat
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mechanically what you had read? I find my
girls doing the latter very often, and myself under
the necessity of saying, “Please tell me that in
the simplest possible English.” Now may I take it
for granted that you will never employa word whose
meaning is not clear to you?

Ruskin says in his Sesame and Lilies (which you
should read again and again, by the way): ‘You
might read all the books in the British Museum (if
you could live long enough) and remain an utterly
illiterate, uneducated person; but if you read the
pages of a good book, letter by letter, that is to
say, with real accuracy, you are forevermore in
some measure an educated person. The entire
difference between education and non-education (as
regards the merely intellectual part of it) consists in
this accuracy. A well-educated gentleman may not
know many languages, may not be able to speak
any but his own, may have read but few books.
But whatever language he knows, he knows pre-
cisely; whatever word he pronounces he pronounces
right; above all he is learned in the peerage of
words; knows the words of true descent and ancient
blood at a glance, from words of modern canaille ;
remembers all their ancestry, their inter-marriages,
distant relationships, and the extent to which they
were admitted and the offices they held in the
national noblesse of words at any time and in any
country. But an uneducated person may know, by
memory, many languages, and talk them all, and yet
truly not know a word of any, not a word even of
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his own. An ordinarily clever and sensible seaman
will be able to make his way ashore at most ports;
yet he has only to speak a sentence of any language
to be known for an illiterate person; so also the
accent or turn of expression of asingle sentence will
at once mark a scholar.”

You still misspell words and so I know you are
far from the accuracy Ruskin speaks of and which I
desire for you. Make your dictionary your constant
companion. I should like you to have some work
on the myths of Greece and Rome, say Bulfinch’s
Age of Fable, and to look up every mythological
allusion you meet in reading, and, if you read the
poets, you will be constantly meeting them.

I assigned your next lesson in my last letter.
Your lesson following that will have John Dryden
for its subject. In addition to that you may answer
these questions :

What was the style and spirit of the drama of the
Restoration ?

Who were the leading comic dramatists of this
period ?

Who wrote Jane Shore ?

Who wrote Venice Preserved?

Who wrote A Short View. of the Immorality and
Profaneness of the English Stage ?

Who was John Locke? Isaac Newton? Rob-
ert Boyle?
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LETTER XI.

OUR letter on Bunyan came this morning. You
have given a correct outline of his life, his
humble birth, his morbid self-accusations, his conver-
sion, preaching, imprisonment, and the composition of
his immortal work, and you add, “There is little of in-
terest in the life of Bunyan.” If you mean by interest,
stirring incident, romantic adventures, “hair breadth
’scapes,” and the like, you are right; but as a psy-
chological study, as a study of genius pure and sim-
ple, Bunyan is intensely interesting. You expressed
your wonder that a man so badly educated, so
obscure in station, so limited in experience, should
have been able to write so profoundly truthful and
so brilliantly imaginative a work as the Pilgnim’s
Progress. You have touched in that expression of
wonder the key-note of the interest Bunyan excites
in my mind.

I ask myself, what is this mysterious power we
call genius? Itis not something that can be culti-
vated like talent. It is utterly independent of time,
place, or station. It is as likely to be born under a
Bedfordshire tinker’s roof, or a Scotch peasant’s
thatch, as under the roof of the Lord- -keeper of the
Great Seal of England. It is so wayward, so pas-
sionate, so lawless, and yet so grandly powerful,
who can pluck out the heart of its mystery?
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Now I do not wish to shock you, and I do not
wish to write what you cannot understand, but I am
going to try to make plain to you what modern sci-
entific psychologists think of genius, and perhaps
that will modify your wonder at Bunyan, and help
you to understand the eccentricities, weaknesses,
vices, and often down-right insanities of a great many
men of genius whom you are yet to study.

Then, too, I want to give you a new idea, and
for truth’s sake I want you to be as receptive toward
painful ideas as toward agreeable ones. A real
lover of truth never stops to ask himself whether she
is to appear before him silk-robed, sandal-footed,
smiling, rosy, young, and fresh, or whether she is to
appear old, haggard, worn, naked of charm. It is
not the outer form of her he loves. It is the soul of
her. He loves her because she is herself, and she
may appear in what form she likes.

Now, I know that is not easy. Indeed, it is the
hardest thing in the world to shut the eyes and see
with the soul, the very hardest thing in the world.
We are all so eye-hungry. We long to feed our
vision on beauty, and that is all right, because it is
natural; but it becomes all wrong when the beauty
conceals a lie. It is then that the really noble soul
shuts the eyes of flesh and opens the spiritual ones.
Now that is just what I want you to do before a
very ugly truth about genius.

Genius, as well as the uncontrolable impulse to
crime, has been pronounced by not a few distinguished
scientists to be one of the many forms of insanity.
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You are familiar with the idea that criminals are of
unsound mind, for this pleading is common enough
in our criminal courts and leads to weak leniency
toward human vipers and mad dogs that have no more
right to exist in a civilized community than have
their bestial counterparts. But the idea that genius
is likewise a form of insanity, though not a new idea,
has not been so generally acknowledged and scien-
tifically examined as the former. It is only begin-
ning to be seriously treated, and has not yet to any
great extent influenced literary criticism as it is un-
questionably destined to influence it.

I said that this idea is not a new one, but you
can hardly know how old it is unless I quote you
some statements from Lombroso’s remarkable book
entitled Genius and Insanity. LLombroso is a profes-
sor in the University of Turin, Italy.

Speaking of the insanity of genius as not being a
recent theory, he says, ‘‘ Even Aristotle, the father
of our thought, and only too often yet the friend
and guide of our philosophy, observes that many
men in consequence of a violent rush of blood to the
head become poets, prophets, sibyls, like Marcus of
Syracuse, who composed beautiful verses during fits
of insanity, but was without any poetical gift in a
calm state of mind.” In another place he repeats
that it is not seldom observed that distinguished
poets, statesmen, and artists were melancholy and
insane, like Ajax, or misanthropical, like Bellerophon.

‘Plato in Phaedrus asserts that insanity is by no
means an evil, but one of the highest blessings, if it
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is a gift of the good spirits; the prophetesses of
Delphi and Dodona lent the Greeks numberless
weighty services in their delirium, while, when free
from excitement, they were of little or no account.
Another kind of insanity that contributes
not a little to the instruction of coming generations
is that fire enkindled by the muses in a pure and
child-like soul, which leads to the singing of heroic
deeds in beautiful poetry.
‘Democritus speaks still more plainly. He does
not believe that a free mind and sound reason are
suited to poetry. A-xcludit sanos Helicone poetas,

“To come down nearer to our own times, Pascal
declared that the highest degree of genius bordered
on insanity, and at the end of his life he himself
became a proof of the truth of what he had said.

‘Goethe was frequently accustomed to say that a
certain excitability of the brain is necessary toa
poet, and that he himself composed many things
while in a condition similar to somnambulism.”

Lombroso pursues his inquiry by comparing first
the physical peculiarities of men of genius and men
of undeniably unsound mind, and he finds a similar-
ity in the emaciation and pallor common to both
and often in convulsive twitchings of some part
of the body. Napoleon, he says, suffered unceas-
ingly from convulsions in his right shoulder and in
his lips. Peter the Great was also subject to in-
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voluntary facial contortions that sometimes de-
formed him in the most frightful manner. He does
not mention our Dr. Johnson, but he might have
done so, for poor Dr. Johnson, with his anything but
emaciated frame and anything but pallid face, was
afflicted with a sort of St. Vitus dance.

The sensitiveness of genius in many cases
amounts to disease. When Alfieri heard music tor
the first time he felt as if blinded. Urquizia fainted
at the smell of arose. Byron in his sixteenth year
went into convulsions on hearing of the marriage of
his beloved Mary Chaworth. Tears streamed down
Sterne’s face at the slightest provocation.

This morbid sensitiveness, together with the ab-
sence of self-control, seem to me to be the strongest
points against the perfect health or sanity of genius,
and alas! there is a melancholy array of brilliant
names that have either gone out utterly in idiocy or
insanity, or else have been temporarily quenched by
fits of insanity. I do not give them to you in any-
thing like the order of time or nationality, but just
as they occur tome. Tasso, Swift, Luther, Cardano,
Brougham, Cowper, Charles Lamb and his sister
Mary, Southey, Collins, Saint-Lambert, Rousseau,
Newton, August Comte, Schumann, Pascal, Schopen-
haur, Hugh Miller, Baudelaire, Lenau, Donizetti,
Techner, Hélderlin, Kant, Kleist, Letitia Landon,
Saxe, Guy Maupassant, James Otis, H. B. Stowe,
Christopher Smart, George Fox (founder of Quaker
sect), Edward Irving, Scott, Ruskin, Fergus O’Con-
nor (leader of the Chartist movement in the 40’s)
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Fourier (the French socialist), Gounod, Haydon,
Ampére, Nat Lee.

I could lengthen this list by a score of names
that would only be names to you, and I have not
included in it men of undoubtedly unsound mind,
like Shelley, who was known at school as ‘mad
Shelley,” Lord Byron, whose wife certainly thought
him so, and our own Edgar A. Poe. Neither have I
included those visionaries who have communicated
their own delusions through the power of contagion,
like Joan of Arc, Ignatius Loyola, Peter the Hermit,
Savonarola, Mahomet, Swedenborg, Saint Theresa,
and others of lesser fame. Neither shall I dwell on
the fact that where insanity has not shown itself in the
distinguished man, it has often been present in the
family; for example, Richelieu had a sister who
thought that her back was made of crystal. Zim-
merman’s brother was insane. The poet Dryden had
an imbecile son; Emerson had a half-witted brother
and an aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, whose eccentric-
ities bordered on insanity. Helmholtz had two in-
sane children. Victor Hugo had an idiotic daughter.
Dr. John Brown’s only grandchild was an imbecile.

These are ugly, melancholy facts that cannot be
ignored and that certainly mean something, and yet
I should lead you far astray were I to leave you to
infer that all men of genius are insane, or that all
insane people are geniuses. That is as far from
being the truth as it can possibly be. The scientist
who asserts genius to be a form of insanity means
that it is an abnormal condition of nervous excita-
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bility which touches disease rather than health.
Sanity means health; insanity, disease of the brain
and nervous system. But there are powerful, sound
geniuses like Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, who
stand for the very highest types of sanity. Their
extraordinary gifts are not developed at the expense
of the ordinary faculties we call common sense.
They are not all imagination like Shelley, all passion
like Byron, all rhythmical raving like Poe. They
can touch earth and soar in the ether too. They
have no limitations,

Perhaps I can best show you the way in which
genius, considered as an abnormal nervous condition,
differs from ordinary soundness of mind, by asking
you to recall the wild rose of the wayside. It has
five regular petals, you remember, surrounding a
fertile cluster of stamens and pistils. It is of a deli-
cate pink color, varying to white. Pluck a thousand
wild roses, you will find them all the same, and
you will find them all repeating their characteristics
in their successors. Now, come into a conservatory
with me and look at the roses here. What a be-
wildering variety ; what a profusion of petals ; what
delicacy, richness, perfume, grace, and beauty is here!
Where did they all come from? From the wild rose
of the wayside, the florist will tell you. They are
not exactly normal, then, not quite natural? No,
they are abnormal, the products of special condi-
tions. And is it all pure gain with them? Have
they lost nothing by this wonderful transformation ?
Yes, all this beauty and grace is purchased at the
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expense of fertility. The fruit-bearing organs have
been converted into these rich, velvety petals. The
whole vitality of the bush goes out into blossom and
fragrance. They live but to delight the senses of
others. Life has no other meaning for them. It is
we who must love and cherish them; they would
die without us; and in return they richly reward us
by being simply beautiful and lovable. Is my com-
parison so far-fetched that you cannot see its appli-
cation, and must I make it clearer by calling your
attention to the helplessness, the child-like depend-
ence upon others, the unfitness for the hard, practical
duties of life, that are so marked a peculiarity of our
wayward geniuses? Think of that wonderful boy,
poor Chatterton, who died by his own hand before
he had completed his eighteenth year. Think of
Robert Burns perishing no less by his own hand,
though in quite another way ; of Goldsmith, Steele,
Sheridan, of timid Cowper, so dependent upon women
and pet rabbits, and of poor Coleridge and De Quin-
cey, and scores of others. Ah me! It isthe saddest
history in the world, this history of geniuses. My
heart aches to think of it. And now I must return
to Bunyan. Can you understand him better in the
light of what I have said? He, too, was not quite
sound in mind in those early days of agony and
remorse when he heard voices, saw lights, and trem-
bled as if in an ague. Push all that nervous excite-
ment a little further and it will end in acute mania.
He worked it off by preaching and by writing the
Pilgrim’s Progress, which is as purely a work of
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genius as any that ever was written. That is the
double rose he gave us for not being able to stick to
tinkering and earning bread for that dearly-loved,
little blind daughter of his. The village of Bedford
lost a tinker, but the world gained another great
writer to delight and console her as long as the Eng-
lish language is read.

And now let us turn to the lesser writers of this
period, Butler, Izaak Walton, Thomas Hobbes, the
Earl of Clarendon, and Samuel Pepys. Butler was
the satirist and humorist, Clarendon the historian,
Hobbes the philosopher, Pepys the chronicler, and
Walton the man of leisure, who loved angling above
everything else and praises it in this quaintly humor-
ous way: ‘‘We may say of angling as Dr. Boteler
said of strawberries, ‘Doubtless God could have
made a better berry, but doubtless God: never did;’
and so if I might be judge, God never did make a
more calm, quiet, innocent recreation than angling.”

He writes of his subject in a strain of mild enthu-
siasm, quotes the poets he loves, and among them I
notice that George Herbert is his favorite. He quotes
from him that sweet little poem on virtue, which I
wished you to learn, “ Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so
bright.” He quotes Kit Marlowe’s Milkmaia’s Song,
‘‘Come live with me and be my love,” and Raleigh’s
reply to it, ‘If all the world and love were young.”
He drops a moral reflection now and then, and
mingles descriptions of fishes and baits with descrip-
tions of scenery, and can make a lark sing as sweetly
as Jeremy Taylor himself.
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 107

But these men were not men of genius. They
made no contribution to literature that it would be
much the poorer without, and it is hardly worth
while giving much time to them.

However, because I have been speaking of genius,
and trying to explain what it is like, I can’t resist
using Samuel Pepys as an admirable example of
what it is not. Indeed, I do not know of any other
man in any literature who has won for himself a like
honorable place on so slender natural endowments.
He has not the slightest spark of genius, fancy, or
imagination. He has neither talent nor taste, but he
knows that two and two make four; he knows that a
round object is not a square one, and that good
clothes go a long way in making the wearer of them
appear respectable to the vast majority of people,
and he can say so in fair English. That last idea
about clothes is one that he came very honestly by.
His father was a tailor, and, though Samuel himself
never crossed his legs on a tailor’s bench, there was an
unmistakable, ineradicable tailor’s crook-leggedness
in his soul. He loved to wear fine clothes as Walton
loved angling, and doubtless he would have said
that that is what God made man for. He never
gets beyond the dress of anything he sees, the lace
and tag ends, or the want of them. For example, he
takes a little run into the country from London one
holiday, and walks out to the downs to see a flock
of sheep and a shepherd. A little boy is reading the
Bible to the shepherd. It is a pretty, idyllic scene
that would have set a poet to rhyming for a month;
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it even brought to Pepys “ those thoughts of the old
age of the world for two or three days after,” but he
adds characteristically, ‘‘We took notice of his
woolen knit stockings of two colors mixed, and of his
shoes shod with iron, both at the toe and heels, and
with great nails in the soles of his feet, which was
mighty pretty;” and that is all we know of the shep-
herd, except that he got four shillings a week
(ninety-six cents) the year round for keeping the
sheep. I would fain get above those stockings and
iron-shod shoes to know what the shepherd himself
was like, but Pepys is more interested in what he
wears.

He notes all his own changes of suits with faith-
ful regularity. Here are some examples :

Feb. 2, 1659.—‘I this day left off my great
skirt suit and put on my white suit with silver lace
coat.”

May 24th.—‘ Up and made myself as fine as I
could with linen stockings on and wide canons that
I bought the other day at Hague.”

April 1st.—‘‘ Up and put on my best black cloth
suit and my velvet cloak, and with my wife in her
best laced suit,to church where we have not been
these nine or ten weeks. A young, simple fellow did
preach. Slept soundly all the sermon.”

This sleeping soundly through the sermon is a
very much more innocent way of behaving in church
than always distinguishes Mr. Samuel Pepys, for on
one occasion he writes in his diary :

Aug. 8, 1667.—‘'I walked toward Whitehall,
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 10g

but being wearied turned into St. Dunstan’s church,
where I heard an able sermon of the minister of the
place and stood by a pretty, modest maid, who I
did labour to take by the hand, but she would not,
and got further and further from me, and at last I
could perceive her to take pins out of her pocket to
prick me if I should touch her again, which seeing
I did forbear and was glad I did spy her design.
And then I fell to gaze upon another pretty maid in
a pew close to me,and she on me, and I did go
about to take her by the hand, which she suffered a
little and then withdrew, and the church broke up
and my amours ended also.”

Gazing on pretty maidens and taking them by
the hand is one of the amiable weaknesses of Mr.
Pepys, which causes Mrs. Pepys many a cry and fit
of ill-humor,all of which are recorded with the
same naivete in this faithful journal, kept for nine
years and only abandoned because his eyes failed
him.

Aug., 1668, he goes to Bartholomew fair ‘‘and
there saw several sights, the mare that tells money
and many things to admiration, and among others
came to me when she was bid go to him of the com-
pany that most loved a pretty wench in a corner.”

He puts down all his fits of ill-humor. “My
wife having dressed herself in a silly dress of a blue
petticoat uppermost and a white satin waistcoat and
white hood, though I think she did it because
her gown is gone to the tailor’s, did, together with
my being hungry, which always makes me peevish,
IIo TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

make me angry.” Or again, April 12, 1667: ‘‘Com-
ing home saw my door and hatch open, leftso by Luce
‘our Cook-maid, which so vexed me that I did give
her a kick in the entry and offer a blow at her, and
was seen doing so by Sir W. Pen’s foot-boy, which
did vex me to the heart, because I know he will be
telling the family of it.”

Pray note that last remark. It is not the fit of
ill-temper that vexes him, nor the kick and the blow
to the cook, but the being seen by a foot boy who
will tell of it. The tailor soul again—every thing
for show—nothing for truth’s sake.

You said Pepys was the only honest official of
his time. That is hardly so. The truth might be
stated in this way: he was one of the few who were
least dishonest. He was not at all above taking
bribes, if he could take them on the same condition
that he would kick the cook; that is, if nobody
would tell. He really records his refusal of a tempt-
ing bribe for the reason that it might be reported of
him. But he was in fact a diligent, punctual, and
in many respects a very faithful public servant. . In
the year of the great plague at London, 1665, he
was the only man in the Navy Pay Office who
stayed in London and did the work of other men in
addition to his own. He sums himself up admirably
in the following entry:

Nov. 1, 1664.—‘‘Lay very long in bed discours-
ing with Mr. Hill of most things of a man’s life and
how little merit do prevail in the world, but only
favour, and that for myself, chance without merit
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 11

brought me in, and that diligence only keeps me so
and will, being as I do among so many lazy people
that the diligent man becomes necessary, that they
cannot do without him.”

That is the whole secret of Pepys’s success in
life and of his literary fame. Hewas not lazy. Chance
threw in his way a lucrative public position and he
did its work well. He lived during the time of the
Commonwealth and the Restoration. He accom-
modated himself to his times. He did not attempt
to judge them ; he curiously noted all he saw and
heard with the eyes and ears of a typical dourgeois.
Thousands of men and women like Pepys are born
and die every day. The only difference is that they
don’t note what they eat, drink, wear, see, and hear,
and he did. :

The poor little fellow. —I wonder if he was
really little. I don’t know. I only fancy he was
little and light-haired, with ruddy, round, fat cheeks,
smooth as a girl’s. But very likely he wasn’t—
well the poor, little fellow makes this semi-pathetic,
semi-ludicrous entry on the 26th of March: ‘My
wife gone this afternoon to the burial of my she-
cousin Scott, a good woman, and it is asad con-
sideration how the Pepyses decay and nobody almost
that I know ina present way of increasing them.”

He needn’t have been so sad, for, as I said before,
Pepyses are born every day ; they don’t go by that
namie, to be sure, but then that is a minor consider-
ation. The Pepyses will live as long as human nature
itself, for the Pepys spirit is the average, well-doing,
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conventional, self-preservative, worldly spirit that
loves its comfort, its good time to-day, with a canny
eye to the future. How different is this from the
free, generous, self-destructive, unwordly, ideal spirit
of genius, whose mission on earth is to lift us out of
the din, the smoke, the hurry, the vulgarity of world-
liness.

Do you feel the immense difference between
Bunyan and Pepys? There was no tinker’s soul
in the body of Bunyan for all its coarse,
patched dress, and there was a mean, little, purblind,
gossiping, curious, surface-loving tailor’s soul in
Pepys, notwithstanding all his velvet cloaks and
laced suits. Bunyan was a jewel without a setting.
Pepys was a common, polished road-pebble set in a
showy, gilded metal. The one had genius, the
other not a spark of it.

I might amuse you with other instances of Pepys’s
weaknesses; his love of good eating, his charms for
curing burns, cramps, wounds, but I must forbear.
However, I can’t help quoting one of his comments
on Mr. Evelyn’s collection of relics. It is as good
as those of Mark Twain’s tormentor of European
guides. Pepys is shown some letters written by the
Earl of Leicester, Queen Elizabeth, and Mary, Queen
of Scots. ‘But Lord,” he says, ‘““how poorly me-
thinks they wrote in those days, and on what plain,
uncut paper.”

Here is an entry, too, decidedly suggestive of
something as modern as Tolstoi: ‘To church in
the morning and there saw a wedding in the church
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 113

which I have not seen many a day; and the young
people as merry, one with the other, and strange
to see what delight we married people have to see
these poor fools decoyed into our condition, every
man and woman gazing and smiling at them.”

Well, I think I have given you a sufficiently
clear idea of this famous diary. Its value to the
historian is really very great, as it is a faithful
photograph of the life of an intensely interesting
period of English history, but that is its sole value.
It has no literary value whatever.

I said that Pepys had no taste. In proof of that I
quote his comments on some of Shakespeare’s plays.

Sept. 9th.—To the King’s Theatre, where we
saw Midsummer Night's Dream, which I had never
seen before, nor shall ever see again, for it is the
most insipid, ridiculous play that I ever saw in my
life.”

“April 5, 1667.—To the King’s house and there
saw Taming of the Shrew, which hath some good
pieces in it, but generally is but a mean play.”

“Jan. 20, 1669.—To the Duke of York house
and saw Twelfth Night, as it is now revived, but I
think one of the weakest plays I ever saw on the
stage.”

Nov. 7th.—‘ At noon resolved with Sir W. Pen to
go to see Zhe Tempest, an old play of Shakespeare’s.
The house mighty full. . . . . . The play has no
great wit, yet good above ordinary plays.”

April 5th—‘‘To the King’s to see Macbeth, a
pretty good play, but admirably acted.” (As ifthe

8
114 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

acting might probably have given more merit to the
play than it deserved.)

Jan. 3, 1661.—‘To the theatre where was acted
Beggars Bush, it being very weak done, and here
the first time in my life that J ever saw women come
upon the stage.” I simply note this comment be-
cause of an interesting historical fact about the
appearance of women as actresses.

Pepys can see no humor in Hudibras that all the
world is laughing at, and he buys Hobbes’ Leviathan
because it ‘is now mightily called for.” A good
tailor-reason, isn’t it? It is the fashion.

A few more quotations from his diary and I have
done with it. He says of himself somewhere that
he is always ‘‘with child to see any strange thing.”
It is to this pert curiosity that we owe an interesting
glimpse into the condition of science in the seven-
teenth century. We find the doctors experimenting
on the effects of opium, and also of fresh blood in-
jected into the veins of animals. We find them
cutting nerves to get at the secret of muscular move-
ments, but we find them strangely ignorant of what
are commonplaces to us. In attending a meeting
of the learnec men of the day at Gresham College,
Pepys is much pleased with the discourse of “Sir G.
Ent about respiration, that it is not to this day known
or concluded on among physicians nor to be done
either, how the action is managed by nature or for
what use it is.”

Please note the confident ‘nor to be done either,”
and then recall the fact that there is not a physiol-
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 115

ogy class in a grammar school anywhere that could
not give him the wonderful explanation.

April 2, 1668, he makes this record: ‘With
Lord Burroughs to the Royal Society. Here to
my great content I did try the use of the Otacous-
tion, which was only a great glass bottle broke at
the bottom, putting the neck to my ear and there I
did plainly hear the dancing of the boats in the
Thames to Arundel gallery window, which without
it I could not in the least do, and I may believe be
improved to a great height which I am mighty glad
of.”

Well, I should think so! Wouldn’t you dearly
love to have Mr. Pepys’s ear at a telephone, now?
And that poor, little long-necked bottle ‘‘Otacous-
tion” is really the remote ancestor of the Edison
telephone. What an evolution!

Well, we must say good bye to Mr. Pepys. After
all, I rather like him; one learns to know him so well,
preserved in his diary like a fly in amber. I should
have enjoyed being at one of his theatre parties, pro-
vided, of course, I was faultlessly dressed, and my
nose wasn’t red. (‘‘May 3rd—Took a turn with my
old friend Mr. Pechell, whose red nose makes me
ashamed to be seen with him, otherwise a good-
natured man.”) But if I weren’t looking well, an
hour in prison with John Bunyan would be infinitely
preferable.

You had not yet received my last letter, with its
quotation from Ruskin, or I think I should hardly
be obliged to correct you to-day for the very inaccu-
116 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

racy against which I cautioned you. You use the
word accept, which means 40 receive, for except, which
means with the exception of. This is quite an unpar-
donable error. Then you ventured to coin a word,
vigorating for invigorating, and that wont do. And
yet again you used the word smart in an improper
sense. It does not mean znéellectual, it means super-
ficially clever, showy, impertinently witty. It is not
by any means a term of high commendation, though
it is very commonly and very improperly used as
as such.

You also used another colloquialism which I wish
you to exclude from your vocabulary, and that is that
hateful newspaper word enthuse. There is in reality
no such word. It is not recognized at all by our
older dictionaries, but I notice that the Century dic-
tionary admits it as a colloquialism, assumed to be
derived from enthusiasm, which it is not, of course.
Somebody thoughtlessly coined the word as you did
vigorating and dropped it into a newspaper, where it
was spread abroad and picked up by uneducated
people.

Get your vocabulary, not from the newspapers,
but from the English classics. Read only the very
best things until your ear learns to know and love
the words of good repute.

Pope, Addison, Steele are the subjects of your
lesson following Dryden. Instead of reading about
these authors it would be better to read them. Try
Pope’s Essay on Criticism, and his Epistle of Eloisa to
Abelard, and tell me who the latter are. Open Addi-
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 117

son’s Spectator anywhere and read some of the essays
You will find pure English there.

Tell me also who wrote the Beggar's Opera and
the Night Thoughts.

The lesson assigned here will be followed by a
study of Swift. If you have access to Thackeray’s
English Humorists, read what he says of Swift.
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LETTER XII.

OUR discontent with your first letter on Dryden,
your trying again five times until you had better
satisfied yourself, are such convincing proofs to me
of your growth in taste and of your strength of pur-
pose, that I must heartily congratulate you, and I
assure you that, if it were possible, I should show my
pleasure by dropping in to-night to give you some
appreciative patting on the head. If I were ever
tempted to build an altar to anything in this world,
it would be to pluck, to good old English pluck.
I say English pluck, because there is a pertinacity, a
“can’t know when they’re beaten” kind of grip on
a given undertaking which distinguishes English
pluck from that of any other nationality. You
showed it when you stuck to your task till it was
ended.

I wish, by the way, that we had a better subject
to illustrate that national characteristic than John
Dryden, who doesn’t illustrate it at all, unless it -be
in making a poet of himself, who, to use his own
language of Settle, “never was a poet of God’s
making.” Perhaps it is the consciousness of his
defects as a poet and as a man that made it so hard
for you to write about him.

Undoubtedly, there is something contemptible to
an honest, truth-loving mind in his vacillations of
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 1Ig

opinion to suit the fashions of the time. He was
Puritan, Protestant, Papist, according as Cromwell,
Charles II., or James II. ruled England, and if he did
not turn Protestant again on the accession of William
and Mary it was very likely because he felt the use-
lessness of another religious summerset, for he seems
to have lost nothing of his suppleness of conscience
with the loss of physical suppleness in growing fat
and gouty. We find him still able to write foul
dramas and adulatory dedications approaching
sycophancy, that would have sorely tried a less
chameleon-hued conscience than his own.

It would be very hard to prove just what Dryden
really did believe on any serious political or religious
subject, but I find two lines in his Essay on Satire
that are unquestionably the utterances of genuine
conviction,

“Reaching above our nature does no good,
We must fall back to our old flesh and blood.

Now, if ever a man fell more solidly back to
“old flesh and blood” than John Dryden, I don’t
know him. But it isn’t with these falls that we are
concerned. English literature owes John Dryden a
heavy debt, and that is what concerns us. That is
why I made him and not Locke or Newton, who in-
terested you more, the main subject of your lesson.

But before I consider that debt, let me add to
what you have said of Dryden’s life the fact that
the Lady Elizabeth Howard whom he married and
who made him so unhappy, was an unattractive,
ignorant termagant, who bore him three sons, Charles,
120 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

John, and Erasmus Henry, the latter of whom died
an imbecile in his forty-second year. Soon after her
husband’s death the Lady Elizabeth became insane
and for some years, until her own decease, was under
the care of a female attendant. She had probably
never been quite right-minded, so that, if experience
can justify severe satire, Dryden may be excused for
never having lost an opportunity to say bitter things
of the marriage state.

As to his personal traits, Dryden is said to have
been an easy, lovable, companionable man, tolerant
of frailties and prone to forgive injuries quickly;
an entertaining man, full of knowledge and com-
municating it freely without pedantry.

As to his place in English literature, he ranks,
and deservedly ranks, high; not as a dramatist, for
nobody ever reads his dramas now; not as a poet
of fiery, imaginative power, for he has nothing
of the poet in him except facility in rhyming, which
is the merely mechanical part of the poet’s gift;
but he ranks high as a writer of uncommonly good
sense, in uncommonly fine, compact English.

One reads him with the same kind of satisfaction
with which one handles a piece of stout, all-wool
English suiting. One feels that it will do exactly
what it was intended to do; it will stand all sorts of
rough usage. Or, if you can make more out of
this comparison, one reads him as one eats a fresh,
juicy slice of good roast beef, feeling it wholesome
and satisfying. Nor is the mustard pot wanting to
give zest to our enjoyment. You will understand
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 121

by this that there is nothing in Dryden that stirs the
passions nor answers the highest demands of the
intellect. No reader ever went to Dryden for
solace, for guidance, or for inspiration. He speaks
entirely to the calm, rational frame of mind. But
he speaks admirably to that.

Unfortunately, he chose the greater part of iis
original themes from the political and theological
situations of his day, and, being of a local and tem-
porary character they must of necessity excite but a
feeble interest now compared with that which they
awoke on their first publication. And this interest
will naturally grow feebler in proportion as the
reader is removed from that time. Dryden will not
be read more in the future, he will be even less read
than he isto-day. But he has been a potent force in
literature, and for that reason the student cannot
ignore him. His name is sown all over literature.
You will meet it twenty times where you will meet
that of Locke or Newton once. Pope modeled him-
self after him. His admirable English made better
English possible, and this is our debt to him.

“He is,” says Lowell, ‘a prose writer with a kind
of AZolian attachment;” and again, “As I read him,
I cannot help thinking of an ostrich to be classed
among flying things, and capable, what with leaps
and flaps together, of leaving the earth for a longer
or shorter space, but loving the open plain where
wing and foot help each other to something that is
both flight and run at once.”

That is an admirable image of Dryden’s work.
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But in one case it seems to me that Dryden
attained an unmistakable flight clear of the ground,
and that was in Alexander's Feast. Read it, if
you haven't done so already, and tell me if you do
not find yourself caught up and involuntarily singing
those musical refrains:

“None but the brave,

None but the brave, |
None but the brave deserve the fair.”

“Rich the treasures,
Sweet the pleasures.
Sweet is pleasure after pain.”
or,
“The mighty master smiled to see

That love was in the next degree,
’Twas but a kindred sound to move,
For pity melts the mind to love.”

Alexander's Feast is poetry, and that is more than
can be said of nearly all Dryden’s versifying. His
poems are not the result of an uncontrolable, inward
impulse, a need for expression as imperative as that
which sets a bird to building its nest. They are the
polished productions of a hand skilful in its trade
and working to order. ‘His thought,” to quote
Lowell again,‘ does not incorporate itself in metaphor,
as in purely poetic minds, but repeats and reinforces
itself.in simile.” I find an admirable illustration of
this statement in comparing the ways in which
Dryden, a man of the highest talent, and Shakes-
peare, a man of the highest genius, express the same
thought that certain fateful epochs occur in the
life of. man which, according as they are neglected or
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 123

used, make or mar his fortune. Shakespeare fuses
his thought into a complete and powerful image:

“There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which taken at the flood leads on to fortune.
Omitted, all the voyage of their lives
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.”

There is the thought pictured and framed in four
terse lines that are hanging somewhere in every-
body’s memory. Now listen to what Dryden says,
and tell me if you ever heard the lines quoted before :

“ Heaven has to all, allotted soon or late,
Some lucky revolution of their fate,
Whose motions if we watch and guide with skill,
(For human good depends on human will)
Our fortune rolls as from a smooth descent,
And from the first impression takes the bent;
But if unseized, she glides away like wind,
And leaves repenting folly far behind.”

Here are eight lines instead of four; here is a
selection of common-place similes to illustrate the
common-place figure of the wheel of fortune; and
here is oblivion close at our elbow, ready to blot out
the feeble impression they make. It is heat of the
mind, warmth of imagination, depth of feeling,
that Dryden lacks. He had plenty of learning,
shrewdness, judgment, worldly experience, and rhe-
torical skill, and he put them all into his works, and,
if they are not sufficient to keep him wholly alive
through the ages, they are at least quite able to keep
him in a state of suspended animation, which is very
far from being the rigidity and oblivion of death.
124 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

The prose he has left us in the Essay of Dramatic
Poesy, Observations on the Art of Painting, and the
introductions and dedications of his poetical transla-
tions, is entitled to unqualified admiration. One
reads his meaning through his well-chosen words as
clearly as one sees the bed of a brook that runs over
sand. This may seem like scant praise to you.
But I assure you that it is nothing of thesort. ‘‘The
greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world,”
says Ruskin, ‘‘is to see something and tell what it
saw in a plain way.” Dryden had a limited vision,
it is true, but what he did see, he saw clearly and
could tell of it in a plain way. He saw, for instance,
what our poor, little, purblind Pepys couldn’t see,
that Shakespeare ‘‘was the man who of all modern
and perhaps ancient poets had the largest and most
comprehensive soul ;”’ that he was “naturally learned ;
he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature ;
he looked inward and found her there!” There
was also some admirable seeing and saying in that
clever character-sketch of the Duke of Buckingham,
which you quoted from Absalom and Achitophel. By
the way, did you take note of that familiar couplet
in the same satire ?

“ Great wits are sure to madness near allied
And thin partitions do their bounds divide.”

I might have inserted it to some purpose in my
last letter.

If you feel any further curiosity on the subject of
the comic dramatists of the Restoration, Wycherly,
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 125

Congreve, Vanbrugh, Farquhar, I must refer you
again to our inexhaustible friend Macaulay. He
has written so entertainingly of them that it is really
worth your while making their acquaintance at
second hand. But I would have you go no further
than that.

Here are some familiar quotations from Congreve:

“ Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned
Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.”

“Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast,
To soften rocks or bend a knotted oak.”

“Tf there’s delight in love, ‘tis when I see
That heart which others bleed for, bleed for me.”

It was Otway who paid that pretty compliment
to woman,
“O woman, lovely woman! Nature made thee

To temper man: we had been brutes without you.
Angels are painted fair to look like you.”

Poor Otway! It is said that he choked to death
on a crust of bread which he was ravenously eating
when on the verge of starvation.

Apropos of the name of Locke, I wish to say
that of all the subjects you can study with the least
satisfaction to yourself or to anybody else, that of
metaphysics ranks the foremost. In the first place,
it has, until the present century, been a purely
speculative science (if that can properly be called
science which is founded upon no physical data
whatever), and yet a thorough understanding of
psychology involves a clear knowledge of every
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other science, and especially a thorough knowledge
of the brain and nervous system. Instead of com-
mencing at the bottom and building upward, meta-
physicians have commenced at the top. That kind
of building does very well for air-castles, but it is
fatal to the construction of real ones. Metaphysicians
have begun with the highest known type of mind,
have classified its faculties and speculated on them,
instead of beginning with the study of the develop-
ment of intelligence from its simplest conditions to
the most complex. They have considered man as a
being superior to the influences of environments,
instead of regarding him as subject to the same laws
that govern all created things. They have regarded
mind as a force capable of acting without an instru-
ment, instead of acknowledging it as a manifestation
of nervous energy dependent upon a complex nerv-
ous system. They have regarded many of man’s
ideas as his endowed prerogative, his gift from birth,
instead of as the result of accumulated experiences.
And, worst of all, not content with simply adhering
to their statements, they have made an idol of their
views by fancying them allied to religion.

Locke, one of the best and most pious of men,
was denounced by the more purely speculative theo-
logians and metaphysicians because he was in ad-
vance of his age and taught that our ideas are
derived from experience.

Your lesson following Swift will include the
early novelists and historians, Richardson, Fielding,
Sterne, Smollett, Gibbon, Hume, Robertson. But
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 127

of these men you need prepare a written lesson only
on Fielding, Sterne, Gibbon.

Thackeray’s English Humorists will give you a
pleasant sketch of Fielding and an unpleasant one
of Sterne, because he is an unpleasant subject.
128 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

LETTER XIII.

OU have just been making the acquaintance of
another famous English poet, Alexander Pope.
You evidently like him better than Dryden, though
no two poets were ever more alike in versification
and in general intellectual characteristics. Both
were poets of external circumstances; that is, both
found their inspiration from without, not within;
only Dryden found his inspiration in politics, Pope in
society. Neither of them made any valuable con-
tribution to the sum-total of human thought, but
both well knew how to give form to current ideas.
Few poets are more quoted than Pope, and yet if
you examine these popular quotations you will find
that they are not the expression of wide and varied
experiences, nor of profound insight into the human
heart, like the popular quotations from Shakespeare.
They are not the revelations of a seer. (Note the
primitive meaning of that word, one who sees.) They
are simply the neat embodiment of ‘‘what oft was
thought but ne’er so well expressed.”
Here are some well-known lines from the Zssay
on Criticism:
“To err is human; to forgive divine.

“A little learning is a dangerous thing,
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring;
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.”
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 129

“Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”

“ At every trifle scorn to take offense;
That always shows great pride or little sense.”

“True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learned to dance.”
“ Be silent always when you doubt your sense,
And speak though sure with seeming diffidence.”

The following are from the Essay on Man:

“ Heaven from all creatures hides the book of fate.”

“Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Man never is, but always to be blest.”

“The proper study of mankind is man.”

“Vice isa monster of so frightful mien

As to be hated needs but to be seen,

Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.”

“Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw.”

“Honor and shame from no condition rise;
Act well your part; there all the honor lies.”

‘Order is heaven's first law.”

“Worth makes the man, and want of it the fellow;
The rest is all but leather and prunella.”

“A wit’s a feather anda chief a rod,
An honest man’s the noblest work of God.”

The Epistle to Lord Bathurst opens with the often
quoted question, ‘‘ Who shall decide when doctors
disagree?”

You see by these quotations that Pope knows
how to polish pebbles for a literary museum. He.
brings out the color and veining, but he is not a:
worker with real jewels. Yet it requires skill to do
what he does; not only skill in polishing and mak-

9
130 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

ing worthy of notice what we had else carelessly
passed over, but skill in selection, for it is not every
pebble that has color and veining to be brought out
by polishing. No poet ever possessed that skill in
a greater degree than Pope, but it is a skill that falls
far short of genius. .

Pope was regarded as a classic of the highest
rank in the eighteenth century, but the nineteenth
century refuses to accord him that homage. It has
defined a classic in better terms than the eighteenth
century did. Sainte Beuve, perhaps the most emin-
ent critic of our age, says in answer to the question,
what is a classic, ‘‘A true classic, as I like to hear the
word defined, is an author who has enriched the hu-
man mind, who has really increased its treasures, who
has led itto take a step in advance, who has discovered
some unequivocal moral truth, or seized anew some
eternal passion of the human heart in which everything
seemed known and explored; who has given to his
thought, his observation, or his invention, no matter
what form so that it be broad and grand, fine and
sensible, sound and beautiful in itself; who has
spoken to all in a style of his own which, neverthe-
less, is every body’s; in a style new without neolo-
gism, new yet old, easily contemporaneous in all
ages.”

Pope very nearly fulfils this last requirement. He
has spoken in a style which will be easily contem-
poraneous in all ages. But it isn’t all his own. It
was Dryden, before him, who collected that simple
yet strong and serviceable vocabulary and who used
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 131

that nicely-balanced couplet in which the ‘sound is
echo to the sense.” But let us try him by the other
tests Sainte Beuve furnishes. Has he enriched the
human mind, really increased its treasures? No; he
has only polished and made more portable the
treasures it already possessed. Has he led it to take
a step in advance? No; he has not the gift of
enkindling the mind with generous ardor, of tempt-
ing it forward by showing it some lofty ideal.
Ordinary life, with its ordinary comforts and _ its
worldly aims,was quite sufficient for Pope; and being
satisfied with it himself, he can show nothing better
to his readers. Has he discovered some unequivocal
moral truth? No; his Assay on Man contains no
profound views of life, nor even clear ones. De-
Quincey, the greatest of English critics, says,

“If the question were asked what ought to have
been the best among Pope’s poems, most people
would answer, Zhe Essay on Man. If the ques-
tion were asked, what is the worst, all people of
judgment would say, The Essay on Man. . ;
It is indeed the realization of anarchy, and one
amusing test of this may be found in the fact that
different commentators have deduced from it the very
opposite doctrines.”

Has he seized anew some strong passion of the
human heart? No. You have enjoyed his Efzstle
of Eloisa to Abelard. \t is enjoyable and has been
very justly admired and praised. But let me trans-
late you the greater part of the real Epistles which
Pope paraphrased in rhyme, and then tell me if his
132 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

poem is not to the real letter as moonlight to sunlight,
as water to wine. The original letters were written
in Latin, but I make this translation from the French
version of the letters quoted in A. De Lamartine’s
brief biography of Heloise et Abelard. The letter is
introduced by the following words :

“To her lord or rather her father, his slave or
rather his daughter, his spouse or rather his sister—
Heloise to Abelard.”

“Some one has lately brought me by chance the
history which you have just confided to a friend.
As soon as I recognized, by the first words of the
address, that it came from you, I commenced to read
it with so much the more precipitation since I adore
more him who wrote it. Him whom I have lost I
thought to find again, as if his image had been able
to reproduce and incarnate itself in the character of
his hand. They are very sad and very bitter, O my
only treasure, the lines of this recital which retrace
our conversion and our inexhaustible misfortunes.”

‘‘T doubt if anybody can read it or hear the story
without bursting into tears.

“In the name of Christ, who seems to protect us,
we who are his humble slaves, as we are yours, we
implore you to inform us by frequent letters of the
shipwrecks in the midst of which you are still
tossed, that we who alone remain to you may be
able to share your sorrows or your consolations.
Ordinarily, to console an afflicted one is to be
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 133

afflicted with him; these letters will be the sweeter
to us, since they will be witness that you think of us.

“Oh! how delicious it is to receive letters from
absent friends. If the portraits of friends separated
by distance revive their memory and beguile regret
by a vain and delusive consolation, how much more
those letters which are their very selves, which bear
the genuine imprints of the absent friend! Thanks
be to God that hate cannot prevent us from being
with one another at least in this way.

“ Think, without speaking of others, of the immense
debt which you have also contracted toward me.
Perhaps then, what you owe toall these holy women
you will acquit more easily to a single one, to a
single one who lives only for you!

“And why, when my soul is overwhelmed with so
much anguish, why have you not at least tried to
console me, absent by your letters, present by your
words? That was a duty you owed so much the
more to me in that we are united by the sacrament
of marriage, and you are the more guilty in this re-
spect, because, as all the world can testify, I have
always loved you with an immense and imperishable
love!

“You know, O my only love, you know how much
I have lost in losing you. The greater my sorrow,
the more pious a duty ought to be the consolation.
134 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

It is not from any other, it is from you alone, that I
expect it. It is your duty to give it, for youare the
only one who can make me sad, the only one who
can gladden and console me. Have I not blindly
obeyed all your wishes? Have I not lost myself to
obey you? I have done more, incredible sacrifice!
My love has exalted itself even to madness and sui-
cide. It is by your order that in clothing myself in
this garb I have changed my heart at your bidding,
to show you that you are the absolute possessor of
it! : ‘ : <

‘Never, God is my witness, never did I wish any
other thing of you than yourself. Though the name
of your wife was the greatest, the holiest of titles,
any other would have satisfied my heart; for the
more I had humiliated myself, the more I should
have merited from you a more tender return and the
less I should have shackled your genius or harmed

your glory.

“T call God to witness that if the master of the
universe had judged me worthy of his hand and had
offered with his name the empire of the world, the
name of your slave would have seemed more glorious
to me than that of Empress! What kings could com-
pare with you? What country, what city, what vil-
lage was not eager to look at you? What woman,
what virgin has not desired your glance to fall on
her? What queen has not envied my happiness?

“ Have you not two gifts which irresistibly fascinate
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 135

the hearts of all women, eloquenceand song? It is by
these gifts that in the hours of your recreations from.
philosophy you composed those love-songs which,
everywhere repeated because of the charm of poetry
and music, have put your name and mine in every
mouth. Thus my name has re-echoed in many
countries, and the envy of many women has been
kindled against me because of you, and, in truth,
what perfections of mind and body did not ornament
your youth?

“‘T have done you harm, and yet, you know it, I
was innocent. Only tell me why, since I have
made myself captive in the cloister by your wish,
you have punished me by neglecting me, by forget-
ting me, and by depriving me of your presence and
even of your letters

“Tell me, if you dare. Ah! I know it! I and the
world suspect it. It is because your love was not
so pure, so disinterested as mine. As soon as you
ceased to desire a profane joy you ceased to love
me.

‘Oh, do what I ask, I implore you; it is so little
and so easy for you. Speak to me at least from
afar by those words which give me an illusion of
your presence. I believed that I deserved all from
you when so young, and to please you I embraced
the austerity of the cloister. What recompense
have I expected from God, for whose sake I have less
136 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

done what I did than for love of you. When you
walked towards God I followed

As if you remembered Lot’s wife, who iookea be-
hind her, you believed it your duty to bind me by
habit and monastic vows, when you yourself quit-
ted the world! Ah, how ae ae understood me.

“T have eecanea eos I have edacie at it,
To chase me from the world, me, me,
who to obey you would not have hesitated then
even to follow you down into hell! For my heart
was not with me, it was with you. . . . Then
make it happy with you, I beg you, and it will be
happy with you, if you grant its prayer, if you ren-
der it love for love.

“Formerly, the purity of the motives which at-
tached me to you might have been doubted, but
does not the end show what was the nature of my
love from the beginning? I have severed myself
from all worldly felicity. Of all terrestrial joys
I have reserved for myself but one, the right to
regard myself forever yours. Ah! by that God to
whom you have consecrated yourself, I implore you
to give me as much of your presence as is permis-
sible, that is to say, in writing me some letters of
consolation so that, strengthened: by this reading, I
can lift myself with more ardor to the service of
God! When, in the past, you aspired to profane
delights, you visited me by frequent epistles which
taught the name of Heloise to all lips; all places,
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 137

all houses, resounded with this name. And what!
to lift me to God, can you not do what you formerly
did to solicit me to earthly love? Ah! think of it!

I close this long epistle by this single sen-
tence, my only one, my all, adieu!”

This letter was written after fifteen years of un-
broken silence and separation: between Heloise and
Abelard. Would you like to know how the man
answered that passionate appeal ? for he did answer
it. He writes coldly, calls her his sister in Christ,
and exhorts her to offer with her companions ‘‘a
holocaust of invocation to expiate our grave and in-
numerable faults, and to protect me from the perils
which encompass me every hour of the day.”

“ Abelard’s letters,” says Lamartine, ‘are dry of
tears, cold-hearted, hard-worded often. One feels
the man full of himself in them. Heloise is full
only of him.”

