P/v 603 UJ9i ;,^Aok> Copyright Fzrsi Edition January 1919 Reprinted April 1919 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION BY CHARLES WHIBLKY BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE Vll xliii ESSAYS THE SPRINGS OF ROMANCE IN THE LITERATURE OF EUROPE THE POETRY OF THE PRISON RONSARD AND LA PL^IADE .... north's PLUTARCH ..... THE POEMS OF SHAKESPEARE ELIZABETHAN ADVENTURE IN ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE SIR WALTER SCOTT ..... 1 43 63 115 237^ 389 421 The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/cletails/cu31924027096027 GEORGE WYNDHAM There never was a time in George Wyndham's life when he did not take delight in books. Neither the army nor politics availed to kill the student that was bom within him. A subaltern in barracks, he taught himself Italian, and filled his leisure with the reading of history and poetry. ' The two worlds of dreams and books ' were always very real to him. The present adventure most vividly recalled to his mind the glory of the past. When, in 1885, he set sail for Egypt, ' I do not suppose,' he wrote, ' that any expedition since the days of Roman governors of provinces, has started with such magni- ficence ; we might have been Antony going to Egypt in a purple-sailed galley.' A sojourn in Alexandria after the campaign and the prospect of Cyprus awoke in his mind visions of St. Louis and of the Turks' assault upon Famagusta. When he went to South Africa, Virgil was in his haversack, and he found in the Heims Kringla a means of escape from the tedium of speech-making. His taste in Uterature was cathohc, his enthusiasms were tireless. The joy he took in Gil Bias did not disturb his sincere appreciation of Chaucer. And though he never lost the faculty of looking back to the remote past, as if he were a part of it, or of welcoming the bravery of a new experiment, he was gradually finding out where his true sympathies lay. At the age of twenty-five he was deep in the study of viii ESSAYS OF GEORGE WYNDHAM Ronsard and the Pleiade, eagerly seeking the best editions of their works, and making the transla- tions which he presently gathered together in a memorable book. Meanwhile he had found out for himself the fierce and haunting beauty of Villon. ' Villon's " Rondeau to Death," ' he wrote, ' is colossal ia ten lines. . . . Death strides about inside those ten hnes, as if he had all the world to live in. If you know where to put the candle you can throw a large shadow on the sheet.' Thus, in a spirit of banter, he described himself as ' an archaistic barbarian, wallowing in the six- teenth century, hankering after the thirteenth, and with a stm ruder rehsh for the pagan horseflesh of the Sagas.' Living in the stress of politics, he wrote verses to his friends, and took refuge in a remote period of the past from the havoc of warring parties. In his mind action and reflection were always mingled, and were all the stronger and clearer for their close companionship. He at any rate had no need to echo Coleridge's lament that ' we judge of books by books, instead of referring what we read to our own experience.' Experience was for George Wyndham always the touchstone of hteratiire. He did many things, and hp did them well, and he took joy in them all. With the same zest that he read and discoursed upon A Winter's Tale or Troilus and Cressida, he rode to hounds, or threw himself with a kind of fury mto a ' point- to-point,' or made a speech at the hustings, or sat late in the night talking with a friend. For him one enterprise helped another. He had a better understanding of books, because he was doing a man's work in the world. He served his coimtry with greater wisdom, because he had learned from INTRODUCTION ix books the sane and sound lessons which history has to teach, beca.use he had let his fancy drink deep at the pure well of poetry. His speeches, deUvered within and outside the House of Ciommons, are eloquent witnesses of the value of a literary training. He preserved even on the platform a respect for EngUsh words and phrases, to which our legislators are unaccustomed, and he won a tribute from Hansard, which, I believe, is unique. The index to the Parliamentary Reports does not err on the side of humanity, and yet you may find under the date of 1st February 1900, when Greorge Wyndham defended the army in South Africa with a fine energy and in a noble style, this solemn entry: ' Wyndham's, Mr., "Brilliant" Defence of the War Office.' And when he sat him down to write, nothing that he had learned in the field or the House of Commons came amiss to him. Gibbon once made confession that ' the Captain of the Hampshire Grenadiers had not been useless to the historian of the Roman Empire.' In all humility Greorge W3mdham might have boasted that the panegyrist of Plutarch owed not a httle to the subaltern of the Coldstream Guards. Neverthe- less he knew weU that life was the substance, not the art, of hterature. To do what is worth the doLag does not ask the same quaUties as to tell the news. And in reviewing Stephen Crane's Bed Badge of Courage, George Wyndham admitted the general failure of gallant soldiers to reproduce in words the effect of war. 'Man the potential Cgmbatant,' he wrote, * is fascinated by the pictur- esque and emotional aspects of battle, and the , experts teU him little of either. To gratify that curiosity you must turn from the Soldier to the X ESSAYS OF GEORGE WYNDHAM Artist, who is trained both to see and tell, or in- spired, even without seeing, to divine what thiags have been and must be.' If only men of action had always understood these simple truths, from how many bad books should we have been saved ! n Until 1892 George Wyndham had served no rigid apprenticeship to literature. Hitherto he had amused his leisure with making verses, and had discovered for himself in which provinces of the past he might wander at his ease. He had not learned the value of discipline and self-criticism. And then there began the friendship with W. E. Henley, which completely changed his outlook upon letters. The friendship was well matched, and for- tunate for them both. George Wyndham brought to Henley, condemned perforce to a hfe of physical inactivity, something of the outside world — rthe strife of parties and the hopes, too often remote, of soTuid government. He confronted the settled wisdom of forty-three with the inspiring vitahty of eight-and- twenty. Henley, on the other hand, with his ready gift of sympathy, received the new-comer enthusi- astically. He did far more than this. He opened to him, generously, the stores of his deep and wide knowledge. He accepted him, so to say, as a pupU in letters. He showed him short cuts to the right understanding of poetry and of prose, which he had reached for himself by toUing along the stony, tedious high road of experiment. He advised him what to read ; he lent him books ; he corrected his taste, where he thought it needed correction ; and he INTRODUCTION xi proved of what value apprenticeship may be, even in the craft of letters. Thus he gave aim and purpose to George Wyndham's desultory studies, and the letters, which they exchanged, show how swiftly their accidental acquaintance grew into an equal and lasting friendship. It was Henley who took the first step. He wrote from the office of The National Observer, hoping, as an editor and a stranger, that, since the party was in opposition, George Wyndham might have leisure to contribute from time to time to the journal. The response came (on 22nd October 1892), in an article criticising Mr. Morley and Lord Rosebery, and called ' Whistling for the Wind.' Henceforth George Wyndham was of the inner council of The National Observer, which he aided not only with his pen but with the sound advice of a practical pohtician ; and he was amply repaid by the training, which taught him to surrender his love of ' ancient arti- fice ' to the necessity of a plain statement. When The National Observer passed into other hands, and was succeeded by The New Review, of which its contributors at least possess the happiest memory, George Wjnidham embraced the venture with an ardour of enthusiasm. He kept a sanguine eye upon the triumphant success, in which he had a simple faith, and which never came. He performed all the duties of a director with unfailing zeal ; he touted for ' copy,' hke an old hand ; having come under the spell of Cecil Rhodes in South Africa, he did his best to help the two causes of ImperiaHsm and The New Review, whose Editor preached the doctrine pure and undefiled, by persuading the South Africans to set forth their views in its pages. More than this : he dared to desert, now and again, the stony xii ESSAYS OF GEORGE WYNDHAM ground of politics for the garden of verse, and to show the specimens of his gathering in the pages of the review. Thus he proved himself a good com- rade, fuU of hope always and fertile in resource, as those who worked with him will not forget. And it was not his fault nor Henley's that the readers of the 'nineties found things better suited to their taste than The New Review. ni But Henley did George Wyndham a far greater service than give him an insight into the triumphs and failures of periodical Uterature. In November 1894 he set him to work upon an introduction to North's Plutarch. He could not have designed for him a happier enterprise, and George Wyndham buckled him to the task with a delight not un- mingled with misgiviug. He knew well the diflfi- culty of the undertaking. ' Somebody has truly said,' he had written just before in a letter, ' that no one can write Poetry after they are forty, nor Prose before it.' And here he was at thirty em- barked upon a sea of prose, not knowing when and how he would come to port. The gift of expres- sion was always his, even though hitherto in his full life he had left it untutored, and he sat him- self down resolutely to the ungrateful task of casti- gation. 'The art of writing has to be learned,' said he, 'like everything else, by practice.' And the conquest which he made of a stubborn medium is aU the more to his credit, because he had no natural love of prose. ' I have never cared much for prose, however excellent,' he told Mr. Wilfrid Blunt, INTRODUCTION xiii when the work was done, ' which does not abound naturally in vivid images. . . . My deUght in the Elizabethan and in some modem French writers, is largely derived from their use of imaginative colour.' But he tackled his new task with the same zeal wherewith he addressed sport or politics, and he was rewarded by finding as many chances as he could wish for the use of the coloiu* which he loved. Scholarship is largely a matter of temperament, and George Wyndham, though he had left Eton early to go into the army, could not expel the temperament, which natiire had implanted within him. He had but to call upon a reserve of strength, half-suspected, to be generously answered. With un- tiring diligence he read the Lives in Amyot's French as weU as in North's Enghsh. To trace Shakespeare's debt in Coriolanus, Ccesar, and Antony was a task very near to the heart of one whose love of Shake- speare was not greater than his understanding. So he pegged steadily at Plutarch, ' in growing terror at his increasing size,' and like all good workmen found a real joy in the work. ' He is a very joUy fellow to hve with,' he wrote, ' and I shaU be sorry to say " Good-bye." ' Meanwhile Henley was always at his side with encomragement and good counsel. When George Wyndham complained that he lacked learning, * In any case,' rephed Henley, 'it isn't learning (so- caUed) that is wanted. It is instinct and it is brain.' So Henley liked ' his idea no end,' and told him it was perfectly plain sailing. ' 'Tis as easy as lying,' said he. And then he showed irresistibly the advantages George Wyndham would reap from the field of letters. 'You'll not make the worse xiv ESSAYS OF GEORGE WYNDHAM Prime Minister or even Irish Secretary,' he wrote, ' for having done a good piece of critical Uterature.' And again he asked : ' How do the wrestlings go ? It is good to see you at it ! It means, I think, a style, which is a thing worth having, at whatever cost ! ' Indeed it meant a style, and much else besides — an increased and reasoned under- standing of men and books. It was not aU praise that Henley gave to George Wyndham. He knew how to mingle with the praise salutary warnings. ' You have the writing instinct,' he wrote in February 1895, ' but you have not fostered and developed it, on the one hand ; on the other, you have more or less deboshed it by hallooing and singing of anthems ; that is, by pubHc speaking and making verses. You love a phrase Uke pie, and are aU for altisonancy and colour. But — ! You forget to " jine your flats." You write at a heat, and don't concern yourself enough with the minutiae — ^the Uttle foxes whose absence spoils the vineyard's whole efEect — ^by which the good stuflE is made to show in its goodness.' Here is a sound lesson in style, imparted with a certain ardour, which Henley himself was quick to mitigate. ' I fear,' he added, ' I have played the schoolmaster too fiercely and with too much passion.' But when the work was finished, and on the eve of pubhshing, Henley has no doubt as to its success. 'I can't help thinking,' he said, ' this is going to be a pleasant experience for you — (it has been that already) — and to give you a reputation outside politics. We shall see — that also.' That the essay on Plutarch gave George Wyndham a reputation outside pohtics is certain. It has stood the test of twenty years, and seems a better piece INTRODUCTION xv of work to-day even than it did when it was first submitted to the eye of the reviewers. Whether its publication aided its author's career is a question not so easily answered. Politics, for the very reason of her dulness, is a jealous mistress, and frowns disapproval upon those who are unfaithful for an hour to her solemn blandishments. There can be no doubt about the cordial reception of the work. George Wjnidham's friends (and the Press) were unanimous in appreciation, and George Wyndham took a frank dehght in the world's approval. He sunned himself in the warmth of the applause. ' " Bis das, imo decies et centies," ' he wrote to Mr. Wilfrid Blunt, ' I am overwhelmed by your praise : of course it is excessive, but I have not the false modesty to deny that I rejoice in having won such praise from you. It pleases me the more in that you select for praise the very field in which I care most to conquer. ... I can't thank you enough for having written your first impression, for even if you revise it, it is everything to know that I exacted it once.' That was the just spirit in which George Wyndham received the plaudits of his friends. The work was done, and the doing of it had brought him what was better worth than those plaudits — ^the discipline and seK-criticism, which Mtherto had been absent from his gay facility. IV George Wyndham was by character and training a romantic. He looked with wonder upon the world as upon a fairyland. It was fortunate for him, therefore, that in dealing with Plutarch, he xvi ESSAYS OF GEORGE WYNDHAM dealt not with the Greek text, of which he knew nothing, but with North's incomparable version. Now the Lives, in travelling by a roundabout road from Greek to English, forgot their origin. They are like a beautiful rose, grafted on a briar-stock. Amyot is joined to the Greek by the link of a Latin translation. North knew no version save Amyot's, and had he been suddenly enabled to read the original, he would not have recognised it. As Shakespeare, iu Troiliis and Gressida, turned Homer's heroes into the rufflers of his own time, so North gave to the men of Plutarch's Lives the gait and seeming of true Elizabethans. And George Wyndham envisaged North's version as an English book of the sixteenth century, a book lavishly over- laid with all the vivid colomrs of speech which he loved weU. He felt an instant sympathy with North, because ' he offers Plutarch neither to philo- sophers nor grammarians, but to aU who would understand life and human nature.' This likewise was the purpose of Plutarch, in whom the dramatic sense never slumbered. But he was a clumsy writer of Greek, and had not his work been happily trans- muted by Amyot and North, he would hardly have kept a secure hold upon the imaginations of wise men. Shakespeare would not have rifled, Montaigne would not have chosen for his ' breviary,' the book of a writer, of whom a professor might say with truth that his language is deficient not only in Attic purity, but even in rhetorical and grammatical skill, that he constantly impedes his readers with difficulties, ' occasioned, not by great thoughts struggling for expression,' but by ' carelessness.' However, George Wyndham was unconscious of Plutarch's faults. He knew only the magnificent INTRODUCTION xvii works composed by Amyot and North on Plutarch's theme ; and his enthusiasm flew upon a stronger wing than it would have, had he studied only the prose that came from Chseroneia. Above all, he detected in North an essentially English quality, of which he cherished a heart-whole admira- tion. ' There was ever in the English temper,' says he, ' a certain jovial forwardness, by far removed both from impertinence and bluster, which inclined us, as we should put it, to stand no nonsense from any body. This natural characteristic is strongly marked in North.' Indeed it is, and North was not merely inclined to stand no nonsense in his prose ; ^ he was ready, if need be, and here again George Wyndham was on his side, to fight for his country. It is true that in his work he was an accomplished translator, but he was a knight also, who captained his three hundred men in the Armada year, and who certainly ' had the pidl ' in scenes of battle over the Bishop. This combined love of action and of letters chimed perfectly with George Wyndham's temper. With a natural agreement he quotes Plutarch's admirable saying, that ' he under- stood matters not so much by words, as he came to understand words by common experience and knowledge he had in things.' Perhaps Plutarch never came truly to understand words ; assuredly he never came to love them as North and George Wyndham loved them ; but all three shared a love of action and swift movement. George Wyndham's essay, then, is purely romantic in style and purpose. He uses the language of chivalry for Plutarch's heroes. Of Alexander and Demetrius, of Pyrrhus and Eumenes, he says : ' All are shining figures, all are crowned, aU are the b xviii ESSAYS OF GEORGE WYNDHAM greatest adventurers in the world ; and tumbling out of one kingdom into another, they do battle in glorious meUays for cities and diadems and Queens.' For this very reason that he looked upon his own life as romance, he uses the language of chivalry, and tests his author by his own experience. He brings whatever knowledge he had gained of pohtics and warfare to the task of inter- preting North's Plutarch. He selects there- from whatever agrees with his own humour— by no means a bad method of commentary, especially upon such a writer as Plutarch. For there is some- thing in Plutarch which is a touchstone of him who reads. In turning over the pages of the Lives, a man may try his own character, may discover his own preferences. Or to choose another image, Plutarch's book is a mirror of truth, which clearly reveals the face of him who looks therein. Such was the road of criticism which Montaigne trod. In talking upor paper about Plutarch, as to the first man he met, Montaigne began to sketch himself, and at length succeeded in drawing a full-length portrait of an intimacy which has seldom been surpassed. And George Wyndham, following the same path, humbly and (I think) unconsciously, arrived at the same end of self-portraiture. In other words, he took the study of the Parallel Lives as an opportunity of explaining the views of the soldier and the statesman that he was : he found in North's Plutarch the reflection of his own mind. He insists upon the pohtical importance of Plutarch ; he will have none of the paradox which denies him pohtical understanding ; and he insists upon this more gladly, because he looks out upon men and their actions from the same watch-tower as INTRODUCTION xix Plutarch himself. ' Plutarch's methods,' says he, ' at least in respect of poUtics and war, are not those of analysis or argument, but of pageant and drama, with actors hving and moving against a background of processions that live and move.' That is what he too saw in hfe — ^pageant and drama and pro- cessions, in which he was intent to take his place. With what gusto does he quote from the Lycurgus, the passage which follows : ' He that directeth well must needs be weU obeyed. For like as the art of a good rider is to make his horse gentle and ready at commandment, even so the chiefest point belonging to a prince is to teach his people to obey ! ' Here the doctrine and the image are equally near to Greorge Wyndham's heart, and wisely does he comment upon Plutarch's words. ' They set forth his chief political doctrine,' he says. . . . ' That the horse (or the man) should play the antic at wiU is to him plainly absurd : the horse must be ridden, and the many must be directed and controlled. Yet, if the riding, or the governing, prove a failure, Plutarch's quarrel is with the ruler or the horse- man, not with the people or the mount. For he knows well that "a ragged colt oftimes proves a good horse, especially if he be weU ridden and broken as he should be." ' Never has the part which should be played by the aristocrat in politics been better defined. If Greorge Wyndham found it in Plutarch's pages, perhaps because he sought it dihgently, it was most intimately his own. ' This need of authority,' he wrote, ' and the obligation of the few to main- tain it — ^by " a natural grace," springing, on the one hand, from courage combined with forbearance ; and leading, on the other, to harmony between the XX ESSAYS OF GEORGE WYNDHAM rulers and the ruled — ^is the text, which ... is illustrated throughout the Parallel Lives.' It was the text also, which George Wyndham himself illus- trated both by doctrine and by example. None knew better than he the obhgation of gentleness. Destiny, he thought, had conferred upon him duties as well as privileges, and he esteemed the privi- leges more hghtly than the duties. But who to-day wiU preach to such a text, whose very meaning is obscured in the welter of party interests, of party feuds, of all the uglinesses, that cloud the sky of politics ? If only our statesmen would still remember Plutarch's sound doctrine, enunciated by Creorge Wyndham, of harmony between the rulers and the ruled, the darkest problem which confronts us would be solved, and England woidd recover at last something of her natural grace. Thus Greorge Wyndham, living fiercely in the present, sought confirmation and support in the annals of the past. And comparing past and present, he noted a double contrast between the England of his day and the world of Plutarch's heroes. These heroes, said he, extreme in action, were all for compromise in theory. 'They are ready to seal with their blood such certainty as they can attain.' How difierent was the character which he gave, with perfect justice, to his own countrymen ! ' Ever extreme in theory,' he wrote, ' we are all for compromise in fact ; proud on the one score of our sincerity, on the other of our common- sense. We are fanatics, who yet decline to perse- cute, still less to suffer, for our faith. And this temperance of behaviour, following hard upon the violent utterance of belief, is apt to show something irrational and tame,' With a rare insight, then, he INTRODUCTION xxi discovers the essential contrasts in ancient and modem politics, supplies the analysis and the argu- ment, which he says, truly enough, Plutarch some- times lacks, and then willingly draws the conclusion from his author's narrative that 'theories and sentiments are in politics no more than flags and tuckets in a battle.' Yet George Wyndham would never frown con- temptuously upon flags and tuckets. He loved whatever was sumptuous and decorative in war or in pohtics as warmly as he loved hfe itself. So that, if he praised Plutarch as the ' dramatist in pohtics,' the ' unrivalled painter of men,' he praised him yet more highly as the painter of battle pieces. The backgrounds of the Lives reminded him of those pictures of a bygone mode, in which ' armies engage, fleets are sunk, towns are sacked, and citadels escaladed.' He applauds the art of Plutarch in selecting the dominant facts : ' the proportion of the two armies and the space between ; the sun flashing on the distant shields ; the long suspense ' ; and declares that ' there have been few between Plutarch and Tolstoi to give the scale and perspec- tive of battle by observing such proportion in the art.' Nor does it escape him that Plutarch could be, when he chose, a very Greek in restraint. He could keep the action ofE the stage, and employ the artifice of the messenger as sldlfully as the best of the tragedians. He could contrive ' the reverberation and not the shock of fate.' As Thackeray showed us Waterloo, not in the field but in Brussels, so Plutarch painted Leuctra, un- erringly, in its effect upon Sparta. But nowhere does George Wjmdham use the experience which he had won as a soldier in Egypt to better purpose, than in xxii ESSAYS OF GEORGE WYNDHAM his comment upon Plutarch's picture of the Roman soldiers after Pydna. He recognises with the eye and ear of one who has shared the joys and labours of the field, the groups round the camp-fires, the lights crossing and recrossing, the songs of the merry soldiers, and then speaks, as his memory bids him. ' It is hard,' says he, ' to analyse the art, for the means employed are of the simplest ; yet it is certain that they do recall to such as have known, and that they must suggest to others who have not, those sights and sounds and sensations, which com- bine with a special enchantment about the time of the fall of darkness upon bodies of men who have drunk excitement and borne toil together in the day.' That is sincerely observed and rightly said, and the sincerity and the rightness prove that when a man who has felt the stress of hfe learns to write he makes discoveries which elude the cloistered craftsman. The merit of George Wyndham's essay on Plutarch owes much to the fact that it is the work of one who was a soldier and a politician as well as a writer, who was not merely a Combatant but an Artist. And all the while George Wyndham was constant to the study of French poetry. The sixteenth century held him as firmly in France as in England, and he turned, by a natural sympathy, to Ronsard and the PMiade. In this avowed pre- ference he was a pioneer of taste, at any rate among his own countrymen. Ronsard had suffered the same fate which has since overtaken Victor Hugo : he had been buried beneath the vast INTRODUCTION xxiii monument of his own majestic verse. And pos- terity, envious always, thinking that he, who was acclaimed the Horace or the Pindar of his age, deserved the chastening rod, took a fierce revenge upon the poet for the generous praise lavished upon him in his hfetime. To-day Ronsard belongs no •longer to antiquity, but to the present world of men and poets. The enthusiasm of Barbey d'Aurevilly, the admiration of Gautier, BanviUe and Heredia, the loyal acknowledgment, made by the Disciple Moreas, of the Master Ronsard, have had their •due efEect. In England, not Pater himself has written with a wiser understanding of the great French poet than George Wyndham. With careful appreciation he marks his place in the Pleiade, discovers his sources, praises his sense of beauty. With the devotion of a pilgrim he visited the castle of Ronsard's father, and transcribed the Latin mottoes incised upon the door. By a fortimate accident, he happened upon the ruined Priory of St. Cosme, whither Ronsard, finding his life a con- tinual death, retired from Coxu-t to die, and marked the Gothic door, through which Ronsard passed, from which he never emerged. ' A rose-tree grew up one of the jambs,' wrote George Wjnadham, ' and a vine had thrown a branch across the grey, worm- eaten panels. When I returned next year the door, with its time-worn sculpture, was gone.' What better illustration could be found than this of Ronsard's text : ' Tout ce qui est de beau ne se garde longtemps Les roses et les lis ne regnent qu'un printemps ' ? While George W3mdham extols at its proper worth the work of the Pleiade, he sees plainly enough xxiv ESSAYS OF GEOKGE WYNDHAM whither its rules, too rigidly interpreted, would lead. A chain, though it be woven of roses, is irk- some to bear, and perfection itself, solemnly ordained, may be a tyranny. MaUarme has pointed out that the rules formulated by the successors of the Pleiade would enable anybody to make a verse to which none could object. ' But,' says George Wyndham, ' that savotirs of deportment rather than of poesy.' He recognises it as ' an admir- able maxim . . . for the genteel mob of eighteenth- century couplet-mongers, but a useless counsel and, so, an impertinence to the leader of a revel or a forlorn hope.' Thus he makes plain, in criticising others, his own ambition. He cared not which he led — ^a revel or a forlorn hope in life or letters. Each of them suited the temper of his mind. He was content to be joyous with those who smiled, or to die in the last ditch for a losing cause. And in Ronsard, I think, he loved the gay valour of the man as much as he loved his sentiment of beauty. He liked to remember his spacious life at the Court, the favour shown him by Ehzabeth and Mary Stuart, the silver Minerva, which he won at the Floral Games of Toulouse. But most of aU he reverenced him because he ' was every inch a man, who stood four-square to the whole racket of his day.' It was not for Ronsard, for aU his love of roses and hlies, to pass his time idly in an enchanted garden. 'Here,' says George Wyndham, 'is a citizen and a soldier, a man who takes a side in pohtics and religion, who argues from the rostrum and pommels in the ring, deUghting in aU the trea- sures garnered into the citadel of the past, and ready to die in its defence.' In sketching thus the ideals of Ronsard, George Wyndham sketched his own. INTRODUCTION xxv VI When his essay on Plutarch was finished, a friend demurred to his spending his time upon such toys of criticism. ' I know that you think I should be better employed on original work. But I find that I have a gift of keen imaginative appreciation combined with another of seeing the past as a whole philosophically, which enables me, as a critic, to say things which strike people as original.' Thus he wrote in defence of himself, and he wrote truly. It was no vain boast that he possessed the gift of imaginative appreciation, and having it he would have been untrue to himself had he cast it away. And he might have gone further, and urged that the art of criticism, as he saw it, was creative also. To rescue from the past the fading figures of great men, to select from the annals such facts as shaU give truth to portraiture, to set dead heroes in the light of day — ^this surely is an act of creation. Moreover, Gteorge Wyndham knew weU that original work, in the higher sense, was out of his reach, so long as he was immersed in poUtics. No man shall serve God and Mammon, and the Mammon of poHtics stands in stem opposition to the God of originahty. We cannot picture to our- selves a great poet sitting in the seat of a Prime Minister, and they who in the House of Commons have written fine prose may be counted on the fingers of a hand. George Wyndham, in truth, had obeyed the caU of what he deemed to be duty ; he had taken (and was takiag) his share iti the government of the country, and so long as he did this, he could count neither upon the leisure nor upon the egoism, xxvi ESSAYS OF GEORGE WYNDHAM which is necessary for the doing of ' original work.' Meanwhile he indulged his gift of imaginative appreciation, and proved that he had the rare faculty of placing on their feet before us the strayhngs of the past, in an essay, entitled The Poetry of the Prison, for instance, he has sketched ViUon lightly and with a loyal sympathy. ' He writes of his shames,' says he, 'as an old soldier of his scars.' Thus is Villon's character revealed in a phrase. Without a hint of irrelevant censure, George Wyndham describes those shames as he knew them, and acclaims the great poet, 'whose verse is bitter with the bitterness, glad only with the insolence ' of his age. By way of contrast turn to R. L. Stevenson's essay on ViUon — surely a sad aberration ia criticism. Stevenson judges ViUon as the Elders of the Scottish Chtu-ch judged Bums, and cannot contemplate him without a reproof upon his tongue. He teUs us that Villon's ' senti- ments are about as much to be relied upon as those of a professional beggar,' and proceeds to find in his work ' an unrivalled insincerity.' Un- rivalled insincerity ! You rub your eyes as you read the words, apphed to a poet who in every word that he wrote was emotionally sincere. StiU worse, Stevenson says contemptuously, ' it shall remain in the original for me,' of a poem, in which Matthew Arnold, no condoner of insincerity, finds the ' a-irov- SaiOTTj's, the high and excellent seriousness which Aristotle assigns as one of the grand virtues of poetry,' the quahty which Arnold himself perceives in Homer and Dante and Shakespeare. Thus, while Stevenson dismisses Villon as ' the sorriest figm-e on the rolls of fame,' George Wyndham remembers that he ' writes of his shames, as an old soldier of INTRODUCTION xxvii his scars ' ; and who shaU say that George Wyndham has not the better of it ? vn With an equally keen perception of hfe, George Wyndham has drawn a sketch of Shakespeare's father. Acting upon a hint, thrown out by R. L. Stevenson in talk with Henley, he ascribes to John Shakespeare something of the whimsical temperament which be- longed to the father of Charles Dickens. He paints him as a kind of Micawber, perplexed always by ' a happy-go-lucky incuriousness,' a man of that san- guine temper that is sure always that ' something will turn up ' either in town or country, prosperous to-day, penniless to-morrow, immersed in lawsuits, crippled by mortgages, yet resolute in pride, and appealing always to the CoUege of Heralds for a grant of arms. At last we see him ' coming not to church for fear of process for debt' ; and the essential truth of the portrait helps to explain something of Shakespeare's own experience, especially his know- ledge of law and heraldry. Indeed, throughout George Wyndham's essay on the Poems of Shake- speare, the reader will find a rare combination of research and understanding. He had read the texts with a discerning mind. He had discovered early in his quest, as aU discover who study a literature, deeply and at first hand, ' that the critics who have written of it, have never read it, but merely handed on tradi- tional judgments, for the most part astonishingly incorrect.' But it was not merely the texts that he was busied with. A quick perception brought th^ London and the life of Ehzabeth's age clearly before xxviii ESSAYS OF GEORGE WYNDHAM him. He could see it in his mind's eye, because he went wandering into the past, and knew what he himself would have felt in the cross-currents of that busy, turbulent time. ' All the talk was,' he was sure, *of sea-fights and new editions: Drake and Lyly, Ralegh and Lodge, Greene and Marlowe and GrenvDle were names in every mouth.' There was nothing in the bubbling activity of the eager town that did not appeal to the lust of the eye and the pride of life. Poets and nobles were alike fervent worshippers of the stage, and gladly did George Wyndham picture Shakespeare as the friend of Herbert and Southampton. His criticism of the Poems is far divorced from any sort of pedantry, as well it might be, since it was written ' in the midst of engrossing duties.' * In the character of " Johaimes Factotum," ' he wrote in November 1896, ' I am at Aldershot doing some cavaby drill ; next week I make political speeches. . . . But aU the time I am writing an introduction to Shakespeare's Poems.^ The diversity of interest is shown ia the work, not in any weakening of the interest, but in a resolute avoidance of irrele- vant, conventional criticism. He cares not for the fooUsh problems which are wont to perplex the critics of the Sonnets. Mr. W. H. is not of supreme importance to him. He brushes Mr. Tyler's case aside, because it ' cannot be argued without the broaching of many issues outside the sphere of artistic appreciation.' In truth, he follows his quest not as a student of history but as a lover of art. He refrains from seeking parallels to Shake- speare's verse, for that method ' discovers not Shakespeare's art, but the common measure of poetry in Shakespeare's day.' What he sought in INTRODUCTION xxix Shakespeare's Poems was the wealth of his imagery, the perfect beauty of his verbal melody. Even while he sketches in brilliant colours the poet's environment, even while he sets in array the combatants on either side of the Poetomachia, he firmly detaches the Poems from Shakespeare's personal experience, and proves that they owe httle enough to the poet's career. What he looked for was 'lyrical discourse'; what he found — ^in Sonnet 90 — ^was 'the perfection of human speech.' His letters, written while the Essay was in progress, are packed with enjoyment. 'What stuff it is! "Lucrece" and all ' — ^thus he writes, ' I had really never read " Lucrece," but just listen to this : " For sorrow, like a heavy hanging bell, Once set on ringing, with his own weight goes." Only WiUiam could have written that, and this must be driven into the people who gUbly quote Hazhtt's Ice-houses, and wearily repeat that a lady in Lucrece's unfortunate predicament is Uttle likely to apostrophize Time, Opportunity, Eternity, Sorrow and any other abstractions that suggest a good tirade.' To this theme, then, he is constant : that Shake- speare is not a Rousseau, not a metaphysician, but a poet, who aims in his Poems at music and beauty; not at seH-revelation or the betterment of others. But now and again he deserts the high-road of his argument for the by-paths of ingenious discovery. He suggests that the open-air effects of Venvs and Adonis are taken one and all from Arden. He marks how the day waxes and wanes from dawn to eve, how even the weather changes, so that pausing at any stanza you might name the hour ; XXX ESSAYS OF GEOKGE WYNDHAM and thereto he adds according to his wont a himinous comment from his own experience : ' A month under canvas,' says he, 'or, better still, without a tent, will convince any one that to speak of the stars and the moon is as natural as to look at your watch or an almanack.' Thus the Cheshire Yeoman came to the aid of the critic of literature, and spoke with an authority denied to the scholar in his library. vin In life and in letters, as I have said, George Wynd- ham esteemed most highly ' the leader of a revel or a forlorn hope.' In 'The Springs of Romance in the Literature of Europe ' he essayed to lead both. It was an address delivered to the Students of the University of Edinbxirgh, and it dealt with a subject which had long been in George Wyndham's mind. More than two years before he was Lord Rector he had made the design, and even filled in many of the details. 'The idea is,' he wrote to his mother, ' Where did romance come from ? There was none among our Northern ancestors of the ninth century. It came from contact of East and West — contact with the East owing to the conflict between Christendom and the Paynim from Roncesvalles on- ward — contact with the West, from the Geraldines' transit through Wales into Ireland.' The idea was fantastic and difficult to make a reaHty, as George Wyndham acknowledged. 'In conclusion,' he wrote, ' I can say with Malory, " Now all was but enchant- ment" ; and invite you to be enchanted.' The question which he put in the letter quoted above, he answered in the address. ' When, then. INT^RODUCTION XXXI and where does Romance arrive in Europe ? The answer to the first question is, not before the second haK of the eleventh century, and, to the second, probably in Great Britain.' So he begins with the Chanson de Roland, which he thinks was retouched after Henry n. of England ' had, by conquest and marriage asserted a shadowy overlordship from the Grampians to the Pyrenees.' He insists upon the importance, for his argument, of Eleanor's marriage with Henry of Anjou. ' It is when they married (in 1152), and where they married, that most of the springs of romance commingle in the hterature of Europe.' And then, aiming at a definition, he asserts that Romance is welcoming the strange — the strange in legend, in allegory. La symbol, and in scenery. 'The reaction of the mind,' says he, ' when confronted with the strange, is, in some sort, a recognition of ignored realities. Romance is an act of recognition.' It is an ingenious argument, ingeniously con- ducted, and illustrated with a wealth of erudition. Of George Wjmdham's fancy and courage in its conduct there can be no doubt. But there is always a danger of dogmatising as to times and places, a danger of which the writer himseK was ftdly conscious. If we admit that Romance came into Europe in the second haK of the eleventh century, and was fully grown, so to say, a hundred years later, we must discard the whole of Classical literature from our view. Fully prepared for the encounter, George Wyndham advanced the 'dis- putable proposition,' that the classics are not romantic. He makes certain concessions to the ' heckler ' ; he gives him Nausicaa and Medea, Dido and Camilla ; finally, he throws to his ^possible xxxii ESSAYS OF GEORGE WYNDHAM opponents the whole body of Apuleius. But he seems to miss one point. If he makes a single exception, he gives up his argument. If there was Romance among the Greeks and Romans, then Romance did not come to its first efflorescence in the Court of Henry n. and Eleanor, his queen. Truly the proposition is ' disputable.' No defini- tion of Romance can exclude from the enchanted kingdom a vast deal of Greek and Latin literature. It is not Nausicaa alone in the Odyssey that is romantic. Romance is in the Odyssey's very tex- ture and essence. The return of the wanderer, who after many years of miraculous dangers comes back to his wife and home is the theme of high romance. The hair of Odysseus is wet with the salt sea spray. Far-distant havens and gallant ships have delighted his vision. The palace of Alcinous, in whose garden pear upon pear waxes old, and apple on apple and cluster ripens upon cluster of the grape, and fig upon fig, is in fairyland. And what a marvellous tale Odysseus has to tell ! There is the story of Poly- phemus, the giant who has but a single eye in the middle of his forehead, and who devoured two of the hero's companions at a meal. And the bewitchings of Circe and the siren's song, and the soul-destrojdng lotus, and the dark hoiise of Hades itself — ^these are the very stuff of which romance is made. Nor does Homer stand alone. Virgil and Ovid were in the Middle Ages the great quickeners of romance. From them the romancers of the Middle Ages bor- rowed their passion ; to them the ladies of high romance owed allegiance. And is not Lucian's ' True History ' romantic, and ' Daphnis and Chloe ? ' And were there not witches in Thessaly when Apuleius wrote ? INTRODUCTION xxxiii For me, indeed, classic and romantic are terms which express neither time nor place. The two modes of thought, the two states of mind have hved, side by side, since the beginning of time. They were bom, both of them in the Garden of Eden, and the Serpent was the first romantic. But if, as I think, George Wyndham has not brought his good ship Romance into port, he has taken us a joyous voyage among the islands of fancy, shown us many a noble sight, and left us careless of our harbourage. In truth, the address given at Ediuburgh is like good talk, set in a formal shape as becomes ink and paper, but good talk aU the same, happy, voluble, and sometimes controversial. Even when a friend may disagree with him, what would that friend not give to face him once more across the hearth, and to hear his voice, gay in tone, large in utter- ance, confronting him ! Above all, when George Wyndham set out to find the hallowed spot, where the springs of romance commingle, he set out upon an adventure. And as his friend, W. P. Ker, told him in a letter, urging him to ' go on,' * nothing good is done except by adventurers — ^ia that branch of learning anyhow.' IX It is characteristic of George W^jmdham that if he accepted W. P. Ker's eulogy as * the tribute of a sportsman to a poacher,' he took a natmral pride in the praise that was worth having ; and with the printing of ' The Springs of Romance ' a sudden thought came to him. ' I remembered with regret,' he wrote to his mother, ' the big book I meant to write about romantic Uterature, with a leaning xxxiv ESSAYS OF GEORGE WYNDHAM towards the French. Then I began to remember all the thmgs I have written, which I had forgotten. They are hidden away ia The New Review (extinct) . . . and in introductions to books which are out of print, or don't sell. Then it suddenly flashed on me that, without knowing it, I have written two- thirds or three-fourths of my book ! And I see exactly what remains to be written. The Springs is the first chapter. I never thought of that. . . . Chap. II. — ^not written — will be The Chroniclers and the Crusades. It is not written, but I have all the stuff and many notes. That takes me right through the thirteenth century. It may become two chapters in order to bring in Dante and the Spaniards. . . . But after that it is nearly all finished. IV. or V. is my old Poetry of the Prison, about Charles d' Orleans and Villon {New Review, out of print) ; V. or VI. is Chaucer (not written) ; VI. or VII. North's Plutarch, written — ^indeed I must cut it down ; VII. or VEII. is Ronsard, written, . . . VIII. or IX. is Shakespeare, written, and must be cut down; IX. or X. is EHzabethan Mariners in Elizabethan Uteratvire, written in the Fortnightly twelve years ago ; X. or XI. is Scott, written ; XI. or XII. is the new French Romantics — ^not pubhshed, but almost aU written, with many translations.' Such was the book as George Wyndham had planned it, and would that he had hved to match the perfecting with the plan! Alas, for the gaps, which never wiU be filled ! Few men of o\a time were better fitted than he by sentiment and know- ledge to write about Chaucer. I would give a wilderness of modem books to hear him discourse of the Chroniclers and the Crusades. Who the new French Romantics are I know not, and what he wrote INTRODUCTION xxxv of them has not come to light. For the rest, I have put the book together, as (I think) he would have wished it done. AH the finished chapters will be found between these covers, which he marked as portions of the book which he had written ' without knowing it.' In the letter I have quoted he proposed to cut down the essays on Plutarch and Shakespeare. This is a task too delicate for friendship to per- form, and I have left them precisely as they came from his hand. Here, then, is a book planned by Greorge Wyndham himself, marred by lacuTiae, which he would have filled up, but none the less complete in itself, and a fair picture of his mind and art. George Wyndham possessed, in full measure, what MaUarme once called la joie critique. Literature was for him no Trdpepyov, no mere way of escape from pohtics. If he was an amateur in feehng, he was a craftsman in execution. He loved books, and he wrote of them as though he loved them. His enthusiasm kept pace with his passion of discovery. He combined with what HazHtt called ' gusto ' a marvellous patience. If he wrote with excitement, he deemed that no labour in the col- lecting of facts went unrewarded. A new ' find ' or a new ' theory ' warmed him like wine. He would turn it over in his mind enthusiastically and furiously discourse upon it. And sitting himself down, with pen and paper, he would test it and check it by all the means within his reach. When he first designed his Springs of Romance, he sketched what he would put into it. ' I shall stick it full of aU I hke,' he said, ' the " Eegina Avrillosa " and the Border Ballads ; The Castle of Qerimont, and the Lady of Tripoli, The Song of Roland and the Fall of Constantinople, Marco Polo, and Antoine Galand.' xxxvi ESSAYS OF GEORGE WYNDHAM As he came to the writing, he contracted his scope, but the design was grandiose, and the Address, which was its result, was all the better for the knowledge of many books, which he had read and did not quote. He worked aU the more wisely because he had something in reserve. Moreover, as I have said, he brought a whiff of the open air into criticism. If he was happy among his books, he was happy also riding across country. And on huntiag days he neither read nor wrote. It may seem something of a paradox that George Wyndham, keenly alive as he was to aU the changing controversies of the hour, should yet have found a lasting solace in the past ; and yet the paradox soon disappears in the light of his character and his upbringing. He had a simple faith in the force of tradition ; he was acutely conscious of the heritage that was his. ' This autumn I addict myself to Pohtics,' he wrote to a friend in 1907, ' beginning at Perth, on October 18th, and continu- ing at Hexham, Birmingham, Dover, Manchester, York, and Leicester. ... I do this from a sense of duty. The Grentry of England must not abdicate.' There was his creed in a phrase : ' The Gentry of England must not abdicate,' for the very reason that the gentry had its roots in the past, that it received from the past its duties and its privileges. He had not a profound behef in platform discourse, but it was the means, nearest to his hand, of carrying on the work which had been bequeathed to bim by his ancestors. He knew that he was but a lantern- bearer, and he was resolved that his lantern should INTRODUCTION xxxvii be handed to those who came after him, stiU ahght and clear-burning. Even fox-hunting, in his eyes, was a glory of tradition. ' The hounds meet here to-morrow,' he wrote to his father from Saighton on the Christmas Day of 1907. ' Twenty-eight persons are coming out from Eaton. . . . And the local lights wiU try to hold their own against the paladins of Leicestershire and Meath. It is interesting — apart from the fun of it and the sport — ^to see this when political changes may abolish the gentry and their pursuits. Personally I back the gentry.' There is George Wjmdham's view made clear as crystal. He felt within him that he ' came from afar,' that it was his first duty to defend the traditional order of things, and he accepted the existing plan of political warfare, with a full determination to make the best of it. And let it be remembered of him that his mind merged what is in what was, that he looked upon the past with the eye of the living present. A man holding such a creed could not help finding his keenest interest in bygone times. Gladly he turned from the racket of the hustings to the calm of the settled past which yielded its secrets to his imagination. He delighted, as I have said, to be thought an 'archaistic barbarian.' He con- fessed, as we have seen, ' a ruder reUsh for the pagan horseflesh of the Sagas.' And gladly would he have gone back, if he could, still further into the child- hood of the world. It was not mere propinquity which inspired him with a passion for Stonehenge. When he visited Wells, it was not the cathedral, not the Hbrary, with its Jensen's Pliny and the autograph of Erasmus, that held him most closely in thrall, it was Wookey Hole, that strange cavern c2 xxxviii ESSAYS OF GEOKGE WYNDHAM of the Mendips, out of which flows the river Axe, and which was a place of refuge for our remote forefathers. Its corridors and galleries, its vast chambers, 'like chapter-houses,' filled him with an ecstatic wonder. It deUghted him to think that there the Britons hid and defended themselves against the beasts of the fields and other foes, when the lake-village of Glastonbmy was destroyed, that there in the soil their combs and their pottery, their coins and their needles and their bones were found. In a moment his fancy was at work. With the help of the excavator he was busy putting the past together from the poor fragments that remain, and divining the habits and ambitions of the ingenious lake-dwellers, who, I think, made but a poor exchange when they left their free homes in the marshes of Glastonbury for the dim-Ht caves of Wookey Hole. And, when the excavator showed him a denarius of 124 B.C., he was aU excitement. ' Now perpend,' said he, ' how is that ? The Roman Conquest was in a.d. 70. I plumped at once for the theory that it has fiiltered through the dim, but civiMsed, Europe of which Morris tells his tales.' Here the archaeologists are on his side, for Sir Arthur Evans is persuaded by the rehcs of the fen-settlement at Glastonbury to conclude that 'the more luxurious arts of the classical world were already influencing even the extreme west of our island in pre-Roman times,' that the little ' Western Venice ' of Glastonbury ' may claim some direct heritage from a still older Venetian culture.' INTEODUCTION XXXIX XI Since George Wjmdham felt the ardent curiosity of the archaeologist, since in poHtics he was a stout champion of tradition, since he knew well that we are but lantern-bearers, it is not strange that he turned his critical eyes towards the past, that he was intimately at home in the thirteenth centiiry, that he bade his research halt at the first half of the seventeenth. His only outpost in the modern world was Sir Walter Scott, and Sir Walter was the great reviver of antiquity in our land. It is easy, therefore, to detect a unity of purpose in George Wyndham's work, and this unity prompts the question what more he would have done had a longer span of hfe been allotted to him. He died in the fulness of his strength and courage. His accession to an estate had filled him with new hopes and new ambitions. He had been disillusioned by politics. The old order, for which he had fought, was fast changing. The passage of the Parliament Bill and the method of its passage had persuaded him, as well they might, to take a grave view of the future. He knew that war was coming with Germany, and he knew that little or nothing was being done to meet the surely impend- ing danger. Above all, he disliked the internation- alising of our politics. He feared what he called ' the Ortolan brigade.' He saw that the cause of Progress and of ' the People versus the Peers ' was led by ' E , ctu-ly-haired C , " dear old chappie " D , and all the other bounding brothers of cosmopolitan finance and polyglot " Society," dining ofi truffles,' and imitating ' the Yiddish pronunciation xl ESSAYS OF GEORGE WYNDHAM of the letter R with a guttural growl. " That 's the dog's letter," as Shakespeare says.' And yet he saw clearly enough that English Ufe, with its hunting and its soldiering and its hterature, would stiU go on, and prove ' far more substantial ' than the ia- trigues of Party PoHtics or the grasping dreams of SociaUsm. What, then, would he have done in what seemed to him a disjointed world ? He had many projects, half thought out, in his busy mind. There was a hf e of Bolingbroke which he had reserved for his age, and though Bolingbroke lay far out in the wUds of the eighteenth century, which was no century for him, the modern half of his soul sympa- thised warmly with Bolingbroke's ideals of a patriot king and a contented people. And there was his estate to manage and to restore to the prosperity which it had enjoyed two hundred years or more before. In a letter, one of the last he wrote, which was actually deUvered to Mr. Wilfrid Ward after his death, he admitted that he was absorbed in two subjects: 'Rural England and his Hbrary.' Truly they were subjects worthy to absorb him. It was not for him to shirk the duties of the countryside, and the beautiful Mbrary at Clouds, already fashioned to his wUl, was fast being fiUed with beautiful books. ' " We know what we are, but we do not know what we may be," ' he told Mr. Ward. ' I may — perhaps — take office again. But I doubt it. Inveni portum.