"R 
 
 Lj 
 
 (!JurucU Htiiucrsity IGibrary 
 
 jlthaca, Ncta gork 
 
 WORDSWORTH COLLECTION 
 
 MADE BY 
 
 CYNTHIA MORGAN ST. JOHN 
 ITHACA, NY. 
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 
 VICTOR EMANUEL 
 
 CLASS OF 1919 
 1925 
 
E S SAYS 
 
 Literary Criticism 
 
 BY 
 
 RICHARD HOLT HUTTON. 
 
 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE.— NATHANIEL HAW- 
 THORNE.— ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH.— WORDS- 
 WORTH AND HIS GENIUS.— GEORGE 
 ELIOT.— MATTHEW ARNOLD. 
 
 PHILADELPHIA: 
 PORTER & COATES, 
 
 822 CHESTNUT STREET. 
 
 Do 
 
Ttrtt 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 IN offering these Essays to an American public, I am 
 very sensible that the only value they are likely 
 to have will arise not from any special literary ability 
 or insight of mine, but solely from the constant de- 
 light which I have taken in the writers here reviewed, 
 — who have indeed lived with me and in me, till their 
 world has become a genuine part of my own by no 
 means too rich intellectual life. It is in this way, I 
 cannot help thinking, — by soaking themselves thor- 
 oughly with a few great writers, instead of spreading 
 their interests so widely as most literary men do, — that 
 educated men of only ordinary capacities such as 
 mine may do most for the service of literature and 
 the culture of their own minds. It is but few who in 
 any age can really aspire to the position of great 
 critics, — critics such as Coleridge, or Hazlitt, or 
 Lamb, or Lowell, or Emerson. But many, by a 
 more intense concentration of their inferior intel- 
 lectual powers, might become both good interpreters 
 and, to a certain extent, just critics of a few great 
 authors, — of such authors, I mean, as, while far above 
 
IV PREFACE. 
 
 them in power and genius, are yet of the type which 
 they can, in the literal sense of the word, "under- 
 stand," — /. e., so stand beneath as to get a good view, 
 though one from a lower point, both of their powers 
 and their defects. For I do not hold that a man who 
 is really familiar with a great author, however much 
 his superior in genius and imaginative power, need 
 be in any way blind to that author's defects. It is a 
 pure affectation to pretend that in studying true genius 
 inferior capacity should always distrust its own judg- 
 ments simply because they are unfavourable. The 
 creative imagination of genius is by no means neces- 
 sarily so capable of judging its own productions as 
 the imagination of those who heartily enjoy without 
 having any power to rival them. If I am not com- 
 petent to affirm without a doubt that it was an exe- 
 crable and most undramatic conceit in Shakespeare, to 
 make Laertes dry his tears over his drowned sister 
 with the wretched effort at jocularity contained in the 
 line, — 
 
 " Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia !" 
 
 I do not suppose I am competent to understand the 
 tragic character of Ophelia's fate at all. If I cannot 
 discern the unmanly element in Goethe's sentimental 
 correspondence with the various ladies with whom he 
 was or thought himself in love, and the rubbishy am- 
 bitiousness, if I may be excused the expression, of his 
 delineation of the ideal State in Wilhelm Meister's 
 *' Wanderjahre," I am quite sure that there must be 
 
PREFACE, V 
 
 something radically misleading in the lessons of crit- 
 icism which he himself has taught me in tl>e crisp 
 epigrams of his conversations with Eckermann, the 
 delicate art-comments of the " Italienische Reise," 
 and the fine commentary on "Hamlet" which is 
 contained in the "Lehrjahre" of Wilhelm Meister. 
 If I am not competent to assert that Wordsworth was 
 unworthy of himself when he indulged in such dreary 
 platitudes about his "moral being" as now and then 
 interrupt the flow of his noblest strains of meditation, 
 or when he falls into the false simplicity of his ad- 
 dresses to "my little Bess" in "Peter Bell," or 
 " dear brother Jim " in " We are Seven," I am quite 
 sure that I cannot have entered aright into that 
 "lonely rapture of lonely minds," which Words- 
 worth, of all the poets that ever lived, knew best how 
 to excite. It is folly to suppose that because a critic 
 stands far beneath the author he tries to interpret, he 
 must therefore be passing his true limits directly he 'IJ -d'iTV'yX' 
 begins to note deficiencies. It is the characteristic t^ 
 of all great authors to teach those who saturate them- 
 selves with their works, where those works fall be- 
 neath the standard which they themselves have set up. 
 This much I say just to indicate that I do not think 
 the inferior scale of any man's critical powers an ad- 
 equate justification for the affection of literary idol- 
 atry. If any one has lived enough in a great writer 
 to know what that writer can do which no one else 
 can do, he has lived long enough with him to know 
 
VI PREFACE. 
 
 when he goes out of his true province, and does badly 
 what much inferior men might do well. 
 
 I would only add that there seems to me to be a 
 certain unity in the subjects of the Essays which my 
 American publisher has selected for republication in 
 the United States. They are all at least concerned 
 with writers whose intellectual self-consciousness is so 
 great that, to some extent, it limits their creative 
 genius. This, indeed, has been true of most of the 
 greatest English and American writers of this genera- 
 tion, and it is to Goethe that most of them owe their 
 intellectual parentage in this respect. That deeply- 
 rooted habit of Goethe's of watching the processes 
 and workings of his own mind when he was drawn 
 toward any object of attraction, or repelled from any 
 object of aversion, cannot, indeed, be credited with 
 any responsibility for the meditative joy which gives 
 all its specific character to the poetry of Wordsworth, 
 for Wordsworth was singularly uninfluenced by any 
 genius but his own. But Wordsworth's genius, too, 
 was certainly limited by its self-consciousness in a 
 different way. He owes to it all his greatest poems, 
 and , also all the worst defects of his greatest poems. 
 Nor can he pass out of the region of self-conscious- 
 ness into the naturalism of Scott, or the realism of 
 Crabbe, or the lyric passion of Shelley. It was his 
 delight to detect the analogies between the workings 
 of the elements of Nature, and the workings of the 
 thought and feeling in his own heart. He was always 
 
PREFACE. Vll 
 
 on the watch for the approach of the moment when 
 his nature was flooded from a source above itself by a 
 tide of feeling which yet somehow connected the phys- 
 ical world with the spiritual and which appeared to 
 testify to the identity of the two. But the self-con- 
 sciousness which was his strength was also his weak- 
 ness. And when he mistook, as he often did, his 
 own individual dogmatisms for the tide of a divine 
 emotion, he became simply maudlin, egotistic, and 
 tedious. The same self-consciousness, though in a 
 very different form, pervades the other writers I have 
 here criticised, and marks the limit of their power. 
 It is the inquisitive irony which arises from this self- 
 consciousness that gives all its peculiar flavour to the 
 poetry of Arnold and Clough, and to the fiction of 
 George Eliot; and though Hawthorne's inquisitive 
 scrutiny into life is combined with a mysticism which 
 I suppose to be of different origin, it introduces the 
 same ambiguous tone into his reflections, and gives to 
 his countenance, in my fancy at least, even a more 
 clearly pronounced sardonic smile. None of these 
 great authors, Wordsworth included, could have writ- 
 ten in any age of the world in which men had not 
 begun to question themselves as to the worth of their 
 own feelings and thoughts, though it was Words- 
 worth's task in life to find a triumphant answer to 
 the question, and to give evidence of moods of feel- 
 ing pervaded by the highest tides of the universal 
 goodness and the universal love. Thus, a pervading 
 
Vlll PREFACE. 
 
 self-consciousness limits all the writers dealt with in 
 these Essays as well as gives them their peculiar power. 
 And though I believe that even the most sceptical of 
 these great writers — even George Eliot and Matthew 
 Arnold — really doubt the value of their own scepti- 
 cism quite as much as they doubt the faiths which it 
 undermines, and though Hawthorne leaves on me the 
 most abiding impression that the solitary mood of 
 mind to which he owed his peculiar genius, — the mood 
 which peered so curiously into those human impulses 
 which he only half shared, — yet gave him glimpses of 
 the action of transcendental forces in human affairs 
 such as would confute the materialist and confound 
 the narrow wisdom of secular prudence, I see clearly 
 that one and all of them are painfully sensible of the 
 imaginative paralysis which doubt brings with it. For 
 myself I heartily believe that when the great wave of 
 self-questioning impulse which has unsettled our re- 
 ligious beliefs has spent its force, we shall find that it 
 has not carried away, but established that divine creed 
 which it will certainly have transformed and trans- 
 figured ; — nevertheless, in the meantime, it is clear 
 that a great literary school will have been produced 
 by that self-questioning spirit, and a school whose 
 members have endured much more of the pain of 
 puzzling over the enigma of life, than of the joy of 
 solving it, though in Wordsworth they most of them 
 found, and all of them might have found, some of 
 that light which comes only in the most exalted mo- 
 
PREFACE. IX 
 
 ments of self-knowledge, but which then assures us 
 that, at bottom, the conscience of man is the key to 
 the science of the universe, and not the science of the 
 universe the key to the conscience of man. 
 
 There is one other common characteristic of all 
 these writers, and it is one, I think, which especially 
 recommends them to the literary world of the United 
 States. They are all great masters of style, — of a 
 lucid and simple style. It has often puzzled me to 
 understand why the style of the greater American 
 authors is so simple and lucid, — has so little in it of 
 the full-mouthed rhetoric of democratic pride or even 
 of the old visionary, republican idealism. But what- 
 ever be the cause, it is quite obvious that the greater 
 writers of the United States have produced much less 
 that resembles the glowing imagery of Bunyan, and 
 the magnificent, not to say magniloquent, declama- 
 tion of Milton, than of literature which reminds us 
 of the polished grace of Addison or of the realistic 
 humour of Goldsmith. Perhaps complete sincerity 
 and simplicity of style is more strictly natural to the 
 intellectual culture of a Republic than to the intel- 
 lectual culture of societies as complex as those of 
 Europe. Be that as it may, I am sure that the few 
 essays here contained are studies of authors whose 
 style is at least as great a charm to the culture of the 
 
 United States as it is to the culture of England. 
 Englefield Green, Staines, 
 28th August, 1876. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 I. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE i 
 
 II. 
 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 98 
 
 III. 
 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 156 
 
 IV. 
 WORDSWORTH AND HIS GENIUS 180 
 
 V. 
 GEORGE ELIOT 227 
 
 VI. 
 
 THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD 301 
 
GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE.' 
 
 GOETHE tells us in his Autobiography, that while 
 his mind was wandering about in search of a re- 
 Irgious system, and thus passing over the intermediate 
 areas between the various regions of theological be- 
 lief, he met with a certain phenomenon which seemed 
 to him to belong to none of them, and which he used 
 to call therefore dcemonic influence. "It was not di- 
 vine, for it seemed unintellectual ; nor human, for it 
 was no result of understanding; nor diabolic, for it 
 was of beneficent tendency ; nor angelic, for you could 
 
 1 "The Life and Works of Goethe: with Sketches of his Age 
 and Contemporaries, from publislied and unpublished sources." 
 By G. H. Lewes. 2 vols. Nutt, 1855, 
 
 " Freundschaftliche Briefe von Goethe und seiner Frau an 
 Nicolaus Meyer, aus den Jahren 1800-1831," Leipzig, Hartung, 
 1856. (" Friendly Letters from Goethe and his Wife to Nicolas 
 Meyer, between the years 1800 and 1831." Leipzig, 1856.) 
 
2 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 
 
 often notice in it a certain mischievousness. It re- 
 sembled chance, inasmuch as it demonstrated noth- 
 ing ; but was like providence, inasmuch as it showed 
 symptoms of continuity. Everything which fetters 
 human agency seemed to yield before it ; it seemed 
 to dispose arbitrarily of the necessary elements of 
 our existence." It is not always, says this great ob- 
 server of life, " the first and best, either in moral 
 nature or in abilities," who possess this magnetic in- 
 fluence, and it is but rarely "that they recommend 
 themselves by goodness of heart ; but a gigantic force 
 goes out of them, and they exercise an incredible 
 power over all creatures, nay, even over the elements 
 themselves ; and who can say how far this influence 
 may reach ? All moral forces united are powerless 
 against them. The masses are fascinated by them. 
 They are only to be conquered by the universe itself,'.' 
 when they enter into conflict with it. Of course 
 Goethe was thinking mainly of Napoleon, and men 
 like him, as he afterwards told Eckermann, when he 
 wrote this passage. Such men put forth, he says, a 
 power, " if not exactly opposite to, yet at least crossing, 
 that of the general moral order of the world ; so that 
 the one might be regarded as the woof, the other as 
 the warp." He adds, that his life-long friend and 
 patron, the Duke of Weimar, had this magnetic in- 
 fluence to such a degree that nobody could resist him 
 and no work of art ever failed in the poet's hands 
 which the duke had suggested or approved. "He 
 would have been enviable indeed if he could have 
 possessed himself of my ideas and higher strivings • 
 
GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 3 
 
 for when the dgemon forsook him, and only the human 
 was left, he knew not how to set to work, and was 
 much troubled at it. In Byron this element was prob- 
 ably very active, giving him such powers of fascination, 
 especially with women." Eckermann, witli his usual 
 delightfully child-like simplicity, anxiously asks, "Has 
 not Mephistopheles traits of this nature?" "No," re- 
 plies Goethe, "Mephistopheles is too negative a being. 
 The daemonic manifests itself in positive active power 
 among artists. It is found often in musicians, more 
 rarely among painters. In Paganini it shows itself to 
 a high degree, and it is by means of it that he pro- 
 duces such great effects." Of himself he says, "it 
 does not lie in my nature, but I am subject to its 
 influence;" by which Goethe probably meant mod- 
 estly to disclaim having any personal fascination of 
 this kind over other men, but to indicate, what we 
 know from other conversations he really held to be 
 true, that apparently arbitrary and quite inexplicable 
 impulses had often exercised the most decisive and 
 frequently fortunate influence on his own career. But 
 it is quite clear that Goethe did possess in no common 
 degree this faculty for, in a certain sense, fascinating 
 men by his presence, as well as by his writings. If 
 Byron had more of it as a man, Goethe succeeded in 
 imparting far more of it to his works, and neither his 
 life nor works can be properly judged without reference 
 to its influence. It is something quite distinct from 
 mere beauty, power, or general merit, either of per- 
 sonal character or of literary creation. It is a power 
 which goes out from the individual man, and which 
 
4 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 
 
 can imprint itself only on such writings as carry with 
 them the stamp of individual character ; and not 
 always even on those, if, as for example in the case 
 of Byron's earlier works, the play of character is a 
 good deal merged in some exaggerated mood of senti- 
 ment. It is not intensity : numbers of writers have 
 surpassed Goethe in the intensity both of literary and 
 personal characteristics. Schiller was a man of far 
 keener and intenser, though narrower nature, and yet 
 he could not help going into utter captivity to the 
 calm and somewhat limply-constituted mind of his 
 Weimar friend. It is not even in itself independence 
 or strength of will ; for though Goethe had this in a 
 remarkable degree, many others, as probably Schiller, 
 had possessed it in as high a degree, who were quite 
 destitute of his fascinating talent. If it be expressible 
 in one phrase at all (which it is not), it might be called 
 presence of mind in combination with a keen knowledge 
 of men. I mean that absolute and complete adequacy 
 to every emergency which gave Napoleon his sang- 
 froid at tlie very turning-point of his great battles, 
 and which in the literary world has secured for John- 
 son his Bosvvell, and for Goethe his Eckermann. John- 
 son, indeed, was immeasurably Goethe's inferior in 
 the range of his experience, and, what is of more 
 importance, in his knowledge of man ; but he was 
 perhaps his superior in mere presence of mind, and 
 hence was greater in conversation, but less in fasci- 
 nation. The Duke of Wellington had nearly as much 
 presence of mind as Napoleon himself; but he had 
 immeasurably less of the other element of fascination 
 
GOETHE AlVD HIS INFLUENCE. 5 
 
 — instinctive knowledge of men, and knowledge how 
 to use them. 
 
 Goethe is almost unrivalled in the literary world 
 in the degree in which he combines these qualities. 
 Shakespeare may have had them equally, but his 
 dramas are too impersonal to tell us clearly what kind 
 of individual influence he put forth. I should con- 
 jecture that his sympathy with men was too vivid to 
 have enabled him to keep, as was the case with 
 Goethe, a part of himself as a permanent reserve- 
 force outside the actual field of action, and ready to 
 turn the flank of any new emergency. Shakespeare 
 can scarcely have been so uniformly able to detach 
 himself, if he would, from the sympathies and pas- 
 sions of the moment as Goethe certainly was; for 
 Goethe, like the little three-eyed girl {Dretdtigleht) 
 in the German tale, had always an extra organ besides 
 the eyes he slept and wept with, to take note of his 
 own sleep and his own tears, and an extra will, subject 
 to the command of the third eye, ready to rescue the 
 ordinary will from the intricacies of human emotion, 
 Shakespeare's knowledge of life was, I should think, 
 less drawn from constant vigilance and presence of 
 mind in the passing moment (to which I imagine him 
 to have abandoned himself far more completely than 
 Goethe), and more from the power of memory and 
 imagination to reproduce those sympathies again. 
 However this may be, Shakespeare has himself 
 sketched, less perhaps this cool presence of mind 
 itself, than the effect which it produces on other men, 
 in his picture of Octavius Caesar. Caesar's cool self- 
 
6 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 
 
 possessed eye for every emergency, and for the right 
 use of human instruments, and its paralyzing effect 
 on Antony's more attaching and passionate power of 
 character, is a striking example of what Goethe would 
 have called the "dgemonic" element in human affairs 
 — the element that fascinates men by at once standing 
 out clear and quite independent of their support, and yet 
 indicating the power to read them off and detect for 
 them their own needs and uses. There is always in 
 this kind of magnetic power something repulsive at 
 first ; but if the repulsion be overcome, the attraction 
 becomes stronger than ever; there is a resistance while 
 the mind of the disciple is striving to keep its inde- 
 pendence and conscious of the spell, — an intense de- 
 votion after he has once relinquished it, and consented 
 to be satellite. So the soothsayer tells Antony, — 
 
 " Thy demon, that's thy spirit which keeps thee, is 
 Noble, courageous, high, unmatchable. 
 Where Caesar's is not; but near him, thy angel 
 Becomes a fear, as being overpowered ; therefore 
 Make space enough between you.'' 
 
 And Goethe, who had, as he says, himself experienced 
 the force of this blind fascination in the Duke of 
 Weimar's influence over him, as well as wielded it in 
 no slight degree, tells Eckermann (himself a captive), 
 " The higher a man stands, the more he is liable to 
 this dcemonic influence; and he must take constant 
 care that his guiding will be not diverted by it from 
 the straight way. . . . This is just the difficult point, 
 — for our better nature stoutly to sustain itself, and 
 yield to the daemonic no more than is reasonable." 
 
GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. / 
 
 In Goethe himself this fascinating power existed as 
 strongly as it is well possible to conceive in a man 
 whose whole intellectual nature was of the sympathetic 
 and contemplative, rather than of the practical cast, 
 — who had no occasion to "use" men except as liter- 
 ary material, — and who, while he stood out independ- 
 ent of them, and could at will shake off from his feet 
 the dust of long association, yet felt with them as one 
 who understood their nature and had entered into 
 their experience. Goethe's sympathetic and genial 
 insight into man would have been a pure embarrass- 
 ment to a practical cold-tempered tool-seeker like 
 Napoleon, who never deciphered men through sym- 
 pathy, but always by an instinctive tact for detecting 
 masterly and workmanlike instruments. And vice 
 versd, the imperturbable self-possession and Napole- 
 onic sang-froid of judgment that underlay in Goethe all 
 storms of superficial emotion, was no little embarrass- 
 ment to him in many of his literary moods. It pre- 
 vented him, we think, from ever becoming a great 
 dramatist. He could never lose himself sufficiently 
 in his creations : yet it was emphatically this which 
 gave that peculiar and undefinable fascination to those 
 minutely-accurate observations on life with which all 
 his later prose works and his conversations are so 
 thickly stocked. You can clearly see that men of 
 strong nature did not submit to Goethe's magnetic 
 influence without a struggle. Schiller, at first in- 
 tensely repelled from him, was only gradually sub- 
 dued, though thoroughly and strangely magnetized 
 into idolatry by personal converse. Herder's keen 
 
» GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 
 
 and caustic nature vibrated to the end between the 
 intense repulsion he felt for Goethe's completely un- 
 moral genius, — the poet's impartial sympathy for good 
 and evil alike, — and the irresistible attraction which 
 his personal influence exerted. Only those could 
 thoroughly cling to Goethe from the first who were 
 not conscious of having any strong intellectual inde- 
 pendence to maintain. Women, who love nothing so 
 much as a completely independent self-sustained na- 
 ture, especially if joined with thorough insight into 
 themselves, were purely fascinated at once. Wieland, 
 who had no intellectual ground to fight for, surren- 
 dered without terms. But no man of eminent ability 
 and a different school of thought seemed to approach 
 him without some sense that, if exposed constantly to 
 his immediate influence, he had to choose between 
 fascination and aversion. Hence his very few inti- 
 mate male friends : scarcely any man at ail able to 
 enter into his mind and share his deeper interests was 
 likely to be found who could go so completely into 
 captivity to his modes of thought ; and, tolerant as he 
 was, the centrifugal force of his mind threw off to a 
 certain respectful distance, all that the attractive force 
 was not able to appropriate as part of itself. There 
 has been a very similar effect produced by his writino-s 
 on those even who did not know the man. Novalis 
 fluttered round them, repeatedly expressing his aver- 
 sion, like a moth round a candle. They invariablv 
 repel, at first, English readers with English views of 
 life and duty. As you read more and more, and the 
 characteristic atmosphere of the man distils into your 
 
COETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 9 
 
 life, you find the magnetic force coming strongly over 
 you ; you are as a man mesmerized ; you feel his 
 calm independence of so much on which you help- 
 lessly lean, combined with his thorough insight into 
 that desire of yours to lean, drawing you irresistibly 
 towards the invisible intellectual centre at which such 
 independent strength and such genial, breadth of 
 thought was possible. And yet you feel that you 
 would be in many and various ways lowered in your 
 own eyes if you could think completely as he thought 
 and act as he acted. It becomes a difficult problem, 
 in the presence of so much genius, and beneath so 
 fascinating an eye, "for our better nature stoutly to 
 sustain itself and yield to the daemonic no more than 
 is reasonable." 
 
 Let me attempt to contribute to the solution of this 
 difficulty by some account and criticism of Goethe's 
 life and genius in connection with that personal cha- 
 racter which so subtly penetrates all he has written. 
 Carlyle mistook completely when he said that Goethe, 
 like Shakespeare, leaves little trace of himself in his 
 creations. To a fine eye this is not even true of 
 Shakespeare, though Shakespeare leaves no immediate 
 stamp of himself, and critical inference alone can 
 discern him in his works; but far less is it true of 
 Goethe. A rarefied self no doubt it is — a highly dis- 
 tilled gaseous essence ; but everywhere, penetrating 
 all he writes, there is the ethereal atmosphere which 
 travelled about with Johann Wolfgang Goethe. 
 
 Mr. Lewes's volume gives us a very able and inter- 
 esting biography, — a book, indeed, of permanent 
 
lO GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 
 
 value ; the incidents illustrating character, though not 
 quite exhausting his materials, are disposed with skill, 
 and the artistic criticism, while thoroughly appreci- 
 ating Goethe's transcendent political genius, is inde- 
 pendent, sensible, and English. From his moral 
 criticism of Goethe, and sometimes, though not so 
 frequently, from the poetical, I very widely dissent, 
 and hope to give the grounds of ray dissent. Some- 
 thing more too might have been done in the way of 
 defining his individual position both as a poet and as 
 a man. But it is impossible to deny Mr. Lewes high 
 merit for the candour of his biography. Where Goethe 
 has been most censured, he gives all the facts without 
 reserve ; and he does not go into any helpless captivity 
 to the poet and artist. He gives his readers the ele- 
 ments for forming their own moral judgments, and he 
 has shaken off from his feet the ponderous rubbish 
 of the German scholiasts. Herr Diintzer and his col- 
 leagues are skilfully used in Mr. Lewes's book; but 
 they are also skilfully ignored. Mr. Lewes has not 
 submitted himself to Carlyle's somewhat undiscrimi- 
 nating, strained, and lashed-up furor of adoration for 
 every word that the German sage let drop. There is, 
 by the way, nothing more remarkably illustrative of 
 Goethe's "daemonic" influence than Carlyle's worship 
 of him. Except in his permanent unfailing self-pos- 
 session, Goethe lacked almost all the personal quali- 
 ties which usually fascinate that great writer's eye. 
 And accordingly there runs through the essays on 
 Goethe a tone of arduous admiration, — a helpless 
 desire to fix on some characteristic which he could 
 
GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. II 
 
 infinitely admire, — betraying that he was in subjection 
 to the "eyes behind the book," not to the thing which 
 is said in it. There was nothing of the rugged thrust- 
 ing power of Johnson, of the imperious practical faith 
 of Cromwell, of the picturesque passion of Danton, the 
 kingly fanaticism of Mahomet ; nothing, in short, of the 
 intensity of nature which Carlyle always needs behind 
 the sagacity he worships. Mr. Lewes reports a rather 
 affected piece of Carlylese, delivered by the Latter- 
 day oracle in Piccadilly upon one of the injurious at- 
 tacks that had been directed against Goethe. Carlyle 
 stopped suddenly, and with his peculiar look and 
 emphasis said, "Yes, it is the wild cry of amazement 
 on the part of all spooneys that the Titan was not a 
 spooney too ! Here is a godlike intellect, and yet 
 you see he is not an idiot! not in the least a spooney!" 
 This was hardly true of Goethe ; and we strongly sus- 
 pect that Mr. Carlyle was resisting a secret feeling that 
 there was a limpness and want of concentration in 
 Goethe's whole nature intellectual and moral, from 
 the results of which his imperturbable presence of 
 mind and great genius barely saved him ; that he did 
 in consequence go sometimes beyond the brink of 
 spooneyishness in early days, and across the verge of 
 very unreal "high art" in later life. These are just 
 the defects to which Mr. Carlyle is most sensitive. 
 It is true Goethe never was in danger of permanently 
 sinking into either abyss ; for his head was always 
 cool, and his third eye, at least, always vigilant. But 
 it may perhaps account for the unusual failure of our 
 great essayist in delineating Goethe, that the poet's 
 
12 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 
 
 wonderful writings were less the real object of his ad- 
 miration than the strange fascination of the character 
 behind. In my very brief sketch of the poet's life, 
 I shall, so far as possible, select my illustrations from 
 passages or incidents passed over in Mr. Lewes's 
 volumes, wherever they seem to be equally charac- 
 teristic. 
 
 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, born at noon on the 28th 
 August, 1749, in Frankfort-on-the-Maine, seems to 
 have inherited his genial, sensitive, sensuous, and 
 joyous temperament from his mother ; and from his 
 father, the pride, self-dependence, and magnificent 
 formality, the nervous orderliness, perseverance, and 
 the microscopic minuteness of eye, by which, at least 
 after the first rush of youth was gone by, he was al- 
 ways distinguished. His mother was but eighteen 
 when he was born. She was a lively girl, full of 
 German sentiment, with warm impulses, by no means 
 much troubled with a conscience, exceedingly afraid 
 of her husband, who was near twenty years her senior, 
 and seemingly both willing and skilful in the invention 
 of occasional white lies adapted to screen her children 
 from his minute, fidgetty, and rather austere superin- 
 tendence. She "spoiled" her children on principle, 
 and made no pretence of conducting a systematic 
 training which she abhorred. She said of herself in 
 after-years, that she could "educate no child, was 
 quite unfit for it, gave them every wish so long as 
 they laughed and were good, and whipped them if 
 they cried or made wry mouths, without ever looking 
 
GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE, I3 
 
 for any reason why they laughed or cried." ^ Her 
 belief in Providence was warm widi German senti- 
 ment, and not a little tinged with superstition. She 
 rejoiced greatly when her son published the "Confes- 
 sions of a Beautiful Soul," which she loved as a memo- 
 rial of a lost pietistic friend. Her religion was one 
 of emotion rather than of moral reverence. She was 
 generous and extravagant, and, after her husband's 
 death, seems to have spent capital as well as income. 
 She was passionately fond of the theatre ; a taste 
 which she transmitted to her son. Her hearty sim- 
 plicity of nature made her universally loved. Her 
 servants loved and stayed with her to the last. She 
 seems to have had at least as much humour as her 
 son, which, for Germans, was not inconsiderable, and 
 not much more sense of awe. She gave the most de- 
 tailed orders for her own funeral, and even specified 
 the kind of wine and the size of the cracknels with 
 which the mourners were to be regaled ; ordering the 
 servants not to put too few raisins into the cakes, as 
 she never could endure that in her life, and it would 
 certainly chafe her in her grave. Having been invited 
 to go to a party on the day on which she died, she 
 sent for answer that "Madame Goethe could not come, 
 as she was engaged just then in dying. "^ Yet her 
 sensitiveness was so great, that she always made it a 
 condition with her servants that they should never 
 repeat to her painful news that they had picked up 
 
 ^ Letter to her granddaughter — Dtintzer's " Frauenbilder," 
 
 P- 544- 
 
 * Diintzer's " Frauenbilder," p. 583, 
 
14 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 
 
 accidentally, as she wished to hear nothing sad with- 
 out absohite necessity. And during her son's danger- 
 ous illness at Weimar, in 1805, no one ventured to 
 speak to her of it till it was past, though she affirmed 
 that she had been conscious all the time of his dan- 
 ger without the heart to mention it. This peculiarity 
 Goethe inherited. Courageous to the utmost degree 
 in all physical danger, he could never bear to encounter 
 mental pain which he could anyhow escape. He in- 
 vented soft paraphrases to avoid speaking of the death 
 of those he had loved, and indeed of all death. 
 Writing to Zelter of his own son's death, he says, 
 "the staying-away (Aeussenbleiben) of my son has 
 weighed dreadfully upon me in many ways." And 
 his feeling was so well known, that his old friend and 
 mistress, the Frau von Stein, who died before him, 
 directed that her funeral should not pass his door, lest 
 it should impress him too painfully. No one dared to 
 tell him of Schiller's death ; and so it was also at the 
 death of his wife's sister, and in other cases. Indeed, 
 his constant unwillingness manfully to face the secret 
 of his own anguish, was a principal source of a shade 
 of unreality in a generally very real character. He 
 habitually evaded the task of fathoming the meaning 
 and the depth of suffering. He avoided all contact 
 with keen pain. He could not bear, although in the 
 neighbourhood, to visit his brother-in-law at atime when 
 
 his sister's child was dying. It was not weakness, 
 
 it was his principle of action ; and the effect remains 
 in his works. He writes like a man who had not only 
 experienced but explored every reality of human life 
 
GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 1 5 
 
 except that of anguish and remorse. The iron that 
 enters into the soul had found him too ; but instead 
 of fronting it as he fronted all other realities of life, 
 and pondering its teaching to the last letter, he drew 
 back from it with what speed he might. This experi- 
 ence even his Faust wants. Remorse, grief, agony, 
 Goethe gently waived ; and, by averting his thoughts, 
 softened them gradually without exhausting their les- 
 son. Hence his passion never reaches the deepest 
 deep of human life. It can glow and melt, but is 
 never a consuming fire. His Werther, Tasso, Ottilie, 
 and Clarchen, suffer keenly, but never vieet the knife- 
 edge. There is nothing in his poems like the courage- 
 ous reality of suffering which vibrates through some 
 of Shelley's lyrics and his " Cenci." The fascination 
 of pain he can paint, but not the conquest of the will 
 over its deeper aspect of terror. The temperament he 
 inherited from his mother. But to him was granted a 
 conspicuously despotic will, which should have enabled 
 him to sound this depth also. 
 
 From his father it is far more difficult to say what 
 qualities of mind Goethe inherited. The old man had 
 always worried his family ; and it became fashionable 
 among the poet's friends, who were enthusiastic about 
 his mother, to ignore and depreciate the old counsel- 
 lor, and they seem to have regarded it as a " mercy " 
 when " Providence removed him." There are, how- 
 ever, one or two incidents in the Autobiography which 
 convey an impression that his affection for his children 
 was as real and deep as even that of his wife. He 
 was a formal man, with strong ideas of straight-laced 
 
1 6 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 
 
 education, passionately orderly (he thought a good 
 book nothing without a good binding), and never so 
 much excited as by a necessary deviation from the 
 "pre-established harmony" of household rules. He 
 could not submit to the inevitable. He was the kind 
 of man who is so attached to his rules, that if he can- 
 not shatter the obstacles of circumstance, he thinks it 
 next best to let the obstacles of circumstance shatter 
 him. He had none of his son's calm presence of 
 mind. But whatever perseverance of temper Goethe 
 had, he probably gained from his father. He could 
 not bear to do anything superficially. He was as 
 thorough {g?'undlich, as the Germans say) in preparing 
 Wolfgang for the coronation of the emperor by an ex- 
 haustive investigation into the authorities for every 
 ceremony to be observed, as in teaching him the civil 
 law. Einleitung, Quellen, &c., were all raked care- 
 fully up ; for was not the coronation a part of the 
 " Entwickelung der Geschichte " ? He had the for- 
 mal notions about everything, considered rhyme the 
 essence of poetry, and believed that pictures, like 
 wine, improved in value by mere keeping. He taught 
 his children himself, and completely alienated his 
 daughter by his dry and exacting manner. But he 
 was at least in earnest with his task. He began to 
 learn both English and drawing at the same time with 
 his children, that his own participation in their efforts 
 might spur them on. He copied all his children's 
 drawing-copies "with an English lead-pencil upon the 
 finest Dutch paper ; and not only observed the great- 
 est clearness of outline, but most accurately imitated 
 
 4 
 
GOETHE AMD HIS INFLUENCE. I J 
 
 the hatching of the copies with a light hand. He 
 drew the whole collection, number by number, while 
 we children jumped from one head to another just as 
 we pleased." This is very characteristic of his son's 
 genius in later years, at least in the microscopic detail. 
 After the first outburst of the poet's youthful passion, 
 the lad took a sudden fancy for rude fragmentary 
 drawings from nature, on all sorts of odd gray scraps 
 of paper. And of this ti-me he tells us, "the peda- 
 gogism of my father, on this point too, was greatly 
 to be admired. He kindly asked for my attempts, 
 and drew lines around every imperfect sketch. . . . 
 The irregular leaves he cut straight, and thus made 
 the beginning of a collection in which he wished at 
 some future time to rejoice in the progress of his son." 
 There seems to me real tenderness here. He was a 
 proud man, who had drawn back into himself at the 
 first repulse, from civic politics ; and was hardly rec- 
 onciled to his son's adhesion to the Weimar Court, 
 because he dreaded lest some ducal caprice should 
 bring mortification to his family pride. 
 
 The poet was born, as he himself records, with that 
 sedate kind of humour in which alone he excelled, with 
 a "propitious horoscope." There was clear anticipa- 
 tion in it of the special worship of young ladies, and 
 of a general sceptre over earth and air. " The sun 
 stood in the sign of the Virgin, and was culminating 
 for the day." Jupiter and Venus were friendly; (lit- 
 tle Pallas, undiscovered for another half century, must 
 surely have lent a helping ray); Mercury was not 
 adverse; Mars and Saturn indifferent; "the moon 
 2 
 
1 8 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 
 
 alone, just full, exerted the power of her opposition, 
 all the more as she had reached her planetary hour ; 
 she therefore resisted my birth, which could not be 
 accomplished till this hour was passed." 
 
 Frankfort was a busy old-fashioned town, with old 
 walls and new walls, full of lingering traditions and 
 gray customs still surviving, which served as an an- 
 tique poetic frame for its changing pictures of motley 
 German life. Goethe remembered his childish ex- 
 ploring expeditions about the old walls, moats, towers, 
 and posterns, with great delight. Directly behind his 
 father's house was a large area of gardens, to which 
 the family had no access, stretchin;;^ away to the walls 
 of the city. The boy used often to gaze on this for- 
 bidden Eden in evening hours from a room in the 
 second story called the garden-room. Even after the 
 lapse of sixty years, the many-coloured picture of these 
 gardens, — the solitary figures of careful neighbours 
 stooping to tend their flowers, the groups of skittle- 
 players, and the bands of merry children, — all 
 blended together in the warm sunset — the floating 
 sounds of many voices, of the rolling balls, and the 
 dropping ninepins — would again beset his imagina- 
 tion, bringing with them many a "tale of visionary 
 hours." 
 
 Mr. Lewes remarks that the child's character fre- 
 quently presents far more distinctly the ground-plan of 
 the matured man's than the youth's, since the propor- 
 tions of the whole are often completely disguised by 
 the temporary caprices of newly-expanded passions 
 and newly-gained freedom. This is, at all events, ex- 
 
GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 1 9 
 
 tremely true of Goethe, and is generally true of all 
 casts of character where the permanent influence of a 
 manly conscience does not start forth into life along 
 with the new powers and new freedom it is to control. 
 The sense of responsibility and moral freedom, once 
 awakened, does not again subside, and where search- 
 ing moral convictions have once taken hold on the 
 character, the subsidence of youthful impetuousness 
 does not give back again the characteristic features of 
 childhood ) but in Goethe this element was always 
 faint, and the difference between the child's mind 
 and the man's was only a difference in maturity of 
 powers; when th^^ spring-tide of youth fell back, his 
 inward life was as it had been, only that all was 
 stronger and riper. He was a reflective, old-fashioned, 
 calmly-imaginative child, always fascinated by a mys- 
 tery, but never, properly speaking, awed by it. It 
 kindled his imagination ; it never subdued him. He 
 was full of wonder, and quite without veneration. In 
 the "altar to the Lord" which the child secretly built 
 on a music-stand of his father's at seven years of age, 
 and on which he burnt incense in the shape of a pas- 
 til, until he found that it was at the risk of injuring 
 his altar, he was innocently playing with a subject 
 which to almost any other child would have been too 
 sacred for imaginative amusement. He was evidently 
 charmed with the picturesqueness of the patriarchal 
 sacrifices, and thought with delight of the blue smoke 
 rising up to heaven beneath the first beam of the 
 rising sun : of the religious feeling, the desire to give 
 up anything of his own out of love to God, he had 
 
20 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 
 
 not of course any idea ; — that in a child of seven no 
 one would expect. But what is characteristic, is the 
 absence of any restraining awe, in thus mingling the 
 thought of God with his play at an age when he had 
 already begun to think whether it was just in Him to 
 send earthquakes and storms. Religion was already 
 to him what it ever continued to be, — not the com- 
 munion with holiness, but at most a graceful develop- 
 ment of human life, a fountain of cool mystery play- 
 ing gratefully over the parched earth. Mr. Lewes has 
 translated a delightful anecdote of Goethe's relation to 
 his mother, from Bettina von Arnim's account. That 
 bold young lady's authority is generally more than 
 questionable ; here, however, there is the strongest 
 evidence of internal truth: — 
 
 " This genial, indulgent mother employed her faculty for story- 
 telling to his and her own delight. ' Air, fire, earth, and water, 
 I represented under the forms of princesses; and to all natural 
 phenomena I gave a meaning, in which I almost believed more 
 fervently than my little hearers. As we thought of paths which 
 led from star to star, and that we should one day inhabit the 
 stars, and thought of the great spirits we should meet there, I 
 was as eager for the hours of story-telling as the children them- 
 selves; I was quite curious about the future course of my own 
 improvisation, and any invitation which interrupted these evenings 
 was disagreeable. There I sat, and there "Wolfgang held me with 
 his large black eyes; and when the fate of one of his favorites 
 was not according to his fancy, I saw the angry veins swell on his 
 temples, I saw him repress his tears. He often burst in with 
 " But, mother, the princess won't marry the nasty tailor, even if 
 he does kill the giant." And when I made a pause for the nio-ht 
 promising to continue it on the morrow, I was certain that he 
 would in the meanwhile think it out for himself, and so he often 
 
GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 21 
 
 stimulated my imagination. When I turned the story according 
 to his plan, and told him that he had found out the denouement, 
 then was he all fire and flame, and one could see his little heart 
 beating underneath his dress ! His grandmother, who made a 
 great pet of him, was the confidant of all his ideas as to how the 
 story would turn out ; and as she repeated these to me, and I 
 turned the story according to these hints, there was a little diplo- 
 matic secrecy between us, which we never disclosed. I had the 
 pleasure of continuing my story to the delight and astonishment 
 of my hearers, and Wolfgang saw with glowing eyes the fulfil- 
 ment of his own conceptions, and listened with enthusiastic ap- 
 plause.' " 
 
 His self-command and self-importance showed them- 
 selves early. He once waited resolutely for many 
 minutes till school-time was "up," though his school- 
 fellows were lashing his legs with switches till they 
 bled, before he would defend himself by a single 
 movement ; and then he fell upon them with immense 
 success. Like all petted children, he did not like 
 school ; his pride was hurt by the unrespecting self- 
 assertion of the republic around him. His most in- 
 timate friends were usually women and younger men. 
 He never could endure to be laughed at. Herder's 
 rather vulgar pun on his name (Gothe), made in 
 college days, — 
 
 "Thou, the descendant of gods, or of Goths, or of gutters,"*— 
 was perhaps a little annoying for the time; but it 
 clearly rankled in his mind ; and he mentions it bitter- 
 ly forty years later, after Herder's death, in the course 
 of a very kindly criticism, as an instance of the sar- 
 casm which rendered Herder often unamiable; charac- 
 *In German " Koth," literally " mud." 
 
22 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 
 
 teristically adding this most true principle of etiquette, 
 " the proper name of a man is not like a cloak, which 
 only hangs about him, and at which one may at any 
 rate be allowed to pull and twitch ; but it is a close- 
 fitting garment, which has grown over and over him, 
 like his skin, and which one cannot scrape and flay 
 without injuring him himself." As a small boy he is 
 said to have walked in an old-fashioned way, in order 
 to distinguish himself from his schoolfellows, and to 
 have told his mother, "I begin with this. Later on 
 in life I shall distinguish myself in far other ways." 
 One cannot help thinking a little judicious whipping 
 and nonchalance at home might at this period have 
 been of some service to him. Yet the " oracular " so 
 entered into his nature, that one could ill spare it 
 now from his essence. It lends a certain antique 
 grandeur to the light leaves of poetry that are twined 
 round it. 
 
 His minute self-observation early showed itself. 
 The following recollection in his Autobiography is 
 extremely characteristic : — • 
 
 " We boys held a Sunday assembly, where each of us was to 
 produce original verses. And here I was struck by something 
 strange, which long caused me uneasiness. My poems, whatever 
 they might be, always seemed to me the best. But I soon re- 
 marked that my competitors, who brought forth very lame affairs, 
 were in the same condition, and thought no less of themselves. 
 Nay, what appeared yet more suspicious, a good lad (though in 
 such matters altogether unskilful), whom I liked in other respects, 
 but who had his rhymes made by his tutor, not only regarded 
 these as the best, but was thoroughly persuaded they were his 
 own, as he always maintained in our confidential intercourse. 
 
GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 
 
 23 
 
 Now, as this allusion and error was obvious to me, the question 
 one day forced itself upon me, whether I myself might not be 
 in the same state — whether those poems were not really better 
 than mine, and whether I might not justly appear to those boys 
 as mad as they to me ? This disturbed me much and long; for 
 it was altogether impossible for me to find any external criterion 
 of the truth ; I even ceased from producing, until at length I was 
 quieted by my own light temperament, and the feeling of my 
 own powers." 
 
 He could not see then that what really distinguished 
 him above his schoolfellows was not near so much, 
 probably, the excellence of his verses, as the power of 
 detecting and applying to his own case the general 
 law of self-deception. 
 
 Goethe was, as he intimates in " Wilhelm Meister," 
 in a passage well known to be in fact autobiographical, 
 a very inquisitive child, and as unscrupulous as spoiled 
 children are in gratifying his inquisitiveness. His 
 childish fondness for the "store-room" is rather uni- 
 versal and human than individual and personal. 
 "More than any other of the young ones I was in the 
 habit of looking out attentively to see if I could notice 
 any cupboard left open, or key standing in its lock." 
 There are few minuter bits of life in his writings than 
 his description of the predatory excursion into the 
 store-room one Sunday morning, when the key had 
 not been withdrawn. "I marked this oversight," he 
 says. He pilfered, however, with less than his usual 
 self-possession; the cook made a " stir in the kitchen," 
 and even Goethe was flurried. But he seems to have 
 had none of the ordinary childish shame and self- 
 reproach connected with the adventure ; his favourite 
 
•24 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 
 
 puppets were always dearer to him because of the 
 "French-plum" fragrance which they had acquired 
 in the scene of theft. 
 
 His delight in the theatre was the same through 
 life. He liked the little mystery. He liked still 
 better to have the key to the mystery. He was as 
 quick as any child at a pantomime to find out "the 
 man in the bear;" but it did not destroy his pleasure, 
 especially if he was able to be " the man in the bear " 
 himself; and besides, his heart was always in his eyes. 
 But what mainly fascinated him in the theatre, I think, 
 was its condensation and concentration of life into one 
 consecutive piece. His imagination was wandering, 
 digressive, microscopic, incoherent; he had the great- 
 est difficulty in grasping in one vision a consecutive 
 whole. He saw vivid points in succession, and saw 
 the continuity and growth ; but his sight was like the 
 passing of a microscope over a surface, — it laid bare 
 the transition, but did not give a connected vision. 
 He saw too intensely and too far at each point to be 
 able to sweep his eye quickly over the whole. The 
 theatre helped to remedy this defect, and he was grate- 
 ful to it; but for that very reason he never could 
 wTite successfully for the theatre. The boy's passion 
 for the theatre had one very bad effect. During the 
 French occupation of Frankfort he (then a lad of ten 
 to twelve years old) had a free admission to the French 
 theatre, which he used daily, accompanied by no older 
 friend. His mother unwisely obtained the reluctant 
 permission of his father that he should go; and his 
 consequent quick progress in French reconciled his 
 
GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 25 
 
 father to the habit. The lad had constant access be- 
 hind the scenes and in the green-room along with his 
 young French companions. Here I have little doubt 
 the natural delicacy of his mind was first rubbed off. 
 Probably he was constitutionally deficient in that ele- 
 ment of mind which shame and reverence have in 
 common {alSdtq, as the Greeks called it); and during 
 the French occupation of Frankfort, at a most suscep- 
 tible age, he was subjected to influences that would be 
 likely to have endangered the most delicate of natures. 
 He was too young, his friends imagined, for danger \ 
 but certainly he was not at all too young for that kind 
 of morbid curiosity about evil which is often more 
 tainting than evil itself. Even in the late-written 
 autobiographical recollections of his youth this is dis- 
 tinctly visible. 
 
 At the age of fourteen he was a great tale-composer; 
 and one of these tales, "The New Paris," full of the 
 genius of his later years, he has preserved in his Auto- 
 biography. It is a most characteristic tale, brimming 
 over with the self-importance of the boy, and full also 
 of the fanciful grace, the mysterious simplicity, and 
 the simple mysteriousness of his older compositions. 
 It is far the most graceful of his short tales ; and must, 
 I think, have received some touches from his older 
 hand. For my own part, I greatly prefer it to the 
 second part of " Faust." But the childlike delight in 
 puzzling his readers is the same. The scene of the 
 fairy-tale, which is autobiographic, is laid in gardens 
 discovered by him beyond the old wall of the city. 
 The tale ends with the following charming mystery :— 
 
26 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 
 
 "The porter did not speak another word; but before he let 
 me pass the entrance, he stopped me, and showed me some objects 
 on the wall over the way, while at the same time he pointed 
 backwards to the door. I understood him; he wished to im- 
 print the objects on my mind, that I might the more certainly find 
 the door which had unexpectedly closed behind me. I now took 
 good notice of what was opposite to me. Above a high wall 
 rose boughs of extremely old nut-trees, which partly covered the 
 cornice at the top. The branches reached down to a stone tablet, 
 the ornamented border of which I could perfectly recognise, 
 though I could not read the inscription. It rested on the corbel 
 of a niche, in which a finely-wrought fountain poured water from 
 cup to cup into a great basin, that formed, as it were, a little 
 pond, and disappeared in the earth. Fountain, inscription, nut- 
 trees, all stood directly one above another; I would paint it as I 
 saw it. 
 
 " Now, it may well be conceived how I passed this evening 
 and many following days, and how often I repeated to myself 
 this story, which even I could hardly believe. As soon as it was 
 in any degree possible, I went again to the Bad Wall to refresh 
 my remembrance, at least of these signs, and to look at the 
 precious door. But, to my great amazement, I found all changed. 
 Nut-trees, indeed, overtopped the wall, but they did not stand 
 immediately in contact. A tablet also was inserted in the wall, 
 but far to the right of the trees, without ornament, and with a 
 legible inscription. A niche with a fountain there was far to the 
 left, but with no resemblance whatever to that which I had seen ; 
 so that I almost believed that the second adventure was, like the 
 first, a dream; for of the door there is not the slightest trace. 
 'J'he only thing that consoles me is the observation, that these 
 three objects seem always to change their places. For in repeat- 
 ed visits to the spot, I think I have noticed that the nut-trees 
 have nioved somewhat nearer together, and that the tablet and 
 the fountain seem likewise to approach each other. Probably, 
 when all is brought together again, the door, too, will once more 
 be visible ; and I will do my best to take up the thread of the 
 
GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 2/ 
 
 adventure. Whether I shall be able to tell you what further 
 happens, or whether it will be expressly forbidden me, I cannot 
 say. 
 
 " This tale, of the truth of which my playfellows vehemently 
 strove to convince themselves, was received with great applause. 
 Each of them visited alone the place described, without confiding 
 it to me or the others, and discovered the nut-trees, the tablet, 
 and the spring, though always at a distance from each other ; as 
 they at last confessed to me, because it is not easy to conceal a 
 secret at that early age. But here the contest first arose. One 
 asserted that the objects did not stir from the spot, and always 
 maintained the same distance : a second averred that they did 
 move, and that too away from each other: a third agreed with 
 the latter as to the first point of their moving, though it seemed 
 to him that the nut-tree, tablet, and fountain rather drew near 
 together : while a fourth had something still more wonderful to 
 announce, which was, that the nut-trees were in the middle, but 
 that the tablet and the fountain were on sides opposite to those 
 which I had stated. With respect to the traces of the little door 
 they also varied. And thus they furnished me an early instance 
 of the contradictory views men can hold and maintain in regard 
 to matters quite simple and easily cleared up. As I obstinately 
 refused the continuation of my tale, a repetition of the first part 
 was often desired. I was on my guard, however, not to change 
 the circumstances much, and by the uniformity of the narrative 
 I converted the fable into truth in the minds of my hearers." 
 
 How vividly this reminds one of his mysterious 
 ■ conduct to Eckermann with regard to some portions 
 of the second part of "Faust." In that dark com- 
 position Faust asks Mephistopheles to show him He- 
 lena; and Mephistopheles tells him it can only be 
 managed by application " to goddesses who live sub- 
 lime in loneliness, but not in space, still less in 
 time — of whom to speak is embarrassment" — "the 
 
28 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 
 
 mothers;" "a glowing tripod"^ is to assure him 
 that he has attained the deepest point of all, and by 
 its shining he is to see the mothers. But there is no 
 way there, as there can be no way into the "untrod- 
 den and untreadable," where he is to be surrounded 
 by "loneliness." On hearing the "mothers" men- 
 tioned, Faust starts back shuddering; and when asked 
 why, only replies — 
 
 " Die Mutter ! Mutter ! 's klingt so vvunderlicli." 
 (The mothers ! mothers ! it has the strangest ring.) 
 
 Poor Eckermann had been set to read this remark- 
 able scene, and was, naturally, a good deal puzzled. 
 But he shall tell his own story : 
 
 " This afternoon Goethe did me the great pleasure of reading 
 those scenes in which Faust visits the mothers. The novelty and 
 unexpectedness of this subject, with his manner of reading the 
 scene, struck me so forcibly that I felt myself translated into the 
 situation of Faust, shuddering at the communication from Meph- 
 istopheles. Although I had heard and felt the whole, yet so 
 much remained an enigma to me that I felt myself compelled to 
 ask Goethe for some explanation. But he, in his usual manner, 
 wrapped himself up in mystery, looking on me with wide open 
 eyes, and repeating the words, — 
 
 ' Die Mutter ! Mutter ! 'j klingt so wanderlich.'' 
 
 " I can betray to you no more, except that I found in Plutarch 
 that in ancient Greece the mothers were spoken of as divinities. 
 
 ^ The passage is, it seems to me, a satire upon the Hegelian 
 practice of deducing everything out of " the pure nothing," by 
 what may be called the tripartite cork-screw philosophy, which 
 does everything in logical triplets, but winds itself a little higher 
 at each repetition. 
 
 1 
 
GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 29 
 
 This is all for which I am indebted to tradition; the rest is my 
 own invention. Take the manuscript home with you, study it 
 carefully, and see to what conclusion you come." 
 
 The good childlike Eckermann conscientiously 
 tasked himself to find the riddle out quite as anx- 
 iously as Goethe's boy-audience did about the door 
 in the old wall ; perhaps it was even less worth while. 
 He elaborated a most complex and difficult "view" on 
 the subject of these mothers \ but Goethe let nothing 
 further transpire. Indeed it might fairly wait at least 
 till the nut-trees, the fountain, and the tablet in the 
 old Frankfort wall had drawn together again. 
 
 There is one other slight incident of his boyhood 
 so characteristic of the man that it is worth mention- 
 ing. The calm, unabashed, self-fortified boy appears 
 in it the very image of the man. Coming out of the 
 theatre, he remarked ponderingly to a companion, 
 with reference to one of the young actors, "How 
 handsomely the boy was dressed, and how well he 
 looked ! Who knows in how tattered a jacket he may 
 sleep to-night!" The mother of the lad, happening 
 to be beside him in the crowd, took great umbrage, 
 and read Goethe a long lecture. "As I could neither 
 excuse myself nor escape from her, 1 was really em- 
 barrassed ; and when she paused for a moment, said, 
 without thinking, ' Well, why do you make such a 
 noise about it ? — to-day red, to-morrow dead. ' " These 
 words seemed to strike the woman dumb. She stared 
 at me, and moved away from me as soon as it was in- 
 any degree possible." This was not meant to give 
 6 " Heute roth, morgen todt;" a German proverb. 
 
30 GO Ell-IE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 
 
 pain ; it was only that Goethe habitually cut short 
 what annoyed him, without caring much how. He 
 had the nerve and the presence of mind, and of other 
 consequences he thought little. There is a like tale, 
 referring to later years, of a fanatical admirer bursting 
 into the bedroom of an inn where Goethe was un- 
 dressing, and throwing himself ecstatically at his feet, 
 pouring forth at the same time a set speech of adora- 
 tion. Goethe blew out the candle and jumped into 
 bed. This was truly a great inspiration;' but the 
 power of calmly warding off anything that did not 
 suit him was exercised quite without reference to the 
 moral elements of the case. Goethe had at every 
 period of his life a thoroughly kindly nature ; but 
 one, as it seems to me, quite unvisited by any devoted 
 affection. The conception of really living for another 
 probably never occurred to him. His attachments to 
 women were numerous and violent, never self-devot- 
 ing. For his mother and sister he clearly felt warmly, 
 but certainly he was neither a fond brother nor a fond 
 son. After his transition to Weimar, he visited his 
 mother only at very long intervals, and never seems 
 to have hastened to her side in any time of special 
 trouble, though he always rejoiced to see her and 
 wished to have her with him. In the last eleven years 
 of her old age he never once visited Frankfort, his 
 summer holiday always taking him in another direc- 
 tion — to Karlsbad or Marienbad. And his letters 
 
 ■f I do not know the authority for this anecdote of Goethe. 
 Mr. Emerson used to narrate it, not without keen sympathy for 
 the oppressed lion. 
 
GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 3 I 
 
 were too few to keep her well informed even of his 
 more important movements. He was, in short, a kind 
 and hearty rather than a deeply-attached brother and 
 son. If he never gave himself up to an affection, he 
 never demanded or even expected it from another. 
 Never was there a less jealous or exacting man. He 
 seldom interfered with his own calm process of self- 
 culture for the sake of another. He never expected 
 another to do it for him. And if this remark prop- 
 erly belongs to a later period of his life, yet the genial 
 but pliant and self-considering nature of his relation 
 to others is distinctly visible in his childhood. He 
 was already beginning to accommodate himself to all 
 inevitabilities, and to ward off, wherever possible, all 
 that was foreign to his nature. The extent of his 
 boyish studies was not less wide than that of his boy- 
 ish experience of life. To Latin, Greek, Italian, 
 German, English, and Hebrew, together with draw- 
 ing, music, geography, and Roman law, he had given 
 much time, and apparently made considerable progress 
 in them before he went to college at sixteen. He 
 scattered his studies, and had " alternate fits" of He- 
 brew and drawing, etc., but his retentive memory 
 did not easily lose what it had once laid hold of. 
 
 In 1764 Goethe began that habit of falling in love, 
 of which he never broke himself for the next sixty 
 years. Mr. Lewes makes light of his love for Gretchen, 
 and the scholiasts seem never to have traced her his- 
 tory. But boyish as his passion was, the separation 
 clearly caused him no less intense a suffering, and a 
 more inconsolable despair, than any subsequent adora- 
 
32 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 
 
 tion. His mind had not yet got the strength to carry 
 him through. His nature was still the dependent na- 
 ture of a home-bred boy. He had as yet no intellect- 
 ual passions, no penetrating consciousness of creative 
 power. It is clear that this kind, sisterly Gretchen, 
 was still living in his imagination when he immortal- 
 ized her name in "Faust." 
 
 The night of Joseph II. 's coronation, when he for- 
 got his secret door-key, by means of which, through 
 his mother's connivance, he used to enter long after 
 his father had supposed him to be in bed, was the 
 last of his childhood. With his separation from 
 Gretchen there came upon, him the moody humours, 
 the dark sentimental infinitudes, the confusion of 
 energies, the thankless melancholies and boisterous 
 caprices peculiar to that period of life when young 
 men are most agreeable to themselves and most 
 oppressive to mankind. The passion for Gretchen 
 had involved him with a set not quite harmless. 
 And the stiff dignity of his father was sadly wounded 
 by having his son's name mixed innocently up in 
 cases of swindling, and even forgery. He was sub- 
 jected to the companionship of an accommodating 
 tutor; and a year later, in the autumn of 1765, went 
 forth to see the world as a student of the University 
 of Leipzig. 
 
 Most poets' youth is turbid, and apt to be egotisti- 
 cal. Goethe's is not an exception. He seems to have 
 had generally, when in good health, buoyant spirits. 
 But the spiritual abysses are of course unfathomable. 
 Mr. Lewes has given some very interesting letters 
 
GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 33 
 
 concerning Goethe at this time from his college 
 friends. At Leipzig Goethe got a good deal of know- 
 ledge without much diligence, and also fell into dis- 
 sipation. The only pureMnfluence over him that he 
 felt powerful was that of Gellert, the professor of 
 belles-lettres, and one lady friend, the wife of a law 
 professor. The latter died during his studentship. 
 Gellert' s mild influence he felt painful and a reproach 
 to him, and he began to avoid it. Perhaps it was not 
 very wisely exerted. He used, says Goethe, "to hold 
 his head down, and ask us with his weeping, winning 
 voice, whether we went regularly to church, who was 
 our confessor, and whether we attended the holy com- 
 munion. If we passed this examination but ill, we 
 were dismissed with lamentations, we were more an- 
 noyed than edified ; and yet we could not help loving 
 the man heartily." Goethe's law-lectures were rather 
 jokes. He naturally preferred drawing caricatures of 
 the official persons in their official costume, to taking 
 notes. Fritters (very good ones), hot from the fire, 
 came into competition with one of these classes, and 
 were considered the more attractive. Goethe fell 
 deeply in love again at Leipzig j but he quarrelled 
 with the young lady, and he seems to say the despair 
 he felt at her loss was the impulse which plunged him 
 into dissipation. This affection was the origin of his 
 little pastoral piece, "The Lover's Humours," which 
 certainly gives promise of his future power. Besides 
 containing some fine lines, and one fair living charac- 
 ter in profile, it shows that rich fertility of ordinary 
 feeling and harmonious sentiment which must flow on 
 3 
 
34 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 
 
 long in order to temper the mind to the higher creative 
 mood. A poet who, like Gray, for instance, has no 
 flow of level feeling, loses the predisposing influences 
 from which the deeper, truer insight can alone come. 
 When the poet has reached, as it were, the ordinary 
 level of genial human emotion, then, and not sooner, 
 do his special characteristics begin to work with effect. 
 If he is not in the first place luxuriant in common' 
 feeling, he loses all the advantage of his higher 
 faculties. Goethe, like all great poets, was most luxu- 
 riant in common thought and feeling ; and when once 
 fairly afloat in that, his genius began to work. The 
 "Fellow-Sinners," which he also wrote at this same 
 time, has equal ease, but not equal warmth, with the 
 piece just mentioned, and consequently very little 
 trace of his characteristic power. From Leipzig 
 Goethe went home ill, after three years' residence, in 
 1768. His father was irritated by his delicate health, 
 and still more by anything like hypochondriacal con- 
 versation. His mother and sister paid him, as is usual 
 in such cases, something like divine honours. They 
 were moped, and delighted to have an invalid to wor- 
 ship. He looked into alchemy, and began to think 
 of Faust. 
 
 In the spring of 1770 he went to the University of 
 Strasburg, where he fell in with Herder, who first in- 
 troduced him to "The Vicar of Wakefield," the loose 
 awkward machinery of which Goethe (who never had 
 any power of constructing a plot) afterwards pardy 
 borrowed in his novel of " Wilhelm Meister." The 
 exquisite humour, and childlike simplicity of taste in 
 
GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 35 
 
 that book, are Goldsmith's own. But in the style of 
 representing nature and life Goethe is not at all unlike 
 Goldsmith. Like him, he does not impartially paint, 
 but rather vaguely indicates the principal influences 
 of the scene before him. He sketches no outlined 
 picture, at least of men — but gives one or two figures, 
 hovering too close to the eye to be caught completely 
 in any one glance, and which are presented therefore, 
 in minute yet very significant successive details, to 
 the closest conceivable scrutiny ; and for the rest, he 
 indicates only the most important inlets of accessory 
 influence in a few words of loose spacious suggestion. 
 As Goldsmith presents Dr. Primrose and his wife by 
 such minute successive touches that not till you fall 
 back from the story can you see them as a whole, and 
 represents the daughters only by the general streams of 
 influence they diffuse, the rosy and violet light their 
 characters respectively reflect, in the vaguer distance, 
 adding, too, those influences of external nature which 
 most beset the senses, but no clear landscape, — so also 
 Goethe painted in his three novels, "Werther," 
 "Meister," and finally, though with more distinctive 
 outline, and less attempt at indicating a whole charac- 
 ter or a whole landscape by isolated samples, in the 
 "Elective Affinities." We do not wonder that he 
 told Eckermann, in later years, that he found in Sir 
 Walter Scott the suggestion of a wholly new school of 
 art. That writer's strong, masterly, often hard out- 
 lines, present the most vivid possible contrast to the 
 faint fringes of that luminous nimbus which usually 
 involves his own most carefully finished figures. 
 
36 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 
 
 While at Strasburg, GoeLhe made the acquaintance 
 of the family which seemed to him the counterpart of 
 Dr. Primrose's, and in which he appeared first in the 
 character of Mr. Burchell ; exchanging it, however, 
 not for Sir William Thornhill's, but for his own. Pas- 
 tor Brion had a little parsonage at Drusenheim, six- 
 teen miles north of Strasburg, into which Goethe was 
 introduced, in the disguise of a poor and dilapidated 
 theological student, by a fellow-student. The latter 
 was attached (or becoming so) to the eldest and most 
 lively daughter, whom Goethe identified as the Olivia 
 of Goldsmith's tale. The second daughter, Fred- 
 erika, who took benign pity on the shabby theologian, 
 and captivated his fancy by her simplicity and grace, 
 reminded him of Sophia ; but she little knew that in- 
 stead of giving rise to a novel, she was starting a new 
 epoch in German criticism, and spinning the first 
 thread of a very ponderous " Frederike litteratur," 
 in which an erudition as yet unborn would discuss, 
 with prodigious learning and subtlety, after collation 
 of MS. letters, personal examination of the place, and 
 cross-questioning of aged survivors, the precise point 
 where Goethe had crossed the Sesenheim road, the 
 position of Frederika's own arbour, the date of the 
 first kisses she bestowed, and many other matters of 
 equal weight. To have spurred on heavy-armed Ger- 
 man commentators (of the class who discuss a lost 
 iota in fragments of Greek plays) into a cumbrous 
 canter of exegetical sympathy with a little affair of 
 the heart, must have been about as far removed from 
 Frederika's presentiments, as this apparatus criticus is 
 
 I 
 
GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 2)7 
 
 from the light air of the life it "expounds." Imag- 
 ine an Anthon's "edition of Tennyson's 'Miller's 
 Daughter,' with critical notes," and you have a faint 
 picture of the " Frederike litteratur. "^ Goethe acted 
 his part skilfully, and promised to "supply" occa- 
 sionally for the pastor on week-day occasions. But, 
 disgusted with his shabby appearance, he fled the next 
 day, only to change one disguise for another. He 
 came back as the innkeeper's boy, with a "christening- 
 cake" and an Alsatian patois; and when this disguise 
 was penetrated, he took his own character, and began 
 seriously to fall in love. The visit was often repeated, 
 and Frederika's heart completely gained. Goethe 
 now became uneasy. The presence of Frederika 
 pained him, though he "knew of nothing more 
 pleasant than to think of her while absent." He had 
 to free himself from this influence, which threatened 
 to introduce something foreign to his natural develop- 
 ment. He was leaving Strasburg, and once more he 
 visited the "golden children" at Sesenheim, where he 
 found a gray desolate mist settling down over the lit- 
 tle parsonage, instead of the fresh buoyant air of days 
 gone by. "I reached her (Frederika) my hand from 
 my horse ; the tears stood in her eyes, and I felt very 
 uneasy." He felt more than uneasy. These words 
 
 8 There is a profoundly learned controversy, for example, as to 
 whether one of Goethe's letters to a friend at this time was or 
 was not written on the piece of blue paper in which some comfits, 
 &c., had been sent to him from Strasburg. The question turns, 
 to a considerable extent, on whether he gave the paper-bag with 
 the comfits to the young ladies, or only the comfits out of it. It 
 is discussed with laborious good faith. 
 