Strange example of Time’s revenges, isn’t it? This
learned, ambitious scholar of the twelfth century,
who sacrificed his love, and the woman who loved
him, to his devouring ambition for fame, lives now
only by the memory of that wronged, suffering
woman’s love. The scholar, the poet, the orator,
the priest, has been dust for centuries; the lover only
is immortal. It.is she who made him famous and
for whose sake fresh flowers are laid every day on
their tomb in Pére la Chaise.

I add only one other appeal from Heloise to
show you how far short Pope falls of her energy and
fire. This letter is in reply to one in which Abelard
138 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

expresses a wish to be buried in the convent where
she is.

‘To my only one after Jesus Christ; to my only
one in Jesus Christ.

‘Ah, it is to you that belongs the rite of celebrat-
ing our obsequies; to you to send to God those whom
you have gathered in his presence. No, God will
never permit us to survive you. But if you die be-
fore us we shall think rather of following you than
of burying you since, destined so soon ourselves to
the tomb, we shall not have the strength to prepare
yours. If I lose you, what is left me to hope for?
How shall I remain in this pilgrimage of life where
I am only retained by the thought that you are still
here. O, most wretched of all wretches! Educated
by you above all women, have I obtained this glory,
then only to be precipitated from greater felicity into
greater misery? We lived chastely, you at Paris, I.
at Argenteuil. We were separated in order to con-
secrate ourselves more holily, you at your studies, I
at prayer among sainted women. It was during this
life, so pure, that crime struck you. Ah, why did it
not strike us both! We were two in error, you were
one in the expiation, and the less guilty has borne
the punishment. What you have suffered one
moment in your punishment it is just that I should
suffer all my life.

‘If I must confess the weakness of my miserable
soul to you, I find no repentance in it. My happiness
was so sweet that I can neither have a horror of it,
nor tear it from my memory. In my sleep, even in
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 139

the midst of ceremonies in which prayer ought to be
the purest, the places, the times, the joys of our
happy years return to me. They call me holy, those
who do not know me groaning; they praise me be-
fore men, but I do not deserve those praises before
God, who fathoms the heart. . . . . In all the
circumstances of my life, you know it, I am more
afraid to offend you than to offend God himself. O,
do not have too high an opinion of me and do not
cease to help me with your prayers.”

How the woman speaks, how Love speaks
in those burning words! That is the ‘seizing anew
of some eternal passion of the human heart,” of
which Sainte Beuve speaks and of which Pope
knows nothing whatever. We cannot, therefore, in
the highest sense of the word, call Pope a classic.
But, as I said of Dryden, he has been a great force
in English literature, and he has his unassailable
place in it and cannot be ignored. There is another
thing I should like to say in his favor which I have
never seen noted anywhere, and that is that, with all
the sufferings, mental and physical, entailed upon
him by that poor, little, frail, crooked body, there is
not a cry of pain nor a headache of his that ever got
into his poetry. There is not a trace in him of that
sickly subjectivity and sentimentality so noticeably
tainting our literature since Byron’s time. Pope
the invalid and Pope the poet are two entirely
different persons, and in this case we are the gainers
by a divorce between mind and body.

Addison is our next subject. I have just been
140 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

turning over an old yellow-leafed copy of the
Spectator in five volumes, and wondering in my
new enjoyment of an old favorite why nobody
reads the Spectator now. It certainly deserves to be
read. I say that to begin with, and I say it with
emphasis. There may be a flavor of antiquity in
that world of foppish gallantry among men, of
patches and real and affected ignorance among
women, but there is nothing antiquated in Addison’s
good sense, sly humor, cultivated taste, fine senti-
ment, and admirably lucid and pleasing style.
Addison’s readers are in good company, be sure of
that. He is the one moralist who knows how to
preach without being a bore. He is not tedious;
one of his essays rarely covers more than three or
four ordinary pages, and often less. His seriousness
is never solemnity, never heavy and oppressive; it
is simply good sense, made palatable by a pleasant
delivery. He gently stimulates without tiring the
mind, and he is an unfailing reservoir of good humor.
He smiles away faults, vanities, caprices, and vul-
garities, and does more good by one of his smiles
than Swift by a volume of brutalities.

It is a great pity that we have not a thoroughly
authentic portrayal of Addison the man. In his
Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, Pope draws a famous pen
picture of him over the name of Atticus, in which
occur those famous lines:

“Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,

And without sneering teach the rest to sneer.”

The picture is said to be true enough to make it
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 141

a recognizable likeness and not a malevolent cari-
cature. The truth is, I suppose, that Addison, like
the best of men, had his failings, and that whatever
he was, he certainly was not the sanctimonious prig
his sentimental admirers described him, but some-
thing quite different, more human, even at the risk
of being more faulty, and therefore more amiable;
and I for one am not at all sorry to give up that
story of his dying observation to his step-son, ‘‘See
how a Christian can die,” for give it up I feel I must.
But, lest I should be drawing too definite a conclusion
from insufficient data, I will give you my authority
for that opinion in a quotation from De Quincey, and
you can interpret it as you like:

‘Lord Byron has said of Addison that he ‘died
drunk.’ This seems to Mr. Gilfillan a ‘horrible
statement,’ for which he supposes that no authority
can exist but a ‘rumor circulated by an inveterate
gossip,’ meaning Horace Walpole. But gossips
usually go upon some foundations, broad or narrow.
‘ Me, this story aroused to laugh ex-
ceedingly ; not at Addison, whose fine genius extorts
pity and tenderness toward his infirmities; but at
the characteristic misanthropy of Lord Byron, who
chuckled as he would do over a glass of nectar, on
this opportunity for confronting the old solemn
legend about Addison’s sending for his step-son, Lord
Warwick, to witness the peaceful death of a Chris-
tian, with so rich a story as this that the said
Christian ‘died drunk.’ Supposing that he did,
the mere physical fact of inebriation, in a stage of
142 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

debility, where so small an excess of stimulating
liquor (though given medicinally) sometimes causes
such an appearance, would not infer the moral blame
of drunkenness; and if such a thing were ever said
by any person, present at the bedside, I should feel
next to certain that it was said in that spirit of exag-
geration to which most men are tempted by circum-
stances unusually fitted to impress a startling pict-
uresqueness upon the statement. But without insist-
ing upon Lord Byron’s way of putting the case, I
believe it is generally understood that latterly Addi-
son gave way to habits of intemperance. He suf-
fered not only from his wife’s dissatisfied temper,
but also (and probably much more) from ennui. He
did not walk one mile a day and he ought to have
walked ten. Dyspepsia was, no doubt, the true
ground of his unhappiness, and he had nothing to
hope for. To remedy these evils, I have always
understood that every day (and especially toward
night) he drank too much of that French liquor
which, calling itself ‘water of life,’ nine times in
ten proves water of death. He lived latterly at
Kensington, namely, in Holland House, the well-
known residence of the late Lord Holland, and the
tradition attached to the gallery in that house is
that, daily as the sun drew near to setting, on two
tables, one at each end of the long ambulatory, the
right honorable Joseph placed, or caused to be placed,
two tumblers of brandy somewhat diluted with water,
and those the said vessels, then and there, did alter-
nately to the lips of him, the aforesaid Joseph,
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 143

diligently apply, walking to and fro during the pro-
cess of exhaustion and dividing his attention between
the two poles, Arctic and Antarctic, of his evening
diaules, with the impartiality to be expected from a
member of the Privy Council. How often the two
‘blessed bears,’ northern and southern, were replen-
ished, entered into no affidavit that ever reached me.
But so much I have always understood, that in the
gallery of Holland House the Ex-Secretary of
State caught a decided hiccup which never after-
ward subsided.

“In all this there would have been very little to
shock the people had it not been for the sycophancy
which ascribed to Addison a religious reputation
such as he neither merited or wished to claim. But
one penal reaction of mendacious adulation for him
who is weak enough to accept it must ever be to
impose restraints upon his own conduct which other-
wise he would be free to decline.

“But such knaves as he who had complimented
Addison with the praise of having written ‘no line
which, dying, he could wish to blot,’ whereas, in fact,
Addison started in life by publishing a translation of
Petronius Arbiter, had painfully coerced his free
agency. This knave, I very much fear, was Tickell
the first, and the result of his knavery was to win
for Addisona disagreeable sanctimonious reputation
that was first founded on lies; second, that painfully
limited Addison’s free agency; and, thirdly, that
prepared insults to his memory, since it pointed a
144 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

censorious eye upon those things viewed as the acts
of a demure pretender to piety which would else
have passed without notice as the most venial of
frailties in a layman.”

I have left myself little space in which to speak of
Steele. Though his essays lack the range and
thoughtfulness of Addison’s, they are not inferior in
humor nor in ease and grace of manner. Poor Steele
was one of those unfortunate men who seem to be
made to be loved and forgiven. With all those
amiable qualities of the heart, generosity, tender-
ness, quick sympathy, he lacked their ballast,
good judgment and prudence. You will meet a like
character again in Fielding, Sheridan, Goldsmith,
and Robert Burns, individualized, to be sure, by orig-
inality of genius, but fundamentally the same.

Steele was the author of the finest compliment
ever paid to a woman when he said of one whom
he admired, ‘To love her is a liberal education.”

The chief subject of your work following the
early novelists (among whom I should have men-
tioned De Foe) and the historians, will be Samuel
Johnson.

In addition, please, name Sheridan’s dramas
and tell me who Burke and Reynolds were. Who
is most generally supposed to be the author of The
Letters of Junius ?
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 145

LETTER XIV.

OU kave given me a scantier account of Swift
than I expected from so interesting a subject,
and I’ve been wondering if the character of Swift is
not as incomprehensible to your fresh, young, healthy
mind as the idea of death was to the little child in
Wordsworth’s We are Seven. If so, it may be use-
less for me to try to make you read a little plainer
that strange human hieroglyph that the wisest of us
read but hesitatingly. However, I should like to
try.

‘The most unhappy man on earth!” so King, the
Archbishop of Dublin, called him. Let us stop just
there and inquire what reason he had to be so
unhappy. Bornto poverty ? Yes, but hundreds of
men have been born to poverty and would not for
much, like brave Jean Paul, have been born to any
other estate. The man who is to be a great force in
any literature, who is tostir the human heart as it
has not been stirred before, must know life from the
bottom and not the top. It is the diver that knows
the varied, wonderful underworld of the sea, and not
the man of pleasure sailing its surface in a yacht.
Physical deformity? No. He had a fine phy-
sique, a good head and face, black-haired, blue-eyed.
Physical suffering ? No, not in youth and middle
life, though he was subject to attacks of vertigo at

10
146 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

intervals. But think of poor little Pope, of the
German poet Heine sending forth peals of laughter
from his “mattress grave,” of Silvio Pellico in the
stifling heat of his Venetian prison, wrapping up his
head and hands to protect himself from the stings
of innumerable insects, or in the cold and gloom
and filth of his Austrian cell, yet finding heaven in
himself in spite of physical wretchedness. Do you
know Silvio Pellico? If ever you feel the need of
an inspiring example of the magnificent triumph of
mind over matter, read his touching autobiography,
My Prisons (Le Mie Prigiont).

In thinking of Swift and Pellico, two men so
widely different that I may almost be blamed for
having them in mind together, I find the clue to
Swift’s wretchedness. Pellico had heaven in him-
self, Swift carried his own hell about with him in
the form of an ungovernable, insatiable, tremendous
pride, a brutal pride that trampled upon the tenderest
of human feelings. He had an only sister who mar-
ried a currier of Dublin, and though he was rich,
respectable, and a well-educated man, moving in the
best society of his city, Swift regarded her marriage
with a tradesman as a mesalliance and was so en-
raged that he refused to see or to hear from her
again. I have no doubt that it was the same cruel
and contemptible pride that prevented him from
acknowledging his secret marriage to Stella, the
only being for whom he felt any real and lasting
tenderness. It is usual to hint at all sorts of mys-
terious motives for this singular reticence, but when
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 147

profound human mysteries are fathomed, as some-
times they are, they are discovered to turn on very
simple primitive passions of the human heart. Pride
was Dean Swift’s ruling passion. It was the drop of
gall that embittered every cup he pressed to his
lips. He was the last man in the world to have
wished for pity. He would have scorned it as
implying some weakness and inferiority in himself,
some strength and superior exemption in the giver.
Yet was there ever a more pitiable creature than he ?
Think of him, with that insane pride of his, in the
vigor of his powers and conscious of their value, but
obliged to make them serve him for food and clothes
and shelter! Think of him in the humble capacity
of secretary to Sir William Temple, a sort of upper
servant where, by force of intellect, he was master !
Think of him there with his paltry salary of twenty
pounds a year (not quite $100) and his seat at the
servant’s table, for his position was too obscure to
warrant him a place at Sir William’s table. How he
must have secretly raged, chained young lion that
he was! How solitary in the midst of all the going
and coming in that great house! We have no record
of these secret rages, of this terrible enmuz, in set
words; but we have a fierce record of them in the
hatred and contempt he felt for all mankind and
uttered in his works.

“When you think of the world, give it one more
lash at my request,” he said to Pope, but he had no
need of assistance in lashing it. He is, himself,
a merciless and ceaseless lasher of mankind. The
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wounds he makes are deep and refuse to heal.
There is no subject too sacred, no sentiment too
tender, for his brutal sarcasm. He despised women,
and he outrages decency in ribald poems expressive
of his contempt for them, and yet, strange contra-
diction, there is hardly in literature a more play-
ful, affectionate, and cleaner record of human tender-
ness than this same merciless misanthrope’s Journal
to Stella. There is nothing wonderful nor brilliant
in it. It is simply a cozy little fire-side chat, full of
nonsense and merriment, bubbling over from a man
who has his arm round the woman he loves. He
calls her his Pet, his MD, his “poor little MD,”
his ‘‘poor dear, dear, dear, dearest MD,” as if one
little word of four letters could not half contain all
the tenderness he feels, and must be repeated again
and again to do duty for the better one he does not
know.

By the way, will it be any comfort to you to
know that Stella was a bad speller, and that Swift
used to scold her playfully and make out lists of her
misspelled words as I do for a certain young miss I
know?

On one occasion he writes, ‘Here is a full and
true account of Stella’s new spelling.” Then fol-
lows a long list of misspelled words, among which I
notice business spelled with two s’s in the first syl-
lable. Then he adds:

“Tell me truly, sirrah, how many of these are
mistakes of the pen, and how many are you to
answer for as real ill-spelling? There are but four-
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 149

teen, I said twenty by guess. You must not be
angry, for I will have you spell right let the world
go how it will. Though, after all, there is but a mis-
take of one letter in any of these words. I allow
you henceforth but six false spellings in every letter
you send me.”

The tenderness and humanity revealed in this
journal tempt me to dwell on it longer, but it is not
literature; and it is not Swift any more than the
dancing light of a moonbeam on turbulent waters is
part of the water it brightens. Stella was Swift’s
moon-light, and her death left him dark. What
darkness it became in a few short years you
know. He had once taken an oath that he would
never wear spectacles, and, when his eyesight
failed him, he refused to break his oath and so lost
the distraction and consolation which books might
have given him. Then his memory failed; the
attacks of vertigo became more and more frequent
and ended in violent madness. About three years
before his death a fearful tumor came upon his eye
and his guardians were obliged to tie his hands to
prevent him from tearing it out. He gradually
sunk into total imbecility and died within a few weeks
of completing his 79th year, and was buried in St.
Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin.

I began by calling your attention to Swift’s un-
happiness, and I said that its cause was in the man
himself, not out of him. I mentioned pride as his
ruling passion, and perhaps have led you to infer
that that was the sole cause of his unhappiness. It
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has much indeed to do with it. It created false posi-
tions, new chains for him to whom liberty was as
necessary as the air he breathed. For example, it
made a dean of him, and in his heart of hearts he
was the freest thinker in England and did not hesitate
to reveal his contempt and hatred of religion in the
terrible satire of Zhe Tale of a Tub. But it was not
pride alone that made him the “most unhappy man
on earth.” He has the keenest eye for detecting
shams, weaknesses, illusions, that probably ever
served a manof genius. He saw nothing from the
outside, no matter how fair and attractive. His vision
pierced the fairest exterior and rested only on what
was ugly and repulsive within. That he called the
true object; the rest was only the husk which he
scorned. He would not have for himself what he
termed the ‘sublime and refined felicity, called the
possession of being well deceived, the serene, peace-
ful state of being a fool among knaves.’”’ Others
might ‘cream off nature,” he preferred to “lap up
the sour dregs of reason and philosophy.” In other
words, he killed the poet in himself, that is, the
delight in beauty and the exercise of the imaginative
faculty, and in doing so he destroyed for himself the
source of human happiness.

We are not made happy nor better by looking
for nor dwelling upon what is ugly and vile in nature
and ourselves. Our happiness lies either in striving
to adorn the one and purify the other, or in res-
olutely ignoring their existence in so far as is com-
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 151

patible with a discharge of duty in our humble
spheres.

There is a bitterly sarcastic chapter on critics in
The Tale of a Tub, and they are held up to ridicule
and contempt because they do not read books to
discover beauties and to improve their taste, but to
single out errors and defects, and are like ‘a dog at
a feast whose thoughts and stomach are wholly set
upon what the guests fling away, and consequently
is apt to snarl most when there are fewest bones.”’ I
wonder if it ever occurred to Swift that he uniformly
treated life and poor human nature in the same way.
That, like his mercilessly satirized critic, he, too, was
guilty of ‘singling out the errors and defects, the
nauseous, the fulsome, the dull, and the impertinent
with the caution of a man that walks through Edin-
burgh streets in a morning, who is indeed as careful
as he can to walk diligently and spy out all the filth
in his way.”

Poor Swift, no wonder he was unhappy! But he
was a great genius, a lover of liberty, an enemy to
cant and hypocrisy, a strong, original, and fearless
thinker. You read Gulliver's Travels when a child
for the sake of thestory. Ina few years from now
read it again as a woman, to understand its powerful
satire on humanity.

Let me quote for you some of Swift’s acute
observations from his Thoughts on Various Subjects:

“We have just enough religion to make us hate
but not enough to make us love one another.
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“The chameleon that is said to feed on nothing
but air has of all animals the nimblest tongue.

“If aman would register all his opinions upon
love, politics, religion, learning, etc., beginning from
his youth and so go on to old age, what a bundle
of inconsistencies and contradictions would appear at
last.,

“What they do in heaven we are ignorant of;
what they do not,. we are told expressly. They
neither marry nor are given in marriage.

“The reason why so few marriages are happy is
because young ladies spend their time in making
nets, not in making cages.

“Ifa man will observe as he walks the streets I
believe he will find the merriest countenances in
funeral coaches.

“Censure is the tax a man pays to the public for
being eminent.

“No wise man ever wished to be younger.

“Complaint is the largest tribute heaven receives
and the sincerest part of our devotion.

“ The common fluency of speech in many menand
most women is owing to a scarcity of matter, and a
scarcity of words, for whoever is a master of lan-
guageand has a mind full of ideas will be apt in speak-
ing to hesitate upon the choice of both, whereas com-
mon speakers have only one set of ideas andone set
of words toclothe them in, and theseare always ready
at the mouth; so people come faster out of a church
when it is almost empty than when a crowd is at the
door.
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 153

“Love of flattery in most men proceeds from the
mean opinion they have of themselves; in women
from the contrary.

‘A very little wit is valued in a woman, as we
are pleased with a few words spoken plain by a
parrot.

‘A nice man is a man of nasty ideas.

‘Very few men, properly speaking, live at present,
but are providing to live another time.

“Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.

“IT must complain the cards are ill shuffled till I
have a good hand.

Here is a very sensible injunction from a Letter to
@ Young Lady on Her Marriage: ‘“Y would have you
look upon finery as a necessary folly, which all great
ladies did whom IJ have ever known; I do not desire
you to be out of the fashion, but to be last and least
in it. JI expect that your dress shall be one degree
lower than your fortune can afford, and in your own
heart I would wish you to be an utter contemner of
all distinctions which a finer petticoat can give you,
because it will neither make you richer, handsomer,
younger, better natured, more virtuous or wise than
if it hung upon a peg.” By the way, that whole
letter, severe as it is upon us women, contains so
many good things that I must counsel you to read it
carefully.

The Treatise on Good Manners opens with the
following sentences :

‘‘Good manners is the art of making those peo-
ple easy with whom we converse.
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‘“Whoever makes the fewest persons uneasy is
the best bred in the company.”

I must quote you a few sentences from his
Directions to Servants, as an example of the inimita-
ble gravity of his satire:

“When you are chidden for a fault, as you go
out of the room and down-stairs, mutter loud enough
to be plainly heard ; this will make him believe you
are innocent.

‘‘If any one desires a glass of bottled ale, first
shake the bottle, to see if anything be in it; then
taste it to see what liquor it is, that you may
not be mistaken; and lastly wipe the mouth of the
bottle with the palm of your hand to show your
cleanliness.

‘‘When you clean your plate, leave the whiting
plainly to be seen in all the chinks, for fear your
lady should not believe you had cleaned it.

“That the salt may lie smooth in the salt cellar,
press it down with your moist palm.

“Tf you have a silver sauce-pan for the kitchen
use, let me advise you to batter it all, and keep it
always black ; this will be for your master’s honor,
for it shows there has been constant good housekeep-
ing ; and make room for the sauce-pan by wriggling
it on the coals, etc.

‘“Never clean your shoes on the scraper, but in
the entry or at the foot of the stairs; by which you
will have the credit of being at home almost a
minute sooner, and the scraper will last longer.

“When you carry dishes or other things out of
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 155

the room at meals, fill both your hands as full as
possible, for although you may sometimes spill and
sometimes let fall, yet you will find at the year’s
end you have made great dispatch and saved abun-
dance of time.

“When you wait behind a chair at meals, keep
constantly wriggling the back of the chair, that the
person behind whom you stand may know you are
ready to attend him.

‘“‘When you are in haste sweep the dust into
a corner of the room, but leave your brush upon it
that it may not be seen, for that would disgrace
you.

‘In the time when you leave the windows open
for air, leave books, or something else, on the
window-seat that they may get air, too.

“ Brush down the cob-webs with a broom that
is wet and dirty, which will make them stick the
faster to it, and bring them down more effectually.

‘When your linen is pinned on the line, or ona
hedge, and it rains, whip it off although you tear it.
But the place for hanging them is on young fruit-
trees, especially in blossom; the linen cannot be
torn, and the trees give them a fine smell.

‘Leave a pail of dirty water, with a mop in it,
a coal-box, a bottle, a broom, and such other un-
sightly things either in the blind entry, or upon the
darkest part of the back stairs, that they may not
be seen, and if people break their shins by trampling
on them it is their own fault.”

Your lesson succeeding the last I assigned you
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will have for its subjects Goldsmith, Chatterton,
Cowper, Gray.

Irving has written a charming life of Goldsmith,
but I prefer you to read at present his poems, 7he
Traveler and The Deserted Village, and his comedy,
She Stoops to Conquer. Read Gray’s Elegy.
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 157

LETTER XV.

Ve have left me little to add to your work on

Gibbon. You have evidently been reading out-
side of your text-book and gleaning interesting facts
wherever you could find them. That is right. I
will add, however, that the young lady with whom
Gibbon fell in love while he was a student at
Lausanne, Switzerland, was Miss Suzanne Curchod,
afterward Mme. Necker and mother of the famous
French authoress, Mme. de Staél. I should like you
to remember that fact, as it will serve to fix in your
memory the time in which Gibbon lived, a very
interesting time, for it was that of the great French
Revolution of ’93.

Necker was a Swiss banker who came into histor-
ical prominence as one of the ministers of Louis
XVI. The unfortunate ministers of this unfortun-
ate monarch tried in vain to better the financial con-
dition of their distracted country. Necker, failing
to do it and finding himself growing unpopular, had
the good sense to resign. It was during Necker’s
prominence in state affairs that Gibbon revisited
France, and spent six months in Paris at the house
of the woman for whom in his youth he had “sighed
as a lover but obeyed like a son.” I have no idea
why his father had objected to his marriage with so
estimable a lady as Miss Curchod. She was the
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daughter of a Swiss pastor, highly educated, accom-
plished, beautiful. Jean Jacques Rousseau, writing to
a friend in a letter dated June 4, 1763, says,

“You gave mea message for Mlle. Curchod, of
which I shall badly acquit myself, precisely because
of my esteem for her. The coldness of M. Gibbon
makes me think ill of him. I have looked over his
book again, Essaz sur 1’ Etude de la Litterature. He
affects the wit in it. He is unnatural. M. Gibbon
is not my man. I cannot believe he is Mlle. Cur-
chod’s. Whoever does not appreciate her value is
not worthy of her, but he who has been able to feel
it and can detach himself from her is a man to be
despised.”

This is rather too hard upon poor Gibbon. He
was by no means a man to be despised simply be-
cause he found it easier to follow his head than his
heart. Mlle. Curchod, herself, had nothing of this
feeling; but you can very well imagine that, as
Mme. Necker, she had a natural pride in showing
her former lukewarm lover that she had not lost
distinction in losing him, but that she was able to
introduce him to the most distinguished men and
women of France in one of the handsomest salons in
Paris. That she had no feeling of pique or resent-
ment is shown in the fact that she remained his life-
long friend. He confided in her as one confides in a
dear sister, and she counseled him like a sister. He
wrote her once that he realized that in growing old
he needed more than ever the cheerful companion-
ship and solace of domestic life, and that he seriously
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 159

thought of marrying, to which she sensibly re-
plied:

“Be careful, Monsieur, about forming one of
these tardy unions. The marriage which makes one
happy in old age is that which was contracted in
youth. It is then only that the union is perfect,
that tastes are communicated, sentiments correspond,
ideas are shared, and the intellectual faculties are
harmoniously blended, while the whole life is double
and the whole life but a prolongation of youth.”

She would not have been a woman if, in writing
this counsel, there had not entered her mind a secret
satisfaction, an under-current thought running in
this wise: We loved each other when we were
young, you and I. We might have been this solace
to each other, but it was you that decided otherwise.
As for me, I have found that joy elsewhere ; but you
have found it in no one, and it is too late to search
it now. However, he did search it, and we owe
to Mme. de Genlis the following ridiculous anecdote :
She says he was enamored of Mme. de Crousaz,
afterward Mme. de Montolieu, and one day, having
so far forgotten himself as to fall on his knees at her
feet, his declaration was badly enough received.

‘Rise, Monsieur,” said the lady.

“Madame, I cannot,” replied poor Gibbon.

He was so stout and heavy that indeed he could
not rise, and there was nothing left Madame to do
but ring for a servant and say to him,

“Lift this gentleman.”

Your pen portrait of him is true in the main par-
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ticulars. Here is one taken from life by M. Garat
and to be found in his Memoires of M. Duard:

“The author of the magnificent history of the
Roman Empire was scarcely four feet seven or eight
inches tall. The immense trunk of his body, with
its huge Silenus belly, was supported by that kind of
frail legs called fluées; his feet turned in so much
that the point of the right one often embarrassed that
of the left, and were long and large enough to have
setved as the pedestal of a statue five feet six inches
high. In the middle of his face, not larger than
one’s fist, the base of his nose was more deeply
buried in his skull than that of a Kalmuck’s; and his
eyes very bright, but very small, were lost in the
same depths. His voice, which had none but shrill
accents, had no other means of reaching the heart
than by piercing the ears.”

According to this description he could not have
been greatly unlike one of Palmer Cox’s Brownies.
Yet this grotesque, fat, little man, with his shrill
falsetto, was a charming companion. He spoke
French as easily as he spoke English, and he liked
to write in it. Indeed, Sainte Beuve says he is ‘in
certain respects a French writer, and has a right to
a decided place in our eighteenth century.” His
first published essay was writtenin French. He had
a remarkable memory, was an omnivorous reader,
believing with Pliny that there is no book so bad
that some good cannot be found in it, an indefatig-
able student, a just and liberal thinker. These are
the indispensable solid qualities of a historian, to
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 161

which he added another quality, that of a polished
and sustained style. If I should find any fault with
this style it would be that it is too sustained. His
calm, sonorous, even flow of language is like the
droning of bees in a clover-field. I simply go to
sleep listening to it. But the reading public to whom
his history was first offered were wide awake over
it. It was a literary event, and had its run as the
latest novel has now.

And, apropos of novels, we have come to the
period in which this form of literature first makes
its appearance. Now, I do not think it is any
presumption in me to take it for granted that, like
the vast majority of readers, you are partial to a
good novel and will be interested in this subject.

The librarian of the Carnegie Free Library at
Edinburgh told me that fiction finds by far the great-
est number of readersthere. He said that the books
in that library are arranged to suit the convenience
of thé boys who lend them to members, and that
according to this arrangement religious and philo-
sophical books are on the top shelf, out of reach
from the floor. The next lower shelf is devoted to
science and art. Fiction occupies the middle
row, at the hand of the lender. History and
biography are just beneath, and the lowest shelf
contains works of a general character. I fancy that
few librarians, if any, would furnish any different
report. Human nature is much the same every-
where. It likes, first of all, to be amused, interested,
excited. It likes to wonder and hold its breath, to

11
162 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

laugh and weep, to hope, to dream, to do anything
but think and be instructed. The desire for knowl-
edge is an acquired appetite, an outgrowth of civiliza-
tion, like that for tobacco or rum.

“Men must be taught as if you taught them
not,” writes Pope, which simply means that your
moral must follow on the tail of a joke, that your
instruction must be disguised in pretty gilt wrap-
pings, must arrive at reason through the gateway of
charmed eyes and ears.

Well, if that is the way we are made, there is no
use quarreling with nature; we must just make the
best of it. Only, I wonder that our writers were
so long finding out so easy and short a cut to popu-
larity as the novel. But, in looking over again some
of the early novels, I wonder more how the reading
public ever could have enjoyed them; but then, I
am thinking of them with Scott, Dickens, Thackeray,
Bronte, George Eliot, and others in mind, which is
hardly more reasonable than to sit in a Pullman
Palace car and wonder how our ancestors ever en-
dured the fatigues and discomforts of a journey by
stage-coach.. The stage was a vast improvement on
walking, and, so, for the average reader, these
clumsy tales, with their insufferable digressions, were
a mental relaxation, a welcome lift on the literary
road where there had been a vast amount of uncom-
fortable going on foot.

The particular book which has set me to pitying
our first novel-readers is Tvistram Shandy. I've
been reading it over again, and I feel very much in
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 163

the humor of Mrs. Hardcastle after that jolting ride
and horse-pond ducking which her graceless son,
Tony Lumpkin, gave her, round and round her own
house. There never was such an exasperating book.
A hundred times I have been on the point of throw-
ing it out of the window, and yet as many times I
have resumed my reading, yawned and smiled, and
ended by falling in love again with “My Uncle
Toby.” And who could help it ?

“There was a frankness in my Uncle Toby, not the
effect of familiarity, but the cause of it, which let
you at once into his soul, and showed you the good-
ness of his nature. To this, there was something in
his looks and voice and manner superadded which

eternally beckoned to the unfortunate to come and
take shelter under him.”

He is indeed the gentlest soul, yet every inch a

man, that you’ll meet anywhere in literature. ‘‘The
finest compliment,” says Hazlitt, ‘ever paid to
human nature.” It was for ‘my Uncle Toby’s” sake

that I submitted to all sorts of joltings in the shape
of whimsical digressions, and to all sorts of horse-
pond duckings in the shape of vulgarities and inde-
cencies. But I am not sure that I should be willing
for you to make his acquaintance on the same con-
ditions. J am afraid that you would come out with
more bruises than J, and feel more lamentably
bespattered. One must have traveled much before
one can take discomforts and mischances as a
matter of course and forget them as soon as they
are past. When you can do that (and it will not
164 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

be for some years yet) you may read Tvstram
Shandy.

The Sentimental Journey is of a piece with Tristram
Shandy, the same mischievous friskings and cur-
vetings, the same light humor shading into pathos
or sentimentality. You understand the difference
between sentiment and sentimentality, do you not?
The former is the expression of deep feeling; the
latter is the expression of affected or surface feeling.
Sterne, who preferred ‘whining over a dead ass to
relieving a living mother,’ was much given to senti-
mentality. He is full of restlessness rather than
energy, and he finds relief in excitement rather than
feeling. His tears flow too readily to liedeep. He
relieves himself of moral responsibilities as easily as
one of your Mexican broncos pitches a boy off his
back, and he does it in the very same way, by duck-
ing his head and kicking up his heels. He isn’t a man
to respect, but he is a man to laugh with and enjoy
yourself with for an hour if you can shut your eyes
to his faults and be wary about trusting your heart
to him.

As for Richardson, he is another begetter of
yawns, with no smiles interspersed. There was a
time, of course, when Clarissa Harlowe, Pamela, and
Sir Charles Grandison were read and admired, but the
time is past. Modern readers are content with
knowing there are such books written by one Rich-
ardson, a prude in trousers, who loved to be sur-
rounded by women whose letters he wrote and whose
flattering homage he mildly received. He was a
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 165

prudent tradesman as well as successful author,
amassed a comfortable fortune, and died leaving an
unblemished character to adorn his fame as a novelist.

Poor Fielding did nothing of the kind. He was
in every way as unlike Richardson as two men can
possibly be. There was nothing of the woman about
him; a huge fellow over six feet tall, frank, pas-
sionate, reckless, extravagant, living with all his
might while he did live, sinning, repenting, and sin-
ning again, but withal a man of true genius, having
to the full the Protean character of genius, the power
to transform himself into the likeness of all men and
women; reading their hearts by the beats of his
own, a great man, quite the greatest of our English
novelists, I think. Unfortunately, his coarseness
prevents him from being generally read now, else I
should wonder why Yom Jones weren’t in every
household library side by side with a volume of
Shakespeare. Hehad humor not inferior to Dickens,
while at the same time he had a truer knowledge of
human nature. He had the sarcastic cleverness of
Thackeray without its bitterness and tinge of misan-
thropy. He had the analytic powers of George
Eliot, unclogged by her heaviness.

Of the three authors, Sterne, Richardson,
Fielding, the latter only was thoroughly virile.
Richardson was a femmelette ; Sterne was a precocious
and mischievous infant whose pranks we forgive
while they provoke us, who excites us yet tires us,
and who would be charming if he had only common
sense enough to know how to behave himself.
166 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

Sterne has the honor of being a unique figure in our
literature. But then one is quite enough of him.

Did you know that the often quoted sentence,
“God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,” is to be
found in his Sentimental Journal?

Defoe and Smollett are also well-known names
of this period. The former is an unapproachable
realist, the latter an unpardonably coarse writer who
loves dirt for dirt’s sake, and, like Sterne,would rather
step into a mud-puddle than keep clear of it, nay,
would step out of his way to wallow in it.

Take Burns and Scott for your subjects following
the last assigned lesson
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 167

LETTER XVI.

OU are usually very accurate in your statements,
but your paper on Johnson contains several
grave errors. In the first place, Dr. Johnson was
never poet-laureate of England. Ben Jonson was
laureate, but not Samuel, the dictionary Johnson.
The latter received a pension from the government
in consideration of his literary services, but he held
no official appointment. Tate, Rowe, Eusden, White-
head were successively poet-laureates during John-
son’s life-time, all very inferior men, by the way,
for being poet-laureate by no means signifies intel-
lectual superiority
In the second place, the disease which afflicted
Johnson, scarred his face, and deprived him of the
sight of one eye, was scrofula. One of his earliest
recollections was that of being touched by Queen
Anne for the ‘‘king’s evil,” but I have never yet heard
that either “gluttony, idleness, or idiocy” are, as you
say, “symptoms” of that disease. Johnson had,
indeed, a constitutional melancholy that occasioned
him great mental suffering, and which he manfully
combated all his life, but hypochondria is as far re-
moved from anything like “idiocy” as day-light
from darkness. Indeed, Sam Johnson is the last man
in the world to accuse of lack of wit. He had it in
superabundance; he was common-sense personified,
168 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

and, what is more, he retained the vigor of his facul-
ties up to the hour of his death. At sixty-seven we
find him determined ‘‘to apply vigorously to study,
particularly of the Greek and Italian tongues.” In
his seventy-first year we find him contending that
“it is a man’s own fault, it is from want of use, if his
mind grows torpid in old age,” and proving the truth
of what he says by publishing in the following year
the last volumes of his greatest work, The Lives of
the Poets. As to his idleness, when I think of what
he did, of the books he read, the books he wrote,
the languages he mastered, I hide my head for shame,
and instead of calling him idle I marvel how he ever
found time to do all he did do, and IJ feel how idle
my own life has been in comparison with his. Tobe
sure, he always accuses himself of idleness as Bunyan
accused himself of having committed the unpardon-
able sin, but, before we accept a man’s self-accu-
sations as a true state of the case, we ought to know
by what standard he is measuring himself, and if it
turns out to be a superhuman one we should not call
him imperfect because he fails to reach it. For my
part, Johnson strikes me as being eminently worthy
the credit of industry, and the more so because he
avows a disinclination to work. I shouldn’t give a
man credit for temperance who disliked intoxicating
liquors to that extent that it would be disagreeable
and even painful for him to drink. In sucha case
the man is temperate simply because it is easier for
him to abstain than to indulge. There is no virtue
in such temperance. Judging Johnson in the same
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 169

way, I see a great deal of virtue in his recovery of
himself from idleness.

As for his gluttony, if you choose to call it by
that ugly name, that is not so easily defended. He
was a huge fellow and he loved good eating, and did
not hesitate to say so, but somehow I am very much
inclined to forgive him for that. I am glad that in
this ‘tough world” (and it was tough for him) he
found something out of which he could get genuine
satisfaction.

‘‘Some people,” said he, ‘‘ have a foolish way of
not minding, or pretending not to mind, what they
eat. For my part, I mind my belly very studiously
and very carefully, for I look upon it that he who
does not mind his belly will hardly mind anything
else.”

He did not like being invited to a plain dinner,
and Boswell records that on such occasions he would
say, ‘This was a good dinner enough, to be sure,
but it was not a dinner to ask a manto.” But, as I
said before, I am willing to grant Johnson this weak-
ness and think none the less of him. I wouldn't
stint him one of his twelve cups of tea, nor cut him
short on veal pie, nor deprive him of a scrap of
orange-peel for the world. He shall eat what he
likes and after his own fashion, and I shall shut my
eyes to the perspiration and swelling veins on his
forehead. You see by this that I love him. I do,
indeed. I was your age when I first made his
acquaintance in that inimitable biography of Bos-
well’s, and I’ve been faithful to him ever since. I
170 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

must send you there to meet him, too. We all know
him through this Scotch hero-worshiper. It was
there that Macaulay found material for his admir-
able essay, and that Carlyle found another hero,
another truth-lover and hater of cant, to hold up to
the world’s admiration in his Heroes and Hero Wor-
ship, and it is there that Iam going for facts to help
you to know him a little better. And, by the way, it is
singular that we know Johnson better and esteem
him more highly by means of this “ Life” of him
than from his own works, which, with the exception
of The Lives of the Poets, are as little read as The
Spectator.

The dictionary, with its accurate etymology and
frequent whimsical definitions, has been superseded
by far better ones. ‘Zhe Rambler,” as Hazlitt says,
“is a splendid and imposing common-place book of
general topics and rhetorical declamations on the
conduct and business of human life’ . . . . but
“there is hardly a reflection to be found in it which
had not been already suggested and developed by
some other author or in the common course of con-
versation.” rene is a dull tragedy, Rasse/as is hardly
less tiresome. Zhe Vanity of Human Wishes has
some good, telling lines in it, but as a whole, it is by
no means agreat poem. The truth is, Pr. Johnson
was not a poet in the best sense of the word. He
could write poetry in as matter-of-fact frame of
mind as he wrote the essays of Zhe Rambler, and
could stop in the midst of his work to run his fingers
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 171

over his verses to calculate how many more he must
write.

Dr. Johnson was an author simply because he
was a full man; that is, a man whose mind was
enriched by observation, experience, and wide read-
‘ing, and he felt the need which every full man feels
of imparting what he knew. Mark what I say,
what he knew, not what he felt. Your poet always
imparts what he feels. Dr. Johnson had an idea that
a man of original mental power, amounting to
genius, is as capable of one kind of intellectual work
as another, which is not so. “I am persuaded,” he
said on one occasion, ‘‘that had Sir Isaac Newton
applied himself he would have made a very fine epic
poem. I could as easily apply to law as to tragic
poetry. The man who has vigor may walk to the
east just as well as to the west if he happens to turn
his head that way.”

This failure to see that what a man of genius,
with rare exceptions, if any, betakes himself to, is
determined by his temperament, which also deter-
mines the character of his work, is one of the causes
of Johnson’s limitations as a critic. Another cause
is the sluggishness of his temperament. ‘A feeble
capacity of passion,” says De Quincey, “must, upon
a question of passion, constitute a feeble range of in-
tellect.”.. This explains why Johnson under-rated
Shakespeare and over-rated Pope. An obtuseness
of sensibility made him incapable of appreciating
Gray. He called him a “ dull fellow, dull in com-
172 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

pany, dull in the closet, dull everywhere. He was
dull in a new way, and that made people call him
great. He was a mechanical poet.’ It is not pos-
sible to make a more unjust estimate of Gray than
this. He was hardly less just to Milton. In fact, as
a critic Johnson is hardly ever right in his estimate
of values, and he is especially wrong wherever depth
of feeling, ideality, and an intimate, sympathetic
knowledge of the human heart are concerned. He
thought Fielding inferior to Richardson, called him
a blockhead, and said, ‘‘ There is more knowledge of
the human heart in one letter of Richardson’s than
in all Zom Jones.’ He would allow Swift no claim
to genius and always professed to doubt that he
really wrote Zhe Tale of a Tub. He thought a
description of the temple in Congreve’s Mourning
Bride the “finest poetical passage” he ever read,
and recollected ‘nothing in Shakespeare equal to it.”

Here are the lines; you may judge for yourself :

“ How reverend is the face of this tall pile,

Whose ancient pillars rear their marble heads,

To bear aloft its arched and pond'rous roof,

By its own weight made steadfast and immovable ;
Looking tranquility! It strikes an awe

And terror to my aching sight.”

Well, you must be saying by this time, “If John-
son doesn’t reach the highest excellence in poetry,
criticism, essay-writing, if he isn’t even an unim-
peachable etymologist (he wasn’t familiar with the
Teutonic languages, from which so many of our
words are derived), what is his claim to excellence,
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 173

and why does he fill so big a niche in the temple of
fame?” I answer, He was a man of unusual
strength and originality of character, and, thanks to
Boswell, we know him almost as intimately as if he
had been our next-door neighbor with whom we
chatted every day. Most authors are less real to us
than their productions; for example, we know
Hamlet, Lear, Othello, better than we know Shakes-
peare, but here is a man whom we know better than
his Rasselas or Irene, and who is infinitely better
worth knowing. He is greater and more interesting
than anything he wrote. His companionship is
healthy and inspiring. He lived an epic, an heroic
struggle with everything that debases and vanquishes
what is noble, and he was never vanquished.

All those little oddities of manner, however.
coarse and rude they may appear at first sight, were
no more an essential part of the man than the
shaggy moss and ragged patches of lichen are a
part of the oak to whose bark they cling. The man
himself was solid, enduring, and deeply rooted in
his native soil. He was a man to take shelter under
and lean upon. He may not have judged a poem
according to the dictum of the highest criticism,
but he was an authority on whatever concerns the
safe conduct of life. He is a sincere man; he will
speak the truth and he will make no compromise
with cant. Boswell tells us that there was at one
time in London “a whimsical fashion in the news-
papers of applying Shakespeare’s words to describe
living persons well-known to the world,” and that,
174 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

amongst other lines, the following were intended to
hit off Johnson:

“He would not flatter Neptune for his trident
Or Jove for his power to thunder.” -

He abhorred whatever savored of affectation or
falsehood. Once, in expressing his admiration of
old Mr. Langton, he concluded his eulogy with what
to him was a climax of praise, in these words: ‘And,
sir, he has no grimace, no gesticulation, no bursts
of admiration on trivial occasions; he never embraces
you with an over-acted cordiality.”

He was absolutely insensible to music; in fact, it
bored him exceedingly. “I told him,” says Boswell,
‘that it (music) affected me to such a degree as
often to agitate my nerves painfully, producing in
my mind alternate sensations of pathetic dejection,
so that I was ready to shed tears; and of daring
resolution, so that I was inclined to rush into the
thickest part of the battle. ‘Sir,’ said he, ‘I should
never hear it, if it made me such a fool.’’

At another time, he said to Boswell: ‘My dear
friend, clear your mind of cant. You may talk as
other people do, you may say toa man, ‘Sir, I am
your most humble servant;’ you are not his most
humble servant. You may say, ‘These are bad
times, it is a melancholy thing to bereserved to such
times.’ You don’t mind the times. You tell aman,
‘I am sorry you had such bad weather the last day
of your journey and were so much wet.’ You don’t
care a sixpence whether he is wetor dry. You may
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS, 175

talk in this manner, it is a mode of talking in society,
but don’t think foolishly.”

I confess that I hear Johnson saying that with
the same satisfaction with which I would fill my
lungs with pure, fresh air on coming out of a hot-
house. This sincerity is bracing, it is a tonic. The
man is wholly like this: you can trust him. If you
do not wholly relish so matter-of-fact a frame of
mind, console yourself by knowing that at least he
will draw you into no fog-land. There is nothing
of the visionary about him. Rousseau and his the-
ories of the blessedness of the savage state are an
abomination to him. He loves man civilized and
governed. There was in his time as there is now
much discussion of political and social matters. It
is interesting to know what he thought on these sub-
jects. He always maintained that ‘subordination
tends greatly to human happiness,” and that “if we
were all upon an equality we should have no other

enjoyment than mere animal pleasure.” He once
said toa Mrs. Macaulay of London, a woman of
avowed republican principles, ‘Madam, I am now

become aconvert to your way of thinking. I am
convinced that all mankind are upon equal: footing,
and, to give you an unquestionable proof, Madam,
that I am in earnest, here is a very sensible, civil,
well-behaved fellow-citizen, your footman; I desire
that he may be allowed to sit down and dine
with us. I thus,’ he adds, “showed her the absurd-
ity of her leveling doctrines. She has never liked
me since. Sir, your levelers wish to level down as
176 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

far as themselves, but they cannot bear leveling up
to themselves. They would all have some people
under them, why not, then, have some people above
them?” At another time he remarked on the same
subject, ‘Sir, all would be losers were all to work
for all; they would have no intellectual improve-
ment. All intellectual improvement arises from
leisure; all leisure arises from one working for an-
other.”

On the subject of luxury he has this opinion to
give: ‘“‘ Many things which are false are transmitted
from book to book. One of these is the cry against
the evil of luxury. Now, the truth is that luxury
produces much good. Take the luxury of buildings
in London. Does it not produce real advantage in
the convenience and elegance of accommodation,
and this all from the exertion of industry.

A man gives half a guinea for a dish of green peas.
How much gardening does this occasion? How
many laborers must the competition to have such
things early in the market keep in employment?
You will hear it said very gravely, ‘Why was not
the half guinea thus spent in luxury given to the
poor? To how many might it have afforded’ a
good meal!’ Alas, has it not gone to the indus-
trious poor whom it is better to support than the
idle poor? You are much surer that you are doing
good when you pay money to those who work as the
recompense of their labor than when you give merely
in charity. Suppose the ancient luxury of a dish of
peacock’s brains were to be revived, how many
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 177

carcasses would be left to the poor at a cheap
rate?”

But if you imagine from this reasoning that
Johnson was wanting in tenderness and charity it is
plain that you have never heard of that motley
household of his, a nest of stray waifs supported by
his charity; or how he once carried home on his back
a poor fallen creature whom he found lying upon
the street, and had her carefully nursed until she was
well. You may know from this, too, that he was

brave, for
“The bravest are the tenderest,
The loving are the daring.”

Brave he was, in that resolute facing of a hard
life without whimpering, in that earnest, prayerful
struggling against his melancholy, which he recog-
nized as the result of disease, and not as the healthy
condition of his mind. Boswell’s melancholy, which
was that of a restless, arnbitious, half-impotent mind,
seems childish in comparison with Johnson’s, yet we
find him, as usual, getting consolation and guidance '
from his master. ‘I had learned from Dr. John-
son,” he acknowledges, ‘‘not to think with a dejected
indifference of the works of art and the pleasures of
life because life is uncertain and short, but to con-
sider such indifference as a failure of reason, a mor-
bidness of mind; for happiness should be cultivated
as much as we can, and the objects which are instru-
mental to it should be steadily considered as of
importance with a reference not only to ourselves,
but to multitudes in successive ages.”

12
178 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

My dear young friend, that is the philosophy of
life in a nut-shell, and it is because Johnson em-
phatically teaches this healthy philosophy that he
deserves our gratitude and esteem.

I do not know how these few extracts may affect.
you. It is possible that asking you to judge of
Johnson’s character from them is like asking you to
judge of a plum-pudding by handing you a plum on
the end of a fork. But, if I dared hope that I had
sufficiently interested you in Boswell’s Life of John-
son to induce you to read it, I should be content to
have failed in giving a right idea of Johnson
myself, feeling sure that you would get it there;
feeling sure, too, that you would get much more
than that, namely, an acquaintance with all the lead-
ing men and women of his time. There you would
meet Burke, of whom Johnson says, ‘ Burke, sir, is
such a man that, if you met him for the first time in
the street where you were stopped by a drove of
oxen, and you and he stepped aside to take shelter
but for five minutes, he’d talk to you in such a
manner that when you parted you would say ‘This
is an extraordinary man.’”

