mm 
 
 f^m^t 
 
 ^^^ 
 
 REALISM & ROMANCE 
 and Other Essays 
 

 djotnell Uninerattg ffithrarg 
 
 Jtliaca, S^eni f attt 
 
 ^ BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE 
 
 SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND 
 
 THE GrpT OF 
 
 HENRY W. SAGE 
 
 1891 
 
^1^ , 
 
 « 
 
 ''^-*1S?fr^, 
 
 R f. 
 
 Cornell University Library 
 PR 99.M11 
 
 Realism and romance, and other essays. 
 
 3 1924 013 355 817 
 
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/cu31924013355817 
 
REALISM AND ROMANCE 
 
REALISM AND ROMANCE 
 
 AND OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 BY THE LATE 
 
 HENRY MACARTHUR 
 
 EDINBURGH: R. W. HUNTER 
 
 1897 
 
 ft 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
P^A^-SoSS 
 
 iKdfliitiurgh : T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty 
 
PREFACE 
 
 A STRONQ desire having been expressed by- 
 friends and admirers of the late Mr. Henry 
 MacArthur to obtain a permanent memorial of 
 him, a Committee was formed to issue a selection 
 from his writings, and this volume is the outcome 
 of the movement. 
 
 Henry MacArthur was born at Bowfield, How- 
 wood, Renfrewshire, on 15th April 1872, and 
 was educated at Howwood Public School, where, 
 according to his teacher, he was facile princeps 
 and the most talerited scholar of his experience. 
 He afterwards attended Hutcheson's Grammar 
 School, Glasgow. 
 
 He studied for the Civil Service, sat for the 
 Boy Clerkships examination, taking first place 
 for Scotland, began official work in the service of 
 the Board of Lunacy, was transferred to H.M. 
 Register House, and later to the Exchequer 
 
vi REALISM AND ROMANCE 
 
 Office, where he remained up till the time of 
 his death on 24th November 1896. 
 
 In Edinburgh he took the opportunity of 
 attending various classes at the Heriot-Watt 
 College and the University. At the former he 
 gained first prizes in English Literature, Political 
 Economy, and Greek ; and at the latter also first 
 prizes for Essays in English Literature and 
 Political Economy. He afterwards was a suc- 
 cessful competitor for the Lord Rector's and 
 Gray prizes for Essays on Burke and Erasmus, 
 both of which are included in this volume. 
 
 These remarkable successes demonstrate his 
 brilliant scholarly attainments ; and the fact that 
 all the essays were written by one so young gives 
 undoubted proof of the possession of distinctive 
 literary abilities, which he was constrained to 
 exercise during his leisure time by his passionate 
 love of learning and literature. 
 
 His brief literary career caused great expecta- 
 tion to be entertained of his future work by 
 competent judges. Among these. Professor 
 Masson writes as follows : — ' I had occasion to 
 take strong note of MacArthur, and to conceive 
 high hopes of his future ; and few things have 
 
PREFACE vii 
 
 impressed me more, or remain more sadly in 
 my memory, than the unexpected news of his 
 melancholy death.' 
 
 Those who knew Mr. MacArthur best agree 
 in ascribing to him the highest personal qualities. 
 Utterly devoid of affectation, and possessed of 
 that saving sense of humour which kept him 
 free from pedantry, he had a quiet but manly 
 presence ; a genuine and unaffected modesty of 
 demeanour ; a kindly, gentle nature ; a thought- 
 fulness for others ; a pure and high walk and 
 conversation ; a consuming love of what was best 
 in literature and life, and an abiding sense of 
 duty to himself and to his neighbours. These 
 qualities endeared him to all who had the 
 privilege of his society and friendship. 
 
 In the first two lines of his last poem, written 
 surely in a prophetic moment, he penned his own 
 epitaph : 
 
 ' He died too soon, who knew so well to live, 
 That sword-bright spirit, in so frail a sheath.' 
 
 It only remains to explain that the essays, with 
 one exception, were written without a view to 
 publication, and they have been printed without 
 editing. 
 
viii REALISM AND ROMANCE 
 
 The Committee desire to place on record their 
 best thanks to the Right Honourable J. P. B. 
 Robertson, to the Editor of the Scots Magazine, 
 and to the Secretary of the Gray Trustees, for 
 their kind permission to include the Essays on 
 Burke, Fergusson, and Erasmus respectively. 
 Their thanks are also due to the representatives 
 of Mr. MacArthur for allowing them to print the 
 other papers in the book. They must also ac- 
 knowledge their indebtedness to Mr. W. L. Carrie 
 of George Watson's College for his kindly assist- 
 ance and advice in selecting the Essays. 
 
 On behalf of the Committee, 
 
 JAMES LEISHMAN, Convener. 
 DAVID WILKIE, Secretary. 
 
 Edinburgh, "jth August 1897. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Realism and Romance : Thomas Hardy and R. L. 
 
 Stevenson i 
 
 The Writings of Edmund Burke .... 33 
 
 Matthew Arnold 139 
 
 A. C. Swinburne 165 
 
 Robert Fergusson 204 
 
 The Poetry and other Writings of James Russell 
 
 Lowell 226 
 
 The Life and Writings of Erasmus .... 263 
 
 Robert Louis Stevenson: a Poem .... 287 
 
REALISM AND ROMANCE: THOMAS 
 HARDY AND R. L. STEVENSON.^ 
 
 To the outsider the world of letters seems a very 
 placid and serene region, to enter which is to bid 
 farewell for the time to the storms and heats and 
 controversies which rage without its bounds. But 
 the truth is that warfare about literary schools 
 and methods is as incessant as our political 
 squabbles ; a change of style excites as much 
 interest as a change of Ministry, and a critical 
 pronouncement by one having authority as much 
 discussion, almost, as the manifesto of a party 
 leader. I shall first of all take note of one of 
 these controversies — that, namely, between the 
 realistic and romantic schools of fiction, and 
 shall afterwards write of two living authors who 
 may be taken as fairly representative of these 
 two schools. 
 
 Not long ago, whenever the Secretary of a 
 Debating Society was gravelled for lack of matter, 
 he was wont to propound some such question as, 
 
 1 Heriot-Watt College Literary Society, Nov. 1893. 
 A 
 
2 REALISM AND ROMANCE 
 
 ' Is Novel-reading injurious ? ' or, ' Does History 
 teach more than Fiction ? ' and the young men 
 bent on what is oddly enough called mutual im- 
 provement never failed to rise to the bait. These 
 ingenuous inquiries seem rather belated now ; the 
 idea that fiction has still its spurs to win is almost 
 discarded, and on all sides the novel is recognised 
 as the prime force in the literature of to-day. 
 
 But when Jeshurun waxed fat he kicked, and 
 the novelists no sooner became the men of the 
 hour than straightway they fell to fisticuffs with 
 one another. It comes, perhaps, of taking them- 
 selves and their art a trifle too seriously. One 
 can fancy how Scott would have lifted his eye- 
 brows had he been asked whether he thought 
 himself a realist or a romantic. But then of 
 course Scott was a mere trifler, who did not 
 understand the A B C of his art; so, at least, 
 Mr. W. D. Howells has lately been telling us, and 
 Mr. Howells ought to know, because he is a novel- 
 ist himself, and lives in Boston. Some of us, 
 indeed, cling foolishly to the belief that Scott was 
 no fool, that the man could once in a while write a 
 decent story; and one or two are audacious enough 
 to hint that Mr. Howells's attacks on him and 
 others of our literary idols only prove how bad a 
 critic a very good novelist may be. But this, as 
 the phrase goes, is a digression. Whether, then. 
 
THOMAS HARDY AND R. L. STEVENSON 3 
 
 we like it or not, the ball has been set rolling, 
 and the battle between the two schools goes on 
 in a very lively and spirited fashion. 
 
 What, then, are the points at issue ? At the 
 outset, I must take notice of the fact that many 
 people attach merely a bad meaning to the term 
 ' Realism ' ; it stands with them for whatever in 
 literature is coarse, immoral, suggestive. This, 
 let me say at once, is not the sense in which I 
 understand the term. I cannot even see the pro- 
 priety of applying the epithet at all to the writers 
 whom people have in their eye when they think 
 of realism and realists in that way. These writers 
 picture man as consistently base and corrupt. 
 They fix their eyes upon a malodorous cesspool 
 swarming with vile creatures, and forget the blue 
 heavens over their head, and the everlasting hills 
 around them, and the grass under their feet. 
 They put a pitiful fragment of ihan's life for the 
 whole of it ; and when they think to give us a 
 faithful portrait, they produce merely a squinting 
 and leering caricature. They call themselves the 
 school of Naturalism ; Animalism were perhaps 
 the fitter term. Well, then, it seems to me that 
 the proper criticism to pass upon such work is to 
 say — not that it is bad because it is realistic, but 
 — that it is not truly realistic at all. Realists 
 they may be in intention, but not in effect. The 
 
4 REALISM AND ROMANCE 
 
 aim of the realist should be to see life steadily, 
 and see it whole, and these do neither. They 
 have no sense of proportion ; their vision is 
 narrow and distorted, and what they do not see 
 is vastly more important than what they do see. 
 The true realists are such writers as Mr. Hardy 
 for English rural life, and Mr. George Gissing 
 for life in our great cities. 
 
 Taking realism, then, in this sense, what are 
 the broad characteristics of the two schools? 
 The object of the realist is to present us with a 
 faithful transcript of the facts of life; the romantic 
 writer, on the other hand, gives a loose rein to his 
 fancy and follows where it leads. Realism is the 
 home-keeping Cinderella ; the romantic, in his 
 fine disdain of the prosaic and merely common- 
 place, tricks himself out in the oddest dresses, 
 and swaggers over the world in search of ad- 
 ventures. The realist keeps to the present day ; 
 the romantic prefers the fifteenth century to the 
 nineteenth. The pomp and circumstance of 
 Courts, brave deeds by land and sea, the delight 
 of battle, the spice of danger — these are to the 
 romantic as the breath of his nostrils ; the realist 
 works with far humbler and homelier material. 
 To the romantic we look for broad and striking 
 effects, for stirring scenes, for hurrying, pell-mell 
 action ; under the guidance of the realist we 
 
THOMAS HARDY AND R. L. STEVENSON $ 
 
 enter a serener atmosphere, a world in which the 
 lights are lowered and the colours are toned down. 
 But it may be asked, Why should these be 
 thought of as antagonistic to one another ? And 
 to me there seems peculiar pertinence in the 
 inquiry. The answer must be that offence has 
 come mainly from the realistic camp. The ex- 
 treme advocates of this school, taking, as I have 
 said, their art very seriously, are inclined to look 
 upon the rival practitioners with undisguised 
 contempt. Mere idle dreamers, they say, and 
 the novelist nowadays must be a very serious 
 person, looking before and after, and striving to 
 puzzle out the riddle of human existence. This, 
 they proceed, is before all a scientific age, and if 
 the novel is to hold its ground it must become 
 scientific also. To simple souls, blissfully igno- 
 rant of science, and loving Shakespeare better 
 than Euclid, the retort might seem easy that 
 since we are becoming so very scientific, it might 
 perhaps be well to leave one region free to the 
 imagination and the fancy. Science, they would 
 say, is no doubt a very admirable thing, and we 
 are quite content to join in its praises so long as 
 you do not require us to study it ; but also it is 
 apt to be rather arid and unattractive, and on 
 the whole we fancy that we should not like the 
 scientific novel. For my own part, I must con- 
 
6 REALISM AND ROMANCE 
 
 fess that I am quite unable to attach any meaning 
 to this conception of the novel as a scientific 
 product. The novelist is a man ; and, try as he 
 may, his own temper and outlook upon things 
 will influence his view of those facts of life which 
 he conceives it to be his business to put into 
 fiction. That is to say, the personal equation 
 must inevitably enter into his ,work. But the 
 personal equation can have no place in science. 
 A scientific work of art is, in short, a glaring con- 
 tradiction in terms, and all that the realist means 
 is that the novelist should depend on observation 
 rather than on imagination, and that he should be 
 a philosopher as well as a story-teller. 
 
 On the other side, the romantic advocates have 
 not been slow to hit back. A novel, they say, is 
 meant to give pleasure, to lift us out of ourselves, 
 to make us forget our daily cares and problems 
 and worries. And this it will hardly do if it con- 
 cerns itself with those very cares and problems 
 and worries from which we wish to escape. Here, 
 again, the extremists seem to me in error. A 
 cynic might rejoin that, as a matter of fact, people 
 do take pleasure in hearing of the worries of other 
 people, and that this pleasure may even make 
 them forget their own. But this would be taking 
 very low ground indeed. The question seems to 
 turn on what we mean by giving pleasure. When 
 
THOMAS HARDY AND R. L. STEVENSON 7 
 
 the advocate of romance denies that realistic 
 novels give pleasure, what he has in his mind is 
 that the realist has commonly a somewhat sombre 
 view of life, and that he has a preference for 
 unhappy endings. But then are we to say that 
 the Merchant of Venice gives pleasure, and that 
 Hamlet does not ; or that Guy Mannering gives 
 pleasure, and not The Bride of Lammermoor ? 
 The truth is, that this squeamish horror of un- 
 happy endings has played havoc with many a 
 promising novel and play. Surely a novel may 
 give pleasure of a very high order although it 
 ends not with the merry jingling of the marriage- 
 bells, but with the harsh and discordant accents 
 of tragedy, and although from its last page there 
 should steal a perfume more potent than that of 
 orange-flowers. 
 
 And when the advocates of romance go on to 
 ridicule the method of the realist they seem not 
 less in error. ' A transcript of the facts of life,' 
 they say ; there needs no genius for that, only a 
 note-book and a lead-pencil. This sounds plaus- 
 ible, but is radically unjust. A note-book and a 
 lead-pencil, although very harmless and useful 
 articles (as Serjeant Buzfuz said of the warming- 
 pan), can by no means be considered as the whole 
 outfit of the realistic writer. He must have the 
 eye to see, the power of selection, arrangement. 
 
8 REALISM AND ROMANCE 
 
 and combination, the faculty of separating the 
 trivial from the essential. And in the conduct of 
 the story, the fact that he must aim at keeping 
 within the limits of the possible and normal 
 course of things does not make imagination and 
 dramatic insight unnecessary. This is so obvious 
 that one is almost ashamed to call attention to 
 it, but it is a point often missed or ignored in 
 diatribes against the realistic school. 
 
 We may now have some notion of how the 
 case stands between the two schools. The dis- 
 tinguishing marks of the realistic school may 
 be summed up thus: — (i) That it keeps to the 
 present day, and aims at keeping within the 
 limits of the possible. (2) That it depends for 
 its interest on character rather than on incident. 
 (3) That in its manner and choice of subjects it 
 is bold and unconventional ,* and that it deals 
 freely with certain aspects of life hitherto left 
 untouched or very gingerly handled. (4) That 
 it aims at painting real men and women, not 
 ideal men and women. 
 
 We have also seen reason to dissent from the 
 extreme views on either side. But what is to be 
 our final judgment on the two schools. Well, 
 in the first place, I dislike the idea of carrying 
 into a thing so soft, fluid, and many-hued as 
 literature the sharp distinctions imperatively 
 
THOMAS HARDY AND R. L, STEVENSON 9 
 
 called for by the requirements of science. And, 
 in the second place, I think that a wide catho- 
 licity of taste is the truest wisdom in literature. 
 The House Beautiful of Art has many mansions, 
 and to-day we may take our ease in one of them, 
 and to-morrow sit under the porch or cross the 
 threshold of another. Sectarianism in literature 
 is as wrong and mischievous as sectarianism in 
 religion, and alas ! it is almost as common. And 
 so of these two schools we should not let our 
 preconceived theories prevent us from taking the 
 best that each has to offer us. In this we shall 
 have the sanction of the best writers of either 
 school, for I know that Mr. Stevenson admires 
 Mr. Hardy, and I make no doubt that Mr. Hardy 
 enjoys his Treasure Island like the rest of us. 
 
 'Tis a wide world, my masters, and this rude 
 jostling and loud decrying are as needless as 
 they are unseemly. There is room for both ; 
 room for the writer who merely aims at telling 
 a story, as for the more ambitious attempt to 
 interpret in fiction the facts of life ; room even 
 for Mr. Howells and what I may call the Needy 
 Knife-Grinder Novelist, who say to us: 'Story, 
 Lord bless you, sir, we 've none to tell.' 
 
 It is true, no doubt, that the vogue is passing 
 more and more to the realistic novel; the tone 
 and temper of the age are all on its side. As 
 
lO REALISM AND ROMANCE 
 
 Sainte-Beuve, the great French critic, has put it : 
 ' The ideal has ceased ; the lyric vein has dried 
 up ; the new men are cured of lyricism and the 
 ideal ; a severe and pitiless truth has made its 
 entry, as the last word of experience, even into 
 art itself.' But with all this the romantic has 
 still its charm and its fascination for us j the 
 Dumas and Scotts and Stevensons have still their 
 beneficent part to play. To soothe the tired brain 
 and calm the overstrained nerves, to carry us 
 into a world where they pass the time carelessly 
 as they did in the golden age, to delight our eyes 
 and senses with gallant and gorgeous pageants, 
 to appeal to that healthy feeling for action and 
 deeds of high prowess, for all that is heroic in 
 man and lovely in woman — these are no mean 
 achievements, and so long as human nature is 
 what it is, the novel which does this will not 
 wholly lose its dominion over men's minds. 
 
 And so, having tried to do justice to both 
 schools, and to vindicate each in turn from the 
 strictures of its opponents, let me conclude this 
 part of my subject with the just and eloquent 
 words of Mr. Walter Pater — words not written, 
 I may explain, with reference to this particular 
 controversy. 'The legitimate contention,' says 
 he, ' is not that of one age or school of literary 
 art against another, but of all successive schools 
 
THOMAS HARDY AND R. L. STEVENSON II 
 
 alike against the stupidity which is dead to the 
 substance and the vulgarity which is dead to 
 form,' 
 
 Mr. Thomas Hardy, whom I take as represent^ 
 ing the dominant school of Realism, is, by the 
 general consent of competent critics, recognised 
 as one, and not the least, of that chosen band 
 with whom the immediate future of English 
 fiction rests. Indeed, till very lately, Mr. Hardy 
 was a greater favourite with the critics than with 
 the public ; and even yet one could name writers, 
 with not a tenth part of his power, who yet count 
 many more readers than he. But honest work 
 makes its way in the end, and the decisive success 
 of his latest novel is a thing for all lovers of good 
 literature to rejoice in. Mr. Hardy may now be 
 said to have fairly won the public ear, and it will 
 be strange if he does not keep it. 
 
 The field in which Mr. Hardy has chosen to 
 work is the south-western corner of England, 
 what in the days of the Saxons was known as 
 Wessex. All his best work deals with the lives 
 of very humble and obscure persons in that 
 district. Casterbridge is Mr. Hardy's Thrums. 
 He knows the country like a book, and we feel 
 that the rustic figures who cross his pages are 
 drawn direct from the life. In his uncom- 
 promising realism he does not shrink from what 
 
12 REALISM AND ROMANCE 
 
 sometimes seems a prosaic and wearisome detail, 
 and it is not his fault if readers do not rise from 
 his books with some notion of what country life 
 in England is like. It is not always a pleasant 
 picture, that which he sets before us, for Mr. 
 Hardy has too austere an idea of the novelist's 
 function to palter with his art for the sake of 
 casting an ideal glamour over his rustics and 
 their ways. He paints them as they are, with 
 their quaint, old-world ways, their dense ignor- 
 ance, their somewhat low moral tone. Absolute 
 truth, absolute sincerity — these are the notes of 
 his work. His books give the lie direct to the 
 theory that the novelist in order to interest us 
 must go far afield for his subjects. Round the 
 lives of these simple peasants Mr. Hardy weaves 
 his striking stories of love and passion and suffer- 
 ing. His tales stand out from the ruck of novels 
 by reason of their sympathetic realism, for, in 
 literature, knowledge enters ever by the door of 
 sympathy. 'What is called poetic insight' — so 
 writes Nathaniel Hawthorne — 'What is called 
 poetic insight is the power of discerning in this 
 sphere of strangely mixed elements the beauty 
 and the majesty which are compelled to assume 
 a garb so sordid.' A large measure of this insight 
 has been granted to Mr. Hardy, and so there 
 passes into his pages the pathos of ill-requited toil. 
 
THOMAS HARDY AND R. L. STEVENSON 1 3 
 
 of weary limbs and aching backs and stunted 
 niinds. This simgle^ mral life, with its weary 
 round of duties, its constant and monotonous toil, 
 its grey uniformity of colour, might have seemed 
 to us poor, petty, and uninteresting enough in all 
 conscience, but there comes a man with the eye 
 of the artist, and lo ! the elements of romance 
 and tragedy are here also. And this is none 
 other than the supreme triumph of the realist. 
 
 Mr. Hardy is often spoken of as if he were 
 above all a humorist, but that, to my mind, is a 
 fundamentally false conception of the man. Only 
 in his first two books (for Desperate Remedies, 
 his 'prentice work, hardly counts) — only, I say, 
 in Under the Greenwood Tree and Far from the 
 Madding Crowd does his humour flow fresh 
 and clear. That charming idyll of country 
 life, Under the Greenwood Tree, though far 
 from being Mr. Hardy's greatest book, is per- 
 haps the most pleasant, certainly it is the most 
 genial. Full of truth and full of sunlight, it 
 shows Mr. Hardy in his lightest and most pleas- 
 ing vein. Not again was he to do anything so 
 admirably humorous and genial as this. In his 
 next book, Far from the Madding Crowd, admir- 
 ably humorous as it is in parts, we already note 
 a more reflective and a more sombre tone. And 
 as novel has followed novel this sadder mood has 
 
14 REALISM AND ROMANCE 
 
 grown upon Mr. Hardy till in Tess he has given 
 us a novel wholly tragic in its interest, as Under 
 the Greenwood Tree is wholly idyllic. With the 
 growth of this sombre habit of mind his humour 
 has changed its colour, and often sounds like 
 bitter irony. One misses, too, in his work that 
 happy lightness of touch which is all but indis- 
 pensable to the humorist. 
 
