PaJ 
 
 CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 FROM 
 
 The •'^state of L.L.'^eaman 
 
DATE DUE 
 
 R '^.?,. 
 
 ii 
 
 rrmayi n 
 
 fdq^ 
 
 ^Y 1^ 190£QZ - 
 
 Hqi 
 
 '^^^^^-^SSJljb 
 
 Cornell University Library 
 PN 511.M11 1892 
 
 Essays in literary interpretation. 
 
 3 1924 026 941 686 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924026941686 
 
ESSAYS 
 
 IN 
 
 LITERARY INTERPRETATION 
 
WORKS BY MR. MABIE. 
 
 MY STUDY FIRE. iimo, cloth, $1.25- 
 
 UNDER THE TREES AND ELSE- 
 WHERE. i2mo, cloth, J1.25. 
 
 SHORT STUDIES IN LITERATURE. 
 
 i2mo, cloth, S1.25. 
 
 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRE- 
 TATION. i2mo, cioth, jfi.25. 
 
 DODD, MEAD & COMPMT, PubUshers. 
 
ESSAYS IN LITERARY 
 
 INTERPRETATION 
 
 BY 
 
 HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE 
 
 $ 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 
 
 1892 
 
Copyright, 1892, 
 By Dodd, Mead and Company. 
 
 AU rights reserved. 
 
 Press of J. J. Little & Co. 
 Astor Place, New York 
 
5Eo mg ffilaggmates mti jjtientis, 
 
 G. STANLEY HALL 
 
 AND 
 
 FRANCIS LYNDE STETSON. 
 
INTRODUCTORY NOTE. 
 
 Three of the essays included in this volume were 
 contributed to the " Andover Review," and are repub- 
 lished by the courtesy of its editors. Personality in 
 Literary Work and the Significance of the Modern 
 Critical Movement in Literature were very briefly 
 presented in "Short Studies in Literature." They 
 are here discussed at much greater length and with 
 fuller illustration. 
 
 August, 1892. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Page 
 
 Some Aspects of Modern Literature ... i 
 
 Personality in Literary Work 20 
 
 The Significance of Modern Criticism . . 46 
 
 The Poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti . 71 
 
 Robert Browning 99 
 
 John Keats: Poet and Man 138 
 
 Some Modern Readings from Dante . . . 175 
 
 A Word about Humour 206 
 
ESSAYS 
 
 IN 
 
 LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 SOME ASPECTS OF MODERN LITERATURE. 
 
 Mr. Andrew Lang, in a recent article on the 
 Greek Anthology, reminds us that in many of these 
 fragments of a rich and varied literature we come 
 upon lines full of the modern spirit. The large 
 objective manner of the earlier poets has given place 
 to an introspective mood significant of a deepening 
 self-consciousness, and the remote epic themes have 
 been succeeded by subjects more intimate and per- 
 sonal. It is true that no period of literature is wholly 
 destitute of glimpses into familiar life, of disclosures 
 of personal experience ; but when the epic and the 
 drama are in the ascendant, these are incidental and 
 subordinate. The great emotions and convictions are 
 presented in types and symbols; multitudes of persons 
 are represented by colossal figures, the range and 
 compass of whose lives create an impression of 
 universality. The pyramids are race monuments ; 
 they have preserved no record of the individual hard- 
 
2 SSSAVS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 ship and sacrifice involved in their construction. In 
 like manner the Book of Job, " Prometheus Bound," 
 " CEdipus Tyrannus," and the " Cid " perpetuate ages 
 of personal experience and achievement in com- 
 manding types of human nature. The personal ele- 
 ment is the very substance of which these typical men 
 and women are formed ; but art has discarded that 
 which was individual, in its instinctive search for 
 those qualities which are of universal moment and 
 significance. The personal element enters as sub- 
 stance, but not as form, in the earlier literatures ; 
 the individual is of value only as he contributes to 
 those ideal conceptions which live and act in epic 
 remoteness from common life. The mountains are 
 of the same substance as the plain ; but on their 
 summits the shepherd's pipe is not heard, nor are 
 the sheep housed there. 
 
 We note here one of the most striking differences 
 between the literature of comparatively modern 
 origin and that of earlier periods. The books of 
 this century, contrasted with those of preceding 
 centuries, present a greatly increased complexity of 
 motives, moods, themes, situations. Probably not 
 one phase of experience of any significance has 
 escaped record at the hands of poet, novelist, 
 essayist, or critic. Never before has there been 
 such a universal confession of sins to a confessor 
 devoid of any power of absolution; never before 
 such a complete and outspoken revelation of the 
 things which belong to our most secret lives. The 
 
SOME ASPECTS OP MODERN LITERATURE. 3 
 
 old declaration that there is nothing hidden which 
 shall not be revealed is already fulfilled in our hear- 
 ing. Those of us who read books must be slow of 
 mind and of heart if we have missed a real and 
 vital knowledge of the age in which, and the men 
 among whom, we live. An impartial spirit of revela- 
 tion presides over the world of our time and uncovers 
 the unclean and the loathsome as persistently as the 
 pure and the good. The selective principle of the 
 older art has given place to a profound passion for 
 knowledge of life ; we are determined to know what 
 is in man at all risks to our tastes and our conven- 
 tional standards. The process is disagreeable, but 
 the fact is significant ; and we shall make a great mis- 
 take if in our detestation of the methods of some 
 contemporary writers we refuse to see the meaning 
 of their appearance and activity. 
 
 Literature is so closely related to the whole move- 
 ment of life that every decided tendency which it 
 discloses, every dominant impulse which it reveals, 
 may be studied with the certainty that some fact of 
 human experience, some energy of human purpose 
 and desire, lies behind. The reflection of moving 
 stars and overhanging trees in the depths of still 
 waters is not more perfect than the reproduction of 
 the thoughts and aims and passions of a generation 
 in the books it writes and reads. This conception 
 of the indissoluble union of literature and life is no 
 longer novel and startling to us; but we have so 
 recently come to understand it that we have not yet 
 
4 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 fully grasped all there is in it of suggestive and fruit- 
 ful truth. Not until we have finally and forever 
 abandoned the old conception of literature as an art 
 conformed to certain fixed and final standards shall 
 we leam the deepest things which books have to 
 teach us. So long as we conceive of literature as an 
 art whose limitations and methods have been estab- 
 lished for all time, we shall have small comprehen- 
 sion of modern literature, very imperfect sympathy 
 with it, and a very inadequate conception of its mean- 
 ing and its tendency. 
 
 Compared with the literature of earlier periods, 
 modern books, as has been said, show distinctly and 
 obviously an immensely increased complexity of form 
 and spirit ; the passion for truth and for expression 
 has become so general and so powerful that it has 
 burst many ancient channels and made countless new 
 courses for itself. Literature to-day tells the whole 
 truth so far as it knows it ; formerly it told only such 
 truths as were consistent with certain theories of art. 
 If a modern artist were to paint the parting of Aga- 
 memnon and Iphigenia, he would tell the whole story 
 in the agony of the father's face ; the Greek artist, 
 on the other hand, veiled the father's anguish in order 
 that the high tranquillity of art might not be disturbed. 
 When Agamemnon was murdered, or CEdipus with 
 his own hand put out his eyes that they might not be 
 the unwilling witnesses of his doom, the theatre knew 
 only by report that these events had taken place; 
 to-day the whole direful course of the tragedy is 
 
SOME ASPECTS OP MODERN LITERATURE. S 
 
 wrought out in full view of the spectators. It may be 
 urged that this removal of the old limits of proper 
 representation in art marks a decadence of the art 
 spirit, a loss of the instinct which set impalpable 
 bounds to the work of the imagination. But it is 
 evident that this expansion of the scope of artistic 
 representation has not been consciously brought about 
 by men who have worked to a common end and be- 
 queathed to their intellectual successors a tradition of 
 iconoclasm. The change has come so slowly and so 
 inevitably that it must be recognized as a universal 
 movement, — the working out of impulses and instincts 
 which are a part of universal human nature, and, 
 therefore, normal and necessary. Great literary move- 
 ments are never consciously directed ; they are always 
 the expression through art of some fresh energy of 
 conviction, some new and large hope and passion 
 of a race or an epoch. The general development of 
 literature is, therefore, in its main directions inevi- 
 table and beneficent ; if it were not so, progress would 
 be a blunder and life a stagnant pool rather than a 
 running stream. 
 
 While there have been periods of decadence, we 
 must assume that the unfolding of the literary power 
 and faculty has been progressive, and has taken 
 place under laws whose operation has been above 
 and beyond human control. Men have spoken 
 through all the forms of art thoughts of whose 
 origin and final outcome they have known as little 
 ,'is one knows of the ports from which and to which 
 
6 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 the vessels sail as they come and go against the blue 
 of the offing. The expansion of the field of litera- 
 ture has not been a matter of choice; it has been 
 a matter of necessity, and our chief concern is to 
 accept it as a revelation of the general order under 
 which we live, and to seek to understand the mean- 
 ing of it. Students of literature know that when they 
 come upon a period of large and fruitful activity, they 
 will find the literary movement contemporaneous 
 with some widespread and vital movement of thought, 
 some profound stirring of the depths of popular life. 
 Without the unusual enrichment of soil, the sudden 
 and affluent fertility never takes place. If the Eng- 
 lish people had not been charged with an outpouring 
 of national spirit strong enough to invigorate English 
 life from the Strand to the Spanish Main, the great 
 drama of Shakespeare and his fellow- craftsmen would 
 not have been written. If literature has been vastly 
 extended, it has been because the literary impulse 
 has made itself more generally felt. Formerly a few 
 men and women wrote the books of the world. They 
 were the voices of a silent world; as we listen, we 
 seem at first to hear no other words but theirs. We 
 might hastily conclude that there were no thoughts in 
 those old times but those that come to us from a few 
 lips, musical with an eloquence which charms time 
 itself into silence and memory. These great souls 
 must surely have been of other substance than the 
 countless multitudes who died and gave no sound ; 
 remote from the lost and forgotten civilizations which 
 
SOME ASPECTS OP MODERN LITERATURE. ^ 
 
 surrounded them, they breathed a larger air and 
 moved with the gods. But as we listen more in- 
 tently and patiently, these puissant tones seem to 
 issue from a world-wide inarticulate murmur; they 
 are no longer solitary ; they interpret that which lies 
 unspoken in countless hearts. How solitary Job sits 
 among his griefs as we look back upon him ! All 
 the races who dwelt about him have vanished ; the 
 world of activity and thought in which he lived has 
 perished utterly ; but there stands the immortal 
 singer with that marvellous song, — " sublime sorrow, 
 sublime reconciliation ; oldest choral melody as of 
 the heart of mankind ; so soft and great ; as the 
 summer midnight, as the world with its seas and 
 stars." But this sublime argument, which moves on 
 with such a sweep of wing, is not the thought of Job 
 alone ; it is the groping, doubting aspiration of the 
 East finding voice and measure for itself; it is the 
 movement of the mind of a people through its long 
 search for truth ; it is the spiritual history of a race. 
 The lonely thinker, under those clear Eastern skies, 
 made himself the interpreter of the world which he 
 alone has survived. Back of the great poem there 
 is an unwritten history greater and more pathetic 
 than the poem itself, could we but uncover it. 
 
 Great books are born not in the intellect, but in 
 experience, — in the contact of mind and heart with 
 the great and terrible facts of life ; the great concep- 
 tions of literature originate not in the individual mind, 
 but in the soil of common human hopes, loves, fears, 
 
8 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 aspirations, sufferings. Shakespeare did not invent 
 Hamlet; he found him in human histories already 
 acted out to the tragic end. Goethe did not create 
 Faust ; he summoned him out of the dim mediaeval 
 world, brought him face to face with the crucial ex- 
 periences of life, and so fashioned a character and 
 a career which have become typical. "It takes a 
 great deal of life," said Alfred de Musset, " to make 
 a little art." The more deeply we study great books 
 the more clear it becomes that literature is not pri- 
 marily an art born of skill and training, but the ex- 
 pression of man's growth into comprehension of his 
 own life and of the sublime order of which he is part. 
 Life itself is the final fact for which all men of genu- 
 ine gift and insight are searching ; and the great books 
 are either representations or interpretations of this 
 all-embracing fact. There are wide differences of 
 original endowment, of temperament, of training, of 
 environment. There are broad contrasts of spirit, 
 method, treatment ; but a common impulse underlies 
 all great works of literary genius. When Byron, with 
 a few daring strokes, draws the portrait of Manfred, 
 when Wordsworth meditates among the Cumberland 
 Hills, each in his way draws near to life, — the one 
 to picture and the other to interpret it. No rapt and 
 lonely vision lifts them to heights inaccessible to 
 common thought and need ; their gift of insight, 
 while it separates them from their fellows as individ- 
 uals, unites them the more closely with humanity. 
 For the essential greatness of men of genius does not 
 
SOME ASPECTS OP MODERN LITERATURE. 9 
 
 lie in their separation from their fellows, nor in any 
 moods which are peculiarly their own, but in that 
 inexplicable union of heart and mind which makes 
 them sharers of the private life of the world, discern- 
 ers of that which is hidden in individual experience, 
 interpreters of men to themselves and to each other. 
 
 The great mass of men arrive late at complete 
 self-consciousness, at a full knowledge of themselves. 
 The earlier generations attained this self-knowledge 
 for the most part very imperfectly; it was the pos- 
 session of a few, and these elect souls spoke for 
 the uncounted hosts of their silent contemporaries. 
 When any considerable number of individuals of the 
 same race secured this complete possession of them- 
 selves, there was a wide and adequate expression of 
 life as they saw it. By virtue of natural aptitude, of 
 exceptional opportunity for knowing what is in life, 
 and of a training of a very high and complete kind, 
 the Greeks attained a degree of self-knowledge which 
 was far in advance of the attainment of most of the 
 Oriental races. This mastery of life and its arts was 
 disclosed chiefly in one city, and within a single cen- 
 tury that city enriched literature for all time by a 
 series of masterpieces. If there had been elsewhere 
 the same degree of self-knowledge, there would have 
 been a corresponding impulse toward expression. 
 But except among the Hebrews, there was not ; for 
 the most part the races in the East contemporaneous 
 with the Greeks did not attain anything more than a 
 very inadequate conception of themselves and their 
 
10 ESSAYS m LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 relation to the world. Among the Hindoos there was, 
 it is true, a very considerable and a very noble liter- 
 ary development ; but this movement for expression 
 was partial and inadequate because the knowledge 
 that inspired it was partial and inadequate. The 
 Hindoos entangled God in the shining meshes of his 
 own creation; they never clearly separated him in 
 thought from Nature, and they never perfectly real- 
 ized their own individuality. The great Western 
 races, on the other hand, were so absorbed in the 
 vast activities of growth and empire that they had 
 small inclination to study themselves ; the Romans 
 conquered the world, but when it lay within their 
 grasp, they did not know what to do with it, so in- 
 adequate was their knowledge of themselves and of 
 the real nature of their possessions. The literature 
 of such a people will rarely reveal any original im- 
 pulse or force ; it will not even express the con- 
 sciousness of power, which is more clearly realized 
 than anything else by such a people ; it will be an 
 imitative art, whose chief attraction will lie in the 
 natural or acquired skill of individuals, and whose 
 chief use will be to register great deeds, not to ex- 
 press and illustrate great souls and a great common 
 life. The Northern races, whose various stages of 
 growth were to be recorded in noble literary forms, 
 were still in the period of childhood, and knew 
 neither their own strength nor the weakness of the 
 older civilization which surrounded them. 
 
 During periods of imperfect self-knowledge there 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF MODERN LITERATURE. II 
 
 will be necessarily fewer thoughts, convictions, or 
 emotions to inspire expression ; and these will be 
 clearly felt and adequately uttered by a few persons. 
 The simplicity of life in such periods makes a very 
 massive and noble art possible ; such an art as the 
 Greeks created as a revelation of their own nature 
 and an expression of their thought about themselves 
 and the world. The limitations of such an art give 
 it definiteness, clearness of outhne, large repose and 
 harmony. And these limitations are not imposed as 
 a matter of artifice ; they are in large measure un- 
 conscious, and they are, therefore, inevitable. To im- 
 pose the standards and boundaries of the art of such 
 a period upon the art of later and immensely ex- 
 panded periods would be as irrational as to impose 
 on the America of to-day the methods of the America 
 of the colonial period. 
 
 As self-knowledge becomes the possession of a 
 larger number of persons, becomes general rather than 
 individual, the faculty of expression is correspondingly 
 developed until the gift and office of the fortunate 
 few become almost public functions. Apollo's lyre 
 still yields its supreme melodies to the greatest souls 
 only, but a host have learned to set their thought to 
 its lighter strains. Now, it is precisely this general 
 development of self-knowledge which characterizes our 
 modern life and reveals itself in our varied and im- 
 mensely diversified literature. Humanity has come to 
 a large measure of maturity. It has had a long his- 
 tory, which has been the record of its efforts to know 
 
12 BSSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 its own nature and to master the field and the imple- 
 ments of its activity. It has made countless experi- 
 ments, and has learned quite as much from its failures 
 as from its successes. It has laboriously traversed 
 the island in space where its fortunes are cast ; it has 
 listened intently, generation after generation, for some 
 message from beyond the seas which encompass it. 
 It has made every kind of venture to enlarge its capi- 
 tal of pleasure, and it has hazarded all its gains for 
 some nobler fortune of which it has dreamed. It has 
 opened its arms to receive the joys of life, and missing 
 them, has patiently clasped a crucifix. It has drank 
 every cup of experience ; won all victories and suf- 
 fered all defeats ; tested all creeds and acted all phi- 
 losophies ; illustrated all baseness and risen to the 
 heights of all nobleness. In short, humanity has lived, 
 — not in a few persons, a few periods, a few activities, 
 but in countless persons, through long centuries, and 
 under all conditions. Surely some larger and more 
 comprehensive idea of life lies in the mind of the 
 modern world than ever defined itself to the men of 
 the earlier times. Society has still much to learn; 
 but men have now lived long enough to have attained 
 a fairly complete self-knowledge. They have by no 
 means fully developed themselves, but they know 
 what is in them. Humanity has come to maturity, 
 and to the self-consciousness which is the power of 
 maturity. 
 
 With this self-consciousness there has come a cor- 
 responding power of expression ; the two are as in- 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF MODERN LITERATURE. 1 3 
 
 separable as the genius of the composer and the music 
 through which it reveals itself, as the impulse of the 
 sculptor and the carven stone in which it stands ex- 
 pressed. Thought and expression are parts of one 
 complete act. As conceptions of life multiply and 
 widen, language is unconsciously expanded and en- 
 riched to receive and convey them ; as experience 
 deepens, speech matches it with profounder and 
 subtiler phrase. With the power to communicate that 
 which is essentially novel comes also the impulse. 
 Expression is the habit and the law of civilized life. 
 There is within us an instinctive recognition of the 
 universal quality of thought and experience ; we feel 
 that neither can be in any sense our private posses- 
 sion. They belong to the world, and even when we 
 endeavour to keep them to ourselves they seem to 
 elude and escape us. No sooner does one utter a 
 thought that was new to him than a hundred other 
 men claim a common ownership with him. It was, as 
 we say, in the air, and he had unconsciously appro- 
 priated that which was public property. There is a 
 large and noble consistency behind our fragmentary 
 thinking which makes us aware of some great order of 
 things with which we are unconsciously working. Our 
 lesser thought is always seen in the end to be part of 
 a larger thought. The investigator, working along one 
 line of scientific research, finds his latest discovery 
 of that which seemed the special law of his depart- 
 ment matched by the discovery of the same law oper- 
 ating in an entirely different field. Men of large 
 
14 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 vision know that the same general tendencies are dis- 
 coverable at almost any given time in science, art, 
 philosophy, literature, and theology. The significance 
 of these common tendencies is deepened by the fact 
 that for the most part the individual workers in the 
 different fields are unconscious of them. They are all 
 unwitting witnesses to a higher and more comprehen- 
 sive truth than that which each is bent upon demon- 
 strating. There is, in other words, a continuous 
 revelation of ultimate things through the totality of 
 human activity and experience ; and this revelation, 
 which is co-extensive with universal life, presses upon 
 men for expression. Whether they will or not, it 
 must utter itself; behind all life it sets its mighty im- 
 pulse, and nothing can resist it. With the immense 
 expansion of modern life it was inevitable that there 
 should be an immense expansion of literature ; that 
 new literary forms like the novel should be developed ; 
 that facts hitherto suppressed or unobserved should 
 be brought to light ; and that phases and aspects of 
 experience hitherto unrecorded should suddenly en- 
 shrine themselves in art. 
 
 The broadening of the literary impulse, the impulse 
 of expression, has materially changed the prevailing 
 character of literature and indefinitely multiplied its 
 forms. Instead of commanding types, massive be- 
 cause isolated, there has succeeded a vast variety of 
 more specialized types, in which the great truths of 
 experience, instead of being generalized into a few 
 personalities, are dispersed through many. Literature 
 
SOME ASPECTS OP MODERN LITERATURE. 1$ 
 
 no longer reveals only the summits of thought and 
 action ; it displays the whole landscape of life, — con- 
 tinent and sea, barren wilderness and blossoming field, 
 lonely valley and shining peak. Personality is no 
 longer sublimated in order to present its universal 
 elements ; it is depicted in its most famihar and inti- 
 mate forms. In art Raphael's Madonnas and Michael 
 Angelo's colossal figures have been succeeded by 
 Bastien-Lepage's Jean d'Arc and Millet's Angelus, — 
 not because the religious feeling is less penetrating 
 and profound, but because it recognizes in nearer and 
 more familiar forms the sanctity and dignity it once 
 saw only in things most beautiful and august. Under 
 the same impulse the literary instinct seeks to dis- 
 cover what is significant in the life that is nearest, 
 convinced that all life is a revelation, and that to the 
 artist beauty is universally diffused through all created 
 things. As the wayside flower, once neglected, dis- 
 closes a loveliness all its own, so does the human 
 thought, emotion, experience, once passed by in the 
 pursuit of some remoter theme. Literature, which 
 holds so vital a relation to the inner life of men, 
 shows in this more catholic and sympathetic selection 
 of characters and scenes the new and deeper concep- 
 tion of human relationship which is now the most 
 potent factor in the social life of the world. 
 
 One looks in vain through the earlier literatures for 
 such frank disclosures of personal feeling and habit, 
 such unveiling of self, as are found in Montaigne, 
 Cellini, Rousseau, and Amiel. But these direct and 
 
1 6 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 explicit confessions are hardly more personal and 
 individual than the great mass of modem literature. 
 We know the secret thoughts, the hidden processes 
 of character, in Tito and Anna Kar^nina, even more 
 completely than if these creations, become actual 
 flesh and blood, had attempted to give us their con- 
 fidence. The great writers who have drawn these 
 masterly portraits have comprehended the significance 
 of the almost imperceptible stages by which motives 
 and impulses are moved forward to their ultimate 
 issue in action, by which character is advanced from 
 its plastic to its final and permanent form. They 
 have seen that dramatic interest does not attach 
 exclusively to those well-defined climaxes of experi- 
 ence which we call crises, but invests and gives artistic 
 value to the whole movement of life ; that no acts 
 which have moral or intellectual quality are unimpor- 
 tant. The peasant is quite as interesting a figure to 
 the literary artist as the king ; has become, in fact, 
 far more attractive and suggestive, since nothing in- 
 tervenes between him and human nature in its purest 
 form. Interest in the great fact of life has become so 
 intense that we are impatient of all the conventions 
 and traditions that conceal it from us. The novels 
 to-day are full of studies of men and women in the 
 most primitive conditions and relations, and he must 
 command the very highest resources of his art who 
 would interest us in a character swathed in the trap- 
 pings of royalty. These things seem tawdry and 
 unreal to a generation that has caught a glimpse of 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF MODERN LITERATURE. I? 
 
 the awful meaning of life as it works out its purpose 
 in every individual soul. If Shakespeare were living 
 to-day, his Lear might not be an uncrowned king, but 
 the kinsman of that lonely, massive peasant-figure 
 whose essential and tragic dignity Tourguenieff has 
 made so impressive in " The Lear of the Steppes." 
 Genius is the highest form of sympathy ; and in mod- 
 em literature this quality has made it the interpreter 
 of the complete experience of humanity. It has been 
 irresistibly drawn to that which is lowly and obscure 
 because it has discerned in these untrodden paths a 
 beauty and a meaning essentially new to men ; it has 
 become conscious of the pathetic contrast between 
 souls encompassed with limitations and the eternal 
 elements of which they are compounded. 
 
 They must be blind indeed who fail to discover in 
 this attitude of literature toward men and women as 
 individuals a change of thought as vital as any that 
 ever has taken place in history. The commonest life 
 is touched and irradiated by this spirit of insight, 
 and in the lowliest as in the most impressive person 
 and fact, an inexhaustible significance is discovered. 
 Literature has come close to life not only in its great 
 historic manifestations, but in its most familiar and 
 homely aspects, and it lends itself with impartial 
 sympathy to the portrayal and interpretation of both. 
 The phrase whose novel appeal to a common humanity 
 once brought out the applause of the Roman theatre 
 is to-day written as a supreme law across all our arts. 
 Nothing that is human is insignificant or without 
 
l8 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 interest for us. Our common search is not for theo- 
 ries of life, — they are all being cast aside because 
 they are all inadequate, — but for the facts of life. 
 There is coming at last the dawn of a great and 
 worthy thought of this life of ours, and the universe in 
 which it is set ; and as this thought clears itself from 
 imperfect knowledge and from ancient ignorance, a 
 new reverence for the humblest human soul is born 
 within us. The expansion of man's conception of 
 the universe from the time of Ptolemy to that of 
 Tyndall has not been greater than the expansion of 
 the conception of the meaning of life from the thought 
 of the first or the thirteenth century to that of the 
 nineteenth century. One result of this vaster con- 
 ception of life is the recognition of its supremacy over 
 the arts. They were once ends in themselves ; they 
 are now means of expression. They were once su- 
 preme and final achievements ; they are now records 
 and registers of that which is greater than they. 
 
 Art is the necessary and universal quality of litera- 
 ture ; it is the presence or absence of this quality 
 which elects some books for long life and others for 
 the life of a day. It is the impalpable and subtile 
 touch of art which confers on a book, a picture, or a 
 statue that longevity which we rashly call immortality. 
 But as books accumulate, and as the years multiply 
 into centuries and the centuries lengthen into epochs, 
 we become conscious of the impotence of art itself 
 to elude the action of that change from a lower to 
 a higher form which we call death. There are no 
 
SOME ASPECTS OP MODERN LITERATURE. 1 9 
 
 finalities of expression ; life has always a new word to 
 utter, a new form to fashion. The greatest cannot 
 hope to measure the complete span of a single age, 
 much less the span of all history. We shall not think 
 less of our arts, but we are coming to have a "new 
 thought about them. The men that create them are 
 greater than they ; humanity is greater than the sum 
 of all its achievements and expressions. Art must 
 come closer to us, must be more reverent and humble, 
 must be our servant and not master. Literature is 
 already full of the signs of this change. It has suf- 
 fered no real loss in the evolution through which it 
 has passed from a few simple and impressive forms 
 to an expression at once more flexible and of vastly 
 increased volume. If the great chords that once 
 vibrated to an infrequent hand are now less distinct 
 and commanding, it is because the lyre yields its 
 full harmony to the passionate touch of life. 
 
PERSONALITY IN LITERARY WORK. 
 
 Dr. Johnson is probably the best English illustration 
 of a writer whose personality was so inadequately ex- 
 pressed in his work that what he^as is likely to obliterate 
 what he did. The man was hearty, simple, often 
 offensively, always unaffectedly, forceful and down- 
 right ; his work, on the other hand, while sound and 
 wholesome, is formal, academic, elaborate, and at 
 times highly artificial. No man spoke with more 
 resolute Saxon bluntness than the author of those 
 solemn and imposing essays in the " Rambler," of 
 whom Goldsmith said that if he wrote of little fishes 
 they would all speak like great whales. That his 
 pen was not wholly devoid of the vigour which his 
 speech uniformly had, is evident to every one who 
 reads his letters ; but as a rule this rugged strength 
 is diffused and lost in a succession of well-wrought 
 phrases rather than concentrated on the sharp edge 
 of concise and telling sentences. It is certainly no 
 lack of personality which one feels in reading John- 
 son ; the Doctor is never far off in those infrequent 
 moments when one takes up " Rasselas " or the 
 "Rambler; " but it is the wigged and powdered pro- 
 fessional man of letters in the wigged and powdered 
 
PERSONALITY IN LITERARY WORK. 2 I 
 
 eighteenth century, not the big-brained, big-hearted, 
 irascible, pathetic, and unaffectedly human hero of Bos- 
 well's immortal biography. In the whole company 
 of English writers from Chaucer to Carlyle there is 
 no more sharply defined and vigorous personality; 
 none more pronounced, more clearly shown, more 
 easily understood. Evidently the failure of Johnson's 
 work to impress us adequately is in no sense due 
 to lack of individuality behind it ; the fact that we 
 are transferring our interest more and more from the 
 work to the man shows clearly enough that the man 
 possessed qualities which his work fails to convey. 
 Johnson's defect as a writer lay in his inability to 
 make his voice distinct ; it does not ring clear in 
 perfectly natural tones. When he talked, his words 
 were charged with the electric current of his tremen- 
 dous personality ; when he wrote, the circuit was 
 broken ; at some point the current escaped into the 
 air, and the reader never receives any emotion or 
 impulse approaching a shock in intensity. It is prob- 
 able that the only saving quality in Johnson's work is 
 due to the fact that it helps us to understand him. 
 In most cases we remember the man because of the 
 work he did ; in Johnson's case we shall remember 
 the work because of the man who did it. 
 
 Shakespeare, on the other hand, furnishes the best 
 English illustration of a writer whose personality is 
 completely expressed in his work. The work we 
 know by heart ; of the man we know almost nothing 
 in the sense that we know Dr. Johnson. So slight 
 
22 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 and fragmentary is our knowledge of the outward 
 facts of Shakespeare's Hfe that this noblest of modern 
 minds has furnished the material for the most fantas- 
 tic exercise of arbitrary inference known in the history 
 of literature. If Sliakespeare had had his Boswell, 
 we might have possessed an authoritative history of 
 "Hamlet" and the "Tempest," — something which 
 would have given us the order and sequence of these 
 marvellous plays. They are creations, however, not 
 pieces of mechanism ; and nothing deeper could be 
 told about them than they reveal themselves. About 
 every great work of art there is something mysterious 
 and inexplicable ; and he who can explain it least is 
 he by whose hand it was done. Shakespeare's spirit- 
 ual autobiography lies clearly written in his work, 
 although the aspect under which his contemporaries 
 knew him is barely hinted at there. Shakespeare's 
 Boswell would have been intensely interesting; we 
 could well have spared libraries of commentaries if 
 his single volume could have taken their place ; but 
 he could have rendered no such service to his master 
 or to us as Johnson's Boswell performed. Johnson 
 spoke from the surface of his nature when he set 
 hand to paper, and the gleanings of Boswell were 
 more than the harvester gathered ; Shakespeare 
 spoke from the depths of his nature and in all the tones 
 which impart expression to uttered speech, and a 
 Boswell would have found little unsaid that was 
 needed to the complete expression of his spiritual 
 nature. It would have given us deep satisfaction to 
 
PERSONALITY IN LITERARY WORK. 23 
 
 have known something of his smile, his carriage, his 
 manner of speech and bearing among his fellows ; 
 but viC know from his own report his thought of 
 human life, encircled by mysteries, swayed by the 
 winds of passion, calmed by the weight of its own 
 destiny; and the essential thing to be known about 
 any man is his thought about these matters. 
 
 These two writers will serve to illustrate a princi- 
 ple which becomes clearer the more thoroughly and 
 widely we apply it to all works which belong distinc- 
 tively to literature : the principle that a man's work 
 approaches the very highest standard in the degree 
 in which it expresses his personality, — personality in 
 the large sense which includes temperament, quality 
 of imagination, artistic sense, point of view, education, 
 and faculty of expression. The word is often used to 
 express what is obvious and idiosyncratic in a man's 
 nature or history ; and literary work is sometimes said 
 to be full of personality when it is stamped with this 
 kind of individual quality. The idea of personality 
 implied in this criticism is not false, but it is inade- 
 quate ; and it becomes misleading when it is applied 
 as a test. " The Sorrows of Werther," " Obermann," 
 and Rousseau's " Confessions " are charged with an 
 intensity of mood or emotion which conveys a vivid 
 impression of personality ; but the real Goethe is to 
 be sought elsewhere than in the " Sorrows of Wer- 
 ther," — the rounded and full personality of the man 
 is not only concealed, but misrepresented, by the mo- 
 mentary passion which burned itself out in that work 
 
24 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 of his youth. These intense expressions of critical 
 moments in a man's growth, these cries out of the 
 heart of a passing anguish, are indeed charged with 
 personahty, but with a personality limited in time and 
 experience ; they are not the complete and harmo- 
 nious expression of the whole man. If we seek this, 
 we shall find it not in these passionate outcries, but in 
 the clear, strong, harmonic tones that convey the 
 full significance of deep, rich, masterful life and 
 thought. The personality of Byron, of Leopardi, of 
 De Musset, is so obvious, so interesting, so pungent, 
 that their work and the work of men of their class 
 seem like the truest and deepest expression of the 
 man behind it ; its intensity makes the calmness and 
 range of the greatest writers seem entirely imper- 
 sonal. When, however, we study these larger and 
 more varied creations, we find ourselves in the pres- 
 ence of men whose restraint and repose are significant 
 not of repression, but of free, complete, and beautiful 
 self-expression. It is in Sophocles, in Shakespeare, in 
 Molifere, in Goethe, that we find the ripest and most 
 powerful personalities, — personalities that have not 
 rested in simple transcriptions of the feeling of the 
 moment, but have made their own experiences illus- 
 trative of universal law, and in the untroubled surface 
 of their calm, deep natures have reflected the whole 
 moving image of things. " Manfred," " The Rob- 
 bers," and " Queen Mab " are not defective in dis- 
 closure of personality ; but in all works of their kind 
 the personality is either limited in time or in expe- 
 
PERSONALITY IN LITERARY WORK. 25 
 
 rience ; it is a personality narrow in itself or imper- 
 fectly expressed. If a man is to make the most of 
 his materials, he must have that mastery of them 
 which permits him to transpose and combine them at 
 will ; which makes them pliant and flexible in his 
 hand. This apt and varied skill eludes those who, 
 by the limitation of their own natures or the violence 
 of their emotions, are driven rather than inspired by 
 the critical moment and experience. The artist is 
 most inspired when his hand is freest and surest, be- 
 cause intensity and agitation of emotion have passed 
 on into depth and clearness of vision. 
 
 Personality in the larger sense is to be found not 
 in what is strongly individualistic in temper and 
 expression, but in what is distinctive and characteristic 
 in a man's view of life and art, — in his structural 
 force and genius ; in the quality and direction of his 
 insight; in the adequacy and inevitableness of his 
 expression. At the very bottom of a man's work lies 
 his thought of life, — his idea of the materials which 
 are at hand and of the use he can make of them ; 
 and this thought contains the very essence of that 
 which makes the man different from all other men 
 who have been or shall be. For this thought 
 embodies everything that is peculiar and distinctive 
 to him. The thought of a mature man about life and 
 art is the adjustment of the man's self to the world 
 which he finds about him ; when he has reached a 
 conception of the significance of life and the uses of 
 art, he has determined that which is most fundamental 
 
26 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 for himself and most deeply and permanently de- 
 finitive of his character and genius. The concep- 
 tion may be primarily moral, philosophic, artistic ; it 
 may involve clear insight into the lines of right, 
 of thought, or of beauty along which the universe is 
 built ; whatever it is, it determines the genius of the 
 man and sets him apart to express once and forever 
 a thought which is essentially his own. Centuries 
 have passed since the first great dramatic poems 
 were written ; and yet neither Job nor ^schylus, 
 neither Shakespeare nor Moliere, has been repeated. 
 Every dramatist of the first order has had a 
 fundamental thought about life which, expressed 
 in his own way, has been in some essential things 
 different from the thought of all his fellows ; and that 
 thought has contained the very essence of his person- 
 ality. The great writers speak not from report, but 
 from personal knowledge. They differ from the 
 lesser writers not only in quality of workmanship, but 
 still more in the fact that they are witnesses of the 
 truth which they express. They have seen and felt ; 
 therefore they speak. And that which thus sees and 
 feels and knows is the man's whole nature, not 
 observation only, nor thought only, nor feeling only. 
 All the faculties, the aptitudes, the sensibilities, the 
 experiences which make us what we are, are involved 
 in this process. So that which lies deepest in a man, 
 his thought of the movement of things in which he 
 finds himself, expresses completely and most pro- 
 foundly his personality. 
 
PERSONALITY IN LITERARY WORK. 27 
 
 There are some elements in this personality which 
 we can distinguish and trace. There are racial marks 
 Oil the mind and temperament of every man ; there 
 are evident impressions of the time in which he lives, 
 with all its subtile and interwoven influences ; but 
 however keenly we distinguish these secondary 
 qualities, and however acutely we analyze them, we 
 never uncover the secret of personality. That is 
 a thing which is primary, and cannot be resolved into 
 its elements, — a thing which is vital and cannot be 
 comprehended. We learn more and more of the 
 vital processes, but we never overtake life itself; we 
 get nearer and nearer to the secret of genius, but we 
 never lay our hand on it. There is something in us 
 that cometh not by observation and that escapes our 
 scrutiny ; and this sacred and inaccessible thing, 
 which the most searching science is powerless to 
 wrest from a man, is what he gives us in a great piece 
 of art. Every great piece of art expresses a great 
 thought, and in that thought is summed up the totality 
 of a man's nature and life. 
 
 This thought, as has been said, is not primarily the 
 result of a conscious process of thinking. It comes 
 to a man he knows not how ; in swift flashes of in- 
 telligence, in the sudden illumination of experience, 
 in the long silence of brooding, under the pressure 
 of tremendous experiences. It is distilled into a 
 man's soul by the alchemy of living, — that myste- 
 rious process by which, through thought, emotion, 
 and action, we attain both knowledge and character. 
 
