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 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013353333 
 
ESSAYS 
 
 BY THE lATE 
 
 GEORGE BRIMLEY, M.A. 
 
 ITBttAKIAN OP TEINIIY COLLEGE, CAMBEIDGE 
 
 WITH AN INTE O DUCTION, BY 
 
 R. H. STODDARD. 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 
 RuDD & Carleton, 130 Grand Street, 
 
 Cambeidge : Macmillan & Co. 
 
 M DCCC LXI. 
 
 7 
 
h^.'^'i^'^ \ 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Page 
 INTEODUCTION ...... 7 
 
 TENNVrSON'S POEMS ..... 13 
 
 woedswoeth's poems .... 131 
 
 poetey and ceiticism .... 227 
 
 the angel in the house . . . 251 
 
 CAELYLe's LIFE OF STEELING . . . 293 
 
 "ESMOND" 311 
 
 "MT NOVEL" 827 
 
 "bleak house" 351 
 
 " westwaed ho ! " 367 
 
 Wilson's "noctes ambkosian^" . . 379 
 
 p'a " T>r»aTT'Ti7i? "ptttt nQn"PTTV " ,, ^ 389 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 There is a fashioa in books, as in many other 
 things, and, between ourselves, it is often prepos- 
 terous and unjust. Most of us, I fancy, hold he- 
 retical opinions concerning the merits of some 
 popular author, — Dickens, Thackeray, Everett, 
 or possibly Cobb ; think him vastly overrated by 
 his admirers ; wonder how he ever attained his 
 eminence — in short see nothing in him. We may 
 or may not be right in thus reversing the judgment 
 of the public — (on the whole I think we are apt 
 to be wrong, for I have never read any book which 
 the world united in pronouncing great, without 
 feeling that the vox Populi was the vox Dei in 
 such cases) — but that we do so, wlienever we feel 
 inclined, is certain. We are more apt, however, 
 to question tha justice of popular opinion with re- 
 gard to those who are, or whom we conceive to 
 be, slighted and neglected, than to those who have 
 reaped, or are reaping, the reward of fame. It is 
 
VIU INTEODUCTION. 
 
 easier to erect new idols than to cast down old 
 ones, and far more graceful, and generous. 
 
 " Full many a flower is bom to blush unseen. 
 And -waste its sweetness on the desert air." 
 
 This is especially true in Literature, which is 
 merely a fashion with the many, though a passion 
 with the few. Here now is a little book, which 
 has passed through two editions in England, — a 
 collection of essays, which, in my opinion, is wor- 
 thy of being better known than it is. The subjects 
 of the essays, or more properly speaking reviews, 
 are some of the most popular authors of the time 
 — Wordsworth, Tennyson, Thackeray, Dickens, 
 Bulwer, and Kingsley. The article on Tennyson's 
 poetry, originally published in the " Cambridge 
 Essays " for 1855 — is the best that has yet ap- 
 peared on that prolific theme of criticism, at any 
 rate it is the best I have read, and I have read 
 many — a searching but genial analysis of his 
 wonderfully artistic genius. You feel while read- 
 ing it that the critic has penetrated into the sub- 
 tlest workings of the poet's mind ; that he fully 
 comprehends the manifold beauties and ' meanings 
 of his poetry ; that he is capable of sitting in judg- 
 ment upon him. The papers on Wordsworth, and 
 " The Angel in the House," are delightfully writ- 
 ten ; the latter is especially noticeable, for its del- 
 
INTRODUCTION. IX 
 
 icate insight into the universal theme of poetry — 
 Love. Indeed, all the articles have an interest 
 independent of the books which called them forth ; 
 even the least important has a permanent value of 
 its own. 
 
 A few words of their author. 
 
 George Brimley was born at Cambridge, Eng- 
 land, on the 29th of December, 1819. Of his 
 childhood and youth no account has reached me. 
 Shortly before reaching his nineteenth year — in 
 October, 1838 — he entered Trinity College, Cam- 
 bridge, as an undergraduate, and resided there 
 till 1841, when he was elected scholar. The fail- 
 ure of his health compelled him to relinquish his 
 purpose of becoming a candidate for University 
 Honors, and was the cause of his failure in ob- 
 taining a College Scholarship. The Master and 
 Seniors, however, showed their sense of his merit 
 by conferring upon him the office of Librarian. 
 " From this time," says the editor of his Eemains, 
 " he continued to reside within the walls of the 
 College, where, with ample leisure and opportuni- 
 ties for study, with the society of tried friends and 
 in the neighborhood of home, his life was made as 
 happy as life can be without health. 
 
 For the last six years he contributed articles 
 
 regularly to the Spectator, and occasionally also 
 
 to Fraser^s Magazine; an employment which 
 
 suited him under the circurnstances better than 
 
 1* 
 
■X INTRODUCTION. 
 
 any other, as his bodily feebleness forbade him to 
 attempt any work of scope and difficulty corres- 
 ponding to his mental powers. To this, his ap- 
 pointed task, he devoted himself with conscien- 
 tious diligence. Papers found after his decease 
 show the pains he took to qualify himself for the 
 responsible duty of a literary judge by careful 
 study and elaborate analysis of the books he was 
 about to criticise. Undertaken in this spirit, his 
 work interested and amused him, while at the same 
 time he was cheered and gratified by the attention 
 and admiration which his articles received. In 
 this way also he came to reckon among the num- 
 ber of his friends some of the most eminent liter- 
 ary men of their time. He made no enemies, be- 
 cause, though he never hesitated to state what he 
 believed to be right, his own sensitive and affec- 
 tionate natui'e guarded him from the wanton in- 
 fliction of pain upon others. Seldom indeed did 
 a petulant sarcasm or an inconsiderate jest fall 
 from his pen. Belonging to no party and to no 
 clique, he was eminently impartial." 
 
 He died on the 29th of May 1857, and was 
 buried in the new Cemetery at Cambridge. 
 
 R. H. S. 
 
TENNYSON'S POEMS. 
 
ESSAYS. 
 
 TENJVYSON' S POEMS. 
 
 An essay upon a poet's writings may take one of 
 two forms. It may either confine itself to an 
 analysis of those writings with a view to discover 
 the source of their power over the sympathies of 
 men, or it may treat of the place the poet occupies 
 in the literature of his time and country. The 
 latter plan requires not only more knowledge and 
 greater power of comprehensive survey on the part 
 of the writer, but readers who are thoroughly ac- 
 quainted both with the poet under review and all 
 those with whom he is brought into comparison. 
 This volume might doubtless find a sufficient num- 
 ber of readers thus qualified, among the class to 
 which it is particularly addressed ; and a com- 
 parison of Mr. Tennyson's genius and productions 
 
14 ESSAYS. 
 
 with those of Byron, Shelley, Scott, Keats, and 
 Wordsworth, would have abundant interest if it 
 were executed with ability and judgment. The 
 motives which, in spite of these reasons, have in- 
 duced a preference for the former and easier plan, 
 are twofold. In the first place, the writer has no 
 confidence in his own ability for a philosophical 
 estimate of the essential characteristics of the poe- 
 try of the first and second quarters of the present 
 century ; he fears running into vague generalities 
 and .dogmatical assertions, where there is not 
 space for testing his opinions by quotation and 
 analysis of detail and construction. In the second 
 place, his own experience leads him to think that 
 analytical criticism of Mr. Tennyson's poems is 
 likely to be interesting and serviceable to a large 
 class of readers, though, of course, it can have little 
 charm for persons who by talent and study are bet- 
 ter qualified than he is to write such a criticism 
 themselves. It has often happened to him to meet 
 with persons of unquestioned talent and good taste, 
 who profess themselves unable to understand why 
 Mr. Tennyson is placed so high among poets as his 
 admirers are inclined to place him ; who say they 
 find him obscure and affected, — the writer for a 
 
tejvjvvsojVS poems. 15 
 
 class rather than for a people. The object of this 
 paper is to shew that we, who do admire him, have 
 a reason for our faith ; that we are not actuated by 
 blind preference for the man who echoes merely 
 our own class feelings and opinions in forms that 
 suit our particular tastes and modes of thought, — 
 but that Mr. Tennyson is a poet of large compass, 
 of profound insight, of finished skill. We find him 
 possessing the clearest insight into our modern 
 life, one who discerns its rich poetical resources, 
 who tells us what we are and may be.; how we 
 can live free, joyous, and harmonious lives ; what 
 grand elements of thought, feeling, and action lie 
 around us ; what a field there is for the various 
 activities fermenting within us. We do not call 
 him a Shakspeare, or even a Chaucer ; but what 
 Shakspeare and Chaucer did for the ages they 
 lived in, Mr. Tennyson is doing for our age, after 
 his measure. He is shewing it to us as an age in 
 which an Englishman may live a man's life, and 
 be neither a mere man of business, nor a mere 
 man of pleasure, but may find in his affections, 
 studies, business, and relaxations scope for his 
 spiritual faculties. 
 
 The main difiBculty of the task has lain in the 
 
16 ESSA VS. 
 
 fact that the poems of Mr. Tennyson are never 
 repetitions, in the great variety both of form and 
 matter they exhibit. It has been impossible to 
 do without special mention of a great number of 
 poems, and the result is necessarily somewhat 
 fragmentary and discursive. It turns out rather 
 a commentary than an essay ; but its object will 
 be answered, and the expectations of the writer 
 amply satisfied, if it helps only a few persons to 
 enjoy Tennyson more than they have hitherto 
 done, and to understand better the ground of the 
 claim that is made for him of belonging to the 
 great poets. Little more has been attempted with 
 the three longest poems. The Princess, In Memo- 
 riam, and Maud, than to pl-ace the reader in the 
 true point of view, and examine certain prejudices 
 against them which have obtained currency among 
 us. Indeed, that was all that was absolutely nec- 
 essary, as the hostile opinions have seldom been 
 expressed unaccompanied by admiration of the 
 beauties of detail in which these poems abound. 
 
 Mr. Tennyson published his first volume of po- 
 ems in 1830,* when he was an undergraduate of 
 
 » There is, we belieTe, an earlier volume of poems pub- 
 lished by Alfred and Charles Tennyson, but we have never seen 
 
TEJVJVrSOJV'S POEMS. 17 
 
 Trinity College, Cambridge. It must always pos- 
 sess considerable interest for those who read and 
 admire his maturer productions ; but, with few 
 exceptions, the poems it contains owe their main 
 attraction to the fact that they are the earliest 
 efforts of one who has gained a position of which 
 they afforded no certaib promise. Many of them 
 are exquisitely musical — great command of the 
 resources of metre is manifest — and a richness of 
 phraseology everywhere abounds. But substantial 
 interest they certainly want, because they present 
 no phenomena of nature or of human life with 
 force and distinctness, tell no story, express no 
 passion or clear thought, depict no person, thing, 
 or scene that the mind can recognize for a reality. 
 They are as far as possible from what might be 
 expected of one who describes the poet as 
 
 Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, 
 The lore of loTe 
 
 and assigns to him the ministry of Wisdom, of 
 whom he writes — 
 
 a copy; and the volume of 1830 is sufficiently juvenile for a 
 starting-point. 
 
18 ESSAYS. 
 
 No sword 
 Of wrath her right arm hurled, 
 But one poor poet's scroll, and with his word 
 She shook the world 
 
 So far from shaking the world, they are incapa- 
 ble of raising emotions in a»solitary heart ; so far 
 from being instruments of wisdom, they scarcely 
 reach the altitudes of ordinary sense. Take the 
 first poem of the series, for example, Claribel. 
 It is not quite certain what the precise feeling of 
 the melody is, — whether it expresses a grief that, 
 finding no consolation in its memories or hopes, 
 is deepened by the sweet sights and sounds of the 
 quiet churchyard ; or a grief that finds in these a 
 soothing influence. Taking, however, the latter 
 as the more probable theory, though no poem 
 ought to admit of such a doubt, how singularly 
 this treatment of the subject eliminates all that is 
 most striking and affecting in it. If we mourn 
 the early removal of one who was dear and love- 
 ly in her life, and whoso memory lends a softening 
 charm to the spot where her body lies, it is on 
 lier gentle and affectionate nature, on her grace 
 and beauty, that the mind loves to linger in visit- 
 
TEJVJVVSOJV'S POEMS. 19 
 
 ing her grave ; it is these that make the place 
 interesting, the recollection of these that consoles 
 us who are deprived of her sweet presence. Or 
 if the mind takes a loftier flight, it looks away 
 from the past, and from the grave, to that bright 
 world of spirits, in which the beauty and excel- 
 lence that were so soon blighted here reach their 
 consummate flower, and bloom through eternity in 
 the still garden of souls. But Mr. Tennyson says 
 nothing of all this : his memory of the dead forms 
 only a medium through which the living sights 
 and sounds of nature round the grave are har- 
 monized in tone with his own sadness, while the 
 stillness and sweetness of the scene soothe his 
 sorrow into a calm repose ; the quiet beauty of 
 the churchyard blends with the image of the lost 
 one, and he thinks of her hereafter in unutterable 
 peace, amid the songs of birds, the voice of the 
 solemn oak-tree, the slow regular changes from 
 morn to noon, from noon to midnight. This is to 
 treat human life from its least impressive point of 
 view, — to feel its sorrows and consolations in their 
 least substantial and abiding power. It is, how- 
 ever, a real point of view ; and both sorrow and 
 consolation will sometimes assume this form spon- 
 
20 ESSAYS. 
 
 taneouslj, though seldom so completely to the 
 exclusion of more direct and powerful considera- 
 tions, as in the poem of Claribel. 
 
 The poems inscribed with the names of women 
 would furnish other examples of this perverse, 
 unreal treatment of subjects capable of interest- 
 ing the sympathies. There is in none of them any 
 presentation of those distinct traits by which we 
 recognize human beings, no action or speech, no 
 description of mind, person, or history, but a se- 
 ries of epithets and similes which convey nothing, 
 because we have not the image of the thing which 
 they are intended to illustrate. Other poems are 
 uninteresting from their subjects, such as The 
 Merman and Mermaid, The Sea Fairies, The 
 Kraken, The Dyin^ Swan, &c. No music of 
 verse, no pictorial power, will enable a reader to 
 care for such creatures of the fancy ; otherwise, 
 both music and pictorial power are there. How 
 clear the painting is here — 
 
 Slow sailed the weary mariners, and saw 
 Between the green brink and the running foam 
 White limbs unrobed in a, crystal air. 
 Sweet faces, rounded arms, and bosoms prest 
 To little harps of gold. 
 
TEJVJVVSOJ\''S POEMS. -1 
 
 How musical and vivid — 
 
 There would be neither moon nor star, 
 But the wave would make music above us afar ; 
 Low thunder and light, in the magic night, 
 Neither moon nor star. 
 
 Though such subjects would seem wilfully chos- 
 en to avoid reality and human interest, they shew 
 throughout great power of painting scenery, and 
 of associating it with the feelings of animated 
 beings ; and are in fact pictures of peculiar char- 
 acter, in which the objects grouped and the quali- 
 ties attributed to them are viewed through the 
 medium of the beings associated with the scene. 
 Thus they become dramatically descriptive, and 
 display the germ of a principle of landscape 
 painting which Mr. Tennyson has in his later 
 poems brought to great perfection, and largely 
 employed. The principle consists in a combina- 
 tion of landscape and figures in which the land- 
 scape is not merely background to the figures, or 
 the figures animated objects in the landscape, but 
 the two are dynamically related, so that the land- 
 scape is described as seen and felt by the persons 
 
j2 ESSA rs. 
 
 of the scene, under the influence of some emotion 
 which selects objects congenial to its own moods, 
 and modifies their generic appearances, — if the 
 word generic may be used to express the appear- 
 ance objects present to a mind in its ordinary, 
 unexcited state. And thus we get a landscape 
 which is at once ideal and real — a collection of 
 actual images of external nature, grouped and 
 colored by a dominant idea ; and the whole com- 
 position derives from this principle a harmony 
 and a force of expression which, whether the 
 principle aim be landscape-painting or the deline- 
 ation of human emotion, produce that dramatic 
 unity demanded in works of art. Employed as 
 the principle is in this early volume upon scenery 
 that is strange and upon emotions that are not 
 human, it yet shows its power of producing a 
 picture throughout harmoniously conceived, and 
 evidences a capacity for concentration that only 
 needs substantially interesting material to work 
 upon. 
 
 The poem which, better than any other in the 
 first series, exhibits the power of concentrating the 
 imagination upon the subject, to the exclusion of 
 an extraneous and discordant train of thought, 
 
TEJVJVVSOJY'S POEMS. 23 
 
 and at the same time furnishes an admirable in- 
 stance of dramatic landscape-painting, or passion 
 reflecting itself on landscape, is Mariana. As 
 the physiologists tell us that the organs of the 
 higher animals are found in an undeveloped state 
 in those of lower type, we may look upon this 
 poem as a foreshadowing of a kind of poetry that, 
 in the later volumes, will be found in full perfec- 
 tion. In Mariana, the landscape details are pre- 
 sented with the minute distinctness with which 
 they would strike upon the morbid sensibility of a 
 woman abandoned to lonely misery, whose atten- 
 tion is distracted by no cares, pleasures, or satis- 
 fied affections. To the painter in search of the 
 picturesque, or a happy observer, seeing the sunny 
 side of everything, or a utilitarian looking for the 
 productive resources of the scene, the whole as- 
 pect of the fen-scenery would be totally different. 
 But selected, grouped, and qualified by epithets, 
 as the natural objects of the landscape are in the 
 poem, they tell of the years of pain and weari- 
 ness associated with them in the mind of the 
 wretched Mariana, and produce an intense impres- 
 sion of hopeless suffering, which no other treat- 
 ment of the single figure could have produced. 
 
24 ESS^ VS. 
 
 The minute enumeration of detail would be a 
 fault in a mere landscape-artist, whose object was 
 to describe a natural scene. It is an excellence 
 here, because no other means could so forcibly 
 mark the isolation, the morbid sensitiveness, and 
 the mind vacant of all but misery ; because, used 
 thus, it becomes eminently dramatic, — the land- 
 scape expresses the passion of the mind which 
 contemplates it, and the passion gives unity and 
 moral interest to the landscape. There is not, 
 throughout the poem, a single epithet which be- 
 longs to the objects irrespective of the story with 
 which the scene is associated, or a single detail 
 introduced which does not aid the general impres- 
 sion of the poem. They mark either the pain 
 with which Mariana looks at things, or the long 
 neglect to which she has been abandoned, or some 
 peculiarity of time and place which marks the 
 morbid minuteness of her attention to objects. If 
 the moss is blackened, the flower-pots thickly 
 crusted, the nails rusted, the sheds broken, the 
 latch clinking, the thatch weeded and worn, not 
 one of these epithets but tells of long neglect, and 
 prolongs the key-note of sad and strange loneli- 
 ness. If 
 
TJSjyjVTSOJVS POEMS. 25 
 
 She could not look on the sweet heaven. 
 Either at morn or eventide ; — 
 
 this epithet, startling at first from its apparent in- 
 trusion of the frame of mind in which the neaven 
 is sweet, heightens the impression of that tear- 
 blinded misery to which the light in its softest 
 mildness is intolerable. Even at night, when the 
 sky is enveloped in ' thickest dark,' when the flats 
 are ' glooming,' she can only glance across the 
 casement window. Her sleep is broken by sounds 
 that painfully recal the desolate scene of daylight ; 
 her dreams are forlorn, and stamped with the 
 hopeless monotony of her lot ; and she wakes to 
 shudder in a cold, windy, cheerless morn. The 
 moat that surrounds her prison is no bright spark- 
 ling stream ; clustered marsh mosses creep over 
 its blackened and sleeping waters, stifling with 
 their loathsome death in life the most active and 
 joyous of nature's visible powers, and giving to 
 the captive a striking emblem of her own choked 
 and stagnant existence. The poplar hard by is 
 never in repose, shaking like a sick man in a fe- 
 ver ; for leagues round spreads the ' level waste, 
 
 the rounding grey,' with no object, no variety, to 
 2 
 
26 ESSAYS. 
 
 interest the attention. What moves, moves al- 
 ways, harassing the nerves, — what is at rest 
 seems dead, striking cold the heart. It is need- 
 less to pursue this analysis throughout a poem so 
 familiar. The effect is felt by the reader with 
 hardly a consciousness of the skill of the writer, 
 or of the intense dramatic concentration implied 
 in such employment of language. If expression 
 were the highest aim of poetry, Mariana in the 
 Moated Grange must be counted among the most 
 perfect of poems, in spite of an occasional weak- 
 ness of phrase. But almost perfect as the execu- 
 tion is, the subject is presented too purely as a 
 picture of hopeless, unrelieved suffering, to de- 
 serve the name of a great poem. The suffering 
 is, so to speak, distinct and individual, but the 
 woman who suffers is vague and indistinct; we 
 have no interest in her, because we know nothing 
 about her story or herself in detail ; she is not a 
 wronged and deserted woman, but an abstract 
 generalization of wronged and deserted woman- 
 hood ; all the individuality is bestowed upon the 
 landscape in which she is placed. This again, as 
 was said of Claribel, is to view human life from 
 its least affecting and impressive side. 
 
TEJVJYYSOJVS POEMS. 27 
 
 The task that lies before us will not allow us to 
 dwell longer on the poems of the first volume. 
 Taken as a whole, they indicate that Mr. Tenny- 
 son set out with the determination to be lio copy- 
 ist, and to abstain from setting to verse the mere 
 personal emotions of his own actual life. Even 
 the few poems that did express personal emotion 
 he has excluded from his collected edition. 
 
 To hold converse with all forms 
 Of the manysided mind, — 
 
 to present not feelings, but the objects which ex- 
 cite feelings, must have been very distinctly his 
 aim at this period. And it is worth noticing, that 
 though he lived at this time in the centre of the 
 most distinguisfied young men of his University, 
 his poems present but faint evidence of this. He 
 seems to have deliberately abstained from any at- 
 tempt to paint the actual human life about him, or 
 to give a poetical form to such impressions of real 
 life as he might have obtained from reading. No 
 one who knows the men with whom he lived, or 
 who has read his later poems, can doubt that the 
 sympathies with human emotion, the noble views 
 
28 ESSAYS. 
 
 of human character and destiny, that distinguish 
 his mature poems, must have then existed in the 
 man ; and we must therefore infer that he did not 
 feel his mastery over the instruments of his art 
 sufficient to justify him in delineating human life. 
 His knowledge of the modes in which emotion 
 and character manifest themselves, must have ap- 
 peared to him too imperfect to attempt their exhi- 
 bition in rhythmical forms — these forms being no 
 mere conventional arrangement of words to please 
 the ear, but the expression of the delight of the 
 poet at the beauty and completeness of the pic- 
 tures vividly present to his imagination ; and in 
 their highest symbolic value, representing the 
 poet's insight into the moral meaning of life, and 
 his vision of a perfect order and harmony in the 
 universe, — of the triumph of gooS over evil. To 
 attain skill in the employment of rhythmical 
 forms, — to sing nobly and naturally, to form a 
 style capable of musically expressing his ideas, as 
 ripening intellect and enlarged experience should 
 supply him with ideas demanding musical expres- 
 sion, may be set down as the aim, more or less 
 conscious, of this first poetical series. Probably 
 to the avoidance of subjects beyond his powers, 
 
TEJVJV¥SOJVS POEMS. 29 
 
 to the careful elaboration of his style, the world 
 may be indebted for the perfection of his later po- 
 ems. Had he begun with Balder or Festus, he 
 would not have afterwards produced The Mort 
 d' Arthur, The Gardener's Daughter, Locksley 
 Hall, and In Memoriam. Mariana in the Moated 
 Grange marks the highest point of the first flight, 
 and in that the power of the artist is shewn, in 
 the complete presentation of a limited and pecu- 
 liar view of the subject, rather than in the ethical 
 or poetical value of the conception. 
 
 Mr. Tennyson's second volume bears the date 
 of 1833. It contains some poems which their 
 author has not thought worthy of preservation, 
 and some others which take their place among his 
 collected poems, considerably altered. But char- 
 acterised as a whole, in comparison with the first 
 volume, it marks a surprising advance, both in 
 conception and execution. Mariana, and perhaps 
 Recollections of the Arabian Nights, are the only 
 poems of the first series that would have had a 
 chance of being remembered for their own merits, 
 and they are both admirably executed, rather than 
 interesting. But in the second volume. The Mil- 
 ler's Daughter, JEnone, The Palace of Art, The 
 
30 ESSAYS. 
 
 May Queen, aud The Lotus Eaters would, even 
 in their original forms, have been enduring memo- 
 rials of a rare poetic faculty. In The Miller's 
 Daughter and Tlie May Queen the affections of 
 our every-day life, and the scenery with which 
 they associate themselves, become for the first time 
 the subject of Mr. Tennyson's art ; and we ap- 
 preciate the important principle of treating land- 
 scape as dynamically related to emotion when we 
 see it applied to feelings which powerfully affect 
 us, and with whose action we are sufficiently fa- 
 miliar to sympathize. In the two Marianas this 
 principle is carried thoroughly out, but under con- 
 ditions which interfere with our hearty enjoyment 
 of the poems. Partly, no doubt, the contempla- 
 tion of'unmixed pain that serves no disciplinal 
 aim is painful, however exquisitely it may be de- 
 lineated, and hardly consistent with the delight 
 we expect from every work of art ; but the ab- 
 sence from both the Marianas of any but the 
 faintest traces of the previous story, and of any 
 traits of individual character, has more to do with 
 this want of popular interest. They are, as was 
 said before, not women whose history and charac- 
 ter we can realize sufficiently to care about them, 
 
TEJVJVVSOJVS POEMS. 31 
 
 but abstract types ; and the consequence of this 
 is, that the landscape element predominates too 
 much. Instead of serving simply to reflect and 
 render legible the misery of the women, it be- 
 comes itself the principal object, and the women 
 are lost in its details. Besides, we feel that no 
 human life could possibly endure a loneliness and 
 wretchedness so unmixed as are depicted, and that 
 these pictures are not true because they leave out 
 elements essential to the real drama, which they 
 present in part. But in The Miller^s Daughter 
 there is a story which tells the leading incidents 
 of a life, — there are real persons presented, with 
 their distinguishing traits; and the scenery, 
 though intimately blended with the life, and en- 
 tering as an indispensable element in the story, 
 because indissolubly connected with the memories 
 of the speaker, becomes subordinate, and no longer 
 overrides the human interest. And it is only in 
 this way, when emotion is presented in connection 
 with the incidents out of which it rises, and with 
 the persons who experience it, and when the 
 scenery is made to reflect, not simple emotion, but 
 the emotion of distinct persons, that an interesting 
 poem can be written, and the aff'ections of the 
 
32 ESSArS. 
 
 reader sincerely touched. So long as the emotion 
 is presented without a distinct conception of the 
 person experiencing it, and the cause why, and 
 the scenery is presented through the medium of 
 this abstract emotion, as it may be called, the skill 
 of the artist may be admired, but he will not be a 
 popular poet ; and a poet who does not write at 
 the heart of a people is no poet at all. The Mil- 
 ler's Daughter and The May Queen at once es- 
 tablished Mr. Tennyson's capacity for becoming a 
 popular poet, and made him one within a limited 
 circle. Their charm consists in the real interest 
 of lives moved by the simplest affections and the 
 simplest enjoyments, and in the skill with which 
 these lives are presented as complete dramas, 
 though each poem is extended in time only through 
 an ordinary conversation. It is in each case a 
 life reviewed by the speaker under the emotion 
 that belongs to a particular moment; and the 
 golden calm that rests upon the one, and the sweet 
 innocence that shines through the other, belong 
 naturally to the circumstances under which the 
 reminiscences are uttered. Nothing of truth is 
 sacrificed to ideality, but such ideality as gives 
 both unity of coloring throughout, and guides 
 
TEj\rj\rrsojv's poems. ss 
 
 the selection of details, is the true result of the 
 emotion of each speaker. Thus the charm of 
 completeness, which is the aim of narrative, is 
 united with the power over the sympathies pos- 
 sessed by the spontaneous outpouring of feeling ; 
 and a lyrical flow of emotion is made to hold in 
 solution, as it were, the constituents of a drama 
 or a novel. 
 
 But it must not be supposed, because these two 
 poems have been contrasted with the Marianas and 
 shewn to have more power over the affections, 
 more of the elements necessary to popularity, that 
 the Marianas are failures of the poet to work out 
 his own intentions. Neither Mariana professes 
 to be a tale of human passion, with its alterna- 
 tions of joy and sorrow. Had the excitement of 
 pity, or any mere emotion, been the object of the 
 poet, we must think him obtuse not to know that 
 his mode of presenting the tale would but feebly 
 answer his purpose. We see by The Miller's 
 Daughter and the Mai/ Queen that he can move 
 us to tears, or fill us with serene delight, if such 
 were his object. But if we revert to the second 
 Mariana, transported to an Italian landscape, 
 
 we see her as in a picture, lovely in her lonely 
 
 2* 
 
34 ESSA VS. 
 
 wretchedness; we see the landscape round her 
 ministering torture to her heart and senses, that 
 long for quiet sound and shadow. We go with 
 her in her dream to her breezy mountain home, 
 — we wake with her to the torturing glare of the 
 blinding noon-day heat, — we breath with her as 
 she leans at evening on her balcony, while Hes- 
 per sheds divine solace on her soul, and coolness 
 and soft distant sounds bring a semblance of 
 repose. In that dream of home and of the past, 
 in the recurrence of a kind of comfort in the cool 
 evening, in her prayer to the Madonna, and even 
 in the distinct picture of her beauty, we recog- 
 nize the superiority to the first Mariana, and the 
 growth of Mr. Tennyson's genius. But one touch 
 of grief that should connect itself with a definite 
 incident, or a person brought clearly before the 
 mind, would excite more pity, more affection to 
 her, and more indignation against her false lover. 
 She would walk out of her frame, and become a 
 woman with a history and with relations to the 
 common world, and our emotional sympathies 
 would at once flow forth towards her. At present 
 it is the perceptive faculties that are occupied with 
 her, which are thronged with images making up a 
 
TEJVJVrSOJV^S POEMS. 85 
 
 picture. No doubt the picture is intelligible 
 enough for the imagination of the reader to sup- 
 ply the history without difficulty in its general 
 character, but the mind has no strong grasp of 
 what is apprehended only in its general character ;. 
 and the poem, as it stands before us, remains a 
 beautiful picture, rather than an affecting love story, 
 and this though it is the crisis of a thousand affect- 
 ing love stories. If Mr. Tennyson had chosen to 
 stamp that individuality of character and incident 
 which gives its charm to life, and to the fiction 
 which aims at presenting real life, we have evi- 
 dence that he could, at this time, have done it. 
 Instead of that he tells us no more of his Italian 
 Mariana than if she were painted for us in a pic- 
 ture by Millais, except that the poem gives us 
 changes of time and scenery as a compensation 
 for that vividness of presentation denied to words. 
 It is the development from the painter to the poet, — 
 from the man who can make beautiful pictures to 
 the man who can present human life, with all its 
 activities of noble thought and pure affection, 
 and, in presenting it, can justify its being to the 
 heart and reason, that marks Mr. Tennyson's 
 poetic course. 
 
S6 ESSAYS. 
 
 But through the greater portion of the second 
 volume the painter predominates. We have no 
 poems to place by the side of 77ie Miller''s 
 Daughter and The May Queen. The Lady of 
 Shalott, founded on an incident in King Arthur, 
 is so treated as to eliminate all the human inter- 
 est of the original story, and the process gives us 
 a being whose existence passes without emotion, 
 without changes, without intelligible motive for 
 living on, without hope or fear here or hereafter. 
 Nothing remains but the faint shadow of humani- 
 ty, from which life, and motion, and substance have 
 departed. All this price to gain perfect serenity, 
 and some new phase of being for the reflective fac- 
 ulty to make what it can of, — perhaps to cause 
 our human heart to beat the stronger for reaction ! 
 Considered merely as a picture, The Lady of 
 Shalott has a serene beauty, and clear landscape 
 features, that only make one more angry that so 
 much skill in presenting objects should be em- 
 ployed upon a subject that can only amuse the 
 imagination. 
 
 The poem to which, in subsequent editions, the 
 name of Fatima is given, cannot be charged with 
 want of passion ; but, like the Marianas, it leaves 
 
TEJVJVVSOJ\rS POEMS. 87 
 
 the reader too much to supply in the way of story 
 and person. It would be doing it injustice to 
 call it the concentrated essence of Byron's Gul- 
 nares, Zuleikas, et id genus omne ; for Byron 
 never reached any point near this ' withering 
 might ' of love. But as it stands, it is too frag- 
 mentary, — a mere study, though so finished as to 
 make one long for the poem which should have 
 developed it. One would think that Mr. Tenny- 
 son must have been smitten with a determinate 
 aversion to popularity, and, at the same time, 
 have resolved to shew what a power of intense 
 passionate expression he was master of, when he 
 left such a poem without beginning, middle, or 
 end. Perhaps, however, in his opinion, this over- 
 mastering Eastern passion, that, like a fever, dries 
 up and exhausts mind and body, has no phases 
 capable of forming into a story or drama. It 
 may be the very essence of this type of love that 
 it should not rise by degrees, by half-confidences, 
 by all the pleasant stages of Western love, but 
 burst forth at once into full consciousness, and 
 know no changes but the fiercest extremes of 
 tenderness and exhaustion. In that case, its true 
 poetic expression would be given in the passion- 
 
83 ESSAVS. 
 
 ate utterance of desire strained to agony ; and, 
 be that as it may, the effect of such passion, in 
 morbidly heightening the nervous sensibility, and 
 giving a .painful intensity to all impressions on the 
 senses, is indicated with marvellous force of ima- 
 gination, and rendered into language and rhythm 
 which pour forth like a flood of lava from a vol- 
 cano in eruption. 
 
 The pre-eminence of the painter reappears in 
 JEnone. If the poet's object had been to tell a 
 moving story of love, and wrong, and grief, he 
 would not have chosen for his heroine a mytholog- 
 ical nymph, nor have thrown his incidents back to 
 the siege of Troy, and among beings whose exis- 
 tence is no longer believed in. As little is his 
 purpose, in treating Greek mythology, akin to 
 Shelley's, who clothes in its forms a sentimental 
 nature-philosophy, and a pantheistical worship. 
 JEnone is more akin in spirit to Endymion and 
 Hyperion; but its verse is more majestic, and its 
 luxuriant pictorial richness more controlled by 
 definite conception, more articulated by fine draw- 
 ing, than even the latter and greater of Keat's 
 two poems. Gorgeous mountain and figure paint- 
 ing stand here as the predominant aim as clearly 
 
TEJVjvrsojrs poems. 89 
 
 as in any picture by Titian or Turner ; only poet- 
 ry will not lose her prerogative of speech, and 
 will paint her mountains and her figures in a me- 
 dium of passion to which the artist upon canvas 
 vainly aspires. Round Ida and its valleys, round 
 Troas and its windy citadel, Mnone can pour the 
 enchantment of her memories of love and grief. 
 To her can the naked goddesses — painted as Reu- 
 bens could not paint them, — life, motion, and 
 floating lights — utter celestial music, and grand 
 thoughts ally themselves with splendid pictures. 
 If the wish will force its way, that Ctreek Mythol- 
 ogy might be left at peace in its tomb, and that a 
 harp so strung to passion and to thought should 
 pour the spell of its music upon a theme in which 
 the imagination should harmonize and interpret the 
 life of the men and women about us, we can but 
 answer, that the deeper music will yet beat itself 
 out, — that this is but prelude, shewing the artist's 
 power and perfecting his hand. 
 
 The Lotos Eaters carries Tennyson's tenden- 
 cy to pure sestheticism to an extreme point. It is 
 picture and music, and nothing more. The writer 
 did not suppose he was writing Hamlet, or solving 
 "the riddle of the painful earth." Nor must we 
 
40 ESSMVS. 
 
 go to work with that demand upon it. If music 
 and picture — the feelings of imaginary beings, 
 in a pure region of imagination, perfectly present- 
 ed in rhythmical language that takes the formative 
 impulse of the feeling, as falling water does of 
 the forces that draw it into a flashing curve — 
 have no charm for any mind, that mind can find 
 no interest in The Lotos Eaters. To attempt to 
 A treat it as an allegory, which figures forth the ten- 
 / dency to abandon the battle of life, to retire from 
 / a fruitless, ever-renewed struggle, — to read it as 
 we should read The Pilgrim's Progress, and look 
 out for facts of actual experience which answer to 
 its images, is as monstrous and perverse as it 
 would be to test a proposition of geometry by its 
 rhythm and imagery. A mood of feeling, of 
 course, it represents, and feeling dependent on, 
 and directed to distinct objects, — in this latter 
 respect, alone, differing from music. We may, of 
 course, too, apply the mood of feeling thus depict- 
 ed to the real events of life, and translate it into 
 the actual language of men under the influence of 
 ' mild-eyed melancholy.' So we might with a 
 sonata of Beethoven's, — but the application is 
 ours, and not the composer's ; and if we attempt 
 
TEJ^TJVrSOJV'S POEMS. 41 
 
 to limit the composer to owr interpretation, rather 
 than give ourselves up to his free inspiration from 
 a purely musical impulse, all we get by it is, gen- 
 erally, a very poor verbal poem, instead of a noble 
 ■work that does not, however, belong to the region 
 of articulate speech. It is, perhaps, because the 
 companion poem of the Hesperides does not even 
 represent a mood of feeling, as well as because it 
 is far less perfect in execution, that it has been 
 left out of succeeding editions. 
 
 It may be suggested that The Palace of Art 
 contradicts what has been said of Mr. Tennyson's 
 tendency to paint pictures rather than to drama- 
 tize life and its emotions. And had the concep- 
 tion of the poem been adequately worked out, it 
 would have reached the highest point of view from 
 which life can be surveyed. The poet himself 
 declares it to be an allegory, and, therefore, to 
 have an interest mainly ethical, to which, by the 
 nature of the case, all mere pictorial or musical 
 beauty is to be subordinate. But how has the 
 conception been carried out ? Has the poet's in- 
 tention been adequately realized, or has the fully 
 developed pictorial and rhythmical talent been 
 too much for his less highly developed dramatic 
 
42 ESSMVS. 
 
 and philosophic powei*? No one can read the 
 poem and fail to see that only half his intention 
 has been completed ; and that, in spite of himself, 
 the pictorial and musical element has prevailed 
 over the moral and philosophic aim. With the 
 site, construction, and furniture of The Soul's 
 Palace, he must be a fastidious critic who would 
 not be highly delighted, — the finest ideal Straw- 
 berry Hill that ever poet's brain conceived. With 
 the truth of the lesson, too, no moralist can quar- 
 rel. It is profoundly true that a mere artistic 
 enjoyment of the universe will make no great soul 
 permanently happy. To make the poem perfect, 
 the process of the soul's growing discontent with, 
 and final disgust at, the beautiful objects with 
 which it has surrounded itself, should have been 
 displayed and accounted for, since, as mere state- 
 ment, it is a truism. If a real man has come to 
 the conclusion that his happiness consists in per- 
 fect isolation from his fellow-creatures in act and 
 sympathy, in letting the world and his fellow-men 
 enter his thoughts solely as pictures to be enjoyed 
 for their variety, one of two things happens to 
 him, — either that his pictures cease to amuse him 
 when his appetite for novelty is worn out, or 
 
TEJYJVrSOJV^S POEMS. 43 
 
 arouse his sympathies for the men and women 
 whose lives and thoughts they shadow forth, — 
 his awe and adoration of the source of all this 
 wondrous activity, — his desire to understand the 
 meaning and purpose of it all. Mere variety, 
 that does not succeed in exciting these feelings, 
 soon wearies ; for the infinite element in life is not 
 the variety of things by which we are acted on, 
 but the unfathomable personality of our own 
 being ; and it is just this personality which the 
 soul in the poem is doing all he can to quench in 
 himself. He is trying to live by the outward 
 things about him, and by the enjoyment they af- 
 ford to his intellect ; while he ignores that relation 
 to God and to his fellow-beings, in the conscious- 
 ness and acknowledgment of which spiritual life 
 consists. When, then, his beautiful objects pall 
 upon him, as his intellectual and perceptive crav- 
 ing is wearied, they become dead things, and 
 loathsome in his eyes — a disgust at his life seizes 
 him, — while he shrinks in horror from the pro- 
 spective isolation of death. The soul that has not 
 exercised itself in feelings which grow by what 
 they feed on must experience inconceivable horror 
 at the decay of its intellectual and perceptive ao- 
 
44 ESS A VS. 
 
 tivities, unless it contemplates annihilation. But 
 the soul in The Palace has reasoned itself into a 
 conviction of immortality, and the pride which in 
 its case lay at the bottom of that conviction, be- 
 comes its own scourge. For immortality becomes 
 blank endless isolation, not merely from sympa- 
 thies, but from objects of interest, — one never- 
 ceasing death in life. Scorn of himself is born 
 of this gloom and misery — vain attempts to rally 
 by recalling memories of past strength and enjoy- 
 ment soon give way to fixed despair. Peeling 
 himself wretched, the desire of pity comes upon 
 him, and the fellow-feeling comes with the sense 
 of the need of fellow-feeling. He sees that the 
 wretched people whom he had despised were ne- 
 cessary to him, — he casts away his proud seclu- 
 sion, abandons his life of intellect and enjoyment to 
 mourn and work with the herd, if so be he may 
 obtain pardon for his inhuman sin. 
 
 Something of this process is no doubt described 
 in the poem, but not with sufficient fullness or 
 clearness. As the mere statement of the law that 
 the soul cannot live in isolation is a truism, the 
 chief interest of the poem should have been 
 thrown upon the development of the law in oper- 
 
TEJVJVrSOJVS POEMS. 45 
 
 ation ; the reader should have been made to go 
 along with the soul in its exultation, in its first 
 start of doubtful suspicion, in its gradual percep- 
 tion of the horrors of its condition, in its slow but 
 sure realization of its own wretchedness, in its 
 prostration of self-abhorrence and remorse. A 
 nobler allegory could not be conceiyed, or one 
 more fitted to the age, and to the highest intel- 
 lects of all ages. But it fails just where it ought 
 to have been strongest ; and what we have is a 
 series of magnificent pictures in magnificent verse, 
 followed, indeed, by a statement of the moral in 
 vefy noble stanzas, but by no adequate dramatic 
 presentation of the mode in which the great law 
 of humanity works out its processes in the soul. 
 What is subordinate in object not only fills more 
 space — that were unimportant, — but in force of 
 treatment, in interest, the furniture of The Palace 
 quite surpasses the vindication of the moral law. 
 Indeed, it has been profanely remarked that the 
 poem resembles a catalogue raisonne richly illu- 
 minated, of the effects of a soul compelled for a 
 time to quit its mansion, and wishing to dispose of 
 its furniture by auction. Perhaps it would have 
 been impossible adequately to impress the moral 
 
46 ESSAYS. 
 
 without descending altogether from the heights of 
 allegory, and presenting a drama of actual human 
 experience. The universal law would have been 
 best shewn in a particular case, and in connexion 
 with an intelligible human life. But even under 
 the conditions of the allegory more emphasis 
 might and ought to have been given to the main 
 end and purpose of the poem, and less, compara- 
 tively, to its machinery. Though many altera- 
 tions have been made in subsequent editions, this 
 main defect of structure has never been remedied. 
 With the publication of the Third Series, in 
 1842, Mr. Tennyson appears distinctly as the 
 poet of his own age. His apprenticeship is over, 
 his mastery over the instruments of his art is com- 
 plete, and he employs it in either presenting the 
 life of his contemporaries, the thoughts, incidents, 
 and emotions of the nineteenth century in Eng- 
 land, or in treating legend and history with ref- 
 erence to the moral and intellectual sympathies 
 now active amongst us. In other words, he no 
 longer writes poems for us that charm by their 
 pictorial and rhythmical beauty, but, presenting 
 modes of existence and feeling which are either 
 altogether inhuman or imperfectly human, excite 
 
TEJVJVrSOJV^S POEMS. 47 
 
 none of the interest that belongs to what reflects 
 and interprets our own lives. Mermen, mermaids, 
 sea fairies, Ladies of Shalott, Lotos Eaters, dis- 
 appear from the scene ; Adelines, Margarets, Ele- 
 anores, no longer come as abstract types of char- 
 actor without speech, story, or personal relations, 
 figured forth in abundance of similes but with 
 none of the traits by which the mind apprehends 
 individual men and women ; Grecian nymphs no 
 longer pour out their loves and griefs to their 
 mother earth, and Grecian goddesses no longer in- 
 terfere in the affairs of mortals, and shed the lus- 
 tre of celestial presences on the mountain side. 
 That in which we cannot believe, either ceases to 
 be treated at all, or is treated as symbol and pic- 
 ture of what we know to be profoundly real. So 
 far is this change from necessitating any narrow- 
 ing of the poet's range of subjects, that legenda- 
 ry history, fairy fiction, Greek poetry, and trees 
 endowed with human speech, blend in the proces- 
 sion with Egyptian fanatics, rapt nuns, English 
 ladies, peasant girls, artists, lawyers, farmers, — 
 in fact, a tolerably complete representation of the 
 miscellaneous public of the present day ; while 
 the forms vary from epic fragments to the homeli- 
 
i8 ESSAYS. 
 
 est dialogue, — from the simplest utterance of 
 emotion in a song to the highest lyrical allegory 
 of a terrible and profound law of life. The poet 
 looks upon a larger field than before, and what 
 he looked on before he now sees with a more pen- 
 etrating eye, a mind that apprehends wider and 
 deeper relations. He paints more brilliantly and 
 forcibly than ever, but his pictures speak to the 
 heart and spirit as well as to the eye ; his music 
 is even richer and more charming in its melody, 
 but it moves henceforth fraught with the feelings 
 and ideas by which men and nations work out the 
 divine purposes of their being. In some poems 
 the artistic beauty seems given more for its own 
 sake than for any moral that lies in the story, any 
 ulterior meaning which it unfolds ; but the noble 
 pictures which the actions and persons of human 
 beings furnish are themselves Moral and Inter- 
 pretation ; and in no poems more than in those 
 which simply present the splendor and beauty 
 of humanity, and of the material universe in which 
 humanity works its work, does the poet fulfil his 
 highest function. 
 
 The first poem in the Third Series is called The 
 Epic, and contains a fragment on the death of 
 
TEJVJVrSOJVS POEMS. 49 
 
 King Arthur, read to the party assembled in a 
 country-house at Christmas. Set thus amidst the 
 fireside talk of Christmas Eve, Morte d' Arthur 
 ceases to be a fragment of animated and pictur- 
 esque epic story, and becomes the answer of a 
 Christian poet to the querulous lamentation of the 
 Christian ritualist and dogmatist over the decay 
 of faith. The noble humanity and piety that 
 shone in chivalry are not dead, he tells us, with 
 King Arthur, though 
 
 The sequel of to-day unsolders all 
 
 The goodliest fellowship of famous kiiights 
 
 Whereof this world holds record. 
 
 Excalibur, the mystic sword which Arthur wield- 
 ed so long and so well, vanishes with him from the 
 world, but the heavenly weapons wherewith men 
 fight the good fight are still bestowed upon the 
 heroes of the successive ages, diflfering in form 
 and temper, but effective for the various work, 
 and fitted to the hands that are to wield them. 
 Not only has each age its new work to do, its new 
 instruments and new men to do it, as matter of 
 historical fact, but it must be so, — 
 
50 ESSM¥S. 
 
 The old order ohangeth, yielding place to new. 
 
 And God fulfils himself in many ways. 
 
 Lest one good custom should corrupt the world. 
 
 The Arthur of the round-table is gone to fable- 
 land ; but the desire and hope that gave birth to 
 the legends of chivalry yet live, — the dim proph- 
 ecy that he will one day return and rule over 
 Britain is ever accomplishing itself. What mean 
 those Christmas bells that tell us yearly Christ is 
 born ? Do they lie ? No ! they blend with all 
 noble legends that speak of man's great deeds, of 
 his vaster aspirations, of his yet unaccomplished 
 hopes. They remind us of the prophecy to which 
 fact is tending, of the ideal after which the real is 
 striving. To him whose heart is hopeful and 
 brave, who will not be the slave of formulas, ' Ar- 
 thur is come again, and cannot die,' is the burden 
 of the world's song ; ' come again, and thrice as 
 fair,' is heard in every change by which the 
 thoughts of men are widened and their hearts 
 enlarged ; ' Come with all good things, and war 
 shall be no more,' the strain that echoes clear in 
 the distance, and most clear when the church bells 
 ring in the Christmas morn. Morte d' Arthur is 
 
TJEJVJVVSOJV^S POEMS. &X 
 
 no mere story out of an old book, refurbished 
 with modern ornaments, but a song of hope, a 
 prophecy of the final triumph of good. Mr. Ten- 
 nyson has, indeed, lavished upon the story all the 
 resources of a genius eminently pictorial, and 
 trained to complete mastery OTer language and 
 metre. He might unquestionably have silenced 
 the parson in a more simple and direct fashion, by 
 which he would not only have deprived us of a 
 noble piece of painting, but have missed a poetic 
 and profoundly true method of looking at national 
 legends. The poem justifies itself, by its finished 
 excellence, as a work of art, but it is spiritualized 
 and raised above merely pictorial and dramatic 
 beauty by its setting, and the poet's nineteenth- 
 century point of view. 
 
 Mr. Tennyson makes the supposed author, Ev- 
 erard Hall, talk of his fragment as 
 
 Faint Homeric echoes, nothing worth, — 
 Mere chaff and draff, much better burnt. 
 
 They are rather Virgilian than Homeric echoes ; 
 elaborate and stately, not naive and eager to tell 
 their story ; rich in pictorial detail ; carefully 
 
62 ESSjiYS. 
 
 studied ; conscious of their own art ; more anxious 
 for beauty of workmanship than interest of action. 
 But since John Dryden died, no English poet has 
 written verse so noble, so sonorous, of such sus- 
 tained majesty and might ; no English poet has 
 brought pictures so clear and splendid before the 
 eye by the power of single epithets and phrases ; 
 and Dryden himself never wrote a poem so free 
 from careless lines, unmeaning words, and conven- 
 tional epithets. The fragment bursts upon us like 
 the blended blast and wail of the trumpets of pur- 
 suing and retreating hosts : a whole day's alter- 
 nate victory and defeat, a series of single combats, 
 the death of the leaders one by one, the drawing 
 off of the armies at sunset, King Arthur alone and 
 wounded on the field, the coming on of night and 
 the rising of the moon, the approach of King 
 Arthur's last captain to bear him to a place of 
 shelter, are pictured to the imagination in the few 
 vigorous lines that commence the poem. 
 
 So all day long the noise of battle rolled 
 Among the mountains hy the winter sea; 
 Until King Arthur's table, man by man, 
 Had fall'u in Lyonness about their Lord, 
 King Arthur : then, because his wound was deep 
 
TEJVJVYSOJ\rS POEMS. 5S 
 
 The bold Sir Bedivere uplifted him. 
 Sir Bedivere, the last of all his knights, 
 And bore him to a chapel nigh the field, 
 A broken chancel with a broken cross. 
 That stood on a dark strait of barren land. 
 On one side lay the ocean, and on one 
 Lay a great water, and the moon was full. 
 
 That phrase, ' a great water,' has probably often 
 been ridiculed- as affected phraseology for ' a great 
 lake ' ; but it is an instance of the intense pre- 
 sentative power of Mr. Tennyson's genius. It 
 precisely marks the appearance of a large lake 
 outspread and taken in at one glance from a high 
 ground. Had ' a great lake ' been substituted for 
 it, the phrase •would have needed to be translated 
 by the mind into water of a certain shape and 
 size, before the picture was realized by the imag- 
 ination. ' A great lake ' is, in fact, one degree 
 removed from the sensuous to the logical, — from 
 the individual appearance to the generic name, 
 and is therefore less poetic and pictorial. 
 
 With what distinctness, with what force and 
 conciseness of language, is the whole scene of 
 the churchyard, with its associations, brought be- 
 
54 ESS J VS. 
 
 tore the mind : its ancestral relics, the ruins of 
 the chapel, the piercing cold of the night-wind 
 edged with sea-salt, the sharp rocks down which 
 the path to the lake descends : — 
 
 So saying, from the ruined shrine he stept, 
 And in the moon athwart the place of tombs, 
 Where lay the mighty bones of ancient men. 
 Old knights, and over them the sea-irind sang 
 Shrill, chill, with flakes of foam. He, stepping down. 
 By zig-zag paths, and juts of pointed rock, 
 Came on the shining levels of the lake. 
 
 The classical cequora may have suggested the 
 ' shining levels ' ; but there is a deeper reason for 
 the change of phrase, for the ' great water,' as 
 seen from the high ground, becomes a series of 
 flashing surfaces when Sir Bedivere looks along it 
 from its margin. 
 
 This pictorial reality is kept up through the 
 poem. Excalibur does not merely sparkle in the 
 moonlight with its jewelled hilt, but 
 
 The winter moon. 
 Brightening the skirts of a long cloud, ran forth. 
 And sparkled keen with frost against the hilt 
 
TEJVJVVSOJV^S POEMS. o5 
 
 Sir Bedivere does not doubt whether he shall 
 throw the sword, but stands 
 
 This way and that, diTiding the swift mind, 
 In act to throw. 
 
