BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME 
 FROM THE 
 
 SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND 
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 
 HUciirg tft. Sage 
 
 1S91 
 
 ^./PkA^y... ?/mi 
 
pn 511 oi8 e " Universl,y Llbrar y 
 
 Es ifniffiiiiiiiiiiiii™iiii'' e and eth 'cs / 
 
 3 1924 026 942 023 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 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/cu31924026942023 
 
&.<3y c SK?«\=, '\- 
 
 ///{^ 
 
ESSAYS 
 
 f '■' U[;Y 
 
 IN 
 
 LITERATURE AND ETHICS. 
 
 BY THE LATE EEV. 
 
 WILLIAM ANDEESON Q'CONOE, B.A., 
 
 TRIN. COLL. DUBLIN. 
 
 Sector of SS. Simon and Jude, Manchester. 
 
 EDITED, 
 WITH A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION, 
 
 by , y 
 WILLIAM E.- A. AXON. 
 
 MANCHESTER : 
 
 J. E. COENISH, 
 
 16, ST. ANNE'S SQUARE, AND 33, PICCADILLY. 
 
 1889. 
 
 C6 
 
A- \ Co 5 
 
 57/ 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Browning's "Childe Roland" - 1 
 
 Tennyson's "Palace of Akt" 25 
 
 The Prometheus Vinctus - - - 57 
 
 The Prometheus of 2Eschylus and of Shelley 83 
 
 Hamlet- - - 108 
 
 The Book of Job 137 
 
 Fables - 169 
 
 From Lancashire to Land's End - - 213 
 
In Jttemoriam. 
 
 'Mid rough-hewn stones, a polished shaft he stood ; 
 His slender frame a cultured spirit shrined, 
 Instinct with genius, vivid, thought-refined, 
 
 And consecrated to the highest good. 
 
 Rest in unrest he sought, found peace through strife ; 
 And all the wealth of his fine nature spent 
 To serve his generation ; well content 
 
 If he might help it to a nobler life ! 
 
 We canonize Ambition ; build to Fame 
 
 Proud monuments that Time's attrition brave : 
 What have we for the men whose life-works crave 
 
 An immortality of worth, not name ; 
 
 No blot on their escutcheon ? Pauper dole ! 
 
 God sets them high upon his martyr-roll. 
 
 J. B. Greenwood. 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 The following pages consist of selections from 
 the literary remains of the late Rev. William 
 Anderson O'Conor, and are fairly representative 
 of his intellectual powers whilst not exhaustive 
 of the material placed at the disposal of the 
 editor. Should the present volume be received 
 with favour, there are sufficient uncollected papers 
 to form a second series. The volume owes its 
 inception to the desire on the part of the members 
 of the Manchester Literary Club and other ad- 
 mirers of Mr. O'Conor to have some permanent 
 memorial of his powers as a critic. Most of the 
 essays now republished were in the first instance 
 read before the Club. 
 
 The editor's duties have been confined to the 
 faithful reproduction of the text, and to the 
 verifying, as far as possible, of the quotations. 
 Some of the translations were, however, freshly 
 executed by Mr. O'Conor for the essays in which 
 
vi INTRODUCTION. 
 
 they are found. It remains only to give some 
 brief account of the remarkable man to whose 
 memory this book is dedicated. 
 
 William Anderson O'Connor (for so his name 
 was spelled originally) was a native of Cork, and 
 was born there in 1820. His family came from 
 the county of Roscommon, where they were 
 important for generations. He was educated at 
 Trinity College, Dublin, and took his B.A. 
 degree in 1864. In a letter which appeared in 
 the Manchester Gucvrdian towards the close of 
 1885, Mr. O'Conor, in commenting upon Church 
 matters, wrote : — 
 
 " When the clergy read of all the current taunts and 
 insinuations about their ' pay,' I do not wonder that they 
 turn away in silent and hopeless disgust from the whole 
 subject. That disgust shall be overcome for once. Not 
 one out of ten of us is ' paid ' as the word is commonly 
 understood. If we sought pay we should have gone to 
 some other profession or business. All the early years of 
 my life were given at a large pecuniary cost to the 
 acquisition of knowledge assumed to be necessary for the 
 discharge of a clergyman's office. I have never put the 
 matter to myself as I now put it, but I now do ask, Can 
 it be said that I have been paid for my work as a clergy- 
 man by having received £100 a year for the greater part 
 of my clerical life ? I remember well the countings of 
 the cost with which I entered the Church. It was a 
 giving up of the world, a surrender of its wealth and its 
 prizes, and of the honours that might be won at the Bar 
 
INTEODUCTION. vii 
 
 or in the Army, with the sole understanding that I was 
 to be freed from the anxieties of a secular calling, and 
 maintained out of the Church's endowments, while I 
 strove to do my Master's work. I speak of myself and 
 allude to my motives simply because I am thus able to 
 give a description that applies — I never uttered sincerer 
 words than those I am now uttering — a hundred-fold 
 more fitly to thousands and thousands of clergymen than 
 it does to me. There are multitudes of clergymen to 
 whom taking orders is equivalent to entering a monastery 
 so far as seclusion from the sunny walks of life is con- 
 cerned. No institution can be found that contains so 
 many able and learned men, strong enough to move to the 
 front rank in any worldly profession, and carry off the 
 prizes, as may be found in the Church of England engaged 
 in labours all their lives that might be called obscure and 
 contemptible if they were not undergone in the service 
 of One who washed His disciples' feet, and bade them to 
 do to others what He had done to them. We are not 
 paid or remunerated. We are merely supported out of 
 endowments given to the Church for this very purpose by 
 men who reflected that St. Paul worked with his own 
 hands rather than be dependent on the offerings of those 
 to whom he preached." 
 
 That this was emphatically true of Mr. O'Conor 
 there can be no doubt. 
 
 His first appointment was that of lecturer on 
 Latin at St. Aidan's College, Birkenhead ; but in 
 1853 he was ordained by the Bishop of Chester, 
 and became curate of St. Nicholas's Church, 
 Liverpool, and afterwards of St. Thomas's, Liver- 
 
viii INTRODUCTION. 
 
 pool. In 1855 he was appointed curate of the 
 Church of St. Michael with St. Olave, Chester. 
 He was in sole charge of this parish until 1858, 
 when he became rector of St. Simon and St. 
 Jude's, Granby Row, Manchester. This was his 
 last preferment. On his settlement in Manchester, 
 he soon became known as an eloquent preacher, 
 and his reputation was further increased by the 
 publication of a series of scholarly and earnest 
 writings on theology. " Faith and Works " ap- 
 peared in 1868, " The Truth and the Church " 
 in 1869, " A Commentary on the Epistles to the 
 Romans " in 1 871, " TheEpistle to the Hebrews " in 
 1872, " The Gospel of St. John newly Translated" 
 in 1874, and " A Commentary on Galatians " in 
 1876. After completing his work on the "Fourth 
 Gospel," Mr. O'Conor read Mr. Greg's " Creed of 
 Christendom," and came to the conclusion that 
 "many of the current objections to this Gospel 
 stand in no relation whatever to its true mean- 
 ing." In order that his readers might judge, he 
 obtained permission to print Mr. Greg's vigorous 
 attack as an appendix to his own work. The 
 incident was creditable to both the scholars con- 
 cerned. Another of these volumes is inscribed 
 in these words : " To my tried and true wife, the 
 companion and helper of my studies, for whose 
 
INTRODUCTION. ix 
 
 sake only has any thought of human praise ever 
 mingled with my desire that ' the truth which 
 makes free/ dear to her as to her husband, 
 should prosper on the earth, this volume is 
 dedicated." 
 
 Another department of literary activity now 
 attracted Mr. O'Conor's attention. His "History 
 of the Irish People" was evolved from a mere 
 pamphlet, which appeared in 1876 and con- 
 tained only Book I. For some time the project 
 of its continuation remained in abeyance, but 
 the increasing importance of the Irish Question 
 in the minds of the British public led to the 
 publication in 1882 of his " History of the Irish 
 People " in two volumes, a work impressive not 
 so much for wealth of erudition as for its beauty 
 of style and its keen and searching ethical spirit. 
 The book was dedicated to Professor F. W. New- 
 man, with whom he was on terms of cordial 
 friendship. 
 
 Mr. O'Conor was a man of marked individuality, 
 and at times of morbid temperament. The voice 
 of detraction was not silent, and the lack of 
 deserved recognition undoubtedly inj ured a proud 
 and sensitive spirit. But the' best answer to any 
 detractors on this account of one of the most 
 lovable of men was furnished by his unceasing 
 
x INTRODUCTION.. 
 
 labour and wise counsel in many departments of 
 public life. He was an active Guardian of the 
 Poor for Chorlton. He was twice a candidate for 
 the Manchester School Board — on one occasion 
 suffering defeat, and on the other withdrawing 
 in order to prevent a contest. As a condition of 
 his withdrawal he claimed that an investigation 
 should be made as to the propriety of the steps 
 he had taken, with a view to the vindication of 
 his character. The arbitrators then appointed 
 justified his action. 
 
 He wrote but little in verse, but the quality of 
 the following poem will justify the claim made 
 for him of poetic instinct and expression ; and it 
 will also illustrate those points in his character 
 and career to which allusion has been made. 
 
 CHILDE ROLAND LEAVING THE DARK 
 TOWER. 
 
 Tou knew not your deity's needs, 
 
 Tour gold-tinselled idol of clay, 
 
 If one truth-lover dared to disclaim : 
 
 False thoughts and false words and false deeds, 
 
 The plot and the fear and the shame, 
 
 Coward falsehood avoiding the day, 
 
 Whisp'ring slander, not daring to speak, 
 
 And all the mean shifts of the weak. 
 
 You knew not the signs of the times — 
 That the light can't be hid in the light — 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 That God's voice can outthunder man's crimes, 
 
 And a people's voice echo its might ; 
 
 That a truth boldly spoken upfloats, 
 
 And flames like a beacon on high ; 
 
 That a lie gasped by fifty hired throats 
 
 Is only a fifty-told lie. 
 
 Tou doomed me alive to the grave ; 
 Tou buried me conscious and strong ; 
 And you deemed that the sense of the wrong, 
 And the shouts of the prisoned who rave, 
 And the coffin-lid close o'er my head 
 Would make my free spirit your slave, 
 And rank me, the living, as dead. 
 
 But the heavens descending crushed in, 
 And earth rose to disburthen the sin, 
 And the grave burst asunder, and then 
 You, the keepers, became as dead men. 
 
 If the earth were an infinite cross, 
 And its socket the broad plain of hell ; 
 And the fiends' multitudinous yell 
 Rose in triumph to blazon my loss, 
 And the universe reeled to the shocks 
 As you hammered my limbs to the rocks, 
 And the throb of o'ermastering pain 
 Rent each quivering sinew in twain — 
 No sense of dismay would intrude 
 On my soul's imperturbable mood. 
 I should smile on your night from my morn 
 With scorn — and scorn — and scorn. 
 
 Yes, I know I am God's lowest son — 
 The foolishest, feeblest, and worst ; 
 But your malice has made me as first, 
 
xii INTRODUCTION. 
 
 And your numbers have left me as one. 
 But I stand at the base of God's throne, 
 Disdaining concealment or guile, 
 Pursuing no end of my own, 
 Resigning my life to His smile ; 
 For He takes and He leaves for the Right : 
 And when others are armed for the fight 
 And the seeds which I ripen are sown, 
 If the earth needs my blood, so is best, 
 I will thankfully go to my rest. 
 
 He was equally popular as a speaker and as a 
 preacher, and his racy wit, shrewd common-sense, 
 lofty eloquence, and entirely original methods of 
 thought made him a conspicuous and always 
 welcome figure at many public gatherings. He 
 was an active member of the Manchester Statistical 
 Society, and contributed to its "Transactions." 
 He became a member of the Manchester Literary 
 Club in 1875 3 and at its social gatherings was 
 seen at his best. He was tall and ascetic-looking, 
 with a benevolent and intellectual aspect, and 
 his wonderful flow of wit, humour, paradox, 
 pathos, and high thinking made him a favourite 
 with all. The cordial sympathy of his brother 
 members not only consoled him, but the fellow- 
 ship with other lovers of literature led him to 
 deal with topics he might otherwise have passed 
 by. His contributions to the " Papers " of the 
 Club and to the Manchester Quarterly are marked 
 
INTEODUCTION. xiii 
 
 not only by brilliance of style and paradoxical 
 audacity, but by great critical insight, and by a 
 really remarkable power of dealing with literature 
 in its ethical aspects. In this spirit he touched 
 upon such subjects as "From Lancashire to 
 Land's End," " The Prometheus of iEschylus and 
 Shelley," "The Relation of Religion to Litera- 
 ture," "The Prometheus Vinctus," "Wit and 
 Humour," "The Book of Job," "Tennyson's 
 ' Palace of Art,' " " Hamlet," " Browning's ' Childe 
 Roland to the Dark Tower Came,' " " Remini- 
 scences of Italy," etc. For several years he 
 preached an annual sermon before the members 
 of the Club assembled for the purpose at his 
 church, St. Simon and St. Jude, Granby Row. 
 One paper records his stay in Italy, where 
 for a time he acted as chaplain to one of the 
 Anglican churches in Rome. This change of 
 scene would, it was hoped, have fully restored his 
 strength, which had begun to fail, and on his 
 return to Manchester he appeared to be in full 
 physical and intellectual vigour. He was soon 
 absorbed in work, preaching, lecturing, writing, 
 and aiding every good cause that appealed to 
 him for help. He determined to complete his 
 "History of the Irish People." What had formed 
 the two volumes of the original work was recast, 
 
xiv INTRODUCTION. 
 
 and appeared as the first volume of a more 
 popular issue. The second volume, bringing the 
 history down to a recent date, was issued only a 
 month before his death. When the MS. was 
 ready for the printer a sudden illness compelled 
 him to seek change at Torquay, and there he 
 rapidly recovered. He came back to Manchester, 
 and began to take up again the threads of his 
 former busy, active life ; but a recurrence of 
 dangerous symptoms led to his return to Torquay, 
 where he died on Tuesday night, March 22, 
 1887. The immediate cause of death was a 
 second paralytic stroke. The following letter is 
 from one who was with him to the end, and who 
 had the best means of judging his character : — 
 
 " From the time of the last seizure I had very 
 little hope. He never rallied after that, and the 
 helplessness of his limbs and the loss of brain 
 power steadily increased, till at last my prayer 
 was that God would release him gently, and this 
 was granted, for a more peaceful end could not 
 have been — no struggle: we could scarcely say 
 when he breathed his last. His gentle patience 
 and his loving tender ways during that three 
 months' quiet resting-time at Torquay were 
 beautiful beyond expression. A purer spirit 
 
INTRODUCTION. xv 
 
 never entered into rest, I verily believe. Many- 
 will miss him. For myself, may God give me 
 patience to wait till in His mercy I too may go 
 home." 
 
 It is a just reproach to those in his district 
 having influence and authority in the Church of 
 England that they never officially recognised 
 either the shining abilities or the high personal 
 qualities of Mr. O'Conor, and that whilst men of 
 inferior calibre, morally and mentally, had their 
 due reward, no promotion was accorded to him, 
 nor even such a position as would have enabled 
 him to give his best to the cause of religion. No 
 other communion having a man of his striking 
 and peculiar genius would have been content to 
 hide such a clear-burning and penetrating light 
 under a bushel. It cannot be supposed that Mr. 
 O'Conor himself was ignorant of this ; doubtless 
 he recognised it, although he did not resent it. 
 The peculiarities of his temperament were such 
 as would have disappeared with recognition and 
 responsibility. He was a many-sided man, and. 
 in various sections of the busy community his loss 
 will be deeply felt. It will be felt in the Church 
 of which he was so distinguished an ornament, 
 and wherever efforts are being made to promote 
 
xvi INTRODUCTION. 
 
 the social good. He was, as I have said, one of 
 the most conspicuous figures of the Manchester 
 Literary Club, and whatever neglect — and there 
 was neglect — there may have been in some 
 quarters, there at least he had undivided ad- 
 miration, and amidst the dark clouds that over- 
 hung some portions of his life, he derived con- 
 solation and inspiration from the sympathy that 
 he could always count upon within the walls of 
 the Club. 
 
 His was one of the old prophetic figures, and 
 therefore perhaps somewhat strange and unac- 
 customed to our busy modern life. But the 
 work he did and the counsel he gave was not 
 less useful and not less needed than the words 
 of those who in bygone ages were also voices 
 crying in the wilderness. Very appropriate to 
 his character and life are those lines in which 
 an English poetess spoke of one of our English 
 poets, who was also a prophet in his day : — 
 
 ' Oh, men ! this man in brotherhood your weary paths 
 beguiling, 
 Groaned inly while he taught ye peace, and died while 
 ye were smiling.' 
 
 There was in Mr. O'Conor that union of humour 
 and deep melancholy that marked Cowper, as it 
 has marked others of the prophetic race. It is 
 
INTRODUCTION. xvii 
 
 this rare combination that gives them full 
 sympathy with human joy and human suffering. 
 Through much tribulation they attain to peace. 
 So it was with him. He is now at peace — not in 
 the green West, the land of his forefathers, nor 
 in the dark and stormy North, where he had 
 many sorrows and many consolations, but far 
 away, stilled by the ceaseless music of the waves 
 upon our Southern coast, beneath clear and lofty 
 skies, and bathed by warm sunshine. Those 
 skies are not clearer than was his intellect, nor 
 loftier than his soul, and the sunshine is not 
 warmer than was his loving heart. 
 
ESSAYS m LITERATURE AND ETHICS. 
 
 BEOWNING'S "CHILDE EOLAND." 
 
 If on a first perusal of " Childe Eoland " we are 
 not induced, by a nameless fascination, to read it 
 again, it is not likely, if we be led to do so by 
 ordinary curiosity, that we shall find our per- 
 severance rewarded by any fresh discovery. But 
 if a startled and perplexed inner feeling recog- 
 nises something old and familiar under its strange 
 disguise — if a sympathy is awakened that takes 
 the form of an almost personal recollection — a 
 second and each repeated reading will give in- 
 creased confirmation to that impression, until the 
 belief is reached that there is here a true segment 
 of the orbit of man's mysterious history, the key 
 to romance, the comprehensive parable of all 
 heroism, the poem of poetry itself. The problem 
 or trial of life assumes the aspect in different 
 poetic minds which constitutional taste or in- 
 dividual experience imparts to it. Tennyson — to 
 
 1 
 
2 BROWNING'S "CHILDE ROLAND." 
 
 whom disappointed affection stands as the repre- 
 sentative sorrow — reproduces this idea in all his 
 characteristic works. Finding in Shakspere a 
 precious relic of old heart-religion kindred to his 
 mood, he bowed himself in wrapt meditation 
 before it, until there arose before his vision a 
 vividly detailed picture of martyred love settling 
 into the tranquil ecstasy of despair. The effort 
 of a misanthropic ambition, struggling to conquer 
 a world which it could neither join with in friend- 
 ship nor part from in contempt, furnished Byron 
 with the model according to which almost all his 
 poems are constructed. It is the reality of an 
 incessant strife and an ever-present failure in 
 which we unconsciously participate that renders 
 these fictitious sorrows so interesting to us. Here 
 the explanation of modern poetry is to be sought. 
 The poet is discovering his burthen and his mis- 
 sion. The baffled corsair and the unfortunate 
 lover are types and adumbrations of a universal 
 tragedy. But as the province of the poet becomes 
 more clear his work seems to grow more obscure. 
 The purely imaginative tale stood distinctly in- 
 telligible in its separate and independent perfect- 
 ness. The typical narrative is made to lie so 
 close to nature that it is encompassed in her 
 mysterious shadow. Browning in " Childe Roland," 
 
BROWNING'S " CHILDE ROLAND." 3 
 
 also inspired by a single treasured note from the 
 master of song, instead of suggesting the battle 
 to which humanity is committed, by the frag- 
 mentary parallel of private sorrows, grasps the 
 whole rounded scene at once, and describes it in 
 circumstantial, if loosely-fitting, allegory. In 
 " Paracelsus " he related a sad but not uncommon 
 instance of imperfect aspiration and unsought 
 attainment. The currents of imagination set 
 moving during that composition, and the unused 
 cosmic material that floated on them, seem to 
 have given birth, by a purer because more in- 
 tuitive poetic genesis, to the abstract ballad of 
 Childe Roland. 
 
 There are some men — the most human because 
 the most representative of that which distin- 
 guishes human nature — in whom the sense of 
 what should be repels the contact of what is, 
 and prevents it from impressing its maxims on 
 the heart. The result is that they inevitably are 
 in an attitude of inquiry and .distrust towards 
 all existing customs and beliefs. The race of 
 man, whatever its origin may have been, always 
 comprehended and has always been directed by 
 the instinct of its final destiny. In working out 
 this destiny it has many successive points of 
 departure. Our kind is born anew whenever a 
 
 1—2 
 
4 BROWNING'S "CHILDE ROLAND." 
 
 soul of greater light is born. The being in 
 whom moral perception first took shape was the 
 pioneer of civilization and the archetypal knight- 
 errant of romance. But he, in the primeval life 
 of the cavern or forest, was not half so perplexing 
 or disturbing a prodigy to the unregulated habits 
 of his savage clan as the modern reformer, who 
 would make the crooked straight and the rough 
 ways smooth, appears to the fixed beliefs of his 
 contemporaries. 
 
 Why is there so much suffering on earth ? Is 
 not the question answered by proposing another ? 
 Why is there so much settled formalized wrong- 
 doing ? It may be that the silencing explanation 
 lies in some original taint of evil in our nature ; 
 but so long as there is in us enough of heaven to 
 wonder at injustice and sorrow, and to yearn for 
 sights of contentment and happiness, and so long 
 as the creeds and laws of men are in agreement 
 with the level doctrines of despair, and not with 
 the holier insight, is it not open to us to think 
 that most of the evils we witness are the result 
 of man's lower nature usurping the government 
 that belongs to the higher ? Has not God given 
 food for the body and dignity for the mind in 
 sufficiency for all ? and is it not law-established 
 falsehood and vanity that are limited in supply ? 
 
BROWNING'S "CHILDE ROLAND." 5 
 
 It is likely, it seems to him who broods over these 
 thoughts, that the remedy and the regimen are 
 more in fault than the disease. Error canonized, 
 legalized, deified, is the real source of the ills we 
 suffer. How great and Godlike to drag forth the 
 lurking Hydra, amidst the acclaim of a delivered 
 universe, and exhibit him perishing under the 
 arrows of Day! But there is no exulting hope 
 no anticipated triumph, in the heart of him who, 
 after long and wearying examination, is compelled 
 to see that the Dark Tower, under whose shadow 
 earth is ill at ease, is the boasted master- work oi 
 human wisdom, and that he who ventures to 
 assail it must war against the convictions of his 
 fellow-men. The nature of his study has been a 
 solitary one. Unrelieved by personal joys, his 
 spirit has been dwelling in the dark spots of 
 history. In tracing the records of the past, and 
 searching for the crowned lie that desolates life, 
 he has grown bewildered and disheartened. A 
 thousand doubts have arisen to darken his 
 prospect. The aim of his youth remains, but it 
 is dim and distant. The bright colours that 
 lighted it have died out in the cold gray of the 
 evening of life. The strong purpose still urges 
 him forward, but the glow of early hope is dead, 
 and its song is silenced for ever. The weary 
 
6 BROWNING'S " CHILDE ROLAND." 
 
 heart seeks rest even in failure, and reason cannot 
 condemn the desire. 
 
 I hardly tried now to rebuke the spring 
 My heart made, finding failure in its scope. 
 
 His friends have been long censuring his in- 
 fatuation and prophesying his ruin. They de- 
 scribe him as already lost. They speak of him 
 and his search, in his presence, as if he were 
 dead or absent, or so absolutely past reason and 
 recovery that there is no longer any danger of 
 wounding his sensibilities. The pursuit that is 
 now his whole remaining life is to them a bitter 
 jest. They associate him with all the fanatics 
 who have attempted to make the world better 
 than God meant it to be, instead of making the 
 best of it for themselves. " He is one of the 
 Band," they say ; thus setting the matter beyond 
 remonstrance, by placing him in a class that has 
 ever been a byword of mockery with all men. 
 He is so humbled in spirit that he is only aware 
 of the affection that underlies their cruel taunts. 
 He feels like a dying man whom his relations 
 suppose to be already dead, and accordingly make 
 their arrangements concerning his burial, in his 
 hearing, in such a matter-of-fact way that the 
 doubtful life remaining in him does not assert 
 
BROWNING'S "CHILDE ROLAND." 7 
 
 itself against their assured belief. So he resigns 
 himself to his lot. All who entered on this enter- 
 prise have failed. That he sees. He is prepared 
 to fail. But is he worthy?- "All the doubt was 
 now should I be fit?" When the youthful 
 aspirant enters on the quest, there always 
 mingles in his motives a disdain for those whom 
 he condescends to serve. Paracelsus, in his early 
 aspirations, expresses this stage of experience : 
 
 I seemed to long 
 At once to trample on, yet save mankind, 
 To make some unexampled sacrifice 
 In their behalf, to wring some wondrous good 
 From heaven or earth for them, to perish, winning 
 Eternal weal in the act : as who should dare 
 Pluck out the angry thunder from its cloud, 
 That, all its gathered flame discharged on him, 
 No storm might threaten summer's azure sleep : 
 Yet never to be mixed with men so much 
 As to have part even in my own work, share 
 In my own largess. Once the feat achieved, 
 I would withdraw from their officious praise, 
 "Would gently put aside their profuse thanks. 
 Like some knight traversing a wilderness, 
 Who, on his way, may chance to free a tribe 
 Of desert-people from their dragon-foe ; 
 When all the swarthy race press round to kiss 
 His feet, and choose him for their king, and yield 
 Their poor tents, pitched among the sand-hills, for 
 His realm : and he points, smiling, to his soarf 
 Heavy with riveled gold, his burgonet 
 
8 BROWNING'S "CHILDE ROLAND." 
 
 Gay set with twinkling stones— and to the East, 
 Where these must be displayed ! 
 
 Thus, in the intolerance of inexperienced ambi- 
 tion, the champion of virtue magnifies himself 
 and the redress he means to achieve by vaunting 
 the unworthiness of the recipients of his future 
 bounty. It is a matter between him and man- 
 kind, and the worth of mankind must be con- 
 sumed to feed the flame of his glory. The cause, 
 the good work to be done, is merely the instru- 
 ment that is to carve his greatness and his fame. 
 It takes long years of protracted disappointment 
 to teach him that the chief thing is the good of 
 men, that men must always be viewed in the 
 radiance of his hope, not fixed on himself, but 
 making them seem deserving, thatAe is the instru- 
 ment, and that the one deed required of him is 
 the sacrifice of his glory as well as of himself. 
 As this is the divinest act, the most unearthly 
 dignity, it is only when it is revealed that the 
 question of fitness arises. We never doubt our 
 worthiness for vulgar rewards and prizes, because 
 the motive is adequate to the end. It is the con- 
 trast between the selfish motive and the unselfish 
 end that tears the veil from the past, and sends 
 the questioner away to bury his dead, or to enter 
 with greater light on a new career. Henceforth 
 
BKOWNING'S "CHILDB BOLAND." 9 
 
 we have no fear for Childe Eoland. His soul is 
 wrought to the true heroic strain. It is not 
 enthusiasm nor amhition that guides him, nor the 
 impassioned rapture of the battle. It is that he 
 has grown past the use of lesser things. Whether 
 failure or success await him on earth, his triumph 
 is secure. The end is gained. Truth has a true 
 soldier. 
 
 His purpose fixed on, he turns from his friends to 
 strangers for counsel and encouragement. " Cannot 
 some redress be found, some deliverance wrought ?" 
 he asks one of that cynical tribe, the hangers-on 
 of society, to whom the tragedy of life is laughter 
 — one of those who cannot engage in the work 
 of the world, but are willing to accept its alms, 
 like beggars by the roadside, ready to shower 
 hackneyed blessings on the robber's dole or the 
 widow's mite, but full of hidden spite against the 
 preachers of a manlier calling. " No redress ?" is 
 the tenor of his reply; "of course there is. / The 
 path to victory and fame lies before you. Blow 
 your trumpet and the enchanted castle will fall. 
 Go forward and conquer." The failure of the 
 earnest is sweet to the place-hunter, who thrives 
 on the vices of the community. Full of genuine 
 envy of the pride and luxury of life — a portion of 
 which is contemptuously dealt to him— he yet 
 
10 BROWNING'S "CHILDE ROLAND." 
 
 hates the champion of simple living and high 
 thought. He would not save his patrons from 
 destruction if he could, and yet he rejoices in the 
 foreseen discomfiture of their assailant, because 
 it is the sole justification of his own policy. Every 
 noble effort that ends in disaster is a tribute to 
 his wisdom. He cannot conceal his malignant 
 joy at seeing another lover of men entering the 
 toils, so he speeds him onward into the ominous 
 tract of inquiry, where every step is perilous to 
 the explorer. With a sinking heart the adven- 
 turer follows his instructions though aware of his 
 treachery, and leaves the highway to traverse the 
 region where common consent places the citadel of 
 misrule. As he does so, the air around him 
 seems to flush with a sudden recognition of his 
 act. 
 
 All the day- 
 Had been a dreary one at best, and dim 
 Was settling to its close, yet shot one grim. 
 Red leer to see the plain catch its estray. 
 
 He is made to feel that he has committed him- 
 self by seeing that the indifference of men is 
 changed for a moment into scornful attention. 
 That attention is deliberate desertion, at the very 
 moment when he most stands in need of coun- 
 tenance and help. 
 
BROWNING'S "CHILDE ROLAND." 11 
 
 For mark ! no sooner was I fairly found 
 Pledged to the plain, after a pace or two, 
 Than, pausing to throw backward a last view 
 
 O'er the safe road, 'twas gone ; grey plain all round : 
 
 Nothing but plain to the horizon's bound. 
 I might go on : nought else remained to do. 
 
 He is abandoned by men and the institutions of 
 men. The safe road is the way of the crowd, the 
 path of conventionality. You may outrage every 
 principle of honour and equity without losing the 
 world's friendship. You may violate in spirit or 
 by open transgression any particular law, and, 
 provided you win by so doing whatever the world 
 prizes, you are secure in the world's applause. 
 But undervalue the ends towards which law is 
 directed — revolt against the prevalent fashion — 
 assail the world's respectability — neglect its 
 standards — or speak ill of its gods — and you are 
 lost. You have missed your way past recovery. 
 
 Better to err amid the throng 
 
 Than boldly speak ten thousand wrong. 
 
 The " hateful cripple " is safe by the highway 
 but Childe Eoland has no path to follow. He 
 held law to be unjust, or religion to be corrupted, 
 or the general aim of society to be somehow 
 mistaken. This is leaving the highway, and 
 simply doing this, he is abandoned to an un- 
 
12 BROWNING'S "CHILDE ROLAND." 
 
 bounded trackless plain. When he quitted the 
 road it ceased to exist for him. His departing 
 from it means that his respect and value for it 
 ceased. The change was inward in his feelings as 
 well as outward in the conduct of men towards 
 him. The man who walks by abstract right walks 
 in a solitude. Eight, apart from custom, has 
 beaten no visible path. So when a man wishes 
 to walk higher than others who walk in the safe 
 road he must go alone. Take down the conven- 
 tional signposts of church or party and you create 
 a wilderness, until you obtain followers enough to 
 make a road. And, moreover, in a society whose 
 wealth is balanced by poverty, the moment you 
 ignore the artificial greatness and excellency, the 
 moment you take away or cease to regard the 
 gilding that pleases the eye, the whole dignity 
 and worth of the social fabric vanishes. Take 
 away, or cease to value, the imponderable refine- 
 ment, the shifting hue of fashion, the pride that 
 ape3 worth, and the remainder seems an untold 
 grossness. Eemove out of the account the 
 blossom or the fruit that gathers all the sun's 
 splendour to itself, and you have the heavy 
 crawling stem, the gnarled, ungraceful joints, and 
 the roots that toil in everlasting darkness. Look 
 at the palace and the hovel together, and your 
 
BROWNING'S "CHILDE ROLAND." 15 
 
 eye and thought may find partial relief. There is 
 a balance of some sort, a counterpoise, a deliver- 
 ance answering to a sacrifice. But lose sight of 
 the palace, -which, if you are thinking how to 
 assuage the miseries of the hovel, you cannot help 
 doing, and what is left ! 
 
 I think I never saw 
 Such starved ignoble nature ; nothing throve : 
 For flowers — as well expect a cedar grove ! 
 
 No ! penury, inertness, and grimace, 
 In some strange sort, were the land's portion. " See, 
 Or shut your eyes," said Nature peevishly, 
 " It nothing skills : I cannot help my case : 
 'Tis the Last Judgment's fire mu3t cure this place, 
 Calcine its clods, and set my prisoners free." 
 
 If there pushed any ragged thistle*stalk 
 Above its mates, the head was chopped ; the bents 
 Were jealous else. What made those holes and rents 
 In the dock's harsh swarth leaves, bruised as to baulk 
 All hope of greenness ? 'tis a brute must walk 
 Pashing their life out, with a brute's intents. 
 
 As for the grass, it grew as scant as hair 
 In leprosy ; thin dry blades pricked the mud, 
 Which underneath looked kneaded up with blood. 
 
 One stiff blind horse, his every bone a-stare, 
 
 Stood stupefied, however he came there ; 
 
 Thrust out past service from the devil's stud ! 
 
 Alive ? he might be dead for aught I know, 
 With that red, gaunt, and colloped neck a-strain, 
 
14 BEOWNING'S "CHILDE ROLAND." 
 
 And shut eyes underneath the rusty mane ; 
 Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe ; 
 I never saw a brute I hated so ; 
 
 He must be wicked to deserve such pain. 
 
 This description answers to almost any piece of 
 ground in the suburbs of a large town, where 
 nature has been invaded and art has not yet 
 made progress in her substitutions. The despoiled 
 surface, the enforced barrenness, the bruised 
 weeds, and the lean and starved horse, are 
 familiar objects in such a locality, and are all 
 full of startling symbolism to a temper that 
 desponds over human prospects. There is a 
 stage of transition in the advance of society that 
 resembles this incomplete victory over the region 
 of spontaneous growth. As the poisoned breath 
 of the city kills the surrounding herbage, so does 
 the first contact of civilization distort the recti- 
 tude of nature. When culture begins to move 
 the soil, weeds spring up, or what once seemed 
 flowers now seem to be weeds. The virtues of 
 primitive life and of civilization appear in an un- 
 sightly form in the middle state, when removed 
 from their native setting, and not yet enlarged to 
 heroic proportions. The village Hampden has his 
 proper dignity when withstanding the little tyrant 
 of his fields, as the historic Hampden has when 
 
BROWNING'S "CHILDE ROLAND." 15 
 
 resisting the usurper of his country's rights. So 
 with the " mute, inglorious Milton " and the 
 "guiltless Cromwell." But there is a tract of 
 progress where only the meanness of these 
 characteristic qualities is visible. This is the 
 sphere where the knight of modern romance 
 labours. We have to remember that our passions 
 seem ignoble only when engaged on ignoble 
 things, and that they are inevitably so engaged 
 with the mass of men. The jealousy that ennobles 
 when it inflames a national contest, or watches 
 the encroachments of a foreign tyrant, is pitiful 
 when it embitters the humble aspirant for fame 
 or fortune, or tempts one son of misery to look 
 askance on some slight accession to the joys of 
 his struggling neighbour. The stately pleasures 
 of the great also take away, in some unintentional 
 manner, from the grace and beauty of the toiling 
 man's happiness. " Seemeth it a small thing 
 unto you to have eaten up the good pasture, but 
 ye must tread down with your feet the residue of 
 your pastures ? and to have drunk of the deep 
 waters, but ye must foul the residue with your 
 feet ? And as for my flock, they eat that which 
 ye have trodden with your feet ; and they drink 
 that which ye have fouled with your feet " 
 (Ezekiel xxxiv. 18, 19). But however we may 
 
16 BROWNING'S "CHILDE ROLAND." 
 
 philosophize on the subject, it is one that fills the 
 heart of him who is absorbed in its details with 
 kindred desolation. Agonized nature seems to 
 him to yearn for a fresh creation, and he is ever 
 confronted with that crowning wrong that makes 
 the sufferer appear to be worthy only of suffering. 
 
 I shut my eyes and turned them on my heart. 
 As a man calls for wine before he fights, 
 I asked one draught of earlier, happier sights, 
 
 Ere fitly I could hope to play my part. 
 
 Think first, fight afterwards — the soldier's art ; 
 One taste of the old time sets all to rights ! 
 
 Not it ! I fancied Cuthbert's reddening face 
 
 Beneath its garniture of curly gold, 
 
 Dear fellow, till I almost felt him fold 
 An arm in mine to fix me to the place, 
 That way he used. Alas ! one night's disgrace ! 
 
 Out went my heart's new fire and left it cold. 
 
 Giles, then, the soul of honour — there he stands 
 Frank as ten years ago when knighted first. 
 What honest man should dare (he said) he durst. 
 
 Good — but the scene shifts — faugh I what hangman 
 hands 
 
 Pin to his breast a parchment ? his own bands 
 Head it. Poor traitor, spit upon and curst ! 
 
 The hero of conventional romance closes his 
 eyes or stops his ears to shut out the sights and 
 sounds of threatening or seduction that attend 
 him as he goes to assail the enchanted castle that 
 
BROWNING'S " OHILDE ROLAND." 17 
 
 holds some captive princess. Childe Eoland has 
 no such relief or immediate prospect to inspirit 
 him. The future veils itself from his hopes in 
 impenetrahle gloom. Launched on his career in 
 the light and warmth of early enthusiasm, when 
 Fancy strewed the path of duty with roses and 
 filled the air with the voices of acclaiming crowds, 
 he is now compelled to proceed in darkness, 
 silence and solitude ; urged forward only by the 
 impetus and following the direction of that 
 happier day. Why can he not take refuge from 
 the depressing effects of his present experience 
 in recollections of the past ? Why can he not 
 surround himself with the associates of his 
 youthful aspirations ? The attempt is vain. His 
 heart has lost the vision of brightness. The 
 firmament of his memory is without sun or star. 
 He first recalls the image of the most genial and 
 affectionate of his comrades till he almost pause3 ; 
 as of old, at the clasp of his detaining arm. But 
 the blackness rises between them as he remembers 
 the sudden disgrace that blighted his friend's 
 career before his fame was made. He then thinks 
 of another, sanguine and daring, and pledged to 
 the path of honour. Oh, but the end of it! 
 That friend died the death of a traitor, and his 
 
 2 
 
18 BROWNING'S "CHILDE ROLAND." 
 
 very followers could not wholly protest against 
 
 his doom. 
 
 Better this present than a past like that ; 
 Back therefore to my darkening path again ! 
 
 The Present requires all his energies. The objects 
 that come under his view are of more moment 
 than bygone dreams. It is part of his quest to 
 note the things he sees. 
 
 A sudden little river crossed my path 
 
 As unexpected as a serpent comes. 
 
 No sluggish tide congenial to the glooms ; 
 This, as it frothed by, might have been a bath 
 
 For the fiend's glowing hoof — 
 
 This stream, " so petty yet so spiteful," the Lethe 
 of the level wretchedness of life, the Nile of the 
 Egypt of the hopeless, nourishes whatever vegeta- 
 tion is possible in such a wilderness. 
 
 Low scrubby alders kneeled down over it ; 
 
 Drenched willows flung them headlong in a fit 
 Of mute despair, a suicidal throng : 
 The river which had done them all the wrong, 
 
 Whate'er that was, rolled by, deterred no whit. 
 
 While fording it he fears to " set his foot on a 
 dead man's cheek," and as he fathoms it with his 
 spear a cry, like the shriek of an infant, issues 
 forth. When he gains the other bank, he comes 
 on a spot where some wild inhuman contest had 
 
BROWNING'S "CHILDE ROLAND." 19 
 
 been waged. It was no orderly anticipated battle 
 of trained soldiers. The place must have created 
 the combatants. The exhalations of the river 
 must have inspired their frenzy. No such 
 creatures as writhed and struggled here ever came 
 from any other domain of nature. 
 
 No foot-print leading to that horrid mews, 
 None out of it. Mad brewage set to work 
 Their brains, no doubt. 
 
 A little farther he finds an engine which his 
 boding imagination transforms into an instrument 
 of torture. The twin expedients of hell for the 
 prevention of the growth of man's moral con- 
 sciousness have been the oblivion of the poisoned 
 brain and the terrors of law — drunkenness and the 
 gallows — the bath for the "fiend's glowing hoof" 
 and " Tophet's tool." 
 
 Then came a bit of stubbed ground, once a wood, 
 Next a marsh, it would seem, and now mere earth 
 Desperate and done with. 
 
 There is no room for further effort, no possibility 
 of success. Every attempt has been made, every 
 variety of expedient has been tried, and all has 
 been done to prove this result. In this the 
 prospects of humanity culminate. The world is 
 only "mere earth, desperate,' and done with." 
 
 2—2 
 
20 BKOWNING'S "CHILDB KOLAND.' 
 
 And just as far as ever from, the end ! 
 Nought in the distance but the evening, nought 
 To point my footstep further ! 
 
 Suddenly, aroused by no audible challenge, 
 but somehow recalled to himself by a sound, a 
 tremor, a shadow, a thing of darkness and the 
 air, an impalpable shape that floats like a bird of 
 evil omen, spontaneous, effortless, through the 
 deepening twilight, he becomes aware that he is 
 no longer in an open plain, free to continue his 
 journey or to retire. He had seen no mountains 
 as he advanced, yet now they surround him. 
 The level must have lifted itself in an angry con- 
 vulsion on all sides of him. The horizon is 
 hemmed in by frowning heights, which a 
 moment before were invisible. The community, 
 the whole mass of men and laws and beliefs, 
 which he had been surveying, criticising, con- 
 demning, seem, like billows of an angry sea, to 
 overwhelm him. He had been seeking amidst 
 the ruins of human happiness for the stronghold 
 of the destroyer, and now, unexpectedly, he is 
 encompassed by its walls. An instant's reflection, 
 and the truth flashes on him. He is captured by 
 the enemy whom he has been all his life seeking 
 to discover and attack. He who assails or even 
 suspects the integrity of the social arrangement, 
 
BROWNING'S " CHILDE ROLAND." 21 
 
 and searches through it for the influence that 
 wields the power of harm, never makes the dis- 
 covery till he is entangled in its strongest meshes. 
 That influence is ever cautiously watching him. 
 It sees his mistrust while it is forming in his con- 
 science. It gathers his secret purposes from the 
 glance of his eye and the measure of his step 
 before his lips have spoken. It rises to meet him. 
 The eminences and elevations which he had 
 ignored appear behind and before, threatening 
 him, so that he is put upon a hopeless 
 defence instead of being able to assail. " Where 
 are the falsehoods and tyrannies that mar the 
 hopes of men ?" he had said. Instead of reply- 
 ing, they silently and darkly crush their enemy. 
 He finds the Hydra only when its folds are 
 tightening round his every limb, and its poison 
 is mingling with his breath. 
 