 It is hardly, then, in Mr. Hardy's humour that 
 I should seek the key to his strength. Nor has 
 he a great command over the softer sentiments, 
 or a great power of pure pathos. But in sheer 
 tragic power he has scarcely an equal among living 
 writers. Mr. Hardy, on the higher plane where 
 pathos, as it were, is swallowed up and tran- 
 scended by tragedy, puts forth his full strength. 
 His greatest books, The Return of the Native, 
 The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the D' Urber- 
 villes, are all cast in a tragic mould : his best- 
 drawn characters are those whose ends are tragic, 
 whose lot it is to sufifer and die. Michael 
 Henchard, 'the Mayor of Casterbridge,' seems 
 to me Mr. Hardy's best bit of portraiture ; 
 strength and subtlety go together in the handling. 
 Here at last in fiction we have a man wholly 
 alive, wholly virile. Only genius could have 
 drawn with so firm a hand and so rare a skill 
 the portrait of this man — a man passionate. 
 
THOMAS HARDY AND R. L. STEVENSON I J 
 
 coarse-grained, wrong-headed, but at bottom 
 neither ignoble nor ungenerous. He plays his 
 hand in so honest and downright a way that our 
 sympathies go to him almost against our judgment, 
 and knowing him to be in the wrong, it is yet 
 not without regret that we see him beaten and 
 foiled at every point in the game. And when, 
 strippted of fortune and the love of friends, he turns 
 his back on Casterbridge, and seeks the country 
 to die, our imagination follows with infinite pity 
 the despairing outcast. Few things in fiction 
 strike a deeper chord than that strange document, 
 Michael Henchard's Will. 
 
 ' That Elizabeth- Jane Farfrae be not told of 
 my death, or made to grieve on account 
 of me. 
 
 ' & that I be not bury'd in consecrated ground, 
 
 ' & that no sexton be asked to toll the bell. 
 
 ' & that nobody is wished to see my dead body. 
 
 ' & that no murners walk behind me at my 
 funeral. 
 
 ' & that no flours be planted on my grave. 
 
 ' & that no man remember me. 
 
 ' To this I put my name.' 
 On this what comment is possible save that of 
 Elizabeth-Jane? 'O Donald,' she said at last, 
 ' what bitterness lies there ! ' 
 
 In The Return of the Native there are passages 
 
1 6 REALISM AND ROMANCE 
 
 of equal intensity and power ; as, for example, the 
 chapter entitled ' The Closed Door,' or again, that 
 great scene between Clym and Eustacia when 
 he discovers the truth about his mother's death. 
 From his first bitterly ironical words, ' It seems 
 my wife is not well,' his agonised cry, ' Eustacia, 
 you have held my happiness in the hollow of your 
 hand, and like a devil you have dashed it down,' 
 the dialogue is almost intolerable in its power. 
 Readers of Far from the Madding Crowd will 
 hardly have forgotten the description of Fanny 
 Robin crawling painfully to the workhouse to 
 die, or the passionate scene between Sergeant 
 Troy and Bathsheba over her coffin. And Tess 
 of the D'Urber.villes is from beginning to end 
 pitched in a tragic key. 
 
 Mr. Hardy is said to be no great favourite with 
 the young ladies of the circulating library, who 
 sometimes annotate the margins of his books with 
 ' I think Mr. Hardy is a horrid man ! ' ' I am 
 sure Bathsheba would have done no such thing,' 
 and other comments of that profound and en- 
 lightening character. The reasons for this extreme 
 disfavour are not far to seek. Mr. Hardy does 
 not allow sentiment to run riot through his pages, 
 and Mr. Mudie's young ladies get, rightly or 
 wrongly, the name of dearly loving that peculiarly 
 feminine luxury known as a 'good cry.' His 
 
THOMAS HARDY AND R. L. STEVENSON \^ 
 
 books may be read dry-eyed, for, as I have said, 
 he touches springs of feeling which lie too deep 
 for tears. But there is more — and worse — behind. 
 His view of the fair sex is curiously consistent, 
 and, as some think, over-cynical. When he says 
 of Eustacia Vye that she ' had the passions and 
 instincts which make a model goddess, that is, 
 those which make not quite a model woman,' he 
 really passes judgment on nearly all his heroines — 
 Tess excepted. ' Nearly every one of the ladies,' 
 says a critic, ' practically propose to one man, two 
 run after him to do so, and one of them then 
 marries another.' We hear a great deal now of 
 woman's rights : well, Mr. Hardy is a consistent 
 advocate of the greatest of these rights, that of 
 changing her mind with or without cause assigned. 
 The strange thing is that they do not seem grate- 
 ful to him for it. Most of his heroines have 
 several wooers — three, I have calculated, is the 
 average number. This, of course, is quite in 
 accordance with the English tradition, but their 
 peculiarity is that they seem to experience a dis- 
 tracting difficulty in choosing between them. Mr. 
 Hardy seems to revel in painting their whims, 
 their caprices, their delightful vanity, their in- 
 voluntary cruelty. Readers accustomed to the 
 bread-and-butter misses of English fiction must 
 feel sorely at a loss to know what to make of these 
 
 B 
 
1 8 REALISM AND ROMANCE 
 
 charmingly unconventional creations, these fair 
 maidens with whom it is always leap-year. Per- 
 haps we are to take it as a sign that in fiction, as 
 in real life, women are beginning to abandon that 
 merely passive role with which they were once 
 content. Whether Mr. Hardy's view is the right 
 one is a point which I do not feel competent to 
 decide. I am content to own that I find them 
 very good company, and to note the dictum of 
 Mr. J. M. Barrie, who is certainly neither a cynic 
 nor a woman-hater. 'Mr. Hardy's women,' says 
 Mr. Barrie, ' are the most interesting in their 
 unconventionality, the most charming in their 
 womanliness, and the most subtly drawn, with 
 the exception of Mr. Meredith's, that this genera- 
 tion of novelists has given us.' That is hand- 
 somely said, and for me it is conclusive. 
 
 In the matter of style, Mr. Hardy can barely be 
 said to rank with the highest. He has neither 
 the erratic brilliance of Mr. Meredith nor the 
 subtle charm of Mr. Stevenson. His style is slow- 
 footed ; it lacks alertness and vivacity. He is far 
 from being a flawless writer ; crudities of phrase 
 abound ; his diction is sometimes distressingly 
 scientific ; his touch often ineffectual and fum- 
 bling. Often, indeed, he strikes out a profound 
 aphorism, but the crispness and polish of epigram 
 are usually lacking. At best his style may be 
 
THOMAS HARDY AND R. L. STEVENSON 19 
 
 described as a useful one. At times, however, 
 one comes upon a passage which arrests us by 
 its felicity; as, for example, his description of 
 Eustacia Vye^r-^To see her hair was to fancy that 
 a whole winter night did not contain darkness 
 enough to form its shadow ; it closed over her 
 forehead like nightfall extinguishing the western 
 glow. . . . She had Pagan eyes, full of nocturnal 
 mysteries. . . . Her presence brought memories 
 of such things as Bourbon roses, rubies, and 
 tropical midnights; her moods recalled lotus- 
 eaters and the march in Athalie; her motions, 
 the ebb and flow of the sea ; her voice, the viola^ 
 Such passages show that behind the realist in 
 Mr. Hardy there is the poet ; and indeed a fine 
 imaginativeness runs like a thread of gold 
 through the homespun texture of his work. He 
 has the poet's fine feeling, too, for the external 
 world ; the man has clearly communed with 
 Nature as a lover, although his defects of style 
 prevent him from adequately rendering her 
 moods, and what he gives us is a photograph 
 rather than a picture. This is specially noticeable 
 in The Return of the Native, in which Egdon 
 Heath is the dark background of a sombre drama. 
 When the end is coming amid storm, darkness, 
 and spiritual tempest, this is how Mr. Hardy 
 writes : ' The gloom of the night was funereal ; all 
 
20 REALISM AND ROMANCE 
 
 nature seemed clothed in crape. ... It was a 
 night which led the traveller's thoughts in- 
 stinctively to dwell on nocturnal scenes of dis- 
 aster in the chronicles of the world, on all that 
 is terrible and dark in history and legend — ^the 
 last plague of Egypt, the destruction of Sen- 
 nacherib's host, the Agony in Gethsemane.' This 
 is truly, in the words of Keats, to 
 
 ' behold upon the night's starred face 
 Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance.' 
 
 The sombre hue of that last picture reflects 
 what one fancies is Mr. Hardy's habitual mood. 
 His books represent that reaction against a 
 hollow and unreal optimism which has set in so 
 strongly in our day. His tone is deeply tinged 
 with pessimism ; the man seems haunted by an 
 abiding sense of what he finely calls ' the ironical 
 sequence of things.' No sooner do we set the cup 
 of happiness to our lips than it is dashed from 
 our hands, or turns to poison in the drinking. 
 He perpetually recurs to this theme, and dwells 
 upon it with what I must call a morbid insistence. 
 ' When she plodded on in the shade of the hedge, 
 silently thinking, she had the hard half-apathetic 
 expression of one who deems anything possible 
 at the hands of Time and Chance, except, per- 
 haps, fair-play.' — ' Except, perhaps, fair-play,' 
 
THOMAS HARDY AND R. L. STEVENSON 21 
 
 how profoundly significant that touch is of Mr. 
 Hardy's temper ! The vast and terrible irony ot 
 Fate, ' the dust and ashes of things, the cruelty 
 of lust and the fragility of love' : it is on these 
 that his mind fixes itself with a painful intensity. 
 One can imagine him saying with the blind 
 Gloucester in King Lear : — 
 
 'As flies to wanton boys, so are we to the gods : 
 They kill us for their sport.' 
 
 Sometimes he turns it into a jest, but his 
 laughter has a hard and bitter ring. He calls 
 The Hiznd ofEthelberta a ' Comedy in Chapters ' ; 
 to me the story seems more ghastly than his 
 direst tragedies. There are things for which one 
 cannot find it in one's heart to forgive even one's 
 favourite authors, and the marriage of Ethelberta 
 to Lord Mountclere, like the nagging of Colonel 
 Newcome by his son's mother-in-law, is one of 
 these. Tess of the D' Urbervilles vfoxks in us that 
 'honest sadness which comes of a logical and 
 inevitable tragedy ' ; The Hand of Ethelberta 
 merely exasperates us, and sets our teeth on 
 edge, and surely it can never be the province of 
 good art to do that. Mr. Hardy should abjure 
 tragi-comedy ; he has better stuff in him than to 
 decline upon Thackeray's worst manner. The 
 sense of revolt against intolerable injustice is 
 
22 REALISM AND ROMANCE 
 
 strongly marked in Tess, so that it reads like a 
 tremendous indictment of the whole order of the 
 Universe. On this book let me quote the verdict 
 of Mr. William Watson : ' Powerful and strange! 
 in design, splendid and terrible in execution, this 
 story brands itself upon the mind as with the 
 touch of incandescent iron.' And again : ' Tess 
 must take its place among the great tragedies, to 
 have read which is to have enlarged the boun- 
 daries of one's intellectual and emotional ex- 
 perience.' In that I join heartily, yet I must 
 repeat that there is something morbid and turbid 
 in this spirit of vain and impotent revolt, some- 
 thing very far removed from the even and equable 
 serenity of the artist. Shakespeare must have 
 felt like this when, with the world darkened 
 around him, he sat down to write his great 
 tragedies. But with him the mood passed, and 
 one would like to think that Mr. Hardy also will 
 yet shake himself free from this malignant in- 
 fluence. He has given us his Lear: when are we' 
 to see his Winter^ s Tale ? Great things may yetj 
 be hoped from a writer still in the prime of life/ 
 who has already added so much to the strengtli 
 and richness of contemporary fiction. To Mrl 
 Hardy, then, belongs in an eminent degree thai 
 supreme merit which Mr. Swinburne, in a mag- 
 nificent phrase, once ascribed to Byron — 'the 
 
THOMAS HARDY AND R. L. STEVENSON 23 
 
 imperishable excellence of sincerity and strength.' 
 Sincerity and strength — these are indeed im- 
 perishable ; and hence of Mr. Hardy we may 
 safely predict that his fame will be stable and 
 enduring. 
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 That very pleasing writer, the author of Obiter 
 Dicta and Res Judicatae, speaks somewhere of 
 the 'Clan Stevenson." Mr. Birrell refers, of 
 course, to those who have come under the spell 
 of Mr. Stevenson's fascinating personality, who 
 have been won by the engaging charm of his 
 style : this is the Clan Stevenson, and of this 
 clan I delight to think myself a humble member. 
 Charles Lamb, you remember, talks of certain 
 writers whose names, he says, ' carry a perfume 
 in the mention ' : his own name is now one of 
 these ; Mr. Stevenson's, I think, is another. Like 
 Lamb, he speaks to his readers as to friends and 
 familiars ; an egoist (in the good sense) of the 
 first water, he abounds in confidences ; he draws 
 one by his gracious and winning worldliness no 
 less than by the sure perfection of his style. He 
 is profoundly interested in himself, and so he 
 never fails to interest us. In the presence of 
 work so captivating as his, so exquisite in its 
 
24 REALISM AND ROMANCE 
 
 literary quality, one feels inclined to strike one's 
 colours and to abdicate the critical function. 
 
 The aroma and savour of style — this it is which 
 makes Mr. Stevenson's books so uniformly de- 
 lightful to the literary epicure. There is no 
 alchemy like that of style ; it transmutes into 
 gold whatever it touches. Think of the verse of 
 Shakespeare, that wave of sound breaking into a 
 thousand clear ripples of melody, of the inter- 
 woven harmonies of Milton, or again, of the un- 
 adorned but terribly effective style of Swift, a 
 style which makes us think of a woodman hewing 
 down trees with a mighty swing of the arm : so 
 great is the power, so various the quality of style 
 in literature ! 
 
 And what are we to say of Mr. Stevenson's 
 style? Hasty readers praise it for its qualities of 
 simplicity and straightforwardness. But simple 
 Mr. Stevenson's style is not ; on the contrary, he 
 is one of the most patient, cunning, and dexterous 
 artificers in English prose. Mr. Hardy uses 
 language as a good workman uses his tools ; Mr. 
 Stevenson, it has been well said, plays upon 
 words as if they were a musical instrument. His 
 description of the old beggar in Across the Plains 
 fits himself like a glove : ' What took him was a 
 richness in the speech ; he loved the exotic, the 
 unexpected word ; the moving cadence of a 
 
THOMAS HARDY AND R. L. STEVENSON 2$ 
 
 phrase ; a vague sense of emotion (about nothing) 
 in the very letters of the alphabet : the romance 
 of language.' The artfulness of his diction is 
 something' to marvel at ; the language grows 
 plastic at his touch; he moulds it to his liking. 
 So severely fastidious is his taste, that you may 
 search his books from cover to cover without 
 lighting upon a single slovenly or slipshod 
 phrase. He is the first of the literary exquisites, 
 the Keats of English prose ; hackneyed forms 
 of speech he shuns as he would the pestilence ; 
 with him distinction is a matter of course. This 
 sedulous avoidance of the commonplace has 
 of course its dangers. A writer who is never 
 content to say things as other people say them, 
 must sometimes pay the penalty by saying them 
 worse ; his style is apt to degenerate into man- 
 nerism. Mannerisms Mr. Stevenson no doubt 
 has ; in particular, he is rather too fond of French 
 idioms ; but nine times out of ten he fairly hits 
 the bull's-eye. On his ov/n confession, we can 
 hardly grant him the praise of originality ; he 
 has borrowed much from Elizabethan writers, a 
 fact which explains the somewhat archaic cast of 
 his diction. The grand style he does not pretend 
 to. In place of the flushed and magnificent 
 rhetoric of Milton and Jeremy Taylor, he gives 
 us a richly-wrought mosaic of dainty words and 
 
26 REALISM AND ROMANCE 
 
 phrases. Occasionally he affects a somewhat 
 mincing gait ; he is overmuch concerned to cut 
 his capers and play his pretty tricks when we 
 should prefer to see him break into a downright 
 gallop. As an example of his style at its best, I 
 quote a very beautiful and very touching passage 
 on Scotland and Edinburgh. Mark the fine 
 felicity of phrase, and the melodious cadence of 
 the evolution : — 
 
 'There is no special loveliness in that grey 
 country, with its rainy, sea-beat archipelago ; its 
 fields of dark mountains ; its unsightly places 
 black with coal ; its treeless, sour, unfriendly- 
 looking corn-lands ; its quaint grey, castled city, 
 where the bells clash of a Sunday and the winds 
 squall and the salt showers fly and beat. I do 
 not even know if I desire to live there ; but let 
 me hear in some far land a kindred voice sing 
 out, " Oh why left I my hame ? " and it seems at 
 once as if no beauty under the kind heavens, and 
 no society of the wise and good, can repay me 
 for my absence from my country. And though 
 I think I would rather die elsewhere, yet in my 
 heart of hearts I long to be buried among good 
 
 Scots clods When I forget thee, Auld Reekie, 
 
 may my right hand forget its cunning.' 'The 
 happiest lot on earth,' he proceeds, ' is to be born 
 a Scotsman. You must pay for it in many ways. 
 
THOMAS HARDY AND R. L. STEVENSON 2^ 
 
 as for all other advantages on earth. You have to 
 learn the paraphrases and the Shorter Catechism ; 
 you generally take to drink ; your youth, as far 
 as I can learn, is a time of louder war against 
 society, of more outcry and tears and turmoil, 
 than if you had been born, for instance, in Eng- 
 land. But somehow life is warmer and closer ; 
 the lights of home shine softer on the rainy 
 street; the very names endeared in verse and 
 music cling nearer round our heart.' 
 
 But it is time to turn to Mr. Stevenson's 
 romances. A nice sense for the subtleties of 
 style is not perhaps very widely diffused, and it 
 was a fortunate day for Mr, Stevenson when it 
 occurred to him to enter into competition with 
 the purveyors of books for boys. Treasure Island, 
 the first-fruit of this resolve, is in its way a 
 classic. ' There should be nothing so much a 
 man's business as his amusements,' says Mr. 
 Stevenson ; and certainly he at any rate is always 
 dead in earnest in his play. The narrative is set 
 down with so convincing an air of reality that it 
 almost imposes on our senses. If Mr. Hardy 
 often gives us the romance of realism, Mr. 
 Stevenson succeeds admirably in giving us the 
 realism of romance. Nor is the interest of 
 Treasure Island solely that of sensational incident. 
 The characters are graphically presented with 
 
28 REALISM AND ROMANCE 
 
 true dramatic genius. Who that has read the 
 book can forget John Silver, that smooth-spoken 
 and plausible villain ? There is a curious pathetic 
 touch in the marooned sailor who dreamt of 
 ' cheese — toasted chiefly — and I awoke, and here 
 I were.' And that eerie tapping of the blind 
 man's stick along the frosty road long haunts the 
 reader's memory. 
 
 Kidnapped takes even higher rank as a story. 
 The fight in the round-house, the flight across 
 the moor, the quarrel on the heather, are all 
 in Mr. Stevenson's happiest manner. But the 
 triumph of the book is Alan Breck, a creation 
 worthy of the hand of Scott himself. Alan's 
 dash and gallantry are irresistible, and we smile 
 indulgently at his unconscionable vanity. Mr. 
 Stevenson has committed a crime past forgiveness 
 in making Alan play second fiddle to Mr. David 
 Balfour of Shaws in the sequel to Kidnapped, 
 published the other day. ' It is the lot of sequels 
 to disappoint,' says Mr. Stevenson, and Catriona is 
 hardly an exception to the rule. The story drags 
 at the outset ; Mr. Stevenson seems to lose him- 
 self in the wilderness of the Appin murder. We 
 are not so much interested as he seems to be 
 in the ins and outs of that case, and the story of 
 legal chicanery and finesse, artfully as it is told, 
 is pale and thin after the breadth and daring of 
 
THOMAS HARDY AND R. L. STEVENSON 29 
 
 Treasure Island and Kidnapped. But David 
 Balfour, with his dour honesty and his good 
 conceit of himself, is admirable ; and the love- 
 story of the youthful pair is told with Mr. 
 Stevenson's happiest art. Mr. Stevenson seems 
 in this book to have laid himself out to dispose 
 once for all of the reproach that he cannot paint 
 a woman. Ladies, indeed, have no business in 
 books for boys ; Jack and Tom may submit to 
 their intrusion just as they submit to being 
 kissed by their sisters, but they do not like it all 
 the same. But Catriona is not a boy's book, and 
 in it Mr. Stevenson has given us two charming 
 women — Catriona herself, with her simplicity, her 
 courage, her quick temper, her picturesque speech, 
 and Miss Barbara Grant, with her arch and 
 audacious wit, her biting tongue, her sterling 
 soundness of heart. The critics, to my thinking, 
 have been unduly hard on The Black Arrow, 
 though, perhaps, it is not one of Mr. Stevenson's 
 great triumphs. The Wrecker, one of his latest 
 books, is a wonderfully picturesque romance, full 
 of life and glowing with colour ; ' full,' in his 
 own words, ' of detail^ of our barbaric manners 
 and unstable morals ; full of the need and lust of 
 money, so that there is scarce a page in which the 
 dollars do not jingle ; full of the unrest and move- 
 ment of our century, so that the reader is hurried 
 
30 REALISM AND ROMANCE 
 
 from place to place, and sea to sea, and the book 
 is less a romance than a panorama — in the end 
 as blood-bespattered as an epic' But skill seems 
 lacking in its construction ; he is terribly long of 
 coming to the point. The story hangs so badly 
 together, that it resembles more a series of 
 picturesque incidents than a coherent romance. 
 Prince Otto strikes me as an experiment, not 
 wholly successful, in the manner of Mr. George 
 Meredith. 
 