 None the worse a phrase for recalling the Virgil- 
 ian ' Atque animum nunc hue celerem nunc dividit 
 illuc.' The ' many-knotted waterflags ' are not 
 brought in simply to hide Excalibur, they must 
 add their life to the picture, and 
 
 Whistle stiff and dry about the marge. 
 
 Everywhere the phenomenon is presented with the 
 utmost vividness and truth of appearance, with the 
 utmost fulness of sense-impressing qualities ; sen- 
 suous concrete language takes the place of our 
 common speech, abounding in logical generaliza- 
 tions and names of classes. The mind is kept 
 awake and in full activity by the presence of those 
 realities which are smothered and hidden by the 
 conventional symbols through which ordinary nar- 
 rative is carried on. The most delicate distinc- 
 tions of phenomena are noted that serve as an aid 
 
56 ESSAYS. 
 
 to our complete realization of the scene. Sir 
 Bedivere hears 
 
 The ripple washing in the reeds, 
 and 
 
 The wild water lapping on the crags; 
 
 the two phrases marking exactly the difference of 
 sound produced by water swelling up against a 
 permeable or impermeable barrier. 
 
 How thoroughly Shakspearian is King Arthur's 
 lament, 
 
 Woe is me ! 
 Authority forgets a dying king, 
 Laid widowed of the power in his eye 
 That bowed the ■will, 
 
 where the personification assists the imagination 
 without distressing the understanding, as when 
 dwelt upon, and expanded in detail ; deepening 
 the impressiveness of the sentiment by giving 
 along with a true thought a grand picture, — -just 
 such a passing flash of impassioned rhetoric as 
 would become the highest oratory, and thrill 
 through the hearts of a great assembly. 
 
 In the description of Sir Bedivere's last and 
 successful attempt to throw the sword into the 
 
TEJVJVVSOJV'S POEMS. 57 
 
 lake, every word tolls of rapid, agitated, deter- 
 mined action, refusing to dally with the temptation 
 that had twice overcome him : — 
 
 Then quickly rose Sir Bedivere, and ran 
 
 And, leaping down the ridges lightly, plunged 
 
 Among the bulrush-beds, and clutched the sword, 
 
 And strongly wheel'd and threw it. The great brand 
 
 Made lightnings in the splendor of the moon, 
 
 And flashing round and round, and whirl'd in an arch, 
 
 Shot like a streamer of the northern morn 
 
 Seen where the moving isles of winter shock 
 
 By night, with noises of the northern sea. 
 
 So flash'd and fell the brand Excalibur. 
 
 A series of brilliant effects is hit off in those 
 two words, ' made lightnings.' ' Whirl'd in an 
 arch,' is a splendid instance of sound answering 
 to sense, which the older critics made so much of ; 
 the additional syllable which breaks the measure, 
 and necessitates an increased rapidity of utter- 
 ance, seeming to express to the ear the rush of 
 the sword up its parabolic curve. And ■vfith what 
 lavish richness of presentative power is the boreal 
 aurora, the collision, the crash, and the thunder 
 of the meeting icebergs, brought before the eye. 
 3* 
 
58 ESSAYS. 
 
 An inferior artist would have shouted through a 
 page, and emptied a whole pallet of color, with- 
 out any result but interrupting his narrative, where 
 Tennyson in three lines strikingly illustrates the 
 fact he has to tell, — associates it impressively 
 with one of nature's grandest phenomena, and 
 give a complete picture of this phenomenon be- 
 sides. 
 
 How dramatic and striking is King Arthur's 
 sudden exclamation on Sir Bedivere's return : 
 
 Now see I by thine eyes that this is done ; 
 
 how wonderfully true of a dying man, the 
 
 Looking wistfully, with wide blue eye. 
 As in a picture ; 
 
 how pictorial and minutely attentive to the facts 
 of appearance, — 
 
 But the other swiftly strode from ridge to ridge, 
 Clothed with his breath, and looking as he walked 
 Larger than human on the frozen hills ; 
 
 how rapid and eager the haste of movement in re- 
 ply to the King's ' Quick, quick ! ' — 
 
TEJVJVVSOJV'S POEMS. 59 
 
 He heard the deep behind him, and a cry 
 Before. His own thought drove him like a goad. 
 Dry clashed his harness in the icy caves 
 And barren chasms, and all to left and right 
 The black cliff clang'd round him, as he based 
 His feet on juts of slippery crag that rang 
 Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels ; • 
 
 do we not seem to burst from the narrow steep 
 path down the ravine, whose tall» precipitous sides 
 hide the sky and the broad landscape from sight, 
 and come out in a moment upon 
 
 The level lake 
 And the long glories of the winter moon ? 
 
 In some over-fastidious moods, one might be in- 
 clined to charge 
 
 A cry that shivered to the tingling stars, 
 
 with a touch of that exaggeration which belongs to 
 the ' spasmodic school ' ; but the cry comes from 
 a company of spirits, amid mountains whose natu- 
 ral power of echo is heightened by the silence of 
 night, the clearness of the winter air, and the hai'- 
 dening effect of frost. Such a cry at such a time, 
 
60 ESSAYS. 
 
 and in such a place, would thrill from rock to 
 rock, from summit to summit, till it seemed to 
 pierce the sky in a hurtling storm of multitudinous 
 arrowy sounds, and die away in infinitely distant 
 pulsations among the stars. In the following 
 lines, where the agony of lamentation is com- 
 pared to 
 
 A wind that shrills 
 All night in a»waste land, where no one comes, 
 Or hath come since the making of the world, — 
 
 the passage italicised may seem at first to add 
 nothing to the force of the comparison, as the 
 shrillness of the wind would not be greater in an 
 uninhabited place than anywhere else in open 
 ground. But the mournfulness of the feeling a 
 man would experience in such a place, from the 
 sense of utter isolation and sterility, is blended 
 with the naturally sad wail of the wind over a 
 wide waste, and the addition thus becomes no 
 mere completion of a thought of which only part 
 is wanted for the illustration — though that were 
 allowable enough, according to ordinary poetic 
 usage, — .but gives a heightening of sentiment 
 without which the illustration itself would be in- 
 complete and less impressive. 
 
TEJVJVrSOJVS POEMS. 61 
 
 Magnificent similes do not make poetry, but 
 they are among its most effective means of filling 
 the mind of the reader with the actual grandeur 
 and pathos of the particular scene presented. 
 Where the poet seizes not upon some mere super- 
 ficial resemblance that draws the fancy between 
 two objects essentially different in the general 
 feeling they excite, but brings in a phenomenon 
 of nature which excites feelings analogous to those 
 Belonging to the event or scene he is narrating, 
 the use of simile and figure not only enables him 
 to avoid encumbering his narrative by detail, and 
 epithet, and general terms otherwise necessary to 
 bring his object before the mind, but associates 
 that object at once and spontaneously with the 
 feelings belonging to the illustrating phenome- 
 non — an effect which could not be produced 
 apart from this device except by long drawn-out 
 reflections. Simile and figure may be regarded as 
 a natural, short-hand, which substitutes well-known 
 things for the unknown qualities of whatever has 
 to be described, and which therefore gives the 
 general effect of the things to be described without 
 necessitating the task of minute description. This 
 
62 ESSAYS. 
 
 is exactly the reverse of the use made of these 
 forms of speech by the man of wit, who intention- 
 ally selects for his illustration some merely acci- 
 dental and often merely verbal resemblance be- 
 tween two things essentially different in themselves 
 and in the feelings they excite. But the poet, in 
 his impassioned or serious moods, seizes not on re- 
 semblances but true analogies ; and they at once 
 adorn his poetry with impressive pictures, and 
 convey his meaning with force and brevity. The 
 passage in which Arthur is described as dying in 
 the arms of the mourning queen, is a fine instance 
 of a poetical use of simile and figure. The moon 
 fading in the early morning, the dazzling bright- 
 ness of the rising sun, the shattered column, the 
 glancing flight of a shooting star, bring before the 
 mind not only the dying king, pale and bleeding, 
 but the contrast between his present weakness and 
 the glory and triumphs of his chivalrous and bril- 
 liant life. In a few lines his whole story is told : 
 it is not merely a dying warrior who lies before 
 us, but the strength, the state, the splendor, and 
 enjoyment of his past life, flash before the imag- 
 ination, and deepen the sadness and humiliation 
 of his defeat and death. 
 
TEjvjyrysoj^rs poems. 63 
 
 For all his face was -white 
 And colorless, and like the wither'd moon 
 Smote by the fresh beam of the springing east ; 
 And all his greaves and cuisses dash'd with drops 
 Of onset ; and the light and lustrous curls — 
 That made his forehead like a rising sun 
 High from the dais throne — were paroh'd with dust ; 
 Or, clotted into points and hanging loose, 
 Mix'd with the knightly growth that fringed his lips. 
 So like a shattered column lay the king ; 
 Not like that Arthur who, with lance in rest, 
 From spur to plume a star of tournament. 
 Shot through the lists at camelot, and charged 
 Before the eyes of ladies and of kings. 
 
 Let not the purpose of this analysis of detail 
 be misunderstood. Fine phrases and fine pas- 
 sages do not make a fine poem ; but they do show- 
 that unflagging activity of imagination, -which, op- 
 erating on a finely constructed -whole, change a 
 well-proportioned framework into a temple of 
 carved stones, every one of -which is instinct -with 
 life and thought, — -where not only the coup d'ceii 
 strikes, but the closest and most minute examina- 
 tion only opens fresh sources of -wonder and en- 
 joyment. In many poems that possess merit 
 equal to Morte (V Arthur, it -would be impossible 
 to pick out single passages or lines that -would be 
 beautiful or striking, -when taken from their con- 
 
64 ESSArs. 
 
 text. Dora is au instance. But this examina- 
 tion of details proves that where Mr. Tennyson is 
 employed upon a poem which consists of a series 
 of actions admitting of splendid pictorial present- 
 ment, being in their own nature pictorially splen- 
 did, his pictures are drawn with a vigorous hand, 
 and colored to the life ; and that no stroke of his 
 brush is without meaning. And this has been 
 done, not because it is supposed that professed 
 admirers of Mr. Tennyson's poetry needed help 
 to point out the just grounds of their admiration, 
 but because many persons say they cannot see 
 why others do so highly admire Mr. Tennyson ; 
 and to show them that a hasty, careless glance 
 over his verses — such as they give to a leader in 
 a newspaper, or even less attentive and interested, 
 — is not precisely the way to arrive at the enjoy- 
 ment of a poet in whom every word is the result 
 of intense activity and concentration of the imag- 
 ination, controlled by cultivated taste, and train- 
 ed to a rare mastery over language and metre. 
 
 The group of poems founded on legendary his- 
 tory, of which Mart d' Arthur is the most impor- 
 tant, consists, besides, of Godiva, St. Smeon 
 SlylUes, Ulysses, St. Agnes, and Sir Galahad. 
 Godiva would have yielded to analysis results 
 
TEJVJVYSOJVS POEMS. 65 
 
 similar to those we have obtained from Morte 
 d' Arthur, resembling that poem in pictorial beauty 
 and vivid dramatic presentation. A virginal pu- 
 rity, a spirit of chivalrous reverence for woman- ' 
 hood and self-sacrifice, veils and softens as with 
 a halo of glory the figure of the ' woman of a 
 thousand summers back,' as ' she rode forth 
 clothed on with chastity.' Though compelled to 
 pass the poem without notice of its details, we 
 cannot but direct the attention of our readers to 
 the intense imaginative reality of that passage in 
 which the feelings of Godiva, as she rides through 
 the streets, are transferred to the material objects 
 by which she is surrounded : — 
 
 The deep air listened round her as she rode. 
 And all the low mnd hardly breathed for fear. 
 The little -wide-mouthed heads upon the spout 
 Had cunning eyes to see, &o. 
 
 And again in the same spirit, subordinating the 
 truth of literal fact to the higher dramatic truth 
 of passion : 
 
 And all at once, 
 With twelve great shocks of sound, the shameless noon 
 Was clashed and hammered from a hundred towers. 
 One after one. 
 
66 ESSAYS. 
 
 The other four poems of the group aim at pre- 
 senting types of character, and not at narrative 
 of action. They take the form of speeches ut- 
 tered on occasions which adequately represent the 
 essential characteristics of the life of the speaker. 
 The habitual selection of this form by Mr. Tenny- 
 son is one among many indications of the intensi- 
 ty of his imagination. It enables him to present 
 in the shortest compass the essentials of his sub- 
 ject without the intervention of any commonplace 
 machinery, but it makes a demand upon the im- 
 aginative resources of his readers, which goes 
 some way to explain why many persons who enjoy 
 certain kinds of poetry are utterly unable to ap- 
 preciate his. Each of these four poems contains 
 implicitly the story of a life and the exhibition of 
 a well-marked type of character. We cannot 
 pause to dwell upon the force and truth of the 
 drawing in each case, but the group is important, 
 as indicating the versatility of Mr. Tennyson's 
 genius, his catholicity of imaginative apprehen- 
 sion, and his command over the elements of the 
 most widely differing characters. St. Simeon 
 Slylites proves that it is from no want of power 
 to paint tnc horrible and the grotesque that Mr. 
 
TEJVJVrSOJVS POEMS. 67 
 
 Tennyson abstains as a rule from sucli subjects. 
 And St. Agnes is the more remarkable as show- 
 ing a hearty appreciation of the purer form of as- 
 ceticism in a poet whose characteristic excellence 
 lies in the portrayal of tender sentiment and vo- 
 luptuous passion, upheld and refined by a stainless 
 purity. 
 
 We pass on to the love-poems, and in them we 
 find the same variety of treatment, the same 
 avoidance of repetition, just noticed in the legend- 
 ary group. 
 
 The Gardener's Davghter, with its rich luxu- 
 riance of imagery, its warmth of passion, its mag- 
 nificence of phrase, its abandon of sentiment, is 
 not more essentially different from the severely 
 dramatic simplicity and pathos of Dora, than the 
 calm retrospect and peaceful affection of The 
 Miller's Daughter is from the stormy current of 
 slighted passion and fierce scorn that rushes wild- 
 ly on through Locksley Hall, to find its haven in 
 grand visions of progress and the excitement of 
 enterprise. The playful fancy of The Talking 
 Oak touches the airy treble of a scale of which 
 Love and Duty sound the deepest and most sol- 
 emn chords. The rustic grace and sweetness of 
 
68 ESS A VS. 
 
 The May Queen contrast sharply with the rude 
 force and indignant sarcasm of Lady Clara Vera 
 de Vere ; while the conversational idylls blend 
 with the level tones of ordinary conversation 
 touches of natural beauty and flashes of elevated 
 thought, which raise them to the rank of poems, 
 and recal what are among the happier hours of 
 our modern life, — those hours with cultivated and 
 genial friends, in which the cares of the world are 
 shaken off, and the best memories of the past, the 
 noblest aspirations, the gentlest feelings, revive 
 amid mountain and lake, for the votaries of ambi- 
 
 ' tion, science, or business. 
 
 Then, as to form, we find narrative, dialogue, 
 soliloquy and direct address. "We have blank 
 verse that ranges through all the scale of feeling, 
 from the exquisitely rhythmical, full, majestic, 
 down to the just accented strain, that may fairly 
 represent genial and animated conversation ; we 
 have lyric measures that flow softly on like a 
 quiet streamlet, as in The Miller's Daughter ; go 
 straight and fierce to their mark like arrows of 
 scorn, as in Lady Clara Vere de Vere ; float gaily 
 or sadly on in sweet calm to the music of a young 
 
 girl's life and early death, as in the three strains 
 
TEJVJ\rYSOJV'S POEMS. 69 
 
 of The May Queen ; dash on in thunder and in 
 storm, sweeping vast spaces, gathering in lurid 
 gloom, or clearing in sudden flashes, impetuous 
 hurricane of thick clouds, or dazzling brightness 
 of tropic summer, as in Locksley Hall. No poet 
 but Goethe has, in our day, swept a lyre of such 
 varied range, with so perfect a command of every 
 key. Moreover, none of these poems belong to 
 the class called ' occasional.' They all have a 
 construction which tells a complete story — often 
 the story of a life. Some touch, frequently slight, 
 lets lis into the previous stages of the personal 
 history, and throws forward a clear light upon the 
 future career. The passions are treated, not 
 merely as giving rise to striking incidents, but as 
 exercising a permanent influence on the character 
 and destiny. Though for the most part lyrical in 
 form, the poems rise, thus, to the full significance 
 of dramas, as has been explained in respect to 
 The Miller's Daughter; and similar remarks 
 might be truly applied to all the principal poems. 
 These qualities of variety and completeness give 
 Mr. Tennyson a claim to a place among great po- 
 ets, which the form and length of his compositions 
 somewhat interfere with in the first rough estimate; 
 
70 ESSAYS. 
 
 of a public inclined to set ' the how much before 
 the how.' "We can only indicate them by selected 
 instances ; but the careful analysis of any one of 
 his poems would lead to the same conclusions. 
 
 The love story to which The Gardener's 
 Daughter supplies a title and a central figure, 
 takes the form of a narrative from the lips of the 
 man who wooed and won the maiden for a wife. 
 By this selection of a speaker, who is made to 
 dwell on the blissful recollections of early love, 
 the dramatic coloring throughout is maintained at 
 a glowing tone, without being exposed to the 
 charge of exaggeration. The minutest incidents, 
 the changing lights and shades of feeling, belong- 
 ing to such a period, are stamped indelibly in the 
 memory, and never lose their first fresh charm 
 and interest. To I'aise the coloring still higher, 
 and justify a more elaborately picturesque treat- 
 ment, a fonder dwelling upon every detail of ant- 
 ural beauty then noted with the seeing eye of a 
 loving heart, the speaker is not only a lover, but 
 a painter. The motive is thus admirably chosen 
 for treatment at once impassioned and pictorial, 
 for the minutest detail of feeling and circumstance, 
 for the freest play of an imaginative sympathy 
 
TEj\rj\rrsoj\rs poems. n 
 
 with nature, and the rich hues that inward joy- 
 sheds over the outward world. But Mr. Tenny- 
 son is the last man to forget that law of reserve 
 which binds the lover — the law which a recent 
 writer has so well expressed, when he says — 
 
 Not to unveil before the gaze 
 
 Of an imperfect sympathy, 
 In aught we are, is the sweet praise 
 
 And the main sum of modesty. 
 Love blabbed of ia a great decline ; 
 
 A careless world unsanctions sense ; 
 But he who casts heaven's truth to swine 
 
 Consummates all incontinence.* 
 
 The rapture delineated in The Gardener's 
 Davghter is the rapture of hope when the eyes 
 and heart first feel the loveliness of a woman, and 
 all nature shines in the wedding-garment, which 
 is but the reflection of the lover's inward life. 
 No babbling of lover's secrets is here ; no laying 
 bare to a third person of what is perfectly befit- 
 ting, graceful, beautiful, and pure when done and 
 said at love's instinctive bidding, but becomes the 
 contrary of these when spoken of to others, or 
 
 *The Angel in the House. 
 
72 ESSAYS. 
 
 dwelt on in cool, reflective moments. The higb- 
 est emotion is sacred, only revealed to the most 
 perfect sympathy — that of the person who ex- 
 cites and shares it ; and even that revelation must 
 be inarticulate, of act, of look — not of speech. 
 There is profound beauty and truth in the allegory 
 that represents love as a blind child ; he knows no 
 wrong, is unconscious of what he does, — trusting 
 to a divine instinct. The speaker in The Gar- 
 dener's Daughter holds fast to this law. He 
 paints the courtship, not the marriage ; speaks of 
 his heart's idol as the star that shone upon his 
 course, the sun that lighted his day ; as the god- 
 dess, ere yet she stepped from her ambrosial cloud 
 pedestal, and blessed his life with joys too sacred 
 for the common ear. It is the beauty that he 
 wooed, not the wife that he won, that he unveils 
 for the listener to his tale. And as if even this 
 were too much, — as if it were a kind of profana- 
 tion to utter even these preludes of a life-blessed- 
 ness to one who might, the moment after, look 
 upon the actual woman who was their object, the 
 speaker tells us that she has passed from earth 
 and mortal taint, — that no second love has con- 
 fused her image ; but long years of lonely widow- 
 
TEJVj\rvsoj\rs poems. 73 
 
 hood have only softened and hallowed it in his 
 heart. As he speaks, he is standing before her 
 veiled portrait, and raising the veil, he says — 
 
 Behold her there. 
 As I beheld her ere she knew my heart, 
 My first, last love ; the idol of my youth. 
 The darling of my manhood, and alas ! 
 Now the most blessed memory of mine age. 
 
 And thus, by this slight touch, what would have 
 been merely a charmingly told love story, becomes, 
 in fact, a story of a life sustained by love to the 
 end, as it was in its youth brightened and enriched 
 by love. The single phase of passion and of for- 
 tune is not only. worked out to its crisis, so as to 
 satisfy the artistic sense of completeness, but the 
 value and influence of that single phase is shown 
 as spreading through to the end of life, and the 
 feeling that demands an eternal meaning and pur- 
 pose in each stage of life is fully satisfied. 
 
 It would be impossible in any notice of Mr. 
 Tennyson to be satisfied with a survey of the plan 
 of what may fairly be called his most popular 
 poem. He, indeed, constructs his poems poetical- 
 ly, and certainly cannot be ranked with the mere 
 4 
 
74 ESSAYS. 
 
 exquisite worker of detail ; but all his detail is so 
 exquisite in his finer poems, that it would be as 
 hopeless to attempt to convey a true impression 
 of them without exhibiting this detail in charac- 
 teristic passages, as it would be to make a person 
 feel all the subtle and penetrating grace and 
 sweetness of a Raffaelle Madonna by description, 
 or to transfuse into words the glory and power of 
 Titian's colors. After all that philosophical critics 
 have talked of organic unity, and such-like hard 
 phrases, since Coleridge influenced English criti- 
 cism, and allowing all the importance that belongs 
 to the facts expressed, or intended to be expressed, 
 by the phrases, it must be admitted that the finest 
 construction would produce little effect in poetry 
 without fine details ; and that where the genius for 
 producing these exists, the art or instinct which 
 combines them will seldom be wanting when the 
 poet is mature. The real truth is, that what is 
 often called fine detail is nothing but tawdry or- 
 nament, — the feeble or vehement effort to say 
 fine things without having fine thoughts, — to utter 
 raptures that are insincere and unreal, inasmuch 
 as the imaginative power to summon up the beau- 
 tiful objects supposed to justify the rapture is j 
 
TEJ\rjvvsoj\rs poems. 75 
 
 wanting, and the would-be poet has before him 
 merely the general conceptions of beautiful ob- 
 jects, to which he applies, consequently, mere gen- 
 eral conventional phrases. Mr. Tennyson's phra- 
 ses, on the contrary, are pictures ; and his rhythm 
 the natural music of a mind rejoicing in the beau- 
 ty of the pictures that flow in ordered continuity 
 and fulness before him. The unflagging activity 
 of this pictorial power is manifested frequently in 
 Mr. Tennyson's poems, by the slightest change 
 from the ordinary phrase, as has been noticed in 
 Morie rf' Arthur. Here, again, in The Garden- 
 er's Daughter, — 
 
 My Eustace might have sat for Hercules — 
 So muscular he spread, so broad of breast, — 
 
 where the spread gives not the mere statement of 
 a fact, but its actual appearance ; the space fills 
 before the eye with the bulky frame of the man, 
 as we look. 
 
 In describing the locality of the garden, Mr. 
 Tennyson fills the mind with the realities of the 
 place. We know the distance from the city by 
 hearing the funeral and marriage bells and the 
 clanging of the minster clock, borne upon the 
 
76 ESSAYS. 
 
 wind; by looking out along a league of grass. 
 The nature of the country and the time of year 
 are given in the slow, broad stream, with its float- 
 ing lilies, its pleasure skiffs, and its barges; in 
 the rich grass meadows with their pasturing cat- 
 tle, and their low-hanging lime-trees in flower, 
 humming with winged life. And to complete the 
 picture thus presented, the extreme distance is 
 filled by the three-arched bridge, with the minster- 
 towers rising above it — 
 
 Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite 
 Beyond it, blooms the garden that I loTe. 
 News from the humming city comes to it 
 In sound of funeral or of marriage bells ; 
 And, sitting muffled in dark leaves, you hear 
 The windy clanging of the minster clock ; 
 Although between it and the garden lies 
 A league of grass, wash'd by a slow broad stream. 
 That, stirr'd with languid pulses of the oar. 
 Waves all its lazy lilies, and creeps on. 
 Barge-laden, to three arches of « bridge 
 Crown'd with the minster-towers. 
 
 The fields between 
 Are dewy-fresh, brows'd by deep-udder'd kine, 
 And aU about the large lime feathers low. 
 The lime a summer home of murmurous wings 
 
TEJVJVVSOJVS POEMS. 77 
 
 A landscape by Constable or De Wint would 
 not bring the scene more clearly before the eye, 
 or with more of the quiet truth of happy, but un- 
 impassioued observation. But it is the high pre- 
 rogative of poetry that she can throw over nature 
 the ' wedding-garment or the shroud,' and exhibit 
 landscape as it is colored by emotion. It would 
 be rash to assert perfection of anything human ; 
 but the following description of a country walk 
 on a May morning, under the influence of the pre- 
 monition of a first passion, before the subjective 
 excitement is determined to and concentrated 
 upon its proper object, approaches that limit. 
 Since 
 
 Adam first 
 Embrafied his Eve, in happy hour, 
 
 love was ever the great ideal artist, at whose touch 
 
 Every bird of Eden burst 
 In carol, every bud in flower ; 
 
 but he never painted a more glowing picture of a 
 mind full of the bliss that is half-sister to desire, 
 or of a nature reflecting the bliss in a thousand 
 beautiful sights and sounds, than this : — 
 
78 JESSAVS. 
 
 And sure this orbit of the memory folds 
 
 For ever ia itself the day we went 
 
 To see her. All the land in flowery squares, 
 
 Beneath a broad and equal-blowing wuid, 
 
 Smelt of the coming summer, as one large cloud 
 
 Drew downward : but all else of Heaven was pure 
 
 Up to the Sun, and May from verge to verge. 
 
 And May with me from head to heel. And now, 
 
 As though 'twere yesterday, as though it were 
 
 The hour just flown, that mom with all its sound, 
 
 (For those old Mays had thrice the life of these,) 
 
 Rings in mine cars. The steer forgot to graze, 
 
 And, where the hedge-row cuts the pathway, stood. 
 
 Leaning his horns iuto the neighbor field. 
 
 And lowing to his fellows. From the woods 
 
 Came voices of the well-contented doves. 
 
 The lark could scarce get out his notes for joy 
 
 But shook his song together as he near'd 
 
 His happy home, the ground. To left and right. 
 
 The cuckoo told his name to aU the hills ; 
 
 The mellow ouzel fluted in the elm ; 
 
 The redcap whistled ; and the nightingale 
 
 Sang loud, as though he were the bird of day. 
 
 We have minute touches, bringing out common 
 objects with a passing glory that catches without 
 chaining the attention, as well as those finished 
 pictures upon which the mind dwells with a fixed 
 delight of contemplation ; touches that charm us 
 
TEJVJVVSOJV'S POEMS. 79 
 
 with their truth, and hqlp to mark the whole 
 scene in its distinction of season and weather. 
 Here are two from a crowd of such. From the 
 lilac in crowded bloom 
 
 One warm gust, full-fed with perfume, blew 
 Beyond us, as we entered in the cool. 
 ***** 
 
 In the midst 
 A cedar spread his dark-green layer of shade. 
 The garden glasses shone, and momently 
 The twinkling laurels scattered sUver lights ; 
 
 where the epithet silver admirably expresses the 
 metallic glitter of the laurel leaves in the sun, 
 compared with the deader green of ordinary- 
 foliage. 
 
 ' The last night's gale,' which had blown the 
 rose-tree across the walk, may have been intro- 
 duced mainly to give Rose a graceful occupation, 
 and to justify a charming picture. But even if 
 that were its main purpose, it no less contributes 
 a fact which accounts for the marvellous transpar- 
 ency of the May morning, the clearness of the 
 atmosphere shedding rapture through the veins 
 and hearts of all living things. Applied to most 
 
80 ESSAYS. 
 
 poets, such an observation would savour of over- 
 refining, but Tennyson's never-aimless minuteness 
 justifies it. 
 
 In the picture of Eose which follows, Mr. Ten- 
 nyson has, with the true instinct of genius, avoid- 
 I ed attempting to paint in words a beautiful human 
 I face, while he preserves dramatic propriety in 
 not making a lover at the first glance master the 
 expression of the countenance he afterwards 
 knows in all its meanings. The painter-lover 
 would be at once attracted to the picturesque alti- 
 tude, general effect of dress, light and shade, the 
 contour of the figure, and the bright points of 
 color — 
 
 One arm aloft, 
 Gown'd in pure white, that fitted to the shape — 
 Holding the bush, to fix it back, she stood. 
 A single stream of all her soft brown hair 
 Poured on one side : the shadow of the flowers 
 Stole all the golden gloss, and, wavering 
 Lovingly lower, trembled on her waist — 
 Ah, happy shade — and still went wavering down. 
 But, ere it touched a foot, that might have danced 
 The greensward into greener circles, dipt. 
 And mis'd with shadows of the common ground! 
 But the full day dwelt on her brows, and sunn'd 
 Her violet eyes, and all her Hebe-bloom, 
 
TEjyjVVSOJVS POEMS. 81 
 
 And doubled his own warmth against her lips, 
 And on the bounteous wave of such a breast 
 As never pencil drew. Half light, half shade. 
 She stood, a sight to make an old man young. 
 
 With what exquisite feeling is the progress of 
 the love associated with the imagery of the garden 
 in which the loved one ' hoarded in herself, grew, 
 seldom seen,' 
 
 The daughters of the year. 
 One after one, thro' that stiU garden passed. 
 Each garlanded with her peculiar flower 
 Danced into light, and died into the shade; 
 And each in passing touch'd with some new grace 
 Or seem'd to touch her, so that day by day. 
 Like one that never can be wholly known, 
 Her beauty grew; 
 
 and in that line, ' like one that never can be 
 wholly known,' is revealed one exhaustless charm 
 in all our true personal relations. Things, as 
 things, soon weary us, because we soon know all 
 we can ever know about them ; persons are ever 
 new, ever unfolding to us something unexpected, 
 as they become dearer to us, and we look at them 
 with eyes opened by sympathy and affection. On- 
 ly the view of the universe, as a revelation of a 
 4» 
 
82 ESSJirS. 
 
 personal being, supplies to outward objects ex- 
 haustless variety and interest. 
 
 The law of reserve whicb rules this poem has 
 been already alluded to. It requires neither art 
 nor genius to raise emotion of a low kind in a 
 reader, if a writer has no reserve. The mind ic 
 sufificiently awake in all of us to realize pictures 
 that appeal to the sensual passions ; and a writer 
 has no more difficulty in being powerful, if he 
 give himself the licence of some poetry, than he 
 has in being witty, if he copy Swift's unbridled 
 profanity and beastliness. Mr. Tennyson's glory 
 is to have portrayed passion with a feminine puri- 
 ty, — to have spiritualized the voluptuousness of 
 the senses and the imagination by a manly reve- 
 rence for woman's worth, and a clear intuition of 
 ' the perfect law of liberty ' through which the 
 true humanity develops itself in the form and 
 condition of an animal nature. He religiously 
 observes the sanctities of love, and in graceful 
 pictures lays down the law which he respects : — 
 
 Would you learn at full 
 How passion rose thro' circumstantial grades 
 Beyond all grades deTelop'd ? and indeed 
 I had not staid so long to tell you all, 
 
TEJVJVVSOJV^S POEMS. 83 
 
 But while I mused came Memory with sad eyes, 
 
 Holding the folded amials of my youth ; 
 
 And while I mused, Love with Imit browa went by, 
 
 And with a flying finger swept my lips. 
 
 And spake, ' Be wise : not easily forgiven 
 
 Are those, who setting wide the doors, that bar 
 
 The secret bridal chambers of the heart. 
 
 Let in the day.' Here, then, my words have end. 
 
 And here must end our remarks upon The Gar- 
 dener's Daughter. We can remember no love 
 story that can be placed beside it in all its har- 
 monious combination of excellences. Passion may 
 have been dramatised more intensely; a subtle 
 grace of sentiment, a charm of evanescent fra- 
 grance, may be felt more in some of Shelly's lyr- 
 rics, and in some of Mr. Tennyson's own ; char- 
 acter may certainly be given with more force of 
 individuality ; and unquestionably a story more 
 exciting in its incidents has often been told by 
 novelist and poet ; but for its delineation of the 
 first and last love of a happy man, whose moral 
 nature has known nothing of conflicts with itself, 
 and whose mind has been kept healthy by the de- 
 lightful occupation of the painter ; for its vivid 
 descriptions of nature in some of her loveliest 
 aspects ; for the sense of perfect enjoyment that 
 
84 ESSJtrS. 
 
 makes the verse flow on as a full stream through 
 a rich meadow-land, and for the touching soften- 
 ing of the tone as the speaker tells of the present 
 as a calm resting-place between a blessed memory 
 and a blessed hope, it stands unrivalled in English 
 literature. And yet it never deviates from the 
 familiar path of our English daily life, and is just 
 a simple picture of that life as a joyous heart and 
 warm affection may make it for any of us. 
 
 The forms of poetry which Mr. Tennyson adopts 
 are not capable of interpteting the more complex 
 moral phenomena. To shew that evil natures 
 and evil actions have their appointed work in the 
 world, 
 
 That somehow good 
 Wm be the final goal of ill. 
 To pangs of nature, sins of wiU, 
 Defects of doubt and taints of blood, — 
 
 will, in most cases, require- a more complex ma- 
 chinery of interacting events and characters than 
 he puts in operation. Beautiful actions and beau- 
 tiful characters are their own interpretation. We 
 need ask no questions as to the motive and ground 
 of their existence, as to the part they bear in the 
 harmonies of the universe. But to throw the 
 
TEJVJVVSOJVS POEMS. 85 
 
 faintest light of hope upon the lives and destinies 
 of men and women who seem to be born only to 
 cause suffering to themselves and others, to grow 
 worse as they grow older, and to harden under 
 the discipline of the moral laws of the universe, 
 the mind must look far back into the determining 
 causes of character and action, far forward into 
 their remote results, and far round upon the so- 
 ciety in which they develop themselves, and upon 
 which they are exerting a constant modifying 
 power, through its interests and sympathies. Even 
 the widest glance forward, backward, and around, 
 will fail often to detect one clue to the mystery of 
 evil ; and faith can only throw herself 
 
 Upon the great world's altlr stairs 
 That slope through darkness up to God. 
 
 So far, however, as the problem can be solved 
 poetically — by exhibiting, that is, the real rela- 
 tions of good and evil in particular cases, and 
 their actual connexion with each other as cause 
 and effect, so as to vindicate at once the eternal 
 law of right and the goodness of God with suffi- 
 cient clearness to justify the expression of the 
 
86 ESSAYS. 
 
 poet's view of the world in a rhythmical form, the 
 drama or the epic will alone satisfy the necessities 
 of the case. The lyric poet may indeed assert in 
 glowing strains his own conviction of the ultimate 
 solution as a general truth, or he may present his 
 view of the working of any great moral laws in 
 lyric allegories, like The Palace of Art or The 
 Vision of Sin: but no machinery short of the 
 drama or epic will enable him to solve practically, 
 and to the conviction of his readers, the darker 
 problems of human life. And Mr. Tennyson ab- 
 stains, as a rule, from touching any actions of hu- 
 man beings that are not, so to speak, their own 
 vindication, and which do not at once commend 
 themselves to the sympathy and conscience by 
 their own gracefulness, beauty, or nobility, the 
 happiness, the gentleness, the vitality of mind and 
 heart, the strength and courage of will they ex- 
 hibit. 
 
 This, however, in a world where suffering and 
 sorrow are among the appointed means of disci- 
 pline for the good as well as among the punish- 
 ments of the bad, leaves still scope enough for 
 poetry of a severer character than the exquisite 
 and happy love story we have been commenting 
 
TEjyjVVSOJTS POEMS. 87 
 
 upon. In Dora and Love and Duty the problem 
 the poet attempts to solve is not to show how the 
 eternal law of right vindicates itself against man's 
 self-will and self-indulgence, but how the goodness 
 of God vindicates itself against man's self-sacri- 
 fice in behalf of the right. If such vindication 
 were impossible in the typical instances selected, 
 the subjects would be unfit for poetic treatment. 
 Suffering, unredeemed by its efi'ects, may be a 
 proper subject for the awe-struck meditations of 
 any man ; but to represent it under rhythmical 
 forms which are symbolical of emotion flowing 
 musically forth from a heart rejoicing in its own 
 thoughts about the objects present to it, would be 
 just mockery. It is only Nero that fiddles when 
 Rome is burning. The true poet must have seen 
 the final issue in good of the struggle he portrays, 
 even though but in a faint and hazy glimpse. 
 And Mr. Tennyson habitually observes this law. 
 Even poor, perverted Simeon Stylites has glimpses 
 of his mistake ; his wretched, addled brain is 
 clouded, but the poem closes with a breaking up 
 of the clouds. And scarcely any other of Mr. 
 Tennyson's poems is open to the faintest suspicion 
 of portraying emotion merely for its dramatic in- 
 
88 ESSAYS. 
 
 terest. In Dora an d Love and Duty the suffer- 
 ing is felt through every nerve. The simple un- 
 conscious pathos of the one, and the high-wrought 
 reflective passion of the other, meet in this ex- 
 pression of a genuine grief. A three-volume 
 novel could not impress the essential characteris- 
 tics of each tale with more vividness than the brief 
 poems, in which the incidents are boldly sketched 
 in outline, and the crisis of the passion struck off 
 with a rapid and masterly force of hand. But in 
 both poems, when the battle has been fought, the 
 sharp agony passed, and all pretence of conven- 
 tional consolation abandoned, the peace that comes 
 of victory over self shines clearly down upon the 
 hearts of the victims, and the striking drama, the 
 pathetic tale, points forward to a life purified, 
 strengthened, and even softened by the conflict. 
 As a mere tale, Dora might have ended with the 
 reconciliation ; it is the higher instinct of the 
 moral teacher that leads Mr. Tennyson to add — 
 
 So tiose four abode 
 Within one house together ; and as years 
 Went forward, Mary took another mate ; 
 But Dora lived unmarried till her death. 
 
TEJVJVVSOJVS POEMS. 80 
 
 And it is not the love that 
 
 Sits brooding on the ruins of a life. 
 Nightmare of youth, the spectre of himself, 
 
 that prompts the speaker in Love and Duty to 
 close his passionate recollections with a strain of 
 exquisite sensibility to external beauty and soft- 
 ened visions of the future of his lost mistress :- — 
 
 Live — yet live, — 
 Shall sharpest pathos Wight us, knowing all 
 Life needs for life is possible to Tfill — 
 Live happy ! tend thy flowers : be tended by 
 My blessing ! should my shadow cross thy thoughts 
 Too sadly for their peace, so put it back 
 For calmer hours in memory's darkest hold ; 
 If unforgotten ! should it cross thy dreams. 
 So might it come like one that looks content, 
 With quiet eyes unfaithful to the truth. 
 And point thee forward to a distant light. 
 Or seem to lift a burthen from thy heart 
 And leave thee freer, tiU thou wake refresh'd, 
 Then when the first low matin-chirp hath grown 
 Full quire, and morning driv'n her plow of pearl 
 Far furrowing into light the mounded rack. 
 Beyond the fair green field and eastern sea. 
 
 In Locksley Hall, we pass to a poem of a wide- 
 ly different strain. It is against the fickleness of 
 
90 ESS A VS. 
 
 a woman, not against circumstances which leave 
 her image pure and beautiful in the memory, that 
 the speaker in Locksley Hall has to find a re- 
 source. And he finds it in the excitement of en- 
 terprise and action, in glowing anticipations of 
 progress for the human race. He not merely re- 
 covers his sympathy with his fellow-men, and his 
 interest in life, which had been paralyzed by the 
 unworthiness of her who represented for him all 
 that was beautiful and good in life, — but he're- 
 covers it on higher and firmer ground. What he 
 lost was a world that reflected his own unclouded 
 enjoyment, his buoyant ardor and high spirits ; 
 a world appreciated mainly in its capacity for 
 affording variety to his perceptive activity and 
 scope for his unflagging energies ; a world of 
 which he himself, with his pleasures and his ambi- 
 tions, was the centre. What he gains is a world 
 that is fulfilling a divine purpose, beside which 
 his personal enjoyments are infinitely unimportant, 
 but in aiding and apprehending which his true 
 blessedness is purified and deepened ; a world in 
 which he is infinitely small and insignificant, but 
 greater in his brotherhood with the race which is 
 evolving ' the idea of humanity ' than in any pos- 
 
TEJVJVVSOJV^S POEMS. 91 
 
 sible grandeur of his own. The poem has heen 
 called ' morbid,' a phrase that has acquired a per- 
 fectly new meaning of late years, and is made to 
 include all works of art, and all views of life that 
 are colored by other than comfortable feelings. 
 If Locksley Hall, as a whole, is morbid, then it is 
 morbid to represent a young man rising above an 
 early disappointment in love, and coming out from 
 it stronger, less sensitive, more sinewed for action. 
 What has led certain critics to call the poem 
 morbid is, of course, that the speaker's judgment 
 of his age, in the earlier part, is colored by his 
 private wrong and grief. But it is not morbid, on 
 the contrary, it is perfectly natural and right that 
 outrages on the affections should disturb the calm- 
 ness of the judgment, that acts of treacherous 
 weakness should excite indignation and scorn ; 
 and the view of the world natural to this state of 
 mind is quite as true as that current upon the 
 Stock Exchange, and not at all more partial or 
 prejudiced. It is not, indeed, the highest, any 
 more than it is a complete view, but it is higher 
 and truer than the serene contemplation of a com- 
 fortable Epicurean or passionless thinker. There 
 is no cynicism in the ' fine curses ' of Locksley 
 
92 ESSAYS. 
 
 Hall; they are not the poisonous exhalations of a 
 corrupted nature, but the thunder and lightning 
 that clear the air of what is foul, the forces by 
 which a loving and poetical mind, not yet calmed 
 and strengthened by experience and general prin- 
 ciples, repels unaccustomed outrage and wrong. 
 With what a rich emotion he recals his early re- 
 collections ! Sea, sandy shore and sky have been 
 for him a perpetual fountain of beauty andv of joy, 
 his youth a perpetual feast of imaginative knowl- 
 edge and pictorial glory. 
 
 Many a night from yonder ivied casement, ere I went to rest, 
 Did I look on great Orion sloping slowly to tie west. 
 
 Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro' the mellow shade. 
 Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid. 
 
 Here about the beach I waader'd, nourishing a youth sublime 
 With the fairy tales of Science, and the long result of Time. 
 
 With what a touching air of tenderness and pro- 
 tection he watches the young girl whom he loves 
 in secret, and whose paleness and thinness excite 
 his pity as well as his hope. How rapturously, 
 when she avows her love, he soars up in his joy 
 with a flight that would be tumultuous but for the 
 swiftness of the motion, — unsteady but for the 
 
TEJVJVrSOJV'S POEMS. 93 
 
 substantial massiveness of thought, and the grand 
 poising sweep of the lyric power that sustains 
 it: — 
 
 LoTe took up the glass of Time, and turned it in Ms glomng 
 
 hands ; 
 Every moment, lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands. 
 
 Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with 
 
 might ; 
 Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, passed in music out 
 
 of sight. 
 
 Many a morning on the moorland did we hear the copses ring. 
 And her whisper throng'd my pulses with the fulness of the 
 Spring. 
 
 Many an evening by the waters did we watch the stately ships, 
 And our spirits rush'd together at the touching of the lips. 
 
 Then how pathetic the sudden fall, the modulation 
 by which he passes from the key of rapture to 
 that of despair : — 
 
 my cousin, shallow-hearted ! my Amy, mine no more ! 
 the dreary, dreary moorland ! the barren, barren shore ! 
 
 And here and there, through all that storm of 
 anger, sarcasm, contempt, denunciation that fol- 
 lows, there sounds a note of unutterable tender- 
 ness which gives to the whole movement a pre- 
 vailing character of pain and anguish, of moral 
 
94 ESSAYS. 
 
 desolation, rather than of wrath and vengeance. 
 Not till this mood exhausts itself, and the mind 
 of the speaker turns to action as a resource 
 against despair, does he realise all that he has 
 lost. Not only is his love uprooted, — his hope, 
 his faith in the world have perished in that 
 lightning flash ; and he turns again to his glorious 
 youth, but now only to sound the gulf that sepa- 
 rates him from it. The noble aspirations, the ar- 
 dent hopes, the sanguine prophecies of earlier 
 years roll in rich pomp of music and of picture 
 before us ; but it is the cloud-pageantry of the 
 boy's day-dream which breaks up to reveal the 
 world as it appears now to the ' palsied heart ' and 
 ' jaundiced eye ' of the man. Yet, in the midst 
 of this distempered vision are seen glimpses of a 
 deeper truth. The eternal law of progress is not 
 broken because the individual man is shipwrecked. 
 It is but a momentary glimpse, and offers no firm 
 footing. His personal happiness, after all, is what 
 concerns each person. Here, at least, in this 
 convention-ridden. Mammon-worshipping Europe, 
 where the passions are cramped, and action that 
 would give scope to passionate energy impossible, 
 the individual has no chance. But in some less 
 
TEJVJVVSOJVS POEMS. 95 
 
 advanced civilization, where the individual is freer 
 if the race be less forward, there may be hope. 
 And a picture of the tropics rises before the imag- 
 ination, dashed off in a few strokes of marvellous 
 breadth and richness of color : — 
 
 There to wander far. away. 
 On from island unto island at the gateways of the day. 
 
 Larger constellations burning, mellow moons and happy skies, 
 Breadths of tropic shade and palms in cluster, knots of Paradise. 
 
 Never comes the trader, never floats an European flag. 
 
 Slides the bird o'er lustrous woodland, droops the trailer from 
 
 the crag; 
 Droops the heavy-blossomed bower, hangs the heavy-fruited 
 
 tree — 
 Summer isles of Eden lying in dark-purple spheres of sea. 
 
 But the deeper nature of the man controls the de- 
 lusion of the fancy ; his heart, reason, and con 
 science revolt against the escape into a mere sav- 
 age freedom ; they will not allow him to drop out 
 of the van of the advancing host ; and manly 
 courage comes with the great thought of a society 
 that is rapidly fulfilling the idea of humanity ; the 
 personal unhappiness, the private wrong, the bit- 
 terness of outraged affection, give way before the 
 
96 ESSAYS. 
 
 upswelling sympathy with the triumph of the race 
 to which he belongs. The passion has passed in 
 the rush of words that gave it expression, and 
 life shines clear again, no longer on the tender- 
 hearted, imaginative boy, but on the man 
 
 Made weak by time and fate, but strong in -will, 
 To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. 
 
 There is no poem of Tennyson's more striking- 
 ly dramatic throughout than this, and none in 
 which an age weakened by sentimental indulgence 
 may find thoughts more suggestive of its recovery 
 to manly vigor and endurance. And if, in works 
 of art, artistic beauty alone be looked for, no 
 poem can be more rich in color, more rapid in 
 movement, more abundant in exquisite beauties of 
 detail. The verse is a marvel of force and grace, 
 — full, majestic, impetuous, — thundering on like 
 the downrush of a mighty cataract, with its infi- 
 nite pulsations of light, its dazzling interradiation 
 of changing forms and colors — the &vjigid/iov 
 yelaafia translated Into sound. Its grand music, 
 poured, full of grief and indignation, to the long 
 swell of the waves upon the flat sandy shore, re- 
 calls the Homeric 
 
TEJVJVYSOJV'S POEMS. 97 
 
 Bt] d' axECiiv naqa diva nolvqjlota^oio dalaaarjg 
 IlolXa 6' inBu' dmavevOs xiiav i^qaff 6 ysqaioQ — 
 
 no less by its majesty of rhythm than by the like- 
 ness of the locality. 
 
 The four principal poems in the third series of 
 Mr. Tennyson's works which depict love in its 
 various influences upon different characters and 
 under differing circumstances have been now more 
 or less fully touched on ; and their general char- 
 acteristic is, that the passion there shown in oper- 
 ation is a purifying, strengthening, sustaining pow- 
 er ; that it allies itself with conscience and rea- 
 son, and braces instead of debilitating the will. 
 The small poem called Fatima is the only instance 
 in which Mr. Tennyson has expended his powers 
 in portraying any love that incapacitates for the 
 common duties of life, unless the two Marianas 
 be regarded in this light, which would be a per- 
 verse misconception of their main purpose. In 
 Locksley Hall the ghost of a murdered love is 
 fairly laid, and the man comes out of his conflict 
 the stronger and the clearer for his experience. 
 Nothing that can with any propriety be called 
 morbid or unhealthy belongs to any of the great 
 5 
 
98 ESSAYS. 
 
 love poems in the collection ; and surely the view 
 of the relation of the sexes in the Princess is as 
 sound a basis for a noble life as was ever pro- 
 pounded. It would be singular if, with such ante- 
 cedents, Mr. Tennyson should, in the maturity of 
 his intellect and experience, have descended to ex- 
 hibit the influence of love upon a weak and worth- 
 less character, and have chosen for that purpose a 
 melodramatic story of suicide, murder, and mad- 
 ness, dished up for popular applause with vehe- 
 ment invective on the vices of the English nation, 
 and claptrap appeals to the war-feeling of the 
 day. This, however, is what we are asked to be- 
 lieve of Mr. Tennyson's latest production, Maud, 
 by the loudest professional critics of the journals 
 and magazines. The critics give us some guage 
 of their opinion by tracing Mr. Tennyson's grad- 
 ual degradation through the Princess, lower still 
 in In Memoriam, to its climax of weakness and 
 absurdity in itfflMc^ ; audit is but justice to say 
 that these opinions are not now for the first time 
 put forth on the provocation of the last named 
 poem, but appear to be the deliberate convictions 
 of the writers. We believe that both the Pnra- 
 cess and In Memoriam are in their sixth edition, 
 
TEJVJVYSOJV'S POEMS. 99 
 
 which, apart from priyate experience, necessarily 
 limited, of the impression the works have pro- 
 duced, leads to the conclusion that these writers 
 do not in this case fairly represent the opinion of 
 the English public. Whether they represent it 
 any better in respect to Maud remains to be seen. 
 Meanwhile it is well not to be frightened out of 
 the enjoyment of fine poetry, and out of the in- 
 struction to be gained from a great poet's views 
 of life, as exhibited dramatically in the destiny of 
 a particular sort of character subjected to a partic- 
 ular set of influences, by such epithets as ' mor- 
 bid,' ' hysterical,' ' spasmodic,' which may mean 
 one thing or another, according to the sense, dis- 
 crimination and sympathy of the man who applies 
 them. 
 
 There is little question as to the artistic merits 
 of Maud. It is only the aim of the poet that has 
 been assailed ; his execution is generally admitted 
 to be successful. It may be at once conceded that 
 the writer of the fragments of a life which tell 
 the story of Maud, is not in a comfortable state 
 of mind when he begins his record ; and that if 
 a gentleman were to utter such sentiments at a 
 board of railway directors, or at a marriage break- 
 
100 ESSAYS. 
 
 fast, he might not improperly be called hysterical. 
 Like the hero of Locksley Hall, his view of the 
 life around him, of the world in which his lot is 
 cast, has been colored by a gricTous personal ca- 
 lamity ; and the character of the man is originally 
 one in which the sensibilities are keen and deli- 
 cate, the speculative element strong, the practical 
 judgment unsteady, the will and active energies 
 comparatively feeble. A Shelley or a Keats may 
 stand for example of his type ; not perfect men, 
 certainly, but scarcely so contemptible as not to 
 possess both dramatic interest and some claim to 
 human sympathy. Chatterton, a much lower type 
 than either, has been thought a subject of psycho- 
 logical and moral interest, in spite or in conse- 
 quence of the vulgar, petulant, weak melodrama 
 of his life and death. You see, God makes these 
 morbid, hysterical, spasmodic individuals occasion- 
 ally, and they have various fates ; some die with- 
 out a sign ; others try the world, and dash them- 
 selves dead against its bars ; some few utter their 
 passionate desires, their weak complaints, their 
 ecstatic raptures in snatches of song that make 
 the world delirious with delight, — and somehow, 
 for their sake the class becomes interesting, and 
 
TEj\rjvysojv^s poems. loi 
 
 we are at times inclined to measure the spiritual 
 capacity of an age by its treatment of these weak 
 souls, — by the fact, whether the general consti- 
 tution of society cherishes such souls into divine 
 lovers and singers of the beautiful, or lashes and 
 starves and changes them into moping idiots and 
 howling madmen. The autobiographer of Maud 
 belongs to this class by temperament, as any one 
 may understand from the turn of his angry 
 thoughts to those social evils which must and ought 
 to excite indignation and scorn in gentle and lov- 
 ing natures that are at the same time inspired with 
 generous and lofty ideas ; from the speculative 
 enigmas he torments himself with at the preva- 
 lence of rapine and pain in creation, at the insig- 
 nificance of man in a boundless universe, subject 
 to iron laws ; from the penetrating tenderness, 
 the rich fancy, the childlike naivete of his love 
 for the young girl who saves him from himself and 
 his dark dreams. There lies in such a character, 
 from the beginning, the capacity for weakness and 
 misery, for crime and madness. That capacity is 
 inseparable from keen sensibility, powerful emo- 
 tions, and active imagination ; and if events hap- 
 pen which paralyze the will already feeble, turn 
 
102 ESSAVS. 
 
 the flow of feeling into a stream of bitterness, and 
 present to the imagination a world of wrong and 
 suffering, the capacity fulfils itself according to 
 the force and direction of the events. In Maud 
 the tendency meets with events that carry it on 
 through these stages ; and the question is whether 
 any one of these events is impossible or improbable, 
 whether English society is misrepresented when 
 it is made capable of furnishing the unwholesome 
 nutriment for such a character. It would rather 
 seem as if the only improbable incident in the 
 whole story were that which redeems society from 
 a wholesome charge ; as if the daughter of the 
 millionaire, the sister of ' the dandy-despot, the 
 oiled and curled Assyrian bull,' were the least 
 likely character of the whole group. God be 
 thanked, however, there are such girls ; and many 
 a noble woman — like the Princess Ida — has 
 given her heart out of pity to a man whose energy 
 and hope she saw crushed for want of sympathy, 
 and would endorse these lines : 
 
 Perhaps the smile and tender tone 
 
 Came out of her pitying womanhood, 
 For am I not, am I not, here alone 
 
 So many a summer since she died, 
 My mother, who was so gentle and good ? 
 
