afotttell Iniuetattg ffiibrarg 
 
 Stlfata, New lorb 
 
 BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE 
 
 SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND 
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 
 HENRY W. SAGE 
 
 1891 
 
The original of tliis bool< is in 
 tlie Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013261122 
 
« HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY" 
 
 Julius C'esar 
 
HEARTS OF 
 CONTROVERSY 
 
 BY 
 ALICE MEYNELL 
 
 BURNS &> GATES 
 
 28 Orchard Street 
 
 London 
 
 W 
 
First Imprasim (1,000 eafia), Oeaber 1917 
 Sectnd Itnprashn (2,000 copies), February 19I« 
 
THE CONTENTS 
 
 SOME THOUGHTS OF A READER OF 
 TENNYSON i 
 
 DICKENS AS A MAN OF LETTERS 23 
 
 SWINBURNE'S LYRICAL POETRY 53 
 
 CHARLOTTE AND EMILY BRONTE 77 
 
 CHARMIAN 101 
 
 THE CENTURY OF MODERATION 109 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 WH6^ WordswortK s little boy 
 visited Charles Lamb in London, 
 his host wrote to the father at 
 the Lakes that the boy was looking about' him 
 and making observations. "Perhaps " fprites 
 Lamb, "he has hitherto paid too little atten- 
 tion to other men^s in')>entions, preferring, like 
 Lord Foppington, the natural sprouts of his 
 oivn." 
 
 We must study other men^s inlfentions in our 
 closet, but need we now print our comments 
 on them? Exposition, interpretation, by them- 
 selves are not necessary. But for controller sy 
 there is cause. 
 
SOME THOUGHTS OF A 
 READER OF TENNYSON 
 
 FIFTY years after Tennyson's birth he 
 was saluted a great poet by that unani- 
 mous acclamation which includes mere 
 clamour. Fifty further years, and his cen- 
 tenary was marked by a new detradlion. It is 
 sometimes difficult to di^inguish the obscure 
 but not unmaje^ic law of change from the 
 sorry cu^om of reaction. Change ha^es not 
 and refts not, reaftion beats to and fro, flicker- 
 ing about the moving mind of the world. 
 Reaction — the paltry precipitancy of the mul- 
 titude — rather than the novelty of change, has 
 brought about a ferment and corruption of 
 opinion on Tennyson's poetry. It may be said 
 that opinion is the same now as it was in the 
 middle of the nineteenth century — the same, 
 but turned. All that was not worth having of 
 admiration then has soured into detraction 
 now. It is of no more significance, acrid, than 
 it was, sweet. What the herding of opinion 
 I 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 
 gave ye^crday it is able to take away to-day, 
 that and no more. 
 
 But besides the common favour-disfavour 
 of the day, there is the tendency of educated 
 opinion, once disposed to accept the whole of 
 Tennyson's poetry as though he could not be 
 "parted from himself," and now disposed to 
 rejeft the whole, on the same plea. But if 
 ever there was a poet who needed to be thus 
 "parted" — the word is his own — it is he who 
 wrote both narrowly for his time and liberally 
 for all time, and who — ^this is the more im- 
 portant character of his poetry — had both a 
 ^yle and a manner : a ma^erly ^yle, a magical 
 ftyle, a too dainty manner, nearly a trick; a 
 noble landscape and in it figures something 
 ready-made. He is a subjedl for our alterna- 
 tives of feeling, nay, our conflifts, as is hardly 
 another poet. We may deeply admire and 
 wonder, and, in another line or hemi^ich, grow 
 indifferent or slightly averse. He sheds the 
 luminous suns of dreams upon men & women 
 who would do well with footlights; waters 
 their way with rushing breams of Paradise 
 and catarads from visionary hills; laps them 
 
 2 
 
TENNYSON 
 in divine darkness; leads them into those 
 touching landscapes, "the lovely that are not 
 beloved," long grey fields, cool sombre sum- 
 mers, and meadows thronged with un notice- 
 able flowers; speeds his carpet knight— or is 
 that hardly a ju^ name for one whose sword 
 "smites" so well? — ^upon a carpet of authentic 
 wild flowers; pushes his rovers, in coilume, 
 from off blossoming shores, on the keels of 
 old romance. The ilyle and the manner, I have 
 said, run side by side. If we may take one 
 poet's too violent phrase, and consider poets 
 to be "damned to poetry," why, then, Tenny- 
 son is condemned by a couple of sentences, "to 
 run concurrently." We have the ftyle and the 
 manner locked together at times in a single 
 ^anza, locked and yet not mingled. There 
 should be no danger for the more judicious 
 reader left impatience at the peculiar Tenny- 
 son trick should involve the great Tennyson 
 ftyle in a sweep of proteft. Yet the danger has 
 in faft proved real within the present and 
 recent years, and seems about to threaten 
 ftill more among the less judicious. But 
 it will not long prevail. The vigorous 
 3 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 little nation of lovers of poetry, alive one by 
 one within the vague multitude of the nation 
 of England, cannot remain finally insensible 
 to what is at once maje^ic and magical in 
 Tennyson. For those are not qualities they 
 negleft in their other makers. How, valuing 
 singleness of heart in the sixteenth century, 
 splendour in the seventeenth, composure in 
 the eighteenth; how, with a spiritual ear for 
 the note — commonly called Celtic, albeit it is 
 the mo^ English thing in the world — ^the wild 
 wood note of the remoter song; how, with the 
 educated sense of ftyle, the liberal sense of 
 ease; how, in a word, foftering Letters and 
 loving Nature, shall that choice nation within 
 England long disregard these virtues in the 
 nineteenth-century mafter? How disregard 
 him, for more than the few years of reaftion, 
 for the insignificant reasons of his bygone 
 ta^e, his insipid courtliness, his prettiness, 
 or what not? It is no dishonour to Tennyson, 
 for it is a dishonour to our education, to dis- 
 parage a poet who wrote but the two — ^had he 
 written no more of their kind — Klines of "The 
 Passing of Arthur," of which, before I quote 
 4 
 
TENNYSON 
 them, I will permit myself the personal re- 
 membrance of a great contemporary author's 
 opinion. Mr. Meredith, speaking to me of the 
 high-water mark of English ftyle in poetry 
 and prose, cited those lines as topmoA in 
 poetry: — 
 
 On one side lay the ocean, and on one 
 Lay a great water, and the moon was full. 
 
 Here is no taint of manner, no pretty po^ure 
 or habit, but the simplicity of poetry and the 
 simplicity of Nature, something on the yonder 
 side of imagery. It is to be noted that this noble 
 passage is from Tennyson's generally weaked: 
 kind of work — ^blank verse; and should thus 
 be a sign that the laxity of so many parts of the 
 "Idylls" and other blank verse poems was a 
 quite unnecessary fault. Lax this form of 
 poetry undoubtedly is with Tennyson. His 
 blank verse is often too easy; it cannot be said 
 to fly, for the paradoxical reason that it has no 
 weight; it slips by, without halting or tripping 
 indeed, but also without the friftion of the 
 movement of vitality. This quality, which is 
 so near to a fault, this quality of ease, has come 
 to be disregarded in our day. That Horace 
 
 5 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 Walpole overpraised this virtue is not good 
 reason that we should hold it for a vice. Yet 
 we do more than undervalue it; and several of 
 our authors, in prose and poetry, seem to find 
 much merit in the manifeft difficulty; they 
 will not have a key to turn, though closely and 
 tightly, in oiled wards; let the reludtant iron 
 catch and grind, or they would even prefer to 
 pick you the lock. 
 
 But though we may think it time that the 
 quality once over-prized should be restored to 
 a more proportionate honour, our great poet 
 Tennyson shows us that of all merits ease is, 
 unexpedledly enough, the mo^ dangerous. It 
 is not only, with him, that the wards are oiled, 
 it is also that the key turns loosely. This is 
 true of much of the beautiful "Idylls," but 
 not of their be^ passages, nor of such magni- 
 ficent heroic verse as that of the close of "A 
 Vision of Sin," or of "Lucretius." As to the 
 queftion of ease, we cannot have a better 
 maxim than Coventry Patmore's saying that 
 poetry "should confess, but not suffer from, 
 its difficulties." And we could hardly find a 
 more curious example of the present love of 
 6 
 
TENNYSON 
 verse that not only confesses but brags of diffi- 
 culties, and not only suffers from them but 
 cries out under the suffering, and shows us 
 the grimace of the pain of it, than I have 
 lighted upon in the critical article of a recent 
 quarterly. Reviewing the book of a "poet" 
 who manife^ly has an insuperable difficulty 
 in hacking his work into ten-syllable blocks, 
 and keeping at the same time any show of 
 respeft for the national grammar, the critic 
 gravely invites his reader to "note" the phrase 
 "neath cliffs" (apparently for "beneath the 
 cliffs") as "charafteriftic" Shall the reader 
 indeed "note" such a matter? Truly he has 
 other things to do. This is by the way. 
 Tennyson is always an arti^, and the finish 
 of his work is one of the principal notes of his 
 versification. How this finish comports with 
 the excessive ease of his prosody remains his 
 own peculiar secret. Ease, in him, does not 
 mean that he has any unhandsome slovenly 
 ways. On the contrary, he resembles rather 
 the warrior with the pouncet box. It is the 
 man of "neath cliffs" who will not be at the 
 trouble of making a place for so much as a 
 7 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 definite article. Tennyson certainly worked^ 
 and the exceeding ease of his blank verse 
 comes perhaps of this little paradox — that he 
 makes somewhat too much show of the hiding 
 of his art. 
 
 In the firft place the poet with the great 
 welcome ^le and the little unwelcome man- 
 ner, Tennyson is, in the second place, the 
 modern poet who withftood France. (That is, 
 of course, modern France — France since the 
 Renaissance. From medieval Provence there 
 is not an English poet who does not own 
 inheritance.) It was some time about the date 
 of the Reftoration that modern France began 
 to be modish in England. A ruffle at the Court 
 of Charles, a couplet in the ear of Pope, a tour 
 de phrase from Mme. de Sdvignd much to the 
 tafte of Walpole, later the good example of 
 French painting — ^rich intereft paid for the 
 loan of our Constable's initiative — Plater ^ill 
 a scattering of French tafte, French critical 
 business, over all the shallow places of our 
 litei'ature — ^these have all been phases of a 
 national vanity of ours, an eager and anxious 
 fluttering or jo^ling to be foremoft and 
 8 
 
TENNYSON 
 French. Matthew Arnold's essay on criticism 
 fo^ered this anxiety, and yet I find in this 
 work of his a lack of easy French knowledge, 
 such as his misunderftanding of the word 
 hrutalite^ which means no more, or little more, 
 than roughness. Matthew Arnold, by the way, 
 knew so little of the French charafter as to be 
 altogether ignorant of French provincialism, 
 French pradtical sense, and French "conveni- 
 ence." "Convenience" is his deare^ word of 
 contempt, "praftical sense" his next deareft, 
 and he throws them a score of times in 
 the teeth of the English. Strange is the 
 irony of the truth. For he be^ows those 
 withering words on the nation that has 
 the fifty religions, and attributes "ideas" 
 — as the antithesis of "convenience" and 
 "praftical sense" — ^to the nation that has 
 the fifty sauces. And not for a moment does 
 he suspeft himself of this blunder, so mani- 
 feft as to be disconcerting to his reader. One 
 seems to hear an incurably English accent in 
 all this, which indeed is reported, by his 
 acquaintance, of Matthew Arnold's adhial 
 speaking of French. It is certain that he has 
 
 9 B 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 not the intere^ of familiarity with the lan- 
 guage, but only the intereft of ftrangeness. 
 Now, while we meet the effeft of the French 
 coat in our seventeenth century, of the French 
 light verse in our earlier eighteenth century, 
 and of French philosophy in our later, of the 
 French revolution in our Wordsworth, of the 
 French painting in our nineteenth-century 
 ftudios, of French fidtion — and the dregs are 
 still running — in our libraries, of French 
 poetry in our Swinburne, of French criticism 
 in our Arnold, Tennyson shows the effeft of 
 nothing French whatever. Not the Eliza- 
 bethans, not Shakespeare, not Jeremy Taylor, 
 not Milton, not Shelley were (in their art, not 
 in their matter) more insular in their time. 
 France, by the way, has more than appreciated 
 the homage of Tennyson's contemporaries; 
 Vidlor Hugo avers, in Les Miserables^thzX. our 
 people imitate his people in all things, and in 
 particular he rouses in us a delighted laugh- 
 ter of surprise by asserting that the London 
 ^reet-boy imitates the Parisian ilreet-boy. 
 There is, in faft, something of a ftreet-boy in 
 some of our late more literary mimicries. 
 
 lO 
 
TENNYSON 
 
 We are apt to judge a poet too exclusively 
 by his imagery. Tennyson is hardly a great 
 mafter of imagery. He has more imagination 
 than imagery. He sees the thing, with so 
 luminous a mind's eye, that it is sufficient to 
 him; he needs not to see it more beautifully 
 by a similitude. "A clear-walled city" is 
 enough; "meadows" are enough — indeed 
 Tennyson reigns for ever over all meadows; 
 "the happy birds that change their sky"; 
 "Bright Phosphor, fresher for the night"; 
 "Twilight and evening bell"; "the ^illness of 
 the central sea"; "that friend of mine who 
 lives in God"; "the solitary morning"; "Four 
 grey walls and four grey towers"; "Watched 
 by weeping queens"; these are enough, illus- 
 trious, and needing not illu^ration. 
 
 If we do not see Tennyson to be the lonely, 
 the firft, the one that he is, this is because of 
 the throng of his following, though a number 
 that are of that throng hardly know, or else 
 would deny, their flocking. But he added to 
 our literature not only in the way of cumula- 
 tion, but by the advent of his single genius. 
 He is one of the few fountain-head poets of 
 
 II B2 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 the world. The new landscape which was his 
 — the lovely unbeloved — is, it need hardly be 
 said, the matter of his poetry and not its in- 
 spiration. It may have seemed to some readers 
 that it is the novelty, in poetry, of this homely 
 unscenic scenery — this Lincolnshire quality 
 — ^that accounts for Tennyson's freshness of 
 vision. But it is not so. Tennyson is fresh 
 also in scenic scenery; he is fresh with the 
 things that others have outworn ; mountains, 
 desert islands, cables, elves, what you will 
 that is conventional. Where are there more 
 divinely poetic lines than those, which will 
 never be wearied with quotation, beginning, 
 "A splendour falls".? What ca^le walls have 
 ^ood in such a light of old romance, where in 
 all poetry is there a sound wilder than that of 
 those faint "horns of elfland".'' Here is the re- 
 moteness, the beyond, the light delirium, not 
 of disease but of more rapturous and delicate 
 health, the closer secret of poetry. This moft 
 English of modern poets has been taunted 
 with his mere gardens. He loved, indeed, the 
 "lazy lilies," of the exquisite garden of "The 
 Gardener's Daughter," but he betook his 
 
 12 
 
TENNYSON 
 ecftatic English spirit also far afield and over- 
 seas; to the winter places of his familiar 
 nightingale: — 
 
 When firft the liquid note beloved of men 
 Comes flying over many a windy wave; 
 
 to the lotus-eaters' shore; to the outland land- 
 scapes of "The Palace of Art" — ^the "clear- 
 walled city by the sea," the "pillared town," 
 the "full-fed river"; to the "pencilled valleys" 
 of Monte Rosa; to the "vale in Ida"; to that 
 tremendous upland in the "Vision of Sin" : — 
 At laft I heard a voice upon the slope 
 Cry to the summit, Is there any hope? 
 To which an answer pealed from that high land. 
 But in a tongue no man could understand. 
 