 The Master of Ballantrae, and some of Mr. 
 Stevenson's short stories, I have left to the last, 
 because they show the darker and grimmer side 
 of his genius. In The Master of Ballantrae the 
 atmosphere is leaden. The two brothers are 
 admirably contrasted, and the grim story of their 
 hates and loves is told with consummate address. 
 The same love for the grim and the weird shows 
 forth in many of Mr. Stevenson's shorter tales, in 
 Jekyll and Hyde, that fine allegory of the double 
 life, for example, and in that little masterpiece, 
 Thrawn Janet. When Mr. Stevenson ventures 
 thus boldly into the region of the supernatural, 
 Hawthorne rather than Scott, I should fancy, is 
 his master ; and indeed he could have no better 
 guide. No writer known to me uses the super- 
 natural with so fine a tact as Hawthorne, so just 
 a perception of the part it can be made to play in 
 
THOMAS HARDY AND R. L. STEVENSON 31 
 
 fiction ; in that shadowy borderland between the 
 natural and supernatural he walks with a firm 
 and sure footing. Mr. Stevenson has taken 
 pattern by Hawthorne with the happiest results. 
 
 Mr. Stevenson is sometimes hailed as the 
 successor of Scott. But a careful comparison of 
 their work hardly bears out the resemblance. 
 On the one hand, Mr. Stevenson has not the 
 great master's wonderful richness, variety, and 
 inexhaustible fertility ; his inventive genius is of 
 a lower order, his romance of a commoner quality. 
 On the other hand, Scott was an inveterate sloven, 
 and his incredible carelessness grievously impairs 
 the artistic quality of his work. Scott, in short, 
 was a great novelist; Mr. Stevenson is an ex- 
 quisite artist. The rich and lavish prodigality 
 of Scott is quite foreign to Mr. Stevenson's nature ; 
 but in all that concerns the technique of his art, in 
 style, in symmetry, in the sense of proportion, he 
 is immeasurably Scott's superior. 
 
 One word in conclusion. There are those 
 among us who profess a fine contempt for all 
 that is being done by writers who have the mis- 
 fortune not yet to be dead. And perhaps to all 
 of us there come times when we fancy we could 
 be richly content with the goodly heritage of the 
 past, and content to let the stream of contem- 
 porary literature flow by us unheeded. But 
 
32 REALISM AND ROMANCE 
 
 surely this is a shallow view to take in the face 
 of work so strong and powerful as Mr. Hardy's, 
 so delicate and exquisite as Mr. Stevenson's. I 
 cannot think that when Time has done his 
 winnowing and sifting work, we shall feel reason 
 to be ashamed of having sat under the green- 
 wood tree with Mr. Hardy, of having voyaged 
 with Mr. Stevenson in search of Treasure Island. 
 And from another point of view, the thought is 
 an inspiring one, that these ' realms of gold ' are 
 indeed boundless, that Art has still its unexplored 
 regions, its undiscovered countries, and that to 
 find a New World there needs only a new 
 Columbus. 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE i 
 ' Nitor in adversum ' ^ 
 
 Among English statesmen, Edmund Burke holds 
 a unique place. The figure of Chatham is a 
 more dazzling and imposing one than that of 
 Burke; his eloquence burns with a finer and 
 brighter flame ; the few ringing phrases of his 
 astounding oratory which have descended to us 
 still seem, after the lapse of more than a century, 
 to thrill our senses as Burke's rarely does. To 
 the younger Pitt, again, there belongs the prestige 
 of those long years during which he held the post 
 of First Minister, and guided with a masterly 
 hand the ship of state. Burke held office for but 
 a few months, and then in a subordinate situation. 
 On the other hand, he stands in contrast to purely 
 speculative writers on politics, such as Locke ; for 
 although he never attained to high official rank, 
 he was, during the greater part of his life, in the 
 
 ^ Lord Rector's Prize Essay, Edinburgh University, 1894. 
 2 ' " Nitor in adversum " is the motto for a man like me.' — 
 Burke's ZeUer to a Noble Lord. 
 
34 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 very thick of the parliamentary fight, and from 
 him his party took its ideas and drew its in- 
 spiration. Burke's peculiarity is that he com- 
 bined with the minutest knowledge of what may 
 be called the technique of politics a greater reach 
 of mind, a speculative grasp, firmer and surer 
 than that possessed by any other writer so 
 absorbed as he was in actual political warfare. 
 The union of these qualities is, indeed, rare. One 
 of the acutest and most brilliant of critics — the 
 late Walter Bagehot — once remarked of political 
 economy that the theory of business leads a life 
 of obstruction because the theorists do not see 
 the business, and the men of business will not 
 reason out the theories ; and this excellent dictum 
 is capable of a wider application to the whole 
 field of politics. The men of detail and routine 
 are often singularly incapable of taking a broad 
 and philosophic view of things. I mmersed in detail 
 and routine, they have neither time nor aptitude 
 for ascending to first principles ; — in the popular 
 phrase, they cannot see the wood for the trees. On 
 the other hand, the philosophers who are philoso- 
 phers only, who contemplate politics from an ideal 
 altitude, are hampered by their lack of knowledge 
 of the actual conditions of political life; in 
 Burke's striking phrase, they do not know the 
 map of the country ; and so their work, excellent 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 35 
 
 and suggestive as it sometimes is, remains, and 
 must remain, rather vague and nebulous, too 
 much ' in the air,' academic and unpractical. It 
 would be unjust to call the younger Pitt a man 
 of detail and routine, yet it has been remarked 
 that in his case remarkable administrative powers 
 went hand in hand with a singular poverty of 
 original thought ; while his great rival Fox was 
 even ostentatiously ignorant of some of the rudi- 
 ments of political science. In Burke alone is 
 the union of the philosopher and the practical 
 politician complete. 
 
 This, however, is only one of the contrasts 
 which meet us in the intellect of Burke. When 
 we are told that a man is a philosopher, we natur- 
 ally open his books, expecting to find in them 
 a philosophic calm, an equable serenity. But 
 Burke is an enthusiast as well as a philosopher ; 
 in M. Taine's words, 'To all those powers of 
 mind which constitute a man of system he added 
 all those energies of heart which constitute an 
 enthusiast.'^ What strikes one in him is that 
 the singular caution of his reasoning, with its firm 
 root in concrete facts, is united with an almost 
 unexampled fervour in exposition. In hardly 
 any other writer do we find this union of the 
 declamatory powers of the orator with the specu- 
 
 ' History of English Literature, Book in. ch. iii. 
 
36 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 lative powers of the philosopher. Light and heat 
 do not usually go together. 
 
 Mr. Buckle has called attention to a third 
 contrast in Burke's intellectual constitution. 
 What appears to him most remarkable in Burke's 
 method is the 'singular sobriety with which he 
 employed his extraordinary acquirements. Dur- 
 ing the best part of his life, his political principles, 
 so far from being speculative, were altogether 
 practical. This is particularly striking because 
 he had every temptation to adopt an opposite 
 course. He possessed materials for generalisa- 
 tion far more ample than any politician of his 
 time, and he had a mind eminently prone to take 
 large views. On many occasions, and indeed 
 whenever an opportunity offered, he showed his 
 capacity as an original and speculative thinker. 
 But the moment he set foot on political ground 
 he changed his method. . . . We had no doubt 
 other statesmen before him who denied the 
 validity of general principles in politics ; but 
 their denial was only the happy guess of ignor- 
 ance, and they rejected theories which they had 
 never taken the pains to study. Burke rejected 
 them because he knew them.' Every careful 
 student of Burke must recognise the truth of this 
 characterisation ; and it is most important to put 
 it prominently forward, for it is hardly too much 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 37 
 
 to say that it supplies the key to the essential 
 unity of Burke's action in the great problems 
 which engaged his attention. In his very first 
 political publication, we find him avowing his 
 contempt for abstract logic as applied to politics ; 
 and his hatred of the French Revolution sprang 
 largely from the fact that it was an attempt to 
 realise in practice a system of politics based on 
 that abstract method of reasoning which he de- 
 spised and distrusted. 
 
 With endowments so various and so splendid, 
 one need not wonder that Burke impressed him- 
 self on his contemporaries as the first man of his 
 time, or that his praises should since have been 
 sung by critic after critic. The verdict of con- 
 temporaries is often set aside with disdain by 
 their successors. But Burke's fame has known 
 no ebb. Men agreeing in nothing else, some of 
 them differing widely from him, have joined in 
 eulogising Burke. Johnson, Hazlitt, Wordsworth, 
 Coleridge, Buckle, Arnold, Morley have, each in 
 his own way, given to Burke the tribute of a 
 generous admiration. The fastidious taste of 
 Arnold one might have expected to be repelled 
 by the vehemence of Burke, and by his Asiatic 
 diction ; but the apostle of ' sweetness and light ' 
 is conquered by him, edits him, and strives to 
 increase his audience. Burke's last years were 
 
38 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 spent in a gigantic struggle with the French 
 Revolution: to Mr. John Morley, one of the 
 most brilliant apologists for that Revolution, we 
 owe the ablest and most sympathetic study of 
 Burke. A verdict so unanimous from a jury 
 so unexceptionable can hardly, one thinks, be 
 cavilled against ; and Burke's place among the 
 Immortals seems already assured. 
 
 The characteristics of Burke's oratory have 
 been so often described that it seems hopeless 
 to add anything new on the subject. But after 
 all, nothing so pregnant has been said of it as 
 the illuminating phrase of Goldsmith. ' He 
 winds,' said Goldsmith, 'into his subject like a 
 serpent.' This describes with a vivid exactness 
 the peculiar character of Burke's oratory, that 
 circuitous method of approach which produces 
 on the unthinking hearer the impression that 
 Burke is going out of his way, that he will never 
 reach his goal, and so he betakes himself to 
 dinner. Indeed nothing more unsuited for a 
 popular audience can well be conceived than 
 Burke's style of oratory. Eloquent commonplace, 
 the quick cut-and-thrust of party invective, smart 
 personalities, speech going straight to its mark 
 like an arrow — these are what the average 
 politician, with his eye on the division lobby, 
 hungers after. What was he to make of an 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 39 
 
 orator to whom politics was not a game, and the 
 House of Commons something other than the 
 •best club in England'? The squires and 
 merchants who surrounded Burke solved the 
 problem in their own way, and went to sleep 
 or to dinner when the greatest genius of his time 
 rose to his feet. The profundity of his thought, 
 the copiousness of his diction, his passion and 
 want of measure, his highly ornate style, simply 
 wearied and perplexed his hearers. It appears, 
 too, that he had no external advantages, that his 
 voice was harsh and unmusical, his figure un- 
 couth, his gestures clumsy and awkward. The 
 whirligig of Time, however, brings in its revenges, 
 and the speeches which were listened to with 
 hardly concealed impatience now rank among 
 the masterpieces of English literature, and are 
 found to be positively the only specimens of 
 Parliamentary oratory which may be studied with 
 profit and delight. 
 
 Burke, however, is not only an orator ; he is a 
 writer of surpassing merit. But there is astonish- 
 ingly little difference between the style of his 
 oratory and that of his writings ; his pamphlets 
 might almost pass for speeches, his speeches for 
 pamphlets, which is, perhaps, as much as to say 
 that he has hardly caught the right tone for either. 
 He ranks among the masters of English prose ; 
 
40 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 some critics would even accord him the very 
 highest place. Dryden is said to have been his 
 model, and one can readily believe that with his 
 fine and just sense in literary matters Burke 
 would have a high regard for the writer of the 
 most business-like prose which English literature 
 can show till we come to Addison and Swift. 
 But, in truth, the resemblance between Dryden 
 and Burke is hardly apparent even to the most 
 careful and critical research. Dryden's prose has 
 the easy grace, the indefinable charm, of cultured 
 conversation ; from affectation and artifice it is 
 absolutely free. Compared with Dryden, Burke 
 is mechanical and artificial. His merits are quite 
 different from those of Glorious John. He comes 
 far closer to Jeremy Taylor and the Milton of 
 the Areopa^tica— those masters of flushed and 
 magnificent rhetoric — than to writers of the con- 
 versational order of prose, like Dryden and 
 Addison. Amplitude and splendour, pomp of 
 diction, sonorousness, solidity, massiveness — these 
 are the epithets that rise to our lips as we read 
 his pages. To those imbued with the classic 
 spirit, loving that 'comely order' which Mr. 
 Pater 1 has defined as the note of the classic 
 temper, Burke's effects must appear violent, 
 
 ' Appreciatiotis : Essay on the Terms ' Classical ' and ' Ro- 
 mantic.'' 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 41 
 
 exaggerated, sometimes grotesque. The charm 
 which the classic writers never fail to throw round 
 their subjects one misses in Burke ; his taste, also, 
 one need scarcely say, was far from faultless. 
 He paints with strong, sometimes even glaring, 
 colours, on an immense canvas. But if his style 
 sometimes suffers from over-ornamentation, at 
 least the jewels are real and massive, not tinsel 
 and pasteboard. One can readily understand 
 why, to the French taste, he should appear an 
 eloquent barbarian — like Shakespeare.^ Alert- 
 ness, vivacity, lucidity, charm, sparkle — these are 
 what the French ask for, and Burke has not these 
 to give. It is true that he usually sets out with a 
 great show of order and rigour. But the stream 
 of his thought is too full to be restrained within 
 artificial barriers ; soon it overflows its banks, 
 and the flood breaks forth, grand and imposing, 
 indeed, but troubled and turbid, not clear, and 
 pure and sparkling. The evolution of his sen- 
 tences is occasionally rather slow and cumbrous ; 
 and the majestic harmony of rhythm and cadence 
 with which the prose of the very greatest masters 
 falls on our ears we rarely hear from him. But it 
 would be absurd to apply to Burke the rules and 
 tests of the literary purist. The heated atmosphere 
 
 ^ M. Taine gives to Burke hardly one-quarter of the space he 
 devotes to Macaulay. 
 
42 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 of politics is not favourable to the cultivation of 
 the literary graces. And Burke's prose, despite 
 its somewhat slow-footed movement, its want of 
 modulation, has an amazing richness and an un- 
 flagging energy. One might almost say that the 
 raw material of poetry lies in his writings ; by 
 his dazzling succession of images, his profusion of 
 metaphor, Burke almost touches poetry, although 
 he had not, one feels, the finely attuned ear of 
 the born poet. He has the enthusiasm of the 
 poet also ; and his intellectual strenuousness and 
 sincerity set him very far apart from the mere 
 exquisites of literature, from those who do not 
 greatly care what they say, so that it be well and 
 tunefully said. 
 
 Johnson thought meanly of Burke's humour, 
 and most critics will agree with the sage of Bolt 
 Court. It is undeniable that the great orator 
 lacked the light and deft touch of the born humor- 
 ist. If it be true, as Edmond Sch^rer has con- 
 tended,^ that the typical humorist is a man of a 
 rather sceptical bias, who sits at his ease in the 
 stalls of the theatre of life, then we have an easy 
 explanation of Burke's lack of humour. For, in 
 truth, his temperament was just the reverse of 
 this. His nature was ardent, vehement, impetu- 
 
 ^ Atttdes critiqttes sur la Littirature contemporaine, t. vi. : 
 Laurence Sterne. 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 43 
 
 ous : he took life and its issues with an habitual 
 seriousness. His style, rich, weighty, massive, 
 does not lend itself to the archness, the grace, 
 the natveti of which such writers as Sterne and 
 Goldsmith possess the secret. But if his want 
 of humour must be counted to him as a defect, 
 it is a defect which he shares with two of the 
 master names of English literature — with Milton 
 and with Wordsworth. With Milton, indeed, 
 Burke has many qualities in common. We mark 
 in both the same indomitable spirit which shrank 
 from no labour and feared not the face of man, 
 the same profound self-respect, the same magna- 
 nimous egotism (if one may use the phrase), even 
 the same little asperities of temper, although to 
 Burke's credit one must add that in the main he 
 is free from the scurrility and coarseness which 
 shock us in the prose writings of one so enamoured 
 of ideal beauty as the author of Comus and Paradise 
 Lost. 
 
 We must not then claim for Burke that he was 
 a humorist. Mr. Morley has also denied that he 
 possessed true pathos. One feels more difficulty 
 in granting this, for one remembers — who, indeed, 
 that reads it can forget ? — that immortal passage 
 in the Letter to a Noble Lord in which Burke 
 deplores the death of his son. Grief never found 
 a nobler expression than this ; in the rolling and 
 
44 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 solemn diction one seems to hear the ' large utter- 
 ance of the early gods.' Yet it must be admitted 
 that we do not find in Burke that sweet, natural, 
 and winning pathos which wells up so freely and 
 spontaneously in Shakespeare. His power is 
 tragic rather than properly pathetic. The ex- 
 quisite scene in which Desdemona sings the 
 willow-song one can scarcely read without a catch 
 in the voice and a strange sensation in the throat. 
 But when the end comes, and Othello dies by 
 his own hand, who does not feel that tears were 
 merely an impertinence ? We may apply this to 
 Burke, and say that if such passages as that 
 referred to are not properly to be described as 
 pathetic, it is because in them Burke is on that 
 higher plane where pathos is, as it were, swallowed 
 up and transcended by tragedy. 
 
 Burke commenced author (to use an eighteenth- 
 century phrase) with a brilliant and audacious 
 parody of Bolingbroke.^ In the eyes of his con- 
 temporaries Bolingbroke filled a place for which 
 we now find it somewhat hard to account. Of that 
 brilliant and nervous eloquence which secured him 
 the title of the English Alcibiades no fragment 
 now remains ; we can form our judgment of it 
 only from his published writings. Even the facts 
 that he fills a niche in Thackeray's most perfect 
 
 ^A Vindication of Natural Society, 1756. 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 45 
 
 novel, and that Mr. Churton Collins has given 
 to the world a brilliant and highly finished study 
 of his career, have scarcely sufficed to keep his 
 fame alive. With many admirable talents he 
 lacked solidity and character. At heart a sceptic, 
 he was the idol of the High Church party and the 
 strenuous promoter of severe repressive measures 
 against the Dissenters. After his intrigues with 
 the Pretender had shattered his party and shut 
 him out from the rdh of an English statesman, 
 he found consolation in playing at being a philo- 
 sopher. He became the ' guide, philosopher, and 
 friend ' of Pope, and to him the credit — such as 
 it is — of the plan and ideas of the Essay on Man 
 belongs. His heterodox opinions in religion were 
 concealed until the posthumous publication of 
 his works under the superintendence of David 
 Mallet. They came as a shock to most of his 
 admirers, and Johnson may be assumed to have 
 voiced the feelings of orthodoxy when, in his full- 
 mouthed style, he denounced Bolingbroke as a 
 scoundrel and a coward — a scoundrel for having 
 held such views, and a coward for having dis- 
 sembled them. 
 
 Burke's design, as he found it necessary to ex- 
 plain, was to show that the blunderbuss which, 
 according to Johnson, Bolingbroke had aimed at 
 religion, could be as effectively directed against 
 
46 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 the whole structure of civil society. To revealed 
 religion Bolingbroke had opposed what it was 
 then fashionable to call ' natural ' religion. Burke 
 in the same way contrasts artificial with natural 
 society. The passages full of a sombre and dark- 
 hued eloquence in which he paints the miseries 
 of wars of conquest would win the approval of 
 a member of the Peace Society ; his description 
 of the tyranny everywhere exercised over men, 
 whether under the form of absolute monarchy, 
 aristocracy, or democracy, would have called a 
 smile of sardonic approval to the lips of the 
 author of Gullivet's Travels. The ' law's delays ' 
 have been the frequent theme of the satirist, but 
 never have they been better handled than by 
 Burke. The fatiguing and degrading toil to 
 which the great mass of human beings are every- 
 where condemned is pictured with a vividness 
 and a concentrated power which Karl Marx him- 
 self might have envied. And all these evils 
 sprang from the institution of artificial society, 
 for what were wars and laws and forms of govern- 
 ment but its creatures? The conclusion was 
 obvious. If the errors and crimes of the advocate 
 of revealed religion constituted a reason for ab- 
 juring their faith, the same inexorable logic called 
 upon men to destroy that artificial society which 
 had brought such misery and ruin on their heads, 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 47 
 
 and return to a state of nature. ' Show me,' cried 
 Burke, ' any mischief produced by the madness or 
 wickedness of theologians, and I will show you an 
 hundred resulting from the ambition and villainy 
 of conquerors and statesmen. Show me an ab- 
 surdity in religion, and I will undertake to show 
 you an hundred for one in political laws and institu- 
 tions. ... If, after all, you should confess these 
 , things, yet plead the necessity of political institu- 
 tions, weak and wicked as they are, I can argue 
 with equal, perhaps superior force, concerning the 
 necessity of artificial religion ; and every step you 
 advance in your argument you add a strength to 
 mine. So that if we are resolved to submit our 
 reason and our liberty to civil usurpation, we 
 have nothing to do but to conform as quietly as 
 we can to the vulgar notions which are connected 
 with this, and take up the theology of the vulgar 
 along with their politics.' 
 
 The fate of the Vindication was extremely 
 curious. The book was justly regarded as an 
 astonishing tour de force. But the subtlety and 
 dexterity of its line of argument were not at first 
 recognised, although the drift of the passage cited 
 might seem obvious enough. Even scholars and 
 men of the world like Chesterfield and Warburton 
 were imposed upon ; they thought that the hand 
 was really Bolingbroke's, and that the erratic 
 
48 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 statesman, after doing his worst on religion, had 
 attempted a still more daring and deadly assault 
 on civil society. When the author of a satire 
 finds it necessary to explain that he was not 
 serious, he must be assumed to have missed his 
 mark. Irony, it would seem, is a dangerous 
 weapon for a publicist to handle, as Defoe had 
 experienced when he found in the pillory the 
 answer to his Short Way with the Dissenters} It 
 is perhaps not altogether fanciful to see in the 
 fate of Burke's maiden effort an illustration of 
 his want of tact, of that tendency to go over the 
 heads of his audience of which even nearly thirty 
 years' experience of the House of Commons did 
 not cure him. The publicist who is not merely 
 studious of artistic form, but who wishes to pro- 
 duce a practical effect, must never allow himself 
 to forget the ' average man '; Burke, on the other 
 hand, constantly wrote and spoke as if the 
 average man did not exist. If he was too subtle 
 even for Chesterfield and Warburton, what could 
 the crowd be expected to make of him ? 
 
