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 PRINTED IN U S.A. 
 
 ,„ onwersltv ^^'^ 
 
 1924 
 
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/cu31924026943666 
 
LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 BY 
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 NEW YORK 
 HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE 
 
 I020 
 
 ^,011 KM I U 
 
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 4 
 
 'O 
 
 V 
 
 ^S'olaZZy 
 
 COPYRIGHT, tgoo, 190s, 1907, BY 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY 
 HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE, IMC. 
 
 1)1 u n 
 ■ VillV 
 
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CONTENTS 
 
 Crabbe, 3 
 
 Landor, 17 
 
 On the Promise of Keats, 35 
 
 Byron's Centenary, 49 
 
 On Browning's Death, 59 
 
 Matthew Arnold, 73 
 
 Coleridge, 91 
 
 Shelley's Work, 107 
 
 Cervantes, 129 
 
 Scott, 157 
 
 Milton, 183 
 
 Virgil, 209 
 
 Montaigne, 237 
 
 Shakespeare, 263 
 
 Swinburne, 289 
 
The author makes grateful acknowledgment to Messrs. 
 Harper &• Brothers for their permission to use the text 
 of the authorized American edition of Mr. Swinburne's 
 poems published by them. 
 
LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
CRABBE 
 
 We have done with Crabbe. His tales have failed to 
 interest us. Burke and his friends, as we all know, held 
 a different opinion from ours; and their praise_is not 
 likely to have been ill founded. The cultivated taste of 
 Holland House, thirty years later, is also against our de- 
 cision. Through two generations of markedly different 
 literary temper Crabbe pleased the men best worth 
 pleasing. Indeed, we owe him to Burke's approval; for 
 when Lord North, Lord Shelburne, and Lord Thurlow had 
 neglected his entreaties for recognition and aid, and had 
 left him to write, pawn, and go hungry, Burke saved him 
 from the debtor's prison, took him into his friendship, 
 welcomed him to his home, and gave him to literature. 
 
 Yet the verses which won this recognition from Burke, 
 and gained for Grabbe, besides, praise from Johnson and 
 talk with Fox and idle mornings in Reynolds's studio, 
 were only his fledgeling flights. It was not until after 
 more than twenty years of silence, spent in the obscurity 
 of a country clergyman's life, that he showed the richness 
 and abundance of his vein. Then Burke and his friends 
 had given place to those younger men, in whose lives a 
 new age was dawning; but as warm a welcome awaited 
 Crabbe among them as he had ever met with in Burke's 
 club. With them he passed his old age, pleased with 
 Byron's praise, and with the friendliness of Moore and 
 Rogers, and with Scott's kindly regard and correspon- 
 dence. They liked to see him, with his beautiful white 
 
 3 
 
4 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 hair, his formal, old-fashioned garb and old-school 
 manners, the last of that long line of poets through whom 
 the Queen Anne taste had tyrannized for a century in 
 English verse, sitting familiarly among themselves, who 
 were preparing the way for the next generation to ignore 
 the traditions which Burke and Johnson had fixed in his 
 poetic faith. Especially did Sir Walter honor him; like 
 Fox, he chose Crabbe's poems to be read to him just be- 
 fore he died. 
 
 Without reckoning the approval of others, what was 
 the strong attraction in Crabbe's work for Scott and Fox? 
 Their judgment was not so worthless that it can be disre- 
 garded with the complacent assurance with which the 
 decisions of Gifford and Jeffrey are set aside; on the con- 
 trary, Scott had such health and Fox such refinement that 
 their judgment ought to raise a doubt whether our gen- 
 eration is not making a mistake and missing pleasure 
 through its neglect of Crabbe. 
 
 Crabbe is a story-teller. He describes the life he saw, 
 — common, homely life, sometimes wretched, not infre- 
 quently criminal; the life of the country poor, with oc- 
 casional light and shadow from the life of the gentlefolk 
 above them. He had been born into it, in a village on the 
 Suffolk coast, amid stern and cheerless natural scenes: 
 landward, the bramble-overgrown heath encompassing 
 crowded and mean houses; eastward, — 
 
 "Stakes and sea-weed withering on the mud." 
 
 Here he had passed his boyhood, in the midst of 
 human life equally barren and stricken with the ugliness 
 of poverty, among surly and sordid fishers given to hard 
 labor and rough brawl, — 
 
 "A joyless, wild, amphibious race, 
 With sullen woe displayed in every face," — 
 
CRABBE 5 
 
 and the sight had been a burden to him. The desire to 
 throw off this twofold oppression of mean nature and hu- 
 manity must have counted for much in determining him 
 on that long-remembered December day, when, as the 
 bleak twilight came down, darkening the marshy pool 
 on the heath where he stood, he took his resolve to go up 
 to London and seek poetical fame; and glad at heart he 
 must have been, that morning of early spring, when he 
 left all this ugliness behind him, ignorant of the struggle 
 and distress he was to meet where he was going. 
 
 In that early poem which Johnson praised Crabbe de- 
 scribed this village life with the vigor of a youth who had 
 escaped out of its dreary imprisonment, and without a 
 touch of that tenderness for early associations which 
 softened Goldsmith's retrospect of the scenes of his early 
 days. Crabbe told of exhausting labor leading on to 
 prematurely useless and neglected age; of storms sweep- 
 ing away the shelter of the poor; of smugglers, poachers, 
 wreckers, tavern debauchery, and, worst of all, the poor- 
 house — a terrible picture, perhaps the best known of all 
 his drawing — with its deserted inmates cut off from all 
 human care except that of the heedless physician and the 
 heartless parson; a miserable tale, but too much of it only 
 what his own eyes had seen. We do not know the con- 
 tents of those piles of manuscripts which he wrote during 
 his twenty years of silence, and — not much to the world's 
 loss, some think — made bonfires of to amuse his 
 children; but his first poem after that long interval was 
 the same story, the experience of those whose names ap- 
 peared in the year's parish register of births, marriages, 
 and deaths, and was a sorrowful survey of seduction, 
 desertion, crime, discontent, and folly. In his later tales 
 he dealt less in unrelieved gloom and bitter misery, and 
 
6 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 at times made a trial at humor. There are glimpses of 
 pleasant English life and character, but these are only 
 glimpses; the ground of his painting is shadow — the 
 shadow that rested on the life of the English poor in his 
 generation. 
 
 Where else would one turn for an adequate description 
 of that life, or gain so direct an insight into the social 
 sources and conditions of the Methodist revival, or into 
 the motives and convictions of reformers like Mary WoU- 
 stonecraft? Where would one obtain so keen a sense of 
 the vast change which has taken place in the conditions of 
 humble human life within this century? Mr. Leslie 
 Stephen, in that essay which is so good-humored but so 
 unsuccessful an attempt to appreciate Crabbe, mentions 
 the few illustrations in modern literature of the life 
 Crabbe described; it is seen in Charlotte Bronte's York- 
 shiremen, and George Eliot's millers, and in a few other 
 characters, "but," he says, "to get a realistic picture of 
 country life as Crabbe saw it, we must go back to Squire 
 Western, or to some of the roughly-hewn masses of flesh 
 who sat to Hogarth." The setting of Crabbe's tales has 
 this special historic interest. The schools, houses, books, 
 habits, occupations, and all the external characteristics of 
 the tales belong to the time: the press-gang comes to 
 carry off the lover just before his wedding-day, and leaves 
 the bride to nurse an unfathered child, to receive the 
 courtship of a canting and carnal preacher, and to find 
 a refuge from him, and from the father who favors him, 
 in suicide; orphan boys are bound over to brutal task- 
 masters; pictures of the sects (from the pen of a re- 
 spectable clerg5mian of the Established Church, it is true) 
 recall the beginnings of Methodism with a vividness only 
 to be equaled by the books and pamphlets of the early 
 
CRABBE 7 
 
 converts' own writing. This historic value of the tales, 
 however, great as it is to the student of manners, is 
 secondary to their poetic value, which lies in the senti- 
 ment, feeling, and pathos with which the experience of 
 life embodied in them, the workings of simple human 
 nature, in however debased surroundings, is set forth. It 
 is an experience which results usually from the interplay 
 of low and selfish motives, and of ignoble or weak pas- 
 sions; it is, too often, the course of brutal appetite, 
 thoughtless or heartless folly, avarice, sensuality, and 
 vice, relieved too seldom by amiable character, sympathy, 
 charity, self-sacrifice, or even by the charm of natural 
 beauty. Yet if all the seventy tales be taken into account, 
 they contain nearly all varieties of character and circum- 
 stance among the country poor; and, though the darker 
 side may seem to be more frequently insisted upon, it is 
 because the nature of his subject made it necessary, be- 
 cause he let his light, as Moore said, — 
 
 "Through life's low, dark interior fall. 
 Opening the whole, severely bright," 
 
 rather than becatise he had any lack of cheerfulness of 
 temper. 
 
 Crabbe does not, in a true sense, give expression to the 
 life of the poor; he merely narrates it. Here and there, 
 throughout the poems, are episodes written out of his own 
 life; but usually he is concerned with the experience of 
 other men, which he had observed, rather than with what 
 his own heart had felt. A description of life is of course 
 far inferior to an utterance of it, such as was given to us 
 by Burns, who dealt with the life of the poor so much 
 more powerfully than Crabbe; and a realistic description 
 has less poetic value than an imaginative one, such as 
 
8 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 was given to us by Wordsworth at his best. Crabbe's 
 description is perhaps the most nakedly realistic of any 
 in English poetry; but it is an uncommonly good one. 
 Realism has a narrow compass, and Crabbe's powers 
 were confined strictly within it; but he had the best 
 virtues of a realist. His physical vision — his sight of 
 what presents itself to the eye — was almost perfect; he 
 saw every object, and saw it as it was. Perhaps the 
 minuteness with which he saw was not altogether an ad- 
 vantage, for he does not seem to have taken in the land- 
 scape as a whole, but only as a mosaic of separate objects. 
 He never gives general effects of beauty or grandeur; in- 
 deed, he seldom saw the beauty of a single object; he 
 did little more than catalogue the things before him, and 
 employ in writing poetry the same faculty in the same 
 way as in pursuing favorite studies of botany and en- 
 tomology. Yet, with these limitations, what realist in 
 painting could exceed in truthfulness and carefulness of 
 detail this picture of a fall morning? — 
 
 "It was a fair and mild autumnal sky. 
 And earth's ripe treasures met th' admiring eye; 
 The wet and heavy grass where feet had strayed, 
 Not yet erect, the wanderer's way betrayed; 
 Showers of the night had swelled the deep'ning rill, 
 The morning breeze had urged the quick'ning mill; 
 Long yellow leaves, from osiers strewed around. 
 Choked the small stream and hushed the feeble sound." 
 
 Or this sketch of light in a decayed warehouse turned into 
 a tenement for the poor? — 
 
 "That window view! oiled paper and old glass 
 Stain the strong rays, which, though impeded, pass, 
 And give a dusty warmth to that huge room, 
 The conquered sunshine's melancholy gloom; 
 
CRABBE 9 
 
 When all those western rays, without so bright, 
 Within become a ghastly glimmering light. 
 As pale and faint upon the floor they fall. 
 Or feebly gleam on the opposing wall." 
 
 Nor is this carefulness of detail a trick, such as is some- 
 times employed, to give the appearance of reality to un- 
 real human life. Crabbe's mental vision, his sight into the 
 workings of the passions and the feelings, although not so 
 perfect as his physical vision, was yet at its best very 
 keen and clear; the sentiments, moods, reflections, and 
 actions of his characters are seldom contrary to nature. 
 It would be difficult to show a finer delineation of its 
 kind than his description of the meeting of two long- 
 parted brothers. As Richard approaches his brother's 
 hall, he reflects, — 
 
 " 'How shall I now my imknown way explore, — 
 He proud and rich, I very proud and poor? 
 Perhaps my friend a dubious speech mistook. 
 And George may meet me with a stranger's look. 
 How stands the case? My brother's friend and mine 
 Met at an inn, and set them down to dine; 
 When, having settled all their own affairs. 
 And kindly canvassed such as were not theirs, 
 Just as my friend was going to retire, 
 "Stay! you will see the brother of our squire," 
 Said his companion; "be his friend, and tell 
 The captain that his brother loves him well, 
 And when he has no better thing in view 
 Will be rejoiced to see him. Now, adieu!" 
 
 " 'Well, here I am; and, brother, take you heed, 
 I am not come to flatter you and feed. 
 You shall no soother, fawner, hearer, find; 
 I will not brush your coat, nor smooth your mind; 
 I will not hear your tales the whole day long. 
 Nor swear you're right, if I believe you wrong; 
 
lo LITERARY ASSAYS 
 
 I win not earn my dinner when I dine 
 By taking all your sentiments for mine; 
 Nor watch the guiding motions of your eye 
 Before I venture question or reply. 
 Yet, son of that dear mother could I meet — 
 But lo! the mansion, — 'tis a fine old seat!' 
 
 "The brothers met, with both too much at heart 
 To be observant of each other's part. 
 'Brother, I'm glad!' was all that George could say. 
 Then stretched his hand, and turned his head away; 
 Richard, meantime, made some attempt to speak, 
 Strong in his purpose, in his trial weak. 
 At length, affection, like a risen tide. 
 Stood still, and then seemed slowly to subside; 
 Each on the other's looks had power to dwell. 
 And brother brother greeted passing well" 
 
 These qualities of fine, true physical and mental vision 
 are the essential qualities for valuable realistic work; if 
 there be room for regret in Crabbe's share of them, it is 
 because their range is contracted. The limitations of his 
 physical vision have been mentioned; in respect to his 
 mental vision Crabbe saw only a few and comparatively 
 simple operations of human nature, — the workings of 
 country-bred minds, not finely or complexly organized, 
 but slow-motioned, and perplexed, if perplexed at all, not 
 from the difficulty of the problem, but from their own 
 dullness. Yet within these limits his characters are often 
 pathetic, sometimes tragic, or even terrible, in their en- 
 ergy of evil passion or remorse. 
 
 One other quality, without which clear mental and 
 physical vision would be ineffective, is essential to realism 
 like Crabbe's, — transparency, the quality by virtue of 
 which life is seen through the text plainly and without 
 distortion; and this is the quality which Crabbe possessed 
 
CRABBE II 
 
 in most perfection. He not only saw the object as it 
 was; he presented it as it was. He neither added nor 
 took away; he did not unconsciously darken or heighten 
 color, soften or harden line. Whatever was before his 
 mind — the conversation of a gossip, the brutality of a 
 ruffian, the cant of a convert — he reproduced truthfully; 
 whatever was the character of his story, mean or tragic, 
 trivial or pathetic, he did not modify it. There was no 
 veil of fancy, no glamour of amiable deception or dim- 
 ness of charitable tears, to obscure his view: if he found 
 nudity and dirt, they reappeared in his work nudity and 
 dirt still; if he found courage and patience, he dealt the 
 same even-handed justice. His distinction is that he told 
 a true story. 
 
 It was, perhaps, because he was thus able to present 
 accurately and faithfully the human life which he saw so 
 clearly that he won such admiration from Scott; for 
 Scott had the welcome of genius for any new glimpse of 
 humanity, and he knew how rare, and consequently how 
 valuable, is the gift of simple and direct narration of 
 what one sees. Fox had great sensibility and tenderness 
 of heart; and Crabbe presented the lot of the poor so 
 vividly, so lucidly, so immediately, that he stirred in Fox 
 the same feelings with which a better poet would have so 
 charged his verses that natures not so finely endowed as 
 Fox would have been compelled to feel them too. Scott 
 and Fox knew what a valuable acquisition this realistic 
 sketch of humble life in their generation was, so faithful, 
 minute, and trustworthy; they felt that their experience 
 was enlarged, that real humanity had been brought home 
 to them, and in the sway of those emotions, which Crabbe 
 did not infuse into his work, but which his work quickens 
 in sympathetic hearts, they could forgive him his tedious- 
 
12 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 ness, his frequent commonplace, his not unusual absurd- 
 ity of phrase, his low level of flight with its occasional 
 feebleness of wing. 
 
 In their minds, too, his style must have had more in- 
 fluence than we are apt to think, — the style of the great 
 school which died with him, the form and versification 
 which they had been taught to believe almost essential to 
 the best poetry, and from a traditional respect for which 
 they could hardly free their minds as easily as ourselves. 
 Crabbe used the old heroic rhymed couplet, that simplest 
 form of English verse music, which could rise, neverthe- 
 less, to the almost lyric loftiness of the last lines of the 
 Dunciad; so supple and flexible; made for easy simile 
 and compact metaphor; lending itself so perfectly to the 
 sudden flash of wit or turn of humor; the natural shell of 
 an epigram; compelling the poet to practice all the 
 virtues of brevity; checking the wandering fancy, and 
 repressing the secondary thought; requiring in a masterly 
 use of it the employment of more mental powers than 
 any other metrical form; despised and neglected now 
 because the literature which is embodied in it is despised 
 and neglected, yet the best metrical form which intelli- 
 gence, as distinct from poetical feeling, can employ. 
 Crabbe did not handle it in any masterful way; he was 
 careless, and sometimes slipshod; but when he chose he 
 could employ it well, and should have credit for it. To 
 take one more example from his poems, how excellently 
 he uses it in this passage! — 
 
 "Where is that virtue which the generous boy 
 Felt, and resolved that nothing should destroy; 
 He who with noble indignation glowed 
 When vice had triumph; who his tear bestowed 
 On injured merit? He who would possess 
 Powerj but to aid the children of distress 1 
 
CRABBE 13 
 
 Who has such joy in generous actions shown, 
 And so sincere they might be called his own; 
 Knight, hero, patriot, martyr! on whose tongue 
 And potent arm a nation's welfare hung, — 
 Where now this virtue's fervor, spirit, zeal? 
 Who felt so warmly, has he ceased to feel? 
 Or are these feelings varied? Has the knight, 
 Virtue's own champion, now refused to fight? 
 Is the deliverer turned th' oppressor now? 
 Has the reformer dropt the dangerous vow? 
 Or has the patriot's bosom lost its heat. 
 And forced him, shivering, to a snug retreat? 
 Is such the grievous lapse of human pride! 
 Is such the victory of the worth untried!" 
 
 Scott felt an attraction in such poetic form which we 
 have perhaps ceased to feel; and Fox, had he lived to read 
 it, would equally have acknowledged its power. 
 
 But Wordsworth said Crabbe was unpoetical; he con- 
 demned him for "his unpoetical mode of considering 
 agreed with Wordsworth, and disagreed with Scott and 
 human nature and society;" and, after all, the world has 
 Fox. Wordsworth told Scott an anecdote in illustration 
 of his meaning. Sir George Beaumont, sitting with him- 
 self and Crabbe one day, blew out the candle which he 
 had used in sealing a letter. Sir George and Wordsworth, 
 with proper taste, sat watching the smoke rise from the 
 wick in beautiful curves; but Crabbe seeing — or rather 
 smelling — the object, and not seeing the beauty of it, 
 put on the extinguisher. Therefore, said Wordsworth, 
 Crabbe is unpoetical, — as fine a bit of aesthetic priggish- 
 ness as is often met with. Scott's opinion was not much 
 affected by the anecdote, and Wordsworth was on the 
 wrong track. It is true, however, that Crabbe was un- 
 poetical in Wordsworth's sense. Crabbe had no imagina- 
 tive vision, — no such vision as is shown in that stormy 
 
14 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 landscape of Shelley's, in the opening of "The Revolt of 
 Islam," which lacks the truth of actuality, but possesses 
 the higher imaginative truth, like Turner's painting, or 
 that shown in that other storm in "Pippa Passes." 
 Crabbe saw sword-grass and saltwort and fen, but he had 
 no secret of the imagination by which he could mingle 
 them into harmonius beauty; there is loveliness in a salt 
 marsh, but Crabbe could not present it, nor even see it 
 for himself. As in landscape so in life. Goldsmith was 
 untrue to the actual Auburn, but he was faithftil to a far 
 more precious truth, the truth of remembered childhood, 
 and he revealed with the utmost beauty the effect of the 
 subtlest working of the spirit of man on practical fact; it 
 is his fidelity to this psychological and spiritual truth 
 which makes Auburn the "loveliest village of the plain." 
 Crabbe exhibited nothing of this imaginative transforma- 
 tion of the familiar and the commonplace, perhaps saw 
 nothing of it; he described the fishing village of Aid- 
 borough as any one with good powers of perception, who 
 took the trouble, might see it. Through these defects of 
 his powers he loses in poetic value; his poetry is, as he 
 called it, poetry without an atmosphere; it is a reflection, 
 almost mirror-like, of plain fact. 
 
 Men go to poetry too often with a preconceived notion 
 of what the poet ought to give, instead of with open minds 
 for whatever he has to give. Too much is not to be 
 expected from Crabbe. He was only a simple country 
 clergyman, half educated, with no burning ideals, no 
 reveries, no passionate dreams; his mind did not rise out 
 of the capabilities and virtues of respectability. His life 
 was as little poetical, in Wordsworth's sense, as his poetry. 
 Yet his gift was not an empty one. Moore, Scott, and 
 Byron were story-tellers who were poetical, in Words- 
 
CRABBE IS 
 
 worth's sense; but is Crabbe's true description of humble 
 life less valuable than Scott's romantic tradition, or 
 Moore's melting, sensuous Oriental dream, or Byron's 
 sentimental, falsely-heroic adventure? Has it not an- 
 other value, because there is more of the human heart in 
 it; because it contains actual suffering and joy of fellow- 
 men; because it is humanity, and calls for hospitality in 
 our S5mipathies and charities? Unpoetical? Yes; but it 
 is something to have real life brought home to our tears 
 and laughter, although it be presented barely, and the 
 poet has trusted to the rightness and tenderness of our 
 hearts for those feelings the absence of which in his verse 
 led Wordsworth to call these tales unpoetical. But it is 
 only when Crabbe is at his best that his verse has this 
 extraordinary power. 
 
LANDOR 
 
 Many of the most sensitive and discriminating critics 
 of this century have, in the suffrage for fame, listed them- 
 selves for Landor. He seemed almost to achieve im- 
 mortality within his lifetime, so continuously was the 
 subtle appreciation of the best yielded to him, from the 
 far-off years when Shelley used, at Oxford, to declaim 
 with enthusiasm passages from "Gebir," to the time, that 
 seems as yesterday, when Swinburne made his pilgrimage 
 to Italy, to offer his tribute of adoration to the old man at 
 the close of his solitary and troubled career; and still each 
 finer spirit, 
 
 "As he passes, turns. 
 And bids fair peace be to his sable shroud." 
 
 During his long life he saw the springtime, and outlived 
 the harvest, of the great poetic revival, and the labor of 
 the Victorian poets of the aftermath was half accom- 
 plished before his death; but from all these powerful 
 contemporary influences he was free. He remained 
 apart; and this single fact, attesting, as it does, extraor-i 
 dinary self-possession and assurance of purpose, suf- 
 fices to make his character interesting, even were his work 
 of inferior worth. As yet, however, even to the minds of 
 cultivated men, he is hardly more than a great figure. 
 He is known, praised, and remembered for particular 
 scenes, dramatic fragments, occasional lyrics, quatrains. 
 This is the natural fate of k discursive writer. It matters 
 not that Landor was wide ranging; it matters not what 
 
 17 
 
i8 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 spoils of thought, what images of beauty, he brought from 
 those far eastern uplands which it was his boast to haunt: 
 he failed to give unity to his work, to give interest to 
 large portions of it, to command public attention for it as 
 a whole. Indeed, his work as a whole does not command 
 the attention even of the best. What does survive, too, 
 lives only in the favor of a small circle. He forfeited 
 popular fame at the beginning, when he selected themes 
 that presuppose rare qualities in his audience, and 
 adopted an antique style; but such considerations, at least 
 in their naked statement, do not tell the whole story. 
 Other poets have missed immediate applause by dealing 
 with subjects that assumed unusual largeness of soul, 
 range of sympathy, and refinement of taste in their 
 readers: like Shelley, singing of unheeded hopes and fears 
 to which the world was to be wrought; like Wordsworth, 
 narrating the myth of Troy. Other poets, in style, have 
 set forth the object plainly, and left it to work its will on 
 the heart and imagination, unaided by the romantic spell, 
 the awakening glow, the silent but imperative suggestion, 
 the overmastering passion that takes heart and imagina- 
 tion captive; and they have not lost their reward. A re- 
 mote theme, an impersonal style, are not of themselves 
 able to condemn a poet to long neglect. They may make 
 wide appreciation of him impossible; they may explain 
 the indifference of an imperfectly educated public; but 
 they do not account for the fact that Landor is to be read, 
 even by his admirers, in a book of selections, while the 
 dust is shaken from the eight stout octavos that contain 
 his works only by the professional man of letters. 
 
 What first strikes the student of Landor is the lack of 
 any development in his genius. This is one reason why 
 Mr, Leslie Stephen, seizing on the characteristic some- 
 
LANDOR 19 
 
 what rudely, and leaping to an ungracious conclusion, 
 calls him "a glorified and sublime edition of the sixth- 
 form schoolboy." Men whose genius is of this fixed type 
 are rare in English literature, and not of the highest rank. 
 They exhibit no radical change; they are at the beginning 
 what they are at the end; their works do not belong to 
 any particular period of their lives; they seem free from 
 their age, and to live outside of it. Hence, in dealing with 
 them, historical criticism — the criticism whose purpose 
 is to explain rather than to judge — soon finds itself at 
 fault. When the circumstances that determined the 
 original bent of their minds have been set forth, there is 
 nothing more to be said. With Landor, this bent seems to 
 have been given by his classical training. To write Latin 
 verses was the earliest serious employment of his genius, 
 and his efforts were immediately crowned with success. 
 These studies, falling in with natural inclinations and 
 aptitudes, pledged him to a classical manner; they made 
 real for him the myths and history of Greece and Rome; 
 they fed his devotion to the ancient virtues, — love of 
 freedom, aspiration for the calm of wisdom, reverence for 
 the dignity of heroism, delight in beauty for its own sake; 
 they supported him in what was more distinctively his 
 own, — his refinement in material tastes, his burning in- 
 dignation, his defense of tyrannicide. These character- 
 istics he had in youth; they were neither diminished nor 
 increased in age. In youth, too, he displayed all his lit- 
 erary excellences and defects: the fullness and weight of 
 line; the march of sentences; the obscurity arising from 
 over-condensation of thought and abrupt and elliptical 
 constructions; his command of the grand and impressive 
 as well as the beautiful and charming in imagery; his 
 fondness for heroic situation and for the loveliness of 
 
20 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 minute objects. This was a high endowment; why, then, 
 do its literary results seem inadequate? 
 
 With all his gifts, Landor did not possess unifying 
 power. He observed objects as they passed before him 
 at hap-hazard, took them into his mind, and gave them 
 back, untransformed, in their original disorder. He 
 thought disconnectedly, and expressed his thoughts as 
 they came, detached and separate. This lack of unity did 
 not result simply from his choice of the classical mode of 
 treatment, or from a defect in logical or constructive 
 power, although it was connected with these. The ability 
 to fuse experience, to combine its elements and make 
 them one, to give it back to the world, transformed, and 
 yet essentially true, the real creative faculty, is propor- 
 tioned very strictly to the self-assertive power of genius, 
 to the energy of the reaction of the mind on nature and 
 life; it springs from a strong personality. To say that 
 Landor's personality was weak would be to stultify one's 
 self; but yet the difference between Landor the man and 
 Landor the author is so great as to make the two almost 
 antithetical; and in his imaginative work, by which he 
 must be judged, it is not too much to say that he denied 
 and forswore his personality, and obliterated himself so 
 far as was possible. He not only eliminated self from his 
 style, and, after the classical manner, defined by Arnold, 
 "relied solely on the weight and force of that which, with 
 entire fidelity, he uttered," but he also eliminated self, so 
 far as one can, from his subject. He did not bind his 
 work together by the laws of his own mind; he did not 
 interpenetrate and permeate it with his own beliefs, as 
 the great masters have always done. His principles were 
 at the best vague, hardly amounting to more than an 
 unapplied enthusiasm for liberty, heroism, and the other 
 
LANDOR 21 
 
 great watchwords of social rather than individual life.^. 
 These illuminate his work, but they do not give it consis- \ 
 tency. It is crystalline in structure, beautiful, ordered, 
 perfect in form when taken part by part, but conglomerate | 
 as a whole; it is a handful of jewels, many of which are f 
 singly of the most transparent and glowing light, but un- 
 related one to another, — placed in juxtaposition, but not 
 set; and in the crystalline mass is imbedded grosser 
 matter, and mingled with the jewels are stones of dull 
 color and light weight. A lovely object caught his eye, 
 and he set it forth in verse; a fine thought came to him, 
 and he inserted it in his dialogues; but his days were not 
 "bound each to each by natural piety," or by any other 
 of the shaping principles of high genius. He was a| 
 spectator of life, not an actor in life. Nature was to him - 
 a panorama, wonderful, awful, beautiful, and he described 
 its scenes down to its most minute and evanescent details. 
 History was his theatre, where the personages played 
 great parts; and he recorded their words and gestures, 
 always helping them with the device of the high buskin 
 and something of a histrionic air. He was content to be 
 thus guided from without; to have his intellectual activity 
 determined by the chance of sensation and of reading, 
 rather than by a well-thought-out and enthusiastic pur- 
 pose of his own soul. And so he became hardly more 
 than a mirror of beauty and an iEolian harp of thought; 
 if the vision came, if the wind breathed, he responded. 
 
 This self-effacement, this impersonality, as it is called, 
 in literature, is much praised. It is said to be classical, 
 and there is an impression in some minds that such an 
 abdication of the individual's prerogatives is the dis- | 
 tinctive mark of classicism. There is no more misleading | 
 and confusiing error in criticism. Not impersonality, but [ 
 
22 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 \ universality, is that mark; and this is by no means the 
 same thing, differently stated. In any age, the first, 
 although not the sole, characteristic of classical work is 
 that it deals with universal truth, of interest to all men: 
 and hence the poet is required to keep to himself his 
 idiosyncrasies, hobbies, all that is simply his own; all 
 that is not identical with the common human nature; all 
 that men in large bodies cannot sympathize with, under- 
 stand, and appreciate. Under these conditions direct 
 self-revelation is exceptional. The poet usually expresses 
 himself by so arranging his plot and developing his 
 characters that they will illustrate the laws of life, as he 
 sees these laws, without any direct statement, — though 
 the Greek chorus is full of didactic sa3dngs; and he may 
 also express himself by such a powerful presentation of 
 the morality intrinsic in beautiful things and noble ac- 
 tions as "to soothe the cares and lift the thoughts of men," 
 without any dogmatic insistence in his own person. In 
 these ways jEschylus obliterated himself from his work 
 just as much as Shakespeare, and no more; Swift just as 
 much as Aristophanes, and no more; but the statement 
 that Shakespeare or Swift obliterated themselves from 
 their works needs only to be made to be laughed at. The 
 faith of /Eschylus, the wisdom of Sophocles, are in all 
 their dramas; Anacreon is in all his songs, Horace in all 
 his odes. The lasting significance of their productions to 
 mankind is derived from the clearness, the power, the 
 skill, with which they informed their works with their 
 personality. These men had a philosophy of life, that 
 underlay and unified their work. They rebuilt the world 
 in their imagination, and gave it the laws of their own 
 minds. Their spirits were active, molding, shaping, 
 creating, subduing the whole of nature and life to them- 
 
LANDOR 23 
 
 selves. It is true that the ancients accomplished their 
 purpose rather by thought, the moderns rather by emo- 
 tion; but this difference is incidental to the change in 
 civilization. Either instrument is sufficient for its end; 
 but he who would now choose the ancient instead of the 
 modern mode, narrows, postpones, and abbreviates his 
 fame only less than Landor, in his youth, by writing in 
 Latin. Whatever be the mode of its operation, the en- 
 ergy of personality is the very essence of effective genius. 
 That Landor had no philosophy of life, in the same 
 sense as Shakespeare or ^schylus, is plain to any reader. 
 Those who look on art, including poetry, as removed from 
 ordinary human life, who think that its chief service to 
 men lies in affording delight rather than in that quicken- 
 ing of the spirit of which delight is only the sign and 
 efflorescence, would consider Landor's lack of this phil- 
 osophy a virtue. It accounts largely for his failxjre to 
 interest even the best in the larger part of his work, and 
 especially for the discontinuity of his reflections. These 
 reflections are always his own; and this fact may seem to 
 make against the view that he eliminated self from his 
 productions so far as possible. But the presence of 
 personality in literature as a force, ordering a great whole 
 and giving it laws, is a very different thing from its 
 presence as a mere mouthpiece of opinion. The thoughts 
 may be numerous, varied, wise, noble; they may have all 
 the virtues of truth and grace; but if they are disparate 
 and scattered, if they tend nowhither, if they leave the 
 reader where they found him, if they subserve no ulterior 
 purpose and accomplish no end, there is a wide gulf be- 
 tween them and the thoughts of Shakespeare and 
 ^schylus, no less their own than were Landor's his. In 
 the former, personality is a power; in the latter, it is 
 
24 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 only a voice. In Landor's eight volumes there are more 
 fine thoughts, more wise apothegms, than in any other 
 discursive author's works in English literature; but they 
 do not tell on the mind. They bloom like flowers in their 
 gardens, but they crown no achievement. At the end, no 
 cause is advanced, no goal is won. This incoherence and 
 inefficiency proceed from the absence of any definite 
 scheme of life, any compacted system of thought, any 
 central principles, any strong, pervading, and ordering 
 personality. 
 
 In the same way the objectivity of Landor's work, its 
 naturalism as distinguished from imaginativeness, results 
 from the same cause, but with the difference that, while 
 the faults already mentioned are largely due to an im- 
 perfect equipment of the mind, his mode of art seems to 
 have been adopted by conscious choice and of set pur- 
 pose. The opinion of those who look on naturalism as a 
 virtue in art is deserving of respect. We have been ad- 
 monished for a long while that men should see things as 
 they are, and present them as they are, and that this was 
 the Greek way. The dictum, when applied with the 
 meaning that men should be free from prejudice and im- 
 partial in judgment, no one would contest; but when it is 
 proclaimed with the meaning that poets should express 
 ideas nakedly, and should reproduce objects by por- 
 traiture, there is excuse for raising some question. No 
 doubt, this was in general the practice of the ancients. 
 The Athenians were primarily intellectual, the Romans 
 unimaginative. But by the operation of various causes — 
 the chief of which are the importance bestowed on the 
 individual and the impulse given to emotion by the Chris- 
 tian religion — mankind has changed somewhat; and 
 therefore the methods of appeal to men, the ways of 
 
LANDOR 25 
 
 touching Jjieir hearts and enlightening their minds, have 
 been modified. In literature this change is expressed by 
 sasdng that the romantic manner has, in general, super- 
 seded the classical. The romantic manner aims at truth 
 no less than the classical; it sets forth things as they are 
 no less completely and clearly. The difference is rather 
 one of methods than of aims. The classical poet usually 
 perceives the object by his intellect, and makes his appeal 
 to the mind; the romantic poet seizes on the object with 
 his imagination, and makes his appeal to the heart. Not / 
 that classical work is without imagination, or romantic 
 work devoid of intellectuality; but that in one the intel- 
 lect counts for more, in the other imagination. The 
 classical poet, having once presented ideas and objects, 
 leaves them to make their way; the romantic poet not 
 only presents them, but, by awakening the feelings, pre- 
 disposes the mood of the mind, makes their reception by 
 the mind easier, wins their way for them. In classical 
 work, consequently, success depends mainly on lucidity 
 of understanding, clearness of vision, skill in verbal ex- 
 pression; in romantic work, the poet must not only pos- 
 sess these qualities, but must superadd, as his prime | 
 characteristics, rightness, one might better say sanity, of \ 
 passion. The classical virtues are more common among 
 authors, the romantic far more rare; and hence error in 
 the romantic manner is more frequent, especially in deal- 
 ing with ideas. But with all its liability to mistake in 
 weak hands, romantic art, by its higher range, its fiercer 
 intensity, especially by its greater certainty, has, in the 
 hands of a master, a clear increase of power over classical 
 art, and under the changed conditions of civilization its 
 resources are not to be lightly neglected. Indeed, one 
 who volimtarily adopts the classical manner as an ex- 
 
26 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 elusive mode seems to choose an instrument of less com- 
 pass and melody, to prefer Greek to modern music. He 
 sings to a secluded and narrow circle, and loses the ear of 
 the world. Certainly Landor made this choice, and by it 
 he must stand. 
 
 Let us take an example from the best of Landor's work, 
 and from that region of classical art where it is wholly 
 competent, — the brief description of small objects: — 
 
 "The ever-sacred cup 
 Of the pure lily hath between my hands 
 Felt safe, unsoiled, nor lost one grain of gold." 
 
 How completely, how distinctly, the image is given, — 
 its form, its transparent purity, its fragile and trembling 
 gold! How free from any other than a strictly artistic 
 charm! And yet how different is its method of appeal 
 from Shelley's 
 
 "tender blue-bells, at whose birth 
 The sod scarce heaved;" 
 
 from Shakespeare's 
 
 "daffodils 
 That come before the swallow dares, and take 
 The winds of March with beauty." 
 
 Or, to select an illustration, also of Landor's best, when 
 the image, no less objective, yields of itself an infinite 
 suggestion: — 
 
 "Borgia, thou once wert almost too august 
 And high for adoration; now thou 'rt dust. 
 All that remains of thee these plaits imfold, 
 Calm hair meandering in pellucid gold." 
 
 Again, how perfect is the image, how effective the de- 
 velopment of the third line; how the melody of the last 
 
LANDOR 27 
 
 blends with its selected epithets to place the object entire 
 and whole before the mind; how free is the quatrain from 
 any self-intrusion of the poet! But here, too, the method 
 of appeal is very different from Shakespeare's, as in the 
 lines on Yorick's skull: "Here hung those lips that I have 
 kissed I know not how oft." The difference in mood be- 
 tween these two only emphasizes the difference in method. 
 Enough has been said, however, in description and ex- 
 emplification of the two kinds of art. Either is sufficient 
 for its ends, nor would any one desire to dispense with 
 that which has resulted in work so admirable as has been 
 quoted from Landor. The distinctively romantic poets 
 do not consign the classical style to disuse. In the pres- 
 entation of images, Keats has frequent recourse to it, as 
 in his picture of Autumn lying 
 
 "on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep, 
 Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook 
 Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers." 
 
 So Wordsworth, in expressing ideas, is sometimes more 
 bald than the least imaginative of the classics. But such 
 poets do not employ this style alone; they are character- 
 ized by the modern manner; they give us those "sweet 
 views" which in the ancient mode "can never well be 
 seen." Landor droops below his great contemporaries, 
 not by merely adopting the classical method, but by 
 adopting it exclusively. Whether this choice was en- 
 tirely free, or partly determined by natural incapacity, is 
 doubtful. Violent and tempestuous as his nature was, 
 with all his boyish intensity of indignation, his boyish 
 delicacy of tenderness, he seems to possess temper rather 
 than true passion. In the verses to his poetic love, 
 lanthe, there are many fine sentiments, graceful turns; 
 
28 ^ITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 there is courtliness of behavior; but the note of passion is 
 not struck. lanthe is only another poetic mistress of the 
 cavalier school, and in the memory her name is less, both 
 for dignity and pathos, than Rose Aylmer's. Without 
 passion, of course, a poet is condemned to the classical 
 style. Passion is the element in which the romantic 
 writer fuses beauty and wisdom; it is the means by which 
 personality pervades literary work with most ease, di- 
 rectness, and glow. In the great modern poets it is the 
 substance of their genius. But just as neither by a phil- 
 osophy of life nor in any other way did Landor fill his 
 subject with himself, so neither by passion nor by any 
 other quality did he breathe his own spirit into his style. 
 
 The consequence is that Landor, unclassified in his 
 own age, is now to be ranked among the poets, increasing 
 in number, who appeal rather to the artistic than to the 
 poetic sense. He is to be placed in that group which looks 
 on art as a world removed; which prizes it mainly for the 
 delight it gives; which, caring less for truth, deals chiefly 
 with the beauty that charms the senses; and which there- 
 fore weaves poetry like tapestry, and uses the web of 
 speech to bring out a succession of fine pictures. The 
 watchwords of any school, whether in thought or art, 
 seldom awake hostility until their bearing on the details 
 of practice reveals their meaning. Art is, in a sense, a 
 world removed from the actual and present life, and 
 beauty is the sole title that admits any work within its 
 limits. Of this there is no question. But that world, 
 however far from what is peculiar to any one age, has its 
 eternal foundations in universal life; and that beauty has 
 its enduring power because it is the incarnation of uni- 
 versal life. What poem has a better right to admission 
 there than "The Eve of St. Agnes"? and in what poem 
 
LANDOR 29 
 
 does the heart of life beat more warmly? "Laodamia" 
 belongs in that world, but it is because it voices abiding 
 hiunan feelings no less than because of its serenity. 
 Nature in itself is savage, sterile, and void; individual 
 life in itself is trifling: each obtains its value through its 
 interest to humanity as a whole, and the office of art is 
 to set forth that value. A lovely object, a noble action, 
 are each of worth to men, but the latter is of the more 
 worth; and, as was long ago pointed out, poetry is by the 
 limitations of language at a considerable disadvantage in 
 treating of formal beauty. But without developing these 
 remarks, of which there is no need, the only point here to 
 be made is that in so far as poetry concerns itself with 
 objects without relation to ideas, it loses influence; in so 
 far as it neglects emotion and thought for the purpose of 
 gaining sensuous effects it loses worth; in both it declines 
 from the higher to the lower levels. Landor, notwith- 
 standing his success in presenting objects of artistic 
 beauty — and his poetry is full of exquisite delineations 
 of them — failed to interest men; nor could his skill in 
 expressing thought, although he was far more intellectual 
 than his successors, save his reputation. Landor mistook 
 a few of the marks of art for all. His work has the >, 
 serenity, the remoteness, that characterize high art, but 
 it lacks an intimate relation with the general life of men; J 
 it sets forth formal beauty, as painting does, but that 
 beauty remains a sensation, and does not pass into 
 thou^t. This absence of any vital relation between his / 
 art and life, between his objects and ideas, denotes his I 
 failure. There are so many poets whose works contain as 
 perfect beauty, and in addition truth and passion; so 
 many who instead of mirroring beauty make it the voice 
 of life, — who instead of responding in melodious thought 
 
30 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 to the wandering winds of reverie strike their lyres in the 
 strophe and antistrophe of continuous song, — that the 
 world is content to let Landor go by. The guests at the 
 famous late dinner-party to which he looked forward will 
 indeed be very few, and they will be men of leisure. 
 
 Thus far, in examining the work of Landor as a whole, 
 and endeavoring to understand somewhat the public in- 
 difference to it, the answer has been found in its objec- 
 tivity and its discontinuity, both springing from the ef- 
 facement of his personality as an active power; or, in 
 other words, in the fact that, by failing to link his images 
 with his thoughts, and his thoughts one with another, so 
 as to make them tell on the mind, and especially by 
 eliminating the romantic element of passion, he failed to 
 bring his work into sympathetic or helpful relations with 
 the general emotional and intellectual life of men. 
 
 Why, then, do the most sensitive and discriminating 
 critics, as was said at the beginning, list themselves in 
 Landor 's favor? They are, without exception, fellow- 
 workers with him in the craft of literature. They have, 
 by their continued eulogy of him, made it a sign of re- 
 finement to be charmed by him, a proof of unusually 
 good taste to praise him. His admirers, by their very 
 divergence in opinion from the crowd, seem to claim 
 uncommon sensibilities; and the coterie is certainly one 
 of the highest order, intellectually: Browning, Lowell, 
 Swinburne, to name no more. They are all literary men. 
 They are loud in their plaudits of his workmanship, but 
 are noticeably guarded in their commendation of his 
 entire contents; the passages for which they express un- 
 stinted enthusiasm are few. Landor was, beyond doubt, 
 a master-workman, and skill in workmanship is dear to 
 the craft; others may feel its effects, but none appreciate 
 
LANDOR 31 
 
 it with the keen relish of the professional author. The 
 fullness, power, and harmony of Landor's language are 
 clearly evident in his earliest work. He had the gift of 
 literary expression from his youth, and in his mature 
 work it shows as careful and high cultivation as such a 
 gift ever received from its possessor. None could give 
 keener point and smoother polish to a short sentence; 
 none could thread the intricacies of long and involved 
 constructions more unerringly. He had at command all 
 the grammatical resources of lucidity, though he did not 
 always care to employ them. He knew all the devices of 
 prose composition to conceal and to disclose; to bring 
 the commonplace to issue in the unexpected; to lead up, 
 to soften, to,hesitate, to declaim; to extort all the supple- 
 mentary and new suggestions of an old comparison; to 
 frame a new and perfect simile; in short, he was thor- 
 oughly trained to his art. Yet his prose is not, by present 
 canons, perfect prose. It is not self-possessed, subdued, 
 and graceful conversation, modulated, making its points 
 without aggressive insistence, yet with certainty, keeping 
 interest alive by a brilliant but natural turn and by the 
 brief and luminous flash of truth through a perfect phrase. 
 His prose is rather the monologue of a seer. In reading 
 his works one feels somewhat as if sitting at the feet of , 
 Coleridge. Landor has the presence that abashes com- 
 panions. His manner of speech is more dignified, more 
 ceremonial, his enunciation is more resonant, his accent 
 more exquisite, than belong to the man of the world. He 
 silences his readers by the mere impossibility of interrupt- 
 ing with a question so noble and smooth-sliding a current 
 of words. The style is a sort of modern Miltonic; it has 
 the suggestion of the pulpit divine iji Hooker, the touch 
 of formal artificiality that characterizes the first good 
 
32 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 English prose. Landor goes far afield for his vocables; 
 his page is a trifle too polysyllabic, has too much of the 
 surface glitter of Latinity. But in the age that produced 
 the styles of De Quincey, Ruskin, and Carlyle, it would 
 be mere folly to find fault because Landor did not write, 
 we will not say after the French fashion, but after the 
 fashion of Swift, at his highest and on his level, the un- 
 rivaled master of simple English prose. Landor, at his 
 best, is not so picturesque as De Quincey, nor so eloquent 
 as Ruskin, nor so intense as Carlyle; but he has more 
 self-possession, more serenity, more artistic charm, a 
 wider compass, a more equal harmony, than any of these. 
 Landor pleases his fellow-craftsmen, however, not only 
 by this general command of language as a means of ex- 
 pression, but by the perfection of form in his short 
 pieces. Perfection of form is the great feature of classical 
 art; it is an intellectual virtue, at least in literature, and 
 appeals to the mind. The moderns are lacking in it. 
 Landor's command of form was limited, insufficient for 
 the construction of a drama; impressive as Count Julian 
 is, it has not this final excellence. Landor's power in this 
 respect is analogous to Herrick's; it is perfect only within 
 narrow bounds; but it lacks Herrick's spontaneity. His 
 verses are not the "swallow flights of song;" he was not a 
 singer. The lyric on "Rose Aylmer" is entirely excep- 
 tional, and much of its charm lies in the beauty of the 
 name, the skilful repetition, and, we must add, in the 
 memory of Lamb's fondness for it. Familiar as it is, it 
 would be unjust not to quote it: — 
 
 "Ah, what avails the sceptred race! 
 Ah, what the form divine! 
 What every virtue, every grace! 
 Rose Aylmer, all were thine. 
 
LANDOR 33 
 
 Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes 
 
 May weep, but never see, 
 A night of memories and of sighs 
 
 I consecrate to thee." 
 
 Ordinarily, however, Landor deals with a beautiful image 
 or one fine sentiment. His objectivity, his discontinuity, 
 help him here; they insure that simplicity and singleness 
 which are necessary for success. The lack of any tempta- 
 tion in his mind to expound and suggest is probably one 
 reason why he rejected the sonnet, certainly the most 
 beautiful poetic mold to give shape to such detached 
 thoughts and feelings. He scorned the sonnet; it was too 
 long for him; he must be even more brief. He would 
 present the object at once, instead of gradually, as the 
 sonnet does; not unveiling the perfect and naked image 
 until the last word has trembled away. His best work of 
 this kind is in the quatrain, which is rather the moralist's 
 than the poet's form, — Martial's, not Horace's. 
 
 « 
 
 "I strove with none, for none was worth my strife. 
 
 Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art; 
 I warmed both hands before the fire of life, 
 It sinks, and I am ready to depart." 
 
 This is perfect; but it is perfect speech, not perfect song. 
 When Landor had something to say at more lengtii, when 
 he had a story to tell, he chose the idyl; and his work in 
 this kind is no less perfect in form than are his quatrains. 
 Indeed, on the idyls his poetic fame will mainly rest. 
 They are very remote from modern life, but the best of 
 them are very beautiful, and in the highest rank of poetry 
 that appeals to the artistic sense. Those who are able still 
 to hold fast to the truth of Greek mythology to the imagi- 
 nation will not willingly let them die. To read them is 
 like looking at the youttis and maidens of an ancient bas- 
 
34 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 relief. The cultivated will never tire of them; the people 
 will never care for them. The limitations of their interest 
 are inherent in their subject and the mode of its presenta- 
 tion; but these limitations do not lessen their beauty, 
 although they make very small the number who appreci- 
 ate it. 
 
 Landor's influence over his critics is due chiefly to his 
 power as a stylist, and to the perfection of form in his 
 shorter poems and his idyls; but something is also due to 
 the passages which, apart from those mentioned, they 
 commend so unreservedly; such as the study of incipient 
 insanity in the dialogue between Tiberius and Vipsania, 
 and the scenes from "Antony and Octavius" where the boy 
 Csesarion is an actor. Not to be conquered by these 
 argues one's self "dull of soul; " and scattered through the 
 volumes are other passages of only less mastery, especially 
 in the Greek dialogues, which cannot here be particu- 
 larized. For this reason no author is more served than 
 Landor by a book of selections. After all, too, an author 
 should be judged by his best. Nevertheless, when one 
 remembers the extraordinary gifts of Landor, one cannot 
 but regret the defects of nature and judgment that have 
 so seriously interfered with his influence. His work as a 
 whole exhibits a sadder waste of genius than is the case 
 even with Coleridge. There is no reason to suppose that 
 the verdict of the public on his value will be reversed. 
 His failure may well serve as a warning to the artistic 
 school in poetry; it affords one more of the long list of 
 illustrations of that fundamental truth in literature, — 
 the truth that a man's work is of service to mankind in 
 proportion as, by expressing himself in it, by filling it 
 with his own personality, he fills it with human interest. 
 
ON THE PROMISE OF KEATS 
 
 In the domestic, chatty, and nonsense portions of the 
 letters of Keats, and their chaffing, their abandon, their 
 unregarded laughter (and admirable fooling they are, 
 too), there is a spontaneous and irresponsible gaiety, 
 which, being quite natural only to the young heart and 
 mind, charmingly discloses his youthfulness as a prime 
 quality. Of all the famous English poets, he had most of 
 the spirit of April in him. His senses were keen; his 
 temperament was feverish, now jealous and irritable, and 
 straightway humble and indulgent; his imaginary joys 
 and sorrows were spiritual possessions, subjecting him; 
 his humor was scampering, his fancy teeming, his taste 
 erratic, his critical faculty exposed to balking enthusi- 
 asms; his opinions of men and affairs were hasty, 
 circimiscribed, frequently adopted unreflectingly at 
 second-hand; and, with all these boyish traits, he was ex- 
 tremely self-absorbed. At the center of his individuality, 
 nevertheless, was the elemental spark, the saving power 
 of genius, the temperance, sanity, and self-reverence of 
 a fine nature gradually coming to the knowledge of its 
 faculties and unriddling the secret of its own moral 
 beauty. Hence Lord Houghton, doing more essential 
 justice to Keats than any of his louder eulogists, describes 
 his works as rather the exercises of his poetical education 
 than the charactery of his original and free power; and 
 Matthew Arnold, even when placing him with Shakes- 
 peare, excuses him as a 'prentice hand in the wisest art. 
 
 3S 
 
36 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 Too many of his admirers, seizing upon the external, 
 accidental, and temporal in his biography and the frag- 
 mentary and parasitical in his poetry, have really wronged 
 Keats more than did the now infamous reviews; they 
 have rescued him from among the cockneys only to con- 
 found him with the neo-pagans. In what did the promise 
 of Keats lie? The first step in the inquiry is the recogni- 
 tion of his immaturity, — the acknowledgment that his 
 memorials must be searched for the germ rather than the 
 fruit. 
 
 Sensuous Keats was, as every poet whose inspiration is 
 direct from Heaven must be; unfortunately, the extraor- 
 dinary beauty and facility of his descriptions of sensation, 
 and his taste for climax and point in his prose have made 
 it easy to quote phrases which seem to show that he was 
 unduly attached to delights of mere sense. To pass by 
 the anecdotes of Haydon, not too scrupulous a truth- 
 teller, here is a characteristic paragraph written to his 
 brother George: — 
 
 "This morning I am in a sort of temper, indolent, and 
 supremely careless; I long after a stanza or two of 
 Thomson's 'Castle of Indolence'; my passions ar« all 
 asleep, from my having slumbered till nearly eleven, and 
 weakened the animal fiber all over me to a delightful sen- 
 sation about three degrees this side of faintness. If I 
 had teeth of pearl and the breath of lilies, I should call it 
 languor; but as I am I must call it laziness. In this 
 state of effeminacy, the fibers of the brain are relaxed in 
 common with the rest of the body, and to such a happy 
 degree that [Sleasure has no show of enticement and pain 
 no unbearable frown; neither poetry, nor ambition, nor 
 love have any alertness of countenance; as they pass by 
 me, they seem rather like three figures in a Greek vase, 
 
ON THE PROMISE OF KEATS 371 
 
 i 
 two men and a woman, whom no one but myself could 
 
 distinguish in their disguisement. This is the only happi- 
 ness, and is a rare instance of advantage in the body over- 
 powering the mind." 
 
 With similar zest he enumerates the pleasures of drink- 
 ing claret or of eating a peach, or he describes his "East 
 Indian" to his brother's wife: "She kept me awake one 
 night, as a tune of Mozart's might do. I speak of the 
 thing as a pastime and an amusement, than which I can 
 feel none deeper than a conversation with an imperial 
 woman, the very 'yes' and 'no' of whose lips is to me a 
 banquet. ... As a man of the world, I love the rich 
 talk of a Charmian; as an eternal being, I love the thought 
 of you. I should like her to ruin me, and I should like 
 you to save me," 
 
 Such quick susceptibility to sensuous impressions of 
 every kind may be plentifully illustrated by opening al- 
 most at random in his works. But the characteristics 
 that mark the real sensualist — the content that the lotus- 
 leaf vapors forth, the fierceness of the centaur's pursuit, 
 the struggle of the faun's transformation — are nowhere 
 to be found in the letters or the poems; before his ill- 
 ness, at least, there is no debility, irresolution, or mastery 
 of the instincts over the mind. In fact, without any revo- 
 lution of his nature, without the slightest effort, by mere 
 growth it would seem, he passed on into the "Chamber of 
 Maiden Thought," as he phrased it, and became absorbed 
 as deeply in his reflections as previously in his impulses. 
 At no time, indeed, was he wholly unthoughtfiil. The 
 passages that have been given above are parenthetical, 
 and should be read in connection with such as these, of 
 the opposite tenor: — 
 
 "I must think that difficulties nerve the spirit of a man; 
 
38 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 they make our prime objects a refuge as well as a 
 passion." 
 
 "I am becoming accustomed to the privations of the 
 pleasures of sense. In the midst of the world, I live like 
 a hermit. I have forgot how to lay plans for the enjoy- 
 ment of any pleasure. I feel I can bear anything, — any 
 misery, even imprisonment, — so long as I have neither 
 wife nor child." 
 
 "Women must want imagination, and they may thank 
 God for it; and so may we, that a delicate being can feel 
 happy without any sense of crime." 
 
 "Scenery is fine, but human nature is finer; the sward 
 is richer for the tread of a real nervous English foot; the 
 eagle's nest is finer for the mountaineer having looked 
 into it." 
 
 Many a remark, based like these immediately upon his 
 own experience, shows that Keats had an insight into his 
 own life and an outlook on the world inconsistent with 
 the portrayal of him as merely impassioned with sensuous 
 beauty. 
 
 So far, in fact, was Keats from being either lapped in 
 Lydian airs or fed on food of sweetest melancholy that he 
 was sometimes a disagreeably unhappy person, if his 
 brother George's description of him be entirely true, since 
 his moodiness was vented in complaints, irritable 
 jealousies, and like ways. However exceptional such oc- 
 casions were in the intercourse of the brothers, this 
 exposure, taken together with some of the upbraidings in 
 the letters to Fanny Brawne, is very significant. Keats 
 himself refers to the strain of morbidity in him, and, al- 
 though from time to time he felt the strong awakening of 
 the philanthropic instinct, frequently expresses his dis- 
 taste for society, his misanthropy, his indifference to the 
 
ON THE PROMISE OF KEATS 39 
 
 public, his wish to live withdrawn, free from human re- 
 lations, engaged in poetizing for his own sake. Toward 
 women especially he had a bitter tongue, before he fell in 
 love with Fanny Brawne. 
 
 "When I was a schoolboy, I thought a fair woman a 
 pure goddess; my mind was a soft nest in which some 
 one of them slept, though she knew it not. . . . When 
 I am among women, I have evil thoughts, malice, spleen; 
 I cannot speak or be silent; I am full of suspicions, and 
 therefore listen to nothing; I am in a hurry to be gone. 
 You must be charitable, and put all this perversity to my 
 being disappointed since my boyhood. Yet with such 
 feelings I am happier alone, among crowds of men, by 
 myself, or with a friend or two." 
 
 He ascribes this peculiarity to his love for his brothers, 
 "passing the love of women:" 
 
 "I have been ill-tempered with them, I have vexed 
 them, — but the thought of them has always stifled the 
 impression that any woman might otherwise have made 
 on me." 
 
 He saw but little to choose, in his satirical moods, be- 
 tween men and hawks : — 
 
 "The hawk wants a mate; so does the Man. Look at 
 them both; they set about it and procure one in the same 
 manner; they want both a nest, and they set about one 
 in the same manner. The noble animal man, for his 
 amusement, smokes a pipe; the hawk balances about 
 the clouds: that is the only difference of their leisures." 
 
 Experience did not teach him more charity, though it 
 made him more discriminating: — 
 
 "The more I know of men the more I know how to 
 value entire liberality in any of them. Thank God, there 
 are a great many who will sacrifice their worldly interest 
 
40 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 for a friend. I wish there were more who would sacrifice 
 their passions. The worst of men are those whose self- 
 interests are their passions; the next, those whose passions 
 are their self-interest. Upon the whole, I dislike man- 
 kind. Whatever people on the other side of the question 
 may advance, they cannot deny that they are always 
 surprised at hearing of a good action and never of a bad 
 one." 
 
 This temper toward man in the abstract is the general 
 feeling of which his mood toward the public is a special 
 instance. He simply disregarded men who stood in no 
 intimate relation to him, whether he met them in society 
 or wrote verses for them to read. He was not, if his 
 word be literally taken, sensitive to criticism or ambitious 
 of popularity: he neglected the one because he put faith 
 in his own judgment, and he despised the other because it 
 was to be got at a vulgar cost. His depreciation of the 
 life of men, as he saw it, arose partly from a conscious- 
 ness of power, partly from a sense of the distance between 
 his thoughts and hopes and those of his fellows. The 
 aloofness of genius he had in full measure. That curi- 
 ously complex emotion, into which so many instincts and 
 perceptions enter that it is scarcely analyzable at all, and 
 is forced to go under the name of pride, was often dom- 
 inant in his moods when others than his friends were 
 before his attention. In short, Keats was as incompatible 
 with his surroundings as ever any young poet left to the 
 oblivion of his own society; and he was as indignant at 
 stupidity, as tired of insignificance, as thoroughly world- 
 weary, as a solitary enthusiast for the ideal could well be. 
 In his last letter to George he sums the whole matter up 
 more fully than at first but to the same purport: — 
 
 " 'Tis best to remain aloof from people, and like their 
 
ON THE PROMISE OF KEATS 41 
 
 good parts without being eternally troubled with the dull 
 process of their every-day lives. When once a person has 
 smoked the vapidness of the routine of society, he must 
 either have self-interest or the love of some sort of dis- 
 tinction to keep him in good humor with it. All I can 
 say is that, standing at Charing Cross and looking east, 
 west, north, and south, I can see nothing but dullness. 
 I hope while I am young to live retired in the country. 
 When I grow in years and have a right to be idle, I shall 
 enjoy cities more." 
 
 In this opinion he did retire to one place or another, — 
 the Isle of Wight, or Winchester, or Teignmouth, and 
 there isolating himself dreamed out his poems. He lived 
 in a sort of ecstasy during no small portion of these 
 solitary hours, when he could call the roaring of the wind 
 his wife, the stars through the window panes his children, 
 and rest contented in the abstract idea of beauty in all 
 things. This absorption in the idea of beauty which de- 
 termined the formulation of his creed in the oft-quoted 
 lines, — ^ 
 
 "Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all 
 Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know;" 
 
 which also led him into that much misunderstood ex- 
 clamation, "O for a life of sensations rather than of 
 thoughts;" this intoxication, as it were, with the loveli- 
 ness of earth, was in his belief a true Pythian inspiration, 
 the medium of the divine revelation. The world takes 
 such expressions as extravaganzas, or as mystical phil- 
 osophy; but to Keats they were as commonplace as the 
 proverbs of the hearth; he meant them as entirely lucid 
 expressions of plain sense. This point in the criticism of 
 Keats has been too little insisted on and brought to no- 
 
42 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 tice. He put his faith in the suggestions of the spirit; he 
 reUed on the intimations of what is veiled from full sight; 
 he had little patience with minds that cannot be content 
 with half-knowledge, or refuse to credit convictions be- 
 cause they cannot be expressed in detail, with logical 
 support, and felt with the hand of sense all round, if one 
 may employ the phrase; in other words, he believed in 
 the imagination as a truth-finding faculty, not less valid 
 because it presents truth in a wholly different way from 
 the purely logical intellect. This was the deepest and 
 most rooted persuasion of his mind from the time when 
 he first comes under our observation. To bring together 
 a few expressions of it is the only right way of setting 
 forth his creed in this matter. The following extracts are 
 from various parts of his letters, from the earliest to the 
 later ones: — 
 
 "At once it struck me what quality went to form a 
 man of achievement, especially in literature, and which 
 Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean negative 
 capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in un- 
 certainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reach- 
 ing after fact and reason. Coleridge, for instance, would 
 let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the 
 penetralium of Mystery, from being incapable of remain- 
 ing content with half-knowledge. This pursued through 
 volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that 
 with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every 
 other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration." 
 
 "Many a man can travel to the very bourne of heaven, 
 and yet want confidence to put down his half-seeing." 
 
 "I never feel quite certain of any truth but from a clear 
 perception of its beauty, and I find myself very young- 
 minded, even in that perceptive power." 
 
ON THE PROMISE OF KEATS 43 
 
 "The whole thing must, I think, have appeared to you, 
 who are a consecutive man, as a thing almost of mere 
 words. But I assure you that, when I wrote it, it was a 
 regular stepping of the imagination toward a truth." 
 
 "What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth, 
 whether it existed before or not. . . . The imagination 
 may be compared to Adam's dream — he awoke and 
 found it truth. I am more zealous in this affair 'because 
 I have never yet been able to perceive how anything can 
 be known for truth by consecutive reasoning, and yet 
 [so] it must be. . . . However it may be, O for a life of 
 sensations rather than of thoughts! It is a 'vision in the 
 form of youth,' a shadow of reality to come." 
 
 A shadow of reality to comet What a light that sen- 
 tence throws on the aspiration for sensations rather than 
 thoughts, for beauty rather than logic, for the sight rather 
 than the inference, for the direct rather than the mediate 
 perception of the divine! So, at least, it is plain, Keats 
 understood himself; and whether one counts his faith a 
 vague self-deception, meaningless except to a mystic, or 
 has found the most precious truth borne in upon his heart 
 only by this selfsame way, the recognition of the poet's 
 philosophy not merely lifts Keats out of and above the 
 sphere of the purely sensuous, but reveals at once the 
 spiritual substance which underlies his poetry, and which 
 gives it vitality for all time. To other men beauty has 
 been a passion, but to him it was a faith; it was the sub- 
 stance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen, 
 — a shadow of the reality to come. It was not, as with 
 other poets, in the beauty of nature, the beauty of virtue, 
 the beauty of a woman's face, singly that he found his 
 way to the supra-sensible; he says in his most solemn 
 words, "I have loved the principle of beauty in all things." 
 
44 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 Dying he said it proudly, as one who had kept the faith 
 that was given him; and since he chose that declaration 
 as the summary of his accomplishment, it needs to be 
 borne in mind, with all its large and many-sided meaning, 
 by those who would pluck out the heart of his mystery. 
 
 But although to Keats the worship of beauty in all 
 things was the essence of his life, and the delight that 
 sprang from it the essence of his joy, he did not find in 
 these the whole of life. At first he had been satis- 
 fied if the melancholy fit fell on him, "sudden from 
 heaven, like a weeping cloud," — eager to let the passion 
 have its way with him, until it wreaked itself upon ex- 
 pression; but he felt this overmastering of his own will 
 an injury, not merely exhausting but wasteful. 
 
 "Some think I have lost that poetic ardor and fire 't is 
 said I once had; — the fact is, perhaps I have; but, in- 
 stead of that, I hope I shall substitute a more thoughtful 
 and quiet power. I am more frequently, now, contented 
 to read and think, but now and then haunted with am- 
 bitious thoughts, . . . scarcely content to write the 
 best verses for the fever they leave behind. I want to 
 compose without this fever. I hope I one day shall." 
 