 Looking up, aware I somehow grew, 
 'Spite of the dusk, the plain had given place 
 All round to mountains. 
 
 Tet half I seemed to recognise some trick 
 Of mischief happened to me, God knows when — 
 In a bad dream perhaps. Here ended, then, 
 Progress this way. When, in the very nick 
 Of giving up, one time more, came a click 
 As when a trap shuts — you're inside the den ! 
 
22 BROWNING'S "CHILDE ROLAND." 
 
 Burningly it came on me all at once, 
 This was the place ! 
 
 What in the midst lay but the Tower itself ? 
 The round squat turret, blind as the fool's heart, 
 Built of brown stone, without a counterpart 
 In the whole world. The tempest's mocking elf 
 Points to the shipman thus the unseen shelf 
 He strikes on, only when the timbers start. 
 
 All his hopes are frustrated, all his calculations 
 put out. His long self-discipline has been in 
 vain. His long preparations are useless against 
 an unforeseen danger. He had not thought about 
 himself, but it is against him that eve'ry weapon 
 is now directed. The meanness and dull shallow- 
 ness of the attack take him unawares. He had 
 thought of a brave and honourable opposition ; 
 he finds only spite and vindictive malice. He 
 supposed he was fighting against the greatness of 
 institutions ; he finds the smallness of men. The 
 greater the end a man has in view, the lower 
 and more degrading is the conflict in which he 
 must engage. A soldier in arms meets a soldier 
 in arms. A soldier of truth meets a hireling of 
 falsehood. This is the nature of the case. The 
 Satan of Milton has misled us. In whatever 
 pomp and pride evil may array itself, resistance 
 brings out its ignoble nature. This is the justifi- 
 
BROWNING'S "CHILDE ROLAND." 23 
 
 cation and should be the encouragement of the 
 contest. The greatness of heaven battles against 
 the littleness of earth, because it is littleness. 
 Childe Boland, when he knew that his own life 
 must be the forfeit, thought at least of falling in 
 equal fight in the open day, with some ray of 
 glory radiating from his knightly armour. But 
 he had made no provision, taken no forethought, 
 against " the round squat turret, blind as the 
 fool's heart." He sees, in his newly-awakened 
 perception, his foes rousing themselves indolently 
 to feast their eyes on his torture. At the instant 
 when all the vigour of his soul is required, he is 
 paralyzed by the crowding memories of the 
 failures of all who came there before him. None 
 of them ever escaped. He is caught in the 
 machinery of a merciless fate. What are strength 
 or fortitude or good fortune against the iron blow 
 that crushes the limbs of the wretch extended on 
 this wheel of destiny ? All his predecessors have 
 fallen. Their shadows haunt the place. 
 
 There they stood, ranged along the hill-sides, met 
 To view the last of me, a living frame 
 For one more picture ! in a sheet of flame 
 
 I saw them and I knew them all. 
 
 He must become as one of them. It is all that 
 remains for him. No, something more remains! 
 
24 BROWNING'S "CHILDE ROLAND." 
 
 He is not without his victory and his note of 
 triumph. He has discovered the Dark Tower, 
 and, so far as his hreath can avail, the world shall 
 know of his discovery. He will let his challenge 
 of defiance to his enemy, of alarm to the slumber- 
 ing world, ring through the muffled stillness, and 
 fall only after the due forms of honourable combat. 
 
 And yet 
 Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set 
 And blew " Childe Roland to the Darh Tower came." 
 
 Nothing succeeds like success, men say. Yea, 
 rather, nothing succeeds like failure. Success 
 succeeds in personal gain for a few. Failure 
 succeeds in the eternal triumph of right for all ! 
 
TENNTSON'S "PALACE OF ART." 
 
 It is commonly said that there is no waste in 
 creation, and that the displacement of an atom 
 would unsettle the balance of the universe. This 
 is true only in a metaphysical relation. In the 
 external world, so far as our power of observation 
 can reach, waste is the rule, use the exception. 
 Our earth during unnumbered ages was a wilder- 
 ness. Even now its inhabited and cultivated 
 portions are only islands and oases. The inter- 
 planetary spaces teem with fragments of worlds 
 which are apparently as useless as the dust of our 
 globe would be if it were blown about for ever by 
 the winds. Every life of plant and animal is 
 rescued from the midst of countless failures. 
 Every creature that moves in densest shoal or 
 flock is also the centre of a ruined region of un- 
 reached existence. All organization is only a 
 germ in a gigantic involution of unproductive 
 expenditure, a minute kernel in a colossal integu- 
 ment of sterility. 
 
26 TENNYSON'S "PALACE OF ART." 
 
 Is this apparent waste real ? Does this super- 
 fluity exist in vain ? Nature is what it is — in its 
 immensity, its variety, its redundancy — for the 
 sake of man. The soul of man is the reflection of 
 the outside world; and that it may be multi- 
 farious, vast, infinite in inexhaustible resources, 
 affluent in unconceived possibilities, nature is so. 
 God does His work with boundless margin, that 
 man's soul may expand and soar as in unlimited 
 space. There is no waste in the lavish prodigality 
 of matter, time, and space, because it only provides 
 a field wide enough for the imagination to traverse. 
 Man does not live on bread alone. The desert 
 places are more fertile than the blossoming 
 garden or the yellow field of corn. That which 
 is limited and practical in man is the shadow of 
 earth's symmetry and organization ; all that is 
 sublime in him is the gloom of her barrenness and 
 deformity. If the elements put forth just so much 
 force and material as was needed for the designed 
 effect, if there was an accurate proportion always 
 between the effort and the product, every exertion 
 of the human will would be narrowed to a calcu- 
 lation in arithmetic. Man would repress his 
 power to visible and definite ends, and nothing 
 would be left for aspiration. Exact law is ever 
 lost in some undefined principle whose orbit is 
 
TENNYSON'S "PALACE OF ART." 27 
 
 beyond our vision, and even our measured actions 
 have a meaning whose echoes are heard in the 
 pathways of the stars. 
 
 The indefiniteness of the universe is repro- 
 duced in us. Our thoughts swell beyond the 
 compass of possible achievement. Our desires 
 outstrip our knowledge. Our distinct conceptions 
 are fertile spots amid wildernesses of vagueness 
 and obscurity. The waste of light in morning 
 dawn and evening sunset, the waste of genial 
 warmth as summer is slowly killed by cruel 
 winter, the waste of consciousness as we pass 
 dimly into the darkness of sleep, all leave their 
 impress upon us. Wonder, awe, mystery are the 
 perfumes of the flowers that never bloom, the 
 echoes of the voices that never become articulate, 
 the impalpable sway of the uncreated creation. 
 Our faculties melt into the immeasurable. 
 Language imitates the extravagance of nature, 
 and spreads into hyperbole and rhetoric. Belief 
 is surrounded by an infinitude of mental space, 
 which we call doubt ; but which, in truth, is the 
 field of progress and of action, the atmosphere of 
 light and life, the breathing-place of mental health. 
 God risks our loyalty to Him to make us ceaseless 
 in our pursuit of truth. Indetermination of 
 aim answering to Nature's vastness, her eternity, 
 
28 TENNYSON'S "PALACE OP ART." 
 
 her infinity, her stores of wealth too great for any 
 known end, gives birth to poetry. We can see the 
 spendthrift outlay of creation bearing fruit in local 
 and national life. The industry of a district is 
 arrested to save a fellow-being from death. The 
 nation puts forth thirty million hands to rescue 
 one or two captives from a savage. Such is the 
 connection between man's soul and the outer 
 world. Art in its aesthetic sense undertakes to 
 embody, to arrange into rule, and to mirror back 
 on the soul, its own grandeur, its own ever- widen- 
 ing universality, imprinted upon it by the uni- 
 versality of external nature. The first duty, 
 therefore, of art is to be true to Nature's ends, 
 and not to detain man's soul in a reverie of idle 
 delight, but to speed it onward to the one far-off 
 divine event to which the whole creation moves. 
 The surface of the soil may be divided into per- 
 sonal possessions; men or nations may call the 
 lands after their own names ; the mountain, the 
 ocean, the cloud, the desert isle, the very planet, 
 may have some imaginary shackle of ownership 
 flung upon it: with these appropriations and 
 limitations art has nothing to do. It must deal 
 with nature in those influences which are the 
 inalienable heritage of mankind. Earth in her 
 wholeness, the heavens in their unfathomable 
 
TENNYSON'S "PALACE OF ART." 29 
 
 depth, and the sublimities of genius were made 
 common property for all. When God formed man 
 in His image He committed the development of 
 the likeness to impressions daily growing from the 
 divine frame of the universe. He placed him 
 amidst scenes of bold and historic magnificence 
 that he might imbibe their colours and magnitude. 
 The end of art is to help nature in imprinting the 
 likeness of God on the soul of man. 
 
 In the/' Palace of Art " we see a being who has 
 trained himself to catch all that is beautiful or 
 touching in nature and history, and employ it for 
 his own solitary gratification. He has sifted the 
 bow from the shower, the grateful terror from the 
 danger and the pain, the kindling emotion from the 
 agony and despair, the sublime from its toil, the 
 heroic from its sacrifice. The cries of earth are 
 mellowed to music before they reach his ears, and 
 the writhings and contortions of its combats are 
 idealized into attitudes of grace. Nature's con- 
 vulsed career amuses him with a phantasmagoric 
 show, while he dwells beyond the reach of her 
 attractions. 
 
 I built my soul a lordly dwelling-house 
 
 Wherein at ease for aye to dwell. 
 I said, " O soul, make merry and carouse, 
 
 Dear soul, for all is well." 
 
30 TENNYSON'S "PALACE OF AET." 
 
 And " while the world runs round and round," I said, 
 
 " Reign thou apart, a quiet king, 
 Still as, while Saturn whirls, his steadfast shade 
 
 Sleeps on his luminous ring." 
 
 The design of the architect of this psychic 
 palace was to enlarge his capacity of enjoyment, 
 to garner for himself the whole harvest of beauty, 
 and to eat, drink, and be merry on goods laid up 
 for many years. It is not the account of an artist 
 whose personal life is untouched by his art. There 
 have been painters and poets who worked with 
 sunbeams while their lives were of the darkness. 
 There have been philosophers and logicians who 
 constructed deathless systems while their steps 
 trod ceaselessly in the labyrinth of error. There 
 have been orators who transmitted truth to pos- 
 terity in sentences of flame, but on whose pledged 
 promises their contemporaries could place no reli- 
 ance. There have been moralists whose maxims 
 were like glittering insects engendered in impurity. 
 There have been preachers whose accurate balanc- 
 ing of dogma protected the perfection of their 
 worldliness, whose spiritual unction could only 
 supply fuel for a fiercer fire of remorse than 
 natural depravity can kindle. But all these did 
 a finished work, and left contributions to a future 
 which they neither foresaw nor desired. 
 
TENNYSON'S "PALACE OF AET." 31 
 
 The case here presented is different. It is that 
 of a favoured and richly-endowed being, calm, 
 self-possessed, refined, who, with discernment to 
 choose and power to execute, out of nature's 
 strength gathered sweetness for himself, and luxu- 
 riously fed his soul on the visions which dying 
 men saw through their tears. It is as if the 
 vapours, rejoicing in their elevation, should never 
 descend to fertilize the plain out of whose arteries 
 they had arisen ; as if Liberty, the child of agonies 
 wide as the world, deep as the heart, should gain 
 her apotheosis to shine like a star in settled splen- 
 dour over a despot's throne ; as if Truth, trans- 
 formed from her ancient servitude and bursting 
 from mediaeval disfiguration, should soar to the 
 higher regions of heaven to company with angels, 
 and never bless with her loveliness the race from 
 whose travails she had sprung. 
 
 A huge crag-platform, smooth as burnished brass, 
 
 I chose. The ranged ramparts bright 
 From level meadow-bases of deep grass 
 
 Suddenly scaled the light. 
 
 Thereon I built it firm. Of ledge or shelf 
 
 The rock rose clear, or winding stair. 
 My soul would live alone unto herself 
 
 In her high palace there. 
 
 Four courts I made, East, West and South and North. 
 
32 TENNYSON'S "PALACE OF ART." 
 
 Let us contrast for a moment with this un- 
 scaleable, impregnable, entranceless fortress of 
 unsocial refinement and uncommunicated joy, the 
 divine idea that warmed the hearts of men of a 
 former time, whose inspired labours have all but 
 shared the fate of ordinary struggles for the good 
 of mankind, and been diverted from ministering 
 to the elevation of the multitude to giving a zest 
 to the pleasures of the chosen few. "And I saw a 
 new heaven and a new earth . . . and I saw the 
 holy city coming down from God out of heaven. 
 And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, 
 Behold the tabernacle of God is with men . . . 
 and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes 
 . . . And there came unto me one of the seven 
 angels . . . and he carried me away in the spirit to 
 a great and high mountain, and showed me that 
 great city descending out of heaven from God . . . 
 and it had a wall great and high and had twelve 
 gates ... on the east three gates ; on the north 
 three gates ; on the south three gates ; and on the 
 west three gates . . . and the gates of it shall 
 not be shut at all by day : for there shall be no 
 night there." 
 
 The internal construction of the palace — which 
 throughout the Poem is now the symbol, now the 
 actual creation of a frame of mind, a material 
 
TENNYSON'S "PALACE OF ART." 33 
 
 erection and a mental disposition acting and 
 reacting on each other — reproduces in an artificial 
 form the grand features of natural scenery. Four 
 floods of fountain foam pour from the golden 
 gorge of dragons. Cloisters, branched like lofty 
 woods, echo to the waterfalls. A gilded gallery 
 shows the distant ocean. The ancients, who 
 believed that superhuman beings dwelt in the 
 fountain and the tree, held in their own way the 
 certain truth that the Godhead speaks to man's 
 soul from the augustness and the tenderness of 
 nature. In the artistic rendering and the aesthetic 
 perception, the beautiful imagination of indwell- 
 ing deity is imperilled. The God of heaven will 
 not deign to dwell in temples made with hands, 
 nor will the God of nature unconditionally 
 suffer His glories to be enclosed within human 
 adaptations. 
 
 Quanto praastantius esset 
 Numen aquae, viridi si margins clauderet undas 
 Herba, nee ingenuum violarunt marmora tophum. 
 
 Juv. Sat. iii. 18. 
 
 But it is not in the temple or the palace of 
 material architecture that God refuses to make 
 His abode, but in the soul of the worshipper that 
 is walled in by symbols, that loads itself with 
 God's gifts, clothes itself in His beauty, arms' 
 
 3 
 
34 TENNYSON'S "PALACE OF ART." 
 
 itself with His power, and sullenly refuses, to be 
 governed by His all-embracing love. 
 
 The latent and unloving spirit of exclusiveness 
 reveals its tendency as we proceed to the exterior 
 aspect of the building. The four currents mingle 
 in one stream, and as they rush over the moun- 
 tain's side form a rainbow. And on each pinnacle 
 of the palace, instead of chimneys, statues stand- 
 ing on tiptoe tossed up clouds of incense from 
 golden cups. 
 
 So that she thought, " And who shall gaze upon 
 
 My palace with unblinded eyes, 
 While this great bow shall waver in the sun, 
 
 And that sweet incense rise ?" 
 
 The delicate disguises and graceful dissem- 
 blances of art, if confined to a class, engender 
 a fictitious sense of superiority. Every device 
 that distinguishes the common wants of men, 
 their common dependence on the bounty of nature, 
 raises barriers more insuperable than any legal 
 privilege could create. The very fabric of the 
 mind becomes imbued with a different colour. 
 In concealing the homeliness of our wants, we 
 dissever our brotherhood. Because we drape our 
 daily needs in elegance, we suppose that they are 
 not the same as the urgent necessities of the un- 
 cultured man. A coronet and ermine cannot, we 
 
TENNYSON'S "PALACE OP ART." 35 
 
 imagine, be intended to shelter their wearer from 
 the cold in which ordinary humanity shivers. 
 The dainty appetite that fares sumptuously off 
 golden dishes cannot be of the same quality as 
 the hunger which is solaced by a crust eaten from 
 the hand. The disease that is mysteriously 
 withheld from the vulgar ear and announced in 
 formal bulletins cannot be that which brings 
 trembling into the toiler's home. The demise 
 that ceremoniously visits the palace, and with 
 respectful pomp conducts its charge to a palatial 
 mausoleum, cannot be the same death that 
 invades the cottage and leaves its surviving 
 inmates broken-hearted. This delusion grows 
 until it becomes the instrument of repulsion 
 and the justification of contempt. Men no 
 longer warm themselves at the same fire, nor 
 drink from the same stream. Ingenious fancy 
 transfigures the familiar into the rare by her 
 touch, into the coarse and forbidding by the 
 contrast of her absence. The mind catches the 
 temper of its haughty surroundings, and deems 
 that it has the right to dazzle, because it has the 
 power to enlighten. 
 
 The interior of the Palace illustrates the objects 
 which the inmate reserves for her own contempla- 
 tion. The range of corridors, " overvaulting 
 
 3—2 
 
36 TENNYSON'S "PALACE OP ART." 
 
 grateful gloom," that connects the several apart- 
 ments may mean the habitual circumspection 
 which guards the judgment from being dissipated 
 by the glare of unshadowed day. The fine 
 touch, the nice discrimination superstitiously 
 avoids too much contact with average estimates. 
 Various moods of mind are represented by ideal 
 landscapes. One, a morning scene, full of 
 animal vigour, in which the clear air is resonant 
 with the blast of the hunter's horn, buoys the 
 imagination with the turbulent gladness of youth. 
 From this we suddenly pass to another, in which, 
 on a sandy tract by the glimmering light of a 
 low large moon, " some one " paces for ever. We 
 never see a mourner without asking, " Why does 
 he weep ?" Here the poet has accumulated all 
 the vague images that intensify the essential 
 mystery of sorrow. Then we behold the sea 
 writhing in convulsive struggle with a threatening 
 cliff ; and, as we enter into the spirit of the con- 
 test, the scene changes, and an endless plain, a 
 quiet river, peaceful herds, and a remote prospect, 
 just relieved from sameness by a ragged thunder- 
 cloud, dissolves the soul into the mingled pre- 
 science of its distant hope. A busy harvest 
 scene, balanced by windy uplands, tells of 
 autumnal plenty, and brings earth and her 
 
TENNYSON'S "PALACE OF ART." 37 
 
 children into grateful relations ; and immediately 
 after a foreground of barren slag and cinder leads 
 the eye backward to haughty crags that rise 
 above the clouds, and volcanic ires reddening 
 above the region of snow. From those occasional 
 moods the soul fitly returns to its settled state, 
 represented by an English home where tragic 
 mystery is unknown, the struggle of life unfelt, 
 the distant hope brought near, orderly, undis- 
 turbed, tree-embowered, and softened by the 
 tender joy of evening. 
 
 All those mental conditions are or may be 
 merely reflective. The sentiment or affection 
 that they arouse is transfused or idly subsides. 
 Strife and peace, joy and sorrow, hope and posses- 
 sion, are fields where the vagrant fancy amuses 
 itself with variety. The lights and shadows of 
 nature and the vicissitudes of man's lot are 
 most fertile in their extreme degrees to the 
 searcher for indolent pleasure. The external 
 world will echo back to us in the mood in which 
 we question it. If we ask for repetition of a 
 sound, it will reverberate a sound. If we ask for 
 wisdom, it will re-echo wisdom. Neither heaven 
 nor earth is lifeless. The clouds are more than 
 masses of vapour. We may not believe in Oreads 
 or Naiads, but still the mountain and the ocean 
 
38 TENNYSON'S "PALACE OF ART." 
 
 are beings to us ; they are instinct with our life 
 and wise with our experience. They sleep and 
 wake, smile and frown, as we do. Calm answers 
 to calm, tear to tear, storm to storm, desolation to 
 desolation. Deep cries aloud to deep. It is not 
 without a meaning that God calls on man to 
 reason with Him in the audience of the moun- 
 tains. The vast, the steadfast, the enduring, the 
 unconquerable, are lessons for the heart and not 
 luxury for the eye. They preside over the 
 genesis of heroism. They are not to he plucked 
 and flung away like blossoms that would never 
 bear fruit. 
 
 After the moods connected with local scenery 
 come those suggested by historic actions and 
 incidents. Saviour, martyr, enthusiast, patriot, 
 myth, legend, and superstition, all smoothed and 
 rounded by the flow of ceaseless ages, all blanched 
 and bleached by the winds and rains of centuries, 
 all reduced by familiar adaptation by the use of 
 a thousand hands, all etherealized by passing 
 through a thousand poetic moods, all gathered 
 in from the shores of time as relics and mementoes 
 of wrecks in which the loftiest efforts of man 
 foundered and sank, are stored in the museum of 
 the beauty-loving mind. It was not for this that 
 God set His chosen ones to aspire, to dare, to 
 
TENNYSON'S "PALACE OF ART." 39 
 
 suffer. There never was a wrong done on earth 
 for which there was not a counterpoise and a 
 remedy in fore-ordained and calculated indigna- 
 tion at wrong. But this indignation was not 
 meant to be the sheet lightning of an imperturb- 
 able mood. The lives of heroes were not crushed 
 by the heel of oppression that they might yield a 
 sweeter perfume for future generations of patrons 
 of art. The world is something better than a 
 gladiatorial show to which heaven sends com- 
 batants for the amusement of the cultured 
 masters of mankind. The maid-mother did not 
 mourn to immortalize the wives and mistresses of 
 painters, and to impart a fresh grace to the beau- 
 tiful. The hope of a kingdom of heaven did not 
 rise and perish that supercilious and unsympathiz- 
 ing refinement might gather flowers on its tomb. 
 It is no desecration that Christ should inspire the 
 painter's pencil or the poet's pen or the sculptor's 
 chisel ; it is no desecration that His Name 
 should be associated with our grandest musical 
 compositions ; but it would be a desecration if 
 Christ, the people's long-expected Ideal answering 
 to the design of heaven, whom the people ac- 
 cepted, whom the select and refined rulers slew, 
 and whom the people raised from the dead, that 
 is, to whose actual resurrection they by their faith 
 
40 TENNYSON'S "PALACE OP AKT." 
 
 gave historic reality and fame — it would be a 
 desecration if this Christ were made the inspira- 
 tion of an art that should never be a solace to the 
 people, and which should only lull the gifted and 
 the privileged into forgetfulness of the people's 
 wants and the people's wrongs. Who are entitled 
 to whatever of soothing power the poetic concep- 
 tion of Redeemer, martyr, saint, or sage can yield, 
 if not those who bore them for a better end ? 
 Have they forfeited their claim to the chastening 
 recollections because they have been robbed of 
 the solid good which their heroes died to achieve? 
 It was their affection that gave life to the legend. 
 It was their undying trust in their own destiny 
 that immortalized the sons who strove for them. 
 To them belongs the substantial good, to them 
 belongs the civilizing influence. 
 
 But unloving . culture, appropriating all the 
 hopes that popular instinct in its period of 
 baffled endeavour had bequeathed for the con- 
 solation of happier days, wreathes them into a 
 thing of beauty for the artistic soul, and sums up 
 the injustice by shaping the forsaken struggles of 
 the despoiled people into a mosaic. Having lined 
 the Palace walls with landscapes, pictured legends, 
 and portraits of bards, having ceiled it with the 
 sheltering ministry of angels, there remains as a 
 
TENNYSON'S 'PALACE OF ART." 41 
 
 pavement — maDkind. Having torn all the gold 
 from the granite in whose tortured womb it had 
 been purified through primeval fires, the granite 
 itself is put to baser use. Having wrung the 
 precious attar from the bruised and bleeding 
 flowers, the rifled mass is flung underfoot. 
 
 Below was all mosaic choicely plann'd 
 
 With cycles of the human tale 
 Of this wide world, the times of every land 
 
 So wrought, they will not fail. 
 
 The people here, a beast of burden slow, 
 
 Toil'd onward, prick'd with goads and stings ; 
 
 Here play'd, a tiger, rolling to and fro 
 The heads and crowns of kings ; 
 
 Here rose, an athlete, strong to break or bind 
 All force in bonds that might endure, 
 
 And here once more like some sick man declined, 
 And trusted any cure. 
 
 But over these she trod : 
 
 We have to remind ourselves from time to 
 time that the Palace is a mental condition, an 
 intellectual habit, a system of abstract beauty. 
 There is an external material building, modelled 
 on the inner idea ; but we must occasionally, to 
 follow the poet's meaning, distinguish the two, 
 and conceive the Palace of Art to be the educated, 
 enriched, and arranged consciousness of an indi- 
 
42 TENNYSON'S "PALACE OF ART." 
 
 vidual soul. When the soul, then, is said to be 
 solitary, it is not implied that she is alone by 
 separation from companions, but alone in unsym- 
 pathetic selfishness and in alienation from the 
 interests of mankind. She is in the midst of 
 friends and admirers who hang upon her accents, 
 but she owns no common purpose with them. 
 
 And those great bells 
 Began to chime. She took her throne : 
 She sat betwixt the shining Oriels, 
 To sing her songs alone. 
 
 The description that follows reminds us of some 
 brilliant festive scene where the resources of 
 opulence and of intellect reflect and intensify 
 each other, and some inspired master of conversa- 
 tion pours from the exhaustless treasure-house of 
 his memory the conquered spoils of every science 
 to a rapt circle of listeners. The kings of every 
 region of literature adorn his triumphal proces- 
 sion. Fed by tributaries from the whole domain 
 of nature, a mighty stream of thought, lit by 
 gorgeous imagery, pours its endless tide. 
 
 And thro' the topmost Oriels' coloured flame 
 
 Two godlike faces gazed below ; 
 Plato the wise, aud large-brow'd Verulam, 
 
 The first of those who know. 
 
TENNYSON'S " PALACE OF ART." 43 
 
 And all those names, that in their motion were 
 Pull- welling fountain-heads of change, 
 
 Betwixt the slender shafts were blazon'd fair 
 In diverse raiment strange : 
 
 Thro' which the lights, rose, amber, emerald, blue, 
 
 Flush'd in her temples and her eyes, 
 And from her lips, as morn from Memnon, drew 
 
 Rivers of melodies. 
 
 Teeming mines of mental wealth, perfect mastery 
 of copious expression, the physical soundness that 
 gives an equipoise to our twofold nature and 
 ensures an easy control over every faculty, a 
 swift obedience from the whole battalioned 
 artillery of illustration and proof, the steadying 
 consciousness of power, the warming rush of the 
 successful onslaught, delighted admiration in the 
 gaze, murmured applause on the lips of each 
 listener, every appliance of luxury that can 
 stimulate the spirit, every victory of cunning con- 
 trivance that can extend the region and multiply 
 the objects of sense, all the majesty of strength, 
 all the achieved sovereignty over willing minds, 
 is squandered on an idle intellectual display. 
 
 No nightingale delighteth to prolong 
 
 Her low preamble aril alone, 
 More than my soul to hear her echo'd song 
 
 Throb thro' the ribbed stone ; 
 
44 TENNYSON'S "PALACE OF ART." 
 
 Singing and murmuring in her feastful mirth, 
 
 Joying to feel herself alive, 
 Lord over nature, Lord of the visible earth, 
 
 Lord of the senses five ; 
 
 Communing with herself : " All these are mine, 
 
 And let the world have peace or wars, 
 'Tis one to me." 
 
 The lights are lit in wreaths and anadems and 
 hollowed moons of precious stone to bewilder the 
 imagination into oblivion of earth by their 
 mimicry of the skies, and wise and great are 
 raised to the rank of gods that their sole living 
 compeer may reign alone in unapproached supre- 
 macy. From this delirious height of flattered 
 pride, this solitary throne of unsocial and recoil- 
 ing sensitiveness, the ordinary joys of men seem 
 grossness, and their efforts towards better things a 
 hopeless frenzy of self-destruction. 
 
 O G-od-like isolation which art mine, 
 
 I can but count thee perfect gain, 
 What time I watch the darkening droves of swine 
 
 That range on yonder plain. 
 
 In filthy sloughs they roll a prurient skin, 
 They graze and wallow, breed and sleep ; 
 
 And oft some brainless devil enters in, 
 And drives them to the deep. 
 
 The old Pharisaic monopoly in law and religion is 
 repeated in philosophy and art. Every article of 
 
TENNYSON'S "PALACE OP ART." 45 
 
 knowledge that can be used as a key to the 
 kingdom of right and truth, natural science, the 
 moral instinct, the resurrection of the dead, is 
 possessed, save the master-key. The master-key 
 is the one further acquisition of knowledge — the 
 sheath, and bond, and crown of all knowledge; 
 that knowledge is the heaven- chartered right of 
 all men. The master-key is love, not of God, 
 which may be a selfish love, but of those whom 
 God loves — men. The master-key is faith, not 
 faith in Christ, which may be a selfish faith, but 
 faith in what Christ did to establish the dignity 
 and the destiny of man. Whether a man believes 
 in one God or a thousand gods, whether he believes 
 in Christ or Mahomet, unless he believes in the un- 
 bounded progress of man on earth he is an anti- 
 theist and an antichrist, for he refuses and resists the 
 purpose and the will of God. Though I understand 
 all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I 
 have all faith so that I could remove mountains, 
 and have not love, I am nothing ; and though I 
 bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though 
 I give my body to be burned, and have not love, 
 it profiteth me nothing. All knowledge is 
 nothing unless it is conditional, and accompanied 
 by the consciousness that it is the birthright o'f 
 man in every state, and rank, and clime. All 
 
46 TENNYSON'S "PALACE OF ART." 
 
 help to man profits nothing if it be done to gain 
 the quick harvest of thanks, and is not directed 
 to the regeneration of races. Faith, hope, and 
 love are one in essence and in object. Faith is 
 loving hope, hope is trusting love, and love is 
 hopeful trust in the sufficiency of virtue and the 
 equal distribution of the highest happiness. The 
 absence of this love is characteristic of the gifted 
 and the privileged. They will not open the 
 kingdom to others, and they cannot constitute a 
 kingdom in themselves. 
 
 A consideration of wide importance now 
 demands settlement. The Poet decides it, but 
 sufficient attention may not be given to his deter- 
 mination. No doubt can exist as to the possible 
 relative value of a pure and largely-endowed 
 mind. But a further question arises : What is the 
 likelihood that such a mind, accustomed to hold 
 itself aloof in haughty isolation from the common 
 herd, and to display its brilliancy to a chosen 
 circle of admirers, will learn that it is a steward 
 and not an owner ? In what direction will it 
 develop ? What is its moral standing ground ? 
 A soul, educated and refined just so far as to see 
 the beautiful and shrink from the coarse and 
 ungraceful around it, capacious to receive and 
 mighty to execute, with wealth of garnered grain 
 
TENNYSON'S "PALACE OP ART." 47 
 
 and hand of skilful strength to scatter, yet 
 spurning the fallows that hunger to produce, and 
 hoarding its heaps in granaries kept for show, is a 
 devil needing only one step of additional progress 
 to become a god. In contrasting good with evil 
 we must not confound imperfect degrees of good 
 with positive evil, and so in reality contrast good 
 with good. Imperfect degrees of good, the nearer 
 they approach to perfect good by what they 
 possess, the nearer they seem to approach to 
 perfect evil by what they want. A being with all 
 the attributes of God, save the will to com- 
 municate happiness, would differ from God in 
 the absence of love, and from a demon in the 
 absence of active hate. A movement on either 
 side- would consummate good or evil. On which 
 side is it most probable that the movement will 
 be made ? We might imagine that the tendencies 
 were equal. Some would argue that the evil 
 tendency is the strongest, if not irresistible. Let 
 it be remembered that the apparent twofold 
 capacity has not been reached by two distinct 
 processes of evil and good, but by one process of 
 good. There was no necessary step towards hate 
 in the whole progress that led to intellectual 
 sovereignty. The very habit of isolation, the 
 sensitive recoil from the mean and commonplace, 
 
48 TENNYSON'S "PALACE OF ART." 
 
 and the consequent severance from the multitude, 
 was an essential part of the struggle to a higher 
 and purer level of thought. He who would raise 
 men must unlearn and avoid their customs, and 
 he can do this only by shunning contagious inter- 
 course with them. To cast off this mechanically- 
 acquired disdain is a final achievement, without 
 which all that went before would be in vain ; but 
 we must not class the man who stops short at it 
 with the sensual and malignant. "We must not 
 mistake the absence of the highest good for the 
 presence of the highest evil. We are prone to do 
 so because the sight of great powers unused for 
 good strikes us as monstrous. As the animal 
 form approaches the human, it is never so de- 
 formed as at the last stage. As man approximates 
 to the godlike, the deficiencies that, associated 
 with positive and vulgar vice, would pass un- 
 noticed, emerge into glowing conspicuousness. We 
 do not wonder at want of love in a gross and 
 sensual nature ; it shocks us in the pure and 
 cultured. So the elder son in the parable is to 
 the indiscriminate eye more morally guilty than 
 his profligate brother. But, in fact, while the one 
 has a past life to retrace, and a new nature to 
 remould, the other requires only a single advance 
 to make in order to become perfect as his father. 
 
TENNYSON'S "PALACE OP ART." 49 
 
 Art without love is stunted, maimed, abortive, but 
 it is on the verge of symmetry. The tongues of 
 angels without love are a tinkling cymbal, but with 
 it they are the harmony of heaven. Self-sacrifice 
 without love profits not, but with love it sits on 
 the throne of God. In our resentment at the 
 sight of power wanting love, we forget that the 
 vanity of vanities is love wanting power. 
 
 But the distinction which is now insisted on is 
 that between imperfect good and positive evil. It 
 has been intimated that Tennyson pronounces a 
 judgment relative to this distinction. He does so 
 by implication in the concluding portion of the 
 poem ; but his meaning will be more intelligible 
 by adverting for a few moments to his " Vision of 
 Sin." There the course and result of positive evil 
 are described. A youth with an aspiring soul, 
 crushed down to earth by the weight of his baser 
 nature, enters a palace, where a company of 
 revellers, jaded with their last debauch, are 
 languidly waiting till with recruited vigour they 
 can renew their orgies. In the interval of sensual 
 enjoyment they are utterly resourceless. No 
 device of art is at hand to minister to a cultured 
 taste, or to beguile them to a higher tract of 
 thought. Nothing is seen but " heaps of gourds, 
 and skins of wine, and piles of grapes." Their 
 
 4 
 
50 TENNYSON'S "PALACE OF ART." 
 
 mode of life is pictured by the wild excitement 
 and voluptuous movements of a dance. But 
 each morning from the uplands, God, in the 
 symbol of sunrise, offers the awful gift of a 
 better life, and each day, and month, and year 
 there floats from the same region satiety and 
 leanness of soul, and the final loss of all noble- 
 ness, as the alternative of refusal. The heavy 
 vapour of moral death envelops the palace, and 
 the result is seen in the " gray and gap-tooth'd 
 man," who with vindictive remorse rails at virtue, 
 liberty, and heaven. The " winged horse " that 
 the heavy rider repressed in early days is now a 
 starved and broken-winded " brute." Nothing 
 remains but " maudlin gall " and bitter " mockeries 
 of the world." The vision finally shifts, and 
 again the mountain range appears, but where the 
 palace stood are " men and horses pierced with 
 worms," bodies and souls reduced to a common 
 level, and sharing a common fate. A voice asks, 
 " Is there any hope ?" and an answer peals back 
 in a language that none can understand. 
 
 If we compare those two souls, — that in the 
 '' Palace of Art " exulting in godlike isolation, 
 and that in the " Vision of Sin " immersed in 
 sense and perishing with the natural decay of 
 sense, — we cannot, apart from the poet's award, 
 
TENNYSON'S "PALACE OF ART." 51 
 
 have any hesitation in assigning to them their 
 fitting places in the moral scale. But while we 
 despair for the one we are indignant with the 
 other. Our despair is in reference to the pos- 
 sibility of personal redemption. Our indignation 
 is in reference to the amount of possible good to 
 others that is left unaccomplished. The single 
 flaw in the aesthetic soul is exasperating ; and 
 since exasperation is a more vehement emotion 
 than hopelessness, we assume that they who 
 provoke it are the greatest offenders. And then 
 we take the words of Christ concerning publicans 
 and sinners, who were the social outcasts, the 
 poor and the ignorant, by whose enforced degrada- 
 tion Pharisaic respectability maintained itself in 
 Jerusalem, and we apply them to the wealthy 
 sensualist who never awakes from the leaden 
 lethargy of self-indulgence. 
 
 The comparison lies between the soul of the 
 lover of art, beauty, and culture, who is not yet 
 a lover of men, and the soul of him who is 
 devoted to animal gratification ; and the question 
 is, which of the two is likeliest to feel the sting 
 of discontent, and to aspire to a yet unattained 
 good. A slave of old was placed in the triumphal 
 car, to remind the victorious general as he rode 
 through the acclaiming city that he was mortal. 
 
 4—2 
 
52 TENNYSON'S " PALACE OF ART." 
 
 God Himself reminds men in their intellectual 
 triumph that they are human. It is only a 
 truism to say, that in proportion as our views 
 widen, as our knowledge grows more clear, as our 
 judgment becomes more just, the wider will our 
 sympathies extend ; for it is only saying that the 
 more we rise above the brute, the more attractive 
 and diffusive must our humanity be. The most 
 sordid joys are most exclusively guarded. The 
 privileges that maintain these joys are always most 
 desperately defended. The growth of society is 
 from exclusive power to universal knowledge. 
 Unjust political privileges, so far as the con- 
 sciences of their possessors are concerned, will 
 be retained for ever. It is when the political 
 monopoly produces learning and refinement that 
 the vessel overflows. The rights of men were 
 never explicitly stated until at that period before 
 the French Eevolution when increasing enlighten- 
 ment and civilization were pent within the bonds 
 of an iron despotism. The soul becomes more 
 tender and more just in proportion as its horizon 
 enlarges. The bud may have to struggle hard 
 against the environment that once protected it 
 before it can burst into verdure ; the moth must 
 strain its formless shell before it expands into 
 summer beauty, yet none the less when its hour 
 
TENNYSON'S "PALACE OF ART." 53 
 
 has come the final transformation cannot be 
 delayed. The soul may find it difficult to over- 
 come the habits of fastidious seclusion which 
 sheltered it from the encroachments of the vicious 
 and the mean, but the "riddle of the painful 
 earth " will flash through it with ever more vivid 
 intensity as the growing light of knowledge con- 
 trasts with the surrounding darkness. As the 
 appliances that heal and strengthen are ascertained 
 and proved, so do the wounds and bruises of our 
 race become more distinct. The spirit delivered 
 from the rule of its earthly companion may eddy 
 for a time round a centre of its own, but it will 
 soon yield to kindred attractions and blend with 
 the human tide. 
 
 The danger of science is that it accustoms us to 
 look at our earth not as the abode of mingled 
 light and shade, joy and sorrow, but as a planet 
 shining with unbroken, because distant, planetary 
 light. This danger is soon lost in the throes of an 
 unappeasable home-sickness. The still music of 
 humanity becomes more attractive than the music 
 of the spheres. The exquisite sense that retired 
 in pain for a season from the sight of moral and 
 material deformity returns for ever to relieve and 
 to redress. The abysmal deeps of personality, 
 swept and garnished by art, will entertain no 
 
54 TENNYSON'S "PALACE OP ART." 
 
 demons. God inspires a divine despair and a 
 righteous self-scorn. Shadows of the actual 
 world, sorrows and horrors of real life, loathsome, 
 amorphous, unnatural, which the eye only glanced 
 at and turned away in disgust, haunt the imagina- 
 tion. The unity of law, the reality of progress, 
 the undisguisable fact that mankind are not 
 toiling in a slavish circle, but going ever onward 
 in an uninterrupted march, startles the spectator 
 to the discovery that if he lingers to gaze he will 
 be left behind. 
 
 A spot of dull stagnation, without light 
 Or power of movement, seem'd my soul, 
 
 'Mid onward-sloping motions infinite 
 Making for one sure goal. 
 
 A still salt pool, lock'd in with bars of sand, 
 Left on the shore ; that hears all night 
 
 The plunging seas draw backward from the land 
 Their moon-led waters white. 
 
 A star that with the choral starry dance 
 Join'd not, but stood, and standing saw 
 
 The hollow orb of moving Circumstance 
 Roll'd round by one fix'd law. 
 
 In the biography of a soul Tennyson has 
 given us the history of society under refining 
 and humanizing influences. Neither an individual 
 soul nor a section of society can clothe itself in 
 
TENNYSON'S "PALACE OF ART." 55 
 
 light and refuse to shine on the world. Any 
 attempt to do so will fail. Life is not a pageant 
 to be gazed upon. Nature does not pose itself for 
 the artist. Motion, life, growth, are indispensable 
 to every true work of art. If it has not the life 
 of nature it will not live. To feel this universal 
 life, to be a part of it, to be conscious of it, to help 
 its pulses to beat more fully, to add to the current 
 of its progress, to lose ourselves and our interests in 
 the sublime mystery of self-evolving destiny, is 
 love. To be without love is death. It is to 
 " moulder with the dull earth's mouldering sod." 
 While this mingling with corruption is unfelt bj r 
 the sensualist, it is torture, terror, and shame to 
 the whetted sensibilities of the soul that has fed 
 on the beautiful. 
 
 As the sympathies quicken and duty is recog- 
 nised, the first sounds of human fellowship are 
 distant and strange. A new land, a new sphere 
 of action, a new and greater faculty is discovered. 
 But it seems too late. " I have found a new land, 
 but I die." The soul is only passing through a 
 stage of advance. The goal of self-sacrifice is 
 gained. The royal robe is cast aside. The 
 Palace is forsaken for a cottage. The soul 
 loathes its secret joy, and retires that it may 
 perfect itself in love. There is none of the 
 
56 TENNYSON'S "PALACE OF ABT." 
 
 jealous Puritanism that malignantly denies to 
 others the pleasures it cannot appreciate ; there is 
 none of the despair of the wearied and sated 
 voluptuary who pronounces the world to be 
 vexation of spirit because he has wasted his 
 powers and misspent his life. Let the beautiful 
 Palace remain, that it may be open to all. 
 
 Yet pull not down my palace towers, that are 
 
 So lightly, beautifully built : 
 Perchance I may return with others there 
 
 When I have purged my guilt. 
 
THE PEOMETHEUS VINCTUS. 
 