 For the reader who sits down to-day to the 
 
 ' Another illustration from the case of a contemporary states- 
 man may be pardoned. Probably nine out of every ten men 
 think that Mr. Balfour's Philosophic Doubt is a sceptical work. 
 They would be astonished if they were told that Mr. Balfour's 
 'philosophic doubts' concern, not the credibility of religion, but 
 the ' oppositions of science.' 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 49 
 
 Vindication, perhaps its chief interest lies in the 
 piquant contrast which it presents to the whole 
 spirit and tenor of Burke's profoundest beliefs. 
 To take only one example : let us put alongside 
 of each other the lively and spirited remonstrance 
 which he addresses to the 'high priests of the 
 temple of justice,' and the noble eulogy of the 
 law in his Speech on American Taxation (1774). 
 ' I am innocent, gentlemen, of the darkness and 
 uncertainty of your science. / never darkened it 
 with confused notions, nor confounded it with 
 chicane and sophistry. You have excluded me 
 from any share in the conduct of my cause ; the 
 science was too deep for me ; I acknowledged it ; 
 but it was too deep even for yourselves ; you have 
 made the way so intricate that you are yourselves 
 lost in it ; you err, and you punish me for your 
 errors.' Now let us turn to the passage in which 
 he declares that ' the law is in my opinion one of 
 the first and noblest of human sciences, a science 
 which does more to quicken and invigorate the 
 human understanding than all the other kinds of 
 learning put together.' 
 
 From another point of view, also, the Vindica- 
 tion is highly interesting to the student of Burke's 
 intellectual processes. It proves his sensitiveness 
 to the atmosphere of the time ; it shows that his 
 quick and vigilant eye had thus early detected the 
 
 D 
 
so THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 ultimate outcome of the loose rein now given to 
 speculation on the bases of religion. He saw 
 that men who would not quietly accept the faith of 
 their fathers because it was the faith of their fathers 
 would not be content to stop there ; that they 
 would soon proceed to call upon civil society also 
 to produce its credentials and justify its existence 
 to the logical reason. That his foresight was 
 accurate is sufficiently proved by the fact that 
 men like Rousseau and Godwin accepted as 
 axioms what was to Burke a reductio ad absur- 
 dum. It would have been one of the strangest 
 phenomena in the history of human thought had 
 his book contributed to help forward the move- 
 ment which he was to expend the last years of 
 his life in combating with an almost unparalleled 
 vehemence and pertinacity. How near it came 
 to this one may guess from the fact that Godwin 
 held that Burke had in the Vindication really 
 proved what he intended to prove ironically. 
 One certainly takes a very different impression 
 from the Vindication than from the Reflections on 
 the French Revolution. But the legitimate infer- 
 ence is, not that Burke was inconsistent, but that 
 his preference for the old order of things sprang 
 from no shallow or unthinking optimism. If he 
 held that Society, constituted even as French 
 society was before the Revolution, was a great 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 5 1 
 
 blessing, he was not, therefore, blind to its defects 
 and its evils. It was his profound belief that 
 these were in the nature of things, that the good 
 immeasurably outweighed the evil, that what was 
 proposed in its place was but the ' airy fabric of a 
 vision,' spun out of the delusive theories of the 
 ' young men who see visions and the old men who 
 dream dreams.! 
 
 In the same year as the Vindication (1756), 
 appeared the well-known treatise on the Sublime 
 and Beautiful. The book is one of that class of 
 works 'without which no gentleman's library is 
 complete ' — books, that is, of which every one has 
 heard, but into which few nowadays think of 
 looking. The reasons for the comparative neglect 
 into which a performance so vigorous and striking 
 has fallen are not far to seek. Here, more than 
 anywhere else in Burke, we feel the cold and 
 sharp air of the eighteenth century — the critical 
 century /«?' excellence, the age of prose and reason. 
 The book, with its air of scientific thoroughness, 
 its close and careful analysis of those qualities 
 and objects which rouse in us the sense of the 
 sublime and the beautiful, fell in with the taste of 
 the time ; but such speculations have now gone 
 sadly out of fashion. We feel that it is out of 
 place to carry into a thing so soft, fluid, and 
 many-hued as literature the rigorous logic which 
 
52 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 is appropriate and necessary in the severer 
 sciences. Like Addison's Essay on the Imagina- 
 tion, like his more celebrated criticism of Paradise 
 Lost, the whole performance strikes a modern 
 reader as rather arid and frigid. Burke often 
 awakens a sense of the sublime ; never less so 
 than in the treatise which goes by that name. 
 Artistic and aesthetic criticism has, in this country 
 at least, gone on widely different lines from those 
 laid down by Burke ; it has laid aside its severely 
 philosophic dress, and sought to charm rather 
 than to convince. And in its method it may be 
 said to have adopted the very system which 
 Burke explicitly condemns. 'One signal merit/ 
 says Mr. Morley, 'remains to the Inquiry. It 
 was a vigorous enlargement of the principle, 
 which Addison had not long before timidly illus- 
 trated, that critics of art seek its principles in the 
 wrong place so long as they limit their search to 
 poems, pictures, engravings, statues, and build- 
 ings, instead of first arranging the sentiments and 
 faculties in man to which art makes its appeal.' 
 The advocacy of this system may be a 'signal 
 merit,' but the method of modern criticism has 
 been quite the reverse ; it has sought — and surely 
 not altogether unsuccessfully — to draw the rules 
 of art from a reverent study of the masters of 
 golden speech, the masterpieces of antique art. 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 53 
 
 In Germany, however, Burke's influence has 
 been more apparent. His book, on its first 
 appearance, had the good fortune to attract the 
 attention of a mind at once so receptive and so 
 original as that of Lessing, and that author, then 
 meditating the Laocodn, a work which makes an 
 epoch in criticism, set about translating and anno- 
 tating Burke's Inquiry. It is also said to have 
 interested and stimulated Kant. And, indeed, the 
 Inquiry is admirably suited to the German mind, 
 with its love of scientific precision and thorough- 
 ness, its passion for classification, for reducing 
 everything to rule and system. We may conceive 
 the delight with which a German logician would 
 read the admirably reasoned passages in which 
 Burke proves, with perhaps a superfluity of illus- 
 tration, that beauty has no necessary connection 
 with proportion or utility. He might at tl;ie same 
 time quarrel with Burke's rather arbitrary use 
 of certain terms, as when he speaks of delight 
 as a neutral sort of feeling, whereas in common 
 parlance delight is a livelier form of pleasure, 
 or again when he calls awe and reverence sub- 
 ordinate degrees of astonishment. 
 
 But when all possible deductions are made, it 
 must be granted that the Inquiry bears the 
 impress of a powerful and vigorous mind. And 
 it must be remembered that it was written at an 
 
54 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 age when most men, if their thoughts turn to 
 literature at all, are writing love-poems or idle 
 tales. It is characteristic of Burke's intellectual 
 strenuousness, that even in what we may term 
 his relaxations he exhibits the same grave 
 sincerity, the same anxiety to penetrate beneath 
 the superficial show of things to their inner and 
 vital spirit, which were to mark his writings on 
 subjects which the practical world considers as of 
 more importance ; that he should throw himself 
 into the discussion of the principles of art with 
 something of the same ardour as he brought to 
 the study of the means by which great empires 
 are built up and held together. To the merely 
 literary student Burke's treatise is interesting as 
 showing his preferences in poetry. It is signifi- 
 cant of his taste that most of his quotations 
 should be drawn from Milton ; doubly significant 
 when we remember that Pope and the polished 
 school were then at the zenith of their fame. It 
 would be wrong to rank the book among Burke's 
 best efforts, but it is of high value as one of the 
 many proofs of the catholicity of his intellectual 
 interests. In the preface, he asks characteris- 
 tically, ' What subject does not branch out 
 to infinity ? It is precisely in awakening this 
 sense of spaciousness, in opening wide vistas 
 of speculations before our eyes, that a great 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 55 
 
 part of Burke's enduring power over our minds 
 resides. 
 
 The two books which have been passed in 
 review gave Burke a high place in the republic of 
 letters. Horace Walpole tells us of his having 
 met, in 1761, 'a young Mr, Burke, who wrote a 
 book in the style of Lord Bolingbroke, which is 
 much admired. He is a sensible man, but has 
 not worn off his authorism yet, and thinks there 
 is nothing so charming as writers, and to be one. 
 He will know better one of these days.' To the 
 last, Burke retained a keen interest in the belles- 
 lettres, but he soon discovered that his true bent 
 was towards politics. In 1765 he became private 
 secretary to Lord Rockingham, and in the same 
 year he entered Parliament. He had now come 
 into his kingdom ; he had found his true sphere. 
 He brought to his task a full, indeed an over- 
 flowing mind ; as he proudly says of himself 
 {Letter to a Noble Lord), he did not go into 
 Parliament to con his lesson. His speeches on 
 the Stamp Act at once drew the eyes of the town 
 to him. They elicited a compliment from Pitt, 
 still the Great Commoner, and Johnson wrote 
 exultingly to Langton that Burke had gained 
 more reputation than perhaps any man had gained 
 by his first appearance before. Burke, however, 
 was to labour for his party by his pen as well as 
 
56 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 by his oratory, and four years after his entry 
 into Parliament he gave the world the first taste 
 of his quality as a political pamphleteer. His 
 Observations on the Present State of the Nation 
 is usually passed by with scantier notice than the 
 striking merit of the pamphlet seems to demand. 
 It is, first of all, a magnificent piece of polemics, 
 and the Whigs who followed the lead of Lord 
 Rockingham must more than ever have con- 
 gratulated themselves on the accession of Burke 
 to their ranks. The pamphlet to which Burke's 
 was a reply was the production of George Gren- 
 ville, then considered the foremost authority 
 among English statesmen on matters of finance 
 and commerce.^ Burke was, however, more than 
 a match for him on his own ground, and he over- 
 whelms him both with facts and with grave and 
 weighty irony. On several grounds the pamphlet 
 is remarkable. It contains the germ of Burke's 
 great speeches on the American question. In it 
 he predicts thus early a convulsion in France 
 from the deplorable condition of her finances, in 
 opposition to Grenville, who had laboured to 
 prove that they were in a much sounder condition 
 than those of England. Here, too, we come for 
 the first time upon a clear and definite statement 
 
 1 Johnson's exquisite, but rather unjust, sarcasm on Grenville, 
 is worth quoting : ' He had powers not universally possessed : 
 could he have enforced payment of the Manilla ransom, he could 
 have counted it. ' 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE $7 
 
 of that doctrine to which Burke held fast through 
 the whole of his life — the doctrine that in politics 
 expediency, conceived in no ignoble sense, is the 
 highest wisdom, and that in this sphere abstract 
 reasoning is likely only to dazzle and to mislead. 
 ' Politics,' he maintains, ' ought to be adjusted, 
 not to human reasonings, but to human nature ; 
 of which reason is but a part, and by no means 
 the greater part' 'Men of sense, when new 
 projects come before them, always think a 
 discourse proving the mere right or the mere 
 power of acting in the manner proposed to 
 be no more than a very unpleasant way of 
 misspending time. They must see the object to 
 be of proper magnitude to engage them ; they 
 must see the means of compassing it to be next 
 to certain ; the mischiefs not to counterbalance 
 the profits ; they will examine how a proposed 
 imposition or regulation agrees with the opinion 
 of those who are likely to be affected by it; 
 they will not despise the consideration even 
 of their habitudes or prejudices. . . . They well 
 know that an attempt towards a compulsory 
 equality in all circumstances, and an exact defini- 
 tion of the supreme rights in every case, is the 
 most dangerous and chimerical of all enterprises. 
 The old building stands well enough, though 
 part Gothic, part Grecian, part Chinese, until 
 an attempt is made to square it into uniformity. 
 
58 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 Then it may come down upon our heads alto- 
 gether in much uniformity of ruin; and great 
 will be the fall thereof.' The passage just quoted 
 bore special reference to the schemes for taxing 
 America. When Burke severed himself from 
 his party on the French Revolution, he was 
 charged with apostasy from the principles which 
 he had till then professed. To this charge it 
 is surely sufficient to answer that the passage 
 cited above, and which is only one of a hundred 
 which might be brought forward, is in exact 
 accordance with the principles on which he con- 
 demned the French Revolution. The circum- 
 stances have changed, but the principles remain 
 the same, and whole passages might be trans- 
 ferred from the Observations of 1769 to the Re- 
 flections of 1790 without shocking any one with 
 the slightest sense of incongruity. In truth, the 
 charge of inconsistency is almost ludicrously in- 
 applicable to Burke ; it may safely be asserted 
 that the life of no public man was more uniform 
 in texture, more of a piece, than that of the sub- 
 ject of this sketch. Strip him of this, as he 
 proudly said, and you leave him naked indeed.^ 
 
 The Thoughts on the Present Discontents, which 
 followed in rapid succession (1770), has been 
 ranked by some critics first among Burke's works 
 ' Appeal from the New to the Old tVAigs. 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 59 
 
 in point of style. It was a bold book, being in 
 essence nothing less than an impeachment of 
 the King ; and although respectful in tone, it is 
 in reality far more deadly, because more measured 
 and better reasoned, than the smart invective, 
 the epigrammatic terseness and point, of Junius. 
 It is directed against what Burke considered a 
 dangerous and insidious attempt to divorce the 
 Ministry from the House of Commons by a 
 system of double cabinets, and to increase the 
 power of the Crown, no longer by the open use 
 of prerogative, but by the secret employment 
 of a corrupt influence. It seems clear that Burke's 
 description of the means adopted to carry out 
 this plan was, to some extent at least, elaborated 
 out of his inner consciousness. Mr. Morley 
 describes it as a ' structure of artificial rhetoric,' 
 and Mr. Lecky^ thinks it probable that Burke 
 considerably exaggerated the systematic and 
 elaborate character of the plan that was adopted. 
 In order, however, to appreciate the Thoughts, a 
 short historical retrospect is necessary. 
 
 George III. had come to the throne deter- 
 mined to be something more than a mere orna- 
 mental figurehead. To this design the great 
 obstacle was that system of homogeneous admini- 
 strations which had been the natural result of 
 1 History of the Eighteenth Century, vol. iii. ch. x. 
 
6o THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 the gradual transference of the seat of authority 
 from the Crown to the House of Commons. 
 That system was not of long standing, and 
 indeed its growth may be described as the result 
 of a happy series of accidents. Under the 
 Tudors and the Stuarts the Ministers were not 
 considered as mutually responsible for the acts of 
 the whole body ; each was looked upon as the 
 personal servant of the sovereign, and responsible 
 only for his own department. The Revolution 
 of 1789 brought about a profound and far-reach- 
 ing change. In foreign affairs, indeed, William 
 exercised a dominant influence ; but in home 
 politics his foreign origin, the instability of his 
 throne, his lack of knowledge of the conditions 
 of English public life, his desire to conciliate 
 those to whom he owed his crown, and his 
 absorption in the mighty confederation against 
 Louis XIV., of which he was the life and soul, 
 all conspired to make him leave the chief direc- 
 tion of affairs in the hands of the able Ministers 
 whom he gathered around him. It was not, 
 however, till the reign of the first two Georges 
 that parliamentary government, directed by a 
 homogeneous Ministry, with a Prime Minister 
 at its head, began to settle down into some- 
 thing like its present form. George i. and 
 George II. were foreigners like William, but they 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 6l 
 
 had not his strength of character, and they were 
 even more ignorant than he of the manners and 
 customs of English life. By the very necessity 
 of the case, by the instinct of self-preservation, 
 they were restricted in their choice of Ministers 
 to one political party. The whole Tory party 
 lay under the suspicion of being tainted with 
 Jacobitism ; and so long as any danger existed 
 from the Pretender, it was impossible to intrust 
 them with any of the chief posts of state. On 
 the death of Anne their chiefs had intrigued for 
 the restoration of the Stuarts ; and when the 
 prompt and resolute action of the Whig lords 
 had defeated their designs, Bolingbroke fled into 
 exile, took service under the Pretender, and vainly 
 tried to instil some of his own daring energy into 
 the feeble and flaccid counsels of that unhappy 
 prince. The inevitable result had been to 
 alienate the Crown from its natural supporters, 
 the Tory party, to throw the new monarch into 
 the hands of the great Whig oligarchy, and thus 
 to perpetuate and fix the character impressed 
 on the constitution by the Revolution. And 
 in Walpole the Whigs found a leader who was 
 resolved to be, in a sense in which no previous 
 minister had been, first Minister of the Crown, 
 and who would brook no insubordination among 
 the members of his administration. It was 
 
62 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 Walpole's long ascendency which gave our parlia- 
 mentary system its present form, and he is 
 perhaps the first minister in whom a Premier of 
 to-day would recognise his prototype. Against 
 that ascendency Bolingbroke waged a bitter but 
 unavailing warfare. He had been permitted to 
 return to England, but his seat in the Lords was 
 not restored, and he was shut out from the House 
 which had so often resounded with his brilliant 
 eloquence. He turned to the press, but his bril- 
 liant diatribes in the Craftsman availed little to 
 shake the power of a minister who had the Crown, 
 the Whig oligarchy, and the whole commercial 
 interest of the country on his side, and even 
 the insensate outcry against the Excise Bill — 
 the one great measure which broke the torpor 
 of an administration almost unexampled in our 
 annals for poverty of legislative achievement — 
 only inflicted a temporary check on the prestige 
 of Walpole. It was at last borne in upon 
 Bolingbroke that so long as the Whigs held to- 
 gether and remained in alliance with the Crown 
 there was no hope for the party of which he 
 was the most brilliant ornament. His mind, 
 somewhat shallow and superficial indeed, but 
 amazingly fertile in expedients, conceived a new 
 scheme, and his Patriot King, a book published 
 after his death, became the text-book of those 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 63 
 
 whose fine-spun theories Burke runs full tilt 
 against in his Thoughts on the Present Discontents. 
 The ideal which Bolingbroke set up was, in- 
 deed, a very pleasing one to contemplate; but 
 briefly, it was that of an enlightened and virtuous 
 monarch who, in choosing his Ministers, would 
 look, not at all to political ties, but only to per- 
 sonal character and ability. The prospect was 
 very fascinating to those who saw only the evils 
 and vices of party government ; under such a king, 
 corruption, the mainspring of Walpole's power, as 
 it was unjustly said,^ would cease, and political 
 life would become cleaner and more wholesome. 
 But a deeper analysis showed that the ideal — 
 ' such was their cant ' are Burke's emphatic 
 words in refuting this charge against Walpole — 
 was radically unsound, and that if it could have 
 been realised in practice, it would virtually have 
 reversed the whole course of development since 
 the Revolution. As soon as that great event 
 made Parliament practically supreme in the state, 
 political stability could only be attained by the 
 conduct of public affairs being placed in the 
 hands of a compact body of men, holding the 
 same political principles, and agreed upon a com- 
 mon course of policy ; and this again implied 
 government by party. Parliament was now to 
 
 ^ Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, 
 
64 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 rule; in order that it might do so with any 
 degree of dignity and efficiency, it must have 
 adequate guidance and direction. And how could 
 it obtain such guidance if the Cabinet was a scene 
 of divided counsels and irreconcilable principles, 
 while the sovereign, whose personal ascendency 
 had formerly held administrations together, was 
 deprived of the power and authority which had 
 enabled him to fulfil that function ? 
 
 Clear, however, as this now seems to us in the 
 light of later experience, the trend of events was 
 as yet but dimly discerned, and George III. was 
 able to make a determined, and all but successful, 
 effort to recover the power which the Crown had 
 lost at the Revolution. The circumstances, in- 
 deed, were singularly propitious for his design. 
 All danger from the Pretender had now ceased ; 
 after the '45, indeed, Jacobitism was dead as a 
 fighting force, though it survived as a sentiment, 
 and country squires still drank to the king over 
 the water, but were perfectly content that he 
 should remain there. A great wave of loyalty 
 swept over the country at the accession of George, 
 and when he declared that, born and educated in 
 this country, he gloried in the name of Briton, he 
 struck a responsive chord in the heart of a people 
 in whose national character jealousy of foreigners 
 is a leading feature. The Tories felt that the 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 65 
 
 time had come to emerge from their long retire- 
 ment, and they rallied round the throne of a 
 monarch who was understood to be anxious to 
 throw off the yoke of the Whigs. The first step 
 was to get rid of Pitt ; and the great Commoner, 
 whose splendid services might have secured him 
 against even the proverbial ingratitude of princes, 
 was driven to resign in 1761. Newcastle, con- 
 temptible, indeed, in character and ability, but 
 powerful as the head of the Whig confederacy, 
 soon followed. The war was brought to a close 
 by a peace which brought indeed great gains to 
 England, but gains which many considered as not 
 at all commensurate to the exertions of England, 
 and to the splendid military achievements which 
 had marked its course. The king fixed upon the 
 Earl of Bute — a mere court favourite, with no 
 experience whatever, as the minister who was to 
 inaugurate the new scheme of things. For the 
 end in view the choice was unfortunate. The 
 one thing certainly known of the new minister 
 was that he was a Scotsman,^ and the mass of 
 Englishmen at this time hated the Scots as 
 heartily as Johnson pretended to do. Bute soon 
 found his position untenable, and the king turned 
 to George Grenville, who called himself a Whig, 
 but who was imbued with autocratic principles. 
 
