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/cu31924013353564 
 
TRANSCRIPTS AND STUDIES. 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 LIFE OF PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. 
 
 With Portrait and Jllustrations. Two Vols.., demy Suo, price 36«. 
 
 " We cordially recommend all who are interested in the life and fame of 
 Shelley, and in the literary history of the strange time in which he lived, to 
 study Professor Dowden's volumes for themselves. Under his skilful 
 guidance they will be enabled to discern, for the first time in any complete- 
 ness, the true lineaments of one of the strangest persouahties ever clothed in 
 human shape." — Times. 
 
 '* The one biography of Shelley which is likely to take its place as the 
 standard life of the poet." — Spectator. 
 
 " We are glad, to bear testimony once more to the excellence of the writer's 
 workmanship, and to the exceeding interest of his narrative. As a picture 
 of the central figure and its smToundings,the Life will bear comparison with 
 the masterpieces of English biogi*aphy." — Guardian. 
 
 SHAKSPERE: His MIND AND ART, 
 
 Eighth Edition, large post 8vo, cloth, 12s. 
 
 "He has an unusual insight into the broader as well as the nicer meanings 
 of Shakspere — . The book contains many valuable remarks on the drama." 
 — Saturday Review. 
 
 " This is a right good book, which our students of English literature should 
 value and enjoy." — British Quarterly Review. 
 
 •' A better book as an introduction to the study of Shakspere than Professoi' 
 Dowden's we do not know." — Westminster Review. 
 
 STUDIES IN LITERATURE, 1789-1877. 
 
 Fowrth Edition, large post Svo, cloth, price 6s. 
 
 CONTEMTS. 
 
 The French Revolution and Literature George EUot. — TI. " Middlemarch " 
 
 The Transcendental Movement and 
 
 Literature 
 The Scientific Movement and Litera^ 
 
 tm'e 
 The Prose Works of Wordsworth 
 Walter Savage Landor 
 Mr Tennyson and Mr Browning 
 George Eliot 
 
 and " Daniel Deronda " 
 Lamennais > 
 
 Edgar Quinet 
 On some Fi'ench Writers of Verse, 
 
 1830-1877 
 The Poeti-y of Victor Hugo 
 The Poeti-y of Democracy: Walt 
 
 Whitman 
 
 'Written with extreme care. . . . We return thanks to Professor Dowden 
 for certainly the most thoughtful book of literary comment which we have 
 seen for a long time." — Acad^ny. 
 
 SHAKSPERE'S SONNETS. 
 
 THE PARCHMENT LIBRARY EDITION. 
 
 Elzevir Svo, parcJiment antique or cloth, 6s.,- vellum, Is. Bd. 
 Edited by Edward Dowden. 
 With a Frontispiece etched by Leopold Lowenstam", after the Death Mask. 
 " A more exquisite edition of these poems the book-lover can scarcely 
 desire."— i\ro(es and Queries. 
 
 " Mr Dowden has prefixed an interesting and well-proportioned introduc- 
 tion."— ^afwrday Review. 
 
 Also an enlarged Edition, uniform with " Shakspere: His Mind and Art.*' 
 Large post Svo, 7s. Gd. 
 
 London : Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1 Paternoster Square. 
 
Transcripts 
 
 AND 
 
 Studies 
 
 EDWARD pOWDEN 
 LL.D. Dublin: Hon. LL.D. IEdinburgh : 
 
 PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF DUBlIn. 
 
 LONDON. 
 KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH & Co. i PATERNOSTER SQUARE 
 
 1888. 
 
^. CL^^^^ 
 
 CORNELL- 
 hUNIVEHSITY 
 \LIBRAR\^ 
 
 
ADVERTISEMENT. 
 
 I THANK the proprietors and-iditors of the Fortnightly 
 Bevieiv, the ContcTnpcn'ary ReiAetu, the Nineteenth 
 Oentury, and the Oornhill Magazine for permitting me 
 to republish several articles In this volume. In the 
 article on " Victorian Literature " il have incorporated a 
 few passages from reviews contributed by me to the 
 Acadeony. I thank Dr Grosart for permitting me to 
 publish the article "Spenser, the Poet and Teacher," 
 which appeared in his privately printed edition of the 
 works of Spenser. I thank Messrs Oassell & Co. for 
 permitting me to republish the article on " Romeo and 
 Juliet," which appeared as an introduction to that play 
 in their edition de luxe, illustrated by Mr Frank 
 Dicksee. 
 
 E. D. 
 
 Temple Eoad, Dublin, 
 November 1887. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Oarltlb's Lectures on the. Periods op European 
 Culture (a Transcrtpt) . . . . 
 
 Shelley's " Philosophical^^ View of Eeform " (a 
 Transcript) . ' . 
 
 Last Words on Shelley . ^ 
 
 The Text of Wordsworth's P^ems \ 
 
 Victorian Literatubji 
 
 The Interpretation of Literature.^ 
 
 Spenser, the Poet and Teacher.^ 
 
 Heroines of Spenser . . ^ 
 
 Shakspere's Portraiture of Wom|;n . v 
 
 KoMEO AND Juliet 
 
 Christopher Marlowe -. 
 
 The Idealism of Milton . 
 
 Mr Browning's "Sordello" 
 
 V 
 
CAHLYLE'S LECTURES ON THE PERIODS 
 OF EUROPEAN CULTURE. 
 
 (A Tjranscript.) 
 
 " Detestable mixture of prophecy and playactorism " 
 — so in his " Reminiscences" Carlyle describes his work 
 as a lecturer. Yet we are assured by a keen, if friendly, 
 critic, Harriet .Martineau, that " the merits of his- dis- 
 courses were so great that he might probably have gone 
 on year after year till this time with improving success 
 and perhaps ease, but the struggle was too severe," i.e., 
 the struggle with nervous excitement and ill-health. 
 In a notice of the first lecture ever delivered (May 
 1, 1837*) by Carlyle before a London audience, the 
 Times observes : " The lecturer, who seems new to the 
 mere technicalities of public speaking, exhibited proofs 
 before he had done of many of its higher and nobler 
 attributes, gathering self-possession as he proceeded." 
 
 In the following year a course of twelve lectures was 
 delivered' " On the History of Literature, or the suc- 
 cessive Periods of European Culture," from Homer to 
 Goethe. As far as I can ascertain, except from short 
 sketches of the two lectures of each week in the Exa- 
 miner from May 6, 1838, onwards, it is now impossible 
 
 * The 1st of May was illustrious. On the evening of that day 
 Browning's Strafford was produced by Macready at Covent Garden 
 1 heatre, 
 
 A 
 
2 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 to obtain an account of this series of discourses.* The 
 writer in the Examiner (perhaps Leigh Hunt) in notic- 
 ing the first two lectures (on Greek literature) writes : 
 " He again extemporises, he does not read. We doubted 
 on hearing the Monday's lecture whether he would ever 
 attain in this way to the fluency as well as depth for 
 which he ranks among celebrated talkers in private ; 
 but Friday's discourse relieved us. He 'strode away' 
 like Ulysses himself, and had only to regret, in common 
 with his audience, the limits to which the one hour 
 confined him." George Ticknor was present at the 
 ninth lecture of this course, and he noted in his diary 
 (June 1, 1838): "He is a rather small, spare, ugly 
 Scotchman, with a strong accent, which I should think 
 he takes no pains to mitigate. . . . To-day he spoke 
 — as I think he commonly does — without notes, and 
 therefore as nearly extempore as a man can who 
 prepares himself carefully, as was plain he had done. 
 He was impressive, I think, though such lecturing 
 could not well be very popular ; and, in some parts, 
 if he were not poetical, he was picturesque." Ticknor 
 estimates the audience at about one hundred. 
 
 A manuscript of over two hundred and fifty pages is 
 in my hands, which I take to be a transcript from a 
 report of these lectures by some skilful writer of short- 
 hand. It gives very fully, and I think faithfully, eleven 
 lectures ; one, the ninth, is wanting. In the following 
 pages, I may say, nothing, or very little, is my own. 
 
 * Dr Chalmers was at this time a'so lecturing in London, and 
 extensive reports of his lectures are given in the Times and the Horn- 
 ing Chronicle. 
 
On the Periods of European Culture. 3 
 
 I have transcribed several of the most striking passages 
 of the lectures, and given a view of the whole, preserv- 
 ing continuity by abstracts of those portions which I do 
 not transcribe. In these abstracts I have as far as pos- 
 sible used the words of the manuscript. In a few in- 
 stances I have found it convenient to bring together 
 paragraphs on the same subject from different lectures. 
 Some passages which say what Carlyle has said else- 
 where I give for the sake of the manner, more direct 
 than that of the printed page ; sometimes becoming 
 even colloquial. The reader will do well to imagine 
 these passages delivered with that Northern accent which 
 Carlyle's refined Bostonian hearer thought " he took no 
 pains to mitigate." 
 
 At the outset Carlyle disclaims any intention to con- 
 struct a scientific theory of the history of culture ; some 
 plan is necessary in order to approach the subject and 
 become familiar with it, but any proposed theory must 
 be viewed as one of mere convenience. 
 
 " There is only one theory which has been most triumphant — that 
 of the planets. On no other subject has any theory succeeded so far 
 yet. Even that is not perfect ; the astronomer knows one or two 
 planets, we may say, but he does not know what they are, where 
 they are going, or whether the solar system is not itself drawn into 
 a larger system of the kind. In short, with every theory the man 
 who knows something about it, knows mainly this— that there is 
 much uncertainty in it, great darkness about it, extending down to 
 an infinite deep ; in a word, that he does not know what it is. 
 Let him take a stone, for example, the pebble that is under his 
 feet ; he knows that it is a stone broken out of rocks old as the 
 creation, but what that pebble is he knows not ; he knows nothing 
 at all about that. This system of making a theory about every- 
 thing is what we may call an enchanted state of mind. That man 
 should be misled, that he should be deprived of knowing the truth 
 that the world is a reality and not a huge confused hypothesis. 
 
4 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 that he should be deprived of this by the very faculties given him 
 to understand it, I can call by no other name than Enchantment." 
 
 Yet when we look into the scheme of these lectures 
 we perceive a presiding thought, which certainly had 
 more than a provisional value for Carl vie. The history 
 of culture is viewed as a succession of faiths, interrupted 
 by periods of scepticism. The faith of Greece and 
 Rome is succeeded by the Christian faith, with an inter- 
 val of Pagan scepticism, of which Seneca may be taken 
 as a representative. The Christian faith, earnestly held 
 to men's hearts during a great epoch, is transforming 
 itself into a new thing, not yet capable of definition, 
 proper to our nineteenth century ; of this new thing the 
 Goethe of " Wilhelm Meister " and the " West-ostlicher 
 Divan" is the herald. But its advent was preceded by 
 that melancholy interval of Christian scepticism, the 
 eighteenth century, represented by Voltaire and the 
 sentimental Goethe of " Werther," which reached its 
 terrible consummation in the French Revolution ; and 
 against which stood out in forlorn heroism Samuel John- 
 son. Carlyle's general view is a broad one, which dis- 
 regards all but fundamental differences in human beliefs. 
 The Paganism of Greece is not severed from that of 
 Rome ; Christianity, Catholic and Protestant, is essen- 
 tially of one and the same epoch. 
 
 " There is a sentence which I find in Goethe full of meaning in 
 this regard. It must be noted, he says, that belief and unbelief 
 are two opposite principles in human nature. The theme of all 
 human history, so far as we are able to perceive it, is the contest 
 between these two principles. All periods, he goes on to say, in 
 which belief predominates, in which it is the main element the 
 inspiring principle of action, are distinguished by great, soul- 
 stirring, fertile events, and worthy of perpetual remembrance: 
 
On the Periods of European Culitire. 5 
 
 and, on the other hand, when unbelief gets the upper hand, that 
 age is unfertile, unproductive, and intrinsically mean ; in which 
 there is no pabulum for the spirit of man, and no one can get 
 nourishment for himself. This passage is one of the most pregnant 
 utterances ever delivered, and we shall do well to keep it in mind 
 in these disquisitions." 
 
 In attempting " to follow the stream of mind from 
 the period at which the first great spirits of our Western 
 World wrote and flourished down to these times," we 
 start from Greece. When we ask who were the first 
 inhabitants of Greece, we can derive no clear account 
 from any source. " We have no good history of Greece. 
 This is not at all remarkable. Greek trans-actions never 
 had anything alive [for us ?] ; no result for us ; they 
 were dead entirely. The only points which serve to 
 guide us are a few ruined towns, a few masses of stone, 
 and some broken statuary." Three epochs, however, in 
 Greek history can be traced: the first, that of the siege 
 of Troy — the first confederate act of the Hellenes in 
 their capacity of a European people ; the second, that 
 of the Persian invasion ; the third, the flower-time of 
 Greece, the period of Alexander the Great, when Greece 
 " exploded itself on Asia." 
 
 " Europe was henceforth to develop herself on an independent 
 footing, and it has been so ordered that Greece was to begin that. 
 As to their peculiar physiognomy among nations, they were in one 
 respect an extremely interesting people, but in another unamiable 
 and weak entirely. It has been somewhere remarked by persons 
 learned in the speculation on what is called the doctrine of races, 
 ■that the Pelasgi were of Celtic descent. However this may be, it 
 is certain that there is a remarkable similarity in character of the 
 French to these Greeks. Their first feature was what we may call 
 the central feature of all others, exhcmiting (?)* vehemence, not 
 
 * MS. "existing." 
 
6 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 exactly strength, for there was no permanent coherence in it as in 
 strength, but a sort of fiery impetuosity ; a vehemence never any- 
 where so remarkable as among the Greeks, except among the 
 French, and there are instances of this, both in its good and bad 
 point of view. As to the bad, there is the instance mentioned by 
 Thucydides of the sedition in Corcyra, which really does read like 
 a chapter out of the French Eevolution, in which the actors seem 
 to be quite regardless of any moment but that which was at hand." 
 
 The story of the massacre is briefly told, which recalls 
 to Carlyle, as it did to Niehtihr, the events of September 
 1792. 
 
 " But connected with all this savageness there was an extraordin- 
 ary delicacy of taste and genius in them. They had a prompt dex- 
 terity in seizing the true relations of objects, a beautiful and quick 
 sense in perceiving the places in which the things lay, all round 
 the world, which they had to work with, and this, without being 
 entirely admirable, was in their own internal province highly use- 
 ful. So the French, with their undeniable barrenness of genius, 
 have yet in a remarkable manner the facility of expressing them- 
 selves with precision and elegance, to so singular a degree that no 
 ideas or inventions can possibly become popularised till they are 
 presented to the world by means of the French language. . . . But 
 in poetry, philosophy, and all things the Greek genius displays 
 itself with as curious a felicity as the French does in frivolous 
 exercises. Singing or music was the central principle of the Greeks, 
 not a subordinate one. And they were right. What is not musical 
 is rough and hard and cannot be harmonised. Harmony is the 
 essence of Art and Science. The mind moulds to itself the clay, 
 and makes it what it will." 
 
 This spirit of harmony is seen even in the earliest 
 Pelasgic architecture, and more admirably in Greek 
 poetry, Greek temples, Greek statuary. A beautiful 
 example m&j be found in the story of how Phidias 
 achieved his masterpiece at Elis. 
 
 " When he projected his Jupiter of Elis, his ideas were so con- 
 fused and bewildered as to give him great unrest, and he wandered 
 about, perplexed that the shape he wished would not disclose itself. 
 
On ike Periods of European Culture. 7 
 
 But one night, after struggling in pain with his thoughts as usual, 
 and meditating on his design, in a dream he saw a group of Grecian 
 maidens approach, with pails of water on their head, who began a ' 
 song in praise of Jupiter. At that moment the Sun of Poetry 
 stared upon him, and set free the image which he sought for, and it 
 crystallised, as it were, out of his mind into marble, and became as 
 symmetry itself. This Spirit of Harmony operated directly in him, 
 informing all parts of his mind, thence transferring itself into 
 statuary, seen with the eye, and filling the heart of all people." 
 
 Having discussed the origin of Polytheism, Carlyle 
 speaks of divination. 
 
 "It is really, in my opinion, a blasphemy against human nature to 
 attribute the whole of the system [of polytheism] to quackery and 
 falsehood. Divination, for instance, was the great nucleus round 
 which polytheism formed itself — the constituted core of the whole 
 matter. All people, private men as well as states, used to consult 
 the oracle of Dodona or Delphi (which eventually became the most 
 celebrated of all) on all the concerns of life. Modern travellers 
 have discovered in those places pipes and other secret contrivances 
 from which they have concluded that these oracles were constituted 
 on a principle of falsehood and delusion. Cicero, too, said that he 
 was certain two Augurs could not meet without laughing ; and he 
 was likely to know, for he had once been an Augur himself. But 
 I confess that on reading Herodotus there appears to me to have 
 been very little quackery about it. I can quite readily fancy that 
 there was a great deal of reason in the oracle. The seat of that at 
 Dodona was a deep, dark chasm, into which the diviner entered 
 when he sought the Deity. If he was a man of devout frame of 
 mind, he must surely have then been in the best state of feeling for 
 foreseeing the future, and giving advice to others. No matter how 
 this was carried on — by divination or otherwise — so long as the 
 individual suffered himself to be wrapt in union with a higher being. 
 I like to believe better of Greece than that she was completely at 
 the mercy of fraud and falsehood in these matters." 
 
 So it was that PheidippiJes, the runner, met Pan in 
 the mountain gorge. * " When I consider the frame of 
 
 * Carlyle tells the story of PheiJippides evidently from memory, and 
 not quite accurately. 
 
8 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 ijiind he must have been in, I have no doubt that he 
 really heard in his own mind that voice of the God of 
 Nature upon the wild mountain side, and that this was 
 not done by quackery or falsehood at all." But above 
 and around and behind the whole system of polytheism 
 there was a truth discovered by the Greeks — 
 
 "that truth which is in every man's heart, and to which no thinking 
 man can refuse his assent. They recognised a destiny ! a great, 
 dumb, black power, ruling during time, which knew nobody for its 
 master, and in its decrees was as inflexible as adamant, and every^ 
 one knew that it was there. It was sometimes called " Moira," or 
 allotment, part, and sometimes " the Unchangeable.'' Their gods 
 were not always mentioned with reverence. There is a strange 
 document on this point, the Prometheus of ^schylus. ^schylus 
 wrote three plays of Prometheus, but only one has survived. 
 Prometheus had introduced fire into the world, and was punished 
 for that : his design was to make our race a little less wretched 
 than it was. Personally he seems to be a taciturn sort of man, but 
 what he does speak seems like a thunderbolt against Jupiter. . . . 
 Jupiter can hurl him to Tartarus ; his time is coming too ; he must 
 come down ; it is all written in the book of ' Destiny.' This 
 curious document really indicates the primeval qualities of man." 
 
 Stories from Herodotus, " who was a clear-headed, 
 candid man," of the Scythian nation who shot arrows in 
 the stormy air against their god, and of another people 
 who made war upon the south-wind, similarly illustrate 
 that the ancient reverence for their deities was not the 
 reverence for that which is highest or most powerful iu 
 the universe. 
 
 From the religion we pass {Lecture II.) to the liter- 
 ature of the Greeks. " The ' Iliad ' or ' Song of Ilion ' 
 consists of a series of what I call ballad delineations of 
 the various occurrences which took place then, rather 
 than a narrative of the event itself. For it begins in 
 
On the Periods of European Culture. 9 
 
 the middle of it, and, I might say, ends in the middle 
 of it." The only argument in favour of Homer being 
 the real author is derived from the common opinion and 
 from the unity of the poem. 
 
 " There appears to me to be a great improbability that any one 
 would compose an epic except in writing. ... I began myself some 
 time ago to read the ' Iliad,' which I had not looked at since I left 
 school, and I must confess that from reading alone I became com- 
 pletely convinced that it was not the work of one man. ... As to 
 its unity — its value does not consist in an excellent sustaining of 
 characters. There is not at all the sort of style in which Shake- 
 speare draws his characters ; there is simply the cunning man, the 
 great-headed, coarse, stupid man, the proud man ; but there is 
 nothing so remarkable but that any -one else could have drawn the 
 same characters for the purpose of piecing them into the ' Iliad.' 
 We all know the old Italian comedy, their harlequin, doctor, and 
 columbine. There are almost similar things in the characters in 
 the ' Iliad."' 
 
 In fact the " Iliad '' has such unity as the modern 
 collection of our old Robin Hood ballads. 
 
 " Contrasting the melodious Greek mind with the not very 
 melodious English mind, the cithara with the fiddle (betwefeu 
 which, by the way, there is strong resemblance), and having in 
 remembrance that those of the one class were sung in alehouses, 
 while the other were sung in kings' palaces, it really appears that 
 Kobin Hood's ballads have received the very same arrangement as 
 that which in other times produced ' the Tale of Troy divine.' " 
 
 The poetry of Homer possesses the highest qualities 
 because it delineates what is ancient and simple, the 
 impressions of a primeval mind. Further, 
 
 ' Homer does not seem to believe his story to be a fiction ; he has 
 no doubt it is a truth. ... I do not mean to say that Homer 
 could have sworn to the truth of his poems before a jury — far from 
 it; but that he repeated what had survived in tradition and 
 records, and expected his readers to believe them as he did. 
 
lo Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 With respect to the " machinery," gods and goddesses, 
 Homer was not decorating his poem with pretty fictions. 
 Any remarkable man then might be regarded as super- 
 natural ; the experience of the Greeks was narrow, and 
 men's hearts were open to the marvellous. 
 
 " Thus Pindar mentions that Neptune appeared on one occasion 
 at the Nemean '' games. Here it is conceivable that if some aged 
 individual of venerable mien and few words had in fact come 
 thither, his appearance would have attracted attention ; people 
 would have come to gaze upon him, and conjecture have been 
 busy. It would be natural that a succeeding generation should 
 actually report that a god appeared upon the eaith. " 
 
 In addition to these excellences, 
 
 " the poem of the ' Iliad' was actually intended to be sung ; it sings 
 itself, not only the cadence, but the whole thought of the poem 
 sings itself as it were ; there is a serious recitative in the whole 
 matter. . . . With these two qualities, Music and Belief, he places 
 his mind in a most beautiful brotherhood, in a sincere contact with 
 his own characters ; there are no reticences ; he allows himself to 
 expand with some touching loveliness, and occasionally it may be 
 with an awkwardness that carries its own apology, upon all the 
 matters that come in view of the subject of his work." 
 
 In the " Odyssey " there is more of character, more of 
 unity, and it represents a higher state of civilisation. 
 Pallas, who had been a warrior, now becomes the God- 
 dess of Wisdom. Ulysses, in the " Iliad " " an adroit, 
 shifting, cunning man," becomes now " of a tragic 
 significance." He is now " the much-endiiring, a most 
 endearing of epithets." It is impossible that the 
 " Odj'^ssey " could have been written by many different 
 people. 
 
 As to detailed beauties of Homer's poetry, we have a 
 touching instance in Agamemnon's calling not only on 
 * Isthmian ? See Pindar, Olymp. viii. 61. 
 
On the Periods of European Culture. 1 1 
 
 gods but rivers and stars to witness his oath ; " he does 
 not say what they are,, but he feels that he himself is a 
 mysterious existence, standing by the side of them, 
 mysterious existences." Sometimes the simplicity of 
 Homer's similes makes us'smile; "but there is great 
 kindness and veneration in the smile." There is a 
 beautiful formula which he uses to describe death :— 
 
 " 'He thumped down falling, and his arms jingled about him.' 
 Now, trivial as this expression may at first appear, it does convey 
 a deep insight and feeling of that phenomenon. The fall, as it 
 were, of a sack of clay, and the jingle of armour, the last sound he 
 was ever to make throughout time, who a minute or two before 
 was alive and vigorous, and now falls a heavy dead mass. . . . 
 But we must quit Homer. There is one thing, however, which I 
 ought to mention about Ulysses, that he is the very model of the 
 type Greek, a perfect image of the Greek genius ; a shifty, nimble, 
 active man, involved in difficulties, but every now and then 
 bobbing up out of darkness and confusion, victorious and intact." 
 
 Passing by the early Greek philosophers, whose most 
 valuable contribution to knowledge was in the province 
 of geometry, Carlyle comes to Herodotus. 
 
 " His work is, properly speaking, an encyclopaedia of the various 
 nations, and it displays in a striking manner the innate spirit of 
 harmony that was in the Greeks. It begins with Croesus, King of 
 Lydia ; upon some hint or other it suddenly goes ofi' into a digres- 
 sion on the Persians, and then, apropos of something else, we have 
 a disquisition on the Egyptians, and so on. At first we feel some- 
 what impatient of being thus carried away at the sweet will of the 
 author ; but we soon find it to be the result of an instinctive spirit 
 of harmony, and we see all these various branches of the tale 
 come pouring down at last in the invasion of Greece by the 
 Persians. It is that spirit of order which has constituted him the 
 prose poet of his country. ... It is mainly through him that we 
 become acquainted with Themistocles, that model of the type 
 Greek in prose, as Ulysses was in song. . . . 
 
 " Contemporary with Themistocles, and a little prior to Hero- 
 dotus, Greek tragedy began. jSlschylus I define to have been a 
 
1 2 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 truly gigantic man — one of the largest characters ever known, and 
 all whose mov'ements are clumsy and huge like those of a son of 
 Anak. In short, his character is just that of Prometheus himself 
 as he has described him. I know no more pleasant thing than to 
 study ^schylus ; you fancy you hear the old dumb rocks speaking 
 to you of all things they had been thinking of since the world 
 began, in their wild, savage utterances." 
 
 Sophocles translated the drama into a choral peal of 
 melody. " The 'Antigone' is the finest thing of the kind 
 ever sketched by man." Euripides writes for effect's 
 sake, " but how touching is the effect produced ! " 
 
 Socrates, as viewed by Carlyle, is " the emblem of the 
 decline of the Greeks," when literature was becoming 
 speculative. 
 
 "I willingly admit that he was a man of deep feeling and 
 morality ; but I can well understand the idea which Aristophanes 
 had of him, that he was a man going to destroy all Greece with 
 his innovation. . . . He shows a lingering kind of awe and attach- 
 ment for the old religion of his country, and often we cannot make 
 out whether he believed in it or not. He must have had but a 
 painful intellectual life, a painful kind of life altogether one would 
 think. . . . He devoted himself to the teaching of morality and 
 virtue, and he spent his life in that kind of mission. I cannot say 
 that there was any evil in this ; but it does seem to me to have 
 been of a character entirely unprofitable. I have a great desire to 
 admire Socrates, but I confess that his writings seem to be made 
 up of a number of very wire-drawn notions about virtue ; there 
 is no conclusion in him ; there is no word of life in Socrates. He 
 was, however, personally a coherent and firm man. 
 
 We pass now (Lecture III.) to the Komans. 
 
 " We may say of this nation that as the Greeks may be com- 
 pared to the children of antiquity from their naweti and graceful- 
 ness, while their whole history is an aurora, the dawn of a higher 
 culture and civilisation, so the Romans were the men of antiquity, 
 and their history a glorious, warm, laborious day, less beautiful and 
 graceful no doubt than the Greeks, but more essentially useful. 
 . . . The Greek life was shattered to pieces against the harder. 
 
On the Periods of European Culture. 1 3 
 
 stronger life of the Romans. ... It was just as a beautiful crystal 
 jar becomes dashed to pieces upon the hard rocks, so inexpressible 
 was the force of the strong Roman energy." * 
 
 The Eomans show the characters of two distinct 
 species of people — the Pelasgi and the Etruscans. 
 The old Etruscans, besides possessing a certain genius 
 for art, were an agricultural people — 
 
 " endowed with a sort of sullen energy, and with a spirit of in- 
 tensely industrious thrift, a kind of vigorous thrift. Thus with 
 respect to the ploughing of the earth they declare it to be a kind 
 of blasphemy against nature to leave a clod unbroken. . . . Now 
 this feeling was the fundamental characteristic of the Roman 
 people before they were distinguished as conquerors. Thrift is a 
 quality held in no esteem, and is generally regarded as mean ; it is 
 certainly mean enough, and objectionable from its interfering with 
 all manner of intercourse between man and man. But I can say 
 that thrift well understood includes in itself the best virtues that 
 a man can have in the world ; it teaches him self-denial, to post- 
 pone the present to the future, to calculate his means, and regulate 
 his actions accordingly ; thus understood, it includes all that man 
 can do in his vocation. Even in its worst state it indicates a great 
 people." + 
 
 Joined with this thrift there was in the Romans a 
 great seriousness and devoutness ; and they made the 
 Pagan notion of fate much more productive of conse- 
 quences than the Greeks did, by their conviction that 
 Rome was fated to rule the world. And it was good for 
 the world to be ruled sternly and strenuously by Rome ; 
 it is the true liberty to obey. 
 
 " That stubborn grinding down of the globe which their ances- 
 tors practised, ploughing the ground fifteen times to make it pro- 
 
 * Here Carlyle speaks of Niebuhr, whose book " is altogether a 
 laborious thing, but he affords after all very little light on the early 
 period of Roman history." 
 
 + See, to the same effect, "a certain editor" in "Frederick the 
 Great," b. iv., ch. 4. 
 
1 4 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 duce a better crop than if it were ploughed fourteen times, the 
 same was afterwards carried out by the Romans in all the concerns 
 of their ordinary life, and by it they raised themselves above all 
 other people. Method was their principle just as harmony was of 
 the Greeks. The method of the Romans was a sort of harmony, 
 but not that beautiful graceful thing which was the Greek har- 
 mony. Theirs was a harmony of plans, an architectural harmony, 
 which was displayed in the arranging of practical antecedents and 
 consequences." 
 
 The "crowning phenomenon" of their history was 
 the struggle with Carthage. The Carthaginians were 
 like the Jews, a stiff-necked people ; a people proverbial 
 for injustice. 
 
 " I most sincerely rejoice that they did not subdue the Romans, 
 but that the Romans got the better of them. We have indications 
 which show that they were a mean people compared to the Romans, 
 who thought of nothing but commerce, would do anything for 
 money, and were exceedingly cruel in their measures of aggrandise- 
 ment and in all their measures. . . . How the Romans got on after 
 that we can see by the Commentaries which Julius Caesar has left 
 us of his own proceedings ; how he spent ten years of campaigns 
 in Gaul, cautiously planning all his measures before he attempted 
 to carry them into effect. It is, indeed, a most interesting book, 
 and evinces the indomitable force of Roman energy ; the triumph 
 of civil, methodic man over wild and barbarous man." 
 
 Before Csesar the government of Rome seems to have 
 been 
 
 " a very tumultuous kind of polity, a continual struggle between the 
 Patricians and the Plebeians. . . . Therefore I cannot join in the 
 lamentations made by some over the downfall of the Republic, 
 when Csesar took hold of it. It had been but a constant strug- 
 gling scramble for prey, and it was well to end it, and to see the 
 wisest, cleanest, and most judicious man of them place himself at 
 the top of it. . . . And what an Empire was it ! Teaching man- 
 kind that they should be tilling the ground, as they ought to be, 
 instead of fighting one another. For that is the real thing which 
 every man is called on to do — to till the ground, and not to slay 
 his poor brother-man.'' 
 
On the Periods of European Culture. 1 5 
 
 Coming now to their language and literature — the 
 peculiarly distinguishing character of the language is 
 " its imperative sound and structure, finely adapted to 
 command." Their greatest work was written on the 
 face of the planet in which we live ; and all their great 
 works were done spontaneously through a deep instinct. 
 
 " The point is not to be able to write a book ; the point is to 
 have the true mind for it. Everything in that case which a nation 
 does will be equally significant of its mind. If any great inan 
 among the Bomans, Julius Csesar or Cato for example, had never 
 done anything but till the ground, they would have acquired equal 
 excellence in that way. They would have ploughed as they con- 
 quered. Everything a great man does carries the traces of a great 
 man." 
 
 Virgil's " ^neid " 
 
 " ranks as an epic poem, and one, too, of the same sort in name as 
 the ' Iliad ' of Homer. But I think it entirely a different poem, and 
 very inferior to Homer. There is that fatal consciousness, that 
 knowledge that he is writing an epic. The plot, the style, all is 
 vitiated by that one fault. The characters, too, are none of them 
 to be compared to the healthy, whole-hearted, robust men of 
 Homer, the much-enduring Ulysses, or Achilles, or Agamemnon, 
 .ffineas, the hero of the poem, is a lachrymose sort of man alto- 
 gether. He is introduced in the middle of a storm, but instead of 
 handling the tackle and doing what he can for the ship, he sits 
 still, groaning over his misfortunes. ' Was ever mortal,' he asks, 
 ' so unfortunate as I am ? Chased from port to port by the perse- 
 cuting deities, who give me no respite,' and so on ; and then he 
 tells them how he is ' the pious .(Eneas.' In short, he is just that 
 sort of lachrymose man ! there is hardly anything of a man in the 
 inside of him." 
 
 " When he let himself alone," Virgil was a great poet, 
 admirable in his description of natural scenery, and in 
 his women ; an amiable man of mild deportment, called 
 by the people of Naples " the maid." " The effect of 
 his poetry is like that of some laborious mosaic of many 
 
1 6 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 years in putting together. There is also the Roman 
 method, the Roman amplitude and regularity." His 
 friend Horace is " sometimes not at all edifying in his 
 sentiments ;" too Epicurean ; " He displays a worldly 
 kind of sagacity, but it is a great sagacity." After 
 these, Roman literature quickly degenerated. 
 
 "If we want an example of a diseased self -consciousness and 
 exaggerated imagination, a mind blown up with all sorts of strange 
 conceits, the spasmodic state of intellect, in short, of a man morally 
 unable to speak the truth on any subject — we have it in Seneca. 
 .... I willingly admit that he had a strong desire to be 
 sincere, and that he endeavoured to convince himself that he was 
 right, but even this when in connection with the rest constitutes of 
 itself a fault of a dangerous kind." 
 
 But — such is the power of genius to make itself heard 
 at all times — the most significant and the greatest of 
 Roman writers appeared later than Seneca. 
 
 " In the middle of all that quackery and puffery coming into 
 play turn-about in every department, when critics wrote books to 
 teach you how to hold your arm and your leg, in the middle of all 
 this absurd and wicked period Tacitus was born, and was enabled 
 to be a Roman after all. He stood like a Colossus at the edge of a 
 dark night, and he sees events of all kinds hurrying past him, and 
 plunging he knew not where, but evidently to no good, for false- 
 hood and cowardice never yet ended anywhere but in destruction." 
 
 Yet he writes with grave calmness, he does not seem . 
 startled, he is convinced that it will end well somehow or 
 other, " for he has no belief but the old Roman belief, 
 full of their old feelings of goodness and honesty." 
 Carlyle closes his view of pagan literature with that 
 passage in which Tacitus speaks of the origin of the sect 
 called Christians. 
 
 " It was given to Tacitus to see deeper into the matter than 
 appears from the above account of it. But he and the great Empire 
 
On the Periods of European Culture. \ 7 
 
 were soon to pass away for ever ; and it was this despised sect — 
 this Christus quidam, — it was in this new character that all the 
 future world lay hid." 
 
 The, transition period (Lecture IV.), styled " th^, 
 millennium of darkness," was really a great and fertile 
 period, during which belief was conquering unbelief ; 
 conquering it not by force of argument but through the 
 heart, and "by the conviction of men who spoke into 
 convincible minds." Belief — that is the great fact of 
 the time. The last belief left by Paganism is seen in 
 the Stoic philosophers — belief in oneself, belief in the 
 high, royal nature of man. But in their opinions a great 
 truth is extremely exaggerated : — 
 
 " That bold assertion for example, in the face of all reason and 
 fact, that pain and pleasure are the same thing, that man is 
 indiiferent to both. ... If we look into the Christian religion, that 
 dignification of man's life and nature, we shall find indeed this also 
 in it, — to believe in oneself. . . . But then how unspeakably more 
 human is this belief, not held in proud scorn and contempt of other 
 men, in cynical disdain or indignation at their paltriness, but received 
 by exterminating pride altogether from the mind, and held in 
 degradation and deep human sufierings." 
 
 Christianity reveals the divinity of human sorrow. 
 
 " In another point of view we may regard it as the revelation of 
 Eternity : Every man may with truth say that he waited for a 
 whole eternity to be born, and that he has a whole Eternity waiting 
 to see what he wiU do now that he is born. It is this which gives 
 to this little period of life, so contemptible when weighed against 
 eternity, a significance it never had without it. It is thus an infinite 
 arena, where infinite issues are played out. Not an action of man 
 but will have its truth realised and will go on for ever. . . . This 
 truth, whatever may be the opinions we hold on Christian doctrine, 
 or whether we hold upon them a sacred silence or not, we must 
 recognise in Christianity and its belief independent of all theories." 
 
 If to the character of the new faith we add the 
 
 B 
 
1 8 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 character of the Northern people, we have the two lead- 
 ing phenomena of the Middle Ages. With much 
 shrewdness, the still rude societies of Europe find their 
 way to order and quiet. Then, there was that thing 
 which we call loyalty. In these times of our own 
 
 " loyalty is much kept out of sight, and little appreciated, and many 
 minds regard it as a sort of obsolete chimera, looking more to inde- 
 pendence and some such thing, now regarded as a great virtue. 
 And this is very just, and most suitable to this time of movement 
 and progress. It must be granted at once that to exact loyalty to 
 things so bad as to be not worth being loyal to is quite an un- 
 supportable thing, and one that the world would spurn at once. 
 This must be conceded ; yet the better thinkers will see that loyalty 
 is a principle perennial in human nature, the highest that unfolds 
 itself there in a temporal, secular point of view. In the Middle 
 Ages it was the noblest phenomenon, the finest phasis in society 
 anywhere. Loyalty was the foundation of the State." 
 
 Another cardinal point was the Church. " Like all 
 other matters, there were contradictions and incon- 
 sistencies without end, but it should be regarded in its 
 Ideal." Hildebrand represents the Mediaeval Church at 
 its highest power. " He has been regarded by some 
 classes of Protestants as the wickedest of men, but I do 
 hope we have at this time outgrown all that. He per- 
 ceived that the Church was the highest thing in the 
 world, and he resolved that it should be at the top of 
 the whole world, animating human things, and giving 
 them their main guidance." Having described the 
 humiliation of the Emperor Henry the Fourth at the 
 Castle of Canossa, Carlyle proceeds : — 
 
 " One would think from all this that Hildebrand was a proud man, 
 but he was not a proud man at all, and seems from many circum-, 
 stances to have been on the contrary a man of very great humility ; 
 but here he treated himself as the representative of Christ, and far 
 
(9« the Periods of European Culture. 19 
 
 beyond all earthly authorities. In these circumstances doubtless 
 there are many questionable things, but then there are many cheer- 
 ing things. For we see the son of a poor Tuscan peasant, solely by 
 the superior spiritual love that was in him, humble a great emperor, 
 at the head of the iron force of Europe, and, to look at it in a 
 tolerant point of view, it is really very grand ; it is the spirit of 
 Europe set above the body of Europe ; the mind triutaphant over 
 the brute force. . . . Some have feared that the tendency of such 
 things is to found a theocracy, and have imagined that if this had 
 gone on till our days a most abject superstition would have become 
 established ; but this is entirely a vain theory. The clay that is 
 about man is always sufficiently ready to assert its rights ; the 
 danger is always the other way, that the spiritual part of man will 
 become overlaid with his bodily part. This then was the Church, 
 which with the loyalty of the time were the two hinges of society, 
 and that society was in consequence distinguished from all societies 
 which have preceded it, presenting an infinitely greater diversity 
 of views, a better humanity, a largeness of capacity. This society 
 has since undergone many changes, but I hope that that spirit may 
 go on for countless ages, the spirit which at that period was set 
 going." 
 
 The grand apex of that life was the Crusades. 
 
 " One sees Peter [the Hermit] riding along, dressed in his brown 
 cloak, with the rope of the penitent tied round him, carrying all 
 hearts, and burning them up with zeal, and stirring up steel-clad 
 Europe till it shook itself at the words of Peter. What a contrast 
 to the greatest of orators, Demosthenes, spending nights and years 
 in the construction of those balanced sentences which are still read 
 with admiration, descending into the smallest details, speaking 
 with pebbles in his mouth and the waves of the sea beside him, and 
 all his way of life in this manner occupied during many years, and 
 then to end in simply nothing at all ; for he did nothing for his 
 country, with all his eloquence. And then see this poor monk start 
 here without any art ; for as Demosthenes was once asked what 
 was the secret of a fine orator, and he replied Action, Action, 
 Action, so, if I were asked it, I should say Belief, Belief, Belief. 
 . . . Some have admired the Crusades because they served to bring 
 all Europe into communication with itself, others because it pro- 
 duced the elevation of the middle classes ; but I say that the great 
 result which characterises and gives them all their merits, is that in 
 
20 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 them Europe for one moment proved its belief, proved that it 
 believed in the invisible world, which surrounds the outward and 
 visible world, that this belief had for once entered into the con- 
 sciousness of man." 
 
 It was not an age for literature. The noble made 
 his signature by dipping the mail-gloved hand into the 
 ink and imprinting it on the charter. But heroic lives 
 were lived, if heroic poems were not written ; an ideal 
 did exist ; the heroic heart was not then desolate and 
 alone ; the great result of the time was " a perpetual 
 struggling forward." And a literature did come at last; 
 beautiful childlike utterances of troubadour and trouvfere ; 
 lasting, however, but a little while, in consequence of the 
 rise of a kind of feeling adverse to the spirit of harmony. 
 Petrarch, the troubadour of Italy, and the Nibelungen- 
 lied represent the period. The spirit of the age did not 
 speak much, but it was not lost. " It is not so ordered." 
 When we hear rude, natural voices singing in the 
 distance, all is true and bright, because all false notes 
 destroy one another, and are absorbed in the air before 
 they reach us, and only the true notes come to us. So 
 in the Middle Ages we only get the heroic essence of 
 the whole. 
 
 Of the new-formed nations the Italian " first possesses 
 a claim on our solicitude." (^Lecture F.)* Though 
 Italy was not a great political power, she produced a 
 greater number of great men distinguished in art, think- 
 ing, and conduct than any other country — and to pro- 
 duce great men is the highest thing any land can do. 
 
 * I make few excerpts from this lecture, for a good part of its sub- 
 stance appears in the lecture "The Hero as Poet," in "Heroes aud 
 Hero-worship." 
 
On the Periods of European Culture. 2 1 
 
 The spokesman of Italy in literature is Dante — one 
 who stands beside ^schylus and Shakspere, and " we 
 really cannot add another great name to these." The 
 idea of his " Divina Commedia," with its three kingdoms 
 of eternity, is " the greatest idea that we have ever got 
 at." " I think that when all records of Catholicism 
 have passed away, when the Vatican shall be crumbled 
 into dust, and St Peter's and Strasburg minster be no 
 more, for thousands of years to come Catholicism will 
 survive in this sublime relic of antiquity." Dante is 
 great in his wrath, his scorn, his pity ; great above all 
 in his sorrow. His gi-eatness of heart, united with his 
 greatness of intellect, determine his character ; and his 
 poem sings itself, has both insight and song. Dante 
 does not seem to know that he is doing anything very 
 remarkable, differing herein from Milton. 
 
 " In all his delineations he has a most beautiful, sharp grace, the 
 quickest and clearest intellect ; it is just that honesty with which 
 his mind was set upon his subject that carries it out. . . . Take for 
 example his description of the citj of Dis to which Virgil carries 
 him ; it possesses a beautiful simplicity and honesty. The light 
 was so dim that people could hardly see, and they winked at him, 
 just as people wink with their eyes under the new moon, or as an 
 old tailor winks threading his needle when his eyes are not 
 good." 
 
 The passage about Francesca is as " tender as the voice 
 of mothers, full of the gentlest pity, though there is 
 much stern tragedy in it. . . . The whole is beautiful, 
 like a clear piping voice heard in the middle of a whirl- 
 wind ; it is so sweet, and gentle, and good." The 
 " Divine Comedy " is not a satire on Dante's enemies. 
 
 " It was written in the pure spirit of justice. Thus he pitied poor 
 Francesca, and would not have willingly placed her in that torment, 
 
22 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 but it was the justice of God's law that doomed her there. . . . 
 Sudden and abrupt movements are frequent in Dante. He is 
 indeed full of what I can call military movements. . . . Those 
 passages are very striking where he alludes to his own sad fortunes; 
 there is in them a wild sorrow, a savage tone of truth, a breaking 
 heart, the hatred of Florence, and with it the love of Florence. . . . 
 His old schoolmaster tells him ' If thou follow thy star thou canst 
 not miss a happy harbour.' That was just it. That star occasion- 
 ally shone on him from the blue, eternal depths, and he felt he was 
 doing something good ; he soon lost it again ; lost it again as he 
 fell back into the trough of the sea. . . . Bitter ! bitter ! poor 
 exile, — none but scoundrelly persons to associate with. . . . The 
 " Inferno " has become of late times mainly the favourite of the three 
 [parts of the poem] ; it has harmonised well with the taste of the 
 last thirty or forty years, in which Europe has seemed to covet 
 more a violence of emotion and a strength of convulsion than 
 almost any other quality. . . . but I question whether the " Purga- 
 torio " is not better, and a greater thing. . . . Men have of course 
 ceased to believe these things, that there is the mountain rising up 
 in the ocean there, or that there are those Malebolgic black gulphs ; 
 but still men of any knowledge at all must believe that there exists 
 the inexorable justice of God, and that penitence is a great thing 
 here for man ; for life is but a series of errors made good again by 
 repentance, and the sacredness of that doctrine is asserted in 
 Dante in a manner more moral than anywhere else. . . . One can 
 well understand what the Germans say of the three parts of the 
 " Divina Commedia," viz., that the first is the architectural, plastic 
 part, as of statuary ; the second is the pictorial or picturesque ; the 
 third is the musical, the melting into music, song." 
 
 Lecture VI. — Dante's way of thinking, in the nature 
 of things, could not long continue. With an increased 
 horizon of knowledge, his theory could no longer fit. 
 " All theories approximate more or less to the great 
 theory which remains itself always unknown. . . . 
 Every philosophy that exists is destined to be embraced, 
 melted down as it were into some larger philosophy." 
 Universities, the art of printing, gunpowder, were chang- 
 ing the aspects of human life during the two centuries 
 
On the Periods of European Culture. 23 
 
 that lie between Dante and Cervantes. Loyalty and 
 the Catholic religion, as we saw, gave their character to 
 the Middle Ages. Chivalry, the great product of the 
 Spanish nation, is a practical illustration of loyalty ; and 
 chivalry includes, with the German valour of character, 
 another German feature, the reverence for women. The 
 Spanish nation was fitted to carry chivalry to a higher 
 perfection than it attained anywhere else. 
 
 " The Spaniards had less breadth of genius than the Italians ; 
 but they had, on the other hand, a lofty, sustained enthusiasm in a 
 higher degree than the Italians, with a tinge of what we call 
 romance, a dash of oriental exaggeration, and a tenacious vigour in 
 prosecuting their object ; of less depth than the Germans, of less 
 of that composed silent force ; yet a great people, calculated to be 
 distinguished." 
 
 Its early heroes, Viriathus and the Cid (whose memory 
 is still musical among the people), lived silent ; their 
 works spoke for them. The first great Spanish name 
 in literature is that of Cervantes. His life — that of a 
 man of action — is told by Carlyle in his brief, picturesque 
 manner. " Don Quixote " is the very reverse of Dante, 
 yet has analogies with Dante. It was begun as a satire 
 on chivalry, a burlesque ; but as Cervantes proceeds, the 
 spirit grows on him. 
 
 " In his ' Don Quixote ' he portrays his own character, repre- 
 senting himself, with good natural irony, mistaking the illusions of 
 his own heart for realities. But he proceeds ever more and 
 more harmoniously. . . . Above all, we see the good-humoured 
 cheerfulness of the author in the middle of his unfortunate destiny; 
 never provoked with it; no atrabiliar quality ever obtained any 
 mastery in his mind. . . . Independently of chivalry, " Don 
 Quixote" is valuable as a sort of sketch of the perpetual struggle 
 in the human soul. We have the hard facts of this world's 
 existence, and the ideal scheme struggling with these in a high 
 
24 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 enthusiastic manner delineated there; and for this there is no more 
 wholesome vehicle anywhere than irony. ... If he had given iis 
 only a high-flown panegyric on the Age of Gold,* he would have 
 found no ear for him ; it is the self-mockery in which he envelops 
 it which reconciles us to the high bursts of enthusiasm, and will 
 keep the matter alive in the heart as long as there are men to read 
 it. It is the Poetry of Comedy." 
 
 Cervantes possessed in an eminent degree the thing 
 
 critics call huTnour. 
 
 " If any one wish to know the difference between humour and 
 wit, the laughter of the fool, which the wise man, by a similitude 
 founded on deep earnestness, calls the crackling of thorns under a 
 pot, let him read Cervantes on the one hand, and on the other 
 Voltaire, the greatest laugher the world ever knew." 
 
 Of Calderon, Carlyle has not read much, "in fact 
 only one play and some choice specimens collected in 
 German books," and in the German admiration for 
 Calderon he suspects there is " very much of forced 
 taste." Lope was " a man of a strange facility, but of 
 much shallowness too, and greatly inferior to Calderon." 
 In the history of Spanish literature there are only these 
 two beside Cervantes. Why Spain declined cannot be 
 explained : " we can only say just this, that its time 
 was come." The lecture closes with a glance at " that 
 conflict of Catholicism and Chivalry with the Eeforma- 
 tion commonly called the Dutch War." 
 
 Lecture VII. — The Eeformation places us upon 
 German soil. The German character had a deep 
 earnestness in it, proper to a meditative people! The 
 strange fierceness known as the Berserkir rage is also 
 theirs. 
 
 * Carlyle had previously made particular reference to the scene 
 with the goat-herda. 
 
On the Periods of European Culture. 25 
 
 " Eage of that sort, defying all dangers and obstacles, if kept 
 down sufficiently, is as a central fire which will make all things to 
 grow on the surface above it. . . . On the whole, it is the best 
 character that can belong to any nation, producing strength of all 
 sorts, and all the concomitants of strength — perseverance, steadi- 
 ness, not easily excited, but when it is called up it will have its 
 object accomplished. We find it iu all their history. Justice, that 
 is another of its concomitants ; strength, one may say, in justice 
 itself. The strong man is he that can be just, that sets everything 
 in its own rightful place one above the other." 
 
 Before the Reformation there had been two great 
 appearances of the Germans iu European history — the 
 first in the overthrow of the Empire, the second in the 
 enfranchisement of Switzerland. The Eeformation was 
 the inevitable result of human progress, the old theory- 
 no longer being found to fit the facts. And " when the 
 mind begins to be dubious about a creed, it will rush 
 with double fury towards destruction ; for all serious 
 men hate dubiety," 
 
 In the sixteenth century there was no Pope Hilde- 
 brand ready to sacrifice life itself to the end that he 
 might make the Church the highest thing in the world. 
 The Popes did indeed maintain the Church, " but they 
 just believed nothing at all, or believed that they got so 
 many thousand crowns a year by it. The whole was 
 one chimera, one miserable sham." Any one inclined 
 to see things in their proper light " would have decided 
 that it was better to have nothing to do with it, but 
 crouch down in an obscure corner somewhere, and read 
 his Bible, and get what good he can for himself in that 
 way, but have nothing to do with the Machiavellian 
 policy of such a Church." 
 
 At such a time Luther appeared, Luther " whose life 
 
26 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 was not to sink into a downy sleep while he heard the 
 great call of a far other life upon him."* His character 
 presents whatever is best in German minds. 
 
 " He is the image of a large, substantial, deep man, tliat stands 
 upon truth, justice, fairness, that fears nothing, considers the right 
 and calculates on nothing else ; and again, does not do it spas- 
 modically, but quietly, calmly ; no need of any noise about it ; 
 adheres to it deliberately, calmly, through good and bad report. 
 Accordingly we find him a good-humoured, jovial, witty man, 
 greatly beloved by every one, and though his words were half 
 battles, as Jean Paul says, stronger than artillery, yet among his 
 friends he was one of the kindest of men. The wild kind of force 
 that was in him appears in the physiognomy of the portrait by 
 Lake Cranach, his painter and friend ; the rough plebeian coun- 
 tenance with all sorts of noble thoughts shining out through 
 it. That was precisely Luther as he appears through his whole 
 history." 
 
 Erasmus admitted the necessity of some kind of 
 reformation : — 
 
 " But that he should risk his ease and comfort for it did not enter 
 into his calculations at all. ... I should say, to make my friends 
 understand the character of Erasmus, that he is more like Addisou 
 than any other writer who is familiarly known in this country. . . . 
 He was a man certainly of great merit, nor have I much to say 
 against him . . . but he is not to be named by the side of Luther,— 
 a mere writer of poems, a litUrateur." 
 
 There is a third striking German character whom we 
 must notice, Ulrich Hutten — a struggler all his days : 
 
 " much too headlong a man. He so hated injustice that be did not 
 know how to deal with it, and he became heart-broken by it at 
 last. ... He says of himself he hated tumult of all kinds, 
 and it was a painful and sad position for him that wished to obey 
 orders, while a still higher order commanded him to disobey, when 
 the standing by that order would be in fact the standing by 
 disorder." 
 
 * Much of what Carlyle says here of Luther reappears in " Heroes 
 and Hero-worship." 
 
On the Periods of European Culture. 27 
 
 His lifting his cap, when at the point of death, because 
 he had reverence for what was above him, to the Arch- 
 bishop who had caused his destruction, " seems to me the 
 noblest, politest thing that is recorded of any such a 
 moment as that." And the worst thing one reads of 
 Erasmus is his desertion of Hutten in his day of mis- 
 fortune. 
 
 The English nation {Lecture VIII,) first comes into 
 decisive notice about the time of the Reformation. In 
 the English character there is " a kind of silent rugged- 
 ness of nature, with the wild Berserkir rage deeper down 
 in the Saxon than in the others." English talent is 
 practical like that of the Romans, a greatness of per- 
 severance, adherence to a purpose, method ; practical 
 greatness, in short. In the early history, before Alfred, 
 "we read of battles and successions of kings, and one 
 endeavours to remember them, but without success, 
 except so much of this flocking and fighting as Milton 
 gives us, viz., that they were the battles of the kites and 
 crows." Yet the history of England was then in the 
 making. " Whoever was uprooting a thistle or bramble, 
 or drawing out a bog, or building himself a house, or in 
 short leaving a single section of order where he had 
 found disorder, that man was writing the History of 
 England, the others were only obstructing it." The 
 battles themselves were a means of ascertaining who 
 among them should rule — who had most force and 
 method among them. A wild kind of intellect as well 
 as courage and traces of deep feeling are scattered over 
 their history. There was an affirmativeness, a largeness 
 of soul, in the intervals of these fights of kites and crows, 
 as the doings of King Alfred show us. 
 
28 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 About the time of Queen Elizabeth the confused 
 elements amalgamated into some distinct vital unity. 
 That period was " in many respects the summation of 
 innumerable influences, the co-ordination of many things 
 which till then had been in contest, the first beautiful 
 outflush of energy, the first articulate, spoken energy." 
 After centuries the blossom of poetry appeared for once. 
 Shakspere is the epitome of the age of Elizabeth ; he 
 is the spokesman of our nation ; like Homer, ^schylus, 
 and Dante, a voice of the innermost heart of nature ; a 
 uaiversal man.* His intellect was far greater than that 
 of any other that has given an account of himself by 
 writing books. " There is no tone of feeling that is not 
 capable of yielding melodious resonance to that of Shak- 
 spere." In him lay " the great, stern Berserkir rage 
 burning deep down under all, and making all to grow 
 out in the most flourishing way, doing ample justice to 
 all feelings, not developing any one in particular." What 
 he writes is properly nature, "the instinctive behest of 
 his mind. This all-producing earth knows not the 
 symmetry of the oak which springs from it. It is all 
 beautiful, not a branch is out of its place, all is symmetry: 
 but the Earth has itself no conception of it, and produced 
 it solely by the virtue that was in itself." Shakspere 
 has a beautiful sympathy of brotherhood with his subject, 
 but he seems to have no notion at all of the great and 
 deep things in him. Certain magniloquent passages lie 
 seems to have imagined extraordinarily great, but in 
 general there is perfect sincerity in any matter he under- 
 
 * Many things said of Shakspere and o£ Knox in this lecture are 
 Irepeated in "Heroes and Hero-worship." 
 
On the Periods of Eiiropean Culture. 29 
 
 takes. It was by accident that he was roused to be a poet, 
 " for the greatest man is always a quiet man by nature. 
 We are sure not to find greatness in a prurient, noisy 
 man." 
 
 We turn from Shakspere to a very different man — 
 John Knox. 
 
 " Luther would have been a great man in other things beside 
 the Eeformation, a great substantial happy man, who must have 
 excelled in whatever matter he undertook. Knox had not that 
 faculty, but simply this of standing upon truth entirely ; it isn't 
 that his sincerity is known to him to be sincerity, but it arises from 
 a sense of the impossibility of any other procedure. . , . Sincerity, 
 what is it but a divorce from earth and earthly feelings ? The sun- 
 which shines upon the earth, and seems to touch it, doesn't touch 
 the earth at all. So the man who is free of earth is the only one 
 that can maintain the great truths of existence, not by an ill- 
 natured talking for ever about truth, but it is he who does the 
 truth. There is a great deal of humour in Knox, as bright a 
 
 humour as in Chaucer, expressed in his own quaint Scotch 
 
 Thus when he describes the two archbishops quarrelling, no doubt 
 he was delighted to see the disgrace it brought on the Church, but 
 he was chiefly excited by the really ludicrous spectacle of rochets 
 flying about, and vestments torn, and the struggle each made to 
 overturn the other." 
 
 Milton may be considered " as a summing up, com- 
 posed as it were of the two, Shakspere and Knox." * 
 Shakspere having reverence for everything that bears 
 the mark of the Deity, may well be called religious, but 
 he is of no particular sect. Milton is altogether sec- 
 tarian. As a poet "he was not one of those who reach 
 into actual contact with the deep fountain of greatness ; " 
 his "Paradise Lost" does not come out of the heart of 
 things ; it seems rather to have been welded together. 
 
 * So Taine, ia his more abstract way, says that Milton sum? up the 
 Renaissance and the Eeformation. 
 
30 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 " There is no life in his characters. Adam and Eve are beautiful, 
 graceful objects, but no one has breathed the Pygmalion life into 
 them ; they remain cold statues. Milton's sympathies were with 
 things rather than men ; the scenery and phenomena of nature, the 
 gardens, the trim gardens, the burning lake ; but as for the phe' 
 nomena of mind, he was not able to see them. He has no delinea- 
 tion of mind except Satan, of which we may say that Satan has 
 his own character." 
 
 [Lecture IX. is -wanting in the manuscript. The 
 following points from the notice in the Examiner may 
 serve to preserve continuity in the present sketch. The 
 French as a nation " go together," as the Italians do 
 not ; but it is physical and animal going together, not 
 that of any steady, final purpose. Voltaire, full of wit 
 and extraordinary talents, but nothing final in him. All 
 modern scepticism is mere contradiction, discovering no 
 new truth. Voltaire kind-hearted and " beneficent," 
 however. French genius has produced nothing original. 
 Montaigne, an honest sceptic. Excessive unction of 
 Eabelais' humour. Rousseau's world-influencing egotism. 
 Bayle, a dull writer.] 
 
 Lecture X. — The French, as we have seen, sowed 
 nothing in the seedfield of time ; Voltaire, on the con- 
 trary, casting firebrands among the dry leaves, produced 
 the combustion we shall notice by-and-bye. No pro- 
 vince of knowledge was cultivated except in an unfruit- 
 ful, desert way. Thus politics summed themselves up 
 in the " Contrat Social " of Rousseau. The only use 
 intellect was put to was to ask why things were there, 
 and to account for it and argue about it. So it was all 
 over Europe in the eighteenth century. The quack 
 was established, and the only belief held was " that 
 money will buy money's worth, and that pleasure is 
 
On the Periods of European Cidture. 31 
 
 -pleasant." In England this baneful spirit was not so 
 deep as in France : partly because the Teutonic nature 
 is slower, deeper than the French ; partly because Eng- 
 land was a free Protestant country. Still it was an age 
 of logic, not of faith ; an age of talk, striving to prove 
 faith and morality by speech ; unaware that logic never 
 proved any truths but those of mathematics, and that 
 all great things are silent things. " In spite of early 
 training I never do see sorites of logic banging together, 
 put in regular order, but I conclude that it is going to 
 end in some measure in some miserable delusion." 
 
 However imperfect the literature of England was at 
 this period, its spirit was never greater; it did great 
 things, it built great towns, Birmingham and Liverpool, 
 Cyclopean workshops, and ships. There was sincerity 
 there at least, Arkwright and Watt were evidently sin- 
 cere. Another symptom of the earnestness of the 
 period was that thing we call Methodism. The fire in 
 Whitfield — fire, not logic — was unequalled since Peter 
 the Hermit. 
 
 As to literature, "in Queen Anne's time, after that 
 most disgraceful class of people — King Charles's people 
 — had passed away, there appeared the milder kind of 
 unbelief, complete formalism. Yet there were many 
 beautiful indications of better things." " Addison was 
 a mere lay preacher completely bound up in formalism, 
 but he did get to say many a true thing in his genera- 
 tion." Steele had infinitely more naiveU, but he sub- 
 ordinated himself to Addison. 
 
 "It is a cold vote in Addison's favour that one gives. By fal? 
 the greatest man of that time, I think, was Jonathan Swift, Dean 
 
3 2 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 Swift, a man entirely deprived of hia natural nourishment, but of 
 great robustness, of genuine Saxon mind, not without a feeling of 
 reverence, though from circumstances it did not awaken in him. 
 ... He saw himself in a world of confusion and falsehood ; no eyes 
 were clearer to see it than his.'' 
 
 Being of acrid tempers-ment, he took up what was 
 fittest for him, " sarcasm mainly, and he carried it quite 
 to an epic pitch. There is something great and fearful 
 in his irony" — which yet shows sometimes sympathy 
 and a kind of love for the thing he satirises. By nature 
 he was one of the truest of men, with great pity for his 
 fellow-men. In Sterne 
 
 " there was a great quantity of good struggling through the super- 
 ficial evil. He terribly failed in the discharge of his duties, still 
 we must admire in him that sporting kind of geniality and affec- 
 tion, a son of our common mother, not cased up in buckram for- 
 mulas. . , . We cannot help feeling his immense love for things 
 around him, so that we may say of him as of Magdalen, ' Much is 
 forgiven him because he much loved.' " 
 
 As for Pope, 
 
 " he was one of the finest heads ever known, full of deep sayings, 
 and uttering them in the shape of couplets, rhymed couplets." * 
 
 The two persons who exercised the most remarkahle 
 influence upon things during the eighteenth century 
 were iinquestionably Samuel Johnson t and David 
 Hume, " two summits of a great set of L^xiences, two 
 opposite poles of it. . , . There is not. such a cheering 
 spectacle in the eighteenth century as Samuel Johnson." 
 He contrived to be devout in it ; he had a belief and 
 held by it, a genuine inspired man. Hume's eye, unlike 
 
 * It is interesting to compare Thackeray's estimates of Swift and 
 Sterne with Carlyle's. 
 
 t The criticism on Johnson, being to the same effect as that of Car- 
 lyle's essay, 1 pass over. 
 
On the Periods of European Culture. 33 
 
 Jolinson's, was not open to faith, yet he was of a noble 
 perseverance, a silent strength. 
 
 "The ' History of England' failed to get buyers ; he bore it all 
 like a Stoic, like a heroic silent man as he was, and then proceeded 
 calmer to the next thing he had to do. I have heard old people, 
 who have remembered Hume well, speak of his great good humour 
 under trials, the quiet strength of it ; the very converse in this 
 of Dr Johnson, whose coarseness was equally strong with his 
 heroisms." 
 
 As an historian, Hume " always knows where to begin 
 and end. In his History he frequently rises, though a 
 cold man naturally, into a kind of epic height as he 
 proceeds." His scepticism went to the very end, so that 
 " all could see what was in it, and give up the unpro- 
 fitable employment of spinning cobwebs in their brain." 
 His fellow-historian, Robertson, was a shallow man, with 
 only a power of arrangement, and a " soft, sleek style." 
 Gibbon, a far greater historian than Robertson, was not 
 so great as Hume. " With all his swagger and bom- 
 bast, no man ever gave a more futile account of human 
 things than he has done in the ' Decline and Fall of the 
 Roman Empire.' " 
 
 Lecture XI. — It is very strange to contrast Hume, 
 the greatest of all the writers of his time, and in some 
 respects the worthiest, with Dante ; to contrast scepti- 
 cism with faith. " Dante saw a solemn law in the 
 universe pointing out his destiny with an awful and 
 beautiful certainty, and he held to it. Hume could see 
 nothinof in the universe but confusion, and he was certain 
 of nothing but his own existence. Yet he had instincts 
 which were infinitely more true than the logical part of 
 him, and so he kept himself quiet in the middle of it 
 
 c 
 
34 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 all, and did no harm to any one." But scepticism is a 
 disease of the mind, a fatal condition to be in, or at best 
 useful only as a means to get at knowledge ; and to 
 spend one's time reducing realities to theories is to be 
 in an enchanted state of mind. Morality, the very 
 centre of the existence of man, was in the eighteenth 
 century reduced to a theory — by Adam Smith to a 
 theory of the sympathies and Moral Sense ; by Hume to 
 expediency, " the most melancholy theory ever pro- 
 pounded." Besides morality, everything else was in the 
 same state. 
 
 "A dinij huge, immeasurable steam-engine they had made of 
 this world, and, as Jean Paul says, heaven became a gas ; God, a 
 force ; the second world, a grave. ... In that huge universe be- 
 come one vast steam-engine, as it were, the new generation that 
 followed must have found it a very difficult position to be in, and 
 perfectly insupportable for them, to be doomed to live in such a ■ 
 place of falsehood and chimera ; and that was in fact the case with 
 them, and it led to the second great phenomenon we have to notice 
 — the introduction of Wertherism." * 
 
 Werther was right : — 
 
 " If the world were really no better than what Goethe imagined 
 it to be, there was nothing for it but suicide ; if it had nothing to 
 support itself upon but these poor sentimentalities, view-hunting 
 trivialities, this world was really not fit to live in. But in the end 
 the conviction that this theory of the world was wrong came to 
 Goethe himself, greatly to his own profit, greatly to the world's 
 profit," 
 
 * A notice, far from accurate, of the origin of Goethe's "Werther " 
 here follows, and the time is thus characterised by the future historian 
 of Frederick : "It was a time of haggard condition ; no genuine hope 
 in men's minds ; all outwards was false — the last war for example, the 
 Seven Years' War, the most absurd of wars ever undertaken, on no 
 public principle, a contest between France and Germany, from 
 Frederick the Great wanting to have Silesia, and Louis the Fifteenth 
 wanting to give Madame de Pompadour some influence in the afifairs of 
 Europe ; and 50,000 men were shot for that purpose." 
 
On the Periods of European Culture. 35 
 
 The same phenomenon shows itself in Schiller's 
 " Eobbers." Life to the robber seems one huge bedlam, 
 and a brave man can do nothing with it but revolt 
 against it. In our own literature Byron represents a 
 similar phasis. He is full of " rage and scowl against 
 the whole universe as a place not worthy that a genuine 
 man should live in it. He seems to have been a com- 
 pound of the Robbers and Werther put together." 
 This sentimentalism is the ultimatum of scepticism. 
 That theory of the universe cannot be true ; for if it 
 were there would be no other way for it but Werther's, 
 to put an end to it ; for all mankind " to return to the 
 bosom of their Father with a sort of dumb protest 
 against it. There was, therefore, a deep sincerity in 
 the sentimentalism, not a right kind of sincerity perhaps, 
 but still a struggling towards it." * 
 
 All this — scepticism, sentimentalism, theorising, de- 
 pendence on the opinion of others, wages taken and no 
 duty done — went on and on. And then came the con- 
 summation of scepticism. " We can well conceive the 
 end of the last century, the crisis which then took place, 
 the prurience of self-conceit, the talk of illumination, the 
 darkness of confusion." The new French kind of belief 
 was belief in the doctrine of Rousseau, " a kind of half- 
 madman, but of tender pity too, struggling for sincerity 
 through his whole life, till his own vanity and egotism 
 drove him quite blind and desperate." Then appeared 
 one of the frightfuUest phenomena ever seen among 
 men, the French Revolution. " It was after all a new 
 revelation of an old truth to this unfortunate people ; 
 * A notice of " Goetz von Berlicliingen " follows. 
 
36 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 they beheld, indeed, the truth there clad in hell-fire, but 
 they got the truth." It began in all the golden radiance 
 of hope ; it is impossible to doubt the perfect sincerity 
 of the men. At first "for the upper class of people it 
 was the joyfullest of news ; now at last they had got 
 something to do ; . . . certainly to starve to death is 
 hard, but not so hard as to idle to death.'' 
 
 But the French theory of life was false — that men 
 are to do their duty in order to give happiness to them- 
 selves and one another. And where dishonest and fool- 
 ish people are, there will always be dishonesty and folly ; 
 we can't distil knavery into honesty. Europe rose and 
 assembled and came round France, and tried to crush 
 the Revolution, but could not crush it all. " It was the 
 primeval feeling of nature they came to crush, but [the 
 spirit of France *] rallied, and stood up and asserted 
 itself, and made Europe know even in the miarrow of its 
 bones that it was there." Bonaparte set his foot on the 
 necks of the nations of Europe. Bonaparte himself was 
 a reality at first, the great armed soldier of democracy, 
 with a true appreciation of the Revolution, as opening 
 the career to all talents ; but at last he became a poor 
 egotist, and stirring up the old Berserkir rage against 
 him, he burned himself up in a day. " On the whole, 
 the French Revolution was only a great outburst of the 
 truth that the world wasn't a mere chimera, but a great 
 reality." 
 
 Having seen how scepticism burned itself up, it 
 becomes interesting to inquire {Lecture XII.), What are 
 we to look for now 1 Are we to reckon on a new period 
 * Word omitted in MS. 
 
On the Periods of European Culhire. 2i7 
 
 of things, of better infinitely extending hopes ? We do 
 see good in store for us. The fable' of the phoenix 
 rising out of its own ashes, which was interpreted by 
 the rise of modern Europe out of the. Roman/ Empire, is 
 interpreted again in the French Eevoliition. On the 
 spiritual side of things we see the phoenix in the 
 modern school of German literature.* We might 
 inquire. What new doctrine is it that is now proposed 
 to us ? What is the meaning of German literature ? 
 But this question is not susceptible of any immediate 
 answer, for German literature has no particular theory 
 at all in the front of it. The object of the men who 
 constructed it was not to save the world, but to work 
 out in some manner an enfranchisement for their own 
 souls. And — 
 
 " seeing here the blessed, thrice-blessed phenomenon of men unmu- 
 tilated in all that constitutes man, able to believe and be in all 
 things men, seeing this, I say, there is here the thing that has all 
 other things presupposed in it. . . . To explain, I can only think 
 of the Eevelation, for I can eaU it no other, that these men made 
 to me. It was to me like the rising of a light in the darkness 
 which lay around, and threatened to swallow me up. I was then 
 in the very midst of Wertherism, the blackness and darkness of 
 death. There was one thing in particular struck me in Goethe. 
 It is in his ' Wilhelm Meister.' He had been describing an asso- 
 ciation of all sorts of people of talent, formed to receive propositions 
 and give responses to them, all of which he described with a sort 
 of seriousness at first, but with irony at the last. However, these 
 people had their eyes on Wilhelm Meister, with great cunning 
 watching over him at a distance at first, not interfering with him 
 too soon j at last the man who was intrusted with the management 
 of the thing took him in hand, and began to give him an account 
 of how the association acted. Now this is the thing, which, 
 as I said, so much struck me. He tells Wilhelm Meister that a. 
 
 * Oarlyle is assured that there are few in his audience able to read 
 German, but anticipates a better time. 
 
38 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 number of applications for advice were daily made to the associa- 
 tion, which were answered thus and thus ; but that many people 
 wrote in particular for recipes of happiness ; all that, he adds, was 
 laid on the shelf, and not answered at all. Now this thing gave me 
 great surprise when I read it. ' "What ! ' I said, ' is it not the recipe 
 of happiness that I have been seeking all my life, and isn't it pre- 
 cisely because I have failed in finding it that I am now miserable 
 and discontented ? ' Had I supposed, as some people do, that 
 Goethe was fond of paradoxes, that this was consistent with the 
 sincerity and modesty of the man's mind, I had certainly rejected 
 it without further trouble ; but I couldn't think it. At length, 
 after turning it up a great while in my own mind, I got to see that 
 it was very true what he said — that it was the thing that all the 
 world were in error in. No man has a right to ask for a recipe for 
 happiness; he can do without happiness; there is something better 
 than that. All kinds of men who have done great things — priests, 
 prophets, sages — have had in them something higher than the love 
 of happiness to guide them, spiritual clearness and perfection, a far 
 better thing that than happiness. Love of happiness is but a kind 
 of hunger at the best, a craving because I have not enough of sweet 
 provision in this world. If I am asked what that higher thing is, I 
 cannot at once make answer, I am afraid of causing mistake. There 
 is no name I can give it that is not to be questioned ; I couldn't 
 speak about it ; there is no name for it, but pity for that heart that 
 does not feel it ; there is no good volition in that heart. This 
 higher thing was once named the Cross of Christ — not a happy 
 thing that, surely." * 
 
 The whole of German literature is not to be reduced 
 to a seeking of this higher thing, but such vras the com- 
 mencement of it. The philosophers of Germa^iy are 
 glanced at. 
 
 " I studied them once attentively, but found that I got nothing 
 out of them. One may just say of them that they are the precisely 
 opposite to Hume. . . . This study of metaphysics, I say, had only 
 the result, after bringing me rapidly through different phases 
 of opinion, at last to deliver me altogether out of metaphysics. I 
 found it altogether a frothy system, no right beginning to it, no 
 
 * Compare with this passage " the Everlasting Yea" of "Sartor 
 Eesartus." 
 
On the Periods of European Culture. 39 
 
 right ending. I began with Hume and Diderot, and as long as I 
 was with them I ran at atheism, at blackness, at materialism of all 
 kinds. If I read Kant I arrived at precisely opposite conclusions, that 
 all the world was spirit, namely, that there was nothing material at 
 all anywhere; and the result was what I have stated, that I 
 resolved for my part on having nothing more to do with meta- 
 physics at aU." 
 
 After the Werther period Goethe "got himself 
 organised at last, built up his mind, adjusted to what 
 he can't cure, not suicidally grinding itself to pieces." 
 For a time the Ideal, Art, Painting, Poetry, were in his 
 view the highest things, goodness being included in 
 these. God became for him " only a stubborn force, 
 really a heathen kind of thing." As his mind gets 
 higher it becomes more serious too, uttering tones of 
 most beautiful devoutness. " In the ' West-ostlicher 
 Divan,' though the garb is Persian, the whole spirit is 
 Christianity, it is Goethe himself the old poet, who goes 
 up and down singing little snatches of his own feelings 
 on dififerent things. It grows extremely beautiful as it 
 goes on, full of the finest things possible, which sound 
 like the jingling of bells when the queen of the fairies 
 rides abroad." * 
 
 Of Schiller the principal characteristic is " a chivalry 
 of thought, described by Goethe as the spirit of freedom 
 struggling ever forward to be free." His " Don 
 Carlos " 
 
 " is well described as being like to a lighthouse, high, far-seen, and 
 withal empty. It is in fact very like what the people of that day, 
 the Girondists of the French Revolution, were always talking 
 about, the Bonheur dupeuple and the rest. . . . There was a noble- 
 
 * A defence of Goethe from the charges of over-serenity and politi- 
 cal indifference follows. 
 
40 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 ness in Schiller, a brotherly feeling, a kindness of sympathy for 
 ■what is true and just. There was a kind of silence too at the last. 
 He gave up his talk about the Bonheur du peuple, and tried to see 
 if he could make them happier instead." 
 
 The third great writer in modern Germany is 
 Richter. 
 
 " Goethe was a strong man, as strong as the mountain rocks, but 
 as soft as the green sward upon the rocks, and like them continually 
 bright and sun-beshone. Eiohter, on the contrary, was what he 
 has been called, a half-made man ; he struggled with the world, 
 but was never completely triumphant over it. But one loves 
 Eichter. . . . There is more joyous laughter in the heart of Eiohter 
 than in any other German writer." 
 
 We have then much reason to hope about the future; 
 great things are in store for us. 
 
 " It is possible for us to attain a spiritual freedom compared with 
 which political enfranchisement is but a name. ... I can't close 
 this lecture better than by repeating these words of Eichter, Thou, 
 Eternal Providence, wilt cause the day to davm. 
 
 " Nothing now remains for me but to take my leave of you — a 
 sad thing at all times that word, but doubly so in this case. When 
 I think of what you are, and of what I am, I cannot help feeling 
 that you have been kind to me ; I won't trust myself to say how 
 kind ; but you have been as kind to me as ever audience was to 
 man, and the gratitude which I owe you comes to you from the 
 bottom of my heart. May God be with you all !" 
 
SHELLEY'S " PHILOSOPHICAL VIEW OF 
 REFORM." 
 
 (A Teansceipt.) 
 
 Theough the kindness of Sir Percy and Lady Shelley, 
 I have had the privilege of reading an unpublished 
 prose work by Shelley, of greater length than any other 
 prose writing of his except his boyish romances, a late 
 product of that annus mirabilis which gave birth to 
 the "Prometheus Unbound" and "The Cenci." It 
 treats of a subject which often occupied Shelley's 
 thoughts and profoundly interested his feelings. To 
 have introduced a full account of this work into the 
 Life of Shelley on which I have been long engaged 
 would, I found, have interrupted the narrative with a 
 digression of unsuitable length, yet it seems desirable 
 that those persons — and they are many — who would 
 make themselves acquainted with the total achievement, 
 in all its breadth and variety, of Shelley's extraordinary 
 thirty years, should, in common with me, possess some 
 acquaintance with a piece of writing belonging to his 
 period of full maturity, which may be viewed in a cer- 
 tain sense as a prose comment on those poems that 
 anticipate, as does the " Prometheus Unbound," a better 
 and happier life of man than the life attained in our 
 century of sorrow, and toil, and hope. Within the 
 limits of an article in a Review, I can do no more than 
 
42 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 give an outline of Shelley's treatise, with extracts 
 which may serve to represent the whole.* It is to be 
 hoped that on some fit occasion Sir Percy Shelley may 
 decide to place the entire work — a posthumous gift of 
 its. author — in the hands of English readers.! 
 
 The manuscript occupies upwards of two hundred 
 pages in a small vellum-bound Italian note-book. On 
 the outer side of one of the covers is a pen-and-ink 
 drawing by Shelley — a landscape with water and trees, 
 filled in with more detail than is common in the delicate 
 pieces of fantastic pencilling or pen-work found among 
 his papers. At one end of the little volume is the 
 fragment, " On Life," which has been assigned, on the 
 internal evidence of style, to the year 1815, but which 
 would hardly have had a place in this Italian note-book 
 if it were of earlier origin than the year 1818 or 18194 
 The principal manuscript in the volume is evidently, in 
 great part if not altogether, a first draft, showing many 
 corrections, alterations, interlineations, and cancelled" 
 sentences ; yet, except in a few passages, it is not a 
 very difficult manuscript to read. The work remains 
 unfinished, and the clos.ing pages yield rather a series of 
 fragments than a continuous treatment of the subject 
 under consideration. Nevertheless, it presents with 
 sufficient clearness an aspect of Shelley's mind which 
 some readers will think it worth their while to study, if 
 
 * Where I condense and cannot use marks of quotation 1 yet retain, 
 as far as may be, the words of Shelley. 
 
 t " A Treatise on Political Reform," wrote Mrs Shelley in her Pre- 
 face to Shelley's " Essays, Letters, &c. ," " and other fragments remain 
 to be published when his works assume a complete shape. " 
 
 X Of course, it may have been copied from an earlier draft into the 
 note-book, but this is unlikely. 
 
Shelley's " Philosophical View of Reform !' 43 
 
 only for the sake of observing how the visions of his 
 poetry were related to his views of real events and the 
 actual condition of English society. 
 
 " I have deserted the odorous gardens of literature," 
 Shelley wrote to his friends, Mr and Mrs Gisborne, on 
 November 6, 1819, "to journey across the great sandy 
 desert of politics, not, as you may imagine, without the 
 hope of finding some enchanted paradise. In all proba- 
 bility I shall be overwhelmed by one of the tempestuous 
 columns which are for ever traversing with the speed of 
 a storm and the confusion of a chaos that pathless 
 wilderness."* "I consider poetry very subordinate to 
 moral and political science,'' he had written to Peacock 
 in the opening of the year, "and, if I were well, 
 certainly I would aspire to the latter, for I can conceive 
 a great work, embodying the discoveries of all ages, and 
 harmonising the contending creeds by which mankind 
 have been ruled." Such a work as this Shelley did not 
 dare to attempt ; but in the preface to " Prometheus 
 Unbound " he speaks of a purpose, actually entertained 
 by him, of writing, with Plato for his master and model, 
 a " systematical history " of what he conceived to be 
 "the genuine elements of society." This ambitious 
 design was never carried into effect. But Shelley still 
 desired to utter his thoughts on politics, and before the 
 year closed he had begun an essay at once occasional 
 and philosophical, having reference to. the present state 
 of England, but viewing the facts of society through the 
 
 * A few sentences here and elsewhere in this article have appeared 
 in the brief account which I have given of the "Philosophical View of 
 Reform" in my "Lite of Shelley," vol. ii., pp. 290-297. 
 
4 4 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 medium of general principles. " One thing I want to 
 ask you/' he wrote to Leigh Hunt (May 26, 1820), 
 " Do you know any bookseller who would publish for me 
 an octavo volume, entitled 'A Philosophical View of 
 Reform'? It is boldly but temperately written, and, I 
 think, readable. It is intended for a kind of standard 
 book for the philosophical reformers, politically con- 
 sidered, like Jeremy Bentham's something, but different 
 and, perhaps, more systematic. I would send it sheet 
 by sheet. Would you ask and think for me 1" Shelley, 
 in 1819, had hoped to publish a series of poems 
 intended to arouse the people of England to a sense of 
 their actual condition, to quicken and purify their 
 feelings, and to guide their imagination towards the true 
 objects of national aspiration and endeavour. A few of 
 these songs were written ; they are not without their 
 worth and beauty, but they show that Shelley's genius 
 was not well fitted to strike, and strike again, the 
 chords whose vibrations thrill and animate a multitude. 
 The same desire to serve the Liberal or Radical cause 
 in England which moved him to utter himself in verse 
 that aimed at being popular, moved him also to set 
 forth his political views in a prose essay. While hold- 
 ing opinions antagonistic in many respects to the existing 
 social order, Shelley now, as always, was opposed to mob 
 violence and the brutality of physical force ; he feared the 
 influence of the demagogue on the passions of the people. 
 It was Shelley's object to encourage men to desire and 
 expect a vast transformation of society, but a transforma- 
 tion which should be gradual, and unstained by cruelty 
 or crime. 
 
Shelley's ''Philosophical View of Reform." 45 
 
 The year 1 8 ] 9 — that in which Shelley, in Rome, 
 Leghorn, and Florence, achieved his highest work in 
 poetry — was in England a year of commercial distress 
 and political agitation. The reformers, it is said, now 
 first assumed the name of Radicals. A Female Reform 
 Society, too, now came into existence, of which one 
 object was to instil into the minds of children " a deep- 
 rooted hatred of our tyrannical rulers." The men of 
 Lancashire, when they left their looms and spindles at 
 dusk, gathered together in the fields, and went through 
 their secret drillings "with a steadiness and a regu- 
 larity," says Bamford, " which would not have disgraced 
 a regiment on parade." In August was held that 
 memorable open-air meeting in St Peter's Field, Man- 
 chester, under the leadership of Orator Hunt, when a 
 display of force on the part of the perplexed magistrates 
 led, through misadventure rather than design, to the 
 death of several persons in the excited crowd. " The 
 country," said Lord Eldon, "must make new laws to 
 meet this state of things, or we must have a shocking 
 choice between military government and anarchy." New 
 laws accordingly were made — laws which forbade public 
 meetings without the license of magistrates, which per- 
 mitted the search of private houses for arms, which 
 authorised the transportation beyond the seas of one 
 who had been twice convicted of publishing a libel. 
 When the news of the Peterloo "massacre" reached 
 Italy, Shelley was deeply moved, and wrote that admir- 
 able poem, "The Mask of Anarchy," in which some- 
 thing of prophetic vision and something of prophetic 
 exhortation were united. "What in his own land was 
 
46 Transcripts and Studies, 
 
 named " order " appeared to Shelley to be in fact 
 anarchy disguised and masked. The chief courtiers of 
 King Anarchy were Eldon, and Sidmouth, and Castle- 
 reagh. Yet Shelley does not counsel violence. He sets 
 forth an ideal of what true freedom is for the working 
 man of England : — 
 
 " For the labourer thou art bread, 
 And a comely table spread, 
 From his daily labour come 
 To a neat and happy home. 
 
 Science, and Poetry, and Thought, 
 Are thy lamps ; they make the lot 
 Of the dwellers in a cot 
 So serene, they curse it not." 
 
 Calmness, moderation, the patience of unquenched 
 hope and long-suffering, the patience, if need be, of 
 martyrdom — these it is to which Shelley exhorts the 
 English people. If force be arrayed against them, let 
 them confront the bayonet and the sword with tranquil, 
 unarmed breasts, and accept the laws of their country as 
 arbiters of the dispute. 
 
 " The old laws of England— they 
 Whose reverend heads with age are grey, 
 Children of a wiser day : 
 And whose solemn voice must be 
 Thine own echo — Liberty ! " 
 
 "The Mask of Anarchy" was sent to England for 
 insertion in "The Examiner," if it should appear suit- 
 able to the editor. " I did not insert it," writes Hunt, 
 "because I thought that the public at large had not 
 become sufficiently discerning to do justice to the 
 
Shelley's " Philosophical View of Reform." 47 
 
 sincerity and kind-heartedness of the spirit that walked 
 in this flaming robe of verse." 
 
 "Those who imagine that their personal interest is 
 directly or indirectly concerned in maintaining the 
 power in which they are clothed by the existing institu- 
 tions of English government, do not acknowledge the 
 necessity of a material change in those institutions. 
 With this exception, there is no inhabitant of the British 
 [Isles]* of mature age and perfect understanding not 
 fully persuaded of the necessity of reform." With these 
 words Shelley's prose treatise, " A Philosophical View of 
 Reform," opens. An introduction follows, in which a 
 brief historical survey is attempted of the chief move- 
 ments on behalf of freedom which have embodied the 
 hopes and aspirations of mankind with respect to a 
 happier social, moral, and intellectual state since the 
 opening of the Christian era. For the student of history 
 its value is slight; but for one who would know the habits 
 of thought and feeling which found a lyrical utterance in 
 the "Ode to Liberty" and the noble choral passages 
 of " Hellas," Shelley's sketch of the history of human 
 progress cannot be without interest. In the " Hellas," 
 Shelley tells how — 
 
 " Apollo, Pan, and Love, 
 And even Olympian Jove," 
 
 fled before "the folding star of Bethlehem." The 
 popular notions of Christianity are represented in the 
 poem as true " in relation to the worship they super- 
 seded . . . without considering their merits in a rela- 
 
 * Where I am uncertain as to the text I use brackets. 
 
48 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 tion more universal." In the " Philosophical View of 
 Eeform " historical Christianity is described as founded 
 on an unhappy perversion of the utterances and actions 
 of the great reformer and philanthropist of Nazareth. 
 
 " The names borrowed from the life and opinions of Jesus Christ 
 •were employed as symbols of domination and imposture ; and a 
 system of liberty and equality, for such was the system preached by 
 that great Reformer, was perverted to support oppression. Not hia 
 doctrines, for they are too simple and direct to be susceptible of 
 such perversion ; but the mere names. Such was the origin of the 
 Catholic Church, which, together with the several dj'nasties then 
 beginning to consolidate themselves in Europe, means, being inter- 
 preted, a plan according to which the cunning and selfish few have 
 employed the fears and hopes of the ignorant many to the estab- 
 lishment of their own power and the destruction of the real in- 
 terests of all." 
 
 Shelley's studies had never led him to form any real 
 acquaintance with the men of lofty intellect and heroic 
 character who had appeared among the master builders 
 of the Christian Church ; nor had he duly estimated 
 the enfranchisement of the affections and the spiritual 
 ardours of humanity attained through the Christian 
 religion. 
 
 The connection between liberty and the higher 
 strivings of man's spirit in literature and art is a topic 
 on which he dwells at the first, and one to vrhich he 
 returns again and again : — 
 
 " The Eepublics and municipal governments of Italy opposed for 
 some time a systematic and eflfectual resistance to the all-surround- 
 ing tyranny. The Lombard League defeated the armies of the 
 despot in the open field, and until Florence was betrayed to those 
 polished tyrants, the Medici, Freedom had one citadel wherSin it 
 could find refuge from a world which was its enemy. Florence 
 long balanced, divided, and weakened the strength of the Empire 
 and the Popedom. To this cause, if to anything, was due the un- 
 
Shelley's "Philosophical View of Reform." 49 
 
 disputed superiority of Italy in literature and the arts over all its 
 contemporary nations ; that union of energy and of beauty which 
 distinguish from all other poets the ■writings of Dante, that rest- 
 lessness of fervid power which expressed itself in painting and 
 sculpture, and in architectural forms ,rude but daring, and from 
 which conjointly with the creations of Athens, its predecessor and 
 its image, Baphael and Michael Angelo drew the inspiration of 
 what is now the astonishment of the world. The father of our own 
 literature, Chaucer, wrought from the simple and powerful lan- 
 guage of a nurseling of this Republic the basis of our own literature. 
 And thus we owe, among other causes, the exact condition belong- 
 ing to our intellectual existence to the generous disdain of submis- 
 sion which burnt in the bosoms of men who filled a distant gene- 
 ration and inhabited another land." 
 
 The resistance offered to fraud and tyranny by the 
 Italian Eepublics was after a time overpowered ; but 
 already the progress of philosophy and civilisation was 
 leading towards that great series of events known as the 
 Reformation. Unhappily, like its child of a later 
 ceatury, the Revolution in France, the movement was 
 not free from violence and wrong. " Exasperated by 
 their long sufferings, influenced by the sparks of that 
 superstition from the flames of which they were emerg- 
 ing, the poor rose against their natural enemies the rich, 
 and repaid with bloody interest the tyranny of ages. 
 One of the signs of the times was that the oppressed 
 peasantry rose like the slaves of a West Indian planta- 
 tion, and murdered their tyrants when they were 
 unaware. The tyrants themselves neither then, nor 
 now, nor ever, left or leave a path to freedom but 
 through their own blood." The Reformation resulted in 
 no more than a partial and imperfect emancipation of 
 mankind from " the yoke of kings apd priests," yet the 
 result is " perhaps the most animating that the philan- 
 
 D 
 
50 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 thropist can contemplate in the history of man. The 
 Republic of Holland, which had been so long \worA 
 undeciphered] the arrows of learning by which super- 
 stition has been wounded even to death, was established 
 by this contest. What, though the name of Republic 
 (and by whom but by conscience-stricken tyrants could 
 it be extinguished ?) is no more ? the Republics of 
 Switzerland derived from this event their consolidation 
 and their union. From England then first began to 
 pass away the stain of conquest. The exposition of a 
 certain portion of religious imposture drew with it an 
 inquiry into political imposture, and was attended with 
 an extraordinary exertion of the energies of intellectual 
 power. Shakspere and Lord Bacon and the great 
 writers of the age of Elizabeth were at once the effects 
 of the new spirit in men's minds and the cause of its 
 more complete development." The temporar}'^ abolition 
 of aristocracy and episcopacy soon followed ; and Eng- 
 land afforded to the world the " mighty example " of 
 bringing to public justice " one of those chiefs of a con- 
 spiracy of public murderers and robbers whose in- 
 humanity has been the consecration of crime." * These 
 words of Shelley are not without interest when we bear 
 in mind the fact that he was engaged in the last year 
 of his life on the drama of " Charles the First." His 
 instincts as a dramatist held in check his political 
 
 * Shelley adds in brackets an unfinished sentence : " The maxim 
 that criminals should be pitied and reformed, not detested and 
 
 punished, alone affords a source of " It may be surmised that he 
 
 stood perplexed between his abstract doctrine, learnt from Godwin, 
 and his enthusiasm on behalf of an act, to justify which Milton em- 
 ployed argument and eloquence. 
 
Shelley s " Philosophical View of Reform" 51 
 
 partisanship, " I ought to say that the tragedy pro- 
 mises to be good as tragedies go," he told his publisher 
 Oilier, in a letter which [has not been printed (Jan. 11, 
 1821), "and that it is not coloured by the party spirit 
 of the author." 
 
 The E evolution which replaced James II. by a con- 
 stitutional monarch is viewed by Shelley with mingled 
 feelings of pleasure and dissatisfaction. It was "a 
 compromise between the unextinguishable spirit of 
 hberty and the ever-watchful spirit of fraud and 
 tyranny." Monarchy, and aristocracy, and episcopacy 
 were at once established and limited by law — " un- 
 fortunately they lost no more in extent of power than 
 they gained in security of possession." Yet as the 
 incomplete spiritual emancipation called the Eeforma- 
 tion established the maxim that the right to protest 
 against religious dogmas which present themselves to his 
 mind as false, is the inalienable prerogative of every 
 human being, so the Revolution of 1688, though but a 
 compromise, established the will of the people as the 
 source from which monarchy, aristocracy, and episcopacy 
 derive the right to subsist — " a man has no right to be 
 a king, or a lord, or a bishop, but so long as it is for 
 the benefit of the people, and so long as the people 
 judge that it is for their benefit that he should imper- 
 sonate that character. ... In both instances [the Re- 
 formation and the English Revolution] the maxims so 
 solemnly recorded remain as trophies of our difficult 
 and incomplete victory planted on the enemies' land." 
 
 With the decay of the old unreserved belief in those 
 errors upon which the superstructure of political and 
 
52 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 religious tyranny was built, began an epoch distinguished 
 by deeper inquiries than had previously been possible 
 into the nature of man. Bacon, Spinoza, Hobbes, 
 Bayle, Montesquieu,* regulated the reasoning powers, 
 criticised the history, exposed the past errors of hu- 
 manity. 
 
 "Then with a less interval of time than of genius followed 
 Locke, and the philosophers of his exact and intelligible but super- 
 ficial school. Their illustrations of the {word undeciphered] conse- 
 quences of the doctrine established by the sublime genius of their 
 predecessors were correct, popular, and energetic. Above all they 
 indicated inferences the most incompatible with the popular re- 
 ligions and the established governments of Europe. Philosophy 
 went into the enchanted forest of the dsemons of "Worldly Power 
 as the pioneer of the overgrowth of ages." t 
 
 Berkeley and Hume, following these eminent thinkers, 
 established the certainty of our ignorance v/ith respect 
 to those obscure questions, the crude answers to which 
 have been misnamed religious truths. A crowd of 
 writers in France seized upon the most popular topics 
 in the doctrine of the great philosophers, and made 
 familiar to the multitude those particular portions of the 
 new philosophy which conducted to inferences at war 
 with the dreadful oppressions under which that country 
 groaned. 
 
 " Considered as philosophers their error seems to have consisted 
 chiefly in a limitation of view ; they told the truth, but not the 
 whole truth. This has arisen from the terrible sufferings of their 
 countrymen, inciting them rather to apply a portion of what had 
 already been discovered to their immediate relief, than to pursue 
 the abstractions of thought, as the great philosophers who preceded 
 
 * The name of Descartes is written and is struck out by Shelley, 
 t This last sentence is enclosed in brackets by Shelley, as if for re- 
 consideration. 
 
Shelley's "Philosophical View of Reform" 53 
 
 them had done for the sake of a future and more universal advan- 
 tage." * Whilst that philosophy which, burying itself in the ob- 
 scurer parts of our nature, regards the truth and falsehood of dogmas 
 relating to the cause of the universe and the nature and manner of 
 man's relation with it, was thus stripping power of its darkest 
 mask, Political Philosophy, or that which considers the relations of 
 man as a social being, was assuming a precise form. That Philo- 
 sophy indeed sprang from, and maintained a connection with, that 
 other as its parent. "What would Swift and Bolingbroke and 
 Sidney and Locke and Montesquieu, or even Eousseau, not to speak 
 of political philosophers, Godwin and Bentham, have been but for 
 Lord Bacon, Montaigne, and Spinoza, and the other great lumin- 
 aries of the preceding epoch ? Something excellent and eminent, 
 no doubt, the last of these would have been, but something diffe- 
 rent from and inferior to what they are." 
 
 While these inquiries were proceeding the mechanical 
 sciences attained to an extraordinary degree of advance- 
 ment, commerce was pursued with a perpetually increas- 
 ing -vigour, the means and sources of knowledge were 
 increased, together with knowledge itself. This was 
 well ; but freedom and equality, the elementary prin- 
 ciples according to which the benefits resulting from the 
 social union ought to be distributed, were not yet incar- 
 nated in institutions, and hence the advantages resulting 
 from the increase of man's power became an instrument 
 for his additional misery. 
 
 " The capabilities of happiness were increased and applied to the 
 augmentation of misery. Modern society is thus a machine de- 
 signed for useful purposes, whose force is by a system of subtle 
 mechanism augmented to the highest power, but which, instead of 
 grinding corn or raising water, acts against itself, and is perpetually 
 wearing away the wheels of which it is composed. The result of 
 
 * " The French," writes Shelley elsewhere in this MS., " were what 
 their literature ia (excluding Montesquieu and Rousseau) weak, super- 
 ficial, vain, with little imagination, and with passions as well as judg- 
 ments cleaving to the external forms of things." It was, he says, their 
 institutions which made them what they are. 
 
54 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 the labours of the political philosophers has been the establishment 
 of the principle of Utility as the substance, and liberty and equality 
 as the forms, according to which the concerns of human life ought 
 to be administered. By this test the various institutions regulat- 
 ing political society have been tried, and, as the undigested growth 
 of the private passions, errors, and interests of barbarians and op- 
 pressors, have been condemned. And many new theories, more or 
 less perfect, but all superior to the mass of evil which they would 
 supplant, have been given to the world." 
 
 The first practical illustration of the new philosophy 
 is seen in the government of the United States. " Suf- 
 ficiently remote, it will be confessed, from the accuracy 
 of ideal excellence is that representative system which 
 will soon cover the extent of that vast continent. But 
 it is scarcely less remote from the insolent and con- 
 taminating tyrannies under which, with some limitations 
 of their terms as regards England, Europe groaned at 
 the period of the successful rebellion of America." * 
 More than anything else in the constitution of the 
 United States Shelley admired the provision made for 
 its modification, if needful or desirable, from time to 
 time. 
 
 " Lastly, it has an institution by which it is honourably distin- 
 guished from all other governments which ever existed. It consti- 
 tutionally acknowledges the progress of human improvement, and 
 is framed under the limitation of the probability of more simple 
 views of political science being rendered applicable to human life. 
 There is a law by which the constitution is reserved for revision 
 every ten years . Every other set of men who assumed the office 
 of legislating and framing institutions for future ages, with far less 
 right to such an assumption than the founders of the American 
 Republic, assumed to themselves the idea that their work was the 
 wisest and best that could possibly have been produced ; these 
 illustrious men looked upon the past history of man, saw that it 
 
 * The reader will remember the eloquent &,oge of American freedom 
 which closes the eleventh canto of " The Revolt of Islam. 
 
Shelley's " Philosophical View of Reform" 55 
 
 was the history of his mistakes, and his sufferings arising from his 
 mistakes ; they observed the superiority of their own work to all 
 the works which had preceded it, and then judged it probable that 
 other political institutions would be discovered bearing the same 
 relation to those they had established which they bear to those 
 which have preceded them. They provided therefore for the ap- 
 plication of these contingent discoveries to the social state, without 
 the violence and misery attendant upon such change in less inodest 
 and more imperfect governments." 
 
 The freedom, happiness, and strength of the people of 
 the United States are due not merely to their situation, 
 but to their government. Give them a king, an aristo- 
 cracy, a priesthood bribed with a tenth part of the pro- 
 duce of the soil, a multitude of drones enjoying the fruits 
 of the workers, a Court of Chancery to assume to itself 
 the most sacred rights of a citizen, a standing army to 
 cut down the people if they murmur : " If any American 
 should see these words his blood would run cold at the 
 imagination of such a change. He well knows that the 
 prosperity and happiness of the United States would, if 
 subjected to such institutions, be no more." In one 
 matter, however, America must look to itself; two con- 
 ditions are necessary to a perfect government : first, 
 " that the wUl of the people should be represented as it 
 is ; " secondly, " that that will should be as wise and 
 just as possible." Only the former of these is possessed 
 by " the most perfect of practical governments, the 
 Republic of the United States." And yet " in a certain 
 extent the mere representation of the public will produces 
 in itself a wholesome condition of it, and in this extent 
 America fulfils imperfectly and indirectly the last and 
 most important condition of perfect government." 
 
 My space does not permit me to follow Shelley 
 
5 6 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 through his survey of contemporary France (undergoing 
 a reaction after the great revolution, yet in essentials a 
 regenerated nation)j Germany (preparing for some stu- 
 pendous change), Spain, South America, India,* Persia, 
 Turkey, Asia Minor, the negro races. From the condi- 
 tion of each he draws some augury of hope, and then 
 returns from this wide-orbing flight to his own land. 
 The long introduction to his essay closes with that well- 
 known and remarkable passage which was afterwards 
 transferred from this essay to form the closing pages of 
 " A Defence of Poetry," where Shelley recognises in the 
 outburst of English poetry in the present century " the 
 herald, companion or follower of the awakening of a 
 great people," and in all great poets " the hierophants of 
 an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of the gigantic 
 shadows which futurity casts upon the present . . . the 
 unacknowledged legislators of the world." Across the 
 page he has written in bold characters the words : " In 
 this sense religion may be called poetry, though dis- 
 torted from the beautiful simplicity of its truth. Cole- 
 ridge has said that every poet was religious ; the 
 converse, that every religious man must be a poet was 
 
 a more true " t 
 
 Here Shelley pauses to draw in outline the design of 
 what should follow. The plan of the work was to in- 
 clude chapters treating of: 1, the sentiment of the 
 necessity of change ; 2, its causes and its object ; 3, 
 
 * India, Shelley holds, will be benefited by the Christian mission- 
 aries ; but it must in the end attain a freedom of its own. The 
 Persians he describes as a refined and impassioned people. 
 
 t Shelley said the same to Medwin. "Conversations with Byron," 
 ii. 32. (Ed. 1832.) 
 
Shelley's " Philosophical View of Reform. " 57 
 
 practicability and necessity of change ; 4, state of parties 
 as regards it ; 5, probable, possible, and desirable mode 
 in which it should be effected. 
 
 All the privileged classes are, as a matter of course, 
 the enemies of reform. They profess a terror of 
 anarchy, a terror certainly not disinterested, and as 
 certainly exaggerated. "These persons propose the 
 dilemma of submitting to a despotism which is perpetu- 
 ally gathering like an avalanche year by year, or taking 
 the risk of something which, it must be confessed, wears 
 the aspect of revolution. To this alternative we are 
 reduced by the selfishness of those who taunt us with it. 
 And the history of the world teaches us not to hesitate 
 an instant in the decision, if indeed the power of de- 
 cision be not already past." 
 
 Having traced briefly the history of parliamentary 
 representation since the Long Parliament, noticing in 
 particular the vast growth in the number of unrepre- 
 sented citizens as compared with those who possess the 
 franchise and the increased influence of the aristocracy 
 on elections, Shelley passes on to speak of " the device 
 of public credit," and spurious money transactions effected 
 by paper. 
 