TEJ\-JVrSOJV'S POEMS. 103 
 
 And many a man who seems to himself to be liv- 
 ing on -without motive, ' a ] , ath in life,' could say, 
 
 Ah ! what shall I be at fifty, 
 
 Should Nature keep me alive, 
 
 If I find the world so bitter 
 
 When I am but twenty-five ? 
 
 Yet, if she were not a cheat, 
 
 If Maud were all that she seem'd, 
 
 And her smile were all that I dream'd. 
 
 Then the world were not so bitter 
 
 But a smile could make it sweet. 
 
 No doubt it is only weak characters who are 
 affected in this way. To strong men the world is 
 not made bitter by a father's ruin and suicide, by 
 the prevalence of meanness and cruelty, by con- 
 temptuous neglect, and general absence of sympa- 
 thy. Nor would a girl's smile atone to them for 
 such calamities as do affect them. So weakness 
 has its compensation. 
 
 But then, some one will say, if the poet's inten- 
 tion were to exhibit the restorative power of love 
 over a delicate and beautiful mind overthrown by 
 circumstances, 
 
 Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune, and harsh, — 
 
104 ESSAYS. 
 
 and if, in respect to this intention, we allow the 
 exhibition of the disease in order to feel the full 
 force of the restoring influence, and of course are 
 prepared that the love should be of a kind cor- 
 responding to the character, — rapturous, fanciful, 
 childish, fitted more for a Southern woman like 
 Juliet, as one of the best critics of Maud has re- 
 marked, than for an Englishman, — why does not 
 the poet carry out liis intention, and conduct his 
 story to a happy close ? Why, good sir or mad- 
 am, does not Shakspeare let Juliet and her Romeo 
 adorn Verona with troops of little Juliets and 
 Romeos, to do as their papa and mamma did be- 
 fore them ? Why does not Cordelia live to coin- 
 fort Lear in his old ago, restored to true apprecia- 
 tion of his daughters ? Why does Ophelia drown ;' 
 in a ditch ; and Hamlet, after murdering Polonius, J 
 die by chance medley ? Why are not Othello's eyes ^ 
 opened before, instead of after his fatal deed, and ( 
 he and Desdemona allowed to spend the rest of \ 
 their days in peace and mutual trust ? Is it, thinE" 
 you, because Shakspeare belongs to the hysterical, 
 morbid, spasmodic school, and likes the violent 
 excitement of melodramatic incident ? We should 
 be sorry to stake much upon the reception any of 
 
TEJVJVrSOJV'S POEMS. 105 
 
 these poetic issues would meet with from certain 
 critics, if they now for the first time came up for 
 judgment. Perhaps in all these cases he had some 
 Tague design of moving certain passions which the 
 older critics knew by the name of pity and terror, 
 and to which one who was himself something of a 
 poet — the author of Samson Agordstes — refers 
 approvingly, on the authority of Aristotle, as the 
 justifying motive of tragedy. Perhaps, too, he 
 might think it his business, in delineating particu- 
 lar characters, to express in their destiny his view 
 of the general condition of society, as tested by 
 the fate and fortunes of such characters. And 
 possibly Mr. Tennyson may think himself justified 
 in presenting a story that does not end happily, 
 for both these reasons. It may appear to him that 
 ' the course of true love ' would be unlikely to 
 ' run smooth ' under the circumstances of Maud 
 and her lover, combined with the conditions of 
 English modern life ; that the man had not the 
 coolness and self-control to master the circum- 
 stances ; and that there was not in society the 
 generosity and disregard of rank and money ne- 
 cessary to allow the restorative influence of 
 Maud's affection to work out its cure. Divest the 
 5* 
 
106 ESSAYS. 
 
 story for a moment of its lyric elevation, and 
 compare it with our greatest novelist's treatment 
 of a somewhat kindred case. Suppose Mr. Barnes | 
 Newcome had not been a coward as well as a 
 brute, and had found his sister Ethel holding a 
 tete-d-tete in the garden with her cousin Clive, 
 after an evening party to which the Most Noble 
 the Marquis of Farintosh had been invited ex- 
 pressly to conclude his courtship, — is it not pos- 
 sible that Mr. Barnes and his cousin might have 
 enacted the scene between the ' Assyrian bull ' 
 and Maud's lover ? The physical courage of the 
 Assyrian bull is quite as true, to say the least, to 
 the real types of his class as the physical coward- 
 ice of Barnes Newcome. But the object of the 
 novelist not be^ng to excite pity and terror, he 
 develops the selfishness and Mammon-worship of 
 English rich people to other consequences and in 
 another direction. The poet takes his course, 
 too, with equal efTect towards carrying out his de- 
 sign, and without violating, so far as we see, the 
 essential contemporary truth of his story ; while 
 he is thus enabled to exhibit some of the eternal 
 elements of tragedy still in operation among us. 
 We need say nothing of the skill and beauty 
 
TJSJ\rjVYSOJV^S POEMS. 1,01 
 
 with which the remorse of the murderer is paint- 
 ed. The wonderful power of the strains in which 
 the successive stages of this feeling arc represent- 
 ed, is admitted on all hands. English literature 
 has nothing more dramatically expressive of a 
 mind on the verge of overthrow, than the verses 
 in which the shell on the Brittany coast serves as 
 text ; nothing that presents the incipient stage of 
 madness, springing from the wrecked affections, 
 with more of reality and pathos than the poem, 
 ' oh ! that 'twere possible,' now recovered from 
 the pages of a long forgotten miscellany, and set 
 as a jewel amid jewels ; nothing that surpasses 
 in truth and terrible force the mad-house solilo- 
 quy, ' Dead, long dead ! ' If the poem had ended 
 there, ' the strangest anti-climax that we ever re- 
 member to have read ' would not have offended a 
 recent critic. We fear that in that case, true 
 enough to nature as it might have been, the cli- 
 max would have come in for blame of the opposite 
 character, and the poet have been found fault with 
 for leaving his readers to dwell upon horrid im- 
 pressions without relief. We are sure that no 
 poet deserving the name would choose such an 
 ending where any other was possible. But men 
 
108 ESSAYS. 
 
 do recover from madness, and can — though with 
 an awe-struck sense of their own unfitness for life, 
 a nervous apprehension that paralyzes energy and 
 action, — be raised to interest themselves in some- 
 thing out of themselves and their miseries. And 
 Mr. Tennyson, who introduces his hero breathing 
 scorn and indignation on the meanness and little- 
 ness of a society, where the vices of individuals 
 are not obscured and compensated by any con- 
 scious noble aim of the commonwealth, dismisses 
 him, cheered and strengthened by knowing that 
 the British nation has risen for a time to a con- 
 sciousness of a great purpose, — has awaked out 
 of its commercial epicureanism, and roused itself 
 to fight a battle for the right and the good. In 
 sympathy with a grand purpose and a high resolve 
 animating his countrymen, the dreary phantom 
 that had haunted him departs ; he knows that his 
 love has forgiven him the injury that his passion- 
 ate heart caused her ; and he can wait, calm and 
 hopeful, till death re-unites them. 
 
 The fact is, that Mr. Tennyson, without aban- 
 doning his lyric forms, has in Maud written a 
 tragedy — a work, that is, which demands to be 
 judged, not by the intrinsic goodness and beauty 
 
TEJVJVrSOJV'S POEMS. 109 
 
 of the actions and emotions depicted, but by their 
 relation to character ; that character, again, being 
 not only an interesting study in itself and moving 
 our sympathy, but being related -dynamically 
 to the society of the time ■which serves as the 
 background of the picture, and thus displaying 
 the characteristics of the society by showing its 
 influence, under particular circumstances, upon 
 the character selected. Mr. Tennyson's critics 
 have for the most part read the poem as if its pur- 
 pose were to hold up an example for our imitation, 
 and have condemned it because, viewed in this 
 light, it offers nothing but a nature of over-excita- 
 ble sensibilities, first rendered moody by misfor- 
 tune, then driven mad by its own crime, and finally 
 recovered to a weak exultation in a noble enter- 
 prise it has not the manliness to share. But no 
 one feels that Shakspeare is immoral in making 
 Othello kill himself ; no one attributes the cyni- 
 cism of Mephistopheles to Goethe. 
 
 Why then should the author of The Gardener's 
 Daughter be set down as morbid ? — the author 
 of Locksley Hall as one who sees no worth in 
 action ? — the author of Dora as a selfish dream- 
 er, who knows nothing of duty ? Let us try and 
 
110 ESSAYS. 
 
 be as just to the great men that live amongst us, 
 as to those who are beyond our praise or blame. 
 Let us not stone our own prophets, while we build 
 the tombs of the men who prophesied to our fore- 
 fathers. 
 
 It is a step back in respect of date to speak of 
 The Princess after Maud ; but while the latter is 
 the deepest and most tragical exhibition of the 
 action of love upon the character and destiny of 
 an individual that Mr. Tennyson has given to the 
 world, the former treats the sexual relations in 
 their most comprehensive form, and may so be 
 considered as containing implicitly all individual 
 love poems, as the poetical statement of the law 
 which they all exhibit in particular instances. In 
 its philosophical aim, therefore. The Princess be- 
 longs to the same class of poems as The Palace 
 of Art and The Vision of Sin, in both of which 
 a law of life is presented, not as modified by the 
 peculiar nature and circumstances of an individu- 
 al, but in its absolute universality as a law for the 
 human race. It is natural enough that in an age 
 when absolute and universal solutions are sought 
 not only for physical phenomena, but also for 
 mental and social, — when not only the movements 
 
TEJVJVrSOJV^S POEMS. Ill 
 
 of the heavenly bodies and the complex relations 
 of the constituent elements of organic matter, but 
 the course of thought — the growth, decay, and 
 character of states, — in a word, the whole life of 
 the indiyidual, and the collective life of humanity, 
 are supposed to be traceable to the orderly opera- 
 tion of fixed principles, — it is natural that, fasci- 
 nated by the grandeur of speculations of this im- 
 mensity, the poet, too, should attempt to rise 
 above the portraiture of individual life to the ex- 
 hibition, in an absolute form, of the principles 
 that determine individual life. Always, indeed, 
 it has been held that the highest poetry gave the 
 law as well as the special instance ; interpreted 
 humanity as well as some individual life ; and be- 
 came highest by blending, as they say, the univer- 
 sal with the particular. This, however, simply 
 means that true portraiture of individual life ne- 
 cessarily involves generic and specific, as well as 
 individual truth ; that John or Mary must be man 
 and woman — English man and English woman — 
 to be a pair of real human beings, under the in- 
 fluence of any particular feelings. Such poems as 
 those mentioned above drop the individual and 
 the special altogether, and attempt to present a 
 
112 ESSJiVS. 
 
 law of. human nature in operation upon beings 
 who are human without being particular men or 
 women. Now, it is the very essence of poetry to 
 present, not abstract propositions to the intellect, 
 but concrete real truth to the senses, the affec- 
 tions, — to the whole man, in short ; and this can 
 be done only by presenting objects as they exist 
 and act upon one another, and upon pur minds, in 
 the real world, — not logical objects formed by 
 the action of our analytic faculty, and abstracted 
 from reality. Such universality as poetry has is 
 derived from the fact, that the individual con- 
 tains the genus and the species, and that the pure 
 universal of the intellect has no counterpart in 
 nature, and is therefore not a truth in the sense in 
 which poetry concerns itself with truth. And 
 poets who attempt to get beyond individual truth, 
 implicitly containing generic and specific truth, 
 fall into one of two mistakes ; they either present 
 the truth as abstract statement, dressed up in rhe- 
 torical ornament, and so fail to fulfil the true func- 
 tion of their genius, — or, feeling the necessity of 
 avoiding this, they invent a fictitious allegorical 
 machinery, with which they obscure the statement, 
 and are, in fact, treating a special instance, with 
 
TEjyjVVSOJTS POEMS. 113 
 
 this difference, — that the individual traits are fan- 
 ciful and arbitrary, instead of being those of ac- 
 tual experience. The result, in the latter case, is 
 that the reader makes the universality by his ab- 
 straction of details, getting, at last, back to a 
 mere abstract statement, and so loses all the force 
 of true poetic teaching ; while, as the only com- 
 pensation, his imagination is amused by the ingen- 
 uity and beauty of the machinery. And, in both 
 cases, by aiming at an universality which belongs 
 to science, poetry loses her true prerogative ; and 
 no longer commanding the sympathies, fails to 
 teach, — becoming at once less useful and less de- 
 lightful. The Palace of Art and The Vision of 
 Sin are instances of the one mode of treatment ; 
 The Two Voices may partly serve to illustrate 
 the other. All three contain exquisite detail, but 
 the whole fails of its effect. And were we com- 
 pelled to regard The Princess solely as an at- 
 tempt to exhibit the action and justification of 
 sexual love as an universal law of human life, as 
 an allegory, aiming at scientific generality, a sim- 
 ilar failure would certainly have to be recorded. 
 The machinery would, in that case, be overdone 
 — would attract the attention to detail quite as 
 
114 ESSAYS. 
 
 mucli as if a merely common love-story were being 
 told, without giving the force of reality, — and 
 would, by the preponderance of detail and traits 
 of individuality and special circumstance, dero- 
 gate from the pure universality of the problem. 
 But, in fact. The Princess is ' earnest wed with 
 sport,' — the attempt of a mind, whose feeling for 
 the beautiful and the true is stronger than its 
 humor and fun, to treat certain modern mistakes 
 about the true relation of man and woman with 
 good-humored satire, and in spite of this inten- 
 tion impelled to a strain of serious thought and 
 impassioned feeling. It is a laugh subsiding into 
 a loving smile, — playful irony surprised into ten- 
 derness and tears. But because the commence- 
 ment is mock-heroic, and the machinery highly 
 fanciful — though not so removed from possibility 
 as to bafSe belief and distress the judgment, — the 
 earnest close seems rather the poet's own utter- 
 ance of his views of the relations of the sexes, 
 than the inherent moral of the story. And ad- 
 miring, as all must, the sweet tenderness and no- 
 ble thought of the dialogue that ends the poem, — 
 the magnificence, at once so rich and tasteful, of 
 the description of the woman's college, and of the 
 
TEJVJvrsoj\r's poems. 115 
 
 scenery about it, — the exquisite sentiment and 
 finish of the interspersed songs and idylls, — the 
 movement and dramatic life of the whole poem, — 
 one cannot help regretting that the longest, and 
 in some respects the finest, of Mr. Tennyson's 
 productions should have been fairly chqiracterized 
 by him as ' A Medley,' and that he should have 
 been obliged at last to say, — 
 
 Then rose a little feud betwixt the two — 
 
 Betwixt the mockers and the realists : 
 
 And I, betwixt them both, to please them both. 
 
 And yet to give the story as it rose, 
 
 I moved as in a strange diagonal, 
 
 And may be neither pleased myself nor them. 
 
 However, the incongruity is there, and we must 
 make the best of it. It interferes, somewhat, with 
 our interest in the loves of the Prince and Prin- 
 cess as actual human beings, and deprives the 
 grand philosophic sentiment at the close of the 
 impressiveness that belongs to the moral of an ac- 
 tual human story. On the other hand, the impulse 
 towards an earnest treatment of the subject, strug- 
 gling through and finally overcoming the mock- 
 heroic, gives the advantage of a contrast, and we 
 pass from the one to the other with a heightened 
 
116 ESSAYS. 
 
 zest and relish. ' Altogether, if we give ourselves 
 lip to the poet — not setting rules for him, but 
 letting him take us along as he will, and accepting 
 his account of the origin and motives of his po- 
 em, — we shall find nothing wanting to a complete 
 work of art, which may not be the most profound 
 or affecting treatment of a great truth, but which, 
 flowering thick with beauties of detail, is graceful 
 and noble throughout, and rises to a close in which 
 lofty thought and passionate feeling blend, typify- 
 ing the union of man and woman, in one full, rich 
 stream of poetry, — 
 
 The two-celled heart beating with one full stroke, 
 Life. 
 
 Wo have not spoken of Mr. Tennyson as a song 
 writer ; yet, had he written nothing but half-a- 
 dozen of liis best songs, his place among English 
 poets would have been incontestably high. Flow 
 down cold Rivulet to the Sea — Break, break ■ — 
 The Bugle Song — Tears, idle Tears — Come 
 doion, O Maid, from yonder Mountain Height, — 
 and the lyric that sparkles through The Brook, 
 would by themselves found a reputation as lasting 
 as the English language. One might almost as 
 
TSJVJ\-VSOJ\rS POEMS. 117 
 
 well attempt to define the simple sensations or to 
 explain why a melody iu music charms the ear, as 
 to convey in words the impression any of these 
 songs makes upon the reader. One may analyse 
 them, and put down the separate feelings and im- 
 ages of which they consist ; but the effort to re- 
 flect upon them substitutes thoughts for sentiments, 
 as some of the most delicate perfumes of flowers 
 refuse to yield themselves to an effort, and only 
 affect us as we catch their evanescent fragrance 
 in fitful wafts. Take, for instance. Tears, idle 
 Tears, to which the title of Regret might be affix- 
 ed. No doubt its charm partly depends on the 
 paKtetic character of the separate images collected 
 from human life by the dominant feeling, and on 
 the skill with which these rise gradually to a cli- 
 max. The sad pleasure excited by the waning 
 fields in autumn — one of the lightest and most 
 evanescent of regrets, — deepens into the feelings 
 with which the return and the departure of friends 
 whose dwelling is byeond the ocean is regarded. 
 It passes, by a most natural and touching grada- 
 tion, to that last parting from all that is dear upon 
 earth, when the sweetness of the least objects that 
 have blended with happy lives is solemnized and 
 
118 ESSJiVS. 
 
 saddened by the thought that it is felt for the last 
 time by the departing spirit ; and that solemn 
 sweetness passes again to a climax in the passion 
 of tenderness and regret which makes the memory 
 of the dead dearer than the presence of the liv- 
 ing, — the passion of tenderness and despair 
 which gives an agonizing rapture to the dreams 
 of hopeless love. 
 
 But the power of the song over our feelings is 
 far greater than can be attributed to any succes- 
 sion of pathetic recollections of human life pre- 
 sented distinctly as objects of thought. It awakes 
 
 / all the fountains of bitter-sweet memory, sets us 
 
 I dreaming like a half audible strain of music in 
 the distance, without fixing the mind to definite 
 
 I objects, suspends reflection and will, and brings 
 up all the delicious sweetness of the past with the 
 
 \ sadness that it is past, — all the brightness of our 
 brightest moments with the cloud that so soon 
 passes over them, — the meetings and the part- 
 ings, the eternal change and flow, that make up 
 human life. It is in its infinite suggestiveness that 
 its charm lies ; in its power, not to bring this or 
 that pathetic remembrance before the mind, but to 
 set the mind at the tone of delicious day-dream- 
 
TEjvjyvsojrs poems. ho 
 
 ing, and to give a half-blissful, half-regretful key 
 note to the day-dreams. And this subtle power 
 of suggestiTeness belongs more or less to all Mr. 
 Tennyson's songs ; they all seem to touch chords 
 that lie deeper down than the region of clear intel- 
 lectual consciousness ; they present definite ideas, 
 but they present them with such delicacy of touch 
 as to leave the mind only half conscious of their 
 presence, — just sufficiently conscious to be set off 
 dreaming about them, to feel their influence with- 
 out being drawn out of itself to them, while the 
 melody of the strain keeps up the creative power 
 of dreaming at its highest activity. . 
 
 Scarcely one of the more elaborate poems of 
 which we have spoken, though its main object is 
 to present the passion of love in its influence 
 upon various characters under various circum- 
 stances, fails to supply abundant evidence of Mr. 
 Tennyson's interest in other phases of life than 
 those colored by high emotion, and of his power 
 to present them with new force and meaning. A 
 fine sense of natural beauty and a marvellous fac- 
 ulty of word-painting adorn his love-poems with 
 landscape pictures which need fear comparison 
 with those of no English poet. Locksley Hall 
 
120 ESSAYS. 
 
 is a grand hymn of liuman progress, in which the 
 discoveries of science, the inventions of art, the 
 order and movement of society, the sublime hopes 
 and beliefs of religion, blend in a magnificent vi- 
 sion of the age, and are sung with the rapture of 
 a prophet to the noblest music. In Maud the 
 commonest newspaper details of the meanness, the 
 cheating, the cruelty, the crime and misery, so 
 rife among us, supply food to the S(sva indignatio 
 of the man whose temperament and circumstances 
 make him look on the darker aspects of the time ; 
 and the same man finds in the latest topic of the 
 day — which is also one of the grandest spectacles 
 of our age — the comfort and the hope that re- 
 store him to sanity and peace with himself and 
 the world. In The Princess, history, science, 
 and metaphysics are touched with a light of pen- 
 etrating intellect as well as a grace of poetry ; the 
 amusements of a Mechanics' Institute and the gen- 
 ial pleasantry of a gay picnic party contrast with 
 the profouudest reflections on the Continental 
 Revolutions of '48 and the most hopeful interpre- 
 tations of the last new socialist theories. It is 
 this wide range of thought, ever active in every 
 direction to supply material for the imaginative 
 
TEjyjVYSOJV^S POEMS. 121 
 
 faculty of the artist, — this catholic sympathy with 
 modern life in all its characteristic phases, that is 
 Mr. Tennyson's distinguishing quality, and that, 
 in combination with his formal poetic skill, ren- 
 ders him the favorite poet of the cultivated class- 
 es. And it is in the development of this wide 
 range of thought and sympathy in his poems pub- 
 lished since 1833 that the growth and maturity of 
 his genius mainly manifests itself. It is because 
 he has grown and ripened as a man tliat his art 
 has seemed to become more perfect with every 
 production. 
 
 Although, however, these qualities are abun- 
 dantly evidenced by the poems hitherto treated, it 
 would leave this survey incomplete were we not to 
 allude to the poems which are devoted expressly 
 to the delineation of other phases of modern life 
 than those mainly dependent on the passion of sex- 
 ual love. If there were no other motive, the ne- 
 cessity of indicating Mr. Tennyson's power of 
 writing in a homelier, a less ornate and elaborate 
 style than he generally adopts as the proper dra- 
 matic expression of the characters and moods of 
 passion he is presenting, would be motive enough. 
 6 
 
122 ESSAYS. 
 
 But in fact The Brook, Edwin Morris, and The 
 Golden Year, are among his most pleasing pro- 
 ductions. The Day Dream, really a love-poem 
 within a love-poom, exquisitely blends sport with 
 earnest, and might be taken in its growth from 
 TTie Sleeping- Beauty to its present elaborate form 
 as a type of the development of Mr. Tennyson's 
 genius from sensuous beauty and rhythmical music 
 to the deep heart and wise intellect of his later 
 poems. Audley Court contains a charming song 
 and a delicious moonlight landscape, besides a 
 transcendant description of a game-pie. Walking 
 to the Mail is a shrewd conversation on the causes 
 that develop character and determine political 
 opinion ; not in our opinion particularly worthy 
 of blank verse or its place in the collection. Then 
 there are the expressly political lyrics, one of 
 which, at least. Love thou thy Land, is only to be 
 compared with an essay of Lord Bacon's for its 
 compressed energy and imaginative reality of 
 phrase, for its fulness and wisdom of sentiment ; 
 and far above any essay of Lord Bacon's for its 
 ardent patriotism, its noble sense of right and 
 truth, its grand faith in human destiny, its pru- 
 
TEjvjvysoj)rs poems. 123 
 
 dence, and its courage. An obscure stanza or two 
 scarcely make themselves felt in the recollection 
 of its general effect. 
 
 But we must speak briefly of In Memoriavi. 
 What survey of Mr. Tennyson's poetry could be 
 satisfactory without it ? Certainly not ours, who 
 do not believe all feelings to be morbid and un- 
 healthy which are not joyous or comfortable, and 
 who do believe that sorrow, and doubt, and med- 
 itation have their appointed beneficent influence 
 upon human character, and are no less part of hu- 
 man training for a nobler and more blessed exis- 
 tence than mirth, and demonstrative certainty, and 
 vigorous action. We should be guilty of treason 
 against our deepest convictions were we to pass 
 without a protest the notion that In Memoriam is 
 a morbid mistake, — the unhealthy product of a 
 man of genius in an unhealthy mood, degrading 
 his genius by employing it in the delineation of a 
 sorrow that is unmanly and exaggerated, — a 
 spasmodic utterance of a weak mind, that can 
 only affect other weak minds with hysterical emo- 
 tion, and incapacitate all who subject themselves 
 to its influence for their duties to their fellow men 
 and their reliance upon the goodness of God. 
 
124 ESSJirS. 
 
 Even if we regarded In Memoriam as simply the 
 record of a personal sorrow, a poetical monument 
 to a personal friend, we should be cautious of call- 
 ing it exaggerated, till we were quite certain that 
 there was anything unworthy and unmanly in 
 binding up our hearts with the life of another, and 
 in feeling them quiver with agony when that other 
 life was torn from us. It is easy to understand, 
 when social intercourse goes no deeper than lik- 
 ing and disliking, being amused and bored ; when 
 personal relations have dwindled down to club 
 intimacies, and a friend is the man with whom we 
 dine and play whist ; that such a tender and root- 
 ed affection as is recorded through In Memoriam 
 should appear exaggerated. The question is 
 whether the Pall-Mall standard of human nature 
 be the highest, whether a profound personal affec- 
 tion be really a weakness, or whether on the Pail- 
 Mall theory the world would not rapidly become 
 a pigstye or a slaughterhouse. Compare the tone 
 in which Shakspeare addresses the male friend to 
 whom the greater number of the sonnets apply, with 
 Tennyson's tone in speaking of Arthur Hallam. 
 If the one is supposed to do no discredit to the 
 soundest-hearted as well as the largest-minded 
 
TEJVJVYSOJV^S POEMS. 125 
 
 man of modern Europe, why is the other to be 
 called morbid and exaggerated ? The critics need 
 not take so much trouble to let the world know 
 that they are not Shakspeares and Tennysons in 
 heart any more than in intellect. No one who 
 knows the class would be in danger of so errone- 
 ous a supposition. But there are thousands of 
 men and women whose affections are akin to those 
 of these great poets, and who are grateful for the 
 power of reading in beautiful poetry an adequate 
 expression of their own deepest feelings. Wo 
 know that such persons find in In Memoriam the 
 sort of consolation and strength they find in the 
 Psalms of David. The suspira de profundis of 
 great minds give articulate expression to, and in- 
 terpret the sorrows of lesser minds, which else 
 would darken life with ' clouds of nameless trou- 
 ble,' and perhaps never find a peaceful solution. 
 
 But the personal motive of In Memoriam is 
 quite inadequate as the standing-point for criti- 
 cism of the poem. 
 
 The imaginatiye woe 
 That loves to handle spiritual strife 
 
 is operative throughout ; and, as Coleridge says 
 of love, — 
 
126 ESSAYS. 
 
 AJX thoughts, all passions, all delights. 
 Whatever stirs this mortal frame, 
 
 Are all but ministers of love. 
 And feed his sacred flame — 
 
 SO, In Memoriam traverses the widest circuit of 
 thought and feeling in search of nutriment to its 
 mood, and represents the night-side of the soul as 
 rich in objects and as various in hues, as the side 
 illuminated by love and joy, but all in sad greys 
 and browns, or shining with the tender grace of 
 the moonlight or starlight which the brilliance of 
 the full day conceals. There is as much variety 
 and beauty in this aspect of life, as in the other ; 
 and as God has created us with large capacities 
 for sorrow, and has placed us in circumstances 
 which give those capacities ample employment, it 
 is, perhaps, quite as sensible to enquire what pos- 
 sible meaning lies in this arrangement, as to ignore 
 the fact altogether ; and quite as religious to pre- 
 sume that it has some beneficent meaning, and is 
 not without a gracious design in training men to 
 virtue and blessedness, as to attempt to bafle the 
 arrangement by drowning the voice of nature in 
 pleasure or in action. If all life but enjoyment 
 and action is morbid and unhealthy, the world 
 
TEJVJVYSOJV^S POEMS. 127 
 
 has been strangely misconstructed. The mere 
 comfort and serenity of the human race seem not 
 to have been leading objects in its design. Had 
 the Epicureans been consulted at the creation, 
 they could, no doubt, have suggested several im- 
 provements. As a late eminent judge remarked, 
 they -would have had it rain only during the 
 night ; and, with Person, when Parr, ' the school- 
 master run to seed,' pompously asked him, Mr. 
 Professor, what do you think of the existence of 
 physical and moral evil ? ' they would reply, 
 ' Why, Doctor, I think we could have done veiy 
 well without either.' Unfortunately, neither Epi- 
 curean, nor stoic, nor egotist of any school or 
 sect, was taken into counsel when the foundations 
 of the universe were laid. And Mr. Tennyson, 
 finding himself in a world where sorrow alternates 
 with joy, and in a nation whose humor, even, 
 has been supposed to have a serious and Saturnine 
 cast, — having heard, too, we may presume, of a 
 text in a certain book which says, ' Blessed are 
 they that mourn, for they shall be comforted,' — 
 and having himself lost a friend who was as the 
 light of his eyes and the joy of his heart, has not 
 thought it an unworthy employment of his poetic 
 
128 ESSM rs. 
 
 gifts to bestow them in erecting a monument to 
 his friend, upon which he has carved bas-reliefs of 
 exceeding grace and beauty, and has worked deli- 
 cate flowers into the cornices, and adorned the 
 capitals of the columns with emblematic devices ; 
 and upon the summit he has set the statue of his 
 friend, and about the base run the sweetest words 
 of love with the mournfullest accents of grief — 
 the darkest doubts with the sublimest hopes. The 
 groans of despair are there, with the triumphant 
 songs of faith, and over all, in letters of gold, 
 surmounting the mingled posies which tell of all 
 the moods of the human mind through its years 
 of mourning, is the scroll on which one reads 
 from afar, ^ I am the resurrection and the life.'' 
 ' Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord.^ 
 
WORDSWOETH'S POEMS. 
 
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 131 
 
 WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 
 
 William Wordsworth is generally allowed to 
 have exercised a deeper and more permanent in- 
 fluence upon the literature and modes of thinking 
 of our age, than any of the great poets who lived 
 and wrote during the first Quarter of the present 
 century. In proportion as his fame was of slower 
 growth, and his poems were longer in making 
 their way to the understanding and affections of 
 his countrymen, so their roots seem to have struck 
 deeper down, and the crown of glory that encir- 
 cles his memory is of gold that has been purified 
 and brightened by the fiery ordeal through which 
 it has passed. Tennyson says of the laureate 
 wreath which he so deservedly wears, that it is 
 
 Greener from the brows 
 Of him who uttered nothing baae. 
 
132 ESSAYS. 
 
 And this, which seems at first sight negative 
 praise, is, in reality, a proof of exquisite discern- 
 ment ; for it is just that which constitutes the 
 marked distinction between Wordsworth and the 
 other really original poets who are likely to share 
 with him the honor of representing poetically to 
 posterity the early part of the nineteenth century. 
 In their crowns there is alloy, both moral and in- 
 tellectual. His may not be of so imperial a fash- 
 ion ; the gems that stud it may be less dazzling, 
 but the gold is of ethereal temper, and there is no 
 taint upon his robe. "Weakness, incompleteness, 
 imperfection, he had, for he was a mortal man of 
 limited faculties, but spotless purity is not to be 
 denied him — he uttered nothing base. Our read- 
 ers will anticipate us in ranking with him, as the 
 representative poets of their age, Byron, Scott, 
 and Shelley. Of each of these we would say a 
 few words, especially in this representative char- 
 acter. 
 
 Lord Byron's poems are the actual life-experi- 
 ence of a man whose birth and fortune enabled 
 him to mix with the highest society, and whose 
 character led him to select for his choice that por- 
 tion of it which pursued pleasure as the main, if 
 
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 133 
 
 not the sole object of existence. Under a thin 
 disguise of name, country, and outward incident, 
 they present us with the desires which actuated, 
 the passions which agitated, and the characters 
 which were the ideals of the fashionable men and 
 women of the earlier part of this century. Lim- 
 ited and monotonous as they are in their essential 
 nature, ringing perpetual changes upon one pas- 
 sion and one phase of passion, the brilliance of 
 their diction, the voluptuous melody of their verse, 
 the picturesque beauty of their scenery, well 
 enough represent that life of the richer classes, 
 which chases with outstretched arms all the Pro- 
 tean forms of pleasure, only to find the subtle es- 
 sence escape as soon as grasped, leaving behind in 
 its place weariness, disappointment, and joyless 
 stagnation. The loftiest joys they paint are the 
 thrillings of the sense, the raptures of a fine ner- 
 vous organization ; their pathos is the regret, and 
 their wisdom the languor and the satiety of the 
 jaded voluptuary. These form the staple, the 
 woof of Lord Byron's poetry, and with it is en- 
 woven all that which gives outward variety and 
 incessant stimulating novelty to the pursuits of an 
 Englishman of fashion. These pursuits are as nu- 
 
lU ESSAYS. 
 
 merous, as absorbing, and demand as much activi- 
 ty of a kind as those of the student or the man 
 of business. Among them will be found those up- 
 on which the student and the man of business are 
 employed, though in a different spirit, and with a 
 different aim. Thus we frequently see among the 
 votaries of pleasure men who are fond of litera- 
 ture, of art, of politics, of foreign travel, of all 
 manly and active enterprise ; but all these will be 
 pursued, not as duties to be done, in an earnest, 
 hopeful, self-sacrificing spirit, ' that scorns delights 
 and lives laborious days,' but for amusement, for 
 immediate pleasure to be reaped, as a resource 
 against ennui and vacuity, to which none but the 
 weakest and most effeminate nature will succumb 
 This difference of object and of motive necessitates 
 a difference in the value of the results. The soil, 
 which is ploughed superficially, and for a quick re- 
 turn, will bear but frail and fading flowers ; the 
 planter of oaks must toil in faith and patience 
 and sublime confidence in the future. And so, 
 into whatever field the wide and restless ener- 
 gies of men like Lord Byron carry them, they 
 bring home no treasures that will endure — no 
 marble of which world-lasting statue or palace may 
 
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 135 
 
 be hewn or built — no iron, of which world-sub- 
 duing machines may be wrought. Poems, pictures, 
 history, science, the magnificence and loveliness 
 of nature, cities of old renown, adventures of des- 
 perate excitement, new manners, languages, and 
 characters, supply them with an ever-fresh flow of 
 sensation and emotion, keep the senses and the 
 faculties cognate with sense in a pleasant activity, 
 but no well-based generalization is gained for the 
 understanding ; facts are not even carefully ob- 
 served and honestly studied ; pleasant sensation 
 was the object, and that once obtained, there is no 
 more worth in that which produced it, though in 
 it may lie a law of G-od's manifestation, one of 
 those spiritual facts to know and obey which would 
 seem the chief purpose of man's existence, to dis- 
 cover and make them known, the noblest glory 
 and highest function of genius. It is in this spirit 
 that Lord Byron has questioned Life : * Oh ! where 
 can pleasure be found ?' and Life, echo-like, 
 would only answer, ' Where ! ' It is because he 
 put that question more earnestly, lived up to its 
 spirit more fearlessly, and more faithfully and 
 experimentally reported the answer, that he is so 
 eminently a representative poet — a representative 
 
136 ESSJiYS. 
 
 of what a large and important class in every 
 country actually is, of what a far larger class as- 
 pires to be. It is in his fearless attempt at solv- 
 ing the problem of life in his own way, his com- 
 plete discomfiture, and his unshrinking exhibition 
 of that discomfiture, that the absolute and perma- 
 nent value of his social teaching consists. For he 
 was endowed with such gifts of nature and of 
 fortune, so highly placed, so made to attract and 
 fascinate, adorned with such beauty and grace, 
 with such splendor of talents, with such quick 
 susceptibility to impressions, with such healthy 
 activity of mind, with such rich flow of speech, 
 with such vast capacity of enjoyment, that no one 
 is likely to make the experiment he made from a 
 higher vantage ground, with more chances of suc- 
 cess. And the result of his experience he has 
 given to the world, and has thrown over the 
 whole the charm of a clear, vigorous, animated 
 style, at once masculine, and easy, and polished, 
 sparkling with beauty, instinct with life, move- 
 ment, and variety ; by turns calm, voluptuous, im- 
 passioned, enthusiastic, terse, and witty, and al- 
 ways most prominent that unstudied grace, that 
 Reubens-like facility of touch, which irresistibly 
 
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 137 
 
 impresses the reader with a sense of power, of 
 strength not put fully forth, of resources careless- 
 ly flowing out with exhaustless prodigality, not 
 husbanded with timid anxiety and exhibited with 
 pompous ostentation. It is the combination of 
 these qualities of the artist, with his peculiar fear- 
 lessness and honesty of avowal — his plain, un- 
 varnished expression of what he found pleasant, 
 and chose for his good, that will ever give him a 
 high, if not almost the highest place among the 
 poets of the nineteenth century, even with those 
 readers who perceive and lament the worthless- 
 ness of his matter, the superficiality and scanti- 
 ness of his knowledge, the want of purity and el- 
 evation in his life and character. Those will best 
 appreciate his wonderful talents who are acquaint- 
 ed with the works of his countless imitators, who 
 have admirably succeeded in reproducing his 
 bad morality, his superficial thoughts, and his 
 characterless portraits, without the fervor of 
 his feeling, the keenness of his sensations, 
 the ease and vigor of his language, the flash 
 of his wit, or the knowledge of the world, and 
 the manly common-sense which redeemed and gave 
 value to what else had been entirely worthless. 
 
138 ESSAYS. 
 
 If the name of Lord Byron naturally links itself 
 with the fashionable life of great cities ; with cir- 
 cles where men and women live mutually to at- 
 tract and please each other ; where the passions 
 are cherished as stimulants and resources against 
 ennui, are fostered by luxurious idleness, and 
 heightened by all the aids that an old and elabo- 
 rate material civilization can add to the charms of 
 beauty, and the excitements of brilliant assem- 
 blies ; where art and literature are degraded into 
 handmaids and bondslaves of sensuality ; where 
 the vanity of social distinction fires the tongue of 
 the eloquent speaker, wakens the harp of the po- 
 et, colors the canvass of the painter, moulds the 
 manners and sways the actions, directs even the 
 loves and the hatreds of all ; no less naturally 
 does the name of Sir Walter Scott stand as the 
 symbol and representative of the life and tastes 
 of the country aristocracy, who bear the titles and 
 hold the lands of the feudal barons, and of the 
 country gentlemen whose habits and manners are 
 in such perfect contrast to those of the Squire 
 Westerns to whose places they have succeeded. 
 Possessing in a high degree the active and athlet- 
 ic frame, the robust health, the hardy training. 
 
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 139 
 
 the vigorous nerve, the bold spirit, the frank bear- 
 ing, and the genial kindness of the gentlemen ■ of 
 the olden time, he could heartily appreciate and 
 unhesitatingly approve all that time and revolu- 
 tion had spared of feudal dominion and territori- 
 al grandeur. The ancient loyalty, so happily tem- 
 pering the firmness of a principle with the fervor 
 of a feeling, never beat higher in the heart of a 
 cavalier of the seventeenth than in that of the 
 Scottish Advocate of the nineteenth century. Ev- 
 ery one will remember that he refused to write a 
 life of Mary Queen of Scots, because in reference 
 to her conduct, his feelings were at variance with 
 his judgment. And in painting those old times in 
 which his imagination delighted to revel, all that 
 would most have revolted- our modern mildness of 
 manners, and shocked our modern sense of justice, 
 was softened down or dropped out of sight, and 
 the nobler features of those ages, their courage, 
 their devotion, their strength and clearness of 
 purpose, their marked individuality of character, 
 their impulses of heroism and delicacy, their man- 
 ly enterprise, their picturesque costumes and man- 
 ners of life, were all brought into bold relief, and 
 plaiced before the reader with such fullness of de- 
 
140 ESSAYS. 
 
 tail, in such grandeur of outline, in such bright 
 and vivid coloring, as gave even to the unimagin- 
 ative a more distinct conception of, and a more 
 lively sympathy with, the past than they could 
 gain for themselves of the present, as it was 
 whirling and roaring round them, confusing them 
 with its shifting of hues and forms, and stunning 
 them with its hurricane of noises. And apart 
 from the fascination which History, so presented, 
 must have for the descendants of men and classes 
 of historical renown, for the hereditary rulers and 
 the privileged families of a great country, and 
 though probably the creator of the splendid pa- 
 geantry was definitely conscious of no such pur- 
 pose, yet there must have mingled with this fasci- 
 nation, and have infused into it a deeper and 
 more personal feeling, the regretful sense that the 
 state of society so glowingly depicted had passed 
 away, — a foreboding that even its last vestiges 
 were fast disappearing before the wave of demo- 
 cratic equality, and the uprising of a new aristoc- 
 racy of wealth and intellect. If at the time those 
 famous verse and prose romances came upon the 
 world in a marvellously rapid succession, all that 
 the public were conscious of was a blind pleasure 
 
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. lii 
 
 and unreflecting delight, it is no less true that in 
 an age of revolution they raised up before it in a 
 transformed and glorified life the characters, the 
 institutions, the sentiments and manners of an ago 
 of absolute government by the strong arm or by 
 divine right — of an age of implicit belief, inspir- 
 ing heroic action, sanctioning romantic tenderness, 
 harmonizing and actuating all the virtues that 
 adorn and elevate fallen humanity ; and that since 
 then there has arisen in our country a thoughtful 
 reverence and love for the past — a sense of the 
 livingness and value of our history — a desire and 
 a determination to appreciate and comprehend, 
 and so not forfeit, the inheritance of wisdom, 
 forethought, brave action, and noble self-denial, 
 which our ancestors have bequeathed to us. How 
 many false and puerile forms this feeling has taken 
 it does not fall within our present scope to notice. 
 In spite of white-waistcoat politics and Pugin pe- 
 dantries, the feeling is a wise and a noble one — 
 one which is the surety and the safeguard of pro- 
 gress ; and that much of it is owing to the inter- 
 est excited so widely and so deeply by Sir Wal- 
 ter Scott's writings, those will be least disposed to 
 deny who have thought most on the causes which 
 
142 ESSAYS. 
 
 mould a nation's character, and the influences 
 which work out a nation's destiny. 
 
 It is no fanciful or arbitrary spirit of system 
 that, while we assign to Byron the empire over 
 the world of fashion and of pleasure, and seek 
 the mainspring of Scott's popularity in the sway 
 of old historical traditions over a landed aristoc- 
 racy, and the longing regret with which they look 
 back to a state of society passed or rapidly pass- 
 ing away, we should regard Shelley as the poeti- 
 cal representative of those whose hopes and aspi- 
 rations and affections rush forward to embrace the 
 great Hereafter, and dwell in rapturous anticipa- 
 tion on the coming of the golden year, the reign 
 of universal freedom, and the establishment of 
 universal brotherhood. By nature and by cir- 
 cumstance he was marvellously fitted for his task, 
 gentle, sensitive, and fervid, he shrank from the 
 least touch of wrong, and hated injustice with the 
 zeal and passion of a martyr ; while, as if to 
 point him unmistakeably to his mission, and con- 
 secrate him by the divine ordination of facts, he 
 was subjected at his first entrance into life to 
 treatment, both from constituted authority and 
 family connexion, so unnecessarily harsh, so stu- 
 
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. US 
 
 pidly cruel, as would have driven a worse man 
 into reckless dissipation, a weaker man into silent 
 despair. ' Most men,' he says to himself, 
 
 Are cradled into poetry by wrong ; 
 
 They learn in suffering what they teach in song. 
 
 Whether this be the best or most usual training 
 for the poet may well be doubted, but it is quite 
 indubitable that such discipline will soonest open 
 a man's eyes to the evils of existing institutions, 
 and the vices of old societies ; and will lend to 
 his invectives that passion which raises them above 
 satire — to his schemes, that enthusiasm which re- 
 deems them from being crotchets ; will turn his 
 abstract abhorrence of oppression into hatred 
 ag'ainst the oppressors — his loathing of corrup- 
 tion into a withering scorn and contempt for ty- 
 rants and their tools, the knaves and hypocrites 
 who use holy names and noble offices to promote 
 their selfish ends, and to fetter and enslave their 
 brother men. And so it happened with Shelley. 
 The feelings of poignant anguish and bitter indig- 
 nation, which had been roused in him by cruelty 
 and injustice towards himself, colored all his 
 views of society, and at once sharpened his hostil- 
 
Ui ESSJIVS. 
 
 ity to the civil and religious institutions of his 
 country, and lent more glowing colors to the rain- 
 bow of promise that beamed upon him from the 
 distance, through the storm of bloodshed and 
 revolution. Add to this, that his mind was ill-, 
 trained, and not well furnished with facts ; that 
 he could draw from form, color, and sound, a vo- 
 luptuous enjoyment, keener and more intense than 
 the grosser animal sensations of ordinary men ; 
 that his intellect hungered and thirsted after abso- 
 lute truth, after central being, after a living per- 
 sonal unity of all things. Thus he united in 
 himself many of the mightiest tendencies of oui- 
 time — its democratic, its sceptical, its pantheistic, 
 its socialistic spirit ; and thus he has become the 
 darling and the watchword of those who aim at 
 reconstructing society, in its forms, in its princi- 
 ples, and in its beliefs, — who regard the past as 
 an unmitigated failure, as an entire mistake, — 
 who would welcome the deluge for the sake of the 
 new world that would rise after the subsidence of 
 the waters. Nor has their affectionate admiration 
 been ill bestowed. With one exception, a more 
 glorious poet has not been given to the English 
 nation ; and if we make one exception, it is be- 
 
WOMBS WORTH'S POEMS. 145 
 
 cause Shakspeare was a man of profounder in- 
 sight, of calmer temperament, of wider experience, 
 of more extensive knowledge ; a greater philoso- 
 pher, in fact, and a wiser man ; not because he pos- 
 sessed more vital heat, more fusing, shaping pow- 
 er of imagination, or a more genuine poetic im- 
 pulse and inspiration. After the passions and the 
 theories, which supplied Shelley with the subject- 
 matter of his poems have died away and become 
 mere matters of history, there will still remain a 
 •song, such as mortal man never sung before, of 
 inarticulate rapture and of freezing pain, — of a 
 blinding light of truth and a dazzling weight of 
 glory, translated into English speech, as colored 
 as a painted window, as suggestive, as penetrat- 
 ing, as intense as music. 
 
 We have assigned to three great poets of our 
 age the function of representing three classes, dis- 
 tinct in character, position, and taste. But as 
 these classes intermingle and beljome confused in 
 life, so that individuals may partake of the ele- 
 ments of all three, and, in fact, no one individu- 
 al can be exactly defined by his class type, so the 
 poets that represent them have, of course, an in- 
 fluence and a popularity that extend far beyond 
 
146 ESSAYS. 
 
 the classes to whose peculiar characteristics and 
 predominant tastes we have assumed them to have 
 given form and expression. Men read for amuse- 
 ment, to enlarge the range of their ideas and sym- 
 pathies, to stimulate the emotions that are slug- 
 gish or wearied out ; and thus the poet is not only 
 the interpreter of men and of classes to them- 
 selves, but represents to men characters, modes 
 of life, and social phenomena with which they are 
 before unacquainted, excites interest, and arouses 
 sympathy, and becomes the reconciler, by causing 
 misunderstandings to vanish, as each man and 
 each class comprehends more fully the common 
 humanity that lies under the special manifestation, 
 the same elemental passions and affections, the 
 same wants, the same desires, the same hopes, the 
 same beliefs, the same duties. It is thus especially 
 that poets are teachers, that they aid in strength- 
 ening and civilizing nations, in drawing closer the 
 bonds of brotherhood. 
 
 He of whom it is our especial purpose in this 
 article to speak, has said of himself, ' The poet is 
 a teacher. I wish to be considered as a teacher, 
 or as nothing.' If we are asked wherein lay the 
 value of his teaching, we reply, that it lay mainly 
 
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 147 
 
 in the power that was given him of unfolding the 
 glory and the beauty of the material world, and 
 in bringing consciously before the minds of men 
 the high moral function that belonged in the hu- 
 man economy to the imagination, and in thereby 
 redeeming the faculties of sense from the compar- 
 atively low and servile office of ministering mere- 
 ly to the animal pleasures, or what Mr. Carlylo 
 has called ' the beaver inventions.' That beside, 
 and in connexion with this, he has shown the pos- 
 sibility of combining a state of vivid enjoyment, 
 even of intense passion, with the activity of 
 thought, and the repose of contemplation. He 
 has, moreover, done more than any poet of his 
 age to break down and obliterate the conventional 
 barriers that, in our disordered social state, di- 
 vide rich and poor into two hostile nations ; and 
 he has done this, not by bitter and passionate 
 'declamations on the injustice and vices of the 
 rich, and on the wrongs and virtues of the poor, 
 but by fixing his imagination on the elemental 
 feelings, which are the same in all classes, and 
 drawing out the beauty that lies in all that is 
 truly natural in human life. Dirt, squalor, dis- 
 ease, vice, and hard-heartedness, are not natural 
 
148 ESSAYS. 
 
 to any grade of life ; where they are found, they 
 are man's work, not God's ; and the poet's busi- 
 ness is not with the misery of man's making, but 
 with the escape from that misery revealed to those 
 that have eyes to see, and ears to hear, — we 
 mean, that no true poet will be merely a painter 
 of that which is low, deformed, essentially inhu- 
 man, as his ultimate and highest aim, though, as 
 means, he may, as the greatest poets have done, 
 use them to move and rouse the sleeping soul. 
 This, we say, in answer to those that asserted that 
 Wordsworth was not a true painter of manners 
 and characters from humble life : we say he was, 
 for that he painted, as minutely as served his aim, 
 that which was essential to its occupations and its 
 general outward condition — that which it must 
 be, if Christian men are to look upon the inequal- 
 ities of wealth and station as a permanent element 
 in society. And all this which he taught in his ■ 
 writings, he taught equally by his life. And fur- 
 thermore, he manifested a deep sense of the sa- 
 credness of the gift of genius, and refused to bar- 
 ter its free exercise for aught that the world could 
 hold out to him, either to terrify or to seduce ; and 
 he lived to prove, not only that the free exercise 
 
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 149 
 
 of poetic genius is its own exceeding great re- 
 ward, bringing a rich harvest of joy and peace, 
 and the sweet consciousness of duty well dis- 
 charged, and God's work done ; but, what was 
 quite as much needed in our time, he showed that 
 for the support and nourishment of poetic inspira- 
 tion, no stimulants of social vanity, vicious sen- 
 suality, or extravagant excitement, were requisite, 
 and that it could flourish in the highest vigor on 
 the simple influence of external nature, and the 
 active exercise of the family affections. 
 
 "William "Wordsworth was born at Cockermouth, 
 in Cumberland, on April 7th, 1770, the second 
 son of John "Wordsworth, attorney and law agent 
 to Sir James Lowther, created Earl of Lonsdale. 
 His mother was a Miss Cookson, of Penrith, and 
 both parents belonged to families of high antiqui- 
 ty and great respectability — a fact which may 
 not have been without its influence on the poet's 
 feelings and opinions. Mrs. Wordsworth died 
 when her son was nearly eight years old, but not 
 too early to have discerned in him qualities which 
 made her anxious about his future life, and to im- 
 press her with the presentiment that he would be 
 
150 ESSAVS 
 
 remarkable for good or evil. He himself attri- 
 butes this feeling of hers to his ' stiff, moody, and 
 violent temper.' 
 
 If however it be true that the child is father to 
 the man, Mrs. Wordsworth had probably better 
 reason for anticipating a remarkable career for 
 her son than was given by any excess of mere 
 boyish obstinacy and self-will. In the fifth book 
 of the Prelude he describes her mode of educa- 
 tion as based upon a 
 
 Virtual faith that He 
 Who fills the mother's breast with innocent mUk, 
 Doth also for our nobler part provide, 
 Under His great correction and control, 
 As innocent instincts and as innocent food. 
 # * * * 
 
 This was her creed, and therefore she was pure 
 
 From anxious fear of error or mishap. 
 