28 esSAVS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 The frankest autobiographies always leave unsaid 
 the thing we care most to know ; they give us hints, 
 side-lights, pregnant suggestions, but they always leave 
 a residuum of mystery. No man was ever yet perfectly 
 explained to his fellows ; and no man ever will be. 
 We shall know some men far more thoroughly than 
 we know others, but we shall never know any man 
 completely. Nor will any man ever attain complete 
 self-knowledge, — that kind of knowledge which will 
 disclose all the sources of his power, trace back every 
 rivulet of influence to its ancestral spring, uncover 
 all the depths not only of personal but of inherited 
 experience, make clear what he receives from his own 
 time, and mark that which is distinctively his own ; 
 that residuum which neither time, race, nor circum- 
 stances account for. In every soul, as in every life, 
 there is something solitary and incommunicable, — a 
 holy of holies upon which the veil is never lifted. 
 It is written that no man can see God and live ; and 
 there is something divine in us upon which we are 
 not suffered to look. It is this mysterious and 
 essential personahty, modified in expression by the 
 temporary elements of place and age, but fundamen- 
 tally apart from and independent of them, which 
 inspires and gives form to every great work of art ; 
 so that there is in every masterpiece something 
 inexplicable, — something which cannot be referred to 
 anything anterior; something, in a word, which we 
 call creative because we cannot account for it in any 
 other way. An imitative work discloses its parentage ; 
 
PERSONALITY IN LITERARY WORK. 29 
 
 a creative work stands apart and remains mute when 
 we question its ancestry. It is surrounded by the 
 same mystery which enfolds every birth, which 
 attaches to everything that is born, not made. 
 
 The work is mysterious even to its creator. 
 " The soul," says Calvert, " while laying the founda- 
 tions of greatness, keeps its own counsel ; and what 
 it has been doing and preparing is only revealed 
 by the completed work." It is a very suggestive 
 fact that Goethe could never explain many things in 
 " Faust." They were there, and that was about the 
 substance of his knowledge of them. Few literary 
 works have been so long in hand, have been so often 
 taken up and laid aside, have received such constant 
 and long-continued revision. Of the outward history 
 of few poems do we know so much ; and yet there 
 was much in it which Goethe confessed himself 
 unable to account for. The origin of the work itself 
 was as mysterious to him as to every one else. It is 
 easy enough to indicate the sources of the legend 
 and of many of the incidents woven into it ; but 
 what affinity lodged this seed in the soil of his 
 nature, what were the stages by which it sank deep 
 into his soul and became so thoroughly part of him- 
 self that it came forth from his brain not only re- 
 fashioned, amplified, harmonized with itself in artistic 
 consistency, but pervaded by a soul which made it 
 significant of profound and universal truth ? "I can 
 truly say of my production," said Goethe, referring 
 to his drama of " Tasso," " it is bone of my bone and 
 
30 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 flesh of my flesh. . . . They come and ask what idea 
 I meant to embody in my ' Faust,' as if I knew 
 myself and could inform them." For more than sixty 
 years the drama was on his mind ; and yet he tells us 
 that the whole poem rose before him at once when it 
 first touched his imagination. He often spoke of the 
 progress of the work ; there are, indeed, few works 
 of art concerning the shaping and evolution of which 
 we possess such full and trustworthy information ; and 
 yet of the first contract between the idea and his own 
 soul, all he can tell us is that it was suddenly and 
 completely disclosed to his imagination. His ina- 
 bility to explain it was not due to lack of an under- 
 lying motive or to vagueness and obscurity of idea, 
 but to the fact that he did not consciously originate 
 it ; it came to him, and he gave it form. The story 
 of Goethe's masterpiece is the story of every master- 
 piece ; there are interesting facts in every such story, 
 but the essential fact, the fact that would have ex- 
 plained the work, is always missing ; no man can 
 furnish it, because no man's knowledge has ever com- 
 passed it. Every such work is the expression of a 
 man's personality ; and personality is a primary and 
 unresolvable force in the world. 
 
 Through the alembic of personality pass all the 
 ideas which appear in art ; detached from a person- 
 ality, an idea may appear as science or philosophy, 
 but it never can appear as art. It is this truth which 
 Mr. James hints at when he says that art is mainly a 
 point of view ; it is that and as much more as one 
 
PERSONALITY IN LITERARY WORK. 31 
 
 brings to the point of view. Whipple had the same 
 truth in mind when he said that " the measure of a 
 man's individuality is his creative power ; and all that 
 Shakespeare created he individually included." In 
 order to show Romeo the prey of a consuming pas- 
 sion, Shakespeare must have felt the possible heat of 
 a kindred flame ; in order to portray Hamlet bending 
 beneath the awful mystery of life and thought, Shake- 
 speare must have felt the danger of a similar loss of 
 adjustment between meditation and action ; in order 
 to picture Antony casting a world away, he must 
 have known the power of such a spell as that woven 
 on the banks of the Nile. These experiences may 
 not have been actual in the life of the dramatist, but 
 they must all have been possible. They form the 
 universal element in which he works, and they are 
 transformed into art by passing through an artist's 
 personality. No two men ever saw the same rainbow, 
 because no two men ever looked at a rainbow from 
 the same point of view ; life was never the same to 
 any two human hearts, and, in the nature of things, 
 never can be. ^schylus will discern in it a vastness 
 and mystery which will escape the beautiful but dis- 
 tinctively Greek mind of Sophocles ; Marlowe will 
 find in it a violence and excess which will fall below 
 the luminous horizon of Shakespeare's mind ; Cor- 
 neille will discover in it a rigid and stately order, 
 which in the vital and mobile mind of Molifere will 
 give place to a more real and vivid perception of 
 individual characteristics. 
 
32 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 The rank of a writer rests in the last analysis on 
 the distinctness and individuality of his thought and 
 of the form which it takes ; and the fuller and more 
 complete the personahty of the man, the more power- 
 ful and varied will be the work of his hand. A limited 
 experience and restricted insight, like Grey's, mean a 
 work which, despite its supreme quality, is seen to lie 
 within narrow confines ; a rich experience, a broad 
 insight, a limitless intellectual sympathy, like Brown- 
 ing's, necessarily imply a vast range of expression, a 
 creation adequate in scope and variety to the force 
 of the creative impulse. If this power of seeing, this 
 swift capacity of entering into all life, reaches its 
 highest development, we have a Dante compassing a 
 whole epoch of history with his thought, or a Shake- 
 speare speaking out of the heart of entire humanity. 
 They have seen ; they know ; therefore they speak. 
 
 There is no such thing as a universal literature in 
 the sense which involves complete escape from all the 
 water-marks of place and time. An expression of 
 thought thus detached would be without structural 
 order and harmony, without colour, atmosphere, style ; 
 would cease to be literature, and become philosophy. 
 The star does not lose the majesty of its movement 
 or the splendour of its aspect because, if we observe 
 it at all, we must observe it from some infinitesimally 
 small point of earth. No man can study or interpret 
 life save from the point of view where he finds him- 
 self; and the range and beauty of vision which he 
 discerns depend upon the clearness and range of his 
 
PERSONALITY IN LITERARY WORK. 33 
 
 sight. In the deepest sense there are no abstract 
 truths, no worlds swinging in invisible space ; that 
 only exists for us at any given time which in some 
 way reaches and touches us, in some way penetrates 
 and affects us. No truth gets into human keeping 
 by any other path than the individual soul, nor into 
 human speech by any other medium than the indi- 
 vidual mind. The universal element in literature lies 
 not in its detachment from personality, in its separa- 
 tion from the peculiarities of age, place, and person, 
 but in the completeness and power with which it ex- 
 presses these things, — for all things partake of the 
 universal, and we have only to pierce the special and 
 particular deep enough, and we shall find it. It is 
 the function of literature to portray and interpret 
 those things which all men understand because they 
 are shared by all men ; but both in portrayal and 
 interpretation it is the presence of the art quality 
 which makes the work literature ; and this quality is 
 always imparted by personality. Detach the truth 
 embodied in " Hamlet " from the dramatic form in 
 which it is cast, and there remains a series of aphorisms 
 or comments upon character and life ; the truth thus 
 expressed is not less true because it has changed its 
 form, but it has ceased to be literature. 
 
 Every work of art has an interior order or architec- 
 ture which in any analysis is hardly less important or 
 significant than the leading conception or idea which 
 it conveys. As a matter of fact, it is impossible to 
 separate the two ; in any true work of art they are 
 3 
 
34 £SSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 SO perfectly fused and blended that they are no longer 
 separable. When we have detached the thought of 
 " Pippa Passes " or " In Memoriam " from its organic 
 sequence in the poem, we have destroyed the poem. 
 The division is impossible, because it does not exist 
 in the work; and yet, as a matter of convenience 
 and in aid of clearness of thought, arbitrary and artifi- 
 cial distinctions may be used to advantage. The 
 structural quality of a work is something much more 
 essential than the outward form which determines the 
 department of literature to which it belongs. The 
 form is part of it, but part only. The structural 
 quality of the " Divine Comedy " is the very sub- 
 stance of the poem ; it is that which gives it its 
 unique place and value. Dante had a clear, profound, 
 and spiritual conception of the soul of man in the 
 vast experience of life. If he had been a philosopher 
 only or distinctively, he would have written a system 
 of theology ; but he was a poet of supreme insight 
 and force. He did not meditate upon abstractions ; 
 he saw the soul of man in all the manifold stages of 
 its experience ; it was not the thought which he pur- 
 sued, it was the soul with which he walked in all the 
 length of its awful journeying. He did not philoso- 
 phize about punishment ; he breathed the very air 
 and was blown upon by the very flames of hell. He 
 did not theorize about purification ; he heard the 
 groans and felt the hot and bitter tears of purgatory. 
 He did not dream about the rewards of righteousness 
 and the blessedness of the good; he heard the in- 
 
PERSONALITY IN LITERARY WORK. 35 
 
 effable strains, and covered his face in the glory of 
 Paradise. The great conception was not first a 
 system of thought and then a subUme dramatic crea- 
 tion; long purposed, sternly executed, it was never 
 other than a complete and consuming vision of hu- 
 manity under the conditions of eternity, — when penalty 
 does not follow, but is part of sin ; when result does 
 not pursue but accompanies act ; when reward and 
 retribution are realized at the same instant within and 
 without the soul. That which Dante saw was con- 
 crete and indivisible ; it did not come to him in parts, 
 although it grew into proportion and harmony in his 
 mind ; he did not put it together as a piece of mech- 
 anism, fitting thought to expression and matching 
 the great inspiring idea with a majestic epic form. 
 In such a work of art there is no separation of soul 
 and body ; a thing of immortality has no perishable 
 part. It comes, an indivisible, indestructible creation, 
 from the soul of the artist ; no sound of hammer was 
 heard in the making of it, — for, like all great products 
 of the imagination, it was a creation and a growth, not 
 a mechanism and a manufacture. Another poet of 
 Dante's genius, dealing with the same theme, would 
 have given us a different poem, because he would have 
 conceived of it in a different way ; and a difference 
 of construction would have involved a difference of 
 idea. If one may venture upon philosophic terms, 
 the moment the idea shapes itself, harmonizes itself, 
 becomes organic and concrete instead of abstract, 
 the structural element enters into the process. The 
 
36 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 work passes through the pre-natal stages before it is 
 bom in the artist's mind ; it is fashioned in that sub- 
 lime mystery which lies behind all birth. Shall it be 
 epic, lyric, or drama ? is a question which the poet is 
 never asked. It is already one or the other of these 
 before it is disclosed to him. By the structure of a 
 great literary work is meant, therefore, something very 
 different from its mere form, — something which is of 
 the very heart and soul of the work ; that which brings 
 it out of the region of abstraction into the world of 
 human perception and thought; that by which the 
 ideal enters into and becomes a part of the real. 
 
 This structural element is discovered, appropriated, 
 or furnished by the imagination, — the one creative 
 faculty we possess, and the " master light of all our 
 seeing." The more closely we study human knowl- 
 edge and thought, the more clearly do we perceive 
 that this word " imagination " has more compass and 
 depth of meaning than any other word which we 
 apply to our faculties. It includes all that we pos- 
 sess of constructive power, — the power of holding 
 masses of facts so firmly and continuously in the 
 field of vision as to enable us to discover their unity 
 and the laws which govern them ; in other words, 
 science, — the power of seeing the permanent in the 
 transitory, the universal in the particular; in other 
 words, philosophy, — the power of perceiving and real- 
 izing the soul of things visible, and out of the real 
 constructing the ideal ; in other words, art, — the 
 power of discerning the spiritual behind the material, 
 
PERSONALITY IN LITERARY WORK. 37 
 
 the creator behind the creation; in other words, 
 reHgion. Wherever and whenever hfe becomes great 
 and the world real to us, the imagination holds aloft 
 its quenchless torch. In every hour when a new 
 truth moves back a little the horizon of thought, or 
 a new birth of beauty expands a little the world of 
 art, the imagination is present. "I assert for myself," 
 said William Blake, " that I do not behold the out- 
 ward creation, and that to me it would be a hindrance 
 and not action. I question not my corporeal eye any 
 more than I would question a window concerning a 
 sight. I look through it, and not with it." It is to 
 the imagination alone that second sight belongs, — that 
 sight which does not rest in obvious and material 
 things, but through them, as through an open win- 
 dow, perceives another and diviner order of creation. 
 Thus the imagination fulfils for the soul the double 
 function of seeing and interpreting, of discovering 
 and possessing. 
 
 But the imagination is not simply or mainly an 
 organ of vision ; it is a hand even more than an eye, 
 and a hand which moves to the impulse of inspira- 
 tion. It was the imagination which discovered the 
 beauty of the world to the earliest men, and it was 
 the imagination which peopled it with the antique 
 gods ; in the history of art seeing and creating have 
 never been dissevered. It is by the activity of the 
 imagination that we possess those masterpieces which, 
 if they fail to convey all that the ideal contains, de- 
 fine for us the laws of beauty and fix the standards of 
 
38 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 supreme excellence. If they cannot bring perfection 
 within the range of our senses, they fail not to bring 
 it within the reach of our souls. Now, the imagina- 
 tion which perceives the idea under some inevitable 
 structural form is not less distinctive and individual 
 than is that mysterious personality which makes a 
 man what he is, as different from all other men. 
 This personality determines the idea that becomes 
 the germ of a great creative work ; -determines that 
 the story of Prometheus shall belong to ^schylus, 
 and the story of Faust to Goethe, and the conception 
 of Tartuffe to Moliire ; but it is the imagination 
 which opens the personality to the idea, and by plac- 
 ing it in relation with the visible and actual, brings 
 the material within reach of the shaping hand. What 
 interior structure the idea shall have, how it shall be 
 shaped, where unite with and where depart from that 
 which art has already achieved, depends on the 
 individual imagination. Faust will be one thing to 
 Marlowe and an entirely different thing to Goethe, 
 the dominant idea remaining the same ; and when 
 we study the differences of structure and treatment 
 between the two dramas, we perceive that we are 
 studying the differences between the two poets. Be- 
 tween Voltaire's thought of Jean d'Arc in " La Pu- 
 celle " and the vision on the canvas of Bastien-Le- 
 page, what an almost measureless divergence of per- 
 sonality is expressed ! If the masters of creative 
 literature are studied by the comparative method, 
 nothing is more striking than the differences which 
 
PERSONALITY IN LITERARY WORK. 39 
 
 exist between them in quality and force of imagina- 
 tion ; and it is such study which enables us to under- 
 stand that the imagination is the creative faculty. 
 
 It is only the most superficial thinking which fails 
 to perceive that style is no less integral, essential, and 
 inevitable than inspiring idea, structural form, or 
 force and quality of imagination. It is obvious that 
 the style of a writer is not uninfluenced by his age : 
 compare the prose of Sir Thomas Malory with that 
 of Milton, that of Fuller with that of Addison, that 
 of Johnson with that of Ruskin or Newman, and the 
 presence of a process of development is unmistak- 
 able. It is obvious also that a writer, by that rigid 
 discipline which is the condition of all artistic ex- 
 cellence, may expand and even radically change his 
 style. Nevertheless, it remains true that the style of 
 a genuine writer is in the deepest sense inevitable, 
 and that all his conscious effort has not fashioned, 
 but found it. It was already existent, to borrow the 
 idea of one of the masters of style, Flaubert ; and the 
 whole education of the man in the secrets of his art 
 has been an endeavour to bring together two things 
 which are parts of one whole. " Possessed," says a 
 critic of the author of " Madame Bovary," " of an 
 absolute belief that there exists but one way of ex- 
 pressing one thing, one word to call it by, one ad- 
 jective to qualify, one verb to animate it, he gave 
 himself to superhuman labour for the discovery, in 
 every phrase, of that word, that verb, that epithet. 
 In this way he believed in some mysterious harmony 
 
40 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 of expression, and when a true word seemed to him 
 to lack euphony, still went on seeking another with 
 invincible patience, certain that he had not yet got 
 hold of the unique word. ... A thousand preoccu- 
 pations would beset him at the same moment, always 
 with this desperate certitude fixed in his spirit, — 
 among all the expressions in the world, all forms and 
 terms of expression, there is but one — one form, 
 one mode — to express what I want to say." There 
 is no paradox in all this ; for while style is an end 
 which may be consciously worked for, it is also and 
 always, whenever it reaches the highest level of art, 
 a full, free, and powerful expression of personality, 
 and as such it was determined for the man in the 
 hour in which his personality was compounded. The 
 search for style is therefore never a search for some- 
 thing artificial, something so distinct from the searcher 
 that he may choose among several, rejecting one and 
 accepting another ; it is always the effort to attain 
 complete self-expression. Some writers never find 
 their true style, and failing of genuine self-expres- 
 sion, soon pass into oblivion ; but genius never misses 
 its vocabulary. 
 
 A genuine literary artist never uses words which 
 are merely ornamental and therefore extraneous ; his 
 phrase contains neither more nor less than his 
 thought ; when it fails either by surplusage or by 
 suppression, it falls short of that perfect art which is 
 the instant and final identification of truth and 
 beauty. The artist is known, as Schiller said, by 
 
PERSONALITY IN LITERARY WORK. 4I 
 
 what he omits quite as much as by what he includes. 
 " For in truth all art does but consist in the removal 
 of surplusage, from the last finish of the gem engraver 
 blowing away the last particle of invisible dust, back 
 to the earliest divination of the finished work to be, 
 lying somewhere, according to Michelangelo's fancy, 
 in the rough-hewn block of stone." The artist has 
 no tricks, devices, or artifices ; the secret of his work- 
 manship is not mechanical, but original and vital, 
 and so completely his own that it cannot be detached 
 from him even in thought. When we speak of style 
 in connection with the masters of literary form, — 
 with Shakespeare, with Keats, with Tennyson, with 
 Hawthorne, with Arnold, — we become conscious that 
 we are speaking of something not only obviously 
 beautiful, but mysteriously and inexplicably personal ; 
 something which, although visible and tangible, par- 
 takes so largely of the invisible soul that it escapes 
 our analysis. Style is not only the quality which de- 
 fines a creation as belonging to art, but which, more 
 than any other which we can discover, is most subtly 
 and comprehensively expressive of personality. In 
 it, as in a medium so delicate that it responds to the 
 lightest touch, so stable that it retains the most 
 powerful impression, we discover the compass and 
 resources of a man's soul ; here he reflects himself as 
 in a mirror, not only with conscious purpose, but 
 with that deep unconsciousness the perpetual revela- 
 tion of which is the deepest inlet of truth into this 
 world of ours. 
 
42 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 Dante was the first of the modern poets in time as 
 well as in depth and power ; and if we seek for the 
 reason of his primacy in order of literary development, 
 we shall find it in his own work. The poets before 
 him had no clear thought of themselves ; they were 
 men not so much of defective as of undeveloped 
 personality. They were bound by traditions, circum- 
 scribed by external conditions, ignorant of the author- 
 ity and the resources of their own souls. They could 
 not trust their intuitions and depend upon their own 
 skill, because they did not know what was within 
 them. They belonged to that dim mediaeval world 
 so long under a spell which lulled the personality of 
 men into a deep sleep. That sleep was not without 
 splendid dreams and heavenly visions, but there was 
 no deep and vital sense of reality. Dante was the 
 first to awaken from this sleep. There is no more 
 vigorous personality in history than that of this 
 banished Florentine, who, loving Florence, could live 
 apart from her ; saturated with the scholarship of his 
 time, could look upon the world with his own eyes, 
 and substitute his own mother tongue for the conven- 
 tional Latin; loyal to the Church, could write the 
 doom of popes and priests with unfaltering hand. If 
 one reads carefully, he will find in the " Vita Nuova " 
 the autobiography of the first great modern personal- 
 ity, — the man who turned from the outer to the inner 
 world for truth, who gained complete consciousness 
 of the mighty force within his own nature, and used 
 it with absolute freedom. He was the first poet 
 
PERSONALITY IN LITERARY WORK. 43 
 
 because he was the first artist ; and the secret of his 
 mastery of art lay in the fact that he attained full 
 self-consciousness. For two centuries and a half Italy 
 was crowded with brilliant figures, — men who used 
 all the arts with a freedom and force which have 
 enriched the world for all time. The secret of this 
 protracted and splendid productiveness lies in the 
 tremendous force of personality which was liberated 
 by the Renaissance, — a force which sought expression 
 through every form of creative energy and through 
 every social activity. 
 
 In France the same outbreak of personal force 
 appears in the early part of the long reign of Louis 
 XIV. ; when the impulse and aspiration of youth and 
 hope were in the air, before prolonged absolutism, 
 exhausting campaigns, and the barrenness of selfish 
 and superficial ideals drained the national life and 
 blighted the national imagination. In the England of 
 Elizabeth there was a liberation of personal force 
 such as no other country has ever seen at a single 
 period. Many of the Elizabethan dramatists impress 
 one as being under a demoniac spell ; they are torn 
 and destroyed by their own emotions ; a titanic rage 
 possesses them, and, like Marlowe, they push life 
 beyond all bounds in the desperate effort to compass 
 the illimitable and perform the impossible. They fail 
 through excess of force not yet turned into power. 
 They had come to the consciousness of personality, 
 but not to the calmness of self-mastery. Shake- 
 speare came at the very moment when the ferment in 
 
44 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 the blood was over, and men, no longer blinded by a 
 sudden access of strength, could measure intelligently 
 the force of personality and the strength of the 
 external forces which condition human achievement 
 and expression. Shakespeare had all of Marlowe's 
 force, but he had also clear understanding of the 
 material in which he had to work. He had arrived 
 at full self-knowledge ; and, therefore, of all men of his 
 time, perhaps of all time, his personality had freest 
 and most complete expression. Toward the close of 
 the eighteenth century a similar liberation of personal 
 force was seen in Germany, where a group of great 
 minds appeared, divided by difference of gifts and 
 divergence of situation, but harmonious in this : that 
 each, following boldly the lead of his own genius, 
 discovered the two or three great principles which 
 shape and direct modern thought. 
 
 These illustrations will serve to bring out the fact 
 that great Hterature is possible only when there are 
 great personalities to create it. On the one hand, a 
 great writer puts into his work that which is peculiar 
 to his own nature, and makes it an expression of his 
 deepest and most hidden self; on the other hand, liter- 
 ature depends for its enlargement and expansion on 
 the appearance of men of great and deep personality. 
 Until the idea of personality is developed and be- 
 comes general, the creation of hterature is impossible. 
 Races which are defective in the sense of personality 
 are incapable of large and varied literary production ; 
 races in which this sense becomes most keen and 
 
PERSONALITY IN LITERARY WORK. 45 
 
 general inevitably turn to art. Self-expression is a 
 necessity when the sense of self becomes deep, rich, 
 and powerful ; when all life awakes to consciousness 
 through it, and the world lies reflected in it as the 
 summer night in the sea that moves through it 
 hushed and calmed as with the deep pulsation of 
 the universe. 
 
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MODERN 
 CRITICISM. 
 
 In his essay on "The Study of Poetry," Mr. Arnold 
 warns us against permitting the true estimate of poe- 
 try to be superseded by the historical estimate or the 
 personal estimate. The final test of poetry is neither 
 its relation to the development of a nation's language 
 and thought, nor its interest and importance to us by 
 reason of its affinity with our personal tastes and ex- 
 periences, but the soundness of its substance and 
 perfection of its form. This statement may be so ex- 
 tended in its application as to make it inclusive of all 
 literature. In the nature of things, the highest test 
 can be neither historic nor personal, but must be uni- 
 versal, — a test, that is, which involves primarily truth 
 neither to historic nor to personal relations, but truth 
 to something common to all men in whom the literary 
 instinct has found normal development. When the 
 highest court in Christendom — the consensus of the 
 educated opinion of the world — assigns their relative 
 places to the great writers, this supreme test must 
 always be applied ; but it is only on rare occasions 
 that this supreme tribunal pronounces judgment. 
 Writers of world-wide import, whose work sustains the 
 application of the very highest test, do not come to 
 
SIGNIFICANCB OF MODERN CRITICISM. 47 
 
 the judgment-seat of this high tribunal oftener than 
 four or five times in a century. For the most part, it 
 is with the men whose inferiority to Homer and 
 Dante, to Shakespeare and Milton, is clearly apparent 
 that criticism concerns itself. These illustrious shades 
 have received but a single comrade into their immor- 
 tal fellowship during the present century. Below 
 these foremost names there are written those of a 
 noble company who, if they have failed of the highest 
 places, have come near the shining goal ; and it is 
 with these that criticism chiefly concerns itself. 
 
 The supreme test separated from all other tests is 
 rarely applied ; the supreme test associated with other 
 and lesser tests is in constant use. Literature is an 
 art, and therefore submits itself to the law of beauty 
 which supplies the test of art ; but it is also a revela- 
 tion of the spirit of man, and there is to be found in 
 it something more than the perfect felicity and un- 
 broken serenity of the most finely tempered souls. 
 The buoyancy of Homer is one of our great posses- 
 sions ; but there is something to be learned also from 
 the despondency of Leopardi. The mastery of Shake- 
 speare over all the materials of his work is inspiring ; 
 but there is something significant also in the turbu- 
 lence of Byron. The amplitude of culture opens the 
 heart of the modern world in Goethe ; but the provin- 
 cial sincerity of Mistral has something to teach us. 
 Dante's majestic strength makes us feel the identity 
 of great living and great art ; but there is something 
 for us in the pathetic felicity of De Musset and the 
 
48 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 often unavailing beauty of Shelley. In each writer of 
 any force and genius there is not only the element 
 which makes him amenable to the highest law of criti- 
 cism, there is also something which appeals to our 
 individual consciousness and is distinctly personal, — 
 something which is the impress of the inheritance and 
 larger circumstance of the time, and is therefore his- 
 toric, and something which lets us into the soul of a 
 generation of men, or of a period of time or of a deep 
 movement of faith and thought. A great piece of 
 literature may be studied from each of these points 
 of view ; and to get to the bottom of its meaning, it 
 must be so studied. Every enduring literary work 
 not only affords material for, but demands, this com- 
 prehensive study, — a study which is at once critical, 
 historic, and personal. 
 
 The " Divine Comedy " has been potent enough to 
 give birth to a large literature of secondary and de- 
 rivative books ; its philosophy, its theology, its cos- 
 mology, its politics, its history, its art, have each in 
 turn been subjected to the most searching investi- 
 gation. We know the rank of the great poem as 
 literature ; we know its historic position in the de- 
 velopment of the Italian mind ; we know its profound 
 analysis of the soul and its experiences; we know 
 what a marvellous revelation of life lies in the heart of 
 it as the supreme and final reward of patient and 
 sympathetic study. No account of Dante's work 
 would be adequate which failed to take into account 
 all these elements of its power. It is something more 
 
SIGNIFICANCE OF MODERN CRITICISM. 49 
 
 than a noble substance of thought encased in a noble 
 form ; something more than a deep glimpse into ex- 
 periences which under different names are common to 
 all men ; something more than a chapter of history 
 written in fire and blood. It is all these, and it is 
 something greater. Dante was a man of genius, a 
 man of wonderful perceptive and receptive power, a 
 man to feel even more profoundly than he thought, 
 and to speak even wiser than he knew. Humanity, 
 under the pressure of that education which we call 
 history, revealed the unfathomable depth and wonder 
 of its life through him. We find this same quality of 
 revelation in Homer, in Shakespeare, in Milton, in 
 Goethe ; we find it in the work of all men of genius 
 who have written in prose or verse ; we find it in 
 Plato, in Marcus Aurelius, in Bacon, in Lessing, in 
 Carlyle, in Newman, in Emerson. And we find it in 
 all the great forms which literature takes on, — in 
 poetry, the drama, fiction, history, essay, criticism. 
 Every expression of life is not literature ; but nothing 
 which possesses the indefinable quality of literature 
 fails to tell us something about that all-embracing 
 fact. Forms, standards, methods, change ; but the 
 unchangeable element in all literature is the presence 
 of some aspect of hfe reflected, reported, interpreted, 
 with more or less fidelity and power. 
 
 Now, the study of literature in these larger rela- 
 tions, these multiform aspects, has never been so 
 earnestly pursued as during the present century. 
 Never before has such a vast amount of material 
 4 
 
50 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 been accumulated; never before have there been 
 such opportunities of using on a great scale the com- 
 parative method. This pursuit has become a passion 
 with many of the most sensitive minds ; and we have 
 as a result a body of literary interpre tation and phi- 
 losophy in the form of criticism so great in mass and 
 so important in substance as to constitute one of the 
 chief distinctively modern contributions to the art of 
 letters. For this study of books and the men who 
 made them is not the pastime of professional Dryas- 
 dusts ; it is the original and in a large measure the 
 creative work of those who, in other literary periods 
 and under other intellectual and social influences, 
 would have illustrated their genius through the epic, 
 the drama, or the lyric. Lessing, Herder, Goethe, 
 Coleridge, Carlyle, Sainte-Beuve, Arnold, Amiel, 
 Emerson, Lowell, and Stedman have not been stu- 
 dents of the work of other men simply from force of 
 the scholarly impulse ; they have been irresistibly 
 attracted to the study of literature because literature 
 has disclosed to them the soul and the laws of life 
 and art. The passion for contact with the great and 
 inexhaustible impulses which unify human hfe under 
 all conditions has led these diligent explorers from 
 one continent to another until a new world lies with- 
 in our ken. Each literature in turn is yielding its 
 secrets of race inheritance, temperament, genius ; 
 each related group of literatures is disclosing the 
 common characteristics of the family of races behind 
 it ; each literary epoch is revealing the spiritual. 
 
SIGNIFICANCE OF MODERN CRITICISM. 5 1 
 
 moral, and social forces which dominated it ; each 
 great literary form is discovering its intimate and 
 necessary relation with some fact of life, some stage 
 or process of experience. We know the Greek race 
 in large measure through the Greek literature ; we 
 know the unspent forces which stirred the Elizabethan 
 age through the Elizabethan writers ; and we know 
 why, at intervals, the greatest literary minds have 
 used the drama, the lyric, the novel, as forms of ex- 
 pression. All this we owe to the modern critical 
 movement, — a movement not so much of study and 
 comparison for the purposes of judgment by fixed 
 standards, as of investigation for the purpose of lay- 
 ing bare the common laws of life and art ; of making 
 it clear to us that literature is always the vital utter- 
 ance of insight and experience. 
 
 The earliest development of criticism on any 
 considerable scale — the criticism of Alexandria and 
 of the later stages of the revival of classical learning 
 in Italy, for example — was largely textual ; it con- 
 cerned itself chiefly with the settlement of questions 
 of variant versions ; it was mainly and necessarily 
 absorbed in a study of words and phrases. Criticism 
 of the higher order — criticism which searches for 
 the laws of beauty in the creations of art — is not 
 possible until there has been a large accumulation of 
 material upon which it can work. The drama must 
 pass through the entire period of its development, 
 from its rudimentary form in the chorus to its per- 
 fection in the plays of Sophocles, before Aristotle 
 
52 £SSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 announces its laws and defines its aims. Not until 
 a literary form has been completely worked out does 
 it disclose the law of its interior structure and its 
 resources of expression. Nor can any single work of 
 literary art furnish the elements for aesthetic criticism ; 
 there must be kindred works with which comparison 
 may be made and resemblances or contrasts noted. 
 When aesthetic criticism is fully equipped and de- 
 veloped, there remains still another stage in the evo- 
 lution ; the criticism which deals with literature as a 
 whole, which studies the large conditions under 
 which it is created, which takes account of race, time, 
 circumstance, which discerns in the detached works 
 of a man or a generation or race an adequate expres- 
 sion of human experience and an authentic revelation 
 of human life, is still to come ; and this larger criti- 
 cism is not possible until universal literature is open 
 to the critic. It is true that these different and pro- 
 gressive stages are not always clearly defined ; they 
 shade into each other, as do the various forms of 
 animal and vegetable life. They are often contem- 
 poraneous in the same piece of critical work ; com- 
 ment on questions of text, illustration of aesthetic 
 quality, and recognition of rank and significance in 
 the general movement of history often go hand in 
 hand in the work of a critic of the first rank. Never- 
 theless, these three stages of the development of 
 criticism are distinctly and unmistakably marked. 
 
 Textual criticism may begin with the first study of 
 a literary work, since it concerns that work alone. 
 
SIGNIFICANCE OP MODERN CRITICISM. S3 
 
 and has no relation to literature at large. Textual 
 criticism of the Iliad and Odyssey began, doubtless, 
 with the attempt, in the time of Pisistratus, to collect 
 these wandering stories. -(Esthetic criticism was 
 only possible when the beauty and truth of these 
 great works had so penetrated and enlightened the 
 Greek mind that soundness of substance and per- 
 fection of form were recognized as the tests of a 
 genuine work of art. The laws of art have always 
 been discovered by the process of induction ; no race 
 has ever thought much about art in the abstract 
 until it has been educated by contact with works 
 which, by their revelation to the eye, have made the 
 mind conscious of its own affinity with the ideals of 
 beauty. The discovery of the same laws in the works 
 of literature has followed a similar order. The lyric 
 must sing in the hearts of men before the secret of 
 its form is discerned and disclosed ; the drama must 
 unfold the iron creed of fate, or the indissoluble 
 union of character and destiny, before the laws 
 which shape it are announced. Esthetic criticism 
 follows, therefore, those productive periods which, by 
 enlargement and enrichment of the scope of actual 
 achievement, disclose new sources of power, larger 
 sweep of ideas, different or higher possibihties of 
 execution. When Euripides completed his work, the 
 Greek had all the materials for an intelligent, if still 
 incomplete, study of the drama at hand ; .(Eschylus, 
 Sophocles, and Euripides had wrought with such 
 power on so great a scale that they had made clear 
 
54 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 the construction and the peculiar force and signifi- 
 cance of the noble literary form which they fashioned. 
 There was no need, for the purposes of aesthetic 
 criticism, to hold judgment in suspense until Lessing, 
 Corneille, Calderon, and Shakespeare had spoken. 
 Aristotle was amply justified by the scope and 
 splendour of the drama of his own race in declaring 
 the purpose of all dramatic representation. But as a 
 disclosure of the full possibilities of the drama as an 
 instrument of human expression, even the Attic stage 
 was incomplete ; other races must endure and suffer 
 and translate experience into art, before the full com- 
 pass of this magnificent literary form could be under- 
 stood. And when the drama has been brought as 
 near perfection as the genius of man can carry it, 
 there are still other elements which must enter into a 
 final and adequate comprehension of its significance. 
 It must be studied in the light of a complete literary 
 development ; it must find its place in the large 
 movement of history. To a real mastery of the 
 drama as a form of art and an expression of experi- 
 ence, there is necessary, therefore, its full development 
 under many diverse conditions and at many hands, 
 familiarity with literature in all its forms, and clear 
 perception of the historic life behind the work of art. 
 And what is true of the drama is also true of the epic, 
 the lyric, the ballad, the novel, — in a word, of 
 literature as a whole. 
 
 The conditions which make possible this com- 
 prehensive study of literature as an art, and as an 
 
SIGNIFICANCE OP MODERN CRITICISM. SS 
 
 expression of human life, have not existed until 
 within comparatively recent times. There are 
 glimpses here and there in the works of the greatest 
 minds of the unity of knowledge, glimpses of the 
 range and significance of literature as the vital out- 
 come of all human experience ; but the clear percep- 
 tion of these truths has been possible only to modern 
 men. It is one thing to glance at a great truth in the 
 swift vision of prophecy ; it is a very different thing 
 to discern it as the result of deliberate searching, and 
 to hold it within the field until it is clearly under- 
 stood in its import and large relations. So long as 
 knowledge and art were abstractly conceived, — 
 thought of as existing apart and isolated from human 
 development, — there could be no conception of 
 their harmony and interdependence, of their vital 
 relation to the development of men as individuals 
 and as a society. It was reserved for the Germans of 
 the last century to comprehend and formulate that 
 idea of the unity and vital interdependence of all 
 the forms and forces of civilization which lies at the 
 foundation of all our modern thinking ; which has, 
 indeed, transformed and reconstructed all knowledge. 
 What the Humanists did in a partial and provi- 
 sional way toward a true and real insight into the an- 
 tique world, the great German critics of the last cen- 
 tury — Winckelmann, Herder, Lessing, and Goethe 
 — did fundamentally and permanently, not only 
 for classical art and life, but for all knowledge 
 and history. The Humanists destroyed the mediae- 
 
56 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION: 
 
 val tradition of Virgil, and brought back the living 
 man; brushed aside the cobwebs with which cen- 
 turies of monkish teaching had obscured the great 
 poem, and made clear once more its human tender- 
 ness and beauty. The German thinkers destroyed 
 the abstract idea of knowledge which divided it into 
 separate departments, isolated from each other and 
 detached from the living experience of men, — the 
 forma], academic idea of art as a set of rules, a fixed 
 and conventional practice unrelated to national char- 
 acter. Rejecting the dry and arbitrary definitions 
 and abstractions of his time, Winckelmann discovered 
 the totality of Greek life, and saw what his predeces- 
 sors had failed to see, — that simplicity, elevation, and 
 repose were the common qualities of the dramas of 
 Sophocles, the marbles of Phidias, the speculations 
 of Plato, the orations of Pericles ; that literature, 
 sculpture, philosophy, and oratory were, therefore, 
 the vitally related parts of a harmonious and com- 
 plete expression of Greek life ; and that the common 
 root whence all these exquisite flowers drew their 
 loveliness was the Greek nature. Many of the mar- 
 bles in the Vatican were recovered as part of the 
 great work of the Renaissance, but they were first 
 really seen by Winckelmann and his contemporaries. 
 He discerned the noble idealism shared aUke by 
 Plato and the sculptors of the Periclean age, — that 
 idealism which found in the Greek mind so congenial 
 a soil, and in the Greek hand and the Greek speech 
 such sure and marvellous interpreters. Winckelmann 
 
SIGNIFICANCE OP MODERN CRITICISM. 57 
 
 " first unveiled the ideal beauty of Greek antiquity," 
 and disclosed those qualities of Greek art which make 
 it one in all its splendid forms ; so that whether we 
 study the trilogy of Agamemnon, the structure of the 
 Parthenon, the statesmanship of Pericles, or the 
 " Phsedrus," we are conscious of but a single creative 
 personality. In its magical beauty each work re- 
 mains a perpetual type ; but the genius of the lamp 
 by which these wonders were wrought was one. Be- 
 hind all these beautiful masks there was a single 
 face. Winckelmann saw that art had a natural history 
 of its own, and that its birth, its successive stages of 
 growth, its decay and death, could be clearly traced ; 
 he saw that religion, political development, race, 
 climate, soil, character, furnished the conditions of 
 its life. He perceived, in a word, the unity of Greek 
 life and history, the organic and historic development 
 of Greek art. For an abstract idea, he substituted 
 a living organism ; for a conventional system, a vital 
 process ; for an isolated skill, the splendid expression 
 of the deepest human experience and the loftiest 
 human ideals. 
 