 The vague sense of wonder and mystery which 
 some poetic representations produce may arise 
 from mere bewilderment of the understanding. 
 We should always give the poet credit for having 
 some better end in view. We should also assume 
 that he is sufficiently master of his art to know 
 that man's highest intelligence is the seat of true 
 sublimity, and that the mind reaches a loftier 
 mood when it fully takes in and comprehends a 
 definite object than when its vision is impeded by 
 encompassing mist and imagination usurps the 
 place of reason. The giant form of the Eastern 
 legend that grew on the eye of the astonished fisher- 
 man out of the cloud was more awful to behold than 
 the shapeless vapour that filled the space between 
 earth and heaven. A great generalization is more 
 sublime than the confusion of facts which it 
 reduces to order. We may hope that our admira- 
 tion for the " Prometheus Vinctus " would not be 
 lessened if it flowed no longer from the region and 
 
58 THE PROMETHEUS VINCTTTS. 
 
 the quality of the unknown. And it is also to 
 be assumed that we may safely confine ourselves 
 to the precise materials which the artist has pro- 
 vided for his special purpose. Out of an un- 
 limited and heterogeneous mass of myth and 
 legend he has taken a few clearly defined 
 characters for the construction of his drama. The 
 distinct relations in which those characters stand 
 to each other, as he has arranged them, would be 
 destroyed if we confused and encumbered our 
 memories with all the fables of Greek mythology 
 that have a nominal association with the subject. 
 The characters of Zeus and Prometheus, as they 
 are here presented to us, are the subject on which 
 we are to form a judgment, and not these 
 characters as described in the works of other 
 writers or in other writings of iEschylus. 
 
 The tragedy commences with a spectacle that 
 arrests and fixes our sympathies. Strength and 
 Force, two rugged giants representing the might of 
 Zeus, compel Vulcan, the representative of 
 mechanical skill, to fasten Prometheus to a 
 savage rock overhanging the ocean. Vulcan 
 shudders over his task, and bewails the necessity 
 under which he works; but his brutal masters 
 threaten him with a similar fate if he resists or 
 shows unwillingness. A deed of merciless torture 
 
THE PROMETHEUS VINCTUS. 59 
 
 is minutely described. The limbs of the prisoner 
 are riveted to the cliff. An iron wedge is driven 
 through his chest. Chains are strung around his 
 ribs till not a muscle can writhe. He endures 
 without a murmur or a struggle. The execu- 
 tioners depart with mocking insults, leaving him 
 to be scorched by the glaring sun, with no 
 possibility of rest, or change of posture, or inter- 
 mission of agony. Then he addresses himself 
 to the powers of inanimate nature — 
 
 Calm ether, winds whose nimble pinion quivers, 
 Cool gurgling founts that swell to mighty rivers,* 
 And multitudinous dimple of the sea, 
 And earth, of all the mother, and of me, 
 And circled sun beholding all things fair, 
 Behold what wrongs a god from gods I bear ! 
 
 See crushed with what pains, 
 Till millenniums have flown, 
 
 In dishonouring chains, 
 I must struggle alone : 
 
 For a new monarch reigns 
 
 With the blest near his throne. 
 Woe ! woe ! through an eternity of woe 
 The present throbs into the coming throe, 
 And endless night reveals no morning glow. 
 And yet what say I ? All things yet to be 
 Belonging to my chosen part I see. 
 I calculate my sorrows ere they rise ; 
 No unexpected loss can bring surprise. 
 He who foreknowing treads the path that fate 
 Bestrews with shivered hopes and burning hate, 
 
60 THE PROMETHEUS VINCTUS. 
 
 Should bear in silence — though to tell the pain, 
 Silence and words strive equally in vain. 
 I succoured mortals — this my one offence, 
 Those chains and tortures are the consequence. 
 The stolen spark of fire to earth I bring, 
 Of arts the teacher, and of joys the spring, ' 
 This deed and these intentions I repay, 
 Nailed to a rock, of sun and storms the prey. 
 
 (88-113.) 
 
 Strength, on the first appearance on the stage, 
 had explained, in words that would not sound 
 amiss from a modern cynic, that their object in 
 punishing Prometheus was that he — 
 
 Jove's sovereign power alone to serve might learn, 
 And cease to show a philanthropic turn. (10, 11.) 
 
 Or, as the lines might be rendered — 
 
 Might learn that fear of God is wisdom's plan, 
 Not dulled or weakened by the love of man. 
 
 This attempt to improve the lot of mortals was 
 an interference with an opposite purpose of Zeus, 
 as we are afterwards informed. The Ocean 
 nymphs come to Prometheus, in answer to his 
 cry, and lament the lawlessness of Zeus. He 
 assures them that the time will come when 
 circumstances will be wholly altered ; when Zeus 
 will eagerly peek his aid, and when that aid will 
 be gladly given. He further explains, at their 
 request, the events that terminated in his present 
 
THE PROMETHEUS VINCTUS. 61 
 
 disaster. A war had broken out in heaven among 
 the gods, some seeking to effect a revolution, and 
 to raise Zeus to the throne of Saturn ; others 
 striving to maintain the established order. Pro- 
 metheus (who throughout the play is character- 
 istically the advocate of counsel in antagonism to 
 brute force) knew that the victory would be won 
 by whichever side employed the devices of policy 
 and prudence. He first addressed himself to the 
 Titans, and advised them to adopt the means that 
 alone could succeed. They scornfully rejected 
 his proposal, and preferred to conquer by strength. 
 Prometheus, though (being a Titan himself) he 
 would have wished that the victory should be 
 with his kindred, yet choosing above all else that 
 he who used policy rather than prudence should 
 win the victory, next made overtures to Zeus, who 
 accepted his offer, and, by his aid, overthrew his 
 adversaries. The new monarch, in arranging his 
 kingdom, took no account of men, or rather was 
 planning to extirpate the race utterly, and 
 introduce some new creation. Prometheus alone 
 took their part, and frustrated the intentions of 
 Zeus, by conveying fire from heaven to them. 
 Pitying their miserable condition and abject fears 
 of death, he gave them the bright vision of hope to 
 flit between them and the grave, and engaged 
 
62 THE PROMETHEUS VINCTUS. 
 
 their thoughts with projects of varied improve- 
 ment. 
 
 The ills of man you've heard : I formed his mind, 
 
 And through the cloud of barb'rous ignorance 
 
 Diffused the beams of knowledge. I will speak, 
 
 Not taxing them with blame, but my own gifts 
 
 Displaying, and benevolence to them. 
 
 They saw indeed, they heard ; but what availed 
 
 Or sight, or sense of hearing, all things rolling 
 
 Like the unreal imagery of dreams, 
 
 In wild confusion mixed ? The lightsome wall 
 
 Of finer masonry, the raftered roof 
 
 They knew not ; but, like ants, still buried, delved 
 
 Deep in the earth, and scooped their sunless caves. 
 
 Unmarked the seasons changed, the biting winter, 
 
 The flower perfumed spring, the ripening summer 
 
 Fertile of fruits. At random all their works, 
 
 Till I instructed them to mark the stars, 
 
 Their rising, and, a harder science yet, 
 
 Their setting. The rich train of marshalled numbers 
 
 I taught them, and meet array of letters. 
 
 T' impress these precepts on their hearts I sent 
 
 Memory, the active mother of all wisdom. 
 
 I taught the patient steer to bear the yoke, 
 
 In all his toils joint-labourer with man. 
 
 By me the harnessed steed was trained to whirl 
 
 The rapid car, and grace the pride of wealth. 
 
 The tall barque, lightly bounding o'er the waves, 
 
 I taught its course, and winged its flying sail. 
 
 To man I gave these arts : with all my wisdom 
 
 Yet want I now one art, that useful art 
 
 To free myself from these afflicting chains. 
 
 (450-480.) Potter. 
 
THE PROMETHEUS VINCTUS. 63 
 
 Io, the victim of the love of Zeus and the 
 jealousy of Juno, comes on the scene and relates 
 her miserable story. Prometheus informs her 
 that eventually Zeus will seek to engage in an 
 amour which will be the cause of his dethrone- 
 ment if persisted in, inasmuch as the object of 
 his love was destined to bear a son who would 
 prove greater than his father. This secret 
 of fate was known to Prometheus only, and he 
 declares that he will never reveal it until after he 
 has been delivered from his bonds, which deliver- 
 ance was to be accomplished against the will of 
 Zeus by Eracles, a descendant of Io. After the 
 departure of Io the Oceanides protest against the 
 loves of the great with the lowly, and lament the 
 lot of those whom Zeus compels to his embrace. 
 Prometheus answers that the licentious desires of 
 Zeus will yet work his ruin. 
 
 Yet Zeus, albeit most absolute of will, 
 
 Shall turn to meekness,— such a marriage-rite 
 
 He holds in preparation, which anon 
 
 Shall thrust him headlong from his gerent seat 
 
 Adown the abysmal void, and so the curse 
 
 His father Chronos muttered in his fall, 
 
 As he fell from his ancient throne and cursed, 
 
 Shall be accomplished wholly. No escape 
 
 From all that ruin shall the filial Zeus 
 
 Find granted to him from any of his gods, 
 
 Unless "I teach him. I the refuge know, 
 
64 THE PROMETHEUS VINCTUS. 
 
 And I, the means. Now, therefore, let Trim sit 
 
 And hrave the imminent doom, and fix his faith 
 
 On his supernal noises, hurtling on 
 
 With restless hand the bolt that breathes out fire ; 
 
 For these things shall not help him, none of them, 
 
 Nor hinder his perdition when he falls 
 
 To shame, and lower than patience : such a foe 
 
 He doth himself prepare against himself, 
 
 A wonder of unconquerable hate, 
 
 An organizer of sublimer fire 
 
 Than glares in lightnings, and of grander sound 
 
 Than aught the thunder rolls, out thundering it, 
 
 With power to shatter in Poseidon's fist 
 
 The trident-spear which, while it plagues the sea, 
 
 Doth shake the shores around it. Ay, and Zeus, 
 
 Precipitated thus, shall learn at length 
 
 The difference betwixt rule and servitude. 
 
 (943-963.) Mrs. Browning. 
 
 Hermes now appears, bearing a command from 
 Zeus that Prometheus should at once clearly 
 explain what the nuptials were by means of which 
 he was destined to lose the sovereignty of heaven, 
 and threatening that if he refused to answer he 
 should be cast down to Tartarus, whence after a 
 long space of time he would be brought back to 
 his former position to suffer as before, with the 
 addition of a winged hound of Zeus — an eagle — 
 perpetually rending his body and feeding on his 
 liver. Prometheus replies with defiant scorn. 
 The Oceanides, though they beseech him to relent 
 
THE PROMETHEUS VINCTTTS. 65 
 
 and bend to necessity, yet, rather than desert him, 
 prefer to share his fate. The play concludes with 
 the description by Prometheus of the approaching 
 storm of divine wrath. 
 
 Truly bursts the doom on me ! 
 
 Earth is heaving like the sea, 
 
 And the thunder bellows by ; 
 
 And the lightning's fiery carls 
 
 Stream in clusters from the sky ; 
 
 And the whirlwind in its whirls 
 
 Sweeps the dust up ; and the blast 
 
 Of every wind is hurrying fast 
 
 With the rush of wild commotion, 
 
 Leaping each against his brother, 
 
 Mad to trample one another ; 
 
 And the sky is mixt with ocean, 
 
 In confusion reconciled : 
 
 Such a blast, with terror piled, 
 
 'Gainst me wings its rapid path, 
 
 Sent from Zeus to do his wrath, 
 
 Oh my dread mother ! oh thou firmament, 
 
 Rolling the common light of all, thou seest 
 
 What violent harms I most unjustly suffer. 
 
 (1116-1129.) 
 Mr. Chapman : Blackwood's Magazine, si. 740. 
 
 The impression left on our minds by the 
 perusal of this tragedy is one of intense and 
 lofty admiration for the divine hero who persists 
 in protecting the weak and helpless race of men 
 from the hate of a merciless tyrant by his own 
 
 5 
 
66 THE PROMETHEUS VINCTUS. 
 
 suffering. It would appear that his patronage was 
 able to baffle the might of Zeus, and that all the 
 tortures imposed on him were chiefly intended to 
 force him to resign his guardianship and abandon 
 men to destruction. He maintains his ground 
 with unflinching resolution, and presents the 
 grandest instance of devotion to duty that the 
 mind can conceive. It need never have occurred 
 to us that the poet had any other aim than 
 this. Freedom, confronting and daring tyranny, 
 was assuredly a subject worthy of and befitting 
 the genius of Greece. It satisfied the co- 
 temporaries of iEschylus. It fails, however, to 
 satisfy our more scrupulous age. The chief 
 obstacle, it is said, to the satisfactory interpretation 
 of the play arises from the difficulty of understand- 
 ing how Prometheus was guilty and Zeus justified. 
 No work was ever written that would not present 
 an insuperable difficulty to its comprehension if 
 we started with the assumption that it does not 
 mean what it says, but something quite opposite. 
 Why should we conclude that, notwithstanding 
 his magnanimous innocence, Prometheus was 
 guilty ? "Why should we settle in our minds that 
 Zeus must be justified in spite of his manifest 
 injustice and tyranny ? The reason seems to be 
 that Zeus is a god and Prometheus a man, and that 
 
THE PKOMETHEUS VINCTUS. 67 
 
 a god by his nature must be right. Miiller states 
 it thus : " Tragedy," he says, " could not consist in 
 a conflict between the free will of man and 
 omnipotent fate." But Prometheus is not a man, 
 nor is Zeus either omnipotent himself nor has 
 he omnipotent fate on his side. The implied 
 imputation of blasphemy or profanity is quite in- 
 adminsible. We can join equally in the protests 
 and defiances of Prometheus or the delegated 
 insults and threats of Zeus without exposing our- 
 selves to the charge of formal impiety. Pro- 
 metheus is a god as well as Zeus. We are 
 reminded of this with a frequency that is 
 suggestive of a purpose : while the early parts of 
 the play in which the passages occur give them the 
 force of a premise to an intended conclusion. 
 Vulcan (in lines 14, 15) says : 
 
 But I am out of heart a kindred god 
 
 To bind perforce to this storm-beaten cleft. 
 
 Again (line 29) : 
 
 A god, thou didst not fear the wrath of gods. 
 
 Strength, addressing Vulcan, makes the same 
 admission (line 37) : 
 
 A god, god-hated, dost thou not abhor ? 
 
 Prometheus himself founds his claim to 
 
 5—2 
 
68 THE PKOMETHEUS VINCTUS. 
 
 sympathy from the powers of nature on his 
 being a god (line 92) : 
 
 Behold what things a god from gods I suffer. 
 
 Again, he says to the approaching Oceanides : 
 
 Look on me prisoned, an ill-fortuned god. 
 
 The conflict, then, is not between god and man, 
 but between a god of power and a god of love ; 
 and, in its first stage, the god of love is crushed 
 and disgraced. But Zeus is not omnipotent, and 
 his triumph is to be short-lived. Prometheus 
 holds the key of destiny in his hands, and it is 
 admitted that the doom of the dynasty of Zeus 
 hangs on his consent or refusal to unlock the 
 mystery. The Oceanides are said to give their 
 verdict against Prometheus because during his 
 conference with Hermes (line 972) they say : 
 
 They who reverence Nemesis are wise. 
 
 The critics to whom I am now referring give 
 as the meaning of this line that " they only are 
 sane and righteous who bow to necessity and 
 accept the law of their superiors." This is simply 
 a very serious mistranslation. They are " wise," 
 the text says, who reverence Adrasteia or Nemesis. 
 But there is a higher and a lower wisdom as there is 
 a higher and a lower Nemesis. Prometheus, the 
 
THE PROMETHEUS VINCTUS. 69 
 
 far-seeing one, sees the higher wisdom and the 
 higher Nemesis, and Zeus, the blind tyrant, sees 
 only the lower. The tender, sympathetic Ocean 
 nymphs, shocked at the appalling threats of divine 
 fury hurled by Hermes at their favourite, beseech 
 him in their momentary terror to yield, and save 
 himself. The wisdom they refer to is the wisdom 
 of self-preservation. The meaning of this counsel 
 was that to escape the fury of Zeus he should 
 surrender the human race to it. This would be 
 only escaping an immediate and temporary 
 Nemesis — the Nemesis that attends well-doing, 
 and incurring the remote and eternal Nemesis — 
 the Nemesis of evil-doing, which impended over 
 Zeus, and would finally overwhelm in endless 
 ruin him and all who abetted him in his arbitrary 
 rule. It is Zeus, then, and not Prometheus, who 
 acts unwisely as well as cruelly in striving 
 against an inevitable fate. All the moral 
 superiority is with the suffering Titan. " I know," 
 he says in the commencement of the play, " that 
 Zeus is harsh and makes right depend on his 
 own will, but for all that he shall be hereafter 
 softened in purpose when he shall be crushed as I 
 am now: and, after quelling bis ruthless rage, 
 with eagerness, at some future day, shall he come 
 into league and friendship with me that shall 
 
70 THE PROMETHEUS VINCTUS. 
 
 eagerly welcome his advances." (194 — 200.) He 
 cannot submit to wrongful tyranny, though 
 triumphant, but he declares his readiness to 
 forgive the tyrant when his hour of destruction 
 comes, though in the meantime he shall have 
 endured all the pangs and tortures that vengeance 
 can devise. On the other hand, Zeus, though he 
 knows that his supremacy depends on the will of 
 Prometheus, and that he must at last have to sue 
 him for deliverance, cannot resort to conciliatory 
 means, cannot bring himself to tolerate his victim, 
 cannot refrain from savage insults and violence to 
 the hated god who has resisted his self-asserted 
 omnipotence. The Oceanides, though in their 
 weak pity they would advise submission, prefer 
 for themselves to descend to Tartarus with Pro- 
 metheus rather than dwell on an earth governed 
 by Zeus. 
 
 If the object of iEschylus were to enforce on 
 his countrymen hatred of human tyrants by the 
 description of a heavenly despot, an interpreta- 
 tion which Grote prefers to the forcible methods 
 employed to bring the poet into harmony with 
 modern religious ideas (vol. 1, p. 37, note), and an 
 interpretation which, though not the primary one, 
 is certainly involved in it, it is obvious that the 
 
THE PKOMETHEUS VINCTUS. 71 
 
 insistence on equality of godhead is readily trans- 
 missible to the human sphere. 
 
 Behold what wrongs a man from men I suffer 
 
 implies as powerful an argument as when the pro- 
 position deals with the immortals. The rack and 
 the throne contain men. The disputes of men, 
 sovereigns, or serfs, are not of classes, or different 
 orders of being, but of rigbts and wrongs. 
 
 The difficulty of the play, as we are now con- 
 sidering it, does not lie in itself, but in reconciling 
 it with current beliefs. That is, the difficulty is 
 not one of comprehension, but of acceptance. 
 There is an obvious meaning, but we do not wish 
 to admit it. Zeus is a tyrant, and it jars upon 
 us to admit that a god can be a tyrant. Even after 
 we have shown that Prometheus was a god also, 
 and was therefore justifiable in his opposition, we, 
 who are only mortal men, feel that we have 
 no right to imitate him; and, if we cannot 
 imitate, we dare not openly approve. Though the 
 gods resist each other, men must look in silent 
 reverence on a scene beyond their comprehension. 
 But, though we cannot assume the rank of gods, 
 and take our place in the war against Zeus, we can 
 take the alternative method and deny — which was 
 the real meaning of iEschylus — that Zeus was a 
 
72 THE PROMETHEUS VINCTUS. 
 
 god. Zeus was a god, and therefore could not 
 possibly be in the wrong, is the argument of 
 superstitious orthodoxy. The true argument is, 
 Zeus was wrong, and therefore he could not be a 
 god. This is the logic of Christianity. The 
 greatest personage of the Hebrew race, and the 
 father of all believers, laid it down as a funda- 
 mental axiom that the Being who rules the world 
 is to be discerned by his possession of a quality 
 which He created man capable of discerning. 
 " Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right ¥' 
 (Gen. xviii. 25). The office of universal ruler 
 implies the indispensable presence of justice, and 
 man is qualified to judge whether it is present or 
 not. The being who has not justice, call him by 
 what sacred name you may, is not ruler of all the 
 earth. The greatest personage in the Christian 
 Church refers to the same great rule as one of final 
 and irreversible appeal. Eeplying to an imputation 
 on God's righteousness, he says : This cannot be 
 true, for, if it were, God would be unjust, and 
 then, how could He judge the world ? (Eom. iii. 6). 
 We must not conceive an unjust God. Whatever 
 is unjust is not God. 
 
 All through the drama there is an older order 
 of things alluded to on which the rule of Zeus is 
 an encroaching and irregular usurpation. The 
 
THE PROMETHEUS VINCTUS. 73 
 
 empire of Zeus is new and marked by the in- 
 solence of novelty. Vulcan says : 
 
 The heart of Zeus is hard to be entreated, 
 
 And every one is harsh who newly reigns. (34, 35.) 
 
 Such ignominious chains 
 This new king of the blest 
 Invents for me. (95.) 
 
 Know thyself and conform to measures new, 
 For a new tyrant reigns among the gods. (317.) 
 
 With him who newly fills the sovereign throne. (397.) 
 
 Who else than I among these upstart gods 
 Portioned to each his fit prerogative ? (448.) 
 
 Prometheus is not a mouther of sedition. He 
 represents the ancient system on which the 
 arbitrary government of Zeus is explicitly said to 
 be an unconstitutional innovation (156). Accord- 
 ing to the ancient order he is the friend and 
 benefactor of man. The belief had become 
 universal in the Pagan world that the gods were 
 the enemies of mankind. If a man had a con- 
 tinued course of good fortune, his friends advised 
 him to undergo some voluntary loss in order to 
 appease the envy of the gods, who else would 
 visit him with some terrible calamity. This idea 
 was the parent of superstition. Men served the 
 gods only from fear ; and as fear is selfish, seeking 
 
74 THE PROMETHEUS VINCTUS. 
 
 personal safety only, and regards power and not 
 moral qualities as the object of its services, the 
 gods became monsters of vice, and their wor- 
 shippers served them with sincere devotion. The 
 man who would practise virtue must be an un- 
 believer in the popular deities. Prometheus is 
 the restorer of the old order. In him the divine 
 foresight, which is really the movable centre of 
 omniscience, the wisdom gathered from the con- 
 verging lines of the two eternities, is brought into 
 lucid distinctness from the near-sighted prudence 
 that sees in one direction only, and there only to 
 the length of one's own shadow. When Strength 
 has bound him to the rock, he addresses him with 
 the brutal taunt : — 
 
 There now insult and robbing the immortals 
 
 Bestow their rights on creatures of a day. 
 
 Can dying men lighten thy freight of pains ? 
 
 Falsely the gods miscall thee the Foreseer, 
 
 Thy very self hast need of a Foreseer 
 
 To loose the webs of Strength's superior art. (82-86.) 
 
 The rude minds of the instruments of despotism 
 often catch the motives that inspire their employers 
 and reflect them with the undisguised triumph 
 of malevolence. The immortals despised men 
 because they were mortal. Why should the sun 
 shine for wretches creeping to their graves 1 This 
 
THE PROMETHEUS VINCTUS. 75 
 
 is the unspoken argument of the gods who dwelt 
 on the clouds that exhaled from a suffering and 
 struggling world. We are happy and the world 
 of men is miserable, why should a drop from our 
 cup of joy be lost on that arid sand ? 
 
 Prometheus is the champion of wisdom against 
 prudence, of counsel against strength, of love 
 against hate, of justice against wrong, of religion 
 against superstition, of the eternal against the 
 temporal. 
 
 There are three distinct ideas of deity in the 
 scheme of theology or divine government which 
 iEschylus exhibits. There is the god of an 
 arbitrary, will delighting in men's agonies, ruling 
 by force, controlling by fear, confining men to 
 dark and joyless lives, because kindness begets 
 happiness, and happiness rouses the buoyant 
 spirit of independence. Zeus delights to reign 
 over abject cowering slaves, whose souls never 
 have a moment's respite from narrow care, whose 
 bodily wants never leave the soul at liberty. In 
 conformity with this policy of rule is his policy of 
 repression. He crushes with bodily pains and 
 tries to extinguish the soul's expansion by 
 evaporating it in the fires of torture. Vulcan 
 brings out the contrast : — 
 
76 THE PROMETHEUS VINCTUS. 
 
 High-minded son of right-advising Themis, 
 I, indisposed to act as thou to suffer, 
 Must nail thy body to this savage peak, 
 • "Where never man nor voice of man shall come 
 To tell thee that thou sufferest not in vain. (18-20.) 
 
 Far away in the past of history, and in the 
 soul's region of faith, there reigns a supreme God, 
 the Creator of the universe, who is invisible save 
 to Prometheus. He seems overthrown and un- 
 crowned now because he meets force not by force, 
 but by the silent action of a constructive principle. 
 To this God, under the name of destiny or retri- 
 bution, Prometheus appeals. He does not mean 
 the blind destiny of tyrannic authority stamping 
 its incoherent caprice on a pliant world, but the 
 destiny of cause and corresponding consequence, 
 of free action and fitting result, of tilth and 
 produce, all controlled by justice and modified by 
 mercy. 
 
 In depicting Zeus, iEschylus did not refer to 
 the ruler of the gods, as his character was con- 
 ceived by good and wise men. He described the 
 popular Zeus, who personified human vices on a 
 divine scale. There were two distinct cotem- 
 poraneous ideas of the same god. One was the 
 god of the lower air vexed by storms ; the other 
 was the god of the empyrean, the calm, eternal 
 wisdom that surrounds the universe and contains 
 
THE PROMETHEUS VINCTTJS. 77 
 
 it, and is slowly reducing it to its own ordered 
 peace. Both those gods were called Zeus. One 
 was the god of tyrants, the torturer of men and 
 defiler of women; the other was the Zeus of 
 patriots and philosophers, the wise and silent 
 distributor of justice, slow in operation because 
 the result is to last for ever. It is to this Zeus 
 that Prometheus appeals against his enemy. He 
 does not appeal to him by name, because he is 
 himself the true Zeus, entering into the struggle for 
 the sake of man and enduring injustice. The 
 persecuting Zeus is a usurper upheld by usurpers 
 and men of crime and violence. The Titans 
 failed to dethrone him, because they fought him 
 with strength against strength and disdained the 
 methods of wisdom. 
 
 Our experience in later ages is the same as that 
 of former men. Power, modified it may be in 
 some subtle way, but still power, rules. The 
 crashing thunderbolt is forged by modern Vulcans 
 into a thousand delicate instruments of torture or 
 destruction. Save to the farseeing there is no 
 trace of the fatherhood of God upon earth. The 
 good are oppressed, the weak suffer, the toilers 
 are unrecompensed. The' cry of fear or anguish 
 to heaven meets no response save in the hidden 
 soul and in the promise of a future redemption. If 
 
78 THE PROMETHEUS VINCTTTS. 
 
 we were to judge of the god that rules from the 
 results of his government, we must conclude that 
 he is the enemy of men. The best policy would 
 be to recognise him practically in this character 
 and worship him accordingly. To serve him by 
 lofty deeds of virtue and love for men is the most 
 certain way to provoke his hatred. It is best 
 therefore to natter and imitate him, to seek our 
 own ease and happiness, and regard our fellow- 
 men as he regards the whole race. To build 
 gorgeous shrines to him, to elaborate and multiply 
 ceremonies on the condition of receiving wealth 
 from him to be used selfishly, and power to 
 be employed after his model, is wise. It is, 
 moreover, true religion ; and anyone offering a 
 different worship is profane and impious ; and he 
 should be made to suffer under the common hate 
 of god and man. So might we speak now, and 
 so might a Greek tragedian describe the popular 
 creed of his day. It is the religion of prudence 
 and expediency, and he who looks beyond what is 
 expedient is certain to stumble against the actual. 
 The god we worship is a god of war, and we 
 chant his praises as such. When nations go to 
 war with each other they both sing Te Deums to 
 the same god, and it is clearly understood that if 
 either of them trusted to right, and acting on 
 
THE PROMETHEUS VINCTUS. 79 
 
 the principle that the battle is not to the strong, 
 neglected to accumulate arms of destruction and 
 to acquire skill in the use of them, god would 
 desert the nation that trusted in righteousness 
 and go over to the nation with strong battalions. 
 No greater insult could be offered to this god than 
 to seek to please him and win his favour by 
 goodness or unselfishness. He would instantly 
 join his true worshippers against such a man, and 
 preside over them while they destroyed him. If, 
 on the other hand, one were to assert that this 
 god is a tyrant and a god of this world, and a 
 friend of tyrants and men of this world — a god 
 of pomp and show and the friend of men of pomp 
 and show — a god who despises the poor, and the 
 honest and sincere, and a friend of those who 
 despise the poor and the honest and sincere — a 
 god who abhors independence and love of truth, 
 and the favourer of all who abhor independence 
 and love of truth; — if one were to assert this, 
 all the worshippers of this god would rise in 
 indignation and pronounce him an atheist and 
 unfit to inhabit the earth. It was prudent, 
 therefore, of iEschylus to speak not in his 
 own person, but to direct against itself the awe 
 in which the mere name of God is held. 
 
 On the other hand, there is a God whom the 
 
80 THE PROMETHEUS VINCTUS. 
 
 friendless, and the unfortunate, the weary and the 
 heavy-laden, call upon; whom lovers of men, and 
 teachers and liberators of men, invoke when they 
 begin their labours, and look to with undimmed 
 devotion from the darkness of their failure. He 
 does not come to their relief ; He does not open 
 the prison door, nor stay the uplifted sword, nor 
 extinguish the encircling flame. Yet in every age 
 there have been men who, with strength and force 
 and the executioner as their doom, cling to this 
 God, and feel an unquenchable certainty that in 
 good time He will deliver them. Would it not be 
 an act of reverence towards this God of justice 
 and love, if some iEschylus were to expose the 
 false and unjust god as having no real existence, 
 as being only a shadow projected from man's base 
 nature on the walls of heaven and as obscuring 
 from men's view the vision of its true In- 
 habitant ? 
 
 It is argued that Zeus cannot be intended to 
 appear as a tyrant by iEschylus, because in his 
 other tragedies he depicts Zeus as the sovereign 
 god of justice and goodness. This is only in- 
 contestable evidence that he had two distinct 
 characters of Zeus in his mind, one true and 
 one false. 
 
 Another mode of evading the conclusion to 
 
THE PROMETHEUS VINCTUS. 81 
 
 which this play leads is the supposition that it 
 is one of a trilogy, and that the concluding drama 
 justifies the conduct of Zeus and shows Prometheus 
 to have been in error. This is pure supposition. 
 There is no ground for supposing that this play is 
 not perfect in itself. We feel, moreover, that if 
 the conduct of Zeus could be reconciled with 
 justice, it can only be by an irreparable injury to 
 justice. But there is no room for this supposition. 
 From the positions laid down in this drama 
 any consistent conclusion arrived at must be in 
 justification of Prometheus. He knew that Zeus 
 would engage in an intrigue with a female des- 
 tined to bear a son greater than his father. This 
 is the knowledge which Zeus seeks from him and 
 which he refuses to render. Here is the point in 
 the contest which the tragedy leaves undecided. 
 But it was known from current mythology that 
 the decision must be in favour of Prometheus, 
 and that his character must come forth loftier 
 and purer, while Zeus must appear baffled and 
 humiliated. Eracles slew the vulture or eagle 
 that preyed on Prometheus, who then, returning 
 good for evil, warned Zeus of his danger, as he 
 had declared he would be ready to do. The story 
 ends in the delivery of Prometheus and Thetisi 
 the objects of the passions of Zeus, who is thus 
 
 6 
 
82 THE PKOMETHETTS VINCTUS. 
 
 checked in his cruelty and his lust. Prometheus 
 comes forth the far superior god. 
 
 But it could not have heen the purpose of 
 iEschylus to conclude the history while in fact its 
 real matter was not concluded. The time had not 
 come for Prometheus to triumph — nor has it come 
 yet. There is a true and a false Jehovah, as there 
 was a true and a false Zeus. 
 
THE PKOMETHETTS OF AESCHYLUS AND 
 OF SHELLEY. 
 
 In attempting to describe the relation which the 
 " Prometheus Unbound " of Shelley bears to the 
 "Prometheus Bound" of iEschylus we are impeded 
 rather than expedited by the English poet's own 
 declaration of his purpose. iEschylus exhibited 
 the drama of human history in a contest between 
 an unjust god, the hater of men, and a just god, 
 the lover of men, in which the lover of men is 
 vanquished and hurled to the nethermost hell, 
 bearing with him the certain knowledge that in 
 the inevitable development of events his doom 
 must be reversed, and his victor and torturer 
 changed into his suppliant and subject. This was 
 the constitution of heavenly empire by which the 
 condition of earth was explained and illustrated. 
 Men were taught to struggle and to endure for the 
 right, and to forget their sufferings, or to glory 
 because of them in the thought that they were 
 sharing the voluntary and mediatory sorrows of a 
 
 6—2 
 
84 THE PROMETHEUS OF 
 
 righteous God. There was no longer adversity in 
 defeat, nor humiliation in pain. The great and 
 decisive moral victory of virtue over vice was 
 made certain and brought nearer by each succes- 
 sive material victory of vice over virtue. The 
 extent to which this representation has succeeded 
 in producing, or preparing the way for, whatever 
 amount of attained liberty or heroic motive exists 
 in the world can scarcely be over-estimated. But 
 manifestly until a time came when light and 
 justice were so fixed, not only in human institu- 
 tions, but in the universal soul of man, as that a 
 return to superstition and tyranny was impossible, 
 it was required imperatively that the story should 
 remain unfinished. That Prometheus may do his 
 work his 'bondage must continue. In later days 
 the degree in which Christianity has proved a 
 failure is mainly owing to the premature substitu- 
 tion of a triumphant for a crucified Christ. A 
 perfectly unauthorized theory has been adopted 
 that iEschylus wrote a second drama, in which 
 Prometheus submits and is reconciled to Jupiter. 
 This second drama, if it existed, would obliterate 
 the first, and so far as the belief in its ever having 
 existed prevails, it succeeds in so doing. Shelley 
 wrote his "Prometheus Unbound" in rivalry to this 
 imaginary "Prometheus Unbound" of iEschylus. 
 
^SCHYLUS AND OF SHELLEY. 85 
 
 " He was averse," he says in his preface, " from a 
 catastrophe so feeble as that of reconciling the 
 champion with the oppressor of mankind. The 
 moral interest of the fable, which is so powerfully 
 sustained by the sufferings and endurance of 
 Prometheus, would be annihilated if we could 
 conceive of him as unsaying his high language 
 and quailing before his successful and perfidious 
 adversary." He might have rested content with 
 the fact that if the supplementary drama had ever 
 been written, it had disappeared in the struggle for 
 immortality, and left the whole field to a survivor 
 that more fitly expressed the nature, the wants, 
 and the aspirations of man. Or he might have 
 followed the direction indicated in the "Prometheus 
 Bound," and produced a drama in which Jupiter 
 is compelled to submit to Prometheus. " I know 
 that Jupiter is harsh," the Prometheus of iEschylus 
 says, " and makes justice depend on his own 
 arbitrary will, but the time will come when, 
 crushed as I am now, he will quell his rage and 
 seek my friendship ; and when that time comes I 
 will gladly meet his advances." On the founda- 
 tion, therefore, of the "Prometheus Bound," any 
 sequel to it must have described Jupiter as sub- 
 mitting to Prometheus, and not Prometheus as 
 submitting to Jupiter — evil as yielding to good, 
 
86 THE PROMETHEUS OF 
 
 and not good to evil. But Shelley so much mis- 
 conceived iEschylus, because of this imaginary 
 drama, that he formally rejects him as a guide. 
 " Should I live," he says, " to accomplish what I 
 purpose, that is, produce a systematical history of 
 what appear to me to be the genuine elements of 
 human society, let not the advocates of injustice 
 and superstition flatter themselves that I should 
 take iEschylus rather than Plato as my model." 
 But he had another immediate motive, which 
 weighed more with him than any other, and would 
 by itself have urged him to his task. He thought 
 that the work of Prometheus was accomplished, 
 and that the time for his deliverance was at hand. 
 He wrote to hasten and help its advent. He 
 believed that the description of the unbinding of 
 Prometheus would affect the miuds of men more 
 powerfully than the picture of his sufferings. " The 
 great writers of our own age," he says, " are, we have 
 reason to suppose, the companions and forerunners 
 of some unimagined change in our social condition, 
 or the opinions which cement it. The cloud of 
 mind is discharging its collected lightning, and the 
 equilibrium between institutions and opinions is 
 now restoring, or is about to be restored." Shelley 
 unbound Prometheus to hasten and illustrate 
 the unbinding of mankind. The feeling that 
 
.^SCHYLUS AND OF SHELLEY. 87 
 
 Prometheus ought not to have suffered at all was 
 so strong with him that he exulted in obliterating 
 at once the traces of the sorrow and of the tyranny 
 that imposed it. But in this course, he ran counter 
 to human history and human nature. 
 
 Here we have one fundamental difference 
 between iEschylus and Shelley. iEschylus wrote 
 what he intended to be a complete and finished 
 work. That fate seemed to hang suspended, and 
 the superstructure of history was made to stand 
 poised on a crisis, constituted its completeness. 
 It arrested the eyes and touched the hearts of men, 
 just because it was unfinished. It was morally com- 
 plete because it was artistically incomplete. The 
 only preparation for unbinding Prometheus would 
 be by unbinding man : but the final unbinding of 
 man depends on Prometheus being left bound. 
 Shelley, in his eager passion, unbound Prometheus 
 dramatically, in order that he might aid thus in 
 loosening man's religious and political chains. 
 But in precipitating the end he in reality destroyed 
 the means. The true sequel to the drama of 
 iEschylus is not the drama of a religious revolution, 
 but an actual religious revolution. The design it 
 has in view is the enthronement of a god of justice 
 in men's hearts, instead of a god of tyranny and 
 cruelty. This is carried out not by representing the 
 
88 THE PROMETHEUS OF 
 
 god of justice as omnipotent and happy, but by 
 representing him as vanquished, tortured, and 
 reviled. Hatred of injustice is the strong wine 
 under whose divine intoxication mankind have 
 fought their greatest battles for freedom and light. 
 iEschylus appeals to this principle. Prometheus 
 was to be freed only in proportion as men made 
 him their model while he hung on the rock. He 
 became unbound by remaining bound. He was 
 freed by men coming to his side and sharing his 
 wrongs with him until no authorized doer of wrong 
 existed on earth or was shadowed on heaven. 
 Prometheus seeks deliverance for men, not for 
 himself; and to deliver him before men were 
 delivered would render all his endeavours and 
 sufferings vain. He is represented as suffering 
 that men may not be ashamed to suffer for the 
 right. He continues impaled at the bidding of a 
 tyrant, that earth may loathe tyrants and resist 
 them, even at the risk and for the glory of being 
 impaled with him. Shelley saw clearly enough 
 that the submission and reconcilement of Pro- 
 metheus to Jupiter would destroy all the Titan's 
 power over mankind, and give the final victory to 
 vice. If a throne were erected to him by the side 
 of the throne of Jupiter, and if the proud rulers "of 
 the world honoured him and sacrificed to him, he 
 would be the accomplice of Jupiter. This was 
 
^SCHTLUS AOT> OF SHELLEY. 89 
 
 what the asserters of the lost drama of iEschylus 
 endeavoured to effect. Something like this has 
 been done in the case of Christ. He came to 
 dispost the bloodthirsty idol-god whom the 
 degenerate Jews had put in the place of the just 
 and merciful Jehovah. He came to bring healing 
 to the broken-hearted, deliverance to the captive, 
 liberty to the bruised. This could be done only 
 by incurring the wrath and vengeance of the god 
 of tyrants. But it was to be the work, not of a 
 day, or an age, or a man ; it was to be the work of 
 successive ages, and successive lines of devoted 
 men. To encourage men through all time to 
 persist in doing this work, and knowing that the 
 inevitable accompaniment of this work must be 
 suffering and sorrow, He proposes Himself to the 
 world as characteristically the sufferer and the man 
 of sorrows. He consorted with the lost and the 
 despised, and He raised the sharp outline of the 
 Cross on every elevation to which his followers 
 might aspire. But rich men took Him down from 
 the Cross, and kings and princes soon patronized 
 Him, and ruled in His name. This was what 
 awoke Shelley's indignation, and drove him to 
 attempt the overthrow of all religion, seeing that 
 it was always made the buttress of unjust dominion. 
 In liberating Prometheus, his intention was to set 
 man free. But is his plan the right one ? The 
 
90 THE PROMETHEUS OF 
 
 object is to induce men to surrender somewhat to 
 each other; to honour each other: to bear each 
 other's burthens. How is this to be done ? How 
 are we to be taught to be heroes, not in the storm 
 of the battle-field or the agony of the wreck only, 
 but in the mart, and at the hearth, and in the 
 social arena ? Under what king shall we be able 
 to conquer the terrors and seductions of earth by 
 conquering self ? Christ was put before the minds 
 of the early Christians as emphatically Christ 
 crucified. Just as emphatically and persistently is 
 He now displayed as Christ glorified, enthroned, 
 and triumphant. Which Christ produced the 
 greatest effects on the minds of men — the Christ 
 who was lifted on the cross and drew all men unto 
 Him, or the Christ who has dignities and salaries to 
 bestow ? ]STo doubt the later Christ produces a 
 greater and wider effect, but it is in exact opposi- 
 tion to the work of the earlier Christ. Let us 
 compare the last scene of the Prometheus of 
 iEschylus with that of the Prometheus of Shelley. 
 
 In deed, and no longer in word, the earth reels, and the 
 thunder bellows past us, and lightning flashes glare, and 
 hurricane blasts whirl the dust, and winds battle with 
 winds, and heaven struggles with the deep. All this, 
 driving panic to my soul, descends on me from Jove. 0, 
 dread majesty of my mother earth ! O, ether, that 
 spreadest light, a common blessing ! you see what wrongs 
 I unjustly suffer. 
 
^SCHYLUS AND OF SHELLEY. 91 
 
 Those are the words of the bound Prometheus as 
 he is about to be cast into Tartarus. Shelley's Pro- 
 metheus, after he has been delivered by Hercules, 
 surveys the prospect that opens before hirn : — 
 
 There is a cave, 
 All overgrown with trailing odorous plants, 
 Which curtain out the day with leaves and flowers, 
 And paved with veined emerald, and a fountain 
 Leaps in the midst with an awakening sound. 
 
 And there is heard the ever- moving air, 
 
 Whispering without from tree to tree, and birds, 
 
 And bees ; and all around are mossy seats, 
 
 And the rough walls are clothed with long soft grass ; 
 
 A simple dwelling, which shall be our own ; 
 
 Where we will sit and talk of time and change, 
 
 As the world ebbs and flows, ourselves unchanged. 
 
 And hither come, sped on the charmed winds, . . . 
 
 The echoes of the human world, which tell 
 
 Of the low voice of love, almost unheard, 
 
 And dove-eyed pity's murmured pain, and music, 
 
 Itself the echo of the heart, and all 
 
 That tempers or improves man's life, now free. 
 
 This is a description of regenerated society. It 
 is in keeping with the tenderness of Shelley's 
 genius that he should substitute those soft scenes 
 of pathetic home affection, as affording a greater 
 stimulus to men pining for rest, than could be 
 supplied by the sight of their tortured and defiant 
 champion. The scene presents Shelley's idea of 
 
92 THE PKOMETHEUS OF 
 
 the end which Prometheus sought to gain for men 
 by the sacrifice of himself. Shelley would gain 
 this end merely by describing its charms, as if all 
 that the world sought was equal happiness. He 
 made the deep mistake, and it is strikingly 
 characteristic of him, that the strongest passion of 
 the soul is philanthropy. Prometheus represents 
 man, Asia, love or beauty. The very picture of 
 the happiness that follows their union will remove 
 all need for suffering Titans in the future. So 
 Shelley reasoned. He forgot that society is saved, 
 not by the readiness of the multitude to be happy, 
 but by the willingness of each man to surrender 
 his propensity to monopolize happiness, and that 
 this seemingly easy result requires the example 
 of a god suffering for all, and inspiring a few to 
 dare and endure for others in preference to en- 
 joying for themselves. There is no return to 
 innocence for the individual or the race. The 
 golden age that is to come must come from the 
 crucible. Long hence, if ever, shall we be able to 
 change our Good Friday into a feast day. 
 
