en CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY UNDERGRADUATE UBRARY Date Due -m^ tmL ^£'H£rr>. MSf ^^RR ^0(,, AHAV ' mm r"'^*^'*^^WR? mn-: ,. OFC^ &!^%i^mm ms — ■ i3 "***«fe S£MKT/:p PRINTED IN U. S. A. floo/c ^ CAT. NO. 23233 Cornell University Library PR4021.E71914 Essays; including Essays in criWcism, 18 3 1924 014 168 425 <'()S1bLlt SRSWH CttJ Cornell University Library The original of tliis bool< is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924014168425 MATTHEW ARNOLD From the painting by G. P. M 'aits in the Naiiotial Portrait Gallery (By pernii^sioji <^My. Frederick Hollyer) OXFORD EDITION ESSAYS BY . MATTHEW ARNOLD INCLUDING ESSAYS IN CRITICISM, 1865 ON TRANSLATING HOMER (WITH F. W. NEWMAN'S REPLY) AND FIVE OTHER ESSAYS NOW FOR THE FIRST TIME COLLECTED HUMPHREY MILFORD OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE BOMBAY 1914 OXFORD : HOBAOB HAET PBINTER TO THE U^TIVEKSIir * CONTENTS ESSAYS IN CRITICISM, 1865 (Here reprinted from the Second Edition of 1889) PAGE Pbeface .......... 3 The Function of Criticism at the Peesbnt Temb . . 9 The Literaby Inflitence of Academies .... 37 Maurice db Gu^bin . . . . 64 Eugenie de Gu^Rusr 92 Hbinrich Hbine 116 Pagan and Mediaeval Religious Sentiment . . . 143 jotjbeet 163 Spinoza and the Bible ....... 192 Mabcus Aubblius . . . . . . 217 ON TRANSLATING HOMER, 1861-2 Lecture I . . 245 Lecture II ....... . 264 Lecture III ... 287 Homeric Translation in Theory and Practice. A Reply to Matthew Arnold by Ebancis W. Newman, 1861 . 313 Last Wobds. A Lecture given at Oxfobd by Matthew Arnold, 1862 . . . . . 377 FIVE ESSAYS HITHERTO UNCOLLECTED De. Stanley's Lectubbs on the Jewish Chubch Dante and Bbatbicb ...... On the Modbbn Element in Litebatube . Obbbmann ... Saintb-Bbuve 427 445 454 473 482 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM 1865 [Reprinted from Second Edition, 1869] PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION (1869) Several of the Essays which are here collected and reprinted had the good or the bad fortune to be much criticised at the time of their first appearance. I am not now going to inflict upon the reader a reply to those criticisms ; for one or two explanations which are desir- able, I shall elsewhere, perhaps, be able some day to find an opportunity ; but, indeed, it is not in my nature, — some of my critics would rather say, not in my power, — to dispute on behalf of any opinion, even my own, very obstinately. To try and approach truth on one side after another, not to strive or cry, nor to persist in pressing forward, on any one side, with violence and self-will, — ^it is only thus, it seems to me, that mortals may hope to gain any vision of the mysterious Goddess, whom we shall never see except in outline, but only thus even in outline. He who wiU do nothing but fight impetuously towards her on his own, one, favourite, particular line, is inevitably destined to run his head into the folds of the black robe in which she is wrapped. So it is not to reply to my critics that I write this preface, but to prevent a misunderstanding, of which certain phrases that some of them use make me apprehensive. Mr. Wright, one of the many translators of Homer, has published a Letter to the Dean of Canterbury, complaining of some remarks of mine, uttered now a long whUe ago, on his version of the Iliad. One cannot be always studying one's own works, and I was really under the impression, B2 4 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM till I saw Mr. Wright's complaint, that I had spoken of him with all respect. The reader may judge of my astonish- ment, therefore, at finding, from Mr. Wright's pamphlet, that I had ' declared with much solemnity that there is not any proper reason for his existing.' That I never said ; but, on looking back at my Lectures on translating Homer, I find that I did say, not that Mr. Wright, but that Mr. Wright's version of the Iliad, repeating in the main the merits and defects of Cowper's version, as Mr. Sotheby's repeated those of Pope's version, had, if I might be par- doned for saying so, no proper reason for existing. Else- where I expressly spoke of the merit of his version ; but I confess that the phrase, qualified as I have shown, about its want of a proper reason for existing, I used. Well, the phrase had, perhaps, too much vivacity ; we have all of us a right to exist, we and our works ; an unpopular author should be the last person to call in question this right. So I gladly withdraw the offending phrase, and I am sorry for having used it ; Mr. Wright, however, would perhaps be more indulgent to my vivacity, if he considered that we are none of us likely to be Uvely much longer. My vivacity is but the last sparkle of' flame before we are all in the dark, the last ghmpse of colour before we all go into drab, — the drab of the earnest, prosaic, practical, austerely literal future. Yes, the world will soon be the Philistines' ! and then, with every voice, not of thunder, silenced, and the whole earth fiUed and ennobled every morning by the magnificent roaring of the young lions of the Daily Telegraph, we shall aU yawn in one another's faces with the dismaUest, the most unimpeachable gravity. But I return to my design in writing this Preface. That design was, after apologising to Mr. Wright for my vivacity of five years ago, to beg him and others to let me bear my own burdens, without saddling the great and PREFACE 5 famous University, to which I have the honour to belong, with any portion of them. What I mean to deprecate is such phrases as, ' his professorial assault,' ' his assertions issued ex cathedra,' ' the sanction of his name as the repre- sentative of poetry,' and so on. Proud as I am of my connection with the University of Oxford,* I can truly say, that knowing how unpopular a task one is undertaking when one tries to puU out a few more stops in that powerful but at present somewhat narrow-toned organ, the modern Englishman, I have always sought to stand by myself, and to compromise others as Kttle as possible. Besides this, my native modesty is such, that I have always been shy of assuming the honourable style of Professor, because this is a title I share with so many distinguished men, — Professor Pepper, Professor Anderson, Professor Frickel, and others, — who adorn it, I feel, much more than I do. However, it is not merely out of modesty that I prefer to stand alone, and to concentrate on myself, as a plain citizeii of the repubhc of letters, and not as an office- bearer in a hierarchy, the whole responsibility for aU I write ; it is much more out of genuine devotion to the University of Oxford, for which I feel, and always must feel, the fondest, the most reverential attachment. In an epoch of dissolution and transformation, such as that on which we are now entered, habits, ties, and associations are inevitably broken up, the action of individuals becomes more distinct, the shortcomings, errors, heats, disputes, which necessarily attend individual action, are brought into greater prominence. Who would not gladly keep clear, from aU these passing clouds, an august institution which was there before they arose, and which wiU be there when they have blown over ? ' When the above waa written the author still had the Chair of Poetry at Oxford, which he has since vacated. 6 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM It is true, the Saturday Review maintains that our epoch of transformation is finished ; that we have found our philosophy ; that the British nation has searched all anchorages for the spirit, and has finally anchored itself, in the fulness of perfected knowledge, on Benthamism. This idea at first made a great impression on me ; not only because it is so consoling in itself, but also because it explained a phenomenon which in the summer of last year had, I confess, a good deal troubled me. At that time my avocations led me to travel almost daily on one of the Great Eastern Lines, — ^the Woodford Branch. Every one knows that the murderer, Miiller, perpetrated his detestable act on the North London Railway, close by. The English middle class, of which I am myself a feeble unit, travel on the Woodford Branch in large, numbers. Well, the demoraUsation of our class, — the class which (the newspapers are constantly saying it, so I may repeat it without vanity) has done all the great things which have ever been done in England, — the demoralisation, I say, of our class, caused by the Bow tragedy, was somethiag bewildering. Myself a transcen- dentaUst (as the Saturday Review knows), I escaped the infection ; and, day after day, I used to ply my agitated fellow-travellers with all the consolations which my transcendentalism would naturally suggest to me. I re- minded them how Caesar refused to take precautions against assassination, because lite was not worth haviag at the price of an ignoble soUcitude for it. I reminded them what insignificant atoms we all are in the hfe of the world. ' Suppose the worst to happen,' I said, addressing a portly jeweller from Cheapside ; ' suppose even yourself to be the victim ; il n'y a pas d'homme nicessaire. We shovdd miss you for a day or two upon the Woodford Branch ; but the great mundane movement would still go PREFACE 7 on, the gravel walks of your villa would still be rolled, dividends would still be paid at the Bank, omnibuses would still run, there would still be the old crush at the corner of Fenchurch Street.' All was of no avail. Nothing could moderate, in the bosom of the great English middle class, their passionate, absorbing, almost blood-thirsty clinging to Ufa. At the moment I thought this over-concern a little unworthy ; but the Saturday Review suggests a touching explanation of it. What I took for the ignoble clinging to Ufe of a comfortable worldling, was, perhaps, only the ardent longing of a faithful Benthamite, traversing an age still dimmed by the last mists of transcendentalism, to be spared long enough to see his religion in the full and final blaze of its triumph. This respectable man, whom I imagLued to be going up to London to serve his shop, or to buy shares, or to attend an Exeter Hall meeting, or to assist at the deliberations of the Marylebone Vestry, was, perhaps, in real truth, on a pious pilgrimage, to obtaia from Mr. Bentham's executors a sacred bone of his great, dissected master. And yet, after all, I cannot but think that the Saturday Beview has here, for once, fallen a victim to an idea, — a beautiful but deluding idea, — and that the British nation has not yet, so entirely as the reviewer seems to imagine, found the last word of its philosophy. No, we are all seekers still ! seekers often make mistakes, and I wish m i ne to redound to my own discredit only, and not to touch Oxford. Beautiful city ! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century so serene ! ' There are our young barbariana all at play ! ' And yet, steeped in sentiment as she Ues, spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers 8 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM the last enchantments of the Middle Age, who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us nearer to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to per- fection, — to beauty, in a word, which is only truth seen from another side ? — nearer, perhaps, than all the science of Tiibingen. Adorable dreamer, whose heart has been so romantic ! who hast given thyself so prodigally, given thyself to sides and to heroes not mine, only never to the Philistines ! home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties ! what example could ever so inspire us to keep down the Philistine ia ourselves, what teacher coidd ever so save us from that bondage to which we are all prone, that bondage which Goethe, in those incomparable lines on the death of Schiller, makes it his friend's highest praise (and nobly did SchiUer deserve the praise) to have left miles out of sight behind him ; — the bondage of ' tvas uns alle biindigt, n.is qbubine! ' She will forgive me, even if I have unwittingly drawn upon her a shot or two aimed at her unworthy son ; for she is generous, and the cause in which I fight is, after all, hers. Apparitions of a day, what is our puny warfare against the Philistiaes, compared with the warfare which this queen of romance has been waging against them for centuries, and will wage after we are gone ! THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM AT THE PRESENT TIME Many objections have been made to a proposition which, in some remarks of miae on translating Homer, I ventured to put forth ; a proposition about criticism, and its impor- tance at the present day. I said : ' Of the literature of France and Germany, as of the intellect of Europe in general, the main effort, for now many years, has been a critical effort ; the endeavour, in all branches of know- ledge, theology, philosophy, history, art, scie nce, to see ti ^e object .asJn itself it reall y is J I added, tiiat owmg 10 to the ojJeration iiTTSTghsh Uterature of certain causes, ' almost the last thing rfe nf literature two powers mup^' """^ii f, the po Ty^ "f tb" "'P" 'ar\ri t,hg pnway ^f f,}^f; mnmp.iit,, flnd the man is not enough without the moment ; the creative power has, for its 20 happy exercise, appointed elements, and those elements V are not in its own control. — * Nay, they are more within the control of the critical A power. It is the business of the critical power, as I said ' in the words already quoted, ' in all branches of know-" ledge, theology, philosophy, history, art, science, to see the object as in itself it really is.' Thus it tends, at last, to make an intellectual situation of which the creative power can profitably avail itself. It tends to establish an order of ideas, if not absolutely true, yet true by com- ao parison with that which it displaces ; to make the best ideas prevail. Presently these new ideas reach society, the touch of truth is the touch of fife, and there is a stir and growth everywhere ; out of this stir and growth comet the creative epochs of Uterature. Or, to narrow our range, and quit these considerations of the general march of genius and of society, considerations which are apt to become too abstract and impalpable, — every one can see that a poet, for instance, ought to know life and the world before dealing with them in poetry ; 4a and Ufe and the world being, in modern times, very com- THE FUNCTION OF CBITICISM 13 plex things, the creation of a modern poet, to be worth much, implies a great critical effort behind it ; else it must be a comparatively poor, barren, and short-lived affair. This is why Byron's poetry had so little endurance in it, and Goethe's so much ; - both Byron and Goethe had a great productive power, but Goethe's was nourished by a great critical effort providing the true materials for it, and Byron's was not ; Gofittipi ^ne w life_aiid-the_wp rld. the poet's necessary subjects, much more comprehen- 10 sively and thoroughly than Byron. He knew a great deal more of them, and he knew them much more as they really are. It has long seemed to me that the burst of creative activity in our literature, through the first quarter of this century, had about it, in fact, something premature ; and that from this cause its productions are doomed, most of them, in spite of the sanguine hopes which accompanied and do still accompany them, to prove hardly more lasting than the productions of far less splendid epochs. And 20 this prematureness comes from its having proceeded with- out having its proper data, without sufficient materials to work with. In other words, the EngUsh poetry of the first quarter of this century, with plenty of energy, plenty of creative force, did not know enough. This makes Byron so empty of matter, Shelley so incoherent, Wordsworth even, profound as he is, yet so wanting in completeness and variety. Wordsworth cared Uttle for books, and disparaged Goethe. I admire Wordsworth, as he is, so much that I cannot wish him different ; and it is vain, 30 no doubt, to imagine such a man different from what he is, to suppose that he could have been different ; but surely the one thing wanting to make Wordsworth an even greater poet than he is, — ^his thought richer, and his in- fluence of wider appUcation, — ^was that he should have read more books, among them, no doubt, those of that Goethe whom he disparaged without reading him. But to speak of books and reading may easily lead to a misunderstanding here. It was not really books and reading that lacked to our poetry, at this epoch ; Shelley 40 had plenty of reading, Coleridge had immense reading. Pindar and Sophocles — as we aU say so glibly, and often 14 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM with so little discernment of the real import of what we are sajring — had not many books ; Shakspeare was no deep reader. True ; but in the Greece of Pindar and Sophocles, in the England of Shakspeare, the poet lived in a current of ideas in the highest degree animating and nourishing to the creative power ; society was, in the fullest measure, permeated by fresh thought, intelligent and alive ; and this state of things is the true basis for the creative power's exercise, — in this it finds its data, its materials, truly ready for its hand ; aU the books and lo reading in the world are only valuable as they are helps to this. Even when this does not actually exist, books and reading may enable a man to construct a kind of semblance of it in his own min d, a world of knowledge and intelligence in which he may live and work : this is by no means an equivalent, to the artist, for the nationally diffused life and thought of the epochs of Sophocles or Shakspeare, but, besides that it may be a means of pre- paration for such epochs, it does really constitute, if many share in it, a quickening and sustaining atmosphere of 20 great value. Such an atmosphere the many-sided learning and the long and widely-combined critical effort of Germany formed for Goethe, when he Uved and worked. There was no national glow of life and thought there, as in the Athens of Pericles, or the England of Elizabeth. That was the poet's weakness. But there was a sort of equivalent for it in the complete culture and unfettered thinking of a large body of Germans. That was his strength. In the England of the first quarter of this century, there was neither a national glow of life and thought, such as we had in the 3o age of Elizabeth, nor yet a culture and a force of learning and criticism, such as were to be found in Germany. Therefore the creative power of poetry wanted, for success in the highest sense, materials and a basis ; a thorough interpretation of the world was necessarily denied to it. At first sight it seems strange that out of the immense stir of the French Revolution and its age should not have come a crop of works of genius equal to that which came out of the stir of the great productive time of Greece, or out of that of the Renaissance, with its powerful episode 40 the Reformation. But the truth is that the stir of the THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 15 French Revolution took a character which essentially distinguished it from such movements as these. These were, in the main, disinterestedly intellectual and spiritual movements ; movements in which the human spirit looked for its satisfaction in itself and in the increased play of its own activity : the French Revolution took a political, practical character. The movement which went on in France under the old regime, from 1700 to 1789, was far more really akin than that of the Revolution itself to the 10 movement of the Renaissance ; the_ Etg.nce of Voltaire ^and Rou sseau tol d far m ore powerfully upon tne mina"o I '^;nmr°~"^^™T tTift h'raT Loe of t he — Revulutiou. ~ Goethe reproached this last expressly "with having ' thrown quiet culture back.' Nay, and the true key to how much in our Byron, even in our Wordsworth, is this ! — that they had their source i n a p^-eat movement of feeling, n ot in a great movement of "m ind. The J^'rench l:tevolution,"iiowever, — tliat object of so much blind love and so much blind hatred, — found undoubtedly its motive-power in the so intelligence of men and not in their practical sense ; — ^this is what distinguishes it from the English Revolution of Charles the First's time ; this is what makes it a more spiritual event than our Revolution, an event of much more powerful and world-wide interest, ■■though practically les s s uccessf ul ; — it appeals to an order of ideas which are universal, certain, permanent. 1789 asked of a thing, Is it rational ? 1642 asked of a thing. Is it legal ? or, when it went furthest, Is it according to conscience ? This is the English fashion ; a fashion to be treated, within its 4S!wn so sphere, with the highest respect ; for its success, within its own sphere, has been prodigious. But what is law in one place, is not law in another ; what is law here to-day, is not law even here to-morrow ; and as for conscience, what is binding on one man's conscience is not binding on another's ; the old woman who threw her stool at the head of the surpliced minister in St. Giles's Church at Edinburgh obeyed an impulse to which millions of the human race may be permitted to remain strangers. But the prescriptions of reason are absolute, unchanging, of 40 universal validity ; to count by tens is the ■eaxipM vmy of counting, — ^that is a' proposition of which every one, frorn 16 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM here to the Antipodes, feels the force ; at least, I shoul(J say so, if we did not live in a country where it is not im-f possible that any morning we may find a letter in the Times declaring that a decimal coinage is an absiirdity. That a whole nation should have been penetrated with an enthusiasm for pvire reason, and with an ardent zeal for making its prescriptions triumph, is a very remarkable thing, when we consider how httle of mind, or anything so worthy and quickening as mind, comes into the motives which alone, in general, impel great masses of men. Inio spite of the extravagant direction given to this enthusiasm, in spite of the crimes and follies in which it lost itself, the French Revolution derives from the force, truth, and universality of the ideas which it took for its law, and from the passion with which it could inspire a multitude for these ideas, a unique and still living power ; it is — ^it wiU probably long remain — the greatest, the most animating event in history. And, as no sincere passion for the things of the mind, even though it turn out in many respects an unfortunate passion, is ever quite thrown away and quite 20 barren of good, France hasireaped from hers one fruit, the natural and legitimate frui^ though not precisely the grand fruit she expected ; she is the country in Europe where the peopk is most ahve. But the mania for giving an immediate poUtical and practical application to all these fine ideas of the reason was fatal. Here an Englishman is in his element : on this theme we can all go on for hom:s. And all we are in the . hal»t of saying on it has undoubtedly a great deal of truth. Ideas cannot be too much prized in and for themselves, 30 cannot be too much lived with ; but to transport them abruptly into the world of politics and practice, violently to revolutionise this world to their bidding, — ^that is quite -another thing. There is the world of ideas and there is the world of practice ; the French are often for suppressing the one and the EngUsh the other ; but neither is to be suppressed. A member of the House of Commons said to me the other day : ' That a thing is an anomaly, I consider to be no objection to it whatever.' I venture to think he was wrong ; that a thmg is an anomaly is an objection 40 to it, but absolutely and in the sphere of ideas : it is not THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 17 necessarily, under such and such circumstances, or at such and such a moment, an objection to it in the sphere of poUtics and practice. Joubert has said beautifully : ' C'est la force et le droit qui reglent toutes choses dans le monde ; la force en attendant le droit.' (yprp.P! a.nd rigrVit a re the governors of this world ; fo rfw f,il1 rifrht, is ready.) Force tiU nglit is reaay ; ana till right is ready, force, the existing order of things, is justified, is the legitimate ruler. But right is something moral, and implies inward recogni- 10 tion, free assent of the wiU ; we are not ready for right, — right, so far as we are concerned, is not ready, — until we have attained this sense of seeing it and willing it. The way in which for us it may change and transform force, the existing order of things, and become, in its turn, the legitimate ruler of the world, wiU depend on the way in which, when our time comes, we see it and will it. There- fore for other people enamoured of their own newly disr cerned right, to attempt to impose it upon us as ours, and violently to substitute their right for our force, is an act 20 of tyranny, and to be resisted. It sets at nought the second great half of our maxim, force till right is ready, This was the grand e rror of the French Revolution ; and it s movement rd ideaa, hy quittmg tne mtellectual sphere afid rushing turiously into the poUtical spnere, ran. Indeed, a prodigious and memorable course, but produced no such intellectual fruit as the movement of ideas of the Renais- sance, and created, in opposition to itself, what I may call an epoch of concentration. The great force of that epoch of concentration was England ; and the great voice of that 30 epoch of conbentration was Burke. Tt is tV| fi fashion t o" treat Burke's writings on the French Revolution as super- annuated and conquered by the event ; as the eloquent but unphilosophical tirades of bigotry and prejudice. I will not deny that they are often disfigured by the violence and passion of the moment, and that in some directions Burke's view was bounded, and his observation therefore at fault ; but on the whole, and for those who can make the needful corrections, what distinguishes these writings is their profound, permanent, fruitful, philosophical 40 truth ; they contain the true philosophy of an epoch of concentration, dissipate the heavy atmosphere which its 18 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM own nature is apt to engender round it, and make its resistance rational instead of mechanical. But Bvirke is so great because, almost alone in England, he brings thought to bear upon pohtics, he saturates politics with thought ; it is his accident that his ideas were at the service of an epoch of concentration, not of an epoch of expansion ; it is his characteristic that he so U^ed by ideas, and had such a source of them welling up wTOdn him, that he could float even an epoch of con- centration and Enghsh Tory politics with them. It does lo not hurt him that Dr. Price and the Liberals were enraged with him ; it does not even hurt him that George the Third and the Tories were enchanted with him. His greatness is that he lived in a world which neither Enghsh Liberalism nor Enghsh Tor5dsm is apt to enter ; — the world of ideas, not the world of catchwords and party habits. So far is it from being really true of him that he ' to party gave up what was meant for mankind,' that at the very end of his fierce struggle with the French Revolution, after all his invectives against its false pretensions, hoUowness, and 20 madness, with his sincere conviction of its mischievousness, he can close a memorandum on the best means of combat- ing it, some of the last pages he ever wrote, — the Thoughts on French Affairs, in December 1791, — with these striking words : — ' The evil is stated, in my opinion, as it exists. The remedy must be where power, wisdom, and information, I hope, are more united with good intentions than they can be with me. I have done with this subject, I beheve, for ever. It has given me many anxious " moments for 30 the last two years. If a great change is to be made in human affairs, the mirids of men will be fitted to it ; the general opinions and feelings will draw that way. Every fear, every hope will forward it ; and then they who persist in opposing this mighty current in human affairs, will appear rather to resist the decrees of Providence itself, than the mere designs of men. They will not be resolute arid firm, but perverse and obstinate.' \ That return of Burke upon himself has always seemed to me one of the finest things in English hterature, or 40 indeed in any literature. That is what I call hving by THE FUNCTION OP CRITICISM 19 ideas ; when one side of a question has long had your earnest support, when all your feelings are engaged, when you hear aU round you no language but one, when your party talks this language like a steam-engine and can imagine no other, — still to be able to think, stiU to be irresistibly carried, if so it be, by the current of thought to the opposite side of the question, and, Uke Balaam, jo' be unable to speak any tbini? j^ fi wluit the Lord has put in 'ifmi.r runiifilj,^ I know nothiug more striking, and 1 must 10 add that I know nothing more un-English. For the Englishman in general is Uke my friend the Member of Parliament, and beUeves, point-blank, that for a thiag to be an anomaly is absolutely no ob^'ection to it whateve r! He is like the Lord Auckland of Burke's aay, who, lii a memorandum on the French Revolution, talks of ' certain miscreants, assuming the name of philo- sophers, who have presumed themselves capable of estab- lishing a new system of society.' The Englishman has been called a poUtical animal, and he values what is 20 political and practical so much that ideas easily become objects of disUke in his eyes, and thinkers ' miscreants,' because ideas and thinkers have rashly meddled with politics and practice. This would be all very well if the dislike and neglect confined themselves to ideas trans- ported out of their own sphere, and meddling rashly with practice ; but they are inevitably extended to ideas as such, and to the whole life of intelligence ; practice is everything, a f ree play of the mind is nothing. The notion of thu fitJtt play oi'^he mind upon aU subjects being 30 a pleasure in itatjl f. being an object of desire, being an essential provider of elements without which a nation's spirit, whatever compensations it may have for them, must, in the long run, die of inanition, hardly enters into an Englishman's thoughts. It is noticeable that the word curiosity, which in other languages is used in a good sense, to mean, as a high and fine quaUty of man's nature, just this disinterested love of a free play of the mind on aU subjects, for its own sake, — ^it is noticeable, I say, that this word has in our language no sense of the kind, no 40 sense but a rather bad and disparaging one. But criticism, real criticism, is essentially the exercise of this very quaUty ; 2 20 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM it obeys an instinct prompting it to try to know the best that is known and thought in the world, irrespectively of practice, poUtics, and everything of the kind ; and to value knowledge and thought as they approach this best, without the iatrusion of any other considerations whatever. This is an instinct for which there is, I think, little original sympathy in the practical Enghsh nature, and what there was of it has undergone a long benumbing period of blight and suppression in the epoch of concentration which followed the French Revolution. lo But epochs of concentration cannot well endure for ever ; epochs of expansion, in the due course of things, foUow them. Such an epoch of expansion seems to be opening in this country. In the first place all danger of a hostile forcible pressure of foreign ideas upon our practice has long disappeared ; hke the traveller in the fable, therefore, we begin to wear our cloak a httle more loosely. Then, with a long peace, the ideas of Europe steal gradually and amicably in, and mingle, though in infinitesimally small quantities at a time, with our own notions. Then, too, 20 in spite of all that is said about the absorbing and brutal- ising influence of our passionate material progress, it seems to me indisputable that this progress is hkely, though not certain, to lead in the end to an apparition of intellectual life ; and that man, after he has made himself perfectly comfortable and has now to determine what to do with himself next, may begin to remember that he has a mind, and that the mind may be made the source of great pleasure. I grant it is mainly the privilege of faith, at present, to discern this end to our railways, our business, and our so fortune-making ; but we shall see if, here as elsewhere, faith is not in the end the true prophet. Our ease, our travelling, and our unbounded liberty to hold just as hard and securely as we please to the practice to which our notions have given birth, all tend to beget an inclination to deal a little more freely with these notions themselves, to canvass them a Uttle, to penetrate a Uttle into their real nature. Flutterings of curiosity, in the foreign sense of the word, appear amongst us, and it is in these that criticism must look to find its account. Criticism first ; 10 a time of true creative activity, perhaps, — ^which, as I have THE FUNCTION OP CRITICISM 21 said, must inevitably be preceded amongst us by a time of criticism, — thereafter, when criticism has done its work. It is of the last importance that English criticism should clearly discern what rule for its course, in order to avail itself of the field now opening to it, and to produce fruit for the future, it ought to take. The rule may be summed up in one word, — disinterestedness. And how is criticism to show disinterestedness ? By keeping aloof from practice ; by resolutely following the law of its own natiu-e, which is 10 to be a free play of the mind on all subjects which it touches ; by steadily refusing to lend itself to any of those ulterior, political, practical considerations about ideas which plenty of people will be sure to attach to them, which perhaps ought often to be attached to them, which in this country at any rate are certain to be attached to them quite sufficiently, but which criticism has reaUy nothing to do with. Its business is, as I have said, simply to know the best that is known and thought in the world, and by in its turn making this known, to create a current of true and 20 fresh ideas. Its business is to do this with inflexible honesty, with due ability ; but its business is to do no more, and to leave alone,aiKguestions of practical ccmseguences and applications," qxf^tiBns which wUl never Tail to~EaVB" due prominence given to them. Else criticism, besides being really false to its own nature, merely continues in the old rut which it has hitherto followed in this- country, and will certainly miss the chance now given to it. For what is at present the bane of criticism in this country ? It is that practical considerations cling to it and stifle it ; it subserves 30 interests not its own ; our organs of criticism are organs of men and parties having practical ends to serve, and with them those practical ends are the first thing and the play of mind the second ; so much play of mind as is compatible with the prosecution of those practical ends is aU that is wanted. An organ like the Beime des Deux Mondes, having for its main function to understand and utter the best that is known and thought in the world, existing, it may be said, as just an organ for a free play of the mind, we have not ; but we have the Edinbwgh Review, existing as an organ of 10 the old Whigs, and for as much play of mind as may suit its being that ; we have the Quarterly Beview, existing as an 22 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM organ of the Tories, and for as much play of mind as may suit its being that ; we have the British Quarterly Review, existing as an organ of the political Dissenters, and for as much play of mind as may suit its being that ; we have the Times, existing as an organ of the common, satisfied, well- to-do Enghshman, and for as much play of mind as may suit its being that. And so on through aU the various fractions, pohtical and religious, of our society ; every fraction has, as such, its organ of criticism, but the notion of combining all fractions in the common pleasure of a free lo disinterested play of mind meets with no favour. Directly this play of mind wants to have more scope, and to forget the pressure of practical considerations a Uttle, it is checked, it is made to feel the chain ; we saw this the other day in the extinction, so much to be regretted, of the Home and Foreign Beview ; perhaps in no organ of criticism in this country was there so much knowledge, so much play of mind ; but these could not save it : the Dvblin Beview subordinates play of mind to the practical business of English and Irish Cathohcism, and lives. It must needs 20 be that men should act in sects and parties, that each of these sects and parties should have its organ, and should make this organ subserve the interests of its action ; but it would be well, too, that there should be a criticism, not the minister of these interests, not their enemy, but abso- lutely and entirely independent of them . No other criticism will ever attain any real authority or make any real way towards its end, — ^the creating a current of true and fresh ideas. It is because criticism has so Uttle kept in the pure Intel- 30 lectual sphere, has so little detached itself from practice, has been so directly polemical and controversial, that it has so ill accomplished, in this country, its best spiritual work ; which is to keep man from a self-satisfaction which is retarding and vulgarising, to lead him towards perfection, by making his mind dwell upon what is excellent in itself, and the absolute beauty and fitness of things. A polemical practical criticism makes men bhnd even to the ideal imper- fection of their practice, makes them willingly assert its ideal perfection, in order the better to secure it against 40 attack ; and clearly this is narrowing and baneful for them. THE FUNCTION OP CRITICISM 23 If they were reassured on the practical side, speculative considerations of ideal perfection they might be brought to entertain, and their spiritual horizon would thus gradually widen. Mr. Adderley says to the Warwickshire farmers : — ' Talk of the improvement of breed ! Why, the race we ourselves represent, the men and women, the old Anglo- Saxon race, are the best breed in the whole world. . . . The absence of a too enervating cUmate, too unclouded skies, and a too luxurious nature, has produced so vigorous a race of 10 people, and has rendered us so superior to all the world.' Mr. Roebuck says to the Sheffield cutlers : — ' I look around me and ask what is the state of England ? Is not property safe ? Is not every man able to say what he likes ? Can you not walk from one end of England to the other in perfect security ? I ask you whether, the world over or in past history, there is anjrthing like it ? Nothing. I pray that our unrivalled happinegs may last.' Now obviously there is a peril for poor human nature in words and thoughts of such exuberant self-satisfaction, 20 until we find ourselves safe in the streets of the Celestial City. ' Das wenige verschwindet leicht dem Blioke Der Torwarts sieht, wie Tiel nooh iibrig bleibt — ' says Goethe ; the little that is done seems nnthinp; yhrn iri look forward an5 see bow mucti we have yet to d o. Clearly this is a better Ime ot reflection tor weak numanity, so long as it remains on this earthly field of labour and trial. But neither Mr. Adderley nor Mr. Roebuck is by nature inac- cessible to considerations of this sort. They only lose sight 30 of them owing to the controversial life we all lead, and the practical form which all speculation takes with us. They have in view opponents whose aim is not ideal, but practical ; and in their zeal to uphold their own practice against these imiovators, they go so far as even to attribute to this practice an ideal perfection. Somebody has been wanting • to introduce a six-pound franchise, or to abolish church- rates, or to collect agricultural statistics by force, or to diminish local seK-govemment. How natural, in reply to such proposals, very likely improper or ill-timed, to go a 40 little beyond the mark, and to say stoutly, ' Such a race 24 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM of people as we stand, so superior to all the world ! The old Anglo-Saxon race, the best breed in the whole world ! I pray that our unrivalled happiness may last ! I ask you whether, the world over or in past history, there is anything hke it ! ' And so long as criticism answers this dithyramb by insisting that the old Anglo-Saxon race would be still more superior to all others if it had no church-rates, or that our unrivalled happiness would last yet longer with a six- pound franchise, so long will the strain, ' The best breed in the whole world ! ' swell louder and louder, everything ideal lo and refining will be lost out of sight, and both the assailed and their critics will remain in a sphere, to say the truth, perfectly unvital, a sphere in which spiritual progression is impossible. But let criticism leave church-rates and the franchise alone, and in the most candid spirit, without a single lurking thought of practical innovation, confront with our dithyramb this paragraph on which I stumbled in a newspaper soon after reading Mr. Roebuck : — ' A shocking child r&urder has just Ijeen committed at Nottingham. A girl named Wragg left the workhouse there so on Satiu:day morning with her young illegitimate child. The child was soon afterwards found dead on Mapperly Hills, having been strangled. Wragg is in custody.' Nothing but that ; but, in juxtaposition with the absolute eulogies of Mr. Adderley and Mr. Roebuck, how eloquent, how suggestive are those few lines ! ' Our old Anglo-Saxon breed, the best in the whole world ! ' — ^how much that is harsh and ill-favoured there is in this best ! Wragg ! If we are to talk of ideal perfection, of ' the best in the whole world,' has any one reflected what a touch of grossness in so our race, what an original shortcoming in the more delicate spiritual perceptions, is shown by the natural growth amongst us of such hideous names, — Higginbottom, Stiggins, Bugg ! In Ionia and Attica they were luckier in this respect than ' the best race in the world ; ' by the Ihssus there was no Wragg, poor thing ! And ' our unrivalled happiness ; ' — ^what an element of grimness, bareness, and hideousness mixes with it and blurs it ; the workhouse, the dismal Mapperly Hills,— how dismal those who have seen them will remember ; — ^the gloom, the smoke, 40 the cold, the strangled illegitimate child ! ' I ask you THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 25 whether, the world over or in past history, there is anything like it ? ' Perhaps not, one is inclined to answer ; but at any rate, in that case, the world is very much to be pitied. And the final touch, — short, bleak, and inhuman : Wragg is in custody. The sex lost in the confusion of our unrivalled happiness ; or (shall I say ?) the superfluous Christian name lopped off by the straightforward vigour of our old Anglo- Saxon breed ! There is profit for the spirit in such contrasts - as this ; criticism serves the cause of perfection by estab- 10 lishing them. By eluding sterile conflict, by refusing to remain in the sphere where alone narrow and relative con- ceptions have any worth and vaHdity, criticism may diminish its momentary importance, but only in this way has it a chance of gaining admittance for those wider and more perfect conceptions to which all its duty is really owed. Mr. Roebuck wUl have a poor opinion of an adversary who repUes to his defiant songs of triumph only by murmuring under his breath, Wragg is in custody ; but in no other way will these songs oi iriumpk be induced gradually to moder- £0 ate themselves, to get rid of what in them is excessive and offensive, and to fall into a softer and truer key. It will be said that it is a very subtle and indirect action which I am thus prescribing for criticism, and that by em- bracing in this manner the Indian virtue of detachment and abandoning the sphere of practical life, it condemns itself to a slow and obscure work. Slow and obscure it may be, but it is the only proper work of criticism. The mass of mankind wiU never have any ardent zeal for seeing things as they are ; very inadequate ideas will always satisfy them. 30 On these inadequate ideas reposes, and must repose, the general practice of the world. That is as much as saying that whoever sets himself to see things as they are will find himself one of a very small circle ; but it is only by this small circle resolutely doing its own work that adequate ideas will ever get current at all. The rush and roar of practical life will always have a dizzying and attracting effect upon the most collected spectator, and tend to draw him into its vortex ; most of all will this be the case where that life is so powerful as it is in England. But it is only by 40 remaining collected, and refusing to lend himself to the point of view of the practical man, that the critic can do the 26 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM practi cal man any service . and it is only bv the greatest jjiliceriiy in pursu inp ; his own course, and by at last con- vxncing even tne practical man of his sincerity, that he can escape misunderstandings which perpetually threaten him. For the practical man is not apt for fine distinctions, and yet in these distinctions truth and the highest culture greatly find their account. But it is not easy to lead a /"practical man — unless you reassure him as to your practical < intentions, you have no chance of leading him — ^to see that (ji thing which he has always been used to look at from one lo side only, which he greatly values, and which, looked at from that side, more than deserves, perhaps, all the prizing and admiring which he bestows upon it, — ^that this thing, looked at from another side, may appear much less bene- ficent and beautiful, and yet retain aU its claims to our practical allegiance. Where shall we find language inno- cent enough, how shall we make the spotless purity of our intentions evident enough, to enable us to say to the political Englishman that the British Constitution itself, which, seen from the practical side, looks such a magnificent 20 organ of progress and virtue, seen from the speculative side, — with its compromises, its love of facts, its horror of theory, its studied avoidance of clear thoughts, — that, seen from this side, our august Constitution sometimes looks, ■ — ^forgive me, shade of Lord Somers ! — a colossal machine for the manufacture of Philistines ? How is Cobbett to say this and not be misunderstood, blackened as he is with the smoke of a lifelong conflict in the field of political practice ? i. how is Mr. Carlyle to say it and not be misunderstood, after his furious raid into this field with his Latter-day Pamphlets t 30 how is Mr. Ruskin, after his pugnacious pohtical economy ? I jay, the critic must keep out of the region of immediate practice in the pohtical, social, humanitarian sphere, if he wants to make a beginning for that more free speculative treatment of things, which may perhaps one day make its benefits felt even in this sphere, but in a natural and thence irresistible manner. Do what he will, however, the critic wUl still remai n exposed to freq uent TniH understarHingra , a.nH p^where s n much as in this country . For here people are particularly 40 indisposed even to comprehend that without this free THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 27 disinterested treatment of things, truth and the highest culture are out of the question. So immersed are they in practical Ufe, so accustomed to take all their notions from this life and its processes, that they are apt to think that truth and culture themselves can be reacned. bv the pro - cesses of tais me. and that it is an impertinent singularity to tnmk ot reaching them in any other. ' We are aU terrae filii,' cries their eloquent advocate ; ' all PhiUstines to- gether. Away with the notion of proceeding by any other 10 course than the course dear to the PhiUstines ; let us have a social movement, let us organize and combine a party to pursue truth and new thought, let us call it the liberal party, and let us all stick to each other, and back each other up. Let us have no nonsense about independent criticism, and intellectual deUcacy, and the few and the many ; don't let us trouble ourselves about foreign thought ; we shall invent the whole thing for ourselves as we go along : if one p1 us speaks well, applaud him ; if one of us speaks ill, applaud him too ; we are all m the same movement, we are Eo ail liberals, we are all in pursuit of truth.' In this way the _ pursuit of truth becomes really a social, practical, pleasu? able atfair, almost requiring a chairman, a secretary, and advertisements ; with the excitement of an occasional scandal, with a little resistance to give the happy sense of difficulty overcome ; but, in general, plenty of bustle and ' very little thought. To act is so easy, as Goethe says ; to think is so hard ! It is true that the critic has many temp- tations to go with the stream, to make one of the party of movement, one of these terrae jUii ; it seems ungracious to^ 30 refuse to be a terrae filius, when so many excellent people '^ are ; but th e critic's duty is to refus e, or, if resistance is vain, at leasrto cry with ubermann : Perissons en risistant. How serious a matter it is to try and resist, I had ample opportunity of experiencing when I ventured some time ago to criticise the celebrated first volume of Bishop Colenso.^ The echoes of the storm which was then raised ' So sincere is my dislike to all personal attaok and controversy, that I abstain from reprinting, at this distance of time from the occasion which called them forth, the essays in which I criticised Dr. Colenso'a book ; I feel bound, however, after all that has passed, to make here a final declaration of my sincere impenitence for having published them. 28 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM I still, from time to time, hear grumbling romid me. That storm arose out of a misunderstanding almost inevitable. It is a result of no Uttle culture to attain to a clear perception that science and reUgion are two wholly different thiags ; the multitude will for ever confuse them, but happily that is of no great real importance, for while the multitude imagines itself to live by its false science, it does really live by its true religion. Dr. Colenso, however, in his first volume did all he could to strengthen the confusion,^ and to make it dangerous. He did this with the best intentions, lo I freely admit, and with the most candid ignorance that this was the natural effect of what he was doing ; but, says Joubert, ' Ignorance, which in matters of morals extenuates the crime, is itself, in intellectual matters, a crime of the first order.' I criticised Bishop Colenso's speculative confusion. Immediately there was a cry raised : ' What is this ? here is a liberal attacking a liberal. Do not you belong to the movement ? are not you a friend of truth ? Is not Bishop Colenso in pursuit of truth ? then speak with proper respect of his book. Dr. Stanley is another friend 20 of truth, and you speak with proper respect of his book ; why make these invidious differences ? both books are excellent, admirable, liberal ; Bishop Colenso's perhaps the most so, because it is the boldest, and will have the best practical consequences for the liberal cause. Do you want to encourage to the attack of a brother liberal his, and your, and our implacable enemies, the Church and State Review or the Record, — the High Church rhinoceros and the Evangeli- cal hyaena ? Be silent, therefore ; or rather speak, speak as loud as ever you can, and go into ecstasies over the eighty 30 and odd pigeons.' But criticism cannot follow this coarse and indiscriminate method. It is unfortunately possible for a man in pursuit Nay, I cannot forbear repeating yet onoe more, for his benefit and that of his readers, this sentence from my original remarks upon Mm : There is truth of science and truth of religion ; truth of science does not become truth of religion till it is made religious. And I will add : Let ua have all the science there is from the men of science ; from the men of religiop "letys have religion. \ " 'it has been said I make it ' a crime against literary criticism and the higher culture to attempt to inform the ignorant.' Need I point out that the ignorant are not informed by being confirmed in a confusion 1 THE FUNCTION OF CRITICISM 29 of truth to write a book which reposes upon a false con- ception. Even the practical consequences of a book are to genuine criticism no recommendation of it, if the book is, in the highest sense, blundering. I see that a lady who herself, too, is in pursuit of truth, and who writes with great abiUty, but a httle too much, perhaps, under the influence of the practical spirit of the Engfish liberal movement, classes Bishop Colenso's book and M. Renan's together, in her survey of the religious state of Europe, as facts of the 10 same order, works, both of them, of ' great importance ; ' ' great ability, power, and skill ; ' Bishop Colenso's, perhaps, the most powerful ; at least. Miss Cobbe gives special expression to her gratitude that to Bishop Colenso ' has been given the strength to grasp, and the courage to teach, truths of such deep import.' In the same way, more than one popular writer has compared him to Luther. Now it is just this kind of false estimate which the critical spirit is, it seems to me, bound to resist. It is really the strongest possible proof of the low ebb at which, in England, the 20 critical spirit is, that whUe the critical hit in the rehgious literature of Germany is Dr. Strauss's book, in that of France M. Renan's book, the book of Bishop Colenso is the critical hit in the religious literature of England. Bishop Colenso's book reposes on a total misconception of the essential elements of the religious problem, as that problem is now presented for solution. To criticism , therefore, which s eeks to have the best that is known and thOtlgtirtm this problem, it is, however well meant, of no importance" whatever " M. Renan's book attempts a new synth^s of 30 The elements furnished to us by the Four Gospels. It attempts,' in my opinion, a synthesis, perhaps premature, perhaps impossible, certainly not successful. Up to the present time, at any rate, we must acquiesce in Fleury's sentence on such recastings of the Gospel-story : Quiconque s' imagine la pouvoir mieux 6crire, ne I'entend fas. M. Renan had himself passed by anticipation a Uke sentence on his own work, when he said : ' If a new presentation of the character of Jesus were offered to me, I would not have it ; its very clearness would be, in my opinion, the best proof 40 of its insufficiency.' His friends may with perfect justice rejoin that at the sight of the Holy Land, and of the actual 30 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM scene of the Gospel-story, all the current of M. Renan's thoughts may have naturally changed, and a new casting of that story irresistibly suggested itself to him ; and that this is just a case for applying Cicero's maxim : Change of mind is not inconsistency — nemo doctus unquam mufationem consilii inconstantiam dixit esse. Nevertheless, for criticism, M. Renan's first thought must still be the truer one, as long as his new casting so fails more fully to commend itseK, more fully (to use Coleridge's happy phrase about the Bible) to _gw(Zus . StUl M. Renan's attempt is, for criticism, of tEe lo most real interest and importance, since, with all its diffi- culty, a fresh synthesis of the New Testament data, — ^not a making war on them, in Voltaire's fashion, not a leaving them out of mind, in the world's fashion, but the putting a new construction upon them, the taking them from imder the old, adoptive, traditional, unspiritual point of view and placing them under a new one, — is the very essence of the i religious problem, as now presented ; and only by efforts in I this direction can it receive a solution. Again, in the same spirit La which she judges Bishop 2S' Colenso, Miss Cobbe, Uke so many earnest liberals of our practical race, both here and in America, herself sets vigor- ously about a positive reconstruction of rehgion, about maMng a rehgion of the future out of hand, or at least setting about making it ; we must not rest, she and they are always thinking and saying, in negative criticism, we must be creative and constructive ; hence we have such works as her recent Religious Duty, and works still more considerable, perhaps, by others, which will be in every one's mind. These works often have much abihty ; they 30 often spring out of sincere convictions, and a sincere wish to do good ; and they sometimes, perhaps, do good. Their fault is (if I may be permitted to say so) one which they have in common with the British College of Health, in the New Road. Every one knows the British College of Health ; it is that building with the Uon and the statue of the Goddess Hygeia before it ; at least, I am sure about the Uon, though I am not absolutely certain about the Goddess Hygeia. This building does credit, perhaps, to the resources of Br. Morrison and his disciples ; - but it fallp a. good deal 40 shptt-of- one's idea (A what a British fip.Uege of Health ought THE FUNCTION OP CRITICISM 31 to be. In England, where we hate public interference and love individual enterprise, we have a whole crop of places like the British College of Health ; the grand name withaut the grand thing. Unluckily, creditable to individual enter- prise as they are, they tend to impair our taste by making us forget what more grandiose, noble, or beautiful character properly belongs to a pubhc institution. The same may be said of the religions of the future of Miss Cobbe and others. Creditable, hke the British College of Health, to the 10 resources of their authors,' they yet tend to make us forget what more grandiose, noble, or beautiful character properly belongs to rehgious constructions. The historic rehgions, with all their faults, have had this ; it certainly belongs to the religious sentiment, when it truly flowers, to have this ; and we impoverish our spirit if we allow a religion of the * future without it. What then is the duty of criticism here ? , To take the practical point of view, to applaud the liberal- movement and all its works, — ^its New Eoad reUgions of theH , future into the bargain, — ^for their general utility's sake ? ^ 20 By no means ; but to be perpetually dissatisfied with these works, while they perpetually fall short of a high and^_^ perfect ideal. For criticism, these are elementary laws ; but they never can be popular, and in this country they have been very little followed, and one meets with immense obstacles in following them. That is a reason for asserting them again and again. Criticism must m aint.a.in ita indep endence nf the practical "spirit and its ain^ s. Even with well-meant efforts of the practical spirit it must express dissatisfaction, 30 if in the sphere of the ideal they seem impoverishing and limiting. It must not hurry on to the goal because of its practical importance. T|, mnst be patient^ n.n dknfyw how to w ait :-a nd flpsjjple, and know how to attacii ft'self to things and how to withdraw from them. It must be apt to study and praise elements that for the fulness of spiritual perfection are wanted, even though they belong to a power which in the practical sphere may be maleficent. It must be apt to discern the spiritual shortcomings or illusions of powers that in the practical sphere may be beneficent. And 40 this without any notion o ^^ ^"Y^nr^g ^^ '"ijnrinp f, in the pra c- tical spnere, one power or the other : v/ithout anv notion of 32 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM playing off, in this sphere, one power against the other . When ohe looks, tor instance, at the Enghsh Divorce Court, — an institution which perhaps has its practical conveni- ences, but which in the ideal sphere is so hideous ; an institution which neither makes divorce impossible nor makes it decent, which allows a man to get rid of his wife, or a wife of her husband, but makes them drag one another first, for the pubUc edification, through a mire of unutter- able infamy, — when one looks at this charming institution, I say, with its crowded benches, its newspaper-reports, and lo its money-compensations, this institution in which the gross unregenerate British Philistine has indeed stamped an, image of himself, — one may be permitted to find the mar- riage-theory of CathoUcism refreshing and elevating. Or when Protestantism, in virtue of its supposed rational and intellectual origin, gives the law to criticism too magis- terially, criticism may and must remind it that its preten- sions, in this respect, are illusive and do it harm ; that the Reformation was a moral rather than an intellectual event ; that Luther's theory of grace no more exactly reflects the 20 mind of the spirit than Bossuet's philosophy of history reflects it ; and that there is no more antecedent probability of the Bishop of Durham's stock of ideas being agreeable to perfect reason than of Pope Pius the Ninth's. But criticism will not on that account forget the achievements of Pro- testantism in the practical and moral sphere ; nor that, 'even in the intellectual sphere. Protestantism, though in a blind and stumbling manner, carried forward the Re- naissance, while CathoUcism threw itself violently across ,its path. 30 I lately heard a man of thought and energy contrasting the want of ardour and movement which he now found amongst young men in this country with what he remembered in his own youth, twenty years ago. 'What reformers we were then ! ' he exclaimed ; ' what a zeal we had ! how we canvassed every institution in Church and State, and were prepared to remodel them all on first principles ! ' He was inclined to regret, as a spiritual flagging, the luU which he saw. I am disposed rather to regard it as a pause in which the turn to a new mode f)f ppirit.ngl prrigT-ooa, j^ ^ being accompushea. Jiverything was long seen, by the THE FUNCTION OP CRITICISM 33 young and ardent amongst us, in inseparable connection with politics and practical life ; we have pretty well ex- j iauste d the benefits of seeing things in. this connecticai, we have got all that can be got by so seeing them. Let us try a more disinterested mode of seeing them ; let us betake ourselves more to tViPi-s^^TPnPir li'fn nijhp. mind and spirit. This life, too, may have its excesses and dangers ; but they are not for us at present. Let us think of quietly enlarging our stock of true and fresh ideas, and not, as soon as we get 10 an idea or half an idea, be running out with it into the street, and trying to make it rule there. Our ideas will, in the end, shape the world aU the better for maturing a little. Perhaps in fifty years' time it will in the English House of Commons be an objection to an institution that it is an anomaly, and my friend the Member of Parliament will shudder in his grave. But let us in the mnQnwTijlp. y^ihp,r^ endeavour that in twenty years' time it may, in English literature, be an obiectxon to a proposition that it is absurd . That will be a change so vast, that the imagination almost 20 fails to grasp it. Ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo . If I have insisted so much on the course which criticism must take where pohtics and reUgion are concerned, it is because, where these burning matters are in question, it is most likely to go astray. I have wished, above all, to insist on the attitude which criticism should adopt toward^ everything ; on its right tone and temper of mind. Then comes the question as to the subject-matter which criticism should most seek. TTere. in jgeneral, its course ia dp.t,pirminp.d for it by the idea which is the law of its being : thi? jrjea. g f 30 a disinterestea enaeavour to learn and propagate the best fTTat, JH Imnwn and thought in the world and thna t.n Pat.a.h." tish a curre nt of fre.=i h and true ideas . By the very nature of things, as England is not aU the world, much of the best that is known and thought in the world cannot be of Eng- lish growth, must be foreign ; by the nature of things, again, it is just this that we are least likely to know, wMle Enghsh thought is streaming in upon us from all sides and takes excellent care that we shall not be ignorant of its existence ; the Enghsh critic, therefore, must dwell much 40 on foreign thought, and with particular heed on any part of it, which, whUe significant and fruitful in itself, is for any 34 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM reason specially likely to escape him. Again, judging is often spoken of as the critic's one business ; and so in some sense it is ; but the judgment which almost insensibly forms itself in a fair and clear mind, along with fresh knowledge, is the valuable one ; and thus knowledge, and ever fresh knowledge, must be the critic's great concern for himself ; and it is by communicating fresh knowledge, and letting his own judgment pass along with it, — but insensibly, and in the second place not the fijst, as a sort of companion and clue, not as an abstract lawgiver, — that he will generally do lo most good to his readers. Sometimes, no doubt, for the sake of establishing an author's place in literature, and his relation to a central standard (and if this is not done, how are we to get at our best in the world ?), criticism may have to deal with a subject-matter so famUiar that fresh knowledge is out of the question, and then it must be all judgment ; an enunciation and detailed application of principles. Here the great safeguard is never to let oneself become abstract, always to retain an intimate and lively consciousness of the truth of what one is saying, and, the moment this fails us, ao to be sure that something is wrong. StUl, under all circum- stances, this mere judgment and application of principles is, in itself, not the most satisfactory work to the critic ; like mathematics, it is tautological, and cannot well give us, like fresh learning, the sense of creative activity. But stop, some one wUl say ; aU this talk is of no practical use to us whatever ; this criticism of yours is not what we have in our minds when we speak of criticism ; when we speak of critics and criticism, we mean critics and criticism of the current EngUsh Uterature of the day ; when you offer 30 to tell criticism its function, it is to this criticism that we expect you to address yourself. I am sorry for it, for I am afraid I must disappoint these expectations. I am bound by my own definition of criticism : a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world. How much of current English literature comes into this ' best that is known and thought in the world ' ? Not very much, I fear ; certainly less, at this moment, than of the current literature of France or Germany. Well, then, am I to alter my definition of criticism, in order to meet the 40 requirements of a number of practising English critics, who. THE FUNCTION OP CRITICISM 35 after all, are free in their choice of a business ? That would be making criticism lend itself just to one of those alien practical considerations, which, I have said, are so fatal to it. One may say, indeed, to those who have to deal with the mass — so much better disregarded — of current English literature,.J]iat^Jiey may at all events endeavour, in dealing with thisi to trvi^. so far as they can, by the standard of the best that'is known and thought in the world ; one may say, that to get anywhere near this standard, every critic should 10 try and possess one great literature, at least, besides his own ; and the more unlike his own, the better. But, after all, the criticism I am reaUy concerned with, — ^the criticism which alone can much help us for the future, the criticism which, throughout Europe, is at the present day meant, when so much stress is laid on the importance of criticism and the critical spirit, — ^is a criticism which regards Europ e^ as beings for intellectual and spiritual purposes, one great/ coniederation. bound to a lomt action and working to a ^ common result : and whose members hav e, fr»f thftir prnpp.r 20 outn u^a^kjj^feg'^ft of OreRk, "R.nma.Ti, a.rnjJga.Htfim antft^nfty / anJl)f O he ^hothCT ; Special, local, and temporary advan/ tages being put out of account, that modem nation will in the intellectual and spiritual sphere make most progress, which most thoroughly carries out this programme. And what is that but saying that we too, all of us, as individuals, the more thoroughly we carry it out, shall make the more progress ? There is so much inviting us ! — ^what are we to take ? " what wiU nourish us in prowth towards perfection ? That j 30 is the question which, with the immense lield of life and of literature lying before him, the critic has to answer; for ' himself first, and afterwards for others. In this idea of the critic's business the essays brought together in the following pages have had their origin ; in this idea, widely different as are their subjects, they have, perhaps, their unity. I conclude with what I said at the beginning : to have the sen.se of creative activity is the p'eat happiness and the great proof of being alive, and. It is not denied to c^it|m'Hm to have it ; but then criticism must be sincere, simple, 40 flexible, ardent, ever widening its knowledge. Then it may have, in no contemptible measure, a joyful sense of creative D 2 36 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM activity ; a sense which a man of insight and conscience will prefer to what he might derive from a poor, starved, fragmentary, inadequate creation. And at some epochs no other creation is possible. Still, in fuU measure, the sense of creative activity belongs only to genuine creation ; in literature we must never forget that. But what true man of letters ever can forget it ? It is no such common matter for a gifted nature to come into possession of a current of true and living ideas, and to produce amidst the inspiration of them, that we are lo likely to underrate it. The epochs of Aeschylus and Shak- speare make us feel their pre-eminence. In an epoch like those is, no doubt, the true life of a literature ; there is the promised land, towards which criticism can only beckon. That Promisftd ]^.r\H it, wi'll nr|f. Y" ""i-a t." PTitpy, ;^,y|r|^y« ahall die i n t he wilderness : but to have desired to enter it, to na\l''fl BUluted it from afar, is already, perhaps, the best distinction among contemporaries ; it will certainly be the best title to esteem with posterity. THE LITERARY INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES It is impossible to put down a book like the history of the French Academy, by PeUisson and D' Olivet, which M. Charles Livet has lately re-edited, without being led to reflect upon the absence, in our own country, of any institu- tion Uke the French Academy, upon the probable causes of this absence, and upon its results. A thousand voices wUl be ready to tell us that this absence is a signal mark of our national superiority ; that it is in great part owing to this absence that the exhilarating words of Lord Macaulay, 10 lately given to the world by his very clever nephew, Mr. . Trevelyan, are so profoundly true : ' It may safely be said that the literature now extant in the English language is of far greater value than all the literature which three hundred years ago was extant in aU the languages of the world to- gether.' I daresay this is so ; only, rem^embering Spinoza's maxim that the two great banes of humanity are self- conceit and the laziness coming from self-conceit, I think it may do us good, instead of resting in our pre-eminence with perfect security, to look a httle more closely why this is so, 20 and whether it is so without any hmitations. But first of aU I must give a very few words to the out- ward history of the French Academy. About the year 1629, seven or eight persons in Paris, fond of literature, formed themselves into a sort of httle club to meet at one another's houses and discuss literary matters. Their meet- ings got talked of, and Cardinal Richelieu, then minister and all powerful, heard of them. He himself had a noble passion for letters, and for aU fine culture ; he was interested by what he heard of the nascent society. Himself a man in 30 the grand style, if ever man was, he had the insight to perceive what a potent instrument of the grand style was here to his hand. It was the beginning of a great century 38 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM for France, the seventeenth ; men's minds were working, the French language was forming. Richelieu sent to ask the members of the new society whether they would be willing to become a body with a public character, holding regular meetings. Not without a little hesitation, — ^for apparently they found themselves very well as they were, and these seven or eight gentlemen of a social and literary turn were not perfectly at their ease as to what the great and terrible minister could want with them, — ^they con- sented. The favours of a man like Richeheu are not easily lo refused, whether they are honestly meant or no ; but this favour of Richelieu's was meant quite honestly. The Parliament, however, had its doubts of this. The Parlia- ment had none of Richelieu's enthusiasm about letters and culture ; it was jealous of the apparition of a new pubhc body in the State ; above all, of a body called into existence by Richelieu. The King's letters patent, establishing and authorizing the new society, were granted early in 1635 ; but, by the old constitution of France, these letters patent required the verification of the ParHament. It was two 20 years and a half, — ^towards the autumn of 1637, — before the ParUament would give it ; and it then gave it only after pressing sohcitations, and earnest assurances of the innocent intentions of the young Academy. Jocose people said that this society, with its mission to purify and embellish the language, filled with terror a body of lawyers like the French Parliament, the stronghold of barbarous jargon and of chicane. This improvement of the language was in truth the declared grand aim for the operations of the Academy. Its so statutes of foundation, approved by Richeheu before the royal edict establishing it was issued, say expressly : ' The Academy's principal function shall be to work with all the care and all the diligence possible at giving sure rules to our language, and rendering it pure, eloquent, and capable of treating the arts and sciences.' This zeal for making a nation's great instrument of thought, — its language, — correct and worthy, is undoubtedly a sign full of promise, a weighty earnest of future power. It is said that Richelieu had it in his mind that French should succeed Latin in its 40 general ascendency, as Latin had succeeded Greek ; if it THE LITERARY INFLUENCE OP ACADEMIES 3a was so, even this wish has to some extent been fulfilled. But, at any rate, the ethical influences of style in language, — ^its close relations, so often pointed out, with character, — are "most important. Richelieu, a man of high culture, and, at the same time, of great character, felt them pro- foimdly ; and that he should have sought to regularise, strengthen, and perpetuate them by an institution for per- fecting language, is alone a striking proof of his governing spirit and of his genius. 10 This was not all he had in his mind, however. The new Academy, now enlarged to a body of forty members, and meant to contain all the chief Uterary men of France, was to be a literary tribunal. The works of its members were to be brought before it previous to pubhcation, were to be criticised by it, and finally, if it saw fit, to be pubhshed with its declared approbation. The works of other writers, not members of the Academy, might also, at the request of these writers themselves, be passed under the Academy's review. Besides this, in essays and discussions the Aca- 20 demy examined and judged works already pubhshed, whether by Uving or dead authors, and hterary matters in general. The celebrated opinion on ComeUle's Gid, de- livered in 1637 by the Academy at RicheUeu's urgent request, when this poem, which strongly occupied pubKo attention, had been attacked by M. de Scudery, shows how fuUy RicheHeu designed his new creation to do duty as a supreme court of hteratiure, and how early it in fact began to exercise this function. One ^ who had known Richelieu declared, after the Cardinal's death, that he had projected 30 a yet greater institution than the Academy, a sort of grand European college of art, science, and Kterature, a Pry- taneum, where the chief authors of all Europe should be gathered together in one central home, there to Uve in security, leisure, and honour ;■ — that was a dream which wUl not bear to be puUed about too roughly. But the project of forming a high court of letters for France was no dream ; Richelieu in great measure fulfilled it. This is what the Academy, by its idea, really is ; this is what it has always tended to become ; this is what it 10 has, from time to time, really been ; by being, or tending ' La Mesnardiire. 40 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM to be this, far more than even by what it has done for the language, it is of such importance in France. To give the law, the tone to literature, and that tone a high one, is its business. ' Richelieu meant it,' says M. Sainte- Beuve, 'to be a haul jury,' — a jury the most choice and authoritative that could be found on all important Uterary matters in question before the pubhc ; to be, as it in fact became in the latter half of the eighteenth century, ' a sovereign organ of opinion.' ' The duty of the Academy is,' says M. Renan, ' maintenir la deli- lo eatesse de I'esprit frangais ' — to keep the fine quality of the French spirit unimpaired ; it represents a kind of ' maitrise en fait de hon ton ' — the authority of a recognized master in matters of tone and taste. ' AU ages,' says M. Renan again, ' have had their inferior literature ; but the great danger of our time is that this inferior literature tends more and more to get the upper place. No one has the same advantage as the Academy for fighting against this mischief ; ' the Academy, which, as he says elsewhere, has even special f acihties for ' creating a form of intellectual 20 culture which shall impose itself on all around.' M. Sainte- Beuve and M. Renan are, both of them, very keen-sighted critics ; and they show it signally by seizing and putting so prominently forward this character of the French Academy. Such an effort to set up a recognised authority, imposing on us a high standard in matters of intellect and taste, has many enemies in human nature. We all of us hke to go our own way, and not to be forced out of the atmo- sphere of commonplace habitual to most of us ; — ' was uns so alle bdndigt,' says Goethe, ' das Oemeine.' We like to be suffered to He comfortably in the old straw of our habits, especially of our intellectual habits, even though this straw may not be very clean and fine. But if the effort to limit this freedom of our lower nature finds, as it does and must find, enemies in human nature, it finds also auxiharies in it. Out of the four great parts, says Cicero, of the honestum,^ or good, which forms the matter on which officium, or human duty, finds employment, one is the fixing of a modus and an ordo, a measure and an order, to fashion « and wholesomely constrain our action, in order to hft it THE LITEEARY INFLUENCE OP ACADEMIES 41 above the level it keeps if left to itself, and to bring it nearer to perfection. Man alone of living creatures, he says, goes feeling after ' quid sit ordo, quid sit quad deceat, in factis dictisque qui modus ' — the discovery of an order, a law of good taste, a measure for his words and actions. Other creatures submissively follow the law of their nature ; man alone has an impulse leading him to set up some other law to control the bent of his nature. This holds good, of course, as to moral matters, as well 10 as intellectual matters : and it is of moral matters that we are generally thinking when we affirm it. But it holds good as to inteUeotual matters too. Now, probably, M. Sainte-Beuve had not these words of Cicero in his mind when he made, about the French nation, the assertion I am going to quote ; but, for aU that, the assertion leans for support, one may say, upon the truth conveyed in those words of Cicero, and wonderfully illustrates and confirms them. ' In France,' says M. Sainte-Beuve, ' the first consideration for us is not whether we are amused and CO pleased by a work of art or mind, nor is it whether we are touched by it. What we seek above all to learn is, whether we were right in being amused with it, and in applauding it, and in being moved by it.' Those are very remarkable words, and they are, I beUeve, in the main quite true. A Frenchman has, to a considerable degree, what one may call a conscience in intellectual matters ; he has an active belief that there is a right and a wrong in them, that he is bound to honour and obey the right, that he is disgraced by cleaving to the wrong. AU the world has, or professes 30 to have, this conscience in moral matters. The word conscience has become almost confined, in popular use, to the moral sphere, because this lively susceptibility of feeling is, in the moral sphere, so far more common than in the intellectual sphere ; the livelier, in the moral sphere, this susceptibility is, the greater becomes a man's readiness to admit a high standard of action, an ideal authoritatively correcting his everyday moral habits ; here, such willing admission of authority is due to sensitiveness of conscience. And a Uke deference to a standard higher than one's own 40 habitual standard in intellectual matters, a like respectful recognition of a superior ideal, is caused, in the inteUeotual 42 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM sphere, by sensitiveness of intelligence. Those whose in- telligence is quickest, openest, most sensitive, are readiest with this deference ; those whose intelligence is less deUcate and sensitive are less disposed to it. Well, now we are on the road to see why the French have their Academy and we have nothing of the kind. What are the essential characteristics of the spirit of our nation ? Not, certainly, an open and clear mind, not a quick and flexible intelhgence. Our greatest admirers would not claim for us that we have these in a pre-eminent lo degree ; they might say that we had more of them than oiu: detractors gave us credit for ; but they would not assert them to be our essential characteristics. They would rather allege, as our chief spiritual characteristics, energy and honesty ; and, if we are judged favourably and positively, not invidiously and negatively, our chief characteristics are, no doubt, these ; — energy and honesty, not an open and clear mind, not a quick and flexible intelligence. Open- ness of mind and flexibility of intelligence were very signal characteristics of the Athenian people in ancient times ; 20 everybody wiU feel that. Openness of mind and flexibihty of inteUigence are remarkable characteristics of the French people in modern times ; at any rate, they strikingly characterise them as compared with us ; I think every- body, or almost everybody, wiU feel that. I will not now ask what more the Athenian or the French spirit has than this, nor what shortcomings either of them may have as a set-off against this ; aU I want now to point out is that they have this, and that we have it in a much lesser degree. Let me remark, however, that not only in the moral 30 sphere, but also in the intellectual and spiritual sphere, energy and honesty are most important and fruitful quahties ; that, for instance, of what we call genius, energy is the most essential part. So, by assigning to a nation energy and honesty as its chief spiritual charac- teristics, — by refusing to it, as at all eminent character- istics, openness of mind and flexibility of inteUigence, — we do not by any means, as some people might at first suppose, relegate its importance and its power of manifesting itself with effect from the intellectual to the moral sphere. 40 We only indicate its probable special line of successful THE LITERARY INFLUENCE OP ACADEMIES 43 activity in the intellectual sphere, and, it is true, certain imperfections and failings to which, in this sphere, it -wiU always be subject. Genius is mainly an affair of energy, and poetry is mainly an aSair of genius ; therefore, a nation whose spirit is characterised by energy may weU be eminent in poetry ; — and we have Shakspeare. Again, the highest reach of science is, one may say, an inventive power, a faculty of divination, akin to the liighest power exercised in poetry ; therefore, a nation whose spirit is characterised 10 by energy may well be eminent in science ; — and we have Newton. Shakspeare and Newton : in the intellectual sphere there can be no higher names. And what that energy, which is the life of genius, above everything demands and insists upon, is freedom ; entire independence of all author- ity, prescription, and routine, — ^the fullest room to expand as it win. Therefore, a nation whose chief spiritual charac- teristic is energy, will not be very apt to set up, in intel- lectual matters, a fixed standard, an authority, Uke an academy. By this it certainly escapes certain real incon- 20 veniences and dangers, and it can, at the same time, as we have seen, reach undeniably splendid heights in poetry and science. On the other hand, some of the requisites of intellectual work are specially the affair of quickness of mind and flexibUity of inteUigence. The form, the method of evolution, the precision, the proportions, the relations of the parts to -the whole, in an intellectual work, depend mainly upon them. And these are the elements of an intellectual work which are really most communicable from it, which can most be learned and adopted from it, 30 which have, therefore, the greatest effect upon the intel- lectual performance of others. Even in poetry, these requisites are very important ; and the poetry of a nation, not eminent for the gifts on which they depend, will, more or less, suffer by this shortcoming. In poetry, however, they are, after all, secondary, and energy is the first thing ; but in prose they are of first-rate importance. In its prose hterature, therefore, and in the routine of intellectual work generally, a nation with no particular gifts for these wiU not be so successful. These are what, as 40 1 have said, can to a certain degree be learned and appro- priated, while the free activity of genius cannot. Academies 44 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM consecrate and maintain them, and, therefore, a nation with an eminent turn for them naturally establishes academies. So far as routine and authority tend to embar- rass energy and inventive genius, academies may be said to be obstructive to energy and inventive genius, and, to this extent, to the human spirit's general advance. But then this evil is so much compensated by the propaga- tion, on a large scale, of the mental aptitudes and demands which an open mind and a flexible intelligence naturally engender, genius itself, in the long run, so greatly finds lo its account in this propagation, and bodies like the French Academy have such power for promoting it, that the general advance of the human spirit is perhaps, on the whole, rather furthered than impeded by their existence. How much greater is our nation in poetry than prose ! how much better, in general, do the productions of its spirit show in the" qualities of genius than in the qualities of inteUigence ! One may constantly remark this in the work of individuals ; how much more striking, in general, does any Englishman, — of some vigour of mind, but by 2o no means a poet, — seem in his verse than in his prose ! No doubt his verse suffers from the same defects which impair his prose, and he cannot express himself with real success in it ; but how much more powerful a per- sonage does he appear in it, by dint of feeling, and of originality and movement of ideas, than when he is writing prose ! With a Frenchman of hke stamp, it is just the reverse : set him to write poetry, he is limited, artificial, and impotent ; set him to write prose, he is free, natural, and effective. The power of French Hterature is in its 30 prose-writers, the power of English literature is in its poets. Nay, many of the celebrated French poets depend whoUy for their fame upon the qualities of intelligence which they exhibit, — qualities which are the distinctive support of prose ; many of the celebrated EngUsh prose-writers depend whoUy for their fame upon the qualities of genius and imagination which they exhibit,- — qualities which are the distinctive support of poetry. But, as I have said, the qualities of genius are less transferable than the qualities of inteUigence ; less can be immediately learned and 40 appropriated from their product ; they are less direct and THE LITERARY INFLUENCE OP ACADEMIES 45 stringent intellectual agencies, though they may be more beautiful and divine. Shakspeare and our great Elizabethan group were certainly more gifted writers than Corneille and his group ; but what was the sequel to this great literature, this literature of genius, as we may call it, stretching from Marlow to Milton ? What did it lead up to in English literature ? To our provincial and second- rate hterature of the eighteenth century. What, on the other hand, was the sequel to the hterature of the French 10 ' great century,' to this literature of intelligence, as, by comparison with our Ehzabethan literature, we may call it ; what did it lead up to ? To the French hterature of the eighteenth century, one of the most powerful and pervasive intellectual agencies that have ever existed, the greatest European force of the eighteenth century. In science, again, we had Newton, a genius of the very highest order, a type of genius in science, 2 ever there was one. On the continent, as a sort of counterpart to Newton, there was Leibnitz ; a man, it seems to me (though on these 20 matters I speak under correction), of much less creative energy of genius, much less power of divination than Newton, but rather a man of admirable intelligence, a type of inteUigence in science, if ever there was one. Well, and what did they each directly lead up to in science ? What was the intellectual generation that sprang from each of them ? I only repeat what the men of science have themselves pointed out. The man of genius was continued by the English analysts of the eighteenth century, comparatively powerless and obscure followers 30 of the renowned master ; the man of inteUigence was continued by successors like BernouUh, Euler, Lagrange, and Laplace, the greatest names in modem mathematics. What I want the reader to see is, that the question as to the utiUty of academies to the intellectual life of a nation is not settled when we say, for instance : ' Oh, we have never had an academy, and yet we have, confessedly, a very great literature.' It still remains to be asked : ' What sort of a great hterature ? a hterature great in the special quahties of genius, or great in the special qualities 40 of intelligence ? ' If in the former, it is by no means sure that either our hterature, or the general intellectual 46 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM life of our nation, has got already, without academies, all that academies can give. Eoth the one and the other may very well be somewhat wanting in those qualities of intelligence, out of a Uvely sense for which a body like the French Academy, as I have said, springs, and which such a body does a great deal to spread and confirm. Our hterature, in spite of the genius manifested in it, may fall short in form, method, precision, proportions, arrangement, — all of them, I have said, things where inteUigence proper comes in. It may be comparatively lo weak in prose, that branch of literature where inteUigence proper is, so to speak, aU in all. In this branch it may show many grave faults to which the want of a quick, flexible intelligence, and of the strict standard which such an intelligence tends to impose, makes it liable ; it may be fuU of hap-hazard, crudeness, provincialism, eccentricity, violence, blimdering. It may be a less stringent and effective intellectual agency, both upon our own nation and upon the world at large, than other hteratures which show less, genius, perhaps, but more inteUigence. 20 The right conclusion certainly is that we should try, so far as we can, to make up our shortcomings ; and that to this end, instead of always fixing our thoughts upon the points in which our literature, and our inteUeotual life generally, are strong, we should, from time to time, fix them upon those in which they are weak, and so learn to perceive clearly what we have to amend. What is our second great spiritual characteristic, — our honesty, — good for, if it is not good for this ? But it wiU, — I am sure it wiU, — more and more, as time goes on, be found good for 30 this. WeU, then, an institution Uke the French Academy, — an institution owing its existence to a national bent to- wards the things of the mind, towards culture, towards clearness, correctness, and propriety in thinking and speakiag, and, in its turn, promoting this bent, — sets standards in a number of directions, and creates, in aU these directions, a force of educated opinion, checking and rebuking those who faU below these standards, or who set them at nought. Educated opinion exists here as in4o France ; but in France the Academy serves as a sort of THE LITERARY INELUENCE OF ACADEMIES 47 centre and rallying-point to it, and gives it a force which it has not got here. Why is all the journeyman-work of literature, as I may call it, so much worse done here than it is in France ? I do not wish to hurt any one's feelings ; but surely this is so. Think of the difference between our books of reference and those of the French, between our biographical dictionaries (to take a striking instance) and theirs ; think of the difference between the translations of the classics turned out for Mr. Bohn's library and those 10 turned out for M. Nisard's collection ! As a general rule, hardly any one amongst us, who knows French and German well, woidd use an English book of reference when he could get a French or German one ; or would look at an EngUsh prose translation of an ancient author when he coiild get a French or German one. It is not that there do not exist in England, as in Frg,nce, a number of people perfectly well able to discern what is good, in these things, from what is bad, and preferriag what is good ; but they are isolated, they form no powerful body of opinion, they 20 are not strong enough to set a standard, up to which even the journeyman-work of literature must be brought, if it is to be vendible. Ignorance and charlatanism in work of this kind are always trying to pass off their wares as excellent, and to cry down criticism as the voice of an insignificant, over-fastidious minority ; they easily persuade the multitude that this is so when the minority is scattered about as it is-here ; not so easily when it is banded together as in the French Academy. So, again, with freaks in dealing with language ; certainly all such freaks tend to impair 80 the power and beauty of language ; and how far more common they are with us than with the French ! To take a very familiar instance. Every one has noticed the way in which the Times chooses to spell the word ' diocese ; ' it always spells it diocess,^ deriving it, I suppose, from Zezts and census. The Journal des Debats might just as well write ' diocess ' instead of ' diocese,' but imagine the Journal des Dibata doing so ! Imagine an educated Frenchman indulging himself in an ortho- graphical antic of this sort, in face of the grave respect 1 The Times has now (1868) abandoned this spelling and adopted the ordinary one. 48 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM with -which the Academy and its dictionary invest the French language ! Some people will say these are httle things ; they are not ; they are of bad example. They tend to spread the baneful notion that there is no such thing as a high, correct standard in intellectual matters ; that every one may as well take his own way ; they are at variance with the severe discipline necessary for all real culture ; they confirm us in habits of wilfulness and eccentricity, which hurt our minds, and damage our credit with serious people. The late Mi. Donaldson was lo certainly a man of great ability, and I, who am not an Orientalist, do not pretend to judge his Jashar ; but let the reader observe the form which a foreign OrientaHst's judgment of it naturally takes. M. Renan calls it a tentative malheunuse, a failure, in short ; this it may be, or it may not be ; I am no judge. But he goes on : 'It is astonishing that a recent article ' (in a French periodical, he means) ' shovdd have brought forward as the last word of German exegesis a work hke this, composed by a doctor of the University of Cambridge, and universally condemned by 20 German critics.' You see what he means to imply : an extravagance of this sort could never have come from Germany, where there is a great force of critical opinion controlling a learned man's vagaries, and keeping him straight ; it comes from the native home of inteUeotual eccentricity of all kinds,^ — ^from England, from a doctor of the University of Cambridge ; — and I daresay he would not expect much better things from a doctor of the University of Oxford. Again, after speaking of what Germany and France have done for the history of Mahomet : 3o ' America and England,' M. Renan goes on, ' have also occupied themselves with Mahomet.' He mentions Washington Irving's Life of Mahomet, which does not, he says, evince much of an historical sense, a sentiment historique fort ilevi. ; ' but,' he proceeds, ' this book shows a real progress, when one thinks that in 1829 Mr. Charles Forster pubhshed two thick volumes, which enchanted ' A critic declares I am wrong in saying that M. Ren^s language implies this. I stOl think that there is a shade, a nuance of expression, in M. Eenan's language, which does iniply this ; but, I confess, the only person who can really settle such a question is M. Kenan himself. THE LITERARY INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES 49 the Englisli reverends, to make out that Mahomet was the little horn of the he-goat that figures in the eighth chapter of Daniel, and that the Pope was the great horn. Mr. Porster founded on this ingenious parallel a whole philosophy of history, according to which the Pope repre- sented the Western corruption of Christianity, and Mahomet the Eastern ; thence the striking resemblances between Mahometanism and Popery.' And in a note M. Renan adds : ' This is the same Mr. Charles Forster who is the 10 author of a mystification about the Sinaitic inscriptions, in which he declares he finds the primitive language.' As much as to say : ' It is an EngHshman, be surprised at no extravagance.' If these innuendoes had no ground, and were made iu hatred and mahce, they would not be worth a moment's attention ; but they come from a grave Orientahst, on his own subject, and they point to a real fact ;— the absence, in this country, of any force of educated Uterary and scientific opinion, making aberrations like those of the author of The One Primeval Language out of the £0 question. Not only the author of such aberrations, often a very clever man, suffers by the want of check, by the not being kept straight, and spends force in vain on a false road, which, under better discipline, he might have used with profit on a true one ; but all his adherents, both ' reverends ' and others, suffer too, and the general rate of information and judgment is iu this way kept low. In a production which we have aU been reading lately, a production stamped throughout with a hterary quahty very rare in this country, and of which I shall have a 30 word to say presently, — urbanity ; in this production, the work of a man never to be named by any son of Oxford without sympathy, a man who alone in Oxford of his generation, alone of many generations, conveyed to us in his genius that same charm, that same ineffable senti- ment, which this exquisite place itself conveys, — I mean Dr. Newman, — an expression is frequently used which is more common in theological than iu literary language, but which seems to me fitted to be of general service ; the note of so and so, the note of cathohcity, the note of 40 antiquity, the note of sanctity, and so on. Adopting this expressive word, I say that in the bulk of the intellectual ABNOU) 3 60 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM work of a nation which has no centre, no intellectual metropohs hke an academy, hke M. Sainte-Beuye s ' sovereign organ of opinion,' hke M. Renan's ' recognised authority in matters of tone and taste,' — ^there is observable a note of provinciality. Now to get rid of provinciahty is a certain stage of culture ; a stage the positive result of which we must not make of too much importance, but which is, nevertheless, indispensable ; for it brings us on to the platform where alone the best and highest intellectual work can be said fairly to begin. Work done after men have lo reached this platform is classical ; and that is the only work which, ia the long run, can stand. All the scoriae in the work of men of great genius who have not hved on this platform, are due to their not having hved on it. Genius raises them to it by moments, .and the portions of their work which are immortal are done at these moments ; but more of it would have been immortal if they had not reached this platform at moments only, if they had had the culture which makes men hve there. The less a hterature has felt the influence of a supposed 20 centre of correct information, correct judgment, correct taste, the more we shall find in it this note of provinciality. I have shown the note of provinciality as caused by remote- ness from a centre of correct information. Of course, the note of provinciahty from the want of a centre of correct taste is stiU. more visible, and it is also stiU more common. For here great — even the greatest — powers of mind most fail a man. Great powers of mind will make him inform himself thoroughly, great powers of mind will make him think profoundly, even with ignorance and platitude all 30 round him ; but not even great powers of mind will keep his taste and style perfectly sound and sure, if he is left too much to himself, with no ' sovereign organ of opinion,' in these matters, near him. Even men hke Jeremy Taylor and Burke suffer here. Take this passage from Taylor's funeral sermon on Lady Carbery : — ' So have I seen a river, deep and smooth, passing with a stiU foot and a sober face, and paying to the fiscus, the great exchequer of the sea, a tribute large and full ; and hard by it, a Uttle brook, skipping and making a40 noise upon its unequal and neighbour bottom ; and after THE LITERARY INMiUENCB OF ACADEMIES 61 all its talking aod bragged motion, it paid to its common audit no more than the revenues of a Uttle cloud or a contemptible vessel : so have I sometimes compared the issues of her religion to the solemnities and famed out- sides of another's piety.' That passage has been much admired, and, indeed, the genius in it is undeniable. I should say, for my part, that genius, the ruHng divinity of poetry, had been too busy in it, and inteUigence, the ruling divinity of prose, 10 not busy enough. But can any one, with the best. models of style in his head, help feeling the note of provinciality there, the want of simpUcity, the want of measure, the want of just the qualities that make prose classical ? If he does not feel what I mean, let him place beside the passage of Taylor this passage from the Panegyric of St. Paul, by Taylor's contemporary, Bossuet : — ' II ira, cet ignorant dans I'art de bien dire, avec cette locution rude, avec cette phrase qui sent I'etranger, il ira en cette Grece pohe, la mere des philosophes et des 20 orateurs_ ; et malgre la resistance du monde, il y etabhra plus d'Eglises que Platon n'y a gagne de disciples par cette eloquence qu'on a crue divine.' There we have prose without the note of provinciahty, — classical prose, prose of the centre. Or take Burke, our greatest EngUsh prose-writer, as I think ; take expressions like this : — ' Blindfold themselves, like buUs that shut their eyes when they push, they drive, by the point of their bayonets, their slaves, blindfolded, indeed, no worse than their 30 lords, to take their fictions for currencies, and to swallow down paper pills by thirty-four millions sterling at a dose.' Or this :— ' They used it ' (the royal name) ' as a sort of navel- string, to nourish their unnatural offspring from the bowels of royalty itself. Now that the monster can purvey for its own subsistence, it will only carry the mark about it, as a token of its having torn the womb it came from.' Or this :— 40 ' Without one natural pang, he ' (Rousseau) ' casts away, as a sort of ofEal and excrement, the spawn of his E 2 52 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM disgustful amours, and sends his children to the hospital of foundlings.' Or this :— ' I confess, I never Mked this continual talk of resistance and revolution, or the practice of making the extreme medicine of the constitution its daily bread. It renders the habit of society dangerously valetudinary ; it is taking periodical doses of mercury subhmate and swallowing down repeated provocatives of oantharides to oxm love of liberty.' lo I say that is extravagant prose ; prose too much suffered to indulge its caprices ; prose at too great a distance from the centre of good taste ; prose, in short, with the note of provinciality. People may reply, it is rich and imagina- tive ; yes, that is just it, it is Asiatic prose, as the ancient critics would have said ; prose somewhat barbarously rich and overloaded. But the true prose is Attic prose. Well, but Addison's prose is Attic prose. Where, then, it may be asked, is the note of provinciality in Addison ? I answer, in the commonplace of his ideas.^ This is a 20 matter worth remarking. Addison claims to take leading rank as a morahst. To do that, you must have ideas of the first order on your subject, — the best ideas, at any rate, attainable in your time, — as well as be able to express them in a perfectly soimd and sure style. Else you show your distance from the centre of ideas by your matter; you are provincial by your matter, though you may not be provincial by your style. It is comparatively a small matter to express oneself well, if one will be content with ' A critic says this is paradoxical, and urges that many second-rate I^enoh academicians have uttered the most commouplace ideas possible. I agree that many second-rate French academicians have uttered the most commonplace ideas possible ; but Addison is not a second-rate man. He is a man of the order, I will not say of Pascal, but at any rate of La Bruy^re and Vauveuargues ; why does he not equal them ? I say, because of the medium in which he finds himself, the atmosphere in which he lives and works ; an atmosphere which tells unfavourably, or rather tends to tell unfavourably (for that is the truer way of putting it) either upon style or else upon ideas ; tends to make even a man of great ability either a Mr. Carlyle or else a Lord Mficaulay. It is to be observed, however, that Lord Macaulay's style has in its turn suffered by his failure in ideas, and this cannot be said of Addison's. THE LITERARY INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES 53 not expressing much, with expressing only trite ideas ; the problem is to express new and profound ideas in a perfectly sound and classical style. He is the true classic, in every age, who does that. Now Addison has not, on his subject of morals, the force of ideas of the moraUsts of the first class, — the classical moralists ; he has not the best ideas attainable in or about his time, and which were, so to speak, in the air then, to be seized by the finest spirits ; he is not to be compared for power, searchingness, or dehcacy of 10 thought, to Pascal, or La Bruyere, or Vauvenargues ; he is rather on a level, in this respect, with a man Uke Mar- montel ; therefore, I say, he has the note of provinciaUty as a moralist ; he is provincial by his matter, though not by his style. To illustrate what I mean by an example. Addison, writing as a morahst on fixedness in rehgious faith, says : — ' Those who deHght in reading books of controversy do very seldom arrive at a fixed and settled habit of faith. The doubt which was laid revives again, and 20 shows itself in new difficulties ; and that generally for this reason, — ^because the mind, which is perpetually tossed in controversies and disputes, is apt to forget the reasons which had once set it at rest, and to be disquieted with any former perplexity when it appears in a new shape, or is started by a different hand.' It may be said, that is classical Enghsh, perfect in lucidity, measure, and propriety. I make no objection ; but, in my turn, I say that the idea expressed is perfectly trite and barren, and that it is a note of provinciaUty in Addison, 30 in a man whom a nation puts forward as one of its great morahsts, to have no profounder and more striking idea to produce on this great subject. Compare, on the same subject, these words of a moralist really of the first order, really at ihe centre by his ideas, — Joubert : — ' Kexperience de beaucoup d' opinions donne a I'esprit beaucoup de flexibilite et I'affermit dans celles qu'il croit lesmeiUeures.' With what a flash of light that touches the subject ! how it sets us thinking ! what a genuine contribution to 40 moral science it is ! In short, where there is no centre Hke an academy, if 64 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM you have genius and powerful ideas, you are apt not to have the best style going ; if you have precision of style and not genius, you are apt not to have the best ideas going. The provincial spirit, again, exaggerates the value of its ideas for want of a high standard at hand by which to try them. Or rather, for want of such a standard, it gives one idea too much prominence at the expense of others ; it orders its ideas amiss ; it is hurried away by fancies ; it likes and dislikes too passionately, too ex- lo clusively. Its admiration weeps hysterical tears, and its disapprobation foams at the mouth. So we get the eruptive and the aggressive manner in hterature ; the former prevails most in our criticism, the latter in our news- papers. For, not having the lucidity of a large and centrally placed intelligence, the provincial spirit has not its graciousness ; it does not persuade, it makes war ; it has not urbanity, the tone of the city, of the centre, the tone which always aims at a spiritual and intellectual effect, and not excluding the use of banter, never disjoins 20 banter itself from politeness, from felicity. But the provincial tone is more violent, and seems to aim rather at an effect upon the blood and senses than upon the spirit and intellect ; it loves hard-hitting rather than persuading. The newspaper, with its party spirit, its thorough-goingness, its resolute avoidance of shades and distinctions, its short, highly-charged, heavy-shotted, articles, its style so unlike that style lenis minimeque per- tinax — easy and not too violently insisting, — ^which the ancients so much admired, is its true literature ; the ao provincial spirit Kkes in the newspaper just what makes the newspaper such bad food for it, — ^just what made Goethe say, when he was pressed hard about the im- morality of Byron's poems, that, after aU, they were not so immoral as the newspapers. The French talk of the brutalite des journaux anglais. What strikes them comes from the necessary inherent tendencies of newspaper- writing not being checked in England by any centre of intelligent and urbane spirit, but rather stimulated by coming in contact with a provincial spirit. Even a news- 40 paper like the Saturday Review, that old friend of all of us, THE LITEBARY INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES 55 a newspaper expressly aiming at an immunity from the common newspaper-spirit, aiming at being a sort of organ of reason,- — and, by thus aiming, it merits great gratitude and has done great good, — even the Saturday Beview, replying to some foreign criticism on our precautions against invasion, falls into a strain of this kind : — ' To do this ' (to take these precautions) ' seems to us eminently worthy of a great nation, and to talk of it as unworthy of a great nation, seems to us eminently 10 worthy of a great fool.' There is what the French mean when they talk of the brutaliti des journaux anglais ; there is a style certainly as- far removed from urbanity as possible, — a style with what I call the note of provinciality. And the same note may not unfrequently be observed even in the ideas of this newspaper, full as it is of thought and cleverness : certain ideas allowed to become fixed ideas, to prevail too absolutely. I will not speak of the immediate present, but, to go a little while back, it had the critic who so 20 disliked the Emperor of the French ; it had the critic who so disliked the subject of my present remarks — academies ; it had the critic who was so fond of the German element in our nation, and, indeed, everywhere ; who ground his teeth if one said Charlemagne, instead of Charles the Great, and, in short, saw all things in Teutonism, as Malebranche saw aU things in God. Certainly any one may fairly find faults in the Emperor Napoleon or in academies, and merit in the German element ; but it is a note of the provincial spirit not to hold ideas of this kind a little more 30 easily, to be so devoured by them, to suffer them to become crotchets. In England there needs a miracle of genius like Shak- speare's to produce balance of mind, and a miracle of intellectual delicacy like Dr. Newman's to produce urbanity of style. How prevalent aU round us is the want of balance of mind and urbanity of style ! How much, doubtless, it is to be found in ourselves, — in each of us ! but, as human nature is constituted, every one can see it clearest in his contemporaries. There, above all, we should consider it, 40 because they and we are exposed to the same influences ; and it is in the best of one's contemporaries that it is 66 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM most worth considering, because one then most feels the harm it does, when one sees what they would be without it. Think of the difierence between Mr. Ruskin exercising his genius, and Mr. Ruskin exercising his intelligence ; consider the truth and beauty of this : — ' Go out, in the spring-time, among the meadows that slope from the shores of the Swiss lakes to the roots of their lower mountains. There, mingled with the taller gentians and the white narcissus, the grass grows deep and free ; and as you follow the winding mountain paths, lo beneath arching boughs all veiled and dim with blossom, — ^paths that for ever droop and rise over the green banks and mounds sweeping down in scented undulation, steep to the blue water, studded here and there with new-mown heaps, filling all the air with fainter sweetness, — ^look up towards the higher hills, where the waves of everlasting green roll silently into their long inlets among the shadows of the pines. . . .' There is what the genius, the feeling, the temperament in Mr. Ruskin, the original and incommunicable part, 20 has to do with ; and how exquisite it is ! All the critic could possibly suggest, in the way of objection, would be, perhaps, that Mr. Ruskin is there trying to make prose do more than it can perfectly do ; that what he is there attempting he wiU never, except in poetry, be able to accompUsh to his own entire satisfaction : but he accom- plishes so much that the critic may well hesitate to suggest even this. Place beside this charming passage another, — a passage about Shakspeare's names, where the inteUigence and judgment of Mr. Ruskin, the acquired, trained, com- so municable part in him, are brought into play, — and see the difference : — ' Of Shakspeare's names I will afterwards speak at more length ; they are curiously — often barbarously — mixed out of various traditions and languages. Three of the clearest in meaning have been already noticed. Desdemona — " Suo-Sai/iovia ", miserable fortune — ^is also plain enough. Othello is, I believe, " the careful ; " all the calamity of the tragedy arising from the single flaw and error in his magnificently collected strength. Ophelia, 40 " gerviceableness," the true, lost wife of Hamlet, is marked THE LITERARY INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES 57 as having a Greek name by that of her brother, Laertes ; and its signification is once exquisitely alluded to in that ' brother's last word of her, where her gentle preciousness is opposed to the uselessness of the churlish clergy : — " A ministering angel shall my sister be, when thou liest howling." Hamlet is, I beUeve, connected in some way with " homely," the entire event of the tragedy turning on betrayal of home duty. Hermione {epfjuaj, " pillar-like " {fj eiSos €xi xpva-rj's 'A^poSmjs) ; Titania (titijvt)), " the 10 queen " ; Benedict and Beatrice, " blessed and blessing " ; Valentine and Proteus, " enduring or strong " (vdlens), and " changeful." lago and lachimo have evidently the same root — ^probably the Spanish lago, Jacob, " the supplanter." ' Now, really, what a piece of extravagance all that is ! I will not say that the meaning of Shakspeare's names (I put aside the question as to the correctness of Mr. Buskin's etymologies) has no effect at all, may be entirely lost sight of ; but to give it that degree of prominence is 20 to throw the reins to one's whim, to forget all moderation and proportion, to lose the balance of one's mind altogether. It is to show in one's criticism, to the highest excess, the note of provinciahty. Again, there is Mr. Palgrave, certainly endowed with a very fine critical tact ; his Oolden Treasury abimdantly proves it. The plan of arrangement which he devised for that work, the mode in which he followed his plan out, nay, one might even say, merely the juxtaposition, in pursuance of it, of two such pieces as those of Words- 30 worth and Shelley which form the 285th and 286th in his collection, show a delicacy of feeling in these matters which is quite indisputable and very rare. And his notes are full of remarks which show it too. All the more striking, conjoined with so much justness of perception, are certain freaks and violences in Mr. Palgrave's criticism, mainly imputable, I think, to the critic's isolated position in this country, to his feeling himself too much left to take his own way, too much without any central authority representing high culture and sovind judgment, by which 40 he may be, on the one hand, confirmed as against the ignorant, on the ■ other, held in respect when he himself 68 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM is inclined to take liberties. I mean 'such things as this note on Milton's hne, — ' The great Emathian conqueror bade spare ' . . . ' When Thebes was destroyed, Alexander ordered the house of Pindar to be spared. He was as incapable of appreciating the poet as Louis XIV of appreciating Racine; but even the narrow and barbarian mind of Alexander could understand the advantage of a showy act of homage to poetry,' A note like that I call a freak or a violence ; if this disparaging view of Alexander and Louis XIV, so lo unlike the current view, is wrong, — ^if the current view is, after all, the truer one of them, — the note is a freak. But, even if its disparaging view is right, the note is a violence ; for, abandoniijg the true mode of intellectual action — persuasion, the instUment of conviction, — ^it simply astounds and irritates the hearer by contradicting without a word of proof or preparation, his fixed and famihar notions ; and this is mere violence. In either case, the fitness, the measure, the centrality, which is the soul of all good criticism, is lost, and the note of provinciality 20 shows itself. Thus in the famous Handbook, marks of a fine power of perception are everywhere discernible, but so, too, are marks of the want of sure balance, of the check and support afforded by knowing one speaks before good and severe judges. When Mr. Palgrave dislikes a thing, he feels no pressure constraining him either to try his dislike closely or to express it moderately ; he does not mince matters, he gives his dislike all its own way ; both his judgment and his style would gain if he were under more restraint, so ' The style which has filled London with the dead monotony of Gower or Harley Streets, or the pale commonplace of Belgravia, Tyburnia and Kensington ; which has pierced Paris and Madrid with the feeble frivolities of the Rue Rivoli and the Strada de Toledo.' He disUkes the archi- tecture of the Rue Rivoli, and he puts it on a level with the architecture of Belgravia and Gower Street ; he lumps them all together in one condemnation, he loses sight of the shade, the distinction, which is everything here ; the distinction, namely, that the architecture of the Rue Rivoli 40 THE LITERARY INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES 69 expresses show, splendour, pleasure, — ^unworthy things, perhaps, to express alone and for their own sakes, but it expresses them ; whereas the architecture of Gower Street and Belgravia merely expresses the impotence of the architect to express anything. Then, as to style : ' sculp- ture which stands in a contrast with Woolner hardly more shameful than diverting,' . . . ' passing from Davy or Faraday to the art of the mountebank or the science of the spirit-rapper.' . . . ' it is the old, old story with Maro- 10 chetti, the frog trying to blow himself out to bull dimensions. He may puff and be puffed, but he wiU never do it.' We all remember that shower of amenities on poor M. Maro- chetti. Now, here Mr. Palgrave himself enables us to form a contrast which lets us see just what the presence of an academy does for style ; for he quotes a criticism by M. Gustave Planche on this very M. Marochetti. M. Gustave Planche was a critic of the very first order, a man of strong opinions, which he expressed with severity ; he, too, condemns M. Marochetti's work, and Mr. Palgrave 20 calls him as a witness to back what he has himself said ; certainly Mr. Palgrave's translation will not exaggerate M. Planche's urbanity in dealing with M. Marochetti, but, even in this translation, see the difference in sobriety, in measure, between the critic writing in Paris and the critic writing in London : — ' These conditions are so elementary, that I am at a perfect loss to comprehend how M. Marochetti has neglected them. There are soldiers here like the leaden playthings of the nursery : it is almost impossible to guess whether 30 there is a body beneath the dress. We have here no question of style, not even of grammar ; it is nothing beyond mere matter of the alphabet of art. To break these conditions is the same as to be ignorant of spelling.' That is really more formidable criticism than Mr. Palgrave's, and yet in how perfectly temperate a style ! M. Planche's advantage is, that he feels himself to be speaking before competent judges, that there is a force of cultivated opinion for him to appeal to. Therefore, he must not be extravagant, and he need not storm ; he 40 must satisfy the reason and taste, — ^that is his business. Mr. Palgrave, on the other hand, feels himself to be 60 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM speaking before a promiscuous multitude, with the few good judges so scattered through it as to be powerless ; therefore, he has no calm confidence and no self-control ; he rehes on the strength of his lungs ; he knows that big words impose on the mob, and that, even if he is outrageous, most of his audience are apt to be a great deal more so.