 " Of this nature are all such transactions of companies and banks 
 as consist in the circulation of promissory notes to a greater extent 
 than the actual property possessed by those whose names they bear. 
 They have the eflfect of augmenting the price of provisions, and of 
 benefiting at the expense of the community the speculators in this 
 trafiic. One of the vaunted effects of this system is to increase the 
 national industry— that is, to increase the labours of the poor, and 
 those luxuries which they supply the rich ; to make a manufac- 
 turer [i.e. as we now say, an operative or artisan] work sixteen 
 hours where he only worked eight ; to turn children into lifeless 
 
58 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 and bloodless machines at an age when otherwise they would be at 
 play before the cottage doors of their parents ; to augment inde- 
 finitely the proportion of those who enjoy the profit of the labour 
 of others as compared with those who exercise this labour." * 
 
 Hence has arisen a new aristocracy, having its basis 
 in fraud as the old aristocracy had its basis in force, t 
 The object of all enlightened legislation and administra- 
 tion is to enclose within the narrowest practicable limits 
 the class of drones. The effect of the financial impos- 
 tures of the modern rulers of England has been to 
 increase the number of drones. In addition to the 
 aristocracy of great landowners and merchants, who 
 possess " a certain generosity and refinement of manners 
 and opinions which, although neither philosophy nor 
 virtue, has been that acknowledged substitute for them, 
 which at least is a religion, which makes respected those 
 venerable names," there has come into existence an 
 aristocracy of "attorneys, excisemen, directors, govern- 
 ment pensioners, usurers, stock-jobbers, with their de- 
 pendants and descendants." 
 
 " These are a set of pelting wretches, in whose employment there 
 is nothing to exercise, even to their distortion, the more majestic 
 forces of the soul. Though at the bottom it is all trick, there is 
 something frank and magnificent in the chivalrous disdain of infamy 
 of a gentleman. There is something to which — until you see 
 through the base falsehood upon which all inequality is founded — 
 it is difficult for the imagination to refuse its respect in the faithful 
 and direct dealings of the substantial merchant. But in the habits 
 and lives of this new aristocracy, created out of an increase in public 
 calamities, whose existence must be terminated with their termina- 
 
 * Shelley advises his readers to study Cobbett'a ' ' Paper Against 
 Gold." 
 
 + In his translation of Goethe's "May-Day Night" scene from 
 Faust Shelley adds a note to the name of the speaker entitled " Par- 
 vtnu " — " A sort of fandholdsr." 
 
Shelley's ''Philosophical View of Reform r 59 
 
 tion, there is nothing to qualify our disapprobation. They eat and 
 drink and sleep, and in the intervals of these actions they cringe 
 and lie." 
 
 It is these who, by requiring mediocrity in books, 
 poison literature ; their hopes and fears are of the 
 narrowest description ; their domestic affections are 
 feeble, and beyond the domestic affections they have 
 none. 
 
 Meanwhile the toil and misery of the poor increase. 
 For fourteen hours' labour they receive the price of seven. 
 " They eat less bread, wear worse clothes, are more 
 ignorant, immoral, miserable, and desperate." If they 
 believe that the same immutable God rules the next 
 world who also rules this, what must their outlook be ! 
 " The gleams of hope which speak of Paradise seem, like 
 the flames of Milton's Hell, only to make darkness 
 visible, and all things take their colour from what sur- 
 rounds them." 
 
 The choice for England is between reform, or insur- 
 rection, or a military despotism. What, then, is the 
 reform that we desire ? 
 
 " A writer [Malthus] . . . has stated that the evils of the poor 
 arise from an excess of population, and that after they have been 
 stript naked by the tax-gatherer and reduced to bread and tea and 
 fourteen hours of hard labour by their masters, after the frost has 
 bitten their defenceless limbs, and the damp driven disease into 
 their bones, and the suppressed revenge of hunger stamped the 
 ferocity of want like the mark of Cain upon their countenance, the 
 last tie by which Nature holds them to benignant earth, whose 
 plenty is garnered up in the strongholds of their tyrants, is to be 
 divided; that the single alleviation of their sufferings and their 
 scorns, the one thing which made it impossible to degrade them 
 below the beasts, which amid all their crimes and miseries yet 
 separated a cynical and unmanly contamination, an anti-social 
 
6o Transcripts and Shidies. 
 
 cruelty from all the soothing and elevating and harmonizing gentle- 
 ness of the sexual intercourse, and the humanizing charities of 
 domestic life, which are its appendages — ^that this is to be 
 obliterated." 
 
 The reform according to Malthus is not the reform 
 desired by Shelley. What, then, is that reform ? Before 
 aspiring after theoretical perfection in the State, we must 
 possess, he says, the advantages of which nations are at 
 present susceptible. To abolish the national debt ; to 
 disband the standing army ; to abolish tithes, due regard 
 being had to vested interests ; to grant complete freedom 
 to thought and its expression ; to render justice cheap, 
 speedy, and secure — these measures, Shelley believed, 
 would together constitute a reform which we might 
 accept as sufficient for a time. Filled as he was with 
 boundless hopes for the future, these demands for the 
 present seemed to him reasonable and moderate. 
 
 " The payment of the principal of what is called the 
 National Debt, which it is pretended is so difficult a 
 problem, is only difficult to those who do not see who 
 nre the creditors, and who the debtors, and who the 
 wretched sufferers from whom they both wring the taxes." 
 In truth the nation is not the debtor ; the debt was 
 contracted not by the nation towards a portion of it, but 
 by the whole mass of the privileged classes towards one 
 particular portion of those classes. It is this which is 
 the cause of our misery — the unjust distribution, surrep- 
 titiously made under the form of the National Debt, of 
 the products of the labour of England. 
 
 " The National Debt was chiefly contracted in two liberticide 
 wars undertaken by the privileged classes of the country ; the first 
 for the purpose of tyrannizing over one portion of their subjects ; 
 
Shelley's " Philosophical View of Reform" 6i 
 
 the second in order to extinguish the resolute spirit of attaining 
 their rights in another. The labour which this money represents, 
 and that which is represented by the money wrung for purposes of 
 the same detestable character out of the people since the commence- 
 ment of the American War, would, if properly employed, have 
 covered our land with monuments of architecture exceeding the 
 sumptuousness and the beauty of Egypt and Athens : it might 
 have made every peasant's cottage a little paradise of comfort, 
 with every convenience desirable in \word undeciphnred], — neat 
 tables and chairs, and good beds, and a collection of useful books ; 
 and our fleet, manned by sailors well-paid and well-clothed, might 
 have kept watch round this glorious island against the less en- 
 lightened nations which assuredly would have envied its prosperity. 
 But the labour which is expressed by these sums has been diverted 
 from these purposes of human happiness to the promotion of slavery, 
 or the attempt at dominion ; and a great portion of the sum in 
 question is debt and must be paid." 
 
 The payment of the interest falls chiefly on those 
 who had no hand in the creation of the debt, and 
 ■who are sufferers from the transactions in which 
 the money was spent ; and this tax is wrung from 
 them in order to maintain in luxury and indolence 
 the public debtors. It is commonly said that the 
 National Debts were contracted by all classes of the 
 nation for defence against a common danger, and for 
 the vindication of the rights and liberties of pos- 
 terity, and therefore that posterity should bear the 
 burden of payment. This reasoning is most falla- 
 cious ; the debts were largely contracted to carry 
 on wars of revenge, of jealousy, and of ambition. 
 The whole property of the nation is mortgaged for the 
 so-called National Debt ; to use the language of the 
 law, let the mortgage foreclose. One of the first acts 
 of a reformed Government would undoubtedly be an 
 effectual scheme for compelling the debtors and credi- 
 
62 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 tors, that is, the privileged classes as a whole, and a 
 certain portion of those classes, to compromise the debt 
 between themselves. Tribunals woidd be appointed to 
 consider and decide upon the claims of every fundholder* 
 There are two descriptions of property, the holders of 
 which are entitled to two very different measures of for- 
 bearance and regard. 
 
 " Labour, industry, economy, skill, genius, or any similar powers 
 honourably and innocently exerted, are the foundations of one 
 description of property. All true political institutions ought to 
 defend every man in the exercise of his discretion with respect to 
 property so acquired. . . . But there is another species of property 
 which has its foundation in usurpation, or imposture, or violence ; 
 without which, by the nature of things, immense aggregations of 
 property could never have been accumulated. Of this nature is the 
 principal part of the property enjoyed by the aristocracy and by the 
 great fundholders, the majority of whose ancestors never either 
 deserved it by their skill and talents or created it by their personal 
 labour." 
 
 Claims to property of this latter kind should be com- 
 promised ixnder the supervision of public tribunals. If 
 Shelley advocates confiscation, it is just to remember 
 that he did not write as one of the greedy have-TiQts, but 
 as heir to a large aggregation of wealth, which he was 
 prepared to forfeit. 
 
 Such, then, would be the action of a reformed Parlia- 
 ment with reference to the National Debt. But what 
 is meant by a reform of Parliament ? Doubtless, from 
 an abstract point of view, universal sufferage is desirable 
 and right ; but abstractedly other and greater changes 
 are also right- — the abolition of monarchy and aristo- 
 cracy, the levelling of inordinate wealth, and an agrarian 
 
 * I am not quite certain that I understand aright Shelley's proposal. 
 
Shelley's " Philosophical View of Reform." 63 
 
 distribution of the uncultivated districts of the country. 
 Universal suffrage would assuredly lead to these measures, 
 but in doing so it would assuredly lead to civil war, and 
 this, beside its other attendant evils, would confirm the 
 nation in its military habits, with which true liberty is 
 incompatible. Any sudden attempt to establish universal 
 suffrage would result in an immature attempt to estab- 
 lish a Republic ; and if this should fail, the last state of 
 the nation might be worse than the first. Now, there- 
 fore, in 1819-20, as three years earlier when Shelley 
 wrote at Marlow his pamphlet on Reform, he advocates 
 a gradual reform of the representative system. He 
 would have the House of Lords remain for the present 
 as it is to represent the aristocracy. The House of 
 Commons should represent, in fact and not merely in 
 name, the people. The entire empire might be divided 
 into five hundred districts, each returning one member 
 of Parliament. In each district there would be a popu- 
 lation of 40,000, or, allowing two-thirds for women and 
 children, 13,300 men. A small property qualification, 
 proved by the payment of a certain sum in direct taxes, 
 should distinguish the electors. 
 
 " Mr Bentham and other writers have urged the admission of 
 females to the right of suffrage. This attempt seems somewhat 
 immature. Should my opinion be the result of despondency, the 
 writer of these pages would be the last to withhold his vote from 
 any system which might tend to an equal and full development of 
 the capacities of all living beings." 
 
 As to the vote by ballot, the method appeared to 
 
 Shelley to be too Tnechanical. 
 
 " The elector and the elected ought to meet face to face and 
 interchange the meanings of actual presence, share some common 
 
64 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 impulses, and in a degree understand each other. There ought to 
 be a common sympathy . . . among the electors themselves. The 
 imagination would thus be strongly excited, and a mass of generous 
 and enlarged and popular sentiments be awakened which would 
 give the vitality of [sentenoe unfinished.] That republican boldness 
 of censuring and judging one another, which has been exerted in 
 England under the name of 'public opinion,' though perverted 
 from its true uses into an instrument of prejudice and calumny, 
 would then be applied to its genuine purposes. Year by year the 
 people would become more susceptible of assuming forms of govern- 
 ment more simple and beneficent." 
 
 The central principle upon which all reform should 
 be based is that of the natural equality of men, jxot as 
 regards property, but as regards rights. The equality 
 taught by Christ is moral rather than political, and it is 
 only as regards abstract principles, not their practical 
 application, that morals and politics can be regarded as 
 parts of the same science. Equality in possessions must 
 be " the last result of the utmost refinements of civilisa- 
 tion." It is a goal on which from far off we may gaze. 
 " We derive tranquillity, and courage, and grandeur of 
 soul from contemplating an object which is, because we 
 will it, and may be, because we hope and desire it, and 
 must be, if succeeding generations of the enlightened 
 sincerely and earnestly seek it.'' From such outlook 
 upon a great and remote object we draw inspiration ; 
 then " it becomes us with patience and resolution to 
 apply ourselves to accommodating theories to immediate 
 practice." 
 
 Whether the reform, Avhicli is now inevitable, be 
 gradual and moderate or violent and extreme, depends 
 largely on the action of the Government. If the 
 Government compel the nation to take the task of 
 
Shelley's ''Philosophical View ofHeform." 65 
 
 reformation iuto its own hands, the abolition of monarchy 
 and aristocracy must infallibly follow. "No friend of 
 mankind and of his country can desire that such a crisis 
 should arrive." 
 
 " If reform shall be begun by the existing government, let us be 
 contented with a limited beginning, with any whatsoever opening. 
 Let the rotten boroughs be disfranchised, and their rights trans- 
 ferred to the unrepresented cities and districts of the nation. It 
 is no matter how slow, gradual, and cautious be the change. 
 We shall demand more and more with firmness and moderation, 
 never anticipating but never deferring the moment of successful 
 opposition, so that the people may become capable of exercising the 
 sfunctions of sovereignty in proportion as they acquire the posses 
 -ion of it. If reform could begin from within the Houses of Par- 
 liament as constituted at present, it appears to me that what is 
 called moderate reform, that is, a suffrage whose qualification 
 should be the possession of a certain small property, and triennial 
 Parliaments, would be principles, a system in which for the sake of 
 obtaining without bloodshed or confusion ulterior improvements of 
 a more important character, all reformers ought to acquiesce. Not 
 that such are first principles, or that they would produce a system 
 of perfect social institution, or one approaching it. But nothing is 
 more idle than to reject a limited benefit because we cannot with- 
 out great sacrifices obtain an unlimited one. We might thus reject 
 a Eepublic, if it were attainable, on the plea that the imagination 
 of man can conceive of something more absolutely perfect. To- 
 wards whatsoever we regard as perfect, undoubtedly, it is no less 
 our duty than it is our nature to press forward ; this is the gener- 
 ous enthusiasm which accomplishes, not indeed the consummation 
 after which it aspires, but one which approaches it in a degree far 
 nearer than if the whole powers had not been developed by 
 delusion which is not a delusion. It is in politics rather than in 
 religion that faith is meritorious." 
 
 If the Houses of Parliament obstinately and perpetu- 
 ally refuse to concede any reform to the people, Shelley- 
 gives his vote for universal suffrage and equal represen- 
 tation. "But it is asked. How shall this be accom- 
 plished in defiance of, and in opposition to, the consti- 
 
 £ 
 
66 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 tuted authorities of the nation ; they who possess, 
 whether with or without its consent, the command of a 
 standing army and of a legion of spies and police officers, 
 and all the strings of that complicated mechanism with 
 which the hopes and fears of men are moved like 
 puppets ? " This question Shelley meets, and answers 
 by another : " Will you endure to pay the half of your 
 earnings to maintain in luxury and idleness the con- 
 federation of your tyrants as the reward of a successful 
 conspiracy to defraud and oppress you ? Will you make 
 your tame cowardice, and the branding record of it the 
 everlasting inheritance of your degraded posterity ? Not 
 only this, but will you render by your torpid endurance 
 this condition of things as permanent as the system of 
 castes in India, by which the same horrible injustice is 
 perpetrated under another form ? Assuredly no Eng- 
 lishman by whom these propositions are understood will 
 answer in the affirmative, and the opposite side of the 
 alternative remains." 
 
 When in any nation the majority arrive at a convic- 
 tion that it is their d\ity and their interest to divest the 
 minority of a power employed to their disadvantage, and 
 the minority are sufficiently mistaken as to believe that 
 their superiority is tenable, a struggle must ensue : — 
 
 " If the majority are enlightened, united, impelled by a uniform 
 enthusiasm, and animateii by a distinct and powerful apprehension, 
 of their object and full confidence in their undoubted power, the 
 struggle is merely nominal. The minority perceive the approaches 
 of the development of an irresistible force, by the influence of the 
 public opinion of their weakness on those political forms, of which 
 no government, but an absolute despotism, is devoid. They divest 
 themselves of their usurped distinctions, and the public tranquillity 
 is not disturbed by the revolution. 
 
Shelley" s " Philosophical View of Reform." 67 
 
 " But these conditions may only be imperfectly fulfilled by the 
 state of a people jrrossly oppressed and impatient to cast off the 
 load. Their enthusiasm may have been subdued by the killing 
 weight of toil and suffering ; they may be panic-stricken and dis- 
 united by the oppressors and the demagogues; the influence of 
 fraud may have been sufficient to weaken the union of classes which 
 compose them by suggesting jealousies ; and the position of the 
 conspirators, though it is to be forced by repeated assaults, may be 
 tenable until that the siege can be vigorously urged." 
 
 Under such circumstances as these, what is the duty 
 of a patriotic citizen ? 
 
 " The true patriot will endeavour to enlighten and to unite the 
 nation, and animate it with enthu.siasm and confidence. For this 
 purpose he will be indefatigable in promulgating political truth. 
 He will endeavour to rally round one standard the divided friends 
 of liberty, and make them forget the subordinate objects with re- 
 gard to which they differ by appealing to that respecting which 
 they are all agreed. He will promote such open confederations 
 among men of principle and spirit as may tend to make their in- 
 tention and their efforts converge to a common centre. He will 
 discourage all secret associations which have a tendency, by mak- 
 ing the nation's will develop itself in a partial and premature 
 manner, to cause tumult and confusion. He will urge the necessity 
 of exciting the people frequently to exercise the right of assemb- 
 ling in such limited numbers as that all present may be actual 
 parties to the measures of the day. Lastly, if circumstances had 
 collected a considerable number, as at Manchester on the memor- 
 able 16lh of August ; if the tyrants send their troops to tire upon 
 them or cut them down unless they disperse, he will exhort them 
 peaceably to defy the danger, and to expect without resistance the 
 onset of the cavalry, and wait with folded arms the event of the 
 • fire of the artillery, and receive with unshrinking bosoms the 
 bayonets of charging battalions. Men are every day persuaded to 
 incur greater perils for a manifest advantage. And this not be- 
 cause active resistance is not justifiable, but because in this instance 
 temperance and courage produce greater advantages than the most 
 decisive victory." 
 
 Shelley's expectation was that the soldiery, if calmly 
 and courageously met, would refuse to fire upon the 
 
68 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 people, and might fraternise with them. "The soldiers 
 are men and Englishmen, and it is not to be believed 
 that they would massacre an unresisting multitude of 
 their countrymen drawn up in unarmed array before 
 them, and bearing in their looks a calm and deliberate 
 resolution to perish rather than abandon the assertion of 
 their rights. In the confusion of flight the soldier 
 becomes confused, and he massacres those who fly from 
 him by the instinct of his trade. In the struggle of 
 conflict and resistance he is irritated by a sense of his 
 own danger ; he is flattered by an apprehension of his 
 own magnanimity in incurring it." But if he should 
 observe neither resistance nor flight he would suddenly 
 be reduced to doubt and indecision. " Thus far his 
 ideas were governed by the same law as those of a dog 
 who chased a flock of sheep to the corner of a field, 
 and keeps aloof when they make the firm parade of re- 
 sistance. But the soldier is a man and an Englishman. 
 This unexpected reception would probably throw him 
 back upon a recollection of the measure of which he was 
 made the instrument, and the enemy might be converted 
 into the ally." 
 
 Shelley continues to set forth the duties of the 
 patriot under circumstances of difficulty and danger. 
 
 " The patriot will be foremost to publish the boldest truths in 
 the most fearless manner, yet without the slightest tincture of 
 personal malignity. He would encourage all others to the same 
 efforts and assist them to the utmost of his power with the resources 
 both of his intellect and fortune. He would call upon them to de- 
 spise imprisonment and persecution, and lose no opportunity of 
 bringing the public opinion and the power of the tyrants into cir- 
 cumstances of perpetual contest and opposition." 
 
Shelley's "Philosophical View of Reform" 69 
 
 All, however, might be ineffectual to produce so uni- 
 form an impulse of the national will as to preclude a 
 further struggle. A considerable mass of the people 
 seem to have fallen into an abject and hopeless apathy, 
 from which it is impossible .to rouse them. " It is in 
 vain to exhort us to wait until all men shall desire free- 
 dom whose real interest will consist in its establishment. 
 It is in vain to hope to enlighten them whilst their 
 tyi'ants employ the utmost artifices of all their compli- 
 cated engines to perpetuate the infection of every species 
 of fanaticism from generation to generation. . . . Infinite 
 and inestimable calamities belong to oppression, but the 
 most fatal of them all is that mine of unexploded mis- 
 chief it has practised* beneath the foundations of 
 society, and with which it threatens to involve the ruin 
 of the whole building together with its own. But delay 
 merely renders those mischiefs more tremendous, not the 
 less inevitable. The savage brutality of the populace is 
 proportioned to the arbitrary character of the Govern- 
 ment ; and tumults and insurrections soon, as in Con- 
 stantinople, become consistent with the permanence of 
 the causing evil, of which they might have been the 
 critical determination.'' 
 
 It is to be borne in mind that the action on the part 
 of the popular leaders which Shelley advocates, supposes 
 as its condition an obstinate and ever-repeated refusal 
 on the part of a parliament, representing but a narrow 
 constituency, to grant any measure, however moderate, 
 of reform. 
 
 * An unusual use of the verb practise, meaning, perhaps, like the 
 French pratiquer in an architectural sense, to "contrive." 
 
7© Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 "The public opinion in England ought first to be excited to 
 action, and the durability of those forms within which the oppressors 
 entrench themselves, brought perpetually to the test of its opera- 
 tion. To that purpose government ought to be defied, in cases of 
 questionable result, to prosecute for political libel. All questions 
 relating to the jurisdiction of magistrates, and courts of law, 
 respecting which any doubt could be raised, ought to be agitated 
 with indefatigable pertinacity. Some two or three of the popular 
 leaders have shown the best spirit in this respect,* only they want 
 system and co-operation. The tax-gatherer ought to be compelled 
 in every practicable instance to distrain ; whilst the right to 
 impose taxes, as was the case in the beginning of the resistance to 
 the tyranny of Charles I., [should be] formally contested by an 
 overwhelming multitude of defendants before the courts of common 
 law." 
 
 So the subtlety of lawyers should be confounded by 
 the subtlety of the law. " The nation would thus be 
 excited to develop itself, and to declare whether it 
 acquiesced in the existing forms of Government. The 
 manner in which all questions of this nature might be 
 decided, would develop the occasions and afford a prog- 
 nostic as to the success of more decisive measures. 
 Simultaneously with this active and vigilant spirit of 
 opposition, means ought to be taken of solemnly convey- 
 ing the sense of large bodies and various denominations 
 of the people in a manner the most explicit to the exist- 
 ing depositories of power. The system of petitioning, 
 but couched in the actual language of the petitioners 
 and emanating from distinct assemblies, ought to load 
 the tables of the House of Commons." Further, men of 
 letters, artists, men of science ought to remonstrate, and 
 their memorials and petitions might show the degrees 
 of conviction they entertain of the inevitable connection 
 
 * Probably Shelley thought of the editors of TKt Examiner, John 
 and Leigh Hunt. 
 
Shelley's "Philosophical View of Reformr 71 
 
 between freedom and the cultivation of the imagination, 
 the cultivation of scientific truth, and the development of 
 morals and metaphysical inquiry. " Suppose these me- 
 morials to be severally written by Godwin, and Hazlitt, 
 and Bentham,* and Hunt, they would be worthy of the age 
 and of the cause, and like the meridian sun, would 
 strike all but the eagles who dared to gaze upOn its 
 beams with blindness and confusion. These appeals of 
 solemn and emphatic argument from those who have 
 already a predestined existence among posterity would 
 appal the enemies of mankind by their echoes from 
 every corner of the world in which the majestic litera- 
 ture of England is cultivated. It would be like a voice 
 from beyond the dead of those who will live in the 
 memories of men when they must be forgotten ; it would 
 be eternity warning time." 
 
 At this stage of the progress of reform it is probable 
 that the strength of the national will would be felt, and 
 would be acknowledged by the reluctant concession of 
 some limited portion of their rights to the people. " In 
 this case the people ought to be exhorted by everything 
 dear to them to pause, until by the exercise of those 
 rights which they have regained, they become fitted to 
 demand more." It is better that we should gain what 
 we demand by a process of negotiation which would 
 occupy twenty years than that we should do anything 
 which might tend towards civil war. If, however, our 
 rulers are hopelessly perverse and blind, if they " consider 
 the chance of personal ruin and the infamy of figuring 
 
 * Lord Byron was first written, then was cancelled, and Bentham 
 written in its place. 
 
y.t ' Ti'anscripts and Studies. . ■ 
 
 on the page of history as the promoters of civil war 
 preferable to resigning any portion, how small soever, of 
 their usurped authority, we are to recollect that we 
 possess a right beyond remonstrance. It has been ac- 
 knowledged by the most approved writers on the English 
 Constitution that we possess a right of resistance. The 
 claim of the reigning family is founded upon a memor- 
 able execution of this solemnly recorded right. The last 
 resort of resistance is undoubtedly insurrection. The 
 right of insurrection is derived from the employment of 
 armed force to counteract the will of the nation. Let 
 the Government disband the standing army, and the 
 purpose of resistance would be sufficiently fulfilled by 
 the incessant agitation of the points of dispute before 
 the courts of common law, and by an unwarlike display 
 of the irresistible number and union of the people." 
 
 Before entering on a consideration of the measures 
 which might terminate in civil war, Shelley briefly con- 
 siders the nature and the consequences of war. There 
 is a secret sympathy between destruction and power, 
 between monarchy and war, and the history of all re- 
 corded time teaches us with what success they have 
 played into each other's hands. 
 
 " War is a kind of superstition ; the parade of arms and badges 
 corrupts the imagination of men. How far more appropWate would 
 be the symbols of an inconsolable grief, muffled drums, and melan- 
 choly music, and arms reversed, the livery of sorrow. "When men 
 mourn at funerals, for what do they mourn in comparison with the 
 calamities which they hasten with all circumstance of festivity to 
 suifer and to inflict 1 Visit in imagination the scene of a field of 
 battle or a city taken by assault. Collect we into one group the 
 groans and the distortions of the innumerable dying, the inconsol- 
 able grief and horror of their sorrowing friends, the hellish exulta- 
 
Shelley^ s " Philosophical View of Reform^ 'j^ 
 
 tion and unnatural drunkenness of destruction of the conquerors, 
 the burning of the harvests, and the obliteration of the traces of 
 cultivation. To this in civil war is to be added the sudden disrup- 
 tion of the bonds of social life, and ' father against son.' If there 
 had never been war there could never have been tyranny in the 
 world. Tyrants take advantage of the mechanical organization of 
 armies to establish and defend their encroachments. It is thus 
 that the mighty advantages of the French Revolution have been 
 almost compensated by a succession of tyrants ; for demagogues, 
 oligarchies, usurpers, and legitimate kings are merely varieties of 
 the same class from Eobespierre to Louis XVIII.'' 
 
 But the greatest evil resulting from war is that it 
 creates a sentiment in favour of brute force, and dimin- 
 ishes our faith in moral influences. 
 
 " War waged from whatever motive extinguishes the sentiment 
 of reason and justice in the mind. The motive is forgotten or only 
 adverted to in a mechanical and habitual manner. A sentiment of 
 confidence in brute force and in a contempt of death and danger is 
 considered as the highest virtue, when in truth, however indis- 
 pensable to [virtue], they are merely the means and the instru- 
 ments highly capable of being perverted to destroy the cause they 
 were assumed to promote. It is a foppery the most intolerable to 
 an amiable and philosophical mind. It is like what some reasoners 
 have observed of religious faith — no fallacious and indirect motive 
 to action can subsist in the mind without weakening the efi'ect of 
 those which are genuine and true. The person who thinks it 
 virtuous to believe, will think a less degree of virtue attaches to 
 good actions than if he had considered it indifferent. The person 
 who has been accustomed to subdue men by force will be less in- 
 clined to the trouble of convincing or persuading them." 
 
 These considerations may make the true friend of 
 mankind pause before he recommends measures tending 
 towards the grievous calamity of war. " I imagine, 
 however," adds Shelley, " that before the English nation 
 shall arrive at that point of moral and political degrada- 
 tion now occupied by the Chinese, it will be necessary 
 to appeal to an exertion of physical strength." 
 
74 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 Here we have almost reached the end of the manu- 
 script. A hiank space of two leaves is left, and in 
 the sentences of the last fragment Shelley contemplates 
 the future victory of the people and the duties which 
 accompany that victory. 
 
 " When the people shall have obtained by whatever means the 
 victory over their oppressors, and when persona appointed by them 
 shall have taken their seats in the Representative assembly of the 
 nation, and assumed the control of public affairs according to con- 
 stitutional rules, then will remain the great task of accommodating 
 all that can be preserved of ancient forms with the improvements 
 of the knowledge of a more enlightened age in legislation, juris- 
 prudence, government, and religious and academical institutions. 
 The settlement of the National Debt is, on the principles before 
 elucidated, merely an affair of form, and however necessary and 
 important, is an affair of mere arithmetical proportions readily de- 
 termined ; nor can I see how those who, being deprived of their 
 unjust advantages, will probably inwardly murmur, can oppose one 
 word of open expostulation to a measure of such irrefragable 
 justice. There is one thing, which vulgar agitators endeavour to 
 flatter the most uneducated part of the people by assiduously pro- 
 posing, which they ought not to do nor to require — and that is 
 Retribution. 
 
 " Men having been injured desire, to injure in return. This is 
 falsely called an universal law of human nature ; it is a law from 
 which many are exempt, and all in proportion to their virtue and 
 cultivation. The savage is more revengeful than the civilised man, 
 the ignorant and uneducated than the person of a refined and cul- 
 tivated intellect, the generous and " 
 
 With which unfinished sentence the " Philosophical 
 View of Reform " ends. It could close with no more 
 sacred thought or word than that of reconciliation — 
 " word over all, beautiful as the sky." 
 
LAST WORDS ON SHELLEY. 
 
 Some critics of my " Life of Shelley," the reviewers, if I 
 remember rightly, in The, Times, the Athenceum, and 
 the Quarterly B^view, noticed with some surprise or 
 regret the fact that I nowhere attempted to give a 
 general view or estimate — a " synthesis " as one of them 
 called it — of Shelley's character, and genius, and work 
 in literature. My reserve in this respect was of course 
 not the result of accident ; I felt, and still feel, that 
 such deliberate reserve was right and wise. The writer 
 of a short study may legitimately present a view in which 
 generalisation has done its full work ; he may reduce 
 what is complex to a simple conception, and arrange a 
 mass of various details under some dominant idea. But 
 such ought not to be the procedure of a biographer, 
 certainly not of a biographer whose aim is to paint a 
 portrait, following at however great a distance these 
 masters who have painted portraits in the great style. 
 His synthesis must be implicit, and if it be present 
 everywhere in a vital way, he will do well to leave it so, 
 and allow others, if they please, to make it exp^l-icit. 
 His general conception guides and governs his work 
 from first to last, but at each moment he seems wholly 
 occupied with the endeavour to set down faithfully the 
 colours and the lines which he sees while his eyes are 
 fixed upon some part of the object before him. It is 
 
76 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 his desire to show a living creature and not an abstrac- 
 tion of the intellect; to display the opal with all its 
 mingling hues, its luminous shadows, and cloudy bright- 
 nesses ; to paint the pigeon's neck and all its shifting 
 dyes, changeful with every stir of life. For the inter- 
 pretation of human character an anecdote may be more 
 valuable than a theory. Dead facts on the one hand 
 and abstract ideas on the other are the Scylla and 
 Charybdis of the biographer; between them lies his 
 difficult way, in the flow of reality and living truth. 
 
 I had, to be sure, my own notion of Shelley, but 
 whether it be philosophical enough to deserve the name 
 of a synthesis I cannot say ; it certainly had its origin 
 in no partial survey or incomplete analysis of the facts. 
 I thought of Shelley — so we all think of him — as a man 
 of extraordinary sensitiveness and susceptibility, suscep- 
 tibility above all to ideal impressions ; and I further 
 thought of him as instinctively craving something to 
 balance his own excessive sensitiveness, something to 
 control his mobility of feeling, something to steady his 
 advance and give him poise. A law he needed, but a 
 law which should steady his advance, not one which 
 should trammel it or hold him in motionless equili- 
 brium. Coming at a time when the ideas of the 
 Revolution were in the air, he found what served him 
 as a law in those ideas, as declared by their most 
 eminent English spokesman, William Godwin. A 
 lyrical nature attempting to steady its advance by the 
 revolutionary abstractions — such was Shelley. And his 
 work in literature represents on the one hand his own 
 mobile temperament, his extraordinary sensitiveness and 
 
Last Words on Shelley. 77 
 
 marvellous imagination, and on the other hand the 
 zeit-geist, the spirit of 1789, as formulated by Godwin 
 in a code of morals, rigid, passionless, and doctrinaire, 
 yet containing a hidden fire, and glowing inwardly with 
 ardent anticipations. The volumes of " Political Justice " 
 were thus for Shelley at once a law and a gospel. 
 
 By his temperament and constitution Shelley was 
 little disposed to acquiesce in traditional and conven- 
 tional ways of thought, presented to him, as these were 
 in his own household, in a fashion which lacked real 
 charm and inspiration. There lay in his instinctive 
 feelings enough that was peculiar or singular to draw his 
 understanding sideways from the paths of use and wont. 
 What attracts the average boy did not attract Shelley ; 
 and when his feelings were driven into opposition, it was 
 natural and indeed inevitable, that his intellect should 
 go hand in hand with his feelings to interpret and justify 
 them. Persecuted by the swarm of young marauders at 
 Eton, he was driven in upon himself. Loosened from 
 the moorings of traditional belief, if he ever had such 
 moorings, he was prepared to accept a new gospel, and 
 precisely at this moment Godwin's remarkable book fell 
 into his hands. Many of us probably could tell, each 
 from his own experience, how some one author or some 
 one book, coming to us at a fortunate moment in youth, 
 has been a key to unlock for us the mysteries of exist- 
 ence ; how it has been to us the revelation sole and 
 single of wisdom ; how it has fed our highest feelings 
 and shaped our desires and our resolves. Some of us 
 have found in Wordsworth such a master, some perhaps 
 in Carlyle, or Goethe, or Browning, or Newmam, or George 
 
78 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 Eliot, or Emerson, or Comte ; and even when the hours 
 of single-hearted devotion have passed and we come 
 under other influences and wander hither and thither, 
 we yet cherish a peculiar gratitude, a loyalty, a piety 
 towards him who was the inspirer and master of our 
 youth. Such a master and inspirer Shelley found in the 
 author of " Political Justice." 
 
 Wherein lay the extraordinary attraction of Godwin's 
 philosophy for Shelley ? No two men could be less like 
 each other than the sensitive, enthu,siastic disciple, and 
 the elderly philosopher who had schooled his temperate 
 feelings, as far as might be, into a monotony of calm. 
 How was it that Godwin came to wield a tyrannous 
 power over Shelley's understanding ? The answer is 
 that Godwin's philosophy brought to Shelley something 
 which his imagination demanded, and something which 
 was needful to his character. Godwin with his abstract 
 principles made a clean sweep of tradition and all the 
 accumulated treasures and all the accumulated lumber 
 of the past ; these same principles, viewed as the ] 
 foundation of a new human society, authorised boundless 
 hopes for the future. It suited Shelley's imagination to I 
 have an open space, a vast clearing wherein to erect its! 
 visionary splendours, a vacant heaven wherein to build' 
 the palaces of cloudland. But besides this, the fact] 
 that Shelley experienced all the troubles of an eager, 
 never-satisfied heart, predisposed him to accept as a 
 counterpoise to his own disturbing passions a philosophy 
 so strict in its ideal of duty, so free from the riot of 
 temperament and the consequent relapse into depression, 
 as was the doctrinaire system of Godwin. Nothing is 
 
Last Words on Shelley. 79 
 
 expressed more frequently or more forcibly in Shelley's 
 poetry than his ecstacy in the approach and his anguish 
 in the passing of delight. The flux and vicissitude of 
 emotion is the ever-recurring subject of his song. We 
 are as clouds " that speed and gleam and quiver " across 
 the midnight moon, and soon night closes round and 
 they are lost. We are as lyres — 
 
 " Whose dissonant strings 
 Give various response to each varying blast, 
 To -whose frail frame no second motion brings 
 One mood or modulation like the last." 
 
 In the " Hymn to Intellectual Beauty " it is the 
 thought of the sudden apparition and then the sudden 
 withdrawal of the ideal light which gladdens and sad- 
 dens the poet's heart. Now Godwin's philosophy, while 
 on the one hand it was a chariot from which Shelley's 
 wild-eyed hopes could lean forward to drink the wind 
 of their own speed, was on the other hand an intellec- 
 tual counterpoise to his excitable temperament. It 
 seemed to give fixity, or at least the calm of a sublime 
 law, to the flux of circumstance and the tumult of pas- 
 sions. It was a doctrine of the reason, a code of duty, 
 and at the same time an evangel of hope. What more 
 or what better could Shelley desire than a creed which, 
 while it gave larger scope and range to the emotions, 
 brought them under a glorious law, and delivered them 
 from the pain and passion of all merely egoistic or 
 personal feeling ? 
 
 And Shelley did in truth find something to steady 
 him in Godwin's philosophy ; it became a kind of pole- 
 siar, lending a guidance to his erratic course. To it 
 
8o Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 and to his ideals he continued in essentials true through 
 all the years of his life, if inconstant in not a few of his 
 affections and admirations. This was not wholly ill for 
 Shelley. But how much better it were if instead of 
 throwing himself for support and sustenance on a system 
 of abstract doctrines, he had thrown himself upon the 
 facts of life an(i tried to get into, close and fruitful rela- 
 tion with reality. Such a rigid, doctrinaire^ system of 
 thought as that of Godwin tends as much as 'anything 
 can to seclude one from the direct and' faithful 
 teaching of experience. And how dull and clumsy a 
 teacher is the closet philosopher when compared with 
 that infinitely quick and subtle doctor, life ! Throw 
 yourself upon life, and you are touched by truth on 
 every side and in the finest ways. View life through 
 the loopholes of a philosophic fortress, and you get at 
 best certain gross and obvious lessons of wisdom. 
 These abstractions have a rigidity about them which 
 will not allow them to work cunningly into character. 
 How fortunate it is when an emotional and imagin- 
 ative nature can steady itself by the slow discipline of 
 reality rather than by the clumsy support of certain 
 abstractions, half of which perhaps are rotten props ! 
 This wiser way was Shakspere's and was not Shelley's. 
 But through his quick sympathies and through a few 
 trumpet-tongued utterances of life the truths of human 
 Jk*- J existence did in fact reach Shelley ; in spite of Godwin's 
 ^Ol^*^!!*. theories, which hedged him in, the pain and the joy of 
 t^ 1 events and of living relations with men and women 
 touched him and b y degrees matured his mind. 
 
 Mr Leslie Stephen has traced some of the effects pro- 
 
Last Words on Shelley. 8i 
 
 duced by Godwin's philosophy on Shelley's imaginative 
 creations. The fact of Godwin's influence was noticed 
 long since. In an early review of Shelley's poetry 
 which has hitherto escaped notice, one published during 
 his lifetime in an obscure and short-lived journal,* the 
 fact is commented on with considerable ability, and 
 from a hostile point of view. 
 
 " It does not strike us as a task by any means difficult to colour 
 the cold speculations of Godwin with the language of poetry, 
 though we think such subjects would be avoided by a poetical 
 mind. That a state of society may be imagined in which men 
 will be ' kingless, and tribeless, and nationless,' we admit, and even 
 feel that the conception has an imposing and sublime appearance, 
 in the same way that the idea of utter desolation is sublime ; but 
 we must remember that these notions are put forward by Mr 
 Shelley with avowed admiration of the consequences he expects to 
 result from their being applied to the test of experience. Now we 
 must continue to believe that such views are likely to lessen the 
 exercise of the domestic charities ; that when no adequate object 
 is offered to the affections, they will, being left without support, 
 droop and die in the heart. We believe that man's duty here is 
 something different from comparing phantoms with phantoms ; 
 and that whatever his talents, or whatever his professed object 
 may be, no man is justified in giving to the world wild and crude 
 notions, the first effect of which, if reduced to practice, would be 
 the overthrow of all existing institutions and the substitution of a 
 waste and howling wilderness — the revolutionary Eden, of which 
 the uncontrolled passions of men are to be protecting angels.'' 
 
 The objections to Shelley's poetical interpretation of 
 Godwin's doctrines could hardly be better expressed in 
 few words by a determined adversary. Mr Leslie 
 Stephen has drawn out the indictment at length. But 
 I am not aware that any one has shown, though it has 
 been often referred to, how powerfully Godwin's book, 
 
 * "Critical Remarks on Shelly's (m.c) Poetry," in the Dnhlin 
 Magazine,, vol. ii. (July — December, 1820) p. 393. 
 
82 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 " Political Justice," influenced Shelley's life and conduct. 
 No one can understand aright either Shelley's poetry or 
 his life who has not formed some acquaintance with the 
 master's teaching so faithfully translated by the disciple 
 into action and into song. 
 
 The words " political justice " express a great ten- 
 dency, and in some respects an admirable tendency of 
 the Revolution and revolutionary thinkers. It means 
 that politics, and in general the dealings of men with 
 one another, should be regulated not by a shallow ex- 
 pediency but by the deeper expediency of justice ; it 
 means that politics and the social order should be 
 moralised. But what is morality ? With Godwin it is 
 simply the application of reason to life. We bring with 
 us into the world, according to Godwin, no rule of right, 
 no innate ideas, no tendencies to good or evil. If we 
 learn the truth we shall certainly do the right ; we can- 
 not but yield to the force of the stronger argument. 
 If ever we do evil, it is because our knowledge is im- 
 perfect or because there is a fallacy in our logic. Mor- 
 ality in a high sense is possible for him alone who has 
 a wide perception of truth and a fully enlightened 
 understanding. And in proportion to a man's enlighten- 
 ment he must of necessity be virtuous, because he comes 
 under the influence of motives which leave him no 
 choice but to act aright. Error and ignorance are the 
 sources of all vice ; vice, indeed, is but a form of error, 
 and virtue is merely knowledge transformed into act. 
 The first dxity, therefore, of one who is himself a virtuous 
 being and desires to make other men good must be to 
 wage war by argument against ignorance, prejudice, and 
 
Last Words on Shelley. 83 
 
 error, and to spread by all fair means a knowledge of the 
 truth. 
 
 Imagine such ideas as these coming into contact with 
 the mind of a boy of fervid temper, and possessed of 
 considerable argumentative ability. They would forth- 
 with transform him into an intellectual combatant, a 
 militant young apostle. He must instantly address 
 himself to attack the prejudices and ignorances of his 
 fellows and to gain converts for the truth. If the vic- 
 tim of prejudice happen to be some fair being of an- 
 other sex than his own, the task of dissipating her cloud 
 of error may be at once an act of virtue and an exqui- 
 site delight. But even the head of a collegiate house 
 or a bishop on the bench, though deeply benighted in 
 ignorance, is not unworthy of enlightenment, and the 
 mistaken man must at last yield to the stress of trium- 
 phant logic. When Shelley became a propagandist of 
 ideas at Eton, when he entered into what he styled a 
 " polemical correspondence'' with Felicia Browne, or 
 Harriet Grove, or Harriet Westbrook, or Elizabeth 
 Kitchener, when he assailed this or that clerical stranger 
 with sceptical argument, when he distributed the Oxford 
 pamphlet which led to his expulsion from University 
 College, he was only acting out, according to his lights, 
 the first principles of " Political Justice." 
 
 Many are the errors and prejudices of mankind, but, 
 according to Godwin, the two giant impostures which 
 have demoralised the human race are religion and govern- 
 ment. " Error is principally indebted for its perman- 
 ence to social institution." Political government is 
 " that brute engine which has been the only perennial 
 
84 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 cause of the vices of mankind." " We cannot hesitate 
 to conclude universally that law is an institution of the 
 most pernicious tendency." Religion is " in all its parts 
 an accommodation to the prejudices and weaknesses of 
 mankind," and therefore it exists by its sufferance of 
 vice. We are forbidden by true philosophy to indulge 
 "wrath or indignation against any hiiman creature, for 
 all act necessarily, and no one can be other than he is ; 
 but if it were permitted us to be enraged, we might 
 indeed feel a boundless rage against kings and priests. 
 In general the idea of authority, whether temporal or 
 spiritual, was abhorrent to Godwin ; virtue is the recog- 
 nition of reason in all our thoughts, words, and deeds, 
 and if we substitute authority for reason we lapse from 
 virtue and expose ourselves to every possibility of 
 wrong-doing. To war against authority as such is there- 
 fore a duty of the virtuous man. 
 
 It is only surprising that Shelley, inspired by such 
 ideas, boy as he was and full of impetuosity, did not 
 dash himself more violently against the rule and order 
 of society. The conviction, derived also from Godwin, 
 that the advance of men towards perfection is a long 
 and a slow process, came to temper his extravagance of 
 hope and desire. Perhaps at the present day we are 
 likely to do some injustice to Shelley viewed as the 
 militant champion of ideas. We have been so much 
 occupied with the natural history of human beliefs, we 
 have come to accept so fully the doctrine that every 
 creed and every form of society corresponds with some 
 general condition of the human mind, and is a natural 
 product, as we say, of the organism and its environment, 
 
Last Words on Shelley. 85 
 
 that we find absolute truth nowhere, and nowhere ab- 
 solute falsehood. And so we recognise each form of 
 belief as natural in its time and place, and find it al- 
 most impossible to make a relentless, unqualified attack 
 on any widespread faith. But such was not the revolu- 
 tionary point of view. Shelley, with Godwin for his 
 guide, viewed all beliefs from the dogmatic standpoint 
 of the reason. In " Political Justice" he had found truth 
 absolute ; the popular beliefs were superstitions more or 
 less gross, but all untrue ; and since truth and know-' 
 ledge are the sources of virtue, and ignorance and error 
 are of the nature of vice, the young champion was urged 
 forward by his highest thoughts and purest feelings to 
 do battle against the darkness that lay around. 
 
 The philosophical system of Godwin, while it cuts at 
 the roots of all natural piety, could have no attraction 
 for one who was low-thoughted or a mere lover of self. 
 Its seductive power lay in the fact that it set up a 
 standard of duty far loftier and far stricter than that 
 recognised by the average man, while at the same time 
 it sapped the instinctive religion of the heart. Self was 
 to become nothing ; reason with each of us was to be all 
 in all. But not only was self to become nothing, filial 
 piety, personal reverence, the bonds of friendship, the 
 vows of love, gratitude to a benefactor, were to be trans- 
 cended as unworthy of the votary of reason — or rather 
 they were to be opposed, crushed, set at nought, for 
 friendship, filial piety, regard to pledges and promises, 
 gratitude, are of the nature of vice. What magic, 
 Godwin asks, is there in the word I ? My benefactor ! 
 It was my benefactor's duty to serve me, or it was not. If 
 
86 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 it was his duty, I am under no obligation to him ; but 
 if it was not his duty, I am compelled by reason to 
 condemn his conduct. My father and my mother ! 
 Why should the accident that a man and woman brought 
 me into the world, possibly through no high sense of 
 duty, nor in compliance with the dictates of reason, why 
 should this constitute a peculiar claim on my obedience 
 or affection ? As a son 1 have indeed special oppor- 
 tunities of being useful to them, and it may be right to 
 use those opportunities ; but if my reason informs me 
 that my services are more useful to the species when 
 bestowed elsewhere, those services are in no sense due 
 to my parents. Shelley viewing his father — the dull, 
 pompous, country squire — from the standpoint of reason, 
 could not place him high in the ranks of human beings. 
 Why venerate one who, ^egaxd^'impartially, was the 
 reverse of venerable? As to the gratitude supposed to 
 be due to a father, gratitude, according to the law of 
 reason, is a vice. " I will try the force of truth on that 
 mistaken man," wrote Shelley, with a magnanimous 
 sense of superiority to a father who was not a votary of 
 reason. And having on one occasion tried its force, he 
 found that his father's arguments were " equine" — those 
 of a headstrong horse. Why venerate an old horse ? 
 It is to the credit of Shelley's nature that in spite of the 
 teaching of " Political Justice " his letters to his father 
 were in general respectful, courteous, and conciliating. 
 
 Shelley's seeming tolerance of vice has surprised and 
 shocked some persons who gladly do honour to his 
 genius. Not many weeks after his marriage his closest 
 friend made an attempt to mislead the child-wife. 
 
Last Words on Shelley. 87 
 
 Harriet, during her husband's absence. A breach of 
 friendship naturally ensued. But a few months pass ; 
 the parted comrades meet in London ; Shelley with no 
 difSculty restores the wrongdoer to his regard and rein- 
 troduces him to Harriet. Again, late in life Shelley was 
 informed by Byron of certain monstrous accusations 
 brought against him. The charge of cruelty shocked 
 him and called forth an outbreak of indignation ; but he 
 speaks, and that in a letter to his wife, of infidelity to 
 the marriage bond as though it were no crime but at 
 worst an " error." In these instances Shelley merely 
 acted and spoke as a faithful disciple of the master who 
 had taught him, as he says, all of virtue and of know- 
 ledge. For what is vice ? It is, according to Godwin, 
 no more than an intellectual error, a mistaken calculation 
 of consequences. To feel indignant with one who 
 commits a crime is in the highest degree unreasonable. 
 The criminal acted according to the preponderance of 
 motives at the moment of the deed, and he could not 
 have acted otherwise. " The assassin cannot help the 
 murder he commits any more than the dagger." * Had 
 the motives been presented to him aright he must needs 
 have acted virtuously. Godwin admits that for the sake 
 of convenience he has not adopted throughout his treatise 
 the language of the doctrine of necessity ; but Shelley 
 was more consistent. If the wrongdoer towards Harriet 
 at York should have escaped from the "prejudice" 
 which misled him, Shelley could gladly take him to his 
 heart again. And it was strictly in accordance with the 
 teaching of " Political Justice " that he should speak of 
 * "Political Justice," book vii., chap. 1. 
 
88 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 conjugal infidelity and the alleged seduction of an inti- 
 mate friend as an " error," error being the Godwinian 
 term for what we unphilosophical speakers name vice 
 and crime. 
 
 That his natural sense of what is right should be 
 sapped by a philosophy so crude as that of Godwin may 
 seem to indicate that there was something wrong with 
 Shelley's heart or his intellect. But in truth the 
 doctrine was specious in its sophistry ; it gained the 
 enthusiastic devotion of Wordsworth and Coleridge for a 
 time in their earlier days ; it represented all the high 
 hopes and pure enthusiasm of the dawn of the French 
 Eevolution. New truths and new and noble ardours 
 were allied with the revolutionary errors. Shelley's best 
 and purest feelings connected themselves with the teach- 
 ing of Godwin. It is easy to understand how a youth 
 of high moral 'and social aim might come to believe in 
 the evil days of the Regency that the special need of 
 England was to oppose the existing order of things and 
 to sustain the better and purer spirit of the great move- 
 ment inaugurated in France. Shelley was not himself 
 in any distinguished degree an original thinker. He 
 accepted with the enthusiasm of a poet doctrines which 
 seemed to him to contain the hope and promise of the 
 future of the human race ; he animated those doctrines 
 with the emotional ardour of his own spirit, and gave 
 them form and colour by the creative power of his 
 imagination. 
 
 And here I would say a few words on the subject 
 of Shelley's separation from his first wife, which most 
 persons regard, and regard justly, as a central point in 
 
Last Words on Shelley. 89 
 
 his life, and one which must go far to determine our 
 estimate of his character. Some of the critics of my 
 " Life of Shelley " seem to consider that I did not pro- 
 nounce a moral judgment on this passage of Shelley's 
 story with sufficient firmness. But a biographer's first 
 duty is to trace the history of a human being as far as 
 possible from within : to follow the involved windings of 
 the stream of life, to go with it through the difficult 
 rapids, and to do this, if possible, with skilled courage. 
 While he must never confound moral distinctions or 
 practise the sophistry of refining away the plain differ- 
 ence between right and wrong, the biographer will do 
 wisely to avoid the didactic attitude ; he will do wisely 
 to practise some reserve in pronouncing such moral judg- 
 ments as are pronounced from a pulpit or a platform. 
 The living moral law must be present in the truth of his 
 story ; it must be part of the natural history, part of the 
 physiology of his book ; and if it be this no more 
 is needed. We know too little of the facts of the 
 six months which ended with the final rupture between 
 Shelley and his wife to warrant much moral hard hitting. 
 I could not indulge in hard hitting, because a sense of 
 right and justice restrained me, and because I felt that 
 only a part of the case was known to me. But what is 
 undoubtedly a portion of the truth would have lived 
 more actively in my story if I had shown more fully 
 and clearly how Godwin's teaching in " Political Justice" 
 had prepared a way for the catastrophe. 
 
 " Delicacy forbids me to say more," Shelley wrote at 
 a later time and on a solemn occasion, " than that we 
 were disunited by incurable dissensions." Dissensions 
 
90 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 between husband and wife unhappily are not of such rare 
 occurrence that we can look on them as very extraordin- 
 ary in the case of Shelley and Harriet. But in general, 
 
 ■ although relations may be strained, there is a binding 
 and restraining force in duty or religion or regard for 
 
 I the opinion of society, or in mature age, which prevents 
 the resort to extreme measures, and things settle down 
 into a kind of discomfortable calm, or perhaps an armed 
 neutrality. The centrifugal forces are there, but the 
 centripetal forces are in some degree more powerful and 
 .overcome them. 
 
 Now what centripetal forces existed in the case of 
 Shelley ? Encouraged by the volume which had taught 
 him all of virtue, he had trained himself to set the 
 opinion of society at defiance. The binding force 
 of religion was, of course, entirely lacking. The 
 restraining influence of mature age in his case did 
 not exist. A certain sense of duty he had indeed, for 
 he was not altogether a doctrinaire philosopher, and he 
 could not but feel the rending of those ties which bind 
 together a husband and wife who have lived in mutual 
 affection during two years. And we know that he 
 pleaded piteously, almost despairingly, with Harriet for 
 a restoration of her love. But the centripetal forces 
 were weak in comparison with the centrifugal, and 
 when Shelley found his own heart drawn a different 
 way, and persuaded himself that his wife had transferred 
 her affections from himself to another, what influence 
 remained to hold husband and wife together 1 The 
 marriage vow was less than a rope of sand or twist of 
 straw. A promise or vow, according to Godwin, is 
 
Last Words on Shelley. 91 
 
 of the nature of vice, because it binds our future 
 conduct by an artificial rule, whereas our conduct 
 at every moment of our lives ought to be governed 
 by reason, and by reason alone. It is positively vicious 
 — so Shelley learnt from " Political Justice " — for hus- 
 band and wife to remain united after the union has 
 ceased to contribute to their common happiness. 
 
 "It is absurd," Godwin wrote, "to expect that the inclinations 
 and wishes of two human beings should coincide through any long 
 period of time. To oblige them to act and to live together is to 
 subject them to some inevitable portion of thwarting, bickering, 
 and unhappiness. . . . The supposition that I must have a com- 
 panion for life is the result of a complicatioa of vices. It is the 
 dictate of cowardice, and not of fortitude. . . . The habit is for a 
 thoughtless and romantic youth of each sex to come together, to 
 see each other for a few times and under circumstances full of de- 
 lusion, and then to vow to each other eternal attachment. What is 
 the consequence of this ? In almost every instance they iind them- 
 selves deceived. . . . The institution of marriage is a system of 
 fraud, and men who carefully mislead their judgments in the daily 
 affair of their life must always have a crippled judgment in every 
 other concern. . . . Marriage is law, and the worst of laws. . . . 
 So long as two human beings are forbidden to follow the dictates 
 of their own mind, prejudice is alive and vigorous. So long as I 
 seek to engross one woman to myself, and to prohibit my neighbour 
 from proving his superior desert and reaping the fruits of it, I am 
 guilty of the most odious of monopolies." 
 
 In the future millennium as imagined by Godwin, men 
 upon this earth will be immortal, for mind will have 
 gained a complete conquest over matter, and the race of 
 immortals will cease to propagate the species ; but long 
 before that golden age a state far happier than the pre- 
 sent will have been attained, when at each moment free 
 man or free woman may at pleasure elect his or her own 
 partner ; when the father of each individual child will be^ 
 
92 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 unknown, and surnames will have been abolished. Can 
 we wonder that the youth Shelley, who had drunk with 
 eagerness these Godwinian tidings of great joy, should 
 think scorn of the old plain law honoured in the homes 
 of England ? 
 
 Yet Godwin's influence on Shelley was by no means 
 wholly for evil, and Shelley's life and work, which ex- 
 hibit all the errors of the revolutionary epoch, exhibit 
 also the better spirit of the time. " Beautiful and 
 ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous 
 wings in vain" — so he is described by Mr Matthew 
 Arnold. " The real is the true world for a great 
 poet, but it was not Shelley's world ". — so the late 
 Professor of Poetry at Oxford, Principal Shairp, pro- 
 nounced judgment. " Oast Shelley at once aside 
 as shallow and verbose," says Mr Ruskin. These 
 are names of high authority, but we may pause a 
 moment before accepting the utterances as true. For 
 my own part I feel that some of the visions which 
 Shelley's poetry conjures up as I read it, are but phan- 
 toms, showing thin and ghostlike indeed when I turn 
 from them to the men and women of Shakspere's plays 
 or Scott's novels. In one of his most beautiful sonnets, 
 Wordsworth tells how on the evening of a day memorable 
 to him — the day of his marriage — he and his bride 
 beheld in the scenery of the clouds a wonderful pageant ; 
 Indian citadel, Grecian temple, minster and bell-tower, 
 islands and groves and seas visibly exprest in the western 
 heavens. But, says Wordsworth, we felt the while we 
 should forget them : 
 
 " They are of the sky, 
 And from our earthly memory fade a'W^.^J' 
 
Last Words on Shelley. 93 
 
 So I sometimes feel when gazing at the cloud-like 
 splendours of Shelley's verse ; the splendours will die 
 down into grey ashes of sunset, and I shall be unable to 
 keep the memory of them alive within me. 
 
 " They are of the sky, 
 And from my earthly memory fade away." 
 
 But two reflections offer themselves to me. The 
 first is that now and again in a hard-working day, one 
 glance into the upper heavens at dawn, or noon, or sun- 
 set, has been the most solidly precious moment of the 
 day, has been the elixir vitce of the four-and-twenty 
 hours, and even though it may be wholly forgotten, it 
 has sent a pulse of exquisite sensation to mingle hence- 
 forth unconsciously with all that I do and all that I am. 
 And, secondly, I reflect that the radiant clouds expressed 
 the powers of the sun and of the winds which come to 
 me all day and every day, and are a portion of my life. 
 Idealist as he was, Shelley lived in some important 
 respects in closer and more fruitful relation with the 
 real world than did his great contemporary, Scott. 
 Because he lived with ideas, he apprehended with some- 
 thing like prophetic insight those great forces which 
 have been altering the face of the world during this 
 nineteenth century, and which we sum up under the 
 names of democracy and science ; and he apprehended 
 them not from the merely material point of view, but 
 from that of a spiritual being, uniting in his vision with 
 democracy and science a third element not easy to name 
 or to define, an element of spirituality which has been 
 most potent in the higher thought and feeling of our 
 time. Many strange phantasies had Shelley, but nq 
 
94 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 phantasy quite so remote from reality as that of building 
 himself a mock feudal castle, or of living in a world half 
 made up of the modern pseudo-antique. Many strange 
 phantasies he had, but none so strange as phantasies of 
 later date ; none so strange as that of reviving the faith 
 of the twelfth century in English brains to-day ; none 
 so feebly wild as that of drawing a curtain of worn-out 
 shreds to hide the risen sun of science. As regards 
 science, it is obvious enough that Shelley possessed in 
 no degree the scientific intellect. He was far from being 
 able to contribute to science such anticipations of imagi- 
 native genius as those which make the name of Goethe 
 illustrious in botany and comparative anatomy. But 
 Shelley expressed a poet's faith in science and a poet's 
 hopes. Wordsworth, incomparably a greater thinker 
 than Shelley, expressed a poet's fears — fears by no 
 means wholly unjustified — that the pursuit of analytic 
 investigation in things material might dull the eye for 
 what is vital and spiritual in nature and in man. 
 Wordsworth recognised a part of the fact, but Shelley's 
 feelings attached themselves to the more important side 
 of truth in this matter. " Beautiful and ineffectual 
 angel beating in the void his luminous wings in vain." 
 No, not in the void, but amid the prime forces of the 
 modern world ; and this ineffectual angel was one of the 
 heralds of the dawn — dawn portentous, it may be, but 
 assuredly real. I recognise in Shelley all the illusions 
 and sophisms of the revolutionary epoch. I recoo-nise 
 the vagueness of much of his humanitarian rhetoric. 
 But humanitarian rhetoric sometimes may be practical 
 beneficence in a nebulous state ; let it condense and 
 
Last Words on Shelley. 95 
 
 solidify, and the luminous mist becomes an orb of love — 
 the stout heart of one who would serve the needy and 
 the downcast of our race. If love, justice, hope, free- 
 dom, fraternity, be real, then so is the wiser part of the 
 inspiration of Shelley's radiant song. 
 
 If, then, Shelley -^did not hover ineffectually in the 
 void, may we not attempt to define his historical position 
 in our literature ? Perhaps it is not rash to assert that 
 when this century of ours is viewed from a point in the 
 distant future, it will be seen that among many great 
 facts of the century the largest and most important are 
 those expressed by the words democracy and science. 
 And what, if we should sum it up in one word, is the 
 leading idea given by democracy to literature? In 
 mediseval times the heroes on whom imagination fixed 
 its gaze were two, the chivalric knight and the ascetic 
 saint — great and admirable figures. With us the hero 
 is, if you please, no hero at all, but simply the average 
 man. For him we think and toil ; our most earnest 
 hopes and wishes are for him. Or, since after all we 
 want a hero, let us say, instead of " ths average man," 
 the race, or humanity. And now what, expressed in a 
 single word, is the ruling idea of science ? What word 
 can we choose except the great and venerable word, law ? 
 Here, then, are two eminent words of our century — the 
 race, or humanity, given to us by democracy ; law, given 
 to us by science. Let us connect the two, and we obtain 
 the expression " humanity subject to -law " — that is, we 
 have the conception of human progress or evolution. 
 Hence this phrase " progress of humanity," however it 
 may have been spoilt for dainty lips by cheap and vulgar 
 
96 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 trumpeting, and however we may recognise the fact that 
 for a day or a year, or a group of years, the world's 
 advance may halt on palsied feet — this word, this idea, 
 this faith has had for our age something like the force 
 of a religion. And as the inspiring faith of our century 
 has been this faith in the progress or evolution of man, 
 so its heresy has been the heresy of pessimism ; and in 
 literature, side by side with the stronger poetry of hope, 
 there has been a feebler poetry of despair. 
 
 In the earlier years of our century the democratic 
 movement concerned itself too exclusively with the indi- 
 vidual and his rights, and regarded too little his duties, 
 affections, and privileges as a member of society. It is 
 greatly to the advantage of Shelley's work as a poet, and 
 greatly to his credit as a man, that he assigns to love, 
 that which links us to our fellows, some of the power 
 and authority which Godwin ascribes to reason alone.* 
 The French Revolution had been in a great measure a 
 destruction of the ancient order of society, and such 
 poetry as that of Byron, sympathising with the revolur 
 tion, is too reckless an assertion of individual freedom. 
 Shelley was deeply infected with the same errors. But 
 it is part of the glory of his poetry that in some degree 
 he anticipated the sentiment of this second half of our 
 century, when we desire more to construct or reconstruct 
 than to destroy. Shelley's ideas of a reconstruction of 
 society are indeed often vague or visionary ; but there is 
 always present in his poetry the sentiment or feelinc 
 
 * Godwin, however, it may be noted, desired to banish from philo- 
 sophy the phrase, "rights of man." Claims he would allow, but never 
 riyhts. 
 
Last Words on Shelley. 97 
 
 which tends to reconstruction, the feeling of love ; and 
 the word " fraternity " is for him at least as potent as 
 the word " liberty." In Byron we find an expression of 
 the revolution on its negative side ; in Shelley we find 
 this, but also an expression of the revolution on its 
 positive side. As the wave of revolution rolls onward, 
 driven forth from the vast volcanic upheaval in France, 
 and as it becomes a portion of the literary movement of 
 Great Britain, its dark and hissing crest may be the 
 poetry of Byron ; but over the tumultuous wave hangs 
 an iris of beauty and promise, and that foam-bow of 
 hope, flashing and failing, and ever reappearing as the 
 wave sweeps on, is the poetry of Shelley. 
 
 There is a kind of wisdom, and a very precious kind, 
 of which we find singularly little in Shelley's poetry. 
 The wisdom of common sense, which enables us to steer 
 our way amid the rocks and shoals of life ; the wisdom 
 of large benignant humour ; the wisdom of the ripened 
 fruits of experience ; the wisdom' of those axioms inter- 
 mediate between first principles and practical details — 
 those axiomata media which in science Bacon regards 
 as so important ; to utter such wisdom in verse was not 
 Shelley's province. But there is another wisdom which 
 the world sometimes counts as folly — that which consists 
 in devotion at all hazards to an ideal, to what stands 
 with us for highest truth, sacred justice, purest love. 
 And assuredly the tendency of Shelley's poetry, however 
 we may venerate ideals other than his, is to quicken the 
 sense thi,t there is such an exalted wisdom as this, and 
 to stimulate us to its pursuit. 
 
 Whether we speak of the poet as an inspirer of wis- 
 
 u 
 
9 8 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 dom, or as one who enlarges and purifies our feelings, or 
 as one who widens the scope of our imagination, we dare 
 not claim for him the title of a great poet unless he has 
 enriched human life and aided men in some way to be- 
 come better or less incomplete and fragmentary crea- 
 tures. If Shelley has done this, we may disregard such 
 words as those of Mr Euskin and Principal Shairp. Let 
 us ask then, " How has Shelley made life better for 
 each of us ? " bearing in mind, while we put the question, 
 that only a small part of the full and true answer can 
 find its way into a definite statement. At least we can 
 say this, he helps us to conceive more nobly of nature 
 and more nobly of man. We come through his poetry 
 to feel more vividly the quick influencings which pass 
 from the beauty and splendour and terror of the external 
 world into these spirits of ours. He helps us to lie 
 more open to the joy and sadness of the earth and skies. 
 Who has felt the breath of the autumnal west wind 
 without a sense of its large life and strength and purity, 
 made ampler and more vivid by what Shelley's great 
 ode has contributed to his imagination? Or who has 
 heard the song of the lark in mid-heaven, and not felt 
 how that atom of intense joy above us rebukes our dis- 
 trust of nature and of life and all our dull despondencies, 
 and feeling this has not remembered that Shelley once 
 helped to interpret for him the rapture of the bird % 
 And though no words of man ca.n make more glorious 
 the spectacle of the midnight heavens, who does not feel 
 in such stanzas as those which begin with the lines — 
 
 " Palaoe-roof of cloudless nights, 
 Paradise of golden lights 
 Deep, immeasurable, vast," 
 
Last Words on Shelley. 99 
 
 a clarion-cry rousing the imagination and inspiring it 
 with &,an for that advance which is needful before we 
 can apprehend the splendour and the awful beauty that 
 encircle us ? 
 
 So Shelley has helped us to feel the glory of external 
 nature, making life a better thing for each of us ; and 
 in like manner he quickens within us a sense of the pos- 
 sibilities of greatness and goodness hidden in man and 
 woman. Let us recognise to the full the philosophical 
 errors in the doctrine which lies behind the poetry of the 
 "Prometheus Unbound," the false conception of evil as 
 residing in external powers rather than in man's heart 
 and will, the false ideal of the human society of the 
 future ; and recognising these, let us acknowledge that 
 the poem has helped us to conceive more truly and more 
 nobly of the possibilities of man's life, its possibilities of 
 fortitude, endurance, pitying sympathy, heroic martyrdom, 
 aspiration, joy, freedom, love. No poet has more truly 
 conceived, or more vividly presented in words a sense of 
 the measureless importance of one human spirit to 
 another — of the master to the disciple, of the spiritual 
 leader to his followers, of man to woman and woman to 
 man. With a quickened sense of the infinite signifi- 
 cance of the relations possible with our fellows, our 
 entire feeling for life and for the virtues which hide in 
 it, more marvellous than the occult virtues of gems, is 
 purified and exalted. Especially has Shelley taught us 
 to recognise the blessedness — blessedness in joy or in 
 anguish — of the higher rule imposed on dedicated spirits, 
 who live for a cause or an idea, a charity or a hope, and 
 for its sake are willing to endure shame and reproach. 
 
lOO Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 and a death of martyrdom. But this higher rule, as 
 conceived bj' Shelley, is not one of voluntary self-morti- 
 fication or ignoble asceticism ; he does honour in verse 
 and prose to music, sculpture, painting, poetry, and 
 quickens our sense of the spiritual power of each. Yet 
 he never settles down to browse with Epicurean satis- 
 faction in any paddock of beauty or pleasure. We are 
 touched through his poetry with a certain divine discon- 
 tent, so that not music, nor sculpture, nor picture, nor 
 song, can wholly satisfy our spirits ; but in and through 
 these we reach after some higher beauty, some divine 
 goodness, which we may not attain, yet towards which 
 we must perpetually aspire. And who has heartened 
 us more than Shelley, amid all his errors, to love 
 freedom, to hope all things, to endure all things, and 
 even while the gloom gathers to have faith in the dawn 
 of light ? Who has done more to quicken and refine 
 our sympathy with suffering creatures ? to assure us that 
 among the despised and rejected things of the world 
 true goodness dwells, so that even the snake may be in 
 truth a defeated angel in disguise ? And who has more 
 powerfully impressed us with the conviction that revenge 
 and reprisals are bitter fruits of the spirit of wrath and 
 pride, and that evil can best be overcome by returning 
 good for evil \ From whom do we learn more effectively 
 the duty of loyalty to our convictions, and the duty, 
 imposed upon us at times, to fling out our highest belief 
 as a factor to do its work in the world ? And if Shelley 
 rouses within us the spirit that makes us nonconformist 
 (and I, for my part, have a deep reverence for reasonable 
 nonconformity), who has given us a more graceful 
 
Last Words on Shelley. loi 
 
 example than he, in his happier moments, of that rare 
 thing, a nonconformist who is not sour-faced but amiable 
 and gentle ? 
 
 But in many respects the truth seen by Shelley was 
 seen as broken lights in an imperfect vision. His ideals 
 were in part false ideals. He never quite escaped from 
 the individualism of Godwin's system of thought. When 
 we say, then, that Shelley possessed the wisdom of 
 devotion to the ideal, we must qualify the statement by 
 adding that his so-called ideal was in part no true ideal, 
 but the spurious ideal of a phantast. For what is the 
 good of using the splendid words "truth," "justice," 
 "charity," if the words are used to describe something 
 other than the realities they ought to stand for 1 These 
 exalted words are wrested in revolutionary times away 
 from their honest sense ; they are made a specious veil 
 behind which acts of injustice and cruelty are freely per- 
 petrated. I do not believe that Shelley could ever have 
 been guilty of such acts ; but it is the Girondin with his 
 fine phrases who prepares the way for the Jacobin with 
 his atrocious deeds. Shelley's notion, expressed in the 
 " Prometheus Unbound," that naked manhood, 
 
 " Equal, uuclassed, tribeless, and nationless," 
 
 will remain, when all has been Stripped off which 
 humanity has painfully acquired during , the ages, is the 
 pseudo-ideal of a Rousseau turned topsy-turvy, or rather 
 of a Rousseau who has turned right-about face, and who 
 sees the fantastic golden age of simplicity, innocence, and 
 freedom not in the past but in the future. 
 
 Here, however, I would insist on an important fact, 
 
I02 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 ■whicli has never received due attention from the students 
 of Shelley's writings, and which goes far towards estab- 
 lishing his sanity as a thinker, although it indicates a 
 weakness in his poetry. While in such poems as " The 
 Revolt of Islam " and " Prometheus Unbound," he has 
 imagined an ideal of the future state of society which 
 never can be realised and which we ought not to desire, 
 in his prose writings he often exhibits a justness of view 
 and a moderation which have hardly obtained the recog- 
 nition they deserve. The contrast between his dreams 
 and visions as a poet, and his very moderate expectations 
 as a practical reformer, is indeed remarkable. " Before 
 the restraints of government are lessened, it is fit that 
 we should lessen the necessity for them," so wrote 
 Shelley in his " Address to the Irish People," and boy 
 as he was, he showed himself by such words to be 
 wiser or honester than some grey-haired counsellors of 
 to-day. " With respect to Universal Suffrage," he 
 wrote, " I confess I consider its adoption in the present 
 unprepared state of public knowledge and feeling a 
 measure fraught with peril." And again, to Leigh 
 Hunt : " The great thing to do is to hold the balance 
 between popular impatience and tyrannical obstinacy. 
 ... I am one of those whom nothing will satisfy, 
 but who are ready to be partially satisfied in all 
 that is practicable." Examples of Shelley's moderation 
 in practical politics could be drawn from every period 
 of his life, evidencing that this was the habit of his 
 mind. His poetry is often vaporous and unreal, 
 although the man himself had a clear perception of 
 reality. Unfortunately the two sides of his mind — the 
 
Last Words on Shelley. 103 
 
 poetical and the practical — seldom worked together. 
 In his verse he set forth his ideals and his visions of 
 the remote future ; he reserved his prose for dealing 
 with what was practicable and near. It would have 
 been better for his poetry if he could have put his 
 whole mind into verse, as did Wordsworth. We could 
 readily excuse a prosaic paragraph for the sake of the 
 gain in wisdom and intellectual and moral breadth. 
 And in truth this would, in some degree, have saved his 
 poetry from what is most prosaic in the longer pieces, 
 that doctrinaire background of Godwinian abstractions 
 to which nothing will give reality or life. In one, and 
 only one, of Shelley's longer non-dramatic poems do the 
 two sides of his mind work harmoniously together, in 
 " The Mask of Anarchy." Although this poem may 
 not rank with his highest work, it enables us to under- 
 stand how greatly that work would have gained had it 
 been possible for the Shelley who saw visions to have 
 taken counsel with the Shelley who observed and medi- 
 tated on affairs. But, as he conceived, his ideals of a 
 remote future were not without a practical use for the 
 toilers of the day and hour. We work among petty 
 details in a larger, wiser spirit, and with more of hope 
 and valour and patience, if now and again we lift our 
 eyes and behold the land that is very far off. " We 
 derive tranquillity, and courage, and grandeur of soul," 
 he writes, " from contemplating an object which is 
 because we will it, and may be because we hope and 
 desire it, and must be if succeeding generations of the 
 enlightened, sincerely and earnestly seek it." 
 
 In what has been said I have had Shelley's larger 
 
1 04 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 works chiefly in view. In his later poetry the doctrin- 
 aire element almost passes out of sight. To his finest 
 lyrical poems, the offspring of his later years and 
 written in Italy, the description of Mr Mill, so untrue 
 of "The Revolt of Islam" or "Queen Mab," really 
 applies — they are pure renderings of states of feeling, 
 without any intellectual centres. And the feeling most 
 frequently and most vividly expressed is that of desire 
 in some one or other of its forms. He is, as Mr Hutton 
 has said in his fine study of Shelley's poetical mysticism, 
 " the hoTdo desiderioruTn ; always thirsty, always 
 yearning ; never pouring forth the strains of a thankful 
 satisfaction, but either the cravings of an expected 
 rapture or the agony of a severed nerve. . , . He 
 cannot be satisfied without a thrill of his whole soul. 
 He knows nothing of serene joy." Longing for the 
 unattained or the unattainable and regret for what is 
 passing away or lost — these feelings have rarely been 
 expressed in verse with such delicacy and such intensity 
 by any other poet. This has been admitted by all 
 intelligent readers, and has been said again and again 
 by the critics of Shelley. But it has not been sufficiently 
 felt or perceived that over against this flux of emotion, 
 and as if to counterpoise it, Shelley sets an ideal of faith 
 in ideas, fortitude in adversity, stoical self-sufficiency, 
 and mastery of the impulses of pain if not of pleasure. 
 From his own lyrical temperament, responding to every 
 incitement of feeling as an .^Eolian lyre responds to 
 every wave of air, he seeks a refuge in the thought 
 of heroic self-possession. Thus, in his early verses 
 " On Death " :— 
 
Last Words on Shelley. 105 
 
 " O man ! hold thee on in courage of soul 
 
 Through the stormy shades of thy worldly way ; 
 And the billows of cloud that around thee roll 
 Shall sleep in the light of a wondrous day." 
 
 And in the later sonnet on " Political Greatness " : — 
 
 " Man, who man would be, 
 Must rule the empire of himself ; in it 
 Must be supreme, establishing his throne 
 On vanquished will, quelling the anarchy 
 Of hopes and fears, being himself alone." 
 
 No one is more sensible to the thrill of joy or pain 
 than Shelley's Prometheus, who yet is unvanquishable 
 in his fortitude. When Laon, who has known all 
 exquisite raptures of love and joy, is hurried by a 
 raging multitude to the stake, he has even transcended 
 the need of resolution, for the light of faith and love 
 which shines upon a martyr illumines his heart and his 
 countenance : — 
 
 " His cheek 
 Resolve has not turned pale ; his eyes are mild 
 And calm, and, like the morn about to break, 
 Smile on mankind ; his heart seems reconciled 
 To all things and itself, like a reposing child." 
 
 And it is with tranquil self-possession (rendered more 
 lovely by one touch of poignant self-pity) that Beatrice 
 Cenci advances to her death : — 
 
 " Give yourself no unnecesi3ary pain. 
 My dear Lord Cardinal. Here, mother, tie 
 My girdle for me, and bind up this hair 
 In any simple knot ; ay, that does well. 
 And yours, I see, is coming down. How often 
 Have we done this for one another ; now 
 We shall not do it any more. My Lord, 
 We are quite ready. Well, 'tis very well." 
 
io6 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 Shelley's poetry, says Mr Hutton, is " the poetry of 
 desire." Yes, but here is something to go along with 
 desire and be its counterpoise. 
 
 Tt is, however, fortitude in the presence of pain, and 
 the constancy of a self-sufficing heroic soul in the midst 
 of vicissitude which Shelley honours rather than temper- 
 ance in the acceptance of delights. Of temperance we 
 find little in his verse. He is always pining for a joy 
 that is gone, or hungering for a rapture that is to come. 
 Only in the last fragment written by Shelley, the ad- 
 mirable " Triumph of Life," does he appear fully to 
 recognise the danger of yielding the heart intemperately 
 to even the purest passion. In that poem Rousseau 
 and Plato appear as victims of their own hearts : Rous- 
 seau, a ruin of manhood ; Plato, who had loved more 
 nobly, punished less cruelly, yet a captive to the tri- 
 umphal car ; both suffering the inevitable doom of those 
 who are intemperate in desire and delight. But Socrates, 
 who had known himself and tempered his heart to its 
 object, is no chained victim in that wild career of Life 
 the Triumpher. Thus, through desire Shelley was reach- 
 ing to a calmer and saner atmosphere as his life drew 
 towards a close. 
 
 And perhaps the influence of his lyrical poems upon 
 his readers may be to lift them towards a like calm of 
 mind attained through passion, or at least to purify 
 desire and delight from all grossness, and so to lighten 
 the task of self-control. Aristotle, in a famous passage, 
 speaks of the effect of tragedy in purifying through 
 terror and pity the like passions. In a similar manner 
 the lyrical poetry of delight and desire should purify 
 
Last Words on Shelley. 107 
 
 delight and desire. From the gross throng of conflict- 
 ing passions the finer are selected by the poet, are given 
 predominance, and are themselves raised to their highest 
 and fairest life. It is the imagination which elevates 
 the gross passion of grief and terror caused by death 
 into the lofty sorrow which is the most human as well 
 as the highest grief, with all of the brute purged away. 
 It is the imagination which elevates the passion of love 
 between man and woman into its nobler forms, where 
 the senses have been taken up into the spirit. So every 
 emotion of pleasure or of pain may be made rarer, finer, 
 more exquisite by the energy of the imagination, and 
 to effect this is one of the ^highest functions of lyrical 
 poetry. The poet feels more exquisitely than other 
 men, and receives more impulses and intimations from 
 the spiritual side of things. When he sings he not only 
 relieves his own heart, he not only widens our sympathy 
 with human emotion ; he chastens and purifies our feel- 
 ings, rendering them finer and more sane and permanent. 
 The lyrical poetry of Shelley plays thus upon our feel- 
 ings of delight — delight in external nature, delight in 
 human beauty, delight in art, delight in the beauty of 
 character and action ; it plays with its refining influence 
 still more often upon our feeling^ of desire and of re- 
 gret. There is a rapture at once calm and impassioned 
 which is admirably expressed in Wordsworth's earlier 
 poetry, a rapture of which Shelley knew little. He 
 does not train us to sober certainties of waking bliss as 
 does Wordsworth. He is in endless pursuit of unattain- 
 able ideals, ever at the heels of the flying perfect. Al- 
 though the man is poor indeed who has not something 
 
1 o8 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 of Wordsworth's art of sinking profoundly into the joy 
 and peace of things, and drinking a portion of their 
 strength and repose, I am not sure that the fittest atti- 
 tude of a human creature in this our mortal life is not 
 Shelley's attitude — the attitude of aspiration and desire. 
 Joy is not a thing for us to rest in ; joy should rather 
 open into higher joy, light should pass into purer light ; 
 from any height or deep at which we may arrive we 
 should still cry, " altitude ?" to the height or deep 
 beyond. To intensify and to purify desire is, perhaps, 
 no less important for us than to deepen and purify satis- 
 faction. And no one can live for a time in the lyrical 
 poetry of Shelley without an exaltation and purification 
 of desire. 
 
 " I can conceive Shelley if he had lived to the pre- 
 sent time," wrote Peacock, " passing his days like Volney, 
 looking on the world from his windows without taking 
 part in its turmoils ; and perhaps like the same or some 
 other great apostle of liberty (for I cannot at this mo- 
 ment verify the quotation), desiring that nothing should 
 be inscribed on his tomb but his name, the dates of his 
 birth and death, and the single word DMllusionn^." 
 But it is he who would lie down and rest in some earthly 
 satisfaction who will be disillusioned, not he who forever 
 passes from desire to delight and from delight to desire, 
 with a foot upon the ladder whose top reaches to heaven. 
 Even in respect to political affairs I do not think that 
 Shelley would have looked forth from his window disil- 
 lusioned. A series of great events would probably have 
 engaged his interest and aroused his imaginative ardour: 
 first, the liberation of Greece, then the emancipation of 
 
Last Words on Shelley, 109 
 
 Catholics in Ireland, then the French Revolution of 
 1830, then the Reform Bill of 1832 ; and in 1882 
 Shelley would have reached his fortieth year, and his 
 character would have gained the enduring ardour of mid- 
 manhood. But however this may have been, I cannot 
 conceive Shelley insensible to hope, untouched by desire, 
 incapable of new delights, possessing only the sorry 
 wisdom of a man disillusioned. Rather, I think, he 
 would have continued to live by admiration, hope, and 
 love ; and as these were directed to worthier objects and 
 yet more worthy, he would have ascended in dignity of 
 being. 
 
 la life and in literature there are three kinds of men to 
 whom we give peculiar honour. The first are the crafts- 
 men, who put true and exact work into all they offer to 
 the world, and find their happiness in such faithful ser- 
 vice. Such a craftsman has been described with affec- 
 tionate reverence by George Eliot in her poem " Stradi- 
 varius" : — 
 
 " That plain, white-aproned man who stood at work, 
 Patient and accurate, full fourscore years, 
 Cherished his sight and touch by temperance ; 
 And since keen sense is love of perfectness 
 Made perfect violins, the needed paths 
 For inspiration and high mastery." 
 
 We do not reckon Shelley among the craftsmen. The 
 second class is small in numbers ; we call these men 
 conquerors, of whom, as seen in literature, the most 
 eminent representatives in modern times have been 
 Shakspere and Goethe. These are the masters of 
 Kfe; and having known joy and anguish, and labour 
 and pleasure, and the mysteries of love and death, of 
 
1 1 o Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 evil and of good, they attain at last a lofty serenity 
 upon heights from which they gaze down, with an in- 
 terest that has in it something of exalted pity, on the 
 turmoil and strife helow. It is their part to bring into 
 actual union, as far as our mortal life permits, what is 
 real and what is ideal. They are at home in both 
 worlds. Shakspere retires to Stratford, and enjoys the 
 dignity and ease and happy activity of the life of an 
 English country gentleman ; yet it was he who had 
 wandered with Lear in the tempest, and meditated with 
 Hamlet on the question of self - slaughter. Goethe, 
 councillor to his noble master, the Grand - Duke of 
 Weimar, in that house adorned with treasures of art and 
 science, presides as an acknowledged chief over the intel- 
 lectual life of a whole generation ; yet he had known the 
 storm and stress, had interpreted the feverish heart of his 
 age in " Werther," and all its spiritual doubts and desires 
 and aspirations in his " Faust. " Such men may well be 
 named conquerors, and Shelley was not one of these. 
 But how shall we name the third class of men, who live 
 for the ideal alone, and yet are betrayed into weakness 
 and error, and deeds which demand an atonement of re- 
 morse ; men who can never quite reconcile the two 
 worlds in which we have our being, the world of mate- 
 rial fact and the spiritual world above and beyond it ; 
 who give themselves away for love or give themselves 
 away for light, yet sometimes mistake bitter for sweet, 
 and darkness for light ; children who stumble on the 
 sharp stones and bruise their hands and feet, yet who 
 can wing their way with angelic ease through spaces of 
 the upper air. These are they whom we say the gods 
 
Last Words on Shelley. 1 1 1 
 
 love, and who seldom reach the fourscore years of 
 Goethe's majestic old age. They are dearer perhaps 
 than any others to the heart of humanity, for they 
 symbolise in a pathetic way, both its weakness and its 
 strength. We cannot class them with the exact and 
 patient craftsmen ; they are ever half defeated and can 
 have no claim to take their seats beside the conquerors. 
 Let us name them lovers ; and if at any time they have 
 wandered far astray, let us remember their errors with 
 gentleness, because they have loved much. It is in this 
 third class of those who serve mankind that Shelley has 
 found a place. 
 
THE TEXT OF WORDSWORTH'S POEMS* 
 
 The text of Wordsworth becomes a subject of study for 
 reasons precisely opposite to those which apply to the 
 text of Shelley. Writing in a white heat of inspiration, 
 Shelley corrected and re-corrected with impetuous speed ; 
 his critical instincts acted in and through his creative 
 energy ; his workmanship is therefore exquisite, and 
 every word is vital. But it is true that Shelley, caught 
 up in the wind of his own flight, was borne past 
 obstacles or borne over chasms which one advancing 
 deliberately must have avoided or removed ; and it was 
 not his cnstom to return again and again upon his own 
 work, applying to the outcome of his mood of inspiration 
 the criticism of a humbler mood of reflection. There 
 
 * It is right to mention that this study was published before the 
 foundation of the Wordsworth Society, and before the appearance of 
 the first volume of the edition of Wordsworth's Poems, in which 
 Professor Knight has attempted to exhibit the variations of the text. 
 The following editions have been used in preparing these notes: — 
 Lyrical Ballads, 1 vol., 1798 ; ditto, 2 vols., 1800 ; ditto, 1802 ; ditto, 
 1805 ; Poems, 2 vols., 1807 ; Excursion, 4to, 1814 ; White Doe, 1815; 
 Poems, 2 vols., 1815; Thanksgiving Ode, &c., 1816; Peter Bell (2nd ed.), 
 1819 ; Waggoner, 1819; Excursion, 1820; Poems, 4 vols., 1820; River 
 Duddon, &c., 1820; Memorials of a Tour on the Continent, 1822; Eccle- 
 siastical Sketches, 1822 ; Poems, 5 vols., 1827 ; ditto, 4 vols., 1832 ; 
 Yarrow Revisited, 1835 ; Sonnets, 1838 ; Poems chiefly of Early 
 and Late Years, 1842; Poems, 6 vols., 1843; ditto, 6 vols., 1849; 
 ditto, 1858 ; Earlier Poems (ed. Johnston), 1857. This last volume 
 exhibits in notes the text of 1815. It may be observed that an earlier 
 text is in some instances likely to be familiar to readers who have 
 made use of other recent editions than those published by Moxon. 
 
The, Text of Wordsworth's Poems. 1 1 3 
 
 was no Shelley of forty, fifty, eighty years of age to 
 re-survey his j'outhful self, to inherit the remains of a 
 buried life, and to cherish and care for these as things 
 which have a history. We get from Shelley no even- 
 ing voluntaries of calm acquiescent happiness. To us 
 his songs must for ever be 
 
 " as are the arrows 
 Of that silver sphere, 
 Whose intense lamp narrows 
 In the white dawn clear." 
 
 And had Shelley lived, he would, in a large measure, 
 have forgotten the past while reaching to things 
 that are before. Already in early manhood he could 
 speak scornfully of his boyish verse ; " Queen Mab," as 
 far as his conscious feeling went, was less to him after a 
 decade than was " The Borderers '' to Wordsworth after 
 half a century. 1 
 
 Then again chance and the evil genius of printers 
 played strange tricks with Shelley's text. Sometimes 
 the printers were Italian, sometimes the poet in Italy 
 despatched his manuscript to London, and saw no proofs, 
 Hence an opening for critical conjecture and comment, 
 by virtue of which Shelley, as has been said, is hardly 
 less than " a classic new unearthed," while Wordsworth 
 must remain deprived for ever of the distinction con- 
 ferred by critical tournaments in which the champions 
 of this or that restored reading do doughty deeds. In 
 "Descriptive Sketches," as given in Wordsworth's Poems, 
 1815, we find the lines : — 
 
 " Then the milk-thistle bade those herds demand 
 Three mites a day the pail and welcome hand." 
 " ' H 
 
114 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 But criticism is spared its ingenuity of conjecture, for 
 the poet had seen his proofs, and in the list of errata we 
 are directed for " mites " to read " times.' In " The 
 Brothers" (Lyrical Ballads, 1800), we read: — 
 
 "A child is born or christen'd, a field plough'd, 
 A daughter sent to service, a web spun, 
 The old house-cloth is deck'd with a new face." 
 
 Conservative critics would doubtless have found an 
 essential point in the contrast between the new-spun 
 web and the old house-cloth, and it might even have 
 been ascertained from some venerable but obscure autho- 
 rity, that the new-facing of old cloths was a well-known 
 custom in Ennerdale. Nor is this reading deprived of 
 Wordsworth's authority in any errata-list, for the mis- 
 print escaped his notice. The needful emendation — 
 easy to anticipate — is, however, supplied in a subsequent 
 edition, where the new face is seen to belong not to a 
 " cloth," but to a " clock." 
 
 Such service — skilled and loving — as Mr W. M. 
 Rossetti and Mr Buxton Forman have rendered to 
 Shelley is, accordingly, uncalled for, and indeed impos- 
 sible in the case of Wordsworth. The study of Words- 
 worth's text is of interest not through any lack of 
 superintendence on the poet's part, but because it 
 received from him the studious superintendence of a 
 lifetime. In place of our own conjectures we have the 
 history of his changes of mood and mind. Wordsworth's 
 mode of poetical creation was one which favoured a 
 return upon his own work, and tempted him to revive 
 former impressions and rehandle former themes. For 
 his creative mood was itself a retiirn upon some moment 
 
The Text of Wordstuorth's Poems. 1 1 5 
 
 or season of involuntary rapture or vision. That moment 
 or season had passed away — passed, it may have been, 
 into the distance of years. But it had left in the soil 
 of the poet's imagination a living germ. Then came a 
 time of recollection, a time of quiet ; and by degrees the 
 quiet was elevated (as we may say, using the words of 
 mystical devotion) into illumination, union, and ecstasy. 
 " Poetry," Wordsworth has written, " takes its origin 
 from emotion recollected in tranquillity ; the emotion is 
 contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquil- 
 lity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to 
 that which was before the subject of contemplation, is 
 gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the 
 mind." And as in the original act or process of creation 
 the poet returned upon a past feeling, recollecting it in 
 tranquillity, so after his imagihation had shaped this 
 into a poem, he would return upon it again and again, 
 he would listen to the voice of his own song, coming to 
 him now echo-wise, until it seemed to him that he could 
 indeed 
 
 " beget 
 That golden time again.'' 
 
 And then would begin the work of refashioning what he 
 had made. It was not always, however, that the 
 revival of the departed mood was true and complete, 
 and thus at times a lower, more critical, less creative 
 temper would cloud the original inspiration. Useful 
 employment there was for critical sagacity, for judgment, 
 in the revision by "Wordsworth of his own poems ; but 
 not seldom he applied with disastrous effect a logic of 
 good sense to works which ought to submit themselves 
 
1 1 6 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 only to a logic of the emotions. In some cases he sub- 
 sequently perceived that in following his later thoughts 
 he had yielded to unwise counsellors, and he returned to 
 his first thought and hie first phrase. In others, the 
 wandering from the primary intention once begun, he 
 would wander still farther and farther astray. 
 
 We must also, in noting rehandlings of his text, bear 
 in mind the great transformation which his character 
 underwent, that transformation of the youth moving in 
 the glory and the freshness of a dream into the man 
 advancing with firm foot under the light of common 
 day. At first in Wordsworth's poetry there is on the one 
 hand a matter-of-factness (as Coleridge called it) most 
 definite, most literal ; and over against this there is the 
 vision, the glory, the divine illumination. These are not 
 opposed one to the other, but they stand apart. Gradu- 
 ally they approach and blend ; and each submits to the 
 influence of the other. The skyey splendours take a 
 sober colouring ; the things of use and wont become 
 more precious because more habitually informed with what 
 is spiritual. It has been matter of reproach against 
 Wordsworth that he did not always remain what he 
 was in the period of early manhood. " Wide apart," 
 one has said, " as lay their lines of work, it is true alike 
 of Shelley and Keats, that for them it was not fated, nor 
 could it ever have been possible, to outlive 
 
 ' the hour 
 Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower ;' 
 
 nor could Byron, while retaining as did Wordsworth the 
 freshness and the force of his genius, have outlived his more 
 fiery delight in the triumphant life of sea and cloud and 
 
The Text of Wordsworth! s Poems. 1 1 7 
 
 storm." It may be so, for Keats as a poet fled from the 
 dissonances of real life, and Byron, feeling their pre- 
 sence, declared with bitter laughter that they, must 
 remain, and that man is always glorious and contempt- 
 ible, majestic and mean ; and Shelley dreamed indeed 
 of a divine new creation of the universe by love, when 
 the Titan should be free ; but for the present to his 
 eyes all is a strife between evil and good, and the 
 martyr's fortitude and faith reveal the only harbourage 
 from despair possible to heroic souls. But Wordsworth 
 made a real attempt, now and here, for his own needs 
 and those of others to accept all the elementary facts of 
 life, and to resolve into a spiritual harmony the dis- 
 sonances of this our world. The harmony was not 
 wholly joyous and triumphant ; a still sad music made a 
 portion of the strain : it certainly was not meant for any 
 Mssnad dance, nor for the horns and cymbals of any 
 company of Corybantes ; but perhaps it was a harmony 
 on the whole as much in keeping with our condition as 
 any that has since been offered to our hearing. 
 
 It will be well to begin these fragmentary notes with 
 mention of a few poems which have wholly disappeared 
 from the later editions. No wrong is done to Words- 
 worth by calling attention to them. Although these 
 poems, for reasons which appeared sufficient to their 
 writer, are refused a place among the remains handed 
 down to posterity, there is no ground for supposing that 
 he regretted their appearance, or that he would be ill 
 pleased if any person who had a care for his work should 
 find them where they stand. 
 
 The most trivial in substance is, with one exception, 
 
1 1 8 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 the earliest in date.* In the second edition of "Lyrical 
 Ballads" appeared a poem of seven stanzas, entitled 
 "Andrew Jones." It reappears fifteen years later in 
 the collected "Poems" of 1815, where it is placed with 
 some appropriateness by the side of " Simon Lee." The 
 pathetic outwelHng of gratitude from the worn-out, little, 
 old huntsman of Cardiganshire, — gratitude for a trivial 
 service, — stands as a token or sign of the oppressive 
 load borne everywhere by helpless age. "Andrew 
 Jones" is a kind of companion picture, in which the 
 misery is unrelieved by anything except by a frank 
 escape of indignation in the first and last stanzas : — 
 
 " I hate that Andrew Jones ; he'll breed 
 His children up to waste and pillage : 
 I wish the press-gang or the drum 
 "Would, with its rattling music, comet 
 And sweep him from the village." 
 
 The most ardent lover of Wordsworth cannot shed many 
 tears for the departed Andrew Jones, a village scoundrel 
 the dastardliness of whose crime alone gives him fame ; 
 yet we could have better spared some " Poems of the 
 
 * I pass over " The Convict," a poem of thirteen stanzas, printed 
 only in Lyrical Ballads, 1798. Its early omission implies Words- 
 worth's consciousness that it was unworthy of him. The verses indeed 
 are so little characteristic that they might have been written by 
 Hayley. The poet descends from the " slope of a mountain " to peer 
 through a glimmering grate at the convict ; the concluding verse may 
 satisfy the reader : — 
 
 " At thy name though compassion her nature resign, 
 
 Though in virtue's proud mouth thy report be a stain. 
 My care, if the arm of the mighty were mine, 
 Would plant thee where yet thou might'st blossom again. " 
 
 If one cared to make a comment on a poem so insignificant, it might 
 be contrasted with the " Sonnets on the Punishment of Death." 
 t " With its tantara sound would come." 1800. 
 
The Text of Wordsworth's Poems. 1 1 9 
 
 Fancy" or some "Ecclesiastical Sonnets." Its dry 
 pathos, its bald recognition of misery, and its welling of 
 pity out of the hard rock of pain, are characteristic of a 
 fragment of Wordsworth's genius. Some passing horse- 
 man has thrown a penny to a travelling cripple and has 
 ridden on ; the " poor crawling helpless wretch " cannot 
 stoop to pick the halfpence up, and no aid is at 
 hand : — 
 
 " Inch-thick the dust lay on the ground, 
 For it had long been drouthy weather : 
 
 So with his staff the cripple wrought 
 
 Among the dust, till he had brought 
 The halfpennies together.'' 
 
 A more prosaically piteous figure than that of the leech- 
 gatherer stirring with his staff the pond and gazing into 
 the muddy water. At the moment Andrew, the village 
 tippler, passes : — 
 
 " He stooped and took the penny up : 
 And when the cripple nearer drew, 
 Quoth Andrew, ' Under half-a-Crown, 
 What a man finds is all his own; 
 And so, my friend, good-day to you.' " 
 
 We hear no imprecations from the victim ; we do not 
 see him shaking his staff at the retreating Andrew; 
 thanks and praises ran fast out of the heart of Simon 
 Lee for one small act of service ; we do not know that 
 the cripple felt even surprise. 
 
 The two small volumes of " Poems " published in 
 1807 are somewhat more difficult to procure than the 
 " Lyrical Ballads," and are known to comparatively few 
 readers of Wordsworth. The first of these volumes 
 contains a poem the disappearance of which is certainly 
 
120 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 to be regretted ; nor is it easy to divine the motive for 
 its exclusion from the later editions. The verses are of 
 peculiar interest as belonging to that little group of 
 poems which record the dearness to one lover and the 
 death of Lucy ; they are one in spirit with others of the 
 group ; we remember the rider, the cottage, the orchard 
 plot ; we know the " fond and wayward thoughts '' which 
 slide into a lover's head.* The poet's gift to surprise his 
 Lucy, and to delight her eyes, is not of diamond or gold ; 
 such would but trouble the rustic simplicity of her way 
 of life ; his gift is the beauty of a little living lamp 
 amid the grass. " I have made a discovery," Landor 
 wrote from Wales, " which is that there are both nightin- 
 gales and glow-worms in my valley. I would give two 
 or three thousand pounds less for a place that was 
 without them." The little poem may be presented as a 
 whole : — 
 
 " Among all lovely things my Love had been ; 
 Had noted well the stars, all flowers that grew 
 About her home ; but she had never seen 
 A Glow-worm, never one, and this I knew. 
 
 " While riding near her home one stormy night, 
 A single Glow-worm did I chance to espy ; 
 I g:i.ve a fervent welcome to the sight, 
 
 And from my horse I leapt ; great joy had I. 
 
 " Upon a leaf the Glow-worm did I lay, 
 
 To bear it with me through the stormy night : 
 And, as before, it shone without dismay ; 
 Albeit putting forth a fainter light. 
 
 * But though thus transformed into a, lover's poem, the verses 
 record an incident of 1795, in which the poet's sister Dorothy, and not 
 the imagined Lucy, had a part. 
 
The Text of Wordsworth's Poems. 1 2 1 
 
 ' When to the dwelling of my Love I came, 
 
 I went into the Orchard quietly; 
 And left the Glow-worm, blessing it by name, 
 Laid safely by itself beneath a Tree. 
 
 " The whole next day, I hoped, and hoped with fear ; 
 At night the Glow-worm shone beneath the Tree : 
 I led my Lucy to the spot — ' Look here ! ' 
 Oh ! joy it was for her, and joy for me." 
 
 It will not be out of place to notice here an episode 
 appearing in the first (1814) and second (1820) editions 
 of " The Excursion," but which, as far as I am aware, 
 has not appeared during half a century in any authorised 
 text. The whole of that great poem underwent minute 
 revision ; lines were omitted, lines were inserted, lines 
 were altered.* A notice of the more significant changes 
 would not be without interest, but here it is forbidden 
 by the limits of this article. In connection with the 
 omitted episode, one alteration aifecting the chief charac- 
 ter must be mentioned. The Wanderer, that flower of 
 pedlars, younger brother of Autolycus, "like, but oh 
 how different ! " had in 1814 (and such was still his 
 fate in 1820) the misfortune to lose his father, and had 
 again the compensating good fortune to gain, by his 
 mother's second marriage, a stepfather, to whose care he 
 owed his scholarship, and some of his moral and spiritual 
 wisdom. 
 
 " Ere he had outgrown his infant days 
 His widowed Mother for a secoiid Mate 
 Espoused the Teacher of the Village School, 
 Who on her offspring zealously bestowed 
 Needful instruction." 
 
 * One insertion is, I believe, generally known as such — that of 
 certain lines towards the close of Book I., in which the Wanderer 
 asserts the power not alone of meditative wisdom, but of Christian 
 faith, to soothe and elevate suffering. This was one of the latest 
 alterations of the text, appearing for the first time in 1845. 
 
12 2 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 In 1827 there was no toleration for the race of step- 
 fathers ; the village schoolmaster is dismissed, disappear- 
 ing to bestow needful instruction we know not where, 
 and the Wanderer's deceased father is resuscitated; 
 Now towards the close of the sixth book a blameless 
 stepmother is in like manner utterly abolished and 
 destroyed. She, indeed, is not guilty of Kving, but she 
 lias lived, and her more immediate crime is that of 
 occupying a place by her husband's side under the sods 
 of the churchyard among the mountains. The moun- 
 tains reject from among them her little hillock of earth. 
 The Pastor has told the story of Wilfred Armathwaite, 
 the causes and incidents of whose faithlessness to his 
 marriage-vow are recorded with a fulness of detail in the 
 earlier editions which is needed to point the moral, and 
 which, in its wise gravity of statement, could not offend 
 any save a diseased sensibility. The story is told of the 
 faithful widower remaining unwedded in the midst of 
 his budding and blooming girls. And then the chronicler 
 turns to three ridges in the churchyard which lie side 
 by side : 
 
 " One Hillock, ye may note, is small and low, 
 Sunk almost to a level with the plain 
 By weight of time ; the others, undepressed. 
 Are bold and swelling." 
 
 Midmost lies the husband, who in the noon of manhood 
 
 had laid in this earth his wife. Left alone with his 
 
 many little ones, he has had to encounter an added 
 
 sorrow in poverty, and the threatened loss of his paternal 
 
 fields. 
 
 " The dews 
 Of night and morn that wet the mountain sides, 
 
The Text of Wordsworth s Poems. 123 
 
 The bright stars twinkling on their dusky tops, 
 "Were conscious of the pain that drove him forth 
 From his own door, he knew not when — to range 
 He knew not where ; distracted was his brain. 
 His heart was cloven ; and full oft he prayed. 
 In blind despair, that God would take them all." 
 
 But relief from want and fear — a gleam of liglit from 
 the bosom of the cloud — comes suddenly, and in that 
 renewal of life and energy, 
 
 " The desolate Father raised his head and looked 
 On the wide world in hope." 
 