 The Cleopatra of "The Dream of Fair 
 Women" is but a ready-made Cleopatra, but 
 when in the shades of her foreft she remem- 
 bers the sun of the world, she leaves the page 
 of Tennyson's pooreil manner and becomes 
 one with Shakespeare's queen : — 
 
 We drank the Libyan sun to sleep. 
 Nay, there is never a passage of manner but a 
 great passage of ^yle rebukes our dislike and 
 recalls our heart again. The dramas, less than 
 
 13 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 the lyrics, and even less than the "Idylls," are 
 matter for the true Tennysonian. Their aftion 
 is, at its livelier, rather vivacious than vital, 
 and the sentiment, whether in "Becket" or in 
 "Harold," is not only modern, it is fixed within 
 Tennyson's own peculiar score or so of years. 
 But that he might have answered, in drama, to 
 a Wronger ftimulus, a sharper spur, than his 
 time adminiftered, may be guessed from a 
 few passages of "Queen Mary," and from 
 the dramatic terror of the arrow in "Harold." 
 The line has appeared in prophetic frag- 
 ments in earlier scenes, and at the moment 
 of doom it is the outcry of unque^ionable 
 tragedy: — 
 
 Sanguelac — Sanguelac — the arrow — the arrow! — 
 Away! 
 
 Tennyson is also an eminently all-intelli- 
 gible poet. Those whom he puzzles or con- 
 founds muft be a flock with an incalculable 
 liability to go wide of any road — "down all 
 manner of Greets," as the desperate drover 
 cries in the anecdote. But what are greets, 
 however various, to the ways of error that a 
 great flock will take in open country — min- 
 14 
 
TENNYSON 
 utely, individually wrong, making mi^kes 
 upon hardly perceptible occasions, or none 
 — "minute fortuitous variations in any pos- 
 sible direftion," as used to be said in exposi- 
 tion of the Darwinian theory? A vast out- 
 lying public, like that of Tennyson, may 
 make you as many blunders as it has heads; 
 but the accurate clear poet proved his mean- 
 ing to all accurate perceptions. Where he 
 hesitates, his is the sincere pause of process 
 and uncertainty. It has been said that Tenny- 
 son, midway between the ftudent of material 
 science and the my^ic, wrote and thought 
 according to an age that wavered, with him, 
 between the two minds, and that men have 
 now taken one way or the other. Is this indeed 
 true, and are men so divided and so sure.^ Or 
 have they not rather already turned, in num- 
 bers, back to the parting, or meeting, of 
 eternal roads? The religious queftion that 
 arises upon experience of death has never been 
 asked with more sincerity and attention than 
 by him. If "In Memoriam" represents the 
 mind of yefterday it represents no less the 
 mind of to-morrow. It is true that pessimism 
 
 15 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 and insurreftion in their ignobler forms — ^nay, 
 in the ignoble^ form of a fashion — have, or 
 had but ye^erday, the control of the popular 
 pen. Trivial pessimism or trivial optimism, it 
 matters little which prevails. For those who 
 follow the one habit to-day would have fol- 
 lowed the other in a paft generation. Fleeting 
 as they are, it cannot be within their compe- 
 tence to negledl or rejeft the philosophy of 
 "In Memoriam." To the dainty Lanzas of 
 that poem, it is true, no great druggie of 
 reasoning was to be committed, nor would any 
 such dispute be judiciously entrufted to the 
 rhymes of a song of sorrow. Tennyson here 
 proposes, rather than closes with, the ulti- 
 mate queftion of our de^iny. The conflift, 
 for which he proves himself ^rong enough, 
 is in that magnificent poem of a thinker, 
 "Lucretius." But so far as "In Memoriam" 
 attempts, weighs, falters, and confides, it is 
 true to the experience of human anguish and 
 intelleft. 
 
 I say intelleft advisedly. Not for him such 
 blunders of thought as Coleridge's in "The 
 Ancient Mariner" or Wordsworth's in "Hart- 
 i6 
 
TENNYSON 
 leap Well" Coleridge names the sun, moon, 
 and ftars as when, in a dream, the sleeping 
 imagination is threatened with some signifi- 
 cant illness. We see them in his great poem 
 as apparitions. Coleridge's senses are infi- 
 nitely and transcendently spiritual. But a 
 candid reader muft be permitted to think the 
 mere ^ory silly. The wedding-gueft might 
 rise the morrow morn a sadder but he assur- 
 edly did not rise a wiser man. 
 
 As for Wordsworth, the moft beautiful 
 ilanzas of "Hartleap Well" are fatally rebuked 
 by the truths of Nature. He shows us the 
 ruins of an aspen wood, a blighted hollow, 
 a dreary place, forlorn because an innocent 
 ftag, hunted, had there broken his heart in a 
 leap from the rocks above; grass would not 
 grow there. 
 
 This beaft not unobserved by Nature fell. 
 His death was mourned by sympathy divine. 
 
 And the signs of that sympathy are cruelly 
 asserted by the poet to be these woodland 
 ruins — cruelly, because the daily sight of the 
 world blossoming over the agonies of beaft 
 and bird is made less tolerable to us by such 
 
 a fiftion. 
 
 17 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 The Being that is in the clouds and air 
 
 Maintains a deep and reverential care 
 
 For the unoffending creature whom He loves. 
 
 The poet offers us as a proof of that "reveren- 
 tial care," the visible alteration of Nature at the 
 scene of suffering — an alteration we have to 
 dispense with every day we pass in the woods. 
 We are tempted to ask whether Wordsworth 
 himself believed in a sympathy he asks us — 
 on such grounds! — to believe in? Did he 
 think his faith to be worthy of no more than 
 a fTiftitious sign and a false proof? 
 
 Nowhere in the whole of Tennyson's 
 thought is there such an attack upon our 
 reason and our heart. He is more serious than 
 the solemn Wordsworth. 
 
 In Memoriam, with all else that Tennyson 
 wrote, tutors, with here and there a subtle 
 word, this nature-loving nation to perceive 
 land, light, sky, and ocean, as he perceived. 
 To this we return, upon this we dwell. He has 
 been to us, firmly, the poet of two geniuses — 
 a small and an immense ; secondly, the modern 
 poet who answered in the negative that moft 
 significant modern queftion, French or not 
 i8 
 
TENNYSON 
 French? But he was, before the outset of all 
 our ^udy of him, of all our love of him, the 
 poet of landscape, and this he is more dearly 
 than pen can describe him. This eternal charac- 
 ter of his is keen in the verse that is winged to 
 meet a homeward ship with her "dewy decks," 
 and in the sudden island landscape, 
 The clover sod, 
 That takes the sunshine and the rains. 
 Or where the kneeling hamlet drains 
 The chalice of the grapes of God. 
 It is poignant in the garden-night : — 
 A breeze began to tremble o'er 
 The large leaves of the sycamore, 
 
 And gathering freshlier overhead. 
 
 Rocked the fuU-foliaged elm, and swung 
 The heavy-folded rose, and flung 
 
 The lilies to and fro, and said 
 
 "The dawn, the dawn," and died away. 
 
 His are the exalted senses that sensual poets 
 know nothing of. I think the sense of hearing 
 as well as the sense of sight, has never been 
 more greatly exalted than by Tennyson : — 
 As from beyond the limit of the world. 
 Like the la^ echo born of a great cry. 
 
 As to this garden-charadler so much decried 
 I coflfess that the "lawn" does not generally 
 
 19 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 delight me, the word nor the thing. But in 
 Tennyson's page the word is wonderful, as 
 though it had never been dull : "The moun- 
 tain lawn was dewy-dark." It is not that he 
 brings the mountains too near or ranks them 
 in his own peculiar garden-plot, but that the 
 word withdraws, withdraws to summits, with- 
 draws into dreams; the lawn is aloft, alone, 
 and as wild as ancient snow. It is the same 
 with many another word or phrase changed, 
 by passing into his vocabulary, into something 
 rich and Grange. His own especially is the 
 March month — his "roaring moon." His is 
 the spirit of the dawning month of flowers and 
 ^orms; the golden, soft names of daffodil and 
 crocus are caught by the gale as you speak 
 them in his verse, in a fine disproportion with 
 the energy and gloom. His was a new appre- 
 hension of nature, an increase in the number, 
 and not only in the sum, of our national appre- 
 hensions of poetry in nature. Unaware of a 
 separate angel of modern poetry is he who is 
 insensible to the Tennyson note — ^the new 
 note that we reaffirm even with the notes of 
 Vaughan, Traherne, Wordsworth, Coleridge, 
 20 
 
TENNYSON 
 Blake well in our ears — the Tennyson note of 
 splendour, all-diftinft. He showed the perpet- 
 ually transfigured landscape in transfiguring 
 words. He is the captain of our dreams. Others 
 have lighted a candle in England, he lit a sun. 
 Through him our daily suns, and also the 
 backward and hiftoric suns long since set, 
 which he did not sing, are magnified; and he 
 be^ows upon us an exalted retrospeftion. 
 Through him Napoleon's sun of Aufterlitz 
 rises, for us, with a more brilliant menace 
 upon arms and the plain; through him Field- 
 ing's "moft melancholy sun" lights the dying 
 man to the setting-forth on that lail voyage of 
 his with such an immortal gleam, denying 
 hope, as would not have lighted, for us, the 
 memory of that seaward morning, had our 
 poetry not undergone the illumination, the 
 transcendent vision, of Tennyson's genius. 
 
 Emerson knew that the poet speaks ade- 
 quately then only when he speaks "a little 
 wildly, or with the flower of the mind." 
 Tennyson, the cleareft-headed of poets, is our 
 wild poet; wild, notwithftanding that little 
 foppery we know of in him — that walking 
 21 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 delicately, like Agag; wild, notwith^anding 
 the work, the ease, the neatness, the finish; 
 notwith^anding the assertion of manliness 
 which, in asserting, somewhat misses that 
 mark; a wilder poet than the rough, than the 
 sensual, than the defiant, than the accuser, 
 than the denouncer. Wild flowers are his — 
 great poet — wild winds, wild lights, wild 
 heart, wild eyes ! 
 
 22 
 
DICKENS AS A MAN OF 
 LETTERS 
 
 IT was said for many years, until the 
 reversal that now befalls the sayings of 
 many years had happened to this also, 
 that Thackeray was the unkind satiric and 
 Dickens the kind humouri^. The truth seems 
 to be that Dickens imagined more evil people 
 than did Thackeray, but that he had an eager 
 faith in good ones. Nothing places him so 
 entirely out of date as his truft in human 
 sanftity, his love of it, his hope for it, his leap 
 at it. He saw it in a woman's face firft met, 
 and drew it to himself in a man's hand firft 
 grasped. He looked keenly for it. And if he 
 associated minor degrees of goodness with 
 any kind of folly or mental ineptitude, he did 
 not so relate sandlity; though he gave it, for 
 companion, ignorance; and joined the two, in 
 Joe Gargery, mo^ tenderly. We might para- 
 phrase, in regard to these two great authors. 
 Dr. Johnson's famous sentence: "Marriage 
 23 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 has many pains, but celibacy has no joys." 
 Dickens has many scoundrels, but Thackeray 
 has no saints. Helen Pendennis is not holy, 
 for she is unjuft and cruel ; Amelia is not holy, 
 for she is an egoift in love ; Lady Caftlewood 
 is not holy, for she too is cruel ; and even Lady 
 Jane is not holy, for she is jealous; nor is 
 Colonel Newcome holy, for he is haughty; 
 nor Dobbin, for he turns with a taunt upon a 
 plain sifter; nor Esmond, for he squanders 
 his beft years in love for a material beauty; 
 and these are the beft of his good people. And 
 readers have been taught to praise the work 
 of him who makes none perfedl; one does not 
 meet perfeft people in trains or at dinner, and 
 this seemed good cause that the novelift should 
 be praised for his moderation; it seemed to 
 imitate the usual measure and moderation of 
 nature. 
 
 But Charles Dickens closed with a divine 
 purpose divinely different. He consented to 
 the counsels of perfeftion. And thus he made 
 Joe Gargery, not a man one might easily find 
 in a forge; and Efther Summerson, not a girl 
 one may easily meet at a dance; and Little 
 24 
 
DICKENS 
 Dorrit, who does not come to do a day's 
 sewing; not that the man and the women are 
 inconceivable, but that they are unfortunately 
 improbable. They are creatures created 
 through a creating mind that worked its six 
 days for the love of good, and never refted 
 until the seventh, the final Sabbath. But 
 granting that they are the counterpart, the 
 heavenly side, of caricature, this is not to 
 condemn them. Since when has caricature 
 ceased to be an art good for man — an honeft 
 game between him and nature.? It is a tenable 
 opinion that frank caricature is a better inci- 
 dent of art than the mere exaggeration which 
 is the more modern pradlice. The words mean 
 the same thing in their origin — an overloading. 
 But, as we now generally delimit the words, they 
 differ. Caricature, when it has the grotesque 
 inspiration, makes for laughter, and when it 
 has the cele^ial, makes for admiration; in 
 either case there is a good under^nding 
 between the author and the reader, or between 
 the draughtsman and the speftator. We need 
 not, for example, suppose that Ibsen sat in 
 a room surrounded by a repeating pattern of 
 25 c 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 his hair and whiskers on the wallpaper, but 
 it makes us moft exceedingly mirthful and 
 joyous to see him thus seated in Mr. Max 
 Beerbohm's drawing; and perhaps no girl 
 ever went through life without harbouring 
 a thought of self, but it is very good for us 
 all to know that such a girl was thought of 
 by Dickens, that he loved his thought, and 
 that she is ultimately to be traced, through 
 Dickens, to God. 
 
 But exaggeration e^ablishes no good under- 
 handing between the reader and the author. 
 It is a solemn appeal to our credulity, and 
 we are right to resent it. It is the violence 
 of a weakling hand — the worft manner of 
 violence. Exaggeration is conspicuous in the 
 newer poetry, and is so far, therefore, success- 
 ful, conspicuousness being its aim. But it was 
 also the vice of Swinburne, and was the bad 
 example he set to the generation that thought 
 his tunings to be the fineft "music." For in- 
 ^ance, in an early poem he intends to tell us 
 how a man who loved a woman welcomed the 
 sentence that condemned him to drown with 
 her, bound, his impassioned breaft againft 
 26 
 
DICKENS 
 hersj abhorring. He might have convinced us 
 of that welcome by one phrase of the profound 
 exactitude of genius. But he makes his man 
 cry out for the greater bliss and the greater 
 imaginable glory to be be^owed upon the 
 judge who pronounces the sentence. And this 
 is merely exaggeration. One takes pleasure 
 in rebuking the false ec^asy by a word thus 
 prim and prosaic. The poet intended to 
 impose upon us, and he fails; we "withdraw 
 our attention," as Dr. Johnson did when the 
 conversation became foolish. In truth we do 
 more, for we resent exaggeration if we care 
 for our English language. For exaggeration 
 writes relaxed, and not ela^ic, words and 
 verses; and it is possible that the language 
 suffers something, at leaft temporarily — dur- 
 ing the life of a couple of generations, let us 
 say — ^from the loss of elafticity and rebound 
 brought about by such a ^rain. Moreover, 
 exaggeration has always to outdo itself pro- 
 gressively. There should have been a Durdles 
 to tell this Swinburne that the habit of 
 exaggerating, like that of boating, "grows 
 upon you." 
 