 ' Apparently no disqualification nowadays ! 
 E 
 
66 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 Burke himself has drawn, as only he can draw, the 
 portrait of this statesman.^ Upright, honest, and 
 well-meaning, admirably versed in parliamentary 
 procedure, and with a knowledge of trade and 
 finance then considered unrivalled, he was yet 
 narrow, formal, and pedantic, incapable of taking 
 broad and general views, and deplorably destitute 
 of political tact. In the course of his ill-omened 
 administration he succeeded in sowing the seeds 
 'of the American War, and in setting the whole 
 country in a flame, by the arbitrary and illegal 
 proceedings against Wilkes. But while these 
 measures secured the hearty approval of the king, 
 Grenville's want of tact made him personally dis- 
 pleasing to George. He lectured and dogmatised 
 in the royal audience-chamber, as he lectured and 
 dogmatised in the House of Commons, till George 
 exclaimed in a fit of petulance that he would 
 rather see the devil in his closet than George 
 Grenville. Grenville fell in 1765, and the king 
 was forced to call upon Rockingham to form 
 a Ministry. Rockingham was the friend and 
 munificent patron of Burke, and the section of 
 the Whigs of which he was the nominal head 
 included the most honest body of politicians then 
 in public life. Almost alone they had resisted 
 the disintegrating influences by which the king 
 
 ^ speech on American Taxation (1774). 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 6j 
 
 had contrived to break all political ties. The 
 accession to office of the Rockingham Whigs was 
 a sign that for the time the king's plan had broken 
 down. The new Ministers set themselves to undo 
 much of the evil that had been done by Gren- 
 ville ; they pacified America by the repeal of the 
 Stamp Act, and by a series of liberal measures 
 conciliated popular feeling at home. But a 
 Ministry so distasteful to the king could not last 
 long ; Chatham, whose support might have given 
 it stability, held aloof, and in 1766 the Rocking- 
 ham Whigs were dismissed and Pitt was recalled 
 to office. Despite the obsequious deference which 
 he paid to the king, Pitt was no favourite with 
 George, in whose eyes the great Commoner was 
 merely a trumpet of sedition. In one most 
 essential point, however, he was in hearty accord 
 with his royal master — he shared George's dislike 
 of the system of party government. These views 
 were reflected in the character of the strangely 
 composite and heterogeneous Ministry which he 
 formed, and of which Burke has left us so inimit- 
 able a description.^ He made, says Burke, a piece 
 of joinery so crossly indented and whimsically 
 dovetailed, such a piece of diversified mosaic, such 
 a tesselated pavement without cement, that it was 
 indeed a very curious show, but utterly unsafe to 
 
 1 speech on American Taxation. 
 
68 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 touch and unsure to stand upon. The personal 
 ascendency of Pitt was the one thing that held 
 the Ministry together; but Pitt had hardly grasped 
 the reins of power before he was laid aside by 
 a mysterious illness, which utterly incapacitated 
 him from attending to public business. No sooner 
 had he disappeared from the scene than his col- 
 leagues, under the guidance of the brilliant 
 Townshend, plunged into a series of disastrous 
 conflicts. Chatham had gone further even than 
 Burke and Rockingham in his support of the 
 Americans ; unwarned by the experience of Gren- 
 ville's abortive attempt, Townshend proceeded to 
 impose new import duties on articles entering 
 America. The old struggle against Wilkes was 
 renewed in an acuter phase, and the House of 
 Commons set itself to defy the country, by trans- 
 ferring the rights of the electors of Middlesex to 
 itself. 
 
 Such was the state of matters at home and 
 abroad when Burke published the Thoughts on the 
 Present Discontents. The attempt to dispense 
 with party government, the attempt to realise 
 Bolingbroke's ideal, had had a fair trial, and what 
 were the results ? Burke's answer was emphatic 
 and damning. The government, he said, was at 
 once dreaded and contemned. The laws were 
 despoiled of all their respected and salutary 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 69 
 
 terrors ; their inaction was a subject of ridicule 
 and their exertion of abhorrence. Our depen- 
 dencies had slackened in their affections. We 
 knew neither how to yield nor how to enforce. 
 Disconnection and confusion, in office, in parties, 
 in families, in parliament, in the nation, prevailed 
 beyond the disorders of any former time. Corrup- 
 tion was practised more openly, and on a far more 
 lavish scale, than in the ' bad old days ' of Walpole. 
 Had Burke limited himself in the Thoughts to 
 a description of the inner working of the cabal, 
 his work would long since have ceased to interest 
 any but the historical student. But, to a greater 
 degree than almost any other of his books, the 
 pamphlet is thick - sown with those profound 
 maxims of political wisdom with which it is his 
 especial distinction to illumine his discussion of 
 the most ephemeral topics. In the true spirit of 
 a statesman he proclaims that ' the temper of the 
 people amongst whom he presides ought to be 
 the first study of a statesman.' ' In all disputes 
 between them and their rulers the presumption is 
 at least upon a par in favour of the people. If 
 this presumption in favour of the subjects against 
 the trustees of power be not the more probable, I 
 am sure it is the more comfortable speculation ; 
 because it is more easy to change an adminis- 
 tration than to reform a people.' 
 
70 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 What then was Burke's remedy for the disorders 
 of which he made so keen an analysis ? It was 
 simply a reversion to the system of government 
 by party. To justify this system was, therefore, 
 one of the main objects of the pamphlet. He did 
 so in no shallow, optimistic spirit. He was fully 
 alive to all that the speculative philosopher could 
 urge against the system ; he was well aware that, 
 considered in the abstract, party government was 
 bound to appear a most curious and not very 
 fascinating phenomenon. He did not wonder, 
 he said, that the behaviour of many parties should 
 have made persons of tender and scrupulous 
 virtue out of humour with all sorts of connection 
 in politics. He admitted that people acquire in 
 such confederacies a narrow, bigoted, and pre- 
 scriptive spirit, and that they are apt to sink 
 the general good in this circumscribed and partial 
 interest. But he maintained that such evils, real 
 and glaring as they were, and are, were accidental, 
 and not necessarily involved in the idea of party 
 connection. ' Where duty renders a critical situa- 
 tion a necessary one, it is our business to keep 
 free from the evils attendant on it, and not to fly 
 from the situation itself. If a fortress is seated in 
 an unwholesome air, an officer of the garrison is 
 obliged to be attentive to his health, but he must 
 not desert his station,' . . . ' When a public man 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 7 1 
 
 omits to put himself in a situation of doing his 
 duty with effect, it is an omission that frustrates 
 the purposes of his trust almost as much as if he 
 had formally betrayed it. It is surely no very 
 rational account of a man's life that he has always 
 acted right, but has taken special care to act in 
 such a manner that his endeavours could not 
 possibly be productive of any consequence.' . . . 
 'Party,' he continues, 'is a body of men united 
 for promoting by their joint endeavours the 
 national interest upon some particular principle 
 in which they are all agreed. For my part, I 
 find it impossible to conceive that any one 
 believes in his own politics, or thinks them to be 
 of any weight, who refuses to adopt the means of 
 having them reduced into practice.' He proceeds 
 to define the limits within which the subordination 
 of one's own opinions to those of one's party is 
 permissible, and even laudable. ' Men thinking 
 freely will in particular instances think differently. 
 But still, as the greater part of the measures 
 which arise in the course of public business are 
 related to or dependent on some great leading 
 general principles in government, a man must 
 be peculiarly unfortunate in the choice of his 
 political company if he does not agree with them 
 nine times out of ten.' . . . ' When the question is 
 in its nature doubtful, or not very material, the 
 
72 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 modesty which becomes an individual, and (in 
 spite of our court moralists) that partiality which 
 becomes a well-chosen friendship, will frequently 
 bring on an acquiescence in the general sentiment. 
 Thus the disagreement will naturally be rare ; it 
 will only be enough to indulge freedom, with- 
 out violating concord or disturbing arrangement. 
 And this is all that ever was required for a 
 character of the greatest uniformity and steadi- 
 ness in connection.' . . . ' Of what sort of material,' 
 he asks, ' must that man be made, how must he 
 be tempered and put together, who can sit whole 
 years in Parliament with five hundred and fifty 
 of his fellow-citizens, amidst the storm of such 
 tempestuous passions, in the sharp conflict of so 
 many wits and tempers and characters, in the 
 agitation of such mighty questions, in the dis- 
 cussion of such vast and ponderous interests, 
 without seeing any one sort of men whose 
 characters, conduct, and disposition would lead 
 him to associate himself with them, to aid and 
 be aided in any one system of public utility ? ' 
 
 Burke's innate conservatism displayed itself 
 when he came to consider the particular measures 
 then advocated for the removal of the evils he 
 describes. The skill with which he conducts his 
 analysis of these evils is only equalled by the 
 poverty of the reforms he proposes, a poverty in 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 73 
 
 which his book resembles nothing so much as 
 Carlyle's Chartism and Past and Present. The 
 one practical measure which he proposes is that 
 frequent and correct lists of voters in the princi- 
 pal divisions should be made out, in order that 
 the people might judge of the conduct of their 
 constituents. Against the favourite proposals 
 for triennial parliaments and a place-bill he set 
 himself like a flint. Distrust and dislike of all 
 organic change, of all tampering with the Con- 
 stitution, were with him a ruling passion. To his 
 vivid historic imagination the British Constitution, 
 as settled at the Revolution, was the last word of 
 political wisdom. To lay violent hands on any 
 part of it seemed to him almost an act of sacrilege. 
 ' We ought,' he cried vehemently at a later day, 
 ' to understand it according to our measure, and 
 to venerate where we are not able presently to 
 comprehend.' ^ Such language sounds strange to 
 modern ears ; and there can be little doubt that 
 Burke's admiration of the British parliamentary 
 system was tinged by something like superstition. 
 With the best will in the world one might surely 
 confess oneself unable to venerate the system of 
 rotten boroughs, although it is easy enough to 
 understand their raison d'etre. But Burke clung 
 even to the rotten boroughs ; and throughout his 
 
 1 Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs {1791). 
 
74 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 career he consistently opposed all attempts to 
 lower the suffrage, or to give representatives to 
 the manufacturing towns which were rapidly 
 springing up. If it is asked how it is possible 
 to reconcile his conduct in this respect with his 
 maxim of 'the presumption being on a par in 
 favour of the people,' the solution would to Burke 
 have seemed easy enough. He drew a strong 
 and sharp distinction between practical grievances 
 and abstract rights. He held that the people 
 were admirable judges of practical oppressions ; ^ 
 but to understand the true cause, and to bring 
 about the real cure, were both beyond their 
 province. The patient must judge whether he is 
 well or ill ; but to discover the disease, and apply 
 appropriate remedies, is the part of the skilled 
 physician. If, indeed, the physician pockets his 
 fee and neglects his patient, there is a call for 
 inquiry, but we are not on that account to fall 
 back on quackery and empiricism. 
 
 Burke's view of the relations which ought to 
 exist between a member of Parliament and his 
 constituents followed naturally from these prin- 
 ciples. In 1774 he stood for Bristol, and was 
 returned. During the stirring times which had 
 followed the action of the House of Commons in 
 the Wilkes affair, it had become the fashion for 
 1 Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe {1792). 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 75 
 
 the constituencies to send express instructions to 
 their representatives as to their conduct in the 
 House. Burke's colleague in the representation 
 of Bristol declared after the poll that he would 
 feel himself bound to obey such mandates. Even 
 in this moment of triumph, when a temporary 
 expansion might have been pardoned, Burke 
 was on the alert to assert his independence. 
 'Certainly, gentlemen,' he said,^ 'it ought to be 
 the happiness and glory of a representative to 
 live in the strictest union, the closest corre- 
 spondence, and the most unreserved communica- 
 tion with his constituents. Their wishes ought to 
 have great weight with him ; their opinions high 
 respect, their business unremitted attention. It 
 is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasure, 
 his satisfactions to theirs ; and above all, ever, 
 and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his 
 own. But his unbiassed opinion, his mature 
 judgment, his enlightened conscience he ought 
 not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set 
 of men living. Your representative owes you not 
 his industry only, but his judgment ; and he betrays 
 instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your 
 opinion'. When, six years afterwards, he was 
 fighting a losing battle in the same city against 
 the forces of bigotry and intolerance, his language 
 
 ^ speech after the Poll at Bristol (IT] i,). 
 
76 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 was no less emphatic. ' I was to look indeed,' he 
 declared, ' to your opinions, but to such opinions as 
 you and I must have five years hence. I was not 
 to look to the flash of the day. I knew that you 
 chose me in my place along with others to be a 
 pillar of the state, and not a weathercock on the 
 top of the edifice, exalted for my levity and 
 versatility, and of no use but to indicate the 
 shiftings of every fashionable gale.'i Is it too 
 much to expect that our modern politicians 
 should show a little of this independent spirit? 
 Perhaps so ; for if even in Burke's day the asser- 
 tion of the right of a representative to form his 
 own opinions and act upon them might cost him 
 his seat, it has certainly become infinitely harder 
 now when every vote recorded in the division 
 lobby is known, every debate published and 
 spread broadcast, every speech read and dis- 
 cussed. In a democratic constitution, it is a 
 matter of infinite difficulty and delicacy to 
 balance and adjust the rights of members of 
 Parliament and the claims of their constituents. 
 Difficult and delicate the business is, but unless 
 our representatives are to be degraded into mere 
 automatic machines, some solution must be found. 
 It is the radical vice of democracy that under it 
 
 ' Speech at the Guildhall, Bristol {I'jSo) — one of the manliest, 
 most admirable, and most dignified of his efforts. 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE -JJ 
 
 the maintenance of any high ideal of statesman- 
 ship becomes almost impossible. In Burke's 
 felicitous phrase, our statesmen are under a con- 
 stant and all but irresistible temptation to look 
 only to the flash of the day. Our leaders, it is 
 the common complaint, no longer lead ; they do 
 not seek to form and mould public opinion ; in 
 the cant phrase of the day, they think it no 
 business of theirs to ' make planks,' but merely to 
 be floated down into office upon them. The 
 dictates of reason are hushed before the whisper 
 of the caucus and the report of the party whip. 
 We have great need of a Burke to protest alike 
 by his voice and by his example against a con- 
 ception of the statesman's function so mean and 
 ignoble as this. 
 
 If Burke shrank with an exaggerated dread 
 from the mere hint of any organic change in the 
 Constitution, he was instrumental in bringing 
 about many practical reforms. His scheme of 
 Economical Reform will fall to be discussed 
 later on. He vigorously supported the repeal 
 of the cruel and foolish insolvency laws which 
 then defaced the statute-book, and in his Bristol 
 speech of 1780 he took occasion to pay a mag- 
 nificent tribute to the philanthropic labours of 
 Howard. Capital punishment was in the eighteenth 
 century inflicted for offences comparatively 
 
78 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 trifling, and the number of executions seems 
 to modern ideas enormous. Burke strove hard 
 to mitigate the ferocity of the law in this re- 
 spect. After the Gordon riots (1780) he pressed 
 on the authorities, with characteristic eagerness 
 and with characteristic keenness of logic, the 
 cruelty and futility of executing a large number of 
 the rioters. His efforts were all the nobler because 
 he had not the slightest sympathy with the ob- 
 jects or passions of the rioters ; indeed, it was his 
 support of the Catholic relief measures which 
 alienated many of his supporters at Bristol. The 
 subject of slavery engaged his earnest attention, 
 and among his works is to be found the sketch of 
 a Negro Code. He feared that the entire abolition 
 of slavery was impracticable, but he hoped that it 
 might be so regulated as to produce the minimum 
 of misery and oppression. Adam Smith is said 
 to have told Burke that he was the only man 
 who, without previous communication, thought 
 on matters of trade and commerce exactly as he 
 did. It does not appear, however, from Burke's 
 published writings that he was a consistent or 
 thoroughgoing advocate of the principle of free 
 trade, although his Thoughts and Details on 
 Scarcity, and detached passages in others of his 
 writings, show that, on some points at least, he 
 was in hearty accord with the author of the 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 79 
 
 Wealth of Nations. He took a leading part in 
 advocating the measure which secured the free- 
 dom of the press by transferring the decision as 
 to whether a publication was or was not libellous 
 from the judge to the jury. 
 
 On the great question of religious toleration, 
 also, Burke showed himself more liberal than 
 most of his contemporaries, though less so than 
 some. For the Roman Catholic Church — that 
 mighty mother of the churches with her historical 
 associations, her high and haughty claims, her 
 imposing rites and ceremonies, her majestic unity 
 — he had a warm and kindly feeling ; for that 
 spurious Protestantism which finds in hatred of 
 the Pope an easy and convenient substitute for 
 the love of God, he had nothing but contempt. 
 He strenuously supported the repeal of the 
 odious and oppressive statutes which put Roman 
 Catholics at the mercy of the meanest informer ; 
 and even the outburst of religious fanaticism 
 which culminated in the Gordon riots did not 
 make him flinch in his policy. On the other 
 hand, he opposed the petition of the Established 
 clergy to be released from subscription to the 
 Thirty-nine Articles, holding, with show of 
 reason, that it was absurd for the state to lend 
 the weight of its authority to an undefined 
 system of church dogma. In his attitude towards 
 
80 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 the Dissenters he was not quite consistent, for 
 although he at first supported their claim to be 
 exempted from subscribing the Articles, when 
 the Unitarians came forward to claim toleration 
 he opposed their cause. He justified his op- 
 position by alleging that the Unitarians were a 
 political as well as a religious sect, that they 
 were in sympathy with the French Revolution, 
 and consequently enemies of the Constitution ; 
 and he drew a distinction between old and long- 
 established sects whose principles and conduct 
 were known, and new bodies which might, for 
 all one knew, be hotbeds of anarchy and re- 
 volution. 
 
 It is time now to turn to Burke's speeches and 
 writings on the American question. The war 
 which was brought to a close by the Peace of Paris 
 (1763) is one of the most glorious in our annals. 
 But military glory is commonly bought for a price, 
 and Pitt's triumphs had left England burdened 
 with an enormous addition to her National Debt. 
 The American Colonies had been perhaps the 
 chief gainers by the war ; for the expulsion of 
 the French from Canada and the Spanish from 
 Florida had removed the gravest danger which 
 menaced the future of the English colonists. By 
 the conquest of Canada the greatest obstacle to 
 the expansion of the English-speaking race in 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 8 1 
 
 America had been swept away. In these circum- 
 stances, it was not at all unnatural that English 
 statesmen should have thought it only right that 
 America should contribute something more than 
 she had hitherto done towards the defence of the 
 Empire to which they looked for protection, and 
 which had just put forth such mighty^efforts on 
 their behalf. It is important that this should be 
 emphatically stated, for historians have shown 
 themselves too much disposed to adopt without 
 adequate inquiry the sentiments and the language 
 of 4th of July orators, and they have for the 
 most part made little effort to enter into the 
 feelings of the statesmen who were responsible 
 for the measures which brought on the rupture. 
 
 Till the accession of Grenville to office in 1765 
 the colonists had been left pretty much to them- 
 selves ; by a wise and salutary neglect, a generous 
 nature, as Burke finely said, had been suffered to 
 take her own way to perfection. It has been 
 said, with almost as much truth as wit, that 
 Grenville lost the Colonies because he read the 
 American despatches, which none of his prede- 
 cessors ever did. The Commercial Code, indeed, 
 seems to modern ideas sufficiently severe and 
 restrictive. The trade of America was made 
 wholly subservient to that of the mother-country 
 by a highly complex code of regulations and 
 
 F 
 
82 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 restrictions. But the Wealth of Nations had not 
 yet appeared ; the Navigation Laws were still 
 the object of an unthinking idolatry ; and the com- 
 mercial policy of England towards her Colonies, 
 however ungenerous and unwise it now seems, 
 was, as Adam Smith himself showed, incompar- 
 ably more liberal than that pursued by any other 
 European nation. The colonists as yet hardly 
 felt the restrictions imposed on their trade as 
 sensible grievances. The laws which amounted 
 to a practical prohibition of all manufactures in 
 America were little resented, for America had riot 
 yet reached the manufacturing stage. Her most 
 valuable and characteristic products found a ready 
 market in Britain, and the home-country bound 
 itself to buy certain articles from the Colonies 
 alone. The most oppressive duties were evaded 
 by an immense and organised system of smug- 
 gling, carried on with the greatest boldness and 
 openness, and almost with the tacit connivance 
 of the home authorities. An extreme case is 
 mentioned by Mr. Lecky. During the French 
 War, a war in which the very existence of the 
 Colonies was at stake, it was found that the 
 Americans were supplying the French with stores 
 and provisions, and to England's indignant re- 
 monstrance it was coolly and cynically rejoined 
 that it was good policy to make as much as 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 83 
 
 possible out of the enemy ! To a man of Gren- 
 ville's temperament — at once that of an autocrat 
 and of a precisian — all this could not but be 
 profoundly abhorrent. To one who prided him- 
 self on his skill in finance, and who took so 
 gloomy a view of the internal resources of 
 England,! it was a supreme object to reduce the 
 National Debt. He would have echoed the de- 
 scription of England given by a poet of our own 
 day, as 
 
 ' Bearing on shoulders immense, 
 Atlantean, the load, 
 Well-nigh not to be borne, 
 Of the too vast orb of her fate.' 
 
 Under the influence of these ideas he set to 
 work with a characteristic energy and a character- 
 istic want of tact. He took vigorous measures 
 to enforce the Navigation Laws and to repress 
 smuggling. Had he been content to stop there, 
 his proceedings would undoubtedly have caused 
 some outcry and irritation in the Colonies, but no 
 one would have thought of denying the perfect 
 legality and competence of his measures. It 
 had been recognised over and over again that 
 England possessed the right of legislating for the 
 regulation of the commerce of the whole empire. 
 