 Similarly, he wishes to know more, and is determined 
 to "get learning, get understanding," if only that he may 
 keep his balance in the "high sensations" that draw him 
 into their whirl. 
 
 "Although I take poetry to be the chief, there is some- 
 thing else wanting to one who passes his time among 
 books and thoughts on books. ... I find earlier daj^ 
 are gone by — I find I can have no enjoyment in the 
 world but continual drinking of knowledge. I find there 
 is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good to 
 the world. . . . There is but one way for me. The 
 
ON THE PROMISE OF KEATS 45 
 
 road lies through application, study, and thought. I will 
 pursue it; and, for that end, purpose retiring for some 
 years." 
 
 The years that should have perfected his powers were 
 denied to him; his account was made up. In these broken 
 plans, however; in this constant expansion of his view and 
 faithful laying of his experience to heart; in the wisdom 
 of his interpretation of what came within his scope; in a 
 word, in his teachableness as well as in his steadier en- 
 thusiasm, his uncloyed sensibility, his finer spirituality, 
 as the promise of Keats seems brighter, so his worth 
 seems greater. These letters show that more had passed 
 into his character than was ever reproduced in his poems. 
 We come back to Lord Houghton's decision. Fine as the 
 work of Keats is, his genius was, nevertheless, 
 
 "The bloom, whose petals, nipt before they blew. 
 Died on the promise of the fruit." 
 
 It has been suggested in some quarters that, notwith- 
 standing his early death, he would probably have done no 
 better work, if indeed he even maintained himself at the 
 height he had reached. In support of this it is urged that 
 Wordsworth's best poetry was written in youth, and that 
 Coleridge's powers were employed on really excellent 
 verse only for two years. These letters make it folly to 
 entertain such a belief; they (and the works too) ex- 
 hibit not only an increase of intellectual, but also of 
 artistic power. No criticism of his poetry is intended 
 here; but, in connection with this point, it may be re- 
 marked that his principal defect is in style, as is shown 
 by the necessity he continually felt of studying literary 
 models, which nevertheless affected his productions hardly 
 at all, except in linguistic handling, — in the choice and 
 
46 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 flow of words, after Spenser, the structure of sentences, 
 after Milton, and later (in "Lamia"), after Dryden, and 
 in a movement and kind of verbal esprit, after Ariosto. 
 This restless change from one master to another, as well 
 as some few critical remarks, indicates a power to form a 
 distinctive style of his own. Again, the marked pictorial 
 character of his poetry — the quality it has to impress 
 one like a cartoon or a bas-relief ("the brede of marble 
 men and maidens"), the grace of form and attitude in 
 the figures of his poetic vision — was clearly recognized 
 by him to be in excess in his compositions. Originally, 
 this was due, in a high degree, to the accident of his 
 friendship with Haydon; the portfolios of the masters 
 helped his imagination in definiteness, in refinement, and 
 especially in power of grouping. As the mind became 
 more to him, and the eye less, he was dissatisfied with 
 this trait of his works. He condemned even the most 
 perfect composition of this kind in English: "I wish to 
 diffuse the coloring of St. Agnes' Eve throughout a poem 
 in which character and sentiment would be the figures to 
 such drapery." One who could speak of such a poem as 
 "drapery" was far from the conclusion of his artistic edu- 
 cation. Lastly, he was from the beginning ambitious of 
 writing dramas. "Otho" and "King Stephen" are by no 
 means unmistakable prophecies of success, had he con- 
 tinued in this hope. The effort, however, proves an in- 
 terest in humanity of a different order from that shown 
 in the mythological or lyrical pieces, and makes evident 
 how far the naturalism of his published poetry was from 
 expressing the fullness of his mind. These three things — 
 the incipiency of his style, the acknowledged insufficiency 
 of picturesque art in creating the best poetry, and the 
 ardent desire to deal with human life directly, and on the 
 
ON THE PROMISE OF KEATS 47 
 
 large scale, in the drama — are enough to convince us 
 that Keats was truly a Chatterton, only less unfortunate, 
 — "born for the future, to the future lost;" one who, 
 though he wears, Adonis-like, the immortal youth that 
 lies in the gift of early death, would have been even 
 dearer to the world, had his name lost in pathos and 
 gained in honor, as it assuredly would have done if his 
 grass-grown grave wore the wheaten garland of England 
 instead of the Roman daisies. 
 
BYRON'S CENTENARY 
 
 The absence of any widespread interest in the cen- 
 tenary of Lord B3n:on is a marvelous illustration of the 
 vicissitudes of literary reputation. Only in Greece was 
 public notice taken of it. The brilliancy with which his 
 fame burst forth, the unexampled rapidity with which it 
 spread through Europe, the powerful influence it con- 
 tinued to exert on the youth of the next age, were to the 
 men who witnessed them sure signs of the magnitude of 
 his future renown. The decadence into which it has 
 fallen would have been incredible to them. It was By- 
 ron's distinction to have been the first man of letters who , 
 enjoyed an international reputation at once; and one can 
 hardly credit the fact that he has shrunk so wonderfully. 
 In the month of his death Sir Walter Scott, in a brief 
 article which attracted wide attention, said that it seemed 
 almost as if the sun in heaven had been extinguished; 
 and when Scott soon followed him, Landor, writing to 
 Crabb Robinson, remarked that the death of these two 
 had "put the fashionable world into deep mourning," and 
 drew gloomy predictions, in the well-known manner of 
 contemporaries, because the great men were leaving no 
 successors. 
 
 Something of the shock of Byron's death and of the 
 exaltation of his genius at the moment was due to the 
 manner in which he met his end; he had fallen like one of 
 his own heroes, died in a cause, and appealed to the 
 romantic feeling of the age. Even then, however, to 
 
 49 
 
so LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 admire him was found to be a different thing from ap- 
 proving him. When the thirty-seven guns had been fired 
 at Missolonghi, and the Turks had responded with "an 
 exultant volley," and the ship had brought home the re- 
 mains, the Abbey was refused, and he was buried in the 
 common soil of England. Two incidents of the funeral 
 bring him very near to us. Lady Caroline Lamb met the 
 cortege as she was driving, and, on being told, in answer 
 to her question, that it was Byron's, fainted in her 
 carriage; and Mary Shelley, as she saw the procession 
 winding down, reflected on the short-sightedness of human 
 life, asking who could have foretold at Lerici such changes 
 as she had witnessed in two little years. 
 
 Hobhouse, with all his efforts, could raise only a 
 thousand pounds for a memorial, but with this he got 
 Thorwaldsen to make a statue which was sent to England 
 in 1834. The Abbey was again refused, and, to the dis- 
 credit of the nation, this work was allowed to remain 
 stored away in the Customhouse eleven years, because no 
 fit place could be got to put it in. At last, in 1845, ^^• 
 Whewell gave permission to set it up in the Library of 
 Trinity, which it still adorns. Thirty years later came the 
 miserable fiasco of Beaconsfield's Committee, which, far 
 from making Newstead Abbey a national possession and 
 gathering there the relics of Byron, placed in Hamilton 
 Park (other sites being refused) that statue of the poet 
 leaning on the rocks, with his dog Boatswain beside him, 
 which can only be described as popular melodrama in 
 stone, beautiful only for the mass of red marble which 
 the Greek Government gave for its base. It is to be 
 remarked, also, that at this time the Abbey was a third 
 time practically refused, as Dean Stanley, out of respect 
 to the action of his two predecessors, but not appparently 
 
BYRON'S CENTENARY 51 
 
 ^or any other reason, precluded application for erecting a 
 tablet there by a letter in which he said he preferred the 
 subject should not be brought before him. 
 
 The history of monuments, however, is not necessarily 
 proof of fame. Others of England's greatest do not sleep 
 in the Abbey, and the hero not infrequently waits for his 
 statue a long age. The place of fame is on the lips of 
 men, and Macaulay, when Moore's "Life" came out, could 
 speak of Byron as "the most celebrated man in Europe." 
 The decline of his vogue was nevertheless rapid and un- 
 mistakable. We all remember Carlyle's oracle: "Close 
 thy Byron; open thy Goethe." This must have been 
 about 1840. But, unfortunately, as one writer observes, 
 to open Goethe is to return to Byron's greatness. Did 
 not Goethe tell Eckermann that a man of Byron's emi- 
 nence would not come again, nor such a tragedy as 
 "Cain"? He thought him greater than Milton — "vast 
 and widely varied," whereas the latter was only simple 
 and stately. Perhaps, as we have been told, Goethe was 
 flattered by Byron's imitation. 
 
 Whatever was the reason, the critical judgment of 
 Goethe is one to be weighed with regard to Byron, and to 
 himself also, for that matter. What part Goethe's praise 
 may have had in making Byron the hero of "Young 
 Germany" we have no means of determining, but his 
 works were vital in the new age there, and still his l)iold 
 seems greater on the Germans, if we may judge by the 
 test of translations and biography, than it is elsewhere on 
 the Continent, Heine was more than touched by him, 
 though he was far from being his duplicate, and could 
 see the humorous side of those young Parisians — Musset 
 the foremost — who were melancholy in the full glow of 
 first manhood, and went about in despair dining sumptu- 
 
52 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 ously every day. One pities Musset, for Byron was, as 
 much as another man can be, the secret of his fate, La- 
 martine caught only the sentimentality of Byron, but 
 Musset assimilated his darker spirit, his recklessness, and 
 license, and skepticism, and transmuted his very coarse- 
 ness into a Parisian vulgarity. Stendhal and Sainte-Beuve 
 paid tribute to him; and, to cut the subject short, Maz- 
 zini thanked him in the name of Italy, in Spain Espron- 
 ceda drew his inspiration from him, and Castelar, in the 
 later time, eulogized him for his liberating influences in 
 the peninsula with Spanish amplitude of phrase. Karl 
 Elze thinks that the Russian poet, Pushkin, was his child; 
 if it were so, Byron might well be proud of what such an 
 influence was the beginning of in Russia. This rapid 
 survey, with its brilliant names, impresses the mind with 
 the range and dominance of this man, although Landor's 
 sneer, when he hoped that "the mercies which have be- 
 gun with man's forgetfulness may be crowned with God's 
 forgiveness," does not now seem so absurd as formerly. 
 
 To look at the matter from this point of view, however, 
 is to confuse Byron with Byronism. There was a Euro- 
 pean mood, a temperament of the revolutionary time, that 
 fed on Byron, but he was not its creator, and to regard 
 him as more than a single influence of many that 
 molded the young men of the next generation is to give 
 him vastly more than his due. This is the secret of his 
 vogue in Europe, not that he liberated their minds, but 
 that he set the fashion for minds expanding in a new age 
 of intellectual pride and moral irresponsibility, helped to 
 form their attitude, and was a rallying name for the 
 faction. He was licentious, but he was neither demo- 
 cratical nor atheistical; he had no body of opinions 
 properly thought out and correlated with social facts, 
 
BYRON'S CENTENARY 53 
 
 either in politics or religion; he had no strong convictions 
 even; but, with prejudices of rank and reminiscences of 
 Scottish theology from which he could not free himself, 
 he was an impulsive and therefore uneven revolter from 
 the old regime, and never quite at home in the new camp. 
 He preferred, he said, to be beheaded by the King and 
 not by the mob; and the whole aristocrat spoke in the 
 sajdng. Shelley wrote of him, "The canker of aristocracy 
 needs to be cut out;" and he hits off Byron's inconse- 
 quence in religion where he speaks of him under the name 
 of Maddalo, and contrasts him with himself. Maddalo, 
 he says, took a wicked pleasure in drawing out his taunts 
 against religion; but, he adds, "What Maddalo thinks on 
 these matters is not exactly known." Byron is believed 
 to have talked with Shelley more seriously than with any 
 other man. He did not himself know what he thought; 
 and his state of mind was well expressed by his remark to 
 Lady Byron, "The trouble is, I do believe." In substance, 
 therefore, unlike Shelley, who was democratical and 
 atheistical on principle, Bs^ron was far from being the 
 ideal of the various "young" nationalities, France, Ger- 
 many, Italy, and Spain, in the principal tenets dear to the 
 age. It was rather his personality, and what they trans- 
 formed him into by their worship, that had power over 
 them in their seardi for "liberty;" and truly, though his 
 ideas were incomplete and fragmentary, and inextricably 
 blended, even in their formation, with his impulses and 
 the accidents of his position as a pariah of genius, yet 
 there was a contagion in his spirit, a dash of energy and 
 of abandon, that told as blood tells more than thought. 
 One advantage, too, Byron had with foreign nations 
 that with his own counts as a defect. ' He had no form, 
 no art, no finish; and the poet who failed in these things 
 
54 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 c^n be read in our day only by a kind of sufferance, and 
 with continual friction with what has come to be our 
 mastering literary taste for perfection in the manner. It 
 has been said that he consequently bore translation better 
 than he otherwise would. JHis quality is power, not 
 charm; the mood and the situation and the thought are 
 the elements that count in his poetry, while the words are 
 at the best eloquent or witty, but not "the living garment 
 of light." The result was, that he could be given almost 
 completely in a foreign language. This consideration 
 may go far to explain the relative estimate of him by 
 foreign writers in comparison with other English poets; 
 for these others who have the charm that cannot be trans- 
 fused, the art that will obey no master but its own Pros- 
 pero, are seen, as one may say, without their singing 
 robes; and their poetry, made prose, loses half its ex- 
 cellence. This, together with the German element in one 
 portion of his work and the strong Italian influence in a 
 larger portion, especially in "Don Juan," must be taken 
 into account in any attempt to understand why he was 
 the best known English poet on the Continent, and per- 
 haps, with the exception of Shakespeare, still is. 
 
 In England, Byron's reputation met with rapid decline 
 from natural causes. It is not likely that his misconduct 
 in morals was much against him, and Beaconsfield was 
 wholly on the wrong track when he reminded the Byron 
 meeting that, after half a century, a man's private life 
 scarcely enters into the estimate of his literary genius. 
 It seems rather Byron's lack of orthodoxy that England 
 most resented. Society put up with much libertinism in 
 those days in high quarters; but Byron had attacked the 
 faith, or at least elements of it, which the Church shared 
 in common with Calvinism, and this was too shoddng a 
 
BYRON'S CENTENARY 55 
 
 matter for a society which found hardly more than matter 
 for gossip in natural sons and daughters. This was the 
 reason which a bishop alleged in the House of Lords in 
 answer to Brougham, in the debate on the second refusal 
 of the Abbey. Byron had attacked Christianity, and he 
 should not be interred "in the Temple of our God." The 
 middle classes have always rejected Byron, in like 
 manner, because he scoffed, though, no doubt, his life and 
 the licentious portions of his poetry also offended them. 
 From the first his skepticism was heavily against him, and 
 probably it still remains the strongest objection to his 
 works in the minds of Englishmen generally. In Landor's 
 bitter attack (he had offended Landor by rhyming his 
 name with gander) this charge is made the climax, and 
 the passage is brief enough to quote as the best word of 
 Byron's enemies: — 
 
 "Afterwards, whenever he wrote a bad poem, he sup- 
 ported his sinking fame by some signal act of profligacy: 
 an elegy by a seduction, a heroic by an adultery, a trag- 
 edy by a divorce. On the remark of a learned man that 
 irregularity is no indication of genius, he began to lose 
 ground rapidly, when, on a sudden, he cried out at the 
 Ha3miarket, There is no God. It was then surmised 
 more generally and more gravely that there was some- 
 thing in him, and he stood upon his legs almost to the 
 last. Say what you will, once whispered a friend of mine, 
 there are things in him strong as poison and original as 
 sin." This, with all its excess, is no inapt character of 
 Byron, as English prejudice drew him. 
 
 On the other hand, much that was in his favor at first 
 was necessarily temporary. The man had a story. He 
 was one of the picturesque characters of the age, and 
 while he lived he was interesting to his time merely for 
 
S6 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 his personal fortunes. It was to his gain, too, that he 
 identified his own romance with that which he early in- 
 vented, appeahng to the adventurous in men and to the 
 pity and admiration of women. His heroes are strong, 
 and strength succeeds with the sex in fiction as well as in 
 life; and they are, besides, usually faithful in love, while 
 their crimes are taken out of the moral region of delib- 
 erate choice by a kind of emotional sophistry, and some- 
 how are charged to their circumstances, so that the 
 unwary and innocent reader commiserates their villainies 
 instead of being revolted by them. These tales (and no 
 part of his work was more popular) are hard to read 
 to-day, but we forget too readily what raw and bloody 
 fiction the world had in the first score years of this cen- 
 tury; we cannot conceive how London ran after stories of 
 blighted brigands and sentimental corsairs, in the very 
 thunder of Waterloo. But so it was, and Bsnron was 
 more interesting in that he was the unhappy and noble 
 original from which the pirates of his imagination were 
 drawn. If he changed the scene and wandered over 
 Europe as Childe Harold, he gained in sentiment; if he 
 wore the mask of Manfred, he gained in tragedy; and if 
 he sneered in Don Juan, there was the jaded man of the 
 world, perhaps more interesting. He was, moreover, a 
 peer; but a dead peer certainly is no better than a dead 
 lion, and when he died, why, — the fashion in collars 
 changed. Other living personalities occupied the stage; 
 England grew steadily more sincere in religion, more 
 strict in the standard of private morals, more exacting of 
 seriousness in thought and of perfection in literary form; 
 and all these influences were adverse to Byron, who made 
 no offsetting gain in his own country from the revolu- 
 tionary fervor that helped him on the Continent. 
 
BYRON'S CENTENARY S7 
 
 What is there left? Some stirring passages of adven- 
 ture, some eloquent descriptions of nature, some personal 
 lyrics of true poetic feeling, dramas which, it is to be 
 hoped, have finally damned "the unities," and one great 
 poem of the modern spirit, "Don Juan." And what re- 
 mains of that melodramatic Byron of women's fancies? 
 His character has come out plain, and we are really 
 amazed at it, — proud, sensual, selfish, and, it must be 
 added, mean. Ignoble he was, in many ways, but, for all 
 that, the energy of his passions, his vitality, his masterly 
 egotism, and the splendid force of his genius, made him a 
 commanding name and stamped him upon the succeeding 
 European time. )He cannot be neglected by history, but 
 men certainly appear to pass him by. Arnold has en- 
 deavored to bring him back by a collection; but Arnold's 
 critical views on poetry seem to be justifications in age 
 for the tastes he had when he was young, — reasons after 
 the act. A late biographer thinks that the decadence of 
 his fame is due to the conservatism of the last half- 
 century, and that in the revolutionary age that ought soon 
 to be beginning, he will retrieve himself. But can this 
 be hoped of a "revolutionary" poet whom Swinburne has 
 cast aside? The prediction does not convince us. By- 
 ronism has go«e by, and the age of the "enlightenment" 
 in Germany and France; such a mood is not repeated. 
 Goethe outlived Wertherism, but had Byron such good 
 fortune? : In his own character there are such defects as 
 forbid admiration in the light of our moral ideas; and in 
 his poems, taken apart from their time, there are other 
 defects, both in their substance, and, unquestionably, in 
 their form, which forbid the sort of approval that would 
 make them in a true sense classic, as a whole, though the 
 qualities that make "Childe Harold" and "Don Juan" 
 
S8 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 great, and preserve here and there passages in other 
 poems, are those that confer immortality. ) He was a 
 poet; he was a force, also, that spent itself partly in 
 creating a world-wide affectation arid partly in rousing 
 and reinforcing the impulse of individual liberty on the 
 Continent; but he is a poet no one can love, and he left 
 a memory that no one can admire, and there is none of 
 his works that receives the meed of perfect praise. 
 
ON BROWNING'S DEATH 
 
 The death of Browning brings one stage nearer the 
 too plainly approaching end of a literary age which will 
 long be full of curious interest to the student of the moods 
 of the mind of man. Time has linked his name with that 
 of Tennyson, and the conjunction gives to England an- 
 other of those double stars of genius in which her years 
 are rich, and by which the spirit of an age has a two-fold 
 expression. The old opposition, the polarity of mind, by 
 virtue of which the Platonist differs from the Aristotelian, 
 the artist from the thinker, Shakespeare from Jonson, 
 shows its efficacy here, too, in the last modern age, and 
 divides the poets and their admirers by innate prefer- 
 ences. It is needful to remember this contrast, though not 
 to insist upon it unduly, in order to approach the work 
 of Browning rightly, to be just to those who idolize him 
 without offense to those who are repelled by him. The 
 analysis of his powers, the charting of his life and work, 
 are not difficult; but the value of his real achievement is 
 more uncertain. Interest centers entirely in his poetry, 
 for his career has been without notable incident, and is 
 told when it is said that he has lived the life of a scholar 
 and man of letfers in England and Italy amid the social 
 culture of his time. For the world, his career is the suc- 
 cession of books he has put forth, and this is as he would 
 have it; publicity beyond this he did not seek, but refused 
 with violence and acrimony. 
 
 In his earliest poem, youthful in its self-portraiture, its 
 
 S9 
 
6o LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 literary touch, and its fragmentary plan, the one striking 
 quality is the flow of language. Here was a writer who 
 would never lack for words; fluent, as if inexhaustible, 
 the merely verbal element in "Pauline" shows no struggle 
 with the medium of the poet's art. This gift of facility 
 was, as is usual, first to show itself. In "Paracelsus" the 
 second primary quality of Browning was equally con- 
 spicuous, — the power of reasoning in verse. These two 
 traits have for a poet as much weakness as strength, and 
 they lie at the source of Browning's defects as a master 
 of poetic art. His facility allowed him to be diffuse in 
 language, and his reasoning habit led him often to be 
 diffuse in matter. In "Sordello" the two produced a mons- 
 trosity, both in construction and expression, not to be 
 rivaled in literature. Picturesque detail, intellectual in- 
 terest, moral meaning, struggle in vain in that tale to 
 make themselves felt and discerned through the tangle of 
 words and the labyrinth of act and reflection. But al- 
 ready in these poems Browning had shown, to himself, if 
 not to the world, that he had come to certain conclusions, 
 to a conception of human life and a decision as to the use 
 of his art in regard to it, which were to give him substan- 
 tial power. He defined it by his absorption in "Paracel- 
 sus" with the broad ideas of infinite power and infinite 
 love, which in his last poem still maintain their place in 
 his system as the highest solvents of experience and spec- 
 ulation; and in "Sordello" he stated the end of art, which 
 he continued to seek, in his maxim that little else is worth 
 study except the "history of a soul." His entire poetip 
 work, broadly speaking, is the illustration of this short 
 sentence. Such prepossessions with the spiritual meaning 
 of life as these poems show made sure the predominance 
 in his work of the higher interests of man; and he won 
 
ON BROWNING'S DEATH 6i 
 
 his audience finally by this fact, that he had something 
 to say that was ethical and religious. The development, 
 however, of both the theory and practice of his mind had 
 to be realized in far more definite and striking forms 
 than the earlier poems before the attention of the world 
 could be secured. 
 
 It would seem natural that a man with such convic- 
 tions as Browning acknowledged, should be preeminently 
 an idealist, and that his point of weakness should prove 
 to be the tendency to metaphysical and vague matter not 
 easily putting on poetical form. But he was, in fact, a 
 realist, — one who is primarily concerned with things, and 
 uses the method of observation. His sense for actual fact 
 is always keen. In that poem of "Paracelsus," which is a 
 discussion in the air if ever a poem was, it is significant 
 to find him emphasizing the circumstance that he had 
 taken very few liberties with his subject, and bringing 
 books to show evidence of historical fidelity. But little of 
 the dramatic spirit as there is in "Paracelsus," there was 
 much in Browning when it should come to be released, 
 and it belongs to the dramatist to be interested in the 
 facts of life, the flesh and blood reality, in which he may 
 or may not (according to his greatness) find a soul. 
 Browning was thus a realist, and he chose habitually the 
 objective method of art — but to set forth "the history of 
 a soul." Had he been an idealist, his subject would have 
 been "the history of the soul; " his method might or might 
 not have been different. This change of the particle is a 
 slight one, but it involves that polarity of mind which sets 
 Browning opposite to Tennyson. He deals with individ- 
 uals, takes in imagination their point of view, assumes 
 for the time being their circumstances and emotions; and 
 one who does this in our time, with a preoccupation with 
 
62 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 the soul in the individual, cannot escape from one over- 
 powering impression, repeated from every side of the 
 modern age, — the impression, namely, of the relativity 
 of human life. 
 
 This is the lesson which is spread over Browning's 
 pages, with line on line and precept on precept. By it 
 he comes into harmony with the very spirit of the cen- 
 tury on its intellectual side, and represents it. The "his- 
 tory of a soul" differs very greatly according to 
 circumstance, native impulses, the needs of life at different 
 stages of growth, the balance of faculties and desires in 
 it, the temperament of its historical period, the access to 
 it of art or music or thought, and in a thousand ways; 
 and Browning devotes himself oftentimes to the expo- 
 sition of all this web of circumstance, in order that we 
 may see the soul as it was imder its conditions, instead of 
 leaping to a conclusion by a hard-and-fast morality based 
 upon the similarity of the soul in all men. The task 
 happily falls in with his fine gift of reasoning, and in- 
 creases by practice the suppleness and subtlety of this 
 faculty of his. One might say, indeed, without close 
 computation, that the larger part of his entire poetic work 
 is occupied with such reasoning upon psychological cases, 
 in the manner of a lawyer who educes a client's justifica- 
 tion from the details of his temptation. Many of the 
 longer poems are only instances of special pleading and 
 have all the faults that belong to that form of thought. 
 "The Ring and the Book" is such an interminable argu- 
 ment, marvelous for intellectual resource, for skill in dia- 
 lectic, for plaiisibility. Bishop Blougram, Mr. Sludge, 
 Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, and others, readily occur 
 in mind as being in the same way "apologies;" and in 
 these one feels that, while it is well to know what the 
 
ON BROWNING'S DEATH 63 
 
 prisoner urges on his own behalf, it is the shabby, the 
 cowardly, the criminal, the base, the detestable, that is 
 masking under a too well-woven cloak of words, and that 
 the special pleader is pursuing his game at the risk of a 
 higher honesty than consists in the mere understanding of 
 the mechanism of motive and act. Yet this catholicity, 
 which seems to have for its motto, "Who understands all, 
 forgives all," is a natural consequence in a mind so im- 
 pressed with the doctrine of the relativity of human life as 
 was Browning's. The tendency of the doctrine is to efface 
 moral judgment, and to substitute for it intellectual com- 
 prehension; and usually this results in a practical fa- 
 talism, acquiesced in if not actively held. Here, too. 
 Browning's mental temperament has another point of con- 
 tact with the general spirit of the age, and allows him to 
 take up into his genius the humanitarian instinct so pow- 
 erful in his contemporaries. For the perception of the ex- 
 cuses for men's action in those of low or morbid or 
 deformed development liberalizes the mind, and the find- 
 ing of the spark of soul in such individuals does mean to 
 the Christian the finding of that immortal part which 
 equalizes all in an equal destiny, however the difference 
 may look between men while the process of life is going 
 on. Browning came very early to this conviction, that in 
 all men, however weak or grossly set this spark may be, it 
 is to be sought for. In this he is consistently philanthropic 
 and democratic, Christian in spirit and practice, compre- 
 hensive in tolerance, large in charity, intellectually (but 
 not emotionally) sympathetic. It is perhaps unnecessary 
 to add that his love of righteousness is not so striking a 
 trait. 
 
 But what in all this view of life is most original in 
 Browning is something that possibly perplexes everi his 
 
64 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 devoted admirers. Life, he says, no matter what it may 
 be in its accidents of time, or place, or action, is the stuff 
 to make the soul of. In the humblest as the noblest, in 
 Caliban as in Prospero, the life vouchsafed is the means 
 (adequate, he seems to say, in all cases) of which the soul 
 makes use to grow in. He thus avoids the deadening con- 
 clusions to which his doctrine of relativity might lead, by 
 asserting the equal and identical opportunity in all to de- 
 velop the soul. He unites with this the original theory — 
 at lea|St one that he has made his own — that whatever 
 the soul seeks it should seek with all its might; and, push- 
 ing to the extreme, he urges that if a man sin, let him sin 
 to the uttermost of his desire. This is the moral of the 
 typical poem of this class, "The Statue and the Bust," and 
 he means more by this than that the intention, sinning 
 in thought, is equivalent to sinning in act, — he means 
 that a man should have his will. No doubt this is directly 
 in accord with the great value he places on strength of 
 character, vitality in life, on resolution, courage, and the 
 braving of consequences. But the ignoring of the im- 
 mense value of restraint as an element in character is 
 complete; and in the case of many whose choice is slowly 
 and doubtfully made in those younger years when the de- 
 sire for life in its fullness of experience is strongest, and 
 the wisdom of knowledge of life in its effects is weakest, 
 the advice to obey impulse at all costs, to throw doubt 
 and authority to the winds, and "live my life and have 
 my day," is of dubious utility. Over and over again in 
 Browning's poetry one meets with this insistence on the 
 value of moments of high excitement, of intense living, of 
 full experience of pleasure, even though such moments be 
 of the essence of evil and fruitful in all dark consequences. 
 It is probable that a deep optimism underlies all this; 
 
ON BROWNING'S DEATH 65 
 
 that Browning believed that the soul does not perish in 
 its wrong-doing, but that through this experience, too, as 
 through good, it develops finally its immortal nature, and 
 that, as in his view the life of the soul is in its energy of 
 action, the man must act even evil if he is to grow at all. 
 Optimism, certainly, of the most thorough-going kind this 
 is; but Browning is so consistent an optimist in other 
 parts of his philosophy that this defense may be made for 
 him on a point where the common thought and deepest 
 conviction of the race, in its noblest thinkers and purest 
 artists, are opposed to him, refusing to believe that the 
 doing of evil is to be urged in the interest of true 
 manliness. 
 
 The discussion of Browning's attitude towards life in 
 the actual world of men has led away from the direct con- 
 sideration of the work in which he embodied his convic- 
 tions. The important portion of it came in middle life, 
 when he obtained mastery of the form of poetic art known 
 as the dramatic monologue. A realist, if he be a poet, 
 must resort to the drama. It was inevitable in Browning's 
 case. Yet the drama, as a form, offered as much unfit- 
 ness for Browning's genius as it did fitness. The drama 
 requires energy, it is true, and interest in men as indi- 
 viduals; and these Browning had. It also requires con- 
 centration, economy of material, and constructive power; 
 and these were difficult to Browning. He did not suc- 
 ceed in his attempts to write drama in its perfect form. 
 He could make fragments of intense power in passion; 
 he could reveal a single character at one critical moment 
 of its career; he could sum up a life history in a long 
 soliloquy; but he could not do more than this and keep 
 the same level of performance. Why he failed is a curi- 
 ous question, and will doubtless be critically debated with 
 
66 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 a plentiful lack of results. His growth in dramatic 
 faculty, in apprehension of the salient points of character 
 and grasp in presenting them, in perception of the value 
 of situation and power to use it to the full, can readily be 
 traced; but there comes a point where the growth stops. 
 Superior as his mature work is to that of his youth in all 
 these qualities, it falls short of that perfect and complex 
 design and that informing life which mark the developed 
 dramatist. In the monologues he deals with incidents in 
 a life, with moods of a personality, with the consciousness 
 which a man has of his own character at the end of his 
 career; but he seizes these singly, and at one moment. 
 His characters do not develop before the eye; he does not 
 catch the soul in the very act; he does not present life so 
 much as the results of life. He frequently works by the 
 method of retrospect, he tells the story, but does not 
 enact it. In all these he displays the governing motive of 
 his art, which is to reveal the soul; but if the soul reveals 
 itself in his verses, it is commonly by confession, not pres- 
 entation. He has, in fact, that malady of thought which 
 interferes with the dramatist's control of his hand; he is 
 thinking about his characters, and only indirectly in them, 
 and he is most anxious to convey his reflections upon the 
 psychical phenomenon which he is attending to. In other 
 words, he is, primarily, a moralist; he reasons, and he is 
 fluent in words and fertile in thoughts, and so he loses the 
 object itself, becomes indirect, full of afterthought and 
 parenthesis, and impairs the dramatic effect. These traits 
 may be observed, in different degrees, in many of the 
 poems, even in the best. In the dramas themselves the 
 lack of constructive power is absolute. "Pippa Passes" is 
 only a succession of dramatic fragments artificially bound 
 together, and in the others the lack of body and inter- 
 
ON BROWNING'S DEATH 67 
 
 dependent life between the parts is patent to all. "In a 
 Balcony," certainly one of the finest wrought poems, is 
 only an incident. He is at his best when his field is most 
 narrow — in such a poem as "The Laboratory." 
 
 There is a compensation for these deficiencies of power 
 in that the preference of his mind for a single passion or 
 mood or crisis at its main moment opens to him the plain 
 and imobstructed way to lyrical expression. His dramatic 
 feeling of the passion and the situation supplies an in- 
 tensity which finds its natural course in lyrical exaltation. 
 It may well be thought, if it were deemed necessary to 
 decide upon the best in Browning's work, that his genius 
 is most nobly manifest in those Isnrics and romances which 
 he called dramatic. The scale rises from his argumenta- 
 tive and moralizing verse, however employed, through 
 those monologues which obey the necessity for greater 
 concentration "as the draniatic element enters into them, 
 up to those most powerful and' direct poems in which the 
 intensity of feeling enforces a lyrical movement and lift; 
 and akin to these last are the songs of love or heroism 
 into which the dramatic element does not enter. Indeed, 
 Browning's lyrical gift was more perfect than his dramatic 
 gift; he knew the secret of a music which has witchery 
 in it independent of what the words may say, and when 
 his hand fell on that chord, he mastered the heart with 
 real poetic charm. It was seldom, however, that this 
 happy moment came to him, ennobling his language and 
 giving wing to his emotion; and, such poems being rare, 
 it remains true that the best of his work is to be sought 
 in those pieces, comprehending more of life, where his 
 dramatic power takes on a lyrical measure. Such work 
 became more infrequent as years went on, and he declined 
 again into that' earlier style of wordy ratiocination, of 
 
68 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 tedioiK pleading as of a lawsuit, of mere intellectuality 
 as of the old hair-splitting schoolmen, though he retained 
 the strength and definiteness of mind which mere growth 
 had brought to him, and he occEisionally produced a poem 
 which was only less good than the best of his middle age. 
 The translations from the Greek with which he employed 
 his age stand in a different class from his original poems, 
 and were a fortunate resort for his vigorous but now 
 feebly creative mind. At the end he still applied himself 
 to the interpretation of individual lives, but in choosing 
 them he was attracted even more uniformly by something 
 exceptional, often grotesque, in them, and hence they are 
 more curious and less instructive than the earlier work of 
 the same kind. 
 
 The mass of Browning's writings which has been 
 glanced at as the expression of the reasoning, the dra- 
 matic, or the lyrical impidse in his genius has attracted 
 attention as wide as the English language, and it has 
 been intimated that this success has been won in some 
 degree on other than poetic grounds. It is fair to say, 
 in view of the facts, that many who have felt his appeal 
 to them have found a teacher rather than a poet. Two 
 points in which he reflects his age have been mentioned, 
 but there is a third point which has perhaps been more 
 efficacious than his sense of the relativity of human life 
 or his conviction of the worth of every human soul: he 
 adds to these cardinal doctrines a firm and loudly assev- 
 erated religious belief. It is the more noteworthy because 
 his reasoning faculty might in his time have led him al- 
 most anywhere rather than to the supreme validity of 
 truth arrived at by intuition. This makes his character 
 the more interesting, for the rationalizing mind which sub- 
 mits itself to intuitive faith exactly parallels in Browning 
 
ON BROWNING'S DEATH 69 
 
 the realist with a predominating interest in the soxil. 
 There is no true contradiction in this, no inconsistency; 
 but the combination is unusual. It is natural that, in a 
 time of decreasing authority in formal religion, a poet in 
 Browning's position should wield an immense attraction, 
 and owe something, as Carlyle did, to the wish of his 
 audience to be reassured in their religious faith. Brown- 
 ing had begun with that resolution of the universe into 
 infinite power and infinite love of which something has 
 already been said, and he continued to teach that through 
 nature we arrive at the conception of omnipotence, and 
 through the soul at the conception of love, and he ap- 
 parently finds the act of faith in the belief that infinite 
 power will finally be discerned as the instrument and ex- 
 pression of infinite love. This is pure optimism; and in 
 accordance with it he preaches his gospel, which is that 
 each soul should grow to its utmost in power and in love, 
 and in the face of difficulties — of mysteries in experience 
 or thought — should repose with entire trust on the doc- 
 trine that God has ordered life beneficently, and that we 
 who live should wait with patience, even in the wreck of 
 our own or others' lives, for the disclosure hereafter 
 which shall reconcile to our eyes and hearts the jar with 
 justice and goodness of all that has gone before. This is 
 a system simple enough and complete enough to live by, 
 if it be truly accepted. It is probable, however, that 
 Browning wins less by these doctrines, which are old and 
 commonplace, than by the vigor with which he dogma- 
 tizes upon them; the certainty with which he speaks of 
 such high matters; the fervor, and sometimes the elo- 
 quence, with which, touching on the deepest and most 
 secret chords of the heart's desire, he- strikes out the notes 
 of courage, of hope and vision, and of the foretasted 
 
70 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 triumph. The energy of his own faith carries others 
 along with it; the manliness of his own soul infects others 
 with its cheer and its delight in the struggle of spiritual 
 life on earth; and all this the more because he is learned 
 in the wisdom of the Rabbis, is conversant with modern 
 life and knowledge in all its range, is gifted with intel- 
 lectual genius, and yet displays a faith the more robust 
 because it is not cloistered, the more credible because it is 
 not professional. 
 
 The character of Browning's genius, his individual 
 traits, the general substance of his thought, do not admit 
 of material misconception. It is when the question is 
 raised upon the permanent value of his work that the 
 opportunity for wide divergence arises. That there are 
 dreary wastes in it cannot be gainsaid. Much is now un- 
 readable that was excused in a contemporary book; much 
 never was readable at all; and of the remainder how much 
 will the next age in its turn cast aside? Its serious claim 
 to our attention on ethical, religious, or intellectual 
 grounds may be admitted, without pledging the twentieth 
 century, which will have its own special phases of thought, 
 and thinkers to illustrate them. Browning must live, as 
 the other immortals do, by the poetry in him. It is true 
 he has enlarged the field of poetry by annexing the ex- 
 perience that belongs to the artist and the musician, and 
 has made some of his finest and most original poems out 
 of such motives ; and his wide knowledge has served him 
 in other ways, though it has stiffened many a page with 
 pedantry and antiquarianism. It is true that there is a 
 grotesque quality in some of his work, but his humor in 
 this kind is really a pretense; no one laughs at it; it 
 arouses only an amazed wonder, like the stone masks of 
 some medieval church. In all that he derived from learn- 
 
ON BROWNING'S DEATH 71 
 
 ing and scholarship there is the alloy of mortality; in all 
 his moralizing and special pleading and superfine reason- 
 ing there enters the chance that the world may lose in- 
 terest in his treatment of the subject; in all, except where 
 he sings from the heart itself or pictures life directly and 
 without comment save of the briefest, there is some op- 
 portunity for time to breed decay. The faith he preached 
 was the poetical complement of Carlyle's prose, and pro- 
 ceeded from much the same grounds and by the same 
 steps: believe in God, and act like a man — that was the 
 substance of it. But Carlyle himself already grows old 
 and harsh. The class of mind to which Browning belongs 
 depends on its matter for its life; unless he has trans- 
 formed it into poetry, time will deal hardly with it. 
 
 To come to the question which cannot be honestly set 
 aside, although it is no longer profitable to discuss it. 
 Browning has not cared for that poetic form which 
 bestows perennial charm, or else he was incapable of it. 
 He fails in beauty, in concentration of interest, in 
 economy of language, in selection of the bestjrom the 
 common treasure of experience. In those works where he 
 has been most indifferent, as in the "Red Cotton Night- 
 Cap Coimtry," he has been merely whimsical and dull; in 
 those works where the genius he possessed is most felt, 
 as in "Saul," "A Toccata of Galuppi's," "Rabbi Ben 
 Ezra," "The Flight of the Duchess," "The Bishop Orders 
 his Tomb in St. Praxed's Church," "Herve Riel," "Cav- 
 alier Tunes," "Time's Revenges," and many more, he 
 achieves beauty or nobility or fitness of phrase such as 
 only a poet is capable of. It is in these last pieces and 
 their like that his fame lies for the future. It was his lot 
 to be strong as the thinker, the moralist with "the accom- 
 plishment of verse," the scholar interested to rebuild the 
 
72 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 past of experience, the teacher with an explicit dogma to 
 enforce in an intellectual form with examples from life, 
 the anatomist of human passions, instincts, and impulses 
 in all their gamut, the commentator on his own age; he 
 was weak as the artist, and indulged, often imnecessarily 
 and by choice, in the repulsive form — in the awkward, 
 the obscure, the ugly. He belongs with Jonson, with 
 Dryden, with the heirs of the masculine intellect, the 
 men of power not unvisited by grace, but in whom mind 
 is predominant. Upon the work of such poets time hesi- 
 tates, conscious of their mental greatness, but also of 
 their imperfect art, their heterogeneous matter; at last 
 the good is sifted from that whence worth has departed. 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 That considerable portion of Arnold's writings which 
 was concerned with education and politics, or with phases 
 of theological thought and religious tendency, however 
 valuable in contemporary discussion, and to men and 
 movements of the third quarter of the century, must be 
 set on one side. It is not because of anything there con- 
 tained that he has become a permanent figure of his time, 
 or is of interest in literature. He achieved distinction as 
 a critic and as a poet; but although he was earlier in the 
 field as a poet, he was first recognized by the public at 
 large as a critic. The union of the two functions is not 
 unusual in the story of literature; but where success has 
 been attained in both, the critic has commonly sprung 
 from the poet in the man, and his range and quality have 
 been limited thereby. It was so with Dryden and Words- 
 worth, and, less obviously, with Landor and Lowell. In 
 Arnold's case there was no such growth: the two modes of 
 writing, prose and verse, were disconnected. One might 
 read his essays without suspecting a poet, and his poems 
 without discerning a critic, except so far as one finds the 
 moralist there.. In fact, Arnold's critical faculty belonged 
 rather to the practical side of his life, and was a part of 
 his talents as a public man. 
 
 This appears by the very definitions that he gave, and 
 by the turn of his phrase, which always keeps an audience 
 rather than a meditative reader in view. "What is the 
 function of criticism at the present time?" he asks, and 
 
 73 
 
74 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 answers — "A disinterested endeavor to learn and propa- 
 gate the best that is known and thought in the world." 
 That is a wide warrant. The writer who exercises his 
 critical function under it, however, is plainly a reformer 
 at heart, and labors for the social welfare. He is not an 
 analyst of the form of art for its own sake, or a contem- 
 plator of its substance of wisdom or beauty merely. He 
 is not limited to literature or the other arts of expression, 
 but the world — the intellectual world — is all before him 
 where to choose; and having learned the best that is 
 known and thought, his second and manifestly not in- 
 ferior duty is to go into all nations, a messenger of the 
 propaganda of intelligence. It is a great mission, and 
 nobly characterized; but if criticism be so defined, it is 
 criticism of a large mold. 
 
 The scope of the word conspicuously appears also in 
 the phrase, which became proverbial, declaring that litera- 
 ture is "a criticism of life." In such an employment of 
 terms, ordinary meanings evaporate; and it becomes nec- 
 essary to know the thought of the author rather than the 
 usage of men. Without granting the dictum, therefore, 
 which would be far from the purpose, is it not clear that 
 by "critic" and "criticism" Arnold intended to designate, 
 or at least to convey, something peculiar to his own con- 
 ception, — not strictly related to literature at all, it 
 may be, but more closely tied to society in its general 
 mental activity? In other words, Arnold was a critic of 
 civilization more than of books, and aimed at illumination 
 by means of ideas. With this goes his manner, — that 
 habitual air of telling you something which you did not 
 know before, and doing it for your good, which stamps 
 hipi as a preacher born. Under the mask of the critic is 
 the long English face of the gospeler; that tj^pe whose 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 75 
 
 persistent physiognomy was never absent from the con- 
 venticle of English thought. 
 
 This evangelizing prepossession of Arnold's mind roust 
 be recognized in order to understand alike his attitude of 
 superiority, his stiffly didactic method, and his success in 
 attracting converts in whom the seed proved barren. The 
 first impression that his entire work makes is one of limi- 
 tation; so strict is this limitation, and it profits him so 
 much, that it seems the element in which he had his being. 
 On a close survey, the fewness of his ideas is most sur- 
 prising, though the fact is somewhat cloaked by the lu- 
 cidity of his thought, its logical vigor, and the manner of 
 its presentation. He takes a text, either some formula of 
 his own or some adopted phrase that he has made his own, 
 and from that he starts out only to return to it again and 
 again with ceaseless iteration. In his illustrations, for 
 example, when he has pilloried some poor gentleman, 
 otherwise unknown, for the astounded and amused con- 
 templation of the Anglican monocle, he cannot let him 
 alone. So too when, with the journalist's knack for nick- 
 names, he divides all England into three parts, he cannot 
 forget the rhetorical exploit. He never lets the points he 
 has made fall into oblivion; and hence his work in general, 
 as a critic, is skeletonized to the memory in watchwords, 
 formulas, and nicknames, which, taken altogether, make 
 up only a small number of ideas. 
 
 His scale, likewise, is meager. His essay is apt to be a 
 book review or a plea merely; it is without that free al- 
 lusiveness and undeveloped suggestion which indicate a 
 full mind and give to such brief pieces of writing the sense 
 of overflow. He takes no large subject as a whole, but 
 either a small one or else some phases of the larger one; 
 and he exhausts all that he touches. He seems to have no 
 
76 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 more to say. It is probable that his acquaintance with 
 literature was incommensurate with his reputation or ap- 
 parent scope as a writer. As he has fewer ideas than any 
 other author of his time of the same rank, so he discloses 
 less knowledge of his own or foreign literatures. His 
 occupations forbade wide acquisition; he husbanded his 
 time, and economized also by giving the best direction to 
 his private studies; and he accomplished much; but he 
 could not master the field as any man whose profession 
 was literature might easily do. Consequently, in com- 
 parison with Coleridge ori Lowell, his critical work seems 
 dry and bare, with neither the fluency nor the richness of 
 a master. 
 
 In yet another point this paucity of matter appears. 
 What Mr. Richard Holt Hutton says in his essay on the 
 poetry of Arnold is so apposite here that it will be best to 
 quote the passage. He is speaking, in an aside, of Ar- 
 nold's crticisms: — 
 
 "They are fine, they are keen, they are often true; but they 
 are always too much limited to the thin superficial layer of the 
 moral nature of their subjects, and seem to take little compara- 
 tive interest in the deeper individuality beneath. Read his 
 essay on Heine, and you will see the critic engrossed with the 
 relation of Heine to the political and social ideas of his day, 
 and passing over with comparative indifference the true soul 
 of Heine, the fountain of both his poetry and his cynicism. 
 Read his five lectures on translating Homer, and observe how 
 exclusively the critic's mind is occupied with the form as dis- 
 tinguished from the substance of the Homeric poetry. Even 
 when he concerns himself with the greatest modern poets, — 
 with Shakespeare as in the preface to the earlier edition of his 
 poems, or with Goethe in reiterated poetical criticisms, or when 
 he again and again in his poems treats of Wordsworth, — it is 
 always the style and superficial doctrine of their poetry, not the 
 individual character and unique genius, which occupy him. 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 77 
 
 He will tell you whether a poet is 'sane and clear,' or stormy 
 and fervent; whether he is rapid and noble, or loquacious and 
 quaint; whether a thinker penetrates the husks of conventional 
 thought which mislead the crowd; whether there is sweetness 
 as well as lucidity in his aims; whether a descriptive writer 
 has 'distinction' of style, or is admirable only for his vivacity: 
 but he rarely goes to the individual heart of any of the sub- 
 jects of his criticism; he finds their style and class, but not 
 their personality in that class; he ranks his men, but does not 
 portray them; hardly even seems to find much interest in the 
 individual roots of their character." 
 
 In brief, this is to say that Arnold took little interest in 
 human nature; nor is there anything in his later essays 
 on Byron, Keats, Wordsworth, Milton, or Gray, to cause 
 us to revise the judgment on this point. In fact, so far as 
 he touched on the personality of Keats or Gray, to take 
 the capital instances, he was most unsatisfactory. 
 
 Arnold was not, then, one of those critics who are in- 
 terested in life itself, and through the literary work seize 
 on the soul of the author in its original brightness, or set 
 forth the life-stains in the successive incarnations of his 
 heart and mind. Nor was he of those who consider the 
 work itself final, and endeavor simply to understand it, — 
 form and matter, — and so to mediate between genius and 
 our slower intelligence. He followed neither the psycho- 
 logical nor the esthetic method. It need hardly be said 
 that he was born too early to be able ever to conceive of 
 literatiure as a phenomenon of society, and its great men 
 as only terms in an evolutionary series. He had only a 
 moderate knowledge of literature, and his stock of ideas 
 was small; his manner of speech was hard and dry, there 
 was a trick in his style, and his self-repetition is tiresome. 
 
 What gave him vogue, then, and what still keeps his 
 volumes of essays alive? Is it anything more than the 
 
78 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 temper in which he worked, and the spirit which he 
 evoked in the reader? He stood for the very spirit of in- 
 telligence in his time. He made his readers respect ideas, 
 and want to have as many as possible. He enveloped 
 them in an atmosphere of mental curiosity and alertness, 
 and put them in contact with novel and attractive themes. 
 In particular, he took their minds to the Continent and 
 made them feel that they were becoming cosmopolitan 
 by knowing Toubert; or at home, he rallied them in oppo- 
 sition to the dullness of the period, to "barbarism" or 
 other objectionable traits in the social classes: and he 
 volleyed contempt upon the common multitudinous foe 
 in general, and from time to time cheered them with some 
 delectable examples of single combat. It cannot be con- 
 cealed that there was much malicious pleasure in it all. 
 He was not indisposed to high-bred cruelty. Like Lamb, 
 he "loved a fool," but it was in a mortar; and pleasant it 
 was to see the spectacle when he really took a man in 
 hand for the chastisement of irony. It is thus that "the 
 seraphim illuminati sneer." And in all his controversial 
 writing there was a brilliancy and unsparingness that will 
 appeal to the deepest instincts of a fighting race, willy- 
 nilly; and as one had only to read the words to feel him- 
 self among the children of light, so that our withers were 
 unwrung, there was high enjoyment. 
 
 This liveliness of intellectual conflict, together with the 
 sense of ideas, was a boon to youth especially; and the 
 academic air in which the thought and style always 
 moved, with scholarly self-possession and assurance, with 
 the dogmatism of "enlightenment" in all ages and among 
 all sects, with serenity and security unassailable, from 
 within at least — this academic "clearness and purity 
 without shadow or stain" had an overpowering charm to 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 79 
 
 the college-bred and cultivated, who found the rare com- 
 bination of information, taste, and aggressiveness in one 
 of their own ilk. Above all, there was the play of intelli- 
 gence on every page; there was an application of ideas to 
 life in many regions of the world's interests; there was 
 contact with a mind keen, clear, and firm, armed for con- 
 troversy or persuasion equally, and filled with eager be- 
 lief in itself, its ways^ and its will. 
 
 To meet such personality in a book was a bracing ex- 
 perience; and for many these essays were an awakening 
 of the mind itself. We may go to others for the greater 
 part of what criticism can give, — for definite and funda- 
 mental principles, for adequate characterization, for the 
 intuition and the revelation, the penetrant flash of thought 
 and phrase: but Arnold generates and supports a temper 
 of mind in which the work of these writers best thrives 
 even in its own sphere; and through him this temper be- 
 comes less individual than social, encompassing the whole 
 of life. Few critics have been really less "disinterested," 
 few have kept their eyes less steadily "upon the object" : 
 but that fact does not lessen the value of his precepts of 
 disinterestedness and objectivity; nor is it necessary in 
 becoming "a child of light," to join in spirit the unhappy 
 "remnant" of the academy, or to drink too deep of that 
 honeyed satisfaction, with which he fills his readers,, of 
 being on his side. As a critic, Arnold succeeds if his main 
 purpose does not fail, and that was to reinforce the party 
 of ideas, of culture, of the children of light; to impart, 
 not moral vigor, but openness and reasonableness of 
 mind; and to arouse and arm the intellectual in contra- 
 distinction to the other energies of civilization. i 
 
 The poetry of Arnold, to pass to the second portion of 
 his work, was less widely welcomed than his prose,, and 
 
8o LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 made its way very slowly; but it now seems the more 
 important and permanent part. It is not small in quan- 
 tity, though his unproductiveness in later years has riiade 
 it appear that he was less fluent and abundant in verse 
 than he really was. The remarkable thing, as one turns 
 to his poems, is the contrast in spirit that they afford to 
 the essays: there is here an atmosphere of entire calm. 
 We seem to be in a different world. This fact, with the 
 singular silence of his familiar letters in regard to his 
 verse, indicates that his poetic life was truly a thing 
 apart. 
 
 In one respect only is there something in common be- 
 tween his prose and verse: just as interest in himian 
 nature is absent in the former, it is absent also in the 
 latter. There is no action in the poems; neither is there 
 character for its own sake. Arnold was a man of the 
 mind, and he betrays no interest in personality except 
 for its intellectual traits; in Clough as in Obermann, it is 
 the life of thought, not the human being, that he portrays. 
 As a poet, he expresses the moods of the meditative spirit 
 in view of nature and our moral existence; and he rep- 
 resents life, not lyrically by its changeful moments, nor 
 tragically by its conflict in great characters, but phil- 
 osophically by a self-contained and varying monologue, 
 deeper or less deep in feeling and with cadences of tone, 
 but always with the same grave and serious effect. He 
 is constantly thinking, whatever his subject or his mood; 
 his attitude is intellectual, his sentiments are maxims, his 
 conclusions are advisory. His world is the sphere of 
 thougb(t, and his poems have the distance and repose and 
 also tl<e coldness that befit that sphere; and the character 
 of hif, imagination, which lays hold of form and reason, 
 mak^s natural to him the classical style. 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 8i 
 
 It is obvious that the sources of his poetical culture 
 are Greek. It is not merely, however, that he takes for 
 his early subjects Merope and Empedocles, or that he 
 strives in "Balder Dead" for Homeric narrative, or that in 
 the recitative to which he was addicted he evoked an 
 immelodious phantom of Greek choruses; nor is it the 
 "marmoreal air" that chills while it ennobles much of 
 his finest work. One feels the Greek quality not as a 
 source, but as a presence. In Tennyson, Keats, and 
 Shelley, there was Greek influence, but in them the result 
 was modern. In Arnold the antiquity remains; remains 
 in mood, just as in Landor it remains in form. The Greek 
 twilight broods over all his poetry. It is pagan in phil- 
 osophic spirit; not Attic, but of a later and stoical time, 
 with the very virtues of patience, endurance, suffering, 
 not in their Christian types, but as they now seem to a 
 post-Christian imagination looking back to the imperial 
 past. There is a difference, it is true, in Arnold's expres- 
 sion of the mood: he is as little Sophoclean as he is 
 Homeric, as little Lucretian as he is Virgilian. The 
 temperament is not the same, not a survival or a revival 
 of the antique, but original and living. And yet the 
 mood of the verse is felt at once to be a reincarnation of 
 the deathless spirit of Hellas that in other ages also has 
 made beautiful and solemn for a time the shadowed 
 places of the Christian world. If one does not realize this, 
 he must miss the secret of the tranquillity, the chill, the 
 grave austerity, as well as the philosophical resignation, 
 which are essential to the verse. Even in those parts of 
 the poems which use romantic motives, one reason of 
 their original charm is that they suggest how the Greek 
 imagination would have dealt with the forsaken merman, 
 the church of Brou, and Tristram and Iseult. The pres- 
 
82 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 ence of such motives, such mythology, and such Christian 
 and chivalric color in the work of Arnold does not dis- 
 turb the simple unity of its feeling, which finds no solvent 
 for life, whatever its accident of time and place and faith, 
 except in that Greek spirit which ruled in thoughtful men 
 before the triumph of Christianity, and is still native in 
 men who accept the intellect as the sole guide of life. 
 
 It was with reference to these modern men and the 
 movement they took part in, that he made his serious 
 claim to greatness; to rank, that is, with Tennyson and 
 Browning, as he said, in the literature of his time. "My 
 poems," he wrote, "represent on the whole the main 
 movement of mind of the last quarter of a century; and 
 thus they will probably have their day as people become 
 conscious to themselves of what that movement of mind 
 is, and interested in the literary productions that reflect 
 it. It might be fairly urged that I have less poetical 
 sentiment than Tennyson, and less intellectual vigor and 
 abundance than Browning; yet because I have, perhaps, 
 more of a fusion of the two than either of them, and 
 have more regularly applied that fusion to the main line 
 of modern development, I am likely enough to have my 
 turn, as they have had theirs." If the main movement 
 had been such as he thought it, or if it had been of 
 importance in the long run, there might be a sounder 
 basis for this hope than now appears to be the case; but 
 there can be no doubt, let the contemporary movement 
 have been what it may, that Arnold's mood is one that 
 will not pass out of men's hearts to-day nor to-morrow. 
 
 On the modern side the example of Wordsworth was 
 most formative, and in fact it is common to describe 
 Arnold as a Wordsworthian: and so, in his contemplative 
 attitude to nature, and in his habitual recourse to her, he 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 83 
 
 was; but both nature herself as she appeared to him, and 
 his mood in her presence, were very different from 
 Wordsworth's conception and emotion. Arnold finds in 
 nature a refuge from life, an anodyne, an escape; but 
 Wordsworth, in going into the hills for poetical com- 
 munion, passed from a less to a fuller and deeper life, and 
 obtained an inspiration, and was seeking the goal of all 
 his being. In the method of approach, too, as well as in 
 the character of the experience, there was a profound 
 difference between the two poets. Arnold sees with the 
 outward rather than the inward eye. He is pictorial in a 
 way that Wordsworth seldom is; he uses detail much 
 more, and gives a group or a scene with the externality 
 of a painter. The method resembles that of Tennyson 
 rather than that of Wordsworth, and has more direct 
 analogy with the Greek manner than with the modern 
 and emotional schools; it is objective, often minute, and 
 always carefully composed, in the artistic sense of that 
 jterm. The description of the river Oxus, for example, 
 thou^ faintly charged with suggested and allegoric 
 meaning, is a noble close to the poem which ends in it. 
 The scale is large, and Arnold was fond of a broad lands- 
 scape of mountains, and prospects over the land; but one 
 cannot fancy Wordsworth writing it. So too, on a small 
 scale, the charming scene of the English garden in "Thyr- 
 sis" is far from Wordsworth's manner: — 
 
 "When garden walks and all the grassy floor 
 With blossoms red and white of fallen May 
 
 And chestnut-flowers are strewn — 
 So have I heard the cuckoo's parting cry, 
 From the wet field, through the vext garden trees, 
 Come with the volleying rain and tossing breeze." 
 
84 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 This is a picture that could be framed: how different from 
 Wordsworth's "wandering voice"! Or to take another 
 notable example, which, like the Oxus passage, is a fine 
 close in the "Tristram and Iseult," — the himter on the 
 arras above the dead lovers: — 
 
 "A stately huntsman, clad in green. 
 And round him a fresh forest scene. 
 On that clear forest-knoll he stays. 
 With his pack round him, and delays. 
 
 ****** 
 The wild boar rustles in his lair, 
 The fierce hounds snuff the tainted air, 
 But lord and hounds keep rooted there. 
 Cheer, cheer thy dogs into the brake, 
 hunter! and without a fear 
 Thy golden tasseled bugle blow — " 
 
 But no one is deceived, and the hunter does not move 
 from the arras, but is still "rooted there," with his green 
 suit and his golden tassel. The piece is pictorial, and 
 highly wrought for pictorial effects only, obviously deco- 
 rative and used as stage scenery precisely in the manner 
 of our later theatrical art, with that accent of forethought 
 which turns the beautiful into the esthetic. This is a 
 method which Wordsworth never used. Take one of his 
 pictures, the "Reaper" for example, and see the difference. 
 The one is out-of-doors, the other is of the studio. The 
 purpose of these illustrations is to show that Arnold's 
 nature-pictures are not only consciously artistic, with an 
 arrangement that approaches artifice, but that he is inter- 
 ested through his eye primarily and not through his 
 emotions. It is characteristic of his temperament also 
 that he reminds one most often of the painter in water- 
 colors. 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 85 
 
 If there is this difference between Arnold and Words- 
 worth in method, a greater difference in spirit is to be 
 anticipated. It is a fixed gulf. In nature Wordsworth 
 found the one spirit's "plastic stress," and a near and 
 intimate revelation to the soul of truths that were his 
 greatest joy and support in existence. Arnold finds there 
 no inhabitancy of God, no such streaming forth of wis- 
 dom and beauty from the fountain heads of being; but 
 the secret frame of nature is filled only with the darkness, 
 the melancholy, the waiting endurance that is projected 
 from himself: — 
 
 "Yet, Fausta, the mute turf we tread. 
 The solemn hills about us spread. 
 The stream that falls incessantly. 
 The strange-scrawled rocks, the lonely sky 
 If I might lend their life a voice. 
 Seem to bear rather than rejoice." 
 
 Compare this with Wordsworth's "Stanzas on Peele 
 Castle," and the important reservations that must be 
 borne in mind in describing Arnold as a Wordsworthian 
 will become clearer. It is as a relief from thought, as a 
 beautiful and half-physical diversion, as a scale of being 
 so vast and mysterious as to reduce the pettiness of 
 human life to nothingness, — it is in these ways that 
 nature has value in Arnold's verse. Such a poet may de- 
 scribe natural scenes well, and obtain by means of them 
 contrast to human conditions, and decorative beauty; but 
 he does not penetrate nature or interpret what her signifi- 
 cance is in the human spirit, as the more emotional poets 
 have done. He ends in an antithesis, not in a synthesis, 
 and both nature and man lose by the divorce. One looks 
 in vain for anything deeper than landscapes in Arnold's 
 treatment of nature; she is emptied of her own infinite, 
 
86 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 and has become spiritually void: and in the simple great 
 line in which he gave the sea — 
 
 "The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea — " 
 
 he is thinking of man, not of the ocean: and the mood 
 seems ancient rather than modern, the feeling of a Greek, 
 just as the sound of the waves to him is always ^Egean. 
 
 In treating of man's life, which must be the main thing 
 in any poet's work, Arnold is either very austere or very 
 pessimistic. If the feeling is moral, the predominant 
 impression is of austerity; if it is intellectual, the pre- 
 dominant impression is of sadness; he was not insensible 
 to the charm of life, but he feels it in his senses only to 
 deny it in his mind. The illustrative passage is from 
 "Dover Beach": — 
 
 "Ah, love, let us be true 
 Jo one another! for the world which seems 
 To lie before us like a land of dreams, 
 
 So various, so beautiful, so new. 
 Hath really neither Joy, nor love, nor light, 
 Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain." 
 
 This is the contradiction of sense and thought, the 
 voice of a regret grounded in the intellect (for if it were 
 vital and grounded in the emotions, it would become de- 
 spair) ; the creed of illusion and futility in life, which is 
 the characteristic note of Arnold, and the reason of his 
 acceptance by many minds. The one thing about life 
 which he most insists on is its isolation, its individuality. 
 In the series called "Switzerland," this is the substance 
 of the whole; and the doctrine is stated with an intensity 
 and power, with an amplitude and prolongation, that set 
 these poems apart as the most remarkable of all his lyrics. 
 From a poet so deeply impressed with this aspect of ex- 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 87 
 
 istence, and unable to find its remedy or its counterpart 
 in the harmony of life, no joyful or hopeful word can 
 be expected, and none is found. The second thing about 
 life which he dwells on is its futility; though he bids one 
 strive and work, and points to the example of the strong 
 whom he has known, yet one feels that his voice rings 
 more true when he writes of Obermann than in any other 
 of the elegiac poems. In such verse as the "Summer 
 Night," again, the genuineness of the mood is indubitable. 
 In "The Sick King of Bokhara," the one dramatic ex- 
 pression of his genius, futility is the very centre of the 
 action. The fact that so much of his poetry seems to 
 take its motive from the subsidence of Christian faith 
 has set him among the skeptic or agnostic poets, and the 
 "main movement" which he believed he had expressed 
 was doubtless that in which agnosticism was a leading 
 element. The unbelief of the third quarter of the cen- 
 tury was certainly a controlling influence over him, and 
 in a man mainly intellectual by nature it could not well 
 have been otherwise. 
 
 Hence, as one looks at his more philosophical and 
 lyrical poems — the profounder part of his, work — and 
 endeavors to determine their character and sources alike, 
 it is plain to see that in the old phrase, "the pride of the 
 intellect" lifts its lonely column over the desolation of 
 every page.. The man of the academy is here, as in the 
 prose, after all. He reveals himself in the literary motive, 
 the bookish atmosphere of the verse, in its vocabulary, 
 its elegance of structure, its precise phrase and its curi- 
 ous allusions (involving foot-notes), and in fact, through- 
 out all its form and structure. So self-conscious is it that 
 it becomes frankly prosaic at inconvenient times, and is 
 more often on the level of eloquent and graceful rhetoric 
 
88 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 than of poetry. It is frequently liquid and melodious, 
 but there is no burst of native song in it anywhere. It is 
 the work of a true poet, nevertheless; for there are many 
 voices for the Muse. It is sincere, it is touched with 
 reality; it is the mirror of a phase of life in our times, and 
 not in our times only, but whenever the intellect seeks 
 expression for its sense of the limitation of its own 
 career, and its sadness in a world which it cannot solve. 
 
