l\n\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\s\\\\s\\\\\n\\\\\s\\\\\\^^^ BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME FROM THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND THE GIFT OF 1891 ^-'x.U.a. i4,^> f \5 \x.u^. to. 6896-1 Cornell University Library PN 511.D74E7 Essays modern and &izabethan 3 1924 026 928 964 The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924026928964 ESSAYS: MODERN & ELIZABETHAN ESSAYS MODERN AND ELIZABETHAN BY EDWARD pOWDEN Professor of English Literature in the University of Dublin LL. D., D. C.L., LiTT.D. MCMX LONDON J. M. DENT & SONS LTD. NEW YORK : E. P. BUTTON & CO. [j4ll Rights Reserved] PREFACE The contents of this volume, with the exception of the notice of the Countess of Winchilsea's unpublished poems, have already appeared in print. I thank the editors of The Contemporary Review, The National Review, The Fortnightly Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The Nineteenth Century and After, for permission to republish various articles ; the Royal Society of Literature for permission to republish " Some Old Shakespearians " ; the Delegates of the Clarendon Press for permission to republish the study of " Hermann and Dorothea." CONTENTS Walter Pater . Henrik Ibsen Heinrich Heine . Goethe's West-Eastern Divan Goethe's Hermann and Dorothea Cowper and William Hayley . An Eighteenth-Century Mystic Some Old Shakespearians A Noble Authoress Is Shakespeare Self- Revealed r Shakespeare as a Man of Science Elizabethan Psychology The English Masque Elizabethan Romance . rXGB I 26 61 89 120 181 213 ^34 250 282 308 334 351 ESSAYS MODERN AND ELIZABETHAN WALTER PATER Let us imagine to ourselves a hoy born some ten years before the middle of the last century, of a family originally Dutch, a family with the home- loving, reserved temper of the Dutch, and that slow- moving mind of HoUand which attaches itself so closely, so intimately to things real and concrete, not tempted away from its beloved interiors and limited prospects by any glories of mountain heights or wide- spreading and radiant horizons ; a family settled for long in the low-lying, slow-moving Olney of Buck- inghamshire — Cowper's Olney, which we see in the delicate vignettes of The Task, and in the delightful letters, skilled in making so much out of so little, of the half-playful, half-pathetic correspondent of John Newton and Lady Hesketh. Dutch, but of mingled strains in matters of religion, the sons, we are told, always, until the tradition was broken in the case of Walter Pater, brought up as Roman Catholics, the daughters as members of the Anglican communion. Walter Pater's father had moved to the neighbourhood of London, and it was at Enfield, where Lamb, about whom the critic has written with penetrating sym- pathy, Lamb and his sister Mary, had lately dwelt, that Pater spent his boyhood. " Not precocious," writes his friend of later years, Mr. Gosse, " he was always meditative and serious." Yes, we cannot think of him at any time as other than serious ; with- ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN drawn from the boisterous sports of boyhood ; fed through little things by the sentiment of home — that sentiment which was nourished in Marius at White Nights by the duteous observances of the religion of Numa ; in Gaston at the Chateau of Deux-Manoirs with its immemorial associations and its traditional Catholic pieties ; in Emerald Uthwart at Chase Lodge, with its perfumes of sweet peas, the neigh- bouring fields so green and velvety, and the church where the ancient buried Uthwarts slept, that home to which Emerald came back to die, a broken man ; in Flbrian Deleal by " the old house," its old stair- case, its old furniture, its shadowy angles, its swallow's nest below the sill, its brown and golden wall-flowers, its pear tree in springtime, and the scent of lime- flowers floating in at the open window. And with this nesting sense of home there comes to the boy from neighbouring London, from rumours of the outer world, from the face of some sad way- farer on the road, an apprehension of the sorrow of the world, and the tears in mortal things, which dis- turbs him and must mingle henceforth with all his thoughts and dreams. He is recognised as " the clever one of the family," but it is not a vivacious cleverness, not a conscientious power of intellect, rather a shy, brooding faculty, slow to break its sheath, and expand into a blossom, a faculty of gradual and exact receptiveness, and one of which the eye is the special organ. This, indeed, is a central fact to remember. If Pater is a seeker for truth, he must seek for it with the eye, and with the imagination penetrating its way through things visible ; or if truth comes to him in any other way, he must project the truth into colour and form, since otherwise it remains for him cold, loveless, and a tyranny of the intellect, like that which oppressed WALTER PATER and almost crushed out of existence his Sebastian van Storck. We may turn elsewhere to read of " the conduct of the understanding." We learn much from Pater concerning the conduct of the eye. Whatever his religion may hereafter be, it cannot be that of Puritanism, which makes a breach between the visible and the invisible. It cannot be reached by purely intellectual processes ; it cannot be em- bodied in a creed of dogmatic abstractions. The blessing which he may perhaps obtain can hardly be that of those who see not and yet have believed. The evidential value of a face made bright by some iimer joy will count with him for more than any syllogism however correct in its premises and con- clusions. A Ufe made visibly gracious and comely ■will testify to him of some hidden truth more de- cisively than any supernatural witnessing known only by report. If he is impressed by any creed it will be by virtue of its living epistles, known and read of all men. He will be occupied during his whole Hfe with a study not of ideas apart from their concrete em- bodiment, not of things concrete apart from their inward significance, but with a study of expression — expression as seen in the countenance of external nature, expression in Greek statue, mediaeval cathe- dral, Renaissance altar-piece, expression in the ritual ■of various religions, and in the visible bearing of various types of manhood, in various exponents of tradition, of thought, and of faith. His creed may partake somewhat of that natural ■or human Catholicism of Wordsworth's poetry, which reveals the soul in things of sense, which is indeed, as Pater regards it, a kind of finer, spiritual sensuous- ness. But why stop where Wordsworth stopped in his earlier days? Why content ourselves with ex- pression as seen in the face of hillside and cloud and 3 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN stream, and the acts and words of simple men, through whom certain primitive elementary passions play ? Why not also seek to discover the spirit in sense in its more complex and subtler incarnations — ^in the arts and crafts, in the shaping of a vase, the lines and colours of a tapestry, the carving of a capital, the movements of a celebrant in the rites of religion, in a relief of Delia Robbia, in a Venus of Botticelli, in the mysterious Gioconda of Lionardo ? Setting aside the mere dross of circumstances in human life, why not vivify all amidst which we live and move by trans- lating sense into spirit, and spirit into sense, thus rendering opaque things luminous, so that if no pure white light of truth can reach us, at least each step we tread may be impregnated with the stains and dyes of those coloured morsels of glass, so deftly ar- ranged, through which such light as we are able to endure has its access to our eyes ? If such thoughts as these lay in Pater's mind during early youth they lay unfolded and dormant. But we can hardly doubt that in the account of Emerald Uthwart's schooldays he is interpreting with fuU-grown and self-conscious imagination his experi- ences as a schoolboy at Canterbury, where the cathedral was the presiding element of the geniuf loci : " If at home there had been nothing great,, here, to boyish sense, one seems diminished to noth- ing at all, amid the grand waves, wave upon wave, of patiently wrought stone ; the daring height, the daring severity, of the innumerable long, upward ruled lines, rigidly bent just at last in one place into the reserved grace of the perfect Gothic arch." Happy Emerald Uthwart in those early days, and happy Walter Pater with such noble, though as yet half-conscious, discipline in the conduct of the eye ! If Pater thought of a profession, the military profes- 4 WALTER PATER sion of his imagined Emerald would have been the last to commend itself to his feelings. His father was a physician, but science had no call for the son's intellect, and we can hardly imagine him as an enthusiastic student in the school of anatomy. He felt the attractions of the life and work of an English clergyman, and when a little boy, Mr. Gosse tells us, he had seen the benign face of Keble during a visit to Hursley, and had welcomed Keble's paternal counsel and encouragement. Had Pater lived some years longer it is quite possible that his early dream might have been reahsed, but Oxford, as things were, dissolved the dream of Canterbury. Two influences stood over against each other in the Oxford of Pater's undergraduate days. There was the High Church movement, with which the name of the University has been associated. The spell of Newman's personal charm and the echoes of his voice in the pulpit of St. Mary's were not yet iorgotten. The High Church movement had made the face of religion more outwardly attractive to such a, spirit as Pater's ; there had been a revival, half serious, half dilettante, of ecclesiastical art. But the High Church movement was essentially dogmatic ; the body of dogma had to some extent hardened into system, and Pater's mind was always prone to regard systems of thought — ^philosophical or theological — as works of art, to be examined and interpreted by the historical imagination ; from which, when inter- preted aright, something might be retained, perhaps, in a transposed form, but which could not be accepted and made one's own en blot. On the other hand there was a stirring critical movement, opening new avenues for thought and imagination, promising a great enfranchisement of the intellect, and claiming possession of the future. Jowett was a nearer pres- 5 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN ence now at Oxford than Newman, and Pater had already come under the influence of German thinkers and had discovered in Goethe — ^greatest of critics — a master of the mind. Art, to which he had found access through the Modern Painters of an illustrious Oxford graduate, had passed beyond the bounds of the ecclesiastical revival, and, following a course like that of the mediaeval drama, was rapidly secularising itself. We see the process at work in the firm of which William Morris was the directing manager, at first so much occupied with church decoration, and by-and-by ex- tending its operations to the domestic interiors of the wealthier lay-folk of England. Pater's dream of occu- pying an Anglo-Catholic pulpit re-shaped itself into the dream of becoming an Unitarian minister, and by degrees it became evident that the only pulpit which he could occupy was that of the Essayist, who explores for truth, and ends his research not without a sense of insecurity in his own conclusions, or rather who con- cludes without a conclusion, and is content to be faithful through manifold suggestions. We can imagine that with a somewhat different composition of the forces within him Pater's career might have borne some resemblance to that of Henri Amiel, " in wandering mazes lost." But the dis- putants in Amiel's nature were more numerous and could not be brought to a conciliation. One of them was for ever reaching out toward the indefinite, which Amiel called the infinite, and the Maya of the Genevan Buddhist threw him back in the end upon a world of ennui. Pater was saved by a certain " in- tellectual astringency," by a passion for the concrete, and by the fact that he hved much in and through the eye. He had perhaps learnt from Goethe that true expansion lies in hmitation, and he never appre- ciated as highly as did Amiel the poetry of fog. His 6 WALTER PATER boyish faith, such as it was, had lapsed away. How was he to face life and make the best of it ? Some- thing at least could be gained by truth to himself, by utter integrity, by Hving, and that intensely, in his best self and in the highest moments of his best self, by detaching from his intellectual force, as he says of Winckelmann, all flaccid interests. If there was in him any tendency to mystic passion and rehgious reverie this was checked, as with his own Marius, by a certain virility of intellect, by a feeling of the poetic beauty of mere clearness of mind. Is nothing per- manent? Are all things melting under our feet ? Well, if it be so, we cannot alter the fact. But we need not therefore spend our few moments of life in Ustlessness. If all is passing away, let the knowledge of this be a stimulus toward intenser activity, let it excite within us the thirst for a full and perfect experience. And remember that Pater's special gift, his unique power, lay in the eye and in the imagination using the eye as its organ. He could not disdain the things of sense, for there is a spirit in sense, and mind com- munes with mind through colour and through form. He notes in Marcus Aurelius, the pattern of Stoical morality, who would stand above and apart from the world of the senses, not, after aU, an attainment of the highest humanity, but a mediocrity, though a mediocrity for once really golden. He writes of Pascal with adequate knowledge and with deep sym- pathy, but he qualifies his admiration for the great friend of Jansenism by observing that Pascal had Uttle sense of the beauty even of hoHness. In Pascal's " sombre, trenchant, precipitous philosophy," and his perverse asceticism, Pater finds evidence of a diseased spirit, a morbid tension like that of insomnia. Sebastian van Storck, with the warm hfe of a rich 7 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN Dutch interior around him, and all the play of light and colour in Dutch art to enrich his eye, turns away to seek some glacial Northwest passage to the lifeless, colourless Absolute. Spinoza appears to Pater not as a God-intoxicated man, but as climbing to the barren pinnacle of egoistic intellect. Such, at all events, could not possibly be his own way. There is something of the true wisdom of humility in modestly remembering that we are not pure intelli- gence, pure soul, and in accepting the aid of the senses. How reassuring Marius finds it to be, after assisting at a long debate about rival criteria of truth, " to fall back upon direct sensation, to limit one's aspira- tion after knowledge to that." To live intensely in the moment, " to burn with a gemlike flame," to maintain an ecstasy, is to live well, with the gain, at least for a moment, of wisdom and of joy. " America is here and now — ^here or nowhere," as WUhelm Meister, and, after him, Marius the Epicurean dis- covered. There is no hint in Pater's first volume of the fortifying thought which afterwards came to him, that some vast logic of change, some law or rhythm of evolution may underlie all that is transitory, aU the pulsations of passing moments, and may bind them together in some hidden harmony. Looking back on the period of what he calls a new Cyrenaicism, he saw a most depressing theory coming in contact, in his own case as in that of Marius, with a happy tem- perament — Chappy though subject to moods of deep depression, and he saw that by virtue of this happy temperament he had converted his loss into a certain gain. Assuredly he never regarded that view of life which is expressed in the Conclusion to Studies in the History of the Renaissance as mere hedonism, as a mere abandonment to the lust of the eye, the lust of the 8 WALTEE PATER flesh, and the pride of life. No : looking back, he per- ceived that his aim was not pleasure, but fulness and vividness of life, a perfection of being, an intense and, as far as may be, a complete experience ; that this v?as not to be attained without a discipUne, involv- ing some severity; that it demanded a strenuous eflFort ; that here, too, the loins must be girt and the lamp Ht ; that for success in his endeavour he needed before all else true insight, and that insight will not come by any easy way, or, as we say, by a royal road ; that on the contrary it must be sought by a culture, which may be, and ought to be, joyous, but which certainly must be strict. The precept, " Be perfect in regard to what is here and now," is one which may be interpreted, as he conceived it, into lofty meanings. A conduct of the intellect in accordance with this precept, in its rejection of many things which bring with them facile pleasures, may in a certain sense be called a form of asceticism. The eye itself must be purified from aU grossness and dulness. " Such a manner of Hfe," writes Pater of the new Cyrenaicism of his Marius, " might itself even come to seem a kind of religion. . . . The true ' aesthetic culture ' would be reahsable as a new form of the ' contem- plative life,' founding its claim on the essential ' blessedness ' of ' "vision ' — the vision of perfect men and things." At the lowest it is an impassioned ideal life. Such is Pater's own apologia pro vita sua — that is, for hfe during his earher years of authorship — as given in Marius the Epicurean. But the best apologia is, indeed, the outcome of that life, the volume of Studies in the History of the Renaissance, and later essays, which are essentially one with these in kind. The richness of colour and delicacy of carving in some of Pater's work have concealed from 9 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN many readers its intellectual severity, its strictness of design, its essential veracity. A statue that is chrys- elephantine may be supposed to be less intellectual than the same statue if it were worked in marble ; yet more of sheer brainwork perhaps is required for the design which has to calculate effects of colour. There are passages in Pater's writing which may be called, if you like, decorative, but the decoration is never incoherent ornament of fafier machi laid on from without ; it is, on the contrary, a genuine out- growth of structure, always bringing into rehef the central idea. This central idea he arrives at only through the process of a steadfast and strenuous receptiveness, which has in it something of the nature of fortitude. Occasionally he gives it an express definition, naming^ it, not perhaps quite happily, the formula of the artist or author who is the subject of his study. Thus,, the formula of Raphael's genius, if we must have one, is this : " The transformation of meek scholarship into genius — ^triumphant power of genius." The essay on Raphael is accordingly the record of a series of educations, from which at last emerge works show- ing a synoptic intellectual power, and large theoretic conceptions, but these are seen to act in perfect unison with the pictorial imagination and a magic power of the hand. The formula, to turn from pictorial art to literature, of Prosper M6rim^e, who met the dis- illusion of the post-Revolution period by irony, is this : " The enthusiastic amateur of rude, crude, naked force in men and women wherever it could be found ; himself carrying ever, as a mask, the con- ventional attire of the modern world — carrying it with an infinite contemptuous grace, as if that to» were an all-sufficient end in itself." Nothing could be more triumphantly exact and complete than 10 WALTER PATER Pater's brief formula of M6rim6e. But perhaps his method is nowhere more convincingly shown than in the companion studies of two French churches, Notre Dame of Amiens, pre-eminently the church of a city, of a commune, and the Madeleine of Vezelay, which is typically the church of a monastery. Here the critic does not for a moment lose himself in de- tails; in each case he holds, as it were, the key of the situation ; he has grasped the central idea of each structure ; and then with the aid of something like creative imagination, he assists the idea — the vital germ — ^to expand itself and grow before us into leaf and tendrU and blossom. In such studies as these we perceive that the eye is itself an intellectual power, or at least the organ and instrument of such a power. And this imaginative criticism is in truth constructive. But the creative work of imagination rises from a basis of adequate knowledge and exact perception. To see precisely what a thing is — ^what, before all else, it is to me ; to feel with entire accuracy its unique quaUty ; to find the absolutely right word in which to express the perception and the feeling — ^this indeed taxes the athletics of the mind. Sometimes, while stiU essentially a critic. Pater's power of construction and reconstruction takes the form of a highly intellectual fantasy. Thus A Study of Dionysus reads like a fantasia suggested by the life of the vine and the " spirit of sense " in the grape ; yet the fantasia is in truth the tracing out, by a learned sympathy, of strange or beautiful sequences of feeling or imagina- tion in the Greek mind. In Denys VAuxerrois and A-pollo in Picardy, which should be placed side by side as companion pieces, the fancy takes a freer range. They may be described as transpositions of the classical into the romantic. Apollo — ^now for II ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN mediaeval contemporaries bearing the ill-omened name Apollyon — appears in a monkish frock and wears the tonsure ; yet he remains a true Apollo, but of the Middle Age, and, in a passage of singular romance, even does to death the mediasval Hyacin- thus. Denys, that strange flaxen and flowery creature, the organ-builder of Auxerre, has all the mystic power and ecstatic rage of Dionysus. Are these two elder brothers of Goethe's Euphorion, earlier-born children of Faust and Helena ? Even these fantasies are not without an intellec- tual basis. For Pater recognises in classical art and classical literature a considerable element of romance — strangeness allied with beauty ; and to re-fashion the myths of Dionysus and even of Apollo in the romantic spirit is an experiment in which there is more than mere fantasy. Very justly and admirably he protests in writing of Greek sculpture against a too intellectual or abstract view of classical art. Here •also were colour and warmth and strange ventures of imaginative faith, and fears and hopes and ecstasies, which we are apt to forget in the motionless shadow or pallid light of our cold museums. Living himself at a time, as we say, of " transition," when new and old ideas were in conflict, and little interested in any form of action except that of thought and feeling, he came to take a special interest in the contention and also in the conciliation of rival ideals. Hence the period of the Renaissance — from the auroral Re- naissance within the Middle Age to the days of Ron- sard and Montaigne, with its new refinements of medisevalism — -seen, for example, in the poetry of the Pleiad — its revival in an altered form of the classical temper, and the invasions of what may be summed up under the name of " the modern spirit " — had a peculiar attraction for him. His Gaston de Latour, 12 WALTEE PATEE as far as he is known to us through what is unhappily a fragment, seems almost created for no other pur- pose than to be a subject for the play of contending influences. The old pieties of the Middle Age survive within him, leaving a deep and abiding de- posit in his spirit ; but he is caught by the new grace and delicate magic of Ronsard's verse, of Ronsard's personality ; he is exposed to all the enriching, and yet perhaps disintegrating forces of Montaigne's undulant philosophy — the philosophy of the relative ; and he is prepared to be lifted — ^lifted, shall we say, or lowered ? — from his state of suspended judgment by the ardent genius of that new knight of the Holy Ghost, Giordano Bruno, with his glowing exposition of the Lower Pantheism. His Marius, again, cannot rest in the reUgion of Numa, which was the presiding influence of his boy- hood. His Cyrenaicism is confronted by the doctrine of the Stoics — sad, grey, depressing, though pre- sented with aU possible amiabiHty in the person of Marcus Aurelius. And in the Christian house of CeciUa, and among the shadowy catacombs of Rome, his eyes are touched by the radiance of a newer light, which thrills him with the sense of an unapprehended joy, a heroic — perhaps a divine — ^hope. In the eighteenth century Pater's Watteau, creating a new and deUcate charm for the society of his own day, is yet iU at ease, half detached from that society, and even — saddening experience ! — ^half detached from- his own art, for he dreams, unlike his age, of a better world than the actual one ; and by an anachronism, which is hardly pardonable (for it confuses the chrono- logy of eighteenth-century moods of mind) the faith- ful and tender diarist of Valenciennes, whose more than sisterly interest in young Antoine has left us this Watteau myth, becomes acquainted — and through 13 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN Antoine himself — ^with the Manon Lescaut of many years later, in which the ardent passion of the period of Rousseau is anticipated. And, again, in that other myth of the eighteenth century, Duke Carl of Rosen- mold — myth of a half-rococo Apollo — the old stiff medisevalism of German courts and the elegant fadeurs of French pseudo-classicism are exhibited in relation to a throng of fresher influences — the classical revival of which Winckelmann was the apostle, the revival of the Middle Age as a new and living force, the artistic patriotism which Lessing preached, the " return to nature " of which a little later the young Goethe — ^he, a true Apollo — ^was the herald, and that enfranchisement of passion and desire, which, now when Rousseau is somewhere in the world, brooding, kindling, about to burst into flame, seems no ana- chronism. I cannot entirely go along with that enthusiastic admirer who declared — surely not without a smile of ironic intelligence — that the trumpet of doom ought to have sounded when the last page of Studies in the History of the Renaissance was completed. Several copies of the golden book in its first edition, contain- ing the famous Conclusion, would probably have perished in the general conflagration ; and Pater was averse to noise. But a memorable volume it is, and one which testifies to the virtue of a happy tem- perament even when in the presence of a depressing philosophy. Too much attention has been centred on that Conclusion ; it has been taken by many persons as if it were Pater's ultimate confession of faith, whereas, in truth, the Conclusion was a pro- logue. Pater's early years had made a home for his spirit among Christian pieties and the old moralities. When Florian Deleal, quitting for the first time the house of his childhood, runs back to fetch the for- 14 WALTER PATEE gotten pet bird, and sees the warm familiar rooms *' lying so pale, with a look of meekness in their denudation," a clinging to the cherished home comes over him. And had Pater in his haughty philosophy of manhood in like manner dismantled and desecrated the little white room of his early faith ? The very question seemed to carry with it something of re- morse ; but Pater's integrity of mind, his intellectual virility, could not permit itself to melt in sentiment. In the essay on Aucassin and Nicolette, he had spoken of the rebellious antinomian spirit connected with the outbreak of the reason and imagination, with the assertion of the liberty of heart, in the Middle Age. *' The perfection of culture," he knew, " is not re- bellion, but peace ; " yet on the way to that end, he thought, there is room for a noble antinomianism. Now, like his own Marius, he began to think that in such antinomianism there might be a taint, he began to question whether it might not be possible some- how to adjust his new intellectual scheme of things to the old moraHty. His culture had brought with it a certain sense of isolation, like that of a spectator detached from the movement of life and the great community of men. His Cyrenaic theory was one in keeping with the proud individuaUsm of youth. From the Stoic Fronto his Marius hears of an august community, to which each of us may perchance belong, " humanity, an universal order, the great polity, its aristocracy of elect spirits, the mastery of their example over their successors." But where are these elect spirits? Where is this comely order? The Cyrenaic lover of beauty begins to feel that his conception of beauty has been too narrow, too ex- clusive ; not positively unsound perhaps, for it enjoined the practice of an ideal temperance, and in- volved a seriousness of spirit almost religious, so that, IS ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN as Marius reflects, " the saint and the Cyrenaic lover of beauty would at least understand each other better than either would understand the mere man of the world." His pursuit of perfection was surely not in itself illegitimate, but by its exclusiveness of a more complete ideal of perfection it might almost partake of the nature of a heresy. Without rejecting his own scheme of life, might it not be possible to adjust it to the old morality as a part to a whole? Viewed even from a purely egoistic standpoint had not such attainments as were his — and the attainments were unquestionably precious^been secured at a great sacrifice ? Was it a true economy to forfeit perhaps a greater gain for the less ? The Stoical ideal, which casts scorn upon the body, and that visible beauty in things which for Marius was indeed a portion of truth, as well as beauty, he must needs reject. But might there not be a divination of something real, an imperfect vision of a veritable possibility in the Stoical conception of an ordered society of men, a Celestial City, Uranofolis, Callifolis ? And what if the belief of Marcus AureHus in the presence of a divine companion, a secret Providence behind the veil, contained some elevating truth ? What if the isolated seeker for a narrow perfection could attach himself to some venerable system of sentiment and ideas, and so " let in a great tide of experience, and make, as it were, with a single step, a great experi- ence of his own ; with a great consequent increase to his own mind, of colour, variety, and relief, in the spectacle of men and things " ? There are two passages of rare spiritual beauty in Marius the Epicurean: one is that which tells of Marius wandering forth with such thoughts as these — ^keeping all these things in his heart — to one of his favourite spots in the Alban or the Sabine hills ; the other is the i6 WALTER PA TEE description of the sacred memorial celebration in the Christian house of Cecilia. After a night of perfect sleep Marius awakes in the morning sunlight, with almost the joyful waking of childhood. As he rides toward the hills his mood is, like the season's, one of flawless serenity ; a sense of gratitude — gratitude to what? — fills his heart, and must overflow ; he leans, as it were, toward that eternal, invisible Companion of whom the Stoic philosopher and emperor spoke. Might he not, he reflects, throw in the election of his wil^ though never faltering from the truth, on the side of his best thought, his best feehng, and perhaps receive in due course the justification, the confirma- tion of this venture of faith ? What if the eternal companion were really by his side ? What if his own spirit were but a moment, a pulse, in some great stream of spiritual energy ? What if this fair material universe were but a creation, a projection into sense of the perpetual mind ? What if the new city, let down from heaven, were also a reality included in the process of that divine intelligence.? Less through any sequence of argument than by a discovery of the spirit in sense, or rather of the imaginative reason, Marius seems to Uve and move in the presence of the Great Ideal, the Eternal Reason, nay, the Father of men. A larger conception assuredly of the reason- able Ideal than that of his Cyrenaic days has dawned for him, every trace or note of which it shall hence- forth be his business to gather up. Paratum cor meum, Deus ! faratum cor meum ! It is a criticism of Uttle insight which represents Marius as subordinating truth to any form of ease or comfort or spiritual self-indulgence ; an erroneous criticism which represents him as only extending a refined hedonism so as to include within it new pleasures of the moral sense or the religious temper. B 17 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN For Marius had never made pleasure his aim and end ; his aim and end had been always perfection, but now he perceives that his ideal of perfection had been in- complete and inadequate. He discovers the larger truth, and the lesser falls into its due place. His experiences among the Sabine hiUs, which remind one of certain passages in Wordsworth's Excursion, may have little evidential value for any other mind than his own ; even for himself they could hardly recur in like manner ever again. But that such phenomena — ^however we may interpret their signi- ficance — are real cannot be doubted by any disin- terested student of human nature. What came to Marius was not a train of argument, but what we may call a revelation ; it came as the last and cul- minating development, under favouring external conditions, of many obscure processes of thought and feeling. The seed had thrust up its stalk, which then had struggled through the soil ; and at last sunlight touches the folded blossom, which opens to become a flower of light. Marius had already seen in CorneUus the ex- emplar of a new knighthood, which he can but im- perfectly understand. Entirely virile, Cornelius is yet governed by some strange hidden ride which obliges him to turn away from many things that are commonly regarded as the rights of manhood ; he has a blitheness, which seems precisely the reverse of the temper of the Emperor, and yet some veiled severity underlies, perhaps supports, this blitheness. And in the gathering at Cecilia's house, where the company — and among them, children — are singing, Marius recognises the same glad expansion of a joyful soul, " in people upon whom some all-subduing experi- ence had wrought heroically." A grave discretion ; an intelligent seriousness about life ; an exquisite i8 WALTER PATER courtesy ; all chaste affections of the family, and these under the most natural conditions ; a temperate beauty ; all are here ; the human body, which had been degraded by Pagan voluptuousness and dis- honoured by Stoic asceticism, is here reverenced as something sacred, or as something sanctified ; and death itself is madq beautiful through a new hope. Charity here is not painfully calculated, but joyous and chivalrous in its devotion ; peaceful labour is re- babilitated and Ulumined with some new light. A higher ideal than Marius had ever known before — Mgher and gladder — ^is operative here, ideal of woman, of the family, of industry, including all of hfe and death. And its effects are visible, addressing them- selves even to the organ of sight, which with Marius is the special avenue for truth ; so that he has only to read backward from effects to causes in order to be assured that some truth of higher import and finer efficacy than any previously known to him must be working among the forces which have created this new beauty. What if this be the company of elect souls dreamed of by the rhetorician Fronto ? And with the tenderest charity in this company of men and women a heroic fortitude — the fortitude of the martyrs, like those of Lyons — ^is united. What if iere be UranopoUs, Callipolis, the City let down from heaven ? For Marius in the house of Cecilia the argument is irrefragable — rather the experience is convincing. Possibly in the light of a more ex- tended survey of history new doubts and questions may arise ; but these were days of purity and of love, the days of the minor peace of the church. Yet even in the end Marius is brought only to his Pisgah — the mount of vision. He does not actually set foot within the promised land. Even that act of surrender, by which Cornelius is delivered and Marius 19 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN goes to his death, is less an act of divine self-sacrifice than the result of an impulse, half careless, half generous, of comradeship. His spirit — anitna naturaliter Christiana — departs less in assured hope than with the humble consolation of memory — tristem neminem fecit ; he had at least not added any pang to the total sum of the world's pain. And although the creator of Marius had arrived, by ways very different from those of Pascal, at some of Pascal's conclusions, and had expressed these with decisiveness in a review of Amiel's Journal, we cannot but remember that essentially his mind belonged to the same order as the mind of Montaigne rather than to the order of the mind of Pascal. We can imagine Pater, had he lived longer, asking himself, as part of that endless dialogue with self which constituted his life, whether the deepest community with his fellows could not be attained by a profound individuality without attaching himself to institutions. Whether, for example, the fact of holding a fellowship at Brase- nose, or the fact of knowing Greek well, bound him the more intimately to the society of Greek scholars. We can imagine him questioning whether other truths might not be added to those truths which made radiant the faces in Cecilia's house. Whether even those same truths might not, in a later age, be capable of, might not even require, a different con- ception, and a largely altered expression. While in the ways indicated in Marius the Epicu- rean Pater was departing from that doctrine of the perpetual flux — with ideals of conduct corresporid- ing to that doctrine — or was at least subordinating this to a larger, really a more hberal view of things, his mind was also tending, and now partly under the in- fluence of Plato, away from the brilliantly-coloured, versatile, centrifugal Ionian temper of his earlier days 20 WALTER PATER toward the simpler, graver, more strictly ordered, more athletic Dorian spirit. Plato and Platonism, in noticing which I shall sometimes use Pater's own words, is distinguished less by colour than by a pervasive light. The de- mand on a reader's attention is great, but the demand is not so much from sentence to sentence as from chapter to chapter. If we may speak of the evolu- tion or development of a theme by literary art, such evolution in this book is perhaps its highest merit. No attempt is made to fix a dogmatic creed, or to piece together an artificial unity of tessellated opinions. Philosophies are viewed very much as works of art, and the historical method is adopted, which endeavours to determine the conditions that render each philosophy, each work of art, and especi- ally this particular work of art, the Platonic philo- sophy, possible. And there is something of autobio- graphy, for those who can discern it, below the surface of the successive discussions of ideas, which yet are often seemingly remote from modern thought. The doctrine of the Many, of the perpetual