 27 02 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 It may be added that later poetry shows us 
 an in^ance of exaggeration in the work of 
 that major poet, Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie. 
 His violence and vehemence, his extremity, 
 are generally signs not of weakness but of 
 power; and yet once he reaches a breaking- 
 point that power should never know. This 
 is where his Judith holds herself to be so 
 smirched and degraded by the proffer of a 
 reverent love (she being devoted to one only, 
 a dead man who had her heart) that thence- 
 forth no bar is left to her entire self-sacrifice 
 to the loathed enemy Holofernes. To this, 
 too, the prim rebuke is the juft one, a word 
 for the mouth of governesses : "My dear, you 
 exaggerate." 
 
 It may be briefly said that exaggeration 
 takes for granted some degree of imbecility 
 in the reader, whereas caricature takes for 
 granted a high degree of intelligence. Dickens 
 appeals to our intelligence in all his carica- 
 ture, whether heavenly, as in Joe Gargery, 
 or impish, as in Mrs. Micawber. The word 
 "caricature" 'that is used a thousand times 
 to reproach him is the word that does him 
 singular honour. „ 
 
DICKENS 
 If I may define my own devotion to 
 Dickens, it may be ^ated as chiefly, though 
 not wholly, admiration of his humour, his 
 dramatic tragedy, and his watchfulness over 
 inanimate things and landscape. Passages of 
 his books that are ranged otherwise than 
 under those charafters often leave me out of 
 the range of their appeal or else definitely 
 offend me. And this is not for the cuftomary 
 reason — that Dickens could not draw a gentle- 
 man, that Dickens could not draw a lady. It 
 matters little whether he could or not. But as 
 a fa(5t he did draw a gentleman, and drew him 
 excellently well, in Cousin Feenix, as Mr. 
 Chefterton has decided. The que^on of the 
 lady we may waive; if it is difficult to prove a 
 negative, it is difficult also to present one; 
 and to the making, or producing, or liberating, 
 or detaching, or exalting, of the charafter of 
 a lady there enter many negatives; and 
 Dickens was an obvious and a positive man. 
 Efther Summerson is a lady, but she is so 
 much besides that her ladyhood does not de- 
 tach itself from her sainthood and her angel- 
 hood, so as to be conspicuous — if, indeed, 
 29 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 conspicuousness may be properly predicated 
 of the quality of a lady. It is a conventional 
 saying that sainthood and angelhood include 
 the quality of a lady, but that saying is not 
 true ; a lady has a great number of negatives 
 all her own, and also some things positive 
 that are not at all included in goodness. How- 
 ever this may be — and it is not important — 
 Dickens, the genial Dickens, makes savage 
 sport of women. Such a company of envious 
 dames and damsels cannot be found among 
 the persons of the satiric Thackeray. Kate 
 Nickleby's beauty brings upon her at firft 
 sight the enmity of her workshop companions ; 
 in the innocent pages of "Pickwick" the aunt 
 is jealous of the niece, and the niece retorts by 
 wounding the vanity of the aunt as keenly as 
 she may; and so forth through early books 
 and late. He takes for granted that the women, 
 old and young, who are not his heroines, wage 
 this war within the sex, being disappointed 
 by defedl of nature and fortune. Dickens is 
 mafter of wit, humour, and derision; and it 
 mu^ be confessed that his derision is abund- 
 ant, and is ca^ upon an artifically exposed and 
 30 
 
DICKENS 
 helpless people; that is, he, a man, derides the 
 women who miss what a man declared to be 
 their "whole exigence." 
 
 The advice which M. Rodin received in 
 his youth from Conftant — "Learn to see the 
 other side; never look at forms only in extent; 
 learn to see them always in relief" — is the 
 contrary of the counsel proper for a reader of 
 Dickens. That counsel should be, "Do not 
 insi^ upon seeing the immortal figures of 
 comedy 'in the round.' You are to be satisfied 
 with their face value, the face of two dimen- 
 sions. It is not necessary that you should seize 
 Mr. Pecksniff from beyond, and grasp the 
 whole man and his deftinies." The hypocrite 
 is a figure dreadful and tragic, a shape of 
 horror; and Mr. Pecksniff is a hypocrite, and 
 a bright image of heart-easing comedy. For 
 comic fidlion cannot exift without some such 
 paradox. Without it, where would our laugh 
 be in response to the generous genuis which 
 gives us Mr. Pecksniff's parenthesis to the 
 mention of sirens ("Pagan, I regret to say"); 
 and the scene in which Mr. Pecksniff, after 
 a ^ormy domeftic scene within, goes as it 
 
 31 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 were accidentally to the door to admit the rich 
 kinsman he wishes to propitiate? "Then Mr. 
 Pecksniff, gently warbling a ru^ic ^ve, put 
 on his garden hat, seized a spade, and opened 
 the ftreet door, as if he thought he had, from 
 his vineyard, heard a modeft rap, but was not 
 quite certain." The visitor had thundered at 
 the door while outcries of family ftrife had 
 been rising in the house. "*It is an ancient 
 pursuit, gardening. Primitive, my dear sir; 
 for, if I am not miftaken, Adam was the firft 
 of the calling. My Eve, I grieve to say, is no 
 more, sir; but' (and here he pointed to his 
 spade, and shook his head, as if he were not 
 cheerful without an effort) 'but I do a little 
 bit of Adam ^ill.' He had by this time got 
 them into the beft parlour, where the portrait 
 by Spiller and the buft by Spoker were." And 
 again, Mr. Pecksniff, hospitable at the supper 
 table: " 'This,' he said, in allusion to the 
 party, not the wine, 'is a Mingling that repays 
 one for much disappointment and vexation. 
 Let us be merry.' Here he took a captain's 
 biscuit. 'It is a poor heart that never rejoices; 
 and our hearts are not poor. No!' With such 
 32 
 
DICKENS 
 Simulants to merriment did he beguile the 
 time and do the honours of the table." More- 
 over it is a mournful thing and an inexplicable, 
 that a man should be as mad as Mr. Dick, 
 None the less is it a happy thing for any 
 reader to watch Mr. Dick while David ex- 
 plains his difficulty to Traddles. Mr. Dick 
 was to be employed in copying, but King 
 Charles the Firft could not be kept out of the 
 manuscripts; "Mr. Dick in the meantime 
 looking very deferentially and seriously at 
 Traddles, and sucking his thumb." And the 
 amours of the gentleman in gaiters who threw 
 the vegetable-marrows over the garden wall. 
 Mr. F.'s aunt, again ! And Auguftus Moddle, 
 our own Moddle, whom a great French 
 critic moft juflily and accurately brooded over. 
 "Augustus, the gloomy maniac," says Taine, 
 "makes us shudder." A good medical diag- 
 nosis. Long live the logical French intelledl 
 
 Truly, Humour talks in his own language, 
 nay, his own dialeft, whereas Passion and 
 Pity speak the universal tongue. 
 
 It is Grange — ^it seems to me deplorable — 
 that Dickens himself was not content to leave 
 
 33 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 his wonderful hypocrite-^-one who should 
 Sand imperishable in comedy — ^in the two 
 dimensions of his own admirable art. After 
 he had enjoyed his own Pecksniff, taking him 
 with the "^renuous tongue" of Keats's volup- 
 tuary burning "joy's grapes againft his palate 
 fine," Dickens moft unfairly gives himself the 
 other and incompatible joy of grasping his 
 Pecksniff in the third dimension, seizes him 
 "in the round," horsewhips him out of all 
 keeping, and finally kicks him out of a splen- 
 did art of fiftion into a sorry art of "poetical 
 juSice," a Pecksniff not only defeated but 
 undone. 
 
 And yet Dickens's retribution upon sinners 
 is a less fault than his reforming them. It is 
 truly an aft denoting excessive simplicity of 
 mind in him. He never veritably allows his 
 responsibility as a man to lapse. Men ought 
 to be good, or else to become good, and he 
 does violence to his own excellent art, and 
 yields it up to his sense of morality. Ah, can 
 we measure by years the time between that 
 day and this.^ Is the fa^idious, the impartial, 
 the non-moral novelift only the grandchild, 
 34 
 
DICKENS 
 and not the remote po^erity, of Dickens, who 
 would not leave Scrooge to his egoism, or 
 Gradgrind to his fadls, or Mercy Pecksniff to 
 her absurdity, or Dombey to his pride? Nay, 
 who makes Micawber finally to prosper? 
 Truly, the moll unpardonable thing Dickens 
 did in those deplorable la^ chapters of his was 
 the prosperity of Mr. Micawber. "Of a son, 
 in difficulties" — the perfedl Micawber nature 
 is respedled as to his origin, and then perverted 
 as to his end. It is a pity that Mr. Peggotty 
 ever came back to England with such tidings. 
 And our la^ glimpse of the emigi'ants had 
 been made joyous by the sight of the young 
 Micawbers on the eve of emigration ; "every 
 child had its own wooden spoon attached to 
 its body by a ^rong line," in preparation for 
 Colonial life. And then Dickens muft needs 
 go behind the gay scenes, and tell us that the 
 long and untiring delight of the book was 
 over. Mr. Micawber, in the Colonies, was 
 never again to make punch with lemons, in a 
 crisis of his fortunes, and "resume his peeling 
 with a desperate air"; nor to observe the 
 expression of his friends' faces during Mrs. 
 
 35 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 Micawber's mafterly exposition of the finan- 
 cial situation or of the possibilities of the coal 
 trade; nor to eat walnuts out of a paper bag 
 what time the die was ca^ and all was over. 
 Alas ! nothing was over until Mr. Micawber's 
 pecuniary liabilities were over, and the perfeft 
 comedy turned into dulness, the joyous im- 
 possibility of a figure of immortal fun into 
 cold improbability. 
 
 There are several such late or laft chapters 
 that one would gladly cut away : that of Mercy 
 PecksniflTs pathos, for example; that of Mr. 
 Dombey's in^allation in his daughter's home; 
 that which undeceives us as to Mr. Bofiin's 
 antic disposition. But how true and how whole 
 a heart it was that urged these unlucky con- 
 clusions ! How shall we venture to complain? 
 The hand that made its Pecksniff in pure wit, 
 has it not the right to belabour him in earned 
 — albeit a kind of earned that disappoints us? 
 And Mr. Dombey is Dickens's own Dombey, 
 and he mu^ do what he will with that finely 
 wrought figure of pride. But there is a little 
 irony in the faft that Dickens leaves more 
 than one villain to his orderly fate for whom 
 36 
 
DICKENS 
 we care little either way; it is nothing to us, 
 whom Carker never convinced, that the train 
 should catch him, nor that the man with the 
 mou^ache and the nose, who did but weary 
 us, should be crushed by the falling house. 
 Here the end holds good in art, but the art 
 was not good from the fir^. But then, again, 
 neither does Bill Sikes experience a change of 
 heart, nor Jonas Chuzzlewit; and the end of 
 each is moil excellently told. 
 
 George Meredith said that the moS diffi- 
 cult thing to write in fi£Hon was dialogue. 
 But there is surely one thing at leail as diffi- 
 cult — a thing so rarely well done that a mere 
 reader might think it to be more difficult than 
 dialogue ; and that is the telling what happened. 
 Something of the fatal languor and preoccupa- 
 tion that persi^ beneath all the violence of our 
 ilage — our national undramatic character — is 
 perceptible in the narrative of our literature. 
 The things the usual modern author says are 
 proportionately more energetically produced 
 than those he tells. But Dickens, being simple 
 and dramatic and capable of one thing at a 
 time, and that thing whole, tells us what 
 37 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 happened with a perfefl speed which has 
 neither hurry nor delays. Those who saw him 
 aft found him a fine a6tor, and this we might 
 know by reading the murder in Oliver Twisty 
 the murder in Martin Chuzzlewity the coming 
 of the train upon Carker, the long moment 
 of recognition when Pip sees his gue^, the 
 convidl, reveal himself in his chambers at 
 night. The swift spirit, the hammering blow 
 of his narrative, drive the great ^orm in 
 David Copperfield through the pooreft part 
 of the book — Steerforth's ^ory. There is 
 surely no greater gale to be read of than 
 this: from the fir^ words, '"Don't you think 
 that,* I said to the coachman, 'a very remark- 
 able sky?' " to the end of a magnificent chapter. 
 "Flying clouds tossed up into mo^ remark- 
 able heaps, suggefting greater heights in the 
 clouds than there were depths below them. 
 . . . There had been a wind all day; and it 
 was rising then with an extraordinary great 
 sound . . . Long before we saw the sea, its 
 spray was on our lips . . . The water was out 
 over the flat country, and every sheet and 
 puddle lashed its banks, and had its ^ress of 
 38 
 
DICKENS 
 little breakers. When we came within sight 
 of the sea, the waves on the horizon, caught 
 at intervals above the boiling abyss, were like 
 glimpses of another shore, with towers and 
 buildings. . . . The people came to their doors 
 all aslant, and with breaming hair." David 
 dreams of a cannonade, when at laft he "fell 
 — off a tower and down a precipice — into 
 the depths of sleep." In the morning, "the 
 wind might have lulled a little, though not 
 more sensibly than if the cannonading I had 
 dreamed of had been diminished by the 
 silencing of half a dozen guns out of 
 hundreds." "It went from me with a shock, 
 like a ball from a rifle," says David in another 
 place, after the visit of a delirious impulse; 
 here is the volley of departure, the shock of 
 passion vanishing more perceptibly than it 
 came. 
 
 The temped in David Copperfie/d combines 
 Dickens's dramatic tragedy of narrative with 
 his wonderful sense of sea and land. But here 
 are landscapes in quietness : "There has been 
 rain this afternoon, and a wintry shudder goes 
 among the little pools in the cracked, uneven 
 39 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 flag-^ones. . . . Some of the leaves, in a timid 
 rush, seek sandluary within the low-arched 
 cathedral door; but two men coming out 
 resift them, and ca^ them out with their feet" 
 The autumn leaves fall thick, "but never faft, 
 for they come circling down with a dead light- 
 ness." Again, "Now the woods settle into 
 great masses as if they were one profound 
 tree." And yet again, "I held my mother in 
 my embrace, and she held me in hers; and 
 among the ilill woods in the silence of the 
 summer day there seemed to be nothing but 
 our two troubled minds that was not at peace," 
 Yet, with a thousand great felicities of diftion, 
 Dickens had no body of ^le. 
 
 Dickens, having the single and simple 
 heart of a morali^, had also the simple eyes of 
 a free intelligence, and the light heart. He 
 gave his senses their way, and well did they 
 serve him. Thus his eyes — and no more mod- 
 ern man in anxious search of "impressions" 
 was ever so simple and so ma^erly: "Mr. 
 Vholes gauntly talked to the fire, and warmed 
 his funereal gloves." "'I thank you,* said Mr. 
 Vholes, putting out his long black sleeve, to 
 40 
 
DICKENS 
 check the ringing of the bell, 'not any.'" Mr. 
 and Mrs. Tope "are daintily kicking sprigs 
 of holly into the carvings and sconces of the 
 cathedral ^alls, as if they were kicking them 
 into the button-holes of the Dean & Chapter." 
 The two young Eurasians, brother and sifter, 
 "had a certain air upon them of hunter and 
 huntress; yet withal a certain air of being the 
 objefts of the chase rather than the followers." 
 This phrase lacks elegance — and Dickens is 
 not often inelegant, as those who do not read 
 him may be surprised to learn — but the im- 
 pression is admirable ; so is that which follows : 
 "An indefinable kind of pause coming and 
 going on their whole expression, both of face 
 and form." Here is pure, mere impression 
 again: "Miss Murdftone, who was busy at 
 her writing-desk, gave me her cold finger- 
 nails." Lady Tippins's hand is "rich in 
 knuckles." And here is vision with great dig- 
 nity: "All beyond his figure was a vaft dark 
 curtain, in solemn movement towards one 
 quarter of the heavens." 
 