38 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 
 
 copy only the blanched picture that remained in the 
 old man's memory. Frederika fell ill ; and Goethe, 
 on his return to Frankfort living in bitter suspense as 
 to the effect on her peace, and yet knowing that he 
 could not comfort her without transforming himself 
 and exchanging a quiet sentiment for real self-devo- 
 tion of spirit, became restless and miserable. That 
 his final decision was wrong is far from clear. The 
 thought of devoting himself to her gave him no joy, 
 but seemed to weigh him down. Yet it seems clear 
 that the reason lay, not in the absence of anything 
 which any other attachment ever gave, but in the re- 
 luctance which was now beginning to creep upon him 
 to devote himself and his inward life to anything out- 
 side of himself. The idea of self-development, self- 
 idealisation, as the only scope of his conscious life, 
 was beginning to fascinate him, and to gnaw at the 
 roots of his nature. If he could by one generous act of 
 self-forgetfulness have devoted himself to secure Fred- 
 erika's happiness, there seems some probability that 
 he would have secured a far happier and clearer life 
 for himself also. It was, perhaps, less the want of 
 love, — for he never seems to have felt more love, — 
 which prevented this, than the want of strength to 
 cast away the miserable dream of keeping the course 
 of his inward development free from all foreign inter- 
 ference. It was much later than this — when the self- 
 idealising vein had become more prominent — that he 
 wrote to Lavater: "The desire to raise the pyramid 
 of my existence — the base of which is already laid — 
 as high as possible in the air absorbs every other de- 
 
GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 39 
 
 sire, and scarcely ever quits me;"^ but the poison was 
 already working in him. Goethe never became a sel- 
 fish man in the coarse sense of the term. He always 
 cultivated benignant unselfish sympathies as the most 
 graceful elements in this same fancy-pyramid of his 
 existence. He was generous by nature, and would 
 give up, from kindly feeling, anything that was not of 
 the essence of himself. But it soon became his habit 
 to cultivate disinterested affection only as a subor- 
 dinate element, needful to the harmony of a universally 
 experienced nature. To have loved the goodness of 
 either God or man more devotedly than he loved its 
 reflex image in his own character, would have done 
 him more good than all the sickly pottering with the 
 " pyramid of his existence " with which he was so 
 much occupied. 
 
 It would be absurd to say all this about Goethe's 
 youthful conduct to Frederika, were it not the type of 
 what was always happening in his after-life, when he 
 knew by experience that he very much preferred to be 
 passively hampered by a wounded heart to being act- 
 ively hampered by an affectionate wife. The essence 
 of these tedious tortures was almost always the same. 
 He wished for love with limited liability; he did not 
 wish to devote himself to any one except himself. 
 This 'limited liability" did not so well meet the 
 views of the young ladies'" themselves, who were some- 
 
 9 Lewes's " Life of Goethe," vol. ii. chap. i. 
 
 10 A distinct classification of Goethe's loves has not yet been 
 added by the critics to the "chronology of the original" of his 
 writings. It would be a material help to head the different years 
 
40 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 
 
 times, to his infinite embarrassment, willing even to 
 "go to America" with him, or anywhere else. This 
 was meeting him a great deal more than half-way. 
 He could not, of course, avail himself of the sacrifice. 
 Goethe returned to Frankfort, bringing with him a 
 little harper-lad whom he had picked up at Mannheim 
 and with thoughtless kindness promised to befriend. 
 His mother, at first much perplexed, found the boy 
 lodging and employment out of the house. " Gotz 
 von Berlichingen " was now in Goethe's mind, and, 
 spurred on by his sister's incredulity as to his literary 
 perseverance, he completed it in its first form in six 
 weeks. To me it seems far the most noble as well as 
 the most powerful of Goethe's dramas. I agree with 
 Mr. Lewes, that in its first shape there are many fine 
 elements which are lost in the later and revised edition. 
 No doubt something is cut away that needed cutting 
 away, and more appearance of unity is given by the 
 condensation of Adelheid's episode. But this is the 
 part on which Goethe's imagination had really worked 
 with finest effect, and the gain to unity is a loss to 
 poetry. It is the only great production of Goethe's 
 in which a really noble, self-forgetful 7nan stands out 
 in the foreground to give us a moral standard by which 
 
 with the name or names of the ascendant star and some indica 
 lion of its apparent brightness. There were about eight A I's, 
 "heiss und leidenschaftlich geliebte," &c. ; five, at least, ^E I's, 
 with whom he stood " im innigsten Verhaltniss der Liebe ;" and, 
 finally, a great number of " holde Wesen," some of them already 
 obscured by shadows of time, who were recipients of a more 
 transient adoration. 
 
GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 4 1 
 
 to measure the meaner characters. It is the only great 
 production in which awful shadows of remorse haunt 
 the selfish and the guilty. One reads in it that 
 Goethe's mind had as yet by no means finally em- 
 braced the calm self-culture view of life — the view 
 which looked upon woman's devotion, human life, 
 indeed the whole universe itself, mainly as artistic ma- 
 terial to be assimilated by the individual constitution, 
 and at as little cost to the digestive system as that 
 constitution would allow. Fascinating as Egmont is, 
 Egmont himself is the later Goethe, the conscious 
 master-builder condescending to accept from woman 
 and man and God materials for his "pyramid of ex- 
 istence." Gotz is a very different figure; and among 
 all Goethe's masculine creatioris he stands alone — the 
 only one who did not use the world, but served it. 
 The play (in its early form) will be thought gross; but 
 it has little of that tainting impurity which turns a 
 microscope full upon the subtler workings of physical 
 passion, to the great disfigurement of some of his later 
 works. In another respect Gotz is exceptional. It is 
 curious that Adelheid in "Gotz von Berlichingen " is 
 the only feminine character of the proud passionate 
 class that Goethe ever drew; and that Maria, much 
 more like his other characters in type, is about the 
 faintest and poorest of them. With all his unmistak- 
 able wealth and inimitable grace in producing women's 
 characters, each as distinct from the other as Adelheid 
 is from Maria, they are all, Adelheid only excepted, 
 of the dependent, tender, worshipping class. Mr. 
 Thackeray's Beatrice, in "Esmond," is less com- 
 
42 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 
 
 pletely exceptional in his writings than Adelheid is in 
 Goethe's. Thackeray and Goethe are alike in this, 
 as in some other respects — both of them have drawn 
 women as living as Shakespeare's. And all three, by 
 one consent, are disposed to make their powerful 
 queen-like women bad. No doubt this is according 
 to nature ; but Sir Walter Scott must have seen the 
 exceptions, for his finest female characters (Rebecca, 
 Flora, Die Vernon, etc.) are certainly of the queenly 
 class. Goethe's predilections are explained by the 
 fact that he painted, for the most part, the women 
 who worshipped him, and it may be that he punished 
 Adelheid for not being one of them by robing her in 
 passion and in crime. She is tlie only woman in his 
 works of whom we find no autobiographical trace. 
 
 In 1772 Goethe went to Wetzlar, ostensibly to watch 
 chancery suits; and there culled some poignant expe- 
 riences for his next work, "Werther." This he did 
 not write, however, till 1774. The remarkable con- 
 trast, both in substance and form, between " Gotz " 
 and "Werther" — written within three years of each 
 other — gives, however, some insight into Goethe's 
 dramatic power and want of power. I find it asserted 
 on all hands — Mr. Lewes vehemently concurring — that 
 a poet must be a greater artist for entirely ignoring all 
 moral partialities, and, as they say, picturing life as it 
 is, not as it ought to be. There is a sense in which it 
 is true (for instance, it is a valuable criticism on Edge- 
 worthian art) : but the sense in which it is put forward 
 as a defence of the utter want of moral perspective in 
 most of Goethe's productions is certainly not that sense 
 
GOETHE A/Vn H/S INELUENCE. 43 
 
 Compare, for instance, "Gotz von Berlichingen " with 
 "Werther," "Wilhelm Meister," the "Elective Affin- 
 ities/' "Egmont," and even "Faust." In the first 
 there is as much moral evil as any appetite, however 
 eager for "things as they are," could wish; but it is 
 thrown into its right relative place by the appearance 
 in the foreground of two noble and simple characters 
 — Gotz and Elizabeth — by which all the others are 
 naturally measured. Shadows are shadows, and light 
 is light. In " Werther " the moral evil introduced is 
 far less — is, indeed, of a quiet, subtle, sentimental 
 kind — the mere heart-eating rust and destructiveness 
 of unmeasured self-indulgence ; but there is nothing 
 noble to contrast with it — nothing but the cold external 
 phantom Albert, and the floating image of Charlotte 
 reflected in such a mist of Wertherism that it has no 
 distinctness at all. What is the mere artistic eff'ect on 
 the reader's mind? Almost universally this, that the 
 picture, powerful as it is, misses its effect from the ab- 
 sence of any fine moral contrasts by which to measure 
 it. It is like the picture of a mist seen from inside. 
 Nothing adds more to the beauty of a landscape than 
 vapours rising round a mountain's brow; but then you 
 must stand out of the fog, and see the dark bold ridges 
 round which the vapours climb. In "Werther" are 
 painted wreath upon wreath of emotion, of blinding 
 doubts and shapeless passions ; no speck of firm land 
 anywhere. This will probably be conceded of "Wer- 
 ther;" but the moral part of the criticism applies 
 equally to Goethe's other works. We believe the ex- 
 raordinary want of outline in his characters to be 
 
44 G op: THE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 
 
 greatly due to this entire absence of any attempt at 
 moral proportion in all his later works. Werther is 
 made, in one letter, to say most characteristically, "I 
 scarce know how to express myself, — my power of 
 representing things is so weak,— everything swims 
 and wavers so before my mind, that I can catch no 
 outline ; but I fancy somehow that, if I had clay or 
 wax, I could succeed in modelling. If it lasts longer, 
 I shall get some clay, and begin kneading, even though 
 it be only cakes after all." Werther's mind is so dis- 
 solved, that he can only feel and grope his way in the 
 dark, as it were, to grace of form. This weakness is 
 partly the expression of an artistic difficulty Goethe 
 really felt in grasping in one glance any extensive 
 outline of thought, — a difficulty due to the microscopic 
 nature of his insight, which only travelled very slowly 
 over a large surface of life : he often modelled his 
 groups figure by figure ; the outline of the whole grew 
 up as he felt his way to it. But a part reason of this 
 was, that he had no moral graduation for his groups, — 
 no natural admirations which gave a unity to the whole 
 and determined the line of the shadows. Outline is 
 a result of comparison, — moral outline of moral com- 
 parison. You cannot compare without an implied 
 standard. The heroes in "Werther," " Wilhelm 
 Meister," "Tasso," "Faust," are such cloudy, shad- 
 owy pictures, because they are essentially sketches of 
 moral weakness without any relief in characters of 
 corresponding power. Albert, Jarno, Antonio, are 
 not foils to them — they have not the force which the 
 others want, but are simply deficient in the moral 
 
GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 45 
 
 qualities which make the former characters problems 
 of some interest. Certainly, the former are soft, the 
 latter hard. But the second set do not give strength 
 as opposed to weakness, but rigidity as opposed to 
 weakness." What is wanted all along is some dim 
 picture in the minds of Werther, Meister, Tasso, and 
 Faust, of what they would be, — what it is which would 
 lift them out of the imbecility of their purposeless 
 career. This is the element never supplied. We are 
 presented with a set of contradictions instead of con- 
 trasts. Only in Gotz is there any picture of strength 
 without hardness ; only in Weislingen is there a picture 
 of fatal irresolution that has a real vision of the career 
 by which he might have been saved. The moral owt- 
 line which Goethe's youthful remorse put into this 
 picture has raised it, considered merely as a work of 
 art, in many respects high above its fellows. So far 
 from the truth is it that the poet must have no moral 
 predilections at heart, that if he has none such, his pic- 
 
 " Goethe well knew, in physical nature, that soft things should 
 not be contrasted with hard, but with firm. He had (I am not 
 speaking ironically) an exquisitely fine sympathy with vegetable 
 life. Consider this picture of a fruit-basket in " Alexis and 
 Dora " (I quote the graceful version given among the " English 
 Hexameter Translations" published by Mr. Murray in 1847) ■ — " 
 " Silently thou arrayest the fruit in the comeliest order, 
 
 Laying the heavier gold-ball of the orange beneath ; 
 
 Next the soft-pulpt figs, that the slightest pressure disfigures ; 
 
 Lastly, the myrtle at top roofing the whole vs^ith its green." 
 If, instead of the orange, Dora had laid a cocoa-nut under the 
 figs, she would never have made such an impression on the yield- 
 ing heart of Alexis. 
 
46 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 
 
 ture becomes feeble, watery, wavering. Impartiality 
 in delineation, not impartiality in conception, is what 
 is needed. Shakespeare frequently gives no foil to the 
 character whose weakness he is delineating; but he 
 always gives it some clear vision of the nobleness and 
 the strength above it. Hamlet knows what he could do, 
 and dare not. Lady Macbeth knows what she should 
 do, and will not. Antony knows what he would do, 
 and cannot. But Faust has no glimmering of salva- 
 tion ; Werther has no gleam of what he might be ; 
 Wilhelm is a nxiYkso'p pur ef simple ; and Tasso's cha- 
 racter is then, and then only, a fine picture if it be 
 granted that he is supposed insane. It seems to me that 
 no more remarkable breakdown of the theory of the 
 "moral indifference" of art can be suggested than 
 Goethe's writings. His poetry is perfect until it rises 
 to the dramatic region, where moral actions are in- 
 volved, and a moral faith therefore needed, and then 
 it becomes blank, shadowy, feeble. "Wilhelm Meis- 
 ter" would not have been "a menagerie of tame ani- 
 mals," as Niebuhr called it with great truth, if Goethe 
 had not lost the (never strong) moral predilections of 
 younger days, but had purified his eye and heart for 
 their insight into human weakness by reverent study 
 of nobler strength. 
 
 Another criticism which has a real connection with 
 that just made is suggested by the comparison of 
 " Werther " and " Gotz." Mr. Lewes truly says, that 
 Goethe never gives enough importance to the action, 
 the progress of events. He does not develop the 
 characters essentially through the action, but on occa- 
 
 m 
 
GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 47 
 
 sion of the action. You do not feel that Gotz has 
 come in from that last scene ; it is too much a series 
 of pictures, like Hogarth's pictorial biographies; the 
 art is much greater, no doubt, if you take them in 
 succession ; but the breath of the past has not passed 
 into the present scene, each is almost intelligible in 
 separation. A very great part of the skill in " Wer- 
 ther " consists in the gradual rise of the excitement, 
 — the stages of passion ; — still it is a series of pictures; 
 there is nothing to oblige you to look back to the past 
 and forward to the future. It might begin almost any- 
 where, and stop almost anywhere, and be intelligible 
 still as a delineation of character. This is so also in 
 "Egmont." It is less so in "Gotz von Berlichingen," 
 though it is too much so there, than in any other 
 work. The past action is much more worked into the 
 essence of the following scenes than is the case of 
 "Egmont," "Meister," "Iphigenia," " Tasso," or 
 " Faust." And the obvious reason is, that the actors 
 have moral characters, and so the sense of what they 
 had done or not done hangs upon them throughout; 
 they do not turn up as complete in relation to each distinct 
 scene as if they had had no previous life: they have 
 a sense of the past, a presentiment of the future. The 
 presence of an implicit moral estimate of the charac- 
 ters does not only help art by adding outline ; for 
 moral responsibility forges many a strong link between 
 the past, present, and future, which is otherwise wanting. 
 Is it not, indeed, the strongest of all links between the 
 past and the future in actual life ? Werther's uneasiness 
 grows organically ; but it grows as a tree puts out its 
 
48 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 
 
 branches, without memory or reference to its past stages. 
 Egmont does not grow at all. Faust does not grow. 
 Tasso undergoes changes ; but only those of a sensitive- 
 plant, drawing in with every touch, expanding at every 
 sunbeam. All Goethe's feminine creations grow; but 
 usually it is the growth of affection only. The only 
 portions of a coherent drama that Goethe ever wrote 
 are the Gretchen elements in "Faust." That is the 
 highest drama in every sense, and one of the most es- 
 sential elements in it is a deep and true remorse. 
 
 After his return from Wetzlar, and publication of 
 " Gotz " and "Werther," Goethe became a famous 
 man. The effect of this fame upon himself was cer- 
 tainly very great. Not only are the letters to Kestner 
 clearly written under great excitement after the publi- 
 cation, but other correspondences which he then began 
 are far more dizzy than "Werther" itself. His letters 
 to the Countess von Stolberg are mostly mystical emo- 
 tional quavers. This young lady he never saw. They 
 struck up an inarticulate attachment on the strength 
 of "Werther." Goethe rushed into a correspondence 
 with her of this description : " My dear one, — I will 
 call you by no name; for what are the names — friend, 
 sister, lover, bride, wife, or even a word that expresses 
 a union of all these names, — compared with the very 
 feeling itself to which — I can write no more ; your 
 letter has come upon me at a strange moment. — Adieu 
 — (written at) the very first moment." ^'^ And some 
 of these remarkable letters are more incoherent still. 
 
 12 Quoted by Diintzer in his " Frauenbilder aus Goethe's 
 Leben," p. 271. 
 
GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 49 
 
 So greatly did Goethe err in afterwards representing 
 "Werther" as setting his mind free from the fever 
 of sentimentalism that not till after its publication did 
 he fully succumb to it. 
 
 Introduced by his celebrity as a writer to many 
 eminent men, Goethe began to see and to study a far 
 wider and more various field of social life than he 
 ever attempted to delineate. It might be matter of 
 surprise that in so freely-moving a plot as that of 
 " Wilhelm Meister " Goethe should not have antici- 
 pated the easy sketches of character which Dickens 
 and Thackeray have made so popular, and thus effect- 
 ively used his large experience of social life] for he 
 never willingly let a grain of real experience go un- 
 used. The reason obviously is, that he had so little 
 of the humour which makes sketches of superficial life 
 and manners living and agreeable. His remarks on 
 common men and manners and on uncommon men 
 and manners are always subtle, often amusing ; but 
 you need to have his personal comments to give his 
 descriptions of these trivial matters any interest; he 
 has not the art of making his characters speak so as to 
 explain their own folly; he cannot give just that touch 
 of caricature by which Dickens effected this ; he can- 
 not introduce that background of fine irony by which 
 Thackeray turned men into critics of themselves. He 
 understood every-day German life as well as either 
 Dickens or Thackeray understood every-day English 
 life. Nothing could be much more skilful than his 
 accounts, for instance, of the prophetic Lavater (whom 
 Mr. Lewes most uncharitably and untruly terms a 
 4 
 
1 
 
 50 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 
 
 "born hypocrite," quite in contradiction to Goethe's 
 latest and maturest estimate), and of Basedow the 
 educational reformer, — the one a man of real power, 
 spoiled by being a lady's preacher and by the needful 
 devices for keeping up popularity which this involved ; 
 the other a coarse, self-indulgent, unscrupulous, and 
 exceedingly dirty philanthropist, who characteristic- 
 ally enough had the greatest horror of baptism/^ The 
 only element wanting in Goethe's descriptions is, not 
 a perception in them which is to us ridiculous, but a 
 thorough perception and enjoyment of the ridiculous 
 part. He can see a full-blown absurdity, but not the 
 delicate transition by which real life passes into unreal- 
 ity. His " Plundersweilern Fair," and other things 
 of that description written at this time, and his sub- 
 sequent comic works (such at least as I know), of which 
 Mr. Lewes thinks the "Triumph of Susceptibility" a 
 fair specimen, are mere farces, — laughable on the 
 stage, perhaps, but tiresome to read. " Bombastes 
 Furiosu" gives a good idea of this kind of produc- 
 tion, but seems to me more amusing. It is strange 
 that so great a poet had not a quicker eye for the 
 boundary-line between reality and unreality, between 
 things and words ; he was never quite out of danger 
 
 1'^ Schlosser, in his " History of the Eighteenth Century," tells 
 us that Basedow had a long dispute with his wife and the clergy- 
 man, in which both of them used all possible arguments and 
 entreaties to induce him to give up the notion of having his 
 daughter baptised " Prsenumerantia Elementaria Philanthropia," 
 partly, I suppose, in ridicule of the ceremony, and partly as a 
 puff of his Philanthropic Academy at Dessau. 
 
GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 5 1 
 
 of mistaking sham pathos for true ; he had never the 
 eye of a great humorist for the subtle distinction 
 between the ring of hollow and of solid metal in 
 others, not always even in himself. A thin vein of 
 genuine trash may be traced both in his compositions 
 and his personal life, — a kind of inanity to which 
 indeed all men are subject, but which a man with real 
 humour would immediately have detected in himself 
 and suppressed on the spot. I may take as instances 
 the execrable sentimental device of giving an artificial 
 appearance of life to Mignon's corpse, in the last part 
 of " Wilhelm Meister" (against which Schiller meekly 
 but hesitatingly protested), — or, in actual life, the 
 ponderous sentimentality that induced Goethe, at the 
 mature age of thirty-three, being seized with a taste 
 for inscriptions, actually to engrave on a big stone in 
 his garden at Weimar some lines beginning, " Here 
 the lover has mused in silence on his beloved;" nor 
 does it appear that he ever suffered from nausea on 
 beholding it. This sort of unreality was in the atmo- 
 sphere, no doubt ; but Goethe was proof against so 
 much malaria that was also in the atmosphere, that it 
 is worthy of notice — especially in connection with the 
 little artistic use he made of his wide experience of 
 contemporary manners — that he was not able to keep 
 himself completely free from this. His observations 
 on society, which were very acute and rich and vari- 
 ous, he threw into the form of epigrammatic maxims, 
 and stowed them away in every gap and corner — 
 suitable or unsuitable — of his many works. He used 
 them but very little — owing, I think, to the unfitness 
 
52 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 
 
 for successful manners-painting I have just indicated — 
 in tlie really concrete delineation of the times he lived 
 in and the society he had himself observed. 
 
 Soon after Goethe's literary fame was established, 
 in the Christmas of the year 1774, he was introduced 
 to Anna Elizabeth Schonemann, whose mother, the 
 widow of a rich Frankford banker, was one of the 
 very few who at that time ever thought of assembling 
 fashionable society in their houses so often as every 
 evening in the season. To this young lady, so familiar 
 in Goethe's writings as Lili, the poet now transferred 
 his affections. His father and mother had been anxious 
 that he should marry a quiet girl in their own circle, 
 to whom he had been thrice assigned by a marriage- 
 lottery in the picnics of the previous year — Anna 
 Sibylla Miinch — but he regarded this parental view 
 as one in which it was impossible to concur, although 
 in the meantime he was quite ready to be affectionate. 
 To Lili, on the other hand, he was really warmly 
 attached, and for a time betrothed ; but neither his 
 father's pride nor his own found it easy to bear the 
 reluctance felt towards the engagement by Lili's 
 friends, who knew that Goethe had neither that 
 amount of money nor of prestige to offer, for which, 
 as it is said, not only the family, but the bank itself, 
 had a craving. Poetry was no object. Goethe wrote 
 many of his most exquisite lyrics under the inspiration 
 of this attachment, sending them simultaneously to the 
 young lady and to the newspaper." It is curious to 
 
 1* The lovely song, " Warum ziehst du mich unwiderstehlich " 
 
GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 53 
 
 note how all Goethe's finest lyrics cluster round his 
 attachments. Few things else seem ever to waken in 
 him the same tones of unconscious airy melody. His 
 other poetry, often exquisitely fine, has the polish of 
 high art upon it, — but his lyrics seem to escape as un- 
 consciously from the essence of the earth and air as 
 th"e scent from a violet, or the music from a bird. 
 Some of Goethe's finest lyrics sprang up at Leipzig 
 under the genial influence of Kathchen Schonkopf ; 
 others, but scarcely of equal loveliness, owe their 
 origin to Frederika; the third, and as yet the rich- 
 est group, belong to Lili ; but curiously enough, the 
 richest cluster, I think, of all, — that which most re- 
 sembles a lapful of fresh wildflowers^ — was written in 
 1803, when Goethe was fifty-four years old, and is 
 due, we imagine (from what Mr. Lewes tells us con- 
 cerning the origin of the "Elective Affinities"), as 
 well as the sonnets written two or three years later, to 
 Minna Herzlieb, the ward of the Jena bookseller. 
 The engaged or married ladies he adored appear to 
 have had a more prosaic influence upon him. 
 
 But to return to Lili. After a good deal of torture, 
 due to the elder representatives of both families, a 
 worthy Fraulein Delf, much given to mediation, pro- 
 cured a tacit consent of the parents on both sides, and 
 Goethe was engaged to Lili. This seems to have on 
 
 was, as Diintzer has ascertained, composed in March, 1775, and 
 sent to Jacobi for insertion in the " Iris " at the same time. So 
 of other songs. Of course names were not given; but the entire 
 absence of any reserve in the sentimental life of that period is 
 very curious, 
 
54 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 
 
 the whole made him unhappy. His sister, who was 
 married and at a distance, took a strong view against 
 the match, and wrote letters about it ; the old Rath, 
 she thought, would never so accommodate himself to 
 the arrangement as to make Lili happy ; Goethe would 
 be obliged still to live with his father and mother, as 
 the custom was, and a young lady of family and wealth 
 would put the former out. In short his sister was sure 
 that for LiW s sake, he ought to break off the engage- 
 ment, intimating, in fact, as Goethe implies, that she 
 found her own husband but dull company, and that 
 Goethe could never make up to Lili for the splendour 
 she would resign. So, after some agonies, he sudden- 
 ly departed for Switzerland with the two Counts von 
 Stolberg, on a probationary absence, only hinting to 
 Lili that he was going, for he could not bear to take 
 leave. It appears to have been his intention, if he 
 could have persuaded himself to endure the pain, to 
 break off the engagement by going on into Italy ; if 
 not, as proved to be the case, to return and see what 
 fate should give. It is not easy to imagine, from the 
 style of Goethe's narrative, that all this effort was made 
 for Lili's sake. He admits that she never hazarded a 
 doubt of her own happiness, and was willing to follow 
 him even to America; a solution which distressed her 
 lover extremely. " My father's good house, but a few 
 hundred yards from her own, was at all events a more 
 tolerable condition to take up with than distant uncer- 
 tain possibilities beyond the sea." They were actu- 
 ally engaged at this time ; and it does not seem very 
 generous in Goethe to have left Lili without explana- 
 
GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 55 
 
 tion to fight his battles for him with her reluctant 
 friends, in order to try experiments on his own forti- 
 tude. 
 
 This flight into Switzerland, while pursued by Lili's 
 image, gave rise to one or two of his loveliest lyrics. 
 As the heavy white masses of the distant Alps rose up 
 in the early dawn, at the foot of the broad lake of 
 Zurich, bordered by gently sloping cornfield banks, he 
 composed the lovely little poem of which I have at- 
 tempted to produce an English version. Goethe was 
 at the time debating in his mind his future relation to 
 Lili. I must premise, with Mr. Lewes, that Goethe 
 is untranslatable. Some dim vision of the beauty of 
 the poem may, however, glimmer through the follow- 
 ing semi-transparent medium : — 
 
 I draw new milk of life, fresh blood, 
 
 From the free universe, — 
 Ah, Nature, it is all too good 
 
 Upon thy breast, kind nurse ! 
 Waves rock our boat in equal time 
 
 With the clear-plashing oar, 
 And cloudy Alps with head sublime 
 
 Confront us from the shore. 
 
 Eyes, have ye forgot your yearning ? 
 Golden dreams, are ye returning? 
 Gold as ye are, O, stay above ! 
 Here too is life — here too is love. 
 
 Hosts of stars are blinking 
 
 In the lake's crystal cup. 
 Flowing mists are drinking 
 
 The tow'ring distance up. 
 
56 GOETHE AND I/IS INFLUENCE. 
 
 Morning winds are skimming 
 
 Round the deep-shadowed bay, 
 In its clear mirror swimming 
 
 The ripening harvests play. 
 
 On the summit of the St. Gothard Goethe felt that 
 his German home and love behind him were sweeter 
 than all the wide warm loveliness into which the 
 bright Ticino rushed eagerly before his eyes ; and he 
 returned, with hesitation in his heart, to Frankfort. 
 Lili, naturally hurt at his unexplained absence, was 
 soon as affectionate as ever, and the poet as happy; 
 but it did not last long. The hurt pride at feeling 
 himself rather tolerated than welcomed by her friends, 
 and the dread of domestic fetters, returned. Gradu- 
 ally he broke the chain, and strove to flirt with other 
 young ladies ; but he was miserable. In this state he 
 began " Egmont." 
 
 An invitation to visit the young Duke of Weimar 
 was now very welcome to him. His father opposed 
 his going, thinking it would place him in a dependent 
 position. Moreover, the Weimar friend in whose 
 company he had been invited to make the journey 
 never appeared, and his father treated the mistake as 
 an intentional slight. But Goethe's portmanteau 
 was ready packed, his mind set upon change. His 
 father proposed to give him money for an Italian 
 journey. Goethe consented to go by Heidelberg and 
 the Tyrol to Italy, if in Heidelberg he found no trace 
 of the missing Weimar escort. There lived Fraulein 
 Delf, the mediating lady who had in vain secured the 
 consent of the reluctant parents to his engagement 
 
GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 57 
 
 with Lili. Her head was now busy with mediating a 
 substitute scheme. She hoped to marry him to a lady 
 at the Mannheim Court, and connect him permanently 
 with it after his return from Italy. A courier came 
 from Frankfort in the middle of the night to announce 
 the arrival of the Weimar friend and to recall Goethe 
 immediately. Fraulein Delf gave vehement counsel, 
 urging him to decline, and go on into Italy. Goethe 
 was in favour of Weimar, and ordered the postchaise. 
 Long he disputed by candlelight with this lady, while 
 an impatient postilion fidgeted about. At length Goethe 
 tore himself away, apostrophising his astonished friend 
 in the words of Egmont : "Child, child no more. 
 Lashed as by invisible spirits, the sun-steeds of time 
 whirl on the light car of our destiny ; and for us it 
 only remains in calm self-possession to hold fast the 
 reins, and here to the right, there to the left, — here 
 from a rock, there from a precipice, — to direct the 
 wheels. Whither we are going who can tell? Scarcely 
 can we remember whence we came." The "sun-steeds 
 of time," with the aid of the visible postilion, took 
 him safely to Weimar. Goethe, reluctant to talk of 
 Providence, intimates, however, that this epoch in his 
 life was providential, and that the " daemonic " ele- 
 ment to which a man ought to concede "no more 
 than is fitting" was represented by his father, his own 
 impatience, and good Fraulein Delf,— -all eager to 
 shatter his Weimar prospects. I am not at all sure 
 that the reverse was not true — that the young Duke of 
 Weimar may not have been the "daemonic" element 
 at this crisis, while the elderly lady may have spoken 
 
S8 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 
 
 the voice of higher warning, — if not in her match- 
 making views, at least so far as she resisted the attrac- 
 tion to Weimar. Goethe had now reached the ma- 
 turity of his powers, and henceforth we shall find his 
 character more distinctly written in his works than in 
 the monotonous incidents of his external life. 
 
 There is no part of Mr. Lewes's book which is more 
 interesting and picturesque than the delineation of the 
 Weimar localities and the new life the poet led. He 
 has himself visited the place, and surveyed everything 
 with a quick and thoughtful eye. The garden-house 
 on the banks of the Ilm — the larger house to which 
 Goethe removed in the town — the open-air theatricals 
 at Ettersburg — and the life of the Court, are all grace- 
 fully and vividly sketched. Far from convincing me, 
 however, that the new life had no injurious effect on 
 Goethe's mind, even Mr. Lewes's apologetic narrative 
 strengthens a strong impression in the other direction. 
 That it made Goethe into a "servile courtier," no one 
 with the faintest insight into the man could for a moment 
 dream. Karl August, the young Duke of Weimar, 
 was a lad of nineteen years — eight years younger than 
 the poet ; and though possessed of a strong will and 
 a certain personal fascination, Goethe was far too con- 
 scious of his own superiority of mind to become a 
 courtier, had even his temperament allowed it. But 
 it did not. He was a very proud man, and one more- 
 over whose life-long principle it was to resist every 
 encroachment of external influence on his own in- 
 dividuality of character. He never endured inter- 
 ference with himself; but he frequently interfered with 
 
 \ 
 
GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 59 
 
 remonstrances in order to tranquillise the mad humours 
 of his young master. When Goethe said of himself 
 in his old age, that he had always been conscious of 
 an innate aristocracy which made him feel perfectly 
 on a level with princes, and this too in its fullest mea- 
 sure before as well as since receiving the diploma which 
 ennobled him, he spoke no more than the truth. He 
 could endure any criticism ; but he could not endure 
 any assumption of a right to influence and direct him. 
 When the old poet Klopstock wrote to remonstrate 
 with him, during his first year at Weimar, for the wild 
 life he was encouraging at court, Goethe wrote back a 
 polite reply as brief and haughty in its reserve as he 
 could well have returned to 9, college companion. And 
 it is as clear as day that the majestic mannerism of his 
 later years was the stiffness of princeliness itself, not 
 the petrified ceremony of a prince's satellite. But 
 nevertheless it seems clear enough that some of the 
 worst tendencies of his mind were fostered by his 
 Weimar life. The man who replied to his dearest 
 friends, Charlotte Kestner and her husband, when they 
 expostulated on the public exposure of private relations, 
 "Ye of little faith! Could you feel the thousandth 
 part of what ' Werther ' is to a thousand hearts, you 
 would not reckon the sacrifice you have made towards 
 it," — who surprised Fraulein Delf with the assurance 
 that " the sun-steeds of time were whirling on the light 
 car of his destiny," — was not the man to be improved 
 by living in a narrow circle of admirers where none of 
 the humiliating and busy indifference of the great world 
 could ever draw his keen eye away from himself to 
 
6o GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 
 
 those many high qualities of practical minds in which 
 he himself was relatively deficient. It was good, even 
 intellectually, for Goethe to have objects above him- 
 self; yet he left a social world, in which he must often 
 have felt himself an insignificant learner, for a literary 
 world in which all the talent was of the same kind as 
 his own, but far beneath it. 
 
 Again, what was far worse than this, the Weimar 
 atmosphere was stagnant with moral evil. Laborious 
 indolence and pleasure-seeking were the great occupa- 
 tions of the greater part of the Court. The women 
 had no employment at once so fashionable and inter- 
 esting as intrigues. " There is not one of them," says 
 Schiller, "who has not had a liaison;^' and women's 
 influence was the only influence which completely 
 reached Goethe. "The first years at Weimar were 
 perplexed with love-affairs," as he told Eckermann ; 
 and what love-affairs! One of them at least with a 
 married woman, whose children were growing up 
 around her to learn that the family-bond had no 
 sacredness in their mother's heart, and that fidelity 
 and purity were far less noble than passion in the eyes 
 of the great poet of their nation. We know well that 
 this was the sin of the century, and may not be in any 
 large measure attributed to the personal laxity of any 
 one man's conscience. But all the more is it to be 
 lamented that Goethe left a social atmosphere where 
 domestic virtue was held comparatively sacred, for one 
 where it was almost a thing unknown. There was in- 
 definitely more difference between Frankfort morals 
 and Weimar morals than between the social virtue of 
 
 \ 
 
GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 6l 
 
 a wholesome busy city like Manchester and that of an 
 idle watering-place cursed with barracks. Weimar was 
 a place, like all idle places, eager for self-conscious 
 stimulants of enjoyment. And it acted upon Goethe 
 accordingly. He became more devoted to that cultus 
 of his own character, which would not, perhaps, have 
 been his worst occupation in a Court where there was 
 very little so much worth attending to, if unfortunately 
 it had not been the very worst influence for that cha- 
 racter that he should thus affectionately nurse it. He 
 never became, indeed, at all deeply infected either 
 with the vulgar selfishness or with the frivolity of 
 Court-life. It did not act upon him in this way. He 
 had not been a year at Weimar, before he felt its genu- 
 ine hollowness, and busied himself as much as in him 
 lay with the regular discharge of official duty, and the 
 busy earnestness of artistic creation. Always generous 
 by nature, always deeply touched with the sight of 
 suffering, it is pleasant, but not surprising, to find him 
 giving away a sixth part of his income in charity, and 
 still less surprising to find him doing it in secret, so 
 that his left hand knew not what his right hand did. 
 There never was a man less influenced by the love of 
 approbation : he never through his whole life seems 
 even to have felt the passion strongly agitating him, 
 except perhaps in the flush of the months of his " Wer- 
 ther"-fame. His pride alone would have raised him 
 above it, even if he had not had so strong a feeling of 
 contempt for the public judgment that he was scarcely 
 shaken by disapprobation, and scarcely confirmed by 
 approbation. He had a thorough contempt for osten- 
 
1 
 
 62 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 
 
 tation. When he was giving a poor man two hundred 
 dollars a year, no one knew of it ; and moreover he 
 continued to give it, in spite of rather graceless and 
 ungrateful acceptance of his charity. He pointed out 
 calmly to his pensioner the unfitness of such conduct, 
 and gave on. The way in which Weimar affected him 
 so unfavourably was not by the contagion of selfish- 
 ness, but rather by giving him such an inferior world 
 with which to compare himself — by the easy victory it 
 permitted him in active goodness on the one hand, 
 and by the contagion of impurity on the other. Goethe 
 had no active religious conviction, and of all men 
 most needed to look up to his companions : he was in 
 almost every direction, at this time, obliged to look 
 down. "The mind," he said, "is d7-iven back all 
 the more into itself, the more one accommodates one- 
 self to other men's inodes of life, instead of seeking 
 to adapt them to one's own : it is like the relation of 
 the musician to his instrument" — a remarkable indi- 
 cation that these "other men's " life was on a platform 
 below rather than above the speaker. Goethe felt that 
 his companions were in a sense his "instruments," 
 from whom he could bring forth fine music, — which 
 was, however, his own music after all, not theirs. But 
 he would not have felt so amongst men and women 
 who, even in mere practical power and domestic vir- 
 tue and devotedness, called forth his reverence as 
 standing higher than himself. 
 
 The thing that jars upon the mind throughout 
 Goethe's life, in his letters, his books — everything he 
 said and did — is the absence of anything like devotion 
 
GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 63 
 
 to any being, human or divine, morally above himself. 
 God he regarded as inscrutable, and as best left to 
 reveal Himself. The future life was not yet. From 
 all men he withdrew himself in a sort of kindly isola- 
 tion — sympathising with them, aiding them, helping 
 them against themselves, understanding them, but 
 never making any of them the object of his life. 
 The object of his life, so far as any man can con- 
 sciously and permanently have one, was the comple- 
 tion of that ground-plan of character presented to the 
 world in Johann Wolfgang Goethe. To perfect this 
 he denied himself much both of enjoyment and real 
 happiness ; to keep this ground-plan intact, or to build 
 upon it, he was always ready to sacrifice either himself 
 or anybody else. To this he sacrificed Frederika's 
 love, Lili's love, and his own love for them — the 
 friendship of any who attempted to interfere with his 
 own modes of self-development ; to this he would at 
 any time have sacrificed, had he supposed it needful, 
 the favour of the duke and his position at Court; to 
 this, in fact, his life was one long offering. There 
 was nothing Goethe would not have given up for 
 others, except any iota of what he considered to be 
 his own. individuality. To tend that was his idolatry. 
 And that this self-worship grew rapidly upon him at 
 Weimar, no one can doubt. Only compare the tone 
 of " Wilhelm Meister " with that of '' Gotz von Ber- 
 lichingen." Compare even his letters to the Frau von 
 Stein with his letters to the Kestners. There is a real 
 sense of humility and remorse gleaming out at times in 
 the latter: with all his susceptibility to other persons' 
 
1 
 
 64 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 
 
 sufferings, there is nothing but at most a sense of error, 
 regret at past mistakes, generally merged in satisfaction 
 at his own steady progress towards "clearness and self- 
 rule," pervading the former. Compare the picture 
 of the cold, self-absorbed, remorseless Lothario, held 
 up as it is to admiration as a kind of ideal, with the 
 ideal of Goethe's earlier days. Compare even Wil- 
 helm Meister himself, who is meant, we are told, to be 
 a progressive character, with Werther, who is meant 
 to be a deteriorating character. With all his hysterics, 
 there is far more trace of humility and sense of the 
 wrong he is doing, and even effort to undo it, in the 
 latter than in the former. Mr. Lewes discovers a 
 "healthy" moral in Wilhelm Meister — that he is 
 raised from "mere impulse to the subordination of 
 reason, from dreaming self-indulgence to practical 
 duty, from self-culture to sympathy." This is a mere 
 dream of Mr. Lewes's. Wilhelm seems to me to 
 become, so far as he changes at all, more selfish as he 
 goes on. He begins with a real deep affection, and 
 ends with the most cold and insipid of "preferences," 
 which he is far from sure is a preference. He begins 
 with resisting, and yet finally yields to, mere physical 
 passion. He begins with an enthusiasm for, at least 
 one art, and ends with an enthusiasm for none. He 
 begins with a passionate love of fidelity, and ends 
 with worshipping Lothario, whose only distinction is 
 calm superiority to such ideas. In short, he begins a 
 kind-hearted enthusiastic milksop, and ends a kind- 
 hearted milksop, with rather more experience and 
 more judgment, but without any enthusiasm and with 
 
GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 65 
 
 far laxer morality. If this be Goethe's notion of 
 progress, it gives but a painful idea of Goethe. The 
 only element in which Wilhelm is made to grow better 
 is knowledge and coolness \ in everything else he 
 degrades. You can see that even ''Werther," much 
 more "Gotz," was written with a much distincter 
 feeling of right and wrong, of the contrast between 
 real strength and real weakness, between domestic 
 purity and guilt, than "Wilhelm Meister. " 
 
 And in purity of thought the change is more remark- 
 able still. Goethe was not infected with the common- 
 place selfishness and frivolity of Court life — he was 
 only driven in upon himself. He was infected with 
 its impurity. His former writings had been coarse ; 
 but they were not coarser than the day, not so coarse 
 as Shakespeare, not near so coarse as Fielding. "Get- 
 ter, Helden und Wieland" and "Gotz" are delicate 
 to many parts of " Tom Jones." But while most of 
 his later writings are perhaps less coarse than his 
 earlier, they are indefinitely more tainting. The frag- 
 ment of the "Letters from Switzerland," at first 
 intended to be pieced on to the beginning of " Wer- 
 ther," several portions of "Wilhelm Meister," not a 
 few minor poems, and parts of the "Elective Affin- 
 ities," emulate Rousseau in their prurience. The 
 "plague of microscopes" with which, as Emerson 
 says, Goethe was pursued, follows about everywhere 
 that aweless mind. Schiller (quoted by Mr. Lewes) 
 says, that "whatever is permitted to innocent nature 
 is permitted also" to the artist; but Goethe gazes 
 away every shrinking reserve of "innocent nature" 
 5 
 
^ 
 
 ^ GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 
 
 with bold curious eye. Tliis he seems to have learned 
 in Weimar society. Goethe was in his own life higher, 
 I believe, than he was in his works — fuller in sympa- 
 thy and generous self-denials for others' sake than he 
 ever makes his heroes to be. But his w^orks betray 
 the moral standard by which he consciously moulded 
 himself, — the absolute prominence in his mind of the 
 aim of self-cultivation — the infinite value he attached 
 to ?/;?moral self-mastery as an end and as in itself far 
 higher than any duty. for the sake of which he might 
 master himself — the great deficiency of fidelity of 
 nature, and of the purity with which fidelity is usually 
 associated, and the general absence of moral rever- 
 ence. They also reflect the geniality, the large charity, 
 the intellectual wisdom, the complete independence of 
 praise or blame, and the thorough truthfulness of mind 
 which marked him throughout life. Goethe never 
 deceived himself about himself. 
 
 During the ten years of Weimar life, before his 
 Italian journey, Goethe's external life had but few re- 
 corded events. He was ennobled in 1782. He car- 
 ried on a correspondence of billets with the Frau von 
 Stein, which are extremely tiresome reading, and were 
 never meant for publication. Mr. Lewes is very de- 
 sirous to prove that all the trifling was on the lady's 
 side, and that whenever she drew back from Goethe's 
 advances, it was only in the spirit of a flirt. It is not 
 a charitable view. In the complete absence of her 
 letters, we know nothing about the matter. It does 
 not seem at all impossible that visitings of remorse 
 and delicacy, and real doubt of the disinterested de- 
 
GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 67 
 
 votedness of a man who considered so little her other 
 domestic and social relations, may have led, in the 
 earlier years of this connection, to the vibrations of 
 feeling which are reflected in Goethe's replies. There 
 is no need to judge the matter at all. It is almost the 
 only case in which Mr. Lewes paints another in dark 
 colours, without justification, for his hero's sake. 
 
 During these years Goethe wrote "Iphigenia" and 
 a part of "Tasso" in their earliest shape; and worked 
 hard at ''Egmont," besides the composition of the 
 finest part of " Wilhelm Meister." Nothing is more 
 striking than the infinite distance between Goethe's 
 success in imagining women and men. The feminine 
 characters in Goethe's works are as living, we dare al- 
 most say more living than Shakespeare's, though there 
 is much less variety and range in his conceptions of 
 them. His men are often creditable sketches ; some- 
 times faint, sometimes entirely shadowy ; they are 
 never so lifelike that we cannot imagine them more 
 so. But his women are like most of his lyrical poems 
 — perfect. " My idea of women is not one drawn from 
 external realities," said Goethe to Eckermann, "but 
 it is inborn in me, or else sprang up, God knows how. 
 My delineations of women are therefore all successful. 
 They are all better than are to be met with in actual 
 life." "The more incommensurable and incompre- 
 hensible for the understanding, a poetic production is, 
 so much the better," he said on another occasion; 
 and judged by this standard also, almost all his women 
 (the dull Theresa and Natalia in the later part of 
 "Wilhelm Meister " alone excepted) are better than 
 
68 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 
 
 almost any of his men. His men are conceptions 
 badly outlined ; his women spring up unconsciously 
 out of his nature, exactly like his smaller poems. 
 Mariana, Philina, and Mignon in " Wilhelm Meister," 
 Cliirchen in"Egmont," Gretchen in "Faust," and 
 Ottilie in the "Elective Affinities," are characters 
 anyone of which would immortalise a poet. We think 
 the reason of this lies deep in the nature of Goethe's 
 genius. 
 
 There is a tiresome dispute whether he is more ob- 
 jective or subjective. He is really as much one as 
 the other ; for you find in all his poems at once a 
 vague indefinite self, reflecting a defined and clearly 
 outlined influence which impresses that self. His own 
 mind is the sheet of water which reflects the image, 
 and you see only that it stretches vaguely away far 
 beyond and beneath the image it is reflecting; but 
 what catches the eye is the clear outline of the re- 
 flected object in the water. His imagination was pas- 
 sive, not active; it did not, like Shakespeare's, by its 
 own inherent energy mould itself into living shapes, 
 and pass into new forms of existence. It always 
 waited to be acted on, to be determined, to receive 
 an influence ; and then, while under the spell or pres- 
 sure of that influence, it pictured with perfect fidelity 
 the impressing power. Goethe was so far dramatic 
 that he was never absorbed in depicting the mere re- 
 sult on himself, but rather reflected back with faithful 
 minuteness the influence which produced these results. 
 Where (as in "Werther," and perhaps " Tasso ") he 
 was mainly occupied in painting the internal effect 
 
GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 69 
 
 produced, he was far vaguer and less successful than 
 where he lent his imagination to reflect truly the ex- 
 ternal influence which had thus deeply affected it. 
 But still it was a passive imagination — i. e., one which 
 acted under the spell of external influences, and gen- 
 erally sensuous influences — not one which went volun- 
 tarily forth to throw itself into new forms and moulds. 
 Hence, though far the best part of his poems is that 
 .in which external objects and social impulses are ren- 
 dered again, you always find the vague mental reflect- 
 ing surface by which they are thus given back ; you 
 always have both the deep dim Goetheish mirror and 
 the fine outlined object which skims over it. The 
 two never coalesce, as is the case in Shakespeare. If 
 you have a Gretchen living before your eyes, you must 
 have with her, as the condition of her existence, the 
 shadowy Faust whom she impresses. The point of 
 sight of the picture requires the presence of Faust; 
 not because she is delineated through the effect pro- 
 duced on Faust's nature, but because you really only 
 see that portion of her nature which was turned to 
 Faust, and no other side. It may be noticed that, 
 perfect as Goethe's women are, they are never very 
 finely drawn in their mutual influence on each other ; 
 it is only in the presence of the lover who is for the 
 time Goethe's representative that they are so strikingly 
 painted. Even their lovely songs only express the 
 same aspect of their character. Indeed it is of the 
 essence of Goethe's feminine characters to express 
 themselves in song. Each of them is a distinct foun- 
 tain of song. But the current of all these songs sets 
 
1 
 
 JO GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 
 
 straight towards the poet himself, who is always in 
 love with these creations of his own genius. As an 
 instance, take the lovely little song of Clarchen in 
 ■'Egmont," of which I attempt an English version 
 for my non-German readers : — 
 
 Freudvoll Cheerful 
 
 Und leidvoll And tearful, 
 
 Gedankenvoll sein ; With quick busy brain ; 
 
 Langen Swayed hither 
 
 Und bangen And thither 
 
 In schwebender Pein ; In fluttering pain ; 
 
 Himmelhoch jauchzend, Cast down unto death — 
 
 Zum Tode betriibt : Soaring gaily above; 
 
 Gliicklich allein Oh, happy alone 
 
 1st die Seele, die liebt. Is the heart that can love. 
 
 If Goethe paints two women alone in each other's 
 company, the scene either fails, or they are both talk- 
 ing away towards some imaginary masculine centre; 
 and instead of being a telling dialogue, it falls into 
 two monologues. Hence Goethe seldom attempts this 
 at all. The scene between the two Leonoras is the 
 worst in "Tasso," and those between Ottilie and 
 Charlotte the worst in the "Elective Affinities;" that 
 between Clarchen and her mother in "Egmont" is 
 really only a soliloquy of Clarchen's; that between 
 Elizabeth and Maria in " Gotz " paints no mutual in- 
 fluence of the women on each other — they are simply 
 placed in juxtaposition. 
 
 And Goethe's imaginative power is not only passive, 
 — not only waits to be influenced, — but it is generally 
 a sensuous influence that most easily and deeply im- 
 
GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. Jl 
 
 presses it. Hence, he not merely paints special women, 
 but he can always give the very essence of a feminine 
 atmosphere to characters not at all individually well- 
 marked. He is so sensitive to the general social in- 
 fluence diffused by women, that he makes you feel a 
 feminine power at work almost without copying the 
 distinguishing peculiarities of any particular person ; 
 he can make a woman a very living woman without 
 being what is called a character at all. This is what 
 few can do. Mignon and Philina and Adelheid and 
 Ottilie are women and something more — they are 
 characters, and we should know them when we met 
 them among a thousand. But all human beings are 
 not thus marked characters ; and when they are not, 
 most authors in attempting to picture them become 
 merely faint and vague. They depend on special 
 peculiarities for the life of their pictures. Not so 
 Goethe. Gretchen is little more than a simple peas- 
 ant-girl. She has not a single striking characteristic ; 
 yet she is his finest creation. Clarchen and Mariana 
 are a little more distinctively moulded, but very slight- 
 ly; and yet they too live more in us than most of 
 our own acquaintances. The little play "Die Ge- 
 schwister " (The Brother and Sister) has a delightful 
 heroine, who is nothing at all more than an ordinary 
 affectionate girl ; yet she has more life than would fill 
 out a hundred ''characteristic sketches" of modern 
 novelists. It is Goethe's extreme sensitiveness to all 
 feminine influence that gave him this power. Meji 
 exercised in general no such influence over him, hence 
 his imagination is never impressed by them ; he has 
 
72 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 
 
 to string up his powers of observation to draw them 
 by sheer effort, and he seldom succeeds conspicuously 
 even in delineating himself. Werther is scarcely so 
 much a delineation of himself as of a series of emo- 
 tions by which he had been agitated. Goethe needed 
 to have some fascinating power taking hold of his 
 imagination in order to call out its full strength. 
 Nature could do it ; women could do it ; but he could 
 not without such external help fascinate the eye of his 
 own imagination. He could picture the influences 
 which touched him most ; but never, as a whole, the 
 nature which they thus stirred. You do indeed get 
 some notion of his men, who are all more or less 
 quarried out of his own nature ; but it is not by means 
 of an unique influence which accompanies them every- 
 where, but only by a sort of secondary inference from 
 the successive states of emotion in which we are accus- 
 tomed to see them. Tasso, Werther, &c., are never 
 personally known to us; we have gathered up a very 
 good notion of them, but the mark of organic unity 
 which distinguishes living influence from the fullest 
 description has not been set upon them. Edward, in 
 the "Elective Affinities," is perhaps the most skilful 
 portrait amongst Goethe's male figures. But Goethe 
 could not outline any character — did not even know 
 the outlines of his own. Where he succeeded, it was 
 not by outline, like Scott, but by a single key note, 
 usually a feminine undertone running through every- 
 thing they say. When that is wanting, the character 
 may be true, but does not hang together ; it is a loosely- 
 knit affair. 
 
 \ 
 
GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 73 
 
 That Goethe should be called by Mr. Lewes "more 
 Greek than German" struck me with astonishment. 
 But in the special criticisms on his works Mr. Lewes 
 virtually retracts altogether this general verdict. 
 Greek poetry is never the product of this passive 
 imagination, that waits for a distinct impression and 
 then reflects back the impressing power. And more- 
 over its subjects are as different from Goethe's as its 
 intellectual process. It does not occupy itself with 
 character so much as events. The characters are there 
 more for the sake of the circumstance than the circum- 
 stance for the characters. And so too with the gods 
 themselves. There is no anxiety to display their per- 
 sonal characters ; they are not explained as in later 
 times ; their caprices or their kindness is only a part 
 of the machinery for enlisting human interest. But 
 Goethe makes a study of his Greek gods and demi- 
 gods, and takes his idea entirely from the most god- 
 like element he could feel in his own character — his 
 cool self-dependence, and his power of shaking him- 
 self free at will from the acute impressions of pain or 
 pleasure. There was nothing Greek at all about the 
 character of Goethe's intellect. What Mr. Lewes had 
 in his mind was the heathen element (not specially 
 Greek) in his character. The entire superseding of 
 personal trust by self-reliance, the absence of all trace 
 of humility, the calm superior glance which he cast 
 into the mystery around but never into the holiness 
 above him, gave often a heathen colouring to his 
 works; but his cast of intellect is strikingly, distinct- 
 ively German, far more so than Schiller's. For one 
 
74 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 
 
 whose mind yielded freely to any sensitive impression, 
 he had a wonderful power of shaking off voluntarily 
 all adhering emotions, and raising his head high above 
 the mists they stirred. This power of assuming at 
 will a cruel moral indifference to that which he did 
 not choose to have agitating him, is the feeling he has 
 so finely embodied in the picture of the gods con- 
 tained in the song of the Fates in "Iphigenia," — far 
 the finest thing in a poem rich in small beauties, but 
 without any successful delineation of human character. 
 This last has been so well translated by an American 
 writer,^^ and represeiits so truly a characteristic phase 
 of Goethe's mind, that I will give it as a pendant to 
 Mr. Lewes's translation from the "Prometheus." 
 
 " Within my ear there rings that ancient song, — 
 Forgotten was it and forgotten gladly, — 
 Song of the Parcse, which they shuddering sang 
 When from his golden seat fell Tantalus. 
 They suffered in his wrongs ; their bosom boiled 
 Within them, and their song was terrible. 
 To me and to my sister in our youth 
 The nurse would sing it, and I marked it well. 
 
 ' The gods be your terror. 
 Ye children of men; 
 They hold the dominion 
 In hands everlasting. 
 All free to exert it 
 As listeth their will. 
 
 15 Mr. N. L. Frothingham. " Metrical Pieces translated and 
 original." Boston: Crosby and Nichols, 1855. A word or two 
 is altered. 
 
GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 75 
 
 Let him fear them doubly 
 "Whome'er they've exalted! 
 On crags and on cloud-piles 
 The seats are made ready 
 Around the gold tables. 
 
 Dissension arises : 
 Then tumble the feasters 
 Reviled and dishonoured 
 To gulfs of deep midnight ; 
 And look ever vainly 
 In fetters of darkness 
 For judgment that's just. 
 
 But THEY remain seated 
 
 At feasts never failing 
 
 Around the gold tables. 
 
 They stride at a footstep 
 
 From mountain to mountain ; 
 
 Through jaws of abysses 
 
 Steams towards them the breathing 
 
 Of suffocate Titans. 
 
 Like offerings of incense 
 
 A light-rising vapour. 
 
 They turn, the proud masters, 
 From whole generations 
 The eye of their blessing ; 
 Nor will in the children 
 The once well-belov6d 
 Still eloquent features 
 Of ancestor see.' 
 
 So sang the dark sisters. 
 The old exile heareth 
 That terrible music 
 In caverns of darkness. 
 
76 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 
 
 Remembereth his children 
 And shaketh his head." 
 
 The metre, like the thought, has a heathen cast. It 
 speaks of cold elevation above all human prayers. 
 
 In the autumn of 1786 Goethe "stole away" from 
 Carlsbad, having received secret permission from the 
 duke for a lengthened journey in Italy, which had long 
 been the dream of his life. Mr. Lewes has made no 
 use of the many marvellous and most characteristic 
 touches which Goethe's journal-letters of this tour con- 
 tain. He speaks of them as of little interest. To me 
 they seem the most fascinating and delightful of the 
 prose works of Goethe. They not only illustrate his 
 character, as it showed itself in the quiet isolated study 
 of beauty, but they explain more than any other of 
 his works the common ground in his mind where sci- 
 ence and poetry met. I must give two very character- 
 istic glimpses into his character which the incidents 
 of this journey furnish. On his way to Venice he 
 turned aside to visit the Lago di Garda, and took his 
 way down the lake in a boat. A strong south wind 
 obliged them to put in to Malsesina, on the east side of 
 the lake, a little spot in the Venetian territory close to 
 tlie (then) boundary between the Venetian and Austrian 
 states. Goethe went up to sketch the old dismantled 
 castle. He was absolutely alone and unknown — had not 
 even introductions to any authorities in Venice. The 
 stranger was observed, and soon many of the villagers 
 had assembled round him with signs of displeasure. 
 One man^ seized his drawing, and tore it up. Others 
 
GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 7/ 
 
 fetched the podesta. Goethe found that he was taken 
 for an Austrian spy sent to make drawings of the strong 
 points on the boundary. The podesta's clerk was 
 threatening, the podesta himself was a captive to his 
 clerk. Goethe was near being sent as a prisoner to 
 Verona to account for his conduct. Instead of feeling 
 nervous and embarrassed, however, he was enjoying 
 the scene, and undertaking to instruct the Italian peas- 
 ants in the pleasures and pursuits of an artist. "I 
 stood on my steps, leaning with my back against the 
 door, and surveyed the constantly increasing crowd. 
 The curious dull glances, the good-natured expression 
 in most faces, and all that usually characterises a mob, 
 gave me the most agreeable impression." He assured 
 them all, in his best Italian, that he drew for beauty 
 and not for political designs. He explained that they 
 could not possibly see so much beauty in the old cas- 
 tle, which they had known all their lives, as he did. 
 The morning sun threw tower, walls, and rocks into 
 the most picturesque light, and he began to describe 
 the picture to them with a painter's enthusiasm. These 
 picturesque objects being, however, in the rear of his 
 audience, who did not wish to turn quite away from 
 him, "they twisted round their heads like the birds 
 which they call 'wrynecks,' in order to see with their 
 eyes what I was thus glorifying to their ears." This 
 ridiculous scene vividly reminded Goethe of the 
 "chorus of birds" in the play of Aristophanes, and 
 with intense amusement, he would not let them off 
 without a detailed dissertation on every element of 
 beauty in the picture, particularly dwelling on the ivy 
 
78 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 
 
 which hung about the walls. His presence of mind 
 extricated him from the scrape. 
 
 A still more characteristic incident occurs on his 
 voyage from Sicily back to Naples. The ship should 
 have passed the straits between the Island of Capri and 
 the mainland.' Evening came on ; Vesuvius glowed 
 brightly ; sheet-lightning was in the air ; it was a dead 
 calm ; the captain had missed the course ; a very slow 
 but decided under-current was drifting them straight on 
 the rocks of Capri ; the herdsmen were visible on the 
 rocks, shouting that the ship would strand ; on deck 
 was a crowd of Italian peasants — men, women, and 
 children ; handkerchiefs were held up to try and find 
 a breath of air by which they might be saved ; the 
 women screamed reproaches on the captain, and all 
 was shrieking and confusion. "I," says Goethe, "to 
 whom anarchy had ever been more hateful than death 
 itself, found it impossible to be longer silent. I stood 
 up, and represented to them that their cries and shrieks 
 were stunning the ears and brains of those from whom 
 alone help could be expected. As for you, I said, re- 
 tire into yourselves, and then put up your most fervent 
 prayers to the Mother of God, with whom it alone rests, 
 whether she will intercede with her Son to do for you 
 what He once did for the apostles, when, on the stormy 
 lake of Tiberias, the waves were already washing into 
 the ship while the Lord slept \ and yet, when the help- 
 less disciples awakened Him, He immediately com- 
 manded the winds to be still, as He can now command 
 the breeze to blow, if it be His holy will." These 
 words had the best effect. The women fell on their 
 
GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. "jg 
 
 knees, left off abusing the captain, and fell to prayer. 
 They were so near the rocks, that the men seized hold 
 of beams to stave the ship off, directly they should be 
 able to reach them. " My sea-sickness, which returned 
 in spite of all this, compelled me to go down to the 
 cabin. I threw myself half-stunned on my mattress, 
 and yet with a certain pleasant sensation, which seemed 
 to emanate from the sea of Tiberias ; for the picture 
 in Merian's illustrated Bible hovered quite clearly be- 
 fore ray eyes. And thus the force of all sensuous- 
 moral impressions is always strongest when men are 
 quite thrown back into themselves." Goethe lay here 
 " half- asleep," with death impending, till his com- 
 panion came down to inform him that a light breeze 
 had just sprung up to save them. There is no incident 
 more characteristic of the calm self-possessed artist in 
 Goethe's whole life, — the " musician adapting himself 
 to his instrument;" playing thus skilfully on strings 
 which were deficient in his own mind, in order to bring 
 out tones of feeling for which there were ulterior 
 reasons ; then lying down to dream so vividly of what 
 he really held to be but a picturesque legend, that all 
 the awe of death was held at a distance by the vivid 
 light of that "inward eye which is the bliss of soli- 
 tude." This one scene brings out the secret at once 
 of the man's vast personal influence, and of the poet's 
 
 "yielding wax-like imagination, more vividly than any 
 incident of his life. 
 
 It was in his Italian journey that his poetic powers 
 
 culminated, and that science and art met in his mind. 
 You see the meeting-point in his descriptions of what 
 
1 
 
 8o GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 
 
 he saw. He fits his mind so close to the objects he 
 studies, that he not only takes off a perfect impression 
 of their present condition, but becomes conscious of 
 their secrets of tendency, and has often a glimpse 
 back into what they have been. Goethe discovered, 
 as is well known, that all the parts of a plant — stalk, 
 leaf, stamen, petal, fruit — are but various modifications 
 of the same essential germ, best exhibited in the leaf. 
 It was a most characteristic discovery. But to under- 
 stand the mental process by which it was made — to 
 prove that it was not, in hmi, due to a mere scientific 
 tendency — just look at this glance of his into the es- 
 sence of a quite different thing, — -the amphitheatre, 
 written at Verona : "It ought not to be seen empty, 
 but quite full of men ) for, properly speaking, such 
 an amphitheatre is made in order to give the people 
 the imposing spectacle of themselves, to amuse the 
 people with themselves. If anything worth looking 
 at happens on a flat space, the hindmost seek in every 
 possible way to get on higher ground than the fore- 
 most ; they get on to benches, roll up casks, bring up 
 carriages, and plank them over, cover any hill in the 
 neighbourhood, and thus a crater forms itself. If the 
 spectacle is often repeated, such a crater is artificially 
 constructed," &c. Now this illustrates the way in 
 which Goethe became so great in criticism, so great 
 in science, so great in description, and so great in the ' 
 more conscious and less inspired part of his poetry. 
 He moulded himself with such flexible mind to every- 
 thing he studied, that he caught not only the existing 
 present, but the state which had just preceded, the 
 
GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE, 8l 
 
 State which would follow ; he caught the thread as it 
 untwined, he caught not the "being" only {das Sein), 
 but the "becoming" {das Werdeii). He had no gift 
 for experimental science. He did not even believe in 
 laws of nature that did not make themselves felt on 
 the living surface of things. He rejected "refrac- 
 tional" theories of light with scorn, because the co- 
 incidence that certain geometrical and arithmetical 
 properties attach to the laws of colour (and it really 
 is nothing more than a coincidence) did not explain 
 in any way the living colours as they shine upon the 
 eye. What is it to the living perception that the 
 length of the wave of the red ray is greater than that 
 of the violet rayj does length explain anything about 
 colour? It is only a sort of inward thread of order 
 running through the phenomena, which is quite inde- 
 pendent of the essence of the phenomena as they af- 
 fect the living organs of man. Goethe had no faculty 
 at all for this experimental detection of aids to know- 
 ledge^ which are not in any way aids to living insight. 
 He thought it a kind of mathematical back-stair to 
 optics, which it was mean to desire ; you ought to 
 look the phenomenon livingly in the face, and ex- 
 plore its symptoms as you do the physiology of a 
 plant or an animal. He used the microscope to de- 
 tect what is really going on ; but he despised an hy- 
 pothesis which left the physiology of colour just where 
 it was. 
 
 Indeed, his science and his poetry and his descrip- 
 tions alike were of the microscopic order ; not that 
 they had the confinement of the microscope, for his 
 6 
 
1 
 
 82 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 
 
 eye ranged freely; but I mean, that he rather pierced 
 nature and life at many points in succession, letting in 
 gleams of an indefinite vista everywhere, than com- 
 bined all he conceived and saw in one co-existing 
 whole. Look at his finest poems and descriptions. 
 It is the intensely vivid gleam thrown on single spots, 
 not the aspect of the whole, that makes you seem to 
 see with your own eyes what he describes. Thus, in 
 one of his finest poems, "Hermann and Dorothea," 
 every touch of description will illustrate what I mean. 
 And the sense of breadth and freedom pervading it is 
 given in the same way by transient glances sidewards 
 and forwards, which open out little vistas of life in 
 many directions, without completing them in any : — 
 
 " Und die Hengste rannten nach Haiise, begierig des Stalles ; 
 Aber dieWolke des Staubes quail unter den machtigen Hufen. 
 Lange noch stand der Jiingling und sah den Staub sich erhe- 
 
 ben, 
 Sah den Staub sich zerstreu'n; so stand er ohne Gedanken." ^^ 
 
 What a vivid impression (it is only one or two strokes 
 for a picture, not properly a picture) is here given, by 
 means of pursuing a little side-path of insight into 
 the feelings of horses, and then fixing the eye in- 
 tensely just on that dreamy cloud of dust in the dis- 
 
 '6 And the horses started off home, pricking their ears for the 
 stable, 
 
 But a cloud of dust grew under the rushing hoofs of their gal - 
 lop. 
 
 Long the youth stood still, and watched the dust whirling up- 
 wards, 
 
 Watched the dust settle down, — thus stood he vacant in spirit. 
 
GOETHE AMD HIS INFLUENCE. 83 
 
 tance which would most catch the eye of a man in a 
 reverie ! It is always by casting these isolated pier- 
 cing glances in two or three directions that Goethe 
 produces his vivid impressions. When Hermann and 
 Dorothea, for instance, are walking by moonlight to 
 the village, there is no attempt to paint the scene; 
 but each object, as it comes m view, is made to flash 
 on the eye of the reader. Thus : — 
 
 " ' How sweet is the glorious moonshine, as clear it is as the 
 
 daylight ; 
 I can surely see in the town the houses and courtyards quite 
 
 plainly, 
 In that gable a casement, — I fancy I count every pane there.' 
 Then they rose, and went downwards through the cornfield 
 
 together, 
 Dividing the thick-standing corn, and enjoying the splendour 
 
 above them ; 
 And thus they had reached the vineyard, and passed from the 
 
 light into shadow." 
 