 Before very long, "a virtuous woman of grave years, 
 and of prudential habits," undertakes " the sacred office 
 of a wife " to him and of a mother to his children. To 
 all she is kind and good, only failing in some partial 
 fondness for the babe " whose heart had known no 
 mother but herself." By industry, and with the aid of 
 her " prudential habits," the land is at last redeemed, 
 and passes to the eldest son of the lost young wife. 
 Every trace of this story has disappeared from " The 
 Excursion." 
 
 We pass now to a volume published in 1 838 to satisfy 
 the demand of some of Wordsworth's friends, who wished 
 to see all the sonnets, hitherto scattered through the 
 several divisions of his poems, brought under the eye 
 at once. Two sonnets, one on the Ballot, and one on 
 Copyright, written in the year of this volume's publica- 
 tion, have not been retained in the later editions of their 
 author's Complete Poetical Works. The Copyright son- 
 net is the second of two treating of that theme. It 
 takes the form of an address from a poet to his grand- 
 child, and the thought expressed in its fourteen lines is 
 
124 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 that, unless authorship receive its just rewards, not alone 
 rewards of fame and usefulness but of current coin, the 
 descendants of the poet, sunk perhaps in poverty, may 
 be unable to obtain the culture needful to feel or under- 
 stand his simplest lay. " This feeling," wrote Words- 
 worth in a note, " had been forced too often upon my 
 own mind by remembering how few descendants of men 
 eminent in literature are even known to exist." The 
 " Protest against the Ballot" is of finer quality. Words- 
 worth's alarm upon the eve of the Reform of 18.32 is 
 known to all readers of his verse or of the letters in 
 his " Memoirs." To Crabb Robinson he talked of leav- 
 ing the country on account of the imminent ruin. The 
 ten-pound householder, as we know, won his right to 
 vote, and somehow England still survived. But a fur- 
 ther horror lay ahead — the Radical Reformers clamoured 
 for secret voting. What monster might not slyly lurk 
 within the ballot-box ? 
 
 " Forth rushed, from Envy sprung and Self-conceit, 
 A Power misnamed the Spirit of Ebform, 
 And through the astonished Island swept in storm, 
 Threatening to lay all Orders at her feet 
 That crossed her way. Now stoops she to entreat 
 Licence to hide at intervals her head. 
 Where she may work safe, undisquieted. 
 In a close Box, covert for Justice meet. 
 St George of England ! keep a watchful eye 
 Eixed on the Suitor ; frustrate her request ; 
 Stifle her hope ; for, if the State comply. 
 From such Pandorian gift may come a Pest 
 Worse than the Dragon that bowed low his crest, 
 Pierced by thy spear in glorious victory." 
 
 The second sonnet on the Ballot, that ending with the 
 
 line 
 
 " Hurrah for , hugging his Ballot-box," 
 
The Text of Wordsworth! s Poems. 125 
 
 was originally relegated to a place among the notes. 
 The reason for its exclusion from the general collection, 
 assigned in a note which has since disappeared, is not 
 without interest. "In no part of my writings have 
 I mentioned the name of any cotemporary, that of 
 Buonaparte only excepted, but for the purpose of eulogy ; 
 and therefore, as in the concluding verse of what follows 
 there is a deviation from this rule (for the blank will be 
 easily filled up), I have excluded the sonnet from the 
 body of the collection, and placed it here as a public 
 record of my detestation, both as a man and a citizen, 
 of the proposed contrivance." The blank was probably 
 meant to be filled with the name of Grote.* 
 
 Wordsworth's habit of rehandling his poems was of 
 early origin. Already in 1800 some changes are intro- 
 duced into the "Lyrical Ballads" of 1798. They are, 
 however, neither numerous nor important.! The altera- 
 tions effected in 1802 in the poems which had appeared 
 two years previously are considerable, and from that 
 date until shortly before his death Wordsworth never 
 ceased to touch and retouch his writings. Probably 
 
 * It is perhaps worth mentioning in a note, that among the " Even- 
 ing Voluntaries " of the volume " Yarrow Revisited, and other Poems " 
 (1835) is included a cento made up of a stanza of Akenside, connected 
 with a stanza from Beattie by a couplet of Thomson. " This practice," 
 Wordsworth writes, " in which the author sometimes indulges, of 
 linking together, in his own mind, favourite passages from different 
 authors, seems in itself unobjectionable ; " and he hopes that this spe- 
 cimen may "open to others a harmless source of private gratification.'' 
 
 t The only poem much affected by these alterations is " Lines left 
 upon a Seat in a Yew-tree ; " but touches will be found in "Animal 
 Tranquillity and Decay," "The Thorn," "The Female Vagrant," 
 " Simon Lee," and "The Idiot Boy." The " Lines written in a Boat," 
 and " Lines written near Richmond," formed one piece in 1798. On 
 the suggestion of Coleridge the poem was divided into two. 
 
126 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 some of the newer readings never had the entire ap- 
 proval of the poet, but were concessions to the scruples 
 of a weak-minded public. " In policy," he said, when 
 dictating his notes to Miss Fenwick, " I excluded ' Atlice 
 Fell' from many editions of my Poems." And it is 
 confessed in a note to " The Waggoner " that, from 
 unwillingness to startle the reader at the outset by so 
 bold a mode of expression, the lines descriptive of the 
 night-hawk's note, 
 
 " The Night-hawk is singing his frog-like tune, 
 Twirling his watchman's rattle about," 
 
 were altered before publication. But for the most part 
 the changes of text serve as materials for a true history 
 of Wordsworth's feelings and opinions with reference to 
 his art. In the critical manifestoes prefixed to the first 
 and second editioas of " Lyrical Ballads," two motives 
 for those poems — spoken of in the preface as " experi- 
 ments" — are insisted on : first, to ascertain how far 
 " the language of conversation in the middle and lower 
 classes of society" (Preface, 1798), or, as he puts it 
 differently two years later, how far "a selection of the 
 real language of men in a state of vivid sensation " 
 (Preface, 1800), is adapted to the purposes of poetic 
 pleasure; secondly (a motive first indicated in 1800), 
 " to make the incidents of common life interesting by 
 tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the 
 primary laws of our nature."* Each poem, we are 
 
 * It may here be noted that the celebrated " Preface of 1800," as it 
 appears in later editions, differs in many and important particulars 
 from the Preface as actually printed in that year. The changes are 
 effected in all ways, by omission, addition, and substitutions. 
 
The Text of Wordsworth! s Poems. 127 
 
 told, has a purpose, and in his Preface, in a passage 
 since omitted, Wordsworth goes from piece to piece 
 through a series of poems, stating in brief the psycho- 
 logical significance of each. Now these two motives 
 carried with them two temptations : one was the temp- 
 tation to literality, matter-of-factness, trivial or acciden- 
 tal detail, and over-familiar phraseology ; the other was 
 the temptation to excessive self-consciousness, to a 
 fatuous caressing of the moral or psychological motive 
 of the poem, or to a kind of turning inside-out of the 
 poem's inward parts. " Here," we can sometimes 
 imagine the writer saying to us through his verses, " I 
 am illustrating the laws of association of ideas ; here I 
 am subtly treating of the maternal passion." And thus 
 in a second way arose a tendency to attach importance, 
 sometimes undue importance, to the trivial, its connec- 
 tion with some one of " the primary laws of our nature" 
 conferring dignity on what would otherwise be mean or 
 merely accidental. 
 
 Wordsworth never receded from his principles, but he 
 perceived that they had occasionally been abused by 
 himself, and he was not unwilling to make reparation 
 for his misdeeds. In the second volume of 1807 some 
 short pieces are placed under the heading "Moods of 
 my own Mind ; " these pieces were at a later time dis- 
 tributed under the classes, founded on the psychological 
 division adopted in 1815, and retained to the last. 
 The little poem which describes a whirling and dancing 
 of withered leaves under a hail shower, as though some 
 Kobin Goodfellow were piping to them, closed originally 
 1802) with the petition: — 
 
128 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 " Oh ! grant me, Heaven, a heart at ease. 
 That I may never cease to find. 
 Even in appearances like these, 
 Enough to nourish and to stir my mind." 
 
 Wordsworth's egoism is, so to speak, of an abstract kind : 
 
 through the operation of his own mind he contemplates 
 
 the universal laws. Still this egoism was inartistic, a 
 
 Wordsworthian form of effusiveness ; and his severer 
 
 instinct as a poet rightly banished such lines as the 
 
 above.* The marvellous passage which closes the second 
 
 book of " The Excursion," a bodying forth in words of 
 
 the mystic pageantry of storm-clouds transmuted by the 
 
 sun, is introduced as originally written, with an apology. 
 
 Speech cannot express such glories, too bright and fair 
 
 even for remembrance, 
 
 " Yet the attempt may give 
 Collateral interest to this homely Tale.'' 
 
 We are now happily spared this apology. Unhappily 
 other sins of Wordsworth knew no repentance. In the 
 same spirit by which the poem of the Leech-gatherer was 
 named " Resolution and Independence," Derwent Cole- 
 ridge remarked, the " Old Cumberland Beggar" might 
 have been changed into "Advantages of Mendicancy." 
 We have still to suffer a twinge at sight of the 
 turning inside-out of the poem originally named " Old 
 Man Travelling," by its later title, " Animal Tranquillity 
 and Decay. " t 
 
 * Compare the verse omitted from the poem beginning, "Let other 
 bards of angels sing." 
 
 t In Lyrical Bards, 1798, this formed a second and subordinate title. 
 This poem originally ended with the old man's answer to an inquiry 
 as to the object' of his journey. He travels to see his son who is 
 dying (lying, 1800) in an hospital at Falmouth, whither he has been 
 brought after a sea-fight. 
 
The Text of Wordsworth! s Poems. 129 
 
 Wordsworth's omissions made for sake of avoiding the 
 merely trivial, literal, matter-of-fact, accidental, or gro- 
 tesque, are numerous, and some of these are sufficiently 
 well known. Simon Lee during two-and-twenty years 
 stood before the reader in that " long blue livery coat " 
 
 " That's fair behind, and fair before," 
 
 and which is only faintly referred to after 1815 ; during 
 several years more he remained bereft of his right eye ; 
 finally the eye was restored to him, but the lustre of his 
 livery was dimmed. If Wordsworth had a tender con- 
 sideration for weaker brethren who might read " The 
 Waggoner," it can hardly be said that he was as con- 
 siderate towards the readers of "Peter Bell." That 
 characteristic and highly interesting piece belongs essen- 
 tially to the period of the first " Lyrical Ballads," but its 
 author, as Cottle tells us, objected to publishing it in any 
 other form than as a separate poem, and hence it was 
 held over. After having in manuscript almost " survived 
 its majority," as a separate poem it appeared. During 
 the long interval pains were taken " at different times to 
 make the production less unworthy of a favourable recep- 
 tion." We know of what nature that reception was. 
 Wordsworth again set to work and revised the poem 
 throughout. In 1819 lihe opening stanza of Part the 
 First runs as follows : — 
 
 " All by the moonlight river-side 
 
 It gave three miserable groans ; 
 ' 'Tis come then to a pretty pass,' 
 Said Peter to the groaning Ass, 
 
 ' But I will hang your bones.' " 
 
 And again, in a later stanza, there is a second bone- 
 
 I 
 
130 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 banging. Already in the following year this had been 
 erased. And that verse prefixed as a motto to his 
 " Peter Bell the Third " by Shelley, — that verse descrip- 
 tive of a possible vision of prosaic horror below the water 
 into which the Potter is staring, — 
 
 " Is it a party in a parlour. 
 Crammed just as they on earth were crammed, 
 Some sipping punch — some sipping tea. 
 But as you by their faces see, 
 All silent and all — damned ? " — 
 
 that verse, which is no invention of " Miching Mallecho, 
 Esq.," disappeared hastily, and disappeared so effectually 
 that its existence at any time in Wordsworth's poem 
 has been denied. " The Idiot Boy," written with speed 
 and in a most gleeful mood, was always a favourite with 
 its author. Yet, — -perhaps for the hardness of our 
 hearts, — he made a sacrifice of some passages not out of 
 keeping with the rest : — 
 
 " Beneath the moon that shines so bright, 
 Till she is tired, let Betty Foy 
 With girt and s&cryxp fiddle-faddle, 
 But wherefore set upon a saddle. 
 
 Him whom she loves, her Idiot Boy ? " 
 
 This verse held its ground until 1827. Any reader 
 who can love Betty Foy, and Susan Gale, and Johnny, 
 and the wise Pony, will find no difficulty in receiving 
 the verse. The anxious mother's fiddle-faddling is a 
 gnat at which no person of a pharynx capacious enough 
 for Johnny and the Pony need strain. Let Betty fiddle- 
 faddle till she is tired ; let Susan or the Pony wince, 
 our withers are unwrung. 
 
 Some of the dropped lines and stanzas of Words- 
 
The Text of Wordsworth's Poems. 131 
 
 worth's earlier poems are worth recalling to mind ; the 
 loss of some is to be seriously regretted. It is not 
 without interest, in connection with the history of the 
 poet's opinions, to note that passage in the earliest- 
 published fragment of " Guilt and Sorrow " which tells 
 of the ruin of the old honest father dispossessed of his 
 little patrimony by a covetous lord of land ; nor that 
 passage which paints in words so vivid the horrors of 
 strife and carnage ; nor, again, that passage in 
 which Wordsworth, who has been charged with the 
 guilt of ingrained respectability, turns with a- natural 
 sympathy to the knavish wanderers who gave them- 
 selves, with too small warrant, the honourable name and 
 style of potters : — • 
 
 " My heart is touched to think that men like these, 
 The earth's rude tenants, were my first relief ; 
 
 How kindly did they paint their vagrant ease ! 
 And their long holiday that feared not grief, 
 For all belonged to all, and each was chief. 
 
 No plough their sinews strained ; on grating road 
 No wain they drove, and yet, the yellow sheaf 
 
 In every vale for their delight was stowed ; 
 
 For them in nature's meads the milky udder ilowed." * 
 
 A poet of our own day has put into the mouth of one 
 of his imaginary characters, who is a slave to society, his 
 confession of a yearning for vagabondage ; the heart of 
 Elvire's husband " fires up for lawlessness ; " he yields 
 for an hour to the charm of the truant life. The youth- 
 ful Wordsworth felt a proneness of affection towards any- 
 
 * Lyrical Ballads, 1798: "The Female Vagrant.'' This poem of 
 Salisbury Plain, and the various fragments of it, published at various 
 times, gave Wordsworth an infinity of "poetic pains." The version 
 of 1802 differs considerably from that of 1798, and again from that of 
 1800. 
 
132 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 thing which symbolized the life of unchartered freedom, 
 even while his feet were advancing along paths which 
 led him to the bondage and the liberty of duty. 
 
 And here may be noticed a remarkable stanza which 
 occurs in the noble " Ode to Duty " as first printed in 
 the "Poems" of the year 1807. The poet has owned 
 his weariness and his weakness ; he has lived as if life's 
 business were a summer mood ; he has " shoved unwel- 
 come tasks away ; " * but now he would serve Duty 
 more strictly ; he longs for steadfast hopes, and for an 
 enduring repose. And, as we now read the poem, he 
 passes on directly to that sublime address to the " Stern 
 Lawgiver" before whom flowers laugh, and through 
 whom the most ancient heavens are fresh and strong. 
 But w4io is this Duty, and how shall she be known ? 
 This Duty is not law merely imposed from without ; it 
 is law approved from within ; it is a free Will made 
 wise. The omitted stanza — which precedes the address 
 to the " Stern Lawgiver " — a stanza never reprinted 
 since 1807, runs thus : — 
 
 " Yet not the less would I throughout 
 
 Still act according to the voice 
 Of my own wish ; and feel past doubt 
 
 That my submissiveness was choice : 
 Not seeking in the school of pride 
 Tor 'precepts over-dignified,' 
 Denial and restraint I prize 
 No farther than they breed a second Will more wise." 
 
 I cannot but regret that Wordsworth, instead of remov- 
 ing these lines, did not rather confer on them, as he well 
 
 * The stanza containing these words has been altered, and muck 
 improved. 
 
The Text of Wordsworth s Poems. ' 133 
 
 knew how, that full and heightened style which would 
 have made them worthy to retain their place in the 
 great poem of which they were once a part. 
 
 The swan on Locarno's lake is known to all students 
 of Wordsworth's poetry, but he does not now sail before 
 the swan-like Dion. The reader must seek the beauti- 
 ful creature in a jungle of notes. The removal of this 
 opening stanza of Dion, after it had held its ground for 
 twenty years, was not without warrant. Beautiful in 
 itself, the passage lent no aid to the poem as a whole. 
 But the majestic bird must not be permitted to hide 
 himself from sight. He is an Italian cousin of that 
 sole voyager on still Saint Mary's lake, sole save for his 
 companioning shadow. There the green hills are 
 mirrored in the unruffled water ; through her depths 
 Saint Mary's Lake is visibly delighted. The swan of 
 Locarno sails at night, and leaves behind him an 
 illumined wake ; oaring along with a gushing impulse, 
 he scatters the reflection of rock and wood, and has for 
 his companion — companion shall we say or rival % — not 
 his own shadow, but the queenly moon. There is 
 another poem from which an exquisite stanza has been 
 robbed ; this was one of Wordsworth's latest crimes, and 
 one of his worst. From 1807, when the poem 
 "Louisa" first appeared, until at least 1832, the lovely 
 maid needed not to be apologised for, and with her 
 quickened blood and breath she stood before us an 
 English girl more lovely than Grecian nymph or naiad ; 
 she is " ruddy, fleet, and strong." 
 
 " And down the rocks can leap along 
 Like rivulets in May." 
 
134 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 Inspired by the Author of Evil, Wordsworth began to 
 
 suspect that a young woman who could leap about the 
 
 rocks in this fashion was hardly a person to be accepted 
 
 in high society ; at all events why need she be blowsy ? 
 
 " I confess," exclaimed Mrs Primrose, " I don't like to 
 
 see my daughters trudging up to their pew all blowsed 
 
 and red with walking, and looking for all the world as 
 
 if they had been winners at a smock race." The poem 
 
 opens in 1843 with the following nauseous words : — 
 
 " Though by a sickly taste betrayed, 
 Some will dispraise the lovely maid. 
 
 With fearless pride I say 
 That she is healthful, fleet, and strong." 
 
 Wordsworth was saved from entire dishonour. By 
 
 1849 the original text had resumed its place, with the 
 
 exception of the offensive epithet "ruddy." Louisa 
 
 is now " nyraph-like." We grow elated to be spared 
 
 the reference to " sickly taste " and the dispraise of 
 
 Louisa by genteel persons. But suddenly a shock comes ; 
 
 we stand in presence of irreparable wrong. A stanza, 
 
 which had lived in the poem and illuminated it with fresh 
 
 loveliness since 1807, is gone. Where are the spiritual 
 
 smiles that rose and brightened and sank on Louisa's 
 
 face? 
 
 " And she has smiles to earth unknown, 
 Smiles, that with motion of their own 
 
 Do spread and sink and rise ; 
 ■ That come and go with endless play, 
 And ever as they pass away 
 Are hidden in her eyes." * 
 
 * Compare Shelley's " Smiles," which 
 
 " Make the cold air fire — then atreen. them 
 In those looks where whoso gazes. 
 Faints entangled in their mazes." 
 
The Text of Wordsworth's Poems. 
 
 ^oo 
 
 They are gone. Was this ravage wrought in the same 
 spirit in which Wordsworth, on his nutting expedition, 
 rose and mutilated the nook of hazels ? * 
 
 How and where to end a poem are questions which, 
 puzzle at times the poet's will. If, indeed, the poet 
 desires to lead you up to a point at which he will sud- 
 denly spring a mine upon you, or discharge a rocket, or 
 perform a sudden pirouette and so disappear in the glory 
 of high art, the ending is of course prepared beforehand 
 and written first. But Wordsworth did not work in this 
 manner, and he had many searchings of heart as to 
 whether the final impression left by his lines was pre- 
 cisely what he intended that it should be. The last 
 stanza of " The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman " 
 (1798) disappeared in 181.5 to be replaced long after. 
 To " Foresight " a final stanza was added. The ending 
 of " The Skylark," the poem beginning " Up with me ! 
 up with me into the clouds ! " was altered and re-altered. 
 The last stanza of the good-humoured trifle entitled 
 "Rural Architecture" disappeared (1805) and again 
 resumed its place (1820). t 
 
 * Compare with the changes wrought in "Louisa" the lines which 
 describe Lucy at that time when suddenly a fear of her death came 
 with a pang into her lover's heart : 
 
 " When she I loved was strong and gay, 
 And like a rose in June," 
 changed (by 1843) to— 
 
 " When she I loved looked every day 
 Fresh as a rose in June. " 
 t " Some little I've seen of blind boisterous works 
 By Christian disturbers more savage than Turks." 
 The second line ran in 1800 — 
 
 " In Paris and London, 'mong Christians or Turks." 
 In 1827 the three rosy-cheeked schoolboys were not named, and the 
 poem opened — 
 
 " From the meadow of Armthwait on Thirl aiere's wild Shore." 
 
136 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 In 1800 "Poor Susan" closed thus : — 
 
 " Poor Outcast ! return — to receive thee once more 
 The house of thy Father will open its door, 
 And thou, once again in thy plain russet gown, 
 May'st hear the thrush sing from a tree of its own.'' 
 
 It was surely right to strike away this stanza (omitted, 
 1802) from the little poem whose unity of impression 
 it only marred. Cheapside, the silent morning, the 
 song of the caged bird, and the vision of a lost home, 
 these are all that make up the present moment for poor 
 Susan ; and in that moment the dream is already pass- 
 ing away ; her return is not to a cottage in the dale, but 
 to the London street : — 
 
 " The stream will not flow, and the hill will not rise, 
 And the colours have all passed away from her eyes." * 
 
 Little need be said of additions made by Wordsworth 
 to the original text of his poems, for these, speaking 
 generally, remain, and are known to all his readers of 
 the present day. It was seldom that Wordsworth, while 
 holding to his original feeling or idea, added baser 
 matter ; the added lines nearly always heighten and 
 enrich the piece. When his vision grew troubled, when 
 his hand slackened its grasp, when he lost faith in his 
 
 * Before leaving the subject of dropped stanzas room may be found 
 for a note on "The Danish Boy." That mysterious fragment originally 
 (1800) possessed a stanza, which would probably have been retained 
 had the poem been completed. It describes in the manner of " The 
 Thorn," two green sods hard by a blasted tree, which neither sun, nor 
 wind, nor rain, can bind together, but which lie as if just severed by the 
 spade. In the editions of 1827 and 1832 a note informs the reader that 
 a ballad was to have been written on the story of a Danish prince, 
 who, flying from battle, was murdered by a cottager for sake of his 
 valuables ; the house fell under a curse, and the valley ever after was 
 haunted by the spirit of the youth. 
 
The Text of Wordsworth' s Poems. 137 
 
 former self, then he would begin to patch and piece in- 
 congruous things together ; while working upon his 
 original lines he was safe. A poem of small worth, 
 " The Song of the Wandering Jew," is indeed lowered 
 in value by the alloy of added verses ; but such a case 
 is exceptional. There are lines in " Michael " which we 
 could ill lose, telling how Luke, a ten-years boy, went 
 with his father to the heights — 
 
 " Why should Irelate 
 That objects which the shepherd loved before 
 Were dearer now 1 that from the Boy there came 
 Feelings and emanations, things which were 
 Light to the sun and music to the wind ; 
 And that the Old Man's heart seemed born again ? " 
 
 These lines were first inserted in the text of 1802. 
 More questionable is the matter of gain or loss in the 
 " Daffodils." When the flowers flash upon the inward 
 eye, the poet's heart dances with the daffodils. In the 
 poem as printed in 1807, at the first moment of be- 
 holding them, he sees them not as "golden," but as 
 " dancing " — 
 
 " A host of dancing daflfodils 
 Along the lake, beneath the trees, 
 Ten thousand dancing in the breeze." 
 
 The stanza beginning, 
 
 " Continuous as the stars that shine 
 And twinkle in the milky-way," 
 
 an insertion of 1815, is not found in the original ver- 
 sion, and for "jocund company" we there read "laugh- 
 ing company." The whole poem is filled with the 
 laughter and the dance of flowers and waves, and the 
 
138 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 contrast between the quiet couch, with its pensive mood, 
 and that involuntary aladriTix'^ ipavTasla of dancing 
 blossoms, becomes the more impressive. Perhaps the 
 stars in the milky-way twinkle, but assuredly they do 
 not dance ; and yet for sake of the " tossing their heads " 
 — ten thousand tossing their heads at once — we must 
 accept the new stanza of 1815, and make no ungrateful 
 comment.* 
 
 In the case of " Daffodils," new lines have been intro- 
 duced, and old lines have been altered. The same is 
 true to a far greater extent of " Ruth." Indeed so per- 
 plexingly have stanzas come in, and gone out, and changed 
 places in the several versions of that poem, that it is im- 
 possible here to present the facts in detail. It may be 
 said in general terms that " Ruth " is found in four 
 states — that of 1800, which is the least elaborated ; 
 secondly, that of 1802, in which many alterations, which 
 might be to the advantage of the poem if skilfully exe- 
 cuted, are made in a bungling manner ; thirdly, that of 
 1815, which nearly reverts to the original form; and 
 last, that of 1820, which resulted from all the sugges- 
 tions of 1802 and 1805 having been again taken up, 
 
 * In the edition of 1815, a note, worth quoting here, is appended to 
 "Daflfodils." "The subject of these stanzas is rather an elementary 
 f 3eling and simple impression (approaching to the nature of an ocular 
 spectrum) upon the imaginative faculty, than an exertion of it. The 
 one which follows [' Poor Susan '] is strictly a Reverie, and neither that 
 nor the next after it in succession, ' The Power of Music,' would have 
 been placed here except [to avoid a needless multiplication of the 
 classes.]" May I offer in this modest corner a thought or a fancy 
 which pleases me — that Wordsworth in placing side by side his ' ' Po wer 
 
 of Music," and his " Star-Gazers, " looked on the poems as companions 
 
 the one illustrating the gains of emotional excitation, when natural 
 and pure ; the other, the barrenness of knowledge unvitalised by the 
 emotions ? 
 
The Text of Wordsworth's Poems. 139 
 
 aud carried out by a thoroughly trained craftsman.* 
 Nothing remained to be done except to add the last 
 touch of perfection to a word or a line. 
 
 The reasons which induced Wordsworth to displace 
 an original reading and substitute a different one were 
 of various kinds. Sometimes a line was metrically 
 defective; it limped or floundered. If our eyes may 
 be trusted, against the incredulous protest of our ears, 
 the opening lines of "Personal Talk" were in 1807 — 
 
 " I am not one who much or oft delight 
 To season my fireside with personal talk 
 About friends, who live within an easy walk." 
 
 Of course a touch set the line right. Similarly the 
 piece beginning with the words of Sydney, " With how 
 sad steps, Moon, thou climb'st the sky," was by a 
 little manipulation transformed from a poem of fifteen 
 lines to a sonnet. i" Sometimes, again, it is an error as 
 to some point of fact which Wordsworth desires to cor 
 rect. The " broad green wave " that flashed images 
 round Leonard as he sailed under a cloudless sky 
 becomes a " broad blue wave ;" the "cowslip-gathering 
 in May's dewy prime " of the wanderer on Salisbury Plain 
 in her girlhood is transferred from May to June. The 
 Broom boasting her good fortune, exclaims : 
 
 " The Spring for me a garland weaves 
 Of yellow flowers and verdant leaves.'' 
 
 * In the Lyrical Ballads (1805) a fine addition was made, " It was a 
 fresh and glorious world," &c., and an important improvement effected 
 hy transposing stanzas. 
 
 t On the other hand a stanza opens with an imperfect line through 
 the rejection of Coleridge's "A simple child, dear brother Jim," 
 which had served to introduce the poem " We are Seven " in "Lyrical 
 Ballads." 
 
1 40 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 On reconsideration she finds her benefactor to be 
 Summer — 
 
 " On me such bounty Summer pours 
 That I am covered o'er with flowers." 
 
 Or again a word is found unsuitable, or has been im- 
 properly used — 
 
 " Forth he teems 
 His little song in gushes." 
 
 So Wordsworth wrote in " The Green Linnet," 1 807. 
 
 The Edinburgh Reviewer italicized the word teems, and 
 
 it disappeared from the poem. In the " Boy of Winan- 
 
 dermere " the word scene occurred twice — once in the 
 
 vague popular sense, which carries with it no reference 
 
 to anything visual — 
 
 "A wild scene 
 Of mirth and jocund din." 
 
 The passage is altered (1805) to " Concourse wild of 
 jocund din." * One adjective Wordsworth had loved and 
 used for its own sake with a peculiar fondness in his 
 earlier poems, the adjective sweet. A hard time of it 
 this innocent adjective had in after-years ; it was hunted 
 as a criminal, discovered in its nestling-places, dragged 
 to the critical judgment-seat, and sentenced, in numerous 
 instances, to perpetual banishment. Sweet smiles, 
 sweet looks, sweet flowers, sweet bowers, sweet flocks, 
 sweet mornings greet us no more where they once did, 
 and bright looks, soft bowers, fine flocks take their 
 place. 
 
 " No Nightingale did ever chaunt 
 So sweetly to reposing bands " 
 
 * See Sara Coleridge's note on this passage : " Biographia Literaria," 
 vol. ii. pp. 111-113 (ed. 1847). 
 
The Text of Wordsworth! s Poems. 141 
 
 as the Solitary Reaper sang ia Wordsworth's hearing — 
 
 " No sweeter voice was ever heard 
 In spring-time from the cuckoo-bird " 
 
 than that voice of hers. In later editions the lines 
 become, 
 
 " No Nightingale did ever chaunt 
 More welcome notes to weary bands. 
 
 A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard 
 In spring-time from the cuckoo-bird." 
 
 A special power of the verb to he, by which the predica- 
 tion of bare existence, apart from qualities and operations, 
 produces a certain spiritualising effect, had at one time 
 an attraction for Wordsworth's mind, which it afterwards 
 appears to have lost. He notices this power of the verb 
 in a letter which explains his feelings in writing " The 
 Leech-gatherer." " What," he asks, " is brought for- 
 ward ? A lonely place, ' a pond by which an old man 
 w(xs, far from all house and home ; ' not stood, nor sat, 
 but wchs — the figure presented in the most naked 
 simplicity possible." But this letter was written while 
 " The Leech-gatherer " was still in manuscript, and 
 when the poem appeared in print the xvas had been 
 replaced by stood. " The stars they were among my 
 dreams," Wordsworth wrote in 1798, and it is matter 
 of rejoicing that this beautiful line again took its place 
 in " The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman," after 
 it had for a time been dispossessed by the unimaginative 
 words: "The stars were iningled with my dreams." 
 Not so fortunate was the first poem, " On the Naming 
 of Places : " 
 
142 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 " Yet meanwhile 
 There was such deep contentment in the aif." 
 
 has been abandoned for 
 
 " But meanwhile prevailed 
 Such an entire contentment in the air.'' 
 
 Still greater is the loss in the sonnet beginning " It is 
 a beauteous evening calm and free," where the dwelling 
 effect of the word broods in the line — 
 
 " The gentleness of heaven broods o'er the sea," 
 
 is a poor gain to set over against the loss of that line of 
 1807, which rendered so purely that living union of the 
 abysses of the waters and the sky — 
 
 " The gentleness of heaven is on the sea." 
 
 Before leaving this sonnet we may note the happy 
 reversion of Wordsworth to the original reading of the 
 first line. In the complete collection of Sonnets, 1838, 
 we find — 
 
 " A.ir sleeps, — from strife or stir the clouds are free ; " 
 and again, a few years later, a second attempt was made 
 at improving what was perfect — 
 
 " A fairer face of evening cannot be." 
 But the simple positive statement that the time was 
 perfect sufSced, and it resumed its place at last. 
 
 Another group of minute verbal changes is worthy of 
 attention, because it shows some alteration of feeling on 
 Wordsworth's part with reference to poetical personifica- 
 tion. His recoil from the unreality and vapidity of 
 eighteenth-century work pretending to be imaginative 
 had gone too far. 
 
 " There ! that dusky spot 
 Beneath thee, that is England, there she lies," 
 
The Text of Wordsworth's Poems, 143 
 
 is truer to the aroused loyalty and love of our mother- 
 country than the original " there it lies." So, too — 
 
 " Ye children of a soil that doth advance 
 Her haughty brow against the coast of France," 
 
 is right, and the earlier " its haughty brow " was justly 
 condemned.* 
 
 Not a few of the later readings in "Wordsworth's text 
 had their origin in the writer's wish to temper some 
 expression which seemed too harsh or violent, to bring 
 within bounds some extravagance, or to tone down into 
 harmony with its surrounding some line of crude vivid- 
 ness. Thus the service of attendants in a public hospital 
 (" Guilt and Sorrow ") is spoken of at first as being 
 rendered with " careless cruelty ; " afterwards with " cold 
 formality;" the lawyer in "A Poet's Epitaph " is at first 
 bid to carry elsewhere 
 
 " The hardness of thy coward eye, 
 The falsehood of thy sallow face ; " 
 
 in later editions 
 
 " The keenness of that practised eye, 
 The hardness of that sallow face ;" 
 
 and the philosopher who would peep and botanise upon 
 his mother's grave has in tbe earliest text a "pin-point 
 of a soul," altered in 1815 to "that abject thing, thy 
 soul," and finally settling down into " thy ever-dwindling 
 soul." So again in " Hart-leap Well," the three bounds 
 of the hunted animal, in the first form of the tale, cover 
 
 * It is more questionable whether 
 
 "And yet thy heart 
 The lowliest duties on AerseJ/ did lay,'' 
 
 gains upon the original iUdf. Duties, Wordsworth no doubt argued, 
 belong to a person — not to a thing. 
 
1 44 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 no less than " nine roods " of ground, reduced at a later 
 time to " three roods ; " * in the same poem Sir Walter's 
 horse, after his eager up-hill race, stands " foaming like 
 a mountain cataract ; " the words appeared extravagant, 
 and the poet, at the cost of finding a new rhyme, altered 
 them, in a not unfortunate moment, to " white with 
 foam as if with cleaving sleet." A favourite dog — little 
 Music — had lived to extreme old age, when a gentle 
 death might seem a thing to be desired. In the 
 " Tribute to the Memory " of this dog, we read, in 
 1807— 
 
 " I prayed for thee, and that thy end were past." 
 
 And why not ? Had not Coleridge taught that 
 
 " He prayeth best who loveth best 
 All things both great and small ?" 
 
 Was not Music worth many sparrows ? In 1820, 
 Wordsworth, if he prayed, prayed in secret, and the line 
 is altered to " I grieved for thee and wished thy end 
 was past." 
 
 Perhaps no alteration falling under this head is more 
 remarkable than the omission from the Thanksgiving 
 Ode, 1816, of the awful words addressed to the Lord of 
 Hosts — 
 
 " But Thy most dreaded instrument. 
 In working out a pure intent. 
 Is Man — arrayed for mutual slaughter — 
 Yea, Carnage is thy daughter ! " 
 
 * So also in " Anecdote for Fathers " (1798)— 
 
 " And/j;e times to the child I said, 
 ' Why, Edward, tell me why ? ' " 
 
 changed to "three, times" (after 1843). And so, again, Leonard's age 
 in " The Brothers," at the date when he parts from James, is altered 
 from thirteen to sixteen, to allow time for the growth of so deep a 
 fraternal love. 
 
The Text of Wordsworth's Poems. 145 
 
 These lines (tlie word " dreaded" having been changed 
 to " awful") were retained as late as 1843. The hour 
 of stern enthusiasm, inspired by a prophetic vision, 
 needs not to be revised and corrected by the hour of 
 meditative calm. At the same time a more important 
 change was effected. The Ode was sliced into a number 
 of pieces ; some of these remained to represent the Ode 
 of ] 8 1 6 as originally published ; the others were pieced 
 together to form the companion Ode now dated 1815. 
 It is painful to think that the poem possessed so little 
 unity of inward life as to allow of this slicing process. 
 Can it have been that the portion now dated 1815 was 
 indeed written in that year, was worked into the ode, 
 kindred in subject, of the following year, and that in 
 dividing the poem as Wordsworth did at the last, he was 
 but recurring to the original and natural arrangement of 
 his first manuscript ? 
 
 Such changes were not always judicious. Some of 
 them, as has been said, may have been concessions to 
 Wordsworth's readers. "On my alluding," Crabb 
 Eobinson recorded in 1815, "to the lines — 
 
 ' I've measured it from side to side, 
 'Tis three feet long and two feet wide,' 
 
 and confessing that I dared not read them aloud in 
 company, he said, 'They ought to be liked.'" The 
 poet, however, at length capitulated to his critics. I 
 must confess to some regret for the loss of the precise 
 statistics in this poem ; I really wish to know whether 
 Martha Eay drowned her baby in the little pond, or not ; 
 perhaps from a lack of humour on my part the words 
 
 K 
 
1 46 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 have never made me smile, and the strangeness and 
 mystery of the poem seemed to me the more affecting 
 because they lived and moved amid details so prosaic 
 and precise* One change in " The Thorn " assuredly 
 no true lover of the " Lyrical Ballads " can accept, that 
 which transforms plain old Farmer Simpson into " grey- 
 haired Wilfred of the glen ; " if this is to be received, 
 then let Martha Kay obtain leave to be known hence- 
 forth as Anna Matilda or Laura Maria, and Stephen Hill 
 in future be named Lothario. 
 
 Nor can a true lover of Wordsworth feel anything but 
 blushing shame at the spurious dignity lent to the 
 voyage of the Blind Highland Boy by the poetical craft 
 in which he drifts away (1815), Wordsworth having 
 consigned to obscurity that humbler vessel, 
 
 " A household tub, like one of those 
 Which women use to wash their clothes.'' (1807.) 
 
 The turtle-shell was, however, in 1815, a turtle-shell 
 and nothing more. Again yielding to external pressure 
 the lines which compare it to the pearly car of Amphi- 
 trite, and the coracle on V^aga's breast, were added 
 (1820); we have indeed travelled far from the Scottish 
 salt-sea loch and the little Highland cottage. Now and 
 
 * Wordsworth probably would have defended the lines on dramatic 
 grounds, the supposed narrator being some such man as " a captain of a 
 small trading vessel . . . who, being past the middle age of life, had 
 retired upon an annuity, or small independent income, to some village 
 or country town of which he was not a native." The Edmhwrgh 
 iJmewer parodies the ammoBce .• "Of this piece the reader will neces- 
 sarily form a very erroneous judgment, unless he is apprised that it 
 was written by a pale man in a green coat, sitting cross-legged on an 
 oaken stool, with a scratch on his nose, and a spelling dictionary on a 
 table." 
 
The Text of Wordsworth! s Poems. 147 
 
 again a touch of homely reality disappears in the later 
 versions, as in "Personal Talk'' that reference to the 
 little room at Town-End, Grasmere, in which Words- 
 worth and his sister ate and wrote. " The last line but 
 two stood at first," Wordsworth himself said, "better 
 and more characteristically, thus : 
 
 ' By my half-kitchen, my half -parlour fire.' " 
 
 Sometimes a phrase, ennobled by its power of spiritual 
 interpretation, is condemned on the ground that it is 
 over-familiar ; Wordsworth listened and listened to the 
 voice of the Solitary Reaper, and did not move away 
 until his soul was satisfied : 
 
 " I listen'd till I had ray fill," 
 
 a perfect line, which gives way in later editions to the 
 very commonplace one — ■ 
 
 " I listened, motionless and still." 
 
 Sometimes a lively metaphorical expression is replaced 
 by one less vivid : 
 
 " The torrent down the rocky dell 
 Came thundering loud and fast," 
 
 and the Eglantine trembled ; in a " Poem of the Fancy," 
 the earlier reading might have been permitted to 
 stand, — 
 
 " The stream came thundering down the dell, 
 And gallop'd loud and fast." 
 
 The apostrophe to the Daisy as " bold lover of the sun " 
 is an audacity which surely justifies itself, yet it could 
 not keep its place. Crabb Robinson notes in his diary. 
 
148 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 1815, "Wordsworth has substituted ebullient iot fiery, 
 
 speaking of the nightingale. 
 
 ' Nightingale, thou surely art 
 A creature of a fiery heart,' 
 
 and jocund for laughing, applied to the daffodils ; but 
 
 he will probably restore the original epithets." Half 
 
 of the prophecy was fortunately fulfilled, and we can 
 
 read " The Nightingale" without feeling that, like Mac- 
 
 beth's Amen, the ebullient sticks in our throats. Would 
 
 that Wordsworth, in the happy hour which restored the 
 
 " fiery heart" to the Nightingale, had given us back the 
 
 fire in the old man's eyes who stood upon the margin of 
 
 the moorish flood : 
 
 " Ere he replied, a flash of mild surprise 
 Broke from the sable orbs of his yet vivid eyes." 
 
 These are fine lines, but we rather hold by the original, 
 
 " He answered me with pleasure and surprise. 
 And there was while he spake a fire about his eyes." * 
 
 But I have played the part of the critical Polouius 
 long enough. " Mdbled queen is good," or rather, in- 
 deed, " this is too long," as was the chamberlain's beard. 
 The reader, however, who has followed me so far, will 
 permit a brief notice of four poems which have under- 
 gone particularly interesting alterations. The second 
 verse of the " Cuckoo" is an example of the attainment 
 of perfect words, which look most simple, natural, and 
 
 * Some readers will, perhaps, be glad to restore in their private 
 thoughts the original text of a touching verse in " The Fountain : " — 
 " ' And, Matthew, for thy children dead, 
 I'll be a son to thee,' 
 At this he grasp'd his hands and said, 
 ' Alas ! that cannot be. ' " 
 
The Text of Wordsworth's Poems. 149 
 
 direct, through a series of fortunate experiments. The 
 various attempts may be presented without comment : — 
 
 " While I am lying on the grass, 
 I hear thy restless shout ; 
 From hill to hill it seems to pass 
 About, and all about ! " (1 807.) 
 
 While I am lying on the grass, 
 
 Thy loud note smites my ear ! — 
 From hill to hill it seems to pass, 
 
 At once far off and near !" (1815.) 
 
 " While I am lying on the grass, 
 Thy loud note smites my ear ; 
 It seems to fill the whole air's space. 
 At once far off and near." (1820.) 
 
 " While I am lying on the grass. 
 Thy two-fold shout I hear. 
 That seems to fill the whole air's space, 
 As loud far off as near." (1827.) 
 
 " While I am lying on the grass, 
 Thy two-fold shout I hear ; 
 From hill to hill it seems to pass, 
 
 At once far off and near. (1849 ; certainly after 1843.) 
 
 Nearly half a century was needed for the creation of 
 this dewdrop of poetry.* 
 
 Among the characteristic defects of Wordsworth's 
 poetry commented on by Coleridge, he, notices " thoughts 
 and images too great for the subject," and as an example 
 he cites the poem on the " Gipsies." The speaker 
 in that poem expresses his indignation at the listless 
 inactivity of the poor tawny wanderers, during one day, 
 " in a series of lines, the diction and imagery of which 
 
 * This example of Wordsworth's alterations of the text seems also 
 to have struck Professor Knight, who presents the various readings in 
 the Preface to his edition of Wordsworth's Poetical Works, as I had 
 done in this article. 
 
150 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 would have been rather above than below the mark, 
 had they been applied to the immense empire of China, 
 unprogressive for thirty centuries." I am not about to 
 consider the justice of this criticism, but to call atten- 
 tion to the closing lines of the poem as it originally 
 stood. The sun has gone to rest after his labour, the 
 evening star has come forth, the mighty moon looks this 
 
 way: — 
 
 " But they 
 Eegard her not ; — oh, better wrong and strife, 
 Better vain deeds or evil than such life ! 
 The silent heavens have goings on ; 
 The stars have tasks — but these have none." 
 
 When the first recast of this passage was made, the last 
 two lines were still retained in conjunction with some 
 added lines of inferior quality, but finally they were 
 altogether excluded, and the poem closes with a half- 
 apology for the tawny wanderers : — 
 
 " They are what their birth 
 And breeding suffer them to be : 
 Wild outcasts of society." 
 
 Now we do not take too generous a view of human in- 
 telligence when we say that several thousands of men, 
 women, and children could at the present moment utter, 
 if need were, this very obvious reflection. But who at 
 any time, except Wordsworth, could have written the 
 words, 
 
 " The silent heavens have goings on " ? 
 
 And for this reason they must not pass from our memory. 
 
 " Beggars," a poem for which Wordsworth had a 
 
 special regard, underwent so many rehandlings, and 
 
The Text of Wordsworth's Poems. 1 5 1 
 
 the details of these are so perplexing, that it is im- 
 possible to put them here before the reader. He 
 would do well to compare the states of the poem in 
 1807 (or 1815) with those of 1820, 1827, and 1832. 
 It will be seen that the long drab-coloured cloak of the 
 majestic beggar, after becoming a blue mantle, finally 
 descended to her feet with a graceful flow. The lines, 
 
 " Haughty, as if her eye had seen 
 Its own light to a distance thrown," 
 
 replace others more simple, less grand ; the stanza 
 
 which compares the boys to " precursors of Aurora's 
 
 car" is an after-thought of 1827 ; the boys in whose 
 
 " fraternal features" the poet can now trace 
 
 " Unquestionable lines of that wild suppliant's face " 
 
 were at first two brothers, 
 
 " eight and ten years old, 
 And like that woman's face as gold is like to gold." 
 
 The changes, as will be perceived, all tend in the direc- 
 tion of a more dignified treatment of the subject. 
 
 The single example of absolute reversal by Words- 
 worth of the central motive of one of his own poems is 
 in "Laodamia." The verbal changes, indeed, in the 
 poem are few : — 
 
 " The gods approve 
 The depth and not the tumult of the soul, 
 Thefervow — not the impotence of love," 
 
 stood originally where now we find " A fervent, not un- 
 governable love," and, influenced probably by Lander's 
 criticism, both the first verse was recast, and those lines 
 altered in which the shade of Protesilaus speaks, 
 
 " As a witness, of a second birth 
 For all that is most perfect upon earth." 
 
152 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 " Witness " and " second birth ! " exclaimed Landor, 
 "however holy and venerable in themselves, come 
 stinking and reeking to us from the conventicle." But 
 these are matters of secondary importance. It is the 
 reversal of the moral judgment on Laodamia's un- 
 governed love of her lord which we know not how to 
 accept. Why should she, who was at first judged gently 
 and forgiven, quoniam dilexit multum, be afterwards 
 condemned to everlasting banishment in " a grosser 
 clime, apart from happy ghosts " ? By no weak pity 
 ■would Wordsworth or the gods be moved for a time ; 
 after many hesitations and questionings (apparent 
 through the altering forms of the text), it was at length 
 decreed that the impassioned queen should not be for 
 ever exiled from the presence of him she loved ; the 
 " grosser clime " is no longer her doom ; only secluded 
 from the spirits who gather flowers of blissful quiet she 
 abides, wearing out her appointed time — a season of 
 hours now no sadder than a purgatorial term.* 
 
 * See, on " Laodamia," an interesting piece of criticism in "Guesses 
 at Truth " {Second Series), and a singularly hard, unsympathetic study 
 by Sara Coleridge : " Memoir and Letters," vol. ii. 
 
 Mention ought perhaps to have been made of a poem never included, 
 I believe, in any edition of Wordsworth's works, "The Installation 
 Ode," 1847, written in compliance with a request not to be refused for 
 the occasion of Prince Albert's Installation as Chancellor of the Uni- 
 versity of Cambridge. A short and touching letter of the aged poet will 
 be found in Mr Theodore Martin's " Life of the Prince Consort." The 
 Ode is printed in The Athenceam, July 10th, 1847. Dora Qaillinan, 
 who had been for some months declining, died on July 9th. This 
 Laureate-poem, born in sorrow, was only in part of Wordsworth's 
 authorship ; it was completed by his nephew, the late Bishop of 
 Lincoln. 
 
VICTORIAN LITERATURE. 
 
 The literature of the Elizabethan age was the flowering 
 through art of a new faith and a new joy — a faith in 
 the spiritual truths recovered by the Reformation move- 
 ment, a joy in the world of nature and of human life as 
 presented in the magic mirror of the Renaissance. 
 Within a decade of years ■ having fqr its centre the year 
 of Queen Elizabeth's accession, were born Sidney, 
 Spenser, Raleigh, Chapman, Daniel, Drayton, Marlowe, 
 Hooker, Bacon, Shakspere. Never before or since in 
 England were such prizes drawn in the lottery of babies. 
 Never before or since had the good fairies who bring 
 gifts to cradles so busy a time. But it was not until 
 Elizabeth's reign had run more than half its course, and 
 these boys were grown to man's estate, that the great 
 summer of literature showed its flowers and fruit. The 
 " Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity," the six books of the 
 " Faerie Queene," the " Essays " of Bacon, " Romeo and 
 Juliet," " As You Like It," and " Henry V." belong to 
 the last period of Elizabeth's reign, that which opens 
 with the defeat of the Armada; and many writings 
 which we commonly class under the head of Elizabethan 
 literature — "King Lear" and "The Tempest," "The 
 Advancement of Learning," " The History of the World," 
 " The Alchemist " and " The Silent Woman " — are 
 named Elizabethan only because they continue the 
 
1 54 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 same literary movenaent and carry it on through the 
 period which had hardly culminated before her death. 
 
 The literature of the reign of Queen Anne was the 
 expression of the better mind of England when it had 
 recovered itself through good sense and moderation of 
 temper from the Puritan excess and from the Cavalier 
 excess. Enthusiasm was discredited, and faith had no 
 wings to soar ; but it was something to have escaped the 
 spiritual orgies of the saints and the sensual riot of the 
 king's new courtiers ; it was something to have attained 
 to a sober way of regarding human life, and to the pro- 
 visional resting-place of a philosophical and theological 
 compromise. Addison's humane smile, Pope's ethics of 
 good sense, and the exquisite felicity of manner in each 
 writer, represent and justify the epoch. 
 
 Our own age has been named the sceculum realisticum; 
 men of science have claimed it as their own, and count- 
 less pseans have been chanted in honour of our material 
 and mechanical advancement. Yet it is hardly less 
 distinguished by its ardours of hope and aspiration, by 
 its eager and anxious search for spiritual truth, by its 
 restlessness in presence of spiritual anarchy, by its de- 
 sire for some spiritual order. It has been pre-eminently 
 an age of intellectual and moral trial, difficulty and 
 danger ; of bitter farewells to things of the past, of 
 ardent welcomes to things as yet but dimly discerned in 
 the coming y^ears ; of dissatisfaction with the actual and 
 of immense desire ; an age of seekers for light, each 
 having trouble too plainly written upon his forehead. 
 
 If a precise date must be chosen separating the present 
 period of literature from that which immediately pre- 
 
Victorian Literature. 155 
 
 cedes it, we shall do well to fix on the year 1832. In 
 that year the Bill for the representation of the people 
 placed the future destiny of England in the hands of the 
 middle classes, and a series of social and political reforms 
 speedily followed. In that year died a great imaginative 
 restorer of the past, and also a great intellectual pioneer 
 of the future. Amid his nineteenth-century feudalisms, 
 within sound of the old Border river, Scott passed away, 
 murmuring to himself, as he lay in his bed, some fragment 
 of the Litany or verse from the venerable hymns of the 
 Romish ritual. On an autumn evening his body was 
 laid in the resting-place of his forefathers amid the 
 monastic ruins of Dryburgh. It was in London, just 
 at the close of a fierce political struggle, that Jeremy 
 Bentham died. To the last he had been " codifying like 
 any dragon"; when he heard the verdict of his physi- 
 cian, that death was inevitable, the cheerful utilitarian 
 thought first of a practical application of his own doc- 
 trine. " Very well," he said serenely, " be it so ; then 
 minimise pain," and so departed, leaving his viscera to 
 be dissected for the benefit of mankind, and his skeleton 
 when duly arrayed to do the honours at University 
 College. 
 
 By the year 1832 the flood-tide of English poetry had 
 withdrawn from the shores which had lightened and sung 
 with the splendour and music of the earlier days of the 
 century. It was eleven years since Keats had found 
 rest in the flowery cemetery at Rome ; ten years since 
 Shelley, in a whirl of sea-mist, had solved the great 
 mystery that had haunted him since boyhood. Byron's 
 memory was still a power, but a power that constantly 
 
156 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 waned. Southey had forsaken poetry, and was just now 
 rejoicing over the words, Laus Deo, written on the last 
 page of his " History of the Peninsular War ; " surely 
 at last those " subsecive hours " were at hand in which 
 he might bring to a fruitful outcome the great labour of 
 two-and-thirty years, his never- to-be- written " History 
 of Portugal." It was in 1832 that Wordsworth, con- 
 scious of the loss of the glory and the freshness of his 
 earlier manhood, and conscious also that he had never 
 forfeited a poet's prerogative, wrote those lines prefixed 
 to his complete works, in which he exhorts the heaven- 
 inspired singer to fidelity and contentment, whether he 
 shine as a great star in the zenith or burn like an 
 untended watch - fire on the ridge of some dark 
 mountain : — 
 
 " If thou, indeed, derive thy light from Heaven, 
 Then, to the measure of that heaven-born light. 
 Shine, Poet ! in thy place, and be content." 
 
 Few of Wordsworth's poems of later date than 1832 
 can be said to dart their beams with planetary influence 
 from the zenith. Yet there is no fond self-pity in his 
 lines, as there are in those which Coleridge, compassed 
 about with infirmity, printed in that same year, 1832, 
 in BlcLckwood's Magazine, under the title " The Old 
 Man's Sigh " : — 
 
 " Where no hope is, life's a warning 
 That only serves to make us grieve 
 
 In our old age, 
 "Whose bruised -wings quarrel with the bars of the still 
 narrowing cage." * 
 
 * The text was afterwards altered, and the poem was made a por- 
 tion of "Youth and Age," 
 
Victorian Literature. 157 
 
 Coleridge, indeed, had but a brief waiting before 
 release from the cage was granted him. "Saw Cole- 
 ridge in bed," writes Crabb Robinson (April 12, 1832). 
 " He looked beautifully — his eye remarkably brilliant 
 — and he talked as eloquently as ever." The voyager 
 through strange seas of thought still held men with his 
 glittering eye and told his tale of wonder, but his 
 voyaging and his work were indeed over. This year, 
 1832, which we have taken as the line of division 
 between Victorian literature and that of the first literary 
 period of the nineteenth century, was also the year of 
 the death of an illustrious poet whose earlier verses had 
 delighted Burke and won the approval of Johnson, and 
 whose later writings were celebrated by Byron and had 
 been the solace of Scott's dying days. Crabbe, whose 
 life and poetry thus served to link together two widely 
 different epochs of literature, touched the boundary of a 
 third era, but his foot was not permitted to pass beyond 
 the limit. 
 
 A student of the poetry of the age of Elizabeth who 
 happens to be also a reader of the poetry of our own 
 time, can hardly fail to be impressed by one important 
 point of contrast between these two bodies of literature. 
 The poets of the Elizabethan age — excepting, perhaps, 
 Spenser — seem to have got on very happily and success- 
 fully without theories of human life or doctrines respecting 
 human society ; but our nineteenth-century poets are 
 almost all sorely puzzled about certain problems of 
 existence, and, having laboured at their solution, come 
 forward witb some lightening of the burden of the 
 mystery, with some hope or some solace ; or else they 
 
158 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 deliberately and studiously turn away from this spiritual 
 travail, not without an underlying consciousness that 
 such turning away is treasonable, to seek for beauty or 
 pleasure or repose. In those strenuous days of the 
 English Renaissance, so full of resolution and energy and 
 achievement, when a broad, healthy, mundane activity 
 replaced the intensity and wistfuluess and passion of 
 mediieval religion and the exaltations of chivalry ; when 
 the world grew spacious and substantial, when mirth was 
 open and unashamed, and when the tragedy of life con- 
 sisted in positive wrestling of man with man and of 
 nation with nation — in those days there was an absorb- 
 ing interest in action and the tug of human passions ; 
 the vital relation of man with man in mutual love or 
 conflict was that which the imagination of the period 
 delighted to present to itself ; it was the age of the 
 drama, and men did not pause in the career of living to 
 devise systems or theories or doctrines of life. But the 
 unity of national thought and feeling ceased when Puritan 
 stood over against Anglican and Roundhead against 
 Cavalier. It became necessary to pause and consider 
 and decide. A youth of fine moral temper coming to 
 manhood when Milton wrote his " Comus," had a choice 
 to make — a choice between two doctrines in religion, two 
 parties in the State, two principles of human conduct. 
 Instead of that free abandonment to the action and 
 passion of the world, characteristic of the Elizabethan 
 period, there was now a self-conscious pursuit of certain 
 ideals — an ideal of loyalty to Church and Crown, with 
 grace and gallantry and wit, or else the stern Puritan 
 ideals — the vigorous liberty of a Republic ; the Church, 
 
Victorian Literature, ■ 159 
 
 a congregation of saints; and a severity and grave 
 majesty of personal character. Milton is deeply inter- 
 ested in providing himself and others with a moral rule 
 of life, and with some doctrine which shall explain the 
 mysteries of existence. He must needs get some answer 
 to the why and wherefore, the whence and whither of the 
 world. Shakspere had cared to see what things are, 
 all of pity and terror, all of beauty and mirth, that 
 human life contains — Lear in the storm, and Falstaff in 
 the tavern, and Perdita among her flowers. He had 
 said, " These things are," and had refused to put the 
 question, " How can these things be ? " Milton, on the 
 contrary, in the forefront of his epic, announces with the 
 confidence of a great dogmatist that, aided by Divine 
 illumination, he aspires " to justify the ways of God to 
 man." 
 
 Our own age is and has been, in a far profounder 
 sense than the term can be applied to the age of Milton, 
 an age of revolution. Society, founded on the old feudal 
 doctrines, has gone to wreck in the storms that have 
 blown over Europe during the last hundred years. A 
 new industrial and democratic period has been in- 
 augurated ; already the interregnum of government by 
 the middle classes has proved its provisiocal character. 
 But the social and political forms suitable to this new 
 epoch are as yet unorganised, and perhaps have not as 
 yet been truly conceived. The contributions towards an 
 ideal reconstruction of society by Fourier, by Eobert 
 Owen, by Auguste Comte, by Lasalle and Karl Marx, 
 testify to the profound dissatisfaction of aspiring minds 
 with the present chaos of our social and political rela- 
 
1 60 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 tions ; and we have seen within the last few years that 
 masses of men, filled with discontent and immoderate 
 hopes that spring from the ashes of despair, are danger- 
 ously eager to turn into actual experiment the immature 
 ideas of the thinkers. "What we want before all else is 
 a true thought, or body of organic thoughts, large and 
 reasonable, which shall include all the conditions of our 
 case. 
 
 Then again it is evident that a prolonged testing of 
 religious ideas has been going forward. Theology, once 
 the science of sciences, is said to be superseded, and in 
 its place we have got a " science of religions." God, to 
 whom once all highest hopes and fears tended and were 
 referred, the living God whom man. His creature, might 
 love and adore aad obey, has been superannuated, and 
 we are requested to cultivate henceforth enthusiasm on 
 behalf of "a stream of tendency" which "makes for 
 righteousness." Or perhaps it is more in harmony with 
 the principles of a scientific age to direct our devout 
 emotions to the great ensemble of humanity : " en- 
 semble of humanity, thou art my ensemble ; early will 
 I seek thee : my soul thirsteth for thee in a dry and 
 thirsty land, where no water is." Or yet again may it 
 not be that we can dispense with this awkward en- 
 semble — a leviathan of pettinesses — and recognising the 
 existence of an Unknowable, may possess in that recog- 
 nition the essence of all religions : " Sing unto the Un- 
 knowable, ye saints of its, and give thanks at the 
 remembrance of its unknowableness." 
 
 It takes a little time and some tuning of the ear 
 before we can feel that the new psalmody is quite as 
 
Victorian Literature. 1 6 1 
 
 happy in its phrasing as the old. The revolution or 
 threatened revolution in the religious order seems to us 
 no less real and no less important than that in the 
 political and social order. In truth, not a conception of 
 any kind respecting the world and man and the life of 
 man remains what it was a century since. Science sap- 
 ping in upon every side of human thought and feeling, 
 is effecting in our views of the individual and of the 
 race a modification as startling as that effected in cos- 
 mical conceptions by the discovery of Copernicus that 
 this earth is not the centre of the universe, but one orb 
 among its brother orbs in a system too vast and glorious 
 for imagination to comprehend. The past of humanity 
 has expanded from the six thousand years of the old 
 biblical chronologists to measureless aeons of time ; the 
 sense of the myriad, intimate relations between the 
 present and all this past has grown strong within us, per- 
 haps tyrannously strong ; while, at the same time, it is 
 impossible to restrain the imagination from a forward 
 gaze into futurity, which seems to open a vista as 
 remote and unfathomable as the past. We were once 
 apes or ascidians, therefore we shall some day be the 
 angels of this earth.* Since Oordorcet speculated and 
 
 * Or possibly crows. " 'You must read the "Eevelationsof Chaos,'" 
 said Lady Constance to Tancred," in Disraeli's novel ; " 'it is all ex- 
 plained. But vphat is most interesting is the way in which man has 
 been developed. You know, all is development. The principle is 
 perpetually going on. First, there was nothing, then there was some- 
 thing ; then, I forget the next, I think there were shells, then fishes ; 
 then we came, let me see, did we come next ? Never mind that ; we 
 came at last. And the next change there will be something very 
 superior to us, something with wings. Ah ! that's it : we were fishes, 
 and I lielieve we shall be crows. But you must read it. ' 'I do not 
 believe I ever was a fish,' said Tancred." 
 
 ti 
 
1 62 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 since Shelley sang, there have been wild hopes of 
 human perfectability in the prophetic soul of the world 
 dreaming of things to come ; and in soberness and truth 
 there has grown up a general confidence in a progress 
 of mankind towards good, which seems to be justified by 
 the most careful scrutiny of the past history of humanity 
 from primitive barbarism to the present imperfect forms 
 of civilisation. If, moreover, the conviction that we 
 and all that surrounds us have been so largely deter- 
 mined by the past sometimes weighs on us with tyran- 
 ous power, the thought that we in our turn are shaping 
 the destinies of future generations becomes a moral 
 motive of almost irresistible force, compelling us to high 
 resolve and dutiful action. 
 
 The stress of the spiritual and social revolution has 
 been widely felt during the second half of the last fifty 
 years ; the twenty-five years which preceded these were 
 a period of comparative tranquillity, a period during 
 which the vast additions made to the means and appli- 
 ances of living somewhat hid out of view the dangers 
 and difficulties of life itself from eyes that did not possess 
 the true seer's vision. The ten-pound householder had 
 his vote ; slavery was abolished in the colonies ; the 
 evils of pauperism were met by a Poor Law ; the bread- 
 tax was abolished ; the people were advancing in 
 education ; useful knowledge was made accessible in 
 cheap publications ; a man could travel forty miles in 
 the time in which his father could have travelled ten ; 
 more iron, more coal, was dug out of the earth ; more 
 wheels were whirling, more shuttles flew, more looms 
 rattled, more cotton was spun, more cloth was sold. 
 
Victorian Literature. 163 
 
 The statistics of progress were surely enough to intoxi- 
 cate with joy a lover of his species. 
 
 The sanguine temper of the period and its somewhat 
 shallow, material conception of human welfare, are well 
 represented in the writings of Macaulay. Incompar- 
 ably great as an accumulator, arranger, and setter-forth 
 of knowledge, he must accept a subordinate place if 
 judged by spiritual standards. Prosperous himself 
 through all his years, which marched with the years of 
 the century, never troubled by inward doubt and per- 
 plexity or falterings of heart, never borne away by eager 
 aspirations towards some unattainable spiritual perfection, 
 Macaulay loved his age as a good boy might love an 
 indulgent mother, who gave no end of cakes and pocket- 
 money, and was jolly to all the other fellows as well as to 
 himself And the mother was justly proud of her vigorous, 
 kindly, cheerful, clever son. How much to her liking 
 was that contrast between the Platonic and the Baconian 
 philosophy : " An acre in Middlesex is better than a prin- 
 cipality in Utopia. The smallest actual good is better 
 than the most magnificent promises of impossibilities. 
 The wise man of the Stoics would, no doubt, be a 
 grander object than a steam-engine. But there are 
 steam-engines. And the wise man of the Stoics is yet 
 to be born." And a thousand readers huzzaed and 
 tossed up their caps for the steam-engine, and held Plato 
 and Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus cheap. Southey, 
 comparing the old cottages of the English peasantry, the 
 solid weather-stained material, the ornamented chim- 
 neys, round or square, the hedge of dipt box beneath 
 the windows, the rose-bushes beside the door, the little 
 
1 64 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 patch of flower-ground with its tall hollyhocks in front, 
 the orchard with its bank of daffodils and snowdrops — 
 Southey, comparing these with the new cottages of the 
 manufacturers built upon the manufacturing pattern, 
 naked and in a row, had asked, " How is it that every- 
 thing which is connected with manufactures presents 
 such features of unqualified deformity?" — a question 
 which Mr Ruskin and Mr William Morris, and in his 
 own way Mr Frederic Harrison, are asking to-day. And 
 Macaulay answered with a contemptuous snort, " Here 
 is wisdom. Here are principles on which nations are 
 to be governed. Rose-bushes and poor-rates, rather 
 than steam-engines and independence." Huzza ! there- 
 fore, once more for the steam-engine ; all is going on 
 beautifully with England : laisser /aire, laisser aller. 
 " It is not by the interrneddling of Mr Southey's idol, 
 the omniscient and omnipotent state, but by the prudence 
 and energy of the people, that England has hitherto 
 been carried forward in civilisation, and it is to the 
 same prudence and the same energy that we now look 
 with comfort and good hope." Truly the whirligig of 
 time has brought Southey and the provident, though 
 not omniscient or omnipotent, state their revenge. 
 
 Tender regrets for the past, for the age when English 
 hands could rear the Cathedral, when English hearts 
 could lift one common hymn of faith and praise, are, if 
 we may trust Macaulay, the follies of the sentimentalist. 
 In those ages " noblemen were destitute of comforts the 
 want of which would be intolerable to a modern foot- 
 man, farmers and shopkeepers breakfasted on loaves the 
 very sight of which would raise a riot in a modern 
 
Victorian Literature. 165 
 
 workhouse." But if it be folly to chase backward 
 through time a vanishing mirage, we may confidently 
 look forward to a golden age iu the near future — a 
 golden age of more abundant beef and richer pudding. 
 " It may well be, in the twentieth century, that the 
 peasant of Dorsetshire may think himself miserably paid 
 with fifteen shillings a week ; that the carpenter at 
 Greenwich may receive ten shillings a day ; that labour- 
 ing men may be as little used to dine without meat as 
 they now are to eat rye-bread." Why let fancy thus 
 halt upon the borders of the terrestrial paradise ? Why 
 not imagine the twenty-first century, when the carpenter 
 may receive a pound a day, and have butcher's meat at 
 dinner, breakfast, and tea? In May, 1851, Macaulay 
 visited the great Exhibition, and strolled for a long time 
 under its glass and iron through acres of glorified shops. 
 " Crystal Palace — bless the mark ! — is fast getting 
 ready," Carlyle had written in his diary a few days 
 before this ; " and bearded figures already grow frequent 
 on the streets ; ' all nations ' crowding to us with their 
 so-called industry or ostentatious frothery. All the 
 loose population of London pours itself every holiday 
 into Hyde Park round this strange edifice. ... My 
 mad humour is urging me to flight from this monstrous 
 place." " I went to the Exhibition," writes Macaulay, 
 " and lounged there during some hours. I never knew 
 a sight which extorted from all ages, classes, and nations, 
 such unanimous and genuine admiration. I felt a glow 
 of eloquence, or something like it, come on me from the 
 mere effect of the place." And again, on the opening 
 day : " I made my way into the building ; a most 
 
1 66 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 gorgeous sight ; vast, graceful, beyond the dreams of 
 the Arabian romances. I cannot think that the Caesars 
 ever exhibited a more splendid spectacle. I was quite 
 dazzled, and I felt as I did on entering St Peter's." 
 Brilliant and indefatigable son of an age of commerce 
 and middle-class ascendancy ! his eloquent pages would 
 nowhere else read so well as under those best of iron 
 girders, beneath the splendours of the largest plate-glass, 
 and amid such decorations, and art, and industry — 
 where nothing nestles or lurks, but all is set forth for 
 display — as were the glory and delight of the year 
 ISol. 
 
 Macaulay, the historian of the first Victorian period, 
 with his company of brilliant actors and his splendid 
 spectacle, had but one rival in popularity, and that rival, 
 the novelist of the period, exhibits with equal force, in 
 his own province of literature, the characteristics of the 
 time, its sanguine temper, its bourgeois ideals. To 
 have awakened the laughter of innumerable readers 
 during half a century is to have been no slight benefac- 
 tor of the world; and 1886, the jubilee year of Pick- 
 wick, ought to have been celebrated with bumpers and 
 exuberant mirth. England, the " weary Titan " of Mr 
 Arnold's majestic simile, is all the better in health for 
 having had to hold her sides with glee. And the tears 
 that have been shed for little Nell and Paul Dombey 
 and Tiny Tim have been a kindly dew, laying some of 
 the dust of the world. And yet the accusations of 
 melodrama, of pseudo-pathos, of overwrought caricature, 
 have been brought against Dickens not unjustly. We 
 have known a nobler laughter than his, and tears more 
 
Victorian Literature. 167 
 
 sacred. The laughter of one whose vision embraces the 
 deepest and highest facts of life has in it a lyrical purity 
 and passion which uplift the spirit as the laughter of 
 Dickens never can ; in such mirth there is no loose 
 squandering of the heart, no orgy of animal spirits, nor 
 does it spring from a perception of trivial incongruities ; 
 there is nothing in it of the mere grin ; it is exquisite, 
 refined, radiant, because it grows from a hidden root of 
 severity. Such is the mirth of Shakspere's "Tempest" 
 and the " Winter's Tale," following hard upon his " King 
 Lear " and " Othello." And in the tears of one who has 
 conversed with the soul in the great moments of its fate 
 there is no moisture of sentimentalism. The pathos is 
 divested of all prettiness ; it is more than an affair of 
 the nerves, or even of the heart. It is at its highest the 
 exquisite spiritual pity, allied with the unfaltering justice, 
 of Dante. We rejoice that Dickens should have quick- 
 ened the sensibility of the English middle class for the 
 trials and sufferings and sorrows of the poor ; we rejoice 
 that he should have gladdened the world with inex- 
 haustible comedy and farce. But it were better if he 
 had discovered that for man and the life of man there 
 is something needful over and above good spirits, a 
 sufficient dinner, and overflowing good-nature. His 
 ideal of human happiness was that of his readers ; their 
 middle-class notions of human well-being and of what is 
 most admirable in character he gave them back, ani- 
 mated by his own vigorous animal spirits — that super- 
 abundant vitality which, when he wrote the name 
 " Charles Dickens," produced such a whirl of flourishes 
 before the pen could rest. Banish from earth some few 
 
1 68 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 monsters of selfishness, malignity, and hypocrisy, set to 
 rights a few obvious imperfections in the machinery of 
 society, inspire all men with a cheery benevolence, and 
 everything will go well with this excellent world of 
 ours. Such in brief was the teaching delivered by 
 Dickens to his time, and he claimed to be regarded as a 
 teacher. But let us rather choose to think of him as a 
 widener of our sympathies, and as a creator of comic and 
 sentimental types ; then we shall see a whole population 
 gather for his defence, and — flace aux dames — Sairey 
 Gamp, armed in his cause, it is who leads the van. 
 
 There is no sense of dissatisfaction with himself in 
 what Dickens writes. How should one tingling with 
 life to the finger-tips be displeased with his own person- 
 ality ? And, setting aside certain political or social 
 inconveniences, " circumlocution offices," and such like, 
 clearly capable of amendment, there was, in Dickens's 
 view, nothing profoundly ailing with society. Thackeray 
 bad a quarrel with himself and a quarrel with society ; 
 but his was not a temper to push things to extremes. 
 He could not acquiesce in the ways of the world, its 
 shabbiness, its shams, its snobbery, its knavery ; he 
 could not acquiesce, and yet it is only for born prophets 
 to break with the world and go forth into the wilderness 
 crying, " Eepent ! " Why affect to be a prophet, and 
 wear camels' hair and eat locusts and wild honey, adding 
 one more sham to the many, when after all the club is 
 a pleasant lounge, and anthropologj' is a most attractive 
 study ? Better patch up a truce with the world, which 
 will not let one be a hero, but is not wholly evil ; the 
 great criminals are few ; men in general are rather 
 
Victorian Literature. 169 
 
 weak than wicked ; vain and selfish, but not malignant. 
 
 It is infinitely diverting to watch the ways of the petty 
 
 human animal. One can always preserve a certain 
 
 independence by that unheroic form of warfare suitable 
 
 to an unheroic age — satire ; one can even in a certain 
 
 sense stand above one's own pettiness by virtue of 
 
 irony ; and there is always the chance of discovering 
 
 some angel wandering unrecognised among the snobs 
 
 and the flunkeys in the form of a brave, simple-hearted 
 
 man or pure-souled, tender woman. Whether right or 
 
 wrong, this compromise with the world is only for a few 
 
 days. Heigh-ho ! everything hastens to the common 
 
 end — vanitas vaniiatum. 
 
 The morality of this compromise with the world is 
 
 fully discussed by Thackeray himself in his " Pendennis," 
 
 and he arrives at no decisive result. Mr Pen is on 
 
 terms of friendship with the great Simpson of the Royal 
 
 Gardens of Vauxhall, and shakes the lovely equestrian 
 
 of the arena by the hand : — 
 
 " And while he could watch the grimaces or the graces of those 
 ■with a satiric humour that was not deprived of sympathy, he could 
 look on with an eye of kindness at the lookers-on too ; at the 
 roystering youth bent upon enjoyment, and here taking it ; at the 
 honest parents, with their delighted children laughing and clap- 
 ping their hands at the show ; at the poor outcasts, whose laughter 
 was less innocent though perhaps louder, and who brought their 
 shame and their youth here, to dance and be merry till the dawn 
 at least, and to get bread and drown care. Of this sympathy with 
 all conditions of men, Arthur often boasted ; he was pleased to 
 possess it, and said that he hoped thus to the last he should retain^ 
 it. As another man has an ardour for art or music, or natural 
 science, Mr Pen said that anthropology was his favourite pursuit, 
 and had his eyes always eagerly opened to its infinite varieties and 
 beauties ; contemplating with an unfailing delight all specimens 
 of it in all places to which he resorted, whether it was the coquet- 
 
1 70 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 ting of a wrinkled dowager in a ballroom or a high-bred young 
 beauty blushing in her prime there ; whether it was a hulking 
 guardsman coaxing a servant-girl in the park — or innocent little 
 Tommy that was feeding the ducks while the nurse listened. And, 
 indeed, a man whose heart is pretty clean can indulge in this pur- 
 suit with an enjoyment that never ceases, and is only perhaps the 
 more keen because it is secret and has a touch of sadness in it ; 
 because he is in his mood and humour lonely, and apart although 
 not alone." 
 
 Over against which there is the author's manly 
 warning : — 
 
 " If seeing and acknowledging the lies of the world, Arthur, as 
 see them you can with only too fatal a clearness, you submit to 
 them without any protest farther than a laugh; if, plunged yourself 
 in easy sensuality, you allow the whole wretched world to pass by 
 you unmoved ; if the fight for the truth is taking place, and all 
 men of honour are on the ground armed on the one side or the other, 
 and you alone are to lie on your balcony and smoke your pipe out 
 of the noise and the danger — you had better have died, or never 
 been at all, than such a sensual coward." 
 
 But Arthur has ready a reply which serves his purpose 
 at least for the moment. 
 
 At a time when there is no dominant faith, no rule 
 of life, no compelling ardour, no ordered, marching army 
 of men where each one of us may fall into the ranks 
 and obey his leader's command, what more natural than 
 that the individual, oppressed by a sense of his own 
 powerlessness, should come to terms with the world, and 
 should compensate himself as a suborned revolter by 
 irony and satire. The worst evil is that such a com- 
 promise with the world breeds a spirit of fatalism and 
 saps the force of the will ; to yield to circumstance, 
 to accept one's environment seems inevitable ; and men 
 forget that in every complex condition of life we are 
 
Victorian Literature. lyi 
 
 surrounded by a hundred possible environments, and that 
 it lies with ourselves to choose whether we shall see our 
 neighbours over the way, or an encompassing great cloud 
 of witnesses who gather and gaze around us. 
 
 Thackeray had not the austerity and lonely strength 
 needful for a prophet ; he would not be a pseudo-pro- 
 phet ; therefore he chose his part — to remain in the 
 world, to tolerate the worldlings, and yet to be their 
 adversary and circumventer, or at least a thorn in their 
 sides. Two men, whose influence extends over the full 
 half-century, of whom one happily remains among us 
 still, were true nineteenth-century sons of the prophets, 
 who would make no compromises, and each in his own 
 way lifted up a solitary voice crying repentance and 
 terror and judgment to come. " In Oriel Lane," writes 
 the late Professor of Poetry at Oxford, Principal Shairp, 
 " light-hearted undergraduates would drop their voices 
 and whisper, ' There's Newman !' when, head thrust for- 
 ward, and gaze fixed as though on some vision seen only 
 by himself, with swift, noiseless step he glided by. 
 Awe fell on them for a moment as if it had been some 
 apparition that had passed." And another Oxford Pro- 
 fessor of Poetry, Mr Matthew Arnold, writes in a like 
 strain : " Who could resist the charm of that spiritual 
 apparition, gliding in the dim afternoon light through 
 the aisles of St Mary's, rising into the pulpit, and then, 
 in the most entrancing of voices, breaking the silence 
 with words and thoughts which were a religious music — 
 subtle, sweet, mournful ? 1 seem to hear him still, saying : 
 ' After the fever of life, after wearinesses and sicknesses, 
 fightings and despondings, languor and fretfulness. 
 
172 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 struggling and succeeding ; after all the changes and 
 chances of this troubled, unhealthy state, — at length 
 comes death, at length the white throne of God, at 
 length the beatific vision.' " 
 
 Mr Arnold dwells on the charm and magic of the 
 preacher's person and manner, because for him the na,me 
 of Cardinal Newman is a great name to the imagination, 
 but the solution adopted by Newman for the doubts and 
 difficulties which beset men's minds to-day, " to speak 
 frankly, is impossible." They alone could feel the full 
 force of Newman's words who believed that he spoke to 
 them of the most glorious and the most awful of all 
 realities. He stood in the pulpit of St Mary's to tell of 
 a hidden life which is the only veritable life of man ; to 
 tell of an invisible world which is more real, intimate, 
 and enduring than the world of the senses. Once in 
 the year this visible earth manifests its hidden powers ; 
 "then the leaves come out, and the blofesoms on the 
 fruit-trees and flowers, and the grass and corn spring up. 
 There is a sudden rush and burst outwardly of that 
 hidden life which God has lodged in the material world." 
 So it shall be one day with the invisible world of light 
 and glory — when God gives the word. "A, world of 
 saints and angels, a glorious world, the palace of God, 
 the mountain of the Lord of Hosts, the heavenly 
 Jerusalem, the throne of God and Christ, all these won- 
 ders, everlasting, all-precious, mysterious, and incompre- 
 hensible lie hid in what we see. What we see is the 
 outward shell of an eternal kingdom, and on that king- 
 dom we fix the eyes of our faith. Shine forth, O Lord, 
 as when on Thy Nativity Thine Angels visited the 
 
Victorian Literature. 173 
 
 shepherds ; let Thy glory blossom forth as bloom and 
 foliage oa the trees ; change with Thy mighty power 
 this visible world into that divine world, which as yet 
 we see not ; destroy what we see, that it may pass and 
 be transformed into what we believe." 
 
 Newman and those who thought with him had little 
 friendly feeling for the Puritans of the seventeenth cen- 
 tury. It was noted by Clough in 18-38 that assent 
 could hardly be obtained at Oxford to an assertion of 
 Milton's greatness as a poet. Yet Newman was indeed 
 in one sense, and a very real sense, a Puritan of the 
 nineteenth century. He rose in the pulpit of St Mary's 
 not only to rebuke the worldliness of the world but to 
 protest against the religion of the day, which had dropped 
 one whole side of the Gospel — its austere character ; 
 which included " no true fear of God, no fervent zeal for 
 his honour, no deep hatred of sin, no horror at the sight 
 of sinners, no indignation and compassion at the blas- 
 phemies of heretics, no jealous adherence to doctrinal 
 truth, no especial sensitiveness about the particular 
 means of gaining ends, if only the ends be good, no 
 loyalty to the Holy Apostolic Church of which the Creed 
 speaks, no sense of the authority of religion as external 
 to the mind — in a word, no, seriousness." These are 
 the words of .a Puritan — a Puritan who was also a 
 Catholic, and here lay his power with higher minds in 
 an age which had yielded to the sapping in of material 
 influences, which had grown soft and self-indulgent, and 
 which ' was bewildered by confused voices that seemed 
 only to announce an intellectual anarchy. " My battle," 
 Newman writes, " was with Liberalism ; by Liberalism 
 
J 74 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 I meant the anti-dogmatic principle and its de- 
 velopments." Peace of mind and a cheerful counten- 
 ance are indeed the gifts of the gospel, hut they should 
 follow zeal and faith ; they should follow a recognition 
 of the severe aiid terrible side of religion. " I will not 
 shrink from uttering my firm conviction/' said Newman, 
 " that it would be a gain to this country were it vastly 
 more superstitious, more bigoted, more gloomy, more 
 fierce in its religion, than at present it shows itself to 
 be. Not, of course, that I think the tempers of mind 
 herein implied desirable, which would be an evident 
 absurdity, but I think them in6nitely more desirable and 
 more promising than a heathen obduracy, and a cold, 
 self-sufficient, self-wise tranquillity." The vital ques- 
 tion with Newman, as he himself has said, was 
 "How were we to keep the Church from being 
 liberalised." And the final answer was given in 
 his own action — by accepting all truth, like a per- 
 plexed child, from the lips of the Queen of Saints, 
 the Holy Roman Church, the mother of us all. " I 
 come," he might have exclaimed, like Charles Reding of 
 his own " Loss and Gain," " 0, mighty Mother, I come, 
 but I am far from home. Spare me a little ; I come 
 with what speed I may, but I am slow of foot, and not 
 as others, mighty Mother." In the divine darkness 
 of her bosom there was rest. Those who look upon 
 Newman's solution of the difficulties of our time as an 
 impossible solution need hardly trouble themselves with 
 his singular reasonings. The title of the fifth chapter 
 of his " Autobiography," " Position of my mind since 
 1845," will suffice — as if during half of a long lifetime 
 
Victorian Literature. 175 
 
 a position were desirable for a thinking being rather 
 than a progress. "From the time that I became a 
 Catholic, of course I have no further history of my 
 religious opinions to narrate." Of course : for the 
 mighty mother laid her hand across the child's weary 
 eyes, soothed him to rest with her immemorial croon, 
 and while he slept removed the hand and fixed her 
 bandage in its place. Yet we heretics, for whose 
 blasphemies the zealous champion of the faith must 
 needs feel compassion and indignation, may win from his 
 teaching something better even than its charm and its 
 culture ; we may win a quickened sense of the reality of 
 the invisible world, and a more strenuous resolution to 
 live with the loins girt and the lamp lit. A young 
 Protestant heretic from America, who prized at their 
 true worth Cardinal Newman's " Verses on Various 
 Occasions," took courage one day and sent a copy of 
 that volume to the Oratory at Birmingham, with a 
 request for the writer's autograph. It was returned 
 with the inscription, Viriliter age, exspectans Bominum, 
 — words containing in little Newman's best contribution 
 to his time ; his vivid faith in a spiritual world, and the 
 call to his fellows in an age of much material ease and 
 prosperity to rise and quit them like men. 
 
 Our second prophet was laid to rest six years since 
 under the green turf of Ecclefechan. A tomb of the 
 prophet was built — built it may be with untempered 
 mortar; and since then the amusement of his country- 
 men has been to pull out one stone and another, or to 
 scribble on their surface caricatures and insolent verses. 
 
 Carlyle's prime influence was a religious one ; he was 
 
1 76 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 a preacher before he was a critic or au historian. James 
 Carlyle, one of " the fighting masons of Ecclefechan," 
 not only could lay the stones straight and firm, but, as a 
 member of the Relief Church, had doubtless a Scottish 
 clearness and vigour in matters of the faith, and, we are 
 informed, loved to read old books which told of Refor- 
 mation times and the deeds of the Covenanters. It was 
 intended that Thomas, his eldest son, should be a minis- 
 ter of the Church. A brilliant French critic has called 
 Carlyle a Puritan, and Carlyle himself described Puritan- 
 ism as "the last of our Heroisms." His heritage of 
 faith was indeed transformed, but it was never cast 
 away. To view life, at times sadly, at times sternly, 
 and always seriously, is the Puritan habit, and it was 
 Carlyle's, only relieved by the sudden tenderness of his 
 heart, aad by his humour as an artist, often almost 
 Aristophanic, before which the whole world would appear 
 in a moment as a huge farce-tragedy. To bear about 
 with us an abiding sense of the infinite issues of human 
 existence is a part of Puritanism. Poor, indeed, is this 
 little life of man for pleasure or for pride ; yet of 
 measureless worth, since heaven and hell environ it. 
 Each deed, each moment is related to Eternity. God 
 and the devil, one at odds with the other, are not 
 names, but terrible realities ; righteousness and sin 
 stand apart from one another by the whole diameter. 
 On whose side does each of us find himself? The many 
 are foolish, slumbering and sleeping, hearing no cry in 
 the night. The wise are few, ever ready, with the 
 loins girt and the lamp lit. 
 
 But Puritanism, in its desire to fortify the moral will. 
 
Victorian Literature. 177 
 
 contracts the sensibilities, impoverishes the affections, 
 averts its gaze from half of nature and of human life. 
 How is one of stormy sensibility, to whom all of life 
 is dear, an artist and a poet, a lover of beauty, a lover 
 of strength even when ill-regulated, full of tenderness, 
 pity, wrath ; full also, in this new century, of new 
 aspiring thoughts and impulses of revolt — how is such 
 an one to be a Puritan ? By his twenty-first year it 
 had become clear to Carlyle that if he were to be a 
 preacher he must preach another gospel than that of the 
 Presbyterian Kirk. And in due time the authentic 
 voice, calling him to be " a writer of books," grew 
 audible. He must preach, if at all, through literature. 
 A broad way in literature for men of passionate 
 temper -had been opened by Byron. His victories had 
 followed one another so brilliantly, so rapidly, that only 
 one other career seemed like his — that of Napoleon. 
 He had revolted against a society of decencies and re- 
 spectability, of social hypocrisies, and moral cant ; and 
 with that revolt Carlyle sympathised. He had known 
 the fever of a deep unrest ; he had been miserable 
 among negations and extinct faiths ; with such unrest, 
 such misery, Carlyle was not unacquainted. In Byron 
 he recognised a certain desperate sincerity, underlying 
 all superficial insincerities. Yet for one who had learnt 
 that " man's chief end is to glorify God," who had heard 
 of obedience to a divine will, of service to a divine 
 King, Byron's egoistic revolt, though of service as a pro- 
 test against the false, seemed to go but a little way 
 towards attaining the liberty of true spiritual manhood. 
 Is no better way possible ? Is a religious freedom un- 
 
 M 
 
1 78 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 attainable ? Is it possible to be "a clear and universal 
 man," and at the same time a man of faith ? Carlyle, like 
 Teufelsdrockh, closed his Byron ; like Teufelsdrockh, he 
 opened his Goethe. And in Goethe he found his own 
 problem and the problem of his time solved. " The 
 question," he writes in his essay on Goethe's works, 
 " Can man still live in devoutness, yet without blind- 
 ness or contraction ; in unconquerable steadfastness for 
 the right, yet without tumultuous exasperation against 
 the wrong ; an antique worthy, yet with the expansion 
 and increased endowment of a modern ? is no longer a 
 question, but has become a certainty and ocularly 
 visible fact." 
 
 Puritanism had said " Live resolutely for God in 
 what is good," but Puritanism had narrowed the mean- 
 ing of the word " good " as Carlyle henceforth could not 
 narrow it ; Puritanism had renounced the experiment of 
 entering the kingdom of heaven otherwise than maimed 
 and blind. Goethe said, " Live resolutely a complete 
 human life, in what is good and beautiful, in the whole 
 of things " — /m Qanze.n, Guten, Schonen resolut zu 
 leben. So the seriousness which is at the heart of 
 Puritanism might grow large, and free, and beautiful. 
 What Carlyle wrote of Goethe was not the mere expres- 
 sion of a literary judgment ; he wrote with the sense 
 that it was Goethe who had made it possible for him to 
 live. He did not approach Goethe, like poor Sterling, 
 with questions as to his classification — Was Goethe 
 a Pagan, or a Christian ? a Pantheist, or perchance a 
 " Pot-theist " ? He found, or thought he found, in 
 Goethe a complete, heroic, modern man. " Carlyle 
 
Victorian Literature. 1 79 
 
 breakfasted with me," wrote Crabb Robinson in 1832, 
 
 " and I harl an interesting morning with him. . . . His voice and 
 manner, and even the style of his conversation, are those of a re- 
 ligious zealot, and he keeps up that character in his declamations 
 against the anti-religious. And yet, if not the god of his idolatry, 
 at least he has a priest and prophet of his church in Goethe, of 
 whose profound wisdom he speaks like an enthusiast. But for him, 
 Carlyle says, he should not now he alive. He owes everything to 
 him!" 
 
 Those were days of steadfast growth in the moorland 
 solitude of Craigenputtoch, when, having conquered the 
 egoistic despair of youth, and found in renunciation and 
 a wise limited activity his " Everlasting Yea," Carlyle 
 moved with a free, courageous step through untrodden 
 regions of literature, and was for a time a prophet of 
 joy and hope. He talked to De Quincey of founding a 
 " Misanthropic Society ,"i its members uniting to " hurl 
 forth their defiance, pity, expostulation over the whole 
 universe, civil, literary, and religious." But in truth he 
 was no Timon ; around him was the solitude which 
 nourished his soul — 
 
 " a solitude altogether Druidical — grim hills tenanted chiefly by 
 wild grouse, tarns and brooks that have soaked and slumbered un- 
 molested since the deluge of Noah, and nothing to disturb you 
 with speech, except Arcturus and Orion, and the Spirit of Nature, 
 in the heaven and in the earth, as it manifests itself in anger or 
 love, and utters its inexplicable tidings, unheard by the mortal 
 ear." 
 
 But, adds this misanthrope, " the misery is the almost 
 total want of colonists." Yet, when he returned to his 
 fireside, there was sufficient human society in the wife, 
 whose " soft invincibility, capacity of discernment, and 
 noble loyalty of heart," were, in spite of all imperfections 
 
1 8o Transcripts and Sltidies. 
 
 of sympathy, to stand him in stead during forty years ; 
 in her, and in that pile upon his library table, eyed with 
 the pride of a young literary athlete — " such a quantity 
 of German periodicals and mystic speculation, embosomed 
 in plain Scottish Peat-moor, being nowhere else that I 
 know of to be met with." 
 
 In temperament Carlyle differed widely from his 
 master, Goethe. When he came from his northern soli- 
 tude to London his age was the same as that of Goethe 
 in the year of his return from Italy to Weimar. In 
 solitude or congenial society, freed from the multifarious 
 cares of a great public servant, delivering his heart 
 from the exaltation of an ideal passion which could not 
 transform itself into duty and happiness nor into crea- 
 tive activity, surrounded by the marble aristocracy of 
 antique art, Goethe in Eome attained a serenity of 
 vision and a comprehensive definiteness of purpose 
 which some have described as resulting in a cooling or 
 chilling of his genius. Carlyle, combative as a son of 
 one of " the fighting masons of Ecclefechan " must needs 
 be, with stormy sensitiveness pained by all the griefs 
 and wrongs and follies of the time, lost such serenity as 
 had been his in his moorland home, saw in tempestuous 
 vision the old Puritan conflict between the powers of 
 hell and heaven renewing itself in our modern world, 
 and could not choose but show forth his vision, announce 
 the woes that were coming on the earth, and declare, to 
 those who had ears to hear, the almost impossible way 
 of salvation for society. " The savageness which has 
 come to be a main characteristic of this singular man is, 
 in my opinion," wrote Harriet Martineau, " a mere ex- 
 
Victoria7t Literature. 18 r 
 
 pression of his intolerable sympathj'- -witb the suffering." 
 Goethe's wide and luminous view is, like that of Shak- 
 spere in his last period, a gazing down upon human 
 life from some clear outpost on the heights. Carlyle, 
 with marred visage and rent prophetic robe, is hurtled 
 hither and thither in the tumult of the throng. 
 
 From the prophets we do not get the axiomata media 
 of wise living, individual or social. They tell of right- 
 eousness, mercy, and judgment to come. Others of 
 trained intelligence must apply their doctrine to life. 
 Carlyle helped to make us feel that the chasm between 
 truth and falsehood, between right and wrong, is sheer 
 aud of infinite depth ; that all things do not of necessity 
 tend from bad to good ; that, on the contrary, bad 
 often grows to worsen that a nation, by faithlessness 
 and folly, may indeed go straight to the devil ; that 
 each bit of neeciful work done soundly, honestly, contri- 
 butes to avert that catastrophe. This was an awaken- 
 ing piece of nineteenth-century prophecy. But how to 
 find the truth ? how to distinguish, in the complex 
 material of life, between good and evil ? how to attain 
 the right ? Worship of heroes (sometimes of question- 
 able heroism), government by the Best (but where to 
 find them ?), drilling of Democracy (which will surely 
 drill itself in the only effectual ways) — these suggestions 
 did not greatly serve to make our path clear. The 
 patient intellect of man had pursued other methods 
 leading to other results. These were indignantly ex- 
 ploded by our transcendental prophet as the manufacture 
 of logic-mills, fragments of the Dismal Science, leavings 
 of the Pig Philosophy, wisdom of National Palaver, and 
 
1 82 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 such like. Happily, it was among the elemental forces 
 of ir dividual character that Carlyle wrought with chief 
 power ; his influence, therefore, without losing its virtue, 
 could submit to manifold transformations. 
 
 Carlyle's transcendentalism was part of the spirit of 
 his time, part of the reaction moral, intellectual, and 
 imaginative against the eighteenth century. The Car- 
 lylean transceadentalism derived its unique character from 
 the Scottish Peat-moor, " Druidical Solitude," " speech 
 <inly of Arcturus, Orion, and the Spirit of Nature " — ■ 
 from these mingling with influences from that pile of 
 "German periodicals and mystic speculation" upon his 
 library table. He needed a vast background. Immensi- 
 ties, Eternities, through which might wander " the pas- 
 sion-winged ministers of thought," Wonder, and Awe, 
 and Adoration. But in the foreground of clear percep- 
 tion and sane activity, all was limited, definite, concrete. 
 From Goethe he had learnt, what, indeed, his own 
 shrewd Scottish head could well confirm, that to drift 
 nowhither in the Inane is not the highest destiny of a 
 human creature ; that, on the contrary, all true expan- 
 sion comes through limitation, all true freedom through 
 obedience. Hence the rule, " Do the work that lies 
 nearest to your hand ;" hence the preciousness of any 
 fragment of living reality, any atom of significant fact. 
 If Carlyle was a mystic, ho was a mystic in the service 
 of what is real and positive. Still the little illuminated 
 spot on which men toil and strive, and love and sorrow, 
 was environed, for Carlyle's imagination, by the Immen- 
 sities ; the day, so bright and dear, wherein men serve 
 or sin, was born from a deep Eternity which swiftly calls 
 
Victorian Literature. 183 
 
 it back, engulphs it. From which contrast between the 
 great and the little, the transitory and the eternal, 
 spring many sudden surprises of humour and of pathos, 
 which at length ceases to surprise, and grow but too 
 familiar to the reader of Carlyle. 
 
 To History, the region of positive, concrete fact, his 
 mind gravitated. As a critic of literature, he had done 
 signal service by showing that a passionate sympathy is 
 often needful to attain the ends of justice. The essays 
 on Burns and Johnson are illuminated by fine intelli- 
 gence, yet less by intelligence than by pity, reverence, 
 and love. While scornfully intolerant of dilettantism 
 and " the poor Fine Arts " founded on unveracity, 
 Carlyle had done much to introduce into England the 
 Continental feeling for art and the artist as important 
 factors in human society ; but the art of which he spoke 
 must be one founded on true insight into man's life and 
 genuine belief ; the artist must possess something more 
 than manipulative dexterity ; he must be in some mea- 
 sure a votes, whose conscious activity has, underlying it, 
 a deep, unconscious energy. As a literary critic, Carlyle 
 was sometimes perverse ; he missed proportions ; now 
 and again he would resolutely invert things, and hold 
 them up to mockery, in grotesque disarray. A certain 
 leaven of Puritanism made him impatient of some 
 harmless wiles and graceful pastimes of " the poor Fine 
 Arts." 
 
 A poet of our century, who was also one of its most 
 admirable prose writers, has told in verse the reproof 
 which he received as rhymer from " Clio, the strong-eyed 
 Muse." History pleased Carlyle, for its matter is robust. 
 
184 Transcripts and Shidies. 
 
 and yet it may be steeped in sentiment. What he 
 could not endure was to attenuate history to a theory, 
 or to relegate its living, breathing actors to a classifica- 
 tion. He would fain lift up a piece of the past whole 
 and unbroken, as a fragment of veritable human ex- 
 perience, with its deep inarticulate suggestions to the 
 conscience and the will. Nothing should be lost, except 
 what is unvital, mere wrappage and encumbrance of 
 historJ^ Working as an artist, with an idea of the 
 whole, and a genius for distinguishing essentials from 
 non-essentials in the myriad of details, the historian 
 must attempt the almost impossible feat of rivalling 
 reality, of presenting things in succession so that they 
 may live in the imagination as simultaneous, since once 
 they were so in fact ; of presenting a series so that it 
 may be recognised as a group. Much that is character- 
 istic in Carlyle's work as historian has its origin in the 
 marvellously quick and keen glance of his eye, his power 
 of reading off some minute visible incident into its in- 
 visible meaning, and thus interpreting character by 
 picturesque signs and symbols, together with the studi- 
 ously elaborated style which quickens and exalts the 
 reader's sensitiveness almost to the point of disease, 
 playing upon every nerve-centre with snapping sparks of 
 a new kind of electricity, until he tingles between 
 pleasure and pain. The strain in Carlyle's writing 
 is caused by his desperate resolve to produce in narra- 
 tive, which, as he says, is linear, the effect of action, 
 which is solid. " It is not in acted as it is in written 
 History : actual events are nowise so simply related to 
 each other as parent and offspring are ; every single 
 
Victorian Literature. 185 
 
 event is the offspring not of one but of all other events, 
 prior or contemporaneous, and will in its turn combine 
 with all others to give birth to new : it is an ever-living, 
 ever- working Chaos of Being, wherein shape after shape 
 bodies itself forth from innumerable elements." In 
 other writers we may read more correctly the causes and 
 the effects of the French Revolution. If we would feel 
 the suck of the maelstrom and explore its green- 
 glimmering terror we must accompany Carlyle. 
 
 In whatever else Carlyle may have failed, he did not 
 fail in impressing on those who took his teaching to 
 heart a sense of the momentous issiies of the time ; a 
 sense that a great social revolution was in progress ; that 
 it was attended with stupendous dangers, and called 
 before all else for loyal, obedient, faithful. God-fearing 
 men. He would, if it were possible, have helped to 
 discipline and train a regiment of modern Ironsides, and 
 then have trusted to God to send a Cromwell to be their 
 leader. He could not huzza for steam-engines, cotton, 
 and oil, and coal, Crystal Palaces, the machinery or the 
 shows of society, while society itself was ailing at the 
 heart. Reverence, obedience, spiritual insight, fidelity 
 to duty, honest work — did England possess more or less 
 of these ? If less, how vain and wicked was the modern 
 cant of Progress ? Progress — yes, progress towards the 
 devil and the black pit of Gehenna. 
 
 Mr John Morley has spoken of Carlyle's method for 
 ascertaining truth as the method of Rousseau. " Each 
 bids us look within our own bosoms for truth and right, 
 postpones reason to feeling, and refers to introspection 
 and a factitious something called Nature, questions only 
 
i86 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 to te truly solved by external observation and history." 
 And as it were in contrast with such a method leading 
 only to pseudo-wisdom, we are told that the force of Mr 
 Mill's character and teaching lay in that " combination 
 of an ardent interest in human improvement with a 
 reasoned attention to the law of its conditions, which 
 alone deserves to be honoured with the high name of 
 wisdom." But Garlyle, in truth, inspected society with 
 a penetrating vision, and the observation of Mr Mill — 
 earnest, disinterested, admirable student as he was — 
 too frequently is that of a one-eyed observer, or a man 
 born colour-blind.* How should one whose feelings had 
 never been cultivated in childhood and youth observe 
 truly ? Mr Mill reasoned ; his reasonings were 
 based on the principle that the individual must 
 take the general happiness as his ultimate end ; and 
 the reason er is compelled to admit that questions of 
 ultimate ends do not admit of proof in the straight- 
 forward sense of the term. He, the philosophical guide 
 of the Libera] party, observed and reasoned, and pro- 
 duced a Political Economy ; and who have banished the 
 orthodox Political Economy to Saturn and Jupiter ? 
 No ; Mr Mill too often observed insufficiently, or rea- 
 soned imperfectly, or started from principles too hastily 
 assumed. Garlyle brought, at least, the complete nature" 
 
 * Dr Ingram, a. writer of sounder judgment than Mr Morley, has 
 well said in his article "Political Economy" in the Encyclopcedia 
 Britannica : "Mill's openness to new ideas and hia enthusiasm for 
 improvements cannot be too much admired. But there appear to 
 have been, combined with these fine traits in hia mental constitution 
 a certain want of practical sense, a, failure to recognise and acquiesce 
 in the necessary conditions of human life, and a craving for better 
 bread than can be made of wheat." 
 
Victorian Literature. 187 
 
 of a devout and passionate man to the aid of observing 
 powers of extraordinary keenness and penetration. And, 
 as regards the elementary truths of human life, not 
 without effect. Mr Froude, in a remarkable pas- 
 sage, has described the influence of Carlyle's writings 
 on young men who felt painfully the trouble and diffi- 
 culty of the time, and were agreed to have done with 
 compromise and conventionalities. " To the young, the 
 generous, to everyone who took life seriously, who wished 
 to make an honourable use of it, and could not be con- 
 tent with making money, his words were like the morn- 
 ing reveille." " Carlyle's doctrine," says Mr Morley, 
 " has all its foundations in the purest individualism." 
 No ; it is empirical utilitarianism, confessing that it 
 cannot prove anything with respect to ultimate ends, 
 which cannot pass beyond individualism ; and Carlyle's 
 doctrine has its roots in God — in God, not to be revealed 
 after death, in a beatific vision seated upon the great 
 white throne, but here and now, in his world of sinning, 
 toiling, suffering, striving men and women. "It is to 
 you, ye workers," he writes, " who do already work, and 
 are as grown men, noble and honourable in a sort, that 
 the whole world calls for new work and nobleness. 
 Subdue mutiny, discord, wide-spread despair, by maa- 
 fulness, justice, mercy, and wisdom. Chaos is dark, 
 deep as Hell ; let light be, and there is instead a green 
 flowery world. Oh, it is great, and there is no other 
 greatness. To make some nook of God's Creation a 
 little fruitfuller, better, more worthy of God ; to make 
 some human hearts a little wiser, manfuller, happier, 
 more blessed, less accursed ! " Such words as these. 
 
1 88 Transcripts and Shidies. 
 
 and the words — so different and yet not wholly alien — 
 from the pulpit of St Mary's, affected young and ardent 
 spirits as words of genuine prophecy. " Early in the 
 eighteen-forties," writes Principal Shairp, " when the 
 ' Miscellanies' appeared, and became known to under- 
 graduates here at Oxford, I remember how they reached 
 the more active-minded, one by one, and thrilled them 
 as no printed book ever before had thrilled them." And 
 Mr Fronde's confession will not be forgotten : " I, for 
 one (if I may so far speak of myself) was saved by 
 Carlyle's writings from Positivism, or Romanism, or 
 Atheism, or any other of the creeds or no-creeds which 
 in those days were whirling us about in Oxford like 
 leaves in an autumn storm." 
 