 The typical character of Shelley's Prometheus, 
 the identification of the champion with the race, 
 not only suggested to him the composition of the 
 drama, but has affected every part of its structure. 
 The Prometheus of iEschylus is a person distinct 
 
^SCHYLUS AND OF SHELLEY. 93 
 
 and isolated, suffering persecution at the hands of 
 a personal tyrant. The whole occurrence is with- 
 out us. We see one whose virtues we revere, 
 whose sorrows we pity and resent. There is no 
 taint of reflected self-interest in our compassion or 
 our indignation. We feel for another, who suffers 
 wrongfully, and we are disciplined to feel for all 
 others who suffer wrongfully. The humanity of 
 Shelley's Prometheus is so representatively depicted 
 that his sorrows tend to beget in us that most 
 demoralizing and emasculating of all emotions — 
 self-pity. There is a plaintive self-consciousness in 
 his lamentations that is signally absent from the 
 proud utterances, of the Titan of the Greek poem. 
 Those lines in the opening address to Jupiter — 
 
 The wingless, crawling hours, one among whom — 
 As some dark Priest hales the reluctant victim — 
 Shall drag thee, cruel King, to kiss the blood 
 From these pale feet — 
 
 would never have been spoken by the Prometheus 
 of iEschylus. 
 
 The sufferings of the hero of the Greek drama 
 are physical. His bodily tortures are set before us 
 almost obtrusively, at the very commencement of 
 the tragedy, and we never forget to the end that 
 one torn by pangs of nerve and sinew is speaking. 
 In this way our sympathies are drawn out of us 
 
94 THE PROMETHEUS OF 
 
 to their proper object. The sufferings of Shelley's 
 Prometheus are mainly mental. Even when 
 physical tortures are described, they are so 
 mingled with elemental impersonations that our 
 sense of compassion grows confused. 
 
 The crawling glaciers pierce me with the spears 
 
 Of their moon-freezing crystals ; the bright chains 
 
 Eat with their burning cold into my bones. 
 
 Heaven's wingecl hound, polluting from thy lips 
 
 His beak in poison not his own, tears up 
 
 My heart ; and shapeless sights come wandering by, 
 
 The ghastly people of the realm of dream, 
 
 Mocking me : and the Earthquake fiends are charged 
 
 To wrench the rivets from my quivering wounds 
 
 When the rocks split and close again behind : 
 
 While from their loud abysses howling throng 
 
 The genii of the storm, urging the rage 
 
 Of whirlwind, and afflict me with keen hail. 
 
 When Mercury calls the furies to punish the 
 refusal to render up the secret that affects Jupiter, 
 we only read of passions and affections that exclude 
 the idea of personality aud disallow dramatic 
 interest. 
 
 We are ministers of pain and fear, 
 And disappointment, and mistrust, and hate, 
 And clinging crime ; and as lean dogs pursue 
 Through wood and lake some struck and sobbing fawn, 
 We track all things that weep, and bleed, and live, 
 When the great King betrays them to our will. 
 
^SCHYLUS AND OP SHELLEY. 95 
 
 As from the rose which the pale priestess kneels 
 To gather for her festal crown of flowers 
 The aerial crimson falls, flushing her cheek, 
 So from our victim's destined agony 
 The shade which is our form invests us round, 
 Else we are shapeless as our mother Night. 
 
 Of the same character is the representation of 
 the worse than failure of all previous efforts to set 
 right the errors and crimes of societies : 
 
 Dost thou boast the clear knowledge thou waken'dst for 
 
 man ! 
 Then was kindled within him a thirst which outran 
 Those perishing waters ; a thirst of fierce fever, 
 Hope, love, doubt, desire, which consume him for ever. 
 
 One came forth of gentle worth 
 Smiling on the sanguine earth : 
 His words outlived him, like swift poison 
 
 Withering up truth, peace, and pity. 
 Look ! where rouad the wide horizon 
 
 Many a million-peopled city 
 Vomits smoke in the bright air. 
 Mark that outcry of despair ! 
 'Tis his mild and gentle ghost 
 
 Wailing for the faith he kindled. 
 
 Eemit the anguish of that lighted stare ; 
 
 Close those wan lips : let that thorn- wounded brow 
 
 Stream not with blood ; it mingles with thy tears ! 
 
 Fix, fix those tortured orbs in peace and death, 
 
 So thy sick throes shake not that crucifix, 
 
 So those pale fingers play not with thy gore. 
 
96 THE PROMETHEUS OF 
 
 O, horrible ! thy. name I will not speak, 
 It hath become a curse. 
 
 Here, Prometheus is made to shrink from his 
 own example, as reproduced in the person of 
 Christ, and Christ is represented as horrified at the 
 unforeseen result of His own teaching. It might 
 be argued that the poet only described the shadow 
 of a doubt crossing the soul of the sufferer in the 
 crisis of his agony, were it not that the deliverance, 
 which is the end of the process, must be taken as 
 a practical commentary on the poet's estimate of 
 suffering as the attribute of all efforts to save. 
 Shelley considered that suffering was unnatural 
 and unnecessary in a deliverer. He conceived 
 that view from a misconception of Christianity; 
 and his misconception throws some confusion over 
 his management of the whole subject. Prometheus, 
 as we read in the original drama of iEscbylus, 
 clearly foresaw all that was to befall him in conse- 
 quence of his benevolent effort for the human 
 race. Christ distinctly said that He was bringing, 
 not peace on earth, but a sword ; and He told His 
 disciples that the time would come when whoever 
 killed them would think he was doing God service. 
 He repeatedly, early and late, warned men that 
 whoever followed Him must follow Him carrying 
 a cross. The cross here spoken of was not the 
 
^SCHTLUS AND OF SHELLEY. 97 
 
 pardon offered through His death, because Christ's 
 death on the cross was yet future. It was not 
 Christ's cross His follower was to bear, but his 
 own. The cross was the punishment of slaves 
 who rebelled against their masters. It was the 
 byword of ignominious death, as rope, or halter, 
 is with us. A man who set himself in hostility to 
 the political, social, or ecclesiastical institutions of 
 a country, would now be described as acting with 
 a halter round his neck. This was precisely the 
 idea that Christ conveyed to those who wished to 
 become His disciples. He knew that He carried 
 His life in His hand. If we refer to only one of 
 his maxims of government, we shall see how 
 reasonable were His calculations. He taught that 
 the ruler should be servant of his people ; that 
 instead of thriving on their misery, he should 
 suffer to make them prosperous. He Himself, He 
 said, was the true shepherd, or ruler, because He 
 would die for His people; and any man who 
 assumed to rule, without copying this example, 
 was a thief and a robber. He who, in any country 
 the government of which is corrupt, teaches this 
 doctrine — and to teach it is the essential part of 
 the Christian preacher's duty — is carrying a cross, 
 or whatever is the equivalent of a cross in the 
 usages of his day. The sight of suffering caused 
 
 7 
 
98 THE PKOMETHEUS OF 
 
 by his example should not be represented as 
 causing sorrow or disappointment to Prometheus. 
 There cannot be a greater error than to impute 
 such feelings to Christ. Nor need we entertain 
 unmixed sentiments of horror at the inhuman 
 wrongs that have been done in the name of 
 religion. The privations endured by the teachers 
 of truth, and asserters of man's rights, are the 
 measure, it should be remembered, not only of 
 human malice, but of human constancy and forti- 
 tude. Whenever an advocate and proclaimer of 
 truth died at the stake, or on the scaffold, there 
 was not only a cruel executioner, but a willing 
 victim. Dreary and miserable as earth has been, 
 it would have been far worse without its martyr. 
 Persecution has only demonstrated that there are 
 men who can dare unjust earthly omnipotence, and 
 die. 
 
 And as to the superiority of defeated and 
 afflicted goodness over goodness triumphant and 
 prosperous in stirring those energies of the soul 
 that lead mankind on to higher thoughts and acts, 
 we may see it proved and exemplified in the high 
 place which the "Prometheus Bound" possesses in 
 the minds of men. We may also see it in the 
 world's recoil from the religion of selfish prosperity. 
 Popular Christianity hangs over an abyss of. mere 
 
-ffiSCHYLUS AND OF SHELLEY. 99 
 
 profession. This is only what might have been 
 expected. Christ saw that corrupt laws and 
 institutions usurped God's place and blotted out 
 His justice. His primary object, therefore, was 
 not to set men thinking about their souls in a 
 future heaven, but to rouse every faculty of 
 reason and righteousness to activity in establishing 
 a heaven on earth. His followers, however, have 
 almost universally preferred the shadow of His cross 
 to the burthen of their own, and religion has lost 
 its reality because it has lost its heroism. Shelley 
 treated Christ only as the Christian world treated 
 Him, and forgot that He was one who bruised His 
 feet in making rough ways smooth, and was 
 crowned with thorns for denning the true import 
 of a crown, and was crucified because He exalted 
 the empire of truth above the empire of force. 
 
 The final and most poignant torture is the 
 description of mankind haunted by the spectres of 
 a dead faith aDd mastered by the illusions of a 
 corrupt society : 
 
 In each human heart terror survives 
 The ruin it has gorged : the loftiest fear 
 All that they would disdain to think were true : 
 Hypocrisy and custom make their minds 
 The fanes of many a worship, now outworn. 
 They dare not devise good for man's estate, 
 And yet they know not that they do not dare. 
 
 7—2 
 
100 THE PROMETHEUS OF 
 
 The good want power, but to weep barren tears ; 
 The powerful goodness want : worse need for them. 
 The wise want love ; and those who love want wisdom ; 
 And all best things are thus confused to ill. 
 Many are strong and rich, and would be just, 
 But live among their suffering fellow-men 
 As if none felt : they know not what they do. 
 
 To fulfil Shelley's standard of the noblest virtue 
 he describes Prometheus as cleansed from all 
 hatred by his sufferings : 
 
 I speak in grief, 
 Not exultation, for I hate no more, 
 As then ere misery made me wise. 
 
 I am changed so that aught evil wish 
 Is dead within. 
 
 The earth is represented as saying to him : 
 
 Thou art more than god 
 Being wise and kind. 
 
 Even Jupiter when overcome exclaims : 
 
 Oh, that thou wouldst make mine enemy my judge, 
 Even where he hangs, seared by my long revenge, 
 On Caucasus ! he would not doom me thus. 
 Gentle, and just, and dreadless, is he not 
 The monarch of the world ? 
 
 The character of passionless goodness thus 
 portrayed would be as incapable of affecting us as 
 a star is of affording warmth, were it not that the 
 poet is himself inspired by the vengeance which he 
 
AESCHYLUS AND OF SHELLEY. 101 
 
 denies to his hero, and inconsistently ascribes to 
 him the exercise of hatred, even while he 
 represents him formally as avowing himself free 
 from its presence. The powerful opening address 
 is full of concentrated hate, and is written to evoke 
 abhorrence and detestation from the reader. The 
 very curse which Prometheus had once pro- 
 nounced, and now wishes to have repeated that 
 he may recall it, is in reality introduced to give an 
 opportunity of hurling defiance against the gods. 
 Though Prometheus withdraws it on behalf of 
 Jupiter, Shelley puts additional humiliation on 
 Jupiter by making his phantasm recite it. 
 
 The liberation of Prometheus is at last produced 
 by the progress of time hastened by love. Through- 
 out the poem a special hour is expected as fraught 
 with freedom. In the opening address Prometheus 
 speaks of 
 
 The wingless, crawling Hours, one among whom 
 Shall drag thee, cruel King. 
 Again he says to Mercury — 
 I wait, 
 Enduring thus, the retributive hour, 
 Which since we spake is even nearer now. 
 
 Asia goes to the cave of Demogorgon, who 
 
 reveals to her the flight of the Hours : 
 
 These are the immortal Hours. 
 One waits for thee. 
 
102 THE PROMETHEUS OF 
 
 Demogorgon enters the chariot of the fatal Hour, 
 ascends to heaven, and hurls Jupiter from his 
 throne, falling with him into darkness. This 
 invincible assailant of Jupiter is simply the result 
 of the flow of events, the fructification of time, the 
 spirit of revolution. Shelley thus symbolizes his 
 belief that the certain and unceasing current of 
 time would sweep priestcraft from the earth, and 
 leave the heavens untenanted. The nature of 
 Demogorgon is discernible in the description of his 
 realm : — 
 
 Hither the sound has borne us — to the realm 
 
 Of Demogorgon, and the mighty portal, 
 
 Like a volcano's meteor-breathing chasm, 
 
 Whence the oracular vapour is hurled up 
 
 Which lonely men drink wandering in their youth, 
 
 And call truth, virtue, love, genius, or joy, 
 
 That maddening wine of life, whose dregs they drain 
 
 To deep intoxication ; and uplift 
 
 The voice which is contagion to the world. 
 
 When Jupiter inquires what he is, he replies : 
 
 Eternity. Demand no direr name. 
 
 And when Asia asks him who is the master of 
 
 Jupiter, he answers — 
 
 If the abysm 
 Could vomit forth its secrets. But a voice 
 Is wanting, the deep truth is imageless ; 
 For what would it avail to bid thee gaze 
 On the revolving world ? What to bid speak 
 
-ESCHYLUS AND OF SHELLEY. 103 
 
 Fate, Time, Occasion, Chance and Change ? To these 
 All things are subject but eternal Love. 
 
 Demogorgon, the bugbear of the Pantheon, the 
 terrible god in the mystery of whose shadow the 
 cheeks of all the other gods blanched, the 
 inexorable law of development that will cleanse 
 man's soul from all superstition, is impersonated 
 by Shelley in order to cast Jupiter from his throne. 
 As a person his work is then done, and he, too, 
 passes into eternal darkness. But Shelley, with 
 entire unconcern about dramatic proprieties, in- 
 troduces him again in the fourth act to utter some 
 further last words. 
 
 Mrs. Shelley, in her note on this drama, 
 says that her husband followed certain classical 
 authorities in figuring Saturn as the good principle, 
 Jupiter the usurping evil one, and Prometheus as 
 the regenerator. Shelley and iEschylus both agree 
 in describing Saturn's reign as an early stage of 
 knowledge and freedom. When a revolution 
 impended that was to enlighten mankind, and 
 improve their condition, Jupiter deceived Prome- 
 theus, the pure reformer, and seized the occasion 
 to put himself on the throne. The first use he 
 made of his power was to make the lot of man 
 worse than before, if not to doom it to utter extinc- 
 tion. When Prometheus resisted, he impaled him. 
 
104 THE PROMETHEUS OF 
 
 Jupiter is the Cromwell, or Napoleon, of the 
 skies. On the fall of Jupiter, Hercules liberates 
 Prometheus, might takes the side of right, and the 
 reign of happiness commences. 
 
 Shelley is intentionally oracular when he speaks 
 of immortality. His theory is, that man is mortal, 
 and the race immortal. Prometheus represents the 
 race, and cannot die. If we compare Shelley's 
 philosophy, which willingly resigns the individual 
 body and soul to mingle with universal nature, 
 with the modern sentiment, neither pantheistic 
 nor Christian, which feebly shrinks from death, 
 we discern a healthiness in its tone that the other 
 lacks. 
 
 Flow down, cold rivulet, to the sea, 
 
 Thy tribute wave deliver ; 
 No more on thee my steps shall be, 
 
 For ever, and for ever. 
 A thousand suns will stream on thee, 
 
 A thousand moons may quiver ; 
 But not by thee my steps shall be, 
 For ever, and for ever. 
 
 There's somewhat flows to us in life, 
 But more is taken quite away ; 
 
 Pray, Alice, pray, my darling wife, 
 That we may die the self-same day. 
 
 Thus is morbid egoism — the soul's consciousness 
 surviving the belief in its immortality. 
 
.ESCHYLTTS AND OF SHELLEY. 105 
 
 Shelley's drama is crowded with irregularities, 
 inconsistencies, and gross violations of almost 
 every dramatic canon ; but so infinitely rich and 
 varied is the heauty of his poetry that we are 
 unaware of any such imperfection. Who could 
 turn away from the brightest flowers on which the 
 sun ever shone, to ascertain whether the soil that 
 bears them is cultivated according to the orthodox 
 fashion ? We lose our way at every step we take ; 
 but who laments at having lost his way, or wishes 
 to recover it, or cares to learn whether there ever 
 was a way to lose, when the byways in which he 
 wanders are strewn with gems, and the air is 
 resonant with the sweetest of music ? The terrific 
 monotone of the cataract thunders on the ear ; and, 
 when the startled sense erects itself to listen, it is 
 wooed back to languor by the ripple of the rivulet 
 and the song of the nightingale. The eye is 
 perpetually changing its focus, as majestic distant 
 forms and minute aspects of loveliness alternately 
 and simultaneously claim the attention. The 
 trumpet of the battle and the strain of the siren 
 intermingle; the hard ascent and the luxurious 
 grotto blend into each other. We travel through a 
 primeval forest of giant trees, and our path is 
 hindered by a wild underwood of blossoming 
 shrubs and festoons of clustering vines. We are 
 
106 THE PROMETHEUS OF 
 
 launched on a mountain lake, and our oars are 
 entangled at every stroke by the stems of the 
 water lilies. But we are not aware of any unfit- 
 ness or incongruity. The strong wine is drugged 
 with soporifics. Not only the scenic incoherencies, 
 but the alleged immoralities and profanities of 
 Shelley are lost sight of in the crowding wealth of 
 his imagination. In other poetry, the snake is 
 hidden in the verdure ; in Shelley's poetry he is 
 stifled. 
 
 In direct contrast to this is the tragedy of 
 iEschylus. In it one figure of sorrow unrelieved, 
 of majesty undiluted, fixes the eye and never 
 allows it to wander. One thought holds the soul, 
 and never relaxes its grasp. It is the triumph of 
 stern simplicity. If viewed as a work of art, it is 
 perfect beyond comparison ; and if we seek to 
 learn why it is so, we find it to be because it is 
 simply true to nature. Its isolation and its 
 fragmentariness have a mysterious lesson for us 
 that we cannot fully explain to ourselves. If one 
 looks on a map thickly covered over with names 
 of towns and rivers, the mind passes over the 
 surface on a level with its subject, and is stirred 
 by no emotion. If a skeleton map with, it may 
 be, one solitary spot marked on it as associated 
 with the life and work of man, be contemplated, 
 
jESCHYLUS AND OF SHELLEY. 107 
 
 the mind is wrought to a different mood ; we feel 
 some secret of the soul is symbolized in the bare- 
 ness of the promontories and the immensity of 
 the ocean. If a plain covered with thick trees 
 presenting a sea of foliage be regarded, the beauty 
 of earth is seen, and our hearts drink in the joy. 
 But if we look on a wide and wild and level 
 moorland, with one solitary tree in its expanse, we 
 are lifted, we know not how, to a higher sphere. 
 "What the skeleton map is to the crowded chart, 
 and the solitary tree to the dense forest, the 
 " Prometheus Bound " of iEschylus is to the 
 " Prometheus Unbound " of Shelley. 
 
HAMLET. 
 
 To make no allusion to the copious literature that 
 exists on the play of " Hamlet " would be either 
 to leave one's self without excuse for going 
 beyond verbal criticism, or to assume the first 
 discovery of the problem which has, in fact, 
 engaged a host of writers. It is well known that 
 the difficulty which has attracted so many com- 
 mentators is owing to a supposed indistinctness 
 in the character of the chief person, and to the 
 inference that Shakspere meant to illustrate some 
 principles or convey some lesson. If any such 
 indefiniteness were observed in one of the historic 
 plays, its cause would reasonably be sought in 
 the necessary, fancy-filled interval that lies 
 between the prose narrative and the poetic con- 
 ception. But " Hamlet " is virtually an historical 
 play. Traditions or fabulous legends must 
 exercise as large a modification on dramatic 
 compositions founded on them as established 
 facts of history. This is mattter of observation 
 
HAMLET. 109 
 
 as well as of probability. Let us sketch the 
 history of Saxo Grammaticus, which suggested 
 directly or indirectly the character of Hamlet to 
 the mind of Shakspere. 
 
 In the reign of Eoderick, two brothers, Horven- 
 dile and Fengon, were joint rulers of a province. 
 The King of Norway challenged Horvendile to 
 combat, and was slain by him. The conditions of 
 the fight were that all the riches in the ship of 
 the vanquished should pass to the conqueror. 
 Eoderick gave his daughter, Geroth, in marriage 
 to Horvendile. Hamblet was their son. Fengon 
 murdered Horvendile, and had sufficient address 
 to gain condonement from the people and nobles, 
 and even their consent to his marriage with his 
 brother's widow. Hamblet, left friendless, coun- 
 terfeited madness in order to elude his uncle and 
 prepare revenge. He ran through the streets 
 like one distracted, and spoke words of phrensy. 
 Yet he sometimes acted and spoke in a manner 
 that indicated a serious undercurrent of intention. 
 Once he was observed sharpening sticks, and, 
 when questioned, said that they were meant to 
 avenge his father's death. The suspicion of the 
 king and his courtiers being aroused, a beautiful 
 woman, greatly beloved by the prince, was em- 
 ployed to entrap him into an avowal of his sanity 
 
110 HAMLET. 
 
 and of the designs which he harboured. This 
 attempt deeply moved him ; but one friend whom 
 he had gave warning, and the lady proved faithful. 
 One of the courtiers, still full of misgivings, pro- 
 posed to the king that Hamblet should have an 
 interview with his mother, and offered to hide 
 himself behind the hangings and hear the con- 
 fidential communications the prince might make. 
 The king assented. Hamblet, when summoned to 
 his mother's chamber, suspected treachery, and 
 imitating with his arms the flapping of a cock's 
 wings, felt something move under the arras, and 
 calling out, "A rat! a rat!" drew his sword, 
 thrust it through, and stabbing the courtier, 
 dragged him out and killed him. He then in a 
 long speech denounced the unbridled passion of 
 his mother in marrying her husband's murdere" 
 and ended by acknowledging that his madness was 
 assumed, and that he meant to kill the king. The 
 queen, moved by his reproaches, embraced him 
 with affection, and made excuses for her conduct. 
 When the king made inquiries concerning the 
 slain courtier, Hamblet made answer that " the hogs 
 meeting him had filled their bellies with him." 
 Fengon resolved to put Hamblet out of his way ; 
 but not wishing to offend Geroth and the people, ' 
 sent him to the King of England with two com- 
 
HAMLET. Ill 
 
 panions, who bore secret orders that he was to be 
 put to death. Hamblet took his departure, having 
 first requested his mother to hang the wall with 
 tapestry, and to celebrate his funeral after a year 
 had elapsed. During the voyage, while his com- 
 panions slept, he substituted their names for his 
 in their instructions. "When he reached England, 
 the king gave him his daughter in marriage, and 
 hanged the two messengers. Hamblet feigned 
 displeasure, and the king to appease him gave 
 Tn'm a large sum of money, which he melted and 
 hid in two staves. He returned to Denmark, and 
 when asked about his companions showed the two 
 staves, and said that those were they. The pre- 
 parations for his funeral feast were applied with 
 added zest to the celebration of his return ; and, 
 when the whole court were sunk in intoxication, 
 he pulled down the tapestry on them, nailed it to 
 the ground with the pointed sticks, and then set 
 fire to the palace, thus destroying all his enemies 
 save the king, whom he afterwards slew in his 
 chamber after having exchanged his own sword, 
 which his enemies fixed in the scabbard, for his. 
 Hamblet then became King of Denmark, and was 
 finally betrayed by his wife to another uncle, who 
 slew him and married the traitress. 
 
 This account is compounded from the Eoman 
 
112 HAMLET. 
 
 story of the first Brutus and popular tales of fools 
 or half-witted persons who overcame powerful 
 enemies by almost infantine devices. Such stories 
 solaced the simple minds of oppressed peasants 
 during centuries, and at last found a fixed and 
 congenial receptacle in the nursery. Saxo Gram- 
 maticus worked the scattered fragments into 
 form and dignified it with the name of history. 
 The lower and unseen outline of this infertile 
 rock, the exuberant genius of Shakspere has 
 partly clothed with mould of his own invention, 
 and altogether covered with the richest flowers 
 and fruit of imagination. Those who are not 
 satisfied with fruit and flowers, unless they are 
 made to grow logically from a suitable soil, think 
 there must be a hidden meaning in the incon- 
 gruity. The same objection might be made in 
 a less degree to every drama that Shakspere 
 wrote. 
 
 Why, it has been asked, did Hamlet feign 
 madness, and what purpose did it serve ? Let 
 us briefly compare the play with the history. 
 Claudius killed his brother secretly ; there is, 
 therefore, no reason for Hamlet to fear that his 
 uncle would suspect him of plotting vengeance, 
 as the Hamblet of the history does, whose father 
 had been killed openly. Accordingly, he consents 
 
HAMLET. 113 
 
 not to go to Wittenberg, at his mother's request- 
 The history and play differ in that the hero of 
 the former feigns madness from the time of his 
 father's murder, while the hero of the play feigns 
 only after his father's ghost appears to him. The 
 appearance of the ghost puts the Hamlet of the 
 play in the same situation as the Hamblet of the 
 history, and leaves him to be guided by the same 
 motives and policy. The ghost makes the murder 
 known to him, and binds him to secrecy by re- 
 fusing to make the revelation save to him alone, 
 and by sanctioning the oath of silence, which he 
 imposes on Horatio and Marcellus. Hamlet, 
 therefore, cannot openly kill Claudius, because the 
 act would seem wanton and unprovoked. The 
 only way left to him is through concealment and 
 cunning. He guards himself against the newly- 
 discovered danger and watches for revenge under 
 the shelter of counterfeited insanity. The 
 legendary Hamblet fears open violence from 
 the known perpetrator of a murder, and pretends 
 to be mad. Shakspere's Hamlet, grieving at his 
 mother's hasty marriage, but free from apprehen- 
 sion of personal danger, as is evident from his 
 consenting not to go to Wittenberg (i. ii. 120), 
 suddenly learns that the king is the murderer of 
 his father. This assimilated his circumstances to 
 
 8 
 
114 HAMLET. 
 
 those of his prototype, and he instantly adopts 
 the same disguise. He conceals the ghost's 
 revelations from Horatio and Mareellus, because 
 if it came to his uncle's ears it would be his 
 interest to murder him likewise. Moreover, as 
 the fact of his father's ghost having appeared to 
 him, if known to Claudius, would at once suggest 
 to his guilty conscience the object of the visita- 
 tion, he solemnly pledges his companions not 
 even by hint or innuendo to furnish any explana- 
 tion of the " antic disposition " which he tells 
 them he is about to put on. He pretends 
 madness because he knows himself to be in 
 the power of a criminal whom it is his duty to 
 punish, but against whom he cannot proceed 
 openly or publicly in consequence of the channel 
 through which his information has come. 
 
 Various hypotheses have been invented to 
 explain why Hamlet does not immediately kill 
 Claudius. Goethe is of opinion that Shakspere's 
 intention was to exhibit a pure but feeble soul 
 staggering under the burthen of a task which it 
 is unable to accomplish. Gervinus believes that 
 he intended to exemplify the demoralizing in- 
 fluence and fatal results of philosophy, specula- 
 tion, and conscientiousness as compared with 
 immediate and resolute action. A number of 
 
HAMLET. 115 
 
 medical writers maintain that Hamlet's irresolu- 
 tion is to be accounted for only on the theory 
 that he was mad, not in pretence, but in reality. 
 If these and other writers confined themselves 
 simply to the facts they would see that Hamlet 
 did not at once kill Claudius, or rather that Shak- 
 spere did not make Hamlet at once kill Claudius, 
 because the poet's object was not to relate a single 
 deed, but to compose five acts, and that with this 
 view he has brought his plot into harmony with 
 the original history, in which the hero does not 
 immediately kill his enemy, but pretends madness, 
 employs craft, and awaits his opportunity. Craft 
 is the conventional weapon which tradition 
 ascribes to assumed madness. Shakspere's 
 Hamlet faithfully follows his prototype in the 
 use of it. When Ophelia, after being forbidden 
 to receive his overtures, is employed to betray 
 him and worm out his secret, he retorts on his 
 enemies and makes her the instrument of putting 
 them on a false scent. The address with which 
 he baffles Kosencrantz and Guildenstern, when 
 they sound him concerning the ambitious views 
 he is suspected of entertaining, and with which 
 he turns Polonius into ridicule, is so successful a 
 part of the representation that we cease to see in 
 it an essential element in Hamlet's rdle, just as 
 
 8—2 
 
116 HAMLET. 
 
 the grotesqueness in the gargoyles of an old 
 church blinds us to their being not accessories or 
 ornaments, but integral portions of the material 
 edifice and speaking symbols of the ecclesiastical 
 mind of the day. When he grows impatient as 
 time advances and nothing is accomplished, it is 
 his invention he appeals to — " About, my brain !" 
 (ii. ii. 598, comp. v. ii. 30), and he hits on the 
 device of the play. He kills Polonius, supposing 
 he was the king, by craft, clearly showing how he 
 meant to execute his purpose, and his readiness to 
 kill Claudius when the occasion offered. A few 
 lines from this scene show in what a mist of 
 suspicion he dwells. Polonius has just gone 
 behind the arras in the queen's chamber, and 
 Hamlet enters. The queen says: 
 
 Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended. 
 
 Nothing would be more apposite than those words 
 to lead to his subject if he did not apprehend that 
 he was surrounded by treachery. He only echoes 
 the charge : 
 
 Mother, you have my father much offended. 
 Immediately afterwards, when he has slain 
 Polonius and he no longer fears an eavesdropper, 
 when the queen says, 
 
 what a rash and bloody deed is this ! 
 
HAMLET. 117 
 
 he unreservedly pours out the full tide of his 
 
 wrath : 
 
 A bloody deed ; — almost as bad, good mother, 
 As kill a king and marry with his brother. 
 
 He almost revels in the anticipation of circum- 
 venting the companions of his voyage to England : 
 
 There's letters sealed : and my two schoolfellows 
 Whom I will trust as I will adders f anged — 
 They bear the mandate, they must sweep my way 
 And marshal me to knavery. Let it work ; 
 For 'tis the sport to have the engineer 
 Hoist with his own petard : and 'twill go hard, 
 But I will delve one yard below their mines, 
 And blow them at the moon : O 'tis most sweet, 
 When in one line two crafts directly meet. 
 
 When he returns from his frustrated voyage he 
 boasts to Horatio of the way in which he out- 
 witted his perfidious companions as the very sort 
 of triumph alone within his reach ; and so far is 
 Horatio from disapproving, as Gervinus to suit his 
 theory would interpret, that after Hamlet's death 
 he claims the credit of the act for him, when the 
 ambassadors would ascribe it to the king. So 
 closely does Shakspere associate the habit of 
 retaliative subtlety with his hero's character, 
 that when Osric comes with the king's message, 
 Hamlet competes with him, and surpasses the 
 exaggeration of his euphuisms, although he does 
 
118 ■ HAMLET. 
 
 not suspect the deadly treachery that lurked 
 under its florid redundance. At last Claudius and 
 Laertes encompass him with wiles from which 
 escape is impossible. He falls, but not until he has 
 slain them both by the recoil of their own artifice. 
 If it be established that the method imposed 
 on Hamlet required delay, all the morbid fancies 
 accounting for that delay on other grounds are 
 shown to be foreign and fallacious. If all the 
 legends concerning pretended madness agree that 
 the object was to gain time in which to over- 
 reach or undermine, and if our play is constructed 
 on the obvious framework of this idea, then the 
 other explanations of the procrastinated revenge 
 are shadows, and the theories built on them are 
 baseless. It cannot be argued, in reply, that 
 Hamlet, in some of his soliloquies, condemns his 
 own apathy and spurs himself to more rapid 
 movement. A poet's hero must rail at himself 
 for not being able to overcome any obstacle that 
 comes in his way. The Eoman historian may 
 describe Brutus as waiting patiently for his 
 opportunity, Saxo Grammaticus may relate the 
 childish preparations of Amlethus, but the 
 Hamlet of Shakspere must rage in self-ac- 
 cusation against the necessity that binds him 
 to inaction. How would the poet feel as he 
 
HAMLET. 119 
 
 threw himself into Hamlet's part ? Would he 
 not chafe and storm at the slow progress of 
 events 1 Is it not natural and customary to 
 depict a great spirit hemmed in by the circum- 
 scribing sands of circumstance as raving in self- 
 torture against the barrier, and ascribing to 
 its own want of determination the laggard 
 policy that is the acknowledged condition of 
 its taski 
 
 There is a more important object than a strictly 
 critical one in scattering those dreams of German 
 commentators. They have assigned an immoral 
 sense to Shakspere, in order to force him into 
 agreement with their purpose. Poetry is forced 
 to go in the crooked way of politics. Gervinus 
 makes Hamlet a parable. " Hamlet is Germany." 
 To show that the doom of Hamlet impends over 
 Germany, unless she corrects her tendency to 
 dissolve action in thought, it is necessary that 
 this fault should be ascribed to Hamlet. Then 
 for the correction of this fault an ethical maxim 
 must be found ; and, as it is assumed that Shak- 
 spere designed to convey the moral which Ger- 
 vinus needs for Germany, the principle of con- 
 duct that should have guided Hamlet, and that 
 Germany would be justified in adopting, must be 
 found in Shakspere also. In the first interview 
 
120 HAMLET. 
 
 between Hamlet and Eosencrantz and Guilden- 
 stern the following dialogue occurs : — i 
 
 Ham. Denmark's a prison. \ 
 
 Ros. We think not so, my lord. 
 
 Ham. Why, then, 'tis none to yon ; for there is 
 nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so ; to 
 me it is a prison. 
 
 Ros. Why, then, your ambition makes it one ; 'tis too 
 narrow for your mind (ii. ii. 236). 
 
 This sentiment, which is so familiar to us in the 
 expression that stone walls do not a prison make, 
 is thus commented on by Gervinus, whose theory- 
 is that Hamlet was deterred by over scrupulosity 
 and a diseased conscientiousness from murdering 
 the king : — 
 
 Thus, from natural impulse and habit, the mind of this 
 man of deep reflection is unconsciously the overruling 
 agent in everything ; thought has become with him the 
 measure of things. Shakspere invests him with a philo- 
 sophical principle, which contains a most characteristic 
 modification of the poet'sown worldly wisdom. That virtue 
 and vice, good and bad actions, acquire no real importance 
 in themselves, but ever from circumstances, objects, and 
 natural character ; that it is not the what but the how 
 that decides the value of an action, is a maxim of Shak- 
 sperian experience, which is too frequently and too 
 forcibly repeated in word and example, for the poet not 
 to have always well weighed every word which he wrote 
 in this sense. This maxim is thus modified in Hamlet's 
 
HAMLET. 121 
 
 lips : " There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking 
 makes it so."** 
 
 As the end for which the parable of Hamlet was 
 preached to Germany is now accomplished, we 
 may, in view of even worse wrestings of more 
 sacred texts, pardon the temporary adaptation and 
 be satisfied with rescuing our bard from the im- 
 putation of an immoral maxim. 
 
 Shakspere did not write to inculcate special 
 morals, or to delineate abnormal and exceptional 
 formations of character. This belongs to lesser 
 playwrights. Anyone may shape a career of 
 fable to exemplify a principle. Only the sover- 
 eign mind can hold the mirror up to nature, and 
 let the reflection teach its lesson as the realities 
 of existence teach it. Shakspere is the poet, not 
 of the oddities and imperfections of human 
 nature, but of human nature itself with all its 
 unexplained inconsistencies. His mystery is 
 not the plot of a tragedy, but the mystery of 
 life. The instruction mankind stands in need of 
 is not fiction shaped artificially to a certain end 
 in which poetic justice is wreaked on villainy, or 
 one-sided instances of unprosperous vice or un- 
 fortunate weakness selected from the mingled sum 
 
 Shakspere Commentaries, by Dr. G. G. Gervinus, 
 1873, vol. ii., page 136. 
 
122 HAMLET. 
 
 of things, but rather representative sections of 
 human history just as it is, lifted before the 
 public gaze and shone upon by the circumambient 
 light of genius, so that every act and thought and 
 circumstance stands revealed, and every beholder 
 can draw his own moral and value it the more 
 because it is his own. The ability to do this 
 miracle is the rarest gift vouchsafed to men ; and 
 if in its largest measure it has been worked through 
 the instrumentality of our English tongue, let us 
 not prove ourselves unworthy of the distinction 
 by classing our great poet, who teaches virtue by 
 the display of universal nature, with inferior 
 artists, who display only so much of nature as 
 their limited conception of virtue will illustrate. 
 
 The medical critics are unanimous in pronounc- 
 ing Hamlet really mad. This is merely a profes- 
 sional illusion. The mind dwelling on certain 
 symptoms, projects them wherever it turns, just 
 as the eye that has been fixed on a coloured out- 
 line will see it in the lucid blue of heaven. A 
 legal friend said to me a few days since with 
 energetic seriousness that if the affair of the rat 
 behind the arras had been brought before a judge 
 and jury the tragedy would probably be brought 
 to a sudden and ignominious close. Dr. Conolly 
 is enamoured of a French version in which, in 
 
HAMLET. 123 
 
 the scene between Hamlet and his mother, the 
 words of the ghost are omitted, and thus poor 
 Hamlet seems raving mad, not only to his mother, 
 but to the audience. 
 
 If indications of the design of Shakspere were 
 decisive on this point there would be little room 
 for doubt. If Laertes or Polonius had any 
 suspicion that Hamlet was afflicted with insanity 
 they would certainly make some allusion to it in 
 the warnings they utter to Ophelia. It cannot 
 be said they were unaware of it, or that it did not 
 occur to them, because the question is : Would 
 Shakspere, if he intended Hamlet to appear mad, 
 keep the secret to himself, and never let it leak 
 out in the speeches of any of the persons of the 
 drama ? Would he specify the time, the occasion, 
 and the avowed intention of the pretence ? Would 
 he describe the ghost as acting in unison with 
 and echoing to real madness ? Would the king 
 and queen speak of the suddenness of the change ? 
 Would Polonius enumerate all the symptoms as of 
 recent occurrence ? Those proofs, however, which 
 might be added to from every speech in the play, 
 are not really of avail, because the design of Shak- 
 spere does not decide the question. The common 
 opinion is that Shakspere meant to describe 
 a man pretending madness. The medical critics 
 
124 HAMLET. 
 
 say that Shakspere described a man really mad. 
 If we set aside the plain statement of Hamlet 
 that he was about to put an antic disposition on, 
 how can we possibly distinguish the assumption 
 of madness from the reality ? There is no way 
 of representing a pretended madman but by 
 making him like a real one. However success- 
 fully and accurately the writer finishes his 
 portrait, we must still understand him as accom- 
 plishing that which he told us he meant to 
 accomplish. The only way in which the medical 
 writers can prove their case is by showing that 
 Shakspere was mad, and this is in fact the legiti- 
 mate and inevitable termination of their proofs, if 
 they can prove anything. If Shakspere, after 
 informing us that he was about to depict a pre- 
 tended madman, drew a man really mad, there is 
 only one way of accounting for the miscarriage. 
 
 No two things can be more distinct than the 
 purposeless incoherency of Ophelia and the 
 studied extravagances of Hamlet, under every 
 sentence of which a pointed meaning is sheathed. 
 Usage, not reason, is the test by which sanity is 
 distinguished from insanity. Eeason restrained, 
 modified, and reduced to an average uniformity, 
 regulates the sane man of public opinion. The 
 man of pure reason, who should cast off the yoke 
 
HAMLET. 125 
 
 of custom, would seem mad without being so ; 
 while the man of imperfect or disordered reason, 
 who conformed to outward custom, would be mad 
 without seeming so. Hamlet's madness was of 
 the former kind. He describes the exact process 
 by which he arrives at it immediately after the 
 interview with the ghost : 
 
 I'll wipe away all trivial fond records, 
 
 AU saws of books, all forms, all pressures past. 
 
 When the pressure of habit is removed, the 
 established proportion of movement to motive, 
 of action to passion, is lost. A man so circum- 
 stanced is in danger of being taken off his guard 
 and hurried to excess if some strong and sudden 
 emotion seizes him. Hamlet forgets himself for a 
 moment at Ophelia's grave. He avows his love, 
 and rivals the demonstrative sorrow of Laertes. 
 Shakspere is careful to make him explain after- 
 wards to Horatio that he lost the management of 
 his simulated phrenzy for a moment, and let his 
 natural passion carry him too far : 
 
 But I am very sorry, good Horatio, 
 That to Laertes I forgot myself, 
 
 But, sure, the bravery of his grief did put me 
 Into a towering passion. 
 
 Shakspere, in fact, was borne away by his vivid 
 
126 HAMLET. 
 
 impression of the scene, and, confident of the 
 truth of its delineation, allowed it to remain, but 
 reminds us that it was owing to a burst of natural 
 passion unchecked by consideration of regard for 
 appearance. 
 
 Hamlet's treatment of Ophelia is strangely mis- 
 understood by the critics. His love for her was 
 the main solace of his life after his father's death. 
 When Polonius forbade her reception of his 
 addresses he is keenly wounded, and makes a 
 despairing effort to move her sympathy; and 
 when she, having never really loved him, her 
 strongest attachment being family affection, im- 
 putes his conduct to insanity, and joins her father 
 in contriving snares for him, he pursues them 
 with covert remonstrances and reproaches. 
 
 Pol. Do you know me, my lord ? 
 
 Hx\M. Excellent well ; you are a fishmonger. 
 
 Pol. Not I, my lord. 
 
 Ham. Then I would you were so honest a man. 
 
 Hamlet's apparently wild words are carefully laid 
 to promote an occasion of uttering this retort on 
 the man who was at that instant plotting against 
 him. He continues : 
 
 To be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man picked 
 out of ten thousand. 
 Pol. That's very true, my lord. 
 
HAMLET. 127 
 
 Ham. For if the sun breed maggots in a dead dog, 
 being a god kissing carrion, Have you a daughter ? 
 
 Pol. I have, my lord. 
 
 Ham. Let her not walk i' the sun : conception is a 
 blessing ; but as your daughter may conceive, — friend, 
 look to't. 
 
 In this way he ridicules the old courtier's extreme 
 caution about his daughter's virtue at the very time 
 when he was practising and teaching her to practise 
 the most cruel treachery. 
 