 1 See The Present State of the Nation and Burke's Observations 
 thereon. 
 
84 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 But Grenville's views went far beyond this. He 
 resolved to establish permanently a portion of the 
 British army in the Colonies, and to pay its cost 
 by the proceeds of a stamp-duty on legal docu- 
 ments issued in America. For this purpose the 
 famous Stamp Act was introduced in 1765. It 
 attracted less attention than is given to an Indian 
 Budget to-day. Burke was present in the gallery, 
 and he tells us that he had rarely heard a more 
 languid debate. No one seems to have had the 
 slightest suspicion of the pregnant nature of the 
 measure. As soon as the news was carried across 
 the Atlantic, the Colonies were in a flame. Par- 
 liament, it was said, was assuming a new and 
 unheard-of claim. It was practically proposing to 
 tax them without their consent. If the claim were 
 submitted to, their whole property was at the 
 mercy of the home-country. To resist that claim 
 was as much their duty as it was the duty of 
 Hampden to resist the arbitrary impositions of 
 Charles I. That taxation and representation 
 went together was one of the fundamental maxims 
 of the British Constitution, and its validity was 
 not destroyed by the practical difficulties in the 
 way of an American representation in Parlia- 
 ment.i 
 
 1 These difficulties were humorously exhibited by Burke in 
 Observations on the Present State of the Nation. 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 85 
 
 They drew a distinction which was to play a 
 great part in the controversy between legislation 
 designed primarily for the regulation of commerce 
 and taxation for the purposes of revenue. The 
 former they admitted to be the indisputable and 
 prescriptive right of the British Parliament ; the 
 latter had hitherto been strictly reserved to their 
 own legislative assemblies. This distinction, it is 
 true, seems now rather vague and shadowy, and 
 the English advocates of Grenville's measures 
 were soon to prove with an unhappy and per- 
 verted ingenuity — what no one would now think 
 of denying — that the Navigation Laws in reality 
 imposed a most onerous and oppressive tax on 
 American industry. The object for which the 
 taxation was imposed was quite as distasteful to 
 the colonists as the scheme itself. They shared 
 the English distrust of standing armies, and it 
 was feared that the British forces stationed in 
 America, ostensibly for the purpose of protecting 
 it from invasion by the French and the destruc- 
 tive raids of the savage Indians, were in reality 
 intended to strengthen the hands of the executive 
 power in the States, and perhaps for the ultimate 
 destruction of the democratic form of liberty 
 which they enjoyed in common. 
 
 The extreme gravity of the situation soon 
 became apparent. Riots broke out in the States. 
 
86 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 All the Stamps on which the colonists could lay 
 hands were destroyed. The newly appointed 
 collectors were intimidated from exercising their 
 functions. It became clear that if a struggle was 
 to be averted the Act must be rescinded. The 
 way was paved for its repeal when Grenville fell 
 and Lord Rockingham came into office. The 
 new Ministry adopted a twofold line of policy. 
 They repealed the Stamp Act ; but they accom- 
 panied the repeal by a Declaratory Act asserting 
 the supreme right of Parliament to legislate for 
 the Colonies in all circumstances whatsoever. In 
 Burke's balanced sentences, 'they preserved the 
 authority of Great Britain ; they preserved the 
 equity of Great Britain ; they made the Declara- 
 tory Act; they repealed the Stamp Act. They 
 did both fully, because the Declaratory Act was 
 without qualification, and the repeal of the Stamp 
 Act total' 
 
 The effect of this eminently wise and healing 
 measure was immediate. The storm subsided as 
 rapidly as it had arisen. The Americans were 
 gratified by the total repeal of the obnoxious Act, 
 and they paid little attention to the mere idle 
 recital of a right which it was assumed Great 
 Britain never intended to exercise. The prospect 
 looked brighter still when Chatham succeeded 
 Rockingham, for that great rhetorician had ranged 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 87 
 
 himself still more decidedly on the side of the 
 Colonies. He had gloried in those acts which 
 Grenville's supporters denounced as rebellion. 
 He had vehemently opposed the Declaratory 
 Act, and had drawn an altogether untenable 
 distinction between the right of legislation and 
 that of taxation. But his practical withdrawal 
 from all share in the conduct of affairs altered 
 the whole complexion of things. The Duke of 
 Grafton became the head of the curiously inco- 
 herent administration which Chatham had formed, 
 but the real direction of its policy rested with the 
 king himself, and George had never concealed his 
 dislike to the repeal of the Stamp Act. In 1767 
 import duties were laid on certain articles enter- 
 ing America. The old scenes were renewed 
 across the Atlantic. The administration partly 
 gave way, and in 1769 all the duties were taken 
 off save that on tea. It was admitted that only 
 a trifling revenue could be expected from this 
 source, especially as the Americans had entered 
 into agreements to use no articles coming from 
 England until the obnoxious duty was removed. 
 But the EngHsh Ministers were resolute to main- 
 tain the duty in order to vindicate the authority 
 of Parliament. The situation was now perilous 
 in the extreme. War might break out at any 
 moment. But a war with their kinsmen did not 
 
88 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 seem distasteful to the English Ministry, nor, one 
 must add, to the English people. Never, indeed, 
 had England entered on a contest with a lighter 
 heart. The Americans were accused of cowardice ; 
 a regiment or two, it was thought, would be suf- 
 ficient to bring them to their senses. The tea- 
 riots at Boston in 1773 were followed by severe 
 measures against the offending city. Its port 
 was closed and its charter was annulled. In the 
 interval between this time and the outbreak of 
 hostilities Burke's two great speeches were de- 
 livered. A month after the second the two 
 countries were at war. 
 
 There are no more pregnant lessons in the 
 science of how to look at things so as to see them 
 and into them, of how to distinguish between 
 what is perennial from what is deciduous in a 
 political question, than Burke's two speeches on 
 Taxation of the American Colonies and on Concilia- 
 tion with America. This is the opinion of Mr. 
 James Russell Lowell,^ a patriotic son of that 
 country whose cause Burke was advocating in 
 the speeches thus eulogised, but the praise is 
 hardly too strong. Burke's genius never shone 
 out in a clearer or more attractive light than in 
 his utterances on this great question. One might 
 extract from them a manual of political maxims. 
 
 ^ Political Essays: The Independent in Politics. 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 89 
 
 Here, for example, is a cluster of the golden 
 sayings which Burke lavishes with a prodigal 
 hand : — ' It is impossible to answer for bodies of 
 men. But I am sure that the natural effect of 
 fidelity, clemency, and kindness in governors is 
 peace, good-will, order, and esteem on the part 
 of the governed.' . . . ' Nobody will persuade me, 
 when a whole people are concerned, that acts of 
 lenity are not means of conciliation.' . . . ' Great 
 and acknowledged force is not impaired either 
 in effect or in opinion by an unwillingness to 
 exert itself. The superior power may offer peace 
 with honour and with safety. Such an offer from 
 such a power will be attributed to magnanimity ; 
 but the concessions of the weak are the con- 
 cessions of fear.' ... Abstract rights are, in their 
 exercise under certain circumstances, 'the most 
 odious of all wrongs and the most vexatious of 
 all injustice.' . . . 'The question with me is not 
 whether you have a right to render your people 
 miserable, but whether it is not your interest to 
 make them happy. It is not what a lawyer tells 
 me I may do, but what humanity, reason, and 
 justice tell me I ought to do. Is a politic act 
 the worse for being a generous one ? Is no con- 
 cession proper but that which is made from your 
 want of right to keep what you grant ? Or does 
 it increase the grace or dignity of an odious 
 
90 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 claim, because you have your evidence-room full 
 of titles and your magazines stuffed with arms to 
 enforce them ? Of what avail are those titles and 
 those arms when the reason of the thing tells 
 me that the assertion of my title is the loss of 
 my suit, and that I could do nothing but wound 
 myself by the use of my own weapons?' . . . 
 ' Providence has decreed vexation to violence and 
 poverty to rapine.' . . . ' It is a great mistake to 
 suppose that mankind follow up practically any 
 speculative principle either of government or of 
 freedom, as far as it will go in argument and 
 logical illation. All government, indeed every 
 human benefit, is founded on compromise and 
 barter. We balance inconveniences ; we give 
 and take ; we remit some rights that we may 
 enjoy others ; and we choose to be happy citizens, 
 rather than subtle disputants. . . . Man acts from 
 adequate motives relative to his interests, and not 
 on metaphysical speculations.' . . . ' Magnanimity 
 in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom ; and 
 a great empire and little minds go ill together.' 
 
 Burke's attitude towards the attempt to tax 
 America was determined by his constant principle 
 of expediency. The question of abstract right 
 he set aside with the same disdain with which he 
 was afterwards to treat the Contrat Social and the 
 'rights of man.' To his mind such arguments 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 91 
 
 were mere babble — mischievous babble, too. 
 Grant, in effect he said, that you possess the 
 right to tax America, grant also that you have 
 the power to enforce that right, which seems 
 doubtful, in case the Americans should take arms 
 to resist it : is it wise to make the attempt, things 
 being as they are ? ' I am not here going into 
 distinctions of rights, not attempting to mark 
 their boundaries. I do not enter into these meta- 
 physical distinctions. I hate the very sound of 
 them.' The distinction between external and 
 internal taxation may be, as gentlemen of the 
 Ministry assert, altogether untenable : the essential 
 thing is that the Americans believe in the dis- 
 tinction, and are prepared to act upon it. Their 
 logic may be weak, but their hearts are stout; 
 you cannot falsify the pedigree of that fierce 
 people : indeed, if you consider it, an Englishman 
 is the unfittest person on earth to argue another 
 Englishman into slavery. 'Be content,' he con- 
 cludes, ' to bind America by laws of trade ; you 
 have always done it. Let this be your reason for 
 binding their trade. Do not burthen them with 
 taxes : you were not used to do so from the 
 beginning. Let this be your reason for not 
 taxing. These are the arguments of states and 
 kingdoms. Leave the rest to the schools ; for 
 there only they may be discussed with safety.' 
 
92 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 In none of his great speeches can one study 
 Burke's oratorical methods to better advantage 
 than in these on American taxation. Even his 
 digressions are magnificent. His portraits of 
 Chatham, Townshend, and Grenville are alto- 
 gether admirable ; it is almost incredible that the 
 author of these finely-touched and discriminating 
 sketches should have been thought capable of 
 perpetrating the vulgar and flaring caricatures of 
 Junius. In the speech of 1775 he describes with 
 an amazing felicity and fertility of illustration 
 the national character of America, the growth of 
 its population, its commerce, its agriculture, its 
 fisheries, the form of its government, the religion 
 of the people,^ their education, and their tempera- 
 ment. This glowing picture seemed to the 
 Ministerialists to prove only that America was 
 a noble object, and worth fighting for. ' Certainly 
 it is,' answered Burke, ' if fighting a people be the 
 best way of gaining them. ... A further objection 
 to force is that you impair the object by your 
 very endeavour to preserve it. The thing you 
 
 ^ ' The people are Protestants. ... All Protestantism, even the 
 most cold and passive, is a kind of dissent. But the religion most 
 prevalent in our northern colonies is a refinement on the principle 
 of resistance ; it is the dissidence of dissent and the Protestantism of 
 the Protestant religion.' It is interesting to see the genesis of the 
 phrase which in Arnold's hands became a weapon of offence against 
 the Dissenters. 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 93 
 
 fought for is not the thing you recover, but 
 depreciated, sunk, wasted, and consumed in the 
 contest. Nothing less will content me than whole 
 America! 
 
 These magnificent appeals fell on dead ears; 
 the whole country, indeed, soon caught the infec- 
 tion, and Burke could only look sadly on as war 
 grew daily more imminent. With the skirmish at 
 Lexington the last hope of peace died, and with 
 it the dream of \ free and united Empire, em- 
 bracing all men of English blood and English 
 speech. The providence of God so willed it, 
 says Hawthorne:^ 'if England had been wise 
 enough to twine our new vigour round about her 
 ancient strength, her power would; have been too 
 firmly established ever to yield, in its due season, 
 to the otherwise immutable law of imperial 
 vicissitude. The world might then have beheld 
 the intolerable spectacle of a sovereignty and 
 institutions, imperfect, but indestructible.' Out 
 of this those who please may draw what comfort 
 and consolation they may. But to most it will 
 perhaps appear that the old dream was a generous 
 and noble one, and that the progress of the world 
 did not demand that the British Empire should, 
 by the folly and rashness of its guardians, be 
 shattered and rent asunder, and to such Burke's 
 1 Our Old Home, chap. i. 
 
94 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 efforts to avert the catastrophe will seem noble 
 and splendid, although, alas ! unavailing. 
 
 While England was fast losing her hold over 
 the American Colonies, a new empire was in the 
 strangest fashion preparing for her in the remote 
 East. The story of the growth of the British 
 power in India reads like a fairy tale ; but alas ! 
 it is a fairy tale with dark and sinister elements. 
 Macaulay has drawn a vivid picture of the state 
 of disorganisation and anarchy into which India 
 fell after the death of Aurungzebe, and he has 
 described the astonishment with which the 
 student of Indian history follows the rapid 
 growth of the power of the East India Company. 
 ' Scarcely any man,' says he, ' however sagacious, 
 would have thought it possible that a trading 
 company, separated from India by fifteen thousand 
 miles of sea, and possessing in India only a few 
 acres for purposes of commerce, would in less 
 than a hundred years spread its empire from Cape 
 Comorin to the eternal snow of the Himalayas ; 
 would compel Mahratta and Mohammedan to 
 forget their mutual feuds in common subjection ; 
 would tame down even those wild races which 
 had resisted the most powerful of the Moguls ; 
 and having united under its laws a hundred 
 millions of subjects, would carry its victorious 
 arms far to the east of the Burrampooter and far 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 95 
 
 to the west of the Hydaspes, dictate terms of 
 peace at the gates of Ava, and seat its vassal on 
 the throne of Candahar.' 
 
 It is impossible in an essay like this to detail 
 the successive steps by which the immense empire 
 passed into the hands of our countrymen. It 
 must suffice to mention that about the middle of 
 last century a short but decisive struggle took 
 place between the French and the forces of the 
 British East India Company ; that, by the daring 
 and the splendid military talents of Clive, the 
 contest ended in favour of the British, and that 
 with Clive's victories the process began by which 
 province after province passed into the hands of 
 the Company. Unfortunately for the honour of 
 Britain, the wisdom and moderation of their 
 government of the country which had thus fallen 
 into their hands was by no means commensurate 
 with the splendour of their military successes. 
 By a strange destiny a company of traders had 
 become the masters of a mighty empire, and it 
 could hardly be wondered at that they did not 
 immediately rise to an adequate conception of 
 their new character, or that they should have 
 ruled India with the one object of extracting as 
 much money out of it as possible. The unhappy 
 natives were the victims of an extortion un- 
 precedented even in India ; they saw their 
 
96 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 ancient chiefs set up and knocked down at the 
 mere pleasure of their new masters, like so many 
 ninepins ; their immemorial customs trampled 
 upon by men who made no effort to enter into 
 thoughts and feelings so different from those 
 familiar to themselves. And against this tyranny 
 they had no refuge ; dire experience had convinced 
 them that they were no match for the British in 
 the field. 
 
 Parliament could not long remain indifferent to 
 the scenes which were being enacted in India. 
 As early as 1772, a Committee had sat on Indian 
 affairs ; Clive had been examined ' like a sheep- 
 stealer,' as he bitterly complained, and neither 
 his splendid services, nor the gallant attempt 
 he had made during his last administration to 
 check the abuses rampant in India, availed to 
 save him from a vote of censure. The fact that 
 the Company, despite the immense revenues 
 which had passed into its. hands, was in desperate 
 financial straits made the intervention of the 
 Government an absolute necessity. The truth 
 was that the victories of Clive had completely 
 changed the character of the Company, and with 
 it the genius of its administration. The possession 
 of the Company's stock was no longer valued for 
 the paltry dividend it might bring, but for the 
 share it conferred in the patronage of India, in 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 97 
 
 the appointment, that is, of the plunderers of 
 that unhappy country. The servants of the 
 Company had virtually become its masters ; and 
 while the Company was on the verge of bank- 
 ruptcy, the writers who had gone out to India in 
 a penniless condition were returning home with 
 immense fortunes. The radical vices of this 
 system of government cannot be better described 
 than in the calm and measured words of Adam 
 Smith. ' The real interests of the Company,' 
 he writes, ' if they were capable of understanding 
 it, is the same with that of the country ; and it is 
 from ignorance chiefly, and the meanness of 
 mercantile prejudice, that they ever oppress it. 
 But the real interest of the servants is by no 
 means the same with that of the country, and the 
 most perfect information would not necessarily 
 put an end to their oppressions. The regulations, 
 accordingly, which have been sent out from 
 Europe, though they have been frequently weak, 
 have upon most occasions been well-meaning. 
 More intelligence, and perhaps less good meaning, 
 has sometimes appeared in those established by 
 the servants in India. It is a very singular 
 government in which every member of the ad- 
 ministration wishes to get out of the country, and 
 consequently to have done with the government, as 
 soon as he can, and to whose interest, the day after 
 
 G 
 
98 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 he has left it, and carried his whole fortune with 
 him, it is perfectly indifferent, though the whole 
 country was swallowed up by an earthquake ' 
 ( Wealth of Nations, Book IV. chap. vii.). And 
 again : ' No other sovereigns ever were, or from 
 the nature of things could be, so perfectly in- 
 different about the happiness or misery of their 
 subjects, the improvement or waste of their 
 dominions, the glory or disgrace of their ad- 
 ministration, as, from irresistible moral causes, 
 the greater part of the proprietors of such a 
 mercantile company are and must necessarily 
 be.' 
 
 The first step in the transfer of the supreme 
 power in India from the Company to the Crown was 
 taken when Lord North's Government in 1773 
 assumed the power of nominating a Governor- 
 General of Bengal who was also to exercise 
 authority over the other presidencies. In view 
 of later developments, it is curious to find that 
 Burke vehemently opposed this measure, holding 
 that it was an unwarrantable breach of the 
 Company's charter. His opposition was, however, 
 of no avail, and the new Governor-General and 
 his Council set out for India. With Warren 
 Hastings' departure for India as the first British 
 Governor -General, Burke's more intimate con- 
 nection with Indian affairs begins, and the names 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 99 
 
 of these two great men are as inseparably linked 
 together as those of Cicero and Verres. 
 
 The care which Burke had bestowed upon the 
 affairs of India, and the strong impression which 
 they had made upon his mind, were first made 
 evident to the world by his great speech on the 
 introduction of Fox's East India Bill (1784). 
 Although the bill was introduced by Fox, it 
 seems clear that it was really drafted by Burke.^ 
 In the eleven eventful years which elapsed be- 
 tween 1773 and 1784, Burke's mind had under- 
 gone a change. He was now convinced that it 
 was impossible to leave the government of India 
 in the hands of the Company. The bill accordingly 
 proposed to supersede the Company by a Board 
 of seven Commissioners, in whose hands the entire 
 political powers over the provinces occupied by 
 the British were to be placed. The Commissioners 
 were to be nominated in the first instance by 
 Parliament, and afterwards by the Crown. Their 
 tenure of office was to be for five years, and they 
 were removable on address from either House of 
 Parliament. 
 
 The speech in which Burke supported the bill 
 is one of the noblest specimens of his oratory. 
 To the charge that it was an attack on the 
 
 ^ See the evidence on the point in Sir George Cornwall Lewis's 
 Administrations of Great Britain. 
 
100 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 chartered rights of men, Burke replied that the 
 charter of the Company was a charter of mono- 
 poly. 'Magna Charta is a charter to restrain 
 power and to destroy monopoly. The East 
 India Charter is a charter to establish monopoly 
 and to create power.' He argued that the powers 
 conferred on the Company emanated from Parlia- 
 ment, and that if it were proved that these 
 powers had been grossly and persistently abused, 
 Parliament was not only justified in intervening, 
 but was bound to do so. ' We sold, I admit, all 
 that we had to sell ; that is our authority, not our 
 control. We had not a right to make a market 
 of our duties.' It was very characteristic of 
 Burke that he should have refused to discuss on 
 general grounds the policy of leaving extensive 
 political powers over a vast empire in the hands 
 of a commercial company, his attitude in this 
 respect being in contrast to that of Adam Smith. 
 He could not agree with those who held that 
 such a policy must inevitably be fatal to good 
 government. 'With my particular ideas and 
 sentiments, I cannot go that way to work. I 
 feel an insuperable reluctance in giving my hand 
 to destroy any established institution upon a 
 theory, however plausible it may be. My ex- 
 perience in life teaches me nothing clear upon 
 the subject. I have known merchants with the 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE lOI 
 
 sentiments and abilities of great statesmen ; and 
 I have seen persons in the rank of statesmen 
 with the conceptions and characters of pedlars.' 
 In words of scathing eloquence he laid bare the 
 abuses of the administration of Warren Hastings, 
 and drew a lurid picture of the state to which 
 India had been reduced under British rule. 
 
 The bill, however, touched too many interests 
 to be successful. The objections to it, indeed, 
 were grave enough, and they were elaborated and 
 exaggerated by the skilful oratory of the younger 
 Pitt, who was just then rising into fame, and 
 already cherishing ambitious dreams. The main 
 objection to which one can now allow weight 
 was that the new Commissioners must inevitably 
 be destitute of any acquaintance with Indian 
 administration. But the defeat of the bill was 
 due to other influences. Every corporation 
 trembled at the attack made upon the greatest 
 chartered company of the realm. The Tories 
 represented the measure as a mere scheme to 
 transfer the patronage of India to a body of 
 Whig politicians. The direct and indirect in- 
 fluence of the Company itself was immense, and 
 it was of course thrown into the scale against 
 the bill. Constitutional pedants pointed out that 
 it was a novel and dangerous precedent for 
 Parliament to name the members of an executive 
 
102 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 body. But the great objection to the bill of the 
 Coalition was simply that it was the bill of the 
 Coalition. Politics, like misfortunes, make us 
 acquainted with strange bedfellows ; but there 
 is hardly anything in the political history of our 
 country so astonishing and inexplicable as the 
 junction of Fox and Burke with the man whom 
 they had denounced during the whole course of 
 the American War with almost unexampled 
 virulence. It offended and alienated the mass 
 of the public, never in love with coalitions, and 
 any measure proceeding from so unpopular a 
 Government was certain to be closely and 
 jealously scrutinised. The King, for once, was 
 on the side of the people ; he had always hated 
 Fox, and he now regarded North as a deserter. 
 He took the extremely bold step of writing to 
 Lord Temple that he would consider as a personal 
 enemy any peer who voted for the bill. His tactics 
 were entirely successful ; the bill was thrown out 
 in the Lords, the Coalition Ministry was dismissed, 
 and Pitt assumed the reins of power, which he 
 was to hold through so many eventful years. 
 