 With that singleness of sight — and his 
 whole body was full of the light of it — he had 
 41 D 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 also the single hearing; the scene is in the 
 Court of Chancery on a London November 
 day: "Leaving this address ringing in the 
 rafters of the roof, the very little counsel 
 drops, and the fog knows him no more." 
 "Mr. Vholes emerged into the silence he 
 could scarcely be said to have broken, so 
 Rifled was his tone." "Within the grill-gate 
 of the chancel, up the ^eps surmounted loom- 
 ingly by the faft-darkening organ, white robes 
 could be dimly seen, and one feeble voice, 
 rising and falling in a cracked monotonous 
 mutter, could at intervals be faintly heard . . . 
 until the organ and the choir burft forth and 
 drowned it in a sea of music. Then the sea 
 fell, and the dying voice made another feeble 
 effort; and then the sea rose high and beat its 
 life out, and lashed the roof, and surged 
 among the arches, and pierced the heights of 
 the great tower; and then the sea was dry and 
 all was ftilL" And this is how a liftener over- 
 heard men talking in the cathedral hollows: 
 "The word 'confidence,' shattered by the 
 echoes, but still capable of being pieced 
 together, is uttered." 
 
 42 
 
DICKENS 
 Wit, humour, derision — to each of these 
 words we assign by cu^om a part in the 
 comedy of literature; and (again) those who 
 do not read Dickens — perhaps even those 
 who read him a little — may acclaim him as a 
 humouri^ and not know him as a wit. But 
 that writer is a wit, whatever his humour, 
 who tells us of a member of the Tite Barnacle 
 family who had held a sinecure office again^ 
 all proteft, that "he died with his drawn 
 salary in his hand." But let it be granted that 
 Dickens the humouri^ is foremoft and moft 
 precious. For we might well spare the phrase 
 of wit juft quoted rather than the one describ- 
 ing Traddles (whose hair ftood up), as one 
 who looked "as though he had seen a cheerful 
 ghoft." Or rather than this: — 
 
 He was so wooden a man that he seemed to have 
 taken his wooden leg naturally, and rather suggefted 
 to the fanciful observer that he might be expedted — 
 if his development received no untimely check — to 
 be completely set up with a pair of wooden legs in 
 about six months. 
 
 Or rather than the incident of the butcher and 
 the beef-fteak. He gently presses it, in a cab- 
 bage leaf, into Tom Pinch's pocket. " 'For 
 43 D2 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 meat,' he said with some emotion, 'muft be 
 humoured, not drove.' " 
 
 A generation, between his own and the 
 present, thought Dickens to be vulgar; if the 
 cause of that judgement was that he wrote 
 about people in shops, the cause is discredited 
 now that shops are the scenes of the novella's 
 research. "High life" and moft wretched life 
 have now given place to the little shop and its 
 parlour, during a year or two. But Dr. Brown, 
 the author of Rab and His Friends, thought 
 that Dickens committed vulgarities in his 
 didlion. "A good man was Robin" is right 
 enough ; but "He was a good man, was Robin" 
 is not so well, and we mu^ own that it is 
 Dickensian; but assuredly Dickens writes 
 such phrases as it were dramatically, playing 
 the cockney. I know of but two words that 
 Dickens habitually misuses, and Charles 
 Lamb misuses one of them precisely in 
 Dickens's manner; it is not worth while to 
 quote them. But for these his English is 
 admirable ; he chooses what is good and knows 
 what is not. A little representative coUeftion 
 of the bad or foolish English of his day might 
 44 
 
DICKENS 
 be made by gathering up what Dickens for- 
 bore and what he derided; for inSance, Mr. 
 Micawber's portly phrase, "gratifying emo- 
 tions of no common description," and Litti- 
 mer's report that "the young woman was 
 partial to the sea." This was the polite lan- 
 guage of that time, as we conclude when we 
 find it to be the language that Charlotte 
 Bronte shook off; but before she shook it off 
 she used it. Dickens, too, had something to 
 throw off; in his earlier books there is an in- 
 flation — rounded words fill the inappropriate 
 mouth of Bill Sikes himself — but he discarded 
 them with a splendid laugh. They are charged 
 upon Mr. Micawber in his own charafter as 
 author. See him as he sits by to hear Captain 
 Hopkins read the petition in the debtors' 
 prison "from His Most Gracious Majefty's 
 unfortunate subjefts." Mr. Micawber lik- 
 ened, we read, "with a little of an author's 
 vanity, contemplating (not severely) the spikes 
 upon the opposite wall." It should be remem- 
 bered that when Dickens shook himself free 
 of everything that hampered his genius he was 
 not so much beloved or so much applauded 
 
 45 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 as when he gave to his cordial readers matter 
 for facile sentiment and for humour of the 
 second order. His public were eager to be 
 moved and to laugh, and he gave them Little 
 Nell and Sam Weller ; he loved to please them, 
 and it is evident that he pleased himself also. 
 Mr. Micawber, Mr. Pecksniff, Mrs. Nickle- 
 by, Mrs. Chick, Mrs. Pipchin, Mr. Augu^us 
 Moddle, Mrs. Jellyby, Mrs. Plornish, are 
 not so famous as Sam Weller and Little Nell, 
 nor is Traddles, whose hair looked as though 
 he had seen a cheerful ghoft. 
 
 We are told of the delight of the Japanese 
 man in a chance finding of something grange- 
 shaped, an asymmetry that has an accidental 
 felicity, an intere^. If he finds such a grace or 
 disproportion — ^whatever the intereft may be 
 — in a ftone or a twig that has caught his 
 ambiguous eye at the roadside, he carries it 
 to his home to place it in its irregularly happy 
 place. Dickens seems to have had a like joy 
 in things misshapen or strangely shapen, 
 uncommon or grotesque. He saddled even his 
 heroes — those heroes are, perhaps, his worft 
 work, young men at once conventional and 
 46 
 
DICKENS 
 improbable — with whimsically ugly names; 
 while his invented names are whimsically per- 
 feft: that of Vholes for the predatory silent 
 man in black, and that of Tope for the cathe- 
 dral verger. A suggeilion of dark and vague 
 flight in Vholes; something of old floors, 
 something respedtably furtive and mufty, in 
 Tope. In Dickens, the love of lurking, un- 
 usual things, human and inanimate — ^he wrote 
 of his discoveries delightedly in his letters — 
 was hypertrophied; and it has its part in the 
 simple^ and the moft fantaftic of his humours, 
 especially those that are due to his child-like 
 eyesight; let us read, for example, of the 
 rooks that seemed to a,ttend upon Dr. Strong 
 (late of Canterbury) in his Highgate garden, 
 "as if they had been written to about him 
 by the Canterbury rooks and were observing 
 him closely in consequence"; and of Mafter 
 Micawber, who had a remarkable head voice 
 — "On looking at Ma^er Micawber again I 
 saw that he had a certain expression of face as 
 if his voice were behind his eyebrows"; and 
 of Joe in his Sunday clothes, "a scarecrow in 
 good circum^ances"; and of the cook's cousin 
 
 47 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 in the Life Guards, with such long legs that 
 "he looked like the afternoon shadow of 
 somebody else"; and of Mrs. Markleham, 
 "who ^ared more like a figure-head intended 
 for a ship to be called the Aftonishment, than 
 anything else I can think of." But there is no 
 reader who has not a thousand such exhilarat- 
 ing little sights in his memory of these pages. 
 From the gently grotesque to the fantaftic run 
 Dickens's enchanted eyes, and in Quilp and 
 Miss Mowcher he takes his joy in the extreme 
 of deformity; and a spontaneous combuftion 
 was an accident much to his mind. 
 
 Dickens wrote for a world that either was 
 exceedingly excitable and sentimental, or had 
 the convention or tradition of great sentimen- 
 tal excitability. All his people, suddenly sur- 
 prised, lose their presence of mind. Even 
 when the surprise is not extraordinary their 
 aftions are wild. When Tom Pinch calls upon 
 John Wedlock in London, after no very long 
 separation, John, welcoming him at break- 
 fa^, puts the rolls into his boots, and so forth. 
 And this kind of di^raftion comes upon men 
 and women everywhere in his books — dis- 
 48 
 
DICKENS 
 traftions of laughter as well. All this seems 
 artificial to-day, whereas Dickens in his be^ 
 moments is the simple^, as he is the mo^ 
 vigilant, of men. But his public was as present 
 to him as an aftor's audience is to the aftor, 
 and I cannot think that this immediate 
 response was good for his art. Assuredly he is 
 not solitary. We should not wish him to be 
 solitary as a poet is, but we may wish that now 
 and again, even while landing applauded and 
 acclaimed, he had appraised the applause 
 more coolly and more juftly, and within his 
 inner mind. 
 
 Those critics who find what they call vul- 
 garisms think they may safely go on to accuse 
 Dickens of bad grammar. The truth is that 
 his grammar is not only good but ftrong; it is 
 far better in conftruftion than Thackeray's, 
 the ease of whose phrase sometimes exceeds 
 and is slack. Lately, during the recent cen- 
 tenary time, a writer averred that Dickens 
 "might not always be parsed," but that we 
 loved him for his, etc., etc. Dickens's page is 
 to be parsed as ftriftly as any man's. It is, apart 
 from the matter of grammar, a wonderful 
 
 49 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 thing that he, with his little education, should 
 have so excellent a diftion. In a letter that 
 records his reluftance to work during a holi- 
 day, the word "wave" seems to me perfeft: 
 "Imaginary butchers and bakers wave me to 
 my desk." In his exquisite use of the word 
 "eftablishment" in the following phrase, we 
 find his own perfedl sense of the use of words 
 in his own day; but in the second quotation 
 given there is a moft beautiful sign of educa- 
 tion. "Under the weight of my wicked secret" 
 (the little boy Pip had succoured his convidl 
 with his brother-in-law's provisions) "I pon- 
 dered whether the Church would be powerful 
 enough to shield me ... if I divulged to that 
 eftablishment." And this is the phrase that 
 may remind us of the eighteenth-century 
 writers of prose, and among those writers of 
 none so readily as of Bolingbroke : it occurs 
 in that passage of Ether's life in which, hav- 
 ing loft her beauty, she resolves to forego a 
 love unavowed. "There was nothing to be 
 undone; no chain for him to drag or for me 
 to break." 
 
 If Dickens had had the education which he 
 50 
 
DICKENS 
 had not, his English could not have been bet- 
 ter ; but if he had had the mage du monde which 
 as a young man he had not, there would have 
 been a difference. He would not, for in^ance, 
 have given us the prepo^erous scenes in 
 Nicholas Nickleby in which parts are played 
 by Lord Frederick Verisopht, Sir Mulberry 
 Hawke, and their friends; the scene of the 
 hero's luncheon at a reftautant and the dread- 
 ful description of the mirrors and other splen- 
 dours would not have been written. It is a 
 very little thing to forgive to him whom we 
 have to thank for — well, not perhaps for the 
 "housefull of friends" for the gift of whom a 
 Granger, often quoted, once blessed him in 
 the ^reet; we may not wish for Mr. Feeder, 
 or Major Bag^ock, or Mrs. Chick, or Mrs. 
 Pipchin, or Mr. Auguftus Moddle, or Mr. 
 F.'s aunt, or Mr. Wopsle, or Mr. Pumble- 
 chook, as an inmate of our homes. Lack of 
 knowledge of the polite world is, I say, a very 
 little thing to forgive to him whom we thank 
 moft chiefly for showing us these interefting 
 people juft named as inmates of the comedy 
 homes that are not ours. We thank him 
 
 51 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 because they are comedy homes, and could 
 not be ours or any man's; that is, we thank 
 him for his admirable art. 
 
 52 
 
SWINBURNE'S LYRICAL 
 POETRY 
 
 THE makers of epigrams, of phrases, 
 of pages— of all more or less brief 
 judgements — assuredly wafte their 
 time when they sum up any one of all man- 
 kind; and how do they squander it when their 
 matter is a poet! They may hardly describe 
 him; nor shall any ^udent's care, or psycho- 
 logic's formula, or man-of-letters' summary, 
 or wit's sentence define him. Definitions, be- 
 cause they muC not be inexaft or incompre- 
 hensive, sweep too wide, and the poet is not 
 held within them; and out of the mere de- 
 scriber's range and capture he may escape 
 by as many doors as there are outlets from 
 a forest. But much ready-made platitude 
 brings about the world's guesses at a poet, 
 and false and flat thought lies behind its 
 epigrams. It is not long since the general 
 guess-work assigned melancholy, without 
 authority, to a poet lately deceased. Real 
 S3 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 poets, it was said, are unhappy, and this 
 was one exceptionally real. How unhappy 
 muft he, then, certainly have been! And 
 the blessed Blake himself was incidentally 
 cited as one of the company of depression 
 and despair! It is, perhaps, a liking for sym- 
 metry that prompts these futile syllogisms; 
 perhaps, also, it is the fear of human my^ery. 
 The biographer used to see "the finger of 
 God" pat in the hiftory of a man; he insi^s 
 now that he shall at any rate see the finger 
 of a law, or rather of a rule, a cuftom, a 
 generality. Law I will not call it; there is 
 no intelligible law that, for example, a true 
 poet should be an unhappy man; but the 
 observer thinks he has noticed a cuftom or 
 habit to that efFed, and Blake, who lived and 
 died in bliss, is named at ignorant random, 
 rather than that an example of the cu^om 
 should be loft. 
 
 But it is not only such a platitude of obser- 
 vation, such a cheap generality, that is silenced 
 in the presence of the poet whose name is at 
 the head of these pages. For if ever Nature 
 showed us a poet in whom our phrases, and 
 54 
 
SWINBURNE 
 the judgements they record, should be denied, 
 defeated, and confused, Swinburne is he. We 
 predicate of a poet a great sincerity, a great 
 imagination, a great passion, a great intellect; 
 these are the ma^er qualities, and yet we are 
 compelled to see here — ^if we would not wil- 
 fully be blind or blindfold — a poet, yes, a 
 true poet, with a perfervid fancy rather than 
 an imagination, a poet with puny passions, a 
 poet with no more than the momentary and 
 impulsive sincerity of an infirm soul, a poet 
 with small intelledl — and thrice a poet. 
 
 And, assuredly, if the creative arts are 
 duly humbled in the universal comtemplation 
 of Nature, if they are accused, if they are 
 weighed, if they are found wanting; if they 
 are excused by nothing but our intimate 
 human sympathy with dear and intere^ing 
 imperfeftion ; if poetry ftands outdone by the 
 passion and experience of an inarticulate soul, 
 and painting by the splendour of the day, and 
 building by the foreft and the cloud, there is 
 another art also that has to be humiliated, and 
 this is the art and science of criticism, con- 
 founded by its contemplation of such a poet. 
 
 SS 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 Poor little art of examination and formula! 
 The miracle of day and night and immortality 
 are needed to rebuke the nobler arts ; but our 
 art, the critic's, mine to-day, is brought to 
 book, and its heart is broken, and its sincerity 
 disgraced, by the paradoxes of the truth. Not 
 in the heavens nor in the sub-celeftial land- 
 scape does this minor art find its refutation, 
 but in the puzzle between a man and his gift; 
 and in part the man is ignoble and leads us by 
 diSafteful paths, and compels us to a reluct- 
 ant work of literary deteftion. Useful is the 
 critical spirit, but it loses heart when (to take 
 a very definite inftance) it has to ask what 
 literary sincerity — what value for art and 
 letters — ^lived in Swinburne, who hailed a cer- 
 tain old friend, in a dedication, as "poet and 
 painter" when he was pleased with him, and 
 declared him "poeta^er and dauber" when 
 something in that dead man's pofthumous 
 autobiography offended his own self-love; 
 when, I say, criticism finds itself called upon, 
 amid its admiration, to do such scavenger 
 work, it loses heart as well as the clue, and 
 would gladly go out into the free air of 
 56 
 
SWINBURNE 
 greater arts, and, with them, take exterior 
 Nature's nobler reprobation. 
 