flux of things, which was so consonant to the mobile Ionian temper, is set over against the doctrine of the One, for which all that is phenomenal becomes null, and the sole reaUty is pure Being, colourless, formless, impalpable. It was Plato's work to break up the formless unity of the philosophy of the One into something multiple, and yet not transitory — ^the starry Platonic ideas. Justice, Temperance, Beauty, and their kindred luminaries of the intellectual heaven. Platonism in one sense is a witness for the unseen, the transcendental. Yet, austere as he some- times appears, who can doubt that Plato's austerity, his temperance is attained only by the control of a 21 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN richly sensuous nature ? Before all else he was a lover ; and now that he had come to love invisible things more than visible, the invisible things naust be made, as it were, visible persons, capable of engaging his affections. The paradox is true that he had a sort of sensuous love of the unseen. And in setting forth his thoughts he is not a dogmatist but essenti- ally an essayist — a questioning explorer for truth, who refines and idealises the manner of his master Socrates, and who, without the oscillating philosophy of Mon- taigne, anticipates something of Montaigne's method as a seeker for the knowledge of things. At thi« point in Pater's long essay, a delightful turn is given to his treatment of the subject by that remarkable and characteristic chapter in which he attempts to revive for the eye, as well as for the mind, the life of old Lacedaemon — Lacedsemon, the highest concrete embodiment of thatDorian temper of Greece, that Dorian temper of which his own ideal Republic would have been a yet more complete development. Those conservative Lacedaemonians, " the people of memory pre-eminently," are made to live and move before us by creative imagination working among the records, too scanty, of historical research. There in hollow Laconia, a land of organised slavery under central military authority, the genius of conservatism was enthroned. The old bore sway ; the young were under strict, but not unjoyous discipline. Every one, at every moment, must strive to be at his best, with all superfluities pruned away. " It was a type of the Dorian purpose in life — a sternness, like sea-water infused into wine, overtaking a matter naturally rich, at the moment when fulness may lose its savour and expression." There in clear air, on the bank of a mountain torrent, stands Lacedaemon ; by no means a " growing " place, rather a solemn, ancient moun- 22 WALTER PATER tain village, with its sheltering plane trees, and its playing-fields for youthful athletes, all under dis- cipline, who when robed might almost have seemed a company of young monks. A city not without many venerable and beautiful buildings, civic and rehgious, in a grave hieratic order of architecture, while its private abodes were simple and even rude. The whole of life is evidently conceived as matter of attention, patience, fidelity to detail, like that of good soldiers or musicians. The Helots, who pur- sue their trades and crafts from generation to genera- tion in a kind of guild, may be indulged in some illiberal pleasures of abundant food and sleep ; but it is the mark of aristocracy to endure hardness. And from these half-mihtary, half-monastic modes of life are born the most beautiful of all people in Greece, in the world. Everywhere one is conscious of re- served power, and the beauty of strength restrained — a male beauty, far remote from feminine tenderness. Silent these men can be, or, if need arise, can speak to the point, and with brevity. With them to read is almost a superfluity, for whatever is essentialhas become a part of memory, and is made actual in habit ; but such culture in fact has the power to develop a vigorous im- agination. Their music has in it a high moral stimulus; their dance is not mere form, but full of subject ; they dance a theme, and that with absolute correctness, a dance fuU of delight, yet with something of the char- acter of a hturgical service, something of a military inspection. And these half-monastic people are also — as monks may be— a very cheerful people, devoted to a religion of sanity, worshippers of ApoUo, sanest of the national gods ; strong in manly comradeship, of which those youthful demi-gods, the Dioscuri, are the patrons. Why aU this strenuous task-work day after day ? An intelligent young Spartan might 23 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN reply, " To the end that I myself may be a perfect work of art." It is this Dorian spirit which inspires the Re- pubHc of Plato. He would, if possible, arrest the dis- integration of Athenian society, or at least protest against the principle of flamboyancy in things and thoughts — ^protest against the fluxional, centrifugal, Ionian element in the Hellenic character. He con- ceives the State as one of those disciplined Spartan dancers, or as a well-known athlete ; he desires not that it shall be gay, or rich, or populous, but that it shall be strong, an organic unity, entirely self- harmonious, each individual occupying his exact place in the system ; and the State being thus har- moniously strong, it will also be of extreme aesthetic beauty — ^the beauty of a unity or harmony enforced on highly disparate elements, unity as of an army or an order of monks, unity as of liturgical music. It could hardly happen that Pater's last word in this long study should be on any other subject than art. It is no false fragment of traditional Platonism which insists on the close connection between the aesthetic qualities of things and the formation of moral character ; on the building of character through the eye and ear. And this ethical influence of art resides even more in the form — its concision, simplicity, rhythm — than in the matter. In the ideal Republic the simplification of human nature is the chief affair ; therefore art must be simple and even austere. The community will be fervently aesthetic, but withal fervent renunciants as well, and, in the true sense of the word ascetic, will be fervently ascetic. " The proper art of the Perfect City is in fact the art of discipline." In art, in its narrower meaning, in literature, what the writer of the Re- public would most desire is that quality which 24 WALTER PATER solicits an effort from the reader or spectator, " who is promised a great expressiveness on the part of the writer, the artist, if he for his part will bring with him a great attentiveness." Temperance superinduced on a nature originally rich and impassioned — ^this is the supreme beauty of the Dorian art. Plato's own prose is, indeed, a practical illustration of the value of intellectual astringency. He is before all else a lover, and infinite patience, quite as much as fire, is the mood of all true lovers. It is, indeed, this infinite patience of a lover which in large measure gives to Pater's own studies of art and literature their peculiar value. The bee, that has gone down the long neck of a blossom, is not more patient in collect- ing his drop of honey. 25 HENRIK IBSEN Several of Ibsen's men and women are possessed with a highly reprehensible passion for exposing their lives to danger on perilous eminences. Halverd Solness, the master-builder, with trembling zeal achieves the impossible, ascends his ladders, and waves his hat for one triumphant moment from the top of his tower. It is among the high mountains and in the great waste places that little Eyolf's father discovers his mission which is no mission, and hears the call which is no call. Brand, bearing the banner with a strange device — not " Excelsior " but " All or Nothing " — perishes where the ice-church impales the blue, among the white wreaths and glacier-spines. John Gabriel Borkman struggles through snow to the plateau from which he sees the fiord below, and his imaginary kingdom of mountain-chains above, and there the ice-cold hand grips his heart. Professor Rubek and Irene reach an altitude from which un- aided descent is impossible for them, and, as with Brand, the final stage direction introducing the deus ex machina might run " Enter Avalanche, who in- geniously saves the situation." As we look back upon the series of Ibsen's works, to which the word " Finis " has now been appended, we feel that we, too, while our interest in them was still quick, were eager climbers, were perpetually on the strain, and never quite reached the point at which we could repose and enjoy in quietude a sure attainment. There are hberal fields of art in which 26 HENEIK IBSEN the eye finds rest in horizontal lines, and this is no dull rest, for the lines may stretch away to the illimit- able. In many great artists there is even a good bovine quahty, which strangely may alternate with a winged joy, and which learns through traiiquillity some of the deepest secrets of our Mother Earth. With Ibsen the lines are aU precipitous and abrupt ; we are forever scaHng to the Viddes or above them ; we hang over desperate fissures ; we cHng to jagged edges ; we are enclosed in forlorn and shadowy chasms, or encounter some sudden spear-like shaft of light ; we learn none of the deep lessons of tran- quillity. Even in Peer Gynt fantasy brings no relief, for it is fantasy with all the energy of will behind it — fantasy with a purpose hidden in its flight. Yet in Peer Gynt, if anywhere, there is some hovering and circhng on the wing, some smooth balance and curv- ing poise of motion in the sea-gull fashion. For the most part, however, Ibsen's advance resembles rather the terribly business-like progress of the cor- morant, bent upon attaining his point with a quite relentless resolve and with incessant beat of pinions. , If his end and aim as an artist were beauty and en- joyment in beauty, it could not have been thus with Ibsen. He must have found, a place of rest. But though beauty comes incidentally in some startHng . form, which is half terror, or in some swift antagonism of brightness and gloom, beauty is not Ibsen's end. His end, even in his earlier romantic plays, even in plays that are historical or semi-historical, is to free, arouse, dilate. He desires to bring the reader or spectator to some point — a point attained by effort — ^from which things may be seen more clearly or more deeply, even though this may be only a moment's standing place in some ascent which does not here cease ; he desires to raise questions, even if no entirely 27 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN satisfactory answer can as yet be given to them, to awaken those who slumber on the easy pillow of traditional opinion and conventional morals, to startle them from the false dream of custom, and, if need be, to combat, to censure, to satirise. He was not pleased, indeed, to be regarded as a didactic poet ; he asserted that his primary object was to see and to represent life, to create true and living men and women. But he did not deny that he attempted to attain and to express a philosophy of life, and un- doubtedly his art suffered because that philosophy of life was not broad-based upon the attainments of the past, because it was not the inevitable growth of the national life surrounding him, because it was a philo- sophy of revolt, the protest of an individual, embody- ing only a fragment of truth, aggressive, polemical, revolutionary. Hence his art was often marred by over-emphasis. The httle towns upon the fiords seemed to Ibsen to be buried in sleep, though morn- ing was growing broad. He would steam up the fiord from the open sea, and try whether the hooting ©f the fog-horn would make them open their eyes. And certainly there followed wide-spreading rever- berations, reverberations which passed across Europe. " To realise oneself " — to bring into full being and action whatever force exists within us, this was Ibsen's chosen expression for what the Shorter Cate- chism terms " man's chief end." " So to conduct one's life as to realise oneself," he wrote to a friend in 1882, " seems to me the highest attainment possible to a human being." And again : " I believe that there is nothing else and nothing better for us all to do than in spirit and in truth to realise ourselves. This, in my opinion, constitutes real liberalism." He desired for his friend and critic, George Brandes, before all else " a genuine, full-blooded egoism," but 28 HENEIK IBSEN he begged at the same time that this desire might not be taken as an evidence of something brutal in his nature. Being an artist, Ibsen found self-realisation to mean for him the putting forth of all that was best within him in and through his art. Dramatic art for him was not so much a delightful play as an inex- orable duty. Wort which may seem whoUy detached from his own personality, whoUy imaginative and objective, was in fact intensely personal ; not indeed in the dramatic action, the sequence of incidents, but in the view of life which gave a meaning and a unity to the incidents. The whole man, as he was for the time being, pressed into his work ; but, while certain general characteristics run through all that he wrote, and constitute the Ibsen cachet, it happened not seldom with him, as it happened with Goethe, that the view of life embodied in this play or in that was one which Ibsen desired to master, to place outside himself, to escape from and leave behind him in his advance. Lessons of warning for the dramatic critic who would discover the mind of a dramatist through his art may be read in Ibsen's correspondence. Thus while into the character of Brand he transposed certain things which he found in himself — ^things which he regarded as the best part of himself, dis- covered only in his highest moments — the poem Brand was partly written, as he declares to Laura Kieler, who attempted a continuation of the poem, because it became a necessity with him to free himself from something that his inner man had done with, by giving it a poetic form. A canon of criticism founded upon such a confession, or upon similar con- fessions made by Goethe, would play havoc with many of the crude attempts to infer the mind and moods of Shakespeare from his dramatic composi- tions. Precisely because he wrote Hamlet Shake- 29 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN speare may have been delivered from the Hamlet mood and the Hamlet view of life, and may have lost interest in them for ever. Nothing can be created, in the true sense of that word, according to Ibsen, except it takes into itself some life-experience ; but we see most clearly, he adds, at a distance ; " we must get away from what we desire to judge ; one describes summer best on a winter day." Soon after his own happy marriage in 1858 Ibsen was engaged upon his Comedy of Love, which, however, was not completed until four years later. Shall we say that his mockery of love-betrothals and love-marriages — or what are called so — and his pronouncement in the play in favour of a marriage of prudence and worldly wisdom expresses the whole of his mind at this time i Or may it not have been that his deeper sense of the worth of a true marriage of love urged him to take his revenge upon a state of society in which, with its half-heartedness and its feeble sentimentalities, the ideal marriage, as it seemed to him, had become almost impossible ? Falk and Svanhild, with the terror before them of a Pastor Straamand and his Maren, a Styver and Miss Skjaere, a Lind and Anna, are incapable of trusting their own hearts, and with- out such a confident venture of faith it is better that Svanhild should be the sensible bride of a kind and sensible Guldstad. A lower view of marriage is set forth and justified perhaps for the precise reason that Ibsen had come to value the true romance above the pseudo-romance of a sentimental con- vention. With much of the strenuousness, if not the sever- ity, of the Northern temper, Ibsen was yet a lover of brightness and joy. The southern sunshine and the colour of the south gave him a sense of happy expan- sion. But where could he find the joy of life in his 30 HENRIK IBSEN earlier years ? Hardly anywhere except in his own consciousness of strength ; and sometimes he lost heart and courage. He was poor and he was proud. He pounded drugs at Grimstad to earn a scanty hving, stung his enemies and even his friends with epigram or lampoon, fashioned his youthful verses in stolen hours, and meditated in his Catiline on the discrepancy between our desires and our power of giving them their satisfaction. He repelled others and was in turn repelled. He retreated into himself and there he heard the " call," about which his poems in dramatic fashion teU us much. And his ambition, his egoism leaped up and responded to the call. There are men whom an unfavourable environment crushes and destroys. But Ibsen was not one of these. He grew stronger through opposition, and the surface of his mind, like the face of a sea-captain, hardened in the rough weather. Through resistance he came to understand his own powers, he came to attain self- definition. Harder to bear than any direct opposition were the narrowness, the pettiness, the death-in-life of the society in which, " like a seven-sealed mystery," he moved. Storm for him was always inspiriting, but fog was stifling. The Vikings of elder days had been transformed into a grocer, an innkeeper, a barber, and he himself was pounding his drugs in an apothe- cary's shop. The common excitement which now and again may have stirred his eight hundred fellow- townsfolk was like the flurry in a very small ant-hiU. They pried, and gossiped and slandered ; they found their law in the artificial proprieties ; they sentimentalised and had their ineffectual pseudo- passions. Religion was the mummy of ancient faith, eviscerated and swathed ; the pastor was only a spiritual beadle. The State was represented by 31 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN an official or two, who earned a salary by wearing the approved blinkers and pulling the old cart through the old rut. If liberalism existed, it spent its enthusi- asm in vacuouswords andhigh-sounding phrases. The best persons were no more than fragments of a whole man, who held together the fragments bysome illogical compromise, and perhaps named this compromise " morality." Ibsen, the Norwegian poet, was never quite at home in the land of his birth. Long after- wards, when he had sunned himself among Italian vines and felt the stupendous life of Rome — life over which in those days there seemed to rest an indescribable peace— the heimweh that drew him back to Norway was not a desire to revive the sentiment of his early life, but his deep, unconquerable passion for the sea. Yet he tells his friend Bjornson that when he sailed up the fjord he felt a weight settling down on his breast, a feeHng of actual physical oppression : " And this feeling," he goes on, " lasted all the time I was at home ; I was not myself " — not his own man, as we say — " under the gaze of all those cold, uncompre- hending Norwegian eyes at the windows and in the streets." And in 1897 he writes to Brandes from Christiania : " Here all the sounds are closed in every acceptation of the word — and all the channels of in- telligence are blocked. Oh, dear Brandes, it is not without consequence that a man hves for twenty- seven years in the wider, emancipated and emanci- pating spiritual conditions of the great world. Up here, by the fjords, is my native land. But — but — but ! Where am I to find my home-land? " It was natural that Ibsen should sigh for a re- volution, or rather — since sighing was not his mode — that he should work towards it. But in the pro- gramme of political liberaHsm he took little interest. A people might — ^like that of Norway — be free, yet 32 HENRIK IBSEN be no more than a congeries of ««free persons. "Dear friend," he cried to Brandes in 1872, " the Liberals are freedom's worst enemies. Freedom of thought and spirit thrive best under absolutism ; this was shown in France, afterwards in Germany, and now we see it in Russia." While Bjomson, like a good member of the Liberal Party, said, " The majority is always right," Ibsen, an admirer, as was Edmund Burke, of the natural aristocracy, was ready to maintain that right is always with the minority. Dr. Stockmann, of the Baths, is in a minority of one ; not only does officialdom hunt him down ; the " com- pact majority " of middle-class citizens and the public Press turn against him ; yet Stockmann — somewhat muddle-headed hero as he is — ^has the whole right and the whole truth upon his side. The rhetoric of a Stensgaard can always gather a party of so-called progress around him, yet Stensgaard, eloquent for freedom, has no conception of that wherein true freedom Ues. The Mayor in Brand is busily employed in ameUorating the lot of his fellow-men by the prescribed methods of social " progress," only he has not yet conceived what a man and the life of a man truly mean. " Liberty," wrote Ibsen in 1882, " is the first and highest condition for me. At home they do not trouble much about Uberty, but only about Hberties — a few more or a few less, according to the standpoint of their party. I feel, too, most painfully affected by the crudity, the plebeian element in all our public discussions. The very praiseworthy attempt to make of our people a democratic commun- ity has inadvertently gone a good way towards making us a plebeian community." As for the peasantry, Ibsen found them in every country very much aUve to their own interests ; in no country did he find them liberal-minded or self-sacrificing, o 33 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN The revolution for which he hoped was not a re- volution of government. He desired, indeed, as immediate measures — so he writes to Bjornson in 1884 — a very wide extension of the suffrage, the statutory improvement of the position of women, and the emancipation of national education froni all kinds of medisevalism ; but these were valuable, he thought, only as means to an end. Governments, States, religions will pass away, but men wiU remain. As for the State, Ibsen regarded it sometimes with almost the hostiHty of an anarchist. He pointed to the Jewish people — " the nobility of the human race " — as a nation without a State, possessing an intense national consciousness and great individual freedom, but no organised government. Perhaps he overlooked the fact that the national consciousness is based upon the common faith and common obser- vances of a unique and highly-organised religion. Ibsen's starting-point and his goal was the individual man or woman. The struggle for liberty which interested him was not the effort to obtain political " rights," but the constant, living assimilation by each individual of the idea of freedom. When December, 1870, came, he rejoiced that " the old, illusory France " had coUapsed. " Up tUl now," he wrote, " we have been living on nothing but the crumbs from the revolution table of last century, a food out of which aU nutriment has long been chewed. The old terms require to have a new meaning infused into them. Liberty, equality and fraternity are no longer the things they were in the days of the late-lamented guillotine. This is what the politicians wiU not understand ; and therefore I hate them. They want only their own special revolutions in externals, in politics, etc. But aU this is mere trifling. What is all-important is 34 HENRIK IBSEN the revolution in the spirit of man." Like Maximus in Emperor and Galilean, Ibsen dreamed of the third empire. The third empire will come when man ceases to be a fragment of himself, and attains, in com- plete self-reaUsation, the fulness of the stature of the perfect man. JuUan, Emperor and apostate, as Ibsen conceives him, is a divided nature, living in a time of moral division. As a youth he has heard the terrible, unconditional, inexorable com- mands of the spirit, declared through the reUgion of Christ ; but they have always been without and not within his heart ; at every turn the merciless god-man has met him, stark and stern, with some uncompromising " Thou shalt " or " Thou shalt not," which never became the mandate of his own vdU. And the old pagan passion for the beauty and the joy of terrene hfe is in JuHan's blood. He is pedant enough to seek for spiritual unity through the schools of philosophy, and man enough to find the shadows of truth exhibited in the schools vain and impotent. Christianity, as he sees it in Con- stantinople, is not a faith but an «»faith — made up •of greeds, ambitipn, treachery, distrust, worldly compromises, external shows of religion. " Do you not feel disgust and nausea," he cries to Basileus, " as on board ship in a windless swell, heaving to and fro between life, and written revelation, and heathen wisdom and beauty? There must come a new revelation. Or a revelation of something new." He can dream of the rapture of a martyr's death — but martyrdom for what? All that he had learnt in Athens can be summed up in one despairing word — " The old beauty is no longer beautiful, and the new truth is no longer true." But the need of action compels him, if not to make a choice in 35 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN the full sense of that word, at least to take a side. The shouts of the soldiery at Vienna are ready to hail him as Emperor. On the one hand are life and the hope of a rehabilitation of beauty, the wisdom of Greece, the recovery of joy. On the other hand are the Nazarene, the cross, the remorseless demands of the spirit, and all for sake of what the Christi- anity of his time had proved to be a lie. The instinct of the blood decides for Julian that he shall be the apostate. Life is at least better than a lie. There foUows in Ibsen's second drama the record of Juhan's failure, his illusions, his partial disillusion- ing, and the darkening of the Ught within him. The patron of free speculation is transformed into a persecutor. The philosopher grows greedy of the adulation of courtiers. He is led on before the close to the madness of self-divinisation. He will restore joy and beauty to the world ; with the panther-skin upon his shoulders and the vine-wreath on his head he plays the part of Dionysus amid a troop of mummers and hallots, and he himself loathes this mockery of beauty and of joy. He will reform the world — ^for he has still the pride of pedantry — with a treatise. He takes his guidance in action from ambiguous oracles and the omens of priests. He dies with a dream of a triumphal entry into Babylon and a vision of beautiful garlanded youths and dancing maidens. Yet aU the while Julian knows that he cannot revive what is long withered, and he is aware of some great power without him and above him which is using him for its own ends. The world- spirit, in truth, has made Julian its instrument. The old era of the flesh had passed away. The new era of the spirit had come. And to quicken it to true Hfe, the spirit, incarnated in the religion of 36 HENRIK IBSEN Christ, needed the discipline of trial and suffering and martyrdom which Julian had devised for its destruction. " Christ, Christ," exclaims Basileus, " how could Thy people fail to see Thy manifest design? The Emperor Julian was a rod of chastise- ment — not unto death, but unto resurrection." And so the Galilean has conquered. The Galilean, however, according to the mystic Maximus, through whom evidently Ibsen expresses his own thought, is not to rule for ever. From the empire of the flesh, through the empire of the spirit, the world must advance to the third empire, which does not destroy but rather includes both its pre- decessors. Both the Emperor and the Galilean — such is the prophecy of Maximus — must succumb ; at what time he cannot tell ; it will be on the day when the right man appears, who shall swallow up both Emperor and Galilean. The fulness of the perfect man must succeed the unconscious joy of childhood and the unqualified ideality of youth, and resume them both in itself. " You have tried," says Maximus, addressing Julian, " to make the youth a child again. The empire of the flesh is swallowed up in the empire of the spirit. But the empire of the spirit is not final any more than the youth is. You have tried to hinder the growth of the youth — -to hinder him from becoming a man. Oh, fool, who have drawn your sword against that which is to be — against the third empire in which the twin-natured shall reign! " For a time, at least, Ibsen regarded Emperor and Galilean as his chief work. That positive theory of Ufe, which the critic had long demanded from him, might here, he believed, be found ; " the play," he wrote to Brandes, " will be a kind of banner." Part of his own spiritual life went 37 ESSAYS—MODERN & ELIZABETHAN into this dramatic history ; he laboured at the " Herculean task " of reviving a past age with a fierce diligence; while, at the same time, he held that the subject had " a much more intimate con- nection with the movements of our own time than might at first be imagined "; the establishment of such a connection — so he tells Mr. Gosse — ^he re- garded as " imperative in any modern poetical treat- ment of such a remote subject, if it is to arouse interest at all." The great drama of the Franco- German war delivered Ibsen from his narrow Scandinavian nationalism, and gave him that wider conception of the march of events which he needed in dealing with historical matter of colossal dimen- sions. With a clear perception of the leading ideas set forth in Emperor and Galilean, a reader of the earher Brand can without difficulty assign to this poem its due position in the series of Ibseii's works. Brand is the hero of the second empire — the empire of the spirit. Ibsen had escaped from Christiania to Rome — the centre of the life of the world, yet for an artist brooded over by a great peace — and because Norway was distant, he seemed to see it all the more clearly, with its many infirmities and its conceivable heroisms. He could not but contrast the spirit of generous self-sacrifice which- had resulted in the unification of Italy with the half- heartedness or dowhi-ight selfishness of his own country during the Danish-German war. " How often we hear good people in Norway," he wrote to Magdalene Thoresen, " talk with the heartiest self- satisfaction about Norwegian discretion, which is really nothing more than a lukewarmness of blood that makes the respectable souls incapable of com- mitting a grand piece of folly." As Ibsen conceiyed 38 HENEIK IBSEN it, a grand piece of folly might be the test and the demonstration of a vahant soul ; and such it is with the hero of that poem, to accomplish which he had laid aside the unfinished Emperor and Galilean. He was indescribably happy while he worked upon Brand. " I felt," he says, " the exaltation of a Crusader, and I don't know anything I should have lacked courage to face." He wanted to deliver the Brand within himself— that which was best in him — from the narrowness and the severity of the empire of the spirit, and the poem was a receptacle for what he desired to expel from his inner consciousness. On his desk, as he wrote, was a glass with a scorpion in it : " From time to time the little animal was ill. Then I used to give it a piece of soft fruit, upon which it fell furiously and emptied its poison into it — ^after which it was well again." The poet is surely thinking of himself when he describes this curative process of his httle brother, the scorpion. Brand is the hero of the empire of the spirit. As Julian was double-minded, with a life which essayed a vain return from the spirit to the flesh, so Brand is necessarily single-minded, a free servant of his stern, inexorable God, who is no grey-beard that may be haggled with, no dotard or dreamer, but young as Hercules, and terrible as he who stood on Mount Horeb when Moses heard the call from the burning bush. That Brand is a priest only deflects but does not alter the idea of the poem. That idea, as Ibsen says in one of his letters, might have been set forth, though with different circum- stance, if Brand had been an artist, a statesman, or a man of science. He is not a fanatic, unless to be a strict logician under the empire of the spirit is to be a fanatic ; granted his premises, all his action, if he be a map of single mind, necessarily follows. 39 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN Puritanism was named by Carlyle the last of the heroisms. Brand is a puritan and an idealist, but Ssen dreams of a higher and saner heroism than at of Brand — the heroism of " the third empire," when the right man shall have come and swallowed up both Emperor and Galilean. To be a whole man, however, even under the rule of an incomplete con- ception of manhood, is a greater thing than to be a half man, and a whole man Brand is, according to his idea, which is an idea incomplete in itself, but on the way to a higher and truer idea. " How can I will the impossible? " asks Julian of the mystic Maximus, and Maximus replies by the question, "" Is it worth while to will what is possible? " What Julian could not do is achieved by Brand — ^he wills the impossible, as every uncompromising idealist must, and he perishes in the act. The absolute tendency in Brand's logic is stimulated and reinforced by the incoherence and inconsequence of the society in which he lives and moves. With the folk around him it is a little of this and a little of that — things out of which no con- sistency can be made — and therefore with him it must be " All or nothing," pushed even to the extreme issue. He is a man among fragments of men. Apart from Ibsen's satirical indictment of Norwegian society, such a condition of moral faint- heartedness and spiritual lethargy was needed to enhance by contrast the uncompromising valiancy of the hero and his fidelity to an idea. The Mayor, representative of the secular power, is only a petty wheel of the state machinery ; his honest efforts in the ways of use and wont relieve the public con- science from all that might spur men to originality and individual effort. The Dean, representative of the spiritual power, is also no more than a state 40 HENBIK IBSEN official, a moral drill-sergeant, a corporal who leads his troop at the regulation pace to church on one day of the week ; as to the other days, they are not his affair, for faith and life must be kept discreetly apart. Neither mayor nor dean is an independent will, or an intelligence, or a soul ; neither of them has a human personality in the true sense of that word. Brand is at least an individual will, and therefore a man. Even in attempting to efface self, and to make his spirit a clean tablet on which God may write, he is in truth realising and affirming himself. And yet Brand's idea — ^that proper to the empire of the spirit — ^is a tyrannous idea, which starves his intelligence, chills his human affections, and conducts him to the icy and sterile region where he must perish. Something of human love he learns through Agnes and his boy, and, after he has lost Agnes, he feels in a pathetic way that without the wisdom of human love he must needs strive in vain. But the tyranny of the idea requires the martyrdom of all natural affections. He dreams of a church of humanity, and at least the virtue is in him of aspira- tion and desire. But the only church which he can attain is Svartetind, the " ice-church," where the distracted girl Gerd is the only votary. The avalanche thunders down, and the judgment — a. judgment including mercy — on all Brand's en- deavour is heard in the Voice which proclaims " He is a God of Love." It was a daring experiment of Ibsen to present in a companion poem to Brand, as the chief person of the poem, an individual whose distinguish- ing characteristic is that he has no individuaUty. Peer Gynt is not like Julian a divided nature ; he is not, like Brand, single and indivisible ; like the women 41 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN of Pope's satire, Peer Gynt has " no character at all." Will, intellect, love are needed, one or all, to constitute true personality. Peer has none of these; he is simply a bundle of appetites, desires, shadows of ideas thrown upon him from without, and fantasies which for him almost, but not quite, succeed in becoming facts. In his strange experi- ment Ibsen was singularly successful. Through all the Norwegian scenes Peer is a delightful person, worth a wilderness of heroic King Hakons or resolute Dr. Stockmanns. The cosmopolitan Peer of Morocco and elsewhere loses much of has attractiveness. Nowhere else is Ibsen so genial as in Peer Gynty yet the faith that is in him compels him to be also stern. If Brand is a Norwegian Don Quixote, Peer is a charming, irresponsible Autolycus of the fells and fjords. Ibsen himself, being, despite his genius for fantasy, a desperately earnest person, gives warrant for heavy moralisings over his hero, if any- one is prone to indulge them ; but the Norwegian Peer, if not his prosperous second self, fuU-blown in Yankee methods of business, leaps too lightly over the laws of morality, to be captured and indicted solemnly before an ethical tribunal. He compares himself happily to an onion, from which layer after layer may be peeled, which indeed is nothing but swathings with neither core nor kernel at the centre. But this in itself is a distinction and gives your onion its character — this, and a certain savour by which, with our eyes shut, we can recognise and name the bulb. And Peer has an atmosphere and aroma much more agreeable than that of an onion. " Tell me now," asked Peer's creator of his friend Bjornson, " is not Peer Gynt a personality, complete and individual? " That he assuredly is. Like Mr. Kipling's Tomlinson of Berkeley Square, Peer majr 42 HENKIK IBSEN be rejected by the guardian of heaven's gate and the devil may refuse to waste good coal on such a phan- tasmal spirit. It can be proved from the text of the poem that Peer has no good ground for a stay of judgment when the Button-moulder demands his soul for the melting-ladle, unless it be that his true self has aU the while existed in Solveig's heart. Peer has never put forth a substantial piece of virtue ; he has never sinned a whole sin ; he is neither true man nor true troll. Off with him, therefore, to the melting-pot ! And yet Solveig here seems somewhat of an impertinence : we cannot exactly construe the metaphor of Peer's personality made substantial by Solveig's love. There is surely some Limbo of Vanities on the other side of the moon where Peer, in his own right, may be immortal and may still recount his incomparable feats of the Gendin-Edge. Or shall we say that the Limbo of Vanities is that of hterature in which Ibsen has placed Peer, and where he has in truth obtained immortality? . Intellect seizing and holding a truth, love ex- pounding the significance and the relations of that truth, will satisfied with nothing less than incarnating the truth in a deed — ^these, as Ibsen conceives it, constitute a complete human personaUty. For such a complete man or woman the whole of morality is comprised in the words, " Man, be thyself." The law for such a one is that of self-realisation ; he acts with his entire nature fused into unity, by virtue of what Ibsen names a " free necessity " ; the compulsion is no external constraint ; it is within the man, and therefore he is absolutely free. Hence the problems of the complete or the incomplete human being, the single or the divided nature, are profoundly interesting to Ibsen ; and hence, too, 43 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN the problems of the life founded upon the rock of truth and the lives built upon the sands of illusion, the illusions of ignoble self-interest, which leaves out of consideration all that really constitutes " self," the illusions of conventional morality, social re- sponsibility, mere use and wont, and that kind of pseudo-religion which is only a form of postponed self-interest. The life erected upon a lie and the life established upon the truth are themes which he is drawn again and again to contemplate and, in dramatic fashion, to discuss with the most searching and eager insistence. He bores and mines under- neath the surface of life into passions and motives, where the light is faint or where thick darkness dwells, in the hope that he may strike upon the ultimate, incontrovertible fact. The crisis in his plays often corresponds to what in another order of ideas and experience would be named religious conversion. But conversion in Ibsen's plays means simply being brought face to face with a truth of life and " realising " its power and virtue in some act which gives a death-blow to the lie. Sometimes the unwrapping of the swathe-bands of self-deception is a long and laborious process; sometimes this is effected swiftly in an hour or in a moment. Then for the first time genuine " self-realisation " becomes possible ; intelligence, love and wUl coalesce in some act of " free necessity." It must be remembered, however, that while these three are the elements from which character is formed, there may exist in a human being certain deep, uncontrollable forces, emerging into consciousness from some subconscious region. A man or woman possessing, or rather possessed by, these would have been termed by 'Goethe " daemonic "; the phrase of Ibsen is that there is a little, or perhaps much, in him of the troll. 