 Again, when Polonius contrives the meeting 
 between Ophelia and Hamlet, of which the king 
 and himself are hidden witnesses> Hamlet, 
 evidently aware of the plot, asks: "Are you 
 honest ?" adding, " I did love you once." When 
 she tamely replies, "Indeed, my lord, you made 
 me believe so," he says, "I loved you not;" 
 meaning that he did not love her in the character 
 in which she now shows herself. Then he makes 
 a last appeal to her sense of truthfulness : 
 " Where's your father ?" and when she falsely 
 answers, " At home, my lord," he pointedly says, 
 " Let the door be shut on him that he may play 
 the fool nowhere but in's own house !" He 
 then breaks into general reproach, and seems to 
 imply that the fashions of the day were frittering 
 away the strength of true womanhood, and render- 
 
128 HAMLET. 
 
 ing the continuance of the race a questionable 
 good. Thenceforward he makes no attempt to 
 move her pity or her love. His conversation 
 with her at the play is merely a specimen of 
 the small talk of the time. The same remark 
 applies to Ophelia's songs. There is nothing 
 special to the relation between them in either. 
 
 It has been said that Hamlet was in advance of 
 his rude era. This only means that Shakspere was 
 a different person from Saxo Grammatieus. There 
 are two Hamlets in the play, the Hamlet who 
 acts and the Hamlet who thinks and speaks. 
 Shakspere has walked on the northern wild, and 
 the flowers of the south have sprung up in his 
 footsteps. A shadowy outline of the subtlety 
 with which oppressed innocence defended itself in 
 primitive days is filled in with all the resources of 
 a supreme intellect. If this were done designedly 
 it would be consummate art. For the simplicity 
 of Hamlet, in his grief, in his love, in his friend- 
 ship, in his artifice, in his revenge, is brought 
 home with hundred-fold, but ever undetected power 
 to that inmost and deepest tenderness of every 
 human soul, the remembrance and the remains 
 of its childhood. In order to reconcile those two 
 characters, the commentators have imagined one 
 character misshapen and disordered. 
 
HAMLET. 129 
 
 But the same incongruity appears, as it could 
 not but appear, in all the other persons of the 
 play. The sage and beautiful counsel of Laertes 
 to his sister rises far above the level of his 
 character. The inimitable maxims of Polonius, 
 which some critics, in their blind pursuit of con- 
 sistency, have striven to depreciate, contrast with 
 his subsequent follies. The spy Rosencrantz 
 makes a majestic speech in defence of majesty 
 (iii. iii.). It is impossible not to feel a pang of 
 regret that a man who was so familiar with the 
 sublimities of nature and the philosophy of 
 political history, and could clothe his thoughts in 
 such flowing verse as the gentleman or attendant 
 (iv. v.) who brings news of the approach of Laertes 
 attended by the rabble, should have filled so 
 humble a position at the Danish court. Here is 
 an instance of keen observation profoundly re- 
 flective, and of balanced conservatism haughtily 
 contemptuous of popular encroachment, stepping 
 with graceful dignity on the stage for a moment, 
 and thenceforward immersed in obscurity. Was 
 an ancestor of the poet a prisoner at the court of 
 Claudius ? Similarly, the first attendant in the 
 same scene (not Horatio, as some copies read), 
 who brings intelligence of Ophelia's derangement, 
 shows a fineness of perception in the connection 
 
130 HAMLET. 
 
 between thought and language that proves him to 
 have been a metaphysician and a grammarian, 
 and a power of accurate survey of mental aberra- 
 tion that would, do honour to a modern commis- 
 sioner in lunacy. Is it not perverse ingenuity to 
 seek for solutions of improbability and explana- 
 tions of disproportion between form and substance 
 in the -work of a man who could not help turning 
 whatever he touched into gold ? 
 
 The soliloquies, it may be observed, are not 
 properly integral parts of the tragedy. They are 
 addresses to the audience explanatory and sugges- 
 tive. They fill almost exactly the part of the 
 ancient chorus. Ophelia (iii. i.) utters a soliloquy 
 though she is aware that the king and her father 
 are listening. The Dumb Show which should 
 have affrighted the king, yet passes unnoticed by 
 him, comes under this head. It was intended for 
 the audience only. 
 
 The moral of '' Hamlet " is artistic rather than 
 ethical. The duty Shakspere set before himself 
 was to write an effective play, a play that would 
 glow in acting and entrance in hearing, a play 
 that would stir- with power the strongest passions 
 of actor and audience. He has succeeded 
 beyond measure. If we behold his creation from 
 the front, suitably to its purpose, and judge by 
 
HAMLET. 131 
 
 the potency of its skill upon us, we do not venture 
 to criticise. But if we go behind the scenes and 
 minutely examine the various parts, we only perplex 
 ourselves with details, whose mutual relation and 
 combined effect the creative mind of Shakspere 
 alone could know. Every incongruity is ex- 
 plained by the general aim. Deep impressions 
 are made not by continuity, symmetry, equipoise, 
 but by flash and fragment and unexpectedness. 
 We do not love smooth completeness. We love 
 broken nature, rugged mountains, chequered sun- 
 light. We have no fondness for tranquil demi 
 gods and serenely secure virtue. Our hearts lean 
 to imperfect men struggling to do right, and 
 dying in the struggle. We are not held captive 
 by Johnson's "Irene," or Addison's " Cato," or 
 Milton's "Comus." We are held captive by 
 " Hamlet." Here Shakspere has rung changes on 
 every mood of the soul, solemn monotone, mirth- 
 ful peal and jangling of sweet bells out of tune. 
 If he has dealt sometimes with the ephemeral, it 
 was that too great a strain might not be put upon 
 us by thoughts beyond the reach of our souls. 
 If he has played on the surface, it was that we 
 might get relief from the long breathlessness of 
 suspense. Each scene is a perfect study for the 
 student who would understand or would describe 
 
 9—2 
 
132 HAMLET. 
 
 human nature. The assemblage of scenes is kept 
 in its place in the mind of the reader like a galaxy 
 in the heavens. The personages, the interests, the 
 events are brought near each other from the re- 
 motest spheres, and when we seek for the in- 
 fluences that group them they seem so subtle 
 that we are not sure whether they were designed. 
 If we are uncertain when we say that the whole 
 play is bound and held together by delicate 
 nerves of feeling, by abiding memories that con- 
 stitute its identity, our doubt is allayed by re- 
 membering that nature, and every true imitator 
 of nature, acts without our consciousness. The 
 play is full of unseen unities. 
 
 The deterioration that takes place in the 
 language and demeanour of Polonius, after the 
 first act, is occasioned mainly by his accommodat- 
 ing himself to the supposed infirmity of Hamlet. 
 He speaks sillily to him, just as we speak in 
 broken English to a foreigner who does not know 
 our language. The first scene in the second act, 
 which is omitted on the stage, and is declared by 
 the critics to have no share in furthering the plot, 
 is a modification of the character of Polonius 
 from the first exhibition of it, preparing the 
 spectator for what is to come. 
 
 The device of Hamlet to assume madness, in 
 
HAMLET. 133 
 
 fact, disorders the whole course of events, and 
 lands them on a declining plane that ends in the 
 final catastrophe. The ghost is first to follow the 
 wild motion. Polonius is shaken from his wisdom, 
 the king from his calm, the queen from her apathy, 
 Ophelia from her tranquil home life, Laertes from 
 his youthful pleasures, and under its fatal in- 
 fluence all at last perish. If it be asked, Why 
 does Hamlet die with the others ? the answer 
 is, that such must be the fate of the hero of a 
 tragedy. 
 
 Perhaps the most constantly affecting circum- 
 stance in the whole poem, though, like the number- 
 less other magic touches on our heartstrings with 
 which it abounds, it eludes our notice, is the 
 manner in which Hamlet, after Ophelia's rejec- 
 tion of him, reposes on the friendship of Horatio. 
 There is nothing in nature so provocative of 
 ineffable sympathy as a man compelled to un- 
 bosom himself to a man. It is because of this 
 that the few cases of male attachment which 
 history presents occupy so disproportionately 
 large a place in our attention. " Thy love to me 
 was wonderful," says David of Jonathan, " passing 
 the love of women." 
 
 Hamlet's opening " aside " remark, " a little 
 more than kin and less than kind," is the key- 
 
134 HAMLET. 
 
 note to his future development. It is the germ 
 from which expands the life of suppressed 
 thought, relieving itself only in solitude, of en- 
 vironing danger from which he can escape only 
 by subterfuges, of betrayed affection seeking 
 alleviation in bitter irony. It prepares us for the 
 victim to whom the heavens seem dark, and whom 
 not man nor woman can delight. 
 
 Horatio introduces himself by the characteristic 
 words, "A piece of him," and at once an ex- 
 pectant attitude is struck. We see one who does 
 not exhaust his heart in words, who reserves his 
 larger self for silent help, on whom will devolve 
 at last the office of making clear all that his friend 
 left unexplained. 
 
 The king's first lines tell us the manner of man 
 that he is, and reveal the canker of his nature : 
 
 Though jet of Hamlet our dear brother's death 
 The memory be green — 
 
 Yet so far hath discretion fought with nature, 
 That we with wisest sorrow think on him, 
 Together with remembrance of ourselves. 
 
 In this balanced and unabashed pretension of 
 " ourselves " we see the selfish voluptuary and 
 murderer. There is a vast difference between 
 the man who is conscious of the instincts of self- 
 ishness and the man who has no shame in assert- 
 
HAMLET. 135 
 
 ing them on a trying and solemn occasion. "We 
 at once know Claudius, and the knowledge grows 
 on us till, when conspiring with Laertes to do a 
 dastardly murder, he again says in excuse : 
 
 I loved your father, and we love ourself, 
 
 and We see his base love lead him to his death. 
 
 When Laertes and Ophelia first appear before 
 us, Laertes is just about to sail for France. He 
 bids his sister farewell, and asks that he may 
 hear from her. " Do you doubt that ?" is her 
 confiding and confident reply. There are a few 
 women whose love, devoid of passion, dwells in 
 deep and silent pools of home associations, that 
 grow fuller and deeper each day, and never alters 
 from the unquestioning trust of childhood. Their 
 affection never runs over. They can love but 
 once, for they can have no second father. Ophelia 
 was one of these. 
 
 In the first scene, on the platform before the 
 castle, the "honest soldier," Francisco, when 
 relieved by Bernardo, speaks : " For this relief, 
 much thanks : 'tis bitter cold, and I am sick at 
 heart ;" and he departs, never to appear again. 
 But the memory of his words does not leave us. 
 Like an obscure unlocalized pain, like a mournful 
 echo, like a secret foreboding, they are felt midst 
 
136 HAMLET. 
 
 every sound and heard in every pause ; and as 
 the play advances towards the end we unknow- 
 ingly crave for their solution. Like some 
 mysterious syllable terminating a line in an 
 irregular poem, they hang on our ears, and we 
 watch with growing impatience for something 
 that will rhyme to them, until at last, as the 
 chill shadow of his approaching doom settles on 
 Hamlet, he says to' Horatio in words of saddest 
 unburdening, " Thou canst not tell how ill all's 
 here about my heart ;" and we feel that we have 
 at length plucked out the heart of the mystery. 
 
THE BOOK OF JOB. 
 
 The Book of Job in its original form most probably 
 ended with the present chapter xxxi. There is 
 also great reason to conclude that the passage 
 commencing with the thirteenth verse of chapter 
 xxvii., and ending with chapter xxviii., was spoken 
 by Zophar in the original poem. It is not my 
 purpose to lay any stress on these or other altera- 
 tions, or to inquire by whom they were made, or 
 whether their object was to conceal or to disguise 
 the author's primary lesson. I consider the book 
 rather as a national composition than as the pro- 
 duction of an individual. 
 
 The prose introduction to the poem gives an 
 instance of the practical government of the world, 
 and furnishes an explanation of the confusions 
 that arise from the clashing of its physical and 
 moral elements. Job is a virtuous and a prosper- 
 ous man. God points him out to Satan, who 
 presents himself along with the angels at the 
 
.138 THE BOOK OF JOB. 
 
 court of heaven, as an example of perfect upright- 
 ness. Satan replies that his integrity is not 
 virtue, hut self-interest, and that it would cease if 
 his good fortune ceased. God permits Satan to 
 put this accusation to the test ; and Satan, by the 
 agency of irruptions of plundering bands of 
 enemies, the Sabeans and Chaldeans, of lightning 
 and of tempestuous winds, destroys the family and 
 the property of Job. The ruined man stands the 
 ordeal, and admits God's right to take as well as to 
 give. When Satan next appears amongst the 
 angels, God again brings Job under his notice as 
 one who was not only upright, but who had 
 maintained his uprightness when '' destroyed with- 
 out cause." Satan alters his point of attack, and 
 says that bare life furnishes a sufficient bribe to 
 render the existence of virtue doubtful. Job's 
 resignation was assumed only to save his life. If 
 his life were threatened he would forsake righteous- 
 ness. God gives Satan all power over him short 
 of death, and Satan afflicts him with loathsome 
 sores from the crown of his head to the soles of his 
 feet. His wife taunts him with the worthlessness 
 of his integrity, and bids him renounce it and 
 die. Job remains firm. He acknowledges the 
 sovereignty of God and virtue. He had received 
 good from God's hand, and was ready also to 
 
THE BOOK OF JOB. 139 
 
 receive evil. Thus Job establishes the existence 
 and the power of perfect, disinterested virtue. 
 
 There are several axioms involved in the 
 narrative which it is necessary to glance at. God 
 and virtue are one. God is the impersonation of 
 perfect virtue, and perfect virtue is the character 
 of God. Happiness is the natural accompaniment 
 and expectation of virtue. If happiness invariably 
 followed virtue it would be an obstacle to its 
 growth and to its recognition. The end of crea- 
 tion is the development of perfect virtue. God's 
 supreme power divides itself into two kinds — 
 moral and physical. The government of the 
 world as a whole is ascribed to God. The 
 physical government of the world is occasionally, 
 or constantly with limitations, remitted to Satan. 
 The moral government of the world is shared with 
 men. God's ultimate sovereignty is not absolute 
 power, but perfect wisdom, to which power is 
 secondary and subservient Satan arises in the 
 evolution of virtue, and is made part of God's 
 wisdom. That virtue may be perfect, man's will 
 must be free. God's power is secondary to His 
 wisdom, because the end sought is attainable by 
 wisdom and not by power. 
 
 The mingled and mysterious world in which we 
 live is the fruit of these principles. We may say 
 
140 THE BOOK OF JOB. 
 
 generally that the world is of God ; but when we 
 speak of particular events we should attribute 
 them to their particular and subordinate causes. 
 The poetic portion of the Book of Job is a 
 controversy on those topics. Truth is so distaste- 
 ful to hear and so dangerous to speak that the 
 poet puts a virtuous man to the rack in order that 
 the boldness of his utterances may be ascribed to 
 the extremity of his tortures. 
 
 The dwelling-place of God claims a moment's 
 notice. It is well that men should have a correct 
 idea of heaven before they accept or reject it. 
 Heaven is commonly described as a region where 
 spiritual Sybarites repose on uncrumpled doctrines, 
 and rise to an eternal ascription of servile praises 
 to the Almighty. The glimpse that we get in the 
 opening chapter of Job reveals a different scene. 
 We see no throned monarch lapped in ecstasy 
 amid prostrate worshippers, but a busy .Ruler 
 filled with cares for His endangered kingdom. No 
 strains of celestial melody float through lofty 
 palace domes, but groans and cries and protests 
 from earth reverberate through the antechamber 
 of the King. When the material chaos settled 
 into order the spiritual chaos began, and still 
 continues. God is making heaven, and His call to 
 us on earth is a call for help. 
 
THE BOOK OF JOB. 141 
 
 It is still more important to bear in our 
 memories that it is not the quantity of Job's 
 virtue that is under debate, but the quality of 
 it. Satan never denied that the man who serves 
 God for earthly reward and material happiness 
 can give him a whole life's devotion. Nor are we 
 to suppose that when God referred to Job's perfect 
 uprightness He meant that he had never in any 
 degree or at any time overstepped the limits of 
 right. What God asserted and what Satan 
 gainsayed was that "Job served God for nought." 
 The question is not concerning the completeness 
 of obedience, but concerning the genuineness of 
 virtue. If goodness were not practised for its own 
 sake, but for its attendant blessings, it would be 
 prudence, policy, selfishness. Virtue calculating 
 results would be undecided vice. It is the dis- 
 interestedness of virtue, therefore, the final purpose 
 of creation, the triumph of God's wisdom, that is 
 affirmed by God and contradicted by Satan. It is 
 important, I say, to note this, because the two 
 questions become confounded in the course of the 
 argument. 
 
 When Job's three friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and 
 Zophar, heard of his calamities they came to 
 mourn with him. During seven days they sat in 
 silent sorrow, and then Job spoke. Like a 
 
142 THE BOOK OF. JOB. 
 
 ■wounded creature spending its rage on the 
 weapon that pierces it, he curses the poisoned 
 arrow, life, that quivers in his soul. With the 
 measured cadence of despair he multiplies impre- 
 cations, and varies .them with every throb of his 
 anguish. His words are the mental echo to the 
 actions of one who riDgs his hands, and smites 
 them together, and clasps them in each other, as 
 the spasms of endurance, impatience, and adjura- 
 tion run their bitter round. Why was he ever 
 born ? Why did he not die in the hour of his 
 birth ? Why should life be forced on those who 
 long for death ? Words like these are only 
 articulated groans. The friends of Job treat them 
 as instances of rebellion and proofs of previous 
 guilt. Eliphaz, strangely anticipating a taunt of 
 later date, argues the insincerity of his righteous- 
 ness from the fact that the topics through which 
 he had formerly administered comfort to others 
 were now found unavailing in his own case. Job's 
 sorrows, it is inferred, must have sprung from his 
 sin. 
 
 Remember, I pray, who ever perished, being innocent ? 
 Or where were the righteous cut off ? — (iv. 7.) 
 
 He then, in a passage whose poetical beauty has 
 always been mistaken for healthy religious feeling, 
 
THE BOOK OF JOB. 143 
 
 gives the experience of a disturbed and clouded 
 conscience : — 
 
 Unto me a thing came secretly, 
 
 And mine ear received a whisper thereof. 
 
 In thoughts from visions of the night, 
 
 "When deep sleep falleth on men, 
 
 Fear came upon me, and trembling, 
 
 Which caused all my bones to shake. 
 
 Then a spirit glided before my face, 
 
 The hair of my flesh stood on end ; 
 
 It stood — but its form I could not discern ; 
 
 A figure was before mine eyes ; 
 
 There was a hush, and I heard a voice, — 
 
 " Shall mortal man be more just than God ? 
 
 Shall man be more pure than his Maker ? 
 
 Lo ! in His servants He putteth no trust, 
 
 And His angels He chargeth with frailty ; 
 
 How much more those who dwell in houses of clay, 
 
 "Whose foundation is the dust ; 
 
 "Who are crushed before the moth-worm ! 
 
 From morning to evening they are destroyed : 
 
 They perish for ever unregarded. 
 
 Doth not their very excellency pass away ? 
 
 They die, even without wisdom.'— (iv. 12-21.) 
 
 It must not be lost sight of that the speaker is 
 the antagonist of virtue and the advocate of a 
 condemned cause. In the struggle between his 
 earthly and his heavenly affections he has filled 
 his soul with a mist of darkness and conjured up a 
 shadow of terror that stands to him for a Person. 
 Religion was meant to give us clear views of 
 
144 THE BOOK OF JOB. 
 
 right, and not gloomy and indistinct visions of 
 God. " Shall mortal man be more just than God ?" 
 Than what God ? God has revealed Himself to 
 man in sunlight as Justice. So far as man's soul 
 is built on this model, he is more just than the in- 
 discernible shape that appals and disorders the 
 imagination of the superstitious dreamer. We 
 must not be imposed on by the craft that strives 
 to strike us dumb with the nomenclature of 
 heaven, nor by the fanaticism which brandishes 
 the name of God as fools toss firebrands. The 
 allegiance we owe on high is due, not to the 
 sound of a name, but to the sanctity of a cha- 
 racter. 
 
 The theory of man's utter baseness is sub- 
 servient to the doctrine that happiness is the 
 object of life and the constant attendant on virtue, 
 or what the men who hold this doctrine regard as 
 more than the equivalent of virtue, the confession 
 of our depravity. " Confess yourself a sinner," 
 Eliphaz says, " and God will restore all that you 
 have lost." 
 
 Job had not hitherto served God for reward, 
 and he will not now depart from the principle of 
 his life. To do so would be to forsake God for 
 Satan, for the contest concerning him was whether 
 he was righteous for righteousness' sake, or for the 
 
THE BOOK OF JOB. 145 
 
 increase of his substance. He again asks for 
 death : — 
 
 O that I might have my request, 
 And that God would grant my desire ; 
 That God would resolve to crush me— 
 Would stretch out His hand and cut me off ! 
 Then would I yet have the consolation, 
 And could exult over this unsparing anguish, 
 That I have not violated the Commandments of 
 the Holy One.— (vi. 8-10.) 
 
 Then Bildad takes up the argument, and insists 
 on the antecedent principle that God is just, and 
 that, therefore, whatever He does must be 
 admitted as just. Since He slew Job's children, 
 they must have sinned, because He destroys none 
 but sinners ; and since Job was afflicted, he 
 cannot be innocent, because the innocent are 
 never afflicted. — (viii.) 
 
 To this Job answers that he knows that God is 
 just, but that the manifestation and sphere of 
 His justice are unknown. The current idea of 
 divine justice was taken not from the moral 
 instinct, nor from a true induction, nor from 
 revelation, but from the foregone conclusion that 
 prosperity is the mark of virtue, and adversity of 
 vice, which was the very point at issue. This 
 notion left the action of justice or the nature of 
 virtue in uncertainty ; for if it can be shown that 
 
 10 
 
146 THE BOOK OP JOB. 
 
 a guilty man ever prospers, then guilt is in- 
 distinguishable from innocence, or else justice 
 must be administered on some unknown principle. 
 Job's argument enforces the latter alternative — 
 
 This one thing I affirm, 
 
 That the upright and wicked He alike destroyeth ; 
 
 When the scourge slays suddenly, 
 
 He laughs at the trials of the innocent. — (ix. 22.) 
 
 Is power justice ? Then this puts an end to all 
 discussion and reasoning, which are pre-supposed 
 and allowed by our primary conception of justice. 
 The universe is alive with God's power; but He 
 passes me by, and I see Him not. He will not 
 deign to reason with me. He overwhelms me 
 with the tempest of His fury. We listen for His 
 voice, and we are stunned with the thunder. We 
 look for light, and we are dazzled by the flash. 
 With yearning, anxious souls we ask a question 
 about virtue and suffering, and we are told that 
 God made the heavens. What has this to do with 
 our question ? The power to make a thousand 
 heavens could not give the right to lay one sorrow 
 on an innocent spirit. If the power that created 
 the stars can heal the mourner's grief, why is it all 
 lavished on inanimate matter ? And if it cannot, 
 what is it to me that through immeasurable space 
 suns stand self-balanced and planets revolve? 
 
THE BOOK OF JOB. 147 
 
 It were better to consign the mechanism of 
 creation to independent law, and bring back God 
 among men, than to describe Him as guiding 
 planets, and give this as a reason why we are to 
 groan unpitied. If injustice reigns on earth, 
 how can the surging doubt of the soul be quelled 
 by being informed that God made the Pleiades and 
 the Chambers of the South ? Will it ease my 
 pang to learn that the hand that inflicts it made 
 Arcturus and Orion ? Power, so far as I have 
 seen it, is associated with wrong. Show me God 
 trusting in right and suffering from might, as I do, 
 and He will reason with me. Such is Job's cry. 
 
 Men say it is well with the righteous and ill 
 with the wicked. But this is an innate convic- 
 tion, not an inference from observation. We are 
 persuaded of it, and cling to it in darkness, despair, 
 and death ; but it lacks confirmation from visible 
 experience. When we come to facts, how are we 
 to discern the righteous man ? Are we to argue 
 back from appearances ? This would be proving 
 that the prosperous man is righteous, not that the 
 righteous is prosperous. To make the proposition 
 logically sound we should have the good man first 
 indicated, and then behold prosperity following 
 his path. God does not do this. We cry to Him 
 in our agony, and ask what sin has brought our 
 
 10—2 
 
148 THE BOOK OF JOB. 
 
 sorrow, and He heeds us not. There is no use, 
 therefore, in appealing to foundations that are hid 
 in the abysms. It is better to shelter our moral 
 instinct from the world, to let it live in the one 
 region where it can live, and there await a time of 
 expansion, than to expose it prematurely to the 
 chill of casuistry and the irony of facts. 
 
 The award of power cannot be a solution of 
 moral anomalies. The thunder and the earth- 
 quake cannot drown the still small voice. If the 
 good man suffers and complains, he is pronounced 
 a sinner for complaining. But if he was good and 
 suffered undeservedly, he was -justified in com- 
 plaining. The question is, was he good ? Power 
 cannot answer, has no right to answer. 
 
 This reference of moral difficulties to Divine 
 power is echoed back to earth in ceaseless 
 reverberations. After having said that God 
 laughs at the temptations of the innocent, Job 
 proceeds : — 
 
 The earth is given unto the hand of the wicked : 
 
 He covereth the faces of its judges ; 
 
 If it be not He, who, then, is it ? — (ix. 24) 
 
 All the tyrannies of earth are shadows of the 
 asserted tyranny of heaven. Henceforth we 
 cannot be shocked at any seeming profanity in 
 the language of the poem, because we see that it 
 
THE BOOK OP JOB. 149 
 
 is levelled against human injustice — against the 
 godless vicegerent of God, whose bribed priests 
 celebrated a despot god that human despotism 
 might seem a godlike institution. If God's power 
 be justice, if whatever God does is just because 
 He is able to do it, and if human government be 
 an ordinance of God, then human government is 
 founded on might, and man's duty is to suffer 
 wrong without complaint or inquiry. The theory 
 of God's character affects not merely our religion ; 
 it affects every earthly institution. The problem 
 of disinterested virtue is not a speculation of idle 
 philosophy : it enters into all the relations of life, 
 and is decided in every adjudication of human 
 authority. If might be right, and the ruler's 
 unjust decision must not be questioned, then 
 all obedience for conscience' sake is abolished, 
 and self-interest becomes the only motive that 
 remains to regulate human conduct. We cannot 
 wonder that men who had God set before them 
 as the pattern of brutal kings and lawless con- 
 querors should have endeavoured to, blot Him 
 from heaven. 
 
 Zophar appeals to God's secret knowledge as 
 furnishing a reason for Job's afflictions. He 
 concludes from the unknown that he is guilty. 
 Let him repent and all will go well with him. 
 
150 THE BOOK OP JOB. 
 
 This means, let him not serve God for nought ; let 
 him cease his vain obedience to a righteous god 
 who cannot save him, and transfer his allegiance 
 to a god of power and rewards. — (xi.) 
 
 In his reply Job lays bare the root of the false 
 argument of his friends. He had already pleaded 
 as an argument against the pretensions of power, 
 that a god of mere power could make him appear 
 guilty whether he were so or not by overwhelm- 
 ing him with disasters that common opinion 
 identified with guilt. 
 
 I know that thou wilt not acquit me. 
 
 I must be accounted wicked : 
 
 Why, then, should I labour in vain ? 
 
 Should I wash myself in snow water, 
 
 And cleanse my hands with rock,— 
 
 Yet wouldst thou plunge me in the ditch, 
 
 And mine own clothes would abhor me.— (ix. 28-31.) 
 
 If men would persist in making calamity the 
 token of sin, and appealing to a god of power to 
 justify their judgment, such a god could always 
 confute the arguments of righteousness by arraying 
 it in loss and misery. Eighteousness in itself and 
 for itself is an independent and incomparable good. 
 This is God's original position illustrated by Job's 
 life and now maintained by his arguments. 
 Satan and Job's friends strive to represent the 
 
THE BOOK OF JOB. 151 
 
 love of righteousness as the love of prosperity, and 
 thereby seek to destroy the essence of right, 
 making it consist only in its visible accident. 
 But we may easily see how unjust this judgment 
 by appearance is. 
 
 Peaceful are the tents of robbers, 
 
 And they that provoke God are secure ; 
 
 Into whose hands God bringeth abundance. — (xii. 6.) 
 
 The beasts of the field prey on each other, the 
 fierce and cruel on the weak and harmless, and 
 God suffers it. There may be, no doubt there is, 
 a secret wisdom in this; but on the strength of 
 the unknown explanation we must not infer that 
 robbers are more righteous or more favoured by 
 God than their victims, or that lambs are guiltier 
 than tigers. It may yet be revealed to us why 
 cruelty triumphed and innocence was overthrown ; 
 but this possibility is not to prevent us from 
 pronouncing innocence to be innocence and 
 justice to be justice. We know as an abstract 
 principle that God is just, and we know with 
 equal certainty that just men suffer : are we to 
 wait for the unfolding of the mystery, or cut the 
 knot now by confounding justice with injustice ? 
 There is a true sense in which all things and 
 events are attributable to God — a sense consistent 
 with the absolute wisdom of His character. But 
 
152 THE BOOK OF JOB. 
 
 there is also a false ascription of authority by 
 which men adulate the omnipotence of heaven. 
 We are all familiar with the pious platitudes, the 
 supine commonplaces, of popular religion. He 
 breaketh down, and none can rebuild. He mis- 
 leadeth counsellors, and maketh judges fools. He 
 increaseth nations and destroyeth them. He 
 blinds rulers and maketh them reel like drunkards. 
 — (xii. 13.) The commercial shock that vibrates 
 through the civilized world has a magnitude 
 commensurate with God's majesty. But take it 
 in detail : go into a single desolated home, look 
 into one despairing heart, contemplate one ruined 
 life, and will you say that is God's deed ? The 
 victory that decides an empire's destiny is 
 ordained of heaven ; but take one murdered 
 victim of ambition, and will you dare to say that 
 God was the murderer ? The conquest was made 
 in the might and the wisdom of the Lord ; but 
 behold a solitary, demoralized, unhumanized, im- 
 bruted slave, and say is that God's handiwork ? 
 The earthquake, the famine, the storm, the sack of 
 the city, the wreck of the ship are from God; 
 but the ruined home, the profaned altar, the 
 shrieking maiden ? The wars of tribes and 
 nations, and the pestilence that walketh in dark- 
 ness, rise to proportions worthy of Deity ; but 
 
THE BOOK OF JOB. 153 
 
 behold Job sitting in ashes childless and anguish- 
 riven ! 
 
 Do we not see that our ascriptions of houour to 
 God are the echoes of our lies to our fellow-men ? 
 We flatter God as man is flattered. We call the 
 wholesale murderer a hero, and we treat God so. 
 We call the spoiler of a continent a statesman, 
 and we treat God so. We rank Jehovah, the 
 omnipotent, with Alaric the destroyer and Alex- 
 ander the Great. 
 
 Will ye speak wickedly on behalf of God, 
 
 And argue deceitfully on His behalf ? 
 
 Will it be good when He searcheth you out, 
 
 If ye flatter Him as man is flattered ? 
 
 Surely He will reprove you, 
 
 If ye secretly be partial. 
 
 Should not His majesty fill you with-reverence, 
 
 And His dread fall upon you ? 
 
 Tour memorable sayings are dust ; 
 
 Tour strongholds strongholds of clay. — (xiii. 7-12.) 
 
 This slavish indiscriminating homage proves 
 how unworthy is our conception of Him to whom 
 we offer it. There is an Order within this chaos, 
 a Providence within this confusion, a God of living 
 justice within this blind unsympathizing fate; to 
 Him Job addresses himself : — 
 
 So He may slay me, I may cease to hope, 
 Tet to His face will I defend my ways ; 
 
154 THE BOOK OF JOB. 
 
 He, too, shall be my deliverance, 
 For the hypocrite cannot come into His presence, 
 (xiii. 15, 16.) 
 
 He feels with an invincible conviction that 
 there is a clue to this maze, though he cannot lay 
 his hand upon it. He knows with the certitude 
 of consciousness that there is a light in which all 
 could be made clear. He is as sure as he exists 
 that if he and his accusers stood now before God, 
 he must be acquitted, and they condemned. The 
 elucidation of the mystery is in the nature of 
 things. It may yet burst forth into daylight, but 
 he shall not be there to see it. He would be 
 satisfied if in the future for a single instant he 
 could be summoned from the blank of non- 
 existence, to witness the vindication and the 
 triumph of right. 
 
 There is hope of a tree, 
 
 If it be cut down, that it will sprout again, 
 
 And its tender branch not fail : 
 
 Though its root in the earth wax old, 
 
 And its stock in the soil die, 
 
 Yet will it bud at the odour of water, 
 
 And shoot forth boughs as when planted : 
 
 But man dies and wastes away ; 
 
 Man breathes his last, and where is he ? 
 
 Waters pass away from a lake, 
 
 And a stream is parched up and dries ; 
 
 So man lies down and rises not 
 
THE BOOK OF JOB. 155 
 
 Till the heavens be no more they shall not awake, 
 Nor be roused from their sleep. 
 Oh that Thou wouldst hide me in sheol, 
 Wouldst conceal me till Thine anger turn, 
 "Wouldst appoint a time and remember me, 
 All the time of my warfare would I wait 
 Till my time to be relieved cometh, 
 Then Thou wouldst call and I would answer Thee. — 
 (xiv. 7-15.) 
 
 The contemplation of a total end of existence had 
 a different effect on Job's mind from that which 
 it has on ours. He had never been accustomed to 
 indulge in any other view. He had never relaxed 
 his mental vision with the prospect of an eternal 
 redress. So the end of life was not a ground of 
 sadness or disappointment, but a stimulus to 
 redoubled remonstrance. When his earthly hope 
 perishes, he cannot sit in contentment awaiting 
 the resurrection. It is not the restoration of his 
 personal happiness he thirsts for, but the justifica- 
 tion of his trust in a righteous God. So he must 
 forthwith lift his voice against wrong. We who 
 have been familiarized with the hope of im- 
 mortality have blinded our moral vision by 
 constantly gazing upon it. All wrong and outrage 
 is beheld with indifference, because there is an 
 endless futurity of reparations. We have lost the 
 distinctness and right value of present things by 
 
156 THE BOOK OF JOB. 
 
 gazing into an incomprehensible distance. We 
 have melted the pearl justice in the goblet of 
 eternity. We have evaporated the rounded dew- 
 drop of our morning conscience into the impalpa- 
 ble azure. We have wasted the beam of the 
 candle of the Lord within us, that was given to 
 guide our steps, by striving, to mingle it with the 
 radiancy of invisible suns. We suffer, and see 
 our brother suffer, injustice, and are content, 
 because it will be set right hereafter. But if we 
 lose our sense of justice, nothing can ever be set 
 right for us. And we have almost lost our sense 
 of justice and our impatience with injustice ; and 
 in consequence, when modern science turns our 
 dawn into darkness and destroys our hope of 
 another life, we have no faith or hope left for 
 earth or heaven. Our argosy has sailed on the 
 vast ocean, and it is lost. It comes to us no more. 
 We staked the justification of God on the reality 
 of a future judgment, and in His anger He 
 suffers it to vanish from our eyes. We despair of 
 earth and heaven. The only God that remains 
 for us is the God of injustice ; the only principle 
 that remains is the principle of selfishness. Our 
 sympathies are with Satan and his three sup- 
 porters, who scorn and calumniate the man who 
 serves God for nought. Job's theology was a 
 
THE BOOK OF JOB. 157 
 
 healthier one than ours. It would be better for 
 us to lose our belief in immortality and retain our 
 integrity and a grand implicit faith than to retain 
 belief and lose our moral sense, for the moral 
 sense ia immortality. It is better to be immortal 
 than to say " I believe in the resurrection of the 
 dead." 
 
 In their next series of addresses Job's friends 
 accuse him of irreverence, repeat that the heavens 
 are not pure in God's sight, much less corrupt and 
 abominable man (xv.), and dilate on the irrever- 
 sible downfall of the wicked (xviii.-xx.) The 
 question under debate is whether man is a slavish, 
 degraded being, who can do no better thing than 
 confess his abject worthlessness and accept the 
 earthly happiness of which alone he is capable, or 
 whether he is righteous and unrewarded. Confess 
 your vileness, be happy, and so still the heart's 
 longings, and solve the problem of life, said the 
 orthodox party in Job's time. Job, on the 
 contrary, asserted his righteousness, that is, the 
 disinterestedness of his virtue, when he was shorn 
 of every earthly joy, and so made existence appear 
 an unfinished history, an uncompleted syllogism. 
 When the doctrine of immortality was made 
 known, the believer in temporal prosperity as the 
 reward of religion could imagine no other world 
 
158 THE BOOK OF JOB. 
 
 than a continuation of this, while the asserter of 
 righteousness beheld the fulfilment of his vague 
 desire and the solution of his difficulty. The mass 
 of religious men in all ages, believing that the 
 acknowledgment of man's entire corruption wins 
 earthly favour from God, conceive, in consequence, 
 a heaven from which every spiritual nature 
 revolts. Orthodoxy has been made to consist 
 altogether in belief apart from the quality of the 
 things believed in, until disbelief in those things 
 has become a negative proof of aspiration more 
 satisfactory to the hopes of the human soul than 
 the consent of all the churches. The counsels of 
 heaven are forced into accommodation with earth 
 such as Satan, by the aid of the Chaldeans, the 
 Sabeans, and the brute forces of nature, has made 
 it ; and heavenly mansions are furnished for those 
 who never entertained an unearthly or an un- 
 selfish thought. The picture drawn by the friends 
 of Job is no dream. There is, beyond doubt, a 
 safe prosperity and a substantial happiness on 
 earth. It is for him who restrains the ex- 
 travagance of his vices and his virtues, the former 
 just below, the latter just above, the level of 
 prudent management and public observation. 
 This man has the world at his feet. He provokes 
 no lightning, and the Sabeans know him as their 
 
THE BOOK OF JOB. 159 
 
 brother. He confesses that he is a sinner, and 
 Satan puts him to no trial. We need not suppose 
 that the comforters of Job were exactly of this 
 type, but unquestionably their arguments rested 
 on such men, and tend to multiply them. And the 
 affliction which they associated with what they 
 called wickedness was, and ever will be, realized 
 in men of Job's character. They do not seek 
 rewards, and it is Satan's special office to take 
 care that they do not get them, for, if they did, 
 their example and their influence would weaken 
 too much the discipline of life. Meanwhile the 
 sight of their wrongs rouses and stimulates every 
 generous spirit : — 
 
 Mine eye is dim through vexation, 
 
 And all my limbs are as a shadow. 
 
 At this the upright are astonished, 
 
 And the innocent rouses himself against the impious. 
 
 But the righteous shall hold fast his way, 
 
 And the pure of hands increase strength. — (xvii. 7-9.) 
 
 Eliphaz, in his third and last address (xxii.), 
 nakedly avows the selfish doctrine of morals, 
 which follows logically from the one-sided con- 
 templation of God's omnipotence. The writer 
 manifestly aims at exposing to detestation the 
 fashionable religion of his day by confessing, in 
 
160 THE BOOK OP JOB. 
 
 the words of one of its advocates, the mean 
 profanity of its principles : — 
 
 Can a man be profitable to God, 
 
 As a wise man is profitable to himself ? 
 
 Is it a pleasure to the Almighty that thou art just ? 
 
 Or gain to Him that thou makest thy ways perfect ? 
 
 Through fear of thee will He plead with thee ? 
 
 — (xxii. 2-4.) 
 
 If we regard God's righteousness, we can be a 
 profit and a pleasure to Him. For what is history 
 but a continual cry for help from defeated virtue ? 
 But if we exclusively regard God's power, we 
 cannot be profitable to Him. In the first case, we 
 do what we can for God ; in the second, we get 
 what we can from Him. Here we have distinctly 
 and briefly the two systems of morals, God's and 
 Satan's. Eliphaz and his followers, looking only 
 at God's power, say, naturally enough, What profit 
 can your goodness be to God ? They regard good- 
 ness, not as a contribution to some wise universal 
 end, but simply in relation to the happiness of the 
 individual. And as earthly happiness does not 
 need goodness as an ingredient, they disavow it, 
 confess themselves sinners, and trust in God's 
 power. Having justified their prosperity by this 
 process of reasoning, they argue backwards from 
 
THE BOOK OF JOB. 161 
 
 the adversity of the truly just man in a totally 
 different direction : — 
 
 Is not thy wickedness great ? 
 
 Are not thine iniquities innumerable ? 
 
 For of thy brother thou hast taken a pledge for nought, 
 
 And stripped off the clothing of the destitute ; 
 
 To the weary thou hast given no water to drink ; 
 
 And hast withholden bread from the hungry, 
 
 As if the land belonged to the man of power alone, 
 
 As if only the man of rank may dwell therein. 
 
 — (xxii. 5-8.) 
 
 If you confessed yourself to be a sinner, the 
 argument runs — God would cause you to prosper ; 
 but you do not prosper, therefore you are a 
 sinner, abusing that very power which you disclaim 
 and opposing the poor whose friend you profess 
 to be. Such was the orthodox mode of reasoning 
 in Job's time. Disinterested virtue is a delusion. 
 It will expose you not only to misfortune, but to 
 the charge of the wrong and high-handedness 
 which you scorn and hate. There is no virtue 
 or goodness but that which stipulates with the 
 power of God for the wages of prosperity : — 
 
 If thou return to the Almighty, thou shalt be built up. 
 Thou shalt put away iniquity from thy tabernacle ; 
 Then shalt thou lay up gold as dust, 
 And the gold of Ophir as the stones of the brooks ; 
 And the Almighty shall be thy defence, 
 And thou shalt have plenty of silver. — (xxii. 23-25.) 
 
 11 
 
162 THE BOOK OF JOB. 
 
 You charge my doctrine, Job answers, with 
 tyranny and oppression of the weak. Your 
 doctrine of selfishness is the triumphant one: 
 behold its fruits in the desolation and wretched- 
 ness that fill the land : 
 
 The wicked remove landmarks ; 
 
 They drive off flocks and feed thereon. 
 
 The aas of the fatherless they drive away ; 
 
 They take the widow's Ox for a pledge ; 
 
 They turn the needy from the way, 
 
 The poor of the land must hide themselves together. 
 
 So they go forth, like wild asses in the desert to their 
 
 work, 
 Seeking diligently for food ; 
 The desert their children's bread I 
 In the field they reap his corn, 
 And crop the oppressor's vineyard ; 
 Naked they pass the night unclad, 
 And without a covering in the cold ; 
 They are wet with mountain showers, 
 And for lack of shelter embrace the rock ; 
 The wicked snatch the fatherless from the breast, 
 And take in pledge what is on the poor ; 
 They cause the naked to go without clothing, 
 And hungry are they who bear the sheaves ; 
 Within dark walls they cause them to press oil ; 
 
 They tread winepresses, yet suffer thirst. 
 
 Here from the city men are groaning, 
 
 There the soul of the wounded crieth out ; 
 
 Yet no judge regardeth the supplication. — (xxiv. 2-12.) 
 
 And what is the possession for which this price is 
 
THE BOOK OF JOB. 163 
 
 paid? Who and what are the few for whose 
 exaltation the many are sacrificed ? Does the God 
 of power, whom alone they recognise, impart to 
 them of His own attributes ? Does He make 
 them immortal ? 
 