 And evil, overweeningly so called, 
 
 Was not puffed up by false unnatural hopes. 
 
 Nor selfish with unnecessary care ; 
 
 Nor with impatience from the season asked 
 
 More than its timely produce ; rather loved 
 
 The hours for what they are, than from regard 
 
 Glanced on their promises in restless pride. 
 
 Such was she — not from faculties more strong 
 
 Than others have, but from the times, perhaps. 
 
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 151 
 
 And spot in -which she lived, and through a grace 
 Of modest meekness, simple-mindedness, 
 A heart that found benignity and hope, 
 Being itself benign. 
 
 And so the first peril of childhood was escaped, 
 and that a peril of no small moment, when the 
 child is a genius, and the mother knows it, and 
 ponders it in her heart ; the peril of overstimula- 
 tion of faculties already precociously developed, 
 bringing with it, as its sure result, prodigious van- 
 ity and premature exhaustion. Nor were other 
 influences besides those of a wise mother's loving 
 care wanting to train the future poet. The pictu- 
 resque Derwent, blending with his nurse's song, 
 flowed murmuring along his infant dreams, and 
 composed to more than infant softness his earliest 
 thoughts and sensations. A few years later, the 
 same river was his ' tempting playmate.' He 
 would, when five years old, ' make one long bath- 
 ing of a summer's day,' ' bask in the sun, and 
 plunge, and bask again, alternate.' Happy child ! 
 the seed-time of whose soul can thus be entrusted 
 to God and Nature. Wise mother ! who knows 
 how to aid, without superseding natural influences 
 
152 ESSA¥S. 
 
 and instinctive tendencies — to let the child grow 
 at its natural pace, and in its natural direc- 
 tion — not to raise it upon stilts, or straiten it in 
 stays. How much wiser would the manhood of 
 many of us be, if our childhood had been more 
 joyous and less trammelled, less made to bend to 
 the whims, systems, or caprices of the elderly pe- 
 dants about us. We of course know that children 
 are not diminutive angels, and need both instruc- 
 tion and correction ; but we believe every sensible 
 mother in the three kingdoms will go with us in an 
 avowal of a decided preference for troublesome, 
 ill-behaved children, over the good little boys and 
 girls, who know the elements of all the ologies, 
 and can define many of the isms — who never 
 dirty their pinafores, and decline eating their din- 
 ners till grace has been said. To return to Wil- 
 liam Wordsworth. Another influence, that was 
 to endure, and color his whole life, had already 
 begun to act upon him. His sister Dorothy was 
 two years younger than himself; the part she 
 played in the formation of his character he ex- 
 quisitely describes in his poem to the ' Sparrow's 
 Nest'-— 
 
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 153 
 
 The blessing of my later years 
 Was with me when a boy. 
 She gave me eyes, she gave me ears, 
 And humble cares, and delicate fears ; 
 A heart, the fountain of sweet tears ; 
 And loYe, and thought, and joy. 
 
 But one blow carried off the mother and sepa- 
 rated brother and sister — the latter went to re- 
 side with her maternal relations : the former was 
 sent to school at Hawkeshead, near the lake of 
 Esthwaite. He had already been instructed in 
 the rudiments of learning at Cockermouth by the 
 Rev. Mr. Gilbanks ; and his father, who is said to 
 have been a person of considerable mental vigor 
 and eloquence, had contributed to his education, 
 by setting him very early to learn passages from 
 the best English poets by heart, so that he could 
 repeat large portions of Shakspeare, Milton, and 
 Spenser. It was probably no great misfortune for 
 Wordsworth that the north-country schools did 
 not pay that attention to classical composition 
 which enables Eton, Rugby, Shrewsbury, and our 
 other great public schools, to send up men to the 
 Universities who can write Greek with the purity 
 of Xenophon, and Latin with the elegance of 
 7* 
 
154 ESSAYS. 
 
 Cicero. At any rate, such was the case ; and 
 the only learning he seems to have acquired at 
 Hawkeshead was a fair knowledge of Latin, and 
 an acquaintance with the elements of mathema- 
 tics. But he tells us that his school days were 
 very happy, chiefly because then, and in the vaca- 
 tions, he was left at liberty to read whatever 
 books he liked.- He instances Fielding, Cervan- 
 tes, Le Sage, and Swift ; and particularizes Gul- 
 liver's Travels and the Tale of a Tab as being 
 much to his taste. The readers of the Prelude 
 need not be told that his real education at school 
 lay neither in the study of Latin, nor in the pe- 
 rusal of the works of the humorists, which exer- 
 cised little apparent influence upon the formation 
 of his tastes, or the character of his subsequent 
 writings. Ali-eady that strong individuality had 
 displayed itself, which was to issue in the conquest 
 of new fields for the creative energy of the poet, 
 of a new poetical philosophy for the analysis of 
 the critic. Already in the pursuit of his boyish 
 amusements — in springing woodcocks in autumn, 
 in taking nests in spring, in skating on the frozen 
 lake of Esthwaite, or rowing on bright half-holi- 
 days with his companions along « the plain of 
 
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 156 
 
 Windermere,' he had begun to feel the presence of 
 Nature in the sky and on the earth ; already had 
 he become a worshipper in that shrine, of which 
 he afterwards was the acknowledged high-priest. 
 It would be as sacrilegious, as it is unnecessary, 
 to translate.into bald prose those high-colored and 
 nobly musical passages of the Prelude, in which 
 he traces the influence of the grand and beautiful 
 scenery amid which his school-days were fortu- 
 nately passed, in awakening his sensibility, in as- 
 sociating his animal sensations with outward ob- 
 jects, that were magnificent and lovely, and so 
 ministering to genial and happy moods of mind, 
 by the constant supply of pure and ennobling 
 pleasures. As pleasurable excitement is almost 
 the necessary condition of poetical activity, too 
 much importance can hardly be attributed to the 
 circumstances which secured to Wordsworth, in 
 his most plastic time of life, an unfailing flow of 
 joyous spirits from purely elevating sources, and 
 preserved him, while reason was yet undeveloped, 
 and self-command had not yet become a habit, 
 from those temptations to coarse pleasures, and 
 even gross vices, which form so weighty a counter- 
 poise to the scholarship and manly training of our 
 
166 ESSJLYS. 
 
 great public schools. Nor was this awakening 
 passion for nature less efficacious or important in 
 thus early laying the foundation of those habits 
 of observation and reflection which not only sup- 
 plied him through life with his matter for poetical 
 composition, but freed him from that necessity 
 for companionship and conversation which weak- 
 ens the character, and fritters away the strength 
 of so many men of genius. Wordsworth, even as 
 a boy, was self-sufficing and independent; soli- 
 tude to him was blithe society, though no one 
 took more interest in boyish sports, or speaks 
 with more affectionate remembrance of boyish 
 friendships. What helped to this was the usual 
 degree in which a genuine poetic activity was con- 
 joined with, and awakened by, his receptive sen- 
 sibility. ' A plastic power,' he tells us, 
 
 Abode witli me ; a forming hand, at times 
 Rebellious, acting in a devious mood; 
 A local spirit of his own, at war 
 With general tendency; but, for the most. 
 Subservient strictly to external things, 
 With which it communed. An auxUiar light 
 Came from my mind, which on the setting sun 
 Bestowed new splendor; the melodious birds. 
 
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 167 
 
 The fluttering breezes, fountains that run on 
 Murmuring so sweetly In themselves, obeyed 
 A like dominion ; and the midnight storm 
 Grew darker in the presence of my eye. 
 
 The prominence which is given in Wordsworth's 
 poetry to this reciprocal action of external nature 
 and the mind of man, is that which mainly distin- 
 guishes him from, and raises him above, merely 
 descriptive or merely didactic poets. Nature to 
 him was not a canvas variously colored, from 
 which he was to select what soothed or excited 
 the sense, and paint in words what was given to 
 him from without ; nor was man an incarnate in- 
 tellect whose senses were merely channels of com- 
 munication between his animal wants and the ma- 
 terial objects which supplied them, or, at best, pur- 
 veyors for the fancy in her airy dreams and unreal 
 analogies ; but the one was related to the other by 
 a vital and organic union, which admitted of no 
 severance, but to the detriment, if not the destruc- 
 tion of moral and spiritual life. Nature was to 
 him a mystic book, written by the finger of God, 
 whose characters were indeed discernible by the 
 senses, but whose meaning was only to be deci- 
 phered by the imagination — 
 
158 ESSAYS. 
 
 By obserTation of aflSnities 
 
 In objects wliere no brotherhood exists 
 
 To passive minds. 
 
 The book of Nature and the world of imagina- 
 tion, are phrases, indeed, that have long been fa- 
 vorites with men of sensibility and men of sci- 
 ence ; but the truths that have been read in the 
 one have usually been generalizations of the an- 
 alytic understanding, or the facts upon which such 
 generalizations are founded, while the other has 
 been soothed upon as peopled only by chimeras, 
 and given up to the visionary and the dreamer. 
 Mr. Wordsworth's originality in this matter con- 
 sists in his assertion of a science of appearances, 
 speaking through the senses to the heart and soul, 
 acting on and acted upon by the imagination, in 
 accordance with laws, which it is the poet's busi- 
 ness to discover and obey ; and not simply in 
 this assertion of a philosophy of esthetic, which 
 would justify such expressions as the ' sensuous 
 false and true,' in opposition to the pure idealist 
 theory of the falseness of all sensuous percep- 
 tion ; but furthermore and mainly in the impor- 
 tance he attaches to a right understanding of this 
 science for the production of genuine poetry, and 
 
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 159 
 
 a practical obedience to it for the building up of 
 the moral being of the individual man. Whether 
 his conclusions on this point are the result of 
 what he possessed in common with all men, or of 
 the exceptional predominance of the imaginative 
 activity in him, may perhaps admit of discussion. 
 Certain it is, that more than almost any poet, he 
 was from childhood ' of imagination all compact,' 
 and equally certain is it that, unless social ar- 
 rangements can be totally altered, it is hard to 
 see how the bulk of our population can be placed 
 in circumstances at all admitting, not to say favor- 
 able to, the cultivation of the imaginative power ; 
 while to suppose them for this reason debarred 
 from attaining moral and religious excellence, 
 would indeed sadden our prospects for the future, 
 change all our boasted civilization to a diabolic 
 delusion, and justify any schemes, however ex- 
 travagant, that promised to relieve our upper 
 classes from so heinous a crime, and our lower 
 classes of towns and cities, and in spite of Mr. 
 Wordsworth, the majority of our peasants, from 
 so dire a destruction. This theory of the func- 
 tion of imagination in the human economy, and of 
 the function of external nature in awakening and 
 
160 ESSAYS. 
 
 evoking its power, is so prominent in all Mr. 
 Wordsworth's higher poetry — is so much the 
 key note to what his earlier critics called his mys- 
 ticism and affected raptures, that we have felt it 
 necessary to allude to it somewhat at length, 
 though to handle it at all adequately would require 
 a philosophical treatise, which has never yet been 
 written, though often talked about. As originat- 
 ing in his own boyish experiences, it properly be- 
 longed to this part of our subject, and may further 
 be taken as an instance of the limitation which is 
 necessary in applying any of Mr. Wordsworth's 
 theories of society. They are all personal expe- 
 riences thrown into the form of general truths, 
 with that strength of phrase and color of passion 
 which belong to an essentially subjective view. 
 
 We may conclude these records of Words- 
 worth's schoolboy experience by mentioning that 
 he was already a poet actual as well as potential, 
 and that a copy of verses in heroic metre, written 
 by him in his fourteenth or fifteenth year (it is 
 rather doubtful which) , on the second centenary 
 from the foundation of the school by Archbishop 
 Sandys, is preserved ; of which, though the poet 
 himself speaks slightingly, as a tame imitation of 
 
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 161 
 
 Pope's versification, and a little in his style, it is 
 not too much to say that very few boys of that 
 age could have possibly written them. 
 
 His father had died while William was yet a 
 schoolboy, in the year 1783. Lord Lonsdale, 
 whose agent he was, refused to settle his accounts, 
 and the sum of which the children, four sons and 
 one daughter, were thus deprived, was the bulk 
 of their fortune. It was afterwards paid in 1802, 
 with interest, by the second Earl of Lonsdale ; 
 but meanwhile, the family of the Wordsworths 
 were dependent upon their relations, and William 
 was sent by his uncles, Richard Wordsworth and 
 Christopher Crackenthorpe, in the year 1787, to 
 St. John's College, Cambridge. 
 
 Prom what has been stated of William Words- 
 worth's studies, attainments, character, and tastes, 
 while he was at Hawkshead, no reasonable sur- 
 prise can be entertained that the pursuits, the 
 honors, and the emoluments of Cambridge failed 
 to excite his industry or stimulate his ambition. 
 The excellence to which the University at that 
 time confined her rewards and distinctions was 
 limited within the range of mathematics, pure and 
 applied, and that highly valuable, but by no means 
 
162 ESSAYS. 
 
 comprehensive scholarship, which is expressed by 
 the phrase, a knowledge of Latin and Greek ; 
 what is excluded being simply the literature, the 
 philosophy, and the history of the two great mod- 
 el nations, and what is included being the power 
 of translating correctly at sight, and of compos- 
 ing in prose and verse. We say at that time, be- 
 cause, though very little extension has actually 
 taken place, yet a new and enlarged system has 
 just come into operation, from which the most 
 beneficial results on national education are to be 
 expected. 
 
 Moreover, Wordsworth went to a college which 
 is now especially, and was, we believe, exclusive- 
 ly devoted to the study of mathematics. It is 
 more than possible that those men in whom taste 
 and imagination are predominant are, as the 
 learned Master of Trinity would maintain, the 
 very men who would profit most by the rigid pro- 
 cesses and absolute results of mathematics ; poets 
 have themselves been famous for saying and writ- 
 ing fine things about the beauty of mathematical 
 demonstrations, and the winning charms of pure 
 truth ; Wordsworth has made Euclid's Elements 
 the subject of an exquisite episode in his autobio- 
 
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 163 
 
 graphical poem ; but equally certain it is that 
 either in cautious self-denial, fearing to be hooked 
 for life by the too seducing bait of the Lady of 
 lines and angles, or that the brightness of her 
 heavenly glory should dazzle them into blindness, 
 or scorch them into annihilation, or from some 
 other cause equally powerful, poets generally, con- 
 tent themselves with singing the praises of the 
 sublime and starry science, and leave to others 
 the profit and the praise of worshipping in her 
 temple, and assuming the robes and crown of her 
 hierophants. Wordsworth was no exception, — 
 no trace of his mathematical studies appears in 
 the records of his college life, no result beyond 
 that of an ordinary B.A. degree appears to have 
 attended them. The only positive result of his 
 Cambridge reading seems to be the acquisition of 
 Italian. We are not aware that he ever regret- 
 ted his neglect of University studies, though his 
 nephew implies as much, founding his belief on an 
 exhortation addressed, we presume, to himself by 
 his uncle, on the importance of mastering the 
 classical writers before coming to the modern ; 
 and in a letter addressed to the son of a friend, 
 regretting that he had given up reading for hon ■ 
 
16d ESSAYS. 
 
 ors. We would suggest to Dr. Christopher 
 Wordsworth that his uncle might see good reason 
 for advising him to confine his attention to that 
 which constituted his path to distinction, without 
 at all regretting the deliberate choice of his own 
 life, or implying the general advisability of the 
 course he recommended to one young man of sin- 
 gularly academic mind and character. But this 
 is only a specimen of the way in which the 
 nephew has reflected his own likeness upon the 
 canvas prepared for his uncle. But to return to 
 the poet. Cambridge seems to have done nothing 
 for him ; not only were the studies of the place 
 distasteful to him, but the country was eminently 
 disqualified for exciting, or even sustaining, the 
 poetic susceptibility of one who had been, up to 
 that time, a free wanderer among the hills and 
 vales and lakes of lovely, romantic Westmore- 
 land. Even Wordsworth, with his creative gift, 
 failed to gain an insight into what there is in that 
 flat, fenny district capable of conversion into ex- 
 quisite poetry. That conquest has been achieved 
 by a younger poet; and now and henceforth, 
 ' Mariana in the Moated Grange,' and the ' Dy- 
 ing Swan,' stand to give the lie to any one who 
 
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 165 
 
 dares to call Cambridge and Lincoln utterly bar- 
 ren of nourishment for minds which crave exter- 
 nal beauty, or languish and sicken from starva- 
 tion. We may add, from personal acquaintance, 
 that these flat counties are famous for their glo- 
 rious sunsets. But Wordsworth's heart was all 
 the time among his mountains and his waterfalls ; 
 the Cam to him was specifically the silent Cam ; 
 and but for his vacations, the poetic spirit would 
 have been imperilled. By these, his love and in- 
 tense enjoyment of nature were sustained, en- 
 hanced by months of absence and longing and 
 regret ; and with them began now to appear an- 
 other range of faculties, called into exercise by 
 the varieties of character his Cambridge life pre- 
 sented to him, and the contrast it afforded to the 
 life he had left behind him. 
 
 He began now to take that interest in observing 
 the passions, characters, and actions of the men 
 and women around him, which, supplying him with 
 the incidents, the feelings, and, to some extent, 
 with the very language of his most original minor 
 poems, finally enabled him to rear the noblest edi- 
 fice of modern song, where, uniting in himself the 
 philosophical breadth of Coleridge with the minute 
 
166 ESSAYS. 
 
 touches and more than the homely pathos of 
 Crabbe, he forms into one organic whole the pro- 
 foundest speculations on society with the simplest 
 annals of the poor. It is only a proof of the ex- 
 ceeding purity and elevation of his character, that 
 he iinds ground for mild self-reproach in the inno- 
 cent enjoyment of rustic balls and innocent flirta- 
 tions — ' love-likings,' as he prettily calls them — 
 with rustic belles, which seem to have partially 
 occupied his first long vacation. Truth to say, we 
 wish he had taken a more lively interest in such 
 matters. The absence of this side of human na- 
 ture from Wordsworth's poetry imparts to it a 
 heaviness, a monotony, which repels the young 
 and the worldly, to whose minds his lofty wisdom 
 and his noble seriousness might perchance find ad- 
 mission and welcome. But great men are not to 
 be fashioned after our will, but according to the 
 ordering of Him who sends them to do His work 
 in the world ; and special work demands a special 
 training. It is only this consideration that pre- 
 vents us from seriously regretting that Words- 
 worth did not, as a young man, join more heartily 
 in what are commonly called the pleasures of the 
 world. There can be no doubt that, had he done 
 
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 167 
 
 SO, he would have exerted an earlier and a wider 
 influence on society ; he would have understood 
 better the pursuits and the pleasures of the men 
 and women of cities ; he would have sympathized 
 more with the life of the burgher classes. On the 
 other hand, it must not be forgotten that, in that 
 case, he would scarcely have so fascinated and 
 controlled the ' fit audience, though few,' whom 
 no one ever asked for more sincerely or more suc- 
 cessfully ; his poetical creed would scarcely, in 
 that case have had its apostles, its martyrs, its con- 
 fessors ; it would not have been so fiercely com- 
 bated, and would not therefore have exhibited 
 such a marked triumph of truth, have been rooted 
 so deeply in the conviction of its votaries. Had 
 his genius, again, played more upon the surface of 
 society, dealt more with the passions and the van- 
 ities of men congregated together, it might have 
 lost something of that depth, of that permanent 
 and elemental character that now renders his re- 
 flections and speculations so valuable and interest- 
 ing to minds at all kindred to his own. Nor is it 
 easy to conceive the simplicity and calm of Words- 
 worth's life and character failing to unfit him for 
 fairly estimating English middle-class life and peo- 
 
168 ESSAYS. 
 
 pie, with their multiform bustle, their eager pursuit 
 of wealth, their love and need of outward excite- 
 ment. With all his greatness, he was neither 
 Shakspeare nor Goethe ; and probably had he 
 striven for many-sidedness, he would have been 
 less than he was. And so, recalling our half- 
 formed expression of regret, we may accept the 
 fact, in all thankfulness and humility, that he soon 
 gave up the chase of trivial pleasures, and return- 
 ed to where his deeper passion lay ; though, as 
 we have hinted above, these trivial pleasures of 
 his Cambridge and vacation life were, in all prob- 
 ability, the appointed means of evoking that med- 
 itative observation of men and character, which 
 makes his poetry no less rich in wisdom than in 
 beauty and feeling. One special occasion he 
 notes, when, after being all night at a country 
 ball, his whole being was stirred within him, as — 
 
 Magnificent 
 The morning rose in memorable pomp ; 
 
 and there came upon him one of those crises, so 
 marked in the history of great minds, which color 
 the whole after-course of existence. ' To the 
 brim,' he says. 
 
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. lOS 
 
 My heart was full ; I made no vows, but vows 
 Were then made for me ; bond unknown to me 
 Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly, 
 A dedicated Spirit. On I walked 
 In thankful blessedness, which yet survives. 
 
 And to this consecration, the silent influences of 
 the morning, poured upon his head by the invisi- 
 ble hand, he remained faithful as few priests have 
 ever been to their calling. What the world has 
 gained by his loyalty is to be seen in his works ; 
 what he might otherwise have become, may be 
 gathered from those parts of the Prelude in which 
 he records his Cambridge and London experience, 
 especially from that magnificent passage where, 
 describing his general impression of University 
 life, he clothes the stern denunciation of a Juve- 
 nal in language as strong as Dryden's, as rich, 
 sensuous, and full of meaning as Shakspeare's : — 
 
 All degrees 
 And shapes of spurious fame and short-lived praise 
 Here sate in state, and fed with daily alms 
 Retainers won away from solid good; 
 And here was Labor, his own bond-slave ; Hope, 
 That never set the pain against the prize; 
 Idleness, halting with his weary clog. 
 And poor misguided Shame, and witless Fear, 
 
 8 
 
170 ESS^ VS. 
 
 And simple Pleasure, foraging for Death; 
 Honor misplaced, and Dignity astray; 
 Feuds, factions, flatteries, enmity, and guile. 
 Murmuring submission, and bald government 
 (The idol weak as the idolater). 
 And Decency and Custom starving Truth, 
 And blind Authority beating with his staff 
 The child that might have led him; Emptiness 
 Followed as of good omen, and meek Worth, 
 Left to himself, unheard of and unknown. 
 
 In connection with this noble passage, showing 
 what Wordsworth could have done had he chosen 
 to cultivate the higher form of satire, it is inter- 
 esting to find him afterwards declining to allow 
 the publication of some imitations of Juvenal, 
 executed as a young man, though solicited by his 
 friend Archdeacon Wrangham, and basing his re- 
 fusal on moral objections to the lowering influence 
 of this species of composition. 
 
 Wordsworth's last long vacation was spent in 
 travelling abroad with his friend Mr. Jones. The 
 tourists landed at Calais on July 13th, 1790, the 
 eve of the day when Louis XVI. took the oath of 
 fidelity to the new constitution ; proceeded princi- 
 pally on foot through France, Savoy, Piedmont, 
 North Italy, Switzei'land, and up the Rhine, re- 
 
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 171 
 
 turning in time for the Cambridge October term. 
 The poems entitled ' Descriptive Slietches,' is the 
 record of this continental tour. A more impor- 
 tant result of it was the warmer sympathy it ex- 
 cited in young Wordsworth with the then fair 
 promise and exulting hopes of the French revolu- 
 tion. In a letter to his sister Dorothy, from the 
 Lake of Constance, he speaks in enthusiastic 
 terms of the French as compared with the Swiss, 
 adding, ' But I must remind you that we crossed 
 at the time when the whole nation was mad with 
 joy, in consequence of the revolution. It was a 
 most interesting period to be in France ; and we 
 had many delightful scenes where the interest of 
 the picture was owing solely to this cause.' It is 
 more than ever superfluous for us, who have since 
 that time been witness to two French revolutions, 
 and the enthusiastic hope they excited, with the 
 miserable disappointment that has in each case 
 ensued, to go far in search of reasons to justify or 
 explain the sympathy which Wordsworth, in com- 
 mon with all the generous hearted young men of 
 his day, felt and expressed with the first and 
 greatest of the democratic convulsions which have 
 since been constantly working to upheave and al- 
 
172 ESSAYS. 
 
 ter the surface of European society. The man 
 who at that time had not so sympathized must 
 have been duller than an owl, or wiser than an 
 angel. It is sufficient here to observe that when 
 the French revolution departed from its first love 
 and its first faith, and developed into that hybrid 
 monster of cruelty, tyranny, and licentiousness, 
 which made the despotism of the Empire a wel- 
 come refuge, Wordsworth was not misled by the 
 vanity of consistency, or dazzled by the splendor 
 of military achievement, to tolerate its excesses 
 and palliate its crimes. Meanwhile, till that pe- 
 riod arrived, he welcomed the advent of the peo- 
 ple's triumphs with enthusiastic faith and joy. 
 
 Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, 
 But to be young was very heaven! 
 
 He took his degree in January, 1791, and in 
 November of the same year we find him returning 
 to France, which he did not again quit till the 
 close of the following year. A considerable por- 
 tion of this period he spent at Orleans and Blois. 
 His most intimate friend was General Beaupuis, 
 whose character as philosopher, patriot, and sol- 
 dier, was eminently calculated to attract the ad- 
 
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 173 
 
 miration of a young and ardent poetic mind. How 
 deep was the impression made upon him during 
 these eventful months, and how keenly he sympa- 
 thized with each new phase of the popular move- 
 ment, is stamped alike upon his earlier and later 
 poems ; and manifests itself equally in the glowing 
 passion of his hopes, and in the indignant bitter- 
 ness of his disappointment. A purer passion never 
 warmed the heart of patriot or poet. 
 
 It was probably fortunate for him that circum- 
 stances — we presume the want of money — com- 
 pelled him to return to England at the close of 
 the year, as he was intimately connected with the 
 Brissotins, and might have shared their destruc- 
 tion, had he stayed till the following May. ' Wil- 
 liam,' says his sister, in a letter of the 22nd De- 
 cember, 1792, ' is in London ; he writes to me 
 regularly, and is a most affectionate brother.' 
 
 The extent to which his political opinions were 
 at this time identified with the principles of the 
 French revolution, may be gathered from an un- 
 published pamphlet, entitled, ' A Letter to the 
 Bishop of Llandaff on the political principles con- 
 'tained in an appendix to one of his lordship's re- 
 cent sermons,' and from a letter to a friend 
 
171 ESSAVS. 
 
 named Matthews. He disapproves of hereditary 
 monarchy, hereditary distinctions and privileged 
 orders of every species, as necessarily counteract- 
 ing the progress of human improvement ; and 
 holds that even social privileges and distinctions 
 should be conferred by the elective voice of the 
 people. He emphatically declares himself not 
 an admirer of the British constitution. ' Yet,' 
 he adds — 
 
 In my ardor to attain the goal, I do not forget the nature 
 of the ground where the race is to be run. The destruction of 
 those institutions ■which I condemn, appears to me to be hasten- 
 ing on too rapidly. I recoil from the very idea of a revolution. 
 I am a determined enemy to every species of Tiolenoe. I see no 
 connexion, but what the obstinacy of pride and ignorance ren- 
 ders necessary, between justice and the sword, — between reason 
 and bonds. I deplore the miserable condition of the French, and 
 thinls that we can only be guarded from the same scourge by the 
 undaunted efforts of good men I severely condemn all inflam- 
 matory addresses to the passions of men. I know that the mul- 
 titude wait in darkness. I would put into each man's hand a 
 lantern, to guide him ; and not have him to set out upon his 
 journey depending for illumination on abortive flashes of light- 
 ning, or the coruscations of transitory meteors. 
 
 With principles so decidedly republican, and 
 sentiments so opposed to violence, physical force. 
 
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 176 
 
 or even inflammatory agitation ; with such a clear 
 consciousness of the necessity of knowledge and 
 virtue, as the only basis and safeguard of popular 
 liberties, a clear-sighted observer might even thus 
 early have anticipated the course of Wordsworth's 
 opinions on the French revolution, and on politics, 
 practical and speculative, in general. The imme- 
 diate effect of his disappointment was to cloud his 
 hopes and weaken his faith in human nature ; and 
 his painful feelings were still farther embittered, 
 and clashing sympathies jarred the more harshly 
 within him, when, in consequence of the execu- 
 tion of Louis XVI., this country declared war 
 against France. During the year 1793, he pub- 
 lished the poems entitled, ' The Evening Walk,' 
 and ' Descriptive Sketches,' the latter of which 
 he had composed principally in his walks along 
 the banks of the Loire the preceding summer. 
 Interesting as these poems are in themselves, as 
 the first fruits of an original genius, they are more 
 important as having in the following year attract- 
 ed the attention of Coleridge, then an undergrad- 
 uate at Cambridge, and having thus laid the 
 foundations of an intimacy which exercised a 
 powerful influence upon these two great men, and 
 
176 ESSAYS. 
 
 contributed to enrich and expand their minds, no 
 less than it ministered to the enjoyments of both. 
 ' Seldom, if ever,' says Coleridge in the Biogra- 
 pliia Literaria, ' was the emergence of an origi- 
 nal poetic genius above the literary horizon more 
 evidently announced.' But poetry can never be 
 counted on as a means of support ; and hitherto 
 Wordsworth had been almost wholly dependent 
 on his relations, the debt to his father's estate 
 from Lord Lonsdale not having been yet recov- 
 ered. He was therefore urged to make choice of 
 a profession ; or rather, the Church was pointed 
 out as the only one open to him. In spite, how- 
 ever, of remonstrating relatives and an empty 
 purse, he resolved not to take orders. The con- 
 sequence naturally was, that relatives from remon- 
 strance turned to indignation and coldness, and 
 the purse was not likely to iill itself. As a means 
 of accomplishing this desirable object, he pro- 
 posed to his friend Matthews, then engaged on a 
 London newspaper, to join him in a monthly peri- 
 odical, to be called the Philanthropist, the princi- 
 ples of which were to be republican, but not rev- 
 olutionary. He was himself to contribute to it 
 criticisms on poetry, painting, gardening, &c., be- 
 
WORDS WORTJI'S POEMS. 177 
 
 sides essays on morals and politics. The scheme, 
 however, came to nothing, and his next attempt 
 was to secure employment on a London paper, on- 
 ly conditioning that it should be an opposition pa- 
 per ; ' for,' says he, ' I cannot abet, in the small- 
 est degree, the measures pursued by the present 
 ministry ;' adding, at the same time, ' I know that 
 many good men are persuaded of the expediency 
 of the present war.' He was at that time en- 
 gaged in attendance on the sick-bed of a young 
 friend, Raisley Calvert, who was dying of con- 
 sumption. Before the newspaper engagement was 
 actually concluded, this young man (who was wise 
 enough to discern Wordsworth's genius, and was im- 
 pressed with the persuasion that, if not impeded by 
 the necessity of other occupations, he would bene- 
 fit mankind by his writings) died, and left to his 
 friend the sum of nine hundred pounds. Thus re- 
 lieved from all immediate care, he gave himself 
 entirely to his poetic impulse, and devoted himself 
 with unswerving aim and untiring energy to what 
 he felt to be his appointed task. This bold step 
 was justified, not only by the clearness of pur- 
 pose and consciousness of power which prompted 
 it, but by the abstemious habits and simple tastes 
 
178 ESSjIYS. 
 
 which are so often wanting in poets. Writing 
 some time afterwards to Sir George Beaumont, he 
 says, ' Upon the interest of the ^900, £400 be- 
 ing laid out in annuity, with £200 deducted from 
 the principal, and <£100 legacy to my sister, and 
 a £100 more which the Lyrical Ballads have 
 brought me, my sister and I contrived to live sev- 
 en years — nearly eight.' People who can so live 
 may follow the promptings of genius without the 
 imputation of folly, rashness, or vain self-confi- 
 dence. The legacy came to "Wordsworth in the 
 early part of 1795, and in the autumn of that 
 year, he and his sister, who thenceforth was his 
 constant companion, were settled at Racedown 
 Lodge, near Crewkerne, in Dorsetshire. It was 
 here that he composed the imitations of Juvenal, 
 alluded to before, and the tragedy of the Border- 
 ers, which, after being offered to Mr. Harris, the 
 manager of Covent G-arden, and by him declined, 
 remained in MS. till the year 1842. Wordsworth 
 assigns it to his sister's benign influence upon him 
 during this period, that he was saved from lasting 
 despondency, consequent upon the failure of his po- 
 litical hopes. Depressed in heart, bewildered in 
 intellect, in danger even of letting slip the great 
 
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 179 
 
 saving truths of Reason, and taking refuge in ab- 
 stract Science from the scoffing Spirit by which a 
 man revenges himself on his own delusions, he 
 than-ks 
 
 The bounteous Giver of aU good. 
 That the beloved sister in whose sight 
 Those days were passed * * 
 
 T * * * * 
 
 Maintained for me a saving intercourse 
 With my true self * * * 
 
 tp # tt- ^ Sp 
 
 She, in the midst of all, preserved me still 
 A poet, made me seek beneath that name, 
 And that alone, my office upon earth. 
 
 How complete was the recovery of the poet un- 
 der the humanizing and tranquillizing influence of 
 this loving and beloved sister, is seen from an in- 
 teresting passage in the Biographia Lileraria. 
 Speaking of his residence at Stowey, Coleridge 
 says, ' I was so fortunate as to acquire, shortly 
 after my settlement there, an invaluable blessing 
 in the society and neighborhood of one, to whom 
 I could look up with equal reverence, whether I 
 regarded him as a poet, a philosopher, or a man. 
 His conversation extended to almost all subjects, 
 except physics and politics ; with the latter he 
 
180 ESSAYS. 
 
 never troubled himself.' A short time previous 
 to the removal of Wordsworth and his sister to 
 Alfosden, in the neighborhood of Stowey, men- 
 tioned in the above passage, Coleridge had paid 
 them a visit at Racedown ; and in a letter from 
 that place to Cottle, he says of Wordsworth, — ' I 
 speak with heartfelt sincerity, and I think unblind- 
 ed judgment, when I tell you that I feel a little 
 man by his side.' Miss Wordsworth he describes 
 to the same friend in terms of warm and eloquent 
 admiration : 
 
 She is a -woman indeed, in mind, I mean, and in heart; for 
 her person is such that if you expected to see a pretty woman, 
 you would think her ordinary; if you expected to see an ordinary 
 woman you would think her pretty, hut her manners are simple, 
 ardent, impressive. In every motion her innocent soul out-beams 
 so brightly, that who saw her would say, ' Guilt was a thing im- 
 possible with her.' Her information various; her eye watchful 
 in minutest observation of Nature; and her taste a perfect elec- 
 trometer. 
 
 On the side of the Wordsworths the impression 
 made by Coleridge was equally favorable, and 
 their removal to Alfoxden was mainly induced by 
 their desire to enjoy his society. The residence 
 at Alfoxden commenced in July 1797, and the 
 
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 181 
 
 twelve-montli that he passed there he describes as 
 ' a very pleasant and productive time of his life.' 
 Indeed, in that year with the exception of the 
 ' Female Vagrant,' all the poems contained in the 
 first edition of the Lyrical Ballads were composed. 
 To the same period ' Peter Bell ' is due, though it 
 was not published till 1819. How the Lyrical 
 Ballads were a joint projection of Wordsworth 
 and Coleridge — the aim with which they were 
 written — the principles which dictated their 
 choice of subjects and style of diction — and how 
 Coleridge was not so industrious as his coadjutor 
 — and that the book was finally published by Cot- 
 tle of Bristol, in the summer of 1798, in a duo- 
 decimo volume — moreover, that the reviews were 
 terribly severe, and that of five hundred copies 
 the greater number were sold as remainder at a 
 loss, are all stale topics to the readers of the Bi- 
 ographia Literaria and Cottle's Reminiscences. 
 Wordsworth received thirty guineas for his share 
 of the copyright, which was, with Mr. Cottle's 
 other literary property, subsequently transferred 
 to Messrs. Longman, who estimating this particu- 
 lar article at nil, returned it, at Mr. Cottle's re- 
 quest, and it was by him presented to the authors, 
 
182 ESSJirS. 
 
 This, it must be confessed, was a singular re- 
 ception for a volume which, however the public 
 taste was repelled by some of its contents, yet 
 gave to the light Coleridge's ' Ancient Mariner ' 
 and ' Nightingale,' with Wordsworth's ' Lines 
 left upon a Yew-tree seat ' and ' Tintern Abbey,' 
 four poems, of which it is not too much to say, 
 that since Milton's voice had ceased, such noble 
 strains had not been uttered in English speech. 
 The famous Preface, to which Coleridge justly, 
 we think, attributes much of the acrimony with 
 which the Lake-school of poetry, as it came after- 
 wards to be called, was assailed, was not pub- 
 lished till the Lyrical Ballads reached a second 
 edition, and were augmented by an additional 
 volume ; so that the public neglect and the severi- 
 ty of the critics must be explained by the poems 
 themselves, and not by revolutionary views of 
 poetic composition, systematically and, it must be 
 owned, somewhat dogmatically announced. These 
 views, and the productions which were the result 
 of them, have been the subject of controversy 
 and discussion from that time to this ; the ablest 
 critics and the greatest poets have borne part in 
 it. The issue may, we think, be fairly stated to 
 
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 188 
 
 be, that the theory, considered as polemic in refer- 
 ence to the style of poetry of which Pope's trans- 
 lation of Homer is the type and highest example, 
 is perfectly successful and generally received ; 
 that the agitation to which it gave rise has had 
 great influence in winning men back to perceive 
 the material that lies ready for the poet's use in 
 our actual daily life, and, as a necessary conse- 
 quence, to bring poetic language nearer to the ac- 
 tual phraseology of human beings in a state of 
 passion or vivid emotion ; but that, on the other 
 hand, the theory was wanting both in comprehen- 
 siveness of knowledge, in subtlety of analysis and 
 catholicity of taste — that, in a word, it was little 
 more than polemic; while the poems composed 
 expressly to support, or at least under the definite 
 and conscious influence of the theory, are just 
 those in which Wordsworth falls farthest below 
 himself, and which, even now that his name is 
 honored by the wise and good, and his seat is 
 among the immortals, are regarded by all but a 
 very few, and those for the most part persons who 
 were in some way connected with him, as experi- 
 ments which, though they in no wise detract from 
 his fame, have added no laurel to his wreath. In 
 
184 ESSAVS 
 
 fact, the best refutation of Mr. Wordsworth's 
 theory, considered as anything more than a cor- 
 rective of an excess in the opposite direction, is 
 furnished by those poems of his own, in which he 
 follows the natural bent of his genius, unwarped 
 by system — that is, in at least nine tenths of 
 his published works. And there, whether it be 
 the play of the fancy, the overflow of affection, 
 the visionary power of imagination, or the rea- 
 son's rapture of intuition, that colors his mental 
 activity and stirs his heart and tongue, the matter 
 is the life-stuff of a great original genius, and the 
 language and versification such as speak the facul- 
 ty and the education of an artist. Mr. Coleridge 
 puts the matter in its simplest form, when he says 
 of ' Alice Fell ' and other kindred poems, — ' Not- 
 withstanding the beauties which are to be found 
 in each of them where the poet interposes the 
 music of his own thoughts, they would have been 
 more delightful to me in prose, told and managed 
 as by Mr. Wordsworth they would have been, in 
 a moral essay or pedestrian tour.' These last 
 words were penned doubtless in the vivid recol- 
 lection of many pedestrian tours, in which the two 
 poets were accompanied by the beloved sister. 
 
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 185 
 
 who was almost equally dear to them both ; and 
 who, in addition to her charms of mind and heart, 
 was 
 
 Fleet and strong; 
 And down the rocks could leap along, 
 Like rivulets in May. 
 
 No one can doubt that the exquisite poem from 
 which these lines are taken, and which the doctor- 
 lawyer-coroner-editor Pangloss, who does not re- 
 present Pinsbury, secured himself from wholesome 
 oblivion by ridiculing in the House of Commons, 
 is a portrait of Dorothy "Wordsworth. The broth- 
 er's description may help us to feel what a pedes- 
 trian tour with such a companion must have been. 
 
 And she hath 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. 
 
 Well, the Lyrical Ballads were published in Ju- 
 ly 1798 ; and a superfluity of cash being thus ob- 
 tained, the trio started in September following for 
 Germany, but separated at Hamburg, Coleridge 
 
186 ESSAVS. 
 
 proceeding in one direction by himself, and the 
 brother and sister taking up their residence at 
 Goslar. The only person of eminence whom the 
 Wordsworths seem to have been introduced to was 
 Klopstock, that ' very German Milton ' who is re- 
 corded as talking like an ' Erz-Philister ' ; the 
 substance of the conversation is published in that 
 portion of the Biographia Lileraria called ' Saty- 
 rane's Letters.' They spent some months at Gos- 
 lar, but from one cause or other, partly Words- 
 worth's dislike of smoke, partly that the presence 
 of his sister would, according to the notions of 
 the place, have bound him to entertain company 
 if he accepted invitations, which his finances pre- 
 vented him from doing — from these or other caus- 
 es, they failed to see much of German society, and 
 spent their time in learning the language by read- 
 ing and casual conversation. Upon the whole, 
 we can point to no specific fruits of this residence 
 abroad in Wordsworth's writings ; while, on the 
 other hand, Coleridge derived from it a knowledge 
 of German philosophy and literature which color- 
 ed the whole of his after-life, and mainly, though 
 not entirely, in consequence of which he is looked 
 on by many as the angel who has come down and 
 
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 187 
 
 troubled the waters of English speculative science, 
 so that they who bathe therein derive from them 
 healing and strength. But even while he was in 
 Germany, Wordsworth's heart was in England ; 
 and it was to English scenes and home recollec- 
 tions that his poems of this period refer ; except 
 one lamentably heavy attempt at being funny. 
 ' Nutting,' well worthy of being considered a pen- 
 dant to ' Tintern Abbey,' the two noble poems af- 
 terwards incorporated with the Prelude, ' Wisdom 
 and Spirit of the Universe,' and ' There was a 
 boy, ye knew him well, ye cliffs,' — the stanzas to 
 Lucy, ' She dwelt amid the untrodden ways,' so 
 tender and graceful, sad, holy, and beautiful as a 
 Madonna, — those others, ' Three years she grew 
 in sun and shower,' the most exquisite description 
 ever written of an English country girl, half child, 
 half woman, with the wildness and witchery of a 
 sylphide, the grace of a duchess, and the purity 
 of an angel, — the poet's Epitaph, containing those 
 lines, so often applied to himself, — 
 
 He is retired as noon-tide dew, 
 Or fountain in a noon-day grove; 
 And you must love Mm, ere to you 
 He will seem worthy of your love; — 
 
188 ESSA VS. 
 
 these and others of his poems less popular, he 
 composed during that winter at Goslar, the sever- 
 est, it is said, of the whole century. But they 
 might have been composed just as well anywhere 
 else ; and neither in the records of this winter, 
 nor in the poems themselves, nor in any after re- 
 sults, is the influence of this Goslar residence ap- 
 parent. It was as he left Goslar, that ' he poured 
 forth the impassioned strain which forms the com- 
 mencement of the Prelude.' This was on the 
 10th February, 1799 ; and of the fourteen books, 
 six only had been written in 1805, and the seventh 
 begun in the spring of that year opens thus ; 
 
 Six changeful years have vanished, since I first 
 Poured out (saluted by that quickening breeze 
 Which met me issuing from the city's Tvalls) 
 A glad preamble to this yerse. 
 
 He writes to Cottle on his return, ' We have 
 spent our time pleasantly enougli in Germany, but 
 we are right glad to find ourselves in England, for 
 we have learnt to know its value.' 
 
 Wordsworth had now reached his thirtieth 
 year, when his training may be presumed com- 
 plete. His tastes, his pursuits, and his character. 
 
WO.RDSWORTH'8 POEMS. 189 
 
 were fully determined, and the remainder of his 
 life, extending over a space of fifty years, was but 
 the progressive manifestation of the powers culti- 
 vated, and the principles formed, during the stages 
 of which we have been hitherto speaking. In the 
 latter part of 1799 he took up his residence with 
 his sister, in a cottage at Grasmere ; and here, or 
 at a house called Allan Bank, and subsequently at 
 Rydal Mount, he passed his long, peaceful, and 
 happy existence in a round of domestic charities 
 and poetic activity. 
 
 The following extracts from Miss Wordsworth's 
 journal we quote, as the best account we can give 
 of the daily life of the writer and her brother : — 
 
 Wednesday, April 28. — Copied the Prioress' Tale. W. 
 in the orchard — tired, I happened to say that when a child I 
 would not have pulled a strawberry blossom : left him, and 
 wrote out the Manciples tale. At dinner he came in with the 
 poem on children gathering flowers.* 
 
 April 30. — We went into the orchard after breakfast and 
 sat there. The lake calm, sky cloudy. W. began poem on the 
 Celandine. 
 
 May 1. — Sowed flower seeds : W. helped me. We sat in 
 the orchard. W. wrote the Celandine. Planned an arbor : the 
 sun too hot for us, 
 
 * The poem entitled ' Foresight,' vol. i. p. 149. 
 
190 ESSAYS. 
 
 May 7. — W. wrote ibe Leech-Gatherer. 
 
 May 21. — W. wrote two sonnets on Buonaparte, after I 
 had read Milton's Sonnets to him. 
 
 May 29. — W. wrote his Poem on going to M. H. I wrote 
 it out. 
 
 June 8. — W wrote the poem ' The sun has long been set.' 
 
 June 17. — W. added to the Ode* he is writing. 
 
 June 19. — Kead Churchill's Rosciad. 
 
 July 9. — W. and X set forth to Keswick on our road to 
 GaUow Hill (to the Hutchinsons, near Malton, York). On 
 Monday, 11th, went to Eusemere (the Clarksous). 13th, walked 
 to Emont Bridge, thence by Greta Bridge. The sun shone cheer- 
 fully, and a glorious ride we had over the moors ; every building 
 bathed in golden light : we saw round us miles beyond miles, 
 Darlington spire, &o. Thence to Thirsk ; on foot to the Hamble- 
 don Hills — Rivaulx. I went down to look at the ruins : thrush- 
 es singing, cattle feeding among the ruins of the Abbey ; green 
 hillocks about the ruins ; these hiUocks scattered over with grove- 
 lets of wild roses, and covered with wild flowers. I could have 
 stayed in this solemn quiet spot tiU evening without a thought of 
 
 moving, but W. was waiting for me. 
 
 ******** 
 
 July 30. — Left London between five and six o'clock of the 
 
 morning outside the Dover coach. A beautiful morning. The 
 
 city, St. Paul's, with the river — a multitude of little boats, 
 
 made a beautiful sight as we crossed Westminster Bridge ,'t the 
 
 * ' On Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of 
 ChUdhood,' vol. v. p. 148. 
 
 t The Sonnet on Westminster Bridge was then written on 
 the roof of the Dover coach (vol. ii. p. 296). 
 
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 191 
 
 houses not overhung by their clouds of smoke, and were spread 
 out endlessly ; yet the suu shone so brightly, with such a pure 
 light, that there was something like the purity of one of Nature's 
 own grand spectacles Arrived at Calais at four in the morn- 
 ing of July Slst. 
 
 Delightful walks in the evenings : seeing far off ia the west 
 the coast of England, like a cloud, crested with Dover Castle, the 
 evening star, and the glory of the sky : the reflections iu the 
 water were more beautiful than the sky itself; purple waves 
 brighter than precious stones &r ever melting away upon the 
 
 sands. 
 
 ******* 
 
 On Monday, Oct. 4, 1802, W. was married at Brompton 
 
 Church, to Mary Hutchinson We arrived at Grasmere at six 
 
 in the evening on Oct, 6, 1802. 
 
 Maiy Hutchinson was Wordsworth's cousin, 
 and they had been intimate from childhood, hav- 
 ing been at the same dame's school together, 
 whenever the poet, during his earliest years, was 
 on a visit to his maternal relations at Peflrith. 
 How calm and beautiful their wedded life was ; 
 how full of mutual support and happiness ; how 
 rich in thoughtful affection, esteem, and purifying 
 influence, may be traced in the poems with which 
 Mrs. "Wordsworth's name will ever be more direct- 
 ly associated, forming a series to which the same- 
 ness of subject, and the progressive development 
 
192 ESSAYS. 
 
 of feeling, give a unity which shapes them into an 
 organic whole, one sweet and holy poem of wed- 
 ded love, reflecting the vicissitudes of earthly 
 life, as the mountain-circled lake reflects the 
 changing face of an April sky, bright or overcast, 
 as clouds or sunshine prevail above ; but whether 
 in brightness or in gloom, calm in its still depths, 
 however the breeze may rufiEle and perplex the 
 mirror of its surface. 
 
 We are indebted to Mr. de Quincey for por- 
 traits of Wordsworth and his wife, which, in the 
 absence of anything of the sort in Dr. Christo- 
 pher Wordsworth's volumes, we will take the lib- 
 erty to present in an abridged form ; though what- 
 ever Mr. de Quincey writes is so admirable, that 
 no abridgement can fail to do it injustice. He de- 
 scribes Mrs. Wordsworth, a few years after her 
 marriage, as a tall young woman, with the most 
 winning expression of benignity upon her features 
 that he had ever beheld, and with such a frank 
 air, and native goodness of manner, as at once to 
 put a stranger at his ease with her. Her figure 
 was good, though rather slender ; her complexion 
 fair, and blooming with an animated expression 
 of health. Her eyes, as her husband paints her, 
 
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. Ki 
 
 Like stars of t5Tilight fair • 
 Like twiliglits, too, her dusky hair ; 
 But all things else about her drawn 
 From May-time and the cheerful dawn. 
 
 Mr. de Quincey adds to this portrait that, in 
 these eyes of vesper gentleness, there was more 
 than that slight obliquity of vision which is often 
 supposed to be an attractive foible of the counte- 
 nance ; and yet, though it ought to have been dis- 
 pleasing or repulsive, in fact it was not. ' Indeed, 
 all faults, had they been ten times more and great- 
 er, would have been swallowed up, or neutralized, 
 by that supreme expression of her features, to the 
 intense unity of which every liniament in the fixed 
 parts, and every undulation in the moving parts, 
 or play of her countenance, concurred — viz., a 
 sunny benignity, a radiant gracefulness, such as in 
 this world I never saw equalled or approached.' 
 He tells us that, ' though generally pronounced 
 very plain, she exercised all the practical power 
 and fascination of beauty, through" the mere com- 
 pensating charms of sweetness all but angelic ; of 
 simplicity the most entire ; womanly self-respect, 
 and purity of heart speaking through all their 
 
 looks, acts, and movements.' She talked so little, 
 9 
 
194 E8SA VS. 
 
 that Clarkson used to say of her, that she could 
 only say, ' God bless you ! ' 
 
 A masterly portrait is completed by a descrip- 
 tion of the intellectual character as nqt being of 
 an active order ; though, ' in a quiescent, repos- 
 ing, meditative way, she appeared always to have 
 a genial enjoyment from her own thoughts.' The 
 acknowledged pique which colors all Mr. de Quin- 
 cey's picture of the Wordsworths may have had 
 something to do with this last touch. Our readers 
 will scarcely be disposed to agree with any depre- 
 ciation of that woman's intellect who wrote the 
 two most beautiful and thoughtful lines in one of 
 Wordsworth's most charming minor poems. It is 
 to Mrs. Wordsworth that the poem called ' Daffo- 
 dils ' owes the lines — 
 
 They flasi upon that inward eye. 
 Which is the bliss of solitude. 
 
 Such was the woman who for nearly fifty years 
 shared the home and heart of the poet with the 
 beloved sister. And what was he like himself ? 
 Let us take a crayon sketch from the full-length 
 carefully colored portrait, by the same skilful 
 hand. He was five feet ten inches in height, and 
 
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 195 
 
 of moderate stoutness, but his legs were bad, and 
 his bust worse, from a narrowness of chest, and a 
 droop about the shoulders. These defects of fig- 
 ure were more conspicuous when he was in motion, 
 and were increased by a habit he had of walking 
 with his arm in his unbuttoned waistcoat, which 
 caused him to advance with a twisting motion, so 
 that he would gradually edge off any one he was 
 with, from the middle to the side of the road, and 
 the country people used to say he walked ' like a 
 cade,' some sort of insect with an oblique motion. 
 He had originally a fine sombre complexion, like 
 that of a Venetian senator, or a Spanish monk ; 
 but constant exposure to weather soon spoilt his 
 tint, and gave a coarse texture to his face, and 
 grizzled hair came early to displace the original 
 brown. His countenance, however, made amends 
 for figure and complexion ; ' it was,' says the 
 artist we are copying, ' the noblest for intellectual 
 efiects that I have ever been led to notice.' It 
 had the character of a portrait of Titian, or Van- 
 dyke, of the great age of Elizabeth and the Stu- 
 arts. Haydon has painted Wordsworth as a 
 disciple, in his picture of ' Christ's Entry into Je- 
 rusalem.' The head was well filled out ; the 
 
196 ESSAYS. 
 
 forehead not very lofty, but remarkable for its 
 breadth and expansive development. The eyes 
 were rather small, and never lustrous or piercing, 
 but at times, especially after long walks, ' assumed 
 an appearance the most solemn and spiritual that 
 it is possible for the human eye to wear.' The 
 light that resided in them, though never super- 
 ficial, seemed, at times ' to come from depths be- 
 low all depths,' ' the light that never was on land 
 or sea.' The nose was a little arched and large. 
 But the most marked feature in the whole face 
 was the mouth ; the swell and protrusion of the 
 parts above and around it were not only noticea- 
 ble in themselves, but gave the face a striking re- 
 semblance to the portrait of Milton, engraved in 
 Richardson the painter's notes on Paradise Lost, 
 which was the only one acknowledged by Milton's 
 last surviving daughter to be a strong likeness of 
 her father. Every member of Wordsworth's fami- 
 ly was as much impressed as Mr. de Quincey 
 with the striking resemblance. The points of 
 diiference were, that Milton's face was shorter 
 and broader, and his eyes larger. The only por- 
 trait of Wordsworth which Mr. de Quincey thinks 
 is to be at all compared for likeness with this 
 
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 197 
 
 Eicliardson-portrait of Milton, is that by Caruth- 
 ers, with one of the Rydal Waterfalls for a back- 
 ground. The objection to the later portraits is, 
 that "Wordsworth, from the fervor of his tempera- 
 ment, and the self-consuming energy of his brain, 
 prematurely displayed the appearance of age. 
 