44 HENRIK IBSEN The troll element is a source of danger ; its action is incalculable and irresponsible, except as other elements of character may arrest or control its pro- gress. But if it is a source of danger, it is also a source of power. Had King Skule even a little of the troll within him, the history of Norway might have been other than it was. For setting forth his ideas, for the conduct of the action of his plays, and for the exposition of his dramatis -persona, Ibsen forged a remarkable instru- ment in his prose dialogue. He has taken vrith singular fidelity the mould of actual, living converse between two minds at play upon, and into, and through each other, in which the thought or feeling evolved belongs to neither alone, and is not so much communicated from mind to mind as produced by the swift interaction of the pair. The shuttle plies incessantly to and fro, and the pattern of the web grows before our eyes. Question, reply, suggestion, development, pause, anticipation, hesitancy — ^these, and all else of which conversation is made up, are most ingeniously reproduced. The conventions of the stage are ignored; there are no asides and no soliloquies. And yet in striving to be real Ibsen has missed a part of reality. The dialogue, in its manner, seems like the type or the abstract of a hundred conversations to which we have listened, or in which we have borne a part. But although the matter varies with this person of the drama and with that, the manner lacks variety and individuaHty, a lack which is not really disguised by the recurrence of some catchword or phrase on the lips of this or the other speaker. Ibsen, aiming at reality, in truth narrowed the range of dramatic dialogue. His speakers are never rhetorical, except when they are born rhetoricians, like Stensgaard, or born senti- 4S ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN mentalists like Hialmar Ekdal ; when passion grows tense, the speech is ordinarily most concentrated and simple. The dialogue seldom errs hy excess of brilliancy, seldom glitters with epigram or flashes with paradox. But in reality we are all at times rhetoricians, and often poor ones, when we would express a passion that only half possesses us ; we are ill-trained actors — the best of us — faultily rendering an emotion that may be genuine, and Ibsen has missed this fact. And even your dullard will, on occasion make his brilliant rapier-thrust of speech; while your epigram-maker may stumble on occasions into a simple and natural utterance. The range of varying levels of dramatic dialogue in Shakespeare is incomparably wider than it is in Ibsen ; there is in Shakespeare incomparably more variety and in- dividuality in the modes of speech. His verse is often nearer to the required realism of the stage — which is never literal reality — than is Ibsen's prose. In passing from the dramas which deal with historical and romantic matter — Lady Inger, The Vikings and The Pretenders — to the plays of modern life, Ibsen gradually came to con- nect and to define his leading ideas. In Lady Inger of Oestraat he presents rather a conflict of motives — maternal passion at war with the passion of patriot- ism — ^than a divided nature essentially at odds with itself. It is the circumstances of her life and her time which bring division into Fru Inger's spirit and produce the tragedy. The idea of the havoc wrought for two lives by even a generous suppression of the truth is a leading motive in The Vikings, but Ibsen's chief joy in writing that noble play must have been in the mere presentation of the Valkyrie woman, Hjordis, possessed by a single consuming desire which glorifies and which destroys her. For 46 HENKIK IBSEN The Pretenders we might find a motto in the words " faith and unfaith can ne'er be equal powers." King Hakon, the whole man, caUed by God and the people to his throne, confident in his call, possessed of a great and generous thought — the unity of the nation — single in will and resolute in act, is set over against the divided man, God's step-child on earth. Earl Skule, who questions his own claim, who doubts even to the point of doubting his doubt, who has no great thought of his own, but would filch that of his rival, whose good and evil instincts trammel and trip each the other, whose faltering ambition needs the support of that faith given by another which he can- not find in himself, yet who dies at the last in the joy of an expiation and an atonement. King Hakon, whole and at one with himself, is the man of good fortune — " he whom the cravings of his time seize like a passion, begetting thoughts he himself cannot fathom, and pointing to paths which lead he knows not whither, but which he follows and must foUow until he hears the people shout for joy." He puts his total self into every act, impelled by the free necessity of his complete man- hood. This idea of " free necessity " receives its most luminous illustration in the denouement of a much later drama. The Lady from the Sea. In matrimonial advertisements the candidate wife — as if woman were naturally a creature of the wild — commonly announces that she is " thoroughly domesticated.'^ This merit certainly could not have been claimed for herself by the second Mrs Wangel. She pines for the unattainable freedom of which the sea is the symbol ; • it affrights her, but it allures her even more than it affrights ; and the stranger from the sea is to ElHda the promise of this freedom. Such a deep, instinctive longing for freedom cannot 47 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN be overmastered by external restraint; it can be met and controlled only by a higher freedom. The physician has at all times been the victim of raillery with writers of comedy ; but the physicians of Ibsen's plays, with scarcely an exception, are either wise or shrewd, or, in their own fashion, heroic. Dr. Wangel, having diagnosed the case, discovers the nature of his wife's strange malady ; by a supreme act of self-surrendering love, which is also an act of the finest discretion, he releases Ellida from every restraint ; she is absolutely free to make her choice between the sea and her home, between the stranger and himself. What is best and highest in Ellida is awakened by the sudden recognition of her husband's love, by the remembrance of an affectionate word of her stepdaughter, Boletta, and by a new sense of responsibility. Her whole nature — brain and heart, conscience and will — is instantly fused into unity, and on the moment declares itself in an act of free and final election, which delivers her from the sick yearning for the lower kind of freedom that had made her home a prisoner's cage. By no preaching of moralities, by no fear of social disrepute, by no bonds of legal right or ecclesiastical control, the Lady from the Sea is converted, reclaimed, and, in the matrimonial formula, " thoroughly domesticated." Ellida has never been a shrew who needed taming ; her ailment, however, was harder to deal with than Kate's ; and by a different and a more courageous treatment the good Dr. Wangel has been as suc- cessful as was Petruchio. Ellida desires freedom, but she also desires love and the work which issues from love. A lighter nature desiring freedom alone might have followed the mysterious stranger. So Maia, in When We Dead Awaken, who neither sought nor found love in the sculptor's luxurious 48 HENRIK IBSEN villa, is beguiled by the lower freedom, even when the promise of it is made by a vigorous brute who hunts alike bears and women, and her triumphant song is heard at the moment when her sculptor and his spiritual bride are conveniently disposed of by a benevolent avalanche. Ibsen advanced to his modern social plays through a comedy which was also a satirical study of political parties in Norway, The League of Youth. WhUe engaged upon its composition he called it a " peaceable " play, but the hisses, the cat-calls, and the applause in the theatre, when it was first represented at Christiania, must have un- deceived him. It placed for a time Ibsen and his friend Bjornson in hostile camps. The unmasking of an adventurer, half-deceiver, half self-deceived, is a not infrequent theme of comedy. What is proper to Ibsen in the character of his political adventurer is the conception of moral disintegration — " soul, disposition, wiU, talents, all pulling in different ways " — the jarring elements being yet bound together by a fierce and ruthless egoism. Stensgaard is himself intoxicated by the enthusiasm of his liberal sentiments and his effusive rhetoric ; and behind the goodly show lurks a sordid soul, as small and hard as it is mean, which waits till the fifth act to be stripped naked and exposed to the general view. Such is the pseudo-democratic leader and the pretended reformer of established society. But the representatives of constituted authority may be just as pretentious and just as hollow. In the title of his play. The Pillars of Society, Ibsen concentrates an in- dignant irony. It tells the story of a hfe that has been erected upon a lie, a structure specious but desper- ately insecure, and it exhibits the social environment, D 49 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN with its vulgar pietisms and conventional morals and manners, which gives opportunity to the architect of such a structure. Consul Bernick, the virtuous husband, has had his disgraceful adventure with an actress, and has transferred the shame which should be his to an innocent man; he has sacrificed the honest passion of his youth for a mercenary marriage ; he has saved the credit of the house of Bernick by a lie. Consul Bernick, the public- spirited citizen, has engineered his great railway project merely with a view to private greed ; and he, whose mission it is to be an example to his townsfolk, will send The Indian Girl to sea with rotten timbers and sham repairs. By the side of this worthy pillar of Society stands another, Rector Rorlund, whose edify- ing readings and self-gratulatory moral comments in- struct the ladies who sacrifice themselves by plain- stitching on behalf of the Lapsed and Lost, and fill the intervals of reading and moral discourse with scandals, slanders and spites. " Oh ! if I could only get far away! " cries that child of Nature, Dina Dorf, " I could get on well enough by myself, if only the people I lived amongst weren't so — so — so proper and moral." As her last possible service to the man whom she had loved, that flouter of the proprieties, Lona, would get firm ground under Bernick's feet. But firm ground can be won only by a public con- fession of his iniquities and by righting the generous man who had been his scapegoat. Such a confession is wrung from him by the agony of joy at the recovery of the lost son who — it seemed — ^had perished as the victim of the father's crime. And with the attain- ment of firm ground a new life may begin. " For many years," exclaims Bernick's wife, just before the curtain is rung down, " I have believed that you had once been mine, and I had lost you. Now I so HENRIK IBSEN know that you never were mine; but I shall win you." In The Pillars of Society there is nothing fine or subtle. Ibsen's pleading for rectitude is written with a broad-nibbed pen. But stage-effect and stage-ethics are not always enhanced by subtlety. The same expression, " Life erected upon a lie," is the formula for both A Doll's House and Ghosts. But in these plays Ibsen turns from the life of Society to domestic life. In the words of Mrs. Bernick just quoted, and in a speech of Selma in The League of Touth the germ of A Doll's House may be discovered. The truth of married life can be found only when the woman is seen not as an adjunct or appendage, formed for the ease or pleasure of her husband, but as herself a complete individual, who has entered into an alliance of mutual help. The charming Nora is a sweet little song-bird, a little lark, a pretty squirrel — anything graceful and petted, but not a reasonable and responsible woman. She is an exquisite toy in her husband's hands, and he would be to her a conscience and a will. He has found his doll-wife, who plays such delightful tricks, amusing, but loved her, in the true sense of the word, he has not. And she has never known him; she has been living with " a strange man " for eight years and borne him three children. Her whole married life has been a lie ; now suddenly the truth breaks in upon her ; and she must be alone in order to see things clearly and to think things out aright. Husband and children have no claim upon her ; she must understand and in some measure realise herself before she can render any true service to others. Inquiries should be set on foot to ascertain whether a manuscript may not lurk in some house in Chris- tiania entitled " Nora Helmer's Reflections in Soli- tude "; it would be a document of singular interest, SI ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN and probably would conclude with the words, "To-morrow I return to Torvald; have been ex- actly a week away; shall insist on a free woman's right to unlimited macaroons as test of his reform." The last scene of the play, in which Nora quits her husband's house, did not at first commend itself to Eleonora Duse, though in the end she accepted it. The prompt instinct of a great actress is perhaps more to be trusted than her later judgment — or perh^s submission. To that scene Ibsen attached the highest importance ; for its sake, he declares, " I may almost say the whole play was written." Yet, hearing that it might suffer alteration on the German stage, he did what he calls an act of barbaric violence to his idea; an alternative scene was provided in which Nora is led by her husband to the door of the children's bedroom, and there sinks down before the curtain falls. The uncompromising author had condescended to a compromise ; it was as if Brand had come to terms with the Dean. Whatever may have been Nora's final decision, the unhappier Mrs. Alving puUed the heavy door behind her with loud reverberations. It was her error that she did not seek solitude, in which to study the wreck of her life and think things clear. The shadows projected on the present from our own or our parents' past are not the only " ghosts "; dead ideas and lifeless old beliefs are ghosts as for- midable, which, like the great Boyg of Peer Gynt, conquer but do not fight. And for Mrs. Alving the ghost-leader is the prudently pious Pastor Manders. From that discreet counsellor she learns the duty of a wife to an erring husband; she takes up the burden of her sorrow and tries to hide its shame. Not to conceal any wrong-doing of her own, but through a false idea of duty and a false idea of honour, 52 HENEIK IBSEN she converts her life into one long, elaborate and piteous fraud. The recoil from Pastor Manders's ghosts carries her to the opposite order of ideas, pushed perhaps — for she is a woman — to an extreme ; yet still she acts out her lie and will canonise Captain Alving's saintly memory with her orphanage. At last a terrible necessity demands a full disclosure of the truth to her son ; but it has no healing efficacy for him or for her. The terrible ghosts of heredity take the place of the ghosts which she had exorcised, and she sinks the victim of the veritable Furies of an age of science. The public howled and the critics flung their heaviest stones at the author of Ghosts. The author faced round upon his pursuers and shook his fist at them in An Enemy of the Peofle. The formula of the play is no longer " a life erected on a lie," but " a life founded on the truth," and Ibsen — only for dramatic purposes a less perspicacious Ibsen — ^is his own hero. It is not he who has made the water of the Baths poisonous and the whole place pestilential. He has only submitted the water to scientific tests, and announced the fact that it swarms with infusoria. True, the representatives of law and order, the Press, the middle-class liberal majority, the Householders' Association, are all united against him; but what of that? The majority are always in the wrong ; " the Liberals are the worst foes of free men," and " party pro- grammes wring the necks of all young and vital truths." Ibsen, as Dr. Stockmann, ends with his word of defiance — " The strongest man upon earth is he who stands most alone." Dr. Stockmann, of the Baths, is an Athanasius contra mundum ; a Galileo with his E fur si muove. And yet Ibsen does not deny that the champion of truth must S3 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN suflFer in the cause ; beside other calamities patent to the doctor and his excellent family, it is discovered that his foes have torn a hole in his black trousers. No critic of An Enemy of the People can spare his readers the sentence beginning with " The strongest man upon earth " as the heroic moral of the play ; but perhaps, for a full statement of the truth, it should be conjoined with another sentence : " One should never put on one's best trousers to go out to battle for freedom and truth." Ibsen's biographer, Henrik Jseger, represents The Wild Duck as the outcome of a mood of despondency, and almost of pessimism, following upon the excitement of self-defence which produced An Enemy of the People. This surely is a mis- conception. Having shaken his fist at the hostile crowd, Ibsen parleys with them. He begs to inform them that everything they have alleged against him and his doctrine is better known to himself than to them. They have cried aloud that his teaching is dangerous, and he repeats the words — Yes, certainly it is dangerous. Every new and every true doctrine of life is an edged tool. Children and fools ought not to play with tools that may cut to the bone. And who wiU deny that a man's worst foes may be found among his own disciples, when they happen to be fools ? " Caricature, if you please, the principles which I have maintained," cries Ibsen, and he pro- ceeds to show in The Wild Duck that he takes no responsibility for the caricatures of his own pro- fessed followers, whose abuse of true principles he understands only too well. This is no outcome of despondency on his part ; it is a mode of bringing into action his second line of defence. We do well to present the claims of the ideal ; but " when crazy people," as the good, ignorant Gina shrewdly says, 54 HENEIK IBSEN " go about presenting the claims of the what-do-you- call-it," who can answer for the consequences? If a Gregers Werle elects himself to a " mission," we know what must follow. And who with a grain of common sense would try to put firm ground under the feet of a Hialmar Ekdal, when the man himself is so fashioned as to convert inevitably every truth presented to him into a lie? There is virtue in the humble common sense and practical energy of poor Gina. Dr. ReUing, though his theory of life may be false, at least perceives the fact that Hialmar is compounded of self-indulgence, vanity and senti- mental folly. Mrs. Sorby is not perhaps a perfect woman nobly planned, but she can conduct her affairs with some honesty and good judgment. Each of these is capable of handling a truth or the frag- ment of a truth to useful ends. But the edged tool of truth — even though it be an admirable instrument in itself — can only work mischief in the hands of a Gregers, and the highest of truths with a Hialmar can only fold him in some new delusion. Meanwhile the innocent may be the victim; little Hedvig lies dead ; and before long her death will supply her supposed father with a pretty theme for sentimental declamation. Life erected upon a lie, life established upon the truth, had occupied Ibsen long. In Rosmersholm there is a terrible concealment of truth followed by a terrible disclosure, but the problem of the true life and the false is here complicated with the pro- blem of a divided nature. Rebecca West is in her intellect, as KroU names her, an emancipated woman. She has read herself into a number of new ideas and opinions: " You have got a sort of smattering of recent discoveries in various fields " — so discourses the astute Kroll — " discoveries that appear to over- 55 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN turn certain principles that have hitherto been held impregnable and unassailable." But, he adds, and Rebecca cannot deny that he speaks with justice, " aU this has been only a matter of the intellect, Miss West — only knowledge. It has not passed into your blood." She sees Rosmer bound in the trammels of the old faith, and languishing in his union with an ailing, hysterical wife. She imagines him freed from the ghosts of beliefs that have had their day, freed from the servitude of a weary marriage, and advancing joyously by her side to struggle and victory. Her passion for Rosmer, her emancipated intellect, and something of the Viking spirit co-operate within her, and she resolves that he shall be hers. She wins him over to her new ideas, and while maintaining the appearance of being the unhappy Beata's devoted friend and attendant, by a system of slow torture she drives Rosmer's wife to the mill-race. A year of what seems pure and disinterested friendship follows, and during this year, under Rosmer's influence, her heart in its gentler feelings, and her conscience, which had lagged behind her intellect, are awakened to activity. Rest descends on her soul, " a stillness as of one of our northern bird-cliffs under the midnight sun." The wild desire within her dies and self-denying love is born. She renounces joy, makes frank confession of her extinct Viking passion and her sin ; and since death is the test which alone can restore his lost faith in her to Rosmer, she prepares to execute justice on herself. But now the pair are in truth united; they have become one in spirit ; for Rosmer true life is gained in the moment when life is to be lost ; and thus in their death the spiritual husband and wife are not divided. The composition of forces resulting from emancipated ideas and the old 56 HENRIK IBSEN faith in the blood has its tragic issue in the mill- race. The theme of Hedda Gahler can be expressed in a word ; it is neither the life founded on truth, nor the life erected on a lie ; it is the baseless life. The beautiful Hedda knows neither love nor duty, nor is she possessed even by a passionate egoism; she is capable of no real joy, no beneficent sorrow ; she simply alternates between prolonged boredom and brief excitements. She seems to arise out of nothing and to tend nowhither. Had her luck been better than to be the wife of a rather stout, blond, spectacled, young aspirant professor, who is entirely happy when he can stuflE his bag with transcripts concerning the domestic industries of Brabant during the Middle Ages, her existence would not have been essentially changed. She comes from the void, and into the void she goes. Her death was not an act of courage, whatever Judge Brack may say ; it was only the last note struck of her wild dance-music, and has at best an aesthetic propriety. There is not substance enough in her even to go into the melting-ladle of Peer Gynt's button-moulder ; she cannot be re-cast ; she is extinguished, and that is all. Judge Brack will find place in another triple alliance and perhaps be cock of another walk. George Tesman will assist Mrs. Elvsted in her pious labours, may throw from her inspiring mind a pallid illumination on the industries of Brabant, and will transcribe many more invaluable documents. The whole of Hedda's story is summed up in the fact that she has pulled her dear friend Thea's irritating hair and effectually scorched the curls. She has had her entrance and has had her exit. As Ibsen felt his hold grow stronger on his public, he became more venturesome and experimental in 57 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN his art. He had early left romantic art behind him and had advanced to his own peculiar kind of realism ; now he would appropriate something from what has chosen to name itself symbolism. In Ibsen's plays symbolism means that an act, while intelligible as an act, is also a metaphor, which gives the act a wider meaning, or that words tending to action have a secondary and fuller significance over and above their direct import. Some lives, says a speaker in Peer Gynt, are fiddles which can be patched and repaired, some are bells which, if cracked, cannot be mended. This is a metaphor. But if the action of the play showed us a man vainly endeavouring to mend a cracked bell, we should at once surmise the presence of a secondary and symboHc intention on the part of the writer. When such symbolism in any degree diverts the action of the play from what is real and natural, it becomes illegitimate ; the secondary meaning does not then lie in the action, but is forced upon it. It cannot be said that Ibsen always avoids this danger. Both the action and the dialogue of The M aster-Builder, which may serve as an example of his latest group of plays, are de- naturalised by the symbolic intentions. It is a drama in which thought-transference and hypnotic suggestion play a part. That excellent critic, Mr. William Archer, to whom, with his fellow-labourers, we are indebted for a translation of Ibsen's works as spirited as it is faithful, was so far hypnotised by the writer's genius as to maintain that we can give imaginative credence to both the action and the dia- logue of The M aster-Builder, considered apart from their double meanings. His friend, Mr. Walkley, had been protected by some fine non-con- ducting medium from the hypnotic spell. Mr. Archer in his trance uttered ingenious words in de- S8 HENRIK IBSEN fence of the play, but to one wto remained awake they were not quite convincing. The Master- Builder, more perhaps than any other work of Ibsen's, swarms with ideas, and to catch at these ideas and bring them under their law is a fas- cinating exercise in gymnastics. The action has all the consequence and logic which a dream seems to have while we are still dreaming, and aU the incon- sequence and absurdity which we perceive in our dream when we awake. The arrival of Hilda, the story of the church-tower, the three nurseries, the nine beautiful dolls, the climbing of ladders are the coinage of Queen Mab ; with the catastrophe we start, are open-eyed, and behold it was a dream. Halverd Solness, the master-builder, has erected his fortunes on the ruin of the lives of others, and, among them, of his own wife. Yet with all his greed of ambition he possesses little of the true Viking-spirit, and his conscience is the reverse of " robust." It is, once again, the problem of the divided nature. A day comes when he decides that he will build no more churches for God ; he will build only homes wherein men may be happy. But his own home has been made unhappy by his fierce ambition and its conse- quences. He can no longer believe in happy homes. What then remains for him to build ? Only castles in the air, for in these alone can human happiness re- side. And to such a pursuit of unattainable ideals the younger generation which he had feared, yet towards which he had yearned, now represented by a woman, who is to him like a sunrise, pricks him on. He will build with her — ^his fairy princess — ^his beautiful castle in the air. But the test of his capacity for such an achievement is that he shall for once do the impossible — mount to the dizzy summit of his tower, and there hold commune with the Powers above. 59 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN He mounts, stands for an instant triumphant, totters, falls, and is dead. All this hangs together coherently enough as the shadowing-forth of an idea. As a sequence of real incidents in this real world of ours it does not rebuke that critic who called it " a bewil- dering farrago of rubbish." It would be entertaining to extract some drops of the quintessence of Ibsenism from other plays — Little Eyolf, John Gabriel Borkman, When We Dead Awaken. But the fate of the master-builder sug- gests the prudence of leaving a few rungs of the ladder unsealed. Happily a literary critic is not obliged to take as his word of order, " All or nothing." 60 HEINRICH HEINE A CENTENARY RETROSPECT " I LOVE Napoleon Bonaparte beyond all limit," wrote Heine, " up to the i8th Brumaire — ^when he betrayed freedom." On that day, when the legisla- ture was forcibly closed, Heine was not, as his bio- graphers commonly give us to understand, an unborn infant ; he was a blue-eyed, chestnut-haired boy of nearly two years old. He came into the household of Diisseldorf, not in the year of Napoleon's " betrayal of freedom," but (13th December 1797) in that of the treaty of Campo-Formio, which gave to France the boundary of the Rhine. His contemporary in babyhood, born in the far South as Heine was in the far North, was afterwards an illustrious enlarger of the Napoleonic legend, " the Goethe of Politics " — so Heine named him — ^first President of the later Republic, Adolphe Thiers, who faced the spectre of Communism, which Heine, earUer than others, descried with alarm in the distance. When the dead poet lay at last freed from torture on his mattress- grave in February 1856, the finely-chiselled mask of marble, described by the friend of his closing days, was the face of a man whom a few more months would have carried into his sixtieth year. To be born with diverse souls is embarrassing, but it was Heine's distinction. It signifies that Ufe is to be no steadfast progress, directed by some guid- ing light, but a wavering advance through a countless 61 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN series of attractions passing into repulsions, and of repulsions transformed into attractions. To belong to the past and to the future, to be romanticist and realist, to mingle Mephistopheles with Faust, to be an aristocrat and a revolutionary, to be of a tribe and of a nation, to be a patriot and cosmopolitan, to be a monotheist through the emotions, a polytheist through the imagination, a pantheist through the in- tellect, to see Jerusalem through the atmosphere of Hamburg, to sit at the feet of Moses and of Aristo- phanes, to reckon Brother Martin Luther and the Patriarch Voltaire among one's ancestry — all this makes fidelity to one's true self a difficult and intricate affair. What is each of us, asked Matthew Arnold, in his poem on " Heine's Grave," but a single mood of the World-spirit in whom we exist ? One of these moods, bitter and strange, constituted Heine's life ; a sardonic smile wandered for one short moment over the Spirit's lips — " that smile was Heine." A grace- ful fantasy, but no true criticism ; it is Heine's special characteristic that he expressed a multiplicity of the moods of the World-spirit. His genius wiU not submit to be condensed into an epigram. There have been men whose character has had the integrity of a diamond, and whose talents have been as variously directed as the diamond's facets. Others exhibit stratum superimposed on stratum, but we can pierce to some central granite. Or mood may melt into mood, and yet the total effect be har- monious, like that of an iridescent wave. Heine was not so fashioned, and to image his total being we labour after a metaphor in vain. With Heine unity did not underlie diversity, but, as far as it existed, rose out of diversity as a last result. No urchin crew of sprites and kobolds possessed him in his cradle, but when his parents named him " Harry," one is 62 HEINEICH HEINE surprised that the baby did not smile ironically and protest — " My name is Legion, for we are many." Shall we say that the deepest thing within him was the inheritance of race, which could be detected, one observer declaj^edj in his gait, though not in his countenance ? When he loved a French grisette he advised a friend to read the Canticles of King Solomon, so to understand the new joy that had overtaken him. When the mattress-grave grew narrow, the faith of his fathers seemed to draw back the curtains of the heavens and reveal Jehovah. We think of young Rabbi Abraham of Bacharach, pure, pious, serious, and of the beautiful Sara for whom he served seven years, in Spain. We think of the en- chanted Prince changed to the unclean form of a dog, but as each Friday evening comes round enter- ing his royal father's halls — tents of Jacob — in his true shape for a renewed espousal with the Prin- cess Sabbath. We think of Jehuda ben Halevy, the troubadour of a desolate lady-love, afflicted Jerusa- lem. We think of that impressive passage in the Confessions, where Heine speaks of the resurrection of religious sentiment within him through the influ- ence of the Bible. He had danced like a butterfly over aU possible systems, but now he knelt by the side of Uncle Tom, the devout negro, before the sacred book. He had not greatly loved Moses, who was somewhat defective in his connoisseurship in the fine arts. Yet, after all, was not Moses a true artist, intent, like his Egyptian compatriots, on colossal and indestructible erections ? Only it was not in brick or granite that the genius of Moses worked ; no, he too constructed pyramids, but they were pyramids of human beings ; " he created Israel." The Greeks were no more than beautiful youths ; the Jews were always men, powerful and unsubduable ; such they 63 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN were in the past, such they are even in the present day, still the " Swiss Guards of Jehovah," notwith- standing eighteen centuries of persecution and misery. But what Heine inherited from his father, besides his delicate senses and the refined hands of an artist, was not the Hebrew rigour ; it was rather an un- quenchable thirst for life, an insatiable appetite for pleasure. His mother's god was less the legislator of Sinai than the amiable eighteenth-century Deity worshipped by the Savoyard Vicar. In the group of Hebrew Melodies, which appears in company with Heine's last poems, the " Princess Sabbath " and " Jehuda ben Halevy " are immediately followed by the extravaganza named " Disputation." A spiritual tournament between Christian monks and Jewish Rabbis is enacted in the presence of King Pedro and Queen Blanche of Spain ; fast and furious grows the mel6e of theologians, with fierce scholastic charges, rallies, and recoils ; for twelve hours the combat has lasted and the result is still undecided ; at length the Queen pronounces judgment ; which party is right she does not profess to know, the only thing indisputable is " Dass der Rabbi und der Monch Dass sie alle Beide stinken." There were times when Heine's own sentiment was not far removed from that expressed by Herr Hyacinth at the pleasant Baths of Lucca — " I teU you Judaism is not a religion, but a misfortune." It came forth from Egypt — so he informs Matilda — from Egypt, land of the crocodile and of priestcraft ; and what is the race of Israel liow but a mummy, which wanders over the world wrapped in swathing- bands of the letter, a petrified fragment of the history 64 HEINEICH HEINE of the world, a spectre that lives by trading in bills of exchange and old pantaloons. The prophet upon Mount Sinai jostles with the old clothes' man of the Judengasse in Heine's imagination ; Prince Israel is the brother of Moses Lump. The worst offence of Borne in Heine's eyes was his narrow, Jewish spiritualism, his Nazarene limitation of mind — and a Nazarene may be either Christian or Jewish — which made him hate the great Greek, Goethe. AH men, Heine explains to us, are born either of the Hebrew or the Hellenic family, men of ascetic instincts, hostile to form, prone to spiritualise, or men who rejoice in Uving, lovers of self-development, grasping reaUty : to the latter alone, who are conscious of their divinity, is the majesty of true enjoyment known.' Heine's mihtant Hellenism lacks the Hellenic happy spontaneity. It was a passionate effort to restore a lost ideal. There were times when he re- volted against Christianity as a religion of sorrow, with the atmosphere of the hospital hanging about it. He was a nightingale that had made a nest in the old periwig of Voltaire, and neither the nest nor the bird was dear to Christian hearts. When the ecclesiastics of the Council of Basle, wandering one day in a wood near the city, had suddenly been surprised by a night- ingale's song, they stood stiU for a moment in ravish- ment, but a learned father, recovering himself, ob- " Bbrne's criticism of Heine's representation of Christianity as a religion of sorrow, the central idea of which is the opposition between the flesh and the spirit, is worth quoting. '* Christianity did not abolish the rights of the Hesh, it never required the sacrifice of the delights of the senses, it only subjected those pleasures to the tutelage of the spirit, so to render them purer and more enduring. No religion ever had so much indulgence for human infirmity as the Christian religion. Catholicism, far from having enervated the nations, restored to them the force and energy which they had lost under the Roman domination. . . . Catholicism is not a gloomy and colourless religion as M. Heine has said ; it is the most serene, the most joyous religion that has ever existed," {GesammeUe Sctriften, vii. 264). E 65 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN served that the notes were not very canonical ; the bird might be a demon in disguise alluring them to pleasure, and when the formula of exorcism was pro- nounced, " Adjuro te per eum qui venturus est judicare vivos et mortuos," such indeed it proved to be ; the nightingale confessed itself a fiend, and flew away with mocking laughter. Heine's half-under- stood Hegelian philosophy placed him upon the incline to pantheism, that old religion, as he held, of the North, and he was ready to adventure the glissade. Must