^ Again, the first two volumes of Mr. Kinglake's Invasion of the Crimea were certainly among the most successful and renowned Enghsh books of our time. Their style was ■ one of the most renowned things about them, and yet how lo conspicuous a fault in Mr. Kinglake's style is this over- charge of which I have been speaking ! Mi. James Gordon Bennett, of the New York Herald, says, I believe, that the highest achievement of the human intellect is what he calls ' a good editorial.' This is not quite so ; but, if it were so, on what a height would these two volumes by Mr. King- lake stand ! I have already spoken of the Attic and the Asiatic styles ; besides these, there is the Corinthian style. That is the style for ' a good editorial,' and Mr. Kinglake has really reached perfection in it. It has not the warm 20 glow, blithe movement, and soft pliancy of life, as the Attic style has ; it has not the over-heavy richness and encumbered gait of the Asiatic style ; it has glitter without warmth, rapidity without ease, efiectiveness without charm. Its characteristic is, that it has no eoul ; all it exists for, is to get its ends, to make its points, to damage its adversaries, to be admired, to triumph. A style so bent on effect at the expense of soul, simpHcity, and dehcacy ; a style so little studious of the charm of the great models ; so far from classic truth and grace, must surely be said to ao have the note of provinciality. Yet Mr. Kinglake's talent is a really eminent one, and so in harmony with our intel- lectual habits and tendencies, that, to the great bulk of Enghsh people, the faults of his style seem its merits ; all the more needful that criticism should not be dazzled by them, but should try closely this, the form of his work. The matter of the work is a separate thing ; and, indeed, this has been, I believe, withdrawn from discussion, ' When I wrote this I had before me the first edition of Mr. Palgrave's HatMlhooh. I am bound to say that in the second edition much strong language has been expunged, and what remains, softened. THE LITERARY INFLUENCE OF ACADEMIES 61 Mr. Kinglake declaring that this must and shall stay as it is, and that he is resolved, like Pontius Pilate, to stand by what he has written. And here, I must say, he seems to me to be quite right. On the breast of the huge Mississippi of falsehood called history, a foam-beU more or less is of no consequence. But he may, at any rate, ease and soften his style. We must not compare a man of Mr. Kinglake's literary talent with French writers like M. de Bazancourt. We 10 must compare him with M. Thiers. And what a superiority in style has M. Thiers from being formed in a good school, with severe traditions, wholesome restraining influences ! Even in this age of Mr. James Gordon Bennett, his style has nothing CJorinthian about it, its hghtness and brightness make it almost Attic. It is not quite Attic, however ; it has not the infallible sureness of Attic taste. Sometimes his head gets a Uttle hot with the fumes of patriotism, and then he crosses the hne, he loses perfect measure, he declaims, he raises a momentary smile. France condemned ' a etre w I'efEroi du monde dont die pourrait etre V amour,' — Caesar, whose exquisite simplicity M. Thiers so much admires, would not have written Uke that. There is, if I may be allowed to say so, the slightest possible touch of fatuity in such language, — of that failure in good sense which comes from too warm a self-satisfaction. But compare this language with Mr. Kinglake's Marshal St. Amaud — ' dis- missed from the presence ' of Lord Baglan or Lord Stratford, ' cowed and pressed down ' under their ' stem reproofs,' or under ' the majesty of the great Elchi's Canning brow and so tight, merciless hps ! ' The failure in good sense and good taste there reaches far beyond what the French mean by fatuity ; they would call it by another word, a word expressing blank defect of intelligence, a word for which we have no exact equivalent in English, — bete. It is the difference between a venial, momentary, good-tempered excess, in a man of the world, of an amiable and social weakness, — vanity ; and a serious, settled, fierce, narrow, provincial misconception of the whole relative value of one's own things and the things of others. So baneful to 40 the style of even the cleverest man may be the total want of checks. 62 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM In all I have said, I do not pretend that the examples given prove my rule as to the influence of academies ; they only illustrate it. Examples in plenty might very likely be found to set against them ; the truth of the rule depends, no doubt, on whether the balance of all the examples is in its favour or not ; but actually to strike this balance is always out of the question. Here, as every- where else, the rule, the idea, if true, commends itseK to the judicious, and then the examples make it clearer still to them. This is the real use of examples, and this alone lo is the purpose which I have meant mine to serve. There is also another side to the whole question, — as to the limiting and prejudicial operation which academies may have ; but this side of the question it rather behoves the French, not us, to study. The reader will ask for some practical conclusion about the estabhshment of an Academy in this country, and perhaps I shall hardly give him the one he expects. But nations have their own modes of acting, and these modes are not easily changed ; they are even consecrated, when 20 great things have been done in them. When a literature has produced Shakspeare and Milton, when it has even produced Barrow and Burke, it cannot well abandon its traditions ; it can hardly begin, at this late time of day, with an institution like the French Academy. I think academies with a limited, special, scientific scope, in the various lines of intellectual work,^ — academies like that of BerUn, for instance, — ^we with time may, and probably shall, establish. And no doubt they wiU do good ; no doubt the presence of such influential centres of correct so information will tend to raise the standard amongst us for what I have called the journeyman-work of literature, and to free us from the scandal of such biographical dictionaries as Chalmers's, or such translations as a recent one of Spinoza, or perhaps, such philological freaks as Mr. Forster's about the one primeval language. But an academy quite like the French Academy, a sovereign organ of the highest Uterary opinion, a recognised authority in matters of intellectual tone and taste, we shall hardly have, and perhaps we ought not to wish to have it. But 40 then every one amongst us with any turn for literature THE LITERARY INELUENCE OP ACADEMIES 63 ■will do well to remember to what shortcomings and excesses, which such an academy tends to correct, we are liable ; and the more liable, of course, for not having it. He win do well constantly to try himself in respect of these, steadily to widen his culture, severely to check in himself the provincial spirit ; and he wiU do this the better the more he keeps in mind that aU mere glorification by ourselves of ourselves or our literature, in the strain of what, at the beginning of these remarks, I quoted from Lord Macaulay, 10 is both vulgar, and, besides being vulgar, retarding. MAUEICE DE GUfiRIN I WILL not presume. to say that I now know the French language well ; but at a time when I knew it even less well than at present, — some fifteen years ago, — I remember pestering those about me with this sentence, the rhythm of which had lodged itself in my head, and which, with the strangest pronunciation possible, I kept perpetually de- claiming : ' Les dieux jaloux ont enfcmi quelque part les temoignages de la descendance des choaes ; mais au bord de quel Ocean ont-ils roule lapierre qui les couvre, o Macarie!' These words come from a short composition called lo the Centaur, of which the author, Georges-Maurice de Guerin, died in the year 1839, at the age of twenty-eight, without having published anything. In 1840, Madame Sand brought out the Centaur in the Revue des Deux Mondes, with a short notice of its author, and a few extracts from his letters. A year or two afterwards she reprinted these at the end of a volume of her novels ; and there it was that I fell in with them. I was so much struck with the Centaur that I waited anxiously to hear something more of its author, and of what he had left ; but it was not 20 tiU the other day — twenty years after the first pubUcation of the Centaur in the Revue des Deux Mondes, that my anxiety was satisfied. At the end of 1860 appeared two volumes with the title, Maurice de Ou6rin, Reliquiae, containing the Centaur, several poems of Guerin,his journals, and a number of his letters, collected and edited by a devoted friend, M. Trebutien, and preceded by a notice of Guerin by the first of living critics, M. Sainte-Beuve. The grand power of poetry is its interpretative power ; by which I mean, not a power of drawing out in black 30 and white an explanation of the mystery of the universe, but the power of so dealing with things as to awaken in us a wonderfully full, new, and intimate sense of them, and of our relations with them. When this sense is awak- MAURICE DE GUfiRIN 65 ened in us, as to objects without us, we feel ourselves to be in contact with the essential nature of those objects, to be no longer bewildered and oppressed by them, but to have their secret, and to be in harmony with them ; and this feeling calms and satisfies us as no other can. Poetry, indeed, interprets in another way besides this ; but one of its two ways of interpreting, of exercising its highest power, is by awakening this sense in us. I will not now inquire whether this sense is illusive, whether it 10 can be proved not to be illusive, whether it does absolutely make us possess the real nature of things ; aU I say is, that poetry can awaken it in us, and that to awaken it is one of the highest powers of poetry. The interpretations of science do not give us this intimate sense of objects as the interpretations of poetry give it ; they appeal to a limited faculty, and not to the whole man. It is not Linnaeus, or Cavendish, or Cuvier who gives us the true sense of animals, or water, or plants, who seizes their secret for us, who makes us participate in their life ; it is 20 Shakspeare, with his ' daffodils That come before the swallow dares, and take The winds of March with beauty ; ' it is Wordsworth, with his ■ voice .' . . heard In spring-time from the cuckoo-bird. Breaking the silence of the seas Among the farthest Hebrides ; ' it is Keats, with his 3Q ' moving waters at their priestlike task Of cold ablution round Earth's human shores ; ' it is Chateaubriand, with his ' cime indeterminee des forets ; it is Senancour, with his mountain birch-tree : ' Cette ecorce blanche, Usse et crevassee ; cette tige agreste ; ces branches qui s'inclinent vers la terre ; la mobilite des feuilles, et tout cet abandon, simpliciti, de la nature, altitude des dlserts.' Eminent manifestations of this magical power of poetry are yery rare and very precious : the compositions of Guerin manifest it, I think, in singular eminence. Not 40 his poems, strictly so called, — his verse, — so much as his AKNOLB S 66 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM prose ; his poems in general take for their vehicle that favourite metre of French poetry, the Alexandrine ; and, in my judgment, I confess they have thus, as compared with his prose, a great disadvantage to start with. In prose, the character of the vehicle for the composer's thoughts is not determined beforehand ; every composer has to make his own vehicle ; and who has ever done this more admirably than the great prose-writers of France, — Pascal, Bossuet, Fenelon, Voltaire ? But in verse the composer has (with comparatively narrow liberty ofio modification) to accept his vehicle ready-made ; it is therefore of vital importance to him that he should find at his disposal a vehicle adequate to convey the highest matters of poetry. We may even get a decisive test of the poetical power of a language and nation by ascertaining how far the principal poetical vehicle which they have employed, how far (in plainer words) the established national metre for high poetry, is adequate or inadequate. It seems to me that the established metre of this kind in France, — ^the Alexandrine, — is inadequate ; that as 20 a vehicle for high poetry it is greatly inferior to the hexa- meter or to the iambics of Greece (for example), or to the blank verse of England. Therefore the man of genius who uses it is at a disadvantage as compared with the man of genius who has for conveying his thoughts a more adequate vehicle, metrical or not. Racine is at a disadvantage as compared with Sophocles or Shakspeare, and he is likewise at a disadvantage as compared with Bossuet. f he same may be said of our own poets of the eighteenth century, a century which gave them as the main vehicle for their 30 high poetry a metre inadequate (as much as the French Alexandrine, and nearly in the same way) for this poetry, — the ten-syllable couplet. It is worth remarking, that the English poet of the eighteenth century whose compositions wear best and give one the most entire satisfaction, — Gray, — hardly uses that couplet at all : this abstinence, however, limits Gray's productions to a few short compositions, and (exquisite as these are) he is a poetical nature repressed and without free issue. For English poetical production on a great scale, for an English poet deploying all the forces 40 of his genius, the ten-syllable couplet was, in the eighteenth MAURICE DE GUfiRIN 67 century, the established, one may almost say the inevitable, channel. Now this couplet, admirable (as Chaucer uses it) for story -telling not of the epic pitch, and often admirable for a few lines even in poetry of a very high pitch, is for continuous use in poetry of this latter kind inadequate. Pope, in his Essay on Man, is thus at a disadvantage compared with Lucretius in his poem on Nature : Lucretius has an adequate vehicle, Pope has not. Nay, though Pope's genius for didactic poetry was not less than that of 10 Horace, while his satirical power was certainly greater, still one's taste receives, I cannot but think, a certain satisfaction when one reads the Epistles and Satires of Horace, which it fails to receive when one reads the Satires and Epistles of Pope . Of such avail is the superior adequacy of the vehicle used to compensate even an inferiority of genius in the user ! In the same way Pope is at a disad- vantage as compared with Addison. The best of Addison's composition (the ' Coverley Papers ' in the Spectator, for instance) wears better than the best of Pope's, becauce 20 Addison has in his prose an intrinsically better vehicle for his genius than Pope in his couplet. But Bacon has no such advantage over Shakspe'are ; nor has Milton, writing prose (for no contemporary English prose-writer must be matched with Milton except Milton himself), any such advantage over Milton writing verse : indeed, the advantage here is all the other way. It is in the prose remains of Guerin, — his journals, his letters, and the striking composition which I have already mentioned, the Centaur, — ^that his extraordinary gift 30 manifests itself. He has a truly interpretative faculty ; the most profound and delicate sense of the life of Nature, and the most exquisite felicity in finding expressions to render that sense. To all who love poetry, Guerin deserves to be something more than a name ; and I shall try, in spite of the impossibility of doing justice to such a master of expression by translations, to make my English readers see for themselves how gifted an organisation his was, and how few artists have received from Nature a more magical faculty of interpreting her. 40 In the winter of the year 1832 there was collected F2 68 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM in Brittany, around the well-linown Abbe Lamennais, a singular gathering. At a lonely place, La Chenaie, he had founded a religious retreat, to which disciples, attracted by his powers or by his reputation, repaired. Some came with the intention of preparing themselves for the ecclesi- astical profession ; others merely to profit by the society and discourse of so distinguished a master. Among the inmates were men whose names have since become known to all Europe, — ^Lacordaire and M. de Montalembert ; there were others, who have acquired a reputation, notio European, indeed, but considerable, — ^the Abbe Gerbet, the Abbe Rohrbacher ; others, who have never quitted the shade of private life. The winter of 1832 was a period of crisis in the religious world of France : Lamennais's rupture with Rome, the condemnation of his opinions by the Pope, and his revolt against that condemnation, were imminent. Some of his followers, like Lacordaire, had already resolved not to cross the Rubicon with their leader, not to go into rebellion against Rome ; they were preparing to separate from him. The society of La Chenaie was soon 20 to dissolve ; but, such as it is shown to us for a moment, with its voluntary character, its simple and severe life in common, its mixture of lay and clerical members, the genius of its chiefs, the sincerity of its disciples, — above all, its paramount fervent interest in matters of spiritual and reli- gious concernment, — it offers a most instructive spectacle. It is not the spectacle we most of us think to find in France, the France we have imagined from common English notions, from the streets of Paris, from novels ; it shows us how, wherever there is greatness like that of France, there are, 30 as its foundation, treasures of fervour, pure-mindedness, and spirituality somewhere, whether we know of them or not ; — a store of that which Goethe calls Halt ; — since greatness can never be founded upon frivolity and cor- ruption. On the evening of the 18th of December in this year 1832, M. de Lamennais was talking to those assembled in the sitting-room of La Chenaie of his recent journey to Italy. He talked with all his usual animation ; ' but,' writes one of his hearers, a Breton gentleman, M. de*o Marzan, ' I soon became inattentive and absent, being MAURICE DE GUERIN . 69 struck with the reserved attitude of a young stranger some twenty-two years old, pale in face, his black hair already thin over his temples, with a southern eye, in which brightness and melancholy were mingled. He kept himself somewhat aloof, seeming to avoid notice rather than to court it. AH the old faces of friends which I found about me at this my re-entry into the circle of La Chenaie failed to occupy me so much as the sight of this stranger, looking on, listening, observing, and saying nothing.' 10 The unknown was Maurice de Guerin. Of a noble but poor family, having lost his mother at six years old, he had been brought up by his father, a man saddened by his wife's death, and austerely reUgious, at the chateau of Le Cayla, in Languedoo. His childhood was not gay ; he had not the society of other boys ; and soUtude, the sight of his father's gloom, and the habit of accompanying ■ the cure of the parish on his rounds among the sick and dying, made him prematurely grave and famOiar with sorrow. He went to school first at Toulouse, then at the 20 CoUege Stanislas at Paris, with a temperament almost as unfit as Shelley's for common school Ufe. His youth was ardent, sensitive, agitated, and unhappy. In 1832 he procured admission to La Chenaie to brace his spirit by the teaching of Lamennais, and to decide whether his reUgious feelings would determine themselves into a dis- tinct rehgious vocation. Strong and deep religious feelings he had, implanted in him by nature, developed in him by the circumstances of his childhood ; but he had also (and here is the key to his character) that temperament which 30 opposes itself to the fixedness of a rehgious vocation, or of any vocation of which fixedness is an essential attribute ; a temperament mobile, inconstant, eager, thirsting for new impressions, abhorring rules, aspiring to a ' renovation without end ; ' a temperament common enough among artists, but with which few artists, who have it to the same degree as Guerin, unite a seriousness and a sad intensity like his. After leaving school, and before going to La Chenaie, he had been at home at Le Cayla with his sister Eugenie (a wonderfully gifted person, whose genius so 40 competent a judge as M. Sainte-Beuve is incUned to pro- nounce even superior to her brother's) and his sister 70 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM Eugenie's friends. With one of these friends he had fallen in love, — a sHght and transient fancy, but which had already called his poetical powers into exercise ; and his poems and fragments, in a certain green note-book (le Cahier Vert) which he long continued to make the deposi- tory of his thoughts, and which became famous among his friends, he brought with him to La Chenaie. There he foiuid among the younger members of the Society several who, Uke himself, had a secret passion for poetry and literature ; with these he became intimate, and in his lo letters and journal we find him occupied, now with a literary commerce established with these friends, now with the fortunes, fast coming to a crisis, of the Society, and now with that for the sake of which he came to La Chenaie, — his rehgious progress and the state of his soul. On Christmas-day, 1832, having been then three weeks at La Chenaie, he writes thus of it to a friend of his family, M. de Bayne : — ' La Chenaie is a sort of oasis in the midst of the steppes of Brittany. In front of the ch3,teau stretches a very 20 large garden, cut in two by a terrace with a Ume avenue, at the end of which is a tiny chapel. I am extremely fond of this Uttle oratory, where one breathes a twofold peace,— the peace of soUtude and the peace of the Lord. When spring comes we shall walk to prayers between two borders of flowers. On the east side, and only a few yards from the chateau, sleeps a small mere between two woods, where the birds in warm weather sing aU day long ; and then, — aright, left, on aU sides, — ^woods, woods, everywhere woods. It looks desolate just now that all is bare and the 30 woods are rust-colour, and under this Brittany sky, which is always clouded and so low that it seems as if it were going to fall on your head ; but as soon as spring comes the sky raises itseK up, the woods come to life again, and everjrthing will be full of charm.' Of what La Ch§naie wiU be when spring comes he has a foretaste on the 3rd of March. ' To-day ' (he writes in his journal) ' has enchanted me. For the first time for a long while the sun has shown himself in all his beauty. He has made the buds of the 40 leaves and flowers swell, and he has waked up in me a MAURICE DE GUfiRIN 71 thousand happy thoughts. The clouds assume more and more their light and graceful shapes, and are sketching, over the blue sky, the most charming fancies. The woods have not yet gof their leaves, but they are taking an indescribable air of hfe and gaiety, which gives them quite a new physiognomy. Everjrthing is getting ready for the great festival of Nature.' Storm and snow adjourn this festival a httle longer. On the 11th of March he writes : — 10 ' It has snowed aU night. I have been to look at our primroses ; each of them had its small load of snow, and was bowing its head under its burden. These pretty flowers, with their rich yellow colour, had a charming effect under their white hoods. I saw whole tufts of them roofed over by a single block of snow ; aU these laughing flowers thus shrouded and leaning one upon another, made one think of a group of young girls surprised by a shower, and sheltering under a white apron.' The burst of spring comes at last, though late. On the 20 5th of April we find Guerin ' sitting in the sun to penetrate himseK to the very marrow with the divine spring.' On the 3rd of May, ' one can actually see the progress of the green ; it has made a start from the garden to the shrub- beries, it is getting the upper hand all along the mere ; it leaps, one may say, from tree to tree, from thicket to thicket, in the fields and on the hiU-sides ; and I can see it already arrived at the forest edge and beginning to spread itself over the broad back of the forest. Soon it will have overrun everything as far as the eye can reach, 30 and all those wide spaces between here and the horizon wiU be moving and sounding Uke one vast sea, a sea of emerald.' Finally, on the 16th of May, he writes to M. de Bayne that ' the gloomy and bad days — ^bad because they bring temptation by their gloom, — are, thanks to God and the spring, over ; and I see approaching a long file of shining and happy days, to do me all the good in the world. This Brittany of ours,' he continues, ' gives one the idea of the greyest and most wrinkled old woman possible suddenly io changed back by the touch of a fairy's wand into a girl of twenty, and one of the loveUest in the world ; the fine 72 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM weather has so decked and beautified the dear old country.^ He felt, however, the cloudiness and cold of the ' dear old country ' with all the sensitiveness of a child of the South. ' What a difference,' he cries, ' between the sky of Brittany, even on the finest day, and the sky of our South ! Here the summer has, even on its highdays and hoUdays, some- thing mournful, overcast, and stinted about it. It is Hke a miser who is making a show ; there is a niggardliness in his magnificence. Give me our Languedoc sky, so bountiful of fight, so blue, so largely vaulted ! ' And somewhat lo later, complaining of the short and dim sunfight of a February day in Paris, ' What a sunshine,' he exclaims, ' to gladden eyes accustomed to all the wealth of fight of the South ! — aux larges et libirales effusions de lumiere du del du Midi.' In the long winter of La Chenaie his great resource was fiterature. One has often heard that an educated Frenchman's reading seldom goes much beyond French and Latin, and that he makes the authors in these two languages his sole fiterary standard. This may or may 20 not be true of Frenchmen in general, but there can be no question as to the width of the reading of Guerin and his friends, and as to the range of their literary sympathies. One of the circle, Hippolyte la Morvonnais, — a poet who pubfished a volume of verse, and died in the prime of life, — ^had a passionate admiration for Wordsworth, and had even, it is said, made a pilgrimage to Rydal Mount to visit him ; and in Guerin's own reading I find, besides the French names of Bernardin de St. Pierre, Chateau- briand, Lamartine, and Victor Hugo, the names of Homer, 30 Dante, Shakspeare, Milton, and Goethe ; and he quotes both from Greek and from English authors in the original. His literary tact is beautifully fine and true. ' Every poet,' he writes to his sister, ' has his own art of poetry written on the groimd of his own soul ; there is no other. Be constantly observing Nature in her smaUest details, and then write as the current of your thoughts guides you ;— that is aU.' But with aU this freedom from the bondage of forms and rules, Guerin marks with perfect precision the faults of the free French fiterature of his40 time, — the litterature facile, — and judges the romantic MAURICE DE GUfiRIN 73 school and its prospects like a master : ' that youthful literature which has put forth all its blossom prematurely, and has left itself a helpless prey to the returning frost, stimulated as it has been by the burning sun of our century, by this atmosphere charged with a perilous heat, which has over-hastened every sort of development, and will most hkely reduce to a handful of grains the harvest of our age.' And the popular authors, — those ' whose name appears once and disappears for ever, whose books, 10 unwelcome to all serious people, welcome to the rest of the world, to novelty-hunters and novel-readers, fiU with vanity these vain souls, and then, faUing from hands heavy with the languor of satiety, drop for ever into the guK of obhvion ; ' and those, more noteworthy, ' the writers of books celebrated, and, as works of art, deserv- ing celebrity, but which have in them not one grain of that hidden manna, not one of those sweet and whole- some thoughts which nourish the human soul and refresh it when it is weary,' — these he treats with such severity 20 that he may in some sense be described, as he describes himself, as ' invoking with his whole heart a classical restoration.' He is best described, however, not as a partisan of any school, but as an ardent seeker for that mode of expression which is the most natural, happy, and true. He writes to his sister Eugenie : — ' I want you to reform your system of composition ; it is too loose, too vague, too Lamartinian. Your verse is too sing-song ; it does not talk enough. Form for your- self a style of your own, which shall be your real expression. 30 Study the French language by attentive reading, making it your care to remark constructions, turns of expression, delicacies of style, but without ever adopting the manner of any master. In the works of these masters we must learn our language, but we must use it each in our own fashion.' ^ It was not, however, to perfect his hterary judgment that Guerin come to La Chenaie. The reUgious feeling, which was as much a part of his essence as the passion ' Part of these extracts date from a time a little after Guerin' 3 residence at La Chenaie ; but already, amidst the readings and con- versations of La Chenaie, his literary judgment was perfectly formed. 74 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM for Nature and the literary instinct, shows itself at moments jealous of these its rivals, and alarmed at their predomin- ance. Like all powerful feeUngs, it wants to exclude every other feehng and to be absolute. One Friday in April, after he has been dehghting himself with the shapes of the clouds and the progress of the spring, he suddenly bethinks himself that the day is Good Friday, and exclaims in his diary : — ' My God, what is my soul about that it can thus go running after such fugitive dehghts on Good Friday, onio this day all filled with thy death and our redemption ? There is in me I know not what damnable spirit, that awakens in me strong discontents, and is for ever prompt- ing me to rebel against the holy exercises and the devout collectedness of soul which are the meet preparation for these great solemnities of our faith. Oh how well can I trace here the old leaven, from which I have not yet perfectly cleared my soul ! ' And again, in a letter to M. de Marzan : ' Of what, my God, are we made,' he cries, ' that a httle verdure and 20 a few trees should be enough to rob us of our tranquiUity and to distract us from thy love ? ' And writing, three days after Easter Sunday, in his journal, he records the reception at La Chenaie of a fervent neophyte, in words which seem to convey a covert blame of his own want of fervency : — ' Three days have passed over our heads since the great festival. One anniversary the less for us yet to spend of the death and resurrection of our Saviour ! Every year thus bears away with it its solemn festivals ; when 30 will the everlasting festival be here ? I have been witness of a most touching sight ; Fran9ois has brought us one of his friends whom he has gained to the faith. This neophyte joined us in our exercises during the Holy week, and on Easter-day he received the communion with us. Fran9ois was in raptures. It is a truly good work which he has thus done. Frangois is quite young, hardly twenty years old ; M. de la M. is thirty, and is married. There is something most touching and beautifully simple in M. de la M. letting himself thus be brought to God by quite 10 a yoxmg man ; and to see friendship, on Fran9ois's side, MAURICE DE GUfiRIN 75 tkus doing the work of an Apostle, is not less beautiful and touching.' Admiration for Lamennais worked in the same direction with this feeUng. Lamennais never appreciated Gu6rin ; his combative, rigid, despotic nature, of which the charac- teristic was energy, had no affinity with Gudrin's elusive, undulating, impalpable nature, of which the characteristic was deUcacy. He set little store by his new disciple, and could hardly bring himself to understand what others lofoimd so remarkable in him, his own genuine feeUng towards him being one of indulgent compassion. But the intuition of Gu^rin, more discerning than the logic of his master, instinctively felt what there was commanding and tragic in Lamermais's character, different as this was from his own ; and some of his notes are among the most interesting records of Lamennais which remain. ' " Do you know what it is," M. FeU ^ said to us on the evening of the day before yesterday, " which makes man the most sufiering of all creatures ? It is that he 20 has one foot in the finite and the other in the infinite, and that he is torn asunder, not by four horses, as in the horrible old times, but between two worlds." Again he said to us as we heard the clock strike : "If that clock knew that it was to be destroyed the next instant, it would stiU keep striking its hour until that instant arrived. My children, be as the clock ; whatever may be going to happen to you, strike always your hour." ' Another time Guerin writes, ' To-day M. Fell startled us. He was sitting behind 30 the chapel, under the two Scotch firs ; he took his stick and marked out a grave on the turf, and said to Ehe, " It is there I wish to be buried, but no tombstone ! only a simple hUlock of grass.. Oh, how well I shall be there ! " Ehe thought he had a presentiment that his end was near. This is not the first time he has been visited by such a presentiment ; when he was setting out for Rome, he said to those here : " I do not expect ever to come back to you ; you must do the good which I have failed to do." He is impatient for death.' ' The familiar name given to M. de Lamennais by his followera at La Chenaie. . 76 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM Overpowered by the ascendency of Lamemiais, Guerin, in spite of his hesitations, in spite of his confession to himself that ' after a three weeks' close scrutiny of his soul, in the hope of finding the pearl of a rehgious vocation hidden in some comer of it,' he had failed to find what he sought, took, at the end of August, 1833, a decisive step. He joined the rehgious order which Lamennais had foimded. But at this very moment the deepening displeasure of Rome with Lamennais determined the Bishop of Eennes to break up, in so far as it was a rehgious lo congregation, the Society of La Chenaie, to transfer the novices to Ploermel, and to place them under other super- intendence. In September, Lamennais, ' who had not yet ceased,' writes M. de Marzan, a fervent Cathohc, ' to be a Christian and a priest, took leave of his beloved colony of La Chenaie, with the anguish of a general who disbands his army down to the last recruit, and withdraws annihilated from the field of battle.' Guerin went to Ploermel. But here, in the seclusion of a real rehgious house, he instantly perceived how ahen to a spirit hke20 his, — a spirit which, as he himself says somewhere, ' had need of the open air, wanted to see the sun and the flowers,' — ^was the constraint and monotony of a monastic life, when Lamennais's genius was no longer present to enliven this life for him. On the 7th of October he renounced the novitiate, beheving himself a partisan of Lamennais in his quarrel with Rome, reproaching the Ufe he had left with demanding passive obedience instead of trying ' to put in practice the admirable aUiance of order with liberty, and of variety with unity,' and declariug that, for his so part, he preferred taking the chances of a hfe of adventure to submitting himself to be ' garrotte, par un reglement, — ^tied hand and foot by a set of rules.' In real truth, a Ufe of adventure, or rather a hfe free to wander at its own wiU, was that to which his nature irresistibly impelled him. For a career of adventure, the inevitable field was Paris. But before this career began, there came a stage, the smoothest, perhaps, and the most happy in the short hfe of Guerin. M. la Morvonnais, one of his La Chenaie friends, — some years older than Guerin, and married to40 a wife of singular sweetness and charm, — had* a house by MAURICE DE GUfiRIN 77 the seaside at the mouth of one of the beautiful rivers of Brittany, the Arguenon. He asked Guerin, when he left Ploermel, to come and stay with him at this place, called Le Val de I'Argu^non, and Guerin spent the winter of 1833-4 there. I grudge every word about Le Val and its inmates which is not Guerin's own, so charming is the picture he draws of them, so truly does his talent find itself in its best vein as he draws it. ' How fuU of goodness ' (he writes in his journal of 10 the 7th of December) ' is Providence to me ! For fear the sudden passage from the mild and temperate air of a rehgious hfe to the torrid clime of the world should be too trying for my soul, it has conducted me, after I have left my sacred shelter, to a house planted on the frontier between the two regions, where, without being in soHtude, one is not yet in the world ; a house whose windows look on the one side towards the plain where the tumult of men is rocking, on the other towards the wilderness where the servants of God are chanting. I intend to write down 20 the record of my sojourn here, for the days here spent are full of happiness, and I know that in the time to come I shall often turn back to the story of these past felicities. A man, pious, and a poet ; a woman, whose spirit is in such perfect sympathy with his that you would say they had but one being between them ; a child, called Marie like her mother, and who sends, like a star, the first rays of her love and thought through the white cloud of infancy ; a simple Hfe in an old-fashioned house ; the ocean, which comes morning and evening to bring us its harmonies ; 30 and lastly, a wanderer who descends from Carmel and is going on to Babylon, and who has laid down at this thres- hold his staff and his sandals, to take his seat at the hospitable table ; — ^here is matter to make a biblical poem of, if I could only describe things as I can feel them ! ' Every fine written by Guerin during this stay at Le Val is worth quoting, but I have only room for one extract more : — ' Never ' (he writes, a fortnight later, on the 20th of December), ' never have I tasted so inwardly and deeply 40 the happiness of home-life. All the little details of this life which in their succession make up the day, are to me 78 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM so many stages of a continuous charm carried from one end of the day to the other. The morning greeting, which in some sort renews the pleasure of the first arrival, for the words with which one meets are almost the same, and the separation at night, through the hours of darkness and uncertainty, does not ill represent longer separations ; then breakfast, during which you have the fresh enjoyment of having met together again ; the stroU afterwards, when we go out and bid Nature good-morning ; the return and setting to work in an old panelled chamber looking out on lo the sea, inaccessible to all the stir of the house, a perfect sanctuary of labour ; dinner, to which we are caUed, not by a beU, which reminds one too much of school or a great house, but by a pleasant voice ; the gaiety, the merriment, the talk flitting from one subject to another and never dropping so long as the meal lasts ; the crackling fire of dry branches to which we draw our chairs directly after- wards, the kind words that are spoken round the warm flame which sings while we talk ; and then, it it is fine, the walk by the seaside, when the sea has for its visitors 20 a mother with her child in her arms, this child's father and a stranger, each of these two last with a stick in his hand ; the rosy lips of the httle girl, which keep talking at the same time with the waves, — now and then tears shed by her and cries of childish fright at the edge of the sea ; our thoughts, the father's and mine, as we stand and look at the mother and child smiling at one another, or at the child in tears and the mother trying to comfort it by her caresses and exhortations ; the Ocean, going on all the while rolling up his waves and noises ; the dead so boughs which we go and cut, here and there, out of the copse-wood, to make a quick and bright fire when we get home, — this httle taste of the woodman's caUing which brings us closer to Nature and makes us think of M. Feli's eager fondness for the same work ; the hours of study and poetical flow which carry us to supper-time ; this meal, which summons us by the same gentle voice as its pre- decessor, and which is passed amid the same joys, only less loud, because evening sobers everything, tones every- thing down ; then our evening, ushered in by the blaze 4o of a cheerful fire, and which with its alternations of reading MAURICE DE GUfiRIN 79 and talking brings us at last to bed-time : — to all the charms of a day so spent add the dreams which follow it, and your imagination will still fall far short of these home- joys in their delightful reality.' I said the foregoing should be my last extract, but who could resist this picture of a January evening on the coast of Brittany ? — ■ ' AU the sky is covered over with grey clouds just silvered at the edges. The sun, who departed a few minutes ago, 10 has left behind him enough light to temper for awhile the black shadows, and to soften down, as it were, the approach of night. The winds are hushed, and the tranquil ocean sends up to me, when I go out on the doorstep to listen, only a melodious murmur, which dies away in the soul like a beautiful wave on the beach. The birds, the first to obey the nocturnal influence, make their way towards the woods, and you hear the rustle of their wings in the clouds. The copses which cover the whole hUl-side of Le Val, which all the day-time are alive with the chirp of the wren, the 20 laughing whistle of the woodpecker,^ and the different notes of a multitude of birds, have no longer any sound in their paths and thickets, unless it be the prolonged high call of the blackbirds at play with one another and chasing one another, after all the other birds have their heads safe under their wings. The noise of man, always the last to be silent, dies gradually out over the face of the fields. The general murmur fades away, and one hears hardly a sound except what comes from the villages and hamlets, in which, up till far into the night, there are cries of 30 children and barking of dogs. Silence wraps me round ; everything seeks repose except this pen of mine, which perhaps disturbs the rest of some living atom asleep in a crease of my note-book, for it makes its light scratching as it puts down these idle thoughts. Let it stop, then,! for all I write, have written, or shall write, will never be worth setting against the sleep of an atom.' On the 1st of February we find him in a lodging at Paris. ' I enter the world ' (such are the last words written in his journal at Le Val) ' with a secret horror.' His ' ' The woodpeoker laughs^ says White of Selborno ; and here is Guerin, in Brittany, confirming his testimony. 80 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM outward history for the next five years is soon told. Ho found himself in Paris, poor, fastidious, and with health which already, no doubt, felt the obscure presence of the malady of which he died, — consumption. One of his Brit- tany acquaintances introduced him to editors, tried to engage lum in the periodical hterature of Paris ; and so unmistakeable was Guerin's talent, that even his first essays were immediately accepted. But Guerin's genius was of a kind which unfitted him to get his bread in this manner. At first he was pleased with the notion of Uving by his lo pen ; ' je n'ai qu'd ecrire,' he says to his sister, — ' I have only got to write.' But to a nature like his, endued with the passion for perfection, the necessity to produce, to produce constantly, to produce whether in the vein or out of the vein, to produce something good or bad or middUng, as it may happen, but at all events something, — is the most intolerable of tortures. To escape from it he betook him- self to that common but most perfidious refuge of men of letters, that refuge to which Goldsmith and poor Hartley Coleridge had betaken themselves before him, — the pro- 20 fession of teaching. In September, 1834, he procured an engagement at the College Stanislas, where he had himself been educated. It was vacation-time, and aU he had to do was to teach a small class composed of boys who did not go home for the holidays, — ^in his own words, ' scholars left like sick sheep in the fold, while the rest of the flock are frisking in the fields.' After the vacation he was kept on at the College as a supernumerary. ' The master of the fifth class has asked for a month's leave of absence ; I am taking his place, and by this work I get one himdred so francs (41.). 1 have been looking about for pupils to give private lessons to, and I have found three or four. School- work and private lessons together fill my day from half- past seven in the morning till half -past nine at night. The college dinner serves me for breakfast, and I go and dine in the evening at twenty -four sous, as a young man beginning Ufe should.' To better his position in the hier- archy of public teachers it was necessary that he should take the degree of agrege es-lettres, corresponding to our degree of Master of Arts ; and to his heavy work in teach- « ing, there was thus added that of preparing for a severe MAURICE DE GUfiRlN 8i examination. The drudgery of this life was very irksome to him, although less insupportable than the drudgery of the profession of letters ; inasmuch as to a sensitive man, like Guerin, to silence his genius is more tolerable than to hackney it. StiU the yoke wore him deeply, and ho had moments of bitter revolt : he continued, however, to bear it with resolution, and on the whole with patience, for four years. On the 15th of November, 1838, he married a young Creole lady of some fortune. Mademoiselle Caroline 10 de Gervain, ' whom,' to use his own words, ' Destiny, who loves these surprises, has wafted from the farthest Indies into my arms.' The marriage was happy, and it ensiu-ed to Guerin hberty and leisure ; but now ' the blind Fury with the abhorred shears ' was hard at hand. Consumption declared itself in him : ' I pass my Hfe,' he writes, with his old playfulness and calm, to his sister, on the 8th of April, 1839, ' within my bed curtains, and wait patiently enough, thanks to Caro's ^ goodness, books, and dreams, for the recovery which the sunshine is to bring with it.' In search 20 of this sunshine he was taken to his native country, Lan- guedoo, but in vain. He died at Le Cayla on' the 19th of July, 1839. The vicissitudes of his inward life during these five years were more considerable. His opinions and tastes imderwent great, or what seem to be great, changes. He came to Paris the ardent partisan of Lamennais : even in April, 1834, after Rome had finally condemned Lamennais, — ' To-night there wUl go forth from Paris,' he writes, ' with his face set to the west, a man whose every step 30 1 would fain follow, and who returns to the desert for which I sigh. M. Feli departs this evening for La Chenaie .' But in October, 1835, — ' I assure you,' he writes to his sister, ' I am at last weaned from M. de Lamennais ; one does not remain a babe and suckling for ever ; I am perfectly freed from his influence.' There was a greater change than this. In 1834 the main cause of Guerin' s aversion to the Uterature of the French romantic school, was that this Uterature, having had a religious origin had ceased to be religious: 'it has forgotten,' he says, 'the 10 house and the admonitions of its Father.' But his friend, '■ His wife. 82 JESSAYS IN CRITICISM M. de Marzan, tells us of a ' deplorable revolution ' which, by 1836, had taken place in him. Guerin had become intimate with the chiefs of this very literature; he no longer went to church ; ' the bond of a common faith, in which our friendship had its birth, existed between us no longer.' Then, again, ' this interregnum was not destined to last.' Reconverted to his old faith by suffering and by the pious efforts of his sister Eugenie, Guerin died a Catholic. His feelings about society imderwent a like change. After ' entering the world with a secret horror,' lo after congratulating himself when he had been some months at Paris on being ' disengaged from the social tumult, out of the reach of those blows which, when I live in the thick of the world, bruise me, irritate me, or utterly crush me,' M. Sainte-Beuve tells us of him, two years afterwards, appearing in society ' a man of the world, elegant, even fashionable ; a talker who could hold his own against the most brilhant talkers of Paris.' In few natures, however, is there really such essential consistency as in Guerin's. He says of himself, in the 20 very beginiiing of his journal : ' I owe everything to poetry, for there is no other name to give to the sum total of my thoughts ; I owe to it whatever I now have pure, lofty, and solid in my soul ; I owe to it all my con- solations in the past ; I shall probably owe to it my future.' Poetry, the poetical instinct, was indeed the basis of his nature ; but to say so thus absolutely is not quite enough. One aspect of poetry fascinated Guerin's imagination and held it prisoner. Poetry is the inter- pretress of the natural world, and she is the interpretress 30 of the moral world ; it was as the interpretress of the natural world that she had Guerin for her mouthpiece. To make magically near and real the life of Nature, and man's life only so far as it is a part of that Nature, was his faculty ; a faculty of naturalistic, not of moral inter- pretation. This faculty always has for its basis a peculiar temperament, an extraordinary delicacy of organisation and susceptibility to impressions ; in exercising it the poet is in a great degree passive (Wordsworth thus speaks of a wise passiveness) ; he aspires to be a sort of human 40 Aeolian-harp, catching and rendering every rustle of MAURICE DE GUfiRIN 83 Nature. To assist at the evolution of the whole life of the world is his craving, and intimately to feel it all : . . . ' the glow, the thrill of life, Where, where do these abound ? ' is what he asks : he resists being riveted and held stationary by any single impression, but would be borne on for ever down an enchanted stream. He goes into religion and out of religion, into society and out of society, not from the motives which impel men in general, but to feel what it lu is all like ; he is thus hardly a moral agent, and, like the passive and ineffectug,! Uranus of Keats's poem, he may say : . . . ' I am but a voice ; My life is but the life of winds and tides ; No more than winds and tides can I avail.' He hovers over the tumult of life, but does not really put his hand to it. No one has expressed the aspirations of this tempera- ment better than Guerin himself. In the last year of his life he writes : — 20 ' I return, as you see, to my old brooding over the world of Nature, that line wliich my thoughts irresistibly take ; a sort of passion which gives me enthusiasm, tears, bursts of joy, and an eternal food for musing ; and yet I am neither philosopher, nor naturalist, nor anything learned whatsoever. There is one word which is the God of my imagination, the tyrant, I ought rather to say, that fasci- nates it, lures it onward, gives it work to do without ceasing, and will finally carry it I know not where ; the word life.' 30 And in one place in his journal he says : — ' My imagination welcomes every dream, every im- pression, without attaching itself to any, and goes on for ever seeking something new.' And again, in another : — ' The longer I live, and the clearer 1 discern between true and false in society, the more does the inclination to live, not as a savage or a misanthrope, but as a solitary man on the frontiers of society, on the outskirts of the world, gain strength and grow in me. The birds come 40 and go and make nests around our habitations, they are G2 84 ESSAYS m CRITICISM fellow-citizens of our farms and hamlets with us ; but they take their flight in a heaven which is boundless, but the hand of God alone gives and measures to them their daily food, but they buUd their nests in the heart of the thick bushes, or hang them in the height of the trees. So would I, too, live, hovering roimd society, and having always at my back a field of liberty vast as the sky.' In the same spirit he longed for travel. ' When one is a wanderer,' he writes to his sister, ' one feels that one fulfils the true condition of humanity.' And the last entry lo in his journal is — ' The stream of travel is full of delight. Oh, who will set me adrift on this Nile ! ' Assuredly it is not in this temperament that the active virtues have their rise. On the contrary, this temperament, considered in itself alone, indisposes for the discharge of them. Something morbid and excessive, as manifested in Guerin, it undoubtedly has. In him, as in Keats, and as in another youth of genius, whose name, but the other day unheard of. Lord Houghton has so gracefully written in the history of English poetry, — ^David Gray, — 20 the temperament, the talent itself, is deeply influenced by their mysterious malady ; the temperament is devouriTtg ; it uses vital power too hard and too fast, paying the penalty in long hours of unutterable exhaustion and in premature death. The intensity of Guerin's depression is described to us by Guerin himself with the same incompar- able touch with which he describes happier feelings ; far oftener than any pleasurable sense of his gift he has ' the sense profound, near, immense, of my misery, of my inward poverty.' And again : ' My inward misery gains so upon me ; I no longer dare look within.' And on another day of gloom he does look within, and here is the terrible analysis : — ' Craving, unquiet, seeing only by glimpses, my spirit is stricken by all those ills which are the sure fruit of a youth doomed never to ripen into manhood. I grow old and wear myself out in the most futile mental strainings, and make no progress. My head seems dying, and when the wind blows I fancy I feel it, as if I were a tree, blowing through a number of withered branches in my top. Study 40 is intolerable to me, or rather it is quite out of my power. MAURICE DE GUfiRIN 85 Mental work brings on, not drowsiness, but an irritable and nervous disgust which drives me out, I know not where, into the streets and public places. The Spring, whose delights used to come every year stealthily and mysteriously to charm me in my retreat, crushes me this year under a weight of sudden hotness. I should be glad of any event which delivered me from the situation in which I am. If I were free I would embark for some distant country where I could begin life anew.' 10 Such is this temperament in the frequent hours when the sense of its own weakness and isolation crushes it to the ground. Certainly it was not for Guerin's happiness, or for Keats's, as men count happiness, to be as they were. Still the very excess and predominance of their tempera- ment has given to the fruits of their genius a unique brilliancy and flavour. I have said that poetry interprets in two ways ; it interprets by expressing with magical felicity the physiognomy and movement of the outward world, and it interprets by expressing, with inspired 20 conviction, the ideas and laws of the inward world of man's moral and spiritual nature. In other words, poetry is interpretative both by having natural magic in it, and by having moral profundity. In both ways it illuminates man ; it gives him a satisfying sense of reaUty ; it reconciles him with himself and the universe. Thus Aeschylus 's ' Spdo-avTi iraOeiv ' and his ' avrjpSiiLOV yeXaariia ' are alike interpretative. Shakspeare interprets both when he says, 'Full many a glorious morning have I seen. Flatter the mountain-tops with sovran eye ; ' 30 and when he says, 'There's a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them as we will.' These great poets unite in themselves the faculty of both kinds of interpretation, the naturalistic and the moral. But it is observable that in the poets who unite both kinds, the latter (the moral) usually ends by making itself the master. In Shakspeare the two kinds seem wonderfully to balance one another ; but even in him the balance leans ; his expression tends to become too little sensuous 40 and simple, too much intellectualised. The same thing 86 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM may be yet more strongly affirmed of Lucretius and of Wordsworth. In Shelley there is not a balance of the two gifts, nor even a co-existence of them, but there is a passion- ate straining after them both, and this is what makes Shelley, as a man, so interesting : I will not now inquire how much Shelley achieves as a poet, but whatever he achieves, he in general fails to achieve natural magic in his expression ; in JMr. Palgrave's charming Treasury may be seen a gallery of his failures.^ But in Keats and Guerin, in whom the faculty of naturalistic interpretation ic is overpoweringly predominant, the natural magic is perfect; when they speak of the world they speak like Adam naming by divine inspiration the creatures ; their expression corre- sponds with the thing's essential reality. Even between Keats and Guerin, however, there is a distinction to be drawn. Keats has, above all, a sense of whatispleasureable and open in the life of Nature ; for him she is the Alma Parens : his expression has, therefore, more than Guerin's. something genial, outward, and sensuous. Guerin has above all a sense of what there is adorable and secret in 20 the life of Nature ; for him she is the Magna Parens ; his expression has, therefore, more than Keats's, something mystic, inward, and profound. So he lived like a man possessed ; with his eye not on his own career, not on the public, not on fame, but on the Isis whose veil he had uplifted. He published nothing : ' There is more power and beauty,' he writes, ' in the well- kept secret of one's-self and one's thoughts, than in the display of a whole heaven that one may have inside one.' ' My spirit,' he answers the friends who urge him to write, 30 ' is of the home-keeping order, and has no fancy for adven- ture ; literary adventure is above all distasteful to it ; for this, indeed (let me say so without the least self-sufficiency), ' Compare, for example, his ' Lines Written in the Euganean Hills,' with Keats's ' Ode to Autumn ' (Oolden Treasury, pp. 256, 284). The latter piece renders Nature ; the former tries to render her. I will not deny, however, that Shelley has natural magic in his rhythm ; what I deny is, that he has it in his language. It always seems to me that the right sphere for Shelley's genius was the sphere of music, not of poetry ; the medium of sounds he can master, but to master the more difficult medium of words he has neither intellectual force enough nor sanity enough. MAURICE DE GUfiRIN 87 it has a contempt. The literary career seems to me ■unreal, both in its own essence and in the rewards which one seeks from it, and therefore fatally marred by a secret absurdity.' His acquaintances, and among them distinguished men of letters, full of admiration for the originality and delicacy of his talent, laughed at his self-depreciation, warmly assured him of his powers. He received their assurances with a mournful incredulity, which contrasts curiously with the self-assertion of poor David Gray, whom I just 10 now mentioned. ' It seems to me intolerable,' he writes, ' to appear to men other than one appears to God. My worst torture at this moment is the over-estimate which generous friends form of me. We are told that at the last Judgment the secret of all consciences will be laid bare to the universe ; would that mine were so this day, and that every passer-by could see me as I am ! ' ' High above my head,' he says at another time, ' far, far away, I seem to hear the murmur of that world of thought and feeling to which I aspire so often, but where I can never attain. I 20 think of those of my own age who have wings strong enough to reach it, but I think of them without jealousy, and as men on earth contemplate the elect and their fehcity.' And, criticising his own composition, ' When I begin a subject, my seK-conceit ' (says this exquisite artist) ' imagines I am doing wonders ; and when I have finished, I see nothing but a wretched made-up imitation, composed of odds and ends of colour stolen from other people's palettes, and tastelessly mixed together on mine.' Such was his passion for perfection, his disdain for all poetical work not 30 perfectly adequate and felicitous . The magic of expression to which by the force of this passion he won his way, will make the name of Maurice de Guerin remembered in literature. I have already mentioned the Centaur, a sort of prose poem by Guerin, which Madame Sand pubhshed after his death. The idea of this composition came to him, M. Sainte-Beuve says, in the course of some visits which he made with his friend, M. Trebutien, a learned antiquarian, to the Museum of Antiquities in the Louvre. The free and wild Ufe which the Greeks expressed by such creations as 40 the Centaur had, as we might weU expect, a strong charm for him ; under the same inspiration he composed a 88 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM Bacchante, which was meant by him to form part of a prose poem on the adventures of Bacchus in India. Real as was the affinity which Guerin's nature had for these subjects, I doubt whether, in treating them, he would have found the full and final employment of his talent. But the beauty of his Centaur is extraordinary ; in its whole conception and expression this piece has in a wonderful degree that natural magic of which I have said so much, and the ' rhythm has a charm which bewitches even a foreigner. An old Centaur on his mountain is supposed to relate lo to Melampus, a human questioner, the life of his youth. Untranslateable as the piece is, I shall conclude with some extracts from it : — 'The Centaur. ' I had my birth in the caves of these mountains. Like the stream of this valley, whose first drops trickle from some weeping rock in a deep cavern, the first moment of my Ufe fell in the darkness of a remote abode, and without breaking the silence. When our mothers draw near to the time of their delivery, they withdraw to the caverns, and 20 in the depth of the loneHest of them, in the thickest of its gloom, bring forth, without uttering a plaint, a fruit silent as themselves. Their puissant milk makes us surmount, without weakness or dubious struggle, the first difficulties of life ; and yet we leave our caverns later than you your cradles. The reason is that we have a doctrine that the early days of existence should be kept apart and enshrouded, as days fiUed with the presence of the gods. Nearly the whole term of my growth was passed in the darkness where I was bom. The recesses of my dwelling ran so far 30 under the mountain, that I should not have known on which side was the exit, had not the winds, when they sometimes made their way through the opening, sent fresh airs in, and a sudden trouble. Sometimes, too, my mother came back to me, having about her the odours of the valleys, or streaming from the waters which were her haunt. Her Tetuming thus, without a word said of the valleys or the rivers, but with the emanations from them hanging about her, troubled my spirit, and I moved up and down restlessly MAUEICE DE GUfiRrN 89 in my darkness. "What is it," I cried, "this outside world whither my mother is borne, and what reigns there in it so potent as to attract her so often ? " At these moments my own force began to make me unquiet. I felt in it a power which could not remain idle ; and betaking myself either to toss my arms or to gallop backwards and forwards in the spacious darkness of the cavern, I tried to make out from the blows which I dealt in the empty space, or from the transport of my course through it, in what 10 direction my arms were meant to reach, or my feet to bear me. Since that day, I have wound my arms round the bust of Centaurs, and round the body of heroes, and round the trunk of oaks ; my hands have assayed the rocks, the waters, plants without number, and the subtlest impres- sions of the air, — ^for I upUft them in the dark and still nights to catch the breaths of wind, and to draw signs whereby I may augur my road ; my feet, — look, Melam- pus, how worn they are ! And yet, all benumbed as I am in this extremity of age, there are days when, in broad 20 sunlight, on the mountain-tops, I renew these gaUopings of my youth in the cavern, and with the same object, brandishing my arms and emplojring all the fleetness which yet is left to me. • •*•■• t ' Melampus, thou who wouldst know the life of the Centaurs, wherefore have the gods willed that thy steps should lead thee to me, the oldest and most forlorn of them all ? It is long since I have ceased to practise any part of their Ufe. I quit no more this mountain summit, to which age has confined me. The point of my arrows now so serves me only to uproot some tough-fibred plant ; the tranquil lakes know me stUl, but the rivers have forgotten me. I will tell thee a little of my youth ; but these recollec- tions, issuing from a worn memory, come like the drops of a niggardly hbation poured from a damaged um. " The course of my youth was rapid and full of agitation. Movement was my life, and my steps knew no bound. One day when I was following the course of a vaUey seldom entered by the Centaurs, I discovered a man making his way up the stream-side on the opposite bank. 40 He was the first whom my eyes had lighted on : I despised 90 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM him. " Behold," I cried, " at the utmost but the half of what I am ! How short are his steps ! and his movement how full of labour ! Doubtless he is a Centaur overthrown by the gods, and reduced by them to drag himself along thus." ' Wandering along at my own wiU like the rivers, feeling wherever I went the presence of Cybele, whether in the bed of the valleys, or on the height of the mountains, I bounded whither I would, like a blind and chainless Ufe. But when Night, filled with the charm of the gods, overtook me on the slopes of the mountain, she guided me to the mouth of lo the caverns, and there tranquiUised me as she tranquillises the billows of the sea. Stretched across the threshold of my retreat, my flanks hidden within the cave, and my head under the open sky, I watched the spectacle of the dark. The sea-gods, it is said, quit during the hovirs of darkness their palaces under the deep ; they seat themselves on the promontories, and their eyes wander over the expanse of the waves. Even so I kept watch, having at my feet an expanse of Ufe hke the hushed sea. My regards had free range, and travelled to the most distant points. Like 20 sea-beaches which never lose their wetness, the line of mountains to the west retained the imprint of gleams not perfectly wiped out by the shadows. In that quarter stiU survived, in pale clearness, mountain-summits naked and pure. There I beheld at one time the god Pan descend, ever soUtary ; at another, the choir of the mystic divinities ; or I saw pass some mountain-nymph charm-struck by the night. Sometimes the eagles of Mount Olympus traversed the upper sky, and were lost to view among the far-off constellations, or in the shade of the dreaming forests. so ' Thou pursuest after wisdom, Melampus, which is the science of the will of the gods ; and thou roamest from people to people hke a mortal driven by the destinies. In the times when I kept my night-watches before the caverns, I have sometimes believed that I was about to surprise the thought of the sleeping Cybele, and that the mother of the gods, betrayed by her dreams, would let fall some of her secrets ; but I have never made out more than sounds which faded away in the murmur of night, or words inarticulate as the bubbling of the rivers, 40 MAURICE DE GUERIN 91 ' " Macareus," one day said the great Chiron to me, whose old age I tended ; " we are, both of us. Centaurs of the mountain ; but how different are our lives ! Of my days aU the study is (thou seest it) the search for plants ; thou, thou art Uke those mortals who have picked up on the waters or in the woods, and carried to their lips, some pieces of the reed-pipe thrown away by the god Pan. From that hour these mortals, having caught from their relics of the god a passion for wild Ufe, or perhaps 1(1 smitten with some secret madness, enter into the wilderness, plunge among the forests, foUow the course of the streams, bury themselves in the heart of the mountains, restless, and haunted by an unknown purpose. The mares beloved of the winds in the farthest Scythia are not wilder than thou, nor more cast down at nightfall, when the North Wind has departed. Seekest thou to know the gods, O Macareus, and from what source men, animals, and the elements of the universal fire have their origin ? But the aged Ocean, the father of all things, keeps looked within his own breast 20 these secrets ; and the nymphs, who stand around, .sing as they weave their eternal dance before him, to cover any sound which might escape from his lips haK-opened by slumber. The mortals, dear to the gods for their virtue, have received from their hands lyres to give delight to man, or the seeds of new plants to make him rich ; but from their inexorable lips, nothing ! " ' Such were the lessons which the old Chiron gave me. Waned to the very extremity of life, the Centaur yet nourished in his spirit the most lofty discourse. so ' For me, Melampus, I decline into my last days, calm as the setting of the constellations. I still retain enterprise enough to climb to the top of the rocks, and there I linger late, either gazing on the wild and restless clouds, or to see come up from the horizon the rainy Hyades, the Pleiades, or the great Orion ; but I feel myself perishing and passing quickly away, like a snow-wreath floating on the stream ; and soon I shall bs mingled with the waters which flow in the vast bosom of Earth,' EUGENIE DE GUfiKIN Who that had spoken of Maurice de Guerin could refrain from speaking of his sister Eugenie, the most devoted of sisters, one of the rarest and most beautiful of souls ? ' There is nothing fixed, no duration, no vitality in the sentiments of women towards one another ; their attach- ments are mere pretty bows of ribbon, and no more. In all the friendships of women I observe this slightness of the tie. I know no instance to the contrary, even in history. Orestes and Pylades have no sisters.' So she herself speaks of the friendships of her own sex. But lo Electra can attach herself to Orestes, if not to Chryso- themis. And to her brother Maurice, Eugenie de Guerin was Pylades and Electra in one. The name of Ma.urice de Guerin, — ^that young man so gifted, so attractive, so careless of fame, and so early snatched away ; who died at twenty-nino ; who, says his sister, 'let what he did be lost with a carelessness so unjust to himself, set no value on any of his own pro- ductions, and departed hence without reaping the rich harvest which seemed his due ; ' who, in spite of his 20 immaturity, in spite of his fragility, exercised such a charm, ' furnished to others so much of that which all live by,' that some years after his death his sister found in a country- house where he used to stay, in the journal of a young girl who had not known him, but who heard her family speak of him, his name, the date of his death, and these words, ' il etait leur vie ' (he was their life) ; whose talent, exquisite as that of Keats, with less of sunlight, abundance, and facility in it than that of Keats, but with more of distinc- tion and power, had ' that winning, deHcate, and beautifully 30 happy turn of expression ' which is the stamp of the master, — ^is beginning to be well known to all lovers of literature. This establishment of Maurice's name was an object for which his sister Eugenie passionately laboured. While he EOGENIE DE GUERIN 93 was alive, she placed her whole joy in the flowering of this gifted nature ; when he was dead, she had no other thought than to make the world know him as she knew him. She outlived him nine years, and her cherished task for those years was to rescue the fragments of her brother's composi- tion, to collect them, to get them published. In pursuing this task she had at first cheering hopes of success ; she had at last baffling and bitter disappointment. Her earthly business was at an end ; she died. Ten years 10 afterwards, it was permitted to the love of a friend, M. Trebutien, to effect for Maurice's memory what the love of a sister had failed to accomplish. But those who read, with delight and admiration, the journal and letters of Maurice de Guerin, could not but be attracted and touched by this sister Eugenie, who met them at every page. She seemed hardly less gifted, hardly less interesting, than Maurice himself. And presently M. Trebutien did for the sister what he had done for the brother. He pubUshed the journal of Mdlle. Eugenie de Guerin, and a few (too few, 20 alas !) of her letters.^ The book has made a profound impression in France ; and the fame which she sought only for her brother now crowns the sister also. Parts of MdUe. de Guerin's journal were several years ago printed for private circulation, and a writer in the National Beview had the good fortune to fall in with them. The bees of our English criticism do not often roam so far afield for their honey, and this critic deserves thanks for having flitted in his quest of blossom to foreign parts, and for having settled upon a beautiful flower found 30 there. He had the discernment to see that Mdlle. de Guerin was well worth speaking of, and he spoke of her with feeling and appreciation. But that, as I have said, was several years ago ; even a true and feeling homage needs to be from time to time renewed, if the memory of its object is to endure ; and criticism must not lose the occasion offered by Mdlle. de Guerin's journal being for the first time published to the world, of directing notice once more to this religious and beautiful character. Eugenie de Guerin was bom in 1805, at the chateau ^ A volume of these, also, has just been brought out by M. Trebutien, One good book, at least, in the literature (tf the yeai' 1865 ! I ! 94 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM of Le Cayla, in Languedoc. Her family, though reduced in circumstances, was noble ; and even when one is a saint one cannot quite forget that one comes of the stock of the Guarini of Italy, or that one counts among one's ancestors a Bishop of Senlis, who had the marshalling of the French order of battle on the day of Bou vines. Le Cayla was a solitary place, with its terrace looking down upon a stream- bed and valley ; ' one may pass days there without seeing any living thing but the sheep, without hearing any Uving thing but the birds.' M. de Guerin, Eugenie's father, lo lost his wife when Eugenie was thirteen years old, and Maurice seven ; he was left with four children, — Eugenie, Marie, Erembert, and Maurice, — of whom Eugenie was the eldest, and Maurice was the youngest. This youngest child, whose beauty and delicacy had made him the object of his mother's most anxious fondness, was commended by her in dying to the care of his sister Eugenie. Maurice at eleven years old went to school at Toulouse ; then he went to the College Stanislas at Paris ; then he became a member of the religious society which M. de Lamennais had formed 20 at La Chenaie in Brittany ; afterwards he lived chiefly at Paris, returning to Le Cayla, at the age of twenty-nine, to die. Distance, in those days, was a great obstacle to frequent meetings of the separated members of a French famUy of narrow means. Maurice de Guerin was seldom at Le Cayla after he had once quitted it, though his few visits to his home were long ones ; but he passed five years, — the period of his sojourn in Brittany, and of his first settlement in Paris,- — ^without coming home at all. In spite of the check from these absences, in spite of the 30 more serious check from a temporary alteration in Maurice's religious feelings, the union between the brother and sister was wonderfully close and firm. For they were knit together, not only by the tie of blood and early attachment, but also by the tie of a common genius. ' We were,' says Eugenie, ' two eyes looking out of one head.' She, on her part, brought to her love for her brother the devotedness of a woman, the intensity of a recluse, almost the solicitude of a mother. Her home duties prevented her from following the wish, which often arose in her, to join a religious 40 sisterhood. There is a trace, — just a trace, — of an early EUGfiNIE DE GUfiRIN 95 attach.ment to a cousin ; but he died when she was twenty- four. After that, she lived for Maurice. It was for Maurice that, in addition to her constant correspondence with him by letter, she began in 1834 her journal, which was sent to him by portions as it was finished. After his death she tried to continue it, addressing it ' to Maurice in Heaven.' But the effort was beyond her strength ; gradually the entries become rarer and rarer ; and on the last day of December, 1840, the pen dropped from her hand : the 10 journal ends. Other sisters have loved their brothers, and it is not her affection for Maurice, admirable as this was, which alone could have made Eugenie de Gueriu celebrated. I have said that both brother and sister had genius : M. Sainte-Beuve goes so far as to say that the sister's genius was equal, if not superior, to her brother's. No one has a more profound respect for M. Sainte-Beuve's critical judgments than I have ; but it seems to me that this particular judgment needs to be a little explained 20 and guarded. In Maurice's special talent, which was a talent for interpreting nature, for finding words which incomparably render the subtlest impressions which nature makes upon us, which bring the intimate life of nature wonderfully near to us, it seems to me that his sister was by no means his equal. She never, indeed, expresses herself without grace and intelligence ; but her words, when she speaks of the life and appearances of nature, are in general but intellectual signs ; they are not like her brother's — symbols equivalent with the thing so symbolised. They bring the notion of the thing described to the mind, they do not bring the feeling of it to the imagination. Writing from the Mvernais, that region of vast woodlands in the centre of France : ' It does one good,' says Eugenie, ' to be going about in the midst of this en- chanting nature, with flowers, birds; and verdure all round one, under this large and blue sky of the Nivemais. How I love the gracious form of it, and those little white clouds here and there, like cushions of cotton, hung aloft to rest the eye in this immensity ! ' It is pretty and graceful, 40 but how different from the grave and pregnant strokes of Maurice's pencil ! ' I have been along the Loire, and seen 96 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM on its banks the plains where nature is puissant and gay ; I have seen royal and antique dweUings, all marked by memories which have their place in the mournful legend of humanity, — Chambord, Blois, Amboise, Chenonceaux ; then the towns on the two banks of the river, — Orleans, Tours, Saumur, Nantes ; and, at the end of it all, the Ocean rumbling. From these I passed back into the interior of the country, as far as Bourges and Nevers, a region of vast woodlands, in which murmurs of an immense range and fulness ' (ce beau torrent de rumeurs, as, with an expres- lo sion worthy of Wordsworth, he elsewhere calls them) ' prevail and never cease.' Words whose charm is like that of the sounds of the murmuring forest itseK, and whose reverberations, like theirs, die away in the irifinite distance of the soul. Maurice's life was in the life of nature, and the passion for it consumed him ; it would have been strange if his accent had not caught more of the soul of nature than Eugenie's accent, whose life was elsewhere. ' You will find in him,' Maurice says to his sister of a friend whom 20 he was recommending to her, ' you wiU find in him that which you love, and which suits you better than anything else, — I'onction, V effusion, la mysticiU.' Unction, the pouring out of the soul, the rapture of the mystic, were dear to Maurice also ; but in him the bent of his genius gave even to those a special direction of its own. In Eugenie they took the direction most native and familiar to them ; their object was the religious Ufe. And yet, if one analyses this beautiful and most interesting character quite to the bottom, it is not exactly as a saint 30 that Eugenie de Guerin is remarkable. The ideal saint is a nature like Saint Fran9ois de Sales or Fenelon ; a nature of ineffable sweetness and serenity, a nature in which struggle and revolt is over, and the whole man (so far as is possible to humaii infirmity) swallowed up in love. Saint Theresa (it is MdUe. de Guerin herself who reminds us of it) endured twenty years of unacceptance and of repulse in her prayers ; yes, but the Saint Theresa whom Christendom Imows is Saint Theresa repulsed no longer ! it is Saint Theresa accepted, rejoicing in love, radiant 40 with ecstasy. MdUe. de Guerin is not one of these saints EUGENIE DE GUfiRIN 97 arrived at perfect sweetness and calm, steeped in ecstasy ; there is something primitive, indomitable in her, which she governs, indeed, but which chafes, which revolts ; somewhere in the depths of that strong nature there is a struggle, an impatience, an inquietude, an ennui, which endures to the end, and which leaves one, when one finally closes her journal, with an impression of profoimd melan- choly. ' There are days,' she writes to her brother, ' when one's nature rolls itself up, and becomes a hedgehog. If 10 I had you here at this moment, here close by me, how I should prick you ! how sharp and hard ! ' ' Poor soul, poor soul,' she cries out to herself another day, ' what is the matter, what would you have ? Where is that which will do you good ? Everything is green, everything is in bloom, all the air has a breath of flowers. How beautiful it is ! well, I will go out. No, I should be alone, and aU this beauty, when one is alone, is worth nothing. What shall I do then ? Read, write, pray, take a basket of sand on my head like that hermit-saint, and walk with it ? Yes, 20 work, work ! keep busy the body which does mischief to the soul 1 I have been too little occupied to-day, and that is bad for one, and it gives a certain ennui which I have in me time to ferment.' A certain ennui which I have' in me : her wound is there. In vain she follows the counsel of Penelon : ' If God tires you, tell him that he tires you.' No doubt she obtained great and frequent solace and restoration from prayer : ' This morning I was suffering ; well, at present I am calm, and this I owe to faith, simply to faith, to an act of faith. I 30 can think of death and eternity without trouble, without alarm. Over a deep of sorrow there floats a divine calm, a suavity which is the work of God only. In vain have I tried other things at a time like this : nothing human comforts the soul, nothing human upholds it :— "A I'enfant il faut sa mere, A mon ame il faut mon Dieu." ' Still the enniii reappears, bringing with it hours of un- utterable forlomness, and making her cling to her one great earthly happiness, — her affection for her brother, — 40 with an intenseness, an anxiety, a desperation in which ABNOLB Q 98 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM there is something morbid, and by which she is occasionally carried into an irritability, a 'jealousy, which she herself is the first, indeed, to censure, which she severely represses, but which nevertheless leaves a sense of pain. Mdlle. de Guerin's admirers have compared her to Pascal, and in some respects the comparison is just. But she cannot exactly be classed with Pascal, any more than with Saint IVangois de Sales. Pascal is a man, and the inexhaustible power and activity of his mind leave him no leisure for ennui. He has not the sweetness and lo serenity of the perfect saint ; he is, perhaps, ' der strenge, kranke Pascal — the severe, morbid Pascal,' — as Gtoethe (and, strange to say, Gfoethe at twenty-three, an age which usually feels Pascal's charm most profoundly) calls him ; but the stress and movement of the lifelong conflict waged in him between his soul and his reason keep him full of fire, full of agitation, and keep his reader, who ■witnesses this conflict, animated and excited ; the sense of forlornness and dejected weariness which clings to Eugenie de Guerin does not belong to Pascal. Eugenie 20 de Guerin is a woman, and longs for a state of firm happi- ness, for an affection in which she may repose ; the inward bliss of Saint Theresa or Penelon would have satisfied her ; denied this, she cannot rest satisfied with the triumphs of self-abasement, with the sombre joy of trampling the pride of life and of reason underfoot, of reducing all human hope and joy to insignificance ; she repeats the magnificent words of Bossuet, words which both Catholicism and Protestantism have uttered with indefatigable iteration : ' On trouve au fond de tout le vide et le neant — at the bottom 30 of everything one finds emptiness and nothingness,' — but she feels, as every one but the true mystic must ever feel, their incurable sterility. She resembles Pascal, however, by the clearness and firmness of her intelligence, going straight and instinctively to the bottom of any matter she is dealing with, and express- ing herself about it with incomparable precision ; never fumbling with what she has to say, never imperfectly seizing or imperfectly presenting her thought. And to this admirable precision she joins a lightness of touch, 40 a feminine ease and grace, a flowing facility which are her EUGENIE DE GUfiRIN 99 own. ' I do not say,' writes her brother Maurice, an excellent judge, ' that I find in myself a dearth of expression ; but I have not this abundance of yours, this productiveness of soul which streams forth, which courses along without ever failing, and always with an infinite charm . ' And writing to her of some composition of hers, produced after her religious scruples had for a long time kept her from the exercise of her talent : ' You see, my dear Tortoise,' he writes, ' that your talent is no illusion, since after a period, 10 I know not how long, of poetical inaction, — a trial to which any haK-talent would have succumbed, — it rears its head again more vigorous than ever. It is really heart-breaking to see you repress and bind down, with I know not what scruples, your spirit, which tends with all the force of its nature to develop itself in this direction. Others have made it a case of conscience for you to resist this impulse, and I make it one for you to follow it.' And she says of herself, on one of her freer days : ' It is the instinct of my life to write, as it is the instinct of the fountain to 20 flow.' The charm of her expression is not a sensuous and imaginative charm like that of Maurice, but rather an intellectual charm ; it comes from the texture of the style rather than from its elements ; it is not so much in the words as in the turn of the phrase, in the happy cast and flow of the sentence. Recluse as she was, she had a great correspondence : every one wished to have letters from her ; and no wonder. To this strength of intelligence and talent of expression she joined a great force of character. Religion had early 30 possessed itself of this force of character, and reinforced it : in the shadow of the Cevennes, in the sharp and tonic nature of this region of southern France, which has seen the Albigensians, which has seen the Camisards, Catholicism too is fervent and intense. Eugenie de Guerin was brought up amidst strong religious influences, and they found in her a nature on which they could lay firm hold. I have said that she was not a saint of the order of Saint Fran9ois de Sales or Fenelon ; perhaps she had too keen an intelli- gence to sufEer her to be this, too forcible and impetuous 40 a character. But I did not mean to imply the least doubt of the reality, the profoundness, of her religious life. She H 2 100 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM was penetrated by the power of religion ; religion was the master -influence of her life ; she derived immense consola- tions from religion, she earnestly strove to conform her whole nature to it ; if there was an element in her which religion could not perfectly reach, perfectly transmute, she groaned over this element in her, she chid it, she made it bow. Almost every thought in her was brought into harmony with religion ; and what few thoughts were not thus brought into harmony were brought into sub- jection. 10 Then she had her affection for her brother ; and this, too, though perhaps there might be in it something a little over-eager, a little too absolute, a little too susceptible, was a pure, a devoted affection. It was not only passionate, it was tender. It was tender, pliant, and self-sacrificing to a degree that not in one nature out of a thousand, — of natures with a mind and will like hers, — ^is found attainable. She thus united extraordinary power of intelligence, extra- ordinary force of character, and extraordinary strength of affection ; and all these under the control of a deep rehgious 20 feeling. This is what makes her so remarkable, so interesting, I shall try and make her speak for herself, that she may show us the characteristic sides of her rare nature with her own inimitable touch. It must be remembered that her journal is written for Maurice only ; in her lifetime no eye but his ever saw it. ' Geci n'est pas pour le public,' she writes ; ' c'est de I'intime, c'est de I'dme, c'est pour un.' ' This is not for the public ; it contains my inmost thoughts, my very soul ; it is for 30 one.' And Maurice, this one, was a kind of second self to her. ' We see things with the same eyes ; what you find beautiful, I find beautiful ; God has made our souls of one piece.' And this genuine confidence in her brother's sym- pathy gives to the entries in her journal a naturalness and simple freedom rare in such compositions. She felt that he would understand her, and be interested in all that she wrote. One of the first pages of her journal relates an incident of the home-life of Le Cayla, the smallest detail of which 40 Maurice liked to hear ; and in relating it she brings this EUGENIE DE GUfiRIN 101 simple life before us. She is writing in November, 1834 : — ' I am furious with the grey cat. The mischievous beast has made away with a little half-frozen pigeon, which I was trying to thaw by the side of the fire. The poor little thing was just beginning to come round ; I meant to tame him ; he would have grown fond of me ; and there is my whole scheme eaten up by a cat ! This event, and all the rest of to-day's history, has passed in the kitchen. Here I take up my abode all the morning 10 and a part of the evening, ever since I am without Mimi.^ I have to superintend the cook ; sometimes papa comes down, and I read to him by the oven, or by the fireside, some bits out of the Antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon Church. This book struck Pierril* with astonishment. " Que de mouts aqui d&dins 1 What a lot of words there are inside it ! " This boy is a real original. One evening he asked me if the soul was immortal ; then afterwards, what a philosopher was ? We had got upon great questions, as you see. When I told him that a philosopher was a 20 person who was wise and learned : " Then, mademoiselle, you are a philosopher." This was said with an air of sim- plicity and sincerity which might have made even Socrates take it as a compliment ; but it made me laugh so much that my gravity as catechist was gone for that evening. A day or two ago Pierril left us, to his great sorrow : his time with us was up on Saint Brice's day. Now he goes about with his little dog, trufiie-hunting. If he comes this way I shall go and ask him if he still thinks I look like a philosopher.' 80 Her good sense and spirit made her discharge with alacrity her household tasks in this patriarchal life of Le Cayla, and treat them as the most natural thing in the world. She sometimes complains, to be sure, of burning her fingers at the kitchen-fire. But when a literary friend of her brother expresses enthusiasm about her and her poetical nature : ' The poetess,' she says, ' whom this gentleman believes me to be, is an ideal being, infinitely removed from the life which is actually mine — a life of occupations, a life of household-business, which takes up ^ The familial name of hei sister Mario. ' A seryant-boy at Le Cayla. 102 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM all my time. How could I make it otherwise ? I am sure I do not know ; and, besides, my duty is in this sort of life, and I have no wish to escape from it.' Among these occupations of the patriarchal life of the cha.telaine of Le Cayla intercourse with the poor fills a prominent place : — ' To-day,' she writes on the 9th of December, 1834, ' I have been warming myself at every fireside in the village. It is a round which Mimi and I often make, and in which I take pleasure. To-day we have been seeing sick lo people, and holding forth on doses and sick-room drinks. " Take this, do that ; " and they attend to us just as if we were the doctor. We prescribed shoes for a little thing who was amiss from having gone barefoot ; to the brother, who, with a bad headache, was lying quite flat, we prescribed a pillow ; the pillow did him good, but I am afraid it will hardly cure him. He is at the beginning of a bad feverish cold : and these poor people live in the filth of their hovels like animals in their stable ; the bad air poisons them. When I come home to Le Cayla I seem to be in a palace.' 20 She had books, too ; not in abimdance, not for the fancying them ; the list of her library is small, and it is enlarged slowly and with difficulty. The Letters of Saint Theresa, which she had long wished to get, she sees in the hands of a poor servant-girl, before she can procure them for herself. ' What then ? ' is her comment : ' very likely she makes a better use of them than I could.' But she has the Imitation, the Spiritval Works of Bossuet and Penelon, the Lives of the Saints, Comeille, Racine, Andre Chdnier, and Lamartine ; Madame de Stael's book on 30 Germany, and French translations of Shakspeare's plays, Ossian, the Vicar of Wakefield, Scott's Old Mortality and Bedgauntlet, and the Promessi Sposi of Manzoni. Above all, she has her own mind ; her meditations in the lonely fields, on the oak-grown hill-side of ' The Seven Springs ; ' her meditations and writing in her own room, her chambrette, her dilicieux chez moi, where every night, before she goes to bed, she opens the window to look out upon the sky, — the balmy moonlit sky of Languedoc. This life of reading, thinking, and writing was the life she liked best, the life 40 that most truly suited her. ' I find writing has become EUGENIE DE GUfiRIN 103 almost a necessity to me. Whence does it arise, this im- pulse to give utterance to the voice of one's spirit, to pour out my thoughts before God and one human being ? I say one human being, because I always imagine that you are present, that you see what I write. In the stillness of a lite like this my spirit is happy, and, as it were, dead to all that goes on upstairs or downstairs, in the house or out of the house. But this does not last long. " Come, my poor spirit," I then say to myself, " we must go back 10 to the things of this world." And I take my spinning, or a book, or a saucepan, or I play with WoK or Trilby. Such a life as this I call heaven upon earth.' Tastes like these, joined with a talent like MdUe. de Guerin's, naturally inspire thoughts of literary composition. Such thoughts she had, and perhaps she would have been happier if she had followed them ; but she never could satisfy herself that to follow them was quite consistent with the religious life, and her projects of composition were gradually relinquished : — 20 ' Would to God that my thoughts, my spirit, had never taken their flight beyond the narrow round in which it is my lot to live ! In spite of all that people say to the contrary, I feel that I cannot go beyond my needlework and my spinning without going too far : I feel it, I believe it : well, then, I will keep in my proper sphere ; however much I am tempted, my spirit shall not be allowed to occupy itseK with great matters until it occupies itself with them in Heaven.' And again : — 30 ' My journal has been untouched for a long while. Do you want to know why ? It is because the time seems to me misspent which I spend in writing it. We owe God an accoiuit of every minute ; and is it not a wrong use of our minutes to employ them in writing a history of our transitory days ? ' She overcomes her scruples, and goes on writing the journal ; but- again and again they return to her. Her brother tells her of the pleasure and comfort something she has written gives to a friend of his in affliction. She 40 answers : — ' It is from the Cross that those thoughts come, which 104 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM your friend finds so soothing, so unspeakably tender. None of them come from me. I feel my own aridity ; but I feel, too, that God, when he will, can make an ocean flow upon this bed of sand. It is the same with so many simple souls, from which proceed the most admirable things ; because they are in direct relation with God, without false science and without pride. And thus I am gradually losing my taste for books ; I say to myself : " What can they teach me which I shall not one day know in Heaven ? let Grod be my master and my study here ! " I try to make lo him so, and I find myself the better for it. I read little ; I go out little ; I plunge myself in the inward life. How infinite are the sayings, doings, feelings, events of that life ! Oh, if you could but see them ! But what avails it to make them known ? God alone should be admitted to the sanc- tuary of the soul.' Beautifully as she says all this, one cannot, I thiuk, read it without a sense of disquietude, without a presenti- ment that this ardent spirit is forcing itseK from its natural bent, that the beatitude of the true mystic will 20 never be its earthly portion. And yet how simple and charming is her picture of the life of religion winch she chose as her ark of refuge, and in which she desired to place all her happiness : — ' Cloaks, clogs, umbrellas, aU the apparatus of winter, went with us this morning to AndiUac, where we have passed the whole day ; some of it at the cure's house, the rest in church. How I like this life of a country Sunday, with its activity, its journeys to church, its^live- liness ! You find all your neighbours on the road ; you 30 have a ciui;sey from every woman you meet, and then, as you go along, such a talk about the poultry, the sheep and cows, the good man and the children ! My great delight is to give a kiss to these children, and see them run away and hide their blushing faces in their mother's gown. They are alarmed at las doumdisilos^ as at a being of another world. One of these little things said the other day to its grandmother, who was talking of coming to see us : " Minirw, you mustn't go to that castle ; there is a black hole there." What is the reason that in all ages40 * The young lady. EUGfiNIE DE GUERIN 105 the noble's cMteau has been an object of terror ? Is it because of the horrors that were committed there in old times ? I suppose so.' This vague horror of the chateau, still lingering in the mind of the French peasant fifty years after he has stormed it, is indeed curious, and is one of the thousand indications how unlike aristocracy on the Continent has been to aristocracy in England. But this is one of the great matters with which Mdlle. de Guerin would not have us occupied ; 30 let us pass to the subject of Christmas in Languedoc : — ' Christmas is come ; the beautiful festival, the one I love most, and which gives me the same joy as it gave the shepherds of Bethlehem. In real truth, one's whole soul sings with joy at this beautiful coming of God upon earth, — a coming which here is announced on all sides of us by music and by our charming nadcdet.^ Nothing at Paris can give you a notion of what Christmas is with us. You have not even the midnight-mass. We all of us went to it, papa at our head, on the most perfect night 20 possible. Never was there a finer 'sky than ours was that midnight ; — so fine that papa kept perpetually throwing back the hood of his cloak, that he might look up at the sky. The ground was white with hoar-frost, but we were not cold ; besides, the air, as we met it, was warmed by the bundles of blazing torchwood which our servants carried in front of us to light us on our way. It was delightful, I do assure you ; and I should like you to have seen us there on our road to church, in those lanes with the bushes along their banks as white as if they were 30 in flower. The hoar-frost makes the most lovely flowers. We saw a long spray so beautiful that we wanted to take it with us as a garland for the communion-table, but it melted in our hands : all flowers fade so soon ! I was very sorry about my garland ; it was mournful to see it drip away, and get smaller and smaller every minute.' The religious life is at bottom everywhere alike ; but it is curious to note the variousness of its setting and out- ward circumstance. Catholicism has these so different from Protestantism ! and in Catholicism these accessories ^ A peculiai peal rung at Chiiatmas-time by the ohuioh bells of Languedoc. 106 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM have, it cannot be denied, a nobleness and amplitude which in Protestantism is often wanting to them. In Catholicism they have, from the antiquity of this form of religion, from its pretensions to universality, from its really wide-spread prevalence, from its sensuousness, something European, august, and imaginative : in Protestantism they often have, from its inferiority in all these respects, some- thing provincial, mean, and prosaic. In revenge. Protes- tantism has a future iDefore it, a prospect of growth in alliance with the vital movement of modem society ; lo while Catholicism appears to be bent on widening the breach between itself and the modem spirit, to be fatally losing itself in the multiplication of dogmas, Mariolatry, and miracle-mongering. But the style and circumstance of actual Catholicism is grander than its present tendency, and the style and circumstance of Protestantism is meaner than its tendency. While I was reading the journal of Mdlle. de Guerin, there came into my hands the memoir and poems of a yoiuig Englishwoman, Miss Emma Tatham ; and one could not but be struck with the singular contrast 20 which the two lives, — ^in their setting rather than in their inherent quality, — ^present. Miss Tatham had not, certainly, Mdlle. de Gueria's talent, but she had a sincere vein of poetic feeling, a genuine aptitude for composition. Both were fervent Christians, and, so far, the two lives have a real resemblance ; but, in the setting of them, what a difference ! The Frenchwoman is a Catholic in Langue- doc ; the Englishwoman is a Protestant at Margate ; Margate, that brick-and-mortar image of English Protes- tantism, representing it in all its prose, all its uncomeli- 30 ness, — ^let me add, all its salubrity. Between the external form and fashion of these two lives, between the Catholic Mdlle. de Guerin's nadalet at the Languedoc Christmas, her chapel of moss at Easter-time, her daily reading of the life of a saint, carrying her to the most diverse times, places, and peoples, — ^her quoting, when she wants to fix her mind upon the stanchness which the religious aspirant needs, the words of Saint Macedonius to a hunter whom he met in the mountains, ' I pursue after God, as you pursue after game,' — her quoting, when she wants to break 40 a village girl of disobedience to her mother, the story of EUGfiNIE DE GUfiRIN 107 the ten disobedient children whom at Hippo Saint Augustine saw palsied ; — between all this and the bare, blank, narrowly English setting of Miss Tatham's Protestantism, her ' union in church-fellowship with the worshippers at Hawley-Square Chapel, Margate ; ' her ' singing with soft, sweet voice, the animating lines — " My Jesus to know, and feel his blood flow, 'Tis life everlsisting, 'tis heaven below ; " ' her ■ young female teachers belonging to the Sunday- 10 school,' and her ' Mr. Thomas Rowe, a venerable class- leader,' — ^what a dissimilarity ! In the ground of the two lives, a likeness ; in all their circumstance, what unlike- ness ! An unlikeness, it will be said, in that which is non- essential and indifferent. Non-essential, — yes ; indifferent, — ^no. The signal want of grace and charm in English Protestantism's setting of its religious life is not an indiffer- ent matter ; it is a real weakness. This ought ye to have done., and not to have left the other undone. I have said that the present tendency of Catholicism, 20 — ^the Catholicism of the main body of the Catholic clergy and laity, — seems likely to exaggerate rather than to remove all that in this form of religion is most repugnant to reason ; but this Catholicism was not that of Mdlle. de Guerin. The insufi&ciency of her Catholicism comes from a doctrine which Protestantism, too, has adopted, although Protes- tantism, from its inherent element of freedom, may find it easier to escape from it ; a doctrine with a certain attraction for all noble natures, but, in the modem world at any rate, incurably sterile, — ^the doctrine of the emptiness so and nothingness of human life, of the superiority of re- noimcement to activity, of quietism to energy ; the doctrine which makes effort for things on this side of the grave a folly, and joy in things on this side of the grave a sin. But her Catholicism is remarkably free from the faults which Protestants commonly think inseparable from Catholicism ; the relation to the priest, the practice of confession, assume, when she speaks of them, an aspect which is not that under which Exeter Hall knows them, but which, — ^unless one is of the number of those who 40 prefer regarding that by which men and nations die to 108 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM regarding that by which they live, — one is glad to study. ' La confession,' she says twice in her journal, ' n'est qu'une expansion du repentir dans I'amour ; ' and her weekly journey to the confessional in the little church of Cahuzao is her ' cher pllerinage ; ' the little church is the place where she has ' laisse taut de miser es.' ' This morning,' she writes, one 28th of November, ' I was up before daylight, dressed quickly, said my prayers, and started with Marie for Cahuzac. When we got there, the chapel was occupied, which I was not sorry for. I like lo not to be hurried, and to have time, before I go in, to lay bare my soul before God. This often takes me a long tiine, because my thoughts are apt to be flying about like these autumn leaves. At ten o'clock I was on my knees, listening to words the most salutary that were ever spoken ; and I went away, feeling myself a better being. Every burden thrown off leaves us with a sense of brightness ; and when the soul has laid down the load of its sins at God's feet, it feels as if it had wings. What an admirable thing is confession ! What comfort, what light, what strength is 20 given me every time after I have said, I have sinned.' This blessing of confession is the greater, she says, ' the more the heart of the priest to whom we confide our repen- tance is like that divine heart which " has so loved us." This is what attaches me to M. Bories.' M. Bories was the cure of her parish, a man no longer young, and of whose loss, when he was about to leave them, she thus speaks : — ' What a grief for me ! how much I lose in losing this faithful guide of my conscience, heart, and mind, of my whole self, which God has appointed to be in his charge, 30 and which let itself be in his charge so gladly ! He knew the resolves which God had put in my heart, and I had need of his help to follow them. Our new cure cannot supply his place : he is so young ! and then he seems so inexperienced, so undecided ! It needs firmness to pluck a soul out of the midst of the world, and to uphold it against the assaults of flesh and blood. It is Saturday, my day for going to Cahuzac ; I am just going there, perhaps I shall come back more tranquil. Grod has always given me some good thing there, in that chapel where I have left behind me so many 10 miseries.' EUGfiNIE DE GUfiRIN 109 Such is confession for her when the priest is worthy ; and, when he is not worthy, she knows how to separate the man from the office : — ' To-day I am going to do something which I dislike ; but I will do it, with God's help. Do not think I am on my way to the stake ; it is only that I am going to confess to a priest in whom I have not confidence, but who is the only one here. In this act of religion the man must always be separated from the priest, and sometimes the man 10 must be annihilated.' The same clear sense, the same freedom from super- stition, shows itself in all her rehgious life. She tells us, to be sure, how once, when she was a little girl, she stained a new frock, and on praying, in her alarm, to an image of the Virgin which hung in her room, saw the stains vanish : even the austerest Protestant will not judge such Mario- latry as this very harshly. But, in general, the Virgin Mary fills, in the religious parts of her journal, no pro- minent place ; it is Jesus, not Mary. ' Oh, how well has 20 Jesus said : " Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden." It is only there, only in the bosom of God, that we can rightly weep, rightly rid ourselves of our burden.' And again : ' The mystery of suffering makes one grasp the belief of somethiiig to be expiated, some- thing to be won. I see it in Jesus Christ, the- Man of Sorrow. It was necessary that the Son of Man should sujfer. That is all we know in the troubles and calamities of life.' And who has ever spoken of justification more impres- 30 sively and piously than Mdlle. de Guerin speaks of it, when, after reckoning the number of minutes she has lived, she exclaims : — ' My God, what have we done with aU these minutes of ours, which thou, too, wilt one day reckon ? WiU there be any of them to count for eternal hfe ? will there be many of them ? wUl there be one of them ? " If thou, Lord, wilt be extreme to mark what is done amiss, Lord, who may abide it ? " This close scrutiny of our time may well make us tremble, all of us who have advanced 40 more than a few steps in life ; for God will judge us other- wise than as he judges the lilies of the field. I have never 110 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM been able to understand the security of those who place their whole reliance, in presenting themselves before God, upon a good conduct in the ordinary relations of human life. As if all our duties were confined within the narrow sphere of this world ! To be a good parent, a good child, a good citizen, a good brother or sister, is not enough to procure entrance into the kingdom of heaven. God demands other things besides these kindly social virtues, of him whom he means to crown with an eternity of glory.' And, with this zeal for the spirit and power of religion, lo what prudence in her counsels of religious practice ; what discernment, what measure ! She has been speaking of the charm of the Lives of the Saints, and she goes on :— ' Notwithstanding this, the Lives of the Saints seem to me, for a great many people, dangerous reading. I would not recommend them to a young girl, or even to some women who are no longer young. What one reads has such power over one's feelings ; and these, even in seek- ing God, sometimes go astray. Alas, we have seen it in poor C.'s case. What care one ought to take with a young 20 person ; with what she reads, what she writes, her society, her prayers, — all of them matters which demand a mother's tender watchfulness ! I remember many things I did at fourteen, which my mother, had she lived, would not have let me do. I would have done anything for God's sake ; I would have cast myself into an oven, and assuredly things like that are not God's will ; he is not pleased by the hurt one does to one's health through that ardent but ill-regulated piety which, whUe it impairs the body, often leaves many a fault flourishing. And, therefore. Saint 30 Fran§ois de Sales used to say to the nuns who asked his leave to go barefoot : " Change your brains and keep your shoes." ' Meanwhile Maurice, in a five years' absence, and amid the distractions of Paris, lost, or seemed to his sister to lose, something of his fondness for his home and its in- mates ; he certainly lost his early reUgious habits and feelings. It is on this latter loss that Mdlle. de Guerin's journal oftenest touches, — with infinite dehcacy, but with infinite anguish : — 40 ' Oh, the agony of being in fear for a soiil's salvation. EUGfiNIE DE GUERIN 111 who can describe it ! That which caused our Saviour the keenest suffering, in the agony of his Passion, was not so much the thought of the torments he was to endure, as the thought that these torments would be of no avail for a multitude of sinners ; for all those who set themselves against their redemption, or who do not care for it. The mere anticipation of this obstinacy and this heedlessness had power to make sorrowful, even unto death, the divine Son of Man. And this feeling aU Christian souls, accord- ifl ing to the measure of faith and love granted them, more or less share.' Maurice returned to Le Cayla in the summer of 1837, and passed six months there. This meeting entirely restored the union between him and his family. ' These six months with us,' writes his sister, ' he Ul, and finding himself so loved by us all, had entirely reattached him to us. Five years without seeing us, had perhaps made him a little lose sight of our affection for him ; having found it again, he met it with all the strength of his own. He 20 had so firmly renewed, before he left us, all family-ties, that nothing but death could have broken them.' The separation in religious matters between the brother and sister gradually diminished, and before Maurice died it had ceased. I have elsewhere spoken of Maurice's rehgious feeling and its character. It is probable that his diver- gence from his sister in this sphere of religion was never so wide as she feared, and that his reunion with her was never so complete as she hoped. ' His errors were passed,' she says, '. his illusions were cleared away ; by the call of 30 his nature, by original disposition, he had come back to sentiments of order. I knew all, I followed each of his steps ; out of the fiery sphere of the passions (which held him but a little moment) I saw him pass into the sphere of the Christian life. It was a beautiful soul, the soul of Maurice.' But the illness which had caused his return to Le Cayla reappeared after he got back to Paris in the wiater of 1837-8. Again he seemed to recover ; and his marriage with a young Creole lady, Mdlle. CaroHne de Gervain, took place in the autumn of 1838. At the end 40 of September in that year Mdlle. de Guerin had joined her brother in Paris ; she was present at his marriage, and 112 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM stayed with him and his wife for some months afterwards. Her journal recommences in April 1839 ; zealously as she had promoted her brother's marriage, cordial as were her relations with her sister-in-law, it is evident that a sense of loss, of loneUnesa, invades her, and sometimes weighs her down. She writes in her journal on the 4th of May : — ' God knows when we shall see one another again ! My own Maurice, must it be our lot to live apart, to find that this marriage, which I had so much share in bringing lo about, which I hoped would keep us so much together, leaves us more asunder than ever ? For the present and for the future, this troubles me more than I can say. My sympathies, my iachnations, carry me more towards you than towards any other member of our family. I have the misfortune to be fonder of you than of anjrthing else in the world, and my heart had from of old built in you its happiness. Youth gone and life declining, I looked forward to quitting the scene with Maurice. At any time of life a great affection is a great happiness ; the spirit 20 comes to take refuge in it entirely. delight and joy which win never be your sister's portion ! Only in the direction of God shall I find an issue for my heart to love as it has the notion of loving, as it has the power of loving.' From such complainings, in which there is undoubtedly something morbid, — complainings which she herself blamed, to which she seldom gave way, but which, in presenting her character, it is not just to put wholly out of sight, — she was called by the news of an alarming return of her brother's illness. For some days the entries in the journal 30 show her agony of apprehension. ' He coughs, he coughs still ! Those words keep echoing for ever in my ears, and pursue me wherever I go ; I cannot look at the leaves on the trees without thinking that the winter wiU come, and then the consumptive die.' Then she went to him and brought him back by slow stages to Le Cayla, dying. He died on the 19th of July, 1839. Thenceforward the energy of life ebbed in her ; but the main chords of her being, the chord of affection, the chord of religious longing, the chord of intelligence, the chord of « sorrow, gave, so long as they answered to the touch at all. EUGfiNIE DE GUfiBIN 113 a deeper and finer sound than ever. Always slie saw before her, ' that beloved pale face ; ' ' that beautiful head, with all its different expressions, smiling, speaking, suffering, dying,' regarded her always : — ' I have seen his coffin in the same room, in the same spot where I remember seeing, when I was a very little girl, his cradle, when I was brought home from Gaillac, where I was then staying, for his chnstening. This christen- ing was a grand one, fuU of rejoicing, more than that of 10 any of the rest of us ; specially marked. I enjoyed myself greatly, and went back to GaUlac next day, charmed with my new little brother. Two years afterwards I came home, and brought with me for him a frock of my own making. I dressed him in the frock, and took him out with me along by the warren at the north of the house, and there he walked a few steps alone, — his first walking alone, — and I ran with delight to tell my mother the news : " Maurice, Maurice has begun to walk by himself ! " — Recollections which, coming back to day, break one's 20 heart ! ' The shortness and suffering of her brother's life filled her with an agony of pity. ' Poor beloved soul, you have . had hardly any happiness here below ; your life has been so short, your repose- so rare. O God, uphold me, stablish my heart in thy faith ! Alas, I have too little of this supporting me ! How we have gazed at him and loved him, and kissed him, — his wife, and we, his sisters ; he lying Hfeless in his bed, his head on the pillow as if he were asleep ! Then we followed him to the churchyard, 30 to the grave, to his last resting-place, and prayed over him, and wept over him ; and we are here again, and I am writing to him again, as if he were staying away from home, as if he were in Paris. My beloved one, can it be, shall we never see one another again on earth ? ' But in heaven ? — and here, though love and hope finally prevailed, the very passion of the sister's longing some- times inspired torturing inqxiietudes : — ' I am broken down with misery. I want to see him. Every moment I pray to God to grant me this grace. 