 They are exalted for a while — and are not. 
 They are cut off like topmost ears of corn ; 
 They die like all beside. — (xxiv. 24.) 
 
 Bildad, who closes the controversy on his side, 
 can only restate his exhausted argument in 
 exaggerated terms that expose its disjointedness 
 and inconsequence : 
 
 Dominion and terror are with him ; 
 
 He worketh absolutely in His high places. 
 
 How, then, can man be just before G-od ? 
 
 The moon and stars are not pure in His sight : 
 
 How much less frail man, a worm, 
 
 And the son of man, a reptile. — (xxv. 2, 5, 6.) 
 
 So religious men reasoned then, and so they reason 
 now. Let us attend to Job's answer. 
 
 You say God is mighty, and you ask me how 
 can man be just before Him ? Man can be just 
 before the God of might, because the power of 
 justice, which you ignore, is mightier, holier, than 
 the power of might. When you speak of God's 
 power you do not comprehend the meaning of 
 your words. You confine your view to what is 
 
 11—2 
 
164 THE BOOK OP JOB. 
 
 without you, and you lose sight of God's grandest 
 work. "He worketh absolutely in His high 
 places !" Yes, He stretehes the north over empty 
 space, He hangs the earth upon nothing, He binds 
 the waters in His clouds, He hushes the sea, He 
 garnishes the heavens — But what are these things ? 
 They are but the outskirts of His ways, the 
 whisper of His voice. The thunder of His power, 
 which you cannot understand, is the eternal law 
 of justice echoed in the heart of man. One moral 
 impulse is greater than the movements of all the 
 sidereal heavens : — 
 
 Look then abroad through nature to the range 
 Of planets, suns, and adamantine spheres, 
 Wheeling unshaken through the void immense ; 
 And speak, oh man ! does this capacious scene, 
 With half that kindling majesty dilate 
 Thy strong conception, as when Brutus rose 
 Refulgent from the stroke of Caesar's fate, 
 Amid the crowd of patriots ; and, his arm 
 Aloft extending, like eternal Jove 
 When guilt brings down the thunder, called aloud 
 On Tully's name, and shook his crimson steel, 
 And bade the father of his country, hail ! 
 For lo ! the tyrant prostrate on the dust, 
 And Borne again is free ! 
 Akenside's Pleasures of Imagination, Book I., 487. 
 
 Haviug distinguished the moral from the 
 material majesty of God, Job once more asserts 
 
THE BOOK OP JOB. 165 
 
 the rectitude of his principles, and his determined 
 maintenance of them. It will he recollected that 
 what he calls his righteousness is not perfect 
 goodness, hut goodness, so far as he had it, of 
 an unselfish kind. So far as he served God he 
 served Him without covenanting for reward. He 
 proves this hy holding his position unchanged 
 even in the presence of God, who had neglected 
 him and treated him unjustly. To ahandon it 
 would be to fall away from righteousness : 
 
 As God liveth, who hath neglected my cause, 
 Till I expire I will not relinquish my integrity ; 
 My righteousness I hold fast and will not let it go. 
 
 — (xxvii. 2, 5, 6.) 
 
 The acknowledgment of sin which Satan and 
 his friends wished to wring from Job was the 
 confession that his virtue was hypocrisy. This he 
 will never admit. His virtue was pure love of 
 right and God. In the strength of that love, amid 
 the wreck and ruin of his fortunes and the tortures 
 of disease, he can stand in the presence of his 
 Maker unabashed. This is the real power of God. 
 Can the impious man, or he who serves for reward, 
 do this ? Can he stand before the Power in 
 which he trusted ? Did he delight himself in the 
 Almighty ? Was he not merely an expectant 
 upon power ? That power will not save him 
 
166 THE BOOK OF JOB. 
 
 from death, nor his posterity from poverty and 
 destruction. So little ~ does omnipotence, apart 
 from justice, effect for its votaries. 
 
 And why, Job continues, do you attempt to cow 
 and crush men's hearts by introducing the works 
 of creation into the argument ? There is no 
 analogy between the moon and stars and man's 
 soul that you should compare them or argue from 
 one to the other. Man digs in mines, but cannot 
 find wisdom there. He cannot find it in earth or 
 sea. Why cannot he find it? Because the 
 wisdom by which God rules the inanimate world 
 is a different wisdom from that by which He 
 rules the rational soul of man. God portions out 
 to His different creations their different wisdoms. 
 He gave weight to the winds, and measured out 
 the waters ; made a course for the rain, and a path 
 for the thunder-flash. And to man He said: 
 " Lo ! the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom." 
 
 Having thus refuted his adversaries, Job, in a 
 lengthened discourse, repels their insinuations by 
 showing how he had faithfully discharged all the 
 duties that purity and charity demand from man. 
 Thus the opponents of righteousness are conclu- 
 sively overthrown. 
 
 But the victory has been too overwhelming, the 
 strain has been too great, the flight of virtue has 
 
THE BOOK OF JOB. 167 
 
 been at too lofty a height and too far away from 
 the legitimate attractions of earth. As Job's 
 friends erred in singling out God's power for the 
 sole object of consideration, so Job was necessarily 
 compelled in his answer to dwell too exclusively 
 on His justice. In his scorn at their sordid trust, 
 Job seemed to lose sight of the fact that a divine 
 attribute was under discussion. Though God's 
 justice is greater than His power, His power also 
 must be vindicated. Virtue must not be left 
 denuded of happiness. Vice cannot be left in 
 possession even of earth. Men must not be 
 tempted to mistake adversity for virtue by their 
 constant companionship. The weak must not be 
 discouraged ; the strong and the hypocrite must 
 not be emboldened. 
 
 In the subsequent part of the poem a new 
 speaker appears, who censures Job's friends for 
 not refuting him, but adds nothing to their argu- 
 ments. Then God speaks, and Job humbles him- 
 self before Him, and has all that he lost restored 
 twofold. This teaches us that however we 
 may renounce the slavish doctrines of men we 
 must reverence God in our hearts, and that an un- 
 speakable blessing remains for those who love the 
 right for its own sake. Still we must in no 
 
168 THE BOOK OF JOB. 
 
 degree lose sight of the design of the poem, which 
 is to establish the rights of man here and his hopes 
 hereafter on the immovable foundation of the 
 reality of virtue and a true conception of the 
 divine character. 
 
FABLES. 
 
 The fable, or that most ancient form of it in 
 which the power of speech is ascribed to the 
 lower orders of creation, is supposed by some 
 writers to have naturally originated in that part of 
 the world where the transmigration of souls was 
 believed in. Others regard it as a dreamy 
 reminiscence of the Golden Age, when man, beast 
 and trees met and conversed with each other on 
 terms of mutual understanding and amity. It is 
 more reasonable to suppose that fables are simply 
 a result of the effort which man has always been 
 making to express his thoughts suitably and 
 forcibly. Just as single words such as " mountain," 
 " star," " lion," " oak," were used to express 
 figuratively simple ideas of character, so those 
 figurative words were grouped together to describe 
 more complicated relations of conduct. The 
 oldest known fable extant is that called Jotham's 
 parable, in the ninth chapter of Judges. Anyone 
 who reads the whole narrative will see how 
 
170 FABLES. 
 
 naturally the occasion prompted the utterance, 
 and will also find grounds for inferring that fables 
 indicate rather a different trait between man and 
 the lower animals, than an identity as implied in 
 the transmigration of souls — in reality require a 
 wide difference between them, for they often are, 
 iu fact, parodies on the actions of man. Jotham's 
 parable is as follows : " The trees went forth on a 
 time to anoint a king over them ; and they said 
 unto the olive-tree, Eeign thou over us. But the 
 olive said unto them, Should I leave my fatness, 
 wherewith by me they honour God and man, and 
 go to be promoted over the trees ? And the trees 
 said to the fig-tree, Come thou, and reign over us. 
 But the fig-tree said unto them, Should I forsake 
 my sweetness and my good fruit, and go to be 
 promoted over the trees ? Then said the trees 
 unto the vine, Come thou, and reign over us. 
 And the vine said unto them, Should I leave my 
 wine which cheereth God and man, and go to be 
 promoted over the trees ? Then said all the trees 
 unto the bramble, Come thou and reign over us. 
 And the bramble said unto the trees, If in truth 
 ye anoint me king over you, then come and put 
 your trust in my shadow; and if not, let fire 
 come out of the bramble, and devour the cedars of 
 Lebanon." Jotham's fable illustrates the general 
 
FABLES. 171 
 
 rule that where irrational or inanimate actors are 
 introduced, the meaning is got, not by considering 
 their natures, but by keeping in mind the characters 
 of the persons whom they represent. Human 
 motives are in an arbitrary and unjust way 
 ascribed to beasts or trees, and then the names of 
 the tree or beast, associated with ridicule or con- 
 demnation from such ascription, are reflected back 
 on the human agent. Nobody would ever think 
 of calling a bramble contemptible or tyrannical 
 until it had been identified with a contemptible or 
 tyrannical man. Its fruit is not so valuable as 
 that of the other trees, but then its growth and 
 attitude are correspondingly humble. As to the 
 vine, I should like to have Sir Wilfrid Lawson's 
 opinion about it. It is because low-minded men 
 are frequently arrogant that the lowly bramble has 
 arrogance ascribed to it. Similarly in the fable of 
 the mountain in labour; the mountain is made 
 ridiculous by describing it as doing metaphorically 
 what only bombastic and self-important men do. 
 We must not, therefore, insist too much on the 
 supposed intrinsic characters of the actors in fables. 
 Thinking of the private character of a tragedian 
 would not help us to understand his delineation of 
 Hamlet. So thinking about the personal character 
 of a preacher might not assist us in comprehend- 
 
172 FABLES. 
 
 ing his discourse. I know some people hold a 
 different idea on this subject, but the world is full 
 of prejudices and errors. But to come back to 
 Jotham's parable, it reminds us of the proverbial 
 saying, " That if you set a beggar on horseback he 
 will ride in the wrong direction." This proverb, 
 which is a fable put hypothetically, is very unjust 
 towards beggars. If you were literally to put a 
 beggar on horseback, the great probability is that 
 he would fall off. The intended meaning is that 
 if a person unaccustomed to the control of large 
 sums of money were suddenly placed in a position 
 where unlimited wealth lay at his disposal, he 
 would be sure to run a career of extravagance. 
 This may be quite true, but there is no reason 
 why a beggar rather than a town councillor should 
 be selected as the illustration of it. Jotham's 
 parable had a political meaning. Communities 
 seek for good men to have rule over them, because 
 they know that good men in office will do their 
 duty, and sacrifice their own comfort to the welfare 
 of the community. On this very account sincere 
 and honest men shrink naturally from taking 
 office. No one is anxious to thrust himself into a 
 position in which he is bound to forget himself 
 and think only of others. But mean and selfish 
 men are always anxious to rule, because they have 
 
FABLES. 173 
 
 a wrong estimate of the ruler's duty, and think 
 only of themselves and wish to be tyrants. This 
 was what Jotham intended to imply by calling 
 Abimelech a bramble. That curious superstition 
 that treats the maxims of the Bible as objects of 
 blind adoration, and not of practical use, keeps this 
 parable too much out of sight. We see from it 
 that politics were just the same thousands 
 of years ago that they are to-day. Whenever 
 there is an election of any kind, this is what 
 happens: A deputation waits on the olive-tree, 
 and invites him to reign over them, and the olive 
 says, Do you suppose I'm going to forsake the 
 service of God and man, and betake myself to 
 a place where neither God nor man is served or 
 respected ? Then the offer is made to the fig-tree, 
 and the fig-tree answers, I won't give up my 
 sweetness and good fruits, and mix myself up in 
 affairs where sweetness and good fruits would 
 be utterly thrown away. Then the vine is 
 invited, and the vine says, No ; thank you ; I'm 
 fond of respectable society, and I don't wan't to be 
 seen among the democrats of the alliance. So at 
 last they go to the bramble, and the bramble says, 
 Yes, I'll be the Lord's anointed ; and if anyone 
 disobeys my orders, I'll provide coals enough to set 
 these men on fire. 
 
174 FABLES. 
 
 The fable of Menenius Agrippa, which we meet 
 with in early Roman history, may be taken as a 
 counterpart to that of Jotharn. The Plebeians 
 had risen in insurrection against the Patricians, 
 and Menenius made them ashamed of themselves 
 by telling them that they acted as foolishly as 
 the members of the human body would act if 
 they were to conspire against the stomach and 
 refuse to supply it with food on the ground that 
 it did nothing in return. Now it might have been 
 argued in reply that the stomach sometimes does its 
 work badly, and sometimes undertakes more work 
 than it is able to perform ; but it did not occur to 
 the Plebeians to say anything of this kind. Perhaps 
 they had more moderate appetites or better diges- 
 tions than we have now. 
 
 There is a book of Indian origin called the 
 Fables of Pilhay, or Bidpai, that may be found 
 in our libraries, but is, I think, very little read 
 amongst us. It was published in Sanscrit about 
 the fifth century, under the title of "The Five 
 Chapters." It is apparently a collection of 
 popular anecdotes and fables, interspersed with 
 state maxims and wise proverbs, strung together 
 for a political or dynastic purpose. The design is, 
 under the guise or reality of giving them good 
 counsel, to exalt the authority of monarchs and 
 
FABLES. 175 
 
 the wisdom of prime ministers. It conveys the 
 impression that no bad man can ever rise at court, 
 and that female influence near the throne is always 
 exerted on the side of innocence and virtue. The 
 work is interesting to us because we see in it an 
 instance of the means or representations by which 
 the Indian people, who are sprung from the same 
 race as ourselves, were soothed into voluntary 
 submission to absolute authority. And it reminds 
 us that this absolute authority, it matters not 
 whether it was beneficially or tyrannically exer- 
 cised, reduced the people of India to such a state 
 of debility that they were overthrown by a hand- 
 ful of men of a nation congeneric with their own, 
 but whose whole history has been and is a struggle 
 for freedom. And it moreover teaches us that no 
 material benefits that we can enforce on con- 
 quered India, no peace, no order, no civilization 
 can for an instant compare with one breath of that 
 freedom by inhaling which we have ourselves 
 risen to greatness. The Fables of Bidpai were 
 translated into Persian, Arabic, and, in the thir- 
 teenth century, into Latin. And now a most 
 noticeable change took place in the reception of 
 this work. In India, Persia, and Arabia it was 
 accepted in good faith, and acquiesced in; but 
 almost the moment it reached Europe, where the 
 
176 FABLES. 
 
 battle of liberty was being fought, it was replied 
 to by one of the most grotesque parodies that 
 ever was written, " The History of Eeynard the 
 Fox." This remarkable production, which is 
 also a kind of collection of fables current at the 
 time and place, chiefly iEsopian in cast, shows by 
 overwhelming illustration that a simple undesign- 
 ing man has not a chance of promotion at the 
 court of an absolute ruler, that the most vicious, 
 the meanest, and the craftiest knave is certain to 
 rise to the place of chief favourite, and that the 
 influence of the women about the court is always 
 exercised on his behalf. Those two fable-epics, 
 one emanating from the court, the other from the 
 people, taken in conjunction with the Parable of 
 Jotham and that of Agrippa, which may be said 
 to have sprung from the same two sources, throw 
 much light on the original purpose of fables, and 
 on their interpretation generally. Their form 
 fitted them naturally for the praise, or censure, or 
 ridicule of rulers. The praise was made more 
 pleasing by its indirectness, and by being thinly 
 veiled, and was recommended to the multitude by 
 some familiar comparison. The censure was 
 rendered more biting by the same means, and 
 also more popular. And in both cases the 
 speaker or writer escaped the charge of being 
 
FABLES. 177 
 
 glaringly personal. If I desired to praise or to 
 blame some great potentate, such as the Town 
 Clerk or the Chairman of the Watch Committee, 
 and if I were to describe those gentlemen by 
 their names and titles, their modesty or their 
 vanity might take offence, and your feelings 
 towards them would blind you to the justice of 
 my remarks ; but if instead of " Town Clerk " 
 or " Chairman " I were to say " Wolf " or " Ass," 
 no offence could be taken, and you would be able 
 to imbibe the moral in that calm, philosophical 
 way that conduces to practical instruction. If 
 one were to denounce and expose the conduct of 
 great or rich men, it might be called factious and 
 ill-natured, but if you compare them to lions, 
 they take it as a compliment. 
 
 The lion and some other beasts agreed once on 
 a time to go hunting together, and to divide the 
 prey in common. They killed a stag, and divided 
 it into four parts. But when they were about to 
 take their several shares, the lion roared out: 
 " The first part is mine because I am highest in 
 dignity, the second is mine because I am 
 strongest, the third is mine because I was most 
 active in the hunt; and if you don't grant me 
 the fourth part, there's an end to all friendship 
 between us." This fable teaches us that when a 
 
 12 
 
178 FABLES. ~ 
 
 rich or powerful man joins with persons -of less 
 wealth and influence in pursuing some enter- 
 prise, religious, or philanthropical, or political, he 
 claims the whole control of it as his rightful due. 
 That is what is called having the lion's sbjare. 
 In Church affairs he insists on the entire disposal 
 of any patronage that is going. If he^i-ac one of 
 the trustees of a vacant living, he says : " I claim 
 one vote because my name is Dives, and a second 
 because I have more influence than all of you put 
 together, and a third! because my contribution has 
 been largest ; and if you don't grant me the fourth 
 you shall never enter my house again." So he has 
 the appointment, and you can imagine the kind 
 of man Dives will appoint. The same thing, I 
 suppose, occurs among Nonconformists. Dives 
 claims the whole management of the doctrine. 
 You can imagine the kind of doctrine Dives 
 likes. In politics, when various candidates are 
 mentioned at an election time, the lion roars : 
 " I claim the appointment first because I give most 
 money to the cause, and, secondly, because, if you 
 refuse, I'll have nothing more to say to you." Or 
 perhaps he says : " This is bad weather for hunt- 
 ing ; let us give our prey a holiday. If you don't 
 agree with me you must go hunting by yourselves;" 
 and somehow they are afraid to go by themselves, 
 
FABLES. 179 
 
 or they go in such small numbers that they have 
 no chance of catching anything. Men speak con- 
 temptuously of woman's mode of reasoning. They 
 say it consists in " Because I wish it." Now, the 
 truth is, this is not reasoning at all, nor is it 
 meant as such. It is merely the exercise of that 
 power which woman has, and which we all must 
 acknowledge, till she gets into Parliament. Most 
 men are struggling all their lives to be able to say 
 the same thing, to reason in the same way. Some- 
 one wrote a book on the " I wills " of Christ ; I 
 wish someone would write a book on the " I 
 wills '' of Dives. It might explain to us why it 
 is that the " I wills " of Christ so often come to 
 nothing. Now, nobody would venture to say all 
 this directly and undisguisedly about rich men. 
 It would be rude to do so. Therefore the fable- 
 writers call them lions. I am only explaining what 
 the fable- writers meant. 
 
 There may perhaps be some persons who think 
 that the lion should be allawed his own way, and 
 that it is black ingratitude to oppose him. They 
 may think that the honour of being allowed to 
 hunt in company with the royal animal is quite 
 enough, without demanding any more in the 
 division of the spoil than he chooses to give. 
 For such persons there is a special fable ready. 
 
 12—2 
 
180 FABLES. 
 
 The lion, the ass, and the fox went hunting- 
 together. They took a good deal of game, and 
 the ass was ordered to divide it. He divided it 
 into three parts, and the lion tore him in pieces. 
 The fox was then ordered to make the division, 
 and he took a small portion for himself and gave 
 all the rest to the lion. The lion commended him 
 greatly, and asked him how he had acquired such 
 correct notions of justice. " I learned them," 
 said the fox, "from the fate of the ass." Here 
 again you see how human conduct is ascribed to 
 the ass and the fox in order to stamp it in the one 
 case as foolish, and in the other as crafty. The 
 ass does not go hunting with the lion. He prefers 
 to hunt for thistles by himself, and in this he 
 shows his good sense. Nor does the fox hunt 
 in company with the lion. He, too, prefers to 
 have all that he can catch as his own. It is man 
 only who is so foolish as to go hunting in exalted 
 society, and either to have nothing but the honour 
 of the thing, or to be torn in pieces, or to get only 
 a worthless fragment of the spoil. This last fable 
 seems to shut us up to the alternative of being 
 torn in pieces like the ass, or frightened into 
 undue self-disparagement like the fox. But there 
 is no need for going hunting with the lion at all. 
 Fables only describe all kinds of human actions. 
 
FABLES. 181 
 
 Wisdom is not to be learned from one fact or one 
 fable, but from many facts and many fables. The 
 wisdom we learn from these two fables is, if we 
 wish to hunt in company, to hunt with our 
 equals. 
 
 It is necessary to retain some knowledge of 
 the political source from which the fable origin- 
 ally flowed, for without it we could trace no tide 
 or current in the ocean of fabulous literature that 
 time has accumulated. On the one side it con- 
 fuses itself with the anecdote and the jest ; on the 
 other it blends into the tale, and the novel or 
 romance. The use of the names of animals was 
 never indispensable to fables, as we may see 
 in Nathan's parable, and in some of the best 
 of the fables known as iEsop's, as for instance, 
 that of the old man who taught his sons the 
 strength of union by showing how a bundle of 
 sticks held together could not be broken ; of the 
 boy who was made to see the prudence of modera- 
 tion by his inability to draw his hand, when full 
 of filberts, out of a jar ; the shepherd's boy who 
 raised a false alarm of the wolf's coming so often 
 that when the wolf really came his warning was 
 not believed ; and many others. Tales might be 
 constructed within the limits of probability to 
 inculcate or illustrate any line of conduct that the 
 
182 FABLES. 
 
 writer deemed important. Stories of this kind, 
 when extended, become what we call novels. It 
 is most probable that novels were originally fables, 
 that is, tales illustrating morals or maxims, and 
 that they in course of time sought to please only 
 by variety of incident and beauty of style. Novels 
 that depict human character, or that are written 
 with a purpose, are long fables. Histories that 
 modify or arrange facts so as to prove a theory 
 are not prevented, by their being extended to 
 eight or ten volumes, from belonging to the 
 fabulous order. Some persons feel bound to 
 countenance religious novels, because they suppose 
 them supported by the example of the parables 
 in Scripture. But a work of fiction proving or 
 advancing religion, and religion illustrating some 
 incidental topic by a fable or parable, are two 
 different things. If all Scripture were a fable or 
 parable, there would be a parallel between it and 
 a religious novel, not otherwise. When we read 
 a novel written to prove some social or political 
 maxim, we say quite truly that, since all the facts 
 are at the writer's disposal, another novel may be 
 written to prove just the opposite. And the same 
 thing may be said of a religious novel. But it could 
 not be said of the teaching of Christ, or of Scrip- 
 ture generally. Fables were used extensively at 
 
FABLES. 183 
 
 one time, and, I believe, still are, for purposes of 
 illustration in sermons. Specimens of those com- 
 posed for that purpose may be found in old collec- 
 tions. A traveller vowed that he would give half 
 of whatever he found to Mercury. He found a 
 bag of dates and almonds. He ate the kernels of 
 the almonds and the pulp of the dates, and gave 
 the rest to Mercury. Men will try to cheat God 
 when they get the habit of cheating each other. The 
 devil once saw an old woman climbing up into a 
 tree with her shoes on, and foresaw that she would 
 fall and lay the blame on him. So he brought 
 witnesses to the spot, and said to them : " You 
 see that old woman getting up into a tree. Now, I 
 know that she will fall, and I want you to bear 
 witness that I did not persuade her to get up 
 into the tree with her shoes on." Presently the 
 old woman tumbled down, and when they asked 
 her why she got into the tree without even 
 taking off her shoes, she answered that the devil 
 had driven her to do it. Then the devil brought 
 his witnesses and proved that he was blameless in 
 the matter. People, it would seem, had got so 
 much into the way of throwing the blame on the 
 devil of every foolish thing they did, that the 
 devil, anxious, it may be, to prove that he is not 
 so black as he is painted, found it necessary to 
 
184 FABLES. 
 
 provide machinery for defending his character and 
 leaving us to bear the whole blame of our follies. 
 A wicked man who had committed a great 
 many villainies and escaped punishment, was 
 again taken and imprisoned for a fresh offence. 
 He besought the devil, who had so often helped 
 him, to come to his assistance once more. The 
 devil came to him carrying on his shoulders a 
 great bundle of shoes with the soles worn away, 
 and said to him : " My friend, I cannot help you 
 any longer. I have been travelling up and down 
 in so many places to get you out of your 
 difficulties that I have worn out all these shoes, 
 and I have no money left to buy others." This is 
 a very familiar way of telling us that there are 
 limits to the truth of the saying that the devil 
 takes care of his own. A preacher or writer, 
 standing on the history of the New Testa- 
 ment, may point his admonitions by stories or 
 fables of this kind, but that, as I have said, is 
 altogether different from building on the founda- 
 tion of fiction a recommendation of truth. 
 Under the head of fables of the kind of which I 
 have been now speaking may be placed the 
 following which I find in an old copy of iEsop. A 
 woman had a drunken husband, and devised a 
 scheme by which she thought she could terrify 
 
FABLES. 185 
 
 him out of his evil propensity. She took him one 
 day, when dead drunk, and placed him in a burial 
 vault, where she left him shut up until he had 
 time to get sober and discover where he was. She 
 then came and knocked at the door, and when he 
 asked who was there, she answered that she was 
 one who brought meat for the dead. " I don't want 
 anything to eat," said he. " Bring me some drink." 
 Another version of this story, which was composed 
 to exemplify the ruling passion strong in death, 
 has got into modern circulation, and most in- 
 iquitously a woman is made the heroine of it. I 
 read it from a cutting out of some serial. It is 
 called : — 
 
 "A Stoey with a Mokal to it. 
 
 " About forty years ago a certain man, whose 
 wife indulged rather freely in John Barleycorn, re- 
 solved to cure her of the disease. So he purchased 
 a small jar of whisky, and also two coffins. The 
 latter he stowed away in a corner of the house. 
 
 "On returning home from his employment as 
 usual this day she was ' very far gone ' indeed. 
 He placed her iu one coffin, and lay down in the 
 other one himself. After a couple of hours the 
 wife, no doubt rather uncomfortable, stretched 
 out her arms and exclaimed : 
 
186 FABLES. 
 
 " ' Ugh ! ugh ! yah ! Where am I ?' 
 " Husband (in a disguised voice, most unearthly): 
 ' You are dead, ma'am.' 
 
 " Wife : ' A'm dead ; and are you dead, too ?' 
 " Husband (still sepulchrally) : ' Yes.' 
 "Wife : ' How long are you dead, sir V 
 " Husband : ' A'm dead fourteen years.' 
 " Wife : ' And how long am I dead, sir V 
 " Husband : ' You are seven years dead.' 
 " Wife : ' Well, God Almighty bless you, sir ! 
 You that's so well acquainted in this country, 
 can you tell me where all get just half a glass of 
 whisky ?' 
 
 " We don't exactly remember what the moral is." 
 The people of the East conveyed instruction 
 through the same channel. We find the follow- 
 ing story in the life of Gautama, the founder of 
 the Buddhist religion. There was a young woman 
 who married early and had a child while still a 
 girl. When her beautiful boy could run alone, he 
 died. Her sorrow deprived her of reason for a 
 time, and in her love for her dead child she carried 
 it from house to house of her pitying friends, 
 asking for medicine for it. A Buddhist convert 
 sent her to Gautama. She went and said, " Lord 
 and master, do you know any medicine that will 
 be good for my child ?" " Yes, I know of some," 
 
FABLES. 187 
 
 said the teacher. Now, it was the custom for 
 patients to provide the herbs which the doctors 
 required ; so she asked what herbs he would want. 
 "I want some mustard-seed," he said; and when 
 the poor girl eagerly promised to bring some, he 
 added : " You must get it from some house where 
 no son, or husband, or parent, or slave, has died." 
 " Very good," she said, and went to ask for it, still 
 carrying her dead child with her. The people 
 said, " Here is mustard-seed ; take it." But when 
 she asked, " In my friend's house has any son died, 
 or a husband, or a parent, or a slave ?" they answered, 
 "Lady! what is this that you say? The living 
 are few, but the dead are many." Then she went 
 to other houses ; but one said, " I have lost a son ;" 
 another, " We have lost our parents ;" another, " I 
 have lost my slave." At last, not being able to 
 find a single house where no one had died, her 
 mind began to clear, and, summoning up resolution, 
 she left the dead body of her child in a forest, and 
 returning to Gautama, paid him homage. He 
 said to her: "Have you the mustard-seed?" 
 " My lord," she replied, " I have not. The people 
 tell me that the living are few, but the dead are 
 many." Then he pointed out to her how the 
 affliction from which she suffered was common to 
 all ; thus her doubts were cleared, she accepted her 
 
188 FABLES. 
 
 lot, and became a disciple. The lesson which this 
 apologue teaches, though infinitely below the 
 Christian's hope, is yet one that the Christian need 
 not despise. There is a selfish joy and a selfish 
 sorrow which can only be allayed by merging 
 them in the level waters of our common lot. 
 An Eastern king, we also read, was unhappy from 
 no definite cause, but simply that he was unhappy. 
 His physicians advised him to wear the garment 
 of a happy man. All his dominions were eagerly 
 and carefully searched through, but no happy man 
 could be found. The seed of this tale has taken 
 a new form in modern dramatic literature. The 
 prescribed garment was a shirt. After infinite 
 pains, a happy man was found ; but when nego- 
 tiations were proposed for the purchase of his 
 shirt, he showed a mysterious and determined 
 opposition to part with the garment. As became 
 the servants of an Oriental monarch, they used 
 violence, and discovered that he wore a front. 
 This was a good lesson to lay before a king. 
 
 It is only natural that fable should find a 
 humorous outlet, and, having found it, should 
 form a distinct channel. A miser sold all he had, 
 and bought a wedge of gold, which he hid in the 
 ground. Someone stole it, and when he lamented 
 and tore his hair, a neighbour said to him : " Take 
 
FABLES. 189 
 
 a stone and put it where the gold was, and, seeing 
 that you never would make any use of the gold, it 
 will serve your purpose just as well." The wig of 
 a bald man was blown off by a high wind. When 
 his companions laughed, he answered that if the 
 hairs that were born with him had left him it was 
 no wonder that those which were not his own 
 should go. A gnat stung a lion to madness, and 
 went away singing a song of triumph. He then 
 fell into a web, and was eaten up by a spider. 
 This resembles the account of a man who fought 
 with four men at a tavern, conquered them all, 
 went home, and was thrashed by his wife. All 
 the stories that we read in the newspapers about 
 Mrs. Partington and Mr. Spoopendyke are fables. 
 
 This redundancy and promiscuousness into 
 which fables run might be reduced to some order, 
 it may be thought, by classification. A division 
 into those with a moral and those without one 
 seems an obvious course. But when we make the 
 attempt we find that, in one sense of the word 
 " moral," all fables have one, while in another sense 
 none have it. All fables may be said to have 
 a moral, because there is scarcely an incident in 
 human life from which a lesson of some kind may 
 not be drawn. When George IV. went to Edin- 
 burgh, Sir Walter Scott seized a wineglass from 
 
190 FABLES. 
 
 which his Majesty had just drunk, put it into his 
 pocket, and vowed with enthusiastic loyalty that 
 it should remain a priceless heirloom in his family 
 for ever. He went home with the glass in his 
 pocket, sat on it, and broke it. Franklin's stories 
 of the " Whistle " and the " Grinding Stone " are 
 instances of the wideness of the field from which 
 worldly wisdom may be gathered. In this sense 
 all fables have morals — that is, you may derive 
 some knowledge of human nature from each of 
 them. But if we take the word " moral " in its 
 ethical meaning, very few fables possess one. 
 Most fables merely aim at exposing some-foible or 
 variety of human character. Those that choose 
 the most innocent and universal weakness are 
 most popular. A fox, seeing some fine clusters of 
 grapes on a vine, made several attempts to reach 
 them, and failed. He went away, saying that 
 they were sour and not fit to eat. There is 
 nothing moral or immoral in depreciating what is 
 unattainable ; it is a harmless relief to disappoint- 
 ment. No one would blame me for saying how 
 thankful I am that I was never made a bishop, 
 since the moment a man becomes a bishop he 
 is not fit for heaven nor earth. When a man 
 attempts to get into the Town Council and fails, 
 no one condemns him for congratulating himself 
 
FABLES. 191 
 
 on his failure to get into such a den of thieves. 
 Or, on an election for the School Board, who 
 would think of calling an unsuccessful candidate 
 to account for blessing his stars that he was not 
 sent to a place from which every honest Church- 
 man runs away ? The fox is the impersonation of 
 shrewdness and prudence, and what he says must 
 carry instruction. Solomon ate great quantities 
 of grapes, and at the end he came to the conclu- 
 sion that they were all sour, just as the fox did 
 who ate none at all. There is great moral 
 economy in coming to a just estimate of things 
 and persons without going through the trial of 
 many years' experience. "We are ready to make a 
 virtue, of necessity. "When things go contrary to 
 our wishes, we say that was the very thing we 
 wished. A huntsman bringing home a hare was 
 overtaken by a horseman, who offered to relieve 
 him of his burden by carrying it for him. The 
 huntsman handed it to him, on which the other 
 rode off as fast as he could. The huntsman, 
 seeing his hare gone past hope, cried out after him : 
 " You may have it ; I make you a present of it." 
 I once heard an anecdote which deserves to rank 
 among fables. A man went into a chemist's shop 
 and asked for some medicines, the price of which 
 came to five shillings. When the parcel was 
 
192 FABLES. 
 
 ready he took it, and, laying fourpence on the 
 counter, ran away. The chemist rushed to the 
 door, but, seeing that the man was just about to 
 turn a corner and escape, he cried out, holding up 
 the fourpence : " You rascal ! I have twopence by 
 you still." Every beaten man looks for some par- 
 ticular in which he can say he had the best of the 
 fight. A man invited a friend to an excellent 
 supper. He had a dog, who also invited the 
 friend's dog. When the invited dog saw all the good 
 things, he began to wag his tail with joy ; but 
 when the cook saw him he seized him by the tail, 
 whirled him round and round, and threw him out 
 of the window. The dog, confounded at this treat- 
 ment, limped away howling. Other dogs met him, 
 and asked him whether he had supped very 
 sumptuously. He, although he was almost faint- 
 ing with pain, replied: "I drank so much wine 
 that I scarcely' know what way I came out." We 
 all sympathize with that poor dog. He simply 
 put on the best face he could under very humili- 
 ating circumstances. Why should he publish the 
 inhospitality of the mansion and the cruelty of 
 the cook to a censorious world ? He lost his head 
 as he was leaving the house, and he accounted for 
 the accident in the way that should have been 
 most appropriate under the circumstances. The 
 
FABLES. 193 
 
 fox who lost his tail, and would have persuaded 
 all the other foxes to get rid of their tails as use- 
 less and burdensome encumbrances, was an animal 
 of heroic enterprise. He might have got a false 
 tail, but instead of this he boldly attempted to set 
 the fashion of taillessness to universal foxdom. 
 "When we consider his daring ambition and the 
 awkward character of the privation under which 
 he suffered, we cannot help feeling pity for the 
 wretched brute. If his misfortune had not been 
 discovered until he had induced half a dozen 
 other foxes to part with their brushes, it would be 
 a relief to us. One now constantly thinks of him 
 as shuffling and twisting and continually changing 
 his seat in company, so as not to turn his back on 
 anyone. He would ascribe this habit, no doubt, 
 to natural politeness. There is no malice or un- 
 kindly spirit in those fables. We smile at the 
 little vanities they expose, but it is with the con- 
 sciousness that we are smiling at ourselves. There 
 are other instances of a more serious import that 
 we also recognize as universally applicable. An 
 old man was toiling under a heavy load, and 
 called on death to deliver him. Death appeared. 
 " Ah !" said the old man, " I only wanted you to 
 help me to carry this load."' The fable of the dog 
 in the manger, who could not eat the hay and 
 
 13 
 
194 FABLES. 
 
 ■would not let the cows eat it, we never apply" to 
 ourselves, because we always apply it in con- 
 demnation. The jackdaw who decked himself in 
 borrowed plumes, the frog who wanted to make 
 himself as large as an ox, and the ass who put on 
 a lion's skin we regard with an ambiguous reserve. 
 If we were to say what we feel, it would come to 
 this : " I'm not so bad as that ; if ever I did any- 
 thing of the kind, I was not without good grounds 
 for it, and I'll never do it again." There are 
 fables that exhibit darker lines of character which 
 we condemn without wholly disowning. A tunny- 
 fish, pursued by a dolphin, leaped on land. The 
 dolphin, in the eagerness of pursuit, also stranded 
 himself. The tunny, seeing the dolphin gasping, 
 said : " I can bear death, since I see the cause of 
 my death dying with me." This characteristic is 
 almost acknowledged as allowable by being undis- 
 guisedly ascribed to human beings. Two men at 
 deadly enmity with each other sailed in the same 
 ship. One sat at the prow, the other at the stern. 
 A storm arose, and the vessel was about to sink. 
 The man at the prow asked the pilot what part 
 would sink first ? The pilot answered, " The 
 stern." "Then," said the man, "it will not 
 trouble me to die, for I shall see my enemy die 
 before me." If those fables, were composed, as is 
 
FABLES. 195 
 
 most likely, in sympathy with the passion they 
 indicate, it is another proof that the general pur- 
 pose of fables is to describe, not to amend, our 
 nature. 
 
 The maxim that necessity has no law is ex- 
 hibited in a multitude of examples. A wolf, 
 meeting a lamb going astray, said to him : " You 
 insulted me last year." " Indeed," said the lamb, 
 " I wasn't born then." " Then you feed on my 
 pastures," said the wolf. " Good sir," said the 
 lamb, "I have never tasted' grass." "You drink 
 at my well," said the wolf. "I assure you," an- 
 swered the lamb, " my mother's milk is all I have 
 ever drunk." " Well, I won't remain supperless," 
 exclaimed the wolf, "even though you should 
 refute all my charges ;" and he ate him up. A cat 
 got hold of a cock and accused him of being noisy, 
 not letting folks sleep at night. The cock pleaded 
 that he crowed at the wish of his owner, to rouse 
 the labourers to their work. Then the cat said : 
 "You are a wicked creature, because you have 
 several wives." The cock replied that this was 
 his master's fault, who wished to have as many 
 eggs as possible. " You have many excuses," said 
 the cat, " but I don't mean to fast ;" so he devoured 
 the cock. So it is in life : vain are the arguments 
 of weakness. A hare argued out some point with 
 
 13—2 
 
196 FABLES. 
 
 a lion very eloquently. " What you say is very 
 true," replied the lion, " but your arguments want 
 teeth and claws." Alas for the lambs and cocks 
 and hares ! Sad is their fate — with, it may be, 
 compensations — in the hard struggle for the sur- 
 vival of the fittest that goes on in savage nature. 
 Sadder is their lot in this artificial state when 
 they afford food and sport for man. But how 
 saddest of all is it for their human counterparts, 
 the real subjects of this parable, who must fill the 
 maws of the hawks and wolves of society ! No 
 wolf ever charged a lamb with having insulted 
 him. No lamb was ever buoyed up with the vain 
 hope that a convincing reply would avert his fate. 
 That preliminary torture is reserved for man. It 
 is when the great nation goes to war with a weak 
 one, or a great man goes to law with a small one, 
 that the pretence of a just quarrel precedes the 
 immolation. In these fables we must guard 
 against making such allowances for the human 
 being represented as the necessities of the beasts 
 that represent them would demand. When the 
 wolf or the cat says, " I cannot go without my 
 supper," the argument is valid. Animals prey 
 on each other, and there is no other limitation to 
 the injury they do than their appetites. When 
 we transfer the figure to men the case is quite 
 
FABLES. 197 
 
 altered. It is not for the gratification of his 
 hunger or of any necessity of nature, but of his 
 pride, his envy, his emulation, his vanity, that 
 man devours his fellow-man. When Ahab wanted 
 Naboth's vineyard and could not get it, " he laid 
 him down upon his bed and turned away his face, 
 and would eat no bread." That is the kind of 
 hunger the human wolf endures. " The wicked 
 sleep not except they have done mischief; and 
 their sleep is taken away unless they cause some 
 to fall." When we describe the wolf as endeavour- 
 ing to pick a quarrel, we ascribe human attributes 
 to him ; and when we imagine the man whom he 
 represents as suffering from hunger, we ascribe a 
 wolfish appetite to him. But the necessities of 
 the wolf do not justify the depredations of the 
 man. The true state of the case is shown in 
 another fable. A birdcatcher was about to sit 
 down to a dinner of herbs, when a friend unex- 
 pectedly came in. He proceeded to kill a part- 
 ridge which he had tamed for a decoy. The 
 partridge begged for his life. " What would you 
 do without me," he said, " when you spread your 
 nets 1" The birdcatcher spared his life, and deter- 
 mined to kill a fine young cock. The cock expos- 
 tulated from his perch : " If you kill me, who will 
 announce to you the appearance of dawn ?" The 
 
198 FABLES. 
 
 man replied : " What you say is true ; you are a 
 capital bird at telling the time of day. But I and 
 the friend who has just come in must have our 
 dinners." Our real wants on earth are few. Man 
 wants but little here below. When a man builds 
 a palace, it is not for his own comfort, but for the 
 admiration and envy of others. When he wears 
 splendid garments, it is not to ensure warmth, 
 but to attract attention. When he provides a 
 luxurious banquet, it is not to satisfy his appetite, 
 but to excel the banquet that has been given by 
 somebody else. And to provide the means for 
 doing these things he must make money by fair 
 means or by foul. The social birdcatcher is will- 
 ing to dine on herbs by himself, but when he has 
 a friend to dine with him he must make a display, 
 and he victimizes some unhappy client. Necessity 
 has no law, it is true ; but the necessities of 
 human beasts are artificial, unreal, imaginary, 
 vicious necessities — necessities of envy, hatred, 
 and malice. We are fighting, not for food or 
 raiment or houses, but for more expensive food, 
 raiment, and houses than our neighbour can 
 afford, and in order to obtain them we are ready 
 to beggar our neighbour. 
 