 By very different methods, and with a very different 
 mind, but in the same vital spirit. Herder approached 
 the study of literature. French influence was still 
 dominant in Germany, where the absolutism of Fred- 
 erick in the State was reproduced in letters in the 
 tyranny of artificial tastes, conventional models, and 
 a dead formality alien to the German mind and 
 powerless to touch the German heart. Boileau's 
 
58 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 " Art Po6tique " was the final word concerning litera- 
 ture ; while the sovereignty of fact and the supremacy 
 of common-sense, incarnated in the " Encyclopaedia," 
 barred out the visions of the imagination and the 
 insight of intuition. In this formal world, from which 
 all natural, primary impulses were shut out, Herder 
 appeared, fresh from contact with the living sources of 
 Hterature. He was saturated with the poetry of the 
 Bible ; he had drunk deep at the springs of Homer, 
 Shakespeare, and the English ballads. He was under 
 the spell of the freshest and most creative spirit ever 
 expressed in literature, — a spirit instinctively artistic in 
 every expression of itself, and yet without a touch of 
 self-consciousness. Nowhere has the soul of man 
 spoken with such perfect simplicity and sincerity, 
 and consequently with such sublime eloquence, as in 
 the pages of the Bible, of Homer, and of Shakespeare. 
 Herder exchanged the old-fashioned French garden, 
 with its deformed trees and intrusive orderliness, for 
 the bloom of the open field. Literature was no arti- 
 ficial product to him ; it was a natural growth ; its 
 roots were in the heart of man ; it was the voice of 
 man's need and sufferings and hopes. From the 
 conventional ideas and standards of his time he 
 turned to the profound conception of literature as a 
 growth, an unforced and authoritative utterance of 
 the soul. He returned to Nature, in the well-worn 
 phrase ; to Nature as he found it in primitive ages, 
 and in men whose simplicity and sincerity were still 
 untouched by conventionalism. " Poetry in those 
 
SIGNIFICANCE OF MODERN CRITICISM. 59 
 
 happy days,'' he declared, " lived in the ears of the 
 people, on the lips and in the harps of living bards ; 
 it sang of history, of the events of the day, of mys- 
 teries, miracles, and signs. It was the flower of a 
 nation's character, language, and country, of its oc- 
 cupations, its prejudices, its passions, its aspirations, 
 and its soul." The epic was to Herder " the living 
 history of the people; " the Lied, or song, was not a 
 poem of the study and the salon ; it was a natural 
 melody out of the heart of a passion or sentiment. 
 The fable was not a calculated setting of moral truth 
 in story form ; it was " the poetical illustration of a 
 lesson of experience by means of a characteristic 
 trait, drawn from animal life, and developed by anal- 
 ogy." "Analogy is the parent of poetry in fables, 
 not abstraction, still less a dry deduction from the 
 general to the particular." Herder opposed to the 
 mechanical conception of literature, then almost uni- 
 versally held, the vital conception ; he recognized 
 the distinctive quality of genius, because he empha- 
 sized the spontaneous element in all great poetry; 
 he discerned the parallelism between literary and 
 historical development. The significant word with 
 him was growth ; because growth implies natural 
 process as opposed to mechanical process, spontane- 
 ous impulse as opposed to conscious action, genius 
 as opposed to artifice, the individual soul as opposed 
 to abstract ideas. Goethe expressed Herder's funda- 
 mental idea when he said : " Everything that man 
 undertakes to produce, whether by action, word, or 
 
6o ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 in whatsoever way, ought to spring from the union of 
 all his faculties." It is this deep, unconscious ex- 
 pression of the totality of man's experience and 
 nature which pervades the greatest works of litera- 
 ture, and makes them the most authoritative works 
 of history we possess. They record the progress of that 
 education of the soul for which the world stands. 
 
 Herder performed for literature the service which 
 Winckelmann performed for antique art : he dis- 
 covered its natural history, and set it in normal 
 relations with the totality of human thought and 
 achievement. And what he had done for literature 
 he did also for history. He substituted a natural and 
 vital for an artificial and mechanical conception. He 
 grasped the great idea of development, so familiar to 
 us, and so fruitful of fresher and deeper views of 
 things. " Up to this time," says a German writer, 
 reported by Hillebrand, from whom these quotations 
 are made, " the most mechanical teleology had 
 reigned in the philosophy of history. Providence 
 was represented to have created cork-trees that men 
 should have wherewith to stop their bottles." Herder 
 saw that the laws which govern the life of men in the 
 world are written in the very constitution of the soul, 
 and are not arbitrary regulations impressed from 
 without ; that history records the unfolding of germs 
 and forces which were within the soul at the begin- 
 ning, not a series of interferences and interruptions ; 
 and that these germs are developed under conditions 
 fixed by law, and part, therefore, of the very structure 
 
SIGNIFICANCE OF MODERN CRITICISM. 6 1 
 
 of Nature. " The God I look for in history," he said, 
 " must be the same as the God of Nature, — for man is 
 but a tiny particle of the whole, and the history of 
 mankind resembles that of the worm, closely con- 
 nected with the tissue it inhabits ; therefore tho 
 natural laws by which the Deity reveals itself must 
 reign in man likewise. . . . The whole history of 
 humanity is pure, natural history of human forces, 
 actions, and instincts, according to time and place." 
 If Herder meant in these words to shut out the 
 constant inflow of spiritual influences into human 
 history, we might well part company with him ; but 
 the emphasis of his statement and its deep signifi- 
 cance are to be found in the fact that he vitalized 
 history as he had vitalized literature, by putting a 
 natural process of growth in the place of a mechanical 
 process, thus making history a living expression of 
 the character of man, — a continuous revelation of 
 the laws and forces of life. 
 
 Those only who understand how widespread and 
 deep-rooted were mechanical and arbitrary ideas in 
 the last century can understand how tremendous a 
 revolution was implicit in the changes of thought thus 
 rapidly sketched, — a revolution which has affected 
 every department of knowledge, and has reorganized 
 it along new and deeper lines. Carlyle once said to 
 Bayard Taylor that Goethe had been his saviour. 
 There was a characteristic exaggeration in the state- 
 ment ; but it had this truth at the bottom, that at a 
 time when the young Scotch thinker found himself 
 
62 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 forced to part company with the narrow and arid 
 conception of life and humanity as vitiated by 
 corruption, and not only entirely untrustworthy, but 
 dissevered and broken into fragments, the buoyant 
 naturalism of Goethe, affirming the divine origin 
 and destiny of all created things, the soundness and 
 healthfulness of Nature and man, the unity and 
 dignity of history and knowledge, and consequently 
 the authority of history, literature, and art as a 
 revelation of both human and divine, put soHd ground 
 under him, and gave him a rational and harmonious 
 view of things, — a view which included and made 
 room for every form of human activity. It is very 
 interesting to the reader of Goethe to-day to discover 
 how generally the intellectual movement of this 
 century is reflected in his pages, and how profoundly 
 sympathetic his mind was with the broad and, within 
 certain limits, healthy and fruitful naturalism which 
 pervades contemporary thought. The nature of man 
 was to Goethe the one authoritative and authentic 
 revelation, and he refused to reject any part of that 
 revelation. History, literature, art, religion, — these 
 all expressed what man has been and has become by 
 virtue of the evolution of his personality under the 
 established conditions of hfe. The natural history of 
 man is written in his works, and together they form 
 the trustworthy record and disclosure of his nature. 
 It will be seen from this brief statement that 
 VVinckelmann, Herder, and Goethe held certain fun- 
 damental ideas in common, and these ideas will be 
 
SIGNIFICANCE OP MODERN CRITICISM. 63 
 
 found to be fundamental in modem criticism. The 
 perception of the truth that literature is, in large meas- 
 ure, conditioned on the development, the surround- 
 ings, and the character of the men who create it ; 
 that the vast and varied movement of humanity re- 
 corded in history is a development, a progressive 
 unfolding, a coherent expression of man's nature ; 
 and that literature, as a part of this vast movement, 
 represents a growth, a vital process, and is, there- 
 fore, a part of the discovery of himself which man is 
 making as his supreme achievement in life, — these 
 are the informing ideas of the modern critical move- 
 ment. The epoch of purely textual criticism has long 
 passed away ; that work has been transferred mainly, 
 if not entirely, to the scholars. Esthetic criticism, 
 on the other hand, has been immensely enriched and 
 stimulated by the application to literature of the ideas 
 which have been set forth ; never in the history of 
 letters has there been so much criticism of the highest 
 order as during the present century. When it was 
 seen that no literary work is detached from the totality 
 of human achievement ; that no work represents in- 
 dividual gift, skill, or experience alone ; that in every 
 real book humanity speaks out of and to its own heart, 
 — the feeling toward literature was immensely deep- 
 ened and freshened, y^isthetic criticism formerly 
 concerned itself entirely with the fidelity of a work to 
 standards already set up by the creations of acknowl- 
 edged masters ; this was the kind of criticism which 
 was practised in England and on the continent at 
 
64 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 the close of the last and the beginning of the present 
 century. It was assumed that the last word had been 
 spoken concerning the art of writing ; that the final 
 canons had been announced, and the final standards 
 and models given to the world. A new work must 
 conform to these standards or suffer condemnation ; 
 lack of conformity meant lack of art. Now, the very 
 idea of literature as a growth, as an expression of the 
 continually unfolding life of man, involves not only 
 the possibility, but the certainty, of change and ex- 
 pansion. New forms of expression must be born with 
 the new thoughts and experiences which they are to 
 clothe. The permanent element in literature is not 
 form, but spirit ; not a particular manner, but perfec- 
 tion of manner ; not uniformity of execution, but 
 endless variety, stamped always with supreme excel- 
 lence. There are flawless models, but they are for 
 inspiration, not for imitation ; they fix the standard 
 of quality, but they liberate the hand which they 
 inspire. 
 
 This was perhaps the first great change effected by 
 the modern way of looking at literature ; and the extent 
 and significance of that change can be seen by com- 
 paring the criticism of Voltaire with that of Sainte- 
 Beuve ; the criticism of Dr. Johnson with that of 
 Matthew Arnold. The older view of literature in- 
 volved the idea of a fixed and formal set of laws con- 
 stituting an art ; the later view involves the growth 
 of literature with the growth of man, the essential 
 element being, not conformity to a rigid order of form. 
 
SIGNIFICANCE OF MODERN CRITICISM. 65 
 
 but soundness and veracity of thought, and beauty 
 and flexibility of expression. Dr. Johnson could 
 understand Dryden because Dryden was a conformist, 
 in letter if not in spirit ; but Shakespeare belonged 
 to another order, and demanded a breadth and catho- 
 licity which Dr. Johnson could not bring to his magical 
 pages. Mr. Arnold, on the other hand, can perceive 
 the literary quality shared in common by men as 
 diverse as Wordsworth and Shelley, as Byron and 
 Tolstoi. The criticism represented by Mr. Arnold, 
 even when it limits itself to esthetic quality alone, is 
 informed with modern ideas ; with the ideas which 
 Herder and his contemporaries were the first to see 
 clearly and to apply profoundly. No man studies a 
 star as a solitary world ; though he shut all other stars 
 out of the field of observation, the heavens still move 
 about the shining point which he has isolated. A 
 modern critic approaches a work of literature with 
 certain ideas which are a part of his intellectual life,, 
 He cannot, if he would, detach a writer from his age, 
 his race, humanity : all these are present in every 
 study which he makes ; they are involved in every 
 conclusion which he reaches ; they contribute to 
 every judgment which he pronounces. 
 
 The older criticism, the criticism based on stand- 
 ards which were supposed to be exact and final, 
 must in the nature of things have continued to be a 
 derivative and secondary growth, — a body of writing 
 related to the original work of which it treated, very 
 much as the parasite is related to the trunk from 
 5 
 
66 ASSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 which it draws its life. But for the development ot 
 the ideas which have been emphasized, criticism as 
 we know it could never have been. For when we 
 study this criticism as a whole, we become aware 
 that it is original and not secondary work ; and that 
 criticism as a literary form has as deep a root, and 
 is as clearly related to human growth and experience 
 as the epic, the drama, or any other form of distinc- 
 tively creative work. The extent to which this form 
 has been used by men of literary genius of late years, 
 and the perfection to which it has been brought, in- 
 dicate clearly that there is behind it a primary im- 
 pulse, — an impulse which seeks it as something 
 normal, adequate, and akin to the spirit and thought 
 of the day. It is sometimes said that the great place 
 in contemporary literature occupied by criticism is 
 evidence of the decline of the creative impulse, and 
 that the originative forces are evidently spent. This 
 class of comment is familiar to all students of litera- 
 ture, who have read again and again the announce- 
 ment of a similar decay of art because some new form 
 of expression had begun to press hard upon the old 
 in importance and influence. The literary instinct, 
 like every kind of artistic instinct, is characterized by 
 the greatest sensitivism ; men select forms of expres- 
 sion rarely as the result of deliberation ; the form 
 comes generally with the message which it is to con- 
 tain, or the significant fact which it is to express. If 
 a literary form attracts a great number of fine minds 
 at a given time, this fact of itself raises the presump- 
 
SIGNIFICANCE OP MODERN CRITICISM. 67 
 
 tion that the attractive power lies in some deep and 
 real affinity between this particular form and the in- 
 tellectual and spiritual conditions of the time. With- 
 out consideration of the contents of modern criticism, 
 the fact that so many minds of the highest class have 
 made it their chief means of self-expression ought to 
 put us on guard against any conclusion involving its 
 rank as an original contribution to literature. That 
 men of the order of Coleridge, Carlyle, Sainte-Beuve, 
 and Arnold have chosen criticism as the method of 
 expression best fitted to convey their convictions and 
 conclusions is a sufficient' answer to those who regard 
 it as a secondary form, and refuse to recognize it as 
 original and first-hand work. Not exhaustion of 
 creative impulse, but change of direction, is indicated 
 by the attractiveness of criticism to modern minds ; 
 not a decline of force, but the application of force 
 through a new instrument. 
 
 The scientific spirit has invaded literature to the 
 extent of emphasizing the importance of a clear com- 
 prehension of all the elements that enter into a work 
 of literary art so far as they are discoverable. The 
 secret of the splendid vitalit}' of the Odyssey eludes 
 all search ; but we recognize it the more clearly now 
 that we have learned so much about the Greek life 
 and character out of which it issued and in which it 
 was embosomed. But this spirit, in its devotion to 
 reahty and its instinct for getting to the bottom of 
 things, could not rest in any isolated study of literary 
 works ; it must study literature as a whole, determine 
 
68 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 its rank and place, and interpret its significance in 
 the totality of human development. It is in the body 
 of modern critical writing that we discover the re- 
 sponse of the literary mind to the methods and spirit 
 of science. The absorbing search of science is for 
 the fact, and the law behind the fact ; it fashions 
 nothing ; it waits with infinite patience on discovery. 
 Now, the end of criticism is, to this extent, identical 
 with the end of science ; it is to discover and lay 
 bare the fact, and the law behind it. Is this work 
 true to the fact, the law? is its first question ; and the 
 answer involves a clear discernment of the truth of 
 idea or experience which the writer has sought to 
 represent under the form of art, and also a clear per- 
 ception of the law of beauty to which it must conform 
 if it contain the indefinable quality of art. Thus, as 
 its most immediate and direct result, criticism dis- 
 covers the presence or absence of soundness of sub- 
 stance and perfection of form. 
 
 But there is another and more comprehensive ques- 
 tion which criticism asks. The work which it studies 
 must conform to something, but it must also reveal 
 something ; it must disclose a certain order and 
 beauty of workmanship, but it must also discover its 
 connection with an ultimate order to which every 
 real expression of man's soul bears witness. When 
 Matthew Arnold defines poetry as a criticism of life, 
 he indicates that which is behind all literature, whether 
 in verse or prose, — that which supplies its inspiration 
 and furnishes its unfailing test. What is soundness 
 
SIGNIFICANCE OP MODERN CRITICISM. 69 
 
 of substance but fidelity to the fact and law of life ? 
 A work of art is sound only when it is true to nature 
 and experience ; it may possess the very highest 
 beauty, but if, like some of Shelley's longer poems, 
 it lacks reality, truth to experience or to ideals which 
 are the projection of experience, we are compelled to 
 assign it a lower rank. It is defective in that quality 
 which is, so far as substance is concerned, the supreme 
 quality of the really great work of art. And what is 
 perfection of form but fidelity to those laws of art 
 never put on tables of stone, but indelibly written in 
 the soul by the hand whose vast creation follows ever 
 the line of beauty? The fact and the law of life and 
 art, — these are the realities for which criticism, con- 
 sciously or unconsciously, is always searching. These 
 form what Fichte called " the divine idea of the world," 
 which "lies at the bottom of all appearance." Herder, 
 Goethe, Hildebrand, and Grimm ; Sainte-Beuve and 
 Scherer ; Coleridge, Carlyle, Arnold, Dowden, and 
 Hutton ; Emerson and Lowell, — the great company 
 of those who have pursued criticism for the highest 
 ends have each and all disclosed the power of these 
 ideas upon their work. They have fashioned a new 
 form of literature, and one perfectly adapted to the 
 intellectual methods and tendencies of the age, — a 
 form through which the creative impulse, following 
 the scientific method, but in the truest literary spirit, 
 works with a freedom and power which attest the 
 adaptation of the instrument to the task. Perfection 
 of form is nowhere more perfectly illustrated than in 
 
70 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 the best critical writing, in which the more imposing 
 qualities of order, proportion, gradation, are combined 
 with marvellous delicacy of touch, refinement of charac- 
 terization, subtilty and keenness of insight. 
 
 Modern criticism has given us a new conception of 
 literature. Studying comprehensively the vast ma- 
 terial which has come to its hand, discerning clearly 
 the law of growth behind all art, and the interdepen- 
 dence and unity of all human development, it has 
 given us an interpretation of literature which is noth- 
 ing less than another chapter in the revelation of life. 
 This is its real contribution to civilization ; this is the 
 achievement which stamps it as creative work. The 
 epic described adequately and nobly the stir and 
 movement of an objective age ; the drama repre- 
 sented the relations of men to the powers above them 
 and to the organized social and moral forces about 
 them ; criticism, in the hands of the great writers, 
 discloses the law and the fact of art and life as these 
 final realities are revealed through literature. 
 
THE POETRY OF DANTE GABRIEL 
 ROSSETTI. 
 
 The real importance of those movements in litera- 
 ture or art which have been definite enough in aim 
 to enlist an active membership of gifted persons 
 and to formulate something like a creed, is to be 
 found, as a rule, not in the creed, but in the fellow- 
 ship. The formulation of principles, the agreement 
 upon methods, seem at the moment of the first im- 
 portance ; but time, that patient corrector of inade- 
 quate judgments and false perspectives, is indifferent 
 to theories of art, and cares only for the work which 
 discovers the inspired touch, and the personality 
 through which the vision of truth or beauty enters 
 into the common life of men. Such movements are 
 often fruitful of great works and great souls, and 
 mark great expansions of thought ; but the specific ■ 
 creeds which they profess, like creeds of every sort, 
 are always partial, inadequate, and provisional. That 
 which seemed a finality to the men who were under 
 the spell of its fresh and thrilling influence, in the 
 end falls into line with the continuous process of 
 development of which it was part, and is recognized 
 as a new and fruitful evolution from the past. 
 
72 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 To the ardent youths who crowded the Theatre 
 Frangais on the evening of Feb. 25, 1830, " Her- 
 nani " filled the entire stage of the world and 
 obliterated the drama of the past; in that hour 
 Romanticism was not so much a reaction as a com- 
 plete and final revolution of the aims and principles 
 of dramatic art. To many of the Transcendentalists 
 of forty years ago the pure and highly intellectual im- 
 pulse which they shared prophesied the breaking of 
 the last seals, and the imminent disclosure of that 
 open secret which has been in all times both inspira- 
 tion and anguish to the noblest souls. No student 
 of literature will underestimate the value of those 
 statements of principles, vague and incomplete as 
 they were, which grew out of the Romantic and 
 Transcendental movements ; but the real significance 
 of Romanticism and Transcendentalism is to be 
 found in the substantial works which attest to the 
 world the reality of the impulse which inspired them, 
 and in which the main drift of both movements is to 
 be discovered. Much has been written concerning 
 Pre-Raphaelitism, and much doubtless remains to be 
 said touching this very interesting movement which 
 affected English art so strongly forty years ago ; but 
 the significance and value of the impulse which strove 
 with only partial success to formulate itself in the 
 " Germ " and, later, in the " Oxford and Cambridge 
 Magazine," is to be found in the works of three or 
 four eminent artists, and of at least one poet of rare 
 quality and unique personality. We are chiefly con- 
 
POETRY OF DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. 73 
 
 cerned to know that the Pre-RaphaeUte movement, 
 hke every other great movement in art and literature, 
 was not so much the outcome of a new doctrine, a 
 novel creed, as a new attitude toward Nature and 
 life, a more sincere and earnest mood, a fresh per- 
 ception of truth and beauty through individual genius, 
 a deep and spontaneous feeling for things which had 
 come to be treated in a conventional and formal way. 
 The significance of such movements lies always in 
 the fact that they mark fresh contact of open and 
 aspiring minds with Nature and life ; and when this 
 takes place, ferment, agitation, and brilliant activity 
 inevitably follow. The artists and poets who are 
 associated with Pre-Raphaelitism were moved by a 
 common instinct to forsake the conventional and 
 academic methods of the day and study Nature for 
 themselves; this was the wholesome impulse at the 
 heart of their common activity, and its sincerity and 
 power are the more apparent now that the excessive 
 individualism and morbid intensity of much of its 
 expression have become things of the past. 
 
 It would be interesting as matter of literary history 
 to indicate the relations of this movement to the 
 larger movement of thought and life which set its 
 impress on the literature of Europe at the close of 
 the last and the beginning of the present century. 
 Herder and the young Goethe ; Burns, Byron, Keats, 
 Shelley, Coleridge, and Wordsworth ; Hugo and Gau- 
 tier, — are names which seem to suggest differences 
 rather than agreement ; but it would not be difficult 
 
74 MSSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 to discover certain near and close ties between them. 
 More evident and readily discoverable is the relation- 
 ship of Pre-Raphaelitism with Romanticism ; with the 
 Oxford movement which expressed itself from the 
 pulpit of St. Mary's Church in those subtile and 
 searching sermons which made the world aware that 
 in John Henry Newman a man of distinctly religious 
 genius had appeared ; and with that notable revival 
 of Gothic forms which a deepened religious feeling 
 substituted for the pseudo-classic architecture of the 
 preceding century. A wonderfully interesting and 
 significant movement of thought and life was that 
 which associated the names of Newman and Keble, 
 Hunt, Millais, and Rossetti, Pugin and Ruskin. But 
 this is, after all, mainly matter of historical interest ; 
 the real message which these men had to deliver to 
 the world is to be sought not so much in their state- 
 ments of faith, which were largely polemic, as in the 
 great works which are the only authentic disclosures 
 of their genius and bent. The men themselves had 
 no sooner come to agreement in certain specific 
 matters of principle or method than they began im- 
 mediately to drift apart ; the law of life was upon 
 them ; and while they held some things in common, 
 the work and the word of each was to be the utter- 
 ance of individual insight and experience. 
 
 Of the seven young men who formed the Pre- 
 Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848, William Holman 
 Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Dante Gabriel 
 Rossetti achieved distinction as painters ; Thomas 
 
POETRY OF DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. 75 
 
 Woolner as a sculptor ; William M. Rossetti and his 
 famous brother, as poets ; while James CoUinson and 
 Frederick George Stephens, either in promise or per- 
 formance, made good their claim to this illustrious 
 companionship. With these narries are also associ- 
 ated others which the world will not care to forget : 
 Madox Brown, the painter of the Manchester frescos, 
 William Bell Scott, and Christina Rossetti. To this 
 little group the Rossetti family furnished three of the 
 most active and original minds ; and of these three, 
 one is likely to remain the most memorable exponent 
 of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Of Gabriel Charles 
 Dante Rossetti, who changed his name to Dante Ga- 
 briel at an early period in his career, much might be 
 said by way of emphasizing the influential element of 
 heredity. In blood, as his brother tells us, he was 
 three fourths Italian and one fourth English, " being 
 on the father's side wholly Italian and on the mother's 
 side half Italian and half English." The father was 
 a scholar, a man of letters, and an ardent patriot 
 long before the days of the successful movement for 
 Italian independence and nationality. Exiled after 
 the good old Bourbon fashion, Gabriele Rossetti came 
 to London in 1824, married the daughter of an 
 English mother and an Italian father, — the latter a 
 teacher, translator, and scholar of excellent quality, — 
 became Professor of ItaUan in King's College, and a 
 commentator on Dante of orthodox depth and ob- 
 scurity. To this fugitive scholar were born four 
 children, — Maria Francesca, who died in 1876; 
 
76 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 Dante Gabriel; William Michael j and Christina 
 Georgina. A group so variously gifted has rarely 
 gathered round any fireside. To Maria Francesca 
 we are indebted for "A Shadow of Dante," which 
 so eminent a student of the great Florentine as Mr. 
 Lowell has declared to be " by far the best comment 
 that has appeared in English." William Michael is 
 known to all readers of current English verse and 
 criticism; and Christina has won high rank as a 
 writer of lyrical verse of marked individual quality. 
 
 Dante Gabriel was born on May 12, 1828, into an 
 atmosphere charged with high and intense intellectual 
 activity. He knew the story of " Hamlet " before 
 most children know the alphabet, and at five years of 
 age he wrote a dramatic poem entitled " The Slave ; " 
 seven years later he composed a series of still more 
 ambitious verses which bore the romantic title of " Sir 
 Hugh the Heron," and were probably suggested by 
 some lines in the first canto of " Marmion." These 
 verses have no interest save as they indicate the pre- 
 cocious activity of a mind which began its conscious 
 development with the advantages of an exceptional 
 pre-natal education. In 1835 he entered King's 
 College school, where he studied Latin, French, and 
 German ; Italian was as familiar to him as English. 
 A strong desire to become a painter led to a change 
 of instruction in his fourteenth year; and leaving 
 King's College school, he devoted himself to the 
 study of art. From the Royal Academy Antique 
 School he entered the studio of Madox Brown, and 
 
POETRY OF DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. 77 
 
 made the acquaintance of the daring young innova- 
 tors who formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 
 1848. In his nineteenth year Dante Gabriel wrote 
 the first verse which gave unmistakable evidence of 
 his possession of poetic genius. In this year he pro- 
 duced the striking lines entitled " My Sister's Sleep," 
 in the metre with which "In Memoriam" was to 
 make the world familiar three years later ; and the 
 most widely known of all his poems, " The Blessed 
 Damosel ; " both of which appeared for the first time 
 in the " Germ " in 1850. Of Rossetti's art work, 
 begun at this period and carried on to the close of 
 his too brief career, this is not the place to speak, 
 even if it were within the power of the writer to 
 characterize and describe its subtile and varied beauty 
 of expression, its noble substance of thought, its 
 splendour and depth of imaginative force. It is suffi- 
 cient to say that the two sides of his life endeavour are 
 entirely harmonious ; that they are complementary 
 expressions of a genius which saw things as a whole 
 with a glance that pierced to the very soul of beauty 
 in things visible and in a vision as rapt and at times 
 as ecstatic as was ever vouchsafed to mystic or saint. 
 In the spring of i860, after a long engagement, 
 Rossetti married Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, — a woman 
 of poetic and artistic faculty, of exquisite sensitiveness 
 of mind and nature, and whose beautiful face will 
 long remain a possession in one of Rossetti's most 
 characteristic works, the " Beata Beatrix." The com- 
 pleteness and happiness of this fellowship, can Qply be 
 
78 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 inferred from the crushing and Hfelong grief which 
 her death, early in 1862, brought upon Rossetti. In 
 the darkness of that sudden and awful sorrow, to 
 quote the words of another, the poet literally buried 
 his wand, and committed his poems to the grave in 
 which his wife was interred. But neither genius nor 
 its works are private property, and the time came 
 when the persuasions of his friends and his own sense 
 of obligation to his gifts induced Rossetti to consent 
 to the disinterment of the manuscripts; and in 1876 
 his first volume of "Poems" was published, — the 
 second volume, " Ballads and Sonnets," appearing in 
 1 88 1. But the hand of death was already upon him. 
 Insomnia, that lurking foe in sensitive and highly 
 imaginative temperaments, had already greatly re- 
 duced his working power, and had developed a morbid 
 tendency which led to recurring periods of depression 
 and to prolonged seclusion from the society of all 
 save the most intimate friends. On Easter Sunday, 
 April 9, 1882, Rossetti died. 
 
 A singularly uneventful life, judged by that shallowest 
 of conventional standards which measures the depth 
 and breadth of man's life by the journeys he makes, 
 and the things which befall his estate ! Rossetti's 
 life was intensive rather than extensive ; its power 
 and affluence lay in the clearness with which its own 
 aims were discerned, and the quiet persistence with 
 which it was held to the lines of its own development. 
 Probably no modern man has been, in one sense, so 
 detached from the world of his time, and so consist- 
 
POETRY OF DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. 79 
 
 ently true to an ideal which was the projection of 
 his own soul. That ideal is clearly disclosed in the 
 two arts which served Rossetti as interpreters with 
 almost equal fidelity and power. No man has left a 
 more distinct record of his temperament and genius, 
 and there are few such records which put one under 
 a spell more potent, or which lead one on to the 
 heart of a more enthralling ideal. A man so sensitive 
 and intense in his imaginative faculty will not fall 
 under the influence of a multitude of antagonistic 
 teachers ; he will respond only to those with whom 
 his own nature has some spiritual kinship. One is 
 not surprised to find, therefore, that Rossetti early dis- 
 covered strongly marked intellectual affinities, which 
 lie so directly along the lines of his own temperament 
 that, after studying his work, one could safely venture 
 to name them. Shakespeare, Byron, Shelley, Cole- 
 ridge, Keats, and Tennyson are the natural teachers 
 of such a boyhood and youth as Rossetti's ; and later 
 one may count with assurance upon the peculiar and 
 potent influence of Blake and Browning. There is 
 one other name with which the name of Rossetti will 
 be associated as long as it carries any power of 
 association with it. Over the household of the exiled 
 Italian scholar the memory of Dante continually 
 hovered like the presence of the genius of a race. 
 The great Florentine was not a tradition, the shadow 
 of a mighty past, to the childhood of the poet ; he 
 was a continual and pervasive influence, penetrating 
 his inmost life in its formative period, and leaving in 
 
8o ESSAYS LW LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 the mind an image as clear and familiar as it was 
 inspiring. Rossetti's personality was too strong and 
 well defined to yield itself even into hands so puissant 
 as those of Dante ; but between the two there was a 
 spiritual as well as a race kinship, and the poet of the 
 " Divine Comedy " has had no truer interpreter than 
 the translator of the "Vita Nuova " and the poet of 
 " The House of lAfe." 
 
 Rossetti was extremely fond of the old English and 
 Scotch ballad literature. For the Italian poets as a 
 whole he cared little ; among modern writers of 
 French verse he was drawn only to Hugo and De 
 Musset ; his admiration for Villon one could safely 
 have predicted. He had little in common with the 
 Germans, whose names were on all lips in the time of 
 his early manhood, although one cannot help think- 
 ing that if he had carried his study of the language 
 further, he would have been strongly moved by many 
 of the German ballads, and that at least one episode 
 in " Faust " would have touched him closely. Fitz- 
 gerald's masterly version of Calderon interested him 
 greatly during the later years of his life. For Teu- 
 tonic and Scandinavian myth and poetry he had no 
 affinity, and he was entirely free from that curiosity 
 concerning Oriental thought and belief which of late 
 has taken possession of so many minds, both great 
 and small. He had none of that unfruitful and 
 essentially unintellectual curiosity which leads people 
 to ransack all literatures and philosophies, not in the 
 spirit of eager search for principles, but from a desire 
 
POETRY OP DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. 8 1 
 
 to discover some new thing, — a desire especially to 
 come upon some esoteric knowledge, and thus, by a 
 single brilliant advance, possess themselves of the 
 secret of the universe. Rossetti did not make the 
 mistake of thinking that truth is something which can 
 be found by searching ; he understood that knowl- 
 edge becomes truth only as we grow into it and make 
 it ours by vital assimilation. Deaf to all solicitations 
 of passion or pleasure, unresponsive to the intellectual 
 curiosity of his time, he took his own way through 
 life, made fellowship with those who shared with him 
 the passion for the ideal, and gave his work the 
 impress of a singular and highly individual consist- 
 ency of conception and mood. 
 
 Two volumes of moderate size contain the complete 
 work of Rossetti in poetry, and one of these is made 
 up of translations. It is the quality rather than the 
 quantity of the work which gives it claim to consider- 
 ation. We could ill afford to lose any of the Shake- 
 spearian dramas or of the longer poems of Tennyson 
 or Browning ; these poets survey and interpret so wide 
 a field of thought that the complete expression of the 
 genius of either would suffer mutilation by suppression 
 or loss. But Rossetti was not in touch with the wide 
 movement of life ; he was absorbed in a single pur- 
 suit, and enthralled by a single ideal; within com- 
 paratively narrow limits he has given us a complete 
 picture of the vision that was reflected in the depths 
 of his soul. The volume of translations, " Dante and 
 His Circle," attests not only his great familiarity with 
 6 
 
82 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 the early Italian poets, but also his extraordinary 
 mastery of difficult metrical forms. In his own verse 
 Rossetti used few forms, but they were among the 
 most expressive and exacting j in his translations he 
 showed himself master of the principles of an art to 
 the practice of which the early Italians brought all 
 their characteristic subtilty and refinement. This 
 volume discloses something more than the possession 
 of those gifts which go to the making of a genuine 
 translation ; it discloses a genius for poetry of a very 
 high order. No one but a poet worthy of Dante's 
 companionship could have entered so completely into 
 the purpose of the " Vita Nuova," and disposed about 
 the great Florentine in such effective and luminous 
 grouping the company of singers who preceded, 
 accompanied, or immediately followed, the master. 
 The sonnets, canzonets, and lyrics, which represent 
 the work of more than forty different writers, are 
 rendered into English with a fidelity of spirit, beauty 
 ot form, and melody of phrase which betray Ros- 
 setti's double mastery of Italian thought and Enghsh 
 speech. 
 
 When we turn to his own work, we find the 
 subtilty and delicacy of the Italian genius still 
 present, but new and personal qualities appear to 
 attest the possession of original gifts as well as of 
 inherited aptitudes. It was chiefly through the ballad, 
 the lyric, and the sonnet that Rossetti spoke to the 
 world ; and although in the use of each of these 
 forms he showed at times a high degree of metrical 
 
POETRY OP DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. 83 
 
 skill, it will probably appear in the end that his genius 
 had more kinship with the sonnet than with either 
 lyric or ballad, and that among all his contemporaries 
 his mastery of this delicate instrument which the 
 Italians formed was most complete. It is not easy, 
 however, to discriminate between varieties of form in 
 a mass of work so full of deep poetic emotion and 
 thought as Rossetti's. His ballads grow in beauty 
 and power as we penetrate more and more their often 
 obscure meaning. It is not alone their quaint 
 phraseology, their archaic turns of speech, their 
 recurring use of obsolete but picturesque words, that 
 impress us with a sense of something not akin to our 
 thought or time ; it is the medisval spirit which 
 pervades them and gives them a deep and moving 
 spell, a glow and splendour such as shine through 
 cloister windows when vesper chants are sung. The 
 ballad as a literary form belongs to social and in- 
 tellectual conditions which have passed away never to 
 return ; but it still offers to a genius like Rossetti's 
 resources of expression not to be found in any other 
 form of verse. It is so nearly akin to the lyric that 
 it brings the rhythmical movement and thrill of the 
 singing note to the narration of objective events and 
 actions ; and it is so full of dramatic resources that it 
 adds to directness of expression the varied and con- 
 trasted motives of the drama. It combines lyrical 
 music with dramatic intensity and cumulative force. 
 The seven ballads which Rossetti wrote illustrate the 
 power and beauty with which a poet of genius can 
 
84 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 inspire a form of verse which has ceased in a sense 
 to be a natural note for modern thought. " Stratton 
 Water," "The White Ship," and "The King's 
 Tragedy " approach very nearly the romantic and 
 historic type of the true ballad, and are thoroughly 
 dramatic in spirit, although charged with intense 
 individualism ; " Troy Town," " Eden Bower," 
 " Rose Mary," and " Sister Helen " belong to the 
 world of imaginative creation, and are essentially 
 lyrical in quality. But it is easy to push analysis too 
 far ; and while certain broad distinctions may be 
 noted, Rossetti's conception of the subject-matter 
 of his ballads was so intense, and in expression so 
 readily rose to passion, that he is always dramatic, 
 while his sense of melody was so quick that he is 
 always lyrical as well. 
 