40 Heaven, the world of spirits, is it so far from us ? depth, mystery of the other life which separates us 1 I, who ABNOLD X 114 ESSAYS IN ORITICISM was so eagerly anxious about him, who wanted so to know all that happened to him, — wherever he may be now, it is over ! I follow him into the three abodes : I stop wistfully before the place of bliss ; I pass on to the place of suffering ; — ^to the gulf of fire. My God, my God, no ! Not there let my brother be ! not there ! And he is not : his soul, the soul of Maurice, among the lost . . . horrible fear, no ! But in purgatory, where the soul is cleansed by suffering, where the failings of the heart are expiated, the doubtings of the spirit, the half-yieldings to evil ? lo Perhaps my brother is there and suffers, and calls to us amidst his anguish of repentance, as he used to call to us amidst his bodily suffering : " Help me, you who love me." Yes, beloved one, by prayer. I will go and pray ; prayer has been such a power to me, and I will pray to the end. Prayer ! Oh ! and prayer for the dead ; it is the dew of purgatory.' Often, alas, the gracious dew would not fall ; the air of her soul was parched ; the arid wind, which was some- where in the depths of her being, blew. She marks in her 20 journal the first of May, ' this return of the lovehest month in the year,' only to keep up the old habit ; even the month of May can no longer give her any pleasure : ' Tout^ est change— t^ is changed.' She is crushed by ' the misery which has nothing good in it, the tearless, dry misery, which bruises the heart like a hammer.' ' I am dying to everything. I am dying of a slow moral agony, a condition of unutterable suffering. Lie there, my poor journal ! be forgotten with all this world which is fading away from me. I will write here no more until 30 I come to life again, until God re-awakens me out of this tomb in which my soul lies buried. Maurice, my beloved ! it was not thus with me when I had you ! The thought of Maurice could revive me from the most profound depres- sion : to have him in the world was enough for me. With Maurice, to be buried ahve would have not seemed dull to me.' And, as a burden to this fimereal strain, the old vide et n&ant of Bossuet, profound, solemn, sterile : — ' So beautiful in the morning, and in the evening, that ! « how the thought disenchants one, and turns one from the EUGENIE DE GUfiRlN 115 world ! I can understand that Spanish grandee who, after lifting iip the winding-sheet of a beautiful queen, threw himself into a cloister and became a great saint. I would have aU my friends at La Trappe, in the interest of their eternal welfare. Not that in the world one cannot be saved, not that there are not in the world duties to be discharged as sacred and as beautiful as there are in the cloister, but . . .' And there she stops, and a day or two afterwards her 10 journal comes to an end. A few fragments, a few letters carry us on a Uttle later, but after the 22nd of August, 1845, there is nothing. To make known her brother's genius to the world was the one task she set herself after his death ; in 1840 came Madame Sand's noble tribute to him in the Bevue des Deux Mondes ; then followed projects of raising a yet more enduring monument to his fame, by collecting and publishing his scattered compositions ; these projects I have already said, were baffled ; — ^Mdlle. de Guerin's letter of the 22nd of August, 1845, relates to this dis- 20 appointment. In silence, during nearly three years more, she faded away at Le Cayla. She died on the 31st of May, 1848. M. Trebutien has accomplished the pious task in which MdUe. de Guerin was baffled, and has established Maurice's fame ; by pubhshing this journal he has established Eugenie's also. She was very different from her brother ; but she too, Uke him, had that in her which preserves a reputation. Her soul had the same characteristic quaUty as his talent, — distinction. Of this quality the world is 30 impatient ; it chafes against it, rails at it, insults it, hatea it : it ends by receiving its influence, and by undergoing its law. This quality at last inexorably corrects the world's blunders, and fixes the world's ideals. It procures that the popular poet shall not finally pass for a Pindar, nor the popular historian for a Tacitus, nor the popidar preacher for a Bossuet. To the circle of spirits marked by this rare quaUty, Maurice and Eugenie de Guerin belong ; they will take their place in the sky which these inhabit, and shine close to one another, Iv^ida sidera. 19, HEINRICH HEINE ' I KNOW not if I deserve that a laurel-wreath should one day be laid on my coffin. Poetry, dearly as I have loved it, has always been to me but a divine plaything. I have never attached any great value to poetical fame ; and I trouble myself very little whether people praise my verses or blame them. But lay on my coffin a sword ; for I was a brave soldier in the war of hberation of humanity.' Heine had his fuU share of love of fame, and cared quite as much as his brethren of the genus irritabile whether people praised his verses or blamed them. And he was lo very little of a hero. Posterity will certainly decorate his tomb with the emblem of the laurel rather than with the emblem of the sword. Still, fot his contemporaries, for us, for the Europe of the present century, he is significant chiefly for the reason which he himself in the words just quoted assigns. He is significant because he was, if not pre-eminently a brave, yet a brUHant, a most effective soldier in the war of liberation of humanity. To ascertain the master-cmrent in the literature of an epoch, and to distinguish this from all minor currents, is 20 one of the critic's highest functions ; in discharging it he shows how far he possesses the most indispensable quality of his office, — ^justness of spirit. The living writer who has done most to make England acquainted with German authors, a man of genius, but to whom precisely this one quality of justness of spirit is perhaps wanting, — I mean Mr. Carlyle, — seems to me in the result of his labours on German literature to afford a proof how very necessary to the critic this quahty is. Mr. Carlyle has spoken admirably of Goethe ; but then Goethe stands before all men's eyes, 30 the manifest centre of German literature ; and from this central source many rivers flow. Which of these rivers is the main stream ? which of the courses of spirit which we see active in Goethe is the course which wiU most influence the future, and attract and be continued by the most HEINRICH HEINE 117 powerful of Goethe's successors ? — that is the question. Mr. Carlyle attaches, it seems to me, far too much impor- tance to the romantic school of Germany, — Tieck, Novalis, Jean Paul Riohter, — and gives to these writers, reaUy gifted as two, at any rate, of them are, an undue prom- inence. These writers, and others with aims and a general tendency the same as theirs, are not the real inheritors and continuators of Goethe's power ; the current of their activity is not the main current of German literature after 10 Goethe. Far more in Heine's works flows this main current ; Heine, far more than Tieck or Jean Paul Richter, is the continuator of that which, in Goethe's varied activity, is the most powerful and vital ; on Heine, of aU German authors who survived Goethe, incomparably the largest portion of Goethe's mantle fell. I do not forget that when Mr. Carlyle was dealing with German literature, Heine, though he was clearly risen above the horizon, had not shone forth with all his strength ; I do not forget, too, that after ten or twenty years many things may come out 20 plain before the critic which before were hard to be dis- cerned by him ; and assuredly no one would dream of imputing it as a fault to Mr. Carlyle that twenty years ago he mistook the central current in German literature, overlooked the rising Heine, and attached undue impor- tance to that romantic school which Heine was to destroy ; one may rather note it as a misfortune, sent perhaps as a dehcate chastisement to a critic, who, — man of genius as he is, and no one recognises his genius more admiringly than I do, — ^has, for the functions of the critic, a little too 30 much of the self-will and eccentricity of a genuine son of Great Britain. Heine is noteworthy, because he is the most important German successor and continuator of Goethe in Goethe's most important line of activity. And which of Goethe's lines of activity is this ? — His line of activity as ' a soldier in the war of liberation of humanity.' Heine himself would hardly have admitted this affilia- tion, though he was far too powerful-minded a man to decry, with some of the vulgar German liberals, Goethe's 40 genius. ' The wind of the Paris Revolution,' he writes after the three days of 1830, ' blew about the candles 118 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM a little in the dark night of Germany, so that the red curtains of a German throne or two caught fire ; but the old watchmen, who do the police of the German kingdoms, are already bringing out the fire-engines, and will k'eep the candles closer snufied for the future. Poor, fast-bound German people, lose not all heart in thy bonds ! The fashionable coating of ice melts off from my heart, my soul quivers and my eyes burn, and that is a disadvantageous state of things for a writer, who should control his subject- matter and keep himself beautifully objective, as theio artistic school would have us, and as Goethe has done ; he has come to be eighty years old doing this, and minister, and in good condition ; — ^poor German people ! that is thy greatest man ! ' But hear Goethe himself : ' If I were to say what I had really been to the Germans in general, and to the young German poets in particular, I should say I had been their liberator.' Modern times find themselves with an immense system of institutions, established facts, accredited dogmas, cus- 20 toms, rules, which have come to them from times not modern. In this system their lite has to be carried for- ward ; yet they have a sense that this system is not of their own creation, that it by no means corresponds exactly with the wants of their actual life, that, for them, it is customary, not rational. The awakening of this sense is the awakening of the modern spirit. The modem spirit is now awake almost everywhere ; the sense of want of correspondence between the forms of modem Europe and its spirit, between the new wine of the eighteenth and so nineteenth centuries, and the old bottles of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, or even of the sixteenth and seven- teenth, almost every one now perceives ; it is no longer dangerous to affirm that this want of correspondence exists ; people are even begimiing to be shy of denying it. To remove this want of correspondence is beginning to be the settled endeavour of most persons of good sense. Dissolvents of the old European system of dominant ideas and facts we must all be, all of us who have any power of working ; what we have to study is that we may not be *o acrid dissolvents of it. HEINRICH HEINE 119 And how did Goethe, that grand dissolvent in an age when there were fewer of them than at present, proceed in his task of dissolution, of liberation of the modem European from the old routine ? He shall tell us himself. ' Through me the German poets have become aware that, as man must live from within outwards, so the artist must work from within outwards, seeing that, make what con- tortions he will, he can only bring to light his own individu- ahty. I can clearly mark where this influence of mine has 10 made itself felt ; there arises out of it a kind of poetry of nature, and only in this way is it possible to be original.' My voice shall never be joined to those which decry Goethe, and if it is said that the foregoing is a lame and impotent conclusion to Goethe's declaration that he had been the liberator of the Germans in general, and of the young German poets in particular, I say it is not. Goethe's profound, imperturbable naturalism is absolutely fatal to aU routine thinking ; he puts the standard, once for all, inside every man instead of outside him ; when he is told, 20 such a thing must be so, there is immense authority and custom in favour of its being so, it has been held to be so for a thousand years, he answers with Olympian polite- ness, ' But is it so ? is it so to me ? ' Nothing could be more really subversive of the foundations on which the old European order rested ; and it may be remarked that no persons are so radically detached from this order, no persons so thoroughly modern, as those who have felt Goethe's influence most deeply. If it is said that Goethe professes to have in this way deeply influenced but a few 30 persons, and those persons poets, one may answer that he could have taken no better way to secure, in the end, the ear of the world ; for poetry is simply the most beautiful, impressive, and widely effective mode of saying things, and hence its importance. Nevertheless the process of liberation, as Goethe worked it, though sure, is undoubtedly slow ; he came, as Heine says, to be eighty years old in thus working it, and at the end of that time the old Middle- Age machine was still creaking oil, the thirty German courts and their chamberlains subsisted in aU their glory ; 10 Goethe himself was a minister, and the visible triumph of the modern spirit over prescription and routine seemed as 120 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM far off as ever. It was the year 1830 ; the German sovereigns had passed the preceding fifteen years in breaking the promises of freedom they had made to their subjects when they wanted their help in the final struggle with Napoleon. Great events were happening in France ; the revolution, defeated in 1815, had arisen from its defeat, and was wresting from its adversaries the power. Heinrich Heine, a young man of genius, born at Hamburg, and with aU the culture of Germany, but by race a Jew ; with warm sympathies for France, whose revolution had given to its lo race the rights of citizenship, and whose rule had been, as is well known, popular in the Rhine provinces, where he passed his youth ; with a passionate admiration for the great French Emperor, with a passionate contempt for the sovereigns who had overthrown him, for their agents, and for their policy, — Heinrich Heine was in 1830 in no humour for any such gradual process of hberation from the old order of things as that which Goethe had followed. His counsel was for open war. With that terrible modem weapon, the pen, in his hand, he passed the remainder of 20 his life in one fierce battle. What was that battle ? the reader will ask. It was a life and death battle with Philis- tinism. Philistinism ! — we have not the expression in English. Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much of the thing. At Soli, I imagine, they did not talk of solecisms ; and here, at the very head-quarters of Goliath, nobody talks of Philistinism. The French have adopted the term dpicier (grocer), to designate the sort of being whom the Germans designate by the term Philistine ; but 30 the French term, — besides that it casts a slur upon a re- spectable class, composed of Uving and susceptible members, while the original Philistines are dead and buried long ago, — is reaUy, I think, in itself much less apt and expressive than the German term. Efforts have been made to obtain in English some term equivalent to Philister or ipicier ; Mr. Garlyle has made several such efforts : ' respectability with its thousand gigs,' he says ; — ^well, the occupant of every one of these gigs is, Mr. Carlyle means, a Philistine. However, the word respectable is far too valuable a word 40 tip be thus perverted from its proper meaning ; if the HEINRICH HEINE 121 English are ever to have a word for the thing we are speak- ing of, — and so prodigious are the changes which the modem spirit is introducing, that even we English shall perhaps one day come to want such a word, — I think we had much better take the term Philistine itself. Philistine must have originally meant, in the" mind of those who invented the nickname, a strong, dogged, un- erdightened opponent of the chosen people, of the children of the light. The party of change, the would-be remodeUers 10 of the old traditional European order, the invokers of reason against custom, the representatives of the modem spirit in every sphere where it is applicable, regarded themselves, with the robust self-coniidence natural to reformers as a chosen people, as children of the Ught. They regarded their adversaries as humdrum people, slaves to routine, enemies to light ; stupid and oppressive, but at the same time very strong. This explains the love which Heine, that Paladin of the modern spirit, has for France ; it explains the preference which he gives to France over 20 Germany : ' the French,' he says, ' are the chosen people of the new religion, its first gospels and dogmas have been drawn up in their language ; Paris is the new Jerusalem, and the Rhine is the Jordan which divides the consecrated land of freedom from the land of the Philistines.' He means that the French, as a people, have shown more accessibility to ideas than any other people ; that prescrip- tion and routine have had less hold upon them than upon any other people ; that they have shown most readiness to move and to alter at the bidding (real or supposed) of 30 reason. This explains, too, the detestation which Heine had for the Enghsh : ' I might settle in England,' he says, in his exile, ' if it were not that I should find there two things, coal-smoke and Englishmen ; I cannot abide either.' What he hated in the English was the ' acht- brittische Beschranktheit,' as he calls it, — the genuine British narrowness. In truth, the Enghsh, profoundly as they have modified the old Middle-Age order, great as is the Uberty which they have secured for themselves, have in all their changes proceeded, to use a famUiar expression, 40 by the rule of thumb ; what was intolerably inconvenient to them they have suppressed, and as they have suppressed 122 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM it, not because it was irrational, but because it was prac- tically inconvenient, they have seldom in suppressing it appealed to reason, but always, if possible, to some pre- cedent, or form, or letter, which served as a convenient instrument for their purpose, and which saved them from the necessity of recurring to general principles. They have thus become, in a certain sense, of all people the most inaccessible to ideas and the most impatient of them ; inaccessible to them, because of their want of familiarity with them ; and impatient of them because they have got lo on so well without them, that they despise those who, not having got on as well as themselves, still make a fuss for what they themselves have done so well without. But there has certainly followed from hence, in this country, somewhat of a general depression of pure intelligence : Philistia has come to be thought by us the true Land of Promise, and it is anjrthing but that ; the bom lover of ideas, the born hater of commonplaces, must feel in this jiountry, that the sky over his head is of brass and iron. The enthusiast for the idea, for reason, values reason, the 20 idea, in and for themselves ; he values them, irrespectively of the practical conveniences which their triumph may obtain for him ; and the man who regards the possession of these practical conveniences as something sufficient in itself, something which compensates for the absence or surrender of the idea, of reason, is, in his eyes, a PhUistine. This is why Heine so often and so mercilessly attacks the liberals ; much as he hates conservatism he hates Philistinism even more, and whoever attacks conservatism itself ignobly, not as a child of Ught, not in the name of the idea, is 30 a Philistine. Our Cobbett is thus for him, much as he dis- liked our clergy and aristocracy whom Cobbett attacked, a Philistine with six fingers on every hand and on every foot six toes, four-and -twenty in number : a Philistine, the staff of whose spear is like a weaver's beam. Thus he speaks of him : — ' While I translate Cobbett's words, the man himself comes bodUy before my mind's eye, as I saw him at that uproarious dinner at the Crown and Anchor Tavern, with his scolding red face and his radical laugh, in which 40 venomous hate mingles with a mocking exultation at his HEINRICH HEINE 123 enemies' surely approaching downfall. He is a chained our, who falls with equal fury on every one whom he does not know, often bites the best friend of the house in his calves, barks incessantly, and just because of this in- cessantness of his barking cannot get listened to, even when he barks at a real thief. Therefore, the distinguished thieves who plunder England do not think it necessary to ' throw the growling Cobbett a bone to stop his mouth. This makes the dog furiously savage, and he shows aU his 30 hungry teeth. Poor old Cobbett ! England's dog ! I have no love for thee, for every vulgar nature my soul abhors ; but thou touchest me to the inmost soul with pity, as I see how thou strainest in vain to break loose and to get at those thieves, who make off with their booty before thy very eyes, and mock at thy fruitless springs and thine impotent howling.' There is balm in PhUistia as well as in GUead. A chosen circle of children of the modern spirit, perfectly emanci- pated from prejudice and commonplace, regarding the 20 ideal side of things in all its efforts for change, passionately despising half -measures and condescension to human folly and obstinacy, — ^with a bewildered, timid, torpid multitude behind, — conducts a country to the ministry of Herr von Bismarck. A nation regarding the practical side of things in its efforts for change, attacking not what is irrational, but what is pressingly inconvenient, and attacking this as one body, ' moving altogether if it move at all,' and treat- ing children of light, like the very harshest of step-mothers, comes to the prosperity and liberty of modern England. 30 For all that, however, Philistia (let me say it again) is not the true promised land, as we JSnglish commonly imagine it to be ; and our exoessiTe neglect of the idea, and con- sequent inaptitude for it, threatens us, at a moment when the idea is beginning to exercise a real power in human society, with serious future inconvenience, and, in the meanwhile, cuts us ofi from the sympathy of other nations, which feel its power more than we do. But, in 1830, Heine very soon found that the fire-engines of the German governments were too much for his direct 40 efforts at incendiarism. ' What demon drove me,' he cries, ' to write my Beisebilder, tp edit a newspaper, to plague 124 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM myself with our time and its interests, to try and shake the poor German Hodge out of his thousand years' sleep in his hole ? What good did I get by it ? Hodge opened his eyes, only to shut them again immediately ; he yawned, only to begin snoring again the next minute louder than ever ; he stretched his stiff ungainly limbs, only to sink down again directly afterwards, and he like a dead man in the old bed of his accustomed habits. I must have rest ; but where am I to find a resting-place ? In Germany I can no longer stay.' lo This is Heine's jesting account of his own efforts to rouse Germany : now for his pathetic account of them ; it is because he unites so much wit with so much pathos that he is so effective a writer : — ' The Emperor Charles the Fifth sate in sore straits, in the Tyrol, encompassed by his enemies. All his knights and courtiers had forsaken him ; not one came to his help. I know not if he had at that time the cheese face with which Holbein has painted him for us. But I am sure that under-lip of his, with its contempt for mankind, stuck 20 out even more than it does in his portraits. How could he but contemn the tribe which in the sunshine of his prosperity had fawned on him so devotedly, and now, in his dark distress, left him all alone ? Then suddenly his door opened, and there came in a man in disguise, and, as he threw back his cloak, the Kaiser recognised in him his faithful Conrad von der Rosen, the court jester. This man brought him comfort and counsel, and he was the court jester ! ■ ' German fatherland ! dear German people ! I am 30 thy Conrad von der Rosen. The man whose proper busi- ness was to amuse thee, and who in good times should have catered only for thy mirth, makes his way into thy prison in time of need ; here, under my cloak, I bring thee thy sceptre and crown ; dost thou not recognise me, my Kaiser ? If I cannot free thee, I wUl at least comfort thee, and thou shalt at least have one with thee who will prattle with thee about thy sorest affliction, and whisper courage to thee, and love thee, and whose best joke and best blood shall be at thy service. For thou, my people, lo art the true Kaiser, the true lord of the land ; thy will is HBINRICH HEINE 125 sovereign, and more legitimate far than that purple Tel est notre plaisir, which invokes a divine right with no better warrant than the anointings of shaven and shorn jugglers ; thy will, my people, is the sole rightful source of power. Though now thou liest down in thy bonds, yet in the end will thy rightful cause prevail ; the day of deliverance is at hand, a new time is beginning. My Kaiser, the night is over, and out there glows the ruddy dawn. 10 ' " Conrad von der Rosen, my fool, thou art mistaken ; perhaps thou takest a headsman's gleaming axe for the sun, and the red of dawn is only blood." ' " No, my Kaiser, it is the sun, though it is rising in the west ; these six thousand years it has always risen in the east ; it is high time there should come a change." ' " Conrad von der Rosen, my fool, thou hast lost the bells out of thy red cap, and it has now such an odd look, that red cap of thine ! " ' " Ah, my Kaiser, thy distress has made me shake my zd head so hard and fierce, that the fool's bells have dropped off my cap ; the cap is none the worse for that." ' " Conrad von der Rosen, my fool, what is that noise of breaking and cracking outside there ? " ' " Hush ! that is the saw and the carpenter's axe, and soon the doors of thy prison wUl be burst open, and thou wilt be free, my Kaiser ! " ' " Am I then really Kaiser ? Ah, I forgot, it is the fool who tells me so ! " ' " Oh, sigh not, my dear master, the air of thy prison 30 makes thee so desponding ! when once thou hast got thy rights again, thou wilt feel once more the bold imperial blood in thy veins, and thou wilt be proud like a Kaiser, and violent, and gracious, and unjust, and smiling, and ungrateful, as princes are." ' " Conrad von der Rosen, my fool, when I am free, what wilt thou do then ? " ' " I wiU then sew new bells on to my cap." ' " And how shall I recompense thy fidelity ? " ' " Ah, dear master, by not leaving me to die in a ditch 1 " ' 40 I wish to mark Heine's place in modern European literature, the scope of his activity, and his value. I cannot 126 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM attempt to give here a detailed account of his life, or a description of his separate works. In May, 1831, he went over his Jordan, the Rhine, and fixed himself in his new Jerusalem, Paris. There, henceforward, he Uved, going in general to some French watering-place in the summer, but making only one or two short visits to Ger- many during the rest of his life. His works, in verse and prose, succeeded each other without stopping ; a collected edition of them, filling seven closely -printed octavo volumes, has been published in America ; ^ in the collected editions lo of few people's works is there so Uttle to skip. Those who wish for a single good specimen of him should read his first important work, the work which made his reputation, the Beisebilder, or ' Travelling Sketches : ' prose and verse, wit and seriousness, are mingled in it, and the mingling of these is characteristic of Heine, and is nowhere to be seen practised more naturally and happily than in his Beisebilder. In 1847 his health, which till then had always been perfectly good, gave way. He had a kind of paralytic stroke. His malady proved to be a softening 20 of the spinal marrow : it was incurable ; it made rapid progress. In May, 1848, not a year after his first attack, he went out of doors for the last time ; but his disease took more than eight years to kill him. For nearly eight years he lay helpless on a couch, with the use of his Umbs gone, wasted almost to the proportions of a child, wasted so that a woman could carry him about ; the sight of one eye lost, that of the other greatly dimmed, and requiring, that it might be exercised, to have the palsied eyelid lifted and held up by the finger ; aU this, and suffering, besides so this, at short intervals, paroxysms of nervous agony. I have said he was not pre-eminently brave ; but in the astonishing force of spirit with which he retained his activity of mind, even his gaiety, amid all his suffering, and went on composing with undiminished fire to the last, he was truly brave. Nothing could clog that aerial hght- ness. ' Pouvez-vous siffler ? ' his doctor asked him one day, when he was almost at his last gasp ; — ' siffler,' as every one knows, has the double meaning of to whistle ' A complete edition has at last appeared in Germany. HEINRICH HEINE 127 and to hiss : — ' Helas ! non,' was his whispered answer ; ' pas meme une com6die de M. Scribe ! ' M. Scribe is, or was, the favourite dramatist of the French Philistine. ' My nerves,' he said to some one who asked him about them in 1855, the year of the Great Exhibition in Paris, ' my nerves are of that quite singularly remarkable miser- ableness of nature, that I am convinced they would get at the Exhibition the grand medal for pain and misery.' He read all the medical books which treated of his com- 10 plaint. ' But,' said he to some one who found him thus engaged, ' what good this reading is to do me I don't know, except that it wiU quaUfy me to give lectures in heaven on the ignorance of doctors on earth about diseases of the spinal marrow.' What a matter of grim seriousness are our own ailments to most of us ! yet with this gaiety Heine treated his to the end. That end, so long in coming, came at last. Heine died on the 17th of February, 1856, at the age of fifty-eight. By his will he forbade that his remains should be transported to Germany. He lies 20 buried in the cemetery of Montmartre, at Paris. His direct political action was nuU, and this is neither to be wondered at nor regretted ; direct political action is not the true function of literature, and Heine was a born, man of letters. Even in his favourite France the turn taken by public affairs was not at all what he wished, though he read French politics by no means as we in England, most of us, read them. He thought things were tending there to the triumph of communism ; and to a champion of the idea like Heine, what there is gross and narrow in 30 communism was very repulsive. ' It is aU of no use,' he cried on his death-bed, ' the future belongs to our enemies, the Communists, and Louis Napoleon is their John the Baptist.' ' And yet,' — ^he added with all his old love for that remarkable entity, so fuU of attraction for him, so profoundly unknown in England, the French people, — ' do not beheve that God lets all this go forward merely as a grand comedy. Even though the Communists deny him to-day, he knows better than they do, that a time will come when they wiU learn to believe in him.' After 1831 40 his hopes of soon upsetting the German Governments had died away, and his propagandism took another, a more 128 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM truly literary, character. It took the character of an intrepid application of the modern spirit to Uterature. To the ideas with which the hurning questions of modem life filled him, he made all his subject-matter minister. He touched all the great points in the career of the human race, and here he but followed the tendency of the wide culture of Germany ; but he touched them with a wand which brought them all under a hght where the modern eye cares most to see them, and here he gave a lesson to the culture of Germany, — so wide, so impartial, that it is lo apt to become slack and powerless, and to lose itself in its materials for want of a strong central idea round which to group all its other ideas. So the mystic and romantic school of Germany lost itself in the Middle Ages, was overpowered by their influence, came to ruin by its vain dreams of renewing them. Heine, with a far profounder sense of the mystic and romantic charm of the Middle Age than Goerres, or Brentano, or Amim, Heine the chief romantic poet of Germany, is yet also much more than a romantic poet ; he is a- great modern poet, he is not 20 conquered by the Middle Age, he has a talisman by which he can feel, — along with but above the power of the fascinating Middle Age itself, — ^the power of modern ideas. A^ French critic of Heine thinks he has said enough in saying that Heine .proclaimed in German countries, with beat of drum, the ideas of 1789, and that at the cheerful noise of his drum the ghosts of the Middle Age took to flight. But this is rather too French an account of the matter. Germany, that vast mine of ideas, had so no need to import ideas, as such, from any foreign country ; and if Heine had carried ideas, as such, from France into Germany, he would but have been carrying coals to New- castle. But that for which France, far less meditative than Germany, is eminent, is the prompt, ardent, and practical application of an idea, when she seizes it, in aU departments of human activity which admit it. And that in which Germany most fails, and by failing in which she appears so helpless and impotent, is just the practical appUcation of her innumerable ideas. ' When Candide,' says Heine lo himself, ' came to Eldorado, he saw in the streets a number HEINRICH HEINE 129 of boys who were playing with gold-nuggets instead of marbles. This degree of luxury made him imagine that they must be the king's children, and he was not a little astonished when he found that in Eldorado gold-nuggets are of no more value than marbles are with us, and that the schoolboys play with them. A similar thing happened to a friend of mine, a foreigner, when he came to Germany and first read German books. He was perfectly astounded at the wealth of ideas which he found in them ; but he soon 10 remarked that ideas in Germany are as plentiful as gold- nuggets in Eldorado, and that those writers whom he had taken for intellectual princes, were in reality only comnion school-boys.' Heine was, as he calls himself, a ' Child of the French Revolution,' an 'Initiator,' because he vigorously assured the Germans that ideas were not counters or marbles, to be played with for their own sake ; because he exhibited in Kterature modem ideas applied with the utmost freedom, clearness, and originality. And therefore he declared that the great task of his life had been the endeavour to 20 establish a cordial relation between France and Germany. It is because he thus operates a junction between the French spirit, and German ideas and German culture, that he founds something new, opens a fresh period, and deserves the attention of criticism far more than the German poets his contemporaries, who merely continue an old period till it expires. It may be predicted that in the literature of other countries, too, the French spirit is destined to make its influence felt, — as an element, in alliance with the native spirit, of novelty and movement, — 30 as it has made its influence felt in German Uterature ; flfty years hence a critic will be demonstrating to our grandchildren how this phenomenon has come to pass. We in England, in our great burst of Uterature during the first thirty years of the present century, had no mani- festation of the modern spirit, as this spirit manifests itself in Goethe's works or Heine's. And the reason is not far to seek. We had neither the German wealth of ideas, nor the French enthusiasm for applying ideas. There reigned in the mass of the nation that inveterate 40 inaccessibility to ideas, that Philistinism, — ^to use the German nickname,— which reacts even on the individual ARNOLD K 130 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM genius that is exempt from it. In our greatest literary epoch, that of the Elizabethan age, English society at large Tvas accessible to ideas, was permeated by them, was viviiied by them, to a degree which has never been reached in England since. Hence the unique greatness in English literature of Shakspeare and his contempo- raries ; they were powerfully upheld by the intellectual life of their nation ; they appUed freely in hterature the then modern ideas, — the ideas of the Renaissance, and the Reformation. A few years afterwards the great EngHsh lo middle class, the kernel of the nation, the class whose intelligent sympathy had upheld a Shakspeare, entered the prison of Puritanism, and had the key turned on its spirit there for two hundred years. He enlargeth a nation, says Job, and straiteneth it again. In the hterary movement of the beginning of the nineteenth century the signal attempt to apply freely the modern spirit was made in England by two members of the aristocratic class, Bjrron and Shelley. Aristocracies are, as such, naturally impenetrable by ideas ; but their individual 20 members have a high courage and a turn for breaking bounds ; and a man of genius, who is the born child of the idea, happening to be born in the aristocratic ranks, chafes against the obstacles which prevent him from freely developing it. But Byron and Shelley did not succeed in their attempt freely to apply the modern spirit in English literature ; they could not succeed in it ; the resistance to baffle them, the want of intelligent sympathy to guide and uphold them, were too great. Their literary creation, compared with the literary creation of Shakspeare and 30 Spenser, compared with the literary creation of Goethe and Heine, is a failure. The best literary creation of that time in England proceeded from men who did not make the same bold attempt as Byron and SheUey. What, in fact, was the career of the chief EngHsh men of letters, their contemporaries ? The greatest of them, Wordsworth, retired (in Middle-Age phrase) into a monastery. I mean, he plunged himself in the inward life, he voluntarily cut himself off from the modern spirit. Coleridge took to opium. Scott became the historiographer royal of feudahsm. 40 Keats passionately gave himself up to a sensuous genius, HEINRICH HEINE 131 to his faculty for interpreting nature ; and he died of consumption at twenty-five. Wordsworth, Scott, and Keats have left admirable works ; far more solid and com- plete works than those which Byron and Shelley have left. But their works have this defect ; — they do not belong to that which is the main current of the literature of modern epochs, they do not apply modem ideas to life ; they constitute, therefore, minor currents, and all other literary work of our day, however popular, which has the same 10 defect, also constitutes but a minor current. Byron and Shelley will be long remembered, long after the inadequacy of their actual work is clearly recognised, for their passionate, their Titanic effort to flow -in the main stream of modern Uterature ; their names will be greater than their writings ; ■Stat magni nominis umbra. Heine's literary good fortune was superior to that of Byron and Shelley. His theatre of operations was Germany, whose Philistinism does not consist in her want of ideas, or in her inaccessibility to ideas, for she 20 teems with them and loves them, but, as I have said, in her feeble and hesitating application of modern ideas to Ufe. Heine's intense modernism, his absolute freedom, his utter rejection of stock classicism and stock romanti- cism, his bringing all things under the point of view of the nineteenth century, were understood and laid to heart by Germany, through virtue of her immense, tolerant intellectualism, much as there was in all Heine said to affront and wound Germany. The wit and ardent modern spirit of France Heine joined to the culture, the sentiment, the 30 thought of Germany. This is what makes him so remark- able ; his wonderful clearness, lightness, and freedom, united with such power of feeling and width of range. Is there anywhere keener wit than in his story of the French abbe who was his tutor, and who wanted to get from him that la religion is French for der Glauhe : ' Six times did he ask me the question : " Henry, what is der Glauhe in French ? " and six times, and each time with a greater burst of tears, did I answer him — ■" It is le cridit." And at the seventh time, his face purple with rage, the infuriated 40 questioner screamed out : " It is la religion ; " and a Tain of cuffs descended upon me, and all the other boys burst K2 132 ESSAYS IN CBITICISM out laughing. Since that day I have never been able to hear la religion mentioned, without feeling a tremor run through my back, and my cheeks grow red with shame.' Or in that comment on the fate of Professor Saalfeld, who had been addicted to writing furious pamphlets against Napoleon, and who was a professor at Gottingen, a great seat, according to Heine, of pedantry and Philistinism : ' It is curious,' says Heine, ' the three greatest adversaries of Napoleon have all of them ended miserably. Castlereagh cut his own throat ; Louis the Eighteenth rotted upon lo his throne ; and Professor Saalfeld is still a professor at Gottingen.' It is impossible to go beyond that. What wit, again, in that saying which every one has heard : ' The Englishman loves hberty like his lawful wife, the Frenchman loves her like his mistress, the German loves her like his old grandmother.' But the turn Heine gives to this incomparable saying is not so well known ; and it is by that turn he shows himself the born poet he is, — full of delicacy and tenderness, of inex- haustible resource, infinitely new and striking : — 20 ' And yet, after all, no one can ever tell how things may turn out. The grumpy Englishman, in an ill-temper with his wife, is capable of some day putting a rope round her neck, and taking her to be sold at Smithfield. The inconstant Frenchman may become unfaithful to his adored mistress, and be seen fluttering about the Palais Royal after another. But the German will never quite abandon his old grandmother ; he will always keep for her a nook by the chimney-corner, where she can tell her fairy stories to the listening children.' 30 Is it possible to touch more delicately and happily both the weakness and the strength of Germany ; — ^pedantic, simple, enslaved, free, ridiculous, admirable Germany ? And Heine's verse, — ^his Lieder ? Oh, the cornfort, after dealing with French people of genius, irresistibly impelled to try and express themselves in verse, launching out into a deep which destiny has sown with so many rocks for them, — ^the comfort of coming to a man of genius, who finds in verse his freest and most perfect expression, whose voyage over the deep of poetry destiny 40 makes smooth ! After the rhythm, to us, at aay rate, with HEINRICH HEINE 133 the German paste in our composition, so deeply unsatis- fying, of— ' Ah ! que me dites-vous, et que vous dit mon ame ? Que dit le ciel a I'aube et la flamme a la flamme 1 ' what a blessing to arrive at rhythms like — 'Take, oh, take those lips away. That so sweetly were forsworn—' or — ' Siehst sehr sterbeblasslioh aua, 10 Dooh getrost ! du bist zu Haua — ' in which one's soul can take pleasure ! The magic of Heine's poetical form is incomparable ; he chiefly uses a form of old German popular poetry, a ballad-form which has more rapidity and grace than any ballad-form of ours ; he employs this form with the most exquisite lightness and ease, and yet it has at the same time the inborn fulness, pathos, and old-world charm of all true forms of popular poetry. Thus in Heine's poetry, too, one per- petually blends the impression of French modernism and 20 clearness, with that of German sentiment and fulness ; and to give this blended impression is, as I have said, Heine's great characteristic. To feel it, one must read him ; he gives it in his form as well as in his contents, and \Qr translation I can only reproduce it so far as his contents give it. But even the contents of many of his poems are capable of giving a certain sense of it. Hero, for instance, is a poem in which he makes his profession of faith to an innocent beautiful soul, a sort of Gretchen, the child of some simple mining people having their hut 30 among the pines at the foot of the Hartz Mountains, who reproaches him with not holding the old articles of the Christian creed : — ' Ah, my child, while I was yet a little boy, while I yet sate upon my mother's knee, I believed in God the Father, who rules up there in Heaven, good and great ; ' Who created the beautiful earth, and the beautiful men and women thereon ; who ordained for sun, moon, and stars their courses. ' When I got bigger, my child, I comprehended yet a 134 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM great deal more than this, and comprehended, and grew intelhgent ; and I believe on the Son also ; ' On the beloved Son, who loved us, and revealed love to us ; and for his reward, as always happens, was crucified by the people. ' Now, when I am grown up, have read much, have travelled much, my heart swells within me, and with my whole heart I beheve on the Holy Ghost. ' The greatest miracles were of his working, and still greater miracles doth he even now work ; he burst in lo sunder the oppressor's stronghold, and he burst in sunder the bondsman's yoke. ' He heals old death-wounds, and renews the old right ; all mankind are one race of noble equals before him. ' He chases away the evil clouds and the dark cobwebs of the brain, which have spoilt love and joy for us, which day and night have loured on us. ' A thousand knights, well harnessed, has the Holy Ghost chosen out to fulfil his will, and he has put courage into their souls. ao ' Their good swords flash, their bright banners wave ; what, thou wouldst give much, my child, to look upon such gallant knights ? ' Well, on me, my child, look ! kiss me, and look boldly upon me ! one of those knights of the Holy Ghost am I.' One has only to turn over the pages of his Bomancero, — a collection of poems written in the first years of his illness, with his whole power and charm still in them, and not, like his latest poems of all, painfully touched by the air of his Matrazzen-gruft, his ' mattress-grave,' — ^to see so Heine's width of range ; the most varied figures succeed one another, — Rhampsinitus, Edith with the Swan Neck, Charles the First, Marie Antoinette, King David, a heroine of Mabille, Melisanda of Tripoli, Richard Coeur de Lion, Pedro the Cruel, Firdusi, Cortes, Dr. Dollinger ; — but never does Heine attempt to be hubsch objectiv, ' beautifully objective,' to become in spirit an old Egyptian, or an old Hebrew, or a Middle-Age knight, or a Spanish adven- turer, or an English royalist ; he always remains Heinrich Heine, a son of the nineteenth century. To give a notion 40 of his tone I will quote a few stanzas at the end of the HEINBICH HEINE 135 Spanish Atridae, in which ho describes, in the character of a visitor at the court of Henry of Transtamare at Segovia, Henry's treatment of the children of his brother, Pedro the Cruel. Don Diego Albuquerque, his neighbour, strolls after dinner through the castle with him : — ' In the cloister-passage, which leads to the kennels where are kept the king's hounds, that with their growling and yelping let you know a long way ofi where they are, 'There I saw, built into the wall, and with a strong 10 iron grating for its outer face, a cell like a cage. ' Two human figures sate therein, two young boys ; chained by the leg, they crouched in the dirty straw. ' Hardly twelve years old seemed the one, the other not much older ; their faces fair and noble, but pale and wan with sickness. ' They were all in rags, almost naked ; and their lean bodies showed wounds, the marks of iU-usage ; both of them shivered with fever.. ' They looked up at me out of the depth of their misery ; 20 " Who," I cried in horror to Don Diegcr, " ^te these pictures of wretchedness t " ' Don Diego seemed embarrassed ; he looked round to see that no one was listening ; then he gave a deep sigh ; and at last, putting on the easy tone of a man of the world, he said : ' " These are a pair of king's sons, who v/ere early left orphans ; the name of their father was King Pedro, the name of their mother, Maria de Padilla. ' " After the great battle of Navarette, when Henry of so Transtamare had reUeved his brother. King Pedro, of the troublesome burden of the crown, ' " And likewise of that still more troublesome burden, which is called life, then Don Henry's victorious magna- nimity had to deal with his brother's children. ' " He has adopted them, as an uncle should ; and he has given them free quarters in his own castle. ' " The room which he has assigned to them is certainly rather small, but then it is cool in summer, and not intoler- ably cold in winter. 40 ' " Their fare is rye-bread, which tastes as sweet as if the goddess Ceres had baked it express for her beloved Proserpine. 136 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM ' " Not unfrequently, too, he sends a scullion to them with garbanzos, and then the young gentlemen know that it is Sunday in Spain. ' " But it is not Sunday every day, and garbanzos do not come every day ; and the master of the hounds gives them the treat of his whip. ' " For the master of the hounds, who has under his superintendence the kennels and the pack, and the nephews' cage also, ' " Is the unfortunate husband of that lemon-faced lo woman with the white ruff, whom we remarked to-day at dinner. ' " And she scolds so sharp, that often her husband snatches his whip, and rushes down here, and gives it to the dogs and to the poor little boys. ' " But his majesty has expressed his disapproval of such proceedings, and has given orders that for the future his nephews are to be treated differently from the dogs. ' " He has determined no longer to entrust the disci- plining of his nephews to a mercenary stranger, but to 20 carry it out with his own hands." ' Don Diego stopped abruptly ; for the seneschal of the castle joined us, and politely expressed his hope that we had dined to our satisfaction.' Observe how the irony of the whole of that, finishing with the grim innuendo of the last stanza but one, is at once truly masterly and truly modem. No account of Heine is complete which does not notice the Jewish element in him. His race he treated with the same freedom with which he treated everything else, 30 but he derived a great force from it, and no one knew this better than he himself. He has excellently pointed out how in the sixteenth century there was a double renaissance, — a Hellenic renaissance and a Hebrew renais- sance, — and how both have been great powers ever since. He himself had in him both the spirit of Greece and the spirit of Judaea ; both these spirits reach the infinite, which is the true goal of all poetry and all art, — ^the Greek spirit by beauty, the Hebrew spirit by sublimity. By his perfection of literary form, by his love of clearness, 40 by his love of beauty, Heine is Greek ; by his intensity, HEINRIOH HEINE 137 by his untamableness, by his ' longing which cannot be uttered,' he is Hebrew. Yet what Hebrew ever treated the things of the Hebrews like this ?— ' There lives at Hamburg, in a one-roomed lodging in the Baker's Broad Walk, a man whose name is Moses Lump ; all the week he goes about in wind and rain, with his pack on his back, to earn his few shillings ; but when on Friday evening he comes home, he finds the candlestick with seven candles lighted, and the table 10 covered with a fair white cloth, and he puts away from him his pack and his cares, and he sits down to table with his squinting wife and yet more squinting daughter, and eats fish with them, fish which has been dressed in beautiful white garlic sauce, sings therewith the grandest psalms of King David, rejoices with his whole heart over the deliverance of the children of Israel out of Egypt, rejoices, too, that all the wicked ones who have done the children of Israel hurt, have ended by taking them- selves off ; that King Pharaoh, Nebuchadnezzar, Haman, 20 Antiochus, Titus, and all such people, are well dead, while he, Moses Lump, is yet alive, and eating fish with wife and daughter ; and I can tell you. Doctor, the fish is delicate and the man is happy, he has no call to torment himself about culture, he sits contented in his reUgion and in his green bed-gown, like Diogenes in his tub, he contemplates with satisfaction his candles, which he on no account will snuff for himself ; and I can tell you, if the candles bum a little dim, and the snufiers-woman, whose business it is to snuff them, is not at hand, and Rothschild the Great 30 were at that moment to come in, with all his brokers, bill discounters, agents, and chief clerks, with whom he conquers the world, and Rothschild were to say : " Moses Lump, ask of me what favour you will, and it shall be granted you ; " — Doctor, I am convinced, Moses Lump would quietly answer: "Snufi me those candles!" and Roth- schild the Great would exclaim with admiration : " If I were not Rothschild, I would be Moses Lump." ' There Heine shows us his own people by its comic side ; in the poem of the Princess Sabbath he shows it to 40 us by a more serious side. The Princess Sabbath, ' the tranquil Princess, pearl and flower of all beauty, fair as 138 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM the Queen of Sheba, Solomon's bosom friend, that blue stocking from Ethiopia who wanted to shine by her esprit, and with her wise riddles made herself in the long run a bore ' (with Heine the sarcastic turn is never far off), this princess has for her betrothed a prince whom sorcery has transformed into an animal of lower race, the Prince Israel. ' A dog with the desires of a dog, he wallows all the week long in the filth and refuse of life, amidst the jeers of the boys in the street. lo ' But every Friday evening, at the twilight hour, sud- denly the magic passes off, and the dog becomes once more a human being. ' A man with the feelings of a man, with head and heart raised aloft, in festal garb, in almost clean garb, he enters the halls of his Father. ' Hail, beloved halls of my royal Father ! Ye tents of Jacob, I kiss with my lips your holy door-posts ! ' Still more he shows us this serious side in his beautiful poem on Jehuda ben Halevy, a poet belonging to ' the 20 great golden age of the Arabian, Old-Spanish, Jewish school of poets,' a contemporary of the troubadours : — ' He, too, — ^the hero whom we sing, — Jehuda ben Halevy, too, had his lady-love ; but she was of a special sort. ' She was no Laura, whose eyes, mortal stars, in the cathedral on Good Friday kindled that world-renowned flame. ' She was no chatelaine, who in the blooming glory of her youth presided at tourneys, and awarded the victor's crown. 30 ' No casuistess in the Gay Science was she, no lady doctrinaire, who deUvered her oracles in the judgment- chamber of a Court of Love. ' She, whom the Rabbi loved, was a woe-begone poor darling, a mourning picture of desolation . . . and her name was Jerusalem.' Jehuda ben Halevy, like the Crusaders, makes his pilgrimage to Jerusalem ; and there, amid the ruins, sings a song of Sion which has become famous among his people : — 40 ' That lay of pearled tears is the wide-famed Lament, HEINRICH HEINE 139 which is sung in all the scattered tents of Jacob throughout the world, ' On the ninth day of the month which is called Ab, on the anniversary of Jerusalem's destruction by Titus Vespasianus. ' Yes, that is the song of Sion, which Jehuda ben Halevy sang with his dying breath amid the holy ruins of Jeru- salem. ' Barefoot, and in penitential weeds, he sate there upon 10 the fragment of a fallen column ; down to his breast fell, ' Like a grey forest, his hair ; and cast a weird shadow on the face which looked out through it, — his troubled pale face, with the spiritual eyes. ' So he sate and sang, like unto a seer out of the fore- time to look upon ; Jeremiah, the Ancient, seemed to have risen out of his grave. ' But a bold Saracen came riding that way, aloft on his barb, lolling in his saddle, and brandishing a naked 20 javelin ; ' Into the breast of the poor singer he plunged his deadly shaft, and shot away like a winged shadow. ' Quietly flowed the Rabbi's life-blood, quietly he oang his song to an end ; and his last dying sigh was Jerusalem ! ' But, most of all, Heine shows us this side in a strange poem describing a pubHe dispute, before King Pedro and his court, between a Jewish and a Christian champion, on the merits of their respective faiths. In the strain of the so Jew all the fierceness of the old Hebrew genius, all its rigid defiant Monotheism, appear : — ' Our God has not died like a poor innocent lamb for mankind ; he is no gushing philanthropist, no declaimer. ' Our God is not love ; caressing is not his line ; but he is a God of thunder, and he is a God of revenge. ' The lightnings of his wrath strike inexorably every sinner, and the sins of the fathers are often visited upon their remote posterity. ' Our God, he is alive, and in his hall of heaven he 40 goes on existing away, throughout all the eternities. ' Our God, too, is a God in robust health, no myth. 140 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM pale and thin as sacrificial wafers, or as shadows by Cocytus. ' Our God is strong. In his hand he upholds sun, moon, and stars ; thrones break, nations reel to and fro, when he knits his forehead. ' Our God loves music, the voice of the harp and the song of feasting ; but the soxmd of church-bells he hates, as he hates the grunting of pigs.' Nor must Heine's sweetest note be unheard, — his plaintive note, his note of melancholy. Here is a strain lo which came from him as he lay, in the winter night, on his ' mattress-grave ' at Paris, and let his thoughts wander home to Germany, ' the great child, entertaining herself with her Christmas-tree.' ' Thou tookest,' — ^he cries to the Gferman exile, — ' Thou tookest thy flight towards sunshine and happi- ness ; naked and poor retumest thou back. German truth, German shirts, — one gets them worn to tatters in foreign parts. ' Deadly pale are thy looks, but take comfort, thou 20 art at home ; one lies warm in German earth, warm as by the old pleasant fireside. ' Many a one, alas ! became crippled, and could get home no more : longingly he stretches out his arms ; God have mercy upon him ! ' God have mercy upon him ! for what remain of the days of the years of his life are few and evil. ' Can it be that I still actually exist ? My body is so shrunk that there is hardly anything of me left but my voice, and my bed makes me think of the melodious grave of the enchanter Merlin, 30 which is in the forest of Broceliand in Brittany, under high oaks whose tops shine like green flames to heaven. Ah, I envy thee those trees, brother Merlin, and their fresh waving ! for over my mattress-grave here in Paris no green leaves rustle ; and early and late I hear nothing but the rattle of carriages, hammering, scolding, and the jingle of the piano. A grave without rest, death without the privileges of the departed, who have no longer any need to spend money, or to write letters, or to compose books. What a melancholy situation ! ' 40 He died, and has left a blemished name ; with his HEINRICH HEINE 141 crying faults, — his intemperate susceptibility, his unsoru- pulousness in passion, lus inconceivable attacks on his enemies, his still more inconceivable attacks on his friends, his want of generosity, his sensuality, his incessant mocking, ■ — ^how could it be otherwise ? Not only was he not one of Mr. Carlyle's ' respectable ' people, he was profoundly disrespectable ; and not even the merit of not being a Philistine can make up for a man's being that. To his intellectual deliverance there was an addition of some- 10 thing else wanting, and that something else was something immense ; the old-fashioned, laborious, eternally needful moral deliverance. Goethe says that he was deficient in love ; to me his weakness seems to be not so much a deficiency in love as a deficiency in self-respect, in true dignity of character. But on this negative side of one's criticism of a man of great genius, I for my part, when I have once clearly marked that this negative side is and must be there, have no pleasure in dwelling. I prefer to say of Heine something positive. He is not an 20 adequate interpreter of the modem world. He is only a brilliant soldier in the war of liberation of humanity. But, such as he is, he is (and posterity too, I am quite sure, will say this), in the European poetry of that quarter of a century which follows the death of Goethe, incomparably the most important figure. What a spendthrift, one is tempted to cry, is Nature ! With what prodigality, in the march of generations, she employs human power, content to gather almost always little result from it, sometimes none ! Look at Byron, 80 that Byron whom the present generation of Englishmen are forgetting ; Byron, the greatest natural force, the greatest elementary power, I cannot but think, which has appeared in our literature since Shakspeare. And what became of this wonderful production of nature ? He shattered himself, he inevitably shattered himself to pieces, against the huge, black, cloud-topped, interminable precipice of British Philistinism. But Byron, it may be said, was eminent only by his genius, only by his inborn force and fire ; he had not the intellectual equipment of 40 a supreme modem poet ; except for his genius he was an ordinary nineteenth-century English gentleman, with Uttle 142 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM culture and with no ideas. Well, then, look at Heine. Heine had all the culture of Germany ; in his head fermented all the ideas of modem Europe. And what have we got from Heine ? A half-result, for want of moral balance, and of nobleness of soul and character. That is what I say ; there is so much power, so many seem able to run well, so many give promise of running well ; so few reach the goal, so few are chosen. Many an called, few chosen. PAGAN AND MEDIAEVAL RELIGIOUS SENTIMENT • I BEAD the other day in the Dublin Review : — ' We Catholics are apt to be cowed and scared by the lordly oppression of public opinion, and not to bear ourselves as men in the face of the anti-CathoUc society of England. It is good to have an habitual consciousness that the public opinion of Catholic Europe looks upon Protestant England with a mixture of impatience and compassion, which more than balances the arrogance of the English people towards the Catholic Church in these countries.' 10 The Holy Catholic Church, Apostolic and Roman, can take very good care of herself, and I am not going to defend her against the scorns of Exeter Hall. Catholicism is not a great visible force in this country, and the mass of mankind will always treat lightly even things the most venerable, if they do not present themselves as visible forces before its eyes. In Catholic countries, as the Dublin Review itself says with triumph, they make very little account of the greatness of Exeter Hall. The majority has eyes only for the things of the majority, and 20 in England the immense majority is Protestant. And yet, in spite of all the shocks which the feeling of a good Catholic , like the writer in the Dublin Review, has in this Protestant country inevitably to undergo, in spite of the contemptuous insensibility to the grandeur of Rome which he finds so general and so hard to bear, how much has he to console him, how many acts of homage to the greatness of his religion may he see if he has his eyes open ! I will tell him of one of them. Let him go in London to that delightful spot, that Happy Island in Bloomsbury, the reading-room so of the British Museum. Let him visit its sacred quarter, the region where its theological books are placed. I am almost afraid to say what he will find there, for fear Mr. Spurgeon, like a second Caliph Omar, should give the library 144 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM to the flames. He will find an immense Catholic work, the collection of the Abbe Migne, lording it over that whole region, reducing to insignificance the feeble Pro- testant forces which hang upon its skirts. Protestantism is duly represented, indeed : the librarian knows his business too well to suffer it to be otherwise ; all the varieties of Protestantism are there ; there is the Library of Anglo -Catholic Theology, learned, decorous, exemplary, but a little uninteresting ; there are the works of Calvin, rigid, militant, menacing ; there are the works of Dr. lo Chalmers, the Scotch thistle vahantly doing duty as the rose of Sharon, but keeping something very Scotch about it all the time ; there are the works of Dr. Channing, the last word of religious philosophy in a land where every one has some culture and where superiorities are discounte- nanced, — the flower of moral and intelligent mediocrity. But how are all these divided against one another, and how, though they were all united, are they dwarfed by the Catholic Leviathan, their neighbour ! Majestic in its blue and gold unity, this fills shelf after shelf and compartment 20 after compartment, its right mounting up into heaven among the white folios of the Acta Sanctorum, its left plunging down into hell among the yellow octavos of the Law Digest. Everything is there , in that immsnsePatrologiae Cursus Gomxiletus, in that Encyclopedic Theologique, that Nouvelle Encyclojp&die Thiologique, that Troisihne Encyclo- pedie Theologique ; religion, philosophy, history, biography, arts, sciences, bibliography, gossip. The work embraces the whole range of human interests ; like one of the great Middle -Age Cathedrals, it is in itself a study for a life. Like 30 the net in Scripture, it drags everything to land, bad and good, lay and ecclesiastical, sacred and profane, so that it be but matter of human concern. Wide-embracing as the power whose product it is ! a power, for history at any rate, eminently the Church ; not, perhaps, the Church of the future, but indisputably the Church of the past, and, in the past, the Church of the multitude. This is why the man of imagination — ^nay, and the philosopher too, in spite of her propensity to burn him — will always have a weakness for the Catholic Church ; 40 because of the rich treasures of human life which have PAGAN AND MEDIAEVAL SENTIMENT 145 been stored within her pale. The mention of other religious bodies, or of their leaders, at once calls up in our mind the thought of men of a definite type as their adherents ; the mention of Catholicism suggests no such special following. Anglicanism suggests the English episcopate ; Calvin's name suggests Dr. Candlish ; Chalmers's, the Duke of Argyll ; Channing's, Boston society ; but Catholicism suggests, — ^what shall I say ? — all the pell-mell of the men and women of Shakspeare's plays. This abundance the 10 Abbe Migne's collection faithfully refl.ects. People talk of this or that work which they would choose, if they were to pass their life with only one ; for my part I think I would choose the Abbe Migne's collection. Quicquid agunt homines, — everything, as I have said, is there. Do not seek in it splendour of form, perfection of editing ; its paper is common, its type ugly, its editing indifiEerent, its printing careless. The greatest and most baffing crowd of misprints I ever met with in my life occurs in a very important page of the introduction to the Dictionnaire des 20 Apocryphes. But this is just what you have in the world, — quantity rather than quality. Do not seek in it impartiality, the critical spirit ; in reading it you must do the criticism for yourself ; it loves criticism as little as the world loves it. Like the world, it chooses to have things all its ovm way, to abuse its adversary, to back its own notion through thick and thin, to put forward all the pros for its own notion, to suppress all the contras ; it does just aU that the world does, and all that the critical shrmks from. Open the Dictionnaire des Erreurs Sociales : ' The religious persecu- aotions of Henry the Eighth's and Edward the Sixth's time abated a little in the reign of Mary, to break out again with new fury in the reign of Elizabeth.' There is a summary of the history of religious persecution under the Tudors ! But how unreasonable to reproach the Abbe Migne's work vrith wanting a criticism, which, by the very nature of things, it caimot have, and not rather to be grateful to it for its abundance, its variety, its infinite suggestiveness, its happy adoption, in many a delicate circumstance, of the urbane tone and temper of the man 40 of the world, instead of the acrid tone and temper of the fanatic ! 148 ESSAYS m CRITICISM Still, in spite of their fascinations, the contents of this collection sometimes rouse the critical spirit within one. It happened that lately, after I had been thinking much of Marcus Aurelius and his times, I took down the Dic- tionnaire des Origines du Ghristianisme, to see what it had to say about paganism and pagans. I found much what I expected. I read the article, Bivilation BvangMique, sa NecessitL There I found what a sink of iniquity was the whole pagan world ; how one Roman fed Ws oysters on his slaves, how another put a slave to death that lo a curious friend might see what dying was like.; how Galen's mother tore and bit her waiting-women when she was in a passion with them. I found this account of the religion of paganism : ' Paganism invented a mob of divinities with the most hateful character, and attributed to them the most monstrous and abominable crimes. It personified in them drunkenness, incest, kidnapping, adultery, sensuality, knavery, cruelty, and rage.' And I found that from this religion there followed such practice as was to be expected : ' What must naturally have been 20 the state of morals mider the influence of such a religion, which penetrated with its own spirit the public life, the family life, and the individual lite of antiquity t ' The colours in this picture are laid on very thick, and I for my part cannot believe that any human societies, with a religion and practice such as those just described, could ever have endured as the societies of Greece and Rome endured, still less have done what the societies of Greece and Rome did. We are not brought far by descriptions of the vices of great cities, or even of indi-30 viduals driven mad by unboimded means of self-indulgence. Feudal and aristocratic hfe in Christendom has produced horrors of selfishness and cruelty not surpassed by the grandee of pagan Rome ; and then, again, in antiquity there is Marcus AureHus's mother to set against Galen's. Eminent examples of vice and virtue in individuals prove httle as to the state of societies. What, under the first emperors, was the condition of the Roman poor upon the Aventine compared with that of our poor ia Spitalfields and Bethnal Green ? What, in comfort, morals, and happi- 40 uess, were the rural population of the Sabine country PAGAN AND MEDIAEVAL SENTIMENT 147 under Augustus's rule, compared with the rural population of Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire under the rule of Queen Victoria ? But these great questions are not now for me. Without trying to answer them, I ask myself, when I read such declamation as the foregoing, if I can find anything that wiU give me a near, distinct sense of the real difference in spirit and sentiment between paganism and Christianity, and of the natural effect of this difference upon people 10 in general. I take a representative reUgious poem of paganism, — of the paganism which all the world has in its mind when it speaks of paganism. To be a representa- tive poem, it must be one for popular use, one that the multitude Ustens to. Such a religious poem may be found at the end of one of the best and happiest of iSieocritus's idylls, the fifteenth. In order that the reader may the better go along with me in the hne of thought I am following, I will translate it ; arid, that he may see the medium in which reUgious poetry of this sort is found existing, the 20 society out of which it grows, the people who form it and are formed by it, I will translate the whole, or nearly the whole, of the idyll (it is not long) in which the poem occurs. The idyll is dramatic. Somewhere about two hundred and eighty years before the Christian era, a couple of Syracusan women, stajdng at Alexandria, agreed on the occasion of" a great religious solemnity, — the feast of Adonis, — to go together to the palace of King Ptolemy PhUadelphus, to see the image of Adonis, which the queen ib'sinoe, Ptolemy's wife, had had decorated with 30 peculiar rnagnificence. A hymn, by a celebrated performer,, was to be recited over the image. The names of the two women are Gorgo and Praxinoe ; their maids, who are mentioned in the poem, are called Eunoe and Eutychis. Gorgo comes by appointment to Praxinoe's house to fetch her, and there the dialogue begins : — Gorgo. — Is Praxinoe at home ? Praxinoe. — ^My dear Gorgo, at last! Yes, here I am. Eunoe, find a chair, — get a cushion for it. Gorgo. — It will do beautifully as it is. 40 Praxinoe. — Do sit down. Gorgo. — Oh, this gad-about spirit ! I could hardly L 2 148 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM get to you, Praxinoe, through all the crowd and all the carriages. Nothing but heavy boots, nothing but men in imiform. And what a journey it is ! My dear child, you really live too far off. Praxinoe. — It is all that insane husband of mine. He has chosen to come out here to the end of the world, and take a hole of a place, — for a house it is not, — on purpose that you and I might not be neighbours. He is always just the same ; — anything to quarrel with one ! anything for spite ! lo Oorgo. — My dear, don't talk so of your husband before the little fellow. Just see how astonished he looks at you. Never mind, Zopyrio, my pet, she is not talking about papa. Praxinoe. — Good heavens 1 the child does really under- stand. Oorgo. — Pretty papa ! Praxinoe. — That pretty papa of his the other day (though I told him beforehand to mind what he was about), when I sent him to a shop to buy soap and rouge, brought me home salt instead ; — stupid, great, big, inter- 20 minable animal ! Gorgo. — ^Mine is just the fellow to him. . . . But never mind now, get on your things and let us be off to the palace to see the Adonis. I hear the queen's decorations are something splendid. Praxinoe. — In grand people's houses everything is grand. What things you have seen in Alexandria ! What a deal you will have to teU to anybody who has never been here ! Gorgo. — Come, we ought to be going. 30 Praxinoe. — Every day is holiday to people who have nothing to do. Eunoe, pick up your work ; and take care, lazy girl, how you leave it lying about again ; the cats' find it just the bed they like. Come, stir yourself, fetch me some water, quick ! I wanted the water first, and the girl brings me the soap. Never mind ; give it me. Not all that, extravagant ! Now pour out the water ; — stupid ! why don't you take care of my dress ? That will do. I have got my hands washed as it pleased Grod. Where is the key of the large wardrobe ? Bring it here ;— 10 quick ! PAGAN AND MEDIAEVAL SENTIMENT 149 Gorgo. — Praxinoe, you can't think how well that dress, made full, as you've got it, suits you. Tell me, how much did it cost ? — ^the dress by itseK, I mean. Praxinoe. — ^Don't talk of it, Gorgo : more than eight guineas of good hard money. And about the work on it I have almost worn my life out. Gorgo. — Well, you couldn't have done better. Praxinoe. — ^Thank you. Bring me my shawl, and put my hat properly on my head ; — properly. No, child (to 10 her little hoy), I am not going to take you ; there 's a bogy on horseback, who bites. Cry as much as you like ; I'm not going to have you lamed for life. Now we'll start. Nurse, take the little one and amuse him ; call the dog in, and shut the street-door. {They go out.) Good heavens ! what a crowd of people ! How on earth are we ever to get through all this ? They are like ants : you can't count them. My dearest Gorgo, what will become of us ? here are the royal Horse Guards. My good man, don't ride over me ! Look at that bay horse rearing bolt upright ; 20 what a vicious one ! Eunoe, you mad girl, do take care ! — that horse will certainly be the death of the man on his back. How glad I am now, that I left the child safe at home ! Gorgo. — ^All right, Praxinoe, we are safe behind them ; and they have gone on to where they are stationed. Praxinoe. — Well, yes, I begin to revive again. From the time I was a little girl I have had more horror of horses and snakes than of anything in the world. Let us get on ; here 's a great crowd coming this way upon us. Gorgo {to an old woman). — ^Mother, are you from the 30 palace ? Old Woman. — Yes, my dears. Gorgo. — ^Has one a tolerable chance of getting there ? Old Woman. — ^My pretty young lady, the Greeks got to Troy by dint of trying hard ; trying will do anything in this world. Gorgo. — The old creature has delivered herself of an oracle and departed. Praxinoe. — ^Women can tell you everything about everything, Jupiter's marriage with Juno not excepted. 40 Gorgo. — Look, Praxinoe, what a squeeze at the palace gates 1 150 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM Praxinoe. — Tremendous ! Take hold of me, Gorgo ; and you, Eunoe, take hold of Eutychis ! — ^tight hold, or you'll be lost. Here we go in all together. Hold tight to us, Eunoe ! Oh, dear ! oh, dear ! Grorgo, there 's my scarf torn right in two. For heaven's sake, my good man, as you hope to be saved, take care of my dress ! Stranger. — ^I'U do what I can, but it doesn't depend upon me. Praxinoe. — What heaps of people ! They push like a drove of pigs. lo Stranger. — -Don't be frightened, ma'am, we are all right. Praxinoe. — ^May you be all right, my dear sir, to the last day you live, for the care you have taken of us ! What a land, considerate man ! There is Eunoe jammed in a squeeze. Push, you goose, push ! Capital ! We are all of us the right side of the door, as the bridegroom said when he had locked himself in with the bride. Gorgo. — Praxinoe, come this way. Do but look at that work, how delicate it is ! — how exquisite ! Why, they 20 might wear it in heaven. Praxinoe. — Heavenly patroness of needlewomen, what hands were hired to do that work ? Who designed those beautiful patterns ? They seem to stand up and move about, as if they were real ; — as if they were living things, and not needlework. Well, man is a wonderful creature ! And look, look, how charming he lies there on his silver couch, with just a soft down on his cheeks, that beloved Adonis, — Adonis, whom one loves, even though he is dead ! 30 Another Stranger. — You wretched women, do stop your incessant chatter ! Like turtles, you go on for ever. They are enough to kill one with their broad lingo, — ^nothing but a, a, a. Oorgo. — Lord, where does the man come from ? What is it to you if we are chatterboxes ? Order about your own servants ! Do you give orders to Syracusan women ? If you want to know, we came originally from Corinth, as Bellerophon did ; we speak Peloponnesian. I suppose Dorian women may be allowed to have a Dorian accent. 40 Praxinoe. — Oh, honey-sweet Proserpine, let us have no PAGAN AND MEDIAEVAL SENTIMENT 151 more masters than the one we've got ! We don't the least care for you ; pray don't trouble yourself for nothing. Gorgo. — Be quiet, Praxinoe ! That first-rate singer, the Argive woman's daughter, is going to sing the Adonis hymn. She is the same who was chosen to sing the dirge last year. We are sure to have something first-rate from her. She is going through her airs and graces ready to begin. — So far the dialogue ; and, as it stands in the original, 10 it can hardly be praised too highly. It is a page torn fresh out of the book of human life. What freedom ! What animation ! What gaiety ! What naturalness ! It is said that Theocritus, in composing this poem, borrowed from a work of Sophron, a poet of an earlier and better time ; but, even if this is so, the form is stiU Theocritus's own, and how excellent is that form, how masterly ! And this in a Greek poem of the decadence ; for Theocritus's poetry, after all, is poetry of the decadence. When such is Greek poetry of the decadence, what must be Greek 20 poetry of the prime ? Then the singer begins her hymn : — ' Mistress, who lovest the haunts of Golgi, and Idahum, and high-peaked Eryx, Aphrodite that playest with gold ! how have the delicate-footed Hours, after twelve months, brought thy Adonis back to thee from the ever-flowing Acheron ! Tardiest of the immortals are the boon Hours, but aU mankind wait their approach with longing, for they ever bring something with them. Cypris, Dione's child ! thou didst change — so is the story among men — Berenice so from mortal to immortal, by dropping ambrosia into her fair bosom ; and in gratitude to thee for this, thou of many names and many temples ! Berenice's daughter, Arsinoe, lovely Helen's living counterpart, makes much of Adonis with all manner of braveries. 'All fruits that the tree bears are laid before him, aU treasures of the garden in silver baskets, and alabaster boxes, gold-inlaid, of Syrian ointment ; and all confec- tionery that cunning women make on their kneading-tray, kneading up every sort of flowers with white meal, and 40 all that they make of sweet honey and delicate oil, and all winged and creeping things are here set before him. 152 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM And there are built for him green bowers with wealth of tender anise, and Uttle boy-loves flutter about over them, like young nightingales trying their new wings on the tree, from bough to bough. Oh, the ebony, the gold, the eagle of white ivory that bears aloft his cup-bearer to Kronos- born Zeus ! And up there, see ! a second couch strewn for lovely Adonis, scarlet coverlets softer than sleep itself (so Miletus and the Samian wool-grower will say) ; Cypris has hers, and the rosy-armed Adonis has his, that eighteen or nineteen-year-old bridegroom. His kisses will not lo wound, the hair on his lip is yet light. ' Now, Cjrpris, good-night, we leave thee with thy bride- groom ; but to-morrow morning, with the earliest dew, we will one and all bear him forth to where the waves splash upon the sea-strand, and letting loose our locks, and letting fall our robes, with bosoms bare, we will set up this, our melodious strain : ' " Beloved Adonis, alone of the demigods (so men say) thou art permitted to visit both us and Acheron ! This lot had neither Agamemnon, nor the mighty moonstruck 20 hero Ajax, nor Hector the first-born of Hecuba's twenty children, nor Patroclus, nor Pyrrhus who came home from Troy, nor those yet earher Lapithae and the sons of Deu- calion, nor the Pelasgians, the root of Argos and of Pelops' isle. Be gracious to us now, loved Adonis, and be favour- able to us for the year to come ! Dear to us hast thou been at this coming, dear to us shalt thou be when thou comest again." ' The poem concludes with a characteristic speech from Gorgo : — 30 ' Praxinoe, certainly women 'are wonderful things. That lucky woman to know all that ! and luckier still to have such a splendid voice ! And now we must see about getting home. My husband has not had his dinner. That man is aU vinegar, and nothing else ; and if you keep him waiting for his dinner, he 's dangerous to go near. Adieu, precious Adonis, and may you find us all well when you come next year ! ' So, with the hymn still in her ears, says the incorrigible Gorgo. 40 But what a hymn that is ! Of religious emotion, in our PAGAN AND MEDIAEVAL SENTIMENT 163 acceptation of the words, and of the comfort springing from religious emotion, not a particle. And yet many elements of religious emotion are contained in the beautiful story of Adonis. Symbolically treated, as the thoughtful man might treat it, as the Greek mysteries undoubtedly treated it, this story was capable of a noble and touching appUcation, and could lead the soul to elevating and con- soling thoughts. Adonis was the sun in his summer and in his winter course, in his time of triumph and his time of 10 defeat ; but in his time of triumph still moving towards his defeat, in his time of defeat still returning towards his triumph. Thus he became an emblem of the power of life and the bloom of beauty, the power of human Ufe and the bloom of human beauty, hastening inevitably to diminution and decay, yet in that very decay finding 'Hope, and a renovation without end.' But nothing of this appears in the story as prepared for popular religious use, as presented to the multitude in a popular religious ceremony. Its treatment is not devoid 20 of a certain grace and beauty, but it has nothing whatever that is elevating, nothing that is consoling, nothing that is in our sense of the word religious. The religious cere- monies of Christendom, even on occasion of the most joyful and mundane matters, present the multitude with strains of profoundly religious character, such as the Kyrie eleison and the Te Deum. But this Greek hymn to Adonis adapts itself exactly to the tone and temper of a gay and pleasure-loving multitude, — of Kght-hearted people, like Gorgo and Praxinoe, whose moral nature is 30 much of the same cahbre as that of Phillina in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, people who seem never made to be serious, never made to be sick or sorry. And, if they happen to be sick or sorry, what wiU they do then ? But that we have no right to ask. Phillina, within the enchanted bounds of Goethe's novel, Gorgo and Praxinoe, within the enchanted bounds of Theocritus's poem, never wiU be sick and sorry, never can be sick and sorry. The ideal, cheerful, sensuous, pagan life is not sick or sorry. No ; yet its natural end is in the sort of life which Pompeii and Her- 40 oulaneum bring so vividly before us, — a life which by no 164 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM means in itself suggests the thought of horror and misery, which even, in many ways, gratifies the senses and the understanding ; but by the very intensity and unremitting- ness of its appeal to the senses and the understanding, by its stimulating a single side of us too absolutely, ends by fatiguing and revolting us ; ends by leaving us with a sense of confinement, of oppression, — ^with a desire for an utter change, for clouds, storms, effusion and relief. In the beginning of the thirteenth century, when the clouds and storms had come, when the gay sensuous lo pagan life was gone, when men were not Eving by the senses and understanding, when they were looking for the speedy coming of Antichrist, there appeared in Italy, to the north of Rome, in the beautiful Umbrian country at the foot of the Apennines, a figure of the most magical power and charm, St. Francis. His century is, I think, the most interesting in the history of Christianity after its primitive age, more interesting than even the century of the Reformation ; and one of the chief figures, perhaps the very chief, to which this interest attaches itself, is 20 St. Francis. And why ? Because of the profound popular instinct which enabled him, more than any man since the primitive age, to fit religion for popular use. He brought religion to the people. He founded the most populsir body of ministers of religion that has ever existed in the Church, He transformed monachism by uprooting the stationary monk, delivering him from the bondage of property, and sending him, as a mendicant friar, to be a stranger and sojourner, not in the wilderness, but in the most crowded haunts of men, to console them and to do them good. 30 This popular instinct of his is at the bottom of his famous marriage with poverty. Poverty and suffering are the con- dition of the people, the multitude, the immense majority of mankind ; and it was towards this people that his soul yearned. ' He listens,' it was said of him, ' to those to whom God himself will not listen.' So in return, as no other man he was listened to. When an Umbrian town or village heard of his approach, the whole population went out in joyful procession to meet him, with green boughs, flags, music, and songs of glad- 40 ness. The master, who began with two disciples, could in PAGAN AND MEDIAEVAL SENTIMENT 155 his own lifetime (and he died at forty-four) collect to keep Whitsuntide with him, in presence of an immense multitude, five thousand of his Minorites. And thus he found fulfil- ment to his prophetic cry : ' I hear in my ears the sound of the tongues of all the nations who shall come unto us ; Frenchmen, Spaniards, Germans, Englishmen. The Lord will make of us a great people, even unto the ends of the earth.' Prose could not satisfy this ardent soul, and he made 10 poetry. Latin was too learned for this simple, popular nature, and he composed in his mother tongue, in Italian. The beginnings of the mundane poetry of the ItaUans are in Sicily, at the court of kings ; the beginnings of their rehgious poetry are in Umbria, with St. Francis. His are the humble upper waters of a mighty stream : at the beginning of the thirteenth century it is St. Francis, at the end, Dante. Now it happens that St. Francis, too, hke the Alexandrian songstress, has his hymn for the sun, for Adonis ; Canticle of the Sun, Ccmticle of the Creatures, — 20 the poem goes by both names. Like the Alexandrian hymn, it is designed for popular use, but not for use by King Ptolemy's people ; artless in language, irregular in rhythm, it matches with the childlifce genius that produced it, and the simple natures that loved and repeat^ it : — ' O most high, almighty, good Lord God, to thee belong praise, glory, honour, and all blessing ! ' Praised be my Lord God with all his creatures ; and specially our brother the sun, who brings us the day, and who brings us the light ; fair is he, and shining with a very 30 great splendour : Lord, he signifies to us thee ! ' Praised be my Lord for our sister the moon, and for the stars, the which he has set clear and lovely in heaven. ' Praised be my Lord for our brother the wind, and for air and cloud, calms and aU weather, by the which thou upholdest in life aU creatures. ' Praised be my Lord for our sister water, who is very serviceable unto us, and humble, and precious, and clean. ' Praised be my Lord for our brother fire, through whom thou givest us light in the darkness ; and he is bright, 40 and pleasant, and very mighty, and strong. ' Praised be my Lord for our mother the earth, the 156 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM which doth sustain us and keep us, and bringeth forth divers fruits, and flowers of many colours, and grass. ' Praised be my Lord for all those who pardon one another for his love's sake, and who endure weakness and tribulation ; blessed are they who peaceably shall endure, for thou, most Highest, shalt give them a crown ! ' Praised be my Lord for our sister, the death of the body, from whom no man escapeth. Woe to him who dieth in mortal sin ! Blessed are they who are found walking by thy most holy wUl, for the second death shall lo have no power to do them harm. * Praise ye, and bless ye the Lord, and give thanks unto him, and serve him with great humility.' It is natural that man should take pleasure in his senses. But it is natural, also, that he should take refuge in his heart and imagination from his misery. And when one thinks what human hfe is for the vast majority of man- kind, how little of a feast for their senses it can possibly be, one understands the charm for them of a refuge offered in the heart and imagination. Above all, when one thinks 20 what human life was in the Middle Ages, one understands the charm of such a refuge. Now, the poetry of Theocritus's hymn is poetry treating the world according to the demand of the senses ; the poetry of St. Francis's hjrmn is poetry treating the world according to the demand of the heart and imagination. The first takes the world by its outward, sensible side ; the second by its inward, symboKcal side. The first admits as much of the world as is pleasure-giving ; the second admits the whole world, rough and smooth, painful and so pleasure-giving, all ahke, but aU transfigured by the power of a spiritual emotion, aU brought under a law of super- sensual love, having its seat in the soul. It can thus even say : ' Praised be my Lord for our sister, the death of the body.' But these very words are, perhaps, an indication that we are touching upon an extreme. When we see Pompeii, we can put our finger upon the pagan sentiment in its extreme. And when we read of Monte Alverno and the stigmata ; when we read of the repulsive, because self- 4o caused, sufferings of the end of St. Francis's life ; when we PAGAJM AND MEDIAEVAL SENTIMENT 157 find even him saying, ' I have sinned against my brother the ass,' meaning by these words that he had been too hard upon his own body ; when we find him assailed, even himself, by the doubt ' whether he who had destroyed himself by the severity of his penances could find mercy in eternity,' we can put our finger on the mediaeval Christian sentiment in its extreme. Human nature is neither all senses and understanding, nor all heart and imagination. Pompeii was a sign that for humanity at JO large the measure of sensualism had been over-passed; St. Francis's doubt was a sign that for humanity at large the measure of spiritualism had been over-passed. Humanity, in its violent rebound from one extreme, had swung from Pompeii to Monte Alverno ; but it was sure not to stay there. The Renaissance is, in part, a return towards the pagan spirit, in the special sense in which I have been using the word pagan ; a return towards the life of the senses and the understanding. The Reformation, on the other hand, 20 is the very opposite to this ; in Luther there is nothing Greek or pagan ; vehemently as he attacked the adoration of St. Francis, Luther had himself something of St. Francis in him ; he was a thousand times more akin to St. Francis than to Theocritus or to Voltaire. The Reformation — I do not mean the inferior piece given under that name, by Henry the Eighth and a second-rate company, in this island, but the real Reformation, the Gterman Reformation, Luther's Reformation — was a reaction of the moral and spiritual sense against the carnal and pagan sense ; it was 30 a religious revival like St. Francis's, but this time against the Church of Rome, not within her ; for the carnal and pagan sense had now, in the government of the Church of Rome herself, its prime representative. But the grand reaction against the rule of the heart and imagination, the strong return towards the rule of the senses and understand- ing, is in the eighteenth century. And this reaction has had no more brilliant champion than a man of the nine- teenth, of whom I have already spoken ; a man who could feel not only the pleasurableness but the poetry of the 40 life of the senses (and the life of the senses has its deep poetry) ; a man who, in his very last poem, divided the 158 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM whole world into ' barbarians and Greeks,' — Heinrich Heine. No man has reproached the Monte Alverno extreme in sentiment, the Christian extreme, the heart and imagina- tion subjugating the senses and understanding, more bitterly than Heine ; no man has extolled the Pompeii extreme, the pagan extreme, more rapturously. ' All through the Middle Age these sufferings, this fever, this over-tension lasted ; and we modems still feel in all our limbs the pain and weakness from them. Even those of us who are cured have still to live with a hospital- lo atmosphere all around us, and find ourselves as wretched in it as a strong man among the sick. Some day or other, when humanity shall have got quite well again, when the body and soul shall have made their peace together, the factitious quarrel which Christianity has cooked up between them will appear something hardly comprehensible. The fairer and happier generations, offspring of unfettered unions, that will rise up and bloom in the atmosphere of a religion of pleasure, will smile sadly when they think of their poor ancestors, whose life was passed in melancholy 20 abstinence from the joys of this beautiful earth, and who faded away into spectres, from the mortal compression which they put upon the warm and glowing emotions of cense. Yes, with assurance I say it, our descendants will be fairer and happier than we are ; for I am a believer in progress, and I hold God to be a kind being who has intended man to be happy.' That is Heine's sentiment, in the prime of life, in the glow of activity, amid the brilUant whirl of Paris. I will no more blame it than I blamed the sentiment of the so Greek hymn to Adonis. I wish to decide nothing as of my own authority ; the great art of criticism is to get oneself out of the way and to let humanity decide. Well, the sentiment of the ' religion of pleasure ' has much that is natural in it ; humanity will gladly accept it if it can live by it ; to live by it one must never be sick or sorry, and the old, ideal, Umited, pagan world never, I have said, was sick or sorry, never at least shows itself to us sick or sorry : — ' What pipes and timbrels ! what wild ecstasy ! ' For our imagination, Gorgo and Praxinoe cross the human 40 PAGAN AND MEDIAEVAL SENTIMENT 159 stage chattering in their blithe Doric, — like turtles, as the cross stranger said, — and keep gaily chattering on till they disappear. But in the npw, real, immense, post-pagan world, — ^in the barbarian world, — ^the shock of accident is unceasing, the serenity of existence is perpetually troubled, not even a Greek like Heine can get across the mortal stage without bitter calamity. How does the sentiment of the ' religion of pleasure ' serve then ? does it help, does it console ? Can a man live by it ? Heine again shall 10 answer ; Heine just twenty years older, stricken with incurable disease, waiting for death : — ' The great pot stands smoking before me, but I have no spoon to help myself. What does it profit me that my health is drunk at banquets out of gold cups and in the most exquisite wines, if I myself, while these ovations are going on, lonely and cut off from the pleasures of the world, can only just wet my lips with barley-water ? What good does it do me that all the roses of Shiraz open their leaves and bum for me with passionate tenderness ? 20 Alas ! Shiraz is some two thousand leagues from the Rue d' Amsterdam, where in the solitude of my sick chamber all the perfume I smell is that of hot towels. Alas ! the mockery of God is heavy upon me ! The great author of the universe, the Aristophanes of Heaven, has determined to make the petty earthly author, the so-called Aristophanes of Germany, feel to his heart's core what pitiful needle- pricks his cleverest sarcasms have been, compared with the thunderbolts which his divine humour can launch against feeble mortals ! . . . 30 ' In the year 1340, says the Chronicle of Limburg, all over Germany everybody was strumming and humming certain songs more lovely and delightful than any which had ever yet been known in Gterman countries ; and all people, old and young, the women particularly, were perfectly mad about them, so that from morning till night you heard nothing else. Only, the Chronicle adds, the author of these songs happened to be a young clerk aiHioted with leprosy, and living apart from all the world in a desolate place.. The excellent reader does not require to 40 be told how horrible a complaint was leprosy in the Middle Ages, and how the poor wretches who had this incmable 160 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM plague were banished from society, and had to keep at a distance from every human being. Like living corpses, in a grey gown reaching down to the feet, and with the hood brought over their face, they went about, carrying in their hands an enormous rattle, called Saint Lazarus 's rattle. With this rattle they gave notice of their approach, that every one might have time to get out of their way. This poor clerk, then, whose poetical gift the Limburg Chronicle extols, was a leper, and he sate moping in the dismal deserts of his misery, whilst all Gtermany, gay and lo tuneful, was praising his songs. ' Sometimes, in my sombre visions of the night, I imagine that I see before me the poor leprosy-stricken clerk of the Limburg Chronicle, and then from under his grey hood his distressed eyes look out upon me in a fixed and strange fashion ; but the next instant he disappears, and I hear dying away in the distance, like the echo of a dream, the dull creak of Saint Lazarus's rattle.' We have come a long way from Theocritus there ! the expression of that has nothing of the clear, positive, happy, 20 pagan character ; it has much more the character of one of the indeterminate grotesques of the suffering Middle Age. Profoundness and power it has, though at the same time it is not truly poetical ; it is not natural enough for that, there is too much waywardness in it, too much bravado. But as a condition of sentiment to be popular, — to be a comfort for the mass of mankind, under the pressure of calamity, to live by, — what a manifest failure is this last word of the religion of pleasure ! One man in many millions, a Heine, may console himself, and keep himself 30 erect in suffering, by a colossal irony of this sort, by cover- ing himself and the universe with the red fire of this sinister mockery ; but the many millions cannot, — cannot if they would. That is where the sentiment of a religion of sorrow has such a vast advantage over the sentiment of a rehgion of pleasure ; in its power to be a general, popular, rehgious sentiment, a stay for the mass of mankind, whose lives are full of hardship. It really succeeds in conveying far more joy, far more of what the mass of mankind are so much without, than its rival. I do not mean joy in pros- 40 pect only, but joy in possession, actual enjoyment of the PAGAN AND MEDIAEVAL SENTIMENT 161 world. Mediaeval Christianity is reproached with its gloom and austerities ; it assigns the material world, says Heine, to the devil. But yet what a fulness of delight does St. Francis manage to draw' from this material world itself, and from its commonest and most universally enjoyed elements, — sun, air, earth, water, plants ! His hymn expresses a far more cordial sense of happiness, even in the material world, than the hymn of Theocritus. It is this which made the fortune of Christianity,— its glad- 10 ness, not its sorrow ; not its assigning the spiritual world to Christ and the material world to the devil, but its drawing from the spiritual world a source of joy so abun- dant that it ran over upon the material world and trans- figured it. I have said a great deal of harm of paganism ; and, taking paganism to mean a state of things which it is commonly taken to mean, and which did really exist, no more harm than it well deserved. Yet I must not end without reminding the reader, that before this state of 20 things appeared, there was an epoch in Greek life — in pagan life — of the highest possible beauty and value ; an epoch which alone goes far towards making Greece the Greece we mean when we speak of Greece, — a country hardly less important to mankind than Judaea. The poetry of later paganism lived by the senses and understanding ; the poetry of mediaeval Christianity lived by the heart and imagination. But the main element of the modem spirit's life is neither the senses and understanding, nor the heart and imagination ; it is the imaginative reason. 30 And there is a century in Greek life, — the century preceding the Peloponnesian war, from about the year 530 b. c. to about the year 430, — ^in which poetry made, it seems to me, the noblest, the most successful effort she has ever made as the priestess of the imaginative reason, of the element by which the modem spirit, if it would live right, has chiefly to Uve. Of this effort, of which the four great names are Simonides, Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles, I must not now attempt more than the bare mention ; but it is right, it is necessary, after all I have said, to indicate it. 40 No doubt that effort was imperfect. Perhaps everything, take it at what point in its existence you will, carries ABNOLD -^ 162 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM within itself the fatal law of its own ulterior development. Perhaps, even of the life of Pindar's time, Pompeii was the inevitable bourne. Perhaps the life of their beautiful Greece could not afford to its poets all that fulness of varied experience, all that power of emotion, which ' . . . the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world ' affords to the poet of after-times. Perhaps in Sophocles the thinking-power a little overbalances the religious sense, as in Dante the religious sense overbalances the thinking- lo power. The present has to make its own poetry, and not even Sophocles and his compeers, any more than Dante and Shakspeare, are enough for it. That I will not dis- pute ; nor will I set up the Greek poets, from Pindar to Sophocles, as objects of bUnd worship. But no other poets so well show to the poetry of the present the way it must take ; no other poets have lived so much by the imaginative reason ; no other poets have made their work so well balanced ; no other poets, who have so well satisfied the thinking-power, have so well satisfied the religious 20 sense : — ' Oh ! that my lot may lead me in the path of holy innocence of word and deed, the path which august laws ordain, laws that in the highest empyrean had their birth, of which Heaven is the father alone, neither did the race of mortal men beget them, nor shall oblivion ever put them to sleep. The power of God is mighty in them, and groweth not old.' Let St. Francis — ^nay, or Luther either — beat that 1 JOUBERT Why should we ever treat of any dead authors but the famous ones ? Mainly for this reason : because, from these famous personages, home or foreign, whom we all know so well, and of whom so much has been said, the amount of stimulus which they contain for us has been in a great measure disengaged ; people have formed their opinion about them, and do not readily change it. One may write of them afresh, combat received opinions about them, even interest one's readers in so doing ; but the interest 10 one's readers receive has to do, in general, rather with the treatment than with the subject ; they are susceptible of a lively impression rather of the course of the discussion itself, — its turns, vivacity, and novelty, — ^than of the genius of the author who is the occasion of it. And yet what is really precious and inspiring, in all that we get from literature, except this sense of an immediate contact with genius itself, and the stimTilus towards what is true and excellent which we derive from it ? Now in literature, besides the eminent men of genius who have had their 20 deserts in the way of fame, besides the eminent men of ability who have often had far more than their deserts in the way of fame, there are a certain number of personages who have been real men of genius, — by which I mean, that they have had a genuine gift for what is true and excellent, and are therefore capable of emitting a life- giving stimulus, — but who, for some reason or other, in most cases for very valid reasons, have remained obscure, nay, beyond a narrow circle in their own country, unknown. It is salutary from time to time to come across a genius of 30 this kind, and to extract his honey. Often he has more of it for us, as I have already said, than greater men ; for, though it is by no means true that from what is new to us there is most to be learnt, it is yet indisputably true that from what is new to us we in general learn most. M 2 164 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM Of a genius of this kind, Joseph Joubert, I am now going to speak. His name is, I believe, almost imknown in England ; and even in France, his native country, it is not famous. M. Sainte-Beuve has given of him one of his incomparable portraits ; but, — besides that even M. Sainte-Beuve's writings are far less known amongst us than they deserve to be, — every country has its own point of view from which a remarkable author may most profitably be seen and studied. Joseph Joubert was bom (and his date should be re- lo marked) in 1754, at Montignac, a little town in Perigord. His father was a doctor with small means and a large family ; and Joseph, the eldest, had his own way to make in the world. He was for eight years, as pupil first, and afterwards as an assistant-master, in the public school of Toulouse, then managed by the Jesuits, who seem to have left in him a most favourable opinion, not only of their tact and address, but of their really good quahties as teachers and directors. Compelled by the weakness of his health to give up, at twenty-two, the profession of 20 teaching, he passed two important years of his life in hard study, at home at Montignac ; and came in 1778 to try his fortune in the literary world of Paris, then perhaps the most tempting field which has ever yet presented itself to a young man of letters. He knew Diderot, D'Alembert, Marmontel, Laharpe ; he became intimate with one of the celebrities of the next literary generation, then, like himself, a young man, — Chateaubriand's friend, the future Grand Master of the University, Fontanes. But, even then, it began to be remarked of him, that M. Joubert s'inquietait 30 de perfection bien plus que de gloire — ' cared far more about perfecting himself than about making himself a reputa- tion.' His severity of morals may perhaps have been rendered easier to him by the delicacy of his health ; but the delicacy of his health will not by itself account for his changeless preference of being to seeming, knowing to showing, studying to publishing ; for what terrible public performers have some invalids been ! This preference he retained all through his life, and it is by thjs that he is characterised. ' He has chosen,' Chateaubriand (adopting 4o Epicurus's famous words) said of him, ' to hide Ms life.' JOUBERT 163 Of a life which its owner was bent on hiding there can be but little to tell. Yet the only two public incidents of Joubert's life, slight as they are, do all concerned in them so much credit that they deserve mention. In 1790 the Constituent Assembly made the office of justice of the peace elective throughout France. The people of Montignac retained such an impression of the character of their young townsman, — one of Plutarch's men of virtue, as he had lived amongst them, simple, studious, severe, — ^that, io though he had left them for years, they elected him in his absence without his knowing anything about it. The appointment little suited Joubert's wishes or tastes ; but at such a moment he thought it wrong to decline it. He held it for two years, the legal term, discharging its duties with a firmness and integrity which were long remembered ; and then, when he went out of office, his fellow-townsmen re-elected him. But Joubert thought that he had now accomplished his duty towards them, and he went back to the retirement which he loved. That seems to us 20 a little episode of the great French Revolution worth remembering. The sage who was asked by the king, why sages were seen at the doors of kings, but not kings at the doors of sages, replied, that it was because sages knew what was good for them, and kings did not. But at Mon- tignac the king — ^for in 1790 the people in France was king with a vengeance — knew what was good for him, and came to the door of the sage. The other incident was this. When Napoleon, in 1809, reorganised the public instruction of France, founded the 30 University, and made M. de Fontanes its Grand Master, Fontanes had to submit to the Emperor a list of persons to form the council or governing body of the new University. Third on his list, after two distinguished names, Fontanes placed the unknown name of Joubert. ' This name,' he said in his accompanying memorandum to the Emperor, ' is not known as the two first are ; and yet this is the nomination to which I attach most importance. I have known M. Joubert all my life. His character and intelli- gence are of the very highest order. I shall rejoice if your 40 Majesty will accept my guarantee for him.' Napoleon trusted his Grand Master, and Joubert became a councillor IC3 ESSAYS m CRITICISM of tlie University. It is something that a man, elevated to the highest posts of State, should not forget his obscure friends ; or that, if he remembers and places them, he should regard in placing them their merit rather than their obscurity. It is more, in the eyes of those whom the necessities, real or supposed, of a political system have long familiarised with such cynical disregard of fitness in the distribution of office, to see a minister and his master alike zealous, in giving away places, to give them to the best men to be found. lo Between 1792 and 1809 Joubert had married. His life was passed between ViUeneuve-sur-Yonne, where his wife's family lived, — a pretty little Burgundian town, by which the Lyons railroad now passes, — and Paris. Here, in a house in the Rue St.-Honore, in a room very high up, and admitting plenty of the light which he so loved, — a room from which he saw, in his own words, ' a great deal of sky and very little earth,' — among the treasures of a library collected with infinite pains, taste, and skill, from which every book he thought ill of was rigidly ex- 20 eluded, — he never would possess either a complete Voltaire or a complete Rousseau, — ^the happiest hours of his life were passed. In the circle of one of those women who leave a sort of perfume in literary history, and who have the gift of inspiring successive generations of readers with an indescribable regret not to have known them, — Pauline de Montmorin, Madame de Beaumont, — ^he had become intimate with nearly all which at that time, in the Paris world of letters or of society, was most attractive and promising. Amongst his acquaintances one only misses so the names of Madame de Stael and Benjamin Constant ; neither of them was to his taste, and with Madame de Stael he always refused to become acquainted ; he thought she had more vehemence than truth, and more heat than light. Years went on, and his friends became conspicuous authors or statesmen ; but Joubert remained in the shade. His constitution was of such fragility that how he lived so long, or accomplished so much as he did, is a wonder ; his soul had, for its basis of operations, hardly any body at all : both from his stomach and from his chest he seems 40 to have had constant suffering, though he lived by rule. JOUBERT 107 and was as abstemious as a Hindoo. Often, after over- work in thinking, reading, or talking, he remained for days together in a state of utter prostration, — condemned to absolute silence and inaction ; too happy if the agitation of his mind would become quiet also, and let him have the repose of which he stood in so much need. With this weakness of health, these repeated suspensions of energy, he was incapable of the prolonged contention of spirit necessary for the creation of great works ; but he read 10 and thought immensely ; he was an unwearied note-taker, a charming letter-writer ; above all, an excellent and delightful talker. The gaiety and amenity of his natural disposition were inexhaustible ; and his spirit, too, was of astonishing elasticity ; he seemed to hold on to life by a single thread only, but that single thread was very tenacious. More and more, as his soul and knowledge ripened more and more, his friends pressed to his room in the Rue St.