 When Goethe returned from Italy in 1788, his 
 genius had reached its highest maturity. "Faust" 
 (his greatest work) was virtually written, though after- 
 wards modified, and not published for eighteen years. 
 "Iphigenia" and " Egmont " had received their last 
 touches, and " Tasso " was all but finished. The 
 really fine part of " Wilhelm Meister " was in exist- 
 ence ; all that he added afterwards was a dreary 
 superinduced element of "high art," a painful "Hall 
 of the Past," — except indeed the religious episode, 
 which is a study from memory, a reproduction of the 
 "experience" of a gentle mystic whom both he and 
 his mother had dearly loved. "Hermann und Doro 
 
1 
 
 84 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 
 
 thea" is the only great poem of any length which he 
 wrote afterwards, in 1796, and it is far the most per- 
 fect, though not the richest of them all. 
 
 During his Italian residence he had only fallen in 
 love once. He returned reluctantly to the north, like 
 a child from a Christmas visit, feeling that everything 
 at home was old and slow, and that he, coming from 
 the sweet south, was bringing "gold for brass, what 
 was worth a hundred oxen for what was worth ten." 
 Even the Frau von Stein was tedious ; the Italian lady • 
 had displaced her. In this mood he fell in with Chris- 
 tiane Vulpius, a girl of no culture and considerably 
 lower rank than himself, who, after being for seven- 
 teen years his mistress, became in 1806 his wife. 
 There can be no doubt that he was passionately in love 
 at first, and that his passion ripened afterwards into a 
 real and deeper affection, which had sufficient strength, 
 when he found his heart attracted to another, to enable 
 him to resist the danger and remain faithful to the 
 mother of his child, in spite of the serious estranging 
 influences arising from her intemperance. Goethe's 
 connection with Christiane, if judged by the lax 
 morality of his age, — by which alone we can fairly 
 judge him, when we have once admitted, as we must 
 do, that he was in no way morally purer than his age 
 — that, indeed, in his estimate of these matters he had 
 become less pure since his residence in Weimar, — was 
 surely not the worst of his life. It is in its origin that 
 it is most offensive. That he should either allow him- 
 self to encourage passion without love, and feel no 
 horror, no self-abasement, but rather immortalise it 
 
GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 85 
 
 by using it as literary capital for "elegies;" or, 
 on the other hand, if he did feel real love for this 
 poor girl, that he could endure to write about her 
 to friends in the tone of his letters to the Frau von 
 Stein, — is one of those facts concerning Goethe which 
 makes one feel that a wider gulf divided his nature 
 from purity and fidelity than any merely passionate 
 sins could create. During the first months of his 
 liaison he writes, in answer to the Frau von Stein's 
 remonstrances, "And what is this relation? Who is 
 beggared by it? Who lays any claim to the feelings 
 I give to the poor creature? who to the hours I pass 
 with her?" And again: "I will say nothing in ex- 
 cuse ; but I beg thee to help me, so that the relation 
 which is so objectionable to thee may not become yet 
 worse, but remain as it is. Give me thy confidence 
 again ; look at the thing in a natural light ; allow me 
 to speak to thee quietly and reasonably about it, and 
 I may hope that all will be once more right between 
 us." That a man should write in this tone about a 
 woman he really loved, and keep her in so humiliat- 
 ing a position in which he knew that she was a mark 
 for the contempt of his friends, is hardly credible. 
 And yet, if he did not really love her, that he should 
 have felt no self-reproach and disgust at his own con- 
 duct, while he calmly worked it up into poetry, is still 
 more revolting and still more incredible. The truth 
 seems to be that he did really love her, and yet was 
 insensible to the dishonour to himself and to her im- 
 plied in writing and thinking of his relation to her in 
 this way, and permitting his friends' neglect. Mr. 
 
86 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 
 
 Lewes says that Christiana declared later she had her- 
 self resisted the marriage. Possibly she may have 
 wished to excuse Goethe ; possibly it really was so ; 
 but the decision lay with him, and no false theories 
 can relieve him from the charge of permitting a per- 
 manent dishonour to rest upon the woman who was to 
 him in the place of a wife. He took her to live with 
 him immediately on the birth of his son, and neve: 
 again forsook her. But I can hardly doubt that one 
 great exciting cause for the habits of intemperance in 
 her which caused him so much misery was the con- 
 sciousness of her miserable position in society, — 
 slighted as she was by the very friends whom Goethe 
 most honoured and loved, Goethe permitting the slight. 
 Schiller never seems to have sent her one greeting in 
 his letters, nor even alludes to her existence ; while 
 Goethe's messages to Schiller's wife are constant and 
 courteous. Contrasts of this kind should surely have 
 stung him to the quick, if he really honoured and loved 
 her as a wife. Since Mr. Lewes's book was first pub- 
 lished, letters have appeared from Goethe and his wife 
 to Dr. Nicolaus Meyer of Bremen, a medical student 
 in Jena in 1798, who resided in Goethe's house in the 
 winter 1 799-1800. The correspondence adds little 
 to what we knew ; but the letters from Christiane Vul- 
 pius (who in 1806 became Christiane Goethe) confirm 
 Mr. Lewes's conception of her as an uncultivated but 
 not vulgar person ; and one or two show great depth 
 of feeling. The editor intimates that they were poorly 
 spelt and worse written ; but in those days many ladies 
 of rank had little knowledge of this kind. The letters 
 
GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 87 
 
 — both Goethe's and his wife's — are mostly about her- 
 rings, butter, and port wine. Goethe's letters are sel- 
 dom very good. He saved up his best things for type. 
 One does not expect literary merit from Christiane 
 Vulpius. But her letters are simple, house-wifely, and 
 friendly. It seems she had a genius for jams, which 
 had in part gained her Meyer's esteem. Parts of one 
 or two letters, written in 1805, during a dangerous ill- 
 ness of Goethe's, give a glimpse of the thread of pain 
 in her life. She tells Meyer that Goethe has "now 
 for three months back never had an hour of health, 
 and frequently periods when one fancies he must die. 
 Think only of me — who have not, excepting yourself 
 and him, a single friend in the world ; and you, dear 
 friend, by reason of the distance, are as good as 
 lost . . . Here there is no friend to whom I could 
 tell all that lies on my heart. I might have many ; 
 but I cannot again form such a friendship with any 
 one, and shall be forced to tread my path alone." 
 Seldom, indeed, in these letters, does she express feel- 
 ing of this kind, which gives it more meaning when 
 it is expressed. She says again, " I live a life of pure 
 anxiety." Then she writes a better account, adding, 
 that though better, she fears '* it is but patchwork. O 
 God, when I think a time may come when I may stand 
 absolutely alone, many a cheerful hour is made wretch- 
 ed."" The sentence in which Goethe announces to 
 
 "I have before alluded to the fact, that Goethe's passion for 
 Minna Herzlieb gave rise to his novel of the " Elective Affinities," 
 and is depicted in the love of Edward for Ottilie. It seems, now, 
 not improbable that Meyer's friendship for Christiane Vulpius at 
 
88 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 
 
 Meyer, in 1806, his own marriage, is characteristic. 
 He speaks of the French occupation of Weimar, and 
 the misery it caused, and adds: "In order to cheer 
 these sad days with a festivity, I and my little home- 
 friend (Hausfreundin) yesterday resolved to enter with 
 full formality into the state of holy matrimony, with 
 which notification, I entreat you to send us a good 
 supply of butter and other provisions that will bear 
 carriage." 
 
 Early in the new century, Goethe's growing attach- 
 ment to Minna Herzlieb seems to have given rise to 
 one of the richest groups of minor poems that he ever 
 wrote ; and of one of these so beautiful a translation 
 has come into my hands, ^^ that I venture to hope it will 
 
 least suggested the relation of the Captain to Charlotte in the same 
 novel. Meyer must have been at least six or seven years younger 
 than Christiane, as he was born in 1775. But it seems from these 
 letters that the friendship between them had been strong, and not 
 without sentiment. Christiane keeps Meyer's picture in her room,, 
 and speaks of the constant pleasure and comfort that she derived 
 from looking at it. It was after, and immediately after, Meyer's 
 own marriage in 1806, that Goethe determined to take this step, 
 and announced it to him in the curious form given above. There 
 is no allusion at all to her marriage in any of Christiane's letters to 
 Meyer. She speaks of his own marriage thus; — ."I have been 
 especially pleased to hear that you have at last resolved to enter 
 the state of holy matrimony, in which I heartily wish you happi- 
 ness, and believe that you will also be convinced of these my 
 sentiments." Meyer and his wife visited Weimar on their wed- 
 ding journey: a great chasm in the correspondence occurs im- 
 mediately afterwards. 
 
 1* Translated by Mr. J. C. Richmond, lately the " Native Min- 
 ister" of New Zealand. 
 
GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 89 
 
 at least convey some feeling of the charm of Goethe's 
 little ballads: — 
 
 THE HILL CASTLE. 
 
 Aloft stands a castle hoary 
 
 On yonder craggy height, 
 
 Where of old each gate and doorway 
 
 Was guarded by horse and knight. 
 
 The doors and the gates lie in ashes, 
 And silence broods over all ; 
 I clamber about unchallenged 
 On the ancient mouldering wall. 
 
 Close here lay a cellar, of yore 
 Well filled with the costliest wine ; 
 With the bottle and pitcher no more 
 Steps the maiden merrily in. 
 
 No more in the hall the beaker 
 She sets for the welcome guest ; 
 No more for the holy altar 
 She fills the flask of the priest. 
 
 To the thirsty squire in the courtyard 
 No more the flagon she gives ; 
 No more for the fleeting favour 
 Their fleeting thanks she receives. 
 
 For burnt are the ceilings and floors, 
 Into ashes long long ago passed ; 
 And corridor, chapel, and stairs. 
 Are splinters and rubbish and dust. 
 
 Yet when on a merry morning 
 From these crags I saw with delight. 
 With lute and with wine, my darling 
 Ascending the stony height, — 
 
90 GOETHE AND HIS TNELUENCE- 
 
 Seemed a gay entertainment to burst 
 From the dulness of still decay, 
 And it went as, in times long passed, 
 On a joyous and festive day. 
 
 It seemed the most stately rooms 
 Were prepared for some guest of worth ; 
 It seemed from those hearty old times 
 A loving pair had stepped forth ; 
 
 And as if stood the holy father 
 
 Within his chapel hard by, 
 
 And asked, " Will ye have one another?" 
 
 And we smilingly answered " Ay." 
 
 And when our hearts' deep emotion 
 In music broke forth aloud, 
 Rang out the mellow-voiced echo 
 In answer, — instead of the crowd. 
 
 And when, at the coming of even. 
 In silence all was entranced. 
 And the sun from the glowing heaven 
 On the craggy summit glanced, 
 
 The squire and the maiden, like nobles. 
 Shine out in that golden blaze; 
 Again the goblet she proffers. 
 And again his thanks he pays. 
 
 Goethe seems ultimately to have battled firmly with, 
 and finally subdued, the affection which thus renewed 
 the fi-eshness of his poetry with a second spring of 
 even greater beauty than the first ; but the whole story, 
 as he has embodied it in the "Elective Affinities," is 
 a thoroughly repulsive one, and no mind but one so 
 
, GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 9 1 
 
 destitute as Goethe's of natural remorse for the most 
 humiliating class of sins, could have given such expe- 
 rience publicity in a work of art. The book betrays, 
 in spite of its power, some of the diffuseness of age ; 
 a very great part of it is devoted to describing the 
 laying down of a new gravel-walk and the making a 
 summer-house. 
 
 In 1 81 6 his wife died ; and Goethe's burst of grief 
 was terrible. We are told ^^ that he utterly lost his 
 presence of mind, kneeled down beside her death-bed, 
 and seizing her hands, cried out, "Thou wilt not for- 
 sake me ! No, no ; thou durst not forsake me. ' ' The 
 verse he wrote on the day of her death has more true 
 affection than all his poems of passion together. 
 
 The last sixteen years of Goethe's life were passed 
 in tranquil labor at the completion of his unfinished 
 works. Now and then he wrote a lovely little poem. 
 In 1818, when he was in his 70th year, came one of 
 those little flashes of song, — giving birth to a poem 
 like those which, he tells us, he would in his youth 
 often get up to scribble off in the middle of the night, 
 or write down on the first scrap of paper he found, not 
 even venturing to set the paper straight, lest the little 
 mechanical act should put to flight the flow of the 
 inspiratien. Its beauty is quite as strange as that of 
 the poems of his youth. Goethe always loved the 
 song, and said it was of the very essence of himself. 
 Here is a faint version of it, which I insert less as a 
 poem than as a light on the old man's character : — 
 
 19 Preface to Meyer's " Correspondence." 
 
1 
 
 gZ GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE, 
 
 AT DEAD OF NIGHT. 
 
 At dead of night I went, reluctant goings 
 A wee wee boy, across the churchyard-way, 
 To father's house, the pastor's ; heaven was glowing 
 With star on star — oh, sweetly twinkled they 
 At dead of night. 
 
 Then in broad life, when new impellings drove me 
 To seek my love — impellings which she sent — 
 The stars and Northern-lights in strife above me — 
 I, going, coming, drank in sweet content 
 At dead of night. 
 
 Till the bright moon at last in her high season. 
 So pure so clear, me in my darkness found ; 
 And with her, willing, thoughtful, vivid Reason 
 Her light about my past and future wound 
 At dead of night. 
 
 He fell in love once or twice more; and in 1823 
 was said to be near marrying again. The result, ar. 
 usual, was not marriage, but an elegy — of beauty not 
 greatly inferior to that which the poems of earlier 
 days can show, and which, as his youngest and dear- 
 est poem, he copied out in Roman letters on fine vel- 
 lum, and tied with a silk band into a red morocco 
 cover, in which glory Eckermann saw it. Mr. Lewes, 
 in deference to physiology, unpleasantly and untruly 
 calls the story of an old man's life a ^'necrology." 
 As a man Goethe was never so complete as in his old 
 age. 
 
 The only great addition to his fame which the last 
 twenty years of Goethe's life produced was the con- 
 
GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 93 
 
 versations with Eckermann, — a book which gives to 
 the English reader a far clearer conception of his 
 personal influence than any other of his works. He 
 never runs an opponent through, like Dr. Johnson : 
 indeed, he does not willingly talk with an opponent 
 at all. He rather flows round his disciple like an at- 
 mosphere, leaks into you at every pore, and envelops 
 you in such a calm wide mist of wisdom, that you can 
 only say what he means you to say so long as you 
 breathe that atmosphere. There is no possibility of a 
 contest. There is no point to contest. He credits 
 you with a truth whenever you open your mouth {Idsst 
 das gelten, as the Germans say) ; only he circumvents 
 it with a whole mass of modifying thought; so that 
 it would be easier to bring the air itself to a point 
 than to bring the question you are discussing to an 
 issue. In his old age he recurred again frequently to 
 his religious belief, and some of his most fascinating 
 conversations have relation to it, Goethe had a taste 
 for religion and a shrewd guess at the next world ; but 
 his mind seems to have been quite devoid of personal 
 trust. He was perhaps the wisest man totally without 
 moral humility and personal faith whom the world has 
 ever seen. He took the pantheistic view of God along 
 with the personal view of man.^" He knew that man 
 was a free and responsible being, but he could not at- 
 tribute human attributes of any kind to God; he 
 thought the Infinite would be best honoured by merely 
 denying finite characteristics, and leaving Him unap- 
 proached ; — 
 
 20 See, for instance, the fine little poem, " Das GottlicTi." 
 
94 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 
 
 " Feeling is all in all; 
 Name but an earthly smoke, 
 Darkening the glow of heaven." 
 
 And not only "name" but definite thought concerning 
 God he equally rejected. " No one," he says, " now 
 doubts the existence of God any more than his own;" 
 but "what do we know of the idea of the divine, and 
 what shall our narrow conceptions say of the Highest 
 Being?" And so of immortality also ; he believed 
 in it by a sort of extension of his insight into nature, 
 but he put it aside as not bearing in any way on this 
 life. "I do not doubt of our future existence, for 
 nature cannot afford to throw away any living princi- 
 ple {ivTslkx^i-a^- But we are not all in the same manner 
 immortal ; and in order to manifest ourselves as a 
 powerful living principle in tlie future we must be one." 
 Immortality was no present aid to him ; he thought 
 we should wait to rest on it till we had gained it. 
 "To the able man this world is not dumb; why 
 should he ramble off into eternity? what he really 
 knows can be apprehended." And he was annoyed 
 with anything that he thought a fuss about the matter. 
 Speaking of a poem by Tiedge relating to this sub- 
 ject, he says : — 
 
 "Wherever you went, there lay 'Urania' on the table. 
 ' Urania ' and immortality were the topics of every conversa- 
 tion. I could in no wise dispense with the happiness of believ- 
 ing in our future existence, and, indeed, could say, with Lorenzo 
 de Medici, that those are dead for this life even, who have no 
 hope for another. But such incomprehensible subjects lie too far 
 off, and only disturb our thoughts if made the theme of daily 
 
GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. 95 
 
 meditation. Let him who believes in immortality enjoy his hap- 
 piness in silence, without giving himself airs thereupon. The 
 occasion of ' Urania ' led me to observe that piety has its pre- 
 tensions to aristocracy no less than noble blood. I met stupid 
 women, who plumed themselves on believing, with Tiedge, in 
 immortality, and I was forced to bear much catechising on this 
 point. They were vexed by my saying I should, be well pleased 
 to be ushered into a future state after the close of this, only I 
 hoped I should the7-e meet none of those who had believed in it 
 here. For, how should I be tormented ! The pious would 
 throng around me, and say, 'Were we not right? Did we not 
 foresee it? Has not it happened just as we said?' And so 
 there would be ennui without end. 
 
 " All this fuss about such points is for people of rank, and es- 
 pecially women, who have nothing to do. But an able man, 
 who has something to do here, and must toil and strive day by 
 day to accomplish it, leaves the future world till it comes, and 
 contents himself with being active and useful in this. Thoughts 
 about immortality are also good for those who have small success 
 here below, and I would wager that better fortune would have 
 brought our good Tiedge better thoughts." 
 
 In only one sentence do we catch a glimpse of a 
 time when Goethe had looked to God for a Father's 
 help, and, at least for a moment, conceived the spirit- 
 ual world not as the mere unknown space beyond life, 
 but as the inspiring love which shines everywhere into 
 it. "We may lean for a while," he says once, in 
 speaking of his youth, "on our brothers and friends, 
 be amused by acquaintances, rendered happy by those 
 we love ; but in the end man is always driven back 
 upon himself, and it seems as if the Divinity had so 
 placed Himself in relation to man as not always to re- 
 spond to his reverence, trust, and love ; at least not in 
 
96 GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE, 
 
 the terrible moment of need.'' ^ There had, then, been 
 a time when the easy familiarity with which the young 
 man scrutinised the universe had been exchanged for 
 the humble glance of a heart-stricken child : and he 
 had shrunk away from that time (as he did from every 
 hour of life when pain would have probed to the very 
 bottom the secrets of his nature), to take refuge in the 
 exercise of a faculty which would have been far 
 stronger and purer had it never helped him to evade 
 those awful pauses in existence when alone the depths 
 of our personal life lie bare before the inward eye, 
 and we start to see both "whither we are going, and 
 whence we came." Goethe deliberately turned his 
 back upon those inroads which sin and death make 
 into our natural habits and routine. From the plead 
 ing griefs, from the challenging guilt, from the warn- 
 ing shadows of his own past life, he turned iresolutely 
 away, like his own Faust, to the alleviating occu- 
 pations of the present. Inch by inch he contested 
 the inroads of age upon his existence, striving to 
 banish the images of new graves from his thoughts 
 long before his nature had ceased to quiver with the 
 shock of parting; never seemingly for a m.oment led 
 by grief to take conscious refuge in the love of God 
 and his hopes of an hereafter. 
 
 And so, with his eyes still clinging to the life he left, 
 on the 22d March, 1832, he passed away himself, 
 while drawing with his finger pictures in the air and 
 murmuring a last cry for "more light." During the 
 years which have intervened, the influence of his 
 writings in England has steadily increased. He has 
 
GOETHE AND HIS INFLUENCE. gj 
 
 been held up as the wisest man of modern days, and 
 by some half-worshipped as a demigod. And, in truth, 
 his was a light and spacious mind. I grant that he 
 was the wisest man of modern days who ever lacked 
 the wisdom of a child ; the deepest who never knew 
 what it was to kneel in the dust with bowed head and 
 broken heart. And he was a demigod, if a demigod 
 be a being at once more and less than ordinary men, 
 having a power which few attain, and owing it, in 
 part, to a deficiency in qualities in which few are so 
 deficient ; a being who puts forth a stronger fascina- 
 tion over the earth because expending none of his 
 strength in yearnings towards heaven. In this sense 
 Goethe was a demigod : — ■ 
 
 " He took the suffering human race; 
 He read each wound, each weakness clear; 
 He struck his finger on the place, 
 And said, ' Thou ailest here, and here.' " 
 
 He knew all symptoms of disease, a few alleviations, 
 no remedies. The earth was eloquent to him, but the 
 skies were silent. Next to Luther he was the great- 
 est of the Germans ; next — but what a gulf between ! 
 "Adequate to himself," was written on that broad calm 
 forehead ; and therefore men thronged eagerly about 
 him to learn the incommunicable secret. It was not 
 told, and will not be told. For man it is a weary way 
 to God, but a wearier far to any demigod. 
 
II. 
 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 
 
 HAWTHORNE has been called a mystic, which 
 he was not, — and a psychological dreamer, 
 which he was in very slight degree. He was really 
 the ghost of New England, — I do not mean the 
 "spirit," nor the "phantom," but the ghost in the 
 older sense in which that term is used, the thin, rare- 
 fied essence which is to be found somewhere behind 
 the physical organization : embodied, indeed, and not 
 by any means in a shadowy or diminutive earthly taber- 
 nacle, but yet only half embodied in it, endowed with 
 a certain painful sense of the gulf between his nature 
 and its organization, always recognising the gulf, al- 
 ways trying to bridge it over, and always more or less 
 unsuccessful in the attempt. His writings are not ex- 
 actly spiritual writings, for there is no dominating spirit 
 in them. They are ghostly writings. Hawthorne was, 
 to my mind, a sort of sign to New England of the di- 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 99 
 
 vorce that has been going on there (and not less per- 
 haps in old England) between its people's spiritual 
 and earthly nature, and of the difficulty which they 
 will soon feel, if they are to be absorbed more and 
 more in that shrewd hard earthly sense which is one 
 of their most striking characteristics, in even comi^iu- 
 nicating with their former self. Hawthorne, with all 
 his shyness, and tenderness, and literary reticence, 
 shows very distinct traces also of understanding well 
 the cold, inquisitive, and shrewd spirit which besets 
 the Yankees even more than other commercial peoples. 
 His heroes have usually not a little of this hardness 
 in them. Coverdale, for instance, in the " Blithedale 
 Romance," and Holgrave, in the "House of the Seven 
 Gables," are of this class of shrewd, cold, inquisitive 
 heroes. Indeed there are few of his tales without a 
 character of this type. But though Hawthorne had 
 a deep sympathy with the practical as well as the liter- 
 ary genius of New England, it was always in a far- 
 removed and ghostly kind of way, as though he were 
 stricken by some spell which half-paralysed him from 
 communicating with the life around him, as though he 
 saw it only by a reflected light. His spirit haunted 
 rather than ruled his body ; his body hampered his 
 spirit. 
 
 Yet his external career was not only not romantic, 
 but identified with all the dullest routine of commer- 
 cial duties. That a man who consciously telegraphed, 
 as it were, with the world, transmitting meagre mes- 
 sages through his material organization, should have 
 been first a Custom-house officer in Massachusetts, 
 
lOO NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 
 
 and then the Consul in Liverpool, brings out into the 
 strongest possible relief the curiously representative 
 character in which he stood to New England as its 
 literary or intellectual ghost. There is nothing more 
 ghostly in his writings than his account of the Con- 
 sulship in Liverpool, — how he began by trying to 
 communicate frankly with his fellow-countrymen, how 
 he found the task more and more difficult, and grad- 
 ually drew back into the twilight of his reserve, how 
 he shrewdly and somewhat coldly watched "the dim 
 shadows as they go and come," speculated idly on 
 their fate, and all the time discharged the regular 
 routine of Consular business, witnessing the usual 
 depositions, giving captains to captainless crews, 
 affording costive advice or assistance to Yankees 
 when in need of a friend, listening to them when they 
 were only anxious to offer, not ask, assistance, and 
 generally observing them from that distant and spec- 
 ulative outpost of the universe whence all common 
 things looked strange. 
 
 Hawthorne, who was a delicate critic of himself, 
 was well aware of the shadowy character of his own 
 genius, though not aware that precisely here lay its 
 curious and thrilling power. In the preface to "Twice- 
 told Tales" he tells us frankly, "The book, if you 
 would see anything in it, requires to be read in the 
 clear brown twilight atmosphere in which it was 
 written ; if opened in the sunshine, it is apt to look 
 exceedingly like a volume of blank pages." 
 
 It is one of his favourite theories that there must be 
 a vague, remote, and shadowy element in the subject- 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. lOI 
 
 matter of any narrative with which his own imagina- 
 tion can successfully deal. Sometimes he apologises 
 for this idealistic limitation to his artistic aims. "It 
 was a folly," he says in his preface to the "Scarlet 
 Letter," "with the materiality of this daily life press- 
 ing so intrusively upon me, to attempt to fling myself 
 back into another age, or to insist on creating the 
 semblance of a world out of airy matter, when, at 
 every moment, the impalpable beauty of my soap- 
 bubble was broken by the rude contact of some actual 
 circumstance. The wiser effort would have been to 
 diffuse thought and imagination through the opaque 
 substance of to-day, and thus to make it a bright 
 transparency; to spiritualise the burden that began to 
 weigh so heavily; to seek resolutely the true and 
 indestructible value that lay hidden in the petty and 
 wearisome incidents and ordinary characters with 
 which I was now conversant. The fault was mine. 
 The page of life that was spread out before me was 
 so dull and commonplace only because I had not 
 fathomed its deeper import. A better book than I 
 shall ever write was there ; leaf after leaf presenting 
 itself to me, just as it was written out by the reality 
 of the flitting hour, and vanishing as fast as written, 
 only because my brain wanted the insight and my 
 hand the cunning to transcribe it. At some future 
 day, it may be, I shall remember a few scattered frag- 
 ments and broken paragraphs and write them down 
 and find the letters turn to gold upon the page." 
 
 And yet that dissatisfaction with his own idealism 
 which Hawthorne here expresses never actually sufficed 
 
1 
 
 102 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 
 
 to divert his efforts into the channel indicated. In 
 the "Blithedale Romance" he tells us that he chose 
 the external scenery of the Socialist community at 
 Brook Farm "merely to establish a theatre, a little 
 removed from the highway of ordinary travel, where 
 the creatures of his brain may play their phantasma- 
 gorical antics without exposing them to too close a 
 comparison with the actual events of real lives. In 
 the old countries with which fiction has long been 
 conversant, a certain conventional privilege seems to 
 be awarded to the romancer; his work is not put ex- 
 actly side by side with nature ; and he is allowed a 
 license with regard to every-day probability, in view 
 of the improved effects which he is bound to produce 
 thereby. Among ourselves, on the contrary, there is 
 as yet no such Fairy Land so like the real world that, 
 in a suitable remoteness, one cannot well tell the dif- 
 ference, but with an atmosphere of strange enchant- 
 ment, beheld through which the inhabitants have a 
 propriety of their own. This atmosphere is what the 
 American romancer wants. In its absence, the beings 
 of imagination are compelled to show themselves in 
 the same category as actually living mortals, — a neces- 
 sity that generally renders the paint and pasteboard 
 of their composition but too painfully discernible." 
 And once more, in the preface to his last novel, 
 "Transformation," he reiterates as his excuse for 
 laying the scene in Italy, that "no author without a 
 :rial can conceive of the difficulty of writing a ro- 
 mance about a country where there is no shadow, no 
 antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. IO3 
 
 wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity 
 in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case 
 with my dear native land. It will be very long, I trust, 
 before romance-writers may find congenial and easily- 
 handled themes either in the annals of our stalwart 
 republic, or in any characteristic and probable event 
 of our individual lives. Romance and poetry, ivy, 
 lichens, and wall-flowers, need ruin to make them 
 grow." These passages throw much light on the 
 secret affinities of Hawthorne's genius. But it would 
 be a mistake to conclude from them, as he himself 
 would apparently have us, that he is a mere romantic 
 idealist, in the sense in which these words are com- 
 monly used, — that he is one all whose dramatic con- 
 ceptions are but the unreal kaleidoscopic combinations 
 of fancies in his own brain. 
 
 I may, perhaps, accept a phrase of which Hawthorne 
 himself was fond, — " the moonlight of romance," — 
 and compel it to explain something of the secret of 
 his characteristic genius. There are writers — chiefly 
 poets, but also occasionally writers of fanciful romances 
 like Longfellow's "Hyperion" — whose productions 
 are purely ideal, are not only seen by the light of their 
 own imagination but constituted out of it, — made of 
 moonshine, — and rendered vivid and beautiful, if they 
 are vivid and beautiful, merely with the vividness and 
 beauty of the poet's own mind. In these cases there 
 is no distinction at all between the delineating power 
 and the delineated object ; the dream is indistinguish- 
 able from the mind of the dreamer, and varies wholly 
 with its laws. Again, at the opposite extreme, there 
 
104 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 
 
 is a kind of creative imagination which has its origin 
 in a deep sympathy with, and knowledge of, the real 
 world. That which it deals with is actual life as it 
 has existed, or still exists, in forms so innumerable 
 that it is scarcely possible to assert that its range is 
 more limited than life itself. Of course the only 
 adequate example of such an imagination is Shake- 
 speare's, and this kind of imaginative power resembles 
 sunlight, not only in its brilliancy, but especially in 
 this, that it casts a light so full and equable over the 
 universe it reveals, that we never think of its source 
 at all. We forget altogether, as we do by common 
 daylight, that the light by which we see is not part 
 and parcel of the world which it presents to us. The 
 sunlight is so efficient that we forget the sun. We find 
 so rich and various a world before us, dressed in its 
 own proper colours, that no one is reminded that the 
 medium by which those proper colours are seen is 
 uniform and from a single source. We merge the de- 
 li neative magic by which the scene is illuminated in 
 the details of the scene itself. 
 
 Between these two kinds of creative imagination 
 there is another, which also shows a real world, but 
 shows it so dimly in comparison with the last as to keep 
 constantly before our minds the unique character of 
 the light by which we see. The ideal light itself be- 
 comes a more prominent element in the picture than 
 even the objects on which it shines ; and yet is made 
 so, chiefly by the very fact of shining on those objects 
 which we are accustomed to think of as they are seen 
 in their own familiar details in full daylight. If the 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 105 
 
 objects illuminated were not real and familiar, the light 
 would not seem so mysterious; it is the pale uniform 
 tint, the loss of colour and detail, and yet the vivid 
 familiar outline and the strong shadow, which produce 
 what Hawthorne calls the "moonlight of romance." 
 " Moonlight in a familiar room," he says, in his pref- 
 ace to the " Scarlet Letter," "falling so white, upon 
 the carpet, and showing all its figures so distinctly, 
 making every object so minutely visible, yet so unlike 
 a morning or noontide visibility, — is a medium the 
 most suitable for a romance writer to get acquainted 
 with his illusive guests. There is the little domestic 
 scenery of the well-known apartment; the chairs, with 
 each its separate individuality ; the centre table, sus- 
 taining a work-basket, a volume or two, and an ex- 
 tinguished lamp ; the sofa, the bookcase, the picture 
 on the wall; — all these details, so completely seen, are 
 so spiritualised by the unusual light, that they seem to 
 lose their actual substance and become things of intel- 
 lect. Nothing is too small or too trifling to undergo \ 
 this change, and acquire dignity thereby. A child's 
 shoe, the doll seated in her little wicker carriage, the 
 hobby-horse, — whatever, in a word, has been used or 
 played with during the day, is now invested, with a 
 quality of strangeness and remoteness, though still al- 
 most as vividly present as by daylight. Thus, there- | 
 fore, the floor of our familiar room has become a 
 neutral territory, somewhere between the real world 
 and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary 
 may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of 
 the other." Sir Walter Scott's delineative power par- 
 
I06 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 
 
 takes both of this moonlight imagination and of the 
 other more powerful, brilliant, and realistic kind. 
 Often it is a wide genial sunshine, of which we quite 
 forget the source in the vividness of the common life 
 which it irradiates. At other times, again, when Scott 
 is in his Black Douglas mood, as I may call it, it has 
 all the uniformity of tint and the exciting pallor of 
 what Hawthorne terms the moonlight of romance. 
 
 At all events, there is no writer to whose creations 
 the phrase applies more closely than to Hawthorne's 
 own. His characters are by no means such unreal 
 webs of moonshine as the idealists proper constitute 
 into the figures of their romance. They are real and 
 definitely outlined, but they are all seen in a single 
 light, — the contemplative light of the particular idea 
 which has floated before him in each of his stories, — 
 and they are seen, not fully and in their integrity, as 
 things are seen by daylight, but like things touched by 
 moonlight, o7iIy so far as they are lighted up by the 
 idea of the story. The thread of unity which connects 
 his tales is always some pervading thought of his own; 
 they are not written mainly to display character, still 
 less for the mere narrative interest, but for the illus- 
 tration -they cast on some idea or conviction of their 
 author's. Amongst English writers of fiction, we have 
 many besides Shakes]3eare whose stories are merely 
 appropriate instruments for the portraiture of charac- 
 ter, and who therefore never conceive themselves bound 
 to confine themselves scrupulously to the one aspect 
 most naturally developed by the tale. Once introduced, 
 their characters are given in full, — both that side of 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. lOJ 
 
 them which is, so to say, turned towards the story, 
 and others which are not. Other writers, again, make 
 the characters quite subsidiary to the epical interest of 
 the plot, using them only to heighten the colouring of 
 the action it describes. Hawthorne's tales belong to 
 neither of these classes. Their unity is ideal. His 
 characters are often real and distinct, but they are 
 illuminated only from one centre of thought. So 
 strictly is this true of them that he has barely room for 
 a novel in the ordinary sense of the word. If he were 
 to take his characters through as many phases of 
 life as are ordinarily comprised in a novel, he could 
 not keep the ideal unity of his tales unbroken ; he 
 would be obliged to delineate them from many differ- 
 ent points of view. Accordingly his novels are not 
 novels in the ordinary sense; they are ideal situations, 
 expanded by minute study and trains of clear, pale 
 thought into the dimensions of novels. A very small 
 group of figures is presented to the reader in some 
 marked ideal relation ; or if it be in consequence of 
 some critical event, then it must be some event which 
 has struck the author as rich in ideal or spiritual sug- 
 gestion. But it is not usually in his way — though his 
 last novel gives us one remarkable exception to this 
 observation — to seize any glowing crisis of action when 
 the passion is lit or the blow is struck that gives a new 
 mould to life, for his delineation; he prefers to assume 
 the crisis past, and to delineate as fully as he can the 
 ideal situation to which it has given rise, when it is 
 beginning to assume a fainter and more chronic cha- 
 racter. 
 
I08 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 
 
 But, however this may be, almost all Hawthorne's 
 tales embody single ideal situations, scarcely ever for 
 a moment varied in their course in any essential re- 
 spect. For instance, to take his shorter tales, the 
 mockery of the attempt to renew in wasted age the 
 blasted hopes of youth is crystallized into a ghostly 
 tableau vivant in the "Wedding-Knell." The abso- 
 lute isolation of every man's deepest life, and the awe 
 which any visible assertion of that isolation inspires, 
 even when made by the mildest of our guilty race, is 
 translated into an eerie picture in the "Minister's 
 Black Veil." So in the "Great Stone Face" we 
 have an embodiment of the conviction that he is best 
 fitted to fulfil any great human hope or trust whose 
 heart is constantly fed upon the yearning to find the 
 perfect fulfilment of it in another. So in "Roger 
 Malvin's Burial " we are shown how an innocent man, 
 who is too cowardly to face the mere appearance of 
 guilt, may thereby incur a remorse and guilt as deep 
 as that from the faintest suspicion of which he shrank. 
 And so we may run through almost all the tales prop- 
 erly so called. 
 
 I do not mean that in any of them the author 
 thought the thought first in its abstract form, and then 
 condensed it into a story. I should suppose, on the 
 contrary, that the artistic form is the one in which 
 the idea of the tale first flashed on him, and that the 
 work of elaboration only gave more substance and 
 greater variety of colour to the parts. But not the 
 less was the essence originally ideal, since every touch 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. IO9 
 
 and line in his imagined picture was calculated to im- 
 press some leading thought on the reader. 
 
 But it is only when we look at his longer tales, 
 whose dimensions would lead us to expect more vari- 
 ety of aspect in the characters, more circumstance, 
 and less sameness of leading thought, that this charac- 
 teristic of Hawthorne's tales becomes striking. The 
 stories of the "Scarlet Letter," of the "House of the 
 Seven Gables," and of "Transformation," might all 
 have been included in their full ideal integrity, and 
 with all the incident they contain, in the " Twice-told 
 Tales" without adding more than a few pages to the 
 book. I do not mean that thus compressed they 
 would produce the same, or anything like the same, 
 haunting impression ; but only that, as far as either 
 the aspect of his characters or the circumstantial in- 
 terest of the stories is concerned, there need be no 
 compression in thus shortening them. The omissions 
 would be most important, indeed, to the effect ; but 
 they would be the omission of pale contemplative 
 touches, imaginative self-repetitions, and so forth, 
 which seldom indeed give us a single glimpse of any 
 other than the one side of his characters, or add a 
 second thread to the one interest of the tale. 
 
 In the "Scarlet Letter," for instance, there is but] 
 one conception, which is developed in three — perhaps 
 I should say four — scenes of great power, and that is 
 the deranging effect of the sin of adultery on the in-j 
 trinsically fine characters of those principally affected 
 by it, with a special view to its different influence on\ 
 the woman, who is openly branded with the shame J 
 
no NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 
 
 and on the man, whose guilt is not published, and . 
 who has a double remorse to suffer, for the sin, and 
 for the growing burden of insincerity. The effect of 
 the sin on the child who is the offspring of it is made 
 a special study, as are the false relations it introduces 
 between the mother and child. Throughout the tale 
 every one of the group of characters studied is seen 
 in the lurid light of this sin, and in no other. The 
 "only failure is in the case of the injured and vindic- 
 tive husband, whose character is subordinated entirely 
 to the artistic development of the other three. 
 
 In the same way the predominant idea of the 
 " Blithedale Romance" is to delineate the deranging 
 effect of an absorbing philanthropic idea on a powerful 
 mind, — the unscrupulous sacrifices of personal claims 
 which it induces, and the misery in which it ends. 
 There is scarcely one incident in the tale properly so 
 called except the catastrophe, and what there is is so 
 shrouded in mystery as to have the enigmatic charac- 
 ter of a tableau vivant, not too mysterious for a dis- 
 tinct drift, but of doubtful interpretation as to details. 
 The author seems to say. to the reader, "Here is a 
 group of characters in relations tending to illustrate 
 how much more sacred are personal affections than 
 any abstract cause, however noble : what these rela- 
 tions exactly are, except as they illustrate my idea, I 
 will not say, as that is quite non-essential ; you may 
 imagine them what you please, — I tell you only 
 enough to impress you with my predominant con- 
 viction." 
 
 Again, in the "House of the Seven Gables" we 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. Ill 
 
 have a picture studied to impress on us that both per- 
 sonal character, and the nialign influences of evil 
 action, are transmitted, sometimes with accumulating 
 force, even through centuries, blighting every gene- 
 ration through which they pass. This subject would 
 apparently involve a series of sketches ; but only two 
 are introduced from the past, and the family charac- 
 teristics are so anxiously preserved as to make even 
 these seem like slight modifications of some of the 
 living group. Hawthorne with rare art pictures the 
 shadow of the past as constantly hanging, like a bane- 
 ful cloud, over the heads of his figures; and every 
 detail, even the minutest, is made to point backwards 
 to the weary past from which it has derived its consti- 
 tutional peculiarities. Even the little shop which "old 
 maid Pyncheon " reopens in the dark old house is not 
 new. A miserly ancestor of the family had opened it 
 a century before, who is supposed to haunt it, and the 
 scales are rusty with the rust of generations. The 
 half-effaced picture of the ancestral Pyncheon which 
 hangs on the walls, the garden-mould black with the 
 vegetable decay of centuries, the exhausted breed of 
 aristocratic fowls which inhabit the garden,- — every 
 touch is studied to condense the dark past into a 
 cloud hanging over the living present, and make the 
 reader feel its malign influence. The only incident 
 in the tale is the light thrown upon a crime, — which 
 had been committed thirty years before the story 
 opens, — by the sudden death of the principal repre- 
 sentative of the family, from the same specific disease, 
 in the same chair, and under the same circumstances, 
 
1 
 
 112 NA THANIEL HA WTHORNE. 
 
 as that of the old ancestor and founder of the family 
 whose picture hangs above the chair. 
 
 The same criticism may be made on Hawthorne's 
 last complete novel. The sole idea of "Transforma- 
 tion" is to illustrate the intellectually and morally 
 awakening power of a sudden impulsive sin, commit- 
 ted by a simple joyous, instinctive, " natural " man. 
 The whole group of characters is imagined solely with 
 a view to the development of this idea. Hawthorne 
 even hints, though rather hesitatingly, that without sin 
 the higher humanity of man could not be taken up at 
 all ; that sin may be essential to the first conscious 
 awakening of moral freedom and the possibility of 
 progress. The act of sin itself is the only distinct 
 incident of the tale \ all the rest is either extraneous 
 dissertation on Art, .or the elaboration and study of the 
 group of characters requisite to embody this leading 
 idea. • A tale containing the whole ideal essence of 
 the book, and in this instance, though only in this 
 instance, almost equally powerful, might have been 
 told in a few pages. 
 
 And yet I am very far indeed from meaning to say 
 that the microscopic diffuseness with which Haw- 
 thorne enlarges these mystic studies into the length of 
 an ordinary novel is wasted. For the secret of his 
 power lies in the great art with which he reduplicates 
 and reflects and re-reflects the main idea of the tale 
 from the countless faces of his ghostly imagination, 
 until the reader's mind is absolutely haunted by it. 
 There are many among his shorter tales, which now oc- 
 cupy perhaps only five or ten pages, which would have 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, II3 
 
 gained infinitely in power by similar treatment, with- 
 out the addition of a single fresh incident or scene. 
 As they read now they have almost a feeble effect ; 
 they give the writer's idea, and no more; they do 
 not fill the reader with it; and Hawthorne's peculiar 
 genius lies in the power he possesses to be haunted, 
 and in his turn to haunt the reader with his concep- 
 tions, far more than in their intrinsic force. Look at 
 the central notion of his various minor tales, and you 
 will perhaps be struck with a certain ideal simplicity, 
 and a strange dash of lurid colour in them that will 
 impress you as promising, but no more. But let him 
 summon this idea before you in the innumerable Pro- 
 tean shapes of his own imagination, with alterations 
 of form just striking enough to make it seem at once 
 the same and something fresh, and before he has done 
 with you you are pursued, you are possessed, you are 
 beset with his notion ; it is in your very blood ; it 
 stares at you with ghastly force from every word of his 
 narrative ; it is in the earth and in the air ; and every 
 mouth that opens among his characters, however little 
 they may be involved in the mystery of the tale, only 
 sends it thrilling with greater force through your heart. 
 What a story, for instance, might he not have made 
 out of the very eerie tales called "Roger Malvin's 
 Burial," or "Rappacini's Daughter," if he had elab- 
 orated them with anything like the art shown in the 
 " House of the Seven Gables " ! 
 
 Hawthorne was quite aware of the slight ideal struc- 
 ture of his earlier and shorter tales. He himself crit- 
 icised them with rare candour and subtiety, though not 
 
1 
 
 114 ISfATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 
 
 with a fair appreciation of tlie promise of deeper power 
 which they contained, in that preface to one of the 
 editions of the "Twice-told Tales," to which I have 
 already once referred : — 
 
 " At all events, there can be no harm in the Author's remark- 
 ing that he rather wonders how the " Twice-told Tales " should 
 have gained what vogue they did, than that it was so little and 
 so gradual. They have the pale tint of flowers that blossomed 
 in too retired a shade — the coolness of a meditative habit, which 
 diffuses itself through the feeling and observation of every sketch. 
 Instead of passion there is sentiment ; and, even in what purport 
 to be pictures of actual life, we have allegory, not always so 
 warmly dressed in its habiliments of flesh and blood as to be 
 taken into the reader's mind without a shiver. Whether from 
 lack of power, or an unconquerable reserve, the Author's touches 
 have often an effect of tameness ; the merriest man can hardly 
 contrive to laugh at his broadest humour; the tenderest woman, 
 one would suppose, will hardly shed warm tears at his deepest 
 pathos. With the foregoing characteristics, proper to the pro- 
 ductions of a person in retirement (which happened to be the 
 Author's category at the time), the book is devoid of others that 
 we should quite as naturally look for. The sketches are not, it 
 is hardly necessary to say, profound ; but it is rather more re- 
 markable that they so seldom, if ever, show any design on the 
 writer's part to make them so. They have none of the abstruse- 
 ness of idea, or obscurity of expression, which mark the written 
 communications of a solitary mind within itself. They never 
 need translation. It is, in fact, the style of a man of society. 
 Every sentence, so far as it embodies thought or sensibility, may 
 be understood and felt by anybody who will give himself the 
 trouble to read it, and will take up the book in a proper mood. 
 This statement of apparently opposite peculiarities leads us to a 
 perception of what the sketches truly are. They are not the tallc 
 of a secluded man with his own mind and heart (had it been so 
 they could hardly have failed to be more deeply and permanently 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. II5 
 
 valuable), but his attempts, and very imperfectly successful ones, 
 to open an intercourse with the world." 
 
 This passage contains some of the truest and finest 
 touches in the way of literary self-criticism with which 
 I am acquainted ; but it does not, as I said, do justice 
 to the undeveloped germs of power in many of the 
 pieces comprised in this and Hawthorne's other col- 
 lections of short tales. It is true, indeed, that, through- 
 out almost all he wrote, sentiment takes the place of 
 passion, and it is not seldom true, though it by no 
 means holds of the majority of his finished studies of 
 character, that, in the place of " pictures of actual life, 
 we have allegory not always so warmly dressed in its 
 habiliments of flesh and blood as to be taken into the 
 reader's mind without a shiver." But there is enough 
 even in the early tales of which Hawthorne here speaks 
 to prove that the allegorical turn which his tales are 
 apt to take was not with him, as it often is, a sign of 
 meagre or shallow imaginative endowments, — a proof 
 that fancy predominated in him rather than genuine 
 imagination. 
 
 When a man sits down professing to paint human 
 life and character, and in place thereof succeeds only 
 in representing abstract virtues, vices, passions, and 
 the like, under human names, we may fairly say that 
 with him the allegorical vein proves the general pov- 
 erty of his spiritual blood. He has peeled off the 
 outer surface where he professed to model the sub- 
 stance. But when, on the other hand, the same truth 
 which by an ordinary intellect would be expressed in 
 
1 
 
 ll6 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 
 
 a purely abstract form naturally takes shape in a man's 
 mind under an imaginative clothing which savours of 
 allegorv, no inference of the kind is legitimate. In 
 the one case the allegory is a degenerate romance, in 
 the other it is a thought expressing itself in the lan- 
 guage of the imagination. The weakness in the for- 
 mer case is measured by the inability of the imagina- 
 tion to see the broad chasm between the reality and 
 the allegorical shadow. In the latter case there 
 is no such inability, but the thought which would 
 have entered an ordinary mind in a purely abstract 
 form presents itself to this in the form of a distinct 
 shadow-picture. 
 
 And it is a sign that Hawthorne's genius has not the 
 weakness usually belonging to allegorists, that the 
 longer a subject rests in his mind, the more certainly 
 do the allegorical shadows of its first outline gather 
 solidity of form and variety of colour, and gradually 
 substantiate themselves into real though dimly-lighted 
 figures. In the ideal situation as it first presents itself to 
 the author's mind, the places of the human actors are 
 perhaps occupied by appropriate symbols of some pre- 
 dominant sentiment or characteristic which each of 
 the group subsequently embodies. If written down in 
 that faint early form, the tale seems allegorical. But 
 if allowed to lie by in the imagination, it deepens into 
 a pallid dramatic situation ; a body of human life and 
 character gathers round, and clothes each of the ideal 
 skeletons in the original plan, turning the faint allegory 
 into a chapter of human experience. So clearly did 
 Edgar Poe perceive this vein of genuine imaginative 
 
NA THANIEL HA WTHORNE. 1 1 7 
 
 power in Hawthorne's writings, even at a time when 
 he had published only his shorter tales, that he boldly 
 asserted, — in this, as I think^ overleaping the truth, — 
 that the conspicuously ideal scaffoldings of Hawthorne's 
 stories were but the monstrous fruits of the bad tran- 
 scendental atmosphere which he had breathed so long, 
 — the sign of the Emersonian school of thought in 
 which he had studied. " He is infinitely too fond of 
 allegory," said Edgar Poe, "and can never hope for 
 popularity so long as he persists in it. This he will 
 not do, for allegory is at war with the whole tone of 
 his nature, which disports itself never so well as when 
 escaping from the mysticism of his Goodman Browns 
 and White Old Maids into the hearty, genial, but still 
 Indian-summer sunshine of his Wakefields and Little 
 Annie's Rambles. Indeed, his spirit of metaphor run 
 mad is clearly imbibed from the phalanx and pha- 
 lanstery atmosphere in which he has been so long 
 struggling for truth. He has not half the material for 
 the exclusiveness of authorship that he possesses for its 
 universality. He has the purest style, the finest taste, 
 the most available scholarship, the most delicate hu- 
 mour, the most touching pathos, the most radiant im- 
 agination, the most consummate ingenuity, and with 
 these varied good qualities he has done well as a 
 mystic. But is there any one of these qualities which 
 should prevent his doing doubly well in a career of 
 honest, upright, sensible, prehensible, and compre- 
 hensible things? Let him mend his pen, get a bottle 
 of visible ink, come out from the Old Manse, cut Mr. 
 Alcott, hang (if possible) the editor of the 'Dial,' and 
 
Il8 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 
 
 throw out of the window to the pigs all his odd numbers 
 of the ' North- American Review.' " 
 
 The caustic American critic was, I think, confusing 
 two things in this brief summary of Hawthorne's qual- 
 ifications and deficiencies. He saw that Hawthorne 
 could produce the most skilful studies from real life, 
 as, for instance — to take one amongst many — in his 
 sketch of the old Apple Dealer ; he saw also that al- 
 most all his tales proper embodied an idea or a truth, 
 and he thought the former the natural bent of Haw- 
 thorne's mind, the latter the imported mannerism of 
 a clique. But the truth is, that both are equally nat- 
 ural to him, the pale transparency of an idea being 
 quite as essential to him in putting together a tale as 
 an unlimited store of exciting emergencies is to Fen- 
 imore Cooper or G. P. R. James, or a picturesque 
 episode in history to Sir Walter Scott. Hawthorne 
 could never weave his studies of human nature into a 
 continuous narrative, based on mere circumstantial 
 incident and striking adventure. The constructive 
 talent, probably the special tastes and interests, requi- 
 site for that kind of framework of a tale were not a 
 part of his genius. He must have a ghostly centre of 
 his own, or he could not write at all. 
 
 His power over his readers always arises from mtich 
 the same cause as that of his own fanciful creation, — 
 the minister who wore the black veil as a symbol of 
 the veil which is on all hearts, and who startled men 
 less because he was hidden from their view than be- 
 cause he made them aware of their own solitude. 
 "Why do you tremble at me alone?'' says the mild 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. II9 
 
 old man on his death-bed, from beneath his black 
 veil, and with the glimmering smile on his half-hid- 
 den lips; "tremble also at each other! Have men 
 avoided me, and women shown no pity, and children 
 screamed and fled only from my black veil ? What 
 but the mystery which it obscurely typifies has made 
 this piece of crape so awful ? When the friend shows 
 his inmost heart to his friend, the lover to his best 
 beloved, when man does not vainly shrink from the 
 eye of his Creator, loathsomely treasuring up the 
 secret of his sin, then deem me a monster for the 
 symbol beneath which I have lived and died ! I look 
 around me, and lo ! on every visage a black veil!" 
 Hawthorne, with the pale melancholy smile that seems 
 to be always on his lips, speaks from a somewhat sim- 
 ilar solitude. Indeed I suspect the story was a kind 
 of parable of his own experience. 
 
 But, though Hawthorne's imagination was a solitary 
 and twilight one, there was nothing allegorical about 
 his genius. If we want to find his power at the very 
 highest, we must look to his instinctive knowledge of 
 what we may call the laws, not exactly of discordant 
 emotions, but of emotions which ought to be mutually 
 exclusive, and which combine with the thrill and the 
 shudder of disease. This is almost the antithesis of 
 Allegory. And he makes his delineation of such 
 "unblest unions" the more striking, because it stands 
 out from a background of healthy life, of genial 
 scenes and simple beauties, which renders the con- 
 trast the more thrilling. I have often heard the term 
 " cobweby " applied to his romances; and their most 
 
120 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 
 
 marking passages certainly cause the same sense of 
 unwelcome shrinking to the spirit which a line of unex- 
 pected cobwebs suddenly drawn across the face causes 
 physically when one enters a deserted but familiar 
 room. Edgar Poe, indeed, is much fuller of un- 
 canny terrors ; but then there is nothing in his writ- 
 ings of the healthy, simple, and natural background 
 which gives sin and disease all its horror. It is the 
 pure and severe New England simplicity which Haw- 
 jthorne paints so delicately that brings out in full re- 
 fief the adulterous mixture of emotions on which he 
 Spends his main strength. I might almost say that he 
 has carried into human affairs the old Calvinistic type 
 of imagination. The same strange combination of 
 clear simplicity, high faith, and reverential reality, 
 with a reluctant, but for that very reason intense and 
 devouring, conviction of the large comprehensive- 
 ness of the Divine Damnation, which that grim creed 
 taught its most honest believers to consider as the true 
 trust in God's providence, Hawthorne copies into his 
 pictures of human life. He presents us with a scene 
 of pale severe beauty, full of truthful goodness, and 
 then he uncovers in some one point of it a plague- 
 spot, that, half-concealed as he keeps it, yet runs away 
 with the imagination till one is scarcely conscious of 
 anything else. Just as Calvinism, with all its noble 
 features, can never keep its eyes off that one fact, as 
 it thinks it, of God's calm foreknowledge of a wide- 
 spread damnation ; and this gradually encroaches on 
 the attention till the mind is utterly absorbed in the 
 fascinating terror of the problem how to combine the 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 121 
 
 clashing emotions of love and horror which its image 
 of Hira inspires; — so Hawthorne's finest tales, with 
 all the simplicity of their general outline, never detain 
 you long from some uneasy mixture of emotions which 
 only disease can combine in the same subject, until 
 at last you ask for nothing but the disentangling of 
 the infected web. 
 
 There are many illustrations of this peculiarity of 
 Hawthorne's genius in his earlier and shorter tales. 
 In one of them he exclaims, and it is the key to his 
 genius, "Blessed are all simple emotions, be they dark 
 or bright ! It is the lurid intermixture of the two that 
 produces the illuminating blazes of the infernal re- 
 gions." The tale in which Hawthorne makes this 
 remark, "Rappacini's Daughter," itself exemplifies in 
 a somewhat fanciful but striking form this constant 
 bent of his imagination. Dr. Rappacini is a professor 
 of medical science in the University of Padua. He 
 has devoted himself to the study of deadly poisons, 
 and learnt how to infuse them so subtly into both 
 animal and vegetable natures as to render that which 
 would be fatal in the ordinary way, essential to life 
 and health, and even productive of unusual lustre and 
 bloom. Hawthorne has evidently based his tale on 
 the physiological fact — which, at least in the case of 
 arsenic, is well attested — -that a malignant poison, if 
 gradually administered, may at length become a con- 
 dition of life and conducive to beauty. Dr. Rappacini 
 has filled his garden with flowers so poisonous that he 
 himself dare not touch them, and can scarcely venture 
 to breathe the air around them. But the life of his 
 
122 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 
 
 daughter Beatrice has been imbued and fed with the 
 same poisons which give so rich a bloom and so sweet 
 but deadly a perfume to these rare plants ; and to her 
 they are health and added loveliness. Her breath is 
 instantly fatal to the insect or the butterfly that drinks 
 it in, and even her touch is deadly. But her heart is 
 stainless and noble, and she shudders herself at the 
 malign influences which she involuntarily puts forth as 
 insects fall dead around her. Her great beauty fasci- 
 nates one of the students, whose lodging looks out above 
 this strange garden ; and by Rappacini's skill, exercised 
 without the young man's knowledge, he is gradually 
 imbued with the same poisons which enter so deeply 
 into the life and constitution of Beatrice. The point 
 and art of this eerie tale lie in the conflict of emotions 
 which Beatrice's true spiritual beauty and malignant 
 physical influences raise in the mind of her lover, filling 
 him with a passion blended equally of love and horror; 
 and in the description of the despair with which he 
 discovers that the same malignant influences are already 
 part of himself. 
 
 The same tendency of imagination, in perhaps quite 
 as characteristic, but in a far more unpleasant form, is 
 shown in the tale called the "Birth-Mark," which turns 
 on the morbid horror inspired by a slight birth-mark 
 on the cheek of a beautiful woman in the mind of her 
 husband, who is at the same time passionately attached 
 to her and bent on eradicating it. This tale has no 
 imaginative beauty, and is only remarkable for the 
 diseased mixture of emotions which it depicts. Again, 
 in the tale concerning "The Man with the Snake in 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 1 23 
 
 his Bosom," and "Young Goodman Brown," with all 
 the most remarkable of Hawthorne's shorter tales, the 
 same prominent feature, in some form or other, may- 
 be discerned. 
 
 But it is in the more elaborate tales that Hawthorne 
 has most scope, at once for the relieving elements which 
 these morbid interests, if they are to be artistically 
 treated at all, especially require, and for the fuller de- 
 velopment and justification, so to say, of emotions so 
 subtle and unhealthy. In the "Scarlet Letter," he 
 has a subject naturally so painful as exactly to suit his 
 genius. He treats it with perfect delicacy, for his at- 
 tention is turned to the morbid anatomy of the rela- 
 tions which have originated in the sin of adultery, 
 rather than to the sin itself. There are two points on 
 which Hawthorne concentrates his power in this re- 
 markable book. The first is the false position of the 
 minister, who gains fresh reverence and popularity as 
 the very fruit of the passionate anguish with which his 
 heart is consumed. Frantic with the stings of unac- 
 knowledged guilt, he is yet taught by those very stings 
 to understand the hearts and stir the consciences of 
 others. His character is a pre-Raphaelite picture of 
 the tainted motives which fill a weak but fine and sen- 
 sitive nature when placed in such a position; of self- 
 hatred quite too passionate to conquer self-love; of a 
 quailing conscience smothered into insane cravings for 
 blasphemy; of the exquisite pain of gratified ambition 
 conscious of its shameful falsehood. The second point 
 on which Hawthorne concentrates his power is the 
 delineation of anomalous characteristics in the child 
 
1 
 
 124 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 
 
 who is the offspring of this sinful passion. He gives 
 her an inheritance of a lawless, mischievous, and elfish 
 nature, not devoid of strong affections, but delighting 
 to probe the very sorest points of her mother's heart, 
 induced in part by some mysterious fascination to the 
 subject, in part by wanton mischief. The scarlet A 
 which is the brand of her mother's shame, is the child's 
 delight. She will not approach her mother unless the 
 A be on her bosom ; and the unnatural complication 
 of emotions thus excited in Hester Prynne's heart pre- 
 sents one of the most characteristic features of the book, 
 and are painfully engraved on the reader's mind. 
 
 The scene of most marvellous power which the book 
 contains contrives to draw to a focus all the many clash- 
 ing affections portrayed. Mr. Dimmesdale, the un- 
 happy minister, eager to invent vain penances in ex- 
 piation of the guilt which he dares not avow, creeps 
 out at midnight in his canonical robe to stand for an 
 hour on the scaffold on which Hester and her child had 
 been pilloried years before. It is the night when many 
 are watching by the dying-bed of the governor of 
 Massachusetts, and one of the ntiinister's reverend 
 colleagues, who has been praying with the governor, 
 passes under the scaffold, lantern in hand. In his 
 nervous and excited mood, Dimmesdale almost ad- 
 dresses him aloud, and then, paralysed by dread and 
 his limbs stiffened by cold, it occurs to him that he 
 will never be able to descend the steps of the scaffold, 
 and that morning will break to show him there to all 
 his revering flock : — 
 
 " Morning would break, and find hira there. The neighbour- 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 12$ 
 
 hood would begin to rouse itself. The earliest riser, coming 
 forth in the dim twilight, would perceive a vaguely-defined figure 
 aloft on the place of shame ; and half crazed betwixt alarm and 
 curiosity, would go knocking from door to door, summoning all 
 the people to behold the ghost — as he needs must think it^of 
 some defunct transgressor. A dusky tumult would flap its wings 
 from one house to another. Then— the morning light still wax- 
 ing stronger — old patriarchs would rise up in great haste, each in 
 his flannel gown, and matronly dames without pausing to put off" 
 their night gear. The whole tribe of decorous personages, who 
 had never heretofore been seen with a single hair of their heads 
 awry, would start into public view with the disorder of a night- 
 mai-e in their aspects. Old Governor Bellingham would come 
 grimly forth, with his King James' ruff fastened askew; and 
 Mistress Hibbins, with some twigs of the forest clinging to her 
 skirts, and looking sourer than ever, as having hardly got a wink 
 of sleep after her night ride ; and good Father Wilson too, after 
 spending half the night at a death-bed, and liking ill to be dis- 
 turbed thus early out of his dreams about the glorified saints. 
 Hither likewise would come the elders and deacons of Mr. 
 Dimmesdale's church, and the young virgins who so idolised 
 their minister, and had made a shrine for him in their white 
 bosoms; which now, by the by, in their hurry and confusion, 
 they would scantily have given themselves time to cover with 
 their kerchiefs. All people, in a word, would come stumbling 
 over their thresholds, and turning up their amazed and horror- 
 stricken visages around the scaffold. Whom would they discern 
 there with the red eastern light upon his brow? Whom, but the 
 Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, half-frozen to death, overwhelmed 
 with shame, and standing where Hester Prynne had stood ! 
 
 Carried away by the grotesque horror of this picture, the min- 
 ister, unawares, and to his own infinite alarm, burst into a great 
 peal of laughter. It was immediately responded to by a light, 
 airy, childish laugh, in which, with a thrill of the heart— but he 
 knew not whether of exquisite pain, or pleasure as acute — he 
 recognised the tones of little Pearl. 
 
126 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 
 
 'Pearl! Little Pearl!' cried he, after a moment's pause; 
 then, suppressing his voice, ' Hester ! Hester Prynne ! Are you 
 there? 'Yes; it is Hester Prynne!' she replied, in a tone of 
 surprise; and the minister heard her footsteps approaching from 
 the side-walk, along which she had been passing. ' It is I, and 
 my little Pearl.' 'Whence come you, Hester?' asked the min- 
 ister. 'What sent you hither?' 'I have been watching at a 
 death-bed,' answered Hester Prynne ; ' at Governor Winthrop's 
 death-bed, and have taken his measure for a robe, and am 
 now going homeward to my dwelling.' ' Come up hither, 
 Hester, thou and little Pearl,' said the Reverend Mr. Dim- 
 mesdale. ' Ye have both been here before, but I was not with 
 you. Come up hither once again, and we will stand all three 
 together.' 
 
 She silently ascended the steps, and stood on the platform, 
 holding little Pearl by the hand. The minister felt for the child's 
 other hand, and took it. The moment that he did so, there came 
 what seemed a tumultuous rush of new life, other life than his 
 own, pouring like a torrent into his heart, and hurrying through 
 all his veins, as if the mother and the child were communicating 
 their vital warmth to his half-torpid system. The three formed 
 an electric chain. 
 
 'Minister!' whispered little Pearl. 'What wouldst thou say, 
 child ?' asked Mr. Dimmesdale. ' Wilt thou stand here with 
 mother and me, to-morrow noontide?' inquired Pearl. 'Nay; 
 not so, my little Pearl,' answered the minister; for, with the new 
 energy of the moment, all the dread of public exposure, that had 
 so long been the anguish of his life, had returned upon him; 
 and he was already trembling at the conjunction in which, with 
 a strange joy, nevertheless, he now found himself, — ' not so, my 
 child. I shall indeed stand with thy mother and thee one other 
 day, but not to-morrow.' 
 
 Pearl laughed, and attempted to pull away her hand. But the 
 minister held it fast. ' A moment longer, my child !' said he. 
 ' But wilt thou promise,' asked Pearl, ' to take my hand, and 
 mother's hand, to-morrow noontide?'" 
 
NATHAiXIEL HAWTHORNE. 12/ 
 
 At this moment a sudden meteoric light flashes 
 across the sky, and lights up the scaffold ; after de- 
 scribing it the tale proceeds : — 
 
 " There was a singular circumstance that characterised Mr. 
 Dimmesdale's psychological state at this moment. All the time 
 that he gazed upward to the zenith, he was nevertheless perfectly 
 aware that little Pearl was pointing her finger towards old Roger 
 Chillingworth, who stood at no great distance from the scaffold. 
 The minister appeared to see him with the same glance that 
 discerned the miraculous letter. To his features, as to all other 
 objects, the meteoric light imparted a new expression; or it 
 might well be that the physician was not careful then, as at all 
 other times, to hide the malevolence with which he looked upon 
 his victim. Certainly, if the meteor kindled up the sky, and 
 disclosed the earth, with an awfulness that admonished Hester 
 Prynne and the clergyman of the day of judgment, then might 
 Roger Chillingworth have passed with them for the arch-fiend, 
 standing there with a smile and scowl to claim his own. So 
 vivid was the expression, or so intense the minister's perception 
 of it, that it seemed still to remain painted on the darkness, after 
 the meteor had vanished, with an effect as if the street and all 
 things else were at once annihilated. 
 
 'Who is that man, Hester?' gasped Mr. Dimmesdale, over- 
 come with terror. ' I shiver at him ! Dost thou know the man ? 
 I hate him, Hester !' 
 
 She remembered her oath, and was silent. 
 
 'I tell thee my soul shivers at him!' muttered the minister 
 again. 'Who is he? Who is he? Canst thou do nothing for 
 me ? I have a nameless horror of the man !' 
 
 ' Minister,' said little Pearl, ' I can tell thee who he is.' 
 
 ' Quickly, then, child !' said the minister, bending his ear close 
 to her lips. 'Quickly! and as low as thou canst whisper.' 
 
 Pearl mumbled something into his ear that sounded, indeed, 
 like human language, but was only such gibberish as children 
 
128 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 
 
 may be heard amusing themselves with by the hour together. 
 At all events, if it involved any secret information in regard to 
 old Roger Cliillingworth, it was in a tongue unknown to the 
 erudite clergyman, and did but increase the bewilderment of his 
 mind. The elvish child then laughed aloud." 
 
 This strange vigil, the grim hysteric humour of the 
 minister, the proud and silent fortitude of Hester, the 
 mocking laughter of the child as she detects her un- 
 known father's cowardice, together make as weird-like 
 a tangle of human elements as ever bubbled together 
 in a witches' caldron. Yet this scene, though proba- 
 bly the most powerful which Hawthorne ever painted, 
 scarcely exemplifies his uncanny passion of awakening 
 the most mutually-repellent feelings at the same mo- 
 ment towards the same person so characteristically as 
 many of his other tales. 
 