 These ballads disclose very fully the quality of 
 Rossetti's genius when it deals with objective things. 
 They are charged with imaginative power ; one feels 
 not so much the free and beautiful play of the imagi- 
 nation as in " The Tempest," but the passion and force 
 of it. The imagination has not dallied with these 
 themes, has not contrasted, compared, and balanced 
 them with kindred conceptions; it has pierced to 
 their very heart, and the thrill of personal anguish 
 and agitation is in them. There are few poems in 
 any literature so vivid in presentation, so rapid in 
 climax, so deeply and mysteriously tragic in motive, 
 as " Sister Helen." It bears one on shuddering and 
 breathless until the wax is consumed, the fire gone 
 
POETRY OF*' DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. 85 
 
 out, the " white thing " crossed the threshold, and the 
 story told to its bitter end in the refrain : — 
 
 " Lost, lost, all lost, between hell and heaven." 
 
 In " Rose Mary " Rossetti not only illustrates the 
 depth and passion of love, but still more clearly the 
 awful tragedy which lies locked in its heart, to be un- 
 folded wherever the law of its nature is violated. 
 Those who find him essentially sensuous will do well 
 to study the strange and rare setting which is given 
 the Berylstone in this characteristic ballad. But the 
 most impressive and probably the most enduring of 
 all Rossetti's ballads is "The King's Tragedy," — a 
 noble work in which one of the most dramatic epi- 
 sodes in Scottish history is described with wonderful 
 vividness and power. The pictorial distinctness, dra- 
 matic movement and interest, the depth of feeling 
 and force of expression which characterize this ballad, 
 place it in the front rank of modern dramatic verse. 
 Rossetti's use of the supernatural element is nowhere 
 more effective ; the lines in which the first warning of 
 the haggard old woman is conveyed to the King on 
 the Fife seacoast ring true to the very spirit of the 
 time and scene : — 
 
 " And the woman held his eyes with her eyes : 
 ' O King, thou art come at last ; 
 But thy wraith has haunted the Scotish sea 
 To my sight for four years past. 
 
 ' Four years it is since first I met, 
 ' Twixt the Duchray and the Uhu, 
 A shape whose feet clung close in a shroud, 
 And that shape for thine I knew. 
 
86 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 'A year again, and on Inchkeith isle 
 I saw thee pass in the breeze, 
 With the cerecloth risen above thy feet, 
 And wound about thy knees. 
 
 ' And yet a year, in the Links of Forth, 
 
 As a wanderer without rest. 
 Thou cam'st with both thine arms i' the shroud 
 That clung high up thy breast. 
 
 ' And in this hour I find thee here. 
 
 And well mine eyes may note 
 That the winding-sheet hath passed thy breast 
 And risen around thy throat. 
 
 'And when I meet thee again, O King, 
 
 That of death hast such sore drouth, — 
 Except thou turn again on this shore, — 
 The winding-sheet shall have moved once more, 
 And covered thine eyes and mouth.' " 
 
 Of Rossetti's lyrical verse one poem has had the 
 good or ill fortune to attain something like popularity, 
 — a popularity due, it is to be feared, to its picturesque 
 and quaint phraseology rather than to its high and 
 beautifal imaginative quality. " The Blessed Damo- 
 sel," written at nineteen, remains one of the most 
 captivating and original poems of the century, — a lyric 
 full of bold and winning imagery and charged with 
 imaginative fervour and glow ; a vision upon which 
 painter and poet seemed to have wrought with a 
 single hand ; a thing of magical beauty, whose spell is 
 no more to be analyzed than the beauty of the night 
 when the earliest stars crown it. In all his lyrical 
 
POETRY OP DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. 87 
 
 work Rossetti reveals the peculiar and passionate 
 force of his ideas. " The Burden of Nineveh " and 
 "Dante at Verona" are nobly planned and strongly 
 executed. "The Last Confession" reminds one of 
 Browning in its subtile development of motives, its 
 dramatic vigour, its psychologic insight, and its flashes 
 of imaginative beauty. " The Woodspurge " is per- 
 haps as perfect an expression of a poet's mood as any 
 piece of verse extant; it is a masterpiece of exact 
 observation. Of "The Stream's Secret" Mr. Sted- 
 man has said that it has more music in it than any 
 slow lyric he remembers. The depth of Rossetti's 
 poetic feeling, the subtilty of his conception, and the 
 delicacy and precision of his expression are per- 
 haps best illustrated in the poem entitled " The Sea 
 Limits " : — 
 
 " Consider the sea's listless chime : 
 Time's self it is, made audible, — 
 The murmur of the earth's own shell. 
 Secret continuance sublime 
 
 Is the sea's end : our sight may pass 
 
 No furlong further. Since time was, 
 
 This sound hath told the lapse of time. 
 
 " No quiet, which is death's, — it hath 
 
 The mournfulness of ancient life, 
 
 Enduring always at dull strife. 
 As the world's heart of rest and wrath, 
 
 Its painful pulse is in the sands. 
 
 Last utterly, the whole sky stands, 
 Gray and not known, along its path. 
 
88 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 " Listen alone beside the sea, 
 
 Listen alone among the woods s 
 
 Those voices of twin solitudes 
 Shall have one sound alike to thee. 
 
 Hark where the murmurs of thronged men 
 
 Surge and sink back and surge again, — 
 Still the one voice o£ wave and tree. 
 
 " Gather a shell from the strewn beach 
 
 And listen at its lips : they sigh 
 
 The same desire and mystery, 
 The echo of the whole sea's speech. 
 
 And all mankind is thus at heart 
 
 Not anything but what thou art : 
 And Earth, Sea, Man, are all in each.'' 
 
 The structure of the sonnet is at once the inspira- 
 tion and the despair of those who would range them- 
 selves beside Shakespeare and Milton, Wordsworth 
 and Mrs. Brovi^ning, in the choir of English sonneteers. 
 Within its narrow limits and under its rigid laws the 
 greatest poets have poured their souls at full tide into 
 forms whose perfection predicts immortality. This 
 delicate instrument Rossetti has made his own, and 
 after the manner of Shakespeare, committed into its 
 keeping the secrets of his inner life. It is in the lines 
 of the one hundred and fifty-two sonnets included in 
 his published work that we come nearest his personal 
 life. He has given us an admirable description of 
 this form of verse : — 
 
 "A sonnet is a moment's monument, — 
 Memorial from the Soul's eternity 
 To one dead, deathless hour. Look that it be. 
 
POETRY OP DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. 89 
 
 Whether for lustral rite or dire portent. 
 Of its own arduous fulness reverent ; 
 
 Carve it in ivory or in ebony, 
 
 As Day or Night may rule , and let Time see 
 Its flowering crest impearled and orient. 
 A sonnet is a coin : its face reveals 
 The Soul, — its converse, to what Power 'tis due, — 
 Whether for tribute to the august appeals 
 
 Of Life, or dower in Love's high retinue. 
 It serve ; or, 'mid the dark wharf's cavernous breath, 
 In Charon's palm it pay the toll to Death." 
 
 With this narrow frame of fourteen decasyllabic 
 lines, divided into the octave and the sextet, Rossetti 
 has condensed some of his most profoundly poetic 
 conceptions ; following the interior law of the sonnet 
 structure, he has carried a single thought on the flood 
 of a single emotion to a swift climax, from which the 
 refluent wave recedes by a movement as normal as 
 that which lifts the tides and sends them back in 
 rhythmic melody to the deep from which they came. 
 Rossetti's friend, Mr. Theodore Watts, has said that 
 " for the carrying of a single wave of emotion in a 
 single flow and return, nothing has ever been in- 
 vented comparable to the Petrarchan sonnet, with an 
 octave of two rhymes of a prescribed arrangement, 
 and a sextet which is in some sense free." This form 
 served Rossetti as his type, although he uses it not 
 imitatively but with the freedom and facility of a 
 master. The dramatic power, the movement and 
 life which he can introduce within the compass of a 
 sonnet, are well illustrated by these lines on " Mary 
 
90 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 Magdalene at the Door of Simon the Pharisee," sug- 
 gested by a drawing in which Mary has left a festal 
 procession and by a sudden impulse seeks Christ 
 within, her lover following and endeavouring to turn 
 her back ; — 
 
 " Why wilt thou cast the roses from thine hair ? 
 
 Nay, be thou all a rose, — wreath, lips, and cheek. 
 
 Nay, not this house, — that banquet-house we seek ; 
 See how they kiss and enter ; come thou there. 
 This delicate day of love we two will share 
 
 Till at our ear love's whispering night shall speak. 
 
 "What, sweet one, — hold'st thou still the foolish freak ? 
 Nay, when I kiss thy feet, they '11 leave the stair. 
 
 " Oh, loose me ! See'st thou not my Bridegroom's face 
 That draws me to Him .' For His feet my kiss. 
 My hair, my tears, He craves to-day ; and oh I 
 What words can tell what other day and place 
 Shall see me clasp those blood-stained feet of His ? 
 He needs me, calls me, loves me ; let me go 1 " 
 
 "The House of Life," described as a sonnet- 
 sequence, is undoubtedly the noblest contribution in 
 this form of verse yet made to our Kterature. It 
 should be studied with Shakespeare's sonnets and 
 with Mrs. Browning's " Sonnets from the Portuguese," 
 in order that its wealth of thought, its varied beauty 
 of phrase, and its depth of feeling may be compre- 
 hended. It tells the same heart story, but in how 
 different a key ! The hundred and more sonnets 
 which compose it are a revelation of the poet's 
 nature; all its ideals, its passions, its hopes and 
 
POETRY OP DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. 9 1 
 
 despairs, its changeful moods, are reflected there ; 
 and there, too, a man's heart beats, in one hour 
 with the freedom of a great joy, and in another 
 against the iron bars of fate. 
 
 Rossetti is not, like 'Goethe, Hugo, Browning, and 
 Tennyson, an interpreter of his age ; the key to its 
 wide and confused movement is not to be found in 
 any work of his hand. He heard its turmoil only as 
 Michael Angelo may have heard the noise of the city 
 faintly borne to the scaffolding which concealed the 
 " Last Judgment." Intent upon his own work, the 
 uproar of life was only a hushed murmur on the si- 
 lence in which art always enshrines itself. His was 
 not that spiritual puissance which carries the repose 
 of soKtude into the noisy ways of men ; recognizing 
 his own limitations, — if limitations they were, — he 
 held himself apart and let the world go its way. 
 That way was far from his, and to close most mod- 
 ern books and open upon " The King's Tragedy " 
 or "The House of Life" is like passing from the 
 brilliant square electric with stir and change, or the 
 sunny meadow asleep like a child with daisies in its 
 hands, into some depth of forest awful with the mys- 
 tery of wraith and vision, or into some secluded 
 retreat where Love hears no sound but the throb 
 of its own passion, and sees no image save that one 
 face whose compelling beauty is the mask of fate. 
 Rossetti was pre-eminently an artist ; one who saw 
 the ultimate things of life, not along the lines of in- 
 tellectual striving and inquiry nor in the paoral dis- 
 
92 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 closures of action, but in those ravishing perfections 
 of form and being which seem to be finalities because 
 the imagination, baffled by their very completeness, 
 cannot pass beyond. He was an artist, not after the 
 manner of Tennyson, whose literary insight matches 
 itself with a melody that presses fast upon music 
 itself; not after the manner of Sophocles, to whose 
 work proportion and harmony and repose gave the 
 impress of a supreme and final achievement ; but after 
 the fashion of some of the mystical painters, whose 
 vision included that interior beauty which is the soul 
 of visible things ; which cannot be formulated nor 
 analyzed nor dissevered from itself by an intellectual 
 process, but is the pure product of intuition, — some- 
 thing never to be demonstrated, but always to be 
 revealed. " The Beautiful," said Goethe, " is a pri- 
 meval phenomenon, which indeed never becomes 
 visible itself, but the reflection of which is seen in 
 a thousand various expressions of the creative mind, 
 as various and manifold even as the phenomena of 
 Nature." This quality of perception is so different 
 from the literary faculty as most poets disclose it 
 that it may almost be said to characterize another 
 order of mind. Beauty is one of the finalities of 
 creation, and is, therefore, unresolvable into its ele- 
 ments ; something instantly recognized, but vanish- 
 ing when we try to press its secret from it. Rossetti 
 did not see beautiful aspects of things chiefly, or we 
 could overtake his mental processes ; he saw beauty 
 itself. It was not the attributes but the quality which 
 
POETRY OP DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. 93 
 
 he perceived. He did not discern beauty as one 
 form through which the soul of things expresses it- 
 self; he discerned it as the form, the final and per- 
 fect expression which is substantially identical with 
 the soul. To most modern poets life presents itself 
 under a vast variety of aspects ; the soul wears as 
 many masks as she has activities. But to Rossetti 
 there is no such multiplicity of expression ; there is 
 but a single face, and all things are revealed therein. 
 To a man of this temper, philosophy, and statescraft, 
 schools and creeds, knowledge and action, the warp 
 and woof out of which the fabrics of thought and 
 art are commonly woven, are of small account ; he 
 may not disparage them, but he finds no use in them ; 
 he passes through all this appearance of things, so 
 rich in revelation to others, to something which he 
 sees behind them all, and to which, if they had any 
 power of guidance, they could but lead him in the 
 end. Life is not divided for him into confused 
 activities and disconnected phases ; it is simple ; re- 
 veals itself even in pain ; presses back the blackness 
 of the mystery ; and conveys the irrefutable evidence 
 of immortality. It is idle to speculate, to press 
 through effect to cause, to interrogate knowledge ; 
 the vision of beauty, once discerned, does not forsake 
 the soul, and confirms the hope, alien to no human 
 heart, that happiness and immortality are one and 
 the same : — 
 
 " Nay, come up hither. From this wave-washed mound 
 Unto the furthest flood-brim look with me ; 
 
94 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 Then reach on with thy thought till it be drown'd. 
 
 Miles and miles distant though the last line be, 
 And though thy soul sail leagues and leagues beyond, — 
 
 Still, leagues beyond those leagues, there is more sea." 
 
 The beauty of the universe, which to Rossetti was 
 both law and revelation of life, was not that fair ap- 
 pearance of things which the Greeks loved with a joy 
 born of a sense of kinship with the thing we love ; 
 nor was it that pale, unworldly vision which enthralled 
 some of the early mediaeval painters. It was a beauty 
 to which nothing is foreign which life contains ; it 
 was in the most sensuous and the most spiritual 
 things ; it lay open to all eyes on the meanest flower, 
 and it was hidden in the most obscure symbol. It 
 led up from the throb of passion, from eyes and lips 
 wholly of the earth, through all visible things, to that 
 great white rose in which the vision of Dante rested 
 in Paradise. It pervades all things and yet is not 
 contained by them. 
 
 " Hers are the eyes which, over and beneath. 
 
 The sky and sea bend on thee ; which can draw, 
 By sea or sky or woman, to one law. 
 The allotted bondman of her palm and wreath." 
 
 Plato discerned this conception of beauty as an 
 ideal which reveals itself under all forms to its wor- 
 shipper : " He that gazed so earnestly on what things 
 in that holy place were to be seen, — he, when he dis- 
 cerns on earth some godlike countenance or fashion 
 of body, that counterfeits Beauty well, first of all he 
 
POETRY OF DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. 95 
 
 trembles, and then comes over him something of the 
 fear which erst he knew ; but then, looking on that 
 earthly beauty, he worships it as divine, and if he did 
 not fear the reproach of utter madness, he would sac- 
 rifice to his heart's idol as to the image and presence 
 of a God." 
 
 To one who is possessed by this passion, life does 
 not cease to be perplexing, to be a mystery of un- 
 fathomable depth ; but it ceases to press its questions 
 for instant answer, it ceases to paralyze by its uncer- 
 tainty; the runner is not oblivious of the shadows 
 that surround and pursue him, but he thinks chiefly 
 of the vision which draws him through works and days 
 with irresistible insistence : — 
 
 " Under the arch of life, where love and death, 
 Terror and mystery, guard her shrine, I saw 
 Beauty enthroned ; and though her gaze struck awe, 
 I drew it in as simply as my breath. 
 
 " This is that Lady Beauty, in whose praise 
 
 Thy voice and hand shake still, — long known to thee 
 By flying hair and fluttering hem, — the beat, 
 Following her daily, of thy heart and feet. 
 How passionately and irresistibly. 
 In what fond flight, how many ways and days." 
 
 It was this passion which made Rossetti's life one 
 long, eager pursuit, which gives his art, whether in 
 painting or in verse, the sense of something just be- 
 yond his grasp, a presence hovering forever before 
 him and receding as he advances. This ideal became 
 most clear to him, not through the myriad aspects of 
 
96 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 nature, but in a woman's face ; it was not a mere ap- 
 pearance of beauty, it was a soul revealing itself; it 
 was life removing its masks of shame and indignity 
 and discovering its divine loveliness. Like the Bea- 
 trice of Dante's vision, this face looked through and 
 interpreted all his experiences. All the passion of his 
 soul sets like a mighty tide toward this object of 
 mystical adoration; all forms of human expression, 
 the most familiar, the most intimate, the most intense, 
 the most sensuous, are charged with the flow of his 
 emotion and cannot contain it. It ceases to be a 
 pursuit ; it becomes a life. 
 
 There is one other word yet to be spoken which 
 describes this enthralling passion. One must go back 
 to Plato and study the " Phaedrus " and the " Sympo- 
 sium," one must steep his mind in the mystical 
 thought of Dante, to understand all that love meant 
 to Rossetti. It meant the consummation and fulfil- 
 ment of all that life promised and prophesied ; it 
 meant that final state of being in which knowl- 
 edge and experience and action find their eternal 
 fruition : — 
 
 " Not I myself know all my love for thee ; 
 
 How should I reach so far, who cannot weigh 
 
 To-morrow's dower by gage of yesterday ? 
 Shall birth and death, and all dark names that be 
 As doors and windows bared to some loud sea, 
 
 Lash deaf my ears and blind my face with spray; 
 
 And shall my sense pierce love, — the last relay 
 And ultimate outpost of eternity ? " 
 
POETRY OP DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI. 97 
 
 Before time was, love was, Rossetti tells us in those 
 deep and tender lines entitled " Sudden Light ; " 
 after time ends it shall be, or else the Blessed Damo- 
 sel leans in vain from the golden bar of heaven. 
 Love is " the interpreter and mediator between God 
 and man ; " only through loving do we come to full 
 knowledge, only in loving do we taste eternal life. 
 To this great passion of the soul all knowledge is 
 tributary and instrumental ; to know is not the con- 
 summation, but to love. The great process of life, 
 therefore, involves not only knowledge and action, 
 but the soul ; changes one from a spectator or student 
 of its phenomena into a rapt and tireless seeker of the 
 ideal. The senses, the intellect, relations of every 
 sort and kind, reveal the object and develop the in- 
 tensity of this pursuit. One is possessed by a mighty 
 thirst which nothing can assuage save that supreme 
 surrender of self in which love finds its opportunity 
 and discloses its power. This conception is essen- 
 tially mystical ; its speech is esoteric, but when one 
 translates it into prose, it is true to the deepest facts 
 of life. It formulates no code of morals, but its 
 eternal test is purity and truth ; sacrifice and sur- 
 render; the passion of the soul which counts all 
 things well lost if only it becomes one with the Infi- 
 nite Love. This is the passion which expands the 
 vast symphony of life out of a single theme, and 
 presses from every note, however sensuous in tone, a 
 pure and lofty music. Of the large element of truth 
 in this conception there can be no question even by 
 7 
 
98 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 those who crave a different and more distinctively spir- 
 itual expression. To the sensuous alone can "The 
 House of Life " be sensuous ; it is to be interpreted 
 as akin with the "Vita Nuova; " the same mood runs 
 through both, although one is the word of an artist 
 and the other the vision of a prophet. Beauty as the 
 finality of expression, love as the finality of being, — 
 these are the truths that give all Rossetti's works and 
 words a noble unity and consistency of aim and 
 achievement. 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. 
 
 The best minds still hold the old conception of 
 poetry as a revelation, as containing something more 
 and something greater than the individual poet in- 
 tended or even comprehended when the creative 
 impulse and energy possessed him. The story he 
 told, the song he sang, convey more than the 
 definite truth, the striking incident, the inspiring 
 vision ; they disclose the deeper mind of the singer 
 in his conscious and unconscious relations to his 
 time and to universal life. It is quite conceivable 
 that in one sense the critics have found more in 
 " Faust " than Goethe consciously embodied in that 
 marvellous drama of human experience. Clearly as 
 the great German had thought his way through 
 all knowledge, and thoroughly as he had rationalized 
 his life, there were forces in his nature whose mo- 
 mentum and tendency he never understood ; there 
 were depths in his habitual meditation which he 
 never sounded. His relation to his own time and 
 the character and movement of that time were 
 matters of frequent and searching thought to him ; 
 and yet in the age and in his part in it there was 
 much that was invisible or obscure to him. There i? 
 
100 £SSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 in " Faust " a revelation of the time through its most 
 sensitive personality, of which, in the nature of things, 
 the poet was for the most part unconscious. This 
 fact does not diminish the greatness of such an 
 achievement as the writing of a classic drama ; it 
 simply recalls the supplementary fact that as every work 
 of art discloses relations to universal principles and to 
 an historical development, so every artist discovers 
 certain far-reaching and highly significant spiritual 
 and intellectual affinities, which are so completely 
 a part of himself that he never separates them in 
 consciousness. 
 
 The poet, by a law of his nature, is compelled to 
 open his heart to us ; when he plans to conceal 
 himself most securely, he is making the thing he 
 would hide most clear to us. Shakespeare is the 
 most impersonal of poets, and yet no poet has made 
 us understand more clearly the conditions under 
 which, in his view, this human life of ours is lived ; 
 while of Byron, who 
 
 " bore 
 With haughty scorn which mock'd the smart, 
 Through Europe to the ^tolian shore 
 The pageant of his bleeding heart," 
 
 and of many another of his temperament, we possess 
 the fullest and most trustworthy knowledge. But the 
 poet tells our secret as frankly as he tells his own. 
 We are irresistibly drawn to him, not only because he 
 gives us his view of things, the substance of his 
 personal life, but because he makes ourselves clear 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. lOI 
 
 and comprehensible to us. It is our thought in his 
 words which has such power to bring back the vision 
 which has faded off the horizon of Hfe and left it bare 
 and empty ; to restore the vigour of faith and the 
 clearness of insight which have failed us because we 
 have not trusted them. It is this restoration of our 
 truest selves to us which gives the great poets such 
 power over us, and makes their great works at once 
 so remote and so familiar. In its most characteristic 
 singers, each age finds itself searched to the very 
 bottom of its consciousness. The scientists tell us 
 something of our time, the philosophers, the critics, 
 and the writers of discursive mind more ; but the 
 poet alone knows the secret of its joys or its sorrows, 
 its activity or its repose, its progress or its retro- 
 gression. All these things enter vitally into his life ; 
 and in giving expression to his own thought, he gives 
 them form and substance. We learn more of the 
 heart of medisevalism from Dante than from all the 
 historians; more of the England of Elizabeth from 
 Shakespeare than from all the chroniclers ; and the 
 future will find the essential character of the Amer- 
 ica of the last half-century more clearly revealed in 
 Emerson and Lowell and Whitman than in all the 
 industrious recorders who were their less penetrating 
 contemporaries. 
 
 Robert Browning offers us a double revelation : he 
 discloses the range and the affinities of his own 
 nature and the large and significant thought of his 
 time concerning those matters which form the very 
 
102 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 substance of its life. Burns drove his ploughshare 
 through his own native soil, singing as he went, and 
 the daisy blossomed in the furrow, and the lark sang 
 overhead ; but Browning takes the whole world as 
 his field, and harvests every sort of product which 
 goes to the sustenance of men. A poet of such 
 wide range and such wellnigh universal insight de- 
 mands much of his readers, and must wait patiently 
 for their acceptance of his claims. He offers that 
 which necessitates a peculiar training before it can be 
 received. The Greeks held it dangerous to accept 
 gifts from the gods ; even at the altar, men must 
 give as well as receive if their relations with the 
 Invisible and the Eternal are to be moral and self- 
 respecting. They only truly worship in whom some- 
 thing responds to the Divine, and comprehends it. 
 In the same way the great thinkers and artists compel 
 a certain preparation in those to whom they would 
 communicate that which is incommunicable save to 
 kindred insight and sympathy. The flower by the 
 wayside discovers its superficial loveliness to every 
 eye ; but they are few to whom it discloses its identity 
 with the universal beauty which makes it akin with 
 the flight of birds and the splendour of stars. It is 
 only by degrees that the most sympathetic minds 
 enter into the fundamental conceptions of life and 
 the universe which another has reached as the result 
 of long and eager thinking and living. The more 
 fundamental and vital those conceptions are, the 
 more tardy will be their complete recognition by 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. 103 
 
 Others. A swift, alert, acute mind like Voltaire's 
 makes all its processes clear, and the result of its 
 activity, varied as it may be, is soon measured and 
 ascertained; but a profound, vital intellect like 
 Herder's, entering into the living processes of Nature 
 and of history, finds little sympathy and less compre- 
 hension until, by the slow and painful education of a 
 general movement of mind, the range and value of its 
 contribution to human thought are understood. We 
 have already exhausted Voltaire ; but the most in- 
 telligent and open-minded student of modem life and 
 thought still finds in Herder hints of movements 
 which are yet to touch our intellectual lives with fresh 
 impulse, — thoughts which are unlighted torches wait- 
 ing for the hand strong enough to ignite and bear 
 them forward. 
 
 If Browning's genius has remained long unrecog- 
 nized and unhonoured among his contemporaries, the 
 frequent harshness and obscurity of his expression 
 must not bear the whole responsibility. His thought 
 holds so much that is novel, so much that is as yet 
 unadjusted to knowledge, art, and actual living, that 
 its complete apprehension even by the most open- 
 minded must be slow and long delayed. No English 
 poet ever demanded more of his readers, and none 
 has ever had more to give them. Since Shakespeare 
 no maker of English verse has seen life on so many 
 sides, entered into it with such intensity of sympathy 
 and imagination, and pierced it to so many centres 
 of its energy and motivity. No other has so com- 
 
104 £SSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 pletely mastered the larger movement of modem 
 thought on the constructive side, or so deeply felt 
 and so adequately interpreted the modern spirit. It 
 is significant of his insight into the profounder rela- 
 tions of things that Browning has also entered with 
 such characteristic thoroughness of intellectual and 
 spiritual kinship into Greek and Italian thought ; has 
 rendered the serene and noble beauty of the one into 
 forms as obviously true and sincere as " Cleon," and 
 the subtile and passionate genius of the other into 
 forms as characteristic as "The Ring and the Book." 
 A mind capable of dealing at first hand with themes 
 so diverse evidently possesses the key to that uni- 
 versal movement of life in which all race activities 
 and histories are included, not by violent and arbi- 
 trary adjustment of differences, but by insight into 
 those deep and vital relations which give history its 
 continuity of revelation and its unity of truth. It is 
 a long road which stretches from the Oidipus of 
 Sophocles to " Pippa Passes ; " but if Browning's con- 
 ception of life is true, it is a highway worn by the feet 
 of marching generations, and not a series of ahen and 
 antagonistic territories, each unrelated to the other. 
 The continuity of civilization and of the life of the 
 human spirit, widening by an inevitable and health- 
 ful process of growth and expansion, evidently enters 
 into all his thought, and gives it a certain repose even 
 in the intensity of passionate utterance. Whatever 
 decay of former ideals and traditions his contempo- 
 raries may discover and lament. Browning holds to 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. 105 
 
 the general soundness and wholesomeness of progress, 
 and finds each successive stage of growth not antago- 
 nistic but supplementary to those which have pre- 
 ceded it. His view of life involves the presence of 
 those very facts and tendencies which a less daring 
 and less penetrating spiritual insight finds full of 
 disillusion and bitterness. Though all the world turn 
 pessimist, this singer will still drink of the fountain 
 of joy, and trace the courses of the streams that flow 
 from it by green masses of foliage and the golden 
 glory of fruit. To carry in one's soul the memory of 
 what Greece was and wrought in her imperishable 
 arts, the memory of the mighty stir which broke the 
 sod of medisevalism and reclaimed the world for the 
 springtide of the Renaissance, and yet to live serenely 
 in perpetual presence of the Ideal in our confused 
 and turbulent modem life, involves a more funda- 
 mental insight than most of our poets possess. For 
 the majority safety is to be found only in tillage of 
 the acres that lie warm and familiar under a native 
 sky ; to travel among strange races and hear strange 
 tongues, confuses, perplexes, and paralyzes ; the world 
 is too vast for them. Life has expanded so immeas- 
 urably on all sides that only the strongest spirits can 
 safely give themselves up to it. Of these sovereign 
 natures it is Browning's chief distinction that he is 
 one ; that he asserts and sustains the mastery of the 
 soul over all knowledge ; that instead of being over- 
 whelmed by the vastness of modern life, he rejoices 
 in it as the swimmer rejoices when he feels the fathom- 
 
Io6 ESSAyS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 less sea buoyant to his stroke, and floats secure, the 
 abysses beneath and the infinity of space overhead. 
 No better service certainly can the greatest mind 
 render humanity to-day than just this calm reassur- 
 ance of its sovereignty in a universe whose growing 
 immensity makes the apparent insignificance of man 
 so painfully evident ; no prophet could bring to us a 
 message so charged with consolation as this. To 
 see clearly and love intensely whatever was just and 
 noble and ideal in the past ; to understand the inevi- 
 table changes that have come over the thoughts and 
 lives of men ; to discern a unity of movement through 
 them all ; to find a deepening of soul in art and life ; 
 to bear knowledge and know that it is subordinate to 
 character ; to look the darkest facts in the face, and 
 discern purpose and love in them ; to hold the note 
 of triumph and hope amid the discordant cries of 
 terror and perplexity and despair, — this is what 
 Browning has done ; and for this service, no matter 
 what we think of his art, those who are wise enough 
 to know what such a service involves will not withhold 
 the sincerest recognition. 
 
 Poetry is always a personal interpretation of life, — 
 an interpretation, that is, which reveals truth through 
 a personality. For purposes of literature there is no 
 such thing as impersonal or abstract truth ; that which 
 through the medium of language makes the expres- 
 sion or embodiment of truth literature, is always the 
 presence of the personal element. The same truths in 
 the hands of Spencer and of Tennyson will take on 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. 1 07 
 
 widely different forms : the scientist will give his state- 
 ment clearness, precision, definite relation to kindred 
 facts ; the poet will suffuse his verse with imagination, 
 suggest the universal relationship of his truth, and 
 stamp his expression with the indefinable something 
 Tyhich we call literature. If we define this intangible 
 something as style, we have really added nothing to 
 our knowledge ; for in the last analysis, style, as Buffon 
 long ago said, is the man. Turn the thought of the 
 greatest poets — Sophocles, Dante, or Shakespeare — 
 into your own prose, and you wiU have a valuable 
 residuum of truth ; but the quality which made that 
 truth literature has somehow escaped. You have 
 kept the thought; but Sophocles, Dante, and Shake- 
 speare have slipped through your fingers. 
 
 The correspondence between Goethe and Carlyle 
 shows the German poet meditating on a world-litera- 
 ture. Such a literature would be produced, not by 
 the impersonal expression of universal ideas and as- 
 pirations, but by the clear and noble utterance of 
 powerful personalities of the very substance of whose 
 life these things should be part. The individual 
 genius of the artist must always make universal beauty 
 evident to us ; and in literature personal insight and 
 power must always interpret truth to us. Those 
 writers who are predicting the decline of literature in 
 the growing influence of science overlook one of the 
 most profound and permanent processes in Nature. 
 Their conception of the relation of the soul to its 
 environment is radically defective in that it fails to 
 
Io8 SSSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 take into account that deepest and richest of all the 
 methods by which truth flows into and enriches the 
 common life of humanity as the sun pours its vitality 
 into and enlarges the life of the earth, — that metliod 
 by which, in the simple experience of living, truth is 
 continually revealed and made clear to individual men 
 and women. Life is fed by unseen streams quite as 
 fully and constantly as by those streams whose courses 
 science traces with admirable precision and accuracy. 
 There are certain truths which never came by obser- 
 vation, which have found their way into the universal 
 consciousness through the secret experiences of count- 
 less personalities. Life itself, in all its multiplied 
 forms, — love, suffering, desire, aspiration, satiety, 
 anguish, death, — is the greatest teacher of men. 
 These experiences have more for us than we shall ever 
 find in the textbooks ; they penetrate us with their 
 obscure and terrible lessons, — obscure until we slowly 
 grow into harmony with them, terrible until we dis- 
 cover that this education alone makes us masters of 
 ourselves. The potter does not hold the vessel on 
 the wheel hour after hour, under an irresistible pres- 
 sure, without disclosing, in curve and line, something 
 of his design ; and humanity has not been held under 
 the terrible pressure of the conditions of its life with- 
 out reproducing, by a process of which it was uncon- 
 scious, the general Knes of the purpose which is being 
 wrought out through it. Profounder truth has come, 
 unaware and invisibly, into human thought, through 
 the pressure of circumstances and the struggle of 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. I09 
 
 mere living upon solitary and isolated individual lives 
 than through the activity of the observing and ra- 
 tionalizing faculties. God pours himself into indi- 
 vidual souls as Nature pours herself into individual 
 plants and trees. 
 
 This truth once clearly comprehended, the place 
 and value of personality in life and art are plain 
 enough. Life is the one great fact which art is always 
 endeavouring to express and illustrate and interpret ; 
 and art is the supreme and final form in which life 
 is always striving to utter itself. Greek art was, 
 within its limitations, nobly complete, because Greek 
 life attained a full and adequate development ; and 
 Greek life being what it was, the beauty and harmony 
 of Greek art were inevitable. The truths and forces 
 which determine the quality of life are always wrought 
 out, or find channels for themselves, through individ- 
 uals ; and the individual temperament, adaptation, 
 genius, always adds to the expression of truth that 
 quality which transforms it into art. Now, of this 
 subtile relation of personality to life and art Browning 
 has, of all modem poets, the clearest and most fruit- 
 ful understanding. It is involved in his fundamental 
 conception of life and art ; and in its illustration his 
 genius has lavished its resources. The general order 
 of things, no less than the isolated individual expe- 
 rience, become comprehensible to him when it is seen 
 that through personality the universe reveals itself, 
 and ia the high and final development of personality 
 the universe accompHshes the immortal work for 
 
no ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 which the shining march of its suns and the ebb and 
 flow of its vital tides were ordained. 
 
 To say this is to say that Browning is a philoso- 
 pher as well as a poet, and that his verse, instead of 
 lending itself to the lyric utterance of isolated emo- 
 tion, becomes the medium through which the uni- 
 versal harmony of things is translated into song. It 
 would not be difficult to indicate the sources from 
 which Browning has received intellectual impulses of 
 the highest importance ; but his thought of life as it 
 lies revealed in his work, although allied to more 
 than one system, is essentially his own. Of all Eng- 
 lish poets he is the most difficult to classify, and his 
 originality as a thinker is no less striking. It is true 
 of him, as of most great thinkers, that his real con- 
 tribution to our common fund of thought lies not so 
 much in the disclosure of entirely new truths as in 
 fresh and fruitful application of truths already known ; 
 in a survey of life complete, adequate, and altogether 
 novel in the clearness and harmony with which a few 
 fundamental conceptions are shown to be sovereign 
 throughout the whole sphere of being. It is not too 
 much to say of Browning that of all English poets he 
 has rationalized life most thoroughly. In the range 
 of his interests and the scope of his thought he is a 
 man of Shakespearian mould. If his art matched 
 Shakespeare's, we should have in him the realization 
 of Emerson's dream of the poet-priest, " a reconciler, 
 who shall not trifle with Shakespeare the player, 
 nor shall grope in graves with Swedenborg the 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. Ill 
 
 mourner; but who shall see, speak, and act with 
 equal inspiration." 
 
 The philosopher in Browning sometimes usurps the 
 functions of the artist ; and the thought misses that 
 flash and play of the shaping imagination which 
 would have given it the elusive poetic quality. But 
 for the most part it is the artist who deals with the 
 crude materials of life and gives them, not plastic, 
 but dramatic unity and beauty. Other poets give us 
 glimpses of the highest truth ; Browning gives some- 
 thing near a complete vision of it. Shelley summons 
 the elemental forces out of the formless depths, and 
 they pass before us — ocean, sky, wind, and cloud — 
 as they passed by Prometheus ages ago ; Keats re- 
 calls the vanished loveliness " of marble men and 
 maidens overwrought, with forest branches and the 
 trodden weed ; " Wordsworth matches the evening 
 star, moving solitary along the edges of the hills, 
 with a phrase as pure and high. But in Browning's 
 wide outlook all these partial visions are included. 
 He tod can brood, with Paracelsus, over the invisible 
 and fathomless sea of force, on whose bosom our 
 little world floats like the shining crest of a wave ; he 
 too, with Cleon, can summon ba^^k that perfection of 
 form whose secret perished with the hands that could 
 illustrate but never reveal it ; he too, with David, 
 borne, he knows not how, from the vision of the far- 
 off Christ, can feel Nature throbbing with the beat 
 of his own heart, and the very stars tingling in the 
 sudden and limitless expansion of his own conscious- 
 
112 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 ness. If ill all these varied insights and experiences 
 he fails to secure the perfection of form with which 
 each great poet matches his peculiar and characteris- 
 tic message, there is certainly compensation in the 
 immensity of outlook which includes these isolated 
 scenes as a great landscape holds within its limits 
 fertile field and sterile barrenness, glimpse of sea 
 and depth of forest, familiar village street and remote 
 mountain fastness, losing something of definiteness 
 and beauty of detail from each, but gaining the sub- 
 limity and completeness of half a continent. 
 