 Organisation of labour, if well understood, said Car- 
 lyle, is the problem of the whole future. A practical 
 attempt towards its solution was made by Maurice, 
 Kingsley, Mr Ludlow, and others, who took the name of 
 " Christian Socialists," and, having little in common 
 with what now styles itself Socialism, beyond a sym- 
 pathy with the hardships and wrongs of the toiling 
 thousands, maintained as early as 1849 the principle of 
 co-operation as opposed to competition. The literary 
 side of the movement is represented by the disciple, 
 Kingsley, rather than by the master, Maurice. In the 
 gospel which Kingsley preached in tale and sermon- 
 there was none of what Mr Maurice described as Car- 
 lyle's wild pantheistic rant, the " big inanity of Pan- 
 theism." He spoke of the fatherhood of God, and of 
 the union of all men in and through Jesus Christ ; and 
 yet the' old phrases seemed to be inspired with a new 
 
Victorian Liierahire. 189 
 
 life and meaning. Temper had something to do with 
 the effect produced by Kingsley's words : they were 
 uttered in a voice so ringing and hearty that we felt 
 them to be a portion of his very life. No spiritual man 
 at the time seemed to have in him so much of the 
 natural man, no natural man seemed to have so much 
 of the spiritual man, as Kingsley.* Our Bible grew 
 dearer to vis, and our biceps. We had our modern 
 ideals — the Chartist peer, the lord-loving democrat, the 
 squire-priest ; yet we felt ourselves far removed from 
 Young England, and thought scorn of the stucco mediae- 
 valism of " Coningsby" and " Sybil." Viewed from 
 our less chivalrous elder days, the enthusiasm of that 
 time seems somewhat of an enthusiasm prepense and 
 self-conscious ; and yet it had a use and gallantry of its 
 own. Charles Kingsley assuredly did not solve with a 
 few hearty words the riddle of the Sphinx. He had not 
 perhaps a single capital thought for his own age, but he 
 brought that which is perennially fresh and inspiring — - 
 a vivid and kindling personality. Here was a human 
 being alive at many points, with senses singularly keen, 
 a kind of enthusiasm in the very blood, intellect quick 
 and stirring, imagination not winged but swift of foot as 
 a racer, a generous temper, a hand prompt in deeds of 
 public good, and at the back of temperament a character 
 which grew more close-knit as time went on. His 
 teaching breathed courage, purity, love. His words rang 
 bright and clear in the morning air. It was much to 
 
 * I make use of some portions of a review of the " Everaley Edition 
 of Charles Kingsley's Novels," contributed by me to the Pall Mall 
 Gazette, Nov. 26, 1881. 
 
1 90 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 proclaim in a sceculuTn realisticum that the world is 
 sacred for those whose purpose is high. It was not 
 useless amid a Catholic reaction and a mediaeval revival 
 to vindicate the rights of the natural man, to present 
 ideals of a life more true to the time, more courageous 
 and robust than that of the modem mediaevalist, and to 
 do honour to a great epoch of our national history which 
 an attempt was made to discredit as Protestant and 
 worldly. It was well to rouse public spirit and to set 
 forth our duties to the toilers in great cities, even though 
 the public spirit may have been somewhat headlong in 
 its career. In any picture of the midmost years of the 
 nineteenth century, the figure of Kingsley must attract 
 attention among the high lights of the picture. With 
 justice he was described by Mill as " a man who is 
 himself one of the good influences of the age." 
 
 As a poet and novelist it was not wholly to Kingsley's 
 advantage that he was also a preacher, still less that he 
 felt called to be a preacher militant. Yet the combative 
 spirit was part of the man ; at no period could he have 
 been one of the 
 
 " Serene creators of immortal things ;" 
 
 and without a gospel to deliver he might perhaps never 
 have cared to be an artist. Still much of the high 
 reserve, the mystery and the pathos of art, is lost 
 because Kingsley has an explanation to give of all the 
 problems of life proposed in his books. Having for his 
 gospel the truths compendiously expressed in the formula 
 " This world is God's world " — fearing on the one hand 
 the risks which vigorous manhood runs from mere 
 
Victorian Literature. 191 
 
 animalism, and on the other hand the marsh-fires 
 of false pietism, he constructed his tales so as to lead 
 up to the main articles of his brief creed. The ungodly 
 man — a Prince Wulf, a Tom Thurnell, a Hereward — 
 lacks the very crown of manhood . Yet all good may be 
 hoped for from a vigorous will in a vigorous body ; 
 there needs only the discovery that the natural man is 
 not sufficient unto himself, and this discovery life is 
 almost sure to bring at some crisis when it touches the 
 highest of joy or anguish, and truth is struck as a spark 
 out of darkness. For mere speculation Kingsley has 
 small respect ; it suits a time of ease, and fiiils men in 
 the stress of life ; the faith which will stand the test is 
 that which some blissful or desperate experience compels 
 into existence. 
 
 But what wrings the heart, and especially the heart 
 of youth, so often and so sharply as a woman ? -Base 
 animalism on the one hand — spurious pietism on the 
 other — what delivers us rapturously from both one and 
 the other like the love of a good woman ? This world, 
 " God's world " — what proves the doctrine a reality 
 beyond gainsaying except it be the sanctity of wedded 
 love ? As Falstafif is not only witty in himself but the 
 cause that wit is in other men, so Kingsley's heroines 
 are not only faithful themselves but the cause that faith 
 enters into their lovers. Hereward is lost because 
 animalism destroys love. Raphael Aben Ezra is saved 
 because love suddenly comes and consumes as with 
 lightning his sceptical egoism : " To have found at last 
 the hated and dreaded name of God ; and found that it 
 was love ! To possess Victoria, a living human likeness. 
 
192 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 however imperfect, of that God ; and to possess in her a 
 home, a duty, a purpose, a fresh clear life of righteous 
 labour, perhaps of final victory." And what Raphael 
 learns from Victoria, Tom Thurnell learns in another 
 fashion from Grace Harvey, and Alton Locke from the 
 too edifying and didactic Lady Eleanor. Evidently, 
 since a woman may at any moment come forward 
 to prophesy or to enamour, everything may be hoped for 
 from unregenerate good health. But nothing is to be 
 hoped from, and everything is to be hated in, that 
 false pietisna which would banish woman to a cloister, 
 and which dishonours the exercise of those natural 
 affections whose collision strikes out the spark of divine 
 truth. 
 
 Only in one direction is Kingsley merely a poet and 
 not a preacher — when he is surrounded by objects 
 which influence him and which he cannot influence, 
 when he describes the glory and the life of river or moor 
 or hill. Even here at times the doctrine that these 
 ought to be enjoyed makes intrusive entry, with angry 
 side-glances against the shame and loss of ignoble 
 asceticism. Kingsley 's delight in external nature is not 
 that of a " wise passiveness," in which all influences of 
 earth and sky sink deep into the soul. The joy of 
 quick-stirring senses is met as it were by a kindred joy 
 in the stream that sparkles, and the fish that leaps, and 
 the wind that sings, and the clouds that fly. Lady 
 Eleanor's harangues will survive as interesting docu- 
 ments for a few who study the history of the years of 
 nineteenth century revolution. While the chalk-streams 
 run, and the clififs of southern England stand, there will 
 
Victorian Literature. 193 
 
 be living poetry for all lovers of rock and river in 
 Kingsley's best pages. 
 
 " Alton Locke" has a social and a religious, but hardly 
 a political purpose. The duty of the Church, as Kingsley 
 conceived, was to serve and save the souls and bodies of 
 men, not to advance the interests of a party in the State 
 or of an individual man. When we read in the preface 
 to " Coningsby" that the Church is " a sacred corporation 
 for the promulgation and maintenance in Europe of 
 certain Asian principles," we cannot but entertain a 
 shrewd suspicion that one of the Asian principles was 
 the sacred mission of the New Torj'ism, as led by a 
 certain brilliant and mysterious son of Shem. It was a 
 strange eddy of thought and feeling that caught Young 
 England into its advancing whirl — a composition of 
 forces resulting from the meeting of the democratic 
 movement, the mediaeval revival, the romantic move- 
 ment, and some of the traditions of Toryism. As a 
 rebuke to the materialistic temper of the middle classes, 
 ■as a protest against low utilitarian views, as an exposi- 
 tion of the misery and seething discontent of the toiling 
 masses, as an announcement to the English aristocrat 
 that a new and better rdle, was open to him than that of 
 a Whig oligarch of the Venetian party, " Coningsby" and 
 " Sibyl" were enlightening and effective; at the least they 
 raised questions and provoked thought. For those who 
 would study the workings of an extraordinary mind 
 they must always possess a singular interest. But a 
 political manifesto in three volumes is not a work of art, 
 and when we come close to Sidonia and Sybil it is 
 masks, not faces, that we see. 
 
 If 
 
194 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 What light or strength have the poets of the Victorian 
 half-century brought to serve us in our need ? How 
 are the thought and passion of the time embodied in 
 their verse ? One, who for intellectual power — no un- 
 important gift to a poet — may rank first, or almost first, 
 among the poets of the period, Henry Taylor, occupied 
 himself with the permanent and universal sources and 
 elements of poetry, and rarely touched on ideas or 
 emotions peculiar to his own day. Serving our country 
 as one of her most steadfast and high-minded public 
 servants, he gave the prose side of his mind to his 
 official duties, and reserved its poetical side for dramatic 
 history more on a level with Elizabethan work than any 
 produced in England since the Elizabethan age, and for 
 romantic comedy which might take its place by the side 
 of any comedy written between 1600 and 1640 by 
 any other hand than that of Shakspere. Questions of 
 metaphysics, questions of theology, had no natural 
 attraction for Henry Taylor's intellect, and thus he was 
 little afflicted by some of the most distracting troubles 
 of our time ; but he had an inexhaustible interest in 
 human character, and he gathered from action, observa- 
 tion, meditation, suffering, and delight a fund of moral 
 wisdom which had in it nothing merely abstract, 
 theoretical, or doctrinaire, and which was all available 
 for the purposes of his art. It is impossible, perhaps, that 
 such work should in any age be as popular as work 
 which appeals to the peculiar tastes and feelings of the 
 age, but it is equally impossible that it should ever 
 decline in worth or estimation below the high level 
 once attained. " Philip van Artevelde" and " The Virgin 
 
Victorian Literature. 195 
 
 Widow" will certainly interest lovers of dramatic poetry 
 two hundred years hence no less than they interest 
 lovers of dramatic poetry to-day, for they are wrought 
 out of the enduring stuff of human character, out of the 
 ever-end uring labour and sorrow and j oy of the life of man, . 
 
 " A resuscitated Bacon " Archbishop Whately named 
 Henry Taylor ; and that was not just, for our poet-pbilo- 
 sopher-statesman had little of that creative genius in the 
 speculative sphere, that luminous vision of philosophical 
 method, that native strength of wing and wide-orbing 
 flight over the entire field of knowledge which made 
 Bacon one among our chief angels of light ; and Bacon 
 possessed little of Henry Taylor's tenderness and strength 
 of feeling, or of his power of interpreting through 
 imagination the characters and passions of men. But 
 Whately, the editor of Bacon's " Essays," was doubtless 
 thinking of the wisdom of life which Bacon distilled 
 into those petty phials ; and between Bacon of the 
 " Essays " and Henry Taylor, the writer of prose, a 
 comparison is admissible. But when Whately went on 
 to advise Henry Taylor to do something else than write 
 verses, and " to leave that to the women," he did not 
 know the man whom he was addressing ; for, although 
 it was not Taylor's custom to fling a little volume of 
 raptures or rhapsodies into the air every twelve months, 
 the life poetic was the deepest part of his existence, and 
 the results of that life poetic were of a kind which, 
 while they may well please the women — especially if 
 the women be large-brained as well as fine-hearted — 
 are virile in the highest sense of that word, 
 
 No other eminent poet of our time — no other eminent 
 
196 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 poet, perhaps, since Milton — nourished the life poetic 
 from the life of affairs ; and as this constituted Henry- 
 Taylor's distinction as a man, the distinction of his 
 poetry will be found, in a great degree, in the results of 
 this. Had his poetical gift been primarily or chiefly 
 IjTical, it is probable that the poet in him would have 
 been early done to death, and the ambition of a states- 
 man might possibly have sprung from and overshadowed 
 the youthful poet's grave. But while his temperament 
 was emotional, his nature sympathetic, and his intellect 
 suiBciently mobile, his gift was not that of a lyrical poet. 
 His mind was of a slow-growing, brooding, concocting, 
 shaping kind. Before it could reach its proper ends, it 
 had to learn much from observation of life, to turn that 
 learning by meditation into wisdom, to inspire that 
 wisdom with poetic feeling, and then to restore it to the 
 concrete world in a finer form by aid of the imagination. 
 This was the process constantly going on, as Henry- 
 Taylor himself described it many years since : " Obser- 
 vation of facts ; generalisation from facts observed ; re- 
 jection into the concrete, but with improvements from 
 the fancy, of the general conclusions obtained." Other 
 poets have been engaged in public affairs ; but, unaware, 
 perhaps, of the gains they were procuring for their art, 
 they did not strive to bring the life of action and the 
 life of meditation into co-operative harmony. Chaucer 
 loved the woolfells and leather of the Petty Customs 
 only because they helped to save his purse from growing 
 light ; and he rejoiced when he could escape from his 
 official duties and could lean on his elbow in the short, 
 sweet grass for a day, wondering at the daisy-flower, or 
 
Victorian Literature, 197 
 
 could retreat at evening to his pensive citadel, there to 
 sit dumb as a stone over his book. Yet, while counting 
 the hides, Chaucer perhaps had caught sight, in some 
 si}' under-glance, of the shipman or the merchant 
 who afterwards rode — and is for ever riding — Canter- 
 burywards. Spenser unquestionably gained much for 
 his art from converse with public affairs during his brief 
 period of active political life in Ireland. Some of that 
 high sternness of temper which appears in his " View of 
 the State of Ireland " was probably acquired while serv- 
 ing under Lord Grey, and practical duties consolidated 
 Spenser's moral ardours, making them more than a 
 match for any tendency within him towards imaginative 
 voluptuousness. But Faeryland, which on one side lay 
 so near to Elizabethan England, trended off on th6 
 other side towards cloudland, and Spenser lacked the 
 opportunity possessed by a dramatic poet of enriching his 
 art with the concrete knowledge of a spirit learned in 
 human dealings. It is not too much to say that no 
 other English poet in the same degree as Henry Taylor 
 has possessed the skill to bend the life of action towards 
 the life of meditation, and the craft of the man of affairs 
 towards the poet's craft, until they meet and inosculate 
 as organs of one living body, each aiding the other, each 
 essential to the action of the other. 
 
 He did not possess the lyrical gift in a high degree ; 
 there are few jets and sallies in his verse. But great 
 strength and depth of feeling were his ; and if the cry 
 of passion is not heard in his dramas as clear and high 
 as in dramatic poetry wrought by hands less strong, this 
 is partly because passion is seized in the grasp of reflec 
 
 I 
 
1 98 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 tive power and held in check until it acquires a certain 
 maturity, breadth, and largeness with which mere inten- 
 sitj' is hardly compatible. And his life, like his verse, 
 was not a lyrical, a singing life ; certainly there was little 
 dithyrambic in it. None the less it was a well-ordered 
 poem, in a full and heightened style, and rising in 
 beauty towards its close. As there are few jets and 
 sallies in Henry Taylor's verse, so in his life there were 
 few pre-eminent moments — moments of sudden vision, 
 moments of culminating ardour and force ; nor can we 
 find many strokes even of what he himself described as 
 a surefooted impetuosity. In his conduct of life he was 
 a prudent commander, and never uncourageous — prefer- 
 ring regular warfare to feats which are magnificent but 
 are not war ; never forsaking his basis of action to be 
 sublimely audacious ; but by his deliberate courage at- 
 taining success in the end — and success for him meant 
 primarily success in the life poetic, and, as the most 
 essentia] part of this, the attainment of strength of 
 heart, and dignity and beauty of character. We read in 
 the record of his life of no annus inirahilis followed by 
 declension and collapse, but of steadfastness and progress 
 from year to year. Sir Henry Taylor printed some ill- 
 considered words respecting Goethe in one of the 
 volumes of his " Autobiograph}' " — words which may be 
 taken to heart as a cordial and comfort by the ignorant 
 and incapable, who are thrown off by Goethe's great- 
 ness ; and yet there was something of Goethe in Sir 
 Henry Taylor himself — something of Goethe's wisdom of 
 life, something of Goethe's union of the public servant 
 and the poet, something of Goethe's steadfast advance. 
 
Victorian Literature. 199 
 
 something, at all events, of Goethe's kindliness of 
 temper, and of his generous recognition of other and 
 younger men. But Goethe had an incomparable lyrical 
 genius, a spirit of adventure, and many eminent 
 moments of life, in which as much was accomplished as 
 in years. We are told of one such brief aud extraordi- 
 nary period in Henry Taylor's life, and it was, doubtless, 
 a surprise to some of his readers to find that, with one 
 who drew his materials, if not his inspiration, so largely 
 from the life of man with man, this most vital period 
 should have been one of utter solitude — nay, that its 
 very virtue should have been the enthusiasm of solitude. 
 But the surprise is groundless ; for though a close 
 observer of the life of action, and keenly alive to the 
 minuter phenomena of social intercourse, Henry Taylor 
 could not transfer his gains from life to art without a 
 retreat upon himself. To brood and meditate was no 
 less essential than to observe.* 
 
 Though at times intoxicated by solitude, Henry 
 Taylor had little of the Wordsworthian passion for 
 nature. He sought refreshment and restoration from 
 the beauty of the world, and had a peculiar delight 
 in sylvan recesses, the haunts of meditation ; but ex- 
 ternal nature was not for him a sybil, a maenad, a bride, 
 or an awful mother. His wisdom and power were 
 drawn from human life, from human life in certain con- 
 crete forms, leading up to generalisations which are 
 axiomata media, of invaluable service to the dramatic 
 poet, but hardly attaining the rank of first principles. 
 
 * I refer to a season towards the close of hia twenty-second year, of 
 whioli an account is given in his "Autobiography," vol. i. pp. 44 46. 
 
200 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 " For I must tread on shadowy ground, must sink 
 Deep, and, aloft ascending, breathe in worlds 
 To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil." 
 
 So wrote Wordsworth ; and he prefixed these, among 
 other sublime lines, to his " Excursion." Neither on the 
 wings of the speculative intellect nor on the wings of 
 imaginative faith was our statesman-poet borne into 
 such regions as these. He distrusted himself when 
 leaving the actual world of human dealings, therefore he 
 is a philosophic poet with limitations. His province 
 does not include an Inferno or a Paradise ; nevertheless, 
 it is a province of liberal extent and fruitful in resources, 
 and it is, at least, entirely free from unreality and the 
 phantasms of pseudo-philosophy. 
 
 If a pUiiscite were to pronounce to-day on the ques- 
 tion, " Who is the representative poet of the Victorian 
 period ? " it is possible that the votes might go in favour 
 of Mr Browning. Yet the fact is as certain as any fact 
 can be — as certain as that Millais and not Watts, or 
 Leighton, or Burne-Jones will be looked on as our 
 representative painter — that Tennyson will remain the 
 singer of the age. It is not the poet bringing the gift 
 most needed by his own time who represents that time 
 best ; such a poet may be rejected by the age as an 
 alien. It is he (to use the metaphor applied to another 
 purpose by Mr Gladstone) who gives back to his con- 
 temporaries as a river that which he has received from 
 them as vapour. In the earlier years of the present 
 century Byron and Shelley had carried on the impulse 
 of the French Revolution ; and in a period pf reaction 
 — the period of the White Terror, of the Holy Alliance, 
 
Victorian Literature. 201 
 
 of Eldon, and Castlereagh, and Sidmouth — they had 
 advanced the claims of nations and individuals to 
 freedom : — 
 
 " Yet, Freedom ! yet thy banner, torn, but flying. 
 Streams like the thunder-storm against the wind." 
 
 The principle of order had found a noble exponent in 
 Wordsworth. When the struggle for parliamentary re- 
 form was ended in 1832, it seemed as if for our own 
 country the principles of freedom and of order were 
 reconciled and might march onward with hand clasped 
 in hand ; and because freedom and order were at length 
 conjoined in amity, a steadfast progress of society was 
 assured. Science was daily achieving conquests for 
 humanity ; commerce was wresting new realms from bar- 
 barism ; and should not Poetry gaze into the future, the 
 light of hope within her eyes ? It is the conception of 
 a majestic order at one with freedom, and of human 
 progress as resulting from these, which inspires the 
 earlier poetry of Tennyson. King Arthur may fall in 
 battle and disappear from men's sight ; the whole Round 
 Table may be dissolved. Shall we therefore despair or 
 lament with intemperate grief? No: "the old order 
 changeth, giving place to new." Is the heart sore with 
 some individual loss or grief? Let us not look back. 
 The distance beacons, and not in vain. 
 
 " Forward, forward, let us range, 
 Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of 
 change.'' 
 
 Only let the men of England see to it that this move- 
 ment of advance, as far as they are concerned, be 
 
202 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 untroubled by violence and " school- boy heat " and 
 " blind hysterics ; " rather let it be such ordered pro- 
 gress as befits — 
 
 " A land of settled government, 
 A land of old and just renown, 
 Where freedom slowly broadens down 
 From precedent to precedent." 
 
 For order and freedom must henceforth be inseparably 
 united. 
 
 The poet's sympathy with science is ardent in an age 
 when science " reaches forth her arms to feel from world 
 to world ; " and yet once or twice his spirit is vexed by 
 doubts as to the possibility of reconciling scientific ob- 
 servations with his spiritual faiths and hopes. Happily 
 as yet science had not grown the seemingly remorseless 
 antagonist of faith, undermining by her reasonings the 
 very conscience and the religious sentiment ; therefore 
 it suffices that the heart, in Tennyson's poem, should 
 stand up as the champion of the soul : — 
 
 " A warmth within the breast would melt 
 The freezing reason's colder part. 
 And like a man in wrath the heart 
 Stood up and answered, ' I have felt.' " 
 
 Largely viewed, science cannot but minister to human 
 welfare if only its freedom be in harmony with spiritual 
 order : — 
 
 " Let knowledge grow from more to more. 
 But more of reverence in us dwell." 
 
 The " crowning race," as conceived by Tennyson, is one 
 that shall look, eye to eye, on knowledge ; holding the 
 earth under command, reading nature like an open book ; 
 
Victorian Literature. 203 
 
 possessing majestic order in a system of vast federations 
 which shall bind nation to nation in peace, and having 
 a reverent faith in — 
 
 " One God, one law, one element, 
 
 And one far-off divine event, 
 To which the whole creation moves." 
 
 Tennyson's feelings kept pace with those of his genera- 
 tion ; and in 1855, after the days of the Chartist up- 
 heaval, after Carlyle's vehement indictment of the status 
 quo, and those meagre results which followed the 
 generous efforts of Christian Socialists to serve the suf- 
 fering poor, his tone grows troubled. Assigning in 
 " Maud " the exaggerated denunciation of social wrongs 
 to a speaker of morbid temperament, Tennyson expressed 
 through the hero of his monodrama fears and doubts 
 which assailed his own heart and the hearts of many 
 thoughtful men. He, who had dreamed of peace and 
 a federation of races, finds in the battle ardours of a 
 righteous war deliverance from the selfishness and 
 supineness of spirit which had made social life no better 
 than an internecine strife during days that were styled 
 days of peace. 
 
 In 1886 the tone grows yet more troubled. Again 
 the dramatic device is adopted, and it would be unjust 
 to regard every utterance of the speaker in the second 
 " Locksley Hall " as expressing a conviction of the writer. 
 But the volume which contains this poem, and presents 
 in the character of Philip Edgar an example of the havoc 
 wrought in young spirits by egoism finding its warrant 
 in a philosophy falsely so called, cannot be viewed as 
 other than an indictment of the times. And assuredly 
 
204 Transcripts and Studies, 
 
 the poet's apprehension that in our own days the course 
 of time may have swerved, " crooked and turned upon, 
 itself" in a " backward-streaming curve," is an appre- 
 hension shared by many thoughtful minds. The writer 
 of the second " Locksley Hall " has again given back as 
 a river that which he received from men about him as 
 a vapour — the fears of faith in presence of a godless 
 science, the social fears in presence of a revolution 
 inspired by selfish greeds, the fears of art in presence of 
 a base naturalism which only recognises the beast in 
 man. 
 
 -^ But we have as yet noted only one-half of Tennyson's 
 gift to his time. A distinguished living critic has spoken 
 of the renascence of the spirit of wonder and romance in 
 poetry and art, which began in the last century with 
 " Ossian " and Chatterton and Percy's " Reliques," as 
 one of the most important events in the history of 
 English poetry since the days of Addison and Pope. To 
 that renascence of wonder the poetry of Tennyson has 
 contributed in no slight degree. While we read his 
 verse we are now in the heart of our nineteenth century, 
 aware of all the hopes and fears and doubts of this our 
 day, and now we are alone in some world of old romance, 
 or gaze forth from some — 
 
 " Magic casement, opening on the foam 
 Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.'' 
 
 "The Lady of Shalott," "Sir Galahad," "St Agues," 
 " Oriana," " The Sleeping Beauty," " Morte d' Arthur," 
 are poems belonging to that movement in literature and 
 art which Mr Theodore Watts has described as the 
 
Victorian Literature. 205 
 
 Eenascence of Wonder. The sense of romantic aloofness 
 from our present place and time is perhaps enhanced by 
 the fact that in Tennyson's poetry we never become 
 naturalised citizens of that far country, but pass in and 
 out of the region of romance, never dwelling in it so 
 long or so exclusively as to receive its marvels with the 
 welcome of familiarity or that tranquil expectation with 
 which one looks for the next apparition of wonder in a 
 dream. 
 
 To have felt the growing difficulties of faith, and the 
 increasing intellectual anarchy in the years between 
 1882 and 1851, one must have been born some years 
 later than Tennyson, and have known Oxford in those 
 days when, as Mr Froude writes, the creeds or no creeds 
 were whirling young spirits about like leaves in an 
 autumn storm. It is this whirl which we feel in the 
 poetry of Clough, and yet amid the whirl we become 
 aware of the steadfastness of a nature, sorely perplexed 
 indeed, and driven hither and thither, yet of unwavering 
 moral integrity. No doctrine offered for his acceptance 
 seemed to give him a complete account of the facts of 
 life ; the dogmas of theology were the translations into 
 the language of the intellect of religious instincts and 
 aspirations, the reality of which he could not and would 
 not deny ; yet the ascertained truths of science seemed 
 to render the acceptance of theological dogma impossible. 
 Perhaps a future reconciliation of these conflicting aspects 
 of truth might be hoped for ; meanwhile it was the duty 
 of a man who would not practise a fraud on his own 
 intellect to hold himself unattached to positive creeds, 
 whether theological or scientific ; it was a duty to wait 
 
2o6 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 for further light. Let us, said Clough, attend the 
 clouded hill, and expect the voice of him who entered 
 into the cloud. Perhaps he will descend the mount 
 with sacred light shining from his countenance, bearing 
 the tables of the new law ; meanwhile, let us not turn 
 back to Egypt, nor dance at the bidding of the prieSt 
 around a Golden Calf. This mood of waiting for further 
 light, this attitude of expectant attention, would become 
 with many natures a source of moral weakness, and 
 might give a dangerous vantage-ground to temptations 
 of egoism and faithless self-indulgence. Clough main- 
 tained his attitude strenuously and with a certain 
 self-denial under the strictest sense of duty. He 
 demonstrated that such an attitude of expectant atten- 
 tion is inconsistent neither with a wholesome practical 
 activity nor with a profoundly religious spirit. There 
 is a sanative virtue in his writings which proceeds from 
 moral steadfastness, and a virile temper that refuses 
 mere spiritual comfort and luxury, a pillow of faith for 
 the weary head, an opiate of pious sentiment to lull and 
 cloud the brain. 
 
 Clough's college friend, who has lamented his loss in 
 the pastoral elegy of " Thyrsis," suffered more deeply 
 than Clough from la maladie du siecle. Mr Matthew 
 Arnold's poetry in great part is an exquisitely delicate 
 and lucid record of the trials of a spirit divided against 
 itself Clough's nature, however it may appear otherwise 
 to superficial observers, was not a divided nature ; it was 
 whole and sound, although perplexed by irreconcilable 
 aspects of truth. His will was not diseased ; it was 
 prompt to act upon any authoritative summons of duty. 
 
Victorian Literature. 207 
 
 should such summons make itself audible. Mr Arnold's 
 gifts as a poet were incomparably rarer and finer, but it 
 ■was more difficult for him to live steadfastly his true 
 life, the life poetic, since in him the will itself has been 
 attacked by the malady of the age. His various 
 sympathies perplex and entangle him (I speak of the 
 poet of past days, not of the prose-writer of the present) ; 
 he yields on this side and recovers himself, yields on 
 that side and recovers himself, and loses by each yielding 
 some of the strength of his soul. He would fain 
 simplify his life by submitting to one dominant set of 
 motives, but he cannot. He admires the trenchant 
 force of will of a hardy nature, but he does not see how 
 this can be conjoined with what is dearer to him — 
 gentleness, tenderness, love. He longs for the release 
 from isolation and self-consciousness which passion 
 and true fellowship with another human spirit bring, 
 but he cannot quite attain this, and relapses, con- 
 fessing that love is subject to change, and that each 
 of us must dwell alone. He is swayed by emotions too 
 powerful for him, and to Mr Arnold, as revealed in his 
 poems, deep feeling, instead of bringing a rapturous 
 calm or a resolved energy of will, brings restlessness and 
 fever. He would fain possess his soul, and would be 
 willing to embrace a cold and barren quietism, for sake 
 of the calm that accompanies it ; but knowledge, and 
 beauty, and culture solicit him with promises too delight- 
 ful to be disregarded. To know that there are things 
 higher, nobler, more enduring than himself fortified 
 the soul of Clough, and delivered it from egoistic solici- 
 tude. To Mr Arnold the contrast between the feverish 
 
2o8 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 life and barren toil of man and the serene beauty and 
 large sure operancy of nature becomes at times a re- 
 proach and almost a despair. A wholesome physical 
 enjoyment of open air and the good things of sky, 
 mountain, and stream, with quickened pulsation of the 
 blood and a heightened sense of living, is characteristic 
 of dough's relations with external nature. Mr Arnold 
 feels with infinitely greater delicacy, but with less sanity. 
 He turns to Nature for deliverance from the excitement 
 of his own restless feelings, and he sinks into her calms 
 and mild depths, and is for a little time at rest ; then a 
 touch, a thought, a nameless nothing, and the trouble of 
 heart and brain begins anew. The dreaming garden 
 trees, the full moon, and the white evening star, the 
 dewy dark obscurity down at the far horizon's rim, the 
 untroubled and unpassionate spaces of the sky, the soft 
 sea breaking at his feet, the lovely mountain line, the 
 gracious solitude of the hills at dawn, the dimness of 
 the Alpine pine-wood, all in nature that consoles and 
 soothes rather than what summons or impels, is that to 
 which Mr Arnold loves to abandon sense and spirit. 
 Having gained a brief season of refreshment, he again 
 takes up uneasily his burden of a feverish heart and 
 divided wiU, and endeavours to pursue his way with 
 Stoical calm, or at the lowest, with a pathetic resigna- 
 tion. It is no common spirit which can thus feel and 
 delicately mirror for us the malady of the century. 
 Could he but lose sight of the ideal, his sufferings were 
 at an end. But it is a virtue of Mr Arnold's poetry 
 that the flying perfect is never out of view ; he falters in 
 the pursuit, but the pursuit is never wholly abandoned. 
 
Victorian Literature. 209 
 
 What is here said has reference to Mr Arnold as he 
 stands confessed to us in his earlier volumes of verse. 
 In his prose writings there was discernible an intellectual 
 hauteur which contrasted with the uneasiness and moral 
 incertitude of his versified moods, and which implied 
 that a dogmatist stood erect under the shifting sensi- 
 tiveness of the poet. A dogmatist — for Mr Arnold is 
 not merely a critic who interprets the minds of other 
 men through his sensitiveness and his sympathies ; he 
 delivers with authority the conclusions of his intellect ; 
 he formulates ideas. A thoughtful observer might have 
 predicted long since that the poet, the shy, refined, 
 elder brother in Mr Arnold's twofold nature — would 
 have withdrawn, saddened and unnerved, while the 
 stirring, effective, and happier younger brother, the 
 critic, came forward and played a brilliant part in the 
 world. But these elder brothers are dear to us by virtue 
 of the very qualities that lead them to the shade. We 
 are grateful for all the quickening ideas, all the happy 
 phrases, with which the younger brother has provoked 
 the slow-moving mind of our country : " sweetness and 
 light," " Hebraism," " Hellenism," " the barbarian," 
 " the note of provinciality," " sweet reasonableness," 
 " a magnified non-natural man ; " we rejoice that each 
 barb of thought has pierced and rankled. Yet our heart 
 reverts fondly to the elder brother, the vanished poet. 
 Escaping from his languors and fevers and sick fatigues, 
 did he join himself to some tribe of roving gipsies ? 
 Shall we catch sight of him above Godstow Bridge at 
 noon some day in haytime, or at early morning, or when 
 the stars come out, wandering in some solitude of the 
 
 
 
2 1 o Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 Cumner hills ? or under the moon espy the form of the 
 fugitive singer punting across the Thames at Bablock- 
 hithe ; 
 
 " And leaning backward in a pensive dream 
 And fostering in his lap a heap of flowers, 
 Pluck'd in shy fields and distant "Wychwood bowers, 
 And his eyes resting on the moonlit stream." 
 
 If Mr Arnold is the poet of our times who as poet could 
 least resist la Tnaladie du sihcle in its subtler forms, he 
 whose energy of heart and soul most absolutely rejects 
 and repels its influence is Mr Browning. To him this 
 world appears to be a palaestra in which we are trained 
 and tested for other lives to come ; it is a gymnasium 
 for athletes. Action, passion, knowledge, beauty, science, 
 art^ — these are names of some of the means and instru- 
 ments of our training and education. The vice of vices, 
 according to his ethical creed, is languor of heart, lethargy 
 or faintness of spirit, with the dimness of vision and 
 feebleness of hand attending such moral enervation. 
 Which of us does not suffer now and again from a touch 
 •of spiritual paralysis ? Mr Browning's poetry, to describe 
 it in a word, is a galvanic battery for the use of spiritual 
 paralytics. At first the shock and the tingling fright- 
 ened patients away ; now they crowd to the physician 
 and celebrate the cure. Which of us does not need at 
 times that virtue should pass into him from a stronger 
 human soul ? To touch the singing robes of the author 
 of " Rabbi Ben Ezra" and " Prospice" and " The 
 Grammarian's Funeral," is to feel an influx of new 
 strength. We gain from Mr Browning, each in his 
 degree, some of that moral ardour and spiritual 
 
Victorian Literature. 211 
 
 faith and vigour of human sympathy which make in- 
 teresting to him all the commonplace, confused, and 
 ugly portions of life, those portions of life which, 
 grating too harshly on Mr Matthew Arnold's sensitive- 
 ness, disturb his self-possession and trouble his lu- 
 cidity, causing him often, in his verse, to turn away 
 from this vulgar, distracting world to quietism and soli- 
 tude, or a refined self-culture that lacks the most 
 masculine qualities of discipline. To preserve those 
 spiritual truths which are most precious to him, Mr 
 Browning does not retreat, like the singer of " In 
 Memoriam," into the citadel of the heart ; rather, an 
 armed combatant, he makes a sortie into the world of 
 worldlings and unbelievers, and from among errors and 
 falsehoods and basenesses and crimes, he captures new 
 truths for the soul. It is not in calm meditation or a 
 mystical quiet that the clearest perception of divine 
 things comes to him ; it is rather through the struggle 
 of the will, through the strife of passion, and as pauch 
 through foiled desire and defeated endeavour as through 
 attainment and success. For asceticism, in the sense of 
 that word which signifies a maiming and marring of our 
 complete humanity, Mr Browning's doctrine of life leaves 
 no place ; but if asceticism mean heroic exercise, the 
 askesis of the athlete, the whole of human existence, as 
 he conceives, is designed as a school of strenuous and 
 joyous asceticism. " Our human impulses towards know- 
 ledge, towards beauty, towards love," it has been well 
 said, " are reverenced by him as the signs and tokens of 
 a world not included in that which meets the senses." 
 Therefore, he must needs welcome the whole fulness of 
 
212 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 earthly beauty, as in itself good, but cbiefly precious be- 
 cause it is a pledge and promise of beauty not partial 
 and earthly, but in its heavenly plenitude. And how 
 dare he seek to narrow or enfeeble the affections, when 
 in all their errors and their never-satisfied aspirations, he 
 discovers evidence of an infinite love, from which they 
 proceed and towards which they tend ? Nor would he 
 stifle any high ambition, for it is a wing to the spirit 
 lifting man towards heights of knowledge or passion or 
 power which rise unseen beyond the things of sense, 
 heights on which man hereafter may attain the true ful- 
 filment of his destiny. 
 
 If we were to try to express in one word the special 
 virtue of the work of the ardent poetess who stood and 
 sang by Mr Browning's side, that word could be no other 
 than love. It was her part to show how the ideality of 
 poetry does not lead the singer away from humanity, but 
 rather bids him enter into the inmost chambers of love 
 and tender desire. The poems of Mrs Browning which 
 we remember Avith gratitude are not those that were 
 derived from her learned studies, nor those which show 
 her ineffectually straining after a vague sublimity of 
 thought, but those that come to us straight from " the 
 red-ripe of the heart." "The Cry of the Children," 
 " Cowper's Grave," " Little Mattie," and others akin to 
 these are dearer to us than any songs of any seraphim 
 or rhapsodies of life's progress. And what is "Casa 
 Guidi Windows" but a woman's love-making with a 
 nation ? And what is " Aurora Leigh " but a romance 
 with a purpose, the purpose being to show that what is 
 most precious in art on the one hand, and on the other 
 
Victorian Literature, 215 
 
 what is most precious in modern schemes for the re- 
 generation or amelioration of society, must perish unless 
 both art and social polity be based on the life of the 
 affections — the common heart of man and woman ? 
 With some of the philosophising of the poem we can 
 well dispense, and we would give it all for the picture of 
 Marian Erie's boy, "the yearling creature, warm and 
 moist with life to the bottom of his dimples," as he lies 
 upon the bed : — 
 
 " The pretty baby-mouth 
 Shut close as if for dreaming that it sucked, 
 The little naked feet, drawn up the way 
 Of nested birdlings ; everything so soft 
 And tender, — to the tiny holdfast hands, 
 Which closing on a finger into sleep, 
 Had kept the mould of 't." 
 
 The violin's fulness and the violin's intensity are in 
 the " Sonnets from the Portuguese," and fewer notes 
 here than elsewhere are faultily touched, for the music 
 here has no other meaning to express than that of perfect 
 love. 
 
 But how shall the heart bear itself in presence of the 
 conclusions of modem science, which seem to desolate it 
 and rob it of its most cherished hopes ? What new 
 heroism of the heart is possible in these our days, by 
 which it may confront the truth, and still live nobly, 
 even if sadly? It was a woman who attempted to 
 resolve these questions for herself and us by the aid of 
 imaginative genius. With her active truthfulness of in- 
 tellect and her passionate desire to make her life square 
 with facts, George Eliot sought for knowledge from every 
 side, endeavouring to appropriate and assimilate it for 
 
214 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 the highest uses. But conscience, the moral element, 
 was supreme in her nature, and drew all things towards 
 itself. And second only to conscience stood those deep 
 and tender affections which bound her to her fellows. 
 The scientific acquisitions and ideas of our time, there- 
 fore, interested her profoundly, and she instantly turned 
 ' over these acquisitions and ideas to study their ethical 
 side and their bearings on the affections ; to ascertain 
 how they stand related, first to character and conduct, 
 and secondly to love and joy. The result at which 
 George Eliot arrives is fortifying, not gladdening. Joy, 
 she tells us, is not possible — at least in this present 
 time — to one who would seek it as a personal possession; 
 or, if possible, it is so only through some inadequacy of 
 nature, some narrowness or shallowness of heart, which 
 renders it inaccessible to the great sorrow of the world. 
 The higher nature must accept the higher rule ; only by 
 self-renouncement can such an one attain that heroic 
 strength or that grave and sweet composure which must 
 stand in the place of joy. The motive of this self re- 
 nouncement can henceforth be no hope of any " Well 
 done, thou good and faithful servant" from any super- 
 natural lord or master, but only the desire to serve the 
 actual men and women who surround us, and those who 
 shall follow us and them upon this earth. George Eliot 
 could not be content to shape her character and conduct 
 by mere guess, conjecture, or probability. The hesitancy 
 of endless questioning and re-questioning was intolerable 
 to her ; she loved to bring intellectual and moral conflict 
 to an issue, so that division of nature might cease, and 
 victory, even though a stern and sorrowful victory, might 
 declare itself on this side or on that. 
 
Victorian Literature. 2 1 5 
 
 Our general conception of George Eliot's character 
 formed from her novels was not altered in any essential 
 by the new light thrown upon it by her letters and 
 journals. We had known that she was organised so as 
 to possess the most trembling sensibility to physical 
 sources of pleasure and pain ; and in her personal con- 
 fessions she appears with nerves servile to every skiey 
 influence, saddened in a rare degree by cloud or rain, 
 quickened and invigorated in a rare degree by sunshine, 
 fine airs, and the breathing quiet of the country. The 
 ground-tone of her spirit was not bright, and the autumn 
 harmonised with her mood better than the spring. 
 There is a lucid breadth, spiritual and touched by sad- 
 ness, in a clear September day, which, to some tempers, 
 more than compensates for the songs and blossoms of 
 the spring-tide. The edge of autumn on the morning 
 air would make even Loudon a place of delight to 
 George Eliot. She loved the sunset better than the 
 dawn — a wide sunset seen over heath and moor, or 
 spaces of the sea, and she would dream, like a child, of 
 endless progress through the luminous vistas of the west 
 into an unknown land, or would throw her spirit abroad 
 on the receding flood of light and beauty, as on a wave 
 of choral music, and, losing the sense of separate exist- 
 ence, would " feel melted into the general life." Autumn 
 and sunset have in them some of that " finest memory " 
 in which George Eliot found the substance of our " finest 
 hope." Among perfumes she cared more for the deli- 
 cate scent of dried rose-leaves — an emblem, as it were, 
 of the piety of remembered happiness — than for the rich 
 gusts from a garden in June. With such an exquisite 
 
_226^ Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 sensibility, George Eliot was known to us as possessing 
 a rare capacity for intense delights and prolonged and 
 refined pain; and in her letters she is revealed, ever 
 and anon borne away by raptures of pleasure — -a pas- 
 sionate lover of great music (" music," she writes, 
 " arches over this existence with another and a diviner "), 
 a delighted student of painting and sculpture, or unable 
 to restrain tears of joy on meeting what is noblest in 
 poetry. But, although a happy sharer in beautiful 
 mirth, and herself a creator of wise and genial laughter, 
 her disposition was not spontaneously buoyant or joyous. 
 From childhood she owned that " liability to have all 
 her soul become a quivering fear " which belongs to 
 imaginative and sympathetic natures ; her eye was even 
 morbidly on the watch in cloudless hours for the " crow 
 that flies in heaven's sweetest air." As a girl she suf- 
 fered much from her own sensitiveness and passionate 
 shyness ; in later years she often found cause to object 
 strongly to herself as " a bundle of unpleasant sensa- 
 tions, with a palpitating heart and awkward manners." 
 She often held on her way through a valley of shadow 
 haunted by cruel whisperings, or struggled forward 
 through some desperate slough of despond. " My life 
 for the last year," wrote George Eliot, when " Middle- 
 march " was brought to an end, " has been a sort of 
 nightmare, in which I have been scrambling on the 
 slippery bank of a pool, just keeping my head above 
 water." When her troubles were real and definite, she 
 would face them courageously, and would turn away 
 from false or illusive consolation. What she said to a 
 friend with respect to endurance in trials of faith or 
 
Victorian Literature. 217 
 
 scepticism, she applied to the lesser sorrows of life — ■ 
 " the highest calling and election is to do without 
 opium, and live through all our pain with conscious, 
 clear-eyed endurance.'' 
 
 Her intensest pains and keenest joys were those of 
 the affections. It was not only while she dwelt at 
 Griff, " the warm little nest where her affections were 
 fledged," that there lived the clinging child in her 
 heart ; all through life the most marked trait of her 
 character, as Mr Cross truly says, was " the absolute 
 need of some one person who should be all in all to 
 her." In girlhood she took refuge for a time in severe 
 religious asceticism, because she could not be moderate 
 in human loves, and felt that total abstinence was pos- 
 sible, although temperance was not. No child ever 
 cared more to be cherished and petted, to hear kind 
 words, to receive a motherly kiss, than George Eliot did 
 as a grown-up woman. Her bump of adhesiveness, de- 
 clared the phrenologists, was large ; and in the three 
 volumes of her " Life " there is a wealth of the love of 
 faithful fidendship given and gladly received. Nor did 
 she practise or approve a stoical repression of the utter- 
 ance of affection. " I like not only to be loved," she 
 wrote to Mrs Burne-Jones, " but also to be told that I 
 am loved. . . . The realm of silence is large enough 
 beyond the grave. This is the world of light and 
 speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are 
 very dear." But there is always, as here, a touch of 
 dignity in the expression of her love, no superlatives 
 raised to the to"* power, no " little language," like that 
 which is the foil of Swift's inhumanity. Each MS. of 
 
2 1 8 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 her novels is inscribed to George Henry Lewes in words 
 which make an outlet for the current of her affection so 
 broad and deep that the stream flows with no uproarious 
 hurry, but a grave, sweet majesty. The MS. of 
 " Romola " bears the inscription — " To the husband 
 whose perfect love has been the best source of her in- 
 sight and strength, this MS. is given by his devoted 
 wife, the writer;" and that of " Middlemarch " — "To 
 my dear husband, George Henry Lewes, in this nine- 
 teenth year of our blessed union." In her elder days 
 George Eliot's loving kindness was given with peculiar 
 sweetness and grace to the young who were illuminated 
 by the brightness of some new joy or who felt for the 
 first time the keen edge of pain. " It is one of the 
 gains of advancing age," she writes, " that the good of 
 young creatures becomes a more definite intense joy to 
 us." Her feeling was that pathetic one — purified from 
 all egoistic pleasure — with which Shakspere in the plays 
 of his latest years bows tenderly over his Perdita and 
 Miranda, his Ferdinand and Florizel. 
 
 This tender devotion to individuals and sympathy 
 with personal joys and sorrows were united in George 
 Eliot with a capacity for enthusiasm about great causes 
 in which the general interests of a people or of humanity 
 itself are at stake. Without such sense of a great 
 common existence how could she have been quite 
 ardent and quite true in singing her own part in " the 
 great Handel chorus " of life ? And when she felt that 
 enthusiasm was not a blind warmth — heat without 
 light — it was her happiness to abandon herself to the 
 wave of emotion with no reservations or safeguards of a 
 
Victorian Literature. 2 1 9 
 
 petty prudence. " I love the souls," she writes, " that 
 rush to their goal with a full stream of sentiment — that 
 have too much of the positive to be harassed by the 
 perpetual negatives, which, after all, are but the disease 
 of the soul, to be expelled by fortifying the principle of 
 vitality." And on the occasion of that shining appari- 
 tion, the French Revolution of 1848, she wrote to Mr 
 John Sibree : 
 
 " You and Carlyle are the only two people who feel just as I 
 would have them — who can glory in what is actually great and 
 beautiful without putting forth any cold reservations and incredu- 
 lities to save their credit for wisdom. ... I feared that you lacked 
 revolutionary ardour. But no — you are just as Bans-cvlottish and 
 rash as I would have you. You are not one of those sages whose 
 reason keeps so tight a rein on their emotions that they are too con- 
 stantly occupied in calculating consequences to rejoice in any great 
 manifestation of the forces which underlie our everyday existence." 
 
 Add to this power of enthusiasm for large causes, a rare 
 conscientiousness about duties that to some appear small, 
 and we perceive how complete was George Eliot's nature 
 on the moral side. " ' That conscience goes to the ham- 
 mering in of nails,' " she writes, " is my gospel." This 
 sense of the duty of thoroughness in detail was in part 
 inherited from her father. It afflicted her seriously 
 that, by a misprint, in the cheap edition, Adam Bade 
 should be made to say " speerit," whereas the dialect re- 
 quired that he should say " sperrit " ; and that she 
 should have written " Zinc£lo " in the " Spanish Gypsy " 
 instead of " Zincalo " was a misadventure which in- 
 volved the careful recasting of several passages for a 
 new edition. 
 
 This passion for definiteness and accuracy was a 
 central characteristic of her intellect. It helped to de- 
 
2 20 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 termine her creed on the negative side, while her ardent 
 sympathies went to work on the positive or constructive 
 side to educe the richest meanings and the most vitalis- 
 ing force from that Human Catholicism which was her 
 religion. But although she chose to buUd her temple 
 of stone iipon the solid earth, and feared that if she 
 aspired to build in the heavens the shrine and temple- 
 roof might be of cloud, George Eliot had no tendency to 
 deliver her mind in the form of hard and definite 
 opinions. She felt that the facts and the emotions 
 which should suit the facts are generally larger than can 
 be fitted to a precise formula of words, and she justly 
 feared that such a formula might be a ligature apt to 
 cause the growing soul to dwindle. " I shrink," she 
 wrote to Mr Frederic Harrison, " from decided ' deliver- 
 ances ' on momentous subjects from the dread of coming 
 to swear by my own ' deliverances,' and sinking into an 
 insistent echo of myself. That is a horrible destiny — 
 and one cannot help seeing that many of the most 
 powerful men fall into it." George Eliot was saved 
 from a hard intellectuality, both by the enthusiasm of 
 her afiections, and by the presence of large emotions 
 which were winged by imagination. When asked 
 whether in her opinion Goethe had a strain of mysticism 
 in his soul, she answered Yes — " of so much mysticism 
 as I think inevitably belongs to a full poetic nature — I 
 mean the delighted bathing of the soul in emotions 
 which overpass the outlines of definite thought." But 
 again her sympathies and her intellect protected her 
 against the waste of spirit in a vague and luxurious 
 mysticism, which, as if to justify a dangerous form of 
 
Victorian Literature. 221 
 
 self-indulgence, sometimes assumes higt philosophic 
 
 names. " I thought of you last night," she wrote to 
 
 Miss Hennell, 
 
 " when I was in a state of mingled rapture and torture — rapture at 
 the sight of a glorious evening sky, torture at the sight and hearing 
 of the belabouring given to the poor donkey which was drawing 
 me from Bamsgate home." 
 
 Always in George Eliot's passage through life she re- 
 turned from the mystic sunset splendours to the poor 
 belaboured donkey ; but lest the burden of afflicted and 
 long-suffering donkeyhood should drive her mad, there 
 was the far-off sunset in which to bathe and refresh her 
 spirit. 
 
 The influence — one might perhaps say the tyranny — 
 of scientific ideas apparent in George Eliot's artistic 
 work becomes even more strikingly apparent if we place 
 it side by side with the work of Charlotte Bronte, in 
 which the heart and conscience of a woman of genius, 
 who wrote direct from her own heart and brain, are so 
 vividly presented. The moral import of Charlotte 
 Bronte's work, I have elsewhere written,* was that the 
 mutual passionate love of one man and one woman is 
 sacred, and creates a centre of highest life, energy, and 
 joy in the world — the world from whose favour, indiffer- 
 ence, or antagonism, those secluded and isolated by love 
 are now for ever free. The relations of man and woman 
 as thus conceived are of the purest personal kind. The 
 moral import of George Eliot's work is that all individual 
 personal relations grow out of and belong to large im- 
 persobal social forces, and that in all joy of individual 
 
 * In a review of Mr Swinburne's "A Note on Charlotte Bronte," 
 The, Academy, September 8, 1877. 
 
2 2 2 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 passion there lurks the danger of an egoism blind and 
 cruel. And while Charlotte Bronte, who would glorify 
 passion, delighted in the gradual approach, through 
 external obstacles, of two persons framed each for the 
 bliss and perfecting of the other, George Eliot, who is 
 interested in the tests which sacrifice, self-surrender, 
 duty, apply to the heart, delights in bringing into 
 relation two persons who are spiritually unlike and 
 unequal, of whom one must be the giver the other the 
 receiver, or even the one a redeemer and the other a 
 destroyer. Two human creatures framed for love and 
 joy, starved for lack of both, and then warmed and fed 
 each by the other until life becomes ecstasy — this is 
 what Charlotte Bronte so vividly imagined. George 
 Eliot studies the tragic parting between a full and joyous 
 nature and all its joy, save only the stem joy of dutiful 
 renouncement. The imperious, energetic, passionate, 
 thwarted man, who, a fear and fascination to all others, 
 is drawn on from indifference to a soul-devouring hunger 
 and thirst for one woman (a woman with attraction playing 
 through a resisting medium), drawn on to the extreme 
 of desire and need, and enveloping her whom he loves in 
 an atmosphere charged with the electric force of his 
 desire — such is Charlotte Bronte's one conception of 
 man, her one conception of love ; and it has surely 
 occurred to many readers that such a conception, original 
 and striking though it be, is peculiarly a woman's con- 
 ception, and that Rochester and Paul Emanuel are ad- 
 mirable quite as much because they are feminine ideals 
 as because they are veritable human beings ; or rather a 
 little more admirable and interesting from the former 
 
Victorian Literature. 223 
 
 point of view than from the latter. Out of the oceanic 
 amplitude and variety of human life what has Charlotte 
 Bronte seen and depicted ? One thing with incompar- 
 able force, altogether excellently. And for certain 
 aspects of external nature she possessed a true and 
 passionate perception. It wrongs her genius to speak 
 of it as other than powerful through its intensity, and 
 intense partly through its limitation. 
 
 If we were to seek for the purest expression in lyrical 
 poetry of the same lofty ethics of self- renouncement 
 which George Eliot has embodied in prose fiction, we 
 should find it in a poem by a writer whose genius and 
 moral temper are wholly unlike the genius and moral 
 temper of George Eliot — in Mr Swinburne's stanzas of high 
 intention, entitled " The Pilgrims." Singing " sadly at 
 once and gladly," the pilgrims pass by, and are ques- 
 tioned as they pass : Who is their lady of love ? Is she 
 a queen, having great gifts to give ? Do they not repent 
 the devotion of their lives to one who is seen only by 
 faith — the crowned humanity of some future age — while 
 the sign and sentence of mortal sorrow is written on their 
 brows ? What shall be their reward ? Even their 
 fellows, for whose sake they have renounced joy and 
 peace and rest, will forget them : — 
 
 " And these men shall forget you. Yea, but we 
 Shall be a part of the earth and the ancient sea, 
 And heaven-high air august, and awful fire, 
 
 And all things good ; and no man's heart shall beat 
 But somewhat in it of our blood once shed 
 Shall quiver and quicken, as now in ua the dead 
 Blood of men slain, and the old same life's desire 
 Plants in their fiery footsteps our fresh feet." 
 
 Impatient of the narrow range of human passions. 
 
2 24 Transcripts and Studies, 
 
 which our modern idyllic poetry expresses, and of the 
 limitation of its feeling for the glories and terrors of the 
 forces of external nature, Mr Swinburne took at first 
 perhaps an ill way of effecting a legitimate purpose. 
 Having exhibited the beast in humanity, its orgasms of 
 pleasure and of torment, the man-leopard, the woman- 
 serpent, he looked upward and discovered the god in 
 humanity, the redeeming ardour of the patriot-martyr, 
 the divine self-sacrifice of perfect love in womanhood. 
 Over against the figure of Mary Stuart, wrecker and 
 ruiner of hearts, stands the figure of the girl-redeemer, 
 Chthonia, so spotless in flesh, so strong in spirit. With 
 his lyrical temperament Mr Swinburne sings both the 
 shame and tlie splendour of our manhood in their ex- 
 tremes, and in considering the ethical tendency of his 
 work no one portion of it must be viewed in isolation 
 from the rest. But to judge of any artistic work merely 
 by its ethical tendency is to judge unjustly, and the 
 injustice is extreme in the case of Mr Swinburne. He 
 has widened the bounds of song ; be has created a new 
 music in English verse ; he has enlarged the instrument 
 of expression. The sun, and the wind, and the sea, 
 have spoken to us through his verse. Mr Swinburne's 
 poetry liberates and dilates the imagination in its deal- 
 ings with external nature ; and in the mythology of his 
 imagination the powers of nature are nobly conceived in 
 their strangeness and their beauty, as part monster, part 
 human, part divine. A thinker, in the strict sense of 
 the word, Mr Swinburne is not, except on topics con- 
 nected with art and literature. He has caught up with 
 lyrical, enthusiasm those ideas of the present time that 
 
Victorian Literature. 225 
 
 make the loudest promises on behalf of freedom, and he 
 has animated them with his own ardour and coloured 
 them with the hues of his imagination. If he utters 
 not a little of what Mr Maurice, speaking of Carlyle, 
 termed " wild Pantheistic rant," it is right to remember 
 that Mr Swinburne pays special, homage to the moral 
 powers of the universal soul of which he sings, and that 
 he recognises its highest manifestation in the acts of 
 highest human virtue. As to a future life for the 
 individual soul, he will neither affirm nor deny. 
 
 " Shadows, would we question darkness ? Ere our eyes and brows 
 be fanned 
 Round with airs of twilight, washed with dews from sleep's 
 eternal stream, 
 Would we know sleep's guarded secret ? Ere the tire consume 
 the brand 
 Would we know if yet its ashes may requicken ? " 
 
 Yet were the life of a man no more than the flash of a 
 foambow on the advancing wave, it were worth living 
 for the sake of its brightness, its beauty, its leap towards 
 heaven and free air. 
 
 " All a-flower and all a-fire and all flung heavenward, who shall say 
 Such a flash of life were worthless ? This is worth a world 
 of care — • 
 Light that leaps and runs and revels through the springing 
 flames of spray." 
 
 Many critics have commented on the sensual fervours of 
 Mr Swinburne's earlier poems ; it remains for some 
 critic to bring to clearer view the spirituality of his later 
 songs, and to demonstrate that the poet of freedom is 
 indeed at heart a poet of order. 
 
 Mr Swinburne indulges in a contemptuous reference 
 
 P 
 
2 26 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 to the cheap science of George Eliot. Her effort to 
 adjust deliberately and carefully her feelings to ascer- 
 tained truths, is a process which one of Mr Swinburne's 
 lyrical temper cannot perhaps even conceive aright. 
 " Superstitious in grain, and anti-scientific to the 
 marrow " are the terms in which his brother character- 
 ises Dante Gabriel Rossetti. And not only was the 
 science of our modern days alien to Eossetti's genius ; 
 he was equally out of sympathy with the industrial 
 movement and the mechanical progress of our time. It 
 was the peculiar character of his imagination which 
 held him aloof, rather than any doctrinaire view* or 
 ethical theories. Mr Theodore "Watts, who describes 
 the movement in poetry and art which commenced in 
 the eighteenth century with the ballad revival, the 
 poems of Chatterton and Macpherson's " Ossian," as the 
 Renascence of Wonder, justly assigns a chief place to 
 Dante Rossetti in the later history of this movement. 
 Secluded from the stir and turmoil of the market and 
 the street, unvexed by the clang of hammer and the 
 din of machinery, caring not a jot for origin of species, 
 descent of man, evolution, heredity, struggle for exist- 
 ence, and such-like terrors of the new law, he lived in a 
 haunted land of beauty and of subtle passion. 
 
 " There the elf-girls flood with wiugs 
 Valleys full of plaintive air ; 
 There breathe perfumes ; there in rings 
 "Whirl the foam-bewildered springs; 
 
 Siren there 
 Winds her dizzy hair and sings.'' 
 
 It was just a year before the Hyde Park Exhibition 
 displayed to all nations its nineteenth-century wonders 
 
Victorian Literature. 227 
 
 of glass and iron, that the short-lived periodical The 
 Germ — in which appeared Rosaetti's "The Blessed 
 Damozel," and his allegoric narrative " Hand and Soul '' 
 — ran its course. The naughty world would not buy Th& 
 Germ, and mocked at the art of the pre-Raphaelite 
 brotherhood ; yeti as years went on a kind of occult 
 fame gathered about the name of the great painter and 
 poet. Not a little of the special attraction of his work 
 for the present time lies in its remoteness from all those 
 contemporary influences which make up a great part of 
 the environment of each of us. We enter the dreamer's 
 magic shallop with its prow of carven moonstone and 
 are wafted to the strand of an enchanted island ; all 
 around us is exact and definite as if we saw it with a 
 painter's eye, yet all is steeped in magic and mystery. 
 Is it a world of sense or of spirit ? Of neither alone, 
 but of that " spirit in sense " which the early poets of 
 Italy, and chief among them Dante, revealed in their 
 verse. A higher gift is bestowed by the poet who dis- 
 covers to us the actual world in new and deeper mean- 
 ings, radiant, wonderful, apparelled in the glory and the 
 freshness of a dream than can be given by him who 
 leads us into a shadowy world of old romance and 
 mystical passion. This higher Renascence of Wonder 
 was the gift of Wordsworth's noblest poetry. But the 
 Renascence of Wonder through romance is precious also, 
 widening as it does in its own peculiar way the realm of 
 the spirit ; and in rendering such service to the imagina- 
 tion " Christabel " and " Kobla Khan " can hardly take 
 a higlier place than Rossetti's ballads of " The King's 
 Tragedy " and " Sister Helen," 
 
2 28 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 Rossetti has been spoken of as an " art poet " (as if 
 all poetry were not art) in opposition to the spontaneous 
 poet — the poet of Nature. The truth which missed its 
 expression here is that, with Rossetti, the raw material 
 of emotion, the joy or pain in its native state, must go 
 through many processes before it is transmuted and 
 transfigured from life into art. With such a poet as 
 Burns, in his purely lyrical pieces, the transmutation is 
 indeed absolute ; but it is effected by a single, simple 
 process. He is stung by pleasure or by pain, and 
 his song is only the immortal heart of an actual cry. 
 "With Rossetti also life is the source of song ; but the 
 passage from one to the other may be by occult or 
 seemingly devious ways. The seed of passion drops into 
 the soil, sheds its husk of circumstance, puts up a 
 slender shoot, takes the sunshine and the dew, and after 
 a season bears a flower. But even this flower is not the 
 last result ; there is a spirit of the flower, such as Blake 
 saw springing, with ecstasy, from the calyx, and repre- 
 sented in some of his designs. Actual joy and actual 
 pain finally take form with Rossetti in a new mythology 
 of the imagination — a mythology not cold and incredible, 
 but instinct with the essence of passion, and fostered into 
 full-grown life by the spirit of beauty ; a mythology the 
 peculiar character of which has been determined partly 
 by his own creative instincts, and partly by his nurture 
 among the pre-Renaissance poets and painters of Italy. 
 His poems are very far from being transcripts of actual 
 experience ; and yet they are true offspring of life, 
 " creatures of poignant thirst and exquisite hunger," no 
 mere elaborations of the studio. 
 
Victorian Literature. 229 
 
 " The Song-god— He the Sun-god— is no slave 
 Of thine : thy Hunter he, who for thy soul 
 Fledges his shaft : to no august control 
 Of thy skilled hand his quivered store he gave : 
 But if thy lips' loud ery leap to his smart, 
 The inspir'd recoil shall reach thy brother's heart." 
 
 Admirable as are his ballads, " The House of Life," 
 recording a personal experience transmuted by the 
 imagination, is Rossetti's highest achievement in verse. 
 There are two other "sonnet-sequences," and only two, 
 in English poetry which can take rank beside it, " The 
 Sonnets of Shakspere " and " Sonnets from the Portu- 
 guese." It is no wrong to Shakspere's genius to admit 
 that of his sonnets not a few are overrun with the vices 
 of style characteristic of his age ; and we may with as 
 little fear of injury acknowledge that some sonnets of 
 Mrs Browning lack that fine artistic self-control, the 
 highest obedience to the law of beauty, which should be 
 as stringent as the self-control of asceticism, and is so 
 much more fruitful. On the other hand, pure and ex- 
 quisite as is the conception of love embodied in Rossetti's 
 sonnets, there is another way of love, a higher way, 
 which some poet of hardier temper, who grasps more 
 largely the facts of life, may yet interpret for us. Not 
 beauty alone, and sweetness and grace and gentle com- 
 panionship and tender fidelity, will enter into that ideal. 
 Courage and comradeship, all that is most common and, 
 therefore, most precious, seams and scars, the tokens of 
 stress and strain, strife and endurance, must present 
 themselves as readily as gold hair and the liquid eyes of 
 youth. To breast the gale, to ride into the blast, must 
 be discovered to be as blissful and secure as any leafy 
 
230 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 recess amid the soft rotwoulements of the grove. 
 Rossetti's haunt of love is a garden enclosed like 
 that of mediseval poets, until it is entered and laid 
 waste by the dread powers of doom. But to compensate 
 — great abstractions from life made living presences by 
 the poet's myth-making imagination hover always at 
 hand to give largeness and space to these poems. 
 
 Rossetti escaped from reality to romance, yet at a 
 serious cost ; and the life which should have been so 
 full and joyous to the end was saddened and turned 
 awry. He escaped through his imagination from a world 
 of turmoil and dust, of strife and greed, of commerce 
 and manufacture, of vulgar art and conquering science ; 
 he escaped, for there was little in him of the passion of 
 the reformer to overcome his repugnance, and bid him 
 stand fast and do battle with the world. Mr William 
 Morris, as seen in his earliest volume of poems — a 
 volume full of beauty and strangeness — might appear to 
 have much in common with Rossetti. Romantic beauty 
 and chivalrous passion and tragic-picturesque situations 
 attract him, and where can he find these in our work-a- 
 day world ? Miles and Giles and Isabeau, Constance 
 fille de fay, and fair EUayne le Violet, are infinitely 
 more pleasing company than Thomson and Johnson 
 and Jones. The blue closet, the little tower, the ancient 
 walled garden " in the happy poplar land," are far more 
 delectable places for a lover of romance than the fields 
 and streets of our nineteenth century. In the " Earthly 
 Paradise," though he may claim to be more than the 
 idle singer of an empty day, and to lay ghosts, in truth 
 the author lays no ghosts that haunt the hearts and 
 
Victorian Literature. 231 
 
 brains of modern men. Nor is he in any but a super- 
 ficial sense a disciple of Chaucer. The ride to Canterbury 
 on breezy April mornings to the sound of jingling bells 
 or the miller's bagpipe, under the conduct of jovial Harry 
 Bailly, and in company with a parson who wrought and 
 taught Christ's doctrine, and a ploughman inspired with 
 the hearty benevolence of a Hercules, is all unlike the 
 foiled search of an earthly paradise by weary wanderers. 
 In that soft western land to which they have come 
 without purpose or design, the disappointed questers, 
 now grown old, exchange their northern stories with the 
 old men of the city for stories of Greece. And month 
 blooms and fades into month, and season into season, 
 and at last death comes and makes an end alike of joy 
 and sorrow. An unheroic melancholy, a barren autumnal 
 sadness, broods over the whole poem. The flame of 
 passion and endeavour rises up and sinks down again 
 into coldness and ashes, and our eyes follow the bright- 
 ness and dwell upon the gloom with a strange, enervat- 
 ing, aesthetic satisfaction. We come to hate death, not 
 knowing what it means, and to love life, though of it 
 we know even less ; and the earth and heaven are 
 but as a curtain hung around a narrow room in which 
 play and laughter and weeping are heard ; and last of 
 all there is silence. Such poetry (and all the more 
 because it comes from a spirit robust and vigorous in its 
 sympathy with human passion) is in truth the poetry of 
 despair. 
 
 But since " The Earthly Paradise " was first imagined 
 Mr Morris has found a faith. His heartiness of nature 
 would not permit the passion of the reformer to remain 
 
232 Transcripis and Studies. 
 
 dormant within him ; his quarrel with the present time 
 is acute ; he still dreams indeed of an earthly paradise, 
 but now he sees it afar off in the Socialist millennium. 
 Though we get from Mr Morris no original verse com- 
 parable with that of his earlier volumes, and though we 
 may doubt of his millennium, we cannot but rejoice that 
 he has quitted that strange dreamy western land, and 
 stands a singer of hope in the streets of London. At 
 least as a protest against the greeds and cruelties and 
 unloveliness of the present there is a worth in lines 
 which tell his dream of the future : — 
 
 " Then all mine and all thine, shall be oilts, and no more shall any 
 man crave 
 
 For riches that serve for nothing but to fetter a friend for a 
 slave. 
 
 And what wealth then shall be left us when none shall gather 
 gold 
 
 To buy his friend in the market, and pinch and pine the sold ? 
 
 Nay, what save the lovely city, and the little house on the hill, 
 
 And the wastes and the woodland beauty, and the happy fields 
 we till ; 
 
 And the homes of ancient stories, the tombs of the mighty dead ; 
 
 And the wise men seeking out marvels, and the poet's teeming 
 head; 
 
 And the painter's hand of wonder ; and the marvellous fiddle- 
 bow, 
 
 And the banded choirs of music : all those that do and know." 
 
 Better, far better, " Chants for Socialists " with faith, 
 however inadequate for the wants of the soul, and hope 
 and charity, than the " Earthly Paradise " with all of 
 life a melancholy dream. 
 
 Mr Morris's teaching, in his character of a reformer, 
 has something in common with that of a greater re- 
 former who during forty years has been one of the chief 
 
Victorian Literature. 233 
 
 influences of the age. To speak in a. few words of the 
 manifold lessons on art, and life, and national polity 
 which Mr Ruskin has given to his countrymen may 
 appear less becoming than to be silent ; but in truth 
 the cardinal doctrine which runs through all his teach- 
 ing can be stated in a line. ; lit is that men — men and 
 not the works of men, men and not materials, or 
 machines, or gold, or even pictures, or statues, or public 
 buildings — should be the prime objects of our care, and 
 reverence, and love. } Hence it is that, as a writer on 
 art, he necessarily becomes a moralist, since he must 
 needs inquire from what human faculties does this work 
 of art arise, and to what human faculties does it appeal ? 
 Hence it is that in the decline of architecture or paint- 
 ing he reads the degradation of national character. 
 Hence it is that the life of the workman appears to him 
 to be of higher importance than the quantity of work 
 which he turns out. Hence it is that he has opposed 
 himself to the orthodox political economy, with a sense 
 that man, and the life and soul of man, cannot be 
 legitimately set aside while we consider apart from these 
 the laws of wealth or of so-called utility. No other 
 truth can be quite so important for our own age, or for 
 any age, as the truth preached so unceasingly and so 
 impressively by Mr Ruskin. 
 
 I have named some of the fixed stars that shine in 
 the firmament of our literature; but all of these have 
 not been registered on my map ; and lesser lights 
 are left unnamed, and clusters, and galaxies, and nebulae 
 must remain disentangled and unresolved. I have 
 spoken of eminent persons, because literature, as Cardi- 
 
2 34 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 rial Newman has said, " is essentially a personal work." 
 And I have spoken of these persons less as masters of 
 technique, each in his own province, than as seekers for 
 truth, because it seems to me a distinction of the litera- 
 ture of the Victorian period that it is the literature of a 
 time of spiritual trial, difBculty, and danger, and that its 
 greatest representatives have been before all else seekers, 
 in matters social, moral, and religious, for some coherent 
 conception or doctrine of life which shall bring unity to 
 our emotions and law and impulse to our will. 
 
 Were we to anticipate the future of literature, of 
 what worth were a guess or a venture at unauthentic 
 prophecy ? Some shy schoolboy on whom we had not 
 reckoned, some girl in an unknown nook of rural Eng- 
 land, may one day upset our cunningest calculations ; and 
 our hope is that it will be so. Two great factors, how- 
 ever, in the future, may be reckoned on with certainty — 
 science and democracy. Already scientific conceptions 
 have had their influence on the creatures of imagination, 
 while, at the same time, a great school of historical study, 
 scientific, not in the vain pretension of possessing a 
 complete theory of human development, but in its 
 exact aims and patient habits, has arisen in England. 
 Literature in the future must surely confront science in 
 a friendly attitude, welcoming all the facts and all the 
 new lights that science brings, while maintaining its 
 own dignity and independence, and resisting the tempta- 
 tion to forsake its own methods and processes because 
 they are other than the methods of science. All kinds 
 of material should be welcome to the soul, if only the 
 soul will preserve its own supremacy over the material 
 
Victorian Literature. 235 
 
 which it uses. Having givea ourselves away to observ- 
 ing and co-ordinating facts, having generalised from 
 those facts, we must then recover our personal force and 
 reassert ourselves as being, we ourselves, the first and 
 last of all facts. " A man must sit solidly at home," 
 says Emerson when speaking of the true uses of history, 
 "and not suffer himself to be bullied by kings or 
 empires) but know that he is greater than all the geo- 
 graphy and all the government of the world." No, he 
 need not sit solidly at home ; he may go forth and con- 
 verse with kings and the envoys of empires, and then 
 dismiss them haughtily and re-enter with added wisdom 
 and power into the empire of himself It is possible, 
 indeed, that the old arts and the old types of beauty 
 may be unable to survive the influences of an age of 
 science, commerce, democracy. Well, be it so ; let us 
 bid them a cheerful farewell, and confidently expect 
 some new and as yet inconceivable manifestations of the 
 spirit of order and beauty which can never become 
 extinct while man remains man. "Beauty," says 
 Emerson again, " will not come at the call of a legisla- 
 ture, nor will it repeat in England or America its history 
 in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and 
 spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men. 
 It is in vain that we look for genitis to reiterate its 
 miracles in the old arts ; it is its instinct to find beauty 
 and holiness in new and necessary facts, in the field and 
 roadside, in the shop and mill. Proceeding from a re- 
 ligious heart, it will raise to a divine use the railroad, 
 the insurance office, the joint-stock company, our law, 
 our primary assemblies, our commerce, the galvanic 
 
236 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 battery, the electric jar, the prism, and the chemist's 
 retort, in which we seek now only an economical use. 
 Is not the selfish and even cruel aspect which belongs to 
 our great mechanical works — to mills, railways and 
 machinery — the effect of the mercenary impulses which 
 these works obey ? . . . When science is learned in 
 love, and its powers are wielded by love, they will 
 appear the supplements and continuations of the material 
 creation." 
 
 Here we may end in a spirit of good hope. Let 
 literature accept all modern facts, and at the same time 
 let it assert and reinforce the soul. From the meeting 
 of new truth and fuller and purer passion, what but 
 some higher and unimagined forms of beauty must 
 arise ? Possibly no art of the schools, but a nobler art 
 of life. 
 
THE INTERPRETATION OF LITERATURE.* 
 
 A DISCUSSION, in which many eminent persons took 
 part, was held, not long since, with a view to" finding an 
 answer to the question, " What hundred hooks are the 
 best ? " It would have been more profitable for us had 
 we been advised how to read any one of the hundred ; 
 for what, indeed, does it matter whether we read the 
 best books or the worst, if we lack the power or the 
 instinct or the skill by which to reach the heart of any 
 one of them 1 Books for most readers are, as Mon- 
 taigne says, " a languid pleasure j " and so they must 
 be, unless they become living powers, with a summons 
 or a challenge for our spirit, unless we embrace them or 
 wrestle with them. 
 
 Now if some of those who have proved their power of 
 getting to the heart of great books were to tell us of 
 their craft" or their art or their method, we should listen 
 with interest and attention ; and if we were to compare 
 method with method, we could not fail to learn some- 
 thing worth learning. One would like to know, for ex- 
 ample, the process by which Sainte-Beuve dealt with an 
 author; how he made his advances; how he invested and 
 beleagred his author; how he sapped up to him, and drew 
 his parallels and zigzags of approach ; how he stormed the 
 
 * In this article I have said nothing of the historical study of litera- 
 ture and its interpretation through the general movements of the life 
 and mind of nations. 
 
238 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 breach and made the very citadel his owu. We have 
 heard of the secret of Hegel ; hut it is not Hegel alone 
 who has a secret. Every great writer has a secret of his 
 own, and this is none the less difficult to discover he- 
 cause the great writer made no effort at concealment. 
 An open secret is as securely guarded as any, like Poe's 
 purloined letter, which was invisible because it was 
 obviously exposed upon the mantelpiece. Every great 
 writer has his secret, and there are some writers who 
 seem to cherish their secret and to elude us just 
 at the moment of capture; and these, perhaps, are 
 the most fascinating of all, endlessly to be pursued. 
 *^Who, for example, has ever really laid hold of Shak- 
 spere ? He is still abroad, and laughs at our attempts 
 to capture or surprise him.^ If some fine interpreter of 
 literature would but explain to us how he lays hand on 
 and overmasters the secret of his author, we should feel 
 like boys receiving their lessons in woodcraft from an old 
 hunter ; and we are all hunters, skilful or skilless, in 
 literature — hunters for our spiritual good or for our 
 pleasure. How to stalk our stag of ten ; how to get 
 round to the windward of him ; how to creep within 
 range ; how to bring him down while he glances forth 
 with startled eye (yet does he not always elude us t) ; 
 yes, and how to dismember him and cart him home (but 
 is he not far away, filling the glades with ironical up- 
 roar ?) — in all this it is that we should like to be in- 
 structed by some experienced ranger of the woods. 
 
 We speak of the interpretation of literature ; and it 
 may be asked, Is not literature itself an interpretation 
 — interpretation of external na^ture^and of the nature of 
 
The Intet'pretation of Literature. 239 
 
 man ? 1 Why, then, should we speak of an interpretation 
 of that which itself interprets, an interpretation of an 
 interpretation % And persons who talk in this way are 
 also likely to say that a work of literature — a poem, 
 suppose — which does not explain itself is not worth ex- 
 plaining. But literature is more than an interpretation 
 of external nature and of human life ; it is a revelation 
 of the widening possibilities of human life, of finer 
 modes of feeling, dawning hopes, new horizons of thought, 
 a broadening faith and unimagined ideals. Moreover, 
 every great original writer brings into the world an 
 absolutely new thing — his own personality, with its 
 unique rhode of envisaging life and nature ; and in each 
 of us he creates a new thing— a new nerve of feeling or 
 a new organ of thought ; a new conception of Ufe, or a 
 new thrill of emotion. We sometimes call him by even a 
 higher name than revealer ; we call him a maker or 
 creator. The ideal world in which we live and move ' 
 and have our being — a world in the most literal sense 
 as real as the material universe — is indeed in great part 
 the handiwork of man the creator. By countless genera- 
 tions of men this world of thoughts and hopes and fears 
 and joys and loves has been brought into existence, and 
 it is still in process of creation. To^reveal or_to create 
 this world every great thinker, every great artist has 
 helped in an appreciable degree. It is inhabited by 
 noble creatures — men and women — Achilles, Odysseus, 
 Prometheus, Oedipus, Helen, Antigone, the Socrates of 
 Plato, the two explorers of the circles of Hell and the 
 mount of Purgatory, Don Quixote on Rosinante, Hamlet, 
 Imogen, Cordelia, Falstaff, Prospero — all born of the 
 
2 40 Transcripts . and Studies. 
 
 brain of man the creator. That we should understand 
 the facts and the laws of this ideal world is surely little 
 less important to us than, that we should measure the 
 courses of the planets or explore the universe that lies 
 in a drop of stagnant water. 
 
 Now, if literature be part of a gradually opening 
 revelation or creation from man's spirit, it is easy to un- 
 derstand how it should need to be interpreted. It can- 
 not be comprehended all in a moment; its widening 
 horizons can hardly be recognised. The light of a new 
 truth, coming suddenly upon us, blears our eyes. See- 
 ing, we see, and do not perceive ; hearing, we hear, and 
 do not understand. A great point is gained when men 
 acknowledge that something has indeed come before 
 them, though what it is they cannot tell ; when they 
 see men as trees walking ; when they know that a voice 
 has spoken to them, though it be as the voice of a 
 trumpet, the words of which they cannot understand. 
 At first with most men the revealer can do no more than 
 this ; whatever he utters must be for them at first a 
 dark saying or a parable. The majority of men are 
 slow to apprehend new truths, are slow to become sensi- 
 tive to new feelings. They require to have these things 
 demonstrated and brought home to them. Or, if they 
 try to take things up at once, they take them up, as we 
 say, by the wrong handle, and get no good of them. 
 But time alone is needed, with a serious effort on the 
 part of each man to interpret things to and for himself, 
 using in that effort whatever aid he can obtain from his 
 fellows, who may happen to be better qualified than he 
 to come at the meaning of the widening revelation. A 
 
The Interpretation of Literature, 241 
 
 great writer never fails ultimately to become his own 
 interpreter; omly this may meed much time — perhaps 
 the lifetime of a generation, of men. And thus it is 
 quite right to say that a poem which does not explain 
 itself is not worth explaining ;. only we should add that 
 it sometimes needs twenty, thirty, forty years tO' explain 
 itself to the mass of men,, and that for a long period it 
 may be able to explain itself only to a few ehosen 
 disciples. 
 
 The professional interpreters of literature, as a ciass^ 
 do not help us muck These are the scribes of litera- 
 ture, who expound the law from their pulpits in the 
 reviews, weekly, monthly^ quarterly. The word 
 " critic" by its derivation means a judge rather than ani 
 interpreter, and the function assumed by these ministers 
 of literature resembles that of a magistrate- oa the 
 bench. Now a crew of disorderly persons, often of the 
 frailer sex,, each of whom:, more perhaps through weak- 
 ness, than wickedness, has been guilty of bringing into 
 the world a novel in three volumes ; now a company of 
 abashed and shivering poetlings, each charged with the 
 crime of having uttered counterfeit verse, comes before 
 his worship the reviewer, who lightly dismisses some 
 with a caution, and sentences others to public laughter' 
 and the stocks during a week. And the sad thing is 
 that though instances have been known in which a 
 poetaster reformed and became a respectable citizen, the 
 female novelist; having once erred, is lost to all sense of 
 shame, and inevitably appears before the bench again 
 and again, once at least in every six months during the 
 period of h«r natural life. We need this police and 
 
242 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 magistracy of literature, and we may cheerfully admit 
 that, unless bribed by friendship or malice, they do in 
 the main truly and indifferently administer justice of a 
 rough-and-ready kind. 
 
 But, if in the company of petty poetical offenders 
 there happen to be one true prophet — a Shelley, a 
 Wordsworth, a Keats — the chances are that his worship 
 the reviewer, hearing the evidence against him, and 
 being addressed by the prisoner in an unknown tongue, 
 for which no interpreter can be found in the court or in 
 the city, will, with irritated impatience, sentence him to 
 the stocks for seven days, which under no circumstances 
 can do him much harm, and which may teach him the 
 advantage of learning to speak plain English. Words- 
 worth, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Tennyson, Carlyle, 
 iBrowning, Whitman — each in his day has stood in the 
 stocks, and every fool has been free to throw a cabbage- 
 stump or a rotten egg at the convicted culprit. In the 
 case of some of these, perhaps, the sufferings of their 
 late apotheosis have been more severe than the light 
 affliction of their early martyrdom. 
 
 When we inquire what were the obstacles -that hin- 
 dered or delayed the recognition of such writers as 
 these, and turn to the utterances of the critics who gave 
 expression to the popular thought or sentiment, we find 
 the accusation of obscurity a constant part of the indict- 
 ment drawn up agaiast them. The poet has been well 
 termed " a pioneer of beauty," and he may also be a 
 pioneer of passion and of thought. But nothing is 
 more unintelligible, nothing looks more like affectation, 
 folly, or downright madness than enthusiasm for ideals 
 
The Interpretation of Literature. 243 
 
 of beauty which the world has not as yet learnt to 
 accept. If we were asked to name a poem of this cen- 
 tury, the beauty of which now imposes itself inevitably 
 ou every reader, we might well name Coleridge's 
 " Christabel." But to the Edinburgh Eeviewer 
 "Christabel" was "a mixture of raving and drivel- 
 ling ;" and he goes on to suggest that the author of the 
 poem may possibly be under medical treatment for in- 
 sanity. " A more senseless, absurd, and stupid compo- 
 sition," wrote another critic, "has scarcely of late years 
 issued from the press." If we were asked to name the 
 highest poets of the middle of the eighteenth century, 
 we should instantly name Collins and Gray. And of 
 Collins, the great eighteenth century critic, Johnson, 
 wrote, " The grandeur of wildness and the novelty of 
 extravagance were always desired by him, but were 
 not always attained ;" and he specifies the faults of 
 " harshness and obscurity " as characteristic of Collins. 
 " My process," he writes contemptuously in his life of 
 Gray, " has now brought me to the wonderful ' wonder of 
 wonders,' the two sister odes [' The Progress of Poesy,' 
 and 'The Bard'], by which, though either vulgar 
 ignorance or common sense at first universally rejected 
 them, many have been since persuaded to think them- 
 selves delighted. I am one of those that are willing to 
 be pleased, and therefore would gladly find the meaning 
 of the first stanza of ' The Progress of Poetry.' " 
 
 The same accusation of obscurity, coupled with the 
 accusation of childish simplicity and puerility, was brought 
 a generation later against the leader of the reaction from 
 Gray's poetical style. In Johnson's place now stood 
 
244 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 Jeffrey, as the representative of critical taste, judgment, 
 and sagacity. And Jeffrey was a critic of no ordinary 
 powers ; a quick and keen understanding, great versa- 
 tility of mind, a certain enthusiasm for literary beauty, 
 much wit and fancy, a brilliant manner of setting forth 
 his ideas — these were Jeffrey's gifts. In 1807 appeared 
 two little volumes coiptaiming some of the noblest poetry 
 of "Wordsworth, his loftiest sonnets, his most radiant and 
 profound poems of Nature, some of his most pathetic 
 renderings of human passion. Th©' collection closed 
 with his great ode on Intimations of Immortality, " be- 
 yond doubt," said the Edinburgh Eeviewer, " the 
 most illegible and unintelligible part of the publication. 
 We can pretend tO' give no analysis or explanation of 
 it." Four years later the critic- of the Literary 
 Register lamented the "incomprehensible system of 
 poetry" which was the ruling power in these two volumes 
 of verse ; Mr Wordsworth's " drivelling nonsense " was 
 better " calculated to excite disgust and anger " than 
 anything the critic had ever seen. In other words, the 
 poetry of Wordsworth brought a new thing into English 
 literature, and its speech was at first an utterance in an 
 unknown tongue. In 1816 was published "Alastor," 
 the first high achievement of Shelley's adult years. 
 The Monthly Review condescended to notice the 
 slender octavo, and pronounced it absolutely unintel- 
 ligible. " We entreat Mr Shelley," the critic wrote, 
 " for the sake of his reviewers as well as of his other 
 readers (if be has any), to subjoin to his next publication 
 an ordo^ a glossary and copious notes illustrative of his 
 allusions and explanatory of his meaning." Seventeen 
 
The Interpretation of Literature. 245 
 
 years later the earliest of Mr Browning's dramatic 
 moriologues, " Pauline," appeared. A ,copy fell into the 
 hands of John Stuart Mill, then a young man, and 
 known as a literary critic. Struck . by its originality 
 and power, he wrote to the editor of the magazine to 
 which he was a contributor, requesting that he might 
 be allowed to review the poem in the next number. The 
 editor replied that unluckily it had been already 
 reviewed. On turning to the criticism of "Pauline," 
 Mr Mill found that it had at least the merit of brevitj'-, 
 for it was contained in a single line : " Pauline, a piece 
 of pure bewilderment." Only within the last two or 
 three years has the charge of unintelligible obscurity 
 brought against Mr Browning been silently dropped ; 
 and now we are in the most correct fashion if we express 
 surprise that any one should ever have found himself 
 perplexed in the tangle of the most involved period of 
 " Sordello." The whirligig of time, in the course of half 
 a century, has brought in its revenge. 
 
 When we hear this accusation of obscurity brought 
 against a great writer, we may remember a word of 
 Goethe : " He who would reproach an author with 
 obscurity, ought first to make an examination of himself, 
 to be sure that he is inwardly clear. A very clear hand 
 may not be legible by twilight." In other words, do 
 you yourself bring light or darkness to the study of the 
 author ? do you bring attention, clearness and energy of 
 mind, a patient receptive spirit, a readiness to respond 
 to what is admirable even though it be strange ? — for 
 with all these you bring light, and without them you 
 bring darkness, or at least a shadow. 
 
246 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 A second accusation, sometimes justly but often reck- 
 lessly advanced, which tells with great effect for a time 
 against a certain class of poets and artists, is the accusa- 
 tion of immorality. If it can be coupled with the charge 
 of obscurity it tells with double force. Instead of 
 obscurity, the less courteous word " nonsense " is often 
 employed, and if it can be represented that the poet 
 invites his reader to partake not merely of a dish of 
 clotted nonsense, but also of nonsense which is poisonous, 
 a twofold motive is supplied for turning away from what 
 he offers. 
 
 Now this accusation of immorality, as brought against 
 a great writer, may be wholly false, or it may be true in 
 some respects, but false in being advanced absolutely 
 and without qualification. The entire tendency of a 
 writer may be towards righteousness, and he may be 
 reviled as an immoral writer. Or, what more frequently 
 happens, his dominant influence on character may be 
 potent for good, but on certain side issues he may be 
 ethically unsound ; these are detached from the whole, 
 and are represented as central. / A writer who brings to 
 his age some new and precious gift, some quickening of 
 moral sensibility, some reinforcement of spiritual faith 
 and spiritual passion, is peculiarly exposed to this 
 reproach. "^^We find it hard to conceive, and yet it is a 
 fact, that to the early Edinburgh Reviewers the 
 writings of Southey and Wordsworth seemed dangerous 
 in their moral tendency. Where, asked the guardian 
 of public morals in the Edinburgh Beview, did the 
 Lake School find its inspiration ? Primarily in the 
 anti-social and distempered sensibility of Rousseau, 
 
The Interpretation of Literature, 247 
 
 his discontent with the present constitution of 
 society, his paradoxical morality, and his perpetual 
 hankering after some unattainable state of volup- 
 tuous virtue and perfection. ( Discontent with the 
 present constitution of society — that was the high 
 crime of Wordsworth and Southey in their follow- 
 ing of Rousseau, and to be virtuous means to be satis- 
 fied with things as they are. \ So it was also with Charles 
 Kingsley when he published his " Yeast ;" the little 
 leaven of Christian socialism might possibly leaven the 
 whole lump of society. With the eager anger which 
 inflames celestial minds, the Guardian, representing 
 orthodox English churchmanship, flung against Kingsley 
 its vile accusations of profligacy and heresy. " It is 
 the countenance the writer gives to the worst tendencies 
 of the day," so wrote the Guardian reviewer, " and the 
 manner in which he conceals loose morality in a dress 
 of high-sounding and philosophical phraseology, which 
 calls for plain and decided condemnation." But im- 
 morality may be of many kinds, and to be a child of 
 the devil, if we may trust the derivation of that name 
 of the father of lies, is before all else to be a false 
 accuser. The truth indeed is great, and will prevail ; 
 but sometimes the lie does not rot until its work is 
 done, and the truth prevails too late, 
 
 " When none carea whether it prevail or not." 
 Perhaps the most grievous wrong is done when the 
 accusation has a fragment of truth to countenance it. 
 Such was the case with the charge of immorality so 
 persistently brought against the poetry of Shelley. 
 Setting aside the crude work of his boyhood, there is 
 
248 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 undoubtedly in Shelley's writings an element of unsound 
 thinking, derived in the naain from the teaching of 
 Godwin's "Political Justice," whieh may be fairly 
 termed immoral. To be unjust to the past out of 
 whieh we have grown is immoral, and to the eighteen 
 hundred years of Christendom Shelley is constantly 
 unjust. It is the part of impiety to think scorn of our 
 heritage from the ages which have helped us to what- 
 ever we possess of wisdom and generous passion, and 
 the power of high resolve ; and Shelley's gaze was so 
 ardently fixed upon the future, and so dazzled by the 
 vision of things yet to be, that he could not estimate 
 aright the precious increment of good received from 
 many generations of men. But the central influence 
 of Shelley's poetry was on the side «f justice, charity, 
 beauty, truth. He, more than most other writers, in- 
 spires his reader with an unquenchable aspiration after 
 ideals of beauty, love, gentleness, truth, justice, purity. 
 And it was his special glory to have kept in vital rela- 
 tion with the spiritual forces issuing from the last cen- 
 tury, and full of constructive power for modern society, 
 at a period characterised all over Europe by terror and 
 base reaction. 
 
 Let us remember that a chief function of the poet 
 is to free, to arouse, to dilate the consciousness of his 
 reader. True to the abiding laws of morality, he is 
 often compelled to revolt against the temporary moral 
 conventions of the Scribe or the Pharisee, for whom the 
 quickening truth has hardened into a crust of tradition, 
 which impedes all free growth and movement. It is his 
 part to be through his finer sympathies and through his 
 
The Interpretation of Literature. 249 
 
 imagination a moral pioneer, discovering new duties of 
 the heart or hand or head. But to quicken a new life 
 in men, he is sometimes compelled to wage war against 
 a morality which has stiffened into mere routine. In 
 every epoch when the moral ardour of man has been 
 roused, and a vigorous movement initiated in favour of 
 a higher or a wider conception of human life, the re- 
 formers have had to face the reproach of removing 
 ancient landmarks — which indeed they do — and of 
 endangering the settled order of society. We can easily 
 conceive how dangerous to virtue the doctrines of Chris- 
 tianity must have appeared to an old Roman moralist — 
 how vulgar and popular must have appeared the new 
 emotional movement. And it sometimes may happen 
 that the reformers, though rendering a high service to 
 humanity, are driven, in this direction or in that, by the 
 pressure of the ideas forcing them forward, or by the 
 exaltation of their own enthusiasm, beyond the bounds ; 
 they are human instruments of high truths, and it were 
 strange if they did not mingle an element of infirmity 
 and error with what they achieve. Our duty towards 
 them in such a ease is to recognise the error, to condemn 
 it, to forgive the erring mortal,''and to remain loyal to 
 him and his cause. Thus at the present moment, should 
 we see a woman of pure and courageous heart widening, 
 by life or by literature, the accepted ideal of woman's 
 part in the world, and asserting her right to spend her 
 treasures of love and devotion in the attempt to check 
 or remove some of the foul wrongs and injuries and un- 
 wholesome sores of humanity, and should she be be- 
 trayed, in life or in literature, into error or excess 
 
250 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 through generous zeal, or the pressure of her convic- 
 tions, we must judge that error or excess severely, and 
 condemn it sternly, and forgive it freely, and remain 
 true to our new reformer and the cause which she, en- 
 cumbered with weakness, represents. 
 
 Let us then understand that these two reproaches 
 brought against an original writer — the reproach of ob- 
 scurity and the reproach of immorality — may in fact 
 signify that he offers some precious gift of thought or 
 passion to the world, which as yet the world is unwilling 
 to receive. Mr Mill, in his essay on Alfred de Vigny, 
 contrasted admirably two types of poet or artist — the 
 Conservative poet and the Movement poet. The Con- 
 servative poet, resting his inventions on the broad basis 
 of a settled faith, the broad basis laid by the past, will 
 attain, with little struggle if he be a man of high 
 powers and rich human sympathy, a high level of excel- 
 lence, and he may receive an immediate and wide 
 recognition. Such was Walter Scott. The Movement 
 poet is in some respects less fortunate. He wings his 
 way towards radiant apparitions of faiths, hopes, charities, 
 whose feet have not yet touched the earth. Borne for- 
 ward with aspiring courage, he may soar straight and 
 high, but also he may be caught in tempestuous gales 
 too strong for him, and be whirled he knows not where. 
 Such a writer is peculiarly exposed to the accusations of 
 obscurity and immorality ; and it is quite possible that 
 for lack of the safeguards of organised social life, from 
 which perhaps he has been unjustly cast forth as a rebel, 
 now and again failing of his radiant heights, and baffled 
 and dispirited, he may in fact sink below the level on 
 which they tread safe, who have no wings to soar. 
 
The Interpretation of Literature. 25 1 
 
 An immense and sudden popularity can belong only 
 to the writer who interprets into art the settled feelings 
 and established convictions of his time, or to him who 
 stands at the head of some large advancing movement 
 already organised. It can never belong, at the outset, 
 to one who goes forward alone as a pioneer. And popu- 
 larity, of course, may be suddenly attained by the char- 
 latan or the lucky retailer of moral platitudes. From 
 count of copies sold we cannot determine whether the 
 fortunate author be a Tupper or a Scott. But there is 
 one indication of the presence of some exceptional 
 quality of genius which never fails. We can point to 
 no writer who drew early to his side a small band of 
 eminent disciples, and at the same time suffered shame 
 and scoffing or total neglect from the crowd, who did not 
 in the end prove a power in literature, and gradually 
 win acceptance from the world. Such was Wordsworth's 
 position in the opening years of our century ; such 
 a little later was Shelley's position. Such was Carlyle's 
 half a century since, and Mr Browning's at a date more 
 recent. Such also was Mr Whitman's position until of 
 late, when a considerable company has gathered to his 
 side and the voice of opposition has almost fallen silent. 
 Now, if any one of us be drawn towards a great 
 writer, and resolve that in spite of obstacles he will 
 interpret, for his own use or that of .others, the writer's 
 meaning and message, the first thing to attend to is this 
 — that the author and his work be regarded as a whole 
 bearing on life as a whole.* Our prime object should be 
 
 * I borrow a phrase from Mr Frederic HarrisoB, who writes in 
 his essay on "The Choice of Books" : "There is this stamp upon 
 every stroke of eighteenth century work — the habit of regarding 
 things as wholes bearing on life as a whole." 
 
252 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 to get into living relation with a man; and by his 
 means, with the good forces of nature and humamty 
 which play in and through him. This aina condemns at 
 once all reading for pride and vain-glory as wholly 
 astray, and all reading for scholarship and specialised 
 knowledge as partial and insuflficient. \ We must read 
 not for these, but for life ; we must read in order to 
 live. Only let us bear in mind that in order to live our 
 best life we do not chiefly need advice, direction, in- 
 struction (though these also we may put to use) ; 
 we need above all an access of power rightly directed. \ 
 And hence we must guard against the growth of a spirit 
 which is perpetually craving the didactic, or narrowing 
 power into preaching. There are many great works of 
 literature and art from which we learn little or nothing, 
 at least consciously or in set term and phrase ; but we 
 go to them as a sw^immer goes to the sea. We enter 
 bodily, and breast the waves, and laugh and are glad, 
 and come forth renewed and saturated with the breeze 
 and the brine, a sharer in the free and boundless vitality 
 of our lover, the sea. We have won health and vigour, 
 although the sea has omly sung its mysterious choral 
 song, and the waves have clapped their hands around us, 
 nor has ocean once straitened his lips to utter a little 
 maxim or a moral sentence. And Avith such writers we 
 may be trustful' and generous, and put aside the petty 
 spiritual prudence which it is well that we should make 
 use of when we go to one who is chiefly a teacher. 
 Such an oceanic writer as Shakspere or Goethe may 
 contain within his vastness some things that belong to 
 the rankness and garbage of the earth ; but so antiseptic 
 
The Interpretation of Literature. 253 
 
 is his large and free vitality, played upon by the sun and 
 breeze, so wholesome is his invigorating saltness, that we 
 may dash fearlessly across the breakers, and quit his 
 sands, and shallows, for a gleeful adventure in the 
 deep. 
 
 We are often instructed, to- enter 00 the study of 
 a great writer in a spirit of reverence, and this is well 
 said when it means that we should be neither im- 
 pertinent nor impatient ; but it is ill said if it tend to 
 foster in us the spirit of hero-worship. \ Approach 
 a great writer rather in the spirit of cheerful and 
 trustful fraternity ; this is^ better than hero-worship ; 
 and do homage only to the eternal laws of Nature or of 
 God. The great master is better pleased to find a 
 brother than a worshipper or a serf ; and only to a 
 brother, no matter though he be a younger brother, will 
 he lay bare his heart. \ Surely the master has no par- 
 ticular affection for the idolatrous coterie that reprints 
 his worst verses, with a monograph on the number of 
 occasions on which he turned the loops of his y's and g's 
 to left or right. This is neither literature nor life, but 
 pedantry and puerility.. It was not because Carlyle was 
 a hero-worshipper that he wrote so admirably of Burns 
 and Johnson ; it was because he found in each a brother- 
 man, and took the hand of each in the close grasp of 
 fraternity. | If any author or artist lead us to a dim 
 shrine, and bid us bow before the idol of himself, he 
 secludes and shuts us in from what is larger and better 
 than himself ; but indeed what a great writer desires 
 and will do for us, if we permit him, is to bring us forth 
 into the sun and air, and give us strength and courage 
 
2 54 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 to enjoy them, and wisdom to go our way, cheerful 
 wanderers over a wide earth under an open heaven, "i 
 
 Approaching a great writer in this spirit of courageous 
 and affectionate fraternity, we need all our forces and all 
 our craft for the friendly encounter. If we love ease 
 and lethargy, let us turn in good time and fly. 
 The interpretation of literature, like the interpretation 
 of Nature, is no mere record of facts ; it is no catalogue 
 of the items which make up a book — such catalogues 
 and analyses of contents encumber our histories of litera- 
 ture with some of their dreariest pages. The interpreta- 
 tion of literature exhibits no series of dead items, but 
 rather the life and power of one mind at play upon 
 another mind duly qualified to receive and manifest 
 these. V Hence, one who would interpret the work of a 
 master must summon up all his powers, and must be 
 alive at as many points as possible. He who approach- 
 ing his author as a whole, bearing upon life as a whole, 
 is himself alive at the greatest possible number of points, 
 will be the best and truest interpreter. For he wiU 
 grasp what is central, and at the same time will be 
 sensitive to the value of all details, which details- he will 
 perceive not isolated, but in connection with one another 
 and with the central life to which they belong and from 
 which they proceed. \ 
 
 In the first stage of approach, however, the critic, 
 while all the time full of athletic force, must cunningly 
 assume a passive aspect, and to do so he must put 
 restraint upon his own vivacity and play of mind. His 
 aim is now to obtain a faithful impression of the object. 
 His second movement of mind will be one of recoil and 
 
The Interpretation of Literature. 255 
 
 resilience, whereby having received a pure impression of 
 the object, he tries to surprise and lay hold of the power 
 which has produced that impression. And these are the 
 two chief processes of the critical spirit in literature. To 
 make a pure observation or receive a faithful impression 
 calls for a strenuous patience and a disinterestedness 
 that are rare. " Receptiveness," George Eliot has said, 
 " is a rare and massive power like fortitude." " We are 
 so ready," says Goethe, " to mix up our own imaginations, 
 opinions, judgments, with what comes under our notice, 
 that we do not long retain the quiet position of observers." 
 The peculiar difficulty in the study of literature and art 
 of observing the object purely arises from the fact that 
 in making the observation it is not merely the intellect 
 which is employed, but also the emotions. We must 
 not only see accurately, but feel vividly and truly. Of 
 what value, for example, were any observation of a lyric 
 of Shelley's, unless we recognise the peculiar delight \ 
 which it excites ? And in order to do this, we must feel j 
 that delight vividly and aright. But the moment our 
 emotions are called into play we cease to be guided by 
 the dry light of intellect ; a personal factor enters to 
 disturb our calculations. If only we could be an instru- ' 
 ment of rich tone and ample compass, perfectly in tune, 
 on which the poet might play, capable of rendering back 
 with faultless vibration the meaning of his every touch. 
 This some of us can never be, or anything resembling 
 this. In matters of art and literature there is an 
 election of grace. The poet, it is said, is born, not 
 made ; he is in fact both born and made. .The lover of 
 literature is also born — born with a finer sensitiveness 
 
256 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 than other men, and Pope was in the right when he said 
 
 of poet and critic : 
 
 " Both must alike from heaVn derive their light. 
 These horn to judge, as well as those to write." 1 
 
 But happily the gift of a capacity to enjoy what is 
 beautiful is widely distributed, and where it exists in any 
 degree much can be done to develop the capacity. In 
 a very rare and high degree, however, the gift of natural 
 sensitiveness is not common ; and where it is intense in 
 % quality it is sometimes limited in range. To feel widely 
 and at the same time to feel exquisitely is am excep- 
 tional gift. I From those who lie open to only a few 
 impressions, and who respond to those few impressions 
 with peculiar intensity, arise the sects and heresies of 
 literature and art — unless indeed they acknowledge their 
 own limited range, and put their gift to wisest use. But 
 as the sects and heresies in religion have often been 
 witnesses at a particular time for a neglected truth, so 
 also have been the sects and heresies in art and litera- 
 ture. What constitutes their doctrine a heresy is not 
 the portion of truth, which it possesses, but the falsehood 
 which substitutes the lesser truth for the greater, or a 
 part for the whole. They gather around some master — 
 never one of universal power, but a master of narrow 
 range and exquisite gift — and they call themselves after 
 his name, and make his special qualities their standard 
 of judgment. They are fastidious,, and fastidiousness 
 always means the presence of a narrow, intense, sensi- 
 bility, lacking the larger and more generous passions 
 which arise from rich sensitiveness to the chief sources 
 of emotion in human life. And even of exquisiteness 
 
The Interpretation of Literature. 257 
 
 and subtlety, the very highest kind is attained only 
 through that larger and richer sensibility. The Venus 
 of Melos is not only freer and nobler than the most 
 adored ingenuity of the Grosvenor Gallery, but her 
 beauty is finer, subtler, and more exquisite. 
 