it end in a gulf of indifference, where all things are levelled in the identity of universal being ? Heine held that such need not be the final issue — " Alles ist nicht Gott, sondern Gott ist Alles " ; God manir fests himself in different degrees through different things ; but all things partake of divinity. Before he came into relation with the Saint Simonian School, Heine was prepared by his temperament and by his philosophy to accept as an emancipating truth the doctrine of the rehabilitation of the flesh. Yet Heine maintained that the Christian religion during eighteen centuries had been a blessing to the human race. If it was the religion of sorrow, it was also the religion of consolation. Its idea, its inward essence is indestructible. Voltaire, with his sarcasms and epigrams, had touched only the body of Christi- anity ; its mortal envelope had been reached by his poisoned darts ; its soul remained immortal. Heine had indeed within him — at least, in his imagination — something of the spirit of Catholicism ; in separating himself from the Christian tradition he was parting with a portion of himself. His education had been conducted by Catholic priests. Rector Schallmeyer had advised his mother to devote her son to the service of the Church, and Heine in his Confessions humorously imagines what he might have been as a 66 HEINRICH HEINE Roman abbate, ministering at once to the Church of Christ and to Apollo and the Muses ; from abbate he might have climbed to monsignore, to the cardinal's hat, even to the triple crown, when, seated with care- less elegance in the chair of St. Peter, he would have extended his foot for the kiss of the faithful, or, borne in triumph and profoundly serious (" for I can be very serious when it is absolutely necessary ") have given his blessing to the universal Christian world. This is a jest of the invalid's chamber, a play of light in the gloom ; but Heine was not in his mood of mockery when he wrote as follows : " I was always a poet, and therefore that poetry which blooms and flames in the symbolism of CathoUc dogma and worship revealed itself to me more deeply than any other " ; and he goes on to say how overpowering had been its charm, how he had often lost himself in enthusiasm for the blessed Queen of Heaven, and had celebrated her graciousness in the verses of his " Madonna period," many of which in his later collec- tions were rejected with ironical laughter. The Queen of Heaven was replaced by " our blessed Lady of Melos " in his later worship ; it was at her feet that Heine lay and wept on that day in May 1848, the last on which he felt the sunshine of the Paris street ; and the goddess looked down upon her afflicted votary with pity, but with no power to comfort him, as if she woidd say, " Do you not see that I have no arms, and so I cannot help you? " Heine viewed CathoHcism and feudalism, not as constituting the essential genius of the romantic art, which was always dear to him, but as the means through which that art had manifested itself in the past. There is a romantic art — ^we see it in Shelley and in Hugo — ^which looks to the future. But this also connected Heine with Christian ideas and Christian 67 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN sentiment. He was cosmopolitan ; he had tried to persuade himself that there are no longer nations in Europe, but only two great parties — the party of pro- gress and the party of retrogression. The great cosmopolitan, he thought, was Jesus Christ. Moses legislated for a nation, the idea of Jesus was world- wide and universal ; " how circumscribed in compari- son with Him appears the hero of the Old Testament ! Moses loved his people with sincere affection, he cared for the future of that people like a mother. Christ loved all mankind ; that Sun illumined the whole earth with the warming beams of His charity." But Jesus was not only cosmopolitan ; He was, Heine maintained, a spiritual democrat, a God more attaching than the gods of Greece, who, in the form of a gentle youth wandered under the palms of Pales- tine, preaching those doctrines of freedom, fraternity, equality, which as a French gospel inspired the nine- teenth century. " Christ is the God whom I love best, not because He is a legitimate God, whose Father since time immemorial ruled the world, but because He, though a born Dauphin of Heaven, has democratic sympathies, and cares not for courtly ceremonies ; because He is no God of an aristocracy of crop-headed theological pedants and bedizened warriors, but a modest God of the people, a citizen- God, un bon dieu citoyen." So Heine wrote in one of the later volumes of the Reisebilder, and the idea remained with him to the close of his life. It is sunrise at Paderborn, and, as the morning mists grow thin, the poet of Deutschland ; ein Winter- m'drchen sees by the roadside a cross on which the figure of the Saviour hangs. Unhappy enthusiast ! poor, crucified kinsman in the war of liberation, who spoke so inconsiderately of Church and State ! Pity it was that the art of printing had not been invented 68 HEINEICH HEINE in the first century ; then the young reformer would have written a book on questions in theology ; the licensers of the press, Scribes and Pharisees, would have struck out the objectionable passages, and, thanks to the censure, the author would have escaped the cross. And thus Heine, when with an inward sense of shame he submitted to the rite of baptism, must needs profess himself, notwithstanding his imagina- tive sympathies with the Roman communion, a Lutheran ; for Protestantism was the form of Christianity most in accord with liberal thought . He felt that it was bleak and chilly for the sensuous imagination. " And how do you like the Protestant religion ? "Herr Hyacinth, once Herr Hirsch of Ham- burg, lottery-agent, corn-cutter, and dealer in jewellery, is asked, and that devout convert to Christianity confesses that it would not suit him, for it is much too reasonable a religion ; indeed, if the Protestant churches had not their organs it would be no religion at all ; " between ourselves this religion does no harm, and is as pure as a glass of water, but at the same time it is of no earthly use " — " Sie hilft auch Nichts." Protestantism in its idea, Heine held, was a revolt of spiritualism against the system of accommodation between the senses and the spirit, which had grown up in the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages. But our dear master, Martin Luther, most German of the Germans, lover of Eimbeck beer, lover of wine, woman and song, was no paUid devotee of the spirit. He was a complete human being, a child of nature as well as of grace, a mystic and a man of action, an autochthonic birth, a champion of freedom, a leader of rehgious democracy, a reformer of morals, the liberator of the Bible, the creator of the German 69 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN speech. From him proceed the Deism of the eighteenth century, the enHghtened criticism of Lessing, the " Critique of the Pure Reason " — that axe of Kant the deicide — the pantheism of modern German philosophy, which restored the old national faith of the people, and even the Saint Simonian gospel with its rehabilitation of the flesh. " Glory to Luther ! eternal honour to that illustrious man, to whom we owe the safetyof our dearest possessions, and by whose gifts even now we live. It little becomes us to complain of the narrowness of his views. The dwarf perched on the giant's shoulder may see more than the giant, especially when he has the aid of spec- tacles; but to such a wide survey are wanting the lofty feeling, the giant heart, to which we can lay no claim. . . . Luther's failings have profited us more than the virtues of a thousand others. Neither the subtlety of Erasmus nor the benignity of Melancthon could ever have advanced us so far as the divine brutality of Brother Martin." Jew and Greek and Christian, Protestant and Catholic, monotheist, polytheist, pantheist, Heine named himself in that confession of faith, in which he plays the part of Faust to the miner's daughter of Clausthal, his Gretchen of the moment, a " Knight of the Holy Ghost." Not indeed of the third Person of the Trinity, for Heine thought that the multiplication table should not be printed in children's school books after the Catechism or the Creed. " The Third Person of the Trinity," said his acquaintance, the free-thinking scoffer of Konigsberg, " is much like the third horse when we travel post with a leader — one has always to pay, and yet one never gets a sight of it, this third horse." The flick of Heine's irreverent wit has in it more than a touch of inhumanity. The Spirit to which he swore 70 HEINRICH HEINE allegiance was that which inspired the " war for the emancipation of mankind," and his day of Pentecost occurred in 1789. " I honour the real holiness of every religion," he writes ; " . . . I do not hate the altar, but I hate the serpents which lurk amid the loose stones of the old altar." To religious thought, though it occupied him much, he contributed nothing positive ; he only showed by an example — one of many in our age — that a vague religiosity may exist independently of definite forms of faith. The people, indeed, need a religion of forms ; he would indulge them, as he indulged his wife with the play- things of childlike piety. As for himself, he would contemplate with interest all the mythologies of the Unknowable, and fetter himself to none. In making the recantation of his Confessions, while acknowledg- ing the divine nostalgia of the invalid's couch, he ex- pressly announces that he remains unattached, as in past times, to any of the various positive reUgions. Indeed, his recoil to a vague theism was aided by the fact that he had seen atheism grow dogmatic, and even vulgarly dogmatic. Heine could still fling back a jest to the heavenly Aristophanes, who had been so crueUy sarcastic at the expense of his poor imitator, the soi-disant German Aristophanes. But when barbers' assistants and tailors' apprentices denied the existence of God, when atheism had grown grimy, and acquired an odour of schnapps and tobacco, it was time for a well-bred sceptic to part company with disbelief. " Lay on my coffin a sword, for I was a brave soldier in the War of Freedom for mankind." Yes, Heine fought courageously, and by the uncompro- mising utterance of his opinions succeeded in giving offence equally to friend and foe. Like the tranquS French sceptic of the sixteenth century, for the Guelph 71 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN he was a Ghibelline, for the Ghibelline he was a Guelph. Born in Diisseldorf of a persecuted race, to whom the military representative of the Revolution had come as a deliverer, Heinewas inevitably attracted by the great words inscribed on the Revolutionary banner. He loved them indeed all his life, whether he interpreted them into detailed meanings or not. A brave soldier — but hardly a leader, for he was not a coherent thinker in politics, he lacked persistent ideas, though a swarm of ideas played through his mind, and he had not the organising genius which devises a campaign. A brave soldier — but undis- ciplined, ready in a moment to discharge a musket at his neighbour in the ranks, and therefore ill fitted for regular service. A brilliant guerilla chief, at most, who harassed the enemy, and sometimes dis- turbed the encampment of his friends. It has been observed by one of Heine's critics that, though he wrote a multitude of exquisite lyrics of love, and can express delight and despair, desire and regret, it was not until his last days, when that young consoler whom he named " la Mouche " visited his sick-room, that he filled the abstract idea of love with definite meanings. " There is a certain vacuity in Heine's conception of love ; it has no actual contents, no spiritual significance." The criticism is in a large measure just, and the observa- tion might be extended to Heine's feeling for politi- cal liberty. Freedom was dear to him ; he was ready to run certain risks in its cause ; but his conception of freedom was not filled in with positive contents. It was in a great degree negative ; he hated a state religion ; he hated the licensers of the press ; he hated the tyranny of petty rulers. As for the rest, its positive elements were few. He regarded Goethe, who had contributed so much to the intellectual 72 HEINEICH HEINE liberation of Germany, who had even created a spiritual basis for German unity, as a political quietist. He regarded Borne as a literary demagogue. He had no sympathy with the English method of building up free institutions bit by bit. That slow, inductive method of securing a right here, and securing another right there, without shouting aloud any transcendent words or waving the universal banner, had little in it to captivate the imagination. " The Englishman is contented with that liberty which secures his most personal rights and guards his body, his property, his wedlock, his religion, and even his whims." Well, supposing that this is all, it is a considerable attainment, and such a conception of liberty is far from being vacuous and barren. Heine was more attracted by the deductive method in politics, which starts with comprehensive principles or phrases, but he lacked the reflective power and the patience of hope which fills those phrases with meaning. And the danger is great that one who soars aloft in the airy heights, if he has not great staying power of wing, may drop into the vulgar slough of disillusion. When in July 1830 the Gallic cock crowed the second time, Heine hailed the dawn and was dazzled by the risen light of freedom. " Flowers ! flowers ! I will crown my head for the death-struggle ! And the lyre, too, reach me the lyre, that I may sing a battle-song ! Words are like flaming constellations, which shoot headlong from on high, and burn down the palaces, and iUumine the hovels, words like bright javelins, which whirl upward to the seventh heaven, and strike the pious hypocrites who sneak into the Holy of Holies. I am mere joy and song, mere sword and flame." Lafayette, the tricolour, the Marseillaise ! To see Lafayette riding through the Paris streets, the citizen of both worlds, 7i ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN the godlike old man, his silver locks flowing down upon his sacred shoulders ! O, to see the brave dog Medor ! And Heine would not be Heine if, when he arrived in Paris, he did not enjoy the incongruity of finding that the silver hair of the hero of both worlds was changed to a brown wig scantily cover- ing a scanty head, and that the place of Medor in the court of the Louvre was taken by a vulgar impostor, a mongrel brute over-canopied with tri-coloured banners, while the true Medor, as commonly happens with the heroes of revolution, had retired into a m«dest obscurity. Heine's irony is directed against himself as much as against the illusions of mankind. In truth Heine, though he waged war against German aristocratic pride and privilege, was himself an intellectual aristocrat. The French were the chosen people and Paris was the New Jerusalem ; but in July it was for the bourgeoisie that the people carried the day, a bourgeoisie more deprived of ideas than the noblesse whom they replaced. The citizen king, who lately with his umbrella under his arm had strolled the streets, and squeezed the hand of every grocer, now preferred the company of intriguing financiers. A Jesuit citizen-king ! " It has become apparent that there is something more deplorable than a government by mistresses ; in the boudoir of a dame galante more honour is always to be found than on the counter of a banker." If Heine at a later time came to tolerate the middle-class rule, it was because he regarded it as the last frail defence against the fiercer materialism of the masses. For the people Heine had the sympathy, the pity of an aristocrat; and he had at the same time an aristo- crat's alienation, an aristocrat's alarms. " I love the people," he wrote in the Confession, " but I love them at a distance ; I have always fought for their eman- 74 HEINRICH HEINE cipation ; it was the great affair of my life ; yet in the most ardent moments of the strife I avoided the slightest contact with the masses." He was never, he declares, the sycophant of his Majesty, King Mob. How beautiful is the People ! how good is the People ! how intelligent is this good and beautiful People ! — so cry the foot-lickers of the royal Caliban. No — Heine replies — the poor sovereign People is not beautiful ; on the contrary, it is very ugly ; but the day may come when his Majesty will wash himself gratis in the public baths. The People is not good ; it is often as wicked as other potentates ; but the sovereign People is hungry, and one day it may have wherewithal to eat. The People is certainly not very intelligent ; perhaps it is even less intelUgent than other monarchs ; it would now, as eighteen hundred years ago, cry, " Give us not Christ, but Barabbas " ; but one day it may attend free schools and get bread and butter free along with schooUng. Such were Heine's democratic hopes ; his fears as an intellectual aristocrat outweighed them. The future, he thought, belongs to the monster Commun- ism. He looked forward with dread and horror to a reign of gloomy iconoclasts. Our Lady of Melos, Queen of Beauty, would soon be dust under the blows of their brutal hammers ; groves of laurel would be hewn down to extend the potato-bed; the liUes would be instructed how to spin; the idle nightingales would be banished with the roses ; and Heine's own book of songs would serve grocers as paper bags for old women's snuff or coffee. Yet all men have a right to eat, and logic can draw diabolical conclusions from that major premiss. And one comfort Hes in the fact that a cosmopoUtan Communism will at least make short work with the Teutomaniacs, those patriotic owls of Germany, whose love for their native land 75 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN resides solely in idiotic aversion to all neighbouring peoples. Heine's alienation from Borne, which developed into hostility, was the inevitable result of a deep- seated contrariety of natures leading to adverse positions and a conflict of opinions. Both were children of Germany ; both were of the persecuted Jewish race ; both were soldiers in the war of libera- tion ; both had wit to use as a weapon of their war- fare ; each had sought a refuge in Paris. But Borne was a man of rigid republican convictions, eager for the immediate application of his ideas to life, caring less for spiritual enfranchisement than for a reorganisa- tion of the machinery of society, one who could let literature and art bide their time, if only the popular rights were secured, one who cherished the idea of nationality. Heine ridiculed the distinction that was made between character and talents ; the worthy folk who flattered themselves on possessing character were deplorably bad musicians, while the good musicians were often anything but worthy folk. What of that ? the chief thing is character, not music. The epitaph which honoured Atta Troll, that bear with " a tendency," admitted proudly that he danced ill, but he was a bear, whose character shone forth through his vacuity of talents — " Kein, Talent, doch ein Charakter." The distinction, however, which Heine ridiculed, is a just distinction ; and Borne's talents, inferior to those of Heine, were supported by a stronger character. His conception of freedom was narrow, and wanted depth ; but at least it was definite and coherent. Heine's detachment from system and his inces- sant mobility of mind were to BOrne a bewilderment and an offence. " The most agile criticism, the most stealthy and catlike," he wrote in his review of 76 HEINRICH HEINE De V AllemagTie, " will never succeed in catching M. Heine, who is more a mouse than criticism is a cat. He has contrived mouse-holes for his uses in every corner of the moral, intellectual, religious and social world, and these holes have subterranean communi- cations, one with another ; you see M. Heine peep out from one of his small opinions ; you pounce upon him, and he is in his hole again ; you lay siege to him, and he escapes by a wholly opposite opinion." A grimy democracy, which would have gone far to satisfy Borne, excited Heine's abhorrence. BOrne was a slave to Nazarene abstinence, who hated Goethe and held the fine arts to be frivolous luxuries. In Borne's room was to be found a menagerie of Re- publican animals, such as could scarcely be seen in the Jardin des Plantes — German polar bears, who smoked and swore ; Polish wolves, who howled the banalities of revolution ; a French ape, who varied his grimaces in order that one might select the least repulsive of many. And there was Borne himself, appearing amid clouds of bad tobacco to instruct his menagerie that only a republic can save us, and that all good things come from the German side of the Rhine. The truth is that, while Borne acknowledged no allegiance to Goethe, Heine was a son of that great liberator, though a prodigal son who had wasted some of his portion in journalism and the politics of a littirateur. He valued highly political and social freedom, which, he held, could exist uiider a mon- archy as truly as in a republic, and he mocked those German quietists who were content with an inward or intellectual emancipation without incarnating freedom in institutions. The man of an idea is fol- lowed, he tells us, at no great distance by the lictor who bears the axe : 77 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN " Ich bin dein Liktor, und ich geh' Bestandig mid dem blanken Richterbeile hinter dir — ich bin Die That von deinem Gedanken." He would turn Germany from dreams — dreams of philosophy, dreams of medisevalism, dreams of classic art — to the modern and the practical. But Heine did not attach supreme importance to political machinery. He retained something from that large ideal of humanism and that cosmopolitan culture which had been developed in the period of Goethe and Schiller. Hence his deep dissatisfaction with England, ever present, though he afterwards re- gretted the extravagance of its expression, and with America. In England, that vile country of weary toil and dense ennui, the machines act like men, the men like machines. America is one vast prison- house of liberty, " where," said Heine, " the invisible chains would hang more heavily upon me than the visible ones at home, and where the most repulsive of aU tyrants, the mob, exercises its rough dominion." Thus, with what survived in him of the richer and more concrete humanism of Goethe, he partly filled the abstract conception of liberty. It was weU, as a protest against over-valuing the apparatus of govern- ment, and as a protest against mere materialism, that Heine should have presented even in a fragmentary and an intermittent way a humanist ideal. An aristocrat in things of the mind, a humanist, even though a superficial humanist, Heine was naturally an admirer of great personalities. From Goethe he was partly detached because Goethe would postpone the social and political revolution until inward freedom had been attained, and also, as he confesses, because he was envious of Goethe ; but he would reserve for himself the privilege of being im- 78 HEINEICH HEINE pertinent in the presence of intellectual greatness ; his mockery was the inevitable foil to his reverence. For Napoleon, who seemed to him to lift the prin- ciples of the Revolution into the light of genius, and to concentrate the passions of a people in a single mind, he could beat the Marseillaise or Qa Ira with as much enthusiasm as that of the eloquent performer, Monsieur Le Grand. A captive at St. Helena, Napoleon was the Titan Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods, and whose heart was gnawed by the ignoble kites of Britain. Heine was capable of repre- senting to himself the Tsar Nicholas as no less than the gonfalonier of freedom. It was notwithout reason that Borne suspected such a champion of the cause dear to him, one who avoided contact with the people, and applauded a despot. And in truth an enlightened despotism, animated by ideas, adorned with art, and graceful in its luxuries, would have gone far towards satisfying Heine's political aspirations. Yet, amid the errors of one who was a combatant in a bewildering battle, and who saw only fragments of the strife, he showed on occasions remarkable powers of observation, and uttered some political prophecies which time has not belied. Right or wrong, he profoundly distrusted the liberalism of Prussia, that " long hypocritical hero in gaiters, with his big stomach, his huge mouth, and his corporal's cudgel, which he dips in holy water before he strikes." He warned France of the dangers that were to come from without in a united Germany, and from within in the uprising of the proletariat. In the closing poem of his Lazarus he names himself the " Enfant perdu " of the war of emancipation ; he is a sentinel who has held his' post for thirty years, and never will return home alive ; night and day he watched, and even in the tent the heavy snoring of his friends kept 79 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN him from sleep ; many a fiery bullet has he sent home into the paunches of the dullards ; but, alas ! a dullard may also know how to shoot, and his own wounds gape : " Ein Posten ist vakant ! Die Wunden IclafFen — Der Eine fallt, die Andern riicken nach — Doch fair ich unbesiegt, und meine Waffen Sind nicht gebrochen — Nur mein Herze brach." And in the dying combatant's fanfaronnade there is more than a touch of true pathos. But when looking Godwards Heine confessed himself " a poor dying Jew " ; looking towards his fellows he thought of himself as " nothing — nothing save a poet." Recovering himself he adds : " But no ; I will not abandon myself to a hypocritical humility, and undervalue this noble name of a poet. One who is a poet is much, and especially if one is a great lyric poet of Germany, the poet of the people which in two things, philosophy and lyric verse, has surpassed aU other nations. I will not, with that mock modesty discovered by beggar-knaves, renounce my glory." And it is certainly, as Matthew Arnold said, with the emblem of the laurel rather than with the emblem of the sword that posterity will decorate Heine's tomb — with the laurel, into which may be woven a lotus flower from the Ganges, and some Western blossoms, sharp-scented and pungent. Atta Troll was described by its author as the last wood-notes wild of the romantic school. It was in the house of his maternal uncle, Simon von Geldern — the Noah's Ark of Diisseldorf — that Heine as a child was initiated into romance. In the attic of Noah's Ark, where the spider spun his web, and the fat Angora cat looked on with the eyes of an enchanted princess, the boy spent hours of mystery and delight ; 80 HEINEICH HEINE there were his mother's mouldering cradle, his grand- father's sword and wig, his grandmother's stuffed parrot, half plumeless and turned from green to grey, the broken porcelain dog, much respected by the enchanted princess, an antient flute, faded manu- scripts on the occult sciences, dusty volumes of Para- celsus and Van Helmont ; above aU, his great-uncle's notes of travel in the East — records of the wandering Orientalist, who had seen Jerusalem, and had been chosen sheik of a Bedouin tribe. In his imagination the boy identified himself with the legendary traveller, and had the singular experience of being for a time his own great-uncle. It was doubtless from Simon von Geldern's library that he bore away that book of romance and irony — the first which he read after attaining a boy's years of discretion — The Life and Deeds of the Sagacious Knight Don Quixote de la Mancha, his world of delight and pity from spring till autumn, while day after day he sat on the old mossy stone bench in the Court Garden. Its chivalry he understood, its irony lay in reserve to be discovered at a later time. Some childish premonitions of love were followed by that deep impression, made on his imagination if not on his heart, by the pale marmoreal beauty of Josepha — niece of the old witch who sold love-philtres and (having the advantage of a husband who had been public executioner) dead men's fingers, the possession of which magically enriched the flavour of German beer. Josepha's marble face shone under torrents of blood-red hair ; her voice, commonly muffled in tone, broke forth with a metallic resonance when she sang the old folk-songs, which did much to awaken Heine's dormant genius. " Beyond all doubt she exerted the greatest influence on the poet now stirring within me. My first poems, which I wrote soon after, are of F 8l ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN a cruel and sombre colour, akin to that attraction which threw its crimson shadow over my young life and mind," From the Wunderhorn, from A. W. Schlegel, HoflEmann, Brentano, and Wilhelm Miiller, he de- rived much. The romantic movement in Germany, a reaction in sentiment from the spirit of the eight- eenth century, a reaction in art from the objectivity of Goethe, " the great Greek," was at once a reversion to mediaevalism and an assertion of the rights of the ego in literature. A work of art was no longer to be tested by its truth to nature, and its accordance with reason ; it was all the more admirable if it rendered the cry of individual passion, the measureless sigh of individual regret or desire, the sensibility, the phan- tasy, the caprice of a solitary soul. As far as the in- dividualism of romantic art was controlled or held in check, that control came from the artist's superiority to his own creation betrayed in the irony taught by the critics, if not always practised by the poets, and from a common tendency towards the sentiment and the imaginative forms of the age of faith. The romantic influence is present in Heine's poetry from first to last ; the writer even of Atta 'Troll, and of Deutschland ; ein Wintermarchen — ^his most mature, his most characteristic creations — was a romantic poet, though a romantic poet unfrocked. Heine never escaped from the individualism of the poetic generation to which he belonged. But the control of his artistic egoism came not from the past, but from the present and the future. He would be at once romantic and realist, romantic and re- volutionary. The Middle Ages he viewed as a domain in which his fantasy might disport itself ; there he was free to indulge every caprice and every humour ; anti-clerical and anti-Catholic through 82 HEINRICH HEINE his intelligence, he could gratify his imagination with the sentiment of Catholicism. His genuine hopes, his serious fears were all connected with the nine- teenth century. He had seen the great Emperor, riding his white palfrey in the avenue of the Court Garden at Diisseldorf, his face of chiselled marble, his eye reading the souls of men, a smile upon those lips which had but to whistle et la Prusse n'existait plus, which had but to whistle and the entire body of clerics would have stopped their ringing and sing- ing, the entire Holy Roman Empire would have danced. There was the true hero of modern romance ; there was the veritable incarnation of the new idea. A second check upon Heine's romantic egoism was of a whoUy artistic kind. He had learnt from Goethe the virtue that Ues in definite form. He saw no reason why exact conceptions, precise and vivid imagery, verse close-knit and succinct should not belong to the romantic as well as to the classical poet. " The images, by means of which romantic feeUng may be evoked," so Heine wrote as early as 1820, " should be drawn as clearly and with as well-defined outhnes as the images of plastic poetry." Vague and wandering sentiment, he felt, must yield to the boundary of art ; the floating fragrance must be condensed to an essence, and be imprisoned in a tiny phial. In other lyrists we may study the methods of evolving and expanding a theme ; from Heine we learn innumerable devices of lyrical \:ondensation. A sudden tug of the bearing rein checks the lyrical career, and we halt with more of the sense of motion in our blood than if Pegasus had cantered or ambled for a league. Sometimes indeed, Heine's feats of equitation are those of the circus, ending with a violence of surprise, and we see the performer ex- 83 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN pecting his applause. Sometimes the close is what Wordsworth calls " a shock of mild surprise," which carries far into our hearts all that is expressed, and all that is vitally present and unexpressed. So much of spontaneity has rarely been united with so much of calculation. But the chief control of Heine's romantic egoism came from within — " my name is Legion, for we are many." He plays off one faculty against another, and often in a manner which enhances the power of each. Serious and edifying German critics have preached on the text of Heine's self-mockery as if they would rebuke the offence of spiritual suicide. A true German poet should never suspect his own sentimentality ; a true German poet should be unalterably virtuous, loyal, domestic, pathetic, patriotic. If he weeps, he should draw down the blinds in the chamber of weeping ; if he laughs, he should do so with Teutonic uproariousness in a remote ' chamber of laughter. O wicked Heine, who sapped the foundations of heavy sentiment with irony, who withered his own linden flowers with the desolating breath of scepticism ! " No," cried Nannerl, the comely barmaid in the Reisebilder, " we haven't got irony, but you can have any other sort of beer." Heine confessed that he was not one of the great poets, sound and integral, proper to an age of faith. But irony, in an age of doubt and conflict, may be preservative of such sanity as is possible. " Dear reader," Heine asks in The Baths of Lucca, " do you by chance belong to the flock of pious fowl who have joined in that song of ' Byronic disintegration,' which for ten years in every variety of piping and twittering has sounded in my ears ? Ah, dear reader, if you would complain of discordancy, let your complaint be that the world is rent in pieces. 84 HEINRICH HEINE For, as the heart of the poet is the central point of the world, it must in times like these be miserably divided and torn. He who boasts of his heart that it remains whole, only confesses that it is no more than a prosaic, isolated cornerheart (WinkeUierz). But through this heart of mine went the great rift of the world, and hence I know that the high gods have given me grace above many others, and have counted me worthy of the poet's martyrdom." Heine's apology may be accepted in all seriousness as express- ing a portion of the truth. An age of dissonance gives an opportunity to the poet of many moods, who might be wholly silent or might sing a single penetrating strain in an age at one with itself. If Faust declaims and Mephistopheles derides, it is too readily assumed that the result is whoUy negative ; or it is assumed that Mephistopheles necessarily has the last word. But perhaps the last word and the best of the argument remain with Faust. It is demonstrated at least — and this is some- thing positive — that each has a right to exist, that each has a case to state on his own behalf, and against the other. In many instances Heine does not desire to bring things to an issue ; he mocks his owii exalted sentiment, but it survives to rebuke or to mock his mockery. In Die Nacht am Strande, one of the North Sea poems, the Byronic stranger, after his wandering^y night on a desolate shore, enters the fisher's cottage where the fisher's daughter, lovely and wondrous, sits Hstening to the " sweet domestic prophecies of the kettle " ; for a moment he de- claims as a deity who has descended from heaven to embrace one of the daughters of men ; but the deity has a mortal body, night airs may induce catarrh in his godTship's head, and hot tea with rum is an ex- cellent prophylactic. Surely both sides of the fact 8S ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN deserve to be stated, and the romance is not so timid as to fear the touch of reahsm. The poetic motive of the piece is not attacked by a prosaic conclusion ; the heroics and the jest of the heroics play their part in a duel, and are reconciled by poetic art ; each has received satisfaction, and neither can triumph over the other. Don Quixote on Rosinante is accom- panied by Sancho on his ass, and Sancho Panza, vsdth aU his shrewd good sense, has a touchiitg fideHty to his master ; the hero of the piece is neither master nor squire alone, but the double personality of the immortal pair of adventurers. Heine had neither the nobility of character nor the moral sanity of the great epic inventor of Spain. Some of the dissonances which his poetry expresses were not those abiding incongruities of human nature which form the basis of Cervantes' humour ; they were dissonances of the time, or dissonances which rose from his own infirmities of character ; yet even these are delivered from much of their baser matter by the imagination, and find what we may term their " katharsis " in irony. His purest joy conceals a pain ; his passion of love is half despair ; his intoxication of Ufe ends in a gaUiard of skeleton dancers ; his jests are keenest when the jester lies stretched upon the rack ; his tears are repressed with bitter laughter ; beauty weds grotesqueness in his verse ; what is noble holds hands with what is mean ; the flesh and the spirit encounter or embrace ; faith and unfaith interpenetrate each the other ; he leans towards the future while he turns and gazes at the past. Nothing is concluded, no complete solution is attained ; but it is something to state facts and to raise questions ; it is something to be discontented with shallow or partial solutions ; it is something to disturb a demure self-complacency ; it is something 86 HEINRICH HEINE to delay the answers to our problems until the con- ditions of an adequate answer have been considered. Thus out of the diversities which lay in Heine's nature there rises at last a certain unity, and the con- ciliation of his contending powers and tendencies is effected by an irony which detaches him from each of his inward moods and from each of his views of things external. He belongs to the race of sceptics, but he is a sceptic who inquires, a sceptic who hopes. He felt the need of a religion of joy, and also of a re- ligion of sorrow, and he states the case on behalf of each. He felt that the poUtical future belongs to the populace — ^they have, fortunately or unfortun- ately, a right to eat ; but he would preserve the higher rights of an aristocracy of intellect. He swam with the current of romantic art, and he headed round and swam more vigorously against the current, so anticipating the movement of realism which was to meet and turn the tide ; but Heine's ideal of art, at once realistic and romantic, is still un- attained. He smiles at his own enthusiasm, and the sceptic is an enthusiast to the end : " I used formerly to suppose," he writes in the introduction to an illustrated edition of his beloved Don Quixote, " that the laughable character of Quixotry lay in the fact t- that the noble knight wished to recall to life a long- buried past, and that his poor limbs, or rather his back, came into painful collision with the actualities of the present. Alas, I have learnt since then that it is just as thankless a piece of foUy to try to bring the future prematurely into the present, and that any such antagonism to the substantial interests of the day is mounted on an exceedingly sorry nag and is provided with very rusty armour and a body as easily shattered. A wiseacre wiU shake his head over one form of Quixotry as much as over the other. 