 Browning's life and work were never at odds, nor 
 was there ever any serious change in his methods 
 and principles. Born in 1812, he published his first 
 poem, "Pauline," in 1832, at the age of twenty. 
 From that time until the year of his death there came 
 an almost unbroken series of works from his hand ; 
 they appeared at irregular intervals, but they evi- 
 dently represent a continuous and harmonious unfold- 
 ing of his life. He did not begin by trying his hand 
 at various instruments, searching for that which 
 should match his native gifts ; nor did he grope 
 among different themes for one that should vitalize 
 his imagination. On the contrary, the dramatic 
 quality of his genius discovers itself in " Pauline," 
 from which, by a natural development, both the 
 drama and the monologue of later years were 
 evolved ; while in the matter of themes it is clear that 
 he never waited for the fitting and inspiring motive, 
 but vitalized, by the virile force of his own nature, 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. H3 
 
 such subjects as came to hand. Following the course 
 of his development from " Pauline " through the 
 dramas, the lyrics, the monologues, " The Ring and 
 the Book," to "Asolando," no student of Browning 
 can mistake the great lines of his thought, nor fail to 
 see that thought expanded out of thought until there 
 lies in these varied and voluminous works an orderly 
 and rational world of idea, emotion, and action. 
 Nor will one have gone far without discovering that 
 he is in a new world, and that the man who joumej's 
 beside him is in some sense a discoverer and ex- 
 plorer. Such an one may sometimes blaze his path 
 in the enthusiasm and haste of the search, and leave 
 for others the building of the highway which shall be 
 easy to the feet of the multitude. Coming to man- 
 hood at a time when splendid dreams were in the 
 minds of poets, and glowing prophecies on their 
 lips. Browning held resolutely to the actual as he saw 
 it about him ; that noble work of his early maturity, 
 " Paracelsus," marks, with unerring precision, the 
 limits of human achievement. Living on into a 
 period in which for the moment the aggressive energy 
 of the scientific spirit has almost discredited the 
 authority of the imagination. Browning held with 
 equal resolution to the real as the completion and 
 explanation of the actual ; to the spiritual as the key 
 to the material. 
 
 This repose of mind in an age when many minds 
 float with the shifting tides of current opinion, this 
 undisturbed balance maintained between the two 
 
114 ESSAYS fN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 contrasted facts of life, show how clearly Browning 
 thought his way out of the confusion of appearances 
 and illusions into the realm of reality, and how truly 
 he is a master of life and its arts. One will look 
 through his verse in vain for any criticism of the 
 order of the universe, for any arraignment of the 
 wisdom which established the boundaries and defined 
 the methods of human life ; one will find no lament 
 that certain ages and races have gone, and their gifts 
 perished with them, that change has transformed 
 the world, and that out of this familiar present we 
 are swept onward into the dim and chill unknown. 
 Nor, on the other hand, does one discover here the 
 renunciation of the ascetic, the unhealthy detachment 
 from life of the fanatic, the repose of the mystic fiom 
 whose feet, waiting at the gate of Paradise, the world 
 has rolled away. Browning was a man of the world 
 in the noble sense, — that sense in which the saints of 
 the future are to be heart and soul one with their 
 fellows. He sees clearly that this present is not to 
 be put by for any future ; that there is no future save 
 in this present. Other poets have chosen their paths 
 through the vast growths of life, and, by virtue of 
 some principle of selection and exclusion, made a 
 way for themselves. But Browning surrendered 
 nothing ; he would take life as a whole, or he would 
 reject it. He refused to be consoled by ignoring 
 certain classes of facts, or to be satisfied with frag- 
 ments pieced together after some design of his own. 
 He must have a vision of all the facts ; and, giving 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. II5 
 
 each its weight and place, he must make his peace 
 with them, or else chaos and death are the only cer- 
 tainties. It is only the great souls that thus wrestle 
 the whole night through, and will not rest until God 
 has revealed, not indeed his own name, but the 
 name by which they shall henceforth know that he 
 has spoken to them, and that the universe is no 
 longer voiceless and godless. 
 
 Professor Dowden, in his admirable contrast of 
 Tennyson and Browning, has made it clear that 
 while the Laureate sees life on the orderly and institu- 
 tional side. Browning sees it on its spontaneous and 
 inspirational side. The one seeks the explanation of 
 the mysteries which surround him, and the processes 
 by which life is unfolded, in the slow, large move- 
 ment of law ; the other goes straight to the centre 
 whence the energy of life flows. Society is much to 
 Browning, not because it teaches great truths, but 
 because it reveals the force and direction of individ- 
 ual impulse. Tennyson continually moves away from 
 the individual emotion and experience to that wider 
 movement in which it shall mix and lose itself; the 
 fragment of a hfe gaining dignity and completeness 
 by blending with the whole. Browning, on the other 
 hand, by virtue of the immense importance he at- 
 taches to personality, is continually striving to dis- 
 cover in the individual the potency and direction of 
 the general movement. Every life is a revelation to 
 him ; every life is a channel through which a new 
 force pours into the world. 
 
Il6 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 Browning always refused to break life up- into frag- 
 ments, to use one set of faculties to the exclusion 
 of another set, to accept half truths for the whole 
 truth. He discovers truth not only by the processes 
 of intellectual inquiry, but through the joy and pain 
 of the senses, the mystery of love, loss, suffering, 
 conquest ; by the use, in a word, of his whole per- 
 sonality. Life and the universe are to teach him, 
 and he is in their presence to learn through the 
 whole range of his being ; to be taught quite as much 
 unconsciously as consciously ; above all things, to 
 grow into truth. To reveal truth is, in his concep- 
 tion, the supreme function of the visible world, — a 
 process as natural to it as the growth of trees or the 
 blossoming of flowers. To learn is the normal ac- 
 tivity and function of the human soul. Together, for 
 ages past, the universe and the spirit of man have 
 confronted each other in a mighty and far-reaching 
 struggle of the one to impart and the other to receive ; 
 until, invisibly as the dew falls on the blade of grass, 
 there descends into human lives truth after truth ac- 
 cording to their capacity. Not by searching alone, but 
 by patient waiting as well ; not by intellectual pro- 
 cesses alone, but by obscure processes of heart ; not 
 by conquest only, but by growth, — has life cleared itself 
 to the thought of men. The germs of all truth lie in 
 the soul ; and when the ripe moment comes, the truth 
 within answers to the fact without as the flower responds 
 to the sun, giving it form for heat and colour for 
 light. It follows from Brovvning's refusal to break up 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. II7 
 
 life into fragments, that he never dissociates knowl- 
 edge and art from life ; they are always one in his 
 thought and one in his work. Knowledge is never 
 attainment or conquest with him ; it is always life ex- 
 panded to a certain limit of truth. Paracelsus fails 
 because the volume of his life is not wide and deep 
 enough to receive into itself the truth to which he 
 aspires. Truth does not exist for us until it is part 
 of our life ; until we have made it ours by absorption 
 and assimilation. This is essentially a modern idea ; 
 modem as compared with the mediaeval conception 
 of knowledge. For as Herder long ago saw, before 
 the scientific movement had really begun, all depart- 
 ments of knowledge are vitally related ; so far as they 
 touch man's life, they are parts of a common revela- 
 tion of his history and his soul. The study of the 
 structure of language leads to philology ; and phi- 
 lology opens the path into mythology ; and mythology 
 ends in a science of comparative religion and the 
 deepest questions of philosophy. Literature is no 
 longer an isolated art through which the genius of a 
 few select souls reveals itself; it is the deep, often 
 unconscious overflow and outcry of life rising as the 
 mists rise out of the universal seas. Art is no longer 
 an artifice, a conscious evolution of personal gift and 
 grace ; it is the Ideal that was in the heart of a raee 
 linding here and there a soul sensitive enough to feel 
 its subtile inspiration, and a hand sure enough to give 
 it form. Whoever studies the Parthenon studies not 
 only Athenian genius, but, pre-eminently, Athenian 
 
Il8 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 .character in its clearest manifestation; whoever 
 knows English literature knows the English race. 
 
 This conception of civilization and its arts as a 
 growth, as an indivisible whole in all its manysided- 
 ness, as vitally related to the soul, as, indeed, the soul 
 externalized, is the most fruitful and organic of all 
 the truths which have come into the possession of 
 the modern world. 
 
 This truth Browning, more than any other poet, 
 has mastered and apphed to hfe and art. He sees 
 the entire movement of civilization as a continuous 
 and living growth ; and from it as a revelation, from 
 Nature and from the individual soul, his large and 
 noble conception of life has grown. That conception 
 involves a living relationship between the individual 
 and its entire environment of material universe, 
 human fellowship, and divine impulse. Everything 
 converges upon personaUty, and the key of the whole 
 vast movement of things is to be found in character ; 
 in character not as a set of habits and methods, but 
 as a final decision, a permanent tendency and direc- 
 tion, a last and irrevocable choice. From Browning's 
 standpoint life is explicable only as it is seen in its 
 entirety, death being an incident in its dateless 
 being. Full of undeveloped power, possibility, growth, 
 men are to adjust themselves to the world in which 
 they find themselves by a clear, definite perception of 
 the highest, remotest spiritual end, and by a consist- 
 ent and resolute use of all things to bear them for- 
 ward to that end. Browning does not believe for an 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. 1 19 
 
 instant that human life as he finds it about him is a 
 failure, or that the present order of things is a virtual 
 confession on the part of Deity that the human race, 
 by a wholly unexpected evolution of evil, have com- 
 pelled a modification of the original order, and a tacit 
 compromise with certain malign powers which, under 
 a normal evolution, would have no place here. On 
 the contrary, he believes that the infinite wisdom 
 which imposed the conditions upon which every man 
 accepts his life justifies itself in the marvelous adap- 
 tation of the material means to the spiritual ends ; 
 and that it is only as we accept resolutely and fear- 
 lessly the order of which we are part that we see 
 clearly the " far-off, divine event to which the whole 
 creation moves." 
 
 To Tennyson the path of highest development is to 
 be found in submission and obedience ; to Browning 
 the same end is to be sought by that sublime enthu- 
 siasm which bears the soul beyond the discipline that 
 is shaping it to a unity and fellowship with the divine 
 will which imposes the discipline. We are to suffer 
 and bear, to submit and endure, not passively, with 
 gentle patience and trust, but actively, with co-oper- 
 ative energy of will and joy of insight into the far-off 
 end. Life is so much more than its conditions and 
 accidents that, like the fruitful Nile, it overflows and 
 fertilizes them all. It is this intense vitality which 
 holds Browning in such real and wholesome relations 
 with the whole movement of Nature and life ; which 
 makes it impossible to discard anything which God 
 
I20 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 has made. If further proof of his possession of genius 
 were needed, it would be furnished by this supreme 
 characteristic of his nature ; he is so intensely alive. 
 Few men have the strength to live in more than two 
 or three directions. They are alive to philosophy and 
 what they regard as religion, and dead to science, to 
 art, to the great movements of human society ; or they 
 are alive to science, to art, and dead to philosophy and 
 religion. Genius is intensity of life, — an overflowing 
 vitality which floods and fertilizes a continent or a 
 hemisphere of being ; which makes a nature many- 
 sided and whole, while most men remain partial and 
 fragmentary. This inexhaustible vitality pours like a 
 tide through all Browning's work ; so swift and 
 tumultuous is it that it sometimes carries all manner 
 of ddbris with it, and one must wait long for the 
 settling of the sediment and the clarification of the 
 stream. 
 
 This vitality makes it impossible for Browning, 
 great spiritual prophet that he is, to mutilate life ; to 
 reject a part of it under a false conception of the unity 
 and indivisibility of the whole. No man has a more 
 subtile perception of the most obscure and complex 
 spiritual experiences than the author of " Paracelsus " 
 and the " Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, 
 the Arab Physician," and yet none has greater keen- 
 ness and joy of sense. The world as it lies in its first 
 swift impression on his soul is as divine a world as 
 that which he finds when, probed to the bottom, it 
 discovers a subKme harmony and purpose. Chaucer 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. 121 
 
 did not find skies bluer, flowers more fragrant, than 
 this nineteenth-century poet; Theocritus himself, 
 lulled by the hum of the summer bee and the fall of 
 the pine-cone, was not more responsive to the first, 
 immediate beauty of Nature than this deep thinker 
 within whose vision there also lies that ethereal and 
 transcendent beauty which never deepened the skies 
 of Sicily for the elder singer. Whosoever would 
 possess his life wholly must live richly, joyously, and 
 victoriously in this present : — 
 
 " I find earth not gray but rosy, 
 Heaven not grim but fair of hue. 
 Do I stoop ? I pluck a posy. 
 
 Do I stand and stare ? All 's blue." 
 
 The young David, preparing for the mightiest hercu- 
 lean labours, for the subhmest prophetic visions, mixes 
 his life with the splendid play of life about him, and 
 breeds joy and buoyant strength in the commingling : 
 
 "Oh, our manhood's prime vigour ! No spirit feels waste, 
 Not a muscle is stopped in its playing nor sinew unbraced. 
 Oh, the wild joys of living! the leaping from rock up to rock, 
 The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree, the cool silver 
 
 shock 
 Of the plunge in a pool's living water, the hunt of the bear. 
 And the sultriness showing the lion is couched in his lair. 
 And the meal, the rich dates yellowed over with gold-dust 
 
 divine. 
 And the locust-flesh steeped in the pitcher, the full draught 
 
 of wine. 
 And the sleep in the dried river channel where bulrushes tell 
 That the water was wont to go warbling so softly and well. 
 
122 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 How good is man's life, the mere living I how fit to employ 
 All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy." 
 
 In " Rabbi Ben Ezra," — that complete and noble 
 exposition of the philosophy of life as Browning 
 understands it, — the wholeness and the healthfulness 
 of a rounded and full-pulsed life are distinctly and 
 unmistakably affirmed : — 
 
 " Yet gifts should prove their use : 
 
 I own the past profuse 
 Of power each side, perfection every turn 
 
 Eyes, ears took in their dole, 
 
 Brain treasured up the whole ; 
 Should not the heart beat once ' How good to live and learn ' ? 
 
 " Not once beat ' Praise be Thine I 
 
 I see the whole design, 
 I, who saw Power, see now Love perfect too: 
 
 Perfect I call Thy plan : 
 
 Thanks that I was a man I 
 Maker, remake, complete, — I trust what Thou shalt do I ' 
 
 " Let us not always say 
 
 ' Spite of this flesh to-day 
 I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole I ' 
 
 As the bird wings and sings. 
 
 Let us cry ' All good things 
 Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul ! ' 
 
 " As it was better, youth 
 
 Should strive, through acts uncouth. 
 Toward making, than repose on aught found made : 
 
 So, better, age, exempt 
 
 From strife, should know, than tempt 
 Further. Thou waitedst age : wait death, nor be afraid." 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. 1 23 
 
 Taking up the figure of the potter's wheel, the poet 
 adds, — 
 
 " He fixed thee 'mid this dance 
 
 Of plastic circumstance, 
 This Present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest : 
 
 Machinery just meant 
 
 To give thy soul its bent, 
 Try thee, and turn thee forth sufficiently impressed. 
 
 " What though the earlier grooves 
 
 Which ran the laughing loves 
 Around thy base, no longer pause and press ? 
 
 What though, about thy rim, 
 
 SkuU-things in order grim 
 Grow out, in graver mood obey the sterner stress ? 
 
 " Look thou not down but up ! 
 To uses of a cup. 
 The festal board, lamp's flash, and trumpet's peal. 
 The new wine's foaming flow. 
 The Master's lips aglow I 
 Thou, heaven's consummate cup, what needst thou with earth's 
 wheel ? 
 
 " So, take and use thy work ; 
 
 Amend what flaws may lurk. 
 What strain o' the stuff, what warpings past the aim I 
 
 My times be in Thy hand ! 
 
 Perfect the cup as planned ! 
 Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same." 
 
 The fullest spiritual development involves this joy- 
 ous acceptance of present methods and instrumen- 
 talities of growth and action ; to ignore, undervalue, 
 or corrupt them is to miss the very thing for which 
 
124 ESSAYS /TV LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 they were ordained. One cannot force the process 
 of growth by endeavouring to escape from the con- 
 ditions of this present life into the region of the 
 unconditioned ; neither by renunciation nor by search- 
 ing can the laws which determine the unfolding of 
 a soul into power and light be modified, or their 
 movement accelerated. 
 
 On the other hand, one must not for an instant 
 rest in the life that now is, nor in any of its joys, its 
 arts, its achievements ; there must be an habitual 
 and unfailing perception of the difference between 
 the use and thing used. He only truly lives to whom 
 the falling of the leaf and the fading of the flower 
 are joyous and not grievous, because they speak of 
 a larger and more continuous fertility ; to whom art, 
 when it has matched its divinest vision with faultless 
 workmanship, is still only an unfulfilled prophecy of 
 that beauty which is never wholly present in any 
 work of human hands and never wholly absent from any 
 noble human soul. One ceases to grow the instant he 
 takes a thing for itself, and not for its use, — the instant 
 he detaches it from the power which sustains and 
 spiritualizes it. To rest in any joy of the senses or 
 any achievement of the intellect is to become cor- 
 rupt and to corrupt the good gifts of Hfe. It is 
 the acceptance of things for themselves, or for their 
 uses, which determines character, fixes destiny; at 
 these points of choice life culminates from time to 
 time in grand progressions or in fateful retrogressions, 
 in illuminating flashes which make the horizon shine 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. 1 25 
 
 with the glory beyond, or in awful and permanent 
 recession of light, in awful and lasting advance of 
 darkness. These are the supreme moments in which 
 the soul sees in swift glance the entirety of its life, 
 and the sublime harmony of the universe breaks 
 upon it in ineffable vision : — 
 
 " Oh, we 're sunk enough here, God knows I 
 But not quite so sunk that moments, 
 Sure tho' seldom, are denied us. 
 
 When the spirit's true endowments 
 Stand out plainly from its false ones. 
 
 And apprise it i£ pursuing 
 Or the right way or the wrong way. 
 To its triumph or undoing. 
 
 " There are flashes struck from midnights. 
 
 There are fire-flames noondays kindle, 
 Whereby piled-up honours perish. 
 
 Whereby swollen ambitions dwindle ; 
 While just this or that poor impulse. 
 
 Which for once had play unstifled, 
 Seems the sole work of a lifetime 
 
 That away the rest have trifled." 
 
 Without this clear perception of its larger uses, 
 knowledge itself becomes a snare to the soul ; it 
 conceals instead of revealing the secret of life. 
 Boundless aspiration and desire for nobler life must 
 drain the cup of knowledge, but never rest in study 
 of its curious tracery, its rich and varied design. 
 The cup once drained of the life that was in it must 
 be cast aside, as the eager searcher goes on his way 
 refreshed. Browning has made this conception of 
 
126 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION, 
 
 the meaning of life nowhere so clear as in that noble 
 group of poems which have art as their theme. Cer- 
 tainly no poet has ever had a deeper thought of the 
 functions and limitations of art ; none has ever seen 
 more clearly the beauty of the art which died with 
 the Greeks, not because the soul parted with some 
 endowment when that wonderful race perished, but 
 because life has expanded beyond the capacity of 
 the exquisite chalice in which the Greek poured 
 his genius as a gift to the gods. That art attained 
 its perfection of form, because from the conception 
 of life which pervaded it the spiritual was resolutely 
 rejected. The life that now is came to perfect ex- 
 pression under the Greek chisel and the Greek stylus ; 
 but this very perfection was its limitation. In the 
 art which shall reveal life in its large spiritual rela- 
 tions, life in its infinite duration and growth, there 
 must be imperfection, — the imperfection, not of in- 
 adequate workmanship, but of a thought not yet 
 pressed to its last conclusion, of a conception still to 
 broaden and deepen. Antique art found its supreme 
 function in the faultless representation of complete 
 and finished ideals, — ideals which secured completion 
 and definiteness of outline by the rejection of the 
 spiritual. Modern art will find its supreme function 
 in the noble expression of that unsatisfied aspiration 
 of the soul which craves and creates beauty, but 
 never for a moment deceives itself with the thought 
 of finality or perfection. This thought of the office 
 and work of art Browning has illustrated again and 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. 127 
 
 again with marvellous beauty and power. In " Andrea 
 del Sarto," the painter of the perfect line, the failure 
 of the artist is evidenced by the faultlessness of 
 manner which he has attained : — 
 
 " Yonder 's a work now, of that famous youth 
 The Urbinate who died five years ago. 
 ('Tis copied, George Vasari sent it me.) 
 Well, I can fancy how he did it all, 
 Pouring his soul, with kings and popes to see, 
 Reaching, that Heaven might so replenish him, 
 Above and through his art — for it gives way; 
 That arm is wrongly put — and there again — 
 A fault to pardon in the drawing's lines, 
 Its body, so to speak : its soul is right, 
 He means right — that, a child may understand. 
 Still, what an arm ! and I could alter it : 
 But all the play, the insight and the stretch — 
 Out of me, out of me I " 
 
 The duke, as he lifts the curtain which conceals the 
 matchless portrait of the " Last Duchess," whose life- 
 fountain of joy ceased to overflow in smiles when his 
 command suddenly congealed it, is an unerring judge 
 of the technique of art, but to its spirit he is as dead 
 as the ashes he calls his soul. The real artist is 
 never content, however his genius display its splendid 
 strength ; he presses on, unsatisfied, to that perfect 
 Ideal of which all works of human hands are imper- 
 fect transcriptions. Abt Vogler touches his organ- 
 keys, and straightway an invisible temple springs, arch 
 upon arch, in the vision of his imagination, and 
 through it, as through the Beautiful Gate of the older 
 
128 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 shrine, he passes into the presence of One who is the 
 builder and maker of houses not made with hands. 
 To reach that Presence, to make it real and abiding 
 in the thoughts of men, is the true office and service 
 of art. 
 
 As Browning interprets art, so does he see Nature. 
 When he chooses to study and describe landscape in 
 detail, as in " The Englishman in Italy," no poet has 
 a more exact and faithful touch, a more sensitive per- 
 ception of the thousand and one details which each 
 contribute a charm, an effect, to the completed pic- 
 ture. No man understands more perfectly that the 
 mind is made to see an invisible landscape, not by 
 enumeration of details, but by the few fit words that 
 fire the imagination. But for the most part Brown- 
 ing conceives of Nature as a vast symbol of spiritual 
 force, and describes it broadly, not as a thing apart 
 from human life, but as responsive to the soul in its 
 moments of exaltation. The curtain which hangs 
 between God and his creatures is swayed by many an 
 invisible current of impulse and influence, — becomes 
 at times almost transparent to an eye that " hath 
 looked on man's mortahty." In those supreme 
 moments when life touches its highest altitudes, as 
 when David leaves the presence of Saul, Nature 
 seems to be on the verge of swift transformation into 
 some spiritual medium and substance, so intensely 
 does the soul project itself into all visible things, so 
 alive and responsive are all visible things to the tran- 
 scendent mood and revelation of the hour. In the 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. 1 29 
 
 long range of life the material universe is seen to be 
 plastic and takes on the hue and form of thought, 
 answering the soul as the body responds to the mind. 
 Nature is vitalized by a power greater than itself ; and 
 through the majesty of its elemental forms, — its seas 
 and mountains and continents, — as well as through 
 its finer and more ethereal aspects, — its flowers, 
 its clouds, its sunrises and sunsets, — God presses 
 upon the spirit of man ; and in the hours when 
 that spirit aspires highest and acts noblest, this 
 vast appearance of things material is touched and 
 spiritualized. 
 
 Browning's habitual method of dealing with the 
 personal soul is to reveal it by some swift crisis, by 
 some tremendous temptation, by some supreme expe- 
 rience, under the pressure of which its strength or its 
 weakness, its nobility or its baseness, are brought out 
 as by a flash of lightning. Life is never life to him 
 except in those hours when it rises to a complete out- 
 pouring of itself. To live is to experience intensely. 
 No poet is so intensely Occidental as Browning ; so 
 far removed from the Oriental conception of the world 
 as an illusion, of desire and will as snares and evils, of 
 effacement of personality as the chief aim and end of 
 human existence. Browning holds to personality so 
 resolutely that he constructs life along this central 
 conception : in his view the supreme end of being is 
 to bring out whatever lies undeveloped within ; to 
 seek action, to strive after love and opportunity, and 
 find an unspeakable joy even in the anguish which 
 9 
 
13° ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 does not extinguish, but elevates and purifies desire. 
 It was inevitable, therefore, that the master-passion 
 of life should find at his hands noble and varied ex- 
 pression. It is safe to say that no English poet has 
 matched the sovereign passion of love with so many 
 and such wholly adequate forms. Indeed, when one 
 has grasped Browning's idea of love as the fulfilment 
 of life, there are few other poets who seem to have 
 touched the theme with anything approaching mastery. 
 That other poet, whose star-like soul moves with his 
 forever in a common orbit, could have left no more 
 beautiful revelation of her own nature than that which 
 shines and glows in Browning's thought of love. In 
 "Youth and Art," in " Colombe's Birthday," in 
 "The Inn Album," in "The Ring and the Book," 
 in those noble self- confessions, "One Word More," and 
 " By the Fireside,'' in a hundred other poems, it is 
 made clear that life touches its zenith only as it 
 surrenders itself to a passion whose spiritual fervour 
 burns aways all selfishness and makes it one with 
 whatever is eternal and divine. He who fails to 
 make the last venture, to hazard all for the possible 
 possession of heaven, may gain everything else, but 
 has miserably and finally failed ; he has missed the 
 one supreme hour when life would have been re- 
 vealed to him. So profoundly is the poet possessed 
 by the necessity of surrendering one's self to the 
 highest impulses that occasionally, as in " The 
 Statue and the Bust," this thought dominates and 
 excludes all other considerations, and stamps the 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. 13I 
 
 ungirt loin and the unlit lamp as the supreme and 
 irrevocable sin against life. 
 
 In Browning's conception of the place of person- 
 ality it was foreordained that his genius should be 
 dramatic ; should deal with situations and characters, 
 and rarely with abstractions. Thought, in his view, 
 has not come to complete consciousness until it has 
 borne the fruit of action. From "Pauline" to the 
 epilogue in " Parleyings " it is always a person 
 who speaks, and rarely the poet ; the latter keeps 
 himself out of sight by the instinct which is a part of 
 his gift. The subtile genius of a poet whose mastery 
 of psychology is universally recognized has marvellous 
 power of penetrating the secret of natures widely 
 dissimilar, and of experiences which have little in 
 common save that they are a part of life. No poet 
 has ever surpassed Browning in this spiritual clairvoy- 
 ance or mind-reading, which has made it possible for 
 him to give us the very spirit of the Greek decadence 
 in " Cleon ; " the subtile, confused, but marvellously 
 interesting spirit of the Renaissance in " The Bishop 
 orders his Tombj " the soul of debased medisevalism 
 in "The Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister; " the first 
 dim perception of religious ideas in a possible 
 primitive man in " Caliban upon Setebos." All 
 Browning's poems are dramatic, and all his dramas 
 are dramas of the soul. In " Paracelsus," in 
 "Luria," in " Sordello," in "The Ring and the 
 Book," action is used, not for dramatic effect, but to 
 reveal the soul ; and only those who have carefully 
 
132 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 Studied these works know what astonishing power is 
 embodied in them, what marvellous subtilty of analy- 
 sis, what masterly grouping and interplay of motives, 
 what overflowing and apparently inexhaustible force 
 and vitality of mind. In one of his luminous gener- 
 alizations Goethe says that thought expands, but 
 weakens ; while action intensifies, but narrows. The 
 singular combination of great intellectual range with 
 passionate intensity of utterance which characterizes 
 Browning is explained by the indissoluble union in 
 which he holds thought and action. The dramatic 
 monologue, which belongs to him as truly as the 
 terza ritna to Dante, or the nine-line stanza to 
 Spenser, has this great advantage over other forms 
 of expression, that it gives us with the truth the 
 character which that truth has formed ; instead of an 
 abstraction we have a piece of reality. 
 
 In his essay on Shelley, Browning makes a dis- 
 tinction between the two great classes of poets, — the 
 seers and the makers. It is conceded on all sides 
 that Browning is a seer; is he also a maker? The 
 question involves a good deal more than the posses- 
 sion of the skill of the craftsman who employs ap- 
 proved methods and makes his work conform to the 
 best-accepted standards. Art is as inexhaustible as 
 Nature ; and those who know most thoroughly the 
 history of the development of literature will be slowest 
 to condemn a form of expression which does not at 
 a glance reveal all its content of beauty and strength 
 to them. A thinker of Browning's depth and subtilty 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. 133 
 
 will never attract those to whom literature is a recrea- 
 tion simply, — a decorative art which aims to beguile 
 the senses by purely sensuous melody, and to substitute 
 for the hardship of thinking a pleasantly superficial 
 comment on or embellishment of Kfe. Great art 
 will never be easy of comprehension to any save 
 those who have been trained to the point of under- 
 standing what it signifies, and whose imaginations are 
 sympathetically awakened and dilated by it. The 
 fact that a writer is difficult, that his meaning does 
 not play like a sunbeam on the surface of his ex- 
 pression, but must be sought in the very structure of 
 his work, does not disprove his possession of the 
 highest artistic power. Sophocles is still the supreme 
 artist among all those who have impressed their 
 genius upon language ; but Sophocles never conde- 
 scends to make himself agreeable to our easy, care- 
 less moods ; he demands our best hours and severest 
 thought. Dante stands, by the suffrages of all 
 civilized peoples, among the three or four foremost 
 poett of the world ; but the " Divine Comedy " was 
 never yet mastered by the wayfaring man. The fact 
 that Browning is often difficult is evidently not con- 
 clusive evidence of his failure as an artist. The great 
 body of his work is perfectly comprehensible when 
 one approaches it from the poet's own point of view. 
 It is then seen to be, for the most part, marvellously 
 adapted to the utterance of his thought, the masterful 
 expression of his purpose. The dramatic monologue 
 is not easy reading at first ; but when one has become 
 
134 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 familiar with it, does any form of art seem so alive 
 with the potency of passion, so compact and yet so 
 flexible and expressive ? Does not " My Last 
 Duchess " tell the whole story, reveal the whole 
 interior tragedy, in a few swift words, not one of 
 which misses the exact emphasis, the essential and 
 inevitable weight? It lies within the power of no 
 secondary artist to match his thought with an ex- 
 pression that is instantly and forever a part of that 
 thought, — not its form only, but its soul, irradiating 
 and fashioning the whole by its own impulsion. 
 
 In literature there is not only great variety of type, 
 but there is always the possibility of the new type. 
 The genius of each age creates its own expression by 
 the same unconscious but irresistible development 
 which gives its insight new direction or its construc- 
 tive tendency a new impulse. It is never a question 
 of conformity to accredited standards ; it is always a 
 question of adequate and inevitable expression. The 
 form which comes inevitably with a new thought of 
 Nature or life is invariably recognized in the end as 
 instinct with the art spirit. The style of " Sartor 
 Resartus " is fatal to every imitator; but to convey the 
 set of impressions, to place one at the point of view, 
 which are the essential things in the book, it is 
 thoroughly artistic. The man who wrote " Sartor 
 Resartus " and " The Diamond Necklace " was a 
 literary artist of a very high rank, although he pos- 
 sessed nothing in common with the Benvenuto Cellini 
 school of literary craftsmanship. 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. 135 
 
 The distinctive quality of an artist is that which 
 leads him to use the one form of expression which 
 gives his thought the most virile and capacious utter- 
 ance ; which not only conveys to another its definite 
 outlines, but those undisclosed relations which unite 
 it to the totality of his thinking. Now, at his best 
 this is precisely what Browning does ; he puts us in 
 complete possession of his conception. He gives us 
 not only the fruit of a great passion in some clear, 
 decisive action, he indicates every stage of the 
 obscure processes which lay behind it. The soil out 
 of which it drew its sustenance, the sky that bent 
 over it^ the winds that touched it gently or harshly, 
 shadow of cloud and flash of sun upon it, the atmos- 
 phere that enveloped it, the movement of human life 
 about it, — all these things become clear to us as we 
 read such a story as the crime of Guido in " The 
 Ring and the Book," become part of the intricate 
 play, become part also of our imagination, until at 
 last the marvellous drama is complete in a sense in 
 which few works of art are complete. Browning's 
 view of life and art and Nature is not that of the 
 scientific observer or of the philosopher; it is the 
 artist's view. And those who come into sympathy with 
 it are persuaded that it is a view which enlarges and 
 enriches art on every side, and that the man who has 
 attained it is not only an artist, but an artist in the truest 
 and deepest meaning of a great but ill-used word. 
 
 Browning not only sees life as a whole and sees it 
 in its large relations ; he sees it always through the 
 
136 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 imagination. The bare, unrelated fact touches and 
 inspires him ; he feels the warm Ufa in it ; he under- 
 stands it because there is something in himself which 
 answers to it ; it begins to glow in his thought ; other 
 facts gather about it. It may be a fragment when it 
 leaves the poet's hands, but it will suggest the whole ; 
 fragment or complete and elaborately worked out 
 conception, the truth that lies at its heart somehow 
 penetrates us, rouses our imagination, possesses us 
 then and finally, not only as true, but as beautiful in 
 some new and deep way. "Rabbi Ben Ezra" will 
 hardly attract those who are content with the sweet 
 and obvious commonplaces of the " Psalm of Life ; " 
 but it is one of the incomparable works which slowly 
 distil their meaning to deepening thought and widen- 
 ing experience. Is there not in the sense of incom- 
 pleteness which many of Browning's works convey a 
 hint of that larger art of the future whose depth of 
 beauty shall lie, not in faultless outline, but in inex- 
 haustible suggestiveness ; not in the perfection of 
 form which captures us at a glance and then slowly 
 releases us as its charm becomes familiar, but in that 
 amplitude of idea and of aspiration which slowly wins 
 us to itself by a power which penetrates and dilates 
 our imagination more and more? Life is incomplete, 
 — a titanesque fragment as Browning sees it ; shall not 
 art also share that incompleteness which runs like a 
 shining line of prophecy across all the works of our 
 hands ? " On earth the broken arcs ; in the heaven 
 a perfect round." 
 
ROBERT BROWNING. 137 
 
 In what has been said the endeavour has been to lay 
 bare Browning's characteristic quality as a thinker 
 and as an artist, to make clear his distinctive and 
 peculiar message and work. A poet of such vigour, of 
 such intense vitality, will disclose grave faults. It is 
 the work of intelligent criticism, while it takes 
 account of these things, to make it clear that incom- 
 pleteness is a necessary part of life. The Angelos 
 are always somewhat careless of detail ; the Cellinis 
 alone are faultless. Browning sometimes sees life on 
 its spontaneous side so clearly that he fails to attach 
 due weight to conventions and institutions ; he has 
 more than once wasted his force on unimportant 
 themes ; and he is sometimes needlessly and exas- 
 peratingly obscure. " Sordello," for instance, is dis- 
 tinctly defective as a work of art, because the concep- 
 tion was evidently not mastered at the start ; and the 
 undeniable confusion and obscurity of the poem are 
 due largely to this offence against the primary law of 
 art. The lover of Browning will not shrink from the 
 application of a rigid selective principle to a body of 
 verse which he is persuaded will remain, after all 
 deductions are made, one of the most powerful, varied, 
 and nobly executed contributions to contemporary 
 poetry, the splendid utterance of a great soul who 
 has searched knowledge, nature, art, and life, and 
 with the awful vision clear before him still sings with 
 Pippa : — 
 
 "God's in his heaven, 
 All 's right with the world." 
 
JOHN KEATS: POET AND MAN. 
 
 The apparent misfortune of early death has had 
 no more striking illustration than in the case of 
 Keats, to whom it meant not only arrested devel- 
 opment, but a curiously complete and persistent mis- 
 conception of his character and life. Of no other 
 English poet has the popular idea been so wide of the 
 mark; about no other English poet have so many 
 clouds of misunderstanding gathered and hung to 
 the lasting concealment of the man. Poetry suffers 
 chiefly from those whose idea of its nature and func- 
 tion is so superficial that they set it at odds with 
 life, and turn its vital, mellow sunshine, the very joy 
 and fertility of Nature, into a pale, unfruitful moonlight. 
 Great poetry is as real, as natural, as sane, as neces- 
 sary to the life of man as air and light. Of this sort 
 was the greater part of the poetry of Keats ; of this 
 sort would it have become wholly had time and 
 growth fully ripened his gift. 
 
 And yet above all English poets Keats has been the 
 victim of his feeble brethren, who mitigate their own 
 sense of baffled ambition with the remembrance of 
 his woes at the hands of the Philistine reviewers, 
 and of those sentimental hangers-on at the court of 
 
JOHN KEATS: POET AND MAN. 1 39 
 
 poetry who mistake the king's robe for the king's 
 majesty, and whose solemn genuflections are the very 
 mockery of homage. Instead of the real Keats, 
 virile, manly, courageous, well-poised, and full of noble 
 ambitions, the world has fashioned for itself a weakly, 
 sentimental, sensuous maker of over-ripe verse, with- 
 out large ideas of his art, and sensitive to the very 
 death under the lash of a stupid and vulgar criticism. 
 It was no small offence against the memory of this 
 peculiarly rich and sane nature that these misconcep- 
 tions were permitted to become traditions. Although 
 Lord Houghton, Mr. Arnold, Professor Colvin, and 
 other students and critics of Keats have done much 
 to rescue his fame from the hands of those who have 
 accomplished what blundering critics were unable to 
 effect, there is still much to be done before the world, 
 which takes its impressions rapidly and at second 
 hand, is set right concerning one of the most 
 promising men of the age. 
 