 In the most striking chapter of the "House of the 
 Seven Gables," Hawthorne makes Judge Pyncheon, 
 who has died in his chair from a sudden effusion of 
 blood, holding his still ticking watch in his hand, a 
 subject at once for awe and scorn. He recalls all the 
 judge's engagements for the day, — the bank-meeting 
 at which he was to take the chair, — the business ap- 
 pointment he was to keep, — the private purchases he 
 was to make, — the little act of charity which he had 
 thought of, time and purse permitting, — the half-for- 
 mal call on his physician concerning some trifling 
 symptoms of indisposition, — the political dinner to 
 discuss the election of the next State Governor; and 
 then he taunts the judge with his forgetfulness. He 
 had resolved to spend only half-an-hour in this house. 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 1 29 
 
 '' Half-an-hour ! Why, judge, it is already two hours by 
 your own undeviatingly accurate chronometer. Glance 
 your eye down on it and see. Ah ! he will not give him- 
 self the trouble either to bend his head or elevate his 
 hand, so as to bring the faithful time-keeper within his 
 range of vision. Time all at once appears to have 
 become a matter of no moment with the judge !" And 
 so Hawthorne goes on through the list of his engage- 
 ments, reminding him separately of each as the time 
 comes for it, recalling to the dead man the import- 
 ance he had attached to it when he made his plans in 
 the morning. The private dinner would, in all prob- 
 ability, determine the next election,— and Judge Pyn- 
 cheon was a candidate, and with rare chances of suc- 
 cess. " Make haste, then ; do your part! . . . Drink 
 a glass or two of that noble wine ! — make your pledges 
 in as low a whisper as you will^ — and you rise up from 
 table virtually governor of the glorious old State — 
 Governor Pyncheon of Massachusetts ! And is there 
 no potent and exhilarating cordial in a certainty like 
 this? It has been the grand purpose of half your 
 lifetime to obtain it. Now, when there needs little 
 more than to signify your acceptance, why do you sit 
 so lumpishly in your great-grandfather's old chair, as 
 if preferring it to the gubernatorial one?" Thus 
 Hawthorne goes on throughout the twenty-four hours 
 during which the judge's body remains undiscovered, 
 ■ — mingling with the most powerful picture of the 
 supernatural side of death, which he never ceases to 
 keep vividly before us, the feelings that cluster round 
 petty business, the sarcasms that might sting the sen- 
 9 
 
130 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 
 
 sitive, the urgency that might hasten the dilatory, the 
 incentives that would spur the ambitious, flinging them 
 all in cold irony at the corpse with an eerie efifect that 
 only Hawthorne could produce. 
 
 But the most characteristic instance of Hawthorne's 
 power in studying combinations of emotions that are 
 as it were at once abhorrent to nature and true to life, 
 is in "Transformation." The one powerful scene in 
 that distended work is the scene of crime. The young 
 Tuscan Count Donatello, — the "natural man" of the 
 book, who is rumoured to be a descendant of an 
 ancient Faun, and described in the opening of the 
 tale as possessed only of the happy spontaneous life 
 of the natural creatures, but who is afterwards awak- 
 ened to the higher responsibilities and life of man by 
 his remorse for an impulsive crime, — has fallen in 
 love with Miriam, a lady artist of warm and passion- 
 ate nature, high powers, and mysterious origin. This 
 young lady is pursued by some half-madman, half- 
 demon, who from some (unexplained) connection with 
 her previous life has power to torment her by his 
 threats to the very verge of unsettling her reason. 
 Walking with Donatello, one moonlight night, at a 
 little distance from their party, on the verge of the 
 Tarpeian rock, this tormenting being is discovered, 
 dogging her footsteps as usual, under the shadow of 
 an archway. Donatello seizes him, holds him over 
 the precipice, catches Miriam's eye, reads in it eager 
 and fierce assent to the act he is meditating, and drops 
 him down ; there is a dead thump on the stones below 
 and all is over. Up io this instant Miriam had felt 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. I3I 
 
 nothing but pity for her young lover. Now for the 
 first time, in this hideous moment, horror and love 
 are born together in her breast, and the monstrous 
 birth, the delirium of love born in blood, is thus 
 powerfully described ; — except, by the way, that Mir- 
 iam certainly never addressed Donatello at such a 
 moment as "Oh, friend!" either "with heavy rich- 
 ness of meaning " or otherwise, and that this is a sen- 
 timental blot on Hawthorne's picture. 
 
 " ' Did you not mean that he should die ?' sternly asked Dona- 
 tello, still in the glow of that intelligence which passion had de- 
 veloped in him. 'There was short time to weigh the matter; 
 but he had his trial in that breath or two, while I held him over 
 the cliff, s,nd his sentence in that one glance, when your eyes re- 
 sponded to mine ! Say that I have slain him against your will — 
 say that he died without your whole consent — and in another 
 breath, you shall see me lying beside him.' ' Oh, never !' cried 
 Miriam. ' My one own friend ! Never, never, never !' She 
 turned to him — the guilty, blood-stained, lonely woman — she 
 turned to her fellow-criminal, the youth so lately innocent, whom 
 she had drawn into her doom. She pressed him close, close to 
 her bosom, with a clinging embrace that brought their two hearts 
 together, till the horror and agony of each was combined into 
 one emotion, and that a kind of rapture. ' Yes, Donatello, you 
 speak the truth !' said she ; ' my heart consented to what you did. 
 We two slew yonder wretch. The deed knots us together for 
 time and eternity, like the coil of a serpent !' They threw one 
 other glance at the heap of death below, to assure themselves 
 that it was there ; so like a dream was the whole thing. Then 
 they turned from that fatal precipice, and came out of the court- 
 yard, arm in arm, heart in heart. Instinctively, they were heed- 
 ful not to sever themselves so much as a pace or two from one 
 another, for fear of the terror and deadly chill that would thence- 
 forth wait for them in solitude. Their deed — the crime which 
 
132 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 
 
 Donatello wrought, and Miriam accepted on the instant — had 
 wreathed itself, as she said, Iil<;e a serpent, in inextricable links 
 about both their souls, and drew them into one by its terrible 
 contractile power. It was closer than a marriage-bond. So in- 
 timate, in those first moments, was the union that it seemed as if 
 their new sympathy annihilated all other ties, and that they were 
 released from the chain of humanity ; a new sphere, a special 
 law, had been created for them alone. The world could not 
 come near them; they were safe! . . . 'Oh, friend!' cried 
 Miriam, so putting her soul into that word that it took a heavy 
 richness of meaning, and seemed never to have been spoken be- 
 fore, — 'oh, friend, are you conscious, as I am, of this com- 
 panionship that knits our heart-strings together ?' ' I feel it, 
 Miriam,' said Donatello. ' We draw one breath ; we live one 
 life!' 'Only yesterday,' continued Miriam; 'nay, only a short 
 half-hour ago, I shivered in an icy solitude. No friendship, no 
 sisterhood, could come near enough to keep the warmth within 
 my heart. In an instant, all is changed! There can be no more 
 loneliness !' ' None, Miriam !' said Donatello. ' None, my beau- 
 tiful one !' responded Miriam, gazing in his face, which had taken 
 a higher, almost an heroic aspect from the strength of passion. 
 ' None, my innocent one ! Surely, it is no crime that we have 
 committed. One wretched and worthless life has been sacrificed, 
 to cement two other lives for evermore.' ' For evermore^ Mir- 
 iam!' said Donatello; 'cemented with his blood!' The young 
 man started at the word which he had himself spoken ; it may 
 be that it brought home, to the simplicity of his imagination, 
 what he had not before dreamed of — the ever-increasing loath- 
 someness of a union that consists in guilt. Cemented with blood, 
 which would corrupt and grow more noisome for ever and for 
 ever, but bind them not the less strictly for that ! ' Forget it ! 
 Cast it all behind you !'.said Miriam, detecting, by her sympathy, 
 the pang that was in his heart. ' The deed has done its office, 
 and has no existence any more.' They flung the past behind 
 them, as she counselled, or else distilled from it a fiery in- 
 toxication, which sufficed to carry them triumphantly through 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 1 33 
 
 those first moments of their doom. For guilt has its moment of 
 rapture too. The foremost result of a broken law is ever an ec- 
 static sense of freedom. And thus there exhaled upward (out 
 of their dark sympathy, at the base of which lay a human corpse) 
 a bliss, or an insanity, which the unhappy pair imagined to be 
 well worth the sleepy innocence that was for ever lost to them. 
 As their spirits rose to the solemn madness of the occasion, they 
 went onward — not stealthily, not fearfully — but with a stately 
 gait and aspect. Passion lent them (as it does to meaner shapes) 
 its brief nobility of carriage. They trode through the streets of 
 Rome as if they too were among the majestic and guilty shadows 
 that, from ages long gone by, have haunted the blood-stained 
 city." 
 
 This is very finely conceived and yet revolting. 
 Have I not reason for saying, that Hawthorne's chief 
 jjower lies in the delineation of unnatural alliances 
 of feeling, which are yet painfully real, — of curd- 
 ling emotions that may mix for a moment, but shrink 
 apart again quickly as running water from clotted 
 blood ? 
 
 But it would be very unjust to Hawthorne to repre-1 
 sent him as in any degree addicted, like Edgar Poe, 
 to the invention of monstrosities and horrors. I only 
 mean that his genius naturally leads him to the analy- 
 sis and representation of certain outlying moral anom- 
 alies, which are not the anomalies of ordinary evil and 
 sin, but have a certain chilling unnaturalness of their 
 own. But under Hawthorne's treatment these anom-, 
 alies are only the subtle flaws or passionate taints of 
 natures full of fine elements ; they are never superla- 
 tives of iniquity and abomination, like Edgar Poe's. 
 They are the dark spots in a fine picture, never the 
 
134 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 
 
 very substance of the whole. There is, for instance, 
 every palliation which a charitable imagination can 
 invent for Hester's sin and Dimmesdale's cowardice 
 in the "Scarlet Letter;" and even the child's elfish 
 wantonness, though in some degree preternatural, is 
 not demoniacal, but the mere lawless taint in an other- 
 wise warm and open heart. So too in "Transforma- 
 tion" there is every excuse that circumstances can give 
 to the crime which Donatello commits and Miriam 
 sanctions ; — after the first moment of mad excitement 
 is over, it fills them with unspeakable anguish ; it rouses 
 all the tender devotion of the woman in Miriam for 
 the man who had thus stained his conscience under 
 the impulse of love to her ; it awakens the sleeping 
 soul of Donatello; — and the book is meant to record 
 their uninterrupted upward progress from that moment. 
 Moreover, in the two other characters we find a peace- 
 ful contrast to the turbid hearts of the sinful lovers. 
 Neither in this nor in any other tale does Hawthorne 
 cast any slur on human nature. He loves to picture it 
 in its highest and tenderest aspects. And when he 
 delineates what is revolting, one of the main elements 
 that makes it so revolting is the Manichean incarcer- 
 ation of some noble and half-angelic affection in a 
 malignant body of evil, from which it vainly seeks to 
 be divorced. 
 
 This bent of Hawthorne's genius is no doubt in great 
 degree determined by the lonely wistfulness of his 
 mind. Even his imagination is inquisitive and — if I 
 may call it what he calls it himself in the " Blithedale 
 Romance" — rather /rc/«^ than ardent. It is curious 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 1 35 
 
 to find that Hawthorne was a descendent of the ' ' witch- 
 judge," — the Hawthorne of whom Longfellow intro- 
 duced a sketch into his New England tragedies. One 
 might fancy that Hawthorne had inherited not a little 
 of the eeriness of the spiritual inquisitor without any 
 touch of his cruelty, — except so far as a passionless 
 curiosity which is very little agitated by sympathy, 
 even where it is analysing painful subjects, may popu- 
 larly (and very unjustly) be confused with cruelty. But 
 it is not only the inquisitorial side of Hawthorne's cold 
 fancy which seems to connect him with his ancestor the 
 "witch-judge." There seems to have been in him a 
 considerable vein of what would probably very unjustly 
 be called superstition, — /. ^., aspecial attraction towards 
 the morbid side of mental phenomena, with, perhaps, 
 an undue tendency to credulity. As to the credulity, 
 I am not sure. It may well be that Hawthorne be- 
 lieved no more of the so-called science of mesmeric 
 and spiritualistic phenomena than the most acute and 
 incredulous men of his society. But that he was spe- 
 cially fascinated by these morbid phenomena, as by all 
 morbid phenomena of human nature, is proved by a 
 vast number of passages in his various note-books, as 
 well as by the subjects of his novels. 
 
 His notes are full of suggestions for imaginative in- 
 quisitions into morbid subjects. In one page we find 
 a suggestion, more cynical and less preternatural than 
 usual, that two persons might make their wills in each 
 other's favour, and then wait impatiently for the death 
 of the other, till each was informed that the long-de- 
 sired event had taken place, and hastening to be pres- 
 
136 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 
 
 ent at the other's funeral, they might meet each other 
 in perfect health; in another page we find noted down, 
 " Curious to imagine what murmurings and discontent 
 would be excited if any of the great so-called calamities 
 of human beings were to be abolished, — as, for instance, 
 death;" — again we have a suggestion for a new sort of 
 reading of Boccaccio's story of Isabel, that a girl, not 
 knowing her lover to be dead and buried in her own 
 garden, might yet feel an indescribable impulse of at- 
 traction towards the flowers growing out of his grave, 
 might find them of admirable splendour, beauty, and 
 perfume, and rejoice in keeping them in her bosom 
 and scenting her room with them. Again, on another 
 page we have a suggested sketch of a man who tries to 
 be happy in love, but who cannot really give his heart, 
 or prevent the affair from seeming a pure dream ; — in 
 domestic life, in politics, in every sphere it is to be the 
 same, — he is to seem a patriot, and care nothing really 
 for his country, only try to care; he is to seem the 
 kindest of sons and brothers, but feel the whole relation 
 unreal; in a word, he is to be wholly "detached" from 
 life, like a Roman Catholic monk or nun, but without 
 that life in another world after which they aim. These 
 are only a very few specimens of the fascination with 
 which Hawthorne's fancy dwells on morbid psychology 
 as his natural subject. There are but it^^ pages in his 
 Note-books which do not afford examples of the same 
 thing. Hawthorne seems to illustrate his contemporary 
 and friend Dr. Holmes's theory that we are each of us 
 a sort of physiological and psychological omnibus for 
 bringing back our ancestors in new shapes and under 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 1 3/ 
 
 different conditions to this earth. The "witch-judge," 
 associating himself perhaps with some more literary 
 ancestor of Hawthorne's, reappeared in this most origi- 
 nal of American novelists. Hawthorne was a novelist 
 because he was an intellectual and moral inquisitor. 
 "Inquisitor and novelist," would describe him even 
 better than "novelist and inquisitor," — always care- 
 fully expelling, of course, all notion of torture from 
 the inquisitorial character of his imagination. 
 
 Hawthorne's genius, then, is fertile, but in a cold 
 and restless way. It is used more to help him to ex- 
 plore mysteries than in obedience to the glowing cre- 
 ative impulse that cannot choose but paint. He states 
 to himself a problem, and sets his imagination to work 
 to solve it. How was it the woman felt who wore 
 publicly the symbol of her own sin and shame fanci- 
 fully embroidered on her bosom ? What would be the 
 state of mind of one who had unhappily killed another, 
 and could never clearly determine in his own con- 
 science whether his will bad consented to the deed or 
 not? What would be the result of a wrongful life- 
 imprisonment on a soft aesthetic nature made for the 
 enjoyment of the beautiful ? How would a sin of 
 passion work on a healthy, innocent, natural man of 
 unawakened spirit ? These are the kind of hypotheses 
 on which Hawthorne's imagination works ; and from 
 the nature of the case, images summoned up in obedi- 
 ence to such questionings cannot always be of a very 
 wholesome kind. The problems that Hawthorne starts 
 are usually connected with the deepest mysteries of the 
 human mind and conscience ; and the imagination 
 
138 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 
 
 which attempts to keep pace with the inquisitive intel- 
 lect cannot but paint strange and thrilling anomalies 
 in reply to its queries. 
 
 "That cold tendency," says Mr. Coverdale, the hero 
 of the "Blithedale Romance," who has many points 
 of intellectual affinity with its author, — "that cold 
 tendency between instinct and intellect, which made 
 me pry with a speculative interest into people's pas- 
 sions and impulses, appeared to have gone far towards 
 unhumanising my heart." I do not suppose that it 
 went far, or any way at all, towards unhumanising 
 Hawthorne's heart, which was evidently tender. But 
 no doubt, he is led by the speculative bias of his mind 
 to steep his imagination in arcana on which it is 
 scarcely good to gaze at all. 
 
 It is remarkable, and perhaps a symptom of the same 
 imaginative constitution, that while Hawthorne has 
 the most eager desire to penetrate the secret attitudes 
 of minds painfully or anomalously situated, he has little 
 or no interest in picturing the exact combination of 
 circumstances which brought them into these attitudes. 
 His imagination is the very converse of De Foe's. 
 De Foe seizes the outer fact with the most vivid force ; 
 indirectly only, by the very force and minuteness of 
 his conception of the visible circumstances, actions, 
 and gestures he narrates, do you get at the inward mind 
 of his characters. Hawthorne, on the contrary, is 
 often positively anxious to stippress all distinct account 
 of the actual facts which have given rise to his ideal 
 situations. He wishes to save the mental impression 
 from being swallowed up, so to say, in the interest of 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 1 39 
 
 the outward facts and events. He sees that people of 
 a matter-of-fact turn of mind attach more value to 
 knowing the exciting causes than to knowing the state 
 of mind which results. If they hear what seems to 
 them an insufficient cause for a heroine's misery, they 
 set her down as feeble-minded, and give up their in- 
 terest in her fate. If they hear a too sufficient cause, 
 they say she deserved all she suffered, and for that 
 reason discard her from their sympathies. Haw- 
 thorne saw the difficulty of inventing facts that would 
 exactly hit the shade of feeling that he desired to ex- 
 cite in his readers' minds, and so he often refuses to 
 detail the facts distinctly at all. He often gives us 
 our choice of several sets of facts which might be ade- 
 quate to the results, declines to say which he himself 
 prefers, and insists only on the attitude of mind pro- 
 duced. 
 
 Thus, in the " Blithedale Romance," he preludes a 
 far from explanatory or lucid conversation with this 
 mystifying sentence, "I hardly could make out an 
 intelligible sentence on either side. What I seem to 
 remember I yet suspect may have been patched to- 
 gether by my fancy in brooding over the matter after- 
 wards." Again, in another part of the same book, 
 " The details of the interview that followed being un- 
 known to me, while notwithstanding it would be a 
 pity quite to lose the picturesqueness of the situation, 
 I shall attempt to sketch it mainly from fancy, although 
 with some general grounds of surmise in regard to the 
 old man's feelings." But he carried this preference 
 "or delineating states of mind, and obscurely suggest- 
 
I40 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 
 
 ing the class of facts which may have given rise to 
 them, to the furthest point in his last novel, "Trans- 
 formation." "Owing, it may be," he tells us, in a 
 chapter justly headed " Fragmentary Sentences," at a 
 critical juncture in the tale, "to this moral estrange- 
 ment, ^this chill remoteness of their position, — there 
 have come to us but a few vague whisperings of what 
 passed in Miriam's interview that afternoon with the 
 sinister personage who had dogged her footsteps ever 
 since her visit to the catacomb. In weaving these 
 mystic utterances into a continuous scene, we under- 
 take a task resembling in its perplexity that of gather- 
 ing up and piecing together the fragments of a letter 
 which has been torn and scattered to the winds. 
 Many words of deep significance, — many entire sen- 
 tences, and these probably the most important ones, — 
 have flown too far on the winged breeze to be recov- 
 ered. If we insert our own conjectural amendments, 
 we may perhaps give a purport utterly at variance with 
 the true one." And then he continues, "Of so much 
 we are sure, that there seemed to be a sadly mysterious 
 fascination in the influence of this ill-omened person 
 over Miriam ; it was such as beasts and reptiles of 
 subtle and evil natures sometimes exercise over their 
 victims. . . . Yet let us trust there may have been 
 no crime in Miriam, but only one of those fatalities 
 which are among the insoluble riddles propounded to 
 mortal comprehension — the fatal doom by which every 
 crime is made to be the agony of many innocent per- 
 sons, as well as of the single guilty one." In other 
 words, Hawthorne wishes us to picture a mind per- 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 14I 
 
 turbed, flushed, on the verge of despair, but does not 
 wish us to know how far the exciting causes had 
 involved her in real guilt, or merely in misery. It 
 is not essential, he thinks, to the purpose of the book, 
 which is rather to trace the effects of the subsequent 
 guilt on the relation between Miriam and Donatello 
 than to develop fully the previous character of the 
 woman who draws the poor young Count into crime. 
 As far as regards Miriam, the problem set himself by 
 the author in this book is only to delineate the influ- 
 ence exerted over her heart by Donatello's plunge into 
 guilt on her behalf. He thinks it enough to indicate 
 that she who led Donatello into guilt was either herself 
 guilty, or at least intimately imbued with all the infec- 
 tious fever of a guilty atmosphere. More is not essen- 
 tial to the author's purpose, and more he will not tell 
 us. He seems to hint, perhaps truly, that the chasm 
 between guilt and wretchedness in a woman's mind is 
 not always so wide as in a man's ; and that, at all 
 events, there is as much power in any deeply roused 
 affection to extricate her from the one as from the 
 other. For like reasons, I suppose, the end of the 
 tale is as shadowy as the beginning. The transforma- 
 tion is accomplished : the Faun is no longer a Faun ; 
 and all the author contemplated is therefore attained. 
 The wreath of mist which hangs over Miriam's past is 
 allowed also to settle over her own and Donatello's 
 future. The problem has been solved in the dissolv- 
 ing colours of two dimly-outlined minds. And their 
 earthly destiny is nothing to the reader; to know it 
 might even divert his attention from the artist's true 
 
142 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 
 
 purpose, and concentrate it on the denouement of a 
 commonplace story. 
 
 This predominance of moral colouring over the def- 
 inite forms of actual fact in Hawthorne's novels is to 
 me, I confess, unsatisfactory. And the degree to 
 which it is absent or prevails in his several works, 
 seems to me a fair measure of their relative artistic 
 worth. The "Scarlet Letter," in which there is by 
 far the most solid basis of fact, is, I think, also con- 
 siderably the finest and most powerful of his efforts. 
 The "House of the Seven Gables," in itself nearly a 
 perfect work of art, is yet composed of altogether 
 thinner materials. Yet the details are worked up with 
 so much care and finish, — the whole external scenery 
 of this, as well as of the "Scarlet Letter," is so sharply 
 defined, so full of the clear air of New England life, — 
 that one can bear better the subtle moral colouring and 
 anatomy with which they both abound. In the "Blithe- 
 dale Romance" I observe the first tendency to shroud 
 certain portions of the narrative in an intentional veil, 
 and to attempt to paint a distinct moral expression 
 without giving a distinct outline of fact. The effect 
 is powerful, but vague and not satisfying. The figures 
 wander vagrant-like through the imagination of the 
 reader. They seem to have no distinct place of their 
 own assigned to them. You know what sort of cha- 
 racters you have beheld, but not when and under what 
 circumstances you have beheld them. In "Trans- 
 formation" these defects are at their maximum ; and 
 the evil is exaggerated by the mass of general padding 
 — artistic criticisms, often powerful, and always subtle. 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 1 43 
 
 upon Italian art ; — puffs of the works of American 
 sculptors ; — silly attacks upon nude figures, and the 
 like, — which distend, alloy, and ungracefully speckle 
 the ideal tenor of the tale. 
 
 Both the novels and the note-books testify to their 
 author's melancholy, though hardly melancholy of a 
 deep order. It is the melancholy of a man with a 
 rather slow flow of blood in his veins, and almost a 
 horror of action, rather than any deep melancholy, 
 which speaks in him. He is always sensible, but 
 always apart from the rest of the world. There is a 
 sort of capillary repulsion between his mind and that 
 of the society in which he mixes, and this it is which 
 gives a slight gloom to the general tone of his obser- 
 vations. " The world is so sad and solemn," he says, 
 "that things meant in jest are liable by an overpow- 
 ering influence to become dreadful earnest, — gaily 
 dressed fantasies turning to ghostly and black-clad 
 images, of themselves." This was, no doubt, an ob- 
 servation founded on considerable experience of his 
 own mental life, and any one who knows well his 
 minor tales will be able at once to verify it from them. 
 But there is very little of deep pain in either his criti- 
 cisms of life or his pictures of it. He pictured real 
 anguish, but more as an anatomist would lay bare a 
 convulsive movement of the nerves, than as a poet 
 would express passion. You feel that you are reading 
 a study of human pain, rather than feeling the throb 
 of the pain itself The melancholy is the meditative 
 and microscopic melancholy of a curious and specu- 
 lative intelligence ; there is little of that imaginative. 
 
144 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 
 
 sympathy with pain which is at the heart of all true 
 tragedy. 
 
 Hawthorne's humour is partly of the same root as 
 his melancholy, springing from slow, close, inquisitive 
 scrutiny of the paradoxes of life, — the humour which 
 is quite as much true criticism as true humour. Take, 
 for example, this observation on one of his children : — 
 "One of the children drawing a cow on the black 
 board says, ' I'll kick this leg out a little more,' a very 
 happy energy of expression, completely indentifying 
 herself with the cow ; or perhaps as the cow' s creator, 
 conscious of full power over its movements. ''' Or take 
 the remark, " There is a kind of ludicrous unfitness in 
 the idea of a venerable rose-bush . . . apple trees, on 
 the other hand, grow old without reproach." Or 
 again, take the following, apparently written at a time 
 when his wife was away, and he had no servant to look 
 after his house; — "The washing of dishes does seem 
 to me the most absurd and unsatisfactory business that 
 I ever undertook. If, when once washed, they would 
 remain clean for ever and ever (which they ought in 
 all reason to do, considering how much trouble it is) 
 there would be less occasion to grumble ; but no sooner 
 is it done than it requires to be done again. On the 
 whole, I have come to the resolution not to use more 
 than one dish at each meal." Or this, on a piece 
 of boiled beef which he had boiled himself at great 
 pains and trouble: — "I am at this moment superin- 
 tending the corned beef, which has been on the fire, 
 as it seems to me, ever since the beginning of time, 
 and shows no symptom of being done before the crack 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 1 45 
 
 of doom. . . . The corned beef is exquisitely done, 
 and as tender as a young lady's heart, all owing to my 
 skilful cookery. ... To say the truth, I look upon 
 it as such a masterpiece in its way that it seems irrev- 
 erential to eat it. Things on which so much thought 
 and labour are bestowed should surely be immortal." 
 His humour arises, as it seems to me, in all these cases 
 from the magnifying glass under which he views a 
 somewhat minute phenomenon, till we see its charac- 
 teristics exaggerated and caricatured in relation to the 
 proportions of ordinary life, and partly also from the 
 humorous but determined resistance which his mind 
 offers to every attempt to subdue it to uncongenial 
 habits. Thus he says elsewhere, " 1 went to George 
 Hillard's office, and he spoke with immitigable reso- 
 lution of the necessity of my going to dine with Long- 
 fellow before returning to Concord ; but I have an 
 almost miraculous power of escaping from necessities 
 of this kind. Destiny itself has often been worsted in 
 the attempt to get me out to dinner,''' which strikes me 
 as a stroke of true humour, and true self-knowledge, 
 all in one. His own shy, solitary nature was so averse 
 to any attempt to assimilate it to the temper of ordin- 
 ary society, that it might truly be said that destiny it- 
 self had failed in the attempt to get him to dine out 
 like other folks, just as the most solid masonry often 
 fails to crush a flower, and will even be rent asunder 
 by the upward growth of a tender plant. But besides 
 the truth of the application to himself, there is real 
 humour in the conception of Destiny as trying to get 
 any man "out to dinner." It really is what Destiny 
 
 10 
 
146 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 
 
 seems oftenest to insist upon, and to succeed in, in these 
 days, in spite of enormous obstacles. Hawthorne sel- 
 dom displayed his humour more finely than in thus de- 
 picting the same Destiny which, in the Greek drama, 
 devotes itself to the most sublime tasks, as engaging 
 itself in this flaccid, and yet in some senses far more 
 closely-knit, nineteenth century, in the ignoble task of 
 bringing an irresistible pressure to bear in order to 
 get men to go out to dinner ! 
 
 The most distinguishing deficiency in Hawthorne's 
 mind, which is also in close connection with its high- 
 est power, is his complete want of sympathy not only 
 with the world of voluntary action, but with the next 
 thing to action, namely, the world of impulsive passion. 
 With exceedingly rare exceptions, — the scene of crime 
 and passion which I have quoted from "Transforma- 
 tion " is the only exception I can recall, — the highest 
 power of Hawthorne is all spent on the delineation 
 of chronic suffering or sentiment, in which all desire 
 to act on others is in a measure paralysed. He likes 
 to get past the rapids any way he can ; — as we have 
 seen, he not seldom introduces you to his tale with only 
 the distant rush of them still audible behind you, his 
 delight being to trace the more lasting perturbations 
 which they effect for winding miles below. But what 
 he does paint for you, he likes to study thoroughly ; 
 he loves to get beneath the surface, to sound the deeper 
 and mysterious pools, measure the power of the fretted 
 waters, and map carefully out the sandy shallows. The 
 result is necessarily a considerable limitation in the 
 field of his genius. The excitement which other writers 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. Id^J 
 
 find in delineating the swa3'ing fortunes of an active 
 career, he is — I will not say obliged to find, for of 
 course the positive capacity of his genius, not its in- 
 capacity for other fields, leads him in this direction — 
 but he is obliged to find only in curious and often pain- 
 ful pictures of unhealthy sentiment. 
 
 This is what circles so closely the range of Haw- 
 thorne's characters. They are necessarily very limited 
 both in number and in moral at-feitude. We have but 
 two studies, in his tales, of characters with any active 
 bent — Hollingsworth in the " Blithedale Romance," 
 and Phoebe in the ' ' House of the Seven Gables. ' ' Both 
 are carefully drawn, but both are far slighter sketches, 
 and more evidently taken from observation only, than 
 his other characters. His nearest approach to the de- 
 lineation of impulsive passion is seen in the sketch of 
 Zenobiain the "Blithedale Romance," and of Miriam 
 in "Transformation." But in neither case is it real 
 impulse to act on others which he draws well ; it is 
 rather the turbid tossing of a rich mind ill at ease with 
 itself, and casting about for sympathy and help. The 
 characters which he draws most completely, — though 
 they are not always the pleasantest, — are those which, 
 like Mr. Coverdale in the "Blithedale Romance," and 
 Holgrave in the "House of the Seven Gables," have 
 "no impulse to help or to hinder," caring only "to 
 look on, to analyse, to explain matters to themselves." 
 Clifford too, in the latter tale, — who evidently repre- 
 sents the sensitive and aesthetic side of the author's 
 own mind, "that squeamish love of the beautiful " (to 
 use his own expressive phrase) which is in him, when 
 
148 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 
 
 Stripped of that cold contemplative individuality which 
 seems to me to be at the centre of Hawthorne's literary 
 genius and personality, — is a fine study. 
 
 But one criticism more. The moral ideal which 
 Hawthorne keeps before himself and his readers 
 throughout his works is, on the whole, not only pure 
 but noble. It is defective, however, as we might ex- 
 pect, on the same side on which his genius seems to 
 *. fail. He was, in political and social conviction, a 
 \democratic quietist; one might almost say a fatalist. 
 Was it not a part of this fatalistic disposition to en- 
 courage the cultivated and thinking portion of society 
 to resign to the masses the duty of forming the polit- 
 ical judgment of his nation, and to permit himself to 
 be quietly sucked in by that fatally fascinating and 
 overmastering tide swaying the Will of the democracy? 
 However this may be, in political and social life, he 
 was one who deprecated all spasmodic reforms, and 
 attached little value to any reformatory efforts, except 
 as the indispensable conditions of generous hopes and 
 youthful aspirations. Speaking of such an experiment 
 of social reform, he said, "After all, let us acknowledge 
 it wise, if not more sagacious, to follow out one's day- 
 dream to its natural consummation, although, if the 
 vision have been worth the having, it is certain never 
 to be consummated otherwise than by a failure." 
 Again he said, in another tale, and with much of true 
 moral insight, though it be the one-sided moral insight 
 of the quietist recluse, "the haughty faith with which 
 he [the enthusiastic practical reformer] began life 
 would be well bartered for a far humbler one at its 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 1 49 
 
 close, in discerning that man's best-directed effort ac- 
 complishes a kind of dream, while God is the sole 
 worker of realities." 
 
 Nor should I find fault with him for his very deeply- 
 rooted conviction that, so far as any real and deep 
 reform is accomplished, it may in a certain sense be 
 said to accomplish iiself, instead of being forced on 
 society by the enthusiastic patronage of crusading 
 philanthropists, had he but confined this theory within 
 modest limits, — had he not pressed it into the service 
 of what seems to me the grossest political immorality. 
 I can sympathise with him when he so finely moralises 
 at the end of the " Blithedale Romance" on the dan- 
 gers of philanthropy: — 
 
 " Admitting what is called philanthropy, when adopted as a 
 profession, to be often useful by its energetic impulses to society 
 at large, it is perilous to the individual whose ruling passion, in 
 one exclusive channel, it thus becomes. It ruins, or is fearfully 
 apt to ruin, the heart, the rich juices of which God never meant 
 should be pressed violently out and distilled into alcoholic liquor 
 by an unnatural process ; but should render life sweet, bland, and 
 gently beneficent, and insensibly influence other hearts and other 
 lives to the same blessed end." 
 
 Yet more ; I can even go with him, quite as far as he 
 wishes his readers to go, when he ironically prescribes 
 a universal slumber as the only cure for the world's 
 overstrained nerves : — 
 
 " The world should recline its vast head on the first convenient 
 pillow, and take an age-long nap. It has gone distracted through 
 a morbid activity, and while preternaturally wide awake is never- 
 
ISO NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 
 
 theless tormented by visions that seem real to it now, but would 
 assume their true aspect and character were all things once set 
 right by an interval of sound repose. This is the only method 
 of getting rid of old delusions and avoiding new ones, — of regen- 
 erating our race so that it might in due time awake as an infant 
 out of dewy slumber, — of restoring to us the simple perception 
 of what is right and the single-hearted desire to achieve it, both 
 of which have long been lost in consequence of this weary 
 activity of brain, and torpor or passion of the heart, that now 
 afflict the universe ;"— 
 
 to which he characteristically added in a different 
 passage of his writings, his own present yearning for 
 a long and profound sleep of at least a thousand years 
 between Death and Resurrection. 
 
 For none of these thoughts and sayings, however 
 depreciative of effort, or destructive of the sanguine 
 hopes with which effort spurs itself on, could I 
 reproach Hawthorne. It is fitting that, after the 
 preacher of one-sided action and overstrained vigi- 
 lance has spoken, this too restless age should also hear 
 the invitation to distrust his own "earnestness," and 
 renew its highly-strung energies by rest. Nay, the 
 function of the contemplative man, who keeps clear 
 of the many streams of human energy, and passes his 
 solitary criticisms upon their tendency from some 
 nook of seemingly selfish retirement, is justified in 
 the scheme of Providence by the very existence of 
 the philanthropic class of one-sided workers. But it 
 is when Hawthorne came to apply his quietistic creed 
 to the actual political world in which he lived, that I 
 find his moral shortcomings painfully evident, and see 
 that he had permitted a mere theory to confuse "that 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. I5I 
 
 simple perception of what is right, and the single- 
 hearted desire to achieve it," of which he speaks so 
 well, as grievously as ever a professional philanthropist 
 was deceived by his one dominant idea. 
 
 Little as Hawthorne was disposed to mix in the 
 strife of the political arena, once at least he was not 
 willing to let that vox popuH in which he placed so 
 much confidence speak without a suggestion from him- 
 self. In the little electioneering volume on the life 
 of Franklin Pierce, who was then (in 1852) a candi- 
 date, and as it proved a successful candidate, for the 
 Presidency of the United States, Hawthorne offered 
 his suggestion in the form of an application of his 
 theory to the subject of spasmodic philanthropy as ex- 
 hibited on the question of slavery. The contest, at 
 the time of General Pierce's election, turned, as all 
 the contests then did, chiefly on this question. Gen- 
 eral Pierce represented the party of conciliation to the 
 South, — the party of union at almost any sacrifice of 
 Northern principles. The fugitive-slave law had just 
 passed, and the higher-minded politicians of the 
 Northern States were eager to get a reversal of that 
 disgraceful Act. General Pierce had pledged himself 
 to sustain that Act and the whole system of which it 
 was a part, and it was Hawthorne's object to justify 
 the policy of his friend. After condemning the 
 Northern men, who thought that the world stood still 
 except so far as the anti-slavery cause went forward, for 
 their narrowness, he proceeded thus : — 
 
 " There is still another view, and probably as wise a one. It 
 looks upon slavery as one of those evils which Divine Providence 
 
152 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 
 
 does not leave to be remedied by human contrivances, but wliichj 
 in its own good time, by some means impossible to be antici- 
 pated, but of the simplest and easiest operation, when all its uses 
 shall have been fulfilled, shall vanish like a dream. There is no 
 instance in all history of the human will and intellect having 
 perfected any great moral reform by methods which it adapted 
 to that end; but the progress of the world at every step leaves 
 some evil or wrong on the path behind it, which the wisest of 
 mankind, of their own set purpose, could never have found the 
 way to rectify." ' 
 
 Accordingly, Hawthorne's recommendation to the 
 people of the Northern States was to acquiesce in the 
 Southern encroachments, and trust to Providence for 
 the removal of this foul blot on American institutions. 
 He eulogized General Pierce as "the man who dared 
 to love that great and grand reality — his whole united 
 native country — better than the mistiness of a philan^ 
 thropic theory y^ And he warned the anti-slavery 
 party, in General Pierce's name, that the evil of dis- 
 union would be certain, while the good was "at best 
 a contingency, and (to the clear practical foresight 
 with which he looked into the future) scarcely so 
 much as that, attended as the movement was, and 
 must be during its progress, with the aggravated in- 
 jury of those whose condition it aimed to ameliorate, 
 and terminating in its possible triumph, — -if such pos- 
 sibility there were, — with the ruin of two races which 
 now dwelt together in greater peace and affection, it 
 is not too much to say, than had ever elsewhere 
 existed between the taskmaster and the serf. "^ 
 
 1 " Life of Franklin Pierce," pp. 113, 114. ^ Ibid. p. 31. 
 
 '^ Ibid. pp. Ill, 112, 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. I 53 
 
 This is tlie most immoral kind of political fatalism. 
 It is true enough, and is often forgotten by philanthro- 
 pists, that men can do little enough for each other's 
 highest good by any voluntary effort. Most men who 
 undertake such efforts, fall victims not perhaps to the 
 "mistiness" so much as to the narrow definiteness "of 
 philanthropic theory. ' ' They forget that philanthropic 
 tastes can only be safely humoured by those who keep 
 constantly before their inmost hearts "the exhortation, 
 "Physician, heal thyself." But there is a wide dis- 
 tinction between a philanthropic cause and a conces- 
 sion of the barest justice to the oppressed. Measured 
 by Hawthorne's standard, there would be no criminal 
 national custom, however oppressive, with which it 
 would be our duty to proclaim open war. He might 
 denounce the political advocates of any such war as 
 sacrificing the national peace to the "mistiness of 
 philanthropic theory." Was there, then, no distinc- 
 tion in moral sacredness between the claims of schem.es 
 for doing good to others,— little good of the deeper 
 kind as we can do for any but ourselves, — and the 
 duty of removing obstructions which entirely blotted 
 out the proper voluntary existence of other men? Was 
 the duty of restoring moral freedom to a whole race 
 to be classed as one of the doubtful visionary philan- 
 thropies of modern times ? Is it not obvious that, 
 little as we may be able to organise mutual spiritual 
 help of the higher kind, we are most fearfully compe- 
 tent to organise mutual moral injury of the lowest 
 kind, and that slavery was one of the grandest of di' 
 abolic devices for that end ? 
 
154 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 
 
 I do not say that Hawthorne was bound to be an 
 anti-slavery agitator. I do say that he prostituted the 
 noblest speculative faculties, when he attempted to 
 perpetuate a fearful national crime on the dishonest 
 plea that those who strove to resist its extension and 
 to limit its duration were endangering the Union for 
 the sake of a "misty philanthropic theory." The 
 fatalism which Hawthorne rather suggested than ad- 
 vocated in "Transformation," when he presented sin 
 as the necessary condition of moral growth, received 
 a terrible elucidation when he calmly deprecated all 
 impatient criticism of the providental "uses" of sla- 
 very as if they were the affair of Providence alone. 
 In the great civil war, his sympathies, as might be 
 expected, were with the trimming Buchanans and 
 Douglases of the hour, not with Mr. Lincoln, of 
 whom he spoke slightingly as a man incapable of true 
 statesmanship. 
 
 I need scarcely apologise for treating Hawthorne as 
 something more than a mere writer of fiction. His 
 writings have a very wide and justly-deserved influ-: 
 ence in America ; for as a literary artist, if not in 
 mere rough genius, he may safely be considered al- 
 most the first, and quite the highest, fruit of American 
 culture. He himself recognised the close connection,! 
 between the political and literary condition of nationsj 
 in his plea that America was too happy, too prosper- 
 ous, too free " from any picturesque and gloomy 
 wrong," to be made the scene of a romance. Let 
 me sum up my criticism on his literary deficiencies 
 in a single sentence, by expressing my conviction. 
 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 1 55 
 
 that if he had conceded less to his "squeamish lov^ 
 of the beautiful," if he had cultivated a deeper sym- 
 pathy with action and its responsibilities, he would] 
 not only have taken some interest in the removal of | 
 wrongs that were gloomy enough whether picturesque 
 or not, but might have widened greatly the range of 
 his artistic power, and deepened indefinitely the spell 
 of the great fascination which he wielded over his 
 countrymen. 
 
1 
 
 III. 
 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH.' 
 
 THESE two volumes, as they now stand, contain 
 as adequate a picture of the singular but large, 
 simple, and tender nature of the Oxford poet as is at- 
 tainable, and it is one which no one can study without 
 much profit, and perhaps also some loss; without feel- 
 ing the high exaltation of true poetry and the keen 
 pleasure caused by the subtlety of true scholarship, at 
 every turn ; nor also without feeling now and again 
 those "blank misgivings of a creature moving about 
 in worlds not realized," which are scattered so liber- 
 ally among these buoyant ardours, disappointed long- 
 ings, and moods of speculative suspense, and which 
 characterize these singular letters of reticent tender- 
 ness and rough self-satire. 
 
 1 " The Poems and Prose Remains of Arthur Hugh Clough, 
 with a Selection from his Letters, and a Memoir," Edited by 
 his wife. 2 vols. "With a portrait. Macmillan. 
 166 
 
ARTHUR HUGH C LOUGH. I 57 
 
 Every one who knew Clough even slightly received 
 the strongest impression of the unusual breadth and 
 massiveness of his mind. Singularly simple and genial, 
 he was unfortunately cast upon a self-questioning age, 
 which led him to worry himself with constantly test- 
 ing the veracity of his own emotions. He has de- 
 lineated in four lines the impression which his habitual 
 reluctance to converse on the deeper themes of life 
 made upon those of his friends who were attracted by 
 his frank simplicity. In one of his shorter poems he 
 writes : — 
 
 " I said my heart is all too soft ; 
 He who would climb and soar aloft 
 Must needs keep ever at his side 
 The tonic of a wholesome pride." 
 
 This expresses the man in a very remarkable man- 
 ner. He had a kind of proud simplicity about him, 
 singularly attractive, and often singularly disappoint- 
 ing to those who longed to know him well. He had 
 a fear, which many would think morbid, of leaning 
 much on the approbation of the world ; and there is 
 one characteristic passage in his poems, in which he 
 intimates that men who lean on the good opinion of 
 others might even be benefited by a <rrm^ which would 
 rob them of that evil stimulant : — 
 
 "Why so is good no longer good, but crime 
 Our truest best advantage ; since it lifts us 
 Out of the stifling gas of men's opinion 
 Into the vital atmosphere of Truth, 
 Where He again is visible, though in anger." 
 
158 ARTHUR HUGH C LOUGH. 
 
 So eager was his craving for reality and perfect sin- 
 cerity, so morbid his dislike even for the unreal con- 
 ventional forms of life, that a mind quite unique in 
 simplicity and truthfulness represents itself in his 
 poems as 
 
 " Seeking in vain, in all my store, 
 One feeling based on truth." 
 
 Indeed, he wanted to reach some guarantee for sim- 
 plicity deeper than simplicity itself I remember his 
 principal criticism on America, after returning from 
 his residence in Massachusetts, was that the New 
 Englanders were much simpler than the English, and 
 that this was the great charm of New England society. 
 His own habits were of the same kind, — sometimes 
 almost austere in their simplicity. Luxury he disliked, 
 and sometimes his friends thought him even ascetic. 
 
 This almost morbid craving for a firm base on the 
 absolute realities of life was very wearing in a mind so 
 self-conscious as Clough's, and tended to paralyse the 
 expression of a certainly great genius. As a rule, his 
 lyrical poems fall short of complete success in de- 
 lineating the mood which they are really meant to 
 delineate, owing to this chronic state of introspective 
 criticism on himself in which he is too apt to write, 
 and which, characteristic as it is, necessarily dimin- 
 ishes the linearity and directness of the feeling ex- 
 pressed, refracting it, as it were, through media of 
 very variable density. As he himself, — no doubt in 
 this stanza delineating himself, — says of one of his 
 heroes in " the Clergyman's first tale " : — 
 
ARTHUR HUGH C LOUGH. I 59 
 
 " With all his eager motions still there went 
 A self-correcting and ascetic bent, 
 That from the obvious good still led astray, 
 And set him travelling on the longest way." 
 
 And in the same poem there are descriptive touches 
 which very skilfully portray the nature of those dis- 
 persive influences, as I may call them, in his character 
 which, while they may injure his lyrical, add a great 
 wealth of criticism to his speculative and disquisitional 
 poems: — 
 
 " Beside the wishing-gate, which so they name 
 'Mid Northern hills, to me this fancy came ; 
 A wish I formed, my wish I thus expressed : 
 ' Wojild I could tvish my wishes all to rest, 
 And know to zvish the wish that were the best ! 
 Oh, for some winnowing wind to th' empty air 
 This chaff of easy sympathies to bear 
 Far off, and leave me of myself aware !' " 
 
 That is clearly self-portraiture, and it describes an 
 element in Clough's nature which, no doubt, contrib- 
 uted greatly to diminish the number of his few but ex- 
 quisite lyrical poems, and sometimes to confine even 
 those to the delineation of feelings of a certain vague- 
 ness of drift. Yet there was, besides this most subtle 
 and almost over-perfect intellectual culture in Clough, 
 much also of a boyish, half-formed nature in him, even 
 to the last, which, when fully roused, contributed a 
 great deal of the animation, and, when least roused, 
 contributed not a little of the embarrassed, shy, half- 
 articulate tone to some of the most critical passages 
 of his finest poems. He describes this side of boyish 
 
l60 ARTHUR HUGH C LOUGH. 
 
 feeling admirably in one of his "In Mari Magno " 
 
 tales : — - 
 
 " How ill our boyhood understands 
 Incipient manhood's strong demands ! 
 Boys have such trouble of their own 
 As none, they fancy, e'er have known, 
 Such as to speak of, or to tell 
 They hold were unendurable : 
 Religious, social, of all kinds. 
 That tear and agitate their minds. 
 A thousand thoughts within me stirred 
 Of which I could not speak a word; 
 Strange efforts after something new 
 Which I was wretched not to do ; 
 Passions, ambitions, lay and lurked. 
 Wants, counter-wants, obscurely worked 
 Without their names, and unexplained." 
 
 And even in bis latest and most finisbed poems you 
 see the working of this half-developed element of 
 Clougb's massive and rich but to some extent inei't 
 imagination ; and you see, too, how powerfully it 
 operated to discontent him with bis own productions, 
 to make him underrate vastly their real worth. Rap- 
 idly as his genius ripened at an age when, with most 
 men, the first flush of it would have passed over, there 
 was something of conscious inertia, not unlike imma- 
 turity, in it to the last, which gives a tone of proud 
 hesitation, a slowness of hand, to the literary style of 
 his finest poems. He calls himself, in his "Long 
 Vacation Pastoral," "the grave man, nicknamed 
 Adam," and there is really something of the flavour 
 of primeval earth, of its unready vigour and crude 
 
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. l6l 
 
 laboriousness, about his literary nature. Even when 
 he succeeds best, the reader seems to see him "wipe 
 his honourable brows bedewed with toil." And yet 
 he is impatient with himself for not succeeding better, 
 and despises his own work. 
 
 The " Long Vacation Pastoral" belongs to a class 
 of poems that is scarcely naturalized in England- — the 
 class of which Goethe's "Hermann and Dorothea" 
 is perhaps the most perfect specimen, though in vigour 
 and breadth of imagination Clough's pastoral is cer- 
 tainly not inferior. Goethe's influence over the school 
 of poetry of which Matthew Arnold and Clough have 
 been the most considerable English disciples, is very 
 powerfully marked. There is the same longing after 
 the old Homeric simplicity, — less successful perhaps 
 in a cultivated Englishman than in the more childlike 
 German, — the same love of homely naturalness of 
 manner, of the wholesome flavour of earth, an even 
 deeper desire to tame or exorcise all romance that is 
 alien to common sense, and the same intellectual dis- 
 position to give common sense the casting vote, wher- 
 ever there seems to be a conflict between it and the 
 thirst of their own natures for something deeper. 
 Moreover, in Clough's poem there is the same under- 
 lying theme which haunted Goethe so constantly, — 
 the wish to analyse the true secret of womanly fasci- 
 nation, and finally, the key-note of the answer given 
 in the "Long Vacation Pastoral " is also the key-note 
 of the "Hermann and Dorothea," that the highest 
 charms of women consist in a certain union between 
 homely usefulness and classical beauty, in the graceful 
 11 
 
1 62 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. 
 
 cutting of bread-and-butter, like Werther's "Char- 
 lotte," or graceful "potato-uprooting," like Philip's 
 heroine in Clough's Pastoral. As one of his "read- 
 ing " party expresses it : — 
 
 "All cathedrals are Christian, all Christians are cathedrals : 
 Such is the Catholic doctrine ; 'tis ours with a slight variation. 
 Every woman is or ought to be a cathedral, 
 Built on the ancient plan— a cathedral pure and perfect, 
 Built by that only law, that Use be suggester of Beauty ; 
 Nothing concealed that is done, but all things done to adorn- 
 ment ; 
 Meanest utilities seized as occasions to grace and embellish^ 
 
 But if the school of art and the predominant thought 
 which mark Goethe's "Hermann and Dorothea" 
 and Clough's poem are the same, — if they both alike 
 seek and find their ideal of women in "the freshness 
 of the early world," in some well-born or well-taught 
 maiden, 
 
 " Milking the kine in the field ; like Rachel watering cattle, 
 Rachel, when at the well the predestined beheld and kissed 
 
 her; 
 Or with pail upon head, like Dora beloved of Alexis, 
 Comely, with well-poised pail over neck arching soft to the 
 
 shoulders. 
 Comely in gracefullest act, one arm uplifted to stay it. 
 Home from the river or pump moving stately and calm to the 
 
 laundry;" 
 
 — yet all the imaginative form and framework of 
 Clough's poem are entirely his own, — entirely origi- 
 nal, and marked strongly with the stamp of its Oxford 
 origin. 
 
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. 1 63 
 
 The almost Homeric vigour with which all the 
 characteristics of the reading party are dashed off, 
 the genial humour with which their personal peculi- 
 arities are coloured in, the buoyant life of the discus- 
 sions which arise among them, the strength with 
 which the Highland scenery is conceived and ren- 
 dered in a few brilliant touches, the tenderness and 
 simplicity with which now and then the deeper pathos 
 of life is allowed to be seen in glimpses through the 
 intellectual play of the poem, are all Clough's own. 
 He is far more terse, far less prolix than the great 
 German poet in his style of painting homely nature. 
 There is none of that relaxed fibre which makes scoff- 
 ers say that Goethe is a little spooney on his Char- 
 lotte's bread-and-butter, and his Dorothea's profi- 
 ciency as a waggoner. Clough's poem is masculine 
 throughout, though the sentiment is perhaps not en- 
 tirely healthy, and the humour, therefore, is of a kind 
 of which Goethe had little trace. Here, for example, 
 is Airlie, the high dresser of the party : — 
 
 " Airlie descended the last, effulgent as god of Olympus; 
 Blue, half-doubtfuUy blue, was the coat that had white silk 
 
 facings ; 
 Waistcoat blue, coral buttoned, the white tie finely adjusted, 
 Coral moreover the studs on a shirt as of crochet of women : 
 When the fourwheel for ten minutes already had stood at the 
 
 gateway. 
 He, like a god, came leaving his ample Olympian chamber." 
 
 And here is a Highland dance, in which Airlie again 
 figures, described with all the humour and force of a 
 modern Homer: — 
 
1 
 
 164 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. 
 
 " Him rivalling, Hobbes, briefest kilted of heroes, 
 
 Enters, O stoutest, O rashest of creatures, mere fool of a Saxon, 
 Skill-less of philibeg, skill-less of reel too, the whirl and the 
 
 twirl o't : 
 Him see I frisking and whisking, and ever at swifter gyration 
 Under brief curtain revealing broad acres — not of broad cloth. 
 Him see I there and the Piper — the Piper what vision beholds 
 
 not? 
 Him and his Honour with Arthur, with Janet our Piper, and i-s it, 
 Is it, O marvel of marvels ! he too in the maze of the mazy, 
 Slvipping and tripping, though stately, though languid, with head 
 
 on one shoulder, 
 Airlie, with sight of the waistcoat the golden-haired Katie con- 
 soling? 
 Katie, who simple and comely, and smiling and blushing as ever. 
 What though she wear on that neck a blue kerchief, remembered 
 
 as Philip's, 
 Seems in her maidenly freedom to need small consolement of 
 waistcoats !" 
 
 Or take the description of Sir Hector's speech at 
 the clansmen's dinner, which is rich in Homeric met- 
 aphor, as well as modern humour: — 
 
 " Bid me not, grammar defying, repeat from grammar defiers 
 Long constructions strange, and plusquam-Thucydidean, 
 Tell how, as sudden torrent in time of speat in the mountain 
 Hurries six ways at once, and takes at last to the roughest. 
 Or as the practised rider at Astley's or Franconi's, 
 Skilfully, boldly bestrides many steeds at once in the gallop. 
 Crossing from this to that, with one leg here, one yonder, 
 So, less skilful, but equally bold and wild as the torrent. 
 All through sentences six at a time, unsuspecting of syntax. 
 Hurried the lively good will and garrulous tale of Sir Hector." 
 
 Not, however, by such passages as these can be mea- 
 
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. 1 65 
 
 sured the depth and fuhiess of Clough's poetic nature. 
 I have said that, in his dread of the romantic school, 
 and his longing for that antique type of nobility in 
 which the simpler and more homely tasks are associ- 
 ated with classical grace and dignity, he had borrowed 
 much from Goethe. But his mind had been also 
 deeply influenced by the very different jDoetry of 
 Wordsworth in his strong love of a frugal, hardy, 
 and simple industry as the highest school of human 
 character. And perhaps too, in spite of his steady 
 preference of Aristotle to Plato, of common sense to 
 what he thought idealism, of what is common to what 
 is high, the deep and sometimes transcendental mus- 
 ings of Wordsworth's meditative mind had a charm 
 for him of which he was almost ashamed. At all 
 events, there is a gleam of transcendental depth and 
 subtlety here and again in this poem, shyly — almost 
 apologetically — put forth, and scarcely put forth but 
 to be withdrawn. The lines in which Elspie con- 
 fesses her love for Philip, the radiant poet, are 
 couched in a very different key from that of Goethe's 
 naturalistic school, — a different, and I think a higher 
 key: — 
 
 " And she was silent some time, and blushed all over, and 
 answered 
 Quietly, after her fashion, still knitting, ' Maybe I think of it. 
 Though I don't know that I did;' and she paused again. ' But 
 
 it may be ; 
 Yes, I don't know, Mr. Philip, but only it feels to me strangely 
 ' Like to the high new bridge they used to build at, below there, 
 Over the burn and glen on the road. You won't understand 
 me. 
 
1 66 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. 
 
 But I keep saying in my mind — this long time, slowly with 
 
 trouble, 
 I have been building myself up, up, and toilfully raising, 
 Just like as if the bridge were to do itself without masons. 
 Painfully getting myself upraised one stone on another. 
 All one side, I mean; and now I see on the other 
 Just such another fabric uprising, better and stronger. 
 Close to me, coming to join me. And then I sometimes fancy, — 
 Sometimes I find myself dreammg at night about arches and 
 
 bridges, — 
 Sometimes I dream of a great invisible hand coming down and 
 Dropping the great key-stone in the middle ; there in my 
 
 dreaming 
 There I felt the great key-stone coming in, and through it 
 Feel the other part, — all the other stones of the archway, 
 Joined into mine, with a strange happy sense of completeness. 
 
 But, dear me, 
 This is confusion and nonsense. I mix all the things I can 
 
 think of. 
 And you won't understand, Mr. Philip." 
 
 This is a definite addition to the great doctrine of the 
 poem, that wornen, like flowers, must be "rooted in 
 earth" to be either beautiful or useful — a definite 
 addition and a noble addition. Here we have some- 
 thing of Wordsworth's conception of the poet : — 
 
 " The outward shows of sky and earth. 
 Of hill and valley, he has viewed. 
 And impulses of deeper birth 
 Have come to him in solitude." 
 
 There are " impulses of deeper birth" struggling with 
 the naturalisiai of Clough's chosen school of thought. 
 Still, the great sea, and the wide omnipresent sunlight^ 
 
ARTHUR HUGH C LOUGH. 1 6/ 
 
 are his favourite symbols of what is divine, — what is 
 broad, bright, and simple, rather than what is lofty, 
 mysterious, and dim. 
 
 Clough always seems to have needed external stim- 
 ulus, something of excitement in the atmosphere, for 
 his best poetic success. Thus, the siege of Rome 
 during his residence there in 1849 ^^s the stimulus 
 which gave rise to his very original and striking poem, 
 "Amours de Voyage," — a poem brimful of the breath 
 of his Oxford culture, of Dr. Newman's metaphysics, 
 of classical tradition, of the political enthusiasm of 
 the time, and of his own large, speculative humour, 
 subtle hesitancy of brain, and rich pictorial sense. 
 Yet so ill satisfied was he with this striking poem, that 
 he kept it nine years in MS., and published it apolo- 
 getically at last only in an American magazine, the 
 "Atlantic Monthly." He himself says that what he 
 doubted about in it was not its truth of conception, but 
 its vigour of execution. Yet no execution could have 
 been more perfect of the picture— a picture of incho- 
 acy, I admit— which he intended to draw. Mr. Em- 
 erson has in some cases shown himself a fine critic ; 
 but he never made a more egregious blunder than 
 when he found fault with Clough for not making this 
 poem end more satisfactorily. The whole meaning 
 and drift of it would have been spoiled if it had so 
 ended. His idea was to draw a mind so reluctant to 
 enter on action, shrinking so morbidly from the effects 
 of the "ruinous force of the will," that even when 
 most desirous of action it would find a hundred trivial 
 intellectual excuses for shrinking back in spite of that 
 
1 68 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. 
 
 desire. His own explanation of the poem is contained 
 in the final verse : — 
 
 " So go forth to the world, to the good report and the evil ! 
 
 Go, little book ! thy tale, is it not evil and good ? 
 Go, and if strangers revile, pass quietly by without answer. 
 
 Go, and if curious friends ask of thy rearing and age. 
 Say, ' I am flitting about many years from brain unto brain of 
 
 Feeble and restless youths born to inglorious days : 
 But,' so finish the word, ' I was writ in a Roman chamber. 
 When from Janiculan heights thundered the cannon of France.' " 
 
 And it is this brain of what the author chooses to call 
 "feeble and restless youths born to inglorious days" 
 that the poem is meant to delineate throughout, — its 
 speculative discontent, its passion for the abstract, its 
 dread of being committed to a course, its none the 
 less eager craving for action and for the life that can 
 only be reached through action, its driftings and re- 
 actions; — and all this is artistically contrasted with 
 the great Roman stage on which so many great dramas 
 had been enacted in years gone by, and whereon one 
 great revolutionary drama was going forward at that 
 very moment. To my mind, the poem would lose 
 half its character and meaning if the hero's incipiency 
 of passion had been developed into anything but incip- 
 iency, if it had not faded away, just as it is represented 
 as doing, with the first difficulties, into a restless but 
 still half-relieved passiveness. The irony of the poem, 
 with its background of Mazzinian and Garibaldian 
 achievement, would have been utterly spoiled by any 
 other conclusion. How perfect a picture of the paral- 
 ysis caused by too subtly speculative a nature is there 
 
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. l6g 
 
 in such lines as these, for example, in which the hero 
 declares his intention to abide by the indications of the 
 first adverse throw of fortune : — 
 
 " Great is Fate, and is best. I believe in Providence partly. 
 What is ordained is right, and all that happens is ordered. 
 A/i, no, that isn't it ! But yet I retain my conclusion. 
 I will go where I am led, and will not dictate to the chances." 
 
 ''Amours de Voyage" would indeed have been spoiled, 
 if it had ended "prettily," like any other novel. 
 
 The oftener I return to Clough's unfinished but 
 striking poems, the more I am struck by something in 
 their fresh natural handling, and a certain lustre of 
 sunlight on their surface, which suggests to me a 
 modern and intellectualized Chaucer; and I think the 
 same homely breadth and simplicity were strongly 
 marked in his countenance. Of course, the whole 
 essence of such genius is changed by the intellectual 
 conditions of Clough's age, and the still higher intel- 
 lectual conditions of his personal career. But the 
 characteristic is only the more strongly marked for 
 such striking and fundamental variations ; and had 
 he lived to fill more completely with his individual 
 genius, and to complete the beautiful fragments of 
 tales which are entitled "In Mari Magno," every one 
 would have noticed not merely an external resem- 
 blance in structure and scheme, but a very close anal- 
 ogy in genius between the "Canterbury Tales," by 
 the father of English poetry, and the series by this 
 later representative of our academic school. This 
 Chaucer-like love of the natural simplicities of life 
 
170 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 
 
 was probably Clough's strongest creative impulse; his 
 mode of describing is in the same style of bold, direct, 
 affectionate feeling for the earth and tlie true children 
 of the earth ; and the homely though polished pathos 
 of his stories has again and again filled me with like 
 haunting associations, even when the analogy was so 
 much disguised by the different intellectual accent of 
 our times that its secret was not easy to catch. In 
 the following piece, there is certainly no manner of 
 difficulty in tracing the resemblance. But though the 
 similarity of mere style may arise from Clough's own 
 familiarity with the poet, and with the tales whose 
 plan he was adopting, the portrait is certainly studied 
 from an ecclesiastical type quite foreign to Chaucer's 
 age: — 
 
 " The vicar was of bulk and thews, 
 Six feet he stood within his shoes, 
 And every inch of all a man ; 
 Ecclesiast, on the ancient plan, 
 Unforced by any party rule 
 His native character to school; 
 In ancient learning not unread, 
 But had few doctrines in his head; 
 Dissenters truly he abhorred ; 
 They never had his gracious word. 
 He ne'er was bitter, or unkind. 
 But positively spoke his mind ; 
 Their piety he could not bear, — 
 A sneaking snivelling set they were. 
 Their tricks and meanness fired his blood ; 
 Up for his Church he stoutly stood. 
 No worldly aim had he in life 
 To set him with himself at strife. 
 
ARTHUR HUGH C LOUGH. I/l 
 
 A spade, a spade he freely named, 
 
 And of his joke was not ashamed; 
 
 Made it, and laughed at it, be sure, 
 
 With young and old, with rich and poor. 
 
 His sermons frequently he took 
 
 Out of some standard reverend book; 
 
 They seemed a little strange indeed. 
 
 But were not likely to mislead. 
 
 Others he gave that were his own, — 
 
 The difference could be quickly known. 
 
 Though sorry not to have a boy. 
 
 His daughters were his perfect joy ; 
 
 He plagued them, oft drew tears from each. 
 
 Was bold and hasty in his speech. 
 
 All through the house you heard him call, 
 
 He had his vocatives for all ; 
 
 Patty Patina, Pat became, 
 
 Lydia took Languish with her name ; 
 
 Philippa was the Gentle Queen, 
 
 And Phoebe Madam Prosperine ; 
 
 The pseudonyms for Mary Gwen 
 
 Varied with every week again ; 
 
 But Emily, of all the set, 
 
 Emilia called, was most the pet." 
 
 It is not the mere forms here, it is the simple, direct 
 manner of painting which brings back a flavour of 
 Chaucer to the memory as we read the more intellect- 
 ual poet of modern days. Look, again, at Clough's 
 feeling for women's beauty; the mingled breadth and 
 tenderness of his drawing, his keen sense of the healthy 
 simplicity of true womanliness, his constant preference 
 for the true woman rather than the true lady, his evi- 
 dent bias for that which has its root in the homely 
 ^arth, though it attains a beauty which earth alone 
 
1/2 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. 
 
 could not give ; it is Chaucer become conscious of 
 the difference between his own inner mind and the 
 taste of our modern intellectual day. Chaucer de- 
 scribes his ideas of feminine loveliness in the person 
 of Blanche, wife of John of Gaunt, thus : — 
 
 " I sawgh hir daunce so comeley, 
 Carole and synge so swetely, 
 Laughe and pleye so womanly, 
 And loke so debonairly; 
 So goodely speke, and so friendly; 
 That, certes, I trow that evermore 
 Nas (was not) seyne so blysful a tresore. 
 For every heer on hir hede, 
 Sothe to seyne, hyt nas not rede, 
 Ne nouther yelowe, ne browne, hyt nas. 
 Me thought most lyke golde hyt was. 
 And whiche eyen (eyes) my lady hadde ! 
 Debonaire, goode, glade, and sadde (grave), 
 Symple, of goode mochel, nought to wide. 
 Therto hir looke was not asyde, 
 Ne overtwert, but besette to wele. 
 It drewe and took everydele, 
 AUe that on hir gonne beholde." 
 
 And now let me take an extract from one of Clough's 
 tales to compare with this picture of Chaucer's : — 
 
 " A highland inn amongst the western hills, 
 A single parlour, single bed, that fills 
 With fisher or with tourist as may be; 
 A waiting maid as fair as you can see. 
 With hazel eyes and frequent blushing face. 
 And ample brow, and with a rustic grace 
 In all her easy ample motions seen. 
 Large of her age, which haply is nineteen ; 
 
ARTHUR HUGH C LOUGH 1 73 
 
 Christian her name, in full a pleasant name, 
 Christian and Christie scarcely seem the same. 
 A college fellow who has sent away 
 The pupils he has taught for many a day, 
 And comes for fishing and for soUtude, 
 Perhaps a little pensive in his mood. 
 An aspiration and a thought have failed, 
 Where he had hoped, another has prevailed, 
 But to the joys of hill and stream alive. 
 And in his boyhood yet at twenty-five. 
 
 A merry dance that made young people meet. 
 And set them moving both with hands and feet : 
 A dance in which he danced and nearer knew 
 The soft brown eyes, and found them tender too. 
 A dance that lit in two young hearts the fire, 
 The low soft flame of loving sweet desire, 
 And made him feel that he could feel again ; 
 The preface this what follows to explain." 
 