 A word should be added concerning the personality of 
 Arnold which is revealed in his familiar letters, — a col- 
 lection that has dignified the records of literature with a 
 singularly noble memory of private life. Few who did 
 not know Arnold could have been prepared for the reve- 
 lation of a nature so true, so amiable, so dutiful. In 
 every relation of private life he is shown to have been a 
 man of exceptional constancy and plainness. The letters 
 are mainly home letters; but a few friendships also 
 yielded up their hoard, and thus the circle of private life 
 is made complete. Every one must take delight in the 
 mental association with Arnold in the scenes of his ex- 
 istence, thus daily exposed, and in his family affections. 
 A nature warm to its own, kindly to all, cheerful, fond of 
 sport and fun, and always fed from pure fountains, and 
 with it a character so founded upon the rock, so humbly 
 serviceable, so continuing in power and grace, must wake 
 in all the responses of happy appreciation, and leave the 
 charm of memory. 
 
 He did his duty as naturally as if it required neither 
 resolve, nor effort, nor thought of any kind for the mor- 
 row, and he never failed, seemingly, in act or word of 
 sympathy, in little or great things; and when, to this, 
 one adds the clear ether of the intellectual life where he 
 habitually moved in his own life apart, and the humanity 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 89 
 
 of his home, the gift that these letters bring may be ap- 
 preciated. That gift is the man himself; but set in the 
 atmosphere of home, with sonship and fatherhood, sisters 
 and brothers, with the bereavements of years fully ac- 
 complished, and those of babyhood and boyhood, — a 
 sweet and wholesome English home, with all the cloud 
 and sunshine of the English world drifting over its roof- 
 tree, and the soil of England beneath its stones, and 
 English duties for the breath of its being. To add such 
 a home to the household-rights of English literature is 
 perhaps something from which Arnold would have 
 shrunk, but it endears his memory. 
 
COLERIDGE 
 
 The poetic genius of Coleridge, the highest of his many 
 gifts, found brilliant and fascinating expression. His 
 poems — those in which his fame lives — are as unique 
 as they are memorable; and though their small number, 
 their confined range, and the brief period during which 
 his faculty was exercised with full freedom and power, 
 seem to indicate a narrow veiii, yet the remainder of his 
 work in prose and verse leaves an impression of extraor- 
 dinary and abundant intellectual force. In proportion as 
 his imaginative creations stand apart, the spirit out of 
 which they came must have possessed some singularity: 
 and if the reader is not content with simple esthetic ap- 
 preciation of what the gods provide, but has some touch 
 of curiosity leading him to look into the source of such 
 remarkable achievement and its hxmian history, he is at 
 once interested in the personality of the "subtle-souled 
 psychologist," as Shelley with his accurate critical in- 
 sight first named him; in experiencing the fascination of 
 the poetry one remembers the charm which Coleridge 
 had in life, that quality which arrested attention in all 
 companies and drew men's minds and hearts with a sense 
 of something marvelous in him — "the most wonderful 
 man," said Wordsworth, "that I ever met." The mind 
 and heart of Coleridge, his whole life, have been laid 
 open by himself and his friends and acquaintances with- 
 out reserve in many volumes of letters and memoirs; it 
 is easy to figure him as he lived and to recover his moods 
 
 91 
 
92 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 and aspect: but in order to conceive his nature and define 
 its traits, it is necessary to take account especially of his 
 incomplete and less perfect work, of his miscellaneous 
 interests, and those activities which filled and confused 
 his life without having any important share in establish- 
 ing his fame. 
 
 The intellectual precocity which is the leading trait 
 of Coleridge's boyhood, in the familiar portrait of "the 
 inspired charity-boy" drawn by Lamb from school-boy 
 memories, is not unusual in a youth of genius; but the 
 omnivorousness of knowledge which he then displayed 
 continued into his manhood. He consumed vast quan- 
 tities of book-learning. It is a more remarkable char- 
 acteristic that from the earliest period in which he comes 
 into clear view, he was accustomed to give out his ideas 
 with freedom in an inexhaustible stream of talk. The 
 activity of his mind was as phenomenal as its receptivity. 
 In his college days, too, he was fanatical in all his en- 
 ergies. The remark of Southey after Shelley's visit to 
 him, that here was a young man who was just what he 
 himself had been in his coUege days, is illustrative; for 
 if Southey was then inflamed with radicalism, Coleridge 
 was yet more deeply infected and mastered by that wild 
 fever of the revolutionary dawn. The tumult of 
 Coleridge's mind, its incessant action, the lack of disci- 
 pline in his thought, of restraint in his expression, of 
 judgment in his affairs, are all important elements in his 
 character at a time which in most men would be called 
 the formative period of manhood, but which in him 
 seems to have been intensely chaotic; what is most notice- 
 able, however, is the volume of his mental energy. He 
 expressed himself, too, in ways natural to such self-abun- 
 dance. He was always a discourser, if the name may 
 
COLERIDGE 93 
 
 be used, from the London days at the "Salutation and 
 the Cat" of which Lamb tells, saying that the landlord 
 was ready to retain him because of the attraction of his 
 conversation for customers; and as he went on to the 
 more set forms of such monologue, he became a preacher 
 without pay in Unitarian chapels, a journalist with un- 
 usual capacity for ready and sonorous writing in the 
 press, a composer of whole periodicals such as his ven- 
 tures "The Watchman" and "The Friend," and a lec- 
 turer using only slight notes as the material of his re- 
 marks upon literature, education, philosophy, theology, 
 or whatever the subject might be. In all these methods 
 of expression which he took up one after the other, he 
 merely talked in an ample way upon multifarious topics; 
 in the conversation, sermon, leading article, written dis- 
 course, or flowing address, he was master of a swelling 
 and often brilliant volubility, but he had neither the 
 certainty of the orator nor the unfailing distinction of the 
 author; there was an occasional and impromptu quality, 
 a colloquial and episodical manner, the style of the irre- 
 sponsible speaker. In his earlier days especially, the 
 dominant note in Coleridge's whole nature was excite- 
 ment. He was always animated, he was often violent, he 
 was always without the principle of control. Indeed, a 
 weakness of moral power seems to have been congenital, 
 in the sense that he was not permanently bound by a 
 practical sense of duty nor apparently observant of what 
 place duty has in real life. There was misdirection of his 
 affairs from the time when they came into his own hands; 
 there was impulsiveness, thoughtlessness, a lack of judg- 
 ment which augured ill for him; and in its total effect 
 this amounted to folly. His intoxication with the scheme 
 known as Pantisocracy, by which he with Southey and a 
 
94 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 few like-minded projectors were to found a socialistic 
 community on the banks of the Susquehanna, is the most 
 obvious comment on his practical sense. But his mar- 
 riage, with the anecdotes of its preliminaries (one of 
 which was that in those colloquies with Lamb at the 
 London tavern, so charmingly described by his boon 
 companion, he had forgotten his engagement or was ia- 
 different to it), more strikingly exemplifies the irrespon- 
 sible course of his life, more particularly as it proved to 
 be ill-sorted, full of petty difficulties and makeshift ex- 
 pedients, and in the end a disastrous failure. A radical 
 social scheme and an imprudent marriage might have 
 fallen to his share of human folly, however, without ex- 
 citing remark, if in other ways or at a later time he had 
 exhibited the qualities which would allow one to dismiss 
 these matters as mere instances of immaturity; but where 
 Coleridge's reasonable control over himself or his affairs 
 is looked to, it appears to have been feeble. On the other 
 hand, the constancy of his excitement is plain. It was 
 not only mental, but physical. He was, as a young man, 
 full of energy and capable of a good deal of hard exercise; 
 he had animal spirits, and Wordsworth describes him as 
 "noisy" and "gamesome," as one who 
 
 "His limbs would toss about him with delight, 
 Like branches when strong winds the trees annoy;" 
 
 and from several passages of his own writing, which are 
 usually disregarded, the evidence of a spirit of rough 
 humor and fun is easily obtained. The truth is that 
 Coleridge changed a great deal in his life; he felt himself 
 to be very different in later years from what he was in the 
 time when, to his own memory he was a sort of glorified 
 spirit: and this earlier Coleridge had many traits which 
 
COLERIDGE 95 
 
 are ignored sometimes, as Carlyle ignored them^ and are 
 sometimes remembered rather as idealizations of his 
 friends in their affectionate thoughts of him, but in any 
 event are irreconcilable with the figure of the last period 
 of his life. 
 
 It has been suggested that there was something of 
 disease or at least of ill health in Coleridge always, and 
 that it should be regarded as influencing his tempera- 
 ment. Whether it were so or not, the plea itself shows 
 the facts. If excitement was the dominant note, as has 
 been said, in his whole nature, it could not exist without 
 a physical basis and accompaniment; and his bodily state 
 appears to have been often less one of animation than of 
 agitation, and his correspondence frequently discloses 
 moods that seem almost frantic. In the issue, under 
 stress of pain and trouble, he became an opium-eater; 
 but his physical nature may fairly be described as pre- 
 disposed to such states as lead to the use of opium and 
 also result from its use, with the attendant mental moods. 
 His susceptibility to sensuous impressions, to a voluptu- 
 ousness of the entire being, together with a certain lassi- 
 tude and languor, lead to the same conclusion, which thus 
 seems to be supported on all sides, — that Coleridge was, 
 in his j'outh and early manhood, fevered through all his 
 intellectual and sensuous nature, and deficient on the 
 moral and practical sides in those matters that related to 
 his personal affairs. It iS' desirable to bring this out in 
 plain terms, because in Coleridge it is best to acknowl- 
 edge at once that his character was, so far as our part — 
 the world's part — in him is concerned, of less 
 consequence than his temperament; a subtler and more 
 profound thing than character, though without moral 
 meaning. It is not unfair to say, since literature is to 
 
96 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 be regarded most profitably as the expression of human 
 personality, that with Coleridge the modern literature of 
 temperament, as it has been lately recognized in extreme 
 phases, begins; not that temperament is a new thing in 
 the century now closing, nor that it has been without 
 influence hitherto, but that now it is more often con- 
 sidered, and has in fact more often been, an exclxisive 
 ground of artistic expression. The temperament of Cole- 
 ridge was one of diffused sensuousness physically, and of 
 abnormal mental moods, — moods of weakness, languor, 
 collapse, of visionary imaginative life with a night at- 
 mosphere of the spectral, moonlit, swimming, scarcely 
 substantial world; and the poems he wrote, which are the 
 contributions he made to the world's literature, are based 
 on this temperament, like some Fata Morgana upon the 
 sea. The apparent exclusion of reality from the poems 
 in which his genius was most manifest finds its analogue 
 in the detachment of his own mind from the moral, the 
 practical, the usual, in life as he led it in his spirit; and 
 his work of the highest creative sort, which is all there is 
 to his enduring fame, stands amid his prose and verse 
 composition of a lower sort like an island in the waste of 
 waters. This may be best shown, perhaps, by a gradual 
 approach through his cruder to his most perfect compo- 
 sitions. 
 
 The cardinal fact in Coleridge's genius is that not- 
 withstanding his immense sensuous susceptibilities and 
 mental receptivity, and the continual excitement of his 
 spirit, he never rose into the highest sphere of creative 
 activity except for the brief period called his annus 
 mirabilis, when his great poems were written; and with 
 this is the further related fact that in him we witness the 
 spectacle of the imaginative instinct overborne and sup- 
 
COLERIDGE 97 
 
 plailted by the intellectual faculty exercising its specu- 
 lative and critical functions; and in addition, one ob- 
 serves in his entire work an extraordinary inequality not 
 only of treatment, but also of subject-matter. In general, 
 he was an egoistic writer. His sensitiveness to nature 
 was twofold: in the first place he noticed in the objects 
 and movements of nature evanescent and minute details, 
 and as his sense of beauty was keen, he saw and recorded 
 truly the less obvious and less common loveliness in the 
 phenomena of the elements and the seasons, and this gave 
 distinction to his mere description and record of fact; in 
 the second place he often felt in himself moods induced 
 by nature, but yet subjective, — states of his own spirit, 
 which sometimes deepened the charm of night, for ex- 
 ample, by his enjoyment of its placid aspects, and some- 
 times imparted to the external world a despair reflected 
 from his personal melancholy. In his direct treatment of 
 nature, however, as Mr. Stopford Brooke points out, he 
 seldom achieves more than a catalogue of his sensations, 
 which though touched with imaginative detail are never 
 lifted and harmonized into lyrical unity; though he can 
 moralize nature in Wordsworth's fashion, when he does 
 so the result remains Wordsworth's and is stamped with 
 that poet's originality; and in his own original work 
 Coleridge never equaled either the genius of Shelley, who 
 can identify nature with himself, or the charm of Tenny- 
 son, who can at least parallel nature's phenomena with 
 his own human moods. Coleridge would not be thought 
 of as a poet of nature, except in so far as he describes 
 what he observes in the way of record, or gives a meta- 
 physical interpretation to phenomena. This is the more 
 remarkable because he had to an eminent degree that 
 intellectual power, that overmastering desire of the mind, 
 
98 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 to rationalize the facts of life. It was this quality that 
 made him a philosopher, an analyst, a critic on the great 
 lines of Aristotle, seeking to impose an order of ethics 
 and metaphysics on all artistic productions. But in those 
 poems in which he describes nature directly and without 
 metaphysical thought, there is no trace of anything more 
 than a sensuous order of his own perceptions. Beautiful 
 and often unique as his nature poems are, they are not 
 creative. They are rather in the main autobiographic; 
 and it is surprising to notice how large a proportion of 
 his verse is thus autobiographic, not in those phases of 
 his own life which may be, or at least are thought of, as 
 representative of human life in the mass, but which are 
 personal, such as the lines written after hearing Words- 
 worth read the "Prelude," or those entitled "Dejection." 
 When his verse is not confined to autobiographic expres- 
 sion, it is often a product of his interest in his friends or 
 in his family. What is not personal in it, of this sort, is 
 apt to be domestic or social. 
 
 If we turn from the poems of nature to those con- 
 cerned with man, a similar shallowness, either of interest 
 or of power, appears. He was in early years a radical; 
 he was stirred by the Revolution in France, and he was 
 emotionally charged with the ideas of the time, — ideas 
 of equality, fraternity, and liberty. But this interest died 
 out, as is shown by his political verse. He had none but 
 a social and a philosophical interest in any case. Man, 
 the individual, did not at any time attract him. There 
 was nothing dramatic in his genius, in the narrow and 
 exact sense; he did not engage his curiosity or his phil- 
 osophy in individual fortunes. It results from this limi- 
 tation that his verse lacks human interest of the dramatic 
 kind. The truth was that he was interested in thought 
 
COLERIDGE 99 
 
 rather than in deeds, in human nature rather than in its 
 concrete pity and terror. Thus he did not seize on life 
 itself as the material of his imagination and reflection. 
 In the case of man as in the case of nature he gives us 
 only an egoistic account, telling us of his own private 
 fortune, his fears, pains, and despairs, but only as a 
 diary gives them; as he did not transfer his nature im- 
 pressions into the world of creative art, so he did not 
 transfer his personal experiences into that world. 
 
 What has been said would 'perhaps be accepted, were 
 it not for the existence of those poems, "The Ancient 
 Mariner," "Christabel," "Kubla Khan," which are the 
 marvelous creations of his genius. In these it will be said 
 there is both a world of nature new created, and a dra- 
 matic method and interest. It is enough for the purpose 
 of the analysis if it be granted that nowhere else in Cole- 
 ridge's work, except in these and less noticeably in a few 
 other instances, do these high characteristics occur. The 
 very point which is here to be brought out is that Cole- 
 ridge applied that intellectual power, that overmastering 
 desire of the mind to rationalize the phenomena of life, 
 which has been mentioned as his great mental trait, — 
 that he applied this faculty with different degrees of 
 power at different times, so that his poetry falls naturally 
 into higher and inferior categories; in the autobiographic 
 verse, in the political and dramatic verse which form so 
 large a part of his work, it appears that he did not have 
 sufficient feeling or exercise sufficient power to raise it out 
 of the lower levels of composition; in his great works of 
 constructive and impersonal art, of moral intensity or ro- 
 mantic beauty and fascination, he did so exercise the 
 creative imagination as to make these of the highest rank, 
 or at least one of them. 
 
100 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 "The Ancient Mariner," apart from its many minor 
 merits, has this distinction in Coleridge's work, — it is a 
 poem of perfect unity. "Christabel" is a fragment, 
 "Kubla Khan" is a glimpse; and though the "Ode to 
 France," "Love," "Youth and Age," and possibly a few 
 other short pieces, have this highest artistic vir- 
 tue of unity, yet in them it is of a simpler kind. 
 "The Ancient Mariner," on the other hand, is 
 a marvel of construction in that its imity is less 
 complex than manifold; it exists, however the form be 
 examined. In the merely external sense, the telling of 
 the tale to the Wedding Guest, with the fact that the 
 wedding is going on, gives it unity; in the merely internal 
 sense, the moral lesson of the salvation of the slayer of 
 the albatross by the medium of love felt toward living 
 things, subtly yet lucidly worked out as the notion is, 
 gives it unity: but in still other ways, as a story of con- 
 nected and consequential incidents with a plot, a change 
 of fortune, a climax, and the other essentials of this 
 species of tale-telling, it has unity; and if its conception 
 either of the physical or the ethical world be analyzed, 
 these too — and these are the fundamental things — are 
 found consistent wholes. It nevertheless remains true 
 that this system of nature as a vitalized but not human- 
 ized mode of life, with its bird, its spirit, its magical 
 powers, is not the nature that we know or believe to be, 
 — it is a modern presentation of an essentially primitive 
 and animistic belief; and similarly this system of human 
 life, — if the word human can be applied to it, with its 
 dead men, its skeleton ship, its spirit sailors, its whole 
 miracle of spectral being, — is not the life we know or 
 believe to be; it is an incantation, a simulacrum. It may 
 still be true therefore that the imaginative faculty of 
 
COLERIDGE loi 
 
 Coleridge was not aplied either to nature or human life, 
 in the ordinary sense. And this it is that constitutes 
 the uniqueness of the poem, and its wonderful fascina- 
 tion. Coleridge fell heir, by the accidents of time and the 
 revolutions of taste, to the ballad style, its simplicity, 
 directness, and narrative power; he also was most at- 
 tracted to the machinery of the supernatural, the weird, 
 the terrible, almost to the grotesque and horrid, as these 
 literary motives came into fashion in the crude beginnings 
 of romanticism in that time; his subtle mind, his fine 
 senses, his peculiar susceptibility to the mystic and shad- 
 owy in nature, — as shown by his preference of the 
 moonlight, dreamy, or night aspects of real nature, to 
 its brilliant beauties in the waking world, — gave him 
 ease and finesse in the handling of such subject-matter; 
 and he lived late enough to know that all this eerie side 
 of human experience and imaginative capacity, inherited 
 from primeval ages but by no means yet deprived of 
 plausibility, could be effectively used only as an allegoric 
 or scenic setting of what should be truth to the ethical 
 sense; he combined one of the highest lessons of ad- 
 vanced civilization, one of the last results of spiritual 
 perception, — the idea of love toward life in any form, — 
 with the animistic beliefs and supernatural fancies of the 
 crude ages of the senses. This seems to be the substan- 
 tial matter; and in this he was, to repeat Shelley's phrase, 
 the "subtle-souled psychologist." The material of his 
 imagination, on the sensuous side, was of the slightest: 
 it was the supernaturalism of the romantic movement, 
 somewhat modified by being placed in connection with 
 the animal world; and he put this to use as a means of 
 illustrating spiritual truth. He thus became the first of 
 those who have employed the supernatural in our recent 
 
102 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 literature, without losing credence for it, as an allegory 
 of psychological states, moral facts, or illusions real to 
 the eye that sees them and having some logical relation 
 to the past of the individual; of such writers Hawthorne 
 and Pbe are eminent examples, and both of them, it may 
 be remarked, are writers in whom temperament rather 
 than character is the ground of their creative work. The 
 intimate kinship between imagination so directed and the 
 speculative philosophical temper is plain to see. In 
 "Christabel," on the other hand, the moral substance is 
 not apparent: the place filled by the moral ideas which are 
 the centers of the narrative in "The Ancient Mariner," is 
 taken here by emotional situations; but the supernat- 
 uralism is practically the same in both poems, and in 
 both is associated with that mystery of the animal world 
 to man, most concentrated and vivid in the fascination 
 ascribed traditionally to the snake, which is the animal 
 motive in "Christabel" as the goodness of the albatross is 
 in "The Ancient Mariner." In these poems the good and 
 the bad omens that ancient augurs minded are made again 
 dominant over men's imagination. Such are the signal 
 and unique elements in these poems, which have besides 
 that wealth of beauty in detail, of fine diction, of liquid 
 melody, of sentiment, thought, and image, which belongs 
 only to poetry of the highest order, and which is too 
 obvious to require any comment. "Kubla Khan" is a 
 poem of the same kind, in which the mystical effect is 
 given almost wholly by landscape; it is to "The Ancient 
 Mariner" and "Christabel" what protoplasm is to highly 
 organized cells. 
 
 If it be recognized, then, that the imagery of Coleridge 
 in the characteristic parts of these cardinal poems is as 
 pure allegory, is as remote from nature or man, as is the 
 
COLERIDGE 103 
 
 machinery of faery-lahd and chivalry in Spenser, for ex- 
 ample, and he obtains credibility by the psychological 
 and ethical truth presented in this imagery, it is not sur- 
 prising that his work is small in amount; for the method 
 is not only a difficult one, but the poetic machinery itself 
 is limited and meager. The poverty of the subject-matter 
 is manifest, and the restrictions to its successful use are 
 soon felt. It may well be doubted whether "Christabel" 
 would have gained by being finished. In "The Ancient 
 Mariner" the isolation of the man is a great advantage; if 
 there had been any companion for him, the illusion could 
 not have been entire: as it is, what he experiences has 
 the wholeness and truth within itself of a dream, or of a 
 madman's world, — there is no standard of appeal out- 
 side of his own senses and mind, no real world; but in 
 "Christabel" the serpentine fable goes on in a world of 
 fact and action, and as soon as the course of the story in- 
 volved this fable in the probabilities and actual occur- 
 rences of life, it might well be that the tale would have 
 turned into one of simple enchantment and magic, as 
 seems likely from what has been told of its continuation; 
 certainly it could not have equaled the earlier poem, or 
 have been in the same kind with it, unless the unearthly 
 magic, the spell, were finally completely dissolved into 
 the world of moral truth as is the case with "The Ancient 
 Mariner." Coleridge found it still more impossible to con- 
 tinue "Kubla Khan." It seems a fair inference to con- 
 clude that Coleridge's genius, however it suffered from 
 the misfortunes and ills of his life, was in these works 
 involved in a field, however congenial, yet of narrow 
 range and infertile in itself. In poetic style it is to be 
 observed that he kept what he had gained; the turbid 
 diction of the earlier period never came back to trouble 
 
104 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 him, and the cadences he had formed stUl gave their 
 music to his verse. The change, the decline, was not in 
 his power of style; it was in his power of imagination, if 
 at all, but the fault may have laid in the capacities of the 
 subject-matter. A similar thing certainly happened in his 
 briefer ballad poetry, in that of which "Love," "The 
 Three Graces," "Alice Du Clos," and "The Dark Ladie," 
 are examples; the matter there, the machinery of the ro- 
 mantic ballad, was no longer capable of use; that sort of 
 literature was dead from the exhaustion of its motives. 
 The great "Ode to France," in which he reached his 
 highest point of eloquent and passionate expression, 
 seems to mark the extinction in himself of the revolu- 
 tionary impulse. On the whole, while the excellence of 
 much of the remainder of his verse, even in later years, is 
 acknowledged, and its originality in several instances, 
 may it not be that in his greatest work Coleridge came to 
 an end because of an impossibility in the kind itself? 
 The supernatural is an accessory rather than a main 
 element in the interpretation of life which literary genius 
 undertakes; Coleridge so subordinates it here by making 
 it contributory to a moral truth; but such a practice 
 would seem to be necessarily incidental to a poet who was 
 also so intellectual as Coleridge, and not to be adopted 
 as a permanent method of self-expression. 
 
 From whatever cause, the fact was that Coleridge 
 ceased to create in poetry, and fell back on that fluent, 
 manifold, voluminous faculty he possessed of absorbing 
 and giving out ideas in vast quantities, as it were by 
 bulk. He attended especially to the theory of art as he 
 foimd it illustrated in the greatest poets, and he popu- 
 larized among literary men a certain body of doctrine re- 
 garding criticism, its growth and methods; and in later 
 
COLERIDGE 105 
 
 years he worked out metaphysical theological views which 
 he inculcated in ways which won for him recognition as 
 a practical influence in contemporary church opinion. In 
 these last years of his lecturing and discoursing in pri- 
 vate, the figure he makes is pathetic, though Carlyle de- 
 scribes it with a grim humor, as any one may read in the 
 Life of Sterling: over against that figure should be set 
 the descriptions of the young Coleridge by Dorothy 
 Wordsworth and Lamb; and after these perhaps the con- 
 trast which Coleridge himself draws between his spirit 
 and his body may enable a reader to fuse the two — 
 youth and age — into one. Whatever were the weak- 
 nesses of his nature and the trials of his life, he was 
 deeply loved by friends of many different minds, who 
 if they grew cold, had paid at least once this tribute to 
 the charm, the gentleness, and the delight of his himian 
 companionship. 
 
SHELLEY'S WORK 
 
 The centenary of Shelley's birth will be duly observed 
 with public ceremonies in England and Italy — the land 
 that bore him and drove him forth, and the land that 
 sheltered him and now guards his grave, both equally 
 his home in the eyes of the world; but in the private 
 thoughts of many single lives the day of his birth will be 
 silently remembered with tenderness, with gratitude, and 
 with a renewal of faith in the things in which he believed. 
 Personal devotion must naturally enter into these feel- 
 ings, for such days are to commemorate a life, and they 
 bring the man back with peculiar power. To win un- 
 known friends, age after age, is a privilege of the poet; it 
 is his reward — the greater because it can touch him no 
 more — for the open trust in mankind with which he 
 confides, to whosoever will, the secret things of his spirit. 
 Yet, to make a poet's personality the main element in his 
 memory, if he be really great, confines his fame too nar- 
 rowly. Attractive as Shelley was, his worth did not lie 
 wholly in his charm. Interest in his life may become de- 
 graded into ignoble curiosity, and, in time's balance, 
 love's gift is less weighty than reason's award. 
 
 Recognition of noble human traits is an important part 
 of justice done to the dead; but it is not thus that Shelley 
 would wish to be judged. Chaucer's question, "How shall 
 the world be served?" was the alpha and omega of his 
 life. It inspired his youthful prose; as his faculties grew 
 and the poet emerged from the thinker, it governed the 
 
 107 
 
io8 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 most intense expression of his soul in manhood; it ab- 
 sorbed him, as he himself said, with that passion for re- 
 forming the world which was elemental in his genius. It 
 is true that the artistic and the practical instincts in him 
 worked together imperfectly, and that at times of despair 
 he fell back upon himself, pure poet, pouring his heart 
 out in lyrical effusion, with cadences of pain that fill our 
 eyes with tears. But he took heart again, and returned, 
 though always more wearied, to the large interests of the 
 race. He believed that man is the poet's muse; at the 
 height of his aspiration, singing with the skylark, he still 
 remembered that the poet's "unbidden hymns" are the 
 means by which the world shall be wrought to sympathies 
 with unheeded hopes and fears; in the depth of his de- 
 jection he still prayed that the wind might blow abroad 
 the poet's words, "as from an unextinguished hearth 
 ashes and sparks," to be an enkindling prophecy through- 
 out the world — "my words among mankind." What he 
 believed true poets are he told in a familiar passage of 
 his prose — "the hierophants of an unapprehended in- 
 spiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which 
 futurity casts upon the present; the words which express 
 what they understand not; the trumpets that sing to 
 battle and feel not what they inspire; the influence which 
 is moved not, but moves." 
 
 One hundred years have passed since he was born, and 
 two generations have been buried since his ashes were 
 laid by the Roman wall. It is reasonable to ask whether 
 he had any share in this prophetic power, brooding on 
 things to come, which is the mystical endowment of 
 poetic genius; whether he anticipated time in those far 
 thoughts forecasting hope, which he declared to be the 
 substance of poetic intuition; whether he be one of those 
 
SHELLEY'S WORK 109 
 
 who, in his own phrase, rule our spirits from their urns, 
 with power still vital in the chaotic thought and striving 
 of mankind. "Poets," he said, concluding the impas- 
 sioned words just quoted, "are the unacknowledged legis- 
 lators of the world." If the phrase seems the mere 
 enthusiasm of eloquence, yet so opposite a mind as John- 
 son's ratifies it. "He," said the old doctor concerning 
 the poet, "must write as the interpreter of nature and 
 the legislator of mankind, and consider himself as pre- 
 siding over the thoughts and manners of future genera- 
 tions." To leave, then, Shelley's charm, his character, 
 and all his private life, which the world well knows; to 
 leave analysis and criticism, since any occasion will serve 
 for such examination of the propriety of his moral 
 method in poetry, and its beneficial or injurious effects 
 upon his work, of the truth of his imagination and of its 
 nearness or remoteness in human interest and reality, of 
 his art, the speed and exaltation of his luminous elo- 
 quence, the piercing tone of his lyrical song — to leave 
 such matters, I say, of merely personal or literary con- 
 cern, what has the century past disclosed in regard to 
 Shelley's S)mipathies with the next ages, and the vitality 
 of his energy in the forces that advance mankind? The 
 influences that blend in progress are many and various; 
 the fore-knowledge of the most clear-sighted is vague 
 and doubtful, and the wisest contributes only his portion 
 to the great result. But, this being allowed, in what 
 sense and how far was Shelley prophetic of the time to 
 come, and an element in its coming? 
 
 The spirit of discontent has been a presiding genius in 
 literature since the reflective life of man began. The 
 imaginative creation of ideal commonwealths marks its 
 
no LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 conquest of political thought, and the dream of the golden 
 age its victory in poetry. So long is it since the inspira- 
 tion that governed Shelley has been active in minds like 
 his own. The "Republic" of Plato, however, and that 
 eclogue of the yoxmg Virgil which won for him a place 
 /among the prophets of Christ, though they are the highest 
 reach of literature in such expression, are negative; they 
 condemn what is, by a poetic escape into a world that 
 should be. With the rise of democracy the positive ex- 
 pression of discontent, in those parts of literature which 
 reflect the life of society as distinguished from individual 
 life, has become more direct, comprehensive, and telling. 
 In the last century, in particular, the world was coming 
 to a consciousness of its own misery. The state of man 
 was never more bitterly set forth than by Swift, nor more 
 drearily than by Johnson. Comfortable and self-satis- 
 fied as that century is often described, it was the dark 
 soil in which the seeds of time were germinating. It 
 ended in dry skepticism, cold rationalism, and finally 
 in that utilitarian preoccupation of the mind which was 
 a European mood. 
 
 The first effort toward better things, as is apt to be the 
 case, was political. The Revolution broke. The hope- 
 fulness of that time, when in the year of Shelley's birth 
 Wordsworth said, " 'Twas bliss to be alive, but to be 
 young was very heaven," is perhaps that one of its phases 
 which is now realized with most difficulty. It reminds 
 one of the faith of the early Church in the immediate 
 coming of the reign of Christ on earth. When Shelley 
 began to think and feel, and became a living soul, the 
 first flush of dawn had gone by; but the same hopefulness 
 sprang up in him, it was invincible, and it made him the 
 poet of the Revolution, of which he was the child. So 
 
SHELLEY'S WORK iii 
 
 far as the Revolution was speculative or moral, he re- 
 flected it completely. Its commonplaces were burning 
 truths in his heart; its ferment was his own intellectual 
 life; its confusions, its simplicities, its misapprehensions 
 of the laws of social change, were a part of himself. It 
 would be wrong to ascribe the crudities of Shelley's 
 thought merely to his immature and boyish development: 
 they belonged quite as much to the youth of the cause; he 
 received what he was taught in the form in which his 
 masters held it. The ease with which genius thrives upon 
 any food, and turns all to use, might be astonishing were 
 it not so commonly to be observed; but its transforma- 
 tions are sometimes bewildering. Like fire from heaven 
 Shelley's genius fell upon the dry bones of rationalism, 
 and they rose up, a spirit of beauty and of power. It 
 was the same change that took place when philosophy 
 went out into the streets of Paris, and in the twinkling of 
 an eye was made a flaming maenad. It was the wand of 
 the Revolution touching the soul of man. Shelley was, in 
 truth, in the whirl of forces which he only half under- 
 stood, vaster than he knew, with destinies dimly adum- 
 brated in his own spirit, like the poet of his own eloquent 
 description. The Revolution was, in Gray's phrase, "the 
 Mighty Mother" of this child; she showed him the world- 
 old vision of the Saturnian reign that has ever hung over 
 Italy, yet more fair than the fairest of all our lands; 
 she set him in the footprints of Plato; and she filled his 
 heart with many hatreds. 
 
 The principles and remedies which Shelley adopted 
 were of the utmost simplicity. Principles and remedies 
 must be simple in order to be capable of wide application 
 in the reform of society. He was not an original thinker. 
 He had the enormous receptive and assimilative power 
 
112 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 which characterizes high genius, and he made it his func- 
 tion to give lofty and winning expression to the ideas that 
 he felt to be of ennobling and beneficent power over men. 
 He had also a strongly practical temperament; and he 
 wished to apply ideas as well as to express them, and in 
 his own life he was always restlessly doing what he 
 thought, linking the word with an act, carrjdng convic- 
 tion to the extreme issue of duty performed. It was this 
 union of the practical and speculative instincts, each 
 highly developed, which, under the breath of his poetic 
 nature, made his S5mipathies with reform so intense that 
 he might well describe them as a passion. Yet his po- 
 litical, social, and religious beliefs were nothing unusual. 
 They have been called superficial; but they were so, in 
 the main, in no other sense than are the principles of 
 democracy, philanthropy, and intellectual liberty. They 
 were the simple truths whose acceptance by the world 
 goes on so slowly. He adopted the right of private judg- 
 ment, and with it the right of the individual to put his 
 beliefs in action; the first discredited for him the excel- 
 lence of the existing order, and brought him quickly into 
 conflict with prevailing opinion; the second, in its turn, 
 occasioned a more serious collision with that existing 
 order itself, which met him in the form of custom, in- 
 tolerance, and force. These three things he hated, be- 
 cause he hated most of all injustice, of which they were 
 the triple heads. In all this he had the ordinary fortune 
 of the revolutionist. He was face to face with the enemy. 
 The power of custom in society, which Wordsworth had 
 described, "heavy as frost and deep almost as life"; the 
 venom of intolerance, the foe against which Locke had 
 armed him; the supremacy of force, if it be invoked, in 
 which the long history of tyranny had instructed him — 
 
SHELLEY'S WORK 113 
 
 these stood in his way, and only his own indignant verse 
 can express the violence of the hatred and contempt they 
 excited in his breast. 
 
 What were the tenets that had so involved him in oppo- 
 sition to the social opinion of his own country that he 
 went into voluntary exile? His atheism stands first be- 
 cause it caused his expulsion from Oxford. What was 
 this atheism in substance? He had conceived the divine 
 power in terms of the historic Jehovah, and its relation to 
 man under the Christian dispensation in terms of the 
 legal definitions of an obsolescent theology; nor can it be 
 gainsaid that these notions coincided with the ideas then 
 prevalent, but not realized with the same distinctness in 
 the moral consciousness of those who held them as in 
 Shelley's. When he began to think, this conception was 
 antagonized in two ways. In the first instance he ac- 
 quired some rudimentary metaphysics, and it became 
 necessary to reconcile an anthropomorphic conception of 
 deity with a philosophical definition. In the second in- 
 stance he developed an ideal of goodness, and it became 
 necessary to reconcile the divine virtue, as shown in the 
 same historic conception of deity, with the voice of his 
 own conscience. He took the short and easy, but nat- 
 ural method, and denied the truth of the original con- 
 ception. The metaphysical difficulty, however little it 
 may vex mature minds, was a real one to him; and in 
 connection with it Newman's statement may profitably 
 be recalled, that no question is hedged about with more 
 difficulties than the being of God. The moral difficulty, 
 also, was a real one; and Robertson, whose Christian 
 faith and sincerity none can doubt, was right in defending 
 Shelley's decision and saying, "Change the name, and I 
 will bid that character defiance with you." This was 
 
114 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 Shelley's atheism — on the one hand, a philosophical 
 definition, and on the other, the humanizing of a pre- 
 Christian and medieval idea of God in accordance with 
 that moral enlightenment which Christianity itself has 
 spread through the world. Shelley expressed his denial 
 in terms of blasphemy, as the words were then under- 
 stood; but the "almighty fiend" whom he denoimced 
 was as much an idol as Dagon or Moloch. 
 
 What has the issue been? The conception which 
 Shelley attacked with such vehemence no longer finds a 
 voice in public discussion. It is as dumb as the ideas 
 which once suggested such picturesquely lurid titles to 
 the sermons under which our fathers trembled and trans- 
 gressed. Today the philosophical definition would be 
 less difficult to frame, and it would awake no serious 
 hostility; the moral ideal, too, is enthroned in religious 
 conceptions as securely as in the conscience of man. It 
 would be idle to say that advance has not been made, or 
 to deny that it has pursued the lines of Shelley's instincts, 
 his intellectual questioning, and his moral S}mipathies. 
 Merely as a polemical writer he stood in the necessary 
 path of progress; but as a poet, he vastly strengthened 
 that moral enthusiasm which after his death regenerated 
 religion as it had before inspired politics. He impressed 
 his own moral ideal on those whom he influenced, and 
 the old conception became as impossible for them as for 
 him. Other forces united in the general tendency, for all 
 things spiritual drew that way; nor is it possible to dis- 
 tinguish his share in the change that has passed over 
 English theology in this country. But some sentences 
 of the Rev. Stopford Brooke are apposite, and the opinion 
 of such an observer may be allowed weight upon the 
 question of Shelley's place in this field. "He indirectly 
 
SHELLEY'S WORK 115 
 
 made," says this writer, "as time went on, an ever-in- 
 creasing number of men feel that the will of God could 
 not be in antagonism to the universal ideas concerning 
 man, that His character could not be in contradiction to 
 the moralities of the heart, and that the destiny He willed 
 for mankind must be as universal and as just and loving 
 as Himself. There are more clergymen and more re- 
 ligious laymen than we imagine who trace to the emotion 
 Shelley awakened in them when they were young their 
 wider and better views of God," Whether this be true 
 to the extent indicated is immaterial. It is enough if it 
 becomes clear that Shelley's "atheism" was, by its revolt, 
 the sign and promise of that liberalized thought and more 
 humane feeling in respect to the divine dealing with men 
 which characterized the religious progress of the time; 
 that his denial has been sustained by the common con- 
 science of mankind; and that the affirmations of the 
 moral ideal which he made have been strengthened by 
 years as they passed by, and have spread and been ac- 
 cepted as noble expressions of the conviction and aspira- 
 tion of the men who came after him. Whether Shelley 
 intended these results in the precise form that they took 
 is also immaterial. It probably never entered his mind 
 that clergjanen would thank him for a liberalized ortho- 
 doxy, any more than that Owenites would use Queen Mab 
 as an instrument in their propaganda, and thus give the 
 widest circulation to that one of his poems which he 
 would have suppressed. Certainly he had a conscious 
 purpose to destroy old religious conceptions and to 
 quicken the hearts of men with new ideals, not religious, 
 but moral. If both results came about, under the favor 
 of time, and were such as the poet meant them to be, as 
 in some measure was the case, and yet the influence also 
 
ii6 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 operated in an unexpected way by the reaction of the 
 awakened conscience on the narrower faith to its lib- 
 eralization instead of its destruction, this does not affect 
 the reality of Shelley's work; it affords rather an example 
 of that element in the poet through which, as Shelley 
 said, he is an instrimient as well as a power, and in 
 neither capacity is wholly conscious of his significance. 
 
 The second tenet which immediately drew upon him 
 scandal and obloquy was his belief that legal marriage 
 was not a proper social institution. He had derived the 
 opinion from his teachers, and held it in common with 
 other reformers of the age. It is a view that from time 
 to time arises in minds of an entirely pure and virtuous 
 disposition under the stress of a rigorous and undiscrimi- 
 nating law. The state of women under English law was 
 then one of practical servitude, and in the case of unfit 
 marriages might become, and sometimes was, deplorable. 
 The continuance of forced union, on the side of either 
 man or woman, after affection or respect ceased, was 
 revolting to Shelley, the more so in proportion to the 
 refinement and purity of his own poetic idealization of 
 the relation of love. The helpless condition of woman 
 under such circumstances appealed to him as a violation 
 of justice and of liberty as well as a degradation of love. 
 If since his time the rights of married women have been 
 recognized by important and really sweeping changes in 
 their legal status, and if the bonds of the legal tie have 
 been relaxed, in both instances it was an acknowledg- 
 ment of the reality of the social wrongs which were the 
 basis of his conviction. If there is less tendency among 
 reformers to attack the institution of marriage, and the 
 subject has ceased to be conspicuous, though still oc- 
 casionally manifest, it is because the removal of the more 
 
SHELLEY'S WORK 117 
 
 oppressive and tjnrannic elements in the difficulty has 
 relieved the situation. The belief of Shelley in love with- 
 out marriage was an extreme way of stating his disbelief 
 in marriage without love, as the law of England then 
 was. There was, too, a positive as well as a negative side 
 to his conviction, but in this he merely repeated the 
 dream of the golden age, and asserted that in the ideal 
 commonwealth love and marriage would be one; and 
 this has been the common theme of Utopians, whether 
 poets or thinkers, in all ages. In other words, it may 
 reasonably be held that, in this case as in that of his 
 atheism, an extreme view was taken; but in relation to 
 the time and to the reforms made since then, his ideas of 
 marriage held in them the substantial injustice of a state 
 of facts then existing and the lines of tendency along 
 which advance was subsequently made. He reflected the 
 age, and he foreshadowed the future; though the results, 
 just as in the case of religion, consist in a modification, 
 and not in demolition, of the ideas which he antagonized. 
 Shelley's atheism, however, and his views of legal 
 marriage, have had a disproportionate attention directed 
 to them because of their close relation to the events 
 of his own Ufe. These were not the things in his 
 philosophy for which he most cared. In the matter 
 of marriage, though he acted on his belief in taking his 
 second wife without a divorce from his first, in both 
 unions he went through the form of marriage. He would 
 never have so compromised with the world in an opinion 
 which was a point of conscience with him. If it had been 
 a question of the freedom of the press, or of the welfare 
 of the masses, he would have stood by his conviction 
 though they sent him to prison or the scaffold. The 
 affairs which he took an active interest in, and en- 
 
ii8 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 deavored to make practical, were political. At first the 
 freedom of the press was nearest to him, and he helped 
 with S5mipathy or money those whom he knew to be 
 singled out for persecution by the Government; then the 
 state of Ireland, Catholic emancipation, the putting of 
 reform to the vote, the condition of the poor, exercised 
 his mind and called out such labors as were open to him; 
 at a still later time the Manchester riots, the revolutions 
 on the Continent, and such larger matters engaged his 
 enthusiasm. He was the most contemporary of all poets. 
 His keen interest in what was going on was characteristic; 
 he lost no occasion which gave him opportunity to use 
 the question of the moment to spread his general prin- 
 ciples. His immediate response to the hour is noticeable 
 from the time, for example, of the death of the Princess 
 Charlotte, on which he wrote a pamphlet, to that of the 
 Greek rising, on which he composed a lyric drama. What 
 poet before ever had occasion, as he did in the preface to 
 "Hellas," to beg "the forgiveness of my readers for the 
 display of newspaper erudition to which I have been 
 reduced"? The words are most significant of the spirit 
 of his life. It is also not useless to observe that a share 
 of Shelley's violence, especially in early years, is due to 
 the fact that he was actually in the arena and taking 
 blows in his own person. Such a man does not, between 
 the ages of seventeen and twenty-four, write with the 
 same equable restraint as a student in his library; he is 
 not likely to hold opinions in temperate forms; and if, 
 like Shelley, he is by nature sensitive to injury and re- 
 sentful of it, his language takes heat and may become 
 extravagant. What he struggled with was not only 
 thought, but fact. It was to his advantage, doubtless, 
 that he removed to Italy, where, being less irritated, he 
 
SHELLEY'S WORK 119 
 
 was able to express his abstract ideas in the quiet and 
 undisturbed atmosphere of imaginative poetry. 
 
 These abstract ideas, his scheme of society, were ac- 
 quired in his youth, and they were, as has been said, of 
 the utmost simplicity. He adopted the doctrine known 
 as that of the perfectibility of man. It is especially as- 
 sociated with the name of Condorcet. Shelley believed 
 that society could be made over in such a way that 
 virtue would prevail and happiness be secured. He 
 thought that institutions should be abolished and a new 
 rule of life substituted. He did not enter upon details. 
 The present was wrong; let it cease: that was the whole 
 of the matter. It was a form of what is now called 
 nihilism. The state of society that existed seemed to 
 him real anarchy. "Anarchs" was a favorite word with 
 him for kings and all persons in power. His hatred was 
 consequently centred on the established order. It was 
 a government of force, and therefore he hated force; 
 kings and priests were its depositaries, he hated them; 
 war was its method, he hated war. The word is not too 
 strong. Gall flows from his pen when he mentions any of 
 these things. Their very names are to him embodied 
 curses. If the system he saw prevailing in Europe bred 
 in him such hatred, its results in practice filled him with 
 pity. He was susceptible to the sight of suffering and 
 misery, and almost from boyhood the effort to relieve 
 wretchedness by personal action characterized him. He 
 could endure the sight of pain as little as the sight of 
 wrong. The lot of the poor, wherever he came upon it in 
 experience or in description, stirred his commiseration to 
 the depth of his heart. He was one of those born to bear 
 the sufferings of the world, in a real and not a sentimental 
 or metaphorical sense. He had seen the marks of the 
 
I20 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 devastation of war in France;, he knew the state of the 
 people under tyrannical rule; he was as well aware of 
 the degradation of the English masses as of the stagnation 
 of Italy. Wherever he looked, the fruits of government 
 were poverty, ignorance, hopelessness, in vast bodies of 
 mankind. There was nothing for it but the Revolution, 
 and heart and soul he was pledged to that cause. 
 
 But his hopes went far beyond the purposes of a 
 change to be brought about by force for limited political 
 ends; such an event involved the destruction of forms of 
 power which he wished to see destroyed, and might re- 
 sult in amelioration, since force become popular was 
 better than force that remained aristocratic; but his 
 heart was set upon a change of a far different nature, 
 more penetrating, more universal, more permanent — 
 nothing less than that "divine result to which the whole 
 creation moves." Since Shelley, in common with the 
 thinkers of his time, believed that the world's wretched- 
 ness was due to political misrule, and could be obviated 
 by a change of institutions, he was on his practical side 
 in alliance with every expression of revolutionary force; 
 but he had an ideal side, and in his poetry it was this 
 that found ej^jression. He sang the golden age; time 
 and again he returned to the theme, of which he could 
 not weary, from the hour of youth when he poured forth 
 the story of man's perfect state in eloquence still burn- 
 ing with first enthusiasm, to the impassioned moment 
 when he created the titanic forms of his highest lyrical 
 drama, and bade the planetary spirits discourse in spheral 
 music the pean of peace on earth, good will to men. The 
 paradise of "The Revolt of Islam," the isle of seclusion in 
 "Epipsychidion," the echoes of the Virgilian song in 
 "Hellas," like "Queen Mab" and "Prometheus Unbound," 
 
SHELLEY'S WORK 121 
 
 show the permanence before his rapt eyes of that vision 
 of heaven descended upon earth which has fascinated the 
 poets of all times. Yet how transform this "world's woe" 
 into that harmony? Shelley's command was as simple, 
 as direct, as Christ's — "Love thy neighbor." No; there 
 was nothing novel in it, nothing profound or originaL It 
 is so long now since man's knowledge of what is right 
 has outrun his will to embody it in individual life and the 
 institutions of society, that new gospels, were they pos- 
 sible, are quite superfluous. What Shelley had that other 
 men seldom have was faith in this doctrine, the will to 
 practice it, the passion to spread it. There may be to 
 our eyes something pathetic in such simplicity, as the 
 belief of boyhood in goodness is pathetic in the sight of 
 the man; something innocent, as we say, in such un- 
 worldliness, and again we intimate the eternal child in 
 the poet's heart; but it is the simplicity and innocence — 
 the pathos it may be — of what Christ taught. That 
 Shelley believed what he said cannot be doubted. He 
 thought that men might, if they would, love their fellow- 
 men, and then injustice would of itself cease, being dried 
 at its source, and that reign of mutual helpfulness, of the 
 common sharing of the abundance of the earth's harvest, 
 of man's enfranchisement from slavery to another's lux- 
 urious wants, would begin; war, poverty, and tyranny, 
 force and fraud, greed, indulgence, and crime would be 
 abolished. It was too obvious to need consideration; man 
 was capable of perfection, and the method to attain to 
 it was love, and this way once adopted, as it could be, by 
 the fiat of each individual will, would enthrone justice and 
 spread virtue throughout the world. It was not reason 
 that withstood this doctrine, but custom, tradition, inter- 
 ested individuals and classes, the active and law-in- 
 
122 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 trenched power of institutions established for the security 
 and profit of the few — a whole order of society resting 
 upon a principle opposite to love, the principle of organ- 
 ized force. If this time-incrusted evil, this blind and 
 deaf and dixmb authority of wrong long prevalent, this 
 sorry scheme of accepted lies, coxild be destroyed at a 
 stroke, a simple resolve in each breast would bring heaven 
 on earth. 
 
 This was Shelley's creed. It may be false, impracti- 
 cable, and chimerical; it may be a doctrinaire's philos- 
 ophy, an enthusiast's program, a poet's dream: but that it 
 has points of contact and coincidence with gospel truth is 
 plain to see; and in fact Shelley's whole effort may be 
 truly described as an incident in that slow spread of 
 Christian ideas whose assimilation by mankind is so par- 
 tial, uneven, imperfect, so hesitating, so full of com- 
 promise, so hopeless in delay. He had disengaged once 
 more from the ritual of Pharisees and the things of Caesar 
 the original primitive commands, and made them as 
 simple as conscience; he may have been wrong in the 
 sense that these things are impossible to man in society; 
 but if he was in error, he erred with a greater than Plato. 
 
 But it is not necessary to carry the matter so far. 
 Shelley was a moralist, but he used the poet's methods. 
 He declared the great commands, and he denounced 
 wrong with anathemas; but he also gave a voice to the 
 lament of the soul, to its aspirations and its ineradicable, 
 if mistaken, faith in the results of time; and the ideas 
 which he uttered with such affluence of expression, such 
 poignancy of sympathy, such a thrill of prophetic tri- 
 umph, are absorbed in the spirit which poured them 
 forth — in its indignation at injustice, its hopefulness of 
 progress, its complete conviction of the righteousness of 
 
SHELLEY'S WORK 123 
 
 its cause. He has this kindling power in men's hearts. 
 They may not believe in the perfectibility of man under 
 the conditions of mortal life, but they do believe in his 
 greater perfection; and Shelley's words strengthen them 
 in effort. No cause that he had greatly at heart has re- 
 treated since his day. There are thousands now, where 
 there were hundreds then, who hold his beliefs. The 
 Revolution has gone on, and is still in progress, though 
 it has yet far to go. What part he has had in the in- 
 crease of the mastering ideas of the century is inde- 
 terminable. He was dead when his apostolic work began. 
 His earliest and unripe poem, "Queen Mab," was the 
 first to be caught up by the spirit of the times, and was 
 scattered broadcast; and wherever it fell it served, be- 
 yond doubt, to unsettle the minds that felt it. Crude as 
 it was, it was vehement and eloquent; and the crudities 
 which have most offense in them are of the sort that 
 make the entrance of such ideas into uneducated minds 
 more easy. It was nearer intellectually to these minds 
 than a better poem would have been. Rude thoughts not 
 too carefully discriminated are more powerful revolu- 
 tionary instrimients than more exact truths in finer 
 phrases. "Queen Mab" was certainly the poem by which 
 he was long best known. The first revival of his works 
 came just before the time of the Reform Bill, and they 
 were an element in the agitation of men's minds; but his 
 permanent influence began with the second revival, ten 
 years later, when his collected works were issued by his 
 widow. Since then edition has followed edition, and with 
 every fall of his poems from the presses of England and 
 America new readers feel the impulse of his passion, 
 blending naturally with the moral and political inspira- 
 tion of an age which has exhausted its spiritual force in 
 
124 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 pursuit of the objects that he bade men seek. Democ- 
 racy, of which philanthropy is the shadow, has made 
 enormous gains; the cause is older and social analysis 
 has gone farther than in his day; his denunciation of 
 kings and priests seems antiquated only because the at- 
 tack is now directed on the general conditions of society 
 which make tyrannical power and legalized privilege pos- 
 sible under any political organization, and in industrial 
 and commercial as well as military civilizations; his ob- 
 jects of detestation seem vague and unreal only because a 
 hundred definite propositions, developed by socialistic 
 thought, — any one of which was more rife with danger 
 than his own elementary principles, — have been put 
 forth without any such penalty being visited upon their 
 authors as was fixed upon him. This advance, and 
 more, has been made. The consciousness of the masses, 
 both in respect to their material position and their power 
 to remedy it, has increased indefinitely in extent and in 
 intensity in all countries affected by European thought; 
 socialism, anarchism, nihilism are names upon every lip, 
 and they measure the active discontent of those strata of 
 society last to be reached by thought except the bour- 
 geoisie. Whatever revolutionary excess may unite with 
 the movement, the stream flows in the direct course of 
 Shelley's thought with an undreamt vehemence and mass. 
 That he still implants in others that passion of his for 
 reforming the world is not questioned; his works have 
 been a perennial fountain of the democratic spirit with 
 its philanthropic ardor. As in the other phases of his 
 influence, so in this its grand phase, his work has been in 
 modification instead of demolition of the social order; it 
 has been only one individual element in a world-move- 
 ment issuing from many causes and sustained from many 
 
SHELLEY'S WORK 125 
 
 sources; but here too he fiilfils his own characterization 
 of the poet, imperfectly conscious of his own meanings, 
 dimly prophetic of what shall be, belonging to the future 
 whose ideas come into being through his intuitions, sym- 
 pathies, and longings. 
 
 Shelley's genius, then, it must be acknowledged, had 
 this prescience by which it seized the elements of the 
 future yet inchoate, and glorified them, and won the 
 hearts of men to worship them as an imagined hope, and 
 fervently to desire their coming. If one thing were to be 
 sought for as the secret of his power on man, I should 
 say it was his belief in the soul. No poet ever put such 
 unreserved trust in the human spirit. He laid upon it 
 the most noble of all ideal tasks, and inspired it with 
 faith in its own passion. "Save thyself," he said, and 
 showed at the same time the death in which it lay, the 
 life of beauty, love, and justice to which it was born as to 
 a destiny. Virtue in her shape how lovely, hvunanity 
 throughout the world how miserable, were the two visions 
 on which he bade men look; and he refused to accept 
 this antithesis of what is and what ought to be as in- 
 evitable in man's nature or divine providence; it re- 
 mained with man, he said, to heal himself. He was 
 helped, perhaps, in his faith in the human spirit by the 
 early denial he made of religion as interpreted by the 
 theology of his period; for him salvation rested with man, 
 or nowhere. In later years he made love the principle, 
 not only of human society, but of the government of the 
 universe; it was his only conception of divine power; 
 but he never reconciled in thought this mystical belief 
 with the apparent absence of this divine element from 
 its lost provinces in human life. He promised men in 
 their effort no other aid than the mere existence, in the 
 
126 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 universe, of beneficent laws of which mankind could 
 avail itself by submitting thereto. The doctrine of the 
 power of the himian spirit to perfect itself, and the ne- 
 cessity of the exercise of this power as the sole means of 
 progress, remained in unaffected integrity. This fim- 
 damental conviction is one that has spread equally with 
 the democratic idea or the philanthropic impulse. The 
 immediacy of the soul as the medium of even revealed 
 truth is a conception that clarifies with each decade, and 
 it is in harmony with Shelley's most intimate convictions, 
 with those tendencies and dispositions of his tempera- 
 ment so natural to him that they were felt rather than 
 thought. But in such analysis one may refine too much. 
 It is meant only to illustrate how completely, in the re- 
 cesses of his nature as well as in definite manifestation of 
 his thought, he was the child, intellectually and morally, 
 of the conquering influences implicit in his age, so readily 
 apprehensive of them that he anticipa,ted their power in 
 the world, so intensely S3Tnpathetic that he embodied 
 them in imagination before the fullness of time, so com- 
 pelled to express them that he was their prophet and 
 leader in the next ages. 
 
 By his own judgment, therefore, of what great poets 
 are, he must be placed among them, and the office of 
 genius, as he defined it, miist be declared to be his. The 
 millennium has not come, any more than it came in the 
 first century. The cause Shelley served is still in its 
 struggle; but those to whom social justice is a watchword, 
 and the development of the individual everywhere in 
 liberty, intelligence, and virtue is a cherished hope, miist 
 be thankful that Shelley lived, that the substance of his 
 work is so vital, and his influence, inspiring as it is be- 
 yond that of any of our poets in these ways, was, and 
 
SHELLEY'S WORK 127 
 
 is, so completely on the side of the century's advance. 
 His words are sung by marching thousands in the streets 
 of London. No poet of our time has touched the cause 
 of progress in the living breath and heart-throb of men 
 so close as that. Yet, remote as the poet's dream always 
 seems, it is rather that life-long singing of the golden age, 
 in poem after poem, which most restores and inflames 
 those who, whether they be rude or refined, are the 
 choicer spirits of mankind, and bring, with revolutionary 
 violence or ideal imagination, the times to come. They 
 hate the things he hated; like him they love, above all 
 things, justice; they share the passion of his faith in 
 mankind. Thus, were his own life as dark as Shake- 
 speare's, and had he left unwritten those personal lyrics 
 which some who conceive the poet's art less nobly would 
 exalt above his grander poems, he would stand preem- 
 inent and almost solitary for his service to the struggling 
 world, for what he did as a quickener of men's hearts by 
 his passion for supreme and simple truths. If these 
 have more hold in society now than when he died, and if 
 his influence has contributed its share, however blended 
 with the large forces of civilization, he has in this sense 
 given law to the world and equaled the height of the 
 loftiest conception of the poet's significance in the spir- 
 itual life of man. Such, taken in large lines and in its 
 true relations, seems to me the work for which men should 
 praise Shelley on this anniversary, leaving mere poetic 
 enjoyment, however delightful, and personal charm, how- 
 ever winning, to other occasions. 
 
CERVANTES 
 
 Cervantes, noble by blood, was born pooic* An in- 
 fancy at Alcala de Henares, boyhood at Valladolid, youth 
 at Madrid; from such early years he emerges into the 
 half lights of biography in the two worlds of arms and 
 letters. He was certainly the poet of his school, for his 
 master praised and printed the verse of his "dear and 
 beloved pupil"; and why should we not believe he was 
 that same Miguel de Cervantes, page at court, who for 
 ruffling there in an affair of gallantry was condemned to 
 ten years' exile and tojiave his right hand cut off^nd£s=^ 
 caped to hiding? fTh as easy as deer-stealin^Y^^ut 
 whether as a cavalier in flight, or as a protege more 
 peacefully picked up, Cervantes left Madrid at twenty- 
 one in the train of the Papal Ambassador, Monsignor Ac- 
 quaviva, a fortunate Italian youth two years his senior 
 and a patron of art and letters; and, as a gentleman in 
 attendance upon him, traveled to Rome. 
 
 There in a city which was still the world's high capi- 
 tal the young Spanish provincial, half poet, half gallant, 
 came into touch with life in the large. He learned Ital- 
 ian, then the master tongue of literature; in the palace 
 he mingled with the most cultivated society of the world 
 and heard much high-bred discussion; he came to rec- 
 ognize that something barbarous and belated which for- 
 eign nations found in the literature of his own land. 
 Cervantes had a soul capable of great enthusiasms. At 
 Rome, in 1570, a great cause was in the air. It was one 
 
 129 
 
130 \ LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 of the oldest of great causes, "A Crusade! A Crusade!" 
 was the cry. The Turks were storming C3^rus; they 
 threatened Venice; they filled the African coast; they 
 held the sea. Was the Mediterranean to be a Turkish 
 lake? It appealed to Cervantes because it was a Chris- 
 tian cause, and he was of the "old Christian blood" that 
 for centuries had waged the duel with the Moors, to whom 
 the Turks were heirs. It appealed to him because it be- 
 longed to the glory of Spain, with her vice-royalties 
 strewn in Italy and on the islands, to crush the infidel. 
 And it appealed to him because he was young. Don 
 John of Austria, whose figure stood out in Southern 
 Catholic chivalry with a brilliancy of knighthood not un- 
 like Sidney's in the Puritan North, in its power to awake 
 the imagination of the generous and the jealousies of the 
 cold and mean, was the leader of the cause. Cervantes's 
 choice was a foregone conclusion. Qf_by the spirit he was 
 a writer, by the flesh he was a sold iefTl ^ In that adven- 
 turous age a Spaniard, though a genius, was born for 
 roving and for arms. When his young patron, Acqua- 
 viva, following the pleasant Italian way, put on the 
 Cardinal's hat at twenty-four, Cervantes left the ante- 
 chamber and enlisted in the Spanish ranks. 
 
 A year later, the sun of Lepanto breaking, October 7, 
 1571, the young recruit, sick and weak with fever, lay 
 below on the galleon, "Marquesas." At noon, the fight 
 being on, he pleaded his duty against the remonstrances 
 of his comrades, came on deck, and was stationed by the 
 long boat in command of twelve men. At night, the 
 fight over, he lay there with two gun-shot wounds in the 
 breast and his left hand shattered. It was a fruitless 
 victory, men say to-day; then it was the greatest sea- 
 fight of the world. To Cervantes it remained his "one 
 
CERVANTES 131 
 
 crowded hour of glorious life." Five years he was in 
 these wars, in barracks and on campaigns. He served 
 at Navarino, Corfu, Tunis, Sardinia, Sicily, and in Italy 
 — one fair last year at Naples. Don John himself and 
 the Sicilian viceroy bore testimony to his good conduct. 
 He sailed for home, was captured, taken to Algiers, and 
 fell to the spoils of a Greek renegade as a Christian slave. 
 Five years more he was in these bonds. Once he was 
 sold to the Dey, Hassan, for five hundred ducats, an in- 
 teresting fact, the prfce of a world-genius as a slave not 
 being often quoted. 
 
 His character now shone conspicuous. Two things 
 marked him out among thousands: He was first in the 
 eyes of the captives — to plan, to encourage and to un- 
 dertake. He was the central plotter of daring escapes 
 for himself and his comrades, by twos and threes, and by 
 scores, by land and by sea. He even dreamed of a gen- 
 eral rising and a Spanish rescue of all the sufferers. Has- 
 san said, "could he preserve himself against the maimed 
 Spaniard, he would hold safe his Christians, his ships 
 and his city." He was first also in the respect of his mas- 
 ters. Repeatedly detected, he refused to abandon his 
 attempts; often threatened and with the noose about his 
 neck, in the full peril of such atrocities as he frequently 
 saw inflicted, with unbroken constancy he shielded others 
 and took all danger on himself. Yet he was never once 
 struck. A certain readiness of jesting speech — helped 
 perhaps, like Lamb's, by his stammer — seems to have 
 served him at such times. His security, nevertheless, is 
 inexplicable. A wilder tale than this of his captivity one 
 does not read in books of reality. He was already on 
 board ship for transportation to Constantinople, when 
 the long efforts of his good mother, together with the 
 
132 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 aid of a subscription in Algiers among the merchants by 
 the hands of a Redemptionist Father, bought his freedom. 
 So the decamping court page of twenty came back to 
 Spai n at thirty-th reg, a crippled soldier anda ransomed 
 slave. 
 
 He became a king's officer, a commissary to collect 
 stores for naval adventures, like that great one of the 
 Armada, and a tax-gatherer. He got embarrassed with 
 courts and officers, a trusted agent defaulted, and he was 
 more than once in prison. He had married a wife. Dona 
 Catalina, not a fortune, but she brought him — here 
 opens the domestic interior — besides some vineyards, 
 "two linen sheets, one good blanket and one worn, tables, 
 chairs, a brazier, a grater, several sacred images, one 
 cock, and forty-five pullets." His house was the general 
 refuge of the women of the family; there, in 1605, were 
 living his wife, his natural daughter, two sisters, and a 
 niece; the women took in needlework, and Cervantes 
 himself by that time had become apparently a general 
 business agent and made out papers for customers who 
 called on him. 
 
 The jail, the tax coUectorship, the long-suffering pov- 
 erty — are they not the familiar marks of that other pro- 
 fession, the career of letters? "Pen never blunted lance, 
 nor lance the pen," he said; one failing, he took the other. 
 Strong by nature, he_ cared fo r success, and with go od 
 sense he sough tJlig, the beatentracgTTlSei^eved odr 
 casions, he followed^e~fasEionan3lSe!jaa*kei,^^ 
 •"^3n~Ein^. It was the age of artificial sentiment; and 
 he wrote a shepherd book, like Sidney's "Arcadia," a 
 tangle of intrigue, rhetoric and love-plaining verse. It 
 was the age of the rising drama; and he tried the play, 
 staging realistic scenes from his life in Algiers. It was 
 
CERVANTES 133 
 
 the age of the European short story; and he tried the 
 tale, creating that variety of it which springs from direct 
 observation of manners. Twenty years of such labors, 
 a range from the finished whimsies of fashionable courtly 
 fancy to the hard realism of the thieves' market, and he 
 had not yet succeeded; but his mind comprised the 
 theater of life, and he was trained in all the modes of 
 literary art. " Don Quixote," when it app e ared in his 
 fif ty-eighth v eaivwas.Jhe-bQQ k of a wise]o KLman. RT 
 popular success did not bring him friends or money. Ten 
 years later the second part was issued. 
 