87 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN Yet, all the same, Dulcinea del Tobosa is the fairest woman in the world ; and, though I lie miserable on the ground, never will I recant this profession. I cannot do otherwise — so thrust in with your lances, you silver knights of the Moon, you disguised barbers' apprentices." One feeling rich in virtue, and perhaps only one, lay during all his life in Heine's heart pure and un- mingled. Not the love he bore his wife ; children were always dear to him, and Heine had much joy in the spoilt child who was his wife ; but a child who is a woman, who puts no control upon her tempers, and has an incurable mania for flinging money out of windows, causes some vexations. His one unmingled felicity was in his affection for his mother. It was for her he wrote in youth thosd^onnets which tell how he had wandered far and fruitlessly in search of love, and had found it at last in her dear eyes. It was for her sake long afterwards that he concealed the terrible ravages of his malady, and wrote those letters, cheering and caressing, which brought her bright news of Paris and of her son. " Take good care of my poor old mother," he implores his sister, " she is indeed the pearl of women." " I cover the face and two hands of my dear mother with kisses." " I embrace my dear little mother five-and-twenty times, and love her better than all the cats in the world." If the old days of Hebrew miracle were not departedj we might cast this green tree of filial piety into the bitter waters of Heine's passion and wit, and hope to make them sweet. But at best the waters must remain brackish to our lips. GOETHE'S WEST-EASTERN DIVAN " Men of genius," said Goethe to Eckermann, " may experience a renewed puberty, while other people are young but once " ; having expounded his thought he presently qualified it — " aber jung ist Jung " — still youth is youth. The last word is the true one. The flush of what seems new life which may come to a sexagenarian is not that of spring-time, it is the Indian summer : '* What visionary tints the year puts on When falling leaves falter through motionless air ! " In the greeting of the season there is a touch of fare- well. The sun is still warm at noon, but at morning and evening there is an edge upon the air which is not the freshness of spring. There is a strange and wride stillness in the land, or sounds reach us from far away — thorns of Elfland faintly blowing. The atmo- sphere is sometimes singularly peUucid, and some- times it becomes a luminous mist. The time is one of joy, but in such joy there is something of pathos. Goethe's Indian summer came when he was sixty- five. Its record is to be found in his last important body of lyrical poetry, the West-Eastern Divan. Even in Germany the Divan, as a whole, is much less known than it deserves to be. In England many persons who are familiar with Faust and I-phigenie and the ballads have never opened this collection of verse. There are excuses which may be pleaded for such neglect. The Indian summer has not the mighty ravishment of spring. The marks of old age 89 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN in thought and feeling, in style and diction, are evident. Few poems are quite equal individually to the most enchanting of Goethe's earlier lyrics. Some are obscure even to German commentators ; some are over-ingenious in their symbolism ; some require for their comprehension an acquaintance with Goethe's scientific ideas ; the play at sexagenarian love-making in the Book of Zuleika may be easily mis- understood. Yet certain lines and phrases are on all our lips from time to time. We all remember that characterisation in five words of a primitive condition of the human mind — " broad faith and narrow thought." We all remember the poet's plea for admission as a warrior to Paradise : " For I have been a man, and that Means I have been a combatant." The book as a whole has had worthy lovers and diligent students. From the standpoint of " spiri- tual freedom " and " inner depth of fantasy," Hegel placed it in the forefront of modern poetry. Heine learnt from it something of his lyrical manner, and wondered how such ethereal lightness as that of certain poems of the Divan was possible in the Ger- man language. Charlotte von SchiUer writes happily : " We find ever new results the more we read it." It was the subject — ^but what work of Goethe was not? — of Diintzer's laborious scholar- ship. It was carefully edited by Loeper. But no one has done so much to further a true appreciation of the Divan as Konrad Burdach, who has reproduced the text in its earliest form, edited, with introduction and notes, the received text in the jubilaums-Aufgabe of Goethe's works, superintended the volume con- taining it and a complete critical apparatus for the great Weimar edition still in progress, and made it 90 GOETHE'S WEST-EASTEEN DIVAN the subject of the Fesivortrag delivered at the general meeting of the German Goethe Society in June 1 896. I cannot go astray if I follow the guidance of this excellent scholar and borrow from him what may seem needful. As Hafiz could recite the Koran page by page without an error, so this editor of the Divan has doubtless taken on heart and brain the image of his chosen book ; and as Goethe dared to place himself, through his devotion to the sacred writings of Christendom, almost by the side of Hafiz, so, from the inferior position of an English student of the West-Eastern Divan, I would aspire to come, with a long interval, after Konrad Burdach. Having pre- viously known the poems well, I took with me last summer Loeper's edition to Cornwall, and found that the game of translating Goethe's poetry into what aimed at being English verse could be played on wind-blown cliffs of the Lizard or in the shadow of some fantastic cave of serpentine to the accompani- ment of the western waves. Even to fail in such a game was to enter into the joy of P amour de P impos- sible. By slow degrees the whole of Goethe's silver arabesque work was transmuted into Cornish or British tin. But the foiled translator had at least to scrutinise every line of the original and encounter every difficulty. And there were some things so wise, so humane, so large in their serene benignity, that they could not be whoUy spoilt even by a traduttore, who, at least as regards the sense of each poem, strove not to be a traditore. From his early years Goethe had taken an interest in the poetry of the East. The patriarchal life pre- sented in the Old Testament had even in boyhood stirred his imagination. In the period of his youth- ful Titanism he had chosen Mohammed as the central figure of a dramatic poem, and had prepared himself 91 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN for the task, never to be accomplished, by a study of the Koran. In 1774 he informed his friend Merck that he had translated Solomon's Song of Songs — " the most glorious collection of love songs ever fashioned by God." Partly through Herder's influence, he came to set special store by all that was primitive in the life and literature of the East, all that seemed to spring from nature and from the heart of a people, as conceived by the romantic and humanitarian eighteenth century. At Weimar he had translated one of the pre-Islamic poems from the Mu'allak^t, Sir William Jones having opened up the way. He had been charmed by that pearl of Indian drama, Sakuntala. Some of the roses from Saadi's garden and Jami's Loves of Laila and Majnun had introduced him to Persian poetry. But it was not until after the publication of Joseph von Hammer's celebrated trans- lation of the Divan of Hafiz in 1812 that the great German poet became, as it pleased him to imagine himself, a wandering merchant in the East, trucking his wares for those of Persian singers. " The author of the preceding poems," he writes in the opening of the dissertation which follows the verse of the West- Eastern Divan, " would choose to be regarded as a traveller who is applauded if he accommodates him- self to the customs of foreign countries, tries to ap- propriate their ways of speech, to share their senti- ments and adopt their manners. He is excused if his effort is successful only to a certain point, if, by virtue of a peculiar accent and an unconquerable rigidity proper to his nationaUty, he can still and always be recognised as a foreigner." And to gratify his own folk, such a traveller will return home with his lading of Oriental merchandise. Is Goethe, then, only assuming an Eastern garb and disguise ? Is he only playing with the turban 92 GOETHE'S WEST-EASTERN DIVAN wound around his head ? No, for he is interpreting in his own way a tendency of the time. The dominating classical influence, Greek and Roman, seen in the Iphigenie and the Roman Elegies, had waned. He was again free to be eclectic or as uni- versal as his genius of unparalleled flexibility would permit. And the new Romantic literature was turning towards the East. In England Southey's Thalaba had presented the life of the Arabian desert and the fantastic marvels of Oriental mythology ; but the moral idealism of the poem was the immediate offspring of Southey's own character. The Fairy Mab conducts the spirit of Shelley's lanthe to gaze on " Palmyra's ruined palaces," and when a little later he attempted a huge epic of revolution and reaction, it took the form of a Revolt of Islam. For Byron the East was the land of entrancing visible beauty and of boundless human passion : " Where the rage of the vulture, the love of the turtle. Now melt into sorrow, now madden to crime." The East of Goethe's imagination was as remote as possible from Byron's East. If he was a Romantic poet again it was in his own original and incomparable fashion. Although, partly through the influence of Sulpiz Boisseree and his collections, Goethe's interest in Gothic architecture and old German painting received a new development, he felt profoundly hostile — for one so liberal in his sympathies bitterly hostile — to the neo-Catholic party in the Romantic school, and in the Divan some shrewd thrusts are delivered against them by the old Pagan. Yet the spirit of the old Pagan was in truth religious, not less, but rather more, than theirs. Like Hafiz, he had found the secret of being blessed — selig — without being fromm, a divote, and this was a fact they could 93 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN never admit or understand. He turned to the East as to a refuge from the strife of tongues, as well as from the public strife of European swords. There the heavens were cloudless, and God — the one God — seemed to preside over even the sand-waste. There Islam, submission to God's will, seemed to be the very rule of life. And within the circuit of this all- embracing piety, it was permissible even for an old man to be innocently gay. The cumbrous baggage — intellectual and material — of Western civilisation was no longer a necessity. A wine-cup and a little book of song, upon some strip of herbage that just divides the desert from the sown, would suffice. Or in the wine-tavern the cup-bearer, a boy with all the charm of youth, might fiU the old poet's goblet and receive his reward in the form of wisest counsel and a kiss upon the forehead. Before all else the merchan- dise which Goethe sought to purchase in the East was wisdom and piety and peace. These Hafiz had somehow found ; he was gay, but he was also wise ; " it is through the Koran," he said, " that I have done everything that ever succeeded with me " ; and yet he wrote these Anacreontic ghazels of love and wine, and, possessed of inward piety, did not pursue with zeal the outward practices of religion. He had his grave studies, too, the lessons in grammar, and even in theology, which he gave to his disciples. In like manner Goethe had occupied himself ardently with botany, with com- parative anatomy, with optics. The special quaUty, as Goethe perceived, of the poet Hafiz was his spontaneity, though he often wrote in elaborate forms ; he was a true poetic fount, " wave welling after wave " ; and Goethe could not but remember the lyrical impulses of his own earlier days, described in his autobiography, when song seemed rather to 94 GOETHE'S WEST-EASTEKN DIVAN possess him than to be held in possession. There was another circumstance in common with them. Hafiz, a contemporary of our own Chaucer, had seen that scourge of God, Timur the Tatar, sweep over Persia with his hordes and spread his conquests from Delhi to Damascus. Another Timur had arisen in Europe of the nineteenth century, whose name was Napoleon. Hafiz could not stay the conqueror's career ; but at least he could teach grammar well, and he could give the world the joy of his ghazels. Had those songs of love and wine a spiritual signifi- cance ? Was more meant by them than meets the ear ? Hafiz had been named " the mystical tongue " ; the learned commentators, scholars in words who had no notion of the sense of the word " mystic," had read into the poems, says Goethe in his verse, every silly notion of their own ; they, like sorry tapsters, had retailed as true Hafiz their thin and insipid vintage ; yes, for them he was a mystical tongue ; how could they ever get a glimpse of the real import of the utterances of one who was selig without being fromm. But presently second thoughts come to Goethe. Perhaps he recalled the symbolism of some of his own West-Eastern poems ; when he sang the praises of wine, it was not always the juice of the grape that he meant ; when he spoke of the kiss of the houri, in the Mussulman's Paradise, he meant something more than the seal of earthly love. Those commentators whom he had blamed, after all, have right on their side ; words may play a double part : "A word 's a fan ! a glance is shot Between the sticks from eyes divine ; The fan 's a veil, no more, whose fine Substance may keep the face in shade. But cannot hide from me the maid, 95 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN Since her prime loveliness, the eyes. Flash into mine some swift surprise." In this, too, the expression, almost in an inevitable way, of spiritual mysteries through material imagery — ^were not he and Hafiz alike ? With a strange and happy return upon him of the creative impulse of youth, urging him as of old to swift and spontaneous jets of song, Goethe, in the early morning of 25th July 1 8 14, started in his carri- age from Weimar for the Rhine, Frankfurt and Wiesbaden. It was seventeen years since he had visited the scenes of his childhood and youth. Some- thing of enchantment was added by this revival of the past to the Indian summer of Goethe's sixty-fifth year. With a rearrangement of certain pieces of the West-Eastern Divan, such as is indicated by Burdach in his Festvortrag (which here I gladly follow), we can make out a kind of diary in verse of these days of travel. As the carriage left Weimar a white bow was visible upon the July mist ; it was a sign of promise, though not radiant with colour as it should be for a youthful wanderer : " Greybeard, with clouds in sight. Blithe shouldst thou prove ; What if thy hair be white. Yet thou shalt love." The summer mist stiU hung over the landscape when Erfurt seemed coming nearer, and a vision of lovely mingled colour upon a slope caught Goethe's gaze, and at first failed to expound itself to the eye. The record and explanation of the incident will be found in the poem entitled " Liebliches " : " What motley shows are those that bind The heavens with yonder height, Through mists of morning ill-defined, That half defeat the sight ? 96 GOETHE'S WEST-EASTERN DIVAN Are they the Vizier's tents displayed, Where his loved women bide ? Are they the festal carpets laid For footing of the bride ? Scarlet and white, mixed, freckled, streaked. Vision of perfect worth ! Hafiz, how came thy Shiraz thus To greet the cloudy North ? Yes, neighbour poppies spreading far, A cordial, various band. As if to scorn the god of war Kindly they robe the land. So let the sage who serves our earth, With flowers still make it gay, And, as this morn, the sun shine forth To light them on my way." In the early Weimar days, when the Duke was still untamed, and he himself was overflowing with the spirit of youth, Goethe had known Erfurt weU. The old man — ^if we may trust a poem included after the writer's death among those of the Divan — ^was now recognised and welcomed ; it was all dreamlike, and yet die past had been so real : " And when old dames from stall and booth Me— old like them — would gladly greet, I thought I saw those days of youth We each for other made so sweet." She yonder was a baker's daughter, but, whatever the distracted OpheUa may have said, certainly no owl," and by her side stands the once fair shoe- vamper, who knew, in addition to her trade, the art of Uving : " Hafiz, thy rival I would be In this, and may the humour last. To take the present joyously, And share my gladness in the past." G 97 a ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN To Erfurt succeeded Eisenach, with more awakened memories — Eisenach, from which he had long ago addressed ardent letters to Charlotte von Stein ; Eisenach, the scene of hunting expeditions of Karl August. Seen in the dewy dawn, the garden seemed to be the very same that once it was ; lily and rose blossomed as long ago : " And every air some odour brings As when love ached in those old days, Those dawnings when my psaltery strings Contended with the morning's rays ; There where from greenwood shades would start Rounded and full, the hunter's chant, To quicken and to fire the heart, Accordant to its wish or want. Ever the woods fresh leaves unfold ! With these your soul rejoicing fill ; Pleasures that were your own of old May be enjoyed through others still ; No man will then complain of us Care for ourselves was all we had ; Through all life's process various You must have virtue to be glad ! " And thus, as the name of the poem suggests, the Past may still survive in the Present. In the evening of the same day, at Fulda, Goethe added the closing lines, which, as Burdach says, refer also to the even- ing of our life : " And with such winding of my lay, Hafiz, once more we hear thy voice ; 'Tis meet in each concluded day With the rejoicing to rejoice." A charming lyric of these days of travel, express- ing the poetry of motion, the lyric first named " Vision," and finally " The New Copernicus," was excluded from the Divan, because, though in many respects the collection was Western, the imaginary 98 GOETHE'S WEST-EASTERN DIVAN wanderer of the East, Hatem, who was also Goethe, might be supposed to know the back of a camel better than the interior of a comfortably-fitted German chaise. The chaise is a charming little house, a shelter from the July sun, provided with every con- venience of travel. And, O wonder ! the woods come striding towards this house ; the distant fields are in motion ; mountains, grown large, dance past ; nothing is wanting but the joyous cries of the awakened dwarfs ; and aU this commotion brings no disturbance to the quiet of a July morning. Can it be that the Copernican theory has here also its ap- plication, and that mountains and woods stand stiU while the occupant of the little house is himself borne onward ? In this joyous spirit, as he advanced, song after song rose spontaneously to Goethe's lips ; the exultation of hfe and something like the delightful arrogance of youth possessed him, but such arrogance was more profitable than a self-distrustful modesty : " Song is a certain arrogance, Let none find fault with mc ; But bravely 'let the warm blood dance, Be gay as I, and free. When round the poet's mill-wheel turns, Stop not his whirl of rhymes ; For who once understands us learns To pardon us betimes." " The drive to Wiesbaden, on the warm night of 29th July," writes Diintzer, " has its monument in the beautiful poem, ' Universal Life.' " A thunder- storm had overtaken the traveller ;. the dry and dusty roads were drenched. And then he thought of those poems of Hafiz in which the praise of dust is sung — the dust on the threshold of the beloved, preferred by the lover to that carpet on whose gold-wrought flowers kneel Mahmud's favourites, the dust whirled 99 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN from her door, which is sweeter to breathe than musk or attar of the rose, And again Goethe's thoughts wander to Italy, the dusty South, which he loved so much, and for the sight of which he still pined. Yet even without Italy there is the Universal Life of nature, and this storm of rain and thunder will quicken that life to a fresh putting forth of power " Loved doors upon your hinges long Sounded no sweet recoil. Come heal me, ye tempestuous rains, And scent of breathing soil ! For now if all the thunders roll. Wide heaven with leven glow, The wind's wild dust, rain-saturate. Will fall to earth below. Straightway life leaps, a sacred force And secret strives in birth ; Fresh mists exhale, green things arise. O'er all the bounds of earth." This yearning towards the Universal Life may assume a mystical form ; the intensity of the joy of individual life may pass on to an aspiration for the loss of the personal in the universal, which, as all mystical spirits, Christian, Mohammedan and Buddhist, will affirm, is not loss, but a higher life. Such is the feel- ing embodied in a poem written on 31st July 1814, " Selige Sehnsucht," of which Loeper and Burdach speak in such terms of unqualified admiration that to quote their words would be to ensure disappointment for^any reader of an imperfect English version : " Tell it the wise alone, for when Will the crowd cease from mockery ? Him would I laud of living men Who longs a fiery death to die. 100 GOETHE S WEST-EASTEEN DIVAN In coolness of those nights of love Which thee begat, bade thee beget. Strange promptings wake in thee and move While the calm taper glimmers yet. No more in darkness canst thou rest, Waited upon by shadowrs blind, A new desire has thee possessed For procreant joys of loftier kind. Distance can hinder not thy flight ; Exiled, thou seek'st a point illumed, And last enamoured of the light, A moth art in the flame consumed. And while thou spurnest at the hest Whose word is ' Die, and be new-born ! ' Thou bidest but a cloudy guest Upon an earth that knows not morn." Deeper words assuredly than ever came from a pagan spirit. In a poem placed near the opening of the Divan Goethe enumerates the elements from which song derives its nutriment. First, and chief, is love ; wine and war follow ; and the fourth element is hatred : " Last, hate is indispensable ; Ay, many a thing true poets hate ; Shall he who beauty loves as well Foul things and loathsome tolerate ? " There is not much of hatred in these poems of an illuminated old age, which remained unpublished until the writer's seventieth year. But as a lady requires a boudoir to which she can retire, in order, as the derivation of the word boudoir suggests, to sulk or pout alone, whence she returns smiting to her guests, so Goethe, that he might show a gracious face to his friends, made one short book of the Divan the depository of his indignations and chagrins — -The lOI ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN Book of III Humour. No one reaches even middle life entirely free from dissatisfactions with things as they are. Shakespeare could write a Timon and a Troilus and Cressida. If to consume our own smoke ends in darkening our countenance, it may be wiser to run up a narrow shaft high in the air, by which our smoke may find a harndess vent. Goethe had been an emancipator, and now here were these neo-Catholic Romantics striving to undo his work. He had tasked his powers in service to his age, and now he was regarded by some as an obstructive, a self- centred egoist. There were folk who flattered him prodigiously, and regarded him with bitter, though secret, enmity. There were those who collect big subscriptions to erect a monument to any dead prophet, and who would gladly stone the living prophet. There were the sentimental or Jself-in- terested patriots — most often both in one — who had discovered that Goethe was no true German. There were those who knew much better than he knew him- self how his work as an artist or as a man of science should be done. And there are always cribbed and cabined spirits, " half-men," who cannot away with any liberal interpretation of human life. Finally, there were the downright base, and, whatever men may say, baseness is a power in this world. These last are not to be contended with : " Wanderer ! thy strength would'st try 'Gainst what will be, and must ? Whirlwind and filth that's dry Let spin and mount in dust ! " Against those who would amend his work he has only the domineering word — If there be virtue in you, push on in your own pursuit ; but as for mine, learn that thus I willed it should be made. To the 102 GOETHE'S WEST-EASTERN DIVAN flattery of malice he replies with menaces equal to the flattery. But he will not spend his wrath on individuals ; prompt hatred he has, if needed, but only for some collective mass. And then he reviews his own career, not without a touch of proud and warranted self-satisfaction : " To ape, re-shape, mis-shape me each in turn, Now for at least full fifty years they have sought ; None the less what your worth may be, I thought. In your own native fields you best may learn ; You in your time have played the madcap rude With a wild, young, demonic-genial crew ; Then softly year by year you closer drew To wise men of divine mansuetude." Mohammed himself had not contented all parties, and the Prophet's suggestion of a mode by which a wrathful spirit may be cooled is excellent : " Irks it some man that God in his high place Should grant Mohammed guardianship and grace ? Let him his roof-tree's sturdiest timber choose. Let him make fast thereto a proper noose. Let him adjust his neck. Is it stoutly made .' So shall he feel his anger is allayed." But Goethe is not often moved to tender the advice, " Go, hang ! " The central motive of the poems is, in truth, love ; first, there is a benignant charity extended to man as man ; secondly, there is the charming relation of the old sage, poet, and toper of wine to the boy cup-bearer, blooming in beauty, eager, as a boy may be, for wisdom, a relation which is lightly touched with humour ; and, last, there is the passionate love of man and woman exhibited in that ideal pair, Hatem and Zuleika. Matthew Arnold conjectures that it was Heine whom Goethe described when he spoke of an un- 103 ESSAYS—MODERN & ELIZABETHAN named poet who " had every other gift, but wanted love." Such a judgment pronounced on Heine, whether hj Goethe or Arnold, was not just ; but assuredly no one who knows Goethe himself aright could thus pronounce judgment on him. There is a melancholy poem by Matthew Arnold, " Growing Old," telling of aU the sad concessions made by old age to time, which contrasts, on the one hand, with the exultant rapture of Browning's " Rabbi Ben Ezra," and on the other with the wise and luminous temperance of Emerson's admirable " Terminus." Goethe, in the Divatt, also enumerates an old man's losses, but his tone is not one of depression, for some- thing — and that the most precious thing of all — remains : " ' The years,' thou sayest, ' take so much away : The proper pleasure of the senses' play, The sweet recall of loveliest wiles and words Last eve ; nor vantage true it now affords To sweep from land to land ; no princely token Of merit recognised, no praises spoken. Once welcome, now delight ; no more avails Action for joy ; thy courage quails and fails. Remains one special thing I know not of?' Enough remains ! Illumined thought and love ! " Goethe, if ever any man, was not lacking in as- piration and effort toward intellectual attainment ; but he makes his confession of faith that there is another door of knowledge than that which is entered by the intellect — (the " markets " of the opening line are doubtless all the various marts where learning may be purchased) : " Markets stir the buyer's greed ; But knowledge puffeth up indeed. Who looks around with quiet eye Learns how love doth edify. 104 GOETHE'S WEST-EASTERN DIVAN Didst day and night thy pains bestow Much to hear and much to know, Now hearken at another door, How to learn a wiser lore. Shall Justice dwell in thee, thou must Feel in God something that is just ; Who flames with some pure love alone Will by the loving God be known." There are charming poems, in the same book of the Divan from which this is taken, pleading for generous treatment of the poor — a poet's pleading that pic- tures the grace and speechless eloquence of the sup- pliant's attitude — and for that large charity con- sisting in a gift of self, " To whom thou givest thyself indeed, him as thine own self thou wilt love," a memorable word of counsel borrowed from the Pend- Nameh. From a volume of lyrics designed, in part, to render for readers of the West something of the spirit of Hafiz and of Eastern poetry, " the im- moderate passion for wine, half forbidden," could not, as Goethe says, be omitted, nor the deUght in- spired in old age by the grace of youth, with the arawering feeling of reverence for illuminated old age and its heights of wisdom felt by the young. " The passionate attachment," he writes, " of a child for an old man is not a rare phenomenon. . . . But nothing is more touching than the aspirations of the boy, who, impressed by the lofty spirit of one who is old, experiences an inward amazement and a certain presentiment that something of like kind may de- velop within himself." Such is the motive — ^whoUy spiritual — ^which determines Goethe's conception of the cup-bearer in the ninth Book of the Divan, and his relation to the aged poet for whom he serves the wine. Goethe had found models for his cup-bearer in a son of Professor Paulus, of Heidelberg, and a 105 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN young waiter who attended him at Wiesbaden. The great poet of the East loves his half-forbidden wine as Goethe loves his flask of Eilfer — ^wine of the great vintage of the year eleven — placed before him " by Rhine and Main, in Neckar vale," and to join him over which he invites Hafiz to quit the cups of Paradise. Though he sits often silent and apart, the poet of the Divan loves the shifting, stirring, sounding, multitudinous tavern-hfe, so rich in a various humanity. It has in it something of the iridescence and of the rumours of the sea. Even that wild tumult at earliest morning, when torches flared, flutes shrilled, tabors rattled and insults flew, brought him a fuller sense of Hfe and of the love of life. What if folk declare that he has never rightly learnt the proprieties of manners and morals ! At least he wisely keeps far from certain other fiercer disputes — the wrangling of the doctors and the schools. But the poet, by the very fact that he is a poet, often errs through indiscretion ; the boy who bears the beaker is in some ways more prudent than he, and may even become guardian and counsellor oi/ the sage whom he regards with so much reverence. Song in itself is a betrayal ; and when the wine mounts to his head, and he smites the table with his fist, what rash words escape him, while in corners sit shavehngs with cowled heads, who lurk and spy upon his in- firmities ! True, the wine he drinks is old and sound, and if the Prophet's prohibition must be disregarded it is better to sin for this than for a paltry and insipid liquor : " Damned for poor stuff that turns you sick Were to be twice a heretic." And which of us can escape some intoxication ? io6 GOETHE'S WEST-EASTERN DIVAN Youth itself is drunkenness without the grape"; love, poetry, the passion for knowledge, the enthusi- asm of religion — in each of these a heady element Ues hidden. Still it cannot be denied that the poet sometimes exceeds measure in his cups, and next morning, troubled by what the Persians name " Bidamag buden," and the Germans " caterwaul- ing," comes late and with a languid step from his room. Then it is the part of the faithful boy to en- deavour to restore the Master, whom he reveres in spite of his lapses from wisdom, to his better self : " There on the terrace I would steep Your sense in the reviving air, And in your eyes gaze long and deep. Till you shall kiss the cup-bearer. Earth's not the cavern you suppose. With brood and nest 'tis ever gay, Rose-wafts and attar of the rose, And bulbul sings as yesterday." The people in the market-place hail the Master as the great poet ; but the boy, into whose heart his vnsdom has sunk, can commune with him even when words are few or none : " Th^ have their worth, the rhymes which throng ; Hushed thought is better and more dear ; Give, then, to other folk your song. Give silence to the cup-bearer." Most ennobling communion of all is that of the midsummer night, when the twilight of evening almost meets the uprise of the dawn, when Aurora burns with love for Hesperus, and yet in the Eastern midnight heavens the constellations flame. The boy's heart is full of the lore which he has learnt from the Master, while they both gaze at the vast procession of the planets : 107 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN " I know that this o'erhanging sky. This infinite, you love to view, While yonder cressets magnify Each one the other in the blue ; And who flames brightest will but say — ' Here in my allotted place I shine ; Willed God that you a broader ray Should cast, your lamps were bright as mine.' " Presently it is great raorning, and the worn-out boy murmurs to himself in drowsy tones : " Me thy long hoped-for gift at last contents — God's presence known in all the elements ; How lovingly thou givest it ! yet above All other things the loveliest is thy love." And over the fair young sleeper the Master bends : " Sweetly he sleeps, and sleep is fairly earned ! Dear boy, who hast poured the wine the Master drinks. From friend and teacher thou, so young, hast learned. Unforced, unpunished all the old man thinks. Now the delicious tide of health is flush In every limb ; new life comes momently ; I drink once more, but not a sound ! hush, hush ! That, wakening not, I may have joy in thee." With these words, which sum up the spirit of the whole, the Booh of the Cup-bearer closes. During his visit to Franifurt, in the autumn of 1 814, Goethe had the pleasure of personal inter- course with his friend and correspondent, the banker WiUemer, a man of generous heart and cultured in- telligence. WiUemer was in his fifty-fifth year, more than ten years younger than Goethe. In his house Uved his widowed daughter by a first wife, and Maria Anna Jung, whom Willemer had removed from the temptations of the stage when she was six- teen years old, and brought to his house to be the companion of his younger daughters. She was now 108 GOETHE'S WEST-EASTERN DIVAN thirty, and before the close of Goethe's visit to the South she became Willemer's third wife. Marianne's pleasant, ringleted face is a witness to her good humour and her good sense. She had bright social gifts, sang admirably, wrote graceful verses, and had an enthusiastic veneration for the genius of Goethe, her husband's friend. That she became the model for the Zuleika of the West-Eastern Divan is certain ; that a few beautiful poems in the collection are sub- stantially hers cannot be doubted. She accepted her part as Zuleika with pride and pleasure, and played up to the part with spirit and not without a sense of humour. The poems are poems of passion- ate love ; but to squander sentiment and romance on the relation of Goethe and the good Marianne is to turn to waste what should be reserved for better uses. The relation was absolutely honest ; the passion was born for the imagination from a friendship which was of the happiest kind, and which endured without interruption, though after 1815 they never met, up to Goethe's last days. The secret of Marianne's contributions to the Divan was well kept ; but it was noticed, of course, that in the following stanza of one of Hatem's poems the rhyme of the original text where " Hatem " stands must have been suppUed by the name of Goethe : " As sombre mountain walls the beauty Of morn will flush, you bring me shame, And once more is known to Hatem Springtime's breath and summer's flame." Marianne WUlemer disclosed the facts not long before her tranquil death at the age of seventy-six. The incidents and accidents which gave rise to several of these poems are known ; they are interesting — ^interesting especially to the anecdote-monger ; but 109 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN they were unknown to the earlier readers who enjoyed the Divan, and in truth the actual incidents are the shadows, while the poems themselves — creatures of imaginative moods — are the realities. It adds a certain pleasure to the verses beginning : " Come, dearest, come, wind round my brow this band ! Thy fingers only make the turban fair," to learn that on Goethe's sixty-sixth birthday, spent with the Willemers at their delightful country house, the Gerbermiihle, he received from Marianne the gift of a muslin turban with a laurel wreath. At the Frankfurt fair she bought a Turkish Order of the Sun and Moon, and suddenly came upon her husband and Goethe, for whom the purchase was meant, and there were happy smiles, followed a Httle later by Hatem's interpretation of the symbolism of his new possession : " Be this an image of the joy we have won ! Herein I see refigured me and thee ; Me, my beloved, thou hast named thy Sun ; Come, give it proof, sweet Moon, enclasping me." From Frankfurt he sent her a leaf of the Indian plant, the Gingo Biloba, emblem of perfect friend- ship ; but the poem seems to have been transmitted through her step-daughter, Rosette Stadel. When she sang for him from Mozart's opera she was Goethe's " little Don Juan " ; when she bustled and overbore in household affairs she was his " little Bliicher." They played at letters in cypher to be read by references to page and line of Hammer's translation of Hafiz, and Goethe, in his verse, com- mended to the diplomatists of Europe the use of such a cypher. They agreed as Eastern lovers to think of each other in absence when the moon orbed to the full, and so the charming lyric, V ollmondnacht, came into being. The terrace of the poem, which no GOETHE'S WEST-EASTEEN DIVAN tells of the ring dreamed of as lost in the Euphrates, is the terrace of the Gerbermiihle. The visit of WiUemer and his wife to Heidelberg suggested the great lyric, with its cosmic theoryof love and Goethe's theory of colours involved, Wiederfinden. The chestnut trees of the Heidelberg Castle gardens in- spired the exquisite song, " An voUen Biischel- zweigen." At Darmstadt Zuleika wrote her address to the East Wind, and again at Darmstadt, some days later, her loveHer song to the West Wind. All these details are interesting to the literary student, and especiaEy to the literary anecdote-monger. I will confess that it was the beauty of two lines in the Zuleika Book that indentured me to the busy idle task of trying to translate what cannot be trans- lated — ^the last two lines of a quatrain by Hatem : " Is it possible, sweet Love, I hold thee close. Hear the divine voice pealing musical ? Always impossible doth seem the rose. And inconceivable the nightingale ! " Those two lines went straight from German into English. It might be possible also to make Bagdad, with its sometime population of a million and a half, subservient to the use of a solitary lover : " Are your love and you apart Far as East from West. The heart, Swift runner, o'er the waste will start : 'Tis its own guide, go where it may ; Bagdad for lovers lies not far away." And then there was Hudhud, the crested hoopoe, that served, according to Oriental legend, as go- between for Solomon and the Queen of Sheba ; might not such a bird be captured for the uses of those who need her ? Goethe was geologising when Hudhud ran along the path : ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN " Shells of the ancient sea I sought in stones, shells turned to stone ; Hudhud with stately pace. Spreading abroad her crown. Flaunted with drollest air ; It was life's raillery That mocked at death." But Hudhud learnt such wisdom from Solomon that she can serve as page and envoy not to geologists alone, but to representatives of aU the arts and faculties. It is diflScult to represent by examples these love- poems of Goethe's elder years, for the collection has much variety in feeling, manner and metre, and many of the lyrics have a special beauty which cannot be found in others. The following poem was probably at first designed to find a place in the Book of Zuleika, but, the Book of Timur needing an addition to that piece which tells of Napoleon's campaign in Russia, a fourth stanza was appended, and a new idea — the tyrannous egoism of lovers— was introduced to fit it to its altered position. To Zuleika. To flatter thee with incensed air, Thy mounting pleasure to complete, A thousand rosebuds opening fair Must shrink and shrivel in the heat. One little phial, at whose lips Age-long the snared scent lies enfurled, And slender as thy finger tips — To compass this demands a world ; A world of living motions fine, Which, in their passionate press and throng. The bulbul's coming notes divine. And all his soul-awakening song. GOETHE'S WEST-EASTERN DIVAN Why with their griefs be overgloomed If joy through perished things soar free ? Were not a myriad souls consumed To 'stablish Timur's tyranny ? Just forty years previously, when Goethe was a wonderful young man of five-and-twenty, Lili — ^the daughter of a Frankfurt banker — ^had been his love, and some of his most charming early lyrics had been addressed to her. It may be that here, in Frankfurt, Marianne had mischievously mocked the old poet for his facility and versatility in finding appropriate objects for the gifts of song that lay in him. On a glorious morning of September 1815, in view of the Castle at Heidelberg, he either made his apology or anticipated her playful satire : " Zukika : Much have you sung, be it confessed. And here or there the verse addressed, Penned in your own rare charactery. With pomp of binding, marge of gold. Faultless each point and stroke inscrolled, Ay, many a tome to allure the eye ; Say, did not each such missive prove. Wherever sent, a pledge of love ? Hatem : Yes, and in sweet and potent eyes. Wreathed smiles foretelling extasies. In dazzling teeth of youthful pride, In eyelash-dart and snaky tress Fallen o'er a bosom's loveliness. Thousandfold dangers may be spied : Think then how long since, think and guess, Zuleika has been prophesied ! " But an attempt must be made, though much of the grace of the original may be lost, to exhibit Marianne herself as a poetess, and what better ex- ample can be chosen than her song to the West Wind, which every German singer knows in a beautiful musical arrangement ? It may be noted that in the H 113 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN second stanza there is a doubtful reading ; the whole weight of external evidence is against the reading " fields " {aueri) and in favour of " eyes " (augen), which yet, after all, may be a printer's error : " Ah, West Wind, for thy dewy wing How sorely do I envy thee, For tidings thou to him canst bring Of grief his absence lays on me ! The waving of thy pinions light Wakes silent yearning in the heart ; From flowers and fields, from wood and height Breathed on by thee the quick tears start. Yet these soft wanderings of thy breath Cool the hurt eyelids and restore ; Ah, I should faint with pain to death, Hoped I not sight of him once more. Haste then to my beloved, haste, Speak to his heart in gentlest strain ; No shade across his spirit cast, And hide, ah, hide from him my pain ! Tell him, but tell with lips discreet. His love's the life by which I live ; Glad sense where life with love shall meet His nearness to my heart will give." To confess the truth, the songs of Marianne have more of the direct, simpleilyrical cry, or lyrical sigh, in them than certain of Goeme's more ingeirious or more elaborate poems of theselelder years. My last specimen from the Zuleika Book must, however, be a poem by Hat^m. It is that which tells of the origin of rhyme, and has special reference to the interchange of verses* between Goethe and Marianne : " Behramgur first discovered rhyme, men say ; Stress of pure joy through speech deliverance found ; Dilaram, she his hours' sweet friend, straightway Replied with kindred word and echoing sound. 