 The rejection of the bill did not cause Burke 
 to relax his efforts on behalf of the Indian subjects 
 of the Crown. The following year witnessed the 
 return to England of Warren Hastings, the man 
 of all others whom Burke regarded as the incar- 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 103 
 
 nation of the vicious and tyrannical system of 
 administration which prevailed in India. Burke at 
 once gave notice that he would call attention to the 
 conduct of Hastings. What followed is well known 
 to every one ; for every one has read Macaulay's 
 essay on Hastings — one of the most brilliant 
 efforts of that great master of panoramic history. 
 That Burke was in some respects unjust to 
 Hastings, that he did not make sufficient allow- 
 ance for the exceptional difficulties of his position, 
 is now generally admitted. If no man is a hero 
 to his valet de chambre, every man, it would seem, 
 is a hero to his biographer. The task of white- 
 washing stained reputations is a favourite one 
 with the writers of our day ; Mr, Froude has 
 done his best for Henry Vlil., Lord Wolseley has 
 just published a vindication of Marlborough, and 
 even Judas Iscariot does not lack his apologists 
 and defenders. It would have been hard if 
 Hastings had been left under the stigma placed 
 on his name by the superb eloquence of Burke 
 and the brilliant essay of Macaulay. For in 
 truth there . was much to be said in favour of 
 Hastings to which Burke was in no mood to 
 listen. He had shown himself one of the most 
 capable administrators who had ever been in- 
 trusted with the immense task of shaping an 
 empire out of anarchy and chaos. He had pre- 
 
I04 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 served the British power in India from the gravest 
 perils. Of all this he might justly have exclaimed 
 with Coriolanus, 'Alone I did it,' for his colleagues 
 at the council-board sullenly opposed his every 
 act, and the Directors at home gave him no 
 support. The publications of Sir James Stephen 
 and others seem to prove that the specific 
 charges which Burke brought against Hastings — 
 the execution of Nuncomer, the Rohilla War, the 
 extortions practised on Cheyte Sing and on the 
 Begums of Oude — were greatly over-coloured. 
 
 Of the eloquence with which Burke denounced 
 the administration of Hastings it is difficult to 
 speak in adequate terms. One's mind almost 
 reels before the evidences of the immense and 
 unwearied industry with which Burke had studied 
 the history of India, its customs, and the peculiar 
 temperament of its peoples, which these great 
 orations display. Some of Burke's other speeches 
 and writings are undoubtedly of more permanent 
 interest and importance, but in none do we get 
 a better notion of the full range and compass 
 of his powers. There is hardly an oratorical 
 device of which he does not show himself a com- 
 plete master in these famous and memorable 
 orations on the impeachment of Warren Hastings. 
 The grave and impressive dignity with which he 
 reminded the Lords of the importance of the 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE lOS 
 
 duties imposed upon them, the vividness with 
 which he conjured up a mental picture of the 
 great empire which had been the theatre of the 
 misdeeds of Warren Hastings, his keen, unsparing 
 analysis of the genius and character of the East 
 India Company, are all admirable in their way. 
 And as the great orator warmed to his work and 
 thundered against the crimes of Hastings, pouring 
 forth invectives, pathos, irony, vituperation almost 
 in a breath, even the most devoted admirers of 
 the great pro-consul felt that his cause was lost. 
 Perhaps the most impressive tribute ever paid to 
 an orator was the confession of Hastings that 
 during Burke's speech he felt like a criminal, 
 conscious of his innocence as he was. 
 
 Mr. Morley, in one of the acutest and most 
 admirable passages of an admirable book, has dis- 
 cussed the nature of Burke's sensibility to the 
 wrongs and misdeeds which marked the British 
 rule in India. He dismisses the idea that it 
 sprang wholly or even mainly from a misty and 
 vague philanthropy. ' It was,' says he, ' rever- 
 ence rather than sensibility, a noble and philo- 
 sophic conservatism rather than philanthropy, 
 which raised the storm in Burke's breast against 
 the rapacity of English adventurers in India and 
 the imperial crimes of Hastings.' The importance 
 of this fine and just criticism is that it enables us 
 
I06 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 to see how Burke's attitude in regard to the affairs 
 of India is related to his attitude in regard to the 
 other great problems which came before him, in 
 particular the French Revolution. 
 
 The impeachment dragged on for several years, 
 and in the end Hastings was acquitted. The 
 acquittal came to Burke as a blow, and even now 
 one might be inclined to regard his intervention 
 in Indian affairs as merely one of his splendid 
 failures. But he had really done his work. He 
 had awakened the national conscience. If since 
 his time the whole spirit of Indian administration 
 has changed, if India now enjoys under British 
 rule a degree of peace and prosperity to which 
 she had long been a stranger, no small share of 
 the credit is due to the unwearied efforts of Burke, 
 to the unselfish devotion which he gave to the 
 cause of a people with whom he had no personal 
 ties, and from whom he could expect no gratitude. 
 
 Burke's speech on Economical Reform only falls 
 below the greatest of his efforts. He often tired 
 his audience by his diffuseness and prolixity ; he 
 often shocked its not over-fastidious sense by his 
 almost frenzied violence, his grievous sins against 
 good taste. The speech under consideration is free 
 from both defects ; in taste and temper it is ex- 
 cellent. Gibbon, in his rather magniloquent way, 
 testifies to the delight with which ' that ingenious 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE I07 
 
 and diffusive orator Mr. Burke' was listened to even 
 by those whose existence he proscribed. The nature 
 of the subject-matter did not lend itself to flights of 
 gorgeous rhetoric ; what makes the distinction of 
 the speech is its temperate and statesmanlike tone, 
 its clear and lucid handling of a complicated mass 
 of detail, its strokes of humour and irony. Burke 
 does not often seek to raise a laugh, and his suc- 
 cess is not uniform when he does make the attempt. 
 But it would surely be wrong to deny the merit of 
 humour to the passage in the speech in which he 
 describes the various titles and jurisdictions of the 
 King, or to that other in which he recounts the 
 ' famous history of the revenue adventures of the 
 bold baron North and the good knight Probert 
 upon the mountains of Venodotia.' And what 
 could be keener than his sarcasm on the Board 
 of Trade and Plantations? 'They understood 
 decorum better ; they knew that matters of trade 
 and plantations are no business of theirs.' 
 
 To discuss Burke's speech on its literary merits 
 alone would, however, be absurd. One of the 
 difficulties in the way of an adequate appreciation 
 of Burke is that in a special sense he belongs 
 both to literature and to history.^ The scheme 
 
 ^ It is a significant fact that Burke is the one En^ish statesman 
 of the first rank who has been accorded a place in the English 
 Men of Letters series. 
 
I08 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 which Burke set forth in this famous speech was 
 one of which the name ' Economical Reform ' gives 
 an inadequate notion. The key to the spirit in 
 which Burke approached the question is supplied 
 by the first title of the bill : it was ' a plan for the 
 better security of the independence of Parliament.' 
 As we saw in discussing the Present Discontents, 
 jealousy of the Crown, a dread that through the 
 skilful use of its power of corrupt influence, 
 the independence and authority of Parliament 
 were steadily being sapped, while outwardly 
 everything appeared as of old, were uppermost in 
 the minds of the Rockingham Whigs. Burke 
 avowed this plainly in the opening sentences of 
 his speech. These feelings had been strengthened 
 by the disasters of the American War, a heavy 
 share of the responsibility for which was placed 
 on the shoulders of the King, while the onerous 
 burdens which the struggle entailed could not 
 but give weight to the purely economical reasons 
 for reducing the expenses of administration so 
 far as this could be done without impairing the 
 efficiency of its working, or interfering unduly 
 with established and prescriptive rights. 
 
 The scheme itself was admirably adapted for 
 the end in view. It swept away a host of offices 
 maintained for no public utility, but merely for 
 the purposes of parliamentary corruption ; it 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 109 
 
 simplified and strengthened the great administra- 
 tive departments ; and it restricted the Pension 
 List. Public opinion ran so strongly in favour of 
 the bill that Lord North did not dare to oppose 
 it openly ; it passed the second reading, but did 
 not survive the Committee stage. When Rock- 
 ingham came into power in 1782 the bill was 
 re-introduced, but in a greatly modified form, 
 and shorn of some of its most essential and most 
 salutary provisions. In this form it received the 
 royal assent. Burke sat silent throughout the 
 debates, not altogether satisfied with the turn 
 things had taken, but steady in his resolve to 
 make the most of his actual situation, and not to 
 reject an offered reform because he saw a more 
 excellent and thorough way of setting to work. 
 
 'Burke's political writing and thinking,' says 
 Matthew Arnold, ' has more value on some sub- 
 jects than on others ; the value is at its highest 
 when the subject is Ireland.' The truth of this 
 comparative estimate might be questioned, but 
 there can be no doubt that the value is very 
 high. The volume in which Arnold has collected 
 Burke's scattered utterances on Irish affairs is 
 one which cannot be neglected by any serious 
 student of Irish history ; and one cannot but' 
 regret that what Arnold has done for this section 
 of the great orator's work should not have been 
 
no THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 done by some hand as competent for the whole 
 of Burke's writings and speeches. One of the 
 difiSculties in reading Burke is that, in order to 
 gain a complete view of his opinions on the great 
 questions to which he devoted his life, one has to 
 hunt through volume after volume, and to find 
 the object of one's search mixed up with much 
 extraneous matter. There is certainly room for 
 a new edition of Burke, which should proceed on 
 the plan of grouping together his scattered writ- 
 ings in the same or cognate subjects, and furnish- 
 ing them with such historical introductions as 
 might be necessary to place his readers at the 
 proper point of view from which to judge them. 
 The appearance of such an edition in well- 
 appointed volutaes at a moderate cost might 
 give a considerable stimulus to the study of a 
 writer who can hardly be too much studied, and 
 who is at present grievously neglected. In these 
 days when writers of not a tenth part of Burke's 
 calibre, and works dealing with subjects of in- 
 finitely less importance, are edited with a care 
 and fulness which not seldom err on the side of 
 excess, it must be a matter of extreme surprise 
 and regret that such an edition should still be a 
 desideratum. 
 
 The history of Ireland since the first English 
 adventurers landed on its shores makes one of 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE III 
 
 the saddest pages in our annals. It is a his- 
 tory of successive conquests and confiscations, of 
 spasmodic and impotent revolts followed by cruel 
 measures of repression. The unhappy natives 
 were persecuted for their tenacity in holding fast 
 to their ancient religion ; they were denied all 
 participation in the government of their country, 
 and shut out by monstrous laws from the most 
 ordinary privileges of citizens. It will be profit- 
 able under Burke's guidance to examine a little in 
 detail the various parts of this atrocious system. 
 
 As Burke points out {Letter to Sir Hercules 
 Langrishe, 1792), 'the Revolution (of 1789) 
 operated differently in England and Ireland in 
 many, and these essential, particulars. ... In 
 England it was the struggle of the great body of 
 the people for the establishment of their liberties 
 against the efforts of a very small faction who 
 would have oppressed them. In Ireland it was 
 the establishment of the power of the smaller 
 number at the expense of the civil liberties and 
 properties of the far greater part, and at the 
 expense of the political liberties of the whole.' 
 The race hatred between the English settlers 
 and the native Irish was intensified by a bitter 
 religious feud. The inevitable results were 
 written in the statute-book of an exclusively 
 Protestant Parliament. The Catholics were 
 
112 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 excluded, under the Popery Laws, from holding 
 any office under the Crown. The parliamentary 
 franchise was denied them. No Catholic could 
 be a legal practitioner even of the lowest rank. 
 Peculiarly monstrous provisions had the effect, 
 as Burke shows {Tracts on the Popery Laws) of 
 setting children against their parents, and wives 
 against their husbands, and further, of discouraging 
 all industry and frugality. Successive confisca- 
 tions had put nearly all the landed estates of the 
 country into the hands of Protestants ; in order 
 to keep them so Catholics were disabled from 
 purchasing land. The spirit of the same relentless 
 bigotry was seen in the laws which made it illegal 
 for a Roman Catholic to keep a school, or even to 
 teach in a private family ; while the system of 
 tests at the Universities shut out the richer 
 Catholics from opportunities of gaining higher 
 education. In these circumstances many parents 
 sent their children abroad to receive the culture 
 which they were denied at home ; one finds it 
 hard to believe that even this was forbidden 
 under heavy penalties. Lastly, the natives were 
 taxed to maintain an alien church, while the 
 exercise of their own religious ceremonies was 
 forbidden, and the priests, who to them were the 
 ministers on earth of the Most High, were treated 
 as criminals and outlaws. 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUKD BURKE II 3 
 
 While the native Irish thus suffered under the 
 rule of Protestant ascendency, the whole country 
 was sacrificed to the commercial interests of 
 England. Ireland was ground between the 
 upper and nether millstones of Protestant ascen- 
 dency and English trade jealousy. A great 
 part of Ireland, then as now, was under pasture ; 
 in the interests of English farmers the export of 
 its cattle into England was forbidden. Ireland 
 was suffered to have no share in the trade with 
 the English Colonies. The entrance of its 
 woollens into England was practically prohibited 
 through the jealousy of English weavers and 
 clothiers. 
 
 The first step towards the establishment of free 
 trade between the two countries was taken in 
 1778. We were then engaged in the American 
 War, and it was a matter of supreme importance 
 to conciliate Irish feeling. Lord North intro- 
 duced a timid and partial measure, which would 
 have removed a few of the restrictions on Irish 
 trade. But hardly had they been introduced 
 when they were abandoned in deference to the 
 loud outcry which was instantly raised by the 
 English merchants. Burke on this occasion took 
 the manly and decided part which might have 
 been expected from his liberal notions of trade, 
 and his strong sympathy with the country of his 
 
 H 
 
114 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 birth. Bristol was as loud against the bill as the 
 other commercial centres of the kingdom, and 
 remonstrances, protests, and menaces poured in 
 upon Burke. To these he replied with admirable 
 spirit and wisdom. 'Do we,' he asked with 
 generous warmth, ' in these resolutions bestow 
 anything upon Ireland? Not a shilling. We 
 only consent to leave them in two or three in- 
 stances the use of the natural faculties which God 
 has given to them and to all mankind.' To allay 
 the fears of the merchants, he pointed to the 
 results which had followed the establishment of 
 free trade with Scotland. 'Such virtue there is 
 in liberality of sentiment that you have grown 
 richer even by the partnership of poverty.' He 
 showed himself opposed to that old maxim which 
 till Adam Smith's day was the foundation of our 
 commercial policy — the maxim that trade is, not 
 a mutual benefit, but a sort of warfare in which 
 one country can only gain at the expense of 
 another. 'Beggary and bankruptcy,' he main- 
 tained, ' are not the circumstances which invite to 
 an intercourse with . . . any country ; ... it is 
 the interest of the commercial world that wealth 
 should be found everywhere' {Letter to Samuel 
 Span, Esq., 1778). 'I know that it is but too 
 natural for us to see our own certain ruin in the 
 possible prosperity of other people. It is hard 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 11$ 
 
 to persuade us that everything which is got 
 by another is not taken from ourselves. It is 
 fit that we should get the better of these sugges- 
 tions, which come from what is not the best and 
 soundest part of our nature, and that we should 
 form to ourselves a way of thinking more rational, 
 more just, and more religious. Trade is not a 
 limited thing; as if the objects of mutual demand 
 and consumption could not stretch beyond the 
 bounds of our jealousies.' ' Ireland,' he declared, 
 'has never made a single step in its progress 
 towards prosperity in which you have not had 
 a share, and perhaps the greatest share in the 
 benefits' (Letter to Messrs. ******* ****** ^^^ 
 Co., 1778). Reason, however, was thrown away on 
 men trembling for their trade privileges, and Lord 
 North, always firm where firmness was misplaced 
 and complaisant where firmness was required, 
 withdrew the measure. The results which 
 followed were an ample vindication of Burke's 
 action. For once Protestant and Catholic were 
 united by a common grievance. The Irish 
 Volunteers, a force formed for the purpose of 
 repelling an anticipated French invasion, assumed 
 a menacing attitude. The Irish Parliament took 
 a high tone. As Burke said in a letter to a 
 member of that body, they shortened the credit 
 given to the Crown to six months ; they hung up 
 
Il6 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 the public credit of the kingdom by a thread ; 
 they refused to raise any taxes, whilst they con- 
 fessed the public debt and the public exigencies 
 to be great and urgent beyond example {Letter 
 to Thomas Burgh, Esq., 1780). Lord North 
 was frightened into submission. As Burke com- 
 plained, with not unnatural bitterness, the English 
 Government had got into the habit of refusing 
 everything to reason and surrendering everything 
 to force. His endeavour had been to render by 
 preventive graces and concessions every act of 
 power at the same time an act of lenity — the result 
 of English bounty, and not of English timidity 
 and distress {Letter to John Merlott, Esq., 1780). 
 
 The triumph of the Irish Parliament led them 
 to form larger views. Hitherto that body had 
 been in strict subordination to England, all power 
 of initiating legislation having been taken from 
 it by Poynings' Law. This supremacy it now 
 resolved to shake off. England, engaged in a 
 desperate and unequal conflict with America, 
 France, and Spain, was in no condition to resist 
 their claim, and in 1782 the Irish Parliament 
 became entirely independent. The transfer of 
 the scene of action from Westminster to College 
 Green did not relax the vigilance with which 
 Burke contemplated the struggle of Ireland to 
 work out its own salvation. Unfortunately no 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE I17 
 
 very liberal measures could be expected from an 
 assembly constituted as the Irish Parliament then 
 was. The aid of the Catholics in the struggle for 
 independence was, indeed, acknowledged by a 
 bill which granted them the free exercise of their 
 religion, but at the same time the old oppressive 
 civil disabilities were re-enacted. Burke was 
 emphatic in his disapproval. ' What I could have 
 wished,' he wrote to an Irish peer, ' would be to 
 see the civil advantages take the lead ; the other, 
 of a religious toleration, I conceive, would follow, 
 in a manner, of course. From what I have ob- 
 served, it is pride, arrogance, and a spirit of 
 domination, and not a bigoted spirit of religion, 
 that has caused and kept up those oppressive 
 statutes. I am sure I have known those who 
 have oppressed Papists in their civil rights ex- 
 ceedingly indulgent to them in their religious 
 ceremonies, and who really wished them to con- 
 tinue Catholics, in order to furnish pretences for 
 oppression. These persons never saw a man by 
 converting escape out of their power, but with 
 grudging and regret. I have known men to 
 whom I am not uncharitable in saying, though 
 they are dead, that they would have become 
 Papists in order to oppress Protestants, if, being 
 Protestants, it was not in their power to oppress 
 Papists.' 
 
Il8 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 It was not until ten years afterwards (1792) 
 that a beginning was made towards admitting 
 Roman Catholics to the parliamentary franchise. 
 In the meantime, Pitt's scheme for complete 
 freedom of trade between England and Ireland 
 came before Parliament. It cannot but be re- 
 gretted by every admirer of Burke that, under 
 the influence of a purely fanciful analogy between 
 the minister's proposals and the attempt to tax 
 America, he should, in common with the whole 
 Whig party, have resisted this eminently wise 
 and liberal measure. The fact that he now found 
 himself in line with the merchants and manu- 
 facturers whose hostility to the measure of 1778 
 had cost him his seat, ought in itself to have 
 caused him to doubt of the wisdom of his views. 
 
 The letter which Burke addressed to Sir 
 Hercules Langrishe in 1792, regarding the ad- 
 mission of the Irish Catholics to the franchise, 
 is one of the finest of all his pieces. It is worth 
 noting that it was written at a time when Burke, 
 according to Mr. Buckle, was ' under a complete 
 mental hallucination.' In his absorption in the 
 struggle against the French Revolution he might 
 have been forgiven a momentary forgetfulness of 
 the wrongs and needs of the country that gave 
 him birth. The letter is ample proof that his 
 mind was as clear and sane, his logic as keen, and 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE II9 
 
 his sentiments as liberal as ever. To the cry of 
 ' The Church in danger,' he retorted that whenever 
 he should be convinced — which will be late and 
 reluctantly — that the safety of the Church is 
 utterly inconsistent with all the civil rights what- 
 soever of the far larger part of the inhabitants of 
 the country, he should be extremely sorry for it, 
 because he should think the Church to be truly in 
 danger. ' It is putting things into the position of 
 an ugly alternative, into which I hope in God 
 they never will be put.' He urged that the Irish 
 Parliament should show towards the Catholics 
 a portion of the same magnanimity which the 
 English had shown in 1782. ' Compare what was 
 done in 1782 with what is wished in 1792 ; con- 
 sider the spirit of what has been done at the 
 several periods of reformation, and weigh maturely 
 whether it be exactly true that conciliatory con- 
 cessions are of good policy only in discussions 
 between nations, but that among descriptions in 
 the same nation they must always be irrational 
 and dangerous.' In a keenly ironical passage he 
 set aside the fears expressed lest the Pope should 
 gain a footing in Ireland, and become its real 
 sovereign. He describes the Pope as a 'com- 
 modious bugbear, who is of infinitely more use to 
 those who pretend to fear than to those who love 
 him, and laughs to scorn the idea of him taking 
 
I20 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 that fierce tyrant, the King of France, out of his 
 jail and arming him with bulls and pardons to 
 invade poor old Ireland, and to force the free- 
 born, naked feet of your people into the wooden 
 shoes of that arbitrary monarch.' The 'naked 
 feet ' is a stroke of genius. But he soon laid aside 
 irony, and the passage which immediately follows 
 is as weighty as anything he ever wrote. ' I do 
 not believe,' he proceeds, ' that discourses of this 
 kind are held, or that anything like them will be 
 held, by any who walk about without a keeper. 
 Yet I confess that on occasions of this nature I am 
 the most afraid of the weakest reasonings because 
 they discover the strongest passions. These things 
 will never be brought out in definite propositions. 
 They would not prevent pity towards any person ; 
 they would only cause it for those who were 
 capable of talking in such a strain. But I know, 
 and am sure, that such ideas as no man will 
 distinctly produce to another, or hardly venture 
 to bring in any plain shape to his own mind, 
 he will utter in obscure, ill-explained doubts, 
 jealousies, surmises, fears, and apprehensions, and 
 that in such a fog they will appear to have a good 
 deal of size, and will make an impression, when, 
 if they were clearly brought forth and defined, 
 they would meet with nothing but scorn and 
 derision.' 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 121 
 
 Burke's dominant idea was now a dread of the 
 progress of Jacobinism. In a curiously ingenious 
 fashion he contrived to connect his views on that 
 subject with his advocacy of Catholic emancipa- 
 tion. He urged with great emphasis that the 
 surest way to throw the Catholics into the arms 
 of the Jacobins was to continue to exclude them 
 from a share in the constitution.^ In several 
 curiously characteristic passages he deprecates 
 any attempt to make the Catholics abjure their 
 ancient religion, lest they should become, not 
 Protestants, but atheists. The cause of religion 
 was now menaced, not by the Pope, but by the 
 freethinkers, and it was both unseemly and suicidal 
 for those to whom Christianity was dear to be 
 wrangling over minor details of doctrine and 
 discipline with this grave peril at their door. 
 The events of 1798, the revolt of the United 
 Irishmen and their intrigues with the French, 
 bore emphatic evidence to Burke's sagacity and 
 political prescience. But before those dark days 
 had come the hand of death was laid on the great 
 statesman who had been one of Ireland's wisest, 
 truest, and staunchest friends. The prospect, 
 indeed, looked black enough when Burke passed 
 away, worn out with a life of arduous toil. The 
 
 1 See Letter to William Smith (1795), and Second Letter to Sir 
 Hercules Langrishe (1795). 
 
122 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 hopes of the Catholics, which had been raised high 
 by the mission of Lord Fitzwilliam, were dashed to 
 the ground by his recall. Burke had shared those 
 hopes, and an air of despondency hangs over his 
 last utterances on Irish topics. 'Things must 
 take their course,' he said sadly in a letter written 
 only a month before his death. 
 