 Of course the parallel must not be pushed too far, for 
 even Chaucer, if possessed of all the new culture, and 
 striving to harmonize it with his large, simple, healthy, 
 human tastes, would become quite a new man. And 
 no doubt Clough's poetry is in nature and essence in- 
 tellectual. Still there is no poet of our generation 
 whose intellectuality gives less of the effect of a thin- 
 ning and refining away of life to a shadow than Clough. 
 Such stibtlety as there is in him is of a broad, sweep- 
 ing, comprehensive kind, not logical but practical ; 
 not the fine instinct with which Tennyson, for instance, 
 follows out one by one a hundred shadowy paths of 
 imaginative reasoning, but the wide subtlety which 
 hovers hither and thither over one or two of the greater 
 chasms that separate thought from action. The ground 
 
1/4 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. 
 
 quakes under Clough's feet at points where generally 
 it would be supposed firm ; and where ordinary men's 
 imaginative doubts begin, his scarcely reach. The effect 
 on his poetry is to exercise his imagination in depict- 
 ing not so much universal feelings as the craving of 
 the cultivated mind (ox permission to surrender to them. 
 In some of his most characteristic verses he asks : — 
 
 " What we, when face to face we see 
 The Father of our souls, shall be, 
 John tells us, does not yet appear ; 
 Ah ! did he tell what we are here ! 
 
 A mind for thoughts to pass into, 
 A heart for loves to travel through. 
 Five senses to detect things near. 
 Is this the whole that we are here ? 
 
 Rules baffle instincts — instincts rules. 
 Wise men are bad — and good are fools; 
 Facts evil — wishes vain appear. 
 We cannot go, why are we here ? 
 
 O may we for assurance' sake, 
 Some arbitrary judgment take. 
 And wilfully pronounce it clear 
 For this or that 'tis we are here ? 
 
 Or is it right, and will it do. 
 To pace the sad confusion through. 
 And say :■ — ■' It doth not yet appear. 
 What we shall be, what we are here '? 
 
 Ah ! yet when all is thought and said. 
 The heart still overrules the head; 
 Still what we hope we must believe, 
 And what is given us, receive ; 
 
 1 
 
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH 1 75 
 
 Must still believe ; for still we hope 
 That in a world of larger scope 
 What here is faithfully begun 
 Will be completed, not undone. 
 
 My child, we still must think, when we 
 That ampler life together see, 
 Some true result will yet appear 
 Of what we are, together, here." 
 
 This, like almost all Clough's poems of this class, 
 presents the effect of a homely, simple, human beauty, 
 half undermined by fundamental doubts, — doubts 
 suggested, indeed, only to be partially abandoned, but 
 also to be partially maintained, as a preservative against 
 the blind eager confidence of presumptuous faith. 
 The massive and genial sympathy which Clough feels 
 with the universal instincts of human nature, alike 
 religious and social, is the first marked feature that 
 strikes us in all his poems : then the sifting process 
 begins of tracing them to their roots, showing how 
 much wider is the trust placed in them in the practical 
 conduct of modern life, than it is possible to justify 
 intellectually ; and then when he has pared these in- 
 stincts down to their minimum of meaning, and we 
 have been shown how impossible our whole life would 
 be if they were given no greater validity than that, 
 they are permitted, though with hesitation and a doubt- 
 ful or rather hypothetical confidence, to take back 
 something of their natural authority, now that it is 
 fairly shown to be liable to all kinds of presumptuous 
 error. 
 
 No doubt, this sort of large half-genial suspense of 
 
1 
 
 1/6 ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. 
 
 judgment, that looks upon natural instincts with a sort 
 of loving doubt, and yields with cautious hand a cer- 
 tain limited authority to human yearnings in order 
 not wholly to lose a share in the moving forces of life, 
 is not likely to be widely popular. With Clough this 
 suspense of human judgment was unfortunately not 
 supplemented by any confident belief in a divine an- 
 swer to those vague yearnings, and consequently his 
 tone is almost always at once sweet and sad. It is 
 saturated with the deep but musical melancholy of 
 such thoughts as the following, whose pathos shows 
 how much more profoundly and deeply Clough thirst- 
 ed for truth than many of even the most confident of 
 those of us who believe that there is a living water aJ" 
 which to slake our thirst : — ■ 
 
 '' To spend uncounted years of pain, 
 
 Again, again, and yet again, 
 
 In working out in heart and bi-ain 
 Tlie problem of our being here ; 
 
 To gather facts from far and near, 
 
 Upon the mind to hold them clear, 
 
 And, knowing more may yet appear, 
 
 Unto one's latest breath to fear 
 
 The premature result to draw — 
 
 Is this the object, end, and law, 
 
 And purpose of our being here?" 
 
 Yet even in poetry of this kind, which abounds in 
 the volume, there is something of the same large, 
 hesitating melancholy that we should expect, if once 
 a mind of homely Chaucer-like wisdom fell under a 
 cloud of modern doubt. Instead of applying itself, 
 like the ordinary scepticism, to particular riddles, it 
 
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH I// 
 
 would touch the whole substance of life, not unkindly, 
 with Clough's questioning finger; treat the funda- 
 mental instincts which guide us into our human rela- 
 tions with the same half-confidence ; try to separate, 
 even in dealing with " love," the real affinity of nature 
 from the "juxtaposition " of habit, and show the prob- 
 lem to be indeterminate with the same quaint humour. 
 And in things divine it would state the problem as 
 fairly, and substitute a sigh of pathetic hope for the 
 solution, with the same sad fidelity. It may be some- 
 thing of a fancy, but it is at all events a fancy that 
 touches the border of truth, if I recognise even in the 
 type of Clough's genial scepticism something not en- 
 tirely unlike the scepticism which might pervade the 
 mind of a Chaucer, watching with the old homely 
 shrewdness as well as the rich modern culture the 
 swaying tides of our theological debate, and clinging 
 too closely itself to the human forms of beauty and 
 goodness to come with any clear personal conviction, 
 out of the strife. 
 
 And yet Clough's great literary powers never mani- 
 fested themselves even to his most intimate friends by 
 any outward sign at all commensurate with the pro- 
 found belief they had in his genius. But if his powers 
 did not, there was much in his character that did pro- 
 duce its full effect upon all who knew him. He steadily 
 refrained from looking, even in time of severe trial, 
 to his own interest, when what seemed to him higher 
 interests were at issue. He never flinched from the 
 worldly loss which his deepest convictions brought on 
 him. Even when clouds were thick over his own 
 12 
 
178 ARTHUR HUGH C LOUGH. 
 
 head, and the ground beneath his feet seemed crumb- 
 ling away, he could still bear witness to an eternal 
 light behind the cloud, and tell others that there is 
 solid ground to be reached in the end by the feet of 
 all who will wait to be strong : — 
 
 " Say not, the struggle nought availeth, 
 The labour and the wounds are vain, 
 The enemy faints not, nor faileth, 
 
 And as things have been, they remain. 
 
 If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars, 
 It may be, in yon smoke concealed 
 
 Your comrades chased e'en now the fliers, 
 And, but for you, possess the field. 
 
 For while the tired waves, vainly breaking. 
 Seem here no painful inch to gain. 
 
 Far back, through creeks and inlets making. 
 Comes silent, flooding in, the main. 
 
 And not by eastern windows only. 
 
 When daylight comes, comes in the light : 
 
 In front the sun climbs slow — how slowly ! 
 But westward, look, the land is bright." 
 
 I do not think that any competent judge who really 
 studies Clough's Remains will doubt for a moment 
 that he was one of the most original men of our age, 
 and perhaps its most intellectual, and buoyant, though 
 very far, of course, from its richest, most musical and 
 exquisite poet. There is a very peculiar and unique 
 attraction about what I may call the physical and 
 almost animal buoyancy of these subtly intellectual 
 rhythms and verses, when once the mass of the poet's 
 mind — by no means easy to get into motion — is fairly 
 
ARTHUR HUGH C LOUGH. 1 79 
 
 under weigh. Mr. Matthew Arnold and Clough both 
 represent the stream of the modern Oxford intellectual 
 tradition in their poems, but how different is their 
 genius. With all his intellectual precision, there is 
 something of the boyishness, of the simplicity, of the 
 vascular Saxon breadth of Chaucer's poetry in Clough; 
 while Mr. Arnold's poetical ancestor is certainly no 
 earlier than Wordsworth. There are both flesh and 
 spirit, as well as emotion and speculation, in Clough; 
 while, in Mr. Arnold, soul and sentiment guide the 
 emotion and the speculation. There is tenderness in 
 both; but Clough's is the tenderness of earthly sym- 
 pathy, and Mr. Arnold's the lyrical cry of Virgilian 
 compassion. Both fill half their poems with the most 
 subtle intellectual meditations ; but Clough leaves 
 them all but where they were, not even half settled, 
 reproaching himself for mooning over them so long ; 
 while Mr. Arnold finds some sort of a delicate solu- 
 tion, or no-solution, for all of them, and sorts them 
 with the finest nicety. Finally, when they both reach 
 their highest poetical point, Mr. Arnold is found 
 painting lucidly in a region of pure and exquisite 
 sentiment, Clough singing a sort of paean of buoyant 
 and exultant strength : — 
 
 " But, O, blithe breeze, and O, great seas. 
 
 Though ne'er, that earliest parting past, 
 On your wide plain they join again, 
 
 Together lead them home at last ! 
 One port, methought, alike they sought, 
 
 One purpose hold where'er they fare. 
 O, bounding breeze, O, rushing seas, 
 
 At last, at last, unite them there !" 
 
IV. 
 
 WORDSWORTH AND HIS GENIUS. 
 
 THE commonplace modern criticism on Words- 
 worth is that he is too transcendental. On the 
 other hand the criticism with which he was first as- 
 sailed, which Coleridge indignantly repelled, and 
 which is reflected in the admirable parody published 
 among the "Rejected Addresses," was that he was 
 ridiculously simple, that he made an unintelligible 
 fuss about common feelings and common things. The 
 reconciliation of these opposite criticisms is not diffi- 
 cult. He drew uncommon delights from very common 
 things. His circle of interests was, for a poet, singu- 
 larly narrow. He was a hardy Cumbrian mountaineer, 
 with the temperament of a thoroughly frugal peasant, 
 and a unique personal gift of discovering the deepest 
 secondary springs of joy in what ordinary men either 
 took as matter of course, or found uninteresting, or 
 even full of pain. The same sort of power which sci- 
 entific men have of studiously fixing their minds on 
 
 180 
 
WORDS WOR TH AND HIS GENIUS. 1 8 1 
 
 natural phenomena till they make these phenomena 
 yield lessons and laws of which no understanding des- 
 titute of this capacity for detaching itself entirely from 
 the commonplace train of intellectual associations 
 would have dreamt, Wordsworth had in relation to 
 objects of the imagination. He could detach his mind 
 from the commonplace series of impressions which are 
 generated by commonplace objects or events, resist 
 and often reverse the current of emotion to which 
 ordinary minds are liable, and triumphantly justify the 
 strain of rapture with which he celebrated what excites 
 either no feeling, or weary feeling, or painful feeling, 
 in the mass of unreflecting men. Two distinct pecu- 
 liarities, and rare peculiarities of character, chiefly 
 assisted him in this — his keen spiritual courage, and 
 his stern spiritual frugality. Though his poetry reads 
 so transcendental, and is so meditative, there never 
 was a poet who was so little of a dreamer as Words- 
 worth. There is volition and self-government in every 
 line of his poetry, and his best thoughts come from 
 the steady resistance he opposes to the ebb and flow 
 of ordinary desires and regrets. He contests the 
 ground inch by inch with all despondent and indo- 
 lent humours, and often, too, with movements of 
 inconsiderate and wasteful joy — turning defeat into 
 victory, and victory into defeat. He transmutes sor- 
 rows into food for lonely rapture, as he dwells upon 
 the evidence they bear of the depth and fortitude of 
 human nature ; he transmutes the periodic joy of social 
 conventions into melancholy as he recalls how ''the 
 wiser mind " 
 
1 82 WORDSWORTH AND HIS GENIUS. 
 
 " Mourns less for what age takes away 
 Than what it leaves behind." 
 
 No poet ever contrived by dint of " plain living and 
 high thinking" to get nearer to the reality of such 
 life as he understood, and to dispel more thoroughly 
 the illusions of superficial impression. 
 
 To this same result again the rare spiritual frugality 
 of Wordsworth greatly contributed. Poets, as a rule, 
 lust for emotioii ; some of the most unique poets — like 
 Shelley and Byron in their very different ways — pant 
 for an unbroken succession of ardent feelings. Words- 
 worth, as I shall try to show, was almost a miser in his 
 reluctance to trench upon the spiritual capital at his 
 disposal. He hoarded his joys, and lived upon_the 
 interest which they paid in the form of hope and ex- 
 pectation. This is one of the most original parts of 
 his poetic character. It was only the windfalls, as 
 one may say, of his imagination, the accidents on 
 which he had never counted beforehand, the delight 
 of which he dared thoroughly to exhaust. He paused 
 almost in awe at the threshold of any promised enjoy- 
 ment, as if it were a spendthrift policy to exchange 
 the hope for the reality. A delight once over, he 
 ^ multiplied it a thousand-fold through the vision of 
 / "that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude." 
 
 -^ Spiritual thrift was at the very root of his soul, and 
 this was one of his most remarkable distinctions 
 among a race who in spiritual things are too often 
 prodigals and spendthrifts. In these two characteris- 
 tics lies sufficient explanation of the opposite views as 
 to his simplicity as a poet. No poet ever drew from 
 
WORDSWORTH AND HIS GENIUS. 1 83 
 
 simpler sources than Wordsworth, but none ever made 
 so much out of so little. He stemmed the common- 
 place currents of emotion, and often succeeded in so 
 reversing them, that men were puzzled when they saw 
 weakness transformed into power and sorrow into rap- 
 ture. He used up successfully the waifs and strays of 
 his imaginative life, reaped so much from opportunity, 
 hope, and memory, that men were as puzzled at the 
 simplicity of his delights as they are when they watch 
 the occasions of a child's laughter. 
 
 Thus there is no poet who gives to his theme so 
 perfectly new a birth as Wordsworth. He does not 
 discern and revivify the natural life which is in it ; he 
 creates a new thing altogether, namely the life of 
 thought which it has the power to generate in his own 
 brooding imagination. I have already said that he 
 uses human sorrow, for example, as an influence to 
 stir up his own meditative spirit, till it loses its own 
 nature and becomes 
 
 " Sorrow that is not sorrow, but delight ; 
 And miserable love, that is not pain 
 To hear of, for the glory that redounds 
 Therefrom to human kind and what we are." ^ 
 
 And it is this strange transmuting power, which his 
 meditative spirit exercises over all earthly and human 
 themes, that gives to Wordsworth's poems the intense 
 air of solitude which everywhere pervades them. He 
 is the most solitary of poets. Of him, with far more 
 point than of Milton, may it be said, in Wordsworth's 
 1 Prelude, book xiii. p. 345. 
 
1 
 
 184 WORDSWORTH AND HIS GENIUS. 
 
 own words, that "his soul was like a star, and dwelt 
 apart." Of all English poems, his works are the most 
 completely outside the sphere of Shakespeare's uni- 
 versal genius. In solitude only could they have orig- 
 inated, and in solitude only can they be perfectly en- 
 joyed. It is impossible not to feel the loneliness of 
 a mind which never surrenders itself to the natural 
 and obvious currents of- thought or feeling in the 
 theme the poet takes, but changes their direction by 
 cool side-winds from his own spiritual nature. Natu- 
 ral rays of feeling are refracted the moment they enter 
 Wordsworth's imagination. It is not the theme act- 
 ing on the man that you see, but the man acting on 
 the theme. He himself consciously brings to it the 
 spiritual forces which determine the lines of medita- 
 tion ; he evades, or, as I have insisted, even resists 
 the inherent tendencies of emotion belonging to his 
 subject ; catches it up into his high spiritual imagina- 
 tion, and makes it yield a totally different fruit of con- 
 templation to any which it seemed naturally likely to 
 bear. It is in this that he differs so completely in 
 manner from other self-conscious poets — Goethe, for 
 instance, who in like manner always left the shadow 
 of himself on the field of his vision. But with Goethe 
 it is a shadow of self in quite a different sense. Goethe 
 watches himself drifting along the tide of feeling, and 
 keeps an eye open outside his heart. But though he 
 overhears himself, he does not interfere with himself; 
 he listens breathlessly, and notes it down. Words- 
 worth, on the other hand, refuses to listen to this 
 natural self at all. He knows another world of pure 
 
WORDSWORTH AND HIS GENIUS. 1 85 
 
 and buoyant meditation j and he knows that all which 
 is transplanted into it bears there a new and nobler 
 fruit. With fixed visionary purpose, he snatches away 
 his subject from the influence of the lower currents it 
 is beginning to obey, and compels it to breathe its 
 life into that silent sky of conscious freedom and im- 
 mortal hope in which his own spirit lives. Words- 
 worth has himself explained this fixed purpose of his 
 imagination to stay the drift of common thoughts and 
 common trains of feeling, and lift them up into the 
 light of a higher meditative mood, in a passage of a 
 remarkable letter to "The Friend." It illustrates so 
 curiously the deeper methods of his genius, that I 
 must quote it: — 
 
 " A familiar incident may render plain the manner in which a 
 process of intellectual improvement, the reverse of that which 
 nature pwsttes, is by reason introduced. There never perhaps 
 existed a school-boy vi'ho, having, when he retired to rest, care- 
 lessly blown out his candle, and having chanced to notice, as he 
 lay upon his bed in the ensuing darkness, the sullen light which 
 had survived the extinguished flame, did not, at some time or 
 other, watch that light as if his mind were bound to it by a spell. 
 It fades and revives — gathers to a point — seems as if it would go 
 out in a moment — again recovers its strength, nay becomes 
 brighter than before : it continues to shine with an endurance, 
 which in its apparent weakness is a mystery — it protracts its ex- 
 istence so long, clinging to the power which supports it, that the 
 observer, who had lain down in his bed so easy-minded, becomes 
 sad and melancholy : his sympathies are touched — it is to him 
 an intimation and an image of departing life; the thought comes 
 nearer to him — it is the life of a venerated parent, of a beloved 
 brother or sister, or of an aged domestic ; who are gone to the 
 grave, or whose destiny it soon may be thus to linger, thus to 
 
1 86 WORDSWORTH AND HIS GENIUS. 
 
 hang upon the last point of moral existence, thus finally to de- 
 part and be seen no more. This is nature teaching seriously 
 and sweetly through the affections; melting the heart, and 
 through that instinct of tenderness, developing the understand- 
 ing. In this instance the object of solicitude is the bodily life 
 of another. Let us accompany this same boy to that period be- 
 tween youth and manhood, when a solicitude may be awakened 
 for the moral life of himself. Are there any powers by which, 
 beginning with a sense of inward decay, that affects not, how- 
 ever, the natural life, he could call to mind the same image, and 
 hang over it with an equal interest as a visible type of his own 
 perishing spirit ? O, surely, if the being of the individual be 
 under his own care ; if it be his first care ; if duty begin from 
 the point of accountableness to our conscience, and through that, 
 to God and human nature ; if without such primary sense of 
 duty, all secondary care of teacher, of friend or parent, must be 
 baseless and fruitless; if, lastly, the motions of the soul transcend 
 in worth those of the animal functions, nay give to them their 
 sole value, — then truly are there such powers : and the image of 
 the dying taper may be recalled and contemplated, though with 
 no sadness in the nerves, no disposition to tears, no unconquer- 
 able sighs, jj'd"^ ivifh a nielancholy in the soul, a sinking imvard 
 into ourselves fj-om thought to thought, a steady remonstrance, 
 and a high resolve. Let, then, the youth go back, as occasion 
 will permit, to nature and to solitude, thus admonished by 
 reason, and relying upon this newly-acquired support. A world 
 of fresh sensations will gradually open upon him as his mind puts 
 off its infirmities, and as, instead of being propelled restlessly 
 towards others in admiration, or too hasty love, he makes it his 
 prime business to understand himself. New sensations, I affirm, 
 will be opened out — pure, and sanctioned by that reason which 
 is their original author; and precious feelings of disinterested, 
 that is, self-disregarding joy and love may be regenerated and 
 restored : and, in this sense, he may be said to measure back the 
 track of life he has trod." 
 
WORDSWORTH AND HIS GENIUS. 1 8/ 
 
 One feels that the poet must live alone in order thus 
 consciously to bathe all that he touches with a new 
 atmosphere not his own. We are most alone when we 
 most distinctly feel the boundary-line between ourselves 
 and the world beyond us. In acts of free-will the 
 sense of human solitude is always at its height; for 
 in them we distinguish ourselves from all things else. 
 And in the world of imagination this spiritual freedom 
 is especially remarkable. There one has always heard 
 that freedom is not, that genius is undisputed master 
 of the will. Wordsworth's poetry is the living refu- 
 tation of this assertion. He is so solitary, because his 
 spirit consciously directs his imagination, and imposes 
 on it from within influences stronger than any it re- 
 ceives from without. 
 
 " The outward shows of sky and earth, 
 Of hill and valley, he has viewed;" 
 
 " impulses of deeper birth 
 Have come to him in solitude." ^ 
 
 Reverie is not, in this sense, solitary, and Wordsworth 
 is not the poet of reverie. In reverie the mind wholly 
 loses the boundaries of its own life, and wanders away 
 unconsciously to the world's end. Wordsworth's 
 musings are never reveries. He neither loses himself 
 nor the centre of his thought. He carries his own 
 spiritual world with him, draws the thing or thought 
 or feeling on which he intends to write from its com- 
 mon orbit, fixes it, like a new star, in his own higher 
 2 "A Poet's Epitaph," vol. v. of " Wordsworth's Poems," p. 24. 
 (The seven-volume edition.) 
 
lbs IVO RDS WOR Til A ND HIS GENIUS. 
 
 firmament, and there contemplates it beneath the gleam- 
 ing lights and mysterious shadows of its new sphere. 
 It is in this respect tliat he differs so widely in habit 
 of thought from Coleridge, who was also a muser in 
 his way. All his thoughts in any one poem flow as 
 surely from a distinct centre as the fragrance from a 
 flower. With Coleridge they flit away down every new 
 avenue of vague suggestion, till we are lost in the in- 
 extricable labyrinth of tangled associations. The same 
 spiritual freedom which set Wordsworth's imagination 
 in motion, also controlled and fixed it on a single focus. 
 And this he himself noted in contrasting his own early 
 mental life with his friend's abstract and vagrant habits 
 of fancy : — ■ 
 
 " I had forms distinct 
 To steady me ; each aiiy thought revolved 
 Round a substantial centre, which at once 
 Incited it to motion and controlled. 
 I did not pine like one in cities bred, 
 As was thy melancholy lot, dear friend. 
 Great spirit as thou art, in endless dreams 
 Of sickliness, disjoining, joining, things 
 Without the light of knowledge." ^ 
 
 That this hardy spiritual freedom, acting through the 
 imagination, and drawing the object of the poet's con- 
 templation voluntarily and purposely into his own world 
 of thought, is the most distinguishing characteristic 
 of Wordsworth's poetry, may be best verified by com- 
 paring him with any other of our great poets. All 
 other poets create their poetry, and even their medita- 
 
 " " Prelude," book viii. p. 224. 
 
WORDSWORTH AND HIS GENIUS. 189 
 
 tive poetry, in the act of throwing themselves into tlie 
 life of the scene or train of thought or feeling they are 
 contemplating: Wordsworth deliberately withdraws his 
 imagination from the heart of his picture to contem- 
 plate it in its spiritual relations. Thus, for instance, 
 Tennyson and Wordsworth start from the same mood, 
 the one in the song " Tears, idle tears," the other in the 
 poem called the "Fountain." Tennyson's exquisite 
 poem is well known : — 
 
 " Tears, idle teai's, I know not what they mean; 
 Tears from the depth of some divine despair 
 Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes, 
 In looking on the happy Autumn-fields, 
 And thinking of the days that are no more. 
 
 Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail, 
 That brings our friends up from the underworld ; 
 Sad as the last which reddens over one 
 That sinks with all we love below the verge ; 
 So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more. 
 
 Ah, sad and strange, as in dark summer dawns 
 
 The earliest pipe of half- awaken' d birds 
 
 To dying ears, when unto dying eyes 
 
 The casement slowly grows a glimmering square ; 
 
 So sad, so strange, the days that are no more. 
 
 Dear as remembered kisses after death, 
 And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned 
 On lips that are for others; deep as love. 
 Deep as first love, and wild with all regret ; 
 O Death in Life, the days that are no more." 
 
 Now turn to Wordsworth's treatment of the same 
 theme : — 
 
1 
 
 19^ WORDSWORTH AND HIS GENIUS. 
 
 " My eyes are dim with childish tears, 
 My heart is idly stirred ; 
 For the same sound is in my ears 
 Which in those days I heard. 
 
 Thus fares it still in our decay; 
 
 And yet the wiser mind 
 Mourns less for what age takes away 
 
 Than what it leaves behind. 
 
 The blackbird amid leafy trees, 
 
 The lark above the hill, 
 Let loose their carols when they please, 
 
 Are quiet when they will. 
 
 With Nature never do they wage 
 
 A foolish strife ; they see 
 A happy youth, and their old age 
 
 Is beautiful and free. 
 
 But we are pressed by heavy la:ws ; 
 
 And often, glad no more, 
 We wear a face of joy because 
 
 We have been glad of yore." 
 
 Tennyson continues in tlie same strain of emotion 
 with which he begins, picturing the profound unspeak- 
 able sadness with which we survey the irrecoverable 
 past ; Wordsworth no sooner. touches the same theme 
 than he checks the current of emotion, and, to use 
 his own words, " instead of being restlessly propelled " 
 by it, he makes it the object of contemplation, and, 
 "with no unconquerable sighs, yet with a melancholy 
 in the soul, sinks inward into himself, from thought 
 to thought, to a steady remonstrance and a high 
 resolve." And thus meditating, he wrings from the 
 
WORDSWORTH AAW HIS GENIUS. I9I 
 
 temporary sadness fresh conviction that the ebbing 
 away, both in spirit and in appearance, of the bright- 
 est past, sad as it must ever be, is not so sad a thing 
 as the weak yearning which, in departing, it often 
 leaves stranded on the soul, to cling to the appearance 
 when the spirit is irrecoverably lost. There is no other 
 great poet who thus redeems new ground for spiritual 
 meditation from beneath the very sweep of the tides 
 of the most engrossing affections, and quietly main- 
 tains it in possession of the musing intellect. There 
 is no other but Wordsworth who has led us "to those 
 sweet_couiisels between head and heart'''' which flash 
 upon the absorbing emotions of the moment the steady 
 light of a calm nifinite world. None but Wordsworth 
 has ever so completely transmuted by an imaginative 
 spirit unsatisfied yearnings into eternal truth. No 
 other poet ever brought out as he has done 
 
 " The soothing thoughts that spring 
 Out of human suffering ;" 
 
 or so tenderly preserved the 
 
 " wall-flower scents 
 From out the crumbling ruins of fallen pride;" 
 
 or taught us how, 
 
 " By pain of heart, now checked, and now impelled. 
 The intellectual power through words and things 
 Went sounding on a dim and perilous way." 
 
 He has himself described this self-determination of 
 his genius to "preserve and enlarge the freedom in 
 
192 WORDSWORTH AND HIS GENIUS. 
 
 himself'^ in lines so beautiful, that, though I have 
 already lingered long on this point, I cannot forbear 
 quoting them : — 
 
 " Within the soul a faculty abides 
 That, with interpositions which would hide 
 And darken, so can deal that they become 
 Contingencies of pomp, and serve to exalt 
 Her native brightness. As the ample moon, 
 In the deep stillness of a summer even, 
 Rising behind a thick and lofty grove. 
 Burns like an unconsuming fire of light 
 In the green trees ; and, kindling on all sides 
 Their leafy umbrage, turns the dusky veil 
 Into a substance glorious as her own. 
 Yea with her own incorporated, by power 
 Capacious and serene. Like power abides 
 In man's celestial spirit; virtue thus 
 Sets forth and magnifies herself; thus feeds 
 A calm, a beautiful, and silent .fire 
 From the encumbrances of mortal life, 
 From error, disappointment,— nay, from guilt ; 
 And sometimes, so relenting justice wills, 
 From palpable oppressions of despair." * 
 
 Of other poets, Tennyson alone may seem in some of 
 his more thoughtful poems (the "In Memoriam" and 
 "The Two Voices") to have approached Words- 
 worth's domain in employing the spiritual imagina- 
 tion to illuminate the moods of human emotion. In 
 reality, however, even these poems are quite distinct 
 in kind. They are more like glittering sparks flying 
 upwards from the flames of self-consuming aspirations 
 
 * " Excursion,-' book iv. p. 152. 
 
 m 
 
WORDSWORTH AND HIS GENIUS. 1 93 
 
 than the quiet, stedfast, and spiritual lights of Words- 
 worth's insight. 
 
 But it is by no means principally in treating these 
 deeper themes that Wordsworth brings the most of 
 this conscious, voluntary, imaginative force to bear 
 upon his subjects. All his most characteristic poems 
 bear vivid traces of the same mental process. In his 
 poems on subjects of natural beauty it is perhaps even 
 more remarkable than in his treatment of mental sub- 
 jects where this contemplative withdrawal from the 
 immediate tyranny of a present emotion, in order to 
 gain a higher point of view, seems more natural. But 
 in all his most characteristic poems on nature there is 
 just the same method ; first, a subjection of the mind 
 to the scene or object of feeling studied; then a with- 
 drawing into his deeper self to exhaust its meaning. 
 Thus, in the fine poems on Yarrow, the point of de- 
 parture is the craving of the mind to see an object 
 long ago painted in the imagination; but instead of 
 yielding to the current of that feeling, the poet checks 
 himself, and asks whether the imaginative anticipation 
 may not in itself be a richer wealth than any reality 
 which could take its place : — 
 
 " Let beeves and homebred kine partake 
 The sweets of Burn-mill meadow, 
 The swan on still St. Mary's Lake 
 Float double swan and shadow ! 
 We will not see them, will not go 
 
 To-day, nor yet to-morrow : 
 Enough if in our hearts we know 
 There's such a place as Yarrow. 
 13 
 
194 WORDSWORTH AND HIS GENIUS. 
 
 Be Yarrow stream unseen, unknown ! 
 
 It must, or we shall rue it; 
 We have a vision of our own, — 
 
 Ah, why should we undo it ? 
 The treasured dreams of time long past, 
 
 We'll keep them, winsome Marrow ; 
 For when we're there, although 'tis fair, 
 
 'Twill be another Yarrow." 
 
 And in the same way, in the poem on "Yarrow vis- 
 ited," after brooding over its beauties, he puts them 
 at a distance from him, to distinguish the influence of 
 the "waking dream," "the image that hath perished," 
 in helping hiixi to see the reality: "I see, but not by 
 sight alone, loved Yarrow, have I won thee." And 
 then finally, in revisiting the same spot in old age, we 
 have the first picture of the present ; and, as the mem- 
 ory of the past, with its regrets, naturally follows, 
 again the poet shakes himself free from this regret — 
 the natural mood of the natural man, so to speak — in 
 recognising the beauties of happier years, to win the 
 higher spiritual insight that — 
 
 " the visions of the past 
 Sustaht the heart in feeling 
 Life as she is — our changeful life, 
 With friends and kindred dealing." 
 
 And he ends this most perfect triad of spiritual imag- 
 inations with the characteristic verse, — 
 
 " Flow on for ever, Yarrow stream, 
 Fulfil thy pensive duty. 
 Well pleased that future bards should chant 
 For simple hearts thy beauty; 
 
WORDSWORTH AND HIS GENIUS. 1 95 
 
 To dream-light dear while yet unseen, 
 
 Dear to the common sunshine, 
 And dearer still, as now I feel, 
 
 To memory's shadowy moonshine." 
 
 As more striking illustrations of the same poetic 
 method — more striking simply because the subjects are 
 apparently so purely descriptive that there would seem 
 to be less room for this "sinking inward into himself 
 from thought to thought" — I may recall those daffo- 
 dils transfigured before the "inward eye, which is the 
 bliss of solitude;" the cuckoo, which, though "bab- 
 bling only to the vale of sunshine and of flowers," 
 he spiritualises into a "wandering voice," that "tell- 
 est unto me a tale of visionary hours;" the mountain 
 echo, which sends her "unsolicited reply" to the 
 same babbling wanderer; the nut-laden hazel-branches, 
 whose luxuriant feast first threw him into " that sweet 
 mood when pleasure loves to pay tribute to ease," 
 and which then so "patiently gave up their quiet 
 being," that, haunted by remorse, he is compelled to 
 exclaim, "with gentle hand touch, for there is a spirit 
 in the woods;" the daisy, that recalls him from 
 "stately passions" to "the homely sympathy that 
 heeds the common life our nature breeds;" and the 
 mists, which " magnify and spread the glories of the 
 sun's bright head." But there is no finer instance of 
 Wordsworth's self-withdrawing mood in gazing at ex- 
 ternal things than that of the lines on the Boy of 
 Windermere who mocked the owls. For real lovers 
 of Wordsworth, these lines have effected more in 
 helping them adequately to imagine the full depth of 
 
195 WORDSWORTH AND HIS GENIUS. 
 
 the human imagination, and to feel the inexhaustible 
 wealth of Nature's symbols, than any magnificence of 
 storm or shipwreck or Alpine solitude : — 
 
 " There was a boy : ye knew him well, ye cliffs 
 And islands of Winander ! many a time 
 At evening, when the earliest stars began 
 To move along the edges of the hills. 
 Rising or setting, would he stand alone 
 Beneath the trees or by the glimmering lake; 
 And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands 
 Pressed closely palm to palm, and to his mouth 
 Uplifted, he, as through an instrument, 
 Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls, 
 That they might answer him ; and they would shout 
 Across the watery vale and shout again. 
 Responsive to his call, with quivering peals. 
 And long halloos and screams, and echoes loud 
 Redoubled and redoubled ; concourse wild 
 Of mirth and jocund din : and when it chanced 
 That pauses of deep silence mocked his skill, 
 Then sometimes, in that silence while he hung 
 Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise 
 Has carried far into his heart the voice 
 Of mountain torrents ; or the visible scene 
 Would enter unawares into his mind, 
 With all its solemn imagery, its rocks, 
 Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received 
 Into the bosom of the steady lake." 
 
 No Other poet but Wordsworth that the world ever 
 produced could have written this; you feel in reading 
 it that the lines "a gentle shock of mild surprise has 
 carried y2i;r into his heart the voice of mountain tor- 
 rents," had for him an exactness as well as a fulness 
 
WORDSWORTH AND HIS GENIUS. 1 9/ 
 
 of meaning; — for he shows a curious power of care- 
 fully discriminating the degrees of depth in his poetic 
 imaginations; some lie near the surface; others lie 
 deeper, but still within the sphere of less meditative 
 minds ; others spring from a depth far beyond the 
 reach of any human soundings. 
 
 Again, the beauty of Wordsworth's little ballads is 
 never properly understood by those who do not enter 
 into the contemplative tone in which they are written. 
 There is none of them that can be approached in a 
 mood of sympathetic emotion without failing to pro- 
 duce its full effect. "Lucy Gray," for example, is a 
 continual disappointment to those who look for an 
 expression of the piteousness and desolation of the 
 lost child's fate.^ 'Wordsworth did not feel it thus; 
 he was contemplating a pure and lonely death as the 
 natural completion of a pure and lonely life. He calls 
 it not "Desolation," but "Solitude." He strikes the 
 key-note of the poem in speaking of her in the first 
 verse as "the solitary child," and then 
 
 " No mate, no comrade Lucy knew ; 
 She dwelt on a wide moor, 
 The szveetest thing that ever grew 
 Beside a human door." 
 
 Wordsworth's purpose evidently was to paint a per- 
 fectly lovely solitary flower snapped, for its very purity, 
 in its earliest bud, that it might remain an image of 
 solitary beauty for ever. He intended \.o dissolve away 
 
 ^ Such as Mr. Kingsley, for instance, has so finely given in his 
 ballad on the girl lost on the sands of Dee. 
 
198 WORDSWORTH AND HIS GENIUS. 
 
 all pain and pity in the loveliness of the picture. It 
 was not the lot of Lucy Gray, but the spiritualized 
 meaning of that lot as it lived in his imagination, that 
 he desired to paint. Again, in the exquisite ballad 
 "We are seven," few discern how every touch 
 throughout the whole is intended to heighten the 
 contrast between the natural health and joy of life in 
 the living child and the supernatural secret of death. 
 It is not a mere tale of one little cottage girl, who 
 could not conceive the full meaning of death : it is 
 the poet's contemplative contrast between the rosy 
 beauty and buoyant joyousness of children's life and 
 the "incommunicable" sleep, which is the subject of 
 the poem. The perfect art with which this is effected 
 is seldom adequately observed. He introduces the liv- 
 ing child with a glimpse of the inward brightness that 
 childish health and beauty breathe around them : — 
 
 " She had a rustic woodland air. 
 And she was wildly clad ; 
 Her hair was fair, and very fair : 
 Her beauty made me glad." 
 
 And when he has drawn the picture of her eating her 
 supper by the little graves of her brother and sister, 
 that she may "sit and sing to them," he heightens 
 the contrast yet more, — 
 
 " The first that died was little Jane : 
 In bed she moaning lay, 
 Till God released her of her pain. 
 And then she went away. 
 
WORDSWORTH AND HIS GENIUS. 1 99 
 
 So in the churchyard she was laid ; 
 
 And when the grass was dry, 
 Together rowid her grave we played. 
 
 My brother John and I. 
 
 And when the ground was white with snow, 
 
 And I could run and slide, 
 My brother John was forced to go, 
 
 And he lies by her side." 
 
 Simple as this language is, it is not the language in 
 which a child would have spoken. It is the language 
 of a poet musing on the contrast between the little 
 silent giaves, changing with every season, freshening 
 with the spring, wetted by the rain, and whitened by 
 the winter's snow, like any other specks of common 
 earth, and the buoyant child's unshaken fancy that 
 they contain her sister and her brother still. So full 
 is she of overflowing life herself, that though she can 
 "run and slide," the whitened mounds still seem to 
 her to hide a life as vivid as her own. 
 
 The voluntary element that I have noticed in Words- 
 worth's genius — the preference for checking obvious 
 and natural currents of thought or feeling in order to 
 brood over them meditatively and bring out a result 
 of a higher order, leads to many of his imperfections 
 as well as beauties. He had, as I have noticed, an 
 eminently frugal mind. He liked of all things to 
 make the most of the smaller subject before he gave 
 himself up to the greater. The sober, sparing, free- 
 will with which he gathers up the crumbs, and feeds 
 his genius on them before he will break in on any 
 whole loaf, is eminently characteristic of him. Emo- 
 
200 WORDSWORTH AND HIS GENIUS. 
 
 tion does not hurry him into poetry nor into anything 
 else. He "slackens his thoughts by choice,'"'^ when 
 they grow eager ; he defers his feast of nuts that he 
 may first enjoy expectation to the full ; he will wear 
 out the luxury of his imaginations of Yarrow before 
 he tries the reality ; he is more willing by far to wait 
 for the due seasons of poetry than the husbandman for 
 the due seasons of fruit; — 
 
 " His mind was keen, 
 Intense, and frugal ; apt for all affairs, 
 And watchful more than ordinary men." "^ 
 
 The poem on the strawberry -blossom is right from the 
 heart of his own nature : — 
 
 " That is work of waste and ruin : 
 Do as Charles and I are doing. 
 Strawberry-blossoms one and all. 
 We must spare them — here are many. 
 Look at it, the flower is small — 
 Small and low, but fair as any; 
 Do not touch it — summers two 
 I am older, Anne, than you. 
 * * * * * 
 Hither, soon as spring has fled. 
 You and Charles and I will walk ; 
 Lurking berries ripe and red 
 Then will hang on every stalk. 
 Each within its leafy bower; 
 And for that promise spare the flower." 
 
 And so Wordsworth himself would always have saved 
 
 up his strawberry-blossoms of poetry till the " lurking 
 
 6 " Prelude," book i. ' Michael. 
 
WORDSWORTH AND HIS GENIUS. 201 
 
 berries ripe and red" lay in them, had he had the 
 quick eye to distinguish surely between the unripe 
 beauty and the ripe. But this he had not. As he 
 himself tells us, he found it almost impossible to dis- 
 tinguish "a timorous capacity from prudence," "from 
 circumspection, infinite delay." He had not that 
 swiftness and fusion of nature which helps a m.an to 
 distinguish at once the fruit of his lower from that of 
 his higher moods. He gathered in 
 
 " the harvest of a quiet eye, 
 That broods and sleeps on its own heart," 
 
 with undiscriminating frugality, gathering in often both 
 tares and wheat. It was that same voluntary character 
 of his imaginative life, which enabled him to give so 
 new an aspect to his themes, which also rendered him 
 unable to distinguish with any delicacy between the 
 various moods in which he wrote. A poet who is the 
 mere instrument, as it were, of his own impulses of 
 genius, knows when the influence is upon him ; but a 
 poet whose visionary mood is always half voluntary, 
 and a result of a gradual withdrawing of the mind into 
 its deeper self, cannot well have the same quick vision 
 for the boundary between commonplace and living im- 
 agination which belongs to natures of more spontane- 
 ous genius. Wordsworth seems to kindle his own 
 poetic flame like a blind man kindling his own fire ; 
 and often, as it were, he goes through the process of 
 lighting it without observing that the fuel is damp and 
 has not caught the spark ; and thus, though he has left 
 us many a beacon of pure and everlasting glory flaming 
 
202 WORDSWORTH AND HIS GENIUS. 
 
 from the hills, he has left us also many a monumental 
 pile of fuel from which the poetic fire has early died 
 away. 
 
 It is clear that Wordsworth as a poet did, as he tells 
 us himself, " feel the weight of too much liberty." In 
 his finest poem he declares — 
 
 " Me this unchartered freedom tires, 
 I feel the weight of chance desires." 
 
 And no doubt he had even too complete a mastery over 
 himself He could not distinguish the arbitrary in his 
 poetry from the conscious conquests of insight. And 
 being, as we have seen, most frugal — feeling, as he did, 
 to the very last day of his poetic life, that it was the 
 greatest of impieties to "tax high Heaven with prodi- 
 gality," ® he made not only the most of these " chance 
 desires " or suggestions, but often more than the most, 
 using them as the pedestals to thoughts in reality far 
 too broad for them. It is the great defect of Words- 
 worth's poems, that where he has to deal with circum- 
 stance at all, he either gives it in all its baldness, or 
 makes his meditations overhang it, like the projecting 
 stories of old-fashioned houses, in which the basement 
 is more costly than the air, and therefore is husbanded 
 more carefully. To him the basement of circuiiistance 
 was very costly, and the superinduced contemplation 
 as abundant as the former was costly. Coleridge has 
 criticised this tendency in Wordsworth to spread out 
 a dome of thought over very insufficient supports of 
 
 8 See the beautiful verses, "The unremitting voice of niglitly 
 streams," to v^^hich the date 1846 is attached. 
 
WORDSWORTH AND HIS GENIUS. 203 
 
 fact, in accusing him of " thoughts and images too 
 great for their subject." It is mistaken criticism, we 
 think, to assert this, as Coleridge does, of any of his 
 poems on Nature. The dafsy and the daffodils breathed 
 a buoyant joy and love into Wordsworth's simple na- 
 ture which Coleridge could but half understand. The 
 thoughts were not too great for the real influences they 
 are capable of exerting. But to his poems on incident, 
 Coleridge's charge is often perfectly applicable. The 
 following criticism, for instance, contains a fair illus- 
 tration of this tendency to erect a meditative dome 
 over an inadequate pedestal. We quote from Cole- 
 ridge's " Biographia Literaria " : — 
 
 " The poet having gone out for a day's tour of pleasure, meets 
 early in the morning with a knot of gipsies, who had pitched 
 their blanket-tents and straw-beds, together with their children 
 and asses, in some field by the road-side. At the close of the 
 day, on his return, our tourist found them in the same place. 
 ' Twelve hours,' says he, 
 
 • Tvi'elve hours, twelve bounteous hours are gone, while I 
 Have been a traveller under open sky, 
 Much witnessing of change and cheer; 
 Yet as I left I find them here.' 
 
 Whereat the poet, without seeming to reflect that the poor tawny 
 wanderers might probably have been tramping for weeks together 
 through road and lane, over moor and mountain, and consequently 
 must have been right glad to rest themselves, their children, and 
 cattle for one whole day ; and overlooking the obvious truth, that 
 such repose might be quite as necessary for them as a walk of the 
 same continuance was pleasing or healthful for the more fortunate 
 poet, — expresses his indignation in a series of lines, the diction 
 and imagery of which would have been rather above than below 
 
204 WORDSWORTH AND HIS GENIUS. 
 
 the mark had they been applied to the immense empire of China, 
 improgressive for thirty centuries : — 
 
 ' The weary sun betook himself to rest : — 
 Then issued Vesper from the fulgent west, 
 Outshining like a visible god, 
 The glorious path in which he trod. 
 And now ascending after one dark hour. 
 And one night's diminution of her power. 
 Behold the mighty Moon ! This way 
 She looks, as if at them ; but they 
 Regard not her : — O, better wrong and strife. 
 Better vain deeds or evil, than such life 1 
 The silent heavens have goings on ; 
 The stars have tasks; — but these have none.' " 
 
 There is no structural power in Wordsworth's mind. 
 When he has to deal with things, influences, living 
 unities, he is usually opulent and at ease ; for the 
 natural emanations which flowers and mountains and 
 children and simple rustic natures breathe around them 
 are homogeneous in themselves, and only ask a poet 
 who will open his whole spirit to them with steady 
 contemplative eye, and draw in their atmosphere. 
 But when much incident enters into poetry, the poet 
 also needs high combining power ; he needs the art 
 of rapidly changing his mental attitude, and yet keep- 
 ing the same tone and mood throughout; and to this 
 the voluntary, frugal, contemplative character of 
 Wordsworth's intellectual nature is quite unequal. 
 Wherever there is extended surface in his subject, 
 there there is want of unity in the poem — inadequacy 
 to blend a variety of elements into a single picture. 
 There is no whole landscape in all Wordsworth's ex- 
 
WORDSWORTH AND HIS GENIUS. 205 
 
 quisite studies of nature. There is no variety of moral 
 influences in all his many beautiful contemplations of 
 character. There is no distinct centre of interest in 
 any but his very simplest narratives. Indeed, he can 
 deal with facts successfully only when they are simple 
 enough to embody but a single idea : as in the case 
 of Peter Bell and the Idiot Boy. If they have any 
 character of accident about them, this reappears in his 
 poems in all the accidental, discontinuous, and strag- 
 gling form of its original existence. Almost any one 
 of Wordsworth's fact-poems will immediately occur 
 to the mind in illustration of this — "Simon Lee," 
 "Alice Fell," the story of the traveller lost on Hel- 
 vellyn, and many others. They are anecdotes, with 
 passages often of surpassing beauty, but still untrans- 
 muted anecdotes, — here a bit of fact — there a gleam 
 of natural loveliness — then a layer more of fact, and 
 so forth. He neither throws himself into the narra- 
 tive, so as to give you the active spirit of life inside it, 
 as Scott did ; nor does he give solely the contemplative 
 view of it, as in his simplest ballads he can do with 
 so much beauty; but he sprinkles a little macadam of 
 stony fact along the fair upland path of his imagina- 
 tion. Thus, in the early editions of "The Thorn," 
 he anxiously recorded the size of the infant's grave: — 
 
 " I've measured it from side to side, 
 'Tis three feet long and two feet wide " 
 
 — inevitably suggesting that the poet was an under- 
 taker calculating accurately the measure of the coffin. 
 Yet these spots of prosiness are eminently charac- 
 
206 WORDSWORTH AND HIS GENIUS. 
 
 teristic of Wordsworth. He had vividly acute senses, 
 and delighted in the mere physical use of them; they 
 both relieved him from the strain of contemplation, 
 and suggested new food for contemplation. "I 
 speak," he says in the Prelude, 
 
 " in recollection of a time 
 When the bodily eye — in every stage of life 
 The most despotic of our senses — gained 
 Such strength in me, as often held my mind 
 In absolute dominion. ... 
 I roam'd from hill to hill, from rock to rock, 
 Still craving combination of new^ forms ; 
 New pleasure ; wider empire for the sight, 
 Proud of her own endowments ; and rejoiced 
 To lay the inner faculties asleep.^'' 
 
 The truth of this statement is obvious to any one who 
 reads his earliest poems; and these vivid senses con- 
 tinued to the last to work quite in separation from the 
 poetic spirit within him ; so that no poet gives us so 
 strong a feeling of the contrast between the inward 
 and the outward as Wordsworth ; he dives into him- 
 self between his respirations, that he may exclude for 
 a little while the tyranny of the senses, and so not 
 waste his life in the mere animal pleasure of breath- 
 ing. A geometrician would say, that while most other 
 poetry moves on the plane of life, Wordsworth's is 
 poetry of double curvature, and winds in and out con- 
 tinually beneath and above it. One of Wordsworth's 
 biographers states, that the sense of hearing was the 
 finest sense Wordsworth had, and gave rise to the 
 finest poetry of Nature he ever wrote_, The latter 
 
WORDSWORTH AND HIS GENIUS. 20/ 
 
 Statement is, I think, true ; but the inference from it, 
 that the ear was the finest of Wordsworth's senses, is 
 probably an error. Tliere is no indication that he had 
 any fine faculty for music ; and I think the reasoning 
 by which it was inferred that he had, is probably 
 almost an inversion of the truth. It is because the 
 ear cannot and does not fill and distract the contem- 
 plative mind so much as the eye, — because sound 
 appeals directly to the interpreting spirit, and has so 
 little substantive significance of its own, — that Words- 
 worth's poetry on sounds has, perhaps, less disconti- 
 nuity, more fusion, than his poetry on sight. Vision 
 absorbed him, and would not allow his " inward eye" 
 to see until sight was exchanged for memory; and 
 even then bis poems on visible things have two dis- 
 tinct portions — the descriptive portion, or the strophe 
 dedicated to the eye, and the meditative antistrophe, 
 which belongs to the mind. But when he listened, 
 the sound only served to keep his mind fixed on a 
 single centre, while it allowed him full scope for free 
 meditation. It was not easy for him to macadamise 
 his poetry with little abrupt matter-of-fact sounds. 
 There is no poem like that "To the Cuckoo" — of V-l 
 
 all his poems Wordsworth's own darling. Whether 
 "through water, earth, and air, the soul of happy 
 sound was spread," or the "far-distant hills into the 
 tumult sent an alien sound of melancholy not unno- 
 ticed," there was in Sound ever expression enough to 
 stir the depths of Wordsworth's watchful heart without 
 enslaving his senses. 
 
 But it is by no means due only to the imperfect 
 
1 
 
 208 WORDSWORTH AND HIS GENIUS. 
 
 unity between Wordsworth's spirit and senses, and his 
 disposition to save up all he saw for liis poetry just as 
 he saw it, that these little constant specks of incon- 
 gruous material so often annoy us ; the same thing 
 occurs almost as often in his meditative poems. 
 There was a rigidity in his mind, the offspring prob- 
 ably of the intense meditation he was wont to concen- 
 trate on single centres of thought. Hazlitt has thus 
 finely described the general expression of his personal 
 appearance : — 
 
 " The next day Wordsworth arrived from Bristol at Coleridge's 
 cottage. I think I see him now. He answered in some degree 
 to his friend's description of him, but was more gaunt and Don- 
 Quixote like. He was quaintly dressed (according to the costume 
 of that unconstrained period) in a brown fustian jacket and striped 
 pantaloons. There was something of a roll, a lounge, in his gait, 
 not unlike his own Peter Bell. There was a severe, worn pressure 
 of thought about his temples, a fire in his eye (as if he saw some- 
 thing in objects more than the outward appearance), an intense 
 high narrow forehead, a Roman nose, cheeks furrowed by strong 
 purpose and feeling, and a convulsive inclination to laughter 
 about the mouth, a good deal at variance with the solemn, 
 stately expression of the rest of his face. Chantrey's bust wants 
 the marking traits ; but he was teased into making it regular and 
 heavy. Haydon's head of him,_mtrodu_cj_d Jnto the Entrance 
 of Christ into yerusalem, is the most like his drooping weight of 
 thought and expression. He sat down, and talked very naturally 
 and freely, with a mixture of clear gushing accents in his voice, 
 a deep guttural intonation, and a strong tincture of the northern 
 burr, like the crust on wine." 
 
 Clearly in Wordsworth, as well as in Peter Bell, there 
 were many of 
 
WORDSWORTI-L AND HIS GENIUS. 20g 
 
 " The unshaped half-human thoughts 
 Which solitary nature feeds 
 'Mid summer storms or winter's ice." 
 
 One half applies to him that fine verse— 
 
 " There was a hardness in his cheek, 
 There was a hardness in his eye, 
 As though the man had fixed his face 
 In many a solitary place 
 Against the wind and open sky." 
 
 Indeed, he expressly tells us that this tendency to hard- 
 ness was the leaning of his mind ; but that he had been 
 led to more delicate and sensitive thoughts by his sis- 
 ter's influence — 
 
 " She gave me eyes, she gave me ears, 
 And humble cares, and delicate fears; 
 A heart the fountain of sweet tears, 
 And love, and thought^ and joy." 
 
 The natural rigidity of his mind was great, and hence, 
 probably, his great deficiency in humour, which cannot 
 exist without a certain flexibility of both feeling and 
 thought, allowing of rapid transitions from one point 
 of view to another. It was not only that he had "fixed 
 his face in many a solitary place, against the wind and 
 open sky," but in the intellectual spaces it was the 
 same. Against the infinite solitudes of the eternal 
 world he had intently fixed his spirit, till it too had 
 something of the rigid attitude of the mystic, and was 
 crossed at times by the dark spots which constant gazing 
 at a great brightness will always produce. He paid 
 for the frequency of 
 14 
 
2IO WORDSWORTH AND HIS GENIUS. 
 
 " that blessed mood 
 In which the burden of the mystery, 
 In which the heavy and the weary weight 
 Of all this unintelligible world 
 Is lightened — that serene and blessed mood, 
 In which the affections gently lead us on. 
 Until the breath of this corporeal frame. 
 And even the motion of our human blood, 
 Almost suspended, we are laid asleep 
 In body, and become a living soul ; 
 While with an eye made quiet by the power 
 Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, 
 We see into the life of things " — 
 
 ■ — be paid for the frequency of this mood by a want 
 of ease and delicacy in the lesser movements of his 
 intellectual nature, which rendered him often unable 
 to bring the minutiae even of his finest poems into 
 harmony with their spirit. Thus he often mistook the 
 commonplace observations of his superficial under- 
 standing for the deeper thoughts of his heart ; he had 
 no living feeling that told him when he was dividing 
 things with the blunt edge of common sense, and when 
 he was wielding that fine sword of the imagination by 
 which to the discerning eye the poet divides asunder 
 soul and spirit as surely as that greater sword divides 
 for judgment. He would rise and fall in the same 
 poem from clear vision to the obscure gropings of 
 common sense — from obscure gropings to clear vis- 
 ion — and not feel the incongruity. No one can 
 help shrinking at the sudden discord, when, in the 
 lovely poem, "She was a phantom of delight," we 
 read — 
 
 A 
 
WORDSWORTH AND HIS GENIUS. 211 
 
 " And now I see with eyes serene 
 The very pulse of the machine, 
 A being breathing thoughtful breath, 
 A traveller between life and death." 
 
 It is a jar to the mind, like coming down three steps 
 without notice, to stumble over this " machine " in the 
 midst of such a poem ; you think of an automaton at 
 once, or of Madame Tussaud's breathing figure. There 
 are numbers of gritty little poems completely written 
 in this machine-mood \ but the trial is severe when 
 such a crag starts up to bruise you in the midst of 
 perfect loveliness. We should not grumble if that 
 " worthy short-lived youth " conamemorated in one of 
 his sonnets, had been thus spoken of as a superseded 
 mechanism; but that "a dancing shape, an image 
 gay," should be associated with any notion of the 
 kind, suggests a meaning for the exquisite line "to 
 haunt, to startle, and waylay," the farthest possible, 
 we should imagine, from the mind of the poet in writ- 
 ing it. 
 
 Many of these small discords which interrupt the 
 harmony of Wordsworth's poetry are due to the ego- 
 tism by which a man of moods so solitary and of 
 genius so decisive was almost necessarily haunted. 
 The smallest memoranda of his own mind or life he 
 will often preserve in his poetry, with a kind of blind 
 faith that they have a universal meaning. Thus, in 
 one of his sonnets, he tells us elaborately how he 
 gazed one day at the sea, and saw many ships, and 
 his mind gradually began to take a particular interest 
 in one of them, and how this one sailed northwards. 
 
2 1 2 WORDS WOR TH AND HIS GENIUS. 
 
 One of bis most thoughtful admirers suggested that 
 this sonnet was perhaps trivial ; but Wordsworth con- 
 futed her in a long letter, in which he proved that the 
 sonnet was a poetic illustration of a universal law of 
 mind, by virtue of which man must either find or 
 make a unity in all that he contemplates ; and if there 
 be no determining reason, then the "liberty of in- 
 difference," as the metaphysicians call it, will come 
 into play, and he will select a unit of thought arbi- 
 trarily, as the poet here chose for special interest a 
 special ship, of which he truly observes, that she 
 "was naught to me, nor I to her." "I must say," 
 says Wordsworth of this gently remonstrant admirer, 
 " that even she has something yet to receive from me. 
 I say this with confidence, from her thinking that I 
 have fallen below myself in the sonnet beginning, 
 'With ships the sea was sprinkled far and nigh.' " 
 It might be replied, perhaps, that the same reasoning 
 would prove him to be justified in using poetry to 
 illustrate the simple conversion of propositions, or in 
 writing a touching sonnet on the "Illicit process of 
 the Major." The best and even the most poetical 
 defence we can make for such caprices is, that they 
 are venial egotisms ; for it is certainly more poetic to 
 exhibit life — even egotistic life — in any fasliion, than 
 to illustrate merely formal laws. I should not have 
 alluded to this at all, but that Hazlitt has set up a 
 theory, founded in some measure, perhaps, on these 
 little personal egotisms, to prove -that Wordsworth's 
 poetic power is born of egotism, and is part and 
 parcel of his complete want of universality. 
 
WORDSWOR TH AND HIS GENIUS. 2 1 3 
 
 " Mr. Wordsworth is the last man to ' look abroad into univer- 
 sality,' if that alone constituted genius : he looks at home into 
 himself, and is ' content with riches fineless.' He would in the 
 other case be ' poor as winter,' if he had nothing but general 
 capacity to trust to. He is the greatest, that is, the mcjst original 
 poet of the present day, only because he is the greatest egotist. 
 He is ' self-involved, not daid<.' He sits in the centre of his 
 own being, and there ' enjoys bright day.' He does not waste a 
 thought on others. Whatever does not relate exclusively and 
 wholly to himself, is foreign to his views. He contemplates a 
 whole-length figure of himself, he looks along the unbroken line 
 of his personal identity. He thrusts aside all other objects, all 
 other interests, with scorn and impatience, that he may repose 
 on his own being ; that he may dig out the treasures of thought 
 contained in it; that he may unfold the precious stores of a 
 mind for ever brooding over itself. His genius is the effect of 
 his individual character. He stamps that character — that deep 
 individual interest — on whatever he meets. The object is noth- 
 ing but as it furnishes food for internal meditation, for old associ- 
 ations. If there had been no other being in the universe, Mr. 
 Wordsworth's poetry would have been just what it is. . . . With 
 a mind averse from outward objects, but ever intent upon its 
 own workings, he hangs a weight of thought and feeling upon 
 every trifling circumstance connected with his past history. The 
 note of the cuckoo sounds in his ear like the voice of other 
 years ; the daisy spreads its leaves in the rays of boyish delight 
 that stream from his thoughtful eyes; the rainbow lifts its proud 
 arch in heaven but to mark his progress from infancy to man- 
 hood ; an old thorn is buried, bowed down under the mass of 
 associations he has wound about it; and to him, as he himself 
 beautifully says, 
 
 ' The meanest flow'r that blows can give 
 Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.' " 
 
 Hazlitt's malicious genius delighted in this kind of 
 
214 WORDS IVOR TH A ND HIS GENIUS, 
 
 thorny praise. His criticisms are generally full of 
 insight ; and come short of the truth mainly from the 
 deep scepticism which always leaves him perfectly con- 
 tented with his own paradox. He has no conviction 
 that apparent paradox is not real. He is quite willing 
 to believe that mere egotism can be the root of genius 
 or of anything else that is noble, and is not driven 
 back to his facts by any aversion to so startling a con- 
 clusion. He tells us further on, that Wordsworth's 
 "strength, as it often happens, arises from excess of 
 weakness." This is but the sceptic's bitter version 
 of the truth, that " weakness constantly arises from 
 excess of strength;" a form of the proposition not 
 only more true in itself, but far more applicable to 
 Wordsworth's poetry. Rare gifts of mind almost al- 
 ways tend to some overbalance of habit, or thought, 
 or feeling — to some narrowness, pride, or humour, 
 that is in itself a weakness. But no weakness ever of 
 itself tends to an opposite strength, even though, as 
 Wordsworth so finely observes in a passage I have al- 
 ready quoted, the free and voluntary wisdom of man 
 may transmute it into an occasion for developing the 
 highest strength ; but this is through the supernatural 
 life, not through any natural gravitation of weakness 
 towards its opposite. Strong affections may tend to 
 feebleness of purpose, but not feebleness of purpose 
 to strong affections. Great contemplative power will 
 tend to self-occupation, but self-occupation does not 
 tend to contemplative power. Hazlitt saw that the 
 egotism and the genius in Wordsworth were closely 
 related, and with half-malicious pleasure hastily as- 
 
WORDS WOR TH AND HIS GENIUS. 2 1 5 
 
 sumed that the worse quality had the deeper root. 
 When he says that Wordsworth's poetry is mainly 
 derived from "looking at home into himself," he 
 says what I have all along endeavoured to establish ; 
 but when he means by this the contradictory of "look- 
 ing abroad into universality," he is certainly and wil- 
 fully wrong. There are two selfs in every man — the 
 private and the universal ; — the source of personal 
 crotchets, and the humanity that is our bond with our 
 fellow-men, and gives us our influence over them. 
 Half Wordsworth's weakness springs from the egotist- 
 ical self, as he himself applies when he says, 
 
 "Or is it that when human souls a journey long have had, 
 And are returned into themselves, they cannot but be sad?" ^ 
 
 But all his power springs from the universal self. Nor 
 is it in the least true that Wordsworth's finest poems, 
 as Hazlitt implies, are cocoons of arbitrary personal 
 associations, spun around local and accidental centres. 
 The worst element in Wordsworth is the arbitrary and 
 occasional element. Freedom, indeed, enters into his 
 very finest poems, — but thoughtful, not arbitrary free- 
 dom ; he draws us out of the natural currents of 
 thought and emotion : but if it be from "chance de- 
 sires," if it be to have us "all to himself," and give 
 us an egotistic lecture in his own little study, — he is 
 as far as possible from his true poetic mood. 
 
 It is in order to put us into communication with a 
 part of his nature which has a feebler counterpart in 
 ourselves, — to give us the joy of feeling latent intel- 
 9 Star-gazers, — " Poetical Works," vol. ii. 
 
2 1 6 WORDS WOR TH A ND HIS GENIUS. 
 
 lectual powers quickened into conscious energy, — 
 that, in his finer poems, he gently intrudes upon us 
 his own higher imaginative life. It is an egotism, no 
 doubt, when he ends a fine poem with the verse — ■ 
 
 " Matthew is in his grave; yet now 
 Methinks I see him stand, 
 As at that moment, with a bough 
 Of wilding in his hand." 
 
 But it is not an egotism to tell us, as he does in the 
 
 Prelude — 
 
 " O, when I have hung 
 
 Above the raven's nest, by knots of grass 
 And half-inch fissures in the slippery rock. 
 But ill-sustained, and almost (so it seemed i") 
 Suspended by the blast that blew amain. 
 Shouldering the nakedcrag,— O, at that time. 
 While on the perilous ridge I hung alone, 
 "With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind 
 Blow through my ear ! the sky seemed not a sky 
 Of earth, and with what motion moved the clouds !" 
 
 The difference lies in this, that in the former case the 
 statement is a bare individual experience — which adds 
 nothing to the living expression of the poem — the 
 bough of "wilding" being entirely an "accidental 
 grace" — while the whole verse breaks the unity of the 
 subject by its abrupt transition to a different period 
 and point of view ; whereas the latter, though also a 
 personal memory, paints to the very life that fresh 
 wonder which the excitement of a little physical dan- 
 
 10 Unless, indeed, this pedantic accuracy as to insignificant fact 
 (not unvTsual in Wordsworth) be an egotism. 
 
WORDSWORTH AND HIS GENIUS. 21/ 
 
 ger will spread for any watching eye over the whole 
 face of heaven and earth. There is no egotism or 
 caprice in delineating personal experience that helps 
 to widen or renew the whole experience of others.' 
 Wordsworth was much excited on one occasion, at 
 being told he 'had written a poem on "a daisy." 
 " No," he said, "it was on the daisy — -a very different 
 thing." There was a difference, and it was a differ- 
 ence characteristic of his best poetry. His finest 
 mood never descends to local or personal accidents 
 alien to the experience or imagination of his readers. 
 Coleridge truly says in one of his lectures, that Shake- 
 speare never copied a character from a mere individual 
 — never painted a unique character at all ; each of his 
 characters might represent a whole class ; and so too, 
 in his very different world, all Wordsworth's higher 
 poems have a certain breadth of life and influence, 
 without any of the abstractness which, in inferior 
 poets, accompanies breadth. 
 