 We make no apology for the length to which 
 these descriptions have run ; rather, we heartily 
 recommend our readers to study the originals, not 
 less for Wordsworth's sake, than as adniirable 
 specimens of one of the greatest prose writers 
 whom our century has produced. They will be 
 found in Tait's Magazine, among the ' Lake 
 Reminiscences,' by the English Opium-Eater. 
 
 In the year 1800, an edition of the Lyrical 
 Ballads, with an additional volume, and the fa- 
 mous Preface, had been published. Fresh editions 
 were called for in the years 1802 and 1805, proof 
 sufficient that the fit audience was already gather- 
 ing strength, and that the reviewers were not the 
 public. Still the returns scarcely did more than 
 pay the expense of publication. This, however, 
 was now of less importance. In 1802, on the 
 death of the first Lord Lonsdale, his successor had 
 paid the debt due to Wordsworth's family with in- 
 
198 ESSJlVS. 
 
 terest, and tlie sum that fell to each member was 
 about £1800. Mr. de Quincey, with something 
 of good-humored banter, and a half-serious latent 
 reference to his own different fate, speaks of 
 Wordsworth, in reference to pecuniary matters, as 
 the most fortunate man in existence ; and tells us 
 that a regular succession of god-sends fell in to 
 sustain his expenditure with the growing claims 
 upon his purse. We have mentioned the legacy 
 from Raisley Calvert, which saved him from news- 
 paper writing, and (though his nephew seems to 
 know nothing about it) from the equally unsuitable 
 employment of taking pupils. Next came Lord 
 Lonsdale's repayment, which enabled him to mar- 
 ry; for with his simple habits, what would have been 
 poverty to most men of education, was a compe- 
 tence for him. Miss Hutchinson brought him 
 some fortune which was afterwards increased by a 
 legacy from an uncle, expressed in thousands of 
 pounds. In 1813, just as his family were becom- 
 ing expensive, he was made stamp-distributor for 
 Westmoreland, with an income of above £500 per 
 annum — not to mention the subsequent addition 
 to this source of income from the increase of his 
 district, which Mr. de Quincey estimates at £400 
 
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 199 
 
 more ; aad finally (since Mr. de Quincey wrote), 
 on resigning this office in 1842, it was bestowed 
 upon his younger son. and he was himself put 
 down upon the civil list for £300 a-year, and, to 
 crown all, made Poet Laureate;* so that, by a 
 singular felicity, this man, unpossessed of any 
 marketable talent, was enabled, from, the age of 
 three-and-twenty, to devote himself, without care 
 or anxiety for the future, to the cultivation of his 
 genius, and was secured in that free enjoyment of 
 nature and domestic happiness, which was an es- 
 sential condition of his poetic activity. To Rais- 
 ley Calvert, who laid the first stone, and to Lord 
 Lonsdale, who first, by a prompt and liberal act 
 of justice, and afterwards, by a kind and discern- 
 ing act of patronage, built upon this foundation 
 the solid edifice of the poet's prosperity, be all 
 honor paid. The name and virtues of both are 
 embalmed for immortality in those pages, which 
 
 *Dr. Wordsworth is not quite correct in leading his readers to 
 suppose that his uncle's laureateship was a complete sinecure. 
 On Prince Albert's installation as Chancellor of the University 
 of Cambridge, he wrote the words of the Ode, which was com- 
 posed by the popular and accomplished professor of music, Dr 
 Walmisley, and performed in the Senate House. 
 
200 ESSAYS. 
 
 owe so much to tlie leisure their liberality and 
 discernment fortified ; but England owes them a 
 debt of gratitude, which she will pay, in propor- 
 tion as her people feel ' what a glorious gift God 
 bestows on a nation when he gives them a poet.'* 
 It would be unfair to Sir George Beaumont not to 
 associate his name with Wordsworth's benefactors. 
 Before he had seen Wordsworth, solely from the 
 impression made upon him by his writings, he, in 
 1803, purchased a beautiful spot at Applethwaite, 
 near Keswick, and presented it to the poet, in or- 
 der that he and Coleridge, who was then residing 
 at Greta-hall, might be permanent neighbors. 
 Coleridge's failure of health compelled him to 
 leave England, and the plan was never carried 
 out ; but the friendship that sprang from this be- 
 ginning, ripened into a close intimacy and a, fre- 
 quent interchange of letters and visits. Some of 
 the happiest efforts of the titled painter are illus- 
 trations of the poems of his friend ; and in many 
 of those poems their names will go down to pos- 
 terity, linked together by the purest ties of friend- 
 
 *Dedioation of second edition of Guesses at Truth to W 
 Wordsworth. 
 
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 201 
 
 ship and mutual admiration. Sir George died in 
 1827, and bequeathed to Mr. Wordsworth an annu- 
 ity of £100 to defray the expenses of an annual 
 tour. There had been a period in Wordsworth's 
 life, when fear of poverty and distress had clouded 
 his prospects. Mr. de Quincey informs us, on Miss 
 Wordsworth's authority, that her brother at one 
 time became subject to a nervous affection to such 
 an extent, that his friends, as a means of beguil- 
 ing his distress, played cards with him every night. 
 Again we say, honor and gratitude to Eaisley 
 Calvert and Lord Lonsdale, and the few men who, 
 like Sir George Beaumont, cheered and supported 
 the poet in his struggle with hostile criticism and 
 public apathy. To these three men his works 
 and his correspondence bear ample testimony. 
 We cannot however, in justice, avoid a passing 
 allusion to the absence of any acknowledgment, 
 or of even any feeling of thankfulness, for sym- 
 pathy of a less substantial but no less necessary 
 kind, from those few men of letters who early 
 discerned and expressed their sense of Words- 
 worth's profoundly original genius. If the poet's 
 own extreme dislike of writing prevented such 
 acknowledgments in the shape in which they form 
 9* 
 
202 ESSMVS. 
 
 SO pleasing a portion of tlie biographies of other 
 poets, at least we should like to have had some 
 record of spoken feelings, which would have 
 shown that the homage of such men as Wilson 
 and De Quincey, and later in his career, of 
 Thomas Arnold, of Julius Hare, and of Henry- 
 Taylor, was not paid to an idol of stone. The 
 biographer's want of sympathy with any form of 
 goodness or talent which does not run submissive- 
 ly within the channels of Church-of-England or- 
 thodoxy according to the Westminster Canon, 
 may partly account for this. Still something of 
 it must, we fear, be attributed to a hardness in 
 Wordsworth's nature towards the human world 
 outside his own family circle, to an independence 
 of the sympathy of men, which was indeed a 
 means of preserving him from much discomfort 
 and annoyance, assailed and ridiculed as he was, 
 but which, at the same time, was grievously dis- 
 couraging to such worshippers as felt the worth 
 of their worship, and required some return of 
 affection, sympathy, and esteem. With men of 
 letters especially, the ' limitation of his literary 
 sensibilities' prevented him from forming, or at 
 least sustaining, a mutual friendship. Even to 
 
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 203 
 
 Coleridge, who so dearly loved him, who so gen- 
 erously and so ably vindicated his claims to be 
 called a great poet, whose profound and elaborate 
 criticism in the Biographia Literaria remains to 
 this day the most satisfactory defence and the best 
 exposition of his friend's poetry, how small the 
 return of affectionate, admiring appreciation — 
 how dim and faint the sympathy during all that 
 period of Coleridge's life, when clouds and dark- 
 ness beset his path, and he was walking through 
 the valley of the shadow of death ! The fact is, 
 he did not value all this sympathy, because he 
 did not need it. He could never have written to 
 Coleridge as Coleridge wrote to him in Germany, 
 
 William, my head and my heart ! dear William and dear Doro- 
 thea ! 
 You have all in each other ; but I am lonely, and want you ! 
 
 This last line, too, gives a more amiable reason 
 for Wordsworth's indifference to his friends and 
 admirers. His heart was wrapped up in his wife 
 and sister, and afterwards in his children, especi- 
 ally in her who recalled his sister's childhood — 
 his beloved Dora. The name recals us from our 
 discursion to speak of one in whom so much of 
 the poet's deepest, fondest affection was centered, 
 
204 ESSAVS. 
 
 and to whom his biograplier has paid the honor of 
 joining her portrait with her father's as the fron- 
 tispieces to his two volumes. Wordsworth had 
 ih all five children : — 
 
 John, born 18th June, 1803. 
 
 Dorothy, called and generally known as Dora, 
 born 16th August, 1804. 
 
 Thomas, born 16th June, 1806. 
 
 Catharine, born 6th September, 1808. 
 
 William, born 12th May, 1810. 
 
 Of these, Thomas and Catherine died in early 
 childhood ; John and William survive their father ; 
 the former is a clergyman, the latter succeeded 
 upon his father's resignation to the distributorship 
 of stamps. Nothing remarkable is recorded of 
 any of the four by Dr. Christopher Wordsworth ; 
 but to those for whom curious psychological facts 
 have interest, the name of Catharine Wordsworth 
 (who died before she was four years old ; ' loving 
 she is, and tractable, though wild,' is addressed 
 to her) will always be memorable as the cause 
 and object of that strange nympholepsy, the ago- 
 nies of which Mr. de Quincey has so graphically 
 and powerfully described in those Lake Reminis- 
 cences, to which the absence of what is interest- 
 
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 205 
 
 ing or characteristic in the volumes we are re- 
 viewing has led us so often to refer. Dora Words- 
 worth will always form a conspicuous object in 
 any artistically conceived biography of her father. 
 When she was a month old, he addressed to her 
 that thoughtful poem, beginning, — 
 
 Hast thou, then, survived, 
 Mild offipring of infirm humanity ? 
 
 Not many weeks after, she inspired that most 
 exquisite of all her father's sportive compositions, 
 ' The Kitten and the Palling Leaves.' To her is 
 addressed ' The longest Day ' ; and when, threat- 
 ened with blindness, he anticipates the time that 
 he should need a guiding hand, it is to his ' own 
 Dora, his beloved child,' that he would, like an- 
 other (Edipus, entrust his dark steps. And who 
 can forget that later group, in which the noblest 
 art, warmed by pure affection, has blended togeth- 
 er in indissoluble beauty, Dora Wordsworth, Ed- 
 ith Southey, and Sara Coleridge ? She married 
 at a mature age Edward Quillinan, Esq.,* to whose 
 
 *We regret to he compelled to add that, since this article was 
 written, the newspapers haye announced the death of this gentle- 
 man, himself the author of works which prove him to have been 
 worthy of his charming and gifted wife. 
 
206 ESSA VS. 
 
 children, left to her charge by a beloved friend, 
 she had performed the duties of a mother. But 
 her health rapidly failed, and after an unavailing 
 journey to Portugal, of which she has left a pub- 
 lished record that proves her to have inherited no 
 little of the genius of her father and her aunt, she 
 died of consumption in July 1847, about three 
 years before her father. From the poems address- 
 ed to her, and those previously alluded to, refer- 
 ring to Mrs. Wordsworth, with the scattered al- 
 lusions throughout his works to his sister, the 
 reader may have insight into Wordsworth's life, 
 so far as women influenced either his happiness or 
 the development of his genius. His ' Lucy ' po- 
 ems, which seem to allude to some early love pre- 
 maturely removed, either belong to the region of 
 pure imagination, or all records of the fact have 
 been obliterated. But the sister, the wife, and the 
 daughter remain for us as prominent portraits, 
 scarcely idealized by the poet's pencil, as fellow- 
 workers co-operating in the production of the po- 
 ems, and above all, as personal powers, sustaining, 
 nourishing, purifying, and invigorating the poetic 
 temperament by the sweet and holy influences of 
 affection, and the quiet, unobtrusive action of the 
 
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 207 
 
 domestic charities. The history of literature fur- 
 nishes no group upon which the heart can rest 
 more delighted and satisfied. 
 
 "We have noticed Wordsworth's successive pub- 
 lications up to 1805. In 1807 appeared two vol- 
 umes of Miscellaneous Poems, which drew down 
 upon him the wrath and ridicule of Mr. Jeffrey. 
 The great oracle of the North had before this giv- 
 en vent to sundry manifestations of indignant con- 
 tempt, but our poet had hitherto stood the brunt 
 of the critic's charge, in company with Southey, 
 Lamb, and the rest of the so-called Lakers. But 
 now on his single head was discharged the pitiless 
 pelting of the storm ; and while the majority of 
 the world were shaking with laughter, and a few 
 trembling with indignation, the unhappy victim 
 himself maintained an unbroken serenity, and 
 held on his way with cheerful heart and hope un- 
 abated. God has given to some men love, humili- 
 ty, and genuine appreciation of the beautiful and 
 the good in nature and in art ; to others, the gift 
 of saying witty things and being ill-natured. 
 What could such a critic, with all his brilliant fac- 
 ulties, permanently effect against a ma,n who 
 writes with the views and expectations expressed 
 
208 ESSAYS. 
 
 in the following passage from a letter, dated 1807, 
 to Lady Beaumont : — 
 
 At present let me confine myself to my object, which is to 
 make you, my dear friend, as easy-hearted as myself with re- 
 spect to these poems. Trouble not yourself upon their present 
 reception ; of what moment is that compared with what I trust 
 is their destiny ? — to console the afflicted ; to add sunshine to 
 daylight, by making the happy happier ; to teach the young and 
 the gracious of every age to see, to think, and feel, and, there- 
 fore, to become more actively and securely virtuous'; this is their 
 office, which I trust they will faithfully perform, long after we 
 (that is, aU that is mortal of us) are mouldered in our graves. 
 
 Still, the critic did something : he supplied wit- 
 lings with epigrammatic bon-bons, caused the po- 
 ems to be an unremunerative article of commerce, 
 and retarded the nation in their general acknowl- 
 edgment of a great poet ; and they now stand side 
 by side, critic and poet, and the age has already 
 approximated to a just appreciation of each. 
 Again, on the publication of the ' Excursion,' in 
 1814, the same hand shot another and a more sul- 
 phurous bolt ; he even boasted, in his self-compla- 
 cent blindness, that he had crushed the ' Excur- 
 sion.' ' He crush the Excursion ! ' cried Southey ; 
 ' tell him he might as well hope to crush Skiddaw !' 
 
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 209 
 
 But this time, whether from mere opposition, or 
 from a gleam of genuine insight, the Quarterly 
 Review — established, a few years previously, as a 
 counterblast to the great "Whig Bellows — issued 
 a mild whiff of qualified approval. This, howev- 
 er, was going too far ; and next year, in a notice 
 of the ' White Doe of Rylstone,' ' Wordsworth 
 stood at the bar of the Tory journal, arraigned 
 and convicted of poetical heterodoxy and literary 
 felo-de-se.' Nor — in spite of Southey's intimate 
 connexion with the Quarterly, and his invaluable 
 assistance to it — was the verdict reversed till, in 
 1834, the author of Philip Van Artevelde con- 
 tributed to its pages the ablest estimate and the 
 fullest acknowledgement of Wordsworth's genius 
 and poetry that has appeared since the publica- 
 tion of the Biographia Literaria. That still re- 
 mains, and is likely, we fear, long to remain, un- 
 approached and unapproachable, as a specimen of 
 philosophical criticism, and a generous testimony 
 of personal admiration. 
 
 Instructive as are these facts, as warnings 
 against putting faith in critics, and against that 
 self-conceit and laziness which presume to judge 
 a writer who gives ample proof of original genius, 
 
210 ESSAVS. 
 
 without an attempt to submit to his influence, or 
 to seize his point of view, and so feel with his 
 feelings and see with his eyes, we should not think 
 them worth mentioning here, but for the serene 
 equanimity with which Wordsworth endured, not 
 only the lash of his critics, but, what is far more 
 galling, the neglect of the world of letters. ' Let 
 the age,' he writes to Southey, ' continue to love 
 its own darkness ; I shall continue to write with, 
 I trust, the light of Heaven upon me. "With more 
 epigrammatic point than is usual with him, he says 
 of one of his principal assailants, ' he has taken a 
 perpetual retainer from his own incapacity to plead 
 against my claims to public approbation.' So 
 again, in writing to Bernard Barton : ' It pleases, 
 though it does not surprise me, to learn that, hav- 
 ing been affected early in life by my verses, you 
 have returned again to your old loves, after some 
 little infidelities, which you were shamed into by 
 commerce with the scribbling and chattering part 
 of the world. I have heard of many who, upon 
 their first acquaintance with my poetry, have had 
 much to get over before they could thoroughly 
 relish it; but never of one who, having once 
 learned to enjoy it, had ceased to value it, or sur- 
 
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 211 
 
 vived his admiration. This is as good aa external 
 assurance as I can desire, that my inspiration is 
 from a pure source, and that my principles of com- 
 position are trustworthy.' 
 
 It was this rooted conviction of the genuineness 
 of his inspiration and the truth of his principles, 
 combined with a deep sense that the question in- 
 volved was not a merely personal one to himself, 
 but concerned the best interests of humanity, that 
 sustained his patience and cheerfulness. But sub- 
 ordinate to this moral cause, we have no doubt 
 that his active habits and out-of-door life materi- 
 ally aided this effect. ' Nine-tenths of my verses,' 
 he says, ' have been murmured in the open air.' 
 ' There,' said his servant to some strangers, who 
 were being shown over Rydal Mount, ' is my mas- 
 ter's library, where he keeps his books, but his 
 study is out of doors.' And on his return after a 
 long absence from home, his cottage neighbors 
 have been heard to say, ' Well, there he is ; we 
 are glad to hear him booing about again.' His 
 pedestrian tours have been already mentioned ; 
 and, indeed, his tours seem to have been most of 
 them mainly pedestrian ; it is not from carriage- 
 windows that such impressions as form the stuff 
 
212 ESSAVS. 
 
 of his numerous poetic memorials of his journeys 
 to Scotland and elsewhere are received. How 
 much his happiness was subserved by this habit, 
 may be judged from an anecdote, showing the ex- 
 treme irritability of his constitution, which was 
 further manifested in frequently recurring attacks 
 of inflammation of the eyes. He received a 
 wound in his foot while walking about composing 
 the ' White Doe,' and though he desisted from 
 walking, he found the irritation of the wound- 
 ed part was kept up by the act of composition. 
 Upon taking a mental holiday, a rapid cure was 
 the consequence. He adds, 'Poetic excitement, 
 when accompanied by protracted labor in compo- 
 sition, has throughout my life brought on more or 
 less bodily derangement. Nevertheless, I am, at 
 the close of my seventy-third year, in what may 
 be called excellent health. But I ought to add, 
 that my intellectual labor has been generally car- 
 ried on out of doors.' Not that his poems were 
 given to the public as extempore effusions ; no 
 writer of his time was more impressed with the 
 necessity of labor for the perfect poet. He thus 
 writes to a friend who seemed destined to tread 
 the path of science with honor and usefulness, and 
 
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 213 
 
 was in danger of weakening himself by indulgence 
 in the composition of verses. 
 
 Again and again I must repeat, that the composition of verse is 
 infinitely more of an ari than men are prepared to believe ; and ab- 
 solute success in it depends upon innumerable miautise, which it 
 grieves me you should stoop to acquire a Imowledge of. Milton 
 talljs of pouring easy his unpremeditated verse.' ■ It would be 
 harsh, untrue, and odious, to say there is anything like cant in 
 tliis; but it is not true to the letter, and tends to mislead. I 
 could point out to you five hundred passages in Milton upon 
 which labor has been bestowed, and twice five hundred more to 
 which additional labor would have been serviceable. 
 
 Mr. de Quincey calculated many years ago, that 
 Wordsworth's legs must have carried him then 
 nearly^OOjOOO miles ; and an old friend of ours 
 is fond of telling that as he was riding one sum- 
 mer afternoon on a coach along Grasmere, the 
 coach met Mr. Wordsworth and stopped ; and a 
 young lady inside who wo.s going on a visit to the 
 poet, put her head out to speak to him. ' How 
 d'ye do ? ' said he, — ' how d'ye do ? Mrs. Words- 
 worth will be delighted to see you. I shall be 
 back in the evening. I'm only going to tea with 
 Southey.' Southey lived not less than fifteen 
 miles off — hardly a yard of level ground all the 
 
214 ESSAYS. 
 
 way. Another aaecdote we must tell, partly il- 
 lustrating this peripatetic tendency, and partly as 
 giving a glimpse of that practical humor, which 
 Wordsworth was not deficient in, though these 
 volumes furnish but this solitary one — and that 
 is owing to Mr. Justice Coleridge. 
 
 As we walked, I was admiring tlie neTer-oeasing sound of 
 water, so remarkable in this country. " I was walking," he said, 
 
 " on the mountains, with the Eastern traveller ; it was 
 
 after rain, and the torrents were full. I said, ' I hope you like 
 your companions — these bounding, joyous, foaming streams.' 
 ' No,' said the traveller, pompously, ' I think they are not to be 
 compared in delightful effect with the silent solitude of the Ara^ 
 bian Desert.' My mountain blood was up. I quickly observed 
 that he had boots and a stout great-coat on, and said, ' I am 
 sorry you don't like this ; perhaps I can show you what will 
 please you more.' I strode away, and led him from crag to crag, 
 bill to vale, and vale to hiU, for about six hours ; till I thought 
 I should have had to bring him home, he was so tired." 
 
 This prodigious habit of walking, and that other 
 of lying in luxurious dreamy meditation on silnny 
 bank, or under the shade of trees, account for the 
 very scanty records of study or even desultory 
 reading which these volumes afford. Wordsworth 
 was fairly, though by no means deeply or curious- 
 ly read in English poetry ; Mr. de Quincey adds. 
 
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 215 
 
 in ancient history ; but of this there appears no 
 proof in these volumes, nor the faintest indication 
 in his writings. The only foreign literature for 
 which he seems to have had any taste was Italian, 
 though he could speak French fluently, and had a 
 fair knowledge of German : of the Greek poets 
 he talks, but with the Latin poets he had that fa- 
 miliar acquaintance which was so much more com- 
 mon with our fathers and grandfathers than among 
 ourselves ; he even translated into rhymed heroic 
 verse several books of the JEneid. With philo- 
 sophical writers and philosophical systems he 
 shows no acquaintance, and of physical science he 
 had no special knowledge. In fact, his range of 
 reading was extremely limited, and neither his 
 letters nor his recorded conversations would lead 
 us to suppose that within this range his knowledge 
 was profound or his observation keen. "We can- 
 not cull from these two volumes a single critical 
 remark that betrays extraordinary sagacity or 
 profound comprehension of aesthetic law. He had, 
 or fancied that he had, a taste for old books. 
 ' The only modem books that I read,' he writes 
 to Archdeacon Wrangham, ' are those of travels, 
 or such as relate to matters of fact — and the 
 
216 ESSAYS. 
 
 only modern books that I care for ; but as to old 
 ones, I am like yourself — scarcely anything comes 
 amiss to me.' We question whether this taste for 
 old books was much more than a liking for the 
 thoughtful poets of the Stuart period, such as 
 Daniel and Herbert ; stimulated perhaps by very 
 genuine indifference towards, if not contempt for, 
 all contemporary literature. Even the great lu- 
 minaries of our literature only beamed on him 
 from one side of their sphered brightness. Chau- 
 cer's descriptions, sparkling with the dews of 
 morning, and his gentle piety of heart ; the long- 
 drawn sweetness of Spenser's verse, and the ele- 
 vated purity of his moral ; Milton's austere gran- 
 deur of thought and stately pomp of imagination, 
 all these were Wordsworth's own, and he listened 
 to them with rapt attention as to the voice of his 
 own soul. But of a greater than any or all of 
 these, we can only recal one trace : 
 
 The gentle Lady married to the Moor. 
 
 And here it is not the agony of passion, nor the 
 subtle working of the insidious poison, nor the di- 
 abolic revelation of concentrated coiled malignity, 
 that he dwells on, as characteristic excellencies of 
 
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 217 
 
 the play, but the gentleness of the victim attracts 
 and fascinates him. In all that mighty symphony 
 of maidenly admiration, of manly love, of stately 
 ago, of vigorous youth, of calm domestic peace, 
 of ' the pride, pomp, circumstance of glorious 
 war,' of boundless faith, of agonizing jealousy, 
 of wratb, hate, fondness, and despair, all blend- 
 ing into one complex devouring passion, he hears 
 but the simple melody of the flute. In that woof 
 of death shot over with all the glorious and chang- 
 ing hues of life, he sees but one simple flower 
 blooming by a grass-green grave. That marvel- 
 lous and many sided life-picture is to him only 
 ' patience sitting on a monument, smiling at grief.' 
 Let us not be misunderstood ; of course Words- 
 worth was acquainted with Shakspeare's works ; 
 and of course, with all the world, he placed him 
 with Homer, at the head of the first class of po- 
 ets, while he knew that Spenser and Milton only 
 belonged to the second. But it is the of course 
 that marks the point at which his appreciation 
 stopped. There come from his lips none of those 
 penetrating flashes of light which broke from Col- 
 eridge amid lustrous clouds and radiant darkness, 
 whenever he spoke of the great masters of the 
 10 
 
218 ESSA VS. 
 
 Epos and the Drama, communicating to others 
 his own illuminating insight, the result at once of 
 profound study and profound affection. In fact, 
 we doubt whether Wordsworth read to enlarge 
 the range of his conception or sympathies. In 
 the language of modern criticism, he kept his own 
 centre, and thence surveyed men and books ; nev- 
 er attempted to gain their centre. De Quincey 
 admirably points out how little needful books were 
 to a man who drew such an ' enormity of pleasure ' 
 from the everlasting variety of nature's common 
 appearances, who could derive 
 
 Even from the meanest flower that blows 
 Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears, 
 
 who felt that 
 
 One impulse from the vernal wood 
 
 Could teach him more of man, 
 Of moral evil and of good 
 
 Thau all the sagea can. 
 
 One story, thoroughly characteristic of Words- 
 worth's indifference to every production of modern 
 growth but his own poetry, we recently heard 
 from a friend. Possibly it may be in print, but 
 we have not seen it. - When Rob Roy was pub- 
 
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 21'J 
 
 lished, some of Mr. Wordswortli's friends made a 
 pic-nic, and the Amusement of the day was to be 
 the new novel. He accompanied them to the se- 
 lected spot, joined them at luncheon, and then 
 said — 'Now, before you begin, I will read you a 
 poem of my own on Rob Roy. It will increase 
 your pleasure in the new book.' Of course, every 
 one was delighted, and he recited the well-known 
 verses ; and the moment he had finished, said, 
 ' Well, now I hope you will enjoy your book ; ' 
 and walked quietly off, and was seen no more all 
 the afternoon. 
 
 The very rough mode in which he handled books 
 showed how little he cared for them. Southey 
 said, to let him into a fine library was like turning 
 a bear into a tulip garden ; and De Quincey tells 
 of his cutting open a ' pracht-edition ' of Burke 
 with a knife he had just used to butter toast. 
 What a contrast his pious remorse at the ravage 
 of the nut-bough — 
 
 I felt a sense of pain when I beheld 
 
 The silent trees, and the intruding sky; — 
 
 and the earnest reverence of the exhortation that 
 follows : — 
 
220 ESSAYS. 
 
 Then, dearest maiden ! move along these shades 
 In gentleness of heart ; with gentle hand 
 Touch — for there is u, spirit in the woods. 
 
 We have left ourselves no space to speak of the 
 poet's, later- political opinions. It is well known 
 that they were of what is called a high Tory com- 
 plexion — especially that he looked with no favor- 
 able eye on the sort of education that has been 
 latterly spreading among the poor ; that he ex- 
 tremely disliked dissent, and dis^proved of mod- 
 ern concession to it ; that he anticipated the most 
 disastrous consequences from the Catholic Eman- 
 cipation and Eeform Bills. He passed, in fact, 
 apparently from one pole to the other of the po- 
 litical sphere, just as his friends Southey and 
 Coleridge did, and under the influence of like 
 causes, the chief of which was undoubtedly the 
 strong national feeling that was roused in them all 
 by Napoleon's strides of conquest, and the danger 
 that at one time seemed to threaten England. The 
 violence and crimes of the Jacobins had before 
 this alienated their sympathies from the French 
 Eevolution. They, men of thought and feeling, 
 not men of experience and action, had dreamt of 
 a rose-water revolution, and sickened at blood. 
 
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 221 
 
 At first, they merely stood aloof, displeased equal- 
 ly at the proceedings of the French and at our 
 declaration of war. But when danger came near 
 ' the inviolate island of the brave and free,' they 
 not only felt as Englishmen and as patriots, but 
 looked upon their country as the last citadel and 
 stronghold of liberty ; and henceforth war to the 
 knife with France was identical with devotion to 
 freedom and virtue. During the whole war with 
 Napoleon, the Whigs did, what they dared to 
 thwart its continuance, and to annoy those who 
 carried it on, and so became to a degree identified 
 with the enemies of the country. This is the 
 feeling that lay originally at the bottom of Words- 
 worth's dislike of them. Then, again, he never 
 was at heart a democrat. Like Milton, he would 
 have had an aristocracy of intellect and virtue. 
 There is not a trace of the feeling, that numbers 
 should outweigh worth from beginning to ; end of 
 his writings. He had, besides, a strong distaste 
 for city life, for its endless bustle, and its dull 
 routine, animated as he thought by vanity and the 
 desire of wealth. Commerce, trade, and manu- 
 factures were not, in his estimation, the sources of 
 a nation's greatness ; but on country life, its occu- 
 
222 ESSAYS. 
 
 pations, its traditions, and its customs he lookfed 
 with a fond affection, especially on that national 
 church which so associates itself to the senses, 
 the imagination, and the understanding with a 
 country life. The village spire and the squire's 
 mansion are the centres of this life, and "Words- 
 worth's passion for nature could scarcely have 
 failed to throw something of a poetic lustre, in 
 addition to the value his reason and his heart at- 
 tached to them, over the institutions of which both 
 were symbols. His early association with Cole- 
 ridge, too, tended to open to him the deep founda- 
 tions on which our national institutions rest, and 
 to inspire him with a reverence for them, and a 
 cautious fear of weakening them by attempts at 
 improvement. If, however, any person is inclined 
 to call him reactionist and bigot, we would only 
 remark that there are three classes of politicians, 
 — those who under the pressure of an existing 
 evil seek for change, without the faculty of dis- 
 cerning to what that change will inevitably lead ; 
 ignorant, in fact, of the law of development which 
 links together political events and gives unity to 
 History ; — those who, with conscious and definite 
 aim, plant the great hereafter in the now, and arc 
 
WORDSWORTH'S POEMS. 228 
 
 not consequently liable to bo startled and terrified, 
 and driven into reaction by the results of their 
 own actions ; — and thirdly, those who with clear 
 eye discern the dependence of the hereafter upon 
 the now, and because they shrink from the here- 
 after, refuse to take the step which renders it inevi- 
 tably certain. To the last class belonged William 
 Wordsworth. 
 
POETRY AJVD CRITICISM. Ill 
 
 POETRY AND CRITICISM. 
 
 Dr. Johnson, ia more than a century and a half 
 of English literary history, beginning with Cow- 
 ley and ending with Gray, found less than three- 
 score writers in verse whom he deemed worthy of 
 a place in his biographical collection. Though, in 
 his own line, and in cases where partiality did not 
 disturb his judgment, a tolerably correct arbiter 
 of literary reputation, the Doctor would find hard 
 work to persuade any well-read person of the 
 present day, that more than half the verse-writers 
 whose lives he has composed have any claim to be 
 called poets, or even men of distinguished talents. 
 Perhaps the account might be balanced by the ad- 
 dition to his list of as many names as a modern 
 judgment of the literary celebrities of the seven- 
 
228 ESSAYS. 
 
 teenth and eighteenth centuries would erase from 
 it. We have learned to look for other qualities 
 in those we honor with the name of poets than such 
 as pleased the critics of Johnson's age ; or, at least, 
 we have learned a different relative estimate of po- 
 etical gifts, and are used to flatter ourselves that 
 ours is a truer and deeper view than the one held 
 by our grandmothers. The result is that reputa- 
 tions have since that time both sunk and risen, for- 
 gotten writers have bepn dug up from the dust of 
 oblivion, and others who lived then per ora virum, 
 in the gossip of Mrs. Thrale's tea-table, and in the 
 pages of the oracular Doctor, are buried out of 
 sight and hearing, and silence covers them. But 
 taking all such changes of opinion into account, 
 the century and a-half over which Johnson's im- 
 mortal work extends — for immortal it must be 
 called, though, in reverence be it spoken, it is a 
 collection of lives which is lamentably wanting in 
 many qualities of first-rate biography — can on no 
 mode of forming the list be made to include a 
 hundred writers in verse who attained even mod- 
 erate excellence. This gives one for every year 
 and a-half at a rough calculation. Of these, our 
 ten fingers amply suffice for the calculation re- 
 
POETRY AJVD CRITICISM. 229 
 
 quired to number those whose present reputation 
 could be an object of ambition to a reasonable 
 man ; and how poorly the denial of lasting fame 
 ■was compensated ,to the rest by any Esau's chance 
 of discounting immortality for pottage, ' the Grub- 
 street tradition,' which belongs to a considerable 
 portion of this period, and the details known of 
 so many of the lives, leave no doubt. 
 
 This familiar fact of our literary history may 
 serve, with change of time and place, for a cer- 
 tainly not exaggerated statement of what is true 
 of any equal range of years in the literary history 
 of the world. And it would seem tp prove that, 
 however common a certain degree of poetical fac- 
 ulty may be among men — and that it is common, 
 the almost universal liking for poetry indicates — 
 the possession of this faculty in such perfection 
 and strength as to enable the possessor to produce 
 genuine poems is exceedingly rare. Why this is 
 so, and whether the defect be one of nature or of 
 training, an original vigor denied, or a due culti- 
 vation neglected, is a most interesting question ; 
 but one which would require us to diverge from 
 our immediate route into psychology and the sci- 
 ence of education. We merely point to the fact 
 
230 ESSA VS. 
 
 that poetical genius, capable of artistically mani- 
 festing itself, is, as a matter of experience, ex- 
 tremely rare. Yet, at this moment, we have 
 ranged before us in ' glittering row,' a set of vol- 
 umes in verse by not fewer than half as many au- 
 thors as Johnson found poets in one hundred and 
 fifty years, and these form but a fraction of those 
 published in England within the last year. Not 
 one of these volumes was published without a be- 
 lief on the writer's part that he was an exception 
 to the general rule of poetical incapacity. For, 
 draw as we may upon our candor, we cannot sup- 
 pose that any but a lunatic at large would go to 
 considerable expense to give the world testimony 
 that he or she was that most despised of drudges 
 — a verse-writer without poetical genius. Still 
 less can we suppose that in many of these cases 
 any but the writer has been at the charge of pub- 
 lication. Sint McBcenates, non deerunt Marones, 
 has long ceased to be the limiting condition with 
 authors. The general diffusion of books and 
 wealth produces a capacity for writing verses in 
 numerous persons rich enough to be each his own 
 Maecenas. And so we are obliged to conclude 
 that, in a single year, there are among us as many 
 
POETRY MJVD CR ITICISM. 231 
 
 persons of comfortable means living under a con- 
 viction that they are poets, as there have been 
 vrriters worthy really of the name, even in the 
 most liberal interpretation of its meaning,. since 
 Chaucer five hundred years ago first set our Eng- 
 lish life to English music. And this goes on every 
 year, so that, by a moderate computation, there 
 cannot be in England at this moment less than a 
 thousand persons, men, women, and adolescents, 
 eating, drinking, sleeping, walking about, and in 
 some cases probably talking rationally and en- 
 trusted with important duties, who have committed 
 overt acts based upon a supposition so extrava- 
 gant, so contrary to all deductions of experience, 
 so certainly and entirely fanciful in nine hundred 
 and ninety of the thousand cases as fully, so far 
 as the example extends, to justify the cynical t)b- 
 servatidn, that ' half the world is mad, and the 
 other half does not know it.' Indeed, were we 
 disposed to treat as anything more than one of 
 those amusing delusions incident to the various 
 forms of monomania, the assertion so frequently 
 met with in the preface to published volumes of 
 verse, that the publication has been urged upon 
 the author by admiring friends, we must assume 
 
•232 ESSAYS. 
 
 for every monomaniacal verse-publisher a circle 
 of friends afflicted with a still more unaccountable 
 form of monomania, if somewhat more amiable in 
 its symptoms. For the frenzy of the verse-writer 
 may be partially assigned to vanity and the pleas- 
 ure of. composition ; that of the admiring friends 
 would be pure Bedlamite distraction. But in fact 
 the friends have ever this singularity, that they re- 
 joice in the name of Harris, and neither post- 
 office, police, nor tax-collector, knows of their lo- 
 cal habitation. 
 
 Perhaps we may be suspected of having gone 
 to thai .expense in educating .ourselves for the 
 functions of the critic, which Swift asserts to be 
 indispensable for the true performance of the char- 
 acter, in opposition to those defamers who could 
 make out ' that a true .critic is a sort of mechanic 
 set up with a stock: and tools for his trade, at as 
 little expense as a tailor.' Swift denies this posi- 
 tion, and says, ' On the contrary, nothing is more 
 certain than that it requires greater layings out to 
 be free of the critic's company, than that of any 
 other you can name. For, as to beia true beggar, 
 it will cost the richest candidate every groat he is 
 worth ; so, before one can commence a true crit- 
 
POETRY AJiTD CRITICISM. 233 
 
 ic, it will cost a man all the good qualities of his 
 mind.' We may be, suspected, we say, of having 
 got rid of all good-nature, faculty of being pleased, 
 &c., and of laying our indigestion to the charge of 
 wholesome nutriment. The poetry may be good, 
 but we may have no stomach for it. When we 
 have ceased to admire, enjoy, and thrive upon the 
 various banquets which true poets have set before 
 us, rich with the spoils of time, and like the wid- 
 ow's cruse, undiminished by consumption, where 
 appetite but grows by what it feeds on, and full- 
 ness is not satiety, nor repetition weariness — when 
 we no longer catch in the poet's strains fragments 
 of that eternal symphony of which they are at 
 once memorial and prophecy ; when heart, intel- 
 lect, and sense cease to find in those strains, bro- 
 ken and imperfect as they are at best, hints of 
 that perfect and harmonious fullness of satisfac- 
 tion which is the longing desire and anticipated 
 fruition of all faithful souls — then we may accept 
 our own deadness of heart and blindness of sight, 
 as a probable reason why we look upon the sever- 
 al hundreds of gentlemen and ladies, now living in 
 the land, and convicted of having published vol- 
 umes of verse, much with the same feelings as a 
 
234 ESSAYS. 
 
 man born deaf must contemplate tlie whirling ma- 
 zes of the waltz. Nor can we accuse ourselves of 
 setting up a fanciful standard of poetic excellence, 
 and cultivating a morbid fastidiousness which ad- 
 mits of no excellence that is not perfect. We are 
 too cognizant of the infinite variety of imagina- 
 tive power, of the admirable effects of this varie- 
 ty, to indulge a narrow taste in poetry ; and too 
 well aware of the difficulties that hamper its ex- 
 ercise, and render perfect works of art, or even 
 perfect parts of works of art, the rarest accom- 
 plishments of human skill, to be unhealthily fas- 
 tidious. But with the most catholic aspirations, 
 with the wish to be as large in sympathy, and as 
 liberal of admiration, as is consistent with any 
 high enjoyment of true excellence, we must draw 
 distinctions between things different in kind ; we 
 cannot call Euclid's Elements, on the one hand, 
 poetry ; nor can we any more give that honored 
 title, and the emotions that belong to it, to compo- 
 sitions that have nothing but rhyme and measure 
 — and those seldom good — to separate them from 
 the ordinary talk of vaguely-perceiving, coldly- 
 feeling, and inarticulately-speaking men and wo- 
 men. In the one case, we call the geometry, per- 
 
POETRY AM-D CRITICISM. 235 
 
 feet as it is, not poetry, but science — a body of 
 abstract truths of space ; in the other, we call the 
 producing state of mind stupidity, dullness, weak- 
 ness, or some other constituent mark of the non- 
 apprehensive ; and what is produced we call stuff, 
 nonsense, inarticulate gibberish, or any other term 
 which may seem adequately to present some mark 
 of the non-apprehended. 
 
 Let us see if, by following up the antithesis thus 
 suggested between poetry and science, we cannot 
 gain some tolerably clear notions on the essential 
 characteristics of poetry, both as mental process 
 and product — on the nature of poetic insight and 
 of poems. As things in general, whether sensible 
 objects, actions, emotions, and thoughts, are the 
 matter upon which the understanding operates in 
 its search after the body of truth, the knowledge 
 of which we call science ; so the same objects fur- 
 nish to the imagination the subject-matter of that 
 peculiar mode of apprehension which we call po- 
 etic, and of that peculiar form of language which 
 we call poetry in the mass, and poems in particu- 
 lar examples. The difference is not in the objects, 
 but in the faculty which apprehends and operates 
 upon the objects. The understanding takes any ob- 
 
236 ESSA VS. 
 
 ject presented through the consciousness, and pro- 
 ceeds to analyze it into separate qualities, to name 
 it and refer it to a class of objects with which 
 it possesses certain of its qualities in common. 
 Henceforward, when it asks itself what the thing 
 is, the understanding can answer that it is this 
 thing or that, giving some name expressive of 
 those common qualities which it has along with ail 
 members of its class. The properties which it 
 has to distinguish it from another member of its 
 class are nothing to science, and the understand- 
 ing pro hac vice takes no thought about them. 
 Of all science viewed in its statical aspect, apart 
 from the experience of change and the idea of 
 cause, this classification, naming, and definition 
 are the ultimate processes. And if we examine 
 the higher branch of dynamical science, what is it 
 we seek to know.abo.ut the successive states of the 
 object we investigate ? Is it not again an analysis 
 of the concrete phenomena presented to us by ex- 
 perience at successive times that we have to per- 
 form ? We want to find what is the phenomenon 
 invariably antecedent to some given phenomenon ; 
 and we can obtain the knowledge only by ana- 
 lyzing a complex coil of phenomena, and after 
 
POETRY AJYD CRITICISM. 237 
 
 many experiments, much expenditure of hypothe- 
 sis, we succeed in getting at the invariable antece- 
 dent. We have then established the sequence 
 wanted, and all the attendant phenomena are so 
 much refuse. The process throughout is analytical 
 in its object, and- may be described as an endeavor 
 to detect such identities among objects coexisting in 
 space, as will enable the mind to classify, define, and 
 name them, and such connection between objects 
 successively existing in time, as renders the sepa- 
 rate currents of that mighty ocean of intermin- 
 gling, interacting vortices distinguishable, method- 
 ical, intelligible. A scientific apprehension of the 
 universe would be a knowledge of all the classes 
 into which things can at any moment be divided, 
 and of the corresponding classes into which their 
 immediate antecedents would have been divisible. 
 Its lowest concept would be classes cleared of in- 
 dividuals, its most concrete words names of spe- 
 cies, its apotheosis would be when, having ujirav- 
 elled the infinite web of creation, it could pass 
 from the outermost edge of its circumference along 
 a single thread to the centre and the source of all, 
 and its language would then have attained its 
 
238 ESSAYS.. 
 
 highest stage of generalization, and would consist 
 of two words, cause and effect. 
 
 Imagination takes the same object that we sup- 
 posed before presented to the understanding. As 
 by chemical attraction it lays hold on precisely 
 that part of the phenomenon which the under- 
 standing rejects, passing lightly over and taking 
 little heed of that which the understanding was in 
 quest of. What the object has in common with 
 the class to which its name and its definition refer 
 it, the imagination neglects as not characteristic, 
 and seizes eagerly on that which constitutes it an 
 individual. It may or may not happen that sci- 
 ence has, in the various systems of classification 
 necessary for its purposes, taken separately and at 
 different times, all the qualities of the object which 
 strike the imagination ; but it never happens that 
 it has taken them simultaneously and all together. 
 And we are, therefore, fully justified in saying 
 that imagination neglects, comparatively, the sin- 
 gle, separate qualities of an object, on which the 
 understanding is at any one time engaged, and 
 fixes on the complex residue of qualities of which 
 the understanding only takes heed to throw them 
 
POETRY 'AJ\rD CRITICISM. 239 
 
 aside as nothing to the purpose. Where the un- 
 derstanding is looking for such qualities as will 
 enable it to give the object a name common to as 
 many other objects as possible, and therefore in- 
 cluding as little content (as the logicians call it) 
 as possible, the imagination is looking for those 
 qualities which fill the senses, stir the ' emotions, 
 and form a concrete whole as crowded with con- 
 tent as is consistent with unity. And if a scien- 
 tific concept of the universe be, as we have said, 
 a concept of classes tending upwards to unity as 
 cause ; a poetical view of- the universe is an ex- 
 haustive presentation of all phenomena, as indi- 
 vidual phenomenal wholes of ascending orders of 
 complexity, whose earliest stage is the organiza- 
 tion of single co-existing phenomena into concrete 
 individuals, and its apotheosis the marvellous pic- 
 ture of the iLvrjQidfiov yBlaafia of the Infinite Life, 
 no longer conceived as the oceanic pulsation which 
 the understanding called cause and effect, but seen 
 as unutterable splendor, heard as awful rhythm of 
 far-sounding harmonies, and comprehended as the 
 Time and Space-vesture of Him who in His own 
 absolute being is incomprehensible. 
 
 If any of the writers who may feel aggrieved 
 
240 ESSAYS. 
 
 by our remarks upon their works think fit to re- 
 venge themselves by pronouncing this to be sheer 
 nonsense, we shall not take pains to turn the point 
 of the retort. "We do not think it so, or we should 
 not allow it to stand ; but any extremely abstract 
 and general statement which includes a very large 
 and multifarious class of mental processes and 
 products is sure to be distasteful and unintelligi- 
 ble to most readers, so we shall not weary their 
 patience with what they will probably call meta- 
 physical jargon. But we venture to state as a 
 practical conclusion — not dependent upon the 
 preceding remarks, thotigh involved in them — 
 that whatever objects poetry deals with must be 
 presented to the mind of the poet as concretions 
 of diverse phenomena organized into phenomenal 
 unity by the pervading vital influence of a subjec- 
 tive idea. And this gives us the fundamental 
 condition of poetic activity as well as of the pro- 
 ducts of such activity, that such presentations 
 must be made to the mind of the poet, and by him 
 given to the reader, as include and contain at 
 least' all the qualities or properties of an object 
 necessary to constitute it a possible phenomenal 
 objective whole. If it be a flower of which the 
 
POETRY AJ\rD CRITICISM. 241 
 
 poet wishes to raise the image, it must be a par- 
 ticular flower, and haye the form and color of 
 some particular possible, though not necessarily- 
 actual, flower. If his language fails to express 
 these two qualities at least, it fails by so much of 
 being poetic. If it be a human action, it must be 
 presented at least with such characteristics as dis- 
 tinguish one human action from another. If it be 
 a natural scene, the presentation must embrace 
 such objects made out with such detail, as are 
 necessary to distinguish the scene for the purpose 
 in hand from another similar scene. But we need 
 not pursue the illustration. It is evident that 
 poetry attains its aim just in proportion as it cre- 
 ates individual and not general presentations, just 
 in proportion, that is, as it is distinguished from 
 and antithetical to the representations of science. 
 Let not any one run away with the hasty notion 
 that this amounts to asserting that poetical pre- 
 sentation consists in enumeration of detail. The 
 fact is just the opposite. It consists in the presen- 
 tation of a whole, which arranges and subordi- 
 nates all detail. How much detail is requisite in 
 each case depends upon the nature of the whole 
 contemplated ; but in no case is detail enumerat- 
 11 
 
242 ESS A rs. 
 
 ed — introduced for its own sake — but organized. 
 There must be parts, but no simple addition of 
 parts will make the whole ; on the contrary, they 
 are not parts till the whole is completed, or ex- 
 cept in reference to the idea of the whole. 
 
 Such, then, are the fundamental properties of 
 poeti'y, that, as the antithesis of science, it indi- 
 vidualises instead of classifying, presents organic 
 wholes instead of severed parts ; things actual or 
 possible, instead of abstract general names. When- 
 ever the mind is thus engaged it is making poetry. 
 Language bears testimony to the multifarious and 
 incessant exercise of this power among men from 
 the earliest infancy of our race, and as M. Jour- 
 dain talked prose all his life without knowing it, 
 the dullest proser among us would be astonished, 
 and perhaps disgusted, if he were conscious of the 
 vast amount and the high quality of the poetry he 
 utters, between getting up and going to bed, every 
 day of the year. But we live upon the past, and 
 inherit other men's labors. We are not poets be- 
 cause we are the heirs of the poets ; and as a 
 senseless spendthrift squanders untold wealth with- 
 out any sense of its value, or any adequate return 
 of pleasure or profit, we may squander all tlie 
 
POETRY MJVD CRITICISM. 243 
 
 poetry of our current language without any 
 thought of the preciousness of its material, and 
 find in that which might be ever giving us 
 glimpses of the glory and splendor of the uni- 
 verse, only the means of satisfying the wants of 
 our logical or practical understanding. The lan- 
 guage which bears the stamp of imagination may 
 by use and insensibility become to us only a circu- 
 lating medium of conventional signs, and we may 
 apply words and phrases alive with presentative 
 significance, without assigning to them anything 
 more than the representative or symbolical rela- 
 tion to objects which the coinage of the under- 
 standing originally expresses. 
 
 Now, some one will say, a great deal has been 
 said about poetry, and not a word about verso ; 
 and a position has been taken up which assigns to 
 the poetical faculty or faculties an important part 
 in the formation of language, as if rhythm, verse, 
 stanza, rhyme, were no elements of poetry at all, 
 but only accidental graces. We believe them to 
 be no accidental graces, if accidental mean fortui- 
 tous ; but accidental they certainly are in the 
 logical sense of the word, as not essential to the 
 definition of poetry, nor conditional of its produc- 
 
244 ESSAYS 
 
 tion. They belong to the poetry of man, because 
 he is an emotional as well as a perceptive being, 
 and arise from the fact that objects presented to 
 the mind with living fulness and power, are by the 
 constitution of our nature adapted to excite an 
 emotion of pleasure, apart from our practical con- 
 cern with them. Whatever the presentation be in 
 itself, whether the object presented be such as we 
 should like or dislike in its actual manifestation to 
 our senses, or in its effect upon our actual inter- 
 ests, we delight in the satisfaction it gives to our 
 perceptive or speculative faculties. In minds of 
 peculiar sensibility this pleasure is heightened in 
 proportion to the keenness of these faculties, and 
 the attractions of the objects presented, till the 
 emotion excited seeks relief spontaneously by 
 rhythmical expression. "We cannot now discuss 
 the law by which all emotion, that is not mere 
 pain, is impelled in its highest degrees to rhyth- 
 mical expression, nor are we prepared to make 
 any assertion as to the universality of this law, or 
 its limitation to individuals of peculiar organiza- 
 tion. But we think no one will deny that poetry, 
 and music, and dancing, all rhythmical art in fact, 
 did begin, and must have begun, as we have sug- 
 
POETRY AJVD CRITICISM. 245 
 
 gested. We believe that, like the fundamental 
 poetic faculty, whose function is to organize di- 
 verse phenomena into unities, so this attendant 
 faculty of singing from the emotions of pleasure 
 caused by the perceptive presentations so made, 
 must be in a degree common to all men and 
 women who can enjoy song. But we are not pre- 
 pared to maintain this as certain. This, however, 
 we have no doubt about, that the rhythm of poems 
 expresses the emotion of the singer, just as the 
 words of song express the presentations of his 
 imaginative faculty ; and that the various forms 
 of metre, its recurrent emphasis, its various pauses, 
 its divisions into stanza and verse, and its modern 
 emphatic identities of terminating sound, are all 
 originally expressive of the varieties of kind and 
 degree of emotion. Upon this point all philoso- 
 phy of metre, all criticism of the form of poetry, 
 is to be based. 
 