 Obscurity, poverty, and all manner of untoward 
 circumstances have attached themselves to the early 
 years of Keats ; and if widely prevailing notions are to 
 be accepted, no poet ever had so unlucky a start in 
 life. It is true that Keats was born of obscure 
 parentage, and that as a child he did not overhear 
 the talk of drawing-rooms or play in the shadow 
 of university towns; but he must be a very self- 
 confident critic who would dogmatically pronounce 
 either circumstance a misfortune. Keats was not 
 coddled by fortune, but he was as well born as 
 
I40 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 Shakespeare, and with much more ease of circum- 
 stance and condition than Burns. The year of his 
 birth was an auspicious one for English literature and 
 for the happy development of his genius ; for in the 
 good year of 1 795, while he was opening his eyes in 
 London, Thomas Carlyle was cradled in Ecclefechan. 
 It was the beginning of a splendid chapter of English 
 literary history ; and the prelude of the deep, rich 
 music of the nineteenth century was already in the 
 ear that could hear it. Ten years earlier Cowper had 
 pubhshed the "Task;" and a year later, in 1786, 
 from an obscure press at Kilmarnock had come a 
 slender volume of songs full of the fresh and haunting 
 music which Burns sang to his plough on the uplands 
 of Ayrshire. In the year of Keats's birth Wordsworth 
 was twenty-five, and "The Lyrical Ballads" were 
 only three years distant ; Coleridge was twenty-three ; 
 Southey twenty-one ; Landor twenty ; Scott twenty- 
 four. A group of powerful and original writers, who 
 were to broaden and deepen the new tendencies in 
 English literature, were standing on the threshold of 
 the new day which came with them. A group of 
 immediate contemporaries, hardly less variously and 
 richly endowed, were starting in the race with Keats, 
 — some to be his helpers and friends, others to pass 
 him with scant recognition or to "damn him with 
 faint praise." Byron was born seven years earlier than 
 Keats, Shelley three years earlier, De Quincey ten 
 years, Leigh Hunt eleven years. Another group, 
 including Tennyson, Browning, Newman, Raskin, and 
 
JOHN KEATS: POET AND MAN. I41 
 
 Arnold, were to keep up the immediate succession of 
 men of genius which has been unbroken since the 
 birth of Burns. To have fallen upon such a period, 
 when the intellectual and spiritual tides were rising, 
 when English literature was recalling in the breadth and 
 splendour of its movement the great Elizabethan age, 
 was no small good-fortune. Mr. Arnold has said that 
 in the creation of a master-work of literature two 
 powers must concur, — " the power of the man and 
 the power of the moment." Keats came at the oppor- 
 tune moment, — the moment when fresh impulses were 
 felt by all sensitive spirits, when ideas were gaining 
 the force and momentum of great currents through 
 society. 
 
 The domestic conditions which surrounded the 
 boy Keats did not foster and stimulate his gift of 
 imagination ; but, on the other hand, they formed no 
 great obstacle to the free play of his nature. If there 
 was no direct ministry of circumstances to his har- 
 monious development, there was no long and bitter 
 struggle to preserve the integrity of his genius. His 
 parentage was humble and obscure, for the poet was 
 born in a stable, opposite Finsbury Pavement in 
 London ; but of his father Cowden Clarke reports 
 that he was a man " of so remarkably fine a common- 
 sense and native respectability that I perfectly re- 
 member the warm terms in which his demeanour 
 used to be canvassed by my parents after he had 
 been to visit his boys ; " while of his mother it is said 
 that she was a woman of sense and energy, agreeable 
 
142 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 and intelligent, and that she inspired her children 
 "with the profoundest affection." Her son George 
 describes her as " a woman of uncommon talents." 
 Even the grandparents are remembered as persons 
 of marked ability and geniality of temper. The 
 grandfather was in independent circumstances, and 
 would have been rich if he had been less unsuspect- 
 ing and generous ; add to this that there was always 
 money enough to insure comfortable living, — at times 
 enough not only for independence, but for generous 
 and easy habits of life, — that Keats was free from 
 serious money troubles until within a few months 
 of his death, and it must be conceded that in many 
 respects the poet's youth was fortunate as compared 
 with conditions which often surround boys of excep- 
 tional nature and gift. It was no doubt distinctly 
 unpleasant, when "Endymion" fell into the hands of 
 Wilson and Lockhart, to be branded as a cockney 
 and remanded to the galhpots ; but there happened 
 to be no one in England at that moment, however 
 fortunately bom and bred, who had the inimitable 
 touch, the rich and splendid diction of the cockney 
 of Finsbury Pavement. Keats had brought his genius 
 to its noble flowering ; and the fact that this supreme 
 crisis was safely passed is sufficient evidence that if 
 he missed some happy circumstances of prosperous 
 childhood, he possessed all the essential conditions. 
 
 The parents of the poet had very honourable ambi- 
 tions for their sons, and sent them early to school. 
 When John Keats was nine years old, his father was 
 
JOHN KEATS: POET AND MAN. 143 
 
 killed by a fall from a horse ; the following year the 
 mother married again. The second marriage was 
 speedily followed by a separation ; and the unhappy 
 wife betook herself with her children to the home of 
 her mother in Edmonton. The grandmother had a 
 fortune of about seventy thousand dollars, — no small 
 sum for a family of the social status of the Keatses 
 at the beginning of the century. The following five 
 years passed uneventfully in attendance upon the 
 Rev. John Clarke's school at Enfield, with pleasant 
 holidays at the grandmother's comfortable home. 
 The first impressions of the poet's bearing and char- 
 acter date from this period ; and they show us not a 
 sickly, precocious, and retiring youth, but a boy of un- 
 common spirit and vitality, — passionate, vehement, 
 impressionable, and lovable ; pugnacious to a degree, 
 but as quick to make peace as to open hostilities. 
 He was a natural leader in the school, and even his 
 brothers fell under his occasional tyranny. " I loved 
 him from boyhood," wrote his brother George, 
 " even when he wronged me, for the goodness of his 
 heart and the nobleness of his spirit." 
 
 Through this virile and manly nature, energetic and 
 assertive to the verge of pugnacity, there ran a deep 
 vein of sentiment ; and combined with this vigorous 
 health of mind and body, there was that extreme sen- 
 sitiveness, that delicate poise of the spirit between 
 sadness and joy, which goes with a high imagina- 
 tive endowment. It is not difficult to realize the 
 character of the boy, sharing with his fellows the 
 
144 ESSAYS m LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 boundless physical delight of youth, and yet over- 
 clouded at times with stirrings of a genius which 
 made him an alien on the playground, a solitary 
 among the shouting throng. These overcast days 
 were few, however ; for genius, instead of being the 
 disease sometimes fancied by those who confuse it with 
 morbid self-consciousness, is the very highest sanity 
 and health. 
 
 As a schoolboy, Keats cared more for fighting 
 than for books ; but in spite of his vehemence and 
 occasional violence, he was a prime favourite, — his 
 high-mindedness, tenderness, and real nobility supple- 
 menting his physical leadership with another and 
 finer authority. There comes a time, however, in the 
 life of a boy of such gifts when the obscure stirrings 
 become more frequent and profound ; the imagina- 
 tion no longer hints at its presence, but begins to 
 sound its mysterious and thrilling note in the soul. 
 There is no other moment so wonderful as this first 
 hour of awakening, — this dawn of the beauty and 
 wonder and mystery of the world on a nature that has 
 been living only the glad, unthinking hfe of the senses. 
 It came to Keats in his fifteenth year, — came with 
 that sudden hunger and thirst for knowledge which 
 consume the days with desire as with a fire, and fill 
 the young heart with passionate longing to drain the 
 cup of experience at a draught. " In my mind's eye 
 I now see him at supper," writes Cowden Clarke, "sit- 
 ting back on the form from the table, holding the folio 
 volume of Burnet's ' History of his Own Time ' be- 
 
JOHN KEATS: POET AND MAN. 1 45 
 
 tween himself and the table, eating his meal from 
 beyond it." He forsook the playground, became 
 absorbed in reading, carried off all the literary prizes, 
 devoured the school library, translated the entire 
 ^neid into prose. He took to mythology as a bird 
 takes to air; and he knew Tooke's "Pantheon," 
 Lempriere's Dictionary, and kindred books by heart. 
 No bee ever settled for the first time into the heart of 
 a flower with keener consciousness of touching the 
 farthest bounds of delight than did this eager-hearted 
 boy surrender himself to that ancient world of beauty 
 which lives again wherever a poet finds it. 
 
 In the midst of this intense preoccupation there 
 came a swift and momentous change of conditions : 
 the mother died, and the grandmother, eager to make 
 the wisest disposition of her property, placed her 
 grandchildren under the custody of two guardians to 
 whom she conveyed, in trust, the greater part of her 
 estate. One of the guardians, a London tea mer- 
 chant, seems henceforth to have had matters in his 
 own hands. He removed Keats, now fifteen years 
 old, from school, and bound him for five years as an 
 apprentice to a surgeon of the neighbourhood. From 
 the tea-selling point of view the change was no doubt 
 judicious ; from the poet's point of view it was hard 
 and blundering. Keats had frequent difficulties with 
 the same guardian ; and as his management of the 
 poet's property was neither judicious nor creditable, it 
 is within bounds to say that his management of the 
 poet was neither intelligent nor generous. 
 
146 ESSAYS m LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 Keats's occupations were interrupted ; but his inter- 
 ests were not changed, nor was his progress greatly 
 impeded. Reading and translating went steadily on ; 
 books were borrowed and devoured ; and visits to the 
 Enfield school were frequent. With Cowden Clarke, 
 the first of his friends of the mind, Keats became 
 constantly more intimate. They were at the morning 
 hour, when the whole world turns to gold. It is easy 
 to picture them in an arbour in the school garden, 
 oblivious of Time and London, — those dragons that 
 waste the fair country of the Ideal, — reading poetry 
 together. On one of those blissful days — Time lean- 
 ing on his scythe and London grown silent — Clarke 
 dipped into Spenser; and on the ears of the young 
 poet there fell for the first time the melody of that 
 older poet who was to clear his vision and make him 
 conscious of his gift. In the afternoon they read the 
 " Epithalamium " together, and in the evening Keats 
 carried the " Faerie Queene " home with him. Never, 
 surely, was friendship happier m its ministry, or a 
 young poet, stranger to himself, more fortunate in 
 finding at the critical moment the one guide in all 
 literature to the secrets and the riches of his art ! 
 The delight of that day still glows after eighty years of 
 change and death, — a delight deep as the conscious- 
 ness of a great nature, and passionate as its hopes and 
 aspirations. Keats had come to his own, and it was 
 not the surgeon's shop ; it was the great world of the 
 imagination, in the power of realizing which to eyes less 
 penetrating and to minds less sensitive he was to be 
 
JOHN KEATS: POET AND MAN. 1 47 
 
 without a master so far as time and growth were 
 given him. 
 
 The boy of fifteen fastened upon the " Faerie 
 Queene " with a passionate delight; it hberated his 
 imagination ; it spread before him all he had been 
 dimly groping after ; it gave his intelligence suddenly 
 all the material through which beauty expresses and 
 reveals itself. He sounded the deep, imaginative 
 reach of the poem and felt its profound and mystical 
 beauty ; but he saw also the secret of its workman- 
 ship ; he caught the splendour that lies hidden in 
 words. "He hoisted himself up," says Clarke, "and 
 looked burly and dominant, as he said, ' What an 
 image that is, — sea-shouldering whales! ' " The boy 
 had suddenly become a poet ; henceforth all happen- 
 ings were of secondary importance. 
 
 The lines entitled " In Imitation of Spenser," 
 which appeared in his earliest published volume of 
 verse, were Keats' s first venture into the field which 
 the " Faerie Queene " opened to him, and bear direct 
 testimony to the deep impression made upon him by 
 Spenser ; the influence of the elder poet was, how- 
 ever, of the creative, not of the enslaving kind ; it was 
 an influence felt chiefly in the liberation of the young 
 and untried spirit. Thus it is that one human life 
 ministers to another, and the vision recorded by one 
 great imagination becomes the kindling torch of 
 another glow on the horizon of life. Keats was a 
 man of too virile and original genius to remain long 
 a debtor even to one of the masters of his craft ; a 
 
148 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 clear consciousness of his power and the practice that 
 lies between that consciousness and the mastery of 
 his art were all that Keats needed. The first he 
 owed to Spenser ; the second he immediately set 
 about acquiring for himself. With the secrecy and 
 diffidence of a youth impelled to rhyme and con- 
 scious of his lack of skill, Keats began writing sonnets 
 and other verses, concealing these first flowers of his 
 fancy even from Cowden Clarke, who saw them for 
 the first time two years later. The bondage of the 
 apprenticeship was slowly wearing to its close ; but 
 more than a year before the expiration of the term of 
 five years, the articles were cancelled, and hence- 
 forth, as Mr. Lowell has said, " his indentures ran to 
 Apollo instead of Mr. Hammond." 
 
 In 1 8 14, at the age of nineteen, still looking for- 
 ward to medicine as a vocation and to the making of 
 verse as an avocation, Keats entered the hospitals of 
 St. Thomas's and Guy's as a medical student. Two 
 and a half years passed in apparent devotion to 
 medical study : during the early months of this period 
 the study was serious and real ; during the later 
 months the charm of poetry steadily deepened. It 
 became his real pursuit, his passion, and his life ; but 
 he carried on his professional study with sufficient 
 zeal to pass with credit the regular examination as 
 a licentiate and to secure a hospital appointment at 
 Guy's. To go further was to assume grave and dis- 
 tasteful responsibilities and to put aside visions that 
 were summoning him with deepening insistence into 
 
JOHN KEATS: POET AND MAN. 1 49 
 
 a field whose freshness and fragrance drew him 
 irresistibly from the operating-room. " The other 
 day," he wrote Cowden Clarke, " during the lecture, 
 there came a sunbeam into the room, and with it a 
 whole troop of creatures floating in the ray ; and I 
 was off with them to Oberon and fairy-land." In 
 such a contention the lecture-room was certain to 
 lose the day ; and yet such was the reality and force 
 of Keats's mind that had he chosen to follow the 
 profession of medicine he would undoubtedly have 
 followed it with high success. 
 
 Meantime friendships with literary men, or with 
 men of literary sympathies, had been expanding the 
 life of the young poet and bringing him into closer 
 contact with the world. Clarke recalled long after- 
 ward the fact that shortly after the liberation from 
 prison of Leigh Hunt in February, 1815, Keats gave 
 him the sonnet entitled " Written on the day that Mr. 
 Leigh Hunt left prison." This was the first decisive 
 evidence Keats gave of having committed himself to 
 verse ; and Clarke clearly remembered the conscious 
 look and obvious hesitation of the shy young poet. 
 Not long after, and on a more memorable occasion, 
 the two friends fell upon a copy of Chapman's trans- 
 lation of Homer ; and that same night Keats wrote the 
 famous sonnet and struck for the first time that rich 
 and mellow note, resonant of a beauty deeper even 
 than its own magical cadence, heard for the first 
 time in English poetry. The sonnet has a largeness 
 of idea, a breadth of imagination, an amplitude of 
 
15° ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 serene beauty, which make it the fitting prelude of 
 Keats's later work. In the sestet with which it closes 
 he placed himself at a bound beside the masters of 
 his art : — 
 
 " Then felt I like some watcher of the skies 
 When a new planet swims into his ken; 
 
 Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes 
 He stared at the Pacific — and all his men 
 
 Look'd at each other with a wild surmise — 
 Silent, upon a peak in Darien," 
 
 The friendship with Leigh Hunt, which began 
 about this time, brought Keats in contact with a pro- 
 fessional man of letters, who had a wide if somewhat 
 desultory knowledge of literature, and who was a 
 passionate student and lover of earlier English verse, 
 bent upon restoring with his own hand the large 
 movement and easy naturalness of the pre-classical 
 period. The result of that endeavour was the " Story 
 of Rimini; " in which, with only partial success, the 
 heroic couplet was freed from the artificial compres- 
 sion to which it had been subjected by Dryden and 
 Pope and their followers and given the free, full, and 
 flowing movement which it has in the verse of 
 Chaucer and of the Elizabethans generally. Hunt, 
 who had an almost infallible instinct for good work 
 from other hands, and who seemed to scent the rarest 
 fragrance in whatever field of poetry he strayed, was 
 strong in fancy rather than in imagination. Not to 
 his delicate genius, but to the ampler and profounder 
 spirit of Wordsworth and Coleridge, English poetry 
 
JOHN KEATS: POET AND MAN. 151 
 
 was to owe the completion of the emancipation begun 
 by Cowper and Burns. If Hunt failed of the high 
 task he had imposed upon himself, he was not lack- 
 ing in gifts of high order; and he had what is 
 sometimes more valuable to others as a source of in- 
 spiration than great gifts, the literary temperament; 
 he was ardent, sensitive, impressionable, enthusiastic, 
 capable of great admirations and of great devotions. 
 He, too, was a lover of Spenser ; and if he missed the 
 profounder insight of Keats, he brought to the younger 
 poet a quick sympathy, a keen zest for the delights 
 of literature, and a wide familiarity with whatever was 
 most alluring in it. In many ways the companion- 
 ship was helpful and stimulating ; the force of Keats's 
 creative impulse was so much more powerful than 
 that of Hunt, and issued from depths so much pro- 
 founder, that he was in no danger of feeling the 
 influence of the older man too deeply. 
 
 Friendship with Hunt brought him into contact 
 with a number of kindred spirits, — with John Hamil- 
 ton Reynolds, full of the charm of dawning talent 
 and brilliant wit; with James Rice, whom Dilke 
 describes as the best, and in his quaint way, one of 
 the wittiest and wisest men he had ever known ; with 
 Shelley, whose name was to be so intimately associ- 
 ated with his own in the splendour of a common 
 promise of youth and the sadness of a common 
 prematurity of death ; with the painter Haydon, 
 whose vast ambition was to be mocked by the inade- 
 quacy of his talent to meet the demand he imposed 
 
IS2 JBSSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATfON. 
 
 upon it for work of heroic type and epic magnitude ; 
 with Joseph Severn, a lover of letters and art, whose 
 social charm Mr. Ruskin has preserved in one of his 
 characteristic sentences ; " lightly sagacious, lovingly 
 humorous, daintily sentimental, he was in council 
 with the cardinals to-day, and at picnic on the Cam- 
 pagna with the brightest English belles to-morrow, 
 and caught the hearts of all in the golden net of his 
 goodwill and good understanding, as if life were but 
 for him the rippling chant of his favourite song, — 
 
 " ' Gente, e qui I'uccellatore.' " 
 
 A goodly company of friends surely for the young 
 poet; and another evidence that fortune did not 
 avert her face from the years of his self-discovery 
 and self-culture ! 
 
 In the congenial companionship of this group of 
 variously gifted men Keats found sympathy, apprecia- 
 tion, and, in some cases, enthusiastic encouragement ; 
 and in March, 1817, a slender column of verse came 
 from the press of the OUiers. As a motto for his 
 first venture the poet selected the lines from Spenser : 
 
 " What more felicity can fall to creature 
 Than to enjoy delight with liberty ? " 
 
 Over the gateway of his career Keats thus acknowl- 
 edged his indebtedness to the past, and disclosed the 
 prime qualities of his own contribution to English 
 poetry. Continuing the tradition of Spenser, not as 
 
JOHN KEATS: POET AND MAN. IS3 
 
 an imitation, but as an inspiration, he was to illustrate 
 the liberty of a new force in poetry and the delight 
 which lies on the world like the bloom and fragrance 
 of the early summer. In the volume of 1817 there 
 is much that is crude, immature, and of unequal 
 workmanship ; there is much also that betrays both 
 the vision and the faculty of a great poet : such work 
 as the sonnet on Chapman's Homer and the lines 
 entitled "Sleep and Poetry" convey unmistakable 
 intimation of the presence of a great gift. The book 
 was necessarily a kind of prelude to the poet's real 
 work ; he was feeling for the keys of his instrument, 
 learning its resources, mastering its combinations. 
 The magical touch is not present save here and there 
 in detached lines ; there is little of that quiet, easy, 
 assured putting forth of strength which later was to 
 furnish the last evidence of the poet's greatness. He 
 had felicity of phrase, but he lacked that finality of 
 beauty which marks a great style ; he had glimpses 
 of the world he was to explore with so keen a poetic 
 intelligence, but he lacked that full and ordered 
 knowledge which was to make him one of the masters 
 of the things of the imagination. The volume had 
 the qualities of such a mind as his ; profusion of idea 
 and imagery, depth and freshness of feeling, rare 
 good fortune in words and phrase, the exuberance, 
 the zest, the infinite delight of a poetic mind coming 
 to a consciousness of its power and spreading wing 
 for the first flight. It had also the defects of such 
 a mind at such a stage, — lack of critical power, of 
 
IS4 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 balance between thought and feeling, of restraint 
 and proportion. 
 
 When the slender book appeared, Haydon, who 
 always borrowed the thunder of Jove under the mis- 
 taken impression that the lightning went with it, 
 wrote to Keats : " I have read your ' Sleep and 
 Poetry ; ' it is a flash of lightning that will rouse 
 men from their occupations, and keep them trem- 
 bling for the crash of thunder that will follow." 
 Whoever read that beautiful confession of a poet's 
 faith must have recognized the birth of another child 
 of the Muses ; but unluckily few took time to read 
 it. There were other voices in the air, — voices of 
 great volume and of penetrating musical quality ; and 
 the fresh note of this new voice was heard by few. 
 Byron, Scott, and the facile Moore were a trio such 
 as have rarely sought and won popularity at the 
 same moment. Keats had to wait, and it was prob- 
 ably a piece of good fortune that fame remained at 
 a distance with that mask of indifference which she 
 so constantly wears for those whom she means later 
 to crown. There were a few commendatory notices ; 
 there was a small sale ; and there, for the moment, 
 the matter ended. 
 
 Shortly after the publication, which disappointed 
 his friends apparently more than himself, Keats left 
 London and went to the Isle of Wight, where surely, 
 if anywhere in England, a bruised spirit may find that 
 consolation of beauty which is one of the most pene- 
 trating ministries of the divine completeness to our 
 
JOHN KEATS: PORT AND MAN. iSS 
 
 mortal incompleteness. From this visit dates the 
 beginning of that correspondence with his family and 
 friends in which we possess a kind of autobiography 
 as well as a delightful addition to English letters. It 
 was in the early spring ; " as for primroses, the 
 Island ought to be called Primrose Island, — that is, 
 if the nation of Cowslips agree thereto, of which 
 there are divers clans Just beginning to lift up their 
 heads." The pain and stress of expression — that 
 deep necessity of artistic minds — was upon him : 
 " I find I cannot exist without Poetry^ — without 
 eternal Poetry ; half the day will not do ; the whole 
 of it. I began with a little, but habit has made me a 
 Leviathan. I had become all in a tremble from not 
 having written anything of late, — the sonnet over- 
 leaf did me good. I slept the better last night for 
 it ; this morning, however, I am nearly as bad 
 again. Just now I opened Spenser, and the first lines 
 I saw were these : — 
 
 " 'The noble heart that harbours virtuous thought, 
 And is with child of glorious great intent. 
 Can never rest until it forth have brought 
 Th' eternal brood of glory excellent.' " 
 
 He was reading and writing eight hours a day, feeling 
 in some way a fellowship with Shakespeare which 
 seemed to carry with it the recognition and approval 
 of the master of English song, and brooding over the 
 loveliness of Nature, which enfolded him with the joy 
 and exhaustlessness of eternal poetry. There were 
 
IS6 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 days of restlessness and irritation which foreshadowed 
 the physical weakness which was soon to assert itself 
 and, in a measure, defeat the promise of the glowing 
 spirit. But these clouds were momentary ; there 
 were raptures such as only the young imagination 
 knows. Writing to Miss Reynolds, he says : " Believe 
 me, my dear Jane, it is a great happiness to see that 
 you are in this finest part of the year winning a little 
 enjoyment from the hard world. In truth, the great 
 Elements we know of are no mean comforters : the 
 open sky sits upon our senses like a sapphire crown ; 
 the Air is our robe of state ; the Earth is our throne ; 
 and the Sea a mighty minstrel playing before it, able, 
 like David's harp, to make such a one as you forget 
 almost the tempest cares of life." 
 
 These words are significant of the education which 
 Keats was giving himself, — the education which lies 
 behind every great career, through which the libera- 
 tion of every original mind is accomplished. It was 
 no shallow inspiration which burned like fire in the 
 soul of the poetj it was no obvious and superficial 
 beauty which mirrored itself in his soul, and which he 
 was to give back line for line. His springs were in the 
 secret places, fed by the spirit of God and discovered 
 by those alone who hold the divining-rod of genius. 
 With Keats, as with all the masters of the arts, there 
 was no separation of life and art ; they were one in 
 that fundamental unity which men never break save 
 at the loss of what is deepest in thought and truest in 
 art, — that sublime marriage of which all the great 
 
JOHN KEATS: POET AND MAN. 1 57 
 
 works of art are the offspring. " I feel more and 
 more every day," he wrote, "as my imagination 
 strengthens, that I do not Hve in this world alone, but 
 in a thousand worlds. No sooner am I alone than 
 shapes of epic greatness are stationed round me, and 
 serve my spirit the office which is equivalent to a 
 king's bodyguard, — then ' Tragedy with sceptred 
 pall comes sweeping by.' " 
 
 Keats was now at work on the story of " En- 
 dymion," moving from place to place in search of the 
 most favourable conditions. A delightful episode in 
 this wandering life was a visit of six weeks at Oxford, 
 the mornings devoted to work on the poem and the 
 afternoons to walking or rowing. The charm of the 
 city was on him, as it has been on so many men of 
 imagination ; and Bailey, who was his companion, re- 
 cords the wonderful sweetness and charm of the poet 
 during these days in the ripe old gardens or upon the 
 slow-moving Isis. The months that followed were 
 shadowed by anxiety. His brother Tom was ill, and 
 his brother George was preparing to emigrate to this 
 country ; but Keats kept steadily at work, and " En- 
 dymion " was published in the spring of i8r8. The 
 quality and place of the poem in the development of 
 his mind and art were perfectly understood by the 
 poet. He had very moderate expectations of its suc- 
 cess, and he saw much more clearly than his critics 
 its defects and immaturity ; he saw also its sincerity 
 and value as the fruit of a ripening art. His percep- 
 tion of its defects and his recognition of its freshness 
 
IS8 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATiON. 
 
 and deep poetic impulse were both correct ; for no 
 poet ever understood himself more thoroughly. With 
 manly integrity and simplicity he put into the preface 
 to the poem a clear expression of his feeling toward 
 his work : " Knowing within myself the manner in 
 which this Poem has been produced," he wrote, " it 
 is not without a feeling of regret that I make it public. 
 What manner I mean will be quite clear to the reader, 
 who must soon perceive great inexperience, immatur- 
 ity, and every error denoting a feverish attempt, rather 
 than a deed accomplished. . . . The imagination of 
 a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man 
 is healthy; but there is a space of life between in 
 which the soul is in a ferment, the character unde- 
 cided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick- 
 sighted." It was this " space of life between " which 
 produced " Endymion." 
 
 The story was one of the most familiar in that 
 mythology concerning which, in the same preface, he 
 expressed the hope that he had not touched it in too 
 late a day and dulled its brightness. The motive of 
 the tale, with its blending of youth, love, and immor- 
 tality, had appealed to Theocritus and Ovid, to Lyly, 
 to Michael Drayton, to Fletcher, and to many other 
 poets. Its suggestiveness and its illusiveness gave it 
 a peculiar charm for Keats, and at the same time 
 made it a peculiarly dangerous theme. That he failed 
 to assimilate completely the incongruous elements in 
 his hands is evident ; his work lives not by reason of 
 its perfect structure, but by reason of its overflowing 
 
JOHN KEATS: POET AND MAN. 1 59 
 
 beauty of poetic thought and diction. Two years 
 later it is possible that he might have touched it with 
 the mastered strength which stamps the fragment of 
 " Hyperion." Or it may be that the beautiful fancy, 
 so alluring and so prone to melt into cloud-mist if 
 you look at it steadily, belongs rather to the ferment 
 and freshness of youth than to the definiteness and 
 ordered strength of maturity. " Endymion " dis- 
 closes to the reader of to-day the strength and the 
 weakness which Keats saw in it before the garish 
 light of criticism fell upon it. It has the freshness of 
 feeling and perception, the glow of imagination, the 
 profusion and riot of imagery, the occasional over- 
 ripeness, the occasional perfection of expression, the 
 lack of sustained and cumulative power, which one 
 would expect from so immature a mind : as a finished 
 product it has very great blemishes ; as the work of a 
 young poet it overflows with promise. One wonders 
 not so much at the brutality of the critics as at their 
 stupidity. 
 
 Concerning the treatment of this Greek myth, as 
 concerning his treatment of Greek themes in general, 
 it may be said that while Keats had the temperament 
 of the Greek in his delight in beauty and his repose 
 in it, his manner was pre-eminently romantic. He is 
 as far removed as possible from the classical emphasis 
 on form and idea; the "Eve of Saint Agnes" may 
 well serve as the very highest type of the romantic 
 manner. Its splendid colouring, its richness of tex- 
 ture, its warmth and fragrance, mark the antipodes of 
 
l6o ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 the classical manner. " Endymion " especially dis- 
 covers the widest divergence from Greek models. 
 Its profusion of imagery, its mingling of often inhar- 
 monious elements, and its vagueness are the faults of 
 excessive romanticism. 
 
 After the publication of " Endymion " Keats set 
 off on the interesting but unfortunate northern tour. 
 The scenery and associations of Scotland stirred his 
 imagination to its depths ; but the exposure of the 
 journey told heavily on a frame unequal to such de- 
 mands. From Windermere to Ayr, and from the 
 Highlands to the Hebrides, through scenes touched 
 with whatever is great in English literature and Scotch 
 minstrelsy, and with whatever is pathetic and vener- 
 able in the history of both countries, the ardent young 
 traveller made his way, eager, enthusiastic, often in a 
 tempest of emotion, — the mountains for the first time 
 crowding about him, and Gary's translation of Dante 
 in his knapsack. But in the midst of this great expe- 
 rience, the first distinct symptoms of pulmonary 
 disease showed themselves; and from this time, with 
 occasional pauses, the poet's health steadily failed. 
 
 The welcome that awaited him in London was of 
 the most ungracious sort. The fourth article in the 
 series on the " Gockney School of Poetry " appeared 
 in the August issue of " Blackwood's Magazine ; " and 
 the criticism in the " Quarterly Review " saw the 
 light in September. Too much importance has been 
 attached to these reviews, which are likely to be 
 remembered hereafter simply as prime illustrations of 
 
JOHN KEATS: POET AND MAN. l6l 
 
 the fallibility of criticism. The reviewers did not kill 
 Keats ; and the tradition that fastened this crime upon 
 them has done them honour overmuch, while it has 
 done dishonour to the poet. The sin of the reviewers 
 was not murder, but brutality, vulgarity, and incred- 
 ible stupidity. That the reviews were unfavourable 
 and even severe was a small matter ; the meanness of 
 the onslaught lay in their indifference to the decencies 
 of life, their unpardonable allusions to personal his- 
 tory, their coarse contemptuousness. 
 
 It was inevitable that a man so sensitive and just as 
 Keats should feel keenly the coarseness and meanness 
 of the attack on his work, but he did not bend under 
 it. That it touched him sharply is true ; that it 
 touched him fatally is false. His was too sound a 
 nature, too great a mind, to feel more than the 
 momentary pang of misunderstanding and misrepre- 
 sentation. His real interest was in his art, not in the 
 recognition of his art ; and he saw far more clearly 
 than his critics the defects and the strength of his first 
 long poem. His friends were in a ferment of indig- 
 nation; Keats was calm and cheerful. The passing 
 depression which prompted him to declare that he 
 would write no more poetry speedily gave place to a 
 clearer insight into his own nature. 
 
 "I cannot but feel indebted," he wrote, "to those 
 gentlemen who have taken my part. As for the rest, I 
 begin to get a little acquainted with my own strength and 
 weakness. Praise or blame has but a momentary effect 
 on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes 
 II 
 
l62 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 him a severe critic of his own worlc. My own domestic 
 criticism has given me pain without comparison beyond 
 what ' Blackwood ' or the ' Quarterly ' could possibly in- 
 flict; and also when I feel I am right, no external praise 
 can give me such a glow as my own solitary reperception 
 and ratification of what is fine. J S. is perfectly right in 
 regard to the slip-shod 'Endymion.' That it is so is no 
 fault of mine. No ! though it may sound a little para- 
 doxical. It is as good as I had power to make it — by 
 myself. Had I been nervous about its being a perfect 
 piece, and with that view asked advice, and trembled over 
 every page, it would not have been written ; for it is not 
 in my nature to fumble, — I will write independently. 
 I have written independently, without judgment. I may 
 write independently, and with judgment, hereafter. The 
 Genius of Poetry must work out its own salvation in a 
 man. It cannot be matured by law and precept, but by 
 sensation and watchfulness in itself. That which is crea- 
 tive must create itself. In ' Endymion ' I leaped headlong 
 into the sea, and thereby have become better acquainted 
 with the soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks, than if 
 I had stayed upon the shore and piped a silly pipe, and 
 took tea and comfortable advice. I was never afraid of 
 failure; for I would sooner fail than not be among the 
 greatest." 
 
 These are strong, clear-sighted words ; they have 
 robust sense, courage, and virility in them ; they were 
 never written by a victim of stupid criticism or by a 
 sentimental weakling. They show Keats not only 
 resolutely holding to his ideals, but still possessed of 
 that dauntless pluck which earlier ran to an excess 
 of pugnacity on the pla3'ground. The reception of 
 
JOHN KEATS: POET AND MAN, 163 
 
 " Endymion " would not have justified so full a dis- 
 cussion at this late day had it not been for the popular 
 tradition which transformed a clumsy blow with a 
 bludgeon into the death-thrust of a stiletto. It was, 
 as Keats said in a letter to his brother George, " a 
 mere matter of the moment." And in the calm as- 
 surance of his great gifts he added, " I think I shall 
 be among the English Poets after my death." 
 
 And now the story of the poet's life hurries on to its 
 pathetic close. His brother Tom died, and Keats went 
 to live with his friend Charles Brown. He was writing 
 " Hyperion " and coming under the spell of Miss 
 Fanny Brawne, — a spell which, in the delicate condi- 
 tion of his health and the ferment of his soul, was to 
 work him harm. It was a hard passage in a life over 
 which the clouds were fast gathering. Tom Keats 
 dead, George gone to America, his work spurned, his 
 personal history satirized, his health swiftly breaking, 
 Keats was ill fitted to resist or master the passion which 
 seized him. The winter was full of intense emotion, 
 of alternate depression and exaltation ; and yet in 
 this whirl of emotion the genius of Keats burned with 
 a pure and splendid flame, — for this was the winter 
 of" Hyperion," " The Eve of Saint Agnes," the " Ode 
 on a Grecian Urn," the " Ode to Psyche," the " Ode 
 to a Nightingale." During the succeeding summer 
 " Lamia " was written in rhyming heroics. At Win- 
 chester, with its claustral calm and its venerable ripe- 
 ness and beauty, the late summer and early autumn 
 passed. " Otho " was finished, and the fragment of 
 
l64 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 "Saint Stephen" begun, neither with any degree of 
 success. These were the last working-days, and the 
 last fruit of them was the noble ode "To Autumn." 
 These brief months had brought out, not the full 
 measure, but the ripe power of Keats's genius. The 
 apprenticeship was ended ; the artist had come to full 
 stature. Not since Spenser had there been a purer 
 gift of poetry among English-speaking peoples ; not 
 since Milton a line of nobler balance of sound, 
 thought, and cadence. There is no magic of colour in 
 written speech that is not mixed in the diction of 
 " The Eve of Saint Agnes," — a vision of beauty, deep, 
 rich, and glowing as one of those dyed windows in 
 which the heart of the Middle Ages still burns. While 
 of the odes, so perfect in form, so ripe with thought, so 
 informed and irradiated by the vision and the insight of 
 the imagination, what remains to be said save that they 
 furnish us with the tests and standards of poetry itself? 
 They mark the complete identification of thought with 
 form, of vision with faculty, of life with art. 
 
 But this noble power, that seemed in all those 
 months to create with a divine ease out of a divine ful- 
 ness, was the final energy of an expiring life. Keats 
 returned to London in October, 1819. On the advice 
 of Brown he tried his hand at a satiric piece with a 
 fairy background ; but he failed where Leigh Hunt 
 might have succeeded. The " Cap and Bells " is not 
 without happy phrases, nor is it lacking in music, but 
 Keats's heart was not in it, and where his heart was 
 not, neither was his genius. Meanwhile the con- 
 
JOHN KEATS: POET AND MAN. 165 
 
 sciousness of ebbing strength, the bitterness of great 
 achievements never to be made, of a consuming 
 passion never to be satisfied, preyed on him like a 
 vulture. The strain of genius is a very real thing, — 
 the strain of an imagination easily exalted and stimu- 
 lated, of emotions swiftly fired and of devouring 
 intensity, of a temperament sensitive to every wind 
 and shadow. This strain Keats felt in all its intensity. 
 There were the usual pauses which mark the course 
 of pulmonary disease ; but there was no hope from 
 the beginning. In July the third and last volume of 
 poems came from the press, containing the work of 
 Keats's best period, which extended from the early 
 spring of 1818 to the late autumn of 1819. Poetry 
 of so unmistakable a quality could not and did not 
 fail of recognition. Nothing approaching popularity 
 came to the poet ; but discerning people responded 
 generously to this new appeal for recognition ; there 
 was a kindly notice in the " Edinburgh Review ; " and 
 there was a respectable sale of the book. 
 
 Keats meanwhile was going through the supreme 
 crisis ; and no one can read the passionate outcries 
 which his letters to Fanny Brawne became in those 
 days without passing by with uncovered head. There 
 are confidences too sacred even for the glance of 
 friendship, and there are struggles too bitter to pre- 
 serve in any permanent record. It was inevitable that 
 this strong nature, holding fame and love within 
 reach, should rebel against the last terrible decree of 
 renunciation ; it was also inevitable that this strong 
 
1 66 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 nature should reconcile itself to life and die with the 
 courage of a great human soul. In September Keats 
 left London for Italy. On shipboard his genius 
 blazed up once more from the ashes that were fast 
 covering it ; and on a blank leaf of a copy of Shake- 
 speare he wrote the beautiful sonnet beginning, 
 " Bright Star, would I were steadfast as thou art ! " 
 and containing the noble figure of 
 
 " The moving waters at their priest-like task 
 Of cold ablution round earth's human shores." 
 
 In Rome he was cheerful and serene. There were 
 short walks ; there was even a plan for a poem in 
 Sabina. But the end was close at hand. There was 
 a sudden relapse and then a partial rally, but no more 
 hope. Keats was longing for the great peace, and 
 sustaining himself by listening to the prose of Jeremy 
 Taylor and to the sonatas of Haydn. On the 23d of 
 February, 1821, he called Severn to lift him up : "I 
 am dying ; I shall die easy. Don't be frightened ; be 
 firm, and thank God it has come." Three days after, 
 he was buried in the quiet cemetery where Severn 
 himself sixty years later was to lie beside him, and 
 where Shelley also sleeps under the soft Italian sky, — 
 so near the ancient tumult of Rome, and yet wrapped 
 about by the eternal silence. 
 