 In what then, may one say, in answer to Hazlitt's 
 criticism, that Wordsworth's universality consists, if 
 high universal intelligence is to be found in his poems? 
 Not in any power of elaborating what is usually un- 
 derstood by universal truth : indeed, for so contem- 
 plative a poet, there is singularly little of the compre- 
 hensive grasp of Reason in his mind. Still less in 
 any remarkable power of expressing universal emo- 
 tions, though Hazlitt does regard him as essentially 
 lyrical. His especial poetic faculty lies, I think, in 
 contemplatively seizing the characteristic individual 
 influences which all living things, from the very 
 
■ 
 
 2l8 WORDSWORTH AND HIS GENIUS. 
 
 smallest of earth or air up to man and the Spirit of 
 God, radiate around them to every mind that wih 
 surrender itself to their expressive power. It is not 
 "true that Wordsworth's genius lay mainly in the region 
 
 r\ oimere Nature ; — rather say it lay in detecting Nature's 
 \ influences just at the point where they were stealing 
 unobserved into the very essence of the human soul. 
 Nor is this all. His characteristic power lay no less in 
 discovering divine influences, as they fall like dew 
 upon the spirit. One may say that Wordsworth's 
 poetry is fed on sympathy less, and on influences from 
 natures differing in kind from his own more, than any 
 other poetry in the world ; and that he delineates 
 these influences just as they are entering into the very 
 substance of humanity. Strike out the human element- 
 from his Nature poems, and they lose all their rnean- 
 ing : he did not paint Nature, like Tennyson ; he 
 arrested and interpreted its spiritual expressions. He 
 ' regarded other men chiefly as natural influences act- 
 ^ ing on himself; but he never was inclined to identify 
 "y Nature with either Man or God ; for freedom, immor- 
 "7tality, and a spiritual God were of the very essence of 
 / his own meditative world. He is not specifically the 
 / poet of Nature, nor the poet of Man, nor the poet of 
 Truth, nor the poet of Religion ; he is the poet of all 
 separate living emanations from Nature, or from man 
 or God. Contemplative as he is, his mind was too 
 concentrated and intense for general Truth. He fixed 
 his imagination and his life too entirely and intensely 
 on single centres of influence. He could not pass 
 from the one to the other, and grasp many at once, so 
 
WORDSWORTH AND HIS GENIUS. 219 
 
 as to discern their mutual relations, in the discrimina- 
 tion of which Truth consists. He kept to single influ- 
 ences : solitary contemplative communion with all 
 forms of life which did not disturb the contemplative 
 freedom of his spirit, was his strength. His genius 
 was universal, but was not comprehensive ; it did not 
 Jiold_jTiany things, but it held much. You see this 
 especially in his larger poems : he is like one of his 
 own ''bees that murmur by the hour in foxglove- 
 bells." He cannot move gradually through a train 
 of thought or a consecutive narrative. He flies from 
 bell to bell, and sucks all the honey deliberately out 
 of each. Hence he was so fond of the sonnet, because 
 it was just suited to embody one thought ; yet it seldom 
 exhausted for him one subject, and there is often an 
 injury to his genius in the transition from sonnet to 
 sonnet when he wrote a series on one theme. His 
 ''plain imagination and severe," as he himself called 
 it, isolated whatever it dealt with, brought it into im- 
 mediate contact with his own spirit, and so drew from 
 it slowly and patiently every drop of sweet or sad or 
 stern influence that it had the power to give off. But 
 it is with him consciously injiuence, and influence only. 
 He never humanises the spirits of natural objects, as 
 Shelley did. He puts no fairy into the flower, — no 
 dryad into the tree, — no nymph into the river ; — he is 
 too much of a realist for that, and he has far too intense 
 a consciousness of the simple magnificence of moral 
 freedom. Indeed he has too strict a huma?i centre 
 of contemplation for that to be possible. He regards 
 Nature as a tributary to Man, sending him influences 
 
X 
 
 220 WORDSWORTH AND HIS GENIUS. 
 
 and emanations which pass into the very essence_ofL 
 his life, but never constitute that life. These influ- 
 ences are not like in kind to humanity. To liken 
 them to higher beings is but to find "loose types of 
 things through all degrees;" and when he addresses 
 the river thus — 
 
 " O glide, fair stream, for ever glide, 
 Thy quiet soul on all bestowing, 
 Till all our minds for ever flow 
 
 As thy deep waters now are flowing," 
 
 there is not even a momentary attempt to abstract 
 from the visible water, and bestow a human "soul" 
 upon the river \ he only gathers up the spiritual influ- 
 ences which emanate from it into a living centre, just 
 as he elsewhere spreads abroad the "soul of happy 
 sound" through earth and air. He has the deepest 
 conviction that different objects and scenes do radiate 
 specific influences of their own, not dependent merely 
 on the mood of the contemplative observer : — 
 
 Love had he found in huts where poor men lie, 
 His daily teachers had been woods and rills, 
 
 The silence that is in the starry sky, 
 
 The sleep that is among the lonely hills." 
 
 But these radiated influences are never human till they 
 touch the human soul, and are transmuted by that touch. 
 Rich and almost infinite streams of power and beauty 
 Nature does pour into Man ; but first when they reach 
 that free and solitary spirit which draws down other 
 and higher influences to meet them from God, do they 
 fulfil their simple destiny. If any one chooses to deny 
 
WORDSWORTH AND HIS GENIUS. 221 
 
 1/ 
 
 ( that there is an absolute reality in the expressions of 
 \ Nature to human minds, — that they are something as 
 ( unalterable as the meaning of a smile or a frown, — he 
 ; may and must say with Hazlitt that Wordsworth "never 
 j looks abroad into universality," but overwhelms natural 
 ; objects with the weight of his own arbitrary associa- 
 tions. If the dancing daffodils are no real image of 
 simple joy, — if the "power of hills " be a vague and 
 misleading metaphor, — if the "welcome snow-drop ' ' — 
 
 " That child of winter, prompting thoughts that climb 
 From desolation towards the genial prime" — 
 
 can tell no true tale of immortality to the simple-hearted 
 when sinking beneath the snows of age ; if it be a 
 mere confusion of ideas for a poet to believe 
 
 " That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved 
 To blend his murmurs with my nurse's song; 
 And from his alder shades and rocky falls, 
 And from his fords and shallows, sent a voice 
 That flowed along my dreams y-" 
 
 if there be nothing ghostly in the yew-tree, no " witch- 
 ery " in the sky, and no eternal voices in the sea; if, ' 
 in a word, "the invisible things of Him from the \- 
 creation " are not " clearly seen, being understood by / 
 the things. that are made," — then indeed was Words- /- 
 worth "vain in his imagination," and "his foolish -'- 
 heart was darkened." 
 
 But Wordsworth did not doubt aboutjhese things j he 
 knew them ; and he knew too well the kitid of human 
 '"Character they served to make or mar. His own nature 
 was of this primitive humanity : — 
 
1 
 
 222 WORDSWORTH AND HIS GENIUS. 
 
 " Long have I loved what I behold — 
 
 The night that calms, the day that cheers; 
 
 The common growth of mother earth 
 
 Suffices me — her tears her mirth, 
 Her humblest mirth and tears." 
 
 He knew how these simple influences could not be re- 
 ceived into the heart without receiving also 
 
 " a spirit strong, 
 That gives to all the selfsame bent 
 Where life is wise and innocent ;" 
 
 he knew that no heart which " watches and receives " 
 what quiet Nature gives, can have any of the preoc- 
 cupying restlessness which evil brings ; he knew that he 
 
 " Who affronts the eye of solitude, shall learn 
 That her mild nature can be terrible." 
 
 And thus we have a set of characters of simple grain, 
 all of them fed by the life of Nature, but all religious, 
 spiritual and free, — in Michael, the Leech-gatherer, 
 and the Wanderer in "The Excursion;" while we 
 have Peter Bell, and, in part, the Solitary, on the 
 other hand, whose personal strength had been spent 
 in "affronting the eye of solitude." 
 
 The result of almost all Wordsworth's universal ex- 
 perience of the influences of Nature acting aIo?te on 
 man is gathered up into his three poems, "Lucy," 
 "Ruth," and "The Song at the Feast of Brougham 
 Casde " (the last, perhaps, the most perfect effort of 
 his genius) : the first containing his conception of 
 the plastic influences of Nature in moulding us into 
 
WORDSWORTH AND HIS GENIUS. 223 
 
 beauty ; the second, of her exciting spells for awak- 
 ening the passions; the last, of her tranquilising influ- 
 ences on thought. If we take with these the poem on 
 the lonely Leech-gatherer, in which he contrasts the 
 instinctive joy and life of Nature with the burden of 
 human free-will; the great "Ode on Immortality," in 
 which he brings natural life into contrast with the 
 supernatural, speaking of "those high instincts before 
 which our mortil nature doth tremble like a guilty 
 thing surprised ," and finally, the lines in which he 
 draws together Nature, free -will_, and God into one 
 jjf_theTubli m est poems of our langjiage, the ".Ode to. 
 Duty," — we have in essence nearly all the truth that 
 Wordsworth anxiously gleaned from a life of severe 
 meditation, though a very slight epitome indeed of 
 the innumerable living influences from which that 
 truth was learned. If any one doubts the real affinity 
 between the expressions written on the face of Nature 
 and those human expressions which so early interpret 
 themselves to even infants that to account for them 
 except as a natural language seems impossible, the 
 exquisite poem on "Lucy" ought to convert him. 
 The contrast it illustrates between Wordsworth's faith 
 in real emanations from all living or unliving " mute 
 insensate" things, and the humanised "spirits" of 
 life in the Greek mythological poetry, is very striking. 
 Influences come from all these living objects, but per- 
 sonified influences never. 
 
 " Three years she grew in sun and shower; 
 Then Nature said, 'A lovelier flower 
 On earth was never sown. 
 
 -< 
 
224 WORDSWORTH AND HIS GENIUS. 
 
 This child I to myself will take, 
 She shall be mine, and I will make 
 A lady of my own. 
 
 Myself will to my darling be 
 
 Both law and impulse ; and with me 
 
 The girl, in rock and plain, 
 In earth and heaven, in glade and bower, 
 Shall feel an overseeing power 
 
 To kindle or restrain. 
 
 She shall be sportive as the fawn 
 That wild with glee across the lawn 
 
 Or up the mountain springs ; 
 And hers shall be the breathing balm, 
 And hers the silence and the calm 
 
 Of mute insensate things. 
 
 The floating clouds their state shall lend 
 To her; .for her the willows bend : 
 
 Nor shall she fail to see 
 Even in the motion of the storm 
 Grace that shall mould the maiden's form 
 
 By silent sympathy. 
 
 The stars of midnight shall be dear 
 i To her; and she shall lean her ear 
 In many a secret place 
 Where rivulets dance their wayward round; 
 And beauty born of murmuring sound 
 Shall pass into her face. 
 
 And vital feelings of delight 
 
 Shall rear her form to stately height — 
 
 Her virgin bosom swell : 
 These thoughts to Lucy I will give. 
 When she and I together live 
 
 Here in this happy dell,' 
 
WORDSWORTH AND HIS GENIUS. 225 
 
 Thus Nature spake— the work was done. 
 How soon my Lucy's race was run ! 
 
 She died ; and left to me 
 This heath, this cahn and quiet scene, 
 This memory of what hath been 
 
 And never more will be." 
 
 Of the poetry of Wordsworth, that cannot, perhaps 
 ever be said which Wordsworth truly said of Burns, 
 that " deep in the general heart of man his power sur- 
 vives;" for his is the poetry of solitude, and the 
 "general heart of man" cannot bear to be alone. 
 But there are some solitudes that cannot be evaded. 
 
 " Amid the groves, under the shadowy hills 
 The generations are prepared ; the pangs, 
 The internal pangs, are ready— the dread strife 
 Of poor humanity's afflicted will," — 
 
 — and then we leave the greatest poets of the great 
 w^orld, and look to one who was ever glad to gaze 
 into the deepest depths of his own heart, of Nature, 
 ancLof God. "The pangs, the internal pangs," were 
 not ready for him. " Briglit, solemn, and serene," 
 perhaps he alone, of all the great men of that day, 
 had seen the light of the countenance of God shining 
 clear into the face of duty : — 
 
 " Stern Lawgiver ! Yet thou dost wear 
 The Godhead's most benignant grace; 
 Nor know we anything so fair 
 
 As is the smile upon thy face. 
 Flowers laugh before thee in their beds : 
 And fragrance in thy footing treads, 
 15 
 
226 
 
 WORDSWORTH AND HIS GENIUS. 
 
 Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong ; 
 
 And the most ancient Heavens through thee are fresh and 
 strong." 
 
 And therefore in his poems there will ever be a spring 
 of something even fresher than poetic life — a pure, 
 deep well of solitary joy. 
 
GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 THE great authoress who calls herself George 
 Eliot is chiefly known, and no doubt deserves 
 to be chiefly known, in England, as a novelist, but 
 she is certainly much more than a novelist in the sense 
 in which that word applies even to writers of great 
 genius, to Miss Austen, or Mr. Trollope, — nay, much 
 more than a novelist in the sense in which that word 
 applies to Miss Bronte, or even to Thackeray, though 
 it is of course true in relation to all these writers, that 
 besides being much more, she is also, and necessarily, 
 not so much. What is remarkable in George Eliot is 
 the striking combination in her of very deep speculative 
 power with a very great and realistic imagination. It 
 is rare to find an intellect so skilled in the analysis of 
 the deepest psychological problems, so completely at 
 home in the conception and delineation of real cha- 
 racters. George Eliot discusses the practical influences 
 acting on men and women, I do not say with the ease 
 
 227 
 
228 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 of Fielding, — for there is a touch of carefulness, often 
 of over-carefulness in all she does, — but with much of 
 his breadth and spaciousness, — the breadth and spa- 
 ciousness, one must remember, of a man who had seen 
 London life in the capacity of a London police mag- 
 istrate. Nay, her imagination has, I do not say of 
 course the fertility, but something of the range and 
 the delight in rich historic colouring, of Sir Walter 
 Scott's, while it combines with it something too of 
 the pleasure in ordered learning, and the laborious 
 marshalling of the picturesque results of learning, — 
 though her learning is usually in a very different field, 
 — which gives the flavour of scholastic pride to the 
 great genius of Milton. Not that I think George 
 Eliot's fine verse entitles her to be described as a 
 poet, though the poetic side of her mind has been 
 deep enough and true enough to lend richness, depth, 
 and harmony to her romances. I am only pointing 
 out now how much she is besides a novelist, — how 
 inevitable it was that in her novels she should range 
 far beyond the region of the most successful novelists 
 of recent times, — far beyond that little world of 
 English society which has determined for novelists of 
 the most different type of genius, — for Miss Austen, 
 for Mrs. Gaskell, for Mr. Trollope, for Thackeray, 
 and for many less successful, but still very successful 
 contemporaries,— their peculiar field of work. 
 
 It is, indeed, a great help towards understanding 
 her true genius to compare George Eliot with the 
 school of society-novelists of whom I have spoken. 
 What one remarks about the works of those who have 
 
GEORGE ELIOT. 229 
 
 Studied any particular society as a whole far more 
 deeply than they have studied the individual charac- 
 ters in it, is that their creations all stand on one level, 
 are delineated, with great accuracy, down to the same 
 not very considerable depth, and no further; that all, 
 in short, are bas-reliefs cut out on the same surface. 
 The novelists of this school are perfectly inexhaustible 
 in resource on the special social ground they choose, 
 and quite incapable of varying it. And all of them 
 disappoint us in not giving more insight into those 
 deeper roots of character which lie beneath the social 
 surface. Probably the mobile sympathies which are 
 so essential to artists of this class, and the faculty of 
 readily realising, and of being easily satisfied with real- 
 ising, the workings of other minds, are to some extent 
 inconsistent with that imaginative intensity and te- 
 nacity which is needful for the deeper insight into 
 human character. Certainly the accomplished artists 
 I have named carve out their marvellously life-like 
 groups in a very shallow though sufficiently plastic 
 material. How perfect and how infinitely various are 
 the images left on the mind by the characters in Miss 
 Austen's novels! Lord Macaulay has expressed just 
 admiration of the skill which could paint four young 
 clergymen, "all belonging to the upper part of the 
 middle class, all liberally educated, all under the re- 
 straints of the same sacred profession, all young, all 
 in love, all free from any disposition to ride a special 
 hobby, and all without a ruling passion," without 
 making them insipid likenesses of each other. And 
 no doubt this does show great power; but it is equally 
 
230 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 remarkable that all of them are drawn just to the same 
 depth, all delineated out of the same social elements. 
 None of their minds are exhibited in any direct con- 
 tact with the ultimate realities of life ; none of them 
 are seen grasping at the truth by which they seek to 
 live, struggling with a single deadly temptation, — or, 
 in short, with any of the deeper elements of human 
 life. The same may almost be said of Thackeray's, 
 Mr. Trollope's, and Mrs. Gaskell's sketches. These 
 authors, indeed, sometimes probe the motives of their 
 leading characters, but they generally report that at a 
 very small depth below the surface the analysis fails to 
 detect any certain result. The whole graphic effect 
 of their art is produced with scarcely any disturbance 
 of the smooth surface of social usage. The artist's 
 graver just scratches off the wax in a few given direc- 
 tions till the personal bias of taste and bearing is suffi- 
 ciently revealed, while the pervading principle of the 
 society in which the artist lives is strictly preserved. 
 
 It was very different with Miss Bronte. Her imag- 
 ination was not, and under the circumstances of her 
 life could not have been, at home with the light play 
 of social influences. There is even an abruptness of 
 outline, a total want of social cohesion among her 
 characters. They are sternly drawn, with much strong 
 shading, and kept in isolated spheres. They break, 
 or rather burst, in upon each other, when they exert 
 mutual influences at all, with a rude effort, that is sig- 
 nificant enough of the shyness of a solitary creative 
 imagination. Still, for this very reason, what charac- 
 ters Miss Bronte does conceive truly, she reveals much 
 
GEORGE ELIOT. 23 1 
 
 more deeply than the society-novelists of whom I have 
 been speaking. She has no familiarity with the deli- 
 cate touches and shades by which they succeed in con- 
 veying a distinct impression without laying bare the 
 deeper secrets of character. She has not, like them, 
 any power of giving in her delineations traces of 
 thought and feeling which lie beyond her actual 
 grasp. She has a full and conscious hold of all the 
 moods she paints; and though her paintings are in 
 nine cases out of ten far less lifelike, yet when lifelike 
 they are far more profoundly imagined than those of 
 Mr. Trollope, Miss Austen, Mrs. Gaskell or even 
 Thackeray himself. There is as little common life, 
 diffused atmosphere of thought, and there are as few 
 connecting social ideas, amongst the various figures in 
 Miss Bronte's tales as is possible to conceive among 
 fellow-men and fellow-countrymen. But what per- 
 sonal life there is, is of the deepest sort, though it is 
 apt to be too exceptional and individual, and too little 
 composed out of elements of universal experience. 
 
 The novelists of the society-school, who delineate 
 not so much individual figures as a complete phase of 
 society, have what one may call a medkmi ready to 
 their hand in which to trace the characteristic features 
 of the natures they delineate. They have a familiar 
 world of manners to paint, in which a modulation, an 
 omission, or an emphasis here and there, are quite 
 sufficient to mark a character, or indicate a latent 
 emotion. Not so an author who, like Miss Bronte, 
 endeavoured to fit all her characters with a new and 
 appropriate outward manner of their own as distinct 
 
232 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 and special as the inward nature it expressed. With 
 her there was necessarily a directness of delineation, a 
 strong downrightness in the drawing which is in very 
 marked contrast with the method that charms us so 
 much in the pictures of Miss Austen and her modern 
 successors. Much of the art of the drawing-room 
 novelists consists in the indirectness, the allusiveness, 
 the educated reticence of the artists. They portray a 
 society; they zV^^/iTf^^',? an individuality. They delight 
 in fine strokes ; they will give a long conversation 
 which scarcely advances the narrative at all, for the 
 sake of a few delicate touches of shade or colour on 
 an individual character. In the power to paint this 
 play of common social life, in which there are com- 
 paratively but few key-notes of distinct personality, 
 the charm of this school of art consists ; while Miss 
 Bronte's lay in the Rembrandt-like distinctness with 
 which all that the mind conceived was brought into 
 the full blaze of light, and the direct vigor with which 
 all the prominent features were marked out. 
 
 George Eliot as a novelist has points of connection 
 with both of these schools of art, beside some charac- 
 teristics peculiarly her own. There is the same flow- 
 ing ease of manner, clearness of drawing, delicacy of 
 finish, and absence of excitement, which characterise 
 the modern semi-satirical school. But there is less of 
 play in the surface-painting, — more of depth in the 
 deeper characters imagined, — a broader touch, a 
 stronger, directer fashion of delineation, — less of 
 manner-paintings, and more of the bare naturalism 
 of human life. On the other hand, there is nothing 
 
GEORGE ELIOT. 233 
 
 of the Rembrandt-like style of Miss Bronte : the light 
 flows more equally over George Eliot's pictures ; one 
 finds nothing of the irregular emphasis with which 
 Currer Bell's characters are drawn, or of the strong 
 subjective colouring which tinges all her scenes. 
 George Eliot's imagination, like Miss Bronte's, loves 
 to go to the roots of character, and portrays best by 
 broad direct strokes; but there the likeness between 
 them, so far as there is any, ends. The reasons for 
 the deeper method and for the directer style are hardly 
 likely to have been similar in the two cases. Miss 
 Bronte can scarcely be said to have had any large 
 instinctive knowledge of human nature : — her own 
 life and thoughts were exceptional, cast in a strongly- 
 marked but not very wide mould ; her imagination 
 was solitary; her experience was very limited; and 
 her own personality tinged all she wrote. She "made 
 out" the outward life and manner of her dramatis 
 personce by the sheer force of her own imagination ; 
 and as she always imagined the will and the affections 
 as the substance and centre of her characters, those of 
 her delineations which are successful at all are deep, 
 and their manner broad. 
 
 George Eliot's genius is exceedingly different. Her 
 genial, broad delineations of human life have, as I 
 said just now, more perhaps of the breadth of Fielding 
 than of any of the manners-painters of the present day. 
 For these imagine life only as it appears in a certain 
 dress and sphere, which are a kind of artificial me- 
 dium for their art, — life as affected by drawin'g-rooms. 
 George Eliot has litde, if any, of their capacity for 
 
234 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 catching the under-tones and allusive complexity of 
 this sort of society. She has, however, observed the 
 phases of a more natural and straightforward class of 
 life, and she draws her external world as much as pos- 
 sible from observation — though some of her Florentine 
 pictures must have been suggested more by literary 
 study than by personal experience — instead of imagin- 
 ing it, like Miss Bronte, out of the heart of the charac- 
 ters she wishes to paint. The English manners she 
 delights in are chiefly of the simplest and most homely 
 kind, — of the rural farmers and labourers, — of the 
 half-educated portion of the country middle-class, 
 who have learnt no educated reticence, — and of the 
 resident country gentry and clergy in their relations 
 with these rough-mannered neighbours. This is a 
 world in which she could not but learn a direct style 
 of treatment. The habit of concealing, or at most of 
 suggesting rather than downright expressing, what is 
 closest to our hearts, is, as we know, a result of educa- 
 tion. It is quite foreign to the class of people whom 
 George Eliot knows most thoroughly, and has drawn 
 with the fullest power. All her deepest knowledge 
 of human nature has probably been acquired among 
 people who speak their thoughts with the directness, 
 though not with the sharp metallic ring, of Miss 
 Bronte's Yorkshire heroes. But instead of almost 
 luxuriating, as Miss Bronte appears to do, in the 
 startling emphasis of this mannerism, and making all 
 her characters precipitate themselves in speech in the 
 way best calculated to give a strongly-marked picture 
 of the conception in her own brain, — George Eliot has 
 
GEORGE ELIOT. 235 
 
 evidently delighted to note all the varieties of form 
 which varying circumstances give to these direct and 
 simple manners, and takes as much pleasure in paint- 
 ing their different shades as Miss Austen does in 
 guiding her more elaborate conversations to and fro 
 so as to elicit traits of personal character. Directness 
 of delineation is, indeed, evidently natural to the 
 author of "Adam Bede," but it has no tendency 
 whatever to take, with her, that form of concentrated 
 intensity which it assumed in Miss Bronte : her style 
 has all the general composure and range of tone of the 
 life she paints, and shows her as much in sympathy 
 with the dumb and stolid phases of rural society as 
 with its more active forms. There was something of 
 the poet in both. But George Eliot's poetry is rooted 
 in the more intellectual emotions, Miss Bronte's was 
 in the most personal. George Eliot's poetic tenden- 
 cies are rather of the kind to soften outlines and har- 
 monize the effects of her pictures. Miss Bronte's, on 
 the other hand, were adapted to express the passion of 
 her own imagination; and while the effect was graphic 
 and unique, it was monotonous, and not unfrequently 
 unreal. 
 
 George Eliot's pictures are not only directer and 
 simpler than those of the drawing-room novelists, but 
 her deeper and frequently poetic imagination discrim- 
 inates finely betwixt the various degrees of depth 
 which she gives to her characters, and throws more 
 of universality and breadth into them. The manners 
 of "good society" are a kind of social costume or 
 disguise, which is, in fact, much more effective in 
 
236 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 concealing how much of depth ordinary characters 
 have, and in restraining the expression of universal 
 human instincts and feelings, than in hiding the in- 
 dividualities, the distinguishing inclinations, talents, 
 bias, and tastes of those vi^ho assume them. The 
 slight restraints which are imposed by society upon 
 the expression of individual bias are, in fact, only a 
 new excitement to its more subtle and various, though 
 less straightforward, development. Instead of speak- 
 ing itself simply out, it gleams out in a hundred ways 
 by the side-paths of a more elaborate medium. To 
 avail yourself skilfully of all the opportunities which 
 these social manners admit of being yourself, adds a 
 fresh, though very egotistic, interest to life, and gives 
 much of the zest to the sort of study in which Thack- 
 eray and Mr. Trollope are the acknowledged masters. 
 But this applies only to the lighter and more super- 
 ficial part of human personality. Those stronger pas- 
 sions and emotions in which all men share more or 
 less deeply ; which are in the strictest sense personal, 
 and yet in the strictest sense universal ; which are 
 private, because either the objects or the occasions 
 which excite them most deeply are different for every 
 different person, and universal, because towards some 
 objects, or on some occasions, they are felt alike by 
 all ; — these most personal and most widely diffused of 
 all the elements of human nature are sedulously sup- 
 pressed in cultivated society ; and even the most skil- 
 ful of the drawing-room novelists find little room for 
 delineating the comparative depth of their roots in 
 different minds. 
 
GEORGE ELIOT. 237 
 
 And yet these deepest portions of human character, 
 which the simpler and less educated grades of society, 
 in their comparative indifference to the sympathy they 
 receive, do not care to hide, and which educated soci- 
 ety half suppresses, or expresses only by received for- 
 mulas quite vi^ithout personal significance, are far truer 
 measures of force and mass in human character than 
 any other elements. They are, in fact, the only com- 
 mon measures vi^hich are applicable to all in nearly 
 equal degree. After all, what we care chiefly to know 
 of men and women, is not so much their special 
 tastes, bias, gifts, humours, or even the exact propor- 
 tions in which these characteristics are combined, — 
 as the general depth and mass of the human nature 
 that is in them, — the breadth and the power of their 
 life, — its comprehensiveness of grasp, its tenacity of 
 instinct, its capacity for love, its need of trust. A 
 thousand skilful outlines of character based on mere 
 individualities of taste and talent and temper, are not 
 near as moving to us as one vivid picture of a massive 
 nature stirred to the very depths of its commonplace 
 instinct and commonplace faith. And the means of 
 studying these broader aspects of human life are much 
 fewer in the educated society which Miss Austen and 
 Thackeray draw, than in the country-towns, mills, and 
 farm-houses, which are dotted about George Eliot's 
 "Scenes from Clerical Life," "Silas Marner," and 
 her more elaborate English tales. 
 
 In the depth, force, and thorough naturalness of 
 the human characteristics in the delineation of which 
 she delights, George Eliot is not superior to Miss 
 
1 
 
 238 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 Bronte, who never fails to give us a distinct measure 
 of the instinctive tenderness, depth of affection, and 
 energy of will, of her creations. But in breadth of 
 range George Eliot is far beyond Currer Bell. In- 
 tensity is the main characteristic of the authoress 
 of "Jane Eyre." She cannot paint quiet massive 
 strength, still less, easy, composed, and inert natures. 
 George Eliot enters into these with even more insight 
 than into the more concentrated. Eager prejudice, 
 dumb pain, the passive famine of inarticulate desires, 
 are painted by both authors with marvellous and al- 
 most equal power ; but George Eliot has the wider 
 and more tranquil sympathies ; and sometimes almost 
 seems to rival Sir Walter Scott in the art of delineat- 
 ing the repose of strong natures and the effortless 
 strength they put forth. 
 
 Again, in one field — the field of religious faith — the 
 author of "Adam Bede " and "Romola" shows much 
 broader insight than any of the writers I have named. 
 The drawing-room school of novelists do not and 
 cannot often go down to a stratum of life deep enough 
 to come upon the springs of faith. Miss Austen never 
 touches them. Thackeray turns dizzy with the very 
 mobility of his own sympathies, and finding a dis- 
 tinct type of faith in every different man's mind, not 
 only proclaims the inscrutability of all divine topics, 
 but refuses to assign any strong motive powers to re- 
 ligious emotions at all in his delineations of human 
 life. Miss Bronte, too, finds it needful to eliminate 
 the supernatural, though she once or twice admits the 
 preternatural, in her pictures. As an artist she is 
 
GEORGE ELIOT. 239 
 
 Strictly a secularist, delineating religious enthusiasm 
 only once, and then exhibiting it as the stimulus of a 
 cold nature and as putting forth unlawful claims to 
 overrule legitimate human affections. Even Sir Wal- 
 ter Scott, powerfully as he could paint fanaticism, and 
 keen as was his pleasure in the marvellous, never at- 
 tempted to paint the quieter and deeper forms of re- 
 ligious faith. He evidently did not admit any super- 
 natural element into his conception of sensible men 
 and women, and never paints its influence over a 
 sober and tranquil will. 
 
 Apparently, George Eliot, also, — if I may judge 
 by hints she drops here and there in her various asides 
 to the reader, from the relative place she gives to the 
 supernatural element in her different characters, and 
 from her poems, — agrees with Thackeray that divine 
 things are inscrutable, and that the stronger class of 
 intellects meddle least with the subject, at all events 
 intellectually. But she sees far more clearly than any 
 of them the actual space occupied by spiritual motives 
 in human life, — the depth, beauty, and significance 
 v/hich they, and they alone, give to human action. 
 And, accordingly, in almost all her tales she intro- 
 duces some character with conscious cravings for 
 something beyond human happiness ; while in the 
 most perfect and popular of her works she delineates 
 the most delicately beautiful and spiritual nature with 
 which I have ever met in the whole range of fiction. 
 Goethe's picture of the Fair Saint in "Wilhelm Meis- 
 ter" cannot properly be said to belong to fiction at 
 all. Not only is it, in fact, a minute copy from real 
 
1 
 
 240 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 life, but it is not even woven by his imagination into 
 tiie texture of his story. It is an episode of mere 
 description, and the character is not delineated in 
 action. Nay, in itself, the " Schone Seek" which 
 Goethe has so delicately mirrored for us cannot com- 
 pare in simplicity and beauty with Dinah in "Adam 
 Bede." 
 
 Another element in which George Eliot show's the 
 masculine breadth and strength of her genius adds less 
 to the charm of her tales, — I mean the shrewdness 
 and miscellaneous range of her observations on life. 
 Nothing is rarer than to see in women's writings that 
 kind of strong acute generalisation which Fielding in- 
 troduced so freely. Yet the miscellaneous observations 
 in which George Eliot so often indulges us, after the 
 fashion of the day, are not always well suited to the 
 particular bent of her genius ; indeed, they often break 
 the spell which that genius has laid upon her readers. 
 She is not a satirist, and she half adopts the style of 
 a satirist in these elements of her books. The influ- 
 ence of Thackeray had at first a distinctly bad effect 
 on her genius, but in "Silas Marner " that influence 
 began to wane, and quite disappeared in "Romola," 
 though I think it reappeared a little in "Felix Holt." 
 A powerful and direct style of portraiture is in ill- 
 keeping with that flavour of sarcastic innuendo in which 
 Thackeray delighted. It jars upon the ear in the midst 
 of the simple and faithful delineations of human nature 
 as it really is, with which George Eliot fills her books. 
 It was all very well for Thackeray who made it his 
 main aim and business to expose the hollowness and 
 
GEORGE ELIOT. 24 1 
 
 insincerities of human society, to add his own keen 
 comment to his own one-sided picture. But tlien it 
 was of tlie essence of his genius to lay bare unrealities, 
 and leave the sound life almost untouched. It was 
 rather a relief than otherwise to see him playing with 
 his dissecting-knife after one of his keenest probing 
 feats ; you understand better how limited his purpose 
 is, — 'that he has been in search of organic disease,— 
 and you are not surprised, therefore, to find that he 
 has found little that was healthy. 
 
 But George Eliot has a different power. She can 
 delineate what is sound even more powerfully than 
 what is unsound. She does not expose but paints 
 human nature, its weakness and its strength ; and the 
 satirical tone in which Thackeray justified to his 
 readers the severity of his criticisms, by trying to 
 show that they were all of them open to criticisms at 
 least as severe, is a setting not at all in harmony with 
 George Eliot's style of art. This is, indeed, usually 
 so deep, direct, and real, that the interruption needed 
 to listen to the author's aside is a painful break. It 
 would suit her books far better if in this respect she 
 followed Miss Bronte's eager and undeviating style of 
 narration, and never indulged in the pleasure of being 
 her own critic. But if she must intersperse her narra- 
 tives with comments and thoughts of her own, she 
 could not have found a less suitable tone for them than 
 that satirical contempt for his readers' unreal state of 
 mind to which the author of "Vanity Fair" accus- 
 tomed us. When in the midst of an admirable sketch 
 of the farm-labourers on Mr. Poyser's farm, by no 
 16 
 
242 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 means ill-natured in itself, we come upon such a sen- 
 tence as this, for instance: — "When Tityrus and 
 Meliboeus happen to be on the same farm, they are 
 not sentimentally polite to each other," — we feel sud- 
 denly transported to the latitude of " Vanity Fair." 
 Often it is only that observations themselves not un- 
 genial are clothed in the half-scornful language which 
 Thackeray's success induced so many light writers to 
 adopt. For example, there is in the chapter which 
 opens as follows nothing that is not genial and wise ; 
 but throughout the whole there runs a tone of banter- 
 ing depreciation, — a " what a vulgar world it is we 
 live in" sort of air, which has no justification either 
 in the tenor of what is said, or the particular incident 
 on which it is a comment : — 
 
 " ' This Rector of Broxton is little better than a pagan ! ' I 
 hear one of my lady readers exclaim. ' How much more edify- 
 ing it would have been if you had made him give Arthur some 
 truly spiritual advice ! You might have put into his mouth the 
 most beautiful things — quite as good as reading a sermon.' Cer- 
 tainly I could, my fair critic, if I were a clever novelist, not 
 obliged to creep servilely after nature and fact, but able to repre- 
 sent things as they never have been and never will be. Then, 
 of course, my characters would be entirely of my own choosing, 
 and I could select the most unexceptionable type of clergyman, 
 and put my own admirable opinions into his mouth on all oc- 
 casions." 
 
 This is, when read in its context, sarcasm quite out 
 of its natural element, floundering like a fish out of 
 water. Indeed, this foreign mannerism gives a cer- 
 tain air of laborious smartness to the chapters of com- 
 ment in "Adam Bede," which seems to me the only 
 
GEORGE ELIOT. 243 
 
 defect in that wonderful book. That which was only 
 an external mannerism in the occasional commentary 
 of "Adam Bede," grew into a rankling foreign sub- 
 stance in the "Mill on the Floss," and it was a great 
 relief to her admirers to find that in her later works, 
 especially "Silas Marner " and "Romola," George 
 Eliot had in a great degree discontinued it. 
 
 For certainly she is no satirist. Even where her 
 banter is best, hers is not the bent to bring out with- 
 out effort, and yet in full relief, the weak points of 
 men, as the genius of satire requires; and one cannot 
 but feel painfully, that, like most able people who do 
 what it is not their bent to do, she overdoes it, and 
 breaks a butterfly on the wheel. How lightly and 
 tauntingly Thackeray would have given us the. follow- 
 ■ ing ! how broadly ludicrous Dickens might have made 
 it ! but in George Eliot's hands it is neither broad 
 fun nor indirect satire, but laborious intellectual power 
 commenting, with painfully painstaking analysis, on 
 human foibles : — 
 
 •' It is a pathetic sight and a striking example of the com- 
 plexity introduced into the emotions by a high state of civilisa- 
 tion — the sight of a fashionably-drest female in grief. From the 
 sorrow of a Hottentot to that of a woman in large buckram 
 sleeves, with several bracelets on each arm, an architectural 
 bonnet, and delicate ribbon-strings — what a long series of grada- 
 tions ! In the enlightened child of civilisation the abandonment 
 characteristic of grief is cliecked and varied in the subtlest man- 
 ner, so as to present an interesting problem to the analytic mind. 
 If, with a crushed heart and eyes half-blinded by the mist of tears, 
 she were to walk with a too devious step through a door-place, 
 she might crush her buckram sleeves too, and the deep conscious- 
 
244 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 ness of this possibility produces a composition of forces by which 
 she takes a line that just clears the doorpost. Perceiving that the 
 tears are hurrying fast, she unpins her strings and throws them 
 languidly backward — a touching gesture, indicative, even in the 
 deepest gloom, of the hope in future dry moments when cap- 
 strings will once more have a charm. As the tears subside a 
 little, and with her head leaning backward at the angle that will 
 not injure a bonnet, she endures that terrible moment when grief, 
 which has made all things else a weariness, has itself become 
 weary; she looks down pensively at her bracelets, and adjusts 
 their clasps with that pretty studied fortuity which would be 
 gratifying to her mind if it were once more in a calm and healthy 
 state." 
 
 George Eliot's humour, which is very great, is not 
 of the ironical or satirical kind. The covert meaning 
 which aims at one thing while it appears to say another 
 is not in her way. The humour in which she excels 
 most has nothing in it of the self-command and reti- 
 cence which give the edge to irony. The satirist just 
 moves away sufficiently from the station at which for 
 the moment his character is placed to show you how 
 one-sided and shallow that character is ; but he keeps 
 on the mask of sympathy, though he allows you to see 
 him smiling under it ; and half the sting of his irony 
 consists in his assuming that the weakness probed is 
 too deeply rooted in human nature to mock at openly, 
 though you need not shut your eyes to it. 
 
 There is nothing of this species of humour in George 
 Eliot. She has a large share of that dramatic humour 
 of which Shakespeare's is the model, which consists in 
 a rapid and complete change of moral and intellectual 
 latitude, in showing us the strangely different views of 
 
GEORGE ELIOT. 245 
 
 human things, — vulgar, contemplative, and practical, 
 — which differently situated beings take. Of this kind 
 of humour there is no more perfect and delightful 
 specimen than the scene in which she paints the un- 
 flinching (or as we might falsely say, indelicate) feeling 
 of the uneducated towards Death and the necessary 
 accompaniments of Death, as illustrated by Lisbeth 
 Bede's wishes about her husband's coffin and funeral. 
 
 " ' What art goin' to do?' asked Lisbeth. ' Set about thy fey- 
 ther's cof&n ?' 
 
 ' No, mother,' said Adam ; ' we're going to take the wood to 
 the village, and have it made there.' 
 
 ' Nay, my lad, nay,' Lisbeth burst out in an eager, wailing tone ; 
 ' thee wotna let nobody make thy feyther's coffin but thysen ? 
 Who'd make it so well? An' him as know'd what good work 
 war, an 's got a son as is th' head o' the village, an' all Tred- 
 dles'on too, for cleverness.' 
 
 ' Very well, mother, if that's thy wish, I'll make the coffin at 
 home; but I thought thee wouldstna like to hear the work 
 going on,' 
 
 'An' why shouldna I like 't? It's the right thing to be done. 
 An' what's likin got to do wi 't ? It's choice o' mislikins is all 
 I'n got i' this world. One mossel's as good as another when your 
 mouth's out o' taste. Thee mun set about it now this mornin' fust 
 thing. I wunna ha' nobody to touch the coffin but thee.' 
 
 Adam's eyes met Seth's, which looked from Dinah to him rather 
 wistfully. 
 
 'No, mother,' he said, 'I'll not consent; but Seth shall have 
 a hand in it too, if it's to be done at home. I'll go to the village 
 this forenoon, because Mr. Burge 'uU want to see me, and Seth 
 shall stay at home and begin the coffin. I can come back at 
 noon, and then he can go.' 
 
 ' Nay, nay,' persisted Lisbeth, beginning to cry, ' I 'n set my 
 heart on 't as thee shalt nia' thy feyther's coffin. Thee 't so stiff 
 
246 GEORGE ELI or. 
 
 an' masterful, tliee 't ne'er do as thy mother wants thee. Thee 
 wast often angered wi' thy feyther when he war alive; thee must 
 be the better to 'm now he's goen'. He'd hd' thought nothM on 
 ''t for Seth to nia '' s co_ffin.'' " 
 
 Some of George Eliot's most subtle and character- 
 istic humour consists in giving to the conversation of 
 her rural louts a distinct, though of course unconscious, 
 bearing on the intellectual questions contemporane- 
 ously discussed by the most highly cultivated, without 
 coming to any much more impressive results. Even 
 when this is not the case, there is a humour in the 
 mere sharpness of the contrast between the favourite 
 subjects of her boors and those of refined society. 
 Thus, in the inimitable conversation at the opening 
 -of '' Silas Marner," — the conversation in the Rainbow 
 Inn — the subject is simply and solely one to excite the 
 professional interest of butchers and of all connois- 
 seurs in grazing stock. But the pungency is given by 
 the grotesqueness of the contrast between the profes- 
 sional interests of the lower and middle classes, and by 
 that additional flavour of professionality which every 
 descent in the scale of education certainly insures. 
 
 The conversation, which was at a high pitch of animation when 
 Silas approached the door of the Rainbow, had, as usual, been 
 slow and intermittent when the company first assembled. The 
 pipes began to be puffed in a silence which had an air of sever- 
 ity; the more important customers, who drank spirits and sat 
 nearest the fire, staring at each other as if a bet were depending 
 on the first man who winked ; while the beer-drinkers, chiefly 
 men in fustian jackets and smock-frocks, kept their eyelids down 
 and rubbed their hands across their mouths, as if their draughts 
 of beer had been a funereal duty attended with embarrassing 
 
GEORGE ELIOT. 247 
 
 sadness. At last, Mr. Snell, the landlord, a man of neutral dis- 
 position, accustomed to stand aloof from human differences as 
 those of beings who were all alike in need of liquor, broke 
 silence, by saying in a doubtful tone to his cousin the butcher, — 
 
 " Some folks 'ud say that was a fine beast you druv in yester- 
 day. Bob?" 
 
 The butcher, a jolly, smiling, red-haired man, was not disposed 
 to answer rashly. He gave a few puffs before he spat and replied, 
 "And they wouldn't be fur wrong, John." 
 
 After this feeble delusive thaw, the silence set in as severely as 
 before. 
 
 " Was it a red Durham ?" said the farrier, taking up the thread 
 of discourse after the lapse of a few minutes. 
 
 The farrier looked at the landlord, and the landlord looked at 
 the butcher, as the person who must take the responsibility of 
 answering. 
 
 " Red it was," said the butcher, in his good-humoured husky 
 treble — " and a Durham it was." 
 
 " Then you needn't tell tne who you bought it of," said the 
 farrier, looking round with some triumph ; " I know who it is has 
 got the red Durhams o' this country-side. And she'd a white 
 star on her brow, I'll bet a penny ?" The farrier leaned forward 
 with his hands on his knees as he put this question, and his eyes 
 twinkled knowingly. 
 
 "Well, yes — she might," said the butcher, slowly, considering 
 that he was giving a decided affirmative. " I don't say contrary." 
 
 "I knew that very well," said the farrier, throwing himself 
 backward again and speaking defiantly ; " if / don't know Mr. 
 Lammeter's cows, I should like to know who does — that's all. 
 And as for the cow you've bought, bargain or no bargain, I've 
 been at the drenching of her — contradick me who will." 
 
 The farrier looked fierce, and the mild butcher's conversational 
 spirit was roused a little. 
 
 " I'm not for contradicking no man," he said ; " I'm for peace 
 and quietness. Some are for cutting long ribs — I'm for cutting 
 'em short, myself; but / don't quarrel with 'em. All I say is, 
 
1 
 
 248 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 it's a lovely carkiss — and anybody as was reasonable, it 'ud bring 
 tears into their eyes to look at it." 
 
 " Well, it's the cow as I drenched, whatever it is," pursued the 
 farrier, angrily; " and it was Mr. Lammeter's cow, else you told 
 a lie when you said it was a red Durham." 
 
 " I tell no lies," said the butcher, with the same mild huskiness 
 as before; "and I contradick none — not if a man was to swear 
 himself black : he's no meat o' mine, nor none of my bargains. 
 All I say is, it's a lovely carkiss. And what I say I'll stick to; 
 but I'll quarrel wi' no man." 
 
 " No," said the farrier, with bitter sarcasm, looking at the com- 
 pany generally ; " and p'rhaps you aren't pig-headed ; and p'rhaps 
 you didn't say the cow was a red Durham; and p'rhaps you 
 didn't say she'd got a star on her brow — stick to that, now you're 
 at it." 
 
 " Come, come," said the landlord; "let the cow alone. The 
 truth lies atween you : you're both right and both wrong, as I 
 allays say. And as for the cow's being Mr. Lammeter's, I say 
 nothing to that; but this I say, as the Rainbow's the Rainbow." 
 
 But as soon as Mr. Macey, the parish clerk and tailor, 
 enters into the conversation, a faint shadow of the 
 intellectual phases of "modern thought," — ^just suffi- 
 cient to remind the reader of the form which they 
 take in the present day, without in any way marring 
 the truth of the picture, — begins to fall on it. Mr. 
 Macey has fallen upon some appropriate form of the 
 difficulty of distinguishing between the "subjective" 
 and the "objective." He it is who tells us that 
 "there's allays two 'pinions; there's the 'pinion a 
 man has of himsen, and there's the 'pinion other 
 folks have on him. There'd be two 'pinions about 
 a cracked bell if the bell could hear itself." And 
 further, in discussing the error of a bride and bride- 
 
GEORGE ELIOT. 249 
 
 groom who had interchanged their respective responses 
 in the marriage service, he throws up the difficult 
 question as to the relation between "substance" and 
 "form." "Is it the meaning or the words as makes 
 folks fast in wedlock ? For the parson meant right, 
 and the bride and bridegroom meant right. But then, 
 when I come to think on it, meanin' goes but a little 
 way i' most things, for you may mean to stick things 
 together, and your glue may be bad, and then where 
 are you? And so I says to mysen, 'It isn't the 
 meanin', it's the glue.' And I was worreted as if I'd 
 got three bells to pull at once. . . . But where's the 
 use o' talking? — you can't think what goes on in a 
 'cute man's inside." 
 
 There is also in George Eliot abundance of what 
 always accompanies dramatic humour, — I mean a great 
 fertility in illustrative analogies which go to the very 
 heart of a one-sided view of any question. Of this 
 Mrs. Poyser's justly-admired wit is the most obvious 
 example. When, for instance, she wishes to impress 
 upon Dinah that her village convert's piety is an arti- 
 ficial result of her own personal influence, and cannot 
 outlast her absence a day, what can be more felicitous 
 than her simile? '-'There's that Bessy Cranage, she'll 
 be flaunting in new finery three weeks after you're 
 gone, I'll be bound : she'll no more go on in her new 
 ways without you than a dog 'uU stand on it's hind 
 legs when nobody's looking." 
 
 But while George Eliot's imagination is opulent 
 enough in its power of dramatic humour, in its ca- 
 pacity for easily migrating from one moral latitude to 
 
1 
 
 250 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 another, and fertile enough in illustration of any view, 
 or any character it once grasps, one sees in the third 
 volume of the "Mill on the Floss," and partly, I 
 think, in the somewhat laborious gossip of the Flor- 
 entine society in "Romola," that there is no propor- 
 tionate power of indirectly portraying character by 
 the side-lights and shadows of easy general conversa- 
 tion, — a power which generally distinguishes feminine 
 novelists. In the picture of life as it passed in St. 
 Ogg's drawing-rooms, she falls so much below herself 
 that this, it is quite clear, is not her natural field of 
 art. With all her subtlety and intellectual power, 
 which are obviously great, and her humour, which is 
 greater, she falls far short of many who are greatly 
 her inferiors in genius, in her attempt to delineate 
 character through this tranquil play of educated social 
 intercourse. Take up almost any scene in Thackeray 
 or Mr. Trollope, and you will find a conversation in 
 which, without any formal discussion, every character 
 seems to be answering by some slight modification in 
 its own tone to the chords struck by the others. This 
 sort of play of character is mainly a fruit of social 
 elasticity. The type of mind in the uncultivated 
 classes, whom George Eliot has made her chief study, 
 is much stiffer and more monotonous. The latter 
 change with the changes in their own mood, but do 
 not suffer the same subtle modifications of tone and 
 feeling from social influences, which you perceive in 
 educated life. George Eliot has but little skill in de- 
 lineating this social phenomenon. Her imagination 
 requires to have a distinct conception of the mood or 
 
GEORGE ELIOT. 2$! 
 
 thought to be seized before she can paint it. There is 
 nothing of that easy modulation (grasped by instinct 
 rather than by imagination) in the conversation of her 
 educated people, which constitutes half its charm, and 
 which gives to the modern novelist so wide a field for 
 indirect portraiture. Among Miss Austen's scenes, 
 for instance, George Eliot might perhaps have written 
 those between people of a totally different social level, 
 as, for example, the humorous scenes between the Miss 
 Steeles and the Miss Dashwoods in "Sense and Sen- 
 sibility." But the third volume of the " Mill on the 
 Floss" seems to show that the delicately-delineated 
 play of feeling between Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. 
 Darcy in "Pride and Prejudice," or between Emma 
 and Jane Fairfax in "Emma," would have been quite 
 out of her sphere. It is much more difficult for an 
 Englishman to criticise her very elaborate picture of 
 the gossip of Florentine market-places, but to me 
 there seems a constant over-laboriousness even there. 
 
 Indeed, there are probably no two more different 
 types of genius than that which excels in indirect 
 and that which excels in direct delineation. And 
 George Eliot, like Sir Walter Scott, is always most 
 successful with the broadest and simplest modes in 
 which human character expresses itself. In short, for 
 masculine composure and range of sympathy, for 
 strength of grasp in dealing with universal human 
 feelings, for skill in habitually realising to us that in- 
 dividual differences of character are engrafted on a 
 fundamental community of nature, — she has no rival 
 among the literary artists of the present day. And 
 
1 
 
 253 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 though it is in part a logical consequence of these 
 great gifts, yet, as I have shown, it is exceptional 
 enough to deserve separate notice, and adds indefi- 
 nitely to the charm they exercise, that she has a keen 
 sense of that infinite hunger of the spirit which noth- 
 ing human can appease, and a true eye for the inward 
 conditions, by the rare fulfilment of which that hun- 
 ger is satisfied. 
 
 While ''Romola" will very probably prove to be 
 the favourite work of this great artist with the few who 
 appreciate it thoroughly, and "Silas Marner " is the 
 richest triumph of her humour, "Adam Bede " is always 
 likely to remain George Eliot's most popular work. 
 It is a story of which any English author, however 
 great his name, could not fail to have been proud. 
 Everything about it (if I except perhaps a touch of 
 melodrama connected with the execution scene) is at 
 once simple and great, and the plot is unfolded with 
 singular simplicity, purity, and power. George Eliot 
 is evidently a writer who needs a plot of great natural 
 interest, and with a natural unity of its own, to unfold 
 fully the resources of her genius. She has none of 
 the concentrative and subjective intensity of Miss 
 Bronte ; her lights flow equally over her pictures ; 
 and it is their tendency to ^z'^rflow. Her first pub- 
 lication, "Scenes from Clerical Life," of which the 
 first and last are quite loose sketches without any 
 natural unity, show the characteristic freedom of her 
 manner. She finds it difficult to concentrate her own 
 interest, and therefore to concentrate her readers' in- 
 terest, on any one particular current of life. Hei 
 
GEORGE ELIOT. 253 
 
 genius delights in depicting the life of a little com- 
 munity j and even when she has got a really deep 
 interest at work on her village stage, she is always 
 anxious to remind herself and her readers how the 
 general population are doing meanwhile in spite of it, 
 — to picture them as they are, quite unconscious of 
 the unfolding plot and living out their ordinary lives 
 in the ordinary way, with but few half-curious glances 
 at the slowly-maturing crisis. 
 
 This tendency gives a great charm to a tale in which 
 the interest is really profound ; for it turns the story 
 from a mere narrative of individual perils, trials, joys, 
 and sorrows, into a vivid illustration of the common 
 human lot. There is a concentrated sort of egotism 
 about common novels even of a high order of talent, 
 which is one reason why the interest in them is apt 
 to die away in riper years. Sir Walter Scott's novels 
 are never iron-bound by this purely individual kind 
 of interest : to children they seem far too discursive, 
 too little limited to the particular story; but his tales 
 retain among the mature the popularity which they 
 have in youth in great measure on this very account, 
 that they range so pleasantly beyond the borders of 
 the immediate narrative, and give us so wide a know- 
 ledge of the great common life in the heart of which 
 the individual actors of the story are placed. But 
 then, Sir Walter Scott had also an intense sympathy 
 with action, an eager interest in the unwinding of his 
 own tales, which generally at least prevented his dis- 
 cursiveness from passing the boundaries of legitimate 
 art. He never failed to give us a general background, 
 
1 
 
 254 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 a vista of tradition concerning the times of which he 
 writes ; but he seldom failed to make it a background 
 to some much more vivid interest which fills the fore- 
 ground in his own mind. 
 
 Perhaps George Eliot is to some extent deficient in 
 this sympathy with action. She has obviously a great 
 dislike to all those artificial enhancements of interest 
 which do not arise fairly out of the moral constitutions 
 of the characters ; and this may have induced her 
 sometimes to overlook the artistic value of a rapid 
 current of action, of a certain shadow of suspense, as 
 instruments in the exhibition of the deeper springs 
 of human character. But if this indifference to the 
 machinery of romance be a defect, it disappears in 
 "Adam Bede," and is closely connected with its 
 greatest beauties. In almost any other writer's hands 
 the story of seduction which is at the basis of "Adam 
 Bede " would have been heightened by innumerable 
 factitious elements, and the various threads of interest 
 multiplied and interwoven at every point. George 
 Eliot's natural aversion to these adventitious effects 
 induced her to limit herself strictly to the simplest 
 possible unfolding of the tragedy; and the conse- 
 quence is, that the story gains in moral spaciousness 
 far more than it could have lost in exciting elements. 
 
 Nor is this clearness of the moral space, this free 
 movement of personal character, a common character- 
 istic of modern novels. There are two common errors 
 into which even the greatest authors manage to fall, 
 and by which they produce a suffocating effect in their 
 pictures, and give the impression that their characters 
 
GEORGE ELIOT. 255 
 
 are, as Thackeray calls them, "puppets," with the 
 strings pulled from behind. One error, the common- 
 est in the greater modern artists, is to smother charac- 
 ter in society, — to limit the whole scope of the deline- 
 ation to the little effects which can be produced on a 
 crowded canvas, where there is no room for even one 
 mind to be itself, or to be seen apart from the rippling 
 of social influences upon it. The other error, the 
 commonest in writers of the older school, is to smother 
 character in incident, to accumulate motives and ex- 
 ternal excitements so thickly, as to drown all sponta- 
 neous life in the artificial tension of passive emotion 
 and involuntary impulse. One amongst several reasons 
 why Scott's heroes and heroines are usually the poorest 
 characters in his tales is, that they are made the centres 
 of all these circumstantial interests, — the puppets arbi- 
 trarily moved about by these hidden strings. In neither 
 case is there proper space for the free play of personal 
 life. Real men of any force have a free sphere of their 
 own, influenced, but in no way determined, by the 
 social or circumstantial influences which hem them 
 round ; and to encumber the principal characters with 
 too great a pressure of subsidiary influences whether 
 of one kind or another is almost inevitably to cramp 
 the design and destroy the freedom of the life por- 
 trayed. Now there is nothing of all this in "Adam 
 Bede." There is no such concentration of distracting 
 influences as to bewilder any of the characters out of 
 their natural responsibility for themselves and their 
 own actions. No doubt a rural society, a certain 
 community of life, is depicted ; but while this is kept 
 
256 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 constantly present to one's mind by the fidelity with 
 which all the mutual relations of the village society 
 are impressed on the language and bearing of the cha- 
 racters delineated,, yet each character stands out dis- 
 tinct and clear, holding its own destiny in its own 
 power. This gives dignity, freedom, and simplicity 
 to the whole, and adds a kind of solemnity to the 
 movement of the principal action in the story, which, 
 had it been complicated by any extraneous or chance 
 elements, must have produced a less profound and sin- 
 gle effect on the imagination. 
 
 Even in "Adam Bede" there is an occasional loose- 
 ness in the texture of the narrative which indicates the 
 characteristic tendency of the author to sketch-in freely 
 all her imagination has grasped, without reference tc 
 unity of design j but the intrinsic interest of the plot 
 so far checks this tendency as to render it visible only 
 when previously suggested by her other works. One 
 sees it mainly in this, that some of the principal figures, 
 quite essential to the whole effect of the tale, stand 
 too much outside the thread of the story, and take no 
 part in its evolution. In Goethe's novels this fault 
 reaches its climax ; for no one has any reason to sup- 
 pose, merely because a figure appears there, and is 
 very carefully painted in, that it is to be connected in 
 any way with the unwinding of the tale. George Eliot 
 is not chargeable with any fault so great as this ; but, 
 apart from any disposition to uphold mere technical or 
 formal rules of art, there is a greater vividness of im- 
 pression, a more concentrated effect produced on the 
 mind, when the course of the narrative works in con- 
 
GEORGE ELIOT. 2$y 
 
 function with the power of the artist to engrave the 
 picture upon the memory, than when they work apart. 
 Seth Bede, for instance, one of the best conceptions 
 in the story, is ahnost entirely a spectator of its coarse; 
 one might remember the whole essence of the plot, 
 and almost forget his existence, — and yet he is not a 
 mere side-sketch, like Bartle Massey or Mr. Craig, for 
 his character is essential to bring out in full relief the 
 characters of Adam and of Dinah. Even in this tale, 
 then, the group of characters painted is a far more 
 perfect work of art than the story, taken as a whole, 
 which includes them ; for only one or two are strongly 
 impressed on the mind by virtue of their close con- 
 nection with the action of the narrative; the images 
 of the remainder, graphically as they are rendered, 
 are conveyed to the reader mainly through dialogue 
 and description. 
 
 But, this once admitted, there is no further qualifi- 
 cation to make in one's admiration of the art of the 
 story. The group of characters, conceived in them- 
 selves, and without reference to the narrative, seems to 
 me perfect,— a rural cartoon of marvellous simplicity, 
 and yet stately in its beauty. The strong-headed, 
 manly, sharp-tempered, secular carpenter, with his 
 energetic satisfaction in work, his impatience of 
 dreamers, and his early passion for Hetty's earthly 
 loveliness, — the tender-hearted, mystic-minded Seth, 
 who so readily unlooses his hold of his one dream of 
 happiness, — the pretty, vain, little, pleasure-loving 
 dairymaid, with her inarticulate love of luxury and 
 dread of shame, so shallow that she cannot even feel a 
 17 
 
258 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 passing anticipation of the fate before her, but flutters 
 into it like a moth into the candle, — the spiritual, 
 transparent-minded, meditative, yet clear-sighted Wes- 
 leyan factory-girl, whose delicate sensitiveness to the 
 inward condition and wants of others never ruffles her 
 own distinct apprehension of the personal duty before 
 her, — the good-natured, self-deceiving, weak young 
 squire, with his patronising generosity, and his dispo- 
 sition to comfort himself, in his self-reproach, with the 
 good opinion of those who are totally ignorant of his 
 grounds for self-reproach, — and the noble, easy- 
 minded, tolerant rector who feels so little impulse to 
 exert moral influence over others that the Wesleyan 
 factory-girl is a problem to him, and who, even where 
 he has natural authority, rather shrinks from the in- 
 trusion necessary to exert it, — with the many other 
 vividly-painted figures more or less in the background, 
 — the quick-witted, fretful Lisbeth, with her excessive 
 fondness for the son she fears, and her half-contempt 
 for the son whose religiousness she regards as an in- 
 surance to the family, — the more quick-witted and 
 more audacious farmer's wife, whose reverence for the 
 piety of her niece is so strongly mixed with dislike of 
 eccentricity and dissent ; — these, with the slighter but 
 equally true outlines with which the picture is filled 
 up, form one of the truest and most typical groups of 
 English life I have ever seen delineated. 
 
 Moreover, the characters themselves are not more 
 perfectly handled than the scene. It is impossible to 
 forget where we are for a moment. The hum of villac^e- 
 life is heard throughout ; the paramount influence of 
 
GEORGE ELIOT. 259 
 
 the manor-house, the substantial importance of the 
 well-to-do farmer, the rector's authority in the parish, 
 — are all conveyed without any effort through the 
 force with which the author realizes her scenes ; and 
 frequently we have a picture of idyllic beauty — as 
 where Adam Bede finds Hetty picking currants in the 
 garden — that reminds us of the soft poetic touch with 
 which Goethe delineated a situation that had sunk 
 deep into his mind. 
 
 The greatest effort and greatest success of the book 
 consist, however, in the wonderful power of the con- 
 trast between Hetty and Dinah. From the first intro- 
 duction of Dinah preaching to the crowd on the village 
 green, and winning her little success over the vain heart 
 of the blacksmith's daughter, and the first appearance 
 of Hetty tossing her butter in the dairy, full of con- 
 scious delight at her little success in riveting Captain 
 Donnithorne's admiration, the interest centres in these 
 two figures. What common measure of human nature 
 can apply to them both ? Near as they are in position, 
 and equal in attractions, and belonging alike to the 
 same half-educated class, they represent evidently the 
 highest and lowest grade in the scale of spiritual 
 nature, and the thoughts that fill the mind of the one 
 do not even rouse the faintest echo in the nature of the 
 other. The art of the contrast is the greater that it is 
 never forced on our attention, and never exaggerated. 
 Yet from the first it is growing upon us. Dinah's 
 gentle rejection of the one brother whom she cannot 
 love, opens the tale, while Hetty's conduct to the other 
 whom she cannot love, forms its climax of interest. 
 
1 
 
 26o GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 The interest is the deeper and truer that it is not the 
 commonplace antithesis between right and wrong, but 
 between the finest and most delicate of spiritual con- 
 sciences, and that absolute inaccessibility to moral or 
 spiritual thought which marks a soft, shallow, pleasure- 
 loving nature preoccupied with self-love. The moral 
 material of which the two girls are made seems charge- 
 able with the difference rather than any conduct of 
 their own. Can any meeting-point be found between 
 the two? or, if not, any experience, however strange, 
 which shall bridge the apparently impassable gulf? 
 This is in great measure the theme of the story; and 
 the scene in which it is first fully realised, — where 
 Dinah and Hetty are pictured in the adjoining bed- 
 rooms, each in their separate world, — is one of the 
 most powerful pieces of imaginative writing which the 
 present generation has produced. I can but extract 
 the closing passage : — 
 
 " What a strange contrast the two figures made ! Visible 
 enough in that mingled twilight and moonliglit. Hetty, her 
 cheeks flushed and her eyes glistening from her imaginary drama, 
 her beautiful neck and arms bare, her hair hanging in a curly 
 tangle down her back, and the baubles in her ears. Dinah, 
 covered with her long white dress, her pale face full of subdued 
 emotion, almost like a lovely corpse into which the soul has re- 
 turned charged with sublimer secrets and a sublimer love. They 
 were nearly of the same height; Dinah evidently a little the 
 taller as she put her arm round Hetty's waist, and kissed her 
 forehead. 
 
 " ' I knew you were not in bed, my dear,' she said, in her 
 sweet clear voice, which was irritating to Hetty, mingling with 
 her own peevish vexation like music with jangling chains, ' for I 
 
GEORGE ELIOT. 26 1 
 
 heard you moving; and I longed to speak to you again to-night, for 
 it is the last but one that I shall be here, and we don't know what 
 may happen to-morrow to keep us apart. Shall I sit down with 
 you while you do up your hair?' 'O yes,' said Hetty, hastily 
 turning round and reaching the second chair in the room, glad 
 that Dinah looked as if she did not notice her earrings. 
 
 " Dinah sat down, and Hetty began to brush together her hair 
 before twisting it up, doing it with that air of excessive indiffer- 
 ence which belongs to confused self-consciousness. But the ex- 
 pression of Dinah's eyes gradually relieved her; they seemed 
 unobservant of all details. ' Dear Hetty,' she said, ' it has been 
 borne in upon my mind to-night that you may some day be in 
 trouble — trouble is appointed for us all here below, and there 
 comes a time when we need more comfort and help than the 
 things of this life can give. I want to tell you that if ever you 
 are in trouble and need a friend that will always feel for you and 
 love you, you have got that friend in Dinah Morris at Snowfield ; 
 and if you come to her, or send for her, she'll never forget this 
 night, and the words she is speaking to you now. Will you re- 
 member it, Hetty ?' ' Yes,' said Hetty, rather frightened. ' But 
 why should you think I shall be in trouble ? Do you know of 
 anything?' Hetty had seated herself as she tied on her cap, 
 and now Dinah leaned forwards and took her hands as she an- 
 swered, 
 
 "' Because, dear, trouble comes to us all in this life: we set 
 our hearts on things which it isn't God's will for us to have, and 
 then we go sorrowing; the people we love are taken from us, 
 and we can joy in nothing because they are not with us; sickness 
 comes, and we faint under the burden of our feeble bodies ; we 
 go astray and do wrong, and bring ourselves into trouble with 
 our fellow-men. There is no man or woman born into this world 
 to whom some of these trials do not fall, and so I feel that some 
 of them must happen to you; and I desire for you, that while 
 you are young you should seek for strength from your Heavenly 
 Father, that you may have a support which will not fail ycu in 
 the evil day.' 
 
262 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 " Dinah paused and released Hetty's hands, that she might not 
 hinder her. Hetty sat quite still : she felt no response within 
 herself to Dinah's anxious affection ; but Dinah's words, uttered 
 with solemn, pathetic distinctness, affected her with a chill fear. 
 Her flush had died away almost to paleness; she had the timidity 
 of a luxurious pleasure-seeking nature, which shrinks from the 
 hint of pain. Dinah saw the effect, and her tender anxious 
 pleading became the more earnest, till Hetty, full of a vague fear 
 that something evil was sometime to befall her, began to cry. . . . 
 Dinah had never seen Hetty affected in this way before, and with 
 her usual benignant hopefulness, she trusted it was the stirring of 
 a divine impulse. She kissed the sobbing thing, and began to 
 cry with her for grateful joy. But Fletty was simply in that ex- 
 citable state of mind in which there is no calculating what turn 
 the feelings may take from one moment to another, and for the 
 first time she became irritated under Dinah's caress. She pushed 
 her away impatiently, and said with a childish sobbing voice, 
 ' Don't talk to me so, Dinah. Why do you come to frighten me? 
 I've never done anything to you. Why can't you let me be?' 
 
 " Poor Dinah felt a pang. She was too wise to persist, and 
 only said mildly, ' Yes, my dear, you're tired; I won't hinder you 
 any longer. Make haste and get into bed. Good-night.' She 
 went out of the room almost as quietly and quickly as if she had 
 been a ghost; but once by the side of her own bed, she threw 
 herself on her knees, and poured out in deep silence all the pas- 
 sionate pity that filled her heart. As for Hetty, she was soon in 
 the wood again — her waking dreams being merged in a sleeping 
 life scarcely more fragmentary and confused." 
 
 This is powerful, and it seems scarcely possible that 
 the conception of a problem so deep should be worked 
 out with any adequate success ; and yet the develop- 
 ment is as powerful as the commencement, and the 
 solution most powerful of all. To depict the suffer- 
 ings of a sensitive but frail nature^ — the remorse of 
 
GEORGE ELIOT. 263 
 
 guilt, the despair of shame, — this would be compara- 
 tively easy to an imagination so powerful as George 
 Eliot's. But to deal with a nature too shallow for 
 any real sense of guilt, too easily numbed by pain for 
 clear thought at all, too cowardly for despair, — and 
 to show how, by the slow, dull pressure of mingled 
 shame and hardship, momentarily broken by a new 
 instinct, and then renewed after a more conscious act 
 of guilt, a dim sense of spiritual things is literally 
 wnmg out of this sterile little pleasure-loving life, till 
 under Dinah's kindly influence it becomes a distinct 
 cry for help, — this is a task as great as any which an 
 imaginative writer below the rank of a great poet ever 
 attempted. Observe with what flexibility the author 
 contracts her own powerful imagination within the 
 limits of Hetty's nature, and delineates the growing 
 wretchedness and numbness of her vacant mind during 
 the futile journey in search of Captain Donnithorne, 
 the helpless attempt to destroy herself, and the violent 
 shrinking of her whole being from the brink of death. 
 