 I have to cite this inftance of a change of 
 mind, or of terms and titles, in Swinburne's 
 eftimate of art and letters, because it is all- 
 important to my argument. It is a change he 
 makes in published print, and, therefore, no 
 private matter. And I cite it, not as a sign of 
 moral fault, with which I have no business, 
 but as a sign of a mo^ significant literary- 
 insensibility — ^insensibility, whether to the 
 quality of a poetafter when he wrote "poet," 
 or to that of a poet when he wrote "poetafter," 
 is of no matter. 
 
 Rather than juftify the things I have ven- 
 tured to affirm as to Swinburne's little intelledt, 
 and paltry degree of sincerity, and rachitic 
 passion, and tumid fancy — judgement-con- 
 founding things to predicate of a poet — I turn 
 to the happier task of praise. A vivid writer of 
 English was he, and would have been one of 
 the recurring renewers of our often-renewed 
 and incomparable language, had his words 
 not become habitual to himself, so that they 
 quickly lo^ the light, the breeze, the breath; 
 57 E 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 one whose fondness for beauty deserved the 
 serious name of love; one whom beauty at 
 times favoured and filled so visibly, by such 
 obvious visits and possessions, favours so 
 manife^, that inevitably we forget we are 
 speaking fiftions and allegories, and imagine 
 her a •\nisiting power exterior to her poet; a 
 man, moreover, of a less, not more, than 
 manly receptiveness and appreciation, so 
 that he was entirely and easily possessed by 
 admirations. Less than manly we mu^ call his 
 extraordinary recklessness of appreciation; it 
 is, as it were, ideally feminine; it is possible, 
 however, that no woman has yet been capable 
 of so entire an emotional impulse and impetus ; 
 more than manly it might have been but for 
 the lack of a responsible intelleft in that im- 
 pulse; had it possessed such an intelledhial 
 sanation, Swinburne's admiration of Vidtor 
 Hugo, Mazzini, Dickens, Baudelaire, and 
 Theophile Gautier might have added one to 
 the great generosities of the world. 
 
 We are inclined to complain of such an 
 objeftion to Swinburne's poetry as was preva- 
 lent at his earlier appearance and may be 
 58 
 
SWINBURNE 
 found in criticisms of the time, before the 
 later fashion of praise set in — ^the obvious 
 objedlion that it was as indigent in thought as 
 affluent in words; for, though a truth, it is an 
 inadequate truth. It might be affirmed of 
 many a verse-writer of not unusual talent and 
 insignificance, whose affluence of words was 
 inseleftive and merely abundant, and whose 
 poverty of thought was something less than a 
 national disafter. Swinburne's failure of intel- 
 lect was, in the fulled and moft serious sense, 
 a national disafter, and his inftinft for words 
 was a national surprise. It is in their beauty 
 that Swinburne's art finds its absolution from 
 the obligations of meaning, according to the 
 vulgar judgement; and we can hardly wonder. 
 I wish it were not cuftomary to write of one 
 art in the terms of another, and I use the 
 words "music" and "musical" under proteft, 
 because the world has been so delighted to 
 call any verse pleasant to the ear "musical," 
 that it has not supplied us with another and 
 more specialised and appropriate word. Swin- 
 burne is a complete ma^er of the rhythm and 
 rhyme, the time and accent, the pause, the 
 59 E2 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 balance, the flow of vowel and clash of conso- 
 nant, that make the "music" for which verse 
 is popular and prized. We need not complain 
 that it is for the tune rather than for the 
 melody — ^if we mu^ use those alien terms — 
 that he is chiefly admired, and even for the 
 jingle rather than for the tune: he gave his 
 readers all three, and all three in perfedion. 
 Nineteen out of twenty who take pleasure in 
 this art of his will quote you firft 
 
 When the hounds of Spring are on winter's traces 
 The Mother of months, in meadow and plain, 
 
 and the reft of the buoyant familiar lines. I 
 confess there is something too obvious, insis- 
 tent, emphatic, too dapper, to give me more 
 than a slight pleasure; but it is possible that I 
 am prejudiced by a dislike of English anapxfts 
 (I am aware that the classic terms are not 
 really applicable to our English metres, but 
 the reader will underhand that I mean the 
 metre of the lines juft quoted.) I do not find 
 these anapaefts in the Elizabethan or in the 
 seventeenth-century poets, or moft rarely. 
 They were dear to the eighteenth century, 
 and, much more than the heroic couplet, 
 60 
 
SWINBURNE 
 are the di^inftive metre of that age. They 
 swagger — or, worse, they ftrut — ^in its lighter 
 verse, from its fir^ year to its la^. Swinburne's 
 anapae^s are far too delicate for swagger or 
 ftrut; but for all their dance, all their spring, 
 all their flight, all their flutter, we are com- 
 pelled to perceive that, as it were, they ■per- 
 form. I love to see English poetry move to 
 many measures, to many numbers, but chiefly 
 with the simple iambic and the simple trochaic 
 foot. Those two are enough for the infinite 
 variety, the epic, the drama, the lyric, of our 
 poetry. It is, accordingly, in these old tradi- 
 tional and proved metres that Swinburne's 
 music seems to me mo^ worthy, moft con- 
 trolled, and moft lovely. There is his beft dig- 
 nity, and therefore his beft beauty. For even 
 beauty is not to be thruft upon us; she is not 
 to solicit us or offer herself thus to the firft 
 comer ; and in the moft admired of those flying 
 lyrics she is thus immoderately lavish of her- 
 self. "He lays himself out," wrote Francis 
 Thompson in an anonymous criticism, "to 
 delight and seduce. The great poets entice by 
 a glorious accident . . . but allurement, in Mr. 
 6i 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 Swinburne's poetry, is the alpha and omega." 
 This is true of all that he has written, but it 
 is true, in a more fatal sense, of these famous 
 tunes of his "music." Nay, delicate as they 
 are, we are convinced that it is the less delicate 
 ear that moSt surely takes much pleasure in 
 them, the dull ear that chiefly they delight. 
 
 Compare with such luxurious canterings 
 the graver movement of this "Vision of Spring 
 in Winter" : 
 Sunrise it sees not, neither set of ^r. 
 
 Large nightfall, nor imperial plenilune, 
 ^ Nor ^ong sweet shape of the fuU-breaAed noon; 
 But where the silver-sandalled shadows are, 
 Too soft for arrows of the sun to mar, 
 
 Moves with the mild gait of an ungrown moon. 
 
 Even more valuable than this exquisite 
 rhymed ^anza is the blank verse which Swin- 
 burne released into new energies, new liber- 
 ties, and new movements. Milton, it need 
 hardly be said, is the mafter of those who 
 know how to place and displace the ftress and 
 accent of the English heroic line in epic 
 poetry. His mo^ maje^ic hand undid the 
 mechanical bonds of the national line and 
 made it obey the unwritten laws of his genius. 
 His blank verse marches, pauses, lingers, and 
 62 
 
SWINBURNE 
 charges. It feels the ftrain, it yields, it resits; 
 it is all-expressive. But if the practice of some 
 of the poets succeeding him had tended to 
 make it rigid and tame again, Swinburne was 
 a new liberator. He writes, when he ought, 
 with a finely appropriate regularity, as in the 
 lovely line on the foreSt glades 
 
 That fear the £iun's and know the dryad's foot, 
 in which the rule is completely kept, every 
 ^ep of the five Pepping from the unaccented 
 place to the accented without a tremor. (I 
 muft again prote^ that I use the word "accent" 
 in a sense that has come to be adapted to 
 English prosody, because it is so used by 
 all writers on English metre, and is therefore 
 underwood by the reader, but I think "^ress" 
 the better word.) But having written this per- 
 fedl English-iambic line so wonderfully fit for 
 the sensitive quiet of the woods, he turns the 
 page to the onslaught of such lines — heroic 
 lines with a difference — as report the short- 
 breathed messenger's reply to Althea's ques- 
 tion by whose hands the boar of Calydon had 
 died: 
 
 A maiden's and a prophet's and thy son's. 
 
 63 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 It is lamentable that in his late^ blank verse 
 Swinburne should have made a trick and a 
 manner of that mo^ energetic de\ace of his 
 by which he leads the line at a rush from the 
 fir^ syllable to the tenth, and on to the firll 
 of the line succeeding, with a great recoil to 
 follow, as though a rider brought a horse to 
 his haunches. It is in the same boar hunt: 
 
 And fiery with invasive eyes, 
 And bribing with intolerable hair. 
 Plunged; — 
 
 Sometimes we may be troubled with a mis- 
 giving that Swinburne's fine narrative, as well 
 as his descriptive writing of other kinds, has 
 a counterpart in the programme-music of some 
 now by-gone composers. It is even too descrip- 
 tive, too imitative of things, and seems to out- 
 run the province of words, somewhat as that did 
 the province of notes. But, though this hunt- 
 ing, and checking, and floating, and flying in 
 metre may be to ftrain the arts of prosody and 
 diftion, with how ma^erly a hand is the drain- 
 ing accomplished! The spear, the arrow, the 
 attack, the charge, the footfall, the pinion, nay, 
 the very Pepping of the moon, the walk of the 
 64 
 
SWINBURNE 
 wind, are mimicked in this enchanting verse. 
 Like to programme-music we mu^ call it, but 
 I wish the concert-platform had ever juftified 
 this slight perversion of aim, this excess — 
 almo^ corruption — of one kind of skill, thus 
 miraculously well. 
 
 Now, if Swinburne's exceptional faculty of 
 diftion led him to immoderate expressiveness, 
 to immode^ sweetness, to a jugglery, and 
 preftidigitation, and conjuring of words, to 
 transformations and transmutations of sound 
 — if, I say, his extraordinary gift of diftion 
 brought him to this exaggeration of the man- 
 ner, what a part does it not play in the matter 
 of his poetry! So overweening a place does it 
 take in this man's art that I believe the words 
 to hold and use his meaning, rather than the 
 meaning to compass and grasp and use the 
 word. I believe that Swinburne's thoughts 
 have their source, their home, their origin, 
 their authority and mission in those two places 
 — his own vocabulary and the passion of other 
 men. This is a grave charge. 
 
 Firft, then, in regard to the passion of other 
 men. I have given to his own emotion the 
 
 65 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 punieft name I could find for it; I have no 
 nobler name for his intelledl. But other men 
 had thoughts, other men had passions; poli- 
 tical, sexual, natural, noble, vile, ideal, gross, 
 rebellious, agonising, imperial, republican, 
 cruel, compassionate; and with these he fed 
 his verses. Upon these and their life he sus- 
 tained, he fattened, he enriched his poetry. 
 Mazzini in Italy, Gautier and Baudelaire in 
 France, Shelley in England, made for him a 
 base of passionate and intelleftual supplies. 
 "With them he kept the all-necessary line of 
 communication. We cease, as we see their 
 adtive hearts possess his aftive art, to think a 
 que^ion as to his sincerity seriously worth 
 asking; what sincerity he has is so absorbed in 
 the one excited aft of receptivity. That, in- 
 deed, he performs with all the will, all the pre- 
 cipitation, all the rush, all the surrender, all 
 the whole-hearted weakness of his subservient 
 and impetuous nature. I have not named the 
 Greeks, nor the English Bible, nor Milton, as 
 his inspirers. These he would claim; they are 
 not his. He received too partial^ too fragment- 
 ary, too arbitrary an inheritance of the Greek 
 66 
 
SWINBURNE 
 spirit, too illusory an idea of Milton, of the 
 English Bible little more than a tone; — this 
 poet of eager, open capacity, this poet who is 
 little more, intelleftually, than a too-ready, 
 too-vacant capacity, for those three augu^ 
 severities has not room enough. 
 
 Charged, then, with other men's purposes 
 — this man's Italian patriotism; this man's 
 love of sin (by that name, for sin has been 
 denied, as a fidion, but Swinburne, follow- 
 ing Baudelaire, acknowledges it to love it); 
 this man's despite againft the Third Empire 
 or what not; this man's cry for a political 
 liberty granted or gained long ago — a cry 
 grown vain; this man's contempt for the 
 Boers — nay, was it so much as a man, with a 
 man's evil to answer for, that furnished him 
 here; was it not rather that less guilty judge, 
 the crowd? — this man's — nay, this boy's — 
 erotic sickness, or his cruelty — charged with 
 all these, Swinburne's poetry is primed; it ex- 
 plodes with thunder and fire. But such shar- 
 ing is somewhat too familiar for dignity; such 
 community of goods parodies the Franciscans. 
 As one friar goes darned for another's rending, 
 67 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 having no property in cassock or cowl, so does 
 many a poet, not in humility, but in a paradox 
 of pride, boa^ of the paft of others. And yet 
 one might rather choose to make use of one's 
 fellow-men's old shoes than to put their old 
 secrets to usufruft, and dress poetry in a mot- 
 ley of shed passions, twice corrupt. Promis- 
 cuity of love we have heard of; Pope was 
 accused, by Lord Hervey's indignation and 
 wit, of promiscuity of hatred, and of scattering 
 his disfavours in the ftews of an indiscriminate 
 malignity; and here is another promiscuity — 
 that of memories, and of a licence partaken. 
 
 But by the unanimous poets' splendid love 
 of the landscape and the skies, by this also was 
 Swinburne possessed, andin this hetriumphed. 
 By this, indeed, he profited; here he joined 
 an innumerable company of that heavenly 
 ho^ of earth. Let us acknowledge then his hon- 
 ourable alacrity here, his quick fellowship, his 
 agile adoption, and his filial tenderness — ^nay, 
 his fraternal union •vdth his poets. No touri^'s 
 admiration for all things French, no tourift's 
 politics in Italy — and Swinburne's French 
 and Italian admirations have the touri^ 
 68 
 
SWINBURNE 
 manner of enthusiasm — prompts him here. 
 Here he aspires to brotherhood with the 
 supreme poets of supreme England, with the 
 sixteenth century, the seventeenth, and the 
 nineteenth, the impassioned centuries of song. 
 Happy is he to be admitted among these, 
 happy is he to merit by his wonderful voice 
 to sing their raptures. Here is no humiliation 
 in ready-made lendings ; their ec^asy becomes 
 him. He is glorious with them, and we can 
 imagine this benign and indulgent Nature 
 confounding together the sons she embraces, 
 and making her poets — ^the primary and the 
 secondary, the greater and the lesser — all 
 equals in her arms. Let us see him in that 
 company where he looks noble among^ the 
 noble; let us not look upon him in the com- 
 pany of the ignoble, where he looks ignobler 
 ^ill, being servile to them ; let us look upon him 
 with the lyrical Shakespeare, with Vaughan, 
 Blake, Wordsworth, Patmore, Meredith; not 
 with Baudelaire and Gautier; with the poets 
 of the foreft and the sun, and not with those 
 of the alcove. We can make peace with him 
 for love of them ; we can imagine them thank- 
 69 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 ful to him who, poor and perverse in thought 
 in so many pages, could yet join them in such 
 a song as this : 
 
 And her heart sprang in Iseult, and she drew 
 With all her spirit and life the sunrise through, 
 And through her lips the keen triumphant air 
 Sea-scented, sweeter than land-roses were. 
 And through her eyes the whole rejoicing eaft 
 Sun-satisfied, and all the heaven at feaA 
 Spread for the morning; and the imperious mirth 
 Of wind and light that moved upon the earth, 
 Making the spring, and all the fruitful might 
 And ftrong regeneration of delight 
 That swells the seedling leaf and sapling man. 
 