 The grave old man, on the verge of seventy, was near 
 his end; a figure of medium height, an oval face, with 
 chestnut hair, a Roman nose, vivid complexion, and "the 
 silvery beard that twenty years ago was golden" — so he 
 describes himself. Though he mingled much with men 
 all his life, he appears in the retrospect singularly soli- 
 tary. Not bred in the university, he had never been 
 accepted by those of the schools; he had led an inde- 
 pendent career, frank of speech, careless of enmity, aloof 
 from every clique, acquainted with the strength and 
 weakness of all, soberly judging even his young rival, 
 Lope de Vega, the darling of the age. No one who saw 
 him moving with the stooped shoulders and the slow gait, 
 thought bow future ages would have prized some living 
 portrait of that face, nor guessed that this stammerer 
 was the world- voice of Spain; none of the religious 
 brotherhood he joined to secure his funeral rites, as they 
 followed him "with his face uncovered," a little unno- 
 ticed company, knew that the greatest Spaniard was 
 there consigned to an obscure and now forgotten grave. 
 
 Cervantes himself could not have foreknown the na- 
 ture of his fame. He did not perceive the relative 
 
134 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 importance of "Don Quixote" among his works. Not 
 recognizing that he had broken out the modern path, he 
 went back to the old ways. He again sought the honors 
 of the poet in his "Journey to Parnassus." He fell in 
 with the opinion of his friends that his "Persiles and 
 Sigismunda" would reach "the extreme of possible good- 
 ness," and be "the best composed in our language, of 
 books of entertainment"; he died still projecting a sequel 
 to his first pastoral romance, "Galatea," He was in no 
 haste to take up and finish the second part of "Don 
 Quixote." Literature_$g as in -tJiuse- ilays-, by thoji tandard 
 of taste and in .trfidU''"", ajhin g of refinement, elfv?<^inT\j 
 style, i n matter noble, in manner conventional; and thg 
 conscio us ambitio H-ot-Cei3;antesclu ng to thi£ dyingxlas: 
 ,siasnr~for faue reputation, "Don Quixote" was never 
 planned to be~a great book. It was "engendered in a 
 prison," perhaps a by-thought of his mind, as a parody 
 of the romances of chivalry. Cervantes was apt to have 
 a purpose in his writings. In his realistic plays he meant 
 to bring home to men's bosoms that cause of the freeing 
 of Algiers which was his only practical dream in life and 
 lingered long; in his novels he professed that they were 
 exemplary or moral tales; and in "Don Quixote" he de- 
 clared that his only aim was to destroy the popular 
 chivalric romance which he looked on as a false and 
 harmful mode of fiction. In his first sketch he found it, 
 perhaps, vulgar in matter and barren in topic, too slight 
 a theme tp bear his genius; he tried to heighten it by 
 introducing independent tales either wholly foreign or 
 loosely connected, and episodes of gallantry more closely 
 yet carelessly interwoven with the main plot, ^ T^e book 
 g rew under his hand, and almos t xJiapged it s nafi ^rpjn^ 
 the second part, v^i gre there is nothing extraneous; it 
 
CERVANTES , 135 
 
 displaye d a depth of type and a rg ach of discourse eqiial 
 
 to the power o f any g eniuS_iQr- rrpatinn nr rffflprtirm^ 
 
 a nd: gadiered to^ itc^^lf wifli I'TiJinite variffy t]i£_iinjvfrsn1 
 significance of life . Though Cervantes grew conscious 
 of its intimacy with his own spirit, it is only on the last 
 page that he declares the identity of the work with him- 
 self. He had gradually put into it, substantially, all he 
 was — all he had seen, all he knew — without being 
 aware of what he had done till it was done; and, like 
 Columbus, he was never fully aware of what he had 
 done. "Don Quixote" announced a new age. 
 
 Cervantes was not in advance of his age. A great book 
 greatens with time; and the seed-vessels which it con- 
 tains Time rifles, and scatters its germinal forces through- 
 out the world and ripens them in the bosom of a broad 
 humanity; but the vitality of these belongs to the human 
 spirit and is a thing apart from the individuality of the 
 original author. MeiL_liay£ _found i n_Cfirvajites--a— re- 
 former, ^ a. frpp-thinkp r, a rpnsnr nf r hi,irrh_anrl State, a 
 modern pessimist j— all. the vexed brood of restless s pirits 
 of &e latter day s.) Hfi-Has none of IhesSD He was a 
 man of his coimtry and age, and accepted the world as it 
 was about him. He observed its elements, its operations 
 — summed the general result of life; but h e had n o^ 
 t hought of changing what was . TheJdea. Df change, the 
 re volutionary idea, w as out of h is-ken. Cervantes was 
 part and parcel of the present, whole with his time; a 
 loyal subject, a true Catholic. He approved of the expul- 
 sion of the Moors. He had a liberal outlook on the for- 
 eign world, shown especially by his fair words for 
 England, Spain's foe; and at home he saw the political 
 and even the ecclesiastical organization as human institu- 
 tions subject to defect in persons, means and all their 
 
136 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 temporalities; if divinely instituted, they were humanly 
 constituted. Institutional life he saw in its right pro- 
 portions as a part of fixed mortal routine, belonging es- 
 sentially in the material sphere — the body politic, the 
 body ecclesiastic. He was concerned with life in other 
 phases. He was a natural critic; judgment was one of his 
 principal gifts, shown not only in minor literary notices 
 that stud the way, but in the large in those discourses 
 which richly interweave the narrative or arise out of the 
 dialogue, ttirning eloquently to monologue under the 
 flame of thought; and in the creative parts he was a critic 
 of life. He was a great critic of life just because he had 
 no ulterior aim either reformatory or humanitarian. Not 
 the practical modification of V^'^j ^^t lif** '" t^^f p'''^°pprt, 
 but its imaginative cont emplation, li fe in ^e retrospect, 
 wa r"nis sph erg: It is an old man's Ijook To-him_life 
 was ex ternally a spectac le , and in himsel La. function; as 
 a function it had been a gradually disillusioning enthu- 
 siasm; as a s pectacle it had beco me an increas ing imny 
 An enthusiastic youth is apt to be followed by an ironical 
 old age. In the South, especially, young passion begot 
 these pleasant ironies of later years, and the Mediter- 
 ranean literature, except in the greatest, is well divided 
 between young passion and old irony, whose blend in 
 "Don Quixote" attains to greatness. Its chance "en- 
 gendering in a prison" is in itself ironical; its destiny to 
 enthrall the world is the very fatalism of the grotesque 
 in life. A madman and a fool, a horse and ass, seeking 
 adventures in a world as it is, go faring forth on the great 
 empty Spanish plains: what mortal interest can there be 
 in their doings or their fate? 
 
 "Don Quixote" is the book of Spain. Its theater is the 
 Spanish land. It is a book of the open air and the broad 
 
CERVANTES 137 
 
 world. It has for landscape the burning plains, the deso- 
 late romantic mountains, tbe strip of blue by the coast; 
 its outlook is along the Mediterranean world by the 
 highway of the islands that Cervantes had traveled in 
 youth, whence men came back with tales of sea-fitght and 
 captivity; o n the long Northern -edge- 4av Protestan tism 
 li ke a high mountain ra ggg, audi ts over-sea Jiorizons 
 stretched away Jo _Peru and th e Indies. I t is a bool? . 
 written in Spain'asfrom the cen ter of the world , andjthis 
 Spain was filled wit h its ownToIk : the race-mark of "the 
 old Christian blood," of dark-skinned Moor and gipsy 
 was stamped on them; they^ame-ferth-ffi-aU-theitvariety 
 of jife ^hidalgo, bourgeoise,_ Bic aresque, ducal, provinc ial, 
 i ntellectual, young an djddjgao d and bad , soldieri^studentj 
 and priest, innkeepers, crim iBals,---playef&r~peasajits, 
 lovers, highwaymen^arber§^. ear ners, judggs^ officials, 
 doctors, in gn^grie^n£n»-damsels, duennas- — an endtess 
 1^. Scarce any book has so many people in it. This 
 mass js p ut in rr)ns;tajQ|; mnvpq ient which giv es^unwearied- 
 li veliness to the sce ne.) SOT a book of life on theroa3^»' 
 All the w orld is en voyage . The galley slaves are there; 
 "even the dead are going a journey. The delineation of 
 manners is on the national scale. Only the high digni- 
 taries of Church and State are exempt from the general 
 conscription. The Court and the great ecclesiastics are 
 not seen, but their absence only proves how small a part 
 exalted officials have in constituting the character of a 
 people. The Spanish folk is represented in its racial life 
 without them, and the portrayal is nationally complete. 
 Cervantes deals with this multitude easily, taking them 
 individually and a few at a time. fUjsjL book of short 
 flj^t s. of inci dents-4ightly-doveta^led,"fYf srpnpg strnng 
 together, of combinations rapidly Jo rmed an d dissolved. 
 
138 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 The characters are seized like Holbein's in the "Dance of 
 Death," only here the dramatic moments are as various 
 as the manifold situations of the living range of human 
 affairs; the pictures and groupings are nevertheless on a 
 similar limited scale, momentary and shifting, and each 
 perso n is chara cterized with his own habit of life, caugfit 
 in EisTown worldTa nd shown completely "m' STTew str okgs. 
 How many such small scenes crowd to the memory iThe 
 muleteer trolling the snatch of Roncesvalles in the dark 
 morning of El Toboso; the student singing on his way to 
 the wars, the puppet-show, the lion, and in low life, the 
 disasters of the night at the inn; innumerable vivid 
 sketches! Th us the book is. by its surface, rep resenta- 
 tJYfi -of all Spain, of the look of the lan d , the fibres of th e 
 peop le, the dailv event and b u^inf^^ "f Jj'ft^ — B«t-it-iS^ 
 ceeds the mere flat pictorial method. It is more richly 
 bodied forth. 
 
 About all this panorama there is what gives wholeness 
 to life. There is a world-pe rs perfivp nf thp larger pres- 
 ent, that secular environment of contemporaneity found 
 in Shakespeare's plays, and here sig^eib5£jaeans_of_Ae 
 rnntipi^ni1<; I'nTQa d of the Turkish power into the stn ry. 
 T hereJ s^Jusl^ical background,^tiost clearly r ^g^ffl 
 in Jhe. pnpii)ar ^knowledge of db^ vilncTomance, andjp 
 
 the fact that every o ne knows o f rhivalr-y. n nrlTia jih r^ar- 
 
 actefr-ge ngiatter Ho aZJi umble. ^telcffrTifrffrralTiTaf-afl AJn- 
 staS taneous attitude j o^ards-4>0B^Qmxate~almest-~aa-if 
 KTwere an e^ected_giiest. /^e blend of ballad history 
 with this romance helps the effect!\ This whole Spanish 
 folk inhabits knightly ground, and preserves its tradi- 
 tion and sentiment. There is also an emotional fond, a 
 part of national character, interpreted here by the inces- 
 sant gallantry of love in operatic episodes, by the shep- 
 
CERVANTES 139 
 
 herds, the serenades, the runaways, the youthfulness of 
 love, its sentimental sufferings, the folly of its escapades, 
 all its charms and senselessness. And there are in the 
 Spanish nature of the book qualities more abstractly 
 felt — intrigue and trick, ceremonial, grandiloquence, 
 boasting, gullibility, mendacity, coarseness, cruelty — 
 himian qualities all, but here with their Spanish physi- 
 ognomy. "Don Quixote," even in its national aspects, is 
 a book that has all the dimensions of life, personal, geo- 
 graphical, historical, emotional, moral. It sweats Spain 
 as an olive does oil. 
 
 But all this is only the environment of the action and 
 the means of its operation in the tale. Cervantes knew a 
 more admirable way of setting forth the soul of Spain. 
 
 flFis not merely because Don Quixote and Sancho are 
 always on the scene that they surpass the other charac- 
 ters in power of interest; th ey have a higher life A Cer- ^ 
 vantes stamped the genius of the race by a double 
 die, o n the loftier and the humblgr _aide; n oble a nd 1 
 peasant, t he mad^ idalgo_a nd the deludedboor, divide 
 between them the spirituaPrealm of SpainT The illu-~^ 
 sion of the one, the duping of the other only intensify 
 their racial traits and perfect them. Character is deeper 
 than circumstance, and owns a superiority over all the 
 world of appearance. If Don Quixote is at first interest- 
 ing for what happens to him as is the way of life, he be- 
 comes of interest for what he is; and the same, though in 
 an inferior degree, is true of Sancho. Don Quixote^ 
 achieves his ideal in his soul, however badly he fares 
 with fortune in the outer world. He is complete in t rue 
 kni^thoQd, and when his madness leaves him it cannot, 
 take away the nobility oFna ture wh ich it has br oiight-, 
 
 ^lEe^OOT^gentleman whom it found nameless and unoc- 
 
140 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 cupied on his little estate and made one of the world's 
 heroes. The vocabulary of moral praise cannot exhaust 
 nis virtues, ^Hp is brave, resolute, courteous, wise, kind, 
 gentle, patient; and, not to continue the enumeration, he 
 possesses these traits with a distinctive Spanish excel- 
 lence^ What tenacity there is in his resolution, what 
 recklessness in his courage, what fatalistic sweetness in 
 his resignation, what endurance in a land of lost causes, 
 what sadness of defeat accepted in the quiet of adver- 
 sity! If these are not the most obvious, they are perhaps 
 the deepest Spanish traits in the noble natures of that 
 birth and soil. In Sancho, faithful, affectionate, dubious, 
 nationality has lower relief, since he shares more simply 
 the universal peasant nature of the South, but he is as 
 abundantly Spanish in his peasanthood as Don Quixote 
 in his sublimated chivalry. Both were fooled to the top 
 of their bent; but destiny did not mistake her way; by 
 comedy she perfected them, each in his own kind. It does 
 not matter what happens to the battered body of JQtin 
 Quixote any more than to his crazy armor; in him the 
 souTstiie thing, and Cervantes keeps his soul invulner- 
 able and undishonored. The dignity of the virtue of the 
 great qualities of the Spanish ideal is preserved as well 
 as set forth, and is seconded by the humbler virtue of the 
 life near to the soil. No nation has cast ideal tj^pes of it- 
 self more summary, exemplary and real. 
 
 Later ages have seen in Don Quixote a typifying power 
 even more profound, and far beyond the reach of Cer- 
 vantes to know, as no one can know the depths of his 
 own personality. Don Quixote was a man of the past, 
 bringing outworn arms against a changed world. Spain 
 is a backward nation, ill-furnished for modern times. 
 Other lands have persisted in seeing in Spain the Don 
 
CERVANTES 141 
 
 Quixote of nations, whose life was a dream of past 
 glory, whose thoughts and appliances were antiquated, 
 whose career in the modern world must be foredoomed. 
 So they saw her set forth lately in full tilt in the lists 
 against the best equipped, the most modern, the young- 
 est of the nations of the earth. But what unconscious- 
 penetration there was in that man's genius, what depth / 
 of truth, whose embodiment of the Spanish ideal has be- j 
 come the S3monym of his country's fate I ~-J 
 
 As the book of Spain, in the external and to some ex- 
 tent in the internal sense, "Don Quixote" was fed from 
 the active life of Cervantes in his goings up and down in 
 the country as a tax-gatherer and his journeys as a 
 young soldier on the sea. He had, however, another and 
 perhaps more engaging life in the world of books. He 
 was as full of ideas as of experience. He was a scholar; 
 and using this side of his nature he made his work as ex- 
 pressive of the literary power of Spain as it was repre- 
 sentative of her active genius. "Don Quixote" was liter*^ 
 ary in its origin, a crusade by parody against a particu- 
 lar kind of literature; and, besides, the hero became a 
 knight-errant through the reading of books, and he re- 
 tained on his adventures that interest in literature of all | 
 kinds which makes the book as much one of letters as of 
 arms. All varieties of literature used in Spain are to be 
 found in it either in examples or by allusion and criti- 
 cism, and not only those of native growth but some of 
 foreign extraction, Italian and Arabic. The chronicle, 
 the romance, the pastoral are everywhere present; verse 
 in many forms, comic and serious; the tale of the Boc- 
 caccio type, and the realistic tale; the old Renaissance de- 
 bate between arms and letters, and those discourses 
 which are little highly finished essays of a not unlike 
 
142 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 sort; drama and poetry are also present in elaborate ex- 
 amination of their theory and practice, and the whole 
 question of dict4on ba th by exa jngleandjrecept; and 
 there is much specific criticism of authors and books. 
 The ballad and the proverb, characteristically Spanish 
 kinds, underlie the book, and the style includes all the 
 scale from the homeliest and coarsest to the most artifi- 
 cial, ornate and resonant known to fancy and conceit. 
 Cervantes's interest in all these forms, methods and 
 ^ questions is of the liveliest. Literature was in an unset- 
 tled state, a period of experiment, change and learning. 
 He was him self two-natured . On the one hand he was 
 ' breaking out new ways by sheer impulse, coming near 
 to life in his plays, nearer in his novels, nearest of all in 
 "Don Quixote," and using plain prose with perfection 
 for directness, vividness and truth; on the other hand he 
 was charmed by the academic traditions of the Renais- 
 sance in topic, sentiment, imaginative method, language, 
 1 poetry, and in the greater part of his writings emulated 
 1 it. His entire works exhibit the whole range of literature 
 lin his time; "Don Quixote" shows it substantially, in 
 [epitome. 
 
 "Don Quixote" thus comes to have one of the high 
 distinguishing traits of literary greatness; ^t_is one of 
 those remarkable books which are watersheds of litera- 
 ture."? It looks before and after. Toward the past it slopes 
 back'^on the forests of chivalry and the glades and hills 
 of the pastoral, and it is clothed with the power of poetry 
 in one or another mode of its various magic; and it rolls 
 on to the land of the future in its realism, its humor, its 
 direct contact with life as it is, its recognition of the pop- 
 ular lot, of common-sense, of positive things, and here 
 it is clothed with the power of prose in one or anothe- 
 
CERVANTES 143 
 
 mode of its modern efficiency. Cervantes could not know 
 this; his conscious ambition, unable to emancipate itself 
 from the bonds of the long-loved and still glorious tradi- 
 tion, harked back to the ways of the past, but his genius 
 always struck out for the future with the instinct of a 
 wild creature that has mysterious knowledge of its own 
 paths; his genius str u^_Jor_rga]iain, ^^^ immnr^ iq^ 
 prose, out toward the modern w orld. The poetic irony 
 of chivalry had been attempted in the old way and suc- 
 cessfully accomplished by Ariosto, and other Italians, 
 and their work ended an age; they belong to the Renais- 
 sance past. The solvit which ^ ervantes ..a pplied to 
 ^hivalry wa s another j ron^ the irony o f_&e living-and 
 actual world,^ eirony of prose; hence "Don Quixote" 
 is said to begin modern literature, and the greatest of 
 our Northern novelists, Fielding, Scott, Victor Hugo, to 
 name no others, have taken alms of Cervantes's genius. 
 Notwithstanding the brilliancy of the exploit — Cer- 
 vantes, like Columbus, finding the new world that men 
 of another race and nations of a later destiny were to 
 possess — the_S panish literary genius in "Don Qu ixote" 
 is mainly remini seenL Though the modern child was 
 born, it lay in an antique cradle, in an environment of 
 the iJast. Cervantes loved the old romances which he de- 
 stroyed as Plato loved the poets whom he exiled. He 
 had a soul that felt the swell of great enterprises; he 
 knew the spell of the lonely deed of high emprise ap- 
 pealing to individual prowess, the call of the adventure 
 reserved for the destined knight. Who doubts that in 
 that passage where, the priest speaking of Turkish 
 troubles, Don Quixote makes his dark suggestion, Cer- 
 vantes is smiling at his own heart? "Were they alive 
 now," says Don Qtiixote "(in an evil hour for me — I 
 
144 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 will not speak of any else), the famous Don Belianis or 
 some one of those of the innimierable progeny of Ama- 
 dis of Gaul! If any of them were living to-day, and were 
 to confront the Turk, i' faith, I could not answer for 
 the consequences. God understands me, and I say no 
 more." This had been Cervantes's dream — the freeing 
 of Algiers; and had Philip given him a fleet, doubtless he 
 could have done it; but Philip had other thoughts, and 
 Cervantes shrugged his old shoulders, and smiled at his 
 self-confidence of earlier days. Cervantes loved the pas- 
 toral, too, and the serenade and all the dear old-fash- 
 ioned pleasures, the guitar and the high-sounding words; 
 though set in a humorous situation the eloquent dis- 
 course of Don Quixote oh the golde n age~gives JiietaTi e 
 ^te"of the literarv"S eaTt. Cervanfeswas poiU"ing himself 
 into his book, and all these loves went along with him — 
 a poet's, a scholar's, a lover's, as well as a humorist's 
 loves. He was no young novice, without a past and 
 life-affections of the mind; the wine ripening in his tem- 
 perament was mellowed from the stock of the world's 
 old books. If he had clothed Don Quixote with some 
 shadows of Amadis, he knew that Sancho, too, had his 
 literary ancestry in Italy and remote Provence. Spain 
 was not only a body of contemporary manners and 
 events; it had a soul of poets dead and gone, a various 
 and rich literary tradition, gathered and exemplified in 
 these flowing pages. £^Don Quixote" is a book of arms 
 and the active life, but it is also a book of letters and the 
 scholarly life; either alone had been but half the man; 
 together, body and soul, they make up the world's most 
 wonderful national book in prose — the one that is all 
 Spaing 
 
 "Don Quixote" was welccKned by foreign nations, but 
 
CERVANTES 145 
 
 not altogether as a foreigner. It is a European book. 
 Cervantes, besides what the genius of his race and 
 country gave him, received a gift from destiny. He em- 
 bodied a great moment of time, the passing-hour of the 
 old European ideal. It was a living ideal, that of chivalry. 
 It was sprung from real conditions, and greatly ruled the 
 minds and somewhat the lives of men through a long era. 
 It belonged to a world of social disorder, the thinly popu- 
 lated, scarce reclaimed wilderness of feudal Europe; 
 it belonged, too, to a world of marvel, where the un- 
 known even in geography was a large constituent ele- 
 ment, and magic, superstition and devildom were so rife 
 as to be almost parts of the human mind; but such as it 
 found the world, there this ideal moved with power. 
 The military spirit never took form more nobly than in 
 this chivalric type. It combined andxeconciledjtwo of 
 the greatest niQtiya powersin the li the idea 
 
 of sacrifice and the force of self-assertive personality. 
 The perfect knight would die for his faith, his loyalty 
 and his love, but he died in battle. The reality of this 
 ideal is shown by the depth, the richness and the long 
 continuance of its appeal to the bosoms of men. The 
 idea of rescue, generated from medieval misery and help- 
 lessness in an environment of brutal physical force, is 
 its ethical core; but its efflorescence in the imagination 
 of men was as many-colored as a sun. Beginning in the 
 British waste marshes and the Prankish Court, it annexed 
 the farthest Orient to the forests, deserts and seas of its 
 adventures; it re-made the genealogies of history and 
 drew all tiie great, emperors and saints alike, into 
 the lives of its parentage; it absorbed into its own 
 tradition all past heroic excellence. It developed a cere- 
 monial ritual; it gathered to itself the mighty power of 
 
146 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 symbolism in its most august and passionate forms; it 
 gave forth a great legendary literature, one of the richest 
 products of himian effort and faith, written in every 
 European tongue and splendid with the deeds of every 
 soil. In the fullness of time, Arthur and Roland receding, 
 it was Amadis who was the star of chivalry. Amadis's 
 tale, though now out of the way, was once the book of 
 Europe. It had a spell to hold the finest spirits, like Sid- 
 ney's, and appealed to them directly and intimately as 
 the mirror of their hearts and hopes. It contained the 
 European mood of knighthood in its last beauty before 
 its near eclipse and sudden dimming, Cervantes loved 
 and honored it, and its hero was Don Quixote's ideal 
 man, as he had been of thousands of the d3dng cult. 
 Such was the nature of the literature which Cervantes 
 "smiled away." For that had happened to the burning 
 faith of chivalry whicji is the fate of all the gods; at first 
 men are overawed by them and worship, then they lift 
 equal eyes to them and find them companions of life; and 
 last they laugh at them. The laughter of men at chivalry 
 had already filled the world from the lips of Italy before 
 Cervantes came, jln his day chivalry was dead and 
 buried. The madness of Don Quixote was but its.j JiQst, 
 wanderi ng in the staringdaylight of^jiewj^ge^forlorn, 
 ri^cul oi^, with out place or "use in the worl dT? 
 
 The pastoral, which was a later growth, was comple- 
 mentary to the chivalric romance, and by its means fem- 
 inine elements entered into the simple manhood of the 
 knightly type and softened its humanity. Its afi&liations 
 were Renaissance, as those of chivalry were medieval, 
 and it appropriated easily the grace, the sentiment and 
 the emotional luxury of the reborn classic ideal. It sur- 
 vived the true chivalric mood, and lingered; in "Don 
 
CERVANTES 147 
 
 Quixote" it is not less omnipresent than chivalry, but is 
 less obviously ridiculed, more lightly satirized, more 
 tenderly treated; it is related to chivalry, in the composi- 
 tion, as sentimental to comic opera, but both are alike 
 out of date and discarded moods living only in parody, 
 which is in literature the last stage of extinction. The 
 passing of the pastoral dream, however, is subordinate 
 and not comparable to the death of the chivalric ideal; 
 in "Don Quixote" it is the latter that strikes the tragic 
 note. Whether Cervantes was himself conscious of this 
 note of tragedy in his work must remain forever obscure; 
 if he was aware of it, he very successfully concealed his 
 knowledge. He began with pure comic intention and 
 made fun of the chivalric tradition, and very rough fun 
 it was, nor did it grow less rough. His treatment of the 
 knight is not free from coarseness, and is unremitting in 
 cruelty; here are the standards of the practical joker and 
 the buffoon-stage; but it may be usefully remembered 
 that Cervantes's scale of cruelty in life was one familiar 
 with the ways of the Turk and the pains of the Christian 
 victims in Algiers. ^ Primarily a comedy by its conception 
 and unflinching conduct, "Don Quixote" gave out the 
 note of tragedy only in our own latter days. In this as- 
 pect, it is a myth of the modern mind, which has taken 
 on new meanings and disclosed fresh phases of signifi- 
 cance with time, as is the way of myths; with this Cer- 
 vantes had nothing to do. As he did not see in his hero 
 the incarnation of his country's fate, neither did he see in 
 him the last and greatest of knight-errants. He did not 
 look with our eyes;^;^d it is only through the perspec- 
 tive of centuries that we recognize the historic moment, 
 
 andd jSCefft- the f amous Ttnight^ a g r pa t-h p artprl gPnt 1p-_ 
 
 man^ standing jn_h is travesty a j_the_^gj^_of_duyahyr l 
 
148 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 The unconscious element, or what seems such, in the 
 works of the highest geniiis, is their most immortal part. 
 There is a mystical union of the race with these great 
 works; they are himianized as much by the adoption of 
 mankind as by their original creation. The general hu- 
 man spirit enters into them; they blend with it and be- 
 come impersonal; in the large results of time — in myth- 
 ologies, in the legend of chivalry, in the masterpieces of 
 culture — they become racial products, unindebted to 
 individuals. It is thus that "Don Quixote" is enfran- 
 chised from being the book of a country or of a historic 
 moment merely, and becomes a great book of the mod- 
 ern spirit. It rises with the vigor of world-life in it, and 
 bears the supreme title of a book of humanity. It con- 
 tains the experience, the thought, the doubt of man. 
 y [Thi s comedy is found to be the tragedy of all idealismj 
 If this is not the aspect under which it has most widely 
 spread as a book of popular amusement, it is thus that it 
 has most profoundly affected the mind of modern times. 
 Mephistopheles and Don Quixote are the two great 
 myths that the modern world has generated out of itself, 
 as characteristic as Achilles in Homeric time or Roland 
 in the middle ages or Amadis in the Renaissance. They 
 are forms of its deepest consciousness, types created in 
 its own image, planets cast from its own orb. The mod- 
 ern world is psychological, and this book contains a 
 psychology seemingly as elementary and comprehensive 
 as a law of nature; it is sceptical, and this book utters, as 
 no other does, the double entendre of life; it is pessimis- 
 tic, and this book makes the most destructive impeach- 
 ment of life. Doubtless one goes far from Cervantes in 
 such thoughts; but if he did not fathom, we may well be- 
 lieve that he felt the deeper meanings of his book, for 
 
CERVANTES 149 
 
 even in the eyes of the comedian it is a book of much 
 sadness. 
 
 Th e double na ture_o f life is put to thej ore; — 5^erej§'*l 
 an fippositionj n human nature , ?nr\ this is set forfrh;^ 
 
 
 1^e_con^sl- nf Don Quixote a,nd Sanrhn It is rendered 
 in them by divers ways as the antithesis of the imagina- 
 tion with the senses, of the life of thought with the life of 
 fact, of illusion with reality, of the eloquent discourse 
 with the proverb, of the poetry with the prose of life; 
 but, essentially, this polarity is in the double aspect of 
 life as soul and sense. Cerv antes de cides for neith er; he 
 presgnts ^both as I ja b^^ to e ii?or He"portra3^ DonlQuix- 
 ote with the characteristic defect of the soul, imaginative 
 illusion; and he gives to Sancho the characteristic defect 
 of the material man, self-interest. The higher nature 
 betrayed by its own nobility, the lower duped by its 
 own baseness — that is the two-edged sword of life. 
 That is the human comedy. 
 
 It is in the madness of Don Quixote that the heart of 
 the book beats. It is a very singular madness. The in- 
 vention manifested in the narrative is generally thought 
 to be its prime literary trait; but its verisimilitude, the 
 skill with which it keeps the quaking edge of truth and 
 fiction, is as marvelous ; and nowhere more than in (Don 
 Quixote's madness are the shades made subtle. It is a*^ 
 very normal madness. jDon Quixote does not differ much 
 from other men in his mental processes. He interprets 
 the sights and sounds of the actual world by his past ex- 
 perience; only, as he has lived in the world of books a 
 life of imagination, his experience is unreal, his memory 
 is inapplicable to the world about him, or, as is said, his 
 inferences are all wrong. His illusions have an origin 
 from without, and are misinterpretations of the external 
 
ISO LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 world, due to an expectancy in his own mind which has 
 arisen from his absorbed reading of romances. His 
 senses are overlaid with thought, and he see° what *"• 
 expects to se eZTlt is impossible, too, to acquit him of a 
 certain complicity with his own madness. He shows it 
 when he refrains from testing his second helmet; in the 
 fact that he was not fully persuaded he was a knight- 
 errant till the Duke treated him as such; and unmis- 
 takably in his tale of what happened in the Cave of 
 Montesinos, where Sancho frankly charges him with 
 making it up; at the end, too, his recovery seems, in part 
 at least, self-willed. The history of his madness, also, 
 has a method in it; in the first part he is his own victim; 
 in the second he is the victim of others; beginning with 
 self-deception, he ends as the butt of the deception of all 
 from Sancho to the Duke and the Bachelor. His mad- 
 ness is intermittent; if his mind is in fact diseased, it is 
 by a capability of going mad under certain exciting 
 causes, but on all other occasions he is as remarkable for 
 judgment as for learning and eloquence. 
 rXhis strange madness of Don Quixote is comic in its 
 accidents, in its circimistantial defeat, in its earthly en- 
 /vironment; but in itself it is tragic. Its seat is in the 
 I very excellency of the soul; its illusions take body in the 
 \ noblest himian aims, the most heroic nature and virtue of 
 1 the purest strain. A madman has no character; but it is 
 I the character of Don Quixote that at last draws the 
 Iknight out of all his degradations and makes him triumph 
 iin the heart of the reader. Modern dismay begins in the 
 thought that here is not the abnormality of an individual 
 but the madness of the soul in its own nature. ^Tfliat 
 high aims may be ridiculous; that heroism may be folly; 
 that virtue may be insanity; that the ideal which was 
 
CERVANTES 151 
 
 the spiritual wealth of the fathers may be the farce of 
 the children; that the soul in its exaltation, its gentleness 
 and sacrifice, has no necessary wisdom and in its own 
 vision no warrant of reality; that the good cast down, 
 the kind trampled on, the brave broken, become the 
 laughter of the world; these are the truths which make 
 "Don Quixote" such sorry reading for the ideaUst. Hej 
 thought to make the reality of things curtsey to the lie 
 in his mind; but that lie was itself the substantive virtue 
 of his soul. This is the paradox of idealismi_^__________J 
 
 Don Quixote, so far as the Knight of the Rueful 
 Feature is concerned, would indeed be a pitiful farce to 
 modern feeling, were not his madness ts^ical of the par- 
 tial sanity of mankind. Still as in old time a man finds 
 what he goes out to seek; a man sees his own face in the 
 world; and man is still a victim of past greatness. These 
 are capital truths. jBiagi«ative4]]u|iQn,-&e--sotilV^vice, 
 is c ommon in life, and affects mos t ^^^^ ^f"^* "f "^'^n, ^nd 
 esp ecially_feosfi of creat emotional npnn'tyj and since 
 emotional imagination is the principal feeder of the re- 
 ligious and moral energies of men, this illusion most 
 characterizes men of ideal temper possessed with the 
 ideas of rescue, sacrifice and battle, and arises most fre- 
 quently in the field of the reform of the world. A man 
 of one or few ideas does not differ from Don Quixote 
 psychologically, except in degree. Whether his experi- 
 ence is bookish or real, he confines his attention to a 
 specially selected and usually narrow theme, neglects the 
 correctives that life furnishes, and becomes absorbed in 
 his mastering preconception of hfe; he is infatuated. 
 Often he exhibits a like complicity with his own partial 
 madness, suppresses irreconcilable facts, and refuses to 
 think in their direction. Often, too, he passes on from 
 
152 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 the stage of self-deception, in which he is only his own 
 victim, and becomes the victim of others practising on 
 him, whom they profess to take at his own estimate, for 
 gain, convenience, or amusement. The parallel is easily 
 followed out, and the fact is recognized in the word 
 Quixotic, which has become a familiar term in all lan- 
 guages. Such Quixotism is inherent in the social ideal, 
 especially as held in youth, which having necessarily an 
 inaccurate idea of life indulges those hopes natural to 
 the human breast which can have no accomplishment in 
 reality; and it is imbedded in inherited beliefs and the 
 tradition of education, which contain an element of the 
 past inapplicable to the changing present; the outworn 
 creed, the lost cause, all shells of past faith and passion 
 are its strongholds. In this lies the permanent truth of 
 the book to life. Illusion, and specifically the Ulusion of 
 the noble mind inheriting a great past, is the original 
 mark of Quixotism; and the moral which men have read 
 into it is, the finer the soul, the more utter its earthly 
 defeat. The ^atLfrom_^tomjL took its name maikgd^ 
 break in the moral idea s ^.thfi rare _as things of practice : 
 ^anH^in_lJiOutiUty_j}JLMs_ln^Jjehavior^^^ 
 heigb.t-Oi -tiiie ridiculous , seems too_£learly to exemplify 
 the earthlv defeat of the idea l: a defeat so absolute that 
 thejjest one can say is — he was wholly mad. 
 " <The point of viesLJs_&atofj^ dying^ gel^So Demos- 
 thenes felt on the eve of the Hellenizing of the Mediter- 
 ranean world, and Brutus on the eve of its imperializa- 
 tion; so, on the scale of personal life, an old man feels. 
 "Don Quixote" is an old man's book. Cervantes ap- 
 plied a destructive criticism to the higher nature of man, 
 in its aims, methods, and intelligence; the waste of noble 
 nature, the practical inefficiency of virtue did not disturb 
 
CERVANTES 153 
 
 him; sceptical in that he saw the fallibility of the soul, 
 as such, in its own vision, and pessimistic in that he 
 recognized the impotence of the soul as such in action, 
 he remains serene; the governing factor in human life is 
 its mortal condition, not its spiritual motive, me concludes^ 
 Passion, how sublime it is! but oh, the irony of it at lastl7 
 and no form of it so ironical as the passion for reforming"^ 
 the world, the will to serve mankindT] 
 
 Cervantes is disillusioned; he has accepted the disillu- 
 sionment; he smiles at it. The peculiarity of "Don Quix- 
 ote" is that all this is set forth with loud laughter, with 
 frank and overflowing sjanpathy with the world as it is, 
 with delight in all its various material life and people. 
 It is the world of Maritornes, of Gines de Pasamonte, of 
 Roque Guinart, of the innkeepers and muleteers, of the 
 graceless duke and his duchess, of real people; it is not 
 Don Quixote's world. It is this acceptance of life as it is, ^ 
 of the lower element in life, that is the complement in the 
 book to the denial of the old ideal. Here is the victory ot-^ 
 realism, of the positive spirit, of the oncoming age, of 
 prose and sense and actuality, the modern time. Don 
 Quixote closes a period, and in all that relates to him 
 there is the pathos of death, the hopelessness of failure, 
 the despair of the end]inaU ^e is, the eve is reverted to 
 the past and seesjts dissoluti on, the dpath of aristw^Fafj'^ 
 JmjfelH eal as it'was t" dip in }ts perftpn on the French ^ 
 scafioli. Faith in the ideal is dead in the book to the last 
 spark. T]he kqtjaf-id eaMaMi h adpassed in to the ha nds 
 ^f_the_new-genius of the changi^^wo33,_de3iDcracy, nf 
 ^v^idLXlfiPiajit ^ knew nothipg i he saw and helped to 
 mold the body of the new real world, but its spirit was 
 not yet born. It is because the ideal in "Don Quixote" 
 has no spiritual future that its outworn and lifeless forms 
 
IS4 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 are such a mockery of the soul. It brmgs, too, the immor- 
 tal doubt. Will the democratic ideal in its evolution 
 prove as inapplicable to the enduring life of man as have 
 the other great historic ideals of the race? Is there noth- 
 ing absolute in the soul? ws "Don Quixote" finally 
 greatest in its philosophy, as^ book of that relativity 
 which the modern spirit finds in all things and most 
 dearly lovesfy 
 
 "Don Quixote" is the book of the one great defeat, but 
 also of many victories, and especially those of prose, real- 
 ism, and humor in modern literature. Of all the victories 
 which it embodies, however, the greatest is that of Cer- 
 vantes over himself. The unfailing cheerfulness of its 
 spirit is the temperament of Cervantes plasdng through 
 it. He had lived and toiled, he had felt the full passion of 
 life, he had dreamed and planned and striven, both as 
 man and writer, in arms and letters, and he had met for 
 the most part only the blows of fortune; wounds and 
 slavery, neglect and poverty, the well-known wages of 
 genius, had been paid him in full measure. Yet every in- 
 dication of his personality that survives shows him un- 
 spoiled and still companionable, pleasant, patient. It 
 was in this spirit that, being about to die, he bade fare- 
 well to all. Scott at the end of his days, with Wordsworth 
 and others about him in the library at Abbotsford, asked 
 Lockhart to read the scene. Allan, the painter, "remem- 
 bered nothing he ever saw with such sad pleasure as the 
 attitudes of Scott and Wordsworth as the story went on." 
 It was a scene that recalls that other death of Tennyson, 
 lying with his open Shakespeare in the moonlight. "Good- 
 by, humors; good-by, pleasant fancies; good-by, 
 merry friends, for I perceive I am dying, in the wish to 
 see you happy in the other life." These were Cervantes's 
 
CERVANTES iSS 
 
 last words in his world. The most profound master of 
 the irony of life preserved his heart uncorroded by that 
 knowledge, as he had kept it sweet against the enmity of 
 man and fortune. 
 
SCOTT 
 
 Sm Walter Scott, the prince of prose romancers, 
 should be reckoned among the great benefactors of man- 
 kind. Of the works of prose in the nineteenth century, 
 which have contributed to human happiness on the uni- 
 versal scale, the "Waverley Novels" hold a place by virtue 
 of their millions of readers; and now, coming into the 
 hands of the fourth generation, they are still one of the 
 principal effective contemporary possessions of the Eng- 
 lish race in literature. Criticism, which sooner or later, 
 assails all works of great fame, has the most trifling effect 
 upon them; they are invulnerable in the hearts of the 
 people. They contain so much humanity in its plain 
 style; they disclose such romantic scenes, such stir of 
 gallantry, such a high behavior, in connection with events 
 and personages otherwise memorable; and they are, be- 
 sides, so colored with the hues of the mind arising from 
 local association, imaginative legend, historic glamor and 
 the sense of the presence of fine action, that their recep- 
 tion by the heart is spontaneous. Especially, they con- 
 tain Scotland as Don Quixote contains Spain, only upon 
 a broader and more diversified scale. Cervantes, in- 
 deed, comes into one's mind in connection with Scott in 
 many ways. 
 
 Scott's descent was like that of Cervantes. He was of 
 the old blood, but born in a modest station. If the 
 changes of time had not reduced his family stock to the 
 condition of the poor hidalgo, they had much tempered 
 
 IS7 
 
iS8 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 its original border strain. Scott was as much attached to 
 his ancestors as a New Englander, and was continually 
 harking back in his anecdotes — and he had a full rep- 
 ertory of such tales of the house — to "Auld Watt" of 
 Harden and "Beardie" of Teviotdale, while through these 
 worthies and otherwise he could trace the affluents of his 
 blood to the great Scotch houses, among which he took 
 particular pride in Buccleugh. His father was a simple 
 lawyer, whose portrait is exactly drawn in Saunders 
 Fairford, in "Redgauntlet," a plain citizen, shrewd, 
 formal, practical, well exemplifying the fixed type of the 
 profession at Edinburgh. Perhaps the literary strain, 
 which does not appear in the paternal ancestry, came 
 from the mother, the daughter of an eminent physician, 
 Dr. Rutherford, and herself well-educated; certainly, 
 although Scott had several brothers and a sister, the 
 genius of the family was wholly allotted to him. Owing 
 to a lameness, which developed in his right leg in child- 
 hood and was an impediment to him throughout life, the 
 boy was in early years country-bred and much encour- 
 aged in physical exertion, for which indeed he had a 
 natural inclination, being full of animal vigor and spirits. 
 He said late in life — "from childhood's earliest hour I 
 have rebelled against external circumstances"; and in 
 combatting this physical disadvantage he first exercised 
 his courage and pertinacity. His deficiency did not in- 
 terfere with his good comradery as a school-boy. He 
 walked and rode a good deal, and he bore perhaps more 
 than his share in the rough fighting of the schools and 
 the town then in vogue. As he passed from master to 
 master, each of them characteristic examples of the old 
 discipline, he did his tasks and won their interest and 
 favor, but it was rather by his sympathetic understand- 
 
SCOTT IS9 
 
 ing of literature than by any brilliancy of mind. He 
 had the education of the schools as a thing of course, 
 and it was valuable to him; but he illustrates the fact 
 that to turn a boy loose in a library is to give him the 
 best of all opportunities — the opportunity for self-edu- 
 cation. He read from childhood widely and well, and 
 while yet a boy had such an acquaintance with great 
 literature as would now seem phenomenal, though it was 
 precisely the same as that which a generation later New 
 England boys had at the same age, if they were so in- 
 clined. More than in his childish verses or the tales 
 composed with his schoolmates there is the feeling of in- 
 stinct in Ballantyne's school anecdote: "Come, slink over 
 beside me, Jamie, and I'll tell you a story." Plainly 
 in his boyhood Scott was as full of literature as he was of 
 fight. If one could have discerned it, however, the true 
 sign of the future was not in the literary tastes which 
 Scott shared with others of his kind, but in the historic 
 sense which he possessed in a peculiar degree. He was 
 from the start deeply interested in his own country and 
 his own people; he was an insatiable listener to the 
 tales of "Sixty years since" and their like, to the border 
 ballads, the legends, all the romantic growths of the 
 Scotch memory; he had the zeal of an antiquary in see- 
 ing the places where events had happened, the old fields 
 of battle, the ruined castle, the border-wall, or whatever 
 spot or object history had left its mark upon. This was 
 the gift that, like Aaron's rod, was to swallow up all the 
 others. 
 
 It is impossible to trace in Scott, in early life, any of 
 the self-consciousness that is apt to accompany such 
 precocity and intensity, any sense of a call from the fu- 
 ture. His father tolerated and indulged these tastes, but 
 
i6o LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 to his practical mind a literary career for his son would 
 hardly have occurred. The youth was docile, was ap- 
 prenticed in his father's office, and at twenty-one was 
 called to the bar. Meanwhile he maintained his literary 
 pursuits as a matter of course. Intellectual interest at 
 that time was still a part of men's life, and in the clubs 
 of good fellowship, where Scott delighted to make one 
 and was often a leading spirit, literature had its share 
 with other topics. Thus it happened that he was among 
 the first of his contemporaries to feel the attraction of 
 German literature, then reaching England, and to ac- 
 quire some knowledge of it; the kinship of its ballad and 
 romance with the spirit of the border, which was already 
 growing incarnate in Scott, prepared a ready welcome 
 for it in his sympathies. Nothing is more remarkable in 
 Scott's life than its entire naturalness. He never made 
 an effort, hardly a choice; he merely did the next thing; 
 so now he did not think of adopting literature as a ca- 
 reer, but it was natural for him to try his hand at a trans- 
 lation. Life went on as naturally, too, in other vfays. 
 The course of true love not running smooth, he was left 
 with a memory of early devotion which diffused a pa- 
 thetic tenderness over his recollections of youth; and in 
 the lapse of time — not too long a lapse — he married 
 happily an English-bred lady of French birth, being 
 speedy in both the wooing and the wedding. In his cot- 
 tage at Lasswade and afterwards on the little estate of 
 Ashestiel he had a characteristic home, filled with his per- 
 sonality, and in both he showed that passion for making 
 the place his own which was later displayed on the grand 
 scale at Abbotsford. He made no great progress at the 
 bar, and as time went on he habitually ascribed something 
 of this slowness to the unfavorable effect of his literary 
 
SCOTT i6i 
 
 avocations on his professional reputation. Tenacity, how- 
 ever, was characteristic of him. He never let go of any- 
 thing while it would hold. He knew the ways of his 
 world, too, and was not averse to them; and in this case 
 wisdom was justified of her child. At twenty-eight he 
 was made sheriff of Selkirkshire, and five years later ob- 
 tained the additional post of clerk to the Court of Session; 
 and although he did not at once come into the emolu- 
 ments of the latter, the two places secured him for life an 
 ample independence and honorable station. His position 
 in the working world was that of a gentleman of the law 
 with clerical and executive duties. 
 
 It may be that this security of tenure as a practical 
 man contributed something to Scott's attitude toward the 
 profession of literature — a view exceptional among 
 authors — as a mode of life like any other, and conse- 
 quently to his remarkable freedom from literary vanity. 
 He was always a man of many affairs, of which literature 
 was only one; and it took its place as a normal part of 
 life. It is likely, however, that the slowness of his devel- 
 opment as an author was the fundamental cause of his 
 taking so sober a view. His precocity never took the 
 form of immature publication. In the case of no genius 
 is the gradual hiving of the material on which it was to 
 work so marked, the unhurried ripening of faculty so 
 like a process of nature; and Scott seems all the time as 
 ignorant of what was to be the outcome as the seed and 
 blade are of the full corn in the ear. He was an out-of- 
 doors man as he had been a tramping boy. It is impos- 
 sible to think of him without his horses and dogs. His 
 duties as sheriff took him across country continually, 
 and he always had more months out of Edinburgh than 
 in it notwithstanding his clerkship. He was thus in con- 
 
-162^ LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 stant contact with Scotch life and country, and he never 
 lost or relaxed his first impulse,; to know and see with his 
 eyes, so far as his eyes could see it, all the local history; 
 He was also in love with the genius of Scotland as it was 
 stamped in the people! of all sorts and conditions. Hu- 
 man nature, 1iie> rough I hard article free from its alloy of 
 the town, was- treasure-trove tO' him. On those annual 
 ''raids into Liddesdale," and on many another journey, 
 he made himself master of this book of truth out of which 
 came so much of the character, anecdote and phrase 
 that are most sterling, real and humorsome in his books. 
 For all such actuality in the country-side he had the 
 same tenacity of, mind that Lincoln showed in his circuit- 
 riding, and he was as full of genuine telling anecdote 
 gathered from the living lip. He was, too, most compan- 
 ionable; "he met every man," it was said, "like his 
 blood relation." In these "raids" and joiu-neys there 
 was much roughness, but it was welcome to him as having 
 some taste of the old border life. The country people 
 were fond of him; to them he was to the end of his 
 dalys "the Sheriff." In Edinburgh, also, he held a vig- 
 orous and social life with men. In the times of the fear 
 of Napoleonic invasion, he had been a live patriot and 
 cavalryman, quartermaster of the Light Horse, and took 
 his share of camp and drill with great zest, while still in 
 the late twenties of life; and he was always a fearless 
 horseman, preferring the turbulent ford to the safe pas- 
 sage and never "going round" for anything in the way. 
 If he "broke the neck of the day's work" before break- 
 fast, as was his lifelong habit, it was a matter of neces- 
 sity; for a man who spent the greater part of the day 
 in physical activity and exercise could have a fresh mind 
 only in the morning. It was in those early hours that he 
 
SCOTT 163 
 
 accomplished his literary work; and if there was much 
 mechanical routine in the practice, perhaps his youthful 
 experience as a writer of legal foolscap had accustomed 
 him to the drudgery of the desk. In a life of such variety 
 and scope, so full of work of all kinds, with many active 
 interests, overflowing too with hospitality and rich in 
 friendships, genius less abundant and powerful than 
 Scott's would have been overwhelmed, but he had the 
 knack to turn it all into new resources. 
 
 Until Scott was past thirty he may well have thought 
 of literature as only the busiest and most delightful part 
 of his leisure, and have seemed to himself as to others 
 the son of the old lawyer treading in his father's foot- 
 steps to a like mediocre fortune. He was of a more gen- 
 erous make, it is true; he was not at all a precisian; 
 there was much freedom for human nature in Edinburgh 
 life, and he took his share; in the careless cheer of his 
 yo.uthful days and in the hearty sociability of his man- 
 hood there was something that would now be thought 
 boisterous; boy and man, conviviality was warm in his 
 blood. He was one of those men who diffuse a physical 
 glow about them. But also, it is plain, there was some- 
 thing in him that set him distinctly apart; the unlikeness 
 which isolates genius, felt before it is recognized, like the 
 electric air of the undischarged cloud; in every company, 
 however varied, though never too much the leader, he 
 was the interesting man. There was a glow in his mind 
 as well as in his blood. It was not literary ambition 
 exactly; though he says that when he wrote the song of 
 Young Lochinvar he was "passionately ambitious of 
 fame," it was more the flash of a young man's feeling 
 than the awakening of resolute ambition. Though so 
 widely and well read in literature and with a real book- 
 
1 64 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 ishness in his tastes, his genius was not at all bookish. 
 The glow in his mind was vital, and nourished on life, 
 and it flowed almost entirely from that historic sense, 
 that absorbed interest in his own country and people, 
 which was the master-light in which he saw life. He at- 
 tracted all Scottishness to himself as by the necessity of a 
 fairy gift. If any delver in the old literature was in the 
 neighborhood, such as the marvelous Leyden, he was 
 close in his company; if there was a kindred scholar 
 across the border, like Ellis, he was in correspondence 
 with him; and with such men he began that growing 
 circle of friendships by letter, reinforced with occasional 
 visits, which is one of the most agreeable and peculiar 
 pleasures of the literary life and in Scott's case was so 
 large and interesting a part of his biography. He had, 
 for the time, concentrated his antiquarian interest in the 
 endeavor to collect and edit the ballads which he finally 
 issued as the "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border," and 
 in particular attention to old metrical romances. This 
 work was really a stage in his preparation to write, a 
 stone that marks his progress in that absorption of Scot- 
 land into his own genius which he was unconsciously 
 accomplishing without a thought of its ulterior end. He 
 was so far, in the line of his true development, only a 
 literary antiquary. 
 
 The beginnings of his literary career, which antedated 
 the "Minstrelsy," did not grow out of his true material, 
 but in a curiously opposite way were distinctly bookish. 
 His faculty of imagination was stirred independently and 
 apart from the subjects it was to operate upon habitually. 
 He made some translations from the German ballads, and 
 also a version of Goethe's "Goetz von Berlichingen"; 
 and in connection with these studies he tried some original 
 
SCOTT i6s 
 
 ballads of his own. He was then twenty-eight years old 
 and he describes these as his first "serious attempts at 
 verse." Two years later when he published the early 
 volumes of the "Minstrelsy," the idea that he might make 
 literature an important part of his life seems to have been 
 distinctly formed, and it had found its true roots. The 
 close tie, the natural birth indeed, of his first poem, "The 
 Lay of the Last Minstrel," out of the deepest prepos- 
 session or his mind, is obvious. He wrote it, perhaps, 
 with as little self-confidence as ever any distinguished 
 poet felt in composing his first work, and was as much 
 surprised by its reception as the world was at its ap- 
 pearance. He won at once a popular crown which no 
 hand feebler than Byron's was to wrest from him. He 
 had then already reached his thirty-fourth year. "Mar- 
 mion," and "The Lady of the Lake," which quickly 
 followed, confirmed his poetic fame; on these three tales 
 in verse, together with a score of lyrics, his permanent 
 vogue as what he might have called "a rhymer" rests. 
 
 The merit of Scott's poetry has been much attacked 
 by latter-day critics; but there is a reasonable view to be 
 taken of it, and within its limitations its worth is still un- 
 impaired. Its survival, notwithstanding the immensely 
 greater work of the poets who followed him — men who 
 were purely poets — shows life at the root. It had origi- 
 nality, and retains its force. Scott broke new ground; he 
 discovered material which had natural poetry, and he 
 treated it in a novel manner, appropriate to the subject 
 and stimulating to the mind. If he borrowed his metre 
 from Coleridge, he applied it in a manner and on a scale 
 that Coleridge was incapable of. He was an experi- 
 menter in a new kind, and in it was wholly self-educated; 
 such real defects as there are in the verse are incidental 
 
1 66 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 to its being tentative work. There is more power than 
 craft, more life than skill; he succeeds by spontaneity 
 more than by art. The careless cross-country gallop of 
 the metre is in keeping with the verve and unevenness 
 which characterize the whole; but the blood is kept 
 awake. His great power of narrative tells the tale, but 
 the interest is less in the individuals than in the kind of 
 life depicted, the baronial hall, the border battle, the 
 Highland romance; he revivified the times he treated in 
 enduring colors, which replace history in the memory for 
 his district equally with Shakespeare's plays for the king- 
 dom. He gave especially to the Highlands an imagina- 
 tive memory which annexed them to the lands which 
 have a meaning to the general heart of man; he alone 
 gave that charm to Loch Katrine and its environs which 
 lifts the scene above the savagery of nature. It is not 
 due only to his description, but he placed action there. 
 It is an error to think of nature-poetry as Is^ng in the 
 sphere of contemplation, merely because that was Words- 
 worth's way; out-of-doors poetry, such as Byron's tales, 
 often contains more of nature in the mingling of the 
 great scene with the action than any number of addresses 
 to flowers of the wayside and lonely weeds on the rocks. 
 In Scott, fair as the landscape is, nature is more than 
 landscape; it is the place of the action, the breathing air 
 of life itself. The action, moreover, which is the main 
 interest, is unsurpassed in the quality of gallantry, in the 
 stirring moment and the personal adventure. He is the 
 most martial of English poets; excepting a half-dozen 
 lyrics and ballads by Campbell, and one or two others, 
 there is nothing in our poetry to rival him in this re- 
 spect. This is the Homeric fighting quality that some 
 find in his verse, and there is truth in the remark. It is 
 
SCOTT 167 
 
 said that he "pleases boys"; that is not against him. 
 The obviousness of his meaning, the fact that his ideas, 
 images and language are within easy reach of the aver- 
 age mind, the presence of much ordinariness in the sub- 
 stance, as they partly account for his ready popularity 
 and its wide spread, also denote his permanent appeal; 
 for with all this, which is called his commonness, there 
 goes that most uncommon power to stir the blood, to 
 send the soul out of doors, to revivify lost romantic 
 modes of life in all their picturesque color, their daring 
 spirit, their emotional reality. He makes his reader live 
 the life, and it is not only the life of a past age but it is 
 one of the great permanent types of life. It appeals to 
 all freemen; the echo of it, the desire for it, are in their 
 blood. I have referred to the sneer that Scott "pleases 
 boys." He does. It was "many and many a year ago, in 
 a kingdom by the sea," that my own fourteenth summer 
 was made happy with this delight. I remember that I 
 read every line of his verse with eagerness and poured 
 out my admiration in a longer essay than this is likely to 
 prove. The experience was not a bad one for a boy who, 
 at the yet more tender age of twelve had been deep in 
 Bjrron and melancholy. It is thirty years and more since 
 then; but to this day the clang of the verse of Branksome 
 Hall turns all the iron of my blood to music, and the sight 
 of the falling standard on Flodden Field is the most I 
 shall ever know of the heart of Sidney "moved more than 
 with a trumpet." This is the sort of mastery in which 
 Scott is great, for both boy and man. The personal 
 reminiscence only gives emphasis to what is broadly true. 
 Poetry, in the mold which Scott commanded, could not 
 give egression to his whole genius; it is not in verse that 
 he did his great work; but he had set the fashion and 
 
1 68 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 showed the way for 65^:011 — in itself surely no small 
 thing — and when Byron "beat" him, as he said, he 
 turned to prose fiction and came into his own. It is not 
 the least of his honors as a man that after Byron had 
 surpassed him, and in fact dethroned him in the popular 
 breath, Scott made and kept his friendship and, notwith- 
 standing their profound difference in character, defended 
 his name and fame against the bitter storm of English en- 
 mity. He did not, however, give up the tale in verse at 
 once, just as he had not given up the law. It was not in 
 his nature, as has been said, to let go. He continued to 
 write metrical romances, but none of them have the same 
 boldness of execution or the same cKng to the mind that 
 belonged to the earlier efforts. In these poetic years, too, 
 he had done what in any other man would in itself have 
 seemed abundant labor, in massive editorial work and 
 other miscellaneous literary ways. His poems represent, 
 after all, but a fragment of his immense energy; and now, 
 feeling the need of appealing to the public in a new line, 
 he solved the situation by taking up a new and unfinished 
 task. 
 
 The entrance of Scott on the field of prose fiction bears 
 a close resemblance to his debut in poetry. It has the 
 same tentativeness, the character of an experiment. He 
 had long had in mind an attempt to depict the manners 
 of his country in prose. He had read Miss Edgeworth's 
 Irish tales, and he thought something like that could be 
 done for Scotland. He had for some years been privately 
 interested with Ballantyne in the printing business; and 
 the fact had turned his mind to the problems of publish- 
 ing and kept him keenly alive to the opportunities of 
 trade, as if he had been — as essentially he was — a 
 publisher's adviser. He was always interested in "bring- 
 
SCOTT 169 
 
 ing out" something, and the usefulness of his own fac- 
 ulties in feeding the press was a constant element in the 
 business. Like Cervantes, again, he tried all kinds; but 
 his first experiment in fiction had not seemed promising. 
 He began "Waverley" in 1805, just after the publication 
 of the "Lay of the Last Minstrel"; he resumed it five 
 years later and was again discouraged; after another in- 
 terval, finding the manuscript while he was hunting for 
 fishing tackle, he wrote the last two volumes in three 
 weeks, in 1813, and it was published anonymously early 
 the next year. Its success, which is one of the legends 
 of literature, was as far beyond expectation as that of 
 "The Lay" had been in its time; and he followed it up, 
 just as he had done in poetry, with that rapid succession 
 of triumph after triumph which made him in the end one 
 of the leading figures of contemporary Europe and the 
 national glory of his own country. 
 
 The "Author of Waverley" was forty-three years old 
 when he began the great series; but though the discovery 
 and application of his powers have the semblance of ac- 
 cident, both his success and his fertility were the direct 
 result of slowly maturing causes. That long hiving of 
 material and ripening of faculty had gone on without any 
 consciousness of the end to which they were to be ap- 
 plied; but the preparation was complete, and Scott had 
 now found the work — a necessity of genius — into which 
 he could put the whole of himself. His primary endow- 
 ment was the historic sense, in which he excelled all 
 other English imaginative writers, and in him it was bred 
 of such love of country as to be an impelling passion of 
 patriotism. His love of Scotland was as close to him as 
 his family pride, and his life was a thing of direct contact 
 with what he loved. His tenacity, remarkable in all its 
 
I70 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 manifestations, became genius when applied to anything 
 Scottish. He had an ocular memory of the places he had 
 seen; probably there is no local spot described in his 
 Scotch novels that is not a direct transcript from nature; 
 and the native landscape had so filled his mind that, at 
 the end, in the soft environs of Naples he could see only 
 Scotland; "on proceeding," says his companion there, 
 remarking on this, "he repeated in a grave tone and with 
 great emphasis: 
 
 "Up the craggy mountain, and down the mossy glen 
 We canna gang a-milking, for Charlie and his men." 
 
 There was the same prepossession of his mind with the 
 historical and living characters of the land, its feuds and 
 legends, its past and present. In truth, in these years of 
 unconscious preparation he was not unUke Don Quixote 
 reading the romances of chivalry; his mind was charged 
 with Scotland, and when he went forth into the world as 
 a novelist spent itself in the things of fiction, in a Quix- 
 otic enthusiasm. He lived much of the time in an 
 imaginary world, as he said, not only when he was ac- 
 tually composing but in his mood of mind; it had been 
 so from childhood; he had partly realized this world in 
 poetry, he completely embodied it in prose. His active 
 professional duties, which were of a routine nature, and 
 his out-of-doors life with men and practical affairs were, 
 no doubt, a means of keeping the balancfe of sanity, of 
 actuality, in his life; but, for all that, he had built up a 
 world of his own in which his mind lived. It was this 
 world which came to birth in the "Waverley Novels," pri- 
 marily in the Scotch tales, which are the core of the se- 
 ries, and secondarily in the foreign tales,] including the 
 English, which often have ilarge Scotch elemeiits and are 
 
SCOTT 171 
 
 all created on the same ground principles. As on the ideal 
 side, like Don Quixote, his mind was imbued with a 
 past age that gave its colors to his waking life, so too on 
 the side of actuality, like the Knight of La Mancha's 
 author, he had gone up and down in the land and knew 
 all its people, high and low, noble and peasant and 
 cateran, its professions and trades, its servants, its cast- 
 aways and poor scholars, the whole range of its human 
 t)7pes; for the ideal and the actual, and they were homo- 
 geneous and not opposed in his case, he was equally well 
 furnished; his representation of Scotland would be as 
 complete as Cervantes had made of Spain, and vaster. 
 