 True it is, as we said in reference to poetic lan- 
 guage, that use, and the indifference that comes of 
 use, may degrade forms which were originally the 
 spontaneous expression of plastic emotion into 
 stereotyped moulds which any dullard, blind and 
 crippled, can fill with his clay. The very cause 
 
246 ESSAYS. 
 
 why genuine poetry is, perhaps, a rarer accom- 
 plishment in ages of high, or, at least, general 
 culture, than in earlier and ruder ages, is precise- 
 ly the reason why we have so many writers of 
 smooth verse who cannot understand why critics 
 will refuse them the title of poets. Poetical lan- 
 guage has become so common, that while it is with- 
 in anybody's capacity, the difficulty becomes great- 
 er either to select words not hackneyed that ex- 
 press poetical ideas so well as the current words 
 and phrases, or to make these phrases do their 
 original work of presenting real living objects, 
 and not merely abstract names and conventional 
 signs. And the metrical forms have done duty so 
 often, and the ear has become so habituated to 
 their music, and at the same time so dull to their 
 charms, that it requires at once a higher inspira- 
 tion than ever to write verse from a spontaneous 
 impulse, as distinguished from a mechanical knack, 
 and finer art than ever to cause the reader by 
 means of verse to share that rhythmical condition 
 of emotion which alone justifies to him what is, 
 otherwise, a senseless artifice, and a simple hin- 
 drance to clearness of thought and expression. 
 We have thus briefly sketched the outline of 
 
POETRY AJ^-D CRITICISM. 247 
 
 our own theory of poetry in the general — the 
 theory on which, in our opinion, sound criticism 
 must be based — and on which, therefore, we pro- 
 fess to base our own criticism. The principles we 
 have enunciated may be thus summed up. A po- 
 em must present its subject as an organic whole, 
 which, though made up of parts common, it may 
 be, to an infinite vai'iety of other wholes, is itself 
 distinct from every other whole, and is recogniz- 
 able at once for what it is, an individual not iden- 
 tical with any other individual of the same gener- 
 al character. Any presentation of a subject that 
 falls short of this tends either towards scientific 
 abstraction or towards the utterly inarticulate, that 
 which neither intellect nor imagination have firm- 
 ly grasped or clearly apprehended. This is the 
 principle we shall apply to the compositions we 
 are called to judge, in deciding on their imagina- 
 tive power. As to questions of form, we have 
 already stated that rhythm, metre, and all that 
 constitutes the mode of expression rather than the 
 substance — though in art it is hazardous to draw 
 hard lines of distinction between form and sub- 
 stance, where form is not conventional — are 
 spontaneous natural signs of the singer's emotion, 
 
248 ESS A VS. 
 
 and, as regards the reader, at once an index to the 
 singer's intensity of poetic temperature — a kind 
 of metronome — and the medium through which 
 the same heat of emotion is kindled in the reader, 
 and he is infused with the passion as well as the 
 imaginative perception of the subject. All, then, 
 we have to ask ourselves in reference to the form 
 of any particular poem is, whether it does so ex- 
 press the emotion of the writer, and what quality 
 and degree of emotion it expresses — that of a 
 great soul raised to the height of its subject, or of 
 a little soul vainly striving to warm its thin blood, 
 but puny, starved, and shivering, even in presence 
 of the central fires of the universe. To any po- 
 em which will stand the test of the application of 
 these principles the tribute of our hearty admira- 
 tion is due, and will be joyfully paid. What will 
 not stand this test is not poetry at all ; and in mas- 
 querading under the poetical costume, it is tolera- 
 bly sure to lose any worth or attractiveness of sin- 
 cere human speech, as the voice we may delight to 
 hear in its own natural tones of conversation 
 ceases to charm and becomes painfully ridiculous 
 in attempting the accomplishment of singing, for 
 which nature has not adapted its organization. 
 
THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE. 
 
THE MJVGEL I.X THE HOUSE. 251 
 
 THE ANGEL IN THE HOUSE. 
 
 A PERSON of cynical temper is likely to note with 
 emphasis, and with the grim pleasure that testifies 
 his perception of a fact his humor can assimilate 
 and grow by, a peculiarity in the mode which po- 
 ets have almost uniformly adopted in their treat- 
 ment of love. These interpreters of life would 
 by no means support the cynic in his estimate of 
 that passion ; they have, on the contrary, exhaust- 
 ed heaven and earth for similitudes by which to 
 express their sense of the beauty and worth of 
 women, of the woes of slighted and the raptures 
 of successful lovers, of the agonies and ecstasies, 
 the torments and the blisses, which women are ca- 
 pable of exciting in the hearts of men, and of the 
 comparative poverty and worthlessness of all the 
 
252 ESSAYS. 
 
 delights of life weighed against one hour of the 
 transports of requited passion, or the calm of sat- 
 isfied affection. They may, moreover, be credit- 
 ed with a degree of sincerity in this appreciation, 
 vyhich it would be difficult to accord to their tune-, 
 ful raptures on many of the other emotional ele- 
 ments of human life. Poets are unquestionably 
 born with fathers and mothers, brothers and sis- 
 ters occasionally, and by chance aunts and uncles ; 
 but except the ^neid, King Lear, and Antigone, 
 we remember no great poem in which the natural 
 affections of kindred have been among the leading 
 motives. Poets, too, have countries, with institu- 
 tions and beliefs, unless Schiller's theory be true, 
 which assigns them the clouds for dwelling-place 
 and domain ; but those who have tuned their harps 
 to great national themes, to the foundation of em- 
 pires, the formation of civil society, the triumphs 
 of liberty and order, the origin of supernatural 
 beliefs, and the growth of religious worship, be- 
 long, so far as they have been successful, to 
 a remote past, and are the study of scholars 
 rather than the delight of the people, while their 
 modern imitators have made the very name of epic 
 a bugbear to all moderately sensible and candid 
 
THE JiJVGEL IJV THE HOUSE. 253 
 
 minds. In fact, success in the treatment of sub- 
 jects disconnected with love has been most ex- 
 ceptional ; and even the greatest poets, who have 
 looked abroad upon human life, and have found it 
 poetical throughout its whole extent and under 
 every variety of circumstance, have felt the attrac- 
 tion of love so irresistible, that they have shot its 
 golden threads to illumine the darkest and enliv- 
 en the dullest parts of their microcosmic web, and 
 to bring down upon the whole surface the sheen 
 of heaven's light ; while this universal passion has 
 alone by itself sufficed to make common men poets 
 for the moment, to raise minor poets to unwonted 
 richness of thought and imagery, and has bright- 
 ened the faces of the great masters of song. By 
 its light, when poetry and the world were young, 
 blind Homer read the tale of Troy ; and through 
 a vista of three thousand years, amid myriads of 
 armed warriors, the eye still follows Briseis as she 
 leaves with reluctant feet and reverting gaze the 
 tent where captivity had found a solace, and the 
 stern master was softened into the lover ; still 
 above the din of battle, above the grave turmoil 
 of debate, we listen to the fierce Achilles moaning 
 for his lost mistress ; the charms of Helen are 
 
254 ESSAYS. 
 
 more to us than the wisdom of Athene and the 
 counsels of Nestor ; and the sympathies of all but 
 a few extremely right-minded people are through- 
 out with the Trojans, and would be with Paris, 
 but that he is a downright coward, and the 
 world instinctively adopts the maxim, — 
 
 None but the brave 
 Deserve the fair. 
 
 Society — and poetry with it — had degenerated 
 between the birth of the epic full-grown and full- 
 armed, like its own Athene, from the head of 
 Homer, and the time when jEschylus slaughtered 
 Persians at Salamis, and exhibited their ghosts 
 upon the stage at Athens. The forte of the Athe- 
 nian drama certainly does not lie in the represen- 
 tation of love. But then it must be remembered 
 that the Attic stage was eminently the domain of 
 stateliness and conventionality, that waxen masks 
 frozen into one unchanging no-expression, to 
 which even Charles Kean can only feebly ap- 
 proach, would have been an inadequate instrument 
 for rendering so eminently versatile and variable 
 a passion as love, even reflected in the counte- 
 nance of an ancient philosopher or a modern 
 mathematician. Besides, the construction of the 
 
THE AJVGEL IJV THE HOUSE. 255 
 
 mouthpiece of these masks, to serve for a speaking 
 trumpet, could only have illustrated one rather 
 curious scene, belonging more to comedy than 
 tragedy — a gentleman proposing to a lady who is 
 stone-deaf. Fancy Romeo, major humano by ten 
 inches of cork sole, sweeping along the stage with 
 a drawing-room train of dowager dimensions, and 
 bawling, ' I would I were a glove upon that hand,' 
 through the sort of instrument with which the 
 captain of the Bellerophon speaks the Arrogant 
 half a mile off. Or, still worse, Juliet sighing 
 through the same instrument, ' Romeo ! 0, gen- 
 tle Romeo ! ' and all that wondrous play of pas- 
 sion not once flushing up in the cheek or kindling 
 in the eye. But the ugliest old hag that ever rode 
 a broomstick would be less repellent of the gentler 
 emotions than an automaton Venus, made to speak 
 through a vox humana organ pipe. In short, 
 without insisting upon the social circumstances of 
 Athenian women, and the peculiar notions that 
 regulated Athenian tragedy, these mere mechani- 
 cal conditions under which the tragedians wrote, 
 are sufficient to account for the insignificant part 
 assigned to love in their compositions, though their 
 chorusses abound in passages of the highest lyri- 
 
256 ESSAYS. 
 
 cal beauty and fervor, which indicate that the 
 passion was still as powerful as ever to sway the 
 feelings and excite the imagination. When the 
 stage became again a mirror of actual contempo- 
 raneous life without disguise, as in the later come- 
 dy of Menander and his Latin imitator Terence, 
 we find that even the mechanical obstacles before 
 mentioned were not so insuperable but that women 
 play an important part in these, dramas, and love 
 becomes a prominent motive and a principal at- 
 traction. Pindar unfortunately gave himself up 
 to the turf, the prize-ring, and a curious kind of 
 Pagan high-church hagiology, much as if the ed- 
 itor of Bell's Life, the editor of Boxiana, and 
 the poet of the Christian Year, were all three 
 gentlemen in one. 
 
 The universal human vein shows itself, howev- 
 er, here and there, with a strange gleam of ten- 
 derness, in stray biographical allusions and moral 
 reflections, interspersed with the main subject in 
 hand, which is always to celebrate some Derby 
 event of that old time, or to trace up the lineage 
 of Hellenic game-chickens and White-headed Bobs 
 to Hercules. In Theocritus, again, love is ' the 
 main haunt and region ' of the song, and that song 
 
THE JlJVGEL IJV THE HOUSE. 257 
 
 about the sweetest whose echo still sounds over 
 the waters of Time from the dim shore of ancient 
 Hellas. Then if we come somewhat nearer to 
 our own times, and to poets who have influenced 
 modern literature — at least, up to a very recent 
 period — more than their greater Hellenic breth- 
 ren have done, the names of Ovid and Horace suf- 
 fice to carry on the succession. Horace certain- 
 ly wrote plenty of good moral sentiment and pat- 
 riotism of the sort possible under a despotism of 
 the modern French type ; but he will always be 
 for us the little fat man who loved and lived with 
 various Lalages, and made them, we feel perfectly 
 assured, of more account in his existence than the 
 great ' nephew of his uncle,' his prime minister 
 Maecenas, or even, we fear, than the Palatine 
 Apollo himself, and that Jupiter Optimus Maximus 
 who half frightened the little sceptic with summer 
 thunder. Even the grandiloquent Virgil cannot 
 get through his epic without a strong spice of love, 
 and pious ^neas vindicates for himself the Eng- 
 lish as well as the Latin force of the stereotyped 
 epithet by behaving like a scoundrel to a woman, 
 and sneaking off without even saying good-bye, or 
 leaving a christening-cup for the possible Tyrian 
 
258 ESS^VS. 
 
 lulus. That episode has saved the jEneid from 
 becoming a mere scholar's poem, in spite of its 
 magnificent versification. And when a greater 
 than Virgil took up his mantle, was it not — by 
 permission of the allegorists, be it spoken — by 
 the woman whom he loved that Dante was guided 
 to the Heaven of Heavens — to the presence of 
 the Ineffable ? Nay, was it not in reality under 
 her guidance, 
 
 Donna beata e bella 
 Tal che di commandare io la richiesi, — 
 
 as her messenger says of her, that the poet ven- 
 tured all through that mystic voyage ? by her 
 goodness, sweetness, and beauty alone that his 
 heart was sustained amid the wrongs, the tor- 
 ments, the purgatorial discipline of life ? by the 
 light of love alone that life became to him tQlera- 
 ble and intelligible ? And in spite of his stern 
 theology, with its 
 
 Lasciate ogni speranza Yoi ch' entrate, 
 
 is it not just amid hell's fiercest torments that 
 love — the most passionate, the most sensuous love 
 
THE AMGEL IJV THE HOUSE. 259 
 
 of man and woman — shows itself to Mm mightier 
 than the torment, outbraving despair, and stronger 
 in its own simple strength than Hell and Fate, and 
 that terrible foreknowledge of an eternity without 
 hope ? It is needless to pursue a topic so familiar 
 through the great names of modern poetry. Only 
 conceive this passion of love blotted out from the 
 pages of our own first-class poets, from Chaucer, 
 from Spenser, from Shakspeare, from Milton — 
 what a sky without its sun would remain ! what 
 an earth without its verdure, its streams, and its 
 flowers ! Something, no doubt, there would be 
 still to attract us in the manner-painting, the 
 grand thoughts, the vivid natural descriptions ; 
 but even these would have lost a charm that now 
 often insensibly mingles with them and enhances 
 them. And the poor minors ! where would they 
 be ? All of them in the same category that Dray- 
 ton's Polyolbion, Browne's Britannia's Pastorals, 
 Davenant's Gondibert, were in before Southey 
 and Co. fanned a small flame of antiquarian poet- 
 ic enthusiasm, and are in again now that small 
 flame has gone out. Here and there some lyric, 
 short and tersely expressed, would survive in pop- 
 ular esteem, especially if married to fine music ; 
 
260 ESSAYS. 
 
 but the bulk would float iu undistinguished heaps 
 by Lethe's wharf, and scientific cultivators of lite- 
 rature would resort to them, as agriculturists do 
 to the guano stores, to fertilize dry brains, and as- 
 tonish the world with spasmodic crops of lectures 
 on historical development of poetry, and so forth. 
 If we go on to English poetry since the Revolu- 
 tion, we find the same, or even greater, predomi- 
 nance of this single element of emotion. With 
 the exception of a few reflective and satirical po- 
 ems — that is, with the exception of versified ser- 
 mons and essays borrowing some of the ornaments 
 of poetry proper — where is the really popular 
 poem that does not depend for its main charm on 
 its pictures of love ? What would even Walter 
 Scott himself be without it ? Cowper indeed is a 
 real exception, so far as his poetry does not come 
 under the head of reflective or satirical, as most 
 of it does ; but Cowper was no less exceptional as 
 a man than as a poet ; he fell early in life into hy- 
 pochondria and confirmed valetudinarianism, and 
 was anything but a normal specimen of the warm- 
 blooded male mammal whose differentia is poetry- 
 writing. Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, have 
 written the finest poetry of passion since the Eliz- 
 
THE JlJVGEL IJV THE HOUSE. 261 
 
 abethans ; Moore wrote little else than sentimen- 
 tal love poetry ; Campbell's Gertrude stands high- 
 est of his long poems ; and if Wordsworth thought 
 to wield a poet's influence while he regarded the 
 poet's mightiest spell as a Circean drug, has not 
 the result been that he is more respected than lov- 
 ed, almost universally acknowledged to be a great 
 teacher, but a heavy writer, and that the poems 
 and passages of his which are the greatest favor- 
 ites are precisely those, like Laodamia, Ruth, She 
 was a Phantom, &c., in which he has mingled 
 this spell, or composed his enchantment entirely 
 of it ? "We will not say a word here of Mr. Ten- 
 nyson, for his name alone at once brings to the 
 mind some of the most delicious love poetry in the 
 English language, however much noble poetry of 
 another kind it may also recal. 
 
 The cynic, then, with whom we started, has cer- 
 tainly no great reason to pique himself upon the 
 support his opinions obtain from the poets, so far 
 as his and their estimate of love are brought into 
 direct comparison. But the fact that he would 
 not fail to notice as characteristic in the poetical 
 estimate, and supporting his own opinion rather 
 than theirs of the worth of women and of the in- 
 
262 ESS A VS. 
 
 fluence of love upon human happiness, is that, 
 with a very few exceptions, the poets expend their 
 raptures upon the period of courtship rather than 
 of marriage, upon the pursuit rather than the at- 
 tainment, as if a woman were like a fox, precious 
 only for the excitement of the chase, worthless 
 when won. Or if they venture at all beyond the 
 wedding-day, it is too often to treat marriage — 
 according to that terrible mot of Sophie Arnauld 
 — as the sacrament of adultery. A vast quantity 
 of literature turning on this crime is written in- 
 deed in the spirit of that typical young Parisian 
 who, seeing an injured husband on the stage shoot 
 his wife's seducer, was heard to mutter to himself, 
 cochon de mari ! And our cynical friend might 
 go over nearly the same range of poetry that we 
 have taken, and would show us that Briseis was 
 not the wife, but the mistress, of Achilles ; that 
 Helen's husband was not Paris, but Menelaus. 
 He would add that Odysseus only sighed for Pen- 
 elope while he was away from her, enduring moil 
 and toil in the trenches before Troy, and remem- 
 bering the substantial comforts of his island home, 
 as well as its sentimental attractions ; moreover, 
 that as soon as he returned he was tired of his 
 
THE AJVGEL IJV THE HOUSE. 263 
 
 wife, and finally could not stand domestic felicity 
 any longer, but proceeded on a voyage with an ex- 
 tremely vague destination, from which he took 
 good care never to return. The Greek tragedi- 
 ans, too, would furnish our friend with ample ma- 
 terials for his humor. Though there is little 
 enough in their plays of that love which is the 
 flower of life, making youth glorious, manhood 
 calm and strong, and age peaceful and serene, 
 there is enough and to spare of all the foul and 
 terrible results that belong to the corruption of 
 this consummate excellence. We should hear of 
 Clytemnestra and Phaedra, of Deianira and Me- 
 dea ; be told probably that the Furies were repre- 
 sented as women ; that mythology, the mother of 
 poetry, began and continued in this key, having 
 little to say of faithful wives and constant lovers, 
 but delighting in vagrant loves, in ladies celestial 
 and semi-celestial, all acting with the largest lib- 
 erality. We fear, too, that the lovers in the pas- 
 torals of Theocritus had not been to the register's 
 office ; and Queen Dido could no more have been 
 received at Queen Victoria's court than Queen 
 Isabella the Second. The loves of Ovid and Hor- 
 ace were little better, it is to be feared, than that 
 
264 ESSMYS. 
 
 poor Violetta at whom the great Times has been 
 letting off such tremendously overcharged artil- 
 lery. Dante, too, unfortunately had a wife and 
 children at home all the time he was taking that 
 mystic journey under the protection of the donna 
 beatta e bella ; and Petrarch's Laura, par excel- 
 lence, the type of a poet's mistress, was another 
 man's wife. The ladies of the present day would 
 scarcely thank Chaucer for his portraiture of Gri- 
 selda ; and the Wife of Bath, which, it is said, 
 Dr. Doddridge used to read aloud to the young 
 misses of his pious circle, cannot be considered on 
 the whole complimentary to the fairer half of 
 mankind. The only thoroughly charming wife 
 whom Shakspeare represents, was married to a 
 black man, and throttled by him in the honey- 
 moon or shortly after. Spenser's idolatry was 
 paid to a maiden queen, on the very ground of 
 her maidenhood. Milton's Eve — no less, the 
 cynic would say, from the poet's personal experi- 
 ence of married life than from the historical ne- 
 cessity — ruined her husband, and brought upon 
 the whole world sin, woe, and death. Our ' Au- 
 gustan ' poets were not, as a class, sentimental 
 men. Swift, Pope, and Addison are three persons 
 
THE AJ\rGEL IJ\r THE HOUSE. 265 
 
 as thoroughly desillusionnes as M. de Eochefou- 
 cauld himself; and Matthew Prior turned for 
 such feminine consolations as he needed to the La- 
 lages of Drury Lane. Byron, Scott, Shelley, 
 Keats, all paint courtship, not marriage ; if Burns 
 wrote John Anderson my Jo, John, and The Cot- 
 ter's Saturday Night, he wrote Amang the Rigs 
 of Barley with quite as much gusto, and modula- 
 ted into that key a great deal oftener than into 
 any other. Mr. Tennyson has indeed written the 
 Miller^ s Daughter, and the close of the Princess ; 
 but we should be reminded that the latter is mere- 
 ly a lover's anticipation, his ideal picture of what 
 married life should be, and that the miller's 
 daughter's husband is not a strikingly interesting 
 person, if he be not to be called decidedly imbe- 
 cile, in spite of the two charming songs of which 
 he claims the authorship. 
 
 The cynic has unquestionably a stiiaag prima fa- 
 cie case. It is a remarkable fact, that wedded 
 love has been almost uniformly rejected, as offer- 
 ing no available material for high poetry, except 
 in its corruption, as a theme for tragedy ; while, 
 on the other hand, satirical and comic writers have 
 exhausted ridicule and malignity in depicting the 
 12 
 
266 ESSA VS. 
 
 vices, the absurdities, and the mean miseries, of 
 people who are ill-matched in marriage. As we 
 believe that the elements of high poetry exist 
 wherever human hearts beat with true vital 
 heat ; and as we furthermore believe that the emo- 
 tional and truly human life of a man and woman, 
 so far from being over when, from lovers, they be- 
 come husband and wife, then only begins to at- 
 tain its full growth and capacity of bearing fruit 
 and flower of perennial beauty and fragrance, we 
 are tempted to inquire into some of the causes of 
 this onesidedness which we have charged the po- 
 ets with, and to indicate briefly some of the real 
 poetical capabilities of wedded love, and the sort 
 of treatment they require in being wrought into 
 actual poems. 
 
 The first and most obvious temptation to limit 
 the poetical representation of love to the period 
 before marriage, lies in the fact that this period 
 seems spontaneously to supply that beginning, 
 middle, and end which narrative or dramatic po- 
 ems are truly enough supposed to require. Court- 
 ship, in ordinary cases, divides itself into two 
 phases, the termination of each of which is a point 
 of definite interest, towards which all the inci- 
 
THE AMGEL IJV THE HOUSE. 267 
 
 dents, all the talk, all the surprises, suspensions, 
 difficulties, and triumphs, which make up the plot 
 of a love-story, are directly subordinated. A 
 man falls in love with a woman, and has to win 
 his way by degrees more or less rapid and event- 
 ful, to her affection ; this is the first phase, rich, 
 as experience proves, in elements of poetical pleas- 
 ure, which all men and women are capable of en- 
 joying without effort. Then follows the period, 
 richer still in all the materials for varied in- 
 cident, in which the social arrangements come 
 in to interpose obstacles between the lover and 
 his mistress, and to keep the interest of the 
 reader or spectator always on the stretch. The 
 advantage is beyond all computation which this 
 natural framework, made ready to his hand, con- 
 fers upon the poet who seeks mainly to amuse his 
 audience by a series of connected occurrences, in 
 each of which the least cultivated, the least 
 thoughtful, the least generous, can take an inter- 
 est that demands no strain, scarcely any activity, 
 of the imagination, the heart, 'or the reason. And 
 the free, vigorous exercise of the imagination is 
 so rare among mankind, that it is little wonder, 
 that poets have been content with making their 
 
268 ESSAYS. 
 
 appeals to sympathies that are sure to have been 
 familiar to the hearts of their audience at some 
 time or other in the actual experience of life, and 
 need but the faintest outline of reality in the rep- 
 resentation to awaken them again. But though it 
 must be allowed that the love of husband and 
 wife oifers no such obvious and facile series of con- 
 nected incidents, with well-marked divisions, and 
 all tending, by due gradations of interest, to 
 one event ; and though in proportion as the 
 interest of poetry is made to turn less on striking 
 outward circumstances, a heavier demand is made 
 upon the imagination of both writer and reader, 
 and a mere passive reception of familiar thoughts 
 and feelings becomes no longer sufficient for the 
 enjoyment of the poem ; yet this only amounts to 
 saying that poetry has some higher function than 
 to amuse idle people, some nobler office in cultivat- 
 ing the heart, and enlarging the range of the in- 
 ner life, than can be attributed to it so long as it 
 merely strikes one chord of feeling, or at best 
 plays over and over "again, from the beginning of 
 time to its close, the same old tune in different 
 keys and on different instruments. It is, indeed, 
 quite true that it would be impossible to mark the 
 
THE AJVGEL IJV THE HOUSE. 269 
 
 commencement of any "poem, which should deal 
 with ordinary wedded love as its main subject, by 
 an event as definite as the first meeting of a man 
 with his future mistress, or a feeling as definite, 
 as distinct from his previous state of mind, as the 
 first awakening of the passion that is to rule his 
 life henceforward through the story. The same 
 remark applies as forcibly to the want of any 
 6vent equally definite with marriage to serve for a 
 termination, unless all such poems were to have a 
 mournful close, and end with a deathbed, or fall 
 into the old tragic vein of seduction, adultery, and 
 murder. "We must candidly consent to give up 
 that source of interest which lies in the changes 
 produced upon the outward relation, upon the 
 union or separation of outward existence be- 
 tween the two persons whose inner relations, 
 whose mutual influence upon each other, and affec- 
 tion towards each other, are by supposition the 
 subject of the poem. Instead of watching the 
 formation of a double star, and having all our in- 
 terest concentrated upon the critical moment when 
 the attraction of one for the other finally draws 
 them within the inevitable vortex in which they 
 are henceforth eternally to revolve, we have to ex- 
 
270 ESS A VS. 
 
 plore the laws and witness the phenomena of their 
 mutual action, henceforward bound by a limit in 
 the preservation of which consists the whole pe- 
 culiarity, the whole interest, of this class of ob- 
 jects. Or, if we may be allowed another illustra- 
 tion from physical science, instead of having to 
 deal with a problem mainly dynamical, we advance 
 into the higher because more complex and myste- 
 rious region of chemistry, and are dealing, not 
 with the mutual action of distinct bodies, but with 
 the composition of bodies, with the changes their 
 constituent atoms undergo by combination, and by 
 the action of the subtle elements — heat, light, 
 electricity, and so forth. Will any one deny that 
 the analogy is a true analogy ? And if it be so, 
 is it not more sloth and dullness, mere want of 
 subtle imagination, of delicate sensibility, that can 
 complain of want of incident, and consequent 
 want of interest, in the drama of wedded love ? 
 There can be no want of incident so long as char- 
 acter influences fortune, and fortune character ; 
 so long as the destinies of human beings in this 
 world are carved out by their virtues and their 
 vices ; so long as wisdom and goodness sweeten 
 the bitterest cup of adversity ; so long as folly 
 
THE AJVGEL IJV THE HOUSE. 271 
 
 and wickedness infuse gall into the bowl of nectar 
 which fortune hands her favorites in jewelled gold. 
 It is the stupidity of poets which can see no inci- 
 dent in married life so long as the marriage vow is 
 kept to the letter in the grossest interpretation of 
 that letter ; and which has for the most part in- 
 duced them, when they have introduced married 
 people at all, to use marriage to give a spicier 
 piquancy to intrigue, or a darker glow to hatred 
 and revenge. 
 
 But this notion of want of incident unfitting 
 married love to be a subject for poetry is closely 
 connected with another notion still more false, 
 vulgar, and immoral. The romance of life is 
 over, it is said, with marriage ; nothing like mar- 
 riage, is the congenial reply, for destroying illu- 
 sions and nonsense. In which notable specimens 
 of ' the wisdom of many men expressed in the 
 wit of one,' there are two remarkable assertions 
 involved. The first is that love is an illusion; 
 the second, that marriage destroys it. We may 
 concede to the wisdom of the market-place thus 
 much of truth, that the love which marriage de- 
 stroys is unquestionably an illusion. We may 
 also concede to it this further truth, that the love 
 
272 £:ssArs. 
 
 of husband and wife is no more the love of the 
 man and woman in the days of their courtship, 
 than the blossom of the peach is the peach, or the 
 green shoots of corn that peep above the snows of 
 February are the harvest that waves its broad 
 billows of red and gold in the autumn sun. If 
 indeed there arc persons so silly as to dream, in 
 their days of courtship, that life can be an Arca- 
 dian paradise, where caution, self-restraint, and 
 self-denial are needless; where inexhaustible 
 blisses fall like dew on human lilies that have 
 only to be lovely ; a world from the conception 
 of which pain and imperfection, sin, discipline, 
 and moral growth are excluded, marriage un- 
 doubtedly does destroy this illusion, as life would 
 destroy it were marriage out of the question. If, 
 too, attracted originally to each other by some 
 slight and indefinable charm, by some chord of 
 sympathy vibrating in harmony at a moment's ac- 
 cidental touch, often by the mere force of the 
 tendency at a particular age to what the great 
 Florentine calls — 
 
 Amor che al cor gentil ratio s'apprende. 
 Amor che a nullo amato amar perdona, 
 
 two young persons fancy that this subtle charm, 
 
THE AJVGEL IJV THE HOUSE. 273 
 
 this mysterious attraction, is endowed with eter- 
 nal strength to stand the shocks of time, the 
 temptations of fresh attractions, the more fatal 
 because more continual sap of unresting egotism, 
 ever active to throw down the outworks and un- 
 dermine the citadel of love; and trusting to it 
 alone, think that wedded happiness can be n^ain- 
 tained without self-discipline, mutual esteem and 
 forbearance ; without the charity which covers 
 the defects it silently studies to remove ; without 
 the wisdom and the mutual understanding of char- 
 acter to which profound and patient love can alone 
 attain — this is another illusion which marriage 
 will destroy. What is, however, generally meant 
 by the sayings we have quoted is, that there is no- 
 thing like marriage for taking the passion out of 
 people, for taking out of them all disinterested as- 
 pirations, all noble hopes and fears, all delicacy of 
 sentiment, all purity of mind, all warmth of heart — 
 nothing like marriage for making them see, in 
 respectable money-making, in respectable dinners, 
 respectable furniture, carriages, and so forth, the 
 be-all and the end-all of human existence. So 
 far as marriage in our actual world realizes these 
 noble predications ; — and, so far as it does, the 
 12* 
 
274 ESSAYS. 
 
 result is mainly owing to the miserable views of 
 life and its purposes wMch society instils into its 
 youth of both sexes; being still, as in Plato's 
 time, the sophist par excellence, of which all indi- 
 vidual talking and writing sophists are but feeble 
 copies — just so far is married love, if the phrase 
 is to be so outrageously perverted, utterly unfit 
 for any high poetry, except a great master of 
 tragedy should take in hand to render into lan- 
 guage the too common tragi-comedy of a human 
 soul metamorphosing itself into a muckworm. 
 Eut surely every one can look round among his 
 acquaintance, and find marriages that are not after 
 this type, marriages which 
 
 "have ■wrought 
 Two spirits to one equal mind, 
 With blessings beyond hope or thought, 
 With blessings which no words can find." 
 
 The romance of life gone ! when with the hum- 
 blest and and most sordid cares of life are inti- 
 mately associated the calm delights, the settled 
 bliss of home ; when upon duties, in themselves 
 perhaps often wearisome and uninteresting, hang 
 the prosperity and the happiness of wife and chil- 
 dren ; when there is no mean hope, because there 
 
THE AJSTGEL IJV THJE HOUSE. 275 
 
 is no hope in which regard for others does not 
 largely mingle — no base fear, because suffering 
 and distress cannot affect self alone ; when the 
 selfishness which turns honest industry to greed 
 and noble ambition to egoistical lust of power is 
 exorcised ; when life becomes a perpetual exercise 
 of duties which are delights, and delights which 
 are duties. Once romance meant chivalry ; and 
 the hero of romance was the man who did his 
 knightly devoirs, and was true and loyal to God 
 and his lady-love. If with us it has come to 
 mean the sensual fancies of nerveless boys, and 
 the sickly reveries of girls for whose higher facul- 
 ties society can find no employment, it is only 
 another instance in which the present is not so 
 much wiser and grander than the past, as its flat- 
 terers are fond of imagining. To us it appears 
 that where the capacity for generous devotion, for 
 manly courage, for steadfast faith and love, exists, 
 there exists the main element of romance ; and 
 that where the circumstances of life are most fa- 
 vorable for the development of these qualities in 
 action, they are romantic circumstances, whether 
 the person displaying them be, like Alton Locke, 
 a tailor, or, like King Arthur, a man of stalwart 
 
276 ESSAYS. 
 
 arm and lordly presence. Nor do we see that the 
 giants, dragons, and other monsters of the old ro- 
 mance, are in themselves one whit more interesting 
 than the obstacles that beset the true modern 
 knight in his struggles to perform manfully the 
 duties of his life, and to carry out the. noble spirit 
 of that vow which he has solemnly taken at the 
 altar, to love, comfort, honor, and keep in sickness 
 and in health, the woman who has put her youth, 
 her beauty, her life, and happiness into his hands. 
 It may, however, be said that married life, when 
 it is not utterly corrupted into crime and wretched- 
 ness ; when, that is, it in any degree answers to 
 its ideal — is necessarily monotonous ; and that, 
 though to the husband and wife it may be a per- 
 petual source of discipline and delight, it offers no 
 scope to the poet, whose story must march, his 
 characters develope, and their passions and affec- 
 tions exhibit change, gradation, and culmination. 
 We have already admitted so much of this objec- 
 tion, as to concede to the period before marriage 
 greater facilities for marked gradations of interest 
 depending on changes in the outward relations of 
 the persons whose fortunes and feelings are being 
 narrated. We have said that these outward re- 
 
THE JlJVGEL IJV THE HOUSE. 277 
 
 lations once fixed by marriage, the action of the 
 poem which is to depict married love must lie 
 within narrow limits, and that its interest must 
 depend on more subtle delineation of shades of 
 character and feeling, on a perception, in a word, 
 of those effects which spring from the conduct of 
 the affections in married life, and those influences 
 which circumstance and character combine to work 
 in the affections, and which, slight and common- 
 place as some persons may choose to think them, 
 are important enough to make human beings happy 
 or miserable, and varied enough to account for all 
 the differences that an observant eye can find in 
 modern family life. And the fact, which few per- 
 sons will dispute, that in our actual family life 
 there is found, quite irrespective of distinctions of 
 class and differences of wealth, every possible gra- 
 dation of happiness and misery, of vulgarity and 
 refinement, of folly and wisdom, of genial sense 
 and fantastic absurdity, is a sufficient answer to 
 those who talk of the monotony of married life as 
 an objection to its fitness for yielding materials 
 for poetry. In real truth, there is much more mo- 
 notony in courtship than in marriage. A sort of 
 spasmodic and, to spectators well acquainted with 
 
278 ESSJiVS. 
 
 the parties, a somewhat comical amiability is the 
 general mask under which the genuine features of 
 the character are hidden. Moreover, the ordinary 
 interests of life become throughout that period 
 comparatively insipid ; and lovers are proverbially 
 stupid and tiresome to every one but themselves. 
 No doubt this has its compensating advantage for 
 the poet, who transforms his readers into the lov- 
 ers for the time being^ but it certainly gives mo- 
 notony to all manifestations of the passion in this 
 its spring-time, which is not found in the same 
 passion when the character has recovered from the 
 first shock, and life, with all its interests, again 
 enters into the heart, but invested with new charms 
 and higher responsibilities, and with the deeper, 
 fuller afiections swelling in a steady current 
 through the pulses. 
 
 So much for those more obvious objections that 
 may in great measure account for the almost uni- 
 versal rejection of married love as a theme for 
 poetry. We do not care to argue against any one 
 who says, much less any one who thinks, that it is 
 only young men and women who are interesting. 
 Even with respect to mere sensuous beauty, it is a 
 great absurdity to suppose that its splendor and 
 
THE AJVGEL IJY THE HOUSE. 279 
 
 charm are confined to two or three years of early 
 ■womanhood. ' Beaucoup de femmes de trente 
 ans,' says a shrewd French writer, after enumera- 
 ting the supposed attractions of youth in women, 
 ' out conserve ces avantages ; beaucoup de fem- 
 mes de dix-huit ans ne les ont plus ou ne les out 
 jamais eu.' Certainly no Englishman who uses 
 his eyes needs this assurance ; and no one who de- 
 lights in the society of women can doubt that they 
 continue to grow in all that charms the heart and 
 intellect, in all the materials of poetry, after they 
 become wives and mothers. 
 
 There is, however, one solid objection to the 
 tenor of our remarks tcrwhich we are inclined to 
 give great weight. We can fancy many persons, 
 for whose opinions we have the highest respect, 
 protesting against the intrusion of the poet into 
 the recesses of married life, against the analysis 
 of feelings that were not given us to amuse our- 
 selves with, against 
 
 " Those who, setting wide the doors that bar 
 The secret bridal-chambers of the heart, 
 Let in the day. ' ' 
 
 Literature was made for man, and not man for 
 
 literature. There are, unquestionably, scenes 
 
280 ESS J. VS. 
 
 which the imagination had better leave *alone, 
 thoughts which should find no utterance in printed 
 speech, feelings upon which the light and air can- 
 not dwell without tainting them. But without in 
 the slightest degree trenching upon ground that 
 should be sacred to silence, we conceive married 
 life, as one of the most powerful influences at work 
 upon the character and happiness of individuals 
 and of nations, to present capabilities of noble 
 and beautiful poetry, that, so far from weakening 
 the strength or vulgarizing the delicacy of domes- 
 tic affection, would exalt and refine it. We see 
 no reason for supposing that the conjugal relation 
 would suffer in purity or spontaneous power by 
 being passed through the alembic of a great poet's 
 imagination. If it became the subject of morbid 
 poetry or of weak maudlin poetry — supposing 
 such a combination of terms allowable — the same 
 result would follow as from the morbid or weak 
 treatment of any other powerful human emo- 
 tion — the poet would influence only weak and 
 morbid people. Nor do we see that the danger is 
 really so great of getting morbid, trashy, unheal- 
 thy poetry on this subject as on the more familiar 
 subject of love before marriage. It would de- 
 
THE AJVGEL Ijy THE HOUSE. 281 
 
 maud' qualities of genius which iu themselves are 
 a strong guarantee — the power and the taste of 
 delineating subtle shades of character and feeling, 
 a perception of the action of character upon foi*- 
 tune, an insight into the working of practical life 
 upon the affections, and their reaction upon it. 
 Such topics are not to the taste, or within the ca- 
 pacity, of melodramatic or sensualized minds ; and 
 whatever good poetry was produced on the subject 
 would, as all good poetry does, abide and work 
 upon the highest class of minds, and go on ever 
 spreading its wholesome influence, and giving the 
 tares less and less room to grow. Our domestic 
 life is not so uniformly beautiful as that it may 
 not be profited by having its faults, its short-com- 
 ings, its miseries brought into the full light of con- 
 sciousness, as only poets can bring them ; and 
 bright pictures of what that life might be, what it 
 sometimes is in actual experience, may surely do 
 good as well as give pleasure. But we are not so 
 much concerned to vindicate a large field of strict- 
 ly ethical teaching for poetry as to open to her al- 
 most untried and certainly unhacknied regions of 
 beauty, pathos, and varied human interest ; to bid 
 her cease to stop at the threshold, and boldly, 
 
282 SSSA VS. 
 
 fearlessly, and reverently penetrate into the inner 
 shrine of love — cease to sing for ever of the 
 spring-green and the promise, and remember that 
 love has its flush of summer, and its glow of au- 
 tumn, and its winter's lonely desolation. Happily, 
 we have not to advocate a theory without being 
 able to produce recent cases of successful practice. 
 Mr. Kingsley's Saint's Tragedy, those poems by 
 Mr. Tennyson of which we have already spoken, 
 and some of the most beautiful of Mr. Browning's 
 lyrical poems, as well as his narrative poem of 
 The Flight of the Duchess, and such a character- 
 piece as his Andrea del Sarto, will indicate suffi- 
 ciently how rich a field lies waiting for observa- 
 tion and delineation in poetry of the highest order. 
 Some of the pieces introduced upon our stage, 
 within the last few years, principally of French 
 origin — such as, for instance. Still Waters Run 
 Deep — in spite of the coarse tendency to make 
 adultery too constant a feature of the action, 
 point to the capabilities of the subject for lighter 
 treatment. 
 
 One word before we close upon two special ad- 
 vantages to be anticipated from the habitual ex- 
 tension of poetical representation to married love. 
 
THE JlJ\rGEL IJV THE HOUSE. 283 
 
 The subject, in the first place, interests mature 
 men and women, who must feel, at the perpetual 
 iteration of the first stage of passion in literature, 
 much as if their bodily diet were confined to syl- 
 labub and sweetmeats. Poetry is comparatively 
 little read by grown people who do not pretend to 
 cultivate literature as a special study — mainly, we 
 apprehend, because it confines itself to repeating, 
 with a variety of circumstance, experiences which 
 they have passed through, and of the partial arid 
 onesided truth of which they have long ago been 
 convinced by their more mature experience. A 
 poetry which interpreted to them their own lives, 
 which made them see in those lives elements of 
 beauty and greatness, of pathos and peril, would 
 win their attention, stimulate their interest, and 
 refine their feelings, just as much as the same ef- 
 fects are produced by ordinary love poetry on the 
 young. We shall not argue the question whether 
 the latter effect has been upon the whole for good 
 or not ; such an assumption lies at the root of all 
 discussions upon particular extensions of the po- 
 etic range. To us it appears indisputable that, 
 along with some perils, the representation of any 
 phase of human life by a man of genuine poetic 
 
284 ESSAYS. 
 
 power, is a step towards improving that phase 
 practically, as well as an enlargement of the range 
 of that life which forms so important a part of a 
 modern man's cultivation, the life he partakes by 
 imaginative sympathy. 
 
 A second advantage which we should anticipate 
 from the proposed extension would be the crea- 
 tion of a literature which would, in some impor- 
 tant respects, rival and outweigh any real attrac- 
 tion which the properly styled ' literature of pros- 
 titution ' may have for any but mauvais sujets. It 
 may shock some good and innocent people to be 
 told that such literature is attractive to any but 
 abandoned men and women. A statistical ac- 
 count of the perusal of the worst class of French 
 novels by the educated classes of this Christian 
 and highly moral country would probably be a 
 startling revelation. One can only say off-hand, 
 that a familiar acquaintance with this class of 
 works is commonly displayed in society ; and the 
 reasons are not very recondite. These novels de- 
 pict a certain kind of real life without reserve ; 
 there is flesh and blood in them ; and though some 
 of the attraction is due to the mere fact that they 
 trench on forbidden ground, some to the fact that 
 
THE AJVGEL IJV THE HOUSE. 285 
 
 they stimulate tendencies strong enough in most 
 men, and some to their revelations of scenes in- 
 vested with the charm of a license happily not fa- 
 miliar to the actual experiences of the majority of 
 their readers, there can be little question that one 
 strong attraction they possess is due to their be- 
 ing neither simply sentimental nor simply ascetic. 
 In accordance with an established maxim, which 
 tells us that, corruptio optivii pessima est, these 
 books are almost inconceivably worthless, even 
 from an artistic point of view, but the passions of 
 these novels are those of grown people, and not 
 of babies or cherubim. We can conceive a pure 
 poetry which should deal with the men and women 
 of society in as fearless and unabashed a spirit, 
 and which should beat this demon of the stews at 
 his own magic, — should snatch the wand from 
 the hand of Comus, and reverse all his mightiest 
 spells ; though, doubtless, this task belongs more 
 to prose fiction, as the objectionable works are 
 themselves prose fictions. In the poems we have 
 already mentioned, this has been done. There is 
 no reason why literature, or poetry in particular, 
 should be dedicated virginibus puerisque ; men 
 and women want men's and women's poetry ; the 
 
286 ESSAYS. 
 
 affections and the passions make up the poetical 
 element of life, and no poetry will commend itself 
 to men and women so strongly as that which deals 
 with their own passions and affections. Again 
 we say, we are not careful to guard our language 
 against wilful misconstruction. 
 
 The volume published last year, with the title 
 of T/ie Angel in the House, Part I., inspired us 
 with the hope that a poet of no ordinary promise 
 was about to lay down the leading lines of this 
 great subject, in a composition half narrative and 
 half reflective, which should at least shew, as in 
 a chart, what its rich capabilities were, and give 
 some indication of the treasures that future work- 
 ers in the same mine might have gathered in, one 
 by one. But two Parts have been already pub- 
 lished, and he has only got as far as the threshold 
 of his subject ; while the age is no longer able to 
 bear poems of epic length, even with, and much 
 less without, epic action. He has encumbered 
 himself besides with the most awkward plan that 
 the brain of poet ever conceived. The narrative 
 is carried on by short cantos — idyls he calls 
 them — in which, however, the reflective element 
 largely prevails ; and between each of these are 
 
THE SJ^GEL IJV THE HOUSE. 287 
 
 introduced, first, a poem wholly reflective, and as 
 long as the corresponding narrative canto, upon 
 some phase of passion not very strictly connected 
 with the narrative, and then a set of independent 
 aphorisms, which are often striking in sentiment 
 and sense, and frequently expressed with admira- 
 ble terseness and force, but which convey the im- 
 pression that the writer is resolved not to lose any 
 of his fine things, whether he can find an appro- 
 priate place for them or not. "We doubt whether 
 any excellence of execution would have won great 
 success for a poem written on such a plan, and 
 threatening to extend to such a formidable length. 
 But had the writer really set about singing his 
 professed theme, and not wasted his strength and 
 the patience of his readers in this twofold intro- 
 duction, he possesses many of the qualities requi- 
 site for success. His conception of feminine char- 
 acter is that of a high-minded, pure-hearted, and 
 impassioned man, who worships and respects as 
 well as loves a woman. His delineation of the 
 growth of love in the woman's heart is delicate and 
 subtile, and the lofty aspirations and unselfish en- 
 thusiasm he associates with the passion of his he- 
 ro no less true to the type he has chosen. And 
 
288 ESSAFS. 
 
 as we conceive tim not so much to intend to re- 
 late the story of any individual man and woman, 
 as to embody in a narrative form a typical repre- 
 sentation of what love between man and woman 
 should be, he cannot be censured for selecting two 
 persons of a nature higher-toned and circumstan- 
 ces richer in happy influences than fall to the lot 
 of most of us in this world. Had it been the 
 purpose of our paper to review The Angel in the' 
 House, we could have found many admirable pas- 
 sages in which sentiments of sterling worth and 
 beauty are expressed with great force and felicity 
 of language. Perhaps the only very prominent 
 fault of execution lies in the writer's tendency to 
 run into logical puzzles by way of expounding 
 the paradoxical character of love, which, like 
 wisdom, is yet justified of her children. This ten- 
 dency betrays him not only into prosaic and even 
 scholastic phraseology, that gives frequently a lu- 
 dicrous turn to his sentiments, but tempts him too 
 often into the smartness of epigram, varied by the 
 obscurity of transcendental metaphysics. To the 
 same feature of his mind, as shewn in the fond- 
 ness for this way of expressing his subject, we are 
 inclined to attribute the jerkiness of the verse, 
 
THE AJVGEL IJV THE HOUSE. 289 
 
 which often reads like a bit of Hudibras slightly- 
 altered, and is very dissonant from the innermost 
 spirit of the poem. If we might venture to offer 
 a bit of advice by way of conclusion, we should 
 say to him, forget what you have done ; treat 
 these two parts as an experiment that has partial- 
 ly failed ; begin at the real subject — married love 
 — on a different plan and in a different key. Let 
 the narrative, the drama, occupy a more promi- 
 nent position ; reject every phrase, every turn of 
 thought, that appears to you to be particularly 
 smart and clever, and adopt a measure that can- 
 not run into jingle, but will flow with a calm de- 
 licious melody through the pleasant lands along 
 which its course will lie. And if we add one ex- 
 hortation more, it will be to guard against over- 
 refinement ; not to be afraid of the warm blood and 
 beating pulse of humanity ; to remember that the 
 angel in the house is, as the least sensuous of po- 
 ets reminds us — 
 
 ■ An angel, but a woman too.' 
 
 13 
 
CARLYLE'S LIFE OF STERLING. 
 
CARLYLE'S LIFE OF STERLIJVG. 293 
 
 CARLYLE'S LIFE OF STERLING. 
 
 The domain of political economy is not unlimited ; 
 the laws of supply and demand are not the only 
 or the strongest forces at work in nature. Here 
 is a man whom the world would have been well 
 content to leave quiet in his early grave by the 
 sea-shore in the sweetest of English islands ; to 
 leave him there to the soft melodies of the warm 
 wind and the gentle rain, and the pious visits now 
 and then of those who knew and loved him when 
 his eye was bright and his voice eloquent with 
 sparkling thoughts and warm affections. He had 
 done nothing that the public cared for ; had left 
 no traces on the sands of Time that the next tide 
 would not have effaced. But he lived amongst 
 men who write books, amongst some of the very 
 
29d ESS A VS. 
 
 best of such ; and two of the foremost of them 
 loved him so well that they could not let his mem- 
 ory die, — thofight that the positive actual results 
 of his life made known to the public were but faint 
 indications of the power that lay in him though 
 sorely foiled and bafled, and that he in his indi- 
 vidual spiritual progress typified better than most 
 the struggle that the age is passing through, its 
 processes and its results. But the two men, 
 though imited in affection for Sterling, were so 
 different in other respects, that the memorial rais- 
 ed by the one could scarcely fail to be unsatisfac- 
 tory to the other! Archdeacon Hare, the author 
 of the earlier biography, is a man of encyclopaedic 
 knowledge, — a profound classical scholar, the 
 most learned and philosophical of modern English 
 theologians, at once accurate and wide in his ac- 
 quaintance with European history and literature. 
 And this large survey of the forms under which 
 the men of the past have thought and acted has 
 not led in him to an indifference to all forms, but 
 rather to a keener sense of the organic vitality 
 of forms, especially of national institutions, wheth- 
 er civil or ecclesiastical politics, states or churches. 
 Moreover, apart from this general characteristic. 
 
CARLYLE'S LIFE OF STERLIJVG. 295 
 
 which would lead to an intellectual aud practical 
 reverence for the institutions of his own laud, and 
 a hesitating caution in the introduction of consti- 
 tutional changes, Mr. Hare is an English church- 
 man of no ordinary cast. He has passed from the 
 region of traditional belief, has skirted the bogs 
 and quicksands of doubt and disbelief, and has 
 found firm footing where alone it seems possible, 
 in a revelation whose letter is colored by the hu- 
 man media through which it has passed, and in a 
 faith whose highest mysteries are not only harmo- 
 nious with but necessary complements to the truths 
 of reason. The English Church is to him the 
 purest embodiment of his religious idea, as the 
 English constitution was to him, in common with 
 Niebuhr, Coleridge, and other great thinkers, of 
 the idea of a state. Such a man could not write 
 a life like Sterling's without feeling that his rela- 
 tion to Christianity and the Church was the great 
 fact for him as for all of us ; and that the change 
 in him, from hearty acceptance of Christian doc- 
 trine and church organization to a rejection of the 
 former and something very like contempt for the 
 latter, needed explanation. That explanation he 
 has sought in the overthrow of the balance of 
 
296 ESSAYS. 
 
 Sterling's life through repeated attacks of illness, 
 which shut him out from practical duties, and 
 threw him entirely upon speculation, thereby dis- 
 proportionately developing the negative side of 
 him, already too strong from early defects of edu- 
 cation: and few persons will, we should think, be 
 found to deny Mr. Hare's general position, that 
 the pursuit of speculative philosophy as the busi- 
 ness of life has this tendency ; Mr. Carlyle, we 
 should have supposed, least of all men. But a 
 special cause interferes with Mr. Carlyle's recog- 
 nition of the principle as applicable to Sterling. 
 Christianity as understood commonly, perhaps ev- 
 erywhere except, it may be, at Weimar and Chel- 
 sea, and church formulas certainly as imderstood 
 everywhere, he is in the habit of classing under a 
 category which in his hands has become an exten- 
 sive one — that of shams. He calls them by va- 
 rious forcible but ugly names, — as ' old clothes,' 
 ' spectral inanities,' ' gibbering phantoms,' or, 
 with plainer meaning, ' huge unveracities and un- 
 realities.' That Sterling at any time of his life 
 accepted these for ' eternal verities ' he cannot 
 consider a step from the 'no' to the 'yes,' nor 
 their repudiation as a step backwards from the 
 
CARLVLE'S LIFE OF STERLING. 297 
 
 ' yes ' to the ' no.' Let him speak for himself. 
 He is commenting on Sterling's entry into orders 
 as Mr. Hare's curate at Hurstmonceaux. 
 