 " He dwelt with the bright gods of elder time, 
 On earth and in their cloudy haunts above. 
 He loved them ; and, in recompense sublime. 
 The gods, alas I gave him their fatal love." 
 
JOHN KEATS: POET AND MAN. 167 
 
 The Story of Keats' s life is also the story of his 
 genius and his art, for no English poet has more 
 entirely illustrated the truth of Goethe's declaration 
 that " everything that man undertakes to produce, 
 whether by action, word, or in whatsoever manner, 
 ought to spring from the union of all his faculties." 
 Keats's verse has this wholeness, this inevitableness ; 
 it is no play of fancy, no cleverness of mind, no skill 
 of hand, no dexterity of culture ; it is the expression 
 of the man in his contact with nature and life. Its 
 very immaturity is the evidence of its reality ; it be- 
 trays no early precocity of technical cunning, but the 
 tumultuous strength of a poetic nature coming to a 
 knowledge of itself. The great style was to come, as 
 the great style always comes, from the full and har- 
 monious expression of a powerful and capacious per- 
 sonality. Keats was not to be a maker of a verse 
 only, but a revealer of the thought that is everywhere 
 one with beauty ; and that thought was to show itself 
 to him only with the ripening of his nature under the 
 touch of life. What he did, therefore, pure and per- 
 fect as its quality is, was the promise rather than the 
 performance of his genius. "If I should die," he 
 wrote on one of the last days, " I have left no im- 
 mortal work behind me, — nothing to make my friends 
 proud of my memory ; but I have loved the principle 
 of beauty in all things." It was the passion of his 
 soul that was real to him in those final days, not the 
 expression of it ; and while it is true that his passion 
 has left its immortal records, it is also true that he had 
 
l68 £SSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 followed the principle of beauty but a little way when 
 the shadows overtook him. 
 
 The tradition of his lack of moral stamina has per- 
 haps bred the other misconception that he was de- 
 fective on the side of intellectual strenuousness. The 
 beauty of his work has by strange lack of insight been 
 taken as evidence of its defect in range and depth. 
 Keats was sensuous, as all great poets must be, if we 
 are to accept the testimony of the nobly arduous 
 Milton ; but the richness of his diction carries with it 
 the impression of immense intellectual resource. It is 
 not beauty of form and colour alone which gives the 
 " Ode on a Grecian Urn " and the ode "To Autumn" 
 their changeless spell ; it is that interior beauty of 
 which Keats was thinking when he wrote those pro- 
 found lines, the very essence of his creed : — 
 
 " Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all 
 Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'' 
 
 For the highest uses of thought there has been no 
 greater blunder than the division of the indivisible 
 nature of deity into attributes, of the immortal soul of 
 man into perishing senses and faculties, of the seam- 
 less garment of the universe into parts and patches. 
 This is the method of logic, which deals with the mani- 
 festations and appearances of things ; it is never the 
 method of the imagination, which, by insight, deals 
 with the things themselves. Keats's greatness lay in 
 his mastery of the unity of life and his identification 
 of the highest beauty with the highest truth. God is 
 
JOHN KEATS: POET AND MAN. 1 69 
 
 an artist as fundamentally and much more obviously 
 than he is a moralist. It is a noble and necessary ser- 
 vice which they render who uncover the lines of 
 moral order along which the universe is built ; but it 
 is an equally noble and inevitable service which they 
 perform who make us see the beauty which is not 
 the ornament of righteousness, but the breathing soul 
 of it. 
 
 Keats had this vision of the soul of things ; he was 
 no idle singer of sensuous moods ; he was a resolute 
 and clear-sighted pursuer of the Ideal which forever 
 flies at our approach that our reluctant feet may be 
 forever lured onward ; a passionate lover of that Ideal 
 which no sooner enshrines itself in one beautiful form 
 than it escapes to become again a thing of the spirit. 
 Keats knew the ardours rather than the pleasures of 
 song, to recall his own phrase about Milton. He was 
 alive to the need of moral sanity and power. In a 
 letter to his brothers, after speaking of the " Excur- 
 sion," Haydon's pictures, and Hazlitt's depth of taste 
 as the three superior things in the modern world, he 
 quickly adds : " Not thus speaking with any poor 
 vanity that works of genius were the first things in 
 this world. No ! for that sort of probity and disin- 
 terestedness which such men as Bailey possess does 
 hold and grasp the tiptop of any spiritual honours 
 that can be paid to anything in this world ; " and he 
 asks to be credited with a deeper feeling and devo- 
 tion for uprightness " than for any marks of genius, 
 however splendid." He saw with a keen, clear eye 
 
17° £SSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 who, himself a young man, could pierce the splendid 
 mist which surrounded Byron in those days, and char- 
 acterize him as " a fine thing in the sphere of the 
 worldly, theatrical, and pantomimical." Integrity, 
 honour, and courage were as much a part of Keats's 
 nature as sensitiveness and the love of beauty. 
 
 " I could not live without the love of my friends," 
 he writes, ..." but I hate a mawkish popularity. . . . 
 I have not the slightest feeling of humility towards the 
 public or to anything in existence but the Eternal 
 Being, the Principle of Beauty, and the Memory of 
 Great Men." George Keats was irreverent, but not 
 far wrong, when, referring to the poor creature which 
 some critics and literary circles put in the place of 
 this virile and vigorous nature, he said that his brother 
 was " as much like the Holy Ghost as Johnny Keats." 
 
 Keats's letters are less mature, less finished, than 
 the letters of Cowper or of Shelley; but they are 
 more intimate, more autobiographic. They furnish a 
 fairly complete record of the poet's moods and 
 thoughts from the early spring of 1817 to the late 
 autumn *of 1820, — the period of his most rapid 
 growth, of his best work, and of his deepest personal 
 history. Leigh Hunt saw him as a young man, some- 
 what under the middle height, with a face full of energy 
 and sensibility, a pugnacious mouth, a bold chin, and 
 eyes " mellow and glowing, large, dark, and sensitive." 
 At the recital of a noble action or a beautiful thought, 
 the mouth trembled, and the eyes were suffused with 
 tears. A strong, virile, sensitive nature evidently ; and 
 
JOHN KEATS: POET AND MAN. 171 
 
 the letters confirm the testimony of the face. They 
 show Keats responsive to the beauty of the world, 
 full of generous feeling, unselfish, high-minded, with 
 clear ideas of his art and a large and growing per- 
 ception of its range. In " Sleep and Poetry," which 
 found a place in his first published work, the volume 
 of 181 7, he wrote out his poetical creed, — a creed 
 which he might have touched later with finer art, but 
 which he never outgrew. After marking his diver- 
 gence from the standards and methods of the preced- 
 ing period of English verse, he predicted the stages 
 of his own progress : — 
 
 " First the realm I '11 pass 
 Of Flora and old Pan : sleep in the grass, 
 Feed upon apples red, and strawberries. 
 And choose each pleasure that my fancy sees.'' 
 
 No modern poet has been more at home in that 
 realm of the obvious bloom of the world, — the 
 realm of the Greek lyric and pastoral poets and of 
 many later singers ; nor has any modem poet brought 
 back more vividly the fading glories of that realm. 
 But Keats was to pass through that realm, not to 
 abide in it : — 
 
 ■' And can I ever bid these joys farewell ? 
 Yes, I must pass them for a nobler life. 
 Where I may find the agonies, the strife 
 Of human hearts." 
 
 " Scenery is fine, but human nature is finer," he 
 wrote in prose. " The sward is richer for the tread of 
 
172 ESSAYS m LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 a real nervous English foot ; the eagle's nest is finer 
 for the mountaineer having looked into it." He had 
 steeped himself in the rich beauty of first impres- 
 sions; but he was to make the steep ascent where 
 great thoughts are nurtured like the young eagles in 
 the nests seen only by the mountaineer. There were 
 possibilities of heroic endeavour in him. He knew 
 what self-denial, self-control, and solitude of spirit lie 
 before one who would master any art, but he did not 
 draw back. " I must think that difficulties nerve the 
 spirit of man ; they make our prime objects a refuge 
 as well as a passion." It was a clear insight that 
 thus early discerned this deep truth in the life of the 
 artist. To wring from great endeavour not only the 
 achievement, but the joy of it ; to make the agony of 
 toil contribute to the finished work a depth and ripe- 
 ness denied to skill divorced from profound experi- 
 ence, — this is to have mastered the secret of art. 
 Keats discerned a larger world than that he had yet 
 walked in, a deeper vision of life than that he had 
 yet seen; and he knew that these things were to 
 come to him through the expansion of his own nature 
 under the training of life, and the enlargement of 
 his thought through wider knowledge. In a letter 
 written to John Taylor in 18 18 he says: "I know 
 nothing ; I have read nothing ; and I mean to follow 
 Solomon's directions, ' Get learning ; get under- 
 standing.' I find earlier days are gone by; I find 
 that I have no enjoyment in the world but continual 
 drinking of knowledge. I find there is no worthy 
 
JOHN KEATS: POET AND MAN. 173 
 
 pursuit but the idea of doing some good in the world. 
 Some do it with their society ; some witli their wit ; 
 some with their benevolence ; some with a sort of 
 power of conferring pleasure and good-humour on 
 all they meet, and in a thousand ways, — all dutiful to 
 the command of Great Nature. There is but one way 
 for me. The road lies through application, study, 
 and thought ; I will pursue it." 
 
 "The road lies through application, study, and 
 thought." Would it be possible to state more simply the 
 conditions attached to the production of the greatest 
 works of art, — the "Divine Comedy," Shakespeare's 
 tragedies, Goethe's " Faust," for instance ? Surely one 
 need not search further to discover the possibilities 
 of strenuous intellectual and spiritual development 
 which were in the mind and heart of Keats, nor how 
 secondary was the purely sensuous quality in which 
 some critics have found his sole poetic gift. In that 
 sensuousness lay the promise of a prime which, had 
 it come, might have recalled the noontide of Spenser 
 and Shakespeare. 
 
 Keats saw the road, but he was not to take it ; dis- 
 ease and death had written " No thoroughfare " across 
 it ; the great nature was to give us only the prodigal 
 richness of its first blossoming ; the ripening summer 
 and the fruitful autumn were shared in other fields 
 than ours. 
 
 But how deep was the loveliness of that early put- 
 ting forth of the young imagination ! It was no 
 delicate fancy, no light touch of skill, no precocious 
 
174 ESSAYS IN LITER ARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 brightness of spirit, which Keats gave the world : it 
 was pure imagination, — that rarest and most precious 
 because most creative of gifts. The ode " To Au- 
 tumn " and " The Eve of Saint Agnes " are beautiful 
 to the very heart ; they are not clothed with beauty ; 
 they are beauty itself. There is a vast difference 
 between thought turned into poetry, such as one 
 sometimes comes upon in Goethe and Words- 
 worth, and thought that was born poetry. Since 
 Spenser Keats is the most poetical of poets, because 
 his thought was poetry, — because he saw with the 
 imagination; and what he saw flashed into images, 
 figures, metaphors, — the fresh and glowing speech of 
 poetry. In this process his soul was in contact with 
 the soul of things, not with their surface beauty. 
 " When I wrote it," he said of one of his poems, " it 
 was a regular stepping of the imagination toward a 
 truth." And again : " What the imagination seizes 
 as beauty must be truth, whether it existed before or 
 not. . . . The imagination may be compared to 
 Adam's dream : he awoke and found it truth." 
 There is the secret of Keats' s genius and art, — the 
 secret and the promise. He left much, and of the 
 rarest ; he would have done more. It is enough that, 
 except Shakespeare, no English poet has found such 
 colour in our speech, has made it linger in the ear in 
 phrase so rich and full. This magical note, heard 
 only in the greatest poetry, is heard in Keats, — the 
 evidence alike of the rare quality of his genius and its 
 depth and power. 
 
SOME MODERN READINGS FROM 
 DANTE. 
 
 It is characteristic of a mind of the first order 
 that its relations to life are never at any moment com- 
 pletely discerned, — that with every turn of events a 
 new light shines from it, and for every generation it 
 has a fresh word. For this reason the greatest books 
 are always contemporary; they are in vital contact 
 with the life that is, while they conserve and illustrate 
 the life that was. In a noble sense, they are our 
 masters, and we cannot escape from them. They con- 
 stantly compel us to study them anew ; in every hour 
 when we believe we have mastered them, they reverse 
 the relation, and silently re-establish their supremacy. 
 The world has been reading the book of Job for at 
 least three thousand years ; but it has only begun to 
 read that sublime argument with a true discernment 
 of its passionate impulse and its prophetic drift. The 
 measure of greatness in a book is the extent and close- 
 ness of its correspondence with life ; and we must 
 wait on life to discover that which life alone can evoke 
 by fitting the text to the comment, by adding the fact 
 to the illustration. Of no writer is this truer than 
 of Dante, — so long familiar, so intensely studied, so 
 widely discussed. Insight however keen and true, 
 
176 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 scholarship however searching and profound, have left 
 the " Divine Comedy " as fresh, as suggestive, as inex- 
 haustible as it was when it came, without note or com- 
 ment, into the hands of Petrarch and Boccaccio. 
 Life is, after all, the only authoritative and final com- 
 mentator on Dante ; and life has yet in reserve mean- 
 ings which a longer experience and a vaster history will 
 break open to the very heart. When a great nature, 
 speaking out of that unconsciousness which, to borrow 
 Froebel's phrase, is rest in God, gives its interpretation 
 of life, all history must disapprove or confirm it. The 
 Judgment of any particular age is at the best pro- 
 visional, and may be overruled a century or ten cen- 
 turies later. It is part of the greatness of such nature 
 that it compels judgment from each successive gen- 
 eration. As the stern figure of the man upon whom 
 the women of Ravenna looked askance, because he 
 had walked in Hell, passed through the streets of the 
 cities of his exile, a silent judgment upon corruption 
 and frivolity went with him. Such heroic fidelity, 
 such lofty scorn of compromise, such toil of spirit, 
 searched out and laid bare the meanness and shallow- 
 ness of current ideals and conduct. When such a man 
 sets foot in any community, a standard of character 
 becomes distinct and commanding, and compels clear 
 discrimination between the base and the noble, the 
 heroic and the cowardly. It is as impossible to keep 
 Dante out of sight, in measuring achievement in 
 Verona and Lucca and Ravenna at the beginning of 
 the fourteenth century, as to exclude from the field 
 
SOME MODERN READINGS FROM DANTE. 1 77 
 
 of vision the Alps when one looks at the plains of 
 Lombardy. 
 
 As with the man, so with the work : they are both 
 come not to bring peace, but a sword. Deeply sig- 
 nificant is this quality inherent in every great work 
 of literature which compels each successive age to 
 measure by these enduring standards its own achieve- 
 ments. Every epic recalls Homer; every drama 
 evokes Shakespeare. The necessity of this constant 
 reference to the master- works — this perpetual return of 
 thought to them, this perennial renewal of interest in 
 them — explains the fact that every new age and every 
 new movement in literature invariably attempts a new 
 translation of the masterpieces. We are never done 
 with Homer. Chapman gave us the Elizabethan con- 
 ception of the old poet, — turbulent, dramatic, splendid 
 of colour ; Pope, the conception of the so-called clas- 
 sical age in English letters, — smooth, melodious, arti- 
 ficial ; Cowper, the Homer of the poetic reaction of 
 the first quarter of the century, — unaffected, simple, 
 sincere. We have the Homer of every recent century, 
 and we have also the Homer of the romantic school, 
 of the classical school, of the dramatic school, of the 
 ballad school. Every age and every literary move- 
 ment pours an early libation at this shrine. This 
 tribute is not paid to Homer the traditional classic, 
 but to Homer the great artist, who felt and caught 
 in speech something of the immortal freshness, the 
 tumultuous rush, of life. There will never be a final 
 translation of Homer or of Dante into English : it is 
 
178 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 only to those who Hve at their feet that the mountains 
 appear the same from day to day ; to those who travel 
 they are always looming up in new relations to each 
 other, — they are always discovering changes of out- 
 line and mass, as they are seen from different points 
 of view. 
 
 This prophetic quality — which speaks not to its 
 own time, but to posterity — is in the man before it 
 is in the work ; it cannot be in the work unless it first 
 be in the man. In all literature there is no man so 
 completely possessed by it as Dante, — none whose 
 life and work are so entirely fused, none whose life 
 and work so clearly disclose the conditions out of 
 which the greatest works of art issue ; none, therefore, 
 so unmistakably and sublimely prophetic. For the 
 essence of prophecy is not the discernment of the 
 coming event, — the sudden flash of light on the dis- 
 tant point ; it is rather the illustration of those deep 
 and fundamental laws which, once clearly seen, once 
 perfectly obeyed, make the future luminous and com- 
 prehensible. The soul that has seen God, and grasped 
 once and forever the law of righteousness that runs 
 its divine illumination through the universe, knows 
 the course of events, and can predict to a certainty the 
 main drift of history. Such a soul will never be con- 
 fused by the glitter of easy prosperity, or the eager 
 and audacious energy of materialism ; it will always 
 search for the moral quality behind the apparent suc- 
 cess, and measure progress by the advance or the de- 
 cay of character. It will discern the approach of 
 
SOME MODERN READINGS FRON DANTE. I'jg 
 
 disaster when others see only the shows of prosperity ; 
 it will recognize the coming of empire when others 
 see only the decline and decay of power. There are 
 prophets the use of whose gift is confined to infrequent 
 moments, and there are prophets whose grasp of the 
 principles of life is so powerful, and whose insight into 
 its significance is so sure and penetrating, that history 
 unfolds before them like an unrolled map. To really 
 see God once is to see him forever ; to get at the 
 heart of life in any age is to master it for all ages. 
 Such a man was Dante, — when we get the full sig- 
 nificance of his life and his work, perhaps the greatest 
 man in history ; the greatest because of this prophetic 
 quality, this laying bare of the laws upon which life 
 rests, this sublime reading of the page of history be- 
 fore it has become legible by holding it between the 
 mortal eye and that light whence all illumination 
 comes. 
 
 The uses of such a man as Dante are manifold, and 
 they have not lacked record. Some of them have al- 
 ways been evident ; others are beginning to make 
 themselves clear; others still wait the unfolding of 
 the future. To have seen life under the conditions 
 of eternity is to become in every age a stern and aw- 
 ful judge, a silent and majestic teacher. Dante could 
 afford to spend his life apart from Florence ; he can 
 afford to wait for the complete and final recognition 
 of what he was and what he achieved. Our concern 
 is not with his fame, but with his lesson for us. As 
 a poet or maker, as an artist, he has for our time, with 
 
l8o ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 its distractions and temptations for those who touch 
 in any way the ideal, an invigorating and sanative 
 quality. Art is not inspired by art, but by Hfe ; we 
 shall never write great books by reading Dante ; the 
 great books must be in us as they were in him. But 
 there are moods which favour the growth of art ; there 
 are prosperous influences which make some days fer- 
 tile above all the year. And while the secret of the 
 great artist is incommunicable, his attitude toward life, 
 his use of materials, his thought of the thing he was 
 sent to do, and his manner of doing it, are unconcealed. 
 •The greater the man the simpler are his methods. 
 There is no artifice, no magic, no esoteric skill about 
 the methods of greatness ; they have the elemental 
 simphcity and breadth of the processes of Nature. 
 " My secrets have been few," said Savonarola on the 
 rack, " because my purposes have been great." 
 
 At a time when the men who make whatever litera- 
 ture we possess are under such pressure from conflict- 
 ing tendencies, when skill is so constantly confused 
 with the creative power, when the noise of the mo- 
 ment makes the silence of the centuries so difficult to 
 believe or rest in, Dante has resources of service such 
 as no other poet offers. An age of expansion needs to 
 study the man whose spirit knew all the rigours of con- 
 centration and all the anguish of intensity ; an age 
 of many-sided activity and large tolerance of pleasure 
 stands in special need of the poet who felt the flames 
 of Hell blown upon him, and who heard the bitter 
 rain of tears in Purgatory. Not that our age is less 
 
SOME MODERN READINGS PROM DANTE. l8l 
 
 noble than his, or our spiritual vision less true than 
 his, but that our peculiar temptations find in him their 
 special antagonist. 
 
 What made Dante the supreme artist that he was is 
 a question which cannot be answered until we know 
 more about the individual spirit than we know to-day, 
 — a good deal more than current ways of looking at 
 and explaining genius are likely to secure for us. But 
 leaving the fundamental impulse to the mystery which 
 hides every point of contact between the individual 
 life and the sustaining principle of life, there are cer- 
 tain things about Dante which go far to account for 
 the greatness of his work, — which we may accept, 
 therefore, as the methods and conditions which foster 
 the production of the greatest works of art. In these 
 things we discover the prophetic character of Dante 
 as a literary artist ; prophetic, because the methods 
 and conditions were in accordance with the law of 
 fertility and productiveness, and certain, therefore, in 
 some form, and with the modifications involved in 
 changed habits of life, to reappear m connection with 
 all work of kindred range and power. 
 
 At the first glance no career seems so unfavourable 
 to the production of great art of any kind as Dante's. 
 He was fortunate in his age ; there were " ten silent 
 centuries " waiting for him ; there was a new world 
 of thought and art rising out of the long repose, the 
 rich soil of the Middle Ages. He was fortunate in the 
 city of his birth, — that historic city not yet enriched 
 by the loving genius of the Renaissance, but already 
 
l82 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 beautiful; turbulent with the fierce life of powerful 
 personalities ; the very nursery of great minds and 
 lofty ideals. He was fortunate too in that vision of 
 virginal loveliness which crossed his path in his ninth 
 year, never again to be absent from any world, seen or 
 unseen, in which he found himself. But here, to an 
 eye which sees the soil and not the seed, the pros- 
 perous conditions ended. The time of preparation 
 was golden ; but the time of performance, the years 
 in which vision and toil are one, those sublime years 
 when a man's soul goes out of him in imperishable 
 word and deed, — over these years what blackness of 
 weariness and sorrow ; what brooding of storm and 
 strife ! Exiled at thirty-seven, wandering henceforth 
 from city to city, from court to court, pursued always 
 by that shadow of a lost happiness, accompanied 
 always by that spirit of fierce indignation and fiery 
 revolt, beset always by the strange face and the re- 
 luctant hand, always sore at heart and solitary in 
 spirit, — surely never was a great artist so hopelessly 
 cast upon adverse conditions ! And yet these con- 
 ditions, which would have broken a soul less hardy, a 
 genius less self-sustaining, became contributing forces 
 to the depth and power of his work. 
 
 If he had been like Heine or Alfred de Musset, 
 he would have spent himself in delicate but piercing 
 irony, in exquisite transcriptions of a baffled and broken 
 spirit. But he was the child of his age only in so far as 
 he used its speech and suffered it to strike the chords 
 of his soul ; the music was in him, not in the tempest 
 
SOME MODERN READINGS PROM DANTE. 183 
 
 which evoked it. His mastery of his time lay in the 
 fact that it developed harmony instead of discord in 
 him ; that for its buffetings he gave it an immortal 
 song. So far removed was he from the weakness 
 of despair, from the pitiful malady of pessimism 
 which falls helpless because an obstacle lies in its 
 path, — that disease of temperament so often mis- 
 taken in these days for genius. When one remem- 
 bers what depths of pride and sensitiveness were in 
 Dante, what possibilities of suffering were latent in 
 the very nature of the man, and what fortune befell 
 him, the sufferings of the whole school of pessimists 
 and sentimentalists become things of mockery and 
 shame. They sing out of their weakness, and he out 
 of his strength : they bend and fall ; he rises and 
 triumphs. " Can I not everywhere behold the mir- 
 rors of the sun and stars? speculate on sweetest 
 truths under any sky, without first giving myself up 
 inglorious, nay, ignominious, to the populace and 
 city of Florence?" These words were not lightly 
 written : they issued out of a nature which felt the 
 constant anguish of banishment. " Through all the 
 parts where this language [Italian] is spoken," writes 
 the same hand in the " Convito," " a wanderer, well- 
 nigh a beggar, I have gone, showing against my will 
 the wound of fortune. Truly I have been a vessel with- 
 out sail or rudder, driven to diverse ports, estuaries, 
 and shores by that hot blast, — the breath of grievous 
 poverty ; and I have shown myself to the eyes of 
 many who perhaps, through some fame of me, had 
 
184 £SSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 imagined me in quite other guise, — in whose view not 
 only was my person debased, but every work of mine, 
 whether done or yet to do, became of less account." 
 These words betray no easy acceptance of hardship : 
 they have, rather, a fiery intensity ; there is a soul 
 glowing with indignation behind them, ready on the 
 instant to break into a blaze of speech. Again and 
 again the sense of wrong, the never-ceasing heart- 
 ache, bursts through the self-restraint of that strong 
 nature. 
 
 "... How salt a savour liath 
 The bread of others, and how hard a path 
 To climb and to descend the stranger's stairs ! " 
 
 Never were the loneliness and hardness of the 
 world, to the banished more deeply written than in 
 these lines ; never was his home-sickness more 
 vividly suggested than in another familiar passage : 
 " I have pity for those, whosoever they are, that lan- 
 guish in exile, and revisit their country only in 
 dreams." That which gives experience its signifi- 
 cance is depth of feeling, the sensitiveness of nature 
 which receives the deepest imprint of events. In 
 this capacity for getting the very last anguish out of 
 any kind of pain, Dante was pre-eminent ; his nature 
 was as sensitive as it was passionate ; the intensity 
 which was his strength as a poet was his misery as a 
 man. Among all those who have wandered heartsick 
 and longing for death, his is the figure which in- 
 stantly stands before us whenever the word " exile " 
 is spoken. 
 
SOME MODERN READINGS FROM DANTE. 1 85 
 
 His reaction, therefore, from outward misfortune to 
 inward power is the more notable. He escaped out 
 of the mesh which tlie sense of injustice and the 
 bitterness of poverty always spread for the lofty spirit 
 into one of the great principles of art. So close, so 
 absorbing, so continuous was the immediate contact 
 of his heart with the most piercing and painful facts 
 of life, that his work, enriched as it is with world-wide 
 knowledge, rests as directly and inevitably upon life 
 as the mountains rest on the sustaining mass of the 
 globe. Through two parts of the " Divine Comedy" 
 the pain of existence, that mysterious birth-pang which 
 every human soul carries to the grave, never leaves 
 us. When Goethe, a student at Strasbourg, read 
 for the first time, and in a tumult of soul, the plays of 
 Shakespeare, he said that he felt as if he had been 
 looking into the book of Fate, with the hurricane of 
 hfe tossing its leaves to and fro. In the " Inferno " 
 and the " Purgatorio " that appalling wind beats upon 
 us at every turn ; there are times when we shield 
 ourselves from it, as Dante covered his face from the 
 scorching flames that played about him. Never was 
 such intensity put into any book before ; never, per- 
 haps, will such intensity burn on any later page. The 
 book had made him lean for many a year, because it 
 was made of his own substance. No book ever swept 
 a wider field of thought, or imbedded itself more 
 completely in historical incident and character ; and 
 yet no book ever issued more directly out of the life 
 of its writer. There lies one secret of its power, of its 
 
1 86 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 limitless correspondence with life ; there lies the great 
 principle of art into mastery of which Dante was 
 driven by his very misery. Phillips Brooks somewhere 
 says that the only way to flee away from God is to 
 flee into him ; Dante was driven by his anguish into 
 the very heart of art. Everything else fell from him ; 
 there remained only this last refuge. If he had been 
 less great in vision and in labour, he would have missed 
 the sublime consolation of making his own sorrows 
 the key to the anguish of the world, — of discerning in 
 his own tumultuous experience the record of all human 
 life. To a pure man there was no other key to Hell. 
 Dante makes it clear to us that the great man and 
 the great artist are identical : the artist is the man, 
 not one form of his activity, one side of his nature. 
 A work of talent is a thing of skill, and may be 
 divorced from experience, from character ; but a work 
 of genius is a piece of the man's self. There may be 
 incalculable toU upon it, flawless workmanship may 
 disclose itself in every detail; but the motive, the 
 conception, the informing idea, are out of the man's 
 soul. He does not fashion them ; he is powerless 
 to invent them ; they grow within him ; they are the 
 children of his experience. It is as impossible to 
 separate the "Divine Comedy" from Dante as to 
 separate the fruit from the tree which bore it. It is 
 so distinct that it may be plucked and yet remain 
 entire, so different that it becomes nourishment for 
 other and alien life, but it is of the very substance of 
 the tree. Dante's poem has a significance as wide and 
 
SOME MODERN READINGS FROM DANTE. 187 
 
 deep as any that has been written ; but its universality 
 comes of the very concentration of experience out of 
 which it issued. All the rays of thought were focused 
 and burned into his very soul before they issued in 
 art. What we call experience is the personal test of 
 life, — the personal contact with it ; it involves the 
 kind of knowledge which a man possesses when he 
 is able to say, " I saw it, I touched it, I felt it." This 
 is that first-hand knowledge out of which all the 
 sciences have grown; stage by stage, art has ex- 
 panded out of it ; step by step, the earth has been 
 discovered and mastered by it ; above all, it has been 
 the road through which those supreme and final truths 
 which we call religious have come into the world. 
 They are not its products ; but through it, as through 
 an open door, they have come to succour and inspire. 
 It is a fact of the deepest significance that the Bible, 
 instead of giving us an orderly, logical system of truth, 
 gives us largely history so interpreted that it illustrates 
 and reveals truth. When principles are stated ab- 
 stractly, it is always to meet some pressing need, some 
 peculiar condition or stage of development. One 
 aspect is presented to the Hebrew, another to the 
 Greek, and still another to the Roman. God speaks 
 on human occasion ; the prophetic mood is evoked by 
 historic necessity; Christ addresses himself to the 
 immediate group, to the incident or event of the 
 hour; he uses invariably the nearest illustration. 
 It is through these lowly doors that he passes into 
 the region of universal truth. The Bible is, there- 
 
TOO ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 fore, the supreme book of experience ; it shows the 
 divine brooding over the human and shining into it, 
 wherever and whenever the two come in contact ; and 
 these points of contact constitute experience. This 
 is the method of all the great teachers j not by ab- 
 straction, but by reahzation, is truth appropriated and 
 made a part of human life. 
 
 Capacity for experience is one of the measures of 
 greatness. If this Hne were run through literature, it 
 would separate all writers of the truest insight from 
 those who charm us by some other and secondary 
 gift. The experiencing man steadily widens and 
 deepens with the unfolding of his life history ; every 
 event means for him a fresh glimpse of truth ; every 
 full hour of emotion or work, a ripening of the spirit. 
 It is profoundly interesting to follow the steady 
 growth of such a nature as Shakespeare's, not so much 
 by processes of thought as by processes of life. For 
 the most part unconsciously to himself, life distils its 
 meaning into his soul through the silent but ceaseless 
 opening and expansion of his mind and heart. Sen- 
 sitive to every touch of the outward world, responsive 
 to every appeal through the senses, alive to every 
 suggestion to the spirit, intent not to shun but to 
 share the full movement of life, — such a nature pre- 
 sents an ever-widening contact with the whole of 
 things, and gains an ever-deepening insight into 
 their meaning. A man Uke Macaulay, on the other 
 hand, whom Bagehot rightly describes as a non-ex- 
 periencing nature, may have many gifts, but has no 
 
SOME MODERN READINGS FROM DANTE. 1 89 
 
 true insight. He may portray with striking vividness 
 the thing that has taken place, but he does not see 
 or feel the soul of it ; he may add constantly to his 
 store of information, but he does not grow rich in 
 that wisdom to which the secret of life is an open 
 secret. 
 
 The great artists often come slowly and painfully to 
 the consciousness of their work and their power ; but 
 these things once discovered, the channels that feed 
 them are always deepening and widening. Shakespeare 
 might have made good use of the repose and leisure of 
 Oxford ; but he was independent of special instruction, 
 because he was so apt a pupil in that greater university 
 framed for the training of souls like his. He 
 began with the fresh and buoyant delight of the 
 senses ; he read with such intelligence as no historian 
 has ever possessed the long and stormy story of his 
 race ; he brooded over those questions that are a 
 haunting pain to the iinest souls; he came at last, 
 in his serene maturity, to a rare and beautiful poise 
 of nature, — senses, mind, and soul had, each in turn, 
 received the direct imprint of life, and out of that 
 education came the vision which discerned and the 
 faculty which fashioned the world of the " Tempest." 
 First " Romeo and Juliet,'' then " Henry V.," then 
 " Hamlet," then the " Tempest ; " so runs the story of 
 a soul nourished upon life, and making every separate 
 stage of its growth in the order 'of nature bear a 
 richer and deeper harvest of art. Not so wide, so 
 many-sided, but deeper even than Shakespeare's con- 
 
19° ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 tact with life through experience was Dante's. Shake- 
 speare suffered, as every great mind must, in this 
 long travail which we call life ; but he was not cut and 
 stung by personal injustice ; he had the ease which 
 material prosperity brought with it. Dante bore the 
 long bitterness of poverty. The only refuge for a 
 soul so beset was to search life to its very depths. 
 If pain is to be one's lot, then feel it most keenly 
 that one may find the very heart of it, — that was the 
 attitude of Dante. No man suffers from choice ; but 
 since suffering must come, the great nature will drain 
 it of whatever moral vigour and spiritual insight it 
 may impart. 
 
 Dante did more than this ; he gained its indirect as 
 well as its direct enrichment ; he made it contribute 
 to the beauty of his work. There are, it is true, arid 
 passages in the " Divine Comedy ; " but when one 
 remembers what material is wrought into it, how vast 
 its scope is, and how elaborate its scheme or ground- 
 work, it is amazing that the current moves so rapidly, 
 and that the pauses of artistic progression are so few. 
 The whole poem is inspired with clear, coherent 
 purpose ; it flows together ; it unfolds by virtue of 
 an interior force which plays freely and masterfully 
 through every part of it, and gives it unity of struc- 
 ture and of beauty no less than unity of idea. To 
 achieve this supreme effect of art, this fusion of ma- 
 terials, this perffection of form, a supreme effort of 
 the whole nature is demanded : this kind cometh not 
 save by prayer and fasting. The steady concentra- 
 
SOME MODERN READINGS PROM DANTE. 191 
 
 tion of mind involved in such a work is a moral 
 achievement of the highest order ; the patient brood- 
 ing over the theme, tracing its relations through wide 
 fields of knowledge and history, detecting its analogies 
 and illustrations in the sequence of human and nat- 
 ural fact and law, is an intellectual achievement possi- 
 ble only to the greatest minds. Art is mastered not by 
 the violent, but by the self-sacrificing, the patient, and 
 the enduring. It does not respond to half-hearted de- 
 votion ; it is won by no intermittent service ; it tolerates 
 no compromise with pleasure, with conventions, with 
 other and alien aims and occupations. The painter 
 who is half-artist and half-courtier secures his easy 
 popularity, his quick returns, his social successes, his 
 luxury ; but amid all the applauding voices that reach 
 him he listens in vain for the incorruptible voice of 
 fame. To Michael Angelo, silent and solitary on his 
 lonely scaffolding, sternly intent upon his task, sternly 
 indifferent to the praise of the palace or the cheer of 
 the square, that voice came clear and sustaining. 
 Many wait for the sound of that voice ; but it is heard 
 by those only who shut their souls against all other 
 and lesser voices. Dante heard that voice. Sounds 
 that mingle with most lives, sounds sweet with the 
 long usage of affection, and dear to the heart that 
 leans on familiar things, were denied him ; but he had 
 for consolation and companionship this voice borne 
 in from the unborn times and the unborn men. There 
 was a singleness of aim in him, matched with a sus- 
 tained devotion, which gathered all the forces of his 
 
192 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 nature in one continuous and absorbing task. Shut 
 off from complicated relations with his time, excluded 
 from the privileges and cares of citizenship, practi- 
 cally without family ties, he poured the undivided 
 stream of his power and activity into a single channel. 
 It was not his mind alone which was engaged in his 
 work ; it was not heart alone ; it was not his technical 
 skill and the energy of his nature : in the blending 
 of all these qualities is found the secret of that in- 
 tensity which gives the " Divine Comedy " unity of 
 feeling through all its vast movement. Ballads and 
 lyrics often breathe a single fiery emotion ; but there 
 is no other poem of equal magnitude which glows 
 with such sustained heat of soul. 
 
 A work of art is great in the exact measure in which 
 it absorbs and receives the life of the artist, — in the 
 measure in which it springs, as Goethe would say, 
 from the union of all his faculties. It may be strong, 
 original, suggestive, if it come primarily from his mind ; 
 it may be moving, inspiring, impressive, if it flow 
 from his heart alone ; it may be clear, effective, beauti- 
 ful, if it be the product of his skill or training ; but it 
 is great, deep, and enduring in the measure in which 
 all these faculties and forces contribute to and are 
 mingled in it. It is this fusion of his whole nature 
 which gives Dante's work not only unity, but such 
 range and variety. He had the equipment of a 
 thinker of the first order ; and if his mind had been 
 primarily engaged in his work, he would have added 
 another to the massive folios and quartos of the school- 
 
SOME MODERN READINGS PROM DANTE. I93 
 
 man ; there is a whole system of philosophy in the 
 "Divine Comedy." He had the quick imagination, 
 the glowing feeling, of the lyrical poet ; if his heart 
 had been primarily engaged in his work, we should 
 have had another poet of pure song ; that vision of 
 the fated lovers floating over the blackness of Hell 
 remains the matchless revelation of a heart that knew 
 all the tenderness and bitterness of love. He had 
 the constructive genius, the ripe culture, the technical 
 training, which make an artist by instinct and neces- 
 sity ; if his skill had been the chief quality in his 
 work, we should have had more art for art's sake. 
 We have the " Divine Comedy " because none of 
 these separate faculties took the lead : they flowed to- 
 gether; the whole man was involved and expressed 
 in the work. 
 