^ Had he ? Even if he had found a harbour, it was still restless with the swell of the ocean. His eager mind was discovering new duties, not discarding old ones, ' Some people inherit an estate,' he wrote in the letter to Mr. Ward, from which I have already quoted, ' and go on as if nothing had happened. I can't do that. . . . INTRODUCTION xli Suddenly I find myself responsible for farming two thousand four hundred acres, and for paying sums that stagger me by way of weekly wages and repairs. So I ask myself " What are you going to do ? " I mean to use aU my imagination and energy to get something done that should last and remind.' That he would have done that is certain. He would have done that and much more besides. Had the call come, he woxild, I beUeve, have returned with fresh vigour to poUtics, in spite of partisan intrigues and the selfishness of Socialism. ' The gentry of England must not abdicate,' he had said, and he would not have abdicated. A year after his death came the war, which he had long foreseen and pondered, and the war would have aroused him in a moment from his pleasant dreams of fields and books. Assuredly he would have played his part in the defence of his native land, and I think that it woidd not be displeasing to him that his essays in the art of letters should be gathered together and given to the world in this year of England's gallantry and high endeavour. CHARLES WHIBLEY. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE The Springs of Romance in the Literature of Europe was delivered, as Lord Rector's Address, to the students of the University of Edinburgh in October 1910, and was pub- lished as a pamphlet in the same year. ' The Poetry of the Prison ' made its first appearance in The New Review, March 1895. ' Bonsard and the Pleiade ' served as a pre- liminary essay to selected translations from their poetry, published in 1906. ' North's Plutarch ' formed an introduc- tion to the reprint of North's version in W. E. Henley's series of Tudor Translations, 1895. ' The Poems of Shake- speare ' appeared in 1898 as a preface to an edition of the Poems. ' Elizabethan Adventure in Elizabethan Litera- ture ' was contributed to The Fortnightly Review in November 1898. And Sir Walter Scott was a speech, pro- posing the Toast of Honour, delivered at the Fourteenth Annual Dinner of ' The Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club ' on November 29, 1907. It was published separately in 1908. THE SPRINGS OF ROMANCE IN THE LITERATURE OF EUROPE An Addbbss delivbked to the Sttjdbnts of the UiirivBRSiTY OF Edinbtirgh, October 1910 TO WILLIAM PATON KER ' It is not the contexture of words but the eflfects of action that gives glory to the times. . . .' ' It is but the clouds gathered about our owne judgement that makes us think all other ages wrapt up in mistes, and the great distance betwixt us, that causes us to imagine men so farre off to bee so little in respect of ourselves. ..." ' It is not bookes but onely that great booke of the world and the all-over-spreading grace of heaven that makes men truly judicial. . . .' S. Daniel, Defence of Rhime, 1603. THE SPRINGS OF ROMANCE IN THE LITERATURE OF EUROPE It was not easy to choose a theme for an address to Edinburgh University. Yoiir unbounded behef in Rectorial discretion permits a latitude that is almost embarrassing. For guidance I had nothing but a sense of my own hmitations and a prospect of the scene that confronts me. These suggested a search over the vast province of learning for some plot, not wholly imexplored by your Rector, that should also be linked with the fame of your ancient city. The world allows, and Scott's monument attests, that, from Edinburgh, and by his genius, ' impulse and area ' were added to the great move- ment of the last century which we call the Romantic Revival. That movement changed the literature, architecture, painting, and furniture of Europe, and reversed the attitude of scholarship towards the Middle Ages ; a, fact of world-wide importance : incidentally it renewed the bond between Scotland and France ; a fact of pecuUar interest to the capital of your country. It so happens that, long before I ever dreamed of the honour you have conferred, the phrase — Romantic Revival — made me wonder, what was revived. ' What,' I asked myself, ' is Romance ? ' Unable to answer, I turned to another question—' When did Romance first come into the 6 THE SPRINGS OF ROMANCE IN literature of Europe ? ' — and spent some time in pursuit of so elusive a quarry. My choice of a theme was decided by Edinburgh's connection with the revival of Romance, and my guesses at its origin. I must speak of Romance. Some may feel that a definition of Romance should precede any survey of its inception and character. I respectfully demur. A definition of Romance would be easy if there were general agree- ment on the meaning of the word. Unfortimately there is not. Most people if asked, ' What is Romance ? ' would answer, as Augustine did of Time, ' I know when you do not ask me.' When dealing with the dimly apprehended we must dis- cover before we can define. Columbus had no map of America. One way of discovery would be to select an example of obvious, though undefined, Romance, and then to analyse its contents. But that plan if appHed, for instance, to Ariosto's Orlando Furioso will be found to lead away from definition rather than towards it. Analysis of extreme romantic types jdelds a jumble of mjrthologies, refracted through several layers of history, all more or less distorted and opaque. There is plenty of fighting and love- making, a good deal of scenery and weather ; and, apart from human interest, there are troops of animals and some strange inhuman forces masquer- ading as giants and dragons and warlocks. From such confusion a definition does not readily emerge. A better way of discovery is called, I beheve — rather pompously — ^the historic method. It amounts to this. If you can estabhsh When and Where a thing happened you may be able to guess Why it happened and, even, What it was. Let us, then, post- THE LITERATURE OF EUROPE 7 pone analysis of Romance, and set out by weighing the question with which the Cardinal of Este greeted Ariosto's presentation of his masterpiece. (1510.) The prelate asked the poet, ' quite simply,' ' where he had been for aU that rot.' That is what I shall try to discover. If we begin by detecting when, and where, Romance first appeared in Europe we may be able to say why it appeared, and even to hazard a surmise at its nature. But the last is a fearsome enterprise, trenching on metaphysics, as the way is with aU inquiry if you push it any distance. I shall seek in the main for origins, and call my address ' The Springs of Romance in the Literature of Europe.' You can look for the advent of Romance either in hterature that remains and can be studied ; or else, in the theories of learned men who infer the pre-existence of earher hterature, that has certainly perished, and may never have been written. They cite the songs in which, Tacitus teUs us, the Germans extolled the founders of their race ; or the didactic poetry of the Druids, which the Druids were forbidden to write ; or they point in later versions to a barbarous handling of stories treated with relative urbanity in earher versions, and infer from the discrepancy a common origin for both of a more primitive character than either reveals. These deductions from contemporary references to songs that are lost, and from antique touches in later documents, are always ingenious and often dehghtful. But they present two difficulties. In the first place, hypothetical hterature affords a foundation too insecure for the erection of theory that must itself partake of conjecture. In the second place, it is by no means certain that barbarous 8 THE SPRINGS OF ROMANCE IN legends are romantic to the races who invent them. I shall return to that view before I conclude. At the outset I must look for the advent of Romance in writings that still form part of the literature of Europe. The Advent of Romance Keeping, then, to Uterature that remains, I advance the disputable proposition that the writings preserved from Greece and Rome are not romantic ; briefly, that the classics are not romantic. If time permitted I could, I think, sustain that thesis, with quahfications, of course, and concessions to any who disputed its truth. I would readily admit that the Greeks were more romantic than the Romans. I would certainly concede Nausicaa in the Odyssey and Medea in the Argonauts ; Dido and Camilla in the MTieid. But, excepting VirgU, whose peculiar romantic note caught the ear of the Middle Ages, I should point out that my concessions were mainly in respect of the earUest and latest poems of the Classic world, and that, includuig even the Mneid, all such touches of romance as do faintly transfigure the classics are to be found in stories of wandering through strange lands, and of encounters with aMen customs and superstitions. I would give my ' heck- ler ' the Golden Ass of Apuleius, and cut the argu- ment short by taking refuge in the considered opinion of Professor W. P. Ker. He writes {The Dark Ages, p. 41) : ' Classical hterature perished from a number of contributory ailments, but of these none was more desperate than the want of Romance in the Roman Empire, and especially in the Latin language.' THE LITERATURE OF EUROPE 9 The Latin world of the fifth century was un- romantic, and notably so in northern Gaul, the most Roman, because the least invaded, proviace of the Western Empire. Latinised Gauls led an ordered existence of unchallenged convention, re- volving round garrisons, townhalls, and schools. Their life was military and municipal ; their literature, an affair of grammar and rhetoric, written in classical Latin which had diverged from vulgar Latin, so widely as to be xminteUigible to aU but the learned. From the people's Latin, spoken throughout the country, almost every trace of Celtic words and Celtic behefs had been eHmi- nated. We possess nothing that can be called Romance in either of these languages. Yet Latin Gaul was to be the nursery-garden of the first seedling of romantic literature, and that earliest growth was not to flourish until it had been trans- planted. When, then, and where, does Romance arrive in European literature. The answer to the first question is, not before the second half of the eleventh centin-y, and, to the second, probably in Great Britain. The first piece of obvious Romance in literature that remains is the ' Song of Roland,' as we have it in the Oxford MS. (Bodleian, Digby, 23). The composition of the poem is attributed to a Norman, and the date of it placed between the Norman conquest of England in 1066 and the Crusaders' conquest of Jerusalem in 1099. The handwriting, as distinguished from the composition, is dated about 1170. Roman.ce arrives six centuries after the overthrow of the Western Empire, and appears where a province had been torn from it long before the Latin Gauls had ceased to speak or write in languages derived from Rome. We 10 THE SPRINGS OF ROMANCE IN know when and where Romance appeared. To understand why it came, and to surmise at what it was, we must sketch in the events of those six centuries which preceded and — as I shall urge — prepared for the Advent of Romance after 1050 a.d., and for its rapid development a hundred years later. In the fifth century two things happened which began the preparation of Gaul to be the nursery- garden of Romance. A Celtic people estabMshed themselves in the north-west of Gaul, thenceforward to be called Brittany, where their language is still spoken by the Bretons. They came in numbers, and the territory which they occupied ceased to be Latin. We are told that they sang lays to a Mttle harp, called the rote. But none of their songs appears in literature for centuries. Again in the fifth century, a Teutonic nation, the Francs, invaded the north-east of Gaul, and soon ceased, for the most part, to be German. They were few in number, and their ambition was to be hke the Latin aristocracy. Their mother-tongue, after a brief interval, contained more words of Latin than of Teutonic derivation. Their laws were written in learned Latin. Their religion, after 496 a.d., was orthodox Latin Christianity. Clovis, or Chlodoweg — if you like that name better — ^preferred his title of a ' Roman patrician ' to the glory of his conquests. We are told that the Francs sang the deeds of their kings in poems, accompanied on harps. It may well be so. But none of these poems have ever appeared in hterature. They may, or may not, have been romantic. We have no record of Frankish verse, save one. There are eight Latin lines in the life of a saint composed THE LITERATURE OF EUROPE 11 in the ninth century. They refer to a legendary action of King Clotair in the seventh century. The author presents them as excerpts translated from a song which, he teUs us, was popular at that time. We have nothing else. To reconstruct these non-existent effusions by inference, and even to cite them by name as the panegyric of this or that Erankish king, the song of Clotair, or of Chlodoweg, is, in the word of an eminent French scholar, ' a triumph of scientific hypothesis.' In the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries France was stiU Roman and miromantic, but not Teutonic, and with Celts on one flank. In the eighth century a third event continued the preparation for Romance. The Arabs, after conquering Spain, invaded the south of France and were defeated at the battle of Tours by Charles Martel on the 10th October 732. We know that the Arabs sang songs, for we possess seven odes written by them in ' the days of ignorance ' before Mahomet. And we know that, in the ninth century, they brought into Southern Europe the viol, or fiddle, conveyed from Persia, upon which Jongleurs were, much later, to accompany the Romances of Europe. But the early influence of the Arabs produced no romance. On the contrary, it produced dry translations of the least romantic works of the Greeks. Even the epoch-making contest at Tours bequeathed no legacy to romantic hterature. Charles the Hammer never appears as one of its heroes. It was his grandson, Charlemagne, who became aU but the greatest of romantic figures. His legendary exploits overshadowed his achieve- ments, and were sung for centuries in every language of Europe. Yet the first legend, that we still possess, 12 THE SPRINGS OF ROMANCE IN was not written until some two hundred and seventy- years after his death. Two other events were needed to complete the preparation. Despite the lays of the Bretons, the songs of the Francs, the odes of the Arabs, accompanied by rotes, harps, and viols, it is not until after the Normans had estabhshed them- selves in France at the beginning of the tenth century, and conquered the Enghsh in the second half of the eleventh century, that we find the advent of Romance in European literature. The placid province of Latin Gaul was modified by the juxtaposition of Bretons, the absorption of Francs, the expulsion of Arabs, the absorption of Normans, and the con- quest of England, before the ' Song of Roland ' appears. The Song of Roland The ironical adage Post hoc ergo propter hoc may be discounted at once, for the song reveals the influence of all those five events, and, but for their happening, could not be what it is. It is written in French ; because Latinised Gaul, having ceased to be Celtic, never became German, but became France. Its hero, Roland, is the Count of the Marches of Brittany, and it teems with praise of the Bretons : ' Icil chevalchent en guise de banms Dreites lur hanstes, fennez lur gunfamins ' (1. 3054), ' These ride with the high air of fightiag-men, Their spears erect, and battle-pennons furled ' ; because France was in contact with Celtic Brittany. Its action, in defiance of history, consists of confiicts with Saracens ; because such conflicts in the eighth, niath, and tenth centuries held the imagination of Europe with a growing horror, that culminated when THE LITERATURE OF EUROPE 13 the Turks took Jerusalem from the Arabs, to profane her shrines and persecute their pious visitors. It is written by a Norman ; because the author dis- covered, in the legendary feats of Roland, a parallel to the historic conquests of his race. But he found it difficult to harmonise the two. So Normandy, though conquered, in his song is stiU ' la franche ' — ^the free (1. 2324). Duke Richard is one of Charlemagne's twelve peers, and his Normans are picked from all nations for the highest praise : ' Armes unt beles e bons chevals curanz ; Ja pxir murir cil n'ierent recreant ; Suz del, n'ad gent ki durer poissent tant ' (1. 3047). ' Handsome their weapons and their coursers strong ; Never for death will they admit the wrong ; No other nation can endure so long.' The reference to England, on the other hand, is in the scornful tone of one who had himself followed Wilham to Hastings and Westminster ; because the song was written after, and not before, the conquest of England. To that opinion, at any rate, the weight of French scholarship incUnes, as I hold conclusively. When the death-stricken Roland recites the countries he has won for Charles with his sword Durendal, his slighting reference to England — ' E Engletere que il teneit sa cambre ' (1. 2332), ' And England which he kept for his own room,' finds no counterpart in any allusion to other legendary conquests. The Saracen is detested, but the Enghshman is despised, whilst other nations, although defeated, are hailed as honoured vassals who follow the oriflamme to war. Finally, this 14 THE SPRINGS OF ROMANCE IN song, and no other, won a way for Romance in the Hterature of Europe ; because northern French, by becoming the Royal language of England, attained a position which Latin, for lack of general comprehension, could no longer hold. Northern French became the tongue common to many nations, and was adapted, as Latin never had been, to the expression of Romance. Here I must note a possi- bility of misconception. It is urged that some features in the song we possess are earher than the date attributed to it. Again, we know that the Jongleur, Taillefer, sang some other song of Roland as he rode in front of the Norman advance at Hastings, tossing his sword in the air and catching it by the hilt. But these considerations do not affect my argument. None of the romantic features in the song can be earher than the Celtic and Sara- cenic influences ; most of them must be later than the Norman influence, and that influence did not carry Romance into hterature until after the Con- quest. The view that the ' Song of Roland ' could not have been written until after the events I have enumerated, or be what it is but for their happening, is confirmed if we glance at the historic fact on which it is based, and compare the song with the account written at the time. For the song reveals the influence of aU these events, and the contem- porary account shows scarce a trace of any one of them. On the 15th of August 778, Charlemagne's army had retired from Spain into France over the Pyrenees in safety. But his rear-guard was am- bushed by the Basques in a closely-wooded defile and kiUed out to the last man. That is the historic THE LITERATURE OF EUROPE 15 fact. Now turn to the contemporary account. Charlemagne's secretary, Eginhard, describes the tragedy {vita et gesta Garoli cognomento Magni, etc., cap. ix.) in seventeen and a half lines of prosaic Latin. There is no word of the Saracens. Three of the slaughtered chieftains are named, and of these the third, apparently in order of importance, is Rutlandus, the prsefect of the frontier of Brittany {Rutlandvs Britannici limitis prcefectus). That is aU that history tells us of Roland. He is not even in command, and sounds no ' blast of that dread horn On Fontarabian echoes borne,' that caught the ear of Walter Scott as he was writing Marmion. We hear no more of him in any written word that remains until his romantic glory is unroUed in the four thousand and two ringing lines of the Chanson de Roland. Thenceforward it reverberates through literature, expanding into the stupendous cycle of Carlovingian romances, and their deriva- tives, down to the day on which Ariosto presented the Cardinal of Este with his poem ' of ladies and of knights, of battles and loves, of courtesies and of daring adventures ' : ' Le Donne, il Cavaher, I'Arme, gli Amori, Le Cortesie, I'audaci Lnprese io canto, Che furo al tempo che passaro i Mori D'Africa il mare, e in Francia nocquer tanto, Sequendo I'ire e i giovenil furori D'Agramante lor Re che si di6 vanto Di Vendicar la morte di Trojano Sopra Re Carlo Imperator Romano.' Incidentally the story of Roland gave proverbs to the people — a Roland for an Oliver — and their 16 THE SPRINGS OF ROMANCE IN name to our peers, of whom we still hear so much, even now, when Roland is almost forgotten. This comparison between the song and the account written at the time exhibits — ^to adopt a Hibemicism — a ' dry source ' in the brief Latin original ; a long silence ; and, then, the sudden advent of unmistakable Romance, fuU of the wonders and legends of many lands. Scenery plays her part in human emotion. The mountains are filled with menace : ' Halt sunt li pui e tenebrus e grant Li val parfunt e les ewes curanz ' (1. 1830). ' High are the peaks, and shadow-gloom' d, and vast, Profound the vaUeys where the torrents dash.' We are told the name of each champion's horse and sword, and their marvellous quaUties. The theory that Romance arrived as a result of the events I have enumerated is stiQ further con- firmed, if we proceed from the advent to the huge development of Romance which flooded Europe a hundred years later. For that development foUows immediately on a renewal and multiphcation of the same or similar influences. Literature is transfigured into Romance by the twihght of the West, the mirage of the East, and the uncouth strength of the North, in direct proportion to the commingling of West and East and North in the pohtics of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. I would even dare to suggest that our first version of the ' Song of Roland ' received some later touches, here and there, during the tweKth century, after those influences had been multipHed, i.e. at a time more nearly approaching the date, 1170, attri- buted to the handwriting of the MS. (Bodleian, Digby THE LITERATURE OF EUROPE 17 23). One argument for that view is rather technical. French scholars date the composition of the song before the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099, because it nowhere mentions that event. This, however, in- volves the difficulty of accounting for the mention of a vaUey in Cappadocia, called Butentrot, through which the Crusaders did actually march. How comes it, we may ask, that the first column of the Saracen's legendary army in the song (1. 3220) is said to have been recruited from that place ? May not the positive inclusion of Butentrot outweigh the negative omission of Jerusalem ? And the more, since the author, who swears he is telling the truth, might conceivably borrow local colour from Butentrot for an imaginary picture of the eighth century, but would scarcely insert the most resounding event of his own age, 321 years before it happened. Another argument may be put in this way. The song in the Oxford MS. contains three catalogues of nations, viz. — the conquests recited by Roland before he dies, the divisions in Charle- magne's avenging army, and the judges summoned to try the traitor, Ganelon. The judges include Bretons, Normans, and Poitevins (1. 3702). The fifth, sixth, and seventh divisions of the avenging army (1. 3027) are recruited from Normans, Bretons, and Poitevins. The conquests (1. 2322) include Brittany, Normandy, Poitou, Maine, Aquitaine, and, you will be surprised to hear, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and England. ' Jo Ten cunquis Escoce, Guales, Irlande E Engletere que il teneit sa cambre.' Looking to literature, excepting the ' Song of Roland,' no other poem about Charlemagne — and B 18 THE SPEINGS OF ROMANCE IN there are many — attributes to him any one of these conquests. Looking to history, no king ever led all these nations in war, or accepted homage from their sovereigns, except Henry of Anjou, who became Henry n. of England, and married Eleanor of Poitou and Aquitaine. For further significance, Anjou, his ancestral fief, is added to these conquests in other foreign MSS. and omitted from the Oxford MS. I suggest that the MS. was retouched, in respect of these names, after Henry had, by conquest and marriage, asserted a shadowy over-lordship from the P3a'enees to the Grampians. The singtdar ascription of such conquests to Charlemagne, and the army-list of his forces, would have lacked aU approach to likehhood except to audiences fanuHar with the short-lived climax of Henry's political career. Even if this suggestion be scouted, the catalogues of nations in the ' Song of Roland ' are relevant to my theme. They illuminate the theory that Romance sprang from a mingling of Western and Eastern influences, at a time when the races of Eiirope were bracketed together by the conquests and marriages of northern leaders. The Development of Romance That theory is, once more, confirmed by the great romantic development of the twelfth century ; and no illustration of it can, I submit, be more convincing than the facts of Henry's political career. They constitute a renewal and midtiplication of the influences which preceded the advent of Romance, and were immediately followed by a development of Romance that, from 1150 onwards, flooded the whole area of mediaeval literature. If we take the THE LITERATURE OF EUROPE 19 most important of these renewals, and then the most renowned Romances of the Middle Ages, we can, I beUeve, establish a direct connection between the two. The Eastern, Saracenic, influence was renewed by Henry's marriage with Eleanor — Alienor or ^nor — a most remarkable woman, to whose memory scant justice is done if we associate it exclusively with Fair Rosamund and Woodstock. Omitting — with regret — most of the sensational adventiires in her long hfe of eighty-two years, we must, for our purpose, recall that she was the granddaughter of WiUiam of Poitou, who fought in the First Crusade, and was himself the earliest troubadour, or poet of southern France. He wrote, ' I wiU make a new song ' : ' Farai chansonetta nova,' and so he did. That song is more closely related to modem poetry than any masterpiece in the classics (W. P. Ker, Darh Ages). Its reiterated rhymes thrill down the ages tiU they wake an echo from the lyre of Robert Burns. Eleanor, the wife of two kings, the mother of two kings and of two daughters, married to great vassals whose songs are still remembered, is responsible for a good deal of romance. Thanks to her, St. George became, in the words of Caxton, 'patrone of the 'royame of Englond and the crye of men of warre.' For that was the battle-cry of her grandfather before the walls of Jerusalem. It descended to her, together with his love of poetry and his love of crusading. She accompanied her first husband, the king of France, to the Second Crusade, in 1147 ; was divorced in 1152, and, within two months, married Henry of 20 THE SPRINGS OF ROMANCE IN Anjou, tlie king to be of England, bringing with her ' St. George for England ' and the dower of Poitou and Aquitaine. But these were not all that she bestowed. The troubadours of southern France, after attending her to the East, followed in her train ; reinforced by trouveres, the poets of northern France. She brought to Great Britain, with signal results in Uterature, the artists who were to fashion the romantic material of many voyages into the great romances of Europe. The Western, Celtic, influence was renewed when Henry became suzerain of Brittany. It was multiphed when his motley array of vassals, drawn from one-half of France, and, accompanied by Eleanor's poets, were brought into contact with the legends of Wales. The historic Henry, as CoTuit of Anjou, Maine, Touraine, and Poitou, Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, suzerain of Brittany, king of England and overlord of Wales, had re- ceived the homage of the king of Scotland in 1157, and connived ten years later at the departure, through Wales, of the pioneers in the conquest of Ireland. He, like the legendary Charlemagne, was the war-lord of many nations who had crossed swords with Saracens and Celts and hstened to Norman translations of their strange songs. No sovereign, we may add, except, perhaps, his consort, Eleanor, was better equipped for turning pohtical adventure to pohtical advantage. His earhest tutor. Master Peter of Saintes, was ' learned above aU his contemporaries in the science of verse.' Henry himself 'loved readmg only less than hunting.' His hands, it was said, ' were never empty,' always holding ' a bow or a book.' He spoke French and Latin well, and knew something of every tongue from THE LITERATURE OF EUROPE 21 the Bay of Biscay to the Jordan. This great lover of learning and adventure was, for a time, ' the virtual arbiter of Western Europe ' {Dictionary of National Biography). The lives of Eleanor and Henry were potent factors in the renewal of the influences that preceded the advent of Romance. Let us now turn to the earliest and most re- nowned among the poems that mark its develop- ment. We shall find that, Hke the ' Song of Roland,' most of them derive from a short, unromantic original in Latin ; that aU were written in northern French, and many of them in England, in the second haK of the twelfth centxiry, and that all elaborate themes made vivid by the contact of northern armies with Celts and Saracens. The Romance oe Alexander The ' dry source ' of the Romance of Alexander is a Latin abridgment (eighth century) of an earlier Latin translation (fourth century) from a Greek forgery (second century). It produces no effect for centuries. Only after the First Crusade had renewed contact with the East, is it translated into a French dialect and transfigured. The ' Milites ' become ' chevaUers,' and Alexander a king sur- rounded by his barons. Of this version httle remains. But after the Second Crusade, in which Eleanor took part, and her marriage with Henry, the poets of their continental dominions begin the portentous expansion of the tale and embroider it with oriental marvels. We get the ' Fountain of Youth,' ' Gog and Magog,' and the oracular ' . . . Trees of the Sun and Moon, that speak And told King Alexander of his death.' ^ ^ Brome's Antipodes, in Lamb's Specimens. 22 THE SPRINGS OF ROMANCE IN ' " Signer," fait Alixandre, " je vus voel demander, Se des merveilles d'lnde me saves rien conter." Oil li ont respondu : " Se tu vius eseouter Ja te dirons merveilles, s'es poras esprover. La sus en ces desers pues ii Arbres trover Qui c pies ont de haut, et de grossor sunt per. Li Solaus et La Lune les ont fait si serer Que sevent tous languages et entendre et parler." ' ^ In a thirteenth-century version, we witness the first appearance of ' The Nine Worthies ' — Joshua, David, and Maccahseus, for the Jews ; Hector, Alexander, and Csesar, for the Heathen ; Arthur, Charlemagne, and Godfrey of Bologne, for the Christians. They made their last bow to the pubUc, so far as I know, in Shakespeare's Lovers Labour ''s Lost. Meanwhile they bulk largely in Hterature, and were painted by Perugino. A hundred years before the antics of Holophemes, Caxton, in the beautiful Preface to his Life of Oodefrey of Boloyne, beseeched Almighty God that Edward the Fourth of England might deserve the tenth place by launching yet another Crusade, but in vain, for it never set sail. To these fabulous expansions the French Alexandrine owes its name, and, until Plutarch was translated at the Renaissance, they moulded the popular con- ception of Alexander the Great. The Romance of Troy The ' dry source ' of the Romance of Troy is once more a prosaic Latin abridgment of Greek forgeries, impudently fathered on a supposititious defender of Troy, Dares Phrygian, and a non- existent besieger, Dictys Cretensis. It produces no 1 Chanson d' Alixandre, ed. 1861, Dinan, p. 357 ; Yule's Marco Polo, i. 122. THE LITERATURE OP EUROPE 23 effect till, in 1160, one of Eleanor's poets, Benedict of Sainte More, dedicates to her his expansion, which reaches the respectable length of over thirty thousand Hnes. He asserts the unimpeachable testimony of Dares and Dictys at Homer's ex- pense : — ' Ce que dist Daires et Ditis I avons si retrait et mis.' And away goes the development of Romance, till the love of Troilus and Briseida, which Benedict invented, after figuring in Boccaccio, supplies the theme of Chaucer's great romantic poem, and of Shakespeare's play. In the course of the transition Homer's Briseis becomes Shakespeare's Cressida. ' The skilful painting made for Priam's Troy,' which Shakespeare weaves into Lucrece fll. 1366- 1559), and the speech required by Hamler from the players, and Lorenzo's ecstasy {Merchant of Venice, V. 1), ' The moon shines bright : — In such a night as this, When the ST^'eet wind did gently kiss the trees, And they did make no noise, — ^in such a night Troilus, methinks, mounted the Troyan walls. And sigh'd his soul toward the Grecian tents. Where Gressid lay that night,' — are derived from Benedict's expansion no less than from Virgil, and not from Homer. The Romance of Troy left a deep impression in European literature, largely because of what a French scholar has called ' the monomania for Trojan descent.' Shortly after its appearance, no one in Prance or Great Britain, with pretensions to birth, cared to trace his pedigree from any ancestor less remote than iEneas. So, in close succession to the Romance 24 THE SPEINGS OF ROMANCE IN of Troy, we get a romantic ^neid {Roman d'Enee), attributed by Gaston Paris to the same author, and by others to Marie de France, a poetess, who also wrote in England under the auspices of Henry and Eleanor. In it the lordship of the world is pro- mised to the heirs of Rome and descendants of .Eneas, who are none other than the nations over whom Henry held sway — ' Rome fut grant et bien enclose A mervelle fu ptiis grant cose Trestot le munt ot en baillie vmrld Li oir en orent signorie heirs Qui d'Bneas descentu sunt Signor furent par tot le munt.' The Romance of Thebes About the same time, and, as some hold, again from the prolific pen of Benedict, we get the Romance of Thebes. The ' dry source ' is a Latin abridgment of Statins. In the expansion we read — of the daughters of Adrastus — ^that their laughter and kisses outweighed the worth of London and Poitiers, the capitals of the realms of Henry and Eleanor, ' Mieuz vaut lor ris et lor baisiers Que ne fait Londres ne Peitiers.' The Castle of Montflor is besieged by a thousand knights, and Saracen Almoravides (Almoraives) from the Crusades take part in an ambush of Hippomedon. The Romance of Thebes furnished titles to romantic versions of Byzantine stories which the Crusaders brought back from the East. Parthenopeus, one of the seven against Thebes, becomes Partonopex of Blois in a fairy tale of singular beauty, that recalls the story of Cupid and Psyche, but with THE LITERATURE OF EUROPE 25 the parts reversed, for it is the knight who is for- bidden to look at the lady. I am no more concerned, than I am quahfied, to obtrude an opinion when scholars dispute the attribution of the ' Thebes ' to the author of the ' Troy,' or when they differ on points of priority, interesting in themselves, but immaterial to this argument. It suffices that, but for the Crusades, the three romances — of Alexander, of Troy, and of Thebes — would not have been written to compete in popular favour with the romances of Charle- magne. They are what they are, because of events among which the most typical, and probably the most important, is that Eleanor played the part — it may be in more senses than one — of a Damozel Errant in the East. They produced the develop- ment of Romance because others, but Eleanor above aU, attracted troubadours, the masters of rhyme, and trouveres, the masters of narrative, to display these oriental wares in French, the Royal language of England, and common tongue of every Court in ■ Western Europe. Amid a maze of dates we can put our finger on the year 1147, in which Eleanor set out for Palestine, and say, with confidence, that here is a renewal of Eastern influence : and, I wotild add, thanks to troubadours, the triumph of rhyme ; thanks to trouveres, the art of telling a story. The Arthurian Romances But if we do put our finger on that year, we shall find that we have also covered the source from which a renewal of Western influence inun- dated all Europe with the legends of Arthur and his knights ; incidentally submerging the fame of 26 THE SPRINGS OF ROMANCE IN Charlemagne and the twelve peers. In the same year, 1147, Geo£Erey of Monmouth dedicated the Historia Begum Britannice to Robert, Earl of Gloucester, the uncle of Henry of Anjou, who directed the first steps of his nephew's dazzling career. It is a short book written in Latin by a Welshman. But it is the ' dry source ' of many a river of song. Arthur and Guunhumara, or Guenever, are here introduced for the first time into literatiire that remains. Let no one suppose, for a moment, that Geoffrey invented the legends which enchanted Europe for so long, and have now renewed their speU through the art of Tennyson and Swinburne and Wagner. He found them : but whether in Wales, or in the ' very old book ' — librum vetustissimum — ^brought, so he says, out of Brittany by Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford, is quite beside the mark. What Geoffrey did was to capture the world of letters. His prosaic handling of Celtic mythology in a learned tongue imposed on the clerks of Europe. They received it for his- tory, and were amazed at the close fulfilment of Merlin's prophesies down to the very year in which Geoffrey began to write (1135). We need not intervene when scholars, inspired by local patriotism, dispute the racial extraction of this or that matter involved ; nor attempt to decide whether the Chris- tian graal was a Pagan caldron, or even, as some have it, a stone. It is sufficient to discover what happened in literature. For until these legends won their way into literature they could not produce a romantic effect, and may, for aU we can tell, have been destitute of any tinge of romance. Geoffrey's book was forthwith translated into French poems written by Anglo-Normans, and, THE LITERATURE OF EUROPE 27 apart from its contents, gave a general impulse to the production of verse spun from the legends of Brittany and Wales. In 1150 Marie de France, who hved in England, begins to write her fifteen lays. About the same year we get the first story of Tristan and Yseut from Beroul, who wrote it in England. Unless we reahse that the author staged his legend in the England of his day, without a care for anachronisms, we shall be surprised to find the cathedral cities of Ely and Durham in the kingdom of Cornwall : ' N'a chevalier en son roiaume Ne d'Eli d'antresqu' en Dureaume ' (1. 2199). In 1155 Wace, an Anglo-Norman writing in England, expands Geoffrey's History into a long French poem. He introduces the ' Round Table ' into hterature. ' Arthur,' he says (1. 998), ' made the round table, of which Bretons teU many fabtJous stories ; the vassals sat down to it all chivalrously and aU equal in degree ' : ' Fist Artus la Roonde Table Dont Breton dient mainte fable : Iloc seoient li vassal Tot chievalment et tot ingal.' equal. In another passage (1. 10, 560) the three Arch- bishops of London, York, and Carleon dine at the same legendary board ; for to Wace it is a British institution. Whether it hails, as a legend, from Brittany, from Wales, or from Arthiir's Seat by Edinburgh, it certainly arrives in literature luider the auspices of Henry. Wace writes of him, ' I find no more benefactors except the king, Henry the Second, who has given me a canonry and many other gifts. May God repay him.' Eventually it was exhibited 28 THE SPRINGS OF ROMANCE IN as a piece of furniture tti Winchester, where Henry had been crowned in 1154. At Winchester, as at Glastonbury, Henry's magnetic power polarised the legends of his Western dominions, and attracted French artists to sing them from all the realms bracketed together by his pohtical ambition. Wace's poem, for the first time, weaves the story of Tristan into the story of Arthur, and is named, by a similar process, from Brutus, the imaginary descendant of ^neas, the ancestor of aU the French and the British nations. This romantic descent was ' the kind of thing that everybody could enjoy,' and most people did up to the end of the sixteenth century. It inspired Ronsard's Franciade. ' I once found it set out in a nobleman's commonplace book together with other practical hints, such as the right dishes for a banquet and the proper in- struments for concerted music. So late as 1605, Verstegan devotes a stout volume to destroying the myth under the imposing title, A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities. - In 1170 we get the second song of Tristan from Thomas, another Anglo-Norman. In the same year Christian of Troyes introduces, for the first time, the love of Lancelot and Guenever. He was not an Anglo-Norman, but the story was supphed to him by Eleanor's eldest daughter. In 1175 Chris- tian introduces Perceval and the Graal from a book lent by the Count of Flanders, who had spent some months (1172) in England. After that, for fifty years Arthur and Guenever and Lancelot, Tristan and Yseut, the Round Table and the Holy Graal, are translated into every Western tongue, and inter- laced with every other story that seemed true. A continuous legend of Western conquerors was woven THE LITERATURE OF EUROPE 29 together, reaching right down from the Argonauts who sought the Golden Fleece, through the de- fenders of Troy, and the founders of Rome, to the champions who had recovered Jerusalem. Such Romances of chivalry stood side by side with the ' new ' classics on the shelves of Mary Stuart's library. Then they disappear into dusty cup- boards, to be released again after the Romantic Revival. Just as the advent of Romance sprang from early contacts with Celtic mythology and Saracenic marvels, so did the development expand when those contacts were renewed and multipUed. Both found their first expression in French poems, written for the most part in England, because the conquest of England exalted that tongue into the position held by Latin through the Dark Ages. But Latin was for the learned alone ; whereas French, for many reasons, appealed to the nations of Europe. To the Celts it was the language of those who had defeated their Saxon oppressors ; and to all Chris- tian people the language of those who had delivered Jerusalem. It was written by poets who welcomed the legends which the Latins had rejected. Every nation saw its folk-lore embellished by consummate artists, and their eponymous heroes glorified with pedigrees from the warriors who had redressed the fall of Troy by erecting the walls of Rome. In the French romances of the twelfth century Europe ' fotind herself.' Two Objections Here let me anticipate some of the criticism which I am conscious of provoking. It may be said that I have ignored the Teutonic Romances. 