114 GOETHE'S WEST-EASTEEN DIVAN So, dearest, you were parted from my side, That rhyme's glad usage should become my own ; Unenvious I even of the Sassanide, Behramgur ; mine the art has also grown. This book you awaked ; it is a gift from you ; My full heart spake, for joy was at its prime ; From your sweet life rang back the answer true. As glance to glance so rhyme replied to rhyme. Now let these accents reach you from afar ; The word arrives, though tone and sound disperse ; Is it not the mantle sown with many a star ? Is it not love's high-transiigured Universe ? " The attention of readers of the Zuleika Book may be specially directed to the beautiful unrhymed poem beginning with the words, " Die schon geschriebenen " (No. i8 of Loeper's edition), and, as an example of the ghazel, to the fascinating Utany of love with which the Book closes. The West-Eastern Divan consists of twelve Books. The Parables of the East form so distinctive a part of Oriental literature that Goethe could not pass them by. In his prose study which concludes the volume he tries to classify these parables — ^the ethical, the ascetic, the mystical, and others ; but he leaves it to the intelligent reader to place each of his own parables under whatever rubric may seem right. Some are devout, some are moral, some embody a fragment of humorous wisdom. The last of the series, entitled " It is good," may serve as an example : " In Paradise, where moonbeams played, Jehovah found in slumber deep Adam far sunk, and lightly laid By him a little Eve asleep ; In earthly bounds lay there at rest Two of God's thoughts, the loveliest ! ' Good ! ' guerdoning Himself, He cried. And passed with lingering look aside. IIS ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN No wonder at our glad amaze When eye meets eye in quickening gaze, As if we had flown from regions far Near Him to be, whose thoughts we are. If He should call us, be it so. Let but the summons be for two. These arms thy bounds be, thy abode, Dearest of all the thoughts of God ! " The Book of the Parsees is mainly occupied with the noble " Legacy of the Old Persian Faith," uttered to his disciples by a poor and pious brother now about to depart from earth. The worship of the sun and of fire, seemingly so abstracted, is regarded by Goethe as profoundly practical. The dying saint enthusi- astically aspires towards the light, but his lesson for his brethren is wholly concerned with conduct j " daily fulfilment of hard services " — such is his legacy in a word ; their part it will be to keep pure, as far as human effort can, the soil, the air, the water of the canal, and their own hearts and lives through devoted service, in order that these may be worthy to receive the divine and vivifying rays of the sun. And, as the sun rises above the peaks of Darnavend, the old man's spirit ascends from earth to be gathered from gyre to gyre of the heavens. The Book of Paradise is almost purely Moham- medan ; but it is at the same time West-Eastern, for, though Goethe in one poem justifies the use of sensible imagery as a symboHsm, accommodated to our weakness, for the representation of ineffable things (Richard Baxter did the same), yet now and again his lips are wreathed with smiles at the material joys imagined for the heaven of Mohammed's fol- lowers. Under the starry heavens Mohammed him- self stands and announces to the survivors after the battle of Bedr the glories of that Paradise which his slain warriors have already entered. The lot of ii6 GOETHE'S WEST-EASTERN DIVAN women is less assured ; we only know for certain of four who have passed the gate — Zuleika, who had loved Yussuf, the mother of the Christian Saviour, the wife of Mohammed, and Fatima the Fair : " Spouse, daughter, spotless-souled. Pure spirit with her angelic air, In body of honey-gold." Yet the faith and devotion of other women for- bids us to despair. And, indeed, certain specially favoured beasts have been admitted — ^the ass on which Jesus entered the City of Prophets, the wolf, schooled in the duties of a wolf by Mohammed, the Httle dog that slept long centuries in the cave with the Seven Sleepers, and last, Abuherrira's cat, now purring at the master's knee, and formerly caressed by the Prophet's hand. If Zuleika the Second should be excluded from Paradise, at least an obliging Houri — and here Goethe's snule is broad — ^in obedience to the command of the Prophet can assume her form, and when questioned as to her identity can give such ex- planation as she pleases. The poem, " Admission," records the dialogue between a Houri, warder of the gate, and a poet — assuredly a German poet — ^who craves for entrance : "Houri: To-day I stand, awarder true, Before the gate of Paradise, And scarce I know what I should do. Thou comest in such a doubtful guise. Art thou in very truth allied To these our folk, the Moslem race ? What combats keen, what service tried. Commend thee to the heavenly place ? With those heroic souls dost dare To number thee ? Thy wounds display ! For they will glorious things declare, And I shall lead thee on thy way. 117 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN Poet : Why all this nice punctilio ? What ! Promptly my right of entrance grant ; For I have been a man, and that Means I have been a combatant. Keen-visioned thou, but look more near. Traverse this breast with piercing sight ; Wounds of life's perfidy, see here. See here the wounds of love's delight ! And yet I sang in credulous wise My love's pure faith inviolate, And that the world, which whirls and flies. Is gracious nor can be tngrate. I wrought with men of rarest worth, And this attained, that round my name Love from the fairest hearts on earth Shone like an aureole of flame. No mean man hast thou chosen. Nay, Give me thy hand, for I devise On these slight fingers day by day To reckon the eternities." Much of the spirit of the whole collection of lyrics is expressed in the opening poem, with which we may bring our quotations to an end : Hejira. North and West and South upbreaking. Thrones are shattering, empires quaking ! Fly thou to the untroubled East, There the patriarchs' air to taste ; What with love and wine and song Chiser's fount will make thee young. There, 'mid things pure and just and true. The race of men I would pursue Back to the well-head primitive. Where still from God did they receive Heavenly lore in earthly speech. Nor beat the brain to pass their reach. ii8 GOETHE'S WEST-EASTERN DIVAN Where ancestors were held in awe. Each alien worship banned by law ; In nonage bounds I am gladly caught, Broad faith be mine and narrow thought, As when the word held sway, and stirred Because it was a spoken word. Where shepherds haunt would I be seen, And rest me in oases green ; When with the caravan I fare. Shawl, coffee, musk, my chapman's ware, No pathway would I leave untraced' To the city from the waste. And up and down the rough rock ways, My comfort, Hafiz, be thy lays. When the guide enchantingly. From his mule-back seat on high, Sings, to rouse the stars or scare The lurking robber in his lair. In bath or inn my thought would be. Holy Hafiz, still of thee ; Or when the veil a sweetheart lifts From amber locks in odorous drifts ; Ay, whispered loves of poets fire Even the Houris to desire ! Would you envy him for this. Or bring despite upon his bliss, Know that words of poets rise To the gate of Paradise, Hover round, knock light, implore Heavenly life for evermore. XI9 GOETHE'S HERMANN AND DOROTHEA Goethe had little sympathy — at least in its applica- tion to his own poems — ^with that kind of curiosity which traces a work of art back to its sources. He thought that when guests are invited to a feast they may be content to enjoy the good cheer set before them without visiting the kitchen, calling upon the cook to enumerate the ingredients, and proceeding to inspect the garden where the pot-herbs grew. He himself never connected Hermann und Dorothea with the narrative of the exiles from Salzburg, in which it had its origin ; when that narrative was pointed out as his source in the Morgenblatt of the year 1809 (No. 138) he uttered neither affirmation nor denial. On 31st October 173 1, Leopold, Archbishop of Salzburg, Legate of the Holy See and Primate of Germany, issued a decree directed against his Pro- testant subjects, by which they were required to depart from their country, some within eight days, some after a period less terribly brief, and were for- bidden ever again to enter it, upon pain, if deemed expedient, of death. Snows had already fallen. The expulsion of the Protestants during the late autumn and winter months was attended with many acts of extreme severity. In February 1732 the exiles re- ceived an invitation from Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia to settle in his territory ; Protestant princes threatened reprisals against their Roman Catholic subjects ; and at length some check was placed upon the Archbishop's violence. AU Protestant Europe H20 GOETHE'S HERMANN & DOROTHEA was interested in the misfortunes of the expatriated fugitives. A pamphlet giving an account of their sufferings was pubHshed in London in 1732 ; it sets down the number of exiles from ten districts of the Archbishopric as 20, 678 ; it closes with an announce- ment that subscriptions for their relief would be received and transmitted by certain gentlemen, lay and clerical, who are named in a list which includes among others the rector of Lambeth and the preacher in the German chapel at St. James's. This English pamphlet does not contain the story on which Goethe's poem is founded. But iti a Ger- man pamphlet of the same year it is found, and again in 1732 in a large quarto entitled Ausf&hrliche Historie derer Etnigranten oder vertriebenen Luther- aner aus dem Erzbisthum Salzburg. Two years later the story was repeated, as one of the evidences of providential care extended to the exiles, in Gocking's Vollkommene Emigrationsgeschichte. The following is the version given in the AusfUhrliche Historie : — " In Alt-Mtihl, a town lying in the Oettingen district, a worthy and well-to-do citizen had a son whom he had often— but without success — surged to marry. As the Salzburg emigrants were passing through this little town, among them was a maiden who so attracted the youth that he resolved in his heart to make her his wife, if this might be brought about. He made inquiry of the other Salzburgers respecting the girl's conduct and family, and was in- formed that she was the child of good honest folk, and was always weU conducted, but had separated from her parents on the ground of religion, and had left them behind. Thereupon the young man went to his father, and told him that, as he had so often been urged to marry, he had now made choice of a person, if his father would allow him to have her. ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN When the father desired to know who this person might be, he was told that a Salzburg maiden had won his son's heart, and that if she were not to be his bride he would never marry. At this the father took alarm, and tried to dissuade him from the match. Certain friends were called in, and a pastor, in the hope that by their means his son might be brought to another way of thinking ; but all was in vain. At last it seemed to the pastor that God might design some special providence in this affair, and that hence it might be for the best, in regard both to the son and to the emigrant girl ; whereupon consent was finally given, and the youth was permitted to do as he pleased. Oflf then went the young man to his Salz- burg maiden, and asked her how she liked things in this neighbourhood. ' Well indeed, sir,' answered she. ' And would you ' — ^he went on — ' be willing to act as servant in my father's house ? ' ' With entire content,' she replied, ' and, if he wiU take me, I mean to serve him faithfully and diligently ' ; and then she proceeded to enumerate her various accom- plishments, how she could fodder cattle, mUk cows, work in the fields, make hay, with much more of a like kind. Upon this the youth took her with him and presented her to his father. He asked her whether she liked his son, and would marry him. But she, knowing nothing of the matter, thought that he meant to tease her, and answered that they had no right to jeer at her : the young man had sought a servant for his father, and, if he desired to have her, she meant to serve him in all faithfulness, and honestly to earn her bread. But when the father stuck to it, and the son moreover showed his serious longing for her, she declared that if their purpose was earnest she could be well content, and she would cherish the youth as the apple of her eye. And when 122 GOETHES HERMANN & DOROTHEA the son presented her with a wedding gift she placed her hand in her bosom, saying, ' I, too, must give a marriage-portion,' and handed to him a Httle purse in which were found two hundred ducats." Bottiger, who held close relations with Goethe while the poem was in process of development, and who helped to negotiate its sale, states that Goethe discovered the story in 1794, and that at first he thought of converting it into a drama. The in- cidents were enough to form a nucleus from which other incidents might be evolved as soon as imagina- tion came to quicken them. The personages — the youth, the maiden, the father, the pastor — were already in existence ; only the mother of the young man, the apothecary, and the judge, had no pro- totypes in the tale of the Salzburg exiles. But Goethe, who held himself aloof from theological and ecclesiastical partisanship, could hardly have ac- cepted with pleasure the background of this idyllic love-story — ^the strife of Catholic against Protestant, which drove forth the heroine from her native home. Trusting to the power of art to confer ideaHty upon the theme, he resolved to give it more immediate actuality by placing the incidents and characters in the present time. It was a time when events of epic proportion were occupying the attention of Europe ; and behind the events lay an epic combat between great ideas respecting the life of society. The French Revolution and the upheavals which it caused in neighbouring countries provided a background of wider historical extent and of deeper ethical signi- ficance than that of the reUgious strife of Salzburg some sixty years previously. The interval between the composition of Hermann und Dorothea and the supposed time of the action was measured not by years but by months ; Goethe himself, in a letter to Meyer 123 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN (5th December 1796), places the events of the poem in the preceding August. The war of France against Prussia and Austria had fluctuated to and fro in its earher years. In 1796 the advance of the French armies under Moreau and Jourdan, after some im- portant successes, was checked by the vigorous action of the Archduke Karl, and the French retreat which followed was marked by those cruelties which are common to a soldiery rendered desperate. The imagined scene of Goethe's poem lies near the right bank of the Rhine, perhaps in the region of Hesse- Darmstadt. Goethe himself had witnessed and even experi- enced some of the hardships caused by war. In 1792 he accompanied the Grand Duke of Weimar on that disastrous campaign — ^led by the Duke of Brunswick — against the French Revolutionary forces which closed with the cannonade of Valmy, and a retreat rendered inexpressibly miserable by insufficiency of provisions and the torrents of autumnal rain. In Goethe's account of his experiences, Campagne in Frankreich, will be found the origin of several in- cidents and reflections in Hermann und Dorothea. He had himself seen a young woman who, like Dorothea's companion, had given birth to an infant during her flight ; an old female camp-follower made Imperious requisitions on behalf of the mother and new-born child, and, as she knew no French, Goethe himself expounded in words her passionate gestures. At Etain, on the retreat, the master and mistress of the house in which he found shelter were filled with alarm on behalf of a son, who like Dorothea's be- trothed had been carried away by the passions of the time, and had been hurried into the vortex of the re- volutionary maelstrom in Paris ; at his parents' request he had returned home, deserting the party 124 GOETHE'S HERMANN & DOROTHEA to which his feelings had bound him, and, now that he was inscribed in the Kst of traitors, he found his new allies overwhelmed with defeat. Thus through Goethe's personal experiences and through the ex- citement of his own day a new life and energy were infused into the story derived from the earlier years of the eighteenth century. " Hermann und Dorothea" said Goethe to Ecker- mann in the year 1825, " is almost the only one of my larger poems that still gives me pleasure ; I can never read it without deep interest. I love it best in the Latin translation ; there it seems to me nobler, as if, as regards the form, it had reverted to its source." The poem was the creation of the best period of Goethe's maturity, a period when he had escaped from the storm and stress of his earlier years, when he was dehvered from the excessive pressure of public business that had proved alien to his genius, when the influences of classical art in Italy had sunk deep into his spirit, when the Revolutionary wars had animated in his heart the love of his own country,, when, above all, he enjoyed the stimulus and the support of Schiller's comradeship. Some of Goethe's larger works suffered from the way in which they came to be written. A fragment was produced ; there followed a long interval during which rival interests drew the poet away in other directions ; and when he resumed his work it was perhaps in an altered spirit or a different mood. Or, again, he first adopted the medium of prose, and at a later date recast his work in verse. The process by which Hermann und Dorothea was brought into being certainly tended to give the poem that harmony, or rather tiiat unity, by which it is pre-eminently char- acterised. The germ dropped into Goethe's mind and lay there for a considerable time ; it was borne I2S ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN about and nourished in silence ; although the creative energy lapsed away when some two-thirds of the poem had been swiftly set down in writing, the capacity for careful and sympathetic revision remained, and a second creative impulse, which carried the work to a close, followed after a brief interval. There were few perplexing knots to untie, or tangles to unravel. Goethe's interest in his work never really waned during the period of creation. Some seven or eight months — ^from August 1796 to March 1797 — sufficed for creation and in great part for exact revision. " It is in fact remarkable," wrote SchiUer, in a letter of i8th April 1797, " how swiftly Nature gave birth to this work and how carefully and considerately Art has perfected it." During a visit to Jena, from 8th August to 5th October, while Goethe resided in the old ducal castle, the first four cantos of Hermann und Dorothea, according to the original arrangement, were written. The whole poem was to be comprised in six cantos ; the first four correspond to the first six as we have them in the final arrangement, according to which each of the nine cantos bears the name of one of the nine Muses. It was not until ilth September that Goethe actually " began to versify the idyl," " The execution," wrote Schiller to Korner (28th October 1796), " which, as it were, took place under my eyes, lias been achieved with a Hghtness and swiftness in- comprehensible to me ; he has written over one hundred and fifty hexameters daily for nine suc- cessive days." The days from nth September to 19th September are probably those to which Schiller refers. The idyU, as the poem had been at first conceived, now expanded in Goethe's mind into an idyllic epic. At the close of October he found himself obliged to 126 GOETHE'S HERMANN & DOROTHEA go to IlniMiau for a few days. " It would be a great piece of good luck," he wrote to Schiller, " if I could manage to write a portion of my epic poem while in Ilmenau ; the perfect solitude of the place seems to promise something." And SchiUer, two days latel: (31st October), sends his greeting to the lonely valley, with a wish that the fairest of the Muses may en- counter his friend : " you may, at all events, there find your Hermann's little town, and probably also an apothecary and a greenhouse with stucco work." But the wind bloweth where it listeth, and no fresh inspiration came at Ilmenau. " I did not even touch the garment's hem of any one of the Muses," Goethe confesses to SchiUer on his return to Weimar ; all he could with advantage attempt was revision and correction. It was not, indeed, until the days of travel to Leipzig and Dessau, at the close of the year 1796 and the openingof the new year (28th December to loth January), that the plan of the unfinished portion of the poem was fuUy considered and ela- borated. At last, during another residence at Jena — from February 20th to the end of March 1797 — the creative impulse returned, and that at a time when Goethe was confined to his room by a cold. " My work is progressing," he informed Schiller on 4th March. . . "In two more days I shaU have raised the treasure, and when it is once above ground the polishing process will come of itself. It is re- markable how, towards the end, the poem inclines to its idyllic origin." The work advanced quickly to the close ; the task of revision followed and was deliberately pursued. On 8th April Goethe refers to the " double headings " of the cantos, indicating that the distribution of the text into nine books, named both after the Muses and the subject-matter of each canto, was then in contemplation if not com- 127 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN pletely carried into effect. Three weeks later he writes to Meyer : " My poem is ready ; it consists of 2000 hexameters, and is divided into nine cantos." Hermann und Dorothea was published in the Taschen- buch fur 1798, which was issued in the late autumn of the preceding year. In the labour of revision Wilhelm von Humboldt — one of the earliest critics of the poem ' — ^was ever ready with thoughtful counsel and suggestion. In 1804 a later revision was begun in conjunction with Heinrich Voss the younger, with a special view to metrical improve- ments. The MS., showing these emendations, re- mains among the Goethe archives ; the alterations were not embodied in any printed text, nor can ground for real regret be found in this circumstance. Among the forces which helped to mould the poem of Hermann und Dorothea Goethe's feeHng towards the French Revolution was not the least important. The influences in society which make for change and the influences which make for con- servation and stability are both recognised in the poem and are both justified. Goethe would not and does not deny that social progress and ameUoration are themselves essential elements of true order ; but he insists more strongly on the duty of preserving and maintaining the good that has already been reahsed in the well-being of a nation, for in the ap- palling danger of the time that truth seemed to be the one chiefly needed by his own country. It is possible to study Goethe's view of the Revolutionary movement in several works written under its im- mediate pressure — The German Emigrants, the Venetian Epigrams, the travels of the Sons of Mega- prazon, the Natural Daughter, the Grosskophta, the ' Aesthetische Versuche iiber Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea^ by Wilhelm von Humboldt, 1799. 128 GOETHE'S HERMANN & DOROTHEA Biirgergeneral, the Aufgeregten, and Reynard the Fox ; his matured wisdom will be found summarised in a conversation with Eckermann of 4th January 1824. He was no friend, he declares, of arbitrary rule. He was convinced that a great revolution is never a fault of the people ; it is, on the contrary, always the con- sequence of faults of the government. If there exists a real necessity for a great reform among a people, " God is with it, and it prospers." God, he went on to say, was visibly with Christ and His first adherents He was also visibly with Luther : neither of these " was a friend of the established system ; much more were both of them convinced that the old leaven must be got rid of, and that it would be im- possible to go on and remain in the untrue, inequit- able, and defective way." But while Goethe is just to the influences that make for change, and even for revolutionary change, while, too, his sympathies were popular as much as aristocratic, he could not, he admits, be a friend to the French Revolution in the days of its power : " its horrors were too near me, and shocked me daily and hourly, whilst its beneficial results were not then to be discovered." He revolted especially ffom the efforts made in Germany to reproduce artificially such a state of things as had in France arisen from a great necessity : " Nicht dem Deutschen geziemt es, die furchterliche Bewegung Fortzuleiten und auch zu wanken hierhin und dorthin." So, through the mouth of his Hermann, the poet utters a warning against the factitious cultivation of Revolutionary sentiment by some of his own country- men. And to Eckermann, more than a quarter of a century later, he expresses himself in the same spirit : " Nothing is good for a nation but that which arises from its own core and its own general wants : . . . All I 129 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN endeavours to introduce any foreign innovation, the necessity for which is not rooted in the core of the nation itself, are therefore fooUsh ; and all premedi- tated revolutions of the kind are unsuccessful, for they are without God, who keeps aloof from such bunghng." Goethe could not forget that in his youtiger days he was himself a leader of revolution in things of the mind. Gdtz von Berlichingen was a cry for freedom ; both in substance and form it revolted against eighteenth-century conventions. In Prometheus he asserted in the boldest spirit the independence and individuality of the artist. But the years of pubHc service at Weimar had taught him that freedom is to be attained only through wise limitation, through intellectual clearness and order, through purity of feeling and through activity within a definite sphere. His scientific studies had taught him to expect much from a gradual evolution ; he had come to believe that the way of development is not a way of violent cataclysms. His studies in art led him to value simpUcity and repose as the elements from which beauty arises rather than the turbulence of passion or the straining of immoderate desire. In Italy, in the presence of the masterpieces of classical sculpture, he felt that intellectual sanity and obedience to law produce nobler results in art than are attained by emotional violence or unmeasured caprices of the imagination. In such a poem as Hermann und Dorothea Goethe was really assisting in the work of the European revolution of the eighteenth century, for he was delivering the ideal man — true manhood, true womanhood — from the faded conventions of the earUer art of the century, and also from the violences and sentimentaHties of his own younger days. But the spirit in which he attempted this was far removed 130 GOETHE'S HERMANN & DOROTHEA from the spirit which sought for freedom through the machinery of brand-new constitutions or the machinery of the guillotine. His word to the German people was that for them at least there was a better way — to preserve, to maintain, to develop what was good ; to work for humanity through those limitations imposed by the love of things that are near and real, the home, the little vineyard, the little town with its kindly neighbours, father and mother, and wife and child ; and, when need arises, the country and the nation which include aU that is nearest and dearest, all that is best and most real : ■" All the firmer amidst this universal disruption Be Dorothea the tie ! And thus we will hold and continue ' True to each other, and still maintain the good that is given us ; For the man who in wavering times has a mind ever wavering Only increases the evil and spreads it wider and wider ; But who firmly stands, he moulds the world to his posture. Not the German's work should it be, this fearful commotion Onward to urge, or to reel in his courses this way and that way. ' Here we take our stand ! ' Such be our word and our action," ' Readers of Hermann und Dorothea have expressed «urprise at the union effected by the poet between German life and manners, German thought and sentiment, on the one hand, and on the other a Greek feeling for art and Greek artistic methods. To admirers of the poem this has seemed an achievement almost miraculous. One excellent French critic, Jiowever, Edmond Scherer — ^and his words were quoted apparently with approval by Matthew Arnold — found something inharmonious, something even ludicrous in what he styled " the antico-modern and heroico-middle-class idyll of Goethe." For him the poem was at best a feat, and not quite a successful ' In the above paragraph I have used tome sentences from Geethe and the Frtneh RtvoJution, an Address to the English Goethe Society, published in my "Volume, New Studtti in Literature, ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN feat, of ingenuity. Goethe's manner of proceeding, he declared, is at bottom " that of parody," and the turn of a straw " would set the reader laughing at these farm-horses transformed into coursers, these village innkeepers and apothecaries who speak with the magniloquence of a Ulysses or a Nestor." This, according to Scherer, is not sincere poetry at all, but a factitious work, " the product of an exquisite dilettantism." It ought to have been perceived that a genuine Hellenism is in no respect opposed to truth of obser- vation and sincerity of feeling. Because Goethe was Greek he must — when dealing with a German theme — be genuinely and profoundly German. His earlier conception, indeed, of Greek art led him to some extent away from reality towards a factitious ideal. That earlier conception had in it certain elements of the eighteenth-century conventional feeling for classical art. It was supposed that ideality and the repose of classical art were attained by a process of abstraction, which thinned away details, and regarded with indifference, if not with a lofty disdain, whatever is individual. From this error of the pseudo-classical school Goethe did not wholly escape ; but an inborn reali^ni in general saved his work, even at its worst, from lifelessness or insipidity. Before Hermann und Dorothea was written he had visited Italy, and his eyes had carried into his imagination and his soul the life and the lesson of Greek sculpture. Here was the human body presented not in an abstraction, but in its essential truth ; and the ideal was attained not by turning away from reality, but by seizing some moment of the highest physical and moral Ufe, in action or in dignified repose, and by enabling that life at its fullest to declare and manifest itself ; for which 132 GOETHE'S HERMANN & DOROTHEA manifestation it uses every means that aids a deploy- ing of the inward forces, omitting only — and that not so much by deliberation as by instinct — such dross of accident as rather obscures than interprets the vital energy. And now, having chosen a little German town as the scene of his epic-idyU, and German men and women as his actors, Goethe was constrained by the very principles of Greek art to manifest our common humanity through its German presentment, and to do this with such a profound truth of feeling that in and through reality the ideal should emerge. The Homeric poems filled Goethe with inex- haustible delight ; but the speculations of Wolf had led him at this time to feel that the path to modern poetry of an epic character is not barred by the vast figure of Homer, with whom contention or com- petition were hopeless. Many singers — ^he now held — ^had contributed to the material from which arose the Iliad and the Odyssey. Why should not a modern man also sing in a kindred spirit concerning modern life and action and suffering? Are not the elementary and primitive wants and desires and sufferings and joys and actions of man and woman extant in the world still as in the days of the singers of Greece ? And if a modern poet should deal with the world that Ues around him in a spirit akin to that of Homer, is there anything incongruous in a certain general resemblance to the Homeric manner ? If in a few passages there should be actual reminiscence of the style and the language of Homer, can this rightly be regarded, to use Scherer's word, as " parody " ? Or ought we not rather to view such passages as a suggestion to the reader that, although the Homeric nalveti (if there is, indeed, such a thing) na longer is possible and self -consciousness has come in its place, yet, if men will but lift up their eyes and 133 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN look at the world aright, there are things to be seen in it like those of which Homer sang ? The horses which Hermann tackles are in reality spirited, majestic creatures, and Hermann himself is a noble and vigorous youth. Let us no longer be blinded by what is familiar and customary, let us envisage the reality, and we shall perceive a youth who can bear comparison with any Grecian charioteer, and steeds as strong and graceful as those that whirled the chariots on the fields of Troy. A sculptor walking along the countryside to-day may discover in the pose of a sower, or a reaper, or a woman drawing water at a well, the attitudes of heroes or of gods. It is the dulness of our wearied vision which hides the fact ; and may not the poet remind us once or twice — ^with a slightly ironic smile upon his lips — that nature is still Homeric ? Goethe's epic idyll was not without a parentage in eighteenth-century German literature. Here it is enough to note that its immediate predecessors was the Luise of Johann Heinrich Voss. Both in contents and in form the poem of Voss exerted an influence on Hermann und Dorothea, which may be recognised without detracting from the glory or the originality of the work of Goethe. The Luise is written in hexameters, in the practice of which Voss, the trans- lator of Homer, acquired a degree of mastery which had not been reached by Klopstock ; it is an idyll of German life ; it adapts the forms of Greek art to the rendering of a German theme. The household of a pastor, living in the country, forms the centre of Voss's idyUic poem ; the birthday of the pastor's daughter Luise is celebrated in the neighbouring woods, hard by a lake, in a simple, rural fashion ; the visit of her betrothed and the incidents that lead up to the wedded union of happy man and maid are 134 GOETHE'S HERMANN & DOROTHEA related, not without a certain grace of feeling and of manner. Strength of characterisation, depth of passion, breadth of interest, largeness of conception, the art of composition, are wholly or almost wholly- wanting to the poem. The idylls, pubHshed separ- ately in 1783 and 1784, were revised and brought to- gether to form the completed poem in 1795. Voss's Luise became popular, for it fell in with two streams of tendency — first the return to nature of the pre- Revolutionary period, when Rousseau was a master of men's feelings and imagination, and, secondly, the new sense of the beauty of Greek art, partly developed and largely guided by the writings of Winckelmann. " I still remember," Goethe wrote to Schiller (28th February 1798), " the genuine enthusiasm which I felt for the pastor of Griinau, when he first appeared in The Mercury ; I read it aloud so often that I still know the greater part of it hf heart ; and I gained much good from it, for the delight I had in it became at last productive in me, and tempted me to work in the same genre — ^which resulted in Her- mann, and who knows what may yet arise out of it ? " Recognising the faults and imperfections of Voss's work — ^its lack of deep passion, its lack of general ideas, its deficiency in concentration and vigorous continuity, its pettiness of detail — Goethe did not scruple to accept from it whatever could serve his own purpose, which, besides the general impulse of ^ih.