 " The horror of this cold, and darkness, and solitude — out of 
 all human reach — became greater every long minute : it was al- 
 most as if she were dead already, and knew that she was dead 
 and longed to get back to life again. But no: she was alive 
 still ; she had not taken the dreadful leap. She felt a strange 
 contradictoiy wretchedness and exultation ; wretchedness, that 
 she did not dare to face death ; exultation, that she was still in 
 life — that she might yet know light and warmth again. She 
 walked backwards and forwards to warm herself, beginning to 
 discern something of the objects around her, as her eyes became 
 accustomed to the night : the darker line of the hedge, the rapid 
 motion of some living creature — perhaps a field-mouse — rushing 
 
264 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 across the grass. She no longer felt as if the darkness hedged 
 her in : she thought she could walk back across the field, and 
 get over the stile; and then, in the very next field, she thought 
 she remembered there was a hovel of furze near a sheepfold. . . . 
 " She had found the shelter : she groped her way, touching the- 
 prickly gorse, to the door, and pushed it open. It was an ill- 
 smelling close place, but warm, and there was straw on the 
 ground : Hetty sank down on the straw with a sense of escape. 
 Tears came — she had never shed tears before since she left 
 Windsor — tears and sobs of hysterical joy that she had still hold 
 of life, that she was still on the familiar earth, with the sheep 
 near her. The very consciousness of her own limbs was a de- 
 light to her : she turned up her sleeves, and kissed her arms 
 with the passionate love of life." 
 
 Seldom has any human experience been more power- 
 fully painted, and yet the confession in prison which 
 Dinah at last wins from her is still more powerful. In 
 short, the whole thread of inward history which unites 
 the first interview between them in Hetty's bedroom 
 with the last in her cell, is recounted with a power 
 quite unsurpassed in fiction. With no more promis- 
 ing instrument to work upon than the most sterile 
 and frivolous of characters, George Eliot has brought 
 forth tones which are far more pathetic than could 
 have been extorted from a nobler type of suffering 
 and penitence, for they seem to attest more solemnly 
 the capacities of all men — of man. The spiritual and 
 the earthly natures find at last a single meeting-point 
 in the infantine cry for divine mercy which poor little 
 Hetty puts forth to Dinah rather than to God. 
 
 The artistic conditions under which George Eliot 
 works are, when she chooses, singularly favourable to 
 
 1 
 
GEORGE ELIOT. 265 
 
 the exhibition of the only kind of "moral " which a 
 genuine artist should admit. No one now ever thinks 
 of assuming that a writer of fiction lies under any ob- 
 ligation to dispose of his characters exactly as he 
 would perhaps feel inclined to do, if he could deter- 
 mine for them the circumstances of a real instead of 
 an imaginary life. It was a quaint idea of the last 
 generation to suppose that the moral tendency of a 
 tale lay, not in discriminating evil and good, but in the 
 zeal which induced the novelist to provide, before the 
 end of the third volume, for plucking up and burning 
 the tares. But though we have got over that notion, 
 our modern satirists are leading us into the opposite 
 extreme, and trying to convince us that even discrim- 
 ination itself, in such deep matters, is nearly impos- 
 sible. The author of the "Mill on the Floss" is 
 hardly exempt from this tendency ; but in "Adam 
 Bede " it is not discernible. 
 
 The only moral in a fictitious story which can prop- 
 erly be demanded of writers of genius is, — not to 
 shape their tale this way or that, which they may 
 justly decline to do on artistic grounds, — but to dis- 
 criminate clearly the relative nobility of the charac- 
 ters they do conceive; in other words, to give us light 
 enough in their pictures to let it be clearly seen where 
 the shadows are intended to lie. An artist who leaves 
 it doubtful whether he recognises the distinction be- 
 tween good and evil at all, or who detects in all his 
 characters so much evil that the readers' sympathies 
 must either be entirely passive or side with what is 
 evil, is blind to artistic as well as moral laws. To 
 
266 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 banish confusion from a picture is the first duty of the 
 artist ; and confusion must exist where those lines 
 which are the most essential of all for determining 
 the configuration of human character are invisible or 
 indistinctly drawn. Moreover, I think it may be said, 
 that in painting human nature an artist is bound to 
 give due weight to the motives which would claim 
 authority over him in other acts of his life; and as 
 he would be bound at any time and in any place to 
 do anything in his power to make clear the relation 
 between good and evil, the same motive ought to in- 
 duce him never to omit in his drawing to put in a 
 light or a shadow which would add to the moral truth- 
 fulness of the picture. 
 
 But this conceded, an artist must still work accord- 
 ing to the conditions of his own genius, and where 
 that genius leads him only to give lively sketches, 
 such as Miss Austen's for example, of the social ex- 
 ternals of character, and barely to indicate the inte- 
 rior forces which determine its form and growth, it is 
 unreasonable to expect more than a very superficial 
 moral. Those stories alone can have deep morals 
 which are concerned with the deepest moral phenom- 
 ena ; but where this is so they must show them in 
 their true light. "Adam Bede " may be said to pro- 
 duce in this sense a deeper and nobler moral impres- 
 sion than any other English story of our day. It ex- 
 hibits in close mutual relations characters of very 
 various degrees of moral depth. It teaches us to dis- 
 criminate truly between them. It has for its centre- 
 piece one singularly beautiful and bright character 
 
GEORGE ELIOT. 267 
 
 which illuminates the whole narrative, and so aids us 
 to realise the good and the evil in all the others ; 
 and hence every conscience as well as every imagina- 
 tion gains fresh force and distincter vision from its 
 perusal. 
 
 The " Mill on the Floss " is in every way inferior, 
 in some respects painfully inferior, to "Adam Bede." 
 It is a masterly fragment of fictitious biography in 
 two volumes, followed by a second-rate one-volume 
 novel, — the three connected into a single whole by 
 very inadequate .links. The deeper characters in the 
 tale are not nearly so deep as those in "Adam Bede;" 
 and the shallower characters do not serve in the same 
 way to bring into relief the nobler characteristics of 
 the deeper. The moral foundations of the story are 
 almost entirely laid on the same dreary level. Moral 
 and spiritual peispective there is almost none. The 
 one character which is intended to give depth to and 
 light up the tale at one time threatens to go out in 
 smoke ; and the shadows are anything but clear. There 
 is occasional confusion, both artistic and moral, some 
 exaggeration, and, I think, in the mere physiological 
 attraction felt by the heroine for Stephen Guest, and 
 all but yielded to, there is a serious artistic and moral 
 blot. 
 
 Yet "The Mill on the Floss" is a book of great 
 genius. Its overflowing humour would alone class 
 its author high among the humorists, and there are 
 some sketches in it of English country life which 
 have all the vivacity and not a little of the power of 
 Sir Walter Scott's best works. The proud, warm- 
 
I 
 
 268 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 hearted, not very clear-headed miller, whose heart is 
 broken by bankruptcy, and whose spirit is consumed 
 with the thirst for revenge, is a character to live in the 
 imagination. Yet "The Mill on the Floss" is so 
 inferior in art to George Eliot's really greatest works 
 that I may pass it by to speak of what is in some 
 respects her greatest achievement, "Romola." 
 
 George Eliot's drawings, as I have before said, all 
 require a certain space, like Raffael's cartoons, and 
 are not of that kind which produce their effect by the 
 reiteration of scenes each complete in itself. You 
 have to unroll a large surface of the picture before 
 even the smallest unit of its effect is attained. And 
 this is far more true of "Romola" than of her Eng- 
 lish tales. In the latter, the constant and striking 
 delineation of social features with which we are all 
 familiar, satisfies the mind in the detail almost as 
 much as in the complete whole. This cannot be so 
 when even greater power is shown in mastering the 
 life of a foreign nation in a past age. We do not care 
 about the light Florentine buzz with which so great a 
 part of the firstvolume is filled. Its allusions are half 
 riddles, and its liveliness a blank to us. Small local 
 colours depend for their charm on the familiarity of 
 small local knowledge. Then, again, George Eliot is 
 much greater as an imaginative painter of character 
 than as an imaginative painter of action, and natu- 
 rally much more inclined for the one than the other. 
 What her characters do is always subordinate with her 
 to what they are. This is the highest artistic power, 
 but it carries its inconveniences with it. She does not 
 
GEORGE ELIOT. 269 
 
 carry her readers away, as it is called : it is generally 
 easy to stop reading her ; she satisfies you for the 
 moment, and does not make you look forward to the 
 end. She has Sir Walter Scott's art for revivifying the 
 past, — but not Scott's dynamical force in making you 
 plunge into it with as headlong an interest as into the 
 present. For this she compensates by a deeper and 
 wider intellectual grasp, — but still it is easy enough to 
 understand why half-developed characters, sketched in 
 with unfamiliar local colours on a background of his- 
 tory that has long melted away, should look strange 
 and uninviting,especially when not carried off by any 
 exciting current of events, to the ordinary reader's eye. 
 It is marvellous that, in spite of these disadvantages, 
 the wide and calm imaginative power of the writer 
 should have produced a work which is likely to be 
 permanently celebrated in English literature, — in 
 which Italy and England may feel a common pride. 
 
 The great artistic purpose of the story is to trace out 
 the conflict between liberal culture and a most pas- 
 sionate form of Christian faith in that strange era 
 (which has so many points of resemblance with the 
 present), when the two in their most characteristic 
 forms struggled for pre-eminence over Florentines 
 who had been educated into the half-pedantic and 
 half-idealistic scholarship of Lorenzo de Medici, — 
 who faintly shared the new scientific impulses of the 
 age of Columbus and Copernicus, — and whose hearts 
 and consciences were stirred by the preaching, polit- 
 ical as well as spiritual, of one of the very greatest as 
 well as earliest of the reformers, the Dominican friar 
 
270 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 Savonarola. No period could be found when mingling 
 faith and culture effervesced with more curious results. 
 In some great and noble minds the new Learning, 
 clearing away the petty rubbish of medieval supersti- 
 tion, and revealing the severe simplicities of the great 
 age of Greece, grew into a feeling that supplied all the 
 stimulus of fever, if not the rest of faith, and of these 
 the author has drawn a very fine picture in the blind 
 Florentine scholar, Romola's father, Bardo, who, with 
 a restless fire in his heart, "hung over the books and 
 lived with the shadows" all his life. Nothing is more 
 striking and masterly in the story than the subtle skill 
 with which the dominant influence of this scholarship 
 over the imagination of the elder generation of that 
 time — the generation which saw the first revival of 
 learning — is delineated in the pictures of Bardo and 
 Baldassarre. In the former you get something like a 
 glimpse of the stately passion for learning, which, in a 
 later age (though England was then naturally behind 
 Italy), took so vital a hold of the intellect of Milton, 
 and overlaid his powerful imagination with all its rich 
 fretwork of elaborate classical allusion. In the latter 
 character, Baldassarre, the same impression is conveyed 
 in a still more subtle and striking form, because by 
 painting the intermittent flashes of intellectual power 
 in a scholar's failing memory, and its alternations with 
 an almost animal passion of revenge, we gain not only 
 a more distinct knowledge of the relative value in 
 which scholarship was there and then held as com- 
 pared with other human attainments, but a novel sense 
 of sympathy, which, in an age of diffused culture like 
 
GEORGE ELIOT. 2/1 
 
 this, it is not very easy to attain, with the extrava- 
 gance, as we should now think, of the price set upon 
 it. There are few passages of subtler literary grandeur 
 in English romance than that which paints the elec- 
 trifying effect of a thrill of vindictive passion on Bal- 
 dassarre's paralysed memory, in recalling once more 
 his full command of Greek learning, and the sense 
 of power which thus returned to him : — 
 
 " He leaned to take up the fragments of the dagger; then he 
 turned towards the book which lay open at his side. It was a fine 
 large manuscript, an old volume of Pausanias. The moonlight was 
 upon it, and he could see the large letters at the head of the page : 
 
 MESSHNIKA. K B^ 
 In old days he had known Pausanias familiarly: yet an hour or 
 two ago he had been looking hopelessly at that page, and it had 
 suggested no more meaning to him than if the letters had been 
 black weather-marks on a wall ; but at this moment they were 
 once more the magic signs that conjure up a world. That moon- 
 beam falling on the letters had raised Messenia before him, and 
 its struggle against the Spartan oppression. He snatched up the 
 book, but the light was too pale for him to read further by. No 
 matter; he knew that chapter; he read inwardly. He saw the 
 stoning of the traitor Aristocrates — stoned by a whole people, 
 who cast him out from their borders to lie unburied, and set up a 
 pillar with verses upon it, telling how Time had brought home 
 justice to the unjust. The words arose within him, and stirred 
 innumerable vibrations of memory. He forgot that he was old : 
 he could almost have shouted. The light was come again, 
 mother of knowledge and joy! In that exultation his limbs re- 
 covered their strength : he started up with his broken dagger and 
 book, and went out under the broad moonlight. It vi^as a nipping 
 frosty air, but Baldassarre could feel no chill — he only felt the 
 glow of conscious power. He walked about and paused on all 
 
2/2 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 the open spots of that high ground, and looked down on the 
 domed and towered city, sleeping darkly under its sleeping guar- 
 dians, the mountains; on the pale gleam of the river; on tlie 
 valley vanishing towards the peaks of snow : and felt himself 
 master of them all. That sense of mental empire which belongs 
 to us all in moments of exceptional clearness, was intensified for 
 him by the long days and nights in which memory had been 
 little more than the consciousness of something gone. That city, 
 which had been a weary labyrinth, v/as material that he could 
 subdue to his purposes now : his mind glanced through its affairs 
 with flashing conjecture ; he was once more a man who knew 
 cities, whose sense of vision was instructed with large experience, 
 and who felt the keen delight of holding all things in the grasp of 
 language. Names ! Images ! — his mind rushed through its wealth 
 without pausing, like one who enters on a great inheritance." 
 
 This passage, taken with those which lead up to it, 
 whether they refer to Bardo or Baldassarre, has the 
 effect of reproducing one great feature in the age of 
 the revival of learning with the finest effect — that sense 
 of large human power which the mastery over a great 
 ancient language, itself the key to a magnificent liter- 
 ature, gave, and which made scholarship then a pas- 
 sion, while with us it has almost relapsed into an an- 
 tiquarian dry-as-dust pursuit. 
 
 We realise again, in reading about Bardo and Bal- 
 dassarre, how, for these times, the first sentence of 
 St. John, " In the beginning was the Word," had re- 
 gained all its force, — to the exclusion, perhaps, of the 
 further assertion that the Word was with God and was 
 God. Man's sense of the great power of language, 
 of which we have now so little, which, indeed, it is 
 the tendency of the present day to depreciate, was in 
 
 I 
 
 i 
 
GEORGE ELIOT. 273 
 
 that day full of a new vigour; and to some extent 
 contested with the mysteries of the Gospel the control 
 of great men's souls. 
 
 This is the picture which Roniola makes so living for 
 us. We find here the strife between the keen definite 
 knowledge of the reviving Greek learning, and the 
 turbid visionary mysticism of the reviving Dominican 
 piety. We find a younger generation, represented by 
 Romola, and Dino, and Tito, that has inherited this 
 scholarship, and finds it wholly inadequate for its 
 wants, looking upon that almost as dry bones, which 
 the older generation felt to be stimulating nourishment, 
 - — and either turning from it, like Dino, to the rapture 
 of mystical asceticism, or using it, like Tito, as a useful 
 sharp-edged tool in the battle of Florentine politics, 
 or trying, like Romola, to turn it to its true purpose, 
 viz., that of clarifying and sifting the false from the 
 true elements in the great mysterious faith presented 
 to her conscience by Savonarola. The pride of labori- 
 ous farseeing scholarship, gazing with clear scornful 
 eyes at the inarticulate convulsive esctasies of faith, — 
 all the powers of language rebelling passionately, as 
 it were, against the deep and fervent passions which 
 transcend the containing powers of language, and boil 
 over its edges, in religious, or even in the opposite 
 animal raptures,— this is a picture wonderfully painted, 
 and which produces all the more impression, that the 
 minute vivid ripple of the light gossip of the Floren- 
 tine market-place gives a ground-tone to the book. 
 
 This fundamental conflict between the Greek scholar- 
 ship and the mystical Christian faith which runs through 
 18 
 
274 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 the book, is made even more striking by the treacher- 
 ous character of the man who represents the Greek 
 culture cut adrift from all vestige of moral or religious 
 faith. The fine gradations of social dissimulation so 
 characteristic of Florence in the Medicean era, ranging 
 from the single politic insincerity of Savonarola, which 
 raises so grand a struggle in his mind, down to the 
 easy-sliding treachery of Tito, bring up before us in 
 another shape the characteristic contrasts of that day 
 between that earnest spirit which revived the old cul- 
 ture because it was truer than the degraded current 
 superstitions, — that pliant worldliness which adopted, 
 and adapted itself to it, because it was an instrument 
 of finer edge and wider utility, — and lastly, that fer- 
 vent faith which despised it as substituting the study 
 of a dead past for the great conflict of a living pres- 
 ent. Tito's smooth dissimulation is all the more 
 striking a picture, because it comes out as the natural 
 fruit of a mind almost incapable of either strong con- 
 viction or strong personal fidelity, gliding about in an 
 age when strong convictions were coming to the birth, 
 and among a race barely redeemed from a spirit of 
 political falsehood (which was just going to be called 
 Machiavellian) by a proud sense of loyalty to personal 
 and party ties. 
 
 Tito is pictured, as the Greeks of that time perhaps 
 deserved to be pictured, not as originally false, but as 
 naturally pleasure-loving, and swerving aside before 
 every unpleasant obstacle in the straight path, at the 
 instance of a quick intelligence and a keen dislike 
 both to personal collisions and to personal sacrifices. 
 
 1 
 
GEORGE ELIOT. 275 
 
 His character is, to use a mathematical term, the 
 osculating curve which touches that of each of the 
 others at the surface, and nowhere else — Savonarola's 
 at the point of his external political policy, Romola's 
 in her love of beauty and hatred of the turbid malarious 
 exhalations of visionary excitement, and the scholarly 
 enthusiasm of Bardo only in the apt classical know- 
 ledge, by no means in the ardour of his love for it. 
 On Tito's very first entrance on to the stage, the 
 Florentine artist of the story, Piero di Cosimo, is 
 eager to paint him as aSinon, not that there is treach- 
 ery in his face, but that there is in it the softness and 
 suppleness, and gliding ease of movement, and nirable- 
 ness of intellect, which, in a time of political passion, 
 seem likely to lead to treachery, because, first, they 
 qualify, both intellectually and morally, for the traitor's 
 part, and, next, they serve to mask his play. From 
 this first scene, when the fatal ease of the man's man- 
 ner is first suggested, to the noble scene at the con- 
 clusion, in which he sounds, and sounds successfully, 
 Savonarola's too eager statesmanship, with intent to 
 betray him to the Duke of Milan and the Pope, you 
 see Tito's character grow into the foulest treachery, 
 simply from its consistent desire to compass every 
 pleasant end which suggests itself to him as feasible, 
 without openly facing, if he can help it, any one's 
 severe displeasure. 
 
 Nor is anything drawn more finely than the peculiar 
 species of fear which is an essential part of this cha- 
 racter, — a fear which, in the last resort, spurs the keen 
 intellect of the man into a certain desperate energy. 
 
276 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 but which usually remains too cowardly even to under- 
 stand itself, and lurks on in the character as a kind 
 of unconscious resentment against those who wring 
 from him the exercise of such an energy. A cha- 
 racter essentially treacherous only because it is full of 
 soft fluid selfishness is one of the most difficult to 
 paint. But whether when locking up the crucifix, 
 which Romola received from her dying brother's 
 hands, in the little temple crowned with the figures 
 of Ariadne and Bacchus, and fondly calling her " Re- 
 gina mia," which somehow conveys that he less loves 
 the woman than passionately admires her — or buying 
 his "garment of fear," the coat of light chain armour, 
 from the armour-smith, — or thoughtlessly deceiving 
 the poor little contadina Tessa by the mock marriage 
 at the carnival, — or shrinking before Romola's indig- 
 nation into that frigid tone of empty affiectionateness 
 which is the clearest sign of a contracted heart, — or 
 interpreting the Latin proclamation to the people with 
 a veil of good-nature over his treacherous purpose, — 
 or crowned in the feast at the Rucellai Gardens, 
 and paling suddenly beneath Baldassarre's vindictive 
 glance, — or petting Tessa and her children in his 
 hiding-place on the hill, — the same wonderful power 
 is maintained throughout, of stamping on our imagi- 
 nation with the full force of a master hand a character 
 which seems naturally too fluent for the artist's pur- 
 pose. There is not a more masterly piece of painting 
 in English romance than this figure of Tito. 
 
 Of Romola it is less easy to say whether one is ab- 
 solutely satisfied or not. The soupgon of hardness 
 
 i 
 
GEORGE ELWT. 2/7 
 
 of which one is conscious as somewhat detracting 
 from her power, the skill with which the author has 
 prepared us for a mental struggle exactly similar, even 
 in its minutest features, to what might occur to-day 
 between the claims of a sublime faith appealing to the 
 conscience, and a distaste for miracle or vision in its 
 prophet, the striking contrast with Tessa, the ignorant 
 " pretty little pigeon," who thinks every one who is 
 kind to her a saint, — all render it a little difficult to 
 say whether we know her intimately, or whether we 
 have only a very artistic idea of what she is not, and 
 what she is only by inference and contrast. My own 
 feeling is that Romola is the least perfect figure in the 
 book, though a fine one, — that she is a shade more 
 modernized than the others, several shades less indi- 
 vidual, and, after all, though the pivot of her cha- 
 racter turns, as it were, on faith, that she does not dis- 
 tinctly show any faith except the faith in rigid honour, 
 in human pity, and partially also in Savonarola's per- 
 sonal greatness and power. I do not say the cha- 
 racter is not natural, — I only say it is half-revealed 
 and more suggested than fully painted, though these 
 harder feminine characters always seem to ask to be 
 outlined more strongly than any others. 
 
 But the great and concentrated interest of the book 
 — at least, after the wonderful development of Tito's 
 character—is the portrait of Savonarola, which it is 
 almost impossible not to feel as faithful as history as 
 't is great as romance. You seethe same large human- 
 hearted Italian Luther, narrower than Luther on some 
 sides, owing to the thin Medicean culture against 
 
2/8 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 which he led the reaction, but with a far more states- 
 manlike and political purpose, and far more fiery im- 
 agination, the same, in fact, whom Mr. Maurice has 
 intellectually delineated with so much delicate fidelity 
 in his history of modern philosophy, and who paints 
 himself in almost everything he wrote, but who yet 
 was never before presented clearly to the eye. This 
 portrait evinces almost as graphic a power, and far 
 more scrupulous care than Sir Walter Scott used in 
 those pictures of the various Stewarts which will cer- 
 tainly outlive in fame the very different originals. 
 Nothing can be finer and more impressive — nothing 
 more difficult to make fine and impressive — than Sa- 
 vonarola's exhortation to Romola to return to the 
 home from which she was flying. You see in every 
 word the man's profound trust in God, as the author 
 of all human ties and of all social and political ties, 
 breaking through the fetters of his Dominican order, 
 and asserting the divine order in Nature rather than 
 the divine order out of Nature. 
 
 This, however, is not the finest picture given of 
 him. The finest is contained in the profoundly pa- 
 thetic scene in which Savonarola, having in the 
 fervour of his eloquence committed God to working 
 him a miracle at the right moment, is brought to 
 book both by his enemies and friends on the question 
 of the trial by fire, and kneels in prayer that in fact 
 refuses to be prayer, but rises into a political debate 
 within himself as to the policy of seeming to take a 
 step which he knows he must somehow evade. "While 
 his lips were uttering audibly cor mundum crea in me, 
 
GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 279 
 
 his mind was still filled with the images of the snare 
 his enemies had prepared for him, still busy with the 
 arguments by which he could justify himself against 
 their taunts and accusations." But the scene is too 
 long and too fine to spoil by snatching it from the 
 context, and is, indeed, closely bound up with the 
 noble picture of the encounter with Tito which fol- 
 lows. Our author rejects apparently the authenticity 
 of the last great words attributed to Savonarola as he 
 is dying on the scaffold, which Mr. Maurice accepts. 
 "The voice. of the Papal emissary," says the historian 
 of philosophy, "was heard proclaiming that Savona- 
 rola was cut off from the Church militant and trium- 
 phant. Another voice was heard saying, ' No, not 
 from the Church triumphant, they cannot shut me out 
 of that.' " It is a pity that George Eliot rejects, as I 
 suppose she does, the evidence for these words. They 
 would have formed a far higher artistic ending to her 
 story than the somewhat feeble and womanish chapter 
 with which it concludes, — the only blot on the book. 
 Large and genial as is George Eliot's sympathy with 
 Savonarola, she has, I suppose, no wish to represent 
 his faith as altogether triumphant. Yet Romola's 
 faith in goodness and self-sacrifice, and in little 
 children and "the eternal marriage of love and 
 duty," and so forth, which the proem tells us is ever 
 to last, would be an idle dream for the world, without 
 a Christ in whose eternal nature all these realities live 
 and grow. 
 
 "Felix Holt" contains so little new illustration of 
 George Eliot's genius beyond the fragments of poetry 
 
1 
 
 280 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 which first taught most of us to understand the poetic 
 side of her imagination, that I will pass it by to speak 
 of her two poems, "The Spanish Gipsy" and "The 
 Legend of Jubal," which last might, I think, have 
 been more fitly termed a hymn in praise of death, 
 "The Spanish Gipsy," with all its rich colour, and 
 sometimes almost Miltonic stateliness, shows, I think, 
 that George Eliot is far greater as a poet when she 
 interprets freely the poetry of real life in her novels 
 and romances, than when she submits her imagination 
 to the chains of verse. Verse to her is a fetter, and 
 not a stimulus. In prose she is so free and dramatic 
 that it is a disappointment to find the characters in 
 her "Spanish Gipsy" moving in obvious obedience 
 to the intellectual views which the reader at once dis- 
 covers in relation with them. If I except, perhaps, — 
 and even there I am doubtful, — the Spanish Duke, 
 Don Silva, whose character is certainly finely con- 
 ceived both in outline and detail, though the general 
 effect is, I think, a little like "the misty Hyades," 
 a haze of moral worlds melting into each other, — the 
 chief characters of the story, especially the Gipsy 
 chief and the Gipsy heroine, do not leave upon me 
 any impression of dramatic power at all comparable 
 to the leading figures of George Eliot's greater prose 
 works. "Adam Bede " and " Romola" remain much 
 her greatest imaginative efforts, though there is, of 
 course, ample opportunity in the mere form of verse 
 for imaginative beauties of a kind inadmissible and 
 unadmitted in her novels. 
 
 The intellectual background of the tragedy, — for 
 
GEORGE ELIOT. 28 1 
 
 tragedy, with interspersed narrative links, it really is, 
 — seems to me the greatest thing about it, and it is very 
 great; the figures which are painted in upon that back- 
 ground, and whose movements are intended to bring 
 it out into relief, are, I think, hardly living and real 
 enough to assert fully their own independent vitality. 
 They betray the intellectual analysis to which they 
 have been subjected, and to illustrate which they were 
 probably created. If I may venture to interpret so 
 great a writer's thought, I should say that the "Spanish 
 Gipsy" is written to illustrate not merely doubly and 
 trebly, but from four or five distinct points of view, 
 how the inheritance of the definite streams of impulse 
 and tradition, stored up in what we call race, often 
 puts a tragic veto upon any attempt of spontaneous 
 individual emotion or volition to ignore or defy their 
 control, and to emancipate itself from the tyranny of 
 their disputable and apparently cruel rule. 
 
 You can see the influence of the recent Darwinian 
 doctrines, so far as they are applicable at all to moral 
 characteristics and causes, in almost every page of the 
 poem. How the threads of hereditary capacity and 
 hereditary sentiment control, as with invisible cords, 
 the orbits of even the most powerful characters, — -how 
 the fracture of those threads, so far as it can be accom- 
 plished by mere will, may have even a greater effect in 
 wrecking character than moral degeneracy would itself 
 produce, — how the man who trusts and uses the hered- 
 itary forces which natural descent has bestowed upon 
 him, becomes a might and a centre in the world, 
 while the man, perhaps intrinsically the nobler, who 
 
202 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 dissipates his strength by trying to swim against the 
 stream of Iiis past, is neutralised and paralysed by the 
 vain effort, — again, how a divided past, a past not 
 really homogeneous, may weaken this kind of power, 
 instead of strengthening it by the command of a 
 larger experience, — all this George Eliot's poem 
 paints with a tragical force that answers to Aristotle's 
 fine definition of tragedy, that which "purifies" by 
 pity and by fear. 
 
 Tlie heroine of the book, an infant of gipsy birth, 
 as she subsequently discovers, has been adopted by 
 Duke Silva's mother, and when the poem opens the 
 Duke is planning their immediate marriage. The 
 motto of the story might be given in some of Fedal- 
 ma's, the heroine's last words; — 
 
 " Our dear young love, — its breath was happiness ! 
 But it had grown upon a larger life 
 Which tore its roots asunder. We rebelled, — 
 The larger life stibdued usJ'' 
 
 At the very opening of the poem the seeds of the 
 constitutional difference of tendency between the free 
 gipsy blood and the deeply-furrowed Spanish pride 
 and honour are beginning to flower. Though the love 
 between the two is perfect, Fedalma frets against the 
 restraints of the secluded Spanish grandeur, and yearns 
 after a larger measure of popular sympathies. On a 
 lovely southern evening she even dances on the Plaza, 
 the public square of Bedmar, the garrison of which 
 Duke Alva commands (for a Moorish force is in the 
 neighbourhood), — and this she does from the mere 
 
GEORGE ELIOT. 283 
 
 yearning to express, after the Southern fashion, her 
 spontaneous delight in the harmony of the evening, 
 and her fuhiess of synapathy with the people who are 
 looking on. This incident is the first made use of 
 by the author to indicate the immense divergence 
 between the inherited natures of the Gipsy and the 
 Spanish Duke, — and this, though the difference is 
 purely one of inheritance, for Fedalma has been 
 brought up from her birth in the strict seclusion of 
 a Spanish grandee. This is her excuse to her lover 
 for the breach of conventional manners of which she 
 has been guilty : — 
 
 " Yes, it is true. I was not wrong to dance. 
 The air was filled with music, with a song 
 That seemed the voice of the sweet eventide — - 
 The glowing light entering through eye and ear — 
 That seemed our love — mine, yours — they are but one- 
 Trembling through all my limbs, as fervent words 
 Tremble within my soul and must be spoken. 
 And all the people felt a common joy 
 And shouted for the dance. A brightness soft 
 As of the angels moving down to see 
 Illumined the broad space. The joy, the life 
 Around within me were one heaven : I longed 
 To blend them visibly : I longed to dance 
 Before the people — be as mounting flame 
 To all that burned within them ! Nay, I danced ; 
 There was no longing : I but did the deed, 
 Being moved to do it." 
 
 And here is the finest study of character in the poem, 
 the Spanish Duke, who has a love in him that overflows 
 the channels of Spanish tradition and convention, and 
 
284 GEORGE ELIOT-. 
 
 whose wre-ck of mind, due to the impulse which seizes 
 him to break with those traditions rather than with his 
 love, is the true theme of the tragedy : — ■ 
 
 'A man of high-wrought strain, fastidious 
 In his acceptance, dreading all delight 
 That speedy dies and turns to carrion : 
 His senses much exacting, deep instilled 
 With keen imagination's difficult needs ; — 
 Like strong-limbed monsters studded o'er with eyes, 
 Their hunger checked by overwhelming vision. 
 Or that fierce lion in symbolic dream. 
 Snatched from the ground by wings and new-endowed 
 With a man's thought-propelled relenting heart. 
 Silva was both the lion and the man ; 
 First hesitating shrank, then fiercely sprang. 
 Or having sprung, turned pallid at his deed 
 And loosed the prize, paying his blood for naught. 
 A nature half-transformed, with qualities 
 That oft bewrayed each other, elements 
 Not blent but struggling, breeding strange effects. 
 Passing the reckoning of his friends or foes. 
 Haughty and generous, grave and passionate; 
 With tidal moments of devoutest awe. 
 Sinking anon to farthest ebb of doubt ; 
 Deliberating ever, till the sting 
 Of a recurrent ardour made him rush 
 Right against reasons that himself had drilled 
 And marshalled painfully. A spirit framed 
 Too proudly special for obedience. 
 Too subtly pondering for masteiy ; 
 Born of a goddess with a mortal sire, 
 Heir of flesh-fettered, weak divinity. 
 Doom-gifted with long resonant consciousness 
 And perilous heightening of the sentient soul." 
 
GEORGE ELIOT. 285 
 
 When Fedalma is claimed by her father the Zincalo 
 (or Gipsy) chief, and called upon by him to break 
 from her Spanish ties and aid him in the task he has 
 set himself of forming his gipsy tribe into an inde- 
 pendent nation on the shore of Africa, the struggle 
 between the two natures, — the inherited deference to 
 a captain and father of Zarca's free, bold, and com- 
 manding nature, and the acquired nature, the passion 
 for her Spanish lover, — begins. But in Fedalma it 
 only appears as a struggle which is from the first de- 
 cided in favour of the stronger nature she has inher- 
 ited. Her love to the Duke is true and inexhaustible; 
 but she realises at once that to wrap herself up in the 
 subtle tendernesses of her ducal lover, and leave her 
 father to wrestle alone with his great enterprise on a 
 foreign shore, will make her utterly unworthy even of 
 her own place in life, and so fill her with the convic- 
 tion that she is mean, and selfish, and worthless ; that 
 she would not be worthy even of the part she would 
 choose, and would sink in her own and Silva's esteem. 
 So she goes with her father, broken-hearted but firm, 
 and breaks away from Silva. 
 
 The Duke, on the other hand, tramples on the ties 
 of rank, family, and country, for the sake of his love. 
 He gives up his place as commander of the fortress to 
 follow Fedalma, hoping to win her back to him. Find- 
 ing the Gipsy chief firm, and his daughter inexorably 
 resolved to sacrifice her love to what she thinks her 
 duty, he sacrifices his own place in life altogether, and 
 swears fealty to the Zincalo chief rather than lose his 
 betrothed. In the mean time the latter has to earn 
 
286 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 his Moorish safe-conduct to Africa by taking the fortress 
 of Bedmar, which Silva had commanded, and Silva 
 finds, to his unutterable horror and remorse, that the 
 fortress has been surprised and all his own dearest 
 companions in arms slain by the troop of Zincali with 
 whom he had united himself. In his insanity of re- 
 morse he kills Zarca, — Fedalma's father, — and the 
 tragedy ends with their final separation : she to take, 
 so far as she may, her father's place as ruler of the 
 Gipsy people on the African shore ; he to get absolved 
 for his sin, and to recover his knightly name as a Spanish 
 soldier of the Cross. The point of the tragedy, how- 
 ever, is the contrast between the moral strength of the 
 Gipsy chief, Zarca, whose inherited qualities of mind 
 and body and whole life had been absolutely in har- 
 mony, and the comparative weakness of his daughter, 
 in whom Spanish training and Spanish ties had partly 
 neutralised her gipsy blood, and, again, between both 
 of these and the absolute wreck of character in Silva 
 when he breaks his whole ancestral traditions, and tries 
 to make a sacrifice of them to love. 
 
 The same striking theme is illustrated from several 
 other points of view. Silva's uncle. Father Isidor, the 
 prior of San Domingo, the priest of the Spanish In- 
 quisition, whose nature is all held within the deep-cut 
 channels of Spanish tradition, within the ideas which 
 dominated the Spanish chivalry and the Spanish faith, 
 is the moral foil to his nephew. He stands out, — 
 keen, hard, loyal to his own ideas, domineering with- 
 out hesitation, and crushing without a scruple all even 
 jn himself which tends to divide himself, — as the model 
 
GEORGE ELIOT. 287 
 
 of the morality which acts rigidly and severely, voli- 
 tion and nature being in perfect unison, on a fixed and 
 customary type. 
 
 But apart even from these leading characters, per- 
 petually recurring touches throughout the whole poem 
 show how entirely this theme had occupied George 
 Eliot's imagination. Take but as one instance, this, 
 on the inherited forces which form the characters of 
 monkeys a propos of the juggler's ape : — 
 
 " Man thinks 
 Brutes have no wisdom, since they l<now not his : 
 Can we divine their world ? — the hidden life 
 That mirrors us as hideous shapeless power, 
 Cruel supremacy of sharp-edged death, 
 Or fate that leaves a bleeding mother robbed ? 
 Oh, they have long tradition and swift speech. 
 Can tell -with touches and sharp darting cries 
 Whole histories of timid races taught 
 To breathe in terror by red-handed manP 
 
 It is impossible, indeed, to speak too highly of the 
 intellectual conception at the basis of the poem, and 
 the finish and power with which it is worked out and 
 adorned. Thus, how fine for its purpose is the scene 
 between Don Silva and the Jewish astrologer, Se- 
 phardo, who perceives so clearly the scientific limits 
 to astrological prediction, that he refines away and 
 distinguishes till his science is but, as Silva tells him, 
 to pinch 
 
 " With confident selection these few grains 
 And call them verity, from out the dust 
 Of crumbling error." 
 
288 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 This discussion between Silva and the Jewish astrol- 
 oger on the decaying science of astral influence, and 
 on those contingencies of human life which its clearest 
 visions leave unsolved,- — and again, this glimpse of a 
 subtle scientific mind which, while it had lost confi- 
 dence in the boasted power of the science, still clung 
 cautiously to the dwindling grain of truth which it 
 still believed that the science contained, are, as it 
 were, poetical glosses and commentaries on the main 
 theme of the story, showing how the past of Europe, 
 in that age of religious inquisition and scientific dis- 
 covery, was pressing upon the present, how much of it 
 was crumbling away beneath the intellectual solvent 
 of the new thought, and yet how keenly the most vig- 
 ilant and subtle minds of the age felt the danger of 
 breaking, — even intellectually, — with the past, and 
 how anxiously, as they cut away the superfluous tradi- 
 tions, they held to everything which had not yet been 
 disproved. 
 
 This fading belief, like other fading beliefs, is in- 
 tended to have its effect on Silva's mind, disposing 
 him to distrust both the social and religious traditions 
 in which he had been brought up, and therefore to 
 trust more amply the passion of love in his heart which 
 he knew to be both noble and true. Yet even from 
 the first he, too, cannot keep his mind off the danger 
 of the schism in his life which he feels approaching, 
 and of which his mere love for a nature so untram- 
 melled by tradition as Fedalma's cannot but warn 
 him. How finely he says, in his first love scene with 
 Fedalma : — 
 
GEORGE ELIOT. 289 
 
 "Ah, yes ! all preciousness 
 To mortal hearts is guarded by a fear. 
 All love fears loss, and most that loss supreme, 
 Its own perfection — seeing, feeling, change 
 From high to lower, dearer to less dear. 
 Can love be careless ? If we lost our love. 
 What should we find ? — with this sweet Past torn off, 
 Our lives deep scarred just where their beauty lay? 
 The best we found thenceforth were still a worse ; 
 The only better is a Past that lives 
 On throtigh an added Present, stretching still 
 In hope unchecked by shaming memories 
 To life'' s last breath.^' 
 
 While the intellectual ground-plan of the tragedy is 
 exquisitely worked out, the characters are to me faint, 
 misty, imperfectly executed, — and this applies espe- 
 cially to the Gipsy chief and his daughter. The lyrics, 
 too, though one or two are of great beauty, do not 
 captivate me like the reflective poetry. It is a great 
 meditative, not a great drainatic work, — its meditation 
 inlaid, as all true meditation must be, with keen and 
 clear observation. Of touches of fine humour of 
 George Eliot's grave kind there are many. Of wise 
 apophthegms there are still more, and of exquisitely 
 tender sentiment and fancy as much as heart could 
 wish. But as a poem it is, I think, less striking than 
 the author's very characteristic and sad poem on "The 
 Legend of Jubal." And as a work of imagination it 
 certainly falls far below her greater prose works. 
 
 The subject of this latter poem, which I make no 
 apology for analysing, not only as a work of art, but 
 as a doctrinal work, — for so great a writer as George 
 19 
 
290 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 Eliot should be studied as a thinker as well as a 
 painter, — is praise of death, and of the fulness of 
 energy which the dark inevitable fate that awaits us 
 has lent to human life while it lasts. Cain is intro- 
 duced flying from the wrath of God, and seeking some 
 land where other and kinder gods ruled, and might 
 remit the stern decree of death. He finds such a land 
 as he supposes, and for hundreds of years his descend- 
 ants grow up around him, without hearing of death, 
 in glad idleness. In some of the sweetest lines of the 
 poem we are told how 
 
 " They laboured gently, as a maid who weaves 
 Her hair in mimic mats, and pauses oft 
 And strokes across her hand the tresses soft. 
 Then peeps to watch the poised butterfly 
 Or little burthened ants that homeward hie. 
 Time was but leisure to their lingering thought, 
 There was no need for haste to finish aught ; 
 But sweet beginnings were repeated still 
 Like infant babblings that no task fulfil ; 
 For love, that loved not change, constrained the simple will." 
 
 Into this world, unconscious of doom, the knowledge 
 of death enters by the accidental death of one of 
 Lamech's children, and Cain is compelled to disclose 
 the fate which remains for all of them by that stern 
 will of Jehovah, which he has hoped, but failed, to 
 escape by his long pilgrimage : — 
 
 "And a new spirit from that hour came o'er 
 The race of Cain ; soft idlesse was no more, 
 But even the sunshine had a heart of care, 
 Smiling with hidden dread, — a mother fair 
 
GEORGE ELIOT. 2gi 
 
 Who folding to her breast a dying child 
 Beams with feigned joy that but makes sadness mild. 
 Death was now lord of life, and at his word 
 Time, vague as air before, new terrors stirred, 
 With measured wing now audibly arose 
 Throbbing through all things to some unseen close. 
 Now glad Content by clutching Haste was torn, 
 And Work grew eager and Device was born. 
 It seemed the light was never loved before. 
 Now each man said, ' 'Twill go and come no more.' 
 No budding branch, no pebble from the brook. 
 No form, no shadow, but new dearness took 
 From the one thought that life must have an end ; 
 And the last parting now began to send 
 Diffusive dread through love and wedded bliss, 
 Thrilling them into finer tenderness. 
 Then Memory disclosed her face divine. 
 That like the calm nocturnal lights doth shine 
 Within the soul and shows the sacred graves. 
 And shows the presence that no sunlight craves, 
 No space, no warmth, but moves among them all ; 
 Gone and yet here, and coming at each call. 
 With ready voice and eyes that understand, 
 And lips that ask a kiss, and dear responsive hand. 
 Thus to Cain's race Death was tear-watered seed 
 Of various life, and action-shaping need." 
 
 The vivifying effect of this knowledge of Death is 
 described especially in relation to the three sons of 
 Lamech, — Jabal, who teaches the dumb animals to 
 love and obey him, — Tubal Cain, who founds the in- 
 dustrial arts, — Jubal, in whom the new sense of lim- 
 itation breeds the spirit of poetry and music : — 
 
 " A yearning for some hidden soul of things. 
 Some outward touch complete on inner springs 
 
292 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 That vaguely moving bred a lonely pain, — 
 A want that did but stronger grow with gain 
 Of all good else, as spirits might be sad 
 For lack of speech to tell us they are glad." 
 
 Jubal invents the lyre and the art of song, and re- 
 ceives unmeasured glory and gratitude from his kin- 
 dred for his gift to them of the new faculty, till he 
 grows weary of hearing the echo of his own words, 
 and resolves to seek some distant land where he can 
 find new harmonies and give up his heart to solitary 
 raptures. He journeys on for ages, sowing music 
 everywhere as he goes, till he reaches the sea, and 
 finds himself so utterly unable to render again the 
 music of that " mighty harmonist " that he touches 
 his lyre no more, and longs again for the land where 
 first he realized the power which is ebbing away from 
 him as his "heart widens with its widening home." 
 He returns to find his name famous, and temples built 
 in his praise ; but also to find a generation which 
 knows him not and which hardly notices the feeble 
 old man who is the true claimant for these divine 
 honours. Jubal feels a passionate desire to identify 
 himself with the object of all this veneration. A 
 germ of selfishness lurks in him still : — 
 
 " What though his song should spread from man's small race 
 Out through the myriad worlds that people space, 
 And make the heavens one joy-diffusing choir? 
 Still, 'mid that vast would throb the keen desire 
 Of this poor aged flesh, this eventide, 
 This twilight soon in darkness to subside. 
 
 \ 
 
GEORGE ELIOT. 293 
 
 This little pulse of self that, having glowed 
 Through thrice three centuries, and divinely strowed 
 The light of music through the vague of sound. 
 Ached sniallness still in good that had no bound." 
 
 In other words, the yearning to be personally recog- 
 nized and identified as the giver of these great gifts 
 to man was the poor alloy still left in Jubal's nature, 
 — an alloy which the mere fear of death had, by the 
 way, apparently stimulated rather than diminished ; 
 for George Eliot expressly tells us that Tubal-Cain at 
 least, and still more, I should think, Jubal, 
 
 ..." wot not of treachery. 
 Or greedy lust, or any ill to be, 
 Save the one ill of sinking into naught, 
 Banished from action and act-shaping thought." 
 
 However, Death itself is to purify Jubal from this in 
 satiable longing for personal recognition as the author 
 of that music and song which the fear of Death had 
 generated in him; for Jubal's claim to be the inventor 
 of the lyre is treated as a profanity, and he is beaten 
 and driven away from the temple built in his honour, 
 to die alone. Dying, a vision comes to him of the 
 "angel of his life and death," who teaches him that 
 his life had been full enough of blessing without his 
 receiving in his own person the honour due to it, — 
 
 that 
 
 '• in thy soul to bear 
 The growth of song, and feel the sweet unrest 
 Of the world's spring-tide in thy conscious breast," 
 
 was itself the greatest of all gifts, far greater than 
 
294 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 any gratitude which might seem to be clue to it. In- 
 deed, it was the very intensity of the light he had 
 radiated which caused his old age to be despised, — as 
 a shrine too mean for a rumour so divine. Nay, it 
 was the final blessing of Death, — so I understand the 
 author to teach, — that, after stimulating such creative 
 activity as Jubal's, it destroyed the "fleshy self" 
 with all its egotisms, and left him only an impersonal 
 immortality in that human gladness which, in its re- 
 joicings, does not recognize the personal origin of its 
 joys: — 
 
 " This was thy lot, to feel, create, bestow, 
 And that immeasurable life to know 
 From which the fleshy self falls shrivelled, dead, 
 A seed primeval that has forests bred. 
 It is the glory of the heritage 
 Thy life has left, that makes thy outcast age ; 
 Thy limbs shall lie, dark, tomb! ess on the sod, 
 Because thou shinest in man's soul a god, 
 Who found and gave new passion and new joy. 
 That naught but earth's destruction can destroy. 
 Thy gifts to give was thine of men alone ; 
 'Twas but in giving that thou could'st atone 
 For too much wealth amid their poverty." 
 
 And with these warnings in his ears Jubal is left at the 
 close of this grand but melancholy legend, 
 
 "Quitting mortality, a quenched sun- wave, 
 The All-creating Presence for his grave." 
 
 Whether the poetic fonii is or is not generally ade- 
 quate to the thought, at all events the thought itself is 
 gravely passionate, expressing a strange depth of grat- 
 
 I 
 
 I 
 
GEORGE ELIOT. 295 
 
 itude for the power of Death to stimulate energy and 
 give a new keenness of emotion to the race ; and 
 finally for Death's power to rob the individual soul 
 of the one selfish husk which clings to all such 
 energy, however disinterested, — the craving for perso- 
 nal recognition. 
 
 So I understand the teaching of this very fine le- 
 gend, — and, in parts at least, fine poem, — though the 
 deepest part of the teaching, the part of it most likely 
 to strike the imagination and affect the heart of its 
 readers, seems to me profoundly false. I have noted 
 the apparent contradiction implied in praising Death 
 for the stimulus it gives to the generally beneficent 
 perhaps, but certainly egotistic desire for immortal 
 fame, and yet praising it also for separating the 
 shrivelled, dead husk of the "fleshly self" from the 
 immeasurable life it has engendered in generations to 
 come. 
 
 But there is a deeper vice still in the doctrine that 
 Dn^ath extinguishes that selfish egotism which, as George 
 Eliot so finely says, "ached smallness still in good that 
 has no bound." To extinguish the /(?Z£/,?r of selfish 
 feeling is not really a victory over selfish feeling ; 
 Jubal dies before he has gained any such victory. If 
 he had gained the victory, there would have been no 
 praise due to Death, by which he could not have 
 gained it. To be willing to submit to annihilation 
 for the infinite good of others might be a noble and 
 disinterested attitude of mind, but then such willing- 
 ness is not the gift of Death, but of Life, and he who 
 has it can gain nothing by Death, while the universe 
 

 2gb GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 loses by it the very flower of its life. The death of 
 the corn of wheat which, "except it die, abideth 
 alone, but if it die bringeth forth much fruit," is not 
 the death of annihilation, but of transfiguration ; and 
 the transfiguration of the highest thing man can know, 
 personal love, involves the retention and development 
 of that highest element, the personality, not its de- 
 gradation and extinction. If Jubal, instead of being 
 quenched like "a sun-wave" in the ^^ grave''' of an 
 "All-creating Presence," — what a paradox is there ! 
 — had learnt to renounce the passionate desire to be 
 identified with his own gift to mankind, he would 
 have ceased to " ache smallness still in good that had 
 no bound," in a far higher and truer sense than any 
 in which that can be asserted of a "quenched sun- 
 wave" which has ceased to be at all. The doctrine 
 of this poem seems to me to come to this : either that 
 Death creates by making us smart under the con- 
 sciousness of limitation, by stinging self-love into 
 haste and energy, or, that purely disinterested crea- 
 tion — creation, without the thirst for personal recog- 
 nition — is not for personal beings like men at all, but 
 the privilege only of unconscious and impersonal life. 
 But what we do actually experience, in however im- 
 perfect a degree, cannot be impossible to us, — and the 
 creative power of purely disinterested love has no 
 fascination, indeed, strictly speaking, no meaning, for 
 us, if we drop the thought of the personal centre from 
 which it flows. "Love" implies the self-surrender 
 of a conscious being to the well-being of others. An 
 
 i 
 
GEORGE ELIOT. 297 
 
 imconscious stream of beneficent energy is in no sense 
 "love," and excites none of the moral awe which the 
 display of any divine love excites. 
 
 Moreover, even the true and undeniable effect of 
 death in stimulating energy, and making men, by sug- 
 gesting loss, conscious of the love which otherwise 
 they might hardly know, is more or less conditional on 
 death's being believed to be not final. A man with 
 death near at hand will seldom undertake any task 
 unconnected with the life into which he believes him- 
 self about to plunge, because it seems hardly worth 
 while. Those who lose their belief in immortality 
 too often sink under the moral paralysis of a creed 
 which seems to leave so little that it is worth while to 
 attempt. Especially, the loss of faith in immortality 
 usually saps the deepest and tenderest affections of 
 human nature, instead of giving them, as George 
 Eliot intimates, a new tenderness. It is clear that the 
 apprehension of loss cannot create feeling ; — it can 
 and does only bring home to the heart the depth of 
 feeling already cherished there. But the belief in a 
 final death does much more than this : it undermines 
 our respect for the intrinsic worth of a nature so 
 ephemeral, and makes it seem more reasonable, — 
 perhaps I should say makes it really more reasonable, 
 — to contract our love into better keeping with the 
 short minutes during which alone it can be enter- 
 tained. 
 
 I have analyzed this poem, and even criticised its 
 doctrine at some length, because it is one of the few 
 direct confessions of faith which the great critic I am 
 
298 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 criticising has put on record, though indications of 
 similar views are freely scattered through her works ; 
 and it is impossible to understand so deep and so 
 thoroughly intellectual a painter without knowing her 
 deepest thoughts and measuring them to some extent 
 by one's own. To me, indeed, George Eliot's scepti- 
 cism seems one of the greatest of the limitations on 
 her genius. One rises from the study of her works, 
 profoundly impressed with their thoroughness, their 
 depth, their rich colouring, their marvellous humour, 
 their laborious conscientiousness, their noble ethical 
 standard, and their weariness, — the weariness of a 
 great speculative intellect which can find no true 
 spring of elasticity, and in vain forces from herself a 
 certain amount of enthusiasm for optimist views of that 
 "wide, grey, lampless, deep, unpeopled world," from 
 which Shelley makes Beatrice Cenci recoil in horror. 
 The only flaw I can see in George Eliot's intellect 
 consists in her attempts to conform her mind cheerfully 
 to facts against which she inwardly rebels. In "The 
 Mill on the Floss " she spoilt her story by endeavouring 
 to paint the physiological attraction of a certain kind 
 of animal character for a nature far above it, as if it 
 were more nearly irresistible than in fact I think it is, 
 — and, as far as I can see, only because she had ar- 
 rived at a conviction that, as physiological attractions 
 exert a great influence in human life, realists should 
 put a certain amount of force on their own dislike to 
 recognize them fully; and, in the poem I have just 
 criticised, George Eliot seems to me to make an ex- 
 
GEORGE ELIOT. 299 
 
 traordinary blunder for so fine and subtle an intellect, 
 in not recognizing clearly that Death, if it could really 
 quench the possibility of selfish feeling, would in no 
 way carry on and complete the triumph of true dis- 
 interestedness, but, on the contrary, would finally pre- 
 vent that triumph. But, in truth, George Eliot was 
 here making the best of a bad business, — trying to dis- 
 cover virtues in inevitable destiny because it is inev- 
 itable. It would have been more like her, I think, to 
 admit at once that while the expectation of Death 
 does actually stimulate finite and selfish men to energy, 
 the hope by which it thus stimulates them is empty air, 
 if Death be all it seems. The laborious enthusiasm 
 in the "Legend of Jubal " seems to me profound 
 melancholy in disguise, — melancholy striving for a 
 calm and serenity it does not feel. 
 
 George Eliot, with a faith like that of her own 
 "Dinah," would, to my mind, be one of the greatest 
 intellectual personages the world had ever seen. Her 
 imagination would gain that vivacity and spring the 
 absence of which is its only artistic defect ; her noble 
 ethical conceptions would win certainty and grandeur ; 
 her singularly just and impartial judgment would lose 
 the tinge of gloom which now seems always to pervade 
 it; and her poetic feelings would be no longer weighed 
 down by the superincumbent mass of a body of scepti- 
 cal thought with which they struggle for the mastery 
 in vain. Few minds at once so speculative and so 
 creative have ever put their mark on literature. If 
 she cannot paint the glow of human enterprise like 
 Scott, or sketch with the easy rapidity of Fielding, she 
 
300 
 
 GEORGE ELIOT. 
 
 can do what neither of them could do — see and ex- 
 plain the relation of the broadest and commonest life 
 to the deepest springs of philosophy and science. 
 With a quicker pulse of life, with a richer, happier 
 faith, I hardly see the limit to her power. 
 
 I 
 
VI. 
 THE POETRY OF MATTHEAV ARNOLD. 
 
 HAZLITT, writing of one of Wordsworth's latest 
 and more classical poems, "Laodamia," de- 
 scribes it as having "the sweetness, the gravity, the 
 strength, the beauty, and the languor of death, — 
 calm contemplation and majestic pains." There also 
 we have, in one of Hazlitt's terse and sententious 
 criticisms, the aroma of the finest poems of Words- 
 worth's greatest poetical disciple — one, too, who is 
 the disciple of Wordsworth, emphatically in his later 
 rather than in his earlier phase ; Wordsworth schooled 
 into a grace and majesty not wholly meditative, but 
 in part, at least, critical ; Wordsworth the conscious 
 artist as well as poet ; not Wordsworth the rugged 
 rhapsodist of spiritual simplicity and natural joy. 
 "The sweetness, the gravity, the strength, the beauty, 
 and the languor of death,— calm contemplation and 
 majestic pains," — all these may be found in the most 
 characteristic and most touching of Mr. Arnold's 
 
 301 
 
302 THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD. 
 
 poems; in the melancholy with which the sick King 
 of Bokhara broods over the fate of the wretch whom 
 his pity and power could not save from the expiation 
 he himself courted ; in the gloomy resentment of 
 Mycerinus against the unjust gods who cut short his 
 effort to reign justly over his people ; in the despair 
 of Empedocles on Etna at his failure to solve the 
 riddle of the painful earth — his weariness of "the de- 
 vouring flame of thought," the naked, eternally restless 
 mind whose thirst he could not slake : in those de- 
 jected lines written by a death-bed, in which Mr. Ar- 
 nold contrasts the hopes of youth with what he deems 
 the highest gain of manhood, "calm;" in the noble 
 sonnet which commemorates Sophocles as one whom 
 "business could not make dull nor passion wild;" 
 in the fine "Memorial Verses," wherein he praises 
 Wordsworth for assuaging that dim trouble of human- 
 ity which Goethe could only dissect and describe ; in 
 the melodious sadness of the personal retrospects in 
 "Resignation," "A Southern Night," and " Self- 
 Dependence;" in the large concessions to Heine's 
 satiric genius, made in the verses composed at his 
 tomb at Montmartre ; in the consciously hopeless 
 cravings of "The Scholar Gipsy" and "Thyrsis," 
 after a reconciliation between the intellect of man 
 and the magic of Nature ; and most characteristically 
 of all, in the willing half-sympathy given by Mr. Ar- 
 nold to those ascetics of the Grande Chartreuse, whom 
 his intellect condemns, and in the even deeper enthu- 
 siasm with which he addresses, in the midst of melan- 
 choly Alpine solitudes, that modern refugee from a 
 
 I 
 
THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD. 303 
 
 sick world, the author of "Obermann," delineates the 
 intellectual weakness and dejection of the age, and 
 feebly though poetically shadows forth his own hope- 
 less hope of a remedy. In all these poems alike, and 
 many others which we have not space to enumerate — 
 in all, indeed, in which Mr. Arnold's genius really 
 gains a voice — there is "the sweetness, gravity, 
 strength, beauty, and the languor of death," blended 
 in the spirit of a calm contemplativeness which takes 
 all the edge off anguish and makes the poet's pains 
 "majestic;" for Mr. Arnold's poems are one long 
 variation on a single theme, the divorce between the 
 soul and the intellect, and the depth of spiritual regret 
 and yearning which that divorce produces. Yet there 
 is a didactic keenness with the languor, an eagerness 
 of purpose with the despondency, which give half the 
 individual flavour to his lyrics. A note of confidence 
 lends authority to his scepticism ; the tone of his sad- 
 ness is self-contained, sure, and even imperious, in- 
 stead of showing the ordinary relaxation of loss ; and 
 the reader of his poetry is apt to rise from it with the 
 same curious questioning in his mind which Mr. Ar- 
 nold has put into the mouth of Nature in the verses 
 called " Morality," — a questioning after the origin of 
 "that severe, that earnest air," which breathes through 
 poetry of all but hopeless yearning and all but unmixed 
 regret. 
 
 No doubt one kind of answer to this question is that 
 Mr. Arnold has inherited from the great teacher of 
 Rugby and historian of the Punic War the lofty di- 
 dactic impulse which marks all his prose and poetry 
 
^ 
 
 304 THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD. 
 
 alike, although the substance of the lessons he is so 
 eager to give has sadly dwindled in the descent from 
 father to son. But that is but one sort of answer, 
 which explains rather the spring from which he derives 
 the strain in his temperament which has impressed a 
 certain nervous depth and moral "distinction" upon 
 poetry of which the drift is uniformly a realistic mel- 
 ancholy, than the source from which he has fed the 
 flame of his genius and justified the calm egotism of 
 its literary rescripts. Intellectually, Mr. Arnold's de- 
 scent, as he himself is always foremost to acknowledge, 
 is to be derived in almost equal degree from Goethe 
 the critic and artist, and from Wordsworth the poet; 
 both of them, observe, marked by the same character 
 of clear, self-contained, thoughtful, heroic egotism. 
 We say Goethe the critic and artist — for we recog- 
 nise far less in Goethe's deepest and most perfect vein 
 of poetry that conscious self-culture and that lucidity 
 of enthusiastic self-study which lend the charm to his 
 conversations, his novels, and his criticisms. And 
 Mr. Arnold, even in his capacity of poet — we are not 
 about to touch his essays, except so far as they throw a 
 light on his poetry — is always aiming at self-culture, 
 and singing, not songs of involuntary melody, but of 
 carefully-attuned aspiration or regret. From both 
 Goethe and Wordsworth, again, he has learned to 
 treat his own individuality with a certain exaltation 
 of touch, an air of Olympian dignity and grace, which 
 lends the fascination of "the grand style" to lyrics 
 so sad that they might otherwise trail upon the earth 
 too slack and limp a growth. Mr. Arnold has always 
 
THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD. 305 
 
 impressed on his poems that air of aristocratic select- 
 ness and conscious exclusiveness which Goethe, even 
 after being the popular poet of Germany, claimed for 
 his own writings. Eckermann tells how, going to 
 dine with Goethe one day in 1828, and finding him 
 dressed in "the black frock coat and star in which I 
 (Eckermann) always liked best to see him," the stately 
 old man took him aside into the window, apart from 
 the rest of the dinner company, only to make the 
 following confidence : — 
 
 " Dear child, he said, I will confide something to you, which 
 will at once give you a lift over many puzzles, and which may be 
 an assistance to you throughout your whole life. My writings 
 cannot become popular ; any one who thinks they can, and strives 
 to make them so, is in error. They are not written for the masses, 
 but only for individual men who themselves desire and seek some- 
 thing analogous, and who ai'e pursuing similar lines of thought." 
 
 We can well imagine Mr. Arnold some twenty years 
 hence, dressed with similar care and wearing the order 
 conferred upon him the other day by the king of Italy 
 for his services to the duke of Genoa, making a pre- 
 cisely similar confidence to some "young lion of the 
 Daily Telegraph'" engaged in the study of his writ- 
 ings, and disturbed at finding that his poems secure 
 so much less recognition from the people than those 
 of Tennyson or Morris. And he would be far more 
 right than Goethe, for Goethe's songs are popular in 
 their very essence ; it is only those of his writings in 
 which his cool, reflective spirit has found expression, 
 like "Tasso," or "Iphigenia," or " Wilhelm Meis- 
 20 
 
306 THE POE TR V OF MA TTHE W ARNOLD. 
 
 ter," or "Faust," to which his ingenuous confidence 
 to Eckermann can properly apply. But a similar con- 
 fession would apply to a// Mr. Arnold's poems, which 
 draw their life entirely from the proud self-conscious 
 zone of modern experience, and have scarce given 
 forth one single note of popular grief or joy. It 
 would apply, too, for a different reason, to almost all 
 Wordsworth's poems, not because Wordsworth be- 
 longed to the aristocratic school of modern culture — 
 quite the reverse ; but because he steeped himself in 
 the rapture of a meditative solitude which puts him at 
 a distance from all mankind, and makes him loom 
 large, as it were, out of the magnifying folds of one 
 of his own mountain mists. 
 
 But Mr. Arnold, in borrowing from Goethe the 
 artist and critic, and from Wordsworth the poet, 
 something of what we have called their style of clear 
 heroic egotism, has not borrowed from either of them 
 the characteristic motive and individuality which in 
 them justifies that style. Had he done so he could 
 not be the original poet he is. He is neither the poet 
 of mere self-culture, nor the solitary interpreter of 
 Nature, but something between the two ; a careful 
 student and graphic as well as delicate expositor of 
 the spiritual pangs and restlessness of this age on the 
 one hand, and of the refreshments and anodynes to be 
 derived from Nature on the other. And he is more 
 or less conscious, moreover, in spite of some youthful 
 theories of the true function of poetry which he has 
 had to disregard, that it is in the elaborate delineation 
 of his own poetic individuality that these distresses 
 
THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD. 307 
 
 and these consolations receive their reconciliation and 
 their best chance of being practically combined. He 
 feels that his poetic personality has a certain grandeur 
 and meaning in it ; that while he has something of 
 Goethe's calm, critical eye for human life and its con- 
 fusions, he has also something of the meditative thirst 
 and meditative joy of Wordsworth ; and that the com- 
 bination of these two poetic qualifications gives him 
 a distinctive power of his own. " Non me tua tur- 
 bida terrent dicta," he said once in his majestic way 
 to his critics, " Dii me terrent et Jupiter hostis." 
 There is no better key to his true poetical aims than 
 the very characteristic poem of his own, addressed in 
 November, 1849, to the author of "Obermann:" — 
 
 " Yet of the spirits who have reign' d 
 In this our troubled day, 
 I know but two, who have attain' d, 
 Save thee, to see their way. 
 
 " By England's lakes, in grey old age, 
 His quiet home one keeps ; 
 And one, the strong, much-toiling sage, 
 In German Weimar sleeps. 
 
 *' But Wordsworth's eyes avert their ken 
 From half of human fate ; 
 And Goethe's course few sons of men 
 May think to emulate. 
 
 " For he pursued a lonely road. 
 His eyes on Nature's plan ; 
 Neither made man too much a God, 
 Nor God too much a man. 
 
308 THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD. 
 
 " Strong was he, with a spirit free 
 From mists, and sane, and clear ; 
 Clearer, how much ! than ours— yet we 
 
 Have a worse course to steer. 
 * * * * * 
 
 " But we brought forth and rear'd in houi's 
 Of change, alarm, surprise, 
 What shelter to grow ripe is ours? 
 
 What leisure to grow wise ? 
 ***** 
 " Too fast we live, too much are tried, 
 
 Too harass' d, to attain 
 ■ Wordsworth's sweet cairn, or Goethe's wide 
 And luminous view to gain." 
 
 Nevertheless, that is precisely the combination 
 which Mr. Arnold has tried to attain for himself, 
 and is ambitious of illustrating, through himself, for 
 others. He tries to combine a spirit "free from 
 mists, and sane, and clear," with Wordsworth's 
 ''sweet calm" and joy in the freshness of Nature. 
 And if he has in any degree succeeded, he knows 
 that the success will best be realized, as those great 
 masters' greater successes were realized, in a delinea- 
 tion of his own poetic individuality. Accordingly, it 
 is really self-delineation of a kind like to theirs, though 
 self-delineation of aims and aspirations about midway 
 between theirs, which gives the charm to his poems. 
 Thus in all his poetical success, it is easy to distinguish 
 two distinct strands : first, the clear recognition (with 
 Goethe) of our spiritual unrest, and the manful effort 
 to control it ; next, the clear recognition (with Words- 
 worth) of the balm to be found in sincere communion 
 
THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD. 309 
 
 with Nature. To the treatment of both these elements 
 again he has given a certain freshness and individual- 
 ity of his own. 
 