30 THE SPRINGS OF ROMANCE IN In reply, I would submit that Teutonic Romance branched off when the empire of Charlemagne was divided between his successors, only to return into the main channel of European hterature after the Romantic Revival. The Sagas and the Nibelungenlied, and the early English Beowulf, were not European romances before the last century. Sigfried, originally a Frankish hero, who picked up Burgundian attri- butes and echoes of conflicts with the Huns, counts for nothing in the Middle Ages by comparison with Roland or Arthur. The dwarf Alberich creeps through a French romance, Huon of Bordeau, to emerge as Oberon in Shakespeare's Midsummer NigMs Dream,. But that may have been because of his diminutive size. There was no room for Teutonic gods and giants in a literature already crowded with colossal characters. Yet the in- fluence of the North is not absent from European romances. On the contrary, since it was the Nor- mans who launched them, the uncouth strength of the North accounts for as much in Romance as the glamour of the West, to the mirage of the East. Perhaps it accounts for more than either, and ex- plains why aU three were condemned together as ' Gothic ' during the classical interregnum between the two Romantic periods. It may be said that I have exaggerated the importance of Eleanor's marriage with Henry of Anjou. On that issue I ' stick to my guns.' They married (1152) five years after St. Bernard launched the Second Crusade from Vezelay, at the moment when Geoffrey of Monmouth published the History of the Kings of Britain. Their marriage united the influences attracted by those two events from the THE LITERATURE OF EUROPE 31 East and West. It is when they married, and where they married, that most of the Springs of Romance commingle in the literatm-e of Europe. Nor were the results of that comminghng accidental. They were produced by design ; and the designers were largely the poets of Henry's and Eleanor's cosmo- pohtan court. Mythological legends from the West, and miraculous stories from the East, were guided into one channel by the science of troubadours — the gay science of courteous love — and by the sterner skill of northern trouveres. The design was literary ; but it was also poUtical. Henry, an upstart and a stranger to his Normans, Bretons, and Poitevins, Gascons, Saxons, and Welshmen, found it convenient to exploit the imaginary achievements of Arthurian knights. None could be jealous of such shadows, and, the less, since aU were assured a common descent from the defenders of Troy, and shown a common foe in the assailants of Jerusalem. Henry took the cross for the Third Crusade (1187) as a desperate expedient to save his work of unification on the eve of its collapse. His work, akin as it is to the work of contemporary sovereigns, afifords the most salient example of a vast attempt at unification prosecuted throughout the poHtics and literature of Europe ; and that effort of comprehen- sion reveals, so I believe, the reason why Romance captured the imagination of Europe in the middle of the twelfth century. What is Romance ? I have done what I could to discover When and Where and Why Romance came into European literature. But what is Romance ? Are we any 32 THE SPRINGS OF ROMANCE IN nearer a definition ? Here is a power which pro- duced great changes in Europe from 1100 to 1550, and reproduced them from 1800 until now. Through all those centuries there must have been something in the mind of Europe which needed Romance and sustained it. The unromantic interval shrinks to the relative proportions of an episode in our Western civilisation. Clearly, Romance is not a tangle of absurdities to be dismissed as ' rot ' by the Cardinal of Este, or despised as ' Gothic ' by the imitators of classic models. ' Imitation will after though it break her neck ' (S. Daniel, Defence of Bhime, 1603). But Romance is a tissue. In the twelfth century, when it took hold of the Middle Ages, Romance displays a dehberate weaving together of many- coloured strands. Celtic glamour, the uncouth strength of the North, and marvels from the fabulous East, are interlaced in one woof which unfolds a continuous story of Europe, from the Argonauts' quest of the Golden Eleece, by way of the faU of Troy, and the foundation of Rome, to the conquest of Jerusalem by Crusaders. An examination of these strands reveals that the earhest and most alien are largely mythological. They consist of many attempts made by many races, in different ages and distant countries, to express in symbols their guesses at the origin and destiny, the hopes and fears, of man. May we, then, infer that Romance is compara- tive mythology ? In a sense that is true. Its elements are largely mythological. But that view will not yield a definition of Romance. If it did, all mythologies woidd be obviously romantic. But are they ? There is nothing romantic in a savage's belief that the Creator of the World is a great hare. THE LITERATUEE OF EUROPE 33 or in a Greek legend that men and women sprang from stones thrown behind them by Deucalion and Pyrrha. These explanations are not romantic so long as they satisfy the curiosity of their authors. They only begin to be romantic — either when they cease to offer a tolerable answer to the riddle of the universe ; or, in a greater degree, when they coMront the mind of another civUisation which has explained the universe by a wholly different im- aginative process. Mythologies begin to be romantic when they become strange by reason of their antiquity or alien character. Breton and Welsh legends were not romantic to the Celts, when they conceived them. Nor were the sa.gas romantic to the Ice- landers. On the contrary, their rugged strength reproduced a rugged reality. Nor is magic romantic in the East ; it is familiar there. These strands in the fabric of romance became romantic when they struck more modem, and wholly alie^, modes of thought by their strangeness. Even this impact of the strange in mythology wlQ not wholly account for the nature of romance. If it did, Latin litera- ture would have been romantic. The Romans, no less than the Normans, were confronted by Celts and Teutons and the fabulous East, yet the impact of outlandish legends produced but Uttle romance in Latin literature. Our search for the nature of Romance must be directed not only to the strange in mythology, but, more closely, to the reaction produced in the minds that were startled by that strangeness. If we find that the attitude towards strange mythologies of periods called Classic differs profoundly from the attitude of periods called Romantic, we may discover a clue to the nature of Romance in the contrast so revealed. And that 34 THE SPRINGS OF ROMANCE IN is what we do find. Classic periods repudiated stra-nge mythologies and Romantic periods welcomed them. Both aimed at unity in their order of thought and, so far as the Romans were concerned, in their order of the world's government. But the Classic world aimed at unity by exclusion, and the Middle Ages at unity by comprehension. The Greeks stood for understanding the universe by reducing it to the terms of their lofty intelli- gence, expressed in terms of their aU but perfect language. The Romans stood for governing the world by reducing it to one august state with one Imperial religion. To the Greeks the Barbarian was unintelligible ; to the Romans, ungovernable. So both repelled him, and all his strange imagina- tions, as tending to disturb the pursuit of lucidity and order. It is not the goal of unity, but the method chosen for reaching that goal, which stamped its exclusive character on the Classic world, and sterihsed classic literature to romance, save for some faint touches in the earUest and latest poems that dealt with wandering, and sometimes paused to wonder. Even in their own mythology the Greeks got rid of their Titans at the beginning of the world ; whereas the uncouth North kept its giants at end- less war against its gods ; and the Persians retained Ahriman in perpetual conflict with Ormuzd; and the Celts were imcertain whether their Arthur would ever return from the twiUght of Avalon. On the other hand, if we turn to the first Romantic period, we find the most striking characteristic of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in a huge attempt at imity, throughout poHtics and litera- ture, prosecuted by an aU but universal compre- hension. In that age political actors strove to THE LITERATURE OE EUROPE 35 weld Europe into one, assisted by literary authors who sought to correlate with that policy every known record of the Drama of Mankind. Nothing came amiss to them. The political actors re- pudiated no race, however foreign, and the hterary authors, no legend however ancient or far-fetched. Rather did they embrace the strange, seeming to recognise in it something lacking from their own conventions, but akin to a common humanity. They aimed at unity by comprehension, and that method, at least in the domain of hterature, was resumed after the Romantic Revival. Walter Scott and Victor Hugo, no less than Benedict of Sainte- More and Christian of Troyes, were eager to welcome the strange from the East, the West, or the North. We may say of each, ' nexuque pio longinqua revinxit.' I am not concerned to exalt the Romantic above the Classic method in Literature. Both have their several glories, and pecuhar seeds of decay. When Romantic interlacing of many themes degenerates into a love of intricacy for its own sake, Romance becomes trivial, and tedious. It is then replaced by classic admiration for the noblest models. But when that degenerates into a love of imitation for its own sake, the classic method becomes slavish, and tedious in its turn. Then we note a Romantic Revival. I am solely concerned to discover a distraction between periods called Classic, and periods called Romantic, which may yield a clue to the mystery of Romance. Such a distinction is I believe, disclosed in the diversity of their atti- tudes towards the strange and, specially, towards the strange in mjrthology. It is aU but impossible 36 THE SPRINGS OF ROMANCE IN to analyse a reaction of the mind. We cannot put emotions in a crucible. Yet, guided by this pro- found distinction, we may, perhaps, say that Romance results from welcoming the strange, and specially from welcoming the symbols, perforce fantastic, in which foreign lands and far-away ages have sought to express their ' intimations of im- mortahty ' and doubtful wonder at ' that perpetual revolution which we see to be in aU things that never remain the same.' RoiMANTic Soever Y We get a tentative definition, if we say that Romance is not simply the strange, but a result of welcoming the strange, instead of excluding it. Let us test that definition by seeing if it apphes to things generally called romantic. Take a hackneyed illustration — mountain scenery. Since the Revival of Romance, and the novels of Walter Scott, most people agree that moim^tain scenery is romantic. The definition applies to that view, and goes some way to explain it. Motmtain scenery is not romantic, or even strange, to the mountaineer who wrests a hard-won livelihood from its crags and heather. It was strange, but not romantic, to the cultured sybarite of the eighteenth century who describes it in his journal as a ' horrid alp.' It is romantic to the ' heart city-pent ' of the age in which we live, and only because its strangeness is welcome. THE LITERATUKE OF EUROPE 37 Allegory ' Ci est le Romant de la Rose Ou Tart d' Amors est tote enclose.' Reverting to the earlier Romantic period, this definition will, I believe, throw a light on one of its features ; the labyrinthine development of Allegory. Assuming that an author seeks a welcome for some- thing novel and strange, he must express the new matter by images that are obvious to his audience ; otherwise it remains uninteUigible, and unwelcome. In order to establish the coherence of his novelties with the hfe to which all are accustomed, he per- sonifies his sentiments in characters with whom all are familiar ; and that is allegory. Take a capital example, the Romance of the Rose, which shaped and coloured European Uterature in the thirteenth century, and for long afterwards. The author of the first part (Guillaume de Lorris, 1237) turns the new sentiments of ' courteous love ' into the usual inhabitants of a mediaeval castle, and illustrates the course of love ' which never did run smooth ' by the ups and downs to which life in a fortress was exposed. For that was the kind of thing which any ' fellow could understand.' The author of the first part sought a welcome for a new kind of love, differing, in its deUcacy, from the romping of ' Floraha ' and May Games, sung in rustic ditties ; and, in its mysticism, from the stark passion depicted in classic hterature. The author of the second part (Jean de Meun, 1277) sought a welcome for a new kind of fun, differing, in its whimsical satire, from the blimt predicaments of Plautus, and the banter of Horace. The new love, and the new fun, were made 38 THE SPRINGS OF ROMANCE IN familiar by allegory to secure a welcome for their strangeness. Tables WlU a welcome of the strange account for another feature in mediaeval Romance : the revival of Fables in which animals have most of the speaking parts ? I think it wiU. If you except the animals of ^sop, the dog of Odysseus, the charger of Alex- ander, and Lesbia's sparrow, there are not many animals in the classics. Man dominates the scene. On the other hand, there is an irruption of animals into the first Period of Romance. To secure a welcome for these intruders the earUer romantics had recourse to Msoip — ^Ysopet as they caU him — who had brought them, long before, from the East, where animals have ever been revered. Marie de Prance ushers them in under the auspices of an imaginary emperor, called Romulus, and dedicates her Fables to WiUiam Longsword, the natural son of Henry n. ' Q cummencerai la primi^re Des Fables K'Ysopez escrit.' But the animals soon made themselves at home by the charm of their own half-strangeness to man. We know the names of the horses of nearly aU the heroes of Romance. In the thirteenth century, without any aid from heroes, Reynard the Fox, Bruin the Bear, Chanticleer the Cock, ' came to stay,' tin the classical interregnum. After the revival of romance they returned ; so that, now, in the Jungle of Kipling and the Farmyard of Rostand, they occupy the whole of the stage. THE LITERATURE OF EUROPE 39 FiLNTASTic Symbols It is the note of Romance to welcome in litera- ture much else beside man : with deHght when that is possible, and, when it is not, with courage. In Romance man disputes his place with other living beings and elemental forces without life. He re- ceives the impression of scenery, and guesses at dim ' dominations and powers ' that baffle his mun- dane progress and cloud his longing for eternity. All these Romance accepts for their strangeness ; and, I would add, for their truth. When their strangeness is exorbitant, Romance, in order to make their truth intelligible, resorts to allegory and fable, and even to fantastic symbols that seem ludicrous. We laugh, with Cervantes, at the giants and dragons and warlocks of Romance. It is our human privilege. Man is divided by laughter from all that surrounds him. When we have done laughing, we detect in these symbols an attempt — ^frantic if you please — to explain reahties that are coeval with man ; that, indeed, preceded his origin and may outlast his existence. Man's domination, even of this earth, is more partial than would appear from the unromantic presentment of his case. There are forces in nature, by com- parison with whose gigantic strength man's efforts are puny. There are enemies to his well-being that, hke dragons, are not only dangerous but loathsome. There are subtleties in the universe that, like wizards, bewilder and deride his intelli- gence. Even to-day, enHghtened as we are by popular science, we may recall, without contempt, the wild allegories by which other men, in other ages, tried to explain the overpowering, and grisly. 40 THE SPRINGS OF ROMANCE IN and inscrutable ; we may remember with human kindness that those who invented the sjinbols of horror, invented also a vague behef that horror can be conquered by a charm in the hand of the little child. Universal Affestity The reaction of the mind, when confronted with the strange, is, in some sort, a recognition of ignored realities. Romance is an act of recog- nition. When Shakespeare attacks the reality of Time, as if suggesting that, round Time, there is Eternity, in which aU things and aU men are co- existent and co-eternal, we feel that a rare mind is soaring through a rarer atmosphere to the extreme verge of the comprehensible. When Tennyson makes Ulysses say, ' I am a part of aU that I have met,' we feel that this is a dark saying. Yet there are moments when it seems true of each one of us. Its truth strikes as a forgotten face strikes by its strange famiHarity. At such moments we under- stand that darker utterance, ' The Kingdom of God is within you.' A sense of universal affinity comes into literature when men are no longer content with the mythologies, or philosophies, of their own time and people. Then they turn, with a kindly curiosity, to other nations and other ages. ' Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages To feme halwes couthe in sondry londes.' Romance revives, and, extending her welcome to the strange, discovers in it something which has always been latent in man's mind, although starved by convention. The old northern mythology, with its twilight of the gods, and ceaseless battle against THE LITERATURE OF EUROPE 41 a doom of eternal cold, is not so absurd in the twentieth centTxry as amid the certainties of two htindred years ago. We are taught to expect that catastrophe by popular science, the mythology of our day. But our day is also the day of the Romantic Revival, and in it we imitate, uncon- sciously, the attitude adopted towards the strange by our forefathers in the first Romantic epoch. We turn, as they did, to aU mankind's imaginings, not for comfort, but for human fellowship, in the great Romance of Man's adventure through the Universe. We take our part in that quest, with a brave astonishment. In Romantic literature we listen to the camp-songs of our comrades, and • Greet the unseen with a cheer.' THE POETRY OF THE PRISON THE POETRY OF THE PRISON There is a great gulf fixed between 1450 and 1650, the last watch of the Middle Age and the full flush of the Renaissance. You pass it insensibly, by the way of the years ; but to look backward after those same years is to see, as beyond a bridge that has crumbled, the old social life completely severed from the new, with its conditions all changed for all classes. And nowhere is this contrast more deeply marked than in the hves of poets ; for the change from desultory invasion to world-wide diplomacy com- muted the conditions under which in France aU, and in England many of, the writers we care to recall, were moved to produce, or did produce, their work. During the Hundred Years' War every man of standing in both countries had to play his part. Of the Enghsh in the great expedition under Edward m. ' there was not knight, squire, or man of honour, from the age of twenty to sixty years that did not go ' ; ^ and the burden upon France was aggravated by civil war between the feudatories of the Crown. And thus it came about that Geoffrey Chaucer, entermg the customary career of an Enghsh gentleman, suffered its common accidents. He joined Edward's expedition in November, 1369, and was taken in a skirmish near Rheims.^ In The KnigMs Tale, therefore, we have the poetry, echoed 1 Johnes' Froissart, bk. i. c 206. See Rev. W. W. Skeat's Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, vol. i. p. xviii. ' Ibid. 45 46 THE POETRY OF THE PRISON later in The Two Noble Kinsmen, of one wko added the sharp savour of personal sufEering to his treat- ment of materials common to an age when every house was a fortress and every fortress a gaol. For Chaucer's experience was one general in the Middle Age — ^was the lot of most whose lives were more precious than their deaths could be : of Richard Cceur-de-Lion, troubadour and king ; of Enzo of Sardinia, a poet-king, the son of a poet-emperor, yet a prisoner to the Bolognese from his twenty-fifth yeat to his death, a caitiff for three-and-twenty years ; of James i. of Scotland, the sweetest singer in Chaucer's choir ; of Charles D' Orleans, the father of a king, taken at Agincourt, a stripling of twenty- five and the first prince in France, to be caged in England tmtil he was fifty ; of Jehan Regnier, the precursor of Villon ; of VUlon, the last great singer of the Middle Age — in whose case the doom was, indeed, for crime, yet for crime only probable in a society shattered by war ; of Clement Marot, the sole star in the night between ViUon and the Pleiad, carried first with his king a prisoner of war to Spain, and twice afterwards imprisoned at Paris for offences against the law. The poetry of the Middle Age is so much the poetry of the prison that, even if the poet escape* his plot must still be laid between four waUs. The Roman de la Rose, translated by Chaucer and copied by all, was a chief and pattern poem. Only the books of Homer have dictated the plan and supplied the poetic material for a greater city of verse : it is a Coliseum out of whose ruins many cities have been quaWied. Now in the Roman de la Rose all the allegory is of incarceration and release ; and it is an allegory which none ever wearied of repeating. THE POETRY OF THE PRISON 47 Even as every Arabic poein, on theology or another theme, needs must open with a lament over the wasted camp from which the Beloved has been ravished, so the symbols of mediaeval verse are all of castles and stirprises, of captivity and escape. And the perennial image of Arabic song became an obvious convention ; not so the mediaeval allegory. The tedium of durance, the hope of release, the pros- pect of ransom, the accident of communication with the world without, were too near to Ufe for that. These had been the personal note of trou- veres and troubadours ; and, later, they were the personal note of Charlps D' Orleans and ViUon and many another. I have named Jehan Regnier. Villon borrowed from him freely ; and, indeed, he is a poet whose reahsm and pathos have somehow been overlooked. But, for the moment, I shaU con- sider only the master-theme of his songs, which are to be read in a httle volume, intituled Les Fortunes et Adver sites defeu noble homme Jehan Regnier.^ He was a Burgimdian, and being taken by the King's party in 1431, he was imprisoned at Beauvais. Again and yet again in the current forms of ballade, rondel, lay, he sets forth the actual sorrows of the practical captive : his weariness, his ' annoy ' and disgust ; his long parting from his wife ; the silence of his friends, the hopes that depart him where he lies, the messenger who returns no more. To turn his pages is stiU to read ' un autre balade que ledit prisonnier fit ' ; to find him imploring his wife never to forget, even as he wiU never forget : — ' My princess of the Heart I beg of thee That thou nor I forget not thee nor me, 1 B^impression textuelle de I'^dition originale, par Paul Lacroix; GeniSve, 1867. Only three copies of the said original are known. 48 THE POETRY OF THE PRISON But let us ever hearken to our love. And pray to God and to the maid Mary That He will grant us patience from above. Ma princesse du Cueur je vous supplie Que vous ne moy lung lautre si noublye Mais noz amours tenons en audience Et prions Dieu et la Vierge Marie Que ii nous doint a tous deux pacience '— to hear him thank her for her loyalty : — ' Ma douce maitresse Qui m'a donn6 de sa largesse Lefleur de ne riCovbliez mie.' And she was loyal indeed; -for at the end of two years, and after paying two thousand crowns, she won leave to play the hostage with her son, the while her husband travelled to raise the rest of his ransom. To pass the long days and nights of those two years, he wrote ballades for his fellow-prisoners, for his gaolers even. I have said that he was a Burgundian, so that, naturally, among the former were certain EngUshmen, allies of his master the duke. For one of these he made a ballade : — ' rran9ois parler il ne sgavoit A peine ne mot ne demy En anglois tous jour il disoit God and o ul lady helpemy ! ' Thus to us out of the mediaeval twilight, rendered as only a Frenchman can render EngMsh, comes the cry of a countryman who knew no French. ' God and our Lady help-e me ' : the grotesque pathos of it ! Regnier could not sleep for the man's complaining : he moaned on through the night over his wounded hands and feet — ' my fiet and my handez' — into which the shackles had THE POETRY OF THE PRISON 49 eaten. He wailed of it ever, and Regnier lay awake, listening : — ' Oncques je ne dormy Mais son refrain tou jours estoit God and o ul lady hel/pbny ! ' It is the unchanging burden of his lament ; so Regnier, whose art has a good basis of reality, takes it for his refrain, and knits up his every stave with it. In truth, the prison and its passion were too near to hfe for Regnier and those others ever to be con- ventionalised out of reahty. Conventions they had : of May mornings, for instance, and the coming of spring. Yet even these were less conventional than they seem. The matter was felt and observed under its traditional phrasing. Where every house was a moated gaol with never a road to it in winter, there needed no contrasts, of turnkeys or besieging trenches, to flush the enlargement brought round by the spring. For then, in the ' golden morning,' men came forth from the haU-Ught of loopholed cells and the stench of rotting rushes, and rode out over the fields in their new apparel, seeing and smeUing the fresh flowers, and hearkening to birds singing in the brakes. ' The year hath filing his cloak away Of wind and cold and rainy skies, And goeth clad in broideries Of sun-gleams brilliant and gay : ' — thus Charles D' Orleans, in one of the most famous of his rondels. And thus, through another, not so famous, he runs a natural and famiUar fancy of the ■ coming of summer : — ' King Summer's harbingers are come To place his palace in repair. And have spread out his carpet-ware Woven of greenery and bloom. D 50 THE POETRY OF THE PRISON Laying the green woof of their loom Over the country, here and there, King Summer's harbingers are come To place his palace in repair. Hearts long benumbed with weary gloom. Thank God, are whole again and fair ; Winter, begone some other-where. You shall delay no more at home. King Summer's harbingers are come.' It is charming, and — ^what is as much to the purpose, if not more — it is, as the French say, vkm,. But, for aU that, it profited its author httle. For Charles had long since come to know by experience — ^none better ! — ^that hearts once benumbed with weary gloom can no more be quite whole, can never be again in perfect accord with the renewing year. He wrote these rondels, I doubt not, at Blois, in the languid liberty of his old age, recalling, with vain regret, those long years of his wasted manhood, wherein the banishment of winter and the release of spring still found him in a northern prison. But they were the toys of his second childhood. His Poeme de la Prison, written in England, was the capital piece, even as his imprisonment in England was the chief feature, of his hfe. like Villon's poem, engendered of a kindred mis- fortune, it is excellent in art ; Uke Villon's, too, it has an interest apart from art. We are often tempted to fix our looks on the Uves of the great actors ia an age : to exaggerate, within these lives, the saUence of certain immortal deeds, and then to stamp a nation, or an epoch, with such same dies of individual worth. To yield to that temptation is to misread history, for the contours of an age may far more surely be traced in the lives of those who THE POETRY OF THE PRISON 51 have suffered their impress than in the valour of those who have sought to change their shape. Now, Charles D' Orleans and Frangois Villon were not great actors : were scarce actors at aU. But, while essentially passive, they were yet not dumb. Each of them received the impress of his age upon his Ufe, and each revealed it, a little transfigured by personal reaction, in his song. The imprisonment of Charles, and its effect on his Ufe, the life of Villon, and its result in his imprisonment, show the very image of the Middle Age after the vanishing of its soul. Their poetry is as it were the mask from a dead face. The son of an Italian mother, Valentina Visconti, Charles D' Orleans was bom in the midst of the Hundred Years' War (1391). Doubtless this paren- tage affected his personal taste, and lent a gracious refinement to the turn of his French ballades and rondels. Doubtless, too, when a hundred years later, Louis xn., the child of his old age, came to the throne, by conferring on that king a claim to the Duchy of Milan it led to a further expansion of Itahan influence in France. Yet during his life it was powerless to push on the hands of time. It cotdd not change the necessity of his own or his country's misfortune. He was yet a boy when his father's murder by the Duke of Burgundy fastened an hereditary quarrel on him, and divided the great feudatories of France into the historic factions of Armagnac and Burgundian : so that thenceforward there could be nothing but that blind frenzy of civil war, which led to Agincourt and the English occupation. And at Agincourt Charles was caught up out of the strife to be a captive for a quarter- century, an idler growing old in idleness even while 52 THE POETRY OF THE PRISON his own party grew to be the national party — became, indeed, the nation itself, brought to this late birth by the last and longest agony of feudalism. From his prison in England he might hear of victory or of defeat, of the capture of his own town by the Enghsh or of its dehvery by Joan of Arc, of the crowning of an English king in Paris or of a French king's return to his capital. But for year after year and decade after decade he could hear little of ransom, and nothing at aU of peace. During this speU of lost Hfe it was that he made that series of ballades set in a framework of allegory, which, after M. Charles d'Hericault — ^who bases his opinion on certain MSS. bearing the note, ' Ici finit le Uvre que Monseigneur d' Orleans ecrit dans sa prison,' and on many very obvious references to exile, to imprison- ment, to the hopes of ransom — I have called his Poeme de la Prison. The two series of ballades and the setting in which they are placed form one work of art. Throughout, the elaborate machinery of allegorical abstraction, first employed in the Roman de la Rose, is most dexterously imitated and sustained. But what a difference in the informing spirit of the two poems ! The Roman de la Rose, for aU the irony of the second and longer part, does at least show the final con- summation of Desire. And, again, the enemies that for a time debar the lovers from enjoyment, are far from subtle : they are but Danger, Shame, Fear, and Slander, which every young heart must expect to face, and may hope to outwit or to overthrow. Now the later poem opens, hkewise, with the glorious morning of a young life. But the brave heart is soon ' vestu de noir ' : he languishes in distress ; the ship of ' Good News,' for which he desires a fai? THE POETRY OF THE PRISON 53 wind, never comes for all his calling ; if Fortune turn her wheel in his favour, soon she turns it back ; and the Beloved of the allegory, who should save him, dies. So the hope is never achieved, and the high heart is conquered. Yet not by Danger nor Fear. The new and victorious enemies of manhood's endeavour are Melancholy and Weariness. They were first noted by Charles in his northern prison ; but they are many since his time who have seen the sun of their life's promise ' stealing, unseen, to west with this disgrace.' Merencolie, Ennuy, and, at last, Nonchaloir, the apathy of a heart ' tout en- rouiUe ' — eaten with rust : that is his rendering of the Preacher's lament. It is not alone that the cast of the allegory re- appears, but also all the current forms of French mediaeval verse are with it. And all are changed, are coloured from within by a charge of personal sorrow. ' Le premier jour du mois de May ' comes round again and again : but it is an Enghsh May reflecting the troubled passion of his heart, and it is utterly unlike the May he remembers. It is ' Trouble plain de vent et de pluie : Estre souloit tout autrement Ou temps qu'ay oongneu en ma vie.' In another baUade he writes of the ' Flower and the Leaf,' and chooses the leaf for his wear ; but not on the moral grounds given in the innumerable versions of this mediaeval allegory. He chooses it because of his personal sorrow : — ' Entierement de sa partie ; ^ Je n'ay de nulle flour envie, Porte la qui porter la doit, Car la fleur, que mon cueur aimoit Plus que nulle autre creature, Est hors de ce monde passee.' 54 THE POETRY OF THE PRISON Who was this flower, the Beloved, the Princess, mistress, sole friend, of the poem ? Some have said his wife, Bomie D'Armagnac, others France, or his hberty, or the memory of the women who had loved him when he was yoimg. Yet, as I think, since the poem is but one sustained allegory, it is aU these and more. It is the spirit of his youth : it is aU of love, ambition, and hope, that was in him on the fatal morning of Agincourt. Anyhow, the Beloved dies. In Ballade LV. news reaches him : she is dangerously iU. In the next she recovers. In the next she is no more. He used to think, ' at the beginning of the year,' of what gift he could give his lady, ' la bien aimee,' and now death has laid her in the grave ; so at last, in Ballade LXIX., he cele- brates her obsequies : — ' I made my lady's obsequies Within the miaster of desire, And for her soul sad diriges Were sung by Diile behind the choir ; Her sanctuary was one fire With many cierges lit by grief ; And on her tomb in bold relief Were painted tears, hemmed with a girth Of jewelled letters all around That read : ' Here lyeth in the ground The treasure of all joys on earth.' A slab of gold upon her lies With saphirs set in golden wire ; Gems that are loyalty's devise. And gold well known for joy's attire. Both were the handmaids of her hire ; For joy and loyalty were chief Among the virtues God was lief To show in fashioniag her birth, That to his praise it might redound, She being wonderfully found The treasure of all joys on earth. THE POETRY OF THE PRISON 65 Say no word more. In ecstasies My heart is raptured to expire, Hearing the noble histories Of deeds she did. Whom all aspire To set on high and ever higher. God, binding up death's golden sheaf, Drew her to heaven, in my belief, So to adorn with rarer mirth His paradise where saints stand round ; For joy there was in her renowned. The treasure of all joys on earth. Envoy Tears and laments are nothing worth. All soon or late by death are bound ; And none for long hath kept and crowned The treasure of all joys on earth.' So henceforward he will worship Nonchaloir. So after his release he withdraws from the battle of life to write rondels with his friends, seeking to forget the old-time tragedy of his youth and the present misery of his native land. ' I could not believe,' Petrarch had written, ' that this was the same France I had seen so rich and flourishing. Nothing presented itself to my eyes but a fearful solitude, an utter poverty, land tincultivated, houses in ruins. Even the neighbourhood of Paris showed everywhere marks of desolation and conflagration. The streets are deserted, the roads overgrown with weeds, the whole is a vast solitude.' ^ That was in 1360 ; and eighty more years of invasion and civil broU had come and gone in the hapless land since then. As we have seen, some seeds of the Renaissance were sown in Charles's parentage, but only to lie ^ Green, History of the English People, i. 438. 56 THE POETRY OF THE PRISON dormant through a dateless winter. His kinship with the South might colour his own taste and shed a little lustre on his court at Blois : it could not redeem him from the dark conditions of his age nor change these sensibly through France. They had seemed at their darkest when, amid the last spasms of the war, Fran9ois Villon was bom in a Paris still held by the Enghsh, who that very year (1431) burned Joan, ' la bonne Lorraine,' at Rouen. But they grew darker still when the Enghsh had departed the land, for not tUl after the tide of conquest had turned was there revealed the full horror — the rot and stench — of the wreckage it had submerged. The winter following on Charles vn.'s re-entry into Paris (1437) was one of pestilence and famine and unheard-of cold. Wolves prowled in the streets, attacking grown men.^ Charles D'Orleans took refuge from those evil days in the glow of an easy mind : he shut himself in, as a man on winter even- ings shuts himself into a Httle chamber lit with a cheerful blaze. It was not so with Villon. The grisly shadows of his childhood crept into his soul, and from his soul into his song ; so that when most his verses ghtter and ring with tears and laughter, there shall you look to meet a wolf at any turn. The record of his manhood opens with a sordid tragedy, and closes, so far as we know it, with a blackguardly revenge. Skipping the follies of ' le petit escolier,' we find him, a young man, sitting, on a Jime evening in 1455, after supper under the clock-tower of Saint Benoit-le-betoume. A priest, one Phihppe Sermoise, wronged, it may be, in a ^ ' Fransois Villon d'aprfes des documens nouveaux.' Marcel Schwob. RevuR des deux Mondes, 15 Juillet 1892. I am indebted to this article for the details of Villon's hfe, there published for the first time. THE POETRY OF THE PRISON 57 shameless intrigue, dxew near, and after an exchange of insults, pushed him down. It is a note of the time that every bystander slunk forthwith into the shadows, and the two were left alone in the twilight. Then the priest drew a dagger and stabbed Villon in the lip ; but ViUon, striking from under bis cloak, knifed his antagonist in the groin, and, finaUy, being disarmed by a newcomer, picked up a heavy stone and pashed in the priest's brain-pan. Banished for this manslaughter, he took to .the road, and he travelled the highways of France. They were in- fested, as ever in the Middle Age, yet more thickly then than ever, by a wandering populace of minstrels, beggars, sham clerks, goliards, broken men, camp- followers, and thieves. For the Hundred Years' War had come to an end with Charles vn.'s entry into Bordeaux in 1453, and this tide of scum was now swollen beyond any previous high-water mark by the disbanding of his army. Within its eddies there existed from that year xaitil its extermination in 1461, the secret society (not unlike the Camorra) of the ' CoquiUards,' or ' Companions of the Shell,' with a jargon of its own, with 'prentices, past- masters, and a chief, ' le Roi de la Coquille ' : briefly, a complete hierarchy of blackguardism, with organised departments of brutahty or craft, to which each newcomer was detailed according to his natural aptitude for crimes. It is beyond doubt, as M, Schwob has shown, that ViUon was received into this association. He wrote six ballades in its slang ; he consorted for years with two notorious ' com- panions,' Regnier de Montigny and Colin de Cayeux, in whose felonies he lent a hand, and whose deaths he mourned. In 1456 his banishment was remitted, and he returned to Paris with his new-found know- 58 THE POETKY OF THE PRISON ledge of the world. Nor was he long in tttming it to account. In the December of the same year you will find him, with Colin de Cayeux and another, scaling the high walls of the College de Navarre to pick the common chest of the dons and students in the FactQty of Theology, the while another rascal Guy de Tabarie by name, kept watch outside over the ladder and the cloaks. Villon, for his share of the plunder, pocketed a hundred gold crowns, and, as he teUs us in the Petit Testament, ' about Christ- mas, in the dead season, when the wolves Hve on wind,' he shifted his quarters to Angers. With a wise prevision, as it turned out ; for when, next year (1457), the chest was fotmd empty, Tabarie first blabbed, and then, under torture, gave full information against his confederates. ViUon derides him in the Grand Testament for his habit of telling the truth, and bequeaths a halter to one of his examiners, while to another, Frangois de Ferre- bourg, a sharper vengeance is reserved. But for the moment the poet could return no more to Paris. A Companion of the Shell dared hope for Uttle mercy : three had been boiled ahve at Dijon but two years before, and the society was ever getting thinned by the axe and the rope. Villon, indeed, was not to see Paris again until he was anmestied on the acces- sion of Louis XI., in 1461, for yet another crime of the ' Coquillards,' perpetrated, we know not when, at Montpipeau : a crime which ended in the hanging of Colin de Cayeux, and in his own condemnation to perpetual imprisonment at Meung, in the donjon of the Bishop of Orleans. We get glimpses of him at the courts of Charles D' Orleans and of Jean n. de Bourbon, but soon he wanders out of sight again, by the ways of those that love darkness, and when THE POETRY OF THE PEISON 59 we fish him up again he is in irons at Meung. There, on bread and water, he must have composed the bulk of the great poem which has made him immortal : a work of unfailing execution, of brilliant lines playing Hke forked lightning over unguessed chasms of awful truth. He writes of his shames in it as an old soldier of his sears : ' Necessite fait gens mesprendre. Et faim saiUir les loups des bois.' The worship of the Virgin or the beastliness of the stews ; the old age of the wit told to hold his tongue, or of the harlot heart-sick for lost loveliness ; the fortune of those who fare sumptuously, and, again, of those who beg naked and see bread only through the windows they go by ; the passing of renowned ladies and great emperors and saints : aU these are as one to his art. The truth of them is there, set down with tinfaltering precision, without a trace of effort. He sings the ' snows of yester-year ' in words that haunt the ages, or lightly casts an acrostic of his name into an envoy aching with desolation : — ' Fente, gresle, gelle, j'ay mon pain cuict ! 7e sxiis paillard, la paillarde me duit. Leqnel vault mieux ? Chascun bien s'entresuit, i'ung I'autre vault : c'est a mau chat mau rat. Ordure amons, ordure nous a£Euyt, iVous deffuyons honneur, il nous deffuj^, En ee bourdeau, ou tenons nostre estat.' So he siags. It is easy as the wind in autumn, and as musical, and — ^whirling with dead leaves ! With this and the rest of the Grand Testament in his pocket he returned to Paris in 1461, and we hear of him but once again, playing a mean part in a squaUd brawl. Frangois Ferrebouc, the examiner, his old enemy, knocked up one night after supper by Villon and his friends, was stabbed by an xmknown 60 THE POETRY OF THE PRISON hand. The record of his manhood ends as it began, and he passes for ever into utter darkness. From some lampoons in his work and this last act of rascaUty or cowardice, it would seem that he could never forgive any person concerned in the criminal investigation of 1457 : the calamity which made him an outcast. It was in that year, and in such dubious plight, that Villon drifted to the court of Charles D' Orleans at Blois. It was a strange meeting of two poets : the younger, of twenty-six, a known criminal, a gaol-bird to be ; the elder, of sixty-six, aged before his time, enfeebled with long imprisonment in his country's cause, so fallen into decay that six years later he could no longer even sign his name. Of the manner of their meeting we know nothing directly ; but, indirectly, we can gather enough from significant hints in their writings and from the shortness of one's stay. There is a duU official poem by Villon on the birth of Charles's daughter in December, 1457. It is copied in his hand into a manuscript containing poems in the writing of Charles himself and other rhyming friends. But the fourteen pages following ViUon's contribu- tion are blank. An explanation may be found in his refrain to a ballade, the first Une of which, ' Je meurs de soef aupres de la fontaine,' was apparently given out by Charles as the text for a poetical tourna- ment. We have the thing done and copied out by Charles and many of his guests ; but Villon's work is very different from theirs. The antithesis to be maintained in every line lent itself perfectly to the theme of his own false position. The official line has reminded him of the reservation with which he was received, of the half-hearted hospitality. He dies of thirst beside the fountain ; chatters with THE POETRY OF THE PRISON 451 cold by the hearth ; is an exile in his own land. He laughs through his tears, and expects without hope — so he leads up to the refrain, ' Bien recueilly, debout6 de chascun' — he is well received, and re- jected of aU. To understand this ballade, addtessed to his ' clement Prince,' and the shortness of Villon's visit, yoil scarce need the allusions, scattered thrbligh his writings, to the lot of the man who has borne a reputation for wit in his youth : to this old monkey whose tricks no longer please : who, if he hold his tongue, is taken for a worn-out fool and, if he speak, is told to hold his tongue. Indeed, we are hot left in doubt by Charles himself as to his impressioh of his guest. He has sketched his Villon in a rondel and, lest any should fail to recognise the Hkeness, assists with an obvious allusion to the author of the Grand Testament. That poem opens with this frightful confession : — ' " En Tan trentiesme de mon aage iQwe tcmtes mes honteS j'atf belies." ' The second of these two lines gives the first and the refrain of Charles's rondel, ' Qui a toutes ses hontes beues ' : — ' He that bath dranken all his shame Cares nothing for what people say ; He lets derision pass its way As clouds may go the way they came. If m the street they hoot his name. He winks and turns to wine and play. He that hath drunken all his shame Cares nothing for what people say. A truffle likes him more than fame ; If folk laugh, he must laugh as they ; But if it comes to blushing — ^Nay, He keeps his coimtenance the same Though he have drunken all his shame.' 62 THE POETRY OF THE PRISON So did these poets meet, and so they parted. Both belonged to the last hoiirs of the Middle Age ; both saw the forces of feudahsm overthrow the society they had founded ; both lived and died in the wilderness of the ensuing desolation. The one, caught in the catastrophe, became a waif among wolves and robbers ; the other, by a subtler irony, was at once the leader and the idle witness, the ' flag rather than the captain ' of the feudal party which, abjuring its nature, was to found the new order of monarchy and national Ufe. Charles D' Orleans, aloof from his age, confined perforce in a foreign prison, and later, making a lodge, of choice, in the wilderness, distilled into the narrowest vials songs sweet as any, and yet trivial. Of the cup handed him by Destiny he drank one half, and then set it down unfinished. But Villon drained it to the lees ; knew all the life which renders the legends of Louis xi. and Prince Hal intelligible. His verse is bitter with the bitterness, glad only with the insolence, of those days. And yet it is great verse — ^verse haunted with aU their horror, steeped in their infinite sadness. RONSARD AND LA PLEIADE RONSARD AND LA PLElADE It is bold to select a limited period in the poetry of one country, for the arts have a continuous organic hfe to be traced through many lands back to origins in distant ages. Yet there are periods, often long, when the arts simulate death, and periods, always short, when they seem to be born again. The greatest of these rebirths took place throughout Western Europe during the sixteenth century, and constitutes a feature so striking that the epoch in which it occurred is often called after it, the Re- naissance. We may explain, the renaissance of the arts, but we cannot explain it away. There it is ; in architecture, in sculpture, in painting, in music, and perhaps, above all, in poetry. In poetry some- thing happened — ^not, indeed, altogether without parallels — in the thirteenth century, and again in the nineteenth. But the outbiurst of poetry in Europe during the Renaissance was greater in volume, more ingenious in variety, than at any time before or since. The modem world exploded into an ecstasy of song. The poetry of Ronsard and his companions, their conscious endeavour to re-endow the world with an aU but lost delight, is, in terms of time and place, a central event of the Renaissance. They wrote in the middle of the sixteenth century and in the heart of France. 