& genre, some characteristics of diction, and the metrical form, included a few hints for particular passages, and whatever he appropriated was ennobled. Without Luise, as he indicates, Hermann und Doro- thea might never have come into existence ; yet the true glory of the parent is derived almost wholly from the more illustrious child. " I have tried in the epic crucible to separate what 13s ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN is purely human in the life of a small town from its dross " — so Goethe wrote to Meyer (5th December 1796) — " and to reflect from a little mirror the great movements in progress on the stage of the world." To a superficial gazer nothing could seem more prosaic, nothing more trivial than the life of such a petty German town ; and Goethe does not shrink from any realistic details which help to give a body, visible and almost tangible, to the spirit of his poem. The Golden Lion inn, looking out on the market- place, might have been found a century ago in any one of a score of Rhineland towns ; the old-fashioned garden of the apothecary, with its quaint figures, and grotto adorned with spars and shell-work, may have been known to Goethe at Ilmenau or elsewhere ; nothing in the small duU place is so much to be wondered at and admired as the wealthy neighbour's house, splendid with white stucco and green paint. Is it not a poor scene for an epic poem ? and what can be found here to interest the imagination or the feelings ? What, indeed, can be found except the bounty of nature and its beauty, what except the fulness of a rich and beautiful humanity ? Here are wedded happiness, a home presided over by womanly tact and sympathy ; here are pity for those in need, the heart that plans and the hand that executes good deeds ; here are neighbourly good-will and civic virtues, the love of child and of parent, affection for the home- stead and the soil, patriotic pride and passion, the wisdom of illuminated manhood, maidenly discretion, maidenly service and heroic strength, and a noble sense of personal dignity ; here, above all, is the love of man and maid, swift and final in its happy election, and the sudden unfolding of character under the sunshine of a new and deep affection. 136 GOETHE'S HERMANN & DOROTHEA And as a background for the personages and their passions we see not mereljr the little town, which Goethe views with a feeling of kindly regard that is touched by humour, but a landscape wealthy in summer beauty and whoUy humanised. Mere de- scription of external nature, detached from the actors and the action of his poem, is not sought by the poet of Hermann und Dorothea ; it is indeed hardly per- mitted by his conception of a narrative poem ; but the environment of the actors becomes an essential feature or condition of the incidents. The garden, with its apple trees, the honeysuckle bower, the vine- yard slopes, where the purple clusters hang heavy and warm in the sun, the field and bending corn crop, are known to us because the mother, now setting right a prop, now brushing away a caterpillar, traverses these as she seeks the distraught Hermann. The pear tree on the summit, which is a landmark for all the neighbourhood, shelters the youth in his lonely perturbation of spirit at noon-day, and in its shadow, while the moonlight shines clear around, he sits with Dorothea's hand in his own. Up the steps of the vineyard path the mother cUmbs, and it is here in their shadowy descent that Hermann's beloved, stumbling, finds her support upon his breast and shoulder. The linden grove near the neighbouring village, with the well and the sheltered greensward, lives in our imagination because it is here that Her- mann awaits the tidings of Dorothea brought by the friendly emissaries, and here that the lovers lean over the water and see, in its mirrored blue of heaven, their own wavering forms as they nod and greet each the other. With little play of what has been termed the " pathetic fallacy," Nature even may be said to co- operate in the action of the poem. The brooding heat of the summer day breaks in the nocturnal 137 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN thunderstorm. With her wounded sense of virgin dignity Dorothea is about to quit the shelter of the Golden Lion, and go forth, bearing her little bundle, into the night and tempest and downpour of rain ; at which moment, while the thunder stiU growls without, the kindly mother interposes, and there is a clearing at least in the moral atmosphere. The heavens themselves — if there were no stronger powers at work — ^have made it impossible to permit Dorothea to leave her true home, and thus, as it were, are in league with those who have plotted to render her happiness assured. There is another and a more formidable thunder- storm — that in the social and political world — which adds largeness and something of terror to the scene, and which at the same time serves to endear to our feehngs the tranquil well-being of the little German town. " Who will deny," cries the Judge, " that his heart was uplifted within him when he saw the first beam of the risen sun, and heard of Rights of Man, common to all, of Liberty the inspirer of spirits, and Equality worthy to be praised ? " But the sky darkened ; and the strife became one not for liberty, but for an evil domination. What, after all, if in this little town and among its quiet citizens there were more of true wisdom — at least for Germany and. for the immediate present — than could be derived from the council-chambers of revolutionary Paris ? The homely neighbourhood becomes for the moment a centre in which the principles of stability and orderly progress are seen in contention with the principles of the revolutionary reform. Dorothea's first lover, caught by a generous enthusiasm and possessed by the new republican hopes, has abandoned her to the chances of the time, which have driven her forth, a wanderer from her home, and he himself, having 138 GOETHE'S HERMANN & DOROTHEA effected nothing, has perished amid the strife of ignoble greeds and ambitions. No one can think harshly of the error of his rash gallantry. Hermann is also fired to enthusiasm ; the lover rises to the patriot ; life has grown good to him, and the home- stead and the Httle town are dearer than ever before. To maintain and to defend what is of so great worth shall be his task ; and the future of Dorothea is safe in his steadfast and courageous hands. The conversations are not, as Edmond Scherer represents them, conducted with " the magnilo- quence of a Ulysses or a Nestor." They are full of pleasant familiarities, and they are often pleasantly touched with a humour, of which the reader, though not always the speaker, is conscious. Magniloquence is monotonous, but the talk of the host of the Golden Lion and his neighbours rises and falls with a natural variety. And with each speaker it is admirably characteristic. With the Pastor it can rise into the region of general ideas. He is still young in years, but he has received the best gifts of culture both sacred and profane. Faith and hope and charity dwell in his soul, and therefore his heart has been open to the deeper truths of human life. Through his lips Goethe utters some of his own spiritual vvisdom, and it is uttered with the simplicity and directness of true insight. His trust in the way* and the wisdom of Nature is large. The Leichtsinn of men, which to the Apothecary seems an offence, is seen by the Pastor to be a wise provision of Nature ; curiosity seeks for what is new, and through an interest in what is new we pass to a regard for what is useful, and what is useful leads on in turn to what is good. The whole of human existence is viewed by the Pastor as a full and noble harmony. His friend, the Apothecary, has told how in childhood 139 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN the thought of death was impressed upon him as a thought which might quell or control his youthful impatience. The lines which follow, words of the Pastor presenting life and death as parts of a har- monious and perpetual circuit, are not found in the MS. preserved at Weimar among the Goethe archives; they were a noble after-thought of the poet, and, while wholly in keeping with the young Pastor's spirit, they lie very near to Goethe's own view of life. To the wise man death becomes life, for it urges him to activity ; for the pious it strengthens the hopes of iuturity ; death ought not to be shown to a child as death ; let the young learn the worth of a riper age and let the aged look towards youth, so that both may rejoice in the perpetual cycle of existence, and life may be fulfilled in life — " dass beide des ewigen Kreises Sich erfreuen und so sich Leben im Leben voUende ! " And at this moment the door opens and those who are to bear life onward into the future, with its ful- ness of good, Hermann and his future bride, " das herrliche Paar," are seen. All is natural here, and all is simple ; but never were envoys of a great power more majestically announced than these representa- tives of life and love by the undersigned appositeness of the Pastor's words. It is only on this occasion that any one of the speakers attains so clear and rare an altitude. In general the Pastor's wisdom is that of illuminated good sense ; he is no dreamer of dreams ; and be it remembered to his credit that he can drive a pair of horses round a difficult turning as skilfully as Hermann himself. So also, speaking figuratively, in managing Hermann's love affair, at the moment when Doro- thea's outraged sense of dignity threatens a catas- 140 GOETHE'S HERMANN & DOROTHEA trophe, he drives boldly and comes dangerously near an upset ; it is only his quick eye and steady hand that avert disaster. The man of ideas, after aU, may prove himself an excellent man of affairs. The Apothecary is a contrasted figure ; yet he is not an unserviceable coadjutor in spying out the land in Hermann's interest. He is well advanced in years ; his memories go back to the days long since, when aU things were better than they are now ; grottoes, and shell work, and stone figures have gone out of fashion, and the good old custom of rational wooing by friendly family negotiation has passed away. From first to last Goethe gently smUes, with a not unkindly ironic smile, at the good neighbour, whose cure is that of bodies, not of souls. The timidity of his prudence heightens our sense of the Pastor's more generous prudence, which does not shrink from the ventures of faith. The Apothecary must indulge his grumble against the townsfolk who have hurried after the poor fugitives for sake of the pleasure of an idle excitement ; yet he has been one of the curious sightseers himself ; he shrinks from a narration of the fugitives' distress, and thereupon proceeds with his tale, omitting no harrowing par- ticular ; when his impatience is rising he relates how in childhood he had been cured for ever of impati- ence. The sight of misery has really disturbed the good man, partly through sympathy with those who have been thrown abroad on the world, to the loss of their easy habitual ways and the loss of not a little property, and partly because he reflects that before long his own case may be like theirs. He sits musing in die inn parlour, and needs the prompting of the Host before he can raise to his lips the glass of eighty- three. One comfort at least he has — ^if the invaders should force him to fly, his flight will not be embar- 141 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN rassed by wife or child ; already he has packed up his valuables, and if person and property can be saved there will be some consolation amid disaster. Life has taught him to proceed in all things cautiously ; he would like to regild his sign of the Archangel and Dragon, but the expense has to be considered. In Hermann's affairs of the heart the motto of wise conduct is Festina lente ; Dorothea looks indeed what a maiden ought to be, but it is not well to rely upon appearances. To trust one's spiritual guidance to the young Pastor may be sensible enough ; but is it discreet to trust the safety of one's limbs to such a charioteer ? Yet the egoism of the Apothecary leaves him well-disposed and neighbourly ; he is prompt to act as plenipotentiary in the great business of wedlock ; and, if he does not rashly part with his coin to the unhappy fugitives, he is generous with the contents of his pouch of cherished canaster. Hermann's father is constrained by the exigencies of the narrative to play a somewhat ungrateful part ; he is the chief obstacle which retards young love in its progress, and over which love must find out a way. But Goethe contrives that, notwithstanding his in- firmities of temper and a certain deficiency of intel- lectual and moral delicacy, the host of the Golden Lion shaU impress us favourably as an honest and genial householder. We learn to humour him gently, to view his foibles with a smile, and to remain con- fident that, with a little exercise of tact, he can be brought round to good temper and something like reason in the end. He has toiled since the havoc wrought twenty years ago by the great fire ; he has grown well-to-do, and has gained a position of respect among his fellow-townsmen ; and now his days of struggle are over, and his personal ambition is ap- peased ; he regards himself with much complacency, 142 GOETHE'S HERMANN & DOROTHEA and loves — ^though not ungenerously — ^his comfort and his ease. Should his temper be ruffled, it is enough if his self-complacency can be restored; a little oil will allay the troubled waters, though he may not be able to deny himself the pleasure of feel- ing in a measure wronged. The host would not choose to view the misery of the fugitives, but he is willing to give to them of his substance, for " to give is the duty of the rich " ; and though he parts from the flowered dressing-gown, with all its associations of repose, as from an old friend, let this go too, for it is no longer in the fashion, and a respected citizen must move with the times. The good host is not, like his neighbour, the Apothecary, oppressed by the fear of French invaders ; aU anxiety is hateful to him, and he cherishes a comfortable faith in Providence and re- members the sure barrier of the Rhine. His own time for ease has come, but it should be his son's business now to take up his task, and advance in social success from the point to which the father had arrived — ^for besser ist besser. And, with so exemplary a parent, Hermann is an unsatisfactory son ; he will not seek a bride from among the daughters of the wealthy neighbour, whose white stucco and green paint glorify the market-place ; why should not one of these fashionable young ladies decorate the interior of the Golden Lion and gratify the good father-in- law with fashionable airs on the piano ? But Her- mann is dull and devoid of ambition ; he has been a laggard in his class at school, wlule others strode ahead ; he can content his poor ambition with horses and affairs of the farm ; and all this though he has a father who has not only bettered himself but helped to better the town, one who held the office of " Bauherr " six times, and that with general appro- bation. For certain, Hermann shall never bring 143 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN across the threshold as bride, bearing in hand her little bundle of belongings, some peasant daughter- in-law — die Trulle / And to pardon the host's gross outbreak of speech we must needs bear in mind^ a& does the wise Mutterchen, that he has quickened his blood with some glasses of the vintage of eighty-three. Mother and son are joined against him, and the neighbours aid and abet their revolt ; they do him wrong, but why should he vex his soul ? he will sub- mit and let things take their course. When at length Hermann and Dorothea arrive out of the night, the host has recovered his good humour, and the occasion is one for some harmless banter ; but it fares ill with the father's jests ; the scene changes to one of indig- nation and protest, with weeping, demonstrative women. Was ever kind, indulgent father so wronged? Sobs and bewailings, and confusion at the close of the day, when a little good sense might have set all right ! For his part he can endure it no longer and wiU betake himself to his bed. It needs all Doro- thea's gracious tact to restore harmony ; but the father's heart is in truth sound and warm, and, as he embraces his new daughter, the good man has to hide some happy tears. The Mutterchen bears a certain resemblance to Goethe's own bright-hearted and sympathetic mother. In reading Hermann und Dorothea, though the Pastor with his spiritual wisdom and Hermann with his strong heart and steadfast will vindicate their sex, we have to make some allow- ances for masculine limitations and infirmities ; but the Emg-Weibliche is presented in two exemplars which are wholly admirable. The Mutterchen is in love with happiness and with her own business of creating it for others, and therefore for herself ; and to lessen misery is in a way to be a creator of happiness. 144 GOETHE'S HERMANN & DOROTHEA She does not sentimentalise over sorrow, but straight- way sets herself, as far as in her lies, to chase it away. Being beneficent, she enjoys the sense of power and influence which can be wielded for beneficent ends. And having to deal with a husband whose humours require at times some skilful management, she knows that tact is an auxiliary or a mode of power. Men are wayward and rather irrational creatures, but then they are only men, and it cannot be expected that they should be as intelligent as a woman. Even the Pastor is a little too much given to philosophical re- flections on lightness of temper and the virtues of curiosity, and the new, the useful, and the good, when he ought rather to satisfy her curiosity at once with a budget of news ; the mother must be par- doned for growing a little restive under his discourse. As for the husband, who twenty years ago wooed her amid the ruins of their homes and bore her in his arms over the smouldering ashes of the conflagration, he is dear to her with all the dearness of happy use and wont ; and he is her own to guide and rule, while she wiU never show that she rules ; but her son is wholly her own in even a more delightful way. And, since his happiness is hers, she has no touch of maternal jealousy ; through his joy in Dorothea, a daughter after her heart, she will double her own joy. It is true that she had already in imagination chosen for his bride the rich neighbour's daughter, Minchen : " Minchen fiirwahr ist gut und war dir immer gewogen " ; but marriages are made in heaven, and it seems that Minchen is not the bride-elect ; therefore Dorothea, though she may bring only a bundle for her dowry, shall be beloved by the mother almost as her own child. We must take our children as heaven sends them ; she wiU not have her Hermann rated for being K 145 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN what God made him ; he has his own gift, and must use it in his own way ; he will prove a model to burgher and countryman, and will not be the last or least in the civic council. And so she departs to seek the good son and comfort his troubled heart. Never was there more entire sympathy between mother and son. At first Hermann veils his heart, but it is with a veil that is transparent to the loving maternal eyes. What is all this talk about soldiering and drum and trumpet ? Such is not Hermann's true and instinctive form of patriotism ; he is a brave and noble youth, but his vocation is one of tranquil toil and domestic duty. And presently, through her clear divination and womanly courage in sym- pathy, the veil is wholly dropped and Hermann's naive confession comes forth — ich entbehre der Gattin. It only remains to test a little further the virtues of promptitude and courage ; leading Her- mann by the hand, she will confront his father and with the utmost directness wiU make the situation clear. And happily, just at the moment before the pair enter, the Pastor has been dilating, in words which carry weight however they may appear to be disregarded, on the excellence of such a temper as that of Hermann, calm in its energy, steadfast, bent on acquiring and maintaining what is useful, and un- vexed by misleading ambitions. The fumes of the eighty-three have evaporated from the Host's brains, and who can question the result? Under Hermann's quietude and reserve there He much sensitiveness, much moral deHcacy, and a capacity for genuine passion. It is remarkable that Goethe has succeeded in making us feel at once the solidity of Hermann's character and its natural refine- ment. This youth is no Werther, incapable of con- 146 GOETHE'S HERMANN & DOROTHEA tending effectively with morbid emotion which dis- turbs the intellect and saps the power of the wiU. He has attached himself from childhood to what is useful ; he is eminently healthful of heart, and, when love takes possession of him, love itself, overmastering in its strength, brings him strength, and is indeed a part of the highest sanity. In the perfect understand- ing which exists between mother and son we find evidence of Hermann's freedom from the dulness and egoism that are not uncommon with his sex and age. As a schoolboy he was sensitive for his father's honour, and those graceless comrades who mocked at the host's efflorescence of Sunday costume soon found that there was something dangerous in the quiet son, who rarely resented any provocation directed against himself alone. When his father has reproached him unjustly and pronounced in anticipa- tion a sentence against the maiden of his choice, Hermann utters no indignant word, but endures the wound and gently withdraws to unburden his heart in solitude. He is not insensible to the good father's infirmities, but never have his lips opened on this theme to anyone ; and when as a hint of guidance to Dorothea he must needs refer to the host's regard for external demonstrations of respect and affection he does so with the finest delicacy ; and that he ex- presses even so much is an indication of his absolute trust in Dorothea, and of the perfect community of feeling already established between them. Hermann hitherto has been the reverse of lethargic ; he has diligently attended to the labours of the farm ; but half his nature has lain dormant. There was some- thing a little fatuous in his dutiful efforts to cultivate the airs and graces expected by the young ladies of the great house in the market-place ; and to poor Hermann-Tamino, when, in an agony of shame, he 147 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN laid aside his superfine coat and pulled his hair out of curl, the fatuousness was apparent. But now his total self gives authority to a wise passion ; his whole nature is aroused and all its powers are consentaneous. As Hermann, on his return from the errand of mercy, enters the room, the Pastor observes that he is an altered man ; a new animation has taken possession of him ; he, who had been sUent or reserved, now can wax eloquent ; he must needs step forth to rebuke the Apothecary for his self-regarding celibate views. And when a little later, under the great pear tree, Hermann pours forth his grief, and announces his patriotic resolve to fight and to die for his country, it is not mere vapouring or the enthusiasm of a dream. The passion of his heart, foiled in its immediate aims, bears him onward to new and generous designs. When once again that passion concentrates itself on Dorothea and the substantial joys of home, it con- tains within it a better patriotism, founded on a love first for what is near and real, and then for the mother country which presides over and preserves aU the blessedness of the hearth and home. Hermann, with his delicacy of feeling, is no confident lover, assured that the son of the well-to-do host must carry all before him ; he has the good sense to trust much to the discretion of his friends ; he is perfectly assured that they can make no discovery about Dorothea which will not enhance her honour ; but, for his own part, he is subject to all a lover's vicissitude of hopes and fears. Whatever she may say cannot btit be good and reasonable : — " Was sie sagt, das ist gut, es ist verniinftig, das weiss ich "-^ but the ring upon the maiden's finger fiUs him with forebodings ; one so beautiful must surely have been wooed — perhaps won — already ; and Hermann 148 GOETHE'S HERMANN & DOROTHEA almost to the last fears to put his fate to the touch, " to gain or lose it aU." Yet Hermann's love is that of a heart strong and sane, and it is fixed upon one who is as strong of heart as he, and as good as strong — " so gut wie stark." While he as yet is but half developed, and retains much of the reserve and shy sensitiveness of youth, she has already come into complete possession of her adult powers. Her perceptions are always clear, her judgment always unerroneous, her will always at command and prompt for right action. At the centre of her being is the desire for beneficent service to others ; but she is not careless of her own welfare, or reckless of her future, or insensible of her own rights. In defence of the weak against the out- rage of the oppressor she can flame forth with a righteous rage like that of Spenser's Britomart. But she can show her strength as tenderness when aiding the feeble mother with the new-born babe ; and as she turns to depart from the band of fugitives in company with Hermann the cry of children is heard, and they cling to her skirts as to those of a second mother. With wise foresight she inquires of Her- mann how she may win the esteem and regard of the master and mistress of the Golden Lion ; and, having been satisfied by his answers, she can inwardly indulge a touch of dawning love and at the same time an outward touch of playfulness in the question : " Aber wer sagt mir nunmehr : wie soil ich dir selber begegnen, Dir, dem einzigen Sohn und kiinftig meinem Gebieter ? " For Dorothea, if she has none of the modish, un- generous wit of the young ladies of the great house in the market-place, has a lambent brightness of her own, which is part of her joy in life. We remember her less, however, by any words than by her deeds ; 149 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN by what she does and by what she shows herself to be in the unconscious nobihty of her attitude, and in every gracious turn both of mind and of person. We think of her, staff in hand, guiding, urging, restrain- ing the great oxen which draw the waggon where the pale mother and the infant rest. We think of her as the armed champion of chastity, an Athene addressed to combat. We think of her under the apple tree, pre- paring little garments for a child. We think of her, still bent on service to others, at the fountain, bearing the vessels for water in the right hand and the left. We think of her as she sank, in that stumble of good omen, on her lover's shoulder, and, with no awkward- ness or embarrassment, at once turned off the signi- ficance of the incident and concealed the pain of her wrenched ankle with a jest and a smile. Goethe during his Italian journey and his residence at Rome had aroused and calmed his sense of beauty by the contemplation of classical sculpture. No marble goddess of the Roman galleries has more of dignity than Dorothea, who yet is of warm and breathing humanity, of flesh, not marble, and who withal, in heart and soul, is true German. The circumstances of the time have made her a wanderer, but such upheaval is alien to her nature ; she is made to build upon sure foundations the honour and the happiness of the Ger- man home. She will not spend herself in aspirations towards the unattainable ; but whatever can be at- tained by dutiful ways, by loyalty, fidelity, steadfast- ness, disinterested service, will be in the possession of those who are dear to her. The unbounded trust which Hermann reposes in her has no extravagance in its kind or its degree ; assuredly all will be fulfilled. Other poems tell us of the nobility that may exist in suffering ; it is well to read a poem which makes us feel the nobility that lives in happiness. 150 COWPER AND WILLIAM HAYLEY (From Unpublished Sources) William Hayley, the warm-hearted friend and the biographer of Cowper, prepared for posthumous publication two manuscripts, each of considerable length, relating to incidents in the life of the poet which were not fully told in his biography. These, which are now in my possession, have never appeared in print, nor in the extended form in which Hayley left them would they perhaps be entitled to publica- tion. One of them teUs in detail the efforts of Hayley, at length crowned with success, to obtain a pension for Cowper. The other and the more curious is entitled. The Second Memorial of Hayley' s endeavours to serve his friend Cowper, containing a minute account of Devices employed to restore his dejected spirits. The first is dated 1794 ; the second was written in 1809, after Cowper's death, and after the appearance of the Life of Cowper. Fragments of the story which Hayley tells are known ; it is known that through his exertions several persons of eminence addressed letters to the dejected poet, which, it was hoped, might bring him cheer ; but why it was an urgent matter with Hayley to obtain such letters as these has — so far as I am aware — never been told. Fragments of a well-meant plot, con- ceived in the service of Cowper, have come to light ; but the pivot of the plot has not, if I am right, been ever exhibited, nor has it been shown in what degree Lady Hesketh and Cowper's young kinsman Johnson ESSAYS--MODEIIN & ELIZABETHAN (" Johnny of Norfolk ") were amiable accomplices in the plot. The Second Memorial is addressed to Johnson, several of whose letters, as well as letters of Lady Hesketh and of others, are given in transcriptions. The starting-point of Hayley's well-meant efforts was a mournful communication — thitherto, I believe, unpublished — bearing the post-mark of Dereham, but having no signature, which he received at Eartham on 20th June 1797. The contents of the letter and the hand-writing told clearly enough from whom it came ; the same fixed wretchedness is ex- pressed in it which appears in the unsigned letter, written a month previously, to Lady Hesketh, and printed by Southey. " Ignorant of everything but my own instant and impending misery," wrote Cowper to Hayley, " I know neither what I do, when I write, nor can do otherwise than write, because I am bidden to do so. Perfect Despair, the most per- fect that ever possess'd any mind, has had possession of mine, you know how long, and, knowing that, will not need to be told who writes." The intimation in this letter that Cowper had been " bidden " to write, whether through some compeUing force of his own dark mind or through some supernatural in- junction, suggested to Hayley that the supernatural might be used as a device to Hft Cowper out of his melancholy. His response ran as follows : " Eabtham, 24M yuKe 1797. " My very dear dejected Friend, — ^The few lines in your hand, so often welcome to me, and now so long wished for, affected me thro' my heart and soul, both with joy and grief — ^joy that you are again able to write to me, and grief that you write under the op- pression of melancholy. COWPER AND WILLIAM HAYLEY "My keen sensations in perusing these heart- piercing lines have been a painful prelude to the fol- lowing ecstatic Vision : I beheld the throne of God, Whose splendour, though in excess, did not strike me blind, but left me power to discern, on the steps of it, two kneehng angelic forms. A kind seraph seemed to whisper to me that these heavenly petitioners were your lovely mother, and my own ; both engaged in fervent supplications for your restoration to mental serenity and comfort. I sprang eagerly forward to inquire your destiny of your mother. Turning towards me with a look of seraphic benignity, she smiled upon me and said : ' Warmest of earthly friends ! moderate the anxiety of thy zeal, lest it distract thy dechning faculties, and know, as a reward for thy kindness, that my son shall be restored to him- self and to friendship. But the All-merciful and Almighty ordains that his restoration shall be gradual, and that his peace with Heaven shall be preceded by the following extraordinary circumstances of signal honour on earth. He shall receive letters from Members of Parliament, from Judges, and from Bishops to thank him for the service he has rendered to the Christian world by his devotional poetry. These shall be followed by a letter from the Prime Minister to the same effect ; and this by thanks ex- pressed to him on the same account in the hand of the King himself. Tell him, when these events take place he may confide in his celestial emancipation from despair, granted to the prayer of his mother ; and he may rest satisfied with this assurance from her, that his peace is perfectly made with Heaven. Hasten to impart these blessed tidings to your favour- ite friend,' said the maternal spirit ; ' and let your thanksgiving to God be an increase of reciprocal kind- ness to each other ! ' 153 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN " I obey the Vision, my dear Cowper, with a degree of trembhng fear that it may be only the fruitless offspring of my agitated fancy. But if any part of the prophecy shall soon be accomplished, a faint ray of hope will then be turned into strong, luminous, and delightful conviction in my heart, and I trust in yours, my dear delivered sufferer, as completely as in that of your most anxious and affectionate friend, "W. H. "Postscript. — If any of the incidents speedily take place, which your angelic mother announced to me in this Vision as certain signs of your recovery, I conjure you in her name, my dear Cowper, to com- municate them to me with all the kind despatch that is due to the tender anxiety of sympathetic affection ! Heaven grant that I may hear from you again very soon ! Adieu ! " Something of comedy mingles with graver matter in the good Hayley's sincere distress and his odd flights of imagination. At the throne of God per- haps members of the British House of Commons, perhaps even judges, ermined and bewigged, perhaps — if one may be so bold as to conjecture — even Anglican bishops, shovel-hatted and aproned, are not set mighty store by as such. As for the Prime Minister and the excellent George IH., they, at least on earth, were exalted persons, and difficult of access. The sanguine Hermit of Eartham — Hayley often signed his letters as " Hermit " — never got within hail of prime minister or king for his purpose of raising the poet's dejected spirits, and thus he is re- sponsible for placing the sainted spirit of Cowper's mother in the list of prophetesses who prophesy " a false vision and a thing of nought." 