 It must be again and again repeated that fables 
 are wholly about men, and that the birds and 
 
FABLES. 199 
 
 beasts are mere dramatis personce. One writer 
 has said that it was unnatural to represent a fox 
 wishing to eat grapes. Another has attempted to 
 show the correctness of the imagery by referring 
 to the expression in Solomon's Song (xi. 15) : 
 " The little foxes that spoil the vines." But even 
 granting that Oriental foxes eat grapes, are they 
 in the habit of calling them sour when they can't 
 get them ? An ass, having seen a lapdog jump 
 on his master and get caressed by him, jumped on 
 him in the same way and got beaten. The ass 
 that would do such a thing would be a very un- 
 common ass. A Scotchman was once asked what 
 he would do if an ass fell into a pit on the Sab- 
 bath-day. He cautiously answered that there 
 was not in all Scotland an ass that was " sic an 
 ass as to fall into a pit on the Sawbath-day." 
 Animals, and human beings in relation to animals, 
 are described as doing things they never do in 
 order to represent how human beings act towards 
 each other. No serpent would attempt to eat a 
 file, nor would any man place a frozen serpent 
 before his fire. No ass was ever such an ass as to 
 put on a lion's skin ; nor would any man carry an 
 ass on a pole, as we read of in the fable of the 
 man who wished to please everybody. No goose 
 ever laid golden eggs, nor would any man be such 
 
200 FABLES. 
 
 a goose as to kill the bird that did lay them. A 
 dog in a manger might object to having his slum- 
 bers disturbed, but it is possible the cows might 
 dispute his right of possession. Indeed, a new 
 version of this fable has lately appeared. A bull 
 asked a dog lying on some hay to allow him to 
 eat it. " No," said the dog ; " it is my property." 
 " Suppose we toss up for it 1" said the bull, with 
 anger in his eyes. " I never bet," said the dog, 
 politely going away. 
 
 St. Paul, in interpreting an Old Testament 
 figure, gives the true key for the interpretation 
 of fables: "It is written in the law of Moses, 
 Thou shalt not muzzle the mouth of the ox that 
 treadeth out the corn. Doth God take care for 
 oxen ? or saith He it altogether for our sakes ? 
 For our sakes no doubt it is written " (1 Cor. ix. 9). 
 
 We may see the early application of fables to 
 political purposes surviving largely in our present 
 heterogeneous collections. No lesson is so fre- 
 quently conveyed as the danger of change, and 
 the wisdom of contentment. Some fish were 
 being fried; they did not like the process, and 
 jumped out of the frying-pan. They fell into 
 the fire. An ass belonging to a gardener begged 
 Jupiter to set another master over him. Jupiter 
 gave him a bricklayer, who increased his burdens. 
 
FABLES. 201 
 
 He prayed for a milder owner and got a tanner, 
 who didn't spare even his skin. A tortoise, weary 
 of crawling, wished to get into the air. An eagle 
 took him up and let him fall on the rocks. A 
 camel begged for horns like an ox. Jupiter 
 denied his request, and, moreover, cut off his 
 ears. The frogs asked for a king. Jupiter gave 
 them a log. They were not content, so he gave 
 them a heron, who devoured them daily. The 
 oxen once were conspiring to destroy the butchers. 
 One of them, old and experienced, said : These 
 butchers know how to slaughter us scientifically 
 and skilfully. If we get rid of them we shall 
 only get into the hands of unskilful operators. 
 The pigeons, terrified by the kite, asked for a 
 hawk to defend them. When he came he killed 
 more of them in a day than the kite would kill 
 in a year. Such are the motives to contentment 
 which our teachers favour us with : kites and 
 frying-pans and butchers. A fox swimming 
 over a stream was tormented by gnats. A 
 swallow offered to drive them away. " No, 
 don't," said the fox. " Those are cloyed with 
 my blood. If a fresh hungry swarm came they 
 would not leave a drop in my body." Moral : 
 Never change the members of your Corporations 
 or School Boards. 
 
202 FABLES. 
 
 We can sometimes discern the political tendency 
 of a fable by finding that there is another evi- 
 dently intended to counteract its influence. A 
 wolf saw some shepherds in a hut eating mutton. 
 " Oh \" said he, " what a clamour you would make 
 if you saw me doing that !" This insinuates that 
 law-makers are law-breakers, and was written on 
 the side of the wolf. Many a poor wolf, I dare 
 say, shakes his head as he passes by the Town 
 Hall. However, to save the law-breaking law- 
 makers from falling into contempt another fable 
 was written. A fox saw several old women eating 
 a roasted hen. " Oh !" said he, "' what an outcry 
 and barking of dogs there would be if I were to 
 do as you do !" " Thou base creature," answered 
 one of the women, " we eat what is our own ; 
 you steal other's property." Shepherds and sheep 
 always mean rulers and people in figurative lan- 
 guage. To escape this association the fable of 
 the old women and the hen was invented. But 
 what does " the old women and the hen " mean ? 
 Of course it must have a figurative meaning, and 
 must still represent rulers and people. It is not 
 very complimentary to compare rulers to old 
 women, but you and I are not accountable for 
 it. The intention of the fable, therefore, is to 
 impress such a conception of government as 
 
FABLES. 203 
 
 gives the ruler a right to devour the people. 
 " We eat what is our own," said the old woman. 
 A gentleman was telling me a little time ago 
 that his father had been a member of the Cor- 
 poration, and that in his days they were so 
 scrupulous that they regarded the public money 
 as if it were their own. " That is exactly what 
 they do now," was my answer. In the same 
 spirit the fable of the cock and the jewel has 
 been violently perverted from its original purport. 
 A cock scratching for food on a dunghill found a 
 precious stone. " I would rather have a grain of 
 corn/' said he, " than all the jewels in the world." 
 Obviously the cock means the husbandman of a 
 nation tilling his fields. An attempt is made to 
 dazzle him with stars and titles. " I can't live on 
 glory," he answers ; " I prefer wheat." To conceal 
 this plain and striking presentment the following 
 version of the fable was framed : A fresh young 
 cock, in company with two or three pullets — 
 his mistresses — raking upon a dunghill for 
 something to entertain them with, happened to 
 scratch up a jewel. He knew what it was well 
 enough, but not knowing what to do with it 
 endeavoured to cover his ignorance under a gay 
 contempt. And finally, in the application, the 
 jewel is taken to mean " virtue and learning," and 
 
204 FABLES. 
 
 the grain of com " debauchery." In this way\the 
 fable is made to say the very reverse of what it 
 was meant to say. And then, to prevent it from 
 ever being rescued back to its true meaning, the 
 following one was put in the place it used to 
 occupy : An ass carrying a load of good provisions 
 for his masters the reapers, met with a fine thistle, 
 which he began to eat, saying : " Many epicures 
 would think themselves happy if they had the 
 delicate viands I now carry ; but I prefer a thistle 
 to them all." The high thinker, plain liver, and 
 industrious toiler preferring solid fare for all the 
 glitter and glory, is not like a cock choosing corn 
 before jewels, but like an ass who prefers thistles 
 to good provender. Even those fables that are 
 celebrated and prized for the excellent advice 
 they convey will be found, on examination, to be 
 deficient in true moral teaching. A father who 
 had quarrelsome sons taught them the value of 
 union by showing that a bundle of sticks could 
 not be broken taken together, but that each stick 
 taken by itself could be broken easily. He then 
 addressed them in these words : " My sons, if you 
 are of one mind, and unite to assist each other, 
 you will be like this bundle, uninjured by all the 
 attacks of your enemies ; but if you are divided 
 among yourselves, you will be broken as easily as 
 
FABLES. 205 
 
 those sticks." This teaches that union is strength, 
 but it does not touch on the use that is to be 
 made of the strength, and there only it is that 
 true morality comes in. There is scarcely such a 
 thing as a fable, in our ordinary collections, of a 
 high and ennobling tendency. The attempt even 
 to introduce one has been resented. The general 
 teaching of fables is that of the oak and the reeds. 
 A large oak-tree was uprooted by the wind and 
 thrown across a stream. It fell among some reeds, 
 which it thus addressed : " I wonder how you, 
 who are so light and weak, are not crushed by 
 this strong wind?" They replied: "You fight 
 with the wind, and consequently you are de- 
 stroyed ; while we bend before the least breath 
 of air, and escape." No one could call this an 
 elevating example. The prudence it inculcates is 
 of the lowest kind — submit, and you are safe; 
 and the analogy is not correct. The wind will 
 blow just the same whether the oak or reed yields 
 or resists. It is not so among men. The more 
 the human reed bows his head, the fiercer will the 
 human storm rage and oppress ; the more the 
 slave yields, the more the tyrant exacts. But, 
 apart from prudence, there is the question of right 
 and liberty. Is it not better in some cases to 
 resist and be crushed than to submit and be 
 
206 FABLES. 
 
 secure ? What would our condition be if our 
 forefathers had never sacrificed themselves in 
 contests where defeat for freedom was preferred 
 to safety for slaves ? Do we not owe air we most 
 prize to uprooted oaks, and worse than nothing to 
 reeds that came safe out of the tempest ? Some- 
 one felt thoughts like these stirring in him as he 
 read of the overturned oak, and he wrote the fol- 
 lowing fable : A willow challenged the oak to a 
 trial of strength. A hurricane arose, when the 
 pliant willow, bending from the blast, evaded all 
 its force ; while the generous oak, disdaining to 
 give way, opposed its fury, and was torn up by 
 the roots. Immediately the willow began to 
 exult and to claim the victory, when the fallen 
 oak interrupted his exultation : " Poor wretch ! 
 you owe your safety not to your strength, but to 
 your weakness — not to your courage, but to your 
 cowardice. I am an oak, though fallen ; you are 
 still a willow, though unhurt ; and who except a 
 mean wretch like yourself would prefer an igno- 
 minious life to the glory of meeting death in an 
 honourable cause ?" A writer on fable speaks of 
 this one as " a travesty of a beautiful and well- 
 known apologue, converting it into a lesson of 
 false honour and foolish pride." There is another 
 fable that carries the prudence of the reeds a step 
 
FABLES. 207 
 
 farther : A panther fell into a pit. The shepherds 
 pelted him with stones; but some, moved with 
 compassion, threw in some food to prolong his 
 life. He got out of the pit, killed the shepherds 
 who had attacked him, and slaughtered their herds 
 with burning fury. Then those who had spared 
 his life surrendered all they had, and begged only 
 for their lives. The panther said to them : " I 
 remember those who sought my life with stones, 
 and those who gave me food. Lay aside your 
 fears ; I return as an enemy only to those who 
 injured me." The moral is that when you see a 
 tyrant down, if you help him up he will spare 
 your life, and only ruin your neighbours ; but if 
 he were left in the pit, everyone would be safe. 
 Some, however, prefer helping the panther and 
 seeing others destroyed while they themselves are 
 safe in slavery, to freedom and security for all. 
 That is the reason why panthers exist on earth. 
 A mouse seeing a kite caught in a snare, took 
 compassion on him, gnawed the string that 
 held him, and set him at liberty. The kite, the 
 moment he was free, seized on the mouse and de- 
 voured him. An elderly philanthropic gentleman 
 one day saw a little boy making strenuous but 
 unavailing efforts to reach the knocker of a door. 
 " Let me help you, my little man," said he, and he 
 
208 FABLES. 
 
 gave a loud knock. " Let us both run away now," 
 said the little boy, " or we shall get licked." We 
 must not conclude that every person whom we 
 see striving to do something is deserving of help ; 
 and when a kite or a panther gets caught in a 
 trap, the safest plan is to leave them there. 
 
 Fables, as I have already said, are pictures of 
 life ; and as a wide wisdom cannot be gathered 
 from a single incident, no more can it from a 
 single fable. One fable modifies the tenor by 
 supplementing the history of another. A lion 
 spared the life of a mouse, and the mouse after- 
 wards gnawed asunder the rope by which some 
 hunters had bound the lion to the ground. This 
 story sets the mouse in the high position of being 
 the benefactor of a lion, and surrounds him in 
 consequence with temptations and dangers. There 
 is another fable that tells what those dangers are. 
 A lion, being caught in a net, entreated a mouse 
 to gnaw the ropes and set him free, promising 
 him all manner of rewards. The mouse complied, 
 and as his reward asked for the lion's daughter in 
 marriage. The lion gave his consent, but when 
 they were returning home after the ceremony the 
 bride inadvertently trod on her husband, and 
 crushed him to pieces. Eeaders of the first fable 
 might go away with the notion that all they had 
 
FABLES. 209 
 
 to do was to help some great man, marry his 
 daughter, and live happy ever afterwards. So 
 the second fable teaches that the young lady 
 may put down her foot too forcibly some day. 
 
 In one case three fables are needed to tell all 
 that should be known. A fisherman took a flute 
 with him, and stood on a rock playing, supposing 
 that he could coax the fish out of the water by 
 his music. But when he found nothing could be 
 done in that way, he laid his flute aside, cast in 
 his net and caught a number of fishes. When he 
 saw them dancing in the net, he said : " When I 
 played you refused to dance, but now that I have 
 caught you, you dance without music." This fable 
 teaches that success is to be won only by work. 
 We cannot do any thing great or good by the 
 exercise of an idle taste. Industry and toil are 
 necessary. Industry is so good a thing that, if a 
 man had no need to seek an object in life, he 
 should make an object for the sake of becoming 
 industrious in striving for it. But there is some- 
 thing more than industry required. Sometimes it 
 is said, in the pride of inexperience, that work must 
 succeed, and that where there is poverty there 
 must have been idleness and waste. This is not 
 quite true. Success does not always wait on 
 industry. The race is not always to the swift, nor 
 
 14 
 
210 FABLES. 
 
 the battle to the strong, nor wealth or fame to him 
 who has painfully toiled for them. How many 
 poets and painters fail to make themselves known ! 
 
 Ah ! who can tell how hard it is to climb 
 
 The steep where Fame's proud temple shines afar ? 
 
 Ah ! who can tell how many a soul sublime 
 
 Has felt the influence of malignant star, 
 
 And waged with Fortune an eternal war — 
 
 Check'd by the scoff of Pride, by Envy's frown, 
 
 And Poverty's unconquerable bar — 
 
 In life's low vale remote has pined alone, 
 
 Then drop'd into the grave, unpitied and unknown ? 
 
 In our own neighbourhood how many die poor 
 in proportion to those who become rich — although 
 many of those who have failed toiled as assidu- 
 ously as those who succeeded ! Where lay the 
 difference ? In the absence of the " malignant 
 star." In good fortune. This is indispensable to 
 industry. We do not know what it is. It is 
 beyond our reach and our conception. But with- 
 out it Industry has not her full reward. We must 
 not, therefore, pride ourselves on possessing the 
 sure road to prosperity, or on having success under 
 our control. A man going to law should have, it 
 is said, not only a good lawyer, and a good jury, 
 and a good judge, and a good cause, but also good 
 luck. The second fable teaches us how good 
 fortune may accomplish what work and skill 
 
FABLES. 211 
 
 fail in doing. Some fishermen, wearied with 
 fishing and spent with hunger and grief hecause 
 they had taken nothing, resolved to return home 
 in despair. But, behold, as they were about to 
 depart, a fish — that fled from another that pursued 
 it — leaped into the boat. The fishermen brought 
 it to the city, and sold it at a great price. But do 
 those two fables exhaust the vicissitudes of human 
 history ? May not a time come when industry 
 will fail and fortune forsake us ? What then 
 remains ? There is a third fable that answers 
 the question. Some fishermen dragged a net in 
 the sea, which when they felt it to be very heavy, 
 they were filled with joy, supposing it contained a 
 great quantity of fish. But when they drew it .to 
 the land and found that it contained only a large 
 stone, they were oppressed with sadness. One of 
 them, a very old man, said to his fellows : " Set 
 your hearts at ease : for Sorrow is the sister of 
 Mirth. One ought to foresee changes that are 
 likely to befall, and in order that he may be able 
 to bear them more easily when they come, he 
 ought to persuade himself that they will come." 
 This fable, the "moral" says, signifieth that he 
 that remembereth man's condition is not daunted 
 by adversity. What remains, then, when industry 
 and fortune fail ? Ourselves. We are above the 
 
 14—2 
 
212 FABLES. 
 
 slights of justi6e and the strokes of fortune. A 
 time will inevitably come when all outer things 
 will fail us. !Nay, many times come in the course 
 of our lives when our efforts seem vanity and our 
 hope a false light that brought us on the rocks, 
 and our faith a broken reed piercing our hand. 
 Some men then give way to despair, and fall into 
 low ways of thought, mistaking the importance of 
 the occasion. Those times of apparent loss are 
 only times of trial. They prove whether we have 
 really lost or won in the battle of life. The loss of 
 money, fame, friends, is no essential loss. The only 
 essential loss is the loss of our own love for God 
 and man. The affairs of the world are not ends, 
 but means to an end. That end may be gained 
 whether things go well or ill with us. All the 
 laws of natural cause and effect are subservient 
 to that greater moral law by which fortitude is 
 strengthened and trust in righteousness deepened. 
 It is well to play our part and fight our battle 
 nobly and manfully in earthly affairs. It is well 
 for this reason — that we shall find one day that 
 the things about which we fought, and the field 
 on which we struggled, were shadows, and that 
 the soul, made pure and strong in the encounter, is 
 itself the victory and the everlasting prize. 
 
FROM LANCASHIRE TO LAND'S END. 
 
 I find some difficulty in explaining to my own 
 satisfaction why I went to CornwalTin the spring 
 of this year (1882). It was partly the alternative 
 to another journey which was impossible. An 
 Irishman's conventional mode of accounting for 
 his absence from Ireland in times of trouble was 
 that he left the country " for a reason he had." I 
 did not go to Ireland for a reason my wife had. 
 We resolved to go to Cornwall instead. The 
 remembrance of an old tradition that identified 
 the populations of Ireland and Cornwall by 
 common origin, or conquest, or immigration, 
 pointed the way to this resolve. Referring to 
 Black's " Guide-Book to Penzance," our farthest 
 Cornish destination, I learned that the soil is 
 noted for its extraordinary fertility, and especially 
 for its growth of potatoes. This confirmed both 
 the tradition and our purpose. The people had 
 evidently disciplined the land into congenial pro- 
 ductiveness. While speculating on this subject, 
 
214 FROM LANCASHIRE TO LAND'S END. 
 
 the Manchester newspapers suddenly burst into 
 a blaze" of descriptions of riots that were raging 
 at Garnbourne between the earlier and later in- 
 habitants of the district. Streets were said to be 
 desolated, chapels wrecked, innumerable heads 
 broken. There was no more room for doubt. 
 We started on our journey. We took with us 
 Black's " Guide," a novel by a celebrated lady 
 romancist, said to be eloquent on Cornish scenery, 
 and a book by an author named Bradshaw, who, 
 I was informed, was a great authority in that line. 
 As I consulted those writers promiscuously, it is 
 possible I may confound their remarks with each 
 other's or with my own. 
 
 We took tickets for Plymouth, intending to 
 spend a day or two there on the way and see 
 what was to be seen. A fellow-traveller said, in 
 a commonplace kind of way, that it always rained 
 at Plymouth. Having ultimately come from 
 Manchester, where it is always said to rain, and 
 penultimately from Killarney, where it is also 
 said always to rain, I began to ask myself what 
 was to be gained by travelling. When we 
 reached Plymouth it became clear to me that 
 there is variety even in rain, and that although 
 Killarney, Manchester, and Plymouth may, in 
 this respect, be very much alike, yet Plymouth 
 
FROM LANCASHIRE TO LAND'S END. 215 
 
 was like Manchester and Killarney put together. 
 When I say that this was clear to me, I mean to 
 imply that nothing else was clear. It certainly 
 did rain at Plymouth. Cabs and ships and men 
 were moving, but they were like shadowy ghosts, 
 half visible in rainy darkness. The rain was the 
 one substantial visitant from the upper world. 
 The hotel we went to was chosen for the fine 
 view it was said to afford. It fully answered its 
 engagement. If anyone desires to have an un- 
 equalled view of rain I should advise him to go 
 there. Some blurred objects were pointed out, 
 said to be a lighthouse and a breakwater. They 
 may have been — it was impossible to deny any- 
 thing that might be said of them — but their 
 occupation was gone, or reversed. When I got 
 up the next morning I found it, like a giant 
 refreshed with sleep, raining with renewed vigour. 
 When a man's pleasures fail him, he has his 
 necessities to fall back upon. Breakfasting is a 
 necessity. The waiter informed me that they 
 had some fine whiting, caught that morning. I 
 sympathized deeply with them. We differed only 
 by an accident. They were caught out of the 
 wet, I into it — "in" and "out" are only acci- 
 dents. 
 
 The Tamar separates Devon from Cornwall. It 
 
216 FROM LANCASHIRE TO LAND'S END. 
 
 is crossed near Plymouth by a suspension-bridge 
 that spans the valley at a fearful height. There 
 is no need to linger on this bridge. When we 
 get into Cornwall we shall have to cross the 
 bridges very slowly, because, being made of timber, 
 now in a state of partial decay, if the train caused 
 any considerable commotion, they would give way 
 and precipitate the passengers to a depth of some 
 hundred or more feet. On inquiring why we 
 always went over the bridges at so leisurely a 
 pace, it was encouraging to have this reason 
 assigned; though it had rather an Irish flavour 
 about it, and reminded one of the old woman who 
 having crossed a bridge, and finding it marked 
 " dangerous " on the other side, ran back as fast 
 as she could. The bridge over the Tamar at 
 Saltash is an iron one ; therefore we may pass it 
 over quickly. There is another reason for avoid- 
 ing local details, which I may as well mention. 
 No object in Cornwall that I have seen resembled 
 the written or pictorial descriptions of it. There 
 are numerous illustrations of the same rocks or 
 castle which are as unlike to each other as to the 
 original. Travellers seem to think that they will 
 not be believed unless they give accurate measure- 
 ments and minute particulars. My opinion is 
 that the more general the description the more 
 
FROM LANCASHIRE TO LANDS END. 217 
 
 likely it is to be true and to be believed. There 
 is no tradition in Cornwall so universal— so 
 semper ubique et ab omnibus — as that Chris- 
 tianity was planted in the country by a multitude 
 of saints, male and female, who came from Ireland. 
 While this statement was left to its own proba- 
 bility, and to established opinion, it was safe 
 enough. Unfortunately the Cornish people were 
 not satisfied with generalities. They wanted to 
 be exact and to supply evidences. So they point 
 out a huge rock of granite, with a hollow in one 
 side, that happens to lie conveniently by the 
 margin of the water, and assert that it is the 
 actual boat in which one of those missionaries 
 crossed the sea. It must, however, be said that 
 this story corroborates, by its imaginative charac- 
 ter/the tradition which it fails to make good by 
 material proof. It is precisely of the same kind 
 as the tales of wonder that are prevalent among 
 the Irish peasantry. I well remember an old 
 ruined church which was said to have been trans- 
 ported one night from a distant part of the 
 country to the spot where it then stood. A large 
 rock in a river that lay between its two sites was 
 always referred to as evidence of the fact, it being 
 a foundation-stone that dropped from the edifice 
 while in transitu. It must not be supposed that 
 
218 FROM LANCASHIRE TO LAND'S END. 
 
 these stories are or were really credited by the 
 peasantry. They were regarded just as the labours 
 of Hercules were by an ancient Greek. They 
 were believed by the imagination in order to be 
 smiled at by the reason. We all believe, or 
 realize to a certain extent, the wildest fiction that 
 we read, in order that we may extract the desired 
 pleasure from it, which otherwise we could not 
 possibly do. A peasant, one evening at Trevena, 
 showed me two distant spots eight or ten miles 
 asunder, which measured the single step of a giant 
 on some emergency, just in the same humorous 
 way in which I have heard the nocturnal flight of 
 the church described to me in my boyhood. We 
 too often misconceive and undervalue the true 
 nature of those popular fables. They are the first 
 human recoil from the mechanical realities of 
 mere animal life. It might be expected that this 
 imaginative faculty would produce a greater 
 number of poets than either Cornwall or Ireland 
 can lay claim to. Imagination, when circum- 
 stances are favourable, produces poetry ; but when 
 circumstances are not favourable it has other, 
 and, for the time, much better work to do. It is 
 the soil from which religious feeling springs, and 
 it stimulates to ceaseless personal adventure. 
 " Emigration," says a very able essayist in Corn- 
 
FROM LANCASHIRE TO LAND'S END. 219 
 
 wall, " has been so large of late years as to keep 
 the population almost stationary, ... in all parts 
 of the world, in North and South America and 
 Australia, knots of Cornish emigrants will be 
 found — generally prosperous, though more through 
 speculative qualities than the cool and thrifty 
 determination of the sons of the North."* This 
 description applies generally to Irish emigrants. 
 " Their impulses, tastes, and pleasures," this same 
 writer says, " are almost all gregarious. In old 
 days they met, quarrelled, and fraternized in 
 faction fights like those of Ireland, wrestling 
 matches, hurling matches, and similar amuse- 
 ments. The gentry seemed to have lived in a 
 social Castle Kackrent kind of fashion of their 
 own." " The manners and habits of the Cornish 
 populace before the time of Wesley," we again 
 read, " seem to have strongly resembled those of 
 the Irish, without the religious fervour which 
 characterized the latter. There were the same 
 clannish propensities, the same faction fights, the 
 same riotous fairs and noisy funerals, the same 
 disposition for turbulent encounters with the 
 established authorities on every local occasion." 
 "I saw, in some poor cottages," another writer 
 says, " little girls barefooted and with their hair 
 * Herman Merivale. 
 
220 FROM LANCASHIRE TO LAND'S END. 
 
 floating in disorder down their backs, who re- 
 minded one of Ireland." Every writer on Corn- 
 wall unconsciously testifies to this similarity. 
 The habit of piling the sheaves of corn in stacks 
 of an intermediate size before they are finally 
 stacked in the hay-yard — which I heard an 
 Englishman ridicule in Ireland as a proof of 
 ignorance and indolence — prevails through Corn- 
 wall, where it is accounted for by visitors as a 
 provision against the damp and uncertainty of the 
 climate. The phenomenon of red sheep — the 
 result of an artificial process for a sanitary pur- 
 pose — is common, and, I think, peculiar to both 
 countries. All the superstitious omens of evil, 
 such as the croaking of a raven, seeing a magpie, 
 breaking a looking-glass, the howling of dogs, 
 whistling by night, are the same. The Cornish 
 motto " one and all " is paralleled by the Irish 
 one sheen fane — " ourselves alone," although the 
 description given of one of the two peoples, the 
 Cornish, will equally suit the other : " Never was 
 a small people more curiously and readily divi- 
 sible into factions, or more disinclined to really 
 useful co-operation." 
 
 The people of Cornwall were devoted Catholics 
 till the Reformation, when they fought hard for 
 the old religion. A foreign creed was, however, 
 
FROM LANCASHIRE TO LAND'S END. 221 
 
 forced on them, and then was noticeable the want 
 of religious fervour which has been mentioned. 
 We can scarcely be surprised at it when we recall 
 one or two of the current clerical anecdotes of the 
 time. It is stated as a fact that, a wreck happen- 
 ing on a Sunday morning, the clerk announced 
 to the assembled parishioners "That measter 
 would gee them a holladay." On another occa- 
 sion, it is said, news arrived of a wreck during 
 the service. The congregation started up. " Stop," 
 cried the minister, in a loud voice. The people 
 looked at him in surprise while he divested him- 
 self of his robes, and rushed down among them. 
 "Now," said he, "let us start fair," as he led 
 the way to the wreck. At Kenwyn two dogs, 
 one of which was the parson's, were fighting at 
 the west end of the church ; the parson, who was 
 reading the second lesson, rushed from his desk 
 and parted them. On his return, not remember- 
 ing where he had left off, he asked the clerk, 
 " Eoger, where was I ?" " Why, doon parting the 
 dogs, measter," said Eoger. This was the time 
 when a man of some position in society was said 
 to have driven an ass at night, with its leg tied up 
 and a lantern round its neck, along the summit of 
 a high cliff, that the halting motion of the animal 
 might resemble the plunging of a vessel under 
 
222 FROM LANCASHIRE TO LAND'S END. 
 
 sail, and thus tempt ships to run in, as if there was 
 sea-room. Wesley paid his first visit to Cornwall 
 in 1743, and restored to the people a religion of 
 their own, and a channel for the zeal of their race. 
 It is only fair to note one or two facts that 
 distinguish the history of Cornwall from that of 
 Ireland. The Saxons did not push their way 
 beyond a line running transversely from Plymouth 
 to Tintagel. The Cornish people have, therefore, 
 a claim to descent from their very ancient King 
 Arthur, whoever he was. In the next place, the 
 Normans never established themselves firmly in 
 Cornwall. Great names and titles vanish there 
 like mists from the sea. This fact has passed into 
 a superstition. A third heir is scarcely known ; 
 a fourth never. One cause of this constant change 
 was the frequent occurrence of family tragedies 
 and premature deaths. There are several in- 
 stances of great landowners being compelled to 
 sell their property in order to bribe courtiers to 
 procure a pardon for them when lying under 
 sentence of death for murder. Aristocratic in- 
 fluences are consequently weak, and Methodist 
 teachers and mining captains are the counsellors 
 and leaders of the people by a natural and undis- 
 puted right. The population of Cornwall, again, 
 at least some twenty thousand of them, work 
 
FROM LANCASHIRE TO LAND'S END. 223 
 
 under ground, where cattle cannot be made their 
 substitutes. The mining interest dominates the 
 political economy of Cornwall, and is fed by con- 
 stant supplies from the great speculation field of 
 London. 
 
 Having Kngered beyond intention on the Salt- 
 ash bridge, we must at all peril speed over the 
 others. The country shows more and more the 
 signs of mining operations as we advance. The 
 earth looks as if it were being turned inside out. 
 Towards Cambourne we seem to be steaming 
 through an uneven sea of mud. About this place, 
 probably from the monotony of the scene, I fell 
 into a doze and began to dream. I fancied that 
 three fresh passengers entered the carriage. They 
 soon began to talk about the Irish riots. "Irish 
 has nothing to do with it," said one who seemed 
 to be an inhabitant of the place ; " one chap met 
 some ill-treatment and resented it, and the quarrel 
 spread. That was the sum and substance of the 
 matter. English and Irish were pure accidents." 
 " Who would ever hear anything like that, except 
 in a dream !" thought I to myself. "Don't you 
 think it was a national quarrel, then?" asked 
 another of the party. " Of course it became 
 national when two nations took it up and made 
 it their own, and blew the trumpets of five 
 
224 FROM LANCASHIRE TO LAND'S END. 
 
 hundred newspapers to inflame it," answered the 
 first speaker. " It blazed and burned in the air 
 of nationality, whereas it would have died out, 
 smothered in the narrowness of personal anger, 
 if let alone. Look at two armies destroying each 
 other — or, as we call it, waging glorious war on 
 each other. Forget that they are French and 
 Germans, and you will see that they are simply 
 murderers. Eenew the idea of their distinct 
 nationality, and murder becomes glory." " What 
 extraordinary things dreams are !" was my mental 
 exclamation. "But did not an Irishman begin 
 it 1" said the questioner. " The man who began 
 it, or on whose act it first gained notice, was not 
 an Irishman," was the reply, " though he was the 
 son of Irish parents. He thought he was wronged, 
 and I believe he was, and he looked for redress. 
 Then the differences of country, which had nothing 
 whatever to do with the rights of the question, 
 were dragged in." Here the train stopped at a 
 station with a sudden shock, which I expected 
 would wake me up. But to my astonishment it 
 did not. In fact, without being aware of it, I had 
 been awake the whole time. The scene was real. 
 Penzance takes its name from a projecting head 
 of land on which a little chapel of St. Anthony 
 stands. It is therefore called Penzance, which 
 
FEOM LANCASHIRE TO LAND'S END. 225 
 
 means Holy head. The accent in Cornish names 
 marks the adjectival syllable. San is holy, Pen, 
 head. So the pronunciation is Penzance. The 
 town takes the head of John the Baptist for its 
 arms. The little town of Marazion, or Marketjew, 
 stands opposite to St. Michael's Mount, within a 
 few miles of Penzance. The sound of the name 
 has given occasion to the supposition that the 
 Jews traded largely there. Their ancient fond- 
 ness for tin renders it probable that they may 
 have done so, but if they did, the fact has no 
 connection with the name. Marghas means a 
 market, Ian is the adjective of island. Marazion 
 means Island market, so called from the proximity 
 of Michael's Mount, which is an island. Marghas- 
 jew, or as it is now called Marketjew, signifies 
 Thursday-market. A street in Penzance is so 
 called. 
 
 I went out to have a stroll by moonlight along 
 the seaside at Penzance. Any description of this 
 scene would be only an attempt to describe one's 
 own feelings, and they cannot be described. 
 Suffice it to say that the lights shone in heaven 
 and the sea murmured on earth. I saw another 
 light — a gaslight — on the opposite side, and heard 
 a murmur of human voices. One may linger too 
 long asking, " What are the wild waves saying 1" 
 
 15 
 
226 FROM LANCASHIRE TO LAND'S END. 
 
 I went across the road, and found myself one of 
 a thick crowd under an immense tent, at one end 
 of which stood a platform hung round with a mis- 
 cellaneous assortment of articles for sale. A 
 young man stood on the platform with a tin 
 teapot in his hand. "Ladies and gentlemen," 
 said he, " this teapot is the only one left of three 
 thousand that I have sold within the last couple 
 of days. It is made of the strongest Cornish tin. 
 An old lady bought one of them and put it on the 
 hob. The cover began to move up and down. 
 She laid her hand on it to keep it still. It went 
 on moving. She sat on it, but it resisted her 
 efforts. She had two lodgers, navvies. One of 
 them sat on it with her, but the cover never 
 stopped moving. The other lodger sat with them. 
 It burst. The old woman and a tomcat were 
 blown up the chimney and the two navvies have 
 not been heard of since. You'll say," he concluded, 
 "that this is a great lie — but — it is." One or 
 two of the crowd tried to meet his style in kind by 
 chaffing him. " Ah," said he, " wherever there's 
 light you are sure to have moths fluttering about it." 
 Between Penzance and the Land's End on the 
 coast is the Logan stone. Antiquaries insist that 
 it should be called the logging stone ; to log mean- 
 ing to sway or oscillate. Wilkie Collins gives a 
 
FROM LANCASHIRE TO LAND'S END. 227 
 
 description of it, and also a picture. The descrip- 
 tion I will quote. I rejoice that I can't quote the 
 picture. " This far-famed rock rises on the top of 
 a bold promontory of granite, jutting far out into 
 the sea ; split into the wildest forms, and tower- 
 ing precipitously to a height of a hundred feet. 
 When you reach Logan stone, after some little 
 climbing up perilous-looking places, you see a 
 solid, irregular mass of granite, which is computed 
 to weigh eighty-five tons, resting by its centre 
 only, on a flat, broad rock, which in its turn rests 
 on several others stretching out around it on all 
 sides." The picture confirms this account, repre- 
 senting the stone as being on the top of the pile 
 of rocks. If a mere .historian: someone who 
 only wrote histories, and did not know the differ- 
 ence between fact and fiction — like Froude or 
 Macaulay — wrote after this fashion you could not 
 blame him. But when an habitual writer of fiction 
 —if Mr. W. Wilkie Collins be the Wilkie Collins 
 — who ought to be able to distinguish fact when 
 he saw it from fable, makes things appear as they 
 are not, our condemnation must be without ex- 
 tenuating circumstances. I will never say how 
 many feet high a rock or castle is, nor how many 
 tons a stone weighs, nor how far distant one spot 
 is from another. If I made the attempt, I should 
 
 15—2 
 
228 FROM LANCASHIRE TO LAND'S END. 
 
 most probably be quite as wrong as others ; and 
 if I were right, no one would be able to form an 
 idea of these things, or feel an interest in them 
 more than before. It is the human foot-race that 
 invests the sand with absorbing and mysterious 
 interest. It is the relic of human life — the in- 
 dentations that rage and fear and death have 
 made on the earth that arrest our sympathies. 
 The Logan stone is not twenty feet from the 
 ground — be the same more or less — and so far 
 from being on the summit, the pile of rocks rises 
 to a great height behind it, quite hiding it from 
 the sea. This pile was, in -fact, a keep or fortress 
 at some extremely remote period. It is known 
 as Trereen Castle. Either a castle stood there or 
 the rocks were made to fulfil the defensive func- 
 tions of a castle. The promontory widens in- 
 wards from the sea, and was protected by three 
 lines of circumvallation ; one at the neck of the 
 rocky pile, another where the promontory first 
 juts out from the main shore, and a third between, 
 those two. The moment the guide called my 
 attention to those ancient fortifications, I regarded 
 the Logan stone only in a secondary way. 
 Thoughts of the fierce struggles that raged on the 
 spot, and of the strange men who engaged in 
 them, thronged my imagination. Yet the Logan 
 
FROM LAXCASHIBE TO LAND'S END. 229 
 
 stone must have been there also. Were those 
 bold warriors acquainted with its peculiar pro- 
 perty? When did its power of vibration com- 
 mence ? Who first made the discovery ? The 
 great capabilities of successful defence which the 
 place naturally presented had no doubt led to its 
 being chosen by some piratical invader as a for- 
 tress from which he could pillage the surrounding 
 country, and, at last, if necessary, escape in his 
 ships. It was not likely that he troubled his 
 head about the Logan stone, even enough to make 
 mistakes about it, as Mr. Wilkie Collins did. I 
 asked the guide if there were any record or tradi- 
 tion as to the time when the stone was first 
 observed to be capable of motion ; and he repeated, 
 in reply, a long legendary tale, a few sentences of 
 which I wrote down afterwards from memory. 
 " Calm was the eve by Trereen shore. The sun, 
 a ball of red, hung on the margin of the sky. 
 His beams gently heaved like sleeping sea-birds 
 on the waves. The air was still. But fierce 
 rolled the tides of battle to and fro before the 
 rocky home of Cathmor. He had wooed the 
 daughter of Clougal, chief of the Glen. But the 
 maiden turned from his love. ' Leader of men, 
 she said, ' seek elsewhere a heart that can beat to 
 thine. The halls of chiefs welcome thy coming, 
 
230 FROM LANCASHIRE TO LAND'S END. 
 
 and distant isles are close to thy fast-sailing ships. 
 Isola's love is given to another.' Darkness 
 gathered on Cathmor's brow as when the blast 
 from the mountains settles on the lake. He went 
 in silence. But he came suddenly with his 
 warriors and bore off the shrieking maid. Her 
 friends raised the cry of war through the valley. 
 They poured forth as the stream rushes over rocky 
 falls and shouts in its torrent joy. At the last 
 rampart they joined in fight. They struggled to 
 and fro as the trees of the forest mingle their 
 branches in the fury of the tempest. Cathmor 
 gained his home of rocks. He was seen on the 
 craggy pile. Isola stood by his side. Her hair 
 hung loose. The sunbeams sparkled in its golden 
 mazes. The tear was in her eye, as the dew on 
 the lonely flower that hangs on the cliff. With 
 one hand she sheltered her eyes from the sun as 
 she gazed through her tears on her brothers. 
 ' Cathmor,' shouted Clougal, ' restore the daughter 
 to her sire, the maid to her lover. Let there be 
 peace. We will gladly see thy ships returning 
 when thou sailest over the dark waves.' ' Cath- 
 mor yields not to man,' cried the haughty chief. 
 ' When the rock on which she leans shall move 
 at the pressure of Isola's hand Cathmor will yield.' 
 Isola's heart beat high at Cathmor's words. She 
 
FROM LANCASHIRE TO LAND'S END. 231 
 
 stood in the pride of her maiden strength. She 
 pressed her white hand, and the rock heaved to 
 the tremor of her touch. Loud and long rose the 
 shout of wonder and joy. ' Strong is the rock,' 
 said the sea-borne chief, 'and stronger is love; 
 but more steadfast than the rock and stronger 
 than love is the pledged word of Cathmor. Let 
 the maid depart. Time will lessen the pain of 
 Cathmor's heart. Let there be peace.' Calm was 
 the eve on Trereen shore." 
 
 I asked the guide where he got the legend. 
 He heard a gentleman read it, he said, out of a 
 small, square book, printed on thin paper, and full 
 of lines and figures which he could not under- 
 stand. " Was Bradshaw the name ?" I asked. 
 He said he thought it was. 
 
 On our way to Land's End — we drove in a car 
 drawn by a single horse, I must observe — we 
 came upon a donkey lying on the middle of the 
 road. As we came near the animal turned his 
 head and looked at us languidly, then resumed 
 his former attitude and lay still. The driver 
 made a circuit, and left him undisturbed. "We 
 were followed by another carriage containing a 
 more numerous party, and drawn by two horses. 
 "We watched with some curiosity to see what 
 would happen. The moment the donkey saw a 
 
232 FROM LANCASHIRE TO LAND'S END. 
 
 carriage and pair approaching he arose, shook his 
 ears deferentially, and walked aside with instinc- 
 tive recognition of greatness. I could note the 
 gleam of assured triumph that passed over the 
 features of the occupants of the two-horse carriage 
 at the donkey's homage. It was a subject of 
 thought for me during the rest of the day, and for 
 many days. Why do people ride in two and four 
 and six horse carriages ? Because they expect to 
 meet donkeys. Why do men spend their lives in 
 making money which they never spend ? For the 
 sake of the donkeys. Why do statesmen soar 
 beyond their modest practical duties and embroil 
 the nations in strife ? That donkeys may rise at 
 their approach. Why do town councillors make 
 orations about ship canals ? Why do people wish 
 to get on school boards ? That donkeys who 
 would not move for them before may bow their 
 ears for them as they pass by. Why do young 
 men smoke cigars ? To astonish donkeys. What 
 is all extravagant taste in art and dress for \ For 
 donkeys. The lesson that I learned at the Land's 
 End made me a wiser, without being a sadder 
 man. I constantly think of that donkey. My 
 wife says that I am growing very careless about 
 my appearance and wearing shabby clothes. A 
 friend with whom I was about to take a walk the 
 
FROM LANCASHIRE TO LAND'S END. 233 
 
 other day somewhat too considerately suggested 
 that I should put on an overcoat. He was look- 
 ing at my old jacket as he spoke. I knew what 
 he meant, but I had not gone to the Land's End 
 for nothing. If he chose to lie on the- road while 
 I passed let him do so. There is much more time 
 lost in waiting for a donkey to rise than there is 
 in going round him. When I began to prepare 
 this paper last week, I said to myself with em- 
 phatic warning, " Mind that you do not attempt 
 to drive in a carriage-and-pair style before the 
 Literary Club. There are no donkeys there." 
 
 The Land's End is a place to sit quietly at and 
 think and feel. The feelings created by such 
 scenes are rich with the uncoined ore of humanity 
 — why should we mingle them with the alloy of 
 conventionality to make them circulate ? They are 
 flooded with the milk of human kindness — why 
 churn this milk into words that retain no life, and 
 never can become emotion again? The thought 
 of the Land's End, and the question that arises as 
 the eye scans the distant sweep of ocean — what 
 lies beyond ? — are the chief ingredients of the 
 mood that the locality begets. But when we 
 begin to philosophize we know that America lies 
 beyond, and that if our thoughts only continue to 
 travel they will come round to the very point from 
 
234 FROM LANCASHIRE TO LAND'S END. 
 
 which they started, and the Land's End becomes 
 the end of romance. Let us make-believe that 
 the world is flat. 
 
 In a field by the roadside, not far from Pen- 
 zance, stands a circle of tall gray stones, nineteen 
 in number. How they were brought there or 
 where from is a perplexing inquiry. There are no 
 such stones anywhere near, and if there were it 
 is difficult to comprehend how they could be con- 
 veyed to this spot and set erect. They are called 
 the Nineteen Merry Maidens. Again I say — be 
 the same more or less. I counted them several 
 times, but I do not pledge myself to their exact 
 number. I measured the distance between them, 
 and the diameter and the circumference of the 
 circle, but I was no wiser. At night I read their 
 true history in one of the books which I had 
 brought with me — which of them I am unable 
 to say. 
 