 The oneness of his genius — the fact that the same 
 power is here at work that produced the poems — is 
 shown by the identical way in which he approached his 
 task. The defects of "Waverley," as an experimental 
 trial, are the same as those of "The Lay"; "The Anti- 
 quary" is better made in the same way as "Marmion." 
 He owed little, if anything, to example in either case; he 
 was self educated both as poet and novelist. The virtues 
 of mere craft do not count for much in his success in prose 
 any more than in verse. Construction is loose, composi- 
 tion is rapid and careless; art is secondary to matter. 
 Sheer power of genius, however, is there with its inevitable 
 and brilliant mastery of the situation. It takes the same 
 direction as in the poems; the novelist does not aim at a 
 tale of individual fortunes, but he endeavors to represent 
 a kind of life. It is this that gives him breadth of mean- 
 ing. It is social not private life that he sets forth. In 
 a novel there may be many elements — the plot, the 
 hero, situation, dialogue, tableau, atmosphere and the 
 like; and these may be subordinated or emphasized sep- 
 arately in infinite combinations. The faults which criti- 
 
172 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 cism charges to Scott's form largely proceed from a too 
 limited and rigid conception, from the point of view of 
 construction, of what narrative art consists in. In fact 
 his novel bears, in its relation to the more unified t3^e, 
 some resemblance to the chronicle play in its relation to 
 the more organized drama. He seeks, under the impulse 
 of his historic sense, a broader effect than any tale of in- 
 dividual life can give — a social effect. He is apt to set 
 his particular story in a stream of general events, to 
 which the fortunes of the individuals are related, but the 
 interest is less in the plot than in the stream of events. 
 He thus gives a truer perspective to life and greater sig- 
 nificance to his matter. The control of the plot, and its 
 issues, are apt to lie at a distance, in what may be called 
 a kind of machination in the background, as the affair of 
 the house of Osbaldiston in "Rob Roy," or old Elspeth's 
 secret in "The Antiquary." The encompassing of a 
 larger world is round about the story. Like all the 
 greatest writers, Scott gives the great scene of life always; 
 it is a crowded stage, a world full of people. In such a 
 scene the hero may occupy an unimportant place; the 
 interest is not primarily in him. It is a feudal, com- 
 mercial, political world, filled with fixed types; there is 
 an abundance of stock characters; to set forth the 
 manners and concerns of this world largely in a vivid 
 human way, to be, as it were, a public historian, not a 
 writer of private memoirs, is Scott's scope. The fortunes 
 of the individuals being inserted in this environing world, 
 much as the dialect is inlaid in the English, the progress 
 of the tale is managed by a succession of scenes. Scott's 
 greatest talent of execution lay in the depicting of these 
 scenes; if he was not a dramatist, there was something 
 theatrical in his faculty, and though he could not write a 
 
SCOTT 173' 
 
 play, no one could better stage an incident. These scenes 
 are of all kinds; indoor scenes with the fidelity of Dutch 
 masters, such as the hut in "Rob Roy" or Noma's dwell- 
 ing; out-of-door scenes of infinite variety like the ven- 
 geance of Rob's wife or the drover's foray at the end; 
 scenes of all degrees of spirited action and emotional 
 play, or simple instances of noble behavior like the fare- 
 well of the prince in "Redgauntlet." Scott has an un- 
 rivalled power of realizing life at such times, and here 
 he centers human interest, while about this incessant 
 stream of incidents conducted by persons suffering and 
 doing there is constantly felt the play of great forces, 
 social, political, hereditary, the sense of life as an ele- 
 ment in which lives exist and here presented especially 
 and most powerfully as a thing of history and nationality. 
 Such a presentation of national history and manners, 
 maintaining a permanent hold on the people whom it 
 depicts, must necessarily have great veracity. Imagina- 
 tion could not part company with fact in such a case. 
 The basis of reality in the "Waverley Novels" is one of 
 their most distinguishing qualities, and underlies their en- 
 durance in literature. It is not merely that particular 
 characters are studied from life; that George Constable 
 and John Clerk sat for "The Antiquary," that Scott him- 
 self is Mr. Mannering, that Laidlaw or another is Dandie 
 Dinmont; nor is it that other characters, like Meg Mer- 
 rillies and the gj^jsies are suggestions from living figures 
 that had arrested the author's passing glance. It is not 
 that the scene of "Castle Dangerous" is governed by what 
 his eye beheld on his visit there, or the whole landscape 
 of "The Pirate" transcribed from his voyages among 
 the islands of the north. Still less is it what he gained 
 from books, either of ordinary history and records of 
 
174 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 events or such sermons as those from which he trans- 
 ferred the dark and intense eloquence of "Old Mortality." 
 He had such a marvelous memory for whatever bore the 
 national stamp, he was so brain-packed with the ocular 
 and audible experience of his converse with the people, 
 so full of their physiognomy, gesture and phrase, that he 
 fed his narrative incessantly with actuality; and such was 
 his surplus of treasure of this sort that in his genei'al 
 edition he continued to pour out an illustrative stream 
 of anecdote, reminiscence and antiquarian lore in the 
 notes and prefaces. A keen friend was confirmed in his 
 belief of Scott's authorship by the presence of a striking 
 phrase that he had heard him once use. The Scotch 
 novels are, as it were, an amalgam of memory. When 
 he came to write them all his love of tradition and the 
 country-side with which his mind was impregnated was 
 precipitated in an unfailing flow. It was because Scott 
 was so much alive with Scotland that he made his im- 
 aginary characters live with that intense reality, that 
 instant conviction of their truth, in which he is to be 
 compared only with Shakespeare. It is true that it was 
 a man of letters who wrote the "Waverley Novels," a 
 mind fed on the stuff of medieval romance and on the 
 tradition of the English drama, the "old play" of which 
 he was so fond; but the literary element in the tales is a 
 thing of allusion, like Waverley's studies, or episodical as 
 in the character of Bunce or on a more important scale 
 of Sir Percie Shafton, or else its rambling antiquarianism 
 serves to set forth Scotch pedantry appropriately. The 
 "Waverley Novels" are not a development out of older 
 Uterature, they are an original growth, a fresh form of the 
 imaginative interpretation of the human past, a new and 
 vital rendering straight from the life. Even in the tales 
 
SCOTT I7S 
 
 whose scene is laid in England and the continent, where 
 Scott was more dependent on printed sources, the liter- 
 ary element is little more perceptible than in the Scotch 
 novels themselves; the sense of reality in them is not 
 appreciably less. But Scott already had the best his- 
 torical education as a living discipline in assimilating his 
 own country and he came to the interpretation of history 
 in other lands with trained powers of understanding and 
 imagination in that field. A distinguished historian once 
 expressed to me his admiration for "Count Robert of 
 Paris," and I was glad to find such unexpected support 
 for my own liking of this novel, which is generally re- 
 garded, I believe, as a pitiable example of Scott's mental 
 decline; but my friend had been struck, he said, by its 
 remarkable grasp of history, its brilliant adequacy in 
 that way. It was the same power with which Scott had 
 grasped "Ivanhoe," and told the tale of "Quentin Dur- 
 ward," and made Richard Lion-heart like one of Shakes- 
 peare's kings. He had learned the way by making history 
 alive on his own heath in the most living contact with 
 the past that ever man had. 
 
 Veracity is the first great quality of the "Waverley 
 Novels." The second is emotional power. Scott was a 
 man of strength; he liked strong deeds and strong men; 
 and he liked strong emotions. I do not mean the passion 
 of love, in which he showed little interest. The way of a 
 man with a maid was not to him the whole of life. In the 
 national temperament in its action in history he found 
 two great emotions: the passion of loyalty, whith was 
 incarnate in the Cavaliers and clans, and the enthusiasm 
 of religion which filled the Covenanters. These were 
 social forces and supported a lifelong character in men. 
 They gave ideal elevation to the tragic and cruel events 
 
176 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 which belong to Scotch history, and made an atmosphere 
 about the actors which glowed with life. Scott shared 
 to the full the national capacity for enthusiasm, and was 
 in his own imaginary world as much a Jacobite as he was 
 a border-raider; and he put into his representation a 
 fervor hardly less than contemporary. He was master, 
 too, on the scale of private as opposed to public feeling, 
 of all the moods of sorrow and especially of that dark 
 brooding spirit, frequent in the Scotch character, which 
 he has repeatedly drawn. Such emotion, in the people 
 or in individuals, is the crucible of romance. He used 
 its fires to the full. Whether the scene be battle-broad 
 or dungeon-narrow, whether the passion involves the 
 fortune of a crown or burns in the single breast of Ravens- 
 wood, he finds in these deep-flowing and overmastering 
 human feelings the ideal substance which makes his ro- 
 mances so charged with power over the heart, with the 
 essential meaning of human life, in its course in char- 
 acter, and at its moments of personal crisis. The homo- 
 geneity of this power of passion with the events of Scotch 
 history and with the character of the people is complete, 
 the unity of the whole is reinforced by the romantic 
 quality of the landscape, which is its appropriate setting. 
 The state of society, its stage in civilization, is also in 
 keeping. It is, in fact, a kind of Homeric world, without 
 any f ancifulness ; or if, when the parallel is stated, the 
 difference is more felt than the likeness, it is a world of 
 free action, bold character, primitive customs, as well as 
 of high feeling and enterprise, such as has fallen to the 
 lot of no other author since Homer to depict with the 
 same breadth and elevation. It was good fortune for 
 Scott, too, that he could follow Shakespeare's example in 
 relieving the serious scene with humor. It is humor of 
 
SCOTT 177 
 
 the first quality, which lies in character itself and not in 
 farcical action or the buffoonery of words. It centers in 
 and proceeds from eccentricity, in which the Scottish 
 character is also rich; nor in general is the eccentricity 
 overstrained or monotonously insisted on. Scott is very 
 tender of his fools, whose defectiveness in nature is 
 never made a reproach or cruel burden to themselves; 
 and the humorous side of his serious characters only 
 completes their humanity. All parts of life thus enter 
 into his general material, but harmoniously. His share 
 of artistic power was instinctive; he was never very con- 
 scious of it; but it was most remarkable in the perfect 
 blend he made of the elements used. "The Pirate" is an 
 admirable example. It is a sea story, and takes its whole 
 atmosphere from the coasts where its action lies. The 
 struggle with the elements in Mordaunt's opening jour- 
 ney is like an overture; the rescue of the sailor-castaway, 
 the cliff-setting of Mertoun's house, the old Norse of the 
 patriarch's home, and the life of the beach there with its 
 fishing fleet, the superstitious character of Noma, the 
 weird familiar of the winds, the bardic lays of Claude 
 Halcro, the sentimental pirate-father and the son with 
 his crew, the secret of the past which unlocks the plot — 
 all these make a combination of land, character and 
 story, each raised in power by imaginative treatment to 
 a romantic height and echoing the same note of the sea 
 one to the other in a blend as naturally one as sky, cliff 
 and weather. As a sea piece, given by character and 
 event as well as by description, it is an unrivalled work, 
 and this is due to its artistic keeping. This power of 
 blend was an essential element in Scott's genius; by it 
 his romance becomes integral in plot, character and set- 
 ting; and this felicity of composition achieves in its own 
 
178 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 way the same end in artistic effect that is sought in an- 
 other way by construction in the strict sense. Scott 
 never fails in unity of feeling; it was a part of his emo- 
 tional gift. 
 
 The third commanding trait of the "Waverley Novels" 
 is creative power. It is this that places Scott among the 
 greatest imaginative prose writers of the world, and 
 makes him the first of romancers as Shakespeare is the 
 first of dramatists. He had that highest faculty of genius 
 which works with the simplicity of nature herself and 
 has something magical in its immediacy, in the way in 
 which it escapes observation and in its instant success; 
 he speaks the word, and there is a world of men, moving, 
 acting, suffering in the wholeness of life. These masters 
 of imagination, too, have as many molds as nature; 
 whoever appears on the scene of Homer or Shakespeare, 
 no one is surprised; and Scott was as fertile as any of his 
 tind. He is a master of behavior, for both gentleman 
 and peasant, and of the phrases that seem the very speech 
 of a man's mouth. The world of gentlemen is repre- 
 sented in its motives and interests, its sacrifices and ideas 
 for both age and youth, with a S37mpathetic compre- 
 hension that makes it seem the most just tribute ever 
 given to the essential nobility of that kind of life, aristo- 
 cratic in ideal, warring, terrible in what it did and what 
 it suffered, but habitually moving in a high plane of con- 
 duct and having for its life-breath that passion of loyalty, 
 which however unreasoning, or mistaken, is one of the 
 glorious virtues of men. The world of humble life, like- 
 wise, is rendered with vivid truth in its pursuits, trials 
 and submissions, the virtues welling from the blood itself 
 in peril, sorrow, natural affection, for man and woman, 
 for every time of life and in every station of the poor. It 
 
SCOTT 170 
 
 is in the language of these characters that the life lies 
 with most efficacy; only nature makes men and women 
 who can speak thus; and the solidity of their speech is 
 a part of the simplicity of their lives. Cuddle's mother 
 in "Old Mortality," the old fisherman, Macklebackit, in 
 "The Antiquary," Jennie Deans in "The Heart of Mid- 
 lothian" are examples; but Scott's truth of touch in such 
 dealing with the poor is unfailing. If the behavior of his 
 gentlemen appeals to the sense of chivalry in every gen- 
 erous breast, the words of his humble persons go straight 
 to the heart of all humanity. In both classes there is a 
 vitality that is distinguishable from life itself only by its 
 higher power. He creates from within; he shows char- 
 acter in action so fused that the being and the doing are 
 one; he achieves expression in its highest form — the ex- 
 pression of a soul using its human powers in earthly life. 
 This is the creative act; not the scientific exhibit of the 
 development of character, not the analytic examination 
 of psychology and motivation, for which inferior talent 
 suffices; but the revealing flash of genius which shows the 
 fair soul in the fair act, be it in the highest or the lowest 
 of men, in good fortune or bad, triumphant or tragic, or 
 on the level of all men's days. It belonged to Scott's 
 conception of life that character and act should be in 
 perfect equipoise; to find them so is the supreme moment 
 of art. It was the moment of Shakespeare and Homer, in 
 drama and epic; and it is the moment of Scott in the 
 novel. The living power of his men and women by virtue 
 of which once in the mind they never die out of it, but 
 remain with the other enduring figures of imagination, 
 "forms more real than living man," proceeds from this 
 union of passion, truth and creative power with the form 
 and pressure of life itself. The material is always noble. 
 
i8o LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 and the form into which Scott throws it is manly. The 
 impression of all he creates is of nobility; not the no- 
 bility that requires high cultivation or special consecra- 
 tion to supreme self-sacrifice, but such nobility as is 
 within the reach of most men, to be honest and brave, 
 tender and strong, simple, true and gallant, fair to a foe 
 and faithful to our own. Scott was not greatly interested 
 in intellect; it plays no part in his work as a governing 
 principle; but in this neglect of it he kept the true per- 
 spective of human life; indeed — though this may seem 
 a hard saying — his unconscious subordination of the 
 intellectual to the active virtues and powers is one great 
 cornerstone of his sanity and wholesomeness. 
 
 The "Waverley Novels" made Scott one of the famous 
 men of Europe; he held a place of distinction unshared 
 at home, the idol of his own country, and honored and 
 beloved in every English-speaking land. He also, as is 
 well known, made a great deal of money by them; and 
 Scott was glad to make money. He spent it in a magnifi- 
 cent way, and here the trait of Quixotism is very ob- 
 vious. Abbotsford, his most human monument, may be 
 described as a romantic work, the material counterpart 
 to his estate in imagination. Don Quixote sought the 
 chivalric past which was the life of his brain, in contem- 
 porary Spain; and with a touch of the same madness 
 Scott desired to realize on the banks of the Tweed some- 
 thing of that old baronial life which was so large a part 
 of his memory and imagination; he added farm to farm 
 till he had obtained a considerable domain, he built a 
 mansion, he gathered there the museum of relics of crown, 
 battle and clan which is still intact, and there he dis- 
 pensed hospitality with ancient generosity, as the rep- 
 resentative of his country as well as to his friends and 
 
SCOTT i8i 
 
 dependents with a shadow at least of feudal state. It was 
 a dream that almost came to pass. But at the moment of 
 its realization the crash in his fortunes occurred which 
 condemned him to spend the remainder of his days in a 
 heroic effort to die an honest man. The secret of the au- 
 thorship of "Waverley" was well kept on the whole; at 
 first it was probably merely a means of guarding his repu- 
 tation which he did not wish to expose to the risk of 
 failure as a novelist; afterwards, it was useful as a means 
 of exciting interest and there was no particular reason to 
 change. There was another secret, however, that had 
 been much better kept — the fact that he was a com- 
 mercial partner with the printer, Ballantyne; and the 
 occasion of his secretiveness in this case was that an in- 
 terest in trade would have been regarded as inconsistent 
 with his professional position as a lawyer. The secretive- 
 ness, the willingness to go into trade, the love of money 
 can be turned against Scott; but, to my mind, they only 
 make him more human, a natural man. Scott's practical 
 attitude toward life, and also toward literature itself as a 
 profession like any other, seems not unlike that of Shake- 
 speare; it is the mortal side of the immortal genius which 
 in its own realm was loosened from the sense of reality 
 and lived in an imaginary world. Scott met the situation 
 that confronted him with courage, an unwearied labor, 
 a reckless expenditure of mental power and physical 
 health which again illustrates the marvelous tenacity of 
 his nature. He held on till he died. The story of the last 
 days and the voyage to Italy is well known. He was a 
 failing man. He still held the place of honor which he 
 had won in men's minds, the love of his own and the re- 
 spect of foreign nations. Goethe saluted him almost 
 from his death-bed; and soon after Scott himself passed 
 away at Abbotsford. 
 
i82 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 The fruit of Scott's life is an immeasurable good. 
 There is the life itself, as full of kindliness as of energy, 
 of duty as of honor, incessant in activity, many-sided, 
 patient in official routine, with coimtry loves, with re- 
 finement, blameless in the relations of son, brother, hus- 
 band, father and friend, with room for the affections of 
 dogs and horses and all God's creatures; a life, not 
 saintly as we wish the lives of women to be, not witjiout 
 weakness, but a source of strength to others, with the 
 right humilities and the right prides, unshaken in its 
 loyalties, a man's life. There are the works, which have 
 been the delight of millions of homes through four-score 
 years. I remember one summer seeing a boy of six 
 enacting Rob Roy, and not long after hearing Lowell 
 tell me just before he died that he had lately read the 
 "Waverley Novels" through again with much happiness; 
 genius with a reach like that will defy time long. I have 
 read them myself repeatedly in the passing of years, and 
 always with a greater admiration of their literary power, 
 their sheer creative faculty, their high strain of feeling 
 and human truth, and their wholesomeness for the daily 
 sympathies and moral ideals of the democracy. They 
 are a great feature in English literature. They lie mas- 
 sive, like Ben Nevis and Loch Lomond, in the geography 
 of the soul's country, where she builds her earthly man- 
 sions. One takes leave of them, for a time, but he closes 
 the volume, whatever it may be, with Tennyson's ex- 
 clamation in his heart: 
 
 "0 great and gallant Scott, 
 True gentleman, heart, blood, and bone, 
 I would it had been my lot 
 To have seen thee, and heard thee, and known." 
 
MILTON 
 
 In the old American mind there are some books that 
 neighbor the Bible in their appeal to the affections. Mil- 
 ton, Bunyan, and Cowper have this distinction. They 
 were the books which in my boyhood I was allowed to 
 read on the Sabbath day — old New England Sundays, 
 days of halcyon memory, true bridals of the earth and 
 sky, brooded on by an unshared peace that no desert 
 solitude or mountain beauty ever knew; the yellowing 
 pages of the worn books still exhale odors of those old 
 summers. It is, perhaps, not over-curious to think that 
 the honor of literature, in our earlier age, owed much to 
 the fact that the living faith of the people was the re- 
 Ugion of a book; and in times when, as we learn from 
 many a pious memoir, the child in the cradle was some- 
 times "dedicated to God," on both sides of the water 
 the thought might well grow up in the boy's mind, un- 
 consciously flowering, that as God had once spoken 
 through a book, the spirit might still use the forms of 
 high literature as its vehicle; the idea of the inspiration 
 of the literary life was not far off from him. Milton and 
 Wordsworth both felt this sense of consecration, of be- 
 ing men set apart, and what from the birth of Apollo has 
 been kpown to the poet as the enthusiasm of the god in 
 him, they felt in their breasts, Milton more definitely and 
 Wordsworth more abstractly and vaguely, as a divine 
 prompting and motion. Milton's addresses to the Muse 
 are too passionate to be merely imaginative flights; they 
 
 183 
 
1 84 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 are poetic prayers to a real presence. The singular thing 
 is that this is the view of posterity also toward Milton. 
 He lives as a great and lonely figure, one of the chosen of 
 Israel, with an almost hieratic solemnity; the blind old 
 man who had seen heaven and its angels, the Creation 
 and the Fall, as none other had ever beheld them, in 
 universal vision. Even in his secular life, he seems an 
 apostle of liberty, not a statesman or a politician or any- 
 thing merely executive and official, but the impassioned 
 preacher of freedom because his own soul was free, a 
 great declarer of the self-evident truths of man. But it is 
 the "Paradise Lost" that gives him his sacred character. 
 It is a poem on the highest levels of art, derived from 
 ancient and foreign sources, panoplied in severe scholar- 
 ship, wrought in the inspiration of classicism, academic, 
 intellectual, austere; and yet it made, and continued to 
 make, and still makes such a wide popular appeal as to 
 constitute it one of the greatest monuments of English 
 literature, without regard to the judgment of scholars. It 
 is not only a book; it is a part of English history, of the 
 history of the English race. This is the marvel — and no 
 critical problem is more difficult — what are the grounds 
 of this broad appeal in a poem which appears in many 
 ways so far from the people? 
 
 Milton was born a Londoner in that class of society 
 which was the backbone of the movement for popular 
 rights and independence in religion, in whose onward 
 course, during his mature life, the throne fell and Eng- 
 lish liberties were secured. Little survives to inform us 
 of his childhood except the head of the fair boy which is 
 one of the treasures of English portraiture. He was well- 
 bred in a Puritan home of means and taste, and though 
 there is no sign of rigor in his bringing up, in that home 
 
MILTON i8s 
 
 must have been implanted in him in early days those 
 finer elements of Puritanism which seem already in- 
 stinctive in his first youth. His father who was a scriv- 
 ener had some merit as a musical composer, and was in 
 prosperous circumstances. He had masters for the boy 
 and sent him to a public school, St. Paul's, where he 
 made one deep and tender friendship with a half-Italian 
 schoolmate, Charles Diodati. At sixteen he went up to 
 Christ's College, Cambridge, where tradition says he was 
 called "the Lady of Christ's," his fair hair and bright 
 cheeks and his slender youth confirming a nickname that 
 he appears to have owed really to the purity of his life 
 and manners and a virginal mind. He remained seven 
 years at Christ's, and won the place of a first scholar, 
 showing plain traces of that saving egotism which is the 
 single trait that brings him humanly before the eye now: 
 "performed the Collegiate and Academical exercises to 
 the admiration of all, and was esteemed to be a virtuous 
 and sober person," says old Anthony Wood, "yet not to 
 be ignorant of his own parts." At Christ's he had written 
 verses, Latin and English, among them the famous ode on 
 the morning of Christ's Nativity; and he showed from 
 the first touches of his hand that feeling for rich words 
 and their melodies, the sense of the molding that beauty 
 of language gives to thought itself, which belongs so often 
 to the poetic precocity of great masters of expression. 
 There was never any immaturity in his style. He wrote 
 perfection. Yet then, of course, no one knew that he had 
 written one of the great lyric poems of England, singular 
 for its majesty of thought and manner in a youth of 
 twenty-one years, and a sonnet — that on arriving at the 
 age of twenty-three — which, in his works, is one of the 
 best remembered where all are memorable. 
 
fi86 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 He retired from the University to Horton, near Wind- 
 sor, where his father had now removed from London to 
 live at ease; and there, the church, his original destina- 
 tion, being closed to him by the aspect of the times, 
 without seeking another profession, he obtained his 
 father's leave to pursue literary studies undisturbed. "At 
 my father's country residence, whither he had retired 
 to pass his old age, I was wholly intent," says Milton, 
 "through a period of absolute leisure, on a steady perusal 
 of the Greek and Latin writers, but still so that I oc- 
 casionally exchanged the country for the city, either for 
 the purpose of buying books, or for that of learning any- 
 thing new in mathematics or in music, in which I then 
 took delight." For the six years that remained till he 
 was thirty, he thus enjoyed a secure and quiet period, 
 comparable to Virgil's ease, during which he perfected 
 himself in a studious knowledge of past literature. It was 
 an accumulative and assimilating rather than an original 
 period; his production of English verse was hardly 
 greater in amount than Virgil's in similar circumstances; 
 yet in its small body are comprised all Milton's minor 
 poems of fame, and among them are "L' Allegro" and 
 "II Penseroso," the best idyllic poems in the classical 
 Italian manner; "Lycidas," the first of English elegies 
 in rank; and "Comus," the only English masque that 
 the world has cared to remember. These poems are the 
 finest flower of the great literary movement that had 
 swept up the north from Italy for more than a century, 
 and brought to England its great burst of genius in the 
 reigns of Elizabeth and James; the crest of the Renais- 
 sance had broken in the turbulent dramatists, but here 
 the golden flood of humanism was still at the full, with 
 Italian serenity, purity, and beauty; the burning noon of 
 
MILTON 187 
 
 passion had gone by, but a finer art, a softer mood were 
 present in Milton's genius in its youth, simple, lucid, 
 melodious, suffused with the perfect beauty of an age of 
 art about to die. In these country years Milton probably 
 looked forward only to a literary career; he was a youth- 
 ful, humanist poet seeking to write as his Greek and 
 Italian masters had done before him; perhaps such a life 
 as Virgil's, he thought, might lie in his future. These 
 were the first happy fruits. 
 
 The figure of Milton at this age is full of "sweet at- 
 tractive grace." He was handsome in manly beauty, his 
 mind set on high and serious thoughts, and with a strain 
 of uncommon purity in his soul. He led a simple life in 
 his father's house, plain in its habits; he wandered about 
 the well-watered and well-wooded country, making his 
 mind "a mansion for all lovely forms — a dwelling place 
 for all sweet sounds and harmonies," or in his chamber 
 at home moved "in the still air of delightful studies;" a 
 natural, intellectual, poetic life, free from all disturbance. 
 One hears that "music" in which he "then took delight" 
 as its perpetual undertone. It is reflected crystal-like in 
 the "L'AUegro" and "II Penseroso," with a selective 
 power of art, an idyllic brevity and clearness in the 
 scenes, an evenness of unemphatic beauty, for which 
 there is no parallel except in classical and Italian master- 
 pieces. This poetic softness and clearness mirrors Mil- 
 ton's temper then; there is not a trace of the harsh traits 
 that later came into his life, the sternness of his middle 
 years and his aging into austerity. He was still a pure 
 poet; full of a sweet sensuousness that took delight in 
 all beautiful things; he was a lover of beauty. "What 
 "besides God has resolved concerning me I know not, but 
 this at least": — he is writing to a friend — "He has in- 
 
i88 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 stilled into me at all events a vehement love of the 
 beautiful. Not with so much labor as the fables have it, is 
 Ceres said to have sought her daughter Proserpine, as I 
 am wont day and night to seek for this idea of the beauti- 
 ful through all the forms and faces of things (for many 
 are the shapes of things divine) and to follow it leading 
 me on as with certain assured traces." Thi^ is Plato's 
 voice on the lips of the young Puritan disciple of the 
 "Phaedrus," but it denotes the enthusiasm of his soul 
 and its poetic direction. This Platonic vein, this emo- 
 tional color of beauty in his virtue sets Milton's Puri- 
 tanism somewhat apart. So also his love of the drama 
 removes him from the historical t3T5e of the sect. He 
 could not, being a scholar of classical breeding, fail to 
 look on the drama as a noble form, and its Greek exam- 
 ples fed his genius from the Euripidean passages of 
 "Comus" to the "Samson Agonistes" at the very end. 
 But while yet a student at college he had written the 
 tribute to Shakespeare that was first printed in the 
 Second Folio; and in connection with his friend, Lawes, 
 the musician, he tried, though with an anonymity which 
 he endeavored to preserve, the masque form of the drama, 
 then its popular or at least fashionable phase, in the "Ar- 
 cades" and on the great scale in the "Comus." This last 
 was really a piece of private theatricals written for the 
 Lord-President of Wales, who had employed Lawes, and 
 acted by his children in the great hall at Ludlow Castle 
 on his inauguration into his office. The substance of the 
 poem, however, which was the praise and defense of 
 chastity, was a very noble form of Puritan feeling in the 
 high sense. It, too, is alive with Platonic philosophy, 
 but this is so inwrought in the poetry that it is not felt 
 by the reader except in its results. The praise of chastity 
 
MILTON igg 
 
 also denotes something exceptional in Milton's tempera- 
 ment, in disclosing which it is necessary to use his own 
 words, but with the more happiness since the passage 
 opens with that remarkable sentence which is the most 
 famous that came from his pen: 
 
 "And long it was not after, when I was confirmed in 
 this opinion, that he, who would not be frustrate of his 
 hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought 
 himself to be a true poem; that is, a composition and 
 pattern of the best and honorablest things; not presum- 
 ing to sing high praises of heroic men, or famous cities, 
 unless he have in himself the experience and the practice 
 of all that which is praiseworthy. These reasonings, to- 
 gether with a certain niceness of nature, an honest 
 haughtiness and self-esteem, either of what I was or 
 what I might be (which let envy call pride), and lastly 
 the modesty whereof, though not in the title-page, I may 
 be excused to make here some beseeming profession; all 
 these uniting the supply of their natural aid together 
 kept me still above low descents of mind. . , . Next 
 (for hear me out now, readers), that I may tell you 
 whither my younger feet wandered; I betook me among 
 those lofty fables and romances which recount in solemn 
 cantos the deeds of knighthood founded by our victorious 
 kings, and from hence had in renown over all Christen- 
 dom. There I read in the oath of every knight that he 
 should defend to the expense of his best blood, or of his 
 life if it so befell him, the honor and chastity of virgin 
 or matron; from whence even then I learnt what a noble 
 virtue chastity sure must be, to the defence of which so 
 many worthies by such a dear adventure of themselves 
 had sworn. ... So that even these books, which to 
 many others have been the fuel of wantonness and loose 
 
190 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 living, I cannot think how, unless by divine indulgence, 
 proved to me so many incitements, as you have heard, to 
 the love and steadfast observation of that virtue." 
 
 In these matters, perhaps, silence is as golden in a 
 Galahad as in a Launcelot, but the openness of Milton 
 in this and other passages, is a part of his nature and be- 
 longs to his essential character. The personal feeling is 
 only an instance of the purity that is elemental in his en- 
 tire genius which in the end became a genius for aus- 
 terity. But that time was far off, beyond the barrier of 
 twenty years of the fighting that makes all men stern. 
 The gentler Milton of the earlier day, the youth with the 
 passion for purity, the passion for beauty, the passion 
 for perfection in poetry, had no premonition of what was 
 to be, what truly "God had resolved" concerning him; 
 he looked, it can hardly be doubted, for that Virgilian 
 future, while he pursued his studies of the most mel- 
 lowed art of civilization in the books of Athens, Rome, 
 and Italy, and dreamed the dream of travel, fearful that 
 he had been rash in allowing his friend Lawes to publish 
 the unripe fruit of "Comus." 
 
 It was in this spirit that Milton, when thirty years old, 
 made the journey to Italy where he remained more than 
 a year. He must have been heartened by the praise of 
 Sir Henry Wotton, who gave him letters of introduction, 
 saying of "Comus" — "I should much commend the 
 tragical part, if the lyrical did not ravish me with a cer- 
 tain Doric delicacy in your Songs and Odes, whereunto 
 I must plainly confess to have seen yet nothing parallel 
 in our language." He met famous men, Grotius and 
 Galileo, lingered especially at Florence, Rome, Naples, 
 and Venice, made numerous friends among the men of 
 letters and taste, and had the great happiness to be fa- 
 
MILTON 191 
 
 vored with the acquaintance and warm interest of the 
 aged Manso, the befriender of Tasso in his sad life, and 
 the patron of Marini. It is plain that Milton not only 
 made a good impression, as Manso says, with his "mind, 
 form, grace, face, and morals," but he was socially at- 
 tractive; notwithstanding his strength of natural reserve 
 and what he calls "haughtiness" in his character, his 
 familiar relations with comrades and elder associates be- 
 tray real humaneness, and the affectionateness of his 
 single dose friendship with Charles Diodati intimates 
 perhaps the sweeter quality of nature by which he bound 
 his Italian acquaintances. He followed Wotton's wise 
 and famous advice — "a tongue and an open face will go 
 safely over the whole world" — indifferently, it is to be 
 feared; but he came out of Italy safe to Geneva, and so 
 home. One wonders what he brought away really from 
 the Italian beauty of scenery, the ruins and the galleries, 
 but it is a vain curiosity; so far as appears, his life in 
 Italy was essentially social, he was interested in the men 
 and their academies, and' wrote Italian and Latin verses 
 in their midst, like a dilettante youth; but the great 
 result seems to have been the stir of his mind in re- 
 sponse to the appreciation of his talents about him and 
 the forming of a solid and resolved ambition to produce 
 a great poetic work. His own words are important: 
 "Much latelier," he writes, "in the private academies of 
 Italy, whither I was favored to resort, perceiving that 
 some trifles that I had in memory, composed at under 
 twenty or thereabouts (for the manner is that every one 
 must give some proof of his wit and reading there) met 
 with acceptance above what was looked for; and other 
 things, which I had shifted in scarcity of books and con- 
 veniences to patch up amongst them, were received with 
 
192 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 written encomiums, which the Italian is not forward to 
 bestow on men of this side the Alps; I began thus far to 
 assent both to them and divers of my friends here at 
 home, and no|; less to an inward prompting which now 
 grew daily upon me, that by labor and intent study 
 (which I take to be my portion in this life) joined with 
 the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave 
 something so written to aftertimes as they should not 
 willingly let it die." An epic poem or a tragic drama was 
 to be the form of this attempt, and he listed nigh a hun- 
 dred subjects for choice, the chief being the British story 
 of Arthur's Knights and the Hebrew myth of Paradise. It 
 might be thought that this width of topic consorts but ill 
 with any theory of "God's resolve" concerning him, and 
 certaiiily Apollo in his inspiration was not wont to give 
 the priestess a hundred oracles to pick and choose; but 
 if the academic and reflective nature of Milton's muse 
 is thus superficially clear, the selection of the subject of 
 "Paradise Lost" was not really arbitrary, but the choice 
 along which the character of his life and learning and the 
 spirit of the man were felt in self-commanding ways. 
 
 Milton had come home because of the threatening as- 
 pect of public affairs in the same spirit in which many of 
 our own countrymen returned at the outbreak of the 
 Civil War because it is not fit that a citizen should be 
 abroad (save in her service) when his country is in arms. 
 But he was a private person with no opening into state 
 affairs; so he says very sensibly, "I betook myself to my 
 interrupted studies, trusting the issue of public affairs to 
 God in the first place, and to those to whom the people 
 had committed that charge." Up to this time Milton 
 had depended on paternal support, and his father had 
 been a very good Augustus to him; now he began to earn 
 
MILTON 193 
 
 something, and from undertaking the care of his sister's 
 two young boys, he set up gradually a Uttle private 
 academy of a half-friendly character for the children of 
 families in his acquaintance. A few boys in a house big 
 enough for himself and his books, many of which he had 
 collected and sent from Venice, and with a garden — he 
 always kept a garden near in his many changes of Lon- 
 don residence — and with the schoolmaster's task for 
 his useful employment; this was the outward look of the 
 life which within was brooding the work that the world 
 "would not willingly let die." Milton also signalized his 
 entrance on every-day affairs by taking a wife; strangely 
 enough she was of a broken-down worldly Cavalier 
 family, which was much in debt to his father, and she was 
 but just past seventeen. There was a brief two months 
 of festivity in the house, after which the young bride re- 
 turned to her family for a visit, and would not come 
 back to her husband till two years later when, in the 
 declining fortune of both the Cavalier cause and the 
 family, a reconciliation was arranged. Meanwhile Milton 
 had found an entrance to the life of the public cause as 
 a pamphleteer; he published in swift succession several 
 of the tracts on the times by which for twenty years he 
 was to be mainly known at home, and to become famous 
 abroad as the chief defender of the English nation in the 
 forum of Europe, and in the composition of which he 
 expended his intellectual energy till the last moment of 
 the lost cause. 
 
 The golden age of Milton's life had gone by; the 
 happy home where he had been the light of the house — 
 and how dearly he was cherished is humanly indicated 
 by his father's having two portraits of him in boyhood 
 and youth — was broken up; Charles Diodati, his first 
 
194 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 and only bosom friend, was dead. Life had entered on a 
 new scene, in which domestic unhappiness, conflict with 
 men, the indignation and bitter edge of prose were in 
 sharp contrast with that early felicity, peace and poetic 
 musing. The change was as deep as life, and in fact 
 amounted to a substitution of intellectual for poetic force 
 as the element of its being. Up to now Milton's thinking 
 had been subsidiary to his art, but henceforward it was 
 for its own sake; he had been a man of letters, he be- 
 came a man of politics. His interest in ideas was im- 
 mense, though now it was first apparent. He had a 
 greater intellect than commonly falls to the share even 
 of great poets, and it was of that active sort that makes 
 the practical idealist. The passion for perfection in art 
 which makes the poet, and for purity in life which makes 
 the man, are matters of the private life, but the applica- 
 tion of analogous ideas of perfection to the lives of other 
 men and to the state necessarily throws the asserter of 
 them into opposition, and in so far as he strives for their 
 victory he finds of tenest a thorny path. Milton now en- 
 tered on this career. His practical instinct working 
 through ideas is most simply seen in the things nearest 
 to him. It was no common school that he kept, no hum- 
 drum routine that he mumbled over to his boys; there 
 was a curriculum of his own devising and noticeably he 
 saw to it that his boys read more books that had life in 
 them and with a broader reach of modern power, as it 
 then was, than other schoolboys had any chance to get, 
 and he put speed into their acquisition of Latin; quicker 
 work and a wider and more contemporary round of study, 
 and in general the Renaissance ideal of the development 
 of personal power in manifold ways, characterized the 
 education he strove to give. It was, no doubt, the most 
 
MILTON 19s 
 
 modern school in Europe, though its pupils were only half 
 a handful. His domestic life was, like the school, a 
 near concern; and he no sooner realized that his young 
 wife had deserted him after two months than he at once 
 declared the extreme heretical doctrine of liberty of di- 
 vorce and re-marriage in case of the incompatibility of 
 the parties. It was a shocking position to take, in those 
 days, and first brought obloquy upon him, but he stuck 
 to his opinion, and indeed among the hundreds of the 
 sects of those days one may still read of the Miltonists or 
 Divorcers. The key to Milton's intellectual life lies in 
 his Renaissance training, though the fact is obscured by 
 the Puritanical matter of his tracts; personal force, such 
 as he raised to heroic proportions in "Satan," was his 
 ideal; personal liberty in all its forms was the thing 
 nearest to his heart. It gave great individuality to his own 
 life. Thus he belonged to no communion, attended no 
 church, and had no prayers at home; his religion must 
 have been very sacred to him, and it suffered no profaning 
 hands; he was true Puritan, full grown, not in the sense of 
 -the sectaries of his age but in that which is for all time, the 
 man free from all forms who needs no intermediary with 
 his God except the spiritual Christ. The same proud 
 assertion of individual dignity is the core of the great 
 essay in behalf of a free press, the "Areopagitica," in 
 which he set forth the doctrine of the public toleration of 
 thought and speech, the right of the intellect to be heard, 
 with undying eloquence. Liberty, in one form or an- 
 other, is the watchword of all his prose; it was then, as it 
 continues to be, the shuttlecock between statecraft and 
 priestcraft, but Milton saw the old Priest in the new 
 Presbyter, and in all ways stood for independence in the 
 individual; by so much the more did he stand for inde- 
 
196 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 pendence in the nation, the liberty of the people to call 
 their rulers to the bar and send the violator of their 
 rights to the block; with the vehement and iinabated 
 directness of Demosthenes against Philip, he too thun- 
 dered against the Stuart line. The name of Cromwell 
 only was known so far and widely abroad as that of this 
 Defender of the People of England, It is this office that 
 gives grandeur to his figure; and no one, not of the race 
 itself, has so much" in the thoughts of men the sublime 
 character of a Hebrew prophet, the rebuker of Kings, 
 the declarer of the eternity of truth, the companion of 
 the thoughts of God. This loftiness felt in Milton's 
 prose is what preserves it; if it is not studded with 
 sentences of abstract wisdom, like Burke's, where ripe- 
 ness of thought and breadth of phrase combine to make 
 memorable political sayings, it is strewn with passages 
 of high and sublime flow in which ideal principles flame 
 at their whitest heat of conviction. To be the voice of 
 England on a great occasion, such as the death of her 
 king by the judgment of her people, was a memorable 
 destiny; but what makes Milton more remembered is 
 that a hundred times liberty spoke by his lips. He was 
 that man, hateful to all tyrants, a Republican; though 
 under the powerful presence of Cromwell, "our chief of 
 men," he swerved slightly from the line, he came home 
 true and belonged with Vane. He was not a democrat; 
 he was too much imbedded in the Renaissance for that, 
 and valued men for their personal distinction; for the 
 honor and force in them that makes for inequality: 
 
 "Nor do I name of men the common rout 
 That wandering loose about 
 Grow up and perish as the summer fly, 
 Heads without name, no more remembered." 
 
MILTON 197 
 
 That is the very trick of aristocracy in thought and 
 accent. Equality, fraternity, were not yet risen stars. 
 Milton's "Ready and Easy Way," which he sent forth 
 as the last arrow when Charles II was almost on the 
 coast, proposed a kind of permanent Grand Council, like 
 that of the Republic of Venice, as the ruling body of 
 the state. Nevertheless, Milton's republicanism, though 
 it was not the democracy of to-day, was the high tide of 
 the principle of freedom in that age; and when the dying 
 roll of the retreating storm was heard in that last pas- 
 sionate remonstrance of Milton, on the eve of the King's 
 landing, there was to be silence till the Marseillaise. 
 
 In these years Milton's life took on that harshness of 
 feature, which it retains in tradition, owing to his in- 
 vective against the enemies of the State, his unhappiness 
 in his children, and perhaps the color of the name of 
 Puritan. In outward ways it was one of plain habits and 
 personal dignity. He had given up teaching after seven 
 years, and when in a short period the Commonwealth 
 was established he became Foreign Secretary to the 
 Council; it was a good post, well paid, and he held it till 
 the Restoration from his forty-second to his fifty-second 
 year. He received and wrote foreign despatches and was 
 the official intermediary for all ambassadors and envoys, 
 and was thus brought both at the Council Table and in 
 the Hall into habitual association with the heads of State 
 and persons of distinction from abroad. His private 
 fame and character were also such as to attract visits and 
 attention upon his own account. In his appearance and 
 demeanor there must have been the ripened breeding of 
 the scholar and poet whose social art is attested by his 
 Italian travels, together with the matured handsomeness 
 of the man and the personal dignity of the representative 
 
198 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 of State. His wife had died and he had married again; 
 but after a year of happy wedlock, in this instance, he 
 lost her whose memory he made sacred in the sonnet 
 tenderly recalling her veiled face: 
 
 "Yet to my fancied sight 
 Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shined 
 So clear as in no face with more delight." 
 
 He may never have seen her face, for before this he had 
 become totally blind in his forty-fifth year. He had con- 
 tinued to perform the duties of his Secretaryship, being 
 led to the Council Room, and there listening, dictating, 
 and composing he went through the necessary business 
 as before. Except for a few sonnets at wide intervals he 
 had entirely discontinued poetry during these twenty 
 years. Dr. Johnson described these sonnets as "cherry- 
 stones," and it has been well said that this "marks the 
 lowest-point imaginable in criticism of verse." They are 
 rather stones of David's sling. That on the massacre in 
 Piedmont is noteworthy as the first blaze of the English 
 muse over the violated liberties of Europe, which Byron 
 and Shelley learned the lightning use of, and whereof 
 Swinburne in our own day flings the revolutionary torch. 
 The sonnets, few as they are, would be a mighty monu- 
 ment for any genius; they have the quality of Michael- 
 angelo. Just before the downfall, Milton seems to have 
 reverted in mind to the predestination of his genius to 
 poetry and that great hope he had indulged on returning 
 from Italy: "that what the greatest and choicest wits of 
 Athens, Rome, or modern Italy, and those Hebrews of 
 old did for their country, I, in my proportion, with this 
 over and above of being a Christian, might do for mine." 
 Now the end had come; blind and in hiding, in those 
 months of unloosed revenge, none, the Regicides ex- 
 
MILTON 199 
 
 cepted, was more likely than he to fall a victim; and 
 indeed few who have escaped it came so near as Milton to 
 being hanged. The peril of this shame to England — 
 and such shame there has been in all literatures and 
 nations of civility — was near, but it passed. The "blind 
 old schoolmaster," as he is known from Dryden's lips, 
 lived on in obscurity and himibleness, though a few 
 friends still remembered him and showed him attention, 
 and distinction still clung to his figure. Life, it must have 
 seemed, was done for him. Then he turned to the un- 
 broken meditation of that poem which for two years had 
 employed his thoughts at times, and in three years more 
 of lonely musing carried it to completion. A new age of 
 literature had come in, and new men, strangers to all 
 that had fashioned the men of old in greatness and him, 
 the last of them; but the old age should yet lift one 
 towering peak to heaven, before it subsided to the levels 
 of the eighteenth century. "Paradise Lost" was this last 
 and belated birth of the greatest English age. 
 
 The opposition between the earlier and the later poetry 
 of Milton is very great, and is the more marked because 
 of the barrenness of his middle life in verse. The liquid 
 flow, the beauty of surface locking in mosaic sweet sights 
 and harmonies of the natural world, the mellowness of 
 idyllic and elegiac art, the crystal purity of the air of 
 garden and grove as in some northern Italian night — 
 all these and the like are the traits of his poetic youth; 
 but in the works of his age there is something that dwarfs 
 such qualities and makes natural the designation of the 
 earlier verse as his minor poems. The reason of the 
 difference is, I think, the expansion of Milton's intellec- 
 tual powers which took place on his entrance into public 
 debate, and the strength they acquired in that Hercu- 
 
200 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 lean labor of the mind stretched to its utmost of practical 
 force and mastery for twenty years of unremitted strain. 
 "Paradise Lost" is a great poem of the intellect as well as 
 of the imagination. Milton, after a period of wavering, 
 had finally chosen the form of an epic, built on the lines 
 of classical fradition, with the myth of Eden for its 
 central story; the origin and destiny of the soul and the 
 meaning of its course in history was the real theme. The 
 subject was well chosen, and fulfilled the desirable though 
 not essential condition for a work of national appeal in 
 that it was and had long been familiar to the people; 
 the material was at least as well known to the English, in 
 its main outlines, as the myths of the gods on which the 
 Attic tragedians had wrought had been known to the 
 Athenians. Yet it is the decadence of interest in the 
 subject-matter which is now most pointed to as impairing 
 the permanent appeal of the poem. An epic which is in 
 the third century of its victorious power need not fear 
 any displacement. Its childhood myth of the race, its 
 crude science, its antiquated theology, may all be granted, 
 and it is easy to find in its necessary conventions, which 
 belong to it as a work of limited art, something awkward 
 and irrational, even petty and ridiculous to the mind's 
 eye; but the attack along these lines is successful only 
 when conducted against details; the poem in its whole- 
 ness retains an overwhelming power. It is conceived in 
 three movements; the first is the Titan struggle of the 
 rebellious angels; the second is the Eden bower; the 
 third is the creation of the world with its pendent pano- 
 rama of human history. Of these three subjects the first 
 yields the most majestic sight of that other world of 
 Hades which the tragic imagination of man in the great- 
 est poets has essayed to picture in all times; the second 
 
MILTON 201 
 
 gives the most charming rendering of that Bower of Bliss 
 which has also been so often attempted, and the third 
 presents the most nobly impressive story of the birth of 
 our universe that is to be found in poetry. It is not neces- 
 sary that the mind should cling to the actuality of these 
 scenes and events any more than to the siege of Troy or 
 the voyage of ^neas; if they have imaginary reality — 
 even if they have only that — it is all the truth that 
 poetry seeks and is sufficient to interest men forever. If 
 Adam be as real as Deucalion, and Satan as Enceladus 
 and Prometheus, the only question that remains is with 
 respect to the relative dignity and power of the myth to 
 satisfy the mind in its effort to picture by a symbol — 
 since it cannot know — the secret of its birth, suffering 
 and destiny. If "Paradise Lost" be looked at in this way 
 as only a hj^othesis of the imagination, it yet remains 
 the loftiest flight of the mind of man in that region of 
 what is to be only spiritually conceived. It is here that it 
 makes its long and powerful appeal to masses of readers, 
 and remains a poem of the English nation; critics en- 
 deavor to empty it of the content of meaning of which 
 it is full, and to leave only the style by which alone, they 
 will have it, the poem survives; but my own mind, I 
 know — and in this I cannot be singular — still holds to 
 the substance as the true poem, indifferent to the fate of 
 the Hebrew myth, of Puritan theology or Darwinian de- 
 scent, or any other of those matters of contemporaneity 
 which are forever tossed in men's minds. It is possible, 
 perhaps, to trace the operation of some of the elements 
 in the poem, which are not for an age, but for all time. 
 
 One of the most salutary uses of great poetry is to give 
 a scale of life. Wordsworth was led by the character of 
 his genius to observe how the continual presence of grand 
 
202 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 natural features in the landscape and the habitual sight 
 of the processes of nature's life fulfil this function for 
 those who live in communion with them, and give to 
 human life a setting and perspective. The reflection of 
 the Greeks that the dramatic representation of tragic 
 changes of fortune in the lives of the great and powerful 
 imposed on the spectators a truer estimate of their own 
 share of trial in life, is an analogous thought. But the 
 soul grows in knowledge of itself not only by these hum- 
 bling influences of contrast with the grandeur of nature 
 and tragic calamity; it expands through all ideas that 
 raise its sense of power however excited, and especially 
 that power which is lodged in its own being. "Paradise 
 Lost" performs this service, with great efficiency and in 
 diverse ways. In what poem is the infinity of the universe 
 so sensibly present, merely in the physical sphere? It is 
 true that Milton conceives it on the ancient Ptolemaic 
 system instead of the Copernican; but there is the sense 
 of infinity in either, and so unimportant is this scientific 
 error in the effect that the ordinary man has to be told it 
 before he finds it out, while the localizing of heaven and 
 hell beyond gives the impression of unlimited spacious- 
 ness and the endless reach of the world of being quite in 
 the modern manner. In comparison with Shelley's scien- 
 tifically orthodox representation of the stellar universe 
 in "Queen Mab," Milton's is more sublime, more true to 
 the idea of infinity, in that it is bordered on by the 
 eternal world and held within the compass of human com- 
 prehension with no loss to its majestic beauty as a duster 
 of celestial orbs without number for multitude. What 
 poem, again, so succeeds in realizing to the mind super- 
 human power, personal force raised to the utmost imag- 
 inable height, not only in the magnificent example of 
 
MILTON 203 
 
 Satan, but in his angelic peers, Uriel and Gabriel, even 
 in the young angels, Ithuriel and Zephron, whom the 
 fiend found invincible? But the infinity which most 
 shines in the poem is not material or personal, not in the 
 universe or the protagonists of the battle that was fought 
 "out of space, out of time;" the infinity is that of man 
 himself as a soul in which issues of eternity converge, 
 about which play mysterious agencies of evil and good, 
 for which in its unknown course celestial powers care; 
 that infinity which in the soul itself is the very ground of 
 being of the Christian religion. The soul, weaving this 
 legend of itself from its far prehistoric dawn, fashioned 
 this wonderful Eden dream; the scenes and events, im- 
 bedded in tradition and the life of historical ages, long 
 and continuously in the human consciousness, must have 
 deep affinities with the nature of the soul which in them 
 has incarnated its intuitions, cast its sense of spiritual 
 fact, pictured its beliefs; in a word, this myth em- 
 broidered on the hem of the seamless garment of truth 
 is all the memory the soul has of its own unearthly 
 history. The particular actuality of the links of the 
 legend, and even the form of the elements of thought it 
 uses, are immaterial; for the things of the spirit can only 
 be S3mibolically shown. Genesis and Geneva may be 
 alike disregarded; science and dogma wholly apart, there 
 remains in the myth the long enduring substance of past 
 experience and conviction stored in the race, however to 
 be more broadly interpreted in the future. If the tenet 
 that "in Adam all men sinned" loses its ancient power, it 
 is at least an earlier reading of that solidarity of hu- 
 manity which is one of the master-truths of the democ- 
 racy; if the damnation of the angels is repulsive to 
 humanitarianism, it no less reflects the sense of struggle 
 
204 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 with the Evil Principle which is a fact of the universal 
 consciousness of mankind, and affirms the final triumph 
 of the Good which is an element unshaken in human 
 faith; if the angelic guard round a pre-doomed Paradise 
 seems folly to the reason, it yet does shadow forth the 
 strange double-sense in man of a heavenly guardianship 
 and its mysterious failure to protect the soul in life. But 
 few readers need to consider the matter so curiously as 
 this. Every one, who opens the poem, finds mirrored 
 there the soul in its infinite and eternal nature, and the 
 mystery of its source and destiny set forth with an im- 
 aginative definiteness of vision, as nowhere else. The 
 story is displayed with unexampled grandeur in the 
 scenes, in the wasted gloom of hell, in the abyss of chaos, 
 in the freshly created universe of light, upon the battle- 
 plains of heaven; the characters are ennobled to the 
 height of what is possible in faculty and prowess, in form 
 and moving not inferior to the gods, eloquent in speech, 
 majestic in action, each great in his own resolve; every 
 element of epic power and loveliness, that the practice of 
 elder poets had handled, is employed — whole armies in 
 array, individual conflict, the bower of love, the tale of 
 creation, the panorama of history, the pit, the council, 
 set forth in all modes of oratory, dialogue, narrative, 
 apostrophe and idyl, and all in an unrivaled balance and 
 harmony of the parts. The Hebraic solemnity and di- 
 rectness, the Pindaric loftiness of flight, yet so absorbed 
 into Milton's inspiration as to be his own and personal 
 to him, give to the poem that quality that it holds un- 
 shared with any other epic — sublimity; this is the in- 
 stinctive and also the deliberate judgment of all men — 
 it is a sublime poem. If I were to sum up in a single 
 expression the immediate power of "Paradise Lost" over 
 
MILTON 205 
 
 men, I should say that no poem so dilates the mind; by 
 so doing it gives a scale to life — the scale of infinity. 
 
 "Paradise Lost" is not a modern poem; and I have 
 dwelt elsewhere, perhaps too exclusively, on the impor- 
 tant ways in which it departs from modern sjmipathy; 
 like all great works of imagination in literature it looks 
 on human affairs with a reverted gaze, for such works are 
 climaxes of past thought and passion in centuries and 
 civilization. But neither is it a Renaissance and Re- 
 formation poem, any more than the "Divine Comedy" 
 is a medieval poem. There are cantos of Dante, quite as 
 theologically dead and more unintelligible than Milton's 
 dry tracts. Such elements of hardened matter from 
 which the fire has gone are found in all the greatest 
 compositions. The poem remains universal, not for an 
 age but for all time, because it is thus a poem of the soul 
 and its mystery, and sets forth under an intelligible for- 
 mula of thought and history and in images of becoming 
 grandeur and splendor that particular legend of the soul 
 which has been the historical framework of spiritual 
 piety in Christian ages and still appeals by countless 
 tendrils of memory, custom and aspiration to men born 
 Christians; it fills imaginatively what is otherwise a 
 void, "peoples the lone infinite," as no other secular work 
 has done. It is thus that, as I said, it neighbors the 
 Bible in men's thoughts; and not only does it do this by 
 its matter, but also by its style. The Bible is the stan- 
 dard of perfection in English writing; but the same in- 
 fluence which flows from it upon the listening mind, and 
 is felt as the unapproached perfection of prose speech in 
 language and cadence by the host of the common people 
 in congregations, also flows from Milton's verse in the 
 region of poetry; every one, however unlearned in litera- 
 
2o6 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 ture, feels that here is a standard of perfection. It is 
 a fit and crowning excellence; but the style is no more 
 all of Milton than it is all of Isaiah or St. John. The 
 people cannot escape great style, as all oratory shows; 
 neither can they escape great poetry. The power of the 
 highest is always greatest upon the lowest; it is this 
 which makes a national poem possible; this sent Homer 
 with all Greek ships, Virgil with all Roman eagles, Milton 
 with all English Bibles through the world. 
 
 "Paradise Lost" is the greatest of Milton's works be- 
 cause his powers are there in true balance, intellect and 
 imagination in equal fellowship, with the lesser graces of 
 poetry (such as distinguished his early verse) not in 
 neglect. As he grew rapidly old, his expression became 
 bare and austere; in "Paradise Regained" and "Samson 
 Agonistes" intellectual power seems to transcend and 
 perhaps depress the imaginative — the balance is dis- 
 turbed. They have the severity of outline and surface 
 that belong to the peak. They were the work of the last 
 years, when one thinks of Milton and sees him in the 
 most human way, comes near to him as a natural crea- 
 ture, an old man. One youth there was who came to him 
 now, like the boys he used to teach, and had lessons from 
 him and talk, in return for which he wrote at Milton's 
 dictation. His daughters had left him; a third wife, 
 whom he married late, took kindly care of him; friends 
 visited him. He would sit outside the door in the sun, 
 wrapped in a coarse grey cloth coat. The undying por- 
 trait of him is that reported by the painter, Richardson, 
 from an aged clergyman who called on him. "He found 
 him in a small house, he thinks but one room on a floor. 
 In that, up one pair of stairs, which was hung with a rusty 
 green, he found John Milton sitting in an elbow-chair, 
 
MILTON 207 
 
 black clothes and neat enough; pale but not cadaverous; 
 his hands and fingers gouty, and with chalk stones. 
 Among other discourse he expressed himself to this pur- 
 pose, 'that, was he free from the pain this gave him, his 
 blindness would be tolerable.' " This was the old age ap- 
 pointed for the fair youth of forty years before, in whom 
 the beauty of the Renaissance seemed to have taken on 
 ideal form, on the eve of the Italian journey; to this end 
 he had brought his boyhood passion for beauty, purity 
 and perfection through a life of intellectual conflict to a 
 consummation that gave him kinship with the sterner 
 rather than the softer brothers of his art, with Pindar 
 and ^schylus and the prophets of old rather than Euri- 
 pides and the mild Italian genius; it is hard to reconcile 
 the two, to find in the old man the youth. It is commonly 
 thought that in the tragedy of "Samson" he had his own 
 fortune in mind, and doubtless he drew sympathetic in- 
 spiration from his own position in realizing that of Sam- 
 son in defeat. But his worn spirit seems to have accepted 
 defeat without that despair of life which in so fiery tem- 
 pered a soul, so great in faculty, might well be feared. 
 It may be that his faith was equal to that birth of pa- 
 tience, which is the crown of life long lived, and the 
 capacity for which he showed in promise in his birthday 
 sonnet in youth and in thought in his sonnet on his blind- 
 ness. It is at least noticeable that the last lines of 
 "Samson" look to fuller life, not death, and are words of 
 promise and submission, of growth as well as of faith: 
 
 "All is best, though we oft doubt 
 What the unsearchable dispose 
 Of highest wisdom brings about. 
 And ever best found in the close. 
 
2o8 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 His servants He, with new acquist 
 Of true experience from this great event. 
 With peace and consolation hath dismissed, 
 And calm of mind, all passion spent." 
 
 In this high mood, one hopes, Milton took farewell of 
 the world as of the Muse; he died at almost sixty-six 
 years of age, leaving to mankind a life that has been the 
 inspiration of liberty, and these few rolls of immortal 
 verse. 
 
VIRGIL 
 
 Virgil is that poet whose verse has had most power in 
 the world. He was the poet of Rome, and concentrated 
 in his genius its imperial star; so long as that ruled the 
 old Mediterranean world, with the great northwest and 
 eastern hinterlands, Virgil summed its glory for the hu- 
 man populations that fleeted away in that vast basin; in a 
 world forever mightily changing his solitary pre-emi- 
 nence was one unchanging thing, dimmed only as the 
 empire itself faded. His memory illumined the Dark 
 Ages. He rose again as the morning star of the Latin 
 races. He penetrated the reborn culture of Europe with 
 the persistency and pervasiveness of Latinity itself; not 
 only was knowledge of his works as wide-spread as edu- 
 cation, but his influence on the artistic temperament of 
 literatures, the style of authors and even the characters 
 of men in their comprehension of the largeness of life, 
 was subtle and profound, and was the more ample in pro- 
 portion to the nearness of the new nations to the direct 
 descent of civilization. He, more than any other poet, 
 has been a part of the intellectual life of Europe alike 
 by length of sway and by the multitude of minds he 
 touched in all generations; and, among the Latin races, 
 he is still the climax of their genius, for charm and 
 dignity, for art and the profound substance of his matter, 
 and for its serious inclusiveness of human life. Of no 
 other poet can it be said that his lines are a part of the 
 biography of the great, of emperors like Augustus and 
 
 209 
 
210 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 Hadrian, of fathers like Jerome and Augustine, of 
 preachers like Savonarola, churchmen like Fenelon, 
 statesmen like Pitt and Burke; and among the host of 
 humble scholars, of schoolmasters, the power he has 
 held in their bosoms is as remarkable for its personal 
 intimacy as for its universal embrace. No fame so ma- 
 jestic has been cherished with a love so tender, Virgil 
 thus blends in a marvelous manner the authority of a 
 classic with the direct appeal to life. 
 
 It belongs to the sense of familiar companionship 
 which Virgil's verse exhales that some shadows of his 
 personality survive, slight but sufficient for memory and 
 affection. He was the son of a small farmer, in the prov- 
 ince of North Italy, of whom no more is known than that 
 he wished to give his child the best education then to be 
 had. We first see him, who was to be so great a poet, as 
 the slender tall schoolboy at Cremona and Milan, with 
 the rusticity of manner which he never laid aside. He 
 studied also at Rome, in his youth, and found patrician 
 friends among his mates. He made his way later with 
 men of great affairs, and notwithstanding the shyness of 
 his heart and the awkwardness af his manners they 
 found something to prize in him by some charm the 
 Muses shed, loved him, petted and praised him, and gave 
 him a fortune, a house at Rome, near Maecenas' garden, 
 which he seldom used, and two country homes at Na- 
 ples and Nola, where he loved to live in the soft Cam- 
 panian air; there, except for sojourns in Sicily and 
 pleasant travel in the Greek cities and along the islands, 
 he passed those meditative years of privacy in which his 
 self-distrustful and long-brooding genius slowly matured 
 its eternal work; there, too, as he desired, at Naples, over 
 by the hill of Posilipo, his ashes were laid to rest in that 
 
VIRGIL 211 
 
 pleasant city's soil, which still keeps the tradition of his 
 tomb. He was happy in the protecting affection of his 
 friends, and also in the honor of the world which rose 
 to him as to Augustus when he entered the theater, and 
 in the power of lifelong labor in his art undiminished 
 by an hour wasted on inferior things. In all outward 
 ways his life was the most fortunate recorded in litera- 
 ture; and it is good to know that the world was gentle to 
 one of those delicate spirits who, usually with how dif- 
 ferent a fate, bring it gifts from eternity. In the mem- 
 ory of Virgil there is no bitterness of regret for the words 
 of unkindness or the blows of adversity; he lived peace- 
 fully and in the habitual enoyment of some of the fairest 
 gifts of life. 
 
 Nowhere so much as in those works which seem most 
 independent of the power of time, which escape from 
 their own age, their native country and race, and enter 
 upon a cycle of memory so vast that they are fitly named 
 the stars of the intellectual firmament, is it needful to de- 
 fine their moment, to understand the nest of their con- 
 ception, the law of their creation, the nature of their first 
 appeal to men, in a word their contemporaneity. The 
 moment of Virgil is declared plainly in the "Eclogues." 
 They are little poems, the labored trifles of his 'prentice 
 hand; but in them, like the oak in the acorn there is in 
 miniature all Virgil; both the man and his work are 
 there like a preconception. The teachableness of Virgil is 
 his prime character, and shines in his youth. He woke to 
 the past as simply as a child opens its eyes to the dancing 
 sunlight of the world, and he took it in directly as some- 
 thing belonging to him. He made speed to enter on his 
 inheritance; and for him this heritage in its special form 
 was the glory of Greek literature. The imaginative in- 
 
212 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 terpretation of the world stored in a thousand years of 
 Greek poetry was the food of his heart. Thus it came 
 about iJiat he did not begin to write in a way discovered 
 and worked out merely by himself, but imitated, as it is 
 said, Theocritus the Syracusan, the chief Greek master 
 of pastoral verse. He could not have had better fortune. 
 For a youth unacquainted with experience the artificial 
 mode of life which the pastoral presents as its frame- 
 work of incident and song is itself favorable, since its 
 requirements of accurate representation of reality are 
 less stringent; and, especially, its small scale enforces at- 
 tention to detail and encourages perfection of phrase, 
 line and image in the workmanship and condensation in 
 the matter, while its variety of description, dialogue and 
 inserted song and its blend of l5n:ic and dramatic moods 
 give scope to a mind experimenting as it learns. It is for 
 this reason that so many of the world's great poets in 
 their youth have tried their wings in these numbers, 
 brief, composite, academic, so well fitted for the exercise 
 of growing talents, already touched with scholarship, in 
 a world not too real to be lightly held nor so fantastic as 
 to preclude truth of feeling. Virgil derived the proper 
 good from the imitation of a great master by developing 
 through it his native power. Theocritus remained the 
 master-singer of the idyl; but before the different genius 
 of Virgil passed on to its own toils, he had left the 
 sweetness of his youth here in the pastoral like a perfume 
 forever. 
 
 The poetic life of Virgil, however, in these years was 
 more profound than this. He was not merely training his 
 genius in certain external modes of expression; he was 
 unfolding his soul. Form was the Greek gift to Virgil; 
 not only that form which exists in the outer structure of 
 
VIRGIL 213 
 
 line and melody or within the verse in its logic of emo- 
 tion and event, but form which has power to cast the 
 mind itself in predetermined lines of feeling and action, 
 of taste, of choice^ of temperament, and finds utterance 
 in that beauty of the soul which is precedent to all verse. 
 Form in its religious moods has this power to possess and 
 shape the souls of men, as is familiarly seen; and so 
 artistic form, alive and bodied in the lovely and ancient 
 Greek tradition, seized Virgil in the spirit and fashioned 
 him; he was its child as the novice is the spiritual son of 
 St. Francis. The opposition between Theocritus and 
 Virgil lies in this : in Theocritus, life puts on the forms of 
 art; in Virgil art puts on the forms of life. In the Syra- 
 cusan idyls there is objective beauty — pictures idealized 
 and detached from life; in the Mantuan "Eclogues" one 
 feels rather the presence of a beautiful soul to which art 
 has given the gift of tongues to speak to all men. This 
 deep intimate compelling mastery of the Greek spirit over 
 all that was artistic in Virgil shaped him almost in his 
 essential being; he was Hellenized as by a second birth. 
 It was characteristic of him to yield to the will of life, 
 and he yielded happily to the Greek forms of imagination, 
 for he found in this obedience that yoke in which alone 
 everlasting freedoms lie and the power of a free soul; it 
 released his personality as if by some divine and creative 
 touch. This presence of Virgil in his verse is elementary. 
 He was a lover, and through love disengaged from life its 
 moment of beauty, of sentiment, of millennial hope; but 
 this beauty, sentiment and hope are seen under that 
 almost atmospheric charm which has coined for itself 
 the name Virgilian and is breathed from himself. It is 
 not for what these eclogues contain of Theocritus that 
 they have been dear to the poets of all lands, any more 
 
214 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 than it is for what the youthful lines of Spenser and Mil- 
 ton contain of these eclogues that the English breathings 
 of the pastoral are dear; it is because they express with 
 great purity and sweetness the genius of Virgil in its 
 tender age. 
 