66 EONSARD AND LA PLEIADE The Age and the Man I need not dwell on the age in which they wrote. It is enough for my purpose to say that the age of Ronsard exhibited, in the vigour of their prime, new ideas of monarchy, nationality, and religion, which breaking up, and breaking away from, old ideas of feudahsm, the empire, and the papacy, induced an era of gorgeous embassies in the place of local war waged under sordid conditions. ' The Alps had been levelled for ever ' when, ' on the last day of the year 1494, the army of Charles vm. entered Rome.' Thenceforward, untU the fatal day of Pavia, Italy was the ring in which the Houses of France and Austria wrestled for the headship of Christendom. Italy, the turning-point in the welter of war and diplomacy, became a vortex, sucking in streams of courage and intellect from aU Europe. Never had there been such contact between contemporary civilisations. But this wide embrace of the present was not aU. Of modern coimtries Italy remembered most of the classic past ; had always remembered it, confusedly, as a man dreaming remembers a day of excitement and success. More than a century before the French invasion Petrarch, though he could not read them, had wept with joy over the codices of Homer and Plato. Since then the texts of antiquity had been recovered and printing-presses established, so that between 1494 and 1515, the in- vasion of Charles vm. and the victory of Fran9ois i. at Marignano, the press of Aldus printed in Venice thirty-three first editions of the classics. It was then and there also, in an Italy which riveted the gaze of every cultured mind, that men, having listened once again to the songs of their loveliness. RONSARD AND LA PLEIADE 67 turned to unearth and piece together the broken and buried gods of beauty. The revolution in mediaeval pohtics and religion synchronised with the recovery of classic Hterature and sculpture. Now Ronsard, the man apart from the poet, is an embodiment of aU the forces and confusions of his time. I shall speak first of him and his companions ; next, of the sources of their inspiration and the aim of their art ; lastly, of their achievement and influence. Pierre de Ronsard, son of the Seigneur Loys de Ronsard, the High Steward of Frangois Premier's household, was bom in 1525, the year of that king's defeat at Pavia, which decided adversely his duel with the House of Austria. The historian De Thou wrote afterwards that his birth made amends to France for even so great a disaster. He lay in the cradle when his father set out with the king's hostages to suffer duress until the royal ransom should be paid. I visited his father's castle, De la Poissonniere, as a reverent pilgrim, some years ago. It stands, beneath a low cliff of white rock overgrown with ivy, in the gentle scenery, elegiac rather than romantic, to which Ronsard's verse ever returns. Above the low cHff are remnants of the Foret de Gastine ; between the castle and the little river Loir, bedecked with fieur de lis, stretch poplar- screened meadows. The castle is inscribed here and there, indeed everywhere, in the fashion of that day, transi- tional between Gothic and Renaissance, with Latin mottoes curiously appropriate to Ronsard's tempera- ment and to the alternations of his posthumous fame. Above a door you may read ' Voluptati et gratiis ' ; about the windows, ' Veritas filia temporis ' 68 RONSARD AND LA PLEIADE and ' Respice finem.' Within, beneath his arms and those of France, sculptured on the apex of the great pyramidal chimney-piece in the haU, there runs the confident legend ' Non f aUtmt f utura merentem ' ; and below, in a deep band, a fence of blossoming roses seems to grow on the surface of the stone. It is a moot point whether he himself added this frieze to symbohse his love for a half -guessed princess, who wore the rose for her emblem, or whether the very nest in which he was born presaged that lovely accident of his art — the marriage of what Pater has called the askesis of stone with the pathetic blossom- ing and fading of the rose. But we are not to think that Ronsard, or any of his companions, evaded the conditions of their age to indulge in the languid fallacy of art for art's sake. He was plunged as a child into the unrest of camps and courts, as a youth iato travel and diplomacy, and, long years after he had deliberately sought the seclusion of art and study, replunged into the cruel conflicts of rehgious animosity. When nine years old he fell Ol at the College of Navarre, and was taken by his father to the king's camp at Avignon. There he became page to the Dauphin Fran9ois, who was poisoned six days later. He found another protector in Charles, Due d' Orleans, and, at the age of twelve, accompanied Madeleine of France on her journey to wed James of Scotland. Those days were hectic in their precocity. He passed two years in Edinburgh, and then travelled for six months in England. He could dance and fence well, as was expected, but was given over to solitary wandering and the writing of verses. To prevent such original vagaries the Due RONSARD AND LA PLElADE 69 d' Orleans sent him, in 1540, aged fifteen, on a mission to Flanders and on again to Scotland. He was wrecked on the coast, escaped by swimming, and, returning in the same year to Germany in the suite of the French Ambassador, Lazare de Baif, travelled thence to Turin with GuiUaume de Langey, Seigneur du BeUay. Thus it was that he came to know one of his future comrades in the Pleiade, Antoine de Baif, and to know of another, and greater, Joachim du BeUay, De Langey' s kinsman. At sixteen he spoke English, ItaHan, and German, and was conversant, in all those tongues, with affairs of State ; but, being stricken by deafness, and so handicapped for a hfe of action otherwise promising, he turned to letters, learnt Virgil by heart, and read the poetry of Clement Marot and the Roman de la Rose. He acquired the dower of mediaeval song, the storied legend of GuiUaume de Loris and Jehan de Meung, changing from allegorical romance to allegorical sarcasm, and, in Marot, the tired affecta- tions of used formality. The Middle Age, though few felt this, had come to a fuU close. Ronsard, probably, was conscious of that conclusion, for he had devoured the best of its verse and was still unsatisfied. Then — as the way is with precocious youth — two accidents assailed and redirected his Hfe. The Court, in which he stiU held a post, was at Blois. Wandering thence as his wont was, on a certain day (21st April 1541), aged sixteen, he met a girl in the forest with fair hair, brown eyes, and sinihng hps. . He returned a poet to write his Amours in honour of Cassandra, and loved her vainly for seven years. His father, who objected to poetry, being dead in 1544, he began, perhaps be- cause he loved, and love is new, to study Greek, 70 EONSARD AND LA PLEIADE the new knowledge, stealing off to be taught by the humanist Dorat with De Baiif, his diplomatic companion. Ere long the second accident befeU. Wandering with a promising career lost and a froward mistress discovered, he met at some time not long before 1547 another young man, Joachim du Bellay, from whom the high calls of war and diplomacy had also, oddly enough, been muffled by the curtain of early deafness. Both were turning for consolation to the poetry of the ancients. The meeting was memorable. Out of it sprang the association of poets and scholars who called them- selves at first ' La Brigade,' and afterwards ' La Pleiade,' in imitation of poets at the court of Ptolemy Philadelphus. With Ronsard, Du BeUay, Dorat, and De Baiif, were Estienne JodeUe, Pontus de Tyard, and Remy BeUeau. I must add Ohvier de Magny and, later, many others to fill the places of the dead — Jean Passerat, Gilles Durant, and Phihppe des Portes. The original confederacy toiled in secret till Du BeUay brought out, in 1549, their manifesto, La Defense et Illustration de la Langue Frangaise. Each guarded his labours so jealously that, when Du BeUay surreptitiously read the Odes on which Ronsard had been working, nothing but the ardour of youthful friendship averted a quarrel. This incident precipitated the publication of their poetry. Ronsard's first four books of Odes appeared in 1550, and his Amours in 1552 ; Du Bellay's Olive in 1649, and his Begrets in 1558. I shall not attempt a bibhography of their poetry, amazing in its amount, or a nice discrimination of the ladies by whom it was partly inspired. Louise Labe, the Aspasia of Lyons, who had ridden to war after the Dauphin, accoutred as a captain, who played on many musical RONSARD AND LA PLEIADE 71 instruments, read Greek, and wrote poetry in French and Italian ; or, again, Diane de Poictiers, actually mistress to the ELing, practically a Secretary of State, and accidentally governess to the Queen's children, the model for the Diane Chasseresse in the Louvre and chatelaine d'Anet, with its fanciful traceries and el9.borate parterres, are both so typical of that transitional age that each might exhaust an essay. Ronsard, alone, sang voluminously to Cassandra, Marie, Helene ; frequently to Marguerite, Duchesse de Savoie, and Marie Stuart. And surely Ronsard loved that queen. Else could he have put into the mouth of Charles ix. the address to the shade of his elder brother — Ah ! fr^re mien, tu ne dois faire plainte, De quoi ta vie en sa fleur s'est eteinte ; Avoir joui d'une telle beaute, Sein. centre sein, valait ta royaute. Yet Ronsard loved divine beauty even more ; per- haps loved most, certainly cared most for, the art by which he expressed his love, and, though he loved them, cared least for the beautiful women whose human loveliness helped him to detect Divine Beauty and braced him to elaborate her ritual. The last line of his last love sonnet runs : — ■ Car I'Amour et la Mort n'est qu'une mesme-ehose. He uses his head for the expression of his art, not for the analysis of his emotion. Neither shaU I seek to follow out their diplomatic journeys. Briefly, they sojourned often in Italy, or at Lyons, and spent sweet and splendid days, described by Brantome, among the many castles in the wide valley of the Loire. Ronsard' s Odes were at the outset vehemently attacked, but, first aided by the protection of his 72 EONSARD AND LA PLEIADE Marguerite, sister to Henri n., and then winning on their merits, his poetry and the poetry of his com- panions carried all before it at the court and in the coimtry. Ronsard won a greater fame than was ever accorded to a poet in his lifetime. He was acclaimed a Horace, a Pindar, a Petrarch. The Academy of the Floral Games at Toulouse sent him a sUver Minerva ; his king must have him at all times by his side ; our own Elizabeth gave him a diamond — comparing its water to the purity of his verse ; and Marie Stuart, when others had deserted his old age, a buffet worth two himdred crowns, addressed 'A Ronsard I'ApoUon de la source des Muses.' Chatelard read his Hymn to Death, and no other ofl&ce, for consolation on the scaffold. Montaigne, who could confer dignity beyond the gift of kings, writes, say in 1575 : ' Since Ronsard and Du Bellay have raised our French poetry to a place of honour, I see no apprentice so little but he must inflate phrases and order cadences much about as they do. For the common herd there were never so many poets, but easy enough as it is for these to reproduce their rhymes, they stOl fall short enough of imitating the rich descriptions of the one, and the delicate inventions of the other.' The striking feature in the lives of Ronsard and his companions is their rapid recognition ; but this instant glory was soon followed by sudden ecUpse. The last decade of Henri n.'s reign (1549-1559) comprises most of the work for which he and his comrades are famous. Through these years of poetry and pageantry, storms, pohtical and rehgious, were silently brewing to burst over the head of Henri's son, and incidentally to turn Ronsard the poet into RONSARD AND LA PLEIADE 73 a pamphleteer. But whilst they lasted the Pleiade saw crowns of lesser states pushed about like pieces in a game ; yet with aU Europe for the chess-board, and with players whose gestures and apparel stiU shine from between the wars of dynasties and the wars of religion, as from a sunny patch between the shadows of two thunder-clouds. Beneath that shaft of hght their lives and poetry glisten. They watched the game of high politics, wrote sonnets to the players, and often took a hand in it themselves. Its extension over Europe, demanding long travel and exile abroad, changed the inspiration of their art, and charged it with splendid colours. But, of them aU, Ronsard was the only one who lived on into the sUence of old age amidst altered and uncon- genial surroundings. He saw his companions die; Du Bellay and De Magny in 1560, Jodelle in 1573, BeUeau in 1577. His Franciade fell dead of its own weight, and was forgotten in the horrors of the St. Bartholomew. Even from as early as 1560 an unmoral dehght in mere learning and the love of beauty was no longer possible. His heart, as a patriot, bled for France in her misery of reHgious war, which ever seemed to him, as a Catholic, wicked and irrational. So he set aside his theories of art, his stately measures and plaintive melodies, and took his stand, like a man, in the midst of his country's dissensions. This aspect of his life is so rarely considered that I recommend the study of his Discours, or poetical pamphlets, to any who would im^derstand the attitude of a liberal and cultivated scholar, who yet struck in, hard, on the side of Royalty and Catholi- cism, rather because he was a philosophic conser- vative by temperament than because he held any 74 RONSAED AND LA PLEIADE precise views on religion or politics. In his elegy on the tumult of Amboise, he Avrites, 1560 : — Ainsi que rennemi par livres a seduit Le peuple devoye qui faussement le suit, II faut en disputant par livres le confondre, Par livres I'assaillir, par livres luy respondre. But he was not content with diatribes. According to De Thou, he placed himself, in 1562, at the head of the gentry and routed the Huguenot pillagers. ' Qua ex re commota nobilitas arma subit, duce sibi delecto, Petro Ronsardo ' (Livre xxx. 1562). The most interesting account of his way of think- ing and living is to be found in his Besponse aux injures et calomnies deje ne sgay quels predicantereaux et misnistreaux de Geneve. The brutahties of the attack — Le Temple de Bonsard — which he countered in this reply justify its violence, and challenge his parade of worldly amenities. He had been accused of being a turn- coat Huguenot, an unavowed CathoHc priest, a pagan who sacrificed a buck in aU seriousness to a heathen god, an evil-hver, and of much else which cannot conveniently be repeated. So he describes himself, without extenuation, in this vein : — ' Waking, I say my prayers ; get up, dress, study, composing or reading, in pursuit of my destiny for four or five hours. When weary I go to church. There follows an hour's talk and dinner : " Sobre repas, grace, amu9ement." If fine, I wander in a wood or village, and seek solitary places. J'aime fort les jardins qui sentent le sauvage, J'aime le flot de I'eau qui gazouiUe au rivage. La devisant sur I'herbe avec un mien amy Je me suis par les fleurs bien souvent endormy A I'ombrage d'un saule ; ou, lisant dans un livre, J'ay cherche le moyen de me faire revivre. RONSARD AND LA PLEIADE 75 ' In bad weather I go into society, play cards, take part in gymnastics, leaping, wrestling, or fencing, and make jokes — et k la verite Je ne loge chez inoi trop de severite J'ayme a faire ramour, i'ayme a parler aux femmes, A mettre par escrit mes amoureuses flammes ; J'ayme les bals, la dance, et les masques aussi La musique et le luth eimemis de soucy. ' When the dusky night ranges the stars in order and curtains the sky and earth with veils, without a care I go to bed, and there, lifting my eyes, voice, and heart up to the vault of heaven, I make my orison, praying the divine goodness for gentle pardon of my failing. For the rest I am neither rebeUious nor ill- natured, I do not back my rule with the sword. Thus I live ; if your life be better, I do not envy. Let it be better by aU means.' Au reste je ne suis ny mutin ny meschant, Qui fay croire ma loy par le glaive trenchant. VoUa comme je vy ; si ta vie est meilleixre, Je n'en suis envieux, et soit a la bonne heure. He explains that he is not a priest ; but, in those places where it is right to display the office and duty of a devout heart, he is a stout piUar of the Church, wearing the proper vestments of the minor orders which he had taken, with certain priories conferred on him for his services, by his king. With his astounding touch of unconventional admiration for all living creatures, he compares himself in his cope to a snail on an April morning : — Par le trou de la chappe apparoit esleve Mon col brave et gaillard, comme le chef lave D'un lima9on d'avril . , . 76 RONSARD AND LA PLEIADE and discourses of the snail with the fair palace he carries along slimy tracts among the fresh grass and flowers, shooting out his horns, a warrior of the garden, who pastures on the dew with which his house is besprinkled. He attends the services of his priory and honours his prelate. If others had done so, there woiild have been no civil troubles, the fair sun of the ancient age of Astrsea would shine over aU France. No ritters from the Rhine would have drunk her vintage and squandered her money. No English would have bought her lands. It is absurd for a Calvinist to judge a Catholic, as though a Jew accused a Turk, or a Turk a Christian ; God only, the imfailing Judge, knows the hearts of aU. He goes on : — ' You say my muse is paid to flatter. No prince can boast (I wish he could) of having paid me a salary. I serve whom I please with imfettered courage. I sing the king, his brother, and mother. Of others I am not the valet : if they are mighty lords, I too have a high heart. ' You say I have been a student, a courtier, a soldier. Quite true. But I have never been a street-preacher or hypocrite (cafard), selling my vain dreams to ignorant men. I 'd rather row in a galley, or labour with swoUen hands in fields that no one has heard of, than cease to be a gentleman in order to become a cheat (pipeur). You say it ill becomes me to speak of virtue : Pharisee ! If aU the am- brosia and nectar of heaven be yours, stiU le hon Dieu wiU keep us a httle brown bread. If your new sect should carry you to Paradise, our old one will at least see the door, and we, poor banished wretches, by God's goodness, will still find some room in a retired corner of His house, though, as in reason, the RONSARD AND LA PLEIADE 77 best places must be for you who are children of grace. And yet let me remind you of the Pharisee and the Publican. After aU, virtue cannot be shut up in Geneva. She is a winged creature, who passes over the sea, takes flight to the sky, and traverses the earth like lightning, the wandering guest of all the world ! La ¥ertu ne se peut a Geneve enf ermer : EUe a le dos aile, elle passe la mer, EUe s'envole an eiel, elle marche sur terre Viste comme un esclair, messager du toimerre . . . Ainsi de peuple en peuple eUe court par le monde, De ce grand univers I'hostesse vagabonde. ' You say that in my frenzy I scatter my verses like leaves to the wind. I do. Poetry is an art ; but not comparable to the fixed arts of preaching and prose. The right poets have their hidden artifice, which does not seem art to verse-mongers, but fares forth under a free restraint whithersoever the muse may lead it. I gather my honey, as the bees do, from every flower of Parnassus. I am mad, if you please, when I hold a pen, but without one, perfectly sane. You are like a child who, seeing giants and chimseras in the clouds, holds the pageant for truth. The verses with which I disport myself, you take in earnest ; but neither your verses nor mine are oracles. ' You say that the fame I once had is defeated. Do you really suppose that your sect embraces all the world ? You are very much mistaken. I have too much fame. I would rather without noise or renown be but a shepherd or a labourer. There is no happiness in being pointed at in the street. Celuy n'est pas heureux qu'on montre par la rue. 78 RONSARD AND LA PLEIADE ' You say that I should die overwhelmed with sorrow did I see our Roman Church faU. I should be unhappy. But I have a stout heart, and that inside my head which, if tempests come, must swim with me through the floods. Perhaps your head, if we do reach an unknown shore, will turn out to be useless. ' No ! no ! I do not depend on Church revenues or royal favour. I live a true poet and have de- served as well of my country as you, false impostor and braggart that you are. ' AU your barking will not strip me of the laurel wreath I have deserved for service done to the French language. ' Undaunted by toil I have laboured for the mother-tongue of France. I have made her new words and restored the old. I have raised her poetry to a level with the art of Rome and Greece. I repent me of the deed if this art is to be used by heretics to serve the ends of shop-boys. ' You — and you cannot deny it — are the issue of my muse. You are my subjects ; I your only king. You are my streams. I am your fountain. The more you exhaust me, the more does my un- faihng spring cast back the sands and gush forth perpetually to fulfil your rivulets.' There is more in this haughty strain. But at the last he prays God devoutly that the fearful end of civil strife may be averted, and that the torch of war, like a brand in the fire, may consume itself in smoke. Le feu, le fer, le meurtre, en sont le fondement, Dieu veuille que la fin en arrive autrement, Et que le grand flambeau de la guerre allumee, Comme un tison de feu, se consomme en fumee. RONSARD AND LA PLEIADE 79 I have made this long citation because it reveals the man, more fuUy than any Hst, however con- gested, of names and dates ; and because it supplies a corrective to conventional views based on this or that obvious feature of Ronsard's poetry. It is important to know that a poet chiefly remembered for a few plaintive songs of fading roses, and a dehberate attempt to recast a language and develop the mechanism of verse, was every inch a man who stood four-square to the whole racket of his day. For this, so far from diminishing the value of his particular love of lovehness, and personal servi- tude to the machinery of art, tends, on the contrary, to prove the general importance to mankind of these things for which he cared most. It is clear that he cared also, and acutely, for much that other men prize. Here is a citizen and a soldier, a man who takes a side in pohtics and religion, who argues from the rostrum and pommels in the ring, a conservative with a cathohc pleasure in life, dehghting in aU the treasures garnered into the citadel of the past, and ready to die in its defence. Yet his life-work, for aU these distractions, consists in an exaltation of Beauty that must die And Joy whose hand is ever at his lips Bidding Adieu : consists in that ; and in a curious attention to the formalities of verse, to the artistic hturgy of beauty which aflfirms, paradoxically, that Beauty, by reason of her certitude, is, despite of death, in some irrational way at once divine and immortal. That mystical message comes from a human, sturdy. God-fearing, battle-stained man with ' accents" of dignity that die upon the hps ' of monastic devotees to art cloistered for its own sake. 80 EONSARD AND LA PLEIADE Little else need be said of his life. After the death of Charles ix, an immense sohtude encom- passed the man who had taken part in so many activities. Tasso, it is true, in 1675, submitted to him at Paris the earlier cantos of his Jerusalem Delivered. But Ronsard retired from the Court of Henri m. His life had, he writes, become a con- tinual death, so he sought out the Priory of St. Cosme to die. I strayed to the place by pure accident. Walking near Plessis-les-Tours one summer evening, along the dyke constructed by our Plantagenets to restrain the inundations of the Loire, I saw a cart- road leading through an avenue of poplars to a Gothic archway. I followed the track and found, ht up by the sunset, a stone mansion of the j&fteenth century, neglected and partitioned into the dwellings of four peasant proprietors. The end gable of the upper story was attached by a flying gallery to the ruins of a Gothic church. I was asked if I was looking for the tomb of Ronsard, and told, with a grin, that some learned men had failed to find his grave twenty years earlier, and that I should only waste my time. I thought otherwise. This was evidently St. Cosme. There, was the late-Gothic door, through which Ronsard passed to his death-bed, stUl decorated with Renaissance carvings of fruits and flowers. A rose-tree grew up one of the jambs, and a vine had thrown a branch across the grey, worm-eaten panels. When I returned the next year the door, with its time-worn sculpture, was gone. But I retrieved parts of it from the wood-heap. The scene echoed the note on which Ronsard harped with poignant insistence — Tout ce qui est de beau ne se garde longtemps Les roses et les lis ne regnent qu'un printemps. RONSARD AND LA PLElADE 81 There, lie had dictated his last verses — L'un meurt en son printemps, I'autre attend la vieillesse, Le trespas est tout un, les accidens divers : Le vray thresor de I'homme est la verte jeimesse, Le reste de nos ans ne sont que des hyvers. — and, again, with his incongruous mingling of Catholic faith and pagan despair — Quoy mon ame, dors-tu, engourdie en ta masse ? La trompette a sonne, serre baggage, et va Le chemin diserti que Jesus-Christ trouva. Quand tant mouille de sang racheta nostre race. This is the rehgious verse of a man who, against his wiU, had seen rehgion confounded with war ; who had deplored — Un Christ empistole, tout noirci de fumee ; who almost dreaded that the way of salvation dear to his ancestors was to be obliterated by insurgents against whom he had himseK borne arms. But he died in that way. When asked at the point of death, ' De quelle resolution il voulait mourir ? ' he answered, according to a contemporary, Binet, ' Assez aigrement, qui vous fait dire cela, mon bon amy ? Je veux mourir en la religion Catholique, comme mes ayeulx, bisayeulx, trisayeulx, et comme j'ai tesmoigne assez par mes escrits ! ' He discoursed at length on his life, saying again and again, ' Je n'ay auctme haine contre personne, ainsi me puisse chacun pardonner.' He dictated two more Christian sonnets, and remained a long while with arms extended towards the sky : at last, like one in his sleep, he rendered his spirit to God, and his hands in falling let those present know the moment of his death. The Priory of St. Cosme was suppressed, and the 82 RONSARD AND LA PLEIADE only design of Ronsard's shattered monument is ' par suite d'un vol ' — so a French archaeologist teUs me — ^now in. the Bodleian at Oxford. SOXTBCES AND AlMS Having touched on the age in which the Pleiads wrote, and dwelt on the personality of their leader, I come to the sources of their inspiration and aim of their art. Here we must walk warUy. From this point onward I shall rather invite mquiry than seek to deliver a judgment. There is no final judgment. Conflicting judgments make the work of the Pleiade a matter of interest to-day, especially to students of the Renaissance. The judgment which stood unchallenged ia France for two centuries averred that having thrown away the tradition of French poetry, and the French language after it, the Pleiade invented, per saltum, a new language and a new poetry, awkwardly, and aU but exclusively, imitated from Greek models. The opposite view, urged tentatively by Saiute- Beuve in 1828, was emphasised by Pater in his famous essay on Joachim du BeUay, and can best be stated in his words : — ' In the Renaissance, French poetry did but borrow something to blend with a native growth, and the poems of Ronsard, with their ingenuity, their delicately figured surfaces, their shghtness, their fanciful combinations of rhyme, are but the correlatives of the traceries of the house of Jacque Coeur at Bourges, or the Maison de Justice at Rouen.' Their work, he writes, shows ' a blending of Itahan ornament with the general outhne of Northern design,' and exhibits ' the finest and subtlest phase of the Middle Age itself.' RONSARD AND LA PLEIADE 83 The first view makes the Pleiade too Greek and violently prone to innovation ; the second, too French and complacently mediaeval, with but a top- dressing of Italian ornament. In truth, their sources were manifold ; to a degree in excess of both theories, taken together. They drew their inspiration from every known fountain of poetry and, consequently, aimed in their art at designing elaborate channels, sufficiently definite to contain, yet numerous enough to display, aU the flashing waters they had derived from so many a muse-haunted hill. Let me enumerate their sources. In the first place, they valued the best of mediaeval French verse. They knew their thirteenth century. Ron- sard had studied the Roman de la Rose. He knew of the romance-cycle of Charlemagne, for he writes in one of his many ' regrets pour Marie Stuart ' : — - Que ne vivent encor les palladlns de France ! Un Roland, tin Renaud ! ils prendroient sa defence Et raccompagneroient et seroient bien heureux D'en avoir seulement un regard amoureux. They knew of the Arthurian cycle ; Du BeUay, in their manifesto, far from proposing a classical subject for an epic poem, writes, ' choose one of those beautiful old French romances comme un Lancelot, un Tristan, ou autres.'' Ronsard, in his preface to his Franciade, when attacking those who sought to write in classic Latin, says, ' Why, it would be better worth your while — comme un hon bourgeois — to make a dictionary of the old words of Artus, Lancelot, and Gawain, or a commentary on the Roman de la Rose.'' They revived the Alexandrine verse of twelve syllables from a very early French poem on the legend of Alexander. But if they knew of the Alexandrian cycle, the Carlovingian cycle, the 84 RONSARD AND LA PLEIADE Arthurian cycle, and took delight in the Romance of the Rose, why, then, they enjoyed the heritage of mediaeval French verse, which, as Matthew Arnold has truly said, ' took possession of the heart and imagination of Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and taught Chaucer his trade, words, rhyme, and metre.' As Chaucer puts it — ^with a narrower apphcation which may justly be extended — ' The note I trowe maked was in Fraunce.' They derived from that source their ' fluidity of move- ment ' and the Alexandrine verse, but, so far as I know, nothing else. In the second place, coming to French poetry which immediately preceded their own, they knew and appreciated Clement Marot, MeUia de St. Gellais, Heroet, and Maiirice Sceve. Ronsard praises aU four. But there are two things to be noticed. They skip over Charles d' Orleans and ViUon, springing from the thirteenth century to their immediate predecessors, and from these select only four as bright exceptions. The rest were Court poetasters, recharging the ballade and rondeau, Hke old rocket-cases, with a few pinches of dull flattery or indecent wit. The Chant Royal had become the exercise of a drudge. The Blasons were inanities and brutahties, mere ' gabble of tinkers,' with neither ' wit, manners, nor honesty,' of which it is impossible to speak. Ronsard apostrophises Marot as ' Seule lumiere en ses ans de la vulgaire poesie ' (Preface to Odes, 1550). Marot's Hero and Leander can be read ; his fable of The Lion and the Rat is racy; and some of his rondeaux deUghtful: yet Ronsard' s tribute was generous. He must have raged against such pranks in redoubled rhyme, as for example : — RONSAKD AND LA PLElADE 85 La blanche colombelle belle Sou vent je voys priant, criant, Mais dessoubz la cordelle d'elle Me jecte un ceil friant, riant, etc. etc. We may cry out with Maria, ' What a cater- wauling do you keep here ! ' and acknowledge that the rare art of the Middle Age had declined to ' damnable iteration.' Whilst the Pleiade did not discard the dower of mediseval song, or condemn all their immediate predecessors, it cannot be said that they present in the main the last phase of the Middle Age, decorated with Italian ornament. In the third place, having travelled much in Italy, they knew Petrarch by heart, and helped them- selves, no doubt freely, to his material. But Du BeUay wrote ' contre les Petrarquistes ' ; Ronsard attacked courtiers ' qui n'admirent qu'un petit sonnet Petrarquise ' ; and both were justified in this repudiation. The method of their verse was distinct from the method of ItaUan verse, and, passing from form to matter, they strike a note of plaintive mystery, which is not to be heard in Petrarch. In the fourth place, besides this direct influence from Italy, they receive an indirect influence already transfigured by the School of Lyons, and notably by Maurice Sceve, whose Delie is rather an anagram of TIdee, the platonic idea of beauty, than a title borrowed from the Deha whom TibuUus loved. Lyons, the city of GroHer, was a centre of sensitive culttire where, to quote Brunetiere, ' the natural- ism of Italy had become enriched, perhaps even a Httle over -weighted, by a mystical significance. Platonism, from being a relaxation of the intelligent, and matter to put into a sonnet, had been there 86 RONSARD AND LA PLEIADE transmuted into, as it were, an inward religion, secret and passionate, of beauty.' In the fifth place, they had all the Latin authors at their finger-ends. Yet they knew them for literary echoes, calling Horace ' the Latin Pindar.' To Du BeUay the Iliad is ' admirable,' the Mneid 'laborious.' But of the Latins they set Virgil on a lonely eminence. And so, lastly, they deliberately sought their in- spiration in the fullest measure from the Greeks. Ronsard teUs us that he once shut himself up for three days to read the Iliad at a sitting. But since their main intention was lyric, their chief model was Pindar. I can speak of Pindar only at second-hand. Accepting Professor Butcher for my guide, I learn that Pindar made a twofold claim. On the one hand, he claimed constant inspiration, enthusiasm, and something of a divine importance attaching to lyric poetry as such ; on the other, that lyric poets were the trustees and exponents of an intricate traditional artifice with subtle laws which \ they alone under- stood and always obeyed. Now that is precisely the double claim put forward by Ronsard. After Pindar, among Greek sources, the Pleiade drew largely on Theocritus, CaUimachus, Lycophron, and generally on the Alexandrine poets who flourished at the court of the Ptolemies. Brunetiere insists on this, and approves their choice, since, being absorbed in remaking a language and designing poetical forms, what they needed were ' writing-masters.' In the great edition of Ronsard's works of 1623, a commentator, Marcassus, refers the reader to Lycophron for the elucidation of classical machinery in the very poem from which I quoted the apostrophe to Roland and ' les palladins de France,' That EONSARD AND LA PLElADE 87 illustrates the multiplicity of the Pleiads' s sources, and the impartiaUty with which they tapped them even for one poem. They drew also, on the Greek Anthology, repubhshed at Paris in 1651, so that all the flowers of Meleager passed into their verse ; and, later, on the Anacreon, published by Estienne at Paris for the first time in 1554. If you except the Troubadours, there is scarce a stream of lyric verse, ancient or modern, which they did not sedulously conduct into the swollen river of their song ; and, apart from literary origins, they laid much else under contribution : the splendour of courts, the pageant of embassies, the weariness of exile, the lovehness of women, the glory of gardens — much, too, which they accepted frankly from wild Nature, or went curiously to seek even from among the apphances of industry in towns. The aim of their art is declared in Du BeUay's Defense et Illustration, and in Ronsard's prefaces to his Odes and the Franciade. They did not embark on a wanton quest after novelty. Rather, they were confronted by two real difficulties — the poverty of language and the degradation of poetry — ^which had to be surmounted before French coidd become a medium for modern literature. The French language had never been amphfied and elevated to the pitch required for that purpose. French poetry had fallen and shrunk from the state it once held in the hands of Chaucer's masters. The Pleiade fotmd a language too scanty to convey the new features of Renaissance civilisa- tion, and quite xmfitted to express conceptions im- ported from Greek thought. For that, in its loftier and more suggestive phases, poetry, the first and last mode of speech, is needed ; but their native poetry 88 EONSARD AND LA PLEIADE was worn down to a jingle. What was to be done ? The common view among any who saw the difficulty and sought a solution, seems to have been that French did well enough for ordinary business and a good song ; dog-Latin for law and history ; and that, for higher flights of poetry or philosophy, there was no expedient save to master and employ the vocabularies, syntax, and poetic forms of classic Latin and Greek. Against this the Pleiade protested. Du Bellay, in the first book of his manifesto, defends the French language. All languages, he argues, are, so to say, ' born equal.' All were made in the same way, for the same purpose, viz. by the human fancy to inter- change the conceptions of the human mind. New things must always have demanded new words, and there is no reason why that process should not be continued. French is not a barbarous tongue, nor so poor as many assert. In so far as it is poor it is only so because our ancestors, like the early Romans, were too busy with war to waste time on words. The right plan is to foUow the example set by the Romans, that is, to enrich our own vocabulary by accHmatising classic words, and to give it flexibihty and point by imitating classic models. In his second book, passing from the poverty of language to the abasement of poetry, he urges that French poetry can be hfted from the rut. The authors of the Boman de la Rose ought to be read, not for imitation, but to secure a first image of the French tongue. Of recent poets some have done well, and France is obliged to them. But much better may be done. A natural gift is not enough. Forasmuch as our court poets drink, eat, and sleep at their ease, he who would be read and remembered must endure hunger RONSARD AND LA PLEIADE 89 and thirst and long watches. These are the wings on which the writings of men soar up to heaven. The poet is to avoid copying mere tricks, to develop his own individuality, and to imitate those of a kindred genius, otherwise his imitation wUl resemble that of a monkey. He is to read Greek and Latin authors day and night and to forswear ' Rondeaux, baUiades, vjrrelaiz . . . et autres telles epiceries.' Odes are to be written by setting to work as Horace did, so as to achieve a standard till then unattempted. Poetry of this kind is to be distinguished from the vulgar, enriched and illustrated with appropriate words and carefully chosen epithets, adorned with solemn sayings, and varied in every way with poetic colour and decoration. Epigrams and satires are deprecated. Sonnets, the learned and pleasant invention of Italy, are praised. The long poem is to be essayed, but let the theme be taken from old French romances. Idleness and luxury have destroyed the desire of immortality ; but glory is the only ladder upon whose rungs mortals may with a light step ascend to heaven and make themselves the companions of the gods. Use words which are purely French, neither too common nor too far-fetched, and, if you like, sometimes annex some antique term and set it, as it were a precious stone, in your verse. Rhyme is of the essence of French verse. It must be rich ; free rather than constrained; accepted rather than sought out ; appropriate and natural ; in short, such that the verse falling on it shall not less content the ear than music well harmonised when it falls on a perfect chord. Blank verse is a more doubtful matter ; but as painters and sculptors use greater pains to make nude figures of lovely and good 90 RONSARD AND LA PLEIADE proportion, so must blank verse be athletic and muscular. He attacks the court versifiers, prays to Apollo that France may engender a poet whose resonant lute shall silence the wheezy bagpipes of the day, and, after exhorting the French to write in their own tongue, concludes with an eulogy of France. Ronsard repeats much of this thesis in his prefaces. He dwells on the saHent paradox that, whilst the French language was still prattling in infancy, French poetry was languishing and grimacing towards death. But he chiefly insists oh the necessity of designing varied metres and rhyme-schemes for Ijrric poetry, attesting — and the duaUty of his argument is an index to his aim — first, the example of Pindar, and secondly, the diversity of Nature, which exacts an infinite response to her moods. For the rest, he makes short work of his critics, saying, in the sturdy vernacular which he could ever command for all his artifice : ' If, reader, you are astonished at the sudden changes in my manner of writing, you are to understand that when I have bought my pen, my ink, and my paper, they belong to me, and I may honestly do what I please with my own.' Achievement and Influence There can be no question of the vast material embraced by the Pleiade, and the high aim envisaged in their attempt to renew language and revive lyrics. But two questions obtrude. What did they accom- plish ? What influence did they exert ? Again we have diverse judgments. It is for students of the Renaissance, and, not least, for students of our nation, to seek the final decree. We cannot know RONSARD AND LA PLEIADE 91 French idiomatically and genetically. But we emancipated ourselves, thirty years before they did, from the tame conclusions of academic art, and are by so much the less afraid to reverse the judgments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. What, then, did the Pleiade effect ? They settled decisively, and long before we did, that the mother- tongues of Northern Europe, and not Greek or Latin, were to be explored for adequate expression, and exploited for the highest flights of poetry. That new words must be found for new things ; that rhyme is at once a necessity for lyrics in modem languages which have no definite quantities, and a treasure added to the economy of classic verse ; that modem poetry, based on the number, and not on the time-value, of syllables in a hne, must be contrived in consonance with the ancient songs and genius of European languages, and not in clumsy reproductions of Sapphics or alcaics ; that the lyric must be of endless variety to fit the multitudinous response of human emotion to the infinite appeals of sensation and passion. Finding nothing but worn-out ballades and rondeaux, they revived the freshness, plaintive or gay, of the song, and invented the stately pro- gression of the ode. Ronsard alone, apart from his Pindaric odes, devised sixty-three lyric metres. They decided that beauty is to be frankly enjoyed for its obvious delight, and humbly adored for its inward mystery ; that the poet's calling is an arduous enterprise comparable to the sculptor's ascetic conflict with marble, and never more so than when he sings the pathos of Beauty and anguish walking hand in hand The downward slope of death. All this, I believe, and hope to indicate, was an 92 RONSAED AND LA PLEIADE effective contribution to England as well as to France. They reproduced the sonnet on the exact model of Petrarch in such numbers and with such ease that it cannot be caUed an exotic in French, a feat un- accompUshed in England tiU Rossetti wrote the House of Life. But, apart from their general con- tribution to the renaissance of poetry, they settled some matters particular to French verse, as the alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes, and the sovereignty of the Alexandrine. I use the word settled advisedly, for I am weU aware that experi- ments in these directions had been made by their immediate predecessors, just as a dozen sonnets, and no more, had been hazarded before their time. I know that they reverted from the Alexandrine, and that they did not invariably observe the rules which they had practically estabHshed. It was the volume and the general excellence of their verse, the dash and cogency of their propaganda, which prevailed. Indeed, by the irony of fate, their fame was overthrown for two centuries in France, and their more varied contributions to poetry obscured, just because they had carried some few metrical reforms to a point at which these were usurped by Malherbe and his successors, and emphasised to the desolating exclusion of all else. We cannot speak of tracing their influence con- tinuously in France. It was sharply rejected early in the seventeenth century, and accepted again with diffidence only after an interval of two hundred years. The story is well known. Malherbe (born 1555), who, but for Ronsard, could never have written his celebrated Consolation a M. du Perier, after erasing half his master's lines, took up his pen EONSAED AND LA PLElADE 93 again and, to show the great critic he was, ruled out the rest. The poetry of the Pleiade was no longer read at court, nor at all, save here and there in the houses of country gentlemen, and by an ever- diminishing band of defenders in the university and local parliaments. It slept in dusty volumes on the shelf, as the EUzabethan poetry of England lay dormant for a somewhat shorter period. In 1754 an anonymous author describes La Pleiade as ' les sept Poetes fameux qu'on ne peut plus lire,' and sets up others in their place. I do not know his name, but — and this pleases me — he dedicates his anthology to an officer in a Eoyal Household, mem- ber of several academies, and ' ancien Capitaine de Dragons.' The Alexandrine verse and ' classic ' couplet reigned supreme through an age of periwigs and powder, following on an age of full-bottomed wigs and clanking dragoons. The lyric was an outcast. In poetry — as in architecture — the exuberance of a transitional period is pruned down to classic repose, which, in turn, becomes first puristic, and then, in a sequence of degradation, conventional, respectable, dull, and at last downright ugly and repellent. But the hunger for beauty then becomes clamant, and the desire for manifold expression is again begotten by the love of beauty. So you have a romantic revival of unrestrained abundance, taking its good things from wheresoever they can be found. This happened in 1828. That great critic Sainte- Beuve produced two works : the Tableau de la Poesie frangaise du XV le Siecle and the CEuvres choisies de Pierre de Ronsard. They effected a poetic revulsion and mark an epoch. The degenerate classic was arraigned as a ' Eoi faineant,' and the 94 RONSARD AND LA PLEIADE romantic ruled in his place. The lyne revived. The metres of Ronsard were resumed and carried forward to the ' Strophes frissonnantes ' of Victor Hugo. The ode, the sonnet, the song, were multi- plied ; and song, since then, has never been silenced in the native land of the Trouveres and Troubadours. It breaks out repeatedly, and at each new dehverance with a bolder rejection of conventional tjrranny, a heartier acclamation of Ronsard, Prince des Poetes Frangais. Prom 1857 his complete works were re- published by M. Prosper Blanchemain. De BanviUe, that exquisite conqueror of metrical difficulty, hails him in one of his own neglected metres — mon Ronsard, maitre Victorieux du metre, O sublime echanson De la chanson ! Frangois Coppee is content to be Ronsard's ' humble and modest apprentice.' To Emile Deschamps he is a ' sublime virtuoso, improvising on an imperfect instrument.' Albert Glatigny cries out : — Dans tes bras je me refugie, Et veux, divine et noble orgie, Etre ivre de rimes ce soir. Sully-Prudhomme, addressing ' le maitre des char- meurs de I'oreille,' says the last word on the loss and recovery of the lyric — All ! depiiis que les cieux, les champs, les bois et I'onde N'avaient plus d'ame, un deuil assombrissait le monde. Car le monde sans lyre est comme inhabite ! Tu viens, tu ressaisis la lyre, tu I'accordes Et, fier, tu rajeimis la gloire des sept cordes Et tu refais aux Dieux une immortalite. Ronsard and du Bellay are now called 'les vrais classiques ' {La Lignee des Poetes FrariQais au XIXe \r RONSARD AND LA PLEIADE 95 Steele, 1902). It is enough to make Boileau turn in ,y y his grave. ^ If, however, instead of reading Ronsard's poetry, or the poetry of poets who recrowned him, you turn to any critical history of French Uterature, you will find praise doled out still somewhat grudgingly. Critics and compilers of Hterary manuals cannot bring themselves to believe that the conventional judgments of the eighteenth century have been defimitely reversed. The mystery of beauty and exuberance of song do not always appeal to them. That is why students of the Renaissance should prosecute individual research. Ronsard's poetry was neglected partly because of its volume ; mainly because his immediate successors were preoccupied with their own efforts. But they urged three excuses for their neglect ; — that his verse was overloaded with excerpts from classic myths; that his diction included words foreign to the genius of French poetry, inasmuch as they were old- fashioned and colloquial, or new-fangled and out- landish ; that he invented too many caressing diminutives. These pleas were repeated by suc- cessive generations of critics, who, in the absence of reprints, never read Ronsard's poetry for them- selves. They ought now to be re-examined. It may fairly be said that no one of the features arraigned is typical of Ronsard's art, and that, when taken together, they affect but a small proportion of his seventy or eighty thousand lines. They are accidents of his day and of the conditions under which he wrote ; obvious to the next ensuing age, but not characteristic for all time. We can now estimate their insignificance. His allusions to classic mythology are but faded 96 RONSARD AND LA PLEIADE apparel tricking a fair body. We may reflect that novels, the tjrpical product of our own literature, will suffer just such an Qclipse as the lyrics of the sixteenth century. They, too, are voluminous. Their enthusiastic references to an Age of Invention, to railways and motor cars, wiU some day seem no less superfluous than Renaissance references to an Age of Learning, to ApoUo and the muses. Yet things of beauty outlast their contemporary trap- pings ; and even these — at first a zest, then a bore — become in the end a curiosity, not without charm. The mythology of Ronsard, though faded, has a vague decorative value, as of old tapestry. Turning to strictures on Ronsard's diction : it is true that he preserved some mediaeval terms. ' Spenser in affecting the ancients writ no language,' was Ben Jonson's condemnation of a hke accident in the Faery Queen. Censure of that kind is the ' common form ' of seventeenth-century criticism on sixteenth-century romance, and should carry but little weight with us who live after the romantic revival. It is true, again, that Ronsard did not reject homely words from high-flown periods. He writes of ' chemises ' and ' chandeUes ' ; things ab- horrent to the fastidious pomp of 'Le Roi Soleil,' whose court poets found nothing amiss in a RamiUies wig on the head of a Greek god. L' Abbe de Marolles, in 1675, writes — of a rose ! — Au moment que j'en parle, on voit que sa ferruque Tombe en s'elargissant, qu'elle devient caduque. A wig could never be out of place in the eyes of Ronsard's detractors. But candles were too common. The compatriots of Shakespeare who read, with no shock but of joy, — RONSARD AND LA PLEIADE 97 Though jiot so bright As those gold candles fix'd in heaven's air — need not boggle at Ronsard's ' chandelles.' So, too, with, some of his neologisms ; in our ignorance as foreigners we may even regret that his ' myrteux ' and ' fretiQard ' are obsolete in French. As for his diminutives, I deny that Ronsard in- vented them. He took them from old French songs. In these, the pensive lover ' par ung matinet,' in the shadow of a ' buyssonnet ' is left ' tout seullet ' by ' le doux roussignolet ' (Chansons du XVe Si^U, Gaston Paris). Jehanaot de Lesc^rel {French Lyrics, Saintsbury) has ' doucette, savoureusette, johette, beUette, jeunette,' and so on, with a rehsh- ing frequency to which Ronsard never approached. Mythological machinery — archaisms, colloqijiahsms, neologisms — caressing diminutives these — ^were but trivial excrescences on a rich style ; in its staple ever fresh and forthright, striking, and sonorous. Ronsard's immediate successors, who kicked at his renown, paraded these excrescences to justify their apostasy, and then annexed his goods under cover of the derision they had provoked. They ignored the true characteristics of his art ; but they did not neglect them. Disguising their debt, they took aU they could carry ; and that was enough to furnish their stock-in-trade. Excepting the Drama, every mode of poetic expression exhibited by French ' classic ' authors is, in so far as form is concerned, to be found in Ronsard, with much else of value which they did not appraise. The French ' classic ' was disengaged from the labyrinth of the Pleiade's production. According to Brunetiere, Ronsard's sentiment for the harmonies of the French language has never been equalled. He invented, or brought G 98 RONSAED AND LA PLEIADE into favour, all the combinations of rhythms and metres of which French is capable. All his in- ventions have not been adopted, but no new ones have been made. He determined the essential types of French lyrics, and fixed the model not only of the Classic, but even of the Romantic ode. His Discours gave eloquence a place for ever in French poetry. These were his lasting contributions to art, and the wealth of them has not, even now, been exhausted. The Pleiade called into being a paradise, almost a wilderness of beauty ; florid, — I cannot deny it, — in- tricate and luxuriant in its growth, flaunting its pro- fusion, mad as midsummer is mad : and in the midst they planted a tree of knowledge. Their successors, having tasted of that tree, set to work with axe and biU on the wildemess, lopping it into a formal garden and, at last, turning it into a pubHc place. Their rules, as Mallarme suggests, will enable anybody to make, with certainty, a verse to which nobody can object. But that savours of deportment rather than of poesy. It enjoins a sacrifice of distinction to avoid a charge of eccentricity ; an admirable maxim for any who pursue a respectable calling along a crowded thoroughfare, for the genteel mob of eighteenth-century couplet-mongers, but a useless counsel and, so, an impertinence to the leader of a revel or a forlorn hope. The poets of the French romantic revival were leaders in both capacities, and they threw these restraints to the winds. They took Ronsard for their Bible, and, as Theophile Gautier puts it, 'burned to go forth and combat Vhydre du Perrvquinisme.' The ' wiggery ' — the pomp and punctilio — of 'classic' artifice are now being relin- quished, though reluctantly, and, so to say, against the grain, by the wooden compilers of literary manuals. RONSAED AND LA PLEIADE 99 Thus it stands with the Pleiade's influence on the French language and French poetry. I have but one other question to propound. What effect did the Pleiade work, by example or precept, on the remaking of the English language and of English poetry ? What degree of influence did they exert on our own EUzabethan revival ? The judgment has stood that their influence was of the sHghtest ; i/ but I ask for a stay of execution and more evi- dence. Is it certain that our late sixteenth-century poets drew so much of' their inspiration from Italy,\ and so little of it from France ? Mr. Sidney Lee {Elizabethan Sonnets, 1904) has impugned, has, indeed, traversed that judgment. He based his finding on the materials conveniently collected by Edward Arber in his invaluable reprints. These should be examined more exhaustively with a less exclusive attention to the sonnet : and who wiU say that MSS., and odd volumes in old libraries, which only in 1895 rendered up four lost pearls of Thomas Watson's poetry, do not entice to many another ' adventure of the diver ' ? The argument may be stated thus : ItaUan models had been extant since Petrarch, who hved far into the life of Chaucer. Wyat and Surrey, who turned to these Italian models in the earher years of the sixteenth century, failed to assimilate them, and did little in the way either of remaking the English language or reviving lyrics. The poets who effected these objects for England, as the Pleiade had effected them for France, praised and dismissed Surrey and Wyat, the ' courtly makers,' just as Ronsard had bowed out his precursors of Fran§ois i.'s court. But they were famiUar alike with the Pleiade's practice and with their preaching. They proceeded 100 RONSAED AND LA PLEIADE to the study of Italian from a knowledge of French, and received ItaUan poetry through the medium of French art. Thus transmuted it could be assimilated, and this was done by Enghsh poets, who echo the music of the Pleiade's verse and repeat its critical conclusions in hterary manifestoes. Take the condition of EngUsh lyrics during the last ten years of Henri n.'s reign, the gMttering and august decade of the Pleiade in its prime, which it fulfilled with infinitely varied lyric forms ; with thousands of sonnets easily Avritten on the Petrarchan model; and — let it be noted — with critical manifestoes of sedulous ingenuitj'^. What had we then in England ? TotteVs Miscellany of 1557. Will any one contend that even the verse of Surrey and Wyat, great though its merit be, is com- parable in volume, variety, clarity, and assurance to the verse of the Pleiade ? No ; Surrey and Wyat grope after Itahan models which could not be whoUy assimilated even by them. The other authors in- cluded in that collection are mostly — except Lord Vaux — reminiscent of country catches and the ' canter canter ' of fourteen-syUabled lines. Our Ijrrics, stately or melodious, come much later. But TotteVs Miscellany, Douglas's Virgil (1553), Drant's Horace (1566), TurberviUe's Ovid (1569), reprints even of Piers the Plowman's Vision (1551, 1561), archaic alike in language and poetic form, comprise, with the racy doggerel of Skelton and the somno- lences of Stephen Hawes, aU the recent Enghsh verse which Spenser had to read as a boy. Spenser was born in 1552, It is not, therefore, strange, but it is significant, to find Spenser in 1569, aged seventeen, translating Du BeUay's Vision. Take, again, the Epistle prefixed to Spenser's early RONSARD AND LA PLEIADE 101 anonymous work, The ShephercPs Calendar (1579), dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney. It refers, after naming Marot and Sanazarius, to ' divers other excellent both Itahan and French poets whose footing this authour ' — i.e. Spenser — ' elrerywhere foUoweth : yet so as few, but they be well scented, can trace him out.' It does not, however, demand a very keen nose to retrace the footing of such a stanza as : — Bring hither the pink and purple columbine With gelliflowers ; Bring sweet carnations and sops-in-wine, Worn of paramours ; Strew me the ground with daffadowndillies, With cowslips, and king-ctips and loved lilies. The pretty paunce And the ohevisaunce ShaU watch with the fair fleur-de-lice. That, with its intricate metre, quickly recurrent^ rhjrme, and profusion of flowers, is redolent of the land of the fieur de lis, and imprinted by the metrical footing of the Pleiade. Even so late as in 1591, Spenser, at the age of thirty-nine, translates Du BeUay's Antiquitez de Borne, concluding with an envoy to Bellay, first garland of free Poesie, in which Spenser declares the French poet's im- mortahty, and awards him a fame ' exceeding aU that ever went before.' Thomas Watson, a contemporary of Spenser and Sidney, may be named with them as a Hterary renovator of Ijnrics. He acclaims Spenser : Thou art Apollo, whose sweet hunnie vaine Amongst the muses hath the ohiefest place. 