You would meet Goldsmith, but you would hardly
recognize him, there. Boswell is unfair to him. Bear
that in mind always. You will make Mrs. Thrale’s
acquaintance. She is the author of a little poem
once much admired, entitled Zhe Three Warnings,
from which you might infer she was a very grave
woman instead of being the liveliest, gayest, most
affectionate, thoughtless little woman that ever let
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 179

her heart run away with her good sense. After her
husband’s death she shocked andalienated her friends
by marrying an Italian fiddler named Piozzi. Then
there is the wonderful actor, David Garrick, formerly
a pupil of Johnson’s; and Sir Joshua Reynolds,
the great painter by whom Johnson refused to be
painted as short-sighted, holding a book close to his
face, saying he (Reynolds) might paint himself as
deaf as he pleased, but as for him he didn’t mean to
go down to posterity as blinking Sam. The histo-
rians Gibbon and Robertson are there; so are Gen-
eral Paoli, the Corsican hero; Foote, the come-
dian ; Hannah More, and Fanny Burney, the novelist,
afterwards Madam D’Arblay; and scores of lesser
lights whom you will not be sorry to meet.

Please take Byron and Shelley as your subjects
after Scott and Burns.
180 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

LETTER XVII.

N telling me that Goldsmith had suffered in his
childhood from small-pox, you add that it left
him “dreadfully scaved all his life”. Now, if I had
not known that his homely, good-natured face was
deeply pitted or scarred from that disease I should
have thought myself in possession of a new charac-
teristic of the man who, however much he may have
blundered in his life, never did so with his pen; at
least so far as good English is concerned. But yet,
I might have found your assertion difficult to believe,
because of all men, Goldsmith appears to me to have
been constitutionally one of the most fearless, one
of the men predestined not to be scared at any thing '
life could offer him.
His fearlessness; to be sure, was akin to that of
a healthily brought up child’s, to whom no ghost
stories and no bugaboo threats have made the dark-
ness more unnatural or fuller of terror than the day;
but whatever its character, it was genuine fearless-
ness. Tomorrow never frightened him; indeed, it
did not exist for him, and to-day was his own. It
- isn’t the wisest kind of fearlessness, this, if one wants
to live respectably and die out of debt, but one
escapes a good deal of worry by letting to-morrow
take care of itself. And pray tell me, whoever
better knew how to do that than Oliver Goldsmith ?
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 181

Whoever turned to better account all the drubbings
and misadventures of fortune ?

“He had,” says De Quincey, ‘a constitutional
gayety of heart, an elastic hilarity, and, as he him-
self expresses it, ‘a knack of hoping,’ which knack
could not be bought with Ormus and with Ind, nor
hired for a day with the peacock throne of Delhi.”

That expression ‘‘a knack of hoping” is to be
found in the twentieth chapter of the Vicar of Wake-
field, which chapter is as nearly autobiographical
as it can well be and at the same time accommodate
itself to the demands of the story. It is there we
learn the humiliations and hardships of his life as an
usher in a boy’s school, how he was ‘‘up early and
late, brow-beat by the master, hated for his ugly
face by the mistress, worried by the boys within,
and never permitted to stir out to meet civility
abroad.” He also gives us glimpses of his life-as a
literary drudge hardly more enviable than that of
an usher. He tells us, too, of his setting sail for
Holland to teach English to the Dutch, and that it
was not until he found himself “fallen as from the
skies, a stranger in one of the principal streets of
Amsterdam,” that he recollected that in order to
teach the Dutchmen English, it was necessary that
they should first teach him Dutch. Then, we have
his travels on foot among the harmless peasants of
Flanders, playing on his flute for a night’s lodging
and his food the next day. Who would have ever
dreamed that this flute-playing tramp would one day
prove himself so skilful a player of another kind of
182 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

music, that the world will not cease listening to it
while there is English poetry and melodious English
prose.

Goldsmith was a real poet, a man naturally en-
dowed, a genius. Do you not begin to feel the dif-
ference between the natural endowment we call
genius and the intellectual power, uncommon and
of a high order, too, but based upon application,
experience, tenacity of memory, and shrewdness of
observation? The latter manifests itself in extraor-
dinary good sense, and is at its best typically
in such men as Pope, Dryden, Johnson, Voltaire.
The former is erratic, illusive, refuses to yield ‘its
secret in a definition, and yet is altogether charm-
ing. Something warmer, something more ethereal
than that which enters other souls goes to the
making of it, a flame that feeds itself and never
grows fainter and colder, something kindred to that
which Shakespeare felt inCleopatra when he said of
her, “Age cannot wither her nor custom stale her
infinite variety.”

I am afraid that in trying to be clear ] but make
the matter darker to you, but I am anxious to
awaken in you a sensitiveness to this subtle power
of genius, so that you can have a touch-stone within
yourself by which you can say, ‘This is genuine,
this is good work ; this is a book, and nota ‘thing
in book’s clothing.'’’ But I cannot do this unless
you help me. One never learns what good pictures
are by looking at bad ones ; neither can one learn to
know a good book by reading feeble ones. You must
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS, 183

read only the best books. I have already called
your attention to a number of such books, and I
now add to that number Goldsmith’s Traveller, De-
serted Village, The Good Natured Man, She Stoops to
Conquer, and The Vicar of Wakefield.

If you have read many exciting modern novels,
I shall not expect you to find Zhe Vicar of Wakefield
any more to your taste than a cup of cold water ora
glass of fresh milk would be to that of a wine-bibber.
But I assure you that it isas wholesome and natural,
as refreshing and pleasing to the unvitiated taste as
the glass of water or milk. All the wines and arti-
ficial drinks in the world will never do away with the
use of natural beverages. Nor will society and the
society novel ever produce a species of human being
dearer to the natural heart of man than that which
nature created. It is after Nature’s pattern that
Goldsmith draws his characters. That is why we
know them and talk of them as real people. Then,
too, there is a certain indefinable charm of style and
purity of sentiment in Goldsmith, which corresponds
to the graces of manner and speech which we are
accustomed to call high-bred. One quits him with
the consciousness of having been in good company.
He never calls out any violent emotion, but he
arouses a gentle, agreeable enthusiasm which dis-
poses the mind to think better of life and mankind;
and, the man who can do that has fulfilled an author’s
noblest mission.

Irving’s Life of Goldsmith is charmingly written,
and I recommend it to you. Macaulay’s essay on
184 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

him is good, and De Quincey in his Essays on the
Poets has written delightfully of him.

What a contrast in every particular Cowper
offers to Goldsmith! While the Irish poet carries
in his bosom as gay, light, and fearless a heart as the
bird’s that ‘carols by the roadside,” the English
poet, Cowper, is all shyness, timid to morbidness,
full of forebodings, trembling on the verge of insan-
ity, and alas, falling at times into its awful darkness.

Poor Cowper! If ever was born a soul all sen-
sitiveness and tenderness, itwas his. He wasastrem-
blingly alive to every touch of pain or pleasure as
an aspen leaf to the breath of the wind, but fortu-
nately for English poetry, he was not merely a man
of nerves, a leaf in the wind, he was an A£olian harp,
and all his vibrations were music.

You have given me the general outline of his
uneventful life, the death of his mother in his sixth
year, the tortures of his school-life from the cruel
fagging system permitted in boy’s schools of Eng-
land, his attempt to commit suicide in his thirty-
first year to avoid a public examination to test his
efficiency for the post of Clerk of the Journals in the
House of Lords, his subsequent removal to an asy-
lum, his recovery, and his meeting with the Unwin
family who took him into their household, and there
you leave him. It is there I wish to take him up,
because it is then that his life as a poet really begins.
Writing of himself to a friend he says:

“From the age of twenty to thirty-three I was
occupied, or ought to have been, in the study of the
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 185

law; from thirty-three to sixty I have spent my
time in the country, where my reading has been only
an apology for idleness, and where, when I had not
either a magazine or a review, I was sometimes a
carpenter, at others, a bird-cage maker, or a garden-
er, or a drawer of landscapes. At fifty years of age
I commenced an author. It is a whim that has
served me longest and best, and will probably be
my last.”

It is his quiet, unvaried country life and the
country landscapes he looked at that reappear in
his poetry, strongly colored by his devout religious
sentiments. Sainte Beuve says that he is “in many
respects the Milton of private life.”

Mrs. Unwin, with whom Cowper spent his life and
to whose care through the recurrences of his terrible
malady the world owes a poet, was the wife of a
country clergyman and school-master at Huntingdon.
She was twelve years Cowper’s senior and the
strong attachment that grew up between them,
maternal on her part, filial on his, is one of the
sweetest, purest records of friendship between a man
and woman that I know of. Read his beautiful
tribute to her, the lines Zo Mary. I can’t forbear
quoting the second, seventh, eighth, tenth, and
eleventh stanzas for fear you may not have the poem
at hand:

“Thy spirits have a fainter flow,
I see thee daily weaker grow,
’Twas my distress that brought thee low,
My Mary!
186 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

Thy silver locks, once auburn bright,

Are still more lovely in my sight

Than golden beams of orient ‘light,
MyMary!

For could I view nor them nor thee,
What sight worth seeing could I see ?
The sun would rise in vain for me,
My Mary!

Such feebleness of limbs thou provest,
That now, at every step thou move’st,
Upheld by two, yet still thou lov’st,

My Mary!

And still to love though prest with ill,
In wintry age to feel no chill,
With me is to be lovely still,

My Mary!”

Two years after Cowper went to live with the
Unwin family, Mr. Unwin was killed by an accident.
He was thrown .from a horse, his skull was frac-
tured, and he died a few days after the fall. This
sad event made a change of scene desirable for Mrs.
Unwin and Cowper, and they removed to a village
called Olney in Buckinghamshire. Here Cowper
made the acquaintance of Mr. Newton, the curate of
Olney, who induced him to assist him in writing
some hymns for the use of his parish. It was here,
too, that he had another attack of his terrible
malady. His insanity took the form of religious
despair. He thought he had committed the unpar-
donable sin and was forever lost. Think of it,
he, the gentlest of men, who would not enter on
his “list of friends though graced with polished
a

ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 187

manners and fine sense, yet wanting sensibility, the
man who needlessly sets foot upon a worm!”

But I do not wish to dwell on this sad affliction
of the poet. I wish rather to show you little
glimpses of his quiet country life, drawn by his own
facile pen. Here is a description of the way in
which he spent his time at Huntingdon. The letter
is dated Oct. 20, 1766.

“We breakfast commonly between eight and
nine; till eleven, we read either the scripture, or the
sermons of some faithful preacher of their holy
mysteries; at eleven, we attend divine service, which
is performed here twice every day; and from twelve
to three we separate, and amuse ourselves as we
please. During that interval I either read in my
own apartment, or walk, or ride, or work in the gar-
den. We seldom sit an hour after dinner, but if the
weather permits, adjourn to the garden, where, with
Mrs. Unwin and her son, I have generally the pleas-
ure of religious conversation till tea time. If it
rains, or is-too muddy for walking, we either con-
verse within doors, or sing some hymns of Martin’s
collection, and by the help of Mrs. Unwin’s harpsi-
chord make up a tolerable concert, in which our
hearts, I hope, are the best and most musical per-
formers. After tea we sally forth to walk in good
earnest. Mrs. Unwin is a good walker, and we have
generally traveled about four miles before we see
home again. When the days are short, we make
this excursion in the former part of the day, between
church time and dinner. At night, we read and
188 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

converse as before, till supper, and commonly finish
the evening either with hymns or a sermon, and last
of all, the family are called to prayers. I need not
tell you that such a life as this is consistent with the
utmost cheerfulness; accordingly we are all happy,
and dwell together in unity as brethren. Mrs.
Unwin has almost a maternal affection for me, and I
have something very like a filial one for her, and
her son and I are brothers. Blessed be the God of
our salvation for such companions, and for such a life,
above all, for a heart to like it.”

Poor wounded, sensitive heart! it was fitted for
no other life. Love, obscurity, that is all he asked,
all that was necessary to him, and fate in this regard
was kind; she gave him what he asked. After
their removal to Olney, Mrs. Unwin and he had but
one purse between them and but one aim, to console
and gladden each other.

Once on recovering from a period of dejection,
Cowper expressed a wish to divert himself by rais-
ing ahare. A neighbor gave him three. He built
hutches for them, nursed them through sickness, and
one of the prettiest letters he has written (he is a
famous letter-writer you know) is an account of his
experiences with them. They were all males, but
he gave them the feminine names of Puss, Bess, and
Tiney. ,

Writing to a distant relative concerning a prom-
ised visit of hers, he says, ‘My dear, I will not
let you come till the end of May or the beginning of
June, because before that time my green house will
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 189

not be ready to receive us, and it is the only pleasant
room belonging to us. When the plants go out we
goin. I line it with mats, and spread the floor with
mats, and there you shall sit with a bed of mignon-
ette at your side, and a hedge of honeysuckles,
roses, and jasmine, and I will make you a bouquet of
myrtleevery day. Sooner than the time I mention
the country will not be in complete beauty, and I will
tell you what you shall find at your first entrance.
Imprimis, as soon as you have entered the vesti-
bule, if you cast alook on either side of you, you
shall see on the right hand a box of my making.
It is the box in which have been lodged all my
hares, and in which lodges Puss at present. But he,
poor fellow, is worn out with age, and promises to:
die before you can see him. On the right hand
stands a cupboard, the work of the same author.
It was once a dove-cage, but I transformed it.
Opposite to you stands a table which I also made,
but a merciless servant having scrubbed it until it
became paralytic, it serves no purpose now but of
ornament, and all my clean shoes stand under it.
On the left hand, at the farther end of this superb
vestibule, you will find the door of the parlor into
which I will conduct you, and where I will introduce
you to Mrs. Unwin (unless we should meet her
before) and where we will be as happy as the day is
long.’
It took so little to make him happy ; a child

could hardly have demanded less—a bit of garden
to spade and watch grow, some roses to tend, a pet
190 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

hare to fondle, fresh air, and country walks with
some dear friend like Mrs. Unwin. And in these
walks the slightest thing interests him—some min-
nows in a brook forming a circle round a dead min-
now they are devouring, a hair-worm, an opening
bud in spring, the musical tinkle of a falling icicle
in winter. He has the child-heart and eye of the
poet ; these things never pall on him. He forms a
philosophy of life out of them, a philosophy of con-
tentment and gratitude founded on simplicity and
purity, and one day he will sing this philosophy in
The Task. And it isa woman who sets him to sing-
ing. Lady Austin is her name. Cowper first met
Lady Austin in the fall of 1781. She was the
widow of a baronet, and happened to be visiting her
sister who lived within a mile of Olney. One day
Cowper saw her and her sister enter a shop opposite
his home and expressed a wish to know the stranger,
a very extraordinary wish for him to make, because
he dreaded meeting strangers above everything.
Mrs. Unwin gratified his wish by inviting her to tea,
but true to his timid nature he at first shrank from
meeting her. However, he consented to meet her,
after some urging, and then having seen her he for-
got his shyness, or rather the woman was charming
and clever enough to make him forget it, and the
two became fast friends. She was an accomplished
woman, loved music, played and sang well, had a
lively and sympathetic nature, could tell a good
story and could listen well to one. It was she who
one day turned Cowper’s melancholy humor into a
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. IgI

mirthful one by telling him the story of John Gilpin.
It struck his fancy; he put it into verse, and it
found its way into some journal. There Henderson,
the comedian, saw it and recognized its fitness for
recitation. He tried it in a public reading and it
was received with shouts of laughter and storms of
applause. Its fortune was made; from that day it
became the fashion, and Cowper saw himself intro-
duced to the reading world in a character quite alien
to his real one.

Meanwhile Lady Austin had become charmed
with Olney and her cultivated friends and decided
to take a house near them, the house vacated by
Mr. Newton, the curate. It was so near Mrs. Un-
win’s and of so easy access that the new friends saw
each other every day, for it soon became their cus-
tom to dine alternately at each other’s houses.
Cowper began his Zask, as I have said, at Lady
Austin’s suggestion; he read his verses to her, he
talked with her about his hopes and fears. And.
then, don’t you see how the story will end? Three
isn’t agood number for friendships, especially if one of
the number bea gifted poet and the other two, loving
women, on whom he is dependent for comfort and
inspiration. Poor Mrs. Unwin became jealous of her
younger and cleverer rival. Cowper saw it and with
‘a discretion that proves the rectitude of his heart as
well as his good judgment wrote a letter to Lady
Austin expressing the necessity of seeing her no
more. He valued Mrs. Unwin’s peace of mind
more than his own pleasure, and he did not forget
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that he owed her the sacrifice of it. Lady Austin
left Olney. You may be interested enough in this
bright, warm-hearted little woman to wish to know
what became of her. She married a Frenchman,
went to Paris to live, died and was buried there.

Cowper continued his translation of Homer, be-
gun also at her suggestion. Some kind of mental
work was necessary to him to keep his mind diverted
from his melancholy reflections on religion. He
lived to see his old friend, Mrs Unwin, stricken
with paralysis and gradually sink into imbecility.
He tended her with the same devotion she had
lavished upon him and was inconsolable at her
death. He survived her four years, four years of
terrible gloom.

Cowper is described as having been a rather
strongly built man of middle height, ruddy com-
plexion, light-brown hair, bluish gray eyes, which
were always weak and subject to inflammation. His
manners with strangers were shy and awkward, but
singularly winning with his friends.

His poetry is the genuine outpouring of his heart
and mind. There is no affectation, no hysterical
emotion in it. It is restful and wholesome. It is
grave, but it also abounds in delicious bits of descrip-
tion, pictures of home life, out-door sketches taken
at all seasons of the year. Cowper is less talked of
than he ought to be, partly because there are fewer
salient features in his poetry than in that of most
great poets, and partly because he has been sur-
passed in his own province by Wordsworth, but he
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 193

has been appreciated in more countries than his own.
He is the only English poet who is honored by one
of Sainte Beuve’s Monday Chats. The great French
critic recognizes his power and does justice to it.

Our next poet, Thomas Gray, is of quite another
order of mind than the two we have been consider-
ing. Heis a scholar, a recluse, not from shyness
but from reserve; a poet, not because he must be,
but because he can be, by dint of an overmastering,
yearning love of excellence and of the ideal. And
that which makes him a poet saddens him also with
a sense of failure in achievement. Like Amiel, the
Geneva professor, whose Journal the reading world
welcomed a few years ago, the ideal poisoned him
for all imperfect possession. He belonged to that
unhappy race of men whose device is ‘‘ A//or nothing.”
These men forget that too much worship of the
ideal to the exclusion of the practical and real can
warp, maim, and paralyze a life as much as its utter
absence can. If we should all take to crying for the
moon instead of to cultivating some little accessible
spot of this green earth, pray, what should we come
to? Nothing but lamentations, musical, it may be,
after the manner of the Geneva professor’s, but never-
theless, sterile lamentations.

Gray toiled years over The Elegy. His toil re-
sulted in a masterpiece, to be sure, but it is out of
all proportion to the time he expended on it. He
polished and planed, he hesitated, he threw his work
aside, then took it up again and finally worried out
the poem, that with a little self-abandonment and

13
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fearlessness might have gushed forth like the stream
from the fountain. He was full enough and gifted
enough for that, but he was also a fastidious critic
and worshiper of the unattainable.

That is why we have the phenomenon of a great
name in literature, and the scantiest possible testi-
mony of productive power. Cowper thought Gray
“the only poet since Shakespeare entitled to the
character of sublime.” Matthew Arnold thinks high-
ly of him, and I recommend to your reading what
he says of him in his Essays in Criticism.

By the way, are you aware of the fact that the
familiar saying, ‘‘Where ignorance is bliss ’tis folly
to be wise,” is Gray’s?

And now let us turn for a moment to Chatterton,
‘the marvelous boy, the sleepless soul, that perished
in his pride.” He was only a promise you must
remember, a flower-bud, frost-blackened and with-
ering before it could expand into bloom. He has
written nothing valuable, nothing that does anything
but show what he might have been. He was only
a child, not yet eighteen, not your age when he
killed himself, and at that age what could he have
to say to the world worth listening to! And yet
the divine music was in him, and he could make it
so surely heard that he has conferred a new honor
on old Bristol and her yellow Avon. He has made
the old gray church, St. Mary Redcliffe at the top of
Redcliffe Street, a genius-hallowed place, and strang-
ers from all over the world climb the narrow, cork-
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 195

screw staircase that leads to the famous muniment
room where he said he found Monk Rowley’s poems.
Boswell and Johnson stood on its tiled floor and
looked into the worm-eaten chest where the MSS.
were, or were not.

Out inthe church yard stands a monument to
Chatterton, erected by subscription in 1840, seventy
years after his death. The inscriptions on the mon-
ument are from the pen of Dr. Young and S. T.
Coleridge.

The lines of the latter are as follows:

“A poor and friendless boy was he to whom
Is raised this monument without a tomb ;
There seek his dust, there o'er his genius sigh,
Where famished outcasts unrecorded lie.
Here let his name, for here his genius rose
To might of ancient days,—in peace repose.
Here, wondrous boy, to more than want consigned
To cold neglect, worse famine of the mind.
All uncongenial the bright world within
To that without of darkness and of sin,
He lived a mystery,—died. Here, reader, pause,
Let God be judge, and mercy plead the cause.”

Chatterton’s poems are so rarely seen in an ordi-
nary family library, that I should like to quote you
some of his characteristic lines, so that you can form
some idea of his power. The following lines are
taken from a Hymn for Christmas Day, written when
Chatterton was but eleven years old: Mark the
smoothness of the verses, and note the force and
beauty of the sentiment, a most wonderful sentiment
for a child to express:
196 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

“A humble form the Godhead wore,
The pain of poverty He bore,
To gaudy pomp unknown,
Though in a human walk he trod,
Still was the man Almighty God
In glory all His own.”

The following are the opening lines of An Excel-
ent Balade of Charite,—Thos. Rowley. Here is a
specimen of his forgery ; note the spelling and quaint
wording, but note also the exquisite feeling for
nature:

“In virgine the sultry sun gan sheen
And hot upon the meads did cast his ray,

The apple ruddied from its paly green,
And the lush pear did bend the leafy spray.”

The third line is exquisite. The lines that follow
the above are daring to impudence. They are ad-
dressed, Zo a Lady in Bristol.

“In natural religion free,
I to no other bow the knee,
Nature’s the God I own.
Let priests of future torments tell,
Your anger is the only hell,
No other hell is known.
’Tis vanity, 'tis impudence,
Is all the merit, all the sense
Through which to fame I've trod.
These (by the Trinity 'tis true)
Procure me friends and notice, too,
And shall gain you, by G----. Y

The boy who could write like that deserves to
have his ears well boxed, but he is no common boy.
The same defiance and impudence breathe from
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 197

these lines to Walpole, who refused to take any
notice of the boy after learning that he had imposed
upon him. It is usual to upbraid Walpole for his
neglect of Chatterton, but it must not be forgotten
that it is requiring of a man a great deal of magna-
nimity to ask him to think favorably of one who
deliberately abuses his confidence by a cheat, a
forgery.

“Walpole, I thought not I should ever see
So mean a heart as thine has proved to be,
Thou who inluxury must behold with scorn,
The boy who friendless, fatherless, forlorn,
Asks thy high favors; thou may’st call me cheat;
Say, didst thou never practice such deceit?
Who wrote Otranto? But I will not chide;
Scorn Ill repay with scorn and pride with pride.
Still, Walpole, still thy prosy chapters write,
And twaddling letters to some fair indite ;
Laud all above thee, fawn and cringe to those
Who for thy fame were better friends than foes.

Had I the gift of wealth and luxury shar'd,
Not poor and mean, Walpole, thou had’st not dared
Thus to insult. But I shall live and stand
By Rowley’s side, when thou art dead and damned.”

The following verses were found in Chatterton’s
pocket after death. I cannot read them without
tears.

“Farewell Bristolia’s dingy pile of brick,
Lovers of Mammon, worshipers of trick.
Ye spurned the boy who gave you antique lays,
And paid for learning with your empty praise.
Farewell, ye guzzling, aldermanic fools,
By nature fitted for corruption’s tools.
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I go to where celestial anthems swell,

But you, when you depart, will sink to hell.
Farewell, my mother. Cease my anguished soul.
Nor let distraction’s billows o’er me roll.

Have mercy, Heaven, when here I cease to live
And this last act of wretchedness forgive.”

Let us study after Byron and Shelley, .Keats,
Moore, and the Brownings. You may also answer
these questions :

Who was Leigh Hunt?

Who wrote the Jmaginary Conversations ?

Who wrote the Pleasures of Hope ?

What is Thomas Hood’s place in literature ?
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 199

LETTER XVIII.

T is not easy for you, an American, to recognize
the beauty, tenderness, and genial fire of Burns’s
poetry unless, like me, you have had the good fortune
to be born of a Scotch mother who has sung you to
sleep in childhood with Scottish ballads.

Perhaps that is the reason the Scotch dialect
seems to me the tenderest and most expressive
dialect in the world. It abounds as richly in dim-
inutives as the German tongue. There is a wealth
of sweetness and caresses in it absolutely inimitable.
Take for example that simple phrase ‘bonnie wee
lassie” and try to translate it into an equivalent ex-
pression if you can. You will fare as badly as you
would at trying to preserve the beauty of a plum
or peach by rubbing off the bloom or down.

Now Burns is just as untranslatable to those who
are not familiar with the dialect in which he writes.
The flavor, the bloom of him cannot be fully relished
or perceived by any other nation than the Scotch.
He is their representative of what is deepest and
truest in them. ‘The Scotch,” says Charles Reade
in Christie Johnstone, ‘‘are icebergs with volcanoes
underneath; thaw the Scotch ice which is very cold,
and you shall get to the Scotch fire, warmer than
any sun of Italy or Spain.”

How magnificently Burns illustrates that. What
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fire, energy, and melting tenderness there 1s in him!
What bursts of joy or sorrow wrung from him, or
escaping from him as naturally as the sobs or the
laughter of children! What exquisite sensibilities,
nerves that thrill at sight of beauty or nobleness in
any form! He has some “favorite flowers in spring”’
which he views and hangs over “with particular de-
light; the mountain daisy, the hare-bell, the fox-
glove, the wild briar-rose, the budding birch, and the
hoary hawthorne.” He cannot hear ‘the loud sol-
itary whistle of the curlew in a summer noon, or the
wild mixing cadence of a troop of gray plover in an
autumnal morning without feeling an elevation of
soul like the enthusiasm of devotion or poetry.”
Nothing exalts him, enraptures him more than ‘to
walk in the sheltered side of a wood, or high plant:
ation, in a cloudy winter day, and hear the stormy
wind howling among the trees and raving over the
plain.” He listens to the birds and frequently turns
out of his path lest he ‘should disturb their little
songs or frighten them to another station.” His
great, child-like, tender heart beats with sympathy
even for the “wee, modest, crimson-tipped flower”
that his plough-share upturns. He spares the this-
tle because it is his country’semblem. He has even
'akindly thought for Auld Nickie Ben:

“O wad ye tak a thought an men’!
Ye aiblins might, I dinna ken,
Still hae a stake.
I’m wae to think upo’ yon den,
Ev'n for your sake.”
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. ‘201

But there is nothing maudlin and sentimental in
this tenderness; neither is it a mere luxury of the
fancy that, as in Wordsworth, is united with sterility
of heart. It is an overflowing of the richest, largest
social nature that has been bestowed on any poet
since Chaucer and Shakespeare. Burns loved his
fellow-men not because they were wise or good or
weak and needed his tenderness; he loved them
simply on the score of their being human.. He sings:

«A blessing on the cheery gang
Wha dearly like a jig or sang,
An’ never think o’ right an’ wrang

By square an’ rule,
But as the clegs o’ feeling stang
Are wise or fool.

We've faults and failings - granted clearly,
We're frail backsliding mortals merely,
Eve’s bonny squad, priests wyte them sheerly
For our grand fa’,
But still, but still, I like them dearly,
God bless them a’!”

It is this love which pours such a lava-tide of
life and passion into all his verse that it is impos-
sible to read it understandingly without a leaping of
the pulses and a quick springing of tears into the
eyes. Have you ever heard Scots wha hae wi
Wallace bled sung by Scotchmen, or witnessed the
breaking up of a Scotch social gathering with the
singing of Auld Lang Syne? If you have you
will understand how
202 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

“he haunts his native land
As an immortal youth; his hand S
Guides every plough;
He sits beside each ingle-nook,
His voice is in each running brook,
Each rustling bough.”

But if this large social nature is what endears him
to us, is what makes us shut our eyes to his faults and
screen him from censure, as we would screen a beau-
tiful, daring child, it is no less what made the trag-

‘edy of his life, and gave us, as Carlyle says, “no
more than a poor mutilated fraction of what was in
him, brief, broken, glimpses of a genius that could
never show itself complete; that wanted all things
for completeness; culture, leisure, true effort, nay,
even length of life.” Carlyle finds the great tragedy
of his life to lie not in the fact that he was poor,
that he had to toil like a galley slave, that he lacked
patrons, that the great Edinburgh world took him up
like a new and costly plaything, to be dropped when
the novelty wore off, but that he himself tried “to
mingle in friendly union the common spirit of the
world with the spirit of poetry, which is of a far
different and irreconcilable nature.” It is simply
the old Faust tragedy again, the joy-hunger of the
body fiercely demanding and finding recognition
at the peril of the higher nature. Think of him,
with his youth, his beautiful strength, and that
marvelous poetic gift! All the world eager to listen
to him, to shout, to laugh, to cry as he willed.
He could not enter a tavern at dead of night, but
what if it were whispered, ‘‘ Burns is here,” the news
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 203

ran like wild-fire, rousing every slumberer from
his bed and sending him down to the bar-room to
listen to the radiant newcomer, as if he had been a
heavenly messenger. And indeed, in one sense he
was such a messenger; only he lost sight of his mis-
sion, except at brief intervals. He forgot what Mil-
ton never did, that he, who would be a great poet,
must make his life a poem. Nature had endowed
him with her highest gift. She had put a jewel into
his hand for his keeping, for his adornment, and he
oftener chose to throw it aside for some tawdry,
gilded ornament. That was his life tragedy. He
was not true to his best self. He knew the value of
his gift even in early boyhood.

“FE ’en then, a wish, I mind its pow’r,
A wish that to my latest hour
Shall strongly heave my breast;
That I for poor auld Scotland’s sake
Some usefu’ plan or beuk could make,
Or sing a sang at least.”

The Vision is a beautiful and touching confession
of his consciousness of his mission. The muse of
poetry appears to him and covers him with holly,
and says:

“When ripened fields, and azure skies,
Called forth the reaper’s rustling noise,
I saw thee leave their evening joys

And lonely stalk,

To vent thy bosom’s swelling rise
In pensive walk.

When youthful love, warm-blushing, strong,
Keen shivering shot thy nerves along,
é

204 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

Those accents, grateful to thy tongue,
Th’ adored name
I taught thee how to pour in song,
To soothe thy flame.

I saw thy pulses maddening play,
Wild send thee pleasure’s devious way,
Misled by Fancy’s meteor-ray,
By passion driven;
But yet the light that led astray
Was light from Heaven.

Thou canst not learn, nor can I show
To paint with Thomson’s landscape glow;
Or wake the bosom melting throe
With Shenstone’s art;
Or pour, with Gray, the moving flow,
Warm on the heart.
Yet, all beneath the unrivall’d rose,
The lowly daisy sweetly blows;
Tho’ large the forest’s monarch throws
- His army shade, ©
Yet green the juicy hawthorn grows,
Adown the glade.
Then never murmur nor repine;
Strive:in thy humble sphere to shine; —
And, trust me, not Potosi’s mine,
Nor king's regard,
Can give a bliss o’er matching thine,
A rustic bard.”

Could he but have been contented with the bliss,
we should have no tears to shed over that early
blighted life, that early death, when “thoughtless
follies laid him low, and stained his name!’’ But
with the tears let there be no chiding. He himself
has taught us anew the charity that forgives much,
where there has been much love.
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 205

“Then gently scan your brother man,

Still gentler sister woman,

Though they may gang a kennin’ wrang,
To step aside is human;

One point must still be greatly dark,
The moving why they do it;

And just as lamely can ye mark
How far perhaps they rue it.

Who made the heart, ’tis He alone
Decidedly can try us,

He knows each chord, its various tone,
Each spring, its various bias;

Then at the balance let's be mute,
We never can adjust it;

What’s done we partly may compute,
But know not what’s resisted.”

And so forgetting his frailties, we will remember

his virtues. He ‘scorned to lie; he was generous

to a fault.
“Coin his pouches wad na bide in,
Wi’ him it ne’er was under hiding,
He dealt it free.’
He knew the beauty and nobleness of domestic

life and that

“To make a happy ntreside clime
To weans and wife,
That’s the true pathos and sublime
Of human life.”

He knew what toil and hardship and bitter dis-
appointment are and he bore them manfully. He
knew the worth and dignity of honest manhood
apart from all the trappings of wealth and the
veneering of polished manners. He was fearlessly
sincere; he spoke out and acted truly that which he
felt and thought. He gave of himself unstintingly
206 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

to all whom he met, and he left to his country a
legacy of songs, sweet, tender, inspiring, rapture-
filling, that will be sung as long as there are ears to
listen.

Burns’s best critics regard his Jolly Beggars as his
master-piece. Zam O'Shanter is a great favorite,
while all the world loves The Cotter’s Saturday Night.
The fidelity of its description is attested by the fol-
lowing anecdote: Mrs. Dunlop, a friend and admirer
of the poet, was making preparations to entertain
him, at which her housekeeper showed some wonder
and dissatisfaction, in consideration of the fact that
he did not belong to the gentry. To prove Burns’s
intellectual claim to attention, Mrs. Dunlop gaye her
The Cotter’s Saturday Night to read, and she returned
it with the following remark: ‘Gentlemen and
ladies may think muckle o’ this; but for me, it’s
naething but what I saw i’ my faither’s hoose every
day, an’ I dinna see hoo he could hae tell’t it ony
ither way.”

Four years ago, I walked from Ayr to Alloway,
a distance of three miles, to pay my tribute to Burns’s
memory by visiting his birthplace. The country
about Ayr is a beautiful farming district of green
rolling fields, and though it was the 4th of February,
men were already at the plough, and the ‘“gowan”
or Scotch daisy was beginning to whiten the turf.
Every lowly flower whispered Burns’s name to me,
and wh spered it more forcibly than the humble
thatched cottage in which he was born, which is
kept in so admirable a state of repair, and looks so
+
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 207

fresh and newly white-washed that it is difficult to
associate it with Burns and the eighteenth century.
And there is the mark of the tourist rather than of
Burns in the wee, one-windowed room in which he
was born, with its floor of large, stone flags, its old-
fashioned fire-place, row of blue dishes against the
wall, and small dark recess containing a bed. The
mark of the tourist is left on two tables in the room,
which are so hacked with initials that not a square
inch on them remains undefaced. A visiting and
refreshment room newly built onto the cottage fur-
ther destroys the illusion of association with the
poet, but it contains some interesting relics of him,
among which the most valuable are MS. poems. I
noticed under glass, some printed verses signed, ‘An
American,” lying over a framed print of Edinburgh
Castle which had belonged to Burns. Afterward I
learned they were Ingersoll’s verses. I also noticed
that framed tributes to Burns by our poets Halleck
and Longfellow hung on the wall. By the way,
read Longfellow’s verses, they are really exquisite.

Not far from the cottage stands ‘auld Alloway
kirk” of time-stained, graystone, roofless, ivy-cov-
ered, bearing the date 1516, but so tiny that to con-
ceive a dance of witches in it calls for a stretch of
‘the church as ample as the stretch of the imagina-
tion required to people it in this way. And here
again I found the poetical illusion of wierdness and
loneliness destroyed by broad daylight and the most
prosaic of handsome new churches just across the
street.
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However, the Doon, the bonny Doon, was flow-
ing not far away, just as it was when Burns rhymed on
its banks. I gathered snowdrops from the bank and
stooped down to lave my hand in the Doon waters.
“Ah !”’ remarked my guide, ‘You're an American.
All the Americans do that.” Now, just why all
Americans should do that I can’t tell, but it seemed
to me the most natural thing in the world to do, and
infinitely preferable to hacking one’s name, which
seems to me a very stupid and ill-bred thing to do.
But what a strange and wonderful charm is this, of
association, by which inanimate things take on a
spirit not their own and rise in value far beyond
their intrinsic worth. It is said that Walter
Scott has given to certain otherwise undesirable
tracts of land in Scotland a high commercial value,
by the romantic interest he has attached to them in
poetry or novels.

Have you read Scott’s novels? I see you have
been reading Marmion, for you quote that pretty
sentiment, ‘‘O woman, in our hours of ease, uncer-
tain, coy, and hard to please,” etc. But do you
know Scott as a novelist ? If you don’t, begin to
make his acquaintance at once. You are of the right
age to enjoy him. If you wait until you are maturer
you may find your interest in old castles and roman-
tic adventures on the wane. You may wish to take
your history and fiction separately, and you will miss
the pleasure of growing up with some characters
you cannot afford not to know. Better far miss
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knowing anything about Trilby, or Katherine Lauder-
dale, or Marcella, than miss knowing Jeanie Deans,
Dominie Sampson, Meg Merrilies, and a score of
others who will still be walking among men hale and
hearty when Trilby’s feet are dust and ashes. I
sometimes feel very sorry for the children of to-
day, for whom children’s magazines and count-
less children’s books leave no time or no desire to
get acquainted with those immortal classics that as
much belong to childhood as their right to dream
and loveand be happy: Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson
Crusoe, Don Quixote, Arabian Nights, Gulliver's Travels,
Paul and Virginia, The Vicar of Wakefield, and
Walter Scott’s novels. I dare say I’ve omitted as
many equally good, but these are the books that
occur to me on the spur of the moment, and on
which I should base a child’s literary taste. No boy
or girl should reach thirteen without knowing
them as he or she knows the multiplication table.
The heroes and heroines of these books should
be the companions of their solitude, hardly less
real or dear than those of their social pleasures.
One can’t make up in later life for the loss of this
early companionship. The taste and imagination
are wanting. ‘When I was a boy,” said Thackeray,
“T wanted some taffy, but I hadn’tashilling. When
I was a man I had the shilling, but I didn’t want the
taffy.” Life’s golden hours are made up of the
happy conjunction of taste and opportunity. “Let
us not divorce them, if we can help it. . You are

14 -
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now able to enjoy and thoroughly enjoy Walter
Scott, and let me conjure you not to put off the
enjoyment.

You have given me a careful outline of the main
features of Scott’s biography and it is unnecessary
for me to repeat it. Neither is it necessary for me
to attempt a critical analysis of Scott’s work. That
has been admirably done by Carlyle, to whose essay
on Scott I refer you as the most impartial judgment
that has as yet been pronounced upon him. I shall
content myself with trying to give you a faithful
picture of the man Scott, his tastes, his habits, and
character, and I shall draw my material from Lock-
hart’s admirable biography. Lockhart was, as you
know, Scott’s son-in-law and so had the best oppor-
tunity in the world to study the great novelist.

If I could choose an author with whom to spend
the day and I could choose but one, he should be
Walter Scott. Here at least is a great genius who
leaves nothing to be desired in the man. He has as
much natural kindliness, sincerity, and modesty, as
many of the homely domestic virtues and qualities
of a whole-souled friend, as if he had been nothing
but an honest, healthy, well-to-do, good-natured
country farmer. You think that strange praise. Not
at all. Geniuses, as Thomas Carlyle’s mother said
of him, are “‘gey ill to deal wi’.”’ They are irascible,
and not to be depended on. They live in two
worlds which refuse to be reconciled, the ideal and
the real. Their desires out-run all possibility of
human gratification. They have microscopic eyes.
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 2u1

The little becomes infinitely great to them and the
invisible, visible. Suppose your eyes were so con-
structed that you could see in every glassful of
water you carried to your lips, in every morsel of
food set before your eyes, the millions of wriggling
animalcula that live in it. What nausea you would
feel, how quickly you would turn away disgusted
from the fairest table. Something of this micro-
scopic power of looking into life and finding its
horrors belongs to genius in its less healthy mani-
festations. A compensatory gift is added to be sure,
the gift of veiling all these horrors with the finest,
the most beautiful of dream tissues, that turns all
earthly objects into beatific visions. Hence those
unaccountable moods of genius, cloud-soarings
alternating with mud-baths, or as a Scotch woman
once said to me of her brilliant husband, they are
either ‘a’ honey or a’ dirt.”

Sainte Beuve offers some good advice to women
who are given to exalted worship of men of
genius, and I can’t forbear inserting it here. ‘If
you are woman, if you are wise, and if your heart, in
kindling into love, can still give itself time to choose,
listen to some counsel: love neither Voltaire nor
Jean Jacques, nor Goethe nor Chateaubriand, if per-
chance you happen to meet such great men on your
way. Love—whomthen? Love him who tenderly
and fully loves you in return; love him who has
offered you a whole heart even if he have not a
celebrated name, and can only call himself ‘le
chevalier Des Grieux.’ One of the good Des Grieux
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and a wise Manon—there is the ideal of those who
know how to be happy in obscurity; glory enters
privacy but to spoil all.”

Sir Walter Scott did not belong to the list of
geniuses Sainte Beuve gives. He had none of their
exaltations, their nervous see-saws of ecstasy and
agony. He was the “douce guid man” from
beginning to end. If you want to read the sweetest,
lightest, and most suggestive sketch ever made of
him, read the introductory part of Dr. John Brown's
beautiful little memoir of Marjorie Fleming.
There.you see him with his tall figure, broad shoul-
ders, free stride in spite of the slight limp, the long
head, large sensitive mouth, and kindly eyes, and if
you're a very little girl you’d give anything in the
world to be wee Marjorie wrapped up in his
plaidie. There is in this sketch an expression of
heartiness and homely kindness which all those
who have seen Sir Walter agree in giving him.
Joanna Baillie, the dramatist, almost forgotten now,
says when asked what her first impression of Scott
was: ‘I was at first a little disappointed, for I was
fresh from the Zay, and had pictured to myself an
ideal elegance and refinement of feature ; but I said
to myself, if I had been in a crowd, and at a loss
what to do, I should have fixed upon that face
among a thousand, as the sure index of the benevo-
lence and the shrewdness that would and could help
me in my strait. We had not talked long, however,
before I saw inthe expressive play of his countenance
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 213

far more even of elegance and refinement than I had
missed in its mere lines.”

Here is a more finished picture of him by Miss
Seward, the poetess: ‘On Friday last the poetic-
ally great Walter Scott came ‘like a sunbeam
to my dwelling.’ This proudest boast of the Cale-
donian muse is tall, and rather robust than slender,
but lame in the same manner as Mr, Hayley, and in
greater measure. Neither the contour of his face,
nor yet his features, is elegant; his complexion
healthy, and somewhat fair, without bloom. We
find the singularity of brown hair and eye-lashes
with tlaxen eye brows, and a countenance open,
ingenuous, and benevolent. When seriously con-
versing, or earnestly attentive, though his eyes are
rather of a lightish grey, deep thought is on their
lids. He contracts his brows, and the rays of
genius gleam aslant from the orbs beneath them.
An upper lip too long prevents his mouth from
being decidedly handsome, but the sweetest emana-
tions of temper and heart play about it when he
talks cheerfully or smiles, and in company he is
much oftener gay than contemplative. His con-
versation, an overflowing fountain of brilliant wit,
apposite allusion and playful archness, while on
serious themes it is nervous and eloquent, the
accent decidedly Scotch, yet by no means broad.
On the whole, no expectation is disappointed which
his poetry must excite in all who feel the power and
graces of human inspiration. Not less astonishing
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than was Johnson’s memory is that of Mr. Scott.
Like Johnson also, his recitation is too monotonous
and violent to do justice either to his own writings
or those of others. The stranger guest delighted us
all by the unaffected charms of his mind and
manners.”

The same simplicity of manner, the same whole-
souled kindliness characterized his behavior with
his inferiors. He chatted with his coachman if he
chanced to sit beside him, or with his footman if he
rambled; he held it a duty to see that any young
boy in his service should have some time for self-
improvement, and made him come to his library
once a week to show his copy-book and answer
questions as to what he had been learning. He was
exquisitely delicate in his treatment of the poor, and
resented like a personal injury any form of alms-
giving or interference in their domestic habits which
would tend to lessen their personal respect or inde-
pendence. ‘I dislike all such interference,” he
said, “all your domiciliary, kind, impertinent visits;
they are all pretty much felt like insults, and do no
manner of good; let people go on in their own way
in God’s name. . . . . And take care not to
give them anything gratis; except when they are
under the gripe of immediate misery, what they
think misery. Consider it as a sin to do anything
that can tend to make them lose the precious feel-
ings of independence. For my part, I very, very
rarely give anything away. Now, for instance; this
pile of branches which has been thinned out this
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morning is placed here for sale for the poor
people’s fires, and I am perfectly certain they are
more grateful to me for selling it at the price I do
(which you may be sure is no great matter) than if
I were to give them ten times the quantity for noth-
ing. Every shilling collected in this and other
similar manner goes to a fund which pays the
doctor for his attendance on them when they are
sick; and this is my notion of charity.”

What an altogether beautiful notion of charity
that seems to me. It is the veritable hiding from
the left hand what the right hand doeth. A form
of charity that jealously guards what is best in a
man, his self-respect, his right to look another man
in the face and say, “I’ve earned what you've
given me.” This unostentatious charity that
scorned to draw attention to itself at the expense
of humiliation to its object, sprang from a deep and
reverent love forthe people. ‘I have read books
enough,” he said on one occasion, ‘‘and observed
and conversed with enough of eminent and splen-
didly cultivated minds, too, in my time; but I as-
sure you, I have heard higher sentiments from the
lips of poor, uneducated men and women, when ex-
erting the spirit of severe yet gentle heroism under
difficulties and afflictions, or speaking their simple
thoughts as to circumstances in the lot of friends
and neighbors, than I ever yet met with out of the
pages of the Bible. We shall never learn to feel
and respect our real calling and destiny, unless we
have taught ourselves to consider everything as
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moonshine compared with the education of the
heart.”

He had taught himself that lesson well. Per-
haps no man of genius ever thought less highly of
his own gifts, or set less value on literary fame than
Sir Walter Scott. He had not the slightest con-
sciousness that what he did so easily was at all
remarkable, and until the public approved never
knew whether he had written well or ill. Literature
in itself he regarded as a thing of far less import-
ance than the affairs of practical and political life.
He preferred to talk of men and events rather than
of books and criticism, and indeed his literary judg-
ment was by no means infallible. He often recom-
mended to his publishers books that proved dis-
astrous failures, so that one of them, Constable, was
wont to remark, “I like well Scott’s ‘ain bairns,’ but
Heaven preserve me from those of his fathering.”

Even his own children in their early life were
unconscious of his claims to distinction. Ballantyne
relates that going into Scott’s library one day shortly
after the publication of the Lady of the Lake he
found young Sophia Scott there alone. ‘Well, Miss
Sophia,” he said, “how do you like the Lady of the
Lake?” “Oh, I haven’t read it,’’ was the artless
reply, “papa says there’s nothing so bad for young
people as reading bad poetry.”

One day young Walter, Scott’s oldest boy, came
home from school with stains of tears and blood on
his cheeks. ‘‘Well, Wat,” asked his father, “what
have you been fighting about today?’ The boy
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 217

blushed and finally stammered out that “he had
been called a ‘lassie.’”” ‘Indeed,” said Mrs. Scott,
“that was a terrible mischief, to be sure.” “You
may say what you please, Mamma,” answered the
boy, “but I dinna think there’s a waufer (shabbier)
thing in the world than to be a lassie to sit boring
at a clout.” On questioning him further it turned
out that somebody had called him the Lady of the
Lake, and not at all understanding the allusion he
had taken it for a mortal insult and revenged him-
self as best he could.