 If any one finds in the eclogues only the echo of Theo- 
 critus, he is wide of the mark; his ear is not set to the 
 ringing of the master-melody in their song. The poets 
 used the same instrument, and the younger learned its 
 use from the elder; but each employed it with a difference, 
 and this difference is a gulf of ages between them and an 
 opposition in the spring and impulse of poetry. Art is 
 not life, but is evoked from life. Theocritus held the 
 mirror to life, but its image in his verse though more 
 beautiful is still a thing of the external world; he stands 
 outside what he depicts and renders it for its own sake. 
 Virgil projected himself into life, and is the center of the 
 world he expresses; he uses it to illustrate his own per- 
 sonality, to body forth his own various loves of beauty, 
 nature, sentiment, romance, aspiration, to clothe with the 
 forms of life that soul which art had shaped in him. He 
 was still, though thirty, only a half-boyish lover of books 
 and nature and a few friends, and the world he lived in 
 was but little known to him; the eclogues with the per- 
 sonality of autobiography disclose this young scholar in 
 his world. Virgil's world, too, like the temperamental 
 drift of his art, is different from that of Theocritus; it is 
 one more diversified, more actual and contemporaneous 
 even; it is a Roman, Italian, proconsular world. He 
 thinks of Actium and Parthia as we to-day think of 
 Santiago and the Philippines. His landscape has the face 
 and profile of familiar haunts; his shepherds have the 
 features of his own rustics; his interests are his own local 
 
VIRGIL 2IS 
 
 and temporal affairs. The pastoral Arcadia is a con- 
 vention by means of which the encumbrances of time and 
 place and persons and much matter of fact are gotten 
 rid of; but under its clear veil which softens the unim- 
 portant, stand undisguised the men and events, the senti- 
 ment, the friendships, the scenes, the recreations, all the 
 loves of the young poet from the humblest and tenderest 
 up to the hope of all the world which he in those first 
 years sounded for eternal memory as none before or since 
 has sung the strain. Such is the Roman substance, per- 
 sonal, Italian, imperial, of it all, notwithstanding the 
 superficial artifice of the poetic form. 
 
 Roman, too, was the seriousness of the young poet in 
 his art. He and his fellow poets of the age were in litera- 
 ture provincials whose metropolis was Greek letters. 
 They set themselves to the patriotic task of bringing the 
 Greek muses to Latium where Aeneas had brought the 
 Trojan gods, and creating in Latin something as near 
 the Greek poetry as they could accomplish, and by very 
 obviously, often direct, imitative means. They were 
 zealous in the work; all were serious in it, however light 
 the touch or the topic they strove to transplant to their 
 own language and world. Virgil was such a provincial, 
 though Greek art was itself refined in passing through 
 his temperament; and he had such seriousness of mind. 
 To compare great things with small, he was not unlike 
 the young Longfellow in America who was avid of all 
 the literatures of Europe and assimilated the poetic tra- 
 dition of the thousand years preceding his birth, and who 
 also strove with like seriousness to compass something 
 like that in his own new land; and like Virgil, he too, in 
 after life created for his country its native romance and 
 primitive sentiment, giving to its desert nakedness an 
 
2i6 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 ascribed and imputed poetry. The Roman moment, also, 
 in the largest way, was not unlike our own. Virgil was 
 born in a dawning age; for him, as for us, life had been 
 long lived in the world, there was antiquity, the thousand 
 years of literature, and vanishing religions; Egypt was, 
 perhaps, even more a monument of the Unknown Death 
 than to-day; but with the spread of the power of Rome, 
 which was then what the spread of liberty now is, a new 
 age was at hand. Law and peace, which were the other 
 names of Rome, had the world in their grasp, and were 
 conquering far outward along its dark barbaric 
 edges even to Britain "sundered once from all the human 
 race." It was then that Virgil, "in the foremost files of 
 time," sang in his youth that eclogue, the "Pollio" which 
 is the greatest hymn of antiquity, if not of all time, and 
 won for himself, though a pagan, a place among the 
 saints of the Church: 
 
 Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo. 
 
 The line has the swell of the "Gloria." Thus early, thus 
 fundamental by virtue of its earliness, arose in him and 
 mingled with his genius that temperament of world-hope, 
 not the diminutive Arcadian dream of a valley or distant 
 islands of the blessed, but world-hope mighty as the 
 world, on the great scale of universal sympathy for man- 
 kind, which was one of the authentic signs of a new time. 
 It was the secular hour of the founding of the Empire; it 
 was the spiritual hour of the birth of Christ; and its 
 presence was in the young poet's heart. A mighty voice, 
 too, had before now been heard in Rome, the voice of 
 one crying in the wilderness of the dethroned gods, a 
 man so great that he could endure the longest probation 
 of any of the poets of mankind and wait nineteen cen- 
 
VIRGIL 217 
 
 turies for the fullness of his fame — Lucretius. Virgil 
 heard the voice, and stored it in his heart, and meditated 
 upon it; but the time was not yet come. It was the eve 
 of a great past, the dawn of a great future; and the 
 further one penetrates the verse, the more clearly stands 
 out this youthful figure with the radiance of the world's 
 new morning in his face. 
 
 The "Eclogues," obeying the Jaw of all beautiful 
 things, have gathered beauty from the lapse of time. 
 Some light streams back upon them from the later glory 
 of Virgil, and they have that increase of charm which 
 belongs to things that have been long loved; the lines, 
 too, like shells, are full of vocal memories. For one who 
 knows them well and knows the poets, they are a nest of 
 the singing birds of all lands; as he reads, voices of Italy, 
 France and England blend with the familiar lines, and a 
 choiring vision rises before him of the world's poets in 
 their youth framing their lips to the smooth-sliding syl- 
 lables; for the eclogues have been deeply cherished. 
 They are loved chiefly, however, because the young Virgil 
 is seen in them, as in the palaestra of his art before he 
 had put on his singing-robes, with that sweet teachable- 
 ness, that yielding and hospitable mind, out of which was 
 to come, to bless him and the world, the wide receptivity 
 of his spirit, the rich assimilation, the accumulated power 
 of imagination in the race, already held in the grasp of 
 his genius like Ithuriel's spear. Rome and Athens, the 
 light and majesty of the world, were married in his 
 blood; and though he bore as yet only the rustic reed, 
 here in the adolescence of genius was the form of him 
 who was to hand down by descent the antique vigor to 
 the modern world. Virgil became the great reconciler in 
 his own inherited world, the great mediator betwee« 
 
2i8 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 antiquity and Christendom; he maintained in poetry, 
 equally with Plato in philosophy, the imbroken conti- 
 nuity of the human spirit; but before entering on these 
 great offices and preliminary to them he was first of all 
 and by instinct a great lover — a greater lover than 
 Dante — and here in the first friendly affections of the 
 senses melting with the world, of the heart blending with 
 other lives, of the mind breathing the universal hope of 
 all, is this lover in the bud — he, who was to be the 
 greatest lover in all the world of all things beautiful, 
 strong, tender, pitiful, sad, and fated. 
 
 There was another scope, a different fiber, in the 
 "Georgics," the fruit of his seven years' toil in early 
 manhood. His genius had been powerfully condensed; 
 the matter of the song was as firmly organized as it was 
 richly diversified; the whole, scarcely two thousand lines 
 in all, was a great single poem. The sense of nationality, 
 no longer diffused and dispersed, burns at the center as 
 its nucleus and feeding flame. The work, though small 
 in scale is monumental in effect; it bears the Roman 
 birthmark in its practical purpose to share in the res- 
 toration of the agricultural life, and in the author's dedi- 
 cation of his powers to public spirit. It was character- 
 istic of Virgil to require reality in his subject-matter, and 
 a present hour; contemporaneousness presided in the in- 
 ception and purpose of all he did; however far he might 
 range, he brought all home to amplify that moment of 
 Rome in which he lived. More than any other of the 
 poets of mankind he used the poetic art to idealize, to 
 exalt and to enrich the nation's consciousness; and, 
 through singleness of mind and comprehensivenenss of 
 effort, he became the most national of all poets. As the 
 world had been given to Rome to rule, Rome had been 
 
VIRGIL 219 
 
 given to him to be the Empire of his song; this was his 
 destiny. His genius did not expand suddenly and at once 
 to so vast a sphere; but as is the case with all men who 
 accimiulate greatness as if by a process of nature, hum- 
 bler impulses and lesser tasks conducted him upon 
 his way. He would tell the story of Italy — that was the 
 phase under which Rome first appealed to him. It was as 
 if some one of our own poets had chosen to write an 
 idyl of the old free life of New England, in the days be- 
 fore national unity and American destiny had come to 
 fullness in his heart. With unerring instinct, in choosing 
 his theme, he struck straight at the fundamental Roman 
 interest, the land, the soil; but not yet imperializing, he 
 seized this interest not in its foreign form of land-hunger 
 which is the impulse of all empire, but in its primitive 
 form of the home-domain, "the mighty mother of men 
 and fruits," that Italy which was Rome's birthright. He 
 thought of the land, too, not as our nature-poets do in 
 modern days as a description of contour and color and 
 changes of the weather, the magic of the senses, but 
 primitively as the dwelling place of the race and the ele- 
 ment of its labors. Toil; that, too, was a Roman idea, 
 and he yoked it with the land in a Roman way; for he 
 saw human life on the soil as an arduous and unremitting 
 warfare with the stubborn obduracy of nature, who being 
 subdued, nevertheless, became beneficent, rejoicing in 
 her captivity, and rewarded her conqueror with the 
 harvest of the earth and its loveliness, with the external 
 blessings of the gods and with moral boons of inward 
 excellence stored in the characters of men by this disci- 
 pline of the perennial task of life. 
 
 The "Georgics" is the story of this perennial task. In 
 its original and parent form no more than an almanac, a 
 
220 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 manual of the planting of crops, the raising of cattle and 
 the tending of bees, it grew in Virgil's mind to be a poem 
 of the sacred year. Virgil was by instinct and tempera- 
 ment a ritualist. The regularity inherent in times and 
 seasons and all ceremonial, the solemnity belonging to 
 all rites, the presence of the abstract and hidden in their 
 significance, were things profoundly Roman and re- 
 sponded to what was by race deeply implanted in his 
 nature. The round of the seasons in their connection 
 with agricultural life was in his eyes a ritual of the year, 
 the presence and action of a natural religion. The de- 
 pendence of man on nature always plays a great part in 
 religious life; even now when that dependence is less 
 definitely felt than in primitive times it is at birth, mar- 
 riage and death, the great moments of nature, that re- 
 ligion has its common and vital impact on the general 
 life; and in the primitive conditions, set forth in this 
 poem, nature might seem herself to appoint the sacred 
 days of the gods both for prayer and for thanksgiving, to 
 order the festivals in their course and to prescribe the pe- 
 culiar service for the hour, month after month, in annual 
 revolution. The needs of each season and the pursuits 
 appropriate to it determined the active duties of man, 
 and these drew after them the due religious practices 
 consecrated by use and wont; and, in the issue of all, 
 the blessings of the divine gods crowned the labor with 
 a present reward. Natural piety could not have a simpler 
 being than this. The mystery of the world which en- 
 velops all life-processes on the earth has always over- 
 hung the out-of-doors people with some grandeur in the 
 elements, with stars and winds and waves; in living near 
 to nature, they seem, by virtue of being lost and unpro^ 
 tected there, to reach out to the unknown in habitual 
 
VIRGIL 221 
 
 ways. VirgQ felt this mystery after a different fashion; 
 he knew it in the forms of old mythology that Greek im- 
 agination had put on in the divine presence, and also in 
 the forms of new science that Greek intellect had put 
 forth in attempting a rational conception of nature as a 
 thing subject to human knowledge. He was not dis- 
 turbed by this double possession of imagination and ra- 
 tional intuition; that teachable, that yielding and hos- 
 pitable mind, by its own nature made him in his self- 
 expression a representative poet; he gave out life in its 
 wholeness. This sacred year, with its ritual of work and 
 worship, drew his eyes upon it, as a thing of outward 
 beauty, and first gave up to his gaze, first of men, that 
 enveloping charm of the land and its life which is now 
 the world's thought of Italy; this year, too, with its an- 
 tique usages, as old, perhaps, as the tilled soil itself, 
 recurring in their seasons as the sun rose in the zodiac, 
 engaged his affections by which he was bound to all 
 things of reverence, age and piety, and none more than 
 he realized in his heart both their divine and human ap- 
 peal; and, with all this, awoke, too, the philosophic mind, 
 fed from later fountains, and he flung round this ancient 
 Italy, humanized by long life upon its soil, that large 
 horizon of the intellect, in which his own time was be- 
 ginning to live. 
 
 In such ways as these the poem which was begun as a 
 manual of the farm's task-work came from Virgil's hands 
 so touched with visible beauty, old religious association, 
 the mythology and science of the Mediterranean world 
 and his own loves for all these, that it was, without fiction, 
 an incarnate Italy. He had embodied in his verse the 
 land itself with all its loveliness, then as it is to-day, a 
 land long lived in, with history, legend and ruins of a 
 
222 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 storied past reaching back into the unknown ages; he 
 had set forth its characteristic life, the human product of 
 the soil, as a thing so sharing in the simplicities of na- 
 ture and what is divinely primitive as to make it seem 
 the eternal model of what the life of man on earth should 
 be, under the dispensation of labor, yet enveloped in the 
 kindly agencies of sun and rain, springtide and summer 
 heat and mellowing falls, the birth and rebirth of all 
 things in the revolution of the year — a life which was 
 itself religion, a round of duty, prayer and praise; and he 
 had evoked from this land and the life there lived in the 
 plains and uplands that abstract Italy, the eldest of the 
 modern nations, in unveiling whom he may almost be 
 said to have created the mother-land. It is the same 
 Italy, then and now; the stream of Italian patriotism still 
 mounts to the hymn of the second Georgic as its fountain- 
 head. There Italy is first seen clothed with the divinity 
 that a land identified with a race and a renown takes on 
 in the hearts of its children. Virgil seized the fact in its 
 moment, with that revelation of the actual which the 
 highest poetry exists to achieve. He sees Italy as the 
 center of the world, with other lands antique or bar- 
 barous lying on the sea about and beyond her, each 
 with its just distance and coloring and place in the 
 Mediterranean world, which is her sphere, but subject 
 and tributary to her unenvious supremacy in fertility and 
 men and fame. The miracle is the perfection with which 
 Virgil expresses this security in happiness, beauty and 
 power, this unclouded felicity of fortune, this ordered 
 peace, while distant clouds of war and menace whirl only 
 on the far confines of the scene. 
 
 He had prepared himself with wonderful thoroughness 
 for the work; a broad base of scholarship lies under it, 
 
VIRGIL 223 
 
 and for the didactic substance he had brought all Greek 
 and Roman knowledge, and something even from Car- 
 thage, to contribute to its truth, precision and fullness; 
 but it was rather by his cultural knowledge, which he used 
 in heightening and expanding the theme to its true pro- 
 portions, that he regenerated and transformed the matter 
 of the verse and made the rural scene into the glory of 
 Italy. The wealth of this preparation, and his seven 
 years* toil, may seem disproportionate to the result in a 
 poem so brief, but only to those who do not know that, 
 the scale of the matter being allowed for, the power of a 
 poem is in inverse proportion to its length. He used for 
 his artistic method a selective, partial description, sub- 
 ordinating individuality and detail to social and general 
 presentation, and he employed episode, suggestion and 
 the emphasis that lies in enthusiasm to enlarge the theme 
 and qualify it with greatness; in particular, he intended 
 no exhaustion of the subject but only of the feeling of the 
 subject, which is the method of great poetry, and hence 
 come the rapidity, the variety, the completeness of im- 
 pression which are the most obvious traits of the change- 
 ful lines. The "Georgics," most of all, reveals the master 
 of the poetic art; and in a work somewhat limited by its 
 choice of one though a great and enduring phase of 
 human life and also by its national inspiration and its 
 attachment to a particular social moment, the mind has 
 leisure to notice the more its artistic modes, the choice 
 and ordering of the material, the colors of rhetoric, the 
 edge and immobility of style ever fresh and everlasting as 
 sculpture, the wealth of mosaic, the pictorial, sententious 
 and eclectic compositeness, the elaboration of the poem's 
 beauty in the whole and in detail. It is full of a poet's 
 choices; and, though popular with the cultivated class to 
 
224 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 which it was addressed, is essentially a poet's poem. 
 True to himself, the stuff which Virgil worked in was his 
 own nature; out of his heart brooding on the beauty of 
 the visible world about him, on the picture of its human 
 labors and the imperial care conserving all these things 
 in happy and lasting peace, came the vision shaped and 
 colored and idealized by his sympathies with man's life, 
 his affections for the things of old time, his hopes in the 
 present. The "Georgics" in a land of patriots and poets 
 is still the unrivaled monument of the first poet-lover of 
 Italy. 
 
 The "Aeneid," Virgil's last and greatest work, is a 
 world-poem. It is one of that splendid cluster of world- 
 poems, which by the fewness of their number, the sin- 
 gleness of their glory, and the great intervals of time that 
 separate them, have, of all man's works most infinitude; 
 though time attacks them, they survive like the pyra- 
 mids; they are man's Bibles on the side that he turns to 
 the human, like the Scriptures on the side that he turns 
 to the divine. The distinctive feature of the "Aeneid" is 
 the arc of time it covers, the burden of time it supports. 
 After that song of Italy, of the land and the life, the ge- 
 nius of Virgil struck a deeper compass of reality and 
 seized the theme at its heart. "Utter my toiling power," 
 said Rome. The tale of the wanderings of Aeneas and 
 how he brought the Trojan gods to Latium is only the 
 fable; over and beyond all the character and event which 
 it contains, and including these like an atmosphere, it is 
 a symbol of the massive labor of the seven centuries 
 that had for their crown and climax the pacified Au- 
 gustan world. 
 
 Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem. 
 
VIRGIL 22 s 
 
 This massive labor, this toiling power, is the theme. It 
 is not the Homeric world; no ten years' foray, brilliant 
 with Greek personality, in the dawn of history; no pas- 
 sionate boy, though the most splendid of all Alexanders, 
 great in his sulking wrath, his comrade-love and his 
 battle-glory; no chieftains parleying in the council and 
 warriors rushing in the field; not these. It is the Virgilian 
 world — Rome at the summit of her Empire, rising from 
 those seven centuries of interminable strain. Rome in 
 the verse is its creative impulse, and governs the poem 
 in its whole and in its parts. The sense of past time, 
 too, always so strong in Virgil, is never relaxed. The 
 "Aeneid" is the book of an old world. 
 
 Aeneas is, in his character, Rome concentrated — a 
 man set against the world; and in him, too, is that per- 
 spective of the past. He has outlived his personal life; 
 his city is in ashes, his wife is dead; there remains noth- 
 ing for himself, only to live for others, to obey the will of 
 the gods, devotion to a public end. He is characterized 
 by patience which alike to the Pagan and the Christian 
 world, to the Oriental and the Occidental mind, is the 
 greatest virtue of man, and was the state virtue of Rome; 
 to endure, however distant the goal, however frequent 
 the defeat, however adverse men and fortune and the 
 gods. The "Aeneid" is the book of victory deferred, as 
 imperial Rome, to one looking backward on her past, was 
 the last fruit of time, the late issue of long and perilous 
 struggle through generations. Toil, which in the song of 
 Italy was linked with the land, is here fused with the 
 power of empire; but it is toil — the same Roman ideaj 
 though more informed with grandeur, and it draws with 
 it the same rule of life, obedience, though more set forth 
 with the stern absoluteness that belonged to Roman dis- 
 
226 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 cipline. If Aeneas offends romantic sentiment by desert- 
 ing Dido at Carthage, he conformed thereby to the 
 Roman ideal of right in some of its deepest foundations; 
 and even in the modern view, it may be suspected that if 
 in place of the wing-heeled Mercury there had been some 
 Hebrew prophet rebuking an erring David, the sympathy 
 of the reader might run truer with the thoughts of Virgil. 
 Rome would not tolerate the noblest of Antonys forgetting 
 empire in passion for a woman; and Aeneas, in abandon- 
 ing Dido, was the reverse of Antony, and measured to the 
 Roman rule of life. Aeneas gains, and is truly seen, in 
 proportion as the mind is free from the allurements of 
 individuality, free from the worship of the xmgovernable 
 human power in life, and all that makes against the ideal 
 of patience, obedience and rule; the grandeur of the indi- 
 vidual is found in Mezentius and Turnus, creatures of 
 self-will opposed to the will of heaven, and herein justly 
 doomed to perish; if these latter seem the true heroes, it 
 is as Satan is sometimes, and perhaps popularly, regarded 
 as the hero of Milton, but to Milton Satan was infernal 
 as to Virgil Turnus was impious. Aeneas stands at the 
 opposite pole of conduct; and if he shares the defective 
 attraction which the typical Roman character historically 
 discloses, he the more illustrates that efficient power in 
 life, of which the sense greatens as time clarifies the mind 
 of the ardors of youth, whether in men or nations; for 
 the ideal implanted in him, like every part of the poem, 
 bears the mark of a world grown old. 
 
 The presence of Roman time in the verse, especially 
 the sense of the sorrows that are the price of empire, is 
 also profoundly felt in the diffusion of pathos through 
 the poem, not the pathos of individual lives but of the 
 general lot, which makes it the saddest book of the world. 
 
VIRGIL 227 
 
 It contains three great defeats: the destruction of Troy, 
 the fall of Carthage, which is the atmosphere of fate in 
 which the personal tragedy of Dido burns out on her 
 funeral pyre, and the overthrow of Turnus; the true ac- 
 tion is contained in these passages; and, in addition, 
 though Aeneas is finally successful, his checks have been 
 so many and his success is so long delayed and is so 
 palely realized that his career, in the impression it makes, 
 may almost count as a fourth defeat. Against this scene 
 of disaster the majesty of Rome's final triumph in history, 
 though it fills all the horizons of the poem, blazes in vain. 
 Here are the tears of time. Lacrimae rerum seems almost 
 the other name of the "Aeneid," as it is its best known 
 and central phrase. The "chanter of the PoUio" had 
 come to this. He who was the first to sound the strain of 
 world-hope was also now the first to strike that parallel 
 chord of world-woe which has reverberated down all after 
 ages. The "Miserere" follows the "Gloria" as manhood 
 follows youth. If the "Aeneid" were only a poem of 
 heroic action, and not a S3mibol of life long lived, the 
 suffering would be absorbed in the action; but the poem 
 is heavy with thought and clouded with feeling like a 
 sun struggling with eclipse. The intellectual force in it, 
 the passion of thought, Virgil's overmastering sympathy 
 with the victim — and Aeneas by his long sufferings is 
 essentially a victim — shake its containing bounds, and 
 again and again threaten its epical form. A thousand 
 lines have the lyrical cry; they could, and do, stand 
 alone, each one a poem. The dramatic power in the 
 episode of Dido threatens to overbear the moral unity of 
 the structure; the didactic depth of teaching in the de- 
 scent to Hades threatens to intermit the sense of action 
 and shift the scene to the academy; and at every turn, 
 
228 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 when the epic seems slipping from his hand, Virgil in- 
 vokes Rome, returns to that ground-swell of his music, 
 and fuses all disparate elements in its enveloping power. 
 It is the thought of Ascanius and the Julian line that 
 overrules the wrongs of Dido; and in the Elysian fields 
 it is the encomium of Rome — the most majestic lines 
 ever written by the hand of man — and the bead-roll of 
 her heroes and the vision of her Augustan triumph that 
 restore the epical interest and supremacy. It is in these 
 ways most truly that, as Tennyson said, this "ocean-roll 
 of rhythm sounds forever of imperial Rome." 
 
 Rome, too, sustains the verse in its weakest part, the 
 mythology, and gives to that debilitated supernatural 
 element the only reality which it contains. Virgil was 
 born too late to be a true believer in Olympus; but in 
 placing the prophecy of Rome on the lips of Jupiter and 
 in identifying the fate of Rome with the divine purpose 
 and will he made the mythological creed discharge a 
 true and important function in the poem, and in fact its 
 only function; except for this, Olsmipus is only a tradi- 
 tional adornment, a part of the mechanical scheme and 
 surface pictorialness of the plot, and one element in that 
 many-sided perspective of human history in which the 
 poem is so remarkably beyond all others. If, however, 
 Olympus is a shadow and Virgil recedes from it in his 
 mind, on the other hand he is far advanced and moves 
 forward in what was to Homer the shadow-world, the 
 life beyond the grave; in his thought and sentiment there 
 is not only the sense of profound reality, but he touches 
 on the confines of revealed religion. Here most strik- 
 ingly, in the sweep backward to the still visible but fading 
 gods and in the sweep forward to the still unborn Chris- 
 tian ages, the "Aeneid" shows that characteristic of 
 
VIRGIL 229 
 
 greatness in literature which lies in its being a water-shed 
 of time; it looks back to antiquity in all that clothes it 
 with the past of imagination, character and event, and 
 forward to Christian times in all that clothes it with 
 emotion, sentiment and finality to the heart. If, as is 
 sometimes said. Gibbon's history is the bridge between 
 the ancient and the modern world, the "Aeneid" is the 
 high central ridge where time itself joined both. 
 
 VirgU was so great a poet because he assimilated his 
 vast mental experience, and turned it, in the true Ro- 
 man way, to power over the future. His language itself 
 — and he was the "lord of language" — bears the Ro- 
 man stamp. Scarce any poet is so brief; like all the 
 masters of poetic speech he seldom carries his sentence 
 beyond three lines, and more often he clasps the sense in 
 shorter limits, and notably in those "half-lines" which 
 are so often spoken of as the special characteristic of his 
 style, though they are also to be found in Shakespeare 
 with like power. Oratory belongs to the epic as the lyric 
 belongs to the drama, as its rhetorical means of intensity; 
 and oratory was a Roman art. It belongs to Virgil 
 equally with his winged music. It is the oratory of 
 Brutus, not of Antony; and it is present in spirit and 
 method, not only in the set speeches and narratives, but 
 in the general flow of the verse; the weight of thought, 
 the compactness of vision, the intensity of the lyrical cry 
 of feeling itself, are indebted to it, for it is the native 
 world of Roman speech, and Virgil in his song could only 
 heighten, refine and amplify it, pour it in more lucid and 
 tender voices of the spirit, which was none the less a 
 Roman spirit. It is common to regard the earlier books 
 of the "Aeneid" which are more inspired by the Greek 
 element in Virgil's culture as the greater; but in the later 
 
230 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 books in which the inspiration of the home-land prevails 
 more, and not less excellently in its own qualities, if the 
 presence of Rome is less imperially impressive, it has 
 more primitive charm. The early air of Rome is here, 
 the youth of primeval Italy, when Empire was far away. 
 In Mezentius and Turnus, and especially in Evander, 
 there is an original impulse, a native stamp ; and, most of 
 all, in Camilla. Few poets cast a new ts^je of woman- 
 hood. Camilla is the first of those ideal Italian women 
 who have glorified the pages of Tasso and the canvasses, 
 divine and human, of a hundred artists. If the later 
 books of the "Aeneid" are less valued, it is partly because 
 they are purer in originality, more Italian in their interest, 
 and in limiting themselves to the evolution of a romantic 
 past for the soil of Italy and the beginnings of Rome 
 make a narrower appeal. To Virgil this task was, per- 
 haps, dearer than the echoes of Troy and the sorrows of 
 Carthage, but he worked with names that sounded less 
 in the ears of the world. In one respect he succeeds mar- 
 velously; both on the voyage and in Italy he gives the 
 sense of the early Mediterranean world as a place of 
 wandering colonists and rising settlements in lonely 
 places, a sense of the taking possession of the virgin 
 land, with seas and coasts and spaces never to be 
 crossed again; such a wonder-world did not come to 
 man's view a second time, so effectually, till the days of 
 Cortez and Magellan and De Soto, in the dawn of the 
 Americas. The primitive time, such as it Is shown in 
 Evander, has the same reality, and his hospitality has 
 retained in men's minds its place as the historic and ideal 
 moment of the simplicities of the first life of men on still 
 unviolated soil. If one's eye is on the Roman spirit of 
 the poem, he will not find the Italian prepossession of its 
 
VIRGIL 231 
 
 last books an obstacle to his interest; but rather the 
 charm of a more home-bred inspiration will endear to him 
 its humilities, its native character and the nobility of 
 human feeling which is nowhere in the poem so constant, 
 pervasive and pure. If Rome is less, in these passages, 
 in her imperial form, Italy is more; and it is that Italy 
 in which the true Rome resided and to which she re- 
 turned, of which the Empire itself now seems a planet 
 she cast from her larger and more immortal life. 
 
 The poem of Rome, however, even though such a 
 nation as Italy fall heir to it, could not maintain its 
 intimacy with the modern mind and continue to make a 
 direct appeal to life, unless it were something more. 
 There is a greatness in the "Aeneid" beyond the presence 
 of Rome in the verse. It might seem that Virgil was by 
 nature little fitted for the epic; his initiation into life had 
 been through that "passive youth" which Shelley de- 
 scribes, the type of poetic boyhood, sensitive, impressible, 
 inexhaustibly recipient; and all his days he was a scholar 
 drawing into his brooding thoughts the spectacle of 
 things till his knowledge was equal to the world-culture 
 of his time; that such a man should give back to the 
 world what he had received from it in the shape of a 
 poem of action seems incongruous, and, doubtless, like 
 Tasso and Milton and Spenser and Tennyson, in their 
 several degrees, he experienced the natural difficulties of 
 the task. Yet, to the brooding spirit, not thought, but 
 action is the true sphinx of life; not what is dreamed or 
 reasoned or desired, but what is done, what God permits, 
 as the phrase goes, the power of unrighteousness that is 
 nine- tenths of life; this fastens the eye, perplexes the 
 mind, disturbs the heart. Virgil, born late and acquainted 
 with the world long lived in, was of a contemplative 
 
232 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 mind; in the "Aeneid" thought shadows every word, a 
 subtle judgment blends with every action clothing it, as 
 music clothes the line, in an element of its own, pitying, 
 appealing, affirming, according to the motions of the 
 poet's soul; and hence the "Aeneid" has its grandest 
 phase, by virtue of which it has entered into the hearts 
 of so many later generations and still enters. It is a 
 meditation upon life. 
 
 The modes in which the poem thus affects the reader 
 are infinitely varied; sometimes so intimate as to seem 
 the voice in one's own heart of one's own life, or so lofty 
 and assured as to seem the voice of all men's hearts, or 
 so world-sweeping in its pathos as to seem the voice di- 
 vine. Unbroken is the sense of the difficulty of life, not 
 merely under its old conception as a warfare, but as a 
 thing of burden, of frequent mistake, of unforeseen and 
 unmerited disaster, of repeated defeat, of imcertain is- 
 sue; the toiling power of Rome is made up of the in- 
 numerable toils of miserable men, and about the main 
 actors are the files of captive women, the sons burning 
 on their funeral pyres before the faces of their parents, 
 all the wretchedness of a military state for the private 
 life. The element of difficulty felt in the reverses of the 
 main fortune of the tale, in its birth in the terrors of the 
 last night of Ilium, in the wrong landings, the insidious 
 dangers of Carthage, the burning of the fleet, is, on the 
 individual scale broken into a thousand cries of death 
 and sorrow essentially personal and domestic. Life on 
 land and sea is a field of battle, and everywhere are 
 corpses rolled by Simois or the ocean-wave, and in every 
 prospect the heart follows the remnant of men, in their 
 beaten courage ever more courageous, but none the less 
 victims of life. "Pain, pain, ever, forever," rings through 
 
VIRGIL 233 
 
 the poem like a Promethean cry; the burden of Priam, 
 the burden of Dido, the burden of Turnus, kingdom after 
 kingdom, and by the way the strewn corpses of Pali- 
 nurus, Euryalus, Pallas. In the Elysian fields Aeneas 
 marvels why any soul should desire to see the light of 
 life. Over all there hangs in heaven the doubtful interest 
 of the gods in human fates. "If any gods be just" — "if 
 there be any kindness in heaven" — these are the re- 
 frains of all the prayers. In the presence of the mystery 
 of what is done on earth the reason, always unsatisfied, 
 will not be silent and refuses to yield its just share in the 
 conduct of life; if, in one age, the tale be of Eden and the 
 Fall, this offends the mind's sense of justice; if^ in another 
 time, it be of the struggle for existence from the dawn of 
 life, this offends the mind's sense of mercy; in knowledge 
 of justice and mercy, the mind finds its own superiority 
 to the environment in which it is imprisoned, and in its 
 moods of sincerest reason still seeks refuge in the pro- 
 visional prayer on Virgil's lips, 
 
 Lucretius had lived; and something of all this diffi- 
 culty, pain and uncertainty had come to light in that 
 great intellect. He was essentially one of the eternal 
 Puritan brood, personal revolters against church and 
 state, which in history have been the twin tjnrants of 
 mankind; he looked back on the past and saw there 
 immense and long-continued error in important parts 
 of life, the delusion and woe of whole peoples since time 
 began; and he denounced superstition as the mother of 
 human ills. He was an individualist, a man of conscious 
 virtue, self-sufficing; he had an empire in his mind; he 
 spoke out, a lonely intellect in a world stripped for his 
 eyes to the bare principles of its being and in his words 
 was the fiery seed of the new universe of scientific 
 
234 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 thought. Virgil was of a different strain, a natural wor- 
 shiper, reverent of the rite, attached to the myth, clinging 
 with his affections to the outward garniture of life and 
 history; but his eyes were on the same things that Lu- 
 cretius saw. He, too, was finding in philosophy the true 
 goal. He felt from youth the compelling power of 
 thought of Rome's greatest mind as he looked out on the 
 long Pagan retrospect of life's beauty and sorrow. How 
 did he save himself from the intellectual indignation, the 
 despair of the divine, the earthly pessimism of Rome's 
 great sceptic; for the face of Virgil, "majestic in his 
 sadness at the doubtful doom of human kind," is the 
 grave face of a believer. He saved himself by the power 
 of love. 
 
 He was a lover of life; only an immense love of life 
 could have so revealed to him the pity of it. At every 
 touch he shows a spirit naturally dependent; teachable, 
 yielding, hospitable, responsive, S5mipathetic, appealing, 
 his heart flows out upon things, uniting with them at 
 every contact, from his early loves of nature, romance 
 and antiquity, his long passion of patriotism, on to his 
 brooding over the fates of men; and yet with his self- 
 surrender to the things of life there goes, equal with it, 
 the true Roman self-control; it is a surrender that re- 
 turns to him as strength. At every turn of the verse he 
 evokes the moment of beauty from the natural world, 
 and from life its moment of pain, with the clarity of the 
 poet; charm, which is the one, and pathos, which is the 
 other, are the words that leap from the heart in the mem- 
 ory of what he wrote, and after these the third is majesty, 
 which is the principle of control in him, and completes 
 and perfects his genius. These are wonderfully softened 
 by his constant tenderness. The epics generally find no 
 
VIRGIL 23 s 
 
 place for children in them; but here there are three — 
 Astyanax, Ascanius and Marcellus — and two of these 
 are dead boys. Of all Virgil's loves, the greatest in power 
 is the love of human life; and it is this that makes the 
 poem so Christian-like, because it is embodied and con- 
 veyed in the forms of sorrow and especially of bereave- 
 ment. Yet the burden of that sorrow comes as the 
 burden of the Roman world running its long career of 
 battle-strife; here is the heart of Rome beating in the 
 only Roman breast in which it had become fully conscious 
 of itself. The world was ready to be re-born; there is no 
 break; the premonitions of Christian feeling are natural 
 to Virgil. It is this that makes him of all ancient writers 
 the nearest to modern times, of all epic poets the nearest 
 to all nations. The "Aeneid" is, I think, the greatest 
 single book written by man because of its inclusiveness 
 of human life, of life long lived, in the things of life. It is 
 the dirge of Rome; majestic in its theme, beautiful in its 
 emotions, sad in its philosophy, it is almost the dirge of 
 life; yet many a modern mind still turns from the con- 
 templation of human life in history, like the thousands 
 of old days, to Virgil, and says with Dante, Tu se* lo mio 
 maestro, "Thou art my master." 
 
MONTAIGNE 
 
 Montaigne was one of the great confessors of life. 
 The confession is a paradox; for he reveals himself, and it 
 is the reader who stands revealed. A personal writer, 
 whose whole story is about himself, as he says, matters 
 of his own career, opinions, anecdotes, trivialities of the 
 daily life, a diary of privacies; yet throughout it is not he 
 who is interesting, but that human nature of which he 
 is the showman. His work is not to reprpspn f 1ife^_ as thp 
 novelist does Jn fiction, but to illustrate it by his own 
 example. The fortune of those wBio have been drawn to 
 Him, now for three centuries, is identical; they all claim 
 a share in his individuality. Emerson says of that copy 
 he found in his father's library: "It seemed to me as if I 
 had myself written the book, in some former life, so 
 sincerely it spoke to my thought and experience." Byron 
 heard the same personal tone in it. Not all of Emerson 
 is there, not all of Byron; there are neither hdghts nor 
 depths of the soul in the book; but human nature in the 
 norm'STits^raSgiJ ki-its-middle flight, in its average of the 
 gentleman, a little knowledge, a little morals, a little re- 
 ligion, with much moderation and good sense — these 
 are there, exemplifying the practical life of the great and 
 small in the world in which Montaigne lived and in which 
 his admirers have lived after him. In the practice of 
 life that the world wills, Montaigne is a master; he is its 
 moralist; the "Essays" contain its rule and counsels, and 
 are vivaciously varied by the gossipy interwoven tale of 
 his adventures, body and soul. 
 
 237 
 
238 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 Montaigne, nevertheless, had in his own right the fig- 
 ure that arrests the eye and traits that jet from the mem- 
 ory in high relief. One thinks of him commonly in con- 
 nection with his famous tower, the great Tour de Mon- 
 taigne, that overhangs the entrance of the chateau, 
 round, dungeon-like, massive, in the uppermost of whose 
 three stories is the circular room, spacious, with its 
 rafters on which were cut inscriptions, the author's 
 mottoes of life, and its deep embrasured windows through 
 which he looked out to three parts of heaven, on the 
 garden, farm-yard and court, and over the sloping es- 
 tates to the distant Perigord hills; here was his library, 
 and Montaigne is thought of here, in retirement, like a 
 solitary surveying the world. But this is a fantastic 
 conception. He was in reality a man of affairs all his 
 life; he had the mind of a man of affairs, with something 
 superadded. The best inheritance he drew from his 
 father, an active, capable, successful man, was the ath- 
 letic vigor and business capacity that did him yeoman 
 service in that age when both were needed to keep one's 
 feet in the world about; but to his father he also owed 
 that added something — he owed a Careful education. 
 The elder Montaigne, though not learned, was the friend 
 of scholars, and experienced that new interest in the 
 intellectual life which in his day was molding France as 
 the Renaissance spread to the northwest out of Italy; it 
 was a movement that dealt much with education and 
 favored originality, experiment, eccentricity even; and it 
 was, perhaps, by the touch of Italian conversation and 
 ideas that the father determined that the son should be 
 brought up with Latin for his mother tongue. He had 
 already put the boy to nurse in the country with poor 
 people, in order that he might have his mind and sym- 
 
MONTAIGNE 239 
 
 pathy open to the life of tie humble, and so contract a 
 lively feeling of their condition; and now he secured 
 proper instruction, a learned German who taught the 
 child to speak in Latin from his earliest accents, while 
 all who came in contact with him were compelled to con- 
 form to the rule, even the servants, so that this chatter, 
 it is said, left traces in the country speech. The boy felt 
 and talked in Latin till he was six years old, and later in 
 life French was so much less natural to him that in mo- 
 ments of deep excitement the instinctive words in his 
 brain were Latin. He was bred at college from six to 
 thirteen, immediately put to the law, and made counsellor 
 at twenty-one, in which capacity three years later he 
 became one of the Parliament of Bordeaux, the city that 
 throughout his life was the stage of his public actions and 
 of which his father was mayor. The family by its integ- 
 rity, kindness and energy, had long held a well-established 
 place in the province. On his fatiier's death, Montaigne 
 who had married some five years before became its 
 head. The inscription which records his accession may 
 still be read at the chateau, as follows: 
 
 "In the year of our Lord 1571, aged thirty-eight, on 
 the eve of the Kalends of March, the anniversary day of 
 his birth, Michel de Montaigne, having loug been weary 
 of the slavery of courts and public employments, takes 
 refuge in the bosom of the learned Virgins. He designs 
 in quiet and indifference to all things, to conclude there 
 the remainder of his life, already more than half-past, 
 and he has dedicated to repose and liberty this agreeable 
 and peacefid abode, which he has inherited from his 
 ancestors." 
 
 When Montaigne thus sought the private life in the 
 middle of his years, he had already lived a full and active 
 
240 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 career in a station of moderate distinction which had 
 brought him in contact with various aspects of the hu- 
 man lot. He knew the life of the court and had led it 
 at Paris and elsewhere with a young man's interest, with 
 gallant adventures, with gaming and episodes and de- 
 bauch, and on all sides he had formed ties with persons 
 of power. He knew the life of the camp, and had fol- 
 lowed it, as the custom was, at sieges and on marches 
 to which a young man of his position would go at his will 
 and come away at his choice. He knew the life of admin- 
 istrative affairs to which his post in the Parliament 
 obliged him and by which he was brought into serious 
 concerns affecting his locality and the interests of his 
 faith and country. He had taken no leading part, but he 
 had observed human life in many ways, and he had 
 learned to keep his balance in a difficult age. He was a 
 firm Catholic and loyalist, but he had the art of remain- 
 ing on good terms with all parties, and in his own coun- 
 try which was in the disturbed region he suffered but 
 little in the religious and civil dissensions that distracted 
 and oppressed the times with the changing fortunes of 
 Henry of Navarre. He was that marvel of the moral life, 
 a man of integrity who is a master of compromise. 
 / An entirely different phase is revealed in the only in- 
 cident of distinction that marked his early years. This 
 was his friendship with Estienne de la Boetie, a fellow- 
 counsellor in the Parliament of Bordeaux, famous as the 
 youthful author of the most eloquent attack ever made 
 upon the institution of Monarchy, which though then 
 circulated was not published for many years, and known 
 also as a poet. The two young men were of about the 
 same age, and their friendship, which was meant by 
 themselves to restore the classical example to the world, 
 
MONTAIGNE 241 
 
 was terminated after six years by La Boetie's early 
 death. This attachment is one of the legends of litera- 
 ture, and in it Montaigne showed most heart beyond any 
 9ther action of his life. He idolized it after the ancient 
 model in his essay on "Friendship"; he wrote a minute 
 account of the death-bed scenes, with the classical touch, 
 but real; and his references to his loss are among the 
 few passages of his writings that have poignancy. His 
 first task when he became master of himself in the world 
 was to edit such of his friend's papers as it seemed dis- 
 creet to publish, but he reserved the immortal essay on 
 "Monarchy" for less turbulent times and the next age. 
 It was not in his character to find in his pious duties to 
 the dead a legacy of unrest that might disturb the years 
 which he had dedicated to "repose and liberty." 
 
 Montaigne's retirement was by no means absolute. 
 Throughout the score of years that it lasted before death 
 carried him off at the edge of sixty, he kept in touch with 
 the business of this world; and his privacy was especially 
 broken by two events, his travels into Italy and his in- 
 cumbency of the mayoralty of Bordeaux. The Italian 
 journey, which took place after eight years of labor on 
 the "Essays" and when he was forty-seven years old, was 
 primarily undertaken on the score of health since he had 
 become subject to the stone, and he may also have de- 
 sired to observe the effect of the first publication of his 
 work, then just issued, on his reputation. He saw Paris, 
 assisted at a siege, and made his way by Baden and the 
 Tyrol to Venice, and thence to the chief cities of northern 
 and central Italy, visiting the baths and taking the waters 
 by the way. He was an excellent traveller. He rode on 
 horseback, a habit which he greatly enjoyed, with a suffi- 
 cient but not too expensive suite, in the style befitting a 
 
242 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 French gentleman of his rank; and he took pains to live 
 in the country according to its own customs, to mix with 
 its people and lay aside his native prejudices, to get the 
 full benefit of travel by means of a lively curiosity, an 
 open mind and a hospitable manner. He was bound by 
 no rule or plan, but zigzagged along according to his 
 mood, doubling on his track or deviating from it as the 
 fancy took him; and in all places he conformed and gave 
 way and reaped his harvest of experience and observation. 
 Social tact distinguished him. He got on with the papal 
 critics of the "Index," who handled his "Essays" with 
 some doubtfulness, just as he had done with Henry of 
 Navarre, and they left him to make his own emendations. 
 He gave a dance for the country girls at the Baths of 
 Lucca. He made friends everjrwhere. In spite of acute 
 attacks of illness, with discomfort and wearii^pain, he 
 maintained an even and settled demeanor, and thoroughly 
 enjoyed the new scenes, the honorable entertainment and 
 the variety of life and manners. The note-book which 
 constitutes his Travels reveals the man as plainly and 
 more simply than the "Essays." Posterity remembers 
 out of it two things, the eloquent description of the ruins 
 of Rome, and the offering which he was solicitous to hang 
 up at Loretto — "a framed tablet with four silver figures 
 attached, representing our Lady, myself, my wife and my 
 daughter." 
 
 He spent a year and a half in this journey, and it was 
 still unfinished when he received news of his election to 
 the mayoralty of Bordeaux. He made his return without 
 haste, and as soon as he had arrived told them, he sajrs, 
 "what they had to expect of me — no memory, no vigil- 
 ance, no experience, no vigor; but also no hatred, no 
 ambition, no avarice, and no violence." It was an ex- 
 
MONTAIGNE 243 
 
 cellent program that was thus promised in the dis- 
 tressed situation of affairs, and the character of Mon- 
 taigne for justice, moderate temper and tact must have 
 much commended him in that time and place; he pleased 
 well enough to receive the unusual distinction of a re- 
 election, and thus served for four years. It was charac- 
 teristic of his career that he entertained Henry of 
 Navarre at his chateau in the last year of his term, and 
 that, a pestilence desolating the country at its conclusion, 
 he declined to return to the stricken city to preside at his 
 successor's election. He was an expert avoider of risks. 
 He was careful to leave his chateau undefended in order 
 not to invite attack, and this device succeeded; but he 
 owed his extraordinary immunity from the ravage and 
 insult of either party to his character and manners. Once 
 when a hostile company had entered the chateau by a 
 kind of stealth, Montaigne's hospitable good nature 
 carried the matter so well that the leader took his party 
 off without sign of the injury that had been intended; 
 and once when Montaigne was stopped on the road and 
 robbed, his bold spirit and fair temper so told in his 
 favor that he was released and warned of other danger by 
 the captain of the band. He was not deficient in courage, 
 but what carried him through in so many difficult and 
 delicate situations was his knowledge of men and his 
 open appearance, his mastery of social intercourse. He 
 had none of the traits of a recluse; he was more a soldier 
 and a man of pleasure, used to the business of life, sin- 
 cere, honest, moderate, and above all adroit. In his 
 travels, his office, his adventures of whatever kind, he has 
 the stamp of the man who lives, who knows how to take 
 and give in a real world, and to whom living is more pri- 
 mary than thinking — in other words, the man of action. 
 
244 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 Montaigne, the writer, none the less, was formed by 
 his education. Education had an equal importance with 
 life in stamping that image of personality. It was a class- 
 ical education^ but he did not get it at school. The col- 
 lege where he was bred in his boyhood years was one of 
 the most distinguished in France, but it was one of those 
 hells which civilization has imposed on the suffering youth 
 of most generations. Montaigne tells us how he slipped 
 away from his routine tasks and read by stealth his Ovid 
 and Virgil and found his true world there. He gave his 
 education to himself by reading in his manhood. The 
 important books were of course the ancients. The Latin 
 authors he read in their own tongue in which he was well 
 grounded, and the Greek authors for the most part in 
 the translations then made by the French humanists ; and, 
 generally speaking, he knew the Greek authors later than 
 the Latin, and especially Plato came to him toward the 
 close of his life. He was essentially a pupil of Plutarch, 
 a sort of man who has become in our culture extinct but 
 in the sixteenth century flourished in the new lands of the 
 Renaissance; and especially he was an intellectual child 
 of Plutarch, the moralist. When poetry began to grow 
 shallow in interest to Montaigne, as it belonged to his 
 nature that it should, history and biography became the 
 food of his serious thqjight. They appealed to him be- 
 cause they illustrate life; and it was life that Montaigne 
 held as the center of his meditation always — not life in 
 its principles, but rather life as it is lived, the scene of 
 life. For example, he says that he always had great curi- 
 osity to know how men died, and would eagerly inquire 
 for all the details. Plutarch in his various writings gives 
 immense illustration of life thus viewed in all its aspects, 
 and with it a wealth of apposite reflection on human na- 
 
MONTAIGNE 245 
 
 ture and the fortunes of men. The conduct of life broadly 
 speaking is his theme, as it became Montaigne's. To all 
 such knowledge out of antiquity Montaigne added the 
 memoirs and narratives of the recent world. He applied 
 this to Jos own ends. To him all these facts of life were 
 pot an affair of learning, not information, gossip, but 
 iheans by which he came to a better understanding of 
 human nature, or, as he said, of himself. His proper 
 study, he affirmed, was only himself. The power of his 
 education consisted in the vital connection he made 
 through it between himself and the story of men's lives 
 as he picked up its multitude of fragments in the bio- 
 graphicaland historical records of past times. For prin- 
 ciples of conduct, for maxim and apothegm, he fell back 
 on Seneca, and with all the discursive philosophy of the 
 later ancient world he was in touch; but he became a 
 moralist because he was primarily an observer, and he 
 was always more interested in the premises than in the 
 conclusions of his thoughts, more absorbed in the curious 
 spectacles of human phenomena than in the laws of human 
 nature. He had an immense interest in things human, 
 and this gave him the secret of originality. "I am hu- 
 man," he said. "I am immensely interesting to myself, 
 I will write about myself." The " Essays " were thus 
 engendered. This directness of Montaigne belongs to 
 the man, to his vital energy. He had been formed by 
 life, it is true; but in his mind, the mind of a man of 
 affairs, there was, as I have said, something superadded; 
 it was a meditative habit. There was, however, nothing 
 of the closet in it, nothing of the abstract and logical, the 
 speculative for its own sake; it was a thing of experience, 
 empirical. The intellectual part of his book is a medita- 
 tion upon life as something observed, recorded, practised; 
 
246 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 the vivid reality of the book, which makes it seem often 
 written by the reader, springs from this. A man of af- 
 fairs, in his ripeness, meditating upon the business of 
 living, with cogency, with brilliancy, with unexampled 
 frankness — this was what life and education combined 
 to make of Montaigne; and the "Essays" are the mind 
 of such a man. 
 
 Montaigne was a born man of letters, but like many 
 men so born he did not think of making the career. His 
 father's house was a place of books, of scholars and the 
 intellectual ferment of the age; he had been trained by 
 men of learning and had mingled with the poets of the 
 times; but he showed no early disposition to write a 
 book. There was no adolescence in his genius. For 
 learning he had the characteristic literary contempt. The 
 first requisite for any career for him was that it should be 
 a life. Montaigne had that secret, which has so often de- 
 veloped the highest literary faculty, the power to absorb 
 life into himself directly, to let life have its way with him 
 as an experience, and yet to maintain in the midst of it 
 complete possession of himself, to lead bis own life. He 
 established terms with his environment. With that facil- 
 ity which seems rather a characteristic of southern than 
 of northern peoples, he accepted the social fictions with 
 all solemnity. He was a true Catholic in faith; and the 
 truth revealed through the church, with the observance 
 of its attendant and customary ritual, as things beyond 
 the pale of what is merely human — this was accepted 
 as being imposed by his baptism; he conformed, and did 
 so with apparent sincerity. He was a true loyalist, and 
 the system of state, with its ritual also, was accepted as 
 being imposed by his birth in the country and under the 
 crown; he conformed in secular as in religious matters to 
 
MONTAIGNE 247 
 
 things established. But this being settled, he remained 
 the master of himself in both thought and action, the 
 man of his own choice. He was by temperament Epi- 
 curean, given to an indulgent habit of pleasure, with the 
 wisdom of the moderates; yet his character was of a 
 more vigorous stock than such words imply; he was 
 hardy and sufficiently energetic. Indeed there was in his 
 spirit a nobler capacity, a movement toward enthusiasm 
 even, and a power of admiration that is most often found 
 in alliance with more active and ardent ambition than 
 belonged to his nature. The Stoical precepts awakened 
 a glow in him, the personality of Socrates seized him with 
 the fervor of hero-worship, Cicero disturbed him by his 
 weaknesses. But this strength, this latent passion, this 
 capacity to be morally great never reached the kindling 
 point. One is aware of it by its heat, but never by its 
 flame. He had dedicated himself to repose as well as to 
 liberty; he would pass life agreeably — that was the main 
 thing. He was active intellectually rather than morally; 
 his curiosity was unlimited, and what it brought him was 
 the food of untiring and discursive reflection; but, before 
 all, he was a moralist in the scientific spirit of exploration, 
 and not at all in the proselytizing spirit of the believer. 
 
 He discovered himself as a writer almost, it would 
 seem, by one of those accidents of life which are also not 
 uncommon in the history of literature. He was not an 
 author, and apparently had no thought of being one, when 
 his father put into his hands a book which he asked 
 him to translate. It was a theological work of the times 
 of the Reformation, a "Natural Theology" by Ra3miond 
 de Sebonde, written in a curious sort of Spanish with 
 Latin terminations and left at the chateau by one of the 
 elder Montaigne's scholarly visitors, an attempt to show 
 
248 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 the truth of religion on grounds of human reason inde- 
 pendent of revelation. Montaigne translated this work, 
 and it was afterward published. Later he was led to 
 compose an apology or defense of it, a paper included 
 in his "Essays" and the longest of them. In the medita- 
 tion of this important piece and in writing out his 
 thoughts Montaigne seems to have found himself intel- 
 lectually; and it may fairly be said that the various 
 matter of the famous "Essays" flowed from the author of 
 the "Apology" as truly as Scott's Novels proceeded in 
 their long sequence from "the Author of Waverley." 
 The conjunction of the two names is suggestive; for, at 
 not far from the same mature period of manhood as 
 Scott began his career in fiction, and from a similar 
 foundation of life that had practically fed his genius un- 
 intermittently in the moral sphere by affairs and books, 
 Montaigne like Scott at the moment of "Waverley" was 
 at the moment of his apology for Raymond de Sebonde at 
 the point of ignition; he had been prepared by tempera- 
 ment, experience and studies, in a purely practical way, 
 without literary premeditation, to become the great mor- 
 alist of life that the "Essays" revealed. Montaigne, like 
 Scott and Cervantes, was the product of life, in which 
 studies, it is true, were a large element, but of which 
 reality was the substance and vigor; his book is conse- 
 quently one of those greatest books in which life is su- 
 preme. The center of it is Montaigne himself, because 
 that was the point where for him life converged all its 
 forces; and hence, too, it is often and habitually a book 
 of apparent egotisms, of trivialities, of confidences, as of 
 a man talking with a friend and of a friend, with the 
 frankness of privacy; but this personality which is the 
 center of Montaigne' world is also the center of all of us, 
 
MONTAIGNE 249 
 
 it is human nature, it is ourselves. In this book life is so 
 supreme that the reader himself lives in it. 
 
 Montaigne's subject which he unfolds in the "Essays" 
 is the scene of life, that existence of which "all the 
 world's a stage." He does not do this by the methods of 
 the imagination, as the poet and novelist do. He brings 
 to the task observation, history, biography, all that ex- 
 perience has given him from his personal career or that 
 he had drawn from recent times, and in addition the 
 great bulk of recorded life that the philosophers and es- 
 sayists and historians of antiquity had gathered, a mass 
 of detail that was as modern to him as the facts of jour- 
 nalism. This great body of real experience and moral 
 reflection upon it which man had accumulated at the end 
 of the classical civilization had been displaced by the 
 Christian ages, but in Montaigne's day it flowed back 
 upon men's minds through the channels of the Renais- 
 sance; and it has now again been displaced by the insur- 
 gence of the modern ages of colonization, industrialism, 
 mechanical science, and in its stead we have a different 
 history and other biographies and travels which have not 
 yet developed that finality as an accumulated result of 
 long living which belongs to antiquity. Montaigne thus 
 stands, as it were, in the Renaissance gap between the 
 Christian and modern ages, and surveys life "looking 
 before and after," by the undying lamp that he had found 
 in the Roman tomb. He has placed Christianity on one 
 side, and, having made his peace with it, it troubles him 
 no more; he has hung up the votive images in the shrine 
 of Loretto, and will die when the time comes in the proper 
 odors and acts; but merely as the reasoning animal that 
 is earthly man he will examine human nature without 
 regard to its spiritual part which is a thing whose habitat 
 
2 so LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 is the church. Human nature, so considered, is the same 
 that it was in classical times and is perhaps there more 
 simply observed because of the absence of any entangle- 
 ment with revealed truth. Montaigne thus, though he 
 did not live in the past, lived, in a sense, in the thoughts 
 of the past, and hence one feels in the "Essays" a certain 
 breath of remoteness at times, a certain mustiness of 
 thought. The idea of death, for example, was a fixed 
 idea of ancient moralists; and Montaigne is much con- 
 cerned with it, as if it were as important for him as for 
 Cato and Seneca, as if he were under the same need of 
 Stoical rather than Christian preparation for it, more as 
 a mortal end than an immortal beginning. This idea is, 
 no doubt, part of his literary legacy; he could not avoid 
 prepossession with it, his authors being what they were; 
 but its importance in his reflection indicates a pre-Chris- 
 tian mood in his mind, marks the infection of his 
 paganism, discloses the intellectual and moral atavism 
 which was imbedded in the Renaissance. The Stoical 
 insistence on the idea of death is the trait of a dying 
 culture; it could not fill the mind of a Christian in that 
 antique way unless he were already detached in soul from 
 the lessons of his own faith to some degree. In Mon- 
 taigne this interest, except in so far as it was purely 
 literary, marks a reversion to a past type of intellect, a 
 dislocation from his age which assimilates him with the 
 great world-minds independent of their origin from any 
 particular age; in fact, while seeming a mere reversion 
 mentally, it signifies really his modern enfranchisement. 
 Such an escape into the past was the way to a cosmo- 
 politan point of view. 
 
 This cosmopolitan habit was, in fact, Montaigne's dis- 
 tinction. What an excellent traveler he was is seen in his 
 
MONTAIGNE 251 
 
 account of the Italian journey; but he was a better trav- 
 eler in his mind. An enlightened spirit, a mind hospitable 
 to new things, a marvelous power of detaching himself 
 from his own heredity and civilization belonged to him; 
 his mind was not repelled, but freshened by novelty and 
 strangeness. In the reports of travelers from the Perus 
 and the Indias he sought out manners and customs, the 
 differences from what was established in European habits 
 and ideas; he was interested in what these savages and 
 pagans had made of themselves in their own worlds 
 apart. The page of antiquity, too, in which his curiosity 
 was so much absorbed, held a broad and various world, 
 the old Mediterranean civilization of many races, insti- 
 tutions, religions, thoughts, careers. This past in all its 
 diversity was, too, it must be remembered, far better 
 known to him than the middle ages or even his own times 
 of which the human story had not yet been spread in 
 books in anything like the same degree. His world of 
 intelligence was substantially the classical world; there 
 were the things he knew, his intellectual interests, his 
 dominant mental memories. When he was made, during 
 his Italian residence, a citizen of Rome, an honor that 
 gave him so much delight, no one living better deserved 
 the title; for he was truly a citizen of that eternal Rome 
 which endures in the mind of man. Indeed, he had some- 
 thing of what may be called a colonial dependence on the 
 life of antiquity, and his outlook and feeling toward Rome 
 and Athens were not unlike the attitude of the scholars 
 of New England toward London and Paris in the last 
 century. He was more at home there than in his own 
 age; his outward life and action were in his own neighbor- 
 hood, in the religious and civil strife of a province with 
 which he made terms for the day and the hour, but the 
 
252 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 life of his mind was in the company of the antique world 
 and its affairs. He naturally fell into the philosophic 
 attitude which prevailed in that exhausted paganism; and 
 from the survey of the scene of life familiar to him out 
 of that Greco-Roman past and under the guidance of 
 Roman thought that gave his mind direction, he gathered 
 that general impression of the feebleness of man's nature 
 which kept on deepening with years until it became the 
 master theme of his matter, and made the famous "What 
 do I know" the legend of his shield in literature. 
 
 This impeachment of man's faculty for knowledge 
 was nothing new. It was made up of a resiune of the rags 
 and scraps of those old sceptics in whom the intellect, 
 which had awakened in Greece and had a long career, 
 found its first disillusionment in the pursuit of truth. It 
 had a curious place in Montaigne's day as being the 
 complement of the idea of the necessity of revealed truth 
 miraculously made known to the race; but it was not in 
 that aspect that Montaigne cared for it. The feebleness 
 of man's natural faculty for truth fell in with Montaigne's 
 general convictions with regard to human nature; it har- 
 monized with the Epicurean ease of his temperament. 
 The idea of sex, to approach his philosophy in another 
 way, was a cardinal interest in his mind. He makes his 
 confessions with equal frankness and discretion, but with 
 unconcealed thought. He brings no imagination, no ro- 
 mance to bear upon the matter; he is scientific, natural- 
 istic, and unashamed. As the higher spirituality, which 
 he leaves to the Church, is absent from his philosophy, the 
 higher ethics is absent from his morality. To live with 
 ease in this world involves concessions to established 
 conditions; and as Montaigne conceded to the Church and 
 the State, he conceded also to nature, and was seemingly 
 
MONTAIGNE 253 
 
 no more aware of any conflict in one case than in 
 another; this, it seemed to him, was good sense, the 
 quality in which, in the judgment of his readers, Mon- 
 taigne is more eminent than any other writer. And, in 
 truth, viewing the scene of human life in its action and 
 its thinking, apart from any divine element, as the stage 
 of the world where man is only man, and seeking its 
 examples in the confusions of his own age and in the 
 retrospect of decadent and expiring Rome, Montaigne 
 has within these limits a singular gift for reasonableness, 
 for setting forth the life that the world wills, for good 
 sense. The weakness of human nature, whether knowing 
 or acting, being accepted as primary there remains for 
 Montaigne only the question of an easy adjustment there- 
 to, of a search for "repose and liberty"; and such good 
 sense is the key. 
 
 In the discursive setting forth of human life and na- 
 ture under these lights Montaigne developed one great 
 virtue, toleration. It isolates him in that age, and does 
 him honor forever. A conviction of the futility of himian 
 faculties in the pursuit of truth carries with it the sense 
 of uncertainty in doctrines and induces a mood of indif- 
 ferency toward all tenets, whereby the habit of tolera- 
 tion becomes natural; and, in addition, familiarity with 
 the diversity of human opinion and of moral practice, 
 that has filled the world both in antiquity and among the 
 newly-found regions of the earth gave him the poise and 
 freedom of the traveled mind, of the man acquainted with 
 men and cities, of the man detached from the slavery 
 of one environment. A classical education had exercised 
 on Montaigne one of its great freeing powers; it had 
 made him familiar with a civilization, not specifically 
 and theologically Christian, but of an overawing type; it 
 
254 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 had redressed the balance of ecclesiastical prejudice, and 
 restored the secular life to its due proportions as a thing 
 of this world, of reason and of nature, apart from revela- 
 tion. In Montaigne's case, indeed, life had become es- 
 sentially a purely secular affair, and he considered it as a 
 moralist quite as if he had been born in the fourth cen- 
 tury and remained unconverted. Toleration was the 
 natural habit of a mind so bred, and so capable of enter- 
 ing into another age. It may have been grounded, if one 
 examines the matter curiously, rather on a kindly philo- 
 sophical contempt of human nature than on the doctrine 
 that the way to truth lies through the conflicts of an 
 untrammeled liberty of thought and speech; it may not 
 have been the toleration of a free government, such as is 
 now conceived; but in the days of the religious wars and 
 at the end of the sixteenth century in France, it was the 
 mark of a singularly enlightened spirit. The spectacle of 
 France at that time, and the personal experience of Mon- 
 taigne who had friends on both sides of the struggling 
 factions, no doubt aided him, by virtue of his repug- 
 nance to the folly and turmoil of the scene, to establish 
 the principle in himself; but it also belonged to his con- 
 ciliating and compromising temperament, to his power 
 of facilitating life, to his classically bred intelligence, and 
 to his native kindliness. Toleration was in him a human 
 instinct, strongly supported by his knowledge and expe- 
 rience and approved by his judgment, and not merely a 
 conclusion of philosophy or principle of government. He 
 was as singular, too, for his hatred of cruelty. What he 
 has to say of torture in legal processes, of the imposition 
 of cruel punishments, of public executions and the like 
 matters, also marks him out in the age. He was one 
 of those who had become humane as well as reasonable 
 
MONTAIGNE 255 
 
 in his converse with that antiquity which was then infus- 
 ing secular vigor into the blood of the world as an anti- 
 dote to the ecclesiastical poisons that had long corrupted 
 free human nature. Yet in his "Essays" there is one 
 singular silence. He does not mention nor even allude to 
 the massacre of St. Bartholomew, which was one of the 
 great events of his lifetime, and by which he must have 
 been deeply moved. It is an indication of his good sense. 
 His retirement, after all, was indeed profound intellectu- 
 ally, in the great round Tour de Montaigne, by the Peri- 
 gord hills; there he freely speculated and gossiped in his 
 learned way in the still air of delightful studies; but 
 practically when in the midst of state-affairs, and there 
 was question of publishing his friend La Boetie's attack 
 on "Monarchy" or of a St. Bartholomew's Day, he kept 
 a close mouth. This sense of contradiction between the 
 intellectual and the practical life is necessarily felt in 
 Montaigne; it affects the sincerity of the man, for many 
 readers; but it belongs to the psychology of the con- 
 formist in every age. Montaigne has lived by his thought 
 rather than by his life, and by his privacy rather than by 
 his publicity; yet thought and life with him moved with 
 singular intimacy and equality; and as his career, de- 
 spite its prudencies, will be held manly, energetic, hon- 
 orable and above all wise, so his thought, despite its 
 reticencies — and they are many and serious — will be 
 held bold, free, advancing and again above all wise. 
 Repose and liberty, could he compass and reconcile them, 
 were a possession worth many practical compromises. 
 