-Honore ; often he received them in bed, for he seldom rose before three o'clock in the afternoon ; and 20 at his bedroom-door, on his bad days, Madame Joubert stood sentry, trying, not always with success, to keep back the thirsty comers from the fountain which was forbidden to flow. Fontanes did nothing in the University without consulting him, and Joubert's ideas and pen were always at his friend's service.. When he was in the country, at VUleneuve, the yotmg priests of his neighbourhood used to resort to him, in order to profit by; his library and by his conversation. He, like our Coleridge, was particularly qualified to attract men of this kind and to benefit them : so retaining perfect independence of mind, he was religious ; he was a religious pMosopher. As age came on, his in- firmities became more and more overwhelming ; some of his friends, too, died ; others became so immersed in politics, that Joubert, who hated polities, saw them seldomer than of old ; but the moroseness of age and infirmity never touched him, and he never quarrelled with a friend or lost one. From these miseries he was preserved by that quality in him of which I have already spoken ; a quality which is best expressed by a word, not of common 40 use in English, — alas, we have too little in our national character of the quality which this word expresses,^-his 168 ESSAYS IK CRITICISM inborn, his constant amenity. He lived till the year 1824. On the 4th of May in that year he died, at the age of seventy. A day or two after his death, M. de Chateau- briand inserted in the Journal des Dibats a short notice of him, perfect for its feeling, grace, and propriety. On ne vit dans la memoire du monde, he says and says truly, que par des travaux pour le monde — ' a man can live in the world's memory only by what he has done for the world.' But Chateaubriand used the privilege which his great name gave him to assert, delicately but firmly, Joubert's real lo and rare merits, and to tell the world what manner of man had just left it. Joubert's papers were accumulated in boxes and drawers. He had not meant them for publication ; it was very difficult to sort them and to prepare them for it. Madame Joubert, his widow, had a scruple about giving them a publicity which her husband, she felt, would never have permitted. But, as her own end approached, the natural desire to leave of so remarkable a spirit some enduring memorial, some memorial to outlast the admiring recollec- 2o tion of the living who were so fast passing away, made her yield to the entreaties of his friends, and allow the printing, but for private circulation only, of a volume of his frag- ments. Chateaubriand edited it ; it appeared in 1838, fourteen years after Joubert's death. The volume attracted the attention of those who were best fitted to appreciate it, and profoundly impressed them. M. Sainte-Beuve gave of it, in the Bevue des Deux Mondes, the admirable notice of which I have already spoken ; and so much curiosity was excited about Joubert, that the collection of his frag- 30 ments, enlarged by many additions, was at last published for the benefit of the world in general. It has since been twice reprinted. The first or preliminary chapter has some fancifulness and affectation in it ; the reader should begin with the second. I have likened Joubert to Coleridge ; and indeed the points of resemblance between the two men are numerous. Both of them great and celebrated talkers, Joubert attract- ing pilgrims to his upper chamber in the Eue St.-Honore, as Coleridge attracted pilgrims to Mr. Oilman's at High- 40 gate ; both of them desultory and incomplete writers, — JOUBERT 169 here they had an outward likeness with one another. Both of them passionately devoted to reading in a class of books, and to thinking on a class of subjects, out of the beaten line of the reading and thought of their day ; both of them ardent students and critics of old literature, poetry, and the metaphysics of religion ; both of them curious explorers of words, and of the latent significance hidden under the popular use of them ; both of them, in a certain sense, conservative in religion and politics, by antipathy to 10 the narrow and shallow foolishness of vulgar modem liberal- ism ; — here they had their inward and real likeness. But that in which the essence of their likeness consisted is this, — that they both had from nature an ardent impulse for seeking the genuine truth on all matters they thought about, and a gift for finding it and recognising it when it was found. To have the impulse for seeking this truth is much rarer than most people think ; to have the gift for finding it is, I need not say, very rare indeed. By this they have a spiritual relationship of the closest kind with 20 one another, and they become, each of them, a source of stimulus and progress for all of us. Coleridge had less delicacy and penetration than Joubert, but more richness and power ; his production, though far inferior to what his nature at first seemed to promise, was abundant and varied. Yet in all his production, how much is there to dissatisfy us ! How many reserves must be made in praising either his poetry, or his criticism, or his philosophy ! How little either of his poetry, or of his criticism, or of his philosophy, can we expect permanently 30 to stand ! But that which will stand of Coleridge is this : the stimulus of his continual effort, — ^not a moral effort, for he had no morals, — but of his continual instinctive effort, crowned often with rich success, to get at and to lay bare the real truth of his matter in hand, whether that matter were literary, or philosophical, or political, or religious ; and this in a country where at that moment such an effort was almost unknown ; where the most powerful minds threw themselves upon poetry, which conveys truth, indeed, but conveys it indirectly ; and where ordinary 40 minds were so habituated to do without thinking altogether, to regard considerations of established routine and practical 170 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM convenience as paramount, that any attempt to introduce within the domain of these the disturbing element of thought, they were prompt to resent as an outrage. Coleridge's great action lay in his supplying in England, for many years and under critical circumstances, by the spectacle of this effort of his, a stimulus to all minds, in the generation which grew up round him, capable of profiting by it. His action will still be felt as long as the need for it continues ; when, with the cessation of the need, the action too has ceased, Coleridge's memory, in spite of lo the disesteem — ^nay, repugnance — which his character may and must inspire, will yet for ever remain invested with that interest and gratitude which invests the memory of founders. M. de Remusat, indeed, reproaches Coleridge with his jtigements saugrenus ; the criticism of a gifted truth- iinder ought not to be satigrenu ; so on this reproach we must pause for a moment. Saugrenu is a rather vulgar French word, but, like many other vulgar words, very expressive ; used as an epithet for a judgment, it means 20 something like impudently absurd. The literary judg- ments of one nation about another are very apt to be saugrenus ; it is certainly true, as M. Sainte-Beuve remarks in answer to Groethe's complaint against the French that they have undervalued Du Bartas, that as to the estimate of its own authors every nation is the best judge ; the positive estimate of them, be it understood, not, of course, the estimate of them in comparison with the authors of other nations. Therefore a foreigner's judgments about the intrinsic merit of a nation's authors mil generally, 30 when at complete variance with that nation's own, be wrong ; but there is a permissible wrongness in these matters, and to that permissible wrongness there is a limit. When that limit is exceeded, the wrong judgment becomes more than wrong, it becomes saugrenu, or impudently absurd. For instance, the high estimate which the French have of Racine is probably in great measure deserved ; or, to take a yet stronger case, even the high estimate which Joubert had of the Abbd Delille is probably in great measure deserved ; but the common disparaging judg- 40 ment passed on Racine by English readers is not saugrenu, JOUBERT 171 still less is that passed by them on the Abbe Delille sau- grenu, because the beauty of Baciue, and of Delille too, so far as Delille's beauty goes, is eminently in their language, and this is a beauty which a foreigner cannot perfectly seize ; — ^this beauty of diction, apicihus verborum ligata, as M. Sainte-Beuve, quoting Quintilian, says of Chateau- briand's. As to Chateaubriand himself, again, the common English judgment, which stamps him as a mere shallow rhetorician, all froth and vanity, is certainly wrong ; one 10 may even wonder that we English should judge Chateau- briand so wrongly, for his power goes far beyond beauty of diction ; it is a power, as well, of passion and sentiment, and this sort of power the English can perfectly well appreciate. One production of Chateaubriand's, Bene, is akin to the most popular productions of Byron, — ^to the Childe Harold or Manfred, — ^in spirit, equal to them in power, superior to them in form. But this work, I hardly know why, is almost unread in England. And only con- sider this criticism of Chateaubriand's on the true pathetic ! 20 ' It is a dangerous mistake, sanctioned, like so many other dangerous mistakes, by Voltaire, to suppose that the best works of imagination are those which draw most tears. One could name this or that melodrama, which no one would like to own having written, and which yet harrows the feelings far more than the Aeneid. The true tears are those which are called forth by the beauty of poetry ; there must be as much admiration in them as sorrow. They are the tears which come to our eyes when Priam says to Achilles, irXriv 8', oV ovira> . . . — " And I have 30 endured, — ^the like whereof no soul upon the earth hath yet endured, — to carry to my lips the hand of him who slew my child ; " or when Joseph cries out : " I am Joseph your brother, whom ye sold into Egypt." ' Who does not feel that the man who wrote that was no shallow rhetorician, but a bom man of genius, with the true instinct of genius for what is really admirable ? Nay, take these words of Chateaubriand, an old man of eighty, dying amidst the noise and bustle of the ignoble revolution of February 1848 : ' Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, quand done, quand done 40 serai-je delivre de tout ce monde, ce bruit ; quand done, quand done cela finira-t-il ? ' Who, with any ear, does not 172 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM feel that those are not the accents of a trumpery rhetorician, but of a rich and puissant nature, — ^the cry of the dying lion ? I repeat it, Chateaubriand is most ignorantly underrated in England ; and we English are capable of rating him far more correctly if we knew him better. Still, Chateaubriand has such real and great faults, he falls so decidedly beneath the rank of the truly greatest authors, that the depreciatory judgment passed on him in England, though ignorant and wrong, can hardly be said to transgress the limits of permissible ignorance ; it lo is not a jugement saugrenu. But when a critic denies genius to a literature which has produced Bossuet and Moliere, he passes the bounds ; and Coleridge's judgments on French literature and the French genius are undoubtedly, as M. de Remusat calls them, saugrenus. And yet, such is the impetuosity of our poor human nature, such its proneness to rush to a decision with imperfect knowledge, that his having delivered a saugrenu judgment or two in his life by no means proves a man not to have had, in comparison with his fellow men in 20 general, a remarkable gift for truth, or disqualifies him for being, by virtue of that gift, a source of vital stimulus for us. Joubert had far less smoke and turbid vehemence in him than Coleridge ; he had aiso a far keener sense of what was absurd. But Joubert can write to M. Mole (the M. Mole who was afterwards Louis Philippe's well-known ' minister) .: ' As to your Milton, whom the merit of the Abbe Delille ' (the Abbe Delille translated Paradise Lost) ' makes me admire, and with whom I have nevertheless still plenty of fault to find, why, I should like to know, 30 are you scandalised that I have not enabled myself to read him ? I don't understand the language in which he writes, and I don't much care to. If he is a poet one cannot put up with, even in the prose of the younger Racine, am I to blame for that ? If by force you mean beauty manifesting itself with power, I maintain that the Abbe Delille has more force than Milton.' That, to be sure, is a petulant outburst in a private letter ; it is not, like Coleridge's, a deliberate proposition in a printed philo- sophical essay. But is it possible to imagine a more 40 perfect specimen of a saugrenu judgment ? It is even JOUBERT 173 worse than Coleridge's, because it is saugrenu with reasons. That, however, does not prevent Joubert from having been really a man of extraordinary ardour in the search for truth, and of extraordinary fineness in the perception of it ; and so was Coleridge. Joubert had around him in France an atmosphere of literary, philosophical, and religious opinion as alien to him as that in England was to Coleridge. This is what makes Joubert, too, so remarkable, and it is on this account 10 that I begged the reader to remark his date. He was born in 1754 ; he died in 1824. He was thus in the fulness of his powers at the beginning of the present century, at the epoch of Napoleon's consulate. The French criticism of that day — ^the criticism of Laharpe's successorSj of Geoffroy and his colleagues in the Journal des Debats — had a dry- ness very unlike the telhng vivacity of the early Edinburgh reviewers, their contemporaries, but a fundamental narrow- ness, a want of genuine insight, much on a par with theirs. Joubert, like Coleridge, has no respect for the dominant £0 oracle ; he treats his Geoffroy with about as little deference as Coleridge treats his Jeffrey. ' Geoffroy,' he says of an article in the Journal des Debats criticising Chateaubriand's Oenie du Christidnisme — ' Greoffroy in this article begins by holding out his paw prettily enough ; but he ends by a volley of kicks, which lets the whole world see but too clearly the four iron shoes of the four-footed animal.' There is, however, in France a sympathy with intellectual activity for its own sake, and for the sake of its inherent pleasureableness and beauty, keener than any which exists 30 in England ; and Joubert had more effect in Paris, — though his conversation was his only weapon, and Coleridge wielded besides his conversation Ins pen, — ^than Coleridge had or could have in London. I mean, a more immediate, appreciable effect ; an effect not only upon the young and enthusiastic, to whom the future belongs, but upon formed and important personages to whom the present belongs, and who are actually moving society. He owed this partly to his real advantages over Coleridge. If he had, as I have already said, less power and richness than his English 40 parallel, he had more tact and penetration. He was more possible than Coleridge ; his doctrine was more intelligible 174 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM than Coleridge's, more receivable. And yet with Joubert, the striving after a consummate and attractive clearness of expression came from no mere frivolous dislike of labour and inability for going deep, but was a part of his native love of truth and perfection. The delight of his life he found in truth, and in the satisfaction which the enjoying of truth gives to the spirit ; and he thought the truth was never really and worthily said, so long as the least cloud, clumsiness, and repulsiveness hung about the expression of it. 10 Some of his best passages are those in which he upholds this doctrine. Even metaphysics he would not allow to remain difficult and abstract ; so long as they spoke a professional jargon, the language of the schools, he maintained, — and who shall gainsay him ? — ^that meta- physics were imperfect ; or, at any rate, had not yet reached their ideal perfection. ' The true science of metaphysics,' he says, ' consists not in rendering abstract that which is sensible, but in rendering sensible that which is abstract ; apparent that 20 which is hidden ; imaginable, if so it may be, that which is only intelligible ; and intelhgible, finally, that which an ordinary attention fails to seize.' And therefore : — ' Distrust, in books on metaphysics, words which have not been able to get currency in the world, and are only calculated to form a special language.' Nor would he suffer common words to be employed in a special sense by the schools : — ' Which is the best, if one wants to be useful and to be so really understood, to get one's words in the world, or to get them in the schools ? I maintain that the good plan is to employ words in their popular sense rather than in their philosophical sense ; and the better plan still, to employ them in their natural sense rather than in their popular sense. By their natural sense, I mean the popular and universal acceptation of them brought to that which in this is essential and invariable. To prove a thing by definition proves nothing, if the definition is' purely philo- sophical ; for such definitions only bind him who makes 10 them. To prove a thing by definition, when the definition JOUBERT 175 expresses the necessary, inevitable, and clear idea which the world at large attaches to the object, is, on the contrary, all in all ; because then what one does is simply to show people what they do really think, in spite of themselves and without knowing it. The rule that one is free to give to words what sense one will, and that the only thing needful is to be agreed upon the sense one gives them, is very well for the mere purposes of argumentation, and may be allowed in the schools where this sort of fencing is to be 10 practised ; but in the sphere of the true-bom and noble science of metaphysics, and in the genuine world of literature, it is good for nothing. One must never qtiit eight of realities, and one must employ one's expressions simply as media, — as glasses, through which one's thoughts can be best made evident. I know, by my own experience, how hard this rule is to follow ; but I judge of its importance by the failure of every system of metaphysics. Not one of them has succeeded ; for the simple reason, that in every one ciphers have been constantly used instead of values, 20 artificial ideas instead of native ideas, jargon instead of idiom.' I do not know whether the metaphysician will ever adopt Joubert's rules ; but I am sure that the man of letters, whenever he has to speak of metaphysics, will do well to adopt them. He, at any rate, must remember : — ■ ' It is by means of familiar words that style takes hold of the reader and gets possession of him. It is by means of these that great thoughts get currency and pass for true metal, like gold and silver which have had a recognised so stamp put upon them. They beget confidence in the man who, in order to make his thoughts more clearly perceived, uses them ; for people feel that such an emplojrment of the language of common human life betokens a man who knows that life and its concerns, and who keeps himself in contact with them. Besides, these words make a style frank and easy. They show that an author has long made the thought or the feeling expressed his mental food ; that he has so assimilated them and familiarised them, that the most common expressions suf&ce him in order to express 40 ideas which have become everyday ideas to him by the length of time they have been in his mind. And lastly, 176 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM what one says in such words looks more true ; for, of all the words in use, none are so clear as those which we call common words ; and clearness is so eminently one of the characteristics of truth, that often it even passes for truth itself.' These are not, in Joubert, mere counsels of rhetoric ; they come from his accurate sense of perfection, from his having clearly seized the fine and just idea that beauty and light are properties of truth, and that truth is incom- pletely exhibited if it is exhibited without beauty and lo light :— ' Be profound with clear terms and not with obscure terms. What is difficult will at last become easy ; but as one goes deep into things, one must still keep a charm, and one must carry into these dark depths of thought, into which speculation has only recently penetrated, the pure and antique clearness of centuries less learned than ours, but with more light in them.' And elsewhere he speaks of those ' spirits, lovers of light, who, when they have an idea to put forth, brood 20 long over it first, and wait patiently till it shines, as BufEon enjoined, when he defined genius to be the aptitude for patience ; spirits who know by experience that the driest matter and the dullest words hide within them the germ and spark of some brightness, like those fairy nuts in which were found diamonds if one broke the shell and was the right person ; spirits who maintain that, to see and exhibit things in beauty, is to see and show things as in their essence they really are, and not as they exist for the eye of the careless, who do not look beyond the so outside ; spirits hard to satisfy, because of a keen-sighted- ness in them, which makes them discern but too clearly both the models to be followed and those to be shunned ; spirits active though meditative, who cannot rest except in solid truths, and whom only beauty can make happy ; spirits far less concerned for glory than for perfection, who, because their art is long and life is short, often die without leaving a monument, having had their own inward sense of life and fruitfulness for their best reward.' No doubt there is something a little too ethereal in all 4o this, something which reminds one of Joubert's physical JOUBERT 177 want of body and substance ; no doubt, if a man wishes to be a great author, it is 'to consider too curiously, to consider ' as Joubert did ; it is a mistake to spend so much of one's time in setting up one's ideal standard of perfec- tion, and in contemplating it. Joubert himself knew this very well: ' I cannot" build a house for my ideas,' said he ; ' I have tried tp do without words, and words take their revenge on me by their difficulty.' ' If there is a man upon earth tormented by the cursed desire to get a whole book 10 into a page, a whole page into a phrase, and this phrase into one word, — ^that man is myself.' ' I can sow, but I cannot build.' Joubert, however, makes no claim to be a great author ; by renouncing all ambition to be this, by not trying to fit his ideas into a house, by making no compromise with words in spite of their difficulty, by being quite single-minded in his pursuit of perfection, perhaps he is enabled to get closer to the truth of the objects of his study, and to be of more service to us by setting ideals, than if he had composed a celebrated work. I doubt 20 whether, in an elaborate work on the philosophy of religion, he would have got his ideas about religion to shine, to use his own expression, as they shine when he utters them in perfect freedom. Penetration in these matters is value- less without soul, and soul is valueless without penetration ; both of these are delicate qualities, and, even in those who have them, easily lost ; the charm of Joubert is, that he has and keeps both : — ' One should be fearful of being wrong in poetry when one thinks differently from the poets, and in rehgion when 30 one thinks differently from the saints. ' There is a great difference between taking for idols Mahomet and Luther, and bowing down before Rousseau and Voltaire. People at any rate imagined they were obeying God when they followed Mahomet, and the Scriptures when they hearkened to Luther. And perhaps one ought not too much to disparage that inohnation which leads mankind to put into the hands of those whom it thinks the friends of God the direction and government of its heart and mind. It is the subjection 40 to irreligious spirits which alone is fatal, and, in the fullest sense of the word, depraving. AliKOU) H 178 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM ' May I say it ? It is not hard to know God, provided one will not force oneself to define him. ' Do not bring into the domain of reasoning that which belongs to our innermost feeling. State truths of senti- ment, and do not try to prove them. There is a danger in such proofs ; for in arguing it is necessary to treat that which is in question as something problematic : now that which we accustom ourselves to treat as problematic ends by appearing to us as really doubtful. In things that are visible and palpable, never prove what is believed lo already ; in things that are certain and mysterious, — mysterious by their greatness and by their nature, — ^make people believe them, and do not prove them ; in things that are matters of practice and duty, command, and do not explain. " Fear God," has made many men pious ; the proofs of the existence of God have made many men atheists. From the defence springs the attack ; the advocate begets in his hearer a wish to pick holes ; and men are almost always led on, from the desire to con- tradict the doctor, to the desire to contradict the doctrine. 20 Make truth lovely, and do not try to arm her ; mankind will then be far less inclined to contend with her. ' Why is even a bad preacher almost always heard by the pious with pleasure ? Because he talks to them about what they love. But you who have to expound reHgion to the children of this world, you who have to speak to them of that which they once loved perhaps, or which they would be glad to love, — remember that they do not love it yet, and, to make them love it, take heed to speak with power. 30 ' You may do what you like, mankind will believe no one but God ; and he only can persuade mankind who believes that God has spoken to him. No one can give faith unless he has faith ; the persuaded persuade, as the indulgent disarm. ' The only happy people in the world are the good man, the sage, and the saint ; but the saint is happier than either of the others, so much is man by his nature formed for sanctity.' The same delicacy and penetration which he here shows 40 in speaking of the inward essence of religion, Joubert JOUBERT 179 shows also in speaking of its outward form, and of its manifestation in the world : — ' Piety is not a religion, though it is the soul of all religions. A man has not a religion simply by having pious inclinations, any more than he has a country simply by having philanthropy. A man has not a coimtry until he is a citizen in a state, until he undertakes to follow and uphold certain laws, to obey certain magistrates, and to adopt certain ways of living and acting. 10 ' Religion is neither a theology nor a theosophy ; it is more than all this ; it is a discipline, a law, a yoke, an indissoluble engagement.' Who, again, has ever shown with more truth and beauty the good and imposing side of the wealth and splendour of the Catholic Church, than Joubert in the following passage : — ■ ' The pomps and magnificence with which the Church is reproached are in truth the result and the proof of her incomparable excellence. From whence, let me ask, 20 have come this power of hers and these excessive riches, except from the enchantment into which she threw all the world ? Ravished with her beauty, millions of men from age to age kept loading her with gifts, bequests, cessions. She had the talent of making herself loved, and the talent of ma,king men happy. It is that which wrought prodigies for her ; it is from thence that she drew her power.' ' She had the talent of making herself feared,' — one should add that too, in order to be perfectly just ; but 30 Joubert, because he is a true child of light, can see that the wonderful success of the Catholic Church must have been due really to her good rather than to her bad qualities ; to her making herself loved rather than to her making herself feared. How striking and suggestive, again, is this remark on the Old and New Testaments : — ' The Old Testament teaches the knowledge of good and evil ; the Gospel, on the other hand, seems written for the predestinated ; it is the book of innocence. The 40 one is made for earth, the other seems made for heaven. According as the one or the other of these books takes TS2 180 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM hold of a nation, what may be called the rdigious humours of nations difEer.' So the British and North American Puritans are the children of the Old Testament, as Joachim of Mora and St. Francis are the children of the New. And does not the following maxim exactly fit the Church of England, of which Joubert certainly never thought when he was writing it ? ' The austere sects excite the most enthusiasm at first ; but the temperate sects have always been the most durable.' lo And these remarks on the Jansenists and Jesviits, interesting in themselves, are still more interesting because they touch matters we cannot well know at first hand, and which Joubert, an impartial observer, had had the means of studying closely. We are apt to think of the Jansenists as having failed by reason of their merits ; Joubert shows us how far their failure was due to their defects : — ' We ought to lay stress upon what is clear in Scripture, and to pass quickly over what is obscure ; to light up what 20 in Scripture is troubled, by what is serene in it ; what puzzles and checks the reason, by what satisfies the reason. The Jansenists have done just the reverse. They lay stress upon what is uncertain, obscure, afflicting, and they pass lightly over all the rest ; they eclipse the luminous and consoling truths of Scripture, by putting between us and them its opaque and dismal truths. For example, " Many are called ; " there is a clear truth : " Few are chosen ; " there is an obscure truth. " We are children of wrath ; " there is a sombre, cloudy, terrifying truth : " We are all so the children of God ; " "I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance ; " there are truths which are full of clearness, mildness, serenity, light. The Jansenists trouble our cheerfulness, and shed no cheering ray on our trouble. They are not, however, to be condemned for what they say, because what they say is true ; but they are to be condemned for what they fail to say, for that is true too, — truer, even, than the other ; that is, its truth is easier for us to seize, fuller, rounder, and more complete. Theology, as the Jansenists exhibit her, has but the half 40 of her disk.' JOUBERT 181 Again : — ' The Jansenists erect " grace " into a kind of fourtli person of the Trinity. They are, without thinking or intending it, Quatemitarians. St. Paul and St. Augustine, too exclusively studied, have done all the mischief. Instead of " grace ", say help, succour, a divine influence, a dew of heaven ; then one can come to a right understanding. The word " grace " is a sort of talisman, all the baneful spell of which can be broken by translating it. The trick of 10 personifying words is a fatal source of mischief in theology.' Once more : — ' The Jansenists tell men to love God ; the Jesuits make men love him. The doctrine of these last is full of loosenesses, or, if you will, of errors ; stiU, — singular as it may seem, it is undeniable, — ^they are the better directors of souls. ' The Jansenists have carried into religion more thought than the Jesuits, and they go deeper ; they are faster bound with its sacred bonds. They have in their way of thinking 20 an austerity which incessantly constrains the will to keep the path of duty ; all the habits of their understanding, in short, are more Christian. But they seem to love God without affection, and solely from reason, from duty, from justice. The Jesuits, on the other hand, seem to love him from pure inclination ; out of admiration, gratitude, tenderness ; for the pleasure of loving him, in short. In their books of devotion you find joy, because with the Jesuits nature and rehgion go hand in hand. In the books of the Jansenists there is a sadness and a moral constraint, 30 because with the Jansenists religion is for ever trying to put nature in bonds.' The Jesuits have suffered, and deservedly suffered, plenty of discredit from what Joubert gently calls their ' loosenesses ' ; let them have the merit of their amiability. The most characteristic thoughts one can quote from any writer are always his thoughts on matters hke these ; but the maxims of Joubert on purely literary subjects also, have the same purged and subtle delicacy ; they show the same sedulousness in him to preserve perfectly true 40 the balance of his soul. Let me begin with this, which contains a truth too many people fail to perceive : — 182 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM ' Ignorance, which in matters of morals extenuates the crime, is itself, in matters of _ literature, a crime of the first order.' And here is another sentence, worthy of Goethe, to clear the air at one's entrance into the region of litera- ture : — ' With the fever of the senses, the delirium of the passions, the weakness of the spirit ; with the storms of the passing time and with the great scourges of human life, — hunger, thirst, dishonour, diseases, and death, — lo authors may as long as they like go on making novels which shall harrow our hearts ; but the soul says all the while, " You hurt me." ' And again : — ' Fiction has no business to exist unless it is more beautiful than reality. Certainly the monstrosities of fiction may be found in the booksellers' shops ; you buy them there for a certain number of francs, and you talk of them for a certain number of days ; but they have no place in literature, because in literature the one aim of 20 art is the beautiful. Once lose sight of that, and you have the mere frightful reality.' That is just the right criticism to pass on these ' mon- strosities ' ; they have no place in literature, and those who produce them are not really men of letters. One would think that this was enough to deter from such production any man of genuine ambition. But most of us, alas ! are what we must be, not what we ought to be, — not even what we know we ought to be. The following, of which the first part reminds one of 30 Wordsworth's sonnet, ' If thou indeed derive thy light from heaven,' excellently defines the true salutary function of literature, and the limits of this function : — ' Whether one is an eagle or an ant, in the intellectual world, seems to me not to matter much ; the essential thing is to have one's place marked there, one's station assigned, and to belong decidedly to a regular and whole- some order. A small talent, if it keeps within its limits and rightly fulfils its task, may reach the goal just as well as a greater one. To accustom mankind to pleasures 40 which depend neither upon the bodily appetites nor upon JOUBBRT 183 money, by giving them a taste for the things of the mind, seems to me, in fact, the one proper fruit which nature has meant our literary productions to have. When they have other fruits, it is by accident, and, in general, not for good. Books which absorb our attention to such a degree that they rob us of all fancy for other books, are absolutely pernicious. In this way they only bring fresh crotchets and sects into the world ; they miiltiply the great variety of weights, rules, and measures already existing ; they are 10 morally and politically a nuisance.' Who can read these words and not think of the limiting effect exercised by certain works in certain spheres and for certain periods ; exercised even by the works of men of genius or virtue, — by the works of Rousseau, the works of Wesley, the works of Swedenborg ? And what is it which makes the Bible so admirable a book, to be the one book of those who can have only one, but the miscellaneous character of the contents of the Bible ? Joubert was all his life a passionate lover of Plato ; I ao hope other lovers of Plato will forgive me for saying that their adored object has never been more truly described than he is here : — ' Plato shows us nothing, but he brings brightness with him ; he puts light into our eyes, and fills us with a clear- ness by which all objects afterwards become illuminated. He teaches us nothing ; but he prepares us, fashions us, and makes us ready to know all. Somehow or other, the habit of reading him augments in us the capacity for discerning and entertaining whatever fine truths may so afterwards present themselves. Like mountain-air, it sharpens our organs, and gives us an appetite for whole- some food.' ' Plato loses himself in the void ' (he says again) ; ' but one sees the play of his wings, one hears their rustle.' And the conclusion is : 'It is good to breathe his air, but not to live upon him.' As a pendant to the criticism on Plato, this on the French moralist Nicole is excellent : — ' Nicole is a Pascal without style. It is not what he 40 says which is sublime, but what he thinks ; he rises, not by the natural elevation of his own spirit, but by that of 184 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM his doctrines. One must not look to the form in him, but to the matter, which is exquisite. Ho ought to be, read with a direct view of practice.' English people have hardly ears to hear the praises of Bossuet, and the Bossuet of Joubert is Bossuet at his very best ; but this is a far truer Bossuet than the ' de- claimer ' Bossuet of Lord Macaulay, himself a bom rhetorician, if ever there was one : — ' Bossuet employs all our idioms, as Homer employed all the dialects. The language of kings, of statesmen, lo and of warriors ; the language of the people and of the student, of the country and of the schools, of the sanctuary and of the courts of law ; the old and the new, the trivial and the stately, the quiet and the resounding, — he turns all to his use ; and out of all this he makes a style, simple, grave, majestic. His ideas are, like his words, varied, — common and sublime together. Times and doctrines in all their multitude were ever before his spirit, as things and words in all their multitude were ever before it. He is not so much a man as a human nature, with the temper- 20 anoe of a saint, the justice of a bishop, the prudence of a doctor, and the might of a great spirit.' After this on Bossuet, I must quote a criticism on Racine, to show that Joubert did not indiscrimiuately worship all the French gods of the grand century : — ' Those who find Racine enough for them are poor souls and poor wits ; they are souls and wits which have never got beyond the callow and boarding-school stage. Admirable, as no doubt he is, for his skill in having made poetical the most humdrum sentiments and the most 30 middling sort of passions, he can yet stand us in stead of nobody but himself. He is a superior writer ; and, in literature, that at once puts a man on a pinnacle. But he is not an inimitable writer.' And again : ' The talent of Racine is in his works, but Racine himself is not there. That is why he himself became disgusted with them.' ' Of Racine, as of his ancients, the genius lay in taste. His elegance is perfect, but it is not supreme, like that of Virgil.' And, indeed, there is something supreme in an elegance which exercises 40 such a fascination as Virgil's does ; which makes one JOUBBRT 185 return to his poems again and again, long after one thinks one has done with them ; which makes them one of those books that, to use Joubert's words, ' lure the reader back to them, as the proverb says good wine lures back the wine- bibber.' And the highest praise Joubert can at last find for Racine is this, that he is the Virgil of the ignorant ; — ' Bacine est le Vvrgile des ignorants.' Of Boileau, too, Joubert says : ' Boileau is a powerful poet, but only in the world of half poetry.' How true xo is that of Pope also ! And he adds : ' Neither Boileau's poetry nor Racine's flows from the fountain-head.' No Englishman, controverting the exaggerated French estimate of these poets, could desire to use fitter words. I will end with some remarks on Voltaire and Rousseau, remarks in which Joubert eminently shows his prime merit as a critic, — ^the soimdness and completeness of his judgments. I mean that he has the faculty of judging with all the powers of his mind and soul at work together in due combination ; and how rare is this faculty ! how Eo seldom is it exercised towards writers who so powerfully as Voltaire and Rousseau stimulate and call into activity a single side in us ! ' Voltaire's wits came to their maturity twenty years sooner than the wits of other men, and remained in full vigour thirty years longer. The charm which our style in general gets from our ideas, his ideas get from his style. Voltaire is sometimes afilicted, sometimes strongly moved ; but serious he never is. His very graces have an efErontery about them. He had correctness of judgment, 30 liveliness of imagination, nimble wits, quick taste, and a moral sense in ruins: He is the most debauched of spirits, and the worst of him is that one gets debauched along with him. If he had been a wise man, and had had the self- discipline of wisdom, beyond a doubt half his wit would have been gone ; it needed an atmosphere of licence in order to play freely. Those people who read him every day, create for themselves, by an invincible law, the necessity of liking him. But those people who, having given up reading him, gaze steadily down upon the influ- 40 ences which his spirit has shed abroad, find themselves in simple justice and duty compelled to detest him. It is 186 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM impossible to be satisfied with him, and impossible not to be fascinated by him.' The literary sense in us is apt to rebel against so severe a judgment on such a charmer of the literary sense as Voltaire, and perhaps we English are not very liable to catch Voltaire's vices, while of some of his merits we have signal need ; still, as the real definitive judgment on Voltaire, Joubert's is undoubtedly the true one. It is nearly identical with that of Goethe. Joubert's sentence on Rousseau is in some respects more favourable : — lo ' That weight in the speaker {av£toritas) which the ancients talk of, is to be found in Bossuet more than in any other French author ; Pascal, too, has it, and La Bruyfere ; even Rousseau has something of it, but Voltaire not a particle. I can understand how a Rousseau — I mean a Rousseau cured of his faults — might at the present day do much good, and may even come to be greatly wanted ; but under no circumstances can a Voltaire bo of any use.' The peculiar power of Rousseau's style has never been so better hit off than in the following passage : — ' Rousseau imparted, if I may so speak, bowels of feeling to the words he used (donna des entrailles a tous les mots), and poured into them such a charm, sweetness so penetrating, energy so puissant, that his writings have an effect upon the soul something like that of those illicit pleasures which steal away our taste and intoxicate our reason.' The final judgment, however, is severe, and justly severe : — ' Life without actions ; life entirely resolved into so affections and half-sensual thoughts ; do-nothingness setting up for a virtue ; cowardliness with voluptuousness ; fierce pride with nullity underneath it ; the strutting phrase of the most sensual of vagabonds, who has made his system of philosophy and can give it eloquently forth : there is Rousseau ! A piety in which there is no religion ; a severity which brings corruption with it ; a dogmatism which serves to ruin all authority : there is Rousseau's philosophy ! To all tender, ardent, and elevated natures, I say : Only Rousseau can detach you from religion, and 40 only true religion can cure you of Rousseau.' JOUBERT 187 I must yet find room, before I end, for one at least of Joubert's sayings on political matters ; here, too, the whole man shows himself ; and here, too, the affinity with Coleridge is very remarkable. How true, how true in France especially, is this remark on the contrasting direction taken by the aspirations of the community in ancient and in modern states : — ' The ancients were attached to their country by three things, — ^their temples, their tombs, and their forefathers. 10 The two great bonds which united them to their govern- ment were the bonds of habit and antiquity. With the moderns, hope and the love of novelty have produced a total change. The ancients said our forefathers, we say posterity ; we do not, like them, love our patria, that is to say, the country and the laws of our fathers, rather we love the laws and the country of our children ; the charm we are most sensible to is the charm of the future, and not the charm of the past.' And how keen and true is this criticism on the changed so sense of the word ' liberty ' : — ' A great many words have changed their meaning. The word liberty, for example, had at bottom among the ancients the same meaning as the word dominion. I would be free meant, in the mouth of the ancient, / would take part in governing or administering the State ; in the mouth of a modern it means, / would be independent. The word liberty has with us a moral sense ; with them its sense was purely political.' Joubert had lived through the French Revolution, and 80 to the modem cry for liberty he was prone to answer : — ' Let your cry be for free souls rather even than for free men. Moral liberty is the one vitally important liberty, the one liberty which is indispensable ; the other liberty is good and salutary only so far as it favours this. Subordination is in itself a better thing than independence. The one implies order and arrangement ; the other implies only self-sufficiency with isolation. The one means harmony, the other a single tone ; the one is the whole, the other is but the part.' 40 ' Liberty ! liberty ! ' he cries again ; ' in all things let us have justice, and then we shall have enough liberty.' 188 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM Let us have justice, and then we shall have enough liberty. The wise man will never refuse to echo those words ; but then, such is the imperfection of human governments, that almost always, in order to get justice, one has first to secure liberty. I do not hold up Joubert as a very astonishing and powerful genius, but rather as a delightful and edifying genius. I have not cared to exhibit him as a sayer of brilliant epigrammatic things, such things as, ' Notre vie est du vent tissu . . . les dettes abregent la vie . . . celui lo qui a de I'imagination sans erudition a des ailes et n'a pas de pieds ' {Our life is woven wind . . . debts take from life . . . the man of imagination without learning has wings and no feet), though for such sayings he is famous. In the first place, the French language is in itself so favourable a vehicle for such sayings, that the making them in it has the less merit ; at least half the merit ought to go, not to the maker of the saying, but to the French language. In the second place, the peculiar beauty of Joubert is not there ; it is not in what is exclusively intellectual, — ^it is 20 in the union of soul with intellect, and in the delightful, satisfying result which this union produces. ' Vivre, c'est penser et sentir son ame . . . le bonheur est de sentir son ame bonne . . . toute v6rite nue et crue n'a pas assez passe par I'ame ... les hommes ne sont justes qu'envers ceux qu'ils aiment ' (The essence of life lies in thinking and being conscious of one's soul . . . happiness is the sense of one's soul being good ...ifa truth is nude and crude, that is a proof it ha^ not been steeped long enough in the soul ; . . . man cannot even be just to his neighbour, unless he loves him) ; 30 it is much rather in sayings like these that Joubert 's best and innermost nature manifests itself. He is the most prepossessing and convincing of witnesses to the good of loving light. Because he sincerely loved light, and did not prefer to it any little private darkness of his own, he foimd light ; his eye was single, and therefore his whole body was full of light. And because he was full of light, he was also full of happiness. In spite of his infirmities, in spite of his sufferings, in spite of his obscurity, he was the happiest man alive ; his life was as charming as his thoughts. For 40 certainly it is natural that the love of light, which is already. JOUBERT 189 in some measure, the possession of light, should irradiate and beatify the whole life of him who has it. There is something unnatural and shocking where, as in the case of Coleridge, it does not. Joubert pains us by no such contra- diction ; ' the same penetration of spirit which made him such delightful company to his friends, served also to make him perfect in his own personal life, by enabling him always to perceive and do what was right ; ' he loved and sought light till he became so habituated to it, so accustomed 10 to the jojrful testimony of a good conscience, that, to use his own words, ' he could no longer exist without this, and was obliged to live without reproach if he would live without misery.' Joubert was not famous while he lived, and he will not be famous now that he is dead. But, before we pity him for this, let us be sure what we mean, in literature, by famous. There are the famous men of genius in literature, — the Homers, Dantes, Shakspeares : of them we need not speak ; their praise is for ever and ever. Then there are 20 the famous men of abihty in literature : their praise is in their own generation. And what makes this difference ? The work of the two orders of men is at the bottom the same, — a criticism of life. The end and aim of all literature, if one considers it attentively, is, in truth, nothing but that. But the criticism which the men of genius pass upon human life is permanently acceptable to mankind ; the criticism which the men of ability pass upon human life is transitorily acceptable. Between Shakspeare's criticism of human life and Scribe's the difference is there ; — ^the one is per- 80 manently acceptable, the other transitorily. Whence then, I repeat, this difference ? It is that the acceptable- ness of Shakspeare's criticism depends upon its inherent truth : the acceptableness of Scribe's upon its suiting itself, by its subject-matter, ideas, mode of treatment, to the taste of the generation that hears it. But the taste and ideas of one generation are not those of the next. This next generation in its turn arrives ; — first its sharpshooters, its quick-witted, audacious light troops ; then the elephan- tine main body. The imposing array of its predecessor it con- 40 fidently assails, riddles it with bullets, passes over its body. It goes hard then with many once popular reputations. 190 ESSAYS IN CRITICISil with many authorities once oracular. Only two kinds of authors are safe in the general havoc. The first kind are the great abounding fountains of truth, whose criticism- of life is a source of illumination and joy to the whole human race for ever, — the Homers, the Shakspeares. These are the sacred personages, whom all civilised warfare respects. The second are those whom the out -skirmishers of the new generation, its forerunners, — quick-witted soldiers, as I have said, the select of the army, — recognise, though the bulk of their comrades behind might not, as lo of the same family and character with the sacred personages, exercising like them an immortal function, and like them inspiring a permanent interest. They snatch them up, and set them in a place of shelter, where the on-coming multitude may not overwhelm them. These are the Jouberts. They will never, like the Shakspeares, command the homage of the multitude ; but they are safe ; the multitude will not trample them down. Except these two kinds, no author is safe. Let us consider, for example, Joubert's famous contemporary, Lord Jeffrey. All his 20 vivacity and accomplishment avail him nothing ; of the true critic he had in an eminent degree no quality, except one, — curiosity. Curiosity he had, but he had no gift for truth ; he cannot illuminate and rejoice us ; no intelligent out -skirmisher of the new generation cares about him, cares to put him in safety ; at this moment we are all passing over his body. Let us consider a greater than Jeffrey, a critic whose reputation still stands firm, — ^will stand, many people think, for ever, — ^the great apostle of the Philistines, Lord Macaulay. Lord Macaulay was, 30 as I have already said, a bom rhetorician ; a splendid rhetorician doubtless, and, beyond that, an English rhetorician also, an honest rhetorician ; still, beyond the apparent rhetorical truth of things he never could penetrate ; for their vital truth, for what the French call the vraie verite, he had absolutely no organ ; therefore his reputation, brilliant as it is, is not secure. Rhetoric so good as his excites and gives pleasure ; but by pleasure alone you cannot permanently bind men's spirits to you. Truth illuminates and gives joy, and it is by the bond of joy, 40 not of pleasure, that men's spirits are indissolubly held. JOUBERT 191 As Lord Macaulay's own generation dies out, as a new generation arrives, without those ideas and tendencies of^ its predecessor which Lord Macaulay so deeply shared and so happily satisfied, will he give the same pleasure ? and, if he ceases to give this, has he enough of light in him to make him safe ? Pleasure the new generation will get from its own novel ideas and tendencies ; but light is another and a rarer thing, and must be treasured wherever it can be found. Will Macaulay be saved, in the sweep and pres- 10 sure of time, for his light's sake, as Johnson has already been saved by two generations, Joubert by one ? I think it very doubtful. But for a spirit of any delicacy and dignity, what a fate, if he could foresee it ! to be an oracle for one generation, and then of little or no account for ever. How far better, to pass with scant notice through one's own generation, but to be singled out and preserved by the very iconoclasts of the next, then in their turn by those of the next, and so, like the lamp of life itself, to be handed on from one generation to another in safety ! £0 This is Joubert's lot, and it is a very enviable one. The new men of the new generations, while they let the dust deepen on a thousand Laharpes, will 'say of him : ' He lived in the Philistine's day, in a place and time when almost every idea current in literature had the mark of Dagon upon it, and not the mark of the children of light. Nay, the chil- dren of light were as yet hardly so much as heard of : the Canaanite was then in the land. Still, there were even then a few, who, nourished on some secret tradition, or illumined, perhaps, by a divine inspiration, kept aloof from the so reigning superstitions, never bowed the knee to the gods of Canaan ; and one of these few was called Joubert.' SPINOZA AND THE BIBLE. 'By the sentence of the angels, by the decree of the saints, we anathematise, cut off, curse, and execrate Baruch Spinoza, in the presence of these sacred books with the six hundred and thirteen precepts which are written therein, with the anathema wherewith Joshua anathematised Jericho ; with the cursing wherewith Elisha cursed the children ; and with all the cursings which are written in the Book of the Law : cursed be he by day, and cursed by night ; cursed when he lieth down, and cursed when he riseth up ; cursed when he goeth out, and lo cursed when he cometh in ; the Lord pardon him never ; the wrath and fury of the Lord burn upon this man, and bring upon him aU the curses which are written in the Book of the Law. The Lord blot out his name under heaven. The Lord set him apart for destruction from all the tribes of Israel, with all the curses of the firmament which are written in the Book of this Law. . . . There shall no man speak to him, no man write to him, no man show him any kindness, no man stay under the same roof with him, no man come nigh him.' 20 With these amenities, the current compliments of theological parting, the Jews of the Portuguese synagogue at Amsterdam took in 1656 (and not in 1660 as has till now been commonly supposed) their leave of their erring brother, Baruch or Benedict Spinoza. They remained children of Israel, and he became a child of modem Europe. That was in 1656, and Spinoza died in 1677, at the early age of forty-four. Glory had not found him out. His short life — a life of unbroken diligence, kindliness, and 30 purity — ^was passed in seclusion. But in spite of that seclusion, in spite of the shortness of his career, in spite of the hostility of the dispensers of renown in the eighteenth century, — of Voltaire's disparagement and 'Bayle's detrac- SPINOZA AND THE BIBLE 193 tion, — in spite of the repellent form which he has given to his principal work, in spite of the exterior semblance of a rigid dogmatism alien to the most essential tendencies of modem philosophy, in spite, finally, of the immense weight of disfavour cast upon him by the long-repeated charge of atheism, Spinoza's name has silently risen in importance, the man and his work have attracted a steadily increasing notice, and bid fair to become soon what they deserve to become, — ^in the history of modem philosophy, 10 the central point of interest. An avowed translation of one of his works,— his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, — has at last made its appearance in English. It is the principal work which Spinoza published in his lifetime ; his book on ethics, the work on which his fame rests, is posthumous. The English translator has not done his task well. Of the character of his version there can, I am afraid, be no doubt ; one such passage as the following is decisive : — • ' I confess that, whUe with them (the theologians) / have never been able sufficiently to admire the unfathomed 20 mysteries of Scripture, I have still found them giving utterance to nothing but Aristotelian and Platonic speculations, artfully dressed up and cunningly accommodated to Holy Writ, lest the speakers should show themselves too plainly to belong to the sect of the Grecian heathens. Nor was it enough for these men to discourse with the Greeks ; they have further taken to raving with the Hebrew prophets.' This professes to be a translation of these words of Spinoza : ' Fateor, eos nunquam satis mirari potuisse Scripturae profundissima mysteria ; attamen praeter 30 Aristotelicorum vel Platonicorum speculationes nihil docuisse video, atque his, ne gentiles sectari viderentur, Scripturam accommodaverunt. Non satis his fuit cum Graecis insanire, sed prophetas cum iisdem deliravisse voluerunt.' After one such specimen of a translator's force, the experienced reader has a sort of instinct that he may as well close the book at once, with a smile or a sigh, according as he happens to be a follower of the weeping or of the laughing philosopher. If, in spite of this instinct, he persists in going on with the English version of the 40 Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, he will find many more such specimens. It is not, however, my intention to AENOLD O 194 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM fill my space with these, or with strictures upon their author. I prefer to remark, that he renders a service to literary history by pointing out, in his preface, how ' to Bayle may be traced the disfavour in which the name of Spinoza was so long held ; ' that, in his observations on the system of the Church of England, he shows a laudable freedom from the prejudices of ordinary English Liberals of that advanced school to which he clearly belongs ; and lastly, that, though he manifests little familiarity with Latin, he seems to have considerable familiarity with lo philosophy, and to be well able to follow and comprehend speculative reasoning. Let me advise him to unite his forces with those of some one who has that accurate knowledge of Latin which he himself has not, and then, perhaps, of that union a really good translation of Spinoza will be the result. And, having given him this advice, let me again turn, for a little, to the Tractatus Theologico- Politicus itself. , This work, as I have already said, is a work on the interpretation of Scripture, — ^it treats of the Bible. What 20 was it exactly which Spiiioza thought about the Bible and its inspiration ? That will be, at the present moment, the central point of interest for the English readers of his Treatise. Now, it is to be observed, that just on this very point the Treatise, interesting and remarkable as it is, will fail to satisfy the reader. It is important to seize this notion quite firmly, and not to quit hold of it while one is reading Spinoza's work. The scope of that work is this. Spinoza sees that the life and practice of Christian nations professing the religion of the Bible, are not the 30 due fruits of the religion of the Bible ; he sees only hatred, bitterness, and strife, where he might have expected to see love, joy, and peace in believing ; and he asks himself the reason of this. The reason is, he says, that these people misunderstand their Bible. Well, then, in his conclusion, I will write a Tractatus Theologico-Politictis. I will show these people, that, taking the Bible for granted, taking it to be all which it asserts itself to be, taking it to have all the authority which it claims, it is not what they imagine it to be, it does not say what they imagine it to say. I will 40 show them what it really does say, and I will show them SPINOZA AND THE BIBLE 195 that they will do well to accept this real teaching of the Bible, instead of the phantom with which they have so long been cheated. I will show their governments that they will do well to remodel the national churches, to make of them institutions informed with the spirit of the true Bible, instead of institutions informed with the spirit of this false phantom. The comments of men, Spinoza said, had been foisted into the Christian religion ; the pure teaching of God 10 had been lost sight of. He determined, therefore, to go again to the Bible, to read it over and over with a perfectly unprejudiced mind, and to accept nothing as its teaching which it did not clearly teach. He began by constructing a method, or set of conditions indispensable for the adequate interpretation of Scripture. These con- ditions are such, he points out, that a perfectly adequate interpretation of Scripture is now impossible. For example, to understand any prophet thoroughly, we ought to know the life, character, and pursuits of that prophet, under 20 what circumstances his book was composed, and in what state and through what hands it has come down to us ; and, in general, most of this we cannot now know. Still, the main sense of the Books of Scripture may be clearly seized by us. Himself a Jew with all the learning of his nation, and a man of the highest natural powers, Spinoza had in the difficult task of seizing this sense every aid which special knowledge or pre-eminent faculties could supply. In what then, he asks, does Scripture, interpreted by 30 its own aid, and not by the aid of Rabbinical traditions or Greek philosophy, allege its own divinity to consist ? In a revelation given by God to the prophets. Now all knowledge is a divine revelation ; but prophecy, as repre- sented in Scripture, is one of which the laws of human nature, considered in themselves alone, cannot be the cause. Therefore nothing must be asserted about it, except what is clearly declared by the prophets themselves ; for they are our only source of knowledge on a matter which does not fall within the scope of our ordinary know- 40ing faculties. But ignorant people, not knowing the Hebrew genius and phraseology, and not attending to the o a 196 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM circumstances of the speaker, often imagine the prophets to assert things which they do not. The prophets clearly declare themselves to have received the revelation of God through the means of words and images ; — ^not, as Christ, through immediate communication of the mind with the mind of God. Therefore the prophets excelled other men by the power and vividness of their representing and imagining faculty, not by the perfection of their mind. This is why they perceived almost every- thing through figures, and express themselves so variously, lo and so improperly, concerning the nature of God. Moses imagined that God could be seen, and attributed to him the passions of anger and jealousy ; Micaiah imagined him sitting on a throne, with the host of heaven on his right and left hand ; Daniel as an old man, with a white garment and white hair ; Ezekiel as a fire ; the disciples of Christ thought they saw the Spirit of God in the form of a dove ; the apostles in the form of fiery tongues. Whence, then, could the prophets be certain of the truth of a revelation which they received through the 20 imagination, and not by a mental process ? — for only an idea can carry the sense of its own certainty along with it, not an imagination. To make them certain of the truth of what was revealed to them, a reasoning process came in ; they had to rely on the testimony of a sign ; and (above all) on the testimony of their own conscience, that they were good men, and spoke for God's sake. Either testimony was incomplete without the other. Even the good prophet needed for his message the confirmation of a sign ; but the bad prophet, the utterer of an immoral doctrine, had no so certainty for his doctrine, no truth in it, even though he confirmed it by a sign. The testimony of a good conscience was, therefore, the prophet's grand source of certitude. Even this, however, was only a moral certitude, not a mathematical ; for no man can be perfectly sure of his own goodness. The power of imagining, the power of feeling what good- ness is, and the habit of practising goodness, were therefore the sole essential qualifications of a true prophet. But for the purpose of the message, the revelation, which God 40 designed him to convey, these qualifications were enough. SPINOZA AND THE BIBLE 197 The sum and substance of this revelation was simply: Believe in Ood, and lead a good life. To be the organ of this revelation, did not make a man more learned ; it left his scientific knowledge as it found it. This explains the contradictory and speculatively false opinions about God, and the laws of nature, which the patriarchs, the prophets, the apostles entertained. Abraham and the patriarchs knew God only as El Sadai, the power which gives to every man that which suffices him ; Moses knew him as Jehovah, 10 a self-existent being, but imagined him with the passions of a man. Samuel imagined that Gad could not repent of his sentences ; Jeremiah, that he could. Joshua, on a day of great victory, the ground being white with hail, seeing the daylight last longer than usual, and imaginatively seizing this as a special sign of the help divinely promised to him, declared that the sun was standing still. To be obeyers of God themselves, and inspired leaders of others to obedience and good Ufe, did not make Abraham and Moses metaphysicians, or Joshua a natural philosopher, 20 His revelation no more changed the speculative opinions of each prophet, than it changed his temperament or style. The wrathful EUsha required the natural sedative of music, before he could be the messenger of good fortune to Jehoram. The high-bred Isaiah and Nahum have the style proper to their condition, and the rustic Ezekiel and Amos the style proper to theirs. We are not therefore bound to pay heed to the speculative opinions of this or that prophet, for in uttering these he spoke as a mere man : only in ex- horting his hearers to obey God and lead a good life was 30 he the organ of a divine revelation. To know and love God is the highest blessedness of man, and of aU men alike ; to this aU mankind are called, and not any one nation in particular. The divine law, properly so named, is the method of life for attaining this height of human blessedness : this law is universal, written in the heart, and one for all mankind. Human law is the method of life for attaining and preserving temporal security and prosperity : this law is dictated by a lawgiver, and every nation has its own. In the case 40 of the Jews, this law was dictated, by revelation, through the prophets ; its fundamental precept was to obey God 198 ESSAYS IN ORITIOISM and to keep his commandments, and it is therefore, in a secondary sense, called divine ; but it was, nevertheless, framed in respect of temporal things only. Even the truly moral and divine precept of this law, to practise for God's sake justice and mercy towards one's neighbour, meant for the Hebrew of the Old Testament his Hebrew neighbour only, and had respect to the concord and stability of the Hebrew commonwealth. The Jews were to obey God and to keep his commandments, that they might continue long in the land given to them, and that it might be well lo with them there. Their election was a temporal one, and lasted only so long as^heir State. It is now over ; and the only election the Jews now have is that of the piovs, the remnant, which takes place, and has always taken place, in every other nation also. Scripture itself teaches that there is a universal divine law, that this is common to all nations alike, and is the law which truly confers eternal blessedness. Solomon, the wisest of the Jews, knew this law, as the few wisest men in all nations have ever known it ; but for the mass of the Jews, as for the mass of man- 20 kind everywhere, this law was hidden, and they had no notion of its moral action, its vera vita which conducts to eternal blessedness, except so far as this action was enjoined upon them by the prescriptions of their temporal law. When the ruin of their State brought with it the ruin of their temporal law, they would have lost altogether their only clue to eternal blessedness. Christ came when that fabric of the Jewish State, for the sake of which the Jewish law existed, was about to fall ; and he proclaimed the universal divine law. A certain so moral action is prescribed by this law, as a certain moral action was prescribed by the Jewish law : but he who truly conceives the universal divine law conceives God's decrees adequately as eternal truths, and for him moral action has Uberty and self-knowledge ; while the prophets of the Jewish law inadequately conceived God's decrees as mere rules and commands, and for them moral action had no hberty and no self-knowledge. Christ who beheld the decrees of God as God himself beholds them, — as eternal truths, — proclaimed the love of God and the loveM of our neighbout as commands, only because of the ignorance SPINOZA AND THE BIBLE 199 of the multitude : to those to whom it was ' given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God,' he announced them, as he himself perceived them, as eternal truths. And the apostles, like Christ, spoke to many of their hearers ' as unto carnal not spiritual ; ' presented to them, that is, the love of God and their neighbour as a divine command authenticated by the Ufe and death of Christ, not as an eternal idea of reason carrying its own warrant along with it. The presentation of it as this latter their hearers 10 ' were not able to bear.' The apostles, moreover, though they preached and confirmed their doctrine by signs as ptophets, wrote their Epistles, not as prophets, but as doctors and reasoners. The essentials of their doctrine, indeed, they took not from reason, but, like the prophets, from fact and revelation ; they preached belief in God and goodness of hf e as a cathohc rehgion existing by virtue of the passion of Christ, as the prophets had preached beHef in God and goodness of life as a national rehgion existing by virtue of tiie Mosaic covenant : but while 20 the prophets announced their message in a form purely dogmatical, the apostles developed theirs with the forms of reasoning and argumentation, according to each apostle's ability and way of thinking, and as they might best commend their message to their hearers ; and for their reasonings they themselves claim no divine authority, submitting them to the judgment of their hearers. Thus each apostle built essential rehgion on a non-essential foundation of his own, and, as St. Paul says, avoided building on the foundations of another apostle, which might be quite different from his 30 own. Hence the discrepancies between the doctrine of one apostle and another, — between that of St. Paul, for example, and that of St. James ; but these discrepancies are in the non-essentials not given to them hy revelation, and not in essentials. Human churches, seizing these discrepant non-essentials as essentials, one maiataining one of them, another another, have fiUed the world with unprofitable disputes, have ' turned the Church into an academy, and rehgion into a science, or rather a wrangling,' and have fallen into endless schism. 10 What, then, are the essentials of rehgion according both to the Old and to the New Testament ? Very few 200 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM and very simple. The precept to love God and our neigh- bour. The precepts of the first chapter of Isaiah : ' Wash you, make you clean ; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes ; cease to do evil ; learn to do well ; seek judgment ; reheve the oppressed ; judge the fatherless ; plead for the widow.' The precepts of the Sermon on the Mount, which add to the foregoing the inj miction that we should cease to do evil and learn to do well, not to our brethren and fellow-citizens only, but to aU mankind. It is by following these precepts that belief lo in God is to be shown : if we beUeve in him, we shall keep his commandment ; and this is his commandment, that we love one another. It is because it contains these precepts that the Bible is properly called the Word of God, in spite of its containing much that is mere history, and, hke all history, sometimes true, sometimes false ; in spite of its containing much that is mere reasoning, and, like all reasoning, sometimes sound, sometimes hoUow. These precepts are also the precepts of the universal divine law written in our hearts ; and it is only by this that the 20 divinity of Scripture is estabhshed ; — by its containing, namely, precepts identical with those of this inly-written and self -proving law. This law was in the world, as St. John says, before the doctrine of Moses or the doctrine of Christ. And what need was there, then, for these doctrines ? Be- cause the world at large ' knew not ' this original divine law, in which precepts are ideas, and the beUef in God the knowledge and contemplation of him. Reason gives us this law, reason tells us that it leads to eternal blessedness, and that those who follow it have no need of any other. 30 But reason could not have told us that the moral action of the universal divine law, — followed not from a sense of its intrinsic' goodness, truth, and necessity, but simply in proof of obedience (for both the Old and New Testament are but one long discipline of obedience), simply because it is so commanded by Moses in virtue of the covenant, simply because it is so commanded by Christ in virtue of his Hfe and passion, — can lead to eternal blessedness, which means, for reason, eternal knowledge. Reason could not have told us this, and this is what the Bible tells us. This 40 is that ' thing which had been kept secret since the f ounda- SPINOZA AND THE BIBLE 201 tion of the world.' It is thus that by means of the foolish- ness of the world God confounds the wise, and with things that are not brings to nought things that are. Of the truth of the promise thus made to obedience without knowledge, we can have no mathematical certainty ; for we can have a mathematical certainty only of things deduced by reason from elements which she in herself possesses. But we can have a moral certainty of it ; a certainty such as the prophets had themselves, arising out of the goodness 10 and pureness of those to whom this revelation has been made, and rendered possible for us by its contradicting no principles of reason. It is a great comfort to believe it ; because ' as it is only the very small minority who can pursue a virtuous hfe by the sole guidance of reason, we should, unless we had this testimony of Scripture, be in doubt respecting the salvation of nearly the whole human race.' It follows from this that philosophy has her own inde- pendent sphere, and theology hers, and that neither 20 has the right to invade and try to subdue the other . Theology demands perfect obedience, philosophy perfect knowledge : the obedience demanded by theology and the knowledge demanded by philosophy are ahke saving. As speculative opinions about God, theology requires only •such as are indispensable to the reahty of this obedience ; the behef that God is, that he is a rewarder of them that seek him, and that the proof of seeking him is a good hfe. These are the fundamentals of faith, and they are so clear and simple that none of the inaccuracies provable in the 30 Bible narrative the least affect them, and they have indubitably come to us uncorrupted. He who holds them may make, as the patriarchs and prophets did, other specula- tions aboiit God most erroneous, and yet their faith is complete and saving. Nay, beyond these fundamentals, speculative opinions are pious or impious, not as they are true or false, but as they confirm or shake the believer in the practice of obedience. The truest speculative opinion about the nature of God is impious if it makes its holder rebellious ; the falsest speculative opinion is pious 40 if it makes him obedient. Governments should never render themselves the tools of ecclesiastical ambition by 202 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM promulgating as fundamentals of the national Church's faith more than these, and should concede the fullest hberty of speculation. But the multitude, which respects only what astonishes, terrifies, and overwhelms it, by no means takes this simple view of its own rehgion. To the multitude, religion seems imposing only when it is subversive of reason, confirmed by miracles, conveyed in documents materially sacred and infaUible, and dooming to damnation all without its pale. But this religion of the multitude is not the rehgion lo which a true interpretation of Scripture finds in Scripture. Reason teUs us that a miracle, — understanding by a miracle a breach of the laws of nature, — ^is impossible, and that to think it possible is to dishonour God ; for the laws of nature are the laws of God, and to say that God violates the laws of nature is to say that he violates his own nature. Reason sees, too, that miracles can never attain their professed object, — ^that of bringing us to a higher knowledge of God ; since our knowledge of God is raised only by perfect- ing and clearing our conceptions, and the alleged design 20 of miracles is to baffle them. But neither does Scripture anywhere assert, as a general truth, that miracles are possible. Indeed, it asserts the contrary ; for Jeremiah declares that Nature follows an invariable order. Scrip- ture, however, like Nature herself, does not lay down ■ speculative propositions {Scriptura definitiones non tradit, ut nee etiam natura). It relates matters in such an order and with such phraseology as a speaker (often not perfectly instructed himself) who wanted to impress his hearers with a Uvely sense of God's greatness and goodness would 30 naturally employ ; as Moses, for instance, relates to the Israehtes the passage of the Red Sea without any mention of the east wind which attended it, and which is brought accidentally to our knowledge in another place. So that to know exactly what Scriptiu'e means in the relation of each seeming miracle, we ought to know (besides the tropes and phrases of the Hebrew language) the circumstances, and also, — since every one is swayed in his manner of presenting facts by his own preconceived opinions, and we have seen what those of the prophets were, — the preconceived 40 opinions of each speaker. But this mode of interpreting SPINOZA AND THE BIBLE 203 Scripture is fatal to the vulgar notion of its verbal inspira- tion, of a sanctity and absolute truth in all the words and sentences of which it is composed. This vulgar notion is, indeed, a palpable error. It is demonstrable from the internal testimony of the Scriptures themselves, that the books from the first of the Pentateuch to the last of Kings were put together, after the first destruction of Jerusalem, by a compiler (probably Ezra) who designed to relate the history of the Jewish people from its origin to that destruc- 10 tion ; it is demonstrable, moreover, that the compiler did not put his last hand to the work, but left it with its extracts from various and conflicting sources sometimes unreconciled, left it with errors of text and unsettled readings. The prophetic books are mere fragments of the prophets, collected by the Rabbins where they could find them, and inserted in the Canon according to their discretion. They, at first, proposed to admit neither the Book of Proverbs nor the Book of Ecclesiastes into the Canon, and only ad- mitted them because there were found in them passages 20 which commended the law of Moses. Ezekiel also they had determined to exclude ; but one of their number remodelled him, so as to procure his admission. The Books of Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, and Daniel are the work of a single author, and were not written tiU after Judas Maccabeus had restored the worship of the Temple. The Book of Psalms was collected and arranged at the same time. Before this time, there was no Canon of the sacred writings, and the great synagogue, by which the Canon was fixed, was first convened after the Macedonian conquest of Asia. 30 Of that synagogue none of the prophets were members ; the learned men who composed it were guided by their own faUible judgment. In like manner the uninspired judgment of human councils determined the Canon of the New Testament. Such, reduced to the briefest and plainest terms possible, stripped of the developments and proofs with which he dehvers it, and divested of the metaphysical language in which much of it is clothed by him, is the doctrine of Spinoza's treatise on the interpretation of Scripture. By to the whole scope and drift of its argument, by the spirit 204 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM in which the subject is throughout treated, his work undeniably is most interesting and stimulating to the general crdture of Europe. There are alleged contradictions in Scripture ; and the question which the general culture of Europe, informed of this, asks with real interest is : What then ? Spinoza addresses himself to this question. All secondary points of criticism he touches with the utmost possible brevity. He points out that Moses could never have written : ' And the Canaanite was then in the land,' because the Canaanite was in the land stiU at the death of lo Moses. He points out that Moses could never have written : ' There arose not a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses.' He points out how such a passage as, ' These are the kings that reigned in Edom before there reigned any Icing over the children of Israd,' clearly indicates an author writing not before the times of the Kings. He points out how the account of Og's iron bedstead : ' Only Og the king of Bashan remained of the remnant of giants ; behold, his bedstead was a bedstead of iron ; is it not in Rabbath of the children of Ammon ? ' — probably indicates an author 20 writing after David had taken Rabbath, and found there ' abundance of spoil,' amongst it this iron bedstead, the gigantic reUc of another age. He points out how the language of this passage, and of such a passage as that in the Book of Samuel : ' Beforetime in Israel, when a man went to inquire of God, thus he spake : Come and let us go to the seer ; for he that is now called prophet was aforetime called seer ' — is certainly the language of a writer describing the events of a long-past age, and not the language of a con- temporary. But he devotes to aU this no more space than 30 is absolutely necessary. He apologises for delajdng over such matters so long : non est cur circa haec diu detinear — nolo taediosA lectione lectorem detinere. For him the interest- ing question is, not whether the fanatical devotee of the letter is to continue, for a longer or for a shorter time, to believe that Moses sate in the land of Moab writing the description of his own death, but what he is to beheve when he does not believe this. Is he to take for the guidance of his Ufe a great gloss put upon the Bible by theologians, ■who, ' not content with going mad themselves with Plato lo and Aristotle, want to make Christ and the prophets go SPINOZA AND THE BIBLE 205 mad with them too,' — or the Bible itself ? Is he to be presented by his national church with metaphysical formularies for his creed, or with the real fundamentals of Christianity ? If with the former, religion wiU never produce its due fruits. A few elect will still be saved ; but the vast majority of mankind wiU remaia without grace and without good works, hateful and hating one another. Therefore he calls urgently upon governments to make the national church what it should be. This 10 is the conclusion of the whole matter for him ; a fervent appeal to the State, to save us from the untoward generation of metaphysical Article-makers. And therefore, anticipating Mr. Gladstone, he called his book ' The Church in its Relations with the State.' Such is really the scope of Spinoza's work. He pursues a great object, and pursues it with signal ability ; but it is important to observe that he does not give us his own opinion about the Bible's fundamental character. He takes the Bible as it stands, as he might take the phenomena 20 of nature, and he discusses it as he finds it. Revelation differs from natural knowledge, he says, not by being more divine or more certain than natural knowledge, but by being conveyed in a different way ; it differs from it because it is a knowledge ' of which the laws of human nature considered in themselves alone cannot be the cause.' What is really its cause, he says, we need not here inquire {verum nee nobis jam opus est propheticae cognitionis causam scire), for we take Scripture, which contains this revelation, as it stands, and do not ask how 30 it arose {documentorum causas nihil curamus). Proceeding on this principle, Spinoza leaves the attentive reader somewhat baffled and disappointed, clear as is his way of treating his subject, and remarkable as are the conclusions with which he presents us. He starts, we feel, from what is to him a hypothesis, and we want to know what he really thinks about this hypothesis. His greatest novelties are all within Umits fixed for him by this hypo- thesis. He says that the voice which called Samuel was an imaginary voice ; he says that the waters of the Red Sea 40 retreated before a strong wind ; he says that the Shunam- mite's son was revived by the natural heat of EUsha's 206 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM body ; he says that the rainbow which was made a sign to Noah appeared in the ordinary course of nature. Scrip- ture itself, rightly interpreted, says, he afSrms, all this. But he asserts that the voice which uttered the command- ments on Mount Sinai was a real voice, a vera vox. He says, indeed, that this voice could not really give to the IsraeUtes that proof which they imagined it gave to them of the existence of God, and that God on Sinai was deahng with the Israehtes only according to their imperfect knowledge. Still he asserts the voice to have been a real one ; and for lo this reason, that we do violence to Scripture if we do not admit it to have been a real one (nisi Scripturae vim inferre velimus, omnino concedendum est, Israelitas veram vocem audivisse). The attentive reader wants to know what Spinoza himself thought about this vera vox and its possibility ; he is much more interested in knowing this, than in knowing what Spinoza considered Scripture to affirm about the matter. The feehng of perplexity thus caused is not diminished by the language of the chapter on miracles. In this chapter 20 Spinoza broadly affirms a miracle to be an impossibility. But he himself contrasts the method of demonstration a priori, by which he claims to have estabhshed this proposition, with the method which he has pursued in treating of prophetic revelation. ' This revelation,' he says, ' is a matter out of human reach, and therefore I was boimd to take it as I foimd it.' Monere volo, me alid prorsus methodo circa miracula processisse, quam circa prophetiam . . . quod etiam consulto feci, quia de prophetid, quandoquidem ipsa captum humanum superat et quaestiozo mere theologica est, nihil affirmare, neque etiam scire poteram in quo ipsa potissimum constiterit, nisi ex fundamentis revelatis. The reader feels that Spinoza, proceeding on a hjrpothesis, has presented him with the assertion of a miracle, and afterwards, proceeding a priori, has presented him with the assertion that a miracle is impossible. He feels that Spinoza does not adequately reconcile these two assertions by declaring that any event really miraciJous, if found recorded in Scripture, must be ' a spurious addition made to Scripture by sacrilegious men.' Is, then, he asks, 40 the vera vox of Mount Sinai in Spinoza's opinion a spurious SPINOZA AND THE BIBLE 207 addition made to Scripture by sacrilegious men ; or, if not, how is it not miraculous ? Spinoza, in his own mind, regarded the Bible as a vast collection of miscellaneous documents, many of them quite disparate and not at all to be harmonised with others ; documents of unequal value and of varying applicabiUty, some of them convejing ideas salutary for one time, others for another. But in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus he by no means always deals in this free spirit with the 10 Bible. Sometimes he chooses to deal with it in the spirit of the veriest worshipper of the letter ; sometimes he chooses to treat the Bible as if all its parts were (so to speak) equipollent; to snatch an isolated text which suits his purpose, without caring whether it is annulled by the con- text, by the general drift of Scripture, or by other passages of more weight and authority. The great critic thus becomes voluntarily as uncritical as Exeter Hall. The epicurean Solomon, whose Eccleaiastes the Hebrew doctors, even after they had received it into the canon, forbade the young and 20 weak-minded among their community to read, Spinoza quotes as of the same authority with the severe Moses ; he uses promiscuously, as documents of identical force, without discriminating between their essentially difierent character, the softened cosmopolitan teaching of the prophets of the captivity and the rigid national teaching of the instructors of Israel's youth. He is capable of. extracting, from a chance expression of Jeremiah, the assertion of a specula- tive idea which Jeremiah certainly never entertained, and from which he would have recoiled in dismay, — ^the 30 idea, namely, that miracles are impossible ; just as the ordinary Englishman can extract from God's words to Noah, Be fruitful and multiply, an exhortation to himself to have a large family. Spinoza, I repeat, knew perfectly well what this verbal mode of dealing with the Bible was worth : but he sometimes uses it because of the hypothesis from which he set out ; because of his having agreed ' to take Scripture as it stands, and not to ask how it arose.' No doubt the sagacity of Spinoza's rules for BibUcal interpretation, the power of his analysis of the contents of 40 the Bible, the interest of his reflections on Jewish history, are, in spite of this, very great, and have an absolute 208 ESSAYS IN CEITICISM worth of their own, independent of the silence or ambiguity of their author upon a point of cardinal importance. Few candid people will read his rules of interpretation without exclaiming that they are the very dictates of good sense, that they have always believed in them ; and without adding, after a moment's reflection, that they have passed their lives in violating them. And what can be more interesting than to find that perhaps the main cause of the decay of the Jewish polity was one of which from our English Bible, which entirely mistranslates the 26th lo verse of the 20th chapter of Ezekiel, we hear nothing, — the perpetual reproach of impurity and rejection cast upon the mass of the Hebrew nation by the exclusive priesthood of the tribe of Levi ? What can be more suggestive, after Mr. Mill and Dr. Stanley have been telling us how great an element of strength to the Hebrew nation was the institution of prophets, than to hear from the ablest of Hebrews how this institution seems v to him to have been to his nation one of her main elements of weakness ? No intelUgent man can read the Tractatus 20 Theologico-Politicus without being profoundly instructed by it : but neither can he read it without feeling that, as a speculative work, it is, to use a French military expression, in the air ; that, in a certain sense, it is in want of a base and in want of supports ; that this base and these supports are, at any rate, not to be found in the work itself, and, if they exist, must be sought for in other works of the author. The genuine speculative opinions of Spinoza, which the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus but imperfectly reveals, so may in his Ethics and in his Letters be found set forth clearly. It is, however, the business of criticism to deal with every independent work as with an independent whole, and, instead of establishing between the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus and the Ethics of Spinoza a relation which Spinoza himself has not estabhshed, — ^to seize, in dealing with the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, the impor- tant fact that this work has its source, not in the axioms and definitions of the Ethics, but in a hypothesis. The Ethics are not yet translated into English, and I have not 10 here to speak of them. Then will be the right time for SPINOZA AND THE BIBLE 20S criticism to try and seize the special character and tendencies of that remarkable work, when it is dealing with it directly. The criticism of the Ethics is far too serious a task to be undertaken incidentally, and merely as a supplement to the criticism of the Tractattis Theologico-Politicus. Never- theless, on certain governing ideas of Spinoza, which receive their systematic expression, indeed, in the Ethics, and on which the Traclatus Theologico-Politicus is not formally based, but which are yet never absent from Spinoza's 10 mind in the composition of any work, which breathe through all his works, and fill them with a peculiar effect and power, I have a word or two to say. A philosopher's real power over mankind resides not in his metaphysical formulas, but in the spirit and ten- dencies which have led him to adopt those formulas. Spinoza's critic, therefore, has rather to bring to light that spirit and those tendencies of his author, than to exhibit his metaphysical formulas. Propositions about substance pass by mankind at large like the idle wind, 20 which mankind at large regards not ; it will not even listen to a word about these propositions, unless it first learns what their author was driving at with theni, and finds that this object of his is one with which it sympathises, one, at any rate, which commands its attention. And mankind is so far right that this object of the author is really, as has been said, that which is most important, that which sets all his work in motion, that which is the secret of his attraction for other minds, which, by different ways, pursue the same object. so Mr. Maurice, seeking for the cause of Goethe's great admiration for Spinoza, thinks that he finds it in Spinoza's Hebrew genius. ' He spoke of God,' says Mr. Maurice, ' as an actual being, to those who had fancied him a name in a book. The child of the circumcision had a message for Lessing and Goethe which the pagan schools of philo- sophy could not bring.' This seems to me, I confess, fanciful. An intensity and impressiveness, which came to him from his Hebrew nature, Spinoza no doubt has ; but the two things which are most remarkable about him, and 40 by which, as I think, he chiefly impressed Goethe, seem to me not to come to him from his Hebrew nature at all, ABJSULD f 210 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM ■ — I mean his denial of final causes, and his stoicism, a stoicism not passive , but active . For a mind like Goethe 's , — a mind profoundly impartial and passionately aspiring after the science, not of men only, but of universal nature, — the popular philosophy which explains all things by refer- ence to man, and regards universal nature as existing for the sake of man, and even of certain classes of men, was utterly repulsive. Unchecked, this philosophy would gladly maintain that the donkey exists in order that the invalid Christian may have donkey's milk before break- lo fast ; and such views of nature as this were exactly what Goethe's whole soul abhorred. Creation, he thought, should be made of sterner stuff ; he desired to rest the donkey's existence on larger grounds. More than any philosopher who has ever lived, Spinoza satisfied him here. The full exposition of the counter-doctrine to the popular doctrine of final causes is to be foim.d in the Ethics ; but this denial of final causes was so essential an element of all Spinoza's thinking that we shall, as has been said already, find it in the work with which we are here con- 20 cemed, the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, and, indeed, permeating that work and all his works. From the Trac- tatus Theologico-Politicus one may take as good a general statement of this denial as any which is to be found in the Ethics : — ' Deus naturam dirigit, prout ejus leges universales, non autem prout humanae naturae particulares leges exigunt, adeoque Deus non solius humani generis, sed totius naturae rationem habet.' (Ooi directs nature, according as the universal laws of nature, but not according as the particular so laws of human nature require ; and so God has regard, not of the human race only, but of entire nature.) And, as a pendant to this denial by Spinoza of final causes, comes his stoicism : — ' Non studemus, ut natura nobis, sed contra ut nos naturae pareamus.' {Our desire is not that nature may obey us, but, on the contrary, that we may obey nature.) Here is the second source of his attractiveness for Goethe ; and Goethe is but the eminent representative of a whole order of minds whose admiration has madeio Spinoza's fame. Spinoza first impresses Goethe and any SPINOZA AND THE BIBLE 211 man like Goethe, and then he composes him ; first he fills and satisfies his imagination by the width and grandeur of his view of nature, and then he fortifies and stills his mobile, straining, passionate, poetio temperament by the moral lesson he draws from his view of nature. And a moral lesson not of mere resigned acquiescence, not of melancholy quietism, but of joyful activity within the limits of man's true sphere : — ' Ipsa hominis essentia est conatus quo unusquisque 10 suum esse conservare conatur. . . . Virtus hominis est ipsa hominis essentia, quatenus a solo conatu suum esse conservandi definitur. . . . Felicitas in eo consistit quod homo suum esse conservare potest. . . . Laetitia est hominis transitio ad majorem perfectionem. . . . Tristitia est hominis transitio ad minorem perfectionem.' [Man's very essence is the effort wherewith each man strives to maintain his own being. . . . Man's virtue is this very essence, so far as it is defined by this single effort to maintain his own being. . . . Happiness consists in a man's being able to maintain his 20 own being. . . . Joy is man's passage to a greater perfection. . . . Sorrow is man's passage to a lesser perfection.) It seems to me that by neither of these, his grand charac- teristic doctrines, is Spinoza truly Hebrew or truly Christian. His denial of final causes is essentially alien to the spirit of the Old Testament, and his cheerful and seK-sufficing stoicism is essentially alien to the spirit of the New. The doctrine that ' God directs nature, not according as the particular laws of human nature, but according as the universal laws of nature require,' is at utter variance with 30 that Hebrew mode of representing God's deaUngs, which makes the locusts visit Egypt to punish Pharaoh's hard- ness of heart, and the falling dew avert itself from the fleece of Gideon. The doctrine that ' all sorrow is a passage to a lesser perfection ' is at utter variance with the Christian recognition of the blessedness of sorrow, working ' repent- ance to salvation not to be repented of ; ' of sorrow, which, in Dante's words, ' remarries us to God.' Spinoza's repeated and earnest assertions that the love of God is man's summum bonum do not remove the funda- 40 mental diversity between his doctrine and the Hebrew and Christian doctrines. By the love of God he does not mean f 3 212 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM the same thing which the Hebrew and Christian religions mean by the love of God. He makes the love of God to consist in the knowledge of God ; and, as we know God only through his manifestation of himself in the laws of all nature, it is by knowing these laws that we love God, and the more we know them the more we love him. This may be true, but this is not what the Christian means by the love of God. Spinoza's ideal is the intellectual life ; the Christian's ideal is the religious life. Between the two conditions there is all the difference which there is between lo the being in love, and the following, with dehghted com- prehension, a reasoning of Plato. For Spinoza, undoubtedly, the crown of the intellectual life is a transport, as for the saint the crown of the religious life is a transport ; but the two transports are not the same. This is true ; yet it is true, also, that by thus crowning the intellectual life with a sacred transport, by thus retain- ing in philosophy, amid the discontented murmurs of all the army of atheism, the name of God, Spinoza maintains a profound affinity with that which is truest in reUgion, 20 and inspires an indestructible interest. One of his admirers,. M. Van Vloten, has recently published at Amsterdam a supplementary volume to Spinoza's works, containing the interesting document of Spinoza's sentence of excom- munication, from which I have already quoted, and con- taining, besides, several lately found works alleged to be Spinoza's, which seem to me to be of doubtful authenticity, and, even if authentic, of no great importance. M. Van Vloten (who, let me be permitted to say in passing, writes a Latin which would make one think that the art of writing 30 Latin must be now a lost art in the country of Lipsius) is very anxious that Spinoza's unscientific retention of the name of God should not afflict his readers with any doubts as to his perfect scientific orthodoxy : — ' It is a great mistake,' he cries, ' to disparage Spinoza as merely one of the dogmatists before Kant. By keeping the name of God, while he did away with his person and character, he has done himself an injustice. Those who look to the bottom of things will see, that, long ago as he lived, he had even then reached the point to which the 40 post-Hegelian philosophy and the study of natural science SPINOZA AND THE BIBLE 213 has only just brought our own times. Leibnitz expressed his apprehension lest those who did away with final causes should do away with God at the same time. But it is in his having done away with final causes, and with Ood along with them, that Spinoza's true merit consists.' Now it must be remarked that to use Spinoza's denial of final causes in order to identify him with the C!oryphaei of atheism, is to make a false use of Spinoza's denial of final causes, just as to use his assertion of the all-impor- 10 tance of loAring Gtod to identify him with the saints would be to make a false use of his assertion of the all-importance of loving Giod. He is no more to be identified with the post-Hegelian philosophers than he is to be identified with St. Augustine. Unction, indeed, Spinoza's writings have not ; that name does not precisely fit any quality which they exhibit. And yet, so all-important in the sphere of religious thought is the power of edification, that in this sphere a great fame like Spinoza's can never be founded without it. A court of literature can never be very severe 20 to Voltaire : with that inimitable wit and clear sense of his, he cannot write a page in which the fullest head may not find something suggestive : still, because, with all his wit and clear sense, he handles religious ideas wholly without the power of edification, his fame as a great man is equivocal. Strauss has treated the question of Scripture miracles with an acuteness and fulness which even to the most informed minds is instructive ; but because he treats it wholly without the power of edifica- tion, his fame as a serious thinker is equivocal. But in 00 Spinoza there is not a trace either of Voltaire's passion for mockery or of Strauss's passion for demolition. His whole soul was filled with desire of the love and knowledge of God, and of that only. Philosophy always proclaims her- self on the way to the summum bonum ; but too often on the road she seems to forget her destination, and suffers her hearers to forget it also. Spinoza never forgets his destination : ' The love of God is man's highest happiness and blessedness, and the final end and aim of all himian pctions ; — The supreme reward for keeping God's Word is 40 that Word itself — namely, to know him and with free will and pure and constant heart love him : ' these sentences 214 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM are the keynote to all he produced, and were the inspira- tion of all his labours. This is why he turns so sternly upon the worshippers of the letter, — ^the editors of the Masora, the editor of the Record, — because their doctrine imperils our love and knowledge of God. ' What ! ' he cries, ' our knowledge of God to depend upon these perishable things, which Moses can dash to the ground and break to pieces like the first tables of stone, or of which the originals can be lost like the original book of the Covenant, like the original book of the Law of God, like the book of the lo Wars of God ! . . . which can come to us confused, imper- fect, miswritten by copyists, tampered with by doctors ! And you accuse others of impiety ! It is you who are impious, to believe that God would commit the treasure of the true record of himself to any substance less enduring than the heart ! ' And Spinoza's life was not unworthy of this elevated strain. A philosopher who professed that knowledge was its own reward, a devotee who professed that the love of God was its own reward, this philosopher and this devotee 20 believed in what he said. Spinoza led a life the most spotless, perhaps, to be found among the lives of philo- sophers ; he lived simple, studious, even-tempered, kind ; declining honours, declining riches, declining notoriety. He was poor, and his admirer Simon de Vries sent him two thousand florins ; — ^he refused them. The same friend left him his fortune ; — he returned it to the heir. He was asked to dedicate one of his works to the magnificent patron of letters in his century, Louis the Fourteenth ; — he declined. His great work, his Ethics, published after so his death, he gave injunctions to his friends to publish anonymously, for fear he should give his name to a school. Truth, he thought, should bear no man's name. And finally, — ' Unless,' he said, ' I had known that my writings would in the end advance the cause of true religion, I would have suppressed them, — tacuissem.' It was in this spirit that he lived ; and this spirit gives to all he writes not exactly unction, — I have already said so, — but a kind of sacred solemnity. Not of the same order as the saints, he yet follows the same service : Doubtless thou art our Father, 40 though Abraham be ignorant of us, and Israel acknowledge us not. SPINOZA AND THE BIBLE 21.5 Therefore he has been, in a certain sphere, edifjang, and has inspired in many powerful minds an interest and an admiration such as no other philosopher has inspired since Plato. The lonely precursor of Gterman philosophy, he still shines when the light of his successors is fading away ; they had celebrity, Spinoza has fame. Not because his peculiar system of philosophy has had more adherents than theirs ; on the contrary, it has had fewer. But schools of philosophy arise and fall ; their bands of adherents 10 inevitably dwindle ; no master can long persuade a large body of disciples that they give to themselves just the same account of the world as he does ; it is only the very young and the very enthusiastic who can think themselves sure that they possess the whole mind of Plato, or Spinoza, or Hegel, at all. The very mature and the very sober can even hardly believe that these philosophers possessed it themselves enough to put it all into their works, and to let us know entirely how the world seemed to them. What a remarkable philosopher really does for human thought, 20 is to throw into circulation a certain number of new and striking ideas and expressions, and to stimulate with them the thought and imagination of his century or of after- times. So Spinoza has made his distinction between adequate and inadequate ideas a current notion for educated Europe. So Hegel seized a single pregnant sentence of Heracleitus, and cast it, with a thousand striking applica- tions, into the world of modern thought. But to do this is only enough to make a philosopher noteworthy ; it is not enough to make him great. To be great, he must have 30 something in him which can influence character, which is edifying ; he must, in short, have a noble and lofty character himself, a character, — to recur to that much-criticised expression of mine, — in the grand style. This is what Spinoza- had ; and because he had it, he stands out from the multitude of philosophers, and has been able to inspire in powerful minds a feeling which the most remarkable philosophers, without this grandiose character, could not inspire. ' There is no possible view of life but Spinoza's,' said Lessing. Goethe has told us how he was calmed and 40 edified by him in his youth, and how he again went to him for support in his maturity. Heine, the man (in spite of 216 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM his faults) of truest genius that Germany has produced since Goethe, — a man with faults, as I have said, immense faults, the greatest of them being that he could reverence so little, — ^reverenced Spinoza. Hegel's influence ran off him like water : ' I have seen Hegel,' he cries, ' seated with his doleful air of a hatching hen upon his unhappy eggs, and I have heard his dismal clucking. — ^How easily one can cheat oneself into thinking that one understands everything, when one has learnt only how to construct dialectical formulas ! ' But of Spinoza, Heine said : ' His lo life was a copy of the life of his divine kinsman, Jesus Christ.' And therefore, when M. Van Vloten violently presses the parallel with, the post-Hegelians, one feels that the parallel with St. Augustine is the far truer one. Compared with the soldier of irreligion M. Van Vloten would have him to be, Spinoza is religious. ' It is true,' one may say to the wise and devout Christian, ' Spinoza's conception of beatitude is not yours, and cannot satisfy you ; but whose conception of beatitude would you accept as satis- 20 fying ? Not even that of the devoutest of your fellow- Christians. Fra Angelico, the sweetest and most inspired of devout souls, has given us, in his great picture of the Last Judgment, his conception of beatitude. The elect are going round in a ring on long grass under laden fruit- trees ; two of them, more restless than the others, are flying up a battlemented street, — a street blank with all the ennui of the Middle Ages. Across a gulf is visible, for the delectation of the saints, a blazing caldron in which Beelzebub is sousing the damned. This is hardly more so your conception of beatitude than Spinoza's is. But " in my Father's house are many mansions ; " only, to reach any one of these mansions, there are needed the wings of a genuine sacred transport, of an " immortal longing." ' These wings Spinoza had ; and, because he had them, his own language about himself, about his aspirations and his course, are true : his foot is in the v&ra vita, his eye on the beatific vision. MARCUS AURELIUS Ma. Mill says, in his book on Liberty, that ' Christian morality is in great part merely a protest against paganism ; its ideal is negative rather than positive, passive rather than active.' He says, that, in certain most important respects, ' it falls far below the best moraUty of the ancients.' Now, the object of systems of morality is to take possession of human life, to save it from being aban- doned to passion or allowed to drift at hazard, to give it happiness by establishing it in the practice of virtue ; and 10 this object they seek to attain by prescribing to human life fixed principles of action, fixed rules of conduct. In its uninspired as well as in its inspired moments, in its days of languor and gloom as well as in its days of sun- shine and energy, human life has thus always a clue to follow, and may always be making way towards its goal. Christian morality has not failed to supply to human life aids of this sort. It has supplied. them far more, abundantly than many of its critics imagine. The most exquisite document, after those of the New Testament, of all the 20 documents the Christian spirit has ever inspired, — the Imitation, — by no means contains the whole' of Christian morality ; nay, the disparagers of this morality would think themselves sure of triumphing if one agreed to look for it in the Imitation only. But even the Imitation is full of passages like these : ' Vita sine proposito languida et vaga est ; ' — ' Omni die renovare debemus propositum nostrum, dicentes : nunc hodie perfecte inoipiamus, quia nihil est quod hactenus fecimus ; ' — ' Secundum propositum nostrum est cursus profectus nostri ; ' — ' Raro etiam unum 30 vitium perfecte vincimus, et ad quotidianum profectum non accendimur ; ' — ' Semper aliquid certi proponendum est ; ' — ' Tibi ipsi violentiam frequenter fao : ' (A life without a purpose is a languid, drifting thing ; — Every day we ought to renew our purpose, saying to ourselves .v This day let us 218 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM make a sound beginning, for what we have hitherto done is nought ; — Our improvement is in proportion to our pur- pose ; — We hardly ever manage to get completely rid even of one fault, and do not set our hearts on daily improvement ; — Always place a definite purpose before thee ; — Oet the habit of mastering thine inclination.) These are moral precepts, and moral precepts of the best kind. As rales to hold possession of our conduct, and to keep us in the right course through outward troubles and inward perplexity, they are equal to the best ever furnished by the great lo masters of morals, — Epictetus or Marcus AureHus. But moral rules, apprehended as. ideas first, and then rigorously followed as laws, are, and must be, for the sage only. The mass of mankind have neither force of intellect enough to apprehend them clearly as ideas, nor force of character enough to follow them strictly as laws. The mass of mankind can be carried along a course full of hardship for the natural man, can be borne over the thousand impediments of the narrow way, only by the tide of a joyful and bounding emotion. It is impossible 20 to rise from reading Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius without a sense of restraint and melancholy, without feehng that the burden laid upon man is well-nigh greater than he can bear. Honour to the sages who have felt this, and yet have borne it ! Yet, even for the sage, this sense of labour and sorrow in his march towards the goal constitutes a relative inferiority ; the noblest souls of whatever creed, the pagan Einpedocles as well as the Christian Paul, have insisted on the necessity of an inspiration, a jojrful emotion, to make moral action perfect ; an obscure indication of 30 this necessity is the one drop of truth in the ocean of verbiage with which the controversy on justification by faith has flooded the world. But, for the ordinary man, this sense of labour and sorrow constitutes an absolute disqualification ; it paralyses him ; under the weight of it, he cannot make way towards the goal at all. The paramount virtue of religion is, that it has lighted up morality ; that it has suppUed the emotion and inspiration needful for carrying the sage along the narrow way perfectly, for carrying the ordinary man along it at all. Even the m religions with most dross in them have had something of MARCUS AURELTU8 219 this virtue ; but the Christian religion manifests it with unexampled splendour. ' Lead me, Zeus and Destiny ! ' says the prayer of Epictetus, 'whithersoever I am appointed to go ; I will follow without wavering ; even though I turn coward and shrink, I shall have to follow all the same.' The fortitude of that is for the strong, for the few ; even for them the spiritual atmosphere with which it surrounds them is bleak and grey. But, ' Let thy loving spirit lead me forth into the land of righteousness ; ' — ' The Lord 10 shall be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory ; ' — ' Unto you that fear my name shall the sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings,' says the Old Testament ; ' Born, not of blood, nor of the wUl of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God ; ' — ' Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God ; ' — ' Whatsoever is born of God, overcometh the world,' says the New. The ray of sunshine is there, the glow of a divine warmth ; — ^the austerity of the sage melts away under it, the paralysis of the weak is healed : he who is 20 vivified by it renews his strength ; ' aU things are possible to him ; ' ' he is a new creature.' Epictetus says : ' Every matter has two handles, one of which wiU bear taking hold of, the other not. If thy brother sin against thee, lay not hold of the matter by this, that he sins against thee ; for by this handle the matter will not bear taking hold of. But rather lay hold of it by this, that he is thy brother, thy born mate ; and thou wilt take hold of it by what will bear handling.' Jesus, asked whether a man is bound to forgive his brother so as often as seven times, answers : ' I say not unto thee, until seven times, but untU seventy times seven.' Epic- tetus here suggests to the reason groimds for forgiveness of injuries which Jesus does not ; but it is vain to say that Epictetus is on that aceoimt a better morahst than Jesus, if the warmth, the emotion, of Jesus's answer fires his hearer to the practice of forgiveness of injuries, while the thought in Epictetus's leaves him cold. So with Christian moraUty in general : its distinction is not that it propounds the maxim, ' Thou shalt lovo God and thy 40 neighbour,' with more development, closer reasoning, truer sincerity, than other moral systems ; it is that it propounds 220 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM this maxim with an inspiration which, wonderfully catches the hearer and makes him act upon it. It is because Mr. Mill has attained to the perception of truths of this nature, that he is, — instead of being, like the school from which he proceeds, doomed to sterility, — a writer of dis- tinguished mark and influence, a writer deserving aU attention and respect ; it is (I must be pardoned for saying) because he is not sufficiently leavened with them, that he falls just short of being a great writer. That which gives to the moral writings of the Emperor lo Marcus AureUus their pecidiar character and charm, is their being suffused and softened by something of this very sentiment whence Christian morahty draws its best power. Mr. Long has recently pubhshed in a convenient form a translation of these writings, and has thus enabled English readers to judge Marcus Aurelius for themselves ; he has rendered his countrymen a real service by so doing. Mr. Long's reputation as a scholar is a sufficient guarantee of the general fideUty and accuracy of his translation ; on these matters, besides, I am hardly entitled to speak, 20 and my praise is of no value. But that for which I and the rest of the unlearned may venture to praise Mr. Long is this : that he treats Marcus AureUus's writings, as he treats all the other remains of Greek and B/Oman antiquity which he touches, not as a dead and dry matter of learning, but as documents with a side of modem apphcabUity and living interest, and valuable mainly so far as this side in them can be made clear ; that as in his notes on Plutarch's Roman Lives he deals with the modern epoch of Caesar and Cicero, not as food for schoolboys, but as food for men, 30 and men engaged in the current of contemporary Ufe and action, so in his remarks and essays on Marcus Aurelius he treats this truly modem striver and thinker not as a Classical Dictionary hero, but as a present source from which to draw ' example of life, and instruction of manners.' Why may not a son of Dr. Arnold say, what might naturally here be said by any other critib, that in this lively and fruitful way of considering the men and afEairs of ancient Greece and Rome, Mr. Long resembles Dr. Arnold ? One or two Httle complaints, however, I have against 40 Mr. Long, and I will get them off my mind at once. In MAECUS AURELIUS 221 the first place, why could he not have found gentler and juster terms to describe the translation of his best-known predecessor, Jeremy Collier, — ^the redoubtable enemy of stage plays, — than these : ' a most coarse and vulgar copy of the original ' ? As a matter of taste, a translator should deal leniently with his predecessor ; but putting that out of the question, Mr. Long's language is a great deal too hard. Most Enghsh people who knew Marcus AureUus before Mr. Long appeared as his introducer, knew him 10 through Jeremy CoUier. And the acquaintance of a man hke Marcus AureUus is such an imperishable benefit, that one can never lose a peouhar sense of obUgation towards the man who confers it. Apart from this claim upon one's tenderness, however, Jeremy CoUier's version deserves respect for its genuine spirit and vigour, the spirit and vigour of the age of Dryden. Jeremy CoUier too, Uke Mr. Long, regarded in Marcus AureUus the Uving moraUst, and not the dead classic ; and his warmth of feeling gave to his style an impetuosity and rhythm which from Mr. 20 Long's style (I do not blame it on that account) are absent. Let us place the two side by side. The impressive opening of Marcus Aurelius's fifth book, Mr. Long translates thus : — ' In the morning when thou risest imwiUingly, let this thought be present : I am rising to the work of a human being. Why then am I dissatisfied if I am going to do the things for which I exist and for which I was brought into the world ? Or have I been made for this, to Ue in the bed-clothes and keep myself warm ? — But this is more pleasant. — Dost thou exist then to take thy pleasme, and 30 not at aU for action or exertion ? ' Jeremy CoUier has : — ' When you find an unwillingness to rise early in the niorning, make this short speech to yourself : "I am getting up now to do the business of a man ; and am I out of humour for going about that which I was made for, and for the sake of which I was sent into the world ? Was I. then designed for nothing but to doze and batten beneath the counterpane ? I thought action had been the end of your being." ' 40 Li another striking passage, again, Mr. Long has : — ' No longer wander at hazard ; for neither wilt thou 222 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM read thy own memoirs, nor the acts of the ancient Romans and Hellenes, and the selections from books which thou wast reserving for thy old age. Hasten then to the end which thou hast before thee, and, throwing away idle hopes, come to thine own aid, if thou carest at aU for thyself, while it is in thy power.' Here his despised predecessor has : — ' Don't go too far in your books and overgrasp yourself. Alas, you have no time left to peruse your diary, to read over the Greek and Roman history : come, don't flatter lo and deceive yourself ; look to the main chance, to the end and design of reading, and mind Uf e more than notion : I say, if you have a kindness for your person, drive at the practice and help yourself, for that is in your own power.' It seems to me that here for style and force Jeremy Collier can (to say the least) perfectly stand comparison with Mr. Long. Jeremy CoUier's real defect as a translator is not his coarseness and vulgarity, but his imperfect acquaintance v/ith Greek ; this is a serious defect, a fatal one ; it renders a translation like Mr. Long's necessary. 