You need hardly be told that Scott’s favorite read-
ing was romances, tales of chivalry and old ballads,
and that he loved old relics, old castles, that he
loved to ramble about the country noting with a
curious eye the form of rock, the kind of flowers
that grew in any spot on which he wished to fasten
a story. His enjoyment of the most beautiful
scenery was never complete until he could associate
some legend with it. And where he could not find
a story he made one, until at last all Scotland was
like a fairy book to him. And how he loved it.
“Tf I didn’t see the heather at least once a year, I
think I should die,” he says. All his enjoyments
were of a hearty and robust nature. His senses
were by no means delicate. Lockhart asserts that
he has “seen him stare about quite unconscious of
the cause when his whole company betrayed their
uneasiness at the approach of an over-kept haunch
of venison, and neither by the nose nor the palate
could he distinguish corked wine from sound. He
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could never tell Madeira from sherry.
Port he considered as physic. . . . . In
truth he liked no wines except sparkling champagne
and claret . . . . and sincerely preferred a
tumbler of whisky toddy to the most precious ‘ liquid
ruby’ that ever flowed in the cup of a prince.”’
Neither had he what musicians call an ear for
music. He could not distinguish one tune from
another, unless it was some familiar Scotch air. “I
do not know,” he says, ‘‘and cannot utter a note of
music, and complicated harmonies seem to me a
babble of confused though pleasing sounds. Yet
simple melodies, especially if connected with words
and ideas, have as much effect on me as on most
people. But then I hate to hear a young person sing
without feeling and expression suited to the song.
I cannot bear a voice that has no more life in it than
a piano-forte or a bugle-horn. There is about all
the fine arts a something of soul and spirit, which
like the vital principle in man, defies the research of
the most critical anatomist. You feel where it is
not, yet you cannot describe what it is you want.”
Sir Walter Scott was a tireless worker. His great
maxim was ‘never to be doing nothing.” He con-
sidered thirty printed pages a day’s work, and when
I tell you that Thackeray, who was by no means a
slow writer, regarded six printed pages a good day’s
work, you can understand some of Scott’s phe-
nomenal facility. And with all that work remember
at Abbotsford he was host to all England and
Scotland, and that, at some time during the day, he
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 219

had to meet and entertain a ceaseless influx of
guests, either friends, celebrities of the day, or
inquisitive tourists. Among his guests was our
Washington Irving, who has left a charming record
of his impressions. Indeed, nobody who ever
met him has given us any other idea of him than
that of a man of remarkable sense, unaffected kind-
ness, and winning charm of manners; aman easy to
meet, to love, and to trust.

As it was my intention simply to give you some
idea of the man, and not the writer, I shall conclude
what I have to say by telling you what Lockhart
says of him as a father. He had four children, two
boys and two girls. As soon as they were old
enough to prattle and find their way into the
study, they had free access to it, and if they begged
a story he was always ready to lay down his pen,
take them on his knee and tell them a legend or
recite a ballad. He attached little importance to
the regular system of education, but everything to
gratifying a curiosity or interest aroused in the
child’s mind. Sucha curiosity or interest he regarded
as a mental appetite and a sign that the mind was
ready to digest and be nourished by what it was
offered then. ‘He detested and despised the whole
generation of modern children’s books, in which the
attempt is made to convey accurate notions of
scientific minutiz,” but delighted in those that ap-
peal to the imagination and convey instruction by
arousing an interest. He had himself a marvelous
memory, and he exercised the memory of his
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children by requiring them to learn passages of
popular verse. He cared very little for mere ex-
ternal accomplishments in either girl or boy. He
liked to hear his daughters sing an old ditty, but if
it were sung with feeling he cared nothing about the
technical execution. He cared, however, a great
deal about their love of horsemanship, and he made
them all fearless riders. He used to say, ‘‘Without
courage there cannot be truth; and without truth
there can be no other virtue.” ‘He had a horror of
boarding-schools,” continues Lockhart; “never
allowed his girls to learn anything out of his own
house, and chose their governess . . . . with
far greater regard to her kind, good temper and
excellent moral and religious principles than to the
measure of her attainments in what are called
fashionable accomplishments. The admirable system
of education for boys in Scotland combines all the
advantages of public and private instruction; his,
carried their satchels to the high school, when the
family was in Edinburgh, just as he had done before
them, and shared, of course, the evening society of
their happy home. But he rarely if ever left them
in town when he could himself be in the country,
and at Ashestiel he was, for better or worse, his
eldest boy’s daily tutor after he began Latin.”

I ought not to finish my letter without saying a
word of the unflinching courage with which Scott
met the ruin of his fortunes just as old age was
creeping on. Dante in his exile, Tasso in a mad-
house, Milton friendless and blind, do not pre-
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 221

sent to my mind a more pitiable spectacle than that
of Scott sitting quietly down in the midst of heavy
personal affliction (his wife died at this time) and
growing infirmities to write himself clear of debt.
In the hey-day of his glory, when Waverley was
going to the press, Lockhart relates that a company
of young men were carousing one night when one
of them suddenly looked grave. One of his com-
panions asked him if he were ill. ‘‘No,” said he,
“T shall be well enough presently, if you will only
let me sit where you are, and take my chair; for
there is a confounded hand in sight of me here,
which has often bothered me before, and now it
won't let me fill my glass with a good will.’ The
friend rose to exchange places and he “pointed out
this hand, which like the writing on Belshazzar’s
wall, disturbed his hour of hilarity.”

““Since we sat down,” he said, ‘I have been
watching it; it fascinates my eye; it never stops;
page after page is finished and thrown on the heap
of MS., and still it goes on unwearied; and so it
will be till candles are brought in, and God knows
how long after that. It is the same every night;
I can’t stand the sight of it when 1 am not at
my books.” “Some stupid, dogged, engrossing
clerk probably,” suggested one of the young men.
“No, boys, I well know what hand it is, ’tis Walter
Scott’s.”

If there is something touching in the thought of
this strong, unwearied hand working faithfully on at
its solitary task, what shall I say of the same hand,
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chilblained from working in the cold, benumbed
with the premonitions of a paralytic seizure, guided
by eyes no longer young and strong, but dimming
with age, inspired no longer by hope and youthful
joy in its task, but driven by the courage of an
indomitable heart that is fighting despair ?

The fine, healthy physique was failing, the vig-
orous mind was losing its self-poise and strength.
He felt it and writes in his diary: ‘My nerves
have for these two or three last days been susceptible
of an acute excitement from the slightest causes; the
beauty of the evening, the sighing of the summer
breeze, bring the tears into my eyes not unpleasantly.
But I must take exercise, and case-harden myself.
There is no use in encouraging these moods of the
mind.”

His physicians recognized the perilous condition
he was in and begged him to rest. ‘As for bidding
me not work,” he replied, ‘“Molly might as well put
the kettle on the fire and say, ‘Now, don’t boil.’”’

The time came, however, when the exhausted
brain refused to obey the tireless hand, and the
enchantments of the ‘Great Wizard” became some-
thing to remember and to witness no more. But I
do not wish to dwell on this sad close to so brilliant
a career. I wish you rather to carry about with you
the memory of a great genius who never forgot to
be first of all, the noblest, kindest, truest, and friend-
liest of men; a man who never made his great gifts
an excuse for eccentricities, immoralities, or egotisms;
who never shirked a duty as father, husband, son, or
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 223

friend ; who was tried by misfortune and met it

, heroically; and who, dying, left the world his debtor.

Wordsworth and the Lake School will occupy our
attention after the last lesson I assigned you.
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LETTER XIX.

OMEWHERE in Henri Amiel’s Journal these
words are to be found: ‘To understand
things, we must have been once in them and then
have come out of them; so that first there must be
captivity and then deliverance, illusion followed by
disillusion, enthusiasm by disappointment. He who
is still under the spell and he who has never felt
the spell are equally incompetent. We only know
well what we have first believed, then judged. To
understand, we must be free, yet not have been
always free. The same truth holds whether it is a
question of love, of art, of religion, or of patriotism.
Sympathy is a first condition of criticism; reason
and justice presuppose at their origin, emotion.”
I quote these words as a plea for the right to
. offer any judgment of Lord Byron which may seem
harsh or unjust to you, or incompatible with your
ownenthusiasm. At yourageI thought Lord Byron
the prince of poets. If I was not silly enough to
write ‘‘sweet man” and underscore it heavily on the
margin of my text-book where his name appeared,
as some of my girl-pupils have done, it was-not be-
cause I had not an exalted opinion of him, but be-
cause it never occurred to me to express my ad-
miration in that way. In fact, I should have
thought it, as I do now, a very insipid and altogether
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 225

inadequate expression. It was not any sweetness
in Lord Byron that attracted me. It was the inex-
plicable mystery of his deep-seated melancholy; it
was the passionate outpourings of his ulcered heart;
ulcered why? I incessantly asked myself; and the
image of his pale, proud, beautiful face, disfigured at
times by traces of ‘‘unutterable thoughts,” that caught
my fancy and stirred me to sobs and tears when I
read him. You see, therefore, that I can quite under-
stand the charm which Lord Byron has for youthful
and inexperienced minds. That which we do not
understand awes and attracts us ; that which appeals to
the secret and passionate longings of our own hearts,
that which expresses the vague and unsatisfied am-
bitions which torment us, is sure of an eager atten-
tion. Byron speaks, as, indeed, no other poet
does, to all these tumultuous emotions. He touches
the chords of unhappy love; he gives language to
the nausea of life and vehement rage that follow
disillusionment, whether it result from satiety or
from hopes deceived; he gives fearless utterance to
the rebellion of the soul against the shackles of
conventionality that stifle thought and feeling. In
short, he is the poet of youth in its feverish, ambi-
tious moods, with its covetous eyes fixed on—the
moon; of senseless, rebellious youth, with its scorn-
ful disdain of its two good legs and its passionate
longing for wings. He will be read as long as
youth is fiercely restless and self-tormenting, and
enjoyed in proportion as experience does not de-
stroy the poetical veil that covers his defects and
15
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narrowness. But when experience begins her re-
morseless work, when the veil is pierced by the
light of reason, what a sad plight poor Byron is left
in. I have just put down Moore’s life of him.
What a half-mad, fitfully inspired charlatan he was.
What a poser for effects. That pale, proud, beauti-
ful face was as much a work of art as one of
Raphael’s saints. What an agony of sea-biscuit
and water or vinegar and potato diet is heroically
submitted to in order to change the chubby-faced,
unwieldy youth into a pale and interesting creature.
No society belle was ever vainer than he of his
handsome face and small white hands. His fore-
head was narrow but high, and he shaved his hair
from his temples to increase its height. His eyes
were of a light bluish-gray and wonderfully express-
ive. As for the color of his hair, Moore calls it
dark-brown, but he admits descriptions of Byron in
which it is variously spoken of as auburn, black, and
even flaxen. So you may take your choice of
color, only be sure to make it very soft and very
curly.

His head was remarkably small. Col. Napier
relates that he and a number of men, at a dinner-
party one day, tried on Byron’s hat and, in a com-
pany of twelve or fourteen persons, not one could
put it on, so exceedingly small was his head. At
last Napier tried it on his servant, who had the small-
est head in the Ninetieth Regiment (so small that
he could hardly get a cap to fit him) and him
Byron’s hat fitted exactly. Byron was five feet
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 227

eight and a half inches high. His right foot was
deformed, but he wore his trousers long to conceal
it, and, except for his lameness in walking, the
deformity was hardly noticeable. Yet it is not too
much to say that his whole life was embittered by
this misfortune. He could not endure the slightest
allusion to it, even when a mere child in petticoats,
and once struck his nurse with a whip, crying, ““Dinna
speak of it!” when he overheard her commenting
on his lameness to a companion. That Scotch word
“dinna” will remind you that his mother was a
Scotchwoman, and, though he was born in London,
he spent his childhood at Aberdeen, where the
inhabitants still point out with pride the lodgings in
which Mrs. Byron lived, and where a relic of him,
commemorating one of his childish rages, is pre-
served in the form of a saucer from which he had
bitten out a piece. Youare well aware that he came
honestly by his ungovernable temper. His mother
was a virago (‘You know you are a vixen,” he writes
to her once); a short, fat woman with a rolling gait;
an ignorant, ugly woman, who quarreled with every-
body in general and her sonin particular. There is
something very sad, very ignoble, in the picture that
is given us of their relations to one another, and one
cannot help thinking that, with a wise, patient, loving
mother, this strangely-gifted boy might have devel-
oped into quite another Lord Byron. As it was, he
quite despised, and at times even hated, his mother,
and spoke contemptuously and bitterly of her, as
“that upas tree, that antidote to the arts,” “ Byron,
228 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

your mother is a fool,” said one of his school-fellows
to him. ‘I know it,” bitterly answered the boy.

He was very shy and solitary as a boy, and an
indefatigable reader ; but he was a poor student at
school, always near or at the foot of his class, and
regarded as an idle boy who would never learn any-
thing. But he was, for all that, a very uncommon
boy. He showed unusual sensitiveness, and extraor-
dinary ardor and generosity in his friendships.
You have doubtless heard how he offered his own
arm to a great bully who was beating the inner,
fleshy part of his young friend, Peel’s, arm, and asked
to take half the punishment for him. His friend-
ships, he said, were passions. Indeed, he was all his
life a prey to excessive emotions. His mother used
frequently to say that he was very like Rousseau,
and, although he disclaimed the likeness and even
went so far as to draw up a list of differences be-
tween himself and the great French sentimentalist,
he undoubtedly belonged to the same intellectual
class. And, as there is nothing either profitable or
amusing in the record of excesses and irregularities
that make up Byron’s life, perhaps I cannot do better
than to try to give you some idea of the character-
istics of this class. '

This class includes those writers who are afflicted
with what Sainte Beuve calls, after Chateaubriand’s
hero, la maladie de René, the malady of René,
and whose symptoms he thus admirably defines:
“What is this malady? . . . The malady of
René is disgust with life, inactivity, and the abuse of
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 229

reverie; a proud sentiment of isolation, of believing
one’s self misunderstood, of despising the world and
ordinary ways, of judging them unworthy of one’s
self, of esteeming one’s self the most disconsolate of
men, while at the same time loving one’s wretch-
edness.”

At bottom this malady is physical, for a man’s
intellect is not a power independent of his physical
condition; it is as much an outgrowth of it as the
fruit is of the tree or the flower of the plant. This
malady, then, proceeds from a morbid sensitiveness
of the nervous system, by which effects are produced
which are out of all proportion to the stimuli. The
patient laughs or cries, goes into convulsions, or is
seized with despair by trifles that would hardly
excite an emotion in a healthy condition of the
nerves. If you have ever been ill you will recall
how easily you were moved to tears in your con-
valescence; and you remember that I quoted in your
last letter Sir Walter Scott’s consciousness of his
weakness by his increased excitability. You will
observe the same excitability, the same ready tears
and laughter, in hysterical women. It was on Byron’s
hysteria that his wife based one of her charges
against his sanity. She had seen him in convulsions
on witnessing Kean’s performance of Sz Giles Over-
reach, Writing to his publisher, Murray, from
Bologna, he says, ‘I do not know how far I may
be able to reply to your letter, for I am not very
well to-day. Last night I went to the representation
of Alfieri’s Mirra, the last two acts of which threw
230 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

me into convulsions. I do not mean by that word
a lady’s hysterics, but the agony of reluctant tears
and the choking shudder which I do not often under-
go for fiction. This is but the second time for any-
thing under reality. The first was on seeing Kean’s
Siy Giles Overreach, The worst was that the
dama in whose box I was, went off in the same way,
Treally believe more from fright than from any
other sympathy, at least with the players. But she
has been ill and I have been ill, and we are all
languid and pathetic this morning, with great
expenditure of sal-volatile.”’

Sal-volatile! Can you associate sal-volatile with
Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, or any of the older
giants in literature, Homer, Virgil? Not a bit of it;
they are a thousand leagues from sal-volatile and
hysterics.

Byron had a consciousness of mental unsound-
ness. Twice in his journal appears this gloomy
reflection: ‘I feel a something which makes me
think that, if I ever reach near to old age, like Swift,
‘I shall die at top first’ Only I do not dread
idiotism or madness as much as he does.”

Now that which is in the man reappears in his
poetry, which, however powerful and beautiful in
parts, is, as a whole, decidedly unsound. As I have
explained to you before, that literature which ex-
presses misanthropy, disgust with life, and a perverted
moral sense, is immeasurably inferior to the serene,
hopeful, impersonal literature that points us to what
is beautiful and strong in life. The eye that looks
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 231

outward sees farther than the eye that looks in, or,
as Dr.John Brown has it, ‘It is the man who takes
in who can give out. The man who does not do
the one soon takes to spinning his own fancies out
of his interior, like a spider, and he snares himself
at last as well as his victim. It is the bee that
makes honey, and it is out of the eater that there
comes forth meat, out of the strong that there comes
forth sweetness.”

Byron spun from his own interior, and he finished
by snaring himself and his readers. Speaking of
Werther, Goethe said one day, ‘‘What makes that
book dangerous is to have weakness depicted as a
force.” There is the snare that Byron lays. He
continually pictures weakness as force. He throws
the magic of poetry over the sentiments of a worn-
out debauchee. What is there in reality more poet-
ical or touching in the satiety of a pleasure-gorged
man than in a fit of acute dyspepsia brought on by
gross gluttony? Here is the profound and mys-
terious secret of the ulcered heart that tormented
my girlish imagination, and what a piece of vul-
garity it turns out to be! And what right had he
to make it appear anything but vulgar? It seems
to me that the two greatest offences an author can
commit are to make the wrong seem beautiful, or
the right ugly. Byron committed both these of-
fences, but he suffered terribly for them, and it is
sufficient to have pointed them out to you. I need
not dwell on them longer. JI turn with far greater
pleasure to what in him deserves to live, and there
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is much in him that merits that. ‘Along with his as-
tounding power and passion,” says Matthew Arnold,
‘he had a strong and deep sense for what is beauti-
ful in nature and for what is beautiful in human
action and suffering. When he warms to his work,
when he is inspired, Nature herself seems to take
the pen from him as she took it from Wordsworth,
though in a different fashion, with her own pene-
trating simplicity. Goethe has well observed of
Byron that when he is at his happiest his represen-
tation of things is as easy and real as if he were
improvising.

In Percy Bysshe Shelley we have another typical
example of the class to which Byron belongs, that
morbidly emotional, discontented, rebellious class
that, as Byron said of himself, torment themselves
and everybody who comes in contact with them.
Shelley differed from Byron, however, in being
more entirely subject to his imagination. He
reasoned with his heart, not his head, and, as it was
the most inflammable of hearts, you can imagine what
sad work he made of attempting to reconstruct the
world according to its dictates. He was an uncom-
promising apostle of individual freedom. He
annihilated law and duty in one word, desire. He
had fine dreams about making earth a heaven, but
Satan himself could not have suggested better
methods than he of making it a hell. If he could,
he would have destroyed religious faiths, broken up
domestic life, substituted anarchy for government,
and the rule of desire for that of reason. There
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 233

are too many sickening disclosures to be made in a
truthful record of his short life for me to wish to
give you its details. But you may read, if you like,
Matthew Arnold’s Essay on Shelley.

That lawless imagination and susceptible heart
which made so bad, so fatal a reasoner of him, made
him a great poet for those who can enjoy poetry
that will not bear rough handling, but is as delicate
as the dust on a butterfly’s wing. Clouds, mist,
moonlight, music of the night winds, star showers,
unexpanded buds, rainbows, bird songs, these are
the materials out of which his best poetry is made.
And by his best poetry I mean that in which he is
not setting his rebellious theories to music. But
beautiful and full of color and grace as the material
is, it is too ethereal, too unsubstantial for ‘‘ human ,
nature’s daily food.” We demand something more
robust. Fo this reason Shelley never has been, nor
ever will be, a popular poet. He will remain what
he has always been, an intellectual luxury or dainty,
to be sipped or tasted for his delicate flavor, and
not his nutritive qualities.

About the same thing might be said of Keats, a
contemporary of Byron and Shelley, who died of
consumption in his twenty-fifth year. Only we might
say of him that he is rather the promise of a great
poet than the fulfilment of one. S¢ Agnes Eve seems
to me quite the best thing he has written.

Keats’ first publication was very severely criticised
by William Gifford of the Quarterly Review, and it
undoubtedly deserved criticism. ‘‘ The Endymion,”
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says De Quincey, “displays absolutely the most
shocking revolt against good sense and just feeling
that all literature does now or ever can furnish.

As reasonably and hopefully might a man undertake
an epic poem upon the loves of two butterflies. The
modes of existence of the two parties, the love-fable
of the Endymion, their relations to each other and
to us, their prospects finally, and the obstacles to
the instant realization of these prospects, all these
things are more vague and incomprehensible than
the reveries of an oyster. Still the unhappy subject
and its unhappy expansion must be laid to the
account of childish years and childish inexperience.
But there is another fault in Keats of the first mag-
nitude, which youth does not palliate, which youth
even aggravates.” I stop here to beg you to give
close attention to what follows. It is of a piece
with what I have been trying to impress you since
we began our work together, namely, the importance
of a correct use of your mother-tongue. ‘ This
[Keats other fault] lies in the shocking abuse of
his mother-tongue. If there is one thing in this
world that next after the flag of his country and its
spotless honor should be wholly in the eyes of a
young poet, it is the language of his country. He
should spend the third part of his life in studying
this language and cultivating its total resources.
He should be willing to pluck out his right eye, or
to circumnavigate the globe, if by such a sacrifice
or by such an exertion he could attain to greater
purity, precision, compass, or idiomatic energy of
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 235

diction. This, he should do if he were even a Kal-
muck Tartar, who, by the way, has the good feeling
and patriotism to pride himself upon his beastly
language. But Keats was an Englishman; Keats
had the honor to speak the language of Chaucer,
Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, Newton. The more
awful was the obligation of his allegiance, and yet
upon this mother-tongue, upon this English language
has Keats trampled as with the hoofs of a buffalo;
with its syntax, with its prosody, with its idiom, he
has played such fantastic tricks, as could enter only
into the heart of a barbarian, and for which only
the anarchy of chaos could furnish a forgiving
audience.”

The topic following Wordsworth will be Modern
Criticism. Please let me know what you can of
Macaulay, Carlyle, De Quincey, Lamb, and Mat-
thew Arnold.
236 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

LETTER XX.

O you like Tom Moore, “the wee bit bodie wi’

the pawkie een,” as a Scotchman once called
him. Well, he is likeable, and for the sake of The
Last Rose of Summer, Those Evening Bells, and Oft in
the Stilly Night, you are inclined to quarrel with the
critic who says ‘his muse is a spangled dancing
girl, light, airy, graceful, but nothing more.” And
yet the critic is right. I see you shake your head,
and I fancy you are putting me into a prim, black
mohair gown; you won't allow me a puff on the
sleeve, nor a suggestion of /a mode in the bodice;
you are forcing spectacles on me, and plastering my
hair down smooth over my ears, all because I can’t
see Tom Moore with the eyes of eighteen, nor join
you in singing with him:

“They may rail at this life; from the hour I began it,
I found it a life full of kindness and bliss;
And until they can show me some happier planet,
More social and bright, I'll content me with this;
As long as the world has such lips and such eyes,
As before me this moment enraptured I see,

They may say what they will of their orbs in the skies,
But this is the planet, for you, love, and me.”

A merry jingle, that is, one can’t help smiling
nor being put into good-humor in hearing it. It is

first-rate drawing-room poetry, where good-humor
and smiles have an almost marketable value; and I
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 237

can’t imagine anything pleasanter than to have heard
Tom Moore singing it at some social gathering. It
is said that he had a remarkably sweet voice, and
that with all his social gifts and the flattery lavished
upon him, he was a very unaffected, modest, and
lovable little man. Scott liked him, so did Byron,
so did the social world, and so did scores of senti-
mental young women who wrote him effusively
grateful epistles for some of the most touching of
his Zrish Melodies. But for all that, he is a hundred
fathoms below such men as Scott, Byron, Burns,
Goldsmith, Cowper, Gray. He is to them what the
music of a fandango is to a symphony of Beetho-
ven. He did not live deeply enough to be a great
poet. ‘A life full of kindness and bliss” is not a
life that furnishes the richest materials for poetry,
any more than sunshine without rain will give flesh,
juiciness and brilliant coloring to the apple or peach.

In the old Scandinavian mythology, the ash-tree
Yegdrasill, that supports the universe, has three roots,
one of which extends into Asgard, the home of the
gods; another, into Jotunheim, where the giants
dwell; and the third, into Niflheim, the region of
darkness and cold.

The best poetry as well as the best prose that
carries in itself the noble thought which nourishes
the human spirit, is triple-rooted like this mythical
ash-tree. It reaches upward to the god-like, it
embraces the humanly strong, and it knows despair
and agony and shuddering fear; the heights and the
depths of life. The poetry of Moore is not thus
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triple-rooted. It penetrates little below the surface
of things. It lacks seriousness and strength. It
is a poetry to dance and sing by, but not a poetry
to live by. To one who knows what depth and ten-
derness in poetry are, he is as unsatisfactory as a
stick of barley sugar to a hungry man.

I point you to a higher poetry when I name
Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Ruskin calls Aurora
Leigh the greatest poem of the nineteenth century,
and though it cannot merit that praise in the cen-
tury that produced Faust, it certainly deserves and
holds a high rank in it.

In her dedication of the poem to her cousin, John
Kenyon, Mrs. Browning calls it ‘the most mature
of my works, the one into which my highest convic-
tions upon life and art have entered.” Since you
have not read the poem, I should like to tell you
what those convictions are, because the questions
with which they are concerned are matters of indif-
ference to no one of us. We areall asking for more
light on the dark places of life. We all ask how
to be taught to bear its ills, how to keep true to
our ideals in the face of biting scorn or scornful
silence, how to distinguish the true from the false,
and how to fulfil the best possibilities in ourselves.
We turn eagerly to any one who can help us to
answer these questions. Let us hear, then, how Mrs.
Browning answers them.

The story of Aurora Leigh is briefly this: Aurora
Leigh, the daughter of an austere Englishman, and
a beautiful Florentine lady, was born in Italy and
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 239

left an orphan at thirteen. She was sent to England
to be brought up by her father’s maiden sister,
a narrow-minded, cold-hearted woman, who had
never forgiven her brother for marrying a foreigner.
Under this aunt’s care the child was kindly treated
so far as material comforts and common intellectual
needs are concerned. She was warmly clad, well
fed, well housed, and well educated after the fashion
of a woman’s education in the early part of the
century; that is, she learned a little German, French,
drawing, and music; she learned to stuff birds, make
wax-flowers, sew samplers, and crochet. But it was
a bird-cage life for the little wild bird with a world
of unuttered music in its throat, and she would have
died perhaps, heart-starved, brain-starved, if the
inner life pulsating so strongly behind the calm and
barren outward one, had not found relief in a joyous
love of natural beauty, and nutriment in a garret
full of books to which she had secret access. As it
was, there were early runs on the hills in the morn-
ing, long, deep breaths of air before anyone was
astir in the house, drenches of dew from honey-
suckles and acacias. There were rapturous hours
spent with the poets until the spirit of poetry stirred
in her and taught her that she, too, was a poet, and
might dare dream that the world would one day
listen to her. And so dreaming and reading, she
grew to love England with its low sky one might
almost touch by reaching, its woods which are but
parks, its ‘grounds most gentle dimplement.”
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“ As if God's finger touched but did not press
In making England.”

And not at all unhappy in this rich gift of inner
life, the sunny-haired little Italian girl reached her
twentieth birth-day, having known no other youth-
ful companionship than that of her cousin Romney
Leigh.

The morning of her twentieth birthday she rose
at early dawn, the June in her, feeling “so young,
so strong, so sure of God,” and, not waiting even
long enough to snatch her bonnet by the strings,
brushed a green trail across the lawn with her gown
in the dew and “ took will and way among the aca-
cias of the shrubberies.”

There was not a rose-bud swelling into promise
of sweeter beauty than her youth that morning, not
a lark’s song that breathed of a lighter heart. She
faced the future with such fulness of confidence that,
eager to anticipate her coming triumphs and enjoy
them while the capacity to enjoy was at its height,
she wove herself an ivy wreath and, singing from
very light-heartedness, was pressing the dew-
drenched wreath on her head, when she turned and
saw Romney Leigh’s grave eyes fixed on her.

Now, Romney Leigh is but a few yearsher senior,
anda noble young fellow who has his dreams too, but
they are of quiteanother nature than Aurora’s. Young
Romney Leigh is ‘‘elbow-deep in social problems”
and dreams of restoring the golden age of peace
and plenty and universal brotherhood. He cannot
enjoy his youth nor his wealth for thinking of the.
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 241

sin and misery in the world and the wrongs that
need righting. He carries on his young shoulders
the pain of all the world. He is sick with the mal-
adies of humanity. His soul, he says, ‘‘is grey
with poring over the long sum of ill,’ and he asks
himself how any one
“Being man and human, can stand calmly by

And view these things and never tease his soul

For some great cure.”

He asked that question of Aurora, the beautiful
June morning of her twentieth birthday, when he
asked her to be his wife, to give him her help as well
as her love; he asked for ‘‘life in fellowship, through
bitter duties.”’ It was hardly the way to ask Aurora,
whose views of life were so utterly different from
his own and one can not wonder at her “No!”’ after
he had spoken so contemptuously of art and poetry
as factors in human welfare, and so contemptuously
of woman’s narrow sympathies and frivolous occu-
pations.

A lover who succeeds does not tell the woman
he loves ugly truths about women, does not say out-
right that her ambition is pure folly, and calmly ask
her to merge her individuality into his. Aurora
felt outraged through all her soul by Romney’s pro-
posal, and turned upon him ina glow of indignation.
It was not a woman, she said, but a cause, he loved.
And as for that cause, if he thought he could make
a paradise for men by fattening them and wiping

out
“Earth's furrows of the Thine and Mine,”

16
242 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

he had forgotten that men were chiefly men, not
beasts, by the soul-life in them that asked its food
and chance for growth as well as the body. A
starved man

“ Exceeds a fat beast ; we'll not barter, sir,

The beautiful for barley. And even so

I hold you will not compass your poor ends

Of barley-feeding and material ease,

| Without a poet's individualism

To work your universal. It takes a soul

To move a body ; it takes a high-souled man

To move the masses, even to a cleaner stye ;

It takes the ideal to blow a hair's breadth off

The dust of the actual; ah, your Fouriers failed,

Because not poets enough to understand

That life develops from within.”

Note what she says here. Romney noted it,
and recalled it long after, for these two young souls,
reading life in different languages, but with the same
meaning, if they had but known it, parted that day
and met but once after in seven long years.

Aurora went to London, worked patiently and
hard at writing books, and, by the time she had come
to look upon them with contempt herself, letters
from college striplings and sighing maidens of eigh-
teen poured in, filled with “compliments to smile or
sigh at,” to think that the very love they lavished so,
proved her inferior. The strong loved her not, she
said. But life, deepening in her, deepened, too, the
work she did. Sometimes she felt her strength with
satisfaction; could touch some work and say, ‘That
holds true life,’ but the satisfaction was far from
being happiness. The youthful joy in life for mere
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 243

life’s sake died out in her. The color faded from
her cheeks. She felt that even ‘‘Youth is stern, set
face to face with youth’s ideal.’”’ She learned to
count herself prospering if she gained a step, even
though a nail pierced her foot. In the meantime,
Romney Leigh worked just as patiently and hard
at setting the social world to rights, at trying to
make equalities where nature meant inequajities
should exist, at ‘keeping the sun at nights in
heaven and other possible ends,” and learned
through bitter, disastrous experience that he was
not God’s viceroy on earth and must accept right
and wrong together here, just as he must: accept
light and shade in landscape coloring. The story
concludes with the meeting of Aurora and Romney
in Italy, and their mutual confessions of failure in
aims and need of each other.

The poem is, in the first place, a passionate plea
for the intellectual life in women, but it is a plea
without the noisy and stupid aggressiveness of those
who prate of woman’s rights,

“Of woman's mission, woman’s function, till
The men (who are prating, too, on their side) cry:
A woman’s function plainly is—to talk.”

It teaches that woman, with all her highest
powers developed and her individuality unfettered, is
woman still by the heart of her, and needs the heart-
life as well as the brain-life to complete her happi-
ness and fit her for her noblest work. In the second
place, it is an earnest and powerful plea for art as the
chief factor in the moral and social development of
244 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

mankind. Don’t dare dream that you can lift a man
so much asa hair’s breadth by sending him to the
tailor’s to be measured for a broadcloth suit, or to
the pastry cook’s for tarts and pies, is her constant
teaching. Drop rather some seed of true life in his
soul; open his eyes to the beauty of this world and
teach him to love it. Fill him with scorn and hatred
of sin as of something deformed and hideous. Show
him “ earth’s crammed with heaven, and every com-
mon bush afire with God,” that nothing’s small.

“No lily-muffled hum of a summer bee

But finds some coupling with the spinning stars;

No pebble at your foot but proves a sphere.”

Do this and you will have truly lifted him. Man’s
measure is never the size of his body nor the texture
of his clothes, but the height of his soul. Art, then,
to Mrs. Browning, does not exist for mere art’s sake,
that is, as something agreeable or amusing like a
child’s wonder-book or top, but as an indispensable
contribution to man’s intellectual growth and moral
elevation. Poetry to her is as serious and holy a
thing as it was to Milton, only, unlike him, she does
not separate it from the actual daily life of the
present. She is no scorner of what lies under her
eyes. She thinks a poet’ssole work is to represent
the age he lives in, not Charlemagne’s, and distrusts
‘the poet who discerns no character or glory in his
time and trundles back his soul five hundred years”
to sing of ‘‘ some black chief, half knight, half sheep-
lifter; some beauteous dame, half chattel and half
queen.”
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. _ 245

She illustrates her opinions in her own verse,
which is thoughtful, passionate, and sensuous with-
out loss of spirituality. But she knows the mechan-
ism of art too thoroughly to reach the highest test
of art, namely, unconscious strength and beauty.
There is an evidence of strain.or tension in her work,
an effort to reach some mark beyond her, yet plainly
visible to her, which is very fatiguing to the ordi-
nary reader. She stimulates by irritation and not
by joyous abandon or rapt enthusiasm. She pro-
duces restlessness, not rest. She will always be read
by cultivated persons with interest and profit, but
her poems will not find their way into the human
heart where they cannot enter by the head. Is that
a merit? No, it isa limitation. No one needs to
be told that the rose is beautiful, or that the jagged
lightning is sublime. One simply looks and feels
that. So with the great poets. They need no in-
terpreters. One does not need to join a club to
study meanings into them, nor to have lived in a
library to understand tnem. They speak the mother
tongue and the universal experiences.

Perhaps this remark applies more entirely to her
husband, Robert Browning, whom I should be in-
clined to regard (if Walt Whitman had died in hos-
pital service during the civil war) as the greatest
poetical canard that the world has seen since Mac-
pherson laughed at it in Ossian. You are too young
to have felt the necessity of adopting certain liter-
ary opinions because they are thought to imply an
advanced state of culture, so I shall not fear offend-
246 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

ing you by speaking frankly on this subject. Yet,
I want to speak with justice, for Robert Browning is
not a man to be filliped out of notice as one brushes
a fly from his page. He was a man of goodly pro-
portions, whose unpardonable fault is that he wanted
to pass for a Titan, and so stood on tiptoe, stretched
his arms above his head, puffed, shrieked, strained,
rocked to and fro, and fell, as every man does who
will not understand that the soles of his feet and not
the tips of his toes were made for standing on. He
had learning, culture, and poetic sensibilities; he
had thought well and profoundly on many deeply
interesting questions; and, had he not had a deplora-
ble infatuation for expressing himself in verse and
with originality, he might have been one of the
strongest prose writers of the nineteenth century.
But he chose to cripple and squeeze and stifle his
thoughts in the straight-jacket of a certain number
of syllables to a line, which he called verse, and ‘so
lost himself in confusion and darkness. He mis-
took eccentricity for originality, and so bartered
away the poet’s privilege to inspire for the jug-
gler’s craft of startling. The utterances that might
have been straightforward and manly are violently
strained and twisted out of all semblance to mean-
ing, or hidden in strange and uncouth words that
jar upon the ear. The man who pretends to write
for English ears should at least consult them if he
wishes to fulfill his pretensions. Judge how admir-
ably Browning does not do this from the following
titles to poems, taken at random from a score of
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 247

such: Artemis Prologizes, Dis Aliter Visum, Numpho-
leptos, Bifurcation, Ceneiaja, Pictor Ignotus, Through the
Metidja to Abd-El-Kadr, De Gustibus, A Toccata of
Galuppi’s Prospice, Pheidippides.

The same straining after the uncommon appears
in the body of his poems as well as in their titles.
He is not solicitous about uttering a new truth, but
he makes violently convulsive efforts to inflate and
stretch a commonplace into the semblance of some-
thing new. He seems to share the opinion of a
third-rate actor or preacher, that the value of a line
does not depend upon what it means, but upon the
mouthing and gesticulation that accompany its de-
livery. From this point of view one has only to
write and to roar loud enough, and a comment on
the weather will assume the significance of a Del-
phian oracle. It was this point of view that pro-
duced The Ring and The Book, commonly regarded
as Browning’s masterpiece, that is, his best specimen
of roaring and spasmodic gesticulating. In this
sense it really is his masterpiece, and it is thickly
strewn with such musical combinations and allitera-
tions as ‘‘ring-thing;”’ ‘‘curt-skirt;” “life was grasp-
able and gainable;” ‘In recrudescency of baffled
hate;” “ Thridded and so thrown fast the facts else
free;’ “Granite time’s tooth should grate against,
not graze: ‘A beak-nosed, bushy-bearded, black-
haired lord;” ‘friable, fast to fly;” “your frigid
Virgil’s fiercest word;”’ “ First we fight for faiths ;”
‘‘prune and pare and print.”
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“Go, get you manned by Manning, and new-manned
By Newman, and, mayhap, wise-manned to boot |
By Wiseman, and we'll see or else,” etc.

You hardly believe this driveling punning is from
Browning? I solemnly assure you that it is, as is
also this declaration of an advocate’s being given to

“Ovidian quip or Ciceronian crank,
A bubble in the larynx while he laughs,
As he had fritters deep down frying there.”

A man who is capable of conceiving and then
gravely committing to paper sucha childish kitchen
simile as that, is of course capable of playing the
dotard in three volumes and dribbling out the same
story eleven times, but he is not capable of being a
great poet.

Fine images rise so easily and naturally from the
subject treated that the listener is always surprised
that they had not occurred to him before. Brown-
ing’s images, on the contrary, are as a rule so
unnatural that the reader constantly wonders how
they ever occurred to him. They miss, therefore,
the very aim of an image which is to fuse details
into a vivid picture for the mind’s eye, making that
clearer and fuller that was indistinct before.

Have you ever watched a skilful painter at
work ? His brush moves so easily over the canvas
and performs such miracles as it moves that you are
tempted to think the skill in the brush and that
you could do as well yourself. But try it, andwhat
a stupid, clumsy brush it suddenly changes into ;
you can do nothing with it, and what hard work you
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 249

seem to make of that which looked so easy.
Browning seems to make just such hard work of
poetry. He struggles like a stammering man with
his inarticulate utterances. He labors like a boat-
man on a rough sea against the wind with strained
muscles and dripping brow. He fatigues his reader
as he fatigued himself.

“T cannot read Robert Browning,” says that
genial critic John Burroughs, ‘except here and there
a short poem. The sheer mechanical effort of read-
ing him, of leaping and dodging and turning sharp
corners to overtake his meaning is too much for me.
It makes my mental bones ache. It is not that he
is so subtile and profound, for he is less in both
these respects than Shakespeare, but that he is so
abrupt and elliptical, and plays such fantastic tricks
with syntax. His verse is like a springless wagon
ona rough road. He is full of bounce and vigor,
but it is of the kind that bruises the flesh and makes
one bite his tongue.”

Froude liked him just as little. ‘ Browning’s
verse,” he said, ‘with intellect, thought, power,
grace, all the charms in detail which poets should
have, rings, after all, like a bell of lead.”

The theme of the Ring and the Book is a vulgar
murder case, an account of which the poet found in
an old book picked up from a stallin Florence. A
certain Guido Franceschini and four accomplices are
tried for the murder of Guido’s wife and her parents.
Guido is fifty years old, the wife seventeen, and
mother of his infant child. Guido pleads his injured
250 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

honor as the cause of the crime. The story is
retold eleven times by the author, defendants,
advocates, dying wife, etc. It is told pompously,
extravagantly, with an effort at dramatic individual-
izing which is a dull failure, because it is an impos-
sibility for Browning to lose his identity a moment
in that of another person, Mrs. Browning has the
same limitation. All her characters are Aurora
Leigh, and Aurora Leigh is herself.

You are wondering perhaps what reason Browning
had for calling his murder case The Ring and the Book.
He must have felt that the title needed explaining
because he devotes several pages to telling why he
chose it. The book, of course, refers to the old book
containing the original account of the criminal case,
a purely legal account of testimony and pleadings.
The ring symbolizes the story he makes out of this
dry case The ring with its delicate chasings once
lay in the earth as crude metal. Artistic skill shaped
it into a thing of beauty. Poetry will do the same
thing for this common criminal case in the old book.
So Robert Browning thinks, but to my mind, he would
have done better to follow the intimation of pro-
priety he had when he wrote:

“ Healthy minds let bygones be,
Leave old crimes to grow young and virtuous like
I’ the sun and air; so time treads ugly deeds;
They take the natural blessing of all change.”
The Blot in the Scutcheon has a theme equally

ugly and repulsive, and 4 is equally worthy of ee
unread.
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 251

The sporadic Browning cliques are to be accounted
for by the fact that a great many good-natured per-
sons pretend to an enthusiasm for what they do not
understand, for fear of being thought wanting in
soul or lacking in intellectual penetration.

And just here, my dear young friend, let me warn
you against this weakest of all hypocrisies, the fine-
art hypocrisy, that reveals itself in meaningless
Ahs! and Ohs! Never wish to pass for more than
you are worth in anything. Prefer to that, being
misunderstood and passing for less. In that case
any further investigation is to your advantage, like
breaking open a rough stone that conceals in its
heart pure, gleaming quartz crystals; while, on the
other hand, all lies are the thinnest of ice-covering
over deep, dirty water, and once broken through
there is nothing but drowning for you. Here I am
reminded of a pretty little story by Ludwig Tieck.
Let me translate a few paragraphs for you without
further comment. The story is entitled, Musical
Joys and Sorrows.

‘‘To commence with, Nature made me no friend
to music. I had noear. I could not remember a
tune, and so I shunned concerts and operas, and in
society when songs were sung and cantatas per-
formed, I either talked or busied myself with a
book. . . . ‘Look at that stick, yonder!’ was
the cry from all sides. ‘Has yon big lump of flesh
a human. soul in it? To understand nothing of
music, the divinest of all arts! . Is there a block or
a stone that is not to a certain degree touched by
252 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

heavenly harmony!’ Now at that time a certain
young lady pleased me more than ordinarily, and
she-was so unusually sensitive to music that she
wept whenever she heard it. I, with my cold heart,
was a monster to her. ‘What!’ she said, ‘ you
would love, you, who have not even a presentiment
of the heavenly ecstasy that is so closely related to
love!’ Then I formed the resolution to grow
enthusiastic over music. I astonished all my friends
and acquaintances by the new-born rapture that
beamed from my eyes. There was no containing
me any more. I exceeded in enthusiasm anybody
that I had ever met in society. As soonas the piano
was touched, I wriggled all over with joy. I beat
time with my feet, I tossed my arms about, I rolled
my eyes, I even called in the aid of my tongue and
at times licked my wide-open lips with amazement.
Then my hands had to be clapped; when it was
possible to make them, my eyes must be filled
with tears, and my outstretched arms must press
friends and strangers to my stormy heart beating in
wildest enthusiasm. Afterward, when I entered my
lonely room, I was so tired and exhausted, so thor-
oughly worn out, that at times I wished at the devil,
art and artists, love, and harmony, and all extrava-
gant emotions.”’

I shall send you to Tieck, himself, to learn how
the poor enthusiast, in spite of all his efforts, still
found no favor with his sweetheart, because he wept
in the wrong places, and felt the liveliest emotion
exactly where the least feeling was called out. And
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 253

this is exactly how all feigned emotion betrays itself.
It laughs and feels in the wrong places. Browning
enthusiasts laugh and weep just where he is most
unintelligible and sterile. It is not in the Ring and
the Book, The Blot tn the Scutcheon, and other of his
longer and more elaborate efforts, that Browning
touches anything like real poetry, but in his shorter
poems, Evelyn Hope, Rabbi Ben Ezra, The Boy and
the Angel, and others; in such happy little sketches
as this of a spring morning, which is fresh and dewy
as April itself:

“The year's at the spring
And day’s at the morn ;
Morning’s at seven
The hill-side’s dew-pearled,
The lark’s on the wing,
The snail's on the thorn,
God's in his heaven,

All’s right with the world.”

Here is another admirable vignette:

“Oh to be in England now that April’s there!
And whoever wakes in England sees some morning,
unaware,
That the lowest bows and the brughwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings in the grchard bough,
In Englaad now!
And after April, when May follows
And the whjte-throat builds and all the swallows!
Hark! where my blossomed pear tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dew-drops, at the bent spray’s edge
That’s the wise thrush! Hesings each song twice over
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fing careless rapture!”
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I like, too, the following suggestive lines:

“ “Such a starved bank of moss
Till that May morn,
Blue ran the flash across,
Violets were born!

Sky—what a scowl of cloud
Till near and far,

Ray on ray split the shroud—
Splendid—a star!

World—how it walled about
Life with disgrace,

Till God’s own smile came out,
That was thy face.”

“Why sing your bits of thought, if you can con-
trive to speak them?” asked Carlyle of John Ster-
ling, when the latter was in doubt whether to express
himself in poetry or prose. It is the question
one constantly demands of Browning. He had
some “bits of thought” that were well worth deliv-
ering in an unequivocal manner. They are to be
found scattered throughout his poems, notably in
his Men and Women. He viewed life in an altogeth-
er manly way. Though he felt youth’s “ passionate
delight” he was not insensible to the fulness and
ripeness of age. We have praises enough of the
beauty of blossoms, but few who tell us that the
flower exists only for the fruit, and that the latter
has its wondrous beauty, too, as well as its use.
This idea among others is expressed with energy in
Rabbi Ben Ezra, from which I, shall quote you a few
stanzas: 5 5
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 255

“Grow old along with me,
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made.
Our times are in His hand,
Who saith ‘A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half; trust God,
See all, nor be afraid.”

Poor vaunt of life indeed,

Were men but formed to feed

On joy, to solely seek and find and feast,
Such feasting ended then

As sure an end to men;

Irks care the crop-full bird?

Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast ?

Then welcome each rebuff

That turns earth's smoothness rough,

Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand, but go!
Be our joys three-parts pain!

Strike, and hold cheap the strain, .

Learn, nor account the pang,

Dare, never grudge the throe !”

He insists that a woman owes more to the man
of talent who loves her than mere beauty of per-
son. Read Andrea del Sarto for the expression of
that idea.

“ Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's heaven for?
Had you enjoined them on me, given me soul
We might have risen to Rafael, land you.
Nay, love, you did give all I asked, I think,
More than I merit, yes, by many times.
But had you, Oh, with the same perfect brow
And perfect eyes and more than perfect mouth,
And the low voice my soul hears as a bird
The fowler’s pipe and follows to the snare,
256 TWENTY FIVE LETTERS

Had you, with these the same but brought a mind !
Some women do so. Had the mouth there urged
God and the glory! Never care for gain.

The present by the future, what is that ?

Live for fame, side by side with Agnolo,

Rafael is waiting. Up to God all three.

I might have done it for you. So it seems.
Perhaps not. All is as God overrules,

Besides, incentives ccme from the soul's self,

The rest avails not. Why do I need you ?”

And now we shall leave the Brownings. I do
not expect you to read them with pleasure or profit
as yet, but I thought it best to give you some
inkling of their drift of thought and the character
of their work.

After the modern novelists, Jane Austen, Thack-
eray, Dickens, Bronte, George Eliot, Maria Edge-
‘worth, you may conclude your work in English
literature with a study of Ruskin and Tennyson.
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 257

LETTER XXI.

OU understand, of course, that when we speak
of the Lake School of poets, Wordsworth,
Coleridge, and Southey, we do not mean poets whose
work conforms to certain principles agreed on
and adhered to by them. In that sense, these three
poets by no means form a school, for their writings
are as unlike as their characters. The term Lake
School, unfortunately applied to them, signifies noth-
ing more than that they lived in the beautiful lake
region of Westmoreland, near Penrith, England.
Coleridge and Southey were brothers-in-law, and
lived together in the same house, Greta Hall, at
Keswick, fifteen miles from Grasmere, where Words-
worth had his home.