 Concerning this attempt of Sterling's to find sanctuary in the 
 old Church, and desperately grasp the hem of her garment in 
 such manner, there will at present be many opinions ; and mine 
 must be recorded here in flat reproval of it, in mere pitying con- 
 demnation of it, as a rash, false, unwise, and unpermitted step. 
 Nay, among the evil lessons of his Time to Poor Sterling I can- 
 not but account this the worst ; properly indeed, as we may say, 
 the apotheosis, the solemn apology and consecration, of all the 
 evil lessons that were in it to him. Alas, if we did remember 
 the divine and awful nature of God's Truth, and had not so for- 
 gotten it as poor doomed creatures never did before, — should we, 
 durst we in our most audacious moments, think of wedding it to 
 the world's Untruth, which is also, like aU untruths, the Devil's ? 
 Only in the world's last lethargy can such things be done, and 
 accounted safe and pious ! Fools ! ' Do you think the Living 
 God is a buzzard idol,' sternly asks Milton, that you dare ad- 
 dress Him in this manner? — Such darkness, thick sluggish 
 clouds of cowardice and oblivious baseness, have accumulated on 
 us ; thickening as if towards the eternal sleep ! ^ It is not now 
 known, what never needed proof or statement before, that Reli- 
 gion is not a doubt ; that it is a certainty, — or else a mockery 
 and horror. That none or all of the many things we are in 
 doubt about, and need to have demonstrated and rendered prob- 
 able, can by any alchemy be made a ' Eeligion' for us ; but are 
 and must continue a baleful, quiet or unquiet. Hypocrisy for us ; 
 
 13* 
 
298 ESSJi VS. 
 
 and bring — salvation, do we fancy? I think, it is another 
 thing they will bring ; and are, on all hands, visibly bringing, 
 this good while ! 
 
 Herein consists the whole difference between 
 Hare and Carlyle in their views of Sterling's ca- 
 reer. They look at it from such opposite points 
 that what is the zenith to one is the nadir to the 
 other. What Sterling himself thought of it, was 
 strikingly expressed to his brother, Captain An- 
 thony Sterling, by a comparison of his case ' to 
 that of a young lady who has tragically lost her 
 lover, and is willing to be half-hoodwinked into a 
 convent, or in any noble or quasi-noble way to es- 
 cape from a world which has become intolerable.' 
 The truth seems to be, that Sterling went into 
 orders under the combined influence of remorse 
 for the share he had inadvertently had in causing 
 the disastrous fate of a near relative, (Mr. Boyd, 
 who was shot with Torrijos in Spain,) and of a 
 gradual disenchantment from trust in mere politi- 
 cal schemes for the regeneration of mankind, — 
 a disease more common to the genial young men 
 of his time than of ours. That while in the ex- 
 ercise of his duties as a parish-priest he was ener- 
 
CARLVLE'S LIFE OF STERLIJVG. 299 
 
 getic, useful, and happy, the evidence in Mr. 
 Hare's booii is fully sufficient to show. It is im- 
 possible to say whether his scepticism would have 
 come upon him had he continued in that active 
 career ; but it is certainly a gratuitous supposition 
 of Mr. Carlyle that the ill health which put an end 
 to it was only the outward and ostensible cause of 
 its termination, and does not appear to be borne 
 out by a single letter or expression of Sterling's 
 own. Indeed, for years after he left Hurstmon- 
 ceaux, he seemed to continue as firm in his attach- 
 ment to Christianity as when he was there ; though, 
 on the other hand, it may well be doubted whether 
 a man of Sterling's intellect, who would surrender 
 his beliefs to Strauss's Leben Jesu, is likely in the 
 present day to keep them under any conceivable 
 circumstances. We think that Mr. Hare on the 
 one hand has attributed too exclusive an influ- 
 ence to Sterling's forced inactivity, and Mr. Car- 
 lyle has not certainly taken it sufficiently into ac- 
 count as a determining cause of his scepticism. 
 
 But whatever subject Mr. Carlyle takes up, and 
 whether he be right or wrong in his opinions, he is 
 sure to write an interesting book. He is never 
 wearisome, and whether his tale have been twice 
 
300 ESSAYS. 
 
 told or not, he clothes it by his original treatment 
 with an attractive charm that few writers can lend 
 even to an entirely new subject. The maxim of 
 the author of Modern Antiquity, that 
 
 True genius is the ray that flings 
 A novel light o'er common things, 
 
 has seldom been better illustrated than by this life 
 of Sterling. The facts are most of them neither 
 new nor of a nature in themselves to excite any 
 very strong interest, but the details of the life are 
 told with such simplicity, and yet with such con- 
 stant reference to the grand educational process 
 which they collectively make up, that one seems 
 listening to a narrative by Sterling's guardian an- 
 gel, loving enough to sympathize in the smallest 
 minutiae, and wise enough to see in each of them 
 the greatness of the crowning result. Nor is this 
 impression in the least impaired by the insignifi- 
 cance of the sum total of Sterling's actual achieve- 
 ments. For had they been tenfold greater than 
 they were, they would have been as nothing in the 
 presence of that which Mr. Carlyle looks to as the 
 soul's great achievement — heroic nobleness of 
 struggle and a calm abiding of the issue. After 
 
CARLYLE'S LIFE OF STERLIJVG. 301 
 
 noticing the purity of Sterling's character, and 
 his conformity to ' the so- called moralities,' his 
 biographer goes on to say — 
 
 In clear and perfect fidelity to Truth wherever found, in child- 
 like and soldierlike, pious and yaliant loyalty to the Highest, and 
 what of good and evil that might send him, — he excelled among 
 good men. The joys and the sorrows of his lot he took with true 
 simplicity and acquiescence. Like a true son, not like a miserable 
 mutinous rebel, he comported himself in this Universe. Extremi- 
 ty of distress, — and surely his fervid temper had enough of con- 
 tradiction in this world, — could not tempt him into impatience 
 at any time. By no chance did you ever hear from him a whis- 
 per of those mean repinings, miserable arraignings and question- 
 ings of the Eternal Power, such as weak souls even well disposed 
 wiU sometimes give way to in the pressure of their despair ; to 
 the like of this he never yielded, or showed the least tendency to 
 yield ; — which surely was well on his part. For the Eternal 
 Power, I stiU remark, will not answer the like of this, but silently 
 and terribly accounts it impious, blasphemous, and damnable, 
 and now as heretofore wiU visit it as such. Not a rebel but a 
 son, I said ; willing to suffer when Heaven said, Thou shalt; — 
 and withal, what is perhaps rarer in such a combination, willing 
 to rejoice also, and right cheerily taking the good that was sent, 
 whensoever or in whatever form it came. 
 
 A pious soul we may justly call him ; devoutly submissive to 
 the will of the Supreme in all things: the highest and sole essen- 
 tial form which Keligion can assume in man, and without which 
 aU forms of religion are a mockery and a delusion in man. 
 
302 ESS A rs. 
 
 Every one not personally acquainted with Ster- 
 ling will feel, that the great interest of the book 
 is in the light thrown by it on Mr. Carlyle's own 
 belief. For good or evil, Mr. Carlyle is a power 
 in the country ; and those who watch eagerly the 
 signs of the times have their eyes fixed upon him. 
 What he would have us leave is plain enough, and 
 that too with all haste, as a sinking ship that will 
 else carry us — state, church, and sacred prop- 
 erty — down along with it. But whither would 
 he have us fly ? Is there firm ' land, be it ever so 
 distant ? or is the wild waste of waters, seething, 
 warring round as far as eye can reach, our only 
 hope ? — the pilot-stars, shining fitfully through 
 the parting of the storm-clouds, our only guid- 
 ance ? There are hearts in this land almost bro- 
 ken, whose old traditional beliefs, serving them at 
 least as moral supports, Mr. Carlyle and teachers 
 like him have undermined. Some betake them- 
 selves to literature, as Sterling did ; some fill up 
 the void with the excitement of politics ; others 
 feebly bemoan their irreparable loss, and wear an 
 outward seeming of universal irony and sarcasm. 
 Mr. Carlyle has no right, no man has any right. 
 
CARLYLE'S LIFE OF STERLIJVG. 303 
 
 to weaken or destroy a faith which he cannot or 
 will not replace with a loftier. We have no hesi- 
 tation in saying, that the language which Mr. 
 Carlyle is in the habit of employing towards the 
 religion of England and of Europe is unjustifiable. 
 He ought to have said nothing, or he ought to 
 have said more. Scraps of verse from Goethe, 
 and declamations, however brilliantly they may 
 be phrased, are but a poor compensation for the 
 slightest obscuring of " the hope of immortality 
 brought to light by the gospel," and by it convey- 
 ed to the hut of the poorest man, to awaken his 
 crushed intelligence and lighten the load of his 
 misery. Mr. Carlyle slights, after his contemptu- 
 ous fashion, the poetry of his contemporaries : one 
 of them has uttered in song some practical wisdom 
 which he would do well to heed : 
 
 thou that after toil and storm 
 May'st seem to have reached a purer air. 
 Whose faith has centre everywhere. 
 
 Nor cares to fix itself to form. 
 
 Leave thou thy sister, when she prays. 
 
 Her early heaven, her happy views; 
 
 Nor thou with shadowed hint confuse 
 A life that leads melodious days. 
 
304 KSSAVS. 
 
 Her feith through form is pure as thine, 
 
 Her hands are quicker unto good. 
 
 Oh, sacred be the flesh and blood 
 To ■which she links a truth divine ! 
 
 See thou, that countest reason ripe 
 
 In holding by the law within. 
 
 Thou fail not in a world of sin, 
 And even for want of such a type. 
 
 This life of Sterling will be useful to the class 
 whose beliefs have givea way before Mr. Carlyle's 
 destroying energies ; because it furnishes hints, 
 not to be mistaken though not obtrusive, as to the 
 extent to which they must be prepared to go if 
 they would really be his disciples. If the path 
 has in its very dangers an attraction for some, 
 while others are shudderingly repelled, in either 
 case the result is desirable, as it is the absence of 
 certainty which causes the pain and paralyzes the 
 power of action. At any rate, the doctrines of 
 this teacher must be so much more intelligible to 
 the mass when applied, as they are here, in com- 
 mentary upon a life all whose details are familiar, 
 because it is the life of a contemporary and a 
 countryman, that all who read must inevitably be 
 
CARLYLE'S LIFE OF STERLIJVG. 305 
 
 impressed with that great lesson of the philosophic 
 poet — 
 
 The intellectual power through words and things 
 Goes sounding on, a dim and perilous way. 
 
 Though John Sterling is of course the principal 
 figure in the composition, and Mr. Carlyle's treat- 
 ment the great attraction of the book, yet the fig- 
 ures in the background will be those to make most 
 impression on the general reader. Coleridge 
 stands there in striking but caricatured likeness ; 
 and even his most devoted admirers will not be 
 sorry to see a portrait of their master by such a 
 hand : and all will curiously observe the contrast 
 between the sarcastic bitterness which colors the 
 drawing of the philosophic Christian, and the 
 kindly allowance through which the character of 
 John Sterling's father, the famous ' Thunderer ' of 
 the Times, is delineated. We half suspect that 
 Coleridge would have appeared to Mr. Carlyle a 
 much greater man, if he had allowed him to de- 
 claim — ' Harpocrates-Stentor,' as Sterling calls 
 him — with trumpet voice and for time unlimited 
 on the divine virtues of Silence. There are be- 
 sides, as in all Mr. Carlyle's works, passages of 
 wise thought expressed in most felicitous language : 
 
306 ESSAYS. 
 
 of which not the least important is this advice 
 given to Sterling in reference to his poetic aspira- 
 tions. 
 
 You can speak -with supreme excellence; sing with considerable 
 exceUenoe you never can. And the Age itself, does it not, be- 
 yond most ages, demand and require clear speech; an Age inca- 
 pable of being sung to, in any but a trivial manner, till these 
 convulsive agonies and wild revolutionary overturnings readjust 
 themselves ? Intelligible word of command, not musical psalm- 
 ody and fiddling, is possible in this fell storm of battle. Beyond 
 all ages, our Age admonishes whatsoever thinking or writing 
 man it has : Oh speak to me, some wise intelligible speech; 
 your wise meaning, in the shortest and clearest way; behold, 
 I am dying for want of wise meaning, and insight into the 
 devouring fact : speak, if you have any wisdom ! As to song 
 so-oalled, and your fiddling talent, — even if you have one, much 
 more if you have none, — we will talk of that a couple of cen- 
 turies hence, when things are calmer again. Homer shall be 
 thrice welcome; but only when Troy is taken: alas, while the 
 siege lasts, and battle's fury rages everywhere, what can I do 
 with the Homer ? I want Achilleus and Odysseus, and am en- 
 raged to see them trying to be Homers ! — 
 
 These bricks from Babylon convey but scanty in- 
 timation of the varied interest of the book. How- 
 ever the readers of it may differ from its opinions, 
 they cannot but find, even in Mr. Carlyle's mis- 
 judgments and prejudices, ample matter for serious 
 reflection : for if he misjudges, it is generally be- 
 
CARLYLE'S LIFE OF STERLIJVG. 307 
 
 cause he is looking too intently at a single truth, 
 or a single side of a truth ; and such misjudgments 
 are more suggestive than the completest proposi- 
 tions of a less earnest, keen-sighted, and impas- 
 sioned thinker. He is indeed more a prophet 
 than a logician or a man of science. And one 
 lesson we may all learn from this, as from every- 
 thing he writes, — and it is a lesson that interferes 
 with no creed, — that honesty of purpose, and 
 resoluteness to do and to say the thing we believe 
 to be the true thing, will give heart to a man's 
 life, when all ordinary motives to action and all 
 ordinary supports of energy have failed like a 
 rotten reed. 
 
"ESMOND." 
 
'ESMOJVD.' 811 
 
 "ESMOND." 
 
 Esmond is an autobiographical memoir of the first 
 five-and-thirty years of the life of an English gen- 
 tleman of family, written in his old age after his 
 retirement to Virginia ; and edited with an intro- 
 duction by his daughter, for the instruction and 
 amusement of her children and descendants, and 
 to give them a lively portrait of the noble gentle- 
 man her father. It is historical, inasmuch as po- 
 litical events enter both as motives to the actors 
 and as facts influencing their fortunes, and because 
 historical personages are brought upon the scene : 
 both are necessary elements in the career of a 
 gentleman and a soldier, but neither forms the 
 staple or the main object of the book, — which 
 concerns itself with the characters and fortunes of 
 
812 ESSAYS. 
 
 the noble family of Castlewood, of which Henry 
 Esmond is a member. The period embraced is 
 from the accession of James the Second to the 
 death of Queen Anne, and the manners depicted 
 are those of the English aristocracy. Archaeology 
 is not a special object with the author; though 
 both costume, in its more limited sense, and man- 
 ners, are, we believe, accurately preserved. But 
 Wardour Street and the Eoyal Academy need fear 
 no competitor in Mr. Thackeray. His business 
 lies mainly with men and women, not with high- 
 heeled shoes and hoops and patches, and old china 
 and carved high-backed chairs. Nor have Mr. 
 Macaulay's forthcoming volumes been anticipated, 
 except in one instance, where the Chevalier St. 
 George is brought to England, has an interview 
 with his sister at Kensington just before her death, 
 is absolutely present in London at the proclama- 
 tion of George the First, and indeed only misses 
 being James the Third, King of Great Britain and 
 Ireland, by grace of his own exceeding baseness 
 and folly. Scott, who had a reverence for the 
 Stuarts impossible to Mr. Thackeray with his 
 habit of looking at the actors in life from the side- 
 scenes and in the green-room rather than from be- 
 
" ESMOJVB." 313 
 
 fore the foot-lights, has not scrupled to take a sim- 
 ilar liberty with liis Chevalier in Redgauntlet, 
 merely to arrange a striking tableau at the fall of 
 the curtain. But these violations of received tra- 
 dition with respect to such well-known historical 
 personages, force upon the reader unnecessarily 
 the fictitious character of the narrative, and are 
 therefore better avoided. 
 
 There is abundance of incident in the book, but 
 not much more plot than in one of Defoe's novels : 
 neither is there, generally speaking, a plot in 
 man's life, though there may be and often is in 
 sections of it. Unity is given not by a consecu- 
 tive and self-developing story, but by the ordinary 
 events of life blended with those peculiar to a 
 stirring time acting on a family group, and bring- 
 ing out and ripening their qualities ; these again 
 controlling the subsequent events, just as happens 
 in life. The book has the great chai-m of reality. 
 The framework is, as we have said, historical : 
 men with well-known names, political, litferary, 
 military, pass and repass ; their sayings and do- 
 ings are interwoven with the sayings and doings 
 of the fictitious characters ; and all reads like a 
 genuine memoir of the time. The rock ahead of 
 14 
 
314 ESSAYS. 
 
 historical novelists is the danger of reproducing 
 too much of their raw material ; making the art 
 visible by which they construct their image of a 
 by-gone time ; painting its manners and the out- 
 side of its life with the sense of contrast with 
 which men of the present naturally view them, or 
 looking at its parties and its politics in the light 
 of modern questions : the rock ahead of Mr. 
 Thackeray, in particular, was the temptation mere- 
 ly to dramatize his lectures : but he has triumphed 
 over these difficulties, and Queen Anne's Colonel 
 writes his life, — and a very interesting life it is, — 
 just as such a Queen Anne's Colonel might be 
 supposed to have written it. We shall give no 
 epitome of the story, because the merit of the 
 book does not lie there, and what story there is 
 readers like to find out for themselves. 
 
 Mr. Thackeray's humor does not mainly consist 
 in the creation of oddities of manner, habit, or 
 feeling ; but in so representing actual men and 
 women as to excite a sense of incongruity in the 
 reader's mind — a feeling that the follies and 
 vices described are deviations from an ideal of 
 humanity always present to the writer. The real 
 is described vividly, with that perception of indi- 
 
"ESMOJVB." 315 
 
 viduality which constitutes the artist ; but the de- 
 scription implies and suggests a standard higher 
 than itself, not by any direct assertion of such a 
 standard, but by an unmistakeable irony. The 
 moral antithesis of actual and ideal is the root 
 from which springs the peculiar charm of Mr. 
 Thackeray's writings ; that mixture of gaiety and 
 seriousness, of sarcasm and tenderness, of enjoy- 
 ment and cynicism, which reflects so well the con- 
 tradictory consciousness of man as a being with 
 senses and passions and limited knowledge, yet 
 with a conscience and a reason speaking to him of 
 eternal laws and a moral order of the universe. 
 It is this that makes Mr. Thackeray a profound 
 moralist, just as Hogarth showed his knowledge 
 of perspective by drawing a landscape through- 
 out in violation of its rules. So, in Mr. Thack- 
 eray's picture of society as it is, society as it ought 
 to be is implied. He could not have painted Van- 
 ity Fair as he has, unless Eden had been shining 
 brightly in his inner eyes. The historian of 
 ' snobs ' indicates in every touch his fine sense of 
 a gentleman or a lady. No one could be simply 
 amused with Mr. Thackeray's descriptions or his 
 dialogues. A shame at one's own defects, at the 
 
3ie ESS A vs. 
 
 defects of the world in which one was living, was 
 irresistibly aroused along with the reception of the 
 particular portraiture. But while he was dealing 
 with his own age, his keen perceptive faculty pre- 
 vailed, and the actual predominates in his pictures 
 of modern society. His fine appreciation of high 
 character has hitherto been chiefly shown (though 
 with bright exceptions) by his definition of its 
 contrary. But, getting quite out of the region of 
 his personal experiences, he has shown his true 
 nature without this mask of satire and irony. The 
 ideal is no longer implied, but realized, in the two 
 leading characters of Esmond. The medal is re- 
 versed, and what appeared as scorn of baseness is 
 revealed as love of goodness and nobleness — 
 what appeared as cynicism is presented as a heart- 
 worship of what is pure, affectionate and unselfish. 
 He has selected for his hero a very noble type 
 of the Cavalier softening into the man of the 
 eighteenth century, and for his heroine one of 
 tlie sweetest women that ever breathed from can- 
 vas or from book since Eaffaelle painted Maries 
 and Shakspeare created a new and higher con- 
 sciousness of woman in the mind of Germanic 
 Europe. Colonel Esmond is indeed a fine gentle- 
 
" ESMOJVD." 317 
 
 man, — the accomplished man, the gallant soldier, 
 the loyal heart, and the passionate lover, whose 
 richly contrasted but harmonious character Clar- 
 endon would have delighted to describe ; while 
 Falkland and Richard Lovelace would have worn 
 him in their heart's core. Lucy Hutchinson's 
 husband might have stood for his model in all but 
 politics, and his Toryism has in it more than a 
 smack of English freedom very much akin to that 
 noble patriot's Republicanism. Especially does 
 he recal Colonel Hutchinson in his lofty principle, 
 his unswerving devotion to it, a certain sweet se- 
 riousness which comes in happily to temper a pen- 
 etrating intellect, and a faculty of seeing things 
 and persons as they are, to which we owe passage 
 after passage in the book, that it requires no effort 
 to imagine Thackeray uttering himself in those 
 famous lectures of his, and looking up with his 
 kind glance to catch the delighted smile of his 
 audience at his best points. 
 
 Nor is there anything unartistic in this remind- 
 er of the author ; for this quality of clear insight 
 into men and things united with a kindly nature 
 and a large capacity for loving is not limited to 
 any particular time or age, and combines with 
 
318 ESSAYS. 
 
 Colonel Esmond's other qualities so as to give no 
 impression of incongruity. But besides the har- 
 monizing effect of this sweetly serious tempera- 
 ment, the record of Colonel Esmond's life is 
 throughout a record of his attachment to one wo- 
 man, towards whom his childish gratitude for pro- 
 tection grows with his growth into a complex 
 feeling, in which filial affection and an uncon- 
 scious passion are curiously blended. So uncon- 
 scious, indeed, is the passion, that, though the 
 reader has no difficulty in interpreting it, Esmond 
 himself is for years the avowed and persevering 
 though hopeless lover of this very lady's daugh- 
 ter. The relation between Esmond and Eachel 
 Viscountess Castlewood is of that sort that nothing 
 short of consummate skill could have saved it 
 from becoming ridiculous or offensive, or -both. 
 In Mr. Thackeray's hands, the difficulty has be- 
 come a triumph, and has given rise to beauties 
 which a safer ambition would have not dared to 
 attempt. The triumph is attained by the concep- 
 tion of Lady Castlewood's character. She is one 
 of those women who never grow old, because 
 their lives are in the affections, and the suffering 
 that comes upon such lives only brings out strength 
 
"ESMOJTD." 319 
 
 and beauty unperceived before. The graces of 
 the girl never pass away, but maturer loveliness 
 is added to them, and spring, summer, autumn, 
 all bloom on their faces and in their hearts at 
 once. A faint foreshadowing of this character 
 we have had before in Helen Pendennis : but she 
 had been depressed and crushed in early life, had 
 married for a home, certainly without passion ; 
 and her nature was chilled and despondent. Lady 
 Castlewood has the development that a happy 
 girlhood, and a marriage with the man she de- 
 voutly loves, can give to a woman ; and her high 
 spirit has time to grow for her support when it is 
 needed. Even the weaknesses of her character 
 are but as dimples on a lovely face, and make us 
 like her the better for them, because they give 
 individuality to what might else be felt as too 
 ideal. Nothing can be more true or touching 
 than the way this lady demeans herself when she 
 finds her husband's affection waning from her ; 
 and Mr. Thackeray is eminently Mr. Thackeray 
 in his delineation of that waning love on the one 
 side, and the strength and dignity which the neg- 
 lected wife gradually draws from her own hitherto 
 untried resources, when she ceases to lean on the 
 
320 ESSAYS. 
 
 arm that was withdrawn, and discovers that the 
 heart she had worshipped was no worthy idol. 
 But to those who would think the mother ' slow ' 
 we can have no hesitation in recommending the 
 daughter. Miss Beatrix Esmond — familiarly and 
 correctly termed 'Trix' by her friends — is one 
 of those dangerous young ladies who fascinate 
 every one, man or woman, that they choose to 
 fascinate, but care for nobody but themselves ; and 
 their care for themselves simply extends to the 
 continual gratification of a boundless love of ad- 
 miration, and the kind of power which results from 
 it. If Miss Eebecca Sharp had really been a 
 Montmorency, and a matchless beauty, and a maid 
 of honor to a Queen, she might have sublimated 
 into a Beatrix Esmond. It is for this proud, ca- 
 pricious, and heartless beauty, that Henry Esmond 
 sighs out many years of his life, and does not find 
 out, till she is lost to him and to herself, how much 
 he loves her ' little mamma,' as the saucy young 
 lady is fond of calling Lady Castlewood. Bea- 
 trix belongs to the class of women who figure most 
 in history, with eyes as bright and hearts as hard 
 as diamonds, as Mary Stuart said of herself; and 
 Mary Stuart and Miss Esmond have many points 
 
" ESMOJYD." 821 
 
 in common. Of her end we are almost disposed 
 to say with Othello, ' Oh ! the pity of it, lago, 
 oh ! the pity of it.' Unlovely as she is because 
 unloving, yet her graces are too fair to be so drag- 
 ged through the dirt — that stream is too bright 
 to end in a city sewer. But the tragedy is no 
 less tragical for the tawdry comedy of its close. 
 Life has no pity for the pitiless, no sentiment for 
 those who trample on love as a weakness. 
 
 These three characters are the most prominent 
 in the book. With one or the other of the two 
 women Henry Esmond's thoughts are almost al- 
 ways engaged ; and it is to win the reluctant love 
 of the daughter that he seeks distinction as a 
 soldier, a politician, and finally a conspirator in 
 behalf of the son of King James. In this three- 
 fold career, he has intercourse with Addison, 
 Steele, and the wits ; serves under Marlborough 
 at Blenheim and Ramilies; is on terms of inti- 
 macy with St. John and the Tory leaders. A 
 succession of Viscounts Castlewood figure on the 
 scene, all unmistakeable English noblemen of the 
 Stuart period. A dowager Vicountess is a more 
 faithful than flattering portrait of a class of ladies 
 of rank of that time. The Chevalier St. George 
 14* 
 
322 ESS A VS. 
 
 appears oftener than once. The great Duke of 
 Hamilton is about to make Beatrix his Duchess, 
 when he is basely murdered in that doubly fatal 
 duel with the execrable Lord Mohun, who had 
 twelve years- before slain, also in a duel, my Lord 
 Viscount Castlewood, the father of Beatrix. The 
 book has certainly no lack of incident ; the per- 
 sons come and go as on the scene of real life ; 
 and all are clearly conceiyed, and sketched or 
 painted in full with no uncertain aim or faltering 
 hand. To draw character has been the predomi- 
 nant object of the author ; and he has so done it 
 as to sustain a lively interest and an agreeable 
 alternation of emotions, though a form of com- 
 position particularly difficult to manage without 
 becoming soon tedious, or breaking the true con- 
 ditions of the form. Mr. Thackery has overcome 
 not only this self-imposed difficulty, but one great- 
 er still, which he could not avoid — his own repu- 
 tation. Esmond will, we think, rank higher as a 
 work of art than either Vanity Fair or Penden- 
 nis; because the characters are of a higher type, 
 and drawn with greater finish, and the book is 
 more of a complete whole : not that we anticipate 
 for it anything like the popularity of the former 
 
" ESMOJVS." 323 
 
 of these two books, as it is altogether of a graver 
 cast, the satire is not so pungent, the canvas is far 
 less crowded, and the subject is distant and unfa- 
 miliar ; and, may be, its excellences will not help 
 it to a very large public. 
 
"MY NOVEL." 
 
"MY jyOVEL." 
 
 '' MY NOVEL, 
 
 OR, VARIETIES OF EJVGLISH LIFE." 
 
 Mr. Caxton junior has, he informs us, written 
 his novel with the twofold purpose of making up 
 the deficit in his annual income caused by the re- 
 peal of the Corn-laws, and of doing his part to 
 counteract the effect of incendiary publications, 
 by exhibiting the rural aristocracy, and generally 
 the richer classes, in a truer and kindlier light 
 than that which is thrown upon them by the dark 
 lantern of Socialist, Radical, or Free-trade Diog- 
 enes. The second title of the work implies even a 
 broader and more philosophic purpose. For while 
 every English novel must represent varieties of 
 English life, that which assumes to do this in a 
 special sense must be intended to display the rela- 
 tions of one part of our social fabric to another, 
 
328 ESSAYS. 
 
 and to trace a wise design, a unity of aim, a com- 
 plex harmony, in the whole made up of these va- 
 rieties. The first of Mr. Caxton's objects have 
 doubtless been obtained ; the other has not been 
 accomplished either in its wider or its narrower 
 sense. Mr. Caxton does not specify the danger- 
 ous works to which his own is designed to be an 
 antidote ; and he remarks in the course of it that 
 it is easier to live down than to write down in- 
 flammatory class appeals. We are rejoiced to 
 agree with him, that a kind-hearted sensible squire 
 and a good parson are likely to do more in the 
 reconcilement of classes than any books which he 
 can write ; and the more, because he seems not to 
 have mastered the first element of success in his 
 undertaking — a knowledge of the mischief to be 
 encountered, and of the causes which have pro- 
 duced it. It is not generally supposed that So- 
 cialist schemes or democratic rhetoric liave found 
 their way very extensively to the intellect and 
 passions of the agricultural poor in England ; nor, 
 so far as landowners and parsons have been the 
 objects of invective, has want of kindliness and 
 benevolence been the vice attributed to them. 
 Cordial good-nature and a frank dignity are the 
 
"MY MOV EL." 329 
 
 popular attributes of the ' good old English gen- 
 tleman' ; and had such qualities been, sufficient to 
 prevent what is called, by a rhetorical exaggera- 
 tion, in this country at least, ' the war of classes,' 
 that war would never have broken out. But, un- 
 fortunately, these very country gentlemen — " our 
 territorial aristocracy," as Mr. Disraeli is fond of 
 calling them — with all their virtues, had a natu- 
 ral tendency to high rents ; and being in posses- 
 sion at one time of paramount legislative power, 
 they passed laws which gave them artificially high 
 rents at the expense of the rest of the community. 
 This is the origin of what was certainly a combat 
 between classes; but that is over now. How far 
 English landowners have forgotten that property 
 has its duties as well as its rights and enjoyments, 
 is quite another question ; and if Mr. Caxton wishes 
 to go into it, he will find that fancy-portraits of a 
 model squire and a model parson are but dust in the 
 balance against the facts represented by the words 
 rural pauperism, rural ignorance, and rural bru- 
 tality. If he wants to know — as he seems to have 
 rather a Pall Mall notion of country life — what 
 these words mean, let him consult Sidney Godol- 
 phin Osborne and Charles Kingsley, who are both 
 
330 ESSMYS. 
 
 gentlemen and parsons working among the agri- 
 cultural poor. 
 
 Granted that a goodnatured squire, with eight 
 thousand acres of land, arable and pasture, and 
 not a mortgage on it, aided by a parson with a de- 
 cent income — or even one who can give to the 
 " res angusta domi " the dignity that high charac- 
 ter, good manners, and intellectual accomplish- 
 ments, will bestow — may do great things for a 
 parish. The sagacious Mrs. Glasse prefaces her 
 receipt for hare-soup by the pithy direction, first 
 catch your hare. So, we say, first put your unen- 
 cumbered well-meaning squire and phoenix parson 
 in every parish in England, or in the majority of 
 parishes, and then will be time enough to discuss 
 what good may be got out of them. It is the bur- 
 dened estates preventing improvement, and the 
 parsons careless, sauntering, often with little more 
 intellectual cultivation and much less practical 
 knowledge and good sense than their farmers — 
 these are the things that constitute the circum- 
 stances with which we have to deal in too many 
 of our country parishes, and which have borne 
 fruit in the fearful triad the consideration of which 
 we recommended to Mr. Caxton's notice. 
 
"MVJVOVEL." 381 
 
 But our novelist does not seem to know what 
 to do with his squire and parson when he has 
 found or invented them. A considerable vague- 
 ness as to the daily life, business, enjoyments, and 
 manners of an English village, must have come 
 over the mind of Pisistratus while he was in Aus- 
 tralia making the fortune which he, not prescient 
 of Free-trade iniquities, was rash enough to in- 
 vest in Uncle Rowland's acres ; or, with the ob- 
 ject he announces, he would certainly have given 
 us some more definite picture of our sweet country 
 life, with its immemorial charms, and of the du- 
 ties and pleasures of a great proprietor and a 
 country rector, than is to be found in My Novel. 
 We always thought it spoilt the energetic moral 
 of The Caxlons, that Pisistratus should rush back 
 to the old country the moment he had made a few 
 thousand pounds. He ought to have become an 
 Australian " gentleman"; that would have had sig- 
 nificance. But now that all his agricultural experi- 
 ence has not enabled him to invent a more novel 
 or more useful function for a squire and his be- 
 nevolence and his capital, than to set him employ- 
 ing labor during a hard season unproductively, in 
 digging a fish-pond that he didn't want, we begin 
 
332 ESSArS. 
 
 to suspect Pisistratus of being a charlatan, and 
 that he neither knows nor cares much in his heart 
 about agriculture, and country gentlemen, and the 
 rural poor. It was not on the Palatine that Vir- 
 gil heard the hum of the bees, or smelt the sweet 
 thyme, whose music and fragrance have been for 
 nearly two thousand years wafting the country — 
 all brightness, melody, and perfume — into close 
 chambers, into walled-up cities, into crowded 
 streets, and dismal alleys ; and it is not in Pall 
 Mall that one can learn those secrets of the country 
 which if reproduced in a book would breathe from 
 its pages May-bloom and new-mown hay, calm de- 
 lights, unwearying occupations, robust and anima- 
 ted health — not even in the country, if one car- 
 ried thither a Pall Mall mind and heart. There 
 is about Mr. Caxton's picture of Hazeldean and its 
 master of the same name — Hazeldean of Hazel- 
 dean — the rhetorical vagueness and want of de- 
 tail which betray the writer aiming at a generali- 
 zation but having no knowledge or vivid sense of 
 the particulars ; not that the sort of man is not 
 well enough described — novels and London ex- 
 perience would serve for that — but there is no 
 presentation of that country-gentleman life, with 
 
"MY JVOVEL." 333 
 
 its accessories which is necessary for the attain- 
 ment of the author's professed purpose. Imagine 
 a picture of our rural life with no tenant farmers, 
 and this too, by a man who professes to exhibit 
 that life with a practical aim ! But even the ar- 
 tist, were he of a high and conscientious intellect, 
 could not omit so essential a feature of the moral 
 rustic landscape. In fact, Mr. Hazeldean of Ha- 
 zeldean is described ; and his park and house, and 
 wife and sister, and parish-stocks and parson and 
 bailiff, are described too, — and as a picture of 
 still-life we have no objection to the descriptions ; 
 what is wanting is action and dialogue bearing 
 upon the main purpose of the book, — for of ac- 
 tion and dialogue of the ordinary novel sort there 
 is plenty, and amusing enough. The mere exis- 
 tence of such folks as our best country gentlemen 
 and their families may be a startling novelty to an 
 American, or an Australian who has forgotten the 
 old country ; and rural discontent may seem to 
 such a stranger at first sight unaccountable, though 
 we are by no means sure that he would not fix up- 
 on that as its inevitable cause, with his colonial 
 feelings about the relative value of independence 
 and comfort. But one who pretends to be alive 
 
834 ESSAYS. 
 
 to the animosities of classes in England might 
 know that he is contributing no novelty when he 
 simply informs us of the existence of a cordial, 
 manly, somewhat irritable, middle-aged gentleman, 
 who is proud of his eight thousand acres, consid- 
 ers the landed interest identical with the constitu- 
 tion, but with all his pride and irritability, and 
 prejudice and narrowness, remembers that a Ha- 
 zeldean of Hazeldean has duties, and does for 
 " his poor " all that his limited conscience and 
 feeble inventive faculties suggest to him. These 
 general characteristics of the country gentleman, 
 as statistical facts, we are all familiar with. But 
 our author fails both in his aim as social physician, 
 and in dramatic presentation of his subject, when 
 he contents himself with a vague general concep- 
 tion, and labels his dramatis personse, instead of 
 developing them in action. The Hazeldeans of 
 Hazeldean have for hundreds of years influenced 
 directly the villages in which they have lived and 
 ruled, and have indirectly contributed peculiar ele- 
 ments to the national character, and no slight 
 bias to the national policy. To present this gen- 
 eral truth dramatically, would be to make it felt 
 and appreciated more profoundly and by a wider 
 
''MY J\rOVEL." 335 
 
 circle, and is an aim worthy of an English gentle- 
 man and literary artist. But to do this, he must 
 show his type of the class in action, as landlord, 
 master, neighbor, sportsman, magistrate, a pater- 
 nal despot in his village, a free and kindly man in 
 his family, a gentleman and an aristocrat among 
 his peers. For it is by action in all these and 
 more capacities, that the Hazeldeans of Hazel- 
 dean are what they are ; not by being dummies, 
 with all these titles painted up underneath them. 
 And what makes My Novel a more striking failure 
 is, that an active life of this range and variety is 
 more capable and easy of artistic treatment than 
 that of most workers among us would be, in pro- 
 portion as it is less special and mechanical than 
 that of the professional man, the merchant, the 
 shopkeeper, and artificer, and less abstract than 
 that of the statesman and politician. It deals on 
 the one hand with natural objects and processes 
 of production of vital importance to a nation, with 
 agents, phenomena, and scenery, delightful to the 
 imagination as well as interesting to the under- 
 standing ; while on the other hand, it has to do 
 with the government of men, on such a scale as to 
 admit of that individualized treatment which gives 
 
336 ESSAYS. 
 
 the direct human interest, so difficult to realize in 
 those legislative or administrative processes in 
 which the masses are dealt with on broad general- 
 izations, and regarded not so much as individual 
 men, but as the constituent elements of blue-books 
 and statistical tables. To show all this living on 
 the canvas, would indeed have been to do some- 
 thing for the order to which our author belongs 
 by birth, estate, and county-membership. It 
 would have been still more to the purpose to show 
 how these same Hazeldeans, worthy and loveable 
 race though they are, are to develop into the land- 
 owners of a new era, and in increased knowledge, 
 energy and enterprise, are not to lose the old 
 charm of frankness, kindness, and pride of gen- 
 tlemen ; to make us feel how these country gen- 
 tlemen may still be, as they ought to be from their 
 position and antecedents, the leaders of agricul- 
 tural improvement, the true aristocracy of an in- 
 dustrial people. But for all this, practical 
 knowledge, and, what is more, genuine earnest- 
 nestness, would have been needed ; and it was 
 easier to write a novel of commonplace material 
 dexterously constructed, and spiced with a proper 
 amount of the old familiar sentiment and the new 
 
"MVJVOVEL." 887 
 
 pseudo-Shandyism, which is the merest reflection 
 from books. 
 
 If, leaving these country folks with the general 
 acknowledgment, that, so far as description can be 
 a substitute for dialogue and action, they are well 
 described, and nice points of character seized, and 
 a pleasing impression of the Hazeldean family pro- 
 duced, we trace the purpose of the author in the 
 other characters of the book — extending through 
 four volumes, but in quantity nearly equalling 
 three ordinary novels — we confess ourselves ut- 
 terly puzzled to detect any difference as regards 
 aim and philosophic depth between this and any 
 other novel by the same author, or Indeed any 
 " fashionable novel " of the day. We have in 
 addition to the Hazeldeans, father, son, wife, and 
 sister, and the parson and wife, a Cabinet Minister 
 burdened with a secret remorse — his friend Lord 
 Lestrange, all that is charming, good, and elevat- 
 ed, but crushed and repressed by a regret dating 
 twenty years back — a scheming young gentle- 
 man, a relative of the Cabinet Minister, and the 
 villain of the piece — a semi-Jew baron, ci-devant 
 solicitor, who lends money and lives in the " first 
 society," and calls the Cabinet Minister " my dear 
 15 
 
338 ESSAYS. 
 
 fellow " — an Italian nobleman in exile, with his 
 daughter — another Italian nobleman and his sis- 
 ter, plotting against the former — a peasant poet, 
 who wins his way to eminence, and turns out to be 
 the legitimate son of a great man — an uncle by 
 the mother's side of the poet, who returns from 
 America with a fortune, and becomes a manufac- 
 turer and finally a man of fashion and M. P. for 
 a borough ; all these we have, and a very complex 
 and interesting story is made out of their combi- 
 nations ; there are even scenes of great power, of 
 the sort that Macready on the stage could have 
 given prodigious effect to : but the purpose of the 
 book seems clean gone out of the writer's mind, 
 and we can conceive any novel of the season doing 
 just as much and just as little to knit closer the 
 ties that bind class to class in England, or to make 
 one class appreciate and look with truer and kind- 
 lier eye on the others. 
 
 Indeed, there are characters in My Novel, and 
 there is a pervading tone, which, so far from har- 
 monizing men of different degrees and different 
 occupations in our land, seems to us calculated, if 
 they had any practical effect, to do just the oppo- 
 site. Mr. Sprott the tinker, whose pleasure it is 
 
"MY JVOVEL." 339 
 
 gratuitously to enlighten his rustic brethren on the 
 question of their rights and the wrongs of the 
 rich, is not a flattering specimen of the poor man 
 political. But let him pass as a sketch and a 
 scarecrow. Mr. Richard Avenel, the maker of 
 his own fortune, the manufacturer, and Radical 
 borough M. P., may too be a portrait from life ; 
 we do not doubt that worse men and vulgarer men 
 have sat and are sitting in the House of Commons : 
 but he is still an outrageous caricature, were ho 
 ' liker than life,' because he is presented here as 
 the type of a class, and as the commercial ana- 
 logue of the Hazeldeans of Hazeldean. He is 
 the prosperous middle-class man, as he appears to 
 the horrified vision of May Pair and Almacks ; 
 not even to those artificial eyes quite devoid of a 
 certain rude strength and rough utility, but with 
 all that, a singularly absurd, coarse, selfish, grasp- 
 ing, tyrannical, title-hunting, and unpleasant ' in- 
 trus.' Nor, broad as is the canvas spread, and 
 facile as is the master's hand, does that great 
 ' people,' without which English ' society ' is a 
 "capital without a column, gain admission even to 
 the background of the picture, except as a group 
 of undistinguishable grumbling rustics in one cor- 
 
340 ESSAYS. 
 
 ner, and a corrupt and equally undistinguisliable 
 borough constituency in another. A deep and in- 
 bred contempt for the middle class would be the 
 only interpretation of a picture of English society 
 which ignored or only sarcastically noticed them, 
 were it not to be explained by a defect in this au- 
 thor's genius and sympathies, alike fatal to him as 
 philosophic politician or as philosophic artist. 
 
 And this is, that of the English world, which it 
 is his vocation to paint and to influence, 'he knows 
 and comprehends and cares for only the lightest 
 froth dancing on the surface. We have seen that 
 in his village he could conceive and describe his 
 characters of squire and parson with their fam- 
 ilies ; below this he could not even go by descrip- 
 tion, and he fails to exhibit even them as actors 
 in the real interests of their lives. It is the same 
 when his scene is transferred to London. Dan- 
 dies and fine ladies — men and women upon whom 
 life forces no serious duties, and who are not great 
 enough to impose them on themselves — dress, 
 talk, flirt, and intrigue upon his stage. Even the 
 political life which is bound up in England with' 
 fashionable life he touches with the vaguest, 
 dreamiest pencil, and as if none of the substantive 
 
"MY J\rOVEL." 341 
 
 interests and manly virtues with which it is con- 
 cerned had ever made themselves felt by him. He 
 can understand it as an exciting personal game, 
 more absorbing and more reputable than hazard, 
 with great prizes for those who can win them, and 
 draughts of Nepenthe for those whose youth has 
 left behind it little but gnawing regrets. But as 
 the highest form of business, or the serious pas- 
 sion of serious men, and the duty of those whose 
 rank and fortune release them from the ordinary 
 duties of the less wealthy and eminent, — we do 
 not mean to say that he cannot form the concep- 
 tion or use the phrases, but it is not that view of 
 politicaLlife with which he sympathises, or which 
 his genius aspires to represent among the varieties 
 of English life. Nor, indeed, apart from motives, 
 does he dramatically represent the life of a politi- 
 cal leader. Here again he can form the concep- 
 tion, describe the man ; but his portrait wants de- 
 tails — that is, it wants knowledge, his statesman 
 does nothing as a statesman. It cannot be in this 
 case that life has presented no models to the wri- 
 ter. His manhood must have been passed in the 
 familiar society of political Englishmen of the 
 
§42 ESSAYS. 
 
 higher rank. It must be that his genius is not re- 
 ceptive of this sort of experience ; that it presents 
 to his imagination no beauty or interest ; it is not 
 available to him for purposes of art. Go even 
 into a class with which he ought to be more famil- 
 iar still, among the men of letters : we have in 
 this book three distinct types from this class, — 
 Leonard, the poet ; Henry Norreys, the man who 
 follows literature with the diligence and sobriety 
 of a lawyer ; and John Burley, the reckless, dissi- 
 pated man of genius, who is always out at elbows, 
 eloquently drunk, and dies of delirium tremens. 
 The two latter are strongly marked types, and we 
 know precisely the sort of men intended, if not 
 the very men who sat for the portraits. But this 
 is knowledge we bring to the book, not knowledge 
 we get from it. There is little dramatic power in 
 the representation ; we easily fill up features so 
 strongly marked, and we must not put down to the 
 credit of the artist what belong really to the sub- 
 ject and to our own familiarity with a class. 
 Leonard, on the other hand, upon whom much 
 more talk is lavished, remains in his poetical char- 
 acter a mere nominis umbra ; not a characteristic 
 
"MY JVOVEL." 343 
 
 of his genius is made real and intelligible to us ; 
 he cannot have been as poet and man of letters 
 clearly and distinctly before the author's eye. 
 
 Thus, even with those classes of society with 
 which he must be familiar, he cannot deal dra- 
 matically: he has not the genius for presenting 
 individual character, the primary dramatic facul- 
 ty; much less the faculty — requiring so much 
 study, observation, and superiority to conventional 
 prejudices, in addition to dramatic genius — of 
 presenting class characters individualized, the 
 distinctive features of the man moulded and col- 
 ored by the work he does, representative there- 
 fore of the social function and peculiarities of 
 their class, true typal varieties of English life. 
 It is needless to add, that of the working lives — 
 and that means the serious portion of the lives — 
 of the merchant, the manufacturer, the lawyer, 
 and other ' working classes,' not the faintest rep- 
 resentation is conveyed. Baron Levy and Randal 
 Leslie, who plot together against the fortunes of 
 their fellow ' varieties,' are the only ' working 
 men ' really exhibited in that which is their busi- 
 ness and function. In a word, it is only the 
 
344 ESSAYS. 
 
 amusements, the pleasures, and the passions of 
 the idle members of English society, which Sir 
 Edward Bulwer Lytton has ever succeeded in 
 painting. He cannot paint the busy classes, even 
 in their pleasures and their family life and their 
 passions — not even those who belong to his ' so- 
 ciety' — because the serious occupations and in- 
 terests of men and women affect their pleasures 
 and their passions ; and with these and the char- 
 acters they form he has no adequate acquaintance 
 and sympathy. So, as we said, he paints the 
 froth of society ; and very gay froth it is, and 
 very pretty bubbles he can make of it : but this 
 is not reconciling classes, or giving a philosophic 
 representation in fiction of the great organic being 
 we call the English nation ; and so far as Mt/ 
 Novel pretends to be anything more than any- 
 body else's novel, anything more than a well- 
 wrought story, constructed out of the old Bulwer- 
 Lytton materials, the pretence is fabulous and the 
 performance does not answer to it. We have a 
 novel neither better nor worse than its predeces- 
 sors ; but we have not a great work of art reared 
 on a basis so broad as a general survey of English 
 
"My JVOVEL." 345 
 
 life in the earlier half of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury. 
 
 Would such a work of art be possible ? A mir- 
 ror that should show to a nation of workers — to 
 a nation whose family hearth is dear and sacred, 
 to a nation that is earnest, practical, grave, and 
 religious — its own life, complex and multitudi- 
 nous, as it might reflect itself upon the imagina- 
 tion of a great poet, who to masculine understand- 
 ing trained by observation and study should add 
 the large heart and the clear eye to which nothing 
 human is uninteresting or blank? Homer did 
 something of this sort for the Greece of his day ; 
 Dante for the Italy of his ; Shakspeare for the 
 Europe of his. These men knew not such a word 
 as commonplace or low, except as applied to what 
 is stupid and base. The broad field of human 
 life was to them a field of beauty, richly clothed 
 with food and flowers for the sustenance and nour- 
 ishment of a vigorous imagination. Art can in- 
 deed harmonize classes when the artist is such as 
 these, — when, on the one hand, the dignity and 
 worth of the various callings that minister to the 
 convenience and promote the improvement of a 
 15* 
 
346 ESSAYS. 
 
 nation, are illustrated by viewing them as harmo- 
 nious parts of a great whole ; and on the other, 
 when the men who pursue these callings are rep- 
 resented with the interesting varieties impressed 
 upon the common humanity by circumstances and 
 education, but still as not having that common hu- 
 manity obliterated and replaced by some ludicrous 
 or mean features, characteristic, it may be, of 
 their occupation, but not characteristic of men 
 to whom an occupation should be a servant and 
 not a master. Till art deals again as it did in 
 its mighty youth with common life — with that 
 which is the business of a busy struggling world — 
 neither will art regain its strength and renew its 
 youth, nor will common life reappear to us with 
 the freshness and the sacredness which it had 
 to the eye of those who first became self-conscious 
 and burst into song. Dandy literature and su- 
 perfine sensibilities are tokens and causes of a 
 degenerate art and an emasculate morality; and 
 among offenders in this way none has sinned 
 more, or is of higher mark for a gibbet, than 
 the author of My Novel. Such books as his, 
 when they appear in their true characters, are 
 
"MY JVOVEL." 347 
 
 judged according to one standard ; but when they 
 come in the guise of profound meaning and lofty 
 aims, and give themselves the airs of being grand 
 concrete philosophies, the judge looks at them in 
 quite another light, tries them by a higher code, 
 and condemns them accordingly, as well-dressed 
 impostors. 
 
"BLEAK HOUSE." 
 
"BLEAK HOUSE." 351 
 
 DICKENS'S ''BLEAK HOUSE." 
 
 " I BELIEVE I have never had so many readers," 
 says Mr. Dickens in the preface to Bleak House, 
 " as in this book." We have no doubt that he 
 has the pleasantest evidence of the truth of this 
 conviction in the balance-sheet of his publishing- 
 account ; and, without any more accurate knowl- 
 edge of the statistics of his circulation than the 
 indications furnished by limited personal observa- 
 tion, we should not be surprised to find that 
 Punch and the Times newspaper were his only ri- 
 vals in this respect. Whatever such a fact may 
 not prove, it does prove incontestably that Mr. 
 Dickens has a greater power of amusing the book- 
 buying public of England than any other living 
 writer ; and moreover establishes, what we should 
 
362 ESSJirS. 
 
 scarcely have thought probable, that his power of 
 amusing is not weakened now that the norelty of 
 his style has passed away, nor his public wearied 
 by the repetition of effects in which truth of na- 
 ture and sobriety of thought are largely sacrificed 
 to mannerism and point. Author and public re- 
 act upon each other ; and it is no wonder that a 
 writer, who finds that his peculiar genius and his 
 method of exhibiting it secure him an extensive 
 and sustained popularity, should be deaf to the 
 remonstrances of critics when they warn him of 
 defects that his public does not care for, or urge 
 him to a change of method which might very 
 probably thin his audience for the immediate pres- 
 ent, and substitute the quiet approval of the judi- 
 cious for the noisy and profitable applause of 
 crowded pit and gallery. Intellectual habits, too, 
 become strengthened by use, and a period comes 
 in the life of a man of genius when it is hopeless 
 to expect from him growth of faculty or correction 
 of faults. 
 
 Bleak House is, even more than any of its pre- 
 decessors, chargeable with not simply faults, but 
 absolute want of construction. A novelist may 
 invent an extravagant or an uninteresting plot — 
 
"BLEAK HOUSE." 853 
 
 may fail to balance his masses, to distribute his 
 light and shade — may prevent his story from 
 marching, by episode and discursion : but Mr. 
 Dickens discards plot, while he persists in adopt- 
 ing a form for his thoughts to which plot is es- 
 sential, and where the absence of a coherent 
 story is fatal to continuous interest. In Bleak 
 House, the series of incidents which form the out- 
 ward life of the actors and talkers has no close 
 and necessary connection ; nor have they that 
 higher interest that attaches to circumstances 
 which powerfully aid in modifying and developing 
 the original elements of human character. The 
 great Chancery suit of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, 
 which serves to introduce a crowd of persons as 
 suitors, lawyers, law-writers, law-stationers, and 
 general spectators of Chancery business, has posi- 
 tively not the smallest influence on the character 
 of any one person concerned ; nor has it any in- 
 terest of itself. Mr. Richard Carstone is not 
 made reckless and unsteady by his interest in the 
 great suit, but simply expends his recklessness and 
 unsteadiness on it, as he would on something else 
 if it were non-existent. This great suit is lugged 
 in by the head and shoulders, and kept promi- 
 
354 ESSAYS. 
 
 neatly before the reader, solely to give Mr. Dick- 
 ens the opportunity of indulging in stale and com- 
 monplace satire upon the length and expense of 
 Chancery proceedings, and exercises absolutely 
 no influence on the characters and destinies of 
 any one person concerned in it. The centre of 
 the arch has nothing to do in keeping the arch to- 
 gether. 
 