102 RONSARD AND LA PLEIADE He sojourned in Paris with Sir Francis Walsingham, Sidney's father-in-law. In his Eclogue Sidney is ' AstrophiU,' Francis Walsingham ' MeHboeus,' and Thomas Walsingham ' Tityrus,' who is made to say of the author, ' Corydon ' : — Thy tunes have often pleas'd mine eare of yoare, When milk-white swans did flocke to heare thee sing, Where Seane in Paris makes a double shoare, Paris thrise blest it shee obey her king. Watson was famihar with the verse of Ronsard, the French king's reigning poet. He declares the use which "he made of it in prose prefaces to certain numbers of his 'E/caTo//.7ra^ia, or Passionate Centurie of Loue (1582), e.g. in the preface to xxvii. ' In the first sixe verses of this Passion, the author hath imitated perfectly sixe verses in an ode of Ronsard, which begumeth thus : " Celui qui n'ayme est mal- heureux " ; and in the last staff e of this Passion also he commeth very neere to the sense, which Ronsard useth in another place, where he writeth to his Mistresse in this manner: "En veus tu baiser Pluton," ' etc. He makes similar ascriptions of the numbers xxviii. liv. and Ixxxiii. In some Latin verses prefixed to Watson's work by C. Downhalus we read : — GaUica Pamasso coepit ditescere lingua, Ronsardique operis Luxuriare novis. Turning now to Sir Philip Sidney — ' The reviver of Poetry in those darke times ' (Aubrey's Brief Lives) — ^let us take, as a test, the Alexandrine verse of twelve syllables, a metre peculiarly French, re- vived by Ronsard from a French trouvere to be the classic metre of France. In 1591, the year of Spenser's envoy to Du BeUay, Sir Philip Sidney, RONSARD AND LA PLEIADE 103 Spenser's friend and comrade in Ijo-ic experiments, publislied Astrophel and Stella. The first sonnet is written in Alexandrine verse. But his very re- pudiation — .in the third sonnet — of Pindar's apes who flaunt in phrases fine, . Enamelling with pied flowers their thoughts of gold, is obviously directed at the Pleiade, but only, I would urge, as a rhetorical development of the first sonnet, written in their metre, which ends : — Toole,' said my Muse to me, ' looke in thy heart and write.* When addressing the Lady Penelope, as a lover, Sidney puts aside his hterary masters, the more simply to adore her. But when treating of poetry, as a critic, he reveals those masters to be none other than the Pleiade, the apes of Pindar, who fiUed with their fame the court to which he had been accredited. Sidney had travelled in Italy. But in 1572 he was Grentleman of the Chamber to Charles ix., the king, patron, and intimate friend of Ronsard, whom his sovereign once invited, perhaps in the presence of Sidney, to sit beside him on his royal throne. Of these three dehberate renovators Mx. Sidney Lee has written : — ' It is clear that it was through the study of French that Spenser passed to the study of Italian. . . . Spenser had clearly immersed his thought in French poetry ' ; ' Sidney's masters were Petrarch and Ronsard ' ; and, again, ' Sidney and Watson both came under the impressive influ- ence of Ronsard.' So much for these, but the majority of Elizabethan sonneteers concentrated their attention on contemporary France, and derived their knowledge of ItaHan work from adaptations by Ronsard and Desportes. Mr. Lee prints five 104 RONSARD AND LA PLEIADE sonnets of Daniel side by side with their originals by Desportes, and six sonnets of Lodge side by side with their originals by Ronsard. He has shown Chapman's ' Amorous Zodiacke ' to be but a close and clumsy translation from Gilles Durant. Mr. Kastner proves Const£(,ble's debt to Desportes, and, since the Pleiade's influence extended to Scotland, traces seven sonnets of Montgomery to Ronsard. Drummond of Hawthomden, who studied Ronsard, Muret, and Pontus de Tyard, did not neglect French translations of Ariosto, Tasso, and Sanazzaro. But there is a more subtile debt due from our Elizabethans to the Pleiade which, though harder to prove with precision, is yet sensible. Apart from actual translation, and outside the sonnet-form, we can — as in the stanza quoted from Spenser — ^hear a haunting echo of the Pleiade's music, and see the very facture which distinguished their lyrics by its maze of varied metre and richly recurrent rhyme. This can be detected most readily in those Enghsh authors who set themselves dehberately, and with ostentation, to the task of constructing lyrics and vindicating rhyme. Daniel's Delia may take its title from Maurice Sceve's Delie, but its inspiration comes certainly from Ronsard. When winter snows upon thy sable hairs And frost of age hath nipt thy beauties near ; When dark shall seem the day that never clears, And all lies wither'd that was held so dear — is pure Ronsard. Even when Daniel translates, openly, from Marino, he does it to the lilt and colour of Ronsard's music — Fair is the Lily ; fair The Rose ; of Flowers the eye ! Both wither in the air, EONSARD AND LA PLEIADE 105 Their beauteous colours die ; And so at length shall lie, Deprived of former grace, The Lilies of thy Breasts, the Roses of thy Face. Daniel's allusion to ' Tyber, Arne, and Po,' the rivers of Italy, is often cited ; but without the further reference to ' Loyre and Rhodanus,' the rivers of the Pleiade. Yet he drank deeply from those streams. Or take Herrick, a graduate of Cambridge, where, I have seen it stated, Ronsard's poetry was studied. Read Ronsard and then listen to — Wave seen the past-best Times, and these Will nere return, we see the Seas, And Moons to ■wain ; But they fill up their Ebbs again : But vanisht, man. Like to a Lilly-lost, nere can, Nere can repullulate, or bring His dayes to see a second Spring CroWn we our Heads with Roses then, And 'noint with Tirian Balme ; for when We two are dead The World with us is buried . . . or listen to — Then cause we Horace to be read Which sang, or seyd, A Goblet, to the brim. Of Lyriek Wine both swell'd and crown'd A Round We quafie to him. Herrick, I doubt not, had read Anacreon in Greek : but the Pleiade was the first to translate Anacreon into modem verse, and, what is more, to write anacreontics on a model that could be, and was, easily reproduced in English. Herrick writes Charon and Phylomel, a Dialogue Sung. But Ohvier de Magny had written a dialogue between a lover and 106 RONSARD AND LA PLEIADE Charon, long a favourite piece at the French court, which, CoUetet teUs us, had been set to music by the most skilful composers. The coincidence can hardly be accidental. Or, take this track : Du BeUay writes in the metre of In Memoriam ; so does Theophile, the last disciple of the Pleiade school, unjustly gibbeted by BoUeau — Dans ce val solitaire et sombre Le cerf , qui brame au bruit de I'eau Penchant ses yeux dans un ruisseau, S'amuse a regarder son ombre — so does Ben Jonson ; and you have but to glance at Ben Jonson' s lines — Though Beauty be the mark of praise And yours, of whom I sing, be such. As not the world can praise too much. Yet 'tis your virtue now I raise — to guess the, perhaps unconscious, origin of Tenny- son's melody. Ben Jonson, in his Pindaric ode, improves on Ronsard. But Ronsard first attempted a modem reproduction of strophe, antistrophe, and epode ; and Ben Jonson foUows closely in his steps. Perhaps the most provoking, and yet elusive, echo rings throughout Wither' s Fair Virtue, The Mistress of Philarete. Compare the Picture of Fair Virtue for the sense to Ronsard's elegy to Janet, the court painter, and for both sense and rhythm to the twelfth ode in his fifth book — Through the Veins disposed true Crimson yields a sapphire hue. Which adds grace and more delight / By embracing with the white. r / Smooth, and moist, and soft, and tender V/ Are the Palms ! the Fingers, slender Tipt with mollified pearl : — RONSARD AND LA PLEIADE 107 Doights qui de beaute vaincus Ne sont de ceux de Bacchus, Tant leurs branchettes sont pleines De mille rameuses veines Par oil coule le beau sang Dedans leur yvoire blanc, Yvoire aii sont cinq perlettes Luisantes, claires et nettes, and on, and on, in a running rivulet of seven-syUabled verse ; a metre rarely handled with success in EngUsh, but inimitably rendered by Wither to the very tune of Ronsard. There is a case for the influence of the Pleiade on the practice of our EUzabethans and their suc- cessors. But practice is not aU. The Elizabethans preached as the Pleiade had preached. The out- burst of EHzabethan lyrics came some forty years after the Pleiade' s decade of tumultuous production (1549-1559), and, precisely as with them, was ac- companied by manifestoes on the defects of the vernacular and the methods of exalting poetry, in that medium, to the height which it held in Greece and Rome. The identity of the problems confront- ing the Elizabethans with the problems solved by the Pleiade is apparent from Elizabethan criticism of language and verse. Just as in France a generation earher, so then in England, while some were content with archaic rhythms, others declared that poetry must be written in classic languages ; and yet others that, though written in English, it must be crushed, without rhyme, into the moulds of classic metres. WiUiam Webbe's A Discourse of EngUsh Poetrie (1586) shows the extent of the peril to which our lyrics were exposed. He writes of ' This brutish Poetrie ... I mean this tynkerly verse which we call ryme.' But we must not condemn his error too 108 RONSARD AND LA PLElADE harshly. The fact that he fell into it illustrates the reality of the diffictilty with which the Elizabethans had to deal ; a difficulty which would not have existed had Surrey and Wyat, by imitating Italian models, effected a new departure which could be followed up. Indeed, the contrast between the rhyme-doggerel that prevailed and classic master- pieces, familiar to scholars, goes far to explain his mistake. For that contrast was sharply projected from current translations of the classics into what passed for EngHsh verse. What could a scholar and lover of poetry make of Turberville's Ovid (1569) ? Penelope opens her Epistle to Ulysses in this strain : — To thee that lingrest all too long Thy wyfe (Ulysses) sendes : Gayne write not but by quick retume, For absence make amendes . . . and concludes : — And I that at thy parture was A Gyrle to beholde : Of truth am warte a Matrone now, Thy selfe will iudge mee olde. '' It needs no Ho lgph emes to pronounce, ' For the elegancy, facility, and golden cadence of poetry, careV Webbe despaired of such an engine. He catches, for a moment, a gleam of the true dawn from the Shepheardes Calender, whose anonymous author — Spenser — he calls ' the rightest EngUsh poet that ever I read.' Yet he is not satisfied with Spenser's muse. On the contrary, he proceeds to show how Hobinol's ditty may be civiUsed by casting it into ' the Saphick verse ' ; and this is what he makes of the stanza already quoted, which begins Bring hither the pink and purple columbine : — EONSARD AND LA PLElADE 109 Bring the Pir^ckes, ther^with many Gelliflpwers sweete, And the Cullambynes : let us have the Wynesops, With the Comation that among the love laddes Wontes to be wome much. Daffadowndillies all a long the ground streve, And the Cowslyppe with a pretty paunce let heere lye. Kingcuppe and Lillies so belovde of all men, And the deluce flowre. That is where we were in 1586, a generation after the Pl^iade — ^two generations after Surrey and Wyat — ^two hundred years after Ohauqer. Webbe per- petrates this ' Saphick ' outrage seriatim on twelve of Spenser's thirteen stanzas, but, ' by reason of some let,' defers execution on the last, ' to some other time, when I hope to gratify the readers with more and better verses of this sorte.' Enghsh poetry was rescued fron> such torture by literary renovators who had studied the Pleiade. The darkness, made visible by Webbe' s lucubration, was illumined with rays reflected from France. We have The Arte of Unglish Poesie, ascribed to Puttenham> published in 1589 ; and An Apologie for Poetrie by Sir Phihp Sidney, published in 1595, though circulated, un- known to Webbe, in MS., since 1582 (?). Their manifestoes exhibit two interesting features. In the first place, they grapple with exactly those problems which the Pleiade had done much to splve, and arrive at the same solutions. In the second place, they disclose an intimate acquaintance with the rules and genius of the new French poetry which the Pleiade had created. The Ehzabethan essayists in their turn sought also to renew language and con- struct lyric metres. For such enterprises the Italians offered no adequate model. Tt^ey either wrote, often very well, in Latin, or else were content to follow 110 RONSARD AND LA PLEIADE the lingua toscana of Dante and the poetic forms of Petrarch. Their work was beside the mark at which the Enghsh renovators aimed. Sidney, in his Apologie, hke the Pleiade, finds our mediaeval verse ' apparelled in the dust and cob- webs of an uncivil age,' and, like the Pleiade, asks, ' What would it work if trimmed in the gorgeous eloquence of Pindar?' Apart from this aspiration he is evidently at home in the language on which the Pleiade had laboured, and well aware that it approached more nearly than Italian to Enghsh as a medium for modem verse. He dwells on rhymes ' by the French named masculine and feminine,' claiming a like, indeed a greater, variety for Enghsh, and denying it alto- gether to Italian. He points out that the French have ' the caesura, or breathing-place, in the middest of the verse,' and that we almost unfailingly observe the same rule, which is unknown to the Itahan or Spaniard. And so, too, with Puttenham. Puttenham, indeed, trounces an Enghsh translator for conveying too crudely ' the hymnes of P3mdarus, Anacreon's odes, and other lirickes among the Greeks, very well translated by Rounsard, the French Poet, and appUed to the honour of a great Prince in France.' He objects to the use of French words— freddon, egar, etc. — 'which have no maner of conformitie with our language.' But his theories are largely the theories of the Pleiade, and he evinces a peculiar knowledge of their art. He writes, ' this metre of twelve siUables the French man caUeth a verse Alexandrine, and is with our modern rimers most usuall.' If that was true in 1589, it follows that much Enghsh verse has been lost which was modelled on Ronsard's metre. RONSARD AND LA PLEIADE 111 PutteiJiam and Sidney were fighting in the ' eighties ' of the sixteenth century the battle for the vernacular and modem rhyme which the Pleiade had won in the ' forties.' They use the PMiade's weapons, which were not to be fotmd in any Italian armoury. And their victory was not assured till Daniel, steeped, above others, in the influence of Ronsard, published his Defence of Bhime (1603). That defence fitly concludes the contest for rhyme in English lyrics. The attack, renewed by Milton (1669), on The Invention of a Barbarous Age is irrelevant to the issue, and cannot touch Daniel's glorious declaration of the conservative principle underljong aU sound progress in the arts: 'It is but a fantastike giddiness to forsake the waye of other men, especially where it lyes tolerable. But shall wee not tend to Perfection ? Yes, and that ever best by going on in the course wee are in, where we have advantage, being so far onward of him that is but now setting forth. For wee shall never proceede, if we bee ever beginning, nor arrive at any certaine Porte, sayling mth all windes that blow.' I have but sketched the outhnes of an inquiry which, if prosecuted, may prove that the Pleiade exerted a more active influence on our EUzabethan revival than most of us have hitherto supposed. I believe it was great. The libraries at Petworth and Hatfleld suggest the closeness of the literary con- nection between France and England during the years in which Queen Ehzabeth could neither make up her mind to marry the French king's brother, nor to accept his sister-in-law as her successor to the throne. Even the Gortegiano of Castighone, the stock example of Italian influence, was printed by 112 RONSARP AND LA PLEIADE Wolfe (1588) in three parallel columns — Italiano, FranQois, CngliSf); thus attesting the mediating influence of French hterature at a time when the Pleiade were the arbiters of its elegance. But, whether the influence of the Pleiade on our EHza- bethans was great or slight, we may, as students of the Renaissance, ponder the parallel between the neglect which both endured for so long, and rejoice at the reparation at last accorded to each by their countrjmien in France, as in England. You may cavil at that phrase. But there can be no greater reparation than to accept gifts long proffered and long neglected, simply and gladly ; gladly, because they are good--simply, because they are needed. The lyric gifts of the Elizabethans and the Pleiade were sorely needed when a Coleridge or a Keats in England, a Gautier or a Hugo in France said, ' There they were,' and sang, ' Here they are ! ' The eighteenth century, for all its intellectual turmoil, in the end produced, like a volcano, but a thin conclusion of air-blown ashes. The need for some inward, tmseizable satisfaction grew desperate. Mankind ranged over arid wastes of thought and action, snatching, like hunger-stricken herds, at morality, philosophy, revolution, war. But inanity gnawed at their vitals. The mind of man demands for its well-being a triple diet of the True, the Good, the Beautiful, and is famished in plenty if stinted of but one element in its celestial food. Beauty had departed as the cult of beauty by the arts declined from the classic, through the conventional, to the repellent. Then came revolt. Poets, who are priests of Beauty, restored the liturgy of song by retrieving these lost canticles of delight in lovehness. RONSARt) AND LA PLEIADE. US Reparation was made to the Elizabethans and to the Pleiade by their compatriots. Non fallimt futura merentem. Can we make that reparation international ? If the dynastic wars of the fourteenth century and the sectarian diplomacy of the sixteenth century sent Chaucer and Sidney to school in France, may not the democratic understanding embraced in the twentieth century by the two Western Nations lead to a yet larger traffic between their several possessions in ' the realms of Gold ' ? Let us celebrate our friend- ship with France by annexing her lyric heritage, and courting reprisals on our own. The moment is propitious. It prompts a renewal of that contact with contemporary endeavour, coupled with a re- version to past achievement, which precipitated the Renaissance. Let this be done. Then the poets of the two lands, endowed with the most ancient and glorious traditions of song, may raise again their TTynrrns to Divine Beauty in conscious antiphonies from either shore. NORTH'S PLUTARCH NORTH'S PLUTARCH Plutaech was bom at the little Theban town of Chseronea, somewhere about 50 a.d. The date of his birth marks no epoch in history ; and the place of it, even then, was remembered only as the field of three bygone battles. The name Chseronea, cropping up in conversation at Rome, for the birthplace of a distinguished Greek lecturer, must have sounded strangely f amihar in the ears of the educated Romans whom he taught, even as the name of Dreux, or of Tewkesbury, sounds strangely familiar in our own. But apart from such chance encounters, few can have been aware of its municipal existence ; and this same contrast, between the importance and the re- nown of Plutarch's birthplace, held in the case of his country also. The Boeotian plain — once ' the scaffold of Mars where he held his games ' ^ — ^was but a lonely sheepwalk ; even as all Greece, once a Europe of several States, was but one, and perhaps the poorest, among the many provinces of the Ejjapire. Bom at such a time and in such a place, Plutarch was stiU a patriot, a student of politics and a scholar, and was therefore bound by every tie of sentiment and learning to the ancient memories of his native landj^Sometimes he brooded over her ' 'ApttBs opxw'^p'"'- (Marcdlus, 21.) This contrast has been noted by R. C. Trench, D.D., in his Plutarch. Five Lectures, 1874. An admirable volume full of suggestion. 117 118 NORTH'S PLUTARCH altered fortunes. Boeotia 'heretofore of old time resounded and rung again with Oracles ' ; but now all the land that from sea to sea had echoed the clash of arms and the cadence of oratory was ' mute or altogether desolate and forlorn ':...' hardly- able ' he goes on, ' to make three thousand men for the wars, which are now no more in number than one city in times past, to wit : Megara, set forth and sent to the battle of Platsea.' ^ At Athens, though Sulla had long since cut down the woods of the Academy, there were still philosophers ; and there were merchants again at Corinth, rebuilded by Juhus Caesar. But Athens, even, and a century before, cotdd furnish only three ships for the succour of Pompey ; while elsewhere, the cities of Greece had dwindled to villages, and the villages had vanished. ' The stately and sumptuous buildings which Pericles made to be buUt in the cittie of Athens ' were still standing after four hundred years, untouched by Time, but they were the sole remaining evidence of dignity. So that Plutarch, when he set himself to write of Greek worthies, foimd his material selected to his hand. Greek rhetoricians, himseK among them, might lecture in every city of the South ; but of Greek soldiers and statesmen there was not one in a land left empty and silent, save for ihe statues of gods and. the renown of great men.-^he cradle of war and statecraft was become a memory dear to him, and ever evoked by his personal contact with the triumphs of Rome. From this contrast flowed his inspiration for the Parallel Lives : his desire, as a man, to draw the noble Grecians, long since dead, ^ Plutarch's Morals. Philemon Holland, 1657, p. 1078, in a letter addressed to Terentius Priscus, ' On oracles that have ceased to give answers,' NORTH'S PLUTARCH 119 a little nearer to the noonday of the living ; his delight, as an artist, in setting the noble Romans whose names were in every mouth, a httle further into the twilight of a more ancient romance. By ' placing them side by side, he gave back to the Greeks that touch which they had lost with the Uving ; in the death of Greece, and to the Romans that; distinction from everyday Hfe which they were fast beginning to losey/Then and ever since, an imagina- J tive effort was deeded to restore to Greece those triviahties of daily hfe which, in other countries, an imaginative effort is needed to destroy ; and hence her hold on the imagination of every age. Plutarch, considering his country, found her a sohtude. Yet for him the desert air was vibrant with a rumour of the mighty dead. Their memories loomed heroic and tremendous through the dimness of the past ; and he carried them with him when he went to Rome, partly on a political errand, and partly to deliver Greek lectures. In Juvenal's ' Greek city ' he needed, and indeed he had, small Latin. ' I had no leisTire to study and exercise the Latin tongue, as well for the great busi- ness I had then to do, as also to satisfy them that came to learn philosophy of me ' : thus, looking back from Chseronea, does he write in his preface to the Demosthenes and Cicero, adding that he ' under- stood not matters so much by words, as he came to understand words by common experience and know- ledge he had in things.' We gather that he wrote many, if not all, of the Lives at his birthplace, the ' poor httle town ' to which he returned : ' remaining there willingly lest it should become less.' But it was in Flavian Rome, in the ' great and famous city thoroughly inhabited ' and containing ' plenty of all 120 NORTH'S PLUTARCH sort of books,' that, 'having taken upon him to write a history into which he must thrust many strange things imknown to his country,' he gathered his materials ' out of divers books and authorities,' or picked them up, as a part of ' common experience and knowledge,' ia familiar converse with the cultured of his day, I have quoted thus, for the light the passage throws on the nature of his re- searches ia Rome, although the word ' history ' may mislead. For his purpose was not to write histories, even of individuals. He teUs us so himself. ' I will only desire J^T-padeA'.bPi writes in ]\m pr§laefe]ES AtealMder and Ccesar, ' not to blame rae though I do nrFt^^cTareair^tmij^ , atlarge . . . for they must f ememper that myj uie nt is not to w ri te I nstori eis but only hves. ForJihfi. Tinble>st .dftBd&>!Ji £^Qes on, ' d o n otalways shew man '^s vi rtues and vices, but often - fTmes a lisKt occasion, a word, or some soprt ma& maffT""tfaCffflraFmspositions and_manners appear ^ men^ Tracraral oispositions ancimanners appear more plainly ,t" fliiTl tiM*^ -^"TBOi is battles w o n, wh CTgia are slaiii ten thou sand men/ '.Sb painters do take tej' ' I'esemWSjticeof the ' fa^^ and favour of the countenance,' making ' no accompt of other parts of the body,' so he, too, asks for ' leave to sgek out the signs and tokens of the mind only.'-o^'^at was his ambition : to paint a gallery of portraits ; to focus his vision on the spiritual face of his every subject, and for every Greek to hang a Roman at his side, To compass it he set himself deliberately, as an artist, unconscious of any intention other than the choice of good subjects and, his choice once made, the rejection from each of all but the particular and the significant. He stood before men's souls to study ' the singularity each possessed,' ^ as Velasquez ^ Paulua jEmilius. NORTH'S PLUTARCH 121 in a later age before men's bodies ; and, even as his method was allied, so was his measure of accomplish- ment not less. But the Parallel Lives shows something different from this purpose, is something more than a gallery of portraits htmg in pairs. Plutarch stands by his profession. His,_i|aiBedifait©"'©0«eeMa^6Hw4ttwttei^^ manners of the, ereaL He chooses his man, and then he pamts his picture, with a master s choice of the essential. And yet, inasmuch as he chooses _ every • subject as a matter of course on political I grounds — as he sees all men in the State — ^it follows that his gallery is found, for aU his avowed mtention, to consist of pohtical portraits alone,/xhirteen, indeed, of his sitters belong not only to history but also to one chapter of history — a chapter short, dramatic, bloody, and distinctly pohtical. This was the chance. When Plutarch, the lecturer, dropped into Roman society fresh from the contemplation of Greece ' depopulate and dispeopled,' he found its members spending their ample leisure in academic debate. After more than a htmdred years they were still discussing the protagonists in that greatest of pohtical dramas which, ' for a sumptuous conclusion to a stately tragedy,' had ushered in the empire of the world. Predisposed by contrast of origin and aflSnity of taste, he threw himself keenly into their pastime, and he gives, by the way, some minute references to points at issue. For instance, when Pompey and the Senate had deserted Italy at Caesar's approach, a stem-chase of ships and swords had swept round three continents, and thereon had followed a campaign of words and pens at Rome. In that campaign the chief attack and reply had been 122 NORTH'S PLUTARCH Cicero's Goto and Caesar's Anticaton ; and these, he tells us,^ had ' favourers unto his day, some defend- ing the one for the love they bare Csesar, and others' allowing the other for Cato's sake.' We gather that he and his Roman friends argued of these matters over the dinner-table and in the lecture- haUs, even as men argue to-day of the actors in the French Revolution. Now, to glance at the ' Table of the Noble Grecians and Romanes ' is to see how profoundly this atmosphere afiected his selection of Roman lives. For, excluding the legendary founders and defenders, with the Emperors Galba and Otho (whose lives are interpolations from elsewhere), we find that thirteen of the nineteen left were party chiefs in the constitutional struggles which ended on the fields of PharsaHa and PhiHppi. The effect on the general cast of the Lives has been so momentous that a whole quarter covers only the pohtical action which these thirteen pohticians crowded into less than one hundred years. The society of idlers, which received Plutarch at Rome, was still debating the ideals for which these thirteen men had fought and died ; it was therefore inevitable that, in seeking for foreign parallels, he should have found almost as many as he needed among the actors in that single drama. As it was, he chose for his greater por- traitures all the chief actors, and a whole army of subsidiary characters for his groups in the middle distance : as Satuminus and Cinna from one act, Clodius and Curio from another. Nothing is wanting. You have the prologue of the Gracchi, the epilogue of Antony, and between the play from the triumph of Marius to Brutus in his despair : ' looking up to the firmament that was fuU of stars,' and ' sighing ' over ^ Cmsar. NORTH'S PLUTARCH 123 a cause lost for ever. And yet it remains true that Plutarch did not make this selection from — or rather this clean sweep of — the politicians of a certain epoch in order to illustrate that epoch's history, still less to criticise any theory of constitutional govern- ment. The remaining Romans, howbeit engaged in \ several issues, and the Greeks, though gathered from many ages and many cities, are aU pohticians, or, being orators and captains, are stiU in the same way chosen each for his influence on the fortunes of a State. But they were not consciously chosen to illustrate history or to discuss politics. Thanks, , not to a point of view pecuhar to Plutarch but to an instinct pervading the world in which he lived, to a prepossession then so universal that he is never conscious of its influence on his aim, they are all , pubhc men. For himself, he was painting individual j character ; and he sought it among men bearing a \ personal stamp. But he never sought it in a private j person or a comedian ; nor even in a poet or a master / of the Fine Arts. To look for distinction in such a/ quarter never occurred to him ; could never, I maji say, have entered his head. He cannot conceive that any young ' gentleman nobly bom ' should so much as wish to be Phidias or Polycletus or Ana- creon ; ^ and this from no vulgar contempt for the making of beautiful things, nor any mean reverence for noble birth, but because, over and above the making of beautiful things, there are deeds that are better worth the doing, and because men of noble birth are freer than others to choose what deeds they will set themselves to do. Why, then, he seems to ask, should they seek any service less noble than the service of their countrymen ? why pursue any ■^ Preface to Pericles. 124 NORTH'S PLUTARCH ambition less exalted than the salvation of their State ? For his part, he will prefer Lycurgus before Plato ; for, while the one ' stabhshed and left behind him ' a constitution, the other left behind him only ' words and written books.' ^ His preference seems a strange one now ; but it deserves to be noted the \ more nearly for its strangeness. At any rate, it was the preference of a patriot and a repubUcan, whose country had sunk to a simple province under an ahen emperor, and it governed the whole range of Plu- tarch's choice. This result has been rendered the more conspicu- ous by another cause, springing at first from an accident, but in its apphcation influenced by the poHtical quality of Plutarch's material. Lost sight of and scattered in the Dark Ages, the Parallel Lives were recovered and rearranged at the revival of learning. But just as a gallery of historical por- traits, being dispersed and re-collected, will in all probabihty be hung after some chronological scheme, so have the lives been shuffled anew under the in- fluence of their pohtical extraction, in such a sort as to change not only the complexion but also the structure of Plutarch's design. They form no longer a gaUery of political portraits, hung ia pairs for contrast's sake : they are grouped with inteUigible reference to the history of Athens and of Rome. We know from Plutarch's own statements that he had no hand in their present arrangement. He was engrossed in depicting the characters of great men, and he wrote and dedicated each pair of lives to Socius Senecio, or another, as an independent ' book,' ' treaty,' or ' volume.' It is clear from many passages that he gathered these ' volumes ' ^ Lycurgus. NORTH'S PLUTARCH 125 together without reference to their political bearing on each other. The Pericles and Fahius Maximus, which is now the Fifth ' book,' was originally the Tenth ; and the change has apparently been made to bring Pericles, so far as the Greeks are concerned, within the consecutive history of Athens : just as the Demosthenes and Cicero, once the Fifth, is now by much removed so that Cicero may fall into place among the actors of the Roman drama. So, too, the Theseus, now standing First, as the founder of Athens, was written after the Demosthenes, now set well-nigh at the end of the series. And on the same grounds, evidently, to the Marius and the Pompey, written respectively after the Ccesar and the Brutus, there have been given such positions as were dictated by the development of the drama. The fact is, Plu- tarch's materials, being all poHtical, have settled of themselves, and have been sorted in accordance with their pohtical nature : until his work, pieced to- gether by humanists and rearranged by translators, bears within it some such traces of a new symmetry, imperfect yet complex, as we detect in the strati- fication of crystalline rocks. Little has heem idd&d inJor^t:gJ^st.S^jjMLteJfl^^ bookj/but its stauctTU^ej^d^jusJE^J^e^ae^ some of ils*co!Kiur'^3suriace a re the •produoL snot dnl^-'^rffieoS-e m^w^^t^,^^t^^J^e im3ay'''t{l3Krta^^ of the ages it has om;w^mr'''rE^'ime''c^^^^^ the order of the ' books ' have neither increased nor diminished their contents ; but by evolving, as they do, a more or less symmetrical juxtaposition of certain elements, 1 In North's edition of 1579 all is Plutarch, through Amyot, excepting the Annibal and the Scipio African, which were manufactured by Donato Acciaiuoli for the Latin translation of the Lives published at Kome by Campani in 1470. 126 NORTH'S PLUTARCH they have discovered the extent to which the work is permeated by those elements. As the quartz dispersed through a rock strikes the eye, when it is crystallised, from the angles of its spar ; so the amoxmt of Plutarch's poUtical teaching, which might have escaped notice when it was scattered through independent books, now flashes out from the group- ing together of the Athenians who made and unmade Athens, and of the Romans who fought for and against the Repubhcan Constitution of Rome. For the Parallel Lives are now disposed in a rough chronological order ; in so far, at least, as this has been possible where the members of each pair belong severally to nations whose histories mingle for the first time, when the activity of the one ceases and the activity of the other begins. In earUer days they had but dim intimations of each other's fortunes : as when, in the Gamillus, ' the rumour ran to Greece incontinently that Rome was taken ' ; and it is only in the PMloposmen and Flaminius that their fates are trained into a single channel. So that, rather, there are balance and opposition between the two halves of the whole : the latter portion being governed by the groupiug in dramatic sequence of the thirteen Romans who took part in the consti- tutional drama of Rome ; whereas the earher is as it were polarised about the history of Athens. Con- sidering the governing lives in each case, and dis- regarding their accidental companions, you will find that in both the whole pageant is displayed. There are excursions, but in the latter half we live at Rome ; in the earher we are taken to Athens : there to be spectators of her rise, her glory, and her faU. We listen to the prologue in the Solon ; and in the Themistocles, the Pericles, the Alcibiades, we contem- NORTH'S PLUTARCH 127 plate the three acts of the tragedy. The tragedy of Athens, the drama of Rome : these are the historic poles of the Parallel Lives ; while, about half-way between, in the book of Philopoemen and Flaminius, is the historic hinge, at the fusion of Greek with Roman story. For Philopoemen and Flaminius were contemporaries : the one a Greek whom ' Greece did love passingly well as the last vaUant man she brought forth in her age ' ; the other, a Roman whom she loved also, Plutarch teUs us, because, in fotmding the suzerainty of Rome, he founded it on the broad stone of honour. In this book the balance of sustained interest shifts, and after it the Lives are governed to the end by the de- velopment of the single Roman drama. We may say to the end : since Plutarch may truly be said to end with the sxiicide of Brutus. The Aratus, though of vivid and, with the Sylla, of unique interest — ^for both are based on autobiographies ^ — belongs, it is thought, to another book.^ This, I have already said, is true of the Oalba and the Otho, dissevered as they are by the obvious division of a continuous narrative ; and of the Artaxerxes, which, of course, has nothing to do among the Greek and Roman hves ; while the Hannibal and Scipio (major), included by North, is not even Plutarch. These Uves, then, were added, no doubt, to complete the defect of those that had been lost ; as, for instance, the MeteUus promised by Plutarch in his Marius, and the book of Epaminondas and Scipio (minor), which we know him to have written, on the authority of his son. If, then, ignoring these accretions, we study the ''■ Freeman, Methods of Historic Study, p. 168. Mahaffy, lAfe and Thought. ■ 2 A. H. Clough, Plutarch's Lives. 1883. 128 NOETH'S PLUTARCH physiognomy of the Parallel Lives as revealed in the ' Table,' the national tragedy of Athens and the constitutional drama of Rome are seen to stand out in consecutive presentment from its earlier and latter portions. Each is at once apparent, because each has been reconstituted for us. But the fact that such reconstitution has been possible — proving, as it does, how complete was the unsuspected influence of Plutarch's political temperament over his con- scious selection of great men — ^puts us in the way of tracing this influence over his every preference. It gives a key to one great chamber in his mind, and a clue which we can follow through the windings of his book. It makes plain the fact that every one of nis heroes achieved, or attempted, one of four poli- Itical services which a man may render to his fellows. /Their Hfe-work consisted (1) in foimding States ; 1(2) in defending them from foreign invasion ; (3) in extending their dominion ; or (4) in leading political parties within their confines. All are, therefore, men who made history, considered each one in re- flation to his State. In dealing, for instance, with Demosthenes and Cicero, Plutarch ' wiU not confer their works and writings of eloquence,' but ' then- facts and deeds in the government of the common- iwealth.' In this manner, also, does he deal even with his ' foiuiders,' who can scarce be called men, being but figures of legend and dream. Yet they too were evolved under the speU of political prepossession in the nations which conceived their legends ; and the floating, shifting appearances, the ' mist and hum ' of them, are compacted by a writer in whom that prepossession was strongly present. That such airy creatures should figure at aU as historical states- men, having something of natural movement and NORTH'S PLUTARCH 129 bulk, in itself attests beyond all else to this habit of Plutarch's mind. Having 'set forth the Mves of Lycurgus (which established the law of the Lacedae- monians), and of King Numa PompiHus,' he thought he ' might go a httle further to the life of Romulus,' and ' resolved to match him which did set up the noble and famous city of Athens, with him which foxmded the glorious and invincible city of Rome.' He is dealing, as he says, with matter ' full of suspicion and doubt, being dehvered us by poets and tragedy makers, sometimes without truth and hkelihood, and always without certainty.' He is deahng, indeed, with shadows ; but they are shadows projected backward upon the mists about their origin by two nations which were above all things poUtical ; andi he lends them a further semblance of consistency and perspective, by regarding them from a pohtical point of view in the light of a later political experi- ence. His Theseus and his Romulus are, indeed, a tissue woven out of folk-lore and the faint memories of a savage prime : you shaU find in them traces of forgotten customs ; marriage ,by capture,^ for in- stance, and much else that is frankly beyond belief ; things which, he says, ' peradventure wiU please the reader better for their strangeness and curiosity, than offend or mishke him for their falsehood.' But his Lycurgus, saving the poUtical glosses, and his Pompilius are hkewise all of legend and romance: of the days ' when the Aventine was not inhabited, nor enclosed within the walls of Rome, but was full of springs and shadowed groves,' the haunt of Picus and Faunus, and of ' Lady Silence ' ; yet he con- trives to cast a pohtical reflection over even this I The marriage of Pirithous, p. 62, and the ravishment of the Sabines, 85. I 130 NORTH'S PLUTARCH noiseless dreamland of folk-lore, Lycurgus and Theseus, in the manner of their deaths, present vague images of the fate which in truth befell the most of their historic parallels. Lycurgus kills himself, not because his constitution for Sparta is in danger, but lest any should seek to change it ; and the bones of Theseus, the Athenian, murdered by his ungrateful coimtrymen, are magically discovered, and are brought back to Athens ' with great joye, with processions and goodly sacrifices, as if Theseus himself had been aKve, and had returned into the city agait^.' As we read, we seem to be dreaming of Cato's death at Utica ; and of Alcibiades' return, when the people who had banished him to the ruin of their coimtry ' clustred aU to him only and . . . put garlands of flowers upon his head.' The relation of the Lives in the three other cate- gories to the pohtical temper of Plutarch and his age is more obvious, if less significant of that temper and its prevalence in every region of thought. Of (the Romans, PubHcola and Coriolanus belong also (to romance. But both were captains in the first legendary wars waged by Rome for supremacy in Italy; and the lives of both are charged with the hues Vpf party politics. Pubhcola is painted as the aristo- crat who, by patient loyalty to the Constitution, lives down the suspicions of the populace ; Qorio- _ ■lanus. as a t£a &..o£-&as t .e a.t a nn e n nble, for its ponr-agp a nd lamentable for its indomitable pride. Passing, after these four, out of fable intoEistory, there remain six Romans besides the thirteen involved in the culminating drama. Three of these, Eurius Oamillus, Marcellus, and Quintus Fabius Maximus, were the heroes of Rome's successful resistance to foreign invasion, and two, T. Q. Plaminius and NORTH'S PLUTARCH 131 Paulus ^milius, the heroes of her equally successful foreign and colonial policy ; whQe one only, Marcus Cato, is chosen as a constitutional poHtioian from the few untroubled years between the assurance of empire abroad and the constitutional collapse at home. Turning from Italy to Greece, we find, again, that after the two legendary founders and Solon, the more or less historical contriver of the Athenian con- stitution, the remainder Greeks without exception fall under one or more of the three other categories : they beat back invasion, or they sought to extend a suzerainty, or they led pohtical parties in pursuit of political ideals. Swayed by his pohtical tempera^sf ment, Plutarch exhibits men of a like stamp engagedl in like issues. But, in passing from his public men of b Italy to his pubhc men of Greece, we may note that, whUe the issues which call forth the political energies of the two nations are the same, a difference merely in the order of event works up the same characters and the same situations into another play with another and a more compHcated plot. Rffme had practically secured the headship of the Italian States some years before the First Punic War. Her suze- rainty was, therefore, an accomphshed fact, fre- quently challenged but never defeated, before the ItaKan races were called upon to face any foe capable of absorbing their country. But in Greece, neither before nor after the Persian invasion did any one State ever become permanently supreme. So that, whereas, in Italy, the issue of internal wars and jealousies was decided long before the danger of foreign domination had to be met ; in Greece, over- shadowed in turn by the Persian, the Macedonian, and the Roman, that issue was never decided at all. It f oUows that the history of Italy is the history 132 NOETH'S PLUTARCH of Rome, and not of the Latins or of the Samnites ; but that the history of Greece is, at first, the history of Athens, of Sparta, and of Thebes in rivalry with one another, and, at last, of Macedon and Rome brooding over leagues and confederacies between the lesser islands and States. The Roman drama is single. The City State becomes supreme in Italy ; roUs back wave after wave of Gauls and Cartha- ginians and Teutons ; extends her dominion to the ends of the earth ; and then, suddenly, finds her Constitution shattered by the strain of world-wide empire. Plutarch gives the actors in aU these scenes ; but it is in the last, which is the most essen- tially pohtical, that he crowds his stage with the Hving, and, afterwards, cumbers it with the dead. The Greek drama is complex, and affords no such opportunity for scenic concentration. Even the first and simplest issue, of repelling an invader, is made intricate at every step by the jealousy between Sparta and Athens. Plutarch teUs twice over ^ that Themistocles, the Athenian, who had led the aUies to victory at Salamis, proposed to bum their fleets at anchor so soon as the danger was overpassed : for by this means Athens might seize the supremacy of the sea. The story need not be true : that it should ever have been conceived proves in what spirit the Greek States went into alliance, even in face of Persia. The lives of two other Athenians, Cimon and Aris- tides, complete Plutarch's picture of the Persian War ; and after that war he can never group his Greeks on any single stage. Each of them seeks, in- deed, to extend the influence of his State, or to further his poHtical opinions ; but in the tangle of combinations resulting from their efforts one feature ^ In the Themistocles and in the Aristides. NORTH'S PLUTARCH 133 remains unchanged amdng many changes. Through all the jBghting and the scheming it is ever Greek against Greek. The history is a kaleidoscope, but the pieces are . the same. That is the tragedy of Greece : the ceaseless duel of the few with the many, with a comphcation of racial rivalries between inde- pendent City States. There is no chmax of develop- ment, there is no sudden failure of the heart ; but an agony of spasm twitches at every nerve in the body in turn. Extinction follows extinction of political power in one State after, and at the hands of, another ; and in the end there is a total eclipse of national life under the shadow of Rome. It is customary to date the political death of Greece from the battle at Chseronea, in which the Macedonians overthrew the aUied armies of Athens and Thebes. But to Plutarch, who had a better, because a nearer, point of view, the perennial viru- lence of race and opinion, which constituted so much of the political life of Greece, went after Chseronea as merrily as before. The combatants, whose sky was but clouded by the empire of Alexander, fought on into the night of Roman rule ; and, when they relented, it was even then, according to Plutarch, only from sheer exhaustion. Explaining the lull in these rivalries during the old age of Philopoemen, he writes that ' like as the force and strength of sick- ness declineth, as the natural strength of the sickly body impaireth, envy of quarrel and war surceased as their power diminished.' Of these Greeks, other than the founders and the heroes of the Persian War, six were leaders in the rivalry, first, between Athens and Sparta and, then, between Sparta and Thebes. Of these, three were Athenians — Pericles, Nicias, and Alcibiades ; two were Spartans — Lysander and 134 NORTH'S PLUTARCH Agesilaus ; one was Pelopidas the Theban, These six lives complete Plutarch's picture of the Pelopon- nesian War. Then, stiU keeping to Greeks proper, he indulges in an excursion to Syracuse in the lives of Dion and Timoleon. Later, in the hves of Demos- thenes and Phocion, you feel the cloud of the Mace- donian Empire gathering over Greece. And, lastly, while Rome and Macedon fight over her head for the substance of dominion and political reform, two kings of Sparta, Agis and Cleomenes, and two generals of the Achaean League, Aratus and Philopoemen, are found still thwarting each other for the shadow. Plutarch shows four others, not properly to be called Greeks : the Macedonians, Alexander and Demetrius, Pyrrhus the Molossian, and Eumenes, bom a Greek of Cardia, but a Macedonian by his career. These four come on the stage as an interlude between the rivalries of the Peloponnesian War and the last futilities of the Achaean League. Alexander for a time obUterates all lesser lights ; and in the lives of the other three we watch the flashing traurtsf his successors. All are shining figures, aU are crowned, all are the greatest adventurers of the world ; and tumbling out of one kingdom into another, they do battle in glorious mellays for cities and diadems and Queens. Taking a clue from the late reconstitution of the most moving scenes at Athens and Rome, I follow it through the Parallel Lives, and I sketch the political framework it discovers. Into that frame- work, which co-extends with Plutarch's original conception, I can fit every life in North's first edition, from the Theseus to the Aratus. I could not over- look so palpable and so significant a restdt of Plu- tarch's political temperament ; and I must note it NORTH'S PLUTARCH 136 because it has been overlooked, and even obSCUried, in later editions of Amyot and North; Amydt's first and second editions, of 1559 and 1565, both etid with the Otho, which, although it does hot beloiig to the Parallel Lives, was at least Plutarch. But to Amyot's third, of 1567, there were added the Awhihal and the Scipion (major), first fabricated for the Latin translation of 1470 by Donato AcciaiuoH and trans- lated into French by Charles de I'Escluse^ or de la Sluce, as North prefers to call him. These two lives North received into his first edition : togeth^t with a comparison by Simon Goulard Seiihsien, an in- dustrious gentleman who, as ' S. G. S.,' supplied him with further inaterial at a later date.