You say that Coleridge was the greatest of the
three. This is hardly true if a man’s greatness is to
be determined by the greatness of what he achieves
and not by what he proposes to do, or is even able
to do. Youdo not count an acorn an oak because
it contains the possibility of an oak in it. Coleridge,
from the testimony of his contemporaries, was by
nature, perhaps, the most gifted of the three, but
judged by the value of the actual work left us,
Wordsworth unmistakably takes first rank. Cole-
ridge, according to all who heard him, was a marvel-
ous talker, a powerful mental stimulus to all who

17
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met him, but the talker’s art, like that of the singer
or actor, is one that cannot be preserved to the
delight of posterity. For this reason Coleridge is
to us a sort of poetical Rubini.or Talma. We know
that he could delight. We have even some report
of him in a number of volumes, but it is a fragmen-
tary and unsatisfactory one.
He had the greatest mental gifts, that swift,
poetic insight that outstrips reason and arrives at
surer results; he had breadth of sympathy; he hada
fine sense of the power of words; he had all modern
literature at his tongue’s end, and he was a classical
scholar. He had leisure, influential friends, and the
ear of the world eager to listen to him. No man
would seem to have been better fitted than he. to
leave a name second only to Shakespeare’s, but all his
gifts were half-paralyzed by a will weak and vacilla-
ting asa child’s. Hewas a slave to the caprice of the
moment. ‘‘ He spawned plans like a herring,” says
Southey, and abandoned them with as little con-
cern. ‘ Nobody who knew him,” says De Quincey,
‘‘ever thought of depending upon any appointment
he might make; spite of his uniformly honorable
intentions, nobody attached any weight to his
assurances in ve futura. Those who asked him to
dinner or any other party, as a matter of course, sent
a carriage for him, and went personally or by proxy
to fetch him; and as to letters, unless the address
were in some female hand that commanded his
affectionate esteem, he tossed them all into one
general dead-letter bureau, and. rarely, I believe,
-ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 259

opened them at all.” His brother-in-law, Southey,
gives a like report of him. Writing to his friend,
John Rickman, he says,

“You are in a great measure right about Cole-
ridge; he is worse in body than you seem to be-
lieve, but the main cause lies in his own manage-
ment of himself, or rather want of management.
His mind is in a perpetual St. Vitus dance, eternal
activity without action. At times he feels mortified
that he should have done so little, but this feeling
never produces any exertion. ‘I will begin to-
morrow,’ he says, and thus he has been all his life
long, letting to-day slip. He has had no heavy
calamities in life, and so contrives to be miserable
about trifles. Poor fellow, there is no one thing
which gives me so much pain as the witnessing
such a waste of unequaled power.”

I have spoken of his unrivaled conversational
powers, that made eager listeners for him whenever
he chose to open his mouth, not only among the
learned but the unlearned. When he was a young
fellow and about to be married and go to house-
keeping, his landlord offered him free board and
lodging if he would only stay and talk. But it was
not this power alone that endeared him to those
who met him. He had a singularly winning man-
ner of addressing himself to others by professions
of attachment, but there were no grades in these ex-
pressions of attachment, they were were made as
ardently to the acquaintance of yesterday as to the
tried friend of ten years standing, which, of course,
260 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

decidedly lessened their value. We all like particu-
larizations. We don’t care to be loved in bulk. We
prefer to be taken singly. We do not find every-
thing equally admirable, nor all our friends and ac-
quaintances worthy of the same enthusiastic greet-
ings, the same caressing voice inflections, the same
smiles and tenderness, and we can’t help suspecting
that such frequent and unsparing use of the milk of
human kindness must necessitate a supply of rather
a watery character.

I believe the habit of being sweetly and tenderly
effusive is a notably feminine one, but as such is not
to be imitated. I know a woman with a wonder-
fully magnetic voice who has discarded every sylla-
ble of a vinegary nature from her vocabulary. No
word of censure ever escapes her lips, so that her
opinions are about as valuable as a porcelain egg.
White, pretty, oval, well enough resembling an egg,
only all the sitting on them in the world would
bring nothing out of them. She is full of enthusi-
asms and her raptures are contagious. She has no
personal antipathies. No matter who you are or
what your occupation, she can adapt herself to your
peculiarities with the elasticity of a piece of rubber.
But there is danger in this, as I said to you in my
last letter, you can’t stand safely on the thin
ice of a lie, and I’ve heard that this lady once went
plump through her thin ice of affability (there’s no
real warmth init) by receiving the news of a friend’s
death with a burst of gushing delight from mere
force of habit in saying pleasant things.
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 261

I am sorry that Coleridge had this weak, feminine
habit, but he had, and Southey once scored him
severely for it in a letter I think worth quoting :

“It does vex me to see you so lavish of the out-
ward and visible signs of friendship, and to know
that a set of fellows whom you do not care for
boast everywhere of your intimacy, and with good
reason, to the best of their understanding. You
have accustomed yourself to talk affectionately and
write affectionately to your friends, till the expres-
sions of affection flow by habit in your conversation
and in your letters, and pass for more than they are
worth. The worst of all this is that your letters will
one day rise up in judgment against you.

And you will be convicted of a doulle
ceiitngs which, though you do not design, you cer-
tainly practice. . . ; You say in yours
to Sara, that you love and honor me ; upon my soul
I believe you, but if I did not thoroughly believe it
before, your saying so is the thing of all things that
would make me open my eyes and look about me
to see if I were not deceived. 3 My
moral stomach loathes anything like othe There
is something outlandish in saying them, more akin
to a French embrace than an English shake by the
hand, and I would have you leave off saying them
to those whom you actually do love, that if this
should not break off the habit of applying them to
indifferent persons, the disuse may at least make a
difference. Your feelings go naked; I cover mine
with a bearskin. I will not say that you harden
262 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

‘yours by your mode, but I am sure that mine are
the warmer for their clothing.”

Coleridge had another weakness which would
deserve a harsher name if it had been backed by
sterility of mind. He was an unblushing plagiarist.
He would not hesitate an instant to incorporate
somebody else’s pages with his own, if copying
chanced to be easier than composing. But fortu-
nately for his reputation, it rarely was, and all the
best that remains of him is genuine Coleridge. It
was opium-eating that sapped his character and his
‘genius, and he began the habit not as De Quincey
did for the sake of alleviating pain, but, as the
latter says, ‘as a source of luxurious sensations.
Coleridge, to speak in the words of Cervantes,
wanted ‘better bread than was made of wheat,’ and
when youthful blood no longer sustained the riot of
his animal spirits, he endeavored to excite them by
artificial stimulants.” He never afterward freed
himself from the slavery of it. He neglected his
family, leaving them for Southey to support. He
was the constant despair of those who loved him
best and to whom he made and broke promise after
promise to try to reform. At one time a paid
domestic attended him everywhere to prevent him
from getting opium, and yet he contrived to. evade
his watchfulness by all sorts of clever ruses. The
last fifteen years of his life he spent under the care
of a physician, away from his family at Highgate,
near London. He was not a happy man. How
could he be? He grew indifferent to his wife and
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 263

so found no pleasure in his home. De Quincey
says that at the lakes, Coleridge “lived chiefly by
candle-light. At two or three o’clock in the after-
noon he would make his first appearance. Through
the silence of the night, when all other lights had
long disappeared in the quiet cottage in Grasmere,
his-lamp might be seen invariably by the belated
traveler . . . . and at five or six o’clock in the
morning this isolated son of reveries was retiring
to bed.” Among the many descriptions of Cole-
ridge’s appearance I like best the one to be found
in Hazlitt’s Zable Talk in the essay entitled My
First Acquaintance with Poets, and so I quote it for
you. ‘“ His complexion was at that time (1798)
clear, and even bright

‘As are the children of yon azure sheen.’

His forehead was broad and high, light as if
built of ivory, with large, projecting eyebrows, and
his eyes rolling beneath them like a sea with dark-
ened lustre. ‘A certain tender bloom his face o’er-
spread,’ a purple tinge as we see it in the pale,
thoughtful complexions of the Spanish portrait
painters, Murillo and Velasquez. His mouth was
gross, voluptuous, open, eloquent; his chin good-
humored and round, but his nose, the rudder of the
face, the index of the will, was small, feeble, noth-
ing —like what he has done. It might seem that
the genius of his face as from a height surveyed
and projected him (with sufficient capacity and
huge aspiration) into the world unknown.of thought
264 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

and imagination, with nothing to support or guide
his veering purpose, as if Columbus had launched
his adventurous course for the New World in a
scallop, without oars or compass. So at least I
comment on it after the event. Coleridge, in per-
son, was rather above the common size” (De
Quincey says he appeared to be about five feet
eight but was in reality about an inch and a
half taller), “inclining to the corpulent, or like
Lord Hamlet, ‘somewhat fat and pursy.’ His hair
(now, alas, grey) was then black and glossy as the
raven’s, and fell in smooth masses over his fore-
head. This long pendulous hair is peculiar to
enthusiasts, to those whose minds tend heavenward,
and is traditionally inseparable (though of a differ-
ent color) from the pictures of Christ. It ought to
belong as a character to all who preach Christ cruci-
fied, and Coleridge was at that time one of those.”

Hazlitt, at that time an aspiring youth of twenty
years, had walked ten miles to hear Coleridge
preach. He had risen before day-light to set out
on a cold, raw January morning, but he returned
well satisfied, his heart aglow with new resolves,
his brain throbbing with unwonted action, and
thus records his indebtedness to Coleridge: “A
sound was in my ears as of siren’s song; I was
stunned, startled with it, as from deep sleep. But
I had no notion then that I should ever be able to
express my admiration to others in motley imagery
or quaint allusion, till the light of his genius shone
into my soul, like the sun’s rays glittering in the
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 265

puddles of the road. . . . That my understand-
ing did not remain dumb and brutish, or at length
found a language to express itself, I owe to Cole-
ridge.”

Hazlitt had a six miles walk with him when he
left. Coleridge talked all the way, and, says
Hazlitt, ‘in digressing, in dilating, in passing from
subject to subject, he appeared to me to float in
air, to slide on ice. . . . I observed that he
continually crossed me on the way by shifting from
one side of the foot-path to the other, but I did not
at the time connect it with any instability of pur-
pose or involuntary change of principle, as I have
done since. He seemed unable to keep on in a
straight line.”

Of Coleridge’s talk you will find an excellent criti-
cism in Carlyle’s Life of John Sterling. ‘‘ It was talk,”
says Carlyle, “not flowing anywhither like a river,
but spreading everywhither . . likea lake or sea;
terribly deficient in definite goal or aim, nay, often
in logical intelligibility. What you were to believe
or do on any earthly or heavenly thing obstinately
refusing to appear from it . . . it was distin-
guished like himself by irresolution; it disliked to
be troubled with conditions, abstinences, definite ful-
fillments; loved to wander at its own sweet will, and
make its auditor and his claims and humble wishes
a mere passive bucket for itself.’

Hazlitt himself acknowledged these deficiencies
when his youthful enthusiasm gave place to judg-
ment. ‘Excellent talker, very, if you let him
266 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

start from no premises and. come to no conclu-
sions.”

The same desultory and indefinite character
distinguished his public discourse. If he were
announced for a lecture and appeared (you could
never be quite certain whether he’ would do that
or not), you were fortunate if he remembered the
subject he was advertised to speak on and touched
it at all. In the latter part of his life, his con-
versations were little better than Jeremiads over
the “sunk condition of the world.” His own life
was going out in darkness, and he could see no
light beyond its narrow horizon. And yet Coleridge,
with all his darkness, was a light to hisage. He
was the first critic who brought the English world
to a realization of Shakespeare’s greatness, and
laid the foundations of a better understanding of
true poetry. He believed that the poet’s materials
lie all about him, and not in some remote age or
imaginary world. He affirmed that “one of the
purposes and tests of true poetry is the employ-
ment of common objects in uncommon ways, the
felicitous and novel use of images of daily occur-
rence,” and cited in proof of his statement, Robert
Burns’ beautiful simile:

“Or like the snow falls in the river,
A moment white, then melts forever.”

‘Everybody has seen snow falling upon a
river and vanishing instantly, but who had applied
this result of ordinary experience with such novelty
and beauty? Shakespeare is full of these familiar
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 267

images and illustrations. Milton has them, too,
but they do not occur so frequently. . . He is —
the true poet who can apply to a new purpose the
oldest experiences and most usual appearances.”

He judged the poets of his day with singular
impartiality and accuracy. ‘ Neither Southey, Scott,
nor Campbell will by their poetry survive much
beyond the day when they lived and wrote. Their
works haven't the seeds of vitality, the real germs
of long life.” He once said he would rather have
written the simile of Burns quoted above than all
the poetry Scott had ever composed. He had a
clear idea of the distinction between talent and
genius. The former he compared to a watch, the
latter to an eye; ‘both beautiful, but one was a
piece of ingenious mechanism, the other a produc-
tion above all art. Talent was a manufacture;
genius a gift that no labor could supply. Nobody
could make an eye, but anybody duly instructed
could make a watch.” Chaucer he read with “ in-
creasing delight.” ‘ His manly cheerfulness. is
especially delicious to me in my old age. How ex-
quisitely tender he is, and yet how perfectly free
from the least touch of sickly melancholy or morbid
drooping.” Of his own poetical powers he thought
but humbly and was accustomed to say that he
never attained his idea of true poetry.

You know the Ancient Mariner and Christabel, but
are you acquainted with these lines from his ode
entitled Dejection?’ They are full of meaning and
beauty.
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“O Lady, we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does nature live !
Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud !
And would we aught behold of higher worth,
Than that inanimate cold world allow'd
To the poor, loveless, ever anxious crowd,
Ah, from the soul itself must issue forth
A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud
Enveloping the earth!
And from the soul itself must there be sent
A sweet and powerful voice of its own birth,
Of all sweet sounds the life and element.
O, pure of heart ! thou need’st not ask of me
What this strong music in the soul may be ;
What and wherein it doth subsist,
This light, this glory, this fair luminous mist,
This beautiful and beauty-making power !
Joy, O beloved! joy that ne’er was given,
Save to the pure and in their purest hour,
Life of our life, the parent and the birth,
Which, wedding nature, to us gives in dower
A new heaven and new earth,
Undreamt of by the sensual and the proud ;
This is the strong voice, this the luminous cloud !
Our inmost selves rejoice,
And thence flows all that glads or ear or sight.”

To show you how poetically Coleridge expresses
this thought, that delight in natural beauty, and ele-
vation of soul in contemplation of it, depend upon
the purity, sweetness, and elevation of the soul
itself, let me quote you Matthew Arnold’s metrical
expression of the same thought.
and peevishly he expresses it, and how unbeautiful
and therefore unpoetical he makes it in his version:

“Fools that these mystics are,
Who prate of nature! for she
Hath neither beauty nor warmth,

Note how baldly
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Nor life, nor emotion nor power;
But man has a thousand gifts,

And the generous dreamer invests
The senseless world with them all;
Nature is nothing ; her charm
Lives in our eyes which can paint,
Lives in our hearts which can feel.”

In Coleridge’s version we feel man endowed and |
adorned with a beauty and joy-creating power, and
hardly feel nature stripped of her magic. Arnold
shows us the latter picture, poor nature, bared and
ugly. The former makes prominent the beautiful
aspect of his subject, therefore treats it poetically.
The latter dwells more forcibly on its ugly aspect,
therefore treats it prosaically.

To turn from Coleridge to Southey is like turn-
ing from sheet-lightning to lamp-light. But if we
can’t get much inspiration from such a man as the
latter, we can get some good, steady, practical use.
Southey was an exemplary man in every particular,
a good son and husband, a devoted father and faith-
ful friend, an honest man of uncommon powers,
sorely troubled by the gross cares of this world, the
formidable question ‘‘ Wherewith shall I be fed and
clothed ?” In his youth he resolved to answer this
question in a romantic and philanthropic way that
deserves recording. Coleridge, who was but two
years Southey’s senior, had infected the latter with
a socialistic scheme of his, by which he hoped to
enjoy, with a chosen party of friends, a revival of the
Golden Age, on the banks of the Susquehanna, in
America, I need not go into the details of this
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youthful dream. It is sufficient to say that it prom-
ised the usual social equality, division of labor, and
division of produce, and that Coleridge, Southey,
and some nineteen or twenty other youthful vision-
aries seriously intended to embark for America, but >
were unable to raise the necessary funds. Some
philanthropist proposed settling them in Wales, but
Wales was too near home, too near reality. Little
by little the glamour wore off, the enthusiasm died
out, and Pantisocracy (so Coleridge called his new.
form of government) survived but in name.

We thus see Southey starting in life as an ultra-
republican, ardent, fearless, anxious to propagate
his principles, and really doing it in the tragedy of
Wat Tyler. This restless enthusiasm, these generous
revolutionary ideas are by no means a bad sign in
youth. They are a kind of mental wild-oat sowing
that argues a certain excess of intellectual sap which,
once being rid of, allows the growth of something
better.

“In my mind,” said Coleridge, “it would be a
hopeless symptom, as regards genius, if I found a
young man with anything like perfect taste.” This
sentiment, so true as regards literature, has its
counterpart concerning the affairs of practical life.
It would be an equally hopeless symptom as
regards genius, if a young man were found to accept
the inequalities, miseries, and degradations of civil-
ized life as a matter of course, with no attempt at
removing them. Indeed, so natural does the gen-:
erous thought of removing them, even by Quixotic.
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 275

plans, appear in an uncommon mind alive to the
sufferings of others, that there is something un-
naturally premature and therefore unpromising in
Southey’s rapid out-growing of his youthful repub-
licanism. He was only twenty-three when he wrote
the following:

‘There was a time when I believed in the per-
suadibility of man and had the mania of man-mend-
ing. Experience has taught me better. After a
certain age, the organs of voice cannot accommodate
themselves to the utterance of a foreign pronuncia-
tion; so it is with the mind, it grows stiff and un-
yielding, like our sinews as we grow older. The
ablest physicians can do little in the great lazar-
house of society; it is a pest-house that infects all
within its atmosphere. He acts the wisest part who
retires from the contagion, nor is that part either a
selfish or a cowardly one; it is ascending the ark
like Noah to preserve a remnant which may become
the whole.”

However much truth there may be in the above,
it is not a truth that belongs properly to early youth
with its face set eagerly and hopefully to the future,
its heart open to humanity. It argues less poetry
in its author than shrewdness and practical world-
liness. It is an index to what was wanting in
Southey to make him the poet he aspired to be,
viz., large-heartedness, generous self-abandonment,
and ardent enthusiasm. The man who did not know
by sight twenty persons of the lower class in Kes-
wick, where he lived the greater part of his life,
.

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could not very well be a poet to touch the heart of
mankind, and indeed he never did. He could write
clear and entertaining prose, and will be remembered
by it, notably by his Life of Nelson, but he was a
singularly dull poet. This is partly owing to his
selection of poetical themes from mythical subjects
of no particular interest or suggestiveness in them-
selves.

Madoc is an account of the adventures of the
early Welsh explorer of that name, who, according
to Welsh tradition, was the first discoverer of
America. The Curse of Kehama turns upon a Hindoo
myth, Zhalaba upon Arabian magic. When he was
about to write a poem, he read history and culled
notes as if he were writing another history, which, if
I must tell the truth, I think he would have written
to much better purpose, especially since he himself
makes this singular confession for a poet: ‘Is ita
mark of strength or weakness, of maturity or of
incipient decay, that it is more delightful to me to
compose history than poetry? Not perhaps that I
feel more pleasure in the act of composition, but
that I go to it with more complacency as to an em-
ployment which suits my temperament.”

Southey’s great mistake was in persisting in work
opposed to his temperament, but he was singularly
unconscious of this mistake. Never was writer
more self-conceited than he. He ranked himself with
Homer, Virgil, Dante, Ariosto, and Shakespeare.
Writing of Madoc he says, ‘‘Compare it with the
Odyssey, not the Ihad; with King John or Coriolanus,
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 273

not Macbeth or The Tempest. The story wants unity,
and has perhaps too Greek, too stoical a want of
passion, but as far as I can see with the same eyes
wherewith I read Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton,
it is a good poemand must live.” Of Thalaba, he
writes, ‘‘I know no poem which can claim a place
between it and the Orlando. Let it be weighed with
the Oberon; perhaps were I to speak out, I should
not dread a trial with Ariosto.”

There is little of interest in Southey’s personal
history beyond the fact of his manly struggle
upwards from poverty and obscurity to recognition
and a comfortable income. He tells us that when
Joan of Arc was in the press he often walked the
streets at dinner time for want of a dinner when he
had not eighteen pence to pay for the ordinary meal,
nor bread and cheese, at his lodgings. When Scott
declined the laureateship it was offered to Southey,
who gladly accepted it for the sake of the £90
addition to his income which it brought him. The
sale of his poems was slow, and he turned to prose for
his support. He wrote articles for the Quarterly
Review, and biographies and histories by which he
is still readable. He gathered about him a library
of 14,000 volumes. He loved his books and took
good care of them. Books of less value than his
classics he had bound in cotton prints when they
became ragged and dirty. This was the task of his
daughters, assisted by their girl friends, and they
amused themselves by suiting the bindings to the
author, putting a Quaker work or a volume of

18
274 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

sermons in sober drab, and using gaily figured prints
for the poets and novelists so that the character of
a book came to be indicated by its binding.

His happy domestic life was sadly marred by the
death of a favorite boy, Herbert, a remarkably pre-
cocious child in whom the father took passionate
. delight. But the greatest calamity of his life was
reserved for his declining years. He was in his sixty-
first year when his wife, after forty years companion-
ship, became insane and had to be confined in a
lunatic asylum for the remaining three years of her
life. A year or so after her death he himself began
to show symptoms of failing mentally. He married
again, sunk into imbecility, and died the wreck of
what he had been. It is a singular fact that he had
a half-witted uncle on the mother’s side, a notori-
ously eccentric aunt, while his mother had suffered
fromaparalytic attackin her childhood. Hehad asis-
ter who died of hydrocephalus, and his own first
child, a little girl, died of the same complaint at a
year old. Inhis twenty-sixth year he suffered from
a nervous fever and writes of it: ‘‘ My complaint, so
I am told by the opinion of medical men, is wholly
a diseased sensibility (mind you, physical sensi-
bility), disordering the functions now of the heart,
now of the intestines, and gradually debilitating
me.” He undoubtedly inherited from his mother a
degenerate nervous system, and considering the
amount of literary work he performed it is a
marvel he did not goall to pieces much sooner than
he did. But with all his nervous excitability there
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 275

was adash of coolness in him that kept him sane,
but kept him too from being a great poet. How-
ever, his name is inextricably linked with those of
Coleridge and Wordsworth ; it crops out abundant-
ly in the best critical literature since his time, and
you ought to know something about him. You will
find his letters and autobiography, edited by his son
Cuthbert, very interesting. His biographies will
repay reading. As for his poetry, unless you’ve a
great deal of time you wish to waste, you are safe
in taking it on trust. You will gain nothing by
learning for yourself how indifferent a poet he is.
Southey was quiet and reserved in his manners,
but always courteous. He was considered very hand-
some. Byron, who hated him, paid this tribute to

his person in a sneer at his poetry: ‘To have his
head and shoulders I would almost have written his
Sapphics.”

He was five feet eleven inches tall; his forehead
very broad, his complexion rather dark; large,
arched eyebrows shading a well-shaped, keen, dark-
brown eye; somewhat prominent and muscular, but
very expressive mouth; a finely-formed hook-nose;
chin small in proportion to the upper features of his
face; thick, curling brown hair; spare frame but of
great activity. Such is the picture Cuthbert Southey
leaves of his father.

Of his habits of thought Southey says of him-
self, ‘It isa very odd but a marked characteristic
of my mind . . that it is either utterly idle
or uselessly active without my tools. I never
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enter into any regular train of thought unless the
pen bein my hand. They then flow as fast as did
the water from the rock in Horeb, but without that
wand the source is dry.”

But you are doubtless wearying of Southey,
because as yet he is only a name to you; so let us
turn to Wordsworth, the greatest poet of the Lake
School, and one of the most eminent examples in
literature of the triumphs of genius over prejudices
and misconceptions. Wordsworth in his youth and
manhood was the most ignored of poets. You might
count on your fingers the few who dared to hail him
as a new light in the world. Nobody now thinks
of denying him a high rank among the poets, though
there is much difference of opinion as to just where
he ranks. Matthew Arnold ranks him the greatest
poet after Shakespeare and Milton, and Matthew
Arnold is a critic whose judgments are to be regarded
with great respect, because he is a scholar anda
thinker and always has a reason for them. His
reason for this judgment of Wordsworth lies in his
statement that ‘poetry is at bottom a criticism of
life ; that the greatness of a poet lies in his powerful
and beautiful application of ideas to life, to the
question, Howtolive. . . Hence, Wordsworth’s
superiority; he deals with life as a whole more power-
fully than any other poet since Shakespeare and
Milton. . . Wordsworth’s poetry is great because
of the extraordinary power with which he feels
the joy offered to us in nature, the joy offered
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 277

to usin the simple primary affections and duties,
and because of the extraordinary power with which,
in case after case, he shows us this joy, and renders
it so as to make us share it. The source of joy
from which he thus draws is the truest and most un-
failing source of joy accessible to man. It is also
accessible universally. . . Here isan immense
advantage to the poet.”

Arnold is right; the poet who can point us to
an unfailing and universally accessible source of joy
has an immense advantage. But what if the source
of joy be not universally accessible through the ab-
sence of some faculty, some susceptibility in the
vast majority of mankind? What if there is want-
ing a thoughtful and feeling soul back of the perfect
eyes? How much seeing do you think there will
be from them? The poet who speaks so exclusively
as Wordsworth to a faculty so rare as the passion-
ate love of nature, does not speak to the human
race as a whole; he speaks to the select few who in
some measure share his gift. Now one of the chief
tests of a great poet is his range. The question we
ask concerning him is not how few does he speak
to, but how many. Does he feel with humanity
at large, or does he address himself to an idiosyn-
cracy? Judged by this test, Wordsworth ranks
below Burns. He had a temperament singularly
phlegmatic, not to say cold, with regard to human-
ity, singularly susceptible with regard to nature.
He would not have walked across the street to chat
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with a neighbor who did not commend himself to
him in any striking way, but he would have walked
a score of miles to see a bank of daffodils.

“T am not one who much or oft delight
To season my fireside with personal talk
Of friends who live within an easy walk,
Or neighbors, daily, weekly in my sight;
And for my chance acquaintances, ladies bright,
Sons, mothers, maidens withering on the stalk,
These all wear out of me, like forms with chalk
Painted on rich men’s floors, for one feast night.
Better than such discourse doth silence long,
Long, barren silence, square with my desire;
To sit without emotion, hope or aim,
In the loved presence of my cottage fire,
And listen to the flapping of the flame,
Or kettle whispering its faint undersong.”

It was not in this churlish isolation and ‘‘long,
barren silence” that Shakespeare found Falstaff,
Mercutio, Rosalind, and Beatrice; nor Burns his
Flighland Mary, Jolly Beggars, and Tam O’ Shanter.
Nature is great, but man is greater. Wordsworth
reverses this dictum. To him ‘wilderness and
wood, blank ocean and mere sky . . dreams,
books . . area substantial world both pure and
good,” in which he will find his ‘pastime and happi-
ness.” He would rather meet Desdemona in Shakes-
peare, and Una in Spenser, than meet them in flesh
and blood among his daisies and daffodils. He is
an egotist (of a noble sort, I grant, but still an
egotist), who projected himself into nature and so
worshiped at his own shrine. And because he
could not lose himself in humanity, could not be
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 279

shaken by its griefs, its passions, and tumultuous
joys, he could not give to his poems the warmth
and color that make us feel a life-current throbbing
in their words. He loved the daisy, chose to write
on it several times, and yet all he has written on
it isn’t worth the first line of Burns’s exquisite verses
to a mountain-daisy, ‘ wee, modest, crimson-tipped
flower.” Yet Wordsworth, as the poet of nature, is
on his own ground here. But the truth is that the
real poet of nature is not dissevered from his func-
tion as poet of man.

I have said that Wordsworth’s love of nature was
singularly intense. Speaking of Wordsworth and
his sister, De Quincey says, ‘“ both derive a pleasure
originally and organically more profound than is
often witnessed both from the forms and the color-
ing of rural nature. The very same tests by which
I recognize my own sensibility to music as rising
above the common standard, namely, by the indispens-
ableness of it to my daily comforts; the readiness
with which I make any sacrifice to obtain a ‘grand
debauch’ of this nature, etc., etc.; these, when
applied to Wordsworth, manifest him to have an
analogous craving in a degree much transcending
the general ratio for the luxuries of the eye.”

I do not know whether you are a lover of nature
or not, whether you would prefer a walk in the
woods to a stroll down town, or a bunch of wild
flowers to a bunch of ribbons, but if you are such a
nature-lover you have a rare faculty and a rich and
unfailing source of joy in yourself. You can hope,
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too, to understand and love Wordsworth. But if
you are not such a born nature-lover do not expect
to enjoy him, do not feign to do it, and do not be
ashamed because you cannot feel with him that ‘‘ the
meanest flower that blows can give thoughts that do
often lie too deep for tears.” You have the vast
majority on your side, and you always will have it,
for the simple reason that the sentiment of nature-
worship, to which Wordsworth appeals so constantly,
is not common and instinctive, but is based upon a
peculiarity of temperament. Among the hundreds
of young people with whom I have come in contact
in teaching, I have never yet met one in whom this
sentiment existed, even in an ordinary degree. Dr,
Arnold once said that he stood in utter amaze at the
absence of poetical feeling in boys; I have often
stood in utter amaze at the absence of anything like
a feeling for natural beauty in most men and
women. Take, for example, the barbarous habit of
deforming trees, notably cedars and firs, by trim-
ming them into stiff, symmetrical shapes of pyra-
mids, double cones, hour-glasses, etc.; the laying
out of flower-beds in the form of animals, or in such
a way as to spell sentences, as, for example, the
names of parks; the childish habit of covering
graves with sea-shells, clam-shells, or glass cases,
inclosing artificial flowers instead of allowing the
natural turf to rest lightly on them. As you travel
in a railway carriage, listen to the comments of most
men on the country you pass through; “ beautiful
country that!” you hear, and you look out of the
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window to see a flat stretch of black loam turned up
by the plow. From further comments you under-
stand that the speaker means by a beautiful country
arable land that promises to yield good crops.

Have I made clear to you why Wordsworth is
not popular nor likely to be? Perhaps I can best
show you the impression he makes on clear, well-
trained, sound, and sensible minds by quoting Ma-
caulay’s opinion of Zhe Prelude to The Excursion.

“T brought home and read the Prelude. It is a
poorer Excursion, the same sort of faults and beau-
ties, but the faults greater and the beauties fainter,
both in themselves, and because faults are always
made more offensive and beauties less pleasing by
repetition. The story is the old story. There are the
old raptures about mountains and cataracts, the old
flimsy philosophy about the effect of scenery on the
mind, the old crazy mystical metaphysics, the end-
less wilderness of dull, flat, prosaic twaddle, and
here and there fine descriptions and energetic
declamations interspersed.”

You may be interested in knowing that this sen-
timent for nature is quite a modern one. It origin-
ated with Rousseau. Sainte Beuve comments in the
following manner on Rousseau’s observation in his
Confessions, ‘It was the first time that I had some-
thing green in front of my windows:” ‘To have or
not to have something green under the eyes had
until then been a matter of complete indifference
to French literature . . Rousseau. . was
the first to put something green into our literature.”
282 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

Rousseau, speaking of reading romances with his
father, says, ‘‘We never could stop until the end
of the volume. Sometimes my father, hearing the
swallows in the morning, and quite ashamed of him-
self, would say to me, ‘Come, let’s go to bed. I
am more of a child than you are.’’’ Commenting
on this passage, Sainte Beuve remarks: ‘‘ Note well
that swallow. It is the first, and it announces a new
springtime in the language. It began to be seen
with Rousseau. It is from him that sentiment dates
with us in the eighteenth century. It is from him
also, that, in our literature, dates the sentiment of
domestic life.” It is from Rousseau that these
sentiments passed into other countries and found
national expression wherever they rooted. They
found national expression in England in Words-
worth. If they lost something of their original fire,
they gained in purity, calmness, and elevation. In
no other poet will you better learn the power of
finding joy and beauty in the mute world about us,
and in no other will you so surely feel the tonic
influence of a pure and strong personality to whom
“plain living and high thinking” were not an empty
boast of his pen. Do nottry to read his longer poems
yet, but read his sonnets beginning with the lines:

“The world is too much with us, late and soon.”
“Milton! thou should’st be living at this hour.”
“Tt is a beauteous evening, calm and free.”

“A poet! he hath put his heart to school.”
“Not love, not war, nor the tumultuous swell.”

Read the poem on the daffodils, beginning with
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 283

the words, ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud;”’ the
tribute to his wife, “She was a phantom of delight;’
the poem on Lucy commencing, ‘Three years she
grew in sun and flower;”’ the Ode entitled /uima-
tions of Immortality from Recollections of Early Child-
hood.

Wordsworth is at his best in these selections.
De Quincey’s Literary Reminiscences will give you a
very good idea of the poet’s appearance and character.
He must have been asingularly ungracious man, for
De Quincey, who worshiped him in his youth,
burned incense to him when he was laughed at, and
never grew cold in his allegiance to his intellectual
supremacy, says of him: “J acknowledge myself
to have been long alienated from Wordsworth; some-
times I feel a rising emotion of hostility, nay, some-
times, I fear, too nearly akin to vindictive hatred. . .
I do not conceive that Wordsworth could have been
an amiable boy; he was austere and unsocial. I have
reason to think, in his habits, not generous, and
above all not self-denying. Throughout his later
life, with all the benefits of a French discipline in the
lesser charities of social intercourse, he has always
exhibited a marked impatience of those particular
courtesies of life. Not but he was kind and oblig-
ing where his services would cost him no exertion;
but I am pretty certain that no consideration would
ever have induced Wordsworth to burden himself
with a lady’s reticule, parasol, shawl, or anything
that was hers. Mighty must be the danger which
would induce him to lead her horse by the bridle.
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Nor would he, without some demur, stop to offer her
his hand over astile. Freedom, unlimited, careless,
insolent freedom, unoccupied possession of his own
arms, absolute control over his own legs and motions,
these have always been so essential to his comfort
that in any case where they were likely to become
questionable, he would have declined to make one
of the party.”

I fancy I hear you saying, ‘Oh! is that the kind
of man he was! I don’t like him at all, and I am
very sure I shan’t like his poetry.”

That is a very woman’s reason, and a poor one at
that. You don’t dislike a pearl and deny its beauty
because the oyster it came from is ugly, do you?
You don’t admire a peacock’s tail the less on account
of its feet and voice, do you? Of course you don’t.
Then why dislike a poem because its author, as a
man, doesn’t live upto it? There was that much
good in him any way, and you must respect it, and
in-no way identify it with what in him is incompati-
ble with it. But to go back to Wordsworth, De Quin-
cey pronounces him the most one-sided man that ever
lived. He was intolerant of opinions differing from
his own. He was not a wide reader, nor, to judge
from an anecdote of De Quincey’s, was he a partic-
ular lover of books. He once picked up an uncut
volume of Burke's Orations belonging to De Quincey,
and was about to look it over as he sat down to
a plate of bread and butter. Picking up a greasy
knife he had been using, and carelessly tearing open
the fresh, clean pages with it, he left a greasy smear
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on every page. That is worse than not helping
a woman over a stile, isn’t it ?

He was not prepossessing in appearance; he had
a bad figure, awkward, loose-jointed, narrow-shoul-
dered; his face was thin, weather-worn, and old-look-
ing, even in early manhood. He had a sister, Dor-
othy, to whom he was tenderly attached, and who
was his favorite companion in along walk. She had
her brother’s love for nature, and more than his
sensibility in other directions; a nervous, excitable
woman, extremely awkward in her movements, and
shy in manner. The critic, Hazlitt, once made
her an offer of marriage, but she preferred her
brother’s society to that of anybody else, and lived
with him both before and after his marriage. She be-
came deranged in the latter part of her life.

Southey says that Wordsworth had no sense of
smell. ‘Once, and once only in his life, the dor-
mant power awakened. It was by a bed of stocks
in full bloom, at a house which he inhabited in Dor-
setshire, some five and twenty years ago, and he says
it was like a vision of Paradise to him; but it lasted
only for a few minutes, and the faculty has con-
tinued torpid from that time.’ Southey adds that
he himself possessed the sense in such acuteness
that he could ‘‘remember an odor and call up the
ghost of one departed.”

In addition to what J have recommended to your
notice on Wordsworth, you will find a delightful
little sketch of him in Fields’ Yesterdays with Authors,
Lowell, too, has written well on him.
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LETTER XXII

I DARE say you find the critics dull study after the

poets and novelists, and I dare say you wonder
just what is their particular province, and why your
liking or dislike of a book or my liking or disliking
of it isn’t criticism, and entitled to consideration as
well as the judgment of a Carlyle or a De Quincey.
Now, if books were like apples or pears and needed
only tasting to determine their sweetness or sour-
ness, our decision in the matter might go for some-
thing. But they are not. A book is a mind’s record
of its impressions of life and the world. The char-
acter of these impressions depends on the original
temperament of the writer, modified by his experi-
ences, education, and environments. They may be
true or false, extravagant and fanciful, or matter-of-
fact and sensible. But instead of taking this fact
into consideration, we call the book good when
these impressions chance to coincide with our own,
or, what we wish to make our own, and, when they
do not, we call it bad. This is all that ordinary
criticism amounts to. But it is not criticism at all,
it is only the statement of a personal bias. It is
saying, ‘‘I have found somebody who thinks as I
do,” which by no means signifies that I have found
somebody who feels, sees, and speaks truly. It is
most likely to mean anything but that, for the ex-
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 287

periences of most of us are extremely limited, our
ideas on most subjects extremely superficial. We
commence by looking at the world not as we find it,
but as we want it to be. We resolutely shut our
eyes to what is displeasing, and either deny its ex-
istence or gloss it over; or, sore with some personal
disappointment, we rush to the other extreme and
see everything in black, ‘out en noiy, as our French
neighbors say. We either feel too keenly in one
direction and so become intolerant and narrow, or
we do not feel at all, and are therefore colorless
and indifferent. This fact accounts for the vogue
certain books have, that happen to touch a tem-
porary sentiment, a malady of the time. Everybody
reads them, discusses them, predicts immortality for
them, and forgets them in a twelve-month. Books
that really bid for immortality are not to be found
on milliner’s shelves, fashionable drawing-room
tables, and railway book-stalls. Wordsworth would
have starved had he depended upon the sale of his
poems for his bread and butter, while many a con-
temporary author of The-Skip-of-The-Tip-Toe-Hop
(as Thoreau humorously calls the vapid romance)
wrote himself into a carriage and four. But Words-
worth lives, and will go on living as long as there’s
reading, while the author of Tzttle-Tottle-Tan, The-
Skip, etc. is as dead as his horses. Beware, then, of
mistaking the popularity of a book for an evidence
of its merit; beware of mistaking popular opinion
for criticism. Criticism is not the expression of a
personal bias, it is not mere guide-book work, it
288 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

does not consist in fault-finding, nor in uniform
praising, nor in mere cataloguing; nor are reviewers,
as Coleridge asserts, ‘‘ people who would have been
poets, historians, biographers, etc. if they could,”
but having failed, turn critics for spite, and abuse
those whom they cannot imitate.

True criticism consists in justly estimating, on
sound principles, the value and importance of literary
productions. Life, experience, thought, feeling,
learning, observation, long, faithful study, wide
reading go to the making of true criticism, and for
this reason the critical faculty is the last to be
awakened. A young person’s judgment of a book
is worth little or nothing in itself. It simply shows
the direction in which he is moving.

Sound criticism implies, too, the critic’s posses-
sion of mental gifts identical with those of the great
creative spirits, namely, judgment, feeling, sympathy,
and susceptibility to beauty. We see in books just
so much as we carry to them, not one iota more.
When the heart does not leap at the expression
of a noble sentiment, it is because it does not
already exist there. Tell me that you love a good
book and I know there is something good in you.
Tell me that you love one which is weak, morbid,
sentimental, and you have given me an infallible evi-
dence of yourown weakness. People who read doctors’
books invariably read the descriptions of the com-
plaints with which they fancy themselves afflicted.
Symptoms of diseases foreign to them do not interest
them at all.
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 289

We appreciate wholly by the faculty of recog-
nition, The poet simply gives utterance to what
lies unsaid in us, and the office of the critic is to
recognize this utterance and duly record it in such
manner that shall win for it a wider hearing and
better understanding, and in doing so he is often not
only an interpreter and assistant of creative genius,
but is himself a tiller of the ground and sower of
new seeds in intellectual fields. Such tilters and
sowers were the men of whom you have written me
this week—Macaulay, De Quincey, Lamb, Carlyle,
Matthew Arnold.

There are lesser men in this department well
worthy of your attention, Landor, Jeffrey, Foster,
Hazlitt, Sidney Smith, Wilson; but they are men
who have not impressed their personality so deeply
on the world of thought as those first-mentioned.
The men of the first rank have had a message to
deliver to the world either independent of their
criticism or in connection with it, and for that reason
I chose them for your particular study.

Lamb was the oldest of the first group. He was
born in 1775, the same year in which ‘““Monk”’ Lewis,
Walter Savage Landor, and Jane Austen were born.
I don’t often insist on dates, as you notice, unless
they are easy to remember, and this date happens
to be but one year in advance of our Declaration of
Independence; perhaps you can remember it in that
way. De Quincey was ten years Lamb’s junior, that
is, he was born in 1785. Carlyle followed at the end
of the next decade, that is 1795, and Macaulay came

19
290 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

in with the nineteenth century five years later, that
isin 1800. Arnold was born in 1822.

De Quincey is usually called an essayist rather
than critic, and, indeed, his work as an essayist is
decidedly greater in quantity than what he has left
as acritic. But the latter work is soespecially fine,
so quite unequaled in many respects, that it deserves
particular attention. He had more of the essential
qualities of a fine critic than any author with whom
Iam acquainted. He had judgment without cold-
ness, poetic sensibility without extravagance, humor
without buffoonery, breadth and tolerance without
loss of a distinct, native personality, learning, read-
ing, eloquence. So far as I know, he was the first
English writer to recognize the basis on which phil-
osophic criticism rests, namely, scientific psycholo-
gy. ‘In genial moments,” he writes, ‘the charac-
teristic remembrances of men expand as fluently as
buds travel into blossoms; but criticism, if it isto be
conscientious and profound, and if it is applied to
an object so unlimited as poetry, must be almost as
unattainable by any hasty effort as fine poetry itself.
‘Thou hast convinced me,’ says Rasselas to Imlac,
‘that it is impossible to be a poet,’ so vast had
appeared the array of qualifications. But with the
same ease, Imlac might have convinced the prince
that it was impossible to be a critic. And hence it
is, that in the sense of absolute and philosophic crit-
icism, we have little or none; for before that can
exist we must have a good psychology; whereas at
present we have none at all.”
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 291

I have so often quoted De Quincey to you that
you cannot be an utter stranger to his charming
manner of expressing himself. He is one of the
great masters of English prose, and you must begin
to make his acquaintance by reading his Literary
Reminiscences and Essays on the Poets.

I cannot, of course, begin to give you anything
like an idea of his various opinions on literary mat-
ters. That would be to copy out his books entire
for you, but I should like to call your attention to a
few ofthem. He thought that meditative poetry will
finally maintain most power upon generations that
think, and that in this department Wordsworth has
norival to apprehend since Shakespeare. He thought
the Dunciad the greatest effort of Pope’s genius.
He thought the words, ‘‘didactic poetry,” an asso-
ciation of contrary terms, one destroyed the other,
as if we should say sour sweet. He believed that
no poetry can have the function of teaching. ‘ Poe-
try or any one of the fine arts (all of which speak
through the genial nature of man and his excited
sensibilities) can teach only as nature teaches, as
forests teach, as the sea teaches, as infancy teaches,
namely, by deep impulse, by hieroglyphic sugges-
tion. Their teaching is not direct or explicit, but
lurking, implicit, masked in deep incarnations.” In
the same essay from which the above is taken (the
Essay on Pope) he makes a fine distinction between
what he calls knowledge literature and power litera-
ture, the functions of the first being to teach, that of
the latterto move. But I must send you to the essay
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itself for the discussion. He thought little of novels
as permanent additions to literature, first, because
in order to be popular a writer must speak ‘to what
is least permanent in human sensibilities. That
is already to be self-degraded. Secondly, because
the novel-reading class is by far the most compre-
hensive, and being such must count as a large ma-
jority among its members those who are poor in
capacities of thinking, and are passively resigned to
the instincts of immediate pleasure; to these the
writer must chiefly humble himself, he must study
their sympathies, must assume them, must give them
back. In our days he must give them back even
their own street slang, so servile is the modern
novelist’s dependence on his canaille of an audience.
In France, among the Sues, etc., it has been found
necessary to give back even the closest portraits of
obscene atrocities that shun the light; and burrow
only in the charnel houses of vast manufacturing
towns,” etc. The continuation of that subject you
will find in the essay on Goldsmith.

Perhaps you are interested enough in the writer,
now, to wish to know something about the man.
De Quincey has told the story of his life in his own
charming way in the Confessions of an Opium-Eater.

De Quincey’s father was an English merchant of
good standing and considerable wealth. He was a
man, too, of decided literary tastes, while the mother
was an intellectual woman who framed her children
“to a Spartan simplicity of diet.” De Quincey
was one of the shyest of children, His father died
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 293

when he was seven, and he was left to the care of
four guardians. He was a precocious child and
early distinguished himself for classical attainments.
He read Latin fluently at eleven, at thirteen wrote
Greek with ease, and two years later could converse
in it owing to a.habit he formed of daily reading off
the newspapers in Greek. ‘ That boy,” said one of
his masters, ‘could harangue an Athenian mob
better than you and I could address an English
one.”

At seventeen, becoming dissatisfied with his work
in college, he determined to leave without the
knowledge of his guardians, whose consent to such a
proceeding he knew he could not win. He beggeda
loan of five guineas from a lady, who sent him double
the amount. With this sum he set out for Wales,
and might have managed to live comfortably there
for a number of weeks, but one day he felt himself
affronted by his landlady and abruptly left her
house, rapidly spent his money at inns, and was
reduced to living on one meal a day. Even this
scanty resource failed him in time, and he subsisted
on blackberries, hips, haws, growing by the road-
sides, and such occasional meals as he could get in
exchange for literary service, such as writing busi-
ness letters and love letters. During this time he
slept in the fields in the open air. He soon went
to London, where for upwards of sixteen weeks he
suffered, he says, ‘‘the physical anguish of hunger
in various degrees of intensity,” and laid the as.
tions of recurring attacks of neuralgic pains in his
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stomach, from which he suffered all his life. These
acute attacks subsequently led to his habit of opium-
eating in order to relieve them.

The self-inflicted tortures of his vagabond life
were finally ended by a chance meeting with a
gentleman who was acquainted with his family.
The gentleman lent him ten pounds; he found his
way into print, subsequently came into possession
of his inheritance, and his sufferings, so far as they
were occasioned by want, ceased. The habit of
opium-eating was commenced in his twenty-ninth
year, and continued for upwards of seventeen years,
when he broke it off to a great degree, resumed it
again, underwent the agonizing struggle of another
effort to free himself, and, though he never suc-
ceeded in abandoning it entirely, he did succeed
in acquiring a marvelous control of himself in the
use of it. The immediate cause of his use of
opium was a very painful attack of neuralgia in the
face. He had formed, he said, the habit of wash-
ing his head in cold water every day, and one night
being suddenly seized with a severe toothache, he
attributed it to his accidental omission of the prac-
tice, rose, plunged his head into a basin of cold
water, and with dripping hair lay down and fell
asleep. The next morning he was tortured by
violent neuralgic pains which lasted for twenty
days. On the twenty-first day opium was recom-
mended to him, and he took it.

De Quincey was attracted to the lake region by
the presence of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and lived
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. _ 295

there many years. Ther2 was, however, little real
affinity between the unsocial, cold-hearted Words-
worth and the little, shy, tender De Quincey, with
his ardent affections and poetic sensibility. De
Quincey’s life for years was that of a scholar buried
in books, particularly in German metaphysics, Kant,
Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, and his only recreation
was an opium debauch on Saturday nights.

I was turning over an old copy of Gilfillan’s
Literary Portraits the other day, and I came across
this vivid one of De Quincey:

“Conceive a little, pale-faced, woe-begone and
attenuated man with short indescribables, no coat,
check-shirt, and neck-cloth twisted like a wisp of
straw, opening the door of his room in street,
advancing towards you with hurried movement and
half-recognizing glance, saluting you in low and
hesitating tones, asking you to be seated, and after
he has taken a seat opposite you, beginning to pour
into your willing ear a stream of learning and wis-
dom as long as you are content to listen, or to lend
him the slightest cue. Who isit? ’Tis De Quincey,
the celebrated opium-eater, the friend and inter-
preter of Coleridge and Wordsworth, the sounder of
metaphysic depths and the dreamer of imaginative
dreams, the most learned and the most singular
man alive, the most gifted of scholars, the most
scholar-like of men of genius. . . . Your first
feeling as he enters is, can this be he? Is this the
distinguished scholar? Is this the impassioned
autobiographer?

 
296 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

“His head is small; how can he carry all he
knows ? His brow is singular in shape but not par-
ticularly large or prominent. Where has nature
expressed his majestic intellect? His eyes, they
sparkle not, they shine not, they are lusterless ; can
that be a squint which glances over from them
towards you? No, it is only a slight habit one of
them has of occasionally looking in a different
direction from the other. There is nothing else
particular about them; there is not even the glare
which lights up sometimes dull eyes into eloquence.