154 COWPER AND WILLIAM HAYLEY If Hayley's fancy was somewhat clumsy his heart was generous. With extreme anxiety he waited to learn what impression his letter had produced. On 1 2th July, Johnny of Norfolk, who was not the most regular of correspondents, wrote to assure him that the perusal of the " marvellous Vision " by Cowper him- self, and, ten days later, his listening to the letter read aloud, had a much better effect than could with any confidence have been anticipated. He listened, indeed, in silence ; but some movement of repug- nance or revolt would not have been surprising. " He never looked better in his life," writes Johnson, " as to healthy complexion than he does now " ; but perhaps this was less owing to the Vision than to Johnson's own prescriptions — " half a pint of ass's milk in a morning, an hour and a half before rising, and the yolk of an egg beat up in a glass of port wine at twelve o'clock." Hayley's letter he had forwarded by the hand of an acquaintance to Lady Hesketh at Clifton. He ended by entreating Hayley to persuade some one or more who answered the description of the Vision to write to Cowper, from which confirmation of the heavenly announcements he expected the happiest results. Lady Hesketh at first feared that " dear warm- hearted Hayley's wonderful letter " might only have " sunk the dear soul lower, and made him think it an insult upon his distress. ... I well remember," she adds, " how angry any marks of kindness used to make him formerly." So she writes on 15th July to Johnson ; but a fortnight later, in writing to Hayley himself, she has nothing but praise for the " charming Vision," for the " friendly heart which inspired the Idea, and the lively Genius that executed it." She only feared that it would prove impossible to get any ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN part of the prophecy fulfilled, and that should Cowper find none of the promised letters arrive, he might drop lower down in " that cruel gulph of Despair in which he has been so long and so deeply involved." With much feeling she refers to the melancholy letter which she had received from Cowper in May ; very warmly she commends Cowper's young kinsman for his unwearied devotion ; should Johnson be incapa- citated for the service, she would herself, if suffi- ciently recovered from the illness which had brought her now as a convalescent from Clifton to Chelten- ham, " take the charge of this lost creature " ; but what could she do at present with her almost total loss"of voice ? Hayley, in his reply, is grateful for " the friendly spirit of tender and indulgent enthusiasm " with which Lady Hesketh entered into his purpose and his hope. He evidently wishes it to be thought that the Vision was not wholly a pious fraud, and he ex- plains to some extent his plans for procuring the ful- filment of the " maternal spirit's " prophecy : " The Vision arose," he writes (6th August), " from my very acute sense of our dear friend's suffer- ings and my intense desire to relieve them. After reading his most affecting billet of Despair, I fell into deep meditation upon it ; and, while my eyes were covered by my hand, I seemed to behold something very Hke the Vision I described. The images ap- peared so forcible to my own fancy that I immediately resolved to make a bold, affectionate attempt to render them instrumental, if possible (with the bless- ing of God and good angels), to the restoration of our invaluable friend. I accordingly settled in my own thoughts different projects for producing the series of events announced in the Vision before I ventured to send him the letter, which you so kindly and is6 COWPER AND WILLIAM HAYLEY partially commend. ... I have reason to believe the dear subject of the Vision has, by this time, received letters from Mr. Wilberforce and Lord Kenyon. Steps are taken that other and more im- portant letters may follow these. . . . Your Lady- ship's excellent understanding will show you the pro- priety, I might say the necessity , of keeping the device as secret as -possible to promote its success. On this principle many persons, engaged to write to the dear sufferer, will not know exactly why they are engaged to write to him." Neither the letter of Wilberforce nor that hoped for from Lord Kenyon had in fact been written, but Hayley was apt to take his anticipations for accom- plished facts. Wilberforce was a member of Parlia- ment ; Kenyon — the Chief Justice — ^was a judge ; a bishop was still needed to fulfil the first part, and that least difficult of accomplishment, of the celestial pro- phecy. Five years previously, in June 1792, Hayley on his return from Weston, then full of zeal to pro- cure a pension for Cowper,had breakfasted in London with Lord Thurlow, for whom, in the early days when Thurlow was a law clerk, and the poet spent his hours with his cousins Harriet and Theodora, " giggling and making giggle," Cowper had predicted the lord chancellorship. " You shall provide for me when you are Lord Chancellor," said Cowper ; and Thur- low with a smile assented — " I surely will." At the breakfast, to Hayley's surprise, appeared Lord Kenyon ; but, undaunted by the two great persons, the Hermit gallantly pleaded the cause of his dis- tressed friend and was listened to with favour. He now ventured, with Cowper's barrister acquaintance, Samuel Rose, as an intermediary — " that friendly Httle being " is Lady Hesketh's description of Rose — to apply to the Chief Justice for the desired letter. 1 57 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN Why it was needed, beyond the fact that such a letter might cheer the drooping spirits of Cowper, was not explained. To Kenyon it seemed an em- barrassing task to address in this way a man of literary eminence who was personally unknown to him. The letter accordingly, to Hayley's great mortification, did not arrive. Meanwhile Hayley had fixed upon Watson, Bishop of LlandaflF, as the mark for his next benevo- lent attack, while Lady Hesketh of her own initiative, though acknowledging that Hayley was the prime controller of the " complicated machine," hoped, through her companion at Cheltenham, Mrs. Hol- royd, a sister of Lord Sheffield, to approach Beilby Porteus, " our good Lord of London " — bishop No. 2 — ^with the like intent. Moreover, in a letter to Johnson (27th August) she added some lines, designed to co-operate with Hayley's letter of the Vision, which Johnson might show to Cowper, if it seemed good to him to do so : " I dreamt very lately, my dearest cousin," she wrote, " that I saw you quite well and cheerful — restored by a gracious and merciful God to all your comforts and all your religious privileges, and rejoicing in His mercy and kindness, which, you told me, had been exercised towards you in a very wonderful manner. I own I feel strongly impressed that this will prove true, and that I shall once again be enabled to rejoice in the restored health and spirits of a cousin so truly dear as you have always been to your affectionate friend and cousin, "H. Hesketh." It was reported to her by Johnson that her post- script had been shown and was well received. Lady Hesketh's innocent. " dream " hardly reached the 158 COWPER AND WILLIAM HAYLEY dignity of a pious fraud ; it was a genuine hope translated into dream. She had not quite approved of Hayley's audacity in laying the scene of his Vision at the throne of God, and, if only it could be ascer- tained that Cowper had forgotten the details, she thought that the letter might, to its advantage, be re-copied, with this particular omitted, as a revised and emended Vision. She feared that the audacious Hayley, with aU his generous zeal and aU his learned acquisitions, might stiU be a stranger to " the great truths of Christianity " — a fear which Hayley after- wards ascribed to the suggestions of some unfriendly gossip. Whatever his religious opinions might be, his code of morals, in one particular at least, had partaken, as Southey amiably puts it, of patriarchal liberty. His beloved little sculptor, the pupil of Flaxman — a boy of rare promise — though received by Hayley's " dear irritable Eliza " as her own, was a natural son. Of " those two shining lights of the age," as Lady Hesketh names them, Wilberforce and Lord Kenyon, the former at least was willing to let his beams descend on Cowper. He directed that a copy of his recently published book, A Practical View, should be sent to Dereham — it proved to be a book of amazing popu- larity — and he accompanied the volume with a letter (9th August) conceived in the happiest spirit. Six weeks later came a letter from the Bishop of London, which Lady Hesketh justly described as a " charming performance." Porteus was himself a poet ; at least his verses on Death had won, nearly forty years pre- viously, the Seatonian prize. In his letter he grace- fully applies to Cowper himself, with " 'Twere altered to " 'Twas," the lines from Table Talk : " 'Twere new indeed to see a bard all fire. Touched with a coal from heaven, assume the lyre," 159 )> ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN and the four verses that immediately follow. Lady Hesketh had playfully reproached the faithful John- son with his somewhat spasmodic efforts at corres- pondence. Johnny needed a flapper from the island of Laputa ; when he did write he was always in a hurry. He was ordered to choose the calmest and quietest hour he could pick out of the twenty-four, and then he should remember not to " set out with letters a foot long at least, and literally with only three words in a line or four at most." But now that a letter from that " wonderful mortal," Mr. Wilber- force, had arrived, and a letter from our good Lord of London, Johnny of Norfolk copied both these documents for Hayley's " infinite gratification," and added a narrative of his own : " On Thursday (28th September) came a letter from the Bishop of London, and yesterday morning I found the first favourable opportunity of reading it to our beloved Cowper. His remarks were these : ' Never was such a letter written, never was such a letter read to a man so overwhelmed with despair as I am. It was written in derision ; I know, and I am sure of it.' ' Oh, no ! no ! no ! my cousin ! say not so of the good Beilby, Bishop of London ! ' 'I should say so,' he replied, ' of an Archangel, were it possible for an Archangel to send me such a letter in such circumstances.' This only has passed hitherto, but I suspect that he was gratified notwithstanding, upon the whole. He heard me with the silence of death, and, except at one passage in this amiable Bishop's letter, never opened his lips." A word of Porteus — " That Love [of God] you must possess surely in as full extent as any human being ever did " — ^had drawn from Cowper's Hps the exclamation, " Not an atom of it ! " Johnson believed that the sufferer's mind was 160 COWPER AND WILLIAM HAYLEY occupied very frequently about the letters, having come to him, " though I am certain," he adds, " he does not suspect why they have come so nearly to- gether." He supposed that Cowper did not con- nect them in his mind with Hayley's Vision, and he repented a thousand times that he had sent away Hayley's letter to Lady Hesketh. He begged that it might be returned immediately, and resolved to place it, with the letters of Wilberforce and Porteus, on Cowper's desk, where he knew that Cowper would notice it and read it when he was alone. Johnson himself would assume an air of having entirely for- gotten the Vision, lest Cowper should in any way " suspect the incomparable contrivance." To this design Lady Hesketh was strongly op- posed. " I think and have always thought it highly necessary," she writes with emphatic underhnings to Johnson (7th November), " that on the arrival of every letter which comes to corroborate the truth of that wonderful Vision you should express (though not violently or in such a way as to alarm him) your surprise and satisfaction at this happy coincidence of circumstances. ... I could wish you, my dear Johnny, to sift our poor cousin a little, and endeavour to find out what he thinks of the letters he has re- ceived, which, you may say, afford to you a full proof that his dear Mother's prophecy is very near its completion." Lady Hesketh greatly desired that letter might follow letter, in order that Cowper's mind might be thoroughly roused and kept in motion with an advancing assurance of hope. Another letter had, in fact, arrived. Hayley, in September, had expressed his expectation that con- siderable aid would be derived from " episcopal coadjutors." Lady Hesketh, herself " an angelic coadjutor," had proved her " instantaneous and L 161 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN happy influence over the Lights of our Church " by securing the co-operation of that " angel on earth," Beilby Porteus. A disappointment followed. Dr. Beadon, Bishop of Gloucester, had married a relation of Hayley, Miss Rachel Gooch, " for whom, in her childhood," Hayley writes, " I had felt such affection that during my residence at Cambridge I painted a minute resemblance of the interesting child and had it set in a ring." On Dr. Beadon's marriage the poet had addressed a few friendly verses to the bride and bridegroom ; but not many of his friends escaped some kindly effusion of occasional verse. To his surprise and indignation a very ungracious refusal to write to Cowper came to Eartham, not from the bishop direct, but through his father-in-law. Dr. Gooch, whereupon the manuscript before me be- comes illegible with its vigorous canceUings which perhaps conceal emphatic words. Do the blurrings and blottings bear witness to one of Hayley's " Tri- umphs " — or failures — " of Temper "? More than compensating satisfaction came from a highly-distinguished man, Richard Watson, Bishop of Llandaff, the apologist for the Bible. Lady Hesketh, with a woman's shrewdness, had expected little from Dr. Beadon. " Is he clever? " she asks Hayley, " and will he understand the nature of your request? " But " in regard to the Bishop of Llandaff . . . there can be no doubts of him." The result in each instance agreed with Lady Hesketh's anticipa- tions. Watson was now settled at Calgarth Park, Kendal, but he did not fail to visit his diocese three times each year. He was occupied in improving an estate for the benefit of his family, nor did he regard it as his fault that some of the best years of his life had been thus employed. If he had " commenced an agriculturist," he said, " it was because he desired to 162 COWPER AND WILLIAM HAYLEY secure a moderate competence for eight children," and experience had brought him to Lord Bacon's opinion that to cultivate our Mother Earth is the most honourable mode of improving our fortunes. Hayley, in writing to Watson, mentions the fact that Lord Thurlow had visited the Sussex coast in the autumn of 1797. The summer had been for Hayley a time of anxiety, not only on Cowper's account, but because the dear " juvenile sculptor," his son, had suffered in health from a cold caught from masses of wet clay used in modelling, and all medicines had failed to give him relief. His own favourite panacea, " the salutary sea," was tried with a better result. " We came dripping from it together this morning," he tells Lady Hesketh (6th September), " and saw Lord Thurlow in our way, who has been prevented by the unseasonable rains from passing a morning with us, which he promises to do very soon, and he has, with great good-nature, allowed the young sculptor to prepare a lump of the finest clay to model his grand visage." This, he tells the Bishop of Llandaff, would form " a good prelude for the awful project of modelling your countenance," whenever " the aspiring little artist " could pay his respects at Calgarth Park. From which flattering introduction Hayley passes to his petition for a letter to be addressed to Cowper. The bishop replied in the most genial manner ; he would, of course, follow the example of Lord Thurlow, a man of whom he thought highly, " tho' he is not so good a Whig as he might be ; " he would sit for the young artist ; and as to Cowper, he had obeyed Hayley's commands and dispatched a letter " by this post " (i8th October). It was a manly and generous letter, written as if through an impulse of spontaneous gratitude arising from a perusal — not for the first time — of Cowper's 163 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN poems ; it closed with an invitation to the Lakes, and an offer of the hospitality of Calgarth Park. How Watson's communication was received is told at length in a letter of Johnson to Hayley : " At the very moment of this letter's arrival and delivery into my hands (for the dear soul would not touch a letter himself on any account) we were sitting by the study fire, intent upon that admirable little book of the learned bishop, An Apology for Christi- anity. ' Dear me ! ' said I, ' here is a letter from the author himself.' You may be sure our poor friend was rather startled at the wonderful coincidence ; and so in truth was I, and inwardly thankful to that kind Providence, whose finger I discern so plainly. The dear soul raised his eyes for a moment, but seemed so struck by the suddenness of the affair that I could not profitably read the letter then. I there- fore laid it upon his desk, and went on with our book. Before night, however, I broke the seal, and com- municated the contents to him. He said nothing while I read ; nor yet when I ceased to read ; and the matter was left to work upon his mind." Following Lady Hesketh's advice, Johnson took the first prudent opportunity of connecting the letter from Bishop Watson with Hayley's " inimitable Vision " : " One day, after dinner, as we were aU using the finger-glasses, ' Miss Perowne,' said I (Miss Perowne was lady-housekeeper to Johnson), ' don't you re- collect something about a letter's coming to Mr. Cowper in the summer from Mr. Hayley, containing a wonderful Vision which he had lately had? ' ' I certainly do remember it ' (said she), ' and have often thought of it since.' ' Sam ' (said I), * take away the water-glasses and set the wine upon the table.' This, as I intended, turned the subject ; but in the evening I started up in a great hurry, just as we were 164 COWPER AND WILLIAM HAYLEY sitting down to tea : ' By-the-bye, I will go and look for Mr. Hayley's letter.' Mr. Cowper immediately called out, ' No, pray don't.' Johnny : ' Because it strikes me there is a kind of accomplishment of what is predicted.' Mr. C. : ' Well ! be it so ! I know there is, and I knew there would be ; and I knew what it meant.' These are the very words that passed, for I slipped out of the room and wrote them down with a pencil on the back of a letter. Since that time I have never mentioned the subject ; but the next letter that comes I will renew the attack. It is some con- solation to us in the meantime to know that he has not forgotten the Vision. And now, my dear Sir, let me say that Mr. Cowper is in bodily health much as he was when I wrote last, and much as he was in spirits. But jump for joy when I tell you that he resumed his Homer on the loth of October, and has continued to revise it, and charmingly to correct without missing one day ever since. We go on rapidly, a Book in a week, and sometimes more ; now in the 12th lUad. Our evenings have been long de- voted to Gibbon's marvellous work. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. We have delightfully travelled with him to the end of the chapter which he has given entirely to Justinian's laws ; and our poor dear friend interrupts me frequently to remark any striking passage as we go along." StUl no letter had arrived from Lord Kenyon. It was beheved by Hayley that a letter from him, as coming from a stranger, would be more gratifying to Cowper than one from Thurlow, with whom the poet was personally acquainted. Thurlow's interest with the Lord Chief Justice was secured by the inde- fatigable Hayley. It is stated in Mr. Thomas Wright's biography of Cowper that Lord Kenyon wrote to Cowper. This is perhaps an error. Cer.- 165 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN tainly, as late as 15th March 1798, Lady Hesketh ex- pressed to Hayley some indignation occasioned by his silence : " Lord Kenyon has never written at all, nor will you, I hope, dear Sir, apply to him any more. You have done your part sufficiently as regards this luminary of the law ; and could the pleadings of friendship have prevailed you would long since have gained your cause ; as it is, I hope you will plant your batteries against hearts more penetrable than that of the learned Lord in question." The diligence of Southey obtained for him two letters addressed by Thurlow to the Chief Justice, which Southey supposed to reveal the whole of the benevolent plot for Cowper's restoration to hope and happiness. In fact they only show that Hayley was the chief conspirator. Lord Thurlow apolo- getically condenses in his opening sentence the whole situation from his own point of view : " I have been pressed by one mad poet to ask of you, for another, a favour, which savours of the malady of both." The experiment, Thurlow thought, was at least harmless and charitable. Lord Kenyon apparently still de- murred, and Thurlow was good enough to draw up for his guidance an outline of the sort of letter which he supposed to be required, or, as Southey puts it, a form of testimonial which was to accredit a man to himself. No word of Thurlow's indicates any ac- quaintance with Hayley's Vision, nor was this flight of fancy known to Southey. The " mad poet," the Hermit of Eartham, had probably sense enough to be aware that Thurlow was not the man to become a partner in the task of corroborating Visions re- vealed at the throne of God. Hayley flattered himself with the thought that his efforts on behalf of Cowper had not been useless. He tried to believe that the resumption of work on 166 COWPER AND WILLIAM HAYLEY Homer was in some degree due to the encouragement which the Vision and the letters that followed it may- have brought to the afflicted translator. In truth Cowper's state of mind while engaged in revising his Homer presents a curious problem in mental pathology. His physical health during the year 1797 was but little affected by his malady ; he rode out with Johnson, or walked out, every day ; his daily half-bottle of wine had been increased to a bottle with excellent results ; his cheeks had a certain ruddiness of hue. Nor was he incapable of intellectual exertion. He studied details in his own work with close attention. " What do you think of this? " Johnson writes to Hayley on 5th December, " our blessed Bard now said to me in the gentlest of all possible voices, ' Is there such a word as midmost ? ' Johnson's Dictionary was in my hand in a moment, and no sooner did I mention Dryden and Pope as having used the very word than he was seated and scratching upon the paper in an instant." Johnson's description in the same letter of how the work went on may be added to somewhat similar records which are already in print : " I know you will excuse a hasty line, because a hasty line is all that I can steal from the importunate demands of Homer, who, interleaved and like a mountain, lies before me on the writing-desk, touching my very chin. I am preparing a transcript fairly and for the press of the last alterations of our beloved Cowper : incorporat- ing also certain former variations and notes, which proceeded from his admirable pen before he left Weston, and with which I imagine you acquainted, as I frequently find your handwriting among them. The dear translator is as well as usual, and more than commonly intent upon rendering with iire and faiih- fulness a fiery line in the thirteenth Book of the Iliad." 167 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN Yet while Cowper could thus for a time keep his mind above his misery, the misery lay below, and to make real escape from it was impossible. He was persecuted by both audible and visual illusions. On the 15th of November 1797, Johnson began to enter in a diary, which was continued during a great part of the next year, the words in which Cowper told, or shadowed forth, his distracted fancies. They are almost too pitiable to put on record, yet taken in connection with the fact that he was revising his Homer at the rate of a book each week, they make us feel as if he had, so to speak, a double mind, and. that the sane mind and the insane stood independent of each other and apart. The notices of four days, copied by Hayley, probably represent what went on for weeks and months : " November 1 5 — \Vhile Mr. Cowper was dressing this morning, and just as the Church clock struck nine, he heard the following words, which seemed to come out of the wall behind his bedstead : ' You shall hear that clock strike many months, in that room, upon that bed.' In the course of the night he had heard several voices of the terrifying sort, but remembered only one, which said, ' Bring him out ! bring him out ! ' 19th November — He heard these words, ' You are welcome to all sorts of misery.' 28th November — Mr. Cowper told me, at two diflFerent times in the course of the day, that he had these two notices upon his bed. First he had these words : — ' When Mr. Johnson is gone they will pelt you with stones.' This he told me before dinner ; and towards even- ing he said — ' I saw a man come to my bedside last night and tear my neck-cloth off ; and it will be so, I know it will.' 2nd December — He told me at breakfast he heard this : 168 COWPER AND WILLIAM HA YLEY " ' Sad-win ! I leave you with regret, But you must go to gaol for debt.' " ' Do you know the meaning of Sad-win, my cousin? ' (said I). 'Yes, I do, the Winner of Sorrow.'" Enotigh of these painful memoranda ! Happily no Samuel Teedon was at Dereham to interpret the voices. It is clear, too, that Haylfey's device was of small avail ; for one in Cowper's state an experimeiit in the thyroid treatment would have been more likely to bring help than a score of " inimitable Visions." The death of Mrs. Hayley, the Hermit's " piti- able Eliza," in the late autumn of 1797 — not in 1800 as the Dictionary of National Biography erroneously states — did not cause Hayley to forget his friend. The Hermit was hardly moire a hermit after the event than he had been before it. Hayley and his wife, with kind consideration for their mutual esteem and peace of mind, had lived apart. But the threefold cord which bound together the chief conspirators for Cowper's good seemed for a time to be broken. Johnson, indeed, wrote to Hayley and tried, a little awkwardly, to say " what a owt to 'a said " ; but Lady Hesketh found it difficult to write sympathetically in a case so peculiar, and pre- ferred to be silent. The correspondence was re- opened by Hayley himself taking the initiative, and inviting Lady Hesketh, with her " good coadjutor of Norfolk " and " the dear Cowper," to Eartham or its neighbourhood. To accept the invitation was im- possible, but Lady Hesketh wrote at great length, fuU of hope for the complete restoration of Cowper's health, expressing her desire that he would devote himself rather to original composition than to the task of a translator, and relieving herself of much indignation against the publisher — another of the tribe of Johnson — ^who had announced the appear- 169 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN ance of Cowper's lines On the Receipt of my Mother's Picture, without having obtained permission from either the writer or his friends. Loud also was her complaint against the Treasury, which had neglected to send Cowper his pension. Of twelve quarters due he had received only one, and Lady Hesketh hastily assumed that such neglect was peculiar to Cowper's case. The times bore hardly upon the Treasury, and Cowper was only one of many who suffered. During 1798 Hayley was overwhelmed with real and deep distress caused by the early stages of the long and fatal illness of his beloved son. There is true feeling and, bearing in mind the facts, real pathos in the words which he wrote, on a closing day of January, to Lady Hesketh : " I have limited the hopes and purposes of my remaining life to these two grand objects — to promote the professional pros- perity of my little artist, and to witness and contri- bute to the recovery of my favourite friend to the utmost of my power." Hayley still believed that his plot had effected some good, and that Cowper was progressing towards sanity, happiness and health. No further efforts, however, were made to obtain letters from members of Parliament, " episcopal coadjutors," or " luminaries of the law." This special experiment to raise the unhappy poet's de- jected spirits had come to an end. Lady Hesketh's sense of the Hermit's disinterested zeal on behalf of her cousin found material expression in her gift of " a most elegant standish of cut-glass and silver," gracefullest of ornaments for a poet's table. And never probably in the history of cut-glass did an elegant standish evoke more applause and lyrical enthusiasm on the part of the receiver. There is a passage in the Second Memorial in which Hayley digresses from his immediate narrative and 170 COWPER AND WILLIAM HAYLEY recalls an incident of his visit to Weston in 1792. To extract it will add something to what he, and Southey after him, told of the moment, so dreadful to Cowper, when Mary Unwin was for the second time the victim of a paralytic seizure. His first words to Hayley were, says the Life, " wild in the extreme, and Hayley'a answer would appear little less so, but it was addressed to the predominant fancy of his un- happy friend." The words actually spoken are re- corded in the Memorial : " Returning from her apartment to me, with a countenance of absolute disitraction, he exclaimed, ' There is a wall of separa- tion between me and my God.' I looked fixedly in his face and answered with equal celerity and vehem- ence of expression, ' So there is, my friend, but I can inform you I am the most resolute mortal on earth for pulling down old walls, and by the living God I will not leave a stone st;anding in the wall you speak of.' He examined my features intently for a few moments, and then, taking my hand most cordially, he said, with a sweet appearance of recovered serenity, ' I believe you,' and, as I have said in his Life in mentioning that dreadful alarm, from that moment he rested on my friendship with such mild and cheer- ful confidence that his affectionate spirit regarded me as sent providentially to support him in a season of the severest affliction." When the time came for Hayley to say farewell, and this was not until by his use of medical electricity he had effected a consider- able improvement in Mary Unwin's condition, the parting with Cowper was one of affectionate tender- ness. Cowper dwelt on the great comfort and sup- port which he had derived from Hayley's visit, pressed the hand of his departing guest, and said with his own peculiar sweetness of voice and manner, *' Adieu ! I ne'er shall look upon thy like again." ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN It may be thought, and not unreasonably, that Hayley's visionary devices for Cowper's restoration were the lost labours of a love which was not wise. This certainly cannot be said or thought of his long and unremitting efforts to secure a pension for his friend ; nor should we know how unremitting these efforts were — for Hayley's modesty withheld him from making the facts public either in his Life of Cozvper or in the Memoirs of his own life, prepared for posthumous publication — -were it not that he put them on record in a series of unpublished letters, addressed in terms of the tenderest affection to his son, and written almost immediately after the events which they recount. The alarming illness of Mrs. Unwin during Hayley's visit to Weston in 1792 led him to think anxiously of what Cowper's position might be, supported only by contributions from his relations, if he were deprived of her generous care. Hayley's own finances were shrinking. He thought that some sinecure office might be bestowed upon Cowper by the Government, or some office the duties of which could be performed by a deputy. The temper of the time, however, did not favour his project. Cowper was a Whig ; a gentleman familiar with the Prime Minister had said in public that, though a man of genius, he was " an absolute Jacobin " ; from which accusation, when it was re- ported to him, Hayley warmly defended the gentle poet. On his way to Weston he had spoken of Cowper to Thurlow, then Lord Chancellor ; and the solemn tenderness of Thurlow's voice when he said, " He is a truly good man," lived in his recollection. On his return to London he pleaded with great warmth for Cowper before Thurlow and Kenyon. He even suggested that it might be hinted to the king that to place the afflicted Cowper beyond pos- 172 COWPER AND WILLIAM HAYLEY sible want would be an appropriate act of personal thanksgiving to Heaven for his Majesty's recovery from his own mental malady ; but to attempt this, Thurlow declared, would be an aflFair requiring great delicacy. Though Thurlow's temper was indolent, Hayley believed that his heart was warm. Before the close of June he addressed Thurlow in a letter, made up of verse as well as prose, in which he ex- pressed a hope that his lordship might renew his personal acquaintance with " our dear William of Weston," under Hayley's own roof. He referred to Thurlow's recent retirement from office in flattering terms : " Yes 1 now your hand with decent pride Relinquishes that seal unstained, Which Bacon, law's less upright guide, With many a sordid spot profaned." But Thurlow's retirement had been virtually en- forced ; it left him in no mood of amiability ; and instead of the gracious reply which Hayley had ex- pected, no answer came at all. " Judge of my sur- prise and mortification," he exclaims. At length the indignant Hermit reheved his feelings in a series of stanzas which he dispatched to the good cleric Carwardine with a suggestion that, if he had courage enough, he might repeat them to his patron : " Why, wrapt in clouds no sun pervades, Sullen as Ajax in the shades. Why Thurlow art thou mute. When courtesy, unstained by art, Addresses to thy manly heart. An amicable suit ? " Verses — ^with others that follow — ^which indignation made. Hayley, despairing of the ex- Chancellor, now directed his hopes toward Pitt, the Prime Minister, 173 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN whom he had known as a wonderful boy of fourteen — even a more wonderful boy, he admits, than his own sculptor, Tom — and from whom he had received, at a more recent date, an offer of the Poet-Laureate- ship, vacant by the death of Thomas Warton. On nth December 1792 he wrote to Pitt, stating fully the case of Cowper, and mentioning, among other circumstances, that, in her long protection of the invalid, Mary Unwin had expended ;£i200, " all the ready money she possessed." Mr. Long, of the Treasury, undertook to present the letter in person ; " but after detaining my letter many months," writes Hayley, " with continual protestations that he was forever seeking in vain an opportunity to present it in a favourable season, my unfortunate epistle, which had kept me in an agueish fever of expectation and disappointment, returned unopened and unpre- sented into my hands, in the beginning of June I793-" Thus more than a year had passed since Hayley's attempt upon Thurlow. He could only, as he puts it, practice the military maxim of drawing courage from despair. The letter to Pitt was now dis- patched by post, with some explanatory memoranda, and alas ! with the inevitable verses. " The stars," he writes, " did not appear more propitious to my verse than they had proved to my prose ; neither the one nor the other obtained for me the honour of a reply." Both " the Jupiter " and " the Pluto of politics " — Pitt and Thurlow — seemed to have scorned his rhymes. Hayley's second visit to Weston in October 1793 quickened his zeal. Although Cowper was able to work with him in revising Hayley's Life of Milton, and on his own translation of Homer, it became evident that the translator's mind Tvas " sinking under the influence of incipient in- 174 COWPER AND WILLIAM HAYLEY sanity." Had Thurlow been more active, had Pitt been more generous, Cowper's intellect, Hayley reflected, might have been saved. Wounded as his pride had been by Thurlow's silence, he determined to sacrifice his pride to his friend's service ; he called on " Pluto," die scorner of his verses, and boldly took him — ^in words only — by the throat. " My Lord," said Hayley, " you must point out to me some method by which I may serve our poor Cowper ; what is it possible to do for him ? " To his suggestion of an appointment for Cowper, with a deputy to undertake the work, Thurlow was adverse. " * No ! ' replied the gloomy, yet courteous, Pluto, ' an office would only make him mad ; you must get him a pension.' ' I fear, my Lord, these are bad times for a pension.' ' No ! they are not bad times for it.' ' I rejoice to hear your Lordship say so, but how can I possibly obtain it for our friend ? I had the pleasure of knowing Mr Pitt when a boy, and, though I have not seen him since that time, I have a great inclination to solicit the favour of a private conference with him, then state the case with all the little eloquence I have, and trust to his heart.' ' I am afraid you would not find he has much feeling ; perhaps you had better write to him.' ' To tell you the truth, my Lord, I have written to him on this most interesting subject already, but not success- fully. My letter has not obtained the honour of a reply.' ' Well ! ' said the softened Pluto (a Uttle touched by this oblique reproof to himself), ' I do not pretend to know much of political affairs at present ; perhaps, as you say you have lately seen Lord Spencer, you know more than I do ; but this I can tell you, that if you could get Lord Spencer to signify to the Minister an earnest desire that Mr. Cowper should have a pension he would soon have it.' " 175 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN Gibbon's influence with Lord Spencer was con- siderable ; he was a friend of Hayley, and was now in London. To Gibbon accordingly he immediately- applied. The great historian sympathised deeply with Hayley, desired to be of service, but for political reasons at that time felt that it would not be proper to request Lord Spencer to solicit any favour from the Prime Minister. He urged that Hayley should himself seek an interview with Pitt, and he assured his friend that, conscious of a disinterested motive, he would speak to the Prime Minister with the same ease and spirit with which he was at the present moment speaking to himself. In great uncertainty as to what was best for Cowper's interests, Hayley turned to Lord Egremont for advice. Lord Egre- mont was not only friendly but eager in his anxiety to be of service. He believed that a letter addressed by Hayley to Lord Spencer as a great patron of literature would give the fairest chance of success ; but Hayley considered that it would be wanting in delicacy, if not in loyalty towards Gibbon, to write to Lord Spencer without his sanction ; and Gibbon still expressing his disapproval of the step, though in the kindest and gentlest way, the design was relinquished. Driven to bay by repeated disappointments Hayley turned upon Pitt. In a short note he fer- vently solicited the grace of a few minutes' con- versation. An immediate answer came, appointing the place, the day and the hour — Downing Street, on Friday, at eleven o'clock. The early hours of that formidable morning Hayley spent with his friend, the painter Romney. Perceiving his agitation, Romney prescribed a glass of port wine, which medicine suc- ceeded only in producing a stupefying headache. As Hayley stepped into the coach, Romney's petted and 176 COWPER AND WILLIAM HAYLEY coxcombical servant, Joseph, who, it was agreed, should attend Hayley, astonished him by choosing not an outer but an inner seat. Hayley, with the mildest of reproofs, explained that, though on other occasions he might welcome Joseph's company, it was not fitting that master and man should arrive as com- panions at Mr. Pitt's door ; Joseph, with " an obliging alacrity," mounted behind, and the Hermit arrived in a fit of laughter at the appointed place in Downing Street. Pitt received his visitor, not with the solemn condescension of the Atlas of the State, but with the endearing gaiety of a friend ; he listened with the kindest attention, and every appearance of sympathy. When Hayley rose to leave, he promised to consider the various possibihties and choose that one which seemed most for Cowper's advantage ; he begged, however, that for the present no com- munication as to the favourable turn the interview had taken should be made to Cowper; "wait a little," he added ; " you are going immediately, you say, into Sussex ; I will see what can be done, and write to you very soon on the subject." Tears came to Hayley's eyes and he kissed the hand of Pitt " in a transport of sensibility." Pitt's promise was made on 29th November 1793. During December Hayley waited daily for the post with eager anxiety, but no letter came. The year closed with disappointment and mortification. The new year opened with the mournful tidings of the death of Gibbon. One dear friend was gone, but one remained whom stiU it might be in Hayley's power to serve. In writing a letter of sympathy and condolence to Lord Spencer, he took the oppor- tunity of urging once again the claims of Cowper, and explained the circumstances which had withheld Gibbon from being himself the advocate of Hayley's M 177 ESSAYS— MODERN & ELIZABETHAN surviving friend. He recited the story of his con- ference with Pitt, and begged liord Spencer to recall to the Prime Minister's mind — if a favourable occa- sion should arise — the promise which had not been fulfilled. The answer of I