 Those who feel sanely and nobly in matters of litera- 
 ture and art keep themselves in vital relation with the 
 great facts and laws of life and nature, and refuse to 
 immure themselves in any monastery of art, or of so-called 
 culture. And the great facts and laws of life and nature 
 they find made visible and vocal in the highest works of 
 the universal masters of all ages and lands. \ In keeping 
 close to Homer, Sophocles, Shakspere, Dante, Molifere, 
 Cervantes, Goethe, we keep close not to literature merely 
 but to life. With them we are in the great highway 
 of life ; with them we rock in no sequestered bay, but 
 cross Atlantic and Pacific Seas.j If therefore we would 
 exclude, as far as possible, a personal disturbing element 
 in our recognition and judgment of literature and art, 
 and also exclude the prejudices and partialities of the 
 sects and schools, we shall do well to keep constantly 
 in the company of some one of the universal writers, 
 which means keeping in relation to the great facts and 
 laws of life as rendered most truly and nobly into 
 literature. Thus we shall be members of the One 
 Catholic Church of Kterature, and shall run small risk 
 of being seduced by the allurement of any sect or heresy, 
 for indeed we shall be able to recognise and appropriate 
 for a catholic purpose whatever neglected truth the sect 
 or heresy may proclaim. If we are faithful children of 
 this Catholic Church of literature and art, it will not 
 
 R 
 
258 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 greatly matter who may be the bishop of our particular 
 diocese — Shakspere, Homer, Dante, Goethe, Cervantes, 
 Molifere ; any one of them will teacl^s the catholic 
 doctrine of art — " quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab 
 omnibus." Only let him really shape and form us, let 
 him exert his full influence, let him drive the truth 
 deep into our heart — to accomplish which he must have 
 ample opportunity and time. We shall not grow really 
 wiser by running from teacher to teacher, quitting each 
 before he has done half his work. It is well perhaps to 
 have a notion as to what are the hundred best books ; 
 but it is folly to suppose that we can really make acquaint- 
 ance with half a hundred teachers. Each teaches the truth 
 universal, but in his own way and with his own methods, 
 and to submit ourselves to any one is a discipline. It 
 is a moral impossibility while we are undergoing the 
 peculiar and exacting discipline of Goethe to undergo 
 at the same time the peculiar and- exacting discipline 
 of Dante. But perhaps in the course of years we can 
 do this ; and some of us who are studious of perfection 
 may strive to pass through various rules of discipline, in 
 attempting which we should choose masters like Dante 
 and Goethe, who, while each one of the greatest of all 
 time, and each an interpreter of the catholic truth of 
 human life, yet differ, each from the other, as widely as 
 is permitted to interpreters of the truth universal. I To 
 submit ourselves to as many masters as may be countid 
 on the fingers of one hand, is perhaps as much as can 
 really be accomplished in a lifetime ; for we too have to 
 live, and our master's teaching is never more than 
 notional unless we put it into use and effect in our own 
 lives. A 
 
The Interpretation of Literature. 259 
 
 Mr Matthew Arnold has recommended that we should 
 always have in our mind lines and expressions of the 
 great masters, y^ich may serve, he says, as a touchstone 
 to other poetry, " Of course," he adds, " we are not to 
 require this other poetry to resemble them ; it may be 
 very dissimilar. But if we have any tact, we shall find 
 them, when we have lodged them well in our minds, an 
 infallible touchstone for detecting the presence or absence 
 of high poetic quality in all other poetry which we may 
 place beside them." He instances, among others, the 
 words in Homer addressed by Achilles to the suppliant 
 Priam : — 
 
 Kal ai, yipov, rb irplv fiiv AKOvofnev SK^iov eJcoi" 
 
 " Nay, and thou too, old man, in former days waist, as 
 we hear, happy ; " and Dante's simple, but perfect, 
 single line : 
 
 " In la 8ua volontade S nostra pace,'' 
 
 " In His will is our peace ; " and Shakspere's : 
 
 " Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast 
 Seal up the ship-boy's eyes, and rock his brain 
 In cradle of the rude imperious surge ; " 
 
 and Milton's : 
 
 " Darken'd so, yet shon© 
 Above them all the archangel : but his face 
 Deep scars of thunder had entrench'd, and care 
 Sat on his faded cheek." 
 1 
 
 It would need Mr Matthew Arnold's tact to assay 
 
 ^etry by such a method as this ; but after all only his 
 metaphor is wrong, not his meaning. Such a passage 
 of flawless poetry as any one of those quoted is not a 
 touchstone to apply to other passages of poetry ,_ but a 
 tuning-fork to ring for ourselves ; and if we do not 
 
26o Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 answer true, we had better not proceed with our obser- 
 vation of any other piece of poetry, for we cannot hope 
 that our observation will be pure. We are out of tune 
 with the highest. 
 
 While submitting ourselves patiently and disinter- 
 estedly to the impression of the object, and holding our 
 own vivacity in check, we are not really passive. We 
 are not as wax which receives the impression of a seal, 
 for in this case the wax is instinct with life, and moves 
 towards the seal, and clings around and into it. In this 
 patient energizing of the mind to receive a true impres- 
 sion or to make a pure observation, we should above all 
 endeavour to distinsjuish the relative values in the 
 object ; what is central in the object should be central 
 for us, and each detail should be perceived in relation to 
 the centre. There is a criticism which delights in 
 pointing out the " beauties " of an author, sometimes to 
 the obscuring of the total impression of his work. In 
 this criticism Leigh Hunt was pre-eminent ; his pleasure 
 in dainty phrases and exquisite lines was so quick and 
 fine, that he could not let them remain quietly in their 
 right places, but in his eager and almost sensuous delight 
 he must put in his thumb, and pick out his poetical 
 plums, exclaiming, " What a good critic am I ! " With 
 Leigh Hunt the parts become often more important than 
 the whole. He emphasizes and underlines each curious 
 felicity of diction until we forget that fine lines and 
 phrases must grow out of the heart of the subject, if they 
 are not to wither like the rootless blossoms stuck in a 
 child's .flower-bed. And yet Leigh Hunt was a critic 
 with many admirable qualities, and was swift and gene- 
 
The Interpretation of Literature. 261 
 
 rous in his recognition of genius as yet unnoted by the 
 world. What other critic has ever had the happiness 
 to make discovery in one short article of two such poets 
 as those discovered by Leigh Hunt in his article entitled 
 "Young Poets," in the Examiner for 1816 ? One of 
 the two had published a slender volume of verse in the 
 preceding spring, and one had printed a few sonnets in 
 a newspaper. The first of these became the author 
 of " Prometheus Unbound ; " and the second the author 
 of " Hyperion." * 
 
 Such indicating of what is obvious as we often find in 
 Leigh Hunt's essays has been nicknamed " signpost 
 criticism." Yet he must indeed be a traveller of rare 
 experience and sagacity who has never felt grateful for 
 a signpost. On a straight unbroken road it is an 
 impertinence to advise the wayfarer how to advance. 
 But among mountain tracts, where the mists descend, 
 we may well consult a guide. And to study any great 
 author is to traverse a difficult mountain range, or if he 
 be an author of vast width, as Goethe was, it is to 
 traverse a series of mountain ranges. A modest pedes- 
 trian, if he desire before nightfall to reach some definite 
 point (and the night at farthest is not far off) may rejoice 
 to be saved from objectless wanderings or to be turned 
 aside from entering a cul-de-sac. 
 
 When, after a period of patience and observation, the 
 student of literature has obtained a faithful impression 
 of the object, he casts his self-restraint aside, and leaps 
 or darts forward to discover if possible the law govern - 
 
 • A third name included in Leigh Hunt's poetical prophecy was 
 thiit of Keats' friend, John Hamilton Eeynolds. 
 
262 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 ing the phenomena which he has observed. They are 
 not isolated phenomena ; they belong to an organic 
 whole ; they are determined by the law of its life. 
 What, then, is that law ? Sometimes the unity of a 
 work of literature or art is found in a single dominant 
 conception ; sometimes in a dominant passion ; some- 
 times in a single, low-toned mood of mind ; sometimes 
 in a harmonious sequence or suite of emotions ; some- 
 times in a character ; sometimes in an action ; sometimes 
 in action, character and passion united. In each case 
 we form a hypothesis as to the nibtive of the compo- 
 sition, and endeavour to colligate the facts under that 
 hypothesis. Should our hypothesis fail to colligate the 
 facts, we reject it and try another and yet another. 
 Not that the skilful critic of literature will care to 
 present the public with anything which has a scientific 
 or pseudo-seientiftc aspect. His theory as to the motive 
 of a work of art is not obtruded as theory, but it 
 determines his point of view, and enables him to exhibit 
 the life of the composition, where otherwise he could do 
 no more than set forth a series of dead items and 
 details. Occasionally he can at once and without 
 hesitation put his finger on the precise motive of a work 
 — it is some single definite conception. Thus amid all 
 the varied imagery of Keats' " Ode on Melancholy," the 
 idea of the poem stands forth. The melancholy of 
 melancholies, Keats would say to us, is that of joy 
 which must pass arway, and of beauty which must fade 
 and die. 
 
 " She dwells with Beauty — Beauty that must die 
 And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips 
 Bidding adieu.'' 
 
The Interpretation of Literatiire. 263 
 
 And here we are fortunate in being able to watch 
 the idea in its origin, and assist, as it were, at the 
 very act of creation ; for we know the earlier opening 
 of the ode, rejected by Keats because the raw-head 
 and bloody-bones conception embodied in those rejected 
 lines was felt to be out of harmony with the general 
 effect of luxurious tenderness. 
 
 In studying more complex works we must guard 
 against looking for a thought or a truth, or an abstract 
 notion, or a doctrine, or a passion, or even a character 
 or an action as central ; and especially in the study of 
 dj'amatic poetry we should resist the tendency to exces- 
 sive simplifying of motives. Ordinarily in the drama 
 — always in the Shaksperean drama — an action, a 
 character, and^ a passion are inextricably twisted 
 together to make the central knot of life, the heart, 
 which sends its life-blood pulsing through every member 
 of the whole. It is otherwise with the drama of ideal 
 passion, in which the characters are created as mere 
 vehicles for the passion which forms the real subject of 
 the play. Thus in each of the dramas of Shakspere's 
 great contemporary, Marlowe, the protagonist is a single 
 dominant passion, exalted to heroic proportions, and 
 using the character of the chief person of the drama 
 as the field for its display. In " Tamburlaine," the 
 Scythian king is of dramatic value only as he incarnates 
 the lust of power, which finds its manifestation in him. 
 Nor in the play which bears his name is Dr Faustus so 
 much the dramatic centre as is the lust of knowledge 
 — of knowledge as a means to power — which possesses 
 and dominates the ambitious student of the magic arts. 
 
264 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 This is not Shakspere's mettod. And if we would 
 learn by unhappy example the danger of the attempt to 
 reduce any one of Shakspere's plays to ah abstraction 
 or an idea, we have but to glance into the criticisms of 
 the " Merchant of Venice" by eminent German scholars. 
 It was Shakspere's purpose in the " Merchant of 
 Venice/' says Gervinus, to delineate man in relation to 
 property. No, declares Ulrici, for its ideal unity lies in the 
 principle summum jus summa injuria, a view on which 
 Rotscher improves by exhibiting the topic of the play 
 as " the dialectics of abstract rights." For a modest 
 English critic the play has no other centre than the 
 Merchant placed between Shylock and Portia, with the 
 passion of generosity and mercy set over against the 
 passion , of vindictive hate, and a three-times varied 
 action — the story of the caskets, the story of the pound 
 of flesh, and the story of the rings — strung together 
 upon the thought of how promises and bonds and 
 inherited obligations should be regarded ; an action 
 brightly serious in the casket story, tragic in the story 
 of the merchant's bond, and closing with play and 
 laughter in the jest of the betrothal rings. 
 
 The happiest moment in a critic's hours of study 
 is when seemingly by some divination, but really 
 as the result of patient observation and thought, 
 he lights upon the central motive of a great work. 
 Then, of a sudden, order begins to form itself from the 
 crowd and chaos of his impressions and ideas. There is 
 a moving hither and thither, a grouping or co-ordinatino- 
 all his recent experiences, which goes on of its own 
 accord, and every instant his vision becomes clearer, and 
 
The Interpretatiun of Literature. 265 
 
 new meanings disclose themselves in what had been life- 
 less and unilluminated. It seems as if he could even 
 stand by the artist's side and co-operate with him in the 
 process of creating. With such a sense of joy upon 
 him, the critic will think it no hard task to follow the 
 artist to the sources from whence he drew his material — 
 it may be some dull chapter in an ancient chronicle, or 
 some gross tale of passion by an Italian novelist — and 
 he will stand by and watch with exqiiisite pleasure the 
 artist handling that crude material, and refashioning and 
 refining it, and breathing into it the breath of a higher 
 life. Even the minutest difference of text between an 
 author's earlier and later draft, or a first and second 
 edition, has now become a point not for dull commenta- 
 torship, but a point of life, at which he may touch with 
 his finger the pulse of the creator in his fervour of 
 creation. 
 
 From each single work of a great author we advance 
 to his total work, and thence to the man himself — to 
 the heart and brain from which all this manifold world 
 of wisdom and wit and passion and beauty has proceeded. 
 Here again, before we address ourselves to the interpre- 
 tation of the author's mind, we patiently submit our- 
 selves to a vast series of impressions. And in accordance 
 Bacon's maxim that a prudent interrogation is the 
 'alf of knowledge, it is right to provide ourselves with 
 a number of well-considered questions which we may 
 address to our author. Let us cross-examine him as 
 students of mental and moral science, and find replies in 
 his written words. Are his senses vigorous and fine ?,^ 
 Does he see colour as well as form ? Does he delight 
 
266 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 in all that appeals to the sense of hearing— the voices 
 of Nature, and the melody and harmonies of the art of 
 man ? I Thus Wordsworth, exquisitely organised for 
 enjoying and interpreting all natural, and, if we may so 
 say, homeless and primitive sounds, had little feeling for 
 the delights of music. Can he enrich his poetry by 
 gifts from the sense of smell, as did Keats ; or is his 
 nose, like Wordsworth's, an idle promontory projecting 
 into a desert air ? Has he, like Browning, a vigorous 
 pleasure in all strenuous muscular movements ; or does 
 he, like Shelley, live rapturously in the finest nervous 
 thrills ? I How does he experience and interpret the 
 feeling of sex, and in what parts of his entire nature 
 does that feeling find its elevating connections and 
 associations ? What are his special intellectual powers ? 
 Is his intellect combative or contemplative ? What are 
 the laws which chiefly preside over the associations of 
 his ideas ? What are the emotions which he feels most 
 stronglj'? and how do his emotions coalesce with one 
 another? Wonder, terror, awe, love, grief, hope, 
 despondency, the benevolent affections, admiration, the 
 religious sentiment, the moral sentiment, the emotion 
 of power, irascible emotion, ideal emotion — how do these 
 make themselves felt in and through his writings ? 
 What is his feeling for the beautiful, the sublime, the 
 ludicrous ? Is he of weak or vigorous will ? In the 
 conflict of motives, which class of motives with him is 
 likely to predominate ? Is he framed to believe or 
 framed to doubt ? Is he prudent, just, temperate, or 
 the reverse of these ? These and such like questions 
 are not to be crudely and formally proposed, but are to 
 
The Interpretation of Literature. 267 
 
 be used with tact ; nor should the critic press for hard 
 and definite answers, but know how skilfully to glean 
 its meaning from an evasion. He is a dull cross-examiner 
 who will invariably follow the scheme which he has 
 thought out and prepared beforehand, and who cannot 
 vary his questions to surprise or beguile the truth from 
 an unwilling witness. But the tact which comes from 
 natural gift and from experience, may be well supported 
 by something of method — method well hidden away 
 from the surface and from sight. 
 
 This may be termed, the psychological method of 
 study. But we may also follow a more objective 
 method. Taking the chief themes with which literature 
 and art are conversant — God, external Nature, humanity 
 — we may inquire how our author has dealt with each 
 of these. What is his theology, or his philosophy of the 
 universe ? By which we mean no abstract creed or 
 doctrine, but the tides and currents of feeling and of 
 faith as well as the tendencies and conclusions of the 
 intellect. Under what aspect has this goodly frame of 
 things, in whose midst we are, revealed itself to him ? 
 How has he regarded and interpreted the life of man ? 
 Under each of these great themes a multitude of sub- 
 ordinate topics are included. And alike in this and in 
 what we have termed the psychological method of study, 
 we shall gain double results if we examine a writer's 
 works in the order of their chronology, and thus become 
 acquainted with the growth and development of his 
 powers, and the widening and deepening of his relations 
 with man, with external Nature, and with that Supreme 
 Power, unknown yet well known, of which Nature and 
 
268 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 man are the manifestation. As to the study of an 
 artist's technical qualities, this, by virtue of the fact that 
 he is an artist, is of capital importance; and it may 
 often be associated with the study of that which his 
 technique is employed to express and render — the 
 characteristics of his mind, and of the vision which he 
 has attained of the external universe, of humanity, and 
 of God. 
 
 Of all our study the last end and aim should be to 
 ascertain how a great writer or artist has served the life 
 of man ; to ascertain this, to bring home to ourselves as 
 large a portion as may be of the gain wherewith he has 
 enriched human life, and to render access to that store 
 of wisdom, passion, and power, easier and surer for 
 others. If our study does not directly or indirectly 
 enrich the life of man, it is but a drawing of vanity with 
 cart-ropes, a weariness to the flesh, or at best a busy 
 idleness. 
 
SPENSER, THE POET AND TEACHER. 
 
 In England of the age of Elizabeth what place is filled 
 by the poetry of Spenser ? What blank would be 
 made by its disappearance ? In what, for each of lis 
 who love that poetry, resides its special virtue ? Shall 
 we say in answer to these questions that Spenser is the 
 weaver of spells, the creator of illusions, the enchanter 
 of the Elizabethan age ; and that his name is to us a 
 word of magic by which we conjure away the pain of 
 actual life, and obtain entrance into a world of faery ? 
 Was Spenser, as a poet of our own time names himself, 
 " the idle singer " of his day — that day not indeed " an 
 empty day," but one filled with heroic daring and 
 achievement ? While Raleigh was exploring strange 
 streams of the New World, while Drake was chasing the 
 Spaniard, while Bacon was seeking for the .principles 
 of a philosophy which should enrich man's 'life, while 
 Hooker, with the care of a wise master-builder, was 
 laying the foundation of polity in the National Church, 
 where was Spenser ? Was he forgetful of England, 
 forgetful of earth, lulled and lying in some bower of 
 fantasy, or moving in a dream among imaginary 
 champions of chivalry, distressed damsels, giants and 
 dragons and satyrs and savage men, or shepherds who 
 pipe and shepherdesses who dance for ever in a serene 
 Arcady ? 
 
2 yo Transcripts and Shidies. 
 
 ■ Assuredly it was not thus that a great Englishman of 
 a later age thought of Spenser. When Milton entered 
 upon, his manhood, he entered upon a warfare; the 
 peaceful Horton days, days of happy ingathering of 
 varied culture, days of sweet repose amid rural beauty, 
 were past and gone ; and he stood with loins girt, 
 prepared for battle on behalf of liberty. And then, in 
 London, when London was a vast arsenal in which 
 weapons were forging for the defence of truth and 
 freedom, Milton in his moment of highest and most 
 masculine ardour, as he wrote his speech on behalf of 
 unlicensed printing, thought of Spenser. It was not as 
 a dreamer that Milton thought of him. Spenser had 
 been a power with himself in youth, when he, " the lady 
 of his college," but such a lady as we read of in 
 " Comus," grew in virginal beauty and virginal strength. 
 He had listened to Spenser's " sage and solemn tunes," 
 
 " Of turneys and of trophies hung ; 
 Of forests and enchantmeuts drear, 
 Where more is meant than meets the ear," 
 
 And now, in his manhood, when all of life has grown 
 for him so grave, so glorious with heroic effort, Milton 
 looks back and remembers his master, and he remembers 
 him not as an idle singer, not as a dreamer of dreams, 
 but as " our sage and serious Spenser, whom I dare to 
 name a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas." 
 
 A teacher, — what is the import of this ? " The true 
 use of Spenser," says a poet of our own day, Mr J. R. 
 Lowell, " is as a gallery of pictures which we visit as the 
 mood takes us, and where we spend an hour or two at a 
 time, long enough to sweeten our perceptions, not so long 
 
Spenser, the Poet and Teacher. 271 
 
 as to cloy them." And again : " Whenever in the 
 ' Faery Queen ' you come suddenly on the moral, it gives 
 you a shock of unpleasant surprise, a kind of grit, as 
 when one's teeth close on a bit of gravel in a dish of 
 strawberries and cream." This, then, is the " Faery 
 Queen " — a dish of strawberries and cream mixed up 
 unfortunately with a good deal of grit. And as for 
 the allegory, we may " fairly leave it on one side ; " * 
 Spenser employed it to " convince the scorners that 
 poetry might be seriously useful, and show Master Bull 
 his new way of making line words butter parsnips, in 
 a rhymed moral primer." Shall we accept this view, 
 or that of Milton — " a better teacher than Scotus or 
 Aquinas ? " Was Spenser such a teacher " sage and 
 serious " to his own age ? If so, does he remain such a 
 teacher for this age of ours ? 
 
 Let us put the question in another way, and inquire, 
 What was the highest function which an English poet 
 in the second half of the sixteenth century could fulfil ? 
 The death of the mediseval world and the birth of the 
 modern world had been the achievements of Italy. In 
 Italy the fire of intellectual life had been gathered as on 
 a hearth, and its flame leaped highest ; it was from Italy 
 that the light and warmth diffused themselves to other 
 lands. To Italian seamen we owe the discovery of the 
 New World : Columbus was a Genoese, John Cabot 
 was a Venetian. To Italian students we owe the re- 
 discovery of the Old World of classical art, poetry, and 
 
 * With which contrast Coleridge's words, " No one can appreciate 
 Spenser without some reflection on the nature of allegorical writing ; " 
 and Mr Ruakin'a painstaking attempt in " Stones of Venice " to 
 interpret the allegory of Book 1. 
 
272 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 eloquence. The great thinkers of Greece were no longer 
 denaturalised in the interests of an effete scholastic 
 system ; the pillars of the Parthenon were not employed 
 to prop the crumhling walls of a chapter-house. Plato 
 became at least an equal master with Aristotle, and in 
 Plato the humanists found that beauty and enthusiasm 
 which were needed to arouse and satisfy the imaginative 
 reason. At the same time the architecture of Italy 
 passed from its period of free and varied experiment — 
 experiment nobly inventive — to its period of fulfilled 
 attainment. To the first thirty years of the sixteenth 
 century belong the painters who represent the culmina- 
 tion of the great art-movement of Italy. Life in that 
 southern land seemed like a blossoming plant with petals 
 deep of dye and rich in floating perfume ; like a flame 
 swift, delicate, and aspiring. 
 
 But there was a dark side to the Italian Eenaissance. 
 The Church and the world had alike too much forgotten 
 that true humanism includes a noble morality. In 
 Rome, at the heart of Christendom, were fraud, avarice, 
 ambition, violence, foul living, effeminacy. And the 
 Church possessed no monopoly of vices. .A tendency to 
 materialism in philosophy coincided in point of time 
 with a practical cynicism as to what is most spiritual iu 
 human conduct and character. Sensuality was elaborated 
 into an art. "The immorality of the Italians," says 
 Mr Symonds, making a just distinction, " was not that 
 of beasts ; it rather resembled that of devils." 
 
 In such a moral environment had appeared for a short 
 time a man possessed by the old prophetic fire. Over 
 against Lorenzo, with his splendour and his culture, arose 
 
Spenser, the Poet and Teacher. 273 
 
 the face — a brand under the darkness of the cowl — and 
 the harsh condemnatory voice of Savonarola. It was no 
 part of Savonarola's mission to assail, like Luther, the 
 dogma of the Church ; he was a reformer of morals, not 
 of faith ; and he remained a monk. He came as a 
 prophet to announce a judgment. "When his voice rang 
 in the Duomo " the walls re-echoed with sobs and wail- 
 ings." The painter could no longer paint, the man of 
 culture could no longer trifle,' while the awful issues of 
 life and death were pending. Fra Bartolommeo bore his 
 studies of the nude to the pyre, and flung them among 
 the other vanities doomed to destruction. Pico della 
 Mirandula, the young scholar who at thirty had mastered 
 all learning, shuddered as he listened to the voice of the 
 preacher ; he forsook the world, and wore the frock 
 and hood of St Dominic. So wrought on tender and 
 beautiful souls the truths set forth by Savonarola. But 
 Savonarola fell ; Christ was no longer king of Florence, 
 and Italy went its way to an age of impotence and shame. 
 Now the question arose, " How is this revival of 
 learniilg, this new enthusiasm about beauty, this new 
 and strong delight in man and in the life of man, to 
 fare with the nations of the North ?" Will those nations 
 side with Lorenzo and the humanists, or with Savonarola 
 and his Puritans ? Or is it possible to reconcile these 
 two contending forces 1 At first in England the 
 humanism which had travelled from the South connected 
 itself with religion. The " new learning " was a learning, 
 in the service of God. It marked an epoch in the 
 spiritual history of our country when John Colet lectured 
 at Oxford on the epistles of St Paul, dwelling in his 
 
 s 
 
2 74 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 criticism on the human characteristics of those writings, 
 and insisting upon their relation rather to conduct than 
 to dogma. Erasmus, with all his classical refinement, 
 with all his satiric play, was a reformer ; his " Praise 
 of Folly " and his " Colloquies " are more than balanced 
 by his "New Testament" and his "St Jerome." The 
 group of men which included these scholars, distinguished 
 as it was by culture and learning, was comparatively 
 little influenced by those elements of the Renaissance 
 which addressed themselves chiefly to the senses and 
 the imagination. No great creator of imaginative work 
 in English literature felt the breath of the Italian Re- 
 naissance during that first half of the sixteenth century. 
 In Skelton there is a morning gale ; we feel the breath 
 of a new day. But Skelton was reckless, and asserted 
 his individuality too extravagantly. He is a little 
 Rabelais, full of verve, learned, free-spoken ; capable at 
 times of a certain frank and delicate charm. The palace 
 of Art was not to be taken by violence, and the dis- 
 orderly rabble of Skeltonical rhymes, laughing as they 
 advance, presently fall back defeated from its outer wall. 
 The direct influence of Italy is first seen conspicuously 
 in the verses of Wyatt and Surrey. That was a time 
 of gloom and harshness in which their sonnets and ron- 
 deaux made their appearance. | We cherish the daffodil 
 of early spring for its own sake, and yet more because it 
 is the herald of a thousand blossoms which lead us on to 
 the rose : 
 
 " O love-star of the unbeloved March, 
 When cold and shrill 
 Forth flows beneath a low dim-lighted arch 
 
 The wind that beats sharp crag and barren hill, 
 And keeps unfilmed the lately torpid rill." 
 
Simser, the Poet and Teacher. 275 
 
 So we feel to the poems of the " courtly makers," Surrey 
 and ' Wyatt. Returning to them from the poetry of the 
 close of Elizabeth's reign, their verses seem deficient in 
 varied colour and rich perfume. The half-uncertain 
 twitter of other tiny songsters in TotteVs Miscellany, 
 whose notes vainly imitate the clear melancholy-amorous 
 notes of Petrarch, are less important for their own sakes 
 than because they announce that the winter of poetry is 
 over, and the love-making of spring is in the air. As 
 yet there is indeed little to sing about ; the skies are 
 
 . grey ; but the singers will at least try their voices. 
 
 \ Tottel's Miscellany is like a tuning of instruments before 
 the symphony opens. \ In the days of Henry, Edward, 
 and Mary, the graver mind of England was concerned 
 about other and weightier matters than the Active sorrows 
 of an Italianated sonneteer. There was the great struggle, 
 swaying backward and forward, for the free circulation 
 of an English Bible ; there were the fires of Smithfield 
 to kindle or to quench ; there were the service books of 
 the Anglican Church to compose and recompose. The 
 contention of the Churches had not been favourable to 
 literature and culture. Erasmus, when he shrank from 
 Luther's violences of theological war, had foreseen this ; 
 the fine irony of the humanist reformer, with all such 
 delicate-tempered weapons, must needs appear ineffec- 
 tive to those who endeavoured to emulate the hearty 
 sledge-hammer strokes of the theological reformer. In 
 England classical studies declined ; at the University of 
 Grocyn and Linacre Greek was almost forgotten. 
 
 Was England, then, to have a literary Renaissance, a 
 new birth of the imagination, or not ? Was the Refor- 
 
276 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 mation essentially hostile to such a Eenaissance ? Might 
 it not be that some man at once of fine imaginative 
 genius and of fine moral temper was destined to arise, 
 who should bring into harmony the best elements of the 
 religious movement and the best elements of the artistic 
 movement ? Some preparation, as it were, for the 
 advent of such a writer had been made. The question 
 between the Churches in England was virtually settled ; 
 the nation, working in its own large practical way, had 
 found a faith. An Englishman born about the middle 
 of the sixteenth century might enter upon a heritage of 
 belief; the moral and spiritual forces of the time were 
 organised, and were strong^; they had not yet stiffened 
 into conventions or decayed into traditions. It was in 
 some respects a happy time for a young man of aspiring 
 moral temper. From day to day the national life of 
 England was mounting to the fulness of the flood. In 
 the Queen the nation had found an ideal centre ; loyalty 
 to her became identical with loyalty to England. Much 
 of the homage which at first strikes us as servility was 
 like the devotion of a soldier to his banner : on the Eng- 
 lish banner was inscribed " Elizabeth." The overgrown 
 power of Spain lay open to attack like a huge galleon 
 hung upon by some persistent and persecuting seadog. 
 The spirit of adventure and enterprise was astir. In' 
 the little seaports bronzed mariners told marvellous tales 
 of islands in far ocean, and trackless rivers, and mines 
 of silver, and a city of gold. In town and country there 
 was more of mirth and merrymaking than had been 
 known since Chaucer's pilgrims jingled their reins 
 Canterburyward. The great nobles gathered around. 
 
Spenser, the Poet and Teacher. 277 
 
 their sovereign, and were proud to bear their part in 
 the pageantry of a court. Gay fashions of dress were 
 imported from the Continent. Ideas were attired in 
 fantastic forms of speech on the lips of peeress and of 
 page : when the tide of life runs free it must have its 
 little laughing eddies. CWe know how, in the history of 
 an individual man or woman, when shock has followed 
 shock of anguish or of joy, if these do not overwhelm 
 and crush the spirit, they render it coherent and ardent, 
 they transform it from a state of cold obstruction into 
 one molten, glowing mass. So it was with the English 
 nation in the sixteenth century : shock had followed 
 shock ; it passed from its period of struggle and pain, of 
 hesitancy and division, to a period of coherence and 
 ardour, when it became natural to think greatly of man, 
 to have a passionate faith in human goodness, a passion- 
 ate apprehension of evil, to hope high things, to dare 
 and to achieve noble and arduous things. 
 
 The time had come for England to possess her poet. 
 It could not be a matter of doubt after the year 1579 
 who that poet was. Spenser did not introduce himself 
 to the world with a fanfare of trumpets, as about to 
 celebrate a triumph. He did not even place his name 
 upon the title-page of the " Shepherd's Calendar." He 
 styled himself " Immerito " (the Undeserving) : 
 
 " I never list presume on Parnasse hill, 
 But piping low in shade of lowly grove 
 I play to please myself, all be it ill." 
 
 Yet he could not but be conscious of high powers ; and 
 the friend who introduced the volume to English readers, 
 while commenting on the author's diffidence in choosing 
 
278 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 the pastoral form, compares him to a young bird who 
 proves his wings before making a higher and wider 
 flight: "So flew Virgil, as not yet well feeling his 
 wings. So flew Mantuane, as not being full sumd. So 
 Petrarque. So Boccace." 
 
 In the " Shepherd's Calendar " we discern much of 
 the future writer of the " Faery Queen." It contains 
 the poetical record of his personal griefs as a lover ; it 
 expresses his enthusiasm for his art as a poet ; his 
 loyalty to the crown as a servant of the Queen ; his 
 loyalty to the Reformation as an English churchman ; 
 his delight in natural beauty, and in the fairness of 
 woman. It is now gay and sportive, now staid and 
 serious ; sensuous ardour and moral wisdom are united 
 in it ; the allegorical form in miniature is already em- 
 ployed ; it exhibits a mode of idealised treatment 
 of contemporary public affairs not dissimilar in essentials 
 from that afterwards put to use in his romantic epic. 
 The pastoral, with its ideals of peace and simplicity, 
 possessed a singular charm for Europe in the high- 
 wrought and artificial age of the Renaissance. It had a 
 charm for Spenser ; but his is not the Arcadian pastoral 
 of Sannazaro and Sidney. Colin and Cuddie. keep 
 their flocks upon the hills of Kent ; the disdainful 
 Eosalinde, " the widow's daughter of the glen," is a 
 North-country lass. Spenser's power of taking up real 
 objects, persons and incidents, of plunging these in some 
 solvent of the imagination, and then of recreating them 
 — the same and not the same — is manifest throughout. 
 Everything has been submitted to the shaping power of 
 the imagination ; everything has been idealised ; yet 
 
Spenser, the Poet and Teacher. 2 79 
 
 Spenser does not remove from real life, does not forsake 
 his own country and his own time ; he does not shrink 
 from taking a side in controversies then troubling the 
 English Church; he is primarily a poet, but while 
 a poet, he also aspires to be what Milton named him — a 
 teacher. In these poems the little archer. Love, shoots 
 his roguish shafts ; Pan is the patron of shepherds ; 
 Cynthia sits crowned upon_the grassy green. The poet 
 freely appropriates what pleases his fancy in classical or 
 neo-classical inythology ; yet at heart he is almost 
 Pantgan ^ot indeed Puritan^ in aijy turning away from 
 innocent delights ; not Puritan in casting dishonour on 
 our earthly life, its beauty, its .splendour, its joy, its 
 passion ; but 'Puritan as Milton was when he wrote 
 " Lycidas," in his weight of moral purpo se, in his love of 
 a grave plainness in religion and of humble laboriousness 
 in those who are shepherds under Christ. 
 
 The tenth eclogue of the " Calendar," that for the 
 month of October, is especially characteristic of its 
 author. In it, as stated in the argument, is set out 
 "the perfect pattern of a poet." In what way does 
 Spenser conceive of poetry 1 We know how in periods 
 which are not creative, periods which are not breathed 
 upon by divine ideas, which are not driven by the 
 urge of strong emotions, poetry comes to be looked on 
 as primarily an art, or even as an accomplishment, and 
 it is treated as if its function were to decorate life much 
 as the artistic upholsterer decorates our houses. At 
 such a time great regard is had to the workmanship 
 of verse exclusive of the burden and inspiration of 
 the song, and elegant little specimens of mosaic or of 
 
28o Transcripts and studies. 
 
 enamelling are turned out of the workshops of skilled 
 artists ; until the thing descends into a trade. In the 
 creative periods there is not less devotion to form and 
 workmanship ; but the devotion is of a less self-conscious 
 kind, because generative powers work in the poet with 
 a rapturous blindness of love, and he thinks of himself 
 less as a master of technique (though he is also this) 
 than as a man possessed by some influence out of and 
 beyond himself, some dominant energy of Nature or of 
 God, to which it is his part to submit, which he cannot 
 lay claim to as if it were an attainment of skill, and 
 which he dare not call his own. At such times poetry 
 aims at something more than to decorate life ; it is 
 spoken of as if it possessed some imperial authority, a 
 power to bind and to loose, to sway man's total nature, 
 to calm, to regulate and restrain, and also to free, to 
 arouse, to dilate the spirit — power not to titillate a 
 particular sense, but to discipline the will and mould a 
 character. In such a tone of high assumption Spenser 
 speaks of poetry. About this time he heard much of 
 experiments in new and ingenious forms of English 
 verse. Sidney and Dyer, Drant and Gabriel Harvey, 
 were full of a scheme for introducing classical metres 
 into our poetry, and Spenser was for a while taken by 
 the scheme. He' could not at such a time, he did not 
 ever, despise the craftsman's part of poetry ; yet while 
 he thinks of poetry as an art, in the same moment it 
 appears to him to be " no art, but a divine gift and 
 heavenly instinct not to be gotten by labour and learn- 
 ing, but adorned with both ; and poured into the wit 
 by a certain 'EK^ouff/au^os and celestial inspiration." When 
 
Spenser, the Poet and Teacher. 281 
 
 in the eclogue the needy poet complains that Apollo is 
 a poor paymaster, Piers replies in the spirit of Sidney 
 when he maintains that the highest end of literature is 
 to instruct and incite men to virtuous action : — 
 
 " Cuddie, the prayse is better than the price, 
 The glory eke much greater than the gayne ; 
 O ! what an honor is it to restraine 
 The lust of lawless youth with good advice. 
 Or pricke them forth with pleasaunce of thy vaine. 
 Whereto thou list their trayned -ftills entice. 
 
 " Soon as thou gynst to set thy notes in frame, 
 O, how the rurall routes to thee doe cleave ! 
 Seemeth thou dost their soule of sense bereave ; 
 All as the shepheard that did fetch his dame 
 From Pliitoes balefull bowre withouten leave, 
 His musicks might the hellish hound did tame.'' 
 
 From the eclogue which contains this pronouncement 
 as to the end of poetry, it appears that Spenser already 
 was meditating verse of a loftier kind, and was even now 
 aware that he should before long change his "oaten 
 reeds " for trumpets : — 
 
 " Abandon, then, the base and viler clowne ; 
 Lift up thy selfe out of the lowly dust, 
 And sing of bloody Mars, of wars, of giusts ; 
 Turne thee to those that weld the awful crowne. 
 To doubted knights, whose woundlesse armour rusts. 
 And helmes unbruzed wexen daily browne." 
 
 The " Faery Queen " is here almost promised. Was this 
 to be a mere romance of adventures, like Ariosto's 
 " Orlando," but unsupported by the wit and worldly 
 wisdom of an Ariosto ? Or did Spenser conceive his 
 great poem as something more than a play of fancy ? 
 did he conceive it as capable of winning that praise 
 
282 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 a 
 
 which he declares in the " Shepherd's Calendar " to be 
 
 the true glory of art ? 
 
 The " Shepherd's Calendar " was dedicated 
 
 " To him who is the president 
 Of Noblesse and of chevalree," 
 
 to Philip Sidney, " the noble and virtuous Gentleman, 
 most worthy of all titles both of learning and chevalrie." 
 It was possibly on the enforcement of Sidney that 
 Spenser undertook his task " to sing of knights and 
 ladies gentle deeds." Now, although we have to regret 
 the loss of the work entitled " The English Poet," in 
 which Spenser treated of his own art, there remains to 
 us the admirable essay by Sidney written in defence 
 of poetry against the well-meant but ill-considered 
 attack of the playwright - turned - precisian, Stephen 
 Gosson. The delight and pride of the Queen, the 
 court, and indeed of all cultivated England, in Sidney, 
 the deep and universal sorrow for his early death, can 
 be accounted for only by some extraordinary personal 
 noblenesses over and above those which dignify the 
 passionate story of the "Astrophel and Stella," and 
 redeem from mannered sentimentality the endless pages 
 of the "Arcadia." Sidney, the radiant " Hesper-Phosphor " 
 of the time of Elizabeth, fades in the brightness of that 
 great morning, yet no radiance that follows is qiiite so 
 clear and keen. He charmed by a sweet youthful gravity 
 underlying a sweet youthful joyousness of nature. To 
 Spenser doubtless he appeared to be the realized ideal 
 of what Spenser admired more than any other earthly 
 thing — the chivalric English gentleman. Sidney be- 
 longed to both the great movements of his century, and 
 
Spenser, the Poet and Teacher. 283 
 
 he' felt them to be in harmony one with the other. 
 He belonged heartily to the Reformation ; he had the 
 courage to appear prominently as an opponent of the 
 French marriage ; he translated Philip of Mornay's 
 treatise on the " Trueness of the Christian Religion." He 
 belonged heartily to the Renaissance, introducing into 
 our prose literature the chivalric-pastoral romance, and 
 engaging eagerly in the reform of versification and in 
 the criticism of poetry. " The Muses met him," says 
 Matthew Roydon, "every day upon Mount Parthenie," 
 and taught him to say and sing ; there was in his face, 
 says the same writer, "the lineaments of Gospel books." 
 Sidney could perceive no feud between culture and 
 religion, between the genius of art and the moral temper, 
 between the Muses on " Mount Parthenie '' and the 
 Christian Evangelists. 
 
 In Sidney's reply to Gosson's attack on poetry he 
 inquires what is the end or object of the life of man, 
 and he answers — as Aristotle had answered in the 
 " Nicomachean Ethics " — it is virtuous action. He 
 compares, with reference to their tendency to lead men 
 to an active virtue, three branches of human learning — 
 philosophy, history, poetry ; and his contention is that 
 to poetry must be assigned the highest place. Philoso- 
 phy enlightens the intellect, but does not move the 
 will ; it is weak in its influence on conduct because it 
 deals too exclusively with abstract truth ; it lays down 
 the rule, but omits to give the example. History fails 
 for an opposite reason : it deals too exclusively with 
 concrete fact ; it gives the example, but the example 
 unilluminated by its principle. Poetry excels them 
 
2 84 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 both, giving as it does neither precept apart from 
 example, nor the example apart from the precept or 
 principle, but both together ; and thus it not only 
 enlightens the intellect, but vivifies the emotions and 
 moves the will. 
 
 In the spirit of Sidney's "Apologie for Poetry," 
 Spenser conceived and wrote the "Faery Queen." It 
 is an attempt to harmonise the three divisions of learn- 
 ing considered by Sidney — history, moral philosophy, 
 poetry; and to make the first and second of these sub- 
 serve the greatest of the three. The end of the whole 
 is virtiious action ; Spenser would set forth an ideal of 
 human character, and incite men to its attainment. He 
 thought of his poem, while never ceasing to be a true 
 poem, as if it were, in a certain sense, a study in ethics. 
 frOne day Spenser's friend Bryskett, in his cottage near 
 Dublin, gathered about him a circle of distinguished 
 acquaintances ; and conversing on the subject of ethics, 
 which he wished were worthily handled in English, 
 " whereby our youth might speedily enter into the right 
 course of vertuous life," he turned to Spenser with an 
 embarrassing request — that Spenser should forthwith 
 proceed to deliver a di&course on the virtues and vices, 
 and give the company a taste of true moral philosophy. 
 Spenser naturally excused himself, and pleaded on his 
 own behalf that, though he could not improvise a lecture 
 on ethics, he had actually in hand a work which might 
 in some sort satisfy his friend's desire : " For sure I am 
 that it is not unknowne unto you, that I have already 
 undertaken a work tending to the same effect, which is 
 in heroical verse under the title of a ' Faerie Queene ' to 
 
Spenser, the Poet and Teacher. 285 
 
 represent all the moral vertues, assigning to every vertne 
 a Knight to be the patron and defender of the same, in 
 whose actions and feats of arms and chivalry the opera- 
 tions of that vertue, whereof he is the protector, are to 
 be expressed, and the vices and unruly appetites that 
 oppose themselves against the same, to be beaten down 
 and overcome." 
 
 " A poet at that time," says the Dean of St Paul's, 
 commenting on this passage, "still had to justify his 
 employment by presenting himself in the character of a 
 professed teacher of morality." But this is hardly in 
 accordance with the facts. It was not as a professed 
 teacher of morality that Chaucer had told his " Canter- 
 bury Tales ; " it was not as a professed teacher of 
 morality that Marlowe wrote his " Hero and Leander," 
 or Shakspere his " Venus and Adonis." " Every 
 great poet," said Wordsworth, " is a teacher : I- wish 
 either to be considered as a teacher, or as nothing." 
 May it not be that Spenser had higher thoughts than of 
 justifying his employment ? may not he, like Words- 
 worth, but unlike Chaucer and Marlowe, have really 
 aimed at edification — such edification as is proper to a 
 poet ? " You have given me praise," Wordsworth wrote 
 to John Wilson, "for having reflected faithfully in my 
 poems the feelings of human nature. I would fain hope 
 that I have done so. \But a great poet ought to do 
 more than this : he ought, to a certain degree, to rectify 
 men's feelings, to give them new compositions of feeling, 
 to render their feelings more sane, pure, and permanent ; 
 in short, more consonant to nature and the great moving 
 spirit of things." \ To render men's feelings more sane, 
 
2 86 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 pure, and permanent — this surely was included in the 
 great design of the " Faery Queen ; " it was deliberately 
 kept before him as an object by Spenser — " our sage 
 and serious Spenser, whom I dare to name a better 
 teacher than Scotus or Aquinas." 
 
 How, then, should we read the " Faery Queen " ? Is 
 it poetry ? or is it philosophy ? Are we merely to gaze 
 on with wide-eyed expectancy as at a marvellous pageant 
 or procession, in which knights and ladies, Saracens and 
 wizards, anticks and wild men, pass before our eyes ?. or 
 are these visible shows only a rind or shell, which we 
 must break or strip away in order to get at that hidden 
 wisdom which feeds the spirit ? Neither of these things 
 are we to do. The mere visible shows of Spenser's 
 poem are indeed goodly enough to beguile a summer's 
 day in some old wood, and to hold us from morning to 
 evening in a waking dream. The ethical teaching of 
 Spenser extracted from his poetry is worthy a careful 
 study. Raphael drew his fainting Virgin Mother as a 
 skeleton in his preparatory study, and the student of 
 Raphael may well consider the anatomy of the figure, 
 because whatever an artist has put into his work, that 
 a critic may try to take out of it. So the moral 
 philosophy of Spenser even apart from his poetry may 
 rightly form a subject of study. But the special virtue 
 of the " Faery Queen " will be found only by one who 
 receives it neither as pageantry nor as philosophy, but 
 in the way in which Spenser meant that it should be 
 received — as a living creature of the imagination, a 
 spirit incarnate, " one altogether," " of a reasonable soul 
 and human flesh subsisting." 
 
Spenser, the Poet and Teacher, 287 
 
 There are, indeed, portions of the " Faery Queen " 
 which are not vital — which are, so to speak, excrementi- 
 tious. In a short poem — the expression of a moment 
 of lyrical excitement — a single line, a single word which 
 is not vital, destroys the integrity of the piece. But a 
 poem which has taken into itself the writer's entire 
 mind during long years cannot but be like a wide land- 
 scape that includes level with rise, and sandy patches 
 with verdurous tracts. It seems inevitable that in such 
 comprehensive works as the "Divine Comedy," the 
 " Paradise Lost," the two parts of " Faust," the " Faery 
 Queen," the stream of pure imagination should some- 
 times well out of rocky masses of intellectual argument 
 or didactic meditation. The dullest portions of Spenser's 
 poem are those in which he works with most self- 
 consciousness, piecing together definite meanings to 
 definite symbols ; where his love of beauty slumbers and 
 his spirit of ingenuity awakes ; where his ideas do not 
 play and part and gather themselves together and deploy 
 themselves abroad, like the shifting and shredding of 
 clouds blown by soft upper airs, but are rather cut out 
 with hard edges by some process of mechanism. When 
 in the " Legende of Temperance " the poet allegorises 
 Aristotle's doctrine that virtue is a mean betwixt the 
 extremes of excess and of defect, our distaste for Elissa 
 and Perissa would surely content the moralist, were it 
 not that our feeling towards their virtuous sister is hardly 
 less unfriendly. From the " Castle of Alma" we should 
 not be ill-pleased if the master-cook. Concoction, and 
 the kitchen-clerk, Digestion, were themselves ignobly 
 conveyed away (if allegory would permit such a de- 
 parture) by that nether gate, the Port Esquiline. 
 
2 88 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 • These lapses and declensioas we may pardon and 
 forget. Upon the whole the " Faery Queen," if nothing 
 else, is at least a labyrinth of beauty, a forest of old 
 romance in which it is possible to lose oneself more 
 irrecoverably amid the tangled luxury of loveliness than 
 elsewhere in English poetry. Spenser's delight in the 
 beauty of external nature is often of a high- wrought and 
 elaborated kind, and yet no poet has written a line of 
 more faultless simplicity than that which tells how 
 Calepine when recovered from his wound goes forth " to 
 take the air and hear the thrush's song."^ But Spenser's 
 rare sensibility to beauty would have found itself ill 
 content if he had merely solitudes of nature, however 
 fair, to contemplate. In his perfect joy in the presence 
 of human beauty he is thoroughly a man of the Renais- 
 sance. The visions which he creates of man and woman 
 cast a spell over their creator; they subdue and they 
 exalt him ; he cannot withdraw his gaze from the crea- 
 tures of his imagination; he must satiate his senses 
 with their loveliness ; all his being is thrilled with a 
 pure ecstasy as he continues to gaze. And what form 
 of human beauty is there to which Spenser does not 
 pay a poet's homage ? Is it infancy ? There is the 
 babe rescued by Calepine from the bear's jaws. Spenser 
 speaks of it as the knight's " lovely little spoil." Cale- 
 pine takes it up in his two arms, and can hardly endure 
 to hear its gentle moaning ; he wipes away its tears, 
 and cleanses its face, and searches every little limb, and 
 every part under the swathe-bands, to be assured that 
 the tender flesh is unhurt. Is it old age ? There is 
 that goodly sire who, blind himself, granted to Saint 
 
Spenser, the Poet and Teacher. 2S9 
 
 iReorge a prospect of the New Jerusalem from his 
 
 delectable mountain ; keen of inward vision is the old 
 
 man, though his earthly eyes are dim ; he is bright in 
 
 his extreme age with a visionary glory : 
 
 " With snowy looks adown his shoulders shed ; 
 As hoary frCst with spangles doth attire 
 The mossy branches of an oak half dead." 
 
 Is it manhood in all the superb vitality and grandeur of 
 early adult years ? There is Arthur as first seen by Una, 
 riding towards her in resplendent armour, or Artegall as 
 shown in the magic globe of glass to Britomart : 
 
 " Eftsoones there was presented to her eye 
 A comely knight, all armed in complete wise, 
 Through whose bright ventayle, lifted up on high, 
 His manly face that did his foes agrise, 
 And friends to terms of gentle truce entice, 
 Lookt forth, as Phoebus face out of the East 
 Betwixt two shady mountains doth arise. 
 Portly his person was and much increast 
 Through his heroic grace and honourable gest." 
 
 Or, if we look for a more youthful type of manly 
 strength and grace, there is Calidore, knightliest of 
 shepherds and milkmen, devoted to the service of 
 Pastorella, Spenser's " shepherdess queen of curds and 
 cream," his bright arms exchanged for a rustic weed, 
 and his spear for a shepherd's hook : — 
 
 " So being clad, into the fields he went 
 With the faire Pastorella every day, 
 And kept her sheepe with diligent attent, 
 Watching to drive the ravenous wolfe away. 
 The whylest at pleasure she mote sport and play ; 
 And every evening helping them to fold ; 
 And otherwhiles for need he did assay 
 In his strong hand their rugged teats to hold, 
 And out of them to presse the milke : Love so much could." 
 T 
 
ago Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 But more than any other form of beauty that of 
 womanhood charms Spenser, renders his imagination 
 (to use a favourite word of his own) " empassioned," or 
 calms and completely satisfies it. There is Una, with 
 face sad under her wimpled veil, yet, however sad, 
 luminous like an angel's, and making, when stole and 
 fillet have been laid aside, " a sunshine in the shady 
 place." There is Belphcebe, no lily but a rose of 
 chastity, the ideal of virginal freedom, vigour, health, 
 and hardihood, her face clear as the sky, with the glow 
 in it of the quickened blood, her eyes two living lamps, 
 her .broad ivory forehead a table for love to engrave 
 his triumphs on, her voice resonant like silver, ber 
 moving fleet and firm, a boar-spear in her hand, her 
 brown hair the lovelier for flowers and leaves of the 
 forest which she has borne away in her speed. There 
 is Britomart, of sterner virginal force, yet made for the 
 love of Artegall, tall and large of limb, a martial maid. 
 Let us remember Britomart as she appears when, roused 
 from quiet sleep by the treachery of Malecasta, — now 
 standing for a moment in snow-white smock, with locks 
 unbound, her advanced sword in her hand, and now 
 flying with the flame of wronged and insulted maiden- 
 hood in her heart at the dastard knights who would do 
 her shame. And there is Amoret, the type of perfect 
 womanhood, as Belphcebe is of maidenhood ; Amoret, 
 brought up by Psyche in the garden of Adonis, — 
 
 " To be the ensample of true love alone 
 And loadstar of all chaste affection ; " 
 
 Amoret, the most tried and true of wives, whom I like 
 best to remember as pictured in the first form of the 
 
Spenser, the Poet and Teacher. 291 
 
 legend, rescued from the snares and tortures of the 
 enchanter Busirane, and now lost in the happy secrecy 
 of one long embrace : 
 
 " Lightly he dipt her in his arm^s twaine, 
 And straitly did embrace her body bright, 
 Her body, late the prison of sad pain, 
 Now the sweet lodge of love and dear delight. 
 But the fair lady, overcomen quite 
 Of htige affection, did in pleasure melt. 
 And in sweet ravishment poured forth her spright. 
 No word they spake, nor earthly thing they felt. 
 But like two senseless stocks in long embracements melt." 
 
 And there is Florimell, who seems like the spirit of 
 some inland stream, but irresistibly drawn seaward by 
 her bold lover, Marinell. And there is Serena, scarcely 
 seen in her loveliness by the light of stars, unclothed 
 upon the woodland altar and prepared for death. And 
 there is.;Calidore's shepherdess maiden gathering straw- 
 berries in the greenwood — a sister of Shakspere's 
 Perdita. And there is Charissa, the fruitful mother, 
 hung upon by her multitude of babes. And there is 
 Dame Celia, the reverend lady of the " House of Holi- 
 ness," who bows over Una, and embraces her with the 
 protectiveness of age and experience towards youth. 
 And there is Spenser's own Elizabeth, whom Sir Calidore 
 espies encircled by the Graces, and danced around by 
 the hundred naked maidens, lily white. 
 
 Now, this sensibility to beauty — the beauty of earth 
 and sky, the beauty of man and woman — does it bring 
 with it any peculiar dangers, any temptations and seduc- 
 tions ? Every noble sensibility, every high faculty of 
 man, it may be answered, brings with it some peculiar 
 
292 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 danger. Spenser certainly was conscious of risks 
 attending this sensibility to beauty. Puritanism was 
 also aware of these risks ; and Puritanism, when it had 
 attained to full strength, said, "Lest thy right eye 
 offend thee straightway pluck it out." Spenser said, 
 " See that it offend thee not." ' Ascetic in the best 
 sense of that word Spenser assuredly was : he desired to 
 strengthen every part of our nature by heroic discipline, 
 and to subordinate the lower parts to the higher, so that, 
 if strong, they might be strong for service, not for 
 mastery. But Spenser was almost as free as Words- 
 /worth from asceticism in its evil sense, and for the 
 same reason as Wordsworth. To Spenser and to 
 Wordsworth it could not seem desirable to put out the 
 right eye, because to both the ey^>vwas an inlet of 
 divine things for the uses of the spiri^lu With respect 
 to beauty, Spenser's teaching is that true beauty is 
 always sacred, always ennobling to the spirit which is 
 itself sane and pure, but the sensual mind will put even 
 beauty to sensual uses. And he declares further that 
 there is a forged or feigned beauty, which is no more 
 than a fair illusion covering inward foulness and shame. -t 
 The true beauty, according to Spenser, naay be recog- 
 nised by a certain illuminating quality ; it is not mere 
 pasture for the eye ; rather it smites the gazer, long 
 accustomed to the dimness of common things, as if with 
 sudden and exquisite light ; it is indeed a ray derived 
 from God, the central Luminary of the universe. 
 
 But neither the Aristotelian doctrine of the mean, nor 
 Platonic conceptions of love and beauty, serve best to 
 protect and deliver us from the temptations of sense as 
 
Spenser, the Poet and Teacher. 293 
 
 set forth in Spenser's poetry. By his enthusiasm on 
 behalf of the noblest moral qualities, by his strenuous 
 joy in presence of the noblest human creatures — man 
 and woman — Spenser breathes into us a breath of life, 
 which has an antiseptic power, which kills the germs 
 of disease, and. is antagonistic to the relaxed fibre, the 
 lethargy, the dissolution, or disintegrating life-in-death 
 of sensuality. Any heroism of man or woman is like 
 wine to gladden Spenser's heart ; we see through the 
 verse how it quickens the motion of his blood. A swift 
 clear flame of sympathy, like an answering beacon lit 
 upon the high places of his soul, leaps up in response 
 to the beacon-fire of ehivalric virtue in another soul, 
 even though it be an imagined one, summoning his own. 
 The enchantress Acrasia in her rosy bower is so bewitch- 
 ingly fair and soft that it goes hard with us to see her 
 garden defaced and herself rudel}'' taken captive. Or 
 it would go hard tvith us did we not know the faithful- 
 ness and soft invincibility of Amoret, the virgin joy and 
 vigour of Belphoebe, the steadfastness and animating 
 trust in Una's eyes, — or had we not beheld the face of 
 Britomart shining beneath her umbriere like daydawn 
 to a belated wanderer, and then all that is vain and 
 false and sensual becomes to us what those ignoble 
 knights of Malecasta were to the warrior virgin, — no 
 more than shadows : 
 
 " All were faire knights and goodly well beseene, 
 But to faire Britomart they all but shadows beene." 
 
 We have no need to inspect the rout of monsters de- 
 graded from manhood by Acrasia's witchcraft. Britomart 
 has clean delivered us from Acrasia. 
 
294 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 '' And so we are brought back to the statement that the 
 /high distinction of Spenser's poetry is to be found in 
 I the rare degree in which it unites sense and soul, moral 
 Seriousness and the Renaissance appetite for beauty. / 
 Herein lay his chief lesson for men of his own time. 
 To incite and to conduct men to an active virtue is not 
 only the express purpose of the " Faery Queen," but as 
 far as a poem can render such service, the " Faery 
 Queen'' doubtless has actually served to train knights of 
 holiness, knights of temperance, knights of courtesy. \ 
 Spenser, although an ardent patriot of the time of Eliza- 
 beth, or rather because he was an ardent patriot, did 
 not flatter his own age. He believed that the world 
 had declined from its high estate, and fearing that things 
 might tend to worse, he observed anxiously the wrong- 
 doings of the time. He speaks very plainly in " Mother 
 Hubberd's Tale" of vices in the court, the church, the 
 army. He desired to serve his country and his age, as 
 other great Englishmen were doing, and yet in his own 
 proper way. Now, Spenser expected little — ^perhaps 
 even less than Shakspere — from the people; the doc- 
 trine of equality he held, as Shakspere also held, to 
 be a dangerous and misleading cry of demagogues ; 
 Spenser expressly argues against that idea in his " Le- 
 gend of Justice." Liberty he held to consist in obedience 
 to highest law ; that people, he thought, is wise and 
 happy which follows its appointed leaders. What 
 Spenser's political faith would be, if he were now living, 
 we may surmise, but cannot assert. Living in the age 
 of great monarchies, he was monarchical and aristocratic. 
 He admired heroic persons, and he found some of 
 
Spenser, the Poet and Teacher. 295 
 
 these among the gentle and noble folk of England, 
 He had known Sidney ; he served under Lord Grey. 
 When he conceived and planned this vast poem, of which 
 only six out of the twenty-four contemplated books were 
 written, it was with a design which doubtless seemed to 
 Spenser the best suited and the most needful to his own 
 time; his end, as he declared to Raleigh, was " to fashion 
 a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle 
 discipline." He desired to see at the head of aifairs in 
 England a company of noble Englishmen serving for no 
 selfish ends, but following honour in the highest sense 
 of that word — the " Gloriana" of the " Faery Queen." 
 
 Thus, with all its opulence of colour and melody, 
 with all its imagery of delight, the " Faery Queen" has 
 primarily a moral or spiritual intention. While Spenser 
 sees the abundant beauty of the world, and the splen- 
 dour of man and of the life of man, his vision of human 
 life is grave and even stern. For life he regards as a 
 warfare, a warfare needing all our foresight, strength, 
 and skill. To a certain point Spenser's conception 
 of life may be said to be the Puritan conception ; it is 
 cei;tainly the reverse of the Epicurean conception. Nor 
 is the combat between good and evil in Spenser's poem 
 one in which victory is lightly or speedily attainable ; 
 the sustaining thought is that victory is possible. There 
 is a well-known painting by Eaphael of the Archangel 
 Michael slaying the Dragon ; the heavenly avenger de- 
 scends like a young Apollo, with light yet insupportable 
 advance, and in a moment the evil thing must be 
 abolished. There is a little engraving by Albert Dtirer 
 which contrasts strangely with that famous picture. It 
 
;296 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 represents the moment of St George's victory; the 
 monster, very hideous and ignoble, has bitten the dust 
 and lies impotent. But is the victor elated ? He is 
 too weary for much elation, too thankful that the struggle 
 is ended ; he rests for a short space, still mounted on his 
 heavy German stallion ; we can perceive that other com- 
 bats await him, and that the battle with evil is a battle 
 that lasts a lifetime. Spenser's conception of the strife 
 with wrong comes nearer to that of Diirer than to that 
 of Eaphael. 
 
 Among the elements of character which Spenser's 
 ideal noble or gentle person must possess, he places god- 
 lisqess first — the religious spirit ; and the religious spirit 
 honoured by Spenser is not cloistered or contemplative ; 
 he does, indeed, assign a place to contemplation in the 
 discipline of the soul, but the Knight of the Red-cross 
 is, like other knights, sent forth by his mistress, the in- 
 spirer and prompter of honourable deeds, to achieve 
 knightly victory over a monstrous evil. Man in relation 
 to God being first studied, Spenser then proceeds to 
 consider man in relation, so to speak, to himself; and 
 the subject of the second book is temperance, or, as we 
 might say, self-control. " Incontinence in anger," says 
 Aristotle (" Nic. Eth.," Book VII., chap, v.), " is less dis- 
 graceful than incontinence in appetite." And Spenser, 
 following Aristotle, deals first with the less depraved 
 form of incontinence. " People are called incontinent," 
 says Aristotle, making a distinction between the scien- 
 tific and the metaphorical use of the word, " even with 
 respect to honour and gain." Spenser, again following 
 Aristotle, leads his Knight of Temperance into the delve 
 
Spenser, the Ppet and Te.<ic(ier. 297 
 
 where Mammon lurks, sunning his treasure, and to 
 Pluto's realm, where Queen Philotime, the patroness of 
 worldly honour, as Gloriana is of divine honour, sits en- 
 throned in glistering splendour. From temptations of 
 the pride of life Sir Guyon passes on to temptations of 
 the lust of the flesh — Phsedria, mei'e wanton frivolity, a 
 bubble on the Idle Lake, leading on to the enchantress 
 Acrasia, subduer of so many stout hearts. With a tragic 
 incident the second book of the " Faery Queen" opens 
 — an incident which presents in all its breadth the 
 moral theme of the legend. After his first error 
 through anger — being arigry, as Aristotle would say, 
 with the wrong person (for he is on the point of setting 
 his lance at rest against his fellow-servant St George) — 
 Guyon, accompanied by the Palmer, hears the piercing 
 cries of a woman in distress, and discovers the hapless 
 Amavia lying upon the dead body of her husband, and 
 bleeding to death from the stroke of her own hand. It 
 is aU the work of Acrasia. Mordant, the dead knight, 
 had been the victim of her sensual snares ; through his 
 wife's devotion he had been delivered from them, and 
 restored to his better self ; but the witch had pronounced 
 a spell : — 
 
 " Sad Verse, give death to him that death does give. 
 And losse of love to her that loves to live, 
 So soone as Bacchus with the Nymphe does linck." 
 
 Coming to a well, Mordant stooped and drank ; the 
 charm found its fulfilment, and of a sudden he sank 
 down to die. " Probably," says the ingenious Boyd, " by 
 the mortal sentence being executed ' when Bacchus 
 with the Nymph does link,' may be meant one very 
 
298 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 common effect of intemperance, viz., dropsical com- 
 plaints." foolish commentator and slow of heart, has 
 not Spenser himself explained that this is no mere 
 stream of water, but a metamorphosed virgin, who, 
 flying from the lust of Faunus, was changed by Diana 
 into a fountain ? Mordant, although he has escaped 
 from the garden of Acrasia, still bears the sinful taint 
 in his veins, and he is slain by the sudden shock of 
 purity. So awful is innocence ; so sure to work out 
 their mischief, soon or late, are Acrasia's spells. Mor- 
 dant, the strong man, lies a ruin of manhood because 
 he could not resist pleasure ; his gentle wife perishes 
 because she cannot with womanly fortitude endure pain. 
 Both are the victims of intemperance ; both die because 
 they lack that self-control which forms the subject of 
 the entire legend : 
 
 " The strong through pleasure soonest falles, the weake through 
 smart." 
 
 Guyon, with such piteous examples in view, must learn 
 to resist alike the temptations of pleasure and of pain. 
 
 From a man's relation to God (Book I.) and a man's 
 relation to himself (Book II.), the poem passes to his 
 relations to his fellows. Chief among these is that 
 between the sexes, the law of which is chastity. The 
 representative of that virtue, the Knight of Chastity, is 
 rightly a woman, and the name Britomart is chosen 
 partly because this was a Cretan name for Diana. 
 But by chastity Spenser means no cloistered virtue, 
 and this Diana is the lover of Artegall. There is no 
 chastity, Spenser would assure us, so incapable of stain 
 
Spenser y the Poet and Teacher. 299 
 
 as the heroic love of a magnanimous woman. Next 
 follows the love of man for man — friendship. " Friend- 
 ship," says Aristotle, " is the bond that holds states 
 together, and lawgivers are even more eager to secure 
 it than justice." Spenser accordingly gives friendship 
 the precedence of the sterner virtue. We love one 
 another, says Aristotle, either because we are useful 
 to one another ; or because we provide pleasure each 
 for the other ; or, finally, because " we wish well to one 
 another as good men." " The perfect kind of friendship 
 is that of good men who resemble one another in virtue" 
 (" Nic. Eth.," Book VIII., chap, iii., sec. 6). Spenser 
 makes Aristotle's distinctions his own. Sir Blandamour 
 and Paridell lay aside their wrath, and are accorded as 
 friends for sake of mutual aid against the rival claimants 
 of the false Florimell ; it is an example of Aristotle's 
 " accidental " friendship, founded on motives of utility ; 
 under it, says Spenser, lay hidden hate and hollow guile ; 
 nor can such friendship last long, — 
 
 " For virtue is the band that bindeth hearts most sure." 
 
 The second kind of friendship described by Aristotle 
 — that founded on motives of pleasure — is of a higher 
 nature ; yet even this is not the ideal frieadship. 
 Scudamour finds, in the gardens of the Temple of Venus 
 " thousand payres of lovers " (that is, of friends), who 
 walk 
 
 " Praysing their God, and yeelding him great thantes, 
 
 Ne ever ought but of their true loves talkt, 
 Ne ever for rebuke or blame of any balkt. 
 
 All these together by themselves did sport 
 Their spotless pleasures and sweet loves content. 
 
300 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 But, farre away from these, aotiother sort 
 Of lovers linckld in true harts consent ; 
 Which lovdd not as these, for like intent, 
 But on chaste vertue grounded their desire, 
 Par from all fraud or fajnM blandishment, 
 "Which in their spirits kindling zealous fire, 
 Brave thoughts and noble deeds did evermore aspire." 
 
 It was the fashion of Spenser's time to do high 
 honour to friendship. But doubtless one reason why- 
 he assigns it so important a place in his poem was that 
 he had himself known the worth of friendship and 
 tasted its delight. In one of the few letters of his 
 which are extant, he writes, when about, as he supposed, 
 to leave England for the Continent : " With you I end 
 my last Farewell, not thinking any more to write unto 
 you before I go ; and withal committing to your faithful 
 credence the eternal memorie of our everlasting friend- 
 ship, the inviolable memorie of our unspotted friendship, 
 the sacred memorie of our vowed friendship." Having 
 assigned its place to love, Spenser proceeds to determine 
 the sphere and exhibit the action of justice. The 
 sternness of Spenser in this fifth Book is remarkable. 
 It may be a difficulty with some readers to bring into 
 harmony with their conception of Spenser his emphatic 
 approval of the terrible policy of Lord Grey, the hero 
 of this book, towards the Irish people. Spenser was 
 no dreamer ; his " View of the State of Ireland " is full 
 of precise information and practical suggestion. But 
 towards the Irish people Spenser felt as an old Anglo- 
 Indian might feel towards Sepoys in time of mutiny. 
 Last of the existing Books of the " Faery Queen " is the 
 legend of the courteous knight, Sir Calidore. And 
 
Spenser, the Poet and Teacher. 301 
 
 Spenser's chief thought on this subject is that true cour- 
 tesy is not an accomplishment or an acquirement, but 
 grows out of character, and is indeed the delicate flower- 
 ing of a beautiful nature. | 
 
 All these virtues are summed up in the one centra] 
 virtue of High-mind edness {jLiyaXfi^Myiai), or, as Spenser 
 names it, Magnificence. " Indeed, greatness in every 
 virtue or excellence," says Aristotle, " would seem to be 
 necessarily implied in being a high-souled or great- 
 souled man." But there is one thing, Aristotle goes 
 on, about which the high-souled man is especially con- 
 cerned : " For desert has reference to external good 
 things. Now, the greatest of external good things we 
 may assume to be that which we render to the gods 
 as their due, and that which people in high stations 
 most desire, and which is the prize appointed for the 
 noblest deeds. But the thing which answers to this 
 description is honour, which, we may safely say, is 
 the greatest of all external goods. Honours and dis- 
 honours, therefore, are the field in which the high- 
 minded man behaves as he ought." And again : 
 " High-mindedness, as we have said, has to do with 
 honour on a large scale." Or, as Spenser puts it. Prince 
 Arthur, his ideal of " Magnificence," is the lover of 
 Gloriana. 
 
 Spenser's conception of life was Puritan in its serious- 
 ness ; yet we think with wonder of the wide space that 
 lies between the " Faery Queen " and our other great 
 allegory, the " Pilgrim's Progress." To escape from the 
 City of Destruction and to reach the Celestial City 
 is Christian's one concern ; all his recompense for the 
 
302 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 countless trials of the way lies upon the other side of 
 the river of death. His consuming thought is this : 
 " What must I do to be saved ?" Spenser is spiritual, 
 but he is also mundane ; he thinks of the uses of noble 
 human creatures to this world in which we move. His 
 general end in the poem is "to fashion a gentleman or 
 noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline." " A 
 grand self-culture," I have elsewhere said, " is that about 
 which Spenser is concerned ; not, as with Bunyan, the 
 escape of the soul to heaven ; not the attainment of 
 supernatural grace through a point of mystical contact, 
 like the vision which was granted to the virgin knight, 
 Galahad, in the mediaeval allegory. \Self-culture, the 
 formation of a complete character for the uses of earth, 
 and afterwards, if need be, for the uses of heaven, — this 
 was subject sufficient for the twenty- four books designed 
 to form the epic of the age of Elizabeth. \ And the 
 means of that self - culture are of an active kind — 
 namely, warfare, — warfare, not for its own sake, but for 
 the generous accomplishment of unselfish ends." Bunyan, 
 with whom the visionary power was often involuntary, 
 who would live for a day and a night in some metaphor 
 that had attacked his imagination, transcribed into alle- 
 gory his own wonderful experience of terrors and of 
 comfort. Spenser is more impersonal : he can refashion 
 Aristotle in a dream. But behind him lies all the 
 sentiment of Christian chivalry, and around him all the 
 life of Elizabethan England ; and from these diverse 
 elements arises a rich and manifold creation, which, if it 
 lacks the personal, spiritual passion of Bunyan's allegory, 
 compensates by its moral breadth, its noble sanity, its 
 conciliation of what is earthly and what is divine. 
 
Spenser, the Poet and Teacher. 303 
 
 " A better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas." "We have 
 seen to some small extent what(Spenser sought to impress 
 upon the mind of his own age. He strove, in his own 
 way as poet, to make the national life of England a 
 great unity, — spiritual, yet not disdaining earth or the 
 things of earth, j He strove, as far as in him lay, to 
 breed a race of high-souled English gentlemen, who 
 should have none of the meanness of the libertine, none 
 of the meanness of the precisian. But the contending 
 parties of the English nation went their ways — one 
 party to moral licentiousness and political servility, the 
 other to religious intolerance and the coarse extrava- 
 gances of the sectaries. Each extreme ran its course. 
 And when the Puritan excess and the Cavalier excess 
 had alike exhausted themselves, and England once more 
 recovered a portion 6i her wisdom and her calm, it had 
 become impossible to revert to the ideals of Spenser. 
 Enthusiasm had been discredited by the sectaries until 
 it had grown to be a byword of reproach. The orgies 
 of the Restoration had served to elevate common de- 
 cency into something like high virtue. After the Puritan 
 excess and the Cavalier excess, England recovered her- 
 self not by moral ardour or imaginative reason, but by 
 good sense, by a prosaic but practical respect for the re- 
 spectable, and by a utilitarian conviction that honesty is 
 the best policy. 
 
 " A better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas." Yet we 
 are told by the Dean of St Paul's, that in giving himself 
 credit for a direct purpose to instruct, Spenser " only 
 conformed to the curiously utilitarian spirit which per- 
 vaded the literature of the time." It is the heresy of 
 
304 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 modern art that only useless things should be made 
 beautiful. We want beauty only in playthings. In 
 elder days the armour of a knight was as beautiful as 
 sunlight, or as flowers. " In unaffected, unconscious, 
 artistic excellence of invention," says one of our chief 
 living painters,* " approaching more nearly to the 
 strange beauty of nature, especially in vegetation, 
 mediaeval armour perhaps surpasses any other effort of 
 human ingenuity." VWhat if Spenser wrought armour 
 for the soul, and, because it was precious and of finest 
 temper, made it fair to look upon ? That which gleams 
 as bright as the waters of a sunlit lake is perhaps a 
 breastplate to protect the heart ; that which appears 
 pliant as the blades of summer grass may prove at our 
 need to be a sword of steel. \, 
 
 * Mr G. F. "Watts. 
 
HEROINES OF SPENSER. 
 
 Spenser's manner of portraiture differs much from that 
 of Chaucer, whom he names his poetical master. Am- 
 bling Canterburyward, with his eyes on the ground, the 
 earlier poet could steal sprightly glances at every mem- 
 ber of the cavalcade — glances which took in the tuft of 
 hairs on the Miller's nose, the sparkle of pins in the 
 Friar's tippet, and the smooth forehead and little rosy 
 mouth of Madam Eglantine. We should know the Wife 
 of Bath, if we met her, bj' the wide-parted teeth, the 
 dulness of hearing, the bold laugh, the liberal tongue ; 
 we should expect to see the targelike hat, the scarlet 
 stockings, and the shining shoes. Spenser's gaze dwelt 
 longer on things, in a more passive luxury of sensation 
 or with reverence more devout. His powers of observa- 
 tion are, as it were, dissolved in his sense of beauty, and 
 this again is taken up into his moral idealism and be- 
 comes a part of it. To Chaucer a beautiful woman is a 
 beautiful creature of this good earth, and is often nothing 
 more ; her beauty suddenly slays the tender heart of her 
 lover, or she makes glad the spirit of man as though 
 with some light, bright wine. She is more blissful to 
 look on than " the new perjonette tree," and softer than 
 the wether's wool ; her mouth is sweet as " apples laid 
 in hay or heath " ; her body is gent and small as any 
 weasel. For Spenser behind each woman, made to wor- 
 
 XJ 
 
3o6 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 ship or to love, rises a sacred presence — womauhood 
 itself. Her beauty of face and limb is but a manifesta- 
 tion of the invisible beauty, and this is of one kin with 
 the Divine Wisdom and the Divine Love. In the poet 
 of Edward's reign a gay and familiar side of chivalry is 
 presented, which existed in life and in art and literature 
 along with that chivalry which was the mysticism of 
 human passion. The more modern poet retains of 
 chivalry only what is exalted, serious, and tender. 
 While heartily a man of his own Elizabethan age — a 
 Protestant age, an age of awakening science, of a high 
 mundane spirit — Spenser does not break with the past 
 He does not, like Cervantes, with remorseful mockery 
 bid farewell to romance and knight-errantry. Don 
 Quixote, dying, begs pardon of his honest squire for per- 
 verting his understanding and persuading him to the 
 folly of chivalric adventure ; he had been mad, now he 
 is sane, and is once again Alonzo Quixano the Good. 
 For Spenser knightly warfare against evil was still the 
 rule of heroic manhood ; the champions of the great 
 Queen must all be knights-errant ; there were giant 
 oppressors to overthrow, there were deceivers of men to 
 unmask, there were captive lands and causes to succour ; 
 nor could a time ever come when truth and justice, and 
 purity and gentleness, would not be at odds with evil 
 and untamed forces in our own hearts within and in the 
 broad world without. 
 
 Spenser retained for the uses of the Renaissance the 
 moral idealism of chivalry, and he renewed and recreated 
 this ; for Spenser's chivalry is one which has made 
 acquaintance with the robust energies of his own time. 
 
Heroines of Spenser. 307 
 
 with the hearty morality of the Reformed faith, and also 
 with the broad and well-based thoughts of the great 
 master of ethical philosophy. What England of the 
 Renaissance needed most, Spenser declared, was noble 
 character in man and woman. The most worshipful and 
 lovely things this earth could show were, in his eyes, a 
 true English gentleman and a true English lady ; these, 
 Spenser said, were actually to be found in Elizabethan 
 England. He had known Sidney; he knew Sidney's 
 sister — 
 
 " Urania, sister unto Astrofell, 
 In whose brave mind, as in a golden cofer, 
 All heavenly gifts and riches locked are.'' 
 
 There were others no less praiseworthy, and among 
 them his own three kinswomen, of whom one afterwards, 
 in majestic old age, seemed to the youthful Milton equal 
 to Latona or the towered Cybele, 
 
 " Mother of a hundred gods." 
 
 These Spenser had seen and known. But in Elizabeth's 
 Court he had found also much that repelled him — 
 spurious gentry, aristocratic barbarism, vulgar pleasures, 
 ignoble ambition and ignoble ease, wantonness misnam- 
 ing itself love, the bark of slander, the bite of envy. 
 He had experienced the anxieties, the disappointments, 
 the humiliations of one who is a seeker for preferment. 
 Then came a time when he could look at these things — 
 both the evil and the good — from a distance, when his 
 imagination could deal with them in its own mode of 
 serene ardour and could shape them to their ideal forms. 
 To have a part in the ragged commonwealth of Ireland 
 
3o8 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 appeared to Spenser to be nothing less than banishment. 
 Ireland was to him a savage soil ; yet, for one of his 
 temper, solitude must have been better than the close 
 shouldering of the press; Mulla, rippling below her 
 alders, must have been more musical than the salutings 
 of sycophants ; the Irish air, the lights and shadows, the 
 bright veil of rain, the tender luminousness of morning 
 and evening, the grey mountain Mole, must have made up 
 a surrounding for Spenser more open and fresh than the 
 ante-chamber where importunate suitors are bid to wait. 
 Two qualities of Spenser's genius have made the 
 " Faerie Queene " a poem, and saved it from becoming a 
 frigid moral allegory or a mere masque of the fancy : one 
 was his delight in sensuous beauty, the other his delight 
 in lovely and heroic human character. He was, fortun- 
 ately, a man of the Renaissance. At whatever period 
 of the world's history Spenser might have been born he 
 would have been born a lover of all that is pleasant 
 and comely to the senses ; but had he been a man of the 
 Middle Ages it is possible that his moral earnestness 
 might have set itself to do battle with his senses ; for 
 his garlands of flowers he might have given us only 
 some pale lily or a palm ; his dreams of fair women 
 might have come to him only as ti'oublous and torturing 
 visions. Had Spenser been of Milton's party in the 
 times of civil war, he, like Milton, must needs have 
 parted with the youthful allegrezza ; but he could not, 
 like Milton, have found a higher self in such naked 
 moral sublimity as that of the " Samson Agonistes " ; 
 defrauded of his love of sensuous beauty, Spenser would 
 have been cut off from one, and that a large, afiluent of 
 
Heroines of Spenser. 309 
 
 his spiritual inspiration. For beauty, Spenser main- 
 tained, is twofold. There is beauty which is a mere 
 pasture for the eye ; it is a spoil for which we grow 
 greedy ; as we gaze on it we sink in waves of deep de- 
 light ; it leaves us faint with too much luxury of heart. 
 And there is the higher beauty of which the peculiar 
 quality is a penetrating radiance ; it illuminates all that 
 comes into its presence ; it is a beam from the Divine 
 Fount of Light ; it lifts up the soul of man out of the 
 mire of this world ; it pierces him with a sacred joy ; it 
 animates him to pure and passionate endeavour. 
 
 Spenser's moral idealism and his exquisite sense of 
 beauty met, and became inseparably involved. His 
 moral idealism concerned itself not solely or chiefly 
 about abstract qualities, though with these it also had 
 dealings ; its most appropriate objects were found in ideal 
 human characters. Had Spenser thought only of quali- 
 ties, and had he set his imagination to exhibit these in 
 allegory, the " Faerie Queene " would have been one long 
 masquelike procession, as visionary as that which passes 
 before the eyes of Britomart in the enchanter's chamber. 
 And there are many masques and masquelike figures in 
 Spenser's poems ; even Despair, and Mammon, and Care, 
 figures so marked by Spenser's peculiar genius, may be 
 classed with these. There are times, again, when his 
 genius wholly deserts him, and we get abstractions bald 
 and bare, or tricked out with some antic garb which is 
 too ill-fitting or too ragged to cover their nakedness. 
 Spenser's most admirable poetical creations, however, are 
 not masquerading qualities, well or ill attired, but ideal 
 characters of man and woman ; the moral allegory finds 
 
3 lo Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 its play in and through the epic persons. Sir Calidore 
 and Pastorella are as truly a gallant youth and a shep- 
 herdess queen of curds and cream as are the charming 
 boy and girl lovers of the "Winter's Tale." When 
 Wordsworth would name two personal themes gained 
 from hooks, from books around which our happiness 
 may twine with tendrils strong as flesh and blood, he 
 chooses one from the plays of Shakspere — Desdemona 
 ■ — and the second is the Una of Spenser. 
 
 Spenser's manner of portraiture seems to be at its 
 best in female figures. "The perfection of woman," 
 said Coleridge, " is to be characterless," meaning that no 
 single prominent quality, however excellent, can equal 
 in beauty and excellence a well-developed, harmonious 
 nature. The creator of Una, and Amoret, and Florimell 
 loved also this harmony of character, and he found it, or 
 believed he found it, more in woman than in man. 
 While each of the heroines of the " Faerie Queene " has 
 distinction, so that Una little resembles Belphcebe and 
 Britomart is far removed from Pastorella, each possesses 
 in her own kind that perfection of womanhood which 
 Coleridge praised and loved. Spenser's great knights 
 strive with outward enemies — giant, or dragon, or 
 Saracen, or enchanter — and sometimes these stand in 
 the allegory for actual external difficulties and dangers ; 
 but in many instances we discover presently that they 
 are indeed inward enemies, bosom foes given externality 
 in order to carry on the action of the poem. And so 
 the unity of personal character is broken by the allegory ; 
 one piece of a man's nature hypostatised is set over 
 against another ; inward division of heart is represented 
 
Heroines of Spenser. 311 
 
 by a hurtling of champion against champion. But this 
 is not the case with Spenser's women. They are not 
 parcelled out into fragments. To fortune, evil and good, 
 they are exposed — that fortune behind and above which, 
 according to the faith of Spenser, a Divine Providence 
 for ever lives and works — but they do not suffer inward 
 disruption. If Una be made captive to Sansloy, she 
 only endures a hardship at the hands of fate ; she re- 
 mains faithful and true, and needs no chastening, but 
 rather comforting. If the Red Cross Knight be thrown 
 into Orgoglio's dungeon, it signifies that he is a traitor 
 to his better self; holiness has become infected with 
 pride, and the scourge and fasting of Dame Ccslia's house 
 will be needed for his restoration. Hence while Spenser's 
 knights at times lapse back from persons into qualities, 
 his chief female figures are always the female figures of 
 an epic of romance. The allegory often does little more 
 with respect to them than determine the leading feature 
 in the character of each, or select the group of women 
 from which each shall be singled as an ideal type. It 
 is true they do not possess the interest given by com- 
 plex elements of character ; but if they are simple they 
 are also complete. They rejoice, they sorrow ; fears and 
 hopes play through the life blood in their cheeks ; they 
 are tender, indignant, pensive, ardent ; they know the 
 pain and the bliss of love ; they are wise with the lore 
 of purity, and loyalty, and fortitude. Even in dramatic 
 poetry our interest in character does not depend solely 
 on the number of elements which go to form it. The 
 beauty of perfect poise,, of coherence, and of flawless 
 vitality charms us. If it were not so Miranda might 
 
3 1 2 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 disappear from the "Tempest" and Perdita from the 
 " Winter's Tale." They exhibit none of the iridescent 
 moods of a Cleopatra ; they are not waves of the sea, 
 but children of the grave, sweet mother Earth ; and the 
 imagination finds as endless a satisfaction in their bright 
 purity and singleness of being as the eye finds in some 
 blossom's radiant life and mystery of unmingled loveliness. 
 Spenser's landscape is in harmony with his figures, 
 possessing a portion, as it were, of feminine beauty. 
 His Faerie Land is such a country as Gloriana might 
 have created for her own empire. Something is derived 
 here from Italian poetry, in particular from Ariosto, but 
 something also from Spenser's own genius. The ele- 
 ments of his landscape are few; he returns to them 
 often, and dwells upon them with inexhaustible delight. 
 The objects and aspects of external nature which impress 
 us as sublime were to Spenser, as to the other poets of 
 his time, not sublime, but dreadful. The roaring wilder- 
 ness of waters appals him ; he had watched the billows 
 in the Irish sounds charging one another like angry 
 rivals ; it was a happiness when his foot touched English 
 earth again. Spenser had found his Rosalind in the 
 North Country — Rosalind " the widow's daughter of the 
 glen." But we cannot imagine Spenser exulting in 
 the barren grandeur of a North Country moor ; it was 
 natural that Colin Clout should come south, to lead his 
 flocks among the dales of Kent.* What the poet of 
 
 * Does the Celtic word "glen" occur in English poeti'y before 
 Spenser? His friend E. K., annotating the " Shepheard's Calendar," 
 explains it as "a country hamlet or borough," misunderstanding the 
 word, for Spenser uses it again ("Faerie Queene," b. iii, e. 7, st. 6), 
 where Florimell finds the witch's cottage in a "gloomy glen," certainly 
 not in a " country hamlet or borough." 
 
Heroines of Spenser. 3 1 3, 
 
 Faerie Land especially loves are those select spots 
 devised by nature for delight, sacred and secure, where 
 nature, as it were, vies with art, and where men in 
 instinctive gratitude would fain build an altar on the 
 green sward to the mild genius of the place. To such a 
 sylvan retreat the wounded Timias is conveyed by 
 the damsels of Belphcebe. It is a glade environed by 
 mountains aud mighty woods, forming an amphitheatre 
 in their midst ; a little river plays over its gleaming 
 gravel ; in the myrtles and laurels the birds are uttering 
 
 " Many a lovely lay 
 Of God's high praise and of their love's sweet teen." 
 
 In such a place, or one still fairer, Calidore beheld the 
 hundred naked maidens, lily white, dancing in a circle, 
 and within their circle those three handmaidens of 
 "Venus, the Graces ; and yet again enclosed and gar- 
 landed by their loveliness Spenser's own bride, Elizabeth, 
 set like 
 
 " A precious gem 
 Amidst a ring most richly well enchased." 
 
 Around are woods of matchless height, and all the trees 
 are trees of honour ; a little hill rises from the grassy 
 plain ; at the foot a gentle flood tumbles its silver waves, 
 " unmarred with ragged moss or filthy mud," and on the 
 summit is the plain where the dancers dance and Colin 
 pipes. Even in denser forest, though there is danger of 
 violence and lurking foes, all is not horror ; the wild 
 wood creatures are not all like those who would sacrifice 
 and devour their beauteous prey, Serena ; there are also 
 tribes docile and prone to an untrained fidelity, like 
 
3 1 4 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 those who, grinning gently, bend the knees backward to 
 Una, or like the salvage man who fawns upon Serena — 
 
 " Kissing her hands and grovelling to the ground, 
 For other language had he none, nor speech, 
 But a soft murmur and confused sound 
 Of senseless love." 
 
 The native haunt of evil, as Spenser imagined it, is a 
 cave ; there it lurks and shuns the light. Spenser hates 
 darkness and foulness and the close damp of the den ; 
 and escape from imprisonment into the sunshine, or from 
 the sick room into the outer world, is felt by him as an 
 exquisite pleasure. Calepine goes forth, when recovered 
 from his wound, " to take the air and hear the thrush's 
 song ; " the witch's son escapes with his snow lady from 
 the smoky cottage to pass the idle time " in the open 
 freshness of the gentle air." Creatures who do not love 
 the sun and breeze must needs be very sad or very sinful. 
 In a cave lies coiled the feminine serpent Error ; the 
 den is loathsome and in a covert place, where light 
 seems uncouth and the glistering of St George's armour 
 infuses hatred and alarm. In a cave dwells the ragged 
 wretch Despair — 
 
 " Far underneath a craggy clift ypight, 
 Dark, doleful, dreary, like a greedy grave." 
 
 In a delve hard by the cavernous entrance to hell sits 
 Mammon, sunning his antique treasure. And the much- 
 afflicted Malbecco, goatish old husband to the wanton 
 Hellenore, escaped from his pursuers at last, runs to 
 earth where a buttress of rock hangs dreadfully over the 
 sea ; there, under the ever-threatening crag, above the 
 
Heroines of Spenser. 315 
 
 ever-thundering billow, he creeps into the narrow cave, 
 and, forgetting that he was man, knows himself and is 
 known thenceforward as Jealousy. 
 
 In the legend of St George, as accepted by artists of 
 the Middle Ages, the virgin Cleodolinda, the Andromeda 
 of Christian mythology, is about to die, when the warrior, 
 now riding forward to join his legion, perceives her dis- 
 tress, rescues her, and slays the dragon. Spenser recasts 
 the legend : Una is never exposed to the monster ; she 
 devotes herself to the delivery of her parents, and the 
 part which she plays in the adventure is far from being 
 a passive one. To her the champion of her cause owes 
 the sword which fights her battle, and hope, and courage, 
 and forgiveness, and love, and even life itself. Before 
 her arrival he seems but a clownish young man among 
 the splendid personages of Gloriana's court; it is Una 
 who brings him his great charger and the silver shield. 
 Throughout Spenser's poem, although Una is so young, 
 so tender, so mild, while the knight is stout and bold, 
 there is a certain protectiveness on her part towards 
 him ; yet this is united in such a way with gentle, 
 fervid loyalty and trust that it seems to imply no con- 
 sciousness of superiority. St George is not yet delivered 
 from the cloud of youthful ignorance and unpurged 
 passion : in his courage there is something of mere 
 " greedy hardiment ;" in his indignation against evil 
 there is too little care to distinguish the innocent from 
 the guilty ; in his sorrow for wrong-doing there is some 
 of that lax self-pity which prefers the easy way of 
 despair and death to the hardness of strenuous discipline. 
 But Una has already known the good and evil things of 
 
3 1 6 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 life. She first recognises the peril of the "Wandering 
 
 Wood, yet the knight being once pledged to encounter 
 
 with the serpent of the cavern, she would not have him 
 
 draw back ; she is aware that no half-measures will serve 
 
 in such a struggle with error, and heartens St George 
 
 to the desperate effort. 
 
 " Now, now, Sir Knight, show what ye be ; 
 Add faith unto your force, and be not faint ; 
 Strangle her, else she fain will strangle thee." 
 
 And when this first victory has been achieved, the eager 
 approach and joyous greeting of his lady fill the weary, 
 knight with new strength, so that she has now to warn 
 him that before new adventure rest is needful, and 
 refreshment, and the wise counsel of the night. As she 
 would utterly destroy the evil creature of the Wandering 
 Wood, so when at length the enchantress Duessa, the 
 deceiver of her lord, is overthrown, Una shows no weak- 
 ness of false pity. Her lord's feeble cry comes to her 
 from the dungeon when no one else has heard it, and 
 the wrath of Una, pure and innocent as her own lamb, 
 is unflinching as that wrath of the Lamb of which we 
 read elsewhere. 
 
 " Well begun ; end all so well, I pray ! 
 Ne let that wicked woman 'scape away.'' 
 
 Duessa is not slain, but all her loathsomeness of body 
 is laid bare ; this Una decrees, and her knight must 
 look upon the withered hag whom he had taken to him- 
 self in Una's place ; after that let her deceive him if she 
 can. But before St George endures the pain and shame 
 which are needful, Una has already taken him to her 
 heart, with only tears for his piteous aspect, and no 
 
Heroines of Spenser. 3 1 7 
 
 word of reproach except against the evil star which had 
 wronged his truer self. 
 
 " Whom when his lady saw, to him she ran 
 With hasty joy : to see him made her glad, 
 And sad to view his visage pale and wan, 
 Who erst in flowers of freshest youth was clad. 
 Then, when her well of tears she wasted had, 
 She said, ' Ah, dearest lord, what evil star 
 On you hath frowned and poured his influence bad, 
 That of yourself ye thus berobbed are 
 And this misseeming hue your manly looks doth mar ? ' " 
 
 Yet another subtle and dangerous enemy the young 
 knight meets before his trial of strength with the 
 dragon. The strange fascination which resides in the 
 words of Despair has laid its spell upon his soul ; his 
 eye broods on the dull waters of death ; his resolution 
 ebbs ; he is tending heavily to the grave ; the dagger is 
 in his trembling hand. For one moment Una feels the 
 blood run cold to her heart, and she is on the point of 
 swooning ; the next she snatches away the accursed 
 knife, with courageous words which strive for the des- 
 perate man's sake to be reproachful. 
 
 " Come, come away, frail, feeble, fleshly wight ; 
 Ne let vain words bewitch thy manly heart." 
 
 In Dame Ccslia's house Una is indeed happy. The 
 reverent matron cherishes her ; she is as a sister among 
 the three comely daughters ; and she knows that joy so 
 dear to a woman's heart of acting as an earthly Provi- 
 dence to her lover, of fashioning him in ways after her 
 mind, and of anticipating in her spiritual child some of 
 the delights of motherhood, while she watches him grow 
 daily in thews and stature, in all the cardinal virtues 
 
3 1 8 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 and all the Christian graces. His rueful shrieks and 
 groanings come to her when Patience disciplines him with 
 the iron whip, and Una writhes under the torment as if 
 it were her own ; but it is wholesome for him to endure, 
 and she bears all wisely and patiently. At last the 
 scourgings, and nippings, and prickings, and smartings 
 are over; St George is brought to her clean and sound, 
 the son of her tears and prayers ; he is her very own, 
 and now with sweet complacency she kisses him, praying 
 him to cherish himself and partake once more of 
 gladness. 
 
 Una can endure joy as she can sorrow. Her joy is 
 never a blinding bliss of life ; it has in it a reasonable- 
 ness and sweet sobriety. When Arthur overthrows her 
 adversary, the royal maid comes running fast to greet 
 his victory, "with sober gladness and mild modesty." 
 Yet this perfect poise of joy has nothing of languor in 
 it ; she sees life steadily and sees it whole, and, there- 
 fore, she carries some of the sunshine into shady places, 
 and in her elation there is a touch of sadness. On her 
 betrothal morning Una comes forth as fresh and fair as 
 the freshest flower in May ; she is clothed in a robe all 
 lily white, more pure and less proud than silk or silver ; 
 her sad wimple is thrown aside, and her face has in it 
 the radiance of the morning ; yet at this most wished- 
 for moment Una's gladness, is wisely tempered and 
 serious. 
 
 " Then forth he called that his daughter fair, 
 The fairest Una, his only daughter dear, 
 His only daughter and his only heir ; 
 "Who forth proceeding with sad, sober cheer, 
 
Heroines of Spenser. 319 
 
 As bright as doth the morning star appear 
 Out of the East, with flaming locks bedight 
 To tell that dawning day is drawing near, 
 And to the world does bring long-wished light ; 
 So fair and fresh that lady showed herself in sight." 
 
 But joy of any kind, unless it reside in the conscious- 
 ness of loving duty done, is rare with Una, and, for all 
 her strength of endurance and of affection, she is a frail 
 and tender being, exposed to the roughest buffetings of 
 fortune. By nothing is Spenser so empassioned (to use 
 a word of his own) as by the sight of woman in un- 
 deserved distress ; the chivalrous fire kindles about his 
 heart ; wrath, and remorse, and love make him their 
 own. And Una is for ever passing from calamity to 
 calamity. The brightness of her aspect is that of a face 
 very white and calm ; she veils herself and wears the 
 mourniug stole in token of her , sorrow ; when she has 
 laid aside the veil we see the clear shining of her 
 beauty most often through tears. The lion forgets his 
 rage in her presence, but the fealty of her wild 
 champion brings a pang to the lady's heart, for it 
 reminds her of her own lionlike lord, who has fled 
 away from her. Then, after her manner of shunning 
 violences of feeling, she compels herself to be calm, " in 
 close heart shutting up her grief." Once more, when 
 night comes in the miserable cottage of Abessa, her sor- 
 row breaks its bounds, and once more at morning she is 
 ready to resume her labours. The day brings only de- 
 ception, and wrong, and anguish. Archimago, disguised 
 as her own knight, rides towards her, and Una, in glad 
 yet timid humility, approaches him, and presently taking 
 
320 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 heart, dares to greet him with happier welcome. Then 
 comes the discovery of the old enchanter's fraud and 
 bare escape from the violent hands of the Saracen. 
 Among the kindly salvage tribe Una enjoys a short 
 breathing-time, and resting her over-worn heart is yet 
 not idle ; she is a teacher to the barbarous people of the 
 gentle lore of Christ. When rescued from the woods, 
 grief begins anew with the false tidings of St George's 
 death ; the lady is so downcast that she cannot for sor- 
 row keep pace with her protector, Satyrane. A second 
 escape from the Paynim follows, and a second time 
 assurance reaches her of her lord's death ; for is not 
 this the dwarf who hastens towards her bearing the 
 masterless spear and shield ? Una sinks from deep, 
 swoon to swoon ; and then, when her case is almost 
 desperate, the strong comfort reaches her of Prince 
 Arthur's presence, and his reasonable words, which she, 
 putting away her passion of grief, reasonably ponders 
 and receives. Even the joy of her betrothal day is not 
 unmingled with pain ; the last guileful shaft of her ad- 
 versary has still to be shot; with " sober countenance" 
 Una confronts Archimago and uumasks his lie. At last 
 she touches the whole of happiness, touches it and no 
 more ; she is made one with him who from the first had 
 been dearer to her than the light of day, and almost at 
 the same time she is divided from him. The Faerie 
 champion must depart to accomplish other commands of 
 Queen Gloriana, and Una is left to mourn. 
 
 In all save purity of heart Belphoebe presents a con- 
 trast to Una, and even her purity of heart is of a diffe- 
 rent kind. Una's love towards her chosen knight has 
 
Heroines of Spenser. 321 
 
 in it something of the nature of celestial grace ; all 
 earthly ardour of love is transfigured in the white radi- 
 ance of her soul — transfigured, but present. Belphcebe's 
 passion is that of virginal joy, and pride, and freedom. 
 She thinks of love for no man and from none, whether 
 to give or to take ; it is enough to have victorious play 
 among the woodland beasts, and, Dian-like, to rest in 
 the company of her maidens. In happy hour we first 
 see her, for as she starts suddenly to view from among 
 the green boughs, following hard upon the prelude of 
 her ringing horn, we have almost grown ashamed of 
 manhood in company of the despicable braggart and his 
 squire. She is clad in hunter's weed, and moves a god- 
 dess ; her face is clear as the sky, not with such lumin- 
 ous pallor as that of Una, but with the flush of health 
 and gallant exercise ; a breeze and breath of life, " able 
 to heal the sick and to revive the dead," play around 
 her as they might around some flourishing tree ; her 
 eyes beam like two living lamps " under the shadow of 
 her even brows ;" her ivory forehead is a broad table 
 for Love to engrave his triumphs on ; her lips are incar- 
 nadined with the quickened blood ; her words make 
 silver music in the air. Una had worn the veil and 
 mourning stole. Belphoebe is clad in white, but her 
 short camis is of silk, starred with gold and with golden 
 fringe ; the buskins of her goodly legs are rich with 
 curious anticks and fastened with a jewel. She leads 
 no lamb in a line, but is a pursuer of soft woodland 
 creatures and a queller of the fiercer beasts in her victo- 
 rious play. In her hand is a boar spear, and at her back 
 are the bow and quiver. A golden baldrick is on her 
 
 X 
 
3 22 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 breast, letting its virginal beauty be divined ; the golden 
 
 hair shed about her shoulders is lightly blown by the 
 
 breeze, and it shows the lovelier for fresh leaves and 
 
 •blossoms borne away from the forest trees in the speed 
 
 of her flight. Spenser's imagination pours forth its 
 
 treasures to enrich with all pure splendours this ideal of 
 
 glad virginity. Not love, but honour is her aim, and 
 
 this she seeks where true honour may be found, amid 
 
 the toils and dangers of a strenuous life. 
 
 " In woods, in waves, in wars, she* wonts to dwell, 
 And will be found with peril and with pain ; 
 Ne can the man that moulds in idle cell 
 Unto her happy mansion attain : 
 Before her gate high God did sweat ordaine, 
 And wakeful watches ever to abide.'' 
 
 Belphoebe, the foster child of Diana, forfeits nothing of her 
 sex. Spenser's masculine women are to be found among 
 his evil women. The poet of Faerie Land would make 
 but a poor figure in a company of modern Radical 
 reformers. His giant who proclaims to an applauding 
 crowd the doctrine of equality is " much admired of 
 fools, women, and boys;'' but Talus, that stout squire of 
 Arthegall, patron of justice, shoulders the giant from his 
 rock into the welter of the waves. The amazon Radi- 
 gund revolts against the law of her sex, establishing the 
 liberty of women ; but Britomart in fair field overthrows 
 her, cleaves both head and helmet at one stroke, and 
 she, the heroic warrior-lady, repeals that evil custom and 
 destroys every trace of the feminine usurpation. Spen- 
 ser's Belphoebe, with all her pride and freedom, is a 
 gentle maiden. Led by the track of blood, she suddenly 
 * She, i.e,, Honour. 
 
Heroines of Spenser. 323 
 
 comes — expecting a stricken beast — upon the body of 
 Arthur's youthful squire, laid along the ground, his hair, 
 like faded leaves, knotted with blood, his lips below the 
 boyish down showing pale and wan. Belphcebe starts 
 back for a moment in horror ; 
 
 " But when she better him beheld she grew 
 Full of soft passion and unwonted smart : 
 The point of pity pierced through her tender heart." 
 