But sit and listen to him; hear his
small, thin, yet piercing voice winding out so dis-
tinctly his subtleties of thought and feeling

his uniform urbanityand willingness to allow
you your full share in the conversation ; witness all
this for an hour together and you will say at the
close, ‘This is the best living image of Burke and
Coleridge ; this is an extraordinary man.’”

I am not very fond of Mr. Gilfillan’s English nor
his affected sprightliness, but in spite of his defects
he has managed to convey an impression of De
Quincey’s appearance for which I, for one, am much
obliged to him; and now let us turn to Carlyle.

His story is the old painful one of genius strug-
gling wearily through poverty and discouragement,
but turning out better than many such aone, for it
ends in worldly prosperity and literary’fame while
its hero is still alive. Youwill find this story admir-
ably told in Froude’s Life of Carlyle. Readitand then
read Carlyle’s Heroes and Hero Worshipand his Critical
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 297

and Miscellaneous Essays. You will find him at his
best in these works, and yet they are not his most
ambitious efforts. But in his histories and bio-
graphies as well as in Past and Present and Sartor
Resartus he pushes to extreme that harsh, crabbed,
difficult style and laborious intensity which have
always prevented him from finding the universal
hearing he was so capable of commanding. But I
should be disappointed if you allowed yourself to
be repelled by manner when assured that there was
something worth knowing behind it. Does the hull
and shell of the hickory-nut keep you from the
meat of it? Then don’t be afraid of Carlyle’s
hull ; you'll find a meat as white and sweet in him
as you find in the hickory. Perhaps that is not a
good simile, for along with the sweetness there is
much that is bitter and tonicin him. But what I
wish to say is that his rugged, uncouth language
and eccentric metaphors, issuing white-hot as if
from a blast-furnace, conceal tenderness, strength,
and poetry.

I warn you that he will say quidnunc for gossip,
speciosity for plausibility, iracund for irascible, pab-
ulum for nutriment, minatory for threatening, etc.,
but these are good dictionary words, and if they do
not seem to express their meanings so clearly to us
as their familiar synonyms, that is our fault, not
theirs. He will even compare his adjectives in the
most unmelodious way. He will say beautifullest,
remarkablest, watchfullest, eligiblest. He will
adopt the German fashion of capitalizing his nouns.
298 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

He is not to be defended in these peculiarities; he
ought to have been above such verbal eccentricities,
but he wasn’t, and we must take him as we find him.
Only I should give every young writer Matthew
Arnold’s advice to Frederic Harrison, namely, to
‘‘avoid Carlylese as he would the devil.”

Then, too, Carlyle frequently falls into an extrav-
agant diction, an unnecessary energy, which mar
the effect of what he wishes to say. He talks in
italics when a calm statement would do as well; he
shrieks when he might be better heard in a whisper;
he lacks repose; his energy is often the energy of
fury rather than that of real power. His French
Revolution, for example, usually lauded as a ‘“ prose
epic,” and often designated his masterpiece, is in
reality an exasperating medley of shrieks, vituper-
ations, and bursts of sardonic laughter, relieved here
and there by genuine flashes of genius and sharp
outline drawing of character, wonderfully vivid and
distinct. Particularly fine are his sketches of
“‘Grandison-Cromwell-La Fayette,” the ‘‘sea-green
Robespierre,” Mirabeau, Danton, Mme. Roland. The
trial and guillotining of Louis XVI. and Marie An-
toinette are dramatically rendered. But as a whole
one carries away more ‘“‘Cimmerian darkness and
loud weltering chaos” than clear, definite, historical
thought. And as for enjoying it without a dictionary
and encyclopedia at hand, and a knowledge of
French and French history at one’s tongue’s end,
that is an utter impossibility. In the sense of being
a clear, impartial record of events it is not history
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 299

at all. Carlyle has a marvelous trick of minimizing
men, and so far does he carry this trick in the French
Revolution, that instead of producing a history he
has produced something akin to a magic lantern
performance or a puppet-show, accompanied by
wild strains of music, the glare and snapping of fire-
works, and booming of cannon. One sees pictures
and hears noises until weary and confused, one is as
glad to close the book and so shut out the glare and
noise as one is glad to see the night fall on the fire-
crackers, merry-go-round music, heat, dust, and acci-
dents of a Fourth of July celebration.

It is not, then, by his history of the French Revo-
lution that I would have you learn how great Carlyle
is. He did his best work as a critic; he is the very
finest English interpreter of German literature we
have. He has given us the best estimate of Scott,
Burns, and Dr. Johnson, and he has infused into all
his criticisms his own fine, strong character, his
admiration of activity, growth, power, his hatred of
weakness, sloth, irresolution, and ‘‘ damnable, dead,
putrescent cant.’

He teaches that fine old truth, old as the first
great thinker, that a man’s happiness and his real
worth depend upon what he has in his soul and not
in his pocket-book. ‘The wealth of a man is the
number of things which he loves and blesses, which
he is loved and blessed by! The herdsman in his
poor clay shealing where his very cow and dog are
friends to him, and not a cataract but carries mem-
ories for him, and not a mountain but nods old
300 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

recognition, his life all encircled as in blessed
mother’s arms, is he poorer than Slick’s with the
ass loads of yellow metal on his back?”

He tells the laborer that his condition is not to
be improved by strikes or idle complaints, that the
source of his misery is not to be looked for any-
where but in himself. ‘(When an individual is
miserable, what does it most of all behoove him
to do? To complain of this man or that? To fill
the world and the street with lamentation, objur-
gation? Not so at all; the reverse of so. All
moralists advise him not to complain of any per-
son or of anything but of himself only. He is
to know of a truth that he being miserable, he
has been unwise, he. Had he faithfully followed
Nature and her laws, Nature ever true to her laws
would have yielded fruit and increase and felicity
to him, but he has followed other than Nature’s
laws, and now Nature, her patience ended, leaves
him desolate.”

He believes that a man’s character is very much
determined by what he admires, and that to admire
what is noble is a step toward becoming noble.
This is the burden of that fine series of lectures
called Heroes and Hero Worship.

“It is the very joy of man’s heart to admire
where he can, and nothing so lifts him from all his
mean imprisonments, were it but*for moments, as
true admiration.”

He is fond of the phrase ‘‘grim and silent” as
indicative of intense purpose, and effort ceaseless
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 301

and unobtrusive as that by which nature works her
miracles of growth. He believes with all great
thinkers that real reforms are the effect of inward
growth, and not outward addition, and is not to be
misled by what he terms “philanthropistic phos-
phorescences.” He rails at the materialism of the
age and lauds the past, and here again, on this sub-
ject falls into the old spasmodic, hysterical strain that
mars the French Revolution, as witness this paragraph
from the biography of John Sterling. It is almost
a literal transcript of a lurid page from the French
Revolution, and on meeting with it in Sterling’s
biography one feels a little shock of surprise at see-
ing it out of its proper setting: ‘A world all
rocking and plunging like that old Roman one
when the measure of its iniquities was full, the
abysses, and subterranean and supernal deluges,
plainly broken loose, in the wild dimlighted chaos,
all stars of Heaven gone out. No star of Heaven
visible hardly now to any man; the pestiferous
fogs and foul exhalations grown continual have,
except on the highest mountain tops, blotted out
all stars; will-o’-wisps, of various course and colors,
take the place of stars. Over the wild surging
chaos in the leaden air only sudden glares of
revolutionary lightning; then mere darkness with
philanthropistic phosphorescences, empty meteoric
lights; here and there an ecclesiastical luminary
still hovering hanging on to its old quaking fixtures,
pretending still to be a moon or sun, though visibly
it is but a Chinese lantern made of paper mainly,
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with candle-end foully dying in the heart of it!
Surely as mad a world as you could wish!”

One feels inclined to utter a petulant ‘“ Pshaw !”
or ‘“‘ Bogey-man!”’ at that, and pass it over as the
intolerance of a book-man who feels the world is
going to ruin because it is building railroads and
manufactories instead of studying German and
writing histories of Frederick the Great. This is the
shrieking Carlyle, again, whom we are glad to ex-
change for the strong, brave, bright and tender Car-
lyle with his tonic, incisive speeches.

Sterling says, “I find in all my conversations
with Carlyle that his fundamental position is the
good of evil. He is forever quoting Goethe’s
epigram about the uselessness of wishing to jump
off one’s own shadow.” ‘Even so,’ adds Carlyle,
in confirmation of Sterling’s statement.

“Was lehr ’ich dich vor allen Dingen ?”
‘“Konntest mich lehren von meiner Schatte zu springen?”

Carlyle took life hard. It was in no sensea holi-
day to him. According to him, a man is born into
the world not to ask how he is to be happy, but how
he is to get his task done; renunciation, not happi-
ness, is to be his guide. Nor was he one to preach
what he could not practice. He lived his precept.
There are agony-sweats and struggles in the world
of thought far more severe and telling ona man than
those of the world of action. Read Sartor Resartus
for an idea of those struggles. Carlyle was one of
those men, who, tormented by a vision of the ideal,
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 303

are, in a certain sense, isolated from their kind by
imperfect sympathy with them. He was born
neither to be happy nor to give happiness. ‘ Gey
ill to deal wi’,” was his mother’s judgment of him,
and “ gey ill to deal wi’,” most people find him. If
you want to be flattered, if you want to be told that
weaknesses are harmless and amusing, nay, even
endearing ; if you wish to be told that you are here
to get all the sunshine and laughter you can out of
life; if you wish, in short, to be put in tune with
yourself, do not read Carlyle. But if you have an
intimation that life, after all is a serious thing and is
to be taken seriously, if you believe there is such a
thing as improving yourself, and wish to set about
doing it, even at the risk of exposing your self-love
to some sore affronts ; if you wish to be stimulated
by tonic thought, then read Carlyle. And if, after
reading him carefully, you should begin to feel the
world ‘rocking and plunging, the abysses and
supernal deluges broken loose ;’”’ humanity at large
but a poor affair, and safety for it lying in two or
three great intellects or powerful wills, put him
down; you are going too far, you are getting under
the influence of the wrong Carlyle, the dyspeptic,
pessimistic Carlyle; you need a change of tonics,
you need to come again under the spell of illusion,
to recover from your mental sea-sickness, your
“rocking and plunging;” you need to stand firmly
on this earth and know it good, to turn lovingly
toward your brother man, feeling he really is your
brother, and needs your love the farther his weak-
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nesses take him out of the pale of it; and in such
need as yours to recover faith and love, there is no
writer in any literature so good for you as Charles
Lamb.

I shall first introduce you to Lamb through De
Quincey, who says of him: ‘Considered as aman
of genius he was not in the very first rank, simply
because his range was a contracted one ; within that
range he was perfect ; of the peculiar powers which
he possessed, he has left to the world as exquisite a
specimen as this planet is likely to exhibit. But as
a moral being in the total compass of his relations
to this world’s duties, in the largeness and diffusive-
ness of his charity, in the graciousness of his con-
descension to inferior intellects, I am disposed after a
deliberate view of my own entire experience, to pro-
nounce him the best man, the nearest in his ap-
proaches to an ideal standard of excellence that I
have known or read of. In the mingled purity, a
child-like purity, and the benignity of his nature, I
again express my own deep feeling of the truth
when I say that he recalled to my mind the image
and character of St. John, the Evangelist, of him
who was at once the beloved apostle, and also more
peculiarly the apostle of love.”

It was this large, tolerant, pure, magnetic per-
sonality which made Lamb a great writer. When-
ever he goes out of himself, as in his tragedy of
John Woodvil and his farce Mr. H., he is a very in-
different writer. He becomes classic wherever he
puts himself, as in his Essays of Elia and his private
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 305

letters. I shall let you gather some hints of that
charming personality from some extracts from his
letters, edited by Dean Angier. But first let me
briefly tell you the pathetic story of his life.

His parents were poor and he was obliged to leave
school early to add to the scanty home income.
He secured an appointment in the accountant’s
office of the East India Company in his fifteenth year,
and continued in the service of the company until
he was fifty, when he was released and pensioned.
The fatal curse of insanity rested on the family.
Lamb’s father fell into a condition of semi-imbecil-
ity in his old age. He had been aman of some
literary ability ; had published a small volume of
poems, among which one entitled Zhe Sparrow’s
Wedding was his especial favorite, and in his dotage
he liked to hear Charles read it to him again and
again. In his twenty-first year Charles had an attack
of insanity and was confined in a lunatic asylum for
six weeks. His hallucinations during this period
seem to have been of a highly agreeable character,
for he writes to Coleridge on his release in 1796 :

“At some future time I will amuse you with an
account as full as my memory will permit of the
strange turn my frenzy took. I look back upon it
at times with a gloomy kind of envy, for while it
lasted I had many, many hours of pure happiness.
Dream not, Coleridge, of having tasted all the
grandeur and wildness of fancy till you have gone
mad. All now seems to me vapid, comparatively
so.”

20
306 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

Charles never had another attack of insanity,
but he had a sister Mary, ten years his senior, who
was subject all her life to recurring fits of acute
mania. She was a woman of unusual powers of
mind, gentle, sweet and affectionate in her disposi-
tion; Charles idolized her. Shortly after his release
from the asylum this sister became insane and in her
frenzy killed her poor, old, infirm mother, who had
tried to interpose between her maddened daughter
and an apprentice girl whom she was pursuing with
a knife.

Mary was confined in an asylum and shortly
recovered. Charles had an elder brother, John,
who did not want her released. The authorities of
the parish in which the dreadful accident occurred
were doubtful about the propriety of permitting her
return, but Charles solemnly promised that he
would take care of her as long as he lived, and she
was allowed to return to him. He was then in his
twenty-second year. His salary was a little over
five hundred dollars a year. He renounced all
thoughts of love and marriage and devoted his life
to the care of his sister, who in return lavished upon
him a love as tender and judicious as his own.
They wrote together the Zales from Shakespeare, and
they lived harmoniously and happily in so far as they
could do so when Mary was herself. He was, how-
ever, unceasingly anxious for her, and if he thought
her looking tired in company, he would repeatedly
ask her, ‘Mary, does your head ache?” ‘Don’t
you feel unwell?” He considered it almost a sin
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 307

to indulge himself in any holiday outing that he
could not share with her, but they were obliged to
take all necessary precautions for any unexpected re-
turn of her malady, anda straight-jacket was always
packed among her clothes. She could usually tell
when an attack was coming on by her restlessness
and sleeplessness, and would ask Charles to take
her to an asylum, The two were once seen, hand
in hand, crossing a field on this sad errand, tears
streaming down both their faces. These attacks
at first lasted about six weeks and occurred at
lengthy intervals, but towards the latter part of her
life they happened more frequently and lasted for
months. Poor Charles, writing to a friend, says,
“Tt cuts sad great slices out of the time, the little
time we have to live together.”

You may be interested in knowing that Mary
never felt any reserve about speaking of her mother,
and felt herself entirely absolved from any guilt in
her death, so that the remembrance of it never afflict-
edher. She survived her brother eleven years, dying
in 1847. During the last years of her life her mind
was entirely gone. Charles died in his sixtieth
year. His death was occasioned by an accident,
apparently trivial. He had fallen while out walk-
ing and had struck his face against a stone. An
erysipelas set in from which he died in a few days.

He was small and fragile in figure and dressed
habitually in sober black or brown. He had a Jew-
ish cast of features, prominent nose, clear, brown
complexion, and crisply curling black hair. His
308 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

eyes were not of the same color. One eye was
hazel, the iris of the other was flecked with gray.
He walked slowly, without spring or elasticity in
his gait, but he could walk twenty miles at a stretch
without tiring; fifteen miles was Mary’s limit.

He stammered and was much given to punning
and tobacco. Everybody loved and admired him
not only for his wit and intellect, but for his gentle,
amiable disposition. Yet he was by no means one
of those insipidly good fellows who are good solely
by virtue of negatives. He had'a strong, piquant
personality, and so odious to him was any suggestion
of namby-pambyness that he seriously resented Cole-
ridge’s calling him ‘‘gentle-hearted Charles,” and
wrote him in protest: ‘ For God’s sake (I never was
more serious), don’t make me ridiculous any more
by terming me ‘gentle-hearted’ in print, or do it in
better verses. It did well enough five years ago
when I came to see you and was moral coxcomb
enough at the time you wrote the lines to feed upon
such epithets; but besides that, the meaning of gen-
tle is equivocal at best, and almost always means
poor-spirited; the very quality of gentleness is
abhorent to such vile trumpetings. My sentiment is
long vanished. I hope my virtues have done sucking.
I can scarce think but you meant it in joke. Ihope
you did, for I should be ashamed to think you
could think to gratify me by such praise fit only to
bea cordial to some green-sick sonneteer.” He
returns to the obnoxious epithet in another letter,
and begs Coleridge in his next edition to “ blot out
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 309

gentle-hearted and substitute drunken-dog, ragged-
headed, seld-shaven, odd-eyed, stuttering, or any
other epithet which truly and properly belongs to
the gentleman in question.” He had a horror of
insipidity, affectation, or gravity assumed as a dis-
guise of sterility. He liked a character with knots
or excrescences on it, any sign by which he could
feel that it was not a character shaped according to
rule or convention, but growing after nature’s fash-
ion. He has given us his idea of a perfect man in
a letter to Manning describing his friend John Rick-
man: ‘He is a most pleasant hand; a fine, rattling
fellow, has gone through life laughing at solemn
apes; himself hugely literate, oppressively full of
information in all stuff of conversation, from matter
of fact to Xenophon and Plato; can talk Greek with
Porson, politics with Thelwall, conjecture with
George Dyer, nonsense with me, and anything with
anybody; a great farmer, somewhat concerned in
an agricultural magazine; reads no poetry but Shake-
speare, very intimate with Southey, but never reads
his poetry, relishes George Dyer, thoroughly pene-
trates into the ridiculous wherever found, under-
stands the first time (a great desideratum in common
minds), does not want explanations, translations,
limitations, as Professor Godwin does when you
make an assertion; up to anything, down to every-
thing, whatever sapet hominem. A perfect man. All
this farrago, which must perplex you to read and
has put me to a little trouble to select only proves
how impossible it is to describe a pleasant hand.
310 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

You must see Rickman to know him; for he is a
species in one, a new class, an exotic, any slip of
which I am proud to put in my garden pot. The
clearest headed fellow. Fullest of matter with least
verbosity.”

Many of these characteristics are Lamb’s own.
He, too, had that quickness of insight that doesn’t
need twice telling or the second look. He had the
same penetration into the ludicrous, the same many-
sidedness, and large tolerance he describes. He
was, too, a lover of Shakespeare, but he did not
confine his reading of poetry to Shakespeare. He
loved the old dramatists, Beaumont and Fletcher.
In fact, he was an almost indiscriminate lover of
old books.

He loved Cowper. ‘I have been reading the
Task with fresh delight. Iam glad you love Cow-
per. I could forgive a man for not enjoying Milton,
but I would not call that man my friend who should
be offended with the divine chit-chat of Cowper.”
He disliked Byron and Shelley. Writing to Barton,

a young Quaker poet, he says, “I can no more
understand Shelley than you can. His poetry is
‘thin sown with profit or delight. . . For his

theories and nostrums they are oracular enough, but
I either comprehend ’em not, or there is ‘miching
malice and mischief in ’em,’ but for the most part
ringing with their own emptiness. Hazlitt said well
of’em: ‘Many are the wiser and better for reading
Shakespeare, but nobody was ever wiser or better
for reading Shelley,’” and again to the same person:
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 311

“T have sickened on the modern rhodomontade and
Byronism, and your plain Quakerish beauty has
captivated me.”

Simplicity and naturalness were always captivat-
ing to Lamb as they are to every one of refined
taste. He liked Rousseau’s Confessions for their
‘frankness, openness of heart, and disclosure of all
the most hidden and delicate affections of the mind.”
He advises Coleridge to write more simply. ‘‘Cul-
tivate simplicity, Coleridge, or rather banish elabo-
rateness, for simplicity springs spontaneous from the
heart and carries into daylight with it its own modest
buds and genuine, sweet, clear flower of expression.
I allow no hot beds in the gardens of Parnassus.”’
Burns was a great favorite with Lamb because of his
heartiness and simplicity.

Just as he liked color and distinctness in a char-
acter so he liked to read a man’s personality in
what he wrote. He did not like being taught
scientific truths or moral doctrines in poetry or
fiction any more than he liked eating confectionery
in the form of medicated candies, cough-drops, pur-
gative lozenges, etc. He had been looking one
day for some of the old fairy tales and nursery
rhymes he had loved in his boyhood, in order to
send a volume of them to Coleridge’s children,
and writes to Coleridge apropos of his search:
“Goody Two Shoes is almost out of print. Mrs.
Barbauld’s stuff has banished all the old classics of
the nursery, and the shopman at Newberry’s hardly
deigned to reach them off an old exploded corner
312 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

of a shelf, when Mary asked for them. Mrs. Bar-
bauld’s and Mrs. Trimmer’s nonsense lay in piles
about. Knowledge, insignificant and vapid as Mrs.
B.’s books convey, it seems must come to a child in
the shape of knowledge, and his empty noddle must
be turned with conceit of his own powers when he
has learnt that a horse is an animal and Billy is bet-
ter than a horse, and such like, instead of that beau-
tiful interest in wild tales which made the child a
man while all the time he suspected himself to be no
bigger than achild. Science has succeeded to poetry,
no less in the little walks of children than with men.
Isthere no possibility ofaverting thissoreevil ? Think
what you would have been now, if instead of being
fed with tales and old wives’ fables in childhood, you
had been crammed with geography and natural his-
tory. Hang them! I mean the cursed Barbauld
crew, those blights and blasts of all that is human in
man and child.”

Lamb had a passion for London, which he has
expressed with delicious enthusiasm in several letters.
He did not in the least care for nature. ‘I must
confess that I am not romance-bit about nature.
The earth and sea and sky (when all is said) is but
as a house to dwell in.”

“London, whose dirtiest, drab-frequented alley,
and her lowest-bowing tradesman I would not ex-
change for Skiddaw, Helvellyn, James, Waller, and the
parson into the bargain. O,her lamps of a night! her
rich goldsmiths, paint shops, toy shops, mercers,
hardware men, pastry cooks! St. Paul’s churchyard,
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 313

Exeter Change! Charing Cross, with the man upon
a black horse! They are thy gods, O, London!
Aren’t you mightily moped on the banks of the
Cam? Had not you better come and set up here ?
You can’t think what a difference. All the streets
and pavements are pure gold, I warrant you. At
least I know an alchemy that turns her mud into
that metal, a mind that loves to be at home in
crowds !”’

Wordsworth invited Lamb and his sister to visit
the Lake district, and in the course of his reply Lamb
says, ‘‘I don’t much care if I never see a mount-
ain in my life. I have passed all my days in Lon-
don until I have formed as many and intense local at-
tachments as any of you mountain dwellers can have
done with dead nature. . . . . The crowds,
the very dirt and mud, the sun shining upon houses
and pavements, the print shops, the old book-stalls,
parsons cheapening books, coffee-houses, steams of
soups from kitchens, the pantomimes, London itself
a pantomime and a masquerade, all these things
work themselves into my mind and feed me without
a power of satiating me. The wonder of these
sights impels me into night-walks about her crowded
streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand
from fulness of joy at so much life. All these
emotions must be strange to you, so are your rural

emotions to me. . . . . My attachments are
all local, purely local. I have no passion for
groves and valleys. . . I do not envy you. I

should pity you did I not know that the: mind will
314 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

make friends of anything. Your sun and moon,
and skies and hills and lakes affect me no more, or
scarcely come to me in more venerable characters
than as a gilded room with tapestry and tapers
where I might live with handsome visible objects.”

Afterwards he did see the mountains in Words-
worth’s country and expressed himself as being
haunted by them, and acknowledged that at last he
could conceive of a state of mind romantically ap-
preciative of natural beauty, but he never lost
allegiance to the town, and declared that “a garden
was the primitive prison till man with Promethean
felicity sinned himself out of it.”

I have said that he was not relieved from office
work till he was fifty. His letters often contain
humorous allusions to his office slavery. His
hours were from ten till four, the heart of the day,
and he looked forward with boyish ardor to the
time when he should be master of his days, and
when at last it came he says he wandered about
thinking he was happy, but feeling he was not, for,
now that life was all holiday, there were no holidays.

His disappointment was much like the uncom-
fortable realization of another dream of his youth.
When a young man, he had sadly written Coleridge
that he was the only friend he had in the world.
“T go nowhere, and have no acquaintances. Slow
of speech and reserved of manners, no one seeks of
cares for my society, and I am left alone.’’ What
the youth sighed for, the mature man had in super-
fluity, until he was forced to complain that he
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 315

could never be left alone. He was never “C. L.,
but always C. L. & Co.” One of the Zssays of
Ela humorously describes his own experiences in a
visitor-infested home. Indeed, the Essays of Elia
are more or less transcripts of his own experiences,
hence their wonderful charm. The cousin, Bridget,
inthe Essays,is his sister Mary. Lambtook the name
of an old friend in the East India House for his
nom de plume, but he spelled it with two l’s and
pronounced the e short. The reading-public, how-
ever, has chosen the long e sound, and it would be
an affectation, now, to change it. In conclusion,
let me conjure you to make acquaintance with Euzza,
if you have not already done so. To love Charles
Lamb is to draw very near humanity on the sweet-
est, purest side of it. That is why I called hima
good antidote to Carlyle in his vituperative moods.

You have been so frequently referred to Macaulay
in the early part of our studies that by this time
you must be familiar with his brilliant, vigorous
style and good common sense, and must either like
or dislike him, though I can hardly conceive of any-
body doing the latter unless he be a follower of
Matthew Arnold, and inclined to dislike him because
he is deservedly popular among the vast number of
people whom Arnold contemptuously dubs Philis-
tines. Arnold, of course, was too manly to acknowl-
edge even to himself that his depreciation of Mac-
aulay had anything to do with the Philistine follow-
ing. But Arnold so uniformly puts himself on the
unpopular side of a subject, seems so confident that
316° TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

4s

the Philistine, as he chooses to call him, cannot
possibly think or feel right on a question of litera-
ture or art, that it is safe to say his judgment of a
very popular author like Macaulay will be more or
less warped by his native bias, his instinctive dis-
trust of the people. However, Arnold’s ostensible
reason for underrating Macaulay is summed up in
what he calls “the external and internal character-
istics of Macaulay’s style, the external characteris-
tic being a hard, metallic movement with nothing of
the soft play of life, and the internal characteristic
being a perpetual semblance of hitting the right nail
on the head, without the reality.”

If by “soft play of life” Arnold means that per-
sonal style of writing by which one sees the author
in every line he pens, that style so charming in
Rousseau, Montaigne, De Quincey, Charles Lamb,
Bérne, and other delightful egotists who have but
to show themselves to be loved, faults and all,
Macaulay certainly has none of it. The man who
can do that sort of work successfully is the man who
is more or less interesting by some attractive pecu-
liarities, some endearing eccentricities that set him
apart from ordinary men. Now, Macaulay was the
last man in the world to be so set apart or marked.
He is, perhaps, the most notable example in litera-
ture of the perfect sanity of genius. He hadasound
physique, a buoyant, elastic temperament, and a
quick, shrewd brain, in which common sense was the
prevailing characteristic. A morbid idea never
entered his head. And he was as clean as he was
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 317

sound, or rather he was clean because he was sound.
But if by “soft play of life’’ Arnold means tender-
ness, sympathy, and imaginative glow, there are few
writers who have more of just that ‘play of life”
than Macaulay. I call your attention to Thackeray’s
admirable defense of him on this point, in one of
those delightful Round-about Papers: ‘One paper I
have read, regarding Lord Macaulay, says ‘he had
no heart.’ Why, a man’s books may not always
speak the truth, but they speak his mind in spite of
himself, and it seems to me this man’s heart is beat-
ing through every page he penned. Heisalways in
a storm of revolt and indignation against wrong,
craft, tyranny. How he cheers heroic resistance ;
how he backs and applauds freedom, struggling for
its own; how he hates scoundrels, ever so victorious
and successful; how he recognizes genius, though
selfish villains possess it. The critic who says
Macaulay had no heart might say that Johnson had
none; and two men more generous, and more loving,
and more hating, and more partial, and more noble,
do not live in our history.”

As for ‘striking the nail on the head,” perhaps
no man ever did that more often or more squarely
than Macaulay, for the simple reason that no man
was ever better qualified than he to deliver a judg-
ment into which reason, learning, feeling, and power
of comparison enter. He had a prodigious mem-
ory, he was an insatiable reader, and he was not a
book-man in the sense of being arecluse. He free-
ly mingled with men and was practically conversant
318 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

with worldly affairs. ‘He reads twenty books,”
says Thackeray, ‘‘to write a sentence; he travels a
hundred miles to make a line of description.” The
writer who has this marvelous power of fusing
details into a vivid, suggestive whole that fastens
itself to the mind, cannot justly be accused of not
“striking the nail on the head.’”’ In his expression,
“the semblance of striking it,” Arnold probably
means to censure the confident, clear, unwavering
manner in which Macaulay pours out sentence after
sentence until his subject is exhausted. But to those
who read an author because they wish to hear his
opinions ready-made and not to see them in the con-
fusing process of making, this lucidity and energetic
confidence are particularly satisfying. One may
accept or reject the conclusions arrived at, but at
any rate one is in no doubt as to what Macaulay
thinks and means to say.

He aimed at this very clearness, thinking it a
merit, and so itis. ‘How little,’ he writes in his
diary, ‘the all-important art of making meaning
pellucid is studied now. Hardly any popular author
except myself thinks of it. Many seem to aim at
being obscure. Indeed, they may be right enough
in one sense, for many readers give credit for pro-
fundity to whatever is obscure and call all that is
perspicuous shallow. But coraggio! and think of
A.D. 2850. Where will your Emersons be then?
But Herodotus will still be read with delight. We
must do our best to be read, too.” Again speaking
of his History of England, he says:
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 319

“T have felt today somewhat anxious about the
fate ofmy book . . . . Atall events I have
aimed high. I have tried to do something that may
be remembered. I have had the year 2000 and even
the year 3000 often in my mind. I have sacrificed
nothing to temporary fashions of thought and style;
and if J fail, my failure will be more honorable than
nine-tenths of the successes that I have witnessed.”

There is something very noble in this wish and
this effort to put the best there is in one’s self on
record, and to be satisfied with nothing else but
that, whether the world applaud or not. That mar-
velously clear, fluent, and brilliant style of his was
not acquired without effort. He wrote and re-wrote
his sentences, counting two printed pages a good
day’s work.

He loved his mother tongue and wouldn’t for
the world have debased it by the use of a word of
doubtful origin. He was fond of saying that ‘a
person who professes to be a critic in the delicacies
of the English language ought to have the Bible at
his fingers’ends.” He disliked the word “talented ”’
and thought it ought to be avoided, ‘first, because
it is not wanted; secondly, because you never hear
it from those who speak very good English.” By
the way, Sterling criticised Carlyle’s use of this
word and stigmatized it asa hustings or newspaper
word, invented by O’Connell.

Macaulay had a very modest opinion of his own
critical powers. Once, when asked to review Walter
Scott, he replied, ‘I have done my best to as-
320 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

certain what I can and what I cannot do. There are
extensive classes of subjects which I think myself
able to treat as few people can treat them. After
this you cannot suspect me of affectation of mod-
esty and you will therefore believe that I tell you
what I sincerely think when I say that Iam not suc-
cessful in analyzing the effect of works of genius. I
have written several things on historical, political, and
moral questions of which on the fullest reconsidera-
tion I am not ashamed; but I have never written a
page of criticism on poetry or the fine arts which I
would not burn if I had the power. . . JI havea
strong and acute enjoyment of works of the imag-
ination, but I have never habituated myself to dis-
sect them. . . Such books as Lessing’s Laocoon,
such passages as the criticism on Hamlet in Wilhelm
Meister fill me with wonder and despair.”

This last confession sounds strange to those who
know Macaulay by his charming essays, abounding
in keen analyses and happy judgments. Strange,
too, is the revelation we get of his character in the
Life and Letters edited by his nephew, Trevelyan.
And yet I confess it ought not to seem strange, for
the truly great are always child-like in their sim-
plicity and hearty enjoyment of common things;
always so easy to meet, sinking always to your level
without seeming to sink, and known only to you to
be great in so far as the same child-like naturalness
exists in you.

The great Macaulay, the famous historian and
essayist, the weighty Parliamentary orator, was in
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 321

private life the gentlest, tenderest, most unselfish,
most fun-loving, most home-loving of big boys; the
light, the warmth, the pet of the household from
childhood till the day he died. There was never a
great romp among the children in which he didn’t
have the liveliest part. There was no such hand at
a story-telling or reading. A holiday lost its holi-
day character if he didn’t share it. He disliked
society, passionately loved his home, his sisters, his
nephews and nieces, for he never married, and so
had neither wife nor children of his own to love.

In addition to his love of fun, his sense and
shrewdness, he had the quick sensibilities of a poet.
A noble sentiment, a finely drawn character in fiction,
would set him crying like a child or “blubbering like
a school-boy,” as he phrased it. His imagination
was so vivid that he confesses he could never read
history without romancing it. The flattest, dullest
narrative could furnish him with pictures, conversa-
tions, and action. This is the secret of his charm as
an historian. The past rises before him like a
drama; he sees his characters in their habit as they
lived; he hears them talk, looks into their heart and
knows their secret motives; he sees them as in a
picture, too, with their setting of field, or forest, or
crowded street; he knows what season of the year
it is; can tell you whether the birds are singing and
the grass is green, or whether it is winter and the
snow falls. And his history is not fiction, for,
though this dramatic power of coloring and vivify-
ing what is past may seem identical with that of the

21
322 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

ordinary novelist, there is in reality a vast difference
between the intuitions of genius and the applied
recollections of a story-writer.

Macaulay, like Dr. Johnson, Scott, Byron, and
many other notable literary men, could not tell one
tune from another, nor did he care particularly for
Nature; his one passion was his love for books. He
quaintly expresses that love in a letter to his little
niece, Margaret, whom he called by the pet name of
Baba:

“My dear Baba:

Thank you for your very pretty letter, I am
always glad to make my little girl happy, and noth-
ing pleases me so much as to see that she likes
books. For, when she is as old as I am, she will
find that they are better than all the tarts and cakes
and toys and plays and sights in the world. If any
body would make me the greatest king that ever
lived, with palaces and gardens and fine dinners and
wine and coaches and beautiful clothes and hun-
dreds of servants, on condition that I would not read
books, I would not be a king. I would rather be a
poor man ina garret with plenty of books than a
king who did not love reading.”

Macaulay, like most great readers, preferred old
books to new ones. He thought Dante superior to
Milton, equal to Homer, and only surpassed by
Shakespeare. He considered Madame de Staél the
first woman of her age, Maria Edgeworth the sec-
ond, and Jane Austen the third. His essay on Jane
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS, 323

Austen is quite the most satisfactory thing that has
ever been written about her.

Macaulay was but fifty-nine when he died, on the
28th of December, 1859. You may wish to remem-
ber that Washington Irving died the same year, on
the 28th of November.

Matthew Arnold was the eldest son of the cele-
brated Dr. Arnold of Rugby. Dr. Arnold, himself,
is worth your study, not for the particular value of
anything he has left us in a literary way, but for
his own sake as a man and teacher. In the latter
capacity he was, perhaps, one of the greatest char-
acter formers that ever lived. You will find a beau-
tiful tribute to him in Hughes’ 7om Brown at Rugby,
and you ought by all means to read A. P. Stanley’s
life of him.

Like his father, Matthew Arnold had a high
standard of life, and the aim of his books, Culture
and Anarchy, Literature and Dogma, and Friendship’s
Garland, is to inculcate that standard. But he isa
teacher who does not smile on his pupils; he has no
tolerance for their short-comings, no sympathy with
their weaknesses, and will make no compromise
with them. He sets the same difficult and lengthy
task for the dull boys that he sets for the clever
ones, and is indiscriminately severe if it is recited
haltingly. Or, to drop the metaphor and speak
plainly, Matthew Arnold lacks mellowness, suavity,
and large tolerance. He has imperfect sympathies,
and cannot address himself intelligibly to an
ordinary audience. Some one said of Fontenelle
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that he had as good a heart as could be made of
brains. That might be said with equal justice of
Matthew Arnold. He feels through his intellect.
There is less warmth than light in him. He in-
forms but he does not attract. He stimulates, but
it is by irritation rather than by an enthusiastic
glow. He has been called the apostle of culture,
but the first requisite of an apostle is that he make
his religion attractive, make it seem the one thing
needful and desirable. Now, with all his efforts,
and they have been beautiful, manly, fearless efforts,
continued with increasing vigor in the face of mis-
understanding, opposition, and insolence, Matthew
Arnold does not succeed in making his plea for
culture tell just where it ought to tell, that is,
among uncultured people. All people of culture
read him, admire and enjoy him and profit by him.
But those for whom his message is meant, do not
read him or do not understand him. To them his
ideal of lofty, passionless purity and actionless cul-
ture presents no more attractive image than that of
the coldness and sterility of whitesand. A reeking
muck-heap will nourish a lily of the sweetest frag-
rance and purity; the cold, white sand will nourish
nothing. Would one gain or lose by exchanging
the muck-heap for the sand? What is this calm-
ness and lofty exclusiveness but the fatal chill that
penetrates heart and mind when we shut ourselves
out from contact with our fellow-menand live entirely
in the world of thought? What is gained by this
contempt for sobbing human confidences that once
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 325

warmed us through and through? What is gained
by growing more and more selfish, by opening up
more vulnerable sides in our nature, and so growing
more irritable and fastidious? What is gained by
being worm-eaten with scepticism, doubting one’s
friends, doubting one’s self? Would it not be
better to be caught up and carried away by some
noble enthusiasm or some great passion than to
freeze into a block of ice? Nay, would it not even
be better to die by fire, to blaze up into a magnifi-
cent glow, warming and lighting others, even though
we perish? These are some of the questions that -
trouble the spirits of poor Philistines like myself,
who recognize the fact that human nature, though
at bottom quite the same the world over, is yet so
individualized that there can no more be a universal
panacea for social evils than for physical ailments.
The homely old proverb, “One man’s meat is an-
other man’s poison,” holds good in the intellectual
world as well as in the dining-room. We may see
all around us examples of spiritual natures thriving
and growing fat on mere dry bones of doctrines
that would choke or starve us, while we ourselves
thrive on what would be mere rose-fragrance and
dew-drops to our bone-munching friends. There-
fore, Matthew Arnold’s great remedy for social evils
and the infidelity of the masses, culture, seems to
me of a piece with saying to some gaunt, ravenous,
carnivorous animal, ‘‘Come, here is a field heavy
with rich, juicy stalks of grain and lush clover; eat
your fill and stay your hunger.” The poor animal
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would fain do it, but he wants the masticating and
digestive organs of the herbivorous animal. He is
helpless here and would starve in the midst of
abundance.

I once gave you Matthew Arnold’s definition of
culture: ‘To know the best that has been thought
and said in the world,” but that is only one of his
definitions. In another place he says that culture
is “the study and pursuit of perfection,” and “ per-
fection consists in becoming something, rather than
in having.” He further explains himself by calling
it ‘‘an endeavor to come at reason and the will of
God by means of reading, observing, thinking.”
He affirms that ‘culture is the eternal opponent of
the two things which are the signal marks of Jacob-
inism, its fierceness and its addiction to an ab-
stract system. Culture is always assigning to sys-
tem makers a smaller share in the bent of human
destiny than their friends like.” Again: ‘True
culture implies not only knowledge, but right tact
and delicacy of judgment forming themselves by
knowledge; without this tact it is not true culture.
Difficult, however, as culture is, it is necessary.”

On the acquisition of culture he makes the fol-
lowing sensible observations: ‘‘When we say that
culture is to know the best that has been thought and
said in the world, we imply that for culture a system
directly tending to this end is necessary in our
reading. Now there is no such system yet present
to guide the reading of the rich any more than that
of the poor. Such a system is hardly even thought
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 327

of; a man who wants it must make it for himself.
And our reading being so without purpose as it is,
nothing can be truer than what Butler says, ‘that
really, in general, no part of our time is more idly
spent than the time spent in reading.’ ”

That is good; so, too, is his continual protest
against material advancement without corresponding
soul advancement. He proclaims with eloquence
and vigor that national greatness does not depend
upon miles of telegraph wire and railways, growing
cities and increasing wealth, but upon the breadth
and depth of intellectual life among the people. His
Culture and Anarchy is a noble plea for the intellect-
ual life as the solution of the social and class prob-
lems that vex our political economists, but, as I said
above, it loses half its force from a singular lack
of sympathy and tenderness for humanity in the
rough, and from a singular blindness to the imprac-
ticability of his ideas. No matter how beautiful a
scheme of life for all classes of people may be, if it
fails to answer their needs, or is beyond their reach,
it loses all its force with its impracticability, and it
is absurd and obstinate to cling to it tenaciously. I
may have a theory that it is a great deal better for
pigs to love-roses and prefer sniffing at them in a
garden to rooting for truffles in the dirt; but sup-
pose God did not make the pig that way, suppose
He intended him to be a truffle-hunter, isn’t it more
sensible to accept him with his truffle-digging
instincts and make as clean and respectable a pig
out of him as we can, than to turn him loose in the
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rose-garden? Then, again, Arnold’s ideas, though
clear enough on the beauty and desirability of cul-
ture, are singularly vague as regards the relation of
culture to state government. For example, he
divides society in England into three classes: the
Aristocracy, whom he dubs the Barbarians; the mid-
dle class or Philistines; and the lower class, or the
Populace. He is particularly bitter against the Phil-
istines, and by Philistinism Arnold means indiffer-
ence to the things of the spirit and absorption in
material things; coldness and vulgarity on the side
of sentiment, beauty, and refinement; and alertness
on the side of money-getting and physical pleasures.

“The people who believe most that our great-
ness and welfare are proved by our being very rich,
and who most give their lives and thoughts to be-
coming rich, are just the very people whom we call
Philistines. Culture says, ‘Consider these people
then, their way of life, their habits, their manners,
the very tones of their voice; look at them atten-
tively, observe the literature they read, the things
which give them pleasure, the words which come
forth out of their mouths, the thoughts which make
the furniture of their minds, would any amount of
wealth be worth having with the condition that one
was to become like these people by having it ?’”’ All
that is very clear and very noble. We are grateful
to Arnold for speaking so forcibly and clearly, but
he goes on to say that he finds in no one of these
classes, the Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace,
‘“‘an adequate centre of authority.” The Aristocrat
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 329

is indifferent, the Philistine is blind, the Populace is
brutal. He suggests, then, rising above the idea of
class to the idea of the whole community, and here
he begins to be vague, for what can he mean by the
whole community but his three classes, whom he has
found separately inadequate, through certain defi-
ciencies, and how can the sum of what is bad make
what is good? It seems very much like saying,
here are three bins of apples ; in this bin the apples
are rotten at heart, in the second they are rotten on
the exterior, in the third they are rotten all the way
through. But come, let us pile them all together in
one bin and we shall have good apples. Tobe sure,
the state power, according to him, has its basis in
our best self, not our ordinary selves, and by his
whole community he means ‘our collective best
self.” But all this is very vague and obscure. He
does not tell us, definitely, how to get at this “ col-
lective best self.’’ There is always a great deal more
of how not to do it, than how to do it in Arnold
whenever he attempts to be practical.

His Literature and Dogma contains many fine,
strong thoughts, but I doubt your being able yet to
read it with much profit to yourself. It isaddressed
to that form of skepticism which, disgusted with the
superstition, narrowness, and ignorance often ac-
companying religious professions, ends by discard-
ing the whole as an idle invention. He attempts to
winnow the chaff from the grain, and to prove that
it loses none of its nutritive properties in conse-
quence of such separation. He treats his subject
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with that breadth, that recognition of the necessity
of individualizing formulas and systems of thought
which I miss in his treatment of culture.

“There is no surer proof,” he says, ‘‘of a narrow
and ill-constructed mind, than to think and uphold
that what a man takes to be the truth, on religious
matters, is always to be proclaimed. Our truth on
these matters, and likewise the error of others, is
something so relative, that the good or harm likely
to be done in speaking ought always to be taken
into account. ‘I keep silence at many times,’ says
Goethe, ‘for I would not mislead men, and am well
content if others can find satisfaction in what gives
me offence.’ The man who believes his truth on
religious matters is so absolutely the truth that, say
it when and where and to whom he will, he cannot
but do good with it, is, in our day, almost always a
man whose truth is half-blunder and wholly useless.”

Asa critic, Arnold has done some very fine work,
but the defects of his nature, his lack of geniality or
sunniness, his fastidious aloofness from the coarser
human sides of mankind, are nowhere more appar-
ent than in his criticism. He is a critic with his
dress-coat and gloves on. He rarely touches a
subject with his bare fingers. He languidly turns it
over with the point of his cane. One does get
glimpses of some new side of the subject, but one
does not get the meat of it. He leaves always some-
thing to be said.

His fastidiousness is apparent in his very choice
of subjects. He loves the contemplative, reserved,
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 331

actionless character.’ Joubert, Maurice and Eugenie
de Guerin, Amiel, Gray, Wordsworth, Shelley,
Keats, Spinoza, Marcus Aurelius. But undeniably
there is a delicate, subtle aroma about his thought
very delicious to those who know how to enjoy it,
and quite compensating one for the loss of tang in
him.

Perhaps I can best show you what was wanting
in him for completion by this quotation from Cwd-
ture and Anarchy: ‘‘What intolerable company
Shakespeare and Virgil would have found the Puri-
tans!”’ had they been on the Mayflower together.
Now I venture to assert that, on the contrary, Shake-
speare and Virgil, or Shakespeare at least, wouldn’t
have been on the Mayflower twenty-four hours with-
out having found our familiar old human nature
lurking beneath the sober habits and solemn counte-
nances, and having drawn it to the surface. What
quaint transformations there would have been in that
large, Protean nature to fit itself to its new compan-
ions. What zest he would have thrown into the
new experience, what depths of fun he would have
sounded. While Matthew Arnold would have
yawned and fretted and bored himself to death,
Shakespeare would have laughed and chatted and
stored up the materials of another drama.

In addition to his prose works, Matthew Arnold
has given us a volume of poems, not without their
value as the expression of another side of his nature
which does not appear in his prose; they express
that melancholy which overtakes the scholar in his
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tired hours when, conscious of the nobleness of his
aims, he is at the same time overwhelmed by the
thought of their powerlessness to bring him supreme
joy.

His poetry is not the poetry of youth; there is
no gladness and sparkle in it. He writes always
like one arrived at maturity, or standing where old
age is creeping on. He longs for the quietude,
greatness, and self-sufficiency of sea, earth, heaven,
yet regrets the agitations, keen joys, and agonies of
youth. His longer poems find their themes in Scan-
dinavian and Persian mythology, which fact alone,
ina poet of the nineteenth century, is enough to
denote their artificial character. His shorter poems
are metrical expressions of a subjective nature,
moods of his soul, usually despondency, or longings
for tranquility. You will best know them by hear-
ing some of them, without further comment:

“QUIET WORK.

One lesson, Nature, let me learn of thee,

One lesson, which in every wind is-blown,
One lesson, of two duties, kept at one,
Though the loud world proclaim their enmity.

O, toil, unsevered from tranquility !

Of labour that in lasting fruit outgrows

Far noisier schemes accomplished in repose,
Too great for haste, too high for rivalry!

Yes, while on earth a thousand discords ring,
Man’s fitful uproar mingling with his toil.
Still do thy sleepless ministers move on,

Their glorious tasks in silence perfecting ;
Still working, blaming still our vain turmoil,
Laborers that shall not fail when man is gone.”
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 333

“SELF-DEPENDENCE,

Weary of myself, and sick of asking

What I am and what I ought to be,

At this vessel’s prow I stand, which bears me,
Forwards, forwards, o’er the star-lit sea.

And a look of passionate desire,

O’er the sea and to the stars I send.

Ye, who from my childhood up have calmed me,
Calm me, ah, compose me to the end.

‘Ah, once more,’ I cried, ‘ye stars, ye waters,
On my heart your mighty charm renew,
Still, let me, as I gaze upon you,

Feel my soul becoming vast like you.’

From the intense, clear, star-sown vault of heaven,

O’er the lit sea’s unquiet way,

In the rustling night-air came the answer :
‘Woulds’t thou de as these are? Live as they,

Unaffrighted by the silence round them,
Undistracted by the sights they see,

These demand not that the things without them,
Yield them love, amusement, sympathy.

And with joy the stars perform their shining,
And the sea its long, moon-silvered roll ;

For self-poised they live, nor pine with noting
All the fever of some differing soul.

Bounded by themselves, and unregardful
In what state God’s other works may be,
In their own tasks all their powers pouring,
These attain the mighty life you see.’

O, air-born voice ! long since, severely clear,
A cry, like thine, in mine own heart I hear,
Resolve to be thyself ; and know that he
Who finds himself, loses his misery.”