20 Jeremy CoUier's work will now be forgotten, and Mr. Long stands master of the field ; but he may be content, at any rate, to leave his predecessor's grave unharmed, even if he will not throw upon it, in passing, a handful of kindly earth. Another complaint I have against Mr. Long is, that he is not quite idiomatic and simple enough. It is a httle formal, at least, if not pedantic, to say Ethic and Dialectic, instead of Ethics and Dialectics, and to say, 'Hellenes and Romans ' instead of ' Greeks and Romans.' And why, too, 30 — the name of Antoninus being preoccupied by Antoninus Pius, — wiU Mr. Long call his author Marcus Antonirms instead of Marcus Aurelius ? Small as these matters appear, they are important when one has to deal with the general public, and not with a small circle of scholars ; and it is the general pubhc that the translator of a short masterpiece on morals, such as is the book of Marcus AureUus, should have in view ; his aim should be to make Marcus Aurelius's work as popular as the Imitation, and Marcus Aurehus's name as famihar as Socrates's. In 40 rendering or naming him, therefore, punctiUous accuracy MARCUS AVnSLWS 223 of phrase is not so much, to be sought as accessibUity and currency ; everything which may best enable the Emperor and his precepts volitare per ora virilm. It is essential to render him in language perfectly plain and unprofessional, and to caU him by the name by which he is best and most distinctly known. The translators of the Bible talk of pence and not denarii, and the admirers of Voltaire do not celebrate him under the name of Arouet. But, after these trifling complaints are made, one must 10 end, as one began, in unfeigned gratitude to Mr. Long for his excellent and substantial reproduction in English of an invaluable work. In general the substantiaUty, soundness, and precision of Mr. Long's rendering are (I wiU venture, after all, to give my opinion about them) as conspicuous as the living spirit with which he treats antiquity ; and these quaUties are particularly desirable in the translator of a work like Marcus Aurelius's, of which the language is often corrupt, almost always hard and obscure. Any one who wants to appreciate Mr. Long's merits as a translator ao may read, in the original and in Mr. Long's translation, the seventh chapter of the tenth book ; he wiU see how, through all the dubiousness and involved manner of the Greek, Mr. Long has firmly seized upon the clear thought which is certainly at the bottom of that troubled wording, and, in distinctly rendering this thought, has at the same time thrown round its expression a characteristic shade of painfulness and difficulty which just suits it. And Marcus Aurelius's book is one which, when it is rendered so accur- ately as Mr. Long renders it, even those who know Greek 30 tolerably well may choose to read rather in the translation than in the original. For not only are the contents here incomparably more valuable than the external form, but this form, the Greek of a Roman, is not exactly one of those styles which have a physiognomy, which are an essential part of their author, which stamp an indeUble impression of him on the reader's mind. An old Lyons commentator finds, indeed, in Marcus Am-elius's Greek, something characteristic, something specially firm and imperial ; but I think an ordinary mortal wiU hardly find 40 this : he wiU find crabbed Greek, without any great charm of distinct physiognomy. The Greek of Thuoydides and 224 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM Plato has this charm, and he who reads them in a transla- tion, however accurate, loses it, and loses nauch in losiag it ; but the Greek of Marcus AureUus, like the Greek of the New Testament, and even more than the Greek of the New Testament, is wanting in it. If one could he assured that the English Testament were made perfectly accurate, one might be almost content never to open a Greek Testa- ment again ; and, Mr. Long's version of Marcus AureHus being what it is, an EngUshman who reads to live, and does not live to read, may henceforth let the Greek original lo repose upon its shelf. The man whose thoughts Mr. Long has thus faithfully reproduced, is perhaps the most beautiful figure in history. He is one of those consoling and hope-inspiring marks, which stand for ever to remind our weak and easily dis- couraged race how high human goodness and perseverance have once been carried, and may be carried again. The interest of mankind is pecuharly attracted by examples of signal goodness in high places ; for that testimony to the worth of goodness is the most striking which is borne 20 by those to whom ■ all the means of pleasure and self- indulgence lay open, by those who had at their command the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them. Marcus Aurelius was the ruler of the grandest of empires ; and he was one of the best of men. Besides him, history presents one or two other sovereigns eminent for their goodness, such as Saint Louis or Alfred. But Marcus Aurehus has, for us moderns, this great superiority in interest over Saint Louis or Alfred, that he lived and acted in a state of society modem by its essential characteristics, in an 30 epoch akin to our own, in a briUiant centre of civilisation. Trajan talks of ' our enlightened age ' just as ghbly as the Times talks of it. Marcus AureUus thus becomes for us a man Uke ourselves, a man in all things tempted as we are. Saint Louis inhabits an atmosphere of mediaeval Gatho- hcism, which the man of the nineteenth century may admire, indeed, may even passionately wish to inhabit, but which, strive as he will, he cannot really inhabit : Alfred belongs to a state of society (I say it with all deference to the Saturday Review critic who keeps such jealous watch 40 over the honour of our Saxon ancestors) half barbarous. MARCUS AURELIUS 223 Neither Alfred nor Saint Louis can be morally and intel- lectually as near to us as Marcus Aurelius. The record of the outward life of this admirable man has in it little of striking incident. He was born at Rome on the 26th of April, in the year 121 of the Christian era. He was nephew and son-in-law to his predecessor on the throne, Antoninus Pius. When Antoninus died, he was forty years old, but from the time of his earliest manhood he had assisted in administering public affairs. Then, after 10 his uncle's death in 161, for nineteen years he reigned as emperor. The barbarians were pressing on the Roman frontier, and a great part of Marcus Aurelius' s nineteen years of reign was passed in campaigning. His absences from Rome were numerous and long : we hear of him in Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, Greece ; but, above aU, in the countries on the Danube, where the war with the barbarians was going on, — ^in Austria, Moravia, Hungary. In these countries much of his Journal seems to have been written ; parts of it are dated from them ; and there, a few weeks 20 before his fifty-ninth birthday, he fell sick and died.^ The record of him on which his fame chiefly rests is the record of his inward life, — ^his Journal, or Commentaries, or Medita- tions, or Thoughts, for by all these names has the work been called. Perhaps the most interesting of the records of his outward life is that which the first book of this work supplies, where he gives an account of his education, recites the names of those to whom he is indebted for it, and enumerates his obligations to each of them. It is a refresh- ing and consoling picture, a priceless treasure for those, 30 who, sick of the ' wild and dreamlike trade of blood and guile,' which seems to be nearly the whole of what history has to offer to our view, seek eagerly for that substratum of right thinking and well-doing which in all ages must surely have somewhere existed, for without it the continued Ufe of humanity would have been impossible. ' From my mother I learnt piety and beneficence, and abstinence not only from evil deeds but even from evil thoughts ; and further, simplicity in my way of living, far removed from the habits of the rich.' Let us remember that, the next ' He died on the 17th of March, a.d. 180. ABNOLD Q 226 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM time we are reading the sixth satire of Juvenal. ' From my tutor I learnt ' (hear it, ye tutors of princes !) ' endurance of labour, and to want little, and to work with my own hands, and not to meddle with other people's afiairs, and not to be ready to listen to slander.' The vices and foibles of the Greek sophist or rhetorician — the Oraeculua esuriens — are in everybody's mind ; but he who reads Marcus Aurelius's account of his Greek teachers and masters, will understand how it is that, in spite of the vices and foibles of individual Graeculi, the education of the human race owes to Greece lo a debt which can never be overrated. The vague and colourless praise of history leaves on the mind hardly any impression of Antoninus Pius : it is only from the private memoranda of his nephew that we learn what a disciplined, hard-working, gentle, wise, virtuous man he was ; a man who, perhaps, interests mankind less than his immortal nephew only because he has left in writing no record of his inner life, — caret quia vate sacro. Of the outward life and circumstances of Marcus Aurelius, beyond these notices which he has himself supplied, there 20 are few of much interest and importance. There is the fine anecdote of his speech when he heard of the assassina- tion of the revolted Avidius Cassius, against whom he was marching ; he was sorry, he said, to be deprived of the pleasure of pardoning him. And there are one or two more anecdotes of him which show the same spirit. But the great record for the outward life of a man who has left such a record of his lofty inward aspirations as that which Marcus Aurelius has left, is the clear consenting voice of all his contemporaries, — high and low, friend and enemy, 30 pagan and Christian, — ^in praise of his sincerity, justice, and goodness. The world's charity does not err on the side of excess, and here was a man occupying the most con- spicuous station in the world, and professing the highest possible standard of conduct ; — yet the world was obliged to declare that he walked worthily of his profession; Long after his death, his bust was to be seen in the houses of private men through the wide Roman empire : it may be the vulgar part of human nature which busies itself with the semblance and doings of living sovereigns, it is its nobler 10 part which busies itself with those of the dead ; these busts MARCUS AURELIU8 227 of Marcus Aurelius, in the homes of Gaul, Britain, and Italy, bore witness, not to the inmates' frivolous curiosity about princes and palaces, but to their reverential memory of the passage of a great man upon the earth. Two things, however, before one turns from the out- ward to the inward Ufe of Marcus Aurelius, force them- selves upon one's notice, and demand a word of comment ; he persecuted the Christians, and he had for his son the vicious and brutal Commodus. The persecution at 10 Lyons, in which Attains and Pothinus suffered, the persecution at Smyrna, in which Polyoarp suffered, took place in his reign. Of his humanity, of his tolerance, of his horror of cruelty and violence, of his wish to refrain from severe measures against the Christians, of his anxiety to temper the severity of these measures when they appeared to him indispensable, there is no doubt : but, on the one hand, it is certain that the letter, attributed to him, directing that no Christian should be punished for being a Christian, is spurious ; it is almost certain that his 20 alleged answer to the authorities of Lyons, in which he directs that Christians persisting in their profession shall be dealt with according to law, is genuine. Mr. Long seems inclined to try and throw doubt over the persecution at Lyons, by pointing out that the letter of the Lyons Christians relating it, alleges it to have been attended by miraculous and incredible incidents. ' A man,' he says, ' can only act consistently by accepting all this letter or rejecting it all, and we cannot blame him for either.' But it is contrary to all experience to say that because a fact 30 is related with incorrect additions and embellishments, therefore it probably never happened at all ; or that it is not, in general, easy for an impartial mind to distinguish between the fact and the embellishments. I cannot doubt that the Lyons persecution took place, and that the punish- ment of Christians for being Christians was sanctioned by Marcus Aurehus. But then I must add that nine modern readers out of ten, when they read this, will, I believe, have a perfectly false notion of what the moral action of Marcus Aurehus, in sanctioning that punishment, really 40 was. They imagine Trajan, or Antoninus Pius, or Marcus Aurelius, fresh from the perusal of the Gospel, fully aware 228 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM of the spirit and holiness of the Christian saints, ordering their extermination because he loved darkness rather than light. Far from this, the Christianity which these emperors aimed at repressing was, in their, conception of it, some- thing philosophically contemptible, politically subversive, and morally abominable. As men, they sincerely regarded it much as well-conditioned people, with us, regard Mor- monism ; as rulers, they regarded it much as Liberal states- men, with us, regard the Jesuits. A kind of Mormonism, constituted as a vast secret society, with obscure aims of lo political and social subversion, was what Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius believed themselves to be repressing when they punished Christians. The early Christian apologists again and again declare to us imder what odious imputations the Christians lay, how general was the behef that these imputations were well-grounded, how sincere was the horror which the belief inspired. The multitude, convinced that the Christians were atheists who ate human flesh and thought incest no crime, displayed against them a fury so passionate as to embarrass and alarm their rulers. The 20 severe expressions of Tacitus, exitiabilis sujperstitio — odio humani generis convicti, show how deeply the prejudices of the multitude imbued the educated class also. One asks oneself with astonishment how a doctrine so benign as that of Christ can have incurred misrepresentation so monstrous. The inner and moving cause of the misrepre- sentation lay, no doubt, in this, — that Christianity was a new spirit in the Roman world, destined to act in that world as its dissolvent ; and it was inevitable that Chris- tianity in the Roman world, hke democracy in the modern 3o world, like every new spirit with a similar mission assigned to it, should at its first appearance occasion an instinctive shrinking and repugnance in the world which it was to dissolve. The outer and palpable causes of the mis- representation were, for the Roman public at large, the confounding of the Christians with the Jews, that isolated, fierce, and stubborn race, whose stubbornness, fierce- ness, and isolation, real as they were, the fancy of a civilised Roman yet further exaggerated ; the atmosphere of mystery and novelty which surrounded the Christian 40 rites ; the very simplicity of Christian theism ; — ^for the MARCUS AURELIUS 229 Roman statesman, the character of secret assemblages which the meetings of the Christian community wore, imder a State-system as jealous of unauthorised associa- tions as the State-system of modern France. A Roman of Marcus Aurelius's time and position coidd not well see the Christians except through the mist of these prejudices. Seen through such a mist, the Christians appeared with a thousand faults not their own : but it has not been sufficiently remarked that faults, really their 10 own, many of them assuredly appeared with besides, faults especially likely to strike such an observer as Marcus Aurelius, and to confirm him in the prejudices of his race, station, and rearing. We look back upon Christianity after it has proved what a future it bore within it, and for us the sole representatives of its early struggles are the pure and devoted spirits through whom it proved this ; Marcus Aurehus saw it with its future yet unshown, and with the tares among its professed progeny not less conspicuous than the wheat . Who can doubt that among the professing Chris- 20 tians of the second century, as among the professing Chris- tians of the nineteenth, there was plenty of folly, plenty of rabid nonsense, plenty of gross fanaticism ? who will even venture to affirm that, separated in great measure from tho intellect and civilisation of the world for one or two centuries, Christianity, wonderful as have been its fruits, had the development perfectly worthy of its inestimable germ ? Who will venture to affirm that, by the alUance of Christianity with the virtue and intelligence of men like the Antonines, — of the best product of Greek and 30 Roman civihsation, while Greek and Roman civilisation had yet life and power, — Christianity and the world, as well as the Antonines themselves, would not have been gainers ? That alliance was not to be ; — the Antonines lived and died with an utter misconception of Christianity ; Christianity grew up in the Catacombs, not on the Palatine. Marcus Aurelius incurs no moral reproach by having authorised the punishment of the Christians ; he does not thereby become in the least what we mean by a 'persecutor. One may concede that it was impossible for 10 him to see Christianity as it really was ; — as impossible as for even the moderate and sensible Fleury to see the 230 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM Antoniiiea as they really were ; — one may concede that the point of view from which Christianity appeared some- thing anti-civil and anti-social, which the State had the faculty to judge and the duty to suppress, was inevitably his. StiU, however, it remains true, that this sage, who made perfection his aim and reason his law, did Christianity an immense injustice, and rested in an idea of State- attributes which was illusive. And this is, in truth, characteristic of Marcus Aurelius, that he is blameless, yet, in a certain sense, unfortunate ; in his character, lo beautiful as it is, there is something melancholy, circum- scribed, and ineffectual. For of his having such a son as Commodus, too, one must say that he is not to be blamed on that account, but that he is unfortunate. Disposition and temperament are inexplicable things ; there are natures on which the best education and example are thrown away ; excellent fathers may have, without any fault of theirs, incurably vicious sons. It is to be remembered, also, that Commodus was left, at the perilous age of nineteen, master of the world ; 20 while his father, at that age, was but beginning a twenty years' apprenticeship to wisdom, labour, and self-command, under the sheltering teachership of his uncle Antoninus. Commodus was a prince apt to be led by favourites ; and if the story is true which says that he left, all through hia reign, the Christians untroubled, and ascribes this lenity to the influence of his mistress Marcia, it shows that he could be led to good as well as to evil ; — ^for such a nature to be left at a critical age with absolute power, and wholly 'without good counsel and direction, was the more fatal. 30 StiU one cannot help wishing that the example of Marcus Aurelius could have availed more with his own only son ; one cannot but think that with such virtue as his there should go, too, the ardour which removes mountains, and that the ardour which removes mountains might have even won Commodus : the word ineffectual again rises to one's mind ; Marcus Aurelius saved his own soul by his righteousness, and he could do no more. Happy they, who can do this ! but stiU happier, who can do more ! Yet, when one passes from his outward to his inward 40 life, when one turns over the pages of his Meditations, — MARCUS AURELIU8 231 entries jotted down from day to day, amid the business of the city or the fatigues of the camp, for his own guidance and support, meant for no eye but his own, without the shghtest attempt at style, with no care, even, for correct writing, not to be surpassed for naturalness and sincerity, — all disposition to carp and cavil dies away, and one is overpowered by the charm of a character of such purity, dehcacy, and virtue. He fails neither in small things nor in great ; he keeps watch over himself both that the 10 great springs of action may be right in him, and that the minute details of action may be right also. How admirable in a hard-tasked ruler, and a ruler, too, with a passion for thinking and reading, is such a memorandum as the following : — ' Not frequently nor without necessity to say to any one, or to write in a letter, that I have no leisure ; nor continually to excuse the neglect of duties required by our relation to those with whom we Kve, by alleging urgent occupation.' 20 And, when that ruler is a Roman emperor, what an ' idea ' is this to be written down and meditated by him : — ■ ' The idea of a pohty in which there is the same law for all, a polity administered with regard to equal rights and equal freedom of speech, and the idea of a kingly government which respects most of all the freedom of the governed.' And, for all men who ' drive at practice,' what practical rules may not one accumulate out of these Meditations : — ' The greatest part of what we say or do being unneces- 30 sary, if a man takes this away, he will have more leisure and less uneasiness. Accordingly, on every occasion a man should ask himself : "Is this one of the unnecessary things ? " Now a man should take away not only unneces- sary acts, but also unnecessary thoughts, for thus super- fluous acts will not follow after.' And again : — ' We ought to check in the series of our thoughts every- thing that is without a purpose and useless, but most of all the over-curious feeling and the malignant ; and a man 40 should use himself to think of those things only about which if one should suddenly ask, " What hast thou now in thy 232 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM thoughts ? " with perfect openness thou mightest im- mediately answer, " This or That ; " so that from thy words it should be plain that everything in thee is simple and benevolent, and such as befits a social animal, and one that cares not for thoughts about sensual enjoyments, or any rivalry or envy and suspicion, or anything else for which thou wouldst blush if thou shouldst say thou hadst it in thy mind.' So, with a stringent practicalness worthy of FrankUn, he discourses on his favourite text. Let nothing he done io without a purpose. But it is when he enters the region where Franklin cannot follow him, when he utters his thoughts on the groimd-motives of human action, that he is most interesting ; — that he becomes the unique, the incomparable Marcus Aurelius. Christianity uses language very liable to be misunderstood when it seems to teU men to do good, not, certainly, from the vulgar motives of worldly interest, or vanity, or love of human praise, but that ' their Father which seeth in secret may reward them openly.' The motives of reward and punishment have 20 come, from the misconception of language of this kind, to be strangely overpressed by many Christian moralists, to the deterioration and disfigurement of Christianity, Marcus Aurelius says, truly and nobly : — ' One man, when he has done a service to another, is ready to set it down to his account as a favour conferred. Another is not ready to do this, but stUl in his own mind he thinks of the man as his debtor, and he knows what he has done. A third in a manner does not even know what he has done, but he is like a vine which has produced grapes, so and seeks for nothing more after it has once produced its proper fruit. As a horse when he has run, a dog when he has caught the game, a bee when it has made its honey, so a man when he has done a good act, does not caU out for others to come and see, but he goes on to another act, as a vine goes on to produce again the grapes in season. Must a man, then, be one of these, who in a manner acts thus without observing it ? Yes.' And again : — ' What more dost thou want when thou hast done a man 40 a service ? Art thou not content that thou hast done MARCUS AURELIUS 233 something conformable to thy nature, and dost thou seek to be paid for it, just as if the eye demanded a recompense for seeing, or the feet for walking ? ' Christianity, in order to match morality of this strain, has to correct its apparent offers of external reward, and to say : The kingdom of Ood is within you. I have said that it is by its accent of emotion that the morality of Marcus Aurelius acquires a special character, and reminds one of Christian morality. The sentences of 10 Seneca are stimulating to the intellect ; the sentences of Epictetus are fortifying to the character ; the sentences of Marcus Aurelius find their way to the soul. I have said that religious emotion has the power to light up moraUty : the emotion of Marcus AureUus does not quite light up his morality, but it suffuses it ; it has not power to melt the clouds of effort and austerity, quite away, but it shines through them and glorifies them ; it is a spirit, not so much of gladness and elation, as of gentleness and sweetness ; a delicate and tender sentiment, which is less 20 than joy and more than resignation. He says that in his youth he learned from Maximus, one of his teachers, ' cheer- fulness in all circumstances as well as in illness ; and a just admixture in the moral character of sweetness and dignity : ' and it is this very admixture of sweetness with his dignity which makes him so beautiful a moraUst. It enables him to carry even into his observation of nature a dehcate penetration, a sympathetic tenderness, worthy of Words- worth ; the spirit of such a remark as the following has hardly a parallel, so far as my knowledge goes, in the whole 30 range of Greek and Roman literature : — ' Figs, when they are quite ripe, gape open ; and in the ripe oUves the. very circumstance of their being near to rottenness adds a peculiar beauty to the fruit. And the ears of corn bending down, and the hon's eyebrows, and the foam which flows from the mouth of wild boars, and many other things, — though they are far from being beautiful, in a certain sense, — still, because they come in the course of nature, have a beauty in them, and they please the mind ; so that if a man should have a feeling 40 and a deeper insight with respect to the things which are produced in the universe, there is hardly anything which 234 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM comee in the course of natiire which will not seem to him to be in a mamier disposed so as to give pleasure.' But it is when his strain passes to directly moral subjects that his delicacy and sweetness lend to it the greatest charm. Let those who can feel the beauty of spiritual refinement read this, the reflection of an emperor who prized mental superiority highly : — ' Thou sayest, " Men cannot admire the sharpness of thy wits." Be it so ; but there are many other things of which thou canst not say, " I am not formed for them by lo nature." Show those qualities, then, which are altogether in thy power, — sincerity, gravity, endurance of labour, aversion to pleasure, contentmeiit with thy portion and with few things, benevolence, frankness, no love of super- fluity, freedom from trifling, magnanimity. Dost thou not see how many quaUties thou art at once able to exhibit, as to which there is no excuse of natural incapacity and unfitness, and yet thou still remainest voluntarily below the mark ? Or art thou compelled, through being defectively furnished by nature, to murmur, and to be mean, and to 20 flatter, and to find fault with thy poor body, and to try to please men, and to make great display, and to be so restless in thy mind ? No, indeed ; but thou mightest have been delivered from these things long ago. Only, if in truth thou canst be charged with being rather slow and dull of comprehension, thou must exert thyself about this also, not neglecting nor yet taking pleasure in thy dulness.' The same sweetness enables him to fix his mind, when he sees the isolation and moral death caused by sin, not on the cheerless thought of the misery of this condition, 30 but on the inspiriting thought that man is blest with the power to escape from it : — ' Suppose that thou hast detached thyself from the natural unity, — for thou wast made by nature a part, but now thou hast cut thyself off, — yet here is this beautiful provision, that it is in thy power again to imite thyself. God has allowed this to no other part, — after it has been separated and cut asunder, to come together again. But consider the goodness with which he has privileged man ; for he has put it in his power, when he has been separated, 40 to return and to be united and to resume his place.' MARCUS AURELIUS 236 It enables him to control even the passion folr retreat and solitude, so strong in a soul like his,. to which the world could offer no abiding city : — ' Men seek retreat for themselves, houses in the country, sea-shores, and mountains ; and thou, too, art wont to desire such things very much. But this is altogether a mark of the most common sort of men, for it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thysefi. For nowhere either with more quiet or more freedom from 10 trouble does a man retire than into his own soul, particularly when he has within him such thoughts that by looking into them he is immediately in perfect tranqmlUty. Constantly, then, give to thyself this retreat, and renew thyself ; and let thy principles be brief and fundamental, which, as soon as thou shalt recur to them, will be sufficient to cleanse the soul completely, and to send thee back free from aU discontent with the things to which thou retumest.' Against this feeling of discontent and weariness, so natural to the great for whom there seems nothing left £0 to desire or to strive after, but so enfeebling to them, so deteriorating, Marcus Aurelius never ceased to struggle. With resolute thankfxilness he kept in remembrance the blessingsof his lot ; the true blessings of it, not the false : — ' I have to thank Heaven that I was subjected to a ruler and a father (Antoninus Pius) who was able to take away all pride from me, and to bring me to the knowledge that it is possible for a man to live in a palace without either guards, or embroidered dresses, or any show of this kind ; but that it is in such a man's power to bring himself very so near to the fashion of a private person, without being for this reason either meaner in thought or more remiss in action with respect to the things which must be done for public interest. ... I have to be thankful that my children have not been stupid nor deformed in body ; that I did not make more proficiency in rhetoric, poetry, and the other studies, by which I should perhaps have been completely engrossed, if I had seen that I was making great progress in them ; . . . that I knew ApoUonius, Rusticus, Maximus ; . . . that I received clear and frequent impressions about 40 living according to nature, and what kind of a hfe that is, so that, so far as depended on Heaven, and its gifts, 236 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM help, and inspiration, nothing hindered me from forthwith living according to nature, though I still fall short of it through my own fault, and through not observing the admonitions of Heaven, and, I may almost say, its direct instructions ; that my body has held out so long in such a kind of life as mine ; that though it was my mother's lot to die young, she spent the last years of her life with me ; that whenever I wished to help any man in his need, I was never told that I had not the means of doing it ; that, when I had an inclination to philosophy, I did notio fall into the hands of a sophist.' And, as he dwelt with gratitude on these helps and blessings vouchsafed to him, his mind (so, at least, it seems to me) would sometimes revert with awe to the perils and temptations of the lonely height where he stood, to the lives of Tiberius, CaUgula, Nero, Domitian, in their hideous blackness and ruin ; and then he wrote down for himself such a warning entry as this, significant and terrible in its abruptness : — ' A black character, a womanish character, a stubborn 20 character, bestial, childish, animal, stupid, coimterfeit, scurrilous, fraudulent, tyrannical ! ' Or this :— ' About what am I now employing my soul ? On every occasion I must ask myself this question, and enquire. What have I now in this part of me which they call the ruling principle, and whose soul have I now ? — ^that of a child, or of a young man, or of a weak woman, or of a tyrant, or of one of the lower animals in the service of man, or of a wild beast ? ' 30 The character he wished to attain he knew well, and beautifully he has marked it, and marked, too, his sense of shortcoming : — ' When thou hast assumed these names, — good, modest, true, rational, equal-minded, magnanimous, — take care that thou dost not change these names ; and, it thou shouldst lose them, quickly return to them. If thou maintainest thyself in possession of these names without desiring that others should call thee by them, thou wilt be another being, and wilt enter on another life. For to 40 continue to be such as thou hast hitherto been, and to be MARCUS AURELIUS 237 torn in pieces and deiiled in such a life, is the character of a very stupid man, and one overfond of his life, and like those half-devoured fighters with wild beasts, who though covered with wounds and gore still entreat to be kept to the following day, though they wiUbe exposed in the same state to the same claws and bites. Therefore fix thyself in the possession of these few names : and if thou art able to abide in them, abide as if thou wast removed to the Happy Islands.' For all his sweetness and serenity, however, man's 10 point of life ' between two infinities ' (of that expression Marcus Aurelius is the real owner) was to him anjrthing but a Happy Island, and the performances on it he saw through no veils of illusion. Nothing is in general more gloomy and monotonous than declamations on the hollow- ness and transitoriness of human life and grandeur : but here, too, the great charm of Marcus AureUus, his emotion, comes in to relieve the monotony and to break through the gloom ; and even on this eternally used topic he is imaginative, fresh, and striking : — 20 ' Consider, for example, the times of Vespasian. Thou wUt see all these things, people marrying, bringing up children, sick, dying, warring, feasting, trafficking, cultivat- ing the ground, flattering, obstinately arrogant, suspecting, plotting, wishing for somebody to die, grumbUng about the present, loving, heaping up treasure, desiring to be consuls or kings. Well then, that life of these people no longer exists at all. Again, go to the times of Trajan. All is again the same. Their life too is gone. But chiefly thou shouldst think of those whom thou hast thyself known distracting 30 themselves about idle things, neglecting to do what was in accordance with their proper constitution, and to hold firmly to this and to be content with it.' Again : — ' The things which are much valued in life are empty, and rotten, and trifling ; and people are like Httle dogs biting one another, and little children quarrelling, crying, and then straightway laughing. But fidelity, and modesty, and justice, and truth, are fled Up to Olympus from the wide-spread earth. 10 What then is there which still detains thee here ? ' 238 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM And once more : — • ' Look down from above on the countless herds of men, and their countless solemnities, and the infinitely varied voyagings in storms and calms, and the differences among those who are bom, who live together, and die. And consider too the lite lived by others in olden time, and the life now lived among barbarous nations, and how many know not even thy name, and how many will soon forget it, and how they who perhaps now are praising thee will very soon blame thee, and that neither a posthu- lo mous name is of any value, nor reputation, nor anything else.' He recognised, indeed, that (to use his own words) ' the prime principle in man's constitution is the social ; ' and he laboured sincerely to make not only his acts towards his fellow-men, but his thoughts also, suitable to this conviction : — ' When thou wishest to delight thyself, think of the virtues of those who live with thee ; for instance, the activity of one, and the modesty of another, and the 20 liberality of a third, and some other good quality of a fourth.' Still, it is hard for a pure and thoughtful man to live in a state of rapture at the spectacle afforded to him by his fellow-creatures ; above all it is hard, when such a man is placed as Marcus Aurelius was placed, and has had the meanness and perversity of his feUow-creatures thrust, in no common measure, upon his notice, — has had, time after time, to experience how ' within ten days thou wilt seem a god to those to whom thou art now a beast and an so ape.' His true strain of thought as to his relations with his fellow-men is rather the following. He has been enume- rating the higher consolations which may support a man at the approach of death, and he goes on : — ' But if thou requirest also a vulgar kind of comfort which shall reach thy heart, thou wilt be made best reconciled to death by observing the objects from which thou art going to be removed, and the morals of those with whom thy soul will no longer be mingled. For it is no way right to be offended with men, but it is thy duty 10 to care for them and to bear with them gently ; and yet MARCUS AURELIUS 239 to remember that thy departure will not be from men who have the same principles as thyself. For this is the only thing, if there be any, which could draw us the contrary way and attach us to life, to be permitted to live with those who have the same principles as ourselves. But now thou seest how great is the distress caused by the difference of those who live together, so that thou mayest say : " Come quick, death, lest perchance I too should forget myself." ' 10 faithless and perverse generation I how long shall I he mth you ? how long shall I suffer you ? Sometimes this strain rises even to passion : — ' Short is the little which remains to thee of life. Live as on a mountain. Let men see, let them know, a real man, who Uves as he was meant to live. If they cannot endure him, let them kill him. For that is better than to live as men do.' It is remarkable how little of a merely local and tem- porary character, how little of those scoriae which a reader 20 has to clear away before he gets to the precious ore, how little that even admits of doubt or question, the morality of Marcus Aurelius exhibits. Perhaps as to one point we must make an exception. Marcus Aurelius is fond of urging as a motive for man's cheerful acquiescence in whatever befalls him, that ' whatever happens to every man is for the interest of the universal ; ' that the whole contains nothing which is not for its advantage ; that everything which happens to a man is to be accepted, ' even if it seems disagreeable, because it leads to the health of the universe.' 30 And the whole course of the universe, he adds, has a provi- dential reference to man's welfare : ' all other things have been made for the sake of rational beings.' Religion has in all ages freely used this language, and it is not religion which will object to Marcus Aurelius's use of it ; but science can hardly accept as severely accurate this employment of the terms interest and advantage. Even to a sound nature and a clear reason the proposition that things happen ' for the interest of the universal,' as men conceive of interest, may seem to have no meaning at all, and the proposition 40 that ' all things have been made for the sake of rational beings ' may seem to be false. Yet even to this language, 240 ESSAYS IN CRITICISM not irresistibly cogent when it is thus absohxtely used, Marcus Aurelius gives a turn which makes it true and useful, when he says : ' The ruling part of man can make a material for itself out of that which opposes it, as fire lays hold of what falls into it, and rises higher by means of this very material ; ' — when he says : ' What else are all things except exercises for the reason ? Per- severe then untU thou shalt have made all things thine own, as the stomach which is strengthened makes all things its own, as the blazing fire makes flame and bright- lo ness out of everjrthing that is thrown into it ; ' — when he says : ' Thou wilt not cease to be miserable tiU thy mind is in such a condition, that, what luxury is to those who enjoy pleasure, such shall be to thee, in every matter which presents itself, the doing of the things which are conformable to man's constitution ; for a man ought to consider as an enjoyment everything which it is in his power to do according to his own nature, — and it is in his power everywhere.' In this sense it is, indeed, most true that ' all things have been made for the sake of 20 rational beings ; ' that ' all things work together for good.' In general, however, the action Marcus AureUus pre- scribes is action which every sound nature must recognise as right, and the motives he assigns are motives which every clear reason must recognise as vahd. And so he remains the especial friend and comforter of all clear-headed and scrupulous, yet pure-hearted and upward-striving men, in those ages most especially that walk by sight, not by faith, and yet have no open vision : he cannot give 30 such souls, perhaps, all they yearn for, but he gives them much ; and what he gives them, they can receive. Yet no, it is not for what he thus gives them that such souls love him most ! it is rather because of the emotion which lends to his voice so touching an accent, it is because he too yearns as they do for something unattained by him. What an affinity for Christianity had this persecutor of the Christians ! the effusion of Christianity, its reUeving tears, its happy self-sacrifice, were the very element, one feels, for which his soul longed : they were near him, they 40 brushed him, he touched them, he passed them by. One . MARCUS AURELIUS 241 feels, too, that the Marcus AureUus one reads must still have remained, even had Christianity been fully known to him, in a great measure himself ; he would have been no Justin : but how would Christianity have affected him ? in what measure would it have changed him T Granted that he might have found, like the Alogi in ancient and modern times, in the most beautiful of the Qospels, the Gospel which has leavened Christendom most powerfully, the Gospel of St. John, too much Greek metaphysics, too 10 much gnosis ; granted that this Gospel might have looked too like what he knew already to be a total surprise to him : what, then, would he have said to the Sermon on the Mount, to the twenty-sixth chapter of St. Matthew ? what would have become of his notions of the exitiabilis superstitio, of the ' obstinacy of the Christians ' ? Vain question ! yet the greatest charm of Marcus AureUus is that he makes us ask it. We see him wise, just, self -governed, tender, thankful, blameless ; yet, with aU this, agitated, stretching out his arms for something beyond, — tmdente/mqua manua 20 ri;pae ulterioris amore. ON TRANSLATING HOMER THREE LECTURES GIVEN AT OXFORD, 1861 B i Nunquamns leponam 'I It has more than onco been suggested to me that I should translate Homer. That is a task for which I have neither the time nor the courage ; but the suggestion led me to regard yet more closely a poet whom I had already long studied, and for one or two years the works of Homer were seldom out of my hands. The study of classical hterature is probably on the decline ; but, whatever may be the fate of this study in general, it is certain that as instruction spreads and the number of readers increases, attention will 10 be more and more directed to the poetry of Homer, not indeed as part of a classical course, but as the most im- portant poetical monument existing. Even within the last ten years two fresh translations of the Iliad have appeared in England : one by a man of great abUity and genuine learning. Professor Newman ; the other by Mr. Wright, the conscientious and painstaking translator of Dante. It may safely be asserted that neither of these works will take rank as the standard translation of Homer ; that the task of rendering him will still be attempted by other translators. 20 It may perhaps be possible to render to these some service, to save them some loss of labour, by pointing out rocks on which their predecessors have split, and the right objects on which a translator of Homer should fix his attention. It is disputed, what aim a translator should propose to himself in dealing with his original. Even this prehminary is not yet settled. On one side it is said, that the transla- tion ought to be such ' that the reader should, if possible, forget that it is a translation at all, and be lulled into the illusion that he is reading an original work ; something so original,' (if the translation be in English), ' from an English hand.' The real original is in this case, it is said, ' taken as a basis on which to rear a poem that shall affect our countrymen as the original may be conceived to have affected its natural hearers.' On theother hand, Mr. Newman, 246 ON TRANSLATING HOMER who states the foregoing doctrine only to condemn it, de- clares that he 'aims at precisely the opposite: to retain every peculiarity of the original, so far as he is able, with the greater care the more foreign it may happen to be ; ' so that it may ' never be forgotten that he is imitating, and imitating in a different material.' The translator's ' first duty,' says Mr. Newman, ' is a historical one ; to he faithful.' Probably both sides would agree that the translator's ' first duty is to be faithful ; ' but the question at issue between them is, in what faithfulness consists. lo My one object is to give practical advice to a translator ; and I shall not the least concern myself with theories of translation as such. But I advise the translator not to try ' to rear on the basis of the Iliad, a poem that shall affect our countrymen as the original may be conceived to have affected its natural hearers ; ' and for this simple reason, that we cannot possibly tell how the Iliad ' affected its natural hearers.' It is probably meant merely that he should try to affect Englishmen powerfully, as Homer affected Greeks powerfully; but this direction is not enough, 20 and can give no real guidance. For aU great poets affect their hearers powerfully, but the effect of one poet is one thing, that of another poet another thing : it is our translator's business to reproduce the effect of Homer, and the most powerful emotion of the unlearned English reader can never assure him whether he has reproduced this, or whether he has produced something else. So, again, he may foUow Mr. Newman's directions, he may try to be ' faithful,' he may ' retain every peculiarity of his original ; ' but who is to assure him, who is to assure Mr. Newman 30 himself, that, when he has done this, he has done that for which Mr. Newman enjoins this to be done, ' adhered closely to Homer's manner and habit of thought ' ? Evi- dently the translator needs some more practical directions than these. No one can tell him how Homer affected the Greeks ; but there are those who can teU him how Homer affects them. These are scholars ; who possess, at the same time with knowledge of Greek, adequate poetical taste and feeling. No translation wiU seem to them of much worth compared with the original ; but they alone can say, 40 whether the translation produces more or less the same LECTURE I 247 effect upon them as the original. They are the only competent tribunal in this matter : the Greeks are dead ; the unlearned Englishman has not the data for judging ; and no man can safely confide in his own single judgment of his own work. Let not the translator, then, trust to his notions of what the ancient Greeks would have thought of him ; he will lose himself in the vague. Let him not trust to what the ordinary Enghsh reader thinks of him ; he wiU be taking the blind for his guide. Let him not trust 10 to his own judgment of his own work ; he may be misled by individual caprices. Let him ask how his work afiects those who both know Greek and can appreciate poetry ; whether to read it gives the Provost of Eton, or Professor Thompson at Cambridge, or Professor Jowetthere in Oxford, at all the same feeling which to read the original gives them. I consider that when Bentley said of Pope's translation, ' it was a pretty poem, but must not be called Homer,' the work, in spite of all its power and attractiveness, was judged. 'ill av 6 (^pdi/i/tos opia-euv — ' as the judicious would deter - ao mine ' — that is a test to which every one professes himself willing to submit his works. Unhappily, in most cases, no two persons agree as to who ' the judicious ' are. In the present case, the ambiguity is removed : I suppose the translator at one with me as to the tribunal to which alone he should look for judgment ; and he has thus obtained a practical test by which to estimate the real success of his work. How is he to proceed, in order that his work, tried by this test, may be found most successful ? First of aU, there are certain negative counsels which I 30 will give him. Homer has occupied men's minds so much, such a literature has arisen about him, that every one who approaches him should resolve strictly to limit himself to that which may directly serve the object for which he approaches him. I advise the translator to have nothing to do with the questions, whether Homer ever existed ; whether the poet of the Iliad be one or many ; whether the Iliad be one poem or an Achilleis and an Iliad stuck together ; whether the Christian doctrine of the Atonement is shadowed forth in the Homeric mythology ; whether the 40 Goddess Latona in any way prefigures the Virgin Mary, and so on. These are questions which have been, discussed 248 ON TRANSLATING HOMER with learning, with ingenuity, nay, with genius ; but they have two inconveniences ; one general for all who approach them, one particular for the translator. The general inconvenience is, that there reaUy exist no data for deter- mining them. The particular inconvenience is, that their solution by the translator, even were it possible, could be of no benefit to his translation. I advise him, again, not to trouble himself with construct- ing a special vocabulary for his use in translation ; with excluding a certain class of English words, and with lo confining himseM to another class, in obedience to any theory about the peculiar quaUties of Homer's style. Mr. Newman says that ' the entire dialect of Homer being essentially archaic, that of a ttanslator ought to be as much Saxo-Norman as possible, and owe as little as possible to the elements thrown into our language by classical learning.' Mr. Newman is unfortunate in the observance of his own theory ; for I continually find in his translation words of Latin origin, which seem to me quite ahen to the simplicity of Homer : ' responsive,' for instance, which is a favourite 20 word of Mr. Newman, to represent the Homeric d/i£i;8o/i€i'os : Great Hector of the motley helm thus spake to her responsive. But thus responsivdy to him spake god-like Alexander. And the word ' celestial,' again, in the grand address of Zeus to the horses of AchiUes, You, who are born celestial, from Eld and Death exempted ! seems to me in that place exactly to jar upon the feehng as too bookish. But, apart from the question of Mr. Newman's fidehty to his own theory, such a theory seems to me both dangerous for a translator and false in itself. Dangerous 30 for a translator ; because, wherever one finds such a theory announced, (and one finds it pretty often,) it is generally followed by an explosion of pedantry ; and pedantry is of all things in the world the most un-Homeric. False in itself ; because, in fact, we owe to the Latin element in our language most of that very rapidity and clear decisiveness by which it is contradistinguished from the German, and in sympathy with the languages of Greece and Rome : so that to limit an English translator of Homer to words of Saxon LECTURE I 249 origin ia to deprive him of one of his special advantages for translating Homer. In Voss's well-known translation of Homer, it is precisely the qualities of his German language itself, something heavy and trailing both in the structure of its sentences and in the words of which it is composed, which prevent his translation, in spite of the hexameters, in spite of the fidelity, from creating in us the impression created by the Greek. Mr. Newman's prescription, if followed, would just strip the EngUsh translator of the 10 advantage which he has over Voss. The frame of mind in which we approach an author influences our correctness of appreciation of him ; and Homer should be approached by a translator in the simplest frame of mind possible. Modem sentiment tries to make the ancient not less than the modern world its own ; but against modem sentiment in its apphcations to Homer the translator, if he would feel Homer truly — and unless he feels him truly, how can he render him truly ? — cannot be too much on his guard. For example : the writer of an 20 interesting article on Enghsh translations of Homer, in the last number of the National Review, quotes, I see, with admiration, a criticism of Mr. Ruskin on the use of the epithet c^vo-t^oos, ' life-giving,' in that beautiful passage, in the third book of the Iliad, which follows Helen's mention of her brothers Castor and Pollux as aUve, though they were in truth dead : Sis tjmTo' Tovs 5* ijSri kclt^x^v ^vai^oos aia ev AaKeSaifiovt avdt, Sii SS/iev IItj\^i &vdicn 10 SvrjT^ ; iiifts S' iarbv iyfipai r aBavara re"^ Why gave we you to royal Peleus, to a mortal ? but ye are without old age, and immortal ; Chapman sophisticates this into : Why gave we you t' a mortal king, when immortality And incapacity of age so dignifies yow states ? Again ; in the speech of Achilles to his horses, where Achilles, according to Homer, says simply, ' Take heed that ye bring your master safe back to the host of the Danaans, in some other sort than the last time, when the battle is 20 ended,' Chapman sophisticates this into : When with blood, for this day's fast observed, revenge shall yield Our heart satiety, bring us oft. In Hector's famous speech, again, at his parting from Andromache, Homer makes him say : ' Nor does my own heart so bid me,' (to keep safe behind the walls,) ' since I have learned to be staunch always, and to fight among the foremost of the Trojans, busy on behalf of my father's great glory, and my own.' ^ In Chapman's hands this becomes : The spirit I first did breathe 30 Did never teach me that ; much less, since the contempt of death Was settled in me, and my mind knew what a worthy was. Whose office is to lead in fight, and give no danger pass Without improvement. In this firt must Sector's trial shine : Here miist his country, father, friends, he in Mm made divine. You see how ingeniously Homer's plain thought is tormented, as the Fr«nch would say, here. Homer goes on : ' For * Iliad, xvii, 443. • Iliad, vi, 444. liECTURB I 263 well I know this in my mind and in my heart, the day will be, when sacred Troy shall perish : ' Chapman makes this : And auoh a stormy day shall come, in mind nnd soul I know, When sacred Troy shali ahed her tow'rs, for tears of overthrow. I might go on for ever, but I could not give you a better illustration than this last, of what I mean by saying tha1i,the Elizabethan poet fails to render Homer because he cannot 10 forbear to interpose a play of thought between his object and its expression. Chapman translates his object into EHzabethan, as Pope translates it into the Augustan of Queen Anne ; both convey it to us through a medium. Homer, on the other hand, sees his object and conveys it to us immediately. And yet, in spite of this perfect plainness and directness of Homer's style, in spite of this perfect plainness and directness of his ideas, he is eminently noble ; he works as entirely in the grand style, he is as grandiose, as Phidias, 20 or Dante, or Michael Angelo. This is what makes his translators despair. ' To give relief,' says Cowper, ' to prosaic subjects,' (such as dressing, eating, drinking, harness- ing, travelhng, going to bed), that is to treat such subjects nobly, in the grand style, ' without seeming unreasonably tumid, is extremely difficult,' It is difficult, but Homer has done it ; Homer is precisely the incomparable poet he is, because he has done it. His translator must not be tumid, must not be artificial, must not be literary ; true : but then also he must not be commonplace, must not be 80 ignoble. I have shown you how translators of Homer fail by wanting rapidity, by wanting simplicity of style, by wanting plainness of thought : in a second lecture I will show you how a translator fails by wanting nobility. II I MUST repeat what I said in beginning, that the translator of Homer ought steadily to keep in mind where lies the real test of the success of his translation, what judges he is to try to satisfy. He is to try to satisfy scholars, because scholars alone have the means of reaUy judging him. A scholar may be a pedant, it is true, and then his judgment will be worthless ; but a scholar may also have poetical feehng, and then he can judge him truly ; whereas aU the poetical feehng in the world will not enable a man who is not a scholar to judge him truly. For the translator is to lo reproduce Homer, and the scholar alone has the means of knowing that Homer who is to be reproduced. He knows him but imperfectly, for he is separated from him by time, race, and language ; but he alone knows him at all. Yet people speak as if there were two real tribunals in this matter — ^the scholar's tribunal, and that of the general pubhc. They speak as if the scholar's judgment was one thing, and the general pubUc's judgment another ; both with their shortcomings, both with their habihty to error ; but both to be. regarded by the translator. The translator 20 who makes verbal hterahiess his chief care ' wiU,' says a writer in the National Review whom I have already quoted, ■' be appreciated by the scholar accustomed to test a trans- lation rigidly by comparison with the original, to look perhaps with excessive care to finish in detail rather than boldness and general effect, and find pardon even for a version that seems bare and bald, so it be scholastic and faithful.' But, if the scholar in judging a translation looks to detail rather than to general effect, he judges it pedanti- cally and ill. The appeal, however, hes not from the 30 pedantic scholar to the general pubhc, which can only hke or dishke Chapman's version, or Pope's, or Mr. Newman's, but cannot judge them ; it hes from the pedantic scholar to the scholar who is not pedantic, who knows that Homer is Homer by his general effect, and not by his single words, and who demands but one thing in a translation — that it LECTURE n 265 Bhall, as nearly as possible, reproduce for him the general effect of Homer. This, then, remaias the one proper aim of the translator : to reproduce on the inteUigent scholar, as nearly as possible, the general effect of Homer. Except so far as he reproduces this, he loses his labour, even though he may make a spirited Iliad of his own, like Pope, or translate Homer's Iliad word for word, like Mr. Newman. If his proper aim were to stimulate in any manner possible the general pubhc, he might be right in following Pope's 10 example ; if his proper aim were to help schoolboys to construe Homer, he might be right in following Mr. New- man's. But it is not : his proper aim is, I repeat it yet once more, to reproduce on the intelligent scholar, as nearly as he can, the general effect of Homer. When, therefore, Cowper says, ' My chief boast is that I have adhered closely to my original ; ' when Mr. Newman says, ' My aim is to retain every peculiarity of the original, to be faithful, exactly as is the case with the draughtsman of the Elgin marbles ; ' their real judge only replies : ' It may 20 be so : reproduce then upon us, reproduce the effect of Homer, as a good copy reproduces the effect of the Elgin marbles.' When, again, Mr. Newman tells us that ' by an exhaustive process of argument and experiment ' he has foimd a metre which is at once the metre of ' the modem Greek epic,' and a metre ' hke in moral genius ' to Homer's metre, his judge has still but the same answer for him : ' It may be so ; reproduce then on our ear something of the effect produced by the movement of Homer.' But what is the general effect which Homer produces on 30 Mr. Newman himself ? because, when we know this, we shall know whether he and his judges are agreed at the outset, whether we may expect him, if he can reproduce the effect he feels, if his hand does not betray him in the execution, to satisfy his judges and to succeed. If, however, Mr. Newman's impression from Homer is something quite different from that of his judges, then it can hardly be expected that any amount of labour or talent wiU enable him to reproduce for them their Homer. Mr. Newman does not leave us in doubt as to the general 40 effect which Homer makes upon him. As I have told you what is the general effect which Homer makes upon me — 266 ON TRANSLATING HOMER that of a most rapidly moving poet, that of a poet most plain and direct in his style, that of a poet most plain and direct ia his ideas, that of a poet eminently noble — so Mi. Newman tells us his general impression of Homer. ■' Homer's style,' he says, ' is direct, popular, forcible, quaint, flowing, garrulous.' Again ; ' Homer rises and sinks with his subject, is prosaic when it is tame, is low when it is mean.' I lay my finger on four words in these two sentences of Mr. Newman, and I say that the man who could apply those lo words to Homer can never render Homer truly. The four words are these ; quaint, garrulous, prosaic, low. Search- the English language for a word which does not apply to Homer, and you could not fix on a better than quaint, unless perhaps you fixed on one of the other three. Again ; ' to translate Homer suitably,' says Mr. Newman, ' we need a diction sufficiently antiquated to obtain pardon of the reader for its frequent homeliness.' ' I am con- cerned,' he says again, ' with the artistic problem of obtaining a plausible aspect of moderate antiquity, while 20 remaining easily intelligible.' And, again, he speaks of ' the more antiquated style suited to this subject.' Quaint ! antiquated ! — ^but to whom ? Sir Thomas Browne is quaint, and the diction of Chaucer is antiquated : does Mr. Newman suppose that Homer seemed quaint to Sophocles, when he read him, as Sir Thomas Browne seems quaint to us, when we read him ? or that Homer's diction seemed antiquated to Sophocles, as Chaucer's diction seema antiquated to us ? But we cannot really know, I confess, how Homer seemed to Sophocles : well then, to those who 30 can tell us how he seems to them, to the Uving scholar, to our only present witness on this matter — does Homer make on the Provost of Eton, when he reads him, the impression of a poet quaint and antiquated ? does he make this impression on Professor Thompson, or Professor Jowett ? When Shakspeare says, ' The princes orgulous,' meaning ' the proud princes,' we say, ' This is antiquated ; ' when he says of the Trojan gates, that they, With massy staples And oorresponsive and fulfilling bolts " Speir up ths sons of Troy — LECTURE n 267 we say, ' This is both quaint and antiquated.* But does Homer ever compose in a language which produces on the scholar at all the same impression as this language which I have quoted from Shakspeare ? Never once. Shakspeare is quaint and antiquated in the lines which I have just quoted ; but Shakspeare, need I say it ? can compose, when he likes, when he is at his best, in a language perfectly simple, perfectly intelligible ; in a language which, in spite of the two centuries and a half which part its author from 10 us, stops us or surprises us as little as the language of a contemporary. And Homer has not Shakspeare's varia- tions : Homer always composes as Shakspeare composes at his best ; Homer is always simple and intelligible, as Shakspeare is often ; Homer is never quaint and anti- quated, as Shakspeare is sometimes. When Mr. Newman says that Homer is garrulous, he seems, perhaps, to depart less widely from the common opinion than when he calls him quaint ; for is there not Horace's authority for asserting that ' the good Homer so sometimes nods,' bonus dormitat Homerus ? and a great many people have come, from the currency of this well- known criticism, to represent Homer to themselves as a diffuse old man, with the full-stocked mind, but also with the occasional slips and weaknesses, of old age. Horace has said better things than his ' bonus dormitat Homerus ; ' but he never meant by this, as I need not remind any one who knows the passage, that Homer was garrulous, or anything of the kind. Instead, however, of either discussing what Horace meant, or discussing Homer's garrulity as a general 30 question, I prefer to bring to my mind some style which is garrulous, and to ask myseK, to ask you, whether anything at all of the impression made by that style, is ever made by the style of Homer. The mediaeval romancers, for instance, are garrulous ; the following, to take out of a thousand in- stances the first which comes to hand, is in a garrulous manner. It is from the romance of Richard Cceur de Lion : Of my tale be not a-wondered ! The French Bays he slew an hundred (Whereof is made this English saw) 40 Or he rested him any thraw. Him followed many an English knight That eagerly holp hiTn for to fight — 268 ON TRANSLATING HOMER and so on. Now the manner of that composition I call garrulous ; every one will feel it to be garrulous ; every one will understand what is meant when it is called garrulous. Then I ask the scholar — does Homer's manner ever make upon you, I do not say, the same impression of its garruUty as that passage, but does it make, ever for one moment, an impression in the shghtest way resembling, in the remotest degree akin to, the impression made by that passage of the mediaeval poet ? I have no fear of the answer. I follow the same method with Mr. Newman's two other lo epithets, prosaic, and low. ' Homer rises and sinks with his subject,' says Mr. Newman ; ' is prosaic when it is tame, is low when it is mean.' First I say. Homer is never, in any sense, to be with truth called prosaic ; he is never to be called low. He does not rise and sink with his subject ; on the contrary, his manner invests his subject, whatever his subject be, with nobleness. Then I look for an author of whom it may with truth be said, that he ' rises and sinks with his subject, is prosaic when it is tame, is low when it is mean.' Defoe is eminently such an author ; of 20 Defoe's manner it may with perfect precision be said, that it follows his matter ; his fifelike composition takes its character from the facts which it conveys, not from the nobleness of the composer. In Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack, Defoe is undoubtedly prosaic when his subject is tame, low when his subject is mean. Does Homer's manner in the Iliad, I ask the scholar, ever make upon him an impres- sion at aU hke the impression made by Defoe's manner in Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack ? Does it not, on the con- trary, leave him with an impression of nobleness, even when 30 it deals with Thersites or with Irus ? Well then, Homer is neither quaint, nor garrulous, nor prosaic, nor mean ; and Mr. Newman, in seeing him so, sees him differently from those who are to judge Mr. New- man's rendering of him. By pointing out how a wrong conception of Homer afEects Mr. Newman's translation, I hope to place in still clearer Ught those four cardinal truths which I pronounce essential for him who would have a right conception of Homer ; that Homer is rapid, that he is plain and direct in word and style, that he is plain and 40 direct in his ideas, and that he is noble. LECTURE n 269 Mr. Newman says that in fixing on a style for suitably rendering Homer, as he conceives him, he ' ahghts on the delicate Une which separates the quaint from the grotesque.' ' I ought to be quaint,' he says, 'I ought not to be grotesque.' This is a most unfortunate sentence. Mr. Newman is grotesque, which he himself says he ought not to be ; and he ought not to be quaint, which he himself says he ought to be. ' No two persons will agree,' says Mr. Newman, ' as to 10 where the quaint ends and the grotesque begins ; ' and perhaps this is true. But, in order to avoid all ambiguity in the use of the two words, it is enough to say, that most persons would call an expression which produced on them a very strong sense of its incongruity, and which violently surprised them, grotesque ; and an expression, which pro- duced on them a slighter sense of its incongruity, and which more gently surprised them, quairti. Using the two words in this manner, I say, that when Mr. Newman translates Helen's words to Hector in the sixth book, "" Aaep c^fib, mvos Kaicofnjxdvov, dKpvo4 ing rapidity ; and a movement familiar rather than nobly easy, one has only, I think, to read half a dozen lines in any part of his version. I prefer to keep as much as possible to passages which I have already noticed, so I will quote the conclusion of the nineteenth book, where AohiUes answers his horse Xanthus, who has prophesied his death to him.^ Achilles, far in rage. Thus answered him : — ^It fits not thee thus proudly to presage My overthrow. I know myself it is my fate to fall Thus far from Phthia ; yet that fate shall fail to vent her gall 30 Till mine vent thousands. — These words said, he fell to horrid deeds, Gave dreadful signal, and forthright made fly his one-hoof'd steeds. For what regards the manner of this passage, the words ' Achilles Thus answered him,' and ' I know myself it is my fate to fall Thus far from Phthia,' are in Homer's manner, and all the rest is out of it. But for what regards its movement : who, after being jolted by Chapman through such verse as this : These words said, he fell to horrid deeds. Gave dreadful signal, and forthright made fly his one-hoof'd steeds — 40 ' Iliad, xix, 419. LECTURE n 277 who does not feel the vital difference of the movement of Homer — TJ ^a, Hal €V irpdnots idx^^ «X* fi^vu)(as Xttttovs 1 To pass from Chapman to Dr. Maginn. His Homeric Ballads are vigorous and genuine poems ia their own way ; they are not one contiaual falsetto, like the pinchbeck ■ Boman Ballads of Lord Macaulay ; but just because they are ballads in their manner and movement, just because, to use the words of his applauding editor, Dr. Maginn has 10 ' consciously realised to himself the truth that Greek ballads can be really represented in EngUsh only by a similar manner ' — ^just for this very reason they are not at aU Homeric, they have not the least in the world the manner of Homer. There is a celebrated incident in the nineteenth book of the Odyssey, the recognition by the old nurse Eurycleia of a scar on the leg of her master Ulysses, who has entered his own haU as an imknown wanderer, and whose feet she has been set to wash. ' Then she came near,' says Homer, ' and began to wash her master ; and 20 straightway she recognised a scar which he had got in former days from the white tusk of a wild boar, when he went to Parnassus unto Autolycus and the sons of Auto- lycus, his mother's father and brethren.' ^ This, ' reaUy represented ' by Dr. Maginn, in ' a measure similar ' to Homer's, becomes : And scarcely had she begun to wash Ere she was aware of the grisly gash Above his knee that lay. It was a wound from a wild boar's tooth, 80 AU on Parnassus' slope. Where he went to hunt in the days of his youth With his mother's sire — and so on. That is the true ballad-manner, no one can deny ; ' aU on Parnassus' slope ' is, I was goiag to say, the true ballad-slang ; but never again shall I be able to read, vi^e S' dp* S,ff(Tov iovaa dvaxO' Itip' avriica S' iyvoi without having the detestable dance of Dr. Maginn's, And scarcely had she begun to wash 40 Ere she was aware of the grisly gash — '■ Odyssey, six, 392. 278 ON TRANSLATING HOMER jigging in my ears, to spoil the effect of Homer, and to torture me. To apply that manner and that rhythm to Homer's incidents, is not to imitate Homer, but to travesty him. Lastly I come to Mr. Newman. His rhythm, like Chap- man's and Dr. Magion's, is a ballad-rhythm, but with a modification of his own. ' Holding it,' he teUs us, ' as an axiom, that rhyme must be abandoned,' he found, on abandoning it, ' an unpleasant void until he gave a double ending to the verse.' In short, iostead of sayiag lo Good people all with one accord Give ear unto my tale, Mr. Newman would say. Good people all with one accord Give ear unto my story. A recent American writer ^ gravely observes that for his countrymen this rhythm has a disadvantage in being hke the rhjH;hm of the American national air ' Yankee Doodle,' and thus provokiag ludicrous associations. ' Yankee Doodle ' is not our national air : for us Mr. Newman's 20 rhythm has not this disadvantage. He himself gives us several plausible reasons why this rhythm of his really ought to be successful : let us examine how far it is successful. Mr. Newman joins to a bad rhythm so bad a diction, that it is difficult to distinguish exactly whether in any given passage it is his words or his measure which produces a total impression of such an impleasant kind. But with a little attention we may analyse our total impression, and find the share which each element has in producing it. To take the passage which I have so often mentioned, 30 Sarpedon's speech to Glaucus. Mr. Newman translates this as follows : gentle friend ! if thou and I, from this encounter 'scaping, Hereafter might for ever be from Eld and Death exempted As heav'nly gods, not I in sooth would fight among the foremost. Nor liefly thee would I advance to man-ennobling battle. Now, — sith ten thousand shapes of Death do any-gait pursue us Which never mortal may evade, though sly of foot and nimble ; — ■ Onward ! and glory let us earn, or glory yield to some one. — ^ Mr. Marsh, in hU Lectures on ilia English Language, New York, I860 i p. 620. liECTURB II 279 Could all our care elude the gloomy grave Which claims no less the fearful than the brave — I am not going to quote Pope's version over again, but I must remark in passing, how much more, with all Pope's radical difference of manner from Homer, it gives us of the real effect of, €( pi^y yoipj ir6\efioy Trept rSvSe (pvydvre — than Mr. Newman's lines. And now, why are Mr. New- man's lines faulty ? They are faulty, first, because as 10 a matter of diction, the expressions ' gentle friend,' ' eld,' ' in sooth,' ' liefly,' ' advance,' ' man-ennobling,' ' sith,' ' any-gait,' and 'sly of foot,' are all bad; some of them worse than others, but all bad : that is, they all of them as here used excite in the scholar, their sole judge — excite, I will boldly af&rm, in Professor Thompson or Professor Jowett— a feeling totally different from that excited in them by the words of Homer which these expres- sions profess to render. The hues are faulty, secondly, because, as a matter of rhythm, any and every line among 20 them has to she ear of the same judges, (I affirm it with equal boldness,) a movement as unlike Homer's move- ment in the corresponding Una as the single words are unlike Homer's words. Ovt^ k€ a-e oTeA,Xoi/j,t /j-axw ^s KvSid- veipav — ' Nor Hefly thee would I advance to man-ennobling battle ' — ^for whose ears do those two rhythms produce impressions of, to use Mr. Newman's own words, ' similar moral genius ' ? i will by no means make search in Mr. Newman's version for passages hkely to raise a laugh ; that search, alas ! 30 would be far too easy. I will quote but one other passage from him, and that a passage where the diction is com- paratively inoffensive, in order that disapproval of the words may not unfairly heighten disapproval of the rhythm. The end of the nineteenth book, the answer of Achilles to his horse Xanthus, Mr. Newman gives thus : ' Chestnut ! why bodest death to me ? from thee this was not needed. Myself right surely know also, that 'tis my doom to perish. From mother and from father deax apart, in Troy ; but never Pause will I make of war, until the Trojans be glutted.' 40 He spake, and yelling, held afront the single-hoofed horses. 280 ON TRANSLATING HOMER Here Mr. Newman calls Xanthus Chestnut, indeed, as he calls BaUus Spotted, and Podarga Spry-foot ; which, is as if a Frenchman were to call Miss Nightingale Madlle. Bossignol, or Mr. Bright M. Glair. .Ajid several other expressions, too — ' yelling,' ' held afront,' ' single-hoofed ' — cleave, to say the very least, much to loe desired. Still, for Mr. Newman, the diction of this passage is pure. All the more clearly appears the profound vice of a rhythm, which, with comparatively few faidts of words, can leave a sense of such incurable aUenation from Homer's manner lo as, ' Myself right surely know also that 'tis my doom to perish,' compared with the, eS vi tol oTSa km airos, o fioL /jiopoi evOaS' 6\itr6ai — of Homer. But so deeply-seated is the difference between the ballad- manner and Homer's, that even a man of the highest ■ powers, even a man of the greatest vigour of spirit and of true genius — ^the Coryphaeus of baUadists, Sir Walter Scott — fails with a manner of this kind to produce an effect at all like the effect of Homer. ' I am not so rash,' declares Mr. Newman, ' as to say that if freedom be given to rhyme 20 as in Walter Scott's poetry ' — Walter Scott, ' by far the most Homeric of our poets,' as in another place he calls him — ' a genius may not arise who will translate Homer into the melodies of Marmion.' ' The truly classical and truly romantic,' says Dr. Maginn, ' are one ; the moss- trooping Nestor reappears in the moss-trooping heroes of Percy's Beliquea ; ' and a description by Scott, which he quotes, he calls ' graphic and therefore Homeric' He forgets our fourth axiom — ^that Homer is not only graphic ; he is also noble, and has the grand style. Human nature so under like circumstances is probably in all ages much the same ; and so far it may be said that ' the truly classical and the truly romantic are one ; ' but it is of little use to tell us this, because we know the human nature of other ages only through the representations of them which have come down to us, and the classical and the romantio modes of representation are so far from being ' one,' that they remain eternally distinct, and have created for us a separation between the two worlds which they respectively represent. Therefore to call Nestor the ' moss-trooping 10 Nestor ' is absurd, because, though Nestor may possibly LECTURE II 281 have been much the same sort of man as many a moss- trooper, he has yet come to us through a mode of representa- tion so unhke that of Percy's Bdiques, that, instead of ' reappearing in the moss-trooping heroes ' of these poems, he exists in our imagination as something utterly urJike them, and as belonging to another world. So the Greeks in Shakspeare's Troilus and Greasida are no longer the Greeks whom we have known in Homer, because they come to us through a mode of representation of the romantic 10 world. But I must not forget Scott. I suppose that when Scott is in what may be called full ballad swing, no one will hesitate to pronounce his manner neither Homeric, nor the grand manner. When he says, for instance, X do not rhyme to that dull elf Who cannot image to himself ' — and so on, any scholar will feel that this is not Homer's manner. But let us take Scott's poetry at its best ; and when it is at its best, it is undoubtedly very good indeed : 20 Tunstall lies dead upon the field, His life-blood stains the spotless shield : Edmund is down — ^my life is reft — The Admiral alone is left. Let Stanley charge with spur of fire — With Chester charge, and LancEishire, Full upon Scotland's central host, Or victory and England's lost.' That is, no doubt, as vigorous as possible, as spirited as possible ; it is exceedingly fine poetry. And still I say, it 30 is not in the grand manner, and therefore it is not like Homer's poetry. Now, how shall I make him who doubts this feel that I say true ; that these lines of Scott are essentially neither in Homer's style, nor in the grand style ? I may point out to him that the movement of Scott's hues, while it is rapid, is also at the same time what the French call saccadS, its rapidity is ' jerky ; ' whereas Homer's rapidity is a flowing rapidity. But this is some- thing external and material ; it is but the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual diversity. I may 40 discuss what, in the abstract, constitutes the grand style ; ' Marmion, canto vi, 38. ' Marmion, canto vi, 29. 282 ON TRANSLATING HOMER but that sort of general discussion never much helps our judgment of particular instances. I may say that the presence or absence of the grand style can only be spiritu- ally discerned ; and this is true, but to plead this looks like evading the difficulty. My best way is to take eminent specimens of the grand style, and to put them side by side with this of Scott. For example, when Homer says : dXKdj iKos, 66ve koX av' tct} 6\v(l>vp€cu ovtcus ; KcLTBave Kal TldrpofcKoSj oirep aeo iroAA^i' afielvay^ — that is in the grand style. When Virgil says : lo Diaoe, puer, virtutem ex me verumque laborem ; Fortunam ex aliis" — that is in the grand style. When Dante says : Lascio lo fele, et vo pei doloi pomi Promessi a me per lo verace Duca ; Ma fino al centro pria oonvien ch' io tomi' — • that is in the grand style. When Milton says : His form had not yet lost All her original brightness, nor appear'd Less than archangel ruin'd, and the excess 20 Of glory obscured' — that, finally, is in the grand style. Now let any one, after repeating to himself these four passages, repeat again the passage of Scott, and he wiU perceive that there is some- thing in style which the four first have in common, and which the last is without ; and this something is precisely the grand manner. It is no disrespect to Scott to say that he does not attain to this manner in his poetry ; to say so, is merely to say that he is not among the five or six supreme poets of the world. Among these he is not ; but, being 30 ' ' Be content, good friend, die also thou ! why lamentest thou thy- self on this wise f Patroclus, too, died, who was a far better than thou.' — Iliad, xxi, 106. ■ ' From me, young man, learn nobleness of soul and true effort ; learn success from others.' — Aeneid, xii, 435. ^ ' I leave the gall of bitterness, and I go for the apples of sweetness promised unto me by my faithful Guide ; but far as the centre it behoves me first to faE'— fleK, xvi, 61. ' Paradise Lost, i, 591. LECTURE II 283 a man of far greater powers than the ballad-poets, he has tried to givB to their instrument a compass and an elevation ■which it does not naturally possess, in order to enable him to come nearer to the effect of the instrument used by the great epic poets — an instrument which he felt he could not truly use — and in this attempt he has but imperfectly succeeded. The poetic style of Scott is — (it becomes necessary to say so when it is proposed to ' translate Homer into the melodies of Mwrmion ') — ^it is, tried by 10 the highest standards, a bastard epic style ; and that is why, out of his own powerful hands, it has had so little success. It is a less natural, and therefore a less good style, than the original ballad-style ; while it shares with the baUad-style the inherent incapacity of rising into the grand style, of adequately rendering Homer. Scott is certainly at his best in his battles. Of Homer you could not say this ; he is not better in his battles than elsewhere ; but even between the battle-pieces of the two there exists all the difEerence which there is between an able work 20 and a masterpiece. Tunstall lies dead upon the field, His life-blood stains the spotless shield : Edmund is down — ^my life is reft — The Admiral alone is left. — — ' For not in the hands of Diomede the son of Tydeus rages the spear, to ward ofi destruction from the Danaans ; neither as yet have I heard the voice of the son of Atreus, shouting out of his hated mouth ; but the voice of Hector the slayer of men bursts round me, as he cheers on the 30 Trojans ; and they with their yellings fill all the plain, over- coming the Achaians in the battle.' — I protest that, to my feeling, Homer's performance, even through that pale and far-off shadow of a prose translation, still has a hundred times more of the grand manner about it, than the original poetry of Scott. Well, then, the ballad-manner and the ballad-measure, whether in the hands of the old baUad poets, or arranged by Chapman, or arranged by Mr. Newman, or, even, arranged by Sir Walter Scott, cannot worthily render Homer. And ta for one reason : Homer is plain, so are they ; Homer is 284 ON TRANSLATING HOMER natural, so are they ; Homer is spirited, so are they ; but Homer is sustainedly noble, and they are not. Homer and they are both of them natural, and therefore touching and stirring ; but the grand style, which is Homer's, is something more than touching and stirring ; it can form the character, it is edifying. The old Enghsh baUadist may stir Sir PhQip Sidney's heart like a trumpet, and this is much : but Homer, but the few artists in the grand style, can do more ; they can refine the raw natural man, they can transmute him. So it is not without cause that I say, and say again, lo to the translator of Homer : ' Never for a moment suffer yourself to forget our fourth fundamental proposition. Homer is noble.' For it is seen how large a share this nobleness has in producing that general effect of his, which it is the main business of a translator to reproduce. I shall have to try your patience yet once more upon this subject, and then my task will be completed. I have shown what the four axioms respecting Homer which I have laid down, exclude, what they bid a translator not to do ; I have still to show what they supply, what positive help they can 20 give to the translator in his work. I will even, with their aid, myself try my fortune with some of those passages of Homer which I have already noticed ; not indeed with any confidence that I more than others can succeed in ade- quately rendering Homer, but in the hope of satisfying competent judges, in the hope of making it clear to the future translator, that I at any rate follow a right method, and that, in coming short, I come short from weakness of execution, not from original vice of design. This is why I have so long occupied myself with Mr. Newman's version ; 30 that, apart from all faults of execution, his original design was wrong, and that he has done us the good service of declaring that design in its naked wrongness. To bad practice he has prefixed the bad theory which made the practice bad ; he has given us a false theory in his preface, and he has exemplified the bad effects of that false theory in his translation. It is because his starting-point is so bad that he runs so badly ; and to save others from taking so false a starting-point, may be to save them from running so futUe a course. 40 Mr. Newman, indeed, says in his preface, that if any one LECTURE II 286 dislikes his translation, ' he has his easy remedy ; to keep aloof from it.' But Mr. Newman is a writer of considerable and deserved reputation ; he is also a Professor of the University of London, an institution which by its position and by its merits acquires every year greater importance. It would be a very grave thing if the authority of so eminent a Professor led his students to misconceive entirely the chief work of the Greek world ; that work which, whatever the other works of classical antiquity have to give us, gives 10 it more abundantly than they all. The eccentricity, too, the arbitrariness, of which Mr. Newman's conception of Homer offers so signal an example, are not a peculiar failing of Mr. Newman's own ; in varying degrees, they are the great defect of English intellect, the great blemish of English literature . Our literature of the eighteenth century, the literature of the school of Dryden, Addison, Pope, Johnson, is a long reaction against this eccentricity, this arbitrariness : that reaction perished by its own faultg, and its enemies are left once more masters of the field. It 20 is much more likely that any new English version of Homer will have Mr. Newman's faults than Pope's. Our present literature, which is very far, certainly, from having the spirit and power of Elizabethan genius, yet has in its own way these faults, eccentricity and arbitrariness, quite as much as the Elizabethan literature ever had. They are the cause that, while upon none, perhaps, of the modem literatures has so great a sum of force been expended as upon the English literature, at the present hour this literature, regarded not as an object of mere literary interest 80 but as a living intellectual instrument, ranks only third in European effect and importance among the literatures of Europe ; it ranks after the literatures of France and Germany. Of these two literatures, as of the intellect of Europe in general, the main effort, for now many years, has been a critical effort ; the endeavour, in all branches of knowledge — ^theology, philosophy, history, art, science — to see the object as in itself it really is. But, owing to the presence in English literature of this eccentric and arbitrary spirit, owing to the strong tendency of English writers to 40 bring to the consideration of their object some individual fancy, almost the last thing for which one would come 286 ON TRANSLATING HOMER to English literature is just that very thing which now Europe most desires — criticism. It is useful to notice any signal manifestation of those faults, which thus limit and impair the action of our literature. And therefore I have pointed out, how widely, in translating Homer, a man even of real ahihty and learning may go astray, unless he brings to the stpdy of this clearest of poets one quality in which our English authors, with all their great gifts, are apt to be somewhat wanting — simple lucidity of mind. Ill Homer is rapid in his movement, Homer is plain in bis words and style, Homer is simple in his ideas. Homer is noble in his manner. Cowper renders him ill because he is slow in his movement, and elaborate in his style ; Pope renders him ill because he is artificial both in his style and in his words ; Chapman renders him ill because he is fantastic in his ideas ; Mr. Newman renders him ill because he is odd in his words and ignoble in his manner. All four translators diverge from their original at other points besides 10 those named ; but it is at the points thus named that their divergence is greatest. For instance, Cowper's diction is not as Homer's diction, nor his nobleness as Homer's nobleness ; but it is in movement and grammatical style that he is most unlike Homer. Pope's rapidity is not of the same sort as Homer's rapidity, nor are his plainness of ideas and his nobleness as Homer's plainness of ideas and nobleness : but it is in the artificial character of his style and diction that he is most unlike Homer. Chapman's movement, words, style, and manner, are often far enough 20 from resembling Homer's movement, words, style, and manner ; but it is the fantasticality of his ideas which puts him farthest from resembling Homer. Mr. Newman's movement, grammatical style, and ideas, are a thousand times in strong contrast with Homer's ; still it is by the oddness of his diction and the ignobleness of his manner that he contrasts with Homer the most violently. Therefore the translator must not say to himself : ' Cowper is noble. Pope is rapid, Chapman has a good diction, Mr. Newman has a good cast of sentence ; I will 30 avoid Cowper's slowness, Pope's artificiality, Chapman's conceits, Mr. Newman's oddity ; I will take Cowper's dignified manner, Pope's impetuous movement. Chapman's vocabulary, Mr. Newman's syntax, and so make a perfect translation of Homer.' Undoubtedly in certain points the versions of Chapman, Cowper, Pope, and Mr. Newman, all 288 ON TRANSLATING HOMEB of them have merit ; some of them very high merit, others a lower merit ; but even in these points they have none of them precisely the same kind of merit as Homer, and therefore the new translator, even if he can imitate them in their good points, will still not satisfy his judge the scholar, who asks him for Homer and Homer's kind of merit, or, at least, for as much of them as it is possible to give. So the translator really has no good model before him for any part of his work, and has to invent everything for him- self. He is to be rapid in movement, plain in speech, lo simple in thought, and noble ; and Jiow he is to be either rapid, or plain, or simple, or noble, no one yet has shown him. I shall try to-day to establish some practical sugges- tions which may help the translator of Homer's poetry to comply with the four grand requirements which we make of him. His version is to be rapid ; and of course, to make a man's poetry rapid, as to make it noble, nothing can serve him so much as to have, in his own nature, rapidity and nobleness. It is (he spirit that quickeneth ; and no one will so so well render Homer's swift-flowing movement as he who has himself something of the swift-moving spirit of Homer. Yet even this is not quite enough. Pope certainly had a quick and darting spirit, as he had, also, real noble- ness ; yet Pope does not render the movement of Homer. To render this the translator must have, besides his natural qualifications, an appropriate metre. I have sufficiently shown why I think all forms of our ballad-metre unsuited to Homer. It seems to me to be beyond question that, for epic poetry, only three metres so can seriously claim to be accounted capable of the grand style. Two of these will at once occur to every one — ^the ten-syllable, or so-called heroic, couplet, and blank verse. I do not add to these the Spenserian stanza, although Dr. Maginn, whose metrical eccentricities I have already criticised, pronounces this stanza the one right measure for a translation of Homer. It is enough to observe, that if Pope's couplet, with the simple system of correspondences that its rhymes introduce, changes the movement of Homer, in which no such correspondences are found, and is therefore 40 a bad measure for a translator of Homer to employ, Spenser's LECTURE III 289 stanza, with its far more intricate system of correspon- dences, must change Homer's movement far more profoundly and must therefore be for the translator a far worse measure than the couplet of Pope. Yet I wUl say, at the same time, that the verse of Spenser is more fluid, slips more easily and quickly along, than the verse of almost any other English poet. By this the northern wagoner had set His seven-fold team behind the steadfast star 10 That was in ocean waves yet never wet, But firm is fixt, and sendeth light from far To all that in the wide deep wandering are ; ' one cannot but feel that English verse has not often moved with the fluidity and sweet ease of these lines. It is possible that it may have been this quality of Spenser's poetry which made Dr. Maginn think that the stanza of The Faery Queen must be a good measure for rendering Homer. This it is not : Spenser's verse is fluid and rapid, no doubt, but there are more ways than one of being fluid and rapid, and 20 Homer is fluid and rapid in quite another way than Spenser. Spenser's manner is no more Homeric than is the manner of the one modem inheritor of Spenser's beautiful gift ; the poet, who evidently caught from Spenser his sweet and easy-slipping movement, and who has exquisitely employed it ; a Spenserian genius, nay, a genius by natural endow- ment richer probably than even Spenser ; that light which shines so unexpected and without fellow in our century, an Elizabethan bom too late, the early lost and admirably gifted Keats. 30 I say then that there are really but three metres — the ten- syUable couplet, blank verse, and a third metre which I will not yet name, but which is neither the Spenserian stanza nor any form of ballad-verse — ^between which, as vehicles for Homer's poetry, the translator has to make his choice. Every one will at once remember a thousand passages in which both the ten-syllable couplet and blank verse prove themselves to have nobleness. Undoubtedly the movement and manner of this ; Still raise for good the supplicating voice, 40 But leave to Heaven the measure and the choice — ' The Faery Queen, Canto ii, Stanza 1. AKNOLD U 290 ON TRANSLATING HOMER are noble. Undoubtedly, the movement and manner of this ; High on a throne of royal state, which far Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind — are noble also. But the first is in a rhymed metre ; and the unfitness of a rhymed metre for rendering Homer I have already shown. I will observe, too, that the fine couplet which I have quoted comes out of a satire, a didactic poem ; and that it is in didactic poetry that the ten-syllable couplet has most successfully essayed the grand style. In narrative lo poetry this metre has succeeded best when it essayed a sensibly lower style, the style of Chaucer, for instance ; whose narrative manner, though a very good and sound manner, is certainly neither the grand manner nor the manner of Homer. The rhymed ten-syllable couplet being thus excluded, blank verse ofiers itself for the translator's use. The first kind of blank verse which naturally occurs to us is the blank verse of Milton, which has been employed, with more or less modification, by Mr. Gary in translating Dante, by 20 Cowper, and by Mr. Wright in translating Homer. How noble this metre is in Milton's hands, how completely it shows itself capable of the grand, nay of the grandest, style, I need not say. To this metre, as used in the Paradise Lost, our country owes the glory of having produced one of the only two poetical works in the grand style which are to be found in the modem languages ; the Divine Comedy of Dante is the other. England and Italy here stand alone ; Spain, France, and Germany, have produced great poets, but neither Calderon, nor ComeiUe, nor Schiller, nor even 30 Goethe, has produced a body of poetry in the true grand style, in the sense in which the style of the body of Homer's poetry, or Pindar's, or Sophocles's, is grand. But Dante has, and so has Milton ; and in this respect Milton pos- sesses a distinction which even Shakspeare, undoubtedly the supreme poetical power in our literature, does not share with him. Not a tragedy of Shakspeare but contains passages in the worst of all styles, the affected style ; and the grand style, although it may be harsh, or obscure, or cumbrous, or over-laboured, is never affected. In spite, « LECTURE III 291 therefore, of objections which may justly be urged against the plan and treatment of the Paradise Lost, in spite of its possessing, certainly, a far less enthralling force of interest to attract and to carry forward the reader than the Iliad or the Divine Comedy, it fully deserves, it can never lose, its immense reputation ; for, like the Iliad and the Divine Comedy, nay in some respects to a higher degree than either of them, it is in the grand style. But the grandeur of Milton is one thing, and the grandeur 10 of Homer is another. Homer's movement, I have said again and again, is a flowing, a rapid movement ; Milton's, on the other hand, is a laboured, a self -retarding movement. In each case, the movement, the metrical cast, Corresponds with the mode of evolution of the thought, with the syn- tactical cast, and is indeed determined by it. Milton charges himself so full with thought, imagination, know- ledge, that his style wiQ hardly contain them. He is too full-stored to show us in much detail one conception, one piece of knowledge ; he just shows it to us in a pregnant 20 allusive way, and then he presses on to another ; and all this fulness, this pressure, this condensation, this self- constraint, enters into his movement, and makes it what it is — ^noble, but difficult and austere. Homer is quite difEerent ; he says a thing, and says it to the end, and then begins another, while Milton is trying to press a thousand things into one. So that whereas, in reading Milton, you never lose the sense of laborious and condensed fuEness, in reading Homer you never lose the sense of flowing and abounding ease. With Milton line runs into line, and aU is so straitly bound together : with Homer line runs off from Une, and all hurries away onward. Homer begins, Mrjviv aeiSe, ©fa — at the second word announcing the proposed action : Milton begins : Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal tsiste Brought death into the world, and all our woe. With loss of Eden, till one greater Man Restore us, and regain the blissful seat. Sing, heavenly muse — - 10 SO chary of a sentence is he, so resolute not to let it escape him till he has crowded into it all he can, that it is not tUl IT 2 292 ON TRANSLATING HOMER the thirty-ninth word in the sentence that he will give us the key to it, the word of action, the verb. Milton says : for that warning voice, which he, who saw The Apocalypse, heard cry in heaven aloud — he is not satisfied, unless he can tell us, all in one sentence, and without permitting himself to actually mention the name, that the man who had the warning voice was the same man who saw the Apocalypse. Homer would have said, ' O for that warning voice, which John heard ' — and if it had suited him to say that John also saw the Apocalypse, lo he would have given us that in another sentence. The effect of this allusive and compressed manner of Milton is, I need not say, often very powerful ; and it is an effect which other great poets have often sought to obtain much in the same way : Dante is full of it, Horace is fuU of it ; but wherever it exists, it is always an un-Homeric effect. ' The losses of the heavens,' says Horace, ' fresh moons speedily repair ; we, when we have gone down where the pious .^neas, where the rich Tullus, and Ancus are — ^ulvis et umbra sumus.' ^ He never actually says where we go to ; 20 he only indicates it by saying that it is that place where .ffineas, Tullus, and Ancus, are. But Homer, when he has to speak of going down to the grave, says definitely, h, 'Kkva-iovTreSiov- -addvaToi irijuf/ovcTw ^ — 'The immortals shall send thee to the Elysian plain ; ' and it is not tUl after he has definitely said this, that he adds, that it is there that the abode of departed worthies is placed : 061 iavSoi 'Pa8a/ji,av6vs — ' Where the yellow-hair'd Rhadaman- thus is.' Again ; Horace, having to say that punishment sooner or later overtakes crime, says it thus : 30 Raro antecedentem scelestum Deseruit pede Poena claudo.' The thought itself of these lines is familiar enough to Homer and Hesiod ; but neither Homer nor Hesiod, in expressing it, could possibly have so complicated its expression as Horace complicates it, and purposely com- plicates it, by his use of the word deseruit. I say that this complicated evolution of the thought necessarily com- plicates the movement and rhythm of a poet ; and that » Odes, IV, vii, 13. " Odyssey, iv, 563. " Odes, III, u, 31. LECTURE III 293 the Miltonic blank verse, of course the first model of blank verse which suggests itself to an English translator of Homer, bears the strongest marks of such complication, and is therefore entirely unfit to render Homer. If blank verse is used in translating Homer, it must be a blank verse of which EngUsh poetry, naturally swayed much by Milton's treatment of this metre, offers at present hardly any examples. It must not be Cowper's blank verse, who has studied Milton's pregnant manner with such effect, 10 that, having to say of Mr. Throckmorton that he spares his avenue, although it is the fashion with other people to cut down theirs, he says that Benevolus ' reprieves The obsolete prolixity of shade.' It must not be Mr. Tennyson's blank verse. For all experience is an arch, wherethro' Gleams that untraveU'd world, whose distance fades For ever and for ever, as we gaze — it is no blame to the thought of those lines, which belongs to another order of ideas than Homer's, but it is true, that 20 Homer would certainly have said of them, ' It is to con- sider too curiously to cons^ider so.' It is no blame to their rhythm, which belongs to another order of movement than Homer's, but it is true, that these three lines by themselves take up nearly as much time as a whole book of the Iliad. No ; the blank verse used in rendering Homer must be a blank verse of which perhaps the best specimens are to be found in some of the most rapid passages of Shakspeare's plays — a blank verse which does not dovetail its lines into one another, and which habitually ends its lines with mono- 30 syllables. Such a blank verse might no doubt be very rapid in its movement, and might perfectly adapt itself to a thought plainly and directly evolved ; and it would be interesting to see it well applied to Homer. But the trans- lator who determines to use it, must not conceal from himself that in order to pour Homer into the mould of this metre, he will have entirely to break him up and melt him down, with the hope of then successfully composing him afresh ; and this is a process which is full of risks. It may, no doubt, be the real Homer that issues new from it ; 40 it is not certain beforehand that it cannot be the real Homer, as it is certain that from the mould of Pope's 294 ON TRANSLATING HOMER couplet or Cowper's Miltonio verse it cannot be the real Homer that will issue ; still, the chances of disappointment are great. The result of such an attempt to renovate the old poet may be an jEson ; but it may also, and more probably will, be a PeUas. When I say this, I point to the metre which seems to me to give the translator the best chance of preserving the general effect of Homer — that third metre which I have not yet expressly named, the hexameter. I know aU that is said against the use of hexameters in English poetry ; lo but it comes only to this, that, among us, they have not yet been used on any considerable scale with success. Solvitur ambulando : this is an objection which can best be met by producing good English hexameters. And there is no reason in the nature of the English language why it should not adapt itself to hexameters as well as the German language does ; nay, the English language, from its greater rapidity, is in itself better suited than the German for them. The hexameter, whether alone or with the pentameter, possesses a movement, an expression, which no metre 20 hitherto in common use amongst us possesses, and which I am convinced EngHsh poetry, as our mental wants multiply, will not always be content to forgo. AppUed to Homer, this metre affords to the translator the immense support of keeping him more nearly than any other metre to Homer's movement ; and, since a poet's movement makes so large a part of his general effect, and to repro- duce this general effect is at once the translator's indis- pensable business and so difficult for him, it is a great thing to have this part of your model's general effect 30 already given you in your metre, instead of having to get it entirely for yourself. These are general considerations ; but there are also one or two particular considerations which confirm me in the opinion that for translating Homer into Enghsh verse the hexameter should be used. The most successful attempt hitherto made at rendering Homer into EngHsh, the attempt in which Homer's general effect has been best retained, is an attempt made in the hexameter measure. It is a version of the famous lines in the third book of 40 the Iliad, which end with that mention of Castor and LECTURE III 295 Pollux from which Mr. Ruskin extracts the sentimental consolation already noticed by me. The author is the accomplished Provost of Eton, Dr. Hawtrey ; and this performance of his must be my excuse for having taken the liberty to single him out for mention, as one of the natural judges of a translation of Homer, along with Professor Thompson and Professor Jowett, whose connection with Greek literature is official. The passage is short ^ ; and Dr. Hawtrey's version of it is suffused with a pensive 10 grace which is, perhaps, rather more Virgihan than Homeric; still it is the one version of any part of the Iliad which in '■ So short, that I quote it entire : Clearly the rest I behold of the dark-ey'd sons of Achaia ; Known to me well are the faces of all ; their names I remember ; Two, two only remain, whom I see not among the commanders. Castor fleet in the car, — Polydeukes brave with the oestus — Own dear brethren of mine — one parent loVd us as infants. Are they not here in the host, from the shores of lov'd Laoedsemon, Or, though they came with the rest in ships that bound thro' the waters. Dare they not enter the fight or stand in the oounoU of Heroes, All for fear of the shame and the taunts my crime has awaken' d ? So said she ; — they long since in Earth's soft arms were reposing, There, in their own dear land, their Father -land, Lacedsemon. English Hexameter Translations, London, 1847 ; p. 242, I have changed Dr. Hawtrey's ' Kastor,' ' Lakedaimon,' back to the familiar ' Castor,' ' Lacedemon,' in obedience to my own rule that everything odd is to be avoided in rendering Homer, the most natural and least odd of poets. I see Mr. Newman's critic in the National Review urges our generation to bear with the unnatural effect of these rewritten Greek names, in the hope that by this means the effect of them may have to the next generation become natural. For my part, I feel no disposition to pass aU my own life in the wilderness pi pedantry, in order that a posterity which I shall never see may one day enter an orthographical Canaan ; and, after all, the real question is this — ^whether our living apprehension of the Greek world is more checked by meeting in an English book about the Greeks, names not spelt letter for letter as in the original Greek, or by meeting names which make us rub our eyes and call out, ' How exceedingly odd 1 ' The Latin names of the Greek deities raise in most oases the idea of quite distinct personages from the personages whose idea is raised by the Greek names. Hera and Juno are actually, to every scholar's imagination, two different people. So in all these cases the Latin names must, at any inconvenience, be abandoned when we are dealing with the Greek world. But I think it can be in the sensitive imagina- tion of Mr. Grote only, that ' Thuoydides ' raises the idea of a different man from ^ovxvUSijs. 296 ON TRANSLATING HOMER some degree reproduces for me the original efiect of Homer : it is the best, and it is in hexameters. This is one of the particular considerations that incline me to prefer the hexameter, for translating Homer, to our established metres. There is another. Most of you, prob- ably, have some knowledge of a poem by Mr. Clough, The Bothie of Toper-na-fuosich, a long-vacation pastoral, in hexameters. The general merits of that poem I am not going to discuss : it is a serio-comic poem, and, therefore, of essentially different nature from the Iliad. Still in two lo things it is, more than any other EngUsh poem which I can call to mind, like the Iliad ; in the rapidity of its move- ment, and the plainness and directness of its style. The thought in this poem is often curious and subtle, and that is not Homeric ; the diction is often grotesque, and that is not Homeric. StiU, by its rapidity of movement, and plain and direct manner of presenting the thought however curious in itself, this poem, which being as I say a serio- comic poem has a right to be grotesque, is grotesque truly, not, like Mr. Newman's version of the Iliad, falsely. Mi. 20 Clough's odd epithets, ' The grave man nick-named Adam,' ' The hairy Aldrich,' and so on, grow vitally and appear naturally in their place ; while Mr. Newman's ' dapper- greav'd Achaians,' and ' motley-helmed Hector,' have all the air of being mechanically elaborated and artificially stuck in. Mr. Clough's hexameters are excessively, need- lessly rough : still, owing to the native rapidity of this measiu-e, and to the directness of style which so well aUies itself with it, his composition produces a sense in the reader which Homer's composition also produces, and 30 which Homer's translator ought to reproduce — ^the sense of having, within short limits of time, a large portion of human life presented to him, instead of a small portion. Mr. Clough's hexameters are, as I have just said, too rough and irregular ; and indeed a good model, on any considerable scale, of this metre, the English translator wiU nowhere find. He must not follow the model offered by Mr. Longfellow in his pleasing and popular poem of Evangeline ; for the merit of the manner and movement of Evangeline, when they are at their best, is to be tenderly 40 elegant ; and their fault, when they are at their worst. LECTURE III 297 is to be lumbering ; but Homer's defect is not lumbering- ness, neither is tender elegance his excellence. The lumber- ing effect of most EngUsh hexameters is caused by their being much too dactylic ; ^ the translator must learn to use spondees freely. Mr. Clough has done this, but he has not sufiS-ciently observed another rule which the translator cannot follow too strictly ; and that is, to have no lines which wiQ not, as it is familiarly said, read themselves. This is of the last importance for rhythms with which the 10 ear of the English pubUo is not thoroughly acquainted. Lord Redesdale, in two papers on the subject of Greek and Roman metres, has some good remarks on the out- rageous disregard of quantity in which EngUsh verse, trusting to its force of accent, is apt to indulge itself. The predominance of accent in our language is so great, that it would be pedantic not to avail oneself of it ; and Lord Redesdale suggests rules which might easily be pushed too far. Still, it is imdeniable that in English hexameters we generally force the quantity far too much ; we rely on 20 justification by accent with a security which is excessive. But not only do we abuse accent by shortening long syllables and . lengthening short ones ; we perpetually commit a far worse fault, by requiring the removal of the accent from its natural place to an unnatural one, in order to make our line scan. This is a fault, even when our metre is one which every English reader knows, and when we can see what we want and can correct the rhythm according to our wish ; although it is a fault which a great master may sometimes commit knowingly to produce 30 a desired effect, as Milton changes the natural accent on the word Tiresias in the line : And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old ; and then it ceases to be a fault, and becomes a beauty. But it is a real fault, when Chapman has : By him the golden-thron'd Queen slept, the Queen of Deities ; ' For instance ; in a version (I believe, by the late Mr. Lookharfc) of Homer's description of the parting of Hector and Andromache, there occurs, in the first five lines, but one spondee besides the necessary spondees in the sixth place : in the corresponding five lines of Homer there occur ten. See English Hexameter Translations, 244, 298 ON TRANSLATING HOMER for in this line, to make it scan, you have to take away the accent from the word Queen, on which it naturally falls, and to place it on thron'd, which would naturally be un- accented ; and yet, after all, you get no pecuUar effect or beauty of cadence to reward you. It is a real fault, when Mr. Newman has : Infatuate ! oh that thou wert lord to some other army — for here again the reader is required, not for any special advantage to himself, but simply to save Mr. Newman trouble, to place the accent on the insignificant word lo wert, where it has no business whatever. But it is a stUl greater fault, when Spenser has, (to take a striking in- stance,) Wot ye why his mother with a veil hath covered hia face ? for a hexameter ; because here not only is the reader causelessly required to make havoc with the natural accentuation of the Une in order to get it to run as a hexa- meter ; but also he, in nine cases out of ten, will be utterly at a loss how to perform the process required, and the line wiU remain a mere monster for him. I repeat, it is advis- ao able to construct all verses so that by reading them natur- ally — that is, according to the sense and legitimate accent — the reader gets the right rhythm ; but, for English hexameters, that they be so constructed is indispensable. If the hexameter best helps the translator to the Homeric rapidity, what style may best help him to the Homeric plainness and directness ? It is the merit of a metre appropriate to your subject, that it in some degree suggests and carries with itself a style appropriate to the subject ; the elaborate and self -retarding style, which comes so so naturally when your metre is the Miltonic blank verse, does not come naturally with the hexameter ; is, indeed, alien to it. On the other hand, the hexameter has a natural dignity which repels both the jaunty style and the jog-trot style, to both of which the ballad-measure so easily lends itself. These are great advantages ; and perhaps it is nearly enough to say to the translator who uses the hexa- meter that he cannot too rehgiously follow, in style, the inspiration of his metre. He will find that a loose and LECTURE III 299 idiomatic grammar — a grammar which follows the essential rather than the formal logic of the thought — allies itself excellently with the hexameter ; and that, while this sort of grammar ensures plainness and naturalness, it by no means comes short in nobleness. It is difficult to pro- nounce certainly what is idiomatic in the ancient literature of a language which, though still spoken, has long since entirely adopted, as modem Greek has adopted, modem idioms. Still one may, I think, clearly perceive that 10 Homer's grammatical style is idiomatic — ^that it may even be called, not improperly, a loose grammatical style. ^ Examples, however, of what I mean by a loose grammatical style, will be of more use to the translator if taken from English poetry than if taken from Homer. I call it, then, a loose and idiomatic grammar which Shakspeare uses in the last line of the following three : He '3 here in double trust : First, as I am his kinsman and his subject, Strong both against the deed — 20 or in this : Wit, whither wilt f What Shakspeare means is perfectly clear, clearer, prob- ably, than if he had said it in a more formal and regular manner ; but his grammar is loose and idiomatic, because he leaves out the subject of the verb ' wUt ' in the second passage quoted, and because, in the first, a prodigious addition to the sentence has to be, as we used to say in our old Latin grammar days, understood, before the word ' both ' can be properly parsed. So, again. Chapman's 80 grammar is loose and idiomatic where he says : — Even share hath he that keeps his tent, and he to field doth go — because he leaves out, in the second clause, the relative which in formal writing would be required. But Chapman ' See for instance, in the Iliad, the loose ooutruction of oarf, xvii, 658 ; that of iSoito, xvii, 681 ; that of o'he, xviii, 209 ; and the elliptical construction at xix, 42, 43 ; also the idiomatic construction of iyihv '6d( irapanxelv, xix, 140. These instances are aU taken within a lange of a thousand lines : any one may easily multiply them for himself. 