 She bows meekly down, rears his languid neck, chafes 
 his temples, unfastens his hauberk, and lifts the heavy 
 burganet from his head. What wonder that the youth, 
 waking from his swoon with a long sigh, and looking up 
 and seeing her by his side, takes her for some messenger 
 of God, and, with a boy's ardour and the sense of his 
 unworthiness, is fain to kiss her blessed feet ? But Bel- 
 phcebe, no lily, rather the rose of chastity, feels towards 
 him only as towards a fellow-mortal in distress ; a return 
 of love she cannot give him, but all courtesy she gives, 
 and kindness " tempered with grace and goodly modesty." 
 And she is not indifferent to his devotion ; at least no 
 other woman must be] adored by him. Amoret is 
 rescued from the boarlike salvage, who is Spenser's em- 
 bodiment of lust ; Belphcebe chases the monster, and 
 strikes him in the throat with her arrow as he enters his 
 den ; returning, she discovers the squire, Timias, leaning 
 over Amoret in a swoon, " that new lovely mate ; " he 
 wipes the dew from her eyelids and kisses them, and 
 softly handles every hurt. Belphcebe's cheek flushes and 
 her heart is aflame ; it is not jealousy, but " deep disdain 
 and great indignity ; " she has almost strung the arrow 
 to slay him — 
 
324 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 " Yet held her wrathful hand from vengeance sore ; 
 But drawing nigh, ere he her well beheld, 
 ' Is this the faith 1' she said— and said no more, 
 But turned her face and fled for evermore." 
 
 " For evermore," as it seemed to her in her first indigna- 
 tion and to Timias in his first despair ; but the dove, his 
 emissary, bearing round its neck her heart-shaped ruby, 
 flits before her head and leads her on till she finds the 
 melancholy wretch, no longer to be recognised with his 
 downfallen hair and meagre face, and hears his complaint, 
 and looks mildly on him once more, and restores him to 
 her favour and to a happiness he will not forfeit by a 
 second indiscretion.* 
 
 Belphoebe and Amoret are twin sisters ; the story of 
 their birth and fostering is one of Spenser's most grace- 
 ful inventions. Venus, having lost her little son, seeks 
 for him here and there, in court, and city, and field, 
 and at last among the woods. Diana, with her 
 nymphs, is resting after the chase ; to the inquiry of 
 Venus for her boy she returns a scornful answer, but 
 Venus replies mildly, and the angry goddess is appeased. 
 Diana's maidens set forth to seek the little god, and find 
 in a covert not Cupid, but a fair woman lying entranced, 
 who has brought forth painlessly two lovely babes. 
 
 " Up they them took, each one a babe uptook, 
 And with them carried to be fostered : 
 Dame Phoebe to a nymph her babe betook, 
 To be upbrought in perfect maidenhed, 
 And of herself her name BelphoRbe red ; 
 But Venus hers thence far away conveyed, 
 To be upbrought in goodly womanhed ; 
 And in her little love's stead which was strayed 
 Her Amoretta called, to comfort her dismayed." 
 
 * Belphcebe, we know, is Elizabeth ; it has been conjectured that 
 Sir Walter Ealeigh is the squire. 
 
Heroines of Spenser. 325 
 
 Amoret, the child of the sun's mystical begetting, is 
 brought to the garden of Adonis, that Paradise where 
 the eternal forms of- things reside, and from which our 
 earth is replenished with her various kinds. Here she 
 is committed to the care of Psyche and made companion 
 to Psyche's little daughter. Pleasure. Here she learns 
 the lore of love and " true feminitee," until at length, 
 grown to perfect ripeness, she is presented to the world's 
 view — 
 
 " To be the ensample of true love alone 
 And lodestar of all chaste affection." 
 
 Spenser's thought seems to have been that, glorious 
 in power, freedom, and beauty as virginity may be, such 
 a state is only for rare natures elected to it, and that the 
 true ideal of womanhood, as such, is only attained 
 through love which leads to wedlock. Amoret, more 
 than any other of his heroines, presents us with Spenser's 
 conception in its purest form of the " ewig Weibliche," 
 the eternal feminine principle, which assumes a myriad 
 different forms and finds its highest embodiment in per- 
 fect woman. She is to Spenser what Eve was to Milton, 
 the pure type of her sex, the general mother. Hence 
 when her lover finds Amoret, it is in the Island of Love, 
 and not in the island merely, but in its midst, in Venus's 
 temple, and not in the temple merely, but at the feet of 
 the image of the goddess. To this veiled goddess — 
 veiled not because of shame, but to shadow from profane 
 eyes the mystery of her double sex, both male and female 
 — a troop of lovers chant the great hymn of praise taken 
 from the Roman poet's proemium, the "Alma Venus" 
 of Lucretius, The ecstasy of love in all nature — in 
 
326 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 bird, and beast, and the sea, and the daedal earth — is 
 celebrated, and last in human kind. 
 
 " Thou art the root of all that joyous is, 
 Great god of men and women, queen o' the air, 
 Mother of laughter, and well-spring of bliss." 
 
 Encircled by the choir of lovers, and around the feet 
 of the goddess, lie fair damsels — blushing Shamefast- 
 ness, and Cheerfulness, and Courtesy, and Obedience, 
 and sober Modesty, and soft Silence, and in their midst, 
 of riper years and graver countenance than the rest, is 
 "Womanhood, and in the lap of Womanhood is Amoret. 
 
 But Amoret, if the cherished child of Love, is also 
 Love's martyr. On her marriage day, while still a 
 virgin wife, she is snatched away from her husband by 
 the enchanter Busirane ; she is chained around the 
 slender waist to a pillar in his inner chamber of en- 
 chantment, and all magic arts and rare tortures are 
 practised to subdue her constancy. Instead of the lap 
 of Womanhood she has about her sides the harsh hands, 
 of Despight and Cruelty ; instead of the fair damsels of 
 Venus she has for company those fantastic masquers who 
 pass in procession, some wildly fair, some strange and 
 enigmatical, some fierce and tyrannous, and none true 
 except those who form a sorrowful troop near to that 
 last masquer Death. But Amoret has learnt the pre- 
 ciousness of true love, and joy has finely tempered her 
 soul for the hour of fortitude ; and so she endures until 
 deliverance comes with the heroic Britomart. From our 
 present " Faerie Queene " the true ending of this story, 
 as first conceived by Spenser, has disappeared. We feel 
 in reading the later books of the poem that the second 
 
Heroines of Spenser. 327. 
 
 seizure of Amoret — that by the tusked and hairy wild 
 man — is too gross a wrong to be allowed to hurt a life 
 so dear. As Spenser originally wrote and published his 
 third book Amoret is restored to the arms of her hus- 
 band, who waits sorrowfully outside the enchanted castle, 
 through whose fiery portal Britomart alone can pass. 
 The martyrdom of Amoret should end here ; with the 
 meeting of husband and wife, who are also lover and 
 lover, all grief and fear should pass away. And so 
 Spenser had it in the beautiful stanzas which he removed 
 from the poem as continued to the later books. Scuda- 
 mour, lying forlorn upon the ground, is startled by the 
 voice of Britomart ; he looks up, and Amoret stands 
 before him. 
 
 " There did he see that most on earth him joyed, 
 His dearest love, the comfort of his days, 
 Whose too long absence had him sore annoyed 
 And wearied his life with dull delays ; 
 Straight he upstarted from the loathed layes 
 And to her ran with hasty eagerness. 
 Like as a deer that greedily embayes 
 In the cool soil after long thirstiness 
 Which he in chase endured hath, now nigh breathless. 
 
 Lightly he dipt her in his armes twain, 
 
 And straitly did embrace her body bright — 
 
 Her body, late the prison of sad pain, 
 
 Now the sweet lodge of love and dear delight. 
 
 But the fair lady, overcomen quite 
 
 Of huge affection, did in pleasure melt 
 
 And iu sweet ravishment poured out her spright 
 
 No word they spake, nor earthly thing they felt, 
 
 But like two senseless stocks in long embracements melt." 
 
 The adventures of Florimell are among the most 
 romantic in the " Faerie Queene," but she herself is 
 
328 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 chiefly interesting as their subject or their occasion. 
 She is a woman, beautiful, and in distress ; this, it 
 seems, should be enough. We know how she is snowy 
 white and chaste as snow ; we know how true she is to 
 her sea-sprung lover, Marinell ; and we know little 
 more. Were it not that the false snow-lady, who wears 
 her name, is substanceless, and by her unreality makes 
 the true Florimell real, we might think of her as of 
 some vision seen in the curling of great waves upon the 
 strand when the sun shines bright and a land breeze 
 whirls the gleaming spray. Yet we should miss the story 
 of Florimell if removed from Spenser's poem, for it bears 
 us through romantic wood, and wild, and glen, and to 
 the rich seashore, and to the great waters where Proteus 
 drives his scaly herd, and to Proteus's bower under a 
 whelming rock against which the billows for ever roar 
 and rave. And to it belongs the marriage of the Med- 
 way and the Thames, with that pompous gathering to 
 the feast of British and Irish rivers. In an epic of the 
 days of Drake and Raleigh we should be ill content 
 unless we grew into acquaintance with Nereus and 
 Neptune, with Panope and Galatea, the nymphs and 
 the gods of sea. 
 
 With Britomart it is far otherwise ; she does not, 
 like Florimell, remind us of a myth of external nature 
 born of the sea and shore, but is wholly human to the 
 heart. When Spenser would present a patron knight 
 of chastity, he chose a woman ; and he made her no 
 vestal vowed to perpetual maidenhood, but the most 
 magnanimous of lovers. That is to say, the highest 
 chastity is no cloistered virtue, but lives in a heart 
 
Heroines of Spenser, 329 
 
 aflame with pure passion. Such a heart is no cold 
 house swept and garnished ; it is rather a sanctuary 
 ■where a seraph breathes upon the altar coals. Brito- 
 mart, tall of stature, large of limb, knit strongly for 
 deeds of prowess, follows from childhood upward her 
 appointed way. She is trained to toss the spear and 
 shield, to hunt out perils by sea and land ; she cannot 
 endure, like other ladies, " to finger the fine needle and 
 nice thread." There is something at once lovely and 
 awe-inspiring in her aspect. And for a time the great 
 heart is a girl's heart, still a stranger to love. Then on 
 a day she wonders musingly who shall be her husband, 
 knowing that fate has allotted her one. She gazes into 
 her father's enchanted mirror, and in that moment her 
 doom comes upon her : in the mirror is presented a 
 knight all armed : the ventayle of his helmet is lifted 
 up ; his face, stern yet gracious, looks forth 
 
 " As Phoebus' face out of the east 
 Betwixt two shady mountains doth arise.'' 
 
 It is the one face in the world which can subdue 
 Britomart. To Una love had come as a blessedness in 
 giving, a comfort in receiving ; to Amoret it had come 
 as a joy fulfilling her life ; it comes to Britomart 
 imperiously, tyrannously, laying a burden on her which 
 with all her strength she is hardly able to bear. Her 
 spirits droop during the daytime, and at night, when she 
 lies down by .the side of old Glauce, sleep deserts her, 
 her heart beats hard against her side, she cannot check 
 the heavy sighs that come to ease her breast loaded with 
 a mountainous pain. 
 
330 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 " For me no usual fire, no usual rage 
 It is, O nurse, which on my life doth feed." 
 
 When the old woman has heard the trouble, glad that 
 it is no worse than honest love, she leans on her weak 
 elbow and kisses softly her child's bosom, feeling how it 
 pants and quakes " as it an earthquake were." 
 Cherished and faintly cheered by Glauce's words, at last 
 a little creeping sleep surprises Britomart ; but at morn- 
 ing the pain returns, and neither prayers nor herbs can 
 bring relief And so they go for advice to learned 
 Merlin, the nurse, with old wives' cunning, having first 
 disguised her foster child. But the mage, who has been 
 frowning over his necromantic book, looks up and laughs 
 aloud ; the royal maiden cannot be so concealed from 
 his recognition, and Britomart, blushing instantly to a 
 clear carnation, reads upon his lips her destiny. A 
 glorious destiny it is, for kings and mighty emperors are 
 to be her offspring. Thus heartened, she begins anew 
 her life of enterprise — arrays her limbs in the armour of 
 Angela, the Saxon queen, all fretted round with gold, 
 which hangs in the church of King Ryence, and so sets 
 forth on adventure under the conduct of Love. 
 
 As Amoret, most faithful of wives, was Love's martyr, 
 so Britomart, the patron of chastity, is Love's champion. 
 Outside the Castle Joyous — unworthily so named — a 
 single knight is fiercely assailed by six dastard anta- 
 gonists. Britomart hastens to the rescue, and having 
 with half a score of strokes dispersed the crew, she 
 mildly inquires the cause of their dissension. It is the 
 custom of the castle to require that each passer shall 
 forsake his own lady and devote himself to its Lady of 
 
Heroines of Spenser. 331 
 
 Delight. The indignation of Britomart flames' at the 
 thought of love constrained, and turning from one to 
 another of the ignoble knights she overthrows and 
 subdues them. Presently St George — for he was the 
 distressed combatant — and his deliverer are in the 
 presence of the wanton lady Malecasta, who receives 
 them sitting on a sumptuous bed. The knight is 
 straightway disarmed ; 
 
 " But the brave maid would not disarmed be, 
 But only vented up her umbriere, 
 And so did let her goodly visage to appear.'' 
 
 The face behind its shadowing armour shines as the 
 moon does when breaking through a cloud and discover- 
 ing her bright head to the discomfited world. This 
 incident of Britomart's beauty of womanhood beaming 
 or fla.shing forth before men's eyes from its dark cover- 
 ture is dwelt on by Spenser's imagination with a peculiar 
 fondness, and he repeats it, varying the circumstances, 
 not fewer than three times. Again at Malbecco's inhos- 
 pitable house, to which the knights have forced an 
 entrance, seeking shelter from the darkness, storm, and 
 rain, when they dry themselves before the blazing fire, 
 Britomart too must be disarrayed — 
 
 " Tho', whenas vailed was her lofty crest, 
 Her golden locks, that were in trammels gay 
 Upbounden, did themselves adown display. 
 And raught unto her heels, like sunny beams 
 That in a cloud their light did sometime stay, 
 Their vapour vaded, show their golden gleams 
 And through the persant air shoot forth their azure streams." 
 
 She puts off her heavy habergeon, and lets her frock. 
 
332 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 tucked short about her as she rode, flow to her foot with 
 
 " careless modesty." And so disarrayed she seems do 
 
 other than Bellona returned from the slaughter of the 
 
 giants, with helmet loosed and untying from the arm 
 
 her gorgonian shield. In like manner in the castle to 
 
 which she conducts Amoret, and before which she has 
 
 jousted with the young knight, when the brave youth 
 
 would be thrust out because he has no love nor lady, 
 
 Britomart, his overthrower in arms, with majestic 
 
 courtesy undoes her helmet to disclose her sex and 
 
 claim him for her knight. Her falling shower of hair 
 
 is like the play of summer lightning in the heavens. 
 
 The youth pours forth his thanks and worships the great 
 
 lady in his heart. 
 
 I In Malecasta's abode of false delight the knights 
 
 whom she has subdued, careless livers in the lap of 
 
 pleasure, are to Britomart no more than shadows ; she 
 
 heeds them not. But Malecasta, stricken with love for 
 
 the supposed male warrior whose face has shone beneath 
 
 the umbriere, claims some pity from Britomart ; for has 
 
 she not herself known the imperious force of love ? 
 
 And so, when the hour for sleep had come, with kindly 
 
 thoughts 
 
 " She 'gan herself despoile 
 And safe commit to her soft feathered nest." 
 
 But at night, turning wearily, she wakes to find the 
 wanton dame couched by her side ; she rises in wrath ; 
 a cry from the terrified Malecasta rings through the 
 house ; the six knights come running hastily to their 
 lady's help ; she lies swooning on the ground. We 
 shall not do Britomart 's heroic beauty wrong if we 
 
Heroines of Spenser. 333 
 
 remember her as she appeared at that moment, stand- 
 ing in snow-white smock, with unbound locks, fierce in 
 her maidenhood, " threatening the point of her avenging 
 blade." Love's champion must needs be a terrible 
 justicer to all who wrong love. So she is found to be 
 by Busirane. With her ample shield thrown before her 
 and the advanced sword in her hand, she has passed 
 the fire of his enchanted portal ; she has waited impa- 
 tiently in the chamber of arras and read the strange 
 inscription over each door ; then of a sudden the marvel 
 of the masque goes by, and Britomart gazes on, and of 
 a sudden it is ended. But when the same things 
 repeat themselves next day she knows the deed to do 
 and is swift and sure : she springs into the inner 
 chamber, she plucks from the wizard's hand the knife 
 which was meant to pierce the tender side of Amoret, 
 she smites him to the ground, and when he has risen, 
 sullen but subdued, and is reading backward his mighty 
 spells, all the while Britonart stands by him with out- 
 stretched sword held high above his head, 
 
 Spenser's last introduction of the incident of the 
 helmeted face is when the lovers are made acquainted 
 with each other. Britomart has overthrown Arthegall 
 in the tourney, unwitting that it was he, knowing him 
 only as the Salvage Knight. Shortly after, as Scuda- 
 mour and Arthegall ride in company, they espy the 
 winner at the tourney. Scudamour rides against the 
 stranger and is unhorsed. A like mischance befalls 
 Arthegall, and thereupon begins a furious combat on 
 foot. At length one hideous stroke lights upon her 
 helmet ; she stands unharmed, but her ventayle is shorn 
 away. 
 
334 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 " With that her angel's face, unseene afore, 
 Like to the ruddy morn appeared in sight, 
 Dewed with silver drops through sweating sore. 
 But somewhat redder than beseemed aright 
 Through toilsome heat and labour of her weary fight." 
 
 Around this " Angel's face " the yellow hair makes a 
 golden border. Arthegall's hand, lifted again to strike, 
 drops ; the sword falls from his fingers ; he sinks upon 
 his knees before her, making religion of his wonder and 
 beseeching pardon of the injured goddess. And she, 
 looking stern, stands over him threatening to strike if 
 he will not rise and continue the combat. But old 
 Glauce is at hand to bid her pause, and by degrees the 
 face beheld in the magic mirror and the face of the kneel- 
 ing warrior grow together and are seen to be one. 
 When Scudamour greets the knight as " ArthegaU," 
 
 " Her heart did leap and all her heart-strings tremble 
 For sudden joy and secret fear withal." 
 
 There is no sudden love-making between the pair ; 
 Britomart's modest countenance, "so goodly grave and 
 full of princely awe,'' acts as a check to ranging fancies. 
 But the great hearts are drawing near and are at length 
 made wholly one. 
 
 Yet Britomart is not incapable of a touch of honest 
 jealousy. Her lover has been absent long; tidings 
 come that he, the invincible warrior, has been made 
 captive to a woman. The truth seems but too clear • 
 Britomart shuts herself into her chamber in wrath and 
 pain. If she could only fight with him and die ! She 
 throws herself on her bed lamenting. 
 
 " Yet did she not lament with loud alew 
 As women wont, Ijut with deep sighs and singults few." 
 
Hei'oines of Spenser. 335 
 
 She is at length convinced by Talus that his master 
 is indeed in the dungeon of the amazon. Britomart 
 arms herself, and uttering no word, good or bad, look- 
 ing right down, and with a heart very dangerous and 
 fell, she rides to his delivery. She who had overthrown 
 her lord in fight is now to be his saviour. But the 
 sight of Arthegall clad in womanish attire is too full of 
 shame ; Britomart turns her head aside ; it is, however, 
 only for a moment, and then, filled with a sense of the 
 piteousness of his disgrace, she hastens towards him to 
 bring him comfort and restore him to his self-respect. 
 
 ,In Spenser's earliest volume of verse his muse 
 masqued " in lowly shepherd'.'! weeds." In the last book 
 of his " Faerie Queene " he returns to pastoral poetry, 
 but it is a pastoral poetry into which courtly grace and 
 knightly prowess enter. The stories of Serena and of 
 Pastorella lie side by side, and each heightens the effect 
 of the other. "With Serena we are among the woods, 
 their shadows, their wild recesses and fantastic boughs ; 
 her page is the gentle salvage man ; her foes are the 
 salvage folk, who have laid her naked for sacrifice upon 
 their altar under the faint light of stars, and the din of 
 whose horns and bagpipes is in our ears until Calepine 
 thrusts into the throng and delivers his love from fear, 
 though not from shamefastness. With Pastorella we 
 are amid the fields, at the sheepfold, and among the 
 little cots where shepherds lie ; we listen to their gay 
 singing and the rustic melody of their pipes. Old 
 Melibee, half shepherd, half sage, is such a reverent 
 figure as William Blake loved to present in his pastoral 
 subjects. The girl heroine of Spenser's sixth book 
 
336 Tramcripts and Studies. 
 
 might have been a sister of Shakspere's Perdita or 
 Miranda. Like them, she is a child of high estate re- 
 moved from courtly surroundings into a way of life more 
 simple, more free, where objects and interests are few, 
 natural, and enduring. As with them, a courtly lover 
 comes to make discovery of his rustic princess, and she 
 returns to the place assigned her by her birth. Like 
 Perdita, she is queen of the country side, mistress of 
 rural junketings, the prettiest lass that ever ran on the 
 green sward, and nothing that she does 
 
 " But smacks of something greater than herself." 
 
 We think of her as she stood upon the hillock when 
 first seen by Calidore, crowned with flowers, clad in 
 home-made green, and environed with a garland of 
 lovely maidens ; the lusty swains pipe and sing her 
 praises, " and oft rejoice and oft for wonder shout." We 
 think of her as she meekly leads her little flock at her 
 old foster father's bidding, as she tends at supper while 
 the princely Calidore sits and cannot choose but follow 
 her with his eyes, as she gathers strawberries in the 
 green wood with her rival lovers, as she graciously re- 
 ceives the rustic presents of Coridon, squirrel and spar- 
 row, or looks on while the Knight of Courtesy, a shep- 
 herd for the nonce, pulls the rugged teats of her mother 
 ewes. We remember her in the dimness of the, 
 brigand's cave, and how joy came to her with the clear 
 voice of Calidore, and again as she stood half arrayed 
 and all amazed at that moment when old Melissa espied 
 the ro^y mark upon her breast, and ran in haste, as one 
 dismayed yet full, of joy, to tell her mistress that the 
 long lost babe was found. ^ 
 
Missing Page 
 
Missing Page 
 
Shakspere's Portraiture of Women. 339 
 
 of his character and genius, by glancing along his 
 portraits of women in the order in which they were 
 actually conceived by him. We shall at least spend an 
 hour in the best possible company. These ideal figures 
 cannot fail to quicken our sensibility for what is beauti- 
 ful in real life j there are hidden or marred ideals all 
 around us in the actual men and women, in the com- 
 monplace lives of the street, the market, and the fire- 
 side. If we knew every motion of an Imogen or a 
 Cordelia, it might be possible to detect the heart of one 
 of these beating under a modern gown. We do not re- 
 move from the real world when we pass into the world 
 of true imagination ; rather we train our eyes to make 
 the most precious discoveries in the region of every-day 
 fact. 
 
 But why not go to a woman to hear about women ? 
 Why expect to learn as much from Shakspere as from 
 George Eliot or Jane Austen ? It is true that there 
 were secrets known to Jane Austen and George Eliot at 
 which even Shakspere only guessed ; secrets of womanly 
 fortitude in petty things, which are properly known only 
 to those who feel where the shoe pinches; secrets of 
 feminine weakness visible to keen eyes which are tempted 
 by no chivalric sentiment tb blink the fact. The com- 
 monplaces of masculine satire on woman have something: 
 clumsy and stupid about them ; it is well to have them 
 near us as stones to fling on occasion, but they seldom 
 hit the mark. If the barbed dart is to quiver in the 
 flesh, it should be aimed by a sister's hand ; she is 
 aware at what precise points the armour is unjointed. 
 But, on the other hand, there are many truths which 
 
340 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 each sex can best tell about the other. Our personality ' 
 does not consist solely or chiefly in the little hard central 
 kernel, which we call the ego: we effuse ourselves, and 
 live more in this active expanded self than in the mid- 
 most cell of our being. And each sex dilates and dis- 
 covers itself chiefly in presence of the opposite sex. 
 Therefore, a man may know some things about women 
 of which a woman is hardly aware, and (if we would 
 only believe it) a woman may know a good deal about 
 men which a man will stoutly deny, yet which is most 
 certain; only, women are seldom courageous enough to 
 tell us what they know, and we are pleased by this 
 timidity, choosing to live on in our fool's paradise. 
 Each sex holds the mirror up to the other, and what 
 matter if it be a magic mirror 1 We may call Charlotte 
 Brontes admirable M. Paul Emanuel a woman's hero ; 
 and so he is, for he is a man reflected in a woman's 
 magic mirror. But one of our sex who would under- 
 stand the potency of manhood, will by no means waste 
 his time if he studies the character of M. Paul EmanueL 
 He will see manhood, presented indeed in a magic 
 mirror, but raying out its fierce undeniable attractions, 
 and grappling with myriad spiritual tentacles the feminine 
 heart. Could we have conceived it so 1 And in like 
 manner we may say of Shakspere's heroines, who are 
 women beheld in the most wonderful of magic mirrors, 
 that they are more perfectly feminine, than any woman 
 could have found it in her heart or brain to make them. 
 By what art of divination could she have guessed all the 
 ' potency of her sex ? 
 
 There are poets and artists whose genius brings forth 
 
Shakspere's Portraiture of Women. 341 
 
 men-children only. The greatest of Shakspere's fellow- 
 dramatists, Ben Jonson, was one of these. Admirable 
 as were his wit, his judgment, his learning, his satiric 
 power, his knowledge of life, his reverence for art, his 
 constructive talent, he could not fashion a noble or 
 beautiful woman. Ben Jonson wrought superbly in 
 bronze, and ran his metal into carefully constructed 
 moulds ; he could not work in such finer elements of air 
 and light as those from which a Miranda is framed, and 
 some of these subtle elements enter into each of Shak- 
 spere's heroines. Out of the long range of Jonson's 
 plays, do we remember a single female figure to stand 
 by the side of Imogen or Desdemona or Juliet ? And 
 yet Jonson had but to look around him ; he was 
 honoured with the acquaintance of many noble English 
 ladies of the early Stuart days ; in his own mother he 
 might have found the model of an ancient Roman 
 matron ; and in classical literature, which lay as an 
 open book before him, he must have known Antigone, 
 Electra, Medea, Clytemnestra, and Helen of Troy. Why 
 was he defrauded in the offspring of his imagination — 
 father of sons who were sisterless ? "Was it because his 
 nature had never swayed beneath a woman's influence ? 
 That rugged buttress of manhood hardly felt the moving 
 airs and tremulous waters — a self-poised, self-centred 
 mass. Whatever may have been the cause, the fact is 
 so ; the greatest save one of Elizabethan playwrights 
 knew only half of humanity, and therefore knew 
 that half imperfectly. On the other hand, a far less 
 robust genius, John Webster, one of Shakspere's dra- 
 matic disciples, delighted in nothing so much as in full- 
 
342 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 J length studies of tragic female figures. There are 
 indeed wonderful creations in his plays beside these — 
 sinister and cynical faces of men apparent in the gloom. 
 But in his greatest dramas all exists for the sake of the 
 one woman after whom each drama is named — the 
 Duchess of Malfi, Webster's lady of soitow, and his 
 White Devil, Vittoria Corombona, on whom, splendid in 
 her crime, he turns a high light of imagination that 
 dazzles while we gaze. This was not Shakspere's 
 method. In no play of his do we find a woman 
 as centre of the piece, or conceived as a dramatic unit. 
 And hence indeed it is almost an error to study the 
 character of any of Shakspere's heroines apart from the 
 associate with whom she plays her part. Beatrice 
 is hardly intelligible apart from Benedick ; the echoing 
 voice of love rebounds and rebounds in Romeo and 
 Juliet, inextricably intermingling from lover to, lover, 
 until death has stilled all sound ; in that circle of 
 traitors through which Shakspere leads us in his 
 Inferno, Macbeth and his Queen are miserably united 
 for ever by their crime and its retribution. 
 
 Shakspere, again, compares well with some of our 
 highest poets who have indeed created true women, 
 but who have created many after a single type. Such 
 was Shelley ; such also was Byron. If we set aside 
 the wonderful figure of Beatrice Cenci, we find that 
 Shelley in his highest moods has but one conception of 
 womanhood, varied to suit the circumstances of various 
 
 -poems. She is Cythna now, and now Asia ; a beautiful 
 and inspired prophetess — a prophetess who may be a 
 martyr and a saviour. She is the "woman with a 
 
Shaksperi s Portraiture of Women. 343 
 
 mission," exalted and idealized. She is to emancipate 
 the world by the vision of beauty, love and truth. At 
 her apparition the chains of tyrants and the spiritual 
 bonds of priests are to dissolve and cease to be. She is 
 made indeed to be loved and worshipped ; yet almost \ 
 more as incarnate love and truth than as an individual I 
 human being. Very different is the Byronic heroine, so ', 
 often presented in the Eastern tales. She has no 
 devotion to anything abstract ; no zeal for liberty 
 or truth ; all her devotion is lavished at the feet 
 of one despotic lover, and the only right she claims 
 is the right to be his slave. Another of our highest 
 poets has given us three great figures of women, and no 
 more. From all that he imagined admirable and heroic 
 in woman the youth Milton created the Lady of his 
 Comus ; from all that he imagined attractive and desir- 
 able, including a sweet inferiority as on^ elenient of 
 attraction, Milton in his manhood created/the 'general 
 mother, Eve; from all that he imagined^ detestable in 
 woman he created in his austere old age the figure of 
 the enchantress Dalila. These are Milton's heroines — 
 one the child of admiration, one of love, and the last of 
 loathing. 
 
 Among the dratimtis personce of a single play of 
 Shakspere's, and of this play alone, there is the con- 
 spicuous absence of any important female character. It 
 is the tragedy of despair, " Timon of Athens." Two or 
 three sentences are spoken by Phrynia and Timandra, 
 and that is all. In their foul, few words and in their 
 crying for gold, they merely represent the vice of Athens, 
 from which Timon has fled ; they possess no individu- 
 
344 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 ality, and therefore (like Eosencrantz and Guildenstera 
 in " Hamlet ") they are coupled, and never appear singly ; 
 they show themselves only to demonstrate that the very 
 virtue of womanhood is extinct in the luxurious city, 
 and thus to intensify the despair of the young misan- 
 thrope. In all Shakspere's plays there is only one 
 ahsolute infidel as regards womanly truth and goodness, 
 and he is Shakspere's one irredeemable villain, lagjo. 
 Or rather, we should say, lago can perceive Desdemona's 
 purity and sweetness, but he cannot feel them ; they 
 leave him cold as a serpent in the sunshine. " She is 
 full of most blessed condition," exclaims Roderigo. 
 "Blessed fig's-end !" cries the atheist, who can feel no 
 divinity in man, "the wine she drinks is made of 
 grapes. If she had been blessed, she would never have 
 loved the Moor. Blessed pudding !" The loss of faith 
 in woman is treated in two or three of Shakspere's 
 plays, and is always recognised as a turning-point or 
 crisis in the development of character. Hamlet might 
 have endured his father's untimely death, and the loss 
 of the Danish crown ; he was a student and a lover ; 
 and at no time really ambitious to be a king. It was 
 his mot her's frai lty which transformed his grief into a 
 corroding decay^"all joyous energy ; it was this which 
 made the world appear to him an imweeded garden, 
 ripening to seed-time ; it was this which poisoned his 
 love fftr Ophp.lia. — ^Frailty, thy name is woman." ^ And 
 yet he never wholly despairs, for in the great scene which 
 follows the triumphant discovery of. Claudius' guilt, he 
 assays to wring his mother's heart as if it were made of 
 penetrable stuff ; he pleads with her for righteousness — 
 
Shakspere's Portraiture of Women. 345, 
 
 strange preacher ! a son to a mother — and he receives 
 the reward of his bold cruelty-in-kindness : — 
 
 " Hamlet speak no more, 
 Thou tum'st mine eyes into my very soul, 
 And there I see such black and grained spots 
 y' As -will not leave their tinct." 
 
 Again, in " Troilus and Cressida " it is a turning-point 
 in the life of the young champion of Troy when he sees 
 Cressida, who has heretofore been for him all purity and 
 passion, wantoning lip and hand with Diomed beneath 
 the torchlight of the Grecian camp. Happily the gallant 
 youth has by his side worldly-wisdom incarnate in the 
 person of Ulysses ; and yet the pinch of death could not 
 well be sharper : — 
 
 " Let it not be believed for womanhood ! 
 Think, we had mothers ; do not give advantage 
 To stubborn critics apt, without a theme, 
 For depravation, to square the general sex 
 By Cresaid's rule ; rather think this not Cressid." 
 
 Troilus comes out of the boy's fiery trial successfully. 
 He is cured of love, as far as we can discern, for the 
 rest of his life ; but he has suddenly become a man, 
 strung up by this bitter tonic for the work of a man, 
 yet made a little merciless, and a little reckless by the 
 fact that life has grown a thing of less value than hereto- 
 fore in his eyes : — 
 
 " Troilus hath done to-day 
 Mad and fantastic execution, 
 Engaging and redeeming of himself 
 With such a careless force and forceless care 
 As if that luck, in very spite of cunning, 
 Bade him win all." 
 
 But Troilus is young. If the same anguish, or 
 
346 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 one far more cruel, but of a like kind, were to come 
 upon a man in mature years, a man of fiery nature, 
 who had staked all his hopes and all his faith on a 
 single cast, and who had lost, or deemed himself to have 
 lost, could such an one like Troilus begin a new career, 
 and transform his loss into a bitter gain ? Shakspere 
 gives the answer ; we hear it in the great throbs and 
 heavings of Othello's breast : — 
 
 " O now for ever 
 Farewell the tranquil mind ! farewell content ! 
 Farewell the plumed troop and the big wars 
 That make ambition virtue ! O farewell 1 " 
 
 So much Shakspere tells us of the havoc that may be 
 wrought in a man's life and character, by loss of faith in 
 a mother, a lover, or a wife. And, on the other hand, 
 who has said with more energy of conviction than Shak- 
 spere that even for one who stands upon the heights of 
 virtue higher heights may become visible in the light of 
 a woman's heroism ? It is no romantic boy who speaks 
 in his first fervour of love, but the noblest Roman in 
 presence of one who had been tested and not found 
 wanting (and here Shakspere follows almost the words 
 of Plutarch) : — 
 
 " O ye gods 
 Bender me worthy of this noble wife.'' 
 
 " Timon," Shakspere's tragedy of despair, i."! the 
 only play in which no woman is portrayed. From the 
 first, evidently he was attracted as an artist to the study 
 of female character. The two poems;" on which in his 
 earlier years he hoped/co rest his fame, are laboured 
 studies of womanly character and passion ; and as if 
 
Skakspere's Portraiture of Women. 347 
 
 resolved to spread his drag-net wide, so that nothing 
 might escape him, he studies the remote extremes of 
 •womanhood — in the one, enamoured Venus flushed with 
 all the sensuous ardours of the god ; in the other, 
 Lucrece, pale with despair, and heroic with the chastity 
 of a Roman wife. Probably the first play of Shak- 
 spere, in which he worked out ideas of his own, not 
 following in the steps of a predecessor, is " Love's 
 Labour's Lost." It is throughout a piece of homage, 
 half-serious, half-playful, to the influence of women. It 
 tells us that the best school in which to study is the 
 school of life, and that to rouse and quicken all our 
 faculties, so that we may learn brightly the lessons of 
 that school, we chiefly need the inspiration of love. The 
 play looks as if it were Shakspere's mirthful reply to 
 the sneers and slights of some of his fellow-dramatists, 
 who had come up to town from the University well-read 
 in the classical literature supposed in those Renaissance 
 days to be the sole source of true culture, aud who were 
 indignant that a young fellow from Stratford, who had 
 at best picked up a little irregular schooling, " small 
 Latin and less Greek," from a country pedagogue, should 
 aspire to the career of dramatic poet. If Shakspere 
 was not a graduate of Oxford or Cambridge, he was 
 something better — he had graduated in the school of 
 life ; he had looked about him with quick, observant 
 eyes ; he had thought and felt ; had struggled, sported, 
 loved ; he had laughed at Stratford Dogberries, had 
 perhaps broken open the lodge and killed the deer of 
 the Stratford Mr Justice Shallow ; and if he had not 
 kissed the keeper's daughter (which is far from im- 
 
34^ Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 probable), he had certainly kissed^ ^nne Hathaway to 
 his heart's content. And now in " Love's Labour's 
 Lost," while all the affectations of mock dignity and 
 pedantry, and spurious learning, and fantastical refine- 
 ment are laughed to scorn with a young man's light and 
 vigorous laughter, Shakspere comes forward to main- 
 tain that our best schoolmasters are life and love, and 
 he adds, half-playfully, half-seriously, that if we wish to 
 say our lesson brightly and well, we must first go and 
 learn it from a woman : — 
 
 " Other slow arts entirely keep the brain, 
 And therefore, finding barren practisers, 
 Scarce show a harvest of their heavy toil; 
 But love, first learned in a lady's eyes, 
 Lives not alone immured in the brain, 
 But, with the motion of all elements, 
 Courses as swift as thought in every power, 
 And gives to every power a double power 
 Above their functions and their ofiices." 
 
 In the speaker of these words, the Berowne cf " Love's 
 Labour's Lost," we seem to discern a likeness, more than 
 merely fanciful, to the youthful Shakspere. 
 
 The early comedies are more interesting for what they 
 promise than for what they actually present. One alone 
 remains unsurpassed in its kind, the fairy comedy of 
 fancy and frolic, " A Midsummer Night's Dream." The 
 characterisation of the lovers is somewhat faint ; the 
 play is not designed to interpret depths of passion : were 
 we too seriously interested in real life, how could we 
 lend belief to the story of Oberon's jealousy, and to the 
 wonders of the moonlit wood ? ,It is a dream, and the 
 figures, are a little shadowy, like figures in a dream. 
 
Shakspere's Portraiture of Women. 349 
 
 Hermia, indeed, is sufficiently distinguished from Helena, 
 but neither is strongly drawn. Hippolyta, the Amazonian 
 Queen, so nobly matched with the heroic Theseus, is a 
 fine sketch of the great lady in her hour of ease, as 
 Shakspere may have observed her when playing by 
 command in the hall of some English castle. One 
 knavish jest of Fairyland may have a meaning which 
 extends into the world of men and women ; with juice 
 of love-in-idleness on her lids a Titania may grow 
 enamoured of a Bottom, wearing the ass-head on his 
 shoulders. Such things have been seen outside the 
 Athenian wood. Have not some of ourselves once or 
 twice beheld a fairy creature as delicately bred, as finely 
 nurtured as the elvish Queen hanging enraptured on the 
 arm of some thick-headed Bottom the weaver, or Bottom 
 the captain, or Bottom the curate, who never fails to 
 accept his good fortune with a sublime air of superiority ? 
 As Mephistopheles, in his fiendish fashion, said of Mar- 
 garet, so we may say of Titania, " She is not the first," 
 %ox dare we hope that she will be the last. 
 " "The Two Gentlemen of Verona," in some respects a 
 very unsatisfactory play, is a most interesting one, 
 because it contains hints of so much that Shakspere 
 afterwards worked out. Tlie scene is Italy, to which the 
 poet's imagination so often reverted. The clown, Launce, 
 accompanied by his idolised Crab, is a worthy predeces- 
 sor of Feste and Touchstone. The lovers are not now 
 dream-figures; each is clearly and livingly portrayed, 
 and each acts, not as Oberon or Puck may choose, but 
 as his own character pre-ordains. Shakspere gallantly 
 takes care that the advantage shall be upon the woman's, 
 
3 50 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 side ; for while Valentine is indeed the sketch of a noble 
 youth, faithful friend and chivalric lover, Proteus is false 
 to friendship and fickle in love ; but both the maidens, 
 she of Verona and she of Milan, are flawless of heart, 
 clear of purpose, and courageous of will. Julia is the 
 first of those exquisite disguisers in male apparel, who 
 are as graceful and as feminine in doublet and hose as 
 in petticoat, and who were favourite children of Shak- 
 spere's imagination ; Julia first, and following her 
 appear Portia, Jessica, Rosalind, Viola, Imogen. The 
 investiture in strange attire, and the assumption of a 
 different sex from their own, is too piquant a stage 
 adventure to be forgotten, and Shakspere returns to it 
 with ever-renewed pleasure. It is an indication of the 
 early date of " The Two Gentlemen of Verona " that 
 there is some lack of refinement in the treatment of this 
 incident. In the later plays the treatment varies accord- 
 ing as the heroine is compelled to assume her disguise 
 by painful stress of circumstances, or accepts the trans- 
 formation not without some adequate motive, yet half in 
 a spirit of gaiety and adventure. Imogen, escaped from 
 her father's Court, and now among the wild Welsh 
 mountains, accompanied by a single attendant, who must 
 presently leave her, and almost done to death by her 
 husband's written accusations, which are crueller to her 
 than blows, is advised by Pisanio to take means for the 
 speedy solution of her doubts respecting Posthumus' 
 fidelity — 
 
 " for such means ! 
 Though peril to my modesty, not death on't, 
 I would adventure." 
 
Shaksperis Portraiture of Women. 351 
 
 It is deadly earnest with Imogen, and she has not a 
 
 smile to waste upon her exchange of costume — 
 
 " Nay, be brief ; 
 I see into thy end, and am almost 
 A man already." 
 
 It calls for courage, not gaiety, to hazard this adventure, 
 
 and in Pisanio's speech, describing what her garb and 
 
 bearing must be, there is a touch of remorse to think 
 
 that so rare a creature as Imogen must become as 
 
 common a thing as a pretty, sweet-voiced page in hat 
 
 and doublet — 
 
 " You must forget to be a woman ; change 
 Command into obedience, fear and niceness — 
 The handmaids of all women, or more truly 
 Woman it pretty self — into a waggish courage, 
 Eeady in gibes, quick-answer'd, saucy, and 
 As quarrellous as the weasel ; nay, you must 
 Forget that rarest treasure of your cheek, 
 Exposing it — but, oh, the harder heart ! 
 Alack no remedy ! — ^to the greedy touch 
 Of common-kissing Titan, and forget 
 Your laboursome and dainty trims, wherein 
 You made great Juno angry." 
 
 And Imogen accepts the necessity with a serious courage ; 
 
 no mirth or mock or bright self-raillery, but all subdued 
 
 yet hopeful earnest — 
 
 " This attempt 
 I am soldier to, and will abide it with 
 A prince's courage." 
 
 Ear otherwise is it with Rosalind and with Portia. 
 There is no real suffering for Rosalind in leaving a weary 
 Court ruled by the usurper, and flying to the forest of 
 Arden, where her father and his companions are fleeting 
 their time carelessly as they did in the golden world ; 
 
352 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 where, moreover, many young gentlemen flock to her 
 father ; why not among them a certain gallant wrestler, 
 son of the banished Duke's old friend, Sir Eowland de 
 Boys ? She will not wander alone, for Celia goes with 
 her, and Touchstone is to be a comfort to her travel. 
 Rosalind is not a wronged and solitary wife like Imogen ; 
 she is a girl of bright temper, quick inventive wit, and 
 glad heart. Accordingly, she throws herself into the 
 adventure with abandon, and will play her part with 
 high spirit. She will be one of the young gentlemen 
 who flock to the forest — 
 
 " "Were it not better, 
 Because that I am more than common tall. 
 That I did suit me all points like a man, 
 A gallant curtle-axe upon my thigh, 
 A boar-spear in my hand, and — in my heart 
 Lie there what hidden woman's fear there will — 
 We'll have a swashing and a martial outside. 
 As many other mannish cowards have 
 That do outface it with their semblances." 
 
 This martial disguise of Rosalind, with the gallant 
 curtle-axe upon her thigh, was all the more fortunate, 
 because Portia had put on the doctor's gown, and a con- 
 trast was desirable. With Portia, as with Rosalind, 
 there is no cause of real distress; she sets forth to suc- 
 cour Bassanio's friend ; she travels to the ferry in her 
 coach vi;ith Nerissa ; and her first thought is the de- 
 lighted one — 
 
 " We'll see our husbands 
 Before they think of us." 
 
 We know with what a divine dignity Portia maintains 
 her cause of mercy before the Doge and Seigaory of 
 
Shaksperis Portraiture of Women. 353 
 
 Venice ; but in the glee of anticipating the adventure, 
 her fancy quite runs away with her, and she pictures 
 herself in her strange apparel to Nerissa with a de- 
 lightful exaggeration of the young-mannishness to which 
 she never actually condescends — 
 
 " I'll hold thee any wager 
 When we are both accoutred like young men, 
 I'll prove the prettier fellow of the two, 
 And wear my dagger with the braver grace, 
 And speak between the change of man and boy 
 With a reed voice, and turn two mincing steps 
 Into a manly stride, and speak of frays 
 Like a fine bragging youth, and tell quaint lies, 
 How honourable ladies sought my love, 
 Which I denying, they fell sick and died ; 
 I could not do withal ; then I'll repent 
 And wish, for all that, that I had not killed them ; 
 And twenty of these puny lies I'll tell, 
 That men shall swear I have discontinued school 
 Above a twelvemonth. I have within my mind 
 A thousand raw tricks of these bragging Jacks 
 Which I will practise." 
 
 We know how Portia's bearing belied these sportive 
 announcements ; how grave and graceful, how learned 
 and persuasive, how keen-sighted and yet elevated, with 
 a touch of spiritual exaltation, the young doctor proved 
 in that great affair of life and death. It is precisely 
 with these disguisers that Shakspere is most careful 
 to accentuate the feminine characteristics. Bassanio 
 protests before the Court that he would sacrifice even 
 his wife, dear to him as life itself, to deliver his friend 
 from the Jew. There is more of Portia than of a Daniel 
 come to judgment in the young lawyer's outbreak — 
 
 " Your wife would give you little thanks for that 
 If she were by, to hear you make the offer." 
 Z 
 
354 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 Not that Portia for a moment questions Bassanio's love ; 
 but what woman is not rejoiced to obtain a playful 
 advantage over her husband ? And Portia, who has 
 been defrauded of the pleasure of a lover's quarrel, now 
 must put an edge on her profound content by the brief 
 pretence of a wife's quarrel with her husband. Viola, 
 in her disguise, grows not mannish, but more poignantly 
 feminine — 
 
 " Dear lad, believe it, 
 For they shall yet belie thy happy years 
 That say thou art a man : Diana's lip 
 Is not more smooth and rubious ; thy small pipe 
 Is as the maiden's organ shrill and sound. 
 And all is semblative a woman's part." 
 
 In the forest of Arden and in her martial dress, 
 Rosalind is, if possible, more exquisitely a woman than 
 when she threw the chain around Orlando's neck : 
 " Good my complexion ! dost thou think, though I am 
 caparisoned like a man, I have a doublet and hose in 
 my disposition ?" And is Imogen even when lying 
 asleep — " fresh lily, and whiter than the sheets" — more 
 purely feminine than she is in the cave of Belarius — 
 
 " Behold divineness 
 No elder than a boy ; " 
 
 or when borne as dead in her brother's arms, and lily- 
 like once more — 
 
 " The bird is dead 
 That we have made so much on. 
 
 O sweetest, fairest Uly, 
 My brother wears thee not the one half so well 
 As when thou grew'st thyself." 
 
 Whereupon Arviragus recites the names of all sister 
 
Shaksperi s Portraiture of Women. 355 
 
 flowers — pale primrose, azured harebell, odorous eglan- 
 tine — which shall keep the grave of Fidele fair and 
 fragrant. 
 
 We pass to an entirely diflferent group of characters 
 when we enter on the historical plays. The great affairs 
 of State make havoc in the domestic affections, and 
 women are in a peculiar degree the sufferers. They 
 show like trees that have faced a fierce gale, and limbs 
 are rent away from some, and some are leafless and con- 
 torted, and some are shaken to the roots, and some lie 
 prone upon the ground. Here and there at rare inter- 
 vals appears a woman in whom place and power have 
 nurtured a vast ambition, under the influence of which 
 she has grown strong, and opposed successfully the storm 
 of fate ; yet the day comes when even such an one is 
 bent or broken, and her fall is terrible. The ambitious 
 wife of the Protector Gloster has her will, and plays her 
 part in fortune's pageant bravely for a while — 
 
 " She sweeps it through the court with troops of ladies 
 More like an empress than Duke Humphrey's wife." 
 
 But by-and-by the wheel of fortune is turned full circle, 
 and the proud dame stands in London streets robed in 
 the white penance sheet, her feet bare to the flints, a 
 taper in her hand, ribald verses pinned upon her back, 
 a jeering rabble at her heels — 
 
 " Trow'st thou, that e'er I'll look upon the world, 
 Or count them happy that enjoy the sun ? 
 No : dark shall be my light and night my day ; 
 To think upon my pomp shall be my heU." 
 
 jThe historical plays are filled with the outcries of 
 women. Now it is the Duchess of York pleading pas- 
 
356 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 sionately at King Henry's feet for the life of her first- 
 born, while old York in a frenzy of terrified loyalty de- 
 mands the young man's death. Now it is the new-made 
 bride from whom the bridegroom is torn away to make 
 slaughter among her own kin — it is Blanche crying to 
 
 Lewis — 
 
 " Upon thy wedding day ! 
 Against the blood that thou hast married ! 
 
 husband hear me ! " 
 
 Now it is the wife torn from her husband's side that he 
 may go the way to the grave alone — it is Isabel parted 
 from Richard, but first made to feel his political, and 
 worse, his moral effacement ; made to see her " fair rose 
 wither " beyond the power of " true-love tears " to 
 " wash him fresh again." Now it is the widow mourn- 
 ing for her husband — Lady Percy hanging upon old 
 Northumberland to restrain him from the wars, because 
 her heart is full of the thought of her gallant Hotspur 
 slain, and memory makes it tremble. Now it is Con- 
 stance weeping for her Arthur, who has been over- 
 whelmed by the opposing forces in whose midst he 
 stood : — 
 
 " Grief fills the room up of my absent child, 
 Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, 
 Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words, 
 Remembers me of all his gracious parts, 
 Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form." 
 
 Now it is the wretched Anne, wife of Richard of Gloster, 
 whose stifled misery has its outbreak when she finds that 
 she is to be dragged to the throne over the bodies of the 
 slaughtered princes : — 
 
Shakspere's Portraiture of Women. 357 
 
 " Oh, would to God, that the inclusive verge 
 Of golden metal, that must round my brow 
 Were red-hot steel, to sear me to the brain ! 
 Anointed let me be with deadly venom." 
 
 Now it is an antiphony of lameutations, rising from a 
 royal mother, two fatherless children, and their feeble 
 grandame. Perhaps as much wretchedness may be dis- 
 covered in the first word of nervous alarm uttered by 
 Edward the Fourth's Queen, Elizabeth, while her ailing 
 husband, who has put her son's minority into the trust 
 of Richard, lies upon his sick bed — 
 
 " If he were dead what would betide on me ? " 
 
 But now that he is dead and Clarence has been made 
 away with, Elizabeth lifts up her voice and cries aloud — 
 
 " Give me no help in lamentation, 
 I am not barren to bring forth complaints. 
 
 Ah, for my husband, for my dear Lord Edward ! 
 Children. — Ah, for our father, for our dear Lord Clarence ! 
 Duchess. — Alas, for both, both mine, Edward and Clarence ! " 
 
 And so the terzett of sorrow goes on, a lamentation in 
 which, through the stronger crying of the Queen, the 
 treble of childish voices, and the quavering pipe of old 
 age, may be distinguished. 
 
 But there is something more terrible than the fall of 
 princes or the misery of a queen. It is when thwarted 
 passion and foiled ambition transform a woman's entire 
 nature into, a hunger for revenge. One portentous figure 
 occupies a large place in four connected plays — that of 
 Margaret of Anjou, the formidable wife of the false 
 saint and true dastard, Henry the Sixth. For her inven- 
 tion, or for retrieving her from the chronicles, perhaps 
 
35^ Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 we owe more thanks to Marlowe than to Shakspere ; 
 but doubtless the conception of Marlowe was adopted 
 by Shakspere, and heightened and refined. We follow 
 ber whole history from the day on which in the glory of 
 early womanhood she meets her lover Suffolk, the 
 Lancelot of this Guinevere, to the day when, grey- 
 haired, loverless, husbandless, and childless, she seats 
 herself in the dust by the side of the mother and the 
 wife of her royal antagonist, Edward the Fourth, and 
 teaches them, with terrible sounding of the depths of 
 misery, how to curse their enemies : — 
 
 " Torbear to sleep the night and fast the day ; 
 Compare dead happiness with living woe ; 
 Think that thy babes were fairer than they were, 
 And he that slew them fouler than he is ; 
 Bettering thy loss makes the bad causer worse ; 
 Revolving this will teach thee how to curse." * 
 
 Beautiful, false, amorous, tyrannous, cruel, remorseless, 
 Margaret had been in her days of pride and power. 
 When deprived of all that makes life precious in her 
 eyes, she returns in wretchedness to haunt the place of 
 her former greatness. There, says Mrs Jameson, she 
 stalks around " like a terrible phantom of departed 
 majesty, uncrowned, unsceptered, desolate, powerless — 
 or like a vampire thirsting for blood — or like a grim 
 prophetess of evil, imprecating that ruin on the head of 
 her enemies which she lived to see realised." 
 
 In the historical plays there is only -one really happy 
 woman — Katherine of France, who is wooed in such 
 
 * " Think thai thy babes -were fairer than they were." Surely this line 
 is worthy of either Shakspere or the highest spirit among his early 
 fellow-dramatists. 
 
Shakspere's Portraiture of Women. 359 
 
 soldier-like fashion by the great victor of Agincourt. 
 Well for Kate that King Henry was first a man, and 
 only in the second place a prince ! Under the royal 
 wooer, not regardless of State motives for the marriage, 
 lay Prince Hal of the tavern, who had loved the frank 
 realities of life better than the cold conventions of his 
 father's Court. He does not give the passion of a 
 Romeo or the reverence of a Brutus, but in all honesty 
 he can say : " In faith, Kate, the elder I wax, the better 
 I shall appear ; my comfort is that old age, that ill layer 
 up of beauty, can do no more spoil upon my face ; thou 
 hast me, if thou hast me, at the worst ; and thou shalt 
 wear me, if thou wear me, better and better; and there- 
 fore tell me, most fair Katherine, will you have me ? " 
 
 Before the English historical plays were brought to a 
 close (and from these we set aside King Henry the 
 Eighth as belonging to a later period), Shakspere had 
 produced two great portraits of women, both lovers who 
 move under the sunlight and starlight of Italy, both 
 beautiful and ardent, yet in their beauty unlike as can 
 possibly be, one the most afflicted, the other the most 
 joyous of wedded ladies — Juliet and the Venetian 
 Portia. Juliet (for we need hardly take account of 
 Lavinia in " Titus Andronicus ") is the first-born tragic 
 heroine of Shakspere's imagination. Whether she was or 
 ever would hav^ been a woman of intellect or a woman 
 capable of devotion to a moral ideal, we neither know 
 nor greatly care to know. She was assuredly endowed 
 with genius of the heart. It is enough that Juliet's 
 nature was one clear flame of love, and that death took 
 her, or rather not death but love. If in a rich garden 
 
360 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 ,,we found some red-hearted flower not yet unclosed, and 
 I if we had arrived just at the moment when sunlight fell 
 upon it, and the petals suddenly burst open, and all the 
 sweetness and bloom in an instant spread abroad, we 
 .should have before our eyes an image of Juliet's awaken- 
 ing to passion, and of her instantaneous transit from 
 childhood to womanhood. In this tragedy there is no 
 division of interests, no secondary plot, no double current 
 of feeling. One and the same desire seizes at one and 
 the same instant the hearts of Romeo and Juliet ; one and 
 the same doom awaits them. Hence, from its singleness 
 of passion and -of plot, the play acquires a lyrical charac- 
 ter. In the moonlit garden and at dawn, when — 
 
 " Envious streaks 
 Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east," 
 
 the voices of the lovers sound amid the notes of nightin- 
 gales like the nightingales' own. If we would describe 
 the character of Juliet, we have said what is essential 
 when we have said " she loves." She loves in the heroic 
 fashion, for even as a great thought makes the thinker' 
 indifferent to food and sleep, nay, to life itself, and as a 
 great ambition makes the man of action indifferent to 
 these, so the singleness of her love makes Juliet regard- 
 less of all except love, and bears her onward to her 
 doom. Here, for the first time, Shakspere courage- 
 ously explores the extremes of human passion — the 
 aerial pinnacle of joy, the cavernous abyss of grief. The 
 emotion of love which occupies the play is single, and 
 there is little complexity in either of the two chief 
 characters ; but love is not quite the same as manifesting 
 itself in man and in woman ; it is the same, and it is 
 
Shakspere's Portraiture of Women. 36 1 
 
 not the same, as if the god of love had put twin reeds 
 to his lips and blown, but the harmony was made up of 
 tenor and contralto tones. So with the passion of 
 Eomeo and Juliet. And lest we should be cloyed by 
 sweetness or by sorrow, Shakspere has filled in a back- 
 ground of most varied character, showing us the cold 
 Italian beauty, Juliet's mother, who had wedded old 
 Capulet not for love, and who now strives with little 
 maxims to preach down her daughter's heart ; and Mer- 
 cutio, a free-lance between the rival houses, whose wit 
 lightens and flashes as swift as his rapier blade, whose 
 quick brain and nimble fancy are needed to set off the 
 brooding passion and rich imaginings of Romeo. Nor 
 in this background may we overlook the first entirely 
 humorous study of womanhood in Shakspere's plays — 
 the Nurse, stoutest and most consequential of ladies. 
 Love's breathless go-between, sage counsellor in amorous 
 perplexities, delicate creature whose injured honour 
 Peter the fan-bearer must defend, whose overwrought 
 feelings require from time to time the soothing influences 
 of the aqua vitae flask. Would that, in addition to the 
 Nurse of Juliet and Mrs Quickly of the Boar's Head 
 Tavern, Shakspere had given us a gallery of these 
 humorous portraits, for neither the creator of Mrs Gamp 
 nor the creator of Mrs Poyser has surpassed him in these 
 two. 
 
 Portia, the rich heiress of Belmont, charms us not 
 by the power of one predominant attribute, but by the 
 harmony of many qualities rarely found in union. She 
 is not like Juliet, a passionate child- suddenly- transformed 
 to woman. She does not like Juliet suffer from the 
 
362 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 jb;^rannous_enviTomaent of her elders. She is mistress 
 of a noble house, and already she has known many 
 wooers from the four quarters of the globe, until this 
 business of wooing has grown a weariness : " By my 
 troth, Nerissa, my little body is aweary of this great 
 world." If only she were free to choose, for to Shak- 
 spere's heroines it is in the highest degree inconvenient 
 to be merely chosen. From Juliet to Desdemona, from 
 Helena to Miranda, if they do not themselves actually 
 woo, they are at least active accomplices in their wooing : 
 but Portia must accept her fate from a casket of lead. 
 So her father, ever virtuous, decreed when dying, and 
 with Portia her father's will is to be loyally executed. 
 From the tedium of the rich heiress's life she is roused 
 by veritable love ; but how can she give that love 
 expression ? Sainte-Beuve has noticed that a subtlety 
 and fineness of edge has been put upon satire in France 
 by the laws regulating the press ; a writer who fears the 
 censure cannot blurt out a brutal invective ; he must 
 cast about how to say the same thing, or what comes 
 to the same, in constitutional language. The check 
 put by her father's will on Portia's love acts like the 
 censure in France, and she is taught by it to say things 
 with as full a meaning as any of Juliet's ardent out- 
 breaks, but she says them exquisitely, and with a deli- 
 
 1 cate propriety which adds to their charm. The most 
 irresistible love-letter is that which may be read by 
 every one ; only to the eyes of the one person made 
 wise by love the written words are replaced by invisible 
 phrases set down in a sympathetic ink, shining forth 
 when the poor leaf of paper is laid close to the warmth 
 
f Shakspere s Portraiture of Women. 363 
 
 of a heart. "There's something tells me," exclaims 
 Portia — 
 
 " There's something tells me, but it is not love, 
 I would not lose you ; and you know yourself 
 Hate counsels not in such a quality." 
 
 This is the most graceful of confessions, and yet we 
 must hesitate before declaring it more beautiful than 
 Juliet's — 
 
 " But trust me, gentleman, I'll prove more true 
 Than those that have more cunning to be strange ; " 
 
 or the sacred boldness of Mirandsi's declaration — 
 
 " Hence, bashful cunning ! 
 And prompt me, plain and holy Innocence ! 
 I am your wife, if you will marry me ; 
 If not, I'll die your maid." 
 
 Portia " stands for sacrifice/' while her young Alcides 
 goes to " redeem the virgin tribute " from the sea 
 monster. But when the bar is broken, and the check 
 removed which stayed the current of her love, how her 
 whole life trembles rapturously forward to unite itself 
 with Bassanio's ! how humble and how proud she grows 
 in her desire to set Bassanio above herself, " an un- 
 lesson'd girl, unschool'd, unpractis'd," yet soon to instruct 
 the doge and his magnificoes ! With what an eager 
 delicacy of love does she strive to convince him (happy 
 adventurer) that she is the fortunate one who is getting 
 the best of the bargain ! And in truth. Love like 
 Death is a mighty leveller and in a moment has made 
 them equal. 
 
 Eojtiat-marks an epoch in Shakspere's creations of 
 female character. In her he first shows how he can 
 
364 Transcripts and Studws. 
 
 bring into vital union the various elements which go to 
 make up a noble and cultivated woman. How refined 
 an intellect, how ardent a heart ! What a superb mun- 
 dane life at Belmont amid its flowers, and statues, and 
 music ; what lofty spiritual views in the Court of Venice 
 when she pleads for mercy ! What beautiful earnest- 
 ness, and what beautiful mirth ! And Shakspere has 
 confronted her feminine force, benignant as it is bright, 
 with the remorseless masculine force and dark temper of 
 Shylock. The same self-mastery which she had shown 
 in carrying out the conditions of her father's will stands 
 her in stead at the trial of Antonio. She does not 
 hurry forward to confound her adversary or to relieve 
 the merchant ; but conducts the case to the issue she 
 desires as an artist might ashieve a work of art, testing 
 first whether there be any humanity in Shylock ; then, 
 when it must be so, drawing him on to expose the abso- 
 lute vindictiveness of his nature, and at precisely the 
 right moment giving afifairs the sudden turn which 
 brings good out of evil. We should think of the young 
 doctor less as an interpreter of the law than as an 
 exquisite artist in the afiairs of life. 
 
 It may seem strange that in plays later in the 
 chronological order than " The Merchant of Venice," this 
 refinement of portraiture is not maintained, and that 
 ruder and more boisterous types of womanhood appear. 
 Shakspere was led away from romantic comedy by the 
 historical plays, and after " Henry the Fourth" and 
 " Henry the Fifth " he transferred some of the rough- 
 ness and realism of the lower scenes of the historical 
 drama to the region of comedy. But as regards 
 
Shakspere's Portraiture of Women. 365 
 
 " The Taming of the Shrew" (whatever its date may 
 be) we must bear ia mind that Shakspere worked 
 upon the lines of an older play. And Kate the curst, 
 presently to become the most loyal of wives, is a good 
 broad comedy figure, far more original and laughter- 
 moving than the affectionate scold Adriana in "The 
 Comedy of Errors." There is a gale of high spirits and 
 good humour blowing through the piece. We have not 
 a grain of pity to spare for Kate, who is far better 
 pleased to find a conqueror than herself to conquer. 
 (Men must be such poor creatures if they cannot manage 
 with bit and bridle a headstrong girl ;] on the whole, it 
 is satisfactory to her to discover that there is at least 
 one man of force and spirit in the world, and to know 
 that he and no other has chosen her for his wife. And 
 so Kate transfers all her boldness into the very effrontery 
 of obedience ; if she surrender at all, she must surrender 
 unconditionally, and retain her self-will by sheer pride 
 of self-effacement. 
 
 "The Merry Wives of Windsor," we are told, was 
 written by command of "that gross-minded old bag- 
 gage" (as Hartley Coleridge profanely calls her) Queen 
 Elizabeth. Hartley Coleridge atones for his irreverence 
 towards the bright occidental star by his words about 
 the merry wives, words so happy that once heard they 
 can never cease to form part of our remembrance of the 
 play. 
 
 " The merry wives," he says, " are a delightful pair. Methinks 
 I see them, with their comely, middle-aged visages, their dainty 
 white ruffs and toys, their half witch-like conic hats, their full 
 farthingales, their neat though not over slim waists, their house- 
 wifely keys, their girdles, their sly laughing looks, their apple-red 
 
366 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 cheeks, their brows the h'nes whereon look more like the work of 
 mirth than years. . . . The Mrs Quickly of Windsor is not mine 
 hostess of the Boar's Head, but she is a very pleasant, busy, good- 
 natured, unprincipled old woman whom it is impossible to be 
 angry with." " And sweet Anne Page," adds the elvish poet and 
 critic, " she is a pretty little creature whom one would like to take 
 on one's knee." 
 
 We have travelled a wide space from the noble and 
 gracious lady of Belmont. Even in that brilliant being, 
 Beatrice, true lover, and gallant friend of her friend in dis- 
 tress, we miss the grace of Portia. Behind her delight- 
 ful sauciness lie warmth and courage of heart, but Portia 
 can be as mirthful without this playful effrontery, this 
 appalling cleverness, and Portia can utter the noble 
 periods of her plea for mercy, an achievement beyond 
 the wit of Beatrice. " I am much sorry, sir," says 
 Imogen when provoked by'Cloten's professions of love — 
 
 " I am much sorry, sir, 
 You put me to forget a lady's manners 
 By being so verbal." 
 
 Beatrice might have incurred the censure of Imogen as 
 being " verbal," yet she is a delight to those who can see 
 an actress of genius mediating between. foxwar(iaess..and 
 goo"d"breeding, love and wit, game and jarnest, and for 
 ever^avedTByThfi gentlewoman from the hoyden. After 
 three hundred years my dear Lady Disdain still holds 
 the stage, and has lost none of her buoyancy or bright- 
 ness. Beatrice bears a certain resemblance to the 
 earlier Kosalind of " Love's Labour's Lost," who has 
 the fault, if it be one, of being " verbal." We should 
 remember that Shakspere's women must tread the 
 boards and interest a crowd of spectators. It will not 
 
Sha,ksperi s Portraiture of Women. 367 
 
 do to make them all like Virgilia, the " gracious silence " 
 of her husband. Among various devices to render the 
 women of his plays interesting, two are often resorted to 
 by Shakspere ; either they are brilliant talkers, distin- 
 guished by their intellect and wit ; such are Rosalind 
 and Beatrice ; or they are assigned parts which require 
 from them some sustained and eloquent pleadings ; so 
 it is with Portia pleading for Antonio's life, so with 
 Isabella pleading for the life of her brother, so with 
 Volumnia pleading for the safety of Rome, so with Her- 
 mione and Katherine of Arragon, who are cited before 
 judges to defend their own honour. From first to last 
 we perceive that Shakspere delighted in vigour of 
 character in woman as in man. His heroines are not 
 composed of 
 
 " Matter too soft a lasting mark to bear, 
 And best distinguished by black, brown, or fair." 
 
 Mere softness and yieldingness do not attract Shak- 
 spere. He requires some strength of nature — not 
 always intellectual strength, but if not intellectual 
 strength or brilliancy, then vigour of the emotional or 
 moral nature, and if not active courage, then the passive 
 heroism of fortitude. At first it is evident that he was 
 specially attracted, at least for stage purposes, by clever 
 women. This is natural with a young man of genius ; 
 a student of character likes persons who have something 
 to show, and before his eye has grown penetrating and 
 skilled in the mystery of human character, he takes 
 what is obvious and finds always something to interest 
 him in what a bright intellect and frank good spirits 
 throw out on the surface. But gradually he comes to 
 
368 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 look for deeper and more precious things, until at last 
 the most delicate and evanescent phenomena of the feel- 
 ings interest him, and he finds more scope for study, and 
 a better chance of exquisite discoveries in natures fine as 
 that of some creature of the element, or so richly 
 harmonious that no single feature can jut violently into 
 relief. 
 
 Almost side by side with " Much Ado about Nothing " 
 in point of date lies "As You Like It." The secret 
 hovr to be at once " verbal " and faultless in manner 
 was assuredly discovered by Rosalind. And the secret is 
 this — that while every word uttered shall be vivid, and 
 a challenge to the spirit of dulness, not one word shall 
 be merely clever and intellectual. Eosalind's brilliance 
 is never hard or cold. A cascade of sparkling speech 
 sallies from her lips ; it is sun-illumined as it falls, and 
 over it hangs the iris of a lover's hope. The bluste r of 
 the shrew and the delightful raillery of Beatrice are 
 refined inT^saEnd to an exquisite sprightliness, which 
 half conceals and half "reveals the eager wi sh es^an d 
 tender alai-ms of her heart. What joy to such a woman 
 as Rosalind to be, as it were, the goddess of destiny to 
 three pairs of lovers, including amongst them Orlando 
 and herself ! 
 
 Having brought to perfection one type of womanhood, 
 Shakspere turns to another type, which we find repre- 
 sented by Helena in " All's Well that Ends Well," and 
 by Isabella in " Measure for Measure." " At the 
 entrance," I have said elsewhere, " to the dark and 
 dangerous tragic world into which Shakspere was now 
 about to pass stand the figures of Isabella and Helena, 
 
Shaksperi s Portraiture of Women^ 369 
 
 one the embodiment of conscience, the other the em- 
 bodiment of will." In a world of over-running foulness 
 and shame, Isabella stands the representative of heroic 
 chastity. The change from the forest of Arden to the 
 city of Vienna, where corruption boils and bubbles, is 
 not greater than the change from Rosalind to Isabel. 
 Here are other and less innocent burghers than the 
 dappled deer ; here are neither frolic nor song as in the 
 greenwood of France ; but, instead of these, pleadings 
 for life, desperate inducements to sin, grave searching 
 of hearts, wrestlings with evil, the laying bare of self- 
 deceit. We pass from the freedom of the fields and 
 woods to the damps of the prison cell. Through 
 all moves Isabella immaculate ; but, like Spenser's 
 patron knight of chastity, the virgin Britomart, she 
 finds at the last that there is no purity so invincible as 
 that of love. A heart may be chaste as ice, or chaste 
 as fire, and Isabella's is of the la,tter kind. We remem- 
 ber her as " a thing ensky'd and sainted," yet as the 
 Duke's betrothed, and united with him in the task of 
 restoring order in his evil city of Vienna. Helena, the 
 physician's daughter, is also made to be a healer and 
 restorer ; with her it is not a sinful city that needs 
 healing but one proud boy, on whom she has lavished 
 undeserved affection, and whom she watches over with a 
 fond protectiveness. In this play we meet with a 
 charming, example of Shakspere's treatment of the re- 
 lations of woman with woman, of which another example 
 is found in the beautiful girls' friendship of Rosalind and 
 Celia. The aged Countess and her adopted daughter 
 Helena, although Helena's love of the Countess's son 
 
 2 A 
 
3 fo Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 might easily have disturhed their harmony, perfectly un- 
 derstand each other, and it is the patent of Helena's 
 nobility that her confidant and the partner in her plot 
 is no other than Bertram's mother. When her son's 
 cruel words to Helena are read aloud before the Countess, 
 she breaks forth, her indignation and love comming- 
 ling— 
 
 " There's nothing here that is too good for him, 
 But only she ; and she deserves a lord, 
 That twenty such rude boys might tend upon 
 And call her hourly, mistress." 
 
 " I can almost," writes Mr Hudson, " find it in my heart 
 to adore the beauty of youth, yet this blessed old 
 creature is enough to persuade me that age may be 
 more beautiful still." 
 
 Perhaps it was at this period, and in contrast with the 
 saintly strength of Isabel, and the protective devotion of 
 Helena, that Shakspere created the only light woman 
 in all his plays — Cressida. Poor bubble of vanity and 
 sensuality (and with the gleam and grace of a floating 
 bubble) she serves, if for nothing else, at least to prove 
 that Cleopatra belongs to another class than hers. 
 With one quarter of her small loveless self for Troilus, 
 and one quarter for Diomed, and the rest for any other 
 hopeful candidates of the Grecian or the Trojan camp, 
 she makes us feel that Cleopatra, for whom Antony has 
 at least been the supreme sensation of her life, possesses 
 a certain depth of character and reality of passion. It 
 was certainly about this date that Shakspere drew his 
 only portrait of a woman who, having once loved nobly 
 yields to a second and a base affection Gertrude 
 
Shakspere's Portraiture of Women. 371 
 
 Hamlet's mother. And Ophelia, " sweet rose of May," 
 must not even she be placed among those women whose 
 love, through incapacity of nature rather than through 
 fault, brings no strength or healittg^ with it ? " Ob- 
 serve," writes Mr Ruskin, " among all the principal 
 figures in Shakspere's plays there is only one weak 
 woman — Ophelia ; and it is because she fails Hamlet at 
 the critical moment, and is not, and cannot in her 
 nature be, a guide to him when he needs her most, that 
 aU the bitter catastrophe follows." 
 
 " Hamlet " lies close to " Julius Caesar " in the chrono- 
 logical order of the plays. It is inevitable that we 
 should set side by side the female figures of these two 
 tragedies, and exhibit the gentle helplessness of Ophelia 
 in the light of the Roman Portia's heroic energy of 
 heart. Such strange love-making as that of Hamlet and 
 Ophelia was surely never known before or since ; one 
 silent interview, one distracted or ironical letter, one 
 scene of invective and reproach, real or feigned, and some 
 few ambiguous or indecent speeches — this is the account 
 in brief of all the communications between Ophelia and 
 Hamlet with which we are made directly acquainted. 
 A bar is set between the lovers at the opening of the 
 play, and not one word of trust and confidence is spoken 
 on either side from the beginning to the end. Hamlet's 
 love is poisoned at its source, and Ophelia has not 
 courao'e to press forward and discover where and how he 
 ails ; she has nothing better to bring to Hamlet's aid 
 than piteous little appeals to heaven. It was Helena, 
 not Ophelia, who uttered the words — 
 
372 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 " Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie 
 Which we ascribe to heaven ; the fated sky 
 Gives us free scope, only doth backward pull 
 Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull." 
 
 Portia, created by Shakspere from Plutarch's record 
 at about the same date as Ophelia, is really as feminine, 
 as sensitive to anxiety and pain for those she loves, as 
 the ill-starred Danish maiden ; she too, and with a 
 slighter cause than Ophelia, goes distracted and does 
 herself to death — a deatb by fire, not the piteous,' musi- 
 cal death of Ophelia. Portia is as finely strung as any 
 of Shakspere's heroines, but she is Cato's daughter and 
 Brutus' wife. With an irresistible appeal to Brutus — 
 not to heaven — she urges her wifely right to share the 
 purposes and the cares of her husband. Let Ophelia 
 keep for epitaph her brother's words, "sweet rose of 
 May " — a rose borne helplessly down the stream of fate, 
 and muddied at the close ; it is inexpressibly piteous. 
 But if we would be proud, not pitiful, let us turn to 
 Portia, Shakspere's ideal of Stoic virtue enshrined 
 within a woman's frailty, and let us inscribe to her 
 memory the words of Brutus — 
 
 O ye gods 
 Eender me *orthy of this noble wife.'' 
 
 Portia, the Eoman wife, represents one aspect of 
 ideal womanhood in ancient Kome; Volumnia, the 
 Eoman mother, completes the ideal. She were a fit 
 wife for Hercules ; " in anger, Juno-like." She is 
 indeed like mother Kome herself, as grand, as impe- 
 rious, as proud of her valiant son. And yet if we com- 
 pare her action throughout the play with that of Corio- 
 
Skakspere's Portraiture of Women. 373 
 
 lanus we shall perceive how truly she, like Portia, is 
 first a woman, and only in the second place a Roman 
 mother. With all her haughtiness she has the woman's 
 tact, which Coriolanus lacks, and she instructs him, but 
 in vain, to seem gracious even to the plebeians when it 
 is his interest to conciliate them — 
 
 " I have a heart as little apt as yours, 
 But yet a brain, that leads my use of anger 
 To better vantage." 
 
 The great speech by which she subdues her son and 
 saves her city is in the main a transcript from Plutarch, 
 but there are two or three lines altogether of Shak- 
 spere's invention, which are put, as Mrs Jameson has 
 noticed, with admirable efifect into a mother's mouth, and 
 that of such a mother as Volumnia — 
 
 " There is no man in the world 
 More bound to his mother ; yet here he lets me prate 
 Like one i' the stocks. Thou hast never in thy life 
 Show'd thy dear mother any courtesy : 
 'When she {poor hen I) fond of no second brood, 
 Has clucVd thee to the wars, and safely home. 
 Laden vdth honour." 
 
 The " poor hen " is Shakspere's thought, or shall we 
 not rather say Volumnia's, and omitted by a mistake of 
 Plutarch ? 
 
 , The great figures of the tragedies, all so familiar to 
 us, admit of no grouping or arrangement, for each is a 
 separate full-length study, and each must be gazed at 
 singly and for a sufficient time. These are saviours and 
 martyrs, or else the destroyers of life ; Cordelia, the martyr 
 and patron saint of filial truth and devotion, Desdemona, 
 the wife who enters Paradise with a sacred lie upon her 
 
3 74' Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 lips ; and over against these the she-wolves Goneril and 
 Eegan ; and Lady Macbeth, whose delicate and des- 
 perate womanhood is so finely contrasted with the 
 coarser strength and duller conscience of her husband. 
 Apart from the rest, and more wonderful than any other 
 of Shakspere's heroines, stands Cleopatra — 
 
 " That southern beam, 
 The laughing queen that caught the world's great hands." 
 
 From an historical point of view we may say, that as 
 Portia and Volumnia represent the virtue and the 
 majesty of Roman womanhood, so Cleopatra represents 
 the sensuous witchery of the East sapping in upon 
 Roman manliness and laying it low. But it is an error 
 to view Cleopatra as representative of an epoch, a class, 
 or an influence ; she is Cleopatra, and that is enough ; 
 an individual who herself constitutes a whole species ; 
 an Eastern star, with none other like it, and ruling the 
 destinies of the lords of the earth. 
 
 Of these it is enough to record the mere names, and 
 to let each name bring its own associations. But 
 before ending I must say a word of the contrasted types 
 of womanhood which appear in the latest plays of 
 Shakspere, some perhaps dreamed of as he wandered 
 among the woods and fields around Stratford, or on the 
 banks of the Avon after his return home from the life 
 of distraction and toil in the great city. Shakspere 
 had known trial and sorrow, and had conquered them. 
 And now out of his deep experience and his clarified 
 
 vision of life he creates the figures of great sufferers 
 
 Hermione, Queen Katherine, who conquer by patience 
 
Skakspere's Portraiture of Women. 375 
 
 fortitude, a spirit of justice and long-sufFeriug ; and in 
 contrast with these he imagines exquisite figures of 
 children transfigured, as it were, in the radiance of his 
 own wide and calm sunset — Perdita, Miranda— children 
 who have known no sorrow, and over whose happiness, 
 the loveliest and the frailest of things, Shakspdre bows 
 with pathetic sympathy, and some of that passion which 
 Shelley describes so accurately — , 
 
 f The devotion to something afar ] 
 I From the sphere of our sorrow.'' / 
 
 And with what rare felicity Shakspere varies the com- 
 mon type in his two girl-lovers — Perdita, with the air 
 of the fields around her, shepherdess queen of curds and 
 cream, " the prettiest low-born lass that ever ran on the 
 greensward," lover of flowers and of all pastoral plea- 
 sures ; Mir anda, the j jbild-^f -wonder, -bteathiag the sea- 
 air of the _enclian±ed- island, not nurtured like Perdita 
 among the lads and lasses of the country-side, but 
 instructed by a wonder-working sage, and waited on by 
 a spirit of the air and the hag-born monster, Caliban. 
 Both maidens are flower-like in their delicacy and their 
 fresh beauty — Perdita, a blossom of the inland meadow 
 lands ; Miranda, a more wonderful flower of the foam of 
 the sea. ~ " 
 
 Of all the daughters of his imagination, which did 
 Shakspere love the best ? Perhaps we shall no't err 
 if we say one of the latest-born of them all, our English 
 Imogen. And what most clearly shows us how Shak- 
 spere loved Imogen is this — he has given her faults, 
 and has made them exquisite, so that we love her 
 
37^ Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 better for their sake. No one has so quick and keen 
 a sensibility to whatever pains and to whatever gladdens 
 as she. To her a word is a blow ; and as she is quick 
 in her sensibility, so she is quick in her perceptions, 
 piercing at once through the Queen's false show of 
 friendship ; quick in her contempt for what is un- 
 worthy, as for all professions of love from the clown- 
 prince, Cloten ; quick in her resentment, as when she 
 discovers the unjust suspicions of Posthumus. Wronged 
 she is indeed by her husband, but in her haste she 
 too grows unjust ; yet she is dearer to us for the 
 sake of this injustice, proceeding as it does from the 
 sensitiveness of her love. It is she to whom a word is 
 a blow, who actually receives a buffet from her hus- 
 band's hand ; but for Imogen it is a blessed stroke, 
 since it is the evidence of his loyalty and zeal on her 
 behalf. In a moment he is forgiven, and her arms are 
 round his neck. 
 
 Shakspere made so many perfect women unhappy 
 that he owed us some ctmeTide. And he has made 
 that amende by letting us see one perfect woman 
 supremely happy. Shall our last glance at Shakspere's 
 plays show us Florizel at the rijstic merry-making 
 receiving blossoms from the bands of Perdita ? or Fer- 
 dinand and Miranda playing at chess in Prospered 
 cave, and winning one a king and one a queen, while 
 the happy fathers gaze in from the entrance of the 
 
 cave "i We can see a more delightful sight than these 
 
 Imogen with her arms around the neck of Posthumus, 
 while she puts an edge upon her joy by the playful 
 challenge and mock reproach-T- 
 
Shakspere's Portraiture of Women. 377 
 
 " Why did you throw your wedded lady from you ? 
 Think that you are upon a rock, and now 
 Throw me again ; " 
 
 and he responds-^ — 
 
 " Hang there like fruit, my soul, 
 TUl the tree die." 
 
 We shall find in all Shakspere no more blissful crea- 
 tures than these two. 
 
ROMEO AND JULIET. 
 
 Vieni, a veder Montecchi e CapeUetti. 
 
 Dante, Pwg., Canto VI. 
 
 I. 
 
 On a day of some year unknown, early in the sixteenth 
 century, Luigi da Porto, a young cavalry officer in the 
 service of the Venetian Republic, was riding, as he tells 
 us, along the lonely road between Gradisca and Udine, 
 in the pleasant country of Friuli. Two of his attend- 
 ants had been left far behind, but one followed closer, 
 his favourite archer, Peregrine, a man of fifty, handsome 
 of face, courageous, skilled in the use of his bow, skilled 
 also, like most of his fellow-townsmen of Verona, in use 
 of his tongue, and very learned in tales of love and 
 lovers. The young man, lost in his own thoughts, was 
 musing sadly on the cruelty of fortune, which had given 
 his heart to one who would not give hers in exchange, 
 when the voice of Peregrine sounded in his ears. " Do 
 you wish to live always a wretched life because a beauti- 
 ful, cruel, and fickle one loves you but little ? In your 
 profession. Master mine, it is very unbecoming to slay 
 long in the prison of love ; so sad are almost all the 
 ends to which love leads us that to follow him is danger- 
 ous. In proof of which, and to shorten the tedium of 
 the way, I will, should it please you, relate a story of 
 what happened in my country, in which you will hear 
 
Romeo and Juliet. 379 
 
 how two noble lovers were led to a very sad and pitiful 
 death." 
 
 The story of Romeo and Juliet, which Peregrine, the 
 Veronese archer, told to the jingling of bridle-reins, if 
 not a tradition of real events, is probably a refinement 
 on an older tale found among the Novelle of Masuccio 
 Salernitano, printed at Naples in 1476. Masuccio, of 
 whose life little is known, calls God to witness that the 
 tales of his recital are not vain fictions, but true 
 passages of history. In Siena lived a young man of 
 good family named Mariotto Mignanelli, who loved a 
 citizen's daughter, Giannozza Saraceni, and was loved 
 by her in return. Fate being opposed to them, they 
 cannot avow their love, but are secretly married by an 
 Augustine monk. After some time Mariotto quarrels 
 with a citizen of note, whom he has the misfortune to 
 kill with the blow of a stick. He is condemned to 
 perpetual exile, and, after a sorrowful parting from his 
 beloved, flies to Alexandria, in which city his uncle is a 
 wealthy merchant. Upon Mariotto's departure the 
 father of Giannozza urges her to accept the hand of a 
 suitor whom he has provided, and she, like Juliet in 
 her distress, turns to the friar, who prepares a powder 
 which, dissolved in water, shall cast her into a three 
 days' slumber resembling death. Having first de- 
 spatched a messenger to inform her husband, she drinks 
 the draught, and is buried in the church of St Augus- 
 tij/*** At night the friar delivers her from the tomb, 
 aiW^ears her, still unconscious, to his (Bvelling. Here 
 she comes to herself at the appointed time, and dis- 
 guised as a monk hastens on board a s\ip bound for 
 
380 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 Alexandria. Meanwhile her messenger has been cap- 
 tured by pirates, and tidings of the sudden deaths of 
 Giannozza and of her father (who had really died of 
 grief for his daughter's loss) reach Mariotto. Weary of 
 life, he comes to Siena, disguised as a pilgrim, hurries 
 to the church where he believes that his lady's body 
 lies, and flings himself upon her grave. While endea- 
 vouring to open the tomb he is discovered by the 
 sacristan, who takes him for a thief. He is seized, 
 identified as the banished Mariotto, on the rack 
 confesses the entire truth, and, notwithstanding the 
 general sympathy, and especially that of all women, is 
 condemned and beheaded. Giannozza, having arrived 
 at Alexandria, learns to her dismay that her husband, on 
 hearing of her reported death, has returned to Siena ; 
 she instantly follows him, only to be informed of his 
 execution. She strives to hide her grief in a convent, 
 and there in a short time dies of a broken heart.*' 
 
 This tale of the " Neapolitan Boccaccio " is compara- 
 tively rude — in some features almost savage. Love is 
 here in its might, and death in its terror ; but beauty 
 has not come to lift the tale out of the melodramatic 
 and make it a symbol of what is most piteous and most 
 august in human existence — the strict bounds which 
 life sets to our purest and most ardent desires, and 
 the boundlessness of those desires which choose rather 
 to abandon this world than to be untrue to themselves. 
 
 * " Con ■ interno dolore e sanguinose lacrime con pooo cibo ef^^te 
 dormire." I have followed the analyses of Masucoio's novel i^T)r 
 Schulze's article, Shakespeare- Jahi-buch, XI., Simroek's " Die Quel- 
 len des Shakspeare," and Daniel's Preface to Brooke and Painter (New 
 Shakspere Society, 1878). 
 
Romeo and Juliet. 381 
 
 What, then, does Masuccio's novel need ? It needs 
 that the youth and maiden sacrificed to love should be 
 crowned and garlanded with all that makes life lovely ; 
 that their fate should come upon them at first with a 
 terror of great joy ; that they should be swept suddenly 
 and irresistibly into the mid stream of violent delight ; 
 that the obstacle to their happiness should be of no 
 slight or casual kind, but broad-based on an old 
 foundation '; that hate should thus stand frowning over 
 against love ; that no hazardous wanderings from Italy 
 to Egypt should have place in the story, but that by 
 trivial accident the purpose of destiny should be brought 
 about ; finally, that the death of one lover should be 
 self-sought and deliberate — -outcome of desperate error 
 -■ — and that the other should be fleet to pursue, the lost 
 one through the gates of the grave in a rapture of anguish 
 and of desire. 
 
 II. 
 
 All that was needed to Masuccio's tale Shakspere 
 accomplished ; but before the tale reached Shakspere 
 it had been in large measure ennobled and refined. Da 
 Porto's version (1530-35) is sixty years later in date 
 than that of- Masuccio. In Italy, says Mr Symonds, 
 " the key-note of the Renaissance was struck by the 
 Novella, as in England by the drama." The tragic 
 simplicity of Masuccio's tale gives place in Da Porto's 
 "Romeo and Juliet" to the heightened effects of an 
 artist ; it is a prose poem of the Italian Renaissance. 
 Within a narrow compass it brings together splendour 
 and gloom, joy and misery ; the banquet-hall, the bridal- 
 
2,^2 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 chamber, and the burial-vault ; while over all are cast 
 a grace of manners, a bloom of southern life, which the 
 earlier Novella lacks. In almost every essential, and in 
 various details, Da Porto's story agrees with Shakspere's 
 play.* It is early in the thirteenth century, the time of 
 Bartolomeo della Scala, Prince of Verona — the Escalus 
 of Shakspere. The two rival houses, Capelletti and 
 Montecchi, wearied with continual strife, are now at 
 length almost pacified. In the Carnival season, the 
 head of the Capelletti, Messer Antonio, gives many 
 entertainments night and day, to one of which, on a 
 certain night, came in pursuit of his mistress a young 
 man of the house of Montecchi, masked, and wearing 
 the dress of a nymph. Having removed his mask all 
 are amazed at his comeliness, and the eyes of the 
 daughter of the house — who is herself " of supernatural 
 
 beauty, courageous, and very charming" encounter 
 
 with those of the stranger. In the torch dance the 
 hands of the two touch, and words of love are whispered. 
 From that evening each thinks only of the other, and 
 sometimes at church, sometimes at a window, Romeo 
 catches sight of his beloved. Often at peril of his life, 
 he walks before her house, or climbs to her balcony, 
 now while the moon shines bright, and again when the 
 winter snow is falling thick. Considering the danger 
 to which he is exposed, Giulietta consents to be his wife, 
 and Friar Lorenzo of St Francis, " a great philosopher, 
 who tried many experiments as well in natural as 
 
 • In what follows I have used " The Original Story of Borneo and 
 Juliet, Italian text with English translation," by G. Pace-Sanfeliee, 
 1868. 
 
Romeo mid Juliet. 383 
 
 magical things," plans, in order to gratify his patron 
 Eomeo, and hoping to reconcile the two families, how 
 to assist their meeting and unite them in wedlock. 
 After their secret marriage some happy bridal nights go 
 by, when once again the smouldering hate of the houses 
 flames forth, and in a street quarrel Romeo, although at 
 £rst careful " out of regard for his lady not to hurt any 
 of her family," driven to desperation, rushes on Tebaldo 
 Capelletti, strikes him dead at a blow, and puts his 
 followers to flight. The sentence of banishment follows, 
 as in Shakspere's play, and in the confessional at the 
 convent a sorrowful meeting of wife and husband takes 
 place. Giulietta implores to be allowed to accompany 
 Romeo as a page ; she will cut off her hair ; no one can 
 be a more faithful servant. But Romeo will take her 
 from her father's home only as his wedded lady ; he 
 trusts that ere long the Prince's pardon may be ob- 
 tained, and peace be concluded between their kinsfolk. 
 Half dead with grief, he reaches Mantua ; worn with 
 weeping, she abides in her Veronese palazzo. Her 
 mother now grows anxious at sight of her tears and 
 pallid face, and old Capulet and his wife, taking counsel 
 together, guess that Giulietta, who on St Euphemia's 
 Day last completed her eighteenth year, is pining in the 
 loneliness of maidenhood ; let them find for her a hus- 
 band and once more she will be cheerful. An aspirant 
 husband is speedily found in the young Count of 
 Lodrone, and when Giulietta vehemently opposes the 
 marriage, her father flies into a rage, trying to over- 
 whelm her constancy with threats. In extreme per- 
 plexity she turns to Friar Lorenzo for aid : " Give me as 
 
384 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 much poison as will free me from so great sorrow, and 
 Komeo from so great shame ; if you deny this I shall, 
 with more pain on my part, and grief on his, plunge a 
 dagger into my breast." For a desperate case, the good 
 padre has in store a desperate remedy ; she is too young 
 and beautiful to die ; but let her drink this powder, 
 and she shall enter into a death-like sleep for eight-and- 
 twenty hours ; the tomb of the Capelletti is hard by the 
 Franciscan church ; he will coQvey her from the tomb, 
 give her shelter in his cell, and accompany her, disguised 
 under a friar's hood, to Mantua. " ' But tell me, will 
 you not be afraid of the corpse of your cousin Tebaldo, 
 who was lately buried there ? ' The young lady, now 
 quite joyful, said : ' Father, if I through such means 
 was sure of going to meet Eomeo, I would without fear 
 even pass through the infernal regions.' " Giulietta 
 returns home joyful ; some unremembered sin it was 
 that had saddened her heart, but the best confessor in 
 the world has brought her peace of mind. She is sent 
 by her father to a country house, where preparations for 
 the nuptials have been going forward ; she retires for 
 the night, undresses, rises about four in the morning, 
 calls her chambermaid, and in her presence and that of 
 an aunt drinks the potion, with the words, " My father 
 shall not certainly, if I can help it, marry me against 
 my will." The women, who are dull of apprehension, 
 fail to understand what she has done, and they sleep 
 again. Giulietta dresses and once more lies down, com- 
 posing herself as if she were at the point of dying, and 
 crossing her hands upon her breast. 
 
 In the morning loud are the outcries and lamentations 
 
Romeo and Juliet. 385 
 
 of the women, especially of the chambermaid — almost a 
 sister to Giulietta — on finding the bride a corpse. The 
 physician is summoned and pronounces it death. Her 
 mother is distracted with grief The body, brought 
 back to Verona, is laid in the tomb with very honour- 
 able and great obsequies. Meanwhile, Friar Lorenzo 
 has despatched by a brother of his order a letter which 
 Giulietta had written explaining all that was to happen ; 
 but Romeo cannot be found. Found he is, however, by 
 Giulietta's serving-man, Pietro, who has hastened from 
 Verona with tidings of the lady's death. " Upon hear- 
 ing this, Romeo, pale and half dead, drew his sword and 
 was going to kill himself, but, being prevented by many 
 persons, said, ' The period of my life at any rate cannot 
 be far off, since the better part of it exists no longer,' 
 Dismissing Pietro, disguising himself in the garb of a 
 peasant, and taking a phial of serpent's water in his 
 sleeve, he comes to Verona on the night after that on 
 which his mistress has been buried. The lid of the 
 tomb yields to his efforts, and he enters, carrying with 
 him a dark lantern. There lies Giulietta amidst the 
 bones of many generations ; tears and cries break from 
 Romeo, while he kisses her eyes, her mouth, her breast ; 
 then plucking the serpent-water from his sleeve, he 
 drains the phial, and once more turns to embrace his 
 bride. 
 
 Here the tale of Da Porto varies with tragic power 
 from that version of it which Shakspere has made 
 familiar to us. While Romeo's arms are round his 
 wife, the cold about her heart is conquered, she stirs, 
 and " coming to herself, after a deep sigh, she said, 
 
 2b 
 
386 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 ' Alas, where am I ? who embraces me ? miserable me ! 
 who kisses me ? '" For a moment she fears it is Friar 
 Lorenzo who has played her false ; then the voice of 
 Eomeo fills her sense of hearing, and she would also fill 
 with his presence her sense of sight — " pushing him a 
 little from her, and looking him in the face, she recol- 
 lected him, and, embracing him, kissed him a thousand 
 times, saying, ' What madness has induced you to come 
 here, running into such dangers 1 ' " A dialogue which 
 Shakspere might have re-created and made as full of 
 lyric beauty as that between the lovers in the moonlit 
 garden, or that between the new husband and new wife 
 on the balcony at break of day, takes place between 
 Romeo, who feels the ice of death in all his limbs, and 
 Giulietta, in whom the tide of life has begun again 
 to surge. " ' If ever my love and faith were dear to 
 you, live, if only to think on him who dies for your sake 
 before your eyes.' To which the lady answered, ' Since 
 you die on account of my feigned death, what ought not 
 I to do for your real one ? ' and having pronounced these 
 words she fell down fainting. Coming afterwards to 
 herself, she miserably received in her beautiful mouth 
 the last sighs of her dear lover, whose death was ap- 
 proaching with great strides." But now the Friar, who 
 has observed with alarm a light within the tomb, hurries 
 in, and discovers with horror what has taken place. 
 With a bitter cry of " Eomeo ! " he rouses the almost 
 extinguished consciousness of the unhappy youth ; once 
 more the languid eyes open, just as dawn is about to 
 touch the world, then close for ever, and " death creep- 
 ing through all his limbs, he twisted himself all over, 
 
Romeo and Juliet. 387 
 
 and ended his life with a short sigh." Lorenzo turns to 
 Giulietta, to bring her such comfort as may be ; for her 
 the cloister shall be a refuge, wherein she may pray for 
 Romeo and for herself. But love has swifter solace than 
 this for her stricken heart. " ' What can I do/ she 
 cried, ' without thee, my sweet lord ? and what else 
 remains for me to perform, but to die and follow thee ? ' 
 Having said this, and deeply musing on her great mis- 
 fortune, and the death of her dear lover, resolving to 
 live no longer, she drew in her breath, retained it a 
 great while, and then with a loud scream fell dead upon 
 her lover's body." 
 
 The Friar, discovered in the tomb by officers of the 
 podestk, and brought before the Prince, relates, after 
 some evasions, the sorrowful series of events. By order 
 of Delia Scala the bodies of Romeo and Giulietta are 
 taken from the tomb and placed on two carpets in the 
 church of St Francis. There over the dead children 
 the weeping kinsfolk forget their long enmity and em- 
 brace. " And the Prince having ordered a fair monu- 
 ment, on which was engraven the cause of their death, 
 the two dead lovers were buried with very great and 
 solemn funeral pomp, lamented and accompanied by the 
 Prince, their kindred, and all the city." 
 
 III. 
 
 The story told by the archer Peregrine to Da Porto 
 now took wing and wandered hither and thither. A 
 Dominican monk, Matteo Bandello, the descendant of a 
 noble Lombard house, on whom a French bishopric was 
 conferred by Henri II., took up the tale, re-handled 
 
388 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 it, and included it among his somewhat unclerical 
 Novelle, which appeared at Lucca in 1554. Five 
 years later it passed the Alps — a version of Bandello's 
 Novella, with variations and additions, being given to 
 French readers by Pierre Boaistuau among his " His- 
 toires Tragiques." * In 1562, Arthur Brooke pro- 
 duced the Enghsh poem, "The Tragicall History of 
 Komeus and luliet," on which Shakspere founded his 
 tragedy. Brooke speaks of having seen "the same 
 argument lately set forth on stage ; " no such drama of 
 early Elizabethan days survives ; rude indeed must have 
 been the attempt of any playwright in England of 1562. 
 Again five years, and Boaistuau's French paraphrase of 
 Bandello was translated into English prose by William 
 Painter for his " Palace of Pleasure ; " this also Shak- 
 spere consulted. In Italy before the close of the six- 
 teenth century the legend had been versified in ottava 
 rima, professedly by a noble lady of Verona naming 
 herself "Clitia" — really, it is supposed, by Gherardo 
 Bolderi ; it had been dramatised by the blind poet and 
 actor Luigi Groto, with scene and time and names of 
 persons changed ; it had been recorded as grave matter 
 of history by De la Corte, who states that he had many 
 times seen the tomb or sarcophagus of the lovers, then 
 used as a washing-trough, at the well of the orphanage 
 of St Francis, "and," says he, "discussing this matter 
 with the Cavalier Gerardo Boldiero, my uncle, he showed 
 me, beside the aforesaid sepulchre, a place in the wall, 
 
 * An early French form of the story is found in the dedication to a 
 translation of Boccaccio's "Philocopo," by Adrian Sevin, 1542, with, 
 such outlandish names for the personages as Karilio Humdrum, Hal- 
 quadrioh, Harriaquaoh, &c. 
 
Romeo and Juliet. 389 
 
 on that side next the Eev. Capucini Fathers', from 
 whence, as he assured me, he had been given to under- 
 stand, this sepulchre, containing bones and ashes, had 
 been taken many years before." * 
 
 In Bandello's ' hands the story acquired many resem- 
 blances to the Shaksperian form which are wanting in 
 Da Porto. He dwells on Romeo's amorous fancy for a 
 hard-hearted mistress — Shakspere's Eosaline — to which 
 Da Porto only alludes. An elder friend — Shakspere's 
 Benvolio — advises the enamoured youth to " examine 
 other beauties," and to subdue his passion. Eomeo 
 enters Capulet's mansion disguised, but no longer as a 
 nymph. The Count of Lodrone is now first known as 
 Paris. The ladder of ropes is now first mentioned. The 
 sleeping-potion is taken by Juliet, not in presence of her 
 chamber-maid and aunt, but in solitude. Friar Lorenzo's 
 messenger to Mantua fails to deliver the letter because 
 he is detained in a house suspected of being stricken 
 with plague. In particular we owe to Bandello the 
 figure of the nurse, not Shakspere's humorous creation, 
 but a friendly old woman, who very willingly plays her 
 part of go-between for the lovers. One more develop- 
 ment, and all the materials of Shakspere's play are in 
 full formation. From Bandello's mention of one Spolen- 
 tino of Mantua, from whom Romeo procures the poison, 
 Pierre Boaistuau creates the episode of the Apothecary, 
 and it is also to this French refashioner of the story that 
 we must trace the Shaksperian close ; with him, Juliet 
 
 * Daniel's Introduction to the New Shakspere Society's " Origi- 
 nals and Analogues, Part I." It is by no means certain that the 
 story of Uomeo and Juliet has not an historical foundation. 
 
390 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 does not wake from her sleep until Borneo has ceased to 
 breathe ; and she dies, as in our tragedy, not in a 
 paroxysm of grief, but by her own hand, armed with 
 her husband's dagger. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Yitni a veder Montecchi e Oapelletti — "Come, see 
 the Montagues and Capulets." Will the reader consent 
 to leave Italy, and before we see them in England, view 
 the rival houses and their children as they show them- 
 selves in Spain of the seventeenth century, and in 
 France a century later ? Some eighteen months before 
 the birth of Shakspere in his little Warwickshire 
 town, the most prolific of Spanish dramatists. Lope de 
 Vega, was born at Madrid. When the Great Armada 
 hung upon the southern coast of England in 1588, 
 Lope, a disconsolate lover, was aboard one of the tall 
 ships, with his musket by his side, having for wadding 
 a plentiful supply of the verses he had written in his 
 hard-hearted lady's praise. Among Lope's cloak and 
 sword dramas — " Comedias de Capa y Espada " — is one 
 entitled " Castelvines y Monteses," in which the tragic 
 story of the Veronese lovers undergoes a strange trans- 
 formation.* As with all of its author's productions for 
 the stage, the plot is a bright tangle of incidents, skil- 
 fully ravelled and skilfully unravelled ; as with all, the 
 
 * For what follows I have used the reprint of "Los Bandos de 
 Verona," and "Castelvines y Monteses," in one volume (Paris, 1839), 
 and Mr F. W. Cosens' privately-printed translation, 1869. In Fur- 
 ness's edition of " Komeo and Juliet," and in the Introduction to 
 Fr. -Victor Hugo's translation of Shakspere's play, analyses of Lope's 
 pomedy will be found, 
 
Romeo and Juliet. 391 
 
 characters are subordinate to the incidents, and of course 
 among the characters appear " the primer galan, or 
 hero, all love and honour and jealousy ; the dama, or 
 heroine, no less loving and jealous . . . ; the barba, or 
 old man and father, ready to cover the stage with blood 
 if the lover has even been seen in the house of the 
 heroine ; " and the inevitable gracioso, or droll, whose 
 love adventures parody those of his master. Lope's 
 drama, though it keeps upon the mere surface of life as 
 compared with Shakspere's tragedy, is not without a 
 genuine charm ; it never flags for a moment ; its move- 
 ment is bright as well as rapid ; the stage is always 
 bustling with animated figures ; and there is poetry 
 enough in it to lift the play above mere melodrama or 
 spectacle. Altogether this bright southern flower has a 
 place of its own in the garden of art ; not like Shak- 
 spere's red lily, flowering alone upon a grave, but amid 
 its fellows in some gay parterre blown over by a sunlit 
 breeze. 
 