The Buried Life, too long to quote here, is the
expression of a very pretty sentiment. I should like
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you to read it. In conclusion, let me say of Mat-
thew Arnold, that he might have declared in his
own name what he puts into the mouth of his
Empedocles on Etna:
“Yea, I take myself to witness
That I have loved no darkness,
Sophisticated no truth,

Nursed no delusion,
Allow'd no fear.”
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 335

LETTER XXIII.

EFORE I say anything about novelists in
particular, I should like to say something

to you about the novel in general. I suspect
that you prefer what you call a good novel to
almost any other form of literature, because most
people do; but whether you have as yet an unas-
sailable idea of what a good novel is, is a ques-
tion on which I could speak, not with suspicion,
but with absolute certainty. Your very youth
and inexperience is as much against the possibility
of your having such a true idea as an apple-blossom
is against the possibility of mature fruit in its calyx,
and it is no more your fault than it is the fault of the
blossom. The idea, like the apple, will come in due
season if nothing happens to the blossom, which in
your case means if nothing happens to retard or
arrest your mental development. For this reason
it might be a little unwise in me to try to hasten
Nature’s course, if I were quite sure you were in a
fair growing way, but I can’t be quite sure of that.
Then, again, it may seem very presumptuous in me
to fancy myself arrived at a good idea, but, at any
rate, I believe I am on the road to it, by having rid
myself of some illusions thoughtlessly absorbed
from an indiscriminate reading of novels, and I
believe that I can help you to rid yourself of like
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illusions. The main thing in life is to think rightly
on questions of life, and novels professedly deal with
these questions; they are therefore bad or good
according as they treat these questions falsely or

truthfully.
I once heard a cultured and scholarly gentleman
asked this question, ‘‘Do you read fiction?” ‘“ No,”

he replied, ‘I can’t read a novel any more. I am
like the mathematician to whom somebody lent
Paradise Lost. He handed it back with the remark,
‘What does it prove?’”’

I don’t mean to. say anything about the mental
aridity implied in the mathematician’s question con-
cerning Paradise Lost, except that it is a poor
exchange for the delight of losing one’s self in lofty,
poetical illusions, but the gentleman’s use of it as
an illustration of his attitude to fiction seems to me
particularly happy. It expresses the dissatisfaction,
the sense of unreality and feebleness, which every
mature and cultured mind feels in that class of light,
very light literature, which is so eagerly devoured,
praised, and rapidly forgotten by four-fifths of the
reading public.

I wish you to understand quite clearly what it is
that makes this literature so very light and ephem-
_ eral and consequently so enfeebling to the intellect,
and I shall take pains to give you its characteristics
in detail, assuring you that its defect in general is
falseness, which you recognize as the same old
defect that characterizes bad work in any direction.
The infallible test of all good work is truthfulness.
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 337

It proves some thing, the clearly discerning eye and.
ear and the power to express what is seen and
heard.

For convenience sake I shall group the various
kinds of novels, according to their prevailing char-
acteristics, under the following divisions: the slushy
novel, the pseudo-scientific novel, the purely non-
sensical, the novel of social life, the sewer-novel,
the purely romantic, the didactic novel, and the
novel of genius.

Of course you understand that, in a purely arbi-
trary division like this the lines are not hard and
fast; a novel may show the characteristics of a
number of these divisions, but as a rule it will not
be difficult to assign it its place under one or the
other of them.

The characteristics of the slushy novel are its
feebleness and sentimentality. I call it the slushy
novel because the reader flounders and sinks hope-
lessly in it without being able to find a firm founda-
tion of truth anywhere. It is always the product of
immaturity or of arrested development. It ex-
presses those ideas of life which very young per-
sons or sickly, sentimental women have. Love
plays the grand réle in this form of novel, and the
plot invariably turns on the obstacles that hinder it
from running smooth. If the author is very young,
anemic, and given to despondent views of life, the
' obstacles never are removed, the hero or heroine is
apt to die, thus giving the author an opportunity
for some effective rhetoric designed to reduce

22
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the reader to an imbecile state of mind in which
life appears forevermore draped in mourning.
If, on the other hand, the author is in fair health
and hopeful, the obstacles, no matter how appar-
ently insurmountable, are one by one removed
with the facility with which a chain stitch is un-
raveled when you have got hold of the right thread.
The much-suffering hero and heroine marry, and the
story ends.

In the slushy novel there is no attempt at char-
acter-drawing from real life, no attempt to bring the
incidents within range of probability. Characters
and incidents are drawn, not from the world of the
imagination, for the imagination proper is a truly
fine faculty, but from the cheapest toy-shop world
of make-believe. The author goes for inspiration to
books of the same character as those he writes ; he
reproduces them in their essential features much as a
young miss, who thinks she must take drawing and
painting, goes to her copies and chromos, and repro-
duces them until she loses all capacity for seeing
nature rightly, has no sense of color, light and shade,
and individuality of form, as they really are, and,
when she sees a picture painted after nature, she
calls it bad because she cannot find in it her famil-
iar, cheap-chromo treatment. One of the evils
resulting from the reading of such novels is that the
reader in like manner loses all power of discrimina-
ting character or seeing life as it really is, and so
grows unfit for its actual demands. From this un-
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 339

fitness spring discontent, excessive day-dreaming,
misery, and often suicide.

The style of the slushy novel is either hackneyed
or painfully distinguished by an effort to be original.
In the former case you will meet again and again
with eyes “fringed ”’ with long lashes; in the latter
case the eyes will be violet in color (certainly origi-
nal enough; violet eyes and purple hair being never
met with outside of the slushy novel) and the fringe
will be “deep” and will ‘‘curl.” You will very,
very often meet with “golden hair looking as if it
had imprisoned the sunshine in its meshes,” ‘‘a brow
like alabaster,” ‘‘teeth like a row of pearls,” “ruby
lips.” (Quite geological, isn’t it?) Sometimes the
mouth will be “like a rose-bud,” or “shaped like a
Cupid’s bow,” the smile will be “winsome,” the eyes
“soulful,’’ or sometimes ‘with the look of a startled
fawn.” If the hair is not golden, ten to one it will
be of ‘‘the tint Titian loved,” or ‘black as a raven’s
wing,” or “tawny,” anything but a good, honest
brown. There will be ‘thrilled fibres,’ ‘tense
nerves,” ‘quivering chins,” voices ‘‘as sweet as a
chime of silver bells.” You will have winds that
“sigh and moan through the leafless branches of the
trees.” The ‘angel of death,” the ‘white-winged
messenger,” will not be wanting. Somebody will
be ‘ground under the iron heel” of somebody else.
The laborer, if admitted at all, will be the “horny-
handed son of toil,” etc., ad nauseam. You will also
rarely find such good, old-fashioned names as John,
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Joe, Mary, Sam, Sarah, Ruth, Ben, Tom, Dan, and
William, but you will find a plentiful sprinkling
of Reginalds, Claudes, Violas, Vieras, Ileaines,
Moras, etc.

The hackneyed expressions, quoted above, char-
acterize, of course, only the very feeblest novels of
the slushy kind. In those of a little higher ordet,
especially those which express the ebullitions and
restlessness of youth, there is, as I said before, an
effort to get rid of the conventional which results in
a new turning and coloring of old phrases, so that
they do not appear uniformly feeble, but are some-
times even energetic in a spasmodic way. Still the
slushy novel is unmistakably characterized by its
cheap, flashy rhetoric and no less tawdry senti-
ment. The harm it does is the harm that follows
from substituting morbid, enervating, and false ideas
for healthy and vital motives of action. The novel
that teaches that the mere physical attraction which
makes two people pass their time so agreeably to-
gether, and so monotonously apart, is necessarily to
be dignified by the name of love, and to be regarded
as a sentiment of so holy and deathless a character
that disobedience to its dictates is the ruin of happi-
ness so long as life lasts; that such a sentiment anni-
hilates station and family and social considerations,
and makes it perfectly right for a girl to marry her
father’s coachman, if she only loves him; a novel, I
say, that so apotheosizes a sentiment, often fleeting
and vulgar enough, a mere bedazzling of the vision
and tremor of the senses, cannot be too. severely

ae ie ae a
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 341

condemned, because it lures thoughtless, ardent,
young people into that very ruin of happiness it pre-
tends to teach them to avoid. But all that I could
say to you on this subject has been so admirably
said by Peter Bayne, in his article on John Foster,
that I prefer to give you his emphatic assertion,
assuring you that all thoughtful and mature per-
sons can bear witness to the truth of it. ‘‘ Perhaps
the severest form of human sorrow, that which
most nearly approaches the slow, gnawing agony
of him fixed hopeless on the immovable rock,
arises from marriage in which there never was
any friendship, but the original bond was earthly
passion, arrogating to itself with the impudent lie of
a harlot, the heavenly name of love. . .  Friend-
ship and love must unite in every married union
where happiness can be reasonably expected or truly
deserved; and friendship is a sentiment arising from
pure sympathy of spirit, independent of aught else.
Let none look for happiness in marriage who are
unable deliberately and firmly to declare that it
would be a happiness to live together for life,
though they were of the same sex.”

Another false and harmful sentiment which the
‘slushy novel is much given to propagating is that a
certain delicacy of taste and predilection for artistic
pursuits so far exalts the possessor of them as to
unfit him for the ordinary duties of life and the
station in which he is born.

In illustration of this sentiment we have the
gifted, beautiful girl whose exquisitely refined
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organization is constantly subjected to the tortures
of being misunderstood and unappreciated, who
lives isolated from her kind, yearns for sympathy,
for a “kindred soul,” etc.; sometimes she is not
young, sometimes she is married, and the kindred
soul is not her husband, but whatever her age or
condition she yearns, and she can’t keep it to her-
self. Of late the yearnings of the heroines of
slushy novels run in the direction of a widening of
‘“‘woman’s sphere,” as in Zhe Heavenly Twins.

“Some folk’s booels,” says Sandy Mackaye in
Alton Locke, ‘are that made o’ cat-gut that they
canna’ stir without chirruping and_ screeking.”
Now, it is sad enough to be obliged to listen to this
‘“chirruping and screeking” in real life, but when
it gets into print and tries to pass itself off for liter-
ature it is something infinitely sadder, because
books react upon human nature. We try to grow
like that which we admire. Hence the importance
of right admiration. To admire that which is un-
worthy of admiration is a constant descending, a
debasement. If, then, any readers are induced to
set their lives to this “chirruping and screeking,”
that is, to fretting discontent and idle reverie, in-
stead of to harmonious music, the sum-total of
human nature is just so much more enfeebled and
debased.

Suppose you have a soul formed to know and
love the beautiful, and fitted for a wider range of
thought and action than that allotted to most per-
sons, is not that a superb gift? and should you not
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 343

be so grateful for it that it would make you sweet,
submissive, and generous toward those less richly
gifted than yourself, and with whom your lot in life
has placed you? Should you not be glad to share
in such way as you can your gift with them, setting
aright the blurred vision and dulled ear by your
own keener sight and hearing? Misunderstood?
Whose business is it to understand, yours or theirs?
If all you think and feel were common property,
easily communicated and understood, what would
become of your rare gift? If pebbles were dia-
monds, beggars might wear them. Your wider
range, your quicker sensibilities are your gift by
virtue of their incommunicableness and arity.
Sympathy? Who needs it most, you or they?
Life dull and monotonous? You are there to give
it brightness and variety. Of all unpardonable sen-
timents, this one of fastidious disdain of common
life and common duties seems to me the most
offensive, and it is a disdain which the truly
refined and gifted never feel. They know how to
lighten their tasks by some generous thought of
them. They know how to irradiate what is common
by some quaint or ideal view of it. They give of
their overflowing abundance and ask nothing in re-
turn but love and tolerance. They know that the
development of what is best and strongest in them-
selves depends upon the broadness of their exper-
iences of human needs, and they repine at no grow-
ing pains. If that is the price they must pay for
growth, they pay it willingly.
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You will find nothing like this teaching in the
slushy novel. On the contrary, you will be called
upon to sympathize with hysteria, hypochondria, and
sentimentality. You will not be taught that work
and poverty are good nurses of the heroic virtues.
You will be made to feel that they are intolerable
hardships, and that you are an object of pity unless
you are born to a life of luxury, ease, and gaiety.
You will be taught to set values on merely external
things, beauty and wealth, or led to believe that life
without constant stimulus and excitement is not
worth living. These teachings are not always
set so plainly forth as I have put them here, but
they lurk invidiously in every page of the slushy
novel. This class of novel is also singularly lacking
in anything that even remotely approaches humor,
that genial, whimsical play of the fancy that softens
the sharp edges of fact and gaily brightens its dull
surface. You may often recognize the class by this
fact alone, for humor belongs to a higher order of
mind than that which produces such trash as the
slushy novel.

The pseudo-scientific novel ranks much higher
than the novel I have just been describing, and there
may even go to the making of it genius of a certain
order, as in the work of the French novelist, Balzac,
or decided talent, as in that of Bulwer. It is char-
acterized by cleverness, knowledge of the world, and
a certain large, indifferent tolerance, almost Chinese,
on matters of religion and ethics. Its particular
weakness lies in this indifference and in its credu-
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 345

lous acceptance of dogmatizing upon those unex-
_ plained reported phenomena relating to nervous dis-
orders. As Sainte Beuve says of Balzac, we may say
of the author of this kind of novel, that in his efforts
to be scientific he ‘“‘imagines as much as he ob-
serves.” He has ‘‘a pronounced weakness for the
Swedenborgs, the Van Helmonts, the Mesmers, the
Saint Germains, and the Cagliostros of every descrip-
tion. That is to say, he is subject to illusion.”
Bulwer’s Strange Story is an admirable example
of the worst type of the pseudo-scientific novel.
The pernicious effect of this kind of novel lies
in its power of fixing superstitions as certainties in
the minds of feeble or careless thinkers; and these
superstitions are of the very worst kind at that,
because, assuming the authority of science, they arro-
gate also the right of being received by minds of
superior intelligence, and so make headway among
a really better class of readers than they ought to
find. Now ideas of a scientific character percolate
from the better minds to the lower. Think, then,
of the harm that ensues when the source of these
ideas is polluted, and when they must go on get-
ting muddier and muddier because they are drop-
ping into muddier minds. For an idea, like a stream
of water, takes the color of the soil through which
it flows. Spiritualism, mesmerism, and magic were
the stock-in-trade of the pseudo-scientific novel
some years ago. At present, hypnotism is the
absorbing theme. That poor little story of Trilby,
just now on the wane after a remarkable run, is a
346 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

notable example of the fascination which such sub-
jects have for a certain class of excitable and curi-
osity-loving minds. The absurdity of the introduc-
tion of hypnotism into this story seems to have
struck no one of its countless readers, and yeta
greater psychological or physiological blunder could
not have been made than that of making a sickly
subject of hypnotism out of a girl such as Trilby
is described to us in the beginning of the story,
healthy, active, diligent, full of life and animation,
carrying herself like one whose nerves and muscles
are well in tune, not at all predisposed to hysteria
and nervous attacks, a warm-hearted, easy, dull-
brained sort of girl. There is just as much proba-
bility of such a girl being made a morbid, diseased,
nervous, hypnotic subject as there would be of a
healthy, kicking, crowing baby degenerating in like
manner.

Yet the whole treatment of the subject, the
slovenly English, “real good,” for example, the
unmeaning and tawdry rhetoric, “sweet, wan gaze,”
(how can a gaze be wan?) “kind but choleric eyes,”
a manifest contradiction in terms, one adjective
annulling the force of the other; the cheap, un-
healthy sentiment, on a par with that of the slushy
novel, all these glaring defects, so palpable to a
strong and cultured mind, have not prevented the
book from receiving the most lavish encomiums and
most widespread attention. It has simply fur-
nished another proof of the fact that immediate
popularity is in no way an indication of literary
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 347

merit. ‘‘Good judgment in literature,” says Joubert,
‘is an extremely slow faculty that does not reach
the full extent of its growth until very late.” When
we are young, we judge everything by the amount
of excitement it produces in us, and when we are
not excited, we are not pleased. The vast majority
of readers retain this childish method of judging in
regard to books, forgetting that that which excites
is not necessarily fine and strength-giving. A fire is
amoreexciting scene than that of a quiet harvest
field yellow with ripening grain, but there is des-
truction in one and health and plenty in the other.

The pseudo-scientific novel always contains in
it some element of this destructive excitement. It
lingers by preference on the debatable ground of
nervous phenomena. It is the handmaid of charla-
tanry, and responsible for half the vagaries of faith-
cures, table-turnings, spirit-rappings, thought-trans-
ference, hypnotism, etc.

The purely nonsensical novel, of which Walpole’s
Castle of Otranto, Rider Haggard’s She, Stevenson’s
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,and the various renderings
of the old myth of the Wandering Jew are admirable
specimens, is rather negatively than positively harm-
ful. Such novels consume the time that might
have been employed in reading sense instead of
nonsense. They appeal to the most unintellectual
faculty of the mind, that is, to curiosity of the
commonest kind, the mere wonder how a certain
course of action is going to turn out.

The purely romantic novel differs from the
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purely nonsensical in attempting to preserve some
degree of probability. To be sure it does not often
succeed, but at any rate it has the merit of trying,
and does not offend the understanding by outra-
geously gross mendacity. It looks backward to the
age of chivalry. It has a passion for old castles,
tournaments, knights, lords and ladies, high-flown
speeches, and midnight adventures. There is about
it all a cool air of moonshine, sometimes refreshing,
sometimes bewildering. It is by no means always
the work of mediocre minds. There is a good deal
of pure romance in Scott’s novels. Heinrich von
Ofterdingen by Novalis is perhaps the best specimen
of pure romance in its highest form of excellence.

The novel of social life gives us a clever and
faithful reflection of certain artificial relations of
life, the aspirations, deceptions, and vulgarities of
what is called society. Sometimes it reaches a very
high degree of excellence, as in Jane Austen, and a
lower, yet more than average degree of merit, as in
Trollope and Black. Then again it sinks into mere
froth and tittle-tattle and bad dialect stories.

You can very well understand that when I called
a novel a sewer-novel, the less it is stirred the less
offense it will be to healthy nostrils; so I shall not
offend you by speaking in detail of this vile trash.
If it were not that men of undoubted cleverness
degraded their talents to its service, I should not
speak of it at all; but we pardon so much to intel-
lect, we listen so eagerly to its seductive voice, we
follow so readily whatever direction it goes, that
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 349

you ought to be warned that it does not always lead
upward, but, sometimes, drags you downward into
filth and darkness. The sewer-novel appeals to the
most bestial passions of human kind. It prefers
pictures of foulness, sin, and degradation to pictures
of purity, innocence, and loftiness. It smuts every
thing it touches with vile insinuation. It exalts the
senses and degrades the spiritual nature.

Sometimes when its author is not utterly lost to
all sentiments of purity, it apologizes for itself under
the plea of holding up images of warning, of pictur-
ing life as it is, and attempting to excite disgust of
it, professing that the best safeguard of innocence
is not ignorance, but enlightenment. This may be
true of a sweet, clean, pure, and healthy mind, that
can no more be soiled by filthy thoughts than the
oiled plumage of a duck can be wet, but it is not true
of the vast majority of minds that have no such in-
nate protection. For such minds innocence is the
safeguard, and the shock and recoil they feel at the
first unavoidable contact with vice in real life is that
which holds them to virtue. Destroy this possibil-
ity of shock and recoil by familiarizing their minds
with images of sin, and you remove from them
nature’s strongest force of resistance—natural re-
pulsion.

1 have always greatly admired the strong, in-
stinctive, good sense which Hughes makes Squire
Brown show in his advice to Tom when he is leaving
home for Rugby. ‘And now, Tom, my boy,” said
the squire, ‘‘remember you are going, at your own
350 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

request, to be chucked into this great school, like
a young bear, with all your troubles before you,
earlier than we should have sent you, perhaps. If
schools were what they were in my time you'll see
a great many cruel blackguard things done and
hear a deal of foul, bad talk. But never fear. You
tell the truth, keep a brave and kind heart, and
never listen to or say anything you wouldn’t have
your mother and sister hear, and you'll never feel
ashamed to come home, or we to see you.

‘All the way up to London he had pondered
what he should say to Tom by way of parting advice,
something that the could keep in his head
ready for use.

“To condense the squire’s mediation: it was
somewhat as follows: ‘Iwon’t tell him to read his
Bible and love and serve God; if he don’t do that
for his mother’s sake and teaching, he won’t for
mine. Shall I go into the sort of temptations he’ll
meet with? No, J can’t do that. Never do for an
old fellow to go into such things with aboy. He
won't understand me. Do him more harm than
good, ten to one.’”

The rest of the meditation is just as good and
sensible as that I’ve quoted, but I’ll let you find the
rest of it in the book. I’ve reached the point that
bears on what I want to say, and I ask you to note
well that ‘Do him more harm than good, ten to

one.
That is exactly what the sewer-novel’s professed
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 351

warning does in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred,
and it is not safe to argue one’s self the exceptional
case. The greater number of the authors of this class
are French, Zola, Gautier, Catulle Mendés, and
others, and the less you know about them the better.

The didactic novel is the novel with a purpose
other than that of amusing the reader with an agree-
able story and clever delineation of character. Its
purpose is to teach in the most impressive and
acceptable way some ethical or political truth.
Some of the best novels written during the last
decade are of this character, namely, those of Mrs.
Humphrey Ward. Kingsley’s Alton Locke, devoted to
the propagation of the Chartist principles, is another
good example of the didactic novel. It is often
very wholesome and stimulating reading, but it fails
in reaching the very highest form of excellence
because it subordinates real life to its pet principles
—its hobby. The highest form of teaching is that
which is unconscious, and is received as an impal-
pable influence and not in the shape of set formulas.

It is impossible to characterize as a class the
novel of genius in set terms, because it is the expres-
sion of individuality, of the particular way in which
life appears to a peculiarly gifted and sensitive organ-
ization. Novels of this class must therefore be
studied individually, and I have selected for your
particular study the greatest geniuses in this depart-
ment of English literature, Maria Edgeworth, Jane
Austen, Charlotte Bronté, Thackeray, Dickens,
George Eliot.
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Maria Edgeworth deserves her place in this list

for having written Castle Rackrent, an inimitable bit
of characterization, one of the most charming
sketches of national life that was ever written. It is
a brief story of the holders of an Irish estate, as
. the chief circumstances of their life happen to have
come under the notice of a faithful old steward,
Thady Quirk. Thady speaks in the first person, and
in the qourse of his story gives us the quaintest true
pictures of the obsequious, thoughtless, excitable
Irish peasant of the seventeenth century, brutalized
by the tyrannous exactions of lazy, drinking squires
and savage middle-men. This picture of Irish life
is drawn with a freedom, breadth, tolerance, and
humor unequaled by any other female writer with-
whom I am acquainted. The rest of Maria Edge-
worth’s work is in the didactic line, and very useful,
instructive work it is for young readers. Her easy
lessons, Frank and Harry and Lucy, are to be spe-
cially recommended to young children, as designed to
awaken their observing faculties and a consciousness
of their proper relations to their elders.

Maria Edgeworth was born at Reading in Berk-
shire, in the year 1767. Her father, Richard Lovell
Edgeworth, was an Irishman of versatile genius, much

given to planning, inventing, marrying, and enjoying
himself. He made a runaway marriage at nineteen;
wasn’t yet twenty when his first child, Richard,
was born, and was but twenty-four years older
than his gifted daughter, Maria. This first marriage
did not turn out well except in the matter of children,
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 353

and Mr. Edgeworth spent a good deal of time away
from his wife. During one of these periods of sep-
aration, Mr. Edgeworth met and loved Honora
Sneyd, the beautiful and gifted girl who was unsuc-
cessfully addressed by Major André, and is men-
tioned in almost every memoir of that unfortunate
young Englishman. Honora was the first woman
Edgeworth had met who satisfied his ideal of what
a woman should be. But being a married man, and
an honest man into the bargain, nothing was left
him to do but flee this unattainable ideal. He did
so by going to France, taking with him his boy, to
educate him after the system of Jean Jacques Rous-
seau. In France he learned of his wife’s death, fol-
lowing the birth of a third daughter, returned to
England, and four months later married Miss Sneyd.
Seven years of perfect domestic happiness followed
and then the second wife died. She had advised
her husband to marry her sister Elizabeth, which
advice he graciously followed eight months later.
This sister-in-law proved a loving and faithful wife,
bore him nine children and died, to be replaced in
six months by Miss Beaufort, a bright, intelligent
woman and skilful artist, who had made some illus-
trations for Maria’s stories. Mr. Edgeworth had
twenty-one children, thirteen of whom survived him.
He defended his uxoriousness by saying, ‘‘ Nothing
is more erroneous than the common belief that a
man who has lived in the greatest happiness with
one wife will be the most averse to take another.
On the contrary, the loss of happiness which he

23
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feels when he loses her, necessarily urges him to
endeavor to be again placed in the situation which
constituted his former felicity.”

Maria Edgeworth was fifteen when her father
moved to Ireland. She was a sweet-natured, happy,
confiding, quick-brained girl, who idolized her father,
and moulded her didactic writings in accordance
with his ideas of education and morals. Some of
her work was written in partnership with him. He
always offered her suggestions and criticised her
work. He required her to write a full sketch of
every story before she began writing it in detail.
Her stories were greatly in vogue during her life-
time and still find a place in every good library.
Castle Rackrent was published anonymously in 1800
and raised her to the first rank among the writers of
her age. Her reputation, her cheery, hospitable
nature drew around her hosts of friends. Her letters,
edited by Augustus J. C. Hare, are admirably
bright, cheerful, chatty, and full of glimpses of the
great men and women who were her contemporaries.
By all means, read them.

She visited Walter Scott, of whom she says, ‘I
could not believe he was a stranger, and forgot he
was a great man’’—an admirable tribute to the
hospitality of his nature and the simplicity and true
greatness of his genius.

As an example of her bright, easy style let me
quote you part of a letter to her aunt, dated 1803.
She had “just met Mme. D’Ouditot, the lady who
inspired Rousseau with the idea of Julie. Julie is
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 355

now seventy-two years of age, a thin woman, in a
little black bonnet. She appeared to me shockingly
ugly; she squints so much that it is impossible to
tell which way she is looking. But no sooner did I
hear her speak than I began to like her, and no
sooner was I seated beside her than I began to find
in her countenance most benevolent and agreeable
expression. She seems as gay and open-hearted as
a girl of fifteen. It has been said of her that she not
only never did any harm but never suspected any.
She is possessed of that art, which Lord Kames said
he would prefer to the finest gift from the queen of
the fairies, the art of seizing the best side of every
object. She has had great misfortunes, but she has
still retained the power of making herself and her
friends happy. Even during the horrors of the
Revolution, if she met with a flower, a butterfly, an
agreeable smell, a pretty color, she would turn her
attention to these, and for the moment suspend her
sense of misery, not from frivolity but from real
philosophy. No one has exerted themselves with
more energy in the service of her friends. I felt in
her company the delightful influence of a cheerful
temper and soft, attractive manners, enthusiasm
which age cannot extinguish and which spends but
does not waste itself on small but not trifling objects.
I wish I could at seventy-two be such a woman.”
Maria Edgeworth’s wish to be at seventy-two
such a charming old woman as the one she described
was fulfilled, as all genuine wishes of the kind are
sure to be. She lived to be eighty-three, and was
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to the last moment of her life one of the most lov-
able and entertaining of women. Byron said of her,
“She was a nice, little, unassuming Jeanie Deans
looking body, as we Scotch say, and if not hand-
some, certainly not ill-looking. One would never
have guessed she could write her name; whereas her
father talked not as if he could write nothing else,
but as if nothing else was worth writing.”

Professor Pictet, of Geneva, said she had “a
small figure, eyes nearly always lowered, a, pro-
foundly modest and reserved air.”

It was only those who knew her well who knew
how bright and sweet she was. A Mrs. Hall, writ-
ing of her, says, “In person she was very small—
she was lost ina crowd. Her face was pale and
thin, her features irregular, they may have been con-
sidered plain, even in youth, but her expression was
so perfectly well-bred, partaking of English dignity
and Irish frankness, that one never thought of her
with reference either to beauty or plainness. She
ever occupied, without claiming attention, charming
continually by her singularly pleasant voice, while
the earnestness and truth that beamed from her
bright blue, very blue, eyes increased the value of
every word she uttered. She knew how to listen as
wellastotalkk, . .  . She wasever neat and
particular in her dress; her feet and hands were so
delicate and small as to be almost child-like. In a
word, Maria Edgeworth was one of those women
who do not seem to require beauty.”

And yet, this modest, timid, little woman could
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 357

write with masculine energy and humor. There is
nothing of the peculiarly feminine quality in her
work, no sentimentality, no “ sugary crudity,”’ it is
all straight-forward, earnest prose that she writes ;
hence her superiority.

When she was traveling on the continent, she
happened to meet the son of the librarian at Bruges,
who piqued himself on reading character from hand-
writing. On being shown Miss Edgeworth’s writing
he declared positively that it was not a woman's
handwriting, and when assured that it was, cleared
himself by saying that at any rate it was the hand-
writing of amanly character. He was right. There
was something manly, that is, strong, sensible, un-
emotional in her intellect, and it re-appears in her
books.

Jane Austen possessed the same mental traits in
ano less remarkable degree. For this reason she
has always been a greater favorite among men than
among women. Macaulay, for example, greatly
admired her, so did Scott. Warren Hastings de-
lighted in her, so did George Henry Lewes. Ina
letter to the latter Charlotte Bronté writes, “Why
do you like Miss Austen so much? What induced
you to say that you would rather have written Pride
and Prejudice, or Tom Jones, than any of the Wav-
erley novels? I had not seen Pride and Prejudice till
I read this sentence of yours, and then I got the book
and what did I find. An accurate, daguerreotyped’
portrait of a commonplace face ; a carefully fenced,
high-cultivated garden with neat borders and
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delicate flowers, but no glance of a bright, vivid
physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no
blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to
live with her ladies and gentlemen in their elegant
but confined houses. George Sand is sagacious and
profound. Miss Austen is only shrewd and observ-
ant.”

Charlotte Bronté’s estimate of Jane Austen is
very likely the estimate of two-thirds of her female
readers. It sums up what most women feel as a
weakness in Jane Austen, namely, a certain dryness
and baldness of statement, a certain clear, uncom-
promising, broad noon-day-light of common sense,
in which a romantic illusion cannot possibly lurk.
Life is just as plain and matter-of-fact in Jane Aus-
ten’s books as it is in the drawing room in which
the reader sits. The women gossip about dress,
personal matters, the latest social events just past or
to come, precisely as they do there. No startling
incidents enliven the ordinary monotony of the
daily routine. There are no heroes or heroines, no
very, very good people, no ‘deep-dyed villains.’ Her
people are the people we meet every day, dine with,
live with, and often tire of. No wonder that the
reader who has fed on stimulating, highly-colored
chromo literature turns away from this plain, ordi-
nary fare with indifference and even dislike. It is
not real life that he cares to see reflected in books ;
he has enough of that every day, and with no ideal-
izing power in himself, he wants to escape it and find
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 359

refuge in some imaginary world where the senses
are more powerfully stimulated.

The character of Jane Austen’s work may be
very well surmised from a speech she puts into the
mouth of Edward Ferrars, in Sense and Sensibility:

“T have no knowledge of the picturesque and I
shall offend you by my ignorance and want of taste
if we come to particulars. J shall call hills steep,
which ought to be bold; surfaces strange and un-
couth, which ought to be irregular and rugged; and
distinct objects, out of sight, which ought only to be
indistinct through the soft medium of a hazy atmos-
phere. You must be satisfied with such admiration
as I can honestly give. I call it a very fine country,
the hills are steep, the woods seem full of timber,
and the valley looks comfortable and snug with
rich meadows and several neat farm-houses scat-
tered here and there. It exactly answers my idea
of a fine country, because it unites beauty with util-
ity. . . I like a fine prospect but not on pictur-
esque principles. I do not like crooked, blasted
trees. I admire them much more if they are tall,
straight, and flourishing. I do not like ruined, tat-
tered cottages. I am not fond of nettles, or thistles,
or heath blossoms. I have more pleasure in a snug
farm-house than a watch-tower, and a troop of
tidy, happy villagers please me better than the fin-
est banditti in the world.”

Jane Austen’s genius was not widely recognized
during her life-time. She had no literary acquain-
360 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

tance. She lived the quiet, ordinary life of a
clergyman’s daughter in a small country village,
went into such society as was offered her, loved
dancing, sang well, played on the piano, laughed,
chatted, flirted; in short, there was not the slightest
tinge of the blue about her. She wrote her inimi-
table novels in the midst of the family circle, throw-
ing a paper or her apron over the page in her lap if
a neighbor happened in; she was a good house-
keeper and particularly excelled in needle work;
was well read in the English classics, loved Cowper,
but Crabbe still better, saying if she ever married
she would like being Mrs. Crabbe. She read French
and knew a little Italian, but she was not a scholar
in the strictest sense of the word.

Pride and Prejudice, often regarded her best work,
was begun before she was twenty-one, and finished
inten months. Sense and Sensibility was written im-
mediately afterward, but she was thirty-six before
she found a publisher for it. She received $750 for
this novel, and the entire sum her literary work
brought her did not reach $3500. Pride and Prejudice
was published two years later than Sense and Sensi-
bility. Northanger Abbey was sold to a publisher in
Bath for $50, and allowed to lie a number of years
unpublished. It was finally re-purchased by the
family for the original sum, and together with Per-
suasion was published after her death. During her
life her books appeared anonymously.

She died at the early age of forty-two. She is
said to have been a tall, slender, handsome, round-
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 361

cheeked brunette, with plenty of color, hazel eyes,
and curly brown hair; very sweet in her disposition,
the delight of children who were always tagging
after her. She hated vulgarity, affectation, and sen-
timentality. She knew her limitations, and compared
her work to that of a miniature painter. ‘What
should I do,” she asks, ‘with your strong, vigorous
sketches full of variety and glow? How could I
possibly join them into the little bit (two inches
wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush
as produces little effect after much labor.”

In the autumn of 1815 she nursed her brother
Henry through a tedious illness, during which he
was attended by the Prince Regent’s physician.
The Prince Regent greatly admired her novels, and
on learning from his physician of her stay in the
vicinity of Carlton House, directed that the library
should be shown her. Becoming acquainted with
the librarian in this way, he asked her to delineate
in her next book an English clergyman fond of and
entirely engaged inliterature. She replied, ‘‘I am
quite honored by your thinking me capable of draw-
ing such a clergyman. F ; ‘ But I assure
youlam not. The comic part of the character I
might be equal to, but not the good, the enthusias-
tic, the literary. Such a man’s conversation must at
times be on subjects of science and philosophy, of
which I know nothing, or at least be occasionally
abundant in quotations and allusions, which a woman
who, like me, knows only her mother tongue and
has read. little in that, would be totally without the
362 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

power of giving. A classical education, or, at any
rate, a very extensive acquaintance with English lit-

erature, ancient and modern, appears to me quite
indispensable for the person who would do justice to
your clergyman, and I think I may boast myself to
be with all possible vanity the most unlearned and
uninformed female who ever dared to be an author-
ess.” To the same gentleman who next urged her
to write an historical romance, she replied, “Tam
fully sensible that an historical romance founded on
the house of Saxe-Coburg might be much more to
the purpose of profit or popularity than such pictures
of domestic life in country villages asI dealin. But
I could no more write a romance than an epic poem.
I could not sit seriously down to write a serious
romance under any other notice than to save my
life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it
up and never relax into laughing at myself or other
people, Iam sure I should be hung before I had
finished the first chapter. No, I must keep to my
own style and go on in my own way, and though I
may never succeed again in that, I am convinced
that I should totally fail in any other.”

Here are clever glimpses of her methods of work
and views of character, taken from her letters to a
favorite niece, who was writing stories at the time.
Jane Austen’s letters, by the way, are ordinarily very
commonplace, but they were written to common-
place people, who were interested in new bonnets
and gowns and personal gossip, and Jane Austen,
with all her great genius, or, rather, because it was
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 363

great, carried herself as simply as a child among
them, never making them feel, by word or look,
~that.she was not of them.

One of the characters in her niece’s books she
criticises as being ‘too much in the common novel
style, a handsome, amiable, unexceptionable young
man (such as do not much abound in real life), des-
perately in love and all in vain.” Of another char-
acter she writes, ‘‘She is too formal and solemn,
we think, in her advice to her brother not to fall in
love; and it is hardly like a sensible woman; it is
putting it into his head;” and again, ‘“ Devereux
Forester’s being ruined by his vanity is extremely
good, but I wish you would not let him plunge into
a ‘vortex of dissipation.’ I do not object to the
thing, but I cannot bear the expression; it is such
thorough novel slang, and so old that I dare say
Adam met with it in the first novel he opened.
Pictures of perfection make me sick and wicked.”

For further reading on Jane Austen, turn to Mac-
aulay’s Essay. You will find there a critical and
appreciative analysis of her novels.

Charlotte Bronté is almost as well known to us
through Mrs. Gaskell’s fine biography as Johnson
is to us through Boswell. A tiny, pale, fragile,
timid creature, with “soft, thick, brown hair, reddish-
brown eyes, rest of her features plain, large, ill-set,
crooked mouth, large nose ;” “hands and feet the
smallest I ever saw.” Such was the author of Jane
Eyre, Shirley, and Villette. You have read them, of
course, who hasn’t ? You admire them, of course,
364 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

who doesn’t? Not that there isn’t much that is
melodramatic and rather fiercely overdrawn in her
work. It lacks the serenity that comes from the
highest strength; it lacks the knowledge of the world
that comes from long living or wide experience, but
it has that indescribable vigor and elevation of tone
that belong to genius. Charlotte Bronté has the
artist’s eye for color and the dramatist’s eye for
effective situations, and as passionate a soul as was
ever imprisoned in a body too small for it. No won-
der the restless sword-like spirit wore out the feeble
sheath in thirty-eight years. Poor Charlotte Bronté!
The story of her short life is as sad a one as ever
was written.

Her father, the Rev. Patrick Bronté, a native of
Ireland, was a stern, stoical, passionate man, left
with six little motherless children to be brought up
in a gloomy little parsonage in the village of
Haworth, Yorkshire, England. He disliked chil-
dren, which accounts for the fact that he could
formulate a rigid rule by which to bring them up.
Some of his ideas were excellent; for instance, that
wish ‘to make his children hardy and indifferent to
the pleasures of eating and dress,’ but these ideas
were not humanized by love with tenderness. He
left his children much alone; he was dyspeptic, careful
in diet, and ate alone. Mrs. Bronté’s nurse told Mrs.
Gaskell that one day, when the children were out on
the moors, rain came on, and thinking to have some
warm, dry shoes ready for them when they came
home, she rummaged out some colored boots and
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 365

placed them in a row near the fire. Mr. Bronté
came in and, seeing the red boots, immediately threw
them into the fire, thinking them too gay and likely
to foster a love of dress. On the same principle and
because it did not accord with his notions of sobriety,
he one day cut his wife’s silk dress into shreds.

He had a violent temper and was in the habit of
working off his passion by rapidly firing pistols in
the back-yard. Sometimes, however, he varied his
performances. Once he burned up a hearth-rug and
stood in the smoke-filled room while it smouldered
away; at another time he sawed the backs off his
chairs. The father’s characteristics reappeared,
variously modified, in his children. Emily had her
father’s stoicism with regard to physical comforts.
The incident of the mad dog and the searing of the
wound with red-hot iron, which Charlotte relates in
her novel Shuey, is not fiction, but the relation of an
actual occurrence, and the heroine of it was her
sister Emily. In her last illness (she died at twenty-
nine) Emily refused to take medicine or to see a
physician, or to be helped in any way, and was very
angry if any one asked her how she felt. She had
a passion for animals. Some one said of her that
‘she never showed regard to any human creature;
all her love was reserved for animals.” And yet
there were depths of feeling in her, unsuspected by
any one, except her sister Charlotte.

The only son, Branwell, whose ruined life went
out in dissipation and opium eating, showed an un-
mistakable trait of the Bronté family when he re-
366 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

solved on standing up to die, just as “ the last agony
came on.”

Charlotte showed it all her brave, sorrowful life,
as she saw her sisters and brother one by one droop
and die, yet struggled on with brain and pen to leave
some fit record of herself, some sign that the gift of
life had not been uselessly bestowed on her.

The Bronté children were allowed no children’s
books, but as soon as they could read they began to
browse on the fine old English classics ; they said
their lessons to their father; they saw no other
children, but they were in no need of distractions
outside of themselves. They were all precocious,
book-loving, book-writing children. The two elder
girls, Maria and Elizabeth, were sent to Cowan’s
Bridge school, located between Leeds and Ken-
dal. The school was badly managed, the food
unwholesome, the sanitary conditions not looked
after. The girls were obliged to walk two miles
to church and to sit in an unwarmed church in
all sorts of weather. A contagious fever broke out
in the school, and poor little Maria sickened and
died. Years afterward Charlotte Bronté described
the school and its management under the name of
Lowood in Jane Eyre. Helen Burns is her sister
Maria. Elizabeth died not long after, but notwith-
standing the wretched experience of these two
elder girls, Charlotte and Emily were afterward sent
to the same school.

Somewhat later, Charlotte was sent to a boarding
school called Roehead, a country house. not quite
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 367

twenty miles from Haworth. She was in her fif-
teenth year at this time, 1831, and a school-mate
describes her as looking like ‘a little old woman ;
so short-sighted that, when she took up a book, she
dropped her head over it till her nose nearly touched
it; was very shy and nervous, and spoke with a strong
Irish accent.” The same school-mate describes her
as an “indefatigable student, constantly reading and
learning, never lost a moment of time, and seemed
almost to grudge play hours.’’ She was, however,
physically feeble, took part in no games on the play-
ground, but liked better to stand under the trees and
watch the others. She did not touch animal food
while at school. She spent two years at Roehead,
and returned as a teacher at the age of nineteen.
Emily accompanied her as a pupil, but did not stay
long. Charlotte did faithful work as a teacher, but
teaching was always drudgery to her as well as to
her sisters. Neither she nor they loved children,
nor does Mrs. Gaskell think they had the gift of
imparting knowledge, being deficient in ‘‘sympa-
thetic tact.” Charlotte remained at Roehead until
her health failed. A short stay at home restored
her and she went out as a governess, and says of
this experience in her life: ‘I used to think I
should like to be in the stir of grand folks’ society,
but I have had enough of it. It is dreary work to
look on and listen. I see more clearly than I have
ever done before that a private governess has no
existence, is not considered as a living, rational
being except as connected with the wearisome duties
368 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

she has to fulfil. . .  . I could like to work
in a mill, I could like to feel some mental liberty,
I could like this weight of restraint to be taken off.”

Charlotte’s second situation as governess was
more tolerable. She had 416, about eighty dollars,
a year, salary, and in addition to her charge of two
young children, a girl of eight and a boy of seven,
she did plain sewing. Think of it! That bright,
quick, ardent young mind chained to its homely
task. Pegasus harnessed to a plow! Apollo tending
the flocks of Admetus! But daring dreams of de-
liverance were beginning to occupy her: “If you
knew my thoughts, the dreams that absorb me, and
the fiery imagination that at times eats me up, and
makes me feel society as it is, wretchedly insipid,
you would pity and, I dare say, despise me.” She
was twenty when she wrote that; a year later she
ventured to confide one of these daring dreams to
the poet-laureate Southey. She wrote him a letter
asking advice. The poet replied in a long, dis-
couraging letter, in the course of which he told her
that ‘literature cannot be the business of a woman’s
life, and it ought not to be.”

Charlotte made no outward sign of wincing under
this letter; she was too brave for that. She sent a
courteous, humble, grateful reply, from which I
shall make you some extracts to show you the metal
there was in this little, twenty-one-year-old York-
shire girl.

“T am afraid, Sir, you think me very foolish.

But I am not altogether the idle, dreaming
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 369

being it [the letter for advice] would seem to
denote. My father is a clergyman of limited though
competent income, and I am the oldest of his chil-
dren. He expended quite as much on my education
as he could afford, in justice to the rest. I thought
it therefore my duty when I left school to become
a governess. In that capacity I find enough to oc-
cupy my thoughts all day long, and my head and
hands, too, without having a moment’s time for one
dream of the imagination. In the evening I confess
I do think, but I never trouble any one else with my
thoughts. I carefully avoid any appearance of pre-
occupation and eccentricity which might lead those
I live amongst to suspect the nature of my pursuits.
Following my father’s advice (who from my child-
hood has counseled me just in the wise and friendly
tone of your letter) I have endeavored not only to
observe all the duties a woman ought to fulfil, but
to feel deeply interested in them. I don’t always
succeed, for sometimes I would rather be reading or
writing; but I try to deny myself. . . . . Once
more allow me to thank you with sincere gratitude.
I trust I shall never more feel ambitious to see my
name in print; if the wish should rise, I’ll look at
Southey’s letter and suppress it.”

Dear, little, demure, sore Charlotte Bronté, you
surely had no real intention of doing anything of
the kind. You had only held out your hand for
bread, received a stone, and instead of casting it
angrily back, only proudly closed your hand over it,
as if it had been what you asked for! You were

24
370 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

Spartan enough for that! But Southey, like the
rather dull person he was, accepted the statement in
good faith, and blandly assured her that she had
received his admonition as kindly and considerately
as it had been given, and he shouldn’t forgive him-
self if he did not assure her how much pleasure her
letter had brought him.

Charlotte continued the teaching drudgery, but
not without the dreams and restlessness and impa-
tience to know and grow. One day a letter, with a
description of fine cathedrals and pictures, came to
her from Brussels. ‘I hardly know what swelled
my throat,” she writes, ‘(as I read her letter; such
a vehement impatience of restraint and steady work,
such a strong wish for wings, wings such as wealth
can furnish; such an urgent thirst to see, to know,
to learn; something internal seemed to expand bod-
ily for a minute.”

This letter from Brussels may have been the first
germ of another dream that was to be partially real-
ized later. Charlotte’s experience as a governess
had been bitter enough, but that of Emily and Anne
was worse.

“My sister Emily,” writes Charlotte, “loved the
moors. Flowers brighter than the rose bloomed in
the blackest of the heath for her; out of a sullen
hollow in a livid hill-side her mind could make an
Eden. She found in the bleak solitude many and dear
delights, and not the least and best loved was lib-
erty. Liberty was the breath of Emily’s nostrils,
without it, she perished.”
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 371

It was decided among the sisters that the best
thing to be done was to start a boarding-school of
their own, but a knowledge of French and German
was indispensable. Charlotte and Emily decided to
go to Brussels and enter a boarding-school for the
purpose of learning these languages. Charlotte was
in her twenty-seventh year, Emily about two years
younger. M. Heger, their teacher, thought more
highly of Emily’s abilities than of Charlotte’s, and
said of Emily, ‘She should have been a man, a
great navigator. Her powerful reason would have
deduced new spheres of discovery from the knowl-
edge of the old, and her strong, imperious will would
never have bean daunted by opposition or difficulty,
never have given way but with life.”

While Charlotte and Emily were at Brussels,
their aunt died, and they were called home after a
ten-months stay. Charlotte returned to Brussels
without Emily, to become a pupil-teacher at a salary
of £16, out of which she had to pay ten francs a
month for her German lessons. She writes of her
life there, ‘‘I get on here from day to day in a Rob-
inson Crusoe like sort of way, very lonely, but that
does not signify.” She stayed on through the vaca-
tion, took a low, nervous fever, and finally went
back home with eyes almost blinded from study,
and wrote Heger, despairingly, that a literary career
was closed to her because of this loss of sight.

But it was just about to begin. She had written
some verses, of which she said afterward, they were
the “restless effervescence cf a mind that would not
372 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

be still.” Emily and Anne had also been secretly
expressing themselves in verse, and they resolved to
publish their united efforts under the names of Cur-
rer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. The volume was pub-
lished at their own risk, but made no sensation.
Charlotte then wrote Zhe Professor, which six pub-
lishers successively refused. Nothing daunted, how-
ever, she quietly put aside her rejected manuscript
and began a new novel, Jane Eyre. The publication
of this novel at once made her famous.

She immediately commenced S/zrley. Her liter-
ary career was assured, but sorrow had commenced
for her at home. The brilliant, promising brother
was a wreck. Emily and Anne were far gone in
consumption. The brother died first, then Emily,
then Anne. The father was growing blind, and
long, desolate days fell on her in the gloomy old
parsonage. ‘

‘““T am forced to walk in the moors,” she writes,
‘“‘but when I go out there alone everything reminds
me of the times when others were with me, and
then the moors seem a wilderness, featureless,
solitary, saddening. My sister Emily had a par-
ticular love for them, and there is not a knoll of
heather, not a branch of fern, not a young bilberry
leaf, not a fluttering lark or linnet but reminds me
of her. The distant prospects were Anne’s delight,
and when I look round she is in the blue tints,
the pale mists, the waves and shadows of the
horizon. In the hill-country silence their poetry
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 373

comes by lines and stanzas into my mind. Once I
loved it, now I dare not read it.”