 Montaigne's name, for mankind, is that of the great 
 doubter. The modern spirit, in this one great phase of 
 its manifestation, may be said to begin with him, in lit- 
 erature. He was not aware of the career that this seep- 
 
2S6 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 ticism was to run, of the deep reach and radiations of its 
 undermining power in later days, agnostic and pessimistic, 
 as far as to the base of life itself. He did not question 
 the worth of life; he had found life a pleasant thing; but 
 he certainly doubted the worth of the higher life. He re- 
 peatedly expresses the doubt that the exercise of the 
 higher faculties interferes with the pleasurable good of 
 life and introduces a disturbing element injurious to 
 human happiness. He makes that interrogation of civili- 
 zation, in developing which Rousseau found him so fruit- 
 ful a master. Montaigne, merely as a conformist, has 
 eliminated much from life; and his temperament led him 
 along that path to a general elimination of the nobler 
 faculties, the superior aims, the dangerous toils of the 
 ideal, which he knew rather by observation, seeing what 
 trouble these things brpught upon the private life and 
 public tranquillity; and in his view of the world, the 
 life of nature, whether individually seen in the poor and 
 humble or collectively in the newly-found savages, 
 seemed possibly preferable to the tj^pe of civilization. 
 Perfectibility was an idea that he did not know. Repose 
 and liberty were the ends of life for him, and weakness 
 its condition; not to impose too great a burden, not to 
 accept too heavy a yoke, not to open too distant a scope, 
 not to propose too far a goal, rather to avoid the heights, 
 this was wisdom. It is the philosophy of one who places 
 happiness in recognition of the limitations rather than in 
 cultivation of the energies of life; to enjoy life it is most 
 needful not to overestimate its worth. Such a scheme, so 
 little exacting of force, is naturally crowned by the vir- 
 tues of ease, by moderation, reasonableness, good-sense, 
 the virtues of Montaigne. 
 He was at one with his theory; he is its illustration, 
 
MONTAIGNE 257 
 
 and after all it is himself and not his theory that is inter- 
 esting. The page grows antiquated and dull with out- 
 worn knowledge in proportion as the theory occupies it, 
 tatters of the past in science, thought and scandal; but it 
 grows vivid and contemporary as soon as he puts him- 
 self into the sentences. For him he is himself the model 
 of life; the hxmian nature that he exhibits with such vi- 
 vacity is that with which he has grown acquainted in his 
 own bosom. He tells piecemeal in the rambling method 
 of the "Essays" all the story of himself, his birth, educa- 
 tion and career, what has happened to him, what he has 
 done, his tastes and habits, the secrets of his meals and 
 his toilet, the course of his disease, the most trivial, the 
 most dubious, the most private matters; he makes the 
 world the familiar of his person, of his mortal being, of 
 his quality of man. This intimacy which he ingenuously 
 allows, as a thing the most natural to him in the world, 
 wins credence for his sincerity in his intellectual confes- 
 sions, in his examination of his thoughts and impres- 
 sions, in his remarks on the ways of the world that he 
 lived in; and this sincerity has the appearance of being 
 absolute. I^jE3ves_lQjbia_lhaught-that-<iuality-jQf echo, 
 wh ich make s it seem thejvhkpCTj)£_one's own experi- 
 ence, the utterance^f one's own unframed words. Mon- 
 taigne ihgraffates hunself in the bosom of the reader by a 
 thousand ways, but by none more than by this of being 
 his spokesman; it is pleasant to confess by proxy, to 
 let another tell those truths of which human nature, in 
 its tacitness, is half-ashamed, expose those half -lies which 
 it is reluctant to acknowledge but of which it is aware; 
 apd it is pleasant to find the philosophy of the pleasur- 
 able, the unexigent, the not too serious, stated with so 
 much unconcern, and to feel the compromises of life take 
 
2S8 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 on an aspect of such reasonableness. It is in these things 
 that the personality of Montaigne is so attractive; in 
 the Epicurean, the Sadducean moments of life, in its 
 average actuality of living among people of the world, he 
 is good company; the doubt in his mind has great par- 
 doning power, and may contain indeed a general amnesty 
 for life. 
 
 In a temperament such as Montaigne shows in his 
 career, his thought and his personality there is defined a 
 universal t3^e of man, a constant mood of the human 
 mind, a spirit of life speaking intelligible words to men 
 in every reflective age. It is of the fourth century or the 
 sixteenth or the twentieth indifferently. Its reality was 
 never more vital than in Montaigne, its words never 
 more vivid than here; he is by far its best incarnation. 
 The time was ripe for a lukewarm gospel; the long tri- 
 umph of fanaticism was waning in its last fierce excesses; 
 the hour of the moderates had come. After ages of dog- 
 matism, his unconcerned "What do I know," is the voice 
 of a new world; after centuries of spiritual strain, in 
 in every form of fervor and travesty, his radical accep- 
 tance of this world as man's proper sphere to which he 
 should adapt himself is a welcome relaxation; after the 
 torture, assassination and massacre, the turmoil of sect 
 and feud, the misery of warring faiths, his sceptical tol- 
 eration is a truce of reason that men might be glad to 
 have on any terms. In his works it may seem hard to dis- 
 cern the morning lights; but, as happens in great books, 
 the past and future blend there with long rays. The con- 
 junction of his acutely alive mind with the matter of an- 
 tiquity often strikes the reader as a union of the quick 
 with the dead; but that is an illusion due to our own rtv 
 laxed hold on the classical authors. He found the lettered 
 
 [ 
 
MONTAIGNE 259 
 
 ages of Rome and Athens more modern than any inter- 
 vening century, nearer to him than his own times, su- 
 perior to them; and so it. came about that his book 
 involves a great span of time, and remembers Socrates 
 as it foreshadows Rousseau. In the midst of all this 
 precept out of Seneca and anecdotes of the philosophers' 
 lives, there is a constant cropping out of the great modern 
 traits — the free exercise of reason, the appeal to nature, 
 the restless curiosity, the plea for toleration and humane- 
 ness, the interest in education, the disposition to examine 
 all things anew and bring them to the test of practical 
 reality, to think out the world afresh. Montaigne's 
 modernity is clouded, too, no doubt, not only by his anti- 
 quarianism, but by his attitude of ease toward life. It 
 seems incongruous that one who was so little a reformer 
 as he should bo counted among the leaders of a new age; 
 but if he did not proselytize for a cause, he exemplified 
 what is the best and prdfoundest of all reforms, a reform 
 in the habit of thinking; he thought for himself. He was 
 great in independence of mind; whatever he thought, it 
 was his own. He was great, too, in force of character; 
 whatever he did was his own. He was, as has been said, 
 the man of his own choice. Individuality such as this is 
 an undying ideal; it is superlatively modern; and Mon- 
 taigne is thus a great type of the modern man, primarily 
 in the conduct of his mind, and perhaps also more truly 
 than would readily be confessed, in the conduct of his 
 life. He was not a weakling, though his philosophy may 
 easily be mistaken for that of a weakling. Justly inter- 
 preted, do not his concessions, compromises, reticences 
 show strength of judgment, strength of good sense, pru- 
 dence, which in practical life often avail quite as much 
 as strength of mere opinion? Nor was truth, of itself, a 
 
26o LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 large part of life for Montaigne; it was at best an uncer- 
 tainty. He was not a martyr of ideas, but he was a man 
 of ideas. He spent several years in collecting, digesting, 
 and illustrating these ideas in the book, continually add- 
 ing something to the earlier forms, and left there this 
 portrait of himself, body and spirit. The terms on which 
 he stands with his reader are those of friendship, and for 
 friendship a man must be born; and it must be acknowl- 
 edged that not all men are born for friendship with such 
 a one as he describes himself. There are many who echo 
 Clough's words — "I do not greatly think about Mon- 
 taigne;" and Clough was classical, sceptical, modern, 
 but he was serious-minded. Montaigne is not an author 
 for serious-minded people, in that sense. He has too 
 great detachment of mind, too great insouciance of con- 
 duct; he is in all senses too free a man. 
 
 It might seem that a book which is described as a con- 
 fession of life, and one in which human nature finds it- 
 self absolved in the very bosom of the reader, is just such 
 a one as should appeal to grave persons. But Montaigne 
 has not the proper manner of the confessional; he is gar- 
 rulous, not truly penitent, but rather scandalously inter- 
 ested in his own story; the confession of man's nature 
 has quite as much the character of an exposure of life. 
 Certainly it is a book of the disillusionment. It implies 
 immense experience of living, of life long lived by many 
 generations in many conditions and long meditated upon 
 by many diverse minds. It is a book of the mature life, 
 and century-ripened. The sublimities, the enthusiasms, 
 the heroics of life are not here; the fiery hopes, the stim- 
 ulations, the divine despairs — there is nothing of that, 
 neither gospel, nor rallying-cry nor death-challenge. 
 These things have long been. But the man who is ac- 
 
MONTAIGNE 261 
 
 quainted with human nature in his own breast and in 
 living men, who commands the vistas of history, of liter- 
 ature, of various philosophies, who knows the past issues 
 of human hopes and toils, the man of experience, finds a 
 certain justness in the thought of Montaigne that har- 
 monizes with the latter-day moods of life and is the more 
 acceptable because it is graced with that lightness of 
 spirit, that not too serious view, that tone which might 
 so easily become mocking and yet never mocks. Though 
 the herald of the modern age, Montaigne was deeply im- 
 plicated in the past, in what man has been. In the "Es- 
 says" one finds the lees of antiquity, and somewhat the 
 lees of life; it is the book of an old mind, of an old man, 
 of a retirement from the world; to read it justly, the 
 reader must have lived. Montaigne requires an afternoon 
 light, and a mind content with the private life, with 
 reason and nature and good sense. 
 
SHAKESPEARE 
 
 The primary thing in Shakespeare was his sense of 
 action. He seized all life as action in his thoughts; he led 
 his own life as action in himself, as a career. That is his 
 Englishry. He was a practical man; as a boy he was 
 enterprising, in his maturity he was discreet. The tra- 
 ditions of his early days at Stratford show a lively, 
 capable, eager youth, active, adventurous, expedient, 
 quick to get into trouble, quick in marriage; and the 
 flight from Stratford was a departure into the large scene 
 of life, a going to London, to the field of ambition. The 
 family had seen better days, and was in difficulties; he 
 meant to bear up the name; he succeeded, in the end, in 
 re-establishing the family estate in his native place. The 
 traditions of his early days in London show the same 
 fundamental temperament; he had no scorn of beginnings, 
 whether he held horses at the theater, or by whatever 
 door of trifling service he entered on the great scene that 
 was to be his kingdom, he would get in where he could; 
 he accepted the terms on which life was to be led in his 
 time and place. He learned easily because he was facile 
 to receive; he learned much because he put what he 
 knew to use as soon as he knew it; he was quick to ex- 
 periment with his faculties and what they found to work 
 with. The stage was developing comedy and tragedy and 
 a verbal style proper to display them; there was a stock 
 of plays rapidly outgrown, a public demand to be met, 
 money to be made. He made himself apprentice to the 
 
 363 
 
264 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 best masters of comedy and tragedy, he tried his hand at 
 re-making the old plays, he used what he found on the 
 stage, adding what he could of prettiness and quibble, of 
 grace and softness in the phrase, of heat and vivacity in 
 the dialogue, of golden cadence, comic play, tragic thrust; 
 and gradually he moved forward, emerged, became play- 
 wright and poet, the mark of passing and impotent malice, 
 popular with the many, well-beloved by his comrades, 
 successful. If the history of these days were known in 
 detail, it would not differ from the great t3^e shown in 
 Scott, Cervantes; infinite interest in life, unceasing in- 
 dustry in work, the power to live which makes men great, 
 and with it the apparent unconsciousness of genius, the 
 reality of the individual life, the near regard to the pri- 
 vate good. Whatever else there may have been, the 
 theater was to Shakespeare a profession, a career; he 
 made himself master and head of it by the toilsome proc- 
 ess of daily life; and he measured his success in it, in 
 one way at least, by the substance of what it brought 
 him, wealth, position, a county name. 
 
 At London, where he led this career for twenty-five 
 years, he had complete worldly success. His life there 
 leaves two impressions on the mind. The first is that 
 of immense labor, not only in the composition of the 
 plays, but in the other necessary business of the stage 
 and management, the acting, the preparation, the pro- 
 vincial tours, the court performances, the life of the 
 theater and its finances, the practical realities; it must 
 have been a very busy life, and its wearing effects are 
 plain in the rapid and deep maturing of his manhood, 
 and in his comparatively early death. The second im- 
 pression is of the ease, quiet and friendliness of his tem- 
 perament, his companionableness and his reserve, a 
 
SHAKESPEARE 265 
 
 human and noble nature; the characteristic epithets given 
 him that have survived from his friends' lips are the two 
 words "gentle" and "sweet"; though a few ill-natured 
 phrases were flung at him, he escaped with the highest 
 good-fortune the venom that the literary life vents even 
 on its favorites. He was helpful; in his youth he be- 
 friended Jonson, and in later years he collaborated with 
 younger men. His comrades of the theater show him that 
 wholesome loyalty which mixes respect and affection so 
 that they are indistinguishable. He seems to have had 
 by nature those unconscious, intimate, incommunicable 
 traits that oftenest come only from breeding and make 
 men free of the society where they are. Young South- 
 ampton was not only his patron, but his friend; and in 
 that difficult role of poet and patron Shakespeare was 
 proud and happy in his noble friend, and gave the trib- 
 ute of affectionate compliment in verse and that glory 
 of style that lies in courtly hyperbole, and all that was 
 due from the greatest of poets, but he gave his heart also. 
 Shakespeare accepted the conditions of the literary life 
 with respect to rank and fortune in his day as simply as 
 he met the state of the theater. It is likely there was no 
 better courtier when he went to court, as it is likely that 
 there was no better buyer when he went to view lands 
 and houses, no better judge of the public taste in plays. 
 He was equal to the business of life on all sides that re- 
 quired worldly ability, and temperamentally as equal to 
 it in the things of affection and comradery, of the heart, 
 of humanity in social intercourse. The patron, the 
 mortgage belong in his life, together with the scores of 
 friends and the innumerable affairs to do; they are nat- 
 urally there, for he was a man like others who lived the 
 common life of man, earned and ate his bread in it, and 
 
266 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 to whom this action of life in and about and for him- 
 self was a very palpable thing. It is not a life that has 
 left much record of itself, not diversified by adventure, 
 not the scene of known passions; but the golden silences 
 that lie like autumn mold upon his memory are in har- 
 mony with that thought which discovers there a life, 
 dedicated indeed to the creative dream, but yet within the 
 limitations of its own world distinguished by daily labor 
 and daily kindliness, not too self-conscious, storing up 
 provision for the future, respect from the world, the af- 
 fection of friends, the things that should accompany old 
 age — a life well-lived, well-acted, in its earthly lines. 
 Such a life is consistent with the highest genius even in 
 men in whom the sense of life as action is not so supreme 
 as it was in Shakespeare; in him it was born of that 
 genius where everything set with a great tide toward 
 reality. 
 
 Action is the core of the drama; it is what gives at- 
 tractive and arresting power to the word "dramatic," 
 focuses the attention, makes the eye look and the spirit 
 expect at the fall of those syllables. To Shakespeare, in 
 his youth, immersed and absorbed in the dramatic move- 
 ment that made a captive servant of him, mind, moods, 
 energy, ambition, hope — that overmastered him with 
 what was to be his fate therein, life was the object of his 
 thoughts, but life primarily as a story. The story of life 
 was there before him in the old plays on the stage, in the 
 books he read, in the tales he thumbed over; at first a 
 story of English kmgs and Italian lovers, of the convul- 
 sions of state, heart-break and the words of clowns, 
 comic confusions, tragic discords, enchanted woodlands. 
 He found the chronicle plays in vogue, fragments of 
 history; and here and there, beginning his art, he re- 
 
SHAKESPEARE 267 
 
 established a scene, heightened a dialogue, concentrated 
 a passion of anger or pity; it was piecemeal work by 
 which he came to the power at last of defining a plot, a 
 play of his own, an interpretation and representation of 
 the story in a way of his own. The material he used was 
 external, given to him, persons and incidents; he did not 
 invent them, he found them; and his manipulation of 
 them at first was, naturally, mainly in the language, the 
 verbal investiture of person, act, scene, that part of the 
 work which was most flexible, most plastic, readiest for 
 a youthful hand and most tempting for lips that had 
 suddenly unlocked a flood of such poesy, eloquence and 
 passion in speech, colors of nature and the heart, as 
 had never before poured from an English fount. It is this 
 flow of language, vehement or smooth or impassioned, 
 reflecting natural beauty or personal graces, prone to 
 pathos and sentiment, rhetorical, dragging along with it 
 all the affectations of the hour, experimenting with its 
 own powers, intoxicated with its own poetry, exuberant 
 with its own life — it is this marvelously musical, facile, 
 intellectual power of language, this mastery that is not 
 merely verbal, but is of the essence of expression, poetic 
 not purely dramatic — it is this that in the earlier works 
 plays over the story, atmospheres it, inhabits it, and in 
 its surplus of light, feeling and imagery, in its lyrical 
 effusion, overflows without submerging the dramatic in- 
 terest, threatens the eminence of the action. From 
 "Love's Labor's Lost" to "A Midsummer Night's Dream," 
 this Ijnrical obsession mounts prevailing; thereafter' it re- 
 cedes — the tints of the morning, the bloom of spring, 
 the hour of the bloom of life had passed. Shakespeare, 
 loosing the passion of language to the full as never Eng- 
 lish poet did, had not lost his foothold on the reality of 
 
268 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 life, on the story, the drama, the action; and, deepening 
 in his dramatic faculty he came, in the end, to that subtile 
 mastery of language which belongs only to the greatest 
 genius, lords of the brief and broken phrase. Four words 
 created light; and something of that same miracle lingers 
 in the power of the poet who is truly divine. The gradual 
 victory of dramatic over purely poetic diction in Shakes- 
 peare reflects the victory of life itself, of the action over 
 the illusion of life, in him. 
 
 There was a second rivalry with the dramatic instinct 
 in Shakespeare besides this of the lyrical impulse. It lay 
 in the intellectual temptation, the power of the naked 
 thought. What is technically called the sentiment, that is, 
 the wise saying, the axiomatic verse in which the re- 
 flecting mind is condensed with a purely intellectual 
 value, was an inheritance of the drama from old time; 
 and Shakespeare, particularly in his middle life, was apt 
 at linking such counsels together or in developing them 
 from the dialogue. It is an analogous faculty that he em- 
 ploys in those wit-combats of the characters that are pre- 
 eminently intellectual in tone. The wit of Rosalind and 
 Beatrice is more closely united to the dialogue; but in the 
 passages of advice, from Biron's gentle sermon on love 
 to the sage wisdom of Polonius and Uljrsses, and even 
 on to Prospero's great farewell there is a recurring in- 
 terruption of the action in play after play, due to the 
 emergence of thought in control of the scene; and as 
 Shakespeare's lyricism gives to the plays that atmosphere 
 which isolates them among the works of dramatic genius 
 and sets them apart in an unapproached realm of creative 
 art, so his wisdom gives to them that intellectual dilation 
 by which they excel all others in majesty of mind. Other 
 dramatists have represented life with equal impressive- 
 
SHAKESPEARE 269 
 
 ness in its being, but none have represented life so con- 
 scious of its own significance. Here again, as in his 
 lyrical moment, Shakespeare in his intellectual moment 
 seems to depart from the story, the drama, the action, 
 but he does not really depart, or if he does so it is only to 
 bring back to the drama the offerings of all the Muses. 
 And in a third tributary element of the drama, in the 
 spectacle, while he uses the embellishment of the scene 
 to the full measure of what his times allowed, he intro- 
 duces the masque as an adjunct, like a song or a dance, 
 harmonious with the scene but not an essential of the 
 action. These three things, then, diction, sentiment and 
 spectacle, which were the open temptation to woo him 
 from the essential dramatic point of view, the action, he 
 either overcame or successfully subdued them to the en- 
 richment and enlargement of the action; the main drift 
 of his art, the main purpose of his mind were the same, 
 with whatever slackening or bending of the current, 
 toward the story of life pre-eminently, toward character 
 and event, toward reality in its most human form. Be- 
 'ginning with the more intractable material of history, he 
 came to use preferably romantic story in which his im- 
 agination was more free in creative power; and in the 
 end, to such a height did this power reach that he seemed 
 to create not only character and event, but also the world 
 in which they had their being; to such a complete victory 
 did his dramatic instinct, prevailing over all other im* 
 pulses, carry him who always remained at heart a drama- 
 tist. 
 
 Shakespeare was so completely a dramatist, interested 
 in the action of life, that when he took the autobiograph- 
 ical mask in the "Sonnets" he seems transformed into 
 his opposite, into the Ijrrical poet unlocking his own 
 
270 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 heart; here, it has been believed, he told his dearest se- 
 crets, his intimacies, the most sweet and bitter disgraces 
 of his days and nights, his springs and autimms; and so 
 inspired is the dramatic action of his mind in this play in 
 the forms of the sonnet, if it be such, that it is only by an 
 effort of detachment, by reflection and judgment, that 
 one sees there only the working of that supreme faculty 
 under the appearances of personality. The secret of the 
 "Sonnets" has been so many times discovered, and es- 
 caped in the discovery, that this view, now best sup- 
 ported, may justly have its lease of life in turn, and 
 the physical basis of fact on which the poet's imagina- 
 tion worked — such strands and suggestions of actuality 
 as he used in the romances — may be found in South- 
 ampton's personality; but the black lady, the dear, dis- 
 loyal friend, the rival poet will still wear in their faces, 
 have in their form and moving, an insoluble mystery, 
 because, whatever the drama, they move in a cloud of 
 lyricism, so intense with tenderness, sorrow, xmavailing 
 cries, that here all seems the form and substance of the 
 soul itself. A dramatist who makes his own soul the scene 
 of the drama, using the forms of personality, must nec- 
 essarily leave a mysterious work; but in the "Sonnets" 
 what is plain is the drama, what is obscure is only the 
 basis of the drama, whether it be fact or convention, 
 or mingled of both ; whatever be the personal element, it 
 is conceived, handled, developed dramatically, its truth 
 is at bottom dramatic truth. 
 
 And if it be difficult to trace Shakespeare's personality 
 with any assured steps in the "Sonnets," how much less 
 is it to be probed in the plays proper! Those attempts 
 that have been made to correlate the bare facts of his 
 history with the sequence of his works, to synchronize his 
 
SHAKESPEARE 271 
 
 life-moods with the comedies and the tragedies, to make 
 the plays render up the spiritual states of the man in his 
 personal being, are ingenious; but the conditions of pro- 
 duction, when Elizabeth might ask any day for a "Merry 
 Wives of Windsor," or some noble family desire a hy- 
 meneal spectacle like "A Midsummer Night's Dream," 
 or James be pleased with a Scotch theme, or the public 
 itself, little indulgent to the moods of those who provide 
 entertainment, might have to be recaptured to the play — 
 such conditions are little favorable to "periods" of the 
 private soul. The chronology of the works, too, is not 
 convincing. Did Shakespeare, in whose mind the per- 
 spective of life varied no more than the perspective of 
 the heavens in the celestial telescope, think to have all 
 that world of his courtesy to his private fortunes in a 
 son's death, a friend's fall, a mistress's fickle change? 
 Shakespeare' was of the objective tj^e of genius, a trite 
 but useful phrase for a very palpable fact. He never 
 mistook his soul for the soul of the universe. He passed, 
 as other men, from youth to manhood, and the deepening 
 of his nature in the process, as it was worked out under 
 the control of absorption in creative dramatic art is 
 plainly discerned; he seized life in its action more logi- 
 cally, more ideally, more profoundly; he compassed and 
 penetrated and filled it with omnipresent thought; height 
 and depth, passion and fate and gloom, he laid it bare; 
 he saw it. He passed through the disillusionment; but it 
 was a disillusionment not of the suffering heart, but of 
 the seeing eye; and after the disillusionment came, what 
 comes to all, the lassitude, the indifference, the repose, 
 the relaxed sense of fate, the concession to optimism, the 
 fantastic world; the calm of Shakespeare was the sub- 
 sidence of life in him, the smoothing of the great wave 
 
2 72 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 of passion, the stilling of the tumultuous voices of 
 thought. 
 
 Such a history he had, in whatever special forms of 
 personal feeling; it is the normal life of great genius, ab- 
 sorbing imaginatively the passion and thought of life in 
 the world; and from time to time, out of this continuing 
 personal reaction on life in normal growth there would 
 proceed modifying influences, lines of choice in subject, 
 of intellectual direction, of creative mood, passional har- 
 monies blending with the given theme — to such a point 
 temperament would have its will, more or less, with the 
 work according to time and circumstances; but such a 
 continuing and aging mood attendant on the plays is a 
 far different thing from "periods" determinative of the 
 type of the plays in a sequence which makes them pro- 
 ceed from Shakespeare's personal fortunes as a mortal 
 spirit with changes from cheerfulness to gloom and again 
 to equanimity. Shakespeare was a dramatist by nature 
 as well as by profession, or he became subdued to what he 
 worked in; he was the servant of the public; and, much 
 more, he was fascinated by life in its externality, life as 
 it was in other men, other times, other places; he was in- 
 satiate in informing himself of its story in history, in 
 novels and romances, in ancient and modern authors, 
 wherever it was to be found. He was not that egotist who 
 writes himself large and calls that the world; art in him 
 was not self-revealing, it was the revelation of a world 
 that had been from the foundation of being and would 
 continue when his works were buried deeper than any 
 plummet could sound. This objectivity, this self-efface- 
 ment in art, this interest in the story of life, his absorp- 
 tion in life's movement, in action, is Shakespeare's gift of 
 greatness. It explains his limitations. Spirituality, prop- 
 
SHAKESPEARE 273 
 
 erly speaking, the celestial immortality of man's nature, 
 is not found in Shakespeare either in character, thought 
 or aspiration. The religious life sleeps in his works; and 
 many a generation will marvel at it. He was interested 
 in life, the action of life; and that is a thing confined to 
 this world. He is mundane, secular, in a way scientific; 
 he saw the spectacle as it is in time. 
 
 The second main consideration bearing on Shakes- 
 peare's genius is the fact that the world he saw, dealt with 
 and knew was an aristocratic world. It was given to him 
 first historically, in those chronicles in which his hand 
 learned to mold the human stuff, a kingly world of the 
 Henrys, the Richards and John, with feudal challenge, 
 battle incidents, the life of the council, murders in 
 prisons or on the block, treasons, dethronements, the sor- 
 rows of queens, Norfolk, Hotspur and Falconbridge; a 
 life focussed on aristocratic fortunes and pivoted on aris- 
 tocratic power. To Shakespeare the people was always 
 the mob, and negligible. The sphere of humor, too, in 
 which the vulgar enters, is dependent on the aristocratic 
 sphere from the comedy of the camp-fire and the tavern 
 to Bottom's craftsmen and the court clowns, up to Lear's 
 Fool. Later, the Roman plays gave him the same aristo- 
 cratic state in an antique form, dictatorial, imperial, with 
 the mob of citizens, though more in evidence, more con- 
 temptible. The ordered world for him was the world of 
 courtly life; all else, though contiguous or entering in for 
 entertainment or service or in the mass of battle, was es- 
 sentially subordinated, exteriorized, as environment. The 
 romances, which, after the chronicles, had given him the 
 raw material, reinforced his conception of life as an aris- 
 tocratic structure by expanding it socially into a com- 
 munity of gentle-folk, Venetian, Veronan, Paduan, in 
 
274 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 Arden, Attica, lUyria, or on French or English meadows; 
 a life where everything breathed civility, the sentiment 
 of high breeding in chivalry and courtesy, the cult of 
 phrase, the dress and behavior, the interests, ambitions, 
 intrigues, recreations, language, manners and customs of 
 an aristocratic ideal. Even in those regions of the im- 
 agination, where he reared his own state in its lordliest 
 form, with the effect of an incantation of genius, in the 
 English realm of Lear, the Scotch court of Macbeth, the 
 throne of Denmark, the Venetian principality of Csqjrus, 
 the Egypt of Antony, or in the woods of Csmibeline, the 
 country-side of Perdita, the island-kingdom of Prospero, 
 he impressed upon it aristocracy in its most majestic, 
 noble and gentle forms as the seal of its being. Shakes- 
 peare's genius is, in fact, the finest flower of the aristo- 
 cratic ideal of life. 
 
 Aristocracy is, in a sense, the state of nature histori- 
 cally developed in society as the survival of the fittest in 
 the selfish struggle for existence. Shakespeare received 
 it as the past of the world, contained in the forms of 
 history and romance, the life that had always been, in 
 which the masses, held in economic slavery under what- 
 ever name, furnished that wealth monopolized by the 
 nobles which gave these latter liberty of the higher sphere 
 of life, the sphere of intelligence, ambition, art, where 
 they were enfranchised and armed for the possession of 
 the chief goods of life. Aristocracy, so based on the en- 
 forced tribute of mankind, naturally develops individu- 
 ality, the open career for those who are in command of 
 wealth, opportunity, leisure; it spreads the scene for 
 strong natures, highly endowed, superfluous in vital force 
 and selfish desire; it is the breeding place of human 
 greatness of the positive, self-assertive, world-conquering 
 
SHAKESPEARE 275 
 
 kind. Shakespeare received this aristocratic ideal from 
 the times in which life had been great, from the Greek, 
 Roman, English periods; but he received it also at a 
 peculiarly fortunate moment in the special movement of 
 its historical development; he received it when the 
 coarser, denser forms of military and tyrannic power, of 
 feudalism, monarchy and dogma, were dissolving in the 
 finer, milder, freer modes of rationalism, individuality, 
 culture; he received it at a culminating moment of its ex- 
 cellence — from the Italian Renaissance. 
 
 Personality, the essential fruit of aristocracy, the 
 crowning victory of nature in working out her will, came 
 forth from the Italian Renaissance in one of its highest 
 forms, the form of superb personal power. The idea is so 
 native to Italy and has played so great a part in her his- 
 tory that it seems racial — a race-element in her great- 
 ness. It was then concentrated in the ideal of the Renais- 
 sance prince, whether as a pattern in Machiavelli, or as 
 an illustration from history in the nobles and leaders of 
 the Italian cities; but stripped to its essentials it is no 
 more than the individual will to live, the dominance of 
 that will, the ideal of conquering the world to oneself, of 
 subduing life, of having one's way, one's will, one's desire, 
 of the assertion of the power to live that is the thirst of 
 great souls. The aristocratic ideal of life in the Italian 
 Renaissance developed in the central line of its advance 
 in history this idea of the dominance of the personal will 
 in life, the prepotency of individuality; and in so doing 
 it freed human faculty, energy and desire in a way to a 
 degree which gave to Italy its brilliant period of many- 
 sided genius and impelled the human spirit in every 
 civilized country and recaptured the lost provinces of 
 Rome to the dominion of a spiritual civilization the seat 
 
2 76 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 of whose power is in the ideals of men. The Renaissance 
 was so great a movement. Though not a material con- 
 quest, it was vaster in control than that of Alexander or 
 of the elder antique Rome. Shakespeare took its full 
 impact, lived in it, fed on it, absorbed its passions, its 
 principles, its being, became its spu-it in the North, was 
 its transcendent and overwhelming genius in literature, 
 its greatest monimient in time. This is Shakespeare's 
 position; he was the flower of the aristocratic ideal of life; 
 he was the crest of the Renaissance; he was the incarnate 
 spirit of that mighty power of life to live mightily which 
 belongs to the aristocratic ideal as a right of nature and 
 was the passion of the Renaissance in history. 
 
 The drama, it must be borne in mind, was always a 
 European art. Shakespeare's universality, which is often 
 made the occasion of so much marvel, is in its origins 
 closely connected with this fact. The early English 
 drama, with its miracle-plays, moralities, school-comedies, 
 Senecan imitations, displayed cosmopolitan traits and 
 originals belonging to a common mental culture and a 
 general artistic condition; and the Elizabethan drama, 
 in its Shakespearian culmination, though locally English, 
 proceeded out of the European mind, its general past, its 
 ideas, principles, moods, its order of life, its accumula- 
 tion of sentiment and romance, its forms of imagination; 
 and in this Shakespeare from an early point in his career 
 was more deeply imbued than any of his contemporaries. 
 What, then, constituted the European mind, its intellec- 
 tual memory and moral passion, its conception and ideal 
 of life, its poetic culture and means of art, was more 
 variously, richly and profoundly present and active in 
 him than in any other writer. He may never have been 
 out of England; but he was the most European author 
 
SHAKESPEARE 277 
 
 then living. It is not an accident that on his stage 
 locality ceases to exist. Italy has her immortality in the 
 drama more in Shakespeare than in her own literature. 
 "Hamlet" is the chief literary monument of Denmark. 
 This does not happen by the caprice of an individual, but 
 marks that quality in Shakespeare by virtue of which 
 he is the genius of Europe. The human spirit, from time 
 to time, detaches from the world of known geography a 
 country of its own lying apart, a land for itself; such was 
 Arcadia, in which Sidney and others wandered; such 
 was the region of chivalry where Spenser and others 
 traversed the romantic scene; and such was the realm of 
 Shakespeare's stage, the magic circle where none dared 
 tread but he. It was a world abstracted from the great 
 scene of life in Europe as it then lay before the thoughts 
 of men, in its breadth out of the historic past, in its va- 
 riety of living energy, its medieval and classic garniture, 
 its Renaissance luminousness, space, vivacity; it was 
 this scene of the European consciousness of what life had 
 been and was, idealized and generalized, and made to 
 issue in poetry with the power and brilliancy of a new 
 creation, the realm of Shakespeare's art. The aristocratic 
 ideal of life is its organic principle and determines the 
 quality of the scene, the nature of the event, the impulse 
 of the characters; all the flowering of phrase and fancy, 
 of sentiment and passion, all the adornment of taste in 
 whatever form, all that constitutes mood, temperament 
 and atmosphere, is representative of the European fashion 
 of courtliness, scholarship, art, the reverie and dream 
 that belong to the Renaissance characteristically, its pas- 
 toral, dramatic, rhetorical modes, its vari-colored roman- 
 ticism; but, most cardinal of aU, what is the mainspring 
 of its life, is the human force loosed in it, that prepotency 
 
278 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 of the individual, that dominance of the personal will, 
 which was the master-spirit of the Renaissance every- 
 where and finds in Shakespeare's world the place of its 
 great career. This is not a local, a national, an English 
 thing; it is a world-idea, and the imagination of Shakes- 
 peare, mastered by its inspiration found any country a 
 fit stage for it in that environment of an ideal courtly 
 life which was also not local or provincial, but a great 
 world-scene. Shakespeare's universality in matter goes 
 back to the fact that he was never anything else but 
 cosmopolitan, in the nature of his knowledge, the ideality 
 of his art, the sources, compass and illustrative power of 
 his dramatic work. ^Vhat is most contemporary, realistic 
 and locally English in this work is on its fringes; in its 
 beginnings and interludes, subordinate; in proportion as 
 the work becomes great, profound, comprehensive, it pos- 
 sesses more purely the European character, it develops 
 ideal freedom, it belongs not to Italy or Denmark or 
 England, but to the genius of Europe. 
 
 The dawn of the Renaissance spirit, incarnating itself 
 in English dramatic poetry, was in Marlowe, who was 
 perhaps in his own passion of life more at one with the 
 heart of the Renaissance than was Shakespeare, but he 
 was less nobly, less perfectly, less splendidly, at one with 
 it in its manifold fullness of expression. Marlowe first 
 put on the stage the career of great passions, characters 
 of immeasurable ambition and unquenchable thirst; but 
 in "Tamerlane," "The Jew of Malta" and "Faustus," 
 the theme is not sufficiently correlated with the real 
 play of fact and force in human affairs, it is seized with 
 too much intellectual abstraction and presented too spec- 
 tacularly and fragmentarily in the scenes; some experi- 
 menting with the modifying power of history over 
 
SHAKESPEARE 279 
 
 imagination and invention was needed before it could find 
 its dramatic limits and free itself from fantasy, enthusi- 
 asm and exaggeration in artistic expression. Shakespeare 
 followed Marlowe in turning to English history for the 
 material of his art. The idea of tragedy was, indeed, al- 
 ready defined for him in the European tradition as a 
 thing of the fall of princes, of royal misfortune and the 
 vicissitude of splendid fates; and in this way Shakes- 
 peare's tragic course was charted out for him beforehand; 
 but in working out dramatically the lots of the English 
 kings he also kept a close hold on the idea of a life-force 
 in personality determining temperament, character and 
 the issues of the action. What in Marlowe was extrava- 
 gantly set forth as the fixed idea in his characters, bear- 
 ing almost the impress of madness, remains in 
 Shakespeare, but subdued to the requirements of the en- 
 vironment and of human nature, to probability. "Richard 
 II" is a pathetic instance of the fall of a prince, but the 
 story is linked with that infatuation of the idea of di- 
 vine right which is the dominant idea of Richard, ab- 
 sorbs the eloquence, grace and chivalry of his nature 
 and contains his fate. In "Richard III," the prepotency 
 of the selfish force develops its bloody way with a power 
 to take possession of the king's soul that recalls the self- 
 maddening tyranny of the Roman emperors, till he be- 
 comes the fiend, the enemy of society and of the state 
 itself, whose fall clears the air like a departing thunder- 
 storm. Romeo exhibits the mastering of passion in the 
 youthful soul; love in him is ecstasy. The dominance of 
 the personal will, possessed by an idea inciting it, assert- 
 ing itself with unbridled desire, naturally leads to mad- 
 ness, and in Shakespeare's great characters of this sort 
 mania is never far off; in Macbeth there is the capital in- 
 
28o LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 stance of the blending of the borders between reason and 
 unreason, and, as is Shakespeare's way, this elemental 
 trait in the play permeates it, objectified in the witches, 
 reduplicated in Lady Macbeth, but concentrated in the 
 vivid mental action, the bodily starts and stares, the 
 repeated challenge of fate, in Macbeth's shaking but 
 never quite dethroned "state of man." "Timon" is a 
 lesser illustration. "Hamlet" and "Lear" thrust this 
 part of life into the foreground; and in "Othello," the 
 near neighborhood of the excess of life to madness, of the 
 noble nature to rujn through its own power to live, to be 
 possessed by a passion, an idea, a sorrow, is the ground 
 of its tragic scene. The personal will is necessarily anti- 
 social, and hence opens in its career the whole field of 
 tragic conflict in endless ways; the drama is its natural 
 scope in art, and there it is the most potent power to 
 conjure with; it is, by far, the most interesting thing in 
 the whole of that action of life which Shakespeare contem- 
 plated so absorbingly. The Renaissance spirit concen- 
 trated and intensified the sense of it, carried it to the ex- 
 treme, made an ideal of it, in history; Shakespeare took it 
 over into the sphere of imagination and then gave such 
 examples of it in the transcendent forms of art that his 
 characters became, each in its kind, the supreme models 
 of what is possible to human nature and faculty in per- 
 sonal force, the types of man. 
 
 The fullness of life in all its forms, which makes the 
 plays great, has as its underl5dng basis this life-force, 
 the affirmation of life, in its energies, its desires, its reve-- 
 lations, in the conscious spectacle of being, and with the 
 more brilliancy because of the transcendent idealization 
 to which the scene of life here has been subjected. All 
 Shakespeare's male characters are self-seekers, in a true 
 
SHAKESPEARE 281 
 
 sense; the exceptions, Kent, a feudal type, and Horatio, 
 a modern form of the Kent temperament, are also men 
 of strength. Though with the visitation of thought, mel- 
 ancholy, peculiar misfortune on the scene, there is oc- 
 casionally the sense of a withdrawal from life, in Hamlet, 
 Antonio, Hermione, it is rather a forced and regretful 
 retirement than a true withdrawal; the denial of life is 
 truly present in Shakespeare only as an unshaped sug- 
 gestion. The age was one of action, of faith in life, and 
 the ideals it projected were those of the positive, achiev- 
 ing, realizing kind; and in Shakespeare the life-force 
 moved in his world of art with the fruitfulness, the teem- 
 ing variety, the creative overflow into being that it has in 
 nature. Men recognize and remember this life-force in 
 him by the immortal figures of the plays, Romeo, Hamlet, 
 Lear, the score or more that have entered into the world's 
 memory enduringly, eternal realities, with ideal fascina- 
 tion, either for their beauty or their intimacy with men's 
 bosoms or their awe in fate or some other mode of con- 
 sanguinity with man that is Shakespeare's seal upon 
 them; these figures best illustrate that pow^r of life and 
 will to live, in high personal forms, showing the far reach, 
 the majesty, the pity and terror of the forces of life in 
 the soxil in their energy accomplishing the utmost possible 
 to man unfolding his nature in the vicissitudes of for- 
 tune; but the whole Shakespearian world, no less than 
 these, in its various planes of character, incident and 
 plot, is the outcome and realization in art of this same 
 life-force more widely diffused in humanity of every kind 
 and sort. That infinite variety that so distinguishes the 
 plays, such that each seems a fresh revelation of a new 
 world, so embracing that they seem in their wholeness 
 to leave no lot in life imexpressed, no mortal joy or sorrow 
 
282 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 unrecorded in its own cry, no thought almost untold, — 
 that scene of life from the tavern-companions of Falstaff 
 and the craftsmen of Athens up to the solitude of Caesar 
 in power, the solitude of Lear in grief, the solitude of 
 Prospero in wisdom, — all this proceeds from the life- 
 force manifesting itself with the multiplicity and abun- 
 dance of humanity. Shakespeare engaged his mind with 
 the movement of life in its wholeness; he let the life-force 
 pour through him, from clown and fool and trull up to 
 the highest incarnations of the will in passion, wisdom, 
 sorrow, the types of man; and this seen in imagination 
 is the Shakespearian world. He was not an observer, 
 bringing back word from this or that tract of life or 
 group of mortals or peculiarity of fortune; he was a cre- 
 ator — his world is always whole, as entire and perfect 
 in the Indian boy of Titania as in the Rome of Caesar. 
 The spirit of the Renaissance, insatiable for life, whis- 
 pered to him this secret; but in the act and passion of 
 creation he exceeded the Renaissance and took his station 
 with those mightiest few who are not for an age, but for 
 all time. 
 
 The courtly sphere, the aristocratic ideal, the culmina- 
 tion of life in the career of great passions led up to that 
 triumph of life which is the spectacle the Shakespearian 
 world presents with inexhaustible profusion, splendor 
 and vitality; but this world, though an emanation of the 
 spirit of the Renaissance and its climax in literature, was 
 itself sphered in a larger conception universal in the 
 tragic art; it lies, like the antique drama, in fatality, in 
 the mystery and under the sway of an infinity that en- 
 velops the life-force round about more profoundly and 
 densely than the dark ether envelops the forces and 
 imagery of nature. The prepotency of individuality, the 
 
SHAKESPEARE 283 
 
 dominance of the personal will are the great forms of 
 life; but the power to live, however supreme in its mani- 
 festation, is a wrestling with the unseen angel of life; 
 and to Shakespeare in the long and brooding absorption 
 of his contemplation of the action of life in mortality, 
 what finally emerges from the strife as the master-spirit 
 there is the dominance of fate against which the life- 
 force is shattered. It is commonly said that fate in the 
 antique drama is external and operates from without as 
 destiny, and that in the modern drama it is internal and 
 operates from within as character; the distinction brings 
 out the larger scope of personality and its greater im- 
 portance in the romantic drama of Shakespeare; but in 
 either case the fatality resides in the action, in the play 
 of the forces determining the tragic catastrophe, in that 
 which is essentially beyond and outside of the sphere of 
 the personal will and operates free from its control, 
 against its desire and to effect its ruin. The error, the 
 weakness, the cause that initiates the play of fate may be 
 of different degrees of ignorance or consciousness, of 
 generosity or criminality, of responsibility or irresponsi- 
 biUty; but, once loosed in whatever way, fate in the end 
 rules the issue. In what is known as Shakespeare's period 
 of tragic gloom, that is, in the plays of his manhood's ma- 
 turity, in which his creative genius works with its most 
 profound power in realizing the states of the soul, the 
 characteristic trait is the gradual emergence in his art of 
 the sense of fate in the world, its accumulation in his 
 mind, its possession of his genius which then gave forth 
 those dramas on which his fame as a master of the knowl- 
 edge of life most rests and in which fate controls the 
 scene of life in the wreck of fortune, the riving of the 
 soul within, the catastrophe where tragic death loading 
 
284 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 the stage impresses the mind less as the penalty than as 
 a release of the sufferer from the power of life to torture 
 and betray, a dismissal of the soul to the peace where life 
 is not. To Macbeth, Othello, Lear and also to Hamlet, 
 death is welcome; and to the spectator also their death 
 brings relief, calm, peace. Shakespeare, in these days 
 pre-eminently saw fate as that against which personality 
 is shattered, not merely dramatically by a star-crossed 
 fortune as in Romeo, with the pathos of the death of 
 youth, beauty and passion, but more essentially as by a 
 law inherent in the greatness of the life-force itself to 
 destroy it; for these are not special but typical instances 
 of the action of life — slight changes of circumstances 
 might have altered the fortunes of Romeo, but no change 
 could ever have altered the fate of Macbeth, Othello, Lear, 
 Hamlet. In these four Shakespeare sets personality 
 against fate, front to front, and the story is felt to be a 
 universal chapter of life, of the implication of the human 
 spirit in that vicissitude of nature and fortune which has 
 in every tongue borne the same name and that is stronger 
 than life. 
 
 The realization that such is the nature of human life 
 was attended in Shakespeare's mind by a storm and 
 stress that is read not only in the great dramas, but also 
 in the C5mical acquaintance with humanity shown ia 
 "All's Well that Ends Well," and in the savage temper 
 toward its baseness displayed in "Troilus and Cressida." 
 The concentrated, intense, ideal realization of the tragedy 
 of existence, of humanity victimized in its forms of noblest 
 nature or of most superb power, though most brilliant in 
 the four great tragedies, is not confined to them; it ex- 
 tends and spreads into many others in different planes of 
 character, mood and thought. The action of life takes on 
 
SHAKESPEARE 285 
 
 tbat quality of impenetrable mystery which the face of 
 life has always worn, in every literature, in the highest 
 works of imagination. Mystery is an increasing element 
 in Shakespeare's dramas from the first, continuing, grow- 
 ing in depth, growing also in intangibility; poetically, it is 
 etherealized in "A Midsimimer Night's Dream" full of 
 the idea of illusion in art as the wood is of moonlight; 
 reflectively, it is precipitated in Hamlet's thought; and, 
 at the end, as the illusion of life it fills "The Tempest;" 
 but the finer and most secret form of mystery in Shakes- 
 peare is not poetical or intellectual or metaphysical, but 
 springs from the action itself and is dramatic. It is in 
 Macbeth's superstitious interrogation of the witches, in 
 Hamlet's questioning of the soul in his soliloquy, in those 
 half-lines of tragic climax where life grows silent before 
 the presence of fate; it is in Othello's mind-dazed ques- 
 tion: 
 
 "Will you, I pray, demand that demi-devil 
 Why he hath thus ensnared my soul and body," — 
 
 the mystery of the fates of man; it is in Lear's invocation 
 
 of the elements: 
 
 "I never gave you kingdom, called you children," — 
 
 dismissing them from the moral world as if they alone 
 were free where all was guiltiness in the worse storm of 
 life beating on his white, old head. It is in such passages 
 as these, where Shakespeare's dramatic faculty is at its 
 lightning-stroke that the inner secrecy of the mystery is 
 lighted up, shown but not revealed, in the depth of con- 
 sciousness. Reason has no solvent for it, justice does not 
 measure with it, mercy is unknown to it. The attempt to 
 make fate ethical in Shakespeare, to identify it with moral 
 law in the universe, however it be made, fails; it was not 
 
286 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 as righteousness that he saw life; he saw it with the 
 simpleness of his genius, as a dramatic struggle, and, 
 emerging thence, the dominance of fate shattering life 
 mysteriously, beyond the intelligible grasp of man's 
 reason or the moral sense. He saw, in other words, 
 above all else, the dramatic mystery of life. 
 
 Shakespeare was thus, through and through, a drama- 
 tist; and he was the dramatist in whom the old tradition 
 of the art, even from ^schylus, as a representative of 
 the courtly life and a tale of the fall of princes, culmi- 
 nated. The idea of humanity, in the modern democratic 
 sense, was never in his brain; the types of man that 
 he created were, in their greatness, those of the aristo- 
 cratic life; and the tragedy he set forth was not that of 
 the spirit of life, the modern world-pain, but of the 
 careers of individuals highly endowed by nature or for- 
 tune in a world which seemed to exist to be the theater 
 of their will, ambition, passion; he was the dramatist 
 of a class-society. The aristocratic ideal of society and 
 of action in it, however, is the will of nature, and still 
 prevails in every state; and it makes a universal appeal 
 to men. The ground of this appeal is little affected 
 by the absence in Shakespeare of democratic sympathy; 
 for the scene of life which he does present includes all 
 classes; human nature is common and constant, and the 
 career of life in fortune, ambition, passion is now the 
 same that he depicted; the Shakespearian world, however 
 modern conditions may be changed, is still life as it is 
 known to the thoughts of men. The dramatic mystery is 
 that which is closest to mankind in daily experience, the 
 mystery of what is done, of what happens; the poetic, in- 
 tellectual, metaphysical modes of mystery exist for the 
 few, but the mystery of the event itself is for all, and it is 
 
SHAKESPEARE 287 
 
 seized by them in Shakespeare's way as not a thing of 
 reason or ethics, but as a fact impenetrable, leaving the 
 soul according to its degree affected by the scene. This is 
 the normal human attitude toward calamity, toward trag- 
 edy, of any kind; its force expends itself not in explana- 
 tion, but in experience. The sense of life as action, too, 
 and the ideal of it as Ijang in the prepotency of individ- 
 uality, and the dominance of the personal will is natural 
 to all men, and the thing dearest to their bosoms as their 
 thought and desire of life; the power to live, — to loose 
 the energies of the soul in achievement, enjoyment, ex- 
 perience, to affirm life in its fullness, variety, richness, in- 
 tensely, extremely, insatiably, to the utmost of the force 
 that is in one — this is the impulse to self-expression, to 
 self-realization, that drives men in their ambitions and 
 passions of whatever nature, the action and movement of 
 life in the world; and in this world as it lies outspread 
 in the knowledge and thoughts of men brilliant personal 
 force most attracts admiration, confers fame and secures 
 imitation, oftenest without regard to moral quality. 
 Force is the idol of life that is hardest to combat in civ- 
 ilizing man. In the Shakespearian world the afiirmation 
 of life in general is as broadly various as in the world of 
 nature, and in individual types it reaches a height of 
 beauty, power and majesty that is unrivaled in nature 
 because seen through the ideality of art, and these tj^es 
 have a history and a revelation of their being such as is 
 only possible in imagination; men, consequently, passing 
 into this world as they read or behold the plays find 
 there that enlargement of life and its career, that inten- 
 sification and revelation of it, which, though denied to 
 their experience, truly endows them with the greatness of 
 life, gives them understanding of the soul and the fac- 
 
288 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 ulties lodged in it, the heights and depths of its passion, 
 the reaches of its thoughts, the shadows of fatality amid 
 which it moves under the stars. The universal appeal of 
 Shakespeare lies in the power with which he has seized 
 life in its intense forms, its richest efflorescence, its 
 magical fantasy, its fascination and horror, its vulgar 
 generality, its high types, its manias and himiors, the 
 whole of life, and given it back to men as an increase of 
 their own power to live, a world in which they come to 
 true consciousness of themselves. Life is what men de- 
 sire; Shakespeare gives them life, according to their own 
 ideal, the triumph of life, yet life which at its height is 
 tragic and shocks them with that mystery of the actual 
 which is the profoundest reality. 
 
 The secret of life solves the riddle of Shakespeare, 
 whose greatness has no other mystery than the mystery 
 of the greatness of life. He is the spirit of life made 
 manifest in its own dramatic motion, imprisoned, em- 
 bodied and unveiled in art. Here are the fates of men, 
 grotesque, heroic, terrible, or stately in prosperity with 
 the olive crown and the sheaf of Ceres, almost as many 
 in number as the lots set forth to be chosen by the souls 
 at birth. It is an earthly life limited to the mortal scene; 
 no illumination falls on it from heaven, no divinity in- 
 habits its sphere. It is essentially Pagan in its ideal, its 
 art and its philosophy. It is the supreme work of man's 
 hand so rendering life in its aspects of mortality. If one 
 were to mold in sculpture the face of life, it would be, 
 one thinks, that over which every joy and sorrow, every 
 thought seems to have moved — the infinite of human ex- 
 pression — leaving its trace in the living flesh, — the face 
 of Shakespeare. That would be, could it be won back from 
 time, the ideal face of life, the Sphinx of our existence. 
 
SWINBURNE 
 
 Algernon Charles Swinburne, sprung of the 
 strength of English blood, was born in London, April s, 
 1837, the eldest son of Admiral Charles Henry Swin- 
 burne, and Lady Jane Henrietta, daughter of the third 
 earl of Ashburnham. His childhood was summered in 
 Northiunberland and wintered in the Isle of Wight, so 
 that the ancestry of his senses as well as of his blood was 
 of the sea. He was bred at Eton and Oxford, where 
 though not undistinguished in scholarship he took no de- 
 gree. He became acquainted with Italy and France by 
 travel. From his boyhood and in college days he was 
 devoted to the literary life, and thereafter literature was 
 his sole career. A life secluded in friendships and studies 
 has been his portion, as a man; and the fruits of it, by 
 which he lives to the public, are an abundance of prose 
 and verse which has come forth unintermittently for 
 nearly forty years; he stands now alone, the last of the 
 great English poets of the nineteenth century, with a fame 
 never to be forgotten in the annals of that time thronged 
 though it be with poetic names and voices of matchless 
 splendor and music. 
 
 The gift of Swinburne is to be capable of passion. 
 Enthusiasm is inseparable from him. Perhaps the 
 simplest aspect of his genius lies in his revolutionary 
 songs. The old French fire burns its last in his torch. 
 It is the flame that descended for an hour upon Coleridge, 
 
 289 
 
290 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 that wrapped Shelley life-long and in death, that by 
 tradition now belongs to the English race of poets from 
 Milton to Lander with every well-loved name to aid; 
 and in his generation Swinburne will ever be remembered 
 as its herald, a figure sole and supereminent, the poet* 
 republican — 
 
 "I am the trumpet at thy lips, thy clarion 
 Full of thy cry, sonorous with thy breath," — 
 
 that is his attitude, in the modern battle for liberty, like 
 Taillefer at Hastings. It began with his songs for Italy, 
 in the great days of her patriots, the first-fruits of his 
 S57mpathies with the land and of his personal admiration 
 for Mazzini. He does not state the grounds of his faith, 
 for it is not an intellectual passion that seizes on him; 
 it is a fervor that burns, an exaltation that lifts and 
 heightens, a flood of feeling that pours forth and inun- 
 dates with light and music and with the confluence of 
 many strengths in one superb moral force — the revolu- 
 tionary cause. Its monotone, though in part due to the 
 quality of the resonance and to the sameness of the 
 imagery, is essentially emotional, the monotone of pro- 
 found and unchangeable depth in the feeling itself which 
 is a constituent of the eternal nature of man. The 
 passion is a capacity to hate as well as to love. There 
 is no such master of the curse, in modern days. He 
 strikes home and to the pit with it, and with a mien and 
 phrase and a volleying after of fire and wrath fit to hurl 
 Satan down to the abyss. These are curses to rejoice the 
 heart. They mark their victims indelibly for hell. Vice 
 versa his hymns to Landor, Victor Hugo and Mazzini are 
 adorations. These three were the living hands that had 
 fed him in youth with their touch, their words, their pres- 
 
SWINBURNE 291 
 
 ence on earth. The fire they nursed though they did not 
 kindle, had long life in it, a deep core of heat; and 
 whether the year was '66 or yesterday, whether the scene 
 was Rome or Paris, Crete or Muscovy, the poet still 
 brooded there the passion-bolts of his invective or peans 
 for victor and martyr. In his own land Swinburne's revo- 
 lutionary ardor changed and took a new form in an 
 illimitable patriotism, a pride in England, an Elizabethan 
 might of land-love that carried the fate of the Armada 
 in its bosom as its dearest memory and expressed itself 
 in an exuberance of panegyric and delight that makes his 
 verse seem contemporaneous with English liberty and 
 the ocean-rhythm of England's empire. This love of 
 liberty and dedication to mankind had, too, its far fount, 
 under dark centuries, in Athens, 
 
 "Dear city of men without master or Lord;" 
 
 thence the poet had drunk, most truly, the draught of 
 his inspiration, the intoxication of his faith in man. The 
 stream of his revolutionary song is unmatched in volxmie, 
 splendor and force; it has flowed life-long, and still wells; 
 it is blended of many loves of persons and histories and 
 memories, of time and of eternity; it is a great passion, 
 great in personal intensity, great in its human outreaching 
 and uplifting aspiration, great in sincerity. Here is im- 
 mense manhood-strength, seeking, by the poet's right, to 
 pour itself through the impoverished veins of "miserable 
 men." 
 
 Even in so brief an opening glance at Swinburne's work 
 the fact of his scholarship, his provenience from literature, 
 stands prominently forth. I suppose that no English 
 poet has ever had so wide and familiar acquaintance with 
 the poetry of foreign climes. He began with a felicitous 
 
292 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 command of the classical and romance languages. He 
 took the Taylorian prize, in his college days, for French 
 and Italian, and won other similar distinction in the 
 ancient tongues. He has written, as a poet, in Greek, 
 Latin and French with literary mastery. In English his 
 studies have been prolonged and comprehensive, and not 
 restricted to poetry. Out of this varied scholarship 
 sprang his prose works, a long series beginning with his 
 elaborate exposition of Blake's genius and including for 
 its bulk an examination of the Elizabethan drama, to- 
 gether with the study of Victor Hugo. To be grouped 
 here, also, as dependent on the critical activity of his 
 mind are the poems so many in number which, whether 
 in the form of ode, elegy or sonnet, are dedicated to the 
 literary fame of those writers whom he had deeply 
 studied. In this large body of verse his criticism is con- 
 densed and, so far as the matter permits, is put into the 
 form of poetry with a full heart of praise. He indulges 
 himself in this luxury of praise, in a minute and lavish 
 tribute to the writers of many books and plays, to the 
 nameless as well as the famous dead. Swinburne truly 
 is nowhere more the poet than in this inexhaustible 
 capacity to be moved to hero-worship and the affectionate 
 eulogy of those who from Sappho and Catullus down the 
 long line seem to be in the intimacy of genius his own. 
 His criticism is woven of such noble recognitions. 
 
 This literary element, explicitly exposed in his prose 
 criticism and in the critical as distinguished from the 
 imaginative portions of his verse, is implicitly active in 
 the whole mass of his poetry. Its influence is observed 
 most plainly in the structural form of his dramas. He 
 had achieved such familiarity with past literature that his 
 mind became capable of an attitude of contemporaneity 
 
SWINBURNE 293 
 
 toward it; he was thus led, in opposition to the usual 
 attempt of a literary poet to modernize what he derives 
 from the past and naturalize it in his own age, rather 
 to archaize his own forms. Swinburne's detachment from 
 his own time was gradual, but he moved toward a repro- 
 duction of both the Greek and the English antique. 
 "Atalanta in Calydon" was his first experiment in this 
 way, but "Erechtheus," his second Greek play, was more 
 perfect in the success that it aimed at. Similarly his 
 earliest dramatic work "The Queen Mother" and "Rosa- 
 mond," though Shakespearian in diction and reminiscence, 
 was yet not a conscious reversion in art; but the play of 
 "Locrine," and the trilogy of "Chastelard," "Bothwell" 
 and "Mary Stuart," a chronicle history as he himself 
 describes it, were attempts to write anew in the Eliza- 
 bethan manner of the drama. The same may be said of 
 "Marino Faliero," while "The Sisters" and "Rosamund, 
 Queen of the Lombards," the other two dramas, stand 
 somewhat apart. 
 
 In the trilogy of which Queen Mary is the theme, the 
 effort for contemporaneity with the past is also to be 
 observed, other than artistically, in the historical veracity 
 of the characters in themselves and of the scene of events. 
 Attentive and exhaustive study of the facts of the record 
 is noticeable, the historian's fidelity; and it is rather in 
 obedience to the necessities of history than of art that 
 the poet has swelled and lengthened the drama to such a 
 remarkable compass, and owns that the work has such 
 proportions and has been so treated as to deserve the 
 name of an epic drama. He seems desirous that it should 
 be judged of as a history as well as in its aspect as a work 
 of imagination. This indicates the depth in him of that 
 feeling for past fact, which has controlled the artistic 
 
294 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 form of the drama in his general use, both Greek and 
 English, He disengages himself from contemporary 
 realities — standards, ideas, convictions — but subjects 
 himself to the realities of another place and time so far 
 as he can re-embody them; he thus by native aptitude 
 and with the aid of scholarship, does become in a singular 
 degree a citizen and freeman of many literatures and at 
 their different periods, a poet in whom what would be 
 imitation and reminiscence in others becomes genuine 
 because he plays the part he assumes after due study and 
 with deep feeling; he thus succeeds beyond all others 
 in writing literary drama that accords with past prin- 
 ciples of composition. 
 
 Such a power to free oneself from one's own age and 
 move in the guise and fashion of other times and places, 
 illustrated here by the use Swinburne makes of the 
 drama, involves aloofness from the world. He is, in fact, 
 in his greater work of the imagination, remote from 
 current life. He lives, withdrawn in his own thoughts, in 
 that sphere of the poetic imagination where there is a 
 true timelessness, — the solitude thronged with figures 
 that Appear at any moment from any age and drift 
 across the vision or play their mimic parts before the 
 mind's eye and disappear. It is the world of the great 
 artists. Locrine, Erechtheus, Meleager are natural there; 
 so are the stormy passion of the Scotch peers, the craft 
 of English statesmen, the spectacle of Venetian pride; or 
 Sappho or Faustine. The world of Swinburne is well 
 symbolized by that Zodiac of the burning signs of love 
 that he named in the prelude to "Tristram of Lyonesse," 
 — the signs of Helen, Hero, Alcyone, Iseult, Rosamond, 
 Dido, Juliet, Cleopatra, Francesca, Thisbe, Angelica, 
 Guenevere; under the heavens of these starry names the 
 
SWINBURNE 29s 
 
 poet moves in his place apart and sees his visions of woe 
 and wrath and weaves his dream of the loves and the 
 fates of men. He is a myth-lover, a dreamer, a com- 
 panion of the myths and the dreams of the past, an artist 
 of the imagination. The aloofness that belongs to Swin- 
 burne's verse is not due only to his effort to archaize the 
 forms of his art, but much more to the fact that he reverts 
 to great imaginative themes which, in themselves, are 
 remote from the modern world, and conceives them in a 
 spirit of poetry that now seems to have its death-limit of 
 a great age in his sole surviving genius. 
 
 The artistic conservatism of Swinburne, which dis- 
 posed him in the rigidity of his mind to the preservation 
 and choice of aiiterior poetic forms, and to the treatment 
 of antique and legendary themes or subjects of historic 
 grandeur, is also felt in his desire that these themes 
 should be kept in their priq^itive state. He revolted 
 against modernization of the old in all its forms. The 
 dramatic bent of his own genius may have predisposed 
 him against idyllic treatment by any transforming 
 method; but, apart from that, there was, deep in his 
 nature, a rooted abhorrence of any change in the es- 
 sentials of the antique or medieval matter, a feeling re- 
 flected in his care for the accuracy of history in his 
 trilogy. He was a purist, in opposition to his contem- 
 poraries. This was exemplified, for the Arthur Myth, in 
 "The Tale of Balen," and again in "Tristram of Lyon- 
 esse"; he stood for the medieval, romantic narrative in 
 the one case, and for the naked majesty of primitive love 
 and fate in the other. There is a truthfulness, an aus- 
 terity of truth, in all this which is temperamental in the 
 poet and marks the strength of his individuality. In a 
 certain way there is the spirit of Pre-Raphaelitism in it. 
 
296 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 a formal reversion to severer artistic methods, to a primi- 
 tive poetry, to a more stern and bare figure of life, a 
 reversion to art as opposed to mere manipulation of 
 material, a recognition of the truth that the great themes 
 of imagination are given to man, not created by him in 
 any passing generation, that they are of man but not 
 of men. This reverence of Swinburne for the past, in 
 form and matter, in the things of art, is a part of that 
 ritual of hero-worship to which he gives such fervid and 
 personal expression and which is summed generally 
 throughout his verse in his ever recurring h3min to Apollo, 
 to the Sun-god, the inspiration of all poetry. The poet's 
 faith is in this past of art, both form and matter and 
 personality, instrument and theme and singer, and he 
 sustains it against the temporal hour by virtue of his own 
 enfranchisement in the mind from time, of his own liberty 
 in the mastery of many literatures and epochs, of his own 
 contemporaneity with poetry in a multitude of its forms 
 and moods. Swinburne's conservatism is one with his 
 hero-worship, one with his scholarship, one with his life- 
 long passion for literature, a poet's passion for life in the 
 imaginative world. The love of literature, a scholar's 
 love, is the most fundamental thing in him; it is a jealous 
 and deep-hearted love and controls him in his theories as 
 well as in bis practice, in his mental outlook as well as 
 in his secret inspiration; it may make him aloof in person, 
 remote in theme, reversionary in art, but it gives him a 
 wide domain. The revolutionary cause even was for him 
 a literary heirloom from the poets. Swinburne is a poet 
 of culture through whom flows the broad stream of the 
 many thoughts of men, 
 
 Swinburne first took the world with melody. The 
 opening chorus of "Atalanta in Calydon" was, in the ears 
 
SWINBURNE 297 
 
 of men, a new singing voice on earth. Its music stamps 
 the memory of whoever hears it beyond any possible 
 oblivion. The cadence and the phrase are both char- 
 acteristic of the poet's original genius, and so is their 
 inseparability; they are one in the manifold of their syl- 
 lables and they flash out in their fall what can only be 
 called a color of sound. This is the peculiar and arrest- 
 ing poetic gift of Swinburne, the lyrical iridescence of 
 the verse like a mother-of-pearl sea, like a green wave 
 breaking in tempest, like a rainbow-spray before the 
 beak of his driving song; it is a marvel that changes but 
 fails not, a witchery of language, a vocal incantation in 
 the rhsmies, an enchantment in the mere pour of sound 
 and pause and elision, — a purely metrical gift. The 
 chorus of the "Atalanta" serves melodically as a prelude 
 to all this lyrical change, just as it arises most spontane- 
 ously in the memory, in the recall of his music. 
 