^ Fot indeed, once begun in the first Latin translation, this process of completing Plutarch knew no bounds ibt more than two hundred years. The Spanish historian, Antonio de Guevara, had perpetrated a decade of emperors, Trajan, Hadrian, and eight more, and these, too, were translated into French by Antbine AUegre, and duly appended to the Amyot of 1567 by its pubhsher Vascosan. AH was fish that came to Vascosan's net. The indefatigable S. G; Si con- cocted lives of Augustus and Seneca ; translated biographies from Cornelius Nepos ; and, with an excellent turn for symmetry, Supplied unaided all the Comparisons which are not to be found in Plu- tarch. The Chseronean either wrote them^ and they were lost ; or^ possibly, he paused before the scal- ing of Caesar and Alexander, content with the perfec- tion he had achieved. But S. G, S. knew no such ^ Professor Skeat, in his Shakespeare's Plutarch, leaves the attribution of these initials in doubt. They have been taken by many Frelich editots of Amyot to stand for B. de Girard, Sieur du HaiUan, but M. de Bligniferes shows in his Essai sur Amyot, p. 184, that they stood for Simon Goulard, the translator of Seneca. 136 NORTH'S PLUTARCH embarrassment ; and Amyot's publisher of 1583 accepted his contributions, as before, in the lump. North in his third edition of 1603 is a little, but only a little, more fastidious : he rejects all the Com- parisons except, oddly enough, that between Caesar and Alexander ; but on the other hand, he accepts from S. G. S. the lives of ' worthy chieftains ' and ' famous philosophers ' ^ who — ^and this is a point — were not, as all Plutarch's exemplars were before everything, pubHc men. Later, the international compUment was returned. The Abbe BeUenger translated into French eight hves — of iEneas, Tullus HostiMus, and so forth — concocted in EngHsh by Thomas Rowe ; and these in their turn were duly added, first to Dacier's Plutarch in 1734, and after- wards to the Amyot of 1783 : an edition you are not surprised to see filling a small bookcase. Celebrities of aU sorts were recruited, simply for their fame, from every age, and from every field of performance — ^Plato, Aristotle, Philip, even Charlemagne ! ^ And the process of obscuring Plutarch's method did not end with the interjection of spurious stuff. Men cut down the genuine Lives to convenient lengths, for summaries and ' treasuries.' The undefeated S. G. S. covered the margin of one edition after another with reflections tending to edification. He and his kind epitomised Plutarch's matter and pointed his moral, grinding them to the dust of a classical dictionary and the ashes of a copybook headline. AU these editions and epitomes and maxims, being none of Plutarch's, should not, of 1 Letter of dedication to Queen Elizabeth. Ed. 1631, p. 1108. ^ Fabricated also by Acciaiuoli for Campani's Latin edition of 1470, and attributed to Plutarch by an erudite calling himself VisoelUus. Amyot himself fabricated the lives of Epaminondas and Soipio (minor) at the request of Marguerite of Savoye, but never published them as Plutarch. NORTH'S PLUTARCH 137 course, in reason have darkened his restriction on the choice of great men. Yet by their number and their vogue, they have so darkened it ; and the more easily, for that Plutarch, as I have shown, says nothing of the limit he observed. Beneath these additions the poHtical framework of the Lives lay buried for centuries ; and even after they had been discarded by later translators, it was stiU shrouded in the mist they had exhaled. Banish the additions and their atmosphere — fit only for puritans and pedants — and once more the political framework emerges in aU its significance and in all its breadth. From this effect we cannot choose but turn to the cavsa cavsans — ^the mind that achieved it. We want to know the pohtical philosophy of a writer who, being a student of human character, yet held it unworthy his study save in pubhc men. And the curiosity will, as I think, be sharpened rather than rebated by the reflection that many of his commen- tators have, none the less, denied him any political insight at aU.^ Their paradox plucks us by the sleeve. From a soil thus impregnated with the salt of pohtical instinct one would have looked in the harvest for some savour of pohtical truth ; yet one is told that the Lives, fruitful of aU besides, are barren of this. For my part, I must believe that Plutarch's commentators have been led to a false conclusion along one of two paths : either they have listened too innocently to his avowed intention of "■ Plutarch. Five Lectures, p. 89. Paul-Louis Courier and many others have written to the same efiect, questioning Plutarch's accuracy and in- sight. On the question of accuracy, I am content to quote Ste.-Beuve, Cauteries du I/wndi, vi. 333 : ' Quand on a fait la part du rh6teur et du pretre d'ApoUon en lui, il reste une bien plus large part encore, ce me semble, au collecteur atterdif et consciencieux des moindres traditions sur les grands hommes, au peintre ahondant et curieux de la nature humaine ' : and to refer to Freeman, Methods of Historical Study, pp. 167, 168, 184. 138 NORTH'S PLUTARCH portraying only character, and have been confirmed in their error by the indiscriminate additions to his work ; or, perceiving his exclusive choice of poU- Jbicians, they have still declined to recognise political wisdom in an unexpected shape. ^^ In a work which is constituted, albeit without intention, upon lines thus deiinitely poHtical, one might have looked for many (direct pronouncements of pohtical opinion.-v Yet in that expectation one is deceived — as I think^ happily. For Plutarch's methods, at least in respect of polities and war, are not those of analysis or of argument, but of pageant and of drama, with actors living and moving against a background of proces- sions that move and live. With aU the world for his stage, he shakes off the habit of the lecture-haU, and it is only now and again that, stepping before the curtain, he wiU speak a prologue in a preface, or turn chorus to comment a space upon the play. Mostly he is absorbed in presenting his heroes as they fought and as they fell ; in unfolding, in scene after scene, his iheatrum of stirring life and majestical death/^I cannot deny his many digressions on matters religious, moral, philosophical, and social ; and it may be that their very number, accentuat- ing the paucity of his political pronouncements, has emphasised the view with which I cannot concur. Doubtless they are there ; nor can I believe that any would wish them away. It is interesting to hear the Pythagorean view of the solar system ; ^ and it is charming to be told the gossip about Aspasia ^ and Dionysius^ after his fall. In the Pericles, for instance, Plutarch pauses at the first mention of 1 Numa Pompilius : marred in North by a mistranslation. In the original it approximates to the Copernioan rather than to the Ptolemaic theory. " Pericles, * Timoleon. NORTH'S PLUTARCH 139 Aspasia's name : ' thinking it no great digression of our storie,' to tell you ' by the way what manner of woman she was.' So he tells you what manner, and, after the telling, excuses himself once more ; since, as he says, it came ' in my minde : and me thought I should have dealt hardly, if I should have left it unwritten.' Who will resent such compassion ? Who so immersed in affairs as to die in wiDing ignor- ance of the broken man who seemed to be a ' starke nideotte,' with a turn for low lifie and repartee ? Plutarch carries aU before him when he says : ' me- thinks these things I have intermingled concerning Dionysius, are not impertinent to the description of our Lives, neither are they troublesome nor un- profitable to the hearers, unless they have other hasty business to let or trouble them.' He is irresis- tible in this vein, which, by its hghtness, leads one to believe that some of the Hves, Hke some modem essays, were first deUvered before popular audiences, and then collected with others conceived in a graver,, key. There are many such digressions. But* just^ because his heroes are aU pohticians, of long political I pronouncements there are few : even as of comments | dck- on the art of war you shall find scarce one, for the / ,r ' ' reason that strategy and tactics are made plain on a | hundred fields. His pohticians and captains speak] and fight for themselves. It is for his readers, if they I choose, to gather pohtical wisdom from (say) his hves of the aforesaid thirteen Romans ; even, as, an they I will, they may deduce from the Themistocles or the | Pompey the completeness of his grasp upon the latestV' theories on the command of the sea. Yet there are exceptions, though rare ones, to his rule ; and in questioning the political bent of his mind we are not left to inference alone. In the 140 NORTH'S PLUTARCH Lycurgus, for instance, where the actor is but a walking shadow, Plutarch must needs deal with the system associated with Lycurgus's name : so in this life we have the theory of poHtics which Plutarch favoured, whereas in the Pericles we have the practice of a consummate poHtician. From the Lycurgus, then, we are able to gauge the personal equation (so to say) of the mind which, in the Pericles, must have .coloured that mind's presentment of poHtical action 'and debate. Plutarch, like Plato before him, is a frank admirer of the laws which Lycurgus is said to have framed. He dehghts in that ' perf ectest manner of a commonwealth,' which made the city of Lycurgus ' the chiefest of the world, in glory and honour of government, by the space of five hiuidred years.' He tells of the lawgiver's journey from Crete to Asia, to compare the ' pohcy of those of Crete (being then very straight and severe) with the superfluities and vanities of Ionia ' ; and youc may gather from the context that the one appears to the historian ' whole and healthful,' the others ' sick and diseased.' He seems also to approve Ly- curgus's indiscriminate contempt for aU ' super- fluous and unprofitable sciences ' ; for the devices of ' licorous cooks to cram themselves in comers,' of ' rhetoricians who teach eloquence and the cunning cast of lying,' of goldsmiths and fortune-tellers and panders. Again, it is with satisfaction that he paints his picture of Lycurgus returning ' home one day out of the fields . . . laughing ' as he ' saw the number of sheaves in shocks together and no one shock bigger than another ' ; aU Laconia being ' as it were an inheritance of many brethren, who had newly made partition together.' But if Plutarch approves the suppression of luxury and the equal NORTH'S PI-UTARCH 141 distribution of wealth as ideals, he does not approve the equal distribution of power.; He is in favour of constitutional repubHcs and opposed to hereditary monarchies ; though he will tolerate even these in countries where they already exist. ^ But he is for repubUcs and against monarchies only that the man ' bom to rule ' may have authority : such a man, for instance, as Lycurgus, ' bom to rule, to com- mand, and to give orders, as having in him a certain natural grace and 'power to draw men vnllingly to obey him.'' In any State, he postulates, on the one hand, an enduring Constitution and a strong Senate of proved men ; on the other, a popidace with equal pohtical rights of electing to the Senate and of sanctioning the laws that Senate may propose. Yet these in themselves are but preliminary conditions of Hberty and order. Besides, for the preservation of a State there are needed rulers few and fit, armed with enough authority and having courage enough to wield it. It is essential that the few, who are fit, shall direct and govern the many, who are not. If authority be impaired, whether by incompetence in the few or through jealousy in the many, then must disaster foUow. Now, many who hold this view are prone, when disaster does foUow, to blame the foUy of the many rather than the unfitness of the few. But Plutarch is distinguished in this : that,( holding the view as firmly as any have held it — ^now- preaching the gospel of authority and now exhibitina* its proof at every turn — ^he yet imputes the blame of failure, almost always, to incompetence or to cowardice in the few. ' He that directeth well musi needs be well obeyed. For like as the art of a good rider is to make his horse gentle and ready at com* 1 Comparison of Demetrius with Antonitts. 142 NORTH'S PLUTARCH I mandment, even so the chiefest point belonging to a i prince is to teach his people to obey.' I take these I words from the Lycurgus. They set forth Plutarch's jchief pohtical doctrine ; and the statement of fact is pointed with his favourite image. That the horse (or the many) should play the antic at will, is to him plainly absurd : the horse must be ridden, and the many must be directed and controlled. Yet, if the riding, or the governing, prove a failure, Plu- tarch's quarrel is with the ruler and the horseman, not with the people or the mount. For he knows well that ' a ragged colt oftimes proves a good horse, specially if he be weU ridden and broken as he should be.' ^ This is but one of his innumerable allusions to horse-breaking and hunting : as, for instance, in the Paulus Mmilius, he includes ' riders of horses and hunts of Greece ' among painters and gravers of images, grammarians, and rhetoricians, as the proper Greek tutors for completing the educa- tion of a Roman moving with the times. And no one who takes note of these allusions can doubt that, as one of a chivalrous and sportiag race, he was qualified to deal with images drawn from the manege and the chase. As little can any one who follows his poKtical drama miss the appMcation of these images. Sometimes, indeed, his constant theme and his favourite image almost seem fused : as when he describes the natural grace of his Csesar, ' so excellent a rider of horse from his youth, that holding his hands behind him, he would galop his horse upon the spur ' ; a governor so ever at one with those he governed, that he directed even his charger by an inflexion of his wiU rather than of his body. This need of authority and the obligation on the few to ^ Themisiocks. NORTH'S PLUTARCH 143 maintain it — ^by a ' natural grace,' springing, on the one hand, from courage combined with forbearance ; and leading, on the other, to harmony between the rulers and the ruled — ^is the text which, given out in the Lycurgus, is illustrated throughout the Parallel Lives. I have said that, apart from the Lycurgus, Plu-s tarch's pohtical pronouncements are to be foundj mostly in the prefaces to certain ' books ' and iil scattered comments on such action as he displaysi And of aU these ' books ' the Pericles and Fdbim Maximus is, perhaps, the richest in pronouncements, in both its preface and its body, aU bearing on his theory of authority and on its maintenance by ' natural grace.' A ' harmony ' is to be aimed at ; but a harmony in the Dorian mode. Pericles is commended because in later life ' he was wont . . . not so easily to grant to all the people's wills and desires, no more than as it were to contrary winds.' In Plutarch's eyes he did well when ' he altered his oVer-gentle and popular manner of government ... as too delicate and effeminate an harmony of music, and did convert it into an imperious govern- ment, or rather a kingly authority.' He has nothing but praise for the independence and fortitude by which Pericles achieved Caesar's policy of uniting within himself aU the yearly offices of the State, ' not for a little while, nor in a gear (fashion) of favour,' but for ' forty years together.' He com- pares him to the captain of a ship ' not hearkening to the passengers' fearful cries and pitiful tears,' and holds him up for an example, since he ' neither would be persuaded by his friends' earnest requests and entreaties, neither cared for his enemies' threats and accusations against him, nor yet reckoned of all 144 NORTH'S PLUTARCH their foolish scoffing songs they sung of him in the city.' So, too, in the same book, when Plutarch comes to portray Fabius Maximus, he gives us that great man's view : that ' to be af eared of the wagging of every straw, or to regard every common prating, is not the part of a worthy man of charge, but rather of a base-minded person, to seek to please those whom he ought to command and govern, because they are but fools.' (Thus does blimt Sir Thomas render Amyot's pohte, but equally sound, ' parce quHls ne sont pas sages.'') But the independence and the endurance necessary in a ruler are not to be accompanied by irritation or contempt. While ' to flatter the common people ' is at best effeminate,' and at worst ' the broad high-way of them that practise tyranny,' ^ still, ' he is less to be blamed that seeketh to please and gratify his common people than he that despiseth and disdaiaeth them ' ; for here is no harmony at aU, but discord. The words last f quoted are from the Comparison between Alcibiades and Coriolanus, two heroes out of tune with their countrymen, whose courage and independence were jnade thereby of no avaU. But in the Pericles and iFahius Maximus Plutarch shows us heroes after his j own heart, and in his preface to their lives he insists I more explicitly than elsewhere on the need of not i only courage and independence but also forbearance [ and goodwill ; since without these, their comple- ments, the other virtues, are sterile. Pericles and Fabius, being at least as proud and brave as Alci- biades and Coriolanus, ' for that they would patiently bear the foUies of their people and companions that were in charge of government with them, were mar- vellous profitable members for their country.' He 1 Furius Camillus. NORTH'S PLUTARCH 146 returns to this theory of harmony in his preface to the Phocion and Cato. In every instance he assumes as beyond dispute, that the few must govern, work- ing an obedience in the many ; but they are to work it by a ' natural grace ' of adaptation to the needs and natures they command. In this very book he blames Cato of Utica, not for the ' ancient simplicity ' of his manner, which ' was indeed praiseworthy,' but, simply because it was ' not the convenientest, nor the fittest ' for him ; for that ' it answered nor res- pected not the use and manners of his time.' How comes it to pass that Plutarch's heroes, being / thus prone to compromise, yet fight and die, often at j their own hands, for the ideals they uphold ? The' question is a fair one, and the answer reveals a pro- found difference between the theory and the practice of politics approved by the ancient world and the theory and the practice of pohtics approved in the England of to-day. ' The good and iU,' says Plu- tarch, ' do nothing differ but in mean and mediocrity.' We might therefore expect in his heroes a reluc- tance to sacrifice all for a difference of degree ; and especially might we suppose that, after deciding an equipoise so nice as that between ' authority and lenity,' his governors would stake Httle on their decision. But in a world of adjustment and doubt they are aU for compromise in theory, while in action they are extreme. They are ready in spite, almost because, of that doubt, to seal with their blood such certainty as they can attain. His statesmen, inas- much as they do respect ' the use and manners ' of their time, endure all things while they live, and at last die quietly, not for an abstract idea or a sublime emotion, but for the compromise of their day: though they know it for a compromise, and foresee 146 NORTH'S PLUTARCH its inevitable destruction. They have no enthusi- 1 asm, and no ecstasy. Uninspired from without, and self-gathered within, they live their lives, or lay them down, for the use and wont of their country. In 'reading their history an Enghshman cannot but be struck by the double contrast between these tend- encies of theory and action and the tendencies of theory and action finding favour in England now. Ever extreme in theory, we are aU for compromise in fact ; proud on the one score of our sincerity, on the other of our common sense. We are fanatics, who yet decline to persecute, stiU less to suffer, for our faith. And this temperance of behaviour, follow- ing hard on the violent utterance of beUef, is apt to show something irrational and tame. The actor stands charged, often unjustly, with a lack of both logic and courage. The Greeks, on the other hand, who found ' truth in a union of opposites and the aim of life in its struggle,' ^ and the Romans, who aped their philosophy and outdid their deeds, are not, in Plutarch's pages, open to this disparagement. They live or die for their faiths as they found them, and so appear less extravagant and more brave. The temper is illustrated agaia and agaia by the manner in which they observe his doctrine, that rulers must maintain their authority, and at the same time ' bear the follies of their people and companions that are in charge of government with them.' To read the Pericles or the Pompeius, the Julius Gcesar or the Cato, is to feel that a soldier may as well complain of bullets in a battle as a statesman of stupidity in his colleagues. These are constants of the problem. Only on such terms are fighting and ruling to be had. So, too, with ' the people ' : with the many, that is, 1 The Moral Ideal, Julia Wedgwood, p. 82. NORTH'S PLUTARCH 147 who have least chance of understanding the game, least voice in its conduct, least stake in its success. If these forget all but yesterday's service, if they Ipok only for to-morrow's reward, the hero is not there:fore to complain. This short-hved memory and this short-sighted imagination are constants also. They are regular fences in the course he has set him- self to achieve. He must clear them if he can, and fall if he cannot ; but he must never complain. They are conditions of success, not excuses for failure;! and to name them is to be ridiculous. The Plu- tarchian hero never does name them. He is obstinate, 1 but not querulous. He cares only for the State ; I he insists on saving it in his own way ; he kills him- self, if other counsels prevail. But he never com- plains, and he offers no explanations. Living, he prefers action before argument ; dying, he chooses drama rather than defence. While he has hope, he acts like a great man ; and when hope ceases, he dies i like a great actor. He and his fellows seek for some '• compromise between authority and lenity, and, having found it, they maintain it to the end. They are wise in taking thought, and sublime in taking action : whereas now, we are courageous in our theories, but exceeding cautious in our practice. Yet who among modern politicians will say that Plutarch's men were in the wrong ? Who, hoarse with shouting against the cataract of circumstance, wiU dare reprove the dumb-show of their lives and deaths ? I have shown from the Lycurgus, from the prefaces to the Pericles and the Phocion, and from scattered comments elsewhere, that Plutarch has something to say upon politics which, whether we agree with him or not, is at least worthy our attention. There 148 NORTH'S PLUTARCH is yet an occasion of one other kind — ^which he takes, I think, only twice — for speaking his own mind upon poUtics. After the conclusion of a long series of events, ending, for instance, in the rule of Rome over Greece, or in the substitution of the Empire for the Republic, he assembles these conclusions, at first sight to him imreasonable and unjust, and seeks to interpret them in the Hght of divine wisdom and justice. Now, he was nearer than we are to the two great sequences I have denoted, by seventeen centuries : he lived, we may say, in a world which they had created anew. And whereas he took in aU political questions a general interest so keen that it has coloured the whole of a work not immediately addressed to politics, in these two sequences his interest was particular and personal : in the first because of his patriotism, and in the second because of his familiar converse with the best in Rome. We are happy, then, in the judgment of such a critic on the two greatest pohtical dramas enacted in the ancient world. The human — I might say the pathetic — interest of the treatment accorded by the patriotic Greek to the growth of Roman dominion and its final extension over the Hellenistic East, wiU absorb the attention of many. But it offers, besides, as I think, although this has been questioned, much of political wisdom. In any case, on the one count or upon the other, I feel bound to indicate the passages in which he comments on these facts. We are not in doubt as to his general views on Imperial aggression and a ' forward poHcy.' After noting that the Romans forsook the peaceful precepts of Numa, and ' fiUed all Italy with murder and blood,' he imagines one saying : ' But hath not Rome excelled stOl, and prevailed more and more in NORTH'S PLUTARCH 149 chivalry ? ' And he repHes : ^ ' This question re- quireth a long answer, and especially unto such men as place feUcity in riches, in possessing and in the greatness of empire, rather than in quiet safety, peace and concord of a common weal.' For his part he thought with Lycurgus,^ that a city should not seek to command many ; but that ' the felicity of a city, as of a private man, consisted chiefly in the exercise of virtue, and the unity of the inhabitants thereof, and that the citizens should be nobly minded (Amyot : francs de cueurs), content with their own, and temperate in their doings {attrem'pez en tous leurs faicts), that thereby they might maintain and keep themselves long in safety.' But, holding this general opinion, and biassed into the bargain by his patriot- ism, he cannot relate the stories of Aratus and^ PhUopoemen on the one hand, or of Flaminius and Lucullus on the other, without accepting the con- clusion that the rule of Rome was at last necessary for the rational and just government of the world ; and, therefore, was inevitably ordained by the Divine wisdom. Rome ' increased and grew strong by arms and continual wars, like as 'piles driven into the ground, which the more they are rammed in the further they enter and stick the faster.'' ^ For it was by obedience and self-restraint, by a ' yielding unto reason and virtue ' that the ' Romans came to command all other and to make themselves the mightiest people of the world.' ^ In Greece he finds nothing of this obedience and this self-restraint ; nothing but rivalry between leaders and jealousy between States. deomenes, the Spartan king, Aratus and Philopoe- men, both leaders of the Achaean League, are among 1 Oompariscm of Lycurgus mth Nwma Pompilius. 2 Lycurgus. ' Nwma Pompilius. * Paulus Mnilius. 150 NORTH'S PLUTARCH the last of his Greek heroes. He lingers over them lovingly ; yet it is Aratus who, in jealousy of Qeomenes, brings Antigonus and his Macedonians into Greece ; and it is Flaminius, the Roman, who expels them. In this act some modem critics have seen only one of many cloaks for a policy of calculated aggression, but it is well to remember for what it is worth that Plutarch, the Greek patriot, saw in it simply the act of a ' just and courteous gentleman,' and that, according to him, the ' only cause of the utter destruction of Greece ' must be sought earher : when Aratus preferred the Macedonians before allow- ing Cleomenes a first place in the Achaean League. In the Cimon and Lucullus, even after Greece became a Roman province, he shows the same rivalries on a smaller scale. The ' book ' opens with a story which, with a few changes, mostly of names, might be set in the Ireland of a hundred years ago. One Damon, an antique Rory of the Hills, after just provocation, collects a band of moonlighters who, with blackened faces, set upon and murder a Roman captain. The town council of Chseronea condemns Damon and his companions to death, in proof of its own innocence, and is murdered for its pains. At last Damon him- self is enticed into a bathhouse, and killed. Then the Orchomenians, 'being near neighbours unto the Chseroneans, and therefore their enemies,' hire an ' informer ' to accuse all the Chaeroneans of com- plicity in the original murder ; and it is only the just testimony of the Roman general, Lucullus, who chances to be marching by, which saves the town from punishment. An image is set up to Lucullus which Plutarch has seen ; and even to his day ' terrible voices and cries ' are heard by the neigh- bours from behind the waUed-up door of the bath- NORTH'S PLUTARCH 151 house, in which Damon had died. He knows the whole story from his childhood, and knows that ia this small matter Lucullus showed the same justice and courtesy which Flaminius had displayed in. a great one. For it is only the strong who can be just ; and therefore to the strong there falls in the end, without appeal, the reward, or the penalty, of doing justice throughout the world. That seems to be Plutarch's ' long answer ' to those who question the justice of the Roman Empire. He gives it most fuUy in the life of Flaminius, taking, as I have said, a rare occasion in order to comment on the con- clusion of a long series of events. First, he sums up the results achieved by the noble Greeks, many of whose Hves he has written. ' For Agesilaus,' he writes, ' Lysander, Nicias, Alcibiades, and all other the famous captains of former times, had very good skiU to lead an army, and to winne the battle, as well by sea as by land, but to turn their victories to any honourable benefit, or true honour among men, they could never skill of it ' ; especially as, apart from the Persian War, ' all the other wars and the battles of Greece that were made fell out against themselves, and did ever bring them unto bondage : and aU the tokens of triumph which ever were set up for the same was to their shame and loss.' Having summed up the tragedy of Greece in these words, he turns to the Roman rule, and ' The good deeds of the Romans and of Titus Quintus Flaminius,' he says, ' unto the Grecians, did not only reap this benefit unto them, in recompense that they were praised and honoured of all the world ; but they were cause also of increasing their dominions and empire over all nations.' So that ' peoples and cities . . . pro- cured them to come, and did put themselves into 152 NORTH'S PLUTARCH their hands ' ; and ' kings and princes also (which were oppressed by other more mighty than them- selves) had no other refuge but to put themselves under their protection, by reason whereof in a very short time ... all the world came to submit them- selves under the protection of their empire.' In the same way, he, a republican, acquiesced in the necessity for Caesar. Having told the story of Brutus, the last of the thirteen Romans, he falls on the other of my two occasions, and ' Caesar's power and government,' he writes, ' when it came to be estabhshed, did indeed much hurt at his first entrie and beginning unto those that did resist him : but afterwards there never followed any tyrannical nor cruel act, but contrarily, it seemed that he was a merciful Physician whom Ood had ordained of special grace to he Governor of the Empire of Rome, and to set all things again at quiet stay, the which required the counsel and authority of an absolute Prince.^ That is his epUogue to the longest and the mightiest drama in aU history ; and in it we have for once the judg- ment of a playwright on the ethics of his play. Yet so great a dramatist was Plutarch that even his epilogue has not saved him from the fate of his peers. While some, with our wise King James I., blame him for injustice to Caesar,^ yet others find him a niggard in his worship of Brutus and Cato. The fact is, each of his heroes is for the moment of such flesh and blood as to compel the pity of him that reads ; for each is in turn the brother of all men, in their hope and in their despair. If, then, the actor chances to be Brutus and the reader King James, Plutarch is damned for a rebel ; but again, if the reader be a ^ In his interview with Casaubon. See Ste.-Beuve ; Causeries du Imndi, xiv. 402. NORTH'S PLUTARCH 153 republican, when Servilia's lover wraps him in his cloak and falls, why, then is Plutarch but the friend of a tyrant. Thus by the excellence of his art he forces us to argue that his creatures must reign in his affection as surely as for a moment they can seize upon our own. Take an early hero of the popular party — take Caius Gracchus. We know him even to his trick of vehement speech ; and, knowing him so intimately, we cannot but mourn over that part- ing from his wife, when he left her to meet death, and she, ' reaching after him to take him by the gown, fell to the ground and lay flatHngs there a great while, speaking never a word.' Cato, again, that hero of the other side, lives to be forbidding for his affecta- tion ; 3^t who but remembers the clever boy making orations full of ' witt and vehemence,' with a ' cer- taine gravetie ' which ' delighted his hearers and Tnade them laugh, it did so please them ' ? One harks back to the precocious yoxmgster, once the hope of the winning party, when Cato, left alone in Utica, the last soul true to a lost cause, asks the dissemblers of his sword if they ' think to keep an old man alive by force ? ' He takes kindly thought for the safety of his friends, reads the Phcedo, and dozes fitfully through the night, and behold ! you are in the room with a great man dying. You feel with him that chiU disillusion of the dawn, when ' the little birds began to chirp ' ; you share in the creeping horror of his servants, listening outside the door ; and when they give a ' shriek for fear ' at the ' noise of his fall, overthrowing a little table of geometry hard by his bed,' it is almost a relief to know that the recovered sword has done its work. And who can help loving Pompey, with his ' curtesie in conversation ; so that there was never man that requested anything with less 154 NORTH'S PLUTAECH ill will than he, nor that more willingly did pleasure unto any man when he was requested. For he gave without disdain and took with great honour ' ? ' The cast and soft moving of his eyes . . . had a certain resemblance of the statues and images of King Alexander.' Even ' Flora the curtisan ' — Villon's ' Flora la beUe Romaine ' — opined away for love of him when he turned her over to a friend. He is all compact of courage and easy despair : now setting sail in a tempest, for ' it is necessity, I must go, but not to live ' ; and again, at Pharsalia, at the first reverse 'forgetting that he was'Pompey the Great,' and leaving the field to walk silently away. And that last scene of all : when on a desolate shore a single ' infranchised bondman ' who had ' remained ever ' by the murdered hero, ' sought upon the sands and foimd at the length a piece of an old fisher's boat enough to serve to bum his naked body with ' ; and so a veteran who had been with him in his old wars happens upon the afflicting scene ; and you hear him hail the other lonely figure : ' O friend, what art thou that preparest the funerals of Pompey the Great ? . . . Thou shalt not have all this honour alone . . . to bury the only and most famous Captain of the Romans ! ' There is sorcery in Plutarch's presentments of these poHticians, which may either blind to the import of the drama they enact, or beguile into think- ing that he sympathises by turns with the ideal of every leader he portrays. But behind the glamour of their hving and the glory of their death, a relent- less progression of pohtical causes and efiEects conducts "Thevitably to Csesar' s personal rule. In no other book do we see so full an image of a nation's life, because in no other is the author so little concerned to prove NOKTH'S PLUTARCH 155 the truth of any one theory, or the nobihty of anvL— - one sentiment. He is detached — indeed, absorbed— , in another purpose. He exhibits his thirteen vivid personahties, holding, mostly by birth, to one of two historic parties, and inheriting with those parties certain traditional aspirations and behef s ; yet by showing men as they are, he contrives to show that truth and nobihty belong to many divergent behefs and to many conflicting aspirations. Doubtless he has his own view, his rooted abhorrence to the rule of one man ; and this persuasion inclines him now to the Poptilar Party in its opposition to Sulla, and again to the Senate in its opposition to Caesar. But still, by the sheer force of his realism, he drives home, as no other writer has ever done, the great truth that theories and sentiments are in politics no more than flags and tuckets in a battle : that in fighting and in government it is, after aU, the fighting and the governing which must somehow or another be achieved. And, since in this world governing there must be, the question at any moment is : What are the possible conditions of government ? In the latter days of the Republic it appears from the Lives that two sets of causes had led to a monstrous de- velopment of individuals, in whose shadow aU lower men must wither away. So Sertorius sails for the ' Fortunate Islands ' ; Cato is juggled to Cyprus ; Cicero is banished ; while LucuUus, out-metalled by Pompey on his own side, ' lay still and took his pleasure, and would no more meddle with the commonwealth,' and the unspeakable Bibulus ' kept him close in his ' house for eight months' space, and only sent out bills.' At last you have the Trium- virate ; and then, with Crassus kiUed, the two pro- tagonists face to face ; ' whose names the strange 156 NORTH'S PLtTTARCH and far nations understood before the name of Romans, so great were their victories.' Given the Roman dominion and two parties with the traditions of Marius and Sulla behind them, there was nothing for it but that one or other should prove its com- petence to rule ; and no other way of achieving this than finding the man and giving him the power. The Marians found Caesar, and in him a man who could find power for himself. The political heirs of SuUa found Cato and Brutus, and Lucullus and Pompey ; but none of these was Caesar, and, such as they were, the Senate played them off the one against the other. Bemused with theories and sentiments, they neither saw the necessity, nor seized the means, of governing a world that cried aloud for govern- ment. In Plutarch you watch the play ; and, what- ever you may think of the actors — of Crassus or Cato, Pompey or Caesar — of the non-actors you can think nothing. Bibulus, with his ' biUs,' and the Senate, which bade Pompey disband his troops, stand for ever as tjrpes of formal incompetence. Hutaf ch shows that it is wiser and more righteous to win the game by accepting the rules, even if sometimes you must strain and break them, than to leave the table because you dislike the rules. In- stead of quarrelling with the rules and losing the game, the Senate should have won the game, and then have changed the rules. This Caesar did, as Plutarch the republican allows, to the saving of his country and the lasting profit of mankind. Doubt- less he shows the argument in action, and points the moral only in an epilogue. But living, as we do, after the politicians of so many ages and so many parties have laid competing claims to the glory of his chiefs, this is our gain. Brutus and Cato, heroes of NORTH'S PLUTARCH 157 the Renaissance and gods of liberty a hundred years ago, we are told by eminent historians, were selfish oligarchs: bunglers who, having failed to feed the city or to flush the drains, wrote ' sulky letters ' ^ about the one man who could do these things, and govern the world into the bargain. Between these views it skills not to decide. It is enough to take up the Lives and to rejoice that Plutarch, writing one hundred and fifty years after the foundering of the Repubhc, dwelt rather on its heroes who are for ever glorious than on its theories which were for ever shamed. In his book are three complete plays : the brief * tragedy of Athens — ^that land of ' honey and hem- lock,' offering her cup of sweet and deadly elements to the dreamers of every age ; with the drama of the merging of Greece in the dominion of Rome and the drama of the overthrow of the Roman Republic. And the upshot of all three is that the playwrigh t '7 ' i ns igbs on the__c.ulture of the individual for t he sake f ^^i33ya.«..Sfa>tft>,,,.J teacher behind tfie ' political dramatist inculcates, no theory of politics but, an attitude towards life. Good is the child of custom and conflict, not the reward of individual research ; so he shows you life as one battle in which the armies are ordered States. Every man, there- fore, must needs be a citizen, and every citizen a soldier in the ranks. For this service, life being a battle, he must cultivate the soldier's vktues of courage and courtesy. The word is North's, and smacks something more of chivalry than Amyot's humanite ; yet both may be taken to point Plutarch's moral,^ not only that victory is impossible without kindness between comrades, and intolerable without ' Mommsea: he uses the phrase of Cicero. 158 NORTH'S PLUTARCH forbearance between foes, but also, that in every age of man's progress to perfection through strife these qualities must be developed to a larger growth measured by the moral needs of war between nations and parties. He insists again and again on this need of courtesy in a world wherein aU men are in duty bound to hold opposite opinions, for which they must in honour Uve and die. For this his Sertorius, his Lucullus, and his Mummius, sketched in a passing allusion, are chiefly memorable ; while of Caesar he writes that ' amongst other honours ' his enemies gave him ' he rightly deserved this, that they should build him a Temple of Clemency.' Caesar, lighting from his horse to embrace Cicero, the arch-instigator of the opposition he had overthrown, and walking with him ' a great way a-foot ' ; or Demetrius, who, the Athenians having defaulted, gathers them into the theatre, and then, when they expect a massacre, forgives them in a speech — these are but two exemplars of a style which Plutarch ever praises. And if his standard of courtesy in victory be high, not lower is his standard of courage in defeat. Demosthenes is condemned for that ' he took his banishment unmanly,' while Phocion, his rival, is made glorious for his irony in death : paying, when the stock ran out, for his own hemlock, ' sith a man cannot die at Athens for nothing.' In defeat Plutarch's heroes sometimes doubted if hfe were worth living ; but they never doubted there were things in life worth d3mig for. Even Demosthenes is redeemed in his eyes because, at the last, ' sith the god Neptune denied him the benefit of his sanctuary, he betook Mm to a greater, and that was Death.'' So often does Plutarch applaud the act of suicide, and so scornfully does he revile those who, like the last NORTH'S PLUTARCH 159 king of Macedon, forwent their opportunity, that we might easUy misconceive his ethics. But ' when a man will wiUingly kiU himself, he must not do it to be rid of pains and labour, but it must have an honourable respect and action. For, to live or die for his own respect, that cannot but be dishonourable. . . . And therefore I am of opinion that we shou! not yet cast off the hope we have to serve our country in time to come ; but when aU hope faileth us, then we may easily make ourselves away when we list.' Thus, after Selasia, the last of the kings of Sparta, who recalled the saying of Lycurgus : that, with ' great personages . . . the end of their life should be no more idle and unprofitable then the rest of their hfe before.' And this is the pith of Plutarch's political matter : that men may not with honour hve imto themselves, but must rather live and die in respect to the State. II Side by side, and in equal honour, with Plutarch the dramatist of politics there should stand, I think — ^not Plutarch the morahst but — Plutarch the un- rivalled painter of men. Much has been written, and rightly written, of his perennial influence upon human character and human conduct; yet outside the ethics of citizenship he insisted on little that is not now a platitude. The interest of his morals springs from their likeness to our own ; the wonder of his portraitures must ever be new and strange. Indeed, we may speak of his art much as he writes, through North, of the ' stately and sumptuous build- ings ' which Pericles 'gave to be built in the cittie of Athens.' For ' it looketh at this daye as if it were 160 NOETH'S PLUTARCH but newly done and finished, there is such a certaine kynde of florishing freshnes in it, which letteth that the injurie of time cannot impaire the sight thereof : as if every one of those foresaid workes had some living spirite in it, to make it seeme young and freshe : and a soul that lived ever, which kept them in good continuing state.' Yet despite this ' florishing fresh- nes ' the painter has been shghted for the preacher, and for this preference of the ethical before the aesthetic element in the Lives, and of both before their poUtical quahty, Plutarch has mostly himself to thank. Just as he masks a pohtical framework under a professed devotion to the study of individual ^ouls, so, when he comes to the study of these souls, he puts you off by declaring a moral aim in language that may easily mislead. ' When first I began these j lives,' he writes in the Paulus Mmilius, " my intent I was to profit other : but since, continuing and going I on, I have much profited myself by looking iato these I histories, as if I looked into a glasse, to frame and ; facion my life, to the moold and patteme of these \ vertuous noble men, and doe as it were lodge them , with me, one after another.' And again, ' by keep- ing aUwayes in minde the acts of the most noble, vertuous and best geven men of former age ... I doe teache and prepare my selfe to shake of and banishe from me, all lewde and dishonest condition, if by chaunce the companie and conversation of them whose companie I keepe . . . doe acquaint me with some unhapjne or ungratious toucheJ' Now, as matter of fact, he does not keep always in mind these, and these only. Doubtless his aim was moral ; yet assuredly he never did pursue it by denoting none save the virtuous acts of the ' most noble, vertuous, and best geven men.' On the contrary, his practice NORTH'S PLUTARCH 161 is to record their every act of significance, whether ' good or bad. I admit that he does this ever with a most happy and most gracious touch ; for his ' first study ' is to write a good man's ' vertues at large,' and if ' certaine f aultes ' be there, ' to pass them over lightly of reverent shame to the rnere frayelty of man^s nature.'' ^ He lays the ruin of his country g-t the door of Aratus alone ; but ' this,' he adds, ' that we have written pf Aratus ... is not so much to accuse him as to make us see the fr^-yelty and weak- ness of man's nature : the which, tliough it have never so excellent vertues, cannot yet bring forth such perfit frute, but that it hath ever some mayme and blemishe.' ^ That is his wont in portraying the iU deeds of the virtuous ; and, for their oppo^ites, ' as I hope,' he writes in the preface to the Demetrius and Antonius, ' it sha,!! not be reprehended in me if amon,gst the rest I put iii one or two paier of suche, as living in great place and accompt, haye increased their fame with infamy.' ' Phisicke,' he submits in defence of such a choice, ' dealeth with diseases, musicke with discordes, to thend to remove them, and worke their contraries, and the great Ladies of all other artes (Amyot : Us plus 'paffaittes sciences de tmtes), Temperauuce, Justice, and Wisdom, doe not onely consider ^lonestie, uprightness and profit : but examine withajll, the nature and effects of lewdness, corruption and dam^ige ' ; for ' innocencie,' he goes on, ' which vaunteth her want of experiesnce in undue practices : men call simphcitie (Amyot : une bestise) and ignoraunce of things that be necessary and good to be knowen.' His, then, is a moral standpoint ; and yet it is one from which he is impelled to study — (and that as closely as the keenest apostle of ' art ^ Preface to the Cimon and Luculfus. " Agis anfl Ch^mepfia. L 162 NORTH'S PLUTARCH I for art') — all matters having truth and significance ; 1 whether they be evil or good. For the sake of what is good, he will neither distort truth nor disfigure beauty. Rather, by the exercise of a fine selection, he will create a harmony between the three ; so that, embracing everything except the trivial, his art reflects the world as it shows in the sight of sane and healthy-hearted men. His method naturally differs from the method of some modem historians ; but his canon of evidence, too lax for their purpose, is admirably suited to his own. For instance, in telling of Solon's meeting with Croesus, he wiU not reject so famous an history on chronological grounds : because, in the first place, no two are agreed about chronology, and in the second, the story is ' very agreeable to Solon's manners and nature.'