 He, nevertheless, who was able, in high com- 
 pany, to hail the sea with such fine verse, was 
 not ashamed, in low company, to sing the 
 famous absurdities about "the lilies and lan- 
 guors of virtue and the roses and raptures of 
 vice," with many and many a passage of like 
 charafter. I think it more generous, seeing I 
 have differed so much from the Nineteenth 
 Century's chorus of excessive praise, to quote 
 little from the vacant, the paltry, the silly — 
 no word is so fit as that la^ little word — 
 among his pages. Therefore, I have juftified 
 my praise, but not my blame. It is for the 
 70 
 
SWINBURNE 
 reader to turn to the juSifying pages : to "A 
 Song of Italy," "Les Noyades," "Hermaphro- 
 ditus," "Satia te Sanguine," "Kissing her 
 Hair," "An Interlude," "In a Garden," or 
 such a ^anza as the one beginning 
 
 O thought illimitable and infinite heart 
 Whose blood is life in limbs indissolute 
 
 That all keep heartless thine invisible part 
 And inextirpable thy viewless root 
 
 Whence all sweet shafts of green and each thy dart 
 Of sharpening leaf and bud resundering shoot. 
 
 It is for the reader who has preserved refti- 
 tude of intelleft, sincerity of heart, dignity 
 of nerves, unhurried thoughts, an unexcited 
 heart, and an ardour for poetry, to judge 
 between such poems and an authentic pas- 
 sion, between such poems and truth, I will 
 add between such poems and beauty. 
 
 Imagery is a great part of poetry; but out, 
 alas ! vocabulary has here too the upper hand. 
 For in what is ftill sometimes called the mag- 
 nificent chorus in "Atalanta" the words have 
 swallowed not the thought only but the 
 imagery. The poet's grievance is that the 
 pleasant breams flow into the sea. What 
 would he have.'' The breams turned loose 
 71 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 all over the unfortunate country? There is, 
 it is true, the river Mole in Surrey. But I am 
 not sure that some foolish imagery againft the 
 peace of the burrowing river might not be 
 due from a poet of facility. I am not censur- 
 ing any insincerity of thought; I am com- 
 plaining of the insincerity of a paltry, shaky, 
 and unvisionary image. 
 
 Having had recourse to the passion of 
 Wronger minds for his provision of emotions, 
 Swinburne had diredl recourse to his own 
 vocabulary as a kind of "safe" wherein he 
 ftored what he needed for a song. Claudius 
 ^ole the precious diadem of the kingdom 
 from a shelf and put it in his pocket; Swin- 
 burne took from the shelf of literature — ^took 
 with what art, what touch, what cunning, 
 what complete skill ! — the treasure of the lan- 
 guage, and put it in his pocket. 
 
 He is urgent with his booty of words, for 
 he has no other treasure. Into his pocket he 
 thrufts a hand groping for hatred, and draws 
 forth "blood" or "Hell"— generally "Hell," 
 for I have counted many "Hells" in a quite 
 short poem. In search of wrath he takes hold of 
 ^^ 
 
SWINBURNE 
 "fire"; anxious for wildness he takes "foam," 
 for sweetness he brings out "flower," much 
 linked, so that "flower-soft" has almoft be- 
 come his, and not Shakespeare's. For in that 
 compound he labours to exaggerate Shake- 
 speare, and by his insiftence and iteration 
 goes about to spoil for us the "flower-soft 
 hands" of Cleopatra's rudder-maiden; but 
 he shall not spoil Shakespeare's phrase for 
 us. And behold, in all this fundamental 
 fumbling Swinburne's critics saw only a 
 "mannerism," if they saw even thus much 
 ofi^ence. 
 
 One of the chief pocket-words was 
 "Liberty." O Liberty! what verse is com- 
 mitted in thy name! Or, to cite Madame 
 Roland more accurately, O Liberty, how 
 have they "run" thee! 
 
 Who, it has been well asked by a citizen of 
 a modern free country, is thoroughly free 
 except a fish? Et encore — even the "silent and 
 footless herds" may have more inter-accom- 
 modation than we are aware. But in the pocket 
 of the secondary poet how easy and how ready 
 a word is this, a word implying old and true 
 
 73 F 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 heroisms, but significant here of an excitable 
 poet's economies. Yes, economies of thought 
 and passion. This poet, who is conspicuously 
 the poet of excess, is in deeper truth the poet 
 of penury and defeft. 
 
 And here is a pocket-word which might 
 have a^onished us had we not known how 
 little anyway it signified. It occurs in some- 
 thing cu^omary about Italy: 
 
 Heareft thou, 
 Italia? Tho' deaf sloth hath sealed thine ears. 
 The world has heard thy children — and God hears. 
 
 Was ever thought so pouched, so produced, 
 so surely a handful of loot, as the last 
 thought of this verse.? 
 
 What, finally, is his influence upon the 
 language he has ransacked.? A temporary lay- 
 ing-wa^e, undoubtedly. That is, the contem- 
 porary use of his vocabulary is spoilt, his 
 beautiful words are wa^ed, spent, squan- 
 dered, ^««/)/7/£(f. The contemporary use — I will 
 not say the future use, for no critic should 
 prophesy. But the pa^ he has not been able 
 to violate. He has had no power to rob of their 
 freshness the sixteenth-century flower, the 
 74 
 
SWINBURNE 
 seventeenth-century fruit, or by his violence 
 to shake from either a drop of their dews. 
 
 At the outset I warned the judges and the 
 pronouncers of sentences how this poet, with 
 other poets of quite different charadter, would 
 escape their summaries, and he has indeed 
 refuted that maxim which I had learned at 
 illuftrious knees, "You may not dissociate 
 the matter and manner of any of the greateft 
 poets ; the two are so fused by integrity of fire, 
 whether in tragedy or epic or in the simple^ 
 song, that the sundering is the vaine^ task of 
 criticism." But I cannot read Swinburne and 
 not be compelled to divide his secondhand and 
 enfeebled and excited matter from the success- 
 ful art of his word. Of that word Francis 
 Thompson has said again, "It imposes a law 
 on the sense." Therefore, he too perceived 
 that fatal division. Is, then, the wisdom of 
 the maxim confounded? Or is Swinburne's a 
 "single and excepted case"? Excepted by a 
 thousand degrees of talent from any gener- 
 ality fitting the obviously lesser poets, but, pos- 
 sibly, also excepted by an essential inferiority 
 from this great maxim fitting only the greater? 
 75 F2 
 
CHARLOTTE AND EMILY 
 BRONTE 
 
 THE controversy here is with those 
 who admire Charlotte Bronte 
 throughout her career. She altered 
 greatly. She did, in faft, inherit a manner 
 of English that had been drained beyond 
 reftoration, fatigued beyond recovery, by the 
 "corrupt following" of Gibbon; and there 
 was within her a sense of propriety that 
 caused her to conform. Straitened and 
 serious elder daughter of her time, she 
 kept the house of literature. She praftised 
 those verbs, to evince, to reside, to intimate, 
 to peruse. She wrote "communicating in^ruc- 
 tion" for teaching; "an extensive and eligible 
 connexion"; "a small competency"; "an es- 
 tablishment on the Continent"; "It operated 
 as a barrier to further intercourse"; and of a 
 child (with a singular unfitness with child- 
 hood) "For the toys he possesses he seems to 
 have contracted a partiality amounting to affec- 
 77 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 tion." I have been already reproached for a 
 word on Gibbon written by way of parenthesis 
 in the course of an appreciation of some other 
 author. Let me, therefore, repeat that I am 
 writing of the corrupt foUowng of that apoftle 
 and not of his own ftyle. Gibbon's grammar 
 is frequently weak, but the corrupt followers 
 have something worse than poor grammar. 
 Gibbon set the fashion of "the latter" and 
 "the former." Our literature was for at leaft 
 half a century ftrewn with the wreckage of 
 Gibbon. "After suppressing a competitor who 
 had assumed the purple at Mentz, he refused 
 to gratify his troops with the plunder of the 
 rebellious city," writes the great hiftorian. 
 When Mr. Micawber confesses "gratifying 
 emotions of no common description" he con- 
 forms to a lofty and a diftant Gibbon. So does 
 Mr. Pecksniff when he says of the copper- 
 founder's daughter that she "has shed a 
 vision on my path refulgent in its nature." 
 And when an author, in a work on "The 
 Divine Comedy," recently told us that Paolo 
 and Francesca were to receive from Dante 
 "such alleviation as circumftances would 
 78 
 
CHARLOTTE AND EMILY BRONTE 
 allow," that also is a shattered, a wa^e Gibbon, 
 a waif of Gibbon. For Johnson less than Gib- 
 bon inflated the English our fathers inherited ; 
 because Johnson did not habitually or often 
 use imagery, whereas Gibbon did use habitual 
 imagery, and such use is what deprives a 
 language of elafticity, and leaves it either rigid 
 or languid, oftener languid. Encumbered by 
 this drift and refuse of English, Charlotte 
 Bronte yet achieved the miracle of her 
 vocabulary. It is less wonderful that she 
 should have appeared out of such a parsonage 
 than that she should have arisen out of such 
 a language. 
 
 A re-reading of her works is always a new 
 amazing of her reader who turns back to 
 review the harveft of her English. It mu^ 
 have been with rapture that she claimed her 
 own simplicity. And with what a moderation, 
 how temperately, and how seldom she used 
 her maftery! To the la^ she has an occasional 
 attachment to her bonds ; for she was not only 
 fire and air. In one passage of her life she may 
 remind us of the little colourless and thrifty 
 hen-bird that Lowell watched ne^-building 
 79 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 with her mate, and cutting short the flut- 
 terings and billings wherewith he would 
 joyously interrupt the business; Charlotte's 
 ne^ing bird was a clergyman. He came, 
 lately affianced, for a week's visit to her par- 
 sonage, and she wrote to her friend before his 
 arrival : "My little plans have been disarranged 
 
 by an intimation that Mr. is coming on 
 
 Monday"; and afterwards, in reference to her 
 sewing, "he hindered me for a full week." 
 
 In alternate pages Villette is a book of spirit 
 and fire, and a novel of illiberal rancour, of 
 ungenerous, uneducated anger, ungentle, 
 ignoble. In order to forgive its offences, we 
 have to remember in its author's favour not 
 her pure ftyle set free, not her splendour in 
 literature, but rather the immeasurable sorrow 
 of her life. To read of that sorrow again is to 
 open once more a wound which raaSi men 
 perhaps, certainly raoSt women, received into 
 their hearts in childhood. For the Life of 
 Charlotte Bronte is one of the fir^ books of 
 biography put into the hands of a child, to 
 whom Jane Eyre is allowed only in passages. 
 We are young when we firft hear in what 
 80 
 
CHARLOTTE AND EMILY BRONTE 
 narrow beds "the three are laid" — the two 
 sifters and the brother — and in what a bed 
 of living insufferable memories the one left 
 lay alone, re-saewing the hours of their death 
 — alone in the sealed house that was only less 
 narrow than their graves. The rich may set 
 apart and dedicate a room, the poor change 
 their ftreet, but Charlotte Bronte, in the close 
 captivity of the fortunes of mediocrity, refted 
 in the chair that had been her dying sifter's, 
 and held her melancholy bridals in the dining 
 room that had been the scene of terrible and 
 reluftant death. 
 
 But closer than the conscious house was 
 the conscious mind. Locked with intricate 
 wards within the unrelaxing and unlapsing 
 thoughts of this lonely sifter, dwelt a sorrow 
 inconsolable. It is well for the perpetual fel- 
 lowship of mankind that no child should read 
 this life and not take therefrom a perdurable 
 scar, albeit her heart was somewhat frigid 
 towards childhood, and she died before her 
 motherhood could be born. 
 
 Miftress of some of the beft prose of her 
 century, Charlotte Bronte was subjeft to a 
 8i 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 Lewes, a Chorley, a Miss Martineau : that is, 
 she suffered what in Italian is called soggezione 
 in their presence. When she had met six minor 
 contemporary writers — by-produ6ls of litera- 
 ture — at dinner, she had a headache and a 
 sleepless night. She writes to her friend that 
 these contributors to the quarterly press are 
 greatly feared in literary London, and there is 
 in her letter a sense of tremor and exhau^ion. 
 And what nights did the heads of the critics 
 undergo after the meeting.? Lewes, whose own 
 romances are all condoned, all forgiven by 
 time and oblivion, who gave her lessons, who 
 told her to ^udy Jane Au^en.? The others, 
 whose reviews doubtless did their propor- 
 tionate part in ftill further hunting and harry- 
 ing the tired English of their day.? And before 
 Harriet Martineau she bore herself reverently. 
 Harriet Martineau, albeit a woman of mascu- 
 line under^anding (we may imagine we hear 
 her contemporaries give her the title), could 
 not thread her way safely in and out of two or 
 three negatives, but wrote — about this very 
 Charlotte Bronte: "I did not consider the 
 book a coarse one, though I could not answer 
 82 
 
CHARLOTTE AND EMILY BRONTE 
 for it that there were no traits which, on a 
 second leisurely reading, I might not dislike." 
 Mrs. Gaskell quotes the passage with no 
 consciousness of anything amiss. 
 
 As for Lewes's vanished lesson upon the 
 methods of Jane Au^en, it served one only 
 sufficient purpose. Itself is not quoted by any- 
 one alive, but Charlotte Bronte's rejoinder 
 adds one to our little treasury of her incom- 
 parable pages. If they were twenty, they are 
 twenty-one by the addition of this, written in 
 a long-neglefted letter and saved for us by 
 Mr. Shorter's research, for I believe his is the 
 only record ; "What sees keenly, speaks aptly, 
 moves flexibly, it suits her to ftudy; but what 
 throbs fa^ and full, though hidden, what 
 blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat 
 of life and the sentient target of death — that 
 Miss AuSen ignores." 
 
 When the author of Jane Eyre faltered 
 before six authors, more or less, at dinner in 
 London, was it the writer of her second-class 
 English who was shy.? or was it the author of 
 the passages here to follow.'' — and therefore 
 one for whom the national tongue was much 
 83 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 the better? There can be little doubt. The 
 Charlotte Bronte who used the English of a 
 world long corrupted by "one good cu^om" 
 — ^the good cuftom of Gibbon's Latinity grown 
 fatally popular — could at any time hold up 
 her head amongft her reviewers ; for her there 
 was no sensitive interior solitude in that society. 
 She who cowered was the Charlotte who made 
 Rochefter recall "the simple yet sagacious 
 grace" of Jane's firft smile; she who wrote: 
 "I looked at my love; it shivered in my heart 
 like a suffering child in a cold cradle"; who 
 wrote: "To see what a heavy lid day slowly 
 lifted, what a wan glance she flung upon the 
 hills, you would have thought the sun's fire 
 quenched in laft night's floods." This new 
 genius was solitary and afraid, and touched to 
 the quick by the eyes and voice of judges. In 
 her worse ^le there was no "quick." Latin- 
 English, whether scholarly or unscholarly, is 
 the mediate tongue. An unscholarly Latin- 
 English is proof againft the world. The schol- 
 arly Latin-English wherefrom it is disa^rously 
 derived is, in its own nobler measure, a defence 
 againft more auguft assaults than those of 
 84 
 
CHARLOTTE AND EMILY BRONTE 
 criticism. In the ftrength of it did Johnson 
 hold parley with his profounder sorrows — 
 hold parley (by his phrase), make terms (by 
 his definition), give them at la^ lodging and 
 entertainment after sentence and treaty. 
 