 "When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces, 
 The mother of months in meadow or plain 
 
 Fills the shadows and windy places 
 With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain; 
 
 And the brown bright nightingale amorous 
 
 Is half assuaged for Itylus, 
 
 For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces, 
 The tongueless vigil, and all the pain. 
 
 Come with bows bent and with emptying of quivers, 
 
 Maiden most perfect, lady of light, 
 With a noise of winds and many rivers, 
 
 With a clamor of waters, and with might; 
 Bind on thy sandals, O thou most fleet, 
 Over the splendor and speed of thy feet; 
 For the faint east quickens, the wan west shivers, 
 
 Round the feet of the day and the feet of the night. 
 
298 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 Where shall we find her, how shall we sing to her, 
 Fold our hands round her knees, and cling? 
 
 O that man's heart were as fire and could spring to her, 
 Fire, or the strength of the streams that spring I 
 
 For the stars and the winds are unto her 
 
 As raiment, as songs of the harp-player; 
 
 For the risen stars and the fallen cling to her. 
 And the southwest-wind and the west-wind sing. 
 
 For winter's rains and ruins are over. 
 
 And all the season of snows and sins; 
 The days dividing lover and lover. 
 
 The light that loses, the night iJiat wins; 
 And time remembered is grief forgotten, 
 And frosts are slain and flowers begotten, 
 And in green underwood and cover 
 
 Blossom by blossom the spring begins. 
 
 The fuU streams feed on flower of rushes. 
 
 Ripe grasses trammel a traveling foot, 
 The faint fresh flame of the young year flushes 
 
 From leaf to flower and flower to fruit; 
 And fruit and leaf are as gold and fire, 
 And the oat is heard above the lyre. 
 And the hoofed heel of a satyr crushes 
 
 The chestnut-husk at the chestnut-root. 
 
 And Pan by noon and Bacchus by night, 
 
 Fleeter of foot than the fleet-foot kid. 
 Follows with dancing and fills with delight 
 
 The Mcenad and the Bassarid; 
 And soft as lips that laugh and hide 
 The laughing leaves of the tree divide. 
 And screen from seeing and leave in sight 
 
 The god pursuing, the maiden hid. 
 
 The ivy falls with the Bacchanal's hair 
 
 Over her eyebrows hiding her eyes; 
 The wild vine slipping down leaves bare 
 
 Her bright breast shortening into sighs; 
 
SWINBURNE 299 
 
 The wild vine slips with the weight of its leaves, 
 But the berried ivy catches and cleaves 
 To the limbs that glitter, the feet that scare 
 The wolf that follows, the fawn that flies." 
 
 The l5n:ical vein here opened disclosed richer ores in 
 the succeeding choruses and antiphonal arrangements of 
 the plays. A new master of song-craft was plain to see. 
 But there was that in the Hellenism of this play which 
 gave the quality of an exotic to the verse, which shadowed 
 and veiled the permanence of the gift and made it appear 
 more magical than real. Its reality and permanence as 
 the natural gift of an English poet was first and sur- 
 prisingly established in men's minds by the publication of 
 the first series of "Poems and Ballads" from which Swin- 
 burne's fame properly began. Here the lyrical quality 
 was pre-eminent, greater in range and variety and in 
 effect than in any later volume; here, there, were not only 
 the cadence and the phrase, the flow, the color of sound, 
 the intermingling of musical senses with the whole range 
 of emotion and thought, but such delicacy and litheness 
 and volume in the verses as made them a new revelation 
 of language as a medium of expression. It was as if a 
 new magical art had arisen, and Swinburne was its master. 
 The verse was like sword-play, for brilliancy and pre- 
 cision, for short and long, for speed and glitter and nerve. 
 Familiarity with it has now lessened the pleasures of 
 surprise and wonder; but as the poet has gone on through 
 later years, and from time to time has put forth his 
 strength in novel ways, he has maintained and increased 
 his early fame as a metrical master perfecting a native gift 
 with all the resources of an exact and subtle scholarship in 
 the resources of his art, its aim and limits, as a form of 
 music in words. In all these things he is accomplished. 
 
300 nTERARY ESSAYS 
 
 Perfect, however, in meters, he is less sensitive to 
 purity in structural form. His lyrics are apt to be short- 
 ened dramas, his dramas to be fragmentary epics, his nar- 
 rative to be a blend of l5n:ic passion and dramatic episode. 
 "Tristram of Lyonesse" is his most characteristic poem 
 in this respect as in all others; it is the poem most rep- 
 resentative of his qualities, each at its best. The poet's 
 command of intellectual form, of the proportion of matter 
 to expression, of the economic rendering of character, 
 event and thought, of that logical condensation which is 
 effected by art, is less manifest. Form in all its modes, 
 and they are numerous, is essential to the greatest poetry. 
 Swinburne is eminent for metrical form, in the highest 
 degree; and in this he is lyrically unrivalled, so far as 
 the form only is concerned. Of form in its structural 
 and intellectual modes he has less, but prefers complexity 
 to singleness and an ample fullness to economy. Blank 
 verse also does not take his imprint so ssmipathetically as 
 the lyrical measures, though as studiously labored as his 
 rhsmied and l5^ic lines; it is rather by the melody with 
 which he first captured men, and by no other equal bond, 
 that he holds the world under the fascination of liquid 
 cadences and light lilts and choral harmonies that first 
 fell on hxmian speech from his lips. 
 
 The second salient trait of Swinburne's work, and one 
 not less impressive and individualistic than his IjTicism, 
 is its rendering of the experience of passion. The theme 
 is most pervasive in his earlier verse, and is there so fre- 
 quent and takes on so many forms of imagination that a 
 misleading idea was fixed in the public mind of the nar- 
 rowness of his range in poetry. The poetic fiction under 
 which he develops the theme is multifold, and exhibits 
 the various sources of his culture; it has three main 
 
SWINBUiySTE 301 
 
 phases, classical, medieval and Pre-Raphaelite. The 
 guise of Pre-Raphaelitism is the earliest and most pal- 
 pable in the verse, and the fact is connected with the 
 poet's association in life with the group of artists, Ros- 
 setti, Morris, Burne- Jones and others, with whom he had 
 come in contact in college days and later, and to whose 
 art in painting and cast of imagination generally Swin- 
 burne's was most cognate. His mind formed the habit 
 of allegorizing in human figures abstractions, such as 
 Love, Fear, Grief, and presenting these pictorially and 
 symbolically. They are figures essentially without the 
 motion of life, designated by attributes of color and 
 wreath and wand, canvases or cameos in words; the 
 poems in which they are the human element of interest 
 are also highly conventionalized in their literary art, 
 generally under French or Italian influences. Such are 
 the opening poems of his work, set first in the collected 
 edition, "A Ballad of Life" and "A Ballad of Death." 
 The initial note thus struck often recurs, but as an artistic 
 method it is diminishingly employed by the poet in the 
 progress of his works. The classical source of his song 
 is a much deeper spring, and from the moment when it 
 blends with the verse lifts it far away from estheticism, 
 conventionalized art and any limitation of narrow modes, 
 peculiar- fashion and formalism. The theme at once takes 
 its great form as that of the everlasting opposition in 
 human nature which is historically summed up as the 
 antithesis of classical paganism to monkish Christianity, 
 or more broadly as the contrast of the bodily with the 
 spiritual element in life. Swinburne still further defines 
 the discord as the opposition of the worship of Venus to 
 that of the Virgin Mary; and thus begins for him that 
 denial of Christian symbolism which he carried to the 
 extreme of expression in the poem "Before a Crucifix." 
 
302 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 The reversionary instinct, so noticeable in all his art, is 
 here at work unchecked. He seems, like another Julian, 
 to bring back the worship of the Greek divinities, affirm- 
 ing their permanence essentially in human nature, and he 
 takes the traditionary dying words of Julian as the motto, 
 one may add the motif, of the poem in which he most 
 •eloquently set forth his new paganism, the "Hymn to 
 Proserpine": 
 
 "0 Gods dethroned and deceased, cast forth, wiped out in a 
 
 day! 
 From your wrath is the world released, redeemed from your 
 
 chains, men say. 
 New Gods are crowned in the city; their flowers have broken 
 
 your rods; 
 They are merciful, clothed with pity, the young compassionate 
 
 Gods. 
 But for me their new device is barren, the days are bare; 
 Things long past over suffice, and men forgotten that were. 
 Time and the Gods are at strife; ye dwell in the midst thereof, 
 Draining a little life from the barren breasts of love. 
 I say to you, cease, take rest; yea, I say to you all, be at 
 
 peace, 
 Till the bitter milk of her breast and the barren bosom shall 
 
 cease. 
 Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean? but these thou shalt not take, 
 The laurel, the palms and the pean, the breasts of the njonphs 
 
 in the brake; 
 Breasts more soft than a dove's, that tremble with tenderer 
 
 breath; 
 And all the wings of the Loves, and all the joy before death; 
 All the feet of the hours that soimd as a single lyre. 
 Dropped and deep in the flowers, with strings that flicker like 
 
 fire. 
 More than these wilt thou give, things fairer than all these 
 
 things? 
 Nay, for a little we live, and life hath mutable wings. 
 
SWINBURNE 303 
 
 ,A little while and we die; shall life not thrive as it may? 
 For no man under the sky lives twice, outliving his day. 
 And grief is a grievous thing, and a man hath enough of his 
 
 tears: 
 Why should he labor, and bring fresh grief to blacken his 
 
 years? 
 Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown 
 
 grey from thy breath; 
 We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of 
 
 death. 
 Laurel is green for a season, and love is sweet for a day; 
 But love grows bitter with treason, and laurel outlives not 
 
 May. 
 Sleep, shall we sleep after all? for the world is not sweet in 
 
 the end; 
 For the old faiths loosen and fall, the new years ruin and rend. 
 Fate is a sea without shore, and the soul is a rock that abides; 
 But her ears are vexed with the roar and her face with the 
 
 foam of the tides. 
 lips that the live blood faints in, the leavings of racks and 
 
 rods! 
 
 ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted gods 
 Though all men abase them before you in spirit, and all knees 
 
 bend, 
 
 1 kneel not neither adore you, but standing, look to the end. 
 
 Though the feet of thine high priests tread where thy lords 
 
 and our forefathers trod, 
 Though these that were Gods are dead, and thou being dead 
 
 art a God, 
 Though before thee the throned Cytherean be fallen, and 
 
 hidden her head, 
 Yet thy kingdom shall pass, Galilean, thy dead shall go down 
 
 to thee dead. 
 Of the maiden thy mother men sing as a goddess with grace 
 
 clad around; 
 Thou art throned where another was king; where another was 
 
 queen she is crowned. 
 
304 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 Yea, once we had sight of another: but now she is queen, say 
 
 these. 
 Not as thine, not as thine was our mother, a blossom of 
 
 flowering seas, 
 Clothed round with the world's desire as with raiment as fair 
 
 as the foam. 
 And fleeter than kindled fire, and a goddess and mother of 
 
 Rome. 
 For thine came pale and a maiden, and sister to sorrow; but 
 
 oxirs. 
 Her deep hair heavily laden with odor and color of flowers. 
 White rose of the rose-white water, a silver splendor, a flame, 
 Bent down unto us that besought her, and earth grew sweet 
 
 with her name. 
 For thine came weeping, a slave among slaves, and rejected; 
 
 but she 
 Came flushed from the full-flushed wave, and imperial, her 
 
 foot on the sea. 
 And the wonderful waters knew her, the winds and the view- 
 less ways. 
 And the roses grew rosier, and bluer the sea-blue stream of 
 
 the bays." 
 
 The essential elements of Swinburne's imagination and 
 method are all here present in this delineation of opposed 
 divinities each powerful over human life. The identical 
 theme is set forth again under the guise of medieval 
 fiction in the poem "Laus Veneris," where the knight of 
 the Venusberg legend sets in antithesis the pagan and 
 the Christian scheme of life, and embodies in himself the 
 apostacy from Christian ideals — 
 
 "For I was of Christ's choosing, I God's knight, — " 
 
 and his adhesion to the lady of the myth; 
 
 "For till the thunder in tlie trumpet be. 
 Soul may divide from body, but not we 
 
 One from another; I hold thee with my hand, 
 I let mine eyes have all their will of thee." 
 
SWINBURNE 30s 
 
 Apart from the theory and the imagery, these poems are 
 also identical in the tone of sad, dark farewell which con- 
 verts each of them into a lament for love, for life itself. 
 The protagonist of either poem has finished with life. 
 Both poems have the motion of life, a vital breath in their 
 lyrical expression of emotion profoundly modified by 
 thought; but about the imagery, the figures of Aphrodite, 
 the Vurgin, the Lady of the Venusberg, and also the Cru- 
 cifix that defines the conception of Christ in "Laus 
 Veneris," — about all these there lingers the Pre-Raph- 
 aeUte habit of imagination; the imagery has more affinity 
 with modes of sacerdotal art, with symbolism and the 
 attributive in imaginative power than it has with the free 
 vitality that is more properly the sphere of poetry. 
 
 The new paganism, of which these two poems are 
 elemental expressions receives a widely varied illustra- 
 tion in the body of poetry that is grouped about them. 
 Several of these are dramatic lyrics containing a situation 
 or a slight story; others are hardly more than exercises 
 in verse, often in French forms; still others are deeply 
 meditated or elaborately studied after the sentiment, the 
 phrasing and the thought-movement of the Greek antique. 
 The whole spirit, however, is romantic in mood and con- 
 duct and more nigh to the essentially medieval than to 
 the modern or to the ancient. The dominant memories of 
 Swinburne, however, whether intellectual or imaginative, 
 lie in classical antiquity; and, so far as he has need of 
 any divine principle in his verse, in concrete forms, he 
 has found approach to the Greek gods most facile. He 
 achieves the most genuine appearance of belief in the gods 
 that has fallen to the fortune of any English poet, perhaps 
 of any poet in any modern literature. The recurring 
 hymn to the Sun, under its many forms, which has al- 
 
3o6 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 ready been alluded to, is a deep note of his temperament. 
 The classical immersion of his mind had made clean work 
 of all Christian symbolism; it had swept it away; and in 
 its place came, for imaginative purposes, the Greek forms 
 of old divinity and myth, but less as idols of hope than 
 idols of memory. The close of the "Hymn to Proser- 
 pine" gives his point of faith with most precision; death 
 is the end of all, but he chooses for his companions in 
 death the dead gods, — he will descend to Proserpine 
 where all have gone. His faith is a farewell; a Vale not 
 an Ave. 
 
 The new paganism in which imaginative reminiscence 
 plays so great a part, effecting this renascence of antique 
 symbolism in the poet's mind, also finds expression in a 
 more direct and concrete presentation of the experience 
 as well as of the theory of pzission, both in the form of 
 dramatic incident or situation and in the form of al- 
 legorized figuration in art. Whether set forth under a 
 classical or later name, Sappho or Faustine or Felise, or 
 in the namelessness of a dream of passion, Swinburne 
 delineates the moment with vividness of sensation, with 
 languid hazes, with lights and shadows as of some Vene- 
 tian picture; or in his sjmibolical poems he bxiilds up a 
 figure, a background, a landscape as of some mythic 
 painting, though using mainly cadence as his means of 
 evoking it. "Dolores" is a poem of this last type, and 
 characteristic of his genius, in subject, handling and 
 tone. In all these poems which, in various ways, by 
 dramatic, lyric and meditative modes, set forth the theme 
 of the mortal ways of desire, the accompaniment of the 
 verse is a lament, seldom light, usually profound and 
 often touched with bitterness. Pain is the master-emotion 
 in the verse, unconcealed, rebellious, self-pitjdng. The 
 
SWINBURNE 307 
 
 knight of the "Laus Veneris" is filled full of it; so are 
 the cadences of "Doleres"; so are some of the lightest 
 and most delicate of the lyrics. 
 
 The poem which sets forth this aspect of the paganism 
 of a modern spirit with nobleness of feeliag is "Hesperia," 
 which after its fine nature-opening, goes on with its 
 human burden in these lines: 
 
 "From the bountiful infinite west, from the happy memorial 
 places 
 Full of the stately repose and the lordly delight of the dead, 
 Where the fortunate islands are lit with the light of ineffable 
 faces, 
 And the soimd of a sea without wind is about them, and 
 sunset is red, 
 Come back to redeem and release me from love that recalls 
 and represses, 
 That cleaves to my flesh as a flame, till the serpent has 
 eaten his fill; 
 From the bitter delights of the dark, and the feverish, the 
 furtive caresses 
 That murder the youth in a man or ever his heart have its 
 will. 
 Thy lips cannot laugh and thine eyes cannot weep; thou art 
 pale as a rose is, 
 PaJer and sweeter than leaves that cover the blush of the 
 bud; 
 And the heart of the flower is compassion, and pity the core 
 it encloses, 
 Pity, not love, that is bom of the breath and decays with 
 the blood. 
 As the cross that a wild nun clasps till the edge of it bruises 
 her bosom, 
 So love wounds as we grasp it, and blackens and burns as a 
 flame; 
 I have loved overmuch in my life; when the live bud bursts 
 with the blossom, 
 Bitter as ashes or tears is the fruit, and the wine thereof 
 shame. 
 
3o8 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 As a heart that its anguish divides is the green bud cloven 
 asunder; 
 As the blood of a man self-slain is the flush of the leaves that 
 allure; 
 And the perfume as poison and wine to the brain, a dehght 
 and a wonder; 
 And the thorns are too sharp for a boy, too slight for a man 
 to endure, 
 Too soon did I love it, and lost love's rose; and I cared not 
 for glory's; 
 Only the blossoms of sleep and of pleasure were mixed in 
 my hair. 
 Was it m3Trtle or poppy thy garland was woven with, O my 
 Dolores? 
 Was it pallor of slumber, or blush as of blood, that I found 
 in thee fair? 
 For desire is a respite from love, and the flesh not the heart is 
 her fuel; 
 She was sweet to me once, who am fled and escaped from 
 the range of her reign; 
 Who behold as of old time at hand as I turn, with her mouth 
 growing cruel. 
 And flushed as with wine with the blood of her lovers, Our 
 Lady of Fain. 
 Low down where the thicket is thicker with thorns than with 
 leaves in the summer, 
 In the brake is a gleaming of eyes and a hissing of tongues 
 that I knew; 
 And the lithe long throats of her snakes reach round her, their 
 mouths overcome her. 
 And her lips grow cool with their foam, made moist as a 
 desert with dew. 
 With the thirst and the hunger of lust though her beautiful 
 lips be so bitter. 
 With the cold foul foam of the snakes they soften and 
 redden and smile; 
 And her fierce mouth sweetens, her eyes wax wide and her 
 eyelashes glitter. 
 And she laughs with a savor of blood in her face, and a 
 savor of guile. 
 
SWINBURNE 309 
 
 She laughs, and her hands reach hither, her hair blows hither 
 and hisses, 
 As a lowlit flame in a wind, back-blown till it shudder and 
 leap; 
 Let her lips not again lay hold on my soul, nor her poisonous 
 kisses. 
 To consume it alive and divide from thy bosom. Our Lady 
 of Sleep. 
 Ah daughter of sunset and slumber, if now it return into 
 prison, 
 Who shall redeem it anew? But we, if thou wilt, let us fly; 
 Let us take to us, now that the white skies thrill with a moon 
 unarisen, 
 Swift horses of fear or of love, take flight and depart and 
 not die. 
 They are swifter than dreams, they are stronger than death; 
 there is none that hath ridden. 
 None that shall ride in the dim strange ways of his life as 
 we ride; 
 By the meadows of memory, the highlands of hope, and the 
 shore that is hidden. 
 Where life breaks loud and unseen, a sonorous invisible tide; 
 By the sands where sorrow has trodden, the salt pools bitter 
 and sterile, 
 By the thundering reef and the low sea-wall and the channel 
 of years, 
 Our wild steeds press on the night, strain hard through pleasure 
 and peril. 
 Labor and listen and pant not or pause for the peril that 
 nears; 
 And the sound of them trampling the way cleaves night as an 
 arrow asunder, 
 And slow by the sand-hill and swift by the down with its 
 glimpses of grass. 
 Sudden and steady the music, as eight hoofs trample and 
 thunder, 
 Rings in the ear of the low bUnd wind of the night as we 
 pass; 
 Shrill shrieks in our faces the blind bland air that was mute ad 
 a maiden. 
 
3IO LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 Stung into slorm by the speed of our passage, and deaf 
 
 where we past; 
 And our spirits too burn as we bound, thine holy but mine 
 
 heavy-laden. 
 As we burn with the fire of our flight; ah love, shall we win 
 
 at the last?" 
 
 The procession of Swinburne's studies of passion, 
 highly composite in artistic material and method as they 
 are and diversified by their kinship with many moods and 
 periods of the spirit of poetry, have, together with their 
 vividness of sensation and their sad meditative burden of 
 the emptiness of mortal things, a monotone that is un- 
 mistakable, as omnipresent and profound as the mono- 
 tone in his revolutionary verses. It is the monotone of 
 fundamental emotion in the one as in the other, and 
 springs from a depth of habitual feeling that is a part of 
 the poet's temperament. The experience of passion is 
 not seized dramatically in the true sense, it is seized 
 lyrically, and the ultimate mood is that of the weariness 
 of life which in place of a dramatic exhaustion of the 
 action in tragic catastrophe, issues only in an exhausted 
 emotion; it belongs to the t3rpe that it should end in 
 weakness. The end of the feeling is a transformation 
 into thought; into meditation; in this intellectual climax 
 the mood takes on the appearance of philosophy, of a 
 surrender of life to death, of the prayer to Proserpine 
 before the descent of the poet to the shades of the under- 
 world. This philosophy in which the lyrical mood of 
 Swinburne under these impulses evaporates is most 
 beautifully and winningly given in the verses so well 
 known by their melody alone, "The Garden of Proser- 
 pine." They contain the summary of his verse of life- 
 experience for the individual, of emotional experience 
 
SWINBURNE 311 
 
 properly, and are the death-song of the pagan ideal, not 
 in its historic but its esthetic sense, as it was conceived 
 and presented by him: 
 
 "Here, where the world is quiet, 
 
 Here, where all trouble seems 
 Dead winds' and spent waves' riot 
 
 In doubtful dreams of dreams; 
 I watch the green field growing 
 For reaping folk and sowing. 
 For harvest-time and mowing, 
 
 A sleepy world of streams. 
 
 I am tired of tears and laughter. 
 
 And men that laugh and weep. 
 Of what may come hereafter 
 
 For men that sow to reap: 
 I am weary of days and hours, 
 Blown buds of barren flowers. 
 Desires and dreams and powers 
 
 And everything but sleep. 
 
 Here life has death for neighbor, 
 
 And far from eye or ear 
 Wan waves and wet winds labor, 
 
 Weak ships and spirits steer; 
 They drive adrift, and whither 
 They wot not who make thither; 
 But no such winds blow hither; 
 
 And no such things grow here. 
 
 No growth of moor or coppice, 
 
 No heather-flower or vine. 
 But bloomless buds of poppies, 
 
 Green grapes of Proserpine, 
 Pale beds of blowing rushes 
 Where no leaf blooms or blushes 
 Save this whereout she crushes 
 
 For dead men deadly wine. 
 
312 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 Pale, without name or number, 
 
 In fruitless fields of corn, 
 They bow themselves and sliunber 
 
 All night till light is born; 
 And like a soul belated. 
 In hell and heaven unmated, 
 By cloud and mist abated 
 
 Comes out of darkness morn. 
 
 Though one were strong as seven, 
 He too with death shall dwell. 
 Nor wake with wings in heaven, 
 
 Nor weep for pains in hell; 
 
 Though one were fair as roses, 
 
 His beauty clouds and closes: 
 
 And well though love reposes, 
 
 In the end it is not well. 
 
 Pale, beyond porch and portal, 
 
 Crowned with calm leaves, she stands 
 Who gathers all things mortal 
 With cold immortal hands; 
 Her languid lips are sweeter 
 Than love's who fears to greet her 
 To men that mix and meet her 
 From many times and lands. 
 
 She waits for each and other. 
 She waits for all men born; 
 Forgets the earth her mother. 
 The life of fruits and corn; 
 And spring and seed and swallow 
 Take wing for her and follow 
 Where simimer song rings hollow 
 And flowers are put to scorn. 
 
 There go the loves that wither, 
 The old loves with wearier wings; 
 
 And all dead years draw thither, 
 And all disastrous things; 
 
SWINBURNE 313 
 
 Dead dreams of days forsaken, 
 Blind buds that snows have shaken, 
 Wild leaves that winds have taken, 
 Red strays of ruined springs. 
 
 We are not sure of sorrow, 
 
 And joy was never sure; 
 To-day will die to-morrow; 
 
 Time stoops to no man's lure; 
 And love, grown faint and fretful 
 With lips but half regretful 
 Sighs, and with eyes forgetful 
 
 Weeps that no loves endure. 
 
 From too much love of living. 
 
 From hope and fear set free, 
 We thank with brief thanksgiving 
 
 Whatever gods may be 
 That no life lives for ever; 
 That dead men rise up never; 
 That even the weariest river 
 
 Winds somewhere safe to sea. 
 
 Then star nor sun shall waken. 
 
 Nor any change of light: 
 Nor sound of waters shaken, 
 
 Nor any sound or sight: 
 Nor wintry leaves nor vernal 
 Nor days nor things diurnal, 
 Only the sleep eternal 
 
 In an eternal night." 
 
 In his later work the theme of passion was less 
 brilliantly treated than in these first poems, and few of 
 the passages in which he reverts to the subject are so 
 significant, characteristic or successful. Passion as an 
 element in himian life attracted him rather in more 
 dramatic ways, as it exists in the great trilogy of Queen 
 
314 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 Mary felt in diverse modes by those about the Queen 
 from the tender and noble figure of Chastelard to the 
 weakness of Darnley and the strength of Bothwell; or 
 it attracted him as the life-element of the myth of Tris- 
 tram and Iseult, that in which they had the perfection of 
 their being and the completion of their fate. In both 
 cases this is the drama of passion, not its lyricism; and 
 in both cases, too, it is divorced from the after-sickliness 
 of thought that attends it in the youthful poems, and is 
 free from the envelopment of the pagan world, from dead 
 gods and past time; it stands by itself, in its own right, a 
 part of nature and life universal, a reality. No English 
 poem surpasses "Tristram of Lyonesse" in the quality of 
 passion; it is great as a representation of passion, pri- 
 marily, and equal to the fame of its theme. Yet it is 
 rather upon the younger verse, in the early passionate 
 efflorescence of his poetic nature, tiiat the fame of Swin- 
 burne as an original, unique and powerful exponent of 
 the passion of life in the ways of desire, brilliantly illus- 
 trating the multiform romantic spirit, must rest. 
 
 The meditative power of Swinburne's mind gradually 
 displaced the passionate impulse of the senses, in his 
 verse. He is a very thoughtful poet. The intellectual 
 burden of his poetry first appeared in the vigor with 
 which he seized and held to the idea of fate; fate is as 
 elemental in his work as passion and is its true comple- 
 ment. The conception at the beginning may have been 
 only a part of his Greek legacy, made familiar to him in 
 his study of Greek drama and adopted from it into his 
 own literary scheme of art and philosophy of life. In 
 "Atalanta of Calydon," fate is set forth in the choruses; 
 it is associated there with the feeling of bitter hostility to 
 the gods. There is a Lucretian sternness and fierceness 
 
SWINBURNE 31 S 
 
 in all of Swinburne's invective against those aspects of 
 religion which were to him what superstition was to the 
 old Roman; and he uses violence of phrase in the ex- 
 pression of his mood. It is thus that he comes to a 
 climax of thought in the attack on the supernal powers 
 which ends in the words, "the supreme evil, God." The 
 thought is arrived at through the spectacle of the suffering 
 of the hiunan race, and applies, as it were, to the Zeus of 
 Prometheus. 
 
 "Thou hast fed one rose with dust of many men; 
 
 Thou hast marred one face with fire of many tears; 
 Thou hast taken love, and given us sorrow again; 
 
 With pain thou hast filled us full to the eyes and ears. 
 Therefore because thou art strong, our father, and we 
 
 Feeble; and thou art against us, and thine hand 
 Constrains us in the shallows of the sea 
 
 And breaks us at the limits of the land; 
 Because thou hast bent thy lightnings as a bow. 
 
 And loosed the hours like arrows; and let fall 
 Sins and wild words and many a winged woe 
 
 And wars among us, and one end of all; 
 Because thou hast made the thunder, and thy feet 
 
 Are as a rushing water when the skies 
 Break, and thy face as an exceeding heat 
 
 And flames of fire the eyelids of thine eyes; 
 Because thou art over all who are over us; 
 
 Because thy name is life and our name death; 
 Because thou art cruel and men are piteous, 
 
 And our hands labor and thine hand scattereth; 
 Lo, with hearts rent and knees made tremulous, 
 
 Lo, with ephemeral lips and casual breath. 
 
 At least we witness of thee ere we die 
 That these things are not otherwise, but thus; 
 
 That each man in his heart sigheth, and saith. 
 That all men even as I, 
 All we are against thee, against thee, O God most high.'= 
 
3i6 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 In such passages, of which this was the earliest, the 
 life-weariness that belongs to exhausted passion is ex- 
 tended over the whole of life, and the philosophy set forth 
 is frankly atheistic. The passing away of the successive 
 hierarchies of gods that have been exalted in the heavens, 
 including the entire symbolism of Christianity, is as 
 constant a theme of Swinburne's imagination and medi- 
 tation as is the transitoriness of the generations of men 
 and their works; nor is there only this denial of the gods, 
 but with it goes that implacable hostility to them and 
 their ways, which has been alluded to, giving often to the 
 verse an edge of scorn and hate. Swinburne derived from 
 Greek literature the point of view, so far as the history of 
 man under the Olympian dispensation was concerned; 
 he derived from the revolutionary poets an attitude 
 toward historical Christianity in its medieval forms and 
 in its institutional power, which was a practical repetition 
 of the same point of view; however he approached super- 
 natural religion he collided with the eternal mystery of 
 God's dealing with mankind, and also with the temporal 
 dispensation of the professional ministers of God, the 
 priesthood wherever found. The anti-Christian verse is, 
 of course, incidental to and a part of the great mass of 
 revolutionary verse, and belongs to the poet's crusade 
 against the social powers that be, to his ranking himself 
 with the spirit of Burns and the later upholders of the 
 powers of light, that is of human intellect, liberty and 
 love. But, besides this aspect of it, there is a philo- 
 sophical side to his thought, apart from its revolutionary 
 intention, by virtue of which it must be regarded ab- 
 stractly as his own poetic attitude to the mystery of life 
 itself. Fate is the simplest word to describe the power in 
 whose dark and infinite grasp Swinburne habitually sees 
 the universe of man. 
 
SWINBURNE 317 
 
 Deeply impressed as the poet is by the conception of 
 fate in life and in the universe, he does not embody it in 
 either his dramas or his dramatic narrative with great 
 power; he rather describes it than presents its operation; 
 it is a presence rather than a force in his verse. The 
 story of Atalanta, and also that of Erechtheus contain 
 fate, in piteous and cruel forms, but the will of the gods 
 in either case seems arbitrary rather than fatal. In the 
 Trilogy of Queen Mary the element of fate is discernible 
 in the constant reminiscence, through the play, of Chaste- 
 lard's execution and in Mary Beaton who is the embodi- 
 ment of that memory and shall remain with the Queen 
 until the latter's death at the block expiates the original 
 wrong, or at least crowns it as a consummation; but the 
 linking of fate which should connect one with the other 
 directly and impressively, and as a law of necessity is 
 not shown. In the other dramas there is a similar laxity 
 in the causal operation of fate, — the fatal necessity of 
 the action is not felt as power, but is described as story. 
 In "Tristram of Lyonesse," it is the passion, not the fate 
 of the lovers' love that is in the foreground of interest. 
 In the shorter poems the method of presenting the gen- 
 eral subject-matter is more abstract and by means of 
 passages of invective. "Anactoria" is the best example, 
 where the outcry against the divine power is repeatedly 
 raised, with a fierce vindictiveness : 
 
 "Is not his incense bitterness, his meat 
 Murder? his hidden face and iron feet 
 Hath not man known, and felt them on their way 
 Threaten and trample all things and every day? 
 Hath he not sent us himger? who hath cursed 
 Spirit and flesh with longing? filled with thirst 
 Their lips who cried unto him? who bade exceed 
 The fervid will, fall short the feeble deed, 
 
3i8 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 Bade sink the spirit and the flesh aspire, 
 Pain animate the dust of dead desire, 
 And life yield up her flower to violent fate? 
 Him would I reach, him smite, him desecrate, 
 Pierce the cold lips of God with human breath, 
 And mix his immortality with death," 
 
 At the conclusion of this poem is the first expression of 
 any possible human victory in the strife with the gods. 
 It takes form in the thought that, whatever misfortune 
 may be visited upon Sappho in life, yet after death she 
 will have an immortality in her words still breathing on 
 the lips of men: 
 
 "Albeit I die indeed 
 And hide myself and sleep and no man heed, 
 Of me the high God hath not all his will. 
 Blossom of branches, and on each high hill 
 Clear air and wind, and under in clamorous vales 
 Fierce noises of the fiery nightingales. 
 Buds burning in the sudden spring like fire. 
 The wan washed sand and the waves' vain desire, 
 
 Sails seen like blown white flowers at sea, and words 
 That bring tears swiftest, and long notes of birds 
 Violently singing till the whole world sings — 
 I Sappho, shall be one with all these things. 
 With all high things for ever ; and my face 
 Seen once, my songs once heard in a strange place. 
 Cleave to men's lives, and waste the days thereof 
 With gladness and much sadness and long love." 
 
 This hope of immortality in the mind and for the service 
 of man is the prelude to Swinburne's later exposition of 
 man's faith in himself. 
 
 The earlier attitude of hostility to the gods yields in 
 the poet's maturer years to a prevailing mood of high- 
 
SWINBURNE 319 
 
 spirited indifference, which is felt rather toward fate 
 under the forms of the imagery of nature than under 
 those of divine beings. The passage which best con- 
 centrates it is the speech of Tristram, concerning fate 
 which is described only by negatives as the unknown 
 infinite in the universe: 
 
 "How should it turn from its great way to give 
 Man that must die a clearer space to live? 
 Why should the waters of the sea be cleft. 
 The hills be molten to his right and left, 
 That he from deep to deep might pass dry-shod 
 Or look between die viewless heights on God? 
 Hath he such eyes as, when the shadows flee, 
 The sun looks out with to salute the sea? 
 Is his hand bounteous as the morning's hand? 
 Or where the night stands hath he feet to stand? 
 Will the storm cry not when he bids it cease? 
 Is it his voice that saith to the east wind, Peace? 
 Is his breath mightier than the west wind's breath? 
 Doth his heart know the things of life and death? 
 Can his face bring forth sunshine and give rain. 
 Or his weak will that dies and lives again 
 Make one thing certain or bind one thing fast. 
 That as he willed it shall be at the last? 
 How should the storms of heaven and kindled lights 
 And all the depths of things and topless heights 
 And air and earth and fire and water change 
 Their likeness, and the natural world grow strange, 
 And all the limits of their life undone 
 Lose count of time and conscience of the sun. 
 And that fall under which was fixed above. 
 That man might have a larger hour for love?" 
 
 It is in this identification of fate with the universe of 
 greater being, in a form of apprehension which hovers 
 between pantheism in its aspect of nature-force and in 
 its aspect of humanity, that Swinburne's mind rests in 
 
320 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 its final meditation. The hymn entitled "Hertha" sets 
 forth the matter in full and at great length, with a prin- 
 cipal dependence in the imagery on Igdrasil, the tree of 
 life. In its main philosophic intention the poem is 
 hardly to be distinguished from Emerson's "Brahma," 
 which is the type of such poetic thought; but Swinburne 
 gives it a new turn and transforms its meaning by graft- 
 ing into it the idea that mankind is the highest personi- 
 fication of the divine known to man and hence that true 
 worship and religion is in the energy of man's self-ex- 
 pression, in the apotheosis of himself that is self-achieved. 
 The key stanza is this: 
 
 "A creed is a rod, 
 
 And a crown is of night; 
 But this thing is God, 
 To be man with thy might, 
 To grow straight in the strength of thy spirit, and live out 
 thy life as the light." 
 
 The poem in its last line makes the identification of man 
 with the infinite spirit plain: 
 
 "Man, equal and one with me, man that is made of me, man 
 that is I." 
 
 The same doctrine is more elaborately stated and with a 
 more comprehensive inclusion of many past elements of 
 Swinburne's thought, especially with relation to the 
 passing away of the gods and to the history of supersti- 
 tion, in the "Hymn of Man," which Swinburne himself 
 describes as "the birth-song of spiritual renascence" and 
 which concludes its Miriam-like outburst of triimiph over 
 the fall of old religion with the exultant cry: 
 
 "Glory to man in the highest 1 for Man is the master of things." 
 
SWINBURNE 321 
 
 This is the French apotheosis of Reason in its most 
 modern form, and may be regarded, perhaps, as essen- 
 tially a hymn of positivism. 
 
 It thus appears that Swinburne's mind, guided by the 
 preconceptions of his Greek studies and the revolutionary 
 impetus of his native genius, has been deeply concerned 
 with reaching an intellectual faith with regard to the 
 scheme of man's life as it has been seen by him in history. 
 In this attempt he has clung most tenaciously to the 
 idea of fate, a vague conception diversely seized by his 
 mind and set forth in a variety of ways. The denial of 
 the gods was inherent in his intellectual position; and 
 the gods having passed away, there remained only such 
 an adjustment of mind to the world emptied of old 
 divinity as is possible to many a modern brooder over 
 thought besides the poet himself who may be, somewhat 
 at least, a type of such sceptical men. In the one hand 
 there was the resource of the conception of the unknown 
 infinite which is approached by human thought most 
 commonly through the majestic phenomena of nature, and 
 of which the nature-poetry of the book of Job, whence 
 come the imaginative method and scriptural cadences of 
 that speech of Tristram that has been quoted, is the 
 ritual of expression. On the other hand there was the 
 resource of positivistic and humanitarian insistence on 
 the religion of Humanity, the creed of doing as the 
 other is the creed of knowing. The apotheosis of human 
 energy is natural in any greatly progressive or violently 
 active age of the world; and in the nineteenth century, 
 with its unmeasured pride in itself and its incontestable 
 greatness of achievement in both the realms of knowledge 
 and action, faith in man sprang up and has flourished as 
 if it were the ancient Igdrasil itself; it has seemed as if 
 
322 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 man were a god of nature and a providence for the fu- 
 ture, — at least that has been the tendency of man's late 
 ideals in science and philanthropy. Man at least thinks 
 himself — what Swinburne says the gods were not — 
 piteous. Swinburne has caught the infection of both of 
 these intellectual moods; he has on one hand accepted 
 imaginatively the theory of tha unknown natural infinite 
 and on the other the doctrine of the greatness — as he 
 frankly says, the godhead — of man; not, it should be 
 observed, of men in their parcelled and particular indi- 
 viduality, but of the race, — the apotheosis is a thing of 
 collectivity, and without such collectivity would not ex- 
 ist. Perhaps his own words should be given: 
 
 "We men, the multiform features of man, whatsoever we be 
 Recreate him of whom we are creatures, and all we only are he. 
 For each man of all men is God, but God is the fruit of the 
 
 whole; 
 Invisible spirit and blood, indiscernible body from soul. 
 Not men's but man's is the glory of godhead, — " 
 
 In working out this side of the theory, it follows of 
 necessity that the poet should find himself in a midmost 
 ethical stream, that he should end less as a philosopher 
 than as a moralist; he would finally be absorbed in the 
 vindication of that law of life which is humanly discerned 
 and applied as the will of "righteousness" from age to 
 age. The gods pass like leaves of the forest, in their 
 generations, even as men do; but righteousness is an 
 abiding thing. It is this that is stated, very nobly and 
 magnificently indeed, in the chief poem of Swinburne's 
 later years, "The Altar of Righteousness." This poem is 
 the climax of his intellectual attempt in solving the uni- 
 verse, or in reaching at least a working relation with re- 
 
SWINBURNE 323 
 
 spect to it; it is the ultimate conviction, the last word, — 
 this of the majestic permanence of righteousness. 
 
 Does it seem singular to any that the poet of passion 
 should be one with the poet of righteousness? There is 
 really no discord in the case; the two elements, at least, 
 never cross in the verse. A poet gives a representation 
 of life, and the variety of his representation depends on 
 the richness and complexity of his nature. Swinburne 
 was endowed with power to render with unrivalled vivid- 
 ness, with brilliance of word and melody of cadence the 
 experience of man's life in passion; he was also endowed 
 with intellectual curiosity and restlessness, with mental 
 vigor, with irrepressible and inexhaustible sympathies 
 with the public causes of mankind in political and 
 religious social life, and he had thence his power to in- 
 terest himself in the ideas that lie back of all life, in the 
 philosophy of the divine element appearing in the history 
 of the race and in its changes under the shaping of time 
 from Greek to Christian, and so on to the last results of 
 modern speculation. He expressed himself from year to 
 year, according to the faith that was in him, and he 
 reached in his maturity the clear position which needs no 
 plainer definition than his own lines contain. The 
 original idea of adverse fate has faded in his mind, it 
 would appear, to that of the immanence of the unknown 
 in nature, indifferent and kindless to man, but not con- 
 sciously cruel and deliberately scornful like the old gods; 
 and this in turn yields to the prominence in his later 
 thought of the essential necessity that mankind is under 
 to know no god except his own spirit, to advance that 
 spirit as the life of the race itself, and to find the con- 
 scious law of righteousness in its bosom age after age its 
 only oracle and guide to destiny. 
 
324 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 The third great monochord of Swinburne's verse, after 
 passion and fate, is nature. The poet's genius is one of 
 singular directness, though the fact is masked and ob- 
 scured by the conventionalized, curious and classically 
 reminiscent character that so much of his work superfi- 
 cially bears. The same directness that appears in his deal- 
 ing with the experience of passion, and with the theory of 
 the divine element in the universe, marks also his treat- 
 ment of nature. He is a nature-poet, but rather in the 
 energetic than the esthetic sense. The reminiscence of 
 his boyhood upbringing by the seas of the Northumber- 
 land coast and of the Isle of Wight is always present in 
 his verse of every kind. His description is not deficient 
 in either abundance or beauty of detail; but he seizes 
 the landscape mainly as a whole, he feels the forces abid- 
 ing in it as power, he is exalted by its effluence in him 
 as an emotion; in a word, his treatment is ample. Here, 
 too, that extraordinary trait of primitiveness, that love of 
 the primordial things in thought and life, of which illus- 
 tration has already been afforded in the preceding pages, 
 breaks out with great force. It seems often that his mind 
 is absorbed, not so much in natural objects in their in- 
 dividuality as in natural elements, in their larger life of 
 the constitution, the whirl, the vast spectacle of nature. 
 Fire, air, earth and water are the four elements from 
 which his very vocabulary seems made up; flame, wind 
 and foam, and all the forms of light are so much a part of 
 his color-rhythm that they become an opaline of verse 
 peculiarly his own; his mannerism in diction and style is 
 chiefly a thing of his fascination with these elemental 
 phases of matter and sensation which are more abstrac- 
 tions of motion, hue and luminousness than simple objects 
 of sight and hearing. The blurring effect of this mass of 
 
SWINBURNE 32 s 
 
 indefinaWe sensation, especially when metaphorically em- 
 ployed, even more than the overcharge of vocal sound 
 in the verse, accounts for that impression of vacuity of 
 meaning that Swinburne's poetry in general makes on 
 readers not habituated to his manner. The main fact is 
 that in the sphere of natural imagery his mind tends 
 constantly to escape from the limited and particular ob- 
 ject into the more abstract primary elements of nature, 
 and to use these metaphorically without definition to 
 color his verse with sensation that is rather emotional 
 than perceptive; it is thus that he produces these effects 
 by virtue of which his poetry is generally thought to have 
 more affinity with the art of music than has been achieved 
 by other poets. Color-tones of nature have as much to do 
 with this as simple sound-tones of rhyme, alliteration and 
 cadence; all the senses, and not the ear alone, are occu- 
 pied with this music which lulls and dazzles the mind 
 with a magical and exquisite pleasure. 
 
 The nature poems of Swinburne in the precise sense, 
 however, are many and various and among them some 
 rise higher than others. He has himself, in his own 
 review of his poetic work, named those which to himself 
 seem most significant, and his own choice coincides with 
 that of his readers. He dwells there upon his closeness 
 to the scene and repeats the same traits of the general 
 landscape that he has described in verse. No summary 
 can equal this in justice, brevity and breadth. The 
 poems he selects are the four poems of the West Under- 
 cHff, "In the Bay," "On the Cliffs," "A Forsaken Garden," 
 the dedication to "The Sisters," "Off Shore," "An 
 Autumn Vision," "A Swimmer's Dream," "On the South 
 Coast," "Neap-Tide." It will be found on examination 
 that primitive nature is at the heart of all of these poems 
 
326 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 as plainly as it is in the last class he names — "such as 
 try to render the effect of inland or woodland solitude — 
 the splendid oppression of nature at noon which found 
 utterance of old in words of such singular and everlasting 
 significance as panic and nympholepsy." The terror of 
 noon is precisely one of those primordial things the fas- 
 cination of which — not to speak of the wonder of his 
 merely knowing it — stamps Swinburne's genius, in its 
 approach to nature, with the aboriginal mark of the race. 
 With this capacity to feel the old mood belongs the gen- 
 eral largeness of his outlook and horizon, and through 
 both these traits he comes into sympathy with polytheistic 
 habitudes; at that moment of noon his genius hovers 
 between the Sun-god in heaven and Pan on earth with an 
 equal possession of mythologizing mind; and, in general, 
 it is the grand features and glomeration of things that 
 holds him — heaven with all its stars, its winds and 
 clouds; earth in great tracts of barren places or of "cliff 
 and crag, lawn and woodland, garden and lea;" and most 
 of all the sea. 
 
 Swinburne's ocean-poetry is the crown of his nature 
 verse; in it he is not only most exalted and fluent and 
 vivid, but he winds the sea-voices truly into his song. 
 He was the child of a sailor-race, and in his boyhood the 
 sea was his open highway of dream, imagination and 
 sentiment, of the vision that comes to great poets in their 
 youth. It was the thing of nature most climg about by 
 his spirit; the sun — so he represents it — had his adora- 
 tion, but the sea his love. The sea, too, had other im- 
 aginative values to him. It was his nature-symbol of 
 England. The thought of England as the oceanic power 
 was natural ever after the Armada and the Elizabethan 
 poets, and in later days is supported by the imperial 
 
SWINBURNE 327 
 
 dominion spread and based in all directions upon the 
 waters; to Swinburne, the singer of the Armada and the 
 patriot for whom the greatness of England lay in that 
 quality of race of which her sea greatness is the memorial 
 in time, England is, as it were, the emanation of the sea 
 in humanity, one thing with it and, one may say, the 
 spiritual form of it; so it seems to his eyes. The sea, too, 
 is his nature-symbol of liberty, of that in the spirit of all 
 mankind which is the greatest object of human effort, the 
 condition and the consummation of greatness in nations 
 or men, the state of being in which alone they truly are 
 at all. The historic association of liberty with the sea- 
 races, from Athens down, helps in this idealization, which, 
 in itself is natural to the thoughts of all men and uni- 
 versal in poetry. And again, through the operation of his 
 own poetizing revery and fancy and the familiar growth 
 of his spirit in conjunction with and through an environ- 
 ment of sea-experience, the sea became in Swinburne's 
 secret thoughts the nature-ssmibol of his own genius, a 
 thing of untameable and primitive nature blending with 
 the cause of liberty and the glory of England and the 
 universal hope and life of mankind; he thought of him- 
 self, mythically, as the child of the sea, and he repeatedly 
 praises a sea-death as the appropriate end of such a child. 
 This fancy, which is more genuine in feeling than 
 might seem possible, is expressed in many passages of his 
 poems, but it is the formative idea in one distinctive 
 poem, which may fairly be regarded as an autobio- 
 graphical myth of the idealizing sort, such as Shelley's 
 "Epipsychidion," that entitled "Thalassius." It is a 
 delicate and highly-finished work, and is also perhaps the 
 most broadly instructive, the most comprehensive of his 
 experience and theory, of any of his poems. Thalassius 
 
328 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 is the child of the Sea and of the Sun, and the verse 
 relates his history from birth to the moment of his per- 
 fecting in life, under the sjmibolism of classical mythic 
 imagery. He is educated by a foster-father, and fed 
 
 "For bread with wisdom and with song for wine," 
 
 after the antique manner familiar to us in Shelley's verse 
 of Laon and Prince Athanase; the identification with the 
 poet is made plain in the details of this instruction: 
 
 "High things the high song taught him; 
 
 How he that loves life overmuch shall die 
 
 The dog's death, utterly: 
 
 And he that much less loves it than he hates 
 
 All wrongdoing that is done 
 
 An3rwhere always underneath the sun 
 
 Shall live a mightier life than time's or fate's. 
 
 One fairer thing he shewed him, and in might 
 
 More strong than day and night 
 
 Whose strengths build up time's towering period: 
 
 Yea, one thing stronger and more high than God, 
 
 Which if man had not, then should God not be: 
 
 And that was Liberty. 
 
 And gladly should man die to gain, he said, 
 
 Freedom; and gladlier, having lost, lie dead. 
 
 And hate the song too taught him: hate of all 
 That brings or holds in thrall 
 Of spirit or flesh, free-born ere God began, 
 The holy body and sacred soul of man. 
 And wheresoever a curse was or a chain, 
 A throne for torment or a crown for bane 
 Rose, molded out of poor men's molten pain, 
 There, said he, should man's heaviest hate be set 
 Inexorably, to faint not or forget 
 
SWINBURNE 329 
 
 Till the last warmth bled forth of the last vein 
 
 In flesh that none should call a king's again, 
 
 Seeing wolves and dogs and birds that plague-strike air 
 
 Leave the last bone of all the carrion bare. 
 
 And hope the high song taught him: hope whose eyes 
 
 Can sound the seas unsoundable, the skies 
 
 Inaccessible of eyesight; that can see 
 
 What earth beholds not, hear what wind and sea 
 
 Hear not, and speak what all these crying in one 
 
 Can speak not to the sun. 
 
 For in her sovereign eyelight all things are 
 
 Clear as the closest seen and kindlier star 
 
 That marries morn and even and winter and spring 
 
 With one love's golden ring. 
 
 For she can see the days of man, the birth 
 
 Of good and death of evil things on earth 
 
 Inevitable and infinite, and sure 
 
 As present pain is, or herself is pure. 
 
 Yea, she can hear and see, beyond all things 
 
 That lighten from before Time's thunderous wings 
 
 Through the awful circle of wheel-winged periods, 
 
 The tempest of the twilight of all Gods: 
 
 And higher than^all the circling course they ran 
 
 The sundawn of the spirit that was man." 
 
 The body of the poem continues with the life experience 
 of the hero, and at the end, at the moment of his per- 
 fecting, the Sun-god blesses him with words that may be 
 taken as the ideal of the poet's life: 
 
 "Child of my sunlight and the sea, from birth 
 A fosterling and fugitive on earth; - 
 Sleepless of soul as wind or wave or fire, 
 A manchild with an imgrown God's desire; 
 Because thou hast loved nought mortal more than me, 
 Thy father, and thy mother-hearted sea; 
 Because thou hast set thine heart to sing, and sold 
 Life and life's love for song, God's living gold; 
 
330 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 Because thou hast given thy flower and fire of youth 
 To feed men's hearts with visions, truer than truth; 
 Because thou hast kept in those world-wandering eyes 
 The hght that makes me music of the skies; 
 Because thou hast heard with world-unwearied ears 
 The music that puts light into the spheres; 
 Have therefore in thine heart and in thy mouth 
 The sound of song that minglies north and south, 
 The song of all the winds that sing of me, 
 And in thy soul the sense of all the sea." 
 
 In this poem the nature-poetry of Swinbiirne finds its 
 highest and most beautiful idealization in human life; it 
 is, in fact, the crowning work of his hand, in so far as he 
 drew his inspiration from the life of his spirit with nature. 
 Admirable in portraiture as the pure nature-poems of 
 Swinburne are, in their mere rendering of scene, atmos- 
 phere and landscape mood, they gain in poetic power in 
 proportion as the element of human life is brought into 
 them in any form, whether as a personal tone of the poet 
 or as incident, memory or vision, or as a main action. 
 In "Thalassius," the idealization of nature is superfine 
 and places the poem in the highest rank of those few 
 imaginative and spiritualized allegories of life which can 
 appeal deeply only to a narrow circle of readers in any 
 generation, men who are numbered by two's and three's 
 rather than by scores. In numerous poems, however, 
 Swinburne has blended description with autobiography 
 in the most charming way, especially in those coast poems 
 which he has associated with the name of his friend, 
 Theodore Watts-Dun ton, himself a nature-lover with the 
 primitive bases of feeling in him belonging to earlier ages 
 and a more earthly generation of men; and also, and 
 peculiarly, in the poems of swimming the blend of nature 
 with life is accomplished with a fine effect. The great 
 
SWINBURNE 331 
 
 instance of such a description in which nature is not only 
 the scene but the giver of the action is the swim of Tris- 
 tram in the dawn of the Sun just before the battle in 
 which he receives his death-wounds. The passage is long, 
 and fuller of pure natural beauty than any other scene in 
 the poet's verse, and it is besides unique in literature, 
 sole by itself in its saturation with the sea and the dawn 
 and the joy of the swimmer, made one joy of all; but 
 no presentation of Swinburne's nature-verse can spare 
 the concluding lines, with the glory of their physical 
 delight: 
 
 "Till the sweet change that bids the sense grow sure 
 Of deeper depth and purity more pure 
 Wrapped him and lapped him round with clearer cold, 
 And all the rippling green grew royal gold 
 Between him and the far sun's rising rim. 
 And like the sun his heart rejoiced in him, 
 And brightened with a broadening flame of mirth; 
 And hardly seemed its life a part of earth, 
 But the life kindled of a fiery birth 
 And passion of a new-begotten son 
 Between the live sea and the living sun. 
 And mightier grew the joy to meet full-faced 
 Each wave, and mount with upward plunge, and taste 
 The rapture of its rolling strength, and cross 
 Its flickering crown of snows that flash and toss 
 Like plumes in battle's blithest charge, and thence 
 To watch the next with yet more strenuous sense; 
 Till on his eyes the light beat hard and bade 
 His face turn west and shoreward through the glad 
 Swift revel of the waters golden-clad. 
 And back with light reluctant heart he bore 
 Across the broad-backed rollers In to shore." 
 
 Such poetry brings back that early world in which old 
 Triton blew his wreathed horn, and not in a vision only, 
 but as the everlasting life of nature and man. 
 
332 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 Swinburne is at heart a nature-worshipper, and it is 
 through the symbolism of nature that his religious in- 
 stincts find their fullest and unimpeded flow. His clas- 
 sically reminiscent and anti-Christian poems alike contain 
 a literary alloy and belong in substance to scholarship, to 
 progress, to things of civilization, to society; in propor- 
 tion as he lays these things aside and reverts in primitive 
 freedom to the world of nature, to awe of the sun and 
 delight in the waves and indefinable moods of the moors, 
 the barrens and the glens, he recaptures the original soul, 
 becomes himself purely, pours out his spirit directly, 
 intensely, overflowingly, — he lives the poetic life. The 
 deepest sympathies of his genius are with force, with 
 things of power everywhere, with the energies of life. 
 The truth about him is the exact opposite of what has 
 been widely and popularly thought; weakness, affecta- 
 tion, exotic foreignness, the traits of estheticism in the 
 debased sense of that word, are far from him; he is 
 strong, he is genuine, he is English, bred with an Eu- 
 ropean mind it is true like Shelley, like Gray and Milton, 
 but in his own genius, temperament and the paths of 
 his flight charged with the strength of England. In his 
 nature-verse there is sjonpathy with power, grandeur, 
 energy, marking the verse unmistakably as that of a 
 strong soul; in his social verse of all kinds, political and 
 religious, there is the same sympathy marking it, making 
 it clarion-like, to use his own metaphor, for liberty, prog- 
 ress, man, for the truth and love of the Revolution, for 
 the ideal of the Republic as the great and single aim of 
 the race. In his passion-verse there is the same breath 
 of the power of life; and that farewell to life in which 
 the pagan mood ends, by its insistency, its poignancy, its 
 plangency, the sweetness of its regret, the bitterness of 
 
SWINBURNE 333 
 
 its despair, is the death-recoil of a great power of life, of 
 joy and dream and aspiration in youth, of a power to 
 seize the things of nature and of the spirit, to live over 
 again the experience, to think over again the thoughts of 
 man, to have man's life. It belonged to so strong a nature 
 and genius that the larger note should be ever increasing 
 in the song, blending in widening harmonies, to rest in 
 the unities of nature, of man, and of man's hope in 
 society. 
 
 Swinburne's nature poetry has the added charm of 
 affording some access to his personality, since it is closely 
 connected with his habits of life, his friendships and the 
 loved and familiar places where he has passed his years. 
 Memory and companionship have a large share in their 
 inspiration, and the trace of French and Italian travel and 
 of holidays along English shores is a trodden trail in the 
 verse. He will remain a figure of the Northumbrian 
 headlands and the South Coast forever in the imaginative 
 memory of literature; there he is seen in the verse, alone 
 or with a friend, on horseback or a-foot or a-swim, in his 
 habit as he lived in his own country and with a love for 
 the soil and the breaking sea, his English birth. Such a 
 back-ground of personality, of the human life of a man, 
 is deeply desired by a poet's lovers who thus reach an 
 unnoticed share in his privacy; it is the craving and the 
 due of their gratitude and answers to his unknown in- 
 timacy with their own spirits. A finer approach, however, 
 is given by Swinburne in the numerous poems which he 
 has dedicated to childhood, all of an intimate personal 
 tone, and revealing his heart and mood and speech in the 
 gentlest part of household privacy, in his love of children. 
 The verse, as is usual with him, has a monotone, the 
 permanence and depth of an unchangeable emotion that 
 
334 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 wells always from the same spring; it is made up of pure 
 affection, repeated over and over, of kin to a child's 
 kisses, for which it calls, to which it answers and through 
 which it exists, a delicate, intimate, worshiping poesy, 
 of which the like in English is not to be found. There is 
 here the Delphic christening of the babe, one after an- 
 other, the birthday ode to the boy faithful with each 
 revolving year, the death-rite of the little life in sad 
 cadences of brief refrains; and unique among even these 
 records of life is that rosary of daily song which counts 
 the month of absence and gives the weariness of the child- 
 emptied house through the lengthening hours of summer 
 bereft of its soul. To be capable of such a series shows 
 the man's heart better than all else in his verse; and 
 happy was the boy's head that drew this light to shine 
 upon it and flash out the gold of the poet's affection like 
 suq^hine falling there in far absence, in memory, in pres- 
 ence as the two heads bent together over the legend and 
 the picture by the fire. The sense of the household is as 
 intimate and private here as in Cowper's verse; the 
 house and the garden and the hours are pure English; all 
 is native to the soil, the flowerage, the home of England. 
 In this verse the solitary and secluded figure of the schol- 
 arly poet is familiarly seen in the gentlest associations and 
 the happiest acts of life. 
 
 The nature of Swinburne's personal life is also, though 
 less plainly and unreservedly, shown in the large number 
 of poems addressed to his companions, on one or another 
 occasion, but naturally most of these are memorial 
 verses. He has been "fortunate in friendships," and the 
 hold of love in them was strong. The most of the friends 
 to whom he dedicates verse are naturally in the group of 
 artists and men of letters with which his own fame is 
 
SWINBURNE 33S 
 
 associated, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, William Bell Scott, 
 Morris, Watts, Maddox-Brown, Watts-Dunton, and 
 others, with whom he found his principal companionship 
 in literary and artistic sympathy; but the list includes 
 many besides these, distinguished or eminent or mem- 
 orable for old association with Landor or Shelley or some 
 other. A life which leaves so rich a personal memorial of 
 its human loves, however secluded, has won for itself or 
 received by its own grace one of the true felicities and 
 happiest rewards found by man. Hardly less near than 
 these attachments, the verse discloses the ties, as of 
 student and master, with Landor, Hugo and Mazzini, 
 which Swinburne regarded as the highest honor and 
 greatest blessing upon his younger head; and in a degree 
 yet further removed the verse continues to show, with an 
 ever greater volume and widening range, his tribute to the 
 dead masters of literature, not conventionally or perfunc- 
 torily or affectedly, but in a genuine and deeply-felt out- 
 pouring of admiration and gratitude and that strange, 
 mighty love that only the dead can arouse, a thing of the 
 pure and untrammeled soul. He was ever a lover of 
 heroes, of great deeds and famous works; for him the 
 heavens of fame were constellated more with poetic and 
 spiritual names than is the case with other men; he was 
 faithful to the pure fires there and saw the eternity of 
 poetry as a flame outburning all others in beauty and 
 everlastingness; he worshipped in his verse poetry, free- 
 dom, truth, and the fames that are indestructible names 
 of these in human memory. "On the Cliffs" is a poem 
 in which there is both the vision and the rhapsody of this, 
 in very noble and unusual imaginative forms, and stands 
 as the type of his mood toward fame, which for him more 
 tnily than for men at large was what Shelley called it, 
 
336 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 "love disguised." In all this volume of human apprecia- 
 tion, for the great fames of the past, for the elder masters 
 who touched him with their hands, for the company of 
 familiar friends in private life, there is to be observed the 
 same strength of soul, the same affluence of response to 
 life, the same capacity for the passion of life in its large- 
 ness which has already been spoken of as the fundamental 
 thing in the poet's nature, but here seen in its noblest 
 phase as a power to love. 
 
 Liberty, melody, passion, fate, nature, love and fame 
 are the seven chords which the poet's hand, from its first 
 almost boyhood touch upon the lyre, has swept now for 
 two score years with music that has been blown through 
 the world. He sang in the lines of his earliest dedication, 
 in the opening lines of it, — 
 
 "The sea gives her shells to the shingle, 
 The earth gives her streams to the sea; 
 They are many, but my gift is single, 
 My verses, the iirst frtiits of me." 
 
 and a certain singleness has abided in the gift to the end. 
 He has been faithful to his early lights, his first loves, and 
 has served the ideal of his life with an unswerving recti- 
 tude, a tireless industry and an unflinching courage. He 
 has been the laureate of the Republic in Europe as the 
 continental cause of liberty in every tyrannic or partially 
 enfranchised land; he has been a national poet of Eng- 
 land, and has besides enriched English literature with a 
 music never heard before, with the most stately tragedies 
 of his time, and with its most imaginative romantic poem 
 of passion and with a multitude of noble single poems of 
 great variety of theme, mood and art. He has sup- 
 plemented this poetic gift with a large body of prose 
 
SWINBURNE 337 
 
 which contains the wealth of a poet's appreciation of a 
 main portion of the most famous English literature as well 
 as of the greatest modern poetic mind of France, — a 
 treasure of intuitive criticism such as no other English 
 poet has left. This is the fruit of a long labor of life. 
 Strength is dominant in his genius; the things of strength 
 are in his verse; it is English genius and English strength, 
 racial in lyric power, in free intellect, in bold speech, — 
 none more so — and English also in its poetic scholarly 
 tradition. The reversionary tendency of his art, the im- 
 aginative remoteness of his themes, the primitive predilec- 
 tion of his temperament have been pointed out, with the 
 resulting detachment of his genius in important ways from 
 his own age and generation; but if a certain aloofness has 
 come into his work from these causes, he has been thereby 
 withdrawn into what is most primary in art and most 
 elemental in nature and life. He has been genuine, as 
 only high genius can be, in all that he has done. In 
 private life he has lived in seclusion; but he has been one 
 of a company of sympathetic friends, and has besides 
 numbered among his companions many others of the men 
 of distinction of his times. He has never failed in public 
 sjmipathy with great occasions and events. As a poet, 
 notwithstanding his genius and labor, it must be said he 
 found the world inhospitable. The measure of praise 
 that he won has gone no further than the acknowledgment 
 of the victory of a poetic power that could not be denied; 
 it has not much increased with years; it has never been 
 adequate, just or intelligent. There is, perhaps, the con- 
 sciousness of this in the concluding words of his remarks 
 on his collected verse, which he addresses to his friend 
 and house-mate through these latter years: "It is nothing 
 to me that what I write should find immediate or general 
 
338 LITERARY ESSAYS 
 
 acceptance; it is much to know that, on the whole, it has 
 won for me the right to address this dedication and in- 
 scribe this edition to you." The poet, like all men of 
 simple greatness, is free, it would seem, from the desire 
 for applause, but not from the human want of some 
 loving comradeship in his art. There are, in the wide 
 world, here and there a few — a number that will in- 
 crease ever with passing generations and is even now 
 perhaps manyfold greater than the poet knows — in 
 whose hearts his poetry is lodged with power. 
 
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