 The curtain rises upon a street in Verona ; we see 
 the palace of Antonio, chief of the Castelvines, lit up for 
 revelry. Without stand Roselo (Romeo), his comrade 
 Anselmo, and Roselo's servant Marin, the merry-man or 
 gracioso. The* love of frolic comes strong upon Roselo, 
 and even overpowers the prudent counsel of Anselmo ; 
 in spite of the danger of entering their enemy's doors, the 
 two youths, masked and cloaked, followed close by their 
 attendant, pass into the hall of feasting and music. The 
 scene changes ; it is the garden of Antonio's house, where, 
 escaped from the heat indoors, masked cavaliers and 
 ladies rest or wander to and fro, while musicians finger 
 
392 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 their instruments. As Roselo enters, Julia, tlie daughter 
 of the house, is seated listening to the gallant speeches 
 of her cousin Otavio. Her beauty on the instant trans- 
 ports the new comer, and while standing at gaze he is 
 reckless enough to remove his mask. Julia's father can 
 hardly be restrained from laying violent hands on his 
 uninvited guest, but the lady herself, struck with his 
 noble grace, whispers to her cousin Dorotea — 
 
 " If ever Lore in masquerade should come, 
 And so disguise himself and yet peep forth, 
 Methinks 'twould be with such a form and face." 
 
 Presently the youth grows bold, and seats himself by 
 Julia's side. On the other side is Otavio, and to him 
 Julia turns her face, but, skilled in love's cunning; 
 interprets all her encouraging words by a pressure of 
 Roselo's hand, on which she even contrives adroitly to 
 slip her ring. Discovering through her maid Celia, after 
 his departure, that Roselo belongs to the rival house, 
 she grows for a moment prudent, and is about to 
 despatch Celia to retract her assignation for a later hour, 
 and to reclaim her gage of love. But a lover's resolu- 
 tions are not constant in cruelty, and Celia actually 
 leaves her mistress to summon Roselo to her presence. 
 The f^te is over ; Julia is in the orchard with only her 
 cousin and her maid. The troublesome cousin is 
 speedily dismissed to lull her father to sleep, and as he 
 disappears, Roselo is seen leaping from the orchard wall, 
 scaled with a ladder of rope. Julia tries for a moment 
 to stem the advancing tide of passion, but her resistance 
 is swept away by her lover's importunities, and with 
 hurried words respecting marriage and Roselo's friend 
 
Romeo and Juliet. 393 
 
 the holy friar, they part upon the sound of approaching 
 footsteps. 
 
 The curtain falls, and before it rises again Julia and 
 Roselo have been wedded by the good Friar Aurelio. 
 The scene is the open space outside a church, and there 
 is stir and indignation within and without, for two- 
 Monteses have insolently plucked away the chair of the 
 Castelvine damsel, Dorotea. Her father, Teobaldo, 
 incites Otavio, his son, who has accompanied Julia to 
 church, to revenge the insult. Roselo passes by, telling 
 his friend the news of his fortunate love, when a cry is 
 heard from the church, and Roselo knows that it is his 
 father's voice. Immediately parties of the Castelvines 
 and the Monteses issue from the porch, prepared for furious 
 fight, Roselo, the new- wedded husband, intervenes as a 
 peacemaker, but in vain ; the furious Otavio tilts at him 
 with his rapier, and in self-defence Roselo strikes him 
 dead. And now the Duke of Verona appears, inquiring 
 into the cause of this bloody fray. All who are present 
 bear witness in favour of Roselo, but the decree goes 
 forth against him — ^not death, but banishment,* the 
 Duke in the meantime inviting him to his palace as an 
 honoured guest. 
 
 Again the scene is Antonio's orchard, where a sorrow- 
 ful parting takes place between Roselo and Julia. The 
 passionate dialogue of hero and heroine has its comic 
 counterpart in that of man-servant and maid. Roselo 
 offers his breast if Julia choose to strike with the poig- 
 
 * Lope de Vega was himself banished from Madrid and separated 
 from his wife, who remained behind, in consequence of a duel in 
 which he wounded hia adversary. 
 
394 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 nard and avenge her cousin's death ; the grcu>wso, 
 Marin, in like manner offers his double-quilted doublet 
 for the stroke of Celia. Julia is willing to abandon all 
 things for her husband's love ; and how can the waiting- 
 maid care whether her linen washes white, or the glass 
 for holding preserves be cracked, while her Marin is far 
 away ? Before pathos or play has wearied of itself, the 
 voice of old Antonio is heard above the plash of the 
 fountain, and Roselo with his attendant beats a retreat. 
 Her father finds Julia weeping, but she rises to the 
 occasion, asserting that her tears are for the dead Otavio, 
 whom she had looked on as a husband. A husband 
 shall be found for her, thinks Antonio, and that forth- 
 with — there is Count Paris who will gladly accept her 
 as his bride ; let a messenger be despatched to overtake 
 him on the way to Ferrara, and assure him that his suit 
 for Julia is granted. 
 
 The scene shifts, and we are on the road to Ferrara. 
 Count Paris has fallen in with Roselo, and although a 
 friend to the Castelvines, he offers the banished youth 
 his good-fellowship and protection against the band of 
 assassins hired by his enemies to waylay him. While 
 they converse, Antonio's messenger approaches bearing a 
 missive to the Count, who, knowing nothing of Roselo's 
 sudden wooing and wedding, announces joyously that he 
 is the chosen son-in-law of Julia's father, and must turn 
 back to Verona. Roselo is silent with a trembling lip, 
 and unable to bid adieu, hurries forward to Ferrara, 
 filled with indignation against the perfidious heart of 
 woman. Meanwhile, the faithful Julia is suffering per- 
 secution at her father's hands; driven to desperate 
 
Romeo and Juliet. 395 
 
 straits, she resolves on death ; sends secretly to the 
 Friar for a draught of poison; then assumes a joyful 
 bearing and gives her consent to be the wife of Paris. 
 But when her maid enters with the phial, she half dis- 
 trusts the old man's purpose — may it not be some love- 
 philtre that he has brewed ? She drinks, and is soon 
 convinced that the drug is poison, for torpor and chill 
 seem to creep through all her veins. 
 
 " Julia. Oh, sad end to all my love ! 
 
 And yet I die consoled — we '11 meet above. 
 
 Celia, write tenderly to my husband when I'm dead ; 
 
 And — and — 
 Cdia. What says my Julia— mistress dear ? 
 
 JuLia. I know not what I spake. 'Tis sad to die 
 
 So young." 
 
 To Roselo, in Ferrara, tidings are brought by his 
 friend Anselmo of the supposed death and the burial of 
 his wife ; but, happier than Shakspere's Romeo, Roselo 
 learns at the same time that this seeming death is only 
 a slumber at the heart; his part is to hasten to the 
 tomb and bear his beloved away with him to France or 
 Spain. A new scene discloses the vault beneath the 
 church of Verona. Julia awakes, and after a sense of 
 vague horror, remembers the Friar's draught, and guesses 
 her grim whereabouts. A flicker of light approaches, it 
 is Roselo who enters with his attendant ; Julia shrinks 
 aside in sudden alarm, now fearing the unknown living 
 more than the dead. Marin, in mortal terror among 
 the coffin-lids and death's heads, stumbles and extin- 
 guishes the light, whereupon ensues a "tedious brief 
 scene of very tragical mirth," the gracioso playing clown 
 among the dead men with lively fooling. At length a 
 
396 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 recognition takes place between wife and husband, and 
 they leave the chamber of death to hide themselves for 
 awhile disguised as peasants upon a farm belonging to 
 Julia's father. 
 
 To this same farm comes Julia's father, who, childless 
 and heirless, has resolved to marry his niece Dorotea, 
 and while waiting for a dispensation for this marriage 
 from the Pope, chooses to reside in quiet upon his 
 country estate. Scarcely has he entered the farmhouse 
 when he stands awe-struck to hear the voice of his dead 
 Julia. That quick-witted young lady, hidden in an upper 
 chamber, profits by the opportunity to lecture her father, 
 as if from the spirit- world, on his cruelty, which, she de- 
 clares, has caused her death ; nor does she end until the old 
 man binds himself by a solemn vow to forgive her husband 
 Roselo, and receive him as a son. No sooner is the vow 
 uttered than Eoselo, Anselmo, and Marin, still in peasants' 
 attire, are brought in as prisoners by the fierce old Cas- 
 telvine, Teobaldo, now exulting in the hope of vengeance 
 for his slaughtered Otavio. But the head of the house 
 has pledged his word to his dead daughter to protect 
 and befriend Eoselo ; he will go farther — he will even 
 resign his intended bride, Dorotea, in Roselo's favour. 
 At this point the spirit-wife can play her ghostly part 
 no longer — she darts in with a cry to her husband — 
 
 " No, not so ; wouldst thou, traitor, 
 Wed two wives \ " 
 
 Explanation of the mystery of Julia, now alive from the 
 dead, is soon given, and the drama ends with the union 
 of the lovers sanctioned and approved, to perfect the joy 
 
Romeo and Juliet. 397 
 
 of which, Roselo's friend, Anselmo, wins Dorotea for his 
 bride, while the serving-man Marin duly pairs off with 
 the waiting-woman Celia. 
 
 " Antonio. Enough, let's join their hands. 
 Marin. And I, with all my virtues, where 
 
 Shall I find one my cares to share ; 
 
 The fright I had upon that awful day 
 
 When I dragged forth from death yon mortal clay. 
 Julia. Celia is thine ; a thousand ducats too. 
 Roselo. Good senators, here, I pray 'tis understood 
 
 The Castelvines ends in happiest moods." 
 
 Lope, says Fran9ois- Victor Hugo, has parodied — 
 Shakspere has dramatised the Italian legend. But 
 this is hardly just to Lope. We feel at least a piquant 
 surprise on seeing how readily the tragic tale, with a few 
 turns from the hands of a skilful playwright, transforms 
 itself to a lively and not ungraceful comedy of the cloak 
 and sword. 
 
 V. 
 
 There is a second Spanish play with the same subject. 
 Francisco de Eojas y Zorrilla succeeded Lope as a writer 
 for the stage. In " Los Bandos de Verona " the writer 
 departs even farther from the Italian original than Lope 
 had cared to stray.* In this new variation on the 
 theme, Eomeo has a sister, Elena, the unhappy wife of 
 Count Paris, who since the outbreak of enmity between 
 the houses slights her as a Montague, and desires to 
 obtain a divorce in order that he may be free to wed his 
 wife's friend, Julia. Eomeo has first seen his beloved 
 
 * Mr F. W. Cogens, to whom Shakspere students are much in- 
 debted, has also Englished this drama in a beautiful volume printed 
 for private distribution, 1874. 
 
39^ Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 not at ball or banquet, nor in the festal garden of 
 Antonio, but alone in her chamber, to which he had 
 penetrated sword in hand, seeking her father's life with 
 a maniac's fury, only to be abashed, subdued, and stricken 
 to the heart by her beauty shining through tears. The 
 incident of the sleeping-potion is strangely altered. Old 
 Capulet urges his daughter to a marriage with Paris or 
 with his own nephew, Andres ; let her choose which she 
 pleases; but if she rejects these for Romeo's sake, her 
 choice must be between poignard and poison now lying 
 upon the table. Julia, before her father can step 
 between, has rushed forward, seized the phial, and 
 drained its contents. Happily the servant commissioned 
 to procure the poison, fearing that it may be intended 
 for Julia's waiting-woman, who is dear to him, has had 
 it prepared as a simple sleeping-draught. In the escape 
 from the vault, by a series of misadventures and cross- 
 purposes happening in the darkened church, Romeo 
 carries off his sister Elena in place of Julia, while Julia 
 clings to the cloak of her cousin Andres. Romeo is 
 hunted through a wood by the enraged Capulets, and at 
 dawn in the same wood Rojas's Julia, like Lope's, 
 startles her father as an apparition from the grave. She 
 is immured in a fortress garrisoned by the Capulet 
 faction, which is besieged by Romeo and the Montagues ; 
 the gradoso, who has done the inevitable fooling through- 
 out the play, valiantly finding his way to the rear : 
 
 " I'll sheathe my blade, 
 And leave, to such as like, the cold-steel trade. 
 It is a selfish world, when all is done, 
 I'll stay behind ; take care of number one.'' 
 
Romeo and Juliet. 399 
 
 The play concludes with wedding-bells in prospect for 
 the lovers, and with a reconciliation between Count 
 Paris and his wife. The skilful ijitrigue, the graceful 
 movement and the bright poetry of Lope's comedy are 
 conspicuous by their absence when we pass from " Castel- 
 vines y Monteses " to " Los Bandos de Verona." 
 
 VL 
 
 "I shall never forget," wrote the French poet Cam- 
 penon, who died an old man in 1843, "I shall never 
 forget how, one cold day of January, when I went to 
 Versailles to visit Duels, I found him in his bedroom, 
 mounted on a chair, and intent on arranging with a 
 certain pomp around the head of the English .iEschylus, 
 a huge bunch of box, which had been brought to him. 
 ' I shall be at your service presently,' he said, as I 
 entered, but without changing his position. Observing 
 that I was a little surprised at the attitude in which I 
 found him, he went on, 'You are not aware that it is 
 the eve of Saint William, patron saint of my Shak- 
 spere.' Then, leaning on my shoulder to get down, 
 and having consulted me as to the effect of his bouquet 
 — the only one, doubtless, which the winter season 
 yielded — ' My friend,' added he, with an expression of 
 countenance which I yet remember, 'the ancients 
 crowned with flowers the streams from which they 
 drew.' " 
 
 Hard words have been spoken by Shaksperian en- 
 thusiasts of his eighteenth-century adapter. Duels, and 
 not altogether without reason ; but Duels was himself a 
 Shaksperian enthusiast. His poetic manner betrays 
 
400 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 his age, an age before the Romantic movement had 
 attacked the conventions of the old French theatre, and 
 when the words nature, virtue, and liberty, inspired 
 with a kind of supernatural power by Rousseau, were 
 those most certain to call forth the applause of the par- 
 terre. But Ducis himself stood apart from his age ; 
 there was something rare and original in his nature ; a 
 grave majesty in his very countenance. Among philo- 
 sophers he remained religious ; in the neighbourhood of 
 a Court he remained simple and almost austere. " In 
 my poetic scale," he wrote, " are the notes of the flute 
 and of the thunder ; how do these go together ? I 
 myself do not very well know, but I know that it is so. ' 
 A soul tragic yet tender ; with something in it of the 
 Carthusian — says Sainte-Beuve — and also something 
 gentler and better. To have foiled Bonaparte is Ducis' 
 peculiar distinction ; no bribe — not the Senate, not the 
 Cross of the Legion — could seduce him from allegiance 
 to his ideals. " I am," said he, " a Catholic, a poet, a 
 republican, a solitary." 
 
 Ducis was thirty-six years old when he adapted 
 " Hamlet " to the French stage. It had a brilliant 
 success. Three years later, in 1772, his "Rom^o et 
 Juliette" was represented by the Royal Comedians. A 
 second success was achieved, as brilliant as the first. 
 But the " Hamlet " of Ducis is not Shakspere's 
 "Hamlet," and his "Rom^o et Juliette" loses the 
 unity of motive which characterises Shakspere's tragedy; 
 the plot is altered and complicated ; old Montague be- 
 comes a chief person, as important and interesting as 
 either of the lovers ; " the cry of paternal tenderness," 
 
Romeo and Juliet. 401 
 
 as Ducis expresses it, is heard above the cry of the 
 young, passionate hearts; and a moral lesson directed 
 against the spirit of revenge is in new ways illustrated 
 by the story. " I need not enlarge," says Ducis, " on 
 my obligations to Shakspere and to Dante." With the 
 theme of the English dramatist he links the ghastly 
 story of Ugolino found in the thirty-third canto of the 
 "Inferno." His tragic "note of the thunder" over- 
 powers his lyric "note of the flute." 
 
 Old Montaigu in Ducis' play has disappeared from 
 Verona for more than twenty years. Eetiring from the 
 city to educate his sons in the " virtuous fields," he had 
 been pursued and persecated by a dreadful uncle of 
 Juliette, now dead, who, by means of hired brigands, 
 robbed Montaigu of his boy Eomeo. With four other 
 sons the old man, it is supposed, has taken refuge in 
 some solitude among the Apennines. But what of 
 Romeo ? Escaped from his captors, he wandered un- 
 known into Verona, was received into Capulet's house, 
 has grown up from boyhood under the name of Dolv^do 
 by the side of Juliette, who alone knows the secret of 
 his birth ; and having given her his love, and won her 
 love in exchange, is returning to Verona, at the moment 
 when the play opens, a famous and victorious leader, 
 bringing with him the standards of the defeated 
 Mantuans. 
 
 At the same moment, however, there creeps into 
 Verona an old man, miserable, haggard, desolate, but 
 sustained by one eager hope of revenge. A presenti- 
 ment of coming evil troubles the joy of Juliette in wel- 
 coming home her triumphant Dolv^do. Rumours have 
 
 2c 
 
■^^^ Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 reached Capulet of obscure plots and stirrings among 
 the partisans of Montaigu, and not content with 
 strengthening his house by the approaching marriage of 
 his son Thdbaldo, he also urges — tenderly yet firmly — 
 an alliance between his daughter Juliette and Count 
 Paris. Juliette, in presence of her lover, opposes her 
 father's will ; and Capulet, witless of the struggle in his 
 daughter's heart, entrusts the cause of Paris to a 
 strangely-chosen pleader — Dolv^do. Is he doomed to 
 see — heavens ! — "an object full of charms" which he 
 has " acquired by his exploits and merited by his tears," 
 borne away by an odious rival ? That Juliette is not 
 indifferent her sobs confess ; yet her resolve is made — 
 to immolate herself to the State and to obey her 
 father — 
 
 " Je m'immole a I'Etat, j'ob^is a mon p^re." 
 
 This Juliet is indeed another than the child of Shak- 
 spere's imagination. 
 
 Tidings are brought to Komeo that his father has 
 entered Verona plotting mischief, and that Paris is now 
 inclining to join the Montaigu faction, and break off his 
 intended marriage with Juliette. Eomeo flies to the 
 Duke, entreating his mediation between the heads of 
 the rival houses. Accordingly a meeting in the Duke's 
 presence takes place between Montaigu and Capulet ; 
 but the fierce old Montaigu cannot restrain his hatred, 
 and with dark allusion to some hidden horror, breaks 
 into open threats of violence. Away with him, there- 
 fore, to prison, where his passion may find time to cool ! 
 For Dolv^do-Romeo the position is an agonising one, 
 divided as he is between his love for Juliette and his 
 
Romeo and Juliet. 403 
 
 loyalty to the old man, so woe-begone, so worn with 
 grief, so solitary. Presently, when Montaigu's retainers 
 rescue their chief from the tower, and are in deadly 
 strife with the Capulets, Romeo's piety as a son carries 
 all before it, and charging the enemy, he plunges his 
 sword into the heart of Th^baldo, Juliette's brother and 
 his own bosom friend. 
 
 Once again the Duke intervenes — peace in Verona 
 there must be ; above the tombs of their dead the rival 
 chieftains must make a solemn vow of amity. Capulet 
 gladly consents ; Montaigu consents in seeming ^ then, 
 leading Romeo aside, he implores his son not to defeat 
 the one desire of his joyless life — the desire of ven- 
 geance. He bears about with him an awful secret ; 
 Romeo must know it now. It is the secret of a father 
 whose sons, like Ugolino's, have famished in prison — a 
 father who himself, like XJgolino, has been offered the 
 blood of his children to stay his hunger. Can such an 
 injury as this ever be forgiven 1 And does Romeo 
 start and shrink back because he is asked to strike a 
 dagger into the breast of Capulet's daughter. 
 
 With many entreaties to reconciliation, and some 
 hope that sentiments of honour and magnanimity have 
 subdued the passion for revenge, Romeo leaves the old 
 man. The fifth act opens at the tombs of the Capulets 
 and Montaigus. Juliette has somehow obtained posses- 
 sion of a written order from old Montaigfu to his fol- 
 lowers, directing them, at the moment when the false 
 vows of peace are being sworn, to fall upon their 
 enemies, and exterminate them. It seems to Juliette 
 that if she offer herself a voluntary sacrifice to the ven- 
 
404 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 geance of the Montaigus all may be well for those who 
 survive — with her these dismal family feuds may die. 
 She is alone in the dim place lit by funeral lamps ; and 
 alone she drains the poisoned cup, and waits for death. 
 Eomeo hurries in buoyed up with the deceitful hope 
 that there is to be reconciliation, and joy for him and 
 his beloved springing up in this place of the dead. 
 From Juliette's lips he learns his father's bloody designs, 
 and her own fatal deed. She implores him to live ; but 
 what is life to Eomeo in a world of hate without the one 
 being that made life precious ? In a moment the faithful 
 sword is plunged into his side, but before the lovers die 
 upon the brink of the grave they hear from one another's 
 lips the sacred names of "husband" and "wife" : 
 
 " Arrgte, Eomdo ! la fortune jalouse 
 Ne doit point m'empgcher de mourir ton Spouse. 
 Sur les bords du cercueil, puisqu'il depend de noxis, 
 Laisae-moi te donner le nom sacr^ d'^poux. 
 H^las ! j'ai bien acquis, dans ce moment supreme, 
 Le droit triste et flatteur de me donner moi-mgme. 
 Pour amis, pour t^moins, adoptons ces tombeaux, 
 Ce marbre pour autel, ces clart^s pour flambeaux." 
 
 In the closing scene it only remains for the implacable 
 Montaigu to use his poignard with swift execution 
 against his rival at the moment of the oath of peace ; 
 then to discover the body of Juliette and pause an 
 instant to gloat over her dying pangs ; in that same 
 instant to perceive his slaughtered Romeo by her side, 
 and to fall lifeless — the ruin of his vindictive passion — 
 upon the body of his son. 
 
 The haggard old man driven by extreme love for his 
 offspring into extreme hate, fascinated the imagination. 
 
Romeo and Juliet. 405 
 
 of Ducis. With the lovers he concerns himself less. 
 In a preface he offers an apology for presenting suicide 
 upon the stage : " Doubtless it is dangerous to give in 
 the theatre an example of suicide, but I have to depict 
 the consequences of hereditary hatred, and it is on this 
 object alone that I have desired to fix the attention of 
 the spectator." Happily Shakspere was not troubled 
 by such moral scruples, or rather it is happy that 
 Shakspere found through his imagination the laws of 
 a profounder morality than any which Ducis could 
 conceive. 
 
 VII. 
 
 When Shakspere had attained to about the same 
 age as that of his French adapter, his imagination seized 
 upon the story of an outraged and desolate old man, 
 impotently desiring revenge, and he re-fashioned it 
 with incomparable power. In "King Lear," Shak- 
 spere's tragedy of the parental passion, no tale of the 
 love of youth and maiden dissipates the awe and pity 
 which gather around its central theme. So in " Romeo 
 and Juliet," a work of his earlier years, there is but a 
 single motive ; it is a young man's tragedy of youth and 
 love and death. Admirable secondary characters there 
 are in the play, but no secondary character is ' permitted 
 to stand long between us and the persons of the lovers. 
 How Shakspere must have delighted in his own crea- 
 tion of Mercutio ; so brilliant a figure had never before 
 irradiated the English stage; but Mercutio was created 
 to appear only three or four times, and then suddenly 
 to be withdrawn as the draiha lightens and darkens 
 
 / 
 
4o6 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 towards its close. In the singleness of motive and its 
 ideal treatment dwells the power of the play. What is 
 this, that we should concern ourselves much about it — 
 the love of boy and girl in Verona six centuries ago ? 
 Is it not a slender theme for tragedy, which is author- 
 ised to deal with "stateliest and most regal argument?" 
 Not so — for Juliet and Eomeo come to us in Shak- 
 spere's play as envoys from Love himself, emissaries 
 and ambassadors from a suzerain greater than any king 
 or kaiser — 
 
 "Love, that keeps all the choir of lives in chime ; 
 Love, that is blood within the veins of time ; 
 That wrought the whole world without stroke of hand ; 
 Shaping the breadth of sea, the length of land, 
 And with the pulse and motion of his breath 
 Through the great heart of the earth strikes life and death." 
 
 \ An hour of ecstasy, a few tears, the fleeting joy and pain 
 of a boy and girl in old Verona — these take up a small 
 space in the big history of mankind. True ; yet in the 
 frail blossom of their joy we discover the flowering — 
 scarcely so perfect once in a century — of powers which 
 stir through all animated nature in its season of most 
 vivid life ; in their pain we discern the shadow of that 
 law which rings the whole of human desire and delight, 
 and rounds it with a sleep. 
 
 Much has been written about the moral lesson of the 
 play. We are told that if Eomeo were a little less 
 
 / impetuous, and Juliet a little more prudent, all might 
 have gone well with them ; they might have been cere- 
 moniously married in St Peter's Church ; settlements 
 might have been duly signed and sealed by the relatives; 
 they might have secured a distinguished establishment 
 
Romeo and Juliet: 407 
 
 in Verona. Alas ! they were hare-brained and head- f 
 long, and so their violent delights had violent ends. 1 
 All which is admirably true. In Chaucer's poem, when 
 three eagles stand prepared to do battle for the female 
 seated upon Dame Nature's fist, the goose interposes 
 with wise cackle : " My witte is sharp ; let two of the 
 combatants go and choose other mates ; if she cannot 
 love this one or that, let him love another." 
 
 " Lo ! here a perfect reason of a goose" \\ 
 
 Quoth the Sparhawk. 
 
 And, in like manner, when we read the wise moralis- 
 ings of the excellent Gervinus, perhaps it is enough to 
 exclaim, " Lo ! here a perfect reason for a commen- 
 tator." The example of suicide, again, for setting forth 
 which Ducis apologises, what of it ? Surely, it is not 
 right for young people to drink phials of poison, which 
 " if you had the strength of twenty men " would " dis- 
 patch you straight." Surely a well-regulated under- 
 standing would advise a young widow to choose the 
 cloister before the dagger. True, and a very pretty 
 moral. But while acknowledging all this, may we not 
 be permitted to maintain that a deeper moral lies in the 
 mere presentation -of the fact, that for a human being to 
 be charged with high passion of any kind is to forfeit 
 the security of our lower life, and yet that such forfeit- 
 ure may be justly accepted as the condition of an 
 incalpulable gain ? May we not bear in niiind, also, 
 that vindication of "the lunatic, the lover, and the 
 poet," by Plato, in his " Phsedrus " : " The sane man is 
 nowhere at all when he enters into rivalry with the 
 madman. . . . The fourth and last kind of madness is 
 
4o8 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 imputed to him who, when he sees the beauty of earth, 
 is transported with the recollection of the true beauty ; 
 he would like to fly away, but he cannot ; he is like a 
 bird fluttering and looking upward, and careless of the 
 world below ; and he is therefore esteemed mad." Not 
 that our passionate young lovers of Verona are in any de- 
 gree followers of the Platonic philosophy. They are man 
 and maid, with the hot blood " bating in their cheeks "; 
 yet are they " delicate and virgin souls," such as Plato 
 describes, in whom a divine madness, after its kind, 
 " awakens Ijrical numbers." And, as to their rash self- 
 slaughter — why does this never offend our moral sense 1 
 Why do we never criticise it in the spirit of a serious 
 burgher called to assist upon an inquest, and pondering 
 a verdict of fdo de se ? Why, except that we become 
 aware that the lives of the lovers move in a plane other 
 than the plane of our every-day existence, and that their 
 choice of love together with death rather than of life 
 lapsing back into the loveless round, is a type and 
 emblem of all those heroic sacrifices for an ideal which 
 prove that this earth of ours is not wholly a market or 
 a counting-house. 
 
 Less than one little week contains the events from 
 the first meeting of the lovers until their union in the 
 tomb. In Brooke's poem, Shakspere's original, Eomeo 
 stands many times beneath Juliet's window before the 
 confession of love in the moonlit night is made, and 
 weeks glide away, after their secret marriage, before the 
 fatal encounter in which Tybalt falls. With Shakspere 
 the lovers are from the outset in the rapids above a 
 cataract. He knew that in seasons of high-wrought 
 
Romeo and Juliet. 409 
 
 passion life is not measured by the hour-glass or the 
 shadow that creeps across a dial ; a moment may con- 
 tain the sum of years, or may be pregnant with the 
 destiny of all the future. Therefore let us not wonder 
 if the lovers, having looked in each other's eyes for the 
 first time at Capulet's old-accustomed feast on Sunday 
 evening, after one short summer's night, are united 
 in the Friar's cell next day as husband and wife ; and 
 again after one, and only one, bridal night of gladness 
 dashed with sorrow, part in the dawn of Tuesday only 
 to meet in that " palace of dim night " where worms are 
 the tire-maidens of the bride-chamber. Five days are 
 merely five days while we rock at our moorings with a 
 gentle motion ; they may be long enough, when the gale 
 is up, for a voyage from the sunlit coasts of life to 
 strange islands in an unknown and silent sea. 
 
 The scene is in that country which has not yet wholly 
 
 ceased to be what it was to the Elizabethan imagina- 
 
 r tion, the land of passion and romance. It is Italy ; the 
 
 \ moonlit nights have a warmth which seems their own 
 
 ; and unborrowed from the embers of the day ; the fruit- 
 
 \ tree tops are tipped with silver ; the nightingale sings 
 
 in the pomegranate tree ; the gates of the palazzo 
 
 are thrown wide for the masquers ; at morning the 
 
 lover seeks shelter in the grove of sycamore — the 
 
 lover's tree — or we notice the Franciscan brother gliding 
 
 along in the shadow with the basket of simples on his 
 
 arm ; in the streets at noon the light glares, the mad 
 
 blood is stirring in men's veins, and the ruffler's rapier 
 
 grows impatient of its scabbard ; it is the land where a 
 
 swift solution of the perplexities of hate or of love 
 
4 1 o Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 is found in the poignard or the poison-phial. Let any- 
 one read the Memoirs of Benvenuto Cellini, and he will 
 perceive how truly Shakspere, who perhaps was never 
 out of England, caught with his imagination the external 
 aspect and the manners of Italy in the Renaissance. 
 
 In Goethe's recast of " Eomeo and Juliet,"* in which 
 he aimed at giving the play in a concentrated form, the 
 opening scene presents the front of Capulet's house 
 where the servants are singing while they deck the 
 doors with lamps and wreaths ; the closing scene is the 
 vault, with Friar Laurence left alone to moralise above 
 the bodies of the lovers. Shakspere, after his manner, 
 represents his chief figures as standing out from a back- 
 ground. He shows us in the first scene how the lives of 
 Romeo and Juliet have grown upon the bate of the rival 
 houses ; and in the last, how their deaths are sacrificial, 
 and serve as an atonement between the sorrowing sur- 
 vivors. Note, before the mtlie, begins with what amused 
 interest Shakspere distinguishes his minor characters. 
 The valiant Sampson brags largely of his quarrelsome- 
 ness (a virtue among the Capulets), but Gregory is the 
 leading spirit, and when the two servants of the Monta- 
 gues appear, Sampson, mindful perhaps of the other's 
 " swashing blow," is very willing to give his fellow the 
 precedence, all his valour having shrunk to the poor 
 dimensions of an incitement to Gregory to quarrel, to- 
 gether with a strictly legal biting of the thumb, quite in 
 a genera] way, so that it remains for any Montague who 
 may please to appropriate the insult. The position is like 
 
 * This will be found in Boas's " Naclitrage zu Goethe's Sammtliohen. 
 Werken : zweiter theil. " (Leipzig, 1841.) 
 
Romeo and Juliet. 411 
 
 that of a pair of terriers, each eyeing the other and 
 moving round and round into suspicious points of 
 vantage, with certain suppressed snarls. Only on 
 Tybalt's approach does the tactician Gregory decide to 
 assume the offensive, and give his orders to Sampson 
 (who does the talking) to utter the decisive insult : 
 " Say — ' better ' ; here comes one of my master's kins- 
 men." A fierce breed of swashbucklers are these 
 Capulets, if Tybalt represent them aright : 
 
 " What, drawn, and talk of peace ? I hate the word, 
 As I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee ; " 
 
 or old Capulet, who has hurried out of doors in his 
 gown, gesticulating angrily, and crying for his long 
 sword. The Montagues are a milder race ; Benvolio, 
 always a peacemaker, provokes Mercutio's brightest rail- 
 lery by his inability to enjoy a brawl (Act ITI, Sc. i.) ; 
 and evidently old Montague, though he flourishes his 
 sword, has no heart in the conflict : 
 
 " Who set this ancient quarrel new abroach ? 
 Speak, nephew, you were by when it began." 
 
 In the play of "Hamlet," before the young Prince 
 appears, clad in mourning garb, among the obsequious 
 courtiers, we are interested in him by Horatio's words 
 upon the platform : 
 
 " This spirit, dumb to us, will speak to him.'' 
 
 He is the one, if any, to learn the secret from the 
 ghost. So, in the present play, we hear of Romeo 
 before he is seen in person. The first words tell us that 
 
412 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 he is a mother's idol — they are words of Lady Montague, 
 trembling with anxiety for him in this city of strife : 
 
 " O, where is Eomeo ? saw you him to-day ? 
 Eight glad I am he was not at this fray." 
 
 " 0, where is Romeo V is once again his mother's cry 
 when the sentence of exile is pronounced which sends 
 her son to Mantua, and sends her broken-hearted to the 
 grave. The words which follow Lady Montague's ques- 
 tion tell us that Romeo is already the devoutest off 
 lovers. All the amorous rites of disconsolate adorers he 
 duly practises ; all phrases of the amorous dialect he 
 utters, when he comes before us, with faultless intona- 
 tion. Shakspere adopts, no doubt deliberately, a manner 
 of speech which even Petrarch did not disdain.* Else- 
 where in Shakspere there is excellent mockery of the 
 affectations and melancholy madness of lovers. But here 
 it is not meant that we should smile at the debonair 
 Italian youth wandering in the sycamore grove, stricken 
 with the malady of love, and "augmenting the fresh 
 morning dew " with tears. Shakspere regards these 
 vague love-longings as growing pains of the heart in 
 adolescence. They are the tremblings of the needle 
 before it settles towards the pole. Romeo loves Rosa- 
 line before he loves Juliet. Shakspere found the 
 incident in Brooke, who contrasts the wise and virtuous 
 Rosaline with Juliet the rash and unfortunate ; our poet 
 retains the incident, but spares us the moral. Shall we 
 think Romeo's love of Juliet less whole and single 
 
 * Romeo's unlqverlike question, "Where shall we dine?" is of 
 course asked only to turn away Benvolio from pursuing his inquiries 
 after Bosaline. 
 
Romeo and Juliet. 413 
 
 because she displaced a rival ? But Shakspere allows 
 the rival to be merely a shadow ; if Romeo had loved 
 not one but a score of Rosalines, it would have meant 
 no more than that he was young, and knew not how to 
 dispose of a waste of wandering desires. 
 
 When Capulet's servant, puzzled by the list of persons 
 invited to the banquet, hands the paper which he 
 is unable to read to Romeo, the lover reads the names 
 " with listless good nature " until " his eye lights and 
 his tongue lingers on the name of Rosaline." I have 
 quoted the words of a critic of Mr Irving's acting, but a 
 careful student of the text may perhaps discover a hint 
 which carries with it the authority of Shakspere for that 
 lingering over Rosaline's name. The invitation, appar- 
 ently prose, is really written throughout in blank 
 verse : 
 
 " Signior Martino and his wife and daughters ; 
 County Anselme and his beauteous sisters ; '' 
 
 and so on until we come to a defective line — the only 
 one in the series — 
 
 " My fair niece Rosaline : Livia." 
 
 Why this one irregular line ? Because it is broken for 
 the pause which is to follow the name of Romeo's lady- 
 love, and the gap is filled by the lover's brightening 
 glance and the thought, " Here, then, is a chance of 
 beholding her."* 
 
 * See Dr Abbott's Shabsperian Grammar, § 508. "A foot or 
 syllable'cau be omitted where there is any marked pause arising 
 from emotion." It might be argued that the word /air is a dissyllable. 
 Sidney Walker seems to approve of the proposed insertion of and 
 before Lvna. 
 
4T4 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 In Brooke's poem Romeo goes to the banquet to cure 
 himself of love, and by seeing many beautiful faces to 
 acquire indifference to all. In Shakspere's play he goes 
 to rejoice in Rosaline's superiority over rival beauties ; 
 but after he once enters Capulet'S doors we hear no word 
 of Rosaline; she might as well not be there; the 
 marsh-fire of sentiment has gone out in the dawn 
 of genuine passion. Juliet, in Brooke's poem, enters 
 the hall of festival as any maiden might, with no special 
 thought that her period of virginal freedom is drawing 
 to a close. Shakspere, in the admirable scene before 
 the banquet which introduces us to the Nurse, rouses 
 Juliet from her careless girlhood, and turns her thoughts 
 to love before she has yet seen Romeo's face. On one 
 side Lady Capulet, skilled in worldly views of marriage, 
 on the other the garrulous Nurse, whose old senses are 
 tickled by the thought of youthful pleasure, much as her 
 gums might mumble some toothsome morsel, set upon 
 Juliet and train her in the way that she should go 
 towards wedlock. After the praise of Paris, sounded on 
 the right bygone matron, echoed on the left by the 
 other — and Shakspere ironically makes the praise put 
 into Lady Capulet's mouth grotesquely fantastical — 
 what less can Juliet answer to the question, " Speak 
 briefly, can you like of Paris' love ?" than 
 
 " I '11 look to like, if looking liking move." 
 
 But not one word of Paris, any more than of Rosaline, 
 do we hear in all the festival scene. She goes, however 
 into the lighted room not as a child of fourteen (Shak- 
 spere reduces her age by two years from the sixteen 
 
Romeo and Juliet. 4 1 5 
 
 years of Brooke *), but aware that she is already sought 
 in marriage, and with feelings that tremulously antici- 
 pate the approach of love. So that an hour ago to her 
 mother's question — 
 
 " How stands your disposition to be married?" 
 she could make her maidenly reply — (almost in Ophelia's 
 manner) — 
 
 " It is an honour that I dream not of ;" 
 
 and now she can whisper to her own heart while the 
 Nurse moves off to ask for Komeo's name — 
 
 " If he be married 
 My grave is like to be my wedding bed." 
 
 which indeed it proves to be, but with Romeo by her 
 side. 
 
 Here notice how Shakspere ever and anon through- 
 out the tragedy strikes a note of doom ; sounds, as it 
 were, an alarum-bell that vibrates in our hearts, and 
 whose tone grows more and more like that of a passing- 
 bell as the drama draws towards its close. Now it is 
 Romeo's thrill of disquietude — a shadow as of some 
 cloud, before he enters Capulet's mansion, like Hamlet's 
 " gaingiving " before the passage of arms, and dismissed, 
 like his, with an appeal to Providence — 
 
 " My mind misgives 
 
 Some consequence yet hanging in the stars." 
 * * * * » 
 
 But He, that hath the steerage of my course. 
 Direct my sail ! " 
 
 * "Shakspere," I have written elsewhere, "loved the years of bud- 
 ding womanhood. Miranda is fifteen years of age ; Marina, fourteen." 
 Both, like Juliet, are children of the South. In Da Porto Juliet's age 
 is eighteen. 
 
4 1 6 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 Now it is Juliet's terror of joy in the first recognition of 
 perfect love — 
 
 " I have no joy of this contract to-night : 
 It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden, 
 Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be 
 Ere one can say ' It lightens.'" 
 
 Now it is her vision of Eomeo as she looks over her 
 balcony with pallid face and wide, sad eyes, in the grey 
 of dawn — 
 
 " Methinks I see thee, now thou art below, 
 As one dead in the bottom of a tomb." 
 
 Now it is her words of entreaty to Lady Capulet, 
 who has urged on her the hasty marriage with Paris — 
 
 " Delay this marriage for a month, a week ; 
 Or, if you do not, make the bridal bed 
 In that dim monument where Tybalt lies." 
 
 Now it rings more dismally in her words to the Friar 
 before he proposes the expedient which is to restore her 
 to her lover — 
 
 " Bid me go into a new-made grave, 
 
 And hide me with a dead man in his shroud, 
 
 * * * » » 
 
 And I will do it without fear or doubt 
 
 To live an unstained wife to my sweet love." 
 
 And now this anticipation of doom takes the ghastliest 
 form of all, for the spectre m|,sks itself in the garb of 
 gladness, when Romeo, on the morning of the last and 
 most piteous day, wakes with a radiant sense of youth 
 and hope from a dream of Juliet — 
 
 " My bosom's lord sits lightly in his throne, 
 And all this day an unaccustom'd spirit 
 Lifts me above the ground with cheerful thoughts. 
 
. Romeo ^nd Juliet. ~ 417 
 
 I dreamt my lady came and found me dead — 
 Strange dream, that gives a dead man leave to think ! — 
 And breathed such life with kisses in my lips 
 That I revived and was an emperor " — 
 
 whereupon instantly enters Balthasar with the news 
 from Verona which changes Romeo to a wild and haggard 
 wretch, steadied only by one desperate resolve. • 
 
 We should like to know what was Romeo's earlier 
 dream of the night preceding the banquet : 
 
 " I dreamt a dream to-night ;" 
 
 but, like the speech of Cassius to the Roman people, we 
 must construct it out of our own imagination, for Shak- 
 spere has left it untold, and chosen to give us instead — 
 nor can we complain — Mercutio's brilliant arabesque of 
 faucies about Queen Mab. Tybalt's interruption of the 
 harmony of the guest-chamber is of Shakspere's inven- 
 tion, and prepares us for the catastrophe of the next 
 day. Old Capulet will not allow the fiery youngster to 
 wrong his hospitality, but, in preserving peace, he dis- 
 plays the same quick Capulet temper which has led to 
 Tybalt's outbreak. Observe how this part of the scene 
 is concluded with a , kind of epilogue in four rhymed 
 lines uttered by Tybalt as he withdraws : 
 
 " Patience perforce with wilful choler meeting 
 Makes my flesh tremble in their different greeting. 
 I will withdraw : but this intrusion shall, 
 Now seeming sweet, convert to bitter gall." 
 
 And now begins the second section of the scene. 
 Tybalt gone, the pilgrim Romeo takes " the white 
 wonder " of Juliet's hand (he thinks of this hand after- 
 wards when abandoned to misery in the friar's cell), and 
 
 2d 
 
4 1 8 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 utters himself " in the numbers that Petrarch flowed in." 
 This dialogue between the pilgrim and his saint does not 
 pass the bounds of courtly Italian manners, yet there, is 
 love pulsing beneath the ceremony, and under Juliet's 
 arch replies there is already a yielding of her heart to 
 passion. 
 
 Between the banquet scene and the bailcony scene 
 Shakspere interposes a short dialogue of Mercutio and 
 Benvolio, in which the former makes mock of Eomeo's 
 malady of love with a licence of tongue which we will 
 not call gross only because it is so aimble and leaps so 
 lightly over all propriety. Before passing from the hall 
 of festival to the moon-lighted garden we need some 
 relief from the ardour and enthusiasm of young love. 
 Mercutio's sallies of a wanton brain with their subacid 
 flavour restore our palate, and serve the purpose of 
 olives before the wine. 
 
 And now we pass into the enchanted garden. In the 
 wonderful dialogue of love, to which the nightingale's 
 song is a fit accompaniment, Shakspere emphasises the 
 contrast between Romeo's romantic sentiment and 
 Juliet's direct and simple passion. For Romeo she is 
 like the " winged messenger of heaven borne upon a 
 cloud," and he himself is winged also with the pinions of 
 love. But Juliet does not ever leave the earth — it is the 
 rivalry of the houses dividing them which first occupies 
 her thoughts — 
 
 " Romeo, Eomeo ! wherefore art thou Romeo?" — 
 and when she discovers him within the orchard her 
 instant fear is that Tybalt or some other Capulet may 
 find him there : * 
 
Romeo and Juliet. 41^ 
 
 " The orchard walls are high and hard to climb, 
 And the place death, considering who thou art, 
 If any of my kinsmen find thee here." 
 
 Romeo, with liis reiterated " fair saint," " dear saint," 
 
 would renew the manner of speech of the banquet-hall, 
 
 but Juliet needs plainer words : 
 
 " If they do see thee, they will marder thee." 
 
 While Romeo, " in a sort of sweet surprise at the fervid 
 
 girl-passion which suddenly wraps him round,"* sees all 
 
 things as if in some blissful dream, to Juliet the realities 
 
 of life are more vividly real than ever before : 
 
 " If that thy bent of love be honourable, 
 Thy purpose marriage, send me word to-morrow." 
 
 She never leaves the earth, but this earth has grown of 
 nieasureless worth through Romeo's presence. Her 
 confession of love has been compared to that of Miranda 
 in "The Tempest"; the soul of each desires to stand 
 naked and unashamed before the one beholder : "Fare- 
 well compliment!" "Hence bashful cunning!" But 
 Juliet's passion has to cast aside a heavier brocade 
 of ceremony than was worn on Prospero's island, and it 
 is with a lovely vehemence that she throws off the 
 constraint, 
 
 ■" My boanty is as boundless as the sea, 
 My love as deep ;; tie more I give to thee 
 The more I have ; for both are infinite." 
 
 Friar Laurence's cell in the grey and dewy morning 
 
 is a retreat of delightful quiet after the revelry and 
 
 transport of the night. This amiable student and 
 
 spectator <jf life, standing outside the turmoil, views 
 
 W. * Words of Fanny Eemble. 
 
42d Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 human beings niudh as he views the herbs and stones 
 whose qualities he studies, only he regards his fellows 
 with a kindlier sympathy. From the ardent avowals of 
 love we pass to the moralisings over the dank leaves 
 and buds in the friar's osier cage. He is a centre of 
 ■repose throughout the play. And yet we may be 
 permitted to doubt whether his well-balanced reflections 
 and well-meant scheming contain more of true wisdom 
 than do the native promptings of the lovers' hearts. 
 Such was Goethe's thought apparently when he makes 
 his Lorenzo exclaim at sight of Romeo slain — 
 
 " Where is my wisdom now, where all my care. 
 And secret knowledge of each natural power V 
 
 Every one defers to the old man's judgment, and yet who 
 blunders and stumbles more than he ? In a later scene 
 Romeo, on Tybalt's death, takes refuge in the cell, and 
 there gives way to the abandonment of despair, "palpi- 
 tating with nervous anguish, apprehensive of instantane- 
 ous revengeful murder, expectant of inevitable sentence 
 of death, overwhelmed with horror at his own sanguinary 
 deed, because his victim is kinsman to his wife, filled 
 with passionate longing for the possession of that wife."* 
 How does the Friar think to comfort him \ By a dose' 
 of "adversity's sweet milk, philosophy." "Let me 
 dispute with thee of thy estate," is Brother Laurence's 
 proposal to the distracted man. Well may Romeo com- 
 plain that " wise men have no eyes," and reply 
 
 " Thou canst not speak of what then dost not feel." 
 
 The Nurse enters the cell with her foolish " Ah, sir ! ah 
 
 * Fanny Kemble, " Notes on some of Shakspere's Plays," p. 166. 
 
Romeo and Juliet. ^ 421 
 
 sir ! death is the end of all " ; but it is upon words of 
 hers, " My lord, I'll tell my lady you will come," that 
 the tide begins to turn from despair to hope, and with a 
 delicious welling up of joy and confidence that Juliety 
 after all, will not think of him as "an old murderer," 
 Romeo exelaitns — 
 
 " Do so, and bid my love prepare to chide." 
 
 Here was a livelier cordial for a young man's fainting 
 spirit than m)lght be had in "adversity's sweet milk, 
 g^jleeophy." 
 
 Juliet's nurse, blundering old match-maker and go- 
 between ! we cannot but give her a heartfelt sympathy, 
 when trudging in all her pomp through the hot streets 
 in search of. Romeo, preceded by Peter the fan-bearer, 
 she has the ill fortune to encounter that hornet Mercutio. 
 So infectious is his mirth, and such fair game appears 
 the Nurse, that even the staid Benvolio is caught into 
 the folly of it. How cruelly the ancient lady's plumes 
 are ruffled by these irreverent youths ! How the white 
 table >f her vestal mind is sullied by Mereutio's 
 iiidecorons jests I And how hotly she turns upon her 
 apathetic fan-bearer, who should have been the champion 
 of her insulted dignity 1 But Romeo knows how to 
 soothe the spirit of an ancient gentlewoman, for when 
 Mercutio has buzzed away, and the Nurse has delivered 
 a virtuous lecture on the "weak dealing" of leading 
 her young lady " into a fool's paradise, as they say," the 
 lover's purse suddenly gapes and something is slipped 
 into the good dame's hand even in the moment when 
 het lips decline the largess : "No truly, sir, not a penny." 
 
422 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 And then it is that all those touching little secrets come 
 out — how the prating thing her mistress had as lieve 
 see a toad as Paris, and how she has the " prettiest 
 sententious" about the letter of the alphabet which 
 begins Rosemary and Eomeo. ' 
 
 We forgive the old lady much, even her copious con- 
 cern for her own aching bones, for sake of the glad news 
 which she brings to Juliet, calling the scarlet to her 
 cheeks, and making her step, when she trips to the 
 friar's cell, as buoyant as the morning air. All the 
 current of her being has set towards Romeo, and hurries 
 forward to lose itself and find itself again in him. 
 - Much idle moralising has been expended on Juliet's 
 bridal soliloquy — 
 
 " Gallop apace, ye fiery -footed steeds," 
 
 in which she sings, as it were, her own epithalamium in 
 the manner of Elizabethan poetry. It was a bold en- 
 deavour of the dramatist to transport himself into the 
 breast of the young Italian bride. " I confess," says 
 " Mrs Jameson, " I have been shocked at the utter want 
 of taste and refinement in those who, with coarse 
 derision, or in a spirit of prudery, yet more gross and 
 perverse, have dared to comment on this beautiful 
 ' Hymn to the Night ' breathed out by Juliet in the 
 silence and solitude of her chamber." The only com- 
 ment one cares to make is this — that Juliet's purity of 
 heart henceforth lies in a " bounty boundless as the sea " 
 to the one man, stainless himself, who has won her 
 stainless maidenhood, and in the resolution to guard 
 herself as sacred to him from every alien touch, even 
 
Romeo and Juliet. 423 
 
 though it were by flight within the portals of the 
 grave : 
 
 " Oh ! bid me leap, rather than marry Paris, 
 Prom off the battlements of yonder tower ; 
 Or walk in thievish ways ; or bid me lurk 
 
 Where serpents are. 
 
 ***** 
 
 Or bid me go into a new-made grave, 
 
 And hide me with a dead man in his shroud — • 
 
 Things that to hear them told have made me tremble — 
 
 And I will do it without fear or doubt, 
 
 To live an unstain'd wife to my sweet love." 
 
 A heart may be pure as snow or pure as flame, and vv 
 Juliet's is of the latter kind. 
 
 The bitter sweet of all partings, " such as press the 
 life from out young hearts," is condensed in that scene 
 of reluctant farewells in the dawn. But when Lady 
 Capulet enters the chamber, though Juliet's tears can- 
 not cease to flow, she meets her mother with a gallant 
 simulation of anger against Tybalt's slayer, at the same 
 time flattering her own soul with the consciousness that 
 her two-edged words, with their double meanings, are 
 secret caresses and not words of hate. And now, parted 
 from her husband, the girl-wife of a single night finds 
 the whole household up in arms against her — mother, 
 father, even the gross- minded old woman who should 
 have been a second mother to her — all resolved to bribe 
 or to browbeat her into a marriage which she abhors. 
 JUHaving pleaded as a child for mercy and found none, 
 ,jjtA pTulie t rises a_woman, and with on e last wor d of exquisit e y 
 '^ |_self-pity — ~]T 
 
 " Alack ! alack ! that Heaven should practise stratagems 
 Upon so soft a subject as myself," 
 
424 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 she has done with entreaty and lamentation, and hence- 
 forth will take her own resolve and keep her own counsel. 
 But her persecution is not quite at an end. At the 
 cell-door of Friar Laurence whom must she encounter 
 but Paris. Shakspere is not as hard to Paris as are 
 some of Shakspere's critics, who find excellent reasons 
 for his death at the close of the play as a piece of retri- 
 butive justice for his loveless pursuit of Juliet. But 
 the graceful young Count really loves Juliet in his own 
 fashion, and he dies because he has come to express his 
 sorrow, to utter elegant elegiacs and strew blossoms on 
 her tomb. Nor does Romeo refuse his dying prayer 
 that he may lie near Juliet's corpse. But the noble 
 Count assumes a little too readily that a curled darling 
 of Verona, of noble parentage and fair demesnes, accepted 
 by the parents of his lady-love, need not submit to a 
 very arduous course of wooing. On perceiving Juliet, 
 as she sadly but resolutely stands in the doorway, v?ith 
 pale and tear-stained face, he takes for granted, with a 
 charming impertinence, that she is his own already : 
 
 " Happily met, my lady and my wife." 
 
 The face, which she has abused with tears, is his 
 property, and must not be so wronged. Juliet, who 
 feels that she is all Borneo's, or, if not Romeo's, is the 
 bride of Death, never shows a more gallant bearing than 
 when she bandies words with Paris, hiding her agony, 
 under a play of repartee. Such high-mettled cunning 
 is the ornament of a woman's chivalry. But when Paris 
 is dismissed, and she turns to her good father confessor, 
 the outbreak comes — 
 
Romeo and Juliet. 425 
 
 " Oh, shut the door ! and when thou hast done so, 
 Come weep with me. Past hope, past cure, past help !" 
 
 Such relief is there in giving way to the paroxysm of 
 grief. 
 
 Juliet's' great soliloquy before she drinks the potion is 
 the triumph or the snare of the actress. She has seen 
 the last of the Nurse and the last of her mother. 
 In the hall below all is bustle and confusion, for 
 the eager old Capulefc has hurried on his daughter's 
 marriage from Thursday to Wednesday, and forgetful 
 of his pious resolve to sorrow for Tybalt, and invite 
 no more than " a friend or two," he now has a score 
 of cunning cooks at work, and must himself fidget 
 and meddle in their affairs. But in Juliet's chamber 
 all is dimness and silence ; she is about to close her eyes- 
 on life, and when next they open it must be in the 
 ancient receptacle where Tybalt lies festering in his 
 shroud. Hazlitt speaks with enthusiasm of Miss 
 O'Neill's delivery of Juliet's speech as marking " the 
 fine play and utidulation of natural sensibility, rising' 
 and falling with the gusts of passion, and at last worked 
 up into an agony of despair, in which her imagination 
 approaches the brink of frenzy." Her scream at the 
 imaginary sight of Tybalt's ghost is censured by the 
 critic, as not preserving the distinction between physical 
 and intellectual horror — a scream which, says Hazlitt, 
 " startled the audience, as it preceded the speech which 
 explained its meaning." Lady Martin has recently told 
 the story of her first rendering, when Helen Faucit and a 
 girl, of this character-^ — the earliest of all her dramatic 
 impersonations, and one interwoven, she says, with her 
 
426 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 life. " With all the ardour of a novice," she writes, " I 
 took no heed that the phial for the sleeping potion, 
 which Friar Laurence had given me, was of glass, but 
 kept it tightly in my hand, as though it were a real de- 
 liverance from a dreaded fate which it was to effect for 
 me, through the long impassioned scene wliich follows. 
 When the time came to drink the potion there was 
 none ; for the phial had been crushed in my hand, the 
 fragments of glass were eating their way into the tender 
 palm, and the blood was trickling down in a little 
 stream over my pretty dress. This had been for some 
 time apparent to the audience, but the Juliet knew no- 
 thing of it, until the red stream attracted her attention. 
 Excited as I already was, this was too much for me ; 
 and always having a sickening horror of the bare sight 
 or even talk of blood, poor Juliet grew faint, and stag- 
 gered towards the bed, on which she really fainted. I 
 remember nothing of the end of the play, beyond seeing 
 many kind people in my dressing-room, and wondering 
 what was meant. Our good family doctor from London 
 was among the audience, and bound up the wounded 
 hand. This never occurred again, because they ever 
 afterwards gave me a wooden phial. But, oh my 
 dress ! — my first waking thought. I was inconsolable 
 until told that the injured part could be renewed." 
 
 The lamentations for Juliet, found at morning cold 
 and stiff upon her bed, have a certain air of unreality 
 thrown over them— a movement in the case of Lady 
 Capulet, her husband, and the bridegroom, of a lyrical 
 kind, in which each speaker sustains a part, alto, tenor, 
 or bass, in the pseudo-requiem (let the reader notice the 
 
Romeo and Juliet. 427 
 
 parallelism of the three speeches) while the Nurse's 
 lamentation — 
 
 " O day, O day, O day, O hatef al day," 
 accompanied by a desperate resort to the aqua vitce 
 bottle, is somewhat in the manner of the tragical mirth 
 of Pyramus, " O night, O night, alack, alack, alack," in 
 the " tedious brief scene " of the Athenian craftsmen. 
 It was Shakspere's intention that for us who know the 
 secret, the passion of the real tragedy should not be 
 forestalled ; and perhaps he meant with a touch of 
 irony to expose the worth of that noisy lamentation for 
 the supposed dead girl, uttered by those who had no 
 understanding nor mercy for her while she was in their 
 midst. 
 
 The fifth act has a brilliance of romantic terror and 
 pity — ^like the splendour of funeral torches in the 
 gloom — such as we do not find elsewhere in Shakspere, 
 though elsewhere we find tragic effects more like appal- 
 ling convulsions of the elements of nature. The place 
 is pictured with a few strong touches of ghastly sugges- 
 tiveness ; the churchyard ground is " loose, untirm, with 
 digging up of graves ; " the torch " vainly lends its light 
 to grubs and eyeless skulls ;" the monument is " the 
 palace of dim Night." And since life and beauty are 
 here in the camp of death, death is conceived in no 
 tender elegiac manner, but as a cruel and hungry foe — 
 
 ^ 
 
 ," Thou detestable maw, thou -womb of death, 
 Gorg'd with the dearest morsel of the earth. 
 Thus I enforce thy rotten jaws to open." 
 
 No " dark Mother gliding near with soft feet," no 
 " strong Deliveress " is death as Eomeo sees death in 
 
428 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 the tomb, but a pale flag-bearer who triumphs over the 
 beauty of life, or — more hideous — a "lean abhorred 
 monster," amorous of female loveliness, who keeps the 
 fair Juliet in the dark to be his paramour. When 
 Romeo takes his resolve to die, his words are plain and 
 few ; as he approaches the vault his purpose fills him 
 with a savage carelessness ; and yet it is with gentleness 
 that he chides from his path the unknown youth after- 
 wards discovered to be Paris, whom he would spare if it 
 might be permitted. Once within the vault, and in 
 presence of his beloved, all the poetry of Romeo's 
 imagination, which had made hira a seeker for curious 
 fantasies in the days of his shadow-love for Rosaline, 
 which had made him an impassioned dreamer in the 
 moonlit orchard — all this poetry has one last triumphant 
 outbreak. And then comes the end. " I am no 
 pilot," said Romeo in the moonlit garden, conscious that 
 the guiding hand and eye were not his gifts — 
 
 " I am no pilot ; yet wert thou as far 
 As that vast shore washed with the farthest sea, 
 I would adventure for such merchandise." 
 
 Now he has ventured to that vast shore, but what a 
 haven is this ! And unconsciously he echoes the 
 thought of that night of joy in this night of misery — 
 
 , " Come bitter conduct, come unsavoury guide ! 
 Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on 
 The dashing rocks thy sea-sick, weary bark !" 
 
 In Otway's strange transformation of the play in which 
 Romeo becomes an ancient Roman, son of Oaius Marius, 
 and Juliet becomes his love, Lavinia, there is a dialoo-ue 
 between the pair before the poison quite overcrows the 
 
. Romeo and Juliet 429 
 
 spirit of. young Marius. Garrick, in his stage version of 
 our tragedy, taking some hints from Otway, varies 
 from Shakspere, and expands the dialogue with some 
 eighteenth century sentimentalities — 
 
 " Rom. My powers are blasted, 
 
 'Twixt death and love I'm torn — I am distracted ! 
 But death's strongest — and must I leave thee, Juliet ! 
 Oh, cursed, cursed fate ! in sight of heav'n — 
 Jul. Thou rav'st — lean on my breast — 
 Rom. Fathers have flinty hearts, no tears can melt 'em.- 
 Nature pleads in vain— children must be wretched." 
 
 It were presumptuous to say that had Shakspere been 
 acquainted with the earlier form of the story — Da 
 Porto's, which agrees in this particular with Garrick's — 
 he would have rejected it in favour of the form found in 
 Brooke ; and we can believe that a dialogue of marvel- 
 lous beauty, pure poetry, and therefore unlike the effec- 
 tive stage nonsense of Garrick, might have been written. 
 But we do not desire any va*riation from the scene as 
 we have it. No unavailing lamentations are uttered by 
 Juliet — there is but one agonised moment, that in which 
 she perceives that the phial has been emptied, and fears 
 she may not find the means to die. But in another 
 instant the " happy dagger " is in her heart ; and it is 
 on Romeo's body that she falls. 
 
 And so the event is over; the star-crossed lovers 
 have done with sorrow, and can never more be sepa- 
 rated. Over their bodies kinsmen pledge a lasting 
 peace. They shall lie side by side in effigy, all of pure 
 gold, for other lovers to look on. Their lives have been 
 fulfilled; they are made one in all men's memories ; it 
 is not wholly ill with them. Dawn widens over the 
 
430 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 world, rot bright, but with a grey tranquillity, as the 
 grieved witnesses move away with hushed speech about 
 the dead — 
 
 " A glooming peace this morning with it trings ; 
 The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head : 
 Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things." 
 
CHEISTOPHER MARLOWE* 
 
 The study of Shakspere and his contemporaries is the 
 study of one family consisting of many members, all of 
 whom have the same life-blood in their veins, all of 
 whom are recognisable by accent and bearing, and ac- 
 quired habits, and various unconscious self-revealments 
 as kinsmen, while each possesses a character of his own, 
 and traits of mind and manners and expression which 
 ' distinguish him from the rest. The interest of the 
 study lies chiefly in the gradual apprehension, now on 
 this side, now on that, of the common nature of this 
 _ great family of writers, until we are in complete intel- 
 lectual possession of it, and in tracing out the charac- 
 teristics peculiar to each of its individuals. There is, 
 perhaps, no other body of literature towards which we 
 are attracted by so much of unity, and at the same time 
 by so much of variety. If the school of Rubens had 
 been composed of greater men than it was, we should 
 have had an illustrious parallel in the history of paint- 
 ing to the group of Shakspere and his contemporaries 
 in the history of poetry. 
 
 The " school of Rubens" we say ; we could hardly 
 speak with accuracy of the " school of Shakspere." 
 
 * This essay was publisherl in the Fortnightly Review many years / 
 ago, before the literary cult of Marlowe's genius had become the mode// 
 The essay on Milton which follows was written as a companion study,' 
 each essay attempting to show how a great poet works, who is an 
 idealist, rather than a naturalist or realist, in art. 
 
43 - Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 Yet there can be little doubt that he was in a consider- 
 able degree the master of the inferior and younger 
 artists who surrounded him. It is the independence of 
 Ben Jonson's work and its thorough individuality, 
 rather than comparative greatness or beauty of poetical 
 achievement, which have given him a kind of acknow- 
 ledged right to the second place amongst the Elizabethan 
 dramatists, a title to vice-president's chair in the session 
 of the poets. His aims were different from those of the 
 others, and at a time when plays and playwrights were 
 little esteemed, he had almost a nineteenth-century sense 
 of the dignity of art, and of his own art in particular : — 
 
 " And he told them plainly he deserved the bays, 
 For his were called Works, where others were but Plays." 
 
 But Webster, and Massinger, and Beaumont and 
 Fletcher, and Shirley (who were content, like Shakspere, 
 io write "plays," and did not aspire to "works") 
 are really followers of the greatest of all dramatic 
 writers, and very different handiwork they would 
 probably have turned out had they wrought in their 
 craft without the teaching of his practice and ex- 
 ample. Shakspere's immediate predecessors were men 
 of no mean powers ; but they are separated by a great 
 gulf from his contemporaries and immediate successors. 
 That tragedy is proportioned to something else than the 
 niamber of slaughtered bodies piled upon the stage at 
 the end of act five, that comedy has store of mirth 
 more vital, deeper, happier, more human than springs 
 from 
 
 "Jigging veins of rhyming mother wits. 
 And such conceits as clownagekeeps in pay" 
 
Christopher Marlowe. 433 
 
 these were discoveries in art made by Shakspere ; and 
 is it too much to suppose that but for him these dis- 
 coveries might have come later by a dozen years or 
 more ? The works of the pre-Shaksperians are of 
 small interest for the most part, except as illustrating 
 a necessary stage of growth in the history of the drama. 
 They do not win upon us with the charm, the singleness 
 of aim, the divine innocency, the sacred inexperience, 
 the unction of art, which we are sensible of in the 
 works of Raphael's predecessors. Italian painting may 
 be personified under the figure of a royal maiden who, 
 after a period of chaste seclusion and tender virginity, 
 came forth into the world, and was a queen and mother 
 of men. The Engl ish drama was, first, a schoolbo y, 
 taught rude piety by the priests, and rud e jokes b y bis 
 fellows ; then a young ma n, lusty, passiona te, mettle- 
 some, riotous, aspirings friendly;, full of extravagant no - 
 tions and huffing words, given to_Jrregular ways and 
 disastrous chances a,nd desperate recoveries, but, TilEe 
 Shakspere^ wild prince, co ntainin g the promise oT~that 
 grave, deep-thoughted, and magnificent manhood which 
 wa s afterward s realised. 
 
 It is, however, amongst the pre-Sbaksperians that we 
 find the man who, of all the Elizabethan dramatists, 
 stands next to Shakspere in poetical stature, the one 
 man who, if he had lived longer and accomplished the 
 work which lay clear before him, might have stood even 
 beside Shakspere, as supreme in a different province of 
 dramatic art. Shaks pere wou ld have been master of the 
 realists or naturalists ; Marlowe, master of the idealists. 
 The starting-point of Shakspere, and of those who 
 
 2 E 
 
434 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 resemble him, is always something concrete, something 
 real in the moral world — a character and an action ; to 
 no more elementary components than human characters 
 and actions can the products of their art be reduced in the 
 alembic of critical analysis ; further than these they are 
 
 '^irreducible. The starting-point of Marlowe, and of those 
 •who resemble Marlowe, is something abstract — a passion 
 or an idea ; to a passion or aa idea each work of theirs 
 
 \,can be brought back. Eevenge is not the subject of the 
 " Merchant of Venice ;" Antonio and Shylock, Portia and 
 Nerissa, Lorenzo and Jessica, Bassanio and Gratiano — 
 these, and a passage in the lives of these, are the true 
 subjects. Even of " Romeo and Juliet" the subject is not 
 love, but two young and loving hearts surrounded by a 
 group of most living figures, and overshadowed by a 
 tyrannous fate. Those critics, and they are unfortunately 
 numerous since German criticism became a power in this 
 country, who attempt to discover an intention, idea, or, as 
 they say, motiv presiding throughout each of Shakspere's 
 plays, have got upon an entirely mistaken track, and 
 they inevitably come out after labyrinthine wanderings 
 at the other end of nowhere. Shakspere's trade was 
 not that of preparing nuts with concealed mottoes and 
 sentiments in them for German commentators to crack. 
 Goethe, who wrought in Shakspere's manner (though 
 sometimes with a self-consciousness which went hanker- 
 ing after ideas and intentions), Goethe saw clearly the 
 futility of all attempts to release from their obscurity 
 the secrets of his own works, as if the mystery of what 
 he had created were other than the mystery of life. 
 The children of his imagination were bone of his bone, 
 
Christopher Marlowe. 435 
 
 and flesh of his flesh, not constructions of his intellect 
 nor embodied types of the passions. " Wilhelm Meister 
 is one of the most incalculable productions" — it is Goethe 
 himself who is speaking — " I myself can scarcely be 
 said to have the key to it. People seek a central point, 
 and that is hard and not even right. I should think a 
 rich manifold life brought close to our eyes would be 
 enough in itself without any express tendency, which, 
 after all, is only for the intellect." A 7'ich manifold life 
 brought close to our eyes — that is the simplest and truest 
 account possible of any or all of Shakspere's dramas. 
 But Marlo we wo rked, as Milton__aIso_workedj_from the 
 starting-point of an idea or passion, and the critic who 
 might dissect all the creatures of Shakspere's art 
 without ever having the honour to discover a soul, may 
 really, by dexterous anatomy, come upon the souls of 
 Marlowe's or of Milton's creatures — -intelligent monads 
 seated observant in the pineal gland. 
 
 Shakspere and Marlowe, the two foremost men of 
 the Elizabethan artistic movement, remind us in not a 
 few particulars of the two foremost men of the artistic 
 movement in Germany eighty or ninety years ago, 
 Goethe and Schiller. Shaks pere and Goethe are 
 incompajablv jthe larger an d richer natures, t heir art is 
 incomparably the greater and more fruitful ; yet they 
 were themselves much greater than their art. Shak- 
 spere rendered more by a measureless sum of a man's 
 whole nature into poetry than Marlowe did ; yet his own 
 life ran on below the rendering of it into poetry, and 
 was never wholly absorbed and lost therein. We can 
 believe that under different circumstances Shakspere 
 
43^ Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 might never have written a line, might have carried 
 all that lay within him unuttered to his grave. 
 While still in the full manhood of his powers, he 
 chose to put off his garments of enchantment, break his 
 magic staff, and dismiss his airy spirits ; or, in plain 
 words, bring to a close his career as poet, and live out 
 the rest of his life as country gentleman in his native 
 town. It is a suggestive fact, too, that the scattered 
 references to Shakspere which we find in the writings of 
 his contemporaries, show us the poet concealed and some- 
 times forgotten in the man, and make it clear that he 
 moved among his fellows with no assuming of the bard 
 or prophet, no aspect as of one inspired, no air of 
 authority as of ,one divinely commissioned ; that, on the 
 contrary, he appeared as a pleasant comrade, genial, 
 gentle, full of civility in the large meaning of that word, 
 upright in dealing, ready and bright in wit, quick and 
 sportive in conversation. Goethe, also, though he valued 
 his own works highly, valued them from a superior 
 position as one above them, and independent of them. 
 But Marlowe, like Schiller, seems to have lived in and 
 I for his art. His poetry was no episode in his life, but 
 [his very life itself. With an university education, and 
 a prospect, which for a man of his powers can hardly 
 have been an unpromising one, of success in one of the 
 learned professions (not necessarily the Church), he must 
 abandon his hardly-earned advantages, return to the 
 poverty from which he had sprung, and add to poverty 
 the disgrace of an actor's and playwright's life. His 
 contemporaries usually speak of him as a man would be 
 
Christopher Marlowe. 437 
 
 spoken of who was possessed by his art, rather than as 
 one who, like Shakspere, held it in possession. 
 
 " That fine madness still he did retain, u^ ■- X'"-^*"''*^ 
 Which rightly should possess a poet's brain.'' 
 
 So wrote Drayton ; and according to Chapman's fine 
 hyperbole he 
 
 " Stood 
 Up to the chin in the Pierian flood." 
 
 This is not the way in which Shakspere is spoken 
 of. Nor is it an uncharacteristic circumstance that pro- 
 bably while he lay for a short time tortured with the 
 wound of his own dagger, and death was hastening, one of 
 Marlowe's chief anxieties, if the tradition be trustworthy, 
 was about the fate of his " Hero and Leander," and 
 that he commended it for completion to the man of 
 all others best fitted for the task — the great translator 
 of Homer, whose words have just been quoted. 
 
 But if Marlowe be the-ScMll£J:=tbe subjective po et. ^ 
 the idealist, as Shakspere _is_t^e^_Goethe^_objective and c e^Jiti-v^v' 
 naturali stic, of Elizabethan a rt^^^^^^he is a Schiller of a ^^r^ i S^ 
 deci^dl y Satanic s chool. With an important critical 
 movement behind him, around him a regulated state of 
 society, and many influences calling into activity the 
 better part of his nature, the true Schiller's head and 
 heart and sensibilities as an artist passed through their 
 " Sturm und Drang " fever, and came forth illuminated, 
 purified, and elevated. On the other hand, the world 
 amidst which he moved was too much one of merely 
 cultured refinement ; no rude but large and ardent 
 popular heart beat in his hearing ; rather, in the court 
 
438 Transcripts and Siudies. 
 
 &ndi , salons and theatre of Weimar, official waistcoats 
 rose and fell with admirable but not very inspiring 
 regularity over self-possessed and decorous bosoms. The 
 talk was of poems, pictures, busts, medals, and the 
 last little new law of the Duke. It is not surprising 
 that Schiller's art should have a touch of coldness in it. 
 Marlowe had behind him, not a Critical movement like 
 the German, but the glare of Smithfield fires and the 
 ghostly procession of noble figures dealt with by the 
 headsman on Tower Hill, terrible religious and political 
 battles, and the downfall of a faith. For his own part, 
 'taking art as the object of bis devotion, he thrust all 
 religions somewhat fiercely aside, and professed an angry 
 Atheism. The Catholic hierarchy and creed he seems 
 to have hated with aar energy profoundly different from 
 the feeling of Shakspere, distinguished as that was by 
 a discriminating justice. The reckless Bohemian London 
 life which Marlowe shared with his companions, Greene, 
 Peele, Nash, and other wild livers, had nothing in it to 
 sober his judgment, to chasten and purify his imagina- 
 tion and taste, nothing or very little to elevate his feel- 
 ings. But it was^uic^ and p assionate. The " Sturm 
 und Drang" tlirough which our English dramatists 
 passed was of far sterner stress than that of Germany. 
 But Marlowe did pass through it. He perished un- 
 ?happily before he had acquired mastery in his second 
 'style. He lived long enough to escape from the period, 
 so to speak, of his " Robbers," not long enough to attain 
 to the serene ideality of a " Wilhelm Tell." But Mar- 
 lowe possessed one immense advantage over Schiller — 
 he stood not in the naidst of a petty ducal court, but in 
 
Christopher Marlowe. 439 
 
 the centre of a great nation, and at a time when that 
 natio n was all air and fire, its baser el ements disappear- 
 inginJh£,,£aQaci£msnes&.-o£._a™jiaw:|oun^^ 
 when the nation was no aggregation of atoms cohering 
 by accident, and each clamorous for its own particular 
 rights, but a living body, with something like a unity of 
 ideas, and with feelings self-organised around splendid 
 objects of common interest, pride, and admiration. The 
 strength and weakness of what Marlowe accomplished in 
 literature correspond with the influences from the real 
 world to which he was subject. He is great, ardent, 
 aspiring; but he is also without balance, immoderate, 
 unequal, extravagant. There is an artistic grace which 
 is the counterpart of the theological grace of charity. 
 It pervades everything that Shakspere has written ; 
 there is little of it in Marlowe's writings. There is in 
 them " a hunger and thirst after unrighteousness, a glow 
 of the imagination unhallowed by anything but its own 
 energies. His thoughts burn within him like a furnace' 
 with bickering flames, or throwing out black smoke arid 
 mists that hide the dawn of genius, or like a poisonous 
 mineral corrode the heart." * If a Schiller, then, surely 
 a Schiller of a Satanic school. 
 
 Marlowe's works consist of six or seven plays and 
 some translations, one of which — a paraphrase of the 
 ''Hero and Leander" of the pseudo-Musseus — is re- 
 markable as evidencing, more than any other of his 
 writings, the Renaissance feeling for sensuous beauty 
 which Marlowe possessed in a degree hardly, if at all, 
 less than that displayed by Shakspere in his youthful 
 
 * Hazlitt. 
 
440 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 "Venus and Adonis." Of the dramas, one was pro- 
 duced in conjunction with Nash, and we cannot safely 
 assign to its authors their respective shares in the work. 
 One — " The Massacre at Paris " — seems to have been 
 thrown off to meet' some temporary occasion ; and cer- 
 tainly, however this may have been, it may without 
 remorse be set down as of little worth. A third was 
 written, we can hardly doubt, when the poet was in the 
 transition period from his early to what would have 
 been, if he had lived, his mature style. Though in 
 some respects the best, it is in truth the least character- 
 istic of all his more important writings. There are, critics 
 who can more readily forgive any literary deficiencies or 
 incapacities than sins of actual commission, who can bear 
 with every evidence of dulness of poetical vision, languor 
 of the thinking power, uncertainty of the shaping hands, 
 but who have no toleration for splendid crimes, the sins 
 of the sanguine temperament, extravagant fancies, 
 thoughts that climb too high, turbulency of manner, and 
 great swelling words of vanity. These have pronounced 
 " Edward the Second " Marlowe's best play. A nd it is, 
 do ubtles s, fr ee from the violence and extravagance of the 
 dramas that preceded it, from the vaulting ambition of 
 poetical style, which " o'erleaps itself, and falls o' the 
 other ; " but, except in a few scenes, and notably the 
 closing ones, it wants also the clear raptures, the high 
 reaches of wit, the " brave translunary things," the single 
 lines — each one enough to ransom a poet from captivity 
 — which especially characterise Marlowe. The historical 
 matter he is unable to handle as successfully as a sub- 
 ject of an imaginative or partly mythical kind ; it does 
 
Christopher Marlowe. 441 
 
 not yield and take shape in his hands as readily, and 
 accordingly "Edward the Second," though containing a 
 few splendid passages, is rather a series of scenes from 
 the chronicles of England than a drama. 
 
 Three plays remain,* and on these the fame of Mar- 
 lowe may safely rest — " Tamburlaine the Great," " The 
 Tragical History of Dr Faustus," and " The Jew of Malta." 
 Each of these is admirably characteristic, and could 
 have proceeded from no other brain than that of its 
 creator. The three together form a great achievement 
 in literature for a man probably not more than twenty- 
 seven years of age when the latest was written ; and 
 they still stand apart from the neighbouring crowd of 
 dramatic compositions, and close to one another — a little 
 group distinguished by peculiar marks of closest kin- 
 ship, a peculiar physiognomy, complexion, demeanour,! 
 and accent. Each of the three is the rendering into\ 
 artistic form of the workings of a single passion, while 
 at the same time each of these several passions is 
 only a different form of life assumed by one supreme 
 passion, central in all the great characters of Marlowe, 
 magisterial, claiming the whole man, and in its opera- 
 tion fatal. 
 
 The subject of " Tamburlaine " — probably Marlowe's! 
 earliest work, certainly the first which made an impres- 
 sion on the public — if we would express it in the 
 simplest way, is the mere lust of do minion, th e passion 
 of "a mighty hunter before the Lord" for sovereign ^w 
 sway, theloye_of^ower m its crudest shape. This, and ' 
 this alone, living and acting in the person of the Scythian _i.t .. 
 
 * Four, if we count separately the two parts of "Tamburlaine." ^ \ 
 
442 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 shepherd, gives unity to the multitude of scenes which 
 grow up before us and fall away, like the fiery-hearted 
 blossoms of some inexhaustible tropical plant, blown 
 with sudden and strong vitality, fading and dropping 
 away at night, and replaced next morning by others as 
 sanguine and heavy with perfume. There is no con- 
 struction in " Tamburlaine." Instead ef-two^plays there 
 might as well have been twenty, if Marlowe could have 
 found "TF in his heart to husband his large supply of 
 kings, emperors, soldans, pashas, governors,, and vice- 
 roys who perish before the Scourge of God, or had he 
 been able to discover empires, provinces, and principali- 
 ties with which to endow a new race of rulers. The 
 play ends from sheer exhau stion of resources. As 
 Alexander was reduced to weep for another world to 
 conquer, so Tamburlaine might have wept because there 
 were no more emperors to fill his cages, no more 
 monarchs to increase his royal stud. He does not 
 weep, but what is much better, dies. The play re- 
 sembles in its movement no other so much as the 
 " Sultan Aniurath " of De Quincey's elder brother. 
 " What by the bowstring, and what by the scimitar, the 
 sultan had so thinned the population with which he 
 commenced business that scarcely any of the characters 
 remained alive at the end of Act the first." Five crops 
 had to be taken off the ground in the tragedy, amount- 
 ing, in short, to five tragedies involved in one. The 
 difference is, that Marlowe could not be satisfied with 
 less than ten crops and a corresponding number of 
 tragedies. 
 
 /, Yet " Tamburlaine " is the work of a master-hand, 
 vuntrained. If from some painting ill-composed, full of 
 
Christopher Marlowe. 443 
 
 crude and violent colour, containing abundant proofs of 
 weakness and inexperience, and having half its canvas 
 Crowded with extravagant grotesques which the artist 
 took for sublime — if from such a painting one wonder- 
 ful face looked out at us, the soul in its eyes and on its 
 lips, a single desire possessing it, eager and simple as a 
 flame, should we question the genius of the painter ? 
 And somewhat in this manner the single passion which 
 has the hero of the piece for its temporary body and 
 instrument looks out at us from the play of " Tambur- 
 laine." The lust and the pride of conquest, the ambi- 
 tion to be a god upon earth, the confident sense that in 
 one's own will resides the prime force of nature, disdain 
 of each single thing, how splendid soever, which the 
 world can offer by way of gift or bribe, because less than 
 the possession of all seems worthless — th^se are feelings 
 which, though evidence from history that they are real 
 is not wanting, are yet even imagined in a vivid way 
 by very few persons. The demands which most of us 
 make on life are moderate ; our little lives run on with 
 few great ambitions, and this gross kind of ambition is 
 peculiarly out of relation to our habits of desire. But W^ 
 Ma rlowe, the son of the Canterbu ry shoemaker, realised '^t 
 iu imaginat ion this amb ition as, if j,t, werghis veiry own, o*-., 
 and gave it most living expression. The author of ^^^ 
 " Faustus " and " The Jew of Malta " is wholly in such<iUt5(^<i 
 lines as these of Tamburlaine, spoken while he was yet 
 a mere fortunate adventurer : — 
 
 " But, since they measure our deserts so mean, 
 That in conceit bear empires on our spears, 
 Affecting thoughts coequal. with the clouds, 
 They shall be kept our forced followers 
 Till with their eyes they view us Emperors." 
 
4 44 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 And these : — 
 
 "Torsake thy king, and do but join with me, 
 And -we -will triumph over all the world ; 
 I hold the Fates fast bound in iron chains, 
 And with my hand turn Fortune's wheel about." 
 
 And these spoken of Tamburlaine by Meander : — 
 
 " Some powers divine, or else infernal, mix'd 
 Their angry seeds at hia conception : 
 For he was never sprung of human race, 
 Since with the spirit of his fearful pride 
 He dares so doubtlessly resolve of rule, 
 And by profession be ambitious." 
 
 And lastly these, Tamburlaine speaking : — 
 
 " Nature that fram'd us of four elements 
 "Warring within our breasts for regiment, 
 Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds : 
 Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend 
 The wondrous architecture of the world. 
 And measure every wandering planet's course, 
 Still climbing after knowledge infinite. 
 And always moving as the restless spheres. 
 Will us to wear ourselves, and never rest 
 Until we reach the ripest fruit of all, 
 That perfect bliss and sole felicity. 
 The sweet fruition of an earthly crown." 
 
 There is something gross in this ambition, this thirst for 
 reign, this gloating over " the sweetness of a qrown," 
 but the very excess or transcendency of the passion 
 saves it from vulgarity. The love of pomp is not the 
 mean love of pomp, but the imperial, combined with 
 the self-surrender of the Eenaissance poet to the lust of 
 the eye and the pride of life. Command over material 
 display and pageantry, from the " copper-laced coat and 
 crimson velvet breeches" of the Conqueror up to the 
 
Christopher Marlowe. 445 
 
 " pampered jades of Asia," is valued chiefly as an 
 emblem of triumph and of power, or rather as a frag- 
 ment of that universal power which sways all things to 
 its will, and suggestive of it. It is a fine piece of con- 
 sistency preserved in resistance to the temptation of 
 stage moralising, that when Tamburlaine's great career 
 draws towards its close, and he sees the world passing 
 away from his grasp, he does not lose faith in the king- 
 doms of the world and their glory. He knows that he 
 must submit to the tyranny of Death ; he exhorts his 
 sons to the acquiring of 
 
 " that magnanimity 
 That nobly must admit necessity ;" 
 
 life, he sees, is transitorj', but he does not despise it for 
 its transitoriness ; sovereignty must be resigned, but still 
 he is proud that he was Tamburlaine and a king ; and 
 he delivers over the possession of his empire to his 
 children, lamenting only that their " sweet desires," and 
 those of his friends, must henceforth be deprived of his 
 company. There is a severity of conception in this scene 
 of Tamburlaine's death, which was attained through the 
 projection into his art of Marlowe's own exceeding pride 
 of will. 
 
 In one of the passages quoted above the reader may 
 have been struck by the fine line in which our souls are 
 spoken of as " still clin ib ing a fter . knowledgf e infinite. " 
 ThaTlispiring, insatiate, and insatiable curiosity, which 
 for our generation Mr Browning has endeavoured to re- 
 present in the person of Paracelsus, Marlowe also con- 
 ceived in his own way, and with characteristic energy. 
 
( 
 
 446 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 Faustus is the Paracelsus of Marlowe. Over the soul of 
 the Wiirtemloerg doctorate passion for knowledge domi- 
 nates, and all influences of good and evil, the voices of 
 damned and of blessed angels reach him faint and in- 
 effectual as dreams, or distant music, or the suggestions 
 of long-forgotten odours, save as they promise something 
 to glut the fierce hunger and thirst of his intellect. All 
 subjects, however, in the stream of Marlowe's genius are 
 hurried in a single direction. Pride of will drew to 
 itself all other forces of his nature, and made them 
 secondary and subordinate ; and accordingly we are not 
 surprised when we fiad that, in Marlowe's hands, the 
 passion for knowledge which possesses Faustus becomes 
 little more than a body, as it were, giving a special 
 form of life to the same consuming lust of power which 
 he had treated in the earlier drama of " Tamburlaine." 
 To Faustus, in the suggestion of the Tempter, the words 
 . " knowing good and evil " grow dim in the unhallowed 
 
 'i^^ splendour of the promise " Y e shall be a s gods." All 
 r '^S^secrets of Nature and of Fate he desires to penetrate, 
 but not in order that he may contemplate their mysteries 
 in philosophic calmness, not that he may possess his 
 soul in the serene light of ascertained primal truths ; 
 rather it is for the lordship over men and things which 
 knowledge places in his hands that he chiefly desires it. 
 Logic, law, physic, divinity, have yielded their whole 
 stores into his keeping, but they have left his intellect 
 unsatisfied, craving for acquisitions of a less formal,~a 
 mdre^Yatural jiid__liying kind, and they ha.vft affor d p71 
 himnoadequatejield, and but feeble instruments for the 
 display of the forces of his will. It is magic which with 
 
 \ 
 
Christopher Marlowe. 447 
 
 every discovery to the intellect unites a corresponding 
 gift of power : — 
 
 " 'Tis magic, magic that hath ravished me." 
 What is knowledge worth if it does not enable him to 
 obtain mastery over gross matter, over the lives and for- 
 tunes of men, over the elements of air and earth, of fire 
 and water, and over the strong elemental spirits ? To 
 be surrounded with proofs and witnesses of the tran- 
 scendent might of his own will, — this is the ultimate 
 desire of Faustus, as in other circumstances and seeking 
 other manifestations, it was of Tamburlaine. But the 
 sch olar does n ot ever disappear in the magician. In the 
 first heated vision of the various objects towards which 
 the new agency at his command might be turned, pro- 
 jects rise before him of circling Germany with brass, of 
 driving the Prince of Parma from the land, and reigning 
 " sole king of all the provinces ;" yet even inthat hour 
 there mingle with more vulgar ambitions the ambitions 
 of the thinker and the student; he would have his sub- 
 ject spirits resolve him of all ambiguities, and read to 
 him strange philosophies. The pleasure, which after- 
 wards he seeks, less for its own sake than to banish the 
 hated thought of the approaching future, is the quint- 
 essence of pleasure. He is not m ade for coarse.d ghghts. 
 He desires no beautv but that of " tbe_iairgst .mai^, in 
 Germany," or the beauty of Helen of Troy : — 
 
 " Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships, 
 And burnt the topless towers of Ilium ? 
 Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss." 
 
 He chooses no song but Homer's song, no music but that 
 of Amphion's harp : — 
 
448 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 " Long ere this I should have slain myself 
 Had not sweet pleasure conquer'd deep despair. 
 Have not I made blind Homer sing to me 
 Of Alexander's love and CEnon's death ? 
 And hath not he that built the walls of Thebes, 
 With ravishing sound of his melodious harp, 
 Made music with my Mephistophilis % " 
 
 And in the scene of parting with the two scholars, im- 
 mediately preceding the uncompanioned agony of the 
 doomed man's latest hour — a scene_jiistinguished by a 
 
 larlowe — 
 
 I there is throughouFanT^mosphere of learning, of refine- 
 
 \ ment, of scholarly urbanity, which makes us feel how 
 
 1 thoroughly Marlowe had preserved his original conception 
 
 Ujf the character of Faustus, even while he degraded him 
 
 to the low conjuror of certain passages, introduced by a 
 
 writer singularly devoid of humour, to make sport for. 
 
 the groundlings of the theatre.* 
 
 A grosser air is breathed throughout " The Jew of 
 Malta." The whole play is murky with smoke of the pit. 
 Evil desires, evil thoughts, evil living, fill its five acts to 
 the full. Nine-tenths of the picture are as darkly 
 shadowed as some shadowy painting of Eembrandt; but, 
 as might also be in one of Rembrandt's paintings, in the 
 centre there is a head relieved against the gloom, lit by 
 what strange light we do not know, unless it be the 
 reflection from piles of gold and gems — a head fascinat- 
 ing and detestable, of majestic proportions, full of 
 intellect, full of malice and deceit, with wrinkled brow, 
 beak -like nose, cruel lips, and eyes that, though balf- 
 
 * I should be glad to believe that these scenes were the addition of 
 some inferior playwright. 
 
Christopher Marlowe. 449 
 
 hooded by leathery lids, triumph visibly in the success 
 of something devilish. Barabas is the dedicated child of 
 sin from his mother's womb. As he grew in stature he 
 must have grown in crooked wisdom and in wickedness. 
 His heart is a nest where there is room for the patrons 
 of the seven deadly sins to lodge, but one chief devil is 
 its permanent occupier — Mammon. The lust of money 
 is the passion of the Jew, which is constantly awake and 
 active. His bags are the children of his heart, more 
 loved than his Abigail, and the dearer because they were 
 begotten through deceit or by violence. Yet Barabas is 
 a superb figure. His energy of will is so great ; his 
 resources and inventions are so inexhaustible ; he is so 
 illustrious a representative of material power and of 
 intellectual. Even his love of money has something in 
 it of sublime, it is so huge a desire. He is no miser- 
 treasuring each contemptible coin. Precisely as Tambur- 
 laine looked down with scorn at all ordinary kingships 
 and lordships of the earth, as Faustus held for worthless 
 the whole sum of stored-up human learning in compari- 
 son with the infinite knowledge to which he aspired, so 
 Barabas treats with genuine disdain the opulence of 
 common men. The play opens, as "Faustus" does, in 
 an impressive way, discovering the merchant alone in 
 his counting-house, flattering his own sense of power 
 with the sight of his possessions. He' sits in the centre 
 of a vast web of commercial enterprises, controlling and 
 directing them all. Spain, Persia, Araby, Egypt, India, 
 are tributary to the Jew. He holds hands with the 
 Christian governor of the island. By money he has 
 become a lord of men, as Tamburlaine did by force, and 
 
 2f 
 
450 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 Faustus by knowledge, and the winds and the seas that 
 bear his argosies about are his ministers. 
 
 It is obvious that the lust of money, and the power 
 that comes by money, form the subject of " The Jew 
 of Malta." We should indeed be straining matters, 
 accommodating them to gain for our exposition an 
 artistic completeness, if we were to say that Barabas 
 desires money only for the power which its possession 
 confers. This, in his worship of gold, is certainly a chief 
 element, but he loves it also for its own sake with a 
 fond extravagance. In the dawn after that night when 
 Abigail rescued his treasures fiom their hiding-place in 
 his former dwelling, now converted into a Christian 
 nunnery, the old raven hovers amorously over his 
 recovered bags, and sings above them as a lark does 
 above her young. Yet still it is the sense of power 
 regained which puts the sweetest drop into his cup of 
 bliss : — 
 
 " O my girl, 
 My gold, my fortune, my felicity, 
 Strength to my soul, death to mine enemy ! 
 Welcome the first beginner of my bliss." 
 
 But Marlowe found means in another way to gratify 
 in this play his own passion for power, his pride in the 
 display of the puissance of human will. The opening 
 scene, in which the Jew appears as a great master in the 
 art of money-getting, and surrounded by the works of 
 his hands, in which he is proud, secure, and happy, is 
 quickly succeeded by others in which he is seen stripped 
 of his wealth, turned out of doors by Christian tjTanny, 
 and exposed to common ignominy and insult. The rest 
 
Christopher Marlowe. 45 r 
 
 of the drama is occupied with the great game which 
 Barabas plays, first against his Christian persecutors, 
 afterwards against his own daughter allied with them, 
 and his dangerous tool Ithamore, the cut-throat slave 
 whom he has bought. His hand is henceforth against 
 every man, and every man's hand against him. When 
 he is hunted he doubles on his pursuers, and for a while 
 escapes ; any swine-eating dog that comes too close gets 
 a shrewd bite which stops his cry, and at last, when 
 brought to bay, and when his supreme design has failed 
 by counter-treachery, when fairly hunted down, he turns 
 fiercely on his opponents, is still master of himself and 
 of the situation, and rises above those who watch his 
 death by the grandeur of his resolution. 
 
 It has not seemed necessary here to dwell upon all 
 that -is worthless, and worse than worthless, in Marlowe's 
 plays — on the midsummer madness of " Tamburlaine," 
 the contemptible buffoonery of " Dr Faustus," and the 
 overloaded sensational atrocities of " The Jew of Malta." 
 Such criticism every one but an Ancient Pistol does for 
 himself. We all recognise the fustian of Marlowe's 
 style, and the ill effects of the demands made upon him 
 by sixteenth-century play-goers for such harlequinade as 
 they could appreciate. A more important thing to 
 recognise is that up to the, last Marlowe's great powers 
 were ripening, while his judgment was becoming sane, 
 and his taste purer. He was escaping, as has been 
 already said, from his " Sturm~und^Dr^^^^ESuEijJas 
 l ^st to the w orid,. " Tamburlaine " was written at the 
 age of twenty-two, " Faustus " two or thr6e years later. 
 At such an age accomplishment is rare ; we usually look 
 
452 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 for no more than promise. If Shakspere had died at 
 the age when Marlowe died we should have known little 
 of the capacity which lay within him of creating a 
 Macbeth, a Lear, an Othello, a Cleopatra. Marlowe has 
 left us three great ideal figures of Titanic strength and 
 size. That we should say is much. In one particular 
 a most important advance from " Tamburlaine " to " Dr 
 Faustus " and the later plays is discernible — in versifica- 
 tion. His contemporaries appear to have been much 
 impressed by the greatness of his verse — Marlowe's 
 " mighty line ; " and it was in the tirades of " Tambur- 
 laine " that blank verse was first heard upon a public 
 stage in England. But in this play the blank verse is 
 like a gorgeous robe of brocade, stiff with golden em- 
 broidery ; afterwards in his hands it becomes pliable, 
 and falls around the thought or feeling which it covers 
 in nobly significant lines. 
 
 Had Marlowe lived longer we may surmise, with 
 some degree of assurance, one, at least, of the subjects 
 which would have engaged his attention — -the lust of 
 beauty and the power of beauty. There is very little ^ 
 
 •^.».rW, iiiMiii i-t4w»t ri ■■jMiuuii ...II ■■■■■II ■— ■ *' '' 
 
 of amatory writing in any of his plays except that 
 written in conjunction with Nash. Tender love-making 
 of the idyllic or romantic kind Marlowe was little fitted 
 to represent. But we have the clearest evidence from 
 scattered passages that Marlowe had conceived the 
 tyrannous power of beauty in that transcendent way in 
 which he conceived other forms of power. It is suffi- 
 cient to remind the reader of the scene in which Helena 
 rises before Faustus. And there is - one passage in 
 "Tamburlaine" which in itself is enough to show us 
 
Christopher Marlowe. 453 
 
 that the passionate desire of beauty in its most ideal 
 
 form was not inexperienced by the poet : — 
 
 " What is beauty, saith my sufferings, then ? 
 If all the pens that ever poets held 
 Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts. 
 And every sweetness that inspired their hearts, 
 Their minds, and muses on admirid themes ; 
 If all the heavenly quintessence they still 
 From their immortal flowers of poesy, 
 Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive 
 The highest reaches of a human wit ; 
 If these had made one poem's period, 
 And all combin'd in beauty's worthiness. 
 Yet should there hover in their restless heads. 
 One thought, one grace, one wonder at the least, 
 Which into words no virtue can digest." 
 
 If another passage in " Tamburlaine " : — 
 
 " Still climbing after knowledge infinite," 
 
 announced the poet's Paracelsus, d oes not this more 
 distinctly announce his never-created Aprile ? " 
 
THE IDEALISM OF MILTON. 
 
 The critic who would find some single expression which 
 resumes the tendency of each of an artist's works, or an 
 expression which resumes the tendency of all his works 
 taken together, is commonly engaged in falsifying the 
 truth of criticism, and in all cases runs a risk of losing 
 the faithfulness of sympathy, the disengagedness of 
 intelligence, the capacity for assuming various spiritual 
 attitudes which should belong to him. A man will not 
 be comprehended in a formula, nor will the work of a 
 man. But in the case of Milton, and those who re- 
 semble him in his method as an artist, this doctrinaire 
 style of criticism is at least not illegitimate. No poem, 
 of course, is reducible to an abstract statement or idea ; 
 yet the statement, the idea, may be the germ from 
 which the poem has sprung. A tree glorious with all 
 its leaves and blossoming is much more than the seed 
 in which it lay concealed ; yet from the seed, with 
 favourable earth and skies, it grew. Milton never sang 
 as the bird sings, with spontaneous pleasure, through an 
 impulse unobserved and unmodified by the intellect. 
 The intention of each poem is clearly conceived by 
 himself; the form is elaborated with a conscious study 
 of effects. There is in him none of the delicious 
 imprevu of Shakspere. Milton's nature never reacted 
 simply and directly, finding utterance in a lyrical cry. 
 
The Idealism of Milton. 455 
 
 when impressions from the world of nature or of society 
 aroused the faculty of song. The reaction was checked, 
 and did not find expression until he had considered his 
 own feelings, and modified or altered them upon the 
 suggestions of his intellect. Milton's passion is great, 
 but deliberate, approved by his judgment, and he never 
 repents, feeling that repentance would-be a confession, 
 not only of sin, but of extreme weakness and fatuity. 
 He is not imaginative in the highest — in Shakspere's — 
 manner. Each character of his masque, his drama, his 
 epics, is an ideal character — a Miltonic abstraction 
 incarnated. He himself is, as much as may be, an 
 ideal personage : his life does not grow in large, vital 
 unconsciousness, but is modelled, sometimes laboriously, 
 after an idea. And consequently his life, like his writ- 
 ings, lacks the i/mpr^vu. He resolves in early youth 
 that it shall be a great life, and he carries out his 
 resolution unfalteringly from first to last. He tends his 
 own genius, and observes it. He waits for its maturity, 
 and watches. He accepts his powers as trusts from 
 God, and will neither go beyond nor fall short of them. 
 He is noble, but we are sometimes painfully aware that 
 it is a nobleness prepense. He loves to imagine him- 
 self in heroic attitudes — as defender of England and of 
 liberty, as the afilicted champion of his people, fallen on 
 evil days.. His very recreation is pre-arranged — Mild 
 heaven ordains a time for pleasure.* 
 
 In all this Milton was unlike Shakspere ; and as the 
 men differed, so did the times. During the brighter 
 years of the Elizabethan period, when life — life of the 
 * Sonnet to Cyriao Skinner. 
 
456 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 intellect, life of the imagination, religious life, life of the 
 nation, and life of the individual— with one great bound 
 had broken through and over the mediaeval dykes and 
 dams, and was rushing onwards, somewhat turbid, some- 
 what violent, yet gaining a law and a majestic order 
 from the mere weight of the advancing mass of waters — 
 at that fortunate time to live was the chief thing, not to 
 adopt and adhere to a theory of living. 
 
 " Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, 
 But to be young was very heaven ! " 
 
 At the time when Milton reached manhood, the unity 
 of this new life of England was broken, and there were 
 two conspicuous theories of life, to one of which each 
 man was compelled to attach himself; two experiments 
 of living, of which each person must assay one ; two 
 doctrines in religion, two tendencies in politics, two 
 systems of social conduct and of manners. The large 
 insouciance of the earlier fashion of living was gone ; 
 everyone could tell why he was what he was. 
 
 Thus the character of the period fell in with Milton's 
 natural tendency towards the conscious modelling of his 
 life as a man, and of his works as an artist after certain 
 ideals, types, abstractions. It is not a little remarkable 
 that we have the authority and example of Milton him- 
 self for applying to his writings that criticism which 
 looks for an intention or express purpose as the germinal 
 centre of each, and which attempts to discover an unity 
 in them all, resulting from the constant presence of one 
 dominant idea. In the " Defensio Secunda " Milton, 
 looks back over his more important prose works, and he 
 finds that they all move in a harmonious system around 
 
The Idealism of Milton. 457 
 
 a central conception of liberty. An ideal of liberty was 
 that which presided over his public life, his life in the 
 world of action, and the books which were meant to 
 bear upon the world of action refer to that ideal. There 
 are three forms or species of liberty, Milton tells us, 
 which are essential to the happiness of man as a member 
 of society — religious liberty, domestic, civil. From an 
 early period the first of these had occupied his thoughts. 
 " What he had in view when he hesitated to become a 
 clergyman," Professor Masson remarks, " was, in all pro- 
 bability, less the letter of the articles to be subscribed, 
 and of the oaths to be taken, than the general condition 
 of the Church at that particular time." Prelatical 
 tyranny, and the theories by which it was justified, 
 inspired the indignant pamphlets to write which Milton 
 resolutely put poetry aside. Domestic liberty " involves 
 three material questions — the conditions of the conjugal 
 tie, the education of children, and the free publication 
 of one's thoughts." * ' Each of these was made a subject 
 of distinct consideration — in " Tetrachordon " and other 
 writings on the question of divorce, in the Letter ad- 
 dressed to" Samuel Hartlib on education, and in the 
 Speech for the liberty of unlicensed printing. Were it 
 one of Milton's critics, and not Milton himself, who had 
 thus classed the " Areopagitica " amongst the treatises 
 in defence of domestic liberty, or who had represented 
 the letter to Hartlib as concerned with liberty in any of 
 its forms, should we not be ready to declare that he had 
 departed from the sincerity of criticism, and was forcing 
 the author's works at any cost to accord with a theory 
 * " Def ensio Secunda. '' 
 
458 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 of his own ? Yet there is no forcing here ; there is only 
 the compulsion put upon Milton himself by his dominant 
 idea. Civil liberty occupied him last. He thought at 
 an earlier season that it might be left to the magistrates. 
 It was not until events had proved that his pen might 
 be wielded as a powerful weapon in its defence, that the 
 " Iconoclastes," the "Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio," 
 and the " Defensio Secunda " were produced. 
 
 Thus we are directed by Milton himself to observe 
 how the gi-eat cycle of his prose works revolves around 
 this controlling idea of liberty. One is tempted to go 
 on, and endeavour to apply this authorised kind of 
 criticism to Milton's poetry. Would it be sui-prising, or 
 not rather a thing to be expected, if a certain unity of 
 idea became apparent in the work of the poet as in that 
 of the pamphleteer ? / Milton being what he was, a man 
 governed by ideas, and those ideas -being persistent and 
 few — Milton's poetry at the same time dealing with 
 moral truth, and the abiding meanings of things — might 
 ■we not naturally look for a single chief tendency, a 
 permanent presence of one dominant conception in all 
 his poetical self-utterance, epic and dramatic ? 
 