 And the meaner ofiice of protedlion again^ 
 reviewers and the world was doubtless done 
 by the meaner Latinity. The author of the 
 phrase "The child contradled a partiality for 
 his toys" had no need to fear any authors she 
 might meet at dinner. Againft Charlotte 
 Bronte's sorrows her worse manner of English 
 never ^ands for a moment. Those vain phrases 
 fall from before her face and her bared heart. 
 To the heart, to the heart she took the shafts 
 of her griefs. She tells them therefore as she 
 suffered them, vitally and mortally. "A great 
 change approached. Affliftion came in that 
 shape which to anticipate is dread; to look 
 back on, grief. My sifter Emily firft declined. 
 Never in all her life had she lingered over any 
 task that lay before her, and she did not linger 
 now. She made hafte to leave us." "I remem- 
 bered where the three were laid — in what 
 narrow, dark dwellings." "Do you know this 
 
 85 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 place? No, you never saw it; but you recog- 
 nize the nature of these trees, this foliage — 
 the cypress, the willow, the yew. Stone crosses 
 like these are not unfamiliar to you, nor are 
 these dim garlands of everlafting flowers. Here 
 is the place." "Then the watcher approaches 
 the patient's pillow, and sees a new and Grange 
 moulding of the familiar features, feels at 
 once that the insufferable moment draws 
 nigh." In the same passage comes another 
 single word of genius, "the sound that so 
 waftes our ^rength." And, fine as "wa^es," 
 is the "wronged" of another sentence — 
 "some wronged and fettered wild beaft or 
 bird." 
 
 It is easy to gather such words, more diffi- 
 cult to separate the heSt from such a mingled 
 page as that on "Imagination": "A spirit, 
 softer and better than human reason, had 
 descended with quiet flight to the waste" ; and 
 "My hunger has this good angel appeased 
 with food sweet and Grange"; and "This 
 daughter of Heaven remembered me to-night ; 
 she saw me weep, and she came with comfort; 
 'Sleep,' she said, 'sleep sweetly — I gild thy 
 86 
 
CHARLOTTE AND EMILY BRONTE 
 dreams.' " "Was this feeling dead? I do not 
 know, but it was buried. Sometimes I thought 
 the tomb unquiet." 
 
 Perhaps the mo^ "eloquent" pages are un- 
 luckily those wherein we miss the friftion — 
 friftion of water to the oar, fridlion of air to 
 the pinion — fridion that sensibly proves the 
 use, the buoyancy, the aft of language. Some- 
 times an easy eloquence resembles the easy 
 labours of the daughters of Danaus. To draw 
 water in a sieve is an easy art, rapid and relaxed. 
 But no laxity is ever, I think, to be found 
 in her brief passages of landscape. "The keen, 
 ^ill cold of the morning was succeeded, later 
 in the day, by a sharp breathing from the Rus- 
 sian waftes; the cold zone sighed over the 
 temperate zone and froze it faft." "Not till 
 the deftroying angel of temped had achieved 
 his perfeft work would he fold the wings 
 whose waft was thunder, the tremor of whose 
 plumes was ^orm." "The night is not calm: 
 the equinox ftill druggies in its florms. The 
 wild rains of the day are abated : the great 
 single cloud disappears and rolls away from 
 Heaven, not passing and leaving a sea all sap- 
 87 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 phire, but tossed buoyant before a continued, 
 long-sounding, high-rushing moonlight tem- 
 ped. . . . No Endymion will watch for his 
 goddess to-night: there are no flocks on the 
 mountains." See, too, this ocean : "The sway 
 of the whole Great Deep above a herd of 
 whales rushing through the livid and liquid 
 thunder down from the frozen zone." And 
 this promise of the visionary Shirley: "I am 
 to be walking by myself on deck, rather late 
 of an Auguft evening, watching and being 
 watched by a full harveft moon : something is 
 to rise white on the surface of the sea, over 
 which that moon mounts silent, and hangs 
 glorious. ... I think I hear it cry with an arti- 
 culate voice. ... I show you an image fair as 
 alaba^er emerging from the dim wave." 
 
 Charlotte Bronte knew well the experience 
 of dreams. She seems to have undergone the 
 inevitable dream of mourners — the human 
 dream of the Labyrinth, shall I call it? the 
 uncertain spiritual journey in search of the 
 waiting and sequeftered dead, which is the 
 obscure subjedl of the "Eurydice" of Coventry 
 Patmore's Odes. There is the lately dead, in 
 88 
 
CHARLOTTE AND EMILY BRONTE 
 exile, remote, betrayed, foreign, indifferent, 
 sad, forsaken by some vague malice or negleft, 
 sought by troubled love aSray. 
 
 In Charlotte Bronte's page there is an 
 autumnal and tempe^uous dream. "A name- 
 less experience that had the hue, the mien, 
 the terror, the very tone of a visitation from 
 eternity. . . . Suffering brewed in temporal or 
 calculable measure taftes not as this suffering 
 tafted." Finally, is there any need to cite the 
 passage oijane Eyre that contains the avowal, 
 the vigil in the garden.? Those are not words 
 to be forgotten. Some tell you that a fine ^le 
 will give you the memory of a scene and not 
 of the recording words that are the author's 
 means. And others again would have the phrase 
 to be remembered foremo^. Here, then, in 
 Jane Eyre, are both memories equal. The 
 night is perceived, the phrase is an experi- 
 ence ; both have their place in the reader's irre- 
 vocable pa^. "Cuftom intervened between me 
 and what I naturally and inevitably loved." 
 "Jane, do you hear that nightingale singing 
 in the wood.""' "A waft of wind came sweeping 
 down the laurel walk, and trembled through 
 89 G 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 the boughs of the cheilnut; it wandered away 
 to an infinite diftance. . . . The nightingale's 
 voice was then the only voice of the hour; in 
 likening I again wept." 
 
 Whereas Charlotte Bronte walked, with 
 exultation and enterprise, upon the road of 
 symbols, under the guidance of her own 
 visiting genius, Emily seldom went out upon 
 those far avenues. She was one who praftised 
 imagery sparingly. Her ^yle had the key of 
 an inner prose which seems to leave imagery 
 behind in the way of approaches — the appa- 
 relled and arrayed approaches and ritual of 
 literature — and so to go further and to be ad- 
 mitted among simple realities and antitypes. 
 
 Charlotte Bronte also knew that simple goal, 
 but she loved her imagery. In the passage of 
 Jane Eyre that tells of the return to Thornfield 
 Hall, in ruins by fire, she bespeaks her reader's 
 romantic attention to an image which in truth 
 is not all golden. She has moments, on the 
 other hand, of pure narrative, whereof each 
 word is such a key as I spoke of but now, and 
 unlocks an inner and an inner plain door of 
 90 
 
CHARLOTTE AND EMILY BRONTE 
 spiritual realities. There is, perhaps, no author 
 who, simply telling what happened, tells it 
 with so great a significance: "Jane, did you 
 hear that nightingale singing in the wood?" 
 and "She made hafte to leave us." But 
 her charafteriftic calling is to images, those 
 avenues and temples oracular, and to the 
 vision of symbols. 
 
 You may hear the poet of great imagery 
 praised as a great my^ic. Nevertheless, al- 
 though a great my^ical poet makes images, 
 he does not do so in his greater moments. He 
 is a great myilic, because he has a full vision 
 of the myftery of realities, not because he has 
 a clear invention of similitudes. 
 
 Of many thousand kisses the poor la^, 
 and 
 
 Now with his love, now in the colde grave 
 
 are lines on the yonder side of imagery. So is 
 this line also : 
 
 Sad with the promise of a different sun, 
 
 and 
 
 Piteous passion keen at having found, 
 After exceeding ill, a little good. 
 
 91 G2 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 Shakespeare, Chaucer and Patmore yield us 
 these great examples. Imagery is for the time 
 when, as in these lines, the shock of feeling 
 (which mu^ needs pass, as the heart beats 
 and pauses) is gone by: 
 
 Thy heart with dead winged innocences filled. 
 
 Even as a neft with birds, 
 
 After the old ones by the hawk are killed. 
 
 I cite these lines of Patmore's because of their 
 imagery in a poem that without them would 
 be insupportably close to spiritual fafts; and 
 because it seems to prove with what a yielding 
 hand at play the poet of realities holds his 
 symbols for a while. A great writer is both a 
 major and a minor myftic, in the self-same 
 poem; now suddenly close to his myftery 
 (which is his greater moment) and anon 
 making it myfterious with imagery (which is 
 the moment of his moft beautiful lines). 
 
 The ftudent passes delighted through the 
 several courts of poetry, from the outer to the 
 inner, from riches to more imaginative riches, 
 and from decoration to more complex decora- 
 tion; and prepares himself for the greater 
 opulence of the innermoft chamber. But when 
 92 
 
CHARLOTTE AND EMILY BRONTE 
 he crosses the laft threshold he finds this mid- 
 moft sandluary to be a hypsethral temple, and 
 in its cu^ody and care a simple earth and a 
 space of sky. 
 
 Emily Bronte seems to have a nearly 
 unparalleled unconsciousness of the delays, 
 the charms, the pauses and preparations of 
 imagery. Her ftrength does not dally with the 
 parenthesis, and her simplicity is ignorant of 
 those rites. Her lesser work, therefore, is plain 
 narrative, and her greater work is no more. On 
 the hither side — ^the daily side — of imagery 
 she is ftill a ^rong and solitary writer; on the 
 yonder side she has written some of the moft 
 my^erious passages in all plain prose. And 
 with what direft and incommunicable art! 
 " 'Let me alone, let me alone,' said Catherine. 
 'If I've done wrong, I'm dying for it. You 
 left me too ... I forgive you. Forgive mel' 
 'It is hard to forgive, and to look at those eyes 
 and feel those wa^ed hands,' he answered. 
 'Kiss me again, and don't let me see your eyes 1 
 I forgive what you have done to me. I love 
 my murderer — hut yours! How can I?' They 
 were silent, their faces hid again^ each other, 
 
 93 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 and washed by each other's tears." "So much 
 the worse for me that I am ftrong," cries 
 HeathclifF in the same scene. "Do I want to 
 live? What kind of living will it be when you 
 
 Oh God, would you like to live with 
 
 your soul in the grave?" 
 
 Charlotte Bronte's nobleft passages are her 
 own speech or the speech of one like herself 
 adting the central part in the dreams and 
 dramas of emotion that she had kept from her 
 girlhood — ^the unavowed cuftom of the ordin- 
 ary girl by her so splendidly avowed in a con- 
 fidence that comprised the world. Emily had 
 no such confessions to publish. She contrived 
 — but the word does not befit her singular 
 spirit of liberty, that knew nothing of health 
 — ^to remove herself from the world; as her 
 person left no pen-portrait, so her "I" is not 
 heard here. She lends her voice in disguise 
 to her men and women ; the fir^ narrator of 
 her great romance is a young man, the second 
 a servant woman ; this one or that among the 
 aftors takes up the ftory, and her great words 
 sound at times in paltry mouths. It is then 
 that for a moment her reader seems about to 
 94 
 
CHARLOTTE AND EMILY BRONTE 
 come into her immediate presence, but by a 
 fidtion she denies herself to him. To a some- 
 what trivial girl (or a girl who would be trivial 
 in any other book, but Emily Bronte seems 
 unableto create anything consiftently meagre) 
 — to Isabella Linton she commits one of her 
 mo^ memorable passages, and one which 
 has the rare image, one of a terrifying little 
 company of visions amid terrifying facts: 
 "His attention was roused, I saw, for his 
 eyes rained down tears among the ashes. . . , 
 The clouded windows of hell flashed for a 
 moment towards me; the fiend which usually 
 looked out was so dimmed and drowned." 
 But in Heathcliff's own speech there is no veil 
 or circumftance. "I'm too happy; and yet I'm 
 not happy enough. My soul's bliss kills my 
 body, but does not satisfy itself." "I have to 
 remind myself to breathe, and almoft to 
 remind my heart to beat" "Being alone, and 
 conscious two yards of loose earth was the sole 
 barrier between us, I said to myself: 'I'll have 
 her in my arms again.' If she be cold, I'll 
 think it is this north wind that chills me; and 
 if she be motionless, it is sleep." What art, 
 
 95 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 moreover, what knowledge, what a fresh ear 
 for the clash of repetition; what a chime in 
 that phrase : "I dreamt I was sleeping the la^ 
 sleep by that sleeper, with my heart topped, 
 and my cheek frozen again^ hers." 
 
 Emily Bronte was no ^udent of books. It 
 was not from among the fruits of any other 
 author's labour that she gathered these emi- 
 nent words. But I think I have found the 
 sugge^ion of this a£lion of HeathclifF's — ^the 
 disinterment. Not in any inspiring ancient 
 Irish legend, as has been sugge^ed, did Emily 
 Bronte find her incident; she found it (but 
 she made, and did not find, its beauty) in a 
 mere co^ume romance of Bulwer Lytton, 
 whom Charlotte Bronte, as we know, did not 
 admire. And Emily showed no sign at all of 
 admiration when she did him so much honour 
 as to borrow the adtion of his ^udio^bravo. 
 
 Heathcliff 's love for Catherine's paft child- 
 hood is one of the profound surprises of this 
 unparalleled book; it is to call her childish 
 gho^ — the ghoft of the little girl — when she 
 has been a dead adult woman twenty years 
 that the inhuman lover opens the window of 
 96 
 
CHARLOTTE AND EMILY BRONTE 
 the house on the Heights. Something is this 
 that the reader knew not how to look for. 
 Another thing known to genius and beyond 
 a reader's hope is the tempe^uous purity of 
 those passions. This wild quality of purity has 
 a counterpart in the brief passages of nature 
 that make the summers, the waters, the woods, 
 and the windy heights of that murderous Story 
 seem so sweet. The "beck" that was audible 
 beyond the hills after rain, the "heath on the top 
 of Wuthering Heights" whereon, in her dream 
 of Heaven, Catherine, flung out by angry 
 angels, awoke sobbing for joy ; the bird whose 
 feathers she — delirious creature — ^plucks from 
 the pillow of her deathbed ("This — I should 
 know it among a thousand — it's a lapwing's. 
 Bonny bird; wheeling over our heads in the 
 middle of the moor. It wanted to get to its 
 neit, for the clouds had touched the swells 
 and it felt rain coming"); the only two white 
 spots of snow left on all the moors, and the 
 brooks brim-full ; the old apple-trees, the smell 
 of Socks and wallflowers in the brief summer, 
 the few fir-trees by Catherine's window-bars, 
 the early moon — I know not where are land- 
 97 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 
 scapes more exquisite and natural. And among 
 the signs of death where is any fresher than 
 the window seen from the garden to be swing- 
 ing open in the morning, when HeathclifFlay 
 within, dead and drenched with rain? 
 
 None of these things are presented by 
 images. Nor is that signal passage where- 
 with the book comes to a close. Be it per- 
 mitted to cite it here again. It has taken its 
 place, it is among the paragons of our 
 literature. Our language will not lapse or 
 derogate while this prose ^ands for appeal: 
 "I lingered . . . under that benign sky; 
 watched the moths fluttering among the 
 heath and harebells, likened to the soft wind 
 breathing through the grass, and wondered 
 how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slum- 
 bers for the sleepers in that quiet earth." 
 