300 ON TRANSLATING HOMEB here does not lose dignity by this idiomatic way of ex- pressing himself, any more than Shakspeare loses it by neglecting to confer on ' both ' the blessings of a regular government : neither loses dignity, but each gives that impression of a plain, direct, and natural mode of speaking, which Homer, too, gives, and which it is so important, as I say, that Homer's translator should succeed in giving. Cowper calls blank verse ' a style farther removed than rhyme from the vernacular idiom, both in the language itself and in the arrangement of it ; ' and just in propor- lo tion as blank verse is removed from the vernacular idiom, from that idiomatic style which is of all styles the plainest and most natural, blank verse is unsuited to render Homer. Shakspeare is not only idiomatic in his grammar or style, he is also idiomatic in his words or diction ; and here, too, his example is valuable for the translator of Homer. The translator must not, indeed, aUow himseH all the liberty that Shakspeare aUows himself ; for Shakspeare sometimes uses expressions which pass per- fectly well as he uses them, because Shakspeare thinks 20 so fast and so powerfully, that in reading him we are borne over single words as by a mighty current ; but, if our mind were less excited — and who may rely on exciting our mind hke Shakspeare ? — they would check us. ' To grunt and sweat under a weary load ; ' — that does perfectly well where it comes in Shakspeare ; but if the translator of Homer, who will hardly have wound our minds up to the pitch at which these words of Hamlet find them, were to employ, when he has to speak of one of Homer's heroes under the load of calamity, this figure of ' grunting ' and 30 ' sweating ' we should say. He Newmanises, and his diction would offend us. For he is to be noble ; and no plea of wishing to be plain and natural can get him excused from being this : only, as he is to be also, like Homer, perfectly simple and free from artificiality, and as the use of idio- matic expressions undoubtedly gives this effect,^ he should ' Our knowledge of Homer'a Greek is hardly such as to enable U3 to pronounce quite confidently what is idiomatic in his diction, and what is not, any more than in his grammar ; but I seem to myself clearly to recogBttse an idiomatic stamp in such expressions as ToAuireiieii' iroXe/iow, xiv, 86; 0aoi iv v^eaaiv flvjus, xvi, 94; tik' olai iairaalais atirciy yiyii LECTURE III 301 be as idiomatic as he can be without ceasing to be noble. Therefore the idiomatic language of Shakspeare — such language as, 'prate of his whereabout;' 'jump the life to come ; ' ' the damnation of his taking-off ; ' ' his quietus make with a bare bodkin '-^should be carefully observed by the translator of Homer, although in every case he will have to decide for himself whether the use, by him, of Shakspeare's liberty, will or will not clash with his in- dispensable duty of nobleness. He wiU find one English 10 book and one only, where, as in the Iliad itself, perfect plainness of speech is alHed with perfect nobleness ; and that book is the Bible. No one could see this more clearly than Pojfe saw it : ' This pure and noble simpHcity,' he says, ' is nowhere in such perfection as in the Scripture and Homer ' : yet even with Pope a woman is a ' fair,' a father is a ' sire,' and an old man a ' reverend sage,' and so on through all the phrases of that pseudo-Augustan, and most unbibUcal, vocabulary. The Bible, however, is undoubtedly the grand mine of diction for the translator 20 of Homer ; and, if he knows how to discriminate truly between what wUl suit him and what wiU not, the Bible may afford him also invaluable lessons of style. I said that Homer, besides being plain in style and diction, was plain in the quahty of his thought. It is possible that a thought may be expressed with idiomatic plainness, and yet not be in itself a plain thought. For example, in Mr. dough's poem, already mentioned, the style and diction is almost always idiomatic and plain, but the thought itself is often of a quahty which is not plain ; 30 it is curious. But the grand instance of the union of idiomatic expression with curious or difficult thought is in Shakspeare's poetry. Such, indeed, is the force and power of Shakspeare's idiomatic expression, that it gives an effect of clearness and vividness even to a thought which is imperfect and incoherent ; for instance, when Hamlet says, To take arms against a sea of troubles — Kaiapuv, xix, 71 ; leKoroiiiiuv, xix, 149 ; and many others. The first- quoted expression, ToKvmieiv dpyaXiovs TroXf/iovs, seems to me to have just about the same degree of freedom as the 'jump the life to come,' or the ' shuffle off this mortal ooil,' of Shakspeare. 302 ON TRANSLATING HOMEB the figure there is undoubtedly most faulty, it by no means rims on four legs ; but the thing is said so freely and idiomatically, that it passes. This, however, is not a point to which I now want to call your attention ; I want you to remark, in Shakspeare and others, only that which we may directly apply to Homer. I say, then, that in Shakspeare the thought is often, while most idiomatically uttered, nay, while good and sound in itself, yet of a quahty which is curious and difficult ; and that this quahty of thought is something entirely un-Homeric. For example, lo when Lady Macbeth says, Memory, the warder of the brain. Shall be a fume, and the receipt of reason A limbeck only — this figure is a perfectly sound and correct figure, no doubt ; Mr. Knight even calls it a ' happy ' figure ; but it is a difficult figure : Homer would not have used it. Again, when Lady Macbeth says. When you durst do it, then you were a man ; And, to be more than what you were, you would 20 Be so much more the man — the thought in the two last of these lines is, when you seize it, a perfectly clear thought, and a fine thought ; but it is a curious thought : Homer would not have used it. These are favourable instances of the union of plain style and words with a thought not plain in quality ; but take stronger instances of this union — ^let the thought be not only not plain in quahty, but highly fanciful ; and you have the Elizabethan, conceits ; you have, in spite of idiomatic style and idiomatic diction, everything which is 30 most un-Homerio ; you have such atrocities as this of Chapman : Fate shall fail to vent her gall Tin mine vent thousands. I say, the poets of a nation which has produced such a conceit as that, must purify themselves seven times in the fire before they can hope to render Homer. They must expel their nature with a fork, and keep crying to one another night and day : ' Homer not only moves LECTURE III 303 rapidly, not only speaks idiomatically ; lie is, also, free from fancifulness.' So essentially characteristic of Homer is his plainness and naturalness of thought, that to the preservation of this in his own version the translator must without scruple sacrifice, where it is necessary, verbal fidelity to his original, rather than run any risk of producing, by literalness, an odd and unnatural effect. The double epithets so con- stantly occurring in Homer must be dealt with according 10 to this rule : these epithets come quite naturally in Homer's poetry ; in English poetry they, in nine cases out of ten, come, when literally rendered, quite unnaturally. I will not now discuss why this is so, I assume it as an indis- putable fact that it is so ; that Homer's /tepoTrcov avOpwiroyv comes' to the reader as something perfectly natural, while Mr. Newman's ' voice-dividing mortals ' comes to him as something perfectly unnatural. Well then, as it is Homer's general efiect which we are to reproduce, it is to be false to Homer to be so verbally faithful to him as that we lose 20 this effect : and by the English translator Homer's double epithets must be, in many places, renounced altogether ; in all places where they are rendered, rendered by equiva- lents which come naturally. Instead of rendering ©eVt TavijTeTrXc by Mr. Newman's ' Thetis trailing-rob'd,' which brings to one's mind long petticoats sweeping a dirty pavement, the translator must render the Greek by EngUsh words which come as naturally to us as Milton's words when he says, ' Let gorgeous Tragedy With sceptred pall come sweeping by.' Instead of rendering fidnxa^ iTnrovs so by Chapman's ' one-hoof 'd steeds,' or Mr. Newman's ' single-hoofed horses,' he must speak of horses in a way which surprises us -as little as Shakspeare surprises us when he says, ' GaUop apace, you fiery -footed steeds.' Instead of rendering /AeXirjSea 6vfj.6v by ' life as honey pleasant,' he must characterise Ufe with the simple pathos of Gray's ' Warm precincts of the cheerful day.' Instead of converting iroiov a-e Ittos (jyvyev IpKos 6&6vtv ; into the portentous remonstrance, 'Betwixt the outwork of thy teeth what word hath slipt ? ' he must remonstrate in 40 English as straightforward as this of St. Peter, ' Be it far from thee, Lord, this shall not be unto thee ; ' or as 304 ON TRANSLATING HOMER this of the disciples, ' What is this that he saith, a little while ? we cannot tell what he saith.' Homer's Greek, in each of the places quoted, reads as naturally as any of those English passages : the expression no more calls away the attention from the sense in the Greek than in the EngUsh. But when, in order to render literally in English one of Homer's double epithets, a strange un- familiar adjective is invented — such as ' voice-dividing ' for ft.ipoxj/'i — an improper share of the reader's attention is necessarily diverted to this ancillary word, to this word lo which Homer never intended should receive so much notice ; and a total effect quite different from Homer's is thus produced. Therefore Mr. Newman, though he does not purposely import, like Chapman, conceits of his own into the Iliad, does actually import them ; for the result of his singular diction is to raise ideas, and odd ideas, not raised by the corresponding diction in Homer ; and Chap- man himself does no more. Cowper says, ' I have cautiously avoided all terms of new invention, with an abimdance of which persons of more ingenuity than judgment have ao not enriched our language but encumbered it ; ' and this criticism so exactly hits the diction of Mr. Newman, that one is irresistibly led to imagine his present appearance in the flesh to be at least his second. A translator cannot well have a Homeric rapidity, style, diction, and quality of thought, without at the same time having what is the result of these in Homer — nobleness. Therefore I do not attempt to lay down any rules for obtaining this effect of nobleness — the effect, too, of all others the most impalpable, the most irreducible to rule, 30 and which most depends on the individual personaUty of the artist. So I proceed at once to give you, in conclusion, one or two passages in which I have tried to follow those principles of Homeric translation which I have laid down. I give them, it must be remembered, not as specimens of perfect translation, but as specimens of an attempt to translate Homer on certain principles ; specimens which may very aptly illustrate those principles by falling short, as well as by succeeding. I take first a passage of which I have already spoken, 40 the comparison of the Trojan fires to the stars. The first LECTURB III 305 part of that passage is, I have said, of splendid beauty ; and to begin with a lame version of that, would be the height of imprudence in me. It is the last and more level part with which I shall concern myself. I have already quoted Cowper's version of this part in order to show you how unlike his stiff and Miltonic manner of telling a plain story is to Homer's easy and rapid manner : So numerous seem'd those fires the bank between Of Xanthua, blazing, and the fleet of Greece, 10 In prospect all of Troy — I need not continue to the end. I have also quoted Pope's version of it, to show you how urdike his ornate and arti- ficial manner is to Homer's plain and natural manner : So many flames before proud Ilion blaze, And brighten glimmering Xanthus with their rays ; The long reflections of the distant fires Gleam on the walla, and tremble on the spires — and much more of the same kind. I want to show you that it is possible, in a plain passage of this sort, to keep 20 Homer's simplicity without being heavy and duU ; and to keep his dignity without bringing in pomp and ornament. ' As numerous as are the stars on a clear night,' says Homer, So shone forth, in front of Troy, by the bed of Xanthua, Between that and the ships, the Trojans' numerous fires. In the plain there were kindled a thousand fires ; by each one There sate fifty men, in the ruddy light of the fire : By their chariots stood the steeds, and champ' d the white barley While their masters sate by the fire, and waited for Morning. — 30 Here, in order to keep Homer's effect of perfect plainness and directness, I repeat the word ' fires ' as he repeats ■Trvpd, without scruple ; although in a more elaborate and Uterary style of poetry this recurrence of the same word would be a fault to be avoided. I omit the epithet of Morning, and, whereas Homer says that the steeds ' waited for Morning,' I prefer to attribute this expectation of Morning to the master and not to the horse. Very hkely in this particular, as in any other single particular, I may be wrong : what I wish you to remark is my endeavour after absolute 40 plainness of speech, my care to avoid anything which may ABNOLD 2 S06 ON TRANSLATING HOMER the least check or surprise the reader, whom Homer does not check or surprise. Homer's lively personal familiarity with war, and with the war-horse as his master's com- panion, is such that, as it seems to me, his attributing to the one the other's feeUngs comes to us quite naturally ; but, from a poet without this familiarity, the attribution strikes as a httle unnatural ; and therefore, as everything the least unnatural is un-Homeric, I avoid it. Again ; in the address of Zeus to the horses of Aohillos, Cowper has : lo Jove saw their grief with pity, and his brows Shaking, within himself thus, pensive, said. Ah hapless pair I wherefore by gift divine Were ye to Peleus given, a mortal king. Yourselves immortsu and from age exempt ? ' There is no want of dignity here, as in the versions of Chapman and Mr. Newman, which I have already quoted ; but the whole effect is much too slow. Take Pope : Nor Jove disdained to cast a pitying look While thus relenting to the steeds he spoke. 20 ' Unhappy coursers of immortal strain ! Exempt from age and deathless now in vain : Did we your race on mortal man bestow Only, alas ! to share in mortal woe ? ' Here there is no want either of dignity or rapidity, but aU is too artificial. ' Nor Jove disdained,' for instance, is a very artificial and literary way of rendering Homer's words, and so is, ' coursers of immortal strain.' Mvpofiivoj S' dpa lij ye IdwVj k^erjae Kpoviojv — And with pity the son of Saturn saw them bewailing, 30 And he shook his head, and thus address'd his own bosom ; ' Ah, unhappy pair, to Peleus why did we give you. To a mortal ? but ye are without old age and immortal. Was it that ye, with man, might have your thousands of sorrows f For than man, indeed, there breathes no wretoheder creature. Of all living things, that on earth are breathing and moving.' Here I will observe that the use' of ' own,' in the second Une, for the last syllable of a dactyl, and the use of ' To a,' in the fourth, for a complete spondee, though they do not, I think, actually spoil the run of the hexameter, are yet40 undoubtedly instances of that over-reliance on accent, and LEd'URE III 307 too free disregard of quantity, which Lord Redesdale visits with just reprehension.^ I now take two longer passages in order to try my method more fully ; but I stUl keep to passages which have already come under our notice. I quoted Chapman's version of some passages in the speech of Hector at his parting with Andromache. One astounding, conceit will probably stiU be ia your remembrance : When saored Troy shall shed her iow'ra for tears of overthrow — • 10 as a translation of or av vot okiLXri 'IXios ipi;. I will quote a few Unes which may give you, also, the key-note to the Anglo-Augustan manner of rendering this passage, and to the Miltonic manner of rendering it. What Mr. Newman's manner of rendering it would be, you can by this time sufficiently imagine for yourselves. Mr. Wright — ^to quote for once from his meritorious version instead of Cowper's, whose strong and weak points are those of Mr. Wright also — Mr. Wright begins his version of this passage thus : All these thy anxious cares are also mine, 20 Partner belov'd ; but how could I endure The scorn of Trojans and their long-rob'd wives. Should they behold their Hector shimk from war. And act the coward's part I Nor doth my soul Prompt the base thought. ' It must be remembered, however, that, if we disregard quantity too much in constructing English hexameters, we also disregard accent too much in reading Greek hexameters. We read every Greek dactyl so as to make a pure dactyl of it ; but, to a Greek, the aocent must have hindered many dactyls from sounding as pure dactyls. When we read ai6\os iirwos, for instance, or aiyi6xoto, the dactyl in each of these cases is made by us as pure a dactyl as ' Tityre,' or ' dignity ' ; but to a Greek it was not so. To him aUKos must have been nearly as im- pure a dactyl as ' death-destined ' is to us ; and aiyiSx nearly aa impure as the ' dress'd his own ' of my text. Nor, I think, does this right mode of pronouncing the two words at all spoil the run of the line as a hexameter. The effect of aioWos ittttos, (or something like that), though not our effect, is not a disagreeable one. On the other hand, Kopv6ai6\os as a paroxytonon, although it has the respectable authority of liddell and Scott's Lexicon, (following Heyne,) is certainly wrong ; for then the word cannot be pronounced without throwing an accent on the first syllable as well as the third, and iiiyas icoppv9ai6\Kos "E«Taf> would have been to a Greek as intolerable an ending for an hexameter line, as 'accurst orphanhood-destined houses' would be to ua. The best authorities, accordingly, accent icopvSaio\os as a proparozytonon. X2 308 ON TRANSLATING HOMER Ex pede Herculem : you see just what the manner is. Mr. Sotheby, on the other hand, (to take a disciple of Pope instead of Pope himself,) begins thus : ' What moves thee, moves my mind,' brave Hector said, ' Yet Troy's upbraiding scorn I deeply dread. If, like a slave, where chiefs with chiefs engage, The warrior Hector fears the war to wage. Not thus my heart inclines.' From that specimen, too, you can easily divine what, with such a manner, will become of the whole passage. But lo Homer has neither : What moves thee, moves my mind — nor has he : All these thy anxious cares are also mine. *H Kal ef^ol TaSe ndvTa fieKu, yvvai' dKKd fictK' alvws — that is what Homer has, that is his style and movement, if one could but catch it. Andromache, as you know, has been entreating Hector to defend Troy from within the walls, instead of exposing his life, and, with his own Ufe, the safety of aU those dearest to him, by fighting in the 20 open plain. Hector repUes : Woman, I too take thought for this ; • but then I bethink me What the Trojan men and Trojan women might murmur. If like a coward I skulk' d behind, apart from the battle. Nor would my own heart let me ; my heart, which has bid me be valiant Always, and always fighting among the first of the Trojans, Busy for Priam's fame and my own, in spite of the future. For that day will come, my soul is assur d of its coming. It will come, when sacred Troy shall go to destruction, Troy, and warlike Priam too, and the people of Priam. 30 And yet not that grief, which then will be, of the Trojans, Moves me so much — not Hecuba's grief, nor Priam my father's. Nor my brethren's, many and brave, who then will be lying In the bloody dust, beneath the feet of their foemen — As thy grief, when, in tears, some brazen-coated Aohaian Shall transport thee away, and the day of thy freedom be ended. Then, perhaps, thou shalt work at the loom of another, in Argos, Or bear pails to the well of Messeis, or Hypereia, Sorely against thy will, by strong Necessity's order. And some man may say, as he looks and sees thy tears falling : 40 See, the wife of Hector, that great pre-eminent captain Of the horsemen of Troy, in the day they fought for their city. LECTURE III 309 So some man will say ; and then thy grief will redouble At thy want of a man like me, to save thee from bondage. But let me be dead, and the earth be mounded above me. Ere I hear thy cries, and thy captivity told of. The main question, whether or no this version repro- duces for him the movement and general effect of Homer better than other versions ^ of the same passage, I leave for the judgment of the scholar. But the particular points, in which the operation of my own rules is mani- 10 fested, are as follows. In the second Une I leave out the epithet of the Trojan women eXKco-iirewXous, altogether. In the sixth line I put in five words ' in spite of the future,' which are in the original by implication only, and are not there actually expressed. This I do, because Homer, as I have before said, is so remote from one who reads him in Enghsh, that the English translator must be even plainer, if possible, and more unambiguous than Homer himself ; the connexion of meaning must be even more distinctly marked in the translation than in the original. ao For in the Greek language itself there is something which brings one nearer to Homer, which gives one a clue to his thought, which makes a hint enough ; but in the English language this sense of nearness, this clue, is gone ; hints are insufficient, everything must be stated with full dis- tinctness. In the ninth liae Homer's epithet for Priam is cu/i/xeXto), — ' armed with good ashen spear,' say the dic- tionaries ; ' ashen-speared,' translates Mr. Newman, follow- ing his own rule to ' retain every pecuUarity of his original ' — I say, on the other hand, that ivft-iiMw has not the 80 eSect of a ' pecuUarity ' in the original, while ' ashen- speared ' has the effect of a ' peculiarity ' in English ; and ' warUke ' is as marking an equivalent as I dare give for ivfjifkeXia, for fear of disturbing the balance of expres- sion in Homer's sentence. In the fourteenth Une, again, I translate x"^''°X'''''"'""'' ^J ' brazen-coated : ' Mr. Newman, meaning to be perfectly Uteral, translates it by ' brazen-cloak'd,' an expression which comes to the reader oddly and unnaturaUy, while Homer's word comes to him quite naturaUy ; but I venture to go as near to a literal ' Dr. Hawtrey also has translated this passage ; but here, he has not, I think, been bo successful as in bis ' Helen on the walls of Troy.' 310 ON TRANSLATING HOMER rendering as ' brazen-coated,' because a ' coat of brass ' is familiar to us all from the Bible, and familiar, too, as distinctly specified in connexion with the wearer. Finally, let me farther illustrate from the twentieth line the value which I attach, in a question of diction, to the authority of the Bible. The word ' pre-eminent ' occurs in that line ; I was a little in doubt whether that was not too bookish an expression to be used in rendering Homer, as I can imagine Mr. Newman to have been a little in doubt whether his ' responsively accosted,' for d/x£ty8o/*tvos Trpocri(j>rj, was lo not too bookish an expression. Let us both, I say, consult our Bibles : Mr. Newman will nowhere find it in his Bible that David, for instance, ' responsivdy accosted Goliath ; ' but I do find in mine that ' the right hand of the Lord hath the pre-eminence ; ' and forthwith I use ' pre-eminent ' without scruple. My Bibliolatry is perhaps excessive ; and no doubt a true poetic feeUng is the Homeric trans- lator's best guide in the use of words ; but where this feeling does not exist, or is at fault, I think he cannot do better than take for a mechanical guide Cruden's Con- 20 cordance. To be sure, here as elsewhere, the consulter must know how to consult — must know how very slight a variation of word or circumstance makes the difference between an authority in his favour, and an authority which gives him no countenance at all ; for instance, the ' Great simpleton ! ' (for fjJya v^n-ios) of Mr. Newman, and the ' Thou fool ! ' of the Bible, are something alike ; but ' Thou fool ! ' is very grand, and ' Great simpleton ! ' is an atrocity. So, too. Chapman's ' Poor wretched beasts ' is pitched many degrees too low ; but Shakspeare's ' Poor 30 venomous fool. Be angry and despatch ! ' is in the grand style. One more piece of translation, and I have done. I wiU take the passage in which both Chapman and Mr. Newman have already so much excited our astonishment, the passage at the end of the nineteenth book of the Iliad, the dialogue between AchiUes and his horse Xanthus, after the death of Patroclus. Achilles begins : ' Xanthus and Baliua both, ye far-fam'd seed of Podarga ! See that ye bring your master home to the host of the Argives In some other sort than your last, when the battle is ended ; 40 And not leaye him behind, a corpse on the plain, like Patroclus.' LECTURE III 311 Then, from beneath the yoke, the fleet horse Xanthus address'd him : Sadden he bow'd his head, and all his mane, as he bow'd it, Stream'd to the ground by the yoke, escaping from under the collar ; And he was given a voice by the white-arm'd Goddess Hera. ' Truly, yet this time wiU we save thee, mighty AohiUes ! But thy day of death is at hand ; nor shall we be the reason — No, but the will of Heaven, and Fate's invincible power. Eor by no slow pace or want of swiftness of ours Bid the Trojans obtain to strip the arms from Fatroclus ; 10 But that prince among Gods, the son of the lovely-hair'd Leto, Slew him fighting in front of the fray, and glorified Hector. But, for us, we vie in speed with the breath of the West-Wind, Which, men say, is the fleetest of winds ; 'tis thou who art fated To lie low in death, by the hand of a God and a Mortal.' Thus far he ; and here his voice was stopped by the Furies. Then, with a troubled heart, the swift Achilles address' d him : ' Why dost thou prophesy so my death to me, Xanthus ? It needs not. I of myself know well, that here I am destin'd to perish, 20 Far from my father and mother dear : for all that, I will not Stay this hand from fight, till the Trojans are utterly routed.' So he spake, and drove with a cry his steeds into battle. Here the only particular remark whieli I will make is, that in the fourth and eighth line the grammar is what I call a loose and idiomatic grammar ; in writing a regular and literary style, one would in the fourth line have to repeat, before ' leave ', the words ' that ye ' from the second Una, and to insert the word ' do ' ; and in the eighth line one would not use such an expression as ' he was given a voice.' 30 But I wiU make one general remark on the character of my own translations, as I have made so many on that of the translations of others. It is, that over the graver passages there is shed an air somewhat too strenuous and severe, by comparison with that lovely ease and sweetness which Homer, for all his noble and masculine way of thinking, never loses. Here I stop. I have said so much, because I think that the task of translating Homer into EngUsh verse both will be re-attempted, and may be re-attempted successfully. 40 There are great works composed of parts so disparate, that one translator is not Kkely to have the requisite gifts for poetically rendering all of them. ' Such are the works of Shakspeare, and Goethe's Fatist ; and these it is best to attempt to render in prose only. People praise Tieck and 312 ON TRANSLATING HOMEE Schlegel's version of Shakspeare : I, for my part, woiild sooner read Shakspeare in the French prose translation, and that is saying a great deal ; but in the German poets' hands Shakspeare so often gets, especially where he is humorous, an air of what the Frenph call niaiserie ! and can anything be more un-Shakspearian than that ? Again ; Mr. Hayward's prose translation of the first part of Faiist — so good that it makes one regret Mr. Hayward should have abandoned the line of translation for. a kind of Uterature which is, to say the least, somewhat slight — ^is not likely lo to be surpassed by any translation in verse. But poems like the Iliad, which, in the main, are in one manner, may hope to find a poetical translator so gifted and so trained as to be able to learn that one manner, and to reproduce it. Only, the poet who would reproduce this must ciiltivate in himself a Greek virtue by no means common among the moderns in general, and the EngHsh in particular — modera- tion. For Homer has not only the Enghsh vigour, he has the Greek grace ; and when one observes the boisterous, rollicking way in which his English admirers — even men 20 of genius, Hke the late Professor WUson — ^love to talk of Homer and his poetry, one cannot help feeling that there is no very deep community of nature between them and the object of their enthusiasm. ' It is very well, my good friends,' I always imagine Homer saying to them, 2 he could hear them : ' you do me a great deal of honour, but somehow or other you praise me too Uke barbarians.' For Homer's grandeur is not the mixed and turbid grandeur of the great poets of the north, of the authors of Othello and Faust ; it is a perfect, a lovely grandeur. Certainly 30 his poetry has all the energy and power of the poetry of our ruder climates ; but it has, besides, the pure lines of an Ionian horizon, the liquid clearness of an Ionian sky. HOMERIC TRANSLATION IN THEORY AND PRACTICE A REPLY TO MATTHEW ARNOLD, ESQ. PROFESSOR OF POETRY, OXFORD BY FRANCIS W. NEWMAN A TRANSLATOR OF THE ILIAD HOMERIC TRANSLATION IN THEORY AND PRACTICE It is so difficult, amid the press of literature, for a mere versifier and translator to gain notice at all, that an assailant may even do one a service, if he so conduct his assault as to enable the reader to sit in intelligent judgment on the merits of the book assailed. But when the critic deals out to the readers only so much knowledge as may propagate his own contempt of the book, he has imdoubtedly immense power to dissuade them from wishing to open it. Mr. Arnold writes as openly aiming at this end. He begins by 10 complimenting me, as ' a man of great ability and genuine learning ; ' but on questions of learning, as well as of taste, he puts me down as bluntly, as if he had meant, ' a man totally void both of learning and of sagacity.' He again and agatti takes for granted that he has ' the scholar ' on his side, ' the Uving scholar,' the man who has learning and taste without pedantry. He bids me please ' the scholars,' and go to ' the scholars' tribunal ; ' and does not know that I did this, to the extent of my opportunity, before committing myself to a laborious, expensive and perhaps 20 thankless task. Of course he cannot guess, what is the fact, that scholars of fastidious refinement, but of a judgment which I think far more masculine than Mr. Arnold's, have passed a most encouraging sentence on large specimens of my translation. I at this moment count eight such names, though of course I must nbt here adduce them : nor wiU I further allude to it, than to say, that I have no such sense either of pride or of despondency, as those are liable to, who are consciously isolated in their taste. Scholars are the tribunal of Erudition, but of Taste the 30 educated but unlearned public is the only rightful judge ; and to it I wish to appeal. Even scholars collectively have no right, and much less have single scholars, to pronounce a final sentence on questions of taste in their court. Where 316 HOMERIC TRANSLATION I differ in Taste from Mr. Arnold, it is very difficult to find ' the scholars' tribunal,' even it I acknowledged its absolute jurisdiction : but as regards Erudition, this difficulty does not occur, and I shaU fully reply to the numerous dog- matisms by which he settles the case against me. But I must first avow to the reader my own moderate pretensions. Mr. Arnold begins by instilling two errors which he does not commit himself to assert. He says that my work will not take rank as the standard translation of Homer, but other translations will be made : — as if I thought lo otherwise ! If I have set the example of the right direction in which translators ought to aim, of course those who foUow me wiU improve upon me and supersede me. A man would be rash indeed to withhold his version of a poem of fifteen thousand lines, until he had, to his best ability, imparted to them aU their final perfection. He might spend the leisure of his life upon it. He would possibly be in his grave before it could see the light. If it then were pubhshed, and it was founded on any new principle, there "would be no one to defend it from the attacks of ignorance and prejudice, ao In the nature of the case, his wisdom is to elaborate in the first instance aU the high and noble parts carefully, and get thrpugh the inferior parts somehow ; leaving of necessity ver'y much to be done in successive editions, if possibly it please general taste sufficiently to reach them. A generous and intelligent critic wUl test such a work mainly or solely by the most noble parts, and as to the rest, will consider whether the metre and style adapts itself naturally to them also. Next, Mr. Arnold asks, ' Who is to assure Mr. Newman, 30 that when he has tried to retain every peculiarity of his original, he has done that for which Mr. Newman enjoins this to be done, — adhered closely to Homer's manner and habit of thought ? Evidently the translator needs more practical directions than these.' The tendency of this is, to suggest to the reader that I am not aware of the difficulty of rightly applying good principles ; whereas I have in this very connexion said expressly, that even when a translator has got right principles, he is liable to go wrong in the detail of their application. This is as true of all the principles 40 which Mr. Arnold can possibly give, as of those which I have HOW TO CRITICIZE IT 317 given ; nor do I for a moment assume, that in writing fifteen thousand lines of verse I have not made hundreds of blots. At the same time Mr. Arnold has overlooked the point of my remark. Nearly every translator before me has know- ingly, purposely, habitually shrunk from Homer's thoughts and Homer's manner. The reader will afterwards see whether Mr. Arnold does not justify them in their course. It is not for those who are purposely imf aithf ul to taunt me 10 with the difficulty of being triily faithful. I have alleged, and, against Mr. Arnold's flat denial, I dehberately repeat, that Homer rises and sinks with his subject, and is often homely or prosaic. I have professed as my principle, to follow my original in this matter. It is unfair to expect of me grandeur in trivial passages. If in any place where Homer is confessedly grand and noble, I have marred and ruined his greatness, let me be reproved. But I shall have occasion to protest, that Stateliness is not Grandeur, Picturesqueness is not Stately, Wild Beauty is 20 not to be confounded with Elegance : a Forest has its swamps and brushwood, as well as its tall trees. The duty of one who publishes his censures on me is, to select noble, greatly admired passages, and confront me both with a prose translation of the original (for the pubhc cannot go to the Greek) and also vsith that which he judges to be a more successful version than mine. Translation being matter of compromise, and being certain to fall below the original, when this is of the highest type of grandeur ; the question is not, What translator is perfect ? but, Wlio is 30 least imperfect ? Hence the only fair test is by comparison, when comparison is possible. But Mr. Arnold has not put me to this test. He has quoted two very short passages, and various single Unes, half lines and single words, from me ; and chooses to tell his readers that I ruin Homer's nobleness, when (if his censure is just) he might make them feel it by quoting me upon the most admired pieces. Now with the warmest sincerity I say, — If any EngUsh reader, after perusing my version of four or five eminently noble passages of sufficient length, side by side with those 40 of other translators, and (better stiU) with a prose version also, finds in them high qualities which I have destroyed ; 318 HOMERIC TRANSLATION I am foremost to advise him to shut my book, or to consult it only (as Mr. Arnold suggests) as a schoolboy's ' help to construe,' if such it can be. My sole object is, to bring Homer before the unlearned public : I seek no self- glorification : the sooner I am superseded by a really better translation, the greater will be my pleasure. It was not until I more closely read Mi. Arnold's own versions, that I understood how necessary is his repugnance to mine. I am unwilling to speak of his metrical efforts. I shall not say more than my argument strictly demands, lo It here suffices to state the simple fact, that for awhile I seriously doubted whether he meant his first specimen for metre at all. He seems distinctly to say, he is going to give us English Hexameters ; but it was long before I could beUeve that he had written the following for that metre : — So shone forth, in front of Troy, by the bed of Xanthus, Between that and the ships, the Trojans' numerous fires. In the plain there were kindled a thousand fires : by each one There sate fifty men, in the ruddy light of the fire. By their chariots stood the steeds, and champ'd the white barley, 20 While their masters sate by the fire, and waited for Morning. I sincerely thought, this was meant for prose ; at length the two last lines opened my eyes. He does mean them for Hexameters ! ' Fire ' (=feuer) with him is a spondee or trochee. The first line, I now see, begins with three (quantitative) spondees, and is meant to be spondaic in the fifth foot. ' Bed of, Between, In the,' — are meant for spondees ! So are ' There sate,' ' By their ' ; though ' Troy, by the ' was a dactyl. ' Champ'd the white ' is a dactyl. — My ' metrical exploits ' amaze Mr. Arnold (p. 258) ; but 30 my courage is timidity itself compared to his. His second specimen stands thus : — And with pity the son of Saturn saw them bewailing. And he shook his head, and thus address'd his own bosom : Ah, unhappy pair ! to Peleus why did we give you, To a mortal ? but ye are without old age and immortal. Was it that ye with man, might have your thousands of sorrows ? For than man indeed there breathes no wietcheder creature, Of all living things, that on earth are breathing and moving. Upon this he apologizes for ' To a,' intended as a spondee 4o in the fourth line, and ' -dress'd his own ' for a dactyl in the ME. ARNOLD'S HEXAMETERS 319 second ; liberties which, he admits, go rather far, but * do not actually spoil the run of the hexameter.' In a note, he attempts to paUiate his deeds by recriminating on Homer, though he wiU not allow to me the same excuse. The accent (it seems) on the second syllable of aidXos makes it as impure a dactyl to a Greek as ' death-destin'd ' is to us ! Mr. Arnold's erudition in Greek metres is very curious, if he can estabUsh that they take any cognizance at all of the prose accent, or that aioXos is quantitatively more or 10 less of a dactyl, according as the prose accent is on one or other syllable. His ear also must be of a very unusual kind, if it makes out that ' death-destin'd ' is anything but a downright Molossus. Write it dethdestind, as it is pro- nounced, and the eye, equally with the ear, decides it to be of the same type as the word persistunt. In the lines just quoted, most readers will be slow to believe, that they have to place an impetus of the voice (an ictus metricus at least) on Between, In' the. There sate. By' their, A'nd with, A'nd he, To a, For than, O'f all. Here, 20 in the course of thirteen lines, composed as a specimen of style, is found the same ofEence nine times repeated, to say nothing here of other deformities. Now contrast Mr. Arnold's severity against me,^ p. 298 : ' It is a real fault when Mr. Newman has : Infatuate ! 6h that thou wert | lord to some other army — for here the reader is required, not for any special advantage to himself, but simply to save Mr. Nevmian trouble, to place the accent on the insignificant word wert, where it has no business whatever.' Thus to the flaw which Mr. Arnold 30 admits nine times in thirteen pattern lines, he shows no mercy in me, who have toiled through fifteen thousand. Besides, on wert we are free at pleasure to place or not to place the accent ; but in Mr. Arnold's Between, To a, etc., it is impossible or offensive. To avoid a needlessly personal argument, I enlarge on the general question of hexameters. Others, scholars of repute, have given example and authority to English hexa- ' He attacks the same line also in p. 271 ; but I do not claim this as a mark, how free I am from the fault. 320 HOMERIC TRANSLATION meters. As matter of curiosity, as erudite sport, such experiments may have their value . I do not mean to express indiscriminate disapproval, much less contempt. I have myself privately tried the same in Alcaics ; and find the chief objection to be, not that the task is impossible, but that to execute it well is too difficult for a language like ours, overladen with consonants, and abounding with syllables neither distinctly long nor distinctly short, but of every intermediate length. Singing to a tune was essential to keep even Greek or Roman poetry to true time ; to the lo EngUsh language it is of tenfold necessity. But if time is abandoned, (as in fact it always is,) and the prose accent has to do duty for the ictus metricus, the moral genius of the metre is fundamentally subverted. What previously was steady duphcate time (' march-time,' as Professor Blackie calls it) vacillates between duphcate and triphcate. With Homer, a dactyl had nothing in it more tripping than a spondee : a crotchet followed by two quavers belongs to as grave an anthem as two crotchets. But Mr. Arnold himself (p. 277) calls the introduction of anapaests by Dr. Maginn 20 into our ballad measure, ' a detestable dance : ' as in : And aoaroely had she bSgun to wash. Ere she wSs aware 6f th6 grisly gash. I will not assert that this is everywhere improper in the Odyssey ; but no part of the Iliad occurs to me in which it is proper, and I have totally excluded it in my own practice. I notice it but once in Mr. Gladstone's specimens, and it certainly ofiends my taste as out of harmony with the gravity of the rest, viz. My ships shall bound in th6 morning's light. 30 In Shakspeare we have i'th' and o'th' for monosyllables, but (so scrupulous am I in the midst of my ' atrocities ') I never dream of such a Uberty myself, much less of avowed ' anapaests.' So far do I go in the opposite direction, as to prefer to make such words as Danai, victory three syllables, which even Mr. Gladstone and Pope accept as dissyllabic. Some reviewers have called my metre lege solutum ; which is as ridiculous a mistake as Horace made concerning Pindar. That, in passing. But surely Mr. Arnold's severe THE JIG OF HEXAMETERS 321 blow at Dr. Maginn rebounds with double force upon him- self. To P61eu3 why* did w6 give you ? — H^oiibil's gtiit nor Priam my father's — Thousands fif afirrowa — cannot be a less detestable jig than that of Dr. Maginn. And this objection holds against every accentual hexameter, even to those of Longfellow or Lockhart, if applied to grand poetry. For bombast, in a wild whimsical poem, Mr. 10 Clough has proved it to be highly appropriate ; and I think, the more ' rollicking ' is Mr. Clough (if only I under- stand the word), the more successful his metre. Mr. Arnold himself feels what I say against ' dactyls,' for on this very ground he advises largely superseding them by spondees ; and since what he calls a spondee is any pair of syllables of which the former is accentuable, his precept amounts to this, that the hexameter be converted into a line of six accentual trochees, with free Uberty left of diversif jdng it, in any foot except the last, by Dr. Maginn's ' detestable 20 dance.' What more severe condemnation of the metre is imaginable than this mere description gives ? ' Six trochees ' seems to me the worst possible foundation for an English metre. I cannot imagine that Mr. Arnold will give the slightest weight to this, as a judgment from me ; but I do advise him to search in Samson Agonistes, Thalaba, Kehama, and Shelley's works, for the phenomenon. I have elsewhere insisted, but I here repeat, that for a long poem a trochaic beginning of the verse is most un- natural and vexatious in Enghsh, because so large a number 30 of our sentences begin with unaccented syllables, and the vigour of a trochaic line eminently depends on the purity of its initial trochee. Mr. Arnold's feeble trochees already quoted (from Between to To a) are all the fatal result of defying the tendencies of our language. If by happy combination any scholar could compose fifty siich Enghsh hexameters, as would convey a living likeness of the Virgilian metre, I should applaud it as valuable for initiating schoolboys into that metre : but there its utility would end. The method could not be profitably used for 40 translating Homer or Virgil, plainly because it is impossible to sayf or whose service such a translation would be executed. 323 HOMERIC TRANSLATION Those who can read the original will never care to read through any translation ; and the unlearned look on all, even the best hexameters, whether from Southey, Lockhart, or Longfellow, as odd and disagreeable prose. Mr. Arnold deprecates appeal to popular taste : well he may ! yet if the unlearned are to be our audience, we cannot defy them. I myself, before venturing to print, sought to ascertain how unlearned women and children would accept my verses. I could boast how children and half-educated women have extolled them ; how greedily a working man has inquired lo for them, without knowing who was the translator ; but I well know that this is quite insufficient to estabUsh the merits of a translation. It is nevertheless one point. ' Homer is popular,' is one of the very few matters of fact in this controversy on which Mr. Arnold and I are agreed. ' English hexameters are not popular,' is a truth so obvious, that I do not yet believe he will deny it. Therefore, ' Hexameters are not the metre for translating Homer.' Q. E. D. I cannot but think that the very respectable scholars who 20 pertinaciously adhere to the notion that English hexa- meters have something ' epical ' in them, have no vivid feeling of the difierence between Accent and Quantity ; and this is the less wonderful, since so very few persons have ever actually heard quantitative verse. I have ; by listening to Hungarian poems, read to me by my friend Mr. Francis Pulszky, a native Magyar. He had not finished a single page, before I complained gravely of the monotony. He replied : ' So do we complain of it : ' and then showed me, by turning the pages, that the poet cut the knot which he so could not untie, by frequent changes of his metre. Whether it was a change of mere length, as from Iambic senarian to Iambic dimeter ; or implied a fundamental change of time, as in music from common to minuet time ; — I cannot say. But, to my ear, nothing but a tune can ever save a quantita- tive metre from hideous monotony. It is hke strumming a piece of very simple music on a single note. Nor only so ; but the most beautiful of anthems, after it has been re- peated a hundred times on a hundred successive verses, begins to pall on the ear. How much more would an entire 10 book of Homer, if chanted at one sitting ! I have the' con- THE HOMERIO ACCENT 323 viction, though I will not undertake to impart it to another, that if the living Homer could sing his lines to us, they would at first move in us the same pleasing interest as an elegant and simple melody from an African of the Gold Coast ; but that, after hearing twenty lines, we should complain of meagreness, sameness, and loss of moral ex- pression ; and should judge the style to be as inferior to our own oratorical metres, as the music of Pindar to our third-rate modern music. But if the poet, at our request, 10 instead of singing the verses, read or spoke them, then from the loss of well marked time and the ascendency re- assumed by the prose-accent, we should be as helplessly unable to hear any metre in them, as are the modern Greeks. I expect that Mr. Arnold will reply to this, that he reads and does not sing Homer, and yet he finds his verses to be melodious and not monotonous. To this, I retort, that he begins by wilfully pronouncing Greek falsely, according to the laws of Latin accent, and artificially assimilating the Homeric to the Virgilian line. Virgil has compromised" 20 between the ictus metricus and the prose accent, by exacting that the two coincide in the two last feet and generally for- bidding it in the second and third foot. What is called the ' feminine caesura ' gives (in the Latin language) coincidence on the third foot. Our extreme familiarity with these laws of compromise enables us to anticipate recurring sounds and satisfies our ear. But the Greek prose accent, by reason of oxytons and paroxytons, and accent on the antepenultima in spite of a long penultima, totally resists all such com- promise ; and proves that particular form of melody, which 30 our scholars enjoy in Homer, to be an unhistoric imitation of Virgil. I am aware, there is a bold theory, whispered if not pub- lished, that, — so out-and-out kalian was Homer, — his laws of accent must have been almost Latin. According to this, Erasmus, following the track of Virgil blindly, has taught us to pronounce Euripides and Plato ridiculously ill, but Homer with an accuracy of accent which puts Aristarchus to shame. This is no place for discussing so difiicult a question. Suifice it to say, first, that Mr. Arnold cannot 40 take refuge in such a theory, since he does not admit that Honier was antiquated to Euripides ; next, that admitting Y2 324 HOMERIC TRANSLATION the theory to him, still the loss of the Digamma destroys to him the true rhythm of Homer. I shall recur to both questions below. I here add, that our EngUsh pronuncia- tion even of Virgil often so ruins VirgU's own quantities, that there is something either of delusion or of pedantry in our scholars' self-complacency in the rhythm which they elicit. I think it fortunate for Mr. Arnold, that he had not ' courage to translate Homer ; ' for he must have failed to make it acceptable to the unlearned. But if the public ear prefers ballad metres, still (Mr. Arnold assumes) ' the lo scholar ' is with him in this whole controversy. Nevertheless it gradually comes out that neither is this the case, but he himself is in the minority. P. 312, he writes : ' When one observes the boisterous rollicking way in which Homer's Enghsh admirers — even men of genius, like the late Pro- fessor Wilson — ^love to talk of Homer and his poetry, one cannot help feeling that there is no very deep community of nature between them and the object of their enthusiasm.' It does not occur to Mr. Arnold that the defect of perception lies with himself, and that Homer has more sides than he has 20 discovered. He deplores that Dr. Maginn, and others whom he names, err with me, in believing that our ballad-style is the nearest approximation to that of Homer; and avows that ' it is time to say plainly ' (p. 272) that Homer is not of the ballad-type. So in p. 271, ' — thispopular, but, it is time to say, this erroneous analogy ' between the ballad and Homer. Since it is reserved for Mr. Arnold to turn the tide of opinion ; since it is a task not yet achieved, but remains to be achieved by his authoritative enunciation ; he con- fesses that hitherto I have with me the suffrage of scholars. 30 With this confession, a little more diffidence would be becoming, if diffidence were possible to the fanaticism with which he idolizes hexameters. P. 298, he says : ' The hexameter has a natural dignity, which repels both the jaunty style and the jog-trot style, &c. . . . The translator who uses it cannot too religiously follow the rfrspiEATioN of HIS METEE,' &c. Inspiration from a metre which has no recognised type ? from a metre which the heart and soul of the nation ignores ? I believe, if the metre can inspire anjrthing, it is to frolic and gambol with Mr. Clough. 40 Mr. Arnold's English hexameter cannot be a higher in- EPIC AND BALLAD 325 spiration to him, than the true hexameter was to a Greek : yet that metre inspired strains of totally different essential genius and merit. But I claim Mr. Arnold himself as confessing that our ballad metre is epical, when he says that Scott is ' bastard- epic' I do not admit that his quotations from Scott are at all Scott's best, nor anything like it ; but if they were, it would only prove something against Scott's genius or talent, nothing about his metre . The Ki;7rpia eirr) or 'IXIov iripa-vs were 10 probably very inferior to the Iliad ; but no one would on that account call them or the Frogs and Mice, bastard-epic. No one would call a bad tale of Dryden or of Crabbe bastard- epic. The appHcation of the word to Scott virtually con- cedes what I assert. Mr. Arnold also calls Macaulay's ballads ' pinchbeck ; ' but a man needs to produce some- thing very noble himself, before he can afford thus to sneer at Macaulay's ' Lars Porsena.' Before I enter on my own ' metrical exploits,' I must get 20 rid of a disagreeable topic. Mr. Arnold's repugnance to them has led him into forms of attack, which I do not know how to characterize. I shall state my complaints as concisely as I can, and so leave them. 1. I do not seek for any similarity of sound in an English accentual metre to that of a Greek quantitative metre ; besides that Homer writes in a highly vocalized tongue, while ours is overfilled with consonants. I have disowned this notion of similar rhythm in the strongest terms (p. xvii of my Preface), expressly because some critics had imputed this aim to me in the case of Horace. I summed up : 'It so is not audible sameness of metre, but a likeness of moral genius which is to be aimed at.' I contrast the audible to the moral. Mr. Arnold suppresses this contrast, and writes as follows, p. 265. ' Mr. Newman tells us that he has found a metre hke in moral genius to Homer's. His judge has still the same answer : " reproduce then on our ear something of the effect produced by the movement of Homer." ' He recurs to the same fallacy in p. 279. ' For whose bar do those two rhythms produce impressions of (to use Mr. New- man's own words) "similar moral genius " ? ' His reader 10 will naturally suppose that ' like in moral genius ' is with me an eccentric phrase for ' like in musical cadence.' The 323 HOMERIC TRANSLATION only likeness to the ear which I have admitted, is, that the one and the other are primitively made /of music. That, Mr. Arnold knows, is a matter of fact, whether a ballad be well or ill written. If he pleases, he may hold the rhythm of our metre to be necessarily inferior to Homer's and to his own ; but when I fully explained in my preface what were my tests of ' like moral genius,' I cannot understand his suppressing them, and perverting the sense of my words. 2. In p. 275, Mr. Arnold quotes Chajiman's translation of S. 8ei\M, ' Poor wretched beasts ' (of Achilles' horses), onio which he comments severely. He does not quote me. Yet in p. 306, after exhibiting Cowper's translation of the same passage, he adds : ' There is no want of dignity here, as in the versions of Chapman and of 3Ir. Neivman, which I have already quoted.' Thus he leads the reader to believe that I have the same phrase as Chapman ! In fact, my translation is : Ha ! why on Peleus, mortal prinoe, Bestowed we you, unhappy ! If he had done me the justice of quoting, it is possible that 20 some readers would not have thought my rendering intrin- sically ' wanting in dignity,' or less noble than Mr. Arnold's own, which is : Ah ! unhappy pair ! to Peleus ^ why did we give you. To a mortal ? In p. 276, he with very gratuitous insult remarks, that " Poor wretched beasts " is a little overfamiliar ; but this is no objection to it for the ballad-manner : ^ it is good enough . . . for Mr. Neivman' s Iliad, . . . &c.' Yet I myself have not thought it good enough for my lUad. ^^ 3. In p. 310, Mr. Arnold gives his own translation of the discourse between Achilles and his horse ; and prefaces it v/ith the words, ' 1 wiU take the passage in which both Chapman and Mr. Newman have already so much excited our ' If I had used such a double dative, as ' to Peleus to a mortal,' what would he have said of my syntax ? ' Ballad-manner / The prevalent ballad-meJre is the Common Metre of our Psalm tunes : and yet he assumes that whatever is in this metre must be on the same level. I have professed (Pref. p. x) that our existit^ old ballads are ' poor and mean,' and are not my pattern. DELUSIVE QUOTATION 327. astonishment.^ But h,e did not quote my translation of the noble part of the passage, consisting of 19 lines ; he has merely quoted ^ the tail of it, 5 lines ; which are altogether inferior. Of this a sufficient indication is, that Mr. Gladstone has translated the 19 and omitted the 5. I shall below give my translation parallel to Mr. Gladstone's. The curious reader may compare it with Mr. Arnold's, if he choose. 4. In p. 307, Mr. Arnold quotes from Chapman as a trans- lation of orav ttot' oXaJXr; 'IXios Iprj, 10 Whei} sacred Troy shall shed Tier towWs for tears of overthrow ; and adds : ' What Mr. Newman's manner of rendering would be, you can by this time sufficiently imagine for yourselves.'. Would he! Why does he set his readers to ' imagine,' when in fewer words he could tell them what my version is ? It stands thus : A day, when sacred Hium | for overthrow is destin'd, — which may have faults unperceived by me, but is in my opinion far better than Mr. Arnold's, and certainly did not deserve to be censured side by side with Chapman's £0 absurdity. I must say plainly ; a critic has no right to hide what I have written, and stimulate his readers to despise me by these indirect methods. I proceed to my own metre. It is exhibited in this stanza of Campbell : By this the storm grew loud apace : The waterwraith was shrieking. And in the scowl of heaVn each face Grew dark aa they were, speaking. Whether I use this metre well or iU, I maintain that it is so essentially a noble metre, a popular metre, a metre of great capacity. It is essentially the national ballad metre, for the double rhyme is an accident. Of course it can be appUed to low, as weU as to high subjects ; else it would not be popular : it would not be ' of a like moral genius ' to the Homeric metre, which was available equally for the comic poem Margites, for the precepts of Pythagoras, for the pious prosaic hymn of Cleanthes, for the driest prose of a naval '■ He has also overlooked the misprint Trojans, where I wrote Trotans (in three syllables), and has thus spoiled one verse out of the five. 328 HOMERIC TRANSLATION catalogue ^,— in short, for all early thought. Mr. Arnold appears to forget, though he cannot be ignorant, that prose- composition is later than Homer, and that in the epical days every initial effort at prose history was carried on in Homeric doggerel by the Cyclio poets, who traced the history of Troy ab ova in consecutive chronology. I say, he is merely inadvertent, he cannot be ignorant, that the Homeric metre, like my metre, subserves prosaic thought with the utmost f aciUty ; but I hold it to be, not inadver- tence, but blindness, when he does not see that Homer's lo Tov 8' dira/tEtySo/icvos is a line of as thoroughly unaffected oratio pedestris as any verse of Pythagoras or Horace's Satires. But on diction I defer to speak, till I have finished the topic of metre. " I do not say that any measure is faultless. Every measure has its foible : mine has that fault which every uniform line must have, — ^it is liable to monotony. This is evaded of course as in the hexameter or rather as in Milton's line, — ^first, by varying the Caesura, — secondly, by varying certain feet, within narrow and well understood 20 limits, — ^thirdly, by irregularity in the strength of accents ; fourthly, by varying the weight of the unaccented syllables also. All these things are needed, for the mere sake of breahiTig uniformity. I will not here assert that Homer's many marvellous freedoms, such as iic^lSoXov 'AirdAAwvos, were dictated by this aim, like those in the Paradise Lost-^ but I do say, that it is most unjust, most unintelhgent, in critics, to produce single lines from me, and criticize them ' As a literary curiosity I append the sentence of a learned reviewer concerning this metre of Campbell. ' It is a metre fit for introducing anything or translating anything ; a metre that nothing can elevate, or degrade, or improve, or spoil ; in which all subjects will sound alike. A theorem of Euclid, a leading article from the Times, a dialogue from the last new novel, could all be reduced to it with the slightest possible verbal alteration.' [Quite true of Greek hexameter or Shakspeaie'a line. It is a virtue in the metres.] ' To such a. mill all would be grist that came near it, and in no grain that had once passed through it would human ingenuity/ ever detect again a characteristic quality.' This writer is a, stout maintainor that English ballad metre is the right one for translating Homer : only, somehow, he shuts his eyes to the fact that Campbell's is ballad metre ! — Sad to say, extravagant and absurd assertions, like these, though anonymous, can, by a parade of learning, do much damage to the sale of a book in verse. MANAGEMENT OF CAESURA 329 as rough or weak, instead of examining them and present- ing them as part of a mass. How would Shakspeare stand this sort of test ? nay, or Milton ? The metrical laws of a long poem cannot be the same as of a sonnet : single verses are organic elements of a great whole. A crag must not be cut like a gem. Mr. Arnold should remember Aristotle's maxim, that popular eloquence (and such is -Homer's) should be broad, rough and highly coloured, like scene painting, not polished into delicacy like miniature. 10 But I speak now of metre, not yet of diction. In any long and popular poem it is a mistake to wish every line to conform severely to a few types ; but to claim this of a translator of Homer is a doubly unintelligent exaction, when Homer's own liberties transgress all bounds ; many of them being feebly disguised by later double speUings, as ctcos, €105, invented for his special accommodation. The Homeric verse has a rhythmical advantage over mine in less rigidity of caesura. Though the Hexameter was made out of two Doric lines, yet no division of sense, 20 no pause of the voice or thought, is exacted between them. The chasm between two English verses is deeper. Perhaps, on the side of syntax, a four +three EngHsh metre drives harder towards monotony than Homer's own verse. For other reasons, it lies imder a hke disadvantage, compared with Milton's metre. The secondary caesuras possible in the four feet are of course less numerous than those in the five feet, and the three-foot verse has still less variety. To my taste, it is far more pleasing that the short Hne recur less regularly ; just as the parcemiac of Greek 30 anapaests is less pleasant in the Aristophanic tetrameter, than when it comes frequent but not expected. This is a main reason why I prefer Scott's free metre to my own ; yet, without rhyme, I have not found how to use his freedom. Mr. Arnold wrongly supposes me to have over- looked his main and just objections to rhyming Homer ; viz. that so many Homeric lines are intrinsically made for isolation. In p. ix of my Preface I called it a fatal embar- rassment. But the objection apphes in it^ full strength only against Pope's rhymes, not against Walter Scott's. 40 Mr. Gladstone has now laid before the pubhc his own specimens of Homeric translation. Their dates range from 330 HOMERIC TRANSLATION 1836 to 1859. It is possible that he has as strong a dis- taste as Mr. Arnold for my version ; for he totally ignores the archaic, the rugged, the boisterous element in Homer. But as to metre, he gives me his full suffrage. He has lines with four accents, with three, and a few with two ; not one with five. On the whole,- his metre, his cadences, his varying rhymes, are those of Scott. He has more trochaic lines than I approve. He is truthful to Homer on many sides ; and (such is the delicate grace and variety admitted by the rhyme) his verses are more pleasing than lo mine. I do not hesitate to say, that if all Homer could be put before the pubhc in the same style equally well with his best pieces, a translation executed on my principles could not live in the market at its side ; and certainly I should spare my labour. I add, that I myself prefer the former piece which I quote to my own, even while I see his defects : for I hold that his graces, at which I cannot afford to aim, more than make up for his losses. After this confession, I frankly contrast his rendering of the two noblest passages with mine, that the reader may see, what 20 Mr. Arnold does not show, my weak and strong sides Gladstone, Iliad iv, 422 As when the billow gathers fast With slow and sullen roar Beneath the keen northwestern blast Against the sounding shore : First far at sea it rears its crest. Then bursts upon the beach, Or ' with proud arch and swelling breast. Where headlands ' outward reach, 80 It smites their strength, and bellowing flings Its silver foam afar ; So, stern and thick, the Danaan kings And soldiers marched to war. Each leader gave his men the word ; Each warrior deep in silence heard. So mute they march'd, thou couldst not ken They were a mass of speaking men : And as they strode in martial might, Their flickering arms shot back the light. 40 ^ I think ho has mistaken the summit of the wave for a headland, and has made a single description into two, by the word Or : but I now conCne my regard to the metre and general effect of the style. MR. GLADSTONE'S SPECIMENS 331 But as at even the folded sheep Of some rich master stand, Ten thousand thick their place they keep, And bide the milkman's hand, And more and more they bleat, the more They hear their lamblings cry ; So, from the Trojan host, uproar And din rose loud and high. They were a many-voiced throng : 10 Discordant accents there. That sound from many a differing tongue. Their differing race declare. These, Mars had kindled for the fight ; Those, starry-ey'd Athene's might, _ And savage Terror and Affright, And Strife, insatiate of wars, The sister and the mate of Mars : Strife, that, a pigmy at her birth. By gathering rumour fed, 20 Soon plants her feet upon the earth, And in the heav'n her head. I add my own rendering of the same ; somewhat cor- rected, but only in the direction of my own principles and against Mr. Arnold's. As when the surges of the deep, by Western blore uphoven. Against the ever-booming strand dash up in roll successive ; A head of waters swelleth first aloof ; then under harried By the rough bottom, roars aloud ; till, hollow at the summit. Sputtering the briny foam abroad, " the huge crest tumbleth over i 30 So then the lines of Danaii, successive and unceasing. In battle's close array mov'd on. To his own troops each leader Gave order : dumbly went the rest, (nor mightest thou discover. So vast a train of people held a voice within their bosom,) In silence their commanders fearing : all the ranks wellmarshaU'd Were clad in crafty panoply, which glitter'd on their bodies. Meantime, as sheep within the yard of some great cattle-master, V/hile the white milk is drain' d from them, stand round in number countless. And, grieved by their lambs' complaint, respond with bleat incessant ; 40 So then along their ample host arose the Troian hurly. For neither common words spake they, nor kindred accent utter'd ; But mingled was the tongue of men from divers places summon' d. By Ar^s these were urged on, those by grey-ey'd Athene, By Fear, by Panic, and by Strife immeasurably eager. The sister and companion ' of hero-slaying Ares, Who truly doth at first her crest but humble rear ; thereafter. Planting upon the ground her feet, her head in heaven fixeth. ' Companion, in foiir syllables, is in Shakspeare's style ; with whom habitually the termination -Hon is two. 332 HOMERIC TRANSLATION Gladstone, JUad xix, 403. Hanging low his auburn head, Sweeping with his mane the ground, I'rom beneath his collar shed, Xanthus, hark ! • a Toice hath found, Xanthus of the flashing feet : Whitearm'd Here gave the sound. ' Lord Achilles, strong and fleet ! Trust us, we will bear thee home ; Yet Cometh nigh thy day of doom s 1" No doom of ours, but doom that stands By God and mighty Fate's commands. 'Twas not that we were slow or slack Patroolua lay a corpse, his back All stript of arms by Trojan hands. The prince of gods, whom Leto baro, Leto with the flowing hair. He forward fighting did the deed. And gave to Hector glory's meed. In toil for thee, we will not shun 20 Against e'en Zephyr's breath to run, Swiftest of winds : but all in vain : By god and man shalt thou be slain.' He spake : and here, his words among, Erinnys bound his faltering tongue. Beginning with Achilles's speech, I render the passage parallel to Gladstone thus. ' Chesnut and Spotted ! noble pair ! farfamous brood of Spry-foot ! In other guise now ponder ye your charioteer to rescue Back to the troop of Danai, when we have done with battle : 30 Nor leave him dead upon the field, as late ye left Patroclus.' But him the dapplefooted steed under the yoke accosted ; (And droop'd his auburn head aside straightway ; and thro' the collar. His full mane, streaming to the ground, over the yoke was scatter'd : Him Juno, whitearm'd goddess, then with voice of man endowed :) ' Now and again we verily will save and more than save thee, Dreadful Achillea ! yet for thee the deadly day approacheth. Not ours the guilt ; but mighty God and stubborn Fate are guilty. Not by the slowness of our feet or dulness of our spirit The Troians did thy armour strip from shoulders of Patroclus ; dO But the exalted god, for whom brighthair'd Latona travail'd. Slew him amid the foremost ranks and glory gave to Hector. Now we, in coursing, pace would keep even with breeze of Zephyr, Which speediest they say to be : but for thyself 'tis fated By hand of hero and of god in mighty strife to perish.' So much he spake : thereat his voice the Furies stopp'd for ever. Now if any fool ask, Why does not Mr. Gladstone trans- late all Homer ? any fool can reply with me, Because he is MR. ARNOLD'S DICTA 333 Chancellor of the Exchequer. A man who has talents and acquirements adequate to translate Homer well into rhyme, is almost certain to have other far more urgent calls for the exercise of such talents. So much of metre. At length I come to the topic of Diction, where Mr. Arnold and I are at variance not only as to taste, but as to the main facts of Greek hterature. I had called Homer's style quaint and garrulous ; and said that he rises and falls with his subject, being prosaic 10 when it is tame, and low when it is mean. I added no proof ; for I did not dream that it was needed. Mr. Arnold not only absolutely denies all this, and denies it without proof ; but adds, that these assertions prove my incom- petence, and account for my total and conspicuous failure. His whole attack upon my diction is grounded on a passage which I must quote at length ; for it is so confused in logic, that I may otherwise be thought to garble it, pp. 266, 267. ' Mr. Newman speaks of the more antiquated style 20 suited to this subject. Quaint ! Antiquated ! but to whom 1 Sir Thomas Browne is quaint, and the diction of Chaucer is antiquated : does Mr. Newman suppose that Homer seemed quaint to Sophocles, as Chaucer's diction seems antiquated to us ? But we cannot really know, I confess (! !), how Homer seemed to Sophocles. Well then, to those who can tell us how he seems to them, to the living scholar, to our only present witness on this matter — does Homer make on the Provost of Eton, when he reads him, the impression of a poet quaint and antiquated ? 30 does he make this impression on Professor Thompson or Professor Jowett ? When Shakspeare says, " The princes orgulous," meaning " the proud princes," we say, " This is antiquated." When he says of the Trojan gates, that they. With massy staples And oorresponsive and fulfilling bolts Sperr up the sons of Troy, — we say, " This is both quaint and antiquated." But does Homer ever compose in a language, which produces on . 40 the scholar at all the same impression as this language which I have quoted from Shakspeare ? Never once. 334 HOMERIC TRANSLATION Shakspeare is quaint and antiquated in the lines which I have just quoted ; but Shakspeare, need I say it ? can compose, when he Hkes, when he is at his best, in a language perfectly simple, perfectly intelligible ; in a language, which, in spite 'of the two centuries and a half which part its author from us, stops or surprises us as little as the language of a contemporary. And Homer has not Shak- speare's variations. Homer always composes, as Shak- speare composes at his best. Homer is always simple and inteUigible, as Shakspeare is often ; Homer is never quaint lo and antiquated, as Shakspeare is sometimes.' If Mr. Arnold were to lay before none but Oxford students assertions concerning Greek literature so start- lingly erroneous as are here contained, it would not con- cern me to refute or protest against them. The young men who read Homer and Sophocles and Thucydides, — nay, the boys who read Homer and Xenophon,— would know his statements to be against the most notorious and elementary fact : and the Professors, whom he quotes, would only lose credit, if. they sanctioned the use he makes 20 of their names. But when he publishes the book for the unlearned in Greek, among whom I must include a great number of editors of magazines, I find Mr. Arnold to do a public wrong to literature, and a private wrong to my book. If I am silent, such editors may easily believe that I have made an enormous blunder in treating the dialect of Homer as antiquated. If those who are ostensibly scholars, thus assail my version, and the great majority of magazines and reviews ignore it, its existence can never become known to the public ; or it wiU exist not to be so read, but to be despised without being opened ; and it must perish as many meritorious books perish. I but lately picked up — ^new, and for a fraction of its price — at a second- hand stall, a translation of the Iliad by T. S. Brandreth, Esq. (Pickering, London), into Cowper's metre, which is, as I judge, immensely superior to Cowper. Its date is 1846 : I had never heard of it. It seems to have perished mi- criticized, unreproved, unwept, unknown. I do not wish my progeny to die of neglect, though I am willing that it should be slain in battle. — However, just because I address 40 myself to the pubhc unlearned in Greek, and because HOMER'S DICTION 335 Mr. Arnold lays before them a new, paradoxical, mon- strously erroneous representation of facts, with the avowed object of staying the plague of my Homer ; I am forced to reply to him. Knowingly or unknowingly, he leads his readers to con- fuse four different questions : — 1. whether Homer is thoroughly intelligible to modem scholars ; 2. whether Homer was antiquated to the Athenians of Themistocles ajid Pericles ; 3. whether he was thoroughly understood 10 by them ; 4. whether he is, absolutely, an antique poet. I feel it rather odd, that Mr. Arnold begins by com- plimenting me with ' genuine learning,' and proceeds to appeal from me to the ' living scholar.' (What if I were bluntly to reply : ' Well ! I am the living scholar ' ?) After starting the question, how Homer's style appeared to Sophocles, he suddenly enters a plea, under form of a concession [' I confess ' !], — as a pretence for carrying the cause into a new court, — that of the Provost of Eton and two Professors, — ^into which court I have no admission ; 20 and then, of his own will, pronounces a sentence in the name of these learned men. Whether they are pleased with this parading of their name in behalf of paradoxical error, I may well doubt : and until they indorse it them- selves, I shall treat Mr. Arnold's process as a piece of forgery. But, be this as it may, I cannot allow him to ' confess ' for me against me : let him confess for himself that he does not know, and not for me, who know perfectly well, whether Homer seemed quaint or antiquated to Sophocles. Of course he did, as every beginner must know. Why, if 30 I were to write mon for man, londis for lands, nesties for nests, libbard for leopard, muchel for much, nap for snap, green-wood shaw for green-wood shade, Mr. Arnold would call me antiquated, although every word would be intelli- gible. Can he possibly be ignorant, that this exhibits but the smallest part of the chasm which separates the Homeric dialect not merely from the Attic prose, but from iEsohylus when he borrows most from Homer ? Every sentence of Homer was more or less antiquated to Sophocles, who could no more help feeling at every instant the foreign and 40 antiquated character of the poetry, than an Englishman can help feeling the same in reading Burns's poems. Would 336 HOMERIC TRANSLATION mon, londis, libbard, withouten, muchel be antiquated or foreign, and are UrjkrfidSao for UijXuSov, oa-a-dnoi for oo-os, TjvT€ for a)s, o'T'^yj for ctt^, TiKivrcri for TiKiots, TOLcrSecrcn for TOicroe, TToXees for TToXXoi, fiea-a-rjyvs for /jLcra^, ala for y^, tt/So) for XeijSo), and five hundred others, — ^less antiquated or less foreign ? Homer has archaisms in every variety ; some rather recent to the Athenians, and carrying their minds back only to Solon, as ySao-iXijos foJ" /Sao-iXeus ; others harsher, yet varying as dialect still, as ^ttvos for ^evos, rte for irifna, dv^c/toets for avOrjpos, KiKXvBi for KXvi or aKovarov, OafnJs for dafuvos Or trvp^i/os, 1" vauraovTEs for vatovrcs or oiKoCvres ; others varying in the root, like a new language, as ai^eros for ttXovtos, iotjjs for PovXrfixa, -rq for St'^ai, under which head are heaps of strange words, as dKiyv, ■xwq/j.ai, ySios, KrjXa, /ic/tyffXwKE, yivTO, ireirov, etc. etc. Finally comes a goodly lot of words which to this day are most uncertain in sense. My learned colleague Mr. Maiden has printed a paper on Homeric words, mis- understood by the later poets. Buttmann has written an octavo volume — (I have the English translation, — contain- ing 548 pages) — to discuss 106 iUexplained Homeric words. 20 Some of these Sophocles may have understood, though we do not ; but even if so, they were not the less antiquated to him. If there had been any perfect traditional understand- ing of Homer, we should not need to deal with so many words by elaborate argument. On the face of the Iliad alone every learner must know how many difficult adjectives occur : I write down on the spur of the moment and without reference, Kpr/yvov, dpyds, dStvos, dr/ros, aijyros, vSipoxj/, "qvotjf, cZXlTToSeS, IXlf, IXlKWTTCS, eXXoTTES, jU€/307r£S, ^Xi/SaTos, rjXiKrutp, alytXuj/, (TiyaXotis, lojj.iopo';, tyy(iyu,eAt7;s, and understood by the former nothing but ' full armed ' and by the latter (as he says) nothing but ' warhke,' this would not justify his blame of ' Men who can bear ' belch ' in poetry, nowadays pretend that •sputter' ia indelicate. They find Homer's diro7rTi/« to be 'elegant,' but sputter — not ! ' No one would guess from Mr. Newman's coarse phrases how elegant is Homer ' ! ! QUAINTNESS OP HOMER 345 me for rendering the words correctly. If the whole Greek nation by long familiarity had become inobservant of Homer's 'oddities', (conceding this for the moment,) that also would be no fault of mine. That Homer is extremely peculiar, even if the Greeks had become deadened to the sense of it, the proof on all sides is overpowering. It is very quaint to say, ' the outwork (or rampart) of the teeth ' instead of ' the lips.' If Mr. Arnold will call it ' portentous ' in my English, let him produce some 10 shadow of reason for denying it to be portentous in Greek. Many phrases are so quaint as to be almost untranslatable, as /i'^o-Twp 6^oio (deviser of fear ?) /i^o-rwp diVJjs (deviser of outcry ?) : others are quaint to the verge of being comical, as to call a man an equipoise {ardXavros) to a god, and to praise eyes for having a curl in them.^ It is quaint to' make Juno caU Jupiter aivoTare (grimmest ? direst ?), whether she is in good or bad humour with him, and to call a Vision ghastly, when it is sent with a pleasant message. It is astonishingly quaint to teU how many oxen 20 every fringe of Athene's SBgis was worth. — It is quaint to call Patroclus ' a great simpleton,' for not foreseeing that he would lose his liie in rushing to the rescue of his country- men. (I cannot receive Mr. Arnold's suggested Biblical correction ' Thou fool ! ' which he thinks grander : first, because grave nioral rebuke is utterly out of place ; secondly, because the Greek cannot mean this ; — it means infantine simplicity, and has precisely the coloiu: of the word which I have used.) — It is quaint to say : ' Patroclus kindled a great fire, godlike man ! ' or, ' Automedon held up the 30 meat, divine AchiUes she'd it : ' quaint to address a young friend as ' Oh ^ pippin ! ' or ' Oh softheart ! ' or ' Oh pet ! ' whichever is the true translation. It is quaint to ' In a Note to my translation (overlooked by more than one critic) I have explained curl-ey'd, carefully, but not very accurately perhaps ; as I had not before me the picture of the Hindoo lady to which I referred. The whole upper eyelid, when open, may be called the curl ; for it is shaped like a buffalo's horns. This accounts for (XiKo^\i(papos, ' having a curly eyelid.' ' I thought I had toned it down pretty well, in rendering it ' gentle friend ! ' Mr. Arnold rebukes me for this, without telling me what I ought to say, or what is my fault. One thing is certain, that the Greek is most odd and peculiar. 346 HOMERIC TRANSLATION compaie Ajax to an ass whom boys are belabouring, Ulysses to a pet ram, Agamemnon in two lines to three gods, and in the third line to a bull ; the Myrmidons to wasps, Achilles to a grampus chasing little fishes, AntUochus to a wolf which kills a dog and runs away, Menelaus striding over Patroclus's body to a heifer defending her firstborn. It is quaint to say that Menelaus was as brave as a bloodsucking fly, that Agamemnon's sobs came thick as flashes of lightning ; and that the Trojan mares, while running, groaned like overflowing rivers. All such similes come lo from a mind quick to discern similarities, but very dull to feel incongruities ; unaware therefore that it is on a verge where the sublime easily turns into the ludicrous ; — a mind and heart inevitably quaint to the very core. What is it in Vulcan, — when he would comfort his mother undpr Jupiter's threat, — ^to make jokes about the severe mauling which he himself formerly received, and his terror lest she should be now beaten ? Still more quaint (if rollicking is not the word), is the address by which Jupiter tries to ingratiate himself with Juno : viz. he recounts to her all his unlawful 20 amours, declaring that in none of them was he so smitten as now. I have not enough of the ycyvaios ev-^6eia, the barbarian simpleheartedness, needed by a reader of Homer, to get through this speech with gravity. — ^What shall I call it, — certainly much worse than quaint, — that the poet adds : Jupiter was more enamoured than at his stolen embrace in their first bed ' secretly from their dear parents ' ? But to develop Homer's inexhaustible quaintnesses, of which Mr. Arnold denies the existence, seems to me to need a long treatise. It is not to be expected, that one who is 30 blind to superficial facts so very prominent as those which I have recounted, should retain any delicate perception of the highly coloured, intense, and very eccentric diction of Homer, even if he has ever understood it, which he forces me to doubt. He sees nothing ' odd ' in kwos KaKOfji,r]xdvov, or in KvvofjLvia, ' thou dogfly ' 1 He replaces to his imagina- tion the flesh and blood of the noble barbarian by a dim feeble spiritless outline. I have not adduced, in proof of Homer's quaintness, the monstrous simile given to us in Iliad 13, 754 ; viz. Hector 40 ' darted forward screaming like a snowy mountain, and HOMER PICTURESQUE 347 flew through the Trojans and allies : ' for I cannot believe that the poet wrote anything so absurd. Rather than admit this, I have suggested that the text is corrupt, and that for 6pd vitfioevn we should read opviw ^uovrt, — ' darted forth screaming like a raging bird.' Yet, as far as I know, I am the first man that has here impugned the text. Mr. Brandreth is faithful in his rendering, except that he says shouting for screaming : ' He said ; and, like a snowy mountain, Tush'd 10 Shouting ; and flew through Trojans and allies.' Chapman, Cowper, and Pope strain and twist the words to an impossible sense, putting in something about white plume, which they fancy suggested a snowy mountain ; but they evidently accept the Greek as it stands, unhesitatingly. I claim this phenomenon in proof that to all commentators and interpreters hitherto Homer's quaintness has been such an axiom, that they have even acqmesced unsuspiciously in an extravagance which goes far beyond oddity. Moreover the reader may augur by my opposite treatment of the 20 passage, with what discernment Mx. Arnold condemns me of obtruding upon Homer gratuitous oddities which equal the conceits of Chapman. But, while thus vindicating Quaintness as an essential quality of Homer, do I regard it as a weakness to be apologized for ? Certainly not ; for it is a condition of his cardinal excellencies. He could not otherwise be Pictur- esque as he is. So volatUe is his mind, that what would be Metaphor in a more logical and cultivated age, with him riots in Simile which overflows its banks. His similes not 30 merely go beyond ^ the mark of likeness ; in extreme cases they even turn into contrariety. If he were not so carried away by his illustration, as to forget what he is illustrating (which belongs to a quaint mind), he would never paint for us such fuU and splendid pictures. Where a logical later poet would have said that Menelaus With eagle-eye survey'd the field, ' In the noble simile of the sea-tide, quoted p. 330 above, only the two first of its five lines are to the purpose. Mr. Gladstone, seduced by rhyme, has so tapered off the point of the similitude, that only a microscopic reader will see it. y 848 HOMERIC TRANSLATION the mere metaphor contenting him ; Homer says : Gazing around on every side, in fashion of an eagle. Which, of all heaven's fowl, they say, to scan the earth is keenest : Whose eye, when loftiest he hangs, not the swift hare esoapeth, Lurking amid a leaf -clad bush : but straight at it he souseth. Unerring ; and with crooked gripe doth quickly rieve its spirit. I feel this long simile to be a disturbance of the logical balance, such as belongs to the lively eye of the savage, whose observation is intense, his concentration of reasoning powers feeble. Without this, we should never have got lo anything so picturesque. Homer never sees things in the same proportions as we see them. To omit his digressions, and what I may call his ' impertinencies,' in order to give to his argument that which Mr. Arnold is pleased to caU the proper ' balance,' is to value our own logical minds, more than his picturesque^ but illogical mind. Mr. Arnold says I am not quaint, but grotesque, in my rendering of kwos KaKOfji.-rjxa-vov. I do not hold the phrase to be quaint : to me it is excessively coarse. When 20 Jupiter calls Juno ' a bitch,' of course he means a snarling cur ; hence my rendering, ' vixen ' (or she-fox), is there perfect, since we say vixen of an irascible woman. But Helen had no such evil tempers, and beyond a doubt she meant to ascribe impurity to herself. I have twice com- mitted a pious fraud by making her call herself ' a vixen,' where ' bitch ' is the only faithful rendering ; and Mr. Arnold, instead of thanking me for throwing a thin veil over Homer's deformity, assails me for my phrase as intolerably grotesque. 30 He further forbids me to invent new compound adjectives, as fair-thron'd, rill-bestream'd ; because they strike us as new, though Homer's epithets (he says) did not so strike the Greeks : hence they derange attention from the main ' It is very singular that Mr. Gladstone should imagine such a poet to have no eye for colour. I totally protest against his turning Homer's paintings into leadpencil drawings. I believe that y\avK6s is grey (silvergreen), x^po'f' blue ; and that upaaivos, ' leek-oolour,' was too mean a word for any poets, early or late, to use for * green ; ' therefore X^ojp6^ does duty for it. Kvfia Trop but this one word is exclusively Homer's. — Everything that I have now said, may be repeated still more pointedly concerning hJKvrnuSe^, inasmuch as directing attention to leg-armour is peculiarly quaint. No one in all Greek literature (as far as I know) names the word but Homer ; and yet Mr. Arnold turns on me with his ever reiterated, ever unsupported, assertions and censures, of course assuming that ' the scholar ' is with 20 him. (I have no theory at hand, to explain why he regards his own word to suffice without attempt at proof.) The epithet is intensely peculiar ; and I observe that Mr. Arnold has not dared to suggest a translation. It is clear to me that he is ashamed of my poet's oddities ; and has no mode of escaping from them but by bluntly denying facts. Equally peculiar to Homer are the words xuStaveipa, TayvireirXoi an4 twenty others, — equally unknown to Attic the pecuhar compound /teXtijST^s (adopted from Homer by Pindar), — about all which he carps at me on false grounds. But 30 1 pass these, and speak a little more at length about /iepoTrts. Will the reader allow me to vary these tedious details, by imagining a conversation between the Aristophanie Socrates and his clownish pupil Strepsiades. I suppose the philo- sopher to be instructing him in the higher Greek, Homer being the text. Soc. Now Streppy, tell me what jnEpoTres avOpmroi means ? Strep. Let me see : fiepoTres ? that must mean ' half-faced.' Soc. Nonsense, sUly fellow : think again. Strep. Well then : /xepon-es, half-eyed, squinting. 40 Soc. No ; you are playing the fool : it is not our ott in oi/fts, oij/oixai, KaTcrrrpov, but another sort of OTT, 362 HOMERIC TRANSLATION Strep. Why, you yesterday told me that o'von-a was ' wine-faced,' and aWoTra ' blazing-faced,' something like our aiOiO^. Soc. Ah ! well : it is not so wonderful that you go wrong. It is true, there is also vapoij/, a-Tepoij/, ^voi/'. Those might mislead you ; /lepoi/f is rather peculiar. Now cannot you think of any characteristic of mankind, which /xe/aoTrcs will express. How do men differ from other animals ? Strep. I have it ! I heard it from your yoimg friend Euclid. Mepoij/ ia-riv avOpunroi, ' man is a cooking animal.' lo Soc. You stupid lout ! what are you at ? what do you mean ? Strep. Why, /jLepoij/, from /Acipo), I distribute, oi^ov, sauce. Soc. No, no : oi/^ov has the oij/, with radical immovable s in it ; but here ott is the root, and s is movable. Strep. Now I have got it ; /Attpo), I distribute, ottov, juice, rennet. Soc. Wretched man ! you must forget your larder and your dairy, it ever you are to learn grammar. — Come, Streppy : leave rustic words, and think of the language of 20 the gods. Did you ever hear of the briUiant goddess Circe and of her oira KaX-qv ? Strep. Oh yes ; Circe and her beautiful face. Soc. I told you, no ! you forgetful fellow. It is another oir. Now I will ask you in a different way. Do you know why we call fishes iXXcnns ? Strep. I suppose, because they are cased in scales. Soc. That is not it. — (And yet I am not siu:e. Perhaps the fellow is right, after all.) — ^Well, we will not speak any more of lAXoTres. But did you never hear in Euripides, ovk so lx<" yeycovctv oTra ? What does that mean ? Strep. ' I am not able to shout out, S ttottol.' Soc. No, no, Streppy : but Euripides often uses mra. He takes it from Homer, and it is akin to cV, not to our cm and much less to ttoVoi. What does iir-q mean ? Strep. It means such Unes as the diviners sing. Soc. So it does in Attic, but Homer uses it for p-qimTa, words ; indeed we also sometimes. Strep. Yes, yes, I do know it. AU is right. Soc. I think you do : well, and o\j/ means a voice, iovrj. 40 Strep. How you learned men like to puzzle us 1 I often MEPOHES 363 have heard ottI, oTra in the Tragedies, but never quite under- stood it. What a pity they do not say ^covr; when they mean tfiuivi^. Soc. We have at last made one step. Now what is /Acpoi/r ? fiipoire's avOpoiiroi. Strep. 'M.apw, I divide, oira, ^mvijv, voice ; ' voice-divid- ing ' : what can that mean ? Soc. You have heard a wild dog howl, and a tame dog bark : teU me how they differ. 10 Strep. The wild dog gives a long long oo-oo, which changes Kke a trumpet ii you push your hand up and down it ; and the tame dog says bow, wow, wow, hke two or three panpipes blown one after another. Soc. Exactly ; you see the tame dog is humanized : he divides his voice into syllables, as men do. ' Voice-dividing ' means ' speaking in syllables.' Strep. Oh, how clever you are ! Soc. Well then, you understand ; ' Voice-dividing ' means articulating. 20 Mr. Arnold will see in the -SchoUast on Iliad, i, 250, precisely this order of analysis for /Aepo^cs. It seems to me to give not a traditional but a grammatical explanation. Be that as it may, it indicates that a Greek had to pass through exactly the same process in order to expound /icpoTres, as an Englishman to get sense out of ' voice-dividing.' The word is twice used by Aeschylus, who afEects Homeric words, and one by Euripides (Iph. T.) in the connection TroXicriv p.€p6i!-(i>v, where the very unusual lonism iroXeo-tv shows in how Homeric a region is the poet's fancy. No other word 30 ending in oi/f except /*epoi/r can be confidently assigned to the root oi/f, a voice. ''Hrai/f in Homer (itseK of most uncertain sense and derivation) is generally referred to the other oi/f. The sense of eAAoi/c again ^ is very uncertain. Every way therefore juepoi/f is ' odd ' and obscure. The phraae ' articulating ' is utterly prosaic and inadmissible. Vocal is rather too Latinized for my style, and besides, is apt to mean melodious. The phrase ' voice-dividing ' is indeed easier to us than p.epoTn's can have been to the Athenians, ' 'EXAds needs light and gives none. Benfey suggests that it is for fve6s, as aWm, aliiis, for Sanscrit anya. He with me refers i?J\.o\j/ to Aeffai, Cf. squamigeri in Lucretius, 364 HOMERIC TRANSLATION because we all know what voice means, but they had to be taught scholasticaUy what oTra meant ; nor would easily guess that otj/ in fiipotj/ had a sense, differing from oij/ in (d)o-T£poi/' oLvo\jf, aWoxj/, aWloijf, vZpotj/ (^rot/f), xapoxj/. Finally, since ju,epo7r£s is only found in the plural, it remains an open question, whether it does not mean ' speaking various languages.' Mr. Arnold will find that Stephanus and Scapula treat it as doubtful, though Liddell and Scott do not name the second interpretation. I desired to leave in the English all the uncertainty of the Greek : but my critic lo is unencumbered with such cares. Hitherto I have been unwillingly thrown into nothing but antagonism to Mr. Arnold, who thereby at least adds tenfold value to his praise, and makes me proud when he declares that the structure of my sentences is good and Homeric. For this I give the credit to my metre, which alone confers on me this cardinal advantage. But in turn I will compUment Mr. Arnold at the expense of some other critics. He does know, and they do not, the difference of flowing and smooth. A mountain torrent is flowing, but 20 often very rough ; such is Homer. The ' staircases of Neptune ' on the canal of Languedoc are smooth, but do not flow : you have to descend abruptly from each level to the next. It would be unjust to say absolutely, that such is Pope's smoothness ; yet often, I feel, this censure would not be too severe. The rhyme forces him to so frequent a change of the nominative, that he becomes painfully discontinuous, where Homer is what Aristotle calls ' long- linked.' At the same time, in our language, in order to impart a flowing style, good structure does not suffice. 30 A principle is needed, unknown to the Greeks ; viz. the natural divisions of the sentence oratoricaUy, must coincide with the divisions of the verse musically. To attain this always in a long poem, is very difficult to a translator who is scrupulous as to tampering with the sense. I have not always been successful in this. But before any critic passes on me the general sentence that I am ' deficient in flow,' let him count up the proportion of instances in which he can justly make the complaint, and mark whether they occur in elevated passages. 40 I shall now speak of the peculiarities of my diction, under ANTIQUE ENGLISH 365 three heads : 1. old or antiquated words ; 2. coarse words expressive of outward actions, but having no moral colour ; 3. words of which the sense has degenerated in modem days. I. Mr. Arnold appears to regard what is antiquated as ignoble. I think him, as usual, in fundamental error. In general the nobler words come from ancient style, and in no case can it be said that old words (as such) are ignoble. To introduce such terms as whereat, therefrom, quoth, be- holden, steed, erst, anon, anent, into the midst of style which 10 in all other respects is modern and prosaic, would be hke to that which we often hear from half-educated people. The want of harmony makes us regard it as low-minded and uncouth. From this cause (as I suspect) has stolen into Mr. Arnold's mind the fallacy, that the words themselves are uncouth.^ But the words are exceUent, if only they are in proper keeping with the general style. — ^Now it is very possible, that in some passages, few or many, I am open to the charge of having mixed old and new style imskilfully ; but I cannot admit that the old words (as such) are ignoble. 20 No one so speaks of Spenser's dialect, nay, nor of Thomson's ; although with Thomson it was assumed, exactly as by me, but to a far greater extent, and without any such necessity as urges me. As I have stated in my preface, a broad tinge of antiquity in the style is essential, to make Homer's barbaric puerilities and eccentricities less offensive. (Even Mr. Arnold would admit this, it he admitted ray facts : but he denies that there is anything eccentric, antique, quaint, barbaric in Homer : that is his only way of resisting my conclusion.) If Mr. Gladstone were able to give his valuable 30 time to work out an entire Iliad in his refined modern style, I feel confident that he would find it impossible to deal ' I do not see that Mr. Arnold has any right to reproach me, because he does not know Spenser's word ' bragly (which I may have used twice in the Iliad), or Dryden's word ' plump,' for a mass. The former is so near in sound to hrag and braw, that an Englishman who is once told that it means ' proudly fine,' ought thenceforward to find it very intelligible : the latter is a noble modification of the vulgar lump. That he can carp as he does against these words and against bulhin (=young bullock) a3 unintelligible, is a testimony how little I have imposed of difficulty on my readers. Those who know lambkin cannot find hulkin very hard. Since writing the above, I see a learned writer in the Philo- logical Museum illustrates t\T] by the old English phrase ' a plump of spears.' 366 HOMERIC TRANSLATION faithfully with the eccentric phraseology and with the negligent parts of the poem. I have the testimony of an unfriendly reviewer, that I am the first and only translator that has dared to give Homer's constant epithets and not conceal his forms of thought : of course I could not have done this in modem style. The lisping of a child is well enough from a child, but is disgusting in a full-grown man. Cowper and Pope systematically cut out from Homer what- ever they cannot make stately, and harmonize with modern style : even Mr. Brandreth often shrinks, though he is brave lo enough to say ox-eyed Juno. Who then can doubt the ex- treme unfitness of their metre and of their modem diction ? My opposers never fairly meet the argument. Mr. Arnold, when most gratuitously censuring my mild rendering of KDvos KaKOfirj'xa.vov oKpvoia-crri's, does not dare to Suggest any English for it himself. Even Mr. Brandreth skips it. It is not merely offensive words ; but the purest and simplest phrases, as a man's ' dear life,' ' dear knees,' or his ' tightly- built house,' are a stumbHng-block to translators. No stronger proof is necessary, or perhaps is possible, than 20 these phenomena give, that to shed an antique hue over Homer is of first necessity to a translator : without it, in- justice is done both to the reader and to the poet. Whether I have managed the style well, is a separate question, and is matter of detail. I may have sometimes done well, sometimes ill ; but I claim that my critics shall judge me from a broader ground, and shall not pertinaciously go on comparing my version with modern style, and condemning me as (what they are pleased to call) inelegant, because it is not like refined modern poetry, when it specially 30 avoids to be such. They never deal thus with Thomson or Chatterton, any more than with Shakspeare or Spenser, There is no sharp distinction possible between the foreign and the antiquated in language. What is obsolete with us, may stiU live somewhere : as, what in Greek is called Poetic or Homeric, may at the same time be living Aeolic. So, whether I take a word from Spenser or from Scotland, is generally unimportant. I do not remember more than four Scotch words, which I have occasionally adopted for con- venience ; viz. Gallant, young man ; Canny, right-minded ; 40 Bonny, handsome ; to Skirl, to cry shrilly. A trochaic ANTIQUE ENGLISH 367 word, which I cannot get in English, is sometimes urgently needed. It is astonishing to me that those who ought to know both what a large mass of antique and foreign-sound- ing words an Athenian found in Homer, and how many- Doric or Sicilian forms as well as Homeric words the Greek tragedians on principle brought into their songs, should make the outcry that they do against my very limited use of that which has an antique or Scotch sound. Classical scholars ought to set their faces against the double heresy, 10 of trying to enforce, that foreign poetry, however various, shall be all rendered into one English dialect, and that this shall, in order of words and in diction, closely approxi- mate to poUshed prose. From an Oxford Professor I should have expected the very opposite spirit to that which Mr. Arnold shows. He ought to know and feel that one glory of Greek poetry is its great internal variety. He admits the principle that old words are a source of ennoble- ment for diction, when he extols the Bible as his standard : for surely he claims no rhetorical inspiration for the 20 translators. Words which have come to us in a sacred connection, no doubt, gain a sacred hue, but they must not be allowed to desecrate other old and excellent words. Mr. Arnold informs his Oxford hearers that ' his Bibliolatry is perhaps excessive.' So the pubUc will judge, if he say that wench, whore, pate, pot, gin, damn, huayhody, audience, principality, generation, are epical noble words because they are in the Bible, and that lief, hen, in sooth, grim, stalwart, gait, guise, eld, hie, erst, are bad, because they are not there. Nine times out of ten, what are called ' poetical ' 30 words, are nothing but antique words, and are made ignoble by Mr. Arnold's doctrine. His very arbitrary con- demnation of dd, lief, in sooth, gait, gentle friend in one passage of mine as ' bad words,' is probably due to his monomaniac fancy that there is nothing quaint and nothing antique in Homer. Excellent and noble as are these words which he rebukes, excellent even for ^sohylus, I should doubt the propriety of using them in the dialogue of Euripides ; on the level of which he seems to think Homer . to be. 40 2. Our language, especially the Saxon part of it, abounds with vigorous monosyllabic verbs, and dissyllabic frequenta- 368 HOMERIC TRANSLATION tives derived from them, indicative of strong physical action. For these words (which, I make no doubt, Mr. Arnold regards as ignoble plebeians), I claim Quiritarian rights : but I do not wish them to displace patricians from high service. Such verbs a« sweat, haul, plump, maul, yell, bang, splash, smash, thump, tug, scud, sprawl, spank, &o., I hold (in their purely physical sense) to be eminently epical : for the epic revels in descriptions of violent action to which they are suited. Intense muscular exertion in every form, intense physical action of the surrounding elements, with lo intense ascription or description of size or colour ; — ■ together make up an immense fraction of the poem. To cut out these words is to emasculate the epic. Even Pope admits such words. My eye in turning his pages was just now caught by : ' They tug, they sweat.' Who will say that ' tug,' ' sweat ' are admissible, but ' bang,' ' smash,' ' sputter ' are inadmissible ? Mr. Arnold resents my saying that Homer is often homely. He is homely expressly because he is natural. The epical diction admits both the gigantesque and the homely : it inexorably refuses the con- 20 ventional, under which is comprised a vast mass of what some wrongly call elegant. But whUe I justify the use of homely words in a primary physical, I deprecate them in a secondary moral sense. Mr. Arnold clearly is dull to this distinction, or he woidd not utter against me the following taunt, p. 300 : ' To grunt and sweat under a weary load does perfectly well where it comes in Shakspeare : but if the translator of Homer, who will hardly have wound up our minds to the pitch at which these words of Hamlet find them, were to ao employ, when he has to speak of Homer's heroes under the load of calamity, this figure of ' grunting ' and ' sweating,' we should say, He Newmanizes.' Mr. Arnold here not only makes a mistake, he propagates a slander ; as if I had ever used such words as grunt and sweat morally. If Homer in the Iliad spoke of grunting swine, as he does of sweating steeds, so should I. As the coarse metaphors here quoted from Shakspeare are utterly opposed to Homer's style, to obtrude them on him would be a gross offence. Mr. Arnold sends his readers away with 40 the belief that this is my practice, though he has not dared COARSE METAPHOR S6d to assert it. T hear such coarseness in Shakspeare, not because I am ' wound up to a high pitch ' by him, ' borne away by a mighty current ' — (which Mr. Arnold, with ingenious unfairness to me, assumes to be certain in a reader of Shakspeare and all but impossible in a reader of Homer), — but because I know, that in Shakspeare's time all literature was coarse, as was the speech of courtiers and of the queen herself. Mr. Arnold imputes to me Shakspeare's coarseness, from which I instinctively shrink ; and when 10 his logic leads to the conclusion, ' he Shakspearizes,' he with gratuitous rancour turns it into ' he Newmanizes.' Some words which with the Biblical translators seem to have been noble, I should not now dare to use in the primitive sense. For instance, ' His iniquity shall fall upon his own pate.' Yet I think pate a good metaphorical word and have used it of the sea-waves, in a bold passage, II. xiii, 795 : Then 6n rush'd they, with weight and maas like to a troublous whirl- wind, 20 Which from the thundercloud of Jove down on the champaign plumpeth. And doth the briny flood bestir with an unearthly uproar : Then in the everbrawling sea full many a billow splasheth. Hollow, and bald with hoary pate, one racing after other. Is there really no ' mighty current ' here, to sweep ofE petty criticism ? I have a remark on the strong physical word ' plumpeth ' here used. It is fundamentally Milton's ' plumb down he drops ten thousand fathom deep ; ' plumb and plump in this sense are clearly the same root. I confess I have not 30 been able to find the verb in an old writer, though it is so common now. Old writers do not say ' to plumb down,' but ' to drop plumb down.' Perhaps in a second edition (if I reach to it), I may alter the words to ' plumb . . . droppeth ' on this ground ; but I do turn sick at the mawk- ishness of critics, one of whom, who ought to know better, teUs me that the word plump reminds him ' of the crinolined hoyden of a boarding-school ' ! ! If he had said, ' It is too like the phrase of a sailor, — of a peasant, — of a schoolboy, this objection would be at least intelligible. However : 40 the word is intended to express the violent impact of a body descending from aloft, — and it does express it. AENOLD B I) ^70 HOMERIC TRANSLATION Mr. Arnold censures me for representing Achilles as yelling t He is depicted by the poet as in the most violent physical rage, boiling over with passion and wholly nncontrouled. He smacks his two thighs at once ; he rolls on the ground, /icyas iieyaXoio-n ; he defiles his hair with dust ; he rends it ; he grinds his teeth ; fire flashes from his eyes ; but — ^he may not ' yell,' that would not be comme ilfaut ! We shall agree, that in peace nothing so becomes a hero as modest still- ness ; but that ' Peleus' son, insatiate of combat,' full of the fiercest pent-up passion, should vent a little of it in a yell, lo seems to me quite in place. That the Greek U-xw is not necessarily to be so rendered, I am aware ; but it is a very vigorous word, like peal and shriek ; neither of which would here suit. I sometimes render it shirl : but ' battle-yell ' is a received rightftil phrase. Achilles is not a stately Virgilian pins Aeneas, but is a far wilder barbarian. After Mr. Arnold has laid upon me the sins of Shakspeare, he amazes me by adding, p. 301 : ' The idiomatic language of Shakspeare, — such language as "prate of his whereabout," " jump the life to come," — " the damnation of his taking- 20 off," — " quietus make with a bare bodkin," should be care- fully observed by the translator of Homer ; although in every case he wiU have to decide for himself, whether the use, by him, of Shakspeare's liberty, will or will not clash with his indispensable duty of nobleness.' Of the Shakspearianisms here italicized by Mr. Arnold, there is not one which I could endure to adopt. ' His whereabout,' I regard as the flattest prose. (The word prate is a plebeian which I admit in its own low places ; but how Mr. Arnold can approve of it, consistently with his so attacks on me, I do not understand.) Damnation and Taking-off (for Guilt and Murder), and Jump, I absolutely reject ; and ' quietus make ' would be nothing but an utterly inadmissible quotation from Shakspeare. Jump as an active verb is to me monstrous, but Jump is just the sort of modern prose word which is not noble . Leap, Bound, for great action. Skip, Frisk, Gambol, for smaller, are all good. I have shown against Mr. Arnold, (1) that Homer was out-and-out antiquated to the Athenians, even when perfectly understood by them ; (2) that his conceptions, 40 similes, phraseology and epithets are habitually quaint, COARSE PHYSICAL WORDS 371 strange, unparalleled in Greek literature ; and pardonable only to semibarbarism ; (3) that they are intimately related to his noblest excellencies ; (4) that many words are so peculiar as to be still doubtful to us ; (5) I have indicated that some of his descriptions and conceptions are horrible to us, though they were not so to his barbaric auditors ; (6) that considerable portions of the poem are not poetry, but rhythmical prose Uke Horace's Satires, and are interest- ing to us not as poetry but as portraying the manners or 10 sentiments of the day. I now add (7) what is inevitable in all high and barbaric poetry, — ^perhaps in all high poetry, — — ^many of his energetic descriptions are expressed in coarse physical words. I do not here attempt proof, for it might need a treatise : but I give one illustration j II. xui, 136, T/dSes trpovrvfav doAAe'es. Cowper, misled by the ignis fatuus of ' stateliness,' renders it absurdly The povfrs of Ilium gave the first assault. Embattled close ; but it is strictly, ' The Trojans Icnocked-forward (or, thumped, 20 butted, forward) in close pack.' The verb is too coarse for later polished prose, and even the adjective is very strong {packed together). I beUeve, that ' Forward in pack the Troians pitch'd,' would not be really unfaithful to the Homeric colour ; and I maintain that ' Forward in mass the Troians pitch'd,' would be an irreprovable rendering. Dryden in this respect is in entire harmony with Homeric style. No critic deals fairly with me in isolating any of these strong words, and then appeahng to his readers whether I am not ignoble. Hereby he deprives me of the 30 dyoJv, the ' mighty current ' of Mr. Arnold, and he misstates the problem ; which is, whether the word is suitable, then and there, for the work required of it, as the coalman at the pit, the clown in the furrow, the huntsman in the open field. 3. There is a small number of words, not natural plebeians, but patricians on which a most unjust bUl of attainder has been passed, which I seek to reverse. On the first which I name, Mr. Arnold will side with me, because it is a BibUcal word, — wench. In Lancashire I believe that at the age of about sixteen a ' girl ' turns into ' a wench,' or as we say 40 ' a young woman.' In Homer, ' girl ' and ' yoimg woman * are alike inadmissible ; ' maid ' or ' maiden ' will not B b 2 372 HOMERIC TRANSLATION always suit, and ' wench ' is the natural word. I do not know that I have used it three times, but I claim a right of using it, and protest against allowing the heroes of slang to deprive us of excellent words by their perverse misuse. If the imaginations of some men are always in satire and in low slang, so much the worse for them : but the more we yield to such demands, the more wiU be exacted. I expect, before long, to be told that brick is an ignoble word, meaniag a jolly fellow, and that sell, cut are out of place in Homer. My metre, it seems, is inadmissible with some, because it is lo the metre of Yankee Doodle ! as if Homer's metre were not that of the Margites. Every noble poem is hable to be travestied, as the Iliad and Aeschylus and Shakspeare have been. Every burlesque writer uses the noble metre, and caricatures the noble style. Mr. Arnold says, I must not render ravviren-Xoi ' traihng-rob'd,' because it reminds him of ' long petticoats sweeping a dirty pavement.' What a confession as to the state of his imagination ! Why not, of ' a queen's robe trailing on a marble pavement ' ? Did he never read • 20 nen\ov /jl^v KaTex^vtv kavbv irarpos Iw' ovSei ? I have digressed : I return to words which have been misunderstood. A second word is of more importance. Imp ; which properly means a Graft. The best translation of S AjySas epvos to my mind, is, ' O imp of Leda ! ' for neither ' bud of Leda,' nor ' scion of Leda ' satisfy me ; much less ' sprig ' or ' shoot of Leda '. The theological writers so often used the phrase ' imp of Satan ' for ' child of the devU,' that (since Bunyan ?) the vulgar no longer understand that imp means scion, child, and suppose it to 30 mean ' httle devil.' A Reviewer has omitted to give his unlearned readers any explanation of the word (though I carefully explained it) and calls down their indignation upon me by his censures, which I hope proceeded from careless- ness and ignorance Even in Spenser's Fairy Queen the word retains its right- ful and noble sense : Well worthy imp ! then said the lady, &c., and in North's Plutarch, • He took upon him to protect him from them all, and 40 MISUSED WORDS 373 not to suffer so goodly an imp [Aloibiades] to lose the good fruit of his youth.' Dryden uses the verb, To imp ; to graft, insert. I was quite aware that I claimed of my readers a certain strength of mind, when I bid them to forget the defilements which vulgarity has shed over the noble word Imp, and carry their imaginations back two or three centuries : but I did not calculate that any critic would call Dainty grotesque. This word is equivalent in meaning to Delicate and Nice, 10 but has precisely the epical character in which both those words are deficient. For instance, I say, that after the death of Patroclus, the coursers ' stood motionless,' Drooping tfiward the ground their heads, and down their plaintive eyelids Did warm tears trickle to the ground, their charioteer bewailing. Defiled were their dainty manes; over the yoke-strap dropping. A critic who objects to this, has to learn EngHsh from my translation. Does he imagine that Dainty can mean nothing but ' over-particular as to food ' ? 20 In the compound Dainty-cheek'd, Homer shows his own epic peculiarity. It is imitated in the similar word ewapao? applied to the Gorgon Medusa by Pindar : but not in the Attics. I have somewhere read, that the rudest conception of female beauty is that of a brilhant red plump cheek ; — such as an English clown admires ( — was this what Pindar meant ?) ; the second stage looks to the delicacy of tint in the cheek ; (this is Homer's KaWardfyrjos :) the third looks to shape (this is the Eu/iop^os of the Attics, the formasus of the Latins, and is seen in the Greek sculpture) ; the fourth 30 and highest looks to moral expression : this is the idea of Christian Europe. That Homer rests exclusively in the second or semibarbaric stage, it is not for me to say, but, as far as I am able, to give to the readers of my translation materials for their own judgment. Erom the vague word £t8os, species, appearance, it cannot be positively inferred whether the poet had an eye for Shape. The epithets curl- eyed and fine-ankled decidedly suggest that he had ; except that his application of the former to the entire nation of the Greeks makes it seem to.be of foreign tradition, and as 40 unreal as hrsbzen-mailed. 