- That is his chief canon ; and though the results he attains by it are in no wise doubt-proof, they yield a truer, because a completer, image than do the lean and defective outlines de- termined by excluding all but contemporary evi- dence. These outlines belong rather to the science of anthropometry than to the art of portraiture ; '^^nd Plutarch the painter refuses such restraints. iHis imagination having taken the imprint of his hero, he will supplement it from impressions left in report and legend, so long, at any rate, as they tally with his own ideal. Nor is there better cause for yrfejecting such impressions than there is for rejecting the fossils of primeval reptiles whose carnal economy has perished. Given those fossils and a knowledge of morphology, the palaeontologist will refashion the ragons of the prime ; and in the same way Plutarch, lUt of tradition and his knowledge of mankind, aints you the true Themistocles. His, indeed, is the NORTH'S PLUTARCH 163 surer warrant, since there have been no such changes in human nature as science shows in animal design ; so that the method is safe so long as a nation's legends have not been crushed out of shape by the superincumbent layers of a conquering race. More- over, Plutarch makes no wanton use of his imagina- tion : give him contemporary evidence, and he abides by it, rejecting aU besides. In his accoimt of Alexander's death, having the court journal before him, he repudiates later embellishments : ' for aU these were thought to be written by some, for lyes and fables, because they would have made the ende of this great tragedie lamentable and pitifull.' His results are, of course, unequal. He cannot always revive the past, nor quicken the dead anew. Who can ? His gallery includes some pieces done on a faded convention, faint in colour and angular in line, mere pretexts for a parade of legendary- names : with certain sketches, as those of Cimon and Aristides, which are hack-work turned out to complete a pair. But first and last there stand out six or seven reahsations of hving men, set in an atmosphere, charged with a vivid intensity of ex- pression, and striking you in much the same way as the sight of a few people scattered through a big room strikes you when you enter unawares. And when you have done staring at these, you wiU note a half-dozen more which are scarce less vigor- ously detached. Plutarch's first masterpiece is the Themistocles, and there is never a touch in it but teUs. Even as you watch him at work, you are conscious, leaping out from beneath his hand, of the ambitious boy, ' sodainely taken with desire of glorie,' who, from his first entry into pubMc hfe, ' stoode at pyke with the greatest and mightiest personnes.' But you 164 NORTH'S PLUTARCH soon forget the artist in his creation. You have eyes for nothing but Themistocles himself : nov walkiiig with his father by the seashore ; now, after Marathon ' a very young man many times solitary alone de- vising with himself ' — in this way passing his boy- hood, for 'Miltiades victory would not let him sleep.'' Then the ambitious boy develops into the political artist ; rivals Aristides, as Fox rivalled Pitt ; and is found loving his art for its own sake, above his country, above his ambition even, wrapt as he is, through good fortxme and ill, in the expert's delight in his own accompHshment. Knowing what aU men should do, and swaying every several man to do it, he controls both individuals and nations with the inspired prescience of a master conducting his own symphony. He has aU the devices at his fingers' ends. In the streets he will ' speake to every citizen by his name, no man telling Mtti their names ' ; and in the council he wiU manage even Eurybiades, with that ' Strike an thou wilt, so thou wilt heare me,' which has been one of the world's words since its utterance. Now with ' pleasaunt conceits and answers,' now — ^with a large poetic appeal — ' point- ing ' his countrymen ' the waye unto the sea ' ; this day, deceiving his friends, the next overawing his enemies ; with effrontery or chicane, with good-fellow- ship or reserve ; but ever with infinite dexterity, a courage that never falters, and a patience that never wearies : he keeps the shuttle of his thought quick-flying through the web of intrigue. And aU for the fun of weaving ! Till, at the last, a banished man, being commanded by his Persian master to fight against Greece, ' he tooke a wise resolution with himselfe, to make suche an ende of his life, as the fame thereof deserved.' After NORTH'S PLUTARCH 165 sacrificing to the gods, and feasting his friends, he drank poison, ' and so ended his dayes in the cittie of Magnesia, ' after he had lived threescore and five yeres, and the most parte of them allwayes in ofiftc^ and great charge.' Plutarch produces this notable piece, not by comment and analysis but, simply by'\ settiag down his sitter's acts and words. It is inj^ the same way that he paints his Alcibiades, with his beauty and his Hsp : ' the grace of his eloquence, the strength and vafiantness of his bodie ... his wisdom and experience in marshal! affajo-es ' ; and again, with his insolence and criminal foUy to the women who loved him as to the nations he betrayed. He fought, like the Cid, now for and now against his own. But ' he had such pleasaimt coliiely devises with him that no man was of so sullen a nature, but he left him merrie, nor so churhshe, but he would make him gentle.' And when he died, they felt that their country died with him ; for they had some little poore hope left that they were not altogether cast away so long as Alcibiades lived.' In the first rank of Plutarch's masterpieces come, with these two, the Marius, the Gato, the Alexander, the Demetrius, the Antonius, and the Pom/pey. Modern writers have again and again repainted some of these portraits ; but their colour has all been/ borrowed from Plutarch. These heroes live for aU'j time in the Parallel Lives. There you shall learn j the fashion of their faces, and the tricks of their | speech ; their seat on horseback and the cut of their I clothes ; with every tone and every gesture, aU the f charms and aU the foibles that made them th© men they were. Marcus Cato is what we caU*^ ' character.' He hated doctors and, no doubt, schoolmasters ; for did he not educate his own son. 166 NORTH'S PLUTARCH writing for him ' goodly histories, in great letters with his oune hands ' ? He taught the boy grammar and law, ' to throw a dart, to play at the sword, to vawt, to ride a horse, and to handle aU sortes of weapons, ... to fight with fistes, to abide colde and heate, and to swimme over a swift runninge river.' A ' new man ' from a httle village, his ideal was Manlius Curius sitting ' by the fyer's side seething of per- seneapes,' and he tried to educate everybody on the same lines. Being Censor, he would proceed by way of imprisonment ; but at aU times he was ready to instruct with apophthegms and 'wise sayings,' and ' he would taunte a marvelous f atte man ' thus : ' See, sayd he, what good can such a body do to the commonwealth, that from his chine to his coddepece is nothing but beUy ? ' This is but one of many ' wise sayings ' reported of him, whereby ' we may the easUier conjecture his maners and nature.' ^ Even the Alexander seems a new thing stUl ; so clear is the colouring, so vigorous and expressive the pose. ' Naturally,' you read, ' he had a very fayre white colour, mingled also with red,' and ' his body had so sweete a smeU of itself, that all the appareU he wore next imto his body took thereof a passing dehghtful savor, as if it had been perfumed.' This was his idea of a holiday : ' After he was up in the morning, first of all he would doe sacrifice to the goddes, and then would goe to diner, passing awaie aU the rest of the daye, in hunting, writing something, taking up some quarreU between soldiers, or els in studying. If he went any journey of no hastie busines, he would exercise himselfe by the waie as he went, shooting in his bowe, or learning to get up or >■ Plutarch's Cato is accepted bodily by Mommsen for a tjrpioal ' Roman burgess.' History of Borne, vol. ii. pp. 429-432. NORTH'S PLUTARCH 167 out of his charret sodenly, as it ranne. Oftentimes also for his pastime he would hunt the f oxe, or ketch birdes, as appeareth in his booke of remembrances for everie daie. Then when he came to his lodging, he would enter into his bath and rubbe and nointe himselfe : and would aske his pantelers and carvers if his supper were ready. He would ever suppe late, and was very curious to see, that every man at his bourde were a like served, and would sit longe at the table, bycause he ever loved to talke.' But take him at his work of leading others to the uttermost parts of the earth. Being parched with thirst, in the desM^, ' he tooke the helmet with water, and perceiving that the men of armes that were about him, and had followed him, did thrust out their neckes to look upon this water, he gave the water back againe unto them that had geven it him, and thanked them but drank none of it. For, said he, if I drink alone all these men here will faint.'' What a touch ! And what wonder if his men 'beganne to spurre their horses, saying that they were not wearie nor athirst, nor did think themselves mortall, so long as they had such a king ' ! There is more of self-restraint in Plutarch's portrait than appears in later copies. Alexander passes by the ladies of Persia ' without any sparke of affection towardes them . . . prefer- ring the beautie of his continencie, before their swete faire faces.' But he was ever lavish of valour, loving ' his honour more then his kingdome or his hfe ' ; and it is with a ' marvelous f aier white plume ' in his helmet that he plunges first into the river at Granicus, and single-handed engages the army on the further bank. Centuries later at Ivry, Henri-Quatre, who learned Plutarch at his mother's knee, forgot neither the feather nor the act. But the dead Alexander 168 NORTH'S PLUTARCH never lacked understudies. All the kings, his suc- cessors, ' did but cotmterfeate ' him ' in his purple garments, and in numbers of souldiers and gardes about their persones, and in a certaine facion and bowing of their neckes a httle, and in uttering his speech with a high voyce.' One of them is Demetrius the Fort-gainer,' with ' his wit and manners . . . that were both fearefuU and pleasaunt tmto men that frequented him ' ; his ' sweete countenance . . . and incomparable majestie ' ; ' more wantonly geven to follow any lust and pleasure than any king that ever was ; yet alwayes very careful and diHgent in dispatching matters of importance.' A leader of forlorn hopes and lewd masquerades, juggling with kingdoms as a mountebank with knives ; the lover of innumerable queens and the taker of a thousand towns ; in his defeat, ' not hke unto a king, but like a common player when the play is done ' ; drink- ing himself to death for that he found ' it was that maner of Kfe he had long desired ' — this PoUorcetes, I say, has furnished Plutarch with the matter for yet another masterpiece, which indeed is one of the \ gireater feats in romantic reahsm. / Of the Antonius with his ' Asiatic phrase,' it is / enough to say that it is Shakespeare's Antony? and , at the Pompey I have already glanced. The Ccesar i is only less wonderful than these because the man is I lost in the leader. Julius travels so fast, that you ' catch but glimpses as he races in his litter through the night; ever dictating to his secretaries, and writing by the way. But now and again you see him plainly — ' leane, white and soft-skinned, and often subject to head-ache ' ; filling his soldiers with awe, not at his valiantnesse at putting himself at every instant in such manifest danger, since they NORTH'S PLUTARCH 169 knew 'twas his greedy desife of honor that set him a fire ' . . . but because he * continued aU labour and hardnesse more than his bodie could feeare.' A strange ruler of the world, this epileptic, ' fighting always with his disease ' ! He amazes friends aM enemieis by the swiftness of his movements, while Pompey journeys as in state from land to land. Pompey was of plebeian extraction, JuHus was born into one of the sixteen surviving patrician gtnhs; yet Julius burns with the blasting heat of a new man's endeavour, Pompey as with the banked fires of hereditary self-esteem. And through aU the com- motion and the coil he is stiU mhidful of the day of his youth ' when he had been acquaiated with Serviha, who was extreamihe in love with him. And because Brutus was boorne in that time when their love was hottest he persuaded himself that he begat him.' ^ What of anguish does this not add to the sweep of the gesture wherewith the hero covered his face from the pedant's sword ! With the Goesar may stand the Marius, and the Sylla : Sulla the lucky man, felix, Epaphroditus, beloved of all women and the victor in every fight, who ' when he was in his chief est authoritie would commonly eate and drinke With the most impudent jeasters and scoffers, and aU. such rake helles, as made profession of counteifeate mirth.' He laughed his way to complete pohtical success ; he was f ortmiate even in the weather for his f ttneral ; and, as he epitaphed himself, ' no man did ever passe him, neither in doing good to his friends, nor in doing mischief to his enemies.' Plutarch's LucuUus, being young and ambitious, marches further into the unknown East than any Roman had ventured. He fords the river on foot with the ^ Brulus. 170 NORTH'S PLUTARCH countless hosts of Tigranes on the farther shore, ' himselfe the foremost man,' and marches ' directly towardes his enemy, armed with an " anima " of Steele, made with scaUoppe shelles, shining like the sunne.' He urges on through summer and winter, till the rivers are ' congealed with ice,' so that no man can ' passe over by forde : for they did no sooner enter but the ise brake and cut the vaines and sinews of the horse legges.' His men murmvir, but he presses on : till ' the country being full of trees, woddes and forestes,' they are ' through wet with the snow that fell upon them,' and at last they mutiny and flatly refuse to take another step into the un- known. This is a LucuUus we forget. Plutarch gives the other one as well, and the two together make for him 'an auncient comedy,' the beginning whereof is tedious, but the latter end — ^with its ' feasts and bankets,' ' masks and mummeries,' and ' dauncing with torches,' its ' fine buUt chambers and high raised turrets to gaze a farre, environed about with conduits of water ' ; its superlative cook, too, and its ' hbrary ever open to aU comers ' — is a matter to rejoice the heart of man. Crassus and Cicero complete his group of second-bests: Cicero 'dogge leane,' and ' a Httle eater,' ' so earnest and vehement in his oration that he mounted still with his voyce into the highest tunes : insomuch that men were affrayed it would one day put him in hazard of his life.' Here I may pause to note that Plutarch's references to pubhc speaking are aU observed. He writes from experience, and you might compile a manual of the art from him. Well did he know the danger of fluent earnestness. His Caius Gracchus ' had a servant . . . who, with an instrument of musicke he had . . . ever stoode behind him ; and NORTH'S PLUTARCH 171 when he perceived his Maister's voyce was a little too lowde, and that through choUer he exceeded his ordinary speache, he played a soft stoppe behind him, at the sonde whereof Cains immediately fell from his extreamitie and easUie oame to himself againe.' Thus, too, his Demosthenes and Cicero sets forth fuU instructions for removing every other blemish of delivery.^ The painter of incident is scarce less great than the painter of men. Plutarch's picture of Cicero is completed by a presentment of his death, in which the artist's imagination rises to its fuU height. Hunted down by Antony's sworders, the orator is overtaken at night in. a by-lane ; he stretches out his head from the htter to look his murderers in the face ; and ' his head and his beard beiag all white, and his face leane and wrinckled, for the extreame sorrowes he had taken, divers of them that were by held their handes before their eyes, whilest Herennius did cruelly murder him.' Then the head was set up by Antony ' over the pulpit for orations,' and ' this was a fearefull and horrible sight unto the Romanes, who thought they saw not Ciceroes face, hut an image of Antonius life and dispositions ' (Amyot : une imAige de Vdm,e et de la nature d^ Antonius). This gift, at times almost appalling, of imaginative pre- sentment, is the distinctive note of Plutarch's art. He uses it freely in his backgrounds, which . are animated as are those in certain pictures of a bygone mode ; so that behind his heroes armies engage, fleets are sunk, towns are sacked, and citadels escaladed. Sometimes his effect is produced by a rare restraint. In the Alcibiades, for instance, he tells how the Sicilian expedition was mooted which ^ See also his account of the several maimers of Cleon and Pericles. 172 NORTH'S PLUTARCH was to riiin both the hero and his country ; aind, as Carlyle might have done, at the comer of every street he shows you the groups of yoxmg men brag- ging of victory, and drawing plans of Syracuse in the dust. Sometimes the touch of tert?or is more immediate. Take his description of the Teutons from the Marius. Their voices were 'wonderful both straunge and beastly' ; so Marius kept his men close tUl they should grow accustomed to such dread- ful foes. Meanwhile the Teutons ' were passing by his campe six dayes continually together ' : ' they came raking by,' and ' marching aU together in good array ; making a noyse with their harness aU after one sorte, they oft rehearsed their own name, Avnbrons, Ambrons, Amhrons ' ; and the Romans watched them, listening to the monotonous, un- human call. Here and elsewhere Plutarch conveys, with a peculiar magic, the sense of great bodies of men and of the movements thereof. Now and then he secures his end by reporting a word or two from those that are spying upon others from afar. This is how he gives the space and silence that precede a battle. Tigranes, with his innumerable host, is watching LucuUus and the Romans, far away on the farther shore of the river. ' They seemed but a handful,' and kept ' following the streame to meete with some forde. . . . Tigranes thought they had marched away, and called for Taxiles, and sayd unto him, laughing : " Dost thou see, Taxiles, those goodly Roman legyons, whom thou praisest to be men so invincible, how they flie away now ? " Taxiles answered the king againe : "I would your good fortune (0 king) might work some miracle this day: for doubtless it were a straunge thing that the Romanes should flie. They are not wont to wear NORTH'S PLUTARCH 173 their brave cotes a/iid. furniture uppon their armour, when they meane onely but to marche in the fieldes : neither do they carie their shieldes and targets un- cased, nor their burganets bare on their heades, as they do at this present, having throwen away their leather cases and coveringes. But out of doubt, this goodly furniture we see so bright and glittering in our faces, is a manifest sign that they intend to fight, and that they marche towards us." TaxHes had no sooner spoken these wordes, but Lucullus, in the view of his enemies, made his ensign bearer to turne sodainely that carried the first Eoigle, and the bands tooke their places to passe the river in order of battelV The proportion of the two armies, and the space between ; the sun flashing on the distant shields ; the long suspense ; the king's laugh break- ing the silence, which yet grows tenser, till suddenly the Romans wheel into line : in truth, they have been few between Plutarch and Tolstoi to give the scale and perspective of battles by observing such proportion in their art ! Here Lucullus and a hand- ful of Romans, like CHve and his Englishmen, over- threw a nation in arms ; elsewhere Plutarch gives the other chance, and renders with touches equally subtle and direct the deepening nightmare of Crassus' march into the desert. He tells of the Parthian ' kettle drommes, hoUow within,' and hung about with ' little beUs and cppper rings,' with which ' they all made a noise everywhere together, and it is like a dead sounde.' Does it not recall the Aztec lyar- drums on the Noche Triste ? Intent, too, on creating his impression of terror, this rare artist proceeds from the sense of hearing to the sense of sight. ' The Romanes being put in feare with this de^d sounde, the Parthians straight threw the clothes 174 NORTH'S PLUTARCH and coverings from them that hid their armour, and then showed their bright helmets and curaces of Margian tempered Steele, that glared like fire ; and their horses barbed with Steele and copper.' They canter round and round the wretched enemy, shoot- ing their shafts as they go ; and the ammunition never fails, for camels come up ' loden with quivers full of arrowes.' The Romans are shot through one by one ; and when Crassus ' prayed and besought them to charge . . , they showed him their handes fast nailed to their targets with arrowes, and their feete likewise shot thorow and nailed to the ground : so as they could neither flie, nor yet defende them- selves.' Thus they died, one before the other, ' a crueU lingring death, crying out for anguish and paine they felt ' ; and ' turning and tormenting themselves upon the sande, they broke the arrowes sticking in them.' The reahsm of it ! And the pathos of Crassus' speech, when his son's head is shown to him, which ' kiUed the Romanes hartes ' ! ' The grief and sorrow of this losse (my fellowes),' said he, ' is no man's but mine, mine only ; but the noble successe and honor of Rome remaineth stiU invincible, so long as you are yet living.' After these two pictures of confidence and defeat I should like to give that one of the Romans after Pydna, where Paulus -^milius was thought to have lost his son. It is a wonderful resurrection of departed life. There are the groups round the camp-fires; the sudden clustering of torches towards the one dark and silent tent ; and then the busy fights crossing and recrossing, and scattering over the field. You hear first the droning songs of the tired and happy soldiers; then silence; then cries of anxiety and mournful echoes; then, of a sudden, comes the NORTH'S PLUTARCH 175 reappearance, ' all bloudied with new bloude like the swift-running grey hound fleshed with the bloude of the hare,' of him, the missing youth, ' that Scipio which afterwards destroyed both the citties of Carthage and Numantium.' It is hard to analyse the art, for the means em- ployed are of the simplest ; yet it is certain that they do recall to such as have known, and that they must suggest to others who have not, those sights and sounds and sensations which combine into a special enchantment about the time of the fall of darkness upon bodies of men who have drunk excitement and borne toil together in the day. How intense, too, the flash of imagination with which the coming Africanus is projected on the canvas ! And the book abounds in such hghtning impressions. Thus, Han- nibal cracks a soldier's joke before Cannae ; he pitches the quip into his host, like a pebble into the pond ; and the broken stillness ripples away down all the ranks in widening rings of laughter.^ Some- times the sketch is even shghter, and is yet con- vincing : as when the elder Scipio, being attacked by Cato for his extravagant administration, declare^ his ' intent to go to the wars with full sayles.' These^ are not chance effects but naasterstrokes of imagina- tion ; yet that imagination, vivid and vivifying as it is, never leads Plutarch to attempt the impossible. He remains the supreme artist, and is content with suggesting — ^what is incapable of representation — j that sense of the portentous, the overpowering, which is apparent immediately before,- or immed- iately behind, some notable conjtmction. Alexander -^ sornids the charge which is to change the fortimes of the world, and Arbela is rendered in a few lines. ^ Fabius Maxim/us. 176 NORTH'S PLUTARCH But up till the instant of his sounding it, you are told of his every act. Plutarch, proceeding as leisurely "lis his hero, creates suspense out of delay. You *>^e told that Alexander slept soundly f.ar into the I morning, and that he was called three times. You are told how caref uUy he dressed, and of each article of armour and apparel he put on : his ' SicUian cassocke,' his ' brigandine of many foldes of canvas,' ' his hea,d peece bright as silver,' and ' his coUer sute like to the same aU set full of precious stones.' The battle has begun between the outposts, and he is still riding down the Hues on a hack : ' to spare Bucephal, because he was then somewhat olde.' He moxmted the great horse ' always at the last mpment ; and as soone as he was gotten up on his baeke, the trumpet sounded, and he gave charge.' To-day it is made to seem as if that moment would never come ; but at the last aU things being ready, ' he tooke his launce in his left hande and, holding up his right hande unto heaven, besought the goddes . . . that if it were true, he was begotten of Jupiter, it would please them that day to helpe him and to incorage the Grsecians. The sooth-sayer Aristander was then a-horsebacke hard by Alexander apparelled aU in white, and a croune of gold on his head, who shewed Alexander when he made his prayer, an Eagle flying over his head, and poiatiag directly towards his enemies. This marvellously encouraged all the armie that saw it, and with this joy, the men of armes of Alexander's side, encouraging one. another, did set spurres to their horse to charge upon the enemies.' Until the heroic instant you are com- pelled to note the hero's every dehberate move- ment. He and the little group of gleaming figures about him are the merest specks in the plain before NORTH'S PLUTARCH 177 the Macedonian army, itself but a handful in com- parison to the embattled nations in front. The art is perfect in these flash-pictures of great moments in time : in the Athenians map-drawing in the dust, in the Romans watching the Ambrons raking by, in Tigranes' laugh, in Hannibal's joke, in Alexander's supreme gesture ; and how instant in each the imaginative suggestion of dragging hours before rapid and irreparable events ! Equally potent are\ the effects which Plutarch contrives by revealing | all the consequences of a disaster in some swift, far- reaching gUmpse, Thus, when Caesar crossed the Rubicon, 'Rome itself was fiUed up with the flowing", repaire of aU the people who came thither like droves]^ of cattelV And thus does Sparta receive the news of her annihilation : — ' At that time there was by chance a common feast day in the citie . . . when as the messenger arrived that brought the news of the batteU lost at Leuctres. The Ephori knowing then that the rumor ranne all about ; that they were aU undone, and how they had lost the signone and commaundement over all Grece : would not suffer them for all this to breake off their daunce in the Theater, nor the citie in anything to chaimge the forme of their feast, but sent unto the parentes to everie man's house, to let them understande the names of them that were slaine at the batteU, they themselves remaining stiU in the Theater to see the daunces and sportes continued, to judge who carried the best games away. The next morning when everie man knew the number of them that were slaine, and of those also that escaped : the parentes and frendes of them that were dead, met in the market place, looking cheerfully of the matter, and one of them embraced another. On thother side the parentes of 178 NORTH'S PLUTARCH them that scaped, kept their houses with their wives, as folk that mourned. . . . The mothers of them, that kept their somies which came from the battell, were sad and sorrowfull, and spake not a word. Contrairily, the mothers of them that were slaine, went friendly to visite one another, to rejoyce together.'' ^ There is no word of the fight. As Thackeray gives you Waterloo in a picture of Brussels, so Plutarch gives you Leuctra, and with more of beauty and pathos, in a picture of Sparta. Of the Roman defeat at Cannae there is a full and wonderful account ; but what an effective touch is added with 'the Consul Terentius Varro returning backe to Rome, with the shame of his extreame misfortxme and overthrowe, that he durste not looke upon any man : the Senate notwithstanding, arid all the people following them, , went to the gates of the cittie to meete him, and dyd honourably receyve him ' ! In these passages Plutarch, following the course of Greek tragedy, and keeping the action off the stage, gives the reverberation and not the shock of fate ; but in many others the stark reaUty of his painting is its own sufficient charm. He abounds in un- familiar aspects of famihar places : places he in- vests with (as it were) the magic bom of a wander- ing son's return. Here is his Athens in her decrepi- tude. ' The poore citie of Athens which had escaped from so many warres, t37rannies and civil dissensions,' is now besieged by Sulla without, and oppressed by the tyrant Aristion within ; and in his presentment of her condition there is, surely, a foreshadowing of those dark ages when historic sites became the scenes of new tragedies that were merely brutal and in- significant. At Athens ' men were driven for famine 1 Agesilaus. NORTH'S PLUTARCH 179 to eate feverfew that grew about the castell ' ; also, they ' caused old shoes and old oyle potes to be sodden to dehver some savor unto that which they did eate.' Meanwhile ' the tyrant himself e did nothing aU day long but cramme in meat, drinke dronke, daunce, maske, scoff and flowte at the enemies (suffering the holy lampe of Minerva to go out for lack of oyle).' Is there not a grimness of irony about this picture of the drunken and sinister buffoon sitting camped in the Acropolis, Uke a toad in a ruined temple, ' magnifying the dedes of Theseus and insulting the priestes ' ? At last the Roman enters the city about midnight 'with a wonderfull fearefull order, making a marvellous noise with a number of homes and soimding of trompets, and aU his army with him in order of batteU, crying, " To the sack, to the sack : KiU, MU." ' ^ A companion picture is that of a Syra- cuse Thucydides never knew.^ Archimedes is her sole defence ; and thanks to him, the Roman ships are ' taken up with certaine engines fastened within one contrary to an other, which made them tume in the ayer like a whirlegigge, and so cast them upon the rockes by the towne waUes, and spHtted them all to fitters, to the great spoyle and murder of the persons that were within them.' Elsewhere the Mediterranean pirates, polite as our own highway- men, are found inviting noble Romans^ to walk the plank ; ^ for Plutarch never misses a romantic touch. Some of his strongest reahsations are of moments when fate hangs by a hair : as that breathless and desperate predicament of Aratus and his men on their ladders against the walls of Sicyon ; with the ' ciirste curres ' that would not cease from barking ; the captain of the watch ' visiting the soldiers with a 1 Sylla. ^ Marcdliis. ^ Pompey. 180 NORTH'S PLUTARCH little beU ' ; ' the number of torches and a great noyse of men that followed him ' ; the great grey- hound kept in a little tower, which began to answer the curs at large ' with a soft giming : but when they came by the tower where he lay, he barked out alowde, that all the place thereabouts rang of his barking ' ; the ladders shaking and bowing ' by reason of the weight of the men, unless they did come up fayer and softly one after another,' till at last, ' the cocks began to crowe, and the coxmtry foike that brought things to the market to sell, began to come apace to the towne out of every quarter.' ^ Later in the same hfe you have the escaladuig of the Acrocorinthus : when Aratus and the storming party, with their shoes off, being lost on the slopes, ' sodainely, even as it had been by miracle, the moone appearing through the clowdes, brought them to that part of the wall where they should be, and straight the moone was shadowed againe ' ; so they cut down the watch, but one man escaped, and ' the trompets forthwith sounded the alarom ... all the citie was in an uprore, the streets were straight full of people running up and downe, and of Ughts in every corner.' Plutarch's management of Hght, I should remark, is always astonishingly real ; he never leaves the sun or the moon out of his picture, nor the incidence of clouds and of the dust of battle. Thus varied his sunshine leaps and wavers on dis- tant armour, or glares at hand from Margian steel ; or his moonhght glints on a spear, and fades as the wrack races athwart the sky. It is aU the work of an incomparable painter ; there is any amount of it in the Parallel Lives ; ^ and, ^ Aratus. ''■ See the rousing of Greece in the Fhiloposmen ; the declaration of NORTH'S PLUTARCH 181 like his portraits and his landscapes,^ it has an aesthetic value which sets it far in front of his moral reflections. For value depends, in part, on supply ; and of this kind of art there is less in literature than there is of ethical disquisition. Moreover, in the Parallel Lives the proportions are reversed, and the volume of Plutarch's painting is very much greater than the volume of Plutarch's morahties. And in addition to volume, there is charm. His pictures have kept their ' flourishing freshness ' untarnished through the ages ; whereas his moral sayings, being sound, have long since been accepted, and, as I said, are grown stale. His morahty is ours ; but he had an unique opportunity for depicting the poUtics, the personahties, and the activity of a world | which had passed away. A Httle earher, and he might have laboured like Thucydides, but only at a part of it. A little later, and much would have perished which he has set down and saved. He paints it as a whole, and on that account is some- times slighted for a compiler of legends ; yet he had the advantage of personal contact with those legends while they were still ahve ; and again and again, as you read, this contact strikes with a pleasant shock. To illustrate his argument he will refer, by the way, to the statue of Themistocles in the Temple of Artemis ; to the effigies of LucuUus at Chseronea ; to the buildings of Pericles in their divinely protracted youth. The house of Phocion at Melita, and the ' cellar ' in which Demosthenes practised his oratory, liberty in the Flaminius ; the squadron of the Laoedsemonians at Platsea in the Aristides ; the glimpse of Philip at Chseronea gazing at the ' Holy Band of Thebans all dead oli the grounde ' in the Pelopidas ; the first ride of Alexander on Bucephalus in the Alexander ; the Macedonians at Pydna in the Paidus ^milivs. 1 See the country of the CSmbri in the Marina, and the campaigns of LucuUus and Crassus. 182 NORTH'S PLUTARCH were 'whole even to my time.' The descendants of the soldier who slew Epaiiiinondas are, 'to this day,' known and distinguished by the name ' machceriones.' ^ On the battlefield of Chseronea ' there was an olde oke seene in my time which the country men commonly called Alexander's oke, bicause his tent or pavilion was fastened to it.' ^ His grandfather Mcarchus had told him how the defeat of Antony Mflieved his natal city from a requisition for com.^^Prom his other grandfather, Lamprias, he heard of a physician, his friend, who, ' being a young man desirous to see things,' went over Cleo- patra's kitchen with one of Antony's cooks ; and there, among ' a world of diversities of meates,' encountered with the ' eight wild boares, rosted whole,' which have passed bodily into Shakespearer This contact was rarely immediate ; but it was personal, and it is therefore quickening. At its touch a dead world Hved again for Plutarch, and by his art that dead world lives for us ; so that ia the Lives, as in no other book, aU antiquity, ahke in detail and ui expanse, lies open and revealed to us, ' fiat as to an eagle's eye.' We may study it closely, and see it whole ; and to do so is to dispossess the mind of many illusions fostered by books of a narrower scope. Juvenal, the satirist, and Petro- nius, the arbiter of a mode, do not even pretend to show forth the whole of life ; yet from their works, and from others of a like purview, men have con- structed a fanciful world of imbounded cruelty and immitigable lust. This same disproportion between premise and conclusion runs through the writing of many moderns : just as from the decoration of a single chamber at Pompeii there have been evoked ^ Agedlaus. ^ Alexander. NORTH'S PLUTARCH 183 whole cities, each in the image of a honeycomb whose cells are Iwpanaria. Even so some archaeolo- gist of the future might take up an obscene gurgoyle, and transfigure Christianity to its image ! This antiqiiity of cruelty and lust has been evolved for censure by these, and by those for praise; yet if Plutarch be not the most colossal, taking, and in- genious among the world's liars, we cannot choose but hold that it never existed. For, apart from the coU of pohtics and the clamour and romance of adventure, his book discovers us the religious and the home lives of old-time Italy and Greece ; and we find them not dissimilar from our own. We see them, it is true, with the eyes of a kindly and a moderate man. Yet he was no apologist, with a case to plead ; and if we may be sure that he was never uncharitable, we may be equally sure that he extenuated nothing. He censures freely conduct which, according to the extreme theory of ancient immorahty, should scarce have excited his surprise ; and he alludes, by the way, in a score of places, to a loving-kindness, extending even to slaves and animals, of which, according to the same theory, he could have known nothing, since its very existence is denied, ^he State was more than it is now ; bi you CBioxyst glean that the Family was less, even inj Sparta./ Shakespeare took from Plutarch the love of Coriolanus for his mothej?f^and found in it a | sufficient motive for his plavr But Veturia ^ is by no ' means the only beloved nrother in the Lives, nor is Coriolanus the only adoring son. Epaminondas thought himself 'most happy and blessed' because his father and mother had Uved to see the victory he won ; ^ and Sertorius, making overtures for peace, ^ Shakespeare's Volumnia. ' Coriolanus. 184 NORTH'S PLUTARCH said he had ' rather be counted the meanest citizen in Rome, than being a banished man to be called Emperor of the world,' and the ' chiefest cause . , . was the tender love he bare unto his mother.' ^ When Antipater submitted to Alexander certain well- founded accusations against Olympia's misgovem- ment : ' " Loe," said he, " Antipater knoweth not, that one teare of the mothers eye will wipe out tenne thousande such letters." ' ^ In face of the parting between Cratesiclea and her son Cleomenes, one may doubt if in Sparta itself the love between mother and son was more than dissembled ; for, on the eve of his saiHng, ' she took Cleomenes aside into the temple of Neptune and imbracinge and kissinge him ; perceivinge that his harte yemed for sorrowe of her departure, she sayed unto him : " O kinge of Lacedsemon, lette no man see for shame when we come out of the temple, that we have wept and dis- honoured Sparta." ' Indeed, the national love of Spartans for all children bom to Sparta seems to have been eked out by the fonder and the less in- different affection of each parent for his own. If in battle Henri-Quatre played Alexander, in the nursery his model was Agesdaus, 'who loved his children deerely : and would play with them in his home when they were little ones, and ride upon a little cocke horse or a reede, as a horseback.' ^ Paulus ^miHus being ' appointed to make warre upon King Perseus, all the people dyd honorably companie him home unto his house, where a little girl (a daughter of his) called Tertia, being yet an infant, came weep- ing unto her father. He, making muche of her, asked her why she wept. The poore girl answered, colling him about the necke, and kissing him : — ' Seriorius. ^ Alexander. NORTH'S PLUTARCH 186 " Alas, father, wot you what ? our Perseus is dead." ^^e ment by it a litle whelpe so called, which was her playe fellowe.^ Plutarch had lost his own daughter, and he wrote a letter of consolation to his wife, which Montaigne gave to his wife when she was stricken with the same sorrow : ' bien marry,' as he says, ' de quoy la fortune vous a rendu ce present si propre.' ^ In the Lives he is ever most tender towards children, acknowledgiag the mere possibility of their loss for an ever-abiding terror. ' Nowe,' he writes in the Solon, ' we must not arme ourselves with poverty against the grief of losse of goodes ; neither with lack of affection against the losse of our friendes ; neither with want of mariage against the death of children ; but we must be armed with reason against misfortune.' Over and over again you come upon proof of the love and the compassion children had. At the triumph of the same ^mihus, through three days of such magnificence ag Mantegna has dis- played, the eyes of Rome were aU for Perseus' children : ' when they sawe the poore httle infants, that they knewe not the change of their hard fortune . . . for the compassion they had of them, almost let the father passe without looking upon him,' Of ^mUius' own sons, one had died five days before, and the other three days survived, that triumph for which the father had been given four hundred golden diadems by the cities of Greece. But he pronounced their funeral orations himself 'in face of the whole cittie . . . not like a discomforted man, but like one rather that dyd comforte his sorrowful! countrymen for his mischance. He told them . . . he ever feared Fortune, mistrusting her change and 1 Cruserius, who translated the Lives into Latin (1561), by a strange co- incidence, mourned his daughter's loss and found consolation in his task. 186 NORTH'S PLUTARCH inconstancy, and specially in the last warre.' But Rome had won ; and all was well, ' saving that Perseus yet, conquered as he is, hath this comforte left him : to see his children living, and that the conqueror JEmyhus hath lost his.' This love be- tween chUdren and parents might be expected in any picture of any society ; yet it is conspicuous in the Parallel Lives as it is not, I beheve, in any recon- struction of the Plutarchian world. Note, too, the passionate devotion between brothers, displayed even by Cato of Utica,^ to the scandal of other Stoics ; and note everywhere the loyal comradeship between husbands and wives. To Plutarch wedlock is so sacred that he is fierce in denouncing a certain political marriage as being ' crueU and tyrannicaU, fitter for Sylla's time, rather than agreable to Pompey's nature.' ^ Perhaps the commonest view of antique morahty is that which accepts a family not unlike the family we know, but at the same time denies the ancients aU consideration for their domestic animals and slaves. This tendency, it is thought, is a product of Christianity ; and the example of the elder Cato is sometimes quoted in proof of the view. But in Plutarch's Cato, the Roman's habit of seUing his worn-out slaves is given for an oddity, for the exceptional practice of an eccentric old man ; and Plutarch takes the occasion to expound his own feeling. ' There is no reason,' he writes, ' to use livinge and sensible thinges as we would use an old shooe or a ragge : to cast it out upon the dongehiU when we have worn it and it can serve us no longer. For if it were for no respect els but to use us alwayes to humanitie, we must ever showe ourselves kinde and gentle, even in such small ^ Cato Vtican. * Pom/pey. NORTH'S PLUTARCH 187 poyntes of pitie. And as for me, I coulde never finde in my heart to sell my drawt oxe that hadde ploughed my land a long time, bicause he cotilde plowe no longer for age.' Here we have a higher standard of humanity than obtains in living England, and it is a mistake to suppose, as some have done, that it was pecuhar to Plutarch. On the contrary, his book is ahve with illustrations of the same consideration for domestic pets and beasts of service. A mule em- ployed in building a temple at Athens, used to ' come of herselfe to the place of labour ' : a docility, ' which the people hked so weU in the poore beast, that they appointed she shoulde be kept whilest she lived, at the charge of the town.' How many corporations, I wonder, would lay a hke load on the rates to-day ? In a score of passages is evidence of the behef that ' gentleness goeth farther than justice.' ^ When the Athenians depart from Attica, the most heartrending picture is of the animals they leave deserted on the sea-coast. ' There was be- sides a certen pittie that made men's harts to yeme, when they saw the poore doggs, beasts, and cattell ronne up and doune bleating, mouing, and howling out alowde after their masters in token of sorrow when they dyd imbark.' Xantippus' dog, ' that swam after them to Salamis and dyed presently,' is there interred ; and ' they saye at this daye the place called the Doggs Grave is the very place where he was buried.' ^ With like honour the mares of Gimon, who was fond of racing, are buried at his side. Indeed, the ancients, far from being callous, were, as some would now think, over-sentimental about their horses and dogs. Having no slaves of our own, it is easy for us to denounce slave-owning. 1 Coto. 2 Thetmetocks. 188 NORTH'S PLUTARCH But this is noteworthy : that while Plutarch, the ancient, in dealing with the revolt of Spartacus and his fellow-slaves, speaks only of ' the wickedness of their master,' and pities their hard lot, North, the modern, dubs them ' rebellious rascalls,' ^ without a word of warrant either in the nearer French or in the remoter Greek. It is, indeed, far easier to pick up points of re- semblance than to discover material differences be- tween the social hfe depicted by Plutarch and our own ; and the likeness extends even to those half- shades of feeling and illogical sentiment which often seem peculiar to a generation. To turn from con- temporary life to the Parallel Lives is to find every- where the same natural but inconsequent deference to birth amid democratic institutions ; ^ the same belief that women have recently won a freedom unknown to their grandmothers ; the same self- satisfaction in new developments of culture ; the same despair over the effects of culture on a pristine morality. There are even irresistible appeals to the good old days. Numa, for instance, ' enured women to speak little by forbidding them to speak at aU except in the presence of their husbands,' and with such success, that a woman ' chauncing one daye to pleade her cause in persone before the judges, the Senate hearing of it, did send immediately unto the oracle of ApoUo, to know what that did prognosticate to the cittie.' ^ Here was a beginning ; and the rest soon followed. Just as Greek historians had branded the first murderers and parricides by name, even so ' the Romanes doe note . . . that the wife of one Pinarius, called Thaloea, was the first which ever ^ Crassns. ^ See Themistooles as the rival of Cimon. ^ Comparison of Numa Pompilius vnth lA/curgws. NORTH'S PLUTARCH 189 brauled or quarrelled with her mother-in-law.' ^ That was in the days of Tarquin. By Pompay's time — though he, indeed, was fortunate in a wife unspoiled by her many accomphshments — the re- volution is complete. His Cornelia ' could play well on the harpe, was skiHull in musicke and geometrie, and tooke great pleiasure also in philo- sophie, and not vainly without some profit ' ; yet was she ' very modest and sober in behaviour, with- out brauUng and foolish curiosity, which commonly young women have, that are indued with such singular giftes.' Such a woman was the product of the Greek culture, and for that Plutarch has nothing but praise.