 Finally, of Emily Bronte's face the world 
 holds only an obviously unskilled refledtion, 
 and of her aspeft no record worth having. 
 Wild fugitive, she vanished, she escaped, she 
 broke aw^y, exiled by the negleft of her con- 
 temporaries, banished by their disrespeft, out- 
 lawed by their contempt, dismissed by their 
 98 
 
CHARLOTTE AND EMILY BRONTE 
 
 indifference. And such an one was she as might 
 rather have pronounced upon these the sen- 
 tence passed by Coriolanus under sentence of 
 expulsion; she might have driven the world 
 from before her face and caft it out from her 
 presence as he condemned his Romans: "/ 
 banish you." 
 
 99 
 
CHARMIAN 
 
 I HE is not Cleopatra, but she is at lea^ 
 I Charmian," wrote Keats, conscious that 
 his damsel was not in the vanward of 
 the pageant of ladies. One may divine that 
 he counted the ways wherein she was not 
 Cleopatra, the touches whereby she fell short 
 of and differed from, nay, in which she 
 mimicked, the Queen. 
 
 In like manner many of us have for some 
 years paft boated of our appreciation of the 
 inferior beauty, the sub^itute, the waiting 
 gentlewoman of corrupt or corruptible heart; 
 Keats confessed, but did not boa^. It is a 
 vaunt now, an emulation, who shall discover 
 her beauty, who shall discern her. 
 
 She is mo^ conspicuous in the atmosphere 
 in smoke "effe€ts" in the "lurid," the 
 "myftery"; such are the perfervid words. But 
 let us take the natural and authentic light as 
 our symbol of Cleopatra, her sprightly port, 
 her infinite je^, her blue^ vein, her variety, 
 her laugh. "O Ea^ern ftar!" 
 
 lOI 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 Men in cities look upward not much more 
 than animals, and these — except the dog when 
 he bays the moon — ^look skyward not at all. 
 The events of the sky do not come and go for 
 the citizens, do not visibly approach and with- 
 draw, threaten and pardon ; they merely hap- 
 pen. And even when the sun so condescends 
 as to face them at the level of their own hori- 
 zon (say from the weftern end of the Bays- 
 water Road), when he searches out the eyes 
 that have negledled him all day, finds a way 
 between their narrowing lids, looks ^raight 
 into their unwelcoming pupils, explores the 
 careful wrinkles, singles and numbers the dull 
 hairs, even, I say, to sudden sunset in our dim 
 climate, the Londoner makes no reply; he 
 would rather look into puddles than into the 
 pools of light among clouds. 
 
 Yet the light is as charafteri^ic of a country 
 as is its landscape. So that I would travel for 
 the sake of a charafter of early morning, for a 
 quality of noonday, or a tone of afternoon, or 
 an accident of moonrise, or a colour of dusk, 
 at leaft as far as for a mountain, a cathedral, 
 rivers, or men. The light is more important 
 
 102 
 
CHARMIAN 
 than what it illuminates. When Mr. Tomkins 
 — a person of Dickens's earlieft invention — 
 calls his fellow-boarders from the breakfaft- 
 table to the window, and with emotion shows 
 them the effedt of sunshine upon the left side 
 of a neighbouring chimney-pot, he is far 
 from cutting the grotesque figure that the 
 humouri^ intended to point out to banter. 
 I am not sure that the chimney-pot with the 
 pure light upon it was not more beautiful 
 than a whole black Greek or a whole black 
 Gothic building in the adulterated light of a 
 cu^omary London day. Nor is the pleasure 
 that many writers, and a certain number of 
 painters, tell us they owe to such adulteration 
 anything other than a sign of derogation — in 
 a word, a pleasure in the secondary thing. 
 
 Are we the better artifts for our preference 
 of the waiting-woman.'' It is a Grange claim. 
 The search for the beauty of the less-beautiful 
 is a modern enterprise, ingenious in its minor 
 pranks, insolent in its greater. And its chief 
 ignobility is the love of marred, defiled, 
 disordered, dulled, and imperfedl skies, the 
 skies of cities. 
 
 103 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 Some will tell us that the unveiled light is 
 too clear or sharp for art. So much the worse 
 for art; but even on that plea the limitations 
 of art are better respefted by natural mi^, 
 cloudy gloom of natural rain, natural twilight 
 before night, or natural twilight — Corot's — 
 before day, than by the artificial dimness of 
 our unlovely towns. Those, too, who praise 
 the "myftery" of smoke are praising rather a 
 myftification than a myftery ; and muft be un- 
 aware of the profounder my^eries of light. 
 Light is all my^ery when you face the sun, 
 and every particle of the innumerable atmo- 
 sphere carries its infinitesimal shadow. 
 
 Moreover, it is only in some parts of the 
 world that we should ask for even natural veils. 
 In California we may, not because the light is 
 too luminous, but because it is not tender. 
 Clear and not tender in California, tender and 
 not clear in England; light in Italy and in 
 Greece is both tender and clear. 
 
 When one complains of the ill-luck of 
 
 modern utilities, the sympathetic liftener is apt 
 
 to agree, but to agree wrongly by denouncing 
 
 the eleftric light as something modern to be 
 
 104 
 
CHARMIAN 
 deplored. But the eleftric light is the one 
 success of the laft century. It is never out of 
 harmony with natural things — ^villages, ancient 
 greets of cities, where it makes the moft beau- 
 tiful of all ^reet-lighting, swung from house 
 to opposite house in Genoa or Rome. With 
 no shock, except a shock of pleasure, does the 
 judicious traveller, entering some small sub- 
 alpine hamlet, find the eleftric light, fairly, 
 sparingly spaced, slung from tree to tree over 
 the little road, and note it again in the frugal 
 wine-shop, and solitary and clear over the 
 church portal. 
 
 Yet, forsooth, if yielding to the suggeftions 
 of your re^less hobby, you denounce, in any 
 company, the spoiling of your Italy, the hearer, 
 calling up a "mumping visnomy," thinks he 
 echoes your complaint by his sigh, "Ah, yes 
 — the eledlric light; you meet it everywhere 
 now; so modern, so disenchanting." It is, on 
 the contrary, enchanting. It is as natural as 
 lightning. By all means let all the waterfalls in 
 all the Alps be "harnessed," as the lamenta- 
 tion runs, if their servitude gives us eleftric 
 light. For thus the power of the waterfall 
 105 H 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 kindles a lovely lamp. All this to be done by th( 
 simple force of gravitation — the powerful fal 
 of water. "Wonderful, all that water coming 
 down!" cried the touri^ at Niagara, and the 
 Irishman said, "Why wouldn't it.?" He recog- 
 nised the simplicity of that power. It is s 
 second-rate passion — ^that for the waterfall, and 
 often exadling in regard to visitors from town, 
 "I trudged unwillingly," says Dr. Johnson, 
 "and was not sorry to find it dry." It was very, 
 very second-rate of an American admirer ol 
 scenery to name a waterfall in the Yosemite 
 Valley (and it bears the name to-day) the 
 "Bridal Veil." His Indian predecessor had 
 called it, because it was moSt audible in mena- 
 cing weather, "The Voice of the Evil Wind." 
 In fa6l, your cascade is dearer to every senti- 
 mentalift than the sky. Standing near the 
 folding-over place of Niagara, at the top of the 
 fall, I looked across the perpetual rainbow of 
 the foam, and saw the whole further sky 
 deflowered by the formless, edgeless, languid, 
 abhorrent murk of smoke from the neareft 
 town. Much rather would I see that water put 
 to use than the sky so outraged. As it is, only 
 1 06 
 
CHARMIAN 
 by picking one's way between cities can one 
 walk under, or as it were in, a pure sky. The 
 horizon in Venice is thick and ochreous, and 
 no one cares; the sky of Milan is defiled all 
 round. In England I mu^ choose a path 
 alertly; and so does now and then a wary, 
 fortunate, faftidious wind that has so found 
 his exaft, uncharted way, between this smoke 
 and that, as to clear me a clean moonrise, and 
 heavenly heavens. 
 
 There was an ominous prophecy to Char- 
 mian. "You shall outlive the lady whom you 
 serve." She has outlived her in every city in 
 Europe; but only for the time of setting 
 ftraight her crown — the \a§t servility. She 
 could not live but by comparison with the 
 Queen. 
 
 107 H2 
 
THE CENTURY OF 
 MODERATION 
 
 AFTER a long literary revolt — one of 
 the recurrences of imperishable Ro- 
 mance — ^again^ the eighteenth-cen- 
 tury authors, a reaction was due^ and it has 
 come about roundly. We are guided back to 
 admiration of the measure and moderation and 
 shapeliness of the Auguftan age. And indeed 
 it is well enough that we should compare — 
 not necessarily check — some of our habits 
 of thought and verse by the mediocrity of 
 thought and perfeft propriety of diftion of 
 Pope's beft contemporaries. If this were all! 
 But the eighteenth century was not content 
 with its sure and certain genius. Suddenly and 
 repeatedly it aspired to a "noble rage." It is not 
 to the wild light hearts of the seventeenth 
 century that we muft look for extreme conceits 
 and for extravagance, but to the later age, tc 
 the faultless, to the frigid, dissatisfied with 
 their own propriety. There were ^raws, 1 
 109 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 confess, in the hair of the older poets ; the 
 eighteenth-century men ^ck ftraws in their 
 periwigs. 
 
 That time — surpassing and correfting the 
 century then juSl paft in "tafte" — ^was resolved 
 to make a low leg to no age, antique or 
 modern, in the chapter of the passions — nay, 
 to show the way, to fire the nations. Addison 
 taught himself, as his hero "taught the doubt- 
 ful battle," "where to rage," And in the later 
 years of the same literary century Johnson 
 himself summoned the lapsed and alien and 
 reludlant fury. Take such a word as "madded" 
 — "the madded land"; there indeed is a word 
 created for the noble rage, as the eighteenth 
 century underwood it. Look you, Johnson 
 himself could lodge the fury in his responsible 
 breaft: 
 
 And dubious title shakes the madded land. 
 There is no author of that time of modera- 
 tion and good sense who does not thus more 
 or less eat a crocodile. It is not necessary to 
 go to the bad poets ; we need go no lower than 
 the good. 
 
 And gasping Furies thirft for blood in vain, 
 no 
 
THE CENTURY OF MODERATION 
 says Pope seriously(but the sense of burlesque 
 never leaves the reader). Also 
 
 There purple vengeance bath'd in gore retires. 
 In the only passage of the Dunciad meant to 
 be poetic and not ironic and spiteful, he has 
 "the panting gales" of a garden he describes. 
 Match me such an absurdity among the "con- 
 ceits" of the age preceding! 
 
 A noble and ingenious author, so called by 
 
 high authority but left anonymous, pretends 
 
 (it is always pretending with these people, 
 
 never fine fidlion or a frank lie) that on the 
 
 tomb of Virgil he had had a vision of that 
 
 deceased poet: 
 
 Crowned with eternal bays my ravished eyes 
 Beheld the poet's awful form arise. 
 
 Virgil tells the noble and ingenious one that 
 
 if Pope will but write upon some graver 
 
 themes, 
 
 Envy to black Cocytus shall retire 
 
 And howl with furies in tormenting fire. 
 
 "Genius," says another authoritative writer in 
 
 prose, "is caused by a furious joy and pride 
 
 of soul." 
 
 If, leaving the great names, we pass in 
 
 III 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 
 review the worse poets we find, in Pope's 
 
 essay "On the Art of Sinking in Poetry," 
 
 things like these, gathered from the grave 
 
 writings of his contemporaries : 
 
 In flaming heaps the raging ocean rolls. 
 Whose livid waves involve despairing souls; 
 The liquid burnings dreadful colours shew, 
 Some deeply red, and others faintly blue. 
 
 And a war-horse ! 
 
 His eye-balls burn, he wounds the smoking plain. 
 And knots of scarlet ribbon deck his mane. 
 
 And a demon ! 
 
 Provoking demons all re^raint remove. 
 
 Here is more eighteenth-century "propriety" : 
 
 The hills forget they're fixed, and in their fright 
 Caft off their weight, and ease themselves for flight. 
 The woods, with terror winged, out-fly the wind, 
 And leave the heavy, panting hills behind. 
 
 Again, from Nat Lee's Alexander the Great: 
 
 When Glory, like the dazzling eagle, ^ood 
 Perched on my beaver in the Granic flood; 
 When Fortune's self my ^andard trembling bore. 
 And the pale Fates ^ood 'frighted on the shore. 
 
 Of these lines, with another couplet, Dr. War- 
 burton said that they "contain not only the 
 mo^ sublime but the moS judicious imagery 
 
 112 
 
THE CENTURY OF MODERATION 
 
 that poetry could conceive or paint" And here 
 are lines from a tragedy, for me anonymous : 
 
 Should the fierce North, upon his frozen wings, 
 Bear him aloft above the wondering clouds. 
 And seat him in the Pleiads' golden chariot, 
 Thence should my fury drag him down to tortures. 
 
 Again : 
 
 Kiss, while I watch thy swimming eye-balls roll, 
 Watch thy laft gasp, and catch thy springing soul. 
 
 It was the age of common-sense, we are told, 
 and truly, but of common-sense now and then 
 dissatisfied, common-sense here and there 
 ambitious, common-sense of a diSindlively 
 adult kind taking on an innocent tone. I find 
 this little affeftation in Pope's word "sky" 
 where a simpler poet would have "skies" or 
 "heavens." Pope has "sky" more than once, 
 and always with a little false air of simplicity. 
 And one inftance occurs in that mafterly and 
 moft beautiful poem, the "Elegy on an Un- 
 fortunate Lady" : 
 
 Is there no bright reversion in the sky? 
 
 "Yes, my boy, we may hope so," is the reader's 
 implicit mental aside, if the reader be a man 
 of humour. Let me, however, suggeft no dis- 
 
 113. 
 
HEARTS OF CONTROVERSY 
 respeft towards this lovely elegy, of which 
 the la^ eight lines have an inimitable great- 
 ness, a tenderness and passion which the 
 "Epiftle of Eloisa" makes convulsive move- 
 ments to attain but never attains. And yet 
 how could one, by an example, place the splen- 
 did seventeenth century in closer — ^in slighter 
 yet more significant — comparison with the 
 eighteenth than thus? Here is Ben Jonson : 
 
 What beckoning gho^ besprent with April dew, 
 Hails me so solemnly to yonder yew? 
 
 And this is Pope's improvement : 
 
 What beckoning ghoft along the moonlight shade 
 Invites my fteps, and points to yonder glade? 
 
 But Pope follows this insipid couplet with 
 
 two lines as exquisitely and nobly modulated 
 
 as anything I know in that national metre: 
 
 'Tis she! but why that bleeding bosom gored. 
 Why dimly gleams the visionary sword? 
 
 That indeed is "music" in English verse — 
 
 the counterpart of a great melody, not of a 
 
 tune. 
 
 The eighteenth century matched its desire 
 
 for wildness in poetry with a like craving in 
 
 gardens. The symmetrical and architeftural 
 
 114 
 
THE CENTURY OF MODERATION 
 garden, so magnificent in Italy, and lately 
 though more rigid and less glorious in France, 
 was scorned by the eighteenth-century poet- 
 gardeners. Why? Because it was "artificial," 
 and the eighteenth century muft have "nature" 
 — nay passion. There seems to be some plan 
 of passion in Pope's grotto, ^uck with spar 
 and little shells. 
 
 Truly the age of the "Rape of the Lock" 
 and the "Elegy" was an age of great wit and 
 great poetry. Yet it was untrue to itself. I 
 think no other century has cherished so per- 
 si^ent a self-conscious incongruity. As the 
 century of good sense and good couplets it 
 might have kept uncompromised the dignity 
 we honour. But such inappropriate pranks 
 have come to pass in hiftory now and again. 
 The Bishop of Hereford, in merry Barnsdale, 
 "danced in his boots"; but he was coerced by 
 Robin Hood. 
 
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