 In the very nature of Dante's undertaking lay an 
 all but insurmountable task ; it was so large in scheme, 
 it involved so much knowledge, it demanded such 
 elaboration, such proportion, such adjustment. The 
 Homeric poems had the great aid of successive epi- 
 sodes and incidents, even when continuous narrative 
 failed them ; the Greek tragedies had in each case a 
 living germ of myth or history; the " Epic of Kings," 
 the "Kalevala," the " Nibelungen Lied," ran close 
 to legend or tradition. Shakespeare's power shows 
 no sign of limitation ; but the plays, while they bring 
 the whole movement of life within the vision of the 
 imagination, are for a narrow stage and for a brief 
 three hours. There were pauses of rest between the 
 13 
 
194 £SSArS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 writing of them : the theme changed ; the mind ad- 
 dressed itself to new problems ; there was vast varia- 
 tion of material and of treatment, — as, for instance, 
 between "Lear" and "Antony and Cleopatra." 
 But Dante had no such aids from legend or history, 
 from myth or story, from change and variety of 
 work. No man ever owed more to history than he ; 
 but history did not aid him with narrative ease and 
 flow : his theme shifted the stage of its unfolding ; 
 but it is, after all, the same theme in Hell, in Purga- 
 tory, and in Paradise. All things considered, the 
 "Divine Comedy" is the most tremendous task ever 
 undertaken by a poet, — a task demanding not greater 
 genius, perhaps, than some- other tasks, but greater 
 fixity of attention, more prolonged and continuous 
 absorption, more stern and resolute severance from 
 affairs. Dante's success was conditioned upon long 
 detachment, upon unbroken absorption, upon the 
 concentration and fusion of his whole nature. His 
 success has, therefore, a moral and intellectual signifi- 
 cance practically unique in literature. He illustrates 
 in himself the laws of success as impressively and as 
 authoritatively as his work discloses the standards 
 and aims of art. To possess Dante's genius is not 
 enough ; one must possess also Dante's power of 
 sacrifice and fervour of consecration. To write the 
 " Divine Comedy," one must not only live for art, but, 
 in a very true sense, die for it. A large part of the 
 poet's happiness and all his ease and comfort, the 
 things that in a way console the body for the sorrows 
 
SOME MODERN READINGS PROM DANTE. 1 95 
 
 of the spirit, — were lost in the doing of that sublime 
 work. There were great inspirations, and consola- 
 tions by the way ; but let no man count the sacrifice 
 less because the work to which it contributed is so 
 noble. To underestimate the suffering of the heart 
 is to lessen the significance of the achievement and 
 rob it of its supreme dignity. The law which wrought 
 such havoc with Dante's personal happiness has con- 
 stant illustration in every field of endeavour ; but men 
 are slow to learn and quick to forget it. It is part 
 of the open secret which so many fail to read, though 
 it lies written over all tasks and careers. Whosoever 
 would find his life must lose it, whosoever would keep 
 must spend, whosoever would achieve must fail ; sub- 
 blime paradox of the human life in which the divine 
 is always mingling and striving for the mastery ! 
 
 Dante may well stand as the typical artist in the 
 completeness of his surrender to his art ; he poured 
 out his life as a libation to the Muse of poetry, — that 
 beautiful mistress of the imagination, radiant with im- 
 perishable charms, possessed of such glorious rewards, 
 and yet so inexorable in her demand for devotion ! 
 The men who have risen to the height of this con- 
 secration have, through this very surrender, made 
 themselves masters of life and its arts of expression, 
 ^schylus sustained this test, and the older Greece lives 
 in his work ; Shakespeare was equal to this demand, 
 and left us what have well been called the most 
 authentic documents of human history; Goethe, in 
 his way, rose to this exalted plane of sustained en- 
 
196 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 deavour, and the modern world was foreshadowed in 
 his prose and verse. Byron, on the other hand, with 
 his unsurpassed gift of lyric expression, failed of this 
 supreme surrender, and failed also of the complete 
 expression of his genius. Of how many richly endowed 
 poets must the same record be made ! They pos- 
 sessed all the materials for work of the highest 
 quality, of the greatest magnitude ; they wrought at 
 times with a fidelity that made the occasional mo- 
 ments what the years ought to have been : but lack- 
 ing the power of sustained endeavour born of the 
 union of spiritual integrity with intellectual force, 
 they missed that putting forth of the whole nature in 
 unbroken continuity which is the inexorable law of 
 supreme achievement. In art, which in its deepest 
 aspects is but another name for religion, a man can- 
 not serve two masters. He who sets himself to the 
 task of interpreting life on any great scale must put the 
 world, the flesh, and the Devil behind him as resolutely 
 as ever anchorite shut the door of his cell in the face 
 of these tempters from the perfect way. It is idle to 
 talk of a disseverance between great art and funda- 
 mental morals : they are not bound together by ex- 
 ternal law ; they are as soil and fruit, as sun and 
 light, as truth and beauty. A sound nature, a mind 
 moving inevitably to appointed ends, a whole man, — 
 these are the only sources of the work which sustains 
 comparison with the soundness and inevitableness of 
 Nature. The swallow-flights of song, touching things 
 near and familiar, have their truth and their sweet- 
 
SOME MODERN READINGS PROM DANTE. 197 
 
 ness ; but it is the enduring strength of the eagle's 
 wing that holds a steady way between the light and 
 the world which it searches and reveals. Durante 
 Alighieri, the poet's baptismal name, — the " endur- 
 ing one," and the " wing-bearer,'' — reveals the secret 
 of this masterful soul. 
 
 Probably no poem was ever more thoroughly thought 
 out, so far as its general plan, the relation of its parts, 
 and the blending of its different but harmonious ends 
 were concerned, than the " Divine Comedy." In large 
 design and in minute detail, it is characterized by 
 marvellous definiteness. Every outline is distinct, 
 every personage unerringly described ; the adjectives 
 seem often welded to the substantives ; nothing is 
 left unfinished. From the beginning to the end of 
 his journey, Dante seems to have known where the 
 next step would take him ; and yet, in spite of this 
 extraordinary grasp and clearness of intention, the 
 " Divine Comedy " owes more to the unconscious 
 than to the conscious Dante, — more to the poet's 
 nature than to his mind. The poem has been spoken 
 of as a task ; and when one studies it from the analyti- 
 cal standpoint, the writing of it is seen to have been 
 one of the greatest tasks ever undertaken. There is 
 another point of view, however, from which this mas- 
 sive work loses the elements of a task, and takes on 
 the aspects of play. There are in it the ease, the free- 
 dom, the fulness, of a great nature dealing with life as 
 a master, not as a servant, and creating not arduously, 
 but from an inward pressure. The " Divine Comedy " 
 
igS ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 was not made ; it grew. There was a vital process 
 behind it. There were all the stages of growth in its 
 production from the moment when the seed began to 
 germinate in the soil to that hour — the purest, di- 
 vinest that art has ever known — when it bore the 
 white rose in Paradise. It was not the tremendous 
 effort of a mind strained to the last point of endur- 
 ance ; it was the overflow of a nature through which 
 the tidal influences and forces of life flowed deep and 
 strong. To borrow Ruskin's thought, it is not a great 
 effort, but a great force, which we feel in the " Divine 
 Comedy." A thing of skill, contrivance, mechanism, 
 is detached from its maker and its surroundings ; a 
 thing of Hfe is rooted in the soil where it grows. Be- 
 hind every flower there are the earth and the heavens, 
 and the most secluded violet involves them both ; it 
 could not have been without their combined ministry 
 to its fragile life. Behind Westminster Abbey there 
 were not only stone quarries and tools, there were 
 religion, art, history, fathomless depths of faith and 
 service. Behind the " Divine Comedy " there is 
 more than Dante was conscious of, clear as his in- 
 tention was and definite as was his plan. It was a 
 beautiful fancy of the Greeks that the gods were some- 
 times surprised in their solitude, — Diana at her bath, 
 and Pan on the road to Sparta; but it was only a 
 fancy. The imagination — that larger and deeper 
 insight — knows that divinity cannot be seen by eyes 
 that depend for their seeing upon a waxing and wan- 
 ing light ; it is the inward and constant light that 
 
SOME MODERN READINGS PROM DANTE. 1 99 
 
 shines upon God, and we see him and still live. Not 
 only are we hidden from each other, but we are hid- 
 den from ourselves ; that is our sacredness. We 
 are fed by unseen springs through invisible channels. 
 We are as conscious at times of the advance and re- 
 cession of tides of power as we are of the incom- 
 ing and outgoing of the ocean currents. There are 
 depths in us which we cannot sound ; race instincts 
 which ally us with the remotest past ; ancient associa- 
 tions with forest and sea which survive the memory of 
 their origin ; affinities with Nature which keep us in 
 touch with a world of force and beauty which we 
 never fully comprehend, but with which we have a 
 mysterious intimacy. All history seems to echo and 
 reverberate within us ; its oldest stories are strangely 
 familiar. More wonderful even than this complexity 
 and vitality of natural and human association and in- 
 fluence are the contacts between our souls and the 
 Soul of the universe. 
 
 Now, the greater a nature, the wider its sweep of 
 these unrecorded experiences, the deeper its rootage 
 in this mysterious soil of history, race, nature, divinity. 
 When such a nature produces in the field of art, that 
 which grows out of it will gather up and reproduce a 
 vitality far greater and more significant than the artist 
 standing alone could contribute to it. It is for this 
 reason that a few men are recognized as speaking for 
 their races ; a whole section of life, a long movement 
 of history, seem to bear in them the flower of expres- 
 sion. These men produce out of their unconscious- 
 
200 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 ness far more than out of their consciousness ; they see 
 clearly enough the point to which they would go ; but 
 while we journey with them the earth and the heavens 
 are unrolled before us ; the road along which we pass 
 is but a faintly marked line across unexplored conti- 
 nents. Dante has very definite things to say ; but his 
 deepest message is to the imagination, and is there- 
 fore unspoken. His song is " unfathomable," as Tieck 
 long ago called it, because all life flows under it. 
 Here, again, we come upon his prophetic quality, — 
 his foreshadowing of the attitude and method of the 
 true artist in all times. That which the artist gives us 
 is himself. His genius is not his ; it belongs to the 
 world, because the world has contributed the mate- 
 rial with which it deals. No man ever owed more 
 to his fellows than Dante. Shakespeare borrowed 
 stories from all quarters ; Dante borrowed all history. 
 The "Divine Comedy" is embodied in history; its 
 background is the entire historic movement. It was 
 Dante's greatness that his life had such reach and 
 force, — that it gathered into itself so vast a range of 
 experience, and brought to light so wide a sweep of 
 action. These facts of history had long sunk below the 
 region of consciousness in him ; he had absorbed the 
 past and made it part of himself before he expressed 
 the soul of it in poetry. The Middle Ages had, for 
 the purposes of art, this priceless quality of uncon- 
 sciousness. Morbid as mediaeval thought often was, 
 distorted as its imagination was, grotesque as its mis- 
 takes of fact often were, it had a naivete and un- 
 
SOME MODERN READINGS FROM DANTE. 20I 
 
 consciousness which we sadly and fatally lack. The 
 mediaeval spirit thought much, but it thought pas- 
 sionately, with a certain fervour and intensity; it 
 thought largely by the aid of the imagination. It 
 felt more than it thought ; and in art feeling is the 
 essential quality. Thought without feeling gives us 
 philosophy or science ; thought with feeling gives us 
 literature. The mediaeval spirit felt deeply and in- 
 stinctively, and so, without consciousness of the pro- 
 cess, it produced a vast growth of popular epics, 
 songs, and stories ; and its reverence and piety, felt 
 to the very depths of its nature, were set in pillar and 
 arch, in window and fretted roof, in the imperishable 
 beauty of the cathedral. 
 
 Dante was the first great literary nature touched by 
 these hidden streams of faith and beauty. He not 
 only shared in them, but by so much as he was greater 
 than his contemporaries he was fed by them. He 
 was one of the deepest and clearest of the mediaeval 
 thinkers ; but he felt more profoundly than he thought. 
 Thought, knowledge, fact, were never cold to him ; 
 they seemed to burn their way into his mind ; they 
 sank through his mind into his heart. It was one of 
 the superstitions of the time that cities were some- 
 times sunk by magicians into the depths of pools ; 
 and the peasant passing by at dusk peered trembling 
 and awestruck into the still waters, and saw there the lost 
 town swallowed up in death and silence, — the streets 
 empty that had once been thronged ; the bells silent 
 that had once swung with resonant melody ; the houses 
 
202 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 deserted that had once had cheer and mirth of life. 
 So in Dante that old world survives, and we read it 
 to the very heart. It is not until thought, knowledge, 
 and fact pass beyond the mind into the keeping of 
 the heart, where feeling plays upon them and divines 
 their spiritual meanings, that art finds them ripe for 
 use. The first perceptions of unsuspected beauty in 
 things is always accompanied by agitation. The very 
 essence of literature is this sensitiveness of perception, 
 this freshness of feeling, which clothe familiar facts 
 and obvious truths with a loveliness or majesty un- 
 dreamed of by the thought alone. It is through the 
 insight and play of the imagination that the historic 
 fact yields its inner and spiritual meaning ; and there 
 must be a brooding of the whole nature over the fact 
 before it ripens into art. While questions are still 
 pressing for answer, while movements still absorb the 
 faculties in action, while problems still agitate and dis- 
 turb, they rarely receive literary expression. When 
 the struggle is over and the movement accomplished, 
 the Muse of Poetry comes to claim her own. The 
 agony of strife yields to the quiet meditation, the 
 mysterious distillation of truth, the deep and sweet dis- 
 closure of beauty. Far below the region of eager and 
 painful thinking, with its unrest and its agitation, the 
 question, the problem, the great issues, sink into the 
 rich, profound, unconscious life of a people or a man. 
 They become a kind of background, full of majesty, 
 of mystery, of suggestion and allurement for the 
 imagination, — like those mountain-ranges which 
 
SOME MODERN' READINGS FROM DANTE. 203 
 
 guarded the youth of Titian, and in the long years 
 of his maturity appeared and reappeared in his works. 
 For this reason childhood is so often and so incompar- 
 ably touched by the great writers. It lies behind them, 
 a real landscape, but with what softness of outline, what 
 mysteries of light and atmosphere ! 
 
 Dante came when this light lay soft on the " ten 
 silent centuries," — when their tasks were done and 
 their service complete ; when the problems that 
 had tormented faithful and morbid souls alike were 
 settled ; when the new era was at hand, and the new 
 world was rising out of the old. Deep in the heart 
 and memory of that old world lay the records and ex- 
 periences of its youth and its prime ; deep in Dante's 
 heart they waited for the discernment of his deep in- 
 telligence, for the expression of his unsurpassed fac- 
 ulty of song. He carried that old world in his heart 
 through all his wanderings ; he brooded over it until 
 its faith, its art, its history, were fused, harmonized, 
 and completely possessed. When the " Divine Com- 
 edy " grew under his hands, this ripe and rich past, 
 this vast and fathomless life, to which races and cen- 
 turies had contributed, rose into consciousness once 
 more, — rose in organic unity and completeness, with 
 such disclosure of far-reaching spiritual relations, 
 of immortal significance to the soul of man, as only 
 a poet who was also a prophet could give it. It was 
 no longer an abstract faith, an arbitrary knowledge, a 
 mass of unrelated facts ; it was the allegory of the 
 soul's pilgrimage, the revelation of the soul's life. 
 
204 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 There is but one " Divine Comedy," — one poem in 
 which depth and height of thought, beauty of form, 
 and intensity of feeling are so perfectly combined. 
 There are only three or four works in all literature 
 which we place beside this poem. It has less breadth, 
 less range of sunny fruitfulness, than the work of Shake- 
 speare and of Goethe ; but it is the highest altitude 
 of human achievement. It is one of the great satis- 
 factions of humanity, because it realizes the noblest 
 anticipations of life. Here was a man who lived in 
 the heart of things, who thought and acted as if he 
 were conscious of immortality ; who could afford to 
 let one phase of life torment and disown him, be- 
 cause he had all life for compensation ; who lived and 
 wrought like a master, born to the highest intellectual 
 and spiritual possessions, and not to be despoiled of 
 them by any chance of earthly fortune. All men 
 crave such living and performance as Dante's, because 
 they adequately express the energy of an immortal 
 spirit. Scepticism, cynicism, pessimism, have their 
 periods ; the race has its bad quarter of an hour now 
 and then ; but such men as Dante make these ignoble 
 suspicions of divinity, these mean doubts about our 
 fellows, these weak denials of our own natures, 
 incredible. One righteous man demonstrates the 
 reality of goodness, and one great man makes all 
 life great. Scepticism is the root of all evil in us and 
 in our arts. We do not believe enough in God, in 
 ourselves, and in the divine laws under which we 
 live. Great art involves great faith, — a clear, reso- 
 
SOME MODERN READINGS FROM DANTE. 20$ 
 
 lute, victorious insight into and grasp of things ; a 
 behef real enough and powerful enough to inspire 
 and sustain heroic tasks. The open secret of a great 
 and noble achievement in art is a sound and noble 
 nature in the artist. Dante was great in himself, — 
 not faultless, not entirely harmonious, but great in 
 faith, in force, and in endeavour. He met life as a 
 strong swimmer meets the sea, not with dismay and 
 outcries, but with heroic putting forth of effort, with 
 calmness and steadiness of soul, with the buoyancy of 
 a great strength matching itself against a great peril. 
 He believed and he achieved, — that is the true story 
 of his life. 
 
A WORD ABOUT HUMOUR. 
 
 The difficulties which beset the endeavour to define 
 vital qualities are very evident in the results of the 
 attempts, dating back to the time of Aristotle, to draw 
 sharp lines of distinction between wit and humour. 
 Literature does not offer the record of a more delight- 
 ful will-o'-the-wisp pursuit. These pervasive elements 
 are present in every literature ; but they have a Pro- 
 tean variability of form, and they sport with severe 
 and logical thinkers with an easy indifference to for- 
 mulas and categories. This very elusiveness is not 
 only a very great charm, but furnishes evidence of the 
 important part which wit and humour play in human 
 affairs. They are omnipresent : they register the over- 
 flow of the soul in art, religion, and history ; merri- 
 ment and sorrow, friendship and animosity, purity and 
 evil, have found common use in them. No qualities 
 are better known, or more readily recognizable ; but 
 they are still at large. They will never be caught in 
 any snare of definition, however skilfully set. We 
 shall delight in their manifestations, use them as part 
 of our common speech, value them among the greater 
 resources of life ; but we shall never define them as we 
 define a thing fixed and stationary, or a relation the 
 contacts of which are seen on all sides. Wit is too 
 
A WORD ABOUT HUMOUR. 207 
 
 Protean, humour too elemental, for complete defini- 
 tion. This is not saying that deep glimpses into the 
 nature of these qualities are lacking, or that acute and 
 luminous comments on the differences between them 
 have not been made. English literature, which is nota- 
 bly rich in both wit and humour, is also rich in illus- 
 tration and characterization of these qualities. Hazlitt, 
 Leigh Hunt, and Thackeray have approved themselves 
 as commentators whose joy was in the text rather than 
 in the comment ; while of the large company of Eng- 
 lish and American essayists and critics there are few 
 who have not made some contribution to a clearer 
 understanding of these fugitive things. 
 
 Exact definition is not, however, the prerequisite of 
 deep thinking, or of a really profound comprehension 
 either of the things of the spirit or of the mind ; if it 
 were, we should be cut oif from dealing intelligently 
 with the things which are nearest and most essential 
 to us. The deepest things in our lives are best known 
 and least definable. As soon as we touch them, we 
 slip out of logic into poetry. 
 
 Wit, being distinctively an intellectual quality, pre- 
 sents sharper outlines than humour ; but the two quali- 
 ties so often appear together that, at the first glance, 
 they seem to be interchangeable. They have, indeed, 
 this characteristic in common : they arise out of the 
 perception of some kind of incongruity, some form 
 of contrast. Wit is lighter, drier, more distinctly 
 localized, more purely intellectual, than humour ; and 
 humour is more elemental, more pervasive, more a 
 
2o8 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 matter of character and temperament. Wit is allied 
 to talent in its cleverness, dexterity, and a certain hard 
 and brilliant quality of skill ; while humour partakes 
 of the wider reach, the ampler flow, the deep uncon- 
 sciousness of genius. Wit is the swift play, the flash- 
 ing thrust and parry, of the mind. Humour flows 
 from character ; its springs are in a man's nature ; it 
 is the expression, not of that which is rapid, dexterous, 
 and self-conscious, but of that which is fundamental 
 and unconscious in him. Wit is a thing apart from 
 character ; humour is the most unforced expression of 
 character. The old physicians were not far wrong in 
 making humour one of the four elements out of which 
 the physical body is compounded, and therefore part 
 of the very substance of a man. This original use of 
 the word is the most suggestive comment on its mean- 
 ing ; we shall not go astray if we follow its lead. It 
 was one of those instinctive guesses which fuller knowl- 
 edge has verified in quite unexpected fashion. Wit 
 plays on the surface of things ; humour streams down 
 into the heart of them, irradiates them, and, without 
 intention, gets at their secret. Wit is colourless, emo- 
 tionless ; it is as dry, as detached from the things it 
 touches, as an abstract quality. Humour, being the 
 expression of the whole nature, is full of heart ; it has 
 tenderness, sympathy, piety, sadness ; the laughter 
 which it evokes is without malice or bitterness ; it is 
 often so near to tears that the two blend as naturally 
 as the moods of an April sky. 
 
 The deepest humour is never cynical or destructive ; 
 
A WOED ABOUT HUMOUR. 209 
 
 it never wounds. The wit of Voltaire is often but the 
 mask of a sneer, and the wit of Heine cuts like the 
 surgeon's blade ; but the humour of Cervantes is full 
 of reverence and courtesy, and the humour of Shake- 
 speare of human tenderness and sadness. 
 
 Dr. Bushnell brings out the fundamental quahty 
 of each when he says : " One is the dry labour of 
 intention or design, ambition eager to provoke ap- 
 plause, malignity, biting at an adversary, envy letting 
 down the good or the exalted. The other, humour, 
 is the soul reeking with its own moisture, laughing be- 
 cause it is full of laughter, — as ready to weep as to 
 laugh; for the copious shower it holds is good for 
 either. And then, when it has set the tree a-dripping, 
 
 • And hung a pearl in every cowslip's ear,' 
 
 the pure sun shining after will reveal no colour of 
 intention in the sparkling drop, but will leave you 
 doubting still whether it be a drop let fall by laughter 
 or a tear." Spontaneity and health of soul are the 
 characteristics of humour. Wit may be spontaneous ; 
 humour must be. Wit may be sound and sweet ; 
 humour must be. Wit may let us into the secret of 
 character; humour must reveal it. 
 
 The great wits form a sharply-defined group of ver- 
 satile and gifted persons, not so often read as quoted ; 
 for by its very nature wit is a portable rather than a 
 diffusive quality. It reveals itself in sudden flashes, 
 not in a continuous glow and illumination. It is dis- 
 tilled in sentences ; it is preserved in figures, illustra- 
 14 
 
2IO ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 tions, epigrams, epithets, phrases. In these days one 
 reads Voltaire and Sydney Smith for "points," not 
 for broad completeness or for large and luminous dis- 
 closure of the nature of the themes with which they 
 deal. The elder Dumas has stamped his superscrip- 
 tion on a few pieces of the pure gold of wit, which 
 furnish a standard coinage among the most critical 
 and fastidious. Heine's rare poetic insight and 
 unique quality are too often undervalued in compari- 
 son with that arrowy wit,— never barbed with bitter- 
 ness, and yet always left stinging in the victim as if 
 dipped in the very essence of malice. Wit seems, 
 upon analysis, a conversational quality, called out by 
 social relations and influences, and expressed briefly 
 and compactly, with the incisiveness of epigram and 
 repartee. It is the sharpest of comments ; it often 
 brings a ray of most intense light to bear on a defect, 
 an exaggeration, a falsehood : but it does not deal with 
 subjects broadly and comprehensively ; it does not illu- 
 minate wide fields of thought and life ; it has no crea- 
 tive quality; there is nothing elemental in it. It is 
 like the flash of lightning during the brief duration of 
 which a bit of landscape stands out in startling dis- 
 tinctness ; it has none of the wide, fruitful, reveal- 
 ing quality of the sunlight. 
 
 The great humorists present a significant contrast 
 to the great wits; for while the wits entertain and 
 dazzle us, the humorists reveal life to us. Aristopha- 
 nes, Cervantes, Moliere, and Shakespeare, the typi- 
 cal humorists, are among the greatest contributors to 
 
A WORD ABOUT HUMOUR. 211 
 
 the capital of human achievement. They give us, not 
 glimpses, but views of life, — not detached comments, 
 but comprehensive interpretations. They are pre- 
 eminently creative ; and the ease and breadth of their 
 work hint at the elemental quality of humour. A 
 humorist of the first order has always great range, 
 and moves freely through an almost limitless world of 
 thought and fancy. In his most destructive moods, 
 Aristophanes gives forth such an impression of force 
 and compass that in the very process of decomposing 
 one world, he seems to be constructing another. Lu- 
 cian has far less fertility and resource of imagination, 
 less buoyancy and splendour of poetic fancy ; but he 
 also moves at ease in a world ampler than that of 
 his contemporaries, — a world which his humour, 
 even when destructive of the old faith, broadens 
 rather than destroys. Rabelais, in the broadest spirit 
 of license, makes an honest fight for more reality and 
 less sham, — for a wider and freer world. Cervantes, 
 Moliere, and Heine, with very different gifts, and from 
 very different points of view, share this quality of 
 overflowing abundance and vitality. There is no con- 
 sciousness of strain in them, — no evident effort to 
 conform to certain standards and to meet certain 
 tests. On the contrary, they move in an atmosphere 
 of free and independent expression ; they are con- 
 tinually breaking through the imaginary conventional 
 limits of their time, and breaking into a larger world. 
 The arid and ludicrous formalism of the chivalric 
 habit after the spirit of chivalry has fled; typical 
 
212 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 hypocrisies and specious self-deceit; tlie stupidity 
 and dense self-satisfaction of Philistinism, — all these 
 various forms of narrowness and falsehood are limita- 
 tions of human growth and free activity ; and against 
 these Hmitations the humorists break their lances. 
 Heine justly claimed for himself the position of a 
 liberator of humanity; for all the great humorists 
 are liberators. 
 
 It is true that Aristophanes, Lucian, and Heine are 
 often distinctly destructive in mood, and seem to have 
 no other purpose but to make current beliefs incredi- 
 ble. Heine, the most volatile and tricksy spirit in 
 literature, slips into blasphemy with magical ease, and 
 is never so far from seriousness of spirit as when he 
 puts himself most completely under the spell of senti- 
 ment. " Other bards," says a writer in a recent issue 
 of the "Atheneum," "have passed from grave to 
 gay within the compass of one work ; but the art of 
 constantly showing two natures within the small limit 
 of perhaps three ballad verses was reserved for Heine. 
 No one like him understands how to build up a little 
 edifice of the tenderest and most refined sentiment for 
 the mere pleasure of knocking it down with a last line- 
 No one like him approaches his reader with dole- 
 ful countenance, pours into the ear a tale of secret 
 sorrow, and when the sympathies are enlisted sur- 
 prises his confidant with a horse-laugh. It seems as 
 though Nature had endowed him with a most delicate 
 sensibihty and a keen perception of the ridiculous, 
 that his own feelings may afford him a perpetual sub- 
 
A WORD ABOUT HUMOUR. 21 3 
 
 ject for banter." This incessant intermingling of the 
 most delicate feeling with the broadest or keenest 
 satire was, of course, temperamental ; no one has ever 
 passed from one mood to the other so swiftly as Heine. 
 But the transition is characteristic of all the great 
 humorists. One does not need to read Heine very 
 thoroughly to discover that there is a constant strug- 
 gle in his soul, — a struggle to break with Hebraism, 
 and reconcile himself with Hellenism. He revolts 
 against the Hebrew spirit, because it seems to rob 
 him of a goodly portion of life ; to recover the beauty 
 and harmony which seem to have perished with the 
 Greeks is at once the endeavour and the pang of his 
 life. It is this consciousness of dissonance which in- 
 spires the spirit of mockery in him. He cannot feel 
 at home in his own time ; it limits him, hinders him, 
 binds him ; it is, in his feeling at least, too small for 
 him. Consciously or unconsciously, he is always fight- 
 ing against limitations and striving after a broader life. 
 This is the deeper significance of his work, as it is 
 the deepest significance of humour. 
 
 For that which was true of Heine was still more 
 true of Aristophanes, — the most audacious of all 
 the humorists. It was Heine himself who said : " A 
 deep idea of world-destruction lies at the root of 
 every Aristophanic comedy, and, like a fantastically 
 ironical magic-tree, springs up in it with blooming 
 ornaments of thought, with singing nightingales, and 
 climbing, chattering apes ; " and he speaks elsewhere 
 of the Aristophanic "jubilee of death and fire-works of 
 
214 £SSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 annihilation." The sweep of Aristophanes's imagina- 
 tion, the Hcense of his fancy, the depth and beauty 
 of his tliought, the lawless audacity of his satire, 
 give an impression of fathomless scepticism, — the 
 searching irony of a god looking on human life from 
 the standpoint of cynical indifference. He handles 
 his materials with a kind of Olympian breadth and 
 ease, — more like a god creating worlds out of his 
 own surplusage of vitality than Hke a satirist. It is 
 highly improbable that he was the deliberate and con- 
 scious moralist which some of his German students 
 and critics have held him to be ; but the vein of seri- 
 ousness in his work is quite as evident as the vein of 
 poetry ; and in a certain swift and splendid effective- 
 ness, no poet has ever surpassed him. To his most 
 careless reader he conveys a sense of freedom, an 
 idea of breadth and vastness, which are at times al- 
 most overwhelming. He moves in the creative ele- 
 ment ; his influence plays like fire upon the habits, 
 beliefs, and vices which seemed to him corrupt, false, 
 or ridiculous. His work was, in its ultimate effect, 
 the work of a liberator. 
 
 If this expansive quality of humour, this liberat- 
 ing force, is characteristic of the destructive humor- 
 ists, it is still more notable and significant in the con- 
 structive humorists, — those who, like Shakespeare, 
 Moliere, Cervantes, Richter, and Carlyle, have dealt 
 with life with broad or genial earnestness and sin- 
 cerity. The study of both schools of humour brings 
 out clearly the very significant fact that humour in- 
 
A WORD ABOUT HUMOUR. 215 
 
 volves the background of a greater world than that 
 in which the humorists sport. Carlyle says of Socrates 
 that he was " terribly at ease inZion;" he handled 
 life and its deepest concerns with an ease and free- 
 dom which betray a consciousness of being at home 
 amid the mysteries of existence and, in a way, supe- 
 rior to them. That is the attitude of the great 
 humorist : he plays with life in the sense in which 
 play implies greater range and freedom than work. 
 For while work involves a certain subjection of the 
 man to his toil, a certain submission of the artisan to 
 the task, play implies ease, freedom, and fulness. 
 Play is the spontaneous overflow of a great force, the 
 natural and painless putting forth of strength, the 
 delight and fertility of the artist handling his mate- 
 rial as the plastic medium of his thought. 
 
 The rigid logician, refusing the aid of insight and 
 rejecting the imagination as untrustworthy, stands 
 under the shadow of the globe, and bends, like an 
 over-laden Atlas, under the appalling weight of the 
 burden. He moves within fixed limits, along pre- 
 scribed paths, — often with passionate eagerness and 
 intensity of spirit, but oblivious of all sides of life 
 save the one upon which the thought is fixed, and with 
 the air of one passing over dangerous territory and 
 dreading solicitation or attack. The humorist, on 
 the other hand, stands aside from the world, and 
 watches its movement as part of a greater order; 
 studies it with an audacious ease and equipoise ; 
 judges it with the assurance of one whose vision in- 
 
2l6 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 eludes the whole of which it is part. He feels its 
 suffering and recognizes its tragic elements ; but in his 
 broad conception the shadows are relieved by the 
 lights, and the gloom of the parts is swallowed up in 
 the brightness of the whole. For while the humorist 
 is often a pessimist so far as immediate conditions 
 are concerned, he is an optimist in his faith in the 
 reahty of the universe and the dignity and worth of 
 life in its completeness. 
 
 Socrates was at ease and could play at times iron- 
 ically with matters of apparently deepest moment, 
 because, beyond all local and racial beliefs, he had the 
 resource of a fundamental faith. Carlyle, whose 
 humour and imagination so constantly acted and re- 
 acted upon each other, made traditions and conven- 
 tions pitiful or absurd, by evoking that background of 
 infinity and eternity against which all human life is set. 
 Shakespeare's tragic power is found, in the. last analysis, 
 to be one with his comic power ; both flow from his 
 nature and his view of life. He deals with the tragic 
 forces as one who is superior to them ; for they are, 
 in fact, inimical only to those who offend against the 
 laws whose servants they are. He describes their 
 operation, and records their appalling results with no 
 lack of that fundamental seriousness which is the mood 
 of every profound nature, but with the calmness and 
 quietude of soul that come from the ability to look 
 beyond the passing blackness and fury of the storm 
 into the heavens which they obscure for the moment, 
 only to make their serenity and purity the more ap- 
 
A WORD ABOUT HUMOUR. 2 17 
 
 parent. Speaking reverently, there is something of the 
 divine repose in the greatest humour, — the repose 
 which comes from a vision of the totality of things. 
 
 Humour in this elemental sense is the perception 
 of those contrasts and incongruities which are a part 
 of the very texture of human Ufa. From the stand- 
 point of a formally logical view of life this contrast is 
 pathetic and even tragic ; from the standpoint of the 
 large, free interpretation of faith, through the imagina- 
 tion, this contrast is full of humour. From the divine 
 point of view, there is the same element of humour 
 in human life which the mature mind finds in those 
 experiences of childhood which are painful, be- 
 cause they arise from ignorance of the relative dura- 
 tion and importance of things. There is, as an acute 
 thinker has pointed out, something fundamentally 
 humorous in the very conditions of human life ; 
 in the spectacle of immortal souls becoming mer- 
 chants and trafficking in all manner of perishable 
 wares, and of these same imperishable souls spending 
 energy and heart in a struggle to feed and clothe a 
 body which is but the shell of the spirit. Humour 
 has its source in this fundamental contrast between 
 the human soul, with its far-reaching relations and its 
 immortality, and the conditions of its mortal life. 
 This elemental humour has had no more striking ex- 
 pression of late years than in " Sartor Resartus," — a 
 work of genius conceived in the deepest spirit of 
 humour, and finding its theme in the contrast be- 
 tween a spirit and the clothes which it wears. " To 
 
2l8 ESSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 the eye of vulgar Logic," says Teufelsdrockh, " what 
 is man? An omnivorous Biped that wears Breeches. 
 To the eye of Pure Reason what is he ? A Soul, a 
 Spirit, and divine Apparition. Round his mysterious 
 Me, there lies, under all those wool-rags, a Garm ent 
 of Flesh (or of Senses) contextured in the Loom of 
 Heaven; whereby he is revealed to his like, and 
 dwells with them in Union and Division ; and sees 
 and fashions for himself a Universe, with azure Starry 
 Spaces, and long Thousands of Years. Deep-hidden 
 is he under that strange Garment ; amid Sounds and 
 Colours and Forms, as it were, swathed-in and inex- 
 tricably over-shrouded : yet it is sky-woven, and 
 worthy of a God. Stands he not thereby in the centre 
 of Immensities, in the conflux of Eternities?" 
 
 This contrast between the Finite and the Infinite 
 is the source of the deep and sane humour which is 
 shared by all the creative minds. For it is signifi- 
 cant that, with the possible exception of Dante, all 
 the greatest men have been richly endowed with this 
 quality, and the Italians claim it for Dante. If life 
 is long enough and comprehensive enough to provide 
 for the final reconcilement of apparent contradic- 
 tions, and the final adjustment of all just claims for 
 opportunity and happiness, then humour becomes 
 a prophecy of the joyful outcome of all struggles 
 and incongruities, and of the final resolution of all 
 discords into harmony. In natures of the widest 
 range, this fundamental faith seems to be impUcit in 
 the consciousness ; it lies below all thinking, and 
 
A WOED ABOUT HUMOUR. 2 19 
 
 gives it ease, freedom, and the sportiveness of child- 
 hood, whicli plays serenely in the presence of the 
 sublimest forces, not through insensibility, but through 
 confidence in the benignity of the universal order. 
 The narrower, severer minds, like Calvin, — following 
 rigidly logical processes, and shutting a large part 
 of life out of the field of vision, — are not only 
 partial and inadequate interpreters of life, but seem 
 to be always desperately contending against atheism ; 
 the large, sunny, poetic natures, on the other hand, 
 have such rootage in essential faith that, without loss 
 of moral earnestness, they can deal with the contrasts 
 of human history in the free, confident spirit of 
 humour. If the mistake which the boy makes in his 
 Latin grammar involves permanent ignorance, there 
 is an element of sadness in it ; but if it is to be suc- 
 ceeded ultimately by mastery of the subject, it is 
 humorous, and we smile at it. If the grief at some 
 small loss is as final and lasting as it appears to a 
 child, it is sad enough ; but if it is soon to be for- 
 gotten, if, later, a fuller knowledge is to reveal an 
 exaggeration of emotion, then the exaggeration be- 
 comes humorous, and we smile at the recollection. 
 If life be as great as our highest hopes, many 
 of our present sorrows must have this ignorance 
 of relative importance in them ; however real and 
 painful they are, they must present to an intelligence 
 higher than ours an element of exaggeration. If the 
 contrast between Finite and the Infinite, between 
 Real and the Ideal, is permanent, then the life of men 
 
220 £SSAYS IN LITERARY INTERPRETATION. 
 
 is the saddest, hardest, and most bitter existence 
 imaginable; if, on the other hand, these contrasts 
 are the contrasts between different stages of a suc- 
 cessful development ; if contradiction, incongruity, and 
 imperfection are passing phases in a progression to- 
 ward final harmony, then the life of man permits 
 of the freedom, the delight, the confidence, of secure 
 and happy childhood. The sanest souls instinctively 
 believe their noblest conception of the range and sig- 
 nificance of life, and because they believe, humour 
 springs up like a fountain of joy in them ; and so humour 
 of the highest kind becomes the truest evidence of 
 that fundamental faith which lays its foundations 
 deeper than all systems of dogma. The humorists 
 are always struggling for a broader world, because 
 they believe that such a world exists. 
 
 THE END.