^ It was first introduced, he tells you, after the siege of Syracuse ; for MarceUus it was who brought in ' fineness and curious tables,' ' pictures and statues,' to supplant the existing ' monuments of victories ' : things in themselves ' not pleasant, but rather fearfull sightes to look upon, farre unfit for feminine eyes.' ^ In aU this there is little that differs from the Hf e we know : you have the same facts and the same reflexions — especially the same reflexions. For our own age is akin to the age of Plutarch, in so far as both are certain centuries in rear of an influx of Hellenic ideas. Those ideas reconquered the West in the fifteenth century ; and since this second invasion the results of the first have been repeated in many directions. Certain phases, indeed, of thought and feeling in Plutarch's age are re-echoed to-day still more distinctly than in the world of his Renaissance translators. For in re- moteness from the point of first contact with Greek ^ Cotmpariscm, of ISwma Pompiliiis with Lycurgua. 2 See his defence of it in Cicero, his attack on Cato for opposing it, and passim. ^ MarceUus. 190 NORTH'S PLUTARCH influence, and in the tarnish of disillusion which must inevitably discolour any prolonged develop- ment, this century of ours is more nearly allied to Plutarch's than the sixteenth was, with its yoTong hope and unbounded enthusiasm. The older activ- ity reminds you of the times which Plutarch paiated; the modern temper, of the times in which he wrote. But in the fraU rope which the mind of man is ever weaving, that he may cling to something in the void of his ignorance, there is one strand which runs through aU the Plutarchian centuries ; which persists in his own age and on into the. age of his early translators ; but which in England has been fretted almost through. Nobody can read the Parallel Lives without remarking the signal change which has fallen upon man's attitude towards the super- naturah/^verywhere in Plutarch, by way of both narrative and comment, you find a confirmed behef in omens, portents, and ghosts : not a pious opinion, but a conviction biilking huge in everyday thought, and exerting a constant influence on the ordinary conduct of life. Death and disaster, good fortune and victory, never come without forewarning. Before great Caesar fell there were ' fires in the element . . . spirites running up and downe in the nighte ' and ' sohtary birdes to be scene at n«wne dayes sittinge in the great market-placcy^ Nor only before a great event, but also after<^, occur these sympathetic perturbations in the other world : ' the night being come, such things feU out, as maye be looked for after so terrible a battle.' ^ The wood quaked, and a voice cried out of heaven ! AUied to and alongside of this beUef in an Unseen in touch with the living world at every hour of the day-time 1 Julius CcBsar. 2 Publicola. NOETH'S PLUTARCH 191 and night, you have the solemn practice of obscure rites and the habitual observance of customs half- insignificant. Some of these are graceful ; others embarrassing. The divination, for instance, of the Spartan Ephors must often, at least in August and November, have shaken pubHc confidence in the State ; for they ' did sit downe in some open place, and beheld the stars in the element, to see if they saw any starre shoote from one place to another,' and ' */ they did, then they accused their king.'' ^ To us, this giving of the grotesque and the terrible in the same breath, without distine||ibn or comment, is strangely incongruous. Sulla's bloody entry into Rome was doubly foreshadowed : there was the antic disposition of certain rats, which first gnawed ' some jueUs of golde in a church,' and then, being trapped by the ' sexton,' ate up their young ; and again, ' when there was no cloude to be seen m the element at aU, men heard such a sharp sound of a trompet, as they were almost out of their wits at so great a noise.' ^ No scientific explanation, even if one were forthcoming, could suffice to lull suspicion in a pious mind. jEmiUus understood as weU as any the cause of the moon's echpse : ' nevertheless, he being a godly devout man, so soon as he perceyved the moone had recovered her former brightness againe, he sacrificed eleven calves.' ^ To add to the incon- venience of this habit of mind, there were more unlucky days in the year than hoHdays in the medi- aeval calendar. It was such a day that marred the prospect of Alcibiades' ret\irn : for ' there were some that misMked very much the time of his landing : saying it was very unluckie and unfortunate. For the very day of his retume, feU out by chaunce on ' Agis and Cleomenea. ^ Sylla. ' Paulus Mmilins. NORTH'S PLUTARCH the feast which they call Plynteria, as you would saye, the washing day.' ^ Such feasts, with their half-meaningless customs, accompanied the behef in portents and ghosts and the ordinary forms of ritual, / being but another fruit of the same inteUectunl habit. Some of them seem absurd anachronisms in the Rome of Juhus Csesar. At the Lupercal, for instance, even ia Caesar's day, as every one knows from Shakespeare, yoimg men of good family stiU ran naked through the streets, touching brides at I the request of their husbands.^ Again, on the feast 1 of the goddess Matuta, ' they cause a chamber mayde ^ to enter into her temple, and there they boxe her about the eares. Then they put her out of the temple, and do embrace their brothers' children rather than their own.' ^ There is no end to these customs : customs which are as it were costumes of the mind, partly devised to cover its nakedness, and partly expressed in fancy. Plutarch tries sometimes to explaia their origin ; but he can only hazard a guess. Nobody remembers what they mean. They are, rather, a picturesque means of asserting that there reaUy is an imdercurrent of meaning in the ^..jftterW.. Beyond and above these mummeries, now so strange, in a loftier range of Plutarch's thought is much that is familiar and near. Of some miracles he writes almost as an apologist. It is said that ' images . . . have been heard to sighe : that they have turned : and that they have made certen signes with their eyes.' These reports ' are not,' he adds, ' incredible, nor lightly to be condemned. But for such matters it is daungerous to give too much credit to them, as also to discredit them too 1 Alcibiades. ^ Julius CcBsar. s Furius Camilhia. NORTH'S PLUTARCH 193 much, by reason of the weaknes of man's natiire, which hath no certen boundes, nor can rule itself, but ronneth sometimes to vanitie and superstition, and otherwhile also despiseth and condemneth holy and divine matters.' ^ On such points of belief, as on the immediate inspiration of individuals, ' the waye is open and large ' : ^ each must decide for him- self, remembering that religion is the mean between superstition and impiety. On the other hand, never once does Plutarch admit a doubt of the Divine Government of the world. He approves his Alex- ander's saying : ' that God generally was father to all mortaU men.' ' And in a magnificent passage of North's Enghsh which might almost have come out of the book of Common Prayer, he upholds the view of Pythagoras : ' who thought that God was neither sensible nor mortaU, but invisible, incor- ruptible and only intelligible.' ^ III In substance, then, the book stands alone. Its good fortune has been also unexampled. By a chance this singular image of the ancient world has been happy beyond others in the manner of its transmission to our time. To quote a Quarterly Reviewer : ^ ' There is no other case of an ancient writer — whether Greek or Latin — ^becoming as well ^ Fwrvus CamiUus. * Numa PompiUus. 3 Alexander. Of. Plutarch's Morals, PM. Holland, 1667 : the eighth book of Symposiagues ; the first question, p. 628. * In the Brutus North credits its hero with a declaration of beUef in another life. But this is a mistranslation of Amyot's French. We know, however, with what passionate conviction Plutarch held this belief in ' a better place, and a happier condition,' from the conclusion of his ' con- solatory letter, sent unto his own wife, as touching the death of her and his daughter.'— JlforaZs, Phil. Holland, 1657, p. 442. 5 Vol. ex.. No. 220, p. 459, Oct. 1861. Apparently Archbishop|Trenoh. N 194 NORTH'S PLUTARCH known in translations as he was in the classical world, or as great modern writers are in the modem one ' ; and for this chance we have to thank one man, Jaques Amyot. But for his version we should have received none from North ; and without these two, Plutarch must have remained sealed to aU but Greek scholars. For the Daciers and the Lang- homes could never have conquered in right of their own impoverished prose. They palmed it off on a public still dazzled by the fame wherewith their forerunners had iUuminated the Lives ; and when these were ousted from recoUectipn, their own fate became a simple matter of time. The son of a butcher,^ or a draper,^ Jaques Amyot was bom at Melun in 1513, and was sent as a boy by his parents to study at Paris. You find him there at fifteen, at Cardiaal Lemoine's college, and two years later following the lectures pf Thusan and Danes. For the University, stiU hide-bound in scholastic philosophy, was nothing to his purpose of mastering Greek. It was hard in those years, even for the rich, to find books in Greek character,^ and Amyot must live on the loaves his mother sent him by the river barges, and wait for a pittance on his fellow-students. Yet he toiled on with romantic enthusiasm, reading by the firelight for lack of candles ; till at last he knew all they could teach him, and left Paris to become a tutor at Bourges. There, thanks to Marguerite de Navarre,* he obtained a chair in the University, whence he lectured twice a day on Greek and Latin letters during twelve years. '^ Brantdme. a Blignifires. According to another, parentibits honestis magis qvAxm copiosis. * Before 1530 only a few Homeric Hymns and some essays of Plutarch had been published. ^ The Marguerite of The Heptameron. NORTH'S PLUTARCH 195 It was in these years that he began his great work as a translator : completing in all probability the Ethiopian History,''- and the more famous Daphnis and Chloe.^ But, at the instance of Marguerite's brother, Frangois i., he also began the Lives, receiv- ing by way of incentive the Abbacy of BeUozane ; ^ and to prosecute this purpose, soon after the king's death, he made a scholar's pilgrimage to Italy. In the Library of St. Mark at Venice he rediscovered the Lives of Diodorus Siculus ; * in the Library of the Vatican a more perfect MS. of the Mthio'pian History. But search as he might during his two years' stay at Rome, he could never recover the missing lives of Plutarch. He laboured on the text, but those which Tinjurie du temps nous avoit enviees,^ were gone past retrieving. On his return the scholar became a courtier, in the castles of the Loire, and something of a diplomat ; for he acted as the emissary of Henri n. at the Council of Trent, playing an inconspicuous part grossly exaggerated by De Thou. In 1554 he was appointed tutor to the young princes who were to rule as Charles ix. and Henri m. In 1559 he published the Lives ; the next year, on the accession of his elder pupU, he was made Grand Almoner of France ; and in 1570 he became Bishop of Auxerre. In 1572 he pubhshed the Morals ; but this book, like the Franciade, pubhshed in the same year, fell com- 1 Published in 1547 with an interesting passage in the proem: 'Et n'avoit ce livre jamais est6 imprim6, sinon depuis que la librairie du roi Matthias Corvin fut saccag^e, au quel sac il se trouva un soldat allemant qui mit la main dessus pour ce qu'il le vit richement estof6, et le yendit h celuy qui depuys le fit imprimer en AQemaigne.' * Published without his name as late as 1559. As tutor to the young princes he seems to have entertained a certain scruple, which even led him to suppress one passage in his translation. 3 1546. The last benefice bestowed by Prangoia. * Of which he translated and published seven in 1554. 5 Amyot : Ana; Lecteure. 196 NORTH'S PLUTARCH paratively dead. The halcyon days of scholars and poets ended with the St. Bartholomew ; and thence- forward the darkness deepened over these two and all the briUiant company which had gathered round Catherine and Diane de Poictiers. In 1588 the fuU fury of the CathoHc League fell upon Amyot, for standing by his king after the murder of the Guise. His diocese revolted at the instigation of Claude Trahy, a truculent monk ; and the last works he pubhshed are his Apology and Griefs des Plaintes. In August 1589 he wrote to the Due de Nivemais : ' Je suis le plus afflige, destruit et mine pauvre prebstre qui, comme je crois, soit en France ' ; in 1591 he was divested of his dignities ; ^ and in 1593 he died. His long life reflects the changing features of his time. In youth he was a scholar accused of scepticism, in old age a divine attacked for heresy, and for some pleasant years between, a courtier pacing with poets and painters the long galleries of Amboise and Chenonceaux : as we may think, weU within earshot of those wide bay-windows where the daughters of France ' entourees de leurs gouver- hantes et filles d'honneur, s'edifioient grandement aux beaux dits des Grecs et des Romains, rememoriez par le doulx Plutarchus.' ^ He was, then, a scholar touched with the wonder of a time which saw, as in Angelo's Last Judgment, the great works of antiquity lifting their limbs from the entombing dust of oblivion; and he was a courtier behind the scenes in a great age of poHtical adventure. Was he also an accurate trans- lator ? According to De Thou, he rendered his original ' ma j ore elegantia quam fide ' ; according to 1 Grand Almoner and Librarian of the Royal library. » Brantdme. ' NORTH'S PLUTARCH 197 Meziriac,^ he was guilty of two thousand blunders.^ The verdict was agreeable to the presumption of the seventeenth century, and was, of course, confirmed by the eighteenth ; but it has been revised. Given the impossibility of finding single equivalents in the young speech of the Renaissance, for the hterary and philosophic connotations of a language laboured during six hundred years ; and given the practice of choosing without comment the most plausible sense of a corrupted passage, the better opinion seems to be that Amyot lost httle in truth, and gained everything in charm. ' It is surprising,' says Mr. Long,^ and his word shall be the last, ' to find how correct this old French translation generally is,' The question of style is of deeper importance. Upon this Ste.-Beuve acutely remarks * that the subtlety of Plutarch, as of Augustine, and the artless good-nature of Amyot belong each to its age ; and, further, are more apparent to us than real in their authors. We may say, indeed, without extravag- ance, that the youth of Amyot' s style, modifying the age of Plutarch's, achieves a mean in full and natural harmony with Plutarch's matter. In Amyot's own opinion, so great a work must appeal to aU men of judgment ' en quelque style qu'il soit mis, pourveu qu'il s'entende ' ; ® yet his preoccupation on this point was punctilious. He found in Plutarch a ' scabreuse asperite ' — ' epineuse et ferree ' are Montaigne's epithets — ^yet set himself ' a representer aucunement et a adumbrer la forme de style et maniere de parler d'iceluy ' : ^ apologising to any 1 Who undertook to translate Plutarch, but failed to do so. 2 Disamrs de la Traduction, 1636 (of. Bhgniferes, p. 435). 2 PlvMrch's Lives ; Aubrey Stewart, M.A., and the late George Long, M.A., 1880, vol. i. p. xvii. * Causeries du Lwndi, iv. 469. 6 Dedication to Henri ii. * Auz Lecteurs. 198 NORTH'S PLUTARCH who on that account should find his language less ' coulant ' than of yore. But Amyot was no pedant ; he would render his original, not ape him ; he would write French, and not rack it. He borrowed at need from Greek and Itahan, but he was loyal to his own tongue. ' Nous prendrons,' said he — and the canon is unimpeachable — ' les mots qui sont les plus propres pour signifier la chose dont nous voulons parler, ceux qui nous sembleront plus doux, qui sonneront le mieux a roreUle, qui seront coutumierement en la bouche des bien parlants, qui seront bons fran9ois et non etrangers.' To render late Greek into early French is not easy ; so he takes his time. Not a word is there save to further his conquest of Plu- tarch's meaning; but aU his words are marshalled in open order, and they pace at leisure. For his own great reward Montaigne wrote : ' Je donne la palme avecque raison, ce me semble, a Jaques Amyot, sur tous nos escripvains Fran9ois ' ; and he remains the earhest classic accepted by the French Academy. But for our dehght he found Plutarch a language which could be translated into Elizabethan EngMsh. If Amyot was the right man for Plutarch, North was the right man for Amyot. He was bom the second and youngest son of Edward, first Baron North, about the year 1535, and educated, in all probability, at Peterhouse, Cambridge.^ His father was one of those remarkable men of law who, through all the ranging political and religious vicissitudes under Henry vn., Henry vm., Edward vi.. Queen Jane, Mary, and EHzabeth — so disastrous to the older nobility — ever contrived to make terms with the winning side ; tintil, dying in 1564, a peer of the 1 See Dictionary of National Biography, which gives fuller information than I have found elsewhere. NORTH'S PLUTARCH 199 realm and Lord Lieutenant of Cambridgeshire and th6 Isle of Ely, he was buried in Kirthng Church, where his monumental inscription may still be read in the chancel. His son Thomas was also entered a student at Lincoln's Lm (1557), but he soon pfeferred letters before law. He was generally, Leicester Wrote to Burghley^ ' a very honest gentleman, and hath many good things in him, which are drowned only by poverty.' In particular, we are told by his great- nephew, the fourth Baron, he was ' a man of courage,' and in the days of the Artoada we find him taking command, as Captain, of three hundred men of Ely. Fourteen years before (in 1574) he had accompanied his brother Roger, the second Baron, in his Embassy- Extraordinary to Henri ni. : a mission of interest to us, as it cannot but have encountered him with Amyot, and may have determined him to translate the Lives. He was already an author. In December 1557 he had published, with a dedication to Quden Mary, his translation of Guevara's Libro AureO,^ a Spanish adaptation of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius ; and in 1570 The Morall Philosophie af Doni . . . ' a worke first compiled in the Indian tongue,' ^ For the rest, his immortal service to EngHsh letters brought him little wealth, but much consideration from his neighbours, his kinsmen, and his sovereign. In 1568 he was presented with the freedom of the city of Cambridge. In 1576 his brdther gave him the ' lease of a house and household stuff.' He was knighted about 1591 ; he received the Commission of the Peace in Cambridgeshire in 1592; in 1601 he got a pension of £40 from the 1 Subsequent editions, 1568, 1582, 1619. ^ Second edition, 1601 Eeprinted as The Fables o/ Bidpm, with an Introduction by Joseph Jacobs, 1888. 200 NORTH'S PLUTARCH Queen, duly acknowledged in his dedication of the lives added to the Plutarch of 1603. He died, it is likely, before this edition saw the light : a valiant and courteous gentleman, and the earUest master of great Enghsh prose. He also thought the Lives a book ' meete to be set forth in English.' ^ Truly : but in what English ? He writes of a Muse ' called Tacita,^ as ye would saye, ladye Silence.' Should we ? Turning to a modem translation, I find ' Tacita, which means silent or dumb.' The glory has clearly departed : but before seeking it again in North's unrivalled language, I must ask of him, as I have asked of Amyot, Was he an accurate translator ? I do not beheve there are a score of passages throughout his 1175 foho pages ^ in which he impairs the sense of his original. And most of these are the merest sUps, arising from the necessity imposed on him of breaking up Amyot's prolonged periods, and his subsequent failure in the attribution of relatives and qualifications. They are not of the sfightest consequence, if the reader, on finding an obscurity, Avill rely on the general sense of the passage rather than on the rules of syntax ; and of such obscurities I wiU boldly say that there are not ten in the whole book. Very rarely he mistakes a word — as ' real ' for ' royal ' — and very rarely a phrase. For instance, in the Pericles he writes : ' At the beginning there was but a httle secret grudge only between these two factions, as an artificial flower set in the blade of a sworde,' which stands for ' comme une feuille superficieUe en une lame de fer.' In the Solon he writes : ' his famiher ^ Dedication to Elizabeth. * In the Numa. 3 The first edition of 1559, compared by me with Amyot's second edition of 1565. I had not the third, of 1567, from which North translated ; but on several points I have referred to the copy in the British Museum. NORTH'S PLUTARCH 201 friendes above all rebuked him, saying he was to be accompted no better than a beast,' for ' qu'il seroit bien beste.' Some of his blimders lend power to Amyot and Plutarch both : as in that fine passage of the Publicola, wherein the conspirators' ' great and horrible othe, drinking the blood of a man and shaking hands in his bowels,' stands for ' touchant des mains aux entrailles.' There is one such error of unique interest. It stands in Shakespeare that ' in his mantle muffing up his face, Even at the base of Pompey's statua, Which all the while ran blood, great Caesar fell ' ; and we read in North, ' against the base, whereupon Pompey's image stoode, which ranne all of a goare blovde ' ; but Amyot simply writes, ' qui en fust toute ensanglantee.' The blunder has enriched the world : that is, if it was truly a blimder, and not a touch of genius. For North wiU sometimes, though very rarely of set purpose, magnify with a word, or trans- figure a sentence. ' Le deluge,' for example, is always ' Noe's flood ' ; and in one celebrated passage he bowdlerises without shame, turning Plora's partiag caress to Pompey into a ' sweete quippe or pleasant taimte.' ^ Such are the discrepancies which can by any stretch be called blxmders ; and the sum of them is insignificant in a work which echoes its original not only in sense but also in rhythm and form. North had the Greek text, or perhaps a Latin transla- tion, before him. In the Sertorius he speaks of ' Gaule Narbonensis,' with nothing but ' Languedoc ' in Amyot ; in the Pom'pey he gives the Greek, un- quoted by Amyot, for ' let the dye be cast ' ; in dealing with Demosthenes' quinsy, he attempts an 1 Greek a8ijKT<»s: Lat., Ed. Princeps (1470), 'sine morsu.' Long has another reading and translation, but most will agree that Amyot's is not a blunder but an emendation. 202 NORTH'S PLUTARCH awkward pun, which Amyot has disdained ; and in the Cicero he gives in Greek character the original for Latin terms of philosophy, whereas Amyot does not. These are the only indications I have found of his having looked beyond the French. But on Amyot he set a grip which had its bearing on the de- velopment of Tudor prose. It may even be that, in tracing this development, we have looked too ex- clusively to Italian, Spanish, and classical sources. Sidney read North's book ; Shakespeare rifled it ; and seven editions ^ were published, within, the hundred years which saw the new birth of EngHsh prose and its glorious fulfilment. In acknowledging our debt, have we not unduly neglected the Bishop of Auxerre ? Sentence for sentence and rhythm for rhythm, in aU the great passages North's style is essentially Amyot's.^ There are differences, of course, which catch the eye, and have, therefore, as I think, attracted undue attention, the morp naturally since they are all in North's favour. /Sis, vigorous diction puts stuff into the text : he stitches it with sturdy locutions, he tags it with Elizabethan braverie^<^But. the woof and the design are stiU Amyot's ; and the two versions may be studied most conveniently abreast. In neither writer is the verse of any account. Indeed, when North comes to an incident of the Gymnopaedia — 'the which Sophocles doth easily declare by these verses : ' The song which you shall sing shall be the sonnet sayde By Hermony lusty lasse, that strong and sturdy mayde ; Which trust her peticote about her middle short And set to show her naked hippes in frank and friendly sort ' — 1 1579 ; 1595 ; 1603 ; 1612 ; 1631 ; 1657 ; 1676. ^ Of. for instance, in the Antoniiis, Cleopatra on the Cydnus ; the death of Antonius ; and the death of Cleopatra. NORTH'S PLUTARCH 203 you feel that the reference to Sophocles is not only- remote but also grotesque. It is very different With their prose. And first, is North's version— the translation of a translation — ^by much removed frona — i Plutarch ? In a sense, yes. It is even truer of / North than of Amyot, that he offers Plutarch neither / to philosophers nor to grammarians, but to aU who/ woTild imderstand Hfe and human nature.^ But for these, and for aU lovers of language, Plutarch loses little in Amyot, saving in the matter of literary allusion ; and Amyot loses nothing in North, save for the presence of a score of whims and obscurities. On the other hand, we recapture in North an EngUsh equivalent for those ' gasconisms ' which Montaigne retained in French, but which Amyot rejected from it. The Plutarchian hues are never lost — they are but doubly refracted ; and by each refraction they are broadened in surface and deepened in tone. The sunUght of his sense is sometimes subdued by a hght mist, or is caught in the fantastic outline of a little cloud. But the general effect is touched with a deeper solemnity and a more splendid iridescence ; even where the vapours lie thickest, the red rays throb through. But the proof of the pudding is the eating. Let us take a passage at random, and compare the six- teenth century renderings with the cold perversions of a later age. For example, Amyot writes ^ that Pythagoras ' apprivoisa une aigle, qu'il feit descendre et venir a luy par certaines voix, ainsi comme elle volait en I'air dessus sa teste ' ; in North this eagle is ' so tame and gentle, that she would stoupe, and come down to him by certaine voyces, as she flewe in 1 Gustave Lanson, La lUterature frangaise (1894), p. 223. 2 Nwna Pompilius. 204 NORTH'S PLUTARCH the ayer over his head ' ; while ia an accurate modern Pythagoras merely ' tamed an eagle and made it alight on him.' The earlier creature flies like a bird of Jove, but the later comes down like a brick. The Langhomes' eagle is still more precipitate, their Pythagoras still more peremptory. ' That philo- sopher,' as they naturally call the Greek, ' had so far tamed an eagle that by pronoimcing certain words he could stop it in its flight, or bring it down.' Perhaps I may finish at once with the Langhomes by referring to their description of Cleopatra on the Cydnus. They open that pageant, made glorious for ever by Amyot, North, and Shakespeare, in these terms : ' Though she had received many pressing letters of invitation from Antony and his friends, . . . she by no means took the most expeditious mode of traveUing.' Thus the Langhomes ; and they denotmce the translation called Dryden's ^ for ' tame and tedious, without elegance, spirit, or pre- cision ' ! Now, it was a colossal impertinence to put out the Lives among the Greekhngs of Grub Street, in order to ' complete the whole in a year ' ; but it must be noted that, after North's, this ^ is stiU the only version that can be read without impatience. Dryden's hacks were not artists, but neither were they prigs : the vocabulary was not yet a charnel of decayed metaphor ; and if they missed the rapture of sixteenth-century rhythm, they had not bleached the colour, carded the textiire, and ironed the surface of their language to the weU-glazed insignificance of the later eighteenth century. Their Plutarch is no 1 Corrected and revised by A. H. Clough, 1883. 2 Dryden, in his dedication to the Duke of Ormonde (1683), spoke of North as ungrammatioal and ungracefoL The version he signed was ' executed by several hands ' ; but with his name on the title-page it dis- placed North's, which is now for the first time since republished. NORTH'S PLUTARCH 205 longer wrapped in the royal robes of Amyot and North ; but he is spared the cheap though formal tailoring of Dacier and the Langhomes. In our own time there have been translations by scholars : they are useful as cribs, but they do not pretend to charm. Here, for instance, is North's funeral of Philopoemen : ' The souldiers were aU crowned with garlandes of LaureU ia token of victory, not withstanding the teares ranne downe their cheekes in token of sorrowe, and they led their enemies prisoners shackled and chained. The funeral pot in which were PhiU- poemenes ashes, was so covered with garlands of flowers, nosegaies, and laces that it could scant be seene or discerned.' And here is the crib : ' There one might see men crowned with garlands but weep- ing at the same time, and leading along his enemies in chains. The urn itself, which was scarcely to be seen for the garlands and ribbons with which it was covered,' etc. Here, too, is North's Demetrius : ' He took pleasure of Lamia, as a man would have deUght to heare one teU tales, when he hath nothing else to doe, or is desirous to sleep : but indeede when he was to make any preparation for warre, he had not then ivey at his dart's end, nor had his helmet per- fumed, nor came not out of ladies closets, pricked and princt to go to batteU : but he let all dauncing and sporting alone, and became as the poet Euripides saith, ' The souldier of Mars, cruell and bloodie.' And here is the crib : ' He only dedicated the super- fluity of his leisure to enjoyment, and used his Lamia, like the m3rthical nightmare, only when he was half asleep or at play. When he was preparing for war, no ivy wreathed his spear, no perfume scented his 206 NORTH'S PLUTARCH helmet, nor did he go from his bedchamber to battle covered, with finery.' ' Dedicated the superfluity of his leisure ! ' At such a jewel the Langhomes must have turned in envy in their graves ! But, apart from style, modern scholars have a fetish which they worship to the ruin of any hterary claim. Amyot and North have been ridiculed for writing, in accord- ance with their method, of nuns and churches, and not of vestals and temples. Yet the opposite extreme is far more fatiguing. Where is the sense of putting ' chalkaspides ' in the text and ' soldiers who had shields of brass ' in the notes ? Is it not reaUy less distracting to read, as in North, of soldiers ' march- ing with their copper targets ' ? So, too, with the Parthian kettle-drums. It is an injury to write ' hoUow instruments ' in so splendid a passage ; and an iasult to add in a note ' the context seems to show that a drum is meant.' Of course ! And 'kettle-drums' is a perfect equivalent for poTrrpa, ' made of skin, and hollow, which they stretch round brass sounders.' But if these things are done in England, you may know what to expect of Gtermany. In the picture of Cato's suicide there is one supreme touch, rendered by Plutarch ^St; S' opvcOe? ySov ; by Amyot les petits oyseaux commengoient desja a chanter; by North, the little birds began to chirpe. But Kaltwasser turns the httle birds into crowing cocks ; and maintauis his position by a learned argument. It was stiU, says he, in the night, and other fowls are silent until dawn.^ If the style of the eighteenth century be tedious, the scholarship of the nineteenth is intolerable. The truth is that in the sixteenth alone could the Lives be fitly translated. For there were passages, as of the arming of Greece, 1 See Plutarch's Lives: Stewart and Long, m. 572. NORTH'S PLUTARCH 207 in the Phihpoemen, which could only be rendered in an age still accustomed to armour. Any modern rendering, be it by writer or by don, must needs be archaistically mediaeval or pedantically antique. Turning, then, to Amyot and North, the strangest thing to note, and the most important, is that the English, although without a touch of foreign idiom, is modelled closely upon the French. Some explana- tion of this similarity in form may be found in the nature of the matter. The narration, as opposed to the analysis, of action ; the propounding, as op- posed to the proof, of philosophy — these are readily conveyed from one language into another, and Joshua and Ecclesiastes are good reading in most versions of the Bible. But North is closer to Amyot than any two versions of the Bible are to each other. The French runs into the Enghsh five times out of six, and in aU the great passages, not only word for word but almost cadence for cadence. There is a trick of redundancy in Tudor prose that makes for emphasis and melody. We account it EngHsh, and find it abounding in our Bible. It is wholly alien from modem French prose — ^whoUy aUen, too, from French prose of the seventeenth century. Indeed, I woiild go further, and say that it is largely char- acteristic of Amyot the writer, and not of the age in which he wrote. You do not find it, for instance, in the prose of Joachim du Bellay.^ But now take North's account of the execution before Brutus of his two eldest sons ; ^ ' which,' you read, ' was such a pitieful sight to all people, that they could not find it in their hearts to beholde it, but turned them- selves another waye, bicause they would not see it.' That effective repetition is word for word in the ^ Deffense et illustration de la Langue frangoise. " Pvhlicola. 208 NORTH'S PLUTAECH French : ' qu'ilz n'avoient pas le cueur de les re- garder, ains se tournoient d'un austre coste pour n'en rien veoir.^ But, apart from redundancy, the close- ness is at all times remarkable. Consider the phrase : ' but to go on quietly and joyiuUy at the sound of these pipes to hazard themselves even to death.' ^ You would swear it original, but here is the French : ' ains aUer posement et joyeusement au son des in- struments, se hazarder au peril de la mort.' The same effect is produced by the same rhythm. Or, take the burial of unchaste vestals : ^ when the muffled htter passes, the people ' follow it mourn- ingly with heavy looks and speake never a word ' ; ' avec une chere basse, et mome sans mot dire ' ; and so on, in identical rhythm, to the end of that magnificent passage. I will give one longer example, from the return of Aloibiades. You read in North : ' Those that could come near him dyd welcome and imbrace him : but aU the people whoUy followed him : And some that came to him put garlands of flowers upon his head : and those that could not come neare him, sawe him afarre off, and the olde folkes dyd poynte him out to the younger sorte.' And in Amyot : ' Ceulx qui en pouvoient approcher le saluoient et I'embrassoient, mais tous I'accom- pagnoient ; et y en avoient aucuns qui s'approchans de luy, luy mettoient des chappeaux de fleurs sur la teste et ceulx qui n'en pouvoient approcher, le regardoient de loing, et les vieux le monstroient aux jeunes.' Here is the very manner of the Authorised Version : flowing but not prolix, full but not turgid. Is it, then, fanciful to suggest that Amyot' s style, evolved from the inherent difficulty of his task, was accepted by North for its beauty, and used by the ^ Lycurgus. 2 Numa. NORTH'S PLUTARCH ' 209 translators of the Bible for its fitness to an under- taking hard for similar reasons and in a similar way ? Amyot piles up his epithets, and links one varied cadence to another : yet his volume is not of ex- travagant utterance, but of extreme research. He was endeavouring to render late Greek into French of the Renaissance ; and so he sought for perffect expression not — as to-day — in one word but in the resultant of many. And this very volume of utter- ance, however legitimate, imposed the necessity of rhythm. His innumerable words^ if they were not to weary, must be strung on a wire of undulating gold. North copied this cadence, and gave a store- house of expression to the writers of his time. It seems to me, therefore, not rash to trace, through North, to Amyot one rivulet of the many that fell into the mighty stream of rhythm flowing through the classic version of the EngUsh Bible. But North and Amyot are not men of one trick : they can be terse and antithetical when they wiU. You read that Themistocles advanced the honour of the Athenians, making them ' to overcome their enemies by force, and their friends and aUies with liberahty ' ; in Amyot : ' Vaincre leurs ennemies en prouesse, et letirs aUiez et amis en bonte ' ! North can play this tune as well as any: e.g., 'If they," Plutarch's heroes, ' have done this for heathen Kings, what should we doe for Christian Princes ? If they have done this for glorye, what shoulde we doe for religion ? If they have done this without hope of heaven, what should we doe that looke for immortahtie ? ' ^ But he can play other tunes too. Much is now written of the development of the sentence ; and no doubt since the decadence ^ Dedication to Elizabeth. O 210 NORTH'S PLUTARCH advances have been made. Yet, in the main, they are to recover a territory wilfully abandoned. In North and Amyot there are sentences of infinite device — sentences numerous and harmonic beyond the dreams of Addison and Swift. I wiU give some examples. Amyot : ' S'eblouissant a regarder une telle splendeur, et se perdant a sonder un tel abysme.' That is fine enough, but North beats it : ' Dazeled at the beholding of such brightnesse, and confounded at the gaging of so bottomlesse a deepe.' ^ Amyot : ' Ne plus ne moins que si c'eust este quelque doulce haleine d'un vent salubre et gracieu qui leur eust souffle du coste de Rome pour les rafreshir.' And North : ' As if some gentle ayer had breathed on them by some gracious and healthfull wind, blowen from Rome to refresh them.' ^ No translation could be closer ; yet in the first example North's English is stronger than the French, and in the second it flows, like the air, with a more ineffable ease. Take, again, the account of the miracle witnessed during the battle of Salamis. Here is Amyot : ' que Von ouit une haulte voix et grande clameur par toute la plaine Thrasiene jusques a la mer, comme s'il y eust eu grand nombre d'hommes qui ensemble eussent a haulte voix chante le sacre cantique de laxxhus, et semhloit que de la multitude de ceulx qui chantoient il se levast petit a petit une nuee en fair, laquelle partant de la terre venoit a fondre et tumber sur les galeres en la mer.^ And here is North : ' that a lowde voyce was heard through all the plaine of Thriasia imto the sea, as if there had bene a number of men together, that had songe out alowde, the holy songe of lacchus. And it seemed by htle and htle that there rose a clowde in the ayer from those which sange: that left the 1 Amyot : Awe Lectews. 2 Nvma. NORTH'S PLUTARCH 211 land, and came and lighted on the gaUyes in the sea,' I have put into itahcs so much of Amyot as North renders word for word. His fidelity is beyond praise ; but the combination of such fidelity with perfect and musical expression is no less than a miracle of artistry. North, in this passage as elsewhere, not only writes more beautiful English : he gives, also, a description of greater completeness and clarity than you wiU find in any later version of Plutarch. The elemental drama transfigures his prose ; but every fact is realised, every sensuous impression is set down, and set down in its order. So much may be said, too, of Amyot ; but in his rendering you are aware of the words and the construction — in fact, of the author. In North's there is but the pageant of the sky ; there is never a restless sound to disturb the illusion ; the cadence is sublimated of aU save a delicate alliteration, tracing its airy rhythm to the ear. The work is fuU of such effects, some of simple melody, and others of more than contrapimtal in- volution ; for he commands his Enghsh as a skilled organist his organ, knowing the multitude of its re- sources, and drawing at need upon them all. Listen to his rendering of Pericles' sorrow for his son : ' Neither saw they him weepe at any time nor moume at the funeraUes of any of his kinsmen or friendes, but at the death of Paralus, his yoxmger and lawful begotten sonne : for, the losse of him alone dyd only melt his harte. Yet he dyd strive to showe his naturall constancie, and to keepe his accustomed modestie. But as he woulde have put a garland of flowers upon his head, sorrowe dyd so pierce his harte when he sawe his face, that then he burst out in teares and cryed amaine ; which they never saw him doe before all the dayes of his life.' Yes, the 212 NORTH'S PLUTARCH pathos of tlie earth is within his compass ; but he can also attain to the sublimity of heaven : ' The everlasting seate, which trembleth not, and is not driven nor moved with windes, neither is darkened with clowdes, but is aUwayes bright and cleare, and at aU times shyning with a pure bright light, as being the only habitation and mansion place of the etemall God, only happy and immortaU.' ^ These two passages from the last movement of the Pericles can only be spoken of in North's own language: they are 'as stoppes and soundes of the soul played upon with the fine fingered hand of a conning master.' ^ Yet they are modelled on Amyot's French. It seems scarce credible ; and indeed, if the mould be the same, the metal has been transmuted. You feel that much has been added to the form so faithfully followed ; that you are hstening to an Enghsh master of essentially English prose. For these passages are in the tradition of our tongue : the first gives an echo of Malory's stately pathos, and the second an earnest of our Apocalypse. In building up these palaces of music North has followed the lines of Amyot's construc- tion ; but his melody in the first is sweeter, his harmony in the second peals out with a loftier rapture. I have dwelt upon the close relation of North's style to Amyot's, because it is the rule, and because it has a bearing on the development of Tudor prose. This rule of likeness seems to me worthier of note than any exceptions ; both for the strangeness and the importance. But, of course, there are excep- tions : there are traits, of attitude and of expression, ' Amyot : ' Comme estant telle habitation et convenable a la nature Bouverainement heureuse et immortelle.' 2 Pericles. NORTH'S PLUTARCH 213 personal to North, the man and the writer. He has a national leaning towards the sturdy and the bluff. In a sonnet written some twenty years earher, Du BeUay, giving every nation a particular epithet, labels our forefathers for ' les Anglais mutitis.' The epithet is chosen by an enemy ; but there was ever in the EngMsh temper, above aU, in the roariag days of great Ehzabeth, a certain jovial frowardness, by far removed both from impertinence and from bluster, which inclined us, as we should put it, to stand no nonsense from anybody. This national / characteristic is strongly marked in North. Foi-i him Spartacus and his slaves are 'rebellious rascals.' When Themistocles boasts of being able to make a small city great, though he cannot, indeed, tune a viol or play of the psalterion, Amyot calls his words ' un peu haultaines et odieuses ' : they are repugnant to the cultured prelate, and he gives a full equivalent for the censure of Plutarch, the cultured Greek. ^ But North will not away with this censure of a bluff retort : having his bias, he dehberately betrays his original, making Themistocles answer ' with great and stout words.' There is also in North's character a strain of kindness, almost of softness, towards women and children and the pathetic side of life. In the wonderful passage describing the Kving burial of unchaste vestals,^ where almost every other word is literally translated. North turns ' la crimineUe ' into ' the seely offendour ' : as it were with a gracious reminiscence of Chaucer's ' ne me ne Ust this seely woman chide.' And in the Solon, where a quaint injunction is given for preserving love in wedlock, 1 The Greek epithet is rendered by the word arrogant in Clough's revised Dryden, and by the word vtdgar in Mr. Stewart's translation. - Nvma. 214 NORTH'S PLUTARCH Amyot writes that so courteous a custom, being observed by a husband towards his wife, ' garde que les courages et vouluntez ne s'alienent de tout poinct les uns des autres,' (The phrase is rendered in a modem version 'preventing their leading to actual quarrel,') But North hfts the matter above the level of laughter or puritanical reproach : it ' keepeth,' as he Avrites, ' love and good will waking, that it die not utterly between them.' The beauty and gentleness of these words, in so strange a context, are, you feel, inspired by chivalry and a deep re- verence for women. These two strains in North's character find vent in his expression ; but they never lead him far from the French. There is an insistence, but no more, on aU things gentle and brave ; and this insistence goes but to further a tendency already in Amyot. For in that age the language of gentlemen received a Mke impress in both countries from their common standards of courage and courtesy ; and among gentlemen, Amyot and North seem to have been drawn yet closer to each other by a common kinship with the brave and gentle soul of Plutarch. These two quaHties which are notable in Plutarch and Amyot in aU such passages, lead in North to a distinct exaggeration of phrase, though ever in the direction of their true intent. He makes grim things grimmer, and sweet things more sweet. So that the double translation from the Greek gives the effect of a series of contours traced the one above the other, and ever increasing the curve of the lowest outline. But North, being no sentimentalist, finds occasion for fifty stout words against one soft saying. The stark vigour of his diction is, indeed, its most particular sign. The profit to the Greeks of a pre- liminary fight before Salamis is thus declared by NOETH'S PLUTARCH 215 Amyot : it proved ' que la grande multitude des vaisseaux, ny la pompe et magnificence des pare- ments d'iceulx, ny les cris superbes et chants de victoire des Barbares, ne servent de rien a I'encontre de ceulx qui ont le cueur de joindre de pres, et com- battre a coups de main leur ennemy, et quHl ne fault point f aire compte de tout cela, ains alter droit affronter les hommes et s'attacher hardiment a eulx.'' North follows closely for a time, but in the last sentence he lets out his language to the needs of a maxim so pertinent to a countryman of Drake. The Greeks saw, says he, ' that it was not the great multitude of shippes, nor the pomp and sumptuous setting out of the same, nor the prowde barbarous showts and songes of victory that could stand them to purpose, against noble hartes and vaUiant minded souldiers, that durst grapple with them, and come to hand strokes ivifh their enemies : and that they should make no reckoning of all that bravery and bragges,,but should sticke to it like men, and laye it on the jacks of them.'' The knight who was to captain his three hundred men in the Armada year, has the puU here over the bishop ; and on occasion he has always such language at command. ' Les autres qui estoient demourez a Rome ' instead of marching to the war ^ are ' the home-tarriers and house-doves ' : upbraided else- where ^ because they ' never went from the smoke of the chimney nor carried away any blowes in the field.' When Philopcemen, wounded with a dart that ' pierced both thighes through and through, that the iron was seene on either side,' saw ' the fight terrible,' and that it ' woulde soon be ended,' you read in Amyot ' qu'il perdoit patience de despit,' but in North that ' it spited him to the guttes, he ^ Coriokmus. ^ Fahiua Maximum. 216 NOETH'S PLUTAKCH would so fame have bene among them.' The phrase is born of sympathy and conviction. North, too, has a fine impatience of fools. Hannibal, discover- ing the error of his guides, ' les feit pendre ' in Amyot ; in North he ' roundely trussed them up and honge them by the neckes.' ^ And he is not sparing in his censure of iU-Uvers. Phoea, you read in the Theseus, ' was sumamed a sowe for her beastly brutishe behaviour, and wicked hfe.' He can be choleric as weU as kindly, and never minces his words. Apart from those expressions which spring from the idiosjnicrasy of his temperament. North's style shares to the full in the general glory of Ehzabethan prose. You read of ' fretised seeiiags,' ^ of words that ' dulce and soften the hardened harts of the multitude' ;^ of the Athenians 'being set on a johtie to see themselves strong.' Heads are ' passhed in peces,' and men ' ashamed to cast their honour at their heeles ' (Am.yot : ' d'abandonner leur gloire '). Themistocles' father shows him the ' shipwracks and ribbes (Amyot : ' les corps') of olde gaUyes cast here and there.- You have, ' pluck out of his head the worm of ambition ' * for ' oster de sa f antasie r ambition ' ; and Csesar on the night before his death hears Calpurnia, ' being fast asleep, weepe and sigh, and put forth many fumbling lamentable speeches.^ But in particular. North is richer than even his immediate followers in homespun images and pro- verbial locutions. Men who succeed, ' bear the beU ' ; ^ ' tenter la fortune le premier ' is ' to breake the ise of this enterprise.' * Coriolanus by his pride ' stirred coales emong the people.' The Spartans who thwarted Themistocles ' dyd sit on his skirtes ' ; ^ FcMua Maxtmus. ^ Lycurg'm. ' Pvblicola. * Solon. ^ The old prize for a racehorse. * Puhlicola. NORTH'S PLUTARCH 217 and the Athenians fear Pericles because in voice and manner ' he was Pisistratus up and downe.' The Veians let fall their ' peacockes bravery ' ; '^ and a man when pleased is 'as merry as a pye.'^ Raw recruits are ' fresh- water souldiers.' A tm-ncoat carries ' two faces in one hoode ' ; ^ and the Carthaginians, being outwitted, 'are ready to eate their fingers for spyte.' The last locution occurs also in North's Morall Philosophie of 1570 : he habitually used such expressions, and yet others which are truly proverbs, common to many languages. For instance, he writes in the Camillus, ' these words made Brennus mad as a March Hare that out went his blade ' ; in Goto Utican ' to set aU at six and seven' ; in Solon ' so sweete it is to rule the roste ' ; in Pelopidas ' to hold their noses to the grjmdstone ' ; in Cicero, with even greater incongruity, of his wife Terentia ' wearing her husbandes breeches.' In the Alcibiades, the Athenians ' upon his persuasion, buUt castles in the ayer ' ; and this last has been referred to Sidney's Apologie ; but the first known edition of the Apologie is dated 1695, and it is sup- posed to have been written ab6ut 1581 ; North has it not only in the Lives/^579), but in his Morall Philosophie of 1570.*^/