 It was in the days when the ancient Druidic 
 worship was yielding before the mild doctrine of 
 the true religion. But the later germs of truth 
 lay yet unfolded in the stern soil, and the habits 
 of a gloomy ritual lingered in the first beams of 
 the growing dawn. A group of maidens from 
 Penzance, forgetting or heedless that it was the 
 Sabbath Day, went to join in their accustomed 
 
FROM LANCASHIRE TO LAND'S END. 235 
 
 dance in the field of meeting. The Christian 
 priest, who had previously been a Druid, and 
 was now fired with new-born zeal, hurried after 
 them to prevent the profanation. He found them 
 standing in a ring, just about to commence the 
 measure, and entreated them to forbear. The 
 wilful maidens could not understand why their 
 usual pastime should be abandoned. They 
 ridiculed his scruples. The priest changed his 
 entreaties to threatenings. " Gladsys Pentreath," 
 said he, addressing the ringleader of the party, 
 the fairest and the merriest of the daughters of 
 Penzance, " wilt thou dance on the day of holy 
 rest — on the Sabbath Day ?" " We are ready to 
 dance for a whole week of Sabbath Days," said 
 the laughing girl, as she extended her arms to her 
 companions on each side to commence the move- 
 ment. " Eemain where you are," said the angry 
 priest, "until a week of Sabbaths comes and 
 closes, and be a warning to future time that the 
 laws of religion cannot be broken with impunity." 
 Just in the circle in which they stood the maidens 
 were changed into stone, and there they remain 
 rooted in the earth to the present day. Strangers 
 long felt an unaccountable sadness grow on their 
 spirits as they looked on the group, not knowing 
 the strange fact of their transformation. An air 
 
236 FROM LANCASHIRE TO LAND'S END. 
 
 of sullen terror struggling with defiance breathed 
 from the petrified forms. The attitudes of the 
 graceful maidens, as they were just about to 
 sweep round in undulating motion, contrasted in 
 some felt but unintelligible manner with the fixed 
 and motionless figures of the stones. No sun- 
 shine ever seemed to gladden the spot. A re- 
 bellious darkness that appeared to come from 
 within lowered on the granite masses, and re- 
 pelled the fondling and comforting daybeams. 
 
 After many centuries had passed away, and 
 partial stagnation had long succeeded the first 
 glad influx of Christianity, a fresh wave of life, 
 welling from a distant source, swept over the 
 land. The whole population hastened to bathe in 
 its water, and renewed their dying love. For a 
 time all the usual occupations of daily life were 
 forsaken, and frequent religious services succeeded 
 each other almost without intermission. The 
 church-bells pealed day after day for a whole 
 week — morning and evening the summons to 
 prayer rang through the parish from the church- 
 tower, and was answered by thronging crowds. 
 On Saturday morning the call to worship was 
 repeated and responded to. In the evening again 
 the bell pealed its invitation, and the whole cycle 
 of a week of Sabbaths was almost completed. 
 
FROM LANCASHIRE TO LAND'S END. 237 
 
 The bell rang loud, and the congregation gathered. 
 The bell ceased to ring, and the people sat in ex- 
 pectant silence, but no clergyman appeared. They 
 waited for a long time in surprise, and at last 
 departed in angry unrefreshment. 
 
 The clergyman was a stranger who had ex- 
 changed duties with the resident pastor during 
 the mission. During his stay he had formed an 
 attachment to the daughter of a farmer in the 
 neighbourhood. They had fallen into the habit 
 of going to the church together for some days 
 and the girl had promised, when they met on 
 Saturday evening, in the field of the Nineteen 
 Merry Maidens, to give a final answer to his offer 
 of love. Just as the bells began to ring she 
 entered the field. It appeared quite strange to 
 her — no merry maidens were there ! Astonished, 
 and concluding that she had mistaken the 
 entrance, she passed on to the next field, thinking 
 it must be the one she sought. But this field, too, 
 was empty. Excited and reft of all self-posses- 
 sion, she hastened on, and passed from field to 
 field and lost herself in the wild and fruitless 
 search. Her lover came at the appointed hour. 
 He had yet time to receive the promise that was 
 to make his life happy, and then proceed with 
 his affianced bride to the service that was to 
 
238 FROM LANCASHIRE TO LAND'S END. 
 
 conclude his engagement. He, too, entered the 
 field, and seeing no circle of stone pillars, hastily 
 took for granted that he had mistaken the place 
 in his eagerness, and immediately directed his 
 steps to the adjoining field just as the object of 
 his search passed from it at the opposite side. 
 Surprised and confounded at finding this also 
 without the tokens that distinguished the ap- 
 pointed trysting-place, he lost all sense of time 
 and sound. The beating of his heart was louder 
 than the peal of the bell. For hours he con- 
 tinued his pursuit, and during the whole time, 
 the affrighted girl left each field just as he 
 entered it. 
 
 That night the inhabitants of Penzance were 
 disturbed by strange sounds heard in the streets. 
 Some of them rose and went to the windows to 
 ascertain from what source they proceeded. By 
 the light of the clear moon they saw a number 
 of girls in strange attire, and speaking an un- 
 known language, wandering through the streets. 
 They uttered exclamations of grief and astonish- 
 ment as they approached house after house and 
 failed apparently to discover what they expected 
 to find. Their eager words began to subside into 
 stifled moans and despairing wails, when a sudden 
 cry from one of them caught the attention of all 
 
FROM LANCASHIRE TO LAND'S END. 239 
 
 the others. They flocked together to the place 
 from which the cry came, and a simultaneous 
 exclamation of joy burst from every lip as they 
 recognised the ancient cross that stood by the 
 market-house — the only object in the town, as it 
 would seem, that was familiar to them. A solemn 
 silence succeeded to this burst of glad recognition. 
 They knelt in a cluster round the old cross, and 
 as the wondering watchers gazed, they slowly 
 faded from view. 
 
 The next morning the merry maidens were in 
 their usual place. But observers ever afterwards 
 noticed a change in their appearance. The gloom 
 and the shadow had departed, and when the sun 
 poured his beams on the gray stones, no longer 
 repelling his sympathy, they basked in the grateful 
 warmth and reflected his brightness. 
 
 We returned towards the south by train to Fal- 
 mouthj and travelled by water to Truro, through 
 a succession of wooded lakes that opened before 
 us and closed behind us as we went. 
 
 There is no railway further than Bodmin on 
 the way to Tintagel. A distance of some twenty 
 miles must be walked or driven over. The road 
 is said to be the most dreary and uninteresting 
 that can be found. Fortunately we did not learn 
 this until after we had made the journey. No 
 
240 FROM LANCASHIRE TO LAND'S END. 
 
 feature of what is generally considered fine 
 scenery presented itself. Neither lake, wood, nor 
 castle embellished the view. But we had near 
 and distant objects to contemplate. We passed 
 alternately between steep, and sloping banks, 
 covered with flowers, that shut out the landscape, 
 and low hedges that allowed the horizon to be 
 seen. Wide sweeps of undulating hill that 
 gathered afar off into the semblance of endless 
 plains, and melted insensibly into the low-lying 
 heavens, carried away the thought till it lost its 
 distinctness and became a mysterious emotion, 
 resembling the remote objects in the scene where 
 mountain-tops and clouds were indistinguishable. 
 Bold and craggy eminences at another time drew 
 the mind into their likeness, and inspired the 
 mood that dares and defies the blows of man or 
 fortune. Again, tall hills lifted the soul to the 
 height where, in ambitious reveries, the holiness 
 of earth is forgotten. Then we suddenly drove 
 into ravines of blossoming hyacinths, that called 
 our attention to the immediate products of Nature, 
 and compelled us to listen to her low and sooth- 
 ing voice. " Come," she said, " to my bosom, 
 and learn to contemplate the modest beauties 
 that are life's daily bread. They are always at 
 hand ; they will never fail, never deceive. Enlarge 
 
FROM LANCASHIRE TO LAND'S END. 241 
 
 your imagination, if you will, with the indistinct 
 forms of cloudland, but forget not the tenderness 
 of home and friendship, and the sweetness and 
 fragrance that glorify the near and narrow 
 way." The driver directed our attention to two 
 savage crags that thrust themselves forward 
 and frowned at each other across a deep valley. 
 This, we were told, was called the Devil's Jump. 
 There are two divergent traditions about the 
 devil in Cornwall. The Cornish housewives are 
 famous for the excellence and varied contents of 
 their pies. There is no conceivable thing that 
 may be eaten, or that can be thought possible to 
 be eaten, that they do not dress in this kind of 
 dish. Having subdued one world to their culinary 
 enterprise, they aspire to other worlds, and openly 
 express their desire to catch the devil and cook 
 him in a pie. The devil has heard of this, and 
 he keeps out of the way. It is said that he never 
 dares to make his appearance in Cornwall. But, 
 on the other hand, there are various localities that 
 testify to his visits by their names. There are 
 devil's pits, and coits, and caldrons, and heights, 
 and hollows, just as in other places. The ex- 
 planation of those contradictory evidences is that 
 the devil does visit Cornwall, but that he is very 
 much on his guard, hiding behind bushes and 
 
 16 
 
242 FROM LANCASHIRE TO LAND'S END. 
 
 rocks, and never venturing into the haunts of 
 fashion and parading the streets as he does in 
 other places. He skulks ahout in a cowardly 
 manner, and acts more like a poacher than a 
 licensed sportsman. Once, on a summer's eve, a 
 youth and a maiden wandered in a path that Jeads 
 near one of these crags. The balmy air trilled to 
 the song of the thrush. The streamlet sparkled 
 and sang light-heartedly as it sped from its 
 cradle in the moors to its final home in the ocean. 
 No pollution of town or factory clogged the liquid 
 clearness of its rippling melody. It was pure as 
 the hearts of the youthful pair who drew nigh- 
 The devil happened to be lurking somewhere 
 near, and he immediately crept out and stationed 
 himself on the crag and lay down to listen to 
 what the lovers were saying. Listeners seldom 
 hear good of themselves. " Neelah," said the 
 youth, " do not postpone our happiness through 
 excessive prudence. I am strong and healthy: 
 you shall never want something to put into the 
 pie, though I were to seize the arch fiend himself." 
 The devil sprang up in consternation, jumped 
 across the chasm and disappeared, leaving his 
 name to the locality, and confirming the pious dis- 
 position of the Cornish people. 
 
 Passing through a region that is one vast slate 
 
FROM LANCASHIRE TO LAND'S END. 243 
 
 quarry, we arrived at Trevena, within fifteen 
 minutes' walk of which is King Arthur's Castle. 
 "We lost no time in paying a first visit to it. The 
 castle stands — rather 1 should say stoops or leans 
 — partly on a projecting cliff, and partly on what 
 is called an island, separated from the cliff by a 
 chasm of twenty or thirty yards breadth. I 
 prefer saying it is separated by a wide -chasm. 
 There are various theories as to the original con- 
 nection between the island and the mainland. 
 The isolated portion, it should be explained, is 
 not properly an island, as the sea never flows 
 between, but it is accessible only by a winding 
 and steep path on the face of a lofty precipice. 
 Some say that the island was once united to the 
 land by a connecting neck, and that the castle 
 occupied the whole way across. Others aver that 
 the island and mainland were quite separate at 
 one time, and were united by a drawbridge : that • 
 afterwards the cliff on either side fell down and 
 partially filled up the passage where the sea inter- 
 vened before, and created the chasm that now 
 exists at the top. So, however, it is~that one 
 portion of the castle is on the rock that is nearest 
 to the island, and another portion on the island 
 itself. The two outer walls on either side run 
 towards each other, and would meet if continued 
 
 16—2 
 
244 FROM LANCASHIRE TO LAND'S END. 
 
 across the chasm. The island is between three and 
 four acres in extent. This small space swells, and 
 droops, and undulates, and forms plains, and hills, 
 and vales. It is covered with the thickest and 
 softest carpet of grass that was ever trodden. It 
 is surrounded by a cliff that is terrific in its height 
 and savage outline. The ruins of a small chapel 
 lie on an elevated part, and a shallow grave cut in 
 the rock lies by its side. Entrance to the insular 
 part of the castle is obtained through a gate, the 
 key of which can be got at a cottage not far off, 
 the only condition being that you must lock the 
 door when you have entered, to prevent the sheep, 
 who are always on the watch for an opportunity, 
 from getting in. Having made a hasty inspection 
 we returned, and the next morning set out for a 
 more lengthened exploration. The day was 
 sunny, and soft, and warm ; one of those days 
 that seldom come in a lifetime. We got the key 
 and locked ourselves into the island. In attempt- 
 ing to describe the old castle, for some reason 
 unknown to myself, I use the word senility rather 
 than antiquity. The smaller and the humbler the 
 abode, the more closely does it remind us of man. 
 Towering bastions and frowning fortresses have 
 a character and identity of their own, and rank 
 with the sublimities of material nature. The 
 
FROM LANCASHIRE TO LAND'S END. 245 
 
 hut, the shed, the fragile walls and roof of thatch 
 are sanctified by the eternal presence of the 
 household gods. This is the order of architecture 
 to which Tintagel belongs. It is ancient beyond 
 history, or tradition, or probable conjectures, and 
 is worn and attenuated to decrepitude by the 
 waste of time. But it will be half human while 
 a stone stands on another. It is hollowed and 
 beaten by rain and wind to a shred, and you 
 sympathize in its decay as with a fellow-mortal. 
 After walking for a while through the ruins, my 
 wife sat on the broken wall of the old chapel, 
 and I set off in search of adventures through the 
 island. All desire to investigate, all power to 
 distinguish or enumerate, were lost in pure enjoy- 
 ment. Part of the space, where it inclines down 
 to the cliff, is covered with innumerable anthills. 
 From another point, where the base of the rocks 
 is visible, flocks of puffins are seen. I stumbled 
 on an old cave like many which I have seen in 
 my childhood. I found a bird's nest, and looked 
 in at the rounded treasures it contained with 
 suspended breath, as I had done when a boy. I 
 stood on the extreme verge of the mighty cliff, 
 and gazed abroad until consciousness began to 
 blend into vague immensity. Then I looked back 
 at the quiet figure sitting on the ruined chapel in 
 
246 FROM LANCASHIRE TO LAND'S END. 
 
 the distance, and the island became home, carpeted 
 with verdure, domed by heaven, walled by infinity* 
 with the distant sound of the cruel world vainly 
 raging without. Then we walked round the cliff 
 together. My wife saw a coin in the rocks — a 
 coin probably dropped by King Arthur. I picked 
 it up and we carefully examined it. It proved 
 to be a semi-denarius of the bronze period of 
 Queen Victoria's reign. I believe the proper 
 owner Of it is the Duke of Cornwall. Until it is 
 claimed I am His Eoyal Highness's vicegerent. 
 We afterwards went through the other part of the 
 castle on the mainland in which the principal 
 gateway stands, with a winding approach to it 
 up the side of a steep hill. One doorway through 
 the thickest part of the wall leading sheer out on 
 a deep precipice perplexed me in vain efforts to 
 imagine its use. It may have been an entrance 
 for goods brought by ships, for the sea was nearly 
 under it. 
 
 On our way to the village we sat to take a 
 parting view. As I looked my vision suddenly 
 found its focus, as when the duplicates under the 
 stereoscope join into one, and I distinctly saw a 
 party of gaily caparisoned knights, with pennons 
 flying and armour gleaming in the sunset, riding 
 up the zigzag towards the castle gate. I almost 
 
FROM LANCASHIRE TO LAND'S END. 247 
 
 ceased to breathe as I gazed on the sight. Eleven 
 warriors, preceded by a figure of surpassing 
 stature and dignity, moved before me in the yet 
 clear daylight. The castle was no longer in ruins. 
 Its- front presented an unbroken battlement, and a 
 flag floated from its highest tower. I soon became 
 conscious that someone seated himself on my 
 right-hand side, my wife being on my left. As 
 well as I could perceive in the bewilderment of 
 the moment, it was an old man with a long white 
 beard, and carrying a singular staff in his hand. 
 " Who are those V I asked him, scarcely taking 
 my eyes from the strange vision. " Look and 
 see," he answered, at the same time pointing to 
 them with his staff. I looked and saw seven of 
 the wildest-looking rascals I ever beheld, riding 
 mountain horses as wild and shaggy as themselves, 
 with one riding in front, who was certainly, as far 
 as appearances went, the natural leader of such 
 followers. " Is that King Arthur riding first ?" I 
 said. " You may call him King Arthur if it 
 pleases you," answered my new acquaintance, 
 "but all the same his real name is McCarthy." 
 " And who is that mild-looking youth that goes 
 just after him ?" I inquired. " His name," was 
 the answer, " is Gallagher, but they call him 
 Galahad." " Is not he a very devout young 
 
248 FROM LANCASHIRE TO LAND'S END. 
 
 man ?" I said. "He is, as long as you're looking 
 at him, and he knows it, but I won't answer for 
 more than that," was the reply. " Why," said I, 
 " did he not go on a pilgrimage in search of a 
 holy cup, at one time ?" " There would be no 
 occasion at all for the cup to be holy for him to 
 go in search of it," the old man answered. " If 
 there was whisky in it, that would be holiness 
 enough for him." "And who is that rakish 
 fellow/' said I, " who wears his helmet in such a 
 jaunty style ?" " His name," said my old friend, 
 " is Larry Toole, but they call him Lancelot for 
 shortness." " Isn't he a rather loose-going kind of 
 youth ?" I asked. " He's not a very particular 
 sort of chap," was the old man's answer, " but I'd 
 a sight sooner trust him than Jim Gallagher." 
 " Don't they sit round a table all equal ?" was my 
 next inquiry. " Faith," said my friend, " if you'll 
 go up to the castle to-night, in the small hours of 
 the morning " (I am repeating his exact words)— 
 "if you'll go up to-night, in the small hours of 
 the morning, it's under the table you'll find them 
 all equal, and no mistake." " Could you inform 
 me," I next inquired, " how the island came to be 
 divided from the mainland, or whether it was 
 always so ?" " Well," he answered, " I'll tell you 
 how it came about. A man named Barney Neill 
 
FROM LANCASHIRE TO LAND'S END. 249 
 
 rented the island from Arthur, but in a short 
 time he wanted a new valuation and a reduction, 
 and Arthur wouldn't consent to it : so what does 
 Barney do but get a crowbar one night when 
 Arthur and the boys were out, and pulled down 
 the rocks just as you see them. He repealed the 
 union without any doubt. And now he won't pay 
 a penny of rent at all, for he says Arthur is 
 an absentee; and what else could he be but an 
 absentee, when he can't set foot on the island ?" 
 " Might I make so bold as to ask your name V 
 said I. " Well, then, you may," said he ; " my 
 name is Murrough O'Lyne." "And may I take 
 the further liberty of inquiring," said I, " whether 
 they call you anything for shortness 1" " Why, 
 then, they do," answered he; "they call me 
 Merlin." "Merlin," I gasped, almost breathless 
 with astonishment. And then, in the excitement 
 of the moment, I, with most culpable thoughtless- 
 ness and bad taste, asked, "Where's Vivien." 
 " There, now," said Merlin, " that's the way people 
 talk. Look there," continued he, holding out his 
 wand ; " look at her just coming out of the gate 
 of the Dune." I looked and saw a dark-haired 
 girl, with graceful figure and elastic step, issue 
 from the castle gate. "Do you see any white 
 samite on her V asked Merlin. " I must confess 
 
250 FROM LANCASHIRE TO LAND'S END. 
 
 my entire ignorance," said I, " of that mystic and 
 wonderful fabric, but I can confidently say that 
 your friend over the way is distinguished rather 
 by its absence than its presence, whatever it be." 
 " Exactly," said Merlin, " and you may judge all 
 the rest by that. Her name, for one thing, is not 
 Vivien at all ; her name is Biddy. She's a girl of 
 the Casey s. And there isn't in the whole kingdom 
 of Cornwall an honester or a decenter girl than 
 herself." " How can you go on talking nonsense 
 all night ?" said a voice on my left. I turned a 
 meekly remonstrative look in that direction, and 
 when I looked back again, Merlin was gone. The 
 castle was once more in ruins, and where Arthur 
 and his knights had been, a few sheep nibbled 
 the grass. 
 
 The moment I got into the hotel I referred to a 
 " History of Tintagel " which lay on the table, and 
 there I read that the castle in ancient days con- 
 tained stalls for seven horses. This was exactly 
 the number that I saw, according to Merlin's way 
 of putting things. I also read that the old name 
 of Tintagel was Dundagium. "Dagium" is 
 evidently only the Latin termination, so that Dun 
 was the original name of the place. Now " dune " 
 is the Irish word for fort or fortress. It may be 
 remembered that Merlin spoke of Vivien as 
 
FROM LANCASHIRE TO LAND'S END. 251 
 
 coming out of the Dune. The place was clearly 
 an Irish fort. 
 
 Towards nightfall I went to take one more view 
 of the castle, as we were to leave next morning. I 
 took the road leading to the church, which would 
 bring me to a fresh approach. The day had 
 changed. The sky was dreary, and there was a 
 mournful wail in the wind as it swept over the 
 desolate downs. The iron of pitiless circumstance 
 entered into my soul. The church as I passed it 
 seemed like the tomb of a dead god, with the 
 lesser tombs of his worshippers clustering round. 
 Despair weighed on my spirits ; but it was rather 
 a diffused and passive melancholy than a sharp 
 anguish. I made no struggle, but yielded to the 
 - influences that surrounded me, and to the bitter 
 blast that bore me on. The island, with its rent 
 and tortured cliffs, and the aged and decrepit 
 castle came in sight. Sea and wind, wave upon 
 wave, and blast upon blast, without blind rage, 
 without thought of possible failure, beat on the 
 stones that nature had laid and those which man's 
 hand had erected, and wasted away the strength 
 of both alike. Years and years ago I witnessed 
 the spectacle, before unknown to me, of a cat 
 torturing a mouse. The little creature, when 
 tossed into the air by its gigantic executioner, 
 
252 FROM LANCASHIRE TO LAND'S END. 
 
 always the instant it fell sat erect on its haunches 
 in defiance and exhibited its tiny teeth. And this 
 unequalled courage and constancy were in vain 
 against the tyranny of fate ! But I was wrong, 
 for I stood by, a possible avenger, and I had a 
 gun in my hand. Still I have never forgotten 
 the incident, and it now came back on me as the 
 interpreter of the scene before me. The great 
 torturers, the sea and the storm, were playing 
 with the shore. The cliffs stood in haughty 
 defiance, the buffeted rocks frowned back on their 
 foe. But all was in vain. The calm and cruel 
 monster — calm in its fury and cruel in its repose 
 — was gradually eating away the vitals of its 
 victim. The frown on the brow of the cliff was 
 made only of the wrinkles that ages of tempest 
 had written. The threatening buttresses and tall 
 minarets of stone were only the writhing limbs of 
 a despairing combatant. All was giving way, 
 nothing could endure. Again, the iron chain of 
 material destiny clasped my soul and enthralled it. 
 My consciousness melted into the external world. 
 All nature around, the dismal ocean, the worn 
 rocks, the emaciated ruins, became conscious in my 
 consciousness. I saw them no longer : I was part 
 of them — warring with them, perishing with 
 them. 
 
FROM LANCASHIRE TO LAND'S END. 253 
 
 " The heaven and the earth shall pass away, but 
 My word shall not pass away." No one knows 
 the power of words till they come at the right 
 moment. I recovered and collected my wander- 
 ing fancies. I saw nature from my human height. 
 My soul, that had evaporated and been the soul of 
 the wind, and wave, and rocks, condensed and 
 crystallized, and looked out from her battlement 
 which the tempest cannot reach ; and, like a mass 
 of floating vapour that gathers into a dewdrop, I 
 reflected the outside world instead of mingling 
 with it. 
 
 Within a short drive or walk of Trevena, in the 
 valley of Trevillet, is a waterfall called St. Knighton, 
 or St. Nectan's Kieve. On a high rock near the 
 fall stand the walls of a small building where 
 the saint lived. Once on a time, two ladies took 
 up their abode in this building and died in it — 
 no one ever knew whence they came, or their 
 names or histories. This is no uncommon circum- 
 stance in Cornwall. A foreigner came to a farm- 
 house, begged to be taken in as a lodger, paid 
 liberally in gold coins of some other land, en- 
 treating his landlord not to exhibit them till he 
 ■went away or died ; never went out by day, and 
 died in a few years unknown even by name. 
 One writer (Hunt) confounds the Kieve, the name 
 
254 FROM LANCASHIRE TO LAND'S END. 
 
 of a miner's vessel applied to the basin into which 
 the water falls, with the hermitage. Another 
 (Collins) describes the place where the strange 
 ladies lived and died at a cottage on the outskirts 
 of the wood. The building on the high rock near 
 the fall is of great antiquity. It belongs to a 
 class of small stone-roofed chapels whose origin 
 and use are unknown. One of these stands 
 outside Torquay on the top of a steep precipice. 
 There are one or two in Ireland. If, as is said, 
 they were guides for mariners, it must have been 
 by the aid of perpetually burning lights, and this 
 takes us back to the time when our Aryan fore- 
 fathers came from the East. 
 
 I have only to repair an omission and add that 
 the clergyman and his sweetheart, whom we left 
 wandering around the site of the vanished merry 
 maidens, found each other at last and were 
 married. 
 
 L 
 
 THE END. 
 
J. E. CORNISH'S PUBLICATIONS. 
 
 Abstracts of some of the Medical 
 and Surgical Cases treated at the 
 Children's Hospital, Pendlebury, 
 Edited by Henry Ashby, M.D., 
 H. R. Hutton, M.B., and G. A. 
 Wright, F.R.C.S. 6th year of 
 issue. 2s. 
 
 Roger Bacon. The Philosophy of 
 
 Science in the Middle Ages. By 
 B. Adamson, M.A., LL.D., Pro- 
 fessor of Logic in the Owens 
 College, Victoria University. 18. 
 
 Ailments for the Sick, by a Lady of 
 much experience in the sick-room. 
 6d. 
 
 Art and Hand Work for the People, 
 being three papers read before the 
 Social Science Congress, September, 
 1884. By Bev. W. Tuck-well, 
 Charles Godfrey Leland, and 
 Walter Besant. 6d. 
 
 The Physiology and Pathology of 
 
 Childhood. By Henry Ashby, 
 M.D., Lond., M.E.C.P., Lecturer 
 on Diseases of Children in the 
 Owens College, Victoria Uni- 
 versity. 6d. 
 
 The Teaching of Technical Chem- 
 istry. By G. H. Bailey, D.Sc, 
 Lecturer on Chemistry in the 
 Owens College, Victoria University. 
 id. 
 
 A Manual of French Pronunciation, 
 as exhibited in ordinary life. By 
 Paul Eug. Ed. Barbier. Is. 6d. 
 
 Warwick Brookes' Pencil Pictures 
 of Child Life, with Biographical 
 Reminiscences. By T. Letherbrow. 
 
 Calendar of the Victoria University, 
 is. 
 
 The Questions of the Bible arranged 
 in the order of the Book of Scrip- 
 ture. By W. Carnelley, with 
 Preface by S. G. Green, D.D. 7s. M. 
 
 Illustrations of the Architecture 
 
 and Archaeology of the Cathedral 
 Church of S. Mary the Virgin, S. 
 George, and S. Denys, Manchester. 
 In a series of about 40 plates, with 
 descriptive letterpress. By J. S. 
 Crowther. [In preparation.] 
 
 The Criminal Responsibility of the 
 Insane. By C. J. Cullingworth, 
 M.D., F.R.C.P. 6d. 
 
 Dammann (K. ). German Accidence, 
 or the Essentials of German Gram- 
 mar. 2s. 
 
 Notes on Artillery. By Charles C. 
 
 du Pre, P.L.S., late Captain 3rd 
 Middlesex A. Volunteers, and the 
 Manchester Artillery. 6d. 
 
 Greek Exercises for Beginners. 
 
 Translated from the Greek 
 Grammar of Professor George 
 Curtius. By Edwin B. England, 
 M.A., Lecturer in Greek and Latin 
 in the Owens College, Victoria 
 University. Is. 
 
 The Character and Times of Thomas 
 Cromwell ; a criticism of the first 
 ten years of the English Reforma- 
 tion. By Arthur Galton, New Coll., 
 Oxon. Author of ' UrbanaScripta.' 
 7s. 6d. 
 
 Four Place Logarithmic and Tan- 
 gent Tables, for the use of Physical, 
 ElectricaLEngineering, and Chemi- 
 cal Students. Arranged by W. W. 
 Haldane Gee, B.Sc, Lond., Assis- 
 tant Lecturer in Physics in the 
 Owens College, Victoria University. 
 9d. 
 
 Fasciculus: A Song-Bundle. By 
 H. Hailstone, M.A. 2s. 
 
 Sertum : A Song-Garland. By H. 
 Hailstone, M.A. 2s. 
 
 David Westren. By Alfred Hayes, 
 M.A., New Coll., Oxon. 6s. 
 
 The Last Crusade and other Poems. 
 'By Alfred Hayes, M.A., New Coll., 
 Oxon. 6s. 6d. 
 
 Life and Correspondence of Samuel 
 Hibbert Ware, M.D., F.RS.E., etc. 
 Edited by Mrs. Hibbert Ware. 
 With a Portrait of Dr. Hibbert 
 Ware. 21s. 
 
 Easements and Rights of Light. 
 By John Holden, F.R.I.B.A., F.S.I. 
 3s. 
 
J. E. Cornish's Publications. 
 
 The Faculty of Laws and the Idea 
 of Law. 87 Alfred HopKinson, 
 B.C.L., M.A., Professor of Law in 
 the Owens College, Victoria Uni- 
 versity. 6d. 
 
 Hunting Maps. Cheshire, Wynn- 
 
 stay, and North Staffordshire 
 Hunts. Mounted on cloth and 
 folded in case for the pocket. 4a. 
 each. 
 
 Hymns and Sacred Songs for 
 
 Sunday Schools and Public Wor- 
 ship. 8d. ; or cloth, gilt edges, lOd. 
 
 Decorative Design : An Elementary 
 Text Book of Principles and 
 Practice. By Frank Jackson, 
 Second Master in the Birmingham 
 Municipal School of Art. Is. 6d. 
 
 Diseases of the Bones, their Patho- 
 logy, Diagnosis, and Treatment. 
 By Thomas Jones, P.R.C.S., B.S., 
 Lecturer on Practical Surgery in 
 the Owens College, Victoria Univer- 
 sity. With illustrations. 12s. 6d. 
 
 The Instantaneous Chest Squarer, 
 or Case Maker's Ready Reckoner. 
 By Oliver C. Kenyon. 2nd Edition. 
 6s. 
 
 Gaer Pensauelcoit, A Long Lost un- 
 Romanised British Metropolis. 
 Occasioned by two Reports of an 
 Exploration Committee of the 
 Somersetshire Archaeological and 
 Natural History Society, having 
 for Assessors, Professor Boyd- 
 Dawkins, General A. Pitt-Rivers, 
 and Professor Rolleston. By 
 Thomas Kerslake, 1882. With 
 Map. Is. 
 
 The Liberty of Independent His- 
 torical Research. By Thomas 
 Kerslake, 1885. Is. 
 
 The Origins of Geometry. By 
 Horace Lamb, M.A., F.R.S., Pro- 
 fessor of Pure Mathematics in the 
 Owens College, Victoria University. 
 6tZ. 
 
 The Relation of Pharmacology to 
 Therapeutics. By D. J. Leech, 
 M.D., F.R.C.P., Professor of 
 Materia Medica and Therapeutics 
 in the Owens College, Victoria 
 University. 6d. 
 
 The Present Position of the Anti- 
 septic Question ; being the sub- 
 stance of the oration for the year 
 1883, delivered before the Medical 
 
 Society of London. By Edward 
 Lund, F.R.C.S., Professor of 
 
 Surgery in the Owens College, 
 Victoria University. " 2s. r 
 
 Five Tears' Surgical Work in the 
 
 Manchester Royal Infirmary. By 
 Edward Lund, F.R.C.S. 3s. 
 
 Observations on some of the more 
 
 recent Methods of TreatingWounds, 
 and on Excision .of the Knee-joint. 
 By Edward Lund, F.R.C.S. 2s. 
 
 Palliative Medicine and Palliative 
 Treatment in Surgical Cases. By 
 Edward Lund, F.R.O.S. 6d. 
 
 The Removal of the Entire Tongue 
 
 by the Walter Whitehead Method, 
 with full details of the operation 
 and after-treatment, by Edward 
 Lund, F.R.C.S. 2s. 
 
 MANCHESTER TACTICAL 
 SOCIETY PUBLICATIONS. 
 
 1. - Suggestions for a New Field 
 Exercise fortheVolunteer Infantry. 
 By Spencer Wilkinson, Captain 
 20th L.R.V. 6d. 
 
 2.— Volunteer Artillery. Essays by 
 
 R. K. Birley, Major and Hon. Lieu- 
 tenant-Colonel 'the Manchester 
 Artillery. 6d. 
 
 3. — English Drill : A Historical 
 Sketch. By J. L. Aspland, Lieu- 
 tenant-Colonel 20th L.R.V. 6d. 
 
 4.— Essays on the War Game. By 
 Spencer Wilkinson, Captain 20th 
 L.R.V. Is. 
 
 5.-Exorcises in Strategy and 
 Tactics. Translated from the 
 German by Spencer Wilkinson, 
 Captain 20th L.R. V. With 3 Maps. 
 2s. 6d. 
 
 6.— War-Game Maps. By Henry T. 
 Crook, C.E., Captain 1st Lanca- 
 shire Engineer Volunteers. Qd. 
 
 7. —Field Artillery for Home Service. 
 By R. K. Birley, Major and Hon. 
 Lieutenant-Colonel the Manchester 
 Artillery. 6d. 
 
 8.— The Conduct of Infantry Fire 
 
 according to the French Regula- 
 tions of 1888. Translated, with an 
 Introduction, by A. P. Ledward, 
 late Captain 20th L.R.V. 6d. 
 
16, St. Jtrme's Square, Manchester. 
 
 9.— Map Manceuvres. An Elemen- 
 tary Account of the War Game. 
 NBy A. G. Haywood, Ciptain 6th 
 V.B. Lancashire Division. R.A. 
 Qd. 
 
 10.— Exercises in Strategy and 
 Tactics. Second Series. By H. 
 von Gizycki, Colonel-Commandant 
 of the 18th (Brandenburg) Field 
 Artillery Regiment. Translated 
 by Henry L. Rocca, Lieutenant- 
 Colonel and Hon. Colonel-Com- 
 mandant 5th V.B. the Manchester 
 Regiment. Is. 
 
 Manchester as it is, a Series of 
 Views. By Alfred Brothers, 
 F.R.A.S., with an Introduction by 
 James Croston, F.S.A. £2 2s. 
 
 Manchester Court Leet Records 
 from 1552 (with an interval of 
 about 43 years) to 1846. Edited by 
 J. P. Earwaker, F.S.A, Vols. I. to 
 VI., £3 3s. net; single volumes, 
 12s. Qd. each net. The entire work 
 will be completed in about 12 
 volumes. 
 
 The Frog : an Introduction to 
 
 Anatomy and Histology. With a 
 Chapter on Development added. 
 By A. Milnes Marshall, M.D.,D.Sc, 
 F.R.S., Professor of Biology in the 
 Owens College, Victoria University. 
 3rd Edition, revised and illus- 
 trated. 4s. 
 
 Owens College : Studies from the 
 Biological Laboratories. Vol. I. 
 Published by the Council of the 
 College, and edited by Professor 
 Millies Marshall. 10s. 
 
 Mason Science College Calendar 
 (Birmingham). Is. 
 
 Medical Education at the Uni- 
 versities. By J. E. Morgan, M.D., 
 M.A., Professor of Medicine in the 
 Owens College,Victoria University. 
 Is. 
 
 The Study of Law in Greece, Rome, 
 
 and England. By J. E. Crawford 
 Munro, LL.M., LL.D., Professor 
 of Political Economy in the Owens 
 College, Victoria University. Qd. 
 
 Essays in Literature and Ethics. 
 By the late Rev. William Anderson 
 O'Conor, B.A. Edited, with a Bio- 
 graphical Introduction, by William 
 E. A. Axon. 3s. Qd. 
 
 Old Manchester : a Series of Views 
 of the more Ancient Buildings in 
 Manchester and its vicinity, as 
 they appeared fifty years ago. 
 Drawn by Ralston, James, and 
 others, and reproduced by the 
 Autotype process by Alfred Bro- 
 thers, F.R.A.S., with an Intro- 
 duction by James Croston, F.S.A. 
 £2 5s. 
 
 Owens College Calendar. 3s. 
 
 Address delivered at the Opening 
 of the Session, Department of 
 Medicine, Owens College, 1887-8. 
 By Sir James Paget, Bart., LL.D., 
 D.C.L., F.R.S. Qd. 
 
 The Limits of the Infectiveness of 
 Tubercle. By Arthur Ransome, 
 M.D., M.A., Lecturer on Public 
 Health and Hygiene in the Owens 
 College, Victoria University. Qd. 
 
 The Present Position of State 
 Medicine in England. By Arthur 
 Ransome, M.D., M.A., Lecturer on 
 Public Health and Hygiene in the 
 Owens College, Victoria Univer- 
 sity. Is. 
 
 Engineering : Syllabus of the Lec- 
 tures at the Owens College, to- 
 gether with a Series of Examples 
 relating to the various Subjects 
 included in the Course. By Os- 
 borne Reynolds, M.A., F.R.S., Pro- 
 fessor of Engineering in the Owens 
 College, Victoria University. Ar- 
 ranged by J. B. Millar, M.E., 
 Assistant Lecturer in Engineering. 
 2nd Edition. 3s. 
 
 On Spontaneous Generation and 
 the Doctrine of Contagium Vivum. 
 By Sir William Roberts, M.D., 
 F.R.S. 2s. 
 
 A Selection of Hymns for the Use 
 
 of Young Persons, and especially 
 for the Children of Sunday Schools. 
 By W. Roby. Sd, 
 
 Description of the Chemical Labora- 
 tories at the Owens College, from 
 the Plans of Alfred Waterhouse, 
 R.A. By Sir H. E. Roscoe, F.R.S. 
 With lithographic copies of the 
 original Plans and Elevations. 5s. 
 
 On Technical Education. By James 
 Ross, M.D., LL.D., Professor of 
 Medicine in the Owens College, 
 Victoria University. Qd. 
 
IV 
 
 /. E. Cornish's Publications. 
 
 Notes on the Diagnosis of the 
 
 various Forms of Paralysis of the 
 Muscles of External Relation. By 
 James Ross, M.D., LL.D., Pro- 
 fessor of Medicine in the Owens 
 College, Victoria University. Is. 
 
 Inductive Political Economy. By 
 
 William Lucas Sargant, Author of 
 'The Science of Social Opulence.' 
 10s. 6<*. 
 
 Contributions to Practical Medi- 
 cine. By Sir James Sawyer, M.D., 
 Lond.j F.R.O.P., Senior Physician 
 to the Queen's Hospital, Birming- 
 ham. 6s. 6d. 
 
 Lectures on the Treatment of the 
 
 Common Diseases of the Skin. By 
 Robert M. Simon, M.D., Cantab., 
 M.R.C.P., Lond., Senior Assistant 
 Physician to the General Hospital, 
 Birmingham. 3s. 
 
 Reminiscences of Manchester Fifty 
 Years Ago. By J. T. Slugg, 
 F.R.A.S. 4s. 
 
 The Mechanism of Nature. By 
 Alfred M. Stapley. Is. ; cloth, 
 Is. 6rf. 
 
 The Physical Signs of Pulmonary 
 
 Disease. By Graham Steell, M.D., 
 Lecturer on Clinical Medicine in 
 the Owens College, Victoria Uni- 
 versity. 3s. 6d. 
 
 The Physical Signs of Cardiac 
 
 Disease. By Graham Steell, M.D., 
 Lecturer on Clinical Medicine in 
 the Owens College, Victoria Uni- 
 versity. 2s. 6d. 
 
 Poems. By Henry Septimus Sutton. 
 6s. ; large paper, 15s. 
 
 Diseases of Women. By Lawson 
 Tait, F.R.C.8., LL.D., President 
 of the British Gynaecological 
 Society. 6s, 
 
 Tariff of Medical Fees issued by 
 
 the Manchester Medico-Ethical 
 Association. 3rd Edition. 6d. 
 
 Old Halls of Lancashire and 
 
 Cheshire, including Notes on the 
 Ancient Domestic Architecture of 
 the Counties Palatine. By' Henry 
 Taylor. Numerous Illustrations. 
 £2 10s, 
 
 The Owens College : its Foundation 
 
 and Growth, and its Counection 
 with the Victoria University, Man- 
 chester. By Joseph Thompson. 
 18s. ; large paper, £2 2s. 
 
 Vaccination: a condensed Sum- 
 mary of the Evidence in its favour, 
 and of the Objections urged against 
 it. By J. Thorburn, M.D. 6d. 
 
 University College of Wales Calen- 
 dar. (Aberystwyth.) Is. 6d. 
 
 University College of North Wales 
 
 Calendar. (Bangor.) Is. 6i. 
 
 Pen-and-ink Drawings for Young 
 
 Folks. By William Walker. Cloth, 
 2s. 6d. ; paper, Is. 6d. 
 
 Histological Notes for the Use of 
 
 Medical Students. By W. Hors- 
 craft Waters, M.A., late Lecturer 
 in the Owens College, Victoria 
 University. 2s. 6d. 
 
 Excision of the Tongue. By Walter 
 Whitehead, F.R.C.S.E., F.R.S., 
 Edin., Lecturer on Clinical Surgery 
 in the Owens College, Victoria Uni- 
 versity. Is. 
 
 The Study of Greek Literature. 
 By A. 8. Wilkins, M.A., LL.D., 
 Professor of Latin in the Owens 
 College, Victoria University. 6c?. 
 
 Arithmetical Chemistry ; or. Arith- 
 metical Exercises for Chemical ' 
 Students. By C. J. Woodward, 
 B.Sc. Parti. Is. Part II. 2s. 
 
 Questions in Chemistry and 
 Natural Philosophy, given at the 
 Matriculation Examination of the 
 University of London, from 1864 
 to 1882, by C. J. Woodward, B.Sc. 
 New Edition, with Answers. 2s. 
 
 Arithmetical Physics, Acoustics, 
 
 Light, and Heat. By C. J. Wood- 
 ward, B.Sc. Part la, Elementary 
 Stage, 2s. Part Ha, Is. Part lift, 
 3s. 
 
 Arithmetical Physics, Magnetism, 
 and Electricity. By C. J, Wood- 
 ward, B.Sc. Part IIci, Elementary 
 Stage, Is. Part 116, 3s. 
 
 ABO Five Figure Logarithms ; or, 
 
 Logarithms with Differences, on a 
 new and simple plan, together with 
 Analytical Factors, Gas, Reduction 
 Tables, etc. By C. J. Woodward, 
 B.Sc. 2s. U. 
 
»