It seemed as if she had been robbed of every
possibility of further happiness, and yet it was very
near her after all. Her father’s curate, Mr.
Nicholls, had loved her many years. He asked her
to marry him, but her father, who disapproved of
marriage and always talked emphatically against it,
protested against their union, and she would not
marry without his consent. Mr. Nicholls resigned
his charge and left Haworth. Mr. Bronté’s increas-
ing infirmities and necessity of having an assistant
at last overcame his objections to his daughter’s
marriage. Mr. Nicholls was recalled and the mar-
riage took place in a few months, but in less than a
year, a happy year, Charlotte Bronté was dead.

Charlotte Bronté is in no sense a didactic writer.
She says of her own literary work, ‘I am no
teacher ; to look on me in that light is to mistake
me. To teach is not my vocation.” Yet it is im-
possible to rise from the reading of her books with-
out being taught and strengthened in many ways.
Jane Eyre is the most popular of her works, but
Villette is her best. She was growing a stronger
writer every day she lived. In native genius she is
greater than George Eliot, but she died too early to
leave behind her so valuable a legacy as George
Eliot did. There was in her nature a certain ascet-
icism and sharpness that had yet to ripen into soft-
ness and sweetness. Years and happiness were
wanting to mature her.
374 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

LETTER XXIV.

HAT charming writer, Dr. John Brown, author

of Rab and His Friends, says that for insight into
human nature Thackeray ranks next to Shakespeare
alone. I should like you to read the entire article
on Thackeray in the Spare Hours series, by Brown.
It is worth all the biographical volumes that have as
yet been written on him. If it were possible to spoil
it by creaming it, I should dislike to take anything
from it for your present benefit, but it can’t be
spoiled in that way, for it is all cream. Brown
knew, loved, and appreciated Thackeray, as the open-
ing quotation I have given you very well shows, and
few who read Thackeray carefully will deny him the
praise Brown gives him. But the trouble is that
careful readers are not plentiful, hence all sorts of
erroneous opinions are heard of him, the commonest
of which is that he is a cold-hearted cynic who
delights in stabbing poor human nature in all its
most vulnerable points. Now, the truth is that no
man ever had a tenderer, softer, more womanish heart
than Thackeray, and the reader who cannot feel its
rapid beating behind that protective shield of cyni-
cism he wears to hide it, is singularly wanting in
penetration. ‘ His anger,’ says a French critic,
“for him who is capable of penetrating the secret of
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 375

it is at bottom but the reaction of a tender nature,
furious at having been disappointed.”

An ardent, generous, hopeful, all - believing
nature Thackeray’s had been in early youth, and life
had not kept its promises to him. It had tantalized
him with the sweetest of hopes, only to ruin them.
He had married young and was deeply attached to
his wife, who some years after lost her mind. Dr.
Brown speaks of this terrible occurrence in the
following manner: ‘“ Mrs. Thackeray caught a fever,
brought on by imprudent exposure, at a time when
the effects of such ailments are more than usually
lasting, both on the system and the nerves. She
never afterward recovered so as to be able to be
with her husband and children.”

A man like Thackeray could not have received a
wound like this and carry the mark of no scar after
it. To him more than to most men a congenial
domestic life was a necessary element of happiness.
He had known it for a few years, and was twenty-
nine when the blow came that was to prevent him
from ever knowing it in its perfection again.

Reverses of fortune came upon him, too. He
had to work his way up slowly, to toil unremittingly.
He did not bound at once into public favor. In
the early days, before he had made himself famous,
a few Edinburgh friends, who recognized his genius,
presented him with a costly silver inkstand in
the form of a statuette of Punch. In his acknowl-
edgment of the gift to his donors he thanks them
heartily, and adds, ‘Such tokens of regard and
376 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

sympathy are very precious to a writer like myself,
who have some difficulty in making people under-
stand what you have been good enough to find out
in Edinburgh, that, under the mask satirical, there
walks about a sentimental gentleman who means not
unkindly to any mortal person.”

It is impossible to understand and enjoy Thacke-
ray perfectly until this ‘sentimental gentleman under
the mask” is discovered by the reader. Thackeray is
no misanthropist, no hater ofhis kind. He dearly loves
human nature,only he will not be taken in by its foibles,
its deceits, vanities, and affectations. He will insist
upon piercing them through and through with his wit,
to arrive, if he can, at the real person hidden under
all this frippery, and then he will love that person
as much as he deserves to be loved, often more. He
will only not love the mere trappings of him.

All who knew Thackeray intimately testify to
his sympathy and tenderness, his big-heartedness,
geniality, and boyish animation of spirits. Like all
healthy geniuses, he never quite outgrew the child
in himself, the capacity for finding pleasure in simple
things. To know his fun and the delight he could
be to his companions, read Fields’ recollections of
him in his Yesterdays With Authors.

Thackeray was a new and healthy force in liter-
ature, a powerful antidote to the Bulwer school of
literature that was in its most flourishing state when
he began his career. Bulwer was choosing his heroes
from the Newgate Calendar, endowing them with
sentimental virtues, and so confusing vice and virtue.
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 497

Thackeray entered a loud, ringing protest against
this wicked and wilful misrepresentation. ‘‘ Now if
we are to be interested by rascally actions,” he
writes, ‘‘let us have them with plain faces, and let
them be performed, not by virtuous philosophers but
by rascals. Another clever class of novelists adopt
the contrary system and create interest by making
their rascals perform virtuous actions. Against
these popular plans, we here solemnly appeal. We
say, Let your rogues in novels act like rogues, and
your honest men like honest men. Don’t let us
have any juggling and thimble-rigging with virtue
and vice, so that at the end of three volumes the
bewildered reader shall not know which is which ;
don’t let us find ourselves kindling at the generous
qualities of thieves and sympathizing with the
rascality of noblehearts. . . . . Youought tobe
made cordially to detest, scorn, loathe, and abhor and
abominate all people of this kidney. Men of genius,
like those whose works we have above alluded to, have
no business to make these characters interesting or
agreeable; to be feeding your morbid fancies or in-
dulging their own with such monstrous food.”

All Thackeray’s work is of a piece with this
protest. It is a stripping off of sham and false sen-
timent wherever met with. His greatest work,
Vanity Fair, was rejected by a magazine before it
found a publisher. It is now a recognized classic.
Henry Esmond is often called Thackeray’s best work.
The Newcomes and Pendennis are also great favorites.
You must not miss reading any of them.
378 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

Thackeray was born at Calcutta, India, on the
18th of July, 1811. He was sent to England when
a child, went to school at Charter House, and fin-
ished his education at Trinity College, Cambridge,
though he did not take a degree. He afterward
traveled on the continent, studied art, intending to
take it up as a profession, but subsequently aban-
doned it for journalism.

He was of huge stature and homely, intelligent
face. He was fond of telling, as a joke on himself,
that he once saw the manager of a side show in great
distress over the death of his giant, and humorously
asked the mourner if he couldn’t fill the vacant
place. The showman looked curiously at him a
moment and then replied that he was big enough,
only he was “too hugly.”

Besides his novels and sketches, Thackeray is
the author of an extremely entertaining course of
lectures on the English Humorists and Four Georges.
From the former series I shall quote you in con-
clusion a sentiment worth bearing in mind: ‘“ Might
I give counsel to any young hearer, I would say to
him: Try to frequent the company of your betters.
In books and life, that is the most wholesome society;
learn to admire rightly; the great pleasure of life is
that. Note what the great men admired; they ad-
mired great things; narrow spirits admire basely and
worship meanly.”

Charles Dickens was born on Friday, the 7th
of February, 1812, at Landport, Portsea, in the south
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 379

of England. Forster’s Life of Dickens is the best
biography of him and the one from which I have
gleaned the following facts.

As a child, Charles Dickens was a “very little,
very sickly boy, subject to attacks of violent spasms
which disabled him for any active exertion.” He
could not play rough games, but liked to watch the
other boys. When he was not watching them he
was reading, and reading men’s books, not boys’
books—Smollett, Fielding, Richardson, Goldsmith,
Addison, Steele, Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, Guil-
Blas, and the Arabian Nights.

The elder Dickens was a good-natured, well-
meaning but unfortunate fellow, who couldn’t pay
his debts, and so was forced to spend a good deal of
time in prison. Little Charles used to carry mes-
sages between his father and the family, and it was
on one of these occasions that the father made use
of that expression about the sun having set upon
him forever, which Charles afterward put into the
mouth of Mr. Micawber. Indeed, the author's father
sat for the better part of that picture, while it is said
that some of his mother’s peculiarities live in Mrs,
Nickleby.

Mrs. Dickens tried to better the financial affairs
of the family by starting a girls’ school. But the
plan went no further than a large brass plate on the
door bearing the words “ Mrs. Dickens’ Establish-
ment,” and a bundle of circulars advertising the new
school which poor little Charles conscientiously dis-
380 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

tributed, without procuring a pupil. At ten years
of age, Charles was put to work in a blacking ware-
house.

He stayed at the warehouse until he was twelve
years old, and was then sent to boarding-school for
two years. This is all the regular education he ever
received. ‘ Pray, Mr. Dickens, where was your son
educated ?’’ some one asked the father one day.
‘“Why, indeed, sir; ha! ha!” was the reply, “he
may be said to have educated himself.”

There was an eager, restless energy in the boy, a
hunger to know, that searched food and found it on
all sides. At fifteen he became a lawyer’s clerk on
a salary of thirteen shillings and six pence, which
was afterward increased to fifteen shillings a week.
Then he studied shorthand, and at nineteen became
areporter on the Morning Chronicle. Of his study
at shorthand you will find an interesting account in
David Copperfield, a novel which is in many respects
autobiographical. Of his work in journalism he says,
“To the wholesome training of severe newspaper
work, when I was a very young man, I constantly
refer my success.”

His rise in journalism was rapid. He commenced
his sketches over the signature of Boz, and became
known to London and the provinces. He wrote the
Pickwick Papers and became known to the world.
Such spirit, such humor, such wholesome exaggera-
tion of fun had not been met with before in any lit-
erature. The Pickwick Papers took the reading pub-
lic by storm. There were Pickwick hats, Pickwick
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 381

canes, bonnets, pipes, Pickwick trifles of all sorts,
just as some years later Dolly Varden gave her pretty
name to large-figured cotton prints.

The little, toiling, suffering boy of the blacking
warehouse had turned out to be the prince of hum-
orists, one of the great geniuses of his age. At
twenty-four he married a Miss Catherine Hogarth, a
marriage that was to bring him great unhappiness
many years later, when wealth and fame and social
position left him nothing in their direction to be de-
sired.

“Poor Catherine and I are not made for each
other, and there is no help for it,” he wrote his
friend Forster in those later days. ‘It is not only
that she makes me uneasy and unhappy, but that I
make her so, too, and much more so. She is exactly
what you know in the way of being amiable and
complying, but we are strangely ill-assorted for the
bond there is between us. God knows she would
have been a thousand times happier if she had mar-
ried another kind of man, and that her avoidance of
this destiny would have been equally good for us
both. JI am often cut to the heart by thinking what
a pity it is for her own sake, that I ever fell in her
way. And if I were sick or disabled to-morrow I
know how sorry she would be, and how deeply,
deeply grieved myself to think how we had lost each
other. But exactly the same incompatibility would
arise the moment I was well again, and nothing on
earth could make her understand me or suit us to
each other. Her temperament will not go with
382 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

mine. It mattered not so much when we had only
ourselves to consider, but reasons have been growing
since which make it all but hopeless that we should
ever try to struggle on. What is now befallen me, I
have seen steadily coming on ever since the days you
remember, when Mary was born, and I know, too
well, that you cannot, and no one can help me.

; I make no maudlin complaint. I
agree with you as to the very possible incidents even
not less bearable than mine that might and must
often occur to the married condition when it is en-
tered into when very young.”

When I was writing to you on the slushy novel
last week, I said that the sentiment which mutually
attracts two young persons is not necessarily a
lasting or a sacred sentiment. I have quoted you
this letter to enforce the truth of what I said, by the
unhappy experience of a great man, else there would
have been no reason for calling your attention to
Dickens’ domestic unhappiness.

Of Dickens, as a novelist, I shall hardly be able
to speak without partiality, he has always been such
a prime favorite with me. I acknowledge that he
is rather a caricaturist than a faithful delineator of
human nature, but he is essentially true, and his cari-
catures are more alive than half the people we know.
1 acknowledge that his pathos sometimes degenerates
into sentimentality, but he makes me cry; that his
humor is often exaggerated and broadly farcical, but
he makes me shout with laughter. I read Taine’s
severe criticism of him, confess its clearness and
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 383

its truth in part, yet I wince under it, as I would in
seeing the lashing of a favorite child.

One day in turning over a copy of Forster’s
Life of Dickens, in a public library, I happened
to light on this quotation from Thackeray on
the Christmas Carol, ‘‘Who can listen to  objec-
tions regarding sucha book as this? It seems to me
a national benefit, and to every man or woman who
reads it a personal kindness.’ Some enthusiastic
Dickens admirer had penciled the words ‘* Amen and
Amen” on the margin beside this quotation. Now, I
am not, as a rule, given to looking with anything but
contempt on those fatuous penciled exclamations
that so often soil the margins of circulating library
books, but somehow this fervent ‘‘Amen”’ toucheda
responsive chord in me. I felt acquainted with its
author, and respected him even if he were stupid
enough to write on the margins of books that did
not belong to him. I was willing to believe that, for
the time being, his good judgment was in a state of
suspended animation, but that at bottom he was a
good fellow after all, because he knew how to
appreciate Charles Dickens and had some conscious-
ness of the world’s indebtedness to him. Indeed,
to love Charles Dickens is a letter of introduction
to all other persons who love him. I am inclined
to think that there is something the matter with
either the head or the heart of the English-speaking
man or woman who does not enjoy Charles Dickens,
some lack of appreciating humor, some deficiency of
tenderness there must be.
384 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

It is not only the Christmas Carol that has been a
‘national benefit and personal kindness’ to every
reader, but every book that Charles Dickens has
written. He has added to the sum total of human
joy, faith, and confidence, more than any other
writer that ever lived, and it is my opinion that he
will not “decline in popularity” until human nature
does.

In appearance Dickens was, according to George
Eliot, ‘certainly disappointing; no benevolence in
the face, and I think, little in the head ; the anterior
lobe not by any means remarkable. In fact, he is
not distinguished looking in any way ; neither hand-
some nor ugly, neither fat nor thin, neither tall nor
short.”

He had rich, brown, curly hair, and life in every
feature. Leigh Hunt said of his face, “It has
the life and soul in it of fifty human beings.”

He sought always to inform the head through
the heart. ‘‘ Knowledge,” he once said, “has a very
limited power when it informs the head only; but
when it informs the heart as well, it has a power over
life and death, the body and the soul, and dominates
the universe.”

Of his methods of work he says, “I work slowly
and with great care, and never give way to my
invention recklessly, but constantly restrain it, and
that I think it is my infirmity to fancy or perceive
relations in things which are not apparent generally.
Also, I have such an inexpressible enjoyment of
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 385

what I see in a droll light, that I dare say I pet it
as if it were a spoilt child.”

The dramatic faculty was strong in Dickens.
Carlyle thought if he had not made the first novelist
of his time, he would have been its greatest actor.
During the last years of his life he gave public read-
ings from his works in addition to continuing his
writing, and wore himself out in restless wanderings
from place to place. His friends begged him to
rest, to which he replied, “It is much better to go
on and fret than to stop and fret. As to repose, for
some men there is no such thing in life.” He died
at his home, Gadshill Place, and was buried in
Westminster Abbey on the 14th of June, 1870.

George Eliot was a native of Warwickshire,
England. Her real name, as you know, perhaps,
was Mary Ann Evans, and she was the youngest
child of Robert Evans, a substantial farmer, many
of whose characteristics his daughter afterward
portrayed in Adam Bede.

She was not a precocious child; she did not learn
to read easily. Hers was a large, slow-growing
nature, says Cross. Once, when urged to write her
autobiography, she replied, ‘The only thing I
should care much to dwell on would be the absolute
despair I suffered from, of ever being able to achieve
anything. No one could ever have felt greater
despair, and a knowledge of this might be a help to
some other struggler, but,” she added, smiling,
‘‘on the other hand, it might only lead to an increase
of bad writing.”

25
386 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

As a child she had few books to read, but they
were all standard ones, and she read and re-read
them. Later, she had very superior educational ad-
vantages; masters in German, Italian, and music, in
addition to regular school-work. She studied, read,
wrote, translated incessantly, feeling life, as she said,
‘‘a perpetual nightmare, and always haunted by
something to be done.’’ Her severe mental work
told on her health and made her subject all her life
to violent nervous headaches, but she never abated
one jot of the task she had imposed upon herself,
which seems to have been to make all languages
and learning her own.

This idea of fitness for a self-appointed task is the
key-note to George Eliot’s character as a writer.
She did not begin original work until her mind was
ripened by long study and thought. What she lost
in buoyancy and spontaneity by this course, she
gained in solidity and real value. It is not an easy
task to the ordinary reader to read George Eliot as
she ought to be read, which means that the story is
the smallest part of her novels. They abound in
shrewd analyses of motive and in weighty reflections,
They convey the impression of a large, tolerant,
scholarly mind. They cannot be read intelligently
without in some degree educating and broadening
the reader. To be sure, this can be as truthfully
said of all good works, but it has a peculiar significa-
tion as applied to George Eliot. Charlotte Bronté
protested against being thought a teacher. George
Eliot felt it her mission to teach, and if it were not
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 387

that the indescribable quality, I have spoken of before
as belonging to genius, characterized her novels,
they might very well be classed under the didactic
novel in its broadest sense; by which I mean that she
had no pet system or hobby to introduce to the
world, but that she felt it her duty to insist upon
bringing individual life into harmony with the uni-
versal principles of ethics. This is the broadest kind
of moral teaching, and you will find it speaking from
every page George Eliot writes. You will find the
story of her life as told in her journal and letters
edited by her husband, J. W. Cross.

I have already mentioned Mrs. Humphrey Ward
as the greatest living writer of fiction in English
literature, and, perhaps, you would like to know
something more of her. Her work falls much short
of that we have been considering, yet it is good,
faithful work. Mrs. Ward, like George Eliot, is a
scholar and takes life and her work seriously.

Mrs. Ward (Mary Augusta Arnold) was born
in Australia, where her father, Thomas Arnold,
son of Dr. Arnold, of Rugby, was school-
inspector at Hobart, Tasmania. Her mother was
Julia Sorell, daughter of the first English governor
of Australia, and a beautiful, intelligent, and cultured
woman.

When Mary Arnold was about six or seven years
old, her father returned to England where he served
as school inspector at Birmingham, London and Ox-
ford. It was at Oxford that Mary Arnold re-
ceived the solid part of her education. She read
388 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

indefatigably from the libraries there, studied the, ,
modern languages, and made herself familiar with
their literatures. Twenty years of her life were
passed at Oxford. It was there she met her hus-
band, Mr. Humphrey Ward, then a clever young
tutor of Brasenose College. Both had literary
tastes, and while the husband was preparing an edi-
tion of the English poets and doing work as an art
critic on the Zimes, the young wife was writing for
the Quarterly Review. Her first published work
was a tale for children, which appeared in 1880.
Miss Bretherton, a novel of which the American act-
ress Mary Anderson is the heroine, followed four
years later. An excellent translation of the Journal
Intime, by Henri-Frederic Amiel, appeared in 1885.
Three years later Robert Elsmere was published, and
her fame was established. Since then David Greve
in 1892, and Marcella in 1894, have appeared,
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 389

LETTER XXV.

F you do not know Rab and his Friends, Marjorie
Fleming, and all those delicious sketches and
essays in Dr. John Brown’s Spare Hours, treat your-
self to a reading of them at once. I cannot tell you
what delicious, breezy, wholesome air blows from
Dr. John Brown’s writings, any more than I can
describe the odor of the heather to you. I only
know it is there, and that I never read him that I do
not seem to be listening to sweet, uplifting, stirring
music.

He has so large, tender, and pure a soul, such fine
‘‘pawkie,” Scotch humor, such contagious buoyancy
of spirits, with such delicate susceptibilities, making
him capable of the tenderest pathos quite inimitable
in his way. I look at the choice volume he has left
us from the spare hours left him, after hard, tireless
service as aa Edinburgh physician, and I have such
a great longing to have more of him, and to know
better that beautiful, generous soul.

In 1890 there appeared from an Edinburgh
house a small, thin volume of sixty-two pages
entitled Dr. John Brown and His Sister Isabella. The
author of this very pretty sketch does not venture
more than her initials, E.T. M’L. She was a friend
of the family and familiarly known as ‘“ Cecy.”
Her recollections of Dr. John Brown begin as a
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school-girl, when she had shown a little spirit of
fearless independence in answering a teasing remark
of his. Anything that showed quickness and spirit
delighted him. For this quickness ‘“Cecy’ was
privileged to have rides with the doctor, of which
she says, ‘‘What words can convey any idea of
the sense of pleasure that intercourse with him
always gave? It brought intensifying of life within
and around one, and the feeling of being understood,
of being over-estimated, and yet this over-estimation
only led to humility and aspiration. His kindly
insight seemed to fasten rather on what might yet
be than what already was, and so led one on to hope
and strive, ‘I'll try to be good,’ must have been
the unspoken resolve of many a heart after being
with him, though no one more seldom gave what is
called distinctively ‘good advice,’ medical excepted !”’

“In those rides,” she says, ‘there were often
long silences, then gleams of veriest nonsense and
fun, and then perhaps some true words of far-
stretching meaning. . . . . Nothing escaped
him, and to his sensitive nature the merest passing
incident on the street became a source of joy or
sorrow, while in the same way his keen sense of
humor had endless play. Once, when driving, he
suddenly stopped in the middle of a sentence and
looked eagerly at the back of the carriage. “Is it
some one you know?” I asked. ‘No,’ he said, “ it’s
a dog I don’t know.” . . . . Perhaps no one
who enjoyed mirth so thoroughly, or was so much
the cause of it in others, ever had a quieter bearing.
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 301

He had naturally a low tone of voice, and he seldom
raised it. He never shouted any one down, and did
not fight for a place in the arena of talk, but his
calm, honest tones claimed attention, and way was
gladly made for him. ‘He acts as a magnet in a
room,’ was sometimes said, and it wastrue; gently but
surely he became the center of whatever company
he wasin. . . . . He discovered with keenest
insight all that lay below the surface, dwelling
on the good and bringing it to the light, while from
what was bad or foolish he simply turned aside.
He had friends in all ranks of life, ‘ from the peasant
to the peer,’ as the phrase is, and higher. :
And it was character that he thought of ; surround-
ings were very secondary with him. Though he
thoroughly appreciated a beautiful setting, the want
of it did not repel him.”

Note that last, that beautiful, keen penetration,
which goes right through all mere outside wrappings
and gets at the heart of an object; it is not to be
stopped and distracted by mere surface; only un-
common minds are capable of that clear and perfect
vision. You will see evidences of such vision in
all Dr. Brown’s work. The reminiscences of his
father and his recollections of Dr. Chalmers are the
two most beautiful memorial sketches in the English
language. You cannot afford not to know them.

Alfred Tennyson was a native of Lincolnshire.
His father was a clergyman, and Alfred was the third
of twelve children. He was educated at Trinity
College, Cambridge, where he won a medal for a
392 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

prize poem. Inconjunction with his brother Charles
he published a small volume of verses, in his nine-
teenth year. These early verses hardly promised
the successful career that lay before him. Tennyson
is regarded as one of the greatest poets of the nine-
teenth century. He certainly has written some very
noble verses and deserves a high rank among
poets; but while I say that, I feel myself unable to
assign that rank more definitely. I confess with
great misgiving as to my power of appreciating him,
that he does not touch me, as, for example, Burns
does. I miss in him some flavor of the original
Adam. He is too cultivated, with that artificial
culture associated in my mind with hot-house roses,
kid gloves, and dress suits, I want more fresh air
and sunburn, more evidence that a man has lived
close to nature. The fresh, earthy, out-of-doors
odor is lost in him in perfumes, delicate and exotic,
as in The Princess, Locksley Hall, and Enoch Arden, or
heavy and languorous as in Maud. To read him is
to me like taking a walk through a conservatory;
we see beautiful flowers, luxuriant foliage, inhale
delicious odors, exclamations of delight escape us,
but we are not deeply moved; we are not braced.
We take no long, deep breaths as we would in a pine
forest fragrant with balsamic odors.

Tennyson’s best poem is Jn Memoriam, written in
memory of his school friend, Arthur Hallam, who
died at Vienna, in 1833. Dr. John Brown has writ-
ten a fine sketch of Hallam, which you should read
before reading Jn Memoriam.
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 393

One of the truest criticisms of Jz Memoriam is
that written by Charlotte Bronté, after suffering the
loss of her brother and sisters: ‘I have read
Tennyson’s Jn Memoriam, or, rather, part of it. I
closed the book when I had got about half way. It
is beautiful, it is mournful, it is monotonous. Many
of the feelings expressed bear in their utterance the
stamp of truth, yet if Arthur Hallam had been some-
what nearer Alfred Tennyson—his brother, instead of
his friend, I should have mistrusted this rhymed and
measured and printed monument of grief. What
change the lapse of years may work, I do not know,
but it seems to me that bitter sorrow, while recent,
does not flow out in verse.”

George Eliot, writing to a friend in 1858, says,
“T don’t know whether you look out for Ruskin’s
books whenever they appear. His little book on
the Political Economy of Art contains some magnifi-
cent passages, mixed up with stupendous specimens
of arrogant absurdity, on some economical points.
But I venerate him as one of the great teachers of
the day. The grand doctrines of truth and sincerity
in art, and the nobleness and solemnity of our human
life, which he teaches with the inspiration of a He-
brew prophet, must be stirring up young minds in a
promising way. The two last volumes of Modern
Painters contain, I think, some of the finest writing
of the age.”

After that introduction perhaps you will not be
sorry to know something of Ruskin. Let me tell
you first, however; that Modern Painters was writ-
394 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

ten by Ruskin as a reply to an attack on the
painter Turner in Blackwood’s Magazine. It was
begun in 1843 and completed in 1860. It is one of
those seed-sowing books from which springs a har-
vest of finer feelings and nobler thoughts. Yet this
magnificent book missed its aim. One feels that
Turner must have been a bad painter to require five
thick volumes to prove him a good one. Artists
say, too, that Ruskin’s art theories are altogether ~
wrong, that painting is not as he would have it, a
kind of picture-writing by which thoughts and sen-
timents are conveyed in a charming way to the brain
through the eye. However that may be, the book
in itself is uplifting and inspiring. I would have you
read it carefully, word for word, again and again
For one thing it will teach you how to see; you will
be set to watching cloud-forms, shadows, and tree-
anatomy, and it will seem almost incredible to you
that you could have lived so long, made some pre-
tensions to art-enjoyment, and yet have been so ig-
norant of every principle of art and so blind to the
commonest effects of light, shade, and color in
nature around you. ,

Modern Painters abounds in exquisite descriptions
of natural scenery. Indeed, Ruskin’s sense of form
and color is unrivaled; but I must send you to his
books to learn that fact. I should like now to call
your attention to some facts of his life. Preterita is
one of the most charming autobiographies in the
language. I should like to put a copy of it into the
hands of every mother who wished to bring up her
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 395

children wisely. Not that I mean there was all
wisdom shown in the training of John Ruskin, but
that there was so much that was good and wholesome
in it.

John Ruskin’s father was a wealthy wine merchant
of Croydon, South England. He was of Scotch
descent, and married his English cousin, who was a
few years his senior. John was their only child.
His mother wished to make a clergyman out of him,
and had entire charge of his early education, “I had
Scott’s novels, and the /éad (Pope’s translation),”
he says, ‘‘ for my only reading when I was a child,
on week-days; on Sundays their effect was tempered
by Robinson Crusoe and the Pilgrim's Progress.

Walter Scott and Pope’s Homer were reading
of my own election, but my mother forced me by
steady toil to learn long chapters of the Bible by
heart, as well as to read it every syllable through
aloud, hard names and all, from Genesis to the
Apocalypse, about once a year; and to that discipline,
patient, accurate, and resolute, I owe not only a
knowledge of the book, which I find occasionally
serviceable, but much of my general power of taking
pains, and the best part of my taste in literature.

‘ Once knowing the thirty-second of
Deuteronomy, the one hundred and nineteenth Psalm,
the fifteenth of first Corinthians, the Sermon on the
Mount, and most of the Apocalypse, every syllable by
heart, and having always a way of thinking with my-
self what words meant, it was not possible for me,
even inthe foolishest times of youth, to write entirely
396 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

superficial or formal English. .
My mother’s general principles of first bveainieat
were to guard me with steady watchfulness from all
avoidable pain or danger, and for the rest to let me
amuse myself as I liked, provided I was neither
fretful nor troublesome. But the law was that I
should find my own amusement. No toys of any
kind were at first allowed : ‘ nor did I
painfully wish, what I was never permitted for an
instant to hope or even imagine, the possession of
such things as one saw intoy-shops. I hada bunch
of keys to play with as long as I was capable only
of pleasure in what glittered and jingled; as I grew
older I had a cart and a ball, and when I was five or
six years old, two boxes of well-cut wooden bricks.
With these modest, but, I still think, entirely suffi-
cient possessions, and being always summarily
whipped if I cried, did not doas I was bid, or tumbled
on the stairs, I soon attained serene and secure meth-
ods of life and motion, and could pass my days con-
tentedly in tracing the squares and comparing the col-
ors of my carpet, examining the knots in the wood of
the floor, or counting the bricks in the opposite
houses.”

Iask you to notice particularly the wisdom of
this course of training, the idea being to make the
child self-reliant in the matter of his amusements;
the idea, too, of not allowing his attention to be
diverted from the objects about him by silly, useless
toys, and so awakening his observing powers and
training them to accuracy, seems to me a very excel-
ON ENGLISH AUTHORS. 397

lent one. The boy learned to be company for him-
self.

The elder Ruskin was accustomed to make annual
excursions through England, Scotland, and Wales to
visit his wine customers and take their orders. On
such excursions the boy was allowed to go with the
father and mother, and in this way visited all the
fine old castles and country seats, ‘‘in reverent and
healthy delight of uncovetous admiration, perceiv-
ing as soon as IJ could perceive any political truth at
all, that it was probably much happier to live in a
small house and have Warwick Castle to be aston-
ished at, than to live in Warwick Castle and have
nothing to be astonished at.”

He began Latin in his eighth year. His lessons
began regularly at half-past nine in the morning, and
when they were finished the day was his own.
After tea his father was accustomed to read aloud to
his mother, and in this way he heard ‘all the
Shakespeare comedies again and again, all Scott and
all Don Quixote,’ much of Pope, Spenser, Byron,
Goldsmith, Addison, and Johnson.

I have dwelt on this early, sensible training Ruskin
received, because I have seen nothing like it in these
days of kindergarten paper-cutting, countless toys,
and countless idle children’s books, and there can
be no harm at least in looking back at it and its
results and asking ourselves for what we have dis-
carded it.

The rest of the story of Ruskin’s life is told in
his books—a life of patient study, passionate search
398 TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS

for the highest excellence, and passionate endeavor to
show to others what he has found.

We have finished now our course in English
literature. I have simply introduced you to its
finest writers. It remains for you to make their
acquaintance by careful, thoughtful reading and re-
reading of their works. Make up your mind to
read nothing that is not standard, and try to awaken
the same taste for excellent literature in those young
people with whom you chance to be thrown—so
much depends on starting right in early childhood.
All true literature has the same aim; it makes us
conscious of the beauty and worth of life, and helps
us to live it better.
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF EMINENT
ENGLISH AUTHORS.

1340-1400 GEOFFREY CHAUCER.
1480-1535 Sir THomas More.
1552-1599 EDMUND SPENSER.
1561-1626— FRANCIS BACON.
1564-1593—CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE.
1564-1616 — WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.
1573-1637 BEN JONSON.

1576-1625 JOHN FLETCHER.
1586-1615 — FRANCIS BEAUMONT.
1588-1680 THOMAS HOBBES.
1593-1633 GEORGE HERBERT.
1593-1683 IzAAK WALTON.
1608-1674 EDWARD Hype, LoRD CLARENDON.
1608-1674 JOHN MILTON.

1612-1680 SAMUEL. BUTLER.
1613-1667 — JEREMY TAYLOR.
1618-1667 —ABRAHAM COWLEY.
1628-1688 —JOHN BUNYAN.
1631-1700— JOHN DRYDEN.
1632-1704 — JOHN LOCKE.

1632-1703 SAMUEL PEPYS.
1640-1715 — WILLIAM WYCHERLEY.
1642-1727 SIR ISAAC NEWTON.
1651-1685 — THOMAS OTWAY.
1656-1691 —NaT LEE.
400 CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE.

1660-1731 — DANIEL DEFOE.
1667-1745 — JONATHAN SWIFT.
1669-1729 — WILLIAM CONGREVE.
1670-1729— SIR RICHARD STEELE.
1672-1719 JOSEPH ADDISON.
1672-1726— SIR JOHN VANBRUGH.
1673-1718— NICHOLAS ROWE.
1674-1748— Isaac WATTS.
1678-1707--GEORGE FARQUHAR.
1681-1765 EDWARD YOUNG.
1688-1758— ALLAN RAMSAY.
1688-1732— JOHN Gay.

1688-1744 ALEXANDER POPE.
1689-1761 —SAMUEL RICHARDSON.
1700-1748 — JAMES THOMSON.
1707-1754 HENRY FIELDING.
1709-1784 —SAMUEL JOHNSON.
1711-1776— Davip HuME.
1713-1768 LAURENCE STERNE.
1716-1771 THOMAS GRAY,
1717-1797 — HORACE WALPOLE.
1720-1771 —GEORGE TOBIAS SMOLLETT.
1721-1759— WILLIAM COLLINS.
1721-1770— MARK AKENSIDE.
1722-1791 — WILLIAM ROBERTSON.
1728-1774— OLIVER GOLDSMITH.
1730-1797 EDMUND BURKE.
1731-1800— WILLIAM COWPER.
1737-1794 - EDWARD GIBBON.
1740-1795 JAMES BOSWELL.
1752-1770 THOMAS CHATTERTON.
1752-1840— RICHARD BRINSLEY SHERIDAN.
1752-1840— FANNY BURNEY (Mg. D’ ARBLAY.)
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE. 401

1754-1832— GEORGE CRABBE.

1759-1796— ROBERT Burns.

1756-1826— WILLLAM GIFFORD.

1756-1836— WILLIAM Gopwin.
1763-1855—SAMUEL ROGERS.

1767-1849— MarIA EDGEWORTH.

1770-1850— WILLIAM WorRpDSwoRTH.
1771-1845 — SIDNEY SMITH.

1771-1832— Str WALTER Scort.

1772-1834 —SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.
1774-1843 ROBERT SOUTHEY.

1775-1834 CHARLES LAMB.

1775-1817—JANE AUSTEN.

1775-1864 — WALTER SAvaGE LANDOR.
1777-1844 THOMAS CAMPBELL.

1778-1830— WILLIAM Haz .itt.

1779-1852— THomMAS MOoRE.

1784-1859-- LEIGH Hunt.

1785-1854 JOHN WILSON (CHRISTOPHER NORTH).
1785-1859— THOMAS DE QUINCEY.

1788-1824 LORD ByRON (GEORGE GORDON).
1792-1822 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.
1794-1854 JOHN GIBSON LOCKHART.
1795-1881 — THOMAS CARLYLE.

1796-1821 JOHN KEATS.

1800-1859 THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY.
1806-1861 — ELIZABETH BARRETT (MRS. BROWNING).
1809-1892 ALFRED TENNYSON.
1810-1882 — JoHN BROWN.
1810-1865 — ELIZABETH STEVENSON (MRS. GASKELL).
1811-1863 — WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY.
1812-1870 CHARLES DICKENS.

1812-1889 ROBERT BROWNING.
402 CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE.

1816-1855 CHARLOTTE BRONTE.
1817-1878 GEORGE HENRY LEWEs.
1818-1894—- JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE.
1819-1875 -CHARLES KINGSLEY.

18I19- —Joun RUSKIN.

1819-1880 Mary ANN EVANS (GEORGE ELIOT).

1820- — HERBERT SPENCER.

1822-1888 -- MATTHEW ARNOLD.

1828- — GEORGE MEREDITH.

1851- —Mary Avucusta ARNOLD (Mrs. HUMPHREY

WARD).
INDEX.

A
Abelard 2-220 ssescees 137
Act of Supremacy-----__- 39
Addison, Joseph----- 139-144
Amiel, Henri Frederic,
QuUOLED 225-2 coneseens: 224)
Andrea del Sarto, quota-
Hor from ees sees, 255

Amold, Dr., of Rugby---- 323
Arnold, Matthew, aim of

his books------------ 323
a8 Chit C.2-42.ssccce 330, 331
as poet ------------ 331, 334
definition of culture---. 326
On. BYfONiseei-o-ocssacs 232
Aurora Leigh, story of,
238-243
teachings of-------- 243, 244
Austen, Jane----.-.2-- 357-363
Austin, Lady --------- 1g0-192
B
Bacon, Lord----------- 7I- 74
Bayne, Peter, quoted----- 341
Beauty in nature, feeling
for, not common ----- 280
Becket, Thomas 4a------- 31

Borrowing, literary

Bronté, Charlotte, appear-

character of her work 364, 373
estimate of Jane Austen

357, 358

letter to Southey- - --368, 369

493

 

Bronté, Emily
365, 370, 371, 372
Bronté, Rev. Patrick--364, 365
Brown, Dr. John 389-391
opinion of Thackeray.- 374
QUOLER) ns seco eines “BAT
Browning, Elizabeth Bar-
rett 238-245
Browning, Robert, quoted
253-256
unpardonable fault of -- 246
Bunyan, John 98, 105, 106
Burke, Edmund, Johnson's

tribute: toses2sewsc.-7 178
Burns, Robert-------- 199-208
quoted --------- 201, 203-205
Burroughs, John, on Brown-
INS VErsezc 2 ae 249
on his own reading --- 49
Byron, Lord--------_- 224-232
Cc
Canterbury Tales ....--26, 30
Carlyle, Thomas--_--- 296-303
Style) Ot-eewee es sea 297, 298
teachings of----... 299-301
Castle Rackrent---------- 352
CeltSisas sae eye 20- 22

Charity, Scott's notion of 214
Chatterton, Thomas- - - 194-198
Chaucer, Geoffrey 24- 27

indebtedness to Boccac-
cio .
404

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
257-269
his talk------------ 265, 266
Congreve, William, quoted
125, 172
Cowley, Abraham-.------- 8t
Cowper, William----- 184-193
nature of his insanity -- 186
Criticism discussed - ---286-289
Culture and Anarchy.---- 327

D
Definitions, examples of
school-girl -------- 15, 16
De Quincey .--------- 290-296

quoted-13!, 141-144, 234,
258, 263, 279, 283, 304
Dialect, Scotch---------- 199
Dickens, Charles---- -- 378-385
influence of his novels383, 384
Divine Right of Kings,

James I.’s theory of -- 75
Donne, John------------- 80
quoted ---.-----.------ 81
D'Ouditot, Mme--------- 354
Drama, origin of--------- 51
Dryden, John--------- 118-124
defects as poet--.- - 123, 124

opinion of Shakespeare- 124
personal traits of ------- 120
quotation from Alexan-
der's Feast ---------- 122
vacillating in opinion -- I19
Druidism:.-.-.2-2s.-+--..-. 20
Dunciad  2-== 2sesess2ess=

Edgeworth, Maria- ---352-357
Edgeworth, Richard Lov-
ell .--------.----- 352-354

 

INDEX.

Eisteddfod ---.---------- 21
Eliot, George---- ----- 385 - 387
Emerson, Ralph Waldo,
quoted <--22ssseeese 60
England in Shakespeare’s
time -------------- 57- 60
Erasmus. ----------- 36, 39, 48
F
Falstaff ----------------- 66
Faust, central idea of ---- 57
Fielding, Henry--------- 165
french Revolution ------ 298
Froude, James Anthony, on
Catholic Church ----- 37
on Browning’s verse---- 249

G

Genius and Insanity- --98-105
Geniuses, hard to live with 210

Gibbon, Edward------ 157-161
Gilfillan, George, quoted

295, 296

Goethe, on Werther------ 231

quoted ---------------- 302

Goldsmith, Oliver.--- -~ 180-184

Gray, Thomas-------- 193, 194

H

Hazlitt, William, quoted,
163, 170, 263-265

_| Health, physical, in rela-

tion to literature. -.--
Healthy literature, defined
24- 26
Heloise, letter to Abelard
132-137
Herbert, George--------- 81
Hughes, Thomas, quoted

349, 350
Hunt, Leigh, quoted --65, 384
INDEX.

I
In Memoriam, Charlotte
Bronté’s criticism of-- 393
J
Jacobinism, signal marks
Ofes sea eges ee oe 326
Johnson, Samuel----- 167, 168
character ---------- 173, 174
love of good eating ---- 169
Jonson, Ben-..--------. 69- 71
Joubert, Joseph, quoted ---- 347
K
Keats, John--------_- 233-235
L
Lamb, Charles..------ 304-315
a perfect man, according
ee ee 309
hatred of insipidity ----' 308
love of London----- 312, 313
Lamb, Mary--------- 305, 307
Language, accuracy in use
(0) ee ie ee 96

common errors in-16, 29, 116

development of English 14
Romance-------- .----- 2s
Literatureand Dogma, 329, 330
Locke, John---------- 125, 126

Love, chief motive in
slushy novels. ---- ---- 337
wrong idea of ----... -- 340

Lowell, James Russell,
quoted----- ---. 55, 66, 121

M

Macaulay, Thomas Bab-
ington. ----------- 315, 323

letter to niece on read-
INSveaeegeseeeescsses 322

Maladie de René, defined- 228

 

405
Marcella --------....---- 51
Marlowe, Christopher ---- 56

Metaphysics, unsatisfac-
tory study as com-
monly pursued_--125, 126

Metaphysical poets __-_. 79 S82

Mill on the Floss ..----.- 50

Milton, John, character
and domestic life ._---- g2
difficult to read -_______ 95
his life an epic--------- 90

Modern Painters..... 393, 394

More, Sir Thomas ---___- 39-46
character of ---_--_-_- 41-43
Moore, Thomas.----.- 236, 238

N

Necker, Mme., advice to
Gibbon on marrying-- 159

Novels, classified ----- 335-351
oO
Oberammergau --------- 5I
Ossian a-s2eecnuceevs. 2. 22

Otway, Thomas, quoted --. 125
P

Pepys, Samuel, mental
characteristics of - -.-- 107
quoted - 108, 109, I10, 113, I14

secret of his success---- 111
Philistines, Arnold’s defi-
nition of------------- 328
Poetry, all literatures be-
PIN IN wee eeeensesene 31
Darwin's loss of tastefor 33
nature of real----.. ---- 79
Pope, Alexander- - ---- 128-137
Poussin, quoted---------- 60
Preterita--------- seceeey 304
406

R

Rabbi Ben Ezra, quota-
tion from-----+------ 255
Reade, Charles, quoted--- 199
Reformation, in England. 39
in Germany

Richardson, Samuel--164, 165 |

Richter, Jean Paul, quoted 60
Ring and the Book.-----
247, 249, 250
Rousseau, Jean Jacques,
quoted
sentiment for nature or-
iginated with-.--.-- 281, 282

Ss

Sainte Beuve, on Balzac-- 345
on what is a classic? --- 130
on /a maladie de René.- 228
to women who worship

men of genius------- 211
Scott, Walter------__. 208-223

on education of children
219, 220

Sentiment and Sentiment-
ality cose sess cse tke 164
Self Dependence .-------- 333

Shakespeare, William, con-
jectures about ------- 61
English of ----.------- 63
mental breadth of ---63, 65

Shelley, Percy Bysshe-232, 233
Smollett, George Tobias-- 166

Southey, Robert------ 269-276
on the “mania of man-
mending” ----------- 271
Spencer, Herbert, quoted
53, 54

 

INDEX.

Spenser, Edmund, appear-

ance of-.-..--------- 54
Scott’s enthusiasm for 55
Steele, Sir Richard----.-- 144
Sterne, Laurence ---- ---- 164
Style of slushy novel ---- 339
Suckling, Sir John, quoted 80
Swift, Jonathan------- 145-155
Journal to Stella---148, 149
T

Taine, Hippolyte Adolphe,
quoted -.--- 57, 69, 73, 94

Talk, first characteristic of
POO, - 220. -2- 2sexcin 16
Taylor, Jeremy --------- 82-84

Tennyson, Alfred ----- 391-393
Thackeray, William Make-
peace --------.--- 374-378
Thoughtlessness in youth-
Tieck, Ludwig, quoted---- 251
345
Tristram Shandy----- 162-164

U
Unwin, Mrs. -185-188, I91, 192
Utopia ----------------- 44-48
Vv
Vicar of Wakefield ------ 183
Vocabulary, where to get
a good one ----.----. 116
Ww

Walton, Izaak, on angling, 106
Ward, Mrs. Humphrey

387, 388

Wordsworth, William-276-285

The Excursion 281
roducers of those metals.

 

Mining—The Wor

(Contributed to Southwest Mining News |
York, one of the best and ab

POLITICAL economists tell us that Mining,

next to agriculture, is the greatest industry in
our country. This is true from the viewpoint that
if our soil were untilled there would be little to
eat, and famine would stalk the land.

From a financial, or monetary standpoint, how-
ever, to say nothing about relativity,—and every
commodity is relative to the product of the mines,
—the mining industry is the greatest in the world.
The truth of this assertion becomes apparent when
it is visualized that mining gives us the standard
of value, by which the price of almost everything
produced by the brain and brawn of man is mea-

- sured. Abandon mining and the value of every
commodity would be insignificant, humanity would
sink’ back to the ‘barter and exchange age, and
financial paralysis would lock in its deadly grasp
the industries of mankind. It would be the greatest
calamity that ever befell the human race, and in
less than a generation civilization would revert. to
barbarism, when primitive man knew nothing
about copper, gold, silver, iron, steel, lead, zinc, and
the invaluable mineral resources of Mother Earth.

Those who decry mining are ignorant of history,
or they have ulterior purposes to serve. If they
know anything they must know that all business;
‘that all industry; that all human progress depends
on the mines.

The wealth from the mines from the dawn of:

time is the epic of the song and story of human
advancement, of man’s march along the paths of
progress.

Show me a peopl
show you a people de
a thousand years be
zation.

It was the mines t
past; that made the a
Egypt great; and m
Rome great; and in|
made Spain, and En
great beyond the dre:

Mining is essential
kind, and to the pro
has made more po
decades of the ages
together.

The. government s
less money lost in n
portant business in
prove that in mining
than 35 per cent as ag
failures in other indu
States, during the pa

More real profit hi
in mining securities
from any other Ame

The mines have ot
vestors an opportuni
lously low prices, 1
appreciate in value
dollar mark. .

Investment statistic
from mines is about

SSS ee
to $8,484,266,521.

 

 

 

s Greatest Industry

2 by William Sulzer, former governor of New
iends of the Mining Industry)

dist mines, and I will
he mire of poverty, and
ye procession of civili-

de the greatness of the
civilizations; that made
feece great; and made
1 times the mines have
and the United States
avarice.

: advancement of man-
of civilization. Mining
n. millionaires, in the
: all other things put

s show there has been
than in any other im-
yuntry. These records
failures have been less
gore than 87 per cent of
‘fhroughout the United
7 years.

2 made by investments
the past century than
adustry.

the rank and file of in-
acquire stock at ridicu-
of which subsequently
bove the one hundred

7 that profit to investors
er cent—more than six

times the percentage of any other industry in the
country. Next to mining comes:

Life Insurance .............. 31 percent
Automobiles ................ 18 percent
Steel. s:see ¢:neg i ee cau yea es 8 percent
Railroads eicsssc sie nde 8 Feu D8 Show 5¥4 per cent

Bradstreet’s compilation of business successes
shows the following:

Merchandising ................ 9 per cent
Manufacturing ................ 13 per cent
Barring coe. ees 4 ete bd Sine ae ee 17 per cent
MINING cece iced cpg oviw icing 67 per cent

Wipe out the mines and the people ere long would
again be living in caves and mud shacks along the
banks of streams, like the river drift men in the
dawn of mankind.

Strike down the miner; shackle mining; throttle
the mining industry; and civilization will sink back
into oblivion ten thousand years.

The greatest benefactor of the human race has
been the prospector. The most beneficent of, all
times are the far-seeing men whose brain and
brawn developed the earth’s natural resources, the
men who poured the golden stream of wealth into
the lap of civilization; into the channels of trade;
into the avenues of commerce and into the house
of happiness.

All honor to these. Miners! Long live the Min-
ing Industry!! All hail the Prospector!!! In every
Jand on which the sun shines a monument should
be built to the Prospector for all that he has done
in every clime to bless humanity.

‘ x ; :
SS eeeeeeeeeeEEyEyEyEyeeee—y————eEEEEE