 The series of incidents which answers to what 
 in an ordinary novel is called plot, is that con- 
 nected with the relationship of the heroine (again 
 analogically speaking) to her mother. Lady Ded- 
 lock, who, when first introduced to the reader is a 
 stately lady of the supremest fashion, has before 
 her marriage with Sir Leicester Dedlock given 
 birth to an illegitimate child, whom she supposes 
 to have died in its birth, but who, under the name 
 of Esther Summersori, was brought up in obscuri- 
 ty. The truth become^ known to her Ladyship, 
 and is ferreted out by the family solicitor, Mr. 
 Tulkinghorn ; a person of eminently respectable 
 standing, but incomprehensible motives, who tor- 
 tures Lady Dedlock with mysterious hints, and af- 
 terwards direct menaces of disclosing her shame 
 to her husband ; at which stage of tjie proceed- 
 
"BLEAK HOUSE." 355 
 
 ings he is shot in his chambers. The reader is so 
 artMly tempted to suspect Lady Dedlock of the 
 deed, that all but the simplest will at once con- 
 clude that a theatrical surprise is meditated ; and 
 accordingly, the real culprit turns out to be Lady 
 Dedlock's French maid, whom Mr. Tulkinghorn 
 had used in discovering the secret, and afterwards 
 treated with harshness and contumely, that roused 
 her malignant temper to a murderous revenge. 
 The secret, however, is not buried with Mr. Tulk- 
 inghorn ; and, maddened by fear of discovery and 
 open shame. Lady Dedlock flies from her home, 
 and dies of exhaustion at the entrance of a wretch- 
 ed city churchyard, where her lover was buried, 
 and where she is found by her daughter and a de- 
 tective policeman who had been sent in quest of 
 her. Literally, we have here given the whole of 
 what can by any stretch of the term be called the 
 main plot of Bleak House. And not only is this 
 story both meagre and melodramatic, and disa- 
 greeably reminiscent of that vilest of modern 
 books Eeynolds's Mysteries of London, but it is 
 so unskilfully managed that the daughter is in no 
 way influenced either in character or destiny by 
 her mother's history ; and the mother, her hus- 
 
356 ESSAYS. 
 
 band, the prying solicitor, the French maid, and 
 the whole Dedlock set, might be eliminated from 
 the book without damage to the great Chancery 
 suit, or perceptible effect upon the remaining char- 
 acters. We should then have less crowd, and no 
 story ; and the book might be called ' Bleak House, 
 or the Odd Folks that have to do with a long 
 Chancery Suit.' This would give an exact notion 
 of the contents of a collection of portraits embrac- 
 ing suitors, solicitors, law-writers, law-stationers, 
 money-lenders, law-clerks, articled and not-arti- 
 cled, with their chance friends and visitors, and 
 various members of their respective families. 
 Even then, a comprehensive etcaetera would be 
 needed for supernumeraries. So crowded is the 
 canvas which Mr. Dickens has stretched, and so 
 casual the connexion that gives to his composition 
 whatever unity it has, that a daguerreotype of 
 Fleet Street at noon-day would be the aptest sym- 
 bol to be found for it ; though the daguerreotype 
 would have the advantage in accuracy of repre- 
 sentation. In addition to all other faults of con- 
 struction, the heroine is made to tell her adven- 
 tures in an autobiographic narrative ; and as this 
 would not suffice, under the conditions of a mortal 
 
"BLEAK HOUSE." 357 
 
 existence limited to one spot in space at a time, 
 for the endless array of persons who have to talk 
 and be funny and interesting, the writer interca- 
 lates chapters in his own person, — a mixture 
 which has the awkwardest effect, and is left in its 
 natural awkwardness with no appliances of litera- 
 ry skill to help it out. 
 
 The result of all this is, that Bleak House 
 would be a heavy book to read through at once, 
 as a properly consti-ucted novel ought to be read. 
 But we must plead guilty to having found it dull 
 and wearisome as a serial, though certainly not 
 from its want of cleverness or point. On the con- 
 trary, almost everybody in the book is excessively 
 funny, that is not very wicked, or very miserable. 
 Wright and Keeley could act many of the charac- 
 ters without alteration of a word ; Skimpole must 
 be constructed with an especial eye to the genius 
 of Mr. Charles Matthews ; 0. Smith will of course 
 choose Krook or the sullen bricklayer, but proba- 
 bly the former, for his effective make-up, and the 
 grand finale by spontaneous combustion, — which, 
 however Nature and Mr. Lewes may deride in the 
 pride of intellect, the resources of the Adelphi 
 will unquestionably prove possible: the other 
 
358 ESSMrS. 
 
 characters of the piece would be without difficul- 
 ty distributed among ladies and gentlemen famil- 
 iar to the London boards. By all which is im- 
 plied, that Mr. Dickens selects in his portraiture 
 exactly what a farce- writer of equal ability aud 
 invention would select, — that which is coarsely 
 marked and apprehended at first sight ; that which 
 is purely outward and no way significant of the 
 man, an oddity of feature, a trick of gesture or of 
 phrase, something which an actor can adequately 
 present and in his presentation exhaust the con- 
 ception. And this tendency to a theatrical meth- 
 od shows itself again in the exaggerated form 
 which his satire assumes, and which even when the 
 satire is well directed robs it of its wholesome ef- 
 fect. The theatre is obliged to drive its points 
 home, or they would be lost : the majority of our 
 actors want skill to present a character colored 
 and drawn true to nature, and a London mixed 
 audience would not appreciate the exquisite art 
 that disdained coarse exaggeration. But the gross 
 caricature of the stage is unbearable in the study : 
 we read with some other purpose than to laugh ; 
 and if the Harold Skimpoles and Mrs. Jellybys of 
 the novel are supremely ridiculous, we only refer 
 
"BLEAK HOUSE." 359 
 
 to their counterparts in real life to note that the 
 artist has failed in his execution, and has yet to 
 learn by a deeper study of Nature how cunningly 
 she blends motives, and how seldom men and 
 women are entirely absurd or selfish without a 
 glimmering and uneasy consciousness that all is 
 not quite as it should be. 
 
 The love of strong effect, and the habit of seiz- 
 ing peculiarities and presenting them instead of 
 characters, pervade Mr. Dickens's gravest and 
 most amiable portraits, as well as those expressly 
 intended to be ridiculous and grotesque. His he- 
 roine in Bleak House is a model of unconscious 
 goodness ; sowing love and reaping it wherever 
 she goes, diffusing round her an atmosphere of 
 happiness and a sweet perfume of a pure and 
 kindly nature. Her unconsciousness and sweet 
 humility of disposition are so profound that scarce- 
 ly a page of her autobiography is free from a re- 
 cord of these admirable qualities. With delightful 
 naivete she writes down the praises that are 
 showered upon her on all hands ; and it is impos- 
 sible to doubt the simplicity of her nature, because 
 she never omits to assert it with emphasis. This 
 is not only coarse portraiture, but utterly untrue 
 
360 ESSA VS. 
 
 and inconsistent. Such a girl would not write her 
 own memoirs, and certainly would not bore one 
 with her goodness till a wicked wish arises that she 
 would either do something very ' spicey,' or confine 
 herself to superintending the jam-pots at Bleak 
 House. Old Jarndyce himself, too, is so dread- 
 fully amiable and supernaturally benevolent, that 
 it has been a common opinion during the progress 
 of the book, that he would turn out as great a 
 rascal as Skimpole ; and the fox on the symbolical 
 cover with his nose turned to the East wind has 
 been conjectured by subtle intellects to be intend- 
 ed for his double. We rejoice to find that those 
 misanthropical anticipations were unfounded ; but 
 there must have been something false to general 
 nature in the portrait that suggested them — some 
 observed peculiarity of an individual presented 
 too exclusively, or an abstract conception of gen- 
 tleness and forbearance worked out to form a 
 sharp contrast to the loud, self-assertive, vehe- 
 ment, but generous and tender Boythorne. This 
 gentleman is one of the most original and happiest 
 conceptions of the book, a humorist study of the 
 highest merit. Mr. Tulkinghorn, the Dedlock 
 confidential solicitor, is an admirable study of 
 
"BLEAK HOUSE." 361 
 
 mere outward characteristics of a class ; but his 
 motives and character are quite incomprehensible, 
 and we strongly suspect that Mr. Dickens had him 
 shot out of the way as the only possible method 
 of avoiding an enigma of his own setting which 
 he could not solve. Tulkinghorn's fate excites 
 precisely the same emotion as the death of a nox- 
 ious brute. He is a capital instance of an old 
 trick of Mr. Dickens, by which the supposed ten- 
 dencies and influences of a trade or profession are 
 made incarnate in a man, and not only is ' the dy- 
 er's hand subdued to what it works in,' but the 
 dyer is altogether eliminated, and his powers of 
 motion, his shape, speech, and bodily functions, 
 are translated into the dye-tub. This gives the 
 effect of what some critics call marvellous individ- 
 uality. It gives distinctness at any rate, and is 
 telling; though it may be questionable whether it 
 is not a more fatal mistake in art than the careless 
 and unobservant habit which many writers have 
 of omitting to mark the effect of occupations upon 
 the development and exhibition of the universal 
 passions and affections. Conversation Kcnge and 
 Vholes, solicitors in the great Jarndyce case, have 
 each their little characteristic set of phrases, and 
 16 
 
362 ESSAYS. 
 
 are well-marked specimens of the genus lawyer ; 
 but as they only appear in their professional ca- 
 pacity, we are not entitled to question them as to 
 their qualities as men. 
 
 The allied families of Jellyby and Turveydrop 
 are in Dickens's happiest vein, though Mrs. Jelly- 
 by is a coarse exaggeration of an existing folly. 
 They may, we think, stand beside the Micawbers. 
 Mrs. Jellyby's daughter Caddy is the only female 
 in the book we thoroughly relish : there is a blend- 
 ing of pathos and fun in the description of her 
 under the tyranny of Borrioboola Gha, that is ir- 
 resistible ; and her rapid transformation from a 
 sulky, morose, overgrown child, to a graceful and 
 amiable young woman, under the genial influence 
 of Esther Summerson, is quite Cinderella-like, and 
 as charming as any fairy tale. Inspector Bucket, 
 of the Detective Force, bears evidence of the care- 
 ful study of this admirable department of our Po- 
 lice by the editor of Household Words ; and, as 
 in the case of Kenge and Vholes, the professional 
 capacity is here the object, and we do not require 
 a portraiture of the man and his affections. Poor 
 Joe, the street-sweeping urchin, is drawn with a 
 skill that is never more effectively exercised than 
 
"BLEAK HOUSE." 363 
 
 when the outcasts of humanity are its subjects ; a 
 skill which seems to depart in proportion as the 
 author rises in the scale of society depicted. 
 Dickens has never yet succeeded in catching 
 a tolerable likeness of man or woman whose 
 lot is cast among the high-born and wealthy. 
 Whether it is that the lives of such present less 
 that is outwardly funny or grotesque, less that 
 strikes the eye of a man on the look-out for oddity 
 and point, or that he knows nothing of their lives, 
 certain it is that his people of station are the vilest 
 daubs ; and Sir Leicester Dedlock, Baronet, with 
 his wife and family circle, are no exceptions. 
 
 If Mr. Dickens were now for the first time be- 
 fore the public, we should have found our space 
 fully occupied in drawing attention to his wit, his 
 invention, his eye for common life, for common 
 men and women, for the everyday aspect of streets 
 and houses, his tendency to delineate the affections 
 and the humors rather than the passions of man- 
 kind ; and his defects would have served but to 
 shade and modify the praises that flow forth wil- 
 lingly at the appearance among us of a true and 
 original genius. And had his genius gone on 
 growing and maturing, clearing itself of extrava- 
 
364 ESSAYS. 
 
 gance, acquiring art by study and reflection, it 
 would not be easy to limit the admiration and 
 homage he might by this time have won from his 
 countrymen. As it is, he must be content with 
 the praise of amusing the idle hours of the great- 
 est number of readers ; not, we may hope, with- 
 out improvement to their hearts, but certainly 
 without profoundly affecting their intellects or 
 deeply stirring their emotions. Clever he un- 
 doubtedly is : many of his portraits excite pity, 
 and suggest the existence of crying social sins ; 
 but of almost all we are obliged to say that they 
 border on and frequently reach caricature, of 
 which the essence is to catch a striking likeness by 
 exclusively selecting and exaggerating a peculiar- 
 ity that marks the man but does not represent 
 him. Dickens belongs in literature to the same 
 class as his illustrator, Hablot Browne, in design, 
 though he far surpasses the illustrator in range 
 and power. 
 
"WESTWARD HO!" 
 
" WESTWARD HOr' 367 
 
 KINGSLEY'S ''WESTWARD HO." 
 
 Me. Kingsi.ey has secured the first requisite of 
 success as a novelist, by choosing an interesting 
 subject, which both excites and justifies the powers 
 of art and genius expended upon it. If it has 
 been at times necessary to protest against the ap- 
 plication of the principle of ' cui bono ' to works 
 of art, it has been because the application has been 
 improperly made, the principle wrongly or nar- 
 rowly interpreted, not because art is exempt from 
 the necessity of being available for something high- 
 er than the pastime of inactive minds and jaded 
 energies. To make us wiser and larger-hearted 
 
 — to conduct us through a wider range of experi- 
 ence than the actual life of each generally permits 
 
 — to make us live in the lives of other types of 
 
368 ESSAYS. 
 
 character than our own, or than those of our daily 
 acquaintance — to enable us to pass by sympathy 
 into other minds and other circumstances, and es- 
 pecially to train the moral nature by sympathy 
 ■with noble characters and noble actions, — these 
 are the high aims of fiction in the hands of its 
 master wielders ; these are the aims which have 
 raised novels and dramas to an importance which 
 Nature herself indicates in assigning to their pro- 
 duction those powers which the consent of all ages 
 allows to rank supreme among the gifts of the hu- 
 man race. Mr. Kingsley's object is to paint the 
 types of character, and the sort of training, by 
 which England rose in the reign of Queen Eliza- 
 beth to be mistress of the seas, and a model to all 
 Europe of material prosperity and national unity 
 — a powerful, a wealthy, a free, and a happy peo- 
 ple. He does not, of course, attempt any such 
 absurd impossibility as to epitomize in the fortunes 
 and career of a single man or family the infinite- 
 ly complex elements and agencies that go to make 
 up the life of a nation at any one time ; nor does 
 he select the central Government, with its Court, 
 its Administration, and its Parliament, and write 
 a political novel to illustrate the policy of Eliza- 
 
" WESTWARD HO!" 369 
 
 beth, and the various wisdom and talent of her 
 Ministers, with the hearty yet perfectly indepen- 
 dent action of the national assembly. He takes 
 as his type of Elizabethan character and activity 
 a Devonshire youth, of good birth, and in no way 
 distinguished from other sons of country gentle- 
 men by either fortune, or learning, or genius, but 
 of great bodily strength, of lively aifections and 
 sweet temper, combined with a marked propensity 
 to combat from his earliest years ; a character that 
 when trained to self-denial and a high sense of 
 duty to God and his country, and practised in the 
 arts of war and seamanship, presents perhaps as 
 perfect a specimen of glorious manhood as men 
 have ever obeyed with implicit confidence and 
 women worshipped as their natural liege lord and 
 defender. Beside Amyas Leigh stand grouped 
 his brother Prank, charmingly contrasted with him 
 in all points except his pure and warm affections 
 and chivalrous honor ; and his mother, a saintly 
 lady, whom early experience of calamity has so- 
 bered down to perfect serenity, and whom later 
 sorrow and bereavement -transfigure to almost un- 
 earthly intensity of faith, love, and resignation. 
 The worthies of Devon — Sir Walter Ealeigh, 
 
370 ESSA VS. 
 
 Sir Richard Grenville, Admirals Hawkins and Sir 
 Francis Drake ; families whose names are still the 
 bright stars of the West — Fortescues, Chiches- 
 ters, Carys — blend in the action and interest of 
 the scene. Burghers of Bideford, plotting Jesu- 
 its, Romanist country families, mariners who have 
 sailed round the world with Drake, mariners who 
 have seen Columbus and Cabot and Vasco de Ga- 
 ma, country parsons, gentlemen adventurers, Span- 
 ish Dons, South American Indians, and victims of 
 the inquisition, crowd the story with variety of 
 character and incident. The scene itself spreads 
 out from Bideford, near which is the family seat 
 of the Leighs, through North and South Devon, 
 to London in a passing glance ; to Ireland and its 
 wars, in which Amyas takes a distinguished part ; 
 to the Spanish main, and the boundless South 
 American continent, where indeed the most inter- 
 esting part of the adventures take place ; back 
 again to Bideford and Plymouth ; whence Amyas 
 sails in command of his ship, to take part in that 
 most memorable sea-fight, the twelve-days battle, 
 in which the Spanish Armada was chased from 
 Plymouth round the South and East coasts of 
 England, and finally broke, fled, or went to the 
 
"WESTWARD HO!" 371 
 
 bottom, some escaping to Norway, a few under 
 Medina Sidonia back to Spain ; and England was 
 saved, and the long dream of Spanish ambition 
 and Popish vengeance dispelled for ever. Through 
 all this variety of incident and character Mr. 
 Kingsley never flags, never becomes wearisome. 
 His men and women live in his pages, talk life and 
 not book ; and our sympathies move with them, 
 so that, as in life, we do not impatiently look for 
 the issue, but take an ever new interest in the de- 
 tails of the progress towards the issue. There 
 may be differences of opinion as to the estimate 
 Mr. Kingsley has formed of particular men of the 
 age ; there certainly will be opposition elicited by 
 some of his opinions on the religious manifesta- 
 tions of that age ; Papist and Puritan will scoff 
 almost alike at his estimate of the Church-of-Eng- 
 landism of that day ; and while the Dissenter of 
 to-day has little reason to quarrel with the novel- 
 ist for embodying Elizabethan Puritanism in such 
 a stern warrior, admirable seaman and gunner, 
 true comrade, Spaniard-hating and God-fearing 
 Englishman, as Salvation Yeo of Clovelly, we are 
 not disposed to accept Mr. Kingsley's types as ex- 
 pressive of any but one and that the worst form 
 
372 ESSJlYS. 
 
 of Romanism in the age he depicts. But this is 
 not so much unfairness on his part, as a necessity 
 of his story, which leads him to deal with plotting 
 Jesuits, seminary priests, and Spanish American 
 bishops and inquisitors, rather than with the body 
 of English Catholic gentry, to whose loyalty he 
 bears high and notoriously well-deserved testimo- 
 ny. Still, the result is a somewhat jarring sense 
 of a partial representation in this respect, which 
 we wish the constructive skill of the writer had 
 been employed to obviate ; though we would not, 
 for any breadth of charity or comprehensive phi- 
 losophy, lose or weaken the intensity of his con- 
 viction that the Protestant cause in that day was 
 the cause of God, of freedom, of English nat^on- 
 ality, of American United States, and of all which 
 has made Europe different from what it would 
 have become had the Spanish dream of universal 
 empire and the destruction of Protestantism been 
 realized. It was this conviction that was at the 
 root of the heroism of our land in that day, and 
 it is the reflective glow of this conviction that 
 gives its spirit-stirring trumpet tone to Mr. Kings- 
 ley's representation of that heroism. 
 
 We began by saying that Mr. Kingsley had 
 
" WESTWARD HO!" 373 
 
 chosen his theme well, because of its interest at 
 any time to us Englishmen, descendants of the he- 
 roes of the Armada. But just now it seems es- 
 pecially opportune that we should look back for 
 practical lessons, for encouragement, direction, 
 and warning, to an age when great actions seemed 
 the spontaneous instinct of the community, and 
 success rose to the amplest range of aspiration. 
 K miracles were wrought then, they were wrought 
 by men using human means, under that agency 
 
 
 
 which will always work miracles — under the in- 
 spiration of a faith in righteousness being the law 
 and order of the world — of a manful resolution 
 to dare everything for the right — of a prudence 
 to judge of means — of a gallant spirit to hold 
 life and labor and pain all well spent in the ser- 
 vice of their country, and in the cause of God, 
 freedom, and human happiness. The same spirit, 
 employing means and mechanical skill of which 
 Elizabeth's heroes never dreamed in their wildest 
 aspirations, will again produce proportionate re- 
 sults. But we talk of righteousness and faith in 
 God, and believe in mechanical forces calculable 
 by measurement and arithmetic ; we talk of genius 
 and strong will, and believe in routine and a system 
 
374 ESSAYS. 
 
 of mutual check ; we believe ia these, or rather 
 we have no belief in anything, and this is the ex- 
 pression of our unbelief, our incapacity, our help- 
 lessness, our despair. Welcome war, welcome 
 pestilence, welcome anything that will rouse the 
 once noble English nation from this paralysis of 
 true human, true national life ; that will force us 
 once more to seek out clear heads and brave 
 hearts, and thank God, as for His choicest gifts, 
 for men who will work themselves, and govern us 
 and teach us to work — for men like those wor- 
 thies ' whom ' as Mr. Kingsley says in a hearty 
 dedication of his book to the Bishop of New Zea- 
 land and Rajah Sir James Brooke, 'Elizabeth, 
 without distinction of rank or age, gathered round 
 her in the ever-glorious wars of her great reign.' 
 Westward Ho I partakes much more of the 
 character of biography and history than of the or- 
 dinary sentimental novel. Love plays a great 
 part in the progress of the story, as it does in the 
 lives of most men ; but it is as motive influencing 
 character and determining action that it is exhib- 
 ited, not as itself the sole interest of life, the sin- 
 gle feeling which redeems human existence from 
 dullness and inward death. The love which acts 
 
" WESTWARD HO!" 375 
 
 on the career and character of Amyas Leigh does 
 ftot spend itself in moonlight monologues or in 
 passionate discourses with its object ; nor does the 
 story depend for its interest upon the easily rous- 
 ed sympathy of even the stupidest readers with 
 the ups and downs, the fortunes and emotions, of 
 a passion common in certain degrees and certain 
 kinds to all the race. It is no such narrow view 
 of life that is presented here, but rather that 
 broad sympathy with human action and human 
 feeling in its manifold completeness which gives to 
 art a range as wide as life itself, and throws a 
 consecrating beauty over existence from the cra- 
 dle to the grave, wherever human affections act, 
 wherever human energies find their object and 
 their field, wherever the battle between right and 
 wrong, between sense and spirit, is waged — 
 wherever and by whatever means characters are 
 trained, principles strengthened, and humanity de- 
 veloped. And this comprehensive character — 
 displaying itself in assigning its true relative value 
 to each thing — we take to be the distinguishing 
 test of high art, and that which marks it out from 
 all mere sentimentalism, prettiness, eclecticism, or 
 whatever other name we may give to man's at- 
 
376 ESSA VS. 
 
 tempts to reduce nature to some standard of his 
 own taste, or the taste of a particular age or 
 clique, instead of endeavoring to enlarge his heart 
 and open his eyes to see and feel the wonders and 
 the splendors which are poured down from heaven 
 on earth, in the least of which as in the greatest 
 the Infinite reveals Himself for those who through 
 the letter can penetrate to the spirit. 
 
" N O C T E S A M B E O S I A N M" 
 
"JVOCTES AMBROSIAJ^TM." 379 
 
 WILSON'S "NOCTES AMBROSIANM." 
 
 Many of the causes which contributed to the in- 
 terest excited by the Nodes AmbrosicmcB, on their 
 first appearance in successive numbers of Blaclo- 
 wood's Magazine, have ceased to operate. Po- 
 litical measures round which parties were then 
 struggling with fierce passion and loud mutual 
 denunciation have been built as firmly into the 
 constitution as Magna Charta itself. The men en- 
 gaged in those conflicts have become historical 
 personages, or have fallen into utter oblivion ; in 
 either case escaping from the partial judgments of 
 that time, and no longer lending a charm not its 
 own to panegyric or invective. So, too, the lite- 
 rary celebrities of that day have either attained a 
 fixed rank or been forgotten ; we no longer inter- 
 
380 Ess^rs 
 
 est ourselves in disputes about their claims. And 
 in the case of both political and literary persona- 
 ges, what was then fresh and piquant personality 
 has become familiar history or stale gossip ; point- 
 ed allusions have lost their force, half-revelations 
 have been superseded ; and we wonder, as we 
 read, at the amount of feeling exhibited towards 
 men and women who are now, for the most part, 
 shadowy names, with scarce an association con- 
 necting them with our living sympathies. Yet, in 
 spite of this inevitable effect of the lapse of twenty 
 or thirty years upon papers discussing so largely 
 topics and people of temporary interest, such is 
 the high quality of the genius lavished upon them, 
 that the public will read by far the larger portion 
 of the Nodes with as much delight as at first. 
 They appear now with a claim to rank as English 
 classics — as the choicest production of their au- 
 thor, one of the most highly endowed men of his 
 time. Their chief interlocutor, the eidolon of the 
 Ettrick Shepherd, is ranked by Professor "Wilson's 
 admirers with the most forcible characters known 
 to us through history or created by fiction. Thus, 
 Professor Perrier, introducing the Nodes with a 
 preface, says — " In wisdom, the Shepherd equals 
 
"JVOCTES JlMSROSIAJV^." 881 
 
 the Socrates of Plato ; in humor, he surpasses the 
 Falstaff of Shakspeare ; clear and prompt, he 
 might have stood up against Dr. Johnson in close 
 and peremptory argument ; fertile and copious, he 
 might have rivalled Burke in amplitude of decla- 
 mation." Socrates, Falstaff, Dr. Johnson, and 
 Burke, all in one ! and that one talking a broad 
 Doric, that seems to an English ear the native di- 
 alect of humor, plastic alike to pathos, fun, and 
 homely shrewdness ; a shepherd, too, knowing all 
 the shy charms of nature in remotest haunts of 
 solitude and silence — all the racy characteristics 
 of pastoral life and pastoral people, their joys, 
 their sorrows, their pleasures, and their business. 
 Estimated thus, the Shepherd of the Nodes W(juld 
 really be the most marvellous of the creations of 
 that literature which stands highest among the 
 literatures of Europe for its presentation of hu- 
 man character. And, with some qualification, the 
 estimate is not so absurd as at first sight our ha- 
 bitual reverence for such names as Professor Eer- 
 rier has brought into his comparison would consid- 
 er it. 
 
 The truth is, that Wilson, one of the most re- 
 markable men that ever lived for the variety and 
 
382 ESSAYS. 
 
 strength of his powers, has thrown into the Shep- 
 herd's talk the teeming activity of his own mind 
 and heart ; and so far as characters are displayed 
 in life, and in that fiction which reflects life, solely 
 by their desultory talk, the Shepherd may fairly 
 be matched with any one. If it was simply as a 
 shrewd talker that we knew Socrates — if Falstaff 
 was to us simply a sayer of good things, Dr. John- 
 son a hard hitter in argument, Burke a copious 
 and splendid declaimer — Wilson's shepherd might 
 without exaggeration be put upon a level with all 
 these remarkable characters. He talks as shrewd- 
 ly as Socrates, as wittily as Falstaff, as weightily 
 as Johnson, as splendidly as Burke ; or, at least, 
 the exaggeration of such assertions might pass 
 without challenge. He does talk more shrewdly, 
 wittily, weightily, and splendidly, than any man 
 we have the pleasure of knowing. But the talk 
 of these famous personages is all related to action 
 or serious discussion — is the genuine utterance 
 of the men in contact with facts, either engaged 
 in the business of life or in the pursuit of truth. 
 Something more is revealed by it than a kaleido- 
 scope quickness and variety of intellect ; it dis- 
 plays at once and subserves the will and the affec- 
 
"jyOCTES AMBROSlJlJVJE." 383 
 
 tions. Socrates talks cleverly, and gets his oppo- 
 nent generally into chancery — a feat which would 
 raise him to the rank of a first-rate gophist ; but 
 we value him for his genuine earnestness in pur- 
 suit of truth, his plainness, his fearlessness, his 
 candor, his pure and aspiring soul — dialectic is 
 simply his instrument. Falstaff is witty, but not 
 wittier than Sheridan or Hook : what we admire 
 in him is the profound sincerity of his sensual 
 abasement — the devotion of the whole man, wit, 
 understanding, reason, conscience, to the pleas- 
 ures of the animal man — his utter insensibility to 
 the higher claims and enjoyments of his humanity ; 
 it is a character, not a talker, that delights us in 
 the fat knight. So in Johnson, and Burke, the 
 talk is merely instrumental, symptomatic of a 
 whole man talking. But in the Shepherd of the 
 Nodes the talk is the be-all and the end-all ; the 
 man is a talker and little else ; and we identify 
 him with his talk almost as little as we do an act- 
 or with his part. This is partly owing to the form 
 adopted : desultory talk " de omnibus rebus et 
 quibusdam aliis " can never thoroughly develop a 
 character — can do nothing but show a man's ver- 
 satility of intellect and command of language. 
 
384 ESSAYS. 
 
 But it is also owing to the fact that one of the 
 Shepherd's traits is the queerest and most gro- 
 tesque vanity — almost the only trait borrowed 
 from the original model ; and that he is through- 
 out represented as talking for effect, to show off 
 his eloquence. We have not, consequently, a 
 character completely developed, but merely a man 
 who can assume all characters for the nonce ; can 
 be funny, pathetic, wise, descriptive, poetical, or 
 sensual, just as the play requires. And he is so 
 palpably acting that he tires us by his cleverness 
 of assumption, just as a hired mountebank would 
 tire us by insisting on showing off his powers of 
 mimicry in conversation. 
 
 Another objection to the Nodes as a whole may 
 be conveyed in the words of Mr. Foster, who, in 
 his admirable life of Goldsmith, says — " Of the 
 many clever and indeed wonderful writings that 
 from age to age are poured forth into the world, 
 what is it that puts upon the few the stamp of im- 
 mortality, and makes them seem indestructible as 
 nature ? what is it but their wise rejection of 
 everything superfluous ? " We estimate works of 
 art, as we estimate characters in life, more by 
 their unity and completeness than by their rich- 
 
"JVOCTES AMBROSIAJ\rX." 385 
 
 ness and profusion of raw material. It is cohe- 
 rence, order, purpose, which make the difference 
 between Nature and Chaos. And if all the wit, 
 the wisdom, the geniality, and the imagination of 
 the Nodes Ambrosiance fail to secure them a place 
 among English classics, it will be because these 
 are reduced to no order, subordinated to no gene- 
 ral purpose, organized into no whole. They will 
 even then remain the very best magazine papers 
 that were probably ever written. 
 
 17 
 
COMTE'S POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. 
 
COMTE'S POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 COMTE'S POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 The " Cours de Philosophie Positive " is at once 
 a compendious cyclopedia of science and an ex- 
 hibition of scientific nfietliod. It defines rigor- 
 ously the characteristics of the several orders of 
 phenomena with which the particular sciences are 
 concerned, arranges them in an ascending scale 
 of complexity and specialty beginning with mathe- 
 matics and ending with social physics or sociolo- 
 gy, and assigns to each science its proper method 
 in accordance with the nature of the phenomena 
 to be investigated. The connexion between the 
 sciences thus arranged is, that the laws of each 
 preceding order of phenomena are operative in 
 that which succeeds, but in combination with a 
 new order of laws, the study of which constitutes 
 
390 ESSAYS. 
 
 the advanced science. As might be supposed, 
 the sciences have historically developed them- 
 selves in accordance with this arrangement, the 
 simpler and more general first, the more complex 
 and special afterwards. Thus we obtain not only 
 a lucid and rational classification, but a logical 
 genealogy and an historical law of evolution, 
 forming a sure basis for education and a luminous 
 indication of future progress. An arrangement 
 so simple in its principle, so fruitful in its results, 
 one may well be astonished at having had so many 
 ages to wait for. It is, however, unquestionable 
 that, though half-formed suggestions of such a 
 classification are here and there to be found, and 
 though Hegel in particular, proceeding on a total- 
 ly different method, has reached an arrangement 
 that superficially resembles M. Comte's, yet to 
 the latter belongs the honor of having thoroughly 
 worked out the conception, of having rigorously 
 determined and decisively constituted the filiation, 
 of having exhibited the relations between phe- 
 nomena and method, and finally of having accu- 
 rately conceived and initiated the crowning sci- 
 ence of sociology, with its two departments of so- 
 cial statics and social dynamics, dealing the one 
 
COMTE'S POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. 391 
 
 with the conditions of the stability of human so- 
 cieties, the other with the laws of their progress. 
 Because it is not merely a cyclopaedia of scientific 
 facts, but an exhibition of the methods of human 
 knowledge and of the relations between its difi"er- 
 ent branches, M. Oomte calls his work philosophy ; 
 and because it limits itself to what can be proved, 
 he terms it positive philosophy. 
 
 That, during the twenty years since the appear- 
 ance of the first volume of the original work, it 
 has powerfully influenced the thoughts and wri- 
 tings of the most exact minds engaged in specula- 
 tion in this country, will be doubtful to no one 
 who compares the books published on the general 
 principles and mutual relations of science before 
 and since its appearance. That it has given a far 
 more special and directing impulse to those wri- 
 ters than most of them have or would be willing 
 publicly to avow, is Miss Martineau's opinion, and 
 one of her motives — a highly honorable one — for 
 presenting a translation of the original work to 
 the English public. The motive assigned by Miss 
 Martineau for this assumed reluctance to credit 
 Comte with his due share of influence, is one like- 
 ly enough to have prevailed with all English wri- 
 
392 ESSAYS. 
 
 ters who were not very far above the common lev- 
 el in moral courage, or very far below it in inso- 
 lent bravado and conceited contempt for the opin- 
 ions and sympathies of their countrymen. For 
 M. Comte's book, besides being, as we have de- 
 scribed it, a treatise on science and scientific meth- 
 ods, is also a fierce polemic against theology and 
 metaphysics, with all the notions and sentiments 
 that have their roots in them, all the beliefs and 
 hopes which are considered, among us, if not the 
 foundations, at least indispensable supports of 
 morality. M. Comte scornfully denounces theism 
 and atheism as equally unwarrantable intrusions 
 into a province beyond the faculties, and barren 
 for the needs of man ; he treats our hope of a life 
 beyond the grave as a childish chimera ; mind he 
 scouts as a metaphysical entity, on a level with 
 the " occult causes " of the schoolmen ; Him, 
 whom other men worship as the source and sus- 
 tainer of their own lives, and of all the powers at 
 work around them, he treats as a poor old de- 
 throned Fetish — a roi faineant, kept up, like the 
 descendant of the Great Mogul, from unmeaning 
 habit of accustomed reverence, or the idle preju- 
 dices and selfish interests of metaphysicians and 
 
COMTE'S POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. 393 
 
 theologians — a useless ceremonial, from which all 
 power has been transferred to positive laws, and 
 all glory to their discoverers. In the universe of 
 man and the worlds he resolves to see only a vast 
 consensus of forces, an infinite whirl and rush of 
 phenomena, of which we can loam by observation 
 the uniform coexistences and sequences, but know 
 not, nor need to know, whence they flashed into 
 being, what power sustains them, or what their 
 mighty movements mean. What appears, we may 
 and should investigate — to what is, we have no 
 access, no ascertainable relation. M. Comte aims, 
 in fact, not simply at renovating science by re- 
 forming its general conceptions and completing its 
 range, but at rigidly limiting human beliefs and 
 speculations, and on the basis of . demonstrable 
 knowledge of phenomena constituting a reformed 
 order of practical life and society. It was long 
 ago said by one of our most brilliant living wits, 
 "There is no God, and Miss Martineau is his 
 prophet "; and it therefore excites no surprise that 
 the same pretensions, which are supposed to have 
 deterred other English writers from acknowledg- 
 ing their obligation to the French philosopher, ' 
 should have induced her to undertake the labori- 
 17* 
 
394 ESSAVS. 
 
 ous task of translating and condensing his six 
 bulky volumes into two. She sees in his strict 
 limitation of the human faculties to phenomenal 
 knowledge — in his treatment of all that cannot 
 be demonstrated by sensible experience as chime- 
 ras — a means not otherwise procurable of reme- 
 dying the intellectual anarchy of her country, of 
 reinstating firm beliefs and impregnable principles 
 in religion, morals, and politics, and so putting a 
 final check upon the spread of weak and inconsis- 
 tent practice, general faintness of heart and uncer- 
 tainty of mind. For she too thinks that all the old 
 beliefs and philosophies were but leading-strings 
 and baby-jumpers for our race ; that they have 
 long encumbered the movements of the growing 
 boy, and must be cleared off — sent abroad, per- 
 haps, for the aborigines of Australia and Terra del 
 Fuego, who have yet to pass through the phases of 
 Western Europe, though the duration of the cri- 
 sis may be materialUy abridged for them by the 
 influence of the nations which have preceded them 
 in the course of human evolution. 
 
 It is these pretensions of the positive philoso- 
 phy with which alone we profess to deal, because 
 it is of these alone that there can be any dispute 
 
COMTE'S POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. 395 
 
 amongst competent persons. If observation of 
 phenomena is our sole source of knowledge, no 
 no one questions but that the " inductive canons " 
 are the guides to accurate observation and the 
 rules of safe generalization. The assumption is, 
 however, somewhat extensive ; and M. Comte no- 
 where attempts to demonstrate this fundamental 
 position of his system, unless it is demonstration 
 to assert that theology and metaphysics have been 
 barren speculations, whereas positive science has 
 gone on from age to age extending its domain and 
 adding to men's practical and demonstrable knowl- 
 edge. This, however, our space will not allow us 
 to discuss. Nor can we do more even with res- 
 pect to these pretensions than to speak of some 
 preliminary considerations which lie in the way of 
 their admission. As a series of treatises on the 
 various sciences, M. Comte's work might be full 
 of errors of detail without much impairing its 
 value as a philosophic classification ; and in fact, 
 with respect to all but the simple sciences, even 
 if it had been without blemish at the time of its 
 publication, years are so rapidly developing our 
 knowledge that it could have retained its perfec- 
 tion only a short time. As a treatise on method, 
 
396 ESSMVS. 
 
 it falls so far short of Mr. J. S. Mill's Logic in 
 exhaustive treatment and in clear terse style, and 
 has besides been so ably criticised by him in vari- 
 ous parts of that admirable work, that it is super- 
 fluous to point out its special defects to the Eng- 
 lish student of philosophy. In spite of antiquated 
 details, and of special defects, however, the work 
 will always retain a most distinguished place in 
 the history of opinion ; and to it must the student 
 resort who shall hereafter wish to see the form 
 which the science of social physics acquired in the 
 hands of its first rigorously positive investigator. 
 We have simply to inquire what its great claims 
 are to supply the place of those theological and 
 metaphysical beliefs and sentiments which it pro- 
 poses to supersede — what support it can lend to 
 moral principles and noble conduct, equivalent to 
 the aids of which it would deprive us. 
 
 It is not unlikely that a preliminary objection 
 would ordinarily be taken against the pretensions 
 of positivism to exclude all other motives to ac- 
 tion, and other grounds of assurance, in the fact 
 that except for the simpler sciences, from geome- 
 try to chemistry — physiology rapidly advancing 
 to meet them — it is as yet in its infancy, and has 
 
COMTE'S POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. 897 
 
 no body of doctrine to substitute for what it dis- 
 places. A positivist would answer to this, that 
 conscious ignorance is better than chimerical fan- 
 cies, which not only themselves mislead, but pre- 
 vent the growth of true doctrine ; that we are 
 possessed of empirical laws as to physical life, in- 
 dividual conduct, and social organization, by which 
 to direct experiments and guide practice with more 
 or less approximation to truth ; and that, scien- 
 tific conceptions and scientific methods once institu- 
 ted, a body of doctrine will accumulate with a rap- 
 idly accelerating ratio. A more fundamental ob- 
 jection is, that after leaving physiology, we get 
 into a' region of phenomena where Will plays a 
 leading part, and, quite apart from all considera- 
 tion of theistic interference, introduces a disturb- 
 ing element that bafijes the previsions of science 
 by destroying the uniformity in the connexion of 
 the phenomena of conduct. Whatever theory, how- 
 ever, be held about the human will, whatever phras- 
 es be preferred to express our consciousness of its 
 mode of operation, it is undeniable that an act of 
 determination is uniformly preceded by a predomi- 
 nant desire in conformity with that act. The ques- 
 tion therefore really is, can the succession of our 
 
398 ESSAVS. 
 
 desires be reduced to uniform laws ? Given the 
 character and the circumstances of a man, is it 
 possible to determine what desires will direct his 
 action ? The popular, or rather the metaphysical 
 voice, denies this possibility ; but, we think, more 
 in the interest of certain other theories — such for 
 instance as human responsibility — than because 
 facts compel this denial. For if this determina- 
 tion of human actions be really impossible under 
 the assumed conditions, — in other words, if hu- 
 man actions are capricious and arbitrary in any 
 other sense than arises from the complexity and in- 
 calculable nature of the motives which determine 
 them, — what is the meaning of education, of 
 moral and social influences, of any legislation but 
 what is penal, or indeed even of penal legislation ? 
 Plainly, all these agencies rest for their validity 
 upon the commonly-believed fact that motives in- 
 fluence conduct ; that one train of motives ever 
 acting upon a human being of given tendencies 
 induces conduct different from another train of 
 motives. Religion itself, what is it but a fresh 
 and higher presentation of motives — truths re- 
 vealed to influence human conduct, which oth- 
 er known truths are not capable of influencing 
 
COMTE'S POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. 399 
 
 in the same direction to the same degree ? 
 It is true that nothing appears at first sight 
 more variable, more capricious, less subject to 
 any uniformity of sequence, than the phenom- 
 ena of human conduct : but then it is to be re- 
 membered that the determining condition of hu- 
 man conduct are infinitely various and complex. 
 For this reason, Mr. Mill has carefully guarded 
 against the extravagant supposition that the future 
 acts of men and of societies can, in the highest 
 possibilities of social science, be foreseen like the 
 phenomena of the heavenly bodies ; and has lim- 
 ited the utmost attainment of that science to de- 
 termine that given circumstances have a tendency 
 to alter given characters in ascertainable degrees 
 and directions, or that under given circumstances 
 given characters will act in a determinate manner. 
 Nor has M. Comte carried his speculations to a 
 more extravagant pitch than this ; which seems, 
 after all said, to be nothing more than the enunci- 
 ation with scientific precision of a belief we all 
 act upon every day of our lives, and on which 
 most of the institutions of society — i. e. all which 
 have a moral or educational aim — are founded. 
 Putting aside, then, these two objections, which 
 
400 ESSAYS. 
 
 lie, the one against the present claims, the other 
 against the possibility, of social science, — and sup- 
 posing such a science not only to the extent indi- 
 cated possible, not only constituted in conception 
 and method, but so far constructed as that the ten- 
 dencies of men and of societies under given cir- 
 cumstances shall be rigorously demonstrated, — 
 our inquiry is, whether such knowledge is ade- 
 quate to supply the forces necessary to maintain 
 individuals and societies in a right course of (^on- 
 duct. We assume the conditions known under 
 which the human being may be trained to any giv- 
 en line of conduct ; but how do we determine the 
 line of conduct to be enforced on men and on so- 
 cieties ? The phenomena of human action being, 
 in virtue of their complexity, eminently modifia- 
 ble, have we from positivism any principle on 
 which to found our modifying interference, any 
 end by which to shape our education, our social 
 organization, our legislation ? Comte bases on 
 the past history of human evolution a brilliant 
 generalization of the phases of speculative opinion 
 through which mankind has passed or must pass, 
 and indicates the coexistent social and political 
 phenomena which belong to each phase. -In eve- 
 
COMTE'S POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. 401 
 
 ry department of speculation that has run its. 
 course, mankind has passed through three stages, 
 or modes of viewing the phenomena whose expla- 
 nation is sought, — the theologic, in which all ac- 
 tion in the world is referred to a volition in or 
 above the objects moved ; the metaphysic, in which 
 the action is referred to mysterious entities sup- 
 posed to reside in objects moving^ and which are 
 in fact nothing but abstract conceptions of the 
 phenomena themselves ; and finally the positive, 
 in which no explanation is sought beyond the clas- 
 sification of the phenomenon along with similar 
 phenomena, and the ascertainment of its precedent 
 conditions. This bare statement can give not the 
 faintest conception of the value of the generaliza- 
 tion — if only estimated as an hypothetical ap- 
 proximation to a true law — in studying universal 
 history. But M. Comte authoritatively lays it 
 down as demonstrated to be the leading law of hu- 
 man evolution, since all other social phenomena 
 follow its phases. If we are not satisfied with his 
 proofs, — if we object that the first links in the 
 chain of evidence are altogether wanting, and 
 that the hypothesis is based upon no exhaustive 
 analysis even of the facts which history has re- 
 
402 ESSAYS. 
 
 corded, — we are cavalierly informed that social 
 science requires the establishment of such a law, 
 and established therefore it is and shall be. This 
 law of evolution being then established to M. 
 Comte's satisfaction, and for the sake of argument 
 to ours also, how does it supply the guiding prin- 
 ciple we are in quest of to regulate the future 
 course of that evolution, so far as our modifying 
 power may extend ? Here M. Comte becomes al- 
 together obscure and contradictory. It seems 
 sufi&cient to him to know the law of the phases 
 through which belief has passed in reference to 
 certain departments of science, and is, in his opin- 
 ion, to pass in all branches of knowledge and spec- 
 ulation. The other social phenomena being de- 
 pendent on or at least following the changes of 
 speculative opinion, their law is known too. But 
 we are.,as far off as ever from any guide for indi- 
 vidual conduct, or for the action of society. It 
 may be that M. Comte thinks it superfluous, hav- 
 ing indicated a law of human progression, to do 
 more than hint that we are to obey it, and become 
 positive as quickly as we may ; and that this once 
 in course of accomplishment, the social movement 
 will proceed harmoniouslv in its normal course. 
 
COMTE'S POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. 403 
 
 bringing felicity the highest attainable to individ- 
 uals and to societies. But even this very vague 
 injunction, to make positivism our aim and guid- 
 ing principle of conduct, has after all not even the 
 slight practical bearing which at first sight it seems 
 to have. For we are over and over again assured 
 by M. Comte, that the general course of human 
 evolution is beyond human control ; that only sec- 
 ondary modifications as to speed and minor indi- 
 rect influences of the main movement are within 
 our power. Indeed, the whole course of his de- 
 monstration from history shows this, inasmuch as 
 the evolution has proceeded into the third and 
 final stage not only without conscious effort of men 
 so to direct it, but against their continuous effort 
 to thwart it and turn it to another direction. If, 
 then, only secondary modifications and indirect 
 fluctuations and regurgitations of the main current 
 are within our influence to control and regulate, 
 of what possible use can it be to inform us only 
 of the main law of evolution, with whose course 
 we have nothing to do but to acknowledge it and 
 submit to it ? It is just of the things that are 
 within our power that we have need to know, in 
 order to regulate our conduct. A man wishing to 
 
4M ESSAYS. 
 
 build a house must indeed obey the law of univer- 
 sal gravitation, but it will help him little practi- 
 cally to have that law enunciated with the most 
 convincing pomp of historical proof and the most 
 rigid mathematical precision. We are obliged 
 to conclude, then, that positivism in M. Comte's 
 hands, while pretending to take upon itself the 
 regulation of human conduct, fails to furnish a 
 guiding principle for either individuals or societies. 
 It sends us to sea with an admirable chart of the 
 tides, currents and winds ; instructs us how emi- 
 nently modifiable these forces are by the rudder ; 
 but declines to provide us with a compass, or to 
 say anything about the port for which we have to 
 steer. All that can be done in such a case is to 
 lie on one's back and look at the stars, or exercise 
 an empirical prudence in selecting such a course 
 as fancy or foresight may suggest. To drop met- 
 aphor, we must still have recourse to our celestial 
 guides, or to our internal monitions, in our voyage 
 along the stormy sea of life ; for M. Comte pro- 
 vides us with no satisfactory substitute. 
 
 But morality implies not only a fixed aim, a 
 principle of action to maintain steadiness amid the 
 conflicts of contending motives ; it equally de- 
 
COMTE'S POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. 405 
 
 mands ruling influences that are adequate to main- 
 tain obedience to the principle- of action, persis- 
 tence towards the aim. Suppose, then, society 
 constituted on a positive basis, its principle of ex- 
 istence undisputed, what motives could the system 
 present to the members of society, young and old, 
 to compel obedience to its regulations ? of what 
 forces would its moral police find themselves pos- 
 sessed ? They would have the advantage to begin 
 with of a uniform state of belief, moulding all so- 
 cial influences and institutions, and so by its indi- 
 rect as well as direct effects tending to check that 
 intellectual discord and uncertainty from which so 
 much of our social and individual weakness pro- 
 ceeds ; an enormous force, not to be easily over- 
 estimated — liable, however, we must remember, to 
 be rudely broken in upon by speculations of a con- 
 trary character, so long as any field remained 
 open for such speculations ; and to the young citi- 
 zens of the Positive society the Unknown would 
 still remain open, and dreams and reminiscences 
 could scarcely fail to float in from that region, 
 and fall as fruitful seeds on spirits impatient, as 
 experience tells us human spirits ever will be, of 
 the limitations of certain knowledge. So that 
 
406 ESSAYS. 
 
 even for positivism there is no guarantee against 
 the inroads of metaphysics and mysticism. But, 
 be that worth what it may as an argument, the di- 
 rect moral force of positive teaching would lie in 
 the demonstration of the issues of conduct on so- 
 ciety at large and on the individuals acting — in 
 the strength and vivacity of the personal and gen- 
 eral affections ; of course, rewards and punish- 
 ments might be as effectual as with us at present. 
 In fact, with the exception indicated above, and 
 that only amounts to difference of degree, the mo- 
 tives of positivism are all in force now ; and ad- 
 ded to them are all those sentiments, hopes and 
 fears, that spring from a belief in God and a con- 
 fidence of life beyond the grave. We can speak 
 of self-interest, of love of country, of attachment 
 to friends and relations, of the closer ties of fam- 
 ily and love between man and woman, of the 
 charms of knowledge, of the influences of art, of 
 the sympathies inspired by generous actions, as 
 well as the positivist. But we can speak too of a 
 personal Being of infinite love, purity, and power, 
 to whom we arc responsible, and who we are 
 taught to believe watches our course with a tender 
 interest, for which no name is sufficiently express- 
 
COMTE'S POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY. 407 
 
 ive but those which denote the dearest earthly re- 
 lationships. "We can speak too of a life hereafter, 
 and are taught to believe that the formation of 
 character is of infinite importance compared with 
 all other issues of conduct, because character is 
 eternal, and what is done and thought here bears 
 fruit of weal or wo beyond the limits of time, 
 even these mighty moral forces are continually 
 found insufficient to keep us up to our imperfect 
 sense of duty, to make us ever regard that high- 
 est social law which says ' Thou shalt love thy 
 neighbor as thyself.' What, then, has positivism 
 to offer as a corrective to selfish passions and 
 shortsighted lust of present gratification, that can 
 do in the place of these ? We assumed vastly too 
 much when we conceded to this system that the 
 affections will flourish with the same vigor if the 
 belief of man's immortality is destroyed ; yet 
 these, again, are among our strongest purifying 
 influences — strongest to refine, strongest to free 
 from selfishness. So it appears that this system 
 not only fails to provide an aim for the action of 
 man and of society, but if an aim were conceded 
 to it, has no moral force to keep men steady, no 
 counteracting power to the notorious selfishness 
 
408 ESSAVS. 
 
 and sensuality against which we have to be ever 
 on our guard. 
 
 But if all else prospered with the positive phi- 
 losophy — if demonstration compelled us to ad- 
 mit its law of historical evolution — if it provided 
 aims and motives to individual or social conduct 
 — there remains one objection fatal, in our opin- 
 ion, to its presumptions. It professes the power 
 to elevate human life to heights of felicity and 
 knowledge of which we as yet only dream — that 
 it will bring round the golden year for which po- 
 ets have tuned their most stirring songs and proph- 
 ets yearned upon their watch-towers : and could it 
 perform all its votaries promise, what would be 
 the inevitable result ? Undoubtedly that, the 
 lovelier and the richer life grew — the higher in 
 dignity, the firmer in purpose, the fuller of grand 
 results — the fiercer would rise the longing for 
 immortality ; the more would the men and women 
 of the ' crowning race ' shrink back appalled with 
 horror from the thought of personal annihilation. 
 By this contradiction the scheme stands condemn- 
 ed in the moral judgment. Probably, were it to 
 become the. creed of the world, it would be con- 
 demned not by such contradiction, but by belying 
 
COMTE'S POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY 409 
 
 the promises of its author, and by degrading and 
 sensualizing human life till man would care as lit- 
 tle about death as a dog does, or rather seek it as 
 soon as his sensual faculties were so impaired that 
 life yielded less physical pleasure than pain. If a 
 practical test of the positive creed be wanted, 
 there is one ready at hand. Let any one follow 
 to the grave the wife, the child, the parent he has 
 loved and lost, and seek to comfort himself by the 
 reflection that the loved one is absorbed in the 
 grand eire — in the totality of organized life ex- 
 isting through all time in the universe. No ! 
 whatever speculative difficulties may beset and be- 
 wilder us when intellect is busy, and feeling and 
 action suspended for a while, we shall all be glad, 
 when bereavement and sorrow cast their shadows 
 over our path, to take refuge in the faith of our 
 childhood ; and the words of our Burial-service, 
 ' Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord,' will 
 fall upon the ear with an assurance all the more 
 sure from the doubts with which we have strug- 
 gled, and the clouds of speculation that have hid 
 the great moral verities for a time from our over- 
 strained eyes. 
 
 18 
 

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Cornell University Library 
 PR 99.B85 1861 
 
 Essays; 
 
 3 1924 013 353 333 
 
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 '^^^^^iS iiil^ii sir