 Milton's inner life, of which his poetry is an expres- 
 sion, as his prose is an expression of his outer, public 
 life, was an unceasing tending from evil to good, from 
 base or common to noble, a perpetual aspiration to moral 
 greatness. Not less than Goethe he studied self-culture. 
 But while Goethe, with his deliberate Hellenism, made 
 man an end to himself, Milton, over whom the Hebrew 
 spirit kept jealous guard, considered man at his highest 
 as the creature of God. And in the hierarchy of human 
 
The Idealism of Milton. 459 
 
 faculties Milton assigned the place of supreme authority, 
 as Goethe never did, to those powers which lie upon the 
 Godward side of our humanity, to those perceptions and 
 volitions which are concerned with moral good and evil. 
 The impartiality of Goethe's self-culture was undisturbed 
 by any vivid sense of sin. No part of his being seemed 
 to him in extreme peril from spiritual foes, no part 
 appeared the object of a fierce assault ; it was easy for 
 him to transfer his attention serenely from this side of 
 his nature to that, while with resolute and calm per- 
 sistence he strove to attain completeness of self-develop- 
 ment. To Goethe the world was a gymnasium or 
 academy, and life a period of higher education. The 
 peculiarity of Milton's view was, that before him the 
 world lay as a battle-field, life was a warfare against 
 principalities and powers, and the good man a champion 
 of God. The sense of sin never forsook him, nor that 
 of a glorious possibility of virtue. To Goethe nature 
 presented itself as a harmonious group of influences 
 favourable, upon the whole, towards man ; what he 
 chiefly feared was a mistake in his plan of culture, the 
 substituting in his lifelong education of a subordinate 
 power or faculty of his nature for the master power. 
 What Milton feared before all else was disloyalty to 
 God, and a consequent hell ; and to him nature, in its 
 most significant aspect, was the scene of an indefa- 
 tigable antagonism between good and evil. In other 
 words, Milton was essentially a Puritan. In spite of his 
 classical culture, and his Renaissance sense of beauty, 
 he not less than Bunyan saw, as the prime fact of the 
 world, Diabolus at odds with Iramanuel. He, as well as 
 
46o Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 Bunyan, beheld a Celestial City and a City of Destruc- 
 tion, standing remote from each other, with hostile 
 rulers. Milton added, as Bunyan also added, that final 
 victory must lie on the side of good. That is, he 
 asserted eternal Providence. There is a victory, which 
 is God's, not ours ; it is our part to cleave to the 
 Eternal One, his part to achieve the triumph on our 
 behalf. 
 
 Here we possess the dominant idea which governed 
 the inner life of Milton, and the dominant idea around 
 which revolves the cycle of his poetical works, as that of 
 his prose works revolves around the idea of liberty. 
 There is a mortal battle waged between the powers of 
 good and evil. Therefore in each of Milton's greater 
 poems there are two parties, opposed as light and dark- 
 ness are opposed, there are hostile forces arrayed for 
 strife on this side and on that. But God is omnipotent, 
 the everlasting Jehovah. There is, therefore, in every 
 instance a victory of the righteous, wrought out for them 
 by Divine help. 
 
 In addition to this, let it be borne in mind that 
 Milton, as an artist, works in the manner of an idealist. 
 His starting-point is ordinarily an abstraction. Whereas 
 with Bunyan abstract virtues and vices are perpetually 
 tending to become real persons, with Milton each real 
 person tends to become the representative of an idea or 
 a group, more or less complex, of ideas. Hopeful, and 
 old Honest, and Mr Feeble-Mind, as we read, grow by 
 degrees into actual human beings, who, had we lived 
 two centuries ago, might have been known to us as. 
 respected Puritan neighbours. Samson and Dalila, and 
 
The Idealism of Milton. 461 
 
 not alone these persons of remote Eastern, tradition, but 
 Lady Alice Egerton and her brothers,* veritably alive and 
 breathing, are, as Milton shows them, objects (to borrow 
 a phrase of Cardinal Newman) rather of notional than 
 real apprehension. 
 
 " Comus " is the work of a youthful spirit, enamoured 
 of its ideals of beauty and of virtue, zealous to exhibit the 
 identity of moral loveliness with moral severity. The real 
 incident from which the mask is said to have originated 
 disengages itself, in the imagination of Milton, from the 
 world of actual occurrences, and becomes an occasion 
 for the dramatic play of his own poetical abstractions. 
 The young English gentlemen cast off their identity and 
 individuality, and appear in the elementary shapes of 
 "First Brother" and "Second Brother." The Lady 
 Alice rises into an ideal impersonation of virgin strength 
 and virtue. The scene is earth, a wild wood ; but 
 earth, as in all the poems of Milton, with the heavens 
 arching over it — a dim spot, in which men " strive to 
 keep up a frail and feverish being " set below the " starry 
 threshold of Jove's Court," 
 
 " Where those immortal shapes 
 Of bright aerial spirits live inspher'd 
 In regions mild of calm and serene air." 
 
 From its first scene to the last the drama is a repre- 
 sentation of the trials, difficulties, and dangers to which 
 moral purity is exposed in this world, and of the victory 
 of the better principle in the soul, gained by strenuous 
 human endeavour aided by the grace of God. In this 
 spiritual warfare the powers of good and evil are arrayed 
 * If, indeed, they be presented in " Comus." 
 
462 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 against one another ; upon this side the Lady, her 
 brothers (types of human helpfulness weak in itself, 
 and liable to go astray), and the supernatural powers 
 auxiliar to virtue in heaven and in earth — the Attendant 
 Spirit and the nymph Sabrina. 
 
 The enchanter Comus is son of Bacchus and Circe, 
 and inheritor of twofold vice. If Milton had pictured 
 the life of innocent mirth in "L' Allegro," here was a 
 picture to set beside the other, a vision of the genius of 
 sensual indulgence. Yet Oomus is inwardly, not out- 
 wardly foul ; no grim monster like that which the 
 mediaeval imagination conjured up to terrify the spirit 
 and disgust the senses. The attempt of sin upon the 
 soul as conceived by Milton is not the open and violent 
 obsession of a brute power, but involves a cheat, an 
 imposture. The soul is put upon its trial through the 
 seduction of the senses and the lower parts of our nature. 
 Flattering lies entice the ears of Eve ; Christ is' tried by 
 false visions of power and glory, and beneficent rule ; 
 Samson is defrauded of his strength by deceitful blan- 
 dishment. And in like manner Comus must needs 
 possess a beauty of his own, such beauty as ensnares the 
 eye untrained in the severe school of moral perfection. 
 Correggio sought him as a favourite model, but not 
 Michael Angelo. He is sensitive to rich forms and 
 sweet sounds, graceful in oratory, possessed, like Satan, 
 of high intellect, but intellect in the service of the 
 senses ; he surrounds himself with a world of art which 
 lulls the soul into forgetfulness of its higher instincts 
 and of duty ; his palace is stately, and " set out with all 
 manner of deliciousness." 
 
The Idealism of Milton. 463 
 
 7' 
 
 Over against this potent enchanter stands the virginal 
 figure of the Lady, who is stronger than he. Young 
 men, themselves conscious" of high powers, and who 
 are more truly acquainted with admiration than with 
 love, find the presence of strength in woman in- 
 vincibly attractive. Shakspere, in his earlier dramatic 
 period, delighted to represent such characters as Rosa- 
 lind, and Beatrice, and Portia ; characters at once 
 stronger and weaker than his Imogens and Desdemonas, 
 — stronger because more intellectual, weaker because 
 less harmoniously feminine. Shelley, who was never 
 other than young, exhibited different types of heroic 
 womanly nature, as conceived by him, in Cyntha of 
 " The Revolt of Islam," and in Beatrice Cenci. Some- 
 thing of weakness belongs to the Lady of Milton's poem, 
 because she is a woman, accustomed to the protection of 
 others, tenderly nurtured, with a fair and gentle body ; 
 but when the hour of trial comes she shows herself 
 strong in powers of judgment and of reasoning, strong 
 in her spiritual nature, in her tenacity of moral truth, 
 in her indignation against sin. Although alone, and 
 encompassed by evil and danger, she is fearless, and so 
 clear-sighted that the juggling practice of her antagonist 
 is wholly ineffectual against her. There is much in the 
 Lady which resembles the youthful Milton himself — he, 
 the Lady of his college — and we may well believe that 
 ■the great debate concerning temperance was not alto- 
 gether dramatic (where, indeed, is Milton truly dramatic?), 
 bat was in part a record of passages in the poet's own 
 spiritual history. Milton admired the Lady as he 
 admired the ideal which he projected before him of 
 
464 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 himself. She is, indeed, too admirable to be an object 
 of cherishing love. We could almost prolong her 
 suflferings to draw a more complete enthusiasm from the 
 sight of her heroic attitude. J 
 
 The Lady is unsubdued, and indeed unsubduable, 
 because her will remains her own, a citadel without a 
 breach ; but " her corporal rind " is manacled, she is 
 set in the enchanted chair and cannot leave it. 
 Richardson, an artist who like Milton wrought in the 
 manner of the idealists, conceived a similar situation in 
 his Clarissa. To subdue the will of the noble and 
 beautiful woman against whom he has set himself is as 
 much the object of Lovelace as to gain possession of her 
 person. His mastery over her outward fate grows 
 steadily from less to more, until at length it is absolute; 
 but her true personality (and Richardson never lets us 
 forget this) remains remote, untouched, victorious, and 
 her death itself is not defeat, but a well-conducted 
 retreat from this life to a position of greater security and 
 freedom. Meanwhile, — to return to " Comus," — the 
 brothers wander in the wood. They are alike in being 
 aimless and helpless; if they are distinguished from each 
 other, it is only as " First Brother " and " Second 
 Brother," and by one of the simple devices common to 
 ideal artists — first brother is a philosopher and full of 
 hope and faith; second brother is more apprehensive, 
 and less thoroughly grounded in ethics and metaphysics. 
 The deliverance of their sister would be impossible but 
 for supernatural interposition, the aid afforded by the 
 Attendant Spirit from Jove's court. In other words. 
 Divine Providence is asserted. Not without higher than 
 
The Idealism of Milton. 465 
 
 human aid is the Lady rescued, and through the weak- 
 ness of the mortal instruments of divine grace but half 
 the intended work is accomplished. Comus escapes 
 bearing his magic wand, to deceive other strayers in the 
 wood, to work new enchantments, and swell his rout of 
 ugly-headed followers. 
 
 Little need be said of "Paradise Lost"; the central 
 idea is obvious. There is again a great contention, 
 Heaven and Hell striving for the mastery. Satan 
 and his angels are warring, first tumultuously and 
 afterwards by crafty ways, against God and Messiah, 
 and the executors of God's purposes. Each of the infernal 
 Thrones and Dominations is an ideal conception, the 
 representative of a single living lust. Satan himself is 
 ^ihe spirit of disobedience, that supreme sin of which all 
 other sins are but modes ; he is a will alienated from 
 God, and proudly accepting such alienation as the law 
 of his nature. Man's virtue is placed upon its trial. 
 Paradise, so far from being the peaceful garden, is the 
 central battle-field of the whole universe. Adam falls, 
 and evil for a time appears to have gained the day ; but 
 such an appearance must needs be fallacious — the woman 
 contains within her the seed of promise, the great 
 Deliverer who shall bruise the serpent's head. To 
 " assert eternal Providence " is the declared intention of 
 the whole work. It closes, if in no triumphant strain, 
 yet in a spirit of serious confidence concerning the 
 future : — 
 
 " Some natural tears they dropp'd, but wiped them soon ; 
 The world was all before them, where to choose 
 Their place of rest, and Providence their guide ; 
 
 2g 
 
466 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 They hand in hand, with wand'ring steps and slow, 
 Through Eden took their solitary way." 
 
 By the time "Paradise Lost" was written, Milton 
 had known love as distinct from admiration, the attrac- 
 tion not of identical but of complementary qualities. 
 The novel delight of surrender to a charm, the charm of 
 a being weaker and fairer than himself, had been enough, 
 and he had not prcivided for the difficulties of accom- 
 modating this new self-surrender to the self-maintenance 
 which was his natural and his habitual temper. Ere 
 long the discovery was made of feminine frailty. The 
 Lady of " Comus " had been created out of elements 
 which belonged to his own character. Eve was created 
 out of all that he was not and could not be. The Lady 
 is admirable ; Eve is supremely desirable. If the Lady 
 had been seduced by the fraud of Comus, and had fallen,* 
 we should leave her among the monsters, and despair of 
 goodness ; but Eve, when she has eaten the apple, is 
 hardly less lovable than before, and we know that 
 hardly any fall is fatal to a character like hers, which 
 has no inexorable virtue ; it bends, but is not broken. 
 " Eve is a kind of abstract woman ; essentially a typical 
 being ; an official mother of all living." She is the 
 Miltonic conception of the " eternal feminine " ((ias 
 H^wig-WeiUiche) in nature. 
 
 What passage in the life of Christ would Milton select 
 for treatment as the subject of his second epic ? Para- 
 dise had been forfeited by the disobedience of Adam ; by 
 the perfect obedience of the Son of God it was recovered. 
 The supreme act of submission to his Father's will was 
 surely his obedience unto death, " even the death of the 
 
The Idealism of Milton. 467 
 
 cross." " my Father; if this cup may not pass away 
 from me except I drink it, Thy will be done." The 
 contrast is absolute between such obedient fidelity as 
 this, and the wilfulness and disloyalty of the first Adam. 
 And when Christ had suffered death, and despoiled hell, 
 and risen again, then Paradise was truly and completely 
 regained. Yet it is not the passion, the death, and 
 the triumphant resurrection of the Saviour which Milton 
 determined to render into song. Does the reader not 
 feel a certain incongruity in the appro^iriating of this 
 name " Paradise Regained " to a poem which leaves 
 Christ at the outset of his earthly career, with his crown 
 of thorns yet to weal-, and his cross to be borne to Cal- 
 vary ? Not so did Milton feel. To him the first com- 
 plete victory over Satan was equivalent to the final 
 overthrow of the kingdom of darkness, and the rpstora- 
 tion of the reign of all goodness. The great warfare 
 was then brought to an issue — then, for the first time 
 — and that issue was decisive. Satan had found one 
 mightier than he in the Divine Man. Now, obviously, 
 no passage in the life of Christ illustrates in such naked 
 contrast the struggle between the powers of good and of 
 evil as the assault made upon the virtue of Christ him- 
 self by the arch-enemy. Victory in such a contest 
 must be ultimata, victory. This, therefore, naturally 
 from Milton's point of view became the subject of 
 " Paradise Regained." 
 
 In treating the history of the temptation in the 
 wilderness, the genius of the poet moved under peculiar 
 advantages. Milton was never dramatic in the high 
 sense of that word. Varying, vital movement of thought 
 
468 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 and passion he was unable to exhibit. The mystery and 
 obscurity of life do not belong to the characters created 
 by him. Each of them is perfectly intelligible. But 
 Milton excelled in the representation of characters m 
 position, and more particularly in the discussion of a 
 " topic " by two characters who occupy fixed and oppos- 
 ing points of view. This was not dialogue ; there is no 
 giving and taking of ideas, no shifting of positions, no 
 fluctuant moods, no mobility of thought. It was rather 
 debate, a forensic pleading, with counsel on this side and 
 on that. It was a duel, not with rapiers gleaming 
 under and over each other, and in a moment's irregular 
 strife changing hands — not such a duel, but one much 
 more deliberate, the antagonists alternately letting off 
 their heavy charges of argument, and alternately await- 
 ing the formidable reply. " Paradise Regained " is a 
 series of such debates, which remind us of the scene 
 between Comus and the Lady in Milton's early poem, 
 where already the Miltonic manner appears fully formed. 
 By obedience Christ regains paradise. Loyalty to 
 God, fidelity to the righteous father, is the supreme 
 excellence of his character ; its strength is not Pagan 
 self-dependence, but Hebrew self-devotion to the Eter- 
 nal One. The consciousness of filial virtue, of the union 
 of his will with that of the Father, supports him through 
 every trial. At the same time this obedience, unlike 
 that claimed from Adam, does not lie in the passive 
 accepting of an arbitrary rule. The Saviour is a 
 champion of God. He is filled, like the ancient heroes 
 of the Jewish race, with active zeal for the glory of God, 
 and his people's service : — ■ 
 
The Idealism of Milton. 469 
 
 " Virtuous deeds 
 Mamed in my heart, heroic acts ; one while 
 To rescue Israel from the Boman yoke ; 
 Then to subdue and quell, o'er all the earth, 
 Brute violence and proud tyrannic pow'r, 
 Till truth were freed, and equity restored." 
 
 He is a worthy leader of mankind in the great warfare 
 against sin and death, greater in his virtue than Adam 
 could possibly have been, because the virtue of Christ, is 
 generous and aspiring, not mere obedience for obedience' 
 sake. Such an antagonist no power of evil could with- 
 stand. Satan is not only foiled, but crushingly defeated. 
 The purpose and the promise of God are fulfilled. As 
 the poem closes, we hear the anthems of angelic quires 
 sung for the victory of the righteous cause. 
 
 " Samson Agonistes" remains to be briefly studied. 
 Once again there is the antagonism of good and evil. 
 God, the people of God, and their afflicted chieftain are 
 set over against Dagon, his impious crew of worshippers, 
 the enchantress Dalila, and the champion of the Philis- 
 tines, the giant Harapha. It is apparently an unequal 
 warfare. Samson is blind — 
 
 " Ask for this great deliverer now, and find him 
 Eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves " — 
 
 and his nation is likewise in bondage. God's order 
 seems to be reversed. It is the hour of Dagon's 
 triumph. Worst of all, it was by the moral weakness 
 of their leader that the people of Israel had fallen. 
 But Adam had sinned and was an exile from Paradise, 
 and yet God's order stood. Christ was in the wilder- 
 ness in his humiliation, cold and hungry, drenched with 
 rain, environed by the powers of hell. The Lady sat 
 
470 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 enthralled by the spells of her deadly enemy, alone in 
 the midst of a rout of unclean creatures, and yet 
 deliverance had been wrought. And now the chosen 
 nation, God's representative among the peoples, was but 
 tried and afflicted for a time. A sudden and awful 
 victory is achieved on their behalf. And once again 
 the choral song which ends the tragedy is a confession 
 of a divine order of things, an assertion of eternal 
 Providence : — 
 
 " All is best, though we oft doubt 
 What th' unsearchable dispose 
 Of highest Wisdom brings about, 
 And ever best found in the close." 
 
 "What is Samson ? He is the man gifted with divine 
 strength; one who is great by tlie grace of God, yet a 
 mortal, and therefore liable to fall. As Milton's first 
 important dramatic conception, the Lady, is wrought out 
 of materials supplied from his own character and inner 
 experience, so is this, the last. But as the beautiful 
 youth, a poet more than a fighter, full of noble hopes 
 and unrealized aspirations, differed from the aged man 
 who had warred a good warfare, who had known dis- 
 appointment and defeat, and now was fallen on' evil 
 days, so viidely does Samson differ from Milton's first 
 glad ideal, The transformation is a strange one, and 
 yet we recognise the one same personality. Samson's 
 manner of self-contemplation is precisely that of Milton. 
 He loves to present to his own imagination the glory of 
 his strength, the greatness of his past achievements, and 
 his present afflicted state. This strength which he pos- 
 sesses he looks upon as Milton from his early years was 
 
The Idealism of Milton. 471 
 
 accustomed to look upon his own extraordinary powers 
 — as something entrusted to him, of which he must 
 render an account. It is his sorrow that such a noble 
 gift should be compelled to base uses, and be made the 
 gaze and scorn of his enemies. But no suffering is so 
 cruel as the memory of his folly. Had Milton ever 
 been betrayed into such weakness as that of Samson 
 he would have felt precisely as Samson feels. The 
 single fall is fatal and irrecoverable. He is not one 
 of those who, under the influence of time, and the 
 world, and changing action, can slip back into his 
 self-respect. Being despicable once, he must be always 
 despicable. The thought of an honourable death, self- 
 inflicted, yet not criminal nor weakly sought, must 
 have been the one partial assuagement of his grief that 
 ever came to him. In this death which befalls Samson 
 there is something deeper than poetical justice. It 
 brings peace and consolation, and " calm of mind, all 
 passion spent," as nothing else could. It is the witness 
 of God to the faithfulness, through all weakness and 
 folly, of his champion. 
 
 Harapha, the Philistine giant, is so unmistakably 
 contrasted with Samson, that it is impossible to miss, 
 Milton's intention. Samson is the man gifted with 
 divine strength ; Harapha is the type of the fleshly 
 strength of this world, insolent and brutal. He is the 
 force which Christ in his ardent youth burned to subdue 
 over all the earth, — 
 
 " Brute violence and proud tyrannic power." 
 
 It was Harapha after the restoration of Charles who 
 
472 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 insulted the bodies of Cromwell and Ireton and Brad- 
 shW. It is Harapha who still rules wherever material 
 power is dissociated from moral and spiritual. He is 
 boastful, pitiless, vulgar, and, with all his insolence, in 
 the presence of divine strength he is a coward. Let 
 the Chorus interpret for us the significance of the 
 meeting of the two champions : — 
 
 " Oh, how comely it is and how reviving 
 To the spirits of just men long opprest ! 
 When God into the hands of their deliverer 
 Puts invincible might 
 
 To quell the' mighty of the earth, th' oppressor, 
 The brute and boist'rous force of violent men 
 Hardy and industrious to support 
 Tyrannic power, but raging to pursue 
 The righteous and all such as honour truth ; 
 He all their ammunition 
 And feats of war defeats. 
 With plain heroic magnitude of mind 
 And celestial vigour arm'd." 
 
 The brute violence of the flesh has for its appropriate 
 ally the deceitful beauty of the flesh, full of vanity, and 
 lust, and cruelty. Such beauty has now lost all its 
 fascination for Samson. Even Harapha is less intoler- 
 able than Dalila- — ^" Out, out, hysna !" The Lady of 
 " Comus " was created out of all that Milton conceived 
 as admirable ; Eve out of all in woman that is desirable ; 
 Dalila out of all that is detestable. Her feminine 
 curiosity, her feminine love of dress — she comes towards 
 the blind prisoner "with all her bravery on" — her 
 fleshly desire, her incapacity for any noble thought, her 
 feigned religion, her honeyed words implying the weak- 
 ness and fatuity of him whom she addresses, her wifely 
 
The Idealism of Milton. 473 
 
 treachery and hard-heartedness, make up a personality 
 which, above all others, must have been hateful to 
 Milton. Shakspere would have smiled, and secretly 
 accepted the enchantress as a fruitful subject of study. 
 Milton brings her upon the scene only to expose her, 
 and drive her away with most genuine indignation. 
 The Lad y. Eve. D alila-— these are the women of Milton ; 
 each a great ideal figure, one dedicated to admiration, 
 one to love, and the last to loathing. 
 
 We have now gone the round "of Milton's poetical 
 works. A line will recapitulate the substance of this 
 essay. Milton works from the starting-point of an idea, 
 and two such ideas brought into being what he accom- 
 plished as a man and as an artist. His prose works, 
 the outcome of his life of public action, have for their 
 ideal centre a conception of humanjjhgrty. His poetical 
 works, the outcome of his inner life, his life of artistic 
 contemplation, are various renderings of one dominant 
 idea — that the struggle for mastery between good and 
 evil is the prime fact of life ; and that a final victory of 
 the righteous cause is assured by the existence of a 
 divine order of the universe, which Milton knew by the 
 name of " Providence." 
 
MR BROWNING'S "SORDELLO." 
 
 [A fragment from this article on " Sordello " appeared in Fraser's 
 Magazine for 1867, in which year the whole was written. Some para- 
 graphs from the article then printed were transferred in an expanded 
 form to the essay on "Tennyson and Browning" in my " Studies on 
 Literature." These paragraphs therefore I omit here, with the excep- 
 tion of two or three, which are necessary to place ' ' Sordello " in position 
 with reference to some leading ideas of Mr Browning. In 1867 It was 
 customary to speak of "Sordello " as being wholly unintelligible ; and 
 although it may now be considered more correct to speak of it as a 
 model of lucidity, I have a suspicion that many people still find it hard 
 to understand. I print the article because it is a rendering of the 
 poem into prose, lying closer to the original than any other that I have 
 seen, and because as such it may be helpful to some readers of Mr 
 Browning.] 
 
 Much has been recently written concerning the poems of 
 Mr Browning, but no serious attempt has been made to 
 give an account of his largest work. It was on all hands 
 briefly dismissed as unintelligible. Here is a singular 
 fact : Mr Browning is declared by his contemporaries to 
 be a distinguished poet, a profound and original thinker ; 
 and when we ask, " What of his most laborious under- 
 taking ? " the answer of his ablest critic is, " We do 
 not at all doubt that Mr Browning understands his 
 own drift clearly enough," but " probably no man or 
 woman except the author ever yet understood it ; " 
 and " We suspect that if it be true, as his dedication 
 appears to indicate, that there is really one mortal 
 who to his own satisfaction has understood Mr 
 Browning in Sordello, it would be found on cross- 
 
Mr Browning's " Sordello." 475 
 
 examination of that one, that (like Hegel's sole philo- 
 sophical confidant) even he has misunderstood him." 
 So wrote an admirable critic in the National Review. 
 And what says Mr Browning himself? That the poem 
 is one which the many may not like, but which the few 
 must : that he imagined it with so clear a power of 
 vision, and so faithfully declared what he saw, that no 
 material change can be made in it without injury ; and 
 that though the faults of expression are numerous, they 
 are such as " with care for a man or book " may be sur- 
 mounted.* The truth on the critic's side — not a very 
 profitable truth — has perhaps received adequate con- 
 sideration in the last twenty-seven years; we may now 
 with a good conscience try to see the truth on the 
 author's side, which may happen to be more productive. 
 One word on the obscurity of " Sordello. It arises 
 not so much from peculiarities of style, and the involved 
 structure of occasional sentences, as from the unrelaxing 
 demand which is made throughout upon the intellectual 
 and imaginative energy and alertness of the reader. 
 This constant demand exhausts the power of attention 
 in a short time, and the mind is unable to sustain its 
 watchfulness and sureness of action, so that if we 
 
 * " My own faults of expression were many ; but with care for a 
 man or book such would be surmounted, and without it what avails 
 the faultlessness of either ? I blame nobody, least of all myself, who 
 did my best then and since ; for I lately gave time and pains to turn 
 my work into what the many might, instead of what the few must 
 like ; but after all I imagined another thing at first, and therefore 
 leave it as I find it. " — Dedication of Sordello to J. Milsand of Dijon. 
 M. Milsand's article on Mr Browning's poetry which appeared many 
 years ago in the Betme den deux Mondes, may still be read with 
 advantage. 
 
476 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 read much at a sitting we find the first few pages 
 clear and admirable, while the last three or four over 
 which the eye passes before we close the book leave us 
 bewildered and jaded. The truth is, Mr Browning has 
 given too much in his couple of hundred pages ; there is 
 not a line of the poem which is not as full of matter as 
 a line can be ; so that if the ten syllables sometimes 
 seem to start and give way under the strain, we need 
 not wonder. We come to no places in " Sordello " 
 where we can rest and dream or look up at the sky. 
 Ideas, emotions, images, analyses, descriptions, still 
 come crowding on. There is too much of everything ; 
 we cannot see the wood for the trees. Towards the end 
 of the third book Mr Browning interrupts the story that 
 he may " pause and breathe." That is an apt expres- 
 sion ; but Mr Browning seems unable to slacken the 
 motion of his mind, and during this breathing-space 
 heart and brain, perceptive and reflective powers, are 
 almost more busily at work than ever. 
 
 Before proceeding to trace in detail the story of 
 " Sordello," including what the author has called " the 
 incidents in the development of a soul," it will be right 
 to indicate the place of " Sordello" amongst the poems 
 of Mr Browning, and to make clear its purport as a 
 whole. " Sordello " is a companion poem of " Para- 
 celsus," five years after the publication of which it 
 appeared, and no one can possess himself of the ideas 
 of Mr Browning without a study of the two. " Je sens 
 en moi I'infini " exclaimed Napoleon one day, with his 
 hand upon his breast. " Je sens en moi I'infini," is the 
 germ-idea of these poems. An account of Mr Browning 
 
Mr Browning's " Sordello." 47-7 
 
 as a thinker would be an insufficient account of his 
 genius, for he is also an artist. But more than almost 
 any other poet he is an intellectual artist, and especially 
 in " Paracelsus " and " Sordello " he worked — -worked 
 too much, perhaps — under the guidance of ideas, abstract 
 views of character, or the translation into intellectual 
 theorems of the instincts of the heart, too little perhaps 
 through a pure sympathy with life in some of its indi- 
 vidual, concrete forms. If any artist may be said to! 
 embody in his work a clearly defined sj'stem of thought, ' 
 this may be said of Mr Browning ; a system, however, 
 which is not manufactured by logic, but the vital growth 
 of his whole nature in an intellectual direction. 
 
 Man here on earth, according to the central and con- 
 trolling thought of Mr Browning, man here in a state of 
 preparation for other lives, and surrounded by wondrous 
 spiritual influences, is too great for the sphere that con- 
 tains him, while at the same time he can exist only by 
 submitting for the present to the conditions it imposes ; 
 never without fatal loss becoming content with such 
 submission, or regarding those conditions as final. Our 
 nature here is unfinished, imperfect ; but its glory, its 
 peculiarity — that which makes us men, not God and not 
 brutes^lies in this very character of imperfection, 
 giving scope as it does for indefinite growth and pro- 
 gress. This progress is at the present time commonly! 
 thought of as progress of the race ; Mr Browning does j 
 not forget this, but he dwells chiefly upon the progress 
 of the individual. Now a man may commit either 
 of two irretrievable errors ; through temptations of 
 sense and other causes, but most frequently through 
 
478 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 supineness of heart, or brain, or hand, or else through 
 prudential motives, he may renounce his future, spiritual, 
 infinite life and its concerns. That is one error. Or 
 he may try to force those concerns, and corresponding 
 states of thought, feeling, and endeavour into the present 
 material life, the life of limitation and of inadequate and 
 imperfect resources. That is the other. He may deny 
 his higher nature, which is ever yearning upward to God 
 through all high forms of human thought, emotion, and 
 action ; he may v^eary of failure, which is his glory (as 
 generating a higher tendency), and fall back upon a limited 
 and improgressive perfection ; or else he may spurn at 
 the conditions of existence, and endeavour to realise in 
 this life what is work for eternity. To deny heaven and 
 the infinite life — that is one extreme; to deny earth 
 and the finite life — that is the other. If we are con- 
 tent with the limited and perishable joys, and gifts and 
 faculties of the world, we see not God and never shall 
 see him. If, on the contrary, we aim at accomplishing 
 under all the restrictions of this life the work of eternity 
 — if we desire absolute knowledge or none at all, infinite 
 love or no love, a boundless exercise of our will, the 
 manifestation of our total power, or no exercise of our 
 will^ — then we shall either destroy ourselves, dash our- 
 selves to pieces against the walls of time and space, or 
 else, seeing that our objects are unattainable, sink into 
 a state of hopeless enervation. But between these two 
 extremes lies a middle course, and in it will be found the 
 true life of man. He must not rest content with 
 earth and the gifts of earth ; he must not aim at 
 " thrusting in time eternity's concern ;'' but he must 
 
Mr Browning' s " Sorde/lo." 479 
 
 perpetually grasp at things which are just within, or 
 almost without his reach, and, having attained them, 
 find that they are unsatisfying ; so that by an endless 
 series of aspirations and endeavours, which generate new 
 aspirations and new endeavours, he may be sent on to 
 God and Christ and heaven. 
 
 To these central ideas belong " Paracelsus " (pub- 
 lished 1835), "Sordello" (1840), and "Easter Day" 
 (1850). In each we read "a soul's tragedy." Para- 
 celsus aspires to absolute knowledge, and to power based 
 on such knowledge, the attainment of which is forbidden 
 by the conditions of our existence. In the same poem, 
 a second phase of the same error — that of refusing for 
 the present to submit to the terms of life — is represented 
 in Aprile, who would " love infinitely and be loved " ; 
 the boundlessness of his desires produces a disdain of 
 such attainments and accomplishments as are possible on 
 this earth ; his ideal being beyond possibility of realisa- 
 tion, he rejects all the means of life since they are 
 proved inadequate to his aspirations, and rejects the 
 results of life because they are limited and imperfect ; 
 he cannot stoop from his sublime isolation in a world of 
 dreams to task himself for the good of his fellows, and 
 he sinks into a state of hopeless enervation. Paracelsus 
 is a victim of the temptations of an aspiring intellect; 
 Aprile, of the temptations of a yearning, passionate hea7-t. 
 Mr Browning decided to complete our view of this side 
 of the subject by showing the failure of an attempt to 
 manifest the infinite scope, and realise the infinite 
 energy of will, the inability of a great nature to deploy 
 all its magnificent resources, and by compelling men in 
 
480 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 some way or other to acknowledge that nature as their 
 master, to gain a full sense of its existence. With this 
 purpose he wrote " Sordello." 
 
 But the same subject has another side, and this also 
 Mr Browning felt himself bound to present. It was the 
 error of Paracelsus, and Aprile, and Sordello to endeavour 
 to overleap the limitations of life, or to force within those 
 limits an infinity of knowledge, emotion, or volition, 
 which they are unable to contain. It is no less an 
 error to content one's self with the present conditions of 
 our existence, to cease straining beyond them towards 
 the highest object of thought, love, and desire — ^in a 
 word, to God. And here is the side of the subject 
 which is regarded in "Easter Day." Why is the con- 
 demnation of the soul by God in that dream inevitable ? 
 Because the speaker failed in his dream in the proba- 
 tion of life, accepted the finite joys and aims of earth, 
 each with some taint in it, as sufficient and final, and 
 never grasped at or yearned towards the heavenly 
 influences and joys, that flitted faint and rare above the 
 earthly, but which were taintless, and therefore best. 
 
 We have seized the subject of " Sordello " as it 
 appears in the ultimate analysis. Let us now go briefly 
 over the story, and recount "the incidents in the 
 development of a soul." 
 
 Scfene : First Mantua and its neighbourhood ; after- 
 wards, Verona and Ferrara. Time : about 1225, or 
 forty years before the birth of Dante. Dramatis 
 person® : Azzo, Lord of Este, and Count Richard of St 
 Boniface, Prince of Verona — Guelphs ; Ecelin Romano, 
 Vicar of the Emperor in Italy, and his supporter, 
 
Mr Browning's " Sordello." 481 
 
 Taurello Salinguerra — Ghibellius ; and others, men and 
 women, of whom we shall hear. 
 
 Not many miles from Mantua, having traversed a 
 pine forest, you drop suddenly into a little vale, Goito 
 by name, surrounded by a few low mountains, and 
 bright with vines, through which you may wind to 
 a castle in the midst. Here more than twenty years 
 before the date which has been given, might be seen 
 wandering beneath the vines, or on the hill-tops, or 
 standing on one of the breezy parapets of the castle, a 
 slender boy in the dress of a page, with a noble and 
 finely chiselled face — our hero, Sordello. Here he 
 lives, cared for only by some old women-servants who 
 wait on the mistress of the castle, Adelaide, the second 
 wife of Ecelin, and on the maiden Palma, Ecelin's 
 daughter by his former wife, Agnes Este. 
 
 Who is Sordello ? All his life, as far back as the boy 
 can remember, was spent within the circle of these hills. 
 But he was not always here. He has heard how in a 
 night tumult at Vicenza, when the Ghibellin quarters 
 were attacked and set on fire by Guelphs, Adelaide with 
 her infant son was rescued from the flames by Sordello's 
 father, a poor archer, who himself perished, but left this 
 child whom Adelaide, in gratitude to her preserver, took 
 charge of and brought up in her castle of Goito. On 
 that same night of the Guelph attack perished also the 
 wife and newborn son of the Ghibellin chieftain, Taurello, 
 ever since which event he fell voluntarily into a subor- 
 dinate position, became the instrument of Ecelin, ceased 
 to scheme on his own account, and took life unambi- 
 tiously and pleasantly however it came to him : now in 
 
 2h 
 
482 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 the form of havoc and sudden bloodshed when Guelphs 
 were in the way, now in that of festal ceremonies, bull- 
 baits, dances of jongleurs, and songs of troubadours a 
 portly, easy-natured soldier. 
 
 Before we proceed with the story let us pause to say 
 a word about Bordello's nature, physical and spiritual, 
 forgetting that he is still but a child. His physical 
 organisation is of that fine susceptible kind which a poet 
 might possess. 
 
 " His face 
 
 Look, DOW he turns away ! Yourselves stall trace 
 
 (The delicate nostril swerving wide and fine, 
 
 A sharp and restless lip, so well combine 
 
 With that calm brow) a soul fit to receive 
 
 Delight at every sense ; you can believe 
 
 Sordello foremost in the regal class 
 
 Nature has broadly severed from her mass 
 
 Of men, and framed for pleasure, as she frames 
 
 Some happy lands that have luxurious names, 
 
 For loose fertility ; a footfall there 
 
 SuflSces to upturn to the warm air 
 
 Half-germinating spices ; mere decay 
 
 Produces richer life ; and day by day 
 
 New pollen on the lily-petal grows ; 
 
 And still more labyrinthine buds the rose. 
 
 You recognise at once the finer dress 
 
 Of flesh that amply lets in loveliness 
 
 At eye and ear, while round the rest is furled 
 
 (As though she [Nature] would not trust them with her world) 
 
 A veil that shows a sky not near so blue, 
 
 And lets but half the sun look fervid through.'' 
 
 By two very different classes of spiritual natures this 
 physical organisation, which fits a man for the percep- 
 tion and feeling of beauty, may be possessed. There 
 are those lovers of beauty who are born to be worshippers 
 of something outside themselves, whether it be the sub- 
 
Mr Browning's " Sordello." 483 
 
 duing loveliness of earth and sky, or of some heroic 
 character, or of some nohle cause, or of God himself. 
 They are born to be worshippers, and to lose themselves 
 in what they worship, endowing the object of their 
 homage with all high gifts of their own souls, and bow- 
 ing down biefore it, as if it possessed by an inherent 
 right those qualities which are of their own bestowal. 
 The second class consists of those who recognise in their 
 own natures a power superior to all that exists outside 
 of themselves, and who with each new revealment of 
 beauty, or goodness, or strength, or wisdom, make dis- 
 covery of some new quality of their own souls heretofore 
 undeveloped or unperceived. These are not the wor- 
 shipping spirits ; they are characterised not by a pre- 
 dominance of love but of will; they would subdue all 
 thing's to themselves ; their claims on life are boundless, 
 and they compel life (unless failure overtake them) to 
 yield up to their sublime self-assertion untried forms of 
 beauty, goodness, knowledge, power ; and thus they 
 vindicate the rights of humanity, thus they raise the 
 standard of the general demands on life and the gifts of 
 life, so that we all, to the meanest of us, may in the end 
 follow them with our more bounded wills. 
 
 Now what is the special need of a nature belonging 
 to this second class ? Is it not some means of self- 
 display, — self-display not through any motive of vanity, 
 but because human will gains recognition of itself by its 
 effects ? What I have done, however slight, declares to 
 me that I have willed ; the torn petals of a rose which 
 ,1 have plucked to pieces assure me of the presence of 
 my living will ; much ampler is the assurance which the 
 
484 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 impression of my will upon the men and women who 
 surround me may afibrd. The lover heart-whole in his 
 worship is never troubled by doubts of bis own 
 truth ; but sudden failings of spirit come to him whose 
 faith is in himself and his own will ; he looks out 
 tremblingly to ascertain that others do not consider that 
 he has urged false claims ; he requires to see himself 
 mirrored in external men and things; be must always 
 live before a crowd. 
 
 Such is the special requirement of a nature belonging 
 to this second class — of which Bordello is a member. 
 And now what are its peculiar dangers and temptations ? 
 They are two, leading in precisely opposite directions. 
 Such a man as Sordello may perceive that the world is 
 too narrow a place to admit of a perfect manifestation of 
 himself, that human life with its thousand limitations is 
 too small to contain the workings of the powers of his 
 soul, and that the means of life are too feeble to be their 
 instruments. This perception may result in a mood of 
 fatal enervation. He may decline the duty of toiling 
 for the good of men, because the conditions imposed on 
 human existence forbid the full realisation of his aims ; 
 he may despise the poor successes which are possible ; 
 he may perform no other achievements than the trans- 
 cendent but easy triumphs of a dream. Or, again, he 
 may err in an opposite way. He may be possessed with 
 a desire to put forth all his powers in this sphere of 
 human life which is too narrow to contain them, a desire 
 to display completely here the resources of a nature 
 which can find scope for its full development only here- 
 after, 
 
 " Thrusting in time eternity's concern," 
 
Mr Browning's " Sordello." 485 
 
 and so bring ruin upon himself, and scatter ruin on all 
 around him. "Je sens en moi I'infini," exclaimed 
 Napoleon. 
 
 Now let the reader place Sordello in the second class 
 described above, and bear in mind the special require- 
 ment and the peculiar temptations of that class ; he will 
 then be at the right point for understanding the narra- 
 tive, and studying " the incidents in the development of 
 a soul." 
 
 We return to Goito and the boy who wanders about 
 its castle. And, first, his time passes in the healthy, 
 unconscious life of a child, each day's new sights and 
 sounds sufficing for the day, with natural enjoyment of 
 sun, air, and sleep. After the manner of imaginative 
 children living in solitude, he makes companionship of 
 whatever objects he finds around him* — flowers, trees, 
 birds, insects, — animating and giving them personality 
 according to the caprices of his individual fancy, with no 
 guidance from the catholic feeling which has found ex- 
 pression in our nursery anthology. Everything becomes 
 vassal to his fancy, and by the most incalculable passages 
 of mind and freaks of association he connects one thing 
 with another tiU an entire imaginary world surrounds 
 
 him. 
 
 " Conceive ! the orpine-patoh 
 Blossoming earliest on the log-house thatch 
 The day those archers wound along the vines — 
 Belated to the Chief that left their lines 
 To climb with clinking step the northern stair 
 Up to the solitary chambers where 
 Sordello never came. Thus thrall reached thrall ; 
 He o'er-festooning every interval, 
 As the adventurous spider, making light 
 Of distance, shoots her threads from depth to height, 
 
486 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 From barbican to battlement ; so flung 
 Fantasies forth and in their centre swung 
 Our architect,— the breezy morning fresh 
 Above, and merry, — all his waving mesh 
 Laughing with lucid dew-drops rainbow-edged." 
 
 Thus his days glide away sunnily, while he grows up 
 selfish enough, and without the feeblest moral sense, for 
 what was there to tell the boy that others desired a 
 portion of his happiness ? 
 
 Time at length puts an end to this period of waking 
 dreams. The objects around him become perhaps too 
 familiar to accept of new transformations, surprises, and 
 disguises from the child's fancy, and they settle down 
 into their everyday shapes. The poppy appears to him, 
 after all, a poppy and nothing more ; bird and beast are 
 no longer friends or enemies whom he may watch with 
 wondering awe, and love, and admiration, and hope, and 
 fear ; they have sunk into mere bird and beast. And 
 Sordello perceives that it was his own creative faculty 
 which had endowed them with their peculiar attributes. 
 Now the time is come when the boy cannot be satisfied 
 without doing and being something himself And he 
 needs some companions more competent to allow his 
 claims, and admire his performances than were the 
 flowers and birds. Finding no such companions really 
 at hand he is compelled to create them once again, and 
 he returns to the world of dreams. 
 
 But now the crowd with which he surrounds himself 
 is one of men and women, for such witnesses of his 
 exploits he at present requires. All persons whom he 
 has seen, — his mistress, Adelaide, the golden-haired 
 maiden Palma, the aged foreign women servants who 
 
Mr Browning' s " Sordello." 487 
 
 wait upon them, the archers who one day wound 
 through the vine-paths to the castle ; all persons of 
 whom he has heard, — Ecelin, Este, the Pope, the 
 Emperor, now press before him, a stream of life-like 
 figures. Each is conspicuous by sotne special attribute 
 or power, conspicuous by the embodiment or possession 
 of beauty, or wisdom, or strength, or goodness ; each is 
 played off against the others, and made to pronounce an 
 estimate of the worth of the others' several qualities ; 
 and thus Sordello is feeling his way through much 
 inexperience to that ideal of perfect human faculties 
 and attainments which he would in his own person 
 exhibit, and the possession of which he would assure 
 himself of by the recognition which, as manifested in 
 himself, it would obtain from others. Now when the 
 boy bends his slight bow it is as a crusader against 
 imaginary enemies of the faith ; when he climbs the 
 steep above the vines it is the Trentine pass through 
 which he marches as vicar of the emperor ; all is still a 
 dream he knows ; but a day may come when he shall 
 find means of action corresponding to his will, a body 
 fitted to his soul. 
 
 Testing the powers and qualities of men in this way 
 the pageant of his dream thins, and instead of each 
 figure remaining the possessor of one distinguishing 
 attribute, beauty and strength and wisdom now unite 
 themselves in a single person, so that all the abilities 
 and graces of men are summed up in two or three ideals 
 of manhood. At last from these emerges one tran- 
 scendent form in which the perfection of human nature 
 is embodied, — that form which is to be exhibited in 
 
488 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 Sordello himself. What name shall we give to this 
 
 ideal? Can we say better than that as the antique 
 
 world had discovered before him, so now Sordello has 
 
 discovered Apollo ? This ideal of manhood, this Apollo, 
 
 as we may call it, Sordello will be, and no other. It 
 
 was as Apollo he ascended the bed of the mountain 
 
 stream in the depth of June, and looked down upon the 
 
 forests and fields of vines which his fancj' magnified and 
 
 ennobled into an external world of dimensions suited to 
 
 his new ideal self, and when hours afterwards 
 
 " Aloft would hang 
 White summer-lightnings ; as it sank and sprang 
 To measure, that whole palpitating breast 
 Of heaven, 'twas Apollo, nature prest 
 At eve to worship." 
 
 And for his Daphne who so fit and fair as Palma ? 
 
 " Conspicuous in his world 
 Of dreams sat Palma. How the tresses curled 
 Into a sumptuous swell of gold and wound 
 About her like a glory ! even the ground 
 Was bright as with spilt sunbeams ; breathe not, breathe 
 Not ! — poised, see, one leg doubled underneath, 
 Its small foot buried in the dimpling snow, 
 Bests, but the other, listlessly below. 
 O'er the couch-side swings feeling for cool air. 
 The vein-streaks swoln a richer violet where 
 The languid blood lies heavily ; yet calm 
 On her slight prop, each flat and outspread palm. 
 As but suspended in the act to rise 
 By consciousness of beauty, whence her eyes 
 Turn with so frank a triumph, for she meets 
 Apollo's gaze in the pine glooms.'' 
 
 But time is stealing away. Sordello is no longer a 
 boy ; he is in the prime of youth, and as yet nothing is 
 really done ! 
 
 " Lean he grows and pale. 
 Though restlessly at rest." 
 
Mr Browning's " Sordello." 489 
 
 At last an accident happens which breaks up Sordello's 
 " mixed content," and leads him towards the true busi- 
 ness of men. Adelaide and Palma have left Goito for 
 the neighbouring Mantua, where amongst other amuse- 
 ments and festivities they are to preside at a Court of 
 Love which Richard of St Boniface (a suitor for Palma's 
 hand) is to hold, and which is to conclude with a lay- 
 sung by the illustrious troubadour Eglamor. With the 
 bubble of his fancy grown great and bright, Sordello 
 wanders through the woods towards Mantua, picturing 
 to himself a scene in which he himself gains Palma, and 
 receives confession of her love with crowds to witness 
 his triumph, and in the presence of Richard, the rejected 
 suitor. The bubble, when greatest and brightest, bursts. 
 Emerging beyond a screen of pine-trees, he beholds a 
 crowd of real men and women, gay and noisy, round a 
 pavilion. Real men and women, and Sordello is offered 
 no homage ; he, born to be adored, suddenly discovers 
 that he is weak, scarcely a match for any one he sees. 
 '"And yet there abides within him a consciousness of un- 
 tried powers, and he would not exchange this potential 
 supremacy of his for the best of their actual endowments. 
 We shall see whether something after all may not be 
 realised. 
 
 Palma and Adelaide appear, but not Richard. 
 Richard's troubadour, however, the famous Eglamor, 
 is ready vrith his lute to sing. "Elys" (El lys, the 
 lily) is the ideal subject and the name of Eglamor's 
 poem ; and he images in verse according to his ability 
 this his type of perfection. While he is singing 
 Sordello's brain swims, for he recognises in the subject 
 
490 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 of the poem the tale of A'pollo. ^ And his own ideal of 
 human graces and abilities embodied in a person is 
 nobler than that of the minstrel.^ Eglamor, one of the 
 worshipping spirits, one born for self-forgetful devotion 
 to some object outside himself, one to whom poetry is 
 " a temple- worship vague and vast," who is proud of his 
 service, humble as it is, to ideal beauty, and has his life 
 and joy in it alone, is in all this the opposite of 
 Sordello ; and the latter, whose self-possessed genius 
 bears, to Eglamor's some such relation as Goethe's might 
 be said to bear to Shelley's, sees how in the poem to 
 which he listens he could supply 
 
 " Each foolish gap and chasm 
 The minstrel left in his enthusiasm." 
 
 Accordingly Eglamor has no sooner ceased than Sordello 
 
 takes the lute, advances, and adopting the names and 
 
 time and place that appeared in Eglamor's poem, begins 
 
 and hastens through the " true lay with the true end," 
 
 substituting his own type of perfection for that of the 
 
 poet on whom the people's applause has just been 
 
 showered. By the time his song is ended, a real victory 
 
 has been achieved by him at last : 
 
 " The cries, 
 The crowding round, and proffering the prize ! 
 (For he had gained some prize) — He seemed to shrink 
 Into a sleepy crowd, just at whose brink 
 One sight withheld him. There sat Adelaide, 
 Silent ; but at her knees the very maid 
 Of the North Chamber,* her red lips as rich, 
 The same pure fleecy hair ; one weft of which, 
 Golden and great, quite touched his cheek as o'er 
 She leant, speaking some six words and no more. 
 
 * Palma, whom Sordello had seen in the north chamber of the castle. 
 
Mr Browning's " Sordello." 491 
 
 He answered something, anything ; and she 
 
 Unbound a scarf and laid it heavily 
 
 Upon him, her neck's warmth and all. Again 
 
 Moved the arrested magic ; in his brain 
 
 Noises grew, and a light that turned to glare, 
 
 And greater glare, until the intense flare 
 
 Engulfed him, shut the whole scene from his sense. 
 
 And when he woke 'twas many a furlong thence. 
 
 At home ; the sun shining his ruddy wont ; 
 
 The customary birds' chirp ; but his front 
 
 Was crowned — was crowned ! Her scented scarf around 
 
 His neck ! " 
 
 A week is passed by Sordello — the quiet of Goito around 
 him — in sucking the sweet out of every circumstance of 
 the achievement. As he wanders out one morning, he 
 hears the sound of chanting which approaches through 
 the woods, and soon appears a company of jongleurs and 
 trouveres bearing to burial the body of Eglamor. The 
 shock of his own discomfiture and of Sordello's sudden 
 triumph had been too much for the simple and fervid 
 heart of the poet. He had lost all — his purpose, his 
 rank, his very life. 
 
 " Yet envy sank 
 Within him, as he heard Sordello out. 
 And, for the first time, shouted-^tried to shout 
 ; Like others, not from any zeal to show 
 Pleasure that way ; the common sort did so. 
 And what was Eglamor ? who, bending down 
 The same, placed his beneath Sordello's crown, 
 Printed a kiss on his successor's hand. 
 Left one great tear on it, then joined his band." 
 
 There was no envy in Eglamor's heart, but no one 
 recognised the fact that he was defeated so clearly as 
 himself That night he slept, and never woke again. 
 And now, chanting a funeral song, the trouveres bear 
 
492 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 the beaten man to his last abode. The victor Sordello 
 
 meets this procession, and invoking all blessings of the 
 
 woodlands on the resting-place of Eglamor, and bidding 
 
 his fame continue, he takes the crown from Ms own brow- 
 
 and lays it on the dead poet's breast : 
 
 " Nor the prayer quite fruitless fell. 
 A plant they have yielding a three-leaved bell 
 Which whitens at the heart ere noon, and ails 
 Till evening : evening gives it to her gales 
 To clear away with such forgotten things 
 As are an eyesore to the morn : this brings 
 Him to their mind, and bears his very name." 
 
 Sordello now receives an invitation to Mantua, where 
 he is assured the public long for his arrival, being 
 eager for some more of the wonderful Goito poetry. 
 And now it seems to him that his vocation is clear. By 
 this gift of song he is as far exalted above ordinary men 
 and women as he formerly found himself exalted above 
 his companions the birds and flowers. He now has 
 surely found a means of giving his own nature expres- 
 sion, and of compelling men to recognise bim as their 
 superior. \ For while others — kings, warriors, priests, 
 statesmen, lovers — bad each some real function of his 
 own, and was confined to it, Sordello as an artist, having 
 himself no function, comprehends the natures and lives 
 and interests of all, and can declare their secrets in his 
 verse.\ Will tbey not acknowledge his greatness ? Shall 
 he not obtain evidence of that greatness in this homage 
 of theirs ? With such thoughts he comes to Mantua. 
 
 But the city life agrees ill with Sordello's inner 
 nature. After all, it was not poetry he cared for, but 
 the self-display, the recognition by others, and the con- 
 
Mr Browning s " Sorddlo" 493 
 
 sequent recognition by himself, of the powers of his 
 nature, which he had obtained by means of poetry. He 
 finds the labour of writing verse troublesome, and is 
 even content to plagiarise the rhymes of Eglamor. The 
 men and women of his first poems are simple embodi- 
 ments of virtue or vice, of manly strength or womanly 
 tenderness and grace; slight studies of character, as 
 Sordello himself cannot but be aware. Yet they please 
 the public ; he is courted, complimented, and feted as 
 the last distinguished poet, and soon he finds himself 
 shamefully hankering for praise, and enjoying the petty 
 pleasures of real life, in violation of that design accord- 
 ing to which he was to have comprehended the pleasures 
 and pains of all kinds of men, but not have yielded 
 himself to the restricting influence of any. | He rouses 
 himself to attempt some poetical work of a higher order 
 than he has yet accomplished. But the difficulties 
 which arise from an unformed language, and the in- 
 adequacy of any language to present in the analysis of 
 words what should be perceived whole and unbroken, 
 throw him back, and he returns to the old style of writ- 
 ing, and is content with the old praise, and~the con- 
 sciousness of a greatness in him which is not yet 
 recognised. ^ 
 
 But when he investigates the nature of the applause 
 which he obtained as poet, is the result gratifying ? ' He 
 had supposed that when he represented king, warrior, 
 statesman, priest, lover, in his verses, it would be believed 
 that the poet was superior to them all, because he com- 
 prehended in imagination their several characters and 
 functions.| He finds that the real wonder with the 
 
494 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 Mantuans is how " a mere siDger " could have these 
 great people — such as Montfort, whose deeds he sang of 
 — completely, so to speak, at his fingers' ends ; while/ the 
 full tide of praise swept past him to those who were the 
 subject of his song. \ Upon this discovery his heart 
 turns angrily on his Mantuan critics. Why care what 
 such as they thought of him ? Had he not been fooling 
 himself when he imagined they were competent hearers 
 of his poems, just as he had fooled himself when he 
 made companions out of flowers and trees ? Was it not 
 his own fancy which made them wise and brilliant and 
 witty and judicious 1 Let them praise or blame, as 
 they choose. Only with this conclusion came the con- 
 sequence that he must needs fail to gain by means of 
 them the self-display he needed. 
 
 And now the nature of Sordello is sundered in two, 
 and at war with itself, so that his true personality 
 vanishes. There is Sordello the man, hungry for every 
 paltry pleasure of the moment, and unwilling that one 
 moment's toil should lose its immediate reward, its 
 quick return of praise or gratification ; and there is 
 Sordello the poet, despising the man and thwarting him 
 and postponing all present delight in prospect of a time 
 when his infinite demands on life should be satisfied. 
 " But the complete Sordello, man and bard, . . . was 
 gone." While questioning with himself whether he 
 should devote himself utterly to his art, denying himself 
 every present pleasure, or wholly renounce his art, and 
 mix as a man with men, the Mantuans — people of dis- 
 tinction — would break in upon him : what could he do 
 but fall in with the dull conventions of the day, ex- 
 
Mr Browning" s " Sordellor 495 
 
 pected from such a poet as he ? His very talk becomes 
 a sorrow to the heart ; insincere because talk is required 
 of him, and he must speak in a language not his own. 
 Were he in solitude he could give to any question which 
 arose a meditative answer, such as became a thinker 
 and a poet : 
 
 " but alas ! 
 One of God's large ones \i.e. answers] tardy to condense 
 Itself into a period." 
 
 While the Mantuan talkers have opinions of the pattern- 
 kind, cut and dry, and expect a give-and-take conversa- 
 tion from Sordello : 
 
 " The end was, he retailed 
 Some ready-made opinion, put to use 
 This quip, that maxim, ventured reproduce 
 Gestures and tones, at any folly caught 
 Serving to finish with ; . . . 
 
 His soul. 
 
 Unequal to the compassing a whole, 
 
 Saw in the tenth part less and less to strive 
 
 About." 
 
 So fares the man Sordello. As a poet he falls from his 
 ideal because his hearers are incapable of being inter- 
 ested in the poetry — philosophical studies of character — 
 which his artistic tendency urges him to produce. _^His 
 daily work now is only not to sink beneath his rivals. 
 And working merely for momentary applause, any of the 
 small critics or genius-hunters of Mantua can twist him 
 round his thumb ; whom yet Sordello despises, and with 
 whose views he is ready to fall in, if only to get rid of 
 the intruder. Yet his conformity with these petty views 
 is seldom perfect ; 
 
49^ Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 " He would miss 
 Some point, brought into contact with them ere 
 Assured in what small segment of the sphere 
 Of his existence they attended him ; 
 Whence blunders — falsehoods rectify — a grim 
 List, slur it over !" 
 
 Meanwhile Adelaide dies at Goito; and Ecelin succeeds 
 in procuring the betrothal of the sister of Azzo and the 
 sister of Count Richard to his own two sons ; and pro- 
 mises Palma to the Count himself. Weary of the world, 
 sick and old, he thus hopes to conclude the strife of 
 Ghibellin and Guelf, and retires to end his days in a 
 monastery. His comrade, Taurello Salinguerra, is 
 thunderstruck by the intelligence of Adelaide's death 
 and of these doings of Ecelin, and rides with hot haste 
 from Naples to Vicenza, to expostulate with the chief- 
 tain. But expostulation is useless. Ecelin is tired 
 with the struggle for power ; he would close his life at 
 peace with the Holy Father; and he buys off any 
 further remonstrances of Taurello by offering him Palma, 
 who is still at Goito, as a lure, by which to obtain 
 influence over Richard. 
 
 Taurello is about to visit Mantua to recover breath. 
 His arrival is to be celebrated by games and songs and 
 dances. Sordello is called upon to prepare an ode. 
 Caring not whether verses come or keep away, he 
 wanders into the country : 
 
 " Dumb 
 Till evening, when he paused, thoroughly spent, 
 On a blind hill-top ; down the gorge he went, 
 Yielding himself up as to an embrace. 
 The moon came out ; like features of a face 
 A querulous fraternity of pines, 
 Sad blackthorn clumps, leafless and grovelling vines 
 
Mr Browning's " Sordello" 497 
 
 Also came out, made gradually up 
 
 The picture ; 'twas Goito's mountain-cup 
 
 And castle. He had dropped through one defile 
 
 He never dared explore, the Chief ere while 
 
 Had vanished by. Back rushed the dream, enwrapped 
 
 Him wholly. 'Twaa Apollo now they lapped. 
 
 Those mountains, not a pettish minstrel meant 
 
 To wear his soul away in discontent. 
 
 Brooding on fortune's malice. Heart and brain 
 
 Swelled ; he expanded to himself again. 
 
 Come home Sordello ! Soon 
 Was he low muttering, beneath the moon, 
 
 Of sorrow saved, of quiet evermore, 
 
 Since from the purpose, he maintained before. 
 Only resulted wailing and hot tears.'' 
 
 He explores the castle, torch in hand, and finds that 
 
 Palma had left it that very day. He wanders through 
 
 the well-known chambers, and rests at last beneath a 
 
 marble font supported by the figures of marble girls, 
 
 beside whom he used to rest when a boy. He muses ; 
 
 the instruments at his command for acting out his will 
 
 had been proved unfit ; the men and women, through 
 
 whose recognition of his power he hoped to obtain a 
 
 sense of its existence, have been proved by his Mantuan 
 
 experience no fitter. Was Ike will itself in fault ? 
 
 " His forehead pressed the moonlit shelf 
 Beside the youngest marble maid awhile ; 
 Then, raising it, he thought, with a long smile, 
 ' I shall be king again !' as he withdrew 
 The envied scarf; into the font he threw 
 His crown. 
 
 Next day no poet ! ' Wherefore V asked 
 Taurello, when the dance of Jongleurs, masked 
 As devik, ended ; ' Don't a song come next V 
 The master of the pageant looked perplext, 
 Till Naddo's whisper came to his relief, 
 ' His Highness knew what poets were : in brief, 
 2l 
 
498 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 Had not the tetchy race prescriptive right 
 
 To peevishness, caprice ? or call it spite, 
 
 One must receive their nature in its length 
 
 And breadth, expect the weakness with the strength ! ' 
 
 So phrasing, till, his stock of phrases spent, 
 
 The easy-natured soldier smiled assent. 
 Settled his portly person, smoothed his chin, 
 And nodded that the bull-bait should begin."* 
 
 Sordello has come home to Goito, the shelter of his 
 boyhood. Here in the quietude of the valley and its 
 hills he yields himself to repose, and almost comes to 
 possess his soul and is almost happy. The Mantuan 
 life, its worldliness and restlessness, its factitious modes 
 of feeling, its loves and hatreds not his own, fade out of 
 him, and he wastes "a sweet and solitary year" in 
 passive self-surrender to the mild spirit of the place, 
 living from one day to another upon the unfailing 
 charities of nature. Yet this repose was not undis- 
 turbed; beneath it all lay a dim consciousness of failure 
 and of imbecility which nothing could keep down. 
 
 " He slept but was aware he slept. 
 So frustrated : as who brain-sick made pact 
 Erst with the overhanging cataract 
 To deafen him, yet still distinguished slow 
 His own blood's measured clicking at his brow.'' 
 
 One day in the declining autumn, every spark of the 
 life at Mantua by this time trodden out, he is saunter- 
 ing home in a mood which accords well with that of the 
 season. The Mincio he finds has suddenly overflowed 
 its bounds and submerged the adjacent marsh. Next 
 morning the sight of the broad expanse of gleaming 
 
 * It has been observed that " Sordello " is a companion poem of 
 "Paroelsus." Sordello's Mantuan experiences have their counterpart 
 in Farcelsus's life at Basil. 
 
Mr Brownings " Sordello.'* 499 
 
 water sets Sordello thinking. "Here," he cries, "is 
 nature bound by insuperable laws similar to those which 
 bind myself." But the diflference presently becomes 
 apparent ; what need nature care for a misfortune or 
 catastrophe, she who has time to repair all losses ! land- 
 slip or encroachment of the sea, how can it affect her 
 with her magnificent resources ? But a man who fails 
 in life fails once and for ever. Sordello's mind goes 
 back to the life which he has renounced, its high 
 aspiration and its early promises of greatness. He has 
 failed, but was the failure inevitable, and shall he accept 
 it as final ? Shall he remain here like a deposed im- 
 mured monarch, while life the wonderful and his own 
 chance of achieving somewhat are fleeting for ever. No ; 
 rather resolve upon something and do it before this very 
 night ! His thoughts recur to Palma, and just at this 
 point in his reflections they are interrupted by the pre- 
 sence of Naddo, trouvere and distinguished genius- 
 haunter of Mantua, who has come from Palma with 
 surprising news. The old Ecelin has carried out 
 his intended policy of reconciliation with the Guelfs. 
 He has parted his wealth between his sons, who 
 are both to wed daughters of the opposite faction, 
 and has himself retired to a convent. Palma, who 
 was placed in the hands of Salinguerra, had a week 
 since been betrothed to Count Richard, Prince of 
 Verona, and Sordello has been summoned to make their 
 marriage song. But Guelf and Ghibellin were not to 
 be so easily reconciled. Ecelin had tried to pacify his 
 old adherent Salinguerra, but Salinguerra was not 
 soothed or satisfied. Retiring to his palace in Ferrara, 
 
500 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 and deprived of the support of his leader, which carried 
 with it the imperial authority, he finds his power de- 
 clining and the Guelfs every day making head against 
 him. Off he goes to Padua, professing that as his 
 presence in Ferrara was the only hindrance to perma- 
 nent tranquillity, he would remain there no longer. No 
 sooner is Salinguerra out of sight than the Guelfs burn 
 his palaces, ravage his gardens, and for a week are 
 drunk with joy ; next week 
 
 " their laughter sunk 
 In sobs of blood, for they found, some strange way, 
 Old Salinguerra back again— I say. 
 Old Salinguerra in the town once more 
 Uprooting, overturning, flame before. 
 Blood fetlock-high beneath him " — 
 
 and again he rules Ferrara. But Azzo and Count 
 Eichard, stunned for a moment, recover quickly, and 
 encamp with their forces beneath the walls. Salin- 
 guerra calls for a parley, and, with treacherous design, 
 invites Richard to meet him within the city. Richard, 
 " light-hearted as a plunging star," agrees to enter with 
 fifty chosen friends, and, once inside the gates, Salin- 
 guerra's trap closes upon them. This Sordello, who 
 instantly accepts the invitation brought by the trouvfere, 
 learns on his arrival at Verona — learns how Richard is 
 a captive in Ferrara, learns also how Salinguerra had 
 contrived that Palma should reach Verona the day after 
 Richard had left it for the siege, so postponing the 
 marriage, and how the Lombard League is up in arms 
 to succour the besiegers and effect the Count's deliver- 
 ance. 
 
Mr Brownings " Sordello." 501 
 
 It is here that the story opens, and the greater part 
 of the first three books of the poem are retrospective, 
 bringing up the narrative to this point. We are in 
 Verona on an autumn evening more than six hundred 
 years ago. 
 
 "That autumn eve was stilled : 
 A last remains of sunset dimly burned 
 O'er the far forests, like a torch-flame turned 
 By the wind back upon its bearer's hand 
 In one long flame of crimson ; as a brand 
 The woods beneath lay black." 
 
 There is a tumultuous gathering in the market-place of 
 old and young, citizens and soldiers, to discuss the news 
 of Richard's capture. Within his palace the twenty- 
 four who govern Verona are deliberating ; but if we 
 glide on by council chambers and banquet-rooms and 
 secret passages, we come to a hidden and remote recess 
 where a man and woman are seated. 
 
 " In the palace, each by each, 
 Sordello sat and Palma : little speech 
 At first in that dim closet, face with face 
 (Despite the tumult in the market place). 
 Exchanging quick low laughters : now would rush 
 Word upon word to meet a sudden flush, 
 A look left off, a shifting lips' surmise — 
 But for the most part their two histories 
 Ban best thro' the locked fingers and linked arms. 
 And so the night flew on with it alarms 
 Till in burst one of Palma's retinue ; 
 ' Now, Lady ! ' gasped he. Then arose the two 
 And leaned into Verona's air dead-still. 
 A balcony lay black beneath, until 
 Out mid a gush of torchlight, gray-haired men 
 Came on it and harangued the people.'' 
 
 And the carroch is hauled forth, the trumpets flourish, 
 
502 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 and the great bell peals to let all whom it behoves know- 
 that the League is up. 
 
 Once again that night Sordello and Palma are side by 
 side, and Palma is confessing her heart's need of Sordello. 
 She from the first was made to serve as was Sordello to 
 be served, and in the quiet valley of Goito her craving 
 was for one who should give her life its law. For that 
 unknown one she waited, and even repressed each rising 
 faculty lest it should determine her nature to some bent 
 which might not agree with the will of her future master 
 and guide. That master she found in Sordello on the 
 April morning when Richard's Court of Love was holden ; 
 and since then she has done little but dream and plan 
 how to make him great. She tells how Adelaide the 
 Tuscan, grown lean with plotting, died in the castle at 
 Goito, and disclosed a secret, to which, when Palma 
 comes, she falters, and which she cannot bring herself 
 to reveal — 
 
 " One wild eve that Lady died 
 In her lone chamber : only I beside : 
 Taurello far at Naples, and my sire 
 At Padua, Ecelin away in ire 
 With Alberic. She held me thus — a clutch 
 To make our spirits as our bodies touch — • 
 And so began flinging the Past up, heaps 
 Of uncouth treasure from their sunless sleeps 
 Within her soul ; deeds rose along with dreams, 
 Fragments of many miserable schemes. 
 Secrets, more secrets, then — no not the last — 
 'Mongst others, like a casual trick o' the Past. 
 How . . . Ay, she told me, gathering up her face 
 — All left of it — into one arch-grimace 
 To die with . . . ." 
 
 Since then Palma has grown into importance, and now 
 
Mr Brownings " Sordello." 503 
 
 seems to possess an opportunity of advancing Sordello 
 to eminence. Ecelin, her father, has slunk away to a 
 monastery ; her brothers, Alberic and Ecelin, are about 
 to ally themselves to the Guelfs ; may not she herself, 
 she and he whom she elects, become the leaders of the 
 Ghibellin cause, the representatives of the Emperor, and, 
 with Salinguerra's assistance, the masters of North Italy? 
 She proposes to Sordello that they shall depart to- 
 gether, disguised, fron; Verona, and hasten to Ferrara, 
 where Sordello may learn what must be done from 
 Taurello Salinguerra's lips. 
 
 With this she leaves him, and upon the break of 
 morning Bordello's resolution is formed. He will make 
 her plan his own, and rise to be the master spirit of 
 Lombardy, the leader of the Ghibellin party, the soul of 
 its body. He had found that a soul fitted to such a 
 body as each of us possesses is insufiBcient for its own 
 delight, both in corporeal organs, and in the power by 
 their means of incarnating its will ; he had found also 
 that it is insufficient to make men feel and recognize the 
 supremacy of that will ; he had found by the experience 
 of his last solitary year at Goito that his will would not 
 abdicate, and that to renounce the demands which his 
 nature made upon life was impossible. Men had not 
 paid him homage for understanding and representing 
 and interpreting them as he did in his poems : he had 
 found how unworthy of himself it was to gain enjoyment 
 from men in the common way, by levying on them the 
 tribute of vulgar pleasures, such as had seduced him in 
 Mantua ; finding this he had lived in solitude, and had 
 exiled mankind from his presence ; may he not now 
 
504 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 rescind that sentence of exile ? May he not now recall 
 men and women to serve him 1 And has he not dis- 
 covered that their proper service is very different from 
 what he had supposed when inexperienced he first went 
 to Mantua — that it is by no means to watch Sordello 
 assuming their parts in poetical representation, acting in 
 dramatic character their various lives ; but, on the con- 
 trary, to he themselves made act by Sordello, to become 
 the agents or instruments of his will, the body of which 
 he is to be the controlling mind ; which service, thanks 
 to Palma's wisdom, he may yet secure.''^ 
 
 Here Mr Browning, returning from Sordello to him- 
 self, pauses to take breath. He is seated on a ruined 
 palace-step in Venice, musing about his own life and 
 art. Only in such works, he thinks, as those of 
 Eglamor, in which the artist is wholly self-surrendered 
 to his art, wholly its slave or devotee, can we identify 
 the art and the artist, and discover the complete 
 man in his work. The Eglamors have no life apart 
 from their poetry, and may be said to exist by it rather 
 than it to exist by them. But from the highest works 
 of art, such, for instance, as Sordello might have 
 achieved, there always escapes some indication that the 
 
 * This passage is chosen by a writer in the old National Heview 
 as a specimen illustrating the obscurity of Sordello. "Whoever can 
 construe this," he wrote, " we confess ourselves altogether unable to 
 do so. What, for instance, the parenthetic 
 
 ' To be by him themselves made act, 
 Not watch Sordello acting each of them,' 
 
 means, we have not the most distant notion. Mr Browning might 
 as well have said, ' To be by him her himself herself themselves made 
 act,' for any vestige of meaning we attach to this curious mob of pro- 
 nouns and verbs treading on each other's heels." 
 
Mr Browning's " Sorde/lo." 505 
 
 artist's proper life lay underneath them, and flowed on 
 apart from them, some indication that the poem is but 
 an episode in the poet's history. Such an indication 
 will be found, perhaps, in some humorous side glance 
 of the writer at his own work, some skit or scoff out of 
 harmony with the rest of the piece. "What is this, 
 when truly interpreted, but a confession on the artist's 
 part that he is separate from his work, not absorbed in 
 it, or that he can even afford to smile at it, that his 
 own life began before it, and will continue after ; which 
 after life, for all we can know, may never be revealed to 
 us ? Such an one is not pledged to render for us his 
 whole life into painting or sculpture, or music or song, 
 and if we should take his artistic performances for such 
 a pledge, we shall find it like the promise of a sailor 
 who lands upon our banks, pitches his tent, and begins 
 his tale, but when the first sign of a. fair wind comes, 
 bids us a hasty good-bye and pursues his unknown, 
 trackless voyage. 
 
 Musing thus in Venice, Mi* Browning lingers to 
 watch the girls busy in the fruit-boats, and those 
 passing on with lilies for the chapel beside the bridge, 
 and one who splashes barelegged in the Giudecca, and 
 he falls to wondering which is beautiful enough to be 
 his queen, when suddenly a sad dishevelled woman, 
 not alive and breathing like the others, but doubtless a 
 spirit, stands before him. In her he beholds his queen 
 and mistress, long since acknowledged, for she is Suffer- 
 ing Humanity. Once he had made vast claims on 
 behalf of all men, once he had dreamed that the whole 
 race might be noble in soul and perfect in body ; now 
 
5o6 Transcripts and Stuaies. 
 
 he has grown wiser, and only asks for men what those 
 peasant girls yonder possess, youth, strength, and 
 health. 
 
 " For in this magic weather one discards 
 Much old requirement." 
 
 He has discovered that life must be accepted with 
 the evil as well as the good in it, and in a complacent 
 mood he had been about to boast of the happiness of 
 mankind on the evidence of these Italian girls, poor as 
 they are, but young, and strong, and happy, when his 
 old mistress, Suffering Humanity, appears as if mistrusting 
 him. And it is for her that he will continue the story 
 of Sordello. 
 
 Not a very pleasing poem certainly. But what good 
 to us — to us stumbling through a burning desert like the 
 Israelites of old — were a singer who would deny our 
 wretchedness, flatter us into a deceitful self-satisfaction, 
 and increase our ignorance by blinding our eyes to the 
 true condition of mankind. Eather than such an one, 
 give to us wanderers in the desert a metaphysical poet 
 who shall write a " Sordello," though our metaphysical 
 Moses strike the rock awkwardly enough and forego his 
 Promised Land, as the author of "Sordello" is content to 
 do. He may help us to find, if not the cure, at least 
 the cause of our misery. And to help us thus is indeed 
 what is intended in this poem. Our nature here on 
 earth is incomplete — is in process of construction. 
 Now, with a full-made machine we concern ourselves 
 only about what it can do, not how it is done. But 
 this machine of human nature is still growing gradually 
 into shape ; it is important that we, who have some 
 
Mr Brownings " Sordel/o." 507 
 
 control over it in the process of construction, should 
 make out the purpose of every valve and wheel and 
 cog, and the poets who see something of man's nature 
 can help us here, the best of them imparting to us 
 their own gift of vision. 
 
 " And therefore have I moulded, made anew 
 A Man, and give him to be turned and tried, 
 Be angry with, or pleased at. On your side, 
 Have ye times, places, actors of your own 1 
 Try them upon Sordello when full grown." 
 
 What then is the purport of this story of Sordello ? 
 What but to show that those who despise our common 
 nature because of the restrictions and limitations to 
 which it is subject, yet cannot discard it ; that when 
 they would overleap the bounds of existence they can but 
 flounder on with a nature, great it may be, yet unde- 
 veloped, and which cannot be developed unless — but let 
 us not anticipate the end. Dull enough the story is, no 
 doubt, yet it may turn out better than it looks. The 
 picture which so shocked the Apostle John in the house 
 of his iiephew Xanthus, and which he supposed to be the 
 Devil with his toasting-fork, was by and by discovered 
 to be a portrait of the beloved disciple himself bearing 
 his pastoral cross. Is it not possible that " Sordello," in 
 like manner, may improve on further acquaintance ? 
 
 Sordello and Palma have now reached the beleaguered 
 city Ferrara, and find it between the alternate services 
 of its Guelf and Ghibellin friends in miserable case ; 
 the corn fields outside the town trampled into ruin by 
 the besiegers ; the palaces and houses burnt, and lying 
 in wet heaps of rubbish, or gone with the church steeples 
 
5o8 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 to repair the ramparts ; the thoroughfares overrun with 
 grass, and docks, and mallows, and, most hideous of 
 all, the tanks a crawling mass of human corruption. 
 Salinguerra, in his palace, has just received the Praetor 
 of the Emperor on pressing business, and is now waiting 
 for the delegates of the League, who come to treat 
 concerning the deliverance of Count Richard. 
 
 This palace of his in which Salinguerra sits was one 
 of the wonders of the country, a grim building sur- 
 rounded by terraced gardens of endless beauty, and 
 foreign trees and ranges of statues (the Naples marble, 
 alas ! already crumbling) modelled after the antique 
 sculptures which the Emperor possessed in Messina, all 
 planned long since for the delight of Salinguerra's girlish 
 wife, Retrude, whom he had brought from the Sicilian 
 Court — 
 
 " Here, left a sullen breathing-while 
 Up-gathered on himself the Fighter stood 
 For his last fight, and wiping treacherous blood 
 Out of the eyelids just held ope beneath 
 Those shading fingers in their iron sheath, 
 Steadied his strengths amid the buzz and stir 
 Of the dusk hideous amphitheatre 
 At the announcement of his over-match 
 To wind the day's diversion up, dispatch 
 The pertinacious Gaul : while, limbs one heap, 
 The slave, no breath in her round mouth, watched leap 
 Dart after dart forth, as her hero's car 
 Clove dizzily the solid of the war 
 — Let coil about his knees for pride in him . 
 We reach the farthest terrace, and the grim 
 San Pietro Palace stops us." 
 
 And here Sordello stands beside the door. He had seen 
 much and felt much in the short time since he left 
 
Mr Browning's " Sordello." 509 
 
 Verona full of the resolution to mould the men who sur- 
 rounded him, the people of North Italy, into the instru- 
 ments of his will. He had seen the march of the 
 envoys of the League, the cavalcade of the Papal Legate, 
 and the movements of the leaders of the army. But 
 beside these he had seen — seen perhaps plainly for the 
 first time — the peo'ple — the poor, suifering, mean, un- 
 developed mass of men with their petty enjoyments and 
 huge miseries. Was it these who were to be the 
 exponents of his thoughts, the body of which he was to 
 be the soul ? Were they not too mean, too base ? 
 And yet his heart, moved by their misery, expanded 
 to them, so that a new feeling towards them took 
 possession of him, a new bond bound him to them, and 
 he became indeed one with them, they one with him, as 
 he had intended, but in quite an unexpected way. He 
 felt an error melting in his soul, he saw for the first time 
 that before the people could serve him, he must serve 
 them, and raise them, making their wants and their 
 cause his own. And what was the people's cause ? 
 Why, here perhaps was the very secret of the contest 
 between Guelf and Ghibellin, one party espousing, and 
 one rejecting the people's cause. But whether was Pope 
 or Emperor, since both made a like profession, the true 
 friend of the people ? Best confront Salinguerra, and 
 solve all doubts by urging the people's claims upon 
 him — 
 
 " And at last 
 He did confront him. Scarcely an hour past 
 When forth Sordello came, older by years 
 Than at his entry. Unexampled fears 
 
5 1 o Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 Oppressed bim, and he staggered off, blind, mute 
 
 And deaf, like some fresh-mutilated brute, 
 
 Into Ferrara — not the empty town 
 
 That morning witnessed : he went up and down 
 
 Streets whence the veil had been stripped shred by shred. 
 
 So that, in place of huddling with their dead 
 
 Indoors, to answer Salinguerra's ends, 
 
 Its folk made shift to crawl forth, sit like friends 
 
 With any one. A woman gave him choice 
 
 Of her two daughters, the infantile voice 
 
 Or the dimpled knee, for half a chain, his throat 
 
 Was clasped with ; but an archer knew the coat — 
 
 Its blue cross and eight lilies, — bade beware 
 
 One dogging him in concert with the pair 
 
 Though thrumming on the sleeve that hid his knife." 
 
 The autumn night had set in early, the dews were 
 heavy, and the leaguers kindled great fires while mass 
 was celebrated at every carroch, and the people knelt 
 around. At the Carroch of Verona Sordello approach- 
 ing hears voices in dispute, and the minstrel as he passes 
 is called to drive bad thoughts away with a song. 
 Sordello, with an aching head, and sick heart, sings and 
 at the close Palma, who had been sitting there in her 
 boy's disguise, rises and leads him away. 
 
 Let us return to Salinguerra. He had received the 
 Prsetor of the Emperor, the Legate of the Pope, and 
 Sordello, the incarnation of the people's cause ; and he 
 still sits in the dreary presence-chamber brooding among 
 his thoughts. He had obtained that day most oppor- 
 tunely, a great instrument of power — Friedrich's rescript 
 and the baldric which made him in succession to Ecelin, 
 now turned monk, the emperor's representative in Italy. 
 He was not thinking of this, however, but of the 
 contrast between the minstrel Sordello and himself. 
 
Mr Browning's " Sordello." 5 1 1 
 
 Could he but study their two lives fully ! The minstrel's 
 life spent in doing nothing, and yet he was lean, worn 
 out, and really old ; and Salinguerra's with his sixty 
 yen'-s, his plots and cares, and yet he still seemed young, 
 with his broad chest, and graceful head, and curling 
 brown hair. 
 
 " Square-faced 
 No lion more ; two vivid eyes enchased 
 In hollows filled with many a shade and streak, 
 Settling from the bold nose and bearded cheek. 
 Nor might the half smile reach them that deformed 
 A lip supremely perfect else — un warmed, 
 Unwidened less or more." 
 
 His life had been a series of successes, turning at the last 
 moment into failures, in which lies the secret of that 
 faint half-smile.* And here was one more period of his 
 life fulfilled as all the others had been. Here was the 
 Kaiser's rescript and badge. But by its side lay Ecelin's 
 letter refusing the assistance of his name, and compelling 
 Salinguerra to take the thankless place of chieftain, he 
 who loved to be a subordinate. 
 
 Yet it had not been always so with Salinguerra. 
 Bom at Ferrara, where his family divided the supreme 
 power with the Adelardi, the whole city was to pass into 
 his hands when he was old enough to wed Linguetta, 
 the last child of the Adelardi. But the Guelfs surprised 
 the palace and carried off the girl, and the magistrates 
 having been won over to the Guelf cause, one morning 
 when young Salinguerra sauntered out a mile or two to 
 
 * The fine image here beginning with the line 
 
 " flow his life-streams rolling arrived at last," 
 has been introduced since the first edition. 
 
512 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 hawk, Azzo rode into the city with his bride Linguetta. 
 Salinguerra took refuge in Sicily at the Court of 
 Heinrich VI., son of Friedrich Barbarossa. By and 
 by one spring day the Prince of Verona (father of 
 Count Eichard, who now lies captive in the San Pietro 
 Palace) hurried over to Azzo, to bid him for God's sake 
 quit Ferrara, for Salinguerra had just arrived at Mantua 
 from Sicily, and was coming down on them in hot haste. 
 So Salinguerra settled in Ferrara with his young wife, 
 Ketrude, whom he brought from the Court of Heinrich, 
 and for whom he laid out the gardens and planted the 
 Moorish trees, and procured the thousand statues. How 
 she and her new-born son perished in the fire at Vincenza 
 we have already seen. Salinguerra, made to serve, and 
 who had lived heretofore for the house he was to found, 
 now fell behind Ecelin, in him sought wife and child, 
 and in his cause forgot himself Since that time his 
 life had been a series of struggles on behalf of Ecelin 
 and his family, in which he and Ecelin's wife, Adelaide, 
 worked together, now with success, now in failure. A 
 life contrasting strangely with Sordello's ! i And not the 
 least remarkable point of contrast -was that Salinguerra, 
 merely in the way of business, as it were, acquired all 
 noble accomplishments of the period, and so revealed the 
 strength and graces of his spirit without an effort, 
 whereas Sordello, whose constant aim it was to manifest 
 his inward greatness, had with all his efforts never ouce 
 succeeded. '■ 
 
 The night is passed by Sordello in the camp with 
 Palma at his side, while he still endeavours to probe to 
 the centre of the Guelf and Ghibellin movements, that* 
 
Mr Browning's " Sordello." 5 1 3 
 
 lie may discover which is the cause of the People. Not 
 the GhibeUin surely, after the reception he had met from 
 Salinguerra ! But Palma proves to him that Guelfs 
 care certainly as little for the people as do Ghibellins. 
 Sordello is driven forward to a new hope. Can there 
 be, he thinks, a tliird cause distinct from both, — the 
 People's cause ordained for him to discover ? And just 
 at this point of his reflections, when the gray of dawn is 
 beginning to appear, a watcher in the camp strolls up to 
 them to suggest to Sordello the subject of a ballad. 
 " Does he know the story of Crescentius Nomentanus ? 
 No. Then let him hear it now." And it is related to 
 him how about the close of the tenth century the Consul 
 Crescentius found a cause in the freedom of Rome, how 
 he endeavoured to shake off the Saxon yoke, and was 
 the Brutus of the republic. Eome ! Eome !— not the 
 Emperor, — not the Pope, — but Rome of the Pandects, 
 of the Capitol, of Castle Angelo, — here surely was the 
 true cause of the people. Let Rome be built up 
 'Ugain ! 
 
 '\ When day comes, Sordello wanders through Ferrara 
 fixsMnining the material — his People — out of which- 
 Ronije was to be constructed. Alas, it is a day of 
 disasT\,grg_ Is it these dastardly rogues, these brawlers, 
 these ftithy fellows, these shameless profligates, who are 
 to be^the senators and consuls of his city ? The vision 
 of Biome which he had built up in his imagination at 
 u^Kvn drops arch by arch. Could it be created suddenly 
 tlj!at very day, ages must elapse before such as these 
 Qould understand its use or glory. The hopes and fears 
 'and thoughts of men must dwell for centuries beneath 
 
 2k 
 
514 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 meaner structures — structures more appropriate to them 
 than the Rome which he had conceived. 
 
 But here a low voice whispers in his heart — " "Wake, 
 Sordello ! God has given two sights to a man — one of 
 the race's whole achievement, the result of ages ; the ! 
 other of what each of us may accomplish in the hand's- 
 breadth of his life. This is the hardest word ever on the 
 lips of Fate, — that the race outstrips the individual, and 
 that we must see what we can never attain." But this 
 is only the essential limitation imposed upon our man- 
 hood. Our duty is still clear — to take the step we can, 
 paltry though it seems, carrying mankind with us one 
 step towards the goal we may not hope to reach. Life 
 is short, hut art is long. Every ideal workman has 
 that sentence pronounced upon him, yet must he not, 
 therefore, desist from effort. What is this which 
 Sordello has been desiring ? To reorganize sociei|*'|^ 
 supply the people with a central mind and soul ? Why, 
 that was precisely what Charlemagne, maki 
 by virtue of its mere strength the governin 
 Society, had endeavoured to effect ; and by his endeavc 'Sr 
 had advanced mankind a little. That was what Hi"^** 
 brand, making knowledge with strength for its ser,"^'^"' 
 the governing principle, had also endeavoure|l to ''fftct, 
 and by his endeavour had advanced mankiK&'ai little 
 farther.* May not Sordello, superseding the u\t' ot 
 strength by knowledge obeyed for its own safjB, tale* '"- 
 next step ? No; the world is not yet rea,!^ for th^*- 
 Hildebrand's doctrine for the reorganizatioif of au'ie^y 
 
 * Note the wonderful description of Hildebrand, p] -. ■ ">,. K)^^|il^ 
 1863). 
 
 .kJB strength 
 QgWiaciple c '' 
 
Mr Brownings " Sordello." 5 1 5 
 
 still holds the field ; whoever would help mankind 
 must endeavour to realize Hildebrand's theory. Here, 
 indeed, Sordello has reached the centre of the confused 
 world of thought which had occupied him since he left 
 Verona. If he would help mankind he must change 
 sides in politics ; a Guelf he must be. It is true he 
 can do miserably little ; yet may not he be the man 
 to whom in this age fate offers all the opportunities she 
 possesses ? Since talking is his trade, let him go and 
 convert Salinguerra. 
 
 Sordello loses no time in taking his first step as a 
 Guelf, and is soon standing calmly in Salinguerra's pre- 
 sence, while Palma sits beside the chief " Your spokes- 
 man," says Salinguerra to Palma, "is the archer's son, 
 Elcorte's happy sprout ? Few such have diversified my 
 sober Councils." 
 
 " Elcorte's son ! good ! forward as you may, 
 Our Lady's minstrel with so much to say ! " 
 
 The hesitating evening sunlight floats back, and flushes 
 the chamber, showing in outline the solid figure of 
 Salinguerra, and caressing the form of Palma. Sordello 
 has a chance remaining in spite of all. 
 
 And he begins that great speech which is to bind 
 Salinguerra to the Guelf cause, the effect of which 
 consummate rhetoric, falling as it did a little flat in 
 consequence of Sordello's manifest self-consciousness, was 
 that good-humoured Salinguerra left off playing with 
 the emperor's rescript to scrutinise this extraordinary 
 minstrel. " So poetry," says Salinguerra, " makes young 
 hair fade sooner than politics." 
 
 And Sordello, growing more earnest from the very 
 
5 1 6 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 perception that through the fancies in which he frittered 
 away his youth, through the growth of fatal self-con- 
 sciousness, he had lost all earnestness, seeing the igno- 
 minious years of dreaming, poetry-making, and the re- 
 ceiving of wretched praise, stretch out before him should 
 he fail in this real action, begins again contending for 
 the cause of the Pope and of the People. Salinguerra 
 courteously assenting to all, turns to Palma with a 
 smile : " To have heard all this sung at Mantua would 
 have been more amusing than their forlorn bull-baits — 
 that's indisputable." Salinguerra's contempt stings to 
 activity all that is in Sordello ; for once in the wonder 
 that the poet's rhyme could so much disguise his royalty 
 among men, he forgets himself, and pours forth all his 
 soul without knowing that he is saying or doing, any- 
 thing remarkable. And while he asserts the poet's 
 rank and right, the room seems to expand, and he 
 seems to see the people crowding round with prayers' 
 and good wishes for their spokesman — 
 
 " WLile he rung 
 The changes on this theme, the roof up-sprung. 
 The sad walls of the presence-chamber died 
 Into the distance, or embowering vied 
 With far-away Goito's vine-frontier ; 
 And crowds of faces (only keeping clear 
 The rose-light in the midst, his vantage-ground 
 To fight their battle from) deep clustered round 
 Sordello, with good wishes no mere breath. 
 Kind prayers for him no vapour, since, come death, 
 Come life, he was fresh-sinewed every joint. 
 Each bone new-marrowed as whom Gods anoint 
 Though mortal to their rescue." 
 
 And now he bases the poet's right and rank upon their 
 proper ground, recognising true dignity in service to 
 
Mr Browning's " Sordello." 5 1 7 
 
 mankind, whether as Epoist, Dramatist, or Analyst ; and 
 now he ends with one more attempt to sway the will 
 of Salinguerra to the Guelf cause, which is the people's 
 cause. Then Salinguerra, looking at the eyes of Palm a 
 grown bright as she listened to the minstrel, knows that 
 she loves him. And he begins to speak to her quietly 
 of the position of their affairs. Here is Ecelin's letter 
 declaring that he had done with ambition and the 
 world, which meant to Salinguerra that he himself had 
 wasted thirty years in serving a man who threw away 
 what had been gained for him. And there is the 
 Emperor's rescript and the badge. What does he care 
 for it ? An obscure place suits him best. Some young 
 leader is needed to make a figure before the world ; he 
 is himself old and born to be a liegeman. If only Palma 
 could wear the baldric ; or no, might not someone else 
 wear it for her ? And in sudden sport, which a rapid 
 flash of thought changes to earnest, he has thrown the 
 badge across Sordello's neck. 
 
 " On which ensued a strange 
 And solemn visitation ; there came change 
 O'er every one of them ; each looked on each ; 
 Up in the midst a truth grew, without speech. 
 And when the giddiness sank and the haze 
 Subsided, they were sitting, no amaze, 
 Sordello with the baldric on, his sire 
 Silent, though his proportions seemed aspire 
 Momently ; and, interpreting the thrill 
 Nigh at its ebb, Palma was found there still 
 Relating somewhat Adelaide confessed 
 A year ago when dying on her breast." 
 
 And while father and son, Salinguerra and Sordello, 
 listen, Palma repeats the confession of Adelaide — how on 
 
5 1 8 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 the night of the attack in Vincenza, when the Ghibellin 
 quarters were set on fire, contrasting Salinguerra with 
 her own husband, she had seen, as in a vision, Salin- 
 guerra's child, new born of the young wife Retrude, 
 becoming the future leader, and disinheriting or sup- 
 planting her own infant Ecelin ; and how, with a hastily- 
 formed resolution, she bore away Retrude and her child 
 to the obscure retreat of Goito, where, on the evening of 
 their arrival, Retrude quietly died, and where Adelaide 
 brought up Salinguerra's son under the name of Sordello, 
 concealing his parentage lest Salinguerra should feel he 
 had an interest of his own apart from her husband's 
 cause. 
 
 Let the reader turn to Mr Browning's poem, and learn 
 how Salinguerra and Sordello acquit themselves in the 
 first passionate moments after this disclosure. When 
 these are past the mind of the chieftain hurries forward 
 into a thousand military plans, possible and impossible, 
 by which he is to secure a great future for his child, and 
 which he pours out impetuously as they hurry through 
 his mind. Palma feels she must check this violence of 
 emotion and withdraw Salinguerra from the new-found 
 son : — 
 
 " She without awe, 
 Took off his iron arms from, one by one, 
 Sordello's shrinking shoulders, and that done 
 Made him avert his visage and relieve 
 Sordello (you might see his corselet heave 
 The while), who, loose, rose, tried to speak, then sank : 
 They left him in the chamber. All was blank." 
 
 Palma leads away Salinguerra, endeavouring to calm his 
 excitement with a song of Sordello's, and as they reach 
 
Mr Browning s '^ Sordello." 519 
 
 a long dimly-lighted stone corridor below the presence 
 chamber, she goes on to tell him, while he listens, 
 " sucking in each phrase as if an angel spoke," how the 
 whole world loved his child. There was a seat in the 
 narrow passage, where a grating showed the gold of the 
 sinking sun, and here 
 
 " The foolish praise 
 Ended, he drew her on his mailed knees, made 
 Her face a framework with his hands, a shade, 
 A crown, an aureole ; there must she remain 
 (Her little mouth compressed with smiling pain 
 As in his gloves she felt her tresses twitch) 
 To get the best look at, in fittest niche 
 Dispose his saint. That done, he kissed her brow." 
 
 Whereupon he begins again pouring forth schemes, 
 schemes with a vengeance, " not one fit to be told that, 
 foolish boy." And rising he paces the passage, 
 
 " hands clenched, head erect, 
 Pursuing his discourse. , A grand unchecked 
 Monotony made out from bis quick talk 
 And the recurring noises of his walk." 
 
 Thus with great uniform paces which you were forced 
 to count, he crashed full armed from darkness into the 
 stream of fiery light, and then into darkness again, 
 turning on his heel, while, as he repassed, you caught 
 some snatch of talk about Friedrich, or Azzo, or Ecelin. 
 Nor does he cease till at the height of an imaginary 
 success won for Sordello, a sound overhead fills him with 
 groundless anxiety, and he shrinks to Palma " with 
 large involuntary asking eyes," beseeching her to inter- 
 pret it. Assuring him it is but Sordello's footstep, she 
 takes his damp hand in hers, and leads him from the 
 
520 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 corridor. Then the passion seems to have reached its 
 
 point of relapse, and he begins to feel how failure may 
 
 be possible. 
 
 " Out they two reeled dizzily. 
 ' Visconti's strong at Milan,' resumed he 
 In the old somewhat insignificant way 
 (Was Palma wont years afterwards to say). 
 As though the spirit's flight sustained thus far, 
 Dropped at that very instant." 
 
 Meanwhile the evening slowly fell; star after star 
 came out; and gazing at the one spot still left un- 
 shrouded by the night, a pale piece of sky, and the 
 sky-like water which lay bright below it, Sordello sat 
 and felt how man shrinks to nothingness when compared 
 with the symbols of immensity in nature. But turniug 
 towards the city he rouses himself and shakes off this 
 deceptive feeling. And at last the great truth he 
 needed rose within his mind and lighted up every turn 
 of his life — the truth that \ the requirement of his 
 nature all along was some controlling outside influence 
 superior to himself, a soul above his soul, some power 
 to which he should have yielded homage, and which 
 would have made Love a taskmaster over him, a task- 
 master constraining him to bow to service however 
 humble, however subject to those limitations of our 
 manhood which he had scorned. \ But living beneath 
 the sway of no grand external influence, his life had lost 
 all purpose, all passion, and had become the idle play- 
 thing of circumstances. His strength had been dissi- 
 pated, his sensitiveness wasted, his moral nature' 
 enfeebled. Beauty, Fame, Revenge, Love, Knowledge — 
 the influence of each of these made weaker souls than 
 
Mr Browning's " Sordello." 521 
 
 his grow strong, and gave them some function of their 
 own. But he, living in a real world of accident, and 
 an imaginary world of impossible ideals, had become 
 nothing, had done nothing, nor had anything to do. 
 Not indeed that one of the vulgar aims of life would 
 have satisfied Sordello. But had he sought it, no 
 doubt some Love duly proportioned to it might have 
 swayed his strength. Or what if he were to have been 
 a law to himself? What, indeed, if all that we call 
 external law, external influence, be only subjective ten- 
 dencies projected outwards ? The People and he were 
 one now — in serving the people he was serving himself; 
 yet to serve them he should humble himself and deny 
 himself; he must renounce the discovery of truth after 
 truth, and spend Lis lifetime in getting the people to 
 accept the one truth which would be intelligible to 
 them. Well, had he not found that very truth when 
 he discovered that the Guelf was the party which 
 deserved the popular support ? Shall he not fling 
 away the baldric which Salinguerra gave him, compel 
 his father into allegiance to the Guelf cause, and 
 perhaps persuade him to induce the Kaiser to renounce 
 his claims on Italy ? 
 
 Yet before he flings the badge away, let him consider. 
 The good that he can do in this way is surely doubtful. 
 If he assist the Guelfs, must not the Ghibellins suffer, 
 who, after all, are much about as good and much about 
 as bad as their antagonists ? Or if Ghibellin rule be an 
 evil, is he to undertake the destruction of every evil in 
 the world ? There is no evil without its use — nature itself 
 destroys as well as creates, and even out of corruption 
 
52 2 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 produces beauty and life. Was it not througli their 
 very misery that he came to love the people ? And 
 then to help mankind a little, is he bound to ruin him- 
 self utterly ? Let every enterprising soul push on 
 towards its own end, and mankind perhaps may follow 
 all the sooner. Then, too, his capacities of enjoyment 
 are so vast. Life is so wild and sweet. And is he to 
 lose all that mankind may gain a Utile ? 
 
 Yet others have renounced all this and more — sages, 
 champions, martyrs — and have done so fearlessly. Yes ; 
 but then they had some assurance which made it easy 
 to give up the world ; he has not. What was true and 
 right for them, may not be true and right for him. 
 There is no abstract right after all, but each individual 
 must obey the law of his own nature and circumstances^ 
 And reflecting thus, Sordello perceives that Eight and 
 Wrong, Sorrow and Joy, Beauty and Ugliness, Virtue 
 and Vice, Great and Small — in fine, all qualities of 
 things may be but modes of our present limited sphere 
 of existence ; and he feels himself quite out of Time and 
 the world, while 
 
 " The intellectual power 
 Goes sounding on a dim and perilous way." 
 
 He discovers that all these qualities are expressions of 
 the material limitations of life — expressions suited to 
 our various faculties ; but they do not belong to the 
 mind in itself, nor are they binding in eternity as they 
 are in time. Now he discovers all, for he sees that the 
 soul must stoop to the limitations of life — must, for 
 example, recognise and yield to all the laws which affect 
 the body. But how is the Soul to stoop ? By brutaliz- 
 
Mr Browning's " Sordello." 523 
 
 ing itself and blinding itself to every object except that 
 one — beauty it may be, or fame, or knowledge, or power 
 ■ — which becomes its end for this life ? May no soul 
 ever see All, the great Past and Future, and the small 
 Present, see all and yet be saved by pursuing the one 
 path prescribed to it by Love : 
 
 " As the king-bird with ages on his plumes 
 Travels to die in his ancestral glooms." 
 
 But where shall we find that Love ? Why, surely 
 
 Sordello had found it when he first felt that the cause of 
 
 the people was his own ? All is resolved then into the 
 
 question. Does he decide to save the people or no ? 
 
 And here Mr Browning, several of whose earlier poems 
 
 are declarations of mankind's need of God, and of God 
 
 in Christ, comes forward, and speaking for Sordello, 
 
 tells us that the great requirement of his nature was 
 
 that of a Power above him, and beyond all possible 
 
 rivalry, which he could love though he cared for none of 
 
 the things which men ordinarily love, and of a Power 
 
 which should represent that Supreme Power, and having 
 
 equal authority yet be nearer to him; in a word, his need 
 
 was that of a revelation of the Divine in the Human, of 
 
 the Christ of God. And now Sordello's end is come — 
 
 " What has Sordello found ? 
 Or can his spirit go the mighty round, 
 End where poor Eglamor begun ? as says 
 Old fable, the two eagles went two ways 
 About the world : where, in the midst, they met, 
 Though on a shifting waste of sand, men set 
 Jove's temple. Quick, what has Sordello found ? 
 For they approach— approach — that foot's rebound. . . 
 Palma? No, Salinguerra though in mail ; 
 They mount, have reached the threshold, dash the veil 
 
524 Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 Aside — and you divine who sat there dead, 
 Under his foot the badge : still, Palma said, 
 A triumph lingering in the wide eyes, 
 I'SI^Wider than some spent swimmer's if he spies 
 jEtelp from above in his extreme despair. 
 And, head far back on shoulder thrust, turns there 
 With short, quick passionate cry : as Palma prest 
 In one great kiss her lips upon his breast 
 It beat. By this, the hermit-bee has stopped 
 His day's toil at Goito : the new-cropped 
 Dead vine- leaf answers, now 'tis eve, he bit, 
 Twirled so, and filed all day : the mansion's fit 
 God counselled for. As easy guess the word 
 That passed betwixt them and become the third 
 To the soft small unfrighted bee, as tax 
 Him with one fault— so, no remembrance racks 
 Of the stone maidens and the font of stone. 
 He, creeping through the crevice, leaves alone. 
 Alas, my friend — alas Sordello, whom 
 Anon they laid within that old font-tomb — 
 And yet again, alas ! 
 
 Sordello's life has been a lamentable failure'; yet 
 because in that last moment he flung the imperial 
 baldric below his feet, and aspired towards a great cause 
 above and beyond all selfish interests, it has been a 
 failure containing within it the promise of ultimate 
 fulfilment in some other and higher life which is to 
 come. 
 
 Little more remains to tell. Salinguerra's dreams 
 once again end in failure. Once again he becomes a 
 servant of the family of Ecelin, and, indeed, by and by, 
 marries the youngest daughter of the house, under the 
 pressure of a political necessity. Children are born 
 to him, and as years go on he dwindles down to a mere 
 showy, turbulent soldier. Finally, having quarrelled 
 with the Venetians he is captured, fat and florid, at a 
 
Mr Browning's " Sordello." 525 
 
 banquet in Ferrara, and, now eighty years old, is carried 
 to Venice for a show, and allowed to stroll about the 
 streets and squares, not much cared for by anyone but 
 the children who know he is a magnifico. Young Ecelin 
 meanwhile becomes the Ghibellin chief, and makes a 
 name for himself famous in history by unexampled 
 atrocities and tyranny. 
 
 And all are gone — Ecelin and Taurello, Adelaide, and 
 Palma, and Sordello. Only some few verses of the once 
 famous singer may still be heard. All are gone save 
 Eglamor, whose spiritual face appeared among those of 
 the ghostly listeners to this poem of Mr Browning. He, 
 the enthusiastic worshipper at the altar of poetry, has 
 been going up from heaven to heaven of glory, still a 
 worshipping soul of others nobler than himself. 
 
 " Oh, strange to see how, despite ill-reports 
 Disuse, some wear of years, that face retained 
 Its joyous look of love ! " 
 
 + BT 
 
 lUESBnLL AND SPEAE3, PKINTEES, EDISBUBOH.