374 HOMERIC TRANSLATION Another word which has been ill-understood and ill-used, is dapper. Of the epithet dappergreav'd for ivKvqfLk I certainly am not enamoured, but I have not yet found a better rendering. It is easier to carp at my phrase, than to suggest a better. The word dapper in Dutch = German tapfer ; and like the Scotch braw or brave means with us fine, gallant, elegant. I have read the line of an old poet, The dapper words which lovers use, for elegant, I suppose ; and so ' the dapper does ' and ' dapper elves ' of Milton must refer to elegance or refined lo beauty. What is there ^ ignoble in such a word ? ' Elegant ' and ' pretty ' are inadmissible in epic poetry : ' dapper ' is logically equivalent, and has the epic colour. Neither ' fair ' nor ' comely ' here suit. As to the school trans- lation ' weUgreav'd,' every common EngUshman on hear- ing the sound receives it as ' weUgrieved,' and to me it is very unpleasing. A part of the mischief, a large part of it, is in the word greave ; for dapper-girdled is on the whole well-received. But what else can we say for greave ? leggings ? gambados ? 20 Much perhaps remains to be learnt concerning Homer's perpetual epithets. My very learned colleague Goldstiicker, Professor of Sanscrit, is convinced that the epithet cow-eyed of the Homeric Juno is an echo of the notion of Hindoo poets, that (it I remember his statement) ' the sunbeams are the cows of heaven.' The sacred qualities of the Hindoo cow are perhaps not to be forgotten. I have myself been struck by the phrase SuTrcreos ■Korafj.oio as akin to the idea that the Ganges falls from Mount Meru, the Hindoo Olympus. Also the meaning of two other epithets has been revealed so to me from the pictures of Hindoo ladies. First, curl-eyed, to which I have referred above ; secondly, rosy-fingered Aurora. For Aurora is an ' Eastern lady ' ; and, as such, has the tips of her fingers dyed rosy-red, whether by henna or by some more brilliant drug. Who shall say that the kings and warriors of Homer do not derive from the East their epithet ' Jove-nurtured ' ? or that this or that goddess is not called ' golden-throned ' or ' fair-throned ' in allusion ' I observe that Lord Lyttelton renders Milton's dapper elf by faSiva, ' softly moving.' PERPETUAL EPITHETS 375 to Assyrian sculpture or painting, as Rivers probably drew tkeir later poetical attribute ' bull-headed ' from the sculp- ture of fountains ? It is a familiar remark, that Homer'a poetry presupposes a vast pre-existing art and material. Much in him was traditional. Many of his wild legends came from Asia. He is to us much beside a poet ; and that a translator should assume to cut him down to the standard of modern taste, is a thought which all the higher minds of this age have outgrown. How much better is that reve- lorential Docility, which with simple and innocent wonder, receives the oddest notions of antiquity as material of instruction yet to be revealed, than the self-complacent Criticism, which pronoimcing everything against modem taste to be grotesque ^ and contemptible, squares the facts to its own ' Axioms ' ! Homer is noble : hut this or that epithet is not noble : therefore we must explode it from Homer ! I value, I maintain, I struggle for the ' high a priori road ' in its own place ; but certainly not in historical Uterature. To read Homer's own thoughts, is to wander in a world 20 abounding with freshness : but if we insist on treading round and round in our own footsteps, we shall never ascend those heights whence the strange region is to be seen. Surely an intelligent learned critic ought to inculcate on the unlearned, that if they would get instruction from Homer, they must not expect to have their ears tickled by a musical sound as of a namby-pamby poetaster ; but must look on a metre as doing its duty, when it ' strings the mind up to the necessary pitch ' in elevated passages ; and that instead of demanding of a translator everjrwhere a rhythmical 30 perfection which perhaps can only be attained by a great sacrifice of higher quaUties, they should be willing to sub- mit to a small part of that ruggedness, which Mr. Arnold cheerfully bears in Homer himself through the loss of the Digamma. And now, for a final protest. To be stately is ' Mr. Arnold calls it an unfortunate sentence of mine : ' I ought to be quaint ; I ought not to be grotesque.' I am disposed to think him right, but for reasons very opposite to those which he assigns. I have ' unfortunately ' given to querulous critics a cue for attacking me unjustly. I should rather have said: 'We ought to be qvxiint, and not to shrink from that which the fastidious modern will be sure to call grotesque in English, when he is too blunted by habit or too poor a §pholar to discern it in the Greek,' 876 HOMERIC TRANSLATION not to be grand. Nicolas of Russia may have been stately like Cowper, Garibaldi is grand like the true Homer. A diplomatic address is stately ; it is not grand, nor often noble. To expect a translation of Homer to be pervadingly elegant, is absurd ; Homer is not such, any more than is the side of an Alpine mountain. The elegant and the pic- turesque are seldom identical, however much of delicate beauty may be interstudded in the picturesque : but this has always got plenty of what is shaggy and uncouth, without which contrast the full delight of beauty would not lo be attained. I think Moore in his characteristic way tells of a beauty Shining on, shining on, by no shadow made tender. Till love falls asleep in the sameness of splendour. Such certainly is not Homer's. His beauty, when at its height, is wild beauty : it smells of the mountain and the sea. If he be compared to a noble animal, it is not to such a spruce rubbed-down Newmarket racer as our smooth translators would pretend, but to a wild horse of the Don Cossacks : and if I, instead of this, present to the reader 20 nothing but a Dandie Dinmont's pony, this, as a first approximation, is a valuable step towards the true solution. Before the best translation of the Iliad of which our lan- guage is capable, can be produced, the Enghsh public has to unlearn the false notion of Homer which his deliberately faithless versifiers have infused. Chapman's conceits unfit his translation for instructing the public, even if his rhjiihrn ' jolted ' less, if his structure were simpler, and his dialect more intelligible. My version, if allowed to be read, will prepare the public to receive a version better than mine. I so regard it as a question about to open hereafter, whether a translator of Homer ought not to adopt the old dissyllabic landis, houndis, hartis, &c., instead of our modern im- melodious lands, hounds, harts ; whether the ye or y before the past participle may not be restored ; the want of which confounds that participle with the past tense. Even the final -en of the plural of verbs (we dancen, they singen, etc.) still subsists in Lancashire. It deserves consideration whether by a few such slight grammatical retrogressions into antiquity a translator of Homer might not add much 40 melody to his poem and do good service to the language. ON TRANSLATING HOMER LAST WORDS A LECTURE GIVEN AT OXFORD BY MATTHEW ARNOLD ' Multi, qui persecLUuntur me, et tribulant me : a testimoniis non deolinavi.' ON TRANSLATING HOMER LAST WORDS BuFFON, the great French naturalist, imposed on himself the rule of steadily abstaining from all answer to attacks made upon him. ' Je n'ai jamais repondu a aucune critique,' he said to one of his friends who, on the occasion of a certain criticism, was eager to take up arms in his behalf ; ' je n'ai jamais r6pondu k aucime critique, et je garderai le m§me silence sur celle-ci.' On another occasion, when accused of plagiarism, and pressed by his friends to answer, ' II vaut mieux,' he said, ' laisser ces mauvaises 10 gens dans I'incertitude.' Even when reply to an attack was made successfully, he disapproved of it, he regretted that those he esteemed should make it. Montesquieu, more sensitive to criticism than BufEon, had answered, and successfully answered, an attack made upon his great work, the Esprit des Lois, by the Gazetier Jansiniste. This Jansenist Gazetteer was a periodical of those times, — a periodical such as other times, also, have occasionally seen, — very pretentious, very aggressive, and, when the point to be seized was at all a dehcate one, very apt to 20 miss it. ' Notwithstanding this example,' said Buffon, — who, as well as Montesquieu, had been attacked by the Jansenist Gazetteer, — ' notwithstanding this example, I think I may promise my course will b'e different. I shall not answer a single word.' And to any one who has noticed the baneful effects of controversy, with all its train of personal rivalries and hatreds, on men of letters or men of science ; to any one who has observed how it tends to impair, not only their dignity and repose, but their productive force, their so genuine activity ; how it always checks the free play of the spirit, and often ends by stopping it altogether ; it can hardly seem doubtful, that the rule thus imposed on 380 ON TRANSLATING HOMER himself by Buffon was a wise one. His own career, indeed, admirably shows the wisdom of it. That career was as glorious as it was serene ; but it owed to its serenity no small part of its glory. The regularity and completeness with which he gradually built up the great work which he had designed, the air of equable majesty which he shed over it, struck powerfully the imagination of his con- temporaries, and surrounded BufEon's fame with a peculiar respect and dignity. ' He is,' said Frederick the Great of him, ' the man who has best deserved the great celebrity lo which he has acquired.' And this regiilarity of produc- tion, this equableness of temper, he maintained by his resolute disdain of personal controversy. BufEon's example seems to me worthy of aU imitation, and in my humble way I mean always to foUow it. I never have replied, I never wiU reply, to any literary assailant ; in such encounters tempers are lost, the world laughs, and truth is not served. Least of all should I think of using this Chair as a place from which to carry on such a con- flict. But when a learned and estimable man thinks he 20 has reason to complain of language used by me in this Chair, — when he attributes to me intentions and feelings towards him which are far from my heart, I owe him some explanation,- — and I am bound, too, to make the explana- tion as public as the words which gave offence. This is the reason why I revert once more to the subject of trans- lating Homer. But being thus brought back to that subject, and not wishing to occupy you solely with an explanation which, after all, is Mr. Newman's affair and mine, not the pubhc's, I shall take the opportunity, — ^not certainly to so enter into any conflict with any one, — ^but to try to establish our old friend, the coming translator of Homer, yet a little firmer in the positions which I hope we have now secured for him ; to protect him against the danger of relaxing, in the confusion of dispute, his attention to those matters which alone I consider important for him ; to save him from losing sight, in the dust of the attacks deUvered over it, of the real body of Patroclus. He wfll, probably, when he arrives, requite my soUcitude very ill, and be in haste to disown his benefactor : but my interest in him is so 40 sincere that I can disregard his probable ingratitude. LAST WORDS 381 First, however, for the explanation. Mr. Newman has published a reply to the remarks which I made on his translation of the Iliad. He seems to think that the respect which at the outset of those remarks I professed for him must have been professed ironically ; he says that I use ' forms of attack against him which he does not know how to characterize ; ' that I ' speak scornfully ' of him, treat him with 'gratuitous insidt, gratuitous rancour ; ' that I ' propagate slanders ' against him, that I wish to 10 ' damage him with my readers,' to ' stimulate my readers to despise ' him. He is entirely mistaken. I respect Mr. Newman sincerely ; I respect him as one of the few learned men we have, one of the few who love learning for its own sake ; this respect for him I had before I read his translation of the Iliad, I retained it while I was com- menting on that translation, I have not lost it after read- ing his reply. Any vivacities of expression which may have given him pain I sincerely regret, and can only assure him that I used them without a thought of insult 20 or rancour. When I took the Uberty of creating the verb to Neivmanise, my intentions were no more rancorous than if I had said to Miltonise ; when I exclaimed, in my astonishment at his vocabulary, — ' With whom can Mr. Newman have lived ? ' — ^I meant merely to convey, in a familiar form of speech, the sense of bewilderment one has at finding a person to whom words one thought aU the world knew seem strange, and words one thought entirely strange, intelligible. Yet this simple expression of my bewilderment Mr. Newman construes into an accusa- 30 tion that he is ' often guilty of keeping low company,' and says that I shall ' never want a stone to throw at him.' And what is stranger stUl, one of his friends gravely teUs me that Mr. Newman ' lived with the feUows of BaUiol.' As if that made Mr. Newman's glossary less inexpUcable to me ! As if he could have got his glossary from the feUows of BaUiol ! As if I could beheve, that the members of that distinguished society, — of whose dis- course, not so many years afterwards, I myself was an unworthy hearer, — ^were in Mr. Newman's time so far 40 removed from the Attic purity of speech which we all of us admired, that when one of them called a calf a bulkin, 382 ON TRANSLATING HOMER the rest ' easily understood ' him ; or, when he wanted to say that a newspaper-article was ' proudly fine,' it mattered little whether he said it was that or bragly ! No ; his having lived with the fellows of BaUiol does not explain Mr. Newman's glossary to me. I wiU no longer ask ' with whom he can have lived,' since that gives him offence ; but I must still declare that where he got his test of rarity or intelligibility for words is a mystery to me. That, however, does not prevent me from entertaining a very sincere respect for Mr. Newman, and since heio doubts it, I am glad to reiterate my expression of it. But the truth of the matter is this : I unfeignedly admire Mr. Newman's ability and learning ; but I think in his translation of Homer he has employed that abihty and learning quite amiss. I think he has chosen quite the wrong field for turning his ability and learning to account. I think that in England, partly from the- want of an Academy, partly from a national habit of intellect to which that want of an Academy is itself due, there exists too little of what I may call a public force of correct literary 20 opinion,' possessing within certain limits a clear sense of what is right and wrong, sound and unsound, and sharply recalling men of abUity and learning from any flagrant misdirection of these their advantages. I think, even, that in our country a powerful misdirection of this kind is often more likely to subjugate and pervert opinion, than to be checked and corrected by it.^ Hence a chaos of false tendencies, wasted efforts, impotent conclusions, works which ought never to have been undertaken. Any one who can introduce a little order into this chaos by 30 establishing in any quarter a single sound rule of criticism, a single rule which clearly marks what is right as right, and what is wrong as wrong, does a good deed ; and his ' ' It is the fact, that acholars of fastidious refinement, but of a judg- ment which I think far more masculine than Mr. Arnold's, have passed a most encouraging sentence on large specimens of my translation. I at present count eight such names.' — ' Before venturing to print, I sought to ascertain how unlearned women and children would accept my verses. I could boast how children and half-educated women have extolled them, how greedily a working man has inquired for them, without knowing who was the translator,' — ^Mk. Newman's Reply, pp. 315, 322. LAST WORDS S83 deed is so much the better the greater force he counter- acts of learning and abihty apphed to thicken the chaos. Of course no one can be sure that he has fixed any such rules ; he can only do his best to fix them ; but some- where or other, in the literary opinion of Europe, if not in the literary opinion of one nation, in fifty years, if not in five, there is a final judgment on these matters, and the critic's work wUl at last stand or fall by its true merits. Meanwhile, the charge of having in one instance mis- 10 applied his powers, of having once followed a false ten- dency, is no such grievous charge to bring against a man ; it does not exclude a great respect for himself personally, or for his powers in the happiest manifestations of them. False tendency is, I have said, an evil to which the artist or the man of letters in England is pecuUarly prone ; but everywhere in our time he is liable to it, — ^the greatest as weU as the humblest. ' The fijst beginnings of my Wilhelm Meister,' says Goethe, ' arose out of an obscure sense of the great truth that man wiU often attempt something for 20 which nature has denied him the proper powers, will undertake and practise something in which he cannot become skUled. An inward feehng warns him to desist ' (yes, but there are, unhappUy, cases of absolute judicial blindness !), ' nevertheless he cannot get clear in himself about it, and is driven along a false road to a false goal, without knowing how it is with him. To this we may refer everything which goes by the name of false tendency, dilettantism, and so on. A great many men waste in this way the fairest portion of their hves, and fall at last into 3u wonderful delusion.' Yet after all, — Goethe adds, — it sometimes happens that even on this false road a man finds, not indeed that which he sought, but something which is good and useful for him ; ' like Saul, the son of Kish, who went forth to look for his father's asses, and found a kingdom.' And thus false tendency as well as true, vain effort as well as fruitful, go together to produce that great movement of life, to present that immense and magic spectacle of human affairs, which from boy- hood to old age fascinates the gaze of every man of imagina- 40 tion, and which would be his terror, if it were not at the same time his delight. 384 ON TRANSLATING HOMER So Mr. Newman may see how wide-spread a danger it is, to which he has, as I think, in setting himself to tran- slate Homer, fallen a prey. He may be well satisfied if he can escape from it by pajdng it the tribute of a single work only. He may judge how urdikely it is that I should ' despise ' him for once falling a prey to it. I know far too well how exposed to it we all are ; how exposed to it I myself am. At this very moment, for example, I am fresh from reading Mr. Newman's reply to my lectures, a reply fuU of that erudition in which (as I am so often lo and so good-naturedly reminded, but indeed I know it without being reminded) Mr. Newman is immeasurably my superior. WeU, the demon that pushes us aU to our ruin is even now prompting me to follow Mr. Newman into a discussion about the digamma, and I know not what providence holds me back. And some day, I have no doubt, I shall lecture on the language of the Berbers, and give him his entire revenge. But Mr. Newman does not confine himself to com- plaints on his own behalf, he complains on Homer's behalf 20 too. He says that my ' statements about Greek literature are against the most notorious and elementary fact ; ' that I ' do a pubhc wrong to literature by publishing them ; ' and that the Professors to whom I appealed in my three Lectures, ' would only lose credit if they sanc- tioned the use I make of their names.' He does these eminent men the kindness of adding, however, that ' whether they are pleased with this parading of their names in behalf of paradoxical error, he may well doubt,' and that ' until they endorse it themselves, he shall treat 30 my process as a piece of forgery.' He proceeds to discuss my statements at great length, and with an erudition and ingenuity which nobody can admire more than I do. And he ends by saying that my ignorance is great. Alas ! that is very true. Much as Mr. Newman was mistaken when he talked of my rancour, he is entirely right when he talks of my ignorance. And yet, perverse as it seems to say so, I sometimes find myself wishing, when dealing with these matters of poetical criticism, that my ignorance were even greater than it is. To handle 40 these matters properly there is needed a poise so perfect, LAST WORDS 385 that the least overweight in any direction tends to destroy the balance. Temper destroys it, a crotchet destroys it, even erudition may destroy it. To press to the sense of the thing itself with which one is. deahng, not to go ofi on some collateral issue about the thing, is the hardest matter in the world. The ' thing itself ' with which one is here dealing, — the critical perception of poetic truth, — is of all things the most volatile, elusive, and evanescent ; by even pressing too impetuously after it, one runs the risk of losing 10 it. The critic of poetry should have the finest tact, the nicest moderation, the most free, flexible, and elastic spirit imaginable ; he should be indeed the ' ondoyant et divers,' the undulating and diverse being of Montaigne. The less he can deal with his object simply and freely, the more things he has to take into account in dealing with it, — ^the more, in short, he has to encumber himself, — so much the greater force of spirit he needs to retain his elasticity. But one cannot exactly have this greater force by wishing for it ; so, for the force of spirit one has, the 20 load put upon it is often heavier than it wiU well bear. The late Duke of Wellington said of a certain peer that ' it was a great pity his education had been so far too much for his abilities.' In like manner, one often sees erudition out of all proportion to its owner's critical faculty. Little as I know, therefore, I am always apprehensive, in deahng with poetry, lest even that little should prove ' too much for my abihties.' With this consciousness of my own lack of learning, — nay, with this sort of acquiescence in it, with this belief 80 that for the labourer in the field of poetical criticism learning has its disadvantages, — ^I am not Ukely to dispute with Mr. Newman about matters of erudition. All that he says on these matters in his Reply I read with great interest : in general I agree with him ; but only, I am sorry to say, up to a certain point, like all learned men, accus- tomed to desire definite rules, he draws his conclusions too absolutely ; he wants to include too much under his rules ; he does not quite perceive that in poetical criticism the shade, the fine distinction, is everything ; and that, when 40 he has once missed this, in all he says he is in truth but beating the air. For instance : because I think Homer ABNOLD Q Q 386 ON TRANSLATING HOMER noble, he imagines I must think him elegant ; and in fact he says in plain words that I do think him so, — ^that to me Homer seems ' pervadingly elegant.' But he does not. Virgil is elegant, — ' pervadingly elegant,' — even in passages of the highest emotion : 0, ubi oampi, Speroheosque, et virginibus bacchata Lacaenis Taygeta ! ' Even there Virgil, though of a divine elegance, is stiU elegant : but Homer is not elegant ; the word is quite lo a wrong one to apply to him, and Mr. Newman is quite right in blaming any one he finds so applying it. Again ; arguing against my assertion that Homer is not quaint, he says : ' It is quaint to call waves wet, milk white, blood dusky, horses single-hoofed, words winged, Vulcan Lobfoot (KuXXoTroSiwv), a spear longshadowy ,' and so on. I find I know not how many distinctions to draw here. I do not think it quaint to call waves wet, or milk white, or words winged ; but I do think it quaint to call horses single-hoofed, or Vulcan Lobfoot, or a spear longshadowy. 20 As to calling blood dusky, I do not feel quite sure ; I wUl tell Mr. Newman my opinion when I see the passage in which he calls it so. But then, again, because it is quaint to call Vulcan Lobfoot, I cannot admit that it was quaint to caU him KvXXoiroSiwv ; nor that, because it is quaint to call a spear longshadowy, it was quaint to call it 80X1x6- oTKiov. Here Mr. Newman's erudition misleads him : he knows the literal value of the Greek so well, that he thinks his literal rendering identical with the Greek, and that the Greek must stand or fall along with his rendering. But 30 the real question is,- not whether he has given us, so to speak, full change for the Greek, but how he gives us our change : we want it in gold, and he gives it us in copper. Again : ' It is quaint,' says Mr. Newman, ' to address a young friend as " Pippin ! " — ^it is quaint to compare Ajax to an ass whom boys are belabouring.' Here, too, ]yt. Newman goes much too fast, and his category of quaintness is too comprehensive. To address a young ' ' f or the fields of Thesaaly and the streams of Spercheioa ! Oh for the hills alive with the danoea of the Laoonian maidens, the hills of Taygetus 1 ' — Oeorgics, ii, 486. LAST WORDS 387 friend as ' Pippin I ' is, I cordially agree with him, very quaint ; although I do not think it was quaint in Sarpedon to address Glaucus as Z iriirov : but in comparing, whether in Greek or in English, Ajax to an ass whom boys are belabotuing, I do not see that there is of necessity any- thing quaint at all. Again ; because I said that eld, lief, in sooth, and other words, are, as Mr. Newman uses them in certain places, bad words, he imagines that I must mean to stamp these words with an absolute reprobation ; 10 and because I said that ' my Bibliolatry is excessive,' he imagines that I brand aU words as ignoble which are not in the Bible. Nothing of the kind : there are no such absolute rules to be laid down in these matters. The Bible vocabulary is to be used as an assistance, not as an authority. Of the words which, placed where Mr. Newman places them, I have called bad words, every one may be excellent in some other place. Take eld, for instance : when Shak- speare, reproaching man with the dependence in which his youth is passed, says : 20 all thy bleased youth Becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms Of palsied eld, . . . it seems to me that eld comes in excellently there, in a passage of curious meditation ; but when ]V&. Newman renders dy^pu -r' aOavdrto re by ' from Eld and Death exempted,' it seems to me he infuses a tinge of quaint- ness into the transparent simpUcity of Homer's expression, and so I call eld a bad word in that place. Once more. Mr. Newman lays it down as a general rule 30 that ' many of Homer's energetic descriptions are ex- pressed in coarse physical words.' He goes on : 'I give one illustration — TpZes irpovrvij/av doAAecs. Cowper, inisled by the ignis fatuus of " stateUness " renders it absurdly : The powers of Hium gave the first assault Embattled close ; but it is, strictly, " The Trojans knocked forward (or, thumped, butted forward) ill close pack." The verb is too coarse for later polished prose, and even the adjective is very strong {jpacked together). I believe, that " forward in 40 pack the 'firojans pitch'd," wotild not be really unfaithful 2 388 OJV TRANSLATING HOMER to the Homeric colour ; and I maintain, that " forward in mass the Trojans pitch'd," would be an irreprovable rendering.' He actually gives us all that as if it were a piece of scientific deduction ; and as if, at the end, he had arrived at an incontrovertible conclusion. But, in truth, one cannot settle these matters quite in this way. Mr. Newman's general rule may be true or false (I dishke to meddle with general rules), but every part in what follows must stand or fall by itself, and its soundness or unsoundness has nothing at all to do with the truth or lo falsehood of Mr. Newman's general rule. He first gives, as a strict rendering of the Greek, ' The Trojans knocked forward (or, thumped, butted forward), in close pack.' I need not say that, as a ' strict rendering of the Greek ' this is good, — all Mr. Newman's ' strict renderings of the Greek ' are sure to be, as such, good ; but ' in close pack,' for aoXXees, seems to me to be what Mr. Newman's renderings are not always,- — an excellent poetical render- ing of the Greek ; a thousand times better, certainly, than Cowper's ' embattled close.' Well, but Mj. Newman 20 goes on : 'I believe, that " forward in pack the Trojans pitch'd," would not be really unfaithful to the Homeric colour.' Here, I say, the Homeric colour is half washed out of Mr. Newman's happy rendering of aoWhg ; while in ' pitch'd ' for Trpovrvil/av, the hteral fidelity of the first rendering is gone, while certainly no Homeric colour has come in its place. Finally, Mr. Newman concludes : ' I maintain that " forward in mass the Trojans pitch'd,' would be an irreprovable rendering.' Here, in what Mr. Newman fancies his final moment of triumph, Homeric 30 colour and literal fidelity have ahke abandoned him altogether ; the last stage of his translation is much worse than the second, and immeasurably worse than the first. All this to show that a looser, easier method than Mr. Newman's must be taken, if we are to arrive at any good result in these questions. I now go on to follow Mr. New- man a little further, not at all as wishing to dispute with him, but as seeking (and this is the true fruit we may gather from criticisms upon us) to gain hints from him for 40 the establishment of some useful truth about our subject, LAST WORDS 389 even when I think him wrong. I still retain, I confess, my conviction that Homer's characteristic quaUties are rapidity of movement, plainness of words and style, simplicity and directness of ideas, and, above aU, noble- ness, the grand manner. Whenever Mr. Newman drops a word, awakens a train of thought, which leads me to see any of these characteristics more clearly, I am grateful to him ; and one or two suggestions of this kind which he affords, are all that now, — having expressed my sorrow 10 that he should have misconceived my feelings towards him, and pointed out what I think the vice of his method of criticism, — I have to notice in his Reply. Such a suggestion I find in Mr. Newman's remarks on my assertion that the translator of Homer must not adopt a quaint and antiquated style in rendering him, because the impression which Homer makes upon the living scholar is not that of a poet quaint and antiquated, but that of a poet perfectly simple, perfectly intelligible. I added that we cannot, I confess, really Imow how Homer seemed 20 to Sophocles, but that it is impossible to me to believe that he seemed to him quaint and antiquated. Mr. New- man asserts, on the other hand, that I am absurdly wrong here ; that Homer seemed ' out and out ' quaint and antiquated to the Athenians ; that ' every sentence of him was more or less antiquated to Sophocles, who could no more help feehng at every instant the foreign and antiquated character of the poetry, than an Englishman can help feeling the same in reading Bums's poems.' And not only does Mr. Newman say this, but he has managed 30 thoroughly to convince some of his readers of it. ' Homer's Greek,' says one of them, ' certainly seemed antiquated to the historical times of Greece. Mr. Newman, taMng a far broader historical and philological view than Mr. Arnold, stoutly maintains that it did seem so.' And another says : ' Doubtless Homer's dialect and diction were as hard and obscure to a later Attic Greek, as Chaucer to an Englishman of our day.' Mr. Newman goes on to say, that not only was Homer antiquated relatively to Pericles, but he is antiquated to 40 the Uving scholar ; and, indeed, is in himself ' absolutely antique, being the poet of a barbarian age.' He tells us 390 ON TRANSLATING HOMER of his ' inexhaustible quaintnesses,' of his ' very eccentric diction ; ' and he infers, of course, that he is perfectly right in rendering him in a quaint and antiquated style. Now this question, — ^whether or no Homer seemed quaint and antiquated- to Sophocles, — I caU a delightful question to raise. It is not a barren verbal dispute ; it is a question ' drenched in matter,' to use an expression of Bacon ; a question fuU of flesh and blood, and of which the scrutiny, though I still think we cannot settle it absolutely, may yet give us a directly useful result. To lo scrutinise it may lead us to see more clearly what sort of a style a modem translator of Homer ought to adopt. Homer's verses were some of the first words which a young Athenian heard. He heard them from his mother or his nurse before he went to school ; and at school, when he went there, he was constantly occupied with them. So much did he hear of them that Socrates pro- poses, in the interests of morality, to have selections from Homer made, and placed in the hands of mothers and nurses, in his model republic ; in order that, of an author 20 with whom they were sure to be so perpetually conversant, the young might learn only those parts which might do them good. His language was as familiar to Sophocles, we may be quite sure, as the language of the Bible is to us. Nay, more. Homer's language was not, of course, in the time of Sophocles, the spoken or written language of ordinary life, any more than the language of the Bible, any more than the language of poetry, is with us ; but for one great species of composition, — epic poetry, — ^it was so still the current language ; it was the language in which every one who made that sort of poetry composed. Every one at Athens who dabbled in epic poetry, not only imder- stood Homer's language, — he possessed it. He possessed it as every one who dabbles in poetry with us, possesses what may be called the poetical vocabulary, as distinguished from the vocabulary of common speech and of modern prose : I mean, such expressions as perchance for perhaps, spake for spoke, aye for ever, don for put on, charmed for charm'd, and thousands of others. 40 I might go to Burns and Chaucer, and, taking words LAST WORDS 391 and passages from them, ask if they afforded any parallel to a language so familiar and so possessed. But this I will not do, for Mr. Newman himself supplies me with what he thinks a fair parallel, in its effect upon us, to the language of Homer in its effect upon Sophocles. He says that such words as mon, kmdis, lihbard, withouten, muchd, give us a tolerable but incomplete notion of this parallel ; and he finally exhibits the parallel in all its clearness, by this poetical specimen : 10 Dat mon, quhioh hauldeth Kyngis-af Londis yn Uo, niver (I tell 'e) feereth aught ; sith hee Doth hauld hys londis yver. Now, does Mr. Newman really think that Sophocles could, as he says, ' no more help feeling at every instant the foreign and antiquated character of Homer, than an EngUshman can help feeling the same in hearing ' these lines ? Is he quite sure of it ? He says he is ; he will not allow of any doubt or hesitation in the matter. I had so confessed we could not really know how Homer seemed to Sophocles ; — ' Let Mr. Arnold confess for himself,' cries Mr. Newman, ' and not for me, who know perfectly well.' And this is what he knows ! Mr. Newman says, however, that I ' play fallaciously on the words familiar and unfamiliar ; ' that ' Homer's words may have been familiar to the Athenians (i.e. often heard) even when they were either not understood by them, or else, being understood, were yet felt and known, to be utterly foreign. Let my renderings,' he continues, ' be 30 heard, as Pope or even Cowper has been heard, and no one will be " surprised." ' But the whole question is here. The translator must not assume that to have taken place which has not taken place, although, perhaps, he may wish it to have taken place, — namely, that his diction is become an established possession of the minds of men, and therefore is, in its proper place, familiar to them, will not ' surprise ' them. If Homer's language was famihar, — ^that is, oit&a. heard,^ then to this language words like londis and libbard, which 40 are not famUiar, offer, for the translator's purpose, no parallel. For some purpose of the philologer they may 392 ON TRANSLATING HOMER offer a parallel to it ; for the translator's purpose they offer none. The question is not, whether a diction is antiquated for current speech, but whether it is antiquated for that particular purpose for which it is employed. A diction that is antiquated for common speech and com- mon prose, may very well not be antiquated for poetry or certain special kinds of prose. ' Perad venture there shall be ten found there,' is not antiquated for Biblical prose, though for conversation or for a newspaper it is antiquated. ' The trumpet spake not to the armed throng,' is not lo antiquated for poetry, although we should not write in a letter, ' he spake to me,' or say, ' the British soldier is armdd with the Enfield rifle.' But when language is antiquated for that particular purpose for which it is employed, — as numbers of Chaucer's words, for instance, are antiquated for poetry, — such language is a bad repre- sentative of language which, like Homer's, was never antiquated for that particular purpose for which it was employed. I imagine that niyXiyiaSEO) for TlrjXuSov, in Homer, no more sounded antiquated- to Sophocles, than so armed for arm'd, in Milton, sounds antiquated to us ; but Mr. Newman's withouten and muchel do sound to us anti- quated, even for poetry, and therefore they do not corre- spond in their effect upon us with Homer's words in their effect upon Sophocles. When Chaucer, who uses such words, is to pass current amongst us, to be familiar to us, as Homer was familiar to the Athenians, he has to be modernised, as Wordsworth and others set to work to modernise him ; but an Athenian no more needed to have Homer modernised, than we need to have the Bible so modernised, or Wordsworth himself. Therefore, when Mr. Newman's words hragly, bulkin, and the rest, are an established possession of our minds, as Homer's words were an established possession of an Athenian's mind, he may use them ; but not till then. Chaucer's words, the words of Burns, great poets as these were, are yet not thus an established possession of an Englishman's mind, and therefore they must not be used in rendering Homer into English. Mr. Newman has been misled just by doing that which 4o his admirer praises him for doing, by taking a ' far broader LAST WORDS 393 historical and philological view than ' mine. Precisely because he has done this, and has appUed the ' philo- logical view ' where it was not applicable, but where the ' poetical view ' alone was rightly applicable, he has fallen into error. It is the same with him in his remarks on the difficulty and obscurity of Homer. Homer, I say, is perfectly plain in speech, simple, and intelligible. And I infer from this that his translator, too, ought to be perfectly plain in 10 speech, simple, and intelligible ; ought not to say, for instance, in rendering OvT£ kI (7c (TTf Woifu fJi&xV^ *5 KuBtovupav . . . ' Nor liefly thee would I advance to man-ennobling battle,' — and things of that kind. Mr. Newman hands me a list of some twenty hard words, invokes Buttmann, Mr. Maiden, and M. Benfey, and asks me it I think myself wiser than all the world of Greek scholars, and if I am ready to supply the deficiencies of LiddeU and Scott's Lexicon ! But here, again, Mr. Newman errs by not so perceiving that the question is one not of scholarship, but of a poetical translation of Homer. This, I say, should be perfectly simple and intelligible. He replies by telling me that dSivos, eiXtTroSes, and o-tyaXoeis are hard words. Well, but what does he infer from that ? That the poetical translator, in his rendering of them, is to give us a sense of the difficulties of the scholar, and so is to make his translation obscure ? If he does not mean that, how, by bringing forward these hard words, does he touch the question whether an English version of Homer 30 should be plain or not plain ? If Homer's poetry, as poetry, is in its general effect on the poetical reader per- fectly simple and inteUigible, the uncertainty of the scholar about the true meaning of certain words can never change this general effect. Rather will the poetry of Homer make us forget his philology, than his philology make us forget his poetry. It may even be affirmed that every one who reads Homer perpetually for the sake of enjoying his poetry (and no one who does not so read him will ever translate him well), comes at last to form a per- 40 fectly clear sense in his own mind for every important 394 ON TRANSLATING HOMER word in Homer, such as dStvds, or ^\i)8otos, whatever the scholar's doubts about the word may be. And this sense is present to his mind with perfect clearness and fulness, whenever the word recurs, although as a scholar he may know that he cannot be sure whether this sense is the right one or not. But poetically he feels clearly about the word, although philologically he may not. The scholar in him may hesitate, like the father in Sheridan's play ; but the reader of poetry in him is, Uke the governor, fixed. The same thing happens to us with our own Ian- lo guage. How many words occm: in the Bible, for instance, to which thousands of hearers do not feel sure they attach the precise real meaning ; but they make out a meaning for them out of what materials they have at hand ; and the words, heard over and over again, come to convey this meaning with a certainty which poetically is adequate, though not philologically. How many have attached a clear and poetically adequate sense to 'the beam' and ' the mote,' though not precisely the right one ! How clearly, again, have readers got a sense from Milton's 20 words, ' grate on their scrannel pipes,' who yet might have been puzzled to write a commentary on the word scrannel for the dictionary ! So we get a clear sense from aStvds as an epithet for grief, after often meeting with it and finding out all we can about it, even though that all be philologically insufficient : so we get a clear sense from 6iX«roS£s as an epithet for cows. And this his clear poetical sense about the words, not his philological uncertainties about them, is what the translator has to convey. Words like bragly and bulkin offer no parallel to these words ; 30 because the reader, from his entire want of familiarity with the words bragly and bulkin, has no clear sense of them poetically. Perplexed by his knowledge of the philological aspect of Homer's language, encumbered by his own learning, Mr. Newman, I say, misses the poetical aspect, misses that with which alone we are here concerned. ' Homer is odd,' he persists, fixing his eyes on his own philological analysis of jjitLvvi, and fiepoij/, and KvXXottoSiW, and not on these words in their synthetic character; — just as Professor 40 Max Miiller, going a little farther back, and fixing his LAST WORDS 395 attention on the elementary value of the word B-vydrrjp, might say Homer was ' odd ' for using that word ; — ' if the whole Greek nation, by long familiarity, had become inobservant of Homer's oddities,' — of the oddities of this ' noble barbarian,' as Mr. Newman elsewhere calls him, this ' noble barb»rian ' with the ' lively eye of the savage,' — ' that would be no fault of mine. That would not justify Mr. Arnold's blame of me for rendering the words correctly.' Correctly, — ah, but what is correctness in this 10 case ? This correctness of his is the very rock on which Mr. Newman has split. He is so correct that at last he finds peculiarity everywhere. The true knowledge of Homer becomes at last, in his eyes, a knowledge of Homer's ' peculiarities, pleasant and unpleasant.' Learned men know these ' peculiarities,' and Homer is to be translated because the unlearned are impatient to know them too. ' That,' he exclaims, ' is just why people want to read an English Homer, — to know aU his oddities, just as learned men do.' Here I am obliged to shake my head, and to 20 declare that, in spite of all my respect for Mr. Newman, I cannot go these lengths with him. He talks of my ' monomaniac fancy that there is nothing quaint or antique in Homer.' Terrible learning, — I cannot help in my turn exclaiming, — ^terrible learning, which discovers so much ! Here, then, I take my leave of Mr. Newman, retaining my opinion that his version of Homer is spoUed by his making Homer odd and ignoble ; but having, I hope, sufficient love for literature to be able to canvass works without thinking of persons, and to hold this or that 30 production cheap, while retaining a sincere respect, on other grounds, for its author. In fulfilment of my promise to take this opportunity for giving the translator of Homer a little further advice, I pro- ceed to notice one or two other criticisms which I find, in like manner, suggestive ; which give us an opportiuiity, that is, of seeing more clearly, as we look into them, the true principles on which translation of Homer should rest. This is all I seek in criticisms ; and, perhaps (as I have already said) it is only as one seeks a positive result of this kind, 10 that one can get any fruit from them. Seeking a negative result from them, — personal altercation and wranglmg,^ 396 ON TRANSLATING HOMER one gets no fruit ; seeking a positive result, — the elucidation and establishment of one's ideas, — one may get much. Even bad criticisms may thus be made suggestive and fruitful. I declared, in a former lecture on this subject, my conviction that criticism is not the strong point of our national literature. Well, even the bad criticisms on our present topic which I meet with, serve to illustrate this con- viction for me. And thus one is enabled, even in reading remarks which for Homeric criticism, for their immediate subject, have no value, — ^which are far too personal in spirit, lo far too immoderate in temper, and far too heavy-handed in style, for the dehcate matter they have to treat, — stiU to gain light and confirmation for a serious idea, and to follow the Baconian injunction, semper aliquid addiscere, always to be adding to one's stock of observation and knowledge. Yes, even when we have to do with writers who, — to quote the words of an exquisite critic, the master of us all in criticism, M. Sainte-Beuve, — remind us, when they handle such subjects as our present, of ' Romans of the fourth or fifth century, coming to hold forth, aU at random, in African 20 style, on papers found in the desk of Augustus, Maecenas, or Pollio,' — even then we may instruct ourselves if we may regard ideas and not persons ; even then we may enable ourselves to say, with the same critic describing the effect made upon him by D'Argenson's Memoirs : ' My taste is revolted, but I learn something ; — Je suis choqui, mais je suis instruit.' But let us pass to criticisms which are suggestive directly and not thus indirectly only ; criticisms by examining which we may be brought nearer to what immediately 30 interests us, — ^the right way of translating Homer. I said that Homer did not rise and sink with his subject, was never to be called prosaic and low. This gives surprise to many persons, who object that parts of the Iliad are certainly pitched lower than others, and who remind me of a number of absolutely level passages in Homer. But I never denied that a subject must rise and sink, that it must have its elevated and its level regions ; aU I deny is, that a poet can be said to rise and sink when aU that he, as a poet, can do, is perfectly well done ; when he is perfectly sound lo and good, that is, perfect as a poet, in the level regions of LAST WORDS 397 his subject as well as in its elevated regions. Indeed, what distinguishes the greatest masters of poetry from all others is, that they are perfectly sound and poetical in these level regions of their subject ; in these regions which are the great difficulty of all poets but the very greatest, which they never quite know what to do with. A poet may sink in these regions by being falsely grand as well as by being low ; he sinks, in short, whenever he does not treat his matter, whatever it is, in a perfectly good and poetic way. But, 10 so long as he treats it in this way, he cannot be said to sink, whatever his matter may do. A passage of the simplest narrative is quoted to me from Homer : '■ wrpvviv t\ (KaffTov iiroixSnei/os kiriifffftv, miaSKijv Tf, T\avtc6y re, M^Sovrd tc, QepatKox^v re . , . and I am asked, whether Homer does not sink there ; whether he ' can have intended such lines as those for poetry ? ' My answer is : Those lines are very good poetry indeed, poetry of the best class, in that place. But when Wordsworth, having to narrate a very plain matter, tries 20 not to sink in narrating it, tries, in short, to be what is falsely called poetical, he does sink, although he sinks by being pompous, not by being low. Onward we drove beneath the Castle ; caught, While crossing Magdalen Bridge, a glimpse of Cam, And at the Hoop alighted, famous inn. That last line shows excellently how a poet may sink with his subject by resolving not to sink with it. A page or two further on, the subject rises to grandeur, and then Words- worth is nobly worthy of it : CO The antechapel, where the statue stood Of Newton with his prism and silent face. The marble index of a mind for ever Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone. But the supreme poet is he who is thoroughly sotmd and poetical, alike when his subject is grand, and when it is plain : with him the subject may sink, but never the poet. But a Dutch painter does not rise and sink with his sub- ject, — Defoe, in Moll Flanders, does not rise and sink with • Iliad, xvii, 216. 398 ON TRANSLATING HOMER his subject, — ^in so far as an artist cannot be said to sink who is sound in his treatment of his subject, however plain it is : yet Defoe, yet a Dutch painter, may in one sense be said to sink with their subject, because though sound in their treat- ment of it, they are not poetical, — poetical in the true, not the false sense of the word ; because, in fact, they are not in the grand style. Homer can in no sense be said to sink with his subject, because his soundness has something more than Uteral naturalness about it ; because his soimdness is the soundness of Homer, of a great epic poet ; because, in lo fact, he is in the grand style. So he sheds over the simplest matter he touches the charm of his grand manner ; he makes everything noble. Nothing has raised more ques- tioning among my critics than these words, — noble, the grand style. People complain that I do not define these words sufficiently, that I do not teU them enough about them. ' The grand style, — but what is the grand style ? ' — they cry ; some with an inclination to beheve in it, but puzzled ; others mockingly and with increduUty. Alas ! the grand style is the last matter in the world for verbal 20 definition to deal with adequately. One may say of it as is said of faith : ' One must feel it in order to know what it is.' But, as of faith, so too one may say of nobleness, of the grand style : ' Woe to those who know it not ! ' Yet this expression, though indefinable, has a charm ; one is the better for considering it ; bonum est, nos hie esse ; nay, one loves to try to explain it, though one knows that one must speak imperfectly. For those, then, who ask the question, — ^What is the grand style ? — ^with sincerity, I will try to make some answer, inadequate as it must be. For those 30 who ask it mockingly I have no answer, except to repeat to them, with compassionate sorrow, the Gospel words : Moriemini in peccatis vestria, — Ye shall die in your sins. But let me, at any rate, have the pleasure of again giving, before I begin to try and define the grand style, a specimen of what it is : Standing on earth, not rapt above the pole. More safe I Bing with mortal voice, unchanged To hoarse or mute, though fall'n on evil days. On evil days though fall'n, and evil tongues. ... 40 There is the grand style in perfection ; and any one who has LAST WORDS 399 a sense for it, will feel it a thousand times better from re- peating those lines than from hearing anything I can say about it. Let us try, however, what can be said, controlling what we say by examples. I think it will be found that the grand style arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject. I think this definition wiU be found to cover aU instances of the grand style in poetry which present themselves . I think 10 it mU be found to exclude aU poetry which is not in the grand style. And I think it contains no terms which are obscure, which themselves need defining. Even those who do not understand what is meant by calling poetry noble, wiU understand, I imagine, what is meant by speaking of a noble nature in a man. But the noble or powerful nature — the bedeutendes individuum of Goethe, — is not enough. For instance, Mr. Newman has zeal for learning, zeal for thinking, zeal for liberty, and all these things are noble, they ennoble a man ; but he has not the poetical gift : there 20 must be the poetical gift, the ' divine faculty,' also. And, besides all this, the subject must be a serious one (for it is only by a kind of licence that we can speak of the grand style in comedy) ; and it must be treated with simplicity or severity. Here is the great difficulty : the poets of the world have been many ; there has been wanting neither abundance of poetical gift nor abundance of noble natures ; but a poetical gift so happy, in a noble nature so circum- stanced and trained, that the result is a continuous style, perfect in simpUcity or perfect in severity, has been ex- sotremely rare. One poet has had the gifts of nature and faculty in unequalled fulness, without the circumstances and training which make this sustained perfection of style possible. Of other poets, some have caught this perfect strain now and then, in short pieces or single lines, but have not been able to maintain it through considerable works ; others have composed all their productions in a style which, by comparison with the best, one must call secondary. The best model of the grand style simple is Homer ; 40 perhaps the best model of the grand style severe is Milton. But Dante is remarkable for affording admirable examples 400 ON TRANSLATING HOMER of both styles ; he has the grand style which arises from simplicity, and he has the grand style which arises from severity ; and from him I will illustrate them both. In a former lecture I pointed out what that severity of poetical style is, which comes from saying a thing with a kind of intense compression, or in an illusive, brief, almost haughty way, as if' the poet's mind were charged with so many and such grave matters, that he would not deign to treat any one of them exphcitly. Of this severity the last Une of the following stanza of the Purgatory is a good example. Dante lo has been telling Forese that Virgil had guided him through HeU, and he goes on : ^ Indi m' han tratto su gli suoi oonforti, Salendo e rigirando la Montagna Che drizza voi cJie il mondo fece torti. ' Thence hath his comforting aid led me up, climbing and circling the Mountain, which straightens you whom the world made crooked.' These last words, ' la Montagna che drizza voi che il mondo fece torti,' — ' the Mountain which straightens you whom the world made crooked,' — ^for the Mountain of 20 Purgatory, I call an excellent specimen of the grand style in severity, where the poet's mind is too full charged to suffer him to speak more exphcitly. But the very next stanza is a beautiful specimen of the grand style in simpHcity, where a noble nature and a poetical gift unite to utter a thing with the most limpid plainness and clearness : ^ Tanto dice di farmi sua oompagna Ch' io sarb Ik dove fia Beatrice ; Quivi oonvien che senza lui rimagna. ' So long,' Dante continues, ' so long he (Virgil) saith he so wiU bear me company, until I shaU be there where Beatrice is ; there it behoves that without him I remain.' But the noble simplicity of that in the ItaHan no words of mine can render. Both these styles, the simple and the severe, are truly grand ; the severe seems, perhaps, the grandest, so long as we attend most to the great personaUty, to the noble nature, in the poet its author ; the simple seems the grandest when '■ Purgatory, zxiii, 124. " Ihid., xxiii, 127. LAST WORDS 401 we attend most to the exquisite faculty, to the poetical gift. But the simple is no doubt to be preferred. It is the more magical : in the other there is something intellectual, some- thing which gives scope for a play of thought which may exist where the poetical gift is either wanting or present in only inferior degree : the severe is much more imitable, and this a little spoUa its charm. A kind of semblance of this style keeps Young going, one may say, through aU the nine parts of that most indifferent production, the NightThotights. 10 But the grand style in simphcity is inimitable : aiijv aa(pa\i]s ovK iy^vr' ovt' AlaKiSc^ Ttaph UriKu^ ovre nap' AvTiOicp KdS^^;* KiyovToi fMV ^porSiv 6\Pov inrepraTov oi (rx^"', oi re xal xP^^^af^^vKOiv fieKirofievdv tv opei KoiadVf Kal tv i-mairvKois dtov Qii^ais . . .^ There is a hmpidness in that, a want of salient points to seize and transfer, which makes imitation impossible, except by a genius akin to the genius which produced it. 20 Greek simplicity and Greek grace are inimitable ; but it is said that the Iliad may stiU be ballad-poetry while in- finitely superior to all other ballads, and that, in my speci- mens of English ballad-poetry, I have been imfair. Well, no doubt there are better things in English ballad-poetry than Now Christ thee save, thou proud porter. . . . but the real strength of a chain, they say, is the strength of its weakest link ; and what I was trying to show you was, that the English ballad-style is not an instrument of enough 30 compass and force to correspond to the Greek hexameter ; that, owing to an inherent weakness in it as an epic style, it easily runs into one of two faults, — either it is prosaic and humdrum, or, trjdng to avoid that fault, and to make itself lively {se faire vif), it becomes pert and jaunty. To show that, the passage about King Adland's porter serves very well. But these degradations are not proper to a true epic instrument, such as the Greek hexameter. ' ' A secure time fell to the lot neither of Peleus the son of jEacus, nor of the god-like Cadmus ; howbeit these are said to have had, of all mortals, the supreme of happiness, who heard the golden-snooded Muses sing, one of them on the mountain (Felion), the other in seveu-gated Thebes.' AENOLD J) (J 402 ON TRANSLATING HOMEB You may say, if you like, when you find Homer's verse, even in describing the plainest matter, neither humdrum nor jaunty, that this is because he is so incomparably better a poet than other balladists, because he is Homer. But take the whole range of Greek epic poetry, — ^take the later poets, the poets of the last ages of this poetry, many of them most indifferent, — Coluthus, Tryphiodorus, Quintus of Smyrna, Nonnus. Never wUl you find in this instrument of the hexameter, even in their hands, the vices of the baUad-style in the weak moments of this last : everywhere the hexa- lo meter, — a noble, a truly epical instrument, — ^rather resists the weakness of its employer than lends itselJE to it. Quintus of Smyrna is a poet of merit, but certainly not a poet of a high order : with him, too, epic poetry, whether in the character of its prosody or in that of its diction, is no longer the epic poetry of earlier and better times, nor epic poetry as again restored by Nonnus : but even in Quintus of- Smjrrna, I say, the hexameter is still the hexameter ; it is a style which the baUad-style, even in the hands of better poets, cannot rival. And in the hands of inferior poets, the 20 ballad-style sinks to vices of which the hexameter, even in the hands of a Tryphiodorus, never can become guilty. But a critic, whom it is impossible to read without plea- sure, and the disguise of whose initials I am sure I may be allowed to penetrate, — ^Mr. Spedding, — says that he ' denies altogether that the metrical movement of the English hexa- meter has any resemblance to that of the Greek.' Of course, in that case, if the two metres in no respect correspond, praise accorded to the Greek hexameter as an epical instru- ment wiU not extend to the EngUsh. Mr. Spedding seeks 30 to establish his proposition by pointing out that the system of accentuation differs in the EngUsh and in the VirgUian hexameter ; that in the first, the accent and the long syllable (or what has to do duty as such) coincide, in the second they do not. He says that we cannot be so sure of the accent with which Greek verse should be read as of that with which Latin should ; but that the lines of Homer in which the accent and the long syllable coiucide as in the English hexameter, are certainly very rare. He suggests a type of Enghsh hexameter in agreement with the VirgUian 40 model, and formed on the supposition that ' quantity is as LAST WORDS 403 distinguishable in English as in Latin or Greek by any ear that will attend to it.' Of the truth of this supposition he entertains no doubt. The new hexameter will, Mr. Sped- ding thinks, at least have the merit of resembling, in its metrical movement, the classical hexameter, which merit the ordinary English hexameter has not. But even with this improved hexameter he is not satisfied ; and he goes on, first to suggest other metres for rendering Homer, and finally to suggest that rendering Homer is impossible. 10 A scholar to whom all who admire Lucretius owe a large debt of gratitude, — ^Mr . Mimro, — ^hasreplied to Mr. Spedding. Mr. Munro declares that ' the accent of the old Greeks and Romans resembled our accent only in name, in reality was essentially different ; ' that ' our English reading of Homer and Virgil has in itself no meaning ; ' and that ' accent has nothing to do with the Virgilian hexameter.' If this be so, of course the merit which Mr. Spedding attributes to his own hexameter, of really corresponding with the Virgilian hexameter, has no existence. Again ; in contradiction to 20 Mr. Spedding's assertion that lines in which (in our reading of them) the accent and the long syllable coincide,^ as in the ordinary English hexameter, are ' rare even in Homer,' Mr. Munro declares that such lines, ' instead of being rare, are among the very commonest types of Homeric rhythm.' Mr. Spedding asserts that ' quantity is as distinguishable in English as in Latin or Greek by any ear that wall attend to it ; ' but Mr. Munro replies, that in English ' neither his ear nor his reason recognises any real distinction of quantity except that which is produced by accentuated and unac- 30 centuated syllables.' He therefore arrives at the conclusion, that in constructing English hexameters, ' quantity must be utterly discarded ; and longer or shorter unaccentuated syllables can have no meaning, except so far as they may be made to produce sweeter or harsher sounds in the hands of a master.' It is not for me to interpose between two such com- batants ; and indeed my way Ues, not up the high-road where they are contending, but along a by-path. With the ' Lines such as the first of the Odyasey : 'AvSpa / D d 2 404 ON TRANSLATING HOMER absolute truth of their general propositions respecting accent and quantity, I have nothing to do ; it is most interesting and instructive to me to hear such propositions discussed, when it is Mr. Munro or Mr. Spedding who dis- cusses them ; but I have strictly limited myself in these lectures to the humble function of giving practical advice to the translator of Homer. He, I still think, must not foUow so confidently, as makers of English hexameters have hitherto f oUowed, Mr. Munro's maxim, — quantity may be utterly discarded. He must not, like Mr. Longfellow, lo make seventeen a dactyl in spite of all the length of its last syllable, even though he can plead that in counting we lay the accent on the first syllable of this word. He may be far from attaining Mr. Spedding's nicety of ear ; — may be unable to feel that ' while quantity is a dactyl, quiddity is a tribrach,' and that ' rapidly is a word to which we find no parallel in Latin ; ' — but I think he must bring himself to distinguish, with Mr. Spedding, between ' fA'o'erwearied eyehd,' and ' the wearied eyehd,' as being, the one a correct ending for a hexameter, the other an ending with a false 20 quantity in it ; instead of finding, with Mr. Munro, that this distinction " conveys to his mind no inteUigible idea.' He must temper his belief in Mr. Munro's dictum, — quantity must be utterly discarded, — ^by mixing with it a beUef in this other dictum of the same author, — two or more consonants take longer time in enunciating than one?- ' Substantially, however, in the question at issue between Mr. Munro and Mr. Spedding, I agree with Mr. Munro. By the italicised words in the following sentence, ' The rhythm of the Virgilian hexameter de- pends entirely on caesura, pause, and a due arrangement of words,' he has touched, it seems to me, in the constitution of this hexameter, .the central point, which Mr. Spedding misses. The accent, or heightened tone, of Virgil in reading lus own hexameters, was probably far from being the same thing as the accent or stress with wmoh we read them. The general effect of each line, in Virgil's mouth, was probably there- fore something widely different from what Mr. Spedding assumes it to have been : an ancient's accentual reading was something which allowed the metrical beat of the Latin line to be far more perceptible than our accentual reading allows it to be. On the question as to the real rhythm of the ancient hexameter, Mr. Newman has in his Reply a page quite admirable for force and precision. Here he is in his element, and his ability and aouteness have their proper scope. But it is true that the modem reading of the ancient hexameter is what the modern hexameter has to imitate, and that the LAST WORDS 403 Criticism is so apt in general to be vague and impalpable, that when it gives us a solid and definite possession, such as is Mr. Spedding's parallel of the Virgilian and the English hexameter with their difference of accentuation distinctly marked, we cannot be too grateful to it. It is in the way in which Mr. Spedding proceeds to press his conclusions from the parallel which he has drawn out, that his criticism seema to me to come a little short. Here even he, I think, shows (if he will allow me to say so) a Uttle of that want of pliancy 10 and suppleness so common among critics, but so dangerous to their criticism ; he is a little too absolute in imposing his metrical laws, he too much forgets the excellent maxim of Menander, so applicable to literary criticism : KaXbv ol v6not tX(p6Sp' elcriv 6 S' &pSiv Toiis vSfiOvs Xiav aicpi0Sk, avKofdvrtjs (paiveraf ' laws are admirable things ; but he who keeps his eye too closely fixed upon them, rims the risk of becoming ' — let us say, a purist. Mr. Spedding is probably mistaken in supposing that Virgil pronounced his hexameters as 20 Mr. Spedding pronounces them. He is almost certainly mistaken in supposing that Homer pronounced his hexa- meters as Mr. Spedding pronounces Virgil's. But this, as I have said, is not a question for us to treat ; all we are here concerned with is the imitation, by the English hexameter, of the ancient hexameter in its effect Ufon us moderns. Suppose we concede to Mr. Spedding that his parallel proves our accentuation of the English and of the Virgilian hexameter to be different : what are we to con- clude from that ; how will a criticism,— not a formal, but 30 a substantial criticism, — deal with such a fact as that ? WiU it infer, as Mr. Spedding infers, that the English hexameter, therefore, must not pretend to reproduce better than other rhythms the movement of Homer's hexameter for us ; that there can be no correspondence at all between the movement of these two hexameters ; that, if we want to have such a correspondence, we must abandon the current English hexameter altogether, and English reading of the Virgilian hexameter is as Mr. Spedding describes it. Why this reading has not been imitated by the English hexameter, I have tried to point out in the text. 408 ON TRANSLATING HOMER adopt in its place a new hexameter of Mr. Spedding's Anglo-Latin type ; substitute for lines like the Clearly the rest I behold of the dark-eyed sons of Aohaia . . i of Dr. Hawtrey, hnes like the Procession, complex melodies, pause, quantity, accent. After Virgiliau precedent and practice, in order . . . of Mr. Spedding ? To infer this, is to go, as I have com- plained of Mr. Newman for sometimes going, a great deal too fast . I think prudent criticism must certainly recognise, in the current English hexameter, a fact which cannot so lo lightly be set aside ; it must acknowledge that by this hexameter the English ear, the genius of the English language, have, in their own way, adopted, have translated for themselves the Homeric hexameter ; and that a rhythm which has thus grown up, which is thus, in a maimer, the production of nature, has in its general type something necessary and inevitable, something which admits change only within narrow limits, which precludes change that is sweeping and essential. I think, therefore, the prudent critic will regard Mr. Spedding's proposed revolution as 20 simply impracticable. He wiU feel that in Enghsh poetry the hexameter, if used at all, must be, in the main, the English hexameter now current. He will perceive that its having come into existence as the- representative of the Homeric hexameter, proves it to have, for the English ear, a certain correspondence with the Homeric hexa- meter, although this correspondence may be, from the difierence of the Greek and English languages, necessarily incomplete. This incompleteness he will endeavour,^ as ' Such a minor change I have attempted by occasionally shifting, in the first foot of the hexameter, the accent from the first syllable to the second. In the current English hexameter, it is on the first. Mr. Spedding, who proposes radically to subvert the constitution of this hexameter, seems not to understand that any one can propose to modify it partially ; he can comprehend revolution in this metre, but not reform. Accordingly he asks me how I can bring myself to say, ' Be- tween that and the ships,' or ' TMre sat fifty men ; ' or how I can reconcile such forcing of the accent with my own rule, that ' hexa- meters must read themselves.' Presently he says that he cannot believe 1 do pronounce these words so, but that he thinks I leave out the accent in the first foot altogether, and thus get an hexameter with only five LAST WORDS 407 he may find or fancy himself able, gradually somewhat to lessen through minor changes, suggested by the ancient hexameter, but respecting the general constitution of the modern : the notion of making it disappear altogether by the critic's inventing in his closet a new constitution of his own for the English hexameter, he will judge to be a chimerical dream. When, therefore, Mr. Spedding objects to the English hexameter, that it imperfectly represents the movement 10 of the ancient hexameter, I answer : We must work with the tools we have. The received EngUsh type, in its general outlines, is, for England, the necessary given type of this metre ; it is by rendering the metrical beat of its pattern, not by rendering the accentual beat of it, that the English language has adapted the Greek hexameter. To render the metrical beat of its pattern is something ; by effecting so much as this the English hexameter puts itself in closer relations with its original, it comes nearer to its movement, than any other metre which does not 20 even effect so much as this ; but Mr. Spedding is dis- satisfied with it for not effecting more stUl, for not render- ing the accentual beat too. If he asks me why the English hexameter has not tried to render this too, wTiy it has confined' itself to rendering the metrical beat, why, in accents. He will pardon me : I pronounce, as I suppose he himaeU does, if he reads the words naturally, ' between that and the ships,' and" There sate fifty men.' Mr. Spedding is familiar enough with this accent on the second syllable in Virgil's hexameters ; in ' et U montosae,' or ' Ve?cioes jaoulo.' Such a change is an attempt to relieve the monotony of the current English hexameter by occasionally altering the position of one of its accents ; it is not an attempt to make a wholly new English hexameter by habitually altering the position of four of them, very likely it is an unsuccessful attempt ; but at any rate it does not violate what I think is the fundamental rule for English hexameters, — ^that they be such as to read themselves without necessitating, on the reader's part, any non-natural putting-on or taking-off of accent. Hexameters like these of Mr. Longfellow, In that delightful land which is washed by the Delaware's waters . . . and. As if they fain would appease the Dryads, whose haunts they molested . . . violate this rule ; and they are very common. I think the blemish of Mr. Dart's recent meritorious version of the Iliad is that it contains too many of them. 408 ON TRANSLATING HOMEB short, it is itself, and not Mr. Spedding's new hexameter, — that is a question which I, whose only business is to give practical advice to a translator, am not bound to answer ; but I wUl not decline to answer it nevertheless. I will suggest to Mr. Spedding that, as I have already said, the modern hexameter is merely an attempt to imitate the effect of the ancient hexameter, as read by us modems ; that the great object of its imitation has been the hexa- meter of Homer ; that of this hexameter such lines as those which Mr. Spedding declares to be so rare, even in lo Homer, but which are in truth so common, — alines in which the quantity and the reader's accent coincide, — are, for the English reader, just from that simplicity (for him) of rhythm which they owe to this very coincidence, the master-type ; that so much is this the case, that one may again and again notice an English reader of Homer, in reading Unes where his VirgUian accent would not coincide with the quantity, abandoning this accent, and reading the Unes (as we say) by quantity, reading them as if he were scanning them ; while foreigners neglect our VirgUian 20 accent even in reading Virgil, read even Virgil by quantity, making the accents coincide with the long syllables. And no doubt the hexameter of a kindred language, the German, based on this mode of reading the ancient hexameter, has had a powerful influence upon the type of its Enghsh fellow. But all this shows how extremely powerfid accent is for us moderns, since we find not even Greek and Latin quantity perceptible enough without it. Yet in these languages, where we have been accustomed always to look for it, it is far more perceptible to us Englishmen than 30 in our own language, where we have not been accustomed to look for it. And here is the true reason why Mr. Sped- ding's hexameter is not and cannot be the current English hexameter, even though it is based on the accentuation which EngUshmen give to all Virgil's lines, and to many of Homer's, — ^that the quantity which in Greek or Latin words we feel, or imagine we feel, even though it be un- supported by accent, we do not feel or imagine we feel in EngUsh words, when it is thus unsupported. For example, in repeating the Latin line, 40 Ipsa tibi blandos fundent cunabula flores . . , LAST WORDS 409 an Englishman feels the length of the second syllable of fundent, although he lays the accent on the first ; but in repeating Mr. Spedding's line, Softly Cometh elumber closing th'o'erwearied eyelid, the English ear, full of the accent on the first syllable of closing, has really no sense at all of any length in its second. The metrical beat of the line is thus quite destroyed. So when Mr. Spedding proposes a new Anglo-VirgUian hexameter he proposes an impossibility ; when he ' denies 10 altogether that, the metrical movement of the EngUsh hexameter has any resemblance to that of the Greek,' he denies too much ; when he declares that, ' were every other metre impossible, an attempt to translate Homer into English hexameters might be permitted, but that such an attempt he himself would never read,' he exhibits, it seems to me, a little of that obduracy and over-vehemence in liking and disliking, — a remnant, I suppose, of our insular ferocity, — to which Enghsh .criticism is so prone. He ought to be enchanted to meet with a good attempt 20 in any metre, even though he would never have advised it, even though its success be contrary to all his expecta- tions ; for it is the critic's first duty, — prior even to his duty of stigmatising what is bad — to welcome everything that is good. In welcoming this, he must at all times bo ready, like the Christian convert, even to burn what he used to worship, and to worship what he used to burn. Nay, but he need not be thus inconsistent in welcoming it ; he may retain all his principles : principles endure, cir- cumstances change ; absolute success is one thing, relative so success another. Relative success may take place jm.der the most diverse conditions ; and it is in appreciating the good in even relative success, it is in taking into account the change of circumstances, that the critic's judgment is tested, that his versatility must display itself. He is to keep his idea of the best, of perfection, and at the same time to be willingly accessible to every second best which o£Eers itself. So I enjoy the ease and beauty of Mr. Sped- ding's stanza. Therewith to all the gods in order due . . . 40 I welcome it, in the absence of equally good poetry in 410 OJST TRANSLATING HOMER another metre,^ although I still think the stanza unfit to render Homer thoroughly well, although I stiU think other metres fit to render him better. So I concede to Mr. Spedding that every form of translation, prose or verse, must more or less break up Homer in order to reproduce him ; but then I urge that that form which needs to break him up least is to be preferred. So I concede to him that the test proposed by me for the translator, — a competent scholar's judgment whether the translation more or less reproduces for him the effect of the original, — is not per- lo fectly satisfactory ; but I adopt it as the best we can get, as the only test capable of being reaUy applied ; for Mr. Spedding's proposed substitute, — ^the translation's making the same effect, more or less, upon the unlearned which the original makes upon the scholar, — is a test which can never really be applied at aU. These two impressions, — that of the scholar, and that of the luileamed reader, — can, practically, never be accurately compared ; they are, and must remain, like those lines we read of in Euchd, which, though produced ever so far, can never meet. So, 20 again, I concede that a good verse-translation of Homer, ^ As I welcome another more recent attempt in stanza, — Mr. Worsley'a version of the Odyssey in Spenser's measure. Mr. Worsley does me the honour to notice some remarks of mine on this measure : I had said that its greater intricacy made it a worse measure than even the ten-syllable couplet to employ for rendering Homer. He points out, in answer, that ' the more complicated the correspondences in a poetical measure, the less obtrusive and absolute are the rhymes.' This is true, and subtly remarked ; but I never denied that the single shocks of rhyme in the couplet were more strongly felt than those in the stanza j I said that the more frequent recurrence of the same rhyme, in the stanza, necessarily made this measure more intricate. The stanza repacks Homer's matter yet more arbitrarily, and therefore changes hia movement yet more radically, than the couplet. Accordingly, I imagine a nearer approach to a perfect translation of Homer is possible in the couplet, well managed, than in the stanza, however well managed. But meanwhile Mr. Worsley, — applying the Spenserian stanza, that beautiful romantic measure, to the most romantic poem of the ancient world ; making this stanza yield him, too (what it never yielded to Byron), its treasures of fluidity and sweet ease ; above aU, bringing to his task a truly poetical sense and skiU, — has produced a version of the Odyssey much the most pleasing of those mtherto produced, and which is delightful to read. For the public this may well be enough, nay, more than enough ; but for the critic even this is not yet quite enough. LAST WORDS 411 or, indeed, of any poet, is very diffictilt, and that a good prose-translation is much easier ; but then I urge that a verse-translation, while giving the pleasure which Pope's has given, might at the same time render Homer more faithfully than Pope's ; and that this being possible, we ought not to cease wishing for a source of pleasure which no prose-translation can ever hope to rival. Wishing for such a verse-translation of Homer, beUeving that rhythms have natural tendencies which, within certain 10 limits, inevitably govern them ; having little faith, there- fore, that rhythms which have manifested tendencies utterly un-Homeric can so change themselves as to become well adapted for rendering Homer, — I have looked about for the rhythm which seems to depart least from the tendencies of Homer's rhythm. Such a rhythm I think may be found in the English hexameter, somewhat modified. I look with hope towards continued attempts at perfecting and employing this rhythm ; but my belief in the immediate success of such attempts is far less confident than has been 20 supposed. Between the recognition of this rhythm as ideaUy the best, and the recommendation of it to the translator for instant practical use, there must come all that consideration of circumstances, all that phancy in forgoing, under the pressure of certain difS.culties, the absolute best, which I have said is so indispensable to the critic. The hexameter is, comparatively, stUl unfamiliar in England ; many people have a great dislike to it. A certain degree of unfamiliarity, a certain degree of dislike, are obstacles with which it is not wise to contend. 30 It is difficult to say at present whether the dislike to this rhythm is so strong and so wide-spread that it wUl prevent its ever becoming thoroughly familiar. I think not, but it is too soon to decide. I am incHned to think that the dislike of it is rather among the professional critics than among the general pubUo ; I think the reception which Mr. Longfellow's Evangeline has met with indicates this. I think that even now, if a version of the Iliad in Bnghsh hexameters were made by a poet who, like Mr. Longfellow, has that indefinable quality which renders him popular, — 40 something attractive in his talent, which communicates itself to his verses, — it would have a great success among 412 ON TRANSLATING HOMER the general public. Yet a version of Homer in hexameters of the Evangdine type would not satisfy the judicious, nor is the definite establishment of this type to be desired ; and one would regret that Mr. Longfellow should, even to popularise the hexameter, give the immense labour required ■for a translation of Homer, when one could not wish his work to stand. Rather it is to be wished, that by the efforts of poets like Mr. Longfellow in original poetry, and the efforts of less distinguished poets in the task of translation, the hexameter may gradually be made familiar lo to the ear of the EhgKsh public ; at the same time that there gradually arises, out of all these efforts, an improved type of this rhythm ; a t3rpe which some man of genius may sign with the final stamp, and employ in rendering Homer ; an hexameter which may be as superior to Vosse's as Shakspeare's blank verse is superior to Schiller's. I am incUned to believe that all this travail wiU actually take place, because I believe that modern poetry is actually in want of such an iustrument as the hexameter. In the meantime, whether this rhythm be destined to 20 success or not, let us steadily keep in mind what originally made us turn to it. We turned to it because we required certain Homeric characteristics in a translation of Homer, and because aU other rhythms seemed to find, from different causes, great difficulties in satisfying this our requirement. If the hexameter is impossible, it one of these other rhythms must be used, let us keep this rhythm always in mind of our requirements and of its own faults, let us compel it to get rid of these latter as much as possible. It may be necessary to have recourse to blank verse ; but then blank 30 verse must de-Gowperise itself, must get rid of the habits of stiff self-retardation which make it say ' Not. fewer shone,' for ' So many shone.' Homer moves swiftly : blank verse can move swiftly if it likes, but it must remember that the movement of such lines as A thousand fires were burning, and by each . . . is just the slow movement which makes us despair of it. Homer moves with noble ease : blank verse must not be suffered to forget that the movement of Came they not over from sweet Laoedaemon ... 40 LAST WORDS 413 is ungainly. Homer's expression of his thought is simple as Ught : we know how blank verse affects such locutions as While the steeds mouth'd their corn ahof . . . and such modes of expressing one's thought are sophisti- cated and artificial. One sees how needful it is to direct incessantly the English translator's attention to the essential characteristics of Homer's poetry, when so accomplished a person as Mr. Spedding, reoognisiag these characteristics as indeed 10 Homer's, admitting them to be essential, is led by the ingrained habits and tendencies of EngUsh blank verse thus repeatedly to lose sight of them in translating even a few lines. One sees this yet more clearly, when Mr. Spedding, taking me to task for saying that the blank verse used for rendering Homer ' must not be Mr. Tenny- son's blank verse,' declares that in most of Mr. Tennyson's blank verse all Homer's essential characteristics, — ' rapidity of movement, plainness of words and style, simplicity and directness of ideas, and, above all, nobleness of manner, are ao as conspicuous as in Homer himself.' This shows, it seems to me, how hard it is for Enghsh readers of poetry, even the most accomplished, to feel deeply and permanently what Greek plamness of thought and Greek simpUcity of expres- sion really are : they admit the importance of these qualities in a general way, but they have no ever-present sense of them ; and they easily attribute them to any poetry which has other excellent quahties, and which they very much admire. No doubt there are plainer things in Mr. Tennyson's poetry than the three Hnes I quoted ; in 30 choosing them, as in choosing a specimen of ballad-poetry, I wished to bring out clearly, by a strong instance, the quahties of thought and style to which I was calling atten- tion ; but when Mr. Spedding talks of a plainness of thought like Homer's, of a plainness of speech like Homer's, and says that he finds these constantly in Mr. Tennyson's poetry, I answer that these I do not find there at all. Mr. Tennyson is a most distinguished and charming poet ; but the very essential characteristic of his poetry is, it seems to me, an extreme subtlety and curious elaborateness of 40 thought, an extreme subtlety and ciuious elaborateness or or 414 ON TRANSLATING HOMER of expression. In the best and most characteristic pro- ductions of his genius, these characteristics are most prominent. They are marked characteristics, as we have seen, of the Elizabethan poets ; they are marked, though not the essential, characteristics of Shakspeare himself. Under the influences of the nineteenth century, under wholly new conditions of thought and culture, they mani- fest themselves in Mr. Tennyson's poetry in a wholly new way. But they are stUl there. The essential bent of his poetry is towards such expressions as lo Now lies the Earth all Danae to the stars . . . O'er the sun's bright eye Drew the vast eyelid of an inky cloud . . . When the oaim'd mountain was a shadow, suun'd The world to peace again . . . The fresh young captains flash' d their gMttering teeth. The huge hush-bearded barons heaved and blew ... 20 He bared the knotted column of his throat, The massive square of his heroic breast, And arms on which the standing muscle sloped As slopes a wild brook o'er a, little stone. Running too vehemently to break upon it . . . And this way of speaking is the least plain, the most unHomeric, which can possibly be conceived. Homer presents his thought tt) you just as it wells from the source of his mind : Mr. Tennyson carefully distils his thought 30 before he wiU part with it. Hence comes, in the expres- sion of the thought, a heightened and elaborate air. In Homer's poetry it is aU natural thoughts in natural words ; in Mr. Tennyson's poetry it is all distilled thoughts in distUled words. Exactly this heightening and elaboration may be observed in Mr. Spedding's While the steeds mouth'd their corn aloof . , , (an expression which might have been Mr. Tennyson's), on which I have already commented ; and to one who is penetrated with a sense of the real simpUcity of Homer, 40 or LAST WORDS 415 this subtle sophistication of the thought is, I think, very perceptible even in such lines as these, And drunk delight of battle with my peers, Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy . . which I have seen quoted as perfectly Homeric. Perfect simplicity can be obtained only by a genius of which perfect simplicity is an essential characteristic. So true is this, that when a genius essentially subtle, or a genius which, from whatever cause, is in its essence 10 not truly and broadly simple, determines to be perfectly plain, determines not to admit a shade of subtlety or curiosity into its expression, it cannot even then attain real simplicity; it can only attain a semblance of sim- plicity .^ French criticism, richer in its vocabulary than ours, has invented a useful word to distinguish this sem- blance (often very beautiful and valuable) from the real quality. The real quality it calls simpliciti, the semblance sinvplesse. The one is natural simplicity, the other is artificial simplicity. What is called simplicity in the pro- ao ductions of a genius essentially not simple, is in truth simplesse. The two are distinguishable from one another the moment they appear in company. For instance, let us take the opening of the narrative in Wordsworth's Michael : Upon the forest-side in Grasmere Vale There dwelt a shepherd, Michael was his name ; An old man, stout of heart, and strong of limb. His bodily frame had been from youth to age Of an unusual strength ; his mind was keen, 30 Intense, and frugal, apt for all affairs ; And in his shepherd's calling he was prompt And watchful more than ordinary men. Now let us take the opening of the narrative in Mr. Tenny- son's Dora : With Farmer Allan at the farm abode WUliam and Dora. William was his son, 1 I speak of poetic genius as employing itself upon narrative or dramatic poetry, — ^poetry in which the poet has to go out of himself and to create. In lyrical poetry, in the direct expression of personal feeling, the most subtle genius may, under the momentary pressure of passion, express itself simply. Even here, however, the native tendency will generally be discernible. 416 ON TRANSLATING HOMER And Bhe his niece. He often looked at them, And often thought, ' I'll make them man and wife.' The simplicity of the first of these passages is simpliciti ; that of the second, siw/plesse. Let us take the end of the same two poems ; first, of Michad : — The cottage which was named the Evening Star Is gone — ^the ploughshare has been through the ground On which it stood ; great changes have been wrought In all the neighbourhood : yet the oak is left That grew beside their door: and the remains 10 Of the unfinished sheepfold may be seen Beside the boisterous brook of Green-head GhyU. And now, of Dora : So those four abode Within one house together; and as years Went forward, Mary took another mate : But Dora lived immarried till her death. A heedless critic may call both of these passages simple if he will. Simple, in a certain sense, they both are ; but between the simpUcity of the two there is all the difference 20 that there is between the simpUcity of Homer and the simpUcity of Moschus. But, — ^whether the hexameter estabUsh itself or not, whether a truly simple and rapid blank verse be obtained or not, as the vehicle for a standard English translation of Homer, — I feel sure that this vehicle wiU not be furnished by the baUad-form. On this question about the baUad- character of Homer's poetry, I see that Professor Blackie proposes a compromise : he suggests that those who say Homer's poetry is pure ballad-poetry, and those who deny 30 that it is ballad-poetry at aU, should spUt the difference between them ; that it should be agreed that Homer's poems are ballads a little, but not so much as some have said. I am very sensible to the courtesy of the terms in which Mr. Blackie invites me to this compromise ; but I cannot, I am sorry to say, accept it ; I cannot allow that Homer's poetry is ballad-poetry at all. A want of capacity for sustained nobleness seems to me inherent in the baUad-f orm, when employed for epic poetry. The more we examine this proposition, the more certain, I think, 40 wiU it become to lis. Let us but observe how a great LAST WORDS 417 poet, having to deliver a narrative very weighty and serious, instinctively shrinks from the ballad-form as from a form not commensurate with his subject-matter, a form too narrow and shallow for it, and seeks for a form which has more amplitude and impressiveness. Every one knows the Lucy Oray and the Ruth, of Wordsworth. Both poems are excellent ; but the subject-matter of the narrative of Ruth is much more weighty and impressive to the poet's own feeling than that of the narrative of Lucy Gray, for 10 which latter, in its unpretending simplicity, the ballad- form is quite adequate. Wordsworth, at the time he com- posed Ruth, — his great time, his annus mirabiUs, about 1800, — strove to be simple ; it was his mission to be simple ; he loved the ballad-form, he clung to it, because it was simple. Even in Ruth he tried, one may say, to use it ; he would have used it if he could : but the gravity of his matter is too much for this somewhat slight form ; he is obliged to give to his form more amplitude, more august- ness, to shake out its folds. 20 The wretched parents all that night Went shouting far and wide ; But there was neither sound nor sight To serve them for a guide. That is beautiful, no doubt, and the form is adequate to the subject-matter. But take this, on the other hand : I, too, have passed her on the hills, Setting her little water-mills By spouts and fountains wild ; Such small machinery as she tum'd, 30 Ere she had wept, ere she had moum'd, A young and happy child. Who does not perceive how the greater fulness and weight of his matter has hei;e compelled the true and feehng poet to adopt a form of more volume than the simple ballad- form ? It is of narrative poetry that I am speaking ; the ques- tion is about the use of the ballad -form for this. I say that for this poetry (when in the grand style, as Homer's is) the ballad-form is entirely inadequate ; and that 40 Homer's translator must not adopt it, because it even ARNOLD B Q 418 ON TRANSLATING HOMER leads him, by its own weakness, away from the grand style rather than towards it. We must remember that the matter of narrative poetry stands in a different relation to the vehicle which conveys it, — ^is not so independent of this vehicle, so absorbing and powerful in itself, — as the matter of purely emotional poetry. When there comes in poetry what I may call the lyrical cry, this transfigures everything, makes everything grand ; the simplest form may be here even an advantage, because the flame of the emotion glows through and through it more easily. To lo go again for an illustration to Wordsworth ; — our great poet, since Milton, by his performance, as Keats, I think, is our great poet by his gfit and promise ; — ^in one of his stanzas to the Cuckoo, we have : And I can listen to thee yet ; Can lie upon the plain And listen, till I do beget That golden time again. Here the lyrical cry, though taking the simple baUad-form, is as grand as the lyrical cry coming in poetry of an ampler 20 form, as grand as the An innocent life, yet far astray ! . . . of Ruth ; as the There is a comfort in the strength of love . . . of Michael. In this way, by the occiurrence of this lyrical cry, the ballad-poets themselves rise sometimes, though not so often as one might perhaps have hoped, to the grand style. lang, lang may their ladies sit, Wi' their fans into their hand, 30 Or ere they see Sir Patrick Spenco Come sailing to' the land. . lang, lang may the ladies stand, Wi' their gold combs in their hair. Waiting for their ain dear lords. For they'll see them nae mair. , But from this impressiveness of the ballad-form, when its subject-matter fills it over and over again, — is indeed, in itself, all in all, — one must not infer its effectiveness when LAST WORDS 419 its subject-matter is not thus overpowering, in the great body of a narrative. But, after all. Homer is not a better poet than the balladists, because he has taken in the hexameter a better instrument ; he took this instrument because he was a different poet from them ; so different, — not only so much better, but so essentially different, — that he is not to be classed with them at all. Poets receive their dis- tinctive character, not from their subject, but from their 10 application to that subject of the ideas (to quote the Excursion) On God, on Nature, and on human life . . . which they have acquired for themselves. In the ballad- poets in general, as in men of a rude and early stage of the world, in whom their humanity is not yet variously and fully developed, the stock of these ideas is scanty, and the ideas themselves not very effective or profound. From them the narrative itself is the great matter, not the spirit and significance which underlies the narrative. Even 20 in later times of richly developed life and thought, poets appear who have what may be called a balladist's mind ; in whom a fresh and lively curiosity for the outward spectacle of the world is much more strong than their sense of the inward significance of that spectacle. When they apply ideas to their narrative of human events, you feel that they are, so to speak, travelhng out of their own province : in the best of them you feel this perceptibly, but in those of a lower order you feel it very strongly. Even Sir Walter Scott's efforts of this kind, — even, for 30 instance, the Breathes there the man with soul so dead . . or the Oh woman ! in our hours of ease . . . even these leave, I think, as high poetry, much to be desired ; far more than the same poet's descriptions of a hunt or a battle. But Lord Macaulay's Then out spake brave Horatias, The captain of the gate : ' To all the men upon this earth Death cometh soon or late.' . . . E e 2 420 ON TRANSLATING HOMER (and here, since I have been reproached with undervaluing Lord Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome, let me frankly say that, to my mind, a man's power to detect the ring of false metal in those Lays is a good measure of his fitness to give an opinion about poetical matters at all) — I say, Lord Macaulay's To all the men upon this earth Death oometh soon or late, it is hard to read without a cry of pain. But with Homer it is very different. This ' noble barbarian,' this ' savage lo with the lively eye,' — whose verse Mr. Newman thinks, would afEect us, if we could hear the living Homer, ' like an elegant and simple melody from an African of the Gold Coast,' — ^is never more at home, never more nobly himself, than in applying profound ideas to his narrative. As a poet he belongs, — narrative as is his poetry, and early as is his date, — ^to an incomparably more developed spiritual and intellectual order than the balladists, or than Scott and Macaulay ; he is here as much to be distinguished from thein, and in the same way, as Milton is to be dis- 20 tinguished from them. He is, indeed, rather to be classed with Milton than with the balladists and Scott ; for what he has in common with Milton, — ^the noble and profound application of ideas to life, is the most essential part of poetic greatness. The most essentially grand and charac- teristic things of Homer are such things as avSpbs ncuSo^ovoLo ttotI ffTofxa x^^P ^psy^oOat . . ,^ or as Kal (T^, yepoVj TO irplv ixiv atcovof^ev o\0iov uvat ..." 33 or as £/s y&p eiT€ic\ai(iavro Oiol SciKntffi ^poTotfftv, ^weiv axwixkvovs' avTol Se r d«j;5^es iiciv . . ? ' ' And I have endured, — the like whereof no soul upon the earth hath yet endured, — ^to carry to my lips the hand of him who slew my child.' — Iliad, xxiv, 505. ^ ' Nay and thou too, old man, in times past wert, as we hear, happy.' — Iliad, xxiv, 543. In the original this line, for mingled pathos and dignity, is perhaps without a rival even in Homer. ' ' For so have the gods spun our destiny to us wretched mortals, — that we should live in sorrow ; but they themselves are without trouble.' — Iliad, xxiv, 525. LAST WORDS 421 and of these the tone is given, far better than by anything of the balladists, by such things as the lo no piangeva : si dentro impietrai ; PiangeYan elli . . . ' of Dante ; or the FaU'n Cherub ! to be weak is miserable . . . of Milton. I suppose I must, before I conclude, say a word or two about my own hexameters ; and yet truly, on such a topic, 10 1 am almost ashamed to trouble you. From those perish- able objects I feel, I can truly say, a most Oriental detach- ment. You yourselves a.re witnesses how little importance, when I offered them to you, I claimed for them, — ^how humble a function I designed them to fill . I offered them, not as specimens of a competing translation of Homer, but as illustrations of certain canons which I had been trying to estabhsh for Homer's poetry. I said that these canons they might very well illustrate by failing as well as by succeeding : if they illustrate them in any manner, 20 1 am satisfied. I was thinking of the future translator of Homer, and trying to let him see as clearly as possible what I meant by the combination of characteristics which I assigned to Homer's poetry, — by saying that this poetry was at once rapid in movement, plain in words and style, simple and direct in its ideas, and noble in manner. I do not suppose that my own hexameters are rapid in move- ment, plain in words and style, simple and direct in their ideas, and noble in manner ; but I am in hopes that a translator, reading them with a genuine interest in his 80 subject, and without the slightest grain of personal feeling, may see more clearly, as he reads them, what I meant by saying that Homer's poetry is all these. I am in hopes - that he may be able to seize more distinctly, when he has before him my So shone forth, in front of Troy, by the bed of the Xanthus . . . or my Ah, unhappy pair, to Peleus why did we give you . . . ' ' / wept not : so of stone grew I within : — they wept.' — Hell, xxxiii. 49 (Carlyle's Translation, slightly altered). 422 ON TEANSLATING HOMER or my So he spake, and drove with a cry his steeds into battle . . . the exact points which I wish to him avoid in Cowper's So numerous seemed those fires the banks between . . . or in Pope's Unhappy coursers of immortal strain . . . or in Mr. Newman's He spake, and yelling, held a-front his single-hoofed horses. At the same time there may be innumerable points in mine which he ought to avoid also. Of the merit of his ownio compositions no composer can be admitted the judge. But thus humbly useful to the future translator I still hope my hexameters may prove ; and he it is, above all, whom one has to regard. The general public carries away little from discussions of this kind, except some vague notion that one advocates English hexameters, or that one has attacked Mr. Newman. On the mind of an adversary one never makes the faintest impression. Mr. Newman reads all one can say about diction, and his last word on the subject is, that he ' regards it as a question about to 20 open hereafter, whether a translator of Homer ought not to adopt the old dissyllabic landis, houndis, hartis ' (for lands, hounds, harts), and also ' the final en of the plural of verbs (we dancen, they singen, &c.) ', which ' still sub- sists in Lancashire.' A certain critic reads all one can say about style, and at the end of it arrives at the inference that, ' after all, there is some style grander than the grand stjde itself, since Shakspeare has not the grand manner, and yet has the supremacy over Milton ; ' another critic reads all one can say about rhythm, and the result is, that so he thinks Scott's rhythm, in the description of the death of Marmion, aU the better for being saccadi, because the dying ejaculations of Marmion were likely to be ' jerky.' How vain to rise up early, and to take rest late, from any zeal for proving to Mr. Newman that he must not, in trans- lating Homer, say houndis and dancen ; or to the first of the two critics above-quoted, that one poet may be a greater poetical force than another, and yet have a more unequal LAST WORDS 423 style ; or to the second, that the best art, having to repre- sent the death of a hero, does not set about imitatmg his dying noises ! Such critics, however, provide for an opponent's vivacity the charming excuse offered by Rivarol for his, when he was reproached with giving ofEence by it : ' Ah ! ' he exclaimed, ' no one considers how much pain every man of taste has had to suffer, before he ever inflicts any.' It is for the future translator that one must work. The 10 successful translator of Homer wiU have (or he cannot succeed) that true sense for his subject, and that dis- interested love of it, which are, both of them, so rare in literature, and so precious ; he wiU not be led ofE by any false scent ; he will have an eye for the real matter, and, where he thinks he may find any indication of this, no hint win be too slight for him, no shade will be too fine, no imperfections wiU turn him aside, — he wiU go before his adviser's thought, and help it out with his own. This is the sort of student that a critic of Homer should always 20 have in his thoughts ; but students of this sort are indeed rare. And how, then, can I help being reminded what a student of this sort we have just lost in Mr. Clough, whose name I have already mentioned in these lectmres ? He, too, was busy with Homer ; but it is not on that account that I now speak of him. Nor do I speak of him in order to call attention to his qualities and powers in general, admirable as these are. I mention him because, in so eminent a degree, he possessed these two invaluable 30 literary qualities, — a true sense for his object of study, and a single-hearted care for it. He had both ; but he had the second even more eminently than the first. He greatly developed the first through means of the second. In the study of art, poetry, or philosophy, he had the most undivided and disinterested love for his object in itself, the greatest aversion to mixing up with it anything accidental or personal. His interest was in literature itself ; and it was this which gave so rare a stamp to his character, which kept him so free from all taint of little- 40 ness. In the saturnalia of ignoble personal passions, of which the struggle for literary success, in old and crowded 4U ON TRANSLATING HOMER communities, offers so sad a spectacle, he never mingled. He had not yet traduced his friends, nor flattered his enemies, nor disparaged what he admired, nor praised what he despised. Those who knew him well had the conviction that, even with time, these literary arts would never be his. His poem, of which I before spoke, has some admirable Homeric qualities ; — out-of-doors fresh- ness, life, naturalness, buoyant rapidity. Some of the expressions in that poem, — 'Dangerous Corrievreckan . . . Where roads are unknown to Loch Nevish,' — come back lo now to my ear with the true Homeric ring. But that in him of which I think oftenest, is the Homeric simpHcity of his literary life. FIVE ESSAYS HITHERTO UNCOLLECTED DR. STANLEY'S LECTURES ON THE JEWISH CHURCH [Macmillan's Magazine, February 1863.] Hebs is a book on religious matters, which, meant for all the world to read, fulfils the indispensable duty of edifying at the same time that it informs. Here is a clergyman, who, looking at the Bible, sees its contents in their right proportion, and gives to each matter its due prominence. Here is an inquirer, who, treating Scripture history with a perfectly free spirit, — falsifying nothing, sophisticatiug nothing — ^treats it so that his freedom leaves the sacred power of that history inviolate. Who that had been 10 reproached with denying to an honest clergyman freedom to speak the truth, who that had been misrepresented as wishing to make religious truth the property of an aristo- cratic few, whUe to the multitude is thrown the sop of any convenient fiction, could desire a better opportunity than Dr. Stanley's book affords for showing what, in reUgious matters, is the true freedom of a religious speaker, and what the true demand and true right of his hearers ? His hearers are the many ; those who prosecute the religious life, or those who need to prosecute it. AU these 20 come to him with certain demands in virtue of certain needs. There remain a few of mankind who do not com« to him with these demands, or acknowledge these needs. Mr. Maurice (whom I name with gratitude and respect) says, in a remarkable letter, that I thus assert them to be without these needs. By no means : that is a matter which literary criticism does not try. But it sees that a very few of mankind aspire after a life which is not the life after which the vast majority aspire, and to help them to which the vast majority seek the aid of religion. It 80 sees that the ideal life — the summum bonum for a born thinker, for a philosopher like Parmenides, or Spinoza, or 428 THE JEWISH CHURCH Hegel — is an eternal series of intellectual acts. It sees that this life treats all things, religion included, with entire freedom as subject-matter for thought, as elements in a vast movement of speculation. The few who Uve this life stand apart, and have an existence separate from that of the mass of mankind ; they address an imaginary audience of their mates ; the region which they inhabit is the laboratory wherein are fashioned the new intellectual ideas which, from time to time, take their place in the world. Are these few justified, in the sight of God, in so lo living ? That is a question which Uterary criticism must not attempt to answer. But such is the worth of intellect, such the benefit which it procures for man, that criticism, itself the creation of intellect, cannot but recognise this pmrely intellectual life, when reaUy followed, as justified so far as the jurisdiction of criticism extends, and even admirable. Those they regard as reaUy following it, who show the power of mind to animate and carry forward the intellectual movement in which it consists. No doubt, many boast of living this life, of inhabiting this purely 20 intellectual region, who cannot really breathe its air : they vainly profess themselves able to live by thought alone, and to dispense with rehgion : the hfe of the many, and not the Ufe of the few, would have been the right one for them. They follow the life of the few at their own perU. No doubt the rich and the great, unsoftened by sufiering, hardened by enjoyment, craving after novelty, imagining that they see a distinction in the freedom of mind with which the born thinker treats all things, and believing that all distinctions naturally belong to them, have in every 30 age been prone to treat rehgion as something which the multitude wanted, but they themselves did not — ^to affect freethinking as a kind of aristocratic privilege ; while, in fact, for any f eal mental or moral hie at all, their frivohty entirely disqualified them. They, too, profess the hfe of the few at their own peril. But the few do really remain, whose life, whose ideal, whose demand, is thought, and thought only : to the communications (however bold) of these few with one another through the ages, criticism assigns the right of passing freely. 