 We will first indicate generally his treatment of the 
 former point. His characteristic effort on this side 
 has been to introduce into a delineation, at once con- 
 sistent and various in its aspects, of the intellectual 
 difficulties, hesitations, and distresses of cultivated 
 minds in the nineteenth century, a vein of imperious 
 serenity — what he himself calls "sanity" of treat- 
 ment — which may stimulate the mind to bear the pain 
 of constantly disappointed hope. Yet, oddly enough, 
 his early theory of poetry would have restrained him 
 from giving us such a picture of moral and intellectual 
 sufferings at all; and he even suppressed a poem, 
 " Empedocles on Etna," which had already gained a 
 certain reputation, and which, beneath a thin disguise 
 of antiquity, discussed half the religious difficulties 
 of modern days, simply because he declared it poet- 
 ically faulty to choose a situation in which "every- 
 thing is to be endured, nothing to be done." It was 
 a condemnation of every successful poem he has writ- 
 ten, emphatically so of the long expositions of our 
 modern spiritual paralysis and fever in the two poems 
 to the author of "Obermann," of the lines at Heine's 
 grave, of the stanzas at the Grand Chartreuse; indeed, 
 we may say, of all his poems except the classic play 
 "Merope," which probably Mr. Arnold himself now 
 regards as a failure, since he does not include it in his 
 collected poems. " Empedocles on Etna," according 
 to Mr. Arnold in his preface to the edition of 1853, 
 
3IO THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD. 
 
 was poetically faulty because it was a picture of "a 
 continuous state of mental distress, unrelieved by in- 
 cident or hope," which is quite true, and not less true 
 of almost all his other poems. But when he said that 
 it was also unrelieved by resistance, he was unjust to 
 himself. What alone renders all this delineation of 
 moral distress and spiritual bewilderment which per- 
 vades this poem endurable is that there is a steady 
 current of resistance, a uniform " sanity " of self-con- 
 trol in the treatment of the painful symptoms so subtly 
 described. Empedocles, in the course of his medita- 
 tions on suicide on the slopes of Etna, no doubt dwells 
 much on the feeble and false religious philosophy of 
 the time, the credulous self-flatteries of human sophis- 
 try, and the sharp antagonism between clear self- 
 knowledge and the superstitions of the age ; but he 
 also makes a vigorous appeal to the manliness, forti- 
 tude, and sobriety of spirit with which all the disap- 
 pointments and failures of humanity ought to be met, 
 asserts that it is the part of a man of true wisdom to 
 curb immoderate desires, to bow to the might of forces 
 he cannot control, and, while nursing no "extravagant 
 hope," to yield to no despair. And when, after thus 
 completely justifying his own "sanity of soul," he 
 confesses himself unable to act as he approves, and 
 leaps into the fiery crater, the reader feels that the 
 blunder of the poet has not been in painting the suf- 
 fering too highly — for it is not highly coloured — but 
 in selecting for the sufferer a man of too low a cou- 
 rage, and in making his acts a foil to his thoughts. So 
 far from there being no resistance, no breakwater op- 
 
 I 
 
THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD. 3II 
 
 posed to the flowing tides of mental suffering, Emped- 
 ocles creates the sole interest of the poem by his 
 manly swimming against the stream of despondency, 
 to which later he suddenly abandons himself without 
 sufficient cause assigned. It is like the story of the 
 man who said "I go not," and then went, without 
 giving any glimpse of the reason for his change of 
 mind — a story which, without any attempt to fill in 
 the missing link, would certainly not be a sufficient 
 subject for a poem. It seems to us striking enough 
 that the very charm of Mr. Arnold's method in deal- 
 ing with this hectic fever of the modern intellect, — 
 for Empedocles, if a true ancient, is certainly a still 
 truer modern in his argument, — is due to his own 
 inconsistency ; is due, that is, to the fact that when 
 his subject required him to paint and justify the last 
 stages of moral despondency — and his intellectual 
 view was sceptical enough to be in sympathy with 
 his subject — he could not help expending his chief 
 strength in cutting away the moral ground from under 
 his hero's feet, by insisting that the well-spring of 
 despair was, after all, not in the hostility of Nature 
 or of human circumstances, but in the licence of im- 
 moderate desires and of insatiable self-will. And it 
 is so throughout his poems. He cannot paint the rest- 
 lessness of the soul — though he paints it vividly and 
 well — without painting also the attitude of resistance 
 to it, without giving the impression of a head held 
 high above it, a nature that fixes the limits beyond 
 which the corrosion of distrust and doubt shall not 
 go, a deep speculative melancholy kept at bay, not by 
 
3 1 2 THE FOE TR Y OF MA TTIIE W ARNOLD. 
 
 faith, but by a kind of domineering temperance ol 
 nature. This is the refrain of almost all his poems. 
 He yields much to this melancholy — intellectually, we 
 should say, almost everything — but morally, he bids 
 it keep its distance, and forbids it to engulph him. 
 
 It is this singular equipoise between the doubts that 
 devour, and the intrepid sobriety that excites him to 
 resistance, which gives the peculiar tone to Mr. Ar- 
 nold's poems. He has not the impulse or abandon 
 of nature for a pure lyric melancholy, such as Shelley 
 could pour forth in words that almost make the heart 
 weep, as, for instance, in the "Lines Written in De- 
 jection in Naples." Again, Mr. Arnold has nothing 
 of the proud faith that conquers melancholy and that 
 gives to the poems of Wordsworth their tone of rap- 
 ture. Yet he hits a wonderful middle note between 
 the two. The "lyrical cry," as he himself has finely 
 designated the voice in which the true poetic exalta- 
 tion of feeling expresses itself, is to be found in a 
 multitude of places in his poems; but in him it neither 
 utters the dejection of the wounded spirit nor the joy 
 of the victorious spirit, but rather the calm of a sted- 
 fast equanimity in conflict with an unconquerable and 
 yet also unconquering destiny — a firm mind without 
 either deep shadows of despair or high lights of faith, 
 only the lucid dusk of an intellectual twilight. Per- 
 haps there is no more characteristic specimen of the 
 exact note of Mr. Arnold's "lyrical cry" than the 
 close of the fine poem called "Resignation:" — 
 
 " Enough, we live ! — and if a life, 
 With large results so little rife, 
 
 i 
 
THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD. 313 
 
 Though bearable, seem hardly worth 
 
 This pomp of worlds, this pain of birth; 
 
 Yet, Fausta ! the mute turf we tread, 
 
 The solemn hills around us spread, 
 
 This stream which falls incessantly, 
 
 The strange-scrawl' d rocks,' the lonely sky. 
 
 If I might lend their life a voice, 
 
 Seem to bear rather than rejoice. 
 
 And even could the intemperate prayer 
 
 Man iterates, while these forbear. 
 
 For movement, for an ampler sphere, 
 
 Pierce Fate's impenetrable ear, 
 
 Not milder is the general lot 
 
 Because our spirits have forgot, 
 
 In action's dizzying eddy whirl'd, 
 
 The something that infects the world." 
 
 Such is the general nature of the human strand in 
 Mr. Arnold's poetry, the restless spiritual melancholy 
 which he pictures, resists, and condemns. But there 
 is another permanent strand in it, that due partly to 
 his love for Wordsworth and partly to his love for 
 Nature, of whom Wordsworth was the greatest of 
 modern priests. Mr. Arnold finds in the beauty and 
 sublimity of natural scenes the best assuagement of 
 intellectual unrest and moral perplexities. Nature is 
 his balm for every woe. He does not find in her, as 
 Wordsworth did, the key to any of life's mysteries, 
 or the source of hope, but only the best kind of dis- 
 traction, which, while it does not relax but rather 
 elevates the tone of the spirit, and even furnishes it 
 with a certain number of symbols for its thought and 
 emotion, also lightens the burden of the mystery by 
 
314 THE POETRY OE MATTHEW ARNOLD. 
 
 its cooling and refreshing influence. The " languor 
 of death/' of which Hazlitt speaks, as characterising 
 "Laodamia," and of which we have said that it also 
 characterises Mr. Arnold's poetry, drives him to Na- 
 ture for relief; and though it generally haunts him 
 even under Nature's sweetest spell, yet you can see 
 that he finds the relief, that the languor is less and 
 the pulse stronger while he dwells on Nature's life. 
 And it is this sense of pure refreshment in Nature, 
 this ease of mind she partially brings him, this calm 
 amid feverish strife, this dew after hot thought, that 
 determines the style of his studies of Nature. His 
 poetry of this kind is the sweetest, the most tranquil- 
 lizing, the most quieting of its sort to be found in 
 English literature. In Wordsworth, Nature is the oc- 
 casion, but his own mind always the object, of thought, 
 whether he exercises amidst the "host of golden daf- 
 fodils" "that inward eye tliat is the bliss of solitude," 
 or finds in the teaching of a daisy the true medicine 
 for discontent. You cannot plunge yourself in the 
 poetry of Wordsworth without being mentally braced 
 and refreshed ; but then it takes an effort to enter 
 into a world so unique, "so solemn and serene," and so 
 far removed from that of ordinary life. Throw off 
 the yoke of the world sufficiently to steep yourself in 
 Wordsworth, and no doubt the refreshment is more 
 complete and the flow of new strength more full than 
 you can expect from the verse of Mr. Arnold ; for 
 Mr. Arnold's poetry of Nature is not like Words- 
 worth's, a newly-created meditative universe, distilled 
 by the poet's mind out of Nature; it is a pale tran- 
 
'^^^^H- 
 
 THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD. 315 
 
 script of Nature, painted in the clear, dewy water- 
 colours of tranquil memory. What he says of his 
 own debt to Wordsworth would, if it did not imply a 
 more vivifying and animating influence than Mr. Ar- 
 nold's poetry ever really exerts, be more nearly ap- 
 plicable to most men's debt to him : — 
 
 " He laid us as we lay at birth, 
 On the cool flowery lap of earth ; 
 Smiles broke from us, and we had ease. 
 The hills were round us, and the breeze 
 Went o'er the sun-lit fields again ; 
 Our foreheads felt the wind and rain. 
 Our youth returned ; for there was shed 
 On spirits that had long been dead — 
 Spirits dried up and closely furl'd — 
 The freshness of the early world." 
 
 Now that does not strike us as by any means an accu- 
 rate description of the influence of Wordsworth's 
 poetry on the mind. Wordsworth does not restore 
 us to the ease and freshness of our youth, he rather 
 baptizes us in his own strong and unique spirit. He 
 has a spell of his own, no doubt a cooling and re- 
 freshing one, but also a powerful and transforming one. 
 It is due to the strong, keen, meditative simplicity of 
 a mind that is as full of rapture as it is full of insight. 
 It is Wordsworth himself far more than the lark he 
 watched, whose "canopy of glorious light" snatches 
 us out of ourselves, and from whom we learn to be 
 true "to the kindred points of heaven and home." 
 It is Wordsworth himself far more than the cuckoo to 
 which he listened " till he did beget that golden time 
 
3l6 THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD. 
 
 again," who tells us the old enchanting tale "of vis- 
 ionary hours." The strength and freshness Words- 
 worth gives us is not the strength and freshness of 
 childhood or youth, but the strength and freshness of 
 a poet on whom " the power of hills" had rested till 
 he lived in a purer world than ours. When Words- 
 worth says of the solitary reaper,— 
 
 " Alone she cuts and binds the grain, 
 And sings a melancholy strain. 
 Oh listen ! for the vale profound 
 Is overflowing with the sound!" 
 
 — the charm is far less in the song, of which he gives 
 so thrilling a conception, than in those grateful " im- 
 pulses of deeper birth" springing out of his own 
 heart, of which he tells us a still more thrilling story. 
 Wordsworth is the last poet of whom we should say 
 that he makes us children again. He gives us a new 
 youth, not the old — a youth of deeper serenity, and 
 of a far more truly spiritual joy. But for that very 
 reason, it takes an effort to plunge into him ; the 
 change from the busy and crowded levels of human 
 life to his poetry is too great and sudden to be easily 
 taken ; it requires a regeneration of our senses as well 
 as a change of scene. But with Mr. Arnold it is dif- 
 ferent. He does not create for us a new world out of 
 the suggestions and influences of Nature, he only makes 
 us feel keenly the beauty and delicacy of the spectacle 
 which Nature, as she is in her paler and more subdued 
 moods, presents to us, and her strange power of rest- 
 ing and refreshing the mind wearied by small human 
 responsibilities. His eye is always on the object itself, 
 
THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD. 317 
 
 not on the spiritual lessons it discloses. And he paints 
 in the most restful way. He never concentrates, like 
 Tennyson, so that the imagination is at some pain to 
 follow all the touches crowded into little space ; he 
 never disembodies, like Shelley, till it becomes an 
 effort to apprehend essences so rare ; it is seldom that 
 he paints, like Byron, with a brush dipped as deeply 
 in the glowing passions of his own heart as in the 
 colours of the external world. He paints Nature, like 
 the author of " The Elegy in a Country Churchyard," 
 with the cool liquid, rather weary tone of one who 
 comes to the scenery to take a heart from it, instead 
 of giving the heart to it ; but he does it with infinitely 
 more of the modern tenderness and insight for Nature 
 than Gray possessed, and with far more flowing and 
 continuous descriptive power — far less of that polished 
 mosaic-work manner which makes Gray's verses read 
 as if he had forgotten most of the preceding links 
 before completing and enamelling the next link in the 
 chain. In Mr. Arnold's studies of Nature you see 
 the quiet external scene with exquisite lucidity, but 
 you see also, instead of a mirror of laborious and 
 almost painful elaboration, as you do in Gray, a tran- 
 quillized spirit, which reflects like a clear lake the 
 features of the scene. Take, for example, this picture 
 of a wet and stormy English spring and a soft deep 
 English summer, from the lovely poem "Thyrsis," 
 written in commemoration of Mr. Arnold's early 
 friend, Arthur Hugh Clough : — 
 
 " So, some tempestuous morn in early June, 
 When the year's primal burst of bloom is o'er, 
 
3l8 THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARAOLD. 
 
 Before the roses and the longest day — 
 
 When garden walks and all the grassy floor 
 
 With blossoms, red and white, of fallen May 
 
 And chestnut flowers are strewn— 
 
 So have I heard the cuckoo's parting cry, 
 
 From the wet field, through the vext garden trees 
 
 Come, with the volleying rain and tossing breeze : 
 
 The bloom is gone and with the bloom go 1 1 
 
 " Too quick despairer, wherefore wilt thou go? 
 Soon will the high Midsummer pomps come on, 
 Soon will the musk carnations break and swell, 
 Soon shall we have gold-dusted snapdragon, 
 Sweet-William with his homely cottage-smell, 
 And stocks in fragrant blow ; 
 Roses that down the alleys shine afar, 
 And open, jasmine-mufHed lattices, 
 And groups under the dreaming garden trees, 
 And the full moon and the white evening star." 
 
 It would be impossible to give with greater ease as 
 well as delicacy a true picture of these scenes, and 
 with it the subtle flavour of a real rest of spirit in 
 them. The "volleying" rain, the "tossing" breeze, 
 the "vext" garden trees, and the grass strewn with 
 shed May and chestnut blossoms call up the very life 
 of a squally spring day in England, as do the " high 
 Midsummer pomps," the "roses that down the alleys 
 shine afar," the "open, jasmine-muffled lattices," the 
 "groups under the dreaming garden trees," and the 
 white moon and star, the very life of an English mid- 
 summer night ; and yet the whole has a tinge of care- 
 ful tenderness and peace that tells you of the refresh- 
 ment of these images to the writer. The "vext gar- 
 
 1 
 
THE FOE TR Y OF MA TTHE W ARNOLD. 3 1 9 
 
 den trees" could have been spoken of as " vext " 
 only by one who had a true delight in their air of 
 tranquillity, just as they could have been described as 
 "dreaming" in the midsummer moonlight only by 
 one who had the deepest feeling for this visionary 
 beauty of contrast between the white light streaming 
 over them and the black shade beneath. Again, 
 " roses that down the alleys shine afar," is a line suf- 
 ficiently betraying how deeply the fair perspective of 
 an English garden is engraved on the poet's imagina- 
 tion, while the reproaches lavished on the "too quick 
 despairer " for the hasty neglect of so rich a feast of 
 beauty, strikes the key-note to the feeling of the 
 whole. Nor is this passage in any sense a peculiar 
 instance of Mr. Arnold's flowing, lucid, and tender 
 mode of painting Nature. In all his descriptive pas- 
 sages — and they are many and beautiful — it is the 
 same. He is never buoyant and bright indeed, but 
 the scene is always drawn with a gentle ease and 
 grace, suggesting that it springs up in the poet's im- 
 agination with as rapid and natural a growth as the 
 strokes which delineate it before your eyes, for he 
 makes no heavy draft upon your imaginative power to 
 follow him ; you seem to be sharing with him the very 
 vision which he paints ; and as to moral effect, the 
 impressions that these pictures make is something be- 
 tween wistful enjoyment, quiet yearning, and regretful 
 peace ; it is always one of rest, but always of a rest 
 that is not fully satisfying — the rest of which the poet 
 himself says, " Calm's not life's crown, though calm 
 is well." And it is characteristic of Mr. Arnold, 
 
320 THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD. 
 
 that in closing his larger poems, even when they are 
 poems of narrative, he is very fond of ending with 
 a passage of purely naturalistic description which 
 shadows forth something more than it actually paints, 
 and yet leaves the field of suggestion absolutely to 
 the reader's own fancy. Thus, after painting the 
 fatal conflict between Sohrab and Rustum, in which 
 the famous old warrior Rustum gives the death-wound 
 to his own son, in ignorance that he is his son, Mr. 
 Arnold, after giving us the tender farewell of Sohrab 
 to his father when the discovery is made, concludes 
 with this most beautiful passage, in which the accom- 
 plished geographer turns his half-scientific, half-poet- 
 ical pleasure in tracing the course of a great river to 
 the purpose of providing a sort of poetical anodyne 
 for the pain which the tragic ending has, or ought to 
 have, given : — 
 
 " But the majestic ri.ver floated on, 
 Out of the mist and hum of that low land, 
 Into the fi-osty starlight, and there moved, 
 Rejoicing, through the hush'd Chorasmian waste, 
 Under the solitary moon; — he flow'd 
 Right for the polar star, past Orgunje, 
 Brimming and bright, and large ; then sands begin 
 To hem his watery march, and dam his streams, 
 And split his currents : that for many a league 
 The shorn and parcell'd Oxus strains along 
 Through beds of sand and matted rushy isles — 
 Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had 
 In his high mountain cradle in Pamere, 
 A foil'd circuitous wanderer — till at last 
 The long'd-for dash of waves is heard, and wide 
 
THE POE TR Y OF MA TTHE W ARNOLD. 3 2 1 
 
 His luminous home of waters opens, bright 
 
 And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bathed stars 
 
 Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea." 
 
 Of course the intention may liave been to make the 
 flow of the Oxus, ''out of the mist and hum of that 
 low land, into the frosty starlight," and through the 
 "beds of sand and matted rushy isles," which make 
 him a "foiled, circuitous wanderer," till at last his 
 " luminous home of waters opens, bright and tran- 
 quil," a sort of parable of the unhappy Rustum's 
 great career and the peace of his passing away; but 
 nothing of this is so much as hinted, and we should 
 rather say that, though the course of a great river may 
 be selected rather than any other scene of natural 
 beauty, for the vague analogy it presents to the cheq- 
 uered life of a great leader, the intention of the poet 
 is simply to refresh his own mind after the spectacle 
 of misspent heroism and clouded destiny, with the 
 image of one of Nature's greater works in which there 
 seems to be the same kind of vicissitude, the same loss 
 of pristine force and grandeur, and yet a recovery of 
 all and more than all the majestic volume and trium- 
 phant strength of the earlier period at the end. Mr. 
 Arnold always seems to feel that the proper anodyne 
 for the pain of lacerated hearts is the contemplation 
 of the healing and the peace which are to be found 
 inherent in the vital energies of Nature; but his view 
 never seems to be to use these natural analogies as a 
 vague augury of happier fortunes for his characters 
 than it suits his purpose as a poet to paint, but rather 
 simply to recall that there is a great restorative power 
 21 
 
322 THE POE TR Y OF MA TTHE W ARNOLD. 
 
 in the life of Nature to which we ought to turn 
 for relief, whenever the spectacle of disease and dis- 
 order and distress becomes overpowering. It is in 
 this sense, we suppose, that Mr. Arnold ends the poem 
 on that feeling of hopeless conflict with his age which 
 led Erapedocles to plunge into the crater of Etna, by 
 the following exquisite picture of the classical haunt ' 
 of the Greek Muses : — 
 
 " Through the black, rushing smoke-bursts, 
 Thick breaks the red flame ; 
 All Etna heaves fiercely 
 Her forest-clothed frame. 
 
 " Not here, O Apollo ! 
 Are haunts meet for thee, 
 But, where Helicon breaks down 
 In cliff to the sea, 
 
 " Where the moon-silvered inlets 
 Send far their light voice 
 Up the still vale of Thisbe, 
 O speed, and rejoice ! 
 
 " On the sward at the cliff-top 
 Lie strewn the white flocks ; 
 On the cliff-side the pigeons 
 Roost deep in the rocks. 
 
 " In the moonlight the shepherds. 
 Soft lulled by the rills. 
 Lie wrapt in their blankets, 
 Asleep on the hills. 
 
 " — What forms are these coming 
 So white through the gloom ? 
 
THE FOE TR Y OF MA TFHE W ARNOLD. 323 
 
 What garments out-glistening 
 The gold-flowered broom ? 
 
 " What sweet-breathing presence 
 Out-perfumes the thyme ? 
 What voices enrapture 
 The night's balmy prime ? 
 
 " 'Tis Apollo comes leading 
 His choir, the Nine. 
 — The leader is fairest, 
 But all are divine. 
 
 " They are lost in the hollows ! 
 They stream up again ! 
 What seeks on this mountain 
 The glorified train ? — 
 
 " They bathe on this mountain, 
 In the spring by their road; 
 Then on to Olympus, 
 Their endless abode ! 
 
 " Whose praise do they mention ? 
 Of what is it told ?— 
 What will be for ever; 
 What was from of old. 
 
 " First hymn they the Father 
 Of all things ; — and then. 
 The rest of immortals. 
 The action of men. 
 
 " The day in his hotness. 
 The strife with the palm ; 
 The night in her silence. 
 The stars in their calm." 
 
3 24 THE FOE TR Y OF MA TTHE W ARNOLD. 
 
 A more pe^-fect intellectual anodyne for the pain of 
 a sick mind doubting if its own true life could be har- 
 monized with the life of the great universe, it would 
 be difficult to conceive; it solves no problem, it lifts 
 no veil, but it sings of perfect beauty, human effort, 
 and celestial rest, as if they could really be harmon- 
 ized in the same bright vision, and so hushes for a 
 moment the tumultuous pulses of the heart. And this 
 is Mr. Arnold's habitual use of Nature. He loves to 
 steep his poems in the colours of the great mountain 
 landscapes, or the cool mountain pastures, or the star- 
 lit summer sea; but it is as a febrifuge from restless- 
 ness and doubt, a draught in which he can find not joy 
 but relief, not peace but a sad serenity. Let us give 
 one final instance in the poem called "A Summer's 
 Night," where, after depicting the exhausting duties 
 assigned by the world to the world's labourers, and 
 the disastrous wreck which falls upon those who break 
 away from the world's fetters, he concludes in a strain 
 somewhat more explicit than usual, by affirming that 
 in the great world of Nature there is something, 
 which, though it cannot indeed satisfy the heart, still 
 can teach us fortitude, and instil into the soul a few 
 drops of stoic grandeur: — 
 
 " Is there no life, but these alone ? 
 Madman or slave, must man be one? 
 Plainness and clearness without shadow of stain ! 
 Clearness divine ! 
 
 Ye heavens, whose pure dark regions have no sign 
 Of languor, though so calm, and though so great, 
 Are yet untroubled and unpassionate ! 
 
THE POETRY OF MA TTHE W ARNOLD. 325 
 
 Who, though so noble, share in the world's toil, 
 
 And, though so task'd, keep free from dust and soil ! 
 
 I will not say that your mild deeps retain 
 
 A tinge, it may be, of their silent pain 
 
 Who have long'd deeply once, and long'd in vain; 
 
 But I will rather say that you remain 
 
 A world above man's head to let him see 
 
 How boundless might his soul's horizons be, 
 
 How vast, yet of what clear transparency ! 
 
 How it were good to live there, and breathe free ! 
 
 How fair a lot to fill 
 
 Is left to each man still !" 
 
 We have now sketched slightly the two main strands 
 in Mr. Arnold's poetry, and are in a position to con- 
 sider better his specific power of poetic expression 
 and the degree of success and failure shown in the 
 more striking of his individual poems. " His power 
 of poetic expression is founded on a delicate simpli- 
 city of taste — such a simplicity as we might fairly 
 expect from the student of Goethe and Wordsworth j 
 from one, moreover, who shows the finest appreciation 
 of Greek poetry, and who has a highly cultivated ap- 
 preciation both for the specific aroma of words and 
 for the drift of thoughts. Simplicity is the character- 
 istic fruit of all these studies and tastes, and perhaps 
 Mr. Arnold's bitterest reproach against this modern 
 world of "change, alarm, surprise" is the medley of 
 unblest emotions, and turbid, obscure feelings which 
 it thrusts upon us, leaving us hardly a single moment 
 of real lucidity to " possess our souls" before we die. 
 Hence his own poetic style is remarkable for its schol- 
 arlike delicacy and genuine simplicity of touch (we 
 
326 THE POETRY OF MA TTHE W ARNOLD. 
 
 doubt if one awkward or turgid word is to be found in 
 his poems); and if his ear for rhythm is not equal to 
 his insight into the expressive power of words, it is 
 generally only in the poems oi recitative that this fault 
 is observable. He has not caught from his fine studies 
 of Homer the exquisite music of the Homeric wave 
 of rhythm ; but he has caught his clearness of atmo- 
 sphere, what he himself has so finely termed "the pure 
 lines of an Ionian horizon, the liquid clearness of an 
 Ionian sky." So much as we have yet said of Mr. 
 Arnold's power of expression has relation only to 
 form — to all which is implied in delicacy of discern- 
 ment of the force of language, and preference for sim- 
 plicity of subject in what he treats. But the special 
 direction in which Mr. Arnold's power of poetic ex- 
 pression is chiefly shown is, as what we have said of 
 the burden of his lyrical poems will of course imply, 
 that of sedate and half intellectual emotions, espe- 
 cially those which turn towards Nature with tender 
 and melancholy yearning. Now it is this purity and 
 simplicity of taste which gives to Mr. Arnold's style 
 an open-air freshness and glow, affording a delightful 
 variety to that element of sedate majesty which we 
 have noted in him. Take, for instance, the beautiful 
 song, already quoted, in which Callicles describes the 
 haunt of the Muses, and notice how limpid and fresh 
 is the English as well as the thought, and yet how 
 sedate and stately the general effect. We will repeat 
 only the two lovely verses : — 
 
 " What forms are these coming 
 So white through the gloom ? 
 
THE POETR Y OF MA TTHE W ARNOLD. 327 
 
 What garments out-glistening 
 The gold-flowered broom? 
 
 " What sweet-breathing presence 
 Out-perfumes the thyme ? 
 What voices enrapture 
 The night's balmy prime ?" 
 
 Observe here the exquisitely classical English idiom 
 "out-glistening" and "out-perfume," which conveys 
 with so much simplicity, precision, and grace the ri- 
 valry between the charms of the Muses and of Nature, 
 and the surpassingness of the former. Again, the use 
 of the word " enrapture," for the joy which the divine 
 voices diffuse through the moon-lit air, is a stroke of 
 genius in itself, so happily does it convey the identifi- 
 cation of the singer with the scene, and with so much 
 simple stateliness of effect. Or take this lovely pic- 
 ture of Thames scenery near Oxford in "The Scholar 
 Gipsy," — a picture that is the perfect embodiment of 
 "sweetness and light :" — ■ 
 
 " For most, I know, thou lov'st retired ground ! 
 Thee, at the ferry, Oxford riders blithe. 
 
 Returning home on summer nights, have met 
 Crossing the stripling Thames at Bab-lock-hithe, 
 
 Trailing in the cool stream thy fingers wet, 
 
 As the punt's rope chops round; 
 And leaning backward in a pensive dream. 
 
 And fostering in thy lap a heap of flowers 
 
 Pluck'd in shy fields and distant Wychwood bowers, 
 And thine eyes resting on the moonlit stream!" 
 
 It would be impossible to express the tenderness of 
 feeling which scenery long loved and studied excites 
 
328 THE POETRY OF MA TTHE W ARNOLD. 
 
 in the heart — not by its mere beauty, but by its asso- 
 ciations also — with more perfect simplicity, and yet 
 not without grandeur of movement and dignity of 
 feeling. The latter effect is gained partly by the 
 cadence of the verse, which in this poem is always 
 perfectly musical and sedate, and partly by the cha- 
 racter of the expression, namely, by a tinge of gentle 
 condescension (as, for instance, in the expression 
 "the stripling Thames"), and the careful benignity 
 of the whole detail. The simplicity is gained partly 
 by the perfectly poetical and yet technical naturalness 
 of the line — -"As the punt's rope chops round," which 
 is poetical, because it brings the peculiar motion so 
 vividly before you ; partly by the happy tenderness of 
 the line — " Fostering in thy lap a heap of flowers," to 
 convey the conscious pleasure of both tending and 
 touching them ; but mostly by the perfect ease of the 
 flow of the language, and the bright lucidity of the 
 verse. But Mr. Arnold hardly exercises the full magic 
 of his characteristic power of poetical expression until 
 he is in the mood in which some sad, though calm, 
 emotion is the predominant thread of his thought, and 
 natural beauty only the auxiliary to it; till he is in the 
 mood in which, if his heart flies to his eyes, it is only 
 to find some illustration for the enigmas pent up within 
 it, some new image for the incommunicability of 
 human joy and grief, for the pain which results from 
 the division of the soul against itself, for the restless- 
 ness which yearns inconsistently for sympathy and for 
 solitude, and rebounds like a shuttlecock from the one 
 desire to the other. No line, for instance, in the whole 
 
THE FOE TR Y OF MA TTHE W ARNOLD. 329 
 
 range of English poetry is fuller of depth of expression 
 than that which closes one of the poems to Marguerite, 
 the poem which begins with the sad cry — 
 
 " Yes ! in the sea of life enisled, 
 With echoing straits between us thrown, 
 Dotting the shoreless, watery wild. 
 We mortal millions live alotie." 
 
 — where Mr. Arnold ends his melancholy reverie by 
 confessing that it was God's will which decreed this 
 strange isolation, 
 
 "And bade betwixt their shores to be 
 The unplumb'' d, salt, estranging sea." 
 
 That last line is inexhaustible in beauty and force. 
 Without any false emphasis or prolix dwelling on the 
 matter, it shadows out to you the plunging deep-sea 
 lead and the eerie cry of "no soundings," recalls that 
 saltness of the sea which takes from water every re- 
 freshing association, every quality that helps to slake 
 thirst or supply sap, and then concentrates all these 
 dividing attributes, which strike a sort of lonely terror 
 into the soul, into the one word "estranging." It is 
 a line full of intensity, simplicity, and grandeur — a 
 line to possess and haunt the imagination. And the 
 same exceptional force of expression comes out not 
 unfrequently under the shadow of similar emotions. 
 
 Nothing, for instance, can have more force of its 
 peculiar kind than the description of the blended 
 delight in Nature and disappointment in Man felt by 
 the French recluse, the author of "Obermann," who 
 
3 30 THE FOE TR Y OF MA TTHE W ARNOLD. 
 
 fled from the world he disdained to brood over its 
 maladies in French woods and Swiss huts, 
 
 " In the lone brakes of Fontainebleau, 
 Or chalets near the Alpine snow." 
 
 There is a mixed simplicity and exaltation of feel- 
 ing in the following lines, which few English poets 
 have surpassed : — 
 
 " I turn thy leaves ! I feel thy breath 
 
 Once more upon me roll ; 
 
 That air of languor, cold, and death, 
 
 Which brooded o'er thy soul. 
 * * «- ■ * * 
 
 " A fever in these pages burns 
 
 Beneath the calm they feign; 
 
 A wounded human spirit turns, 
 
 Here, on its bed of pain. 
 
 " Yes, though the virgin mountain air 
 Fresh through these pages blovk^s. 
 Though to these leaves the glaciers spare 
 The soul of their mute snows; 
 
 " Though here a mountain-murmur swells 
 Of many a dark-bough'd pine. 
 Though, as you read, you hear the bells 
 Of the high-pasturing kine — 
 
 " Yet, through the hum of torrent lone. 
 And brooding mountain-bee. 
 There sobs I know not what ground tone 
 Of human agony !" 
 
 Nor is the opening of this poem at all more cha- 
 racteristic of the special power of its author than 
 its close. There is indeed something, more almost 
 
 I 
 
THE FOE TR V OF MA TTHE W ARNOLD. 3 3 1 
 
 of peroration than of the last swell of a lyric emotion, 
 in the poet's adieu to the hero of his reverie : — 
 
 " Farewell ! Under the sky we part, 
 In this stern Alpine dell. 
 O unstrung will ! O broken heart, 
 A last, a last farewell !" 
 
 And that leads us to remark how very near poetry 
 of this order — the predominant emotion of which, 
 however sad, is always sedate and stately in its move- 
 ment — often approaches to the nobler rhetoric, — of 
 which grandeur of total effect, with simplicity of 
 elementary structure, are the main conditions. The 
 object of the verse we have just quoted seems to be 
 almost as nearly one of persuasion, i.e., oratorical, as 
 one of expression, i.e., poetical. It reads more like 
 an indirect but conscious effort to subdue the reader's 
 mind into a mood of compassionate admiration for 
 the author of " Obermann," than a mere utterance of 
 the poet's own feeling; — it is more eloquent than 
 pathetic. And where, as often happens in other 
 poems — in the very fine continuation of this same 
 poem, for instance — Mr. Arnold's thread of sentiment 
 is much more directly didactic than it is here (and 
 this is especially the case in the pieces of unrhyraed 
 recitative, where the leading idea is usually a train of 
 thought rather than feeling, and very frequently a train 
 of very directly hortative, on argumentative thought), 
 the rhetorical often predominates greatly over the 
 poetical vein, and seems to court direct comparison 
 rather with the effusions of the improvisatore than 
 
332 THE FOE TR Y OF MA TTHE W ARNOLD. 
 
 with those of the singer. In such pieces the verse 
 fails — when it does fail, — as the inspiration of the im- 
 provisatore fails, more from a subsidence of the initial 
 impulse, than from artistic exhaustion of the theme, 
 or inadequate command of language to work out fully 
 the conception of the imagination. Take, for instance, 
 among the rhymed pieces, the eloquent indictment 
 brought against Death, as if it involved a sort of 
 breach of faith with the instinctive youthful hope for 
 some fulness of earthly rapture, in the piece called 
 "Youth and Calm." No one can read it without 
 noticing the regularly mounting steps of an impas- 
 sioned speech, rather than the imperceptibly graduated 
 concentration of feeling, natural to a lyrical poem : — 
 
 " 'Tis death ! and peace, indeed, is here, 
 And ease from shame, and rest from fear. 
 There's nothing can dismarble now 
 The smoothness of that limpid brow. 
 But is a calm like this, in truth. 
 The crowning end of life and youth, 
 And when this boon rewards the dead, 
 Are all debts paid, has all been said ? 
 And is the heart of youth so light, 
 Its step so firm, its eye so bright. 
 Because on its hot brow there blows 
 A wind of promise and repose 
 From the far grave, to which it goes ; 
 Because it has the hope to come. 
 One day, to harbour in the tomb? 
 Ah no, the bliss youth dreams is one 
 For daylight, for the cheerful sun, 
 For feeling nerves and living breath — 
 Youth dreams a bliss on this side death! 
 
THE POETRY OF MA TTHE W A RNOLD. 333 
 
 It dreams a rest, if not more deep, 
 
 More grateful than this marble sleep ; 
 
 It hears a voice within it tell : 
 
 Calni's not life's crown, though calm is well ! 
 
 'Tis all perhaps which man acquires, 
 
 But 'tis not what our youth desires." 
 
 Only here, what should be the peroration is an anti- 
 climax. The best illustrations, however, of the rhe- 
 torical cast of a good deal of Mr. Arnold's poetry 
 are to be found in the recitatives which find so much 
 favour in his sight, but which in the perfect simplicity 
 and lucidity of structure of his rhymed poems are 
 sometimes — not always — remarkably deficient. The 
 music of rhymed verse always seems to bind him down 
 to the simpler ranges of human experience. He does 
 not resemble Shelley, who, like his own skylark, seems 
 to sing most sweetly as he rises into the rarefied air 
 of abstract essences. On the contrary, Mr. Arnold 
 is always awakened to homelier feelings by the melody 
 of verse, and is never so lucid and concrete as when 
 he has to meet the exigencies of a complex stanza such 
 as he uses in the "Scholar-Gipsy," and "Thyrsis." 
 The little speech which we have just quoted on the 
 contrast between the youthful hopes of earthly bliss 
 and the sad calm of early death is rhetorical in struc- 
 ture, but it is the pathetic rhetoric of a troubled heart, 
 descanting on the experience of almost every home. 
 When, however, Mr. Arnold chooses the unrhymed 
 dactylic or anapsestic metres for his oratory, though 
 he is often extremely eloquent, and sometimes even 
 rich in pictorial effect, he is apt to be cold and grand- 
 iose, and now and then even to be obscure — a sin of 
 
334 THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD. 
 
 which he is rarely indeed guilty. The contrast may 
 be best seen, though it would be impossible with the 
 space at our command to illustrate it, in the compari- 
 son between the second poem addressed to the author 
 of "Obermann" ("Obermann Once More," vol. ii. 
 p. 239), and the poem which follows it, and closes the 
 volumes, called "The Future." They are on kindred 
 subjects, the first tracing the signs of the immediate 
 future of modern religion ; the second, the relation 
 generally of the tendencies of the Future to those of 
 the Past. The Pantheistic vein of thought and senti- 
 ment pervades both poems alike, — and it is one which, 
 as we need hardly say, runs counter to our deepest 
 convictions, — but there is a vast difference between 
 the two as poems. The former is full of human yearn- 
 ing and pathos, of definite picture, and clear imagery; 
 the latter is a dim vapour of eloquent dissertation, in 
 which, indeed, there are vaguely seen some of the 
 bright tints of the rainbow, but there is no warmth 
 and no clearness ; it is grandiose without grandeur, 
 nebulous without mystery. Within our limits we do 
 not know that we can give a finer specimen at once of 
 the frequently high oratory of these choric outbursts 
 of Mr. Arnold's didactic genius, and also of the fre- 
 quent tendency in them to overpass the impulse which 
 gave them birth, than in the deservedly celebrated 
 lines at Heine's grave, in which Mr. Arnold passes 
 from criticism of the bitter German poet to a grand 
 image for this Philistine nation of ours — its blindness 
 and its strength ; but unfortunately does not stop there, 
 falling into bathos as he proceeds : — 
 
THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD. 335 
 
 " I chide thee not, that thy sharp 
 Upbraidings often assail' d 
 England, my country ; for we. 
 Troublous and sad, for her sons, 
 Long since, deep in our hearts. 
 Echo the blame of her foes. 
 We, too, sigh that she flags ! 
 We, too, say that she now, 
 Scarce comprehending the voice 
 Of her greatest, golden-mouth'd sons 
 Of a former age any more, 
 Stupidly travels her round 
 Of mechanic business, and lets 
 Slow die out of her life 
 Glory, and genius, and joy ! 
 
 " So thou arraign'st her, her foe. 
 So we arraign her, her sons. 
 
 " Yes, we arraign her ! but she, 
 The weary Titan ! with deaf 
 Ears, and labour-dimm'd eyes, 
 Regarding neither to right 
 Nor left, goes passively by, 
 Staggering on to her goal ; 
 Bearing on shoulders immense, 
 Atlantean, the load. 
 Well-nigh not to be borne. 
 Of the too vast orb of her fate. 
 
 " But was it thou — I think 
 Surely it was — that bard 
 Unnamed, who, Goethe said, 
 Had every other gift, but wanted love; 
 Love, without which the tongue 
 Even of angels sounds amiss ? 
 
336 THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD. 
 
 " Charm is the glory which makes 
 Song of the poet divine ; 
 Love is the fountain of charm ! 
 How without charm wilt thou draw, 
 Poet ! the world to thy way ? 
 Not by the lightnings of wit! 
 Not by the thunder of scorn ! 
 These to the world, too, are given; 
 Wit it possesses, and scorn — 
 Charm is the poet's alone. 
 Hollow and dull are the great, 
 And artists envious, and the mob profane. 
 We know all this, we know ! 
 Cam'st thou from heaven, O child 
 Of light ! but this to declare ? 
 Alas ! to help us forget 
 Such barren knowledge awhile, 
 God gave the poet his song." 
 
 It would be hard to find a higher piece of pure 
 pictorial oratory than that description of England ; — 
 as regards style, Mr. Bright, if he held with Mr. 
 Arnold, which of course he does not, might almost 
 have delivered it in one of his greater speeches ; — 
 and hard, too, to find a bathos deeper than the flat, 
 harsh, somewhat stilted prose, not even rhythmical, 
 though it is printed in metre, which immediately 
 follows, especially the lines which Mr. Arnold itali- 
 cizes in his last two stanzas. The same may be said 
 of almost all his recitative pieces. They contain frag- 
 iTients of high oratory, but they are coldly intellectual, 
 and tend to a grandiosity from which the fall to flat 
 prose is not difficult. 
 
 And it is indeed Mr. Arnold's chief defect as a 
 
THE POETRY OF MA TTHE W AR MOLD. 337 
 
 poet and artist that the themes which interest him 
 most are seldom living and organic wholes, but are 
 rather trains of thought sufficiently fascinating to the 
 imagination and the feelings, but without definite form 
 and organization; in fact, subjects which necessarily 
 lend themselves more easily to the irregular rhythmic 
 improvisations to which we have just referred, than to 
 more perfect forms of verse. Even when he adopts 
 these more perfect forms, it is rather for the sake of 
 the pathos of elegiac moods than for the completeness 
 they give to the framework of an artistic whole. Of 
 all his so-called narrative poems, most of which are, 
 indeed, usually reflective rather than narrative, the 
 " Sick King in Bokhara " is the only one that strikes 
 us as reaching anything like the higher levels of Mr. 
 Arnold's force. " Sohrab and Rustum," polished and 
 elegant as it is, is tame beyond anything that the 
 story can account for. The long Homeric similes are 
 often extremely beautiful, the subject itself is genu- 
 inely tragic, the style is classical ; there is nothing to 
 account for its tameness except the tameness itself. 
 It is evident that the author felt no throbs of heart as 
 he brought the gallant son into the fatal conflict with 
 the gallant father. He looked on it with the polished 
 interest of an Oxford scholar in an episode of Oriental 
 tradition, but without the slightest touch of that ani- 
 mated sympathy and vivid suspense which Scott would 
 have thrown into such a theme. It is not till we get 
 to the beautiful description of the northward course of 
 the Oxus, when Rustum is left with the corpse of his 
 son lying beside him on the plain, enveloped in mid- 
 22 
 
338 THE POE TR Y OF MA TTHE W ARNOLD. 
 
 night and despair, that we feel the true charm of the 
 poet, and then the story is over. " Balder Dead " has 
 to our ears even less interest than " Sohrab and Rus- 
 tum." "Tristram and Iseult " is a great advance on 
 either, and is unquestionably a very fine fragment ; 
 but it has little title to the name of a narrative poem 
 at all. Mr. Arnold borrows the Arthurian legend 
 only to give a beautiful picture of the shipwreck of 
 unhappy passions in a double form, in the feverish and 
 restless delirium of the dying knight, and in the hollow 
 disappointed youth of Iseult of Brittany after she has 
 survived her husband and her grander rival. Iseult 
 of Ireland is hardly painted, except in face and 
 form ; she only kneels beside her lover's death-bed to 
 die with him, and lend her outward image to the 
 poet's picture. But it would be hard to speak too 
 highly of the exquisite and lucid painting of the 
 scene of Tristram's death in the Breton castle, beneath 
 those "ghostlike tapestries" on which are figured the 
 green huntsman, with his bugle and hounds, so dear 
 to the sylvan knight in lifetime, with the Irish queen 
 kneeling, also dead, at his bedside, both of them — 
 
 " Cold, cold as those who lived and loved 
 A thousand years ago ;" 
 
 or of Iseult of Brittany and of the white hands, in 
 the subsequent part, living, after her husband's and 
 rival's deaths, the joyless life of one who had sought, 
 but found not, the happiness of love, and who sur- 
 vives in the happiness of her children as in a kind of 
 moonlit dream : — 
 
THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD. 339 
 
 " Joy has not found her yet, nor ever will — 
 Is it this thought that makes her mien so still, 
 Her features so fatigued, her eyes, though sweet, 
 So sunk, so rarely lifted save to meet 
 Her children's ? She moves slow ; her voice alone 
 Hath yet an infantine and silver tone, 
 But even that comes languidly; in truth, 
 She seems one dying in a mask of youth." 
 
 No picture could be sweeter or fairer. Mr. Arnold 
 has a special gift for the delineation of these moods 
 of passionless pain — of still, moonlit craving that is 
 never hot and never satisfied. But the beauty of the 
 poem certainly does not lie in the strength of its nar- 
 rative, but in its exquisite delineation of the feelings 
 of death-chilled passion and of joyless calm. The 
 "Forsaken Merman " — a very delicate little poem of 
 its kind — is again hardly in any sense a narrative poem. 
 It is a pretty fanciful song full of picture, of which the 
 living pulse is the innocent childish heart-longing of a 
 bewildered, instinctive, unmasterful love conscious of 
 the existence of a rivalry in the claims of religious 
 feelings into which it cannot enter, and yet full of 
 painful yearning. This is always the type of feeling 
 which Mr. Arnold paints most finely. But far higher 
 are the pretensions of the "Sick King in Bokhara." 
 Slight as the subject is, the poem is full of life, and 
 paints not merely a few exquisite pictures and a new 
 phase of that painful calm or placid suffering in which 
 Mr. Arnold so much excels, but the richness and state- 
 liness, and also the prostration and fatalism, of Ori- 
 ental life; and it is especially happy in portraying 
 vividly the concrete simplicities of Eastern imagery 
 
340 THE FOE TR Y OF MA TTHE W ARNOLD. 
 
 when expressing desire and regret. The grave, busi- 
 ness-like local colour of the opening is in itself full 
 of promise : — 
 
 Hussein. — 
 
 " O most just Vizier, send away 
 The cloth-merchants, and let them be. 
 Them and their dues, this day ! the King 
 Is ill at ease, and calls for thee." 
 
 The Vizier. — 
 
 *' Oh merchants, tarry yet a day 
 Here in Bokhara ! but at noon 
 To-morrow, come, and ye shall pay 
 Each fortieth web of cloth to me, 
 As the law is, and go your way." 
 
 And then the story of the poor man who in the inten- 
 sity of his thirst, during the long drought, had se- 
 creted a pitcher of water for his own use, and when 
 he found it drained, had cursed those who drained it, 
 his own mother amongst them, and who, in his re- 
 morse, called upon the king to give judgment upon 
 him that he might be stoned and expiate his sin as 
 the law demanded, and the delineation of the king's 
 extreme reluctance, are given with the most genuine 
 force and simplicity. The king's great desire to spare 
 the man, and the orders given for that purpose, of 
 which it is pithily said — 
 
 " As the king said, so was it done," 
 
 — the man's indignation at this hesitation to judge and 
 punish him, — the king's loth consent at last, and the 
 fanatical joy of the victim, are painted with some- 
 
 I 
 
THE FOE THY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD. 34 1 
 
 thing like the grand simplicity of the Hebrew Scrip- 
 tures : — 
 
 " Now the King charged us secretly : 
 ' Stoned must he be ; the law stands so. 
 Yet, if he seek to fly, give way ! 
 Hinder him not, but let him go.' 
 
 " So saying, the King took a stone, 
 And cast it softly; — but the man, 
 With a great joy upon his face, 
 Kneel'd down, and cried not, neither ran." 
 
 And perhaps the most dramatic thing in the whole 
 range of Mr. Arnold's poems is the scornful reproof 
 administered by the old Vizier when he has heard the 
 story, to the king's weakness and softness of heart : — 
 
 The Vizier. — 
 
 " O King, in this I praise thee not ! 
 Now must I call thy grief not wise. 
 Is he thy friend, or of thy blood. 
 To hnd such favour in thine eyes? 
 
 " Nay, were he thine own mother's son, 
 Still thou art king, and the law stands. 
 It were not meet the balance swerved, 
 The sword were broken in thy hands. 
 
 " But being nothing, as he is, 
 Why for no cause make sad thy face? — 
 Lo, I am old ! three kings, ere thee, 
 Have I seen reigning in this place. 
 
 <' But who, through all this length of time, 
 Could bear the burden of his years. 
 If he for strangers pain'd his heart 
 Not less than those who merit tears ? 
 
342 THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD. 
 
 " Fathers we mtist have, wife and child, 
 And grievous is the grief for these; 
 This pain alone which must be borne. 
 Makes the head white, and bows the knees. 
 
 " But other loads than this his own 
 One man is not well made to bear. 
 Besides, to each are his own friends, 
 To mourn with him and show him care. 
 
 " Look, this is but one single place. 
 Though it be great ; all the earth round, 
 If a man bear to have it so. 
 Things which might vex him shall be found. 
 
 " Upon the Russian frontier, where 
 The watchers of two armies stand 
 Near one another, many a man. 
 Seeking a prey unto his hand, 
 
 " Hath snatch'd a little fair-hair'd slave; 
 They snatch also, towards Merve, 
 The Shiah dogs, who pasture sheep. 
 And up from thence to Orgunje. 
 
 " And these all, labouring for a lord. 
 Eat not the fruit of their own hands ; 
 Which is the heaviest of all plagues. 
 To that man's inind, who understands. 
 
 " The kaffirs also (whom God curse !) 
 Vex one another, night and day ; 
 There are the lepers, and all sick ; 
 There are the poor, who faint alway. 
 
 " All these have sorrow, and keep still, 
 Whilst other men make cheer, and sing. 
 Wilt thou have pity on all these ? 
 No, nor on this dead dog, O King !" 
 
THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD. 343 
 
 Mr. Arnold has never achieved anything so truly 
 dramatic as this poem. The reasoning, never in the 
 abstract, but always by examples which run through it, 
 the profound abasement of mind before the demands 
 of the admitted conditions of social existence, the 
 utter acquiescence of the sage old minister's intellect 
 in the order of things as he knows it, the wonder and 
 distress of the young king that his own urgent desire 
 is of so little account when he would alleviate the lot 
 of one human being whom he pities, and the kicking 
 of his nature against the pricks of the iron circle 
 which limits his royal power, are all painted with a 
 brightness and care which would almost argue a special 
 Oriental culture, though we do not suppose that Mr. 
 Arnold has had any specially great opportunities in 
 that direction. Of the poems which are called narra- 
 tive, this is in our opinion the only one, rightly so 
 called, that is perfectly successful. And perhaps its 
 perfect success is due to the curious correspondence 
 between the elements of the story and the peculiar 
 tendencies already noticed in Mr. Arnold's genius. 
 The stately egotism of manner, which has here full 
 swing and a great field, the dignified remorse which 
 breeds so resolute a spirit of expiation in the sinner's 
 mind, the sedate dignities of the king's helplessness, 
 the contemptuous criticism of the Grand Vizier on 
 the unreasonable excess of his master's sympathy with 
 one who had no natural claims on him, and the ex- 
 treme simplicity of the whole action, all seem to fit 
 the subject specially for Mr. Arnold's treatment. At 
 all events, as to the brilliant clearness and rich colour- 
 
344 THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD. 
 
 ing of the completed whole, there can be no two 
 opinions. It seems to us nearly the only case in 
 which Mr. Arnold has chosen a subject distinct and 
 perfect in its parts, and complete as a whole — a sub- 
 ject of which you cannot say that he brought it to a 
 conclusion chiefly because it must end somewhere, and 
 he had exhausted his own interest in it. This piece 
 is the one exception to the rule that Mr. Arnold's best 
 poems are not artistic wholes, which come to a neces- 
 sary and natural end because their structure is organ- 
 ically perfect, but rather fragments of imaginative 
 reverie, which begin where the poet begins to med- 
 itate, and end when he has done. 
 
 It must not be supposed, however, that we regard 
 the art of those of Mr. Arnold's poems which are ex- 
 pressly elegiac and lyrical, as generally poor. On the 
 contrary, as it is of the essence of pieces of this kind 
 to reflect absolutely the mood of the poet, to begin 
 where he begins and end where he ends, — the only 
 artistic demand which can possibly be applicable to 
 the structure of such pieces, is that it shall show you 
 the growth and subsidence of a vein of thought and 
 emotion, and make no abrupt demands on the sympa- 
 thy of the reader. This, at all events in almost all 
 his rhymed pieces of a lyrical and elegiac nature, Mr. 
 Arnold effects with the greatest delicacy and modula- 
 tion of feeling; in the others he is not unfrequently 
 stranded on bare prose, and compelled to leap back 
 with a very jerky movement into the tide of his emo- 
 tion. But from his highest moods of reverie he sub- 
 sides, by the help of some beautiful picture of scenery 
 
 ?H 
 
Tl^E rOETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD. 345 
 
 in harmony with the emotions he is dehneating ;— as 
 in the lovely Alpine sketches of his "Obermann," or 
 with some graceful episode of illustration, like the 
 beautiful comparison between the wandering Scholar- 
 Gipsy's dread of the contagion of our hesitating half- 
 love of Nature, which hugs the shore of artificial civ- 
 ilization, and the old Tyrian skipper's wrath against 
 the Greek coaster, who troubled his realm by timid 
 competition, and yet never dared to launch out into 
 the shoreless ocean. No art can be more perfect than 
 that with which Mr. Arnold closes the finer of his lyr- 
 ical and elegiac poems — poems, however, of which it 
 is the very essence to reflect his own reveries, not to 
 paint any continuous whole. 
 
 When we come to ask what Mr. Arnold's poetry has 
 done for this generation, the answer must be that no 
 one has expressed more powerfully and poetically its 
 spiritual weaknesses, its craving for a passion that it 
 cannot feel, its admiration for a self-mastery that it 
 cannot achieve, its desire for a creed that it fails to 
 accept, its sympathy with a faith that it will not share, 
 its aspiration for a peace that it does not know. But 
 Mr. Arnold does all this from the intellectual side, — ■ 
 sincerely and delicately, but from the surface, and 
 never from the centre. It is the same with his criti- 
 cisms. They are fine, they are keen, they are often 
 true, but they are always too much limited to the thin 
 superficial layer of the moral nature of their subjects, 
 and seem to take little comparative interest in the 
 deeper individuality beneath. Read his essay on 
 Heine, and you will see the critic engrossed with the 
 
34^ THE POETRY OE MATTHEW ARNOLD. 
 
 relation of Heine to the political and social ideas of 
 his day, and passing over with comparative indiffer- 
 ence the true soul of Heine, the fountain both of his 
 poetry and his cynicism. Read his fine lectures on 
 translating Homer, and observe how exclusively the 
 critic's mind is occupied with the form, as distin- 
 guished from the substance of the Homeric poetry. 
 Even when he concerns himself with the greatest 
 modern poets, with Shakespeare (as in the preface to 
 the earlier edition of his poems), or with Goethe in 
 reiterated poetical criticisms, or when he, again and 
 again in his poems, treats of Wordsworth, it is always 
 the style and superficial doctrine of their poetry, not 
 the individual character and unique genius which oc- 
 cupy him. He will tell you whether a poet is "sane 
 and clear," or stormy and fervent; whether he is 
 "rapid" and "noble," or loquacious and quaint; 
 whether a thinker penetrates the husks of conventional 
 thought which mislead the crowd ; whether there is 
 sweetness as well as lucidity in his aims ; whether a 
 descriptive writer has "distinction" of style, or is 
 admirable only for his vivacity ; but he rarely goes to 
 the individual heart of any of the subjects of his 
 criticism ; — he finds their style and class, but not 
 their personality in that class ; he ranks his men, but 
 does not portray them ; hardly even seems to find 
 much interest in the individual roots of their charac- 
 ter. And so, too, with his main poetical theme, — -the 
 spiritual weakness and languor and self disdain of the 
 age. He paints these characteristics in language which 
 makes his poems a sort of natural voice for the expe- 
 
THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD. 347 
 
 rience of his contemporaries, a voice without which 
 their intellectual life would be even more obscure and 
 confused than it is ; but still with a certain intellectual 
 superficiality of touch which suggests the sympathetic 
 observer rather than the wakeful sufferer, and which 
 leaves an unfathomed depth beneath the layer of per- 
 turbed consciousness with which h6 deals — that is, 
 beneath that plane wherein the spheres of the intel- 
 lect and the soul intersect, of which he has so carefully 
 studied the currents and the tides. The sign of this 
 limitation, of this exclusion, of this externality of 
 touch, is the tinge of conscious intellectual majesty 
 rearing its head above the storm with the " Quos ego " 
 of Virgil's god, that never forsakes these poems of 
 Mr. Arnold's even when their "lyrical cry" is most 
 pathetic. It is this which identifies him with the 
 sceptics, which renders his poems, pathetic as they 
 often are, no adequate expression of the passionate 
 craving of the soul for faith. There is always a 
 tincture of pride in his confessed inability to believe 
 — a self-congratulation that he is too clear-eyed to 
 yield to the temptations of the heart. He asks with 
 compassionate imperiousness for demonstration rather 
 than conviction ; conviction he will not take without 
 demonstration. The true humility of the yearning for 
 faith is far from Mr. Arnold's conception. The Poet 
 Laureate's picture of himself, as — 
 
 " Falling with my weight of cares 
 
 Upon the world's great altar stairs 
 That slope through darkness up to God," 
 
 is a great contrast to Mr. Arnold's grand air of tearful 
 
348 THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD. 
 
 Virgilian regret as he gazes on the pale ascetic faces 
 of the Carthusian monks, and delivers himself thus: — 
 
 " Wandering between two worlds, one dead, 
 The other powerless to be born, 
 With nowhere yet to rest my head, 
 Like these, on earth I wait forlorn. 
 Their faith, my tears, the world deride ; 
 I come to shed them at their side." 
 
 His vision of Christ and Christianity, even, is 
 wholly taken from the same standing-point of genuine 
 but condescending sympathy. He can see how much 
 greater the Christian Church was than the Roman world 
 it subdued ; but to him it is greater not through the 
 truth of its belief, but through that vast capacity of 
 belief which enabled it to accept what was not true,— 
 in short, to feign a truth higher than the naked facts. 
 No passage in Mr. Arnold's poems is perhaps so 
 grand as the one which delineates this contrast, with 
 its majestic though false and desolate assumption that 
 it was the mighty dreammg power of the East, the 
 power to create the objects of its own belief, which 
 conquered the hard organization of the West ; and as 
 no passage is so characteristic of Mr. Arnold's whole 
 relation to the thought of his day, with it, though it 
 is somewhat long, we will close our too voluminous 
 extracts from his stately and fascinating poems : — 
 
 " Wellnigh two thousand years have brought 
 Their load, and gone away. 
 Since last on earth there lived and wrought 
 A world like ours to-day. 
 
THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD. 349 
 
 " Like ours it look'd in outward air; 
 But of that inward prize, 
 Soul, that we take more count and care, 
 Ah ! there our future lies.i 
 
 " Like ours it looli'd in outward air! — ■ 
 Its head was clear and true, 
 Sumptuous its clothing, rich its fare, 
 No pause its action knew ; 
 
 " Stout was its arm, each thew and bone 
 Seem'd puissant and alive — • 
 But, ah ! its heart, its heart was stone, 
 And so it could not thrive. 
 
 " On that hard Pagan world disgust 
 And secret loathing fell ; 
 Deep weariness and sated lust 
 Made human life a hell. 
 
 " In his cool hall, with haggard eyes. 
 The Roman noble lay ; 
 He drove abroad, in furious guise, 
 Along the Appian way ; 
 
 "He made a feast, drank fierce and fast, 
 And crown' d his hair with flowers — 
 No easier nor no quicker pass'd 
 The impracticable hours, 
 
 " The brooding East with awe beheld 
 Her impious younger world. 
 The Roman tempest swell'd and swell'd, 
 And on her head was hurl'd. 
 
 1 This flat and unfortunate verse, as it seems to us, has been 
 inserted by Mr. Arnold in his second edition to make his doctrine 
 of the religion of the future seem more hopeful. It is a prosaic 
 doctrinal graft on which we cannot compliment him. 
 
350 THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD. 
 
 " The East bow'd low before the blast 
 In patient, deep disdain ; 
 She let the legions thunder past, 
 And plunged in thought again. 
 
 " So well she mused, a morning broke 
 Across her spirit grey. 
 A conquering, new born joy awoke, 
 And filled her life with day. 
 
 " ' Poor world," she cried, ' so deep accurst ! 
 That runn'st from pole to pole 
 To seek a draught to slake thy thirst — 
 Go, seek it in thy soul !' 
 
 " She heard it, the victorious West, 
 In crown and sword array'd ! 
 She felt the void which mined her breast, 
 She shiver'd and obey'd. 
 
 " She veil'd her eagles, snapp'd her sword, 
 And laid her sceptre down ; 
 Her stately purple she abhorr'd. 
 And her imperial crown ; 
 
 " She broke her flutes, she stopp'd her sports, 
 Her artists could not please ; 
 She tore her books, she shut her courts, 
 She fled her palaces. 
 
 " Lust of the eye and pride of life, 
 She left it all behind — 
 And hurried, torn with inward strife, 
 The wilderness to find. 
 
 " Tears wash'd the trouble from her face ! 
 She changed into a child ! 
 'Mid weeds and wrecks she stood — a place 
 Of ruin — but she smiled ! 
 
THE FOE TR V OF MA TTHE W ARNOLD 3 5 1 
 
 " Oh, had I lived in that great day, 
 How had its glory new 
 Fill'd earth and heaven, and caught away 
 My ravish'd spirit too ! 
 
 " No cloister-floor of humid stone 
 Had been too cold for me ; 
 For me no Eastern desert lone 
 Had been too far to flee. 
 
 " No thoughts that to the world belong 
 Had stood against the wave 
 Of love which set so deep and strong 
 From Christ's then open grave. 
 
 " No lonely life had pass'd too slow 
 When I could hourly see 
 
 That wan, nail'd Form, with head droop'd low, 
 Upon the bitter tree ; 
 
 " Could see the Mother with the Child 
 Whose tender winning arts 
 Have to his little arms beguiled 
 So many wounded hearts ! 
 
 " And centuries came, and ran their course, 
 And unspent all that time 
 Still, still went forth that Child's dear force. 
 And still was at its prime, 
 
 " Ay, ages long endured his span 
 Of life, 'tis true received. 
 
 That gracious Child, that thorn-crown'd Man ! 
 He lived while we believed. 
 
 " While we believed, on earth he went. 
 And open stood his grave ; 
 
352 THE POE TR V OF MA TTHE W ARNOLD. 
 
 Men call'd from chamber, church, and tent, 
 And Christ was by to save. 
 
 " Now he is dead ! Far hence he lies 
 In the lorn Syrian town, 
 And on his grave, with shining eyes, 
 The Syrian stars look down. 
 
 •' In vain men still, with hoping new, 
 Regard his death-place dumb, 
 And say the stone is not yet to, 
 And wait for words to come. 
 
 " Ah, from that silent sacred land, 
 Of sun, and arid stone, 
 And crumbling wall, and sultry sand, 
 Comes now one word alone ! 
 
 " From David's lips this word did roll, 
 'Tis true and living yet ; 
 No fnan can save his brother's soul, 
 Nor pay his brother'' s debt. 
 
 "Alone, self- poised, henceforward man 
 
 Must labour ! must resign 
 . His all too human creeds, and scan 
 
 Simply the way divine." 
 
 It would be impossible to paint more grandly the 
 hard pageantry of Roman civilization, or more imag- 
 inatively the apparently magic victory of the brooding 
 mystic over the armed conqueror. But when Mr. 
 Arnold paints the "patient deep disdain^ ^ of the East 
 for physical might as the power by which it won its 
 miraculous victory, he is inverting strangely the testi- 
 
THE FOE TR Y OF MA TTHE W ARNOLD. 353 
 
 mony of history, indeed he is reading his own lofty 
 intellectualism back into the past. The East has 
 always been accused of bowing with even too deep a 
 prostration of soul before the omnipotent fiat of the 
 Almighty. It was the Eastern delight in that semi- 
 fatalism which gave Mahommed his strange spell over 
 the Eastern imagination ; nay, it was the same fascin- 
 ated submission to the finger of sheer Power which is 
 occasionally so intensely expressed even in the He- 
 brew prophets as to read to Christian ears as if God 
 were above righteousness, and as if responsibility 
 could be merged in obedience. If there were any 
 disdain in the Eastern feeling towards the armies of 
 Rome, it was not disdain for thelR-oraan power but for 
 the Roman weakness — that inaccessibility of the West 
 to whispers of the soul which seemed to the Eastern 
 mystic the oracles of a power far greater than the 
 Roman, and of one before which the Roman would 
 be broken in pieces. In other words, what the East 
 disdained in Rome was its want of listening power, 
 not its want of dreaming power, of which the Oriental 
 world always knew too well the relaxing and enervat- 
 ing influence. It was too much dreaming which had 
 brought it into subjection to Rome, and further dream- 
 ing would only make that subjection more abject. 
 Had Christ, or rather his ideal image, "received," as 
 Mr. Arnold here says, from the enthusiastic reverie of 
 the East, the gift of a spiritual ascendancy which there 
 was no real Christ to exercise, the peculiar strength of 
 the East must have been precisely identical with its 
 peculiar weakness, namely, its faculty for believing 
 23 
 
354 THE POETRY OF MA TTHE W A RNOLD. 
 
 that to be due to a living Power, outside the mind, 
 which was in truth only the unreal image of the mind 
 itself. The power which could break to pieces hosts 
 of legions was not in the dreamer but in him who 
 awakened the dreamer and dispelled the dream. And 
 it was not "disdain" but "humility" by which the 
 East learned to thrill to the authority of this imperi- 
 ous whisper of the soul — this " foolishness " of faith. 
 
 And for us, too, it is not disdain but humility which 
 can help us to recover the loss which Mr. Arnold so 
 pathetically bewails, but which his poetry implicitly 
 expresses also a deep reluctance to supply. The old 
 paradox is as true to-day as it was when St. Paul pro- 
 claimed that the weak things of the world should con- 
 found the mighty, and the things which were not, 
 should bring to nought the things which were. Per- 
 haps we may paraphrase the same truth in relation to 
 Mr. Arnold's many beautiful expressions of the im- 
 potence of the intellect to believe, by saying that he 
 never reaches down to the sources of faith, simply 
 because that final act of humility and trust in which 
 faith arises, is always individical, and therefore to him 
 an act of foolishness. Faith is not susceptible of in- 
 tellectual generalization, being indeed a living act of 
 the individual soul, which must surrender itself to 
 God in a spiritual plane far deeper than that where the 
 dialogue with Doubt which Mr. Arnold so leisurely 
 dramatizes, takes place. Like his own favourite 
 Alpine peak, like 
 
 " Jaman ! delicately tall 
 Above his sun-warm'd firs," 
 
THE POETRY OF MATTHEW ARNOLD. 355 
 
 Mr. Arnold's poetry towers above the warmth of the 
 faiths it analyzes and rejects, and gains thereby its air 
 of mingled pride and sadness. However, his poetry is 
 no more the worse, as poetry, for its false spiritual as- 
 sumptions than Drama is the worse, as drama, for de- 
 lineating men as they seem to each other to be, and not 
 as they really are to the eye of God. And as the poet 
 of the soul's melancholy hauteur and plaintive benign- 
 ity, as the exponent of pity for the great excess of her 
 wants beyond her gifts and graces, as the singer at once 
 of the spirit's hunger, of the insufficiency of the food 
 which the intellect provides for her cravings, and yet 
 also of her fastidious rejection of more celestial nutri- 
 ment, Mr. Arnold will be read and remembered by 
 every generation in which faith continues to be daunted 
 by reason, and reason to seek, not without pangs of 
 inexplicable compunction, to call in question the 
 transcendental certainties of faith ; in a word he will 
 be read and remembered, as we said in our opening 
 sentence, as the poet who, more than any other of 
 his day, has embodied in his verse " the sweetness, 
 the gravity, the strength, the beauty, and the languor 
 of death." 
 
 THE ENP.