40 But the world of the few — the world of speculative life — THE JEWISH CHURCH 429 is not the world of the many, the world of religious life ; the thoughts of the former cannot properly be transferred to the latter, cannot be called true in the latter, except on certain conditions. It is not for literary criticism to set forth adequately the religious life ; yet what, even as criticism, it sees of this life, it may say. Religious life resides not in an incessant movement of ideas, but in a feeling which attaches itself to certain fixed objects. The religious life of Christendom has thus attached itself 10 to the acts, and words, and death of Christ, as recorded in the Gospels and expounded in the Epistles of the New Testament ; and to the main histories, the prophecies and the hymns of the Old Testament. In relation to these objects, it has adopted certain intellectual ideas ; such are, ideas respecting the being of God, the laws of nature, the freedom of human wiU, the character of prophecy, the character of inspiration. But its essence, the essence of Christian life, consists in the ardour, the love, the self- renouncement, the ineffable aspiration with which it throws so itself upon the objects of its attachment themselves, not in the intellectual ideas which it holds in relation to them. These ideas belong to another sphere, the sphere of speculative Ufe, of intellect, of pure thought ; trans- planted into the sphere of religious life, they have no meaning in them, no vitahty, no truth, imless they adjust themselves to the conditions of that Ufe, unless they allow it to pursue its course freely. The moment this is forgotten, the moment in the sphere of the religious life undue prominence is given to the intellectual ideas which are 30 here but accessories, the moment the first place is not given to the emotion which is here the principle, that moment the essence of the religious life is violated : confusion and falsehood are introduced into its sphere. And, if not only is undue prominence in this sphere given to intellectual ideas, but these ideas are so presented as in themselves violently to jar with the rehgious feeUng, then the con- fusion is a thousand times worse confounded, the falsehood a thousand times more glaring. ' The earth moves,' said Galileo, speaking as a philosopher 40 in the sphere 6f pure thought, in which ideas have an absolute value ; and he said the truth ; he was a great 430 THE JEWISH CHURCH thinker because he perceived this truth ; he was a great man because he asserted it in spite of persecution. It was the theologians, insisting upon transplanting his idea into the world of theology, and placing it in a false connexion there, who were guilty of folly. But if Galileo himself, quitting the sphere of mathematics, coming into the sphere of religion, had placed this thesis of his in juxtaposition with the Book of Joshua, had applied it so as to impair the value of the Book of Joshua for the religious life of Christendom, to make that book regarded as a tissue of lo fictions, for which no blame indeed attached to Joshua, because he never meant it for anything else, — ^then Galileo would have himself placed his idea in a false connexion, and would have deserved censure : his ' the earth moves ', in spite of its absolute truth, would have become a false- hood. Spinoza, again, speaking as a pure thinker to pure thinkers, not concerning himself whether what he said impaired or confirmed the power and virtue of the Bible for the actual religious life of Christendom, but pursuing a speculative demonstration, said : ' The Bible contains 20 much that is mere history, and, like all history, sometimes true, sometimes false.' But we must bear in mind that Spinoza did not promulgate this thesis in immediate con- nexion with the reUgious life of his times, but as a specula- tive idea : he uttered it not as a religious teacher, but as an independent philosopher ; and he left it, as Galileo left his, to filter down gradually (if true) into the common thought of mankind, and to adjust itself, through other agency than his, to their religious life. The Bishop of Natal does not speak as an independent philosopher, as 30 a pure thinker ; if he did, and if he spoke with power in this capacity, literary criticism would, I have already said, have no right to condemn him. But he speaks actually and avowedly, as by virtue of his office he was almost inevitably constrained to speak, as a reHgious teacher to the religious world. Well, then, any intellectual idea which, speaking in this capacity, he promulgates, he is bound to place in its right connexion with the reUgious life, he is bound to make harmonise with that hfe, he is bound not to magnify to the detriment of that life : else, 40 in the sphere of that life, it is false. He takes an in- THE JEWISH CHURCH 431 telleotual idea, we will say, which is true ; the idea that Mr. Burgon's proposition, ' Every letter of the Bible is the direct utterance of the Most High,' is false. And how does he apply this idea in connexion with the religious life ? He gives to it the most excessive, the most exag- gerated prominence ; so much so, that hardly in one page out of twenty does he suffer his reader to recollect that the rehgious life exists out of connexion with this idea, that it is, in truth, wholly independent of it. And by 10 way of adjusting this idea to the feeling of the rehgious reader of the Bible, he puts it thus : — ' In writing the story of the Exodus from the ancient legends of his people, the Scripture writer may have had no more consciousness of doing wrong, or of practising historical deception, than Homer had, or any of the early Roman annalists.' Theo- logical criticism censures this language as unorthodox, irreverent : literary criticism censures it as false. Its employer precisely does what I have imagined Galileo doing : he misemploys a true idea so as to deprive it of 20 all truth. It is a thousand times truer to say that the Book of Exodus is a sacred book, an inspired history, than to say that it is fiction, not culpable because no deception was intended, because its author worked in the same free poetic spirit as the creator of the Isle of Calypso and the Garden of Alcinous. It is one of the hardest tasks in the world to make new intellectual ideas harmonise truly with the religious life, to place them in their right light for that life. The moments in which such a change is accomphshed are epochs in 30 religious history ; the men through whose instrumentality it is accomplished are great religious reformers. The great- ness of these men does not consist in their having these new ideas, in their originating them. The ideas are in the world ; they come originally from the sphere of pure thought ; they are put into circulation by the spirit of the time. The greatness of a religious reformer consists in his reconciling them with the religious life, in his starting this life upon a fresh period in company with them. No such religious reformer for the present age has yet shown 40 himself. Till he appears, the true religious teacher is he who, not yet reconciling all things, at least esteems things 432 THE JEWISH CHURCH still in their due order, and makes his hearers so esteem them ; who, shutting his mind against no ideas brought by the spirit of his time, sets these ideas, in the sphere of the religious life, in their right prominence, and still puts that first which is first ; who, under the pressure of new' thoughts, keeps the centre of the religious life where it should be. The best distinction of Dr. Stanley's lectures is that in them he shows himself such a teacher. Others will praise them, and deservedly praise them, for their eloquence, their varied information ; for enabling us to lo give such form and substance to our impressions from Bible history. To me they seem admirable, chiefly by the clear perception which they exhibit of a religious teacher's true business in deaUng with the Bible. Dr. Stanley speaks of the Bible to the religious world, and he speaks of it so as to maintain the sense of the divine virtue of the Bible unimpaired, so as to bring out this sense more fully. He speaks of the deliverance of the Israehtes out of the land of Egj^pt. He does not dilate upon the difficulty of understanding how the Israelites should have departed 20 ' harnessed ' ; but he points out how they are ' the only nation in ancient or modern times, which, throwing off the yoke of slavery, claims no merit, no victory of its own : There is no Marathon, no Regillus, no Tours, no Morgarten. All is from above, nothing from themselves.' He mentions the difficulty of ' conceiving the migration of a whole nation under such circumstances ' as those of the Israelites, the proposal ' to reduce the numbers of the text from 600,000 to 600 armed men ; ' he mentions the difficulty of deter- mining the exact place of the passage of the Red Sea ; 30 but he quickly ' dismisses these considerations to fix the mind on the essential features of this great dehverance ' — on the Almighty, ' through the dark and terrible night, with the enemy pressing close behind and the driving seas on either side, leading his people like sheep by the hands of Moses and Aaron ; ' his people, carrying with them from that night ' the abiding impression that this dehverance — the first and greatest in their history — was effected not by their own power, but by the power of God.' He tells the reader how, ' with regard to all the topographical 40 details of the Israelite journey, we are still in the condition THE JEWISH CHURCH 433 of discoverers ; ' but, instead of impressing upon him as an inference from this that the Bible narrative is a creation such as the Iliad and Odyssey, he reminds him, with truth, how ' suspense as to the exact details of form and locality is the most fitting approach for the consideration of the presence of Him who has made darkness His secret place, his pavilion round about Him with dark water, and thick clouds to cover them.' Everywhere Dr. Stanley thus seeks to give its due prominence to that for which the religious 10 life really values the Bible. If ' the Jewish rehgion is characterized in an eminent degree by the dimness of its conception of a future hfe,' Dr. Stanley does not find here, like Warburton, matter for a baffling contrast between Jewish and pagan religion, but he finds fresh proof of the grand edifying fact of Jewish history, ' the consciousness of the hving, actual presence of God Himself — a truth, in the limited conceptions of this youthful nation, too vast to admit of any rival truth, however precious.' He speaks of the call of Samuel. What he finds to dwell on in this call 20 is not the exact nature of the voice that called Samuel, on which Spinoza speculates so curiously ; it is the image of ' childlike, devoted, continuous goodness,' which Samuel's childhood brings before us ; the type which Samuel offers ' of holiness, of growth, of a new creation without con- version.' He speaks of the Prophets, and he avows that ' the Bible recognizes " revelation " and " inspiration " outside the circle of the chosen people ; ' but he makes it his business not to reduce, in virtue of this avowal, the greatness and significance of Hebrew prophecy, but to set 30 that greatness and significance in clearer light than ever. To the greatness and significance of what he calls ' the negative side ' of that prophecy — ^its attacks on the falsehoods and superstitions which endeavoured to take the place of God — he does due justice ; but he reserves the chief prominence for its ' positive side — ^the assertion of the spirituahty, the morality of God, His justice. His goodness. His love.' Everywhere he keeps in mind the purpose for which the rehgious life seeks the Bible — to be enlarged and strengthened, not to be straitened and perplexed. He 40 seizes a truth of criticism when he says that the Bible narrative, whatever inaccuracies of numbers the Oriental ABNOLD ^ f 434 The JEWISH CHURCH tendency to amplification may have introduced into it, remains a ' substantially historical ' work — ^not a work like Homer's poems ; but to this proposition, which, merely so stated, is a truth of criticism and nothing more, he assigns no undue prominence : he knows that a mere truth of criticism is not, as such, a truth for the religious life. Dr. Stanley thus gives a lesson not only to the Bishop of Natal, but to the Bishop of Natal's adversaries. Many of these adversaries themselves exactly repeat the Bishop's error in this, that they give a wholly undue prominence, lo in connexion with the religious lite, to certain intellectual propositions, on which the essence and vitality of the religious lite in no way depends. The Bishop devotes a volume to the exhibition of such propositions, and he is censurable because, addressing the religious world, he exhibits his propositions so as to confuse the religious life by them, not to strengthen it. He seems to have so con- fused it in many of his hearers that they, like himself, have forgotten in what it really consists. Puzzled by the Bishop's sums, terrified at the conclusion he draws from 20 them, they, in their bewilderment, seek for safety in attacking the sums themselves, instead of putting them on one side as irrelevant, and rejecting the conclusion deduced from them as untrue. ' Here is a Bishop,' many of Dr. Stanley's brethren are now crying in aU parts of England — ' here is a Bishop who has learnt among the Zulus that only a certain number of people can stand in a doorway at once, and that no man can eat eighty-eight pigeons a day, and who teUs us, as a consequence, that the Pentateuch is all fiction, which, however, the author 30 may very likely have composed without meaning to do wrong, and as a work of poetry, like Homer's.' ' Well,' one can imagine Dr. Stanley answering them, ' you cannot think that ! ' ' No,' they reply ; ' and yet the Bishop's sums puzzle us, and we want them disproved. And power- ful answers, we know, are preparing. An adversary worthy of the Bishop will soon appear, — Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor ! He, when he comes, will make mince-meat of the Bishop's calculations. Those great truths, so necessary to our salva- 40 tion, which the Bishop assails, will at his hands receive THE JEWISH CHURCH 435 all the strengthening they deserve. He will prove to demonstration that any number of persons can stand in the same doorway at once, and that one man can eat eighty-eight pigeons a day with ease.' ' Compose your- selves,' says Dr. Stanley : ' he cannot prove this.' ' What,' cry his terrified interlocutors, ' he cannot ! In that case we may as well shut up our Bibles, and read Homer and the first books of Livy ! ' ' Compose yourselves,' says Dr. Stanley again : ' it is not so. Even if the Bishop's 10 sums are right, they do not prove that the Bible narrative is to be classed with the Iliad and the Legends of Rome. Even if you prove them wrong, your success does not bring you a step nearer to that which you go to the Bible to seek. Carry your achievements of this kind to the Statistical Society, to the Geographical Society, to the Ethnological Society. They hr6.ve no vital interest for the rehgious reader of the Bible. The heart of the Bible is not there.' Just because Dr. Stanley has comprehended this, and, in a book addressed to the religious world, makes us feel 20 that -he has comprehended it, his book is excellent and salutary. I praise it for the very reason for which some critics find fault with it — ^for not giving prominence, in speaking of the Bible, to matters with which the real virtue of the Bible is not bound up. ' The book,' a critic com- plains, ' contains no solution of the difficulties which the history of the period traversed presents in the Bible. The oracle is dumb in the very places where many would wish it to speak. This must lessen Dr. Stanley's influence in the cause of Biblical science. The present time needs bold 30 men, prepared to give utterance to their deepest thoughts.' And which are a man's deepest thoughts I should like to know : his thoughts whether it was 215 years, or 430, or 1,000 that the IsraeHtes sojourned in Egypt, — ^which question the critic complains of Dr. Stanley for saying that it is needless to discuss in detail, — or his thoughts on the moral lesson to be drawn from the story of the IsraeHtes' deliverance ? And which is the true science of the Bible — ^that which helps men to foUow the cardinal injunction of the Bible, to be ' transformed by the renewing 40 of their mind, that they may ■ prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect will of God ' — or that which Ef 2 436 THE JEWISH CHURCH helps them to ' settle the vexed question of the precise time when the Book of Deuteronomy assumed its present form ' ? — that which elaborates an octavo volume on the arithmetical difficulties of the Bible, with the conclusion that the Bible is as unhistorical as Homer's poetry, or that which makes us feel that ' these difficulties melt away before the simple pathos and lofty spirit of the Bible itself ' ? Such critics as this critic of Dr. Stanley are those who commend the Bishop of Natal for ' speaking the truth,' who say that ' liberals of every shade of opinion ' lo are indignant with me for rebuking him. Ah ! these liberals ! — the power for good they have had, and lost : the power for good they wxll yet again have, and yet again lose ! Eternal bondsmen of phrases and catchwords, will they never arrive at the heart of any matter, but always keep muttering round it their silly shibboleths like an incantation ? There is truth of science and truth of religion : truth of science does not become truth of religion until it is made to harmonize with it. Applied as the laws of nature are applied in the Essays and Beviews, applied 20 as arithmetical calculations are appUed in the Bishop of Natal' s work, truths of science, even supposing them to be such, lose their truth, and the utterer of them is not a ' fearless speaker of truth,' but, at best, a blunderer. ' Allowing two feet in width for each full-grown man, nine men could just have stood in front of the Tabernacle.' ' A priest could not have eaten, daily, eighty-eight pigeons for his own portion, " in the most holy place." ' And as a conclusion from all this : ' In writing the story of the Exodus from the ancient legends of his people, the Scripture- 30 writer may have had no more consciousness of doing wrong, or of practising historical deception, than Homer had, or any of the early Roman annahsts.' Heaven and earth, what a gospel ! Is it this which a ' fearless speaker of truth ' must ' burst ' if he cannot utter ? Is this a message which it is woe to him if he does not preach ? — ^this a testi- mony which he is straitened till he can dehver ? I am told that the Bishop of Natal explains to those who do not know it, that the Pentateuch is not to be read as an authentic history, but as a narrative full of 40 divine instruction in morals and religion ; I wish to lay THE JEWISH CHURCH 437 aside all ridicule, into which literary criticism too readily falls, while I express my unfeigned conviction that in hia own heart the Bishop of Natal honestly believes this, and that he originally meant to convey this to his readers. But I censure his book because it entirely fails to convey this. I censure it, because while it impresses strongly on the reader that ' the Pentateuch is not to be read as an authentic narrative,' it so entirely fails to make him feel that it is 'a narrative full of divine instruction in morals 10 and religion.' I censure it, because, addressed to the religious world, it puts the non-essential part of the Bible so prominent, and the essential so much in the background, and, having established this false proportion, holds such language about the Bible in consequence of it, that, instead of serving the religious life, it confuses it. I do not blame the Bishop of Natal's doctrine for its novelty or heterodoxy — ^literary criticism takes no account of a doctrine's novelty or heterodoxy ; I said expressly that Mr. Jowett's Essay was, for literary criticism, justified by its unction ; I said 20 that the Bishop of Natal's book was censurable, because, proclaiming what it did, it proclaimed no more ; because, not taking rank as a book of pure speculation, inevitably taking rank as a religious book for the religious world, for the great majority of mankind, it treated its subject unedifyingly. Address what doctrine you like to the religious world, be as unorthodox as you wiU, literary criticism has no authority to blame you : only, it your doctrine is evidently not ada:pted to the needs of the religious life, — if, as you present it, it tends to confound 30 that life rather than to strengthen it, literary criticism has the right to check you ; for it at once perceives that your doctrine, as you present it, is false. Was it, nevertheless, your duty to put forth that doctrine, since you believed it to be true ? The honoured authority of the Archbishop of Dublin is invoked to decide that it was. Which duty comes first for a man — ^the duty of proclaiming an in- adequate idea, or the duty of making an inadequate idea adequate ? But this difficult question we need not resolve : it is enough that, if it is a man's duty to announce even 40 his inadequate ideas, it is the duty of criticism to tell him that they are inadequate. 438 THE JEWISH CHURCH But, again, it is said that the Bishop of Natal's book ■will, in the end, have a good effect, by loosening the super- stitious attachment with which the mass of the English religious world clings to the letter of the Bible, and that it deserves from criticism indulgence on this ground. I can- not teU what may, in the end, be the effect of the Bishop of Natal's book upon the religious life of this country. Its natural immediate effect may be seen by any one who will take the trouble of looking at a newspaper called Pvblic Opinion, in which the Bishop's book is the theme of a great lo continuous correspondence. There, week after week, the critical genius of our nation discovers itseK in captivating nudity ; and there, in the letters of a terrible athlete of Reason, who signs himself ' Eagle-Eye,' the natural imme- diate effect of the Bishop's book may be observed. Its natural ultimate effect would be, I think, to continue, in another form, the excessive care of the English religious world for that which is not of the real essence of the Bible : as this world has for years been prone to say, ' We are the salt of the earth, because we beUeve that every syllable 20 and letter of the Bible is the direct utterance of the Most High,' so it would naturally, after imbibing the Bishop of Natal's influence, be inclined to say, ' We are the salt of the earth, because we believe that the Pentateuch is unhistorical.' Whether they believe the one or the other, what they should learn to say is : ' We are unprofitable servants ; the religious life is beyond.' But, at aU events, literary criticism, which is the guardian of literary truth, must judge books according to their intrinsic merit and proximate natural effect, not according to their possible 30 utility and remote contingent effect. If the Bishop of Natal's demonstrations ever produce a salutary effect upon the religious life of England, it will be after some one else, or he himself, has supplied the now missing power of edification : for literary criticism his book, as it at present stands, must always remain a censurable production. The situation of a clergyman, active-minded as well as pious, is, I freely admit, at the present moment one of great difficulty. Intellectual ideas are not the essence of the religious life ; still the religious life connects itseU, as 40 I have said, with certain intellectual ideas, and all intel- THE JEWISH CHURCH 430 lectual ideas follow a development independent of the religious lite. Goethe remarks somewhere how the Zeit- Oeist, as he calls it, the Time-Spirit, irresistibly changes the ideas current in the world. When he was young, he says, the Time-Spirit had made every one disbelieve in the existence of a single Homer : when he was old, it was bearing every one to a belief in it. Intellectual ideas, which the majority of men take from the age in which they live, are the dominion of this Time-Spirit ; not moral and 10 spiritual life, which is original in each individual. In the Articles of the Church of England are exhibited the intel- lectual ideas with which the rehgious life of that Church, at the time of the Reformation, and almost to the present day, connected itself. They are the intellectual ideas of the English Reformers and of their time ; they are liable to development and change. Insensibly the Time-Spirit brings to men's minds a consciousness that certain of these ideas have undergone such development, such change. For the laity, to whom the religious life of their National 20 Church is the great matter, and who owe to that Church only the general adhesion of citizens to the Government under which they are born, this consciousness is not irk- some as it is for the clergy, who, as ministers of the Church, undertake to become organs of the intellectual ideas of its formularies. As this consciousness becomes more and more distinct, it becomes more and more irksome. One can almost fix the last period in which a clergyman, very speculative by the habit of his mind, or very sensible to the whispers of the Time-Spirit, can sincerely feel himself 30 free and at ease in his position of a minister of the Church of England. The moment inevitably arrives when such a man feels himself in a false position. It is natural that he should try to defend his position, that he should long prefer defending his position to confessing it untenable, and demanding to have it changed. Still, in his own heart, he cannot but be dissatisfied with it. It is not good for him, not good for his usefulness, to be left in it. The sermons of Tauler and Wesley were not preached by men hampered by the consciousness of an unsound position. 40 Even when a clergyman, charged full with modern ideas, manages by a miracle of address to go over the very ground 440 THE JEWISH CHURCH most dangerous to him without professional ruin, and even to exhibit unction as he goes along, there is no reason to exult at the feat : he would probably have exhibited more unction still if he had not had to exhibit it upon the tight- rope. The time at last comes for the State, the collective nation, to intervene. Some reconstruction of the English Church, a reconstruction hardly less important than that which took place at the Reformation, is fast becoming inevitable. It will be a delicate, a most difficult task ; and the reconstruction of the Protestant Churches of lo Germany offers an example of what is to be avoided rather than of what is to be foUowed. Still, so divine, so indestructible is the power of Christianity — so immense the power of transformation afforded to it by its sublime maxim, ' The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life,' that it will assuredly ever be able to adapt itself to new conditions, and, in connexion with intellectual ideas changed or developed, to enter upon successive stages of progress. It will even survive the handling of ' liberals of every shade of opinion.' But it 20 will not do this by losing its essence, by becoming such a Christianity as these liberals imagine, the ' Christianity not Mysterious ' of Toland ; a Christianity consisting of half a dozen intellectual propositions, and half a dozen moral rules deduced from them. It will do it by retaining the religious life in all its depth and fulness in connexion with new intellectual ideas ; and the latter will never have meaning for it until they have been harmonized with the former, and the rehgious teacher who presents the latter to it, without harmonizing them with the former, will 30 never have fulfilled his mission. The religious life existed in the Church of the Middle Ages, as it exists in the Churches of Protestantism ; nay, what monument of that life have the Protestant Churches produced, which for its most essential qualities, its tenderness, its spirituahty, its ineffable yearning, is comparable to the Imitation. The critical ideas of the sixteenth century broke up the Church of the Middle Ages, resting on the basis of a priesthood with supernatural power of interpreting the Bible. But Luther was a great religious reformer, not because he made 40 himself the organ of these ideas, themselves negative, not THE JEWISH CHURCH 441 because he shattered the idol of a mediatory priesthood, but because he reconciled these ideas with the religious life, because he made the religious Ufe feel that a positive and fruitful concliosion was to be drawn from them, — ^the conclusion that each man must ' work out his own salva- tion with fear and trembling.' Protestantism has formed the notion that every syllable and letter of the Bible is the direct utterance of the Most High. The critical ideas of our century are forcing Protestantism away from this 10 proposition, untrue like the proposition that the Pope is infaUible : but the religious reformer is not he who rivets our minds upon the untruth of this proposition, who bewilders the religious life by insisting on the intellectual blunder of which it has been guilty in entertaining it ; he is the man who makes us feel the future which undoubtedly exists for the religious life in the absence of it. Makes us all feel, not the multitude only. I am reproached with wishing to make free-thinking an aristocratic privilege, while a false religion is thrown to the multitude to keep 20 it quiet ; and in this country — ^where the multitude is, in the first place, particularly averse to being called the multi- tude, and in the second, by its natural spirit of honesty, particularly averse to all underhand, selfish scheming — such an imputation is readily snatched up, and carries much odium with it. I will not seek to remove that odium by any flattery, by saying that I think we are all one enlightened public together. No, there is a multitude, a multitude made up out of all ranks ; probably in no country — so much has our national life been carri^ on by so means of parties, and so inevitably does party-spirit, in regarding all things, put the consideration of their intrinsic reason and truth second, and not first — ^is the multitude more unintelligent, more narrow-minded, and more pas- sionate than in this. Perhaps in no country in the world is so much nonsense so firmly believed. But those on whose behalf I demeuid from a religious speaker edification are more than this multitude ; and their cause aud that of the multitude are one. They are all those who acknow- ledge the need of the religious Kfe. The few whom literary 40 criticism regards as exempt from all concern with edifica- tion, are far fewer than is commonly supposed. Tho30 442 THE JEWISH CHURCH whose life is all in thought, and to whom, therefore, literary criticism concedes the right of treating religion with absolute freedom, as pure matter for thought, are not a great class, but a few individuals. Let them think in peace, these sublime solitaries ; they have a right to their liberty : Churches will never concede it to them ; literary criticism will never deny it to them. From his austere isolation a bom thinker like Spinoza cries with warning solemnity to the would-be thinker, what, from his austere isolation a bom artist like Michael Angelo, cries to the would-be lo artist — ' Canst thou drink of the cup that I drink of ? ' Those who persist in the thinker's life, are far fewer even than those who persist in the artist's. Of the educated minority, far the greatest number retaia their demand upon the religious life. They share, indeed, the culture of their time, they are curious to know the new ideas of their time ; their own culture is advanced, in so far as those ideas are novel, striking, and just. This course they follow, whether they feel or not (what is certainly true), that this satisfaction of their curiosity, this culture of 20 theirs, is not without its dangers to the religious life. Thus they go on being informed, gathering intellectual ideas at their own perU, minding, as Marcus Aurelius reproached himself with too long minding, ' lite less than notion.' But the moment they enter the sphere of religion, they too ask and need to be edified, not informed only. They inevitably, such is the law of the religious life, take the same attitude as the least-instructed. The religious voice that speaks to them must have the tone of the spiritual world : the intellectual ideas presented to them must be 30 made to blend with the religious life. The world may not see this, but cannot a clergyman see it ? Cannot he see that, speaking to the religious life, he may honestly be silent about matters which he cannot yet use to edification, and of which, therefore, the religious life does not want to hear ? Does he not see that he is even bound to take account of the circumstances of his hearers, and that information which is only fruitless to the religious life of some of his hearers, may be worse than fruitless, confounding, to the religious life of others of 40 them ? Certainly, Christianity has not two doctrines, one THE JEWISH CHURCH 443 for the few, another for the many ; but as certainly, Christ adapted His teaching to the different stages of growth in His hearers, and for all of them adapted it to the needs of the religions life. He came to preach moral and spiritual truths ; and for His purpose moral genius was of more avail than intellectual genius, St. Peter than Solomon. But the speculative few who stood outside of His teaching were not the Pharisees and the Sadducees. The Pharisees were the narrow-minded, cruel-hearted reKgious professors 10 of that day ; the Sadducees were the ' liberals of every shade of opinion.' And who, then, were the thinking few of that time ? — a student or two at Athens or Alexandria. That was the hour of the religious sense of the East : but the hour of the thought of the West, of Greek thought, was also to come. The religious sense had to ally itself with this, to make certain conditions with it, to be in certain ways inevitably modified by it. Now is the hour of the thought of the West. This thought has its apostles on every side, and we hear far more of its conquests than 20 of the conquests of the reKgious sense. Still the rehgious life maintains its indefeasible claims, and in its own sphere inexorably refuses to be satisfied with the new thought, to admit it to be of any truth and significance, until it has harmonized it with itself, until it has imparted to it its own divine power of refreshing souls. Some day the religious life will have harmonized all the new thought with itself, will be able to use it freely : but it cannot use it yet. And who has not rejoiced to be able, between the old idea, tenable no longer, which once coimected itself so with certain religious words, and the new idea, which has not yet connected itself with them, to rest for awhile in the healing virtue and beauty of the words themselves ? The old popular notion of perpetual special interventions of Providence in the concerns of man is weak and erroneous ; yet who has yet found, to define Providence for the rehgious life, words so adequate as the words of Isaiah — ' In aU their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them ; and he bare them and carried them aU the days of old ' ? The old popular notion of an incensed God 40 appeased in His wrath against the helpless race of mankind by a bloody sacrifice, is barbarous and false ; but what 444 THE JEWISH CHURCH intellectual definition of the death of Christ has yet suc- ceeded in placing it, for the religious lite, in so true an aspect as the sublime ejaculation of the Litany : ' Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us ! ' And you are masters in Israel, and know not these things ; and you require a voice from the world of literature to tell them to you ! Those who ask nothing better than to remain silent on such topics, who have to quit their own sphere to speak of them, who cannot touch them lo without being reminded that they survive those who touched them with far different power, you compel, in the mere interest of letters, of intelligence, of general culture, to proclaim truths which it was your function to have made familiar. And, when you have thus forced the very stones to cry out, and the dumb to speak, you call them singular because they know these truths, and arrogant because they declare them I DANTE AND BEATRICE [Fraaer's Magazine, May 1863.] Those critics who allegorize the Divine Comedy, who exaggerate, or, rather, who mistake the supersensual element in Dante's work, who reduce to nothing the sensible and human element, are hardly worth refuting. They know nothing of the necessary laws under which poetic genius works, of the inevitable conditions under which the creations of poetry are produced. But, in their turn, those other critics err hardly less widely, who exag- gerate, or, rather, who mistake the human and real element 10 in Dante's poem ; who see, in such a passion as that of Dante for Beatrice, an affection belonging to the sphere of actual domestic life, fitted to sustain the wear and tear of our ordinary daUy existence. Into the error of these second critics an accomplished recent translator of Dante, Mr. Theodore Martin, seems to me to have fallen. He has ever present to his mind, when he speaks of the Beatrice whom Dante adored, Wordsworth's picture of — The perfect woman, nobly planned To warn, to comfort, and command ; 20 And yet a spirit still, and bright With something of an angel light. He is ever quoting these lines in connexion with Dante's Beatrice ; ever assimilating to this picture Beatrice as Dante conceived her ; ever attributing to Dante's passion a character identical with that of the affection which Wordsworth, in the poem from which these lines are taken, meant to portray. The affection here portrayed by Words- worth is, I grant, a substantial human affection, inhabiting the domain of real life, at the same time that it is poetical 30 and beautiful. But in order to give this flesh-and-blood character to Dante's passion for Beatrice, what a task has Mr. Martin to perform ! how much is he obliged to imagine ! how much to shut his eyes to, or to disbelieve ! Not per- 446 DANTE AND BEATRICE ceiving that the vital impulse of Dante's soul is towards reverie and spiritual vision ; that the task Dante sets himself is not the task of reconciling poetry and reality, of giving to each its due part, of supplementing the one by the other ; but the task of sacrificing the world to the spirit, of making the spirit aU in all, of effacing the world in presence of the spiri1^-Mr. Martin seeks to find a Dante admirable and complete in the life of the world as well as in the life of the spirit; and when he cannot find him, he invents him. Dante saw the world, and used in his poetry what he had seen ; lo for he was a bom artist. But he was essentially aloof from the world, and not complete in the life of the world ; for he was a born spirituahst and solitary. Keeping in otir miads this, his double character, we may seize the exact truth as to his relations with Beatrice, and steer a right course between the error of those who deliteralize them too much, on the one hand, and that of those who literahze them too much, on the other. The Divine Comedy, I have already said, is no alle- gory, and Beatrice no mere personification of theology. 20 Mr. Martin is quite right in saying that Beatrice is the Beatrice whom men turned round to gaze at in the streets of Florence ; that she is no ' allegorical phantom,' no ' fiction purely ideal.' He is quite right in saying that Dante ' worships no phantoms,' that his passion for Beatrice was a real passion, and that his love-poetry does not deal ' in the attributes of celestial charms.' He was an artist — one of the greatest artists ; and art abhors what is vague, hollow, and impalpable. Enough to make this fully manifest we have in the Vita sa Nuova. Dante there records how, a boy of ten, he first saw Beatrice, a girl of -niae, dressed in crimson ; how, a second time, he saw her, nine years later, passing along the street, dressed in white, between two ladies older than herself, and how she saluted him. He records how after- wards she once denied him her salutation ; he records the profound impression which, at her father's death, the grief and beauty of Beatrice made on aU those who visited her ; he records his meeting with her at a party after her marriage, his emotion, and how some ladies present, 40 observing his emotion, ' made a mock of him to that most DANTE AND BEATRICE 447 gentle being ; ' he records her death, and how, a year afterwards, some gentlemen found him, on the anniversary of her death, ' sketching an angel on his tablets.' He tells us how, a little later, he had a vision of the dead Beatrice ' arrayed in the same crimson robe in which she had originally appeared in my eyes, and she seemed as youthfid as on the day I saw her first.' He mentions how, one day, the sight of some pilgrims passing along ■ a particular street in Florence brought to his mind the 10 thought that perhaps these pilgrims, comiag from a far country, had never even heard the name of her who iilled his thoughts so entirely. And even in the Divine, Comedy, composed many years afterwards, and treating of the glorified Beatrice only, one distinct trait of the earthly Beatrice is still preserved — ^her smUe ; the santo riso of the Purgatory, the dolce, riso of the Pa/radise. Yes, undoulitedly there was a real Beatrice, whom Dante had seen living and moving before him, and for whom he had felt a passion. This basis of fact and reaHty he took 20 from the Ufe of the outward world : this basis was indis- pensable to him, for he was an artist. But this basis was enough for him as an artist : to have seen Beatrice two or three times, to have spoken to her two or three times, to have felt her beauty, her charm ; to have had the emotion of her marriage, her death — ^this was enough. Art requires a basis of fact, but it also desires to treat this basis of fact with the utmost freedom ; and this desire for the freest handling of its object is even thwarted when its object is too near, and too real. To have had his relations 30 with Beatrice more positive, intimate, and prolonged, to have had an affection for her into which there entered more of the life of this world, would have even somewhat impeded, one may say, Dante's free use of these relations for the purpose of art. And the artist nature in him was in little danger of being thus impeded ; for he was a bom solitary. Thus the conditions of art do not make it necessary that Dante's relations with Beatrice should have been more close and real than the Vita Nuova represents them ; and the conditions of Dante's own nature do not make it 40 probable. Not the less do such admirers of the poet as Mr. Martin — misconceiving the essential characteristic of 448 DANTE AND BEATRICE chivalrous passion in general, and of Dante's divinization of Beatrice in particular, misled by imagining this ' worship for woman,' as they call it, to be something which it was not, something involving modem relations in social life between the two sexes — insist upon making out of Dante's adoration of Beatrice a substantial modem love-story, and of arranging Dante's real lite so as to turn it into the . proper sort of real life for a ' worshipper of woman ' to lead. The few real incidents of Dante's passion, enumerated in the Vita Nuova, sufficient to give to his great poem the lo basis which it required, are far too scanty to give to such a love-story as this the basis which it requires ; therefore they must be developed and amplified. Beatrice was a living woman, and Dante had seen her ; but she must become The creature not too bright and good For human nature's daily food, of Wordsworth's poem : she must become ' pure flesh and blood — ^beautiful, yet substantial,' and ' moulded of that noble humanity wherewith Heaven blesses, not imfre- 20 quently, our common earth.' Dante had saluted Beatrice, had spoken to her ; but this is not enough : he has surely omitted to ' record particulars : ' it is ' scarcely credible that he should not have found an opportunity of directly declaring his attachment ; ' for ' in position, education, and appearance he was a man worth any woman,' and his face ' at that time of his life must have been eminently engaging.' Therefore ' it seems strange that his love should not have found its issue in marriage ; ' for ' he loved Beatrice as a man loves, and with the passion that naturally 30 perseveres to the possession of its mistress.' However, his love did not find its issue in marriage. Beatrice married Messer Simone dei Bardi, to whom, says Mr. Martin, ' her hand had been, perhaps lightly or to please her parents, pledged, in ignorance of the deep and noble passion which she had inspired in the yoimg poet's heart.' But she certainly could not ' have been insensible to his profound tenderness and passion ; ' although whether ' she knew of it before her marriage,' and whether ' she, either then or afterwards, gave it her countenance and 40 DANTE AND BEATRICE 449 approval, and returned it in any way, and in what degree ' — questions which, Mr. Martin says, ' naturally suggest themselves ' — are, he confesses, questions for solving which ' the materials are most scanty and unsatisfactory.' ' Un- questionably,' he adds, ' it startles and grieves us to find Beatrice taking part with her friends "in laughing at Dante when he was overcome at first meeting her after her marriage." But there may,' he thinks, ' have been causes for this — causes for which, in justice to her, allowance must 10 be made, even as we see that Dante made it.' Then, again, as to Messer Simone dei Bardi's feelings about this attach- ment of Dante to his wife. ' It is true,' says Mr. Martin, ' that we have no direct information on this point ; ' but ' the love of Dante was of an order too pure and noble to occasion distrust, even if the purity of Beatrice had not placed her above suspicion ; ' but Dante ' did what only a great and manly nature could have done — he triumphed over his pain ; he uttered no complaint ; his regrets were buried within his own heart.' 'At the same time ', Mr. Martin 20 thinks, ' it is contrary to human nature that a love imf ed by any tokens of favour should retain all its original force ; and without wrong either to Beatrice or Dante we may conclude that an understanding was come to between them, which in some measure soothed his heart, if it did not satisfy it.' And ' sooner or later, before Beatrice died, we cannot doubt that there came a day when words passed between them which helped to reconcile Dante to the doom that severed her from his side during her all too brief sojourn on earth, when the pent-up heart of the poet 30 swept down the barriers within which it had so long struggled, and he Caught up the whole of love, and utter'd it, Then bade adieu for ever, if not to her, yet to all those words which it was no longer meet should be spoken to another's wife.' But Dante married, as well as Beatrice ; and so Dante's married life has to be arranged also. ' It is,' says Mr. Martin, ' only those who have observed httle of human nature, or of their own hearts, who will think that Dante's marriage 40 with Gemma Donati argues against the depth of sincerity ABNOLD Q a 450 DANTE AND BEATRICE of his first love. V/hy should he not have sought the solace and the support of a generous woman's nature, who, knowing all the truth, was yet content with such affection as he was able to bring to a second love ? Nor was that necessarily small. Ardent and affectionate as his nature was, the sympathies of such a woman must have elicited from him a satisfactory response ; while, at the same time, without prejudice to the wife's claim on his regard, he might entertain his heavenward dream of the departed Beatrice.' The tradition is, however, that Dante did not lo live happily with his wife ; and some have thought that he means to cast a disparaging reflection on his marriage in a passage of the Purgatory. I need not say that this sort of thing would never do for Mr. Martin's hero — ^that hero who can do nothing ' inconsistent with the purest respect to her who had been the wedded wife of another, on the one hand, or with his regard for the mother of his children, on the other.' ■ Accordmgly, ' are we to assume,' Mr. Martin cries, ' that the woman who gave herself to him in the full knowledge that she was not the bride of 20 his imagination, was not regarded by him with the esteem which her devotion was calculated to inspire ? ' It is quite impossible. ' Dante was a true-hearted gentleman, and could never have spoken slightingly of her on whose breast he had found comfort amid many a sorrow, and who had borne to him a numerous progeny^ — ^the last a Beatrice.' Donna Gemma was a ' generous and devoted woman,' and she and Dante ' thoroughly imderstood each other.' AU this has, as applied to real personages, the grave defect of being entirely of Mr. Martin's own imagining. 30 But it has a still graver defect, I think, as appUed to Dante, in being so singularly inappropriate to its object. The grand, impracticable Solitary, with keen senses and ardent passions — for nature had made him an artist, and art must be, as Milton says, ' sensuous and impassioned ' — but with an irresistible bent to the inward life, the life of imagination, vision, and ecstasy ; with an inherent im- patience of the outward life, the life of distraction, jostling, mutual concession ; this man ' of a humour which made him hard to get on with,' says Petrarch ; ' melancholy and 40 pensive,' says Boccaccio; ' by nature abstracted and taci- DANTE AND BEATRICE 461 turn, seldom speaking unless he was questioned, and often so absorbed in his own reflections that he did not hear the questions which were put to him ; ' who cotild not live with the Florentines, who cotild not live with Gemma Donati, who could not hve with Can Grande deUa Scala ; this lover of Beatrice, but of Beatrice a vision of his youth, hardly at aU in contact with him in actual Ufe, vanished from him soon, with whom his imagination could deal freely, whom he could divinize into a fit object for the 10 spiritual longing which fiUed him — ^this Dante is trans- formed, in Mr. Martin's hands, into the hero of a senti- mental, but strictly virtuous, novel ! To make out Dante to have been eminent for a wise, complete conduct of his outward Me, seems to me as unimportant as it is impossible. I can quite beheve the tradition which represents him as not having lived happily with his wife, and attributes her not having joined him in his exile to this cause. I can even beheve, without difficulty, an assertion of Boccaccio which excites Mr. Martin's indignation, that Dante's con- 20 duct, even in mature life, was at times exceedingly irregular. We know how the followers of the spiritual life tend to be antinomian in what belongs to the outward life : they do not attach much importance to such irregularity them- selves ; it is their fault, as complete men, that they do not ; it is the fatdt of the spiritual life, as a complete Hfe, that it allows this tendency : by dint of despising the outward life, it loses the control of this Ufe, and of itself when in contact with it. My present business, however, is not to praise or blame Dante's practical conduct of his so life, but to make clear his peculiar mental and spiritual constitution. This, I say, disposed him to absorb himself in the inner Ufe, wholly to humble and efface before this the outward hfe. We may see this in the passage of the Purgatory where he makes Beatrice reprove him for his backsUdmgs after she, his visible symbol of spiritual per- fection, had vanished from his eyes. ' For a while ' — she says of him to the ' pious substances,' the angels — ' for a while with my countenance I upheld him ; showing to him my youthful eyes, with me I led 40 him, turned towards the right way. * Soon as I came on the threshold of my second ago, og2 452 DANTE AND BEATRICE and changed my life, this man took himself from me and gave himself to others. 'When that I had mounted from flesh to spirit, and beauty and spirit were increased unto me, I was to him less dear and less acceptable. ' He turned his steps to go in a way not true, pursuing after false images of good, which fulfil nothing of the promises which they give. ' Neither availed it me that I obtained inspirations to be granted me, whereby, both in dream and otherwise, lo J. called him back ; so little heed paid he to them. ' So deep he fell, that, for his salvation all means came short, except to show him the people of perdition. ' The high decree of God would be broken, could Lethe be passed, and that so fair aliment tasted, without some scot paid of repentance, which pours forth tears.' Here, indeed, and in a somewhat similar passage of the next canto, Mr. Martin thinks that the ' obvious allusion ' is to certain moral shortcomings, occasional slips, of which (though he treats Boccaccio's imputation as monstrous and 20 incredible) ' Dante, with his strong and ardent passions, having, like meaner men, to fight the perennial conflict between flesh and spirit,' had sometimes, he supposes, been guilty. An Italian commentator gives at least as true an interpretation of these passages when he says that ' in them Dante makes Beatrice, as the representative of theology, lament that he should have left the study of divinity — ^in which, by the grace of Heaven, he might have attained admirable proficiency — to immerse himself in civil affairs with the parties of Florence.' But the real truth 30 is, that all the life of the world, its pleasures, its business, its parties, its politics, all is alike hoUow and miserable to Dante in comparison with the inward lite, the ecstasy of the divine vision ; every way which does not lead straight towards this is for him a via non vera ; every good thing but this is for him a false image of good, fulfilling none of the promises which it gives ; for the excellency of the knowledge of this he counts all things but loss. Beatrice leads him to this ; herself symbolizes for him the ineffable beauty and purity for which he longs. Even to Dante at 40 twenty-one, when he yet sees the living Beatrice with his DANTE AND BEATRICE 453 eyes, she already symbolizes this for him, she is already not the ' creature not too bright and good ' of Wordsworth, but a spirit far more than a woman ; to Dante at twenty- five composing the Vita Nuova she is still more a spirit ; to Dante at fifty, when his character has taken its bent, when his genius is come to his perfection, when he is composing his immortal poem, she is a spirit altogether. ON THE MODERN ELEMENT IN LITERATURE [Macmillan's Magazine, February 1869] [What follows was delivered as an inaugural lecture in the Poetry Chair at Oxford. It was never printed, but there appeared at the time several comments on it, from critics who had either heard it, or heard reports about it. It was meant to be followed and completed by a course of lectures developing the subject entirely, and some of these were given. But the course was broken off because I found my knowledge insufficient for treating in a solid way many portions of the subject chosen. The inaugural lecture, however, treating a portion of the subject where my knowledge was perhaps less insufficient, and where besides my hearers were better able to help themselves out from their own knowledge, is here printed. No one feels the imperfection of this sketchy and generalizing mode of treatment more than I do ; and not only is this mode of treatment less to my taste now than it was eleven years ago, but the style too, which is that of the doctor rather than the explorer, is a style which I have long since learnt to abandon. Nevertheless, having written much of late about Hellenism and Hebraism, and Hellenism being to many people almost an empty name compared with Hebraism, I print this lecture with the hope that it may serve, in the absence of other and fuller illustrations, to give some notion of the Hellenic spirit and its works, and of their significance in the history of the evolution of the human spirit in general. M. A.] It is related in one of those legends which illustrate the history of Buddhism, that a certain disciple once presented himself before his master, Buddha, with the desire to be permitted to undertake a mission of peculiar difi&culty. The compassionate teacher represented to him the obstacles to be surmounted and the risks to be run. Pourna — so the disciple was called — ^insisted, and replied, with equal humility and adroitness, to the successive objections of his adviser. Satisfied at last by his answers of the fitness of his disciple, Buddha accorded to him the desired per- lo mission ; and dismissed him to his task with these remark- able words, nearly identical with those in which he himself is said to have been admonished by a divinity at the outset of his own career : — ' Go then, Pouma,' are his words ; ' having been delivered, deliver ; having been ON THE MODERN ELEMENT IN LITERATURE 455 consoled, console ; being arrived thyself at the farther bank, enable others to arrive there also.' It was a moral deliverance, eminently, of which the great Oriental reformer spoke ; it was a deliverance from the pride, the sloth, the anger, the selfishness, which impair the moral activity of man — a deliverance which is demanded of all individuals and in all ages. But there is another deliverance for the human race, hardly less important, indeed, than the first — for in the enjoyment of both 10 united consists man's true freedom — but demanded far less universally, and even more rarely and imperfectly obtained ; a deliverance neglected, apparently hardly con- ceived, in some ages, while it has been pursued with earnest- ness in others, which derive from that very pursuit their peculiar character. This deliverance is an intellectual deliverance. An intellectual deliverance is the peculiar demand of those ages which are called modern ; and those nations are said to be imbued with the modem spirit most eminently 20 in which the demand for such a deliverance has been made with most zeal, and satisfied with most completeness. Such a dehverance is emphatically, whether we will or no, the demand of the age in which we ourselves live. All intellectual pursuits our age judges according to their power of helping to satisfy this demand ; of all studies it asks, above all, the question, how far they can contribute to this deliverance. I propose, on this my first occasion of speaking here, to attempt such a general survey of ancient classical literature 30 and history as may afford us the conviction — in presence of the doubts so often expressed of the profitableness, in the present day, of our study of this literature — ^that, even admitting to their fullest extent the legitimate demands of our age, the literature of ancient Greece is, even for modern times, a mighty agent of intellectual deliverance ; even for modern times, therefore, an object of indestructible interest. But first let us ask ourselves why the demand for an intellectual deliverance arises in such an age as the present, 40 and in what the deliverance itself consists ? The demand arises, because our present age has around it a copious 456 ON THE MODERN ELEMENT IN LITERATURE and complex present, and behind it a copious and complex past ; it arises, because the present age exhibits to the individual man who contemplates it the spectacle of a vast multitude of facts awaiting and inviting his com- prehension. The deliverance consists in man's comprehen- sion of this present and past. It begins when our mind begins to enter into possession of the general ideas which are the law of this vast multitude of facts. It is perfect when we have acquired that harmonious acquiescence of mind which we feel in contemplating a grand spectacle lo that is intelligible to us ; when we have lost that impatient irritation of mind which we feel in presence of an immense, moving, confused spectacle which, while it perpetually excites our curiosity, perpetually baffles our comprehen- sion. This, then, is what distinguishes certain epochs in the history of the human race, and our own amongst the number ; — on the one hand, the presence of a significant spectacle to contemplate ; on the other hand, the desire to find the true point of view from which to contemplate 20 this spectacle. He who has found that point of view, he who adequately comprehends this spectacle, has risen to the comprehension of his age : he who communicates that point of view to his age, he who interprets to it that spectacle, is one of his age's intellectual deliverers. The spectacle, the facts, presented for the comprehen- sion of the present age, are indeed immense. The facts consist of the events, the institutions, the sciences, the arts, the literatures, in which human life has manifested itself up to the present time : the spectacle is the collective so life of humanity. And everywhere there is connexion, everywhere there is illustration : no single event, no single literature, is adequately comprehended except in its relation to other events, to other literatures. The literature of ancient Greece, the literature of the Christian Middle Age, so long as they are regarded as two isolated literatures, two isolated growths of the human spirit, are not adequately comprehended ; and it is adequate com- prehension which is the demand of the present age. ' We must compare,'— the illustrious Chancellor of Cambridge ^ 40 '■ The late Prinoe Consort. ON THE MODERN ELEMENT IN LITERATURE 457 said the other day to his hearers at Manchester, — ' we must compare the works of other ages with those of our own age and country ; that, while we feel proud of the immense development of knowledge and power of production which we possess, we may learn humility in contemplating the refinement of feeling and intensity of thought manifested in the works of the older schools.' To know how others stand, that we may know how we ourselves stand ; and to know how we ourselves stand, that we may correct 10 our mistakes and achieve our deliverance — ^that is our problem. But all facts, aU the elements of the spectacle before us, have not an equal value — do not merit a like attention : and it is well that they do not, for no man would be adequate to the task of thoroughly mastering them all. Some have more significance for us, others have less ; some merit our utmost attention in all their details, others it is sufficient to comprehend in their general character, and then they may be dismissed. 20 What facts, then, let us ask ourselves, what elements of the spectacle before us, will naturally be most interesting to a highly developed age like our own, to an age making the demand which we have described for an intellectual deliverance by means of the complete intelligence of its own situation ? Evidently, the other ages simUarlj' developed, and making the same demand. And what past literature will naturally be most interesting to such an age as our own ? Evidently, the Uteratures which have most successfully solved for their ages the problem which 30 occupies ours : the literatures which in their day and for their own nation have adequately comprehended, have adequately represented, the spectacle before them. A signi- ficant, a highly-developed, a culminating epoch, on the one hand, — a comprehensive, a commensurate, an adequate literature, on the other, — ^these will natiaraUy be the objects of deepest interest to our modem age. Such an epoch and such a literature are, in fact, modern, in the same sense in which our own age and literature are modem ; they are f oxmded upon a rich past and upon an instructive 40 fulness of experience. It may, however, happen that a great epoch is without 458 ON THE MODERN ELEMENT IN LITERATURE a perfectly adequate literature ; it may happen that a great age, a great nation, has attained a remarkable fulness of political and social development, without in- tellectually taking the complete measure of itself, without adequately representing that development in its literature. In this case, the epoch, the nation itself, will still be an object of the greatest interest to us ; but the literature will be an object of less interest to us : the facts, the material spectacle, are there ; but the contemporary view of the facts, the intellectual interpretation, are inferior and w inadequate. It may happen, on the other hand, that great authors, that a powerful literature, are found in an age and nation less great and powerful than themselves ; it may happen that a literature, that a man of genius, may arise adequate to the representation of a greater, a more highly-developed age than that in which they appear ; it may happen that a literature completely interprets its epoch, and yet has something over ; that it has a force, a richness, a geniahty, a power of view which the materials at its disposition are 20 insufficient adequately to employ. In such a case, the liter atiire will be more interesting to us than the epoch. The interpreting power, the illuminating and revealing intellect, are there ; but the spectacle on which they throw their light is not fully worthy of them. And I shall not, I hope, be thought to magnify too much my office if I add, that it is to the poetical literature of an age that we must, in general, look for the most perfect, the most adequate interpretation of that age, — for the performance of a work which demands the most so energetic and harmonious activity of aU the powers of the human mind. Because that activity of the whole mind, that genius, as Johnson nobly describes it, ' without which judgment is cold and knowledge is inert ; that energy which collects, combines, ampMes, and animates,' is in poetry at its highest stretch and in its most energetic exertion. What we seek, therefore, what will most enhghten us, most contribute to our intellectual deliverance, is the union of two things ; it is the co-existence, the simul- 40 taneous appearance, of a great epoch and a great literature. ON THE MODERN ELEMENT IN LITERATURE 459 Now the culminating age in the life of ancient Greece I call, beyond question, a great epoch ; the Ufe of Athens in the fifth century before our era I caU one of the highly- developed, one of the marking, one of the modem periods in the Ufe of the whole human race. It has been said that the ' Athens of Pericles was a vigorous man, at the summit of his bodily strength and mental energy.' There was the utmost energy of life there, pubhc and private ; the most entire freedom, the most unprejudiced and intelligent 10 observation of human affairs. Let us rapidly examiae some of the characteristics which distinguish modern epochs ; let us see how far the culminating century of ancient Greece exhibits them ; let us compare it, in respect of them, with a much later, a celebrated century ; let us compare it with the age of Elizabeth in our own country. To begin with what is exterior. One of the most charac- teristic outward features of a modern age, of an age of advanced civilization, is the banishment of the ensigns of war and bloodshed from the intercourse of civil life. 20 Crime stUl exists, and wars are stUl carried on ; but within the limits of civil Hfe a circle has been formed within which man can move securely, and develop the arts of peace uninterruptedly. The private man does not go forth to his daily occupation prepared to assail the life of his neighbour or to have to defend his own. With the disappearance of the constant means of offence the occasions of offence diminish ; society at last acquires repose, con- fidence, and free activity. An important inward charac- teristic, again, is the growth of a tolerant spirit ; that 30 spirit which is the offspring of an enlarged knowledge ; a spirit patient of the diversities of habits and opinions. Other characteristics are the multipUcation of the con- veniences of life, the formation of taste, the capacity for refined pursuits. And this leads us to the supreme charac- teristic of all : the intellectual maturity of man himself ; the tendency to observe facts with a critical spirit ; to search for their law, not to wander among them at random ; to judge by the rule of reason, not by the impulse of prejudice or caprice. 40 Well, now, with respect to the presence of all these characteristics in the age of Pericles, we possess the explicit 460 ON THE MODERN ELEMENT IN LITERATURE testimony of an immortal work, — of the history of Thucy- dides. ' The Athenians first,' he says — speaking of the gradual development of Grecian society up to the period -when the Peloponnesian war commenced — ' the Athenians first left off the habit of wearing arms : ' that is, this mark of superior civilization had, in the age of Pericles, become general in Greece, had long been visible at Athens. In the time of Elizabeth, on the other hand, the wearing of arms was universal in England and throughout Europe. Again, the conveniences, the ornaments, the luxuries of lo life, had become common at Athens at the time of which we are speaking. But there had been an advance even beyond this ; there had been an advance to that perfec- tion, that propriety of taste which prescribes the excess of ornament, the extravagance of luxury. The Athenians had given up, Thucydides says, had given up, although not very long before, an extravagance of dress and an excess of personal ornament which, in the first fiush of newly discovered luxury, had been adopted by some of the richer classes. The height of civilization in this respect 20 seems to have been attained ; there was general elegance and refinement of life, and there was simplicity. What was the case in this respect in the Elizabethan age ? The scholar Casaubon, who settled in England in the reign of James I, bears evidence to the want here, even at that time, of conveniences of hfe which were already to be met with on the continent of Europe. On the other hand, the taste for fantastic, for excessive personal adornment, to which the portraits of the time bear testimony, is admirably set forth in the work of a great novelist, whoso was also a very truthful antiquarian — in the Kenilworth of Sir Walter Scott. We all remember the description, in the thirteenth and fourteenth chapters of the second volume of Kenilworth, of the barbarous magnificence, the ' fierce vanities,' of the dress of the period. Pericles praises the Athenians that they had discovered sources of recreation for the spirit to counterbalance the labours of the body : compare these, compare the pleasures which charmed the whole body of the Athenian people through the yearly round of their festivals with the popular 40 shows and pastimes in Kenilworth, ' We have freedom,' ON THE MODERN ELEMENT IN LITERATURE 461 says Pericles, ' for individual diversities of opinion and character ; . we do not take offence at the tastes and habits of our neighbour if they differ from our own.' Yes, in Greece, in the Athens of Pericles, there is toleration ; but in England, in the England of the sixteenth century ? — ^the Puritans are then in full growth. So that with regard to these characteristics of civilization of a modern spirit which we have hitherto enumerated, the superiority, it will be admitted, rests with the age of Pericles. 10 Let ua pass to what we said was the supreme charac- teristic of a highly developed, a modem age — the manifesta- tion of a critical spirit, the endeavour after a rational arrangement and appreciation of facts. Let us consider one or two of the passages in the masterly introduction which Thucydides, the contemporary of Pericles, has prefixed to his history. What was his motive in choosing the Peloponnesian War for his subject ? Because it was, in his opinion, the most important, the most instructive event which had, up to that time, happened, in the history 20 of mankind. What is his eSort in the first twenty-three chapters of his history ? To place in their correct point of view aU the facts which had brought Grecian society to the point at which that dominant event found it ; to strip these facts of their exaggeration, to examine them critically. The enterprises undertaken in the early times of Greece were on a much smaller scale than had been commonly supposed. The Greek chiefs were induced to combine in the expedition against Troy, not by their respect for an oath taken by them all v/hen suitors to Helen, but by 30 their respect for the preponderating influence of Aga- memnon ; the siege of Troy had been protracted not so much by the valour of the besieged as by the inadequate mode of warfare necessitated by the want of funds of the besiegers. No doubt Thucydides' criticism of the Trojan war is not perfect ; but observe how in these and many other points he labours to correct popular errors, to assign their true character to facts, complaining, as he does so, of men's habit of uncritical reception of current stories. ' So little a matter of care to most men,' he says, ' is the 40 search after truth, and so inclined are they to take up any story which is ready to their hand.' ' He himself,' he 462 ON THE MODERN ELEMENT IN LITERATURE continues, ' has endeavoured to give a true picture, and believes that in the main he has done so. For some readers his history may want the charm of the uncritical, half- fabulous narratives of earlier writers ; but for such as desire, to gain a clear knowledge of the past, and thereby of the future also, which wUl surely, after the course of human things, represent again hereafter, if not the very image, yet the near resemblance of the past — ^if such shall judge my work to be profitable, I shall be well content.' What language shall we properly call this ? It is lo modern language ; it is the language of a thoughtful philosophic man of our own days ; it is the language of Burke or Niebuhr assigning the true aim of history. And yet Thucydides is no mere literary man ; no isolated thinker, speaking far over the heads of his hearers to a future age — no : he was a man of action, a man of the world, a man of his time. He represents, at its best indeed, but he represents, the general intelligence of his age and nation ; of a nation the meanest citizens of which could follow with comprehension the profoundly thoughtful 20 speeches of Pericles. Let us now turn for a contrast to a historian of the EUzabethan age, also a man of great mark and ability, also a man of action, also a man of the world. Sir Walter Ralegh. Sir Walter Ralegh writes the History of the World, as Thucydides has written the History of the Peloponnesian War ; let us hear his language ; let us mark his point of view ; let us see what problems occur to him for solution. ' Seeing,' he says, ' that we digress in all the ways of our lives — yea, seeing the life of man is nothing else but digres- 30 sion — I may be the better excused in writing their Hves and actions.' What are the preliminary facts which he dis- cusses, as Thucydides discusses the Trojan War and the early naval power of Crete, and which are to lead up to his main inquiry ? Open the table of contents of his first volume. You will find : — ' Of the firmament, and of the waters above the firmament, and whether there be any crystaUine Heaven, or any primum mobUe.' You will then find : — ' Of Fate, and that the stars have great influence, and that their operations may diversely be 40 prevented or furthered.' Then you come to two entire ON THE MODERN ELEMENT IN LITERATURE 463 chapters on the place of Paradise, and on the two chief trees in the garden of Paradise. And in what style, with what power of criticism, does Ralegh treat the subjects so selected ? I turn to the seventh section of the third chapter of his first book, which treats ' Of their opinion which make Paradise as high as the moon, and of others which make it higher than the middle region of the air.' Thus he begins the discussion of this opinion : — ' Whereas Beda saith, and as the schoolmen affirm Paradise to be 10 a place altogether removed from the knowledge of men ("locus a'cogiiitione hominum remotissimus "), and Bar- cephas conceived that Paradise was far in the east, but mounted above the ocean and all the earth, and near the orb of the moon (which opinion, though the schoolmen charge Beda withal, yet Pererius lays it ofi from Beda and Ms master Rabanus) ; and whereas Rupertus in his geography of Paradise doth not much differ from the rest, but finds it seated next or nearest Heaven ' So he states the error, and now for his own criticism of it. ' First, 20 such a place cannot be commodious to live in, for being so near the -moon it had been too near the sun and other heavenly bodies. Secondly, it must have been too joint a neighbour to the element of fire. Thirdly, the air in that region is so violently moved and carried about with such swiftness as nothing in that place can consist or have abiding. Fourthly,' — but what has been quoted is surely enough, and there is no use in continuing. Which is the ancient here, and which is the modern ? Which uses the language of an intelligent man of our own so days ? which a language wholly obsolete and unfamiliar to us ? Which has the rational appreciation and control of his facts ? which wanders among them helplessly and without a clue ? Is it our own countryman, or is it the Greek ? And the language of Ralegh affords a fair sample of the critical power, of the point of view, possessed by the majority of intelligent men of his day ; as the language of Thucydides affords us a fair sample of the critical power of the majority of intelligent men in the age of Pericles. Well, then, in the age of Pericles we have, in spite of 40 its antiquity, a highly-developed, a modem, a deeply interesting epoch. Next comes the question : Is this 464 ON THE MODERN ELEMENT IN LITERATURE epoch adequately interpreted by its highest literature ? Now, the peculiar characteristic of the highest literature - — the poetry — of the fifth century in Greece before the Christian era, is its adequacy ; the peculiar characteristic of the poetry of Sophocles is its consummate, its unrivalled adequacy ; that it represents the highly developed human nature of that age — human nature developed in a number of directions, politically, socially, religiously, morally developed — ^in its completest and most harmonious develop- ment in all these directions ; while there is shed over this lo poetry the charm of that noble serenity which always accompanies true insight. If in the body of Athenians of that time there was, as we have said, the utmost energy of mature manhood, public and private ; the most entire freedom, the most unprejudiced and intelligent observa- tion of human affairs— in Sophocles there is the same energy, the same maturity, the same freedom, the same intelligent observation ; but aU these idealized and glorified by the grace and light shed over them from the noblest poetical feeling. And therefore I have ventured to say of 20 Sophocles, that he ' saw life steadily, and saw it whole.' Well may we understand how Pericles — how the great statesman whose aim was, it has been said, ' to realize in Athens the idea which he had conceived of human great- ness,' and who partly succeeded in his aim — should have been drawn to the great poet whose works are the noblest reflection of his success. I assert, therefore, though the detailed proof of the assertion must be reserved for other opportimities, that, if the fifth century in Greece before our era is a significant so and modem epoch, the poetry of that epoch — ^the poetry of Pindar, Aeschylus, and Sophocles — ^is an adequate representation and interpretation of it. The poetry of Aristophanes is an adequate representa- tion of it also. True, this poetry regards humanity from the comic side ; but there is a comic side from which to regard humanity as well as a tragic one ; and the dis- tinction of Aristophanes is to have regarded it from the true point of view on the comic side. He too, like Sophocles, regards the human nature of his time in its fullest develop- 40 ment ; the boldest creations of a riotous imagination are ON THE MODERN ELEMENT IN LITERATURE 465 in Aristophanes, as has been justly said, based always upon the foundation of a serious thought : politics, educa- tion, social life, literature — all the great modes in which the human life of his day manifested itself — are the sub- jects of his thoughts, and of his penetrating comment. There is shed, therefore, over his poetry the charm, the vital freshness, which is felt when man and his relations are from any side adequately, and therefore genially, re- garded. Here is the true difierence between Aristophanes lb and Menander. There has been preserved an epitome of a comparison by Plutarch between Aristophanes and Menander, in which the grossness of the former, the exquisite truth to life and feUcity of observation of the latter, are strongly insisted upon ; and the preference of the refined, the learned, the intelligent men of a later period for Menander loudly proclaimed. ' What should take a man of refinement to the theatre,' asks Plutarch, ' except to see one of Menander' s plays ? When do you see the theatre filled with cultivated persons, except when 20 Menander is acted ? and he is the favourite refreshment,' he continues, ' to the overstrained mind of the laborious philosopher.' And every one knows the famous line of tribute to this poet by an enthusiastic admirer in antiquity : — ' Life and Menander, which of you painted the other ? ' We remember, too, how a great English statesman is said to have declared that there was no lost work of antiquity whichhe so ardently desired to recover as a play of Menander. Yet Menander has perished, and Aristophanes has survived. And to what is this to be attributed ? To the instinct of 30 self-preservation in humanity. The human race has the strongest, the most invincible tendency to live, to develop itself. It retains, it clings to what fosters its life, what favours its development, to the literature which exhibits it in its vigour ; it rejects, it abandons what does not foster its development, the Uterature which exhibits it arrested and decayed. Now, between the times of Sophocles and Menander a great check had befallen the development of Greece ; — ^the failure of , the Athenian expedition to Syracuse, and the consequent termination of the Pelo- 4oponnesian War in a result unfavourable to Athens. The free expansion of her growth was checked ; one of the ARNOLD H h 466 ON THE MODERN ELEMENT IN LITERATURE noblest channels of Athenian life, that of political activity, had begun to narrow and to dry up. That was the true catastrophe of the ancient world ; it was then that the oracles of the ancient world should have become silent, and that its gods should have forsaken their temples ; for from that date the intellectual and spiritual life of Greece was left without an adequate material basis of political and practical life ; and both began inevitably to decay. The opportunity of the ancient world was then , lost, never to return ; for neither the Macedonian nor the lo Roman world, which possessed an adequate material basis, possessed, like the Athens of earlier times, an adequate intellect and soul to inform and inspire them ; and there was left of the ancient world, when Christianity arrived, of Greece only a head without a body, and of Rome only a body without a soul. It is Athens after this check, after this diminution of vitality, — ^it is man with part of his life shorn away, refined and intelligent indeed, but sceptical, frivolous, and dis- solute, — ^which the poetry of Menander represented. The 20 cultivated, the accomplished might applaud the dexterity, the perfection of the representation — ^might prefer it to the free genial delineation of a more living time with which they were no longer in sympathy. But the instinct of humanity taught it, that in the one poetry there was the seed of life, in the other poetry the seed of death ; and it has rescued Aristophanes, while it has left Menander to his fate. In the flowering period of the life of Greece, therefore, we have a culminating age, one of the flowering periods 30 of the life of the human race : in the poetry of that age we have a literature commensurate with its epoch. It is most perfectly commensurate in the poetry of Piadar, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes ; these, therefore, will be the supremely interesting objects in this literature ; but the stages in literature which led up to this point of perfection, the stages in literature which led downward from it, will be deeply interesting also. A distinguished person,! who has lately been occupying himself with Homer, has remarked that an undue preference is given, 40 ' Mr. Gladstone. ON THE MODERN ELEMENT IN LITERATURE 407 in the studies of Oxford, to these poets over Homer. The justification of such a preference, even if we put aside all philological considerations, lies, perhaps, in what I have said. Homer himself is eternally interesting ; he is a greater poetical power than even Sophocles or Aeschylus ; but his age is less interesting than himself. Aeschylus and Sophocles represent an , age as interesting as themselves ; the names, indeed, in their dramas are the names of the old heroic world, from which they were far separated ; 10 but these names are taken, because the use of them permits to the poet that free and ideal treatment of his characters which the highest tragedy demands ; and into these figures of the old world is poured aU the fulness of life and of thought which the new world had accumulated. This new world in its maturity of reason resembles our own ; and the advantage over Homer in their greater significance for MS, which Aeschylus and Sophocles gain by belonging to this new world, more than compensates for their poetical inferiority to him. 20 Let us now pass to the Roman world. There is no necessity to accumulate proofs that the culminating period of Roman history is to be classed among the leading, the significant, the modern periods of the world. There is universally current, I think, a pretty correct appreciation of the high development of the Rome of Cicero and Augustus ; no one doubts that material civilization and the refine- ments of life were largely diffused in it ; no one doubts that cultivation of raind and intelligence were widely diffused in it. Therefore, I will not occupy time by show- so ing that Cicero corresponded with his friends in the style of the most accomplished, the most easy letter-writers of modern times ; that Caesar did not write history like Sir Walter Ralegh. The great period of Rome is, perhaps, on the whole, the greatest, the fullest, the most significant period on record ; it is certainly a greater, a fuller period than the age of Pericles. It is an infinitely larger school . for the men reared in it ; the relations of life are immeasur- ably multiplied, the events which happen are on an immeasurably grander scale. The facts, the spectacle of 40 this Roman world, then, are immense : let us see how far the literature, the interpretation of the facts, has been adequate. ah 2 468 ON THE MODERN ELEMENT IN LITERATURE Let us begin with a great poet, a great philosopher, Lucretius. In the case of Thucydides I called attention to the fact that his habit of mind, his mode of dealing with questions, were modern ; that they were those of an enlightened, reflecting man among ourselves. Let me call attention to the exhibition in Lucretius of a modem feeling not less remarkable than the modern thought in Thucydides. The predominance of thought, of reflection, in modern epochs is not without its penalties ; in the unsound, in the over-tasked, in the over-sensitive, it has produced the lo most painful, the most lamentable results ; it has produced a state of feeling unknown to less enlightened but perhaps healthier epochs — ^the feeling of depression, the feeling of ennui. Depression and ennui ; these are the characteristics stamped on how many of the representative works of modem times ! they are also the characteristics stamped on the poem of Lucretius. One of the most powerful, the most solemn passages of the work of Lucretius, one of the most powerful, the most solemn passages in the literature of the whole world, is the well-known conclusion of the2o third book. With masterly touches he exhibits the lassi- tude, the incurable tedium which pursue men in their amusements ; with indignant irony he upbraids them for the cowardice with which they cling to a life which for most is miserable ; to a Ufe which contains, for the most fortunate, nothing but the old dull roimd of the same unsatisfying objects for ever presented. ' A man rushes abroad,' he says, ' because he is sick of being at home ; and suddenly comes home again because he finds himself no whit easier abroad. He posts as fast as his horses can so take him to his country-seat : when he has got there he hesitates what to do ; or he throws himself down moodily to sleep, and seeks forgetfulness in that ; or he makes the best of his way back to town again with the same speed as he fled from it. Thus every one flies from himself.' What a picture of ennui ! of the disease of the most modem societies, the most advanced civilizations ! ' O man,' he exclaims again, ' the lights of the world, Scipio, Homer, Epicurus, are dead ; wUt thou hesitate and fret at dying, whose life is weUnigh dead whilst thou art yet alive ; who 40 consumest in sleep the greater part of thy span, and when ON THE MODERN ELEMENT IN LITERATURE 469 awake dronest and ceasest not to dream ; and earnest about a mind troubled with baseless fear, and canst not find what it is that aileth thee when thou staggerest like a drunken wretch in the press of thy cares, and welterest hither and thither in the unsteady wandering of thy spirit ! ' And again : ' I have seen nothing more than you have already seen,' he makes Nature say to man, ' to invent for your amusement ; eadem sunt omnia semper — aU things continue the same for ever.' 10 Yes, Lucretius is modem ; but is he adequate ? And how can a man adequately interpret the activity of his age when he is not in sjrmpathy with it ? Think of the varied, the abundant, the wide spectacle of the Roman life of his day ; think of its fulness of occupation, its energy of effort. From these Lucretius withdraws him- self, and bids his disciples to withdraw themselves ; he bids them to leave the business of the world, and to apply themselves ' naturam cognoscere rerum — ^to learn the nature of things ; ' but there is no peace, no cheerfulness for him 20 either in the world from which he comes, or in the solitude to which he goes. With stem effort, with gloomy despair, he seems to rivet his eyes on the elementary reaUty, the naked framework of the world, because the world in its fulness and movement is too exciting a spectacle for his discomposed brain. He seems to feel the spectacle of it at once terrifying and alluring ; and to deliver himself from it he has to keep perpetually repeating his formula of disenchantment and annihilation. In reading him, you understand the tradition which represents him as having 30 been driven mad by a poison administered as a love- charm by his mistress, and as having composed his great work in the intervals of his madness. Lucretius is, there- fore, overstrained, gloom-weighted, morbid ; and he who is morbid is no adequate interpreter of his age. I pass to VirgU ; to the poetical name which of all poetical names has perhaps had the most prodigious fortune ; the name which for Dante, for the Middle Age, represented the perfection of classical antiquity. The perfection of classical antiquity Virgil does not represent ; 40 but far be it from me to add my voice to those which have decried his genius ; nothing that I shall say is, or can 470 ON THE MODERN ELEMENT IN LITERATURE ever be, inconsistent ■with a profound, an almost affec- tionate veneration for him. But with respect to him, as with respect to Lucretius, I shall freely ask the question. Is he adequate ? Does he represent the epoch in which he lived, the mighty Roman world of his time, as the great poets of the great epoch of Greek life represented theirs, in aU its fulness, in all its significance ? From the very form itself of his great poem, the Aeneid, one would be led to augur that this was impossible. The epic' form, as a form for representing contemporary or lo nearly contemporary events, has attained, in the poems of Homer, an unmatched, an immortal success ; the epic form as employed by learned poets for the reproduction of the events of a past age has attained a very considerable success. But for this purpose, for the poetic treatment of the events of a past age, the epic form is a less vital form than the dramatic form. The great poets of the modem period of Greece are accordingly, as we have seen, the dramatic poets. The chief of these — ^Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes — ^have survived : the distinguished 20 epic poets of the same period — Panyasis, ChoerUus, Anti- machus — though praised by the Alexandrian critics, have perished in a common destruction with the undistinguished. And what is the reason of this ? It is, that the dramatic form exhibits, above all, the actions of man as strictly determined by his thoughts and feelings ; it exhibits, there- fore, what may be always accessible, always intelligible, always interesting. But the epic form takes a wider range ; it represents not only the thought and passion of man, that which is universal and eternal, but also the forms of 30 outward life, the fashion of manners, the aspects of nature, that which is local or transient. To exhibit adequately what is local and transient, only a witness, a contem- porary, can suffice. In the reconstruction, by learning and antiquarian ingenuity, of the local and transient features of a past age, in their representation by one who is not a witness or contemporary, it is impossible to feel the liveliest kind of interest. What, for instance, is the most interesting portion of the Aeneid, — ^the portion where Virgil seems to be moving most freely, and therefore to 40 be most animated, most forcible ? Precisely that portion ON THE MODERN ELEMENT IN LITERATURE 471 which has most a dramatic character ; the episode of Dido ;• that portion where locality and manners are nothing — ■ where persons and characters are everything. We might presume beforehand, therefore, that if Virgil, at a time when contemporary epic poetry was no longer possible, had been inspired to represent human life in its fullest significance, he would not have selected the epic form. Accordingly, what is, in fact, the character of the poem, the frame of mind of the poet ? Has the poem depth, the 10 completeness of the poems of Aeschylus or Sophocles, of those adequate and consummate representations of human life ? Has the poet the serious cheerfulness of Sophocles, of a man who has mastered the problem of human life, who knows its gravity, and is therefore serious, but who knows that he comprehends it, and is therefore cheerful ? Over the whole of the great poem of Virgil, over the whole Aeneid, there rests an ineffable melancholy : not a rigid, a moody gloom, like the melancholy of Lucretius ; no, a sweet, a touching sadness, but stiU a sadness ; a melan- 20 choly which is at once a source of charm in the poem, and a testimony to its incompleteness. Virgil, as Niebuhr has well said, .expressed no affected self-disparagement, but the haunting, the irresistible self-dissatisfaction of his heart, when he desired on his deathbed that his poem . might be destroyed. A man of the most delicate genius, the most rich learning, but of weak health, of, the most sensitive nature, in a great and overwhelming world ; conscious, at heart, of his inadequacy for the thorough spiritual mastery of that world and its interpretation in 30 a work of art ; conscious of this inadequacy — the one inadequacy, the one weak place in the mighty Roman nature ! This suffering, this graceful-minded, this finely- gifted man is the most beautiful, the most attractive figure in hterary history ; but he is not the adequate interpreter of the great period of Rome. We come to Horace : and if Lucretius, if Virgil want cheerfulness, Horace wants seriousness. I go back to what I said of Menander : as with Menander so it is with Horace : the men of taste, the men of cultivation, the men 40 of the world are enchanted with him ; he has not a pre- judice, not an illusion, not a blunder. True ! yet the best 472 ON THE MODERN ELEMENT IN LITERATURE men in the best ages have never been thoroughly satisfied with Horace. If human life were complete without faith, without enthusiasm, without energy, Horace, like Menan- der ; would be the perfect interpreter of human life : but it is not ; to the best, to the most living sense of humanity, it is not ; and because it is not, Horace is inadequate. Pedants are tiresome, men of reflection and enthusiasm are unhappy and morbid ; therefore Horace is a sceptical man of the world. Men of action are without ideas, men of the world are frivolous and sceptical ; therefore Lucretius lo is plunged in gloom and in stem sorrow. So hard, nay, so impossible for most men is it to develop themselves in their entireness ; to rejoice in the variety, the movement of human life with the children of the world ; to be serious over the depth, the significance of human lite with the wise ! Horace warms himself before the transient fire of human animation and human pleasure while he can, and is only serious when he reflects that the fire must soon go out : — ' Damna tamen oeleres reparant coelestia lunae : 20 Noe, ubi deoidimus — ' ' For nature there is renovation, but for man there is none ! ' — it is exquisite, but it is not interpretative and fortifying. In the Roman world, then, we have found a highly modern, a deeply significant, an interesting period — a period more significant and more interesting, because fuller, than the great period of Greece ; but we have not a cominensurate literature. In Greece we have seen a highly modem, a most significant and interesting period, 30 although on a scale of less magnitude and importance than the great period of Rome ; but then, co-existing with the great epoch of Greece there is what is wanting to that of Rome, a commensurate, an interesting literatiu-e. The intellectual history of our race cannot be clearly understood without applying to other ages, nations, and literatures the same method of inquiry which we have been here imperfectly applying to what is called classical antiquity. But enough has at least been said, perhaps, to establish the absolute, the enduring interest of Greek 40 literature, and, above all, of Greek poetry. OBERMANN [The Academy, October 9, 1869.] The most recent edition of Obermann lies before me, the date on its title-page being 1863. It is, I believe, the fourth edition which has been published ; the book made its first appearance in 1804 ; three editions, and not large editions, have sufficed for the demand of sixty years. Yet the book has lived, though with but this obscure life, and is not likely to die. Madame George Sand and Monsieur Sainte-Beuve have spoken in prose much and excellently of the book and its author. It may be in the recollection 10 of some who read this that I have spoken of Obermann in verse, if not well, at least abundantly. It is to be wished, however, that Obermann should also speak to English readers for himself ; and my present design is to take those two or three points where he is most significant and interesting, and to present some of his deliverances on those points in his own words. It may be convenient, however, that first I should repeat here the short sketch which I have already given elsewhere of the imeventful Ufe of the personage whom 20 we call Obermann. His real name is Senancour. In the book which occupies us,— a volume of letters of which the writer, calling himself Obermann, and writiag chiefly from Switzerland, delivers his thoughts about God, nature, and the human soid, — it is Senancour himself who speaks under Obermann's name, ifitienne Pivert de Senancour, a ^Frenchman, although having in his nature much that we are accustomed to consider as by no means French, was bom in 1770, was trained for the priesthood, and passed some time in the seminary of St. Sulpice, broke ao away from his training and country to live some years in Switzerland, where he married, came back to France in middle life, and followed thenceforward the career of a man of letters, but with hardly any fame or success. 474 OBERMANN His marriage was not a happy one. He died an old man in 1846, desiring that on his grave might be placed these words only: ' Eternite, deviens mon asile.' Of the letters of Obermann, the writer's profound inward- ness, his austere and sad sincerity, and his delicate feeling for nature, are, as I have elsewhere remarked, the dis- tinguishing characteristics. His constant inwardness, his unremitting occupation with that question which haunted St. Bernard — Bernarde, ad quid venisti ? — distinguish him from Goethe and Wordsworth, whose study of this question lo is relieved by the thousand distractions of a poetic interest in nature and in man. His severe sincerity distinguishes him from Rousseau, Chateaubriand, or Byron, who in their deaUng with this question are so often attitudinising and thinking of the effect of what they say on the public. His exquisite feeling for nature, though always dominated by his inward self -converse and by his melancholy, yet distinguishes him from the men simply absorbed in philo- sophical or religious concerns, and places him in the rank of men of poetry and imagination. Let me try to show 20 these three main ■ characteristics of Senancour from his own words. A Frenchman, coming immediately after the eighteenth century and the French Revolution, too clear-headed and austere for any such sentimental Catholic reaction as that with which Chateaubriand cheated himself, and yet, from the very profoundness and meditativeness of his nature, religious, Senancour felt to the uttermost the bare and bleak spiritual atmosphere into which he was born. Neither to a German nor to an Englishman, perhaps, would such so a sense of absolute religious denudation have then been possible, or such a plainness and even crudity, therefore, in their way of speaking of it. Only to a Frenchman were these possible ; but amid wars, bustle, and the glory of the grande nation few Frenchmen had meditativeness and seriousness enough for them. Senancour was of a character to feel his spiritual position, to feel it without dream or illusion, and to feel, also, that in the absence of any real inward basis life was weariness and vanity, and the ordinary considerations so confidently urged to induce a man to 10 master himseU and to be busy in it, quite hollow. OBBRMANN 473 ' People keep talking,' says he, ' of doing with energy that which ought to be done ; but, amidst aU this parade of firmness, tdl me, then, what it is that ought to be done.. For my part I do not know ; and I venture to suspect that a good many others are in the same state of ignor- ance.' He was bom with a passion for order and harmony, and a belief in them ; his being so utterly divested of aU con- ventional beliefs, makes this single elementary belief of 10 his the more weighty and impressive. ' May we not say that the tendency to order forms an essential part of ovir propensities, our instinct, just Uke the tendency to self-preservation, or to the reproduction of the species ? Is it nothing, to live with the calm and the security of the just ? ' And therefore, he concludes, ' inasmuch as man had this feeling of order planted in him, inasmuch as it was in his nature, the right course would have been to try and make every individual man sensible of it and obedient to 20 it.' But what has been done ? Since the beginning of the world, instead of having recourse to this innate feeling, the guides of mankind have imiformly sought to control human conduct by means of supernatural hopes, super- natural terrors, thus misleading man's inteUigence, and debasing his soul. ' Depuis trente siecles, les resultats sont dignes de la sagesse des moyens.' What are called the virtues, ' are laws of nature as necessary to man as the laws of his bodily senses.' Instead of teaching men to feel this, instead of developing in them that sentiment of order 30 and that consciousness of the divine which are the native possession of our race, Paganism and Christianity alike- have tampered with man's mind and heart, and wrought confusion in them. ' Conquerors, slaves, poets, pagan priests, and nurses, succeeded in disfiguring the traditions of primitive wisdom by dint of mixing races, destroying memorials, explaining allegories and making nonsense of thera, abandoning the profound and true meaning in order to discover in them absurd ideas which might inspire wonder and awe, and 40 personifying abstract beings in order to have plenty of objects of worship. The principle of life — ^that which was 476 OBEBMANN intelligence, Uglit, the eternal — ^became nothing more than the husband of Juno ; harmony, fruitfulness, the bond of all living things, became nothing more than the mistress of Adonis ; imperishable wisdom came to be distinguished only through her owl ; the great ideas of immortality and retribution consisted in the fear of turning a wheel, and the hope of strolling in a green wood. The indivisible divinity was parcelled into a hierarchical multitude torn by miserable passions ; the fruit of the genius of primitive mankind, the emblems of the laws of the universe, had lo degenerated into superstitious usages which the children in great cities turned into ridicule.' Paul at Athens might have set forth, in words not unlike these, the degradation of the Unknown God ; now for the religion of which Paul was a minister : — ' A moral belief was wanted, because pure morahty was gone out of men's knowledge ; dogmas were wanted, which should be profound and perhaps unfathomable, but not by any means dogmas which should be absurd, because intelUgence was spreading more and more. All rehgions 20 being sunk into degradation, there was needed a religion of majesty, and answering to man's effort to elevate his soul by the idea of a God of all things. There were needed religious rites which should be imposing, not too common, objects of desire, mysterious yet simple ; rites which seemed to belong to a higher world, and which yet a man's reason should accept as naturally as his heart. There was needed, in short, what only a great genius could institute, and what I can only catch glimpses of. ' But you have fabricated, patched, experimented, 30 altered ; renewed I know not what incoherent multitude of trivial ceremonies and dogmas, more fitted to scandalize the weak than to edify them. This dubious mixture you have joined to a morality sometimes false, often exceed- ingly noble, and almost always austere ; the one single point in which you have shown sagacity. You pass some hundreds of years, in arranging all this by inspiration ; and your slowly built work, industriously repaired, but with a radical fault in plan, is so made as to last hardly longer than the time during which you have been m accomplishing it.' OBERMANN 477 There is a passage to be meditated by the new Oecu- menical Comicil ! Not that Senanoour has a trace of the Voltairian bitterness against Christianity, or against Catholicism which to him represented Christianity : — ' So far am I from having any prejudice against Chris- tianity, that I deplore, I may say, what the majority of its zealous adherents never themselves think of deploring. I could willingly join them in lamenting the loss of Chris- tianity ; but there is this difference between us, that they 10 regret it in the form into which it settled, nay, in the form, even, which it wore a century ago ; whereas I cannot consider such a Christianity as that was to be much worthy of regret.' He owns that religion has done much ; but, ' si la religion a fait des grandes choses, c'est avec des moyena immenses.' Disposing of such means, it ought to have done much more. Remark, he says, that for the educated class religion is one of the weakest of the motive-powers they live by ; and then ask yourself whether it is not 20 absurd that there should be only a tenth part of our race educated. That religion should be of use as some restraint to the ignorant and brutal mass of mankind, shows, he thinks, not so much the beneficence of religion as the state of utter confusion and misery into which mankind . has, in spite of religion, drifted : — ' I admit that the laws of civil society prove to be not restraint enough for this multitude to which we give no training, about which we never trouble our heads, which we bring into the world and then leave to the chance of so ignorant passions and of habits of low debauchery. This only proves that there is mere wretchedness and confusion under the apparent calm of vast states ; that the science of politics, in the true sense of the term, is a stranger to our world, where diplomacy and financial administration produce prosperity to be sung in poems, and win victories to figure in gazettes.' This concern for the state and prospects of what are called the masses is perpetually recurring with Senancour ; it came to him from his singular lucidity and plain-deaUng, 40 for it was no commonplace with his time and contemporaries, as it is with ours. ' There are men,' he says, and he was 478 OBEBMANN one of them, ' who cannot be happy except among men who are contented ; who feel in their own persons all the enjoyment and suffering they witness, and who cannot be satisfied with themselves except they contribute to the order of the world and to man's welfare.' ' Arrange one's life how one will,' he says in another place, ' who can answer for its being any happier, so long as it is and must be sans accord avec les choses, et passee au milieu des peuples souffrans ? ' This feeUng returns again and again : — ' InequaUty is in the nature of things ; but you have lo increased it out of aU measure, when you ought, on the contrary, to have studied to reduce it. The prodigies of your industry must surely be a baneful work of superfluity, if you have neither time nor faculties for doing so many things which are indispensable. The mass of mankind is brutal, foolish, given over to its passions ; all your ills come fr&m this cause. Either do not bring men into exis- tence, or, if you do, give them an existence which is himian.' But as deep as his sense that the time was out of joint, 20 was the feeling of this Hamlet that he had no power to set it right. Vos douleurs ont fletri man dme, he says : — ' Your miseries have worn out my soul ; they are intolerable, because they are objectless. Your pleasures are illusory, fugitive ; a day suffices for knowing them and abandoning them. I inquired of myself for happiness, but with my eyes open ; I saw that it was not made for the man who was isolated ; I proposed it to those who stood round me ; they had not leisure to concern them- selves with it. I asked the multitude in its wear and tear 30 of misery, and the great of earth under their load of ennui ; they answered me : We are wretched to-day, but we shall enjoy ourselves to-morrow. For my part, I know that the day which is coming wiU only tread in the footsteps of the day which is gone before.' But a root of failure, powerlessness, and ennui, there certainly was in the constitution of Senancour's own. nature ; so that, unfavourable as may have been his time, we should err in attributing to any outward circum- stances the whole of the discouragement by which he is 40 pervaded. He himself knew this well, and he never seeks OBERMANN 479 to hide it from us. ' II y a dans moi un derangement,' says he ; ' c'est le disordre des ennuis.' ' I was born to be not happy. You know those dark days, bordering on the frosts of winter, when mists hang heavily about the very dawn, and day begins only by threatening lines of a lurid light upon the masses of cloud. That glooming veil, those stormy squalls, those uncertain gleams, that whistling of the wind through trees which bend and shiver, those prolonged throes like funeral 10 groans — ^you see in them the morning of life ; at noon, cooler storms and more steadily persistent ; at evening, thicker darkness still, and the day of man is brought to an end.' No representation of Senancour can, however, be com- plete without some of the gleams which relieved this discouragement. Besides the inwardness, besides the sincerity, besides the renouncement, there was the poetic emotion and the deep feeling for nature. ' And I, too, I have my moments of forgetfulness, of 20 strength, of grandeur ; I have desires and yearnings that know no limit. But I behold the monuments of effaced generations ; I see the flint wrought by the hand of man, and which will subsist a hundred centuries after him. I renounce the care for that which passes away, and the thought of a present which is already gone. I stand still, and marvel ; I listen to what subsists yet. I would fain hear what will go on subsisting ; in the movement of the forest, in the murmur of the pines, I seek to catch some of the accents of the eternal tongue.' 30 Nature, and the emotion caused by nature, inspire so many beautiful passages in Obermann's letters that one is embarrassed to make a choice among them. The follow- ing, with which we will end our extracts, is a morning and nightpiece from the north end of the Lake of Neufchatel, where the river Thiele enters the lake from Bienne, between Saint-Blaise and Morat : — ' My window had remained open all night, as is my habit. Towards four o'clock in the morning I was wakened by the dawn, and by the scent of the hay which they had 40 been cutting in the cool early hours by the light of the moon. I expected an ordinary view ; but I had a moment 480 OBERMANN of perfect astonishment. The midsummer rains had kept up the waters which the melting snow in the Jura had previously swollen. The space between the lake and the Thiele was almost entirely flooded ; the highest spots formed islands of pasture amidst the expanse of waters ruffled with the fresh breeze of morning. The waves of the lake could be made out in the distance, driven by the wind against the half-flooded bank. Some goats and cows, with their herdsman, who made a rustic music with a horn, were passing at the moment over a tongue of lo land left dry between the flooded plain and the Thiele. Stones set in the parts where it was worst going sup- ported this natural causeway or filled up gaps in it ; the pasture to which the docile animals were proceeding was not in sight, and to see their slow and irresolute advance, one would have said they were about to get out into the lake and be lost there. The heights of Anet and the thick woods of Julemont rose out of the waters like a desert island without an inhabitant. The hUly chain of Vuilly edged the lake on the horizon. To the south, this chain 20 stretched away behind the slopes of Montmirail ; and farther on than all these objects, sixty leagues of eternal snows stamped the whole country with the inimitable majesty of those bold lines of natmre which give to places sublimity.' He dines at the toll-house by the river-bank, and after passing the afternoon there, goes out again late in the evening : — ' The moon had not yet risen ; my path lay beside the green waters of the Thiele. I had taken the key of myao lodging that I might come in when I liked without being tied to a particular hour. But feeUng inclined to muse, and finding the night so warm that there was no hardship in being all night out of doors, I took the road to Saint Blaise. I left it at a little village called Marin, which has the lake to the south of it. I descended a steep bank, and got upon the shore of the lake where its ripple came up and expired. The air was calm ; not a sail was to be seen on the lake. Every one was at rest ; some in the forgetfulness of their toils, others in the forgetfulness of 40 their sorrows. The moon rose ; I remained there hours. OBERMANN 481 Towards morning, the moon shed over earth and waters the ineffable melancholy of her last gleams. Nature seems unspeakably grand, when, plunged in a long reverie, one hears the washing of the waves upon a soUtary strand, in the calm of a night stUl enkindled and luminous with the setting moon. ' Sensibility which 'no words can express, charm and torment of our vain years ! vast consciousness of a nature everywhere greater than we are, and everywhere impene- 10 trable ! all-embracing passion, ripened wisdom, delicious self-abandonment, — everything that a mortal heart can contain of life-weariness and yearning, I felt it all, I ex- perienced it all, in this memorable night. I have made an ominous step towards the age of decline ; I have swallowed up ten years of life at once. Happy the simple, whose heart is always young ! ' There, in one of the hours which were at once the inspiration and the enervation of Senancour's life, we leave him. It is possible that an age, breaking with the 20 past, and inclined to tell it the most naked truths, may take more pleasure than its predecessors in Obermann's bleak frankness, and may even give him a kind of celebrity. Nevertheless it may be predicted with certainty that his very celebrity, if he gets it, will have, like his life, some- thing maimed, incomplete, and unsuccessful about it ; and that his intimate friends wiU stUl be but a few, as they have hitherto been. These few will never faU him. II SAINTE-BEUVE [The Academy, November 13, 1869.] This is neither the time nor the place to attempt any complete account of the remarkable man whose pen, busy to the end, and to the end charming and instructing us, has within the last few weeks dropped from his hand for ever. A few words are all that the occasion allows, and it is hard not to make them words of mere regret and eulogy. Most of what is at this moment written about him is in this strain, and very naturally ; the world has some arrears to make up to him, and now, i£ ever, it feels this. Late, and as it were by accident, he came to his due estimation lo in France ; here in England it is only within the last ten years that he can be said to have been publicly known at all. We who write these lines knew him long and owed him much ; something of that debt we will endeavour to pay, not, as we ourselves might be most inclined, by following the impulse of the hour and simply praisLag him, but, as he himself would have preferred, by recalling what in sum he chiefly was, and what is the essential scope of his effort and working. Shortly before Sainte-Beuve's death appeared a new 20 edition of his Portraits Gontemporairis, one of his earlier works, of which the contents date from 1832 and 1833, before his method and manner of criticism were finally formed. But the new edition is enriched with notes and retouches added as the volumes were going through the press, and which bring our communications with him down to these very latest months of his life. Among them is a comment on a letter of Madame George Sand, in which she had spoken of the admiration excited by one of his articles. ' I leave this as it stands,' says he, ' because the 30 sense and the connection of the passage require it ; but, personne ne sait mieux que moi d quoi s'en tenir sur le merite absolu de ces articles qui sont tout au plus, et mSme SAINTE-BEUVE 483 lorsqu'ils reussissent le mieux, des choses sense.es dans un genre mediocre. Ge qu'ils ont eu d'alerte et d'd-propos d leur moment suffit cL peine a expliquer ces exagerations de I'amitie. Beservons V admiration pour les oeuvres de poisie et d'art, pour les compositions ilevees ; la plus grande gloire du critique est dans I'approbation et dans I'estime des bons This comment, which extends to his whole work as a critic, has all the good breeding and deUcacy by which 10 Sainte-Beuve's writing was distinguished, and it expresses, too, what was to a great extent, no doubt, his sincere conviction. Like so many who have tried their hands at (Buvres de poisie et d'art, his preference, his dream, his ideal, was there ; the rest, was comparatively journeyman- work, to be done well and estimably rather than fll and discreditably, and with precious rewards of its own, besides, in exercising the faculties and in keeping off ennui ; but still work of an inferior order. Yet when one looks at the names on the title-page of the Portraits Gontemporains : 20 Chateaubriand, Beranger, Lamennais, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, George Sand, — names representing, in our judg- ment, very different degrees of eminence, but none of which we have the least inclination to disparage,^ — ^is it certain that the works of poetry and art to which these names are attached eclipse the work done by Sainte- Beuve ? Could Sainte-Beuve have had what was no doubt his wUl, and in the line of the Gonsolations and Volupte have produced works with the power and vogue of Lamar- tine's works, or Chateaubriand's, or Hugo's, would he have 30 been more interesting to us to-day, — would he have stood permanently higher ? We venture to doubt it. Works of poetry and art like MoUere's and Milton's ecKpse no doubt all productions of the order of the Gauseries du Lundi, and the highest language of admiration may very properly be reserved for such works alone. Inferior works in the same kind have their moment of vogue when their admirers apply to them this language ; there is a moment when a drama of Hugo's finds a. public to speak of it as if it were MoUere's, and a poem of Lamartine's finds 40 a public to speak of it as if it were Milton's. At no moment will a public be found to speak of work like Sainte-Beuve's 484 SAINTE-BEUVE Causeries in such, fashion ; and if this alone were regarded, one might allow oneself to leave to his work the humbler rank which he assigns to it. But the esteem inspired by his work remains and grows, while the vogue of aU works of poetry and art but the best, and the high-pitched admiration which goes with vogue, diminish and disappear ; and this redresses the balance. Five-and-twenty years ago it would have seemed absurd, in Prance, to place Sainte-Beuve, as a French author, on a level with Lamartine. Lamartine had at that time still his vogue, and though lo assuredly no Moliere or Milton, had for the time of his vogue the halo which surrounds properly none but great poets like these. To this Sainte-Beuve cannot pretend, but what does Lamartine retain of it now ? It would still be absurd to place Sainte-Beuve on a level with Moliere or Milton ; is it any longer absurd to place him on a level with Lamartine, or even above him ? In other words, excellent work in a lower kind counts in the long run above work which is short of excellence in a higher ; first- rate criticism has a permanent value greater than that of 20 any but first-rate works of poetry and art. And Sainte-Beuve's criticism may be called first-rate. His curiosity was unbounded, and he was born a naturalist, carrying into letters, so often the mere domain of rhetoric and futile amusement, the ideas and methods of scientific natural inquiry. And this he did while keeping in perfec- tion the ease of movement and charm of touch which belong to letters properly so called, and which give them their unique power of imiversal penetration and of propagandism. •Man, as he is, and as his history and the productions of his 30 spirit show him, was the object of his study and interest ; he strove to find the real data with which, in dealing with man and his affairs, we have to do. Beyond this study he did not go, — ^to find the real data. But he was deter- mined they should be the real data, and not fictitious and conventional data, if he could help it. This is what, in our judgment, distinguishes him, and makes his work of singular use and instructiveness. Most of us think .that we already possess the data required, and have only to pro- ceed to deal with human affairs in the light of them. 40 This is, as is well known, a thoroughly English persuasion. SAINTE-BEUVE 485 It is what makes us such keen politicians ; it is an honour to an Englishman, we say, to take part in pohtical strife. Solomon says, on the other hand, ' It is an honour to a man to cease from strife, but every fool will be medcUing ; ' and Sainte-Beuve held with Solomon. Many of us, again, have principles and connections which are all in all to us, and we arrange data to suit them ; — a book, a character, a period of history, we see from a point of view given by our principles and connections, and to the requirements 10 of this point of view we make the book, the character, the period, adjust themselves. Sainte-Beuve never did so, and criticised with unfailing acuteness those who did. ' Tocqueville arrivait avec son moule tout pret ; la realite n'y ripond pas, et les choses ne se pretent pas a y entrer,' M. de Tocqueville commands much more sympathy in England than his critic, and the very mention of him will awaken impressions unfavourable to Sainte-Beuve ; for the French Liberals honour Tocqueville and at heart dislike Sainte-Beuve ; and people in England always take 20 their cue from the French Liberals. For that very reason have we boldly selected for quotation this criticism on him, because the course criticised in Tocqueville is pre- cisely the course with which an Englishman would sym- pathise, and which he would be apt to take himself ; while Sainte-Beuve, in criticising him, shows just the tendency which is his characteristic, and by which he is of use to us. Tocqueville, as is well known, finds in the ancient rigime all the germs of the centraUsation which the French B,e volution developed and established. This centralisa- 30 tion is his bugbear, as it is the bugbear of English Liberal- ism ; and directly he finds it, the system where it appears is judged. Disliking, therefore, the French Revolution for its centralisation, and then finding centrahsation in the ancient regime also, he at once sees in this discovery, ' mille motifs nouveaux de haiir I'ancien regime.' How entirely does every Englishman abound here, as the French say, in TocquevUle's sense ; how faithfully have a]l Enghsh- men repeated and re-echoed Tocqueville's book on the ancient regime ever since it was published ; how incapable 40 are they of supplying, or of imagining the need of suppljring, any corrective to it ! But hear Sainte-Beuve :— 486 SAINTE-BEUVE ' Dans son effroi de la centralisationj I'auteur en vient a meconnaitre de grands bienfaits d'equite dus a Richelieu et a Louis XIV. Homme du peuple ou bourgeois, sous Louis XIII, ne valait-U pas mieux avoir affaire a un intendant, a I'homme du roi, qu'a un gouvemeur de province, a quelque due d'^fipemon ? Ne maudissons pas ceux a qui nous devons les commencements de I'egalite devant la loi, la premiere ebauche de I'ordre modeme qui nous a afEranchis, nous et nos peres, et le tiers-etat tout entier, de cette quantite de petits tyrans qui couvraient lo le sol, grands seigneurs ou hobereaux.' The point of view of Sainte-Beuve is as little that of a glowing Revolutionist as it is that of a chagrined Liberal ; it is that of a man who seeks the truth about the ancient regime, and its institutions, and who instinctively seeks to correct anything strained and arranged in the representa- tion of them. ' Voyons les choses de I'histoire telles qu'elles se sont passees.' At the risk of offending the prejudices of English readers we have thus gone for an example of Sainte-Beuve's 20 essential method to a sphere where his application of it makes a keen impression, and created for him, in his lifetime, warm enemies and detractors. In that sphere it is not easily permitted to a man to be a naturalist, but a naturaUst Sainte-Beuve could not help being always. Accidentally, at the end of his Ufe, he gave delight to the Liberal opinion of his own country and ours by his famous speech in the Senate on behalf of free thought. He did but follow his iastinct, however, of opposing, in whatever medium he was, the current of that medium when it 30 seemed excessive and tyrannous. The extraordinary social power of French Catholicism makes itself specially felt in an assembly Hke the Senate. An elderly Frenchman of the upper class is apt to be, not imfrequently, a man of pleasure, reformed or exhausted, and the deference of such a personage to repression and Cardinals is generally excessive. This was enough to rouse Sainte-Beuve's oppo- sition ; but he would have had the same tendency to oppose the heady current of a medium where mere Liberalism reigned, where it was Professor Fawoett, and not the 40 Archbishop of Bordeaux, who took the bit in his teeth. SAINTE-BEUVE 487 That Sainte-Beuve stopped short at curiosity, at the desire to know things as they really are, and did not press on with faith and ardour to the various and immense applications of this knowledge which suggest themselves, and of which the accomplishment is reserved for the future, was due in part to his character, but more to his date, his period, his circumstances. Let it be enough for a man to have served well one need of his age ; and among politicians and rhetoricians to have been a naturahst, at 10 a time when for any good and lasting work in government and literature our old conventional draught of the nature of things wanted in a thousand directions re- verifying and correcting. THE END