 It is impossible to conjecture with any degree 
 of certainty whether Burke would have approved 
 of the Union. At no time does he seem to have 
 shown himself unwilling to consider its desira- 
 bility, though his utterances on the subject are 
 cautious and guarded to a degree. It is likely 
 that he would have recognised that the step was 
 forced on Pitt as the one way out of the im- 
 broglio into which Irish affairs had got. He was 
 too well acquainted with the meaner side of 
 politics to have held up his hands with holy 
 horror at Pitt's employment of the only means 
 by which the Union could be brought about. 
 One of the saddest things in the history of Ire- 
 land has been the inability of her people to re- 
 cognise their best friends and their truest patriots, 
 their tendency to heap rewards and honours on 
 those who have sullied her fair fame, to follow 
 with a generous confidence unworthy leaders, and 
 to contemn and neglect those who speak to her 
 in the accents of truth and sincerity. If ever in 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 1 23 
 
 the fulness of time the eyes of Ireland should be 
 opened — if ever she should cease to fight against 
 the 'nature of things,' and should strive to see 
 things as they really are, the name which she 
 will most of all prize and honour will be that of 
 the great statesman whose love of Ireland was 
 mixed with no base alloy of hatred to England, 
 and whose efforts on her behalf were marked by 
 a sanity, a temperance, and a foresight in which 
 her chosen leaders have, alas ! for the most part, 
 shown themselves miserably deficient. 
 
 There may be a doubt as to which of Burke's 
 writings possess the most permanent value ; 
 there can be none as to which of them have 
 created the keenest interest and caused the 
 widest controversy. That distinction belongs 
 unquestionably to his writings on the French 
 Revolution. Most of the other questions with 
 which he dealt are no longer open questions ; 
 the world has long since made up its mind upon 
 them. Some of them were ephemeral in their 
 nature, and now possess merely an historical 
 interest. But that astonishing portent known as 
 the French Revolution is almost universally re- 
 cognised as the greatest event in the history of 
 modern Europe. It has cast the potency of its 
 spell over the most diverse minds ; it has ex- 
 ercised the ablest heads and the most skilful 
 
124 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 pens of two generations of thinkers. Among the 
 shoal of books on this subject which have issued 
 from the press, Burke's still take a commanding 
 place ; and if Carlyle's History is unmatched for 
 its pictorial, dramatic, and picturesque effects, 
 Burke's Reflections remains by far the ablest and 
 most philosophical exposition of the view taken 
 by conservative thinkers of the great questions 
 raised in so acute a form by the French Re- 
 volution. 
 
 We have seen that in 1769 Burke, in his first 
 political pamphlet, had predicted that the de- 
 plorable state of the French finances would 
 sooner or later lead to a catastrophe which might 
 involve the whole of Europe. In this he was at 
 one with the most competent observers of the 
 time. Sixteen years before, indeed, Chesterfield 
 had written that all the symptoms which he had 
 met with in history previous to great changes 
 and revolutions in government existed, and daily 
 increased, in France.^ 
 
 The great wars into which the ambition of 
 Louis XIV. had plunged France had brought the 
 nation to the verge of bankruptcy. His successor 
 had to face a task which might have proved be- 
 yond the powers of the ablest monarchs known 
 to history, and Louis XV. was one of the most 
 ' Letters : 25th December 1753. 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 125 
 
 incapable and dissolute sovereigns who had ever 
 sat upon the throne of France. The need for a 
 strong and capable monarch was all the greater, 
 because France, in the midst of modern Europe, 
 still retained the impress of the feudal organisa- 
 tion. Louis XIV. 's well-known saying, ^ L'^tat, 
 dest moil was no idle boast, but the expression 
 of a profound truth. The French form of 
 government was a monarchy of the most abso- 
 lute kind. Even before the Revolution of 1689 
 none of the English sovereigns could properly be 
 described as absolute monarchs. As early as the 
 fifteenth century, Sir John Fortescue had proudly 
 called attention to the difference between the 
 English and French forms of government. One 
 leading cause of that difference was that in Eng- 
 land the nobles had made common cause with 
 the people in resisting the encroachments of the 
 Crown. But. in France a despotic and highly 
 centralised system of government shut out even 
 the nobles from any real share in the conduct of 
 affairs ; they existed merely for show and or- 
 nament. The so-called parliaments, with the 
 parliament of Paris at their head, bore little 
 resemblance to the powerful body of the same 
 name in England. In reality their functions 
 were judicial rather than legislative; their sole 
 legislative function — if one could dignify it by 
 
126 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 that title — consisted in registering edicts pre- 
 sented to them by the king. They had, indeed, 
 won, and occasionally exercised, the right of 
 protesting against these edicts, but if the king 
 chose to disregard their protests, they were 
 powerless to resist his will by constitutional 
 means. 
 
 The exclusion of the noblesse and the dignified 
 clergy from the direction of the policy of the 
 nation was compensated by the privileges and 
 immunities which partly exempted them from 
 taxation, and placed the greater part of the 
 burden on the shoulders least able to bear it. 
 The mass of the people were still liable to render 
 those feudal services which had been imposed 
 when the conditions of national life were radically 
 different, and which in England had long since 
 disappeared, or been commuted for money pay- 
 ments. The condition of the peasants was de- 
 plorable, as one may realise by a perusal of 
 Arthur Young's Travels in France. The whole 
 empire, in short, although outwardly presenting 
 an appearance of great splendour and prosperity, 
 was suffering from an inward decay which only 
 the most prompt and vigorous measures could 
 have arrested. It is right to dwell a little on this 
 side of the question, because it is the side on 
 which Burke touches but slightly. 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 1 27 
 
 Meanwhile, a great intellectual movement was 
 passing over France like a wave. The eighteenth 
 century was throughout Europe an epoch of 
 immense intellectual activity, and the dominant 
 temper of the great writers of the time was one 
 of restless inquiry and all but universal scepticism. 
 Nowhere, however, was that spirit so widely 
 spread as in France. Nowhere was the play of 
 thought freer, or the spirit of inquiry keener or 
 more relentless. Montesquieu, in his monumental 
 work, had pointedly and vigorously eulogised the 
 British Constitution. Voltaire, with almost in- 
 credible activity, sent forth volume after volume 
 in which he applied his admirable literary talents, 
 his keen, rapier-like wit, his agreeable raillery, to 
 discredit existing institutions. But the crowning 
 impulse came from the strange and distorted 
 genius of Rousseau. Montesquieu would have 
 been amply satisfied to see the French Govern- 
 ment brought into something like the English 
 form. Voltaire took too cynical a view of human 
 nature to be a democratic leader ; his preference 
 was rather for a benevolent aristocracy. But 
 Rousseau, starting from a theorem that man was 
 inherently and naturally virtuous, and that society 
 was responsible for his vices and crimes, declared 
 himself, in the most unequivocal terms, against 
 property, and argued that no power was legiti- 
 
128 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 mate which did not emanate directly from the 
 sovereign people. The startling nature of his 
 paradoxes, and the persuasive eloquence with 
 which he enunciated them, created for him a wide 
 audience ; and to the teaching of the Contrat 
 Social must largely be ascribed, if not the up- 
 heaval itself, at least the shape into which the 
 revolutionists attempted to mould the government 
 of France. 
 
 While this vast intellectual fermentation was 
 going on Louis XV. died, and his grandson, the 
 ill-fated Louis XVI. came to the throne (1774). 
 The new monarch was a mere boy, with a good 
 heart and fair intentions ; but he was weak, 
 irresolute, and vacillating. That everything now 
 depended on the personal character of the 
 sovereign is the opinion of such competent au- 
 thorities as Professor Flint and Mr. Lecky. ' The 
 old order of society,' says Professor Flint, ' could 
 not endure. The only question was. How was it 
 to give place to another ? Was it to be through 
 the action of the monarch, or of the people 1 I 
 see no reason for believing that it might not have 
 been brought about in the former way, that the 
 Revolution in the form which it actually assumed 
 was inevitable, even at the accession of Louis 
 XVI.' He proceeds to argue that if Louis xvi. 
 had been a capable sovereign ' there would have 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 1 29 
 
 been no French Revolution like that which 
 actually happened, no taking of the Bastille, no 
 "night of Spurs," no September Massacre or 
 Reign of Terror, and yet all the principles and 
 strivings which led to the Revolution might have 
 been as fully realised. The Revolution may have 
 no more added to the power or influence of the stream 
 of thought and tendency which characterises the 
 eighteenth century, than the cataracts of Niagara 
 increase the force and volume of the St. Lawrence^ "• 
 
 Unfortunately, Louis XVI. was not such a 
 monarch. The financial straits of the Govern- 
 ment were now extreme, and Turgot, who, soon 
 after the King's accession, became Controller- 
 General of the Finances, was driven to propose 
 that the noblesse and the clergy should surrender 
 their exemption from taxation. Had the King 
 steadily backed up the great minister, the whole 
 course of French history might have been changed. 
 But Louis bent before the storm of indigna- 
 tion which Turgot's schemes provoked, and the 
 minister was dismissed (1776). The ingenious 
 schemes of Necker, his successor, did practically 
 nothing to remove the deficit, and the Govern- 
 ment soon after plunged into the American War. 
 This was a fatal step, for not only did the expenses 
 of the war saddle France with a new increment of 
 
 ' History of the Philosophy of History in France, ch. iv. 
 I 
 
130 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 indebtedness, but the soldiers who took part in it 
 returned to France with a new zeal for liberty, 
 and the example of a purely democratic com- 
 munity across the Atlantic powerfully impressed 
 the public, already disposed towards democracy 
 by the writings of the philosophers. Calonne, a 
 French Townshend, who succeeded Necker, could 
 hit upon no better plan than that of convoking 
 the Notables (1787), and asking them to lay aside 
 their privileges. The only result of this step was 
 to secure his own dismissal. After other fruitless 
 attempts at financial reform, it was decided to 
 convoke the States-General, a body which had 
 not sat since 1614. The elections threw France 
 into a state of violent excitement. As soon as 
 the States- General assembled (May 4, 1789), it 
 became evident that the Third Estate was re- 
 solved not to take a subordinate position. Hot 
 disputes broke out as to whether the three Estates 
 should deliberate in common, and these ended in 
 the triumph of the Third Estate. The French 
 Revolution had now begun, and the victory of the 
 Third Estate was quickly followed by the attack 
 on the Bastille (July 14, 17S9). Next came the 
 march of the Paris mob on Versailles, and the 
 King and royal family were brought in triumph 
 to Paris. 
 
 In England the news of these great events was 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 131 
 
 at first received with sympathy and approval. 
 Fox, on hearing of the fall of the Bastille, 
 exclaimed, ' How much is this the greatest event 
 that ever happened in the world, and how 
 much the best ! ' The majority of English poli- 
 ticians regarded the French Revolution of 1789 
 simply as a counterpart of the English Revolution 
 of 1689; they thought that France was now, 
 thus late in the day, asserting her right to those 
 liberties which England had won a hundred years 
 before. Poetic souls like Wordsworth and Cole- 
 ridge welcomed the Revolution with a burst of 
 enthusiasm. But Burke from the first regarded 
 the Revolution with hatred and distrust. The 
 only explanation which seems to Mr. Buckle 
 adequate to account for Burke's attitude is that 
 he was suffering from a complete Jmental halluci- 
 nation. This reminds one of poor D'Espr^menil, 
 whom the National Assembly, says Carlyle, will 
 by and by, to save time, ' regard as in a state of 
 distraction.' To Mr. Buckle the answer must be 
 short. If Burke was mad when he wrote the 
 Reflections, the disease was chronic and of long 
 standing. It is no doubt easy, by taking de- 
 tached passages from his earlier writings, as 
 Lord Brougham has done,^ to show a seeming 
 
 ' Sketches of English Statesmen in the Time of George III. : 
 Burke. 
 
132 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 inconsistency between these and the tone of 
 thought which permeates the Reflections. But 
 a fairer and juster criticism will recognise that 
 Burke attacked the French Revolution on exactly 
 the same principles which he had consistently 
 professed all through his public career. No one 
 has brought this out better than Mr. Morley, 
 who differs widely from Burke in his view of the 
 French Revolution. 
 
 Burke was not the man to conceal his opinions 
 because they might be distasteful to his associates. 
 As early as January 1790 he seized an opportunity 
 in the House of Commons for denouncing the 
 Revolution. Fox had eulogised the authors of 
 the Revolution. ' The French,' exclaimed Burke, 
 ' have shown themselves the ablest architects of 
 ruin who have hitherto existed in the world. In 
 a short space of time they have pulled to the 
 ground their army, their navy, their commerce, 
 their arts, and their manufactures.' He now set 
 vigorously to work on his book, and in October 
 1790 the Reflections on the French Revolution was 
 published. 
 
 Few books have had a greater influence on 
 political thought, and few so well repay a careful 
 study. To Burke, with his deep-rooted con- 
 servatism, his passionate attachment to the past, 
 his hatred of everything in the slightest degree 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 1 33 
 
 approaching revolution, his distrust of abstract 
 logic, his almost mystic manner of regarding the 
 social structure of a country, the proceedings of 
 the revolutionary party in France were utterly 
 hateful. He regarded all existing institutions, 
 even the most defective, with a sort of super- 
 stitious awe, an awe which sprang from his 
 conviction that they were not the result of mere 
 accident, but of mighty forces acting silently and 
 unseen through countless ages of history. One 
 may imagine how a man, thinking in this way, 
 would regard the destruction at one blow of the 
 whole social system of France. It is important to 
 remember that the Reflections were written long 
 before the Revolution assumed its more violent 
 forces, for it shows that Burke's opposition sprang 
 from his hatred to the principles on which the 
 new constitution was based. 
 
 The text of the Reflections was a sermon by 
 Dr. Price, a Dissenting minister, in which he had 
 praised the Revolution, and extolled its authors 
 for following the example set them by the English 
 a hundred years before. Burke had no difficulty 
 in winning a dialectical triumph over Dr. Price, 
 by showing that the English Revolution had 
 proceeded on traditional and hereditary lines, 
 and that there was no real analogy between the 
 two cases. Perhaps the one weak point in the 
 
134 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 argument is that Burke seems to overlook the 
 fact that the English Revolution, although it 
 seemed merely to assert the ancient rights and 
 privileges of the people of England which had 
 been violated by James II., in reality involved the 
 transfer of power from the Crown to Parliament.^ 
 In the congratulations bestowed upon the French 
 for having at last achieved their liberty he refused 
 to join, and he gave his reasons in a weighty 
 passage : ' When I see the spirit of liberty in 
 action, I see a strong principle at work ; and this, 
 for a while, is all I can possibly see. ... I must 
 be tolerably sure, before I venture publicly to 
 congratulate men upon a blessing, that they have 
 really received one. . . . The effect of liberty to 
 individuals is that they may do what they please : 
 we ought to see what it will please them to do 
 before we risk congratulations, which may be 
 soon turned into complaints.' The English form 
 of liberty, he held, was an affair of tradition and 
 inheritance : ' By this means our liberty becomes 
 a noble freedom. It carries an imposing and 
 majestic aspect. It has a pedigree and illustrating 
 ancestors. It has its bearings, and its ensigns 
 armorial. It has its gallery of portraits, its 
 monumental inscriptions, its records, evidences, 
 
 ' I think Mr. Leslie Stephen has a remark to this efifect in his 
 History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century. 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 1 35 
 
 and titles. We procure reverence to our civil 
 institutions on the principle upon which nature 
 teaches us to revere individual men — on account of 
 their age, and on account of those from whom they 
 are descended. All your sophisters cannot pro- 
 duce anything better adapted to preserve a 
 rational and manly freedom than the course that 
 we have pursued who have chosen our nature 
 rather than our speculations, our breasts rather 
 than our inventions, for the great conservatories 
 and magazines of our rights and privileges.' The 
 French, on the other hand, had ' set up their trade 
 without a capital.' Instead of ' heaving the lead 
 every inch of the way/ they had thrown both 
 chart and compass overboard, and voyaged 
 boldly into unknown seas. 
 
 One of the most weighty and characteristic 
 passages of the Reflections is that in which Burke 
 with equal courage and candour justifies what 
 the Revolutionists called mere prejudices : ' We 
 are afraid to put men to live and trade each on 
 his own private stock of reason, because we 
 suspect that this stock in each man is small, and 
 that the individuals would do better to avail 
 themselves of the general bank and capital of 
 nations and of ages. Many of our men of 
 speculation, instead of exploding general pre- 
 judices, employ their sagacity to discover the 
 
136 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 latent wisdom which prevails in them. If they 
 find what they seek — and they seldom fail, — they 
 think it more wise to continue the prejudice with 
 the reason involved, than to cast away the coat 
 of prejudice, and to leave nothing but the naked 
 reason ; because prejudice, with its reason, has a 
 motive to give action to that reason, and an 
 affection which will give it permanence. Pre- 
 judice is of ready application in the emergency ; 
 it previously engages the mind in a steady course 
 of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the 
 man hesitating in the moment of decision, 
 sceptical, puzzled, and unresolved.' Prejudice 
 renders a man's virtue his habit, and not a series 
 of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, 
 his duty becomes a part of his nature.' 
 
 The great fault of the Reflections is that Burke 
 refused to recognise the evils of the old system 
 of government. He would admit nothing that 
 was urged against the conduct and character of 
 the nobles and the clergy. To see the other side 
 of the shield, one must turn to Carlyle and Taine. 
 The old regime was doomed — doomed by its own 
 faults and vices. 
 
 As the Revolution assumed a more violent 
 form, Burke's indignation steadily increased. In 
 his Letter to a Member of the National Assembly 
 we have the first intimation of that crusade 
 
THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 1 37 
 
 against the Revolution which he was to devote 
 the rest of his life to preaching. 
 
 Burke was violently reproached by the Whigs 
 who followed Fox with apostasy from all the 
 principles he had formerly professed. He replied 
 in The Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs 
 (1791) — a calm and masterly vindication of his ab- 
 solute consistency. In balance, in serene mastery 
 of his facts, in symmetry and proportion, this book 
 must rank very high among Burke's efforts. 
 
 A reaction now rapidly set in against the 
 French Revolution. When the more violent 
 spirits obtained the upper hand, and the execu- 
 tion of the King was resolved upon and carried 
 out, war between the two countries was inevitable. 
 Burke, however, was emphatic in his disapproval 
 of the way in which the war was carried on, and 
 in his Letters on a Regicide Peace he put forth all 
 his powers to ensure its continuance in a more 
 determined fashion. We do not recognise the 
 better part of Burke in these letters ; vituperation 
 has taken the place of argument, and one can 
 only marvel to what excesses of passion the 
 wisest of statesmen can allow himself to be 
 carried. In magnificence of declamation, how- 
 ever, nothing in Burke surpasses the Letters on a 
 Regicide Peace, and the irony of the fourth Letter 
 is unique of its kind. 
 
138 THE WRITINGS OF EDMUND BURKE 
 
 Burke now felt that his days on earth were 
 drawing near a close. The stage had darkened 
 ere the curtain fell. The death of his son had 
 been a grievous blow to a man whose domestic 
 affections were as strong as his political passions. 
 He was filled with the most gloomy forebodings 
 of the fate of Europe. A darker moment was, 
 indeed, yet to come, when the dying Pitt, pointing 
 to a map of Europe, was to say, 'Roll up that 
 map ; it will not be wanted these ten years.' But 
 the outlook was black and gloomy enough ; the 
 French were carrying everything before them, 
 and the whole Western world was veiled in thick 
 battle-smoke, when Death brought Burke's career 
 of beneficent activity to an end, July 9, 1797. 
 He had barely reached the allotted span of 
 threescore and ten ; but he had never thought of 
 sparing himself, and the severe strain of his 
 manifold activities had told in the end upon his 
 constitution. In the nature of things, the toil of 
 a statesman can rarely be of that blessed sort 
 described by the poet as 'toil unsevered from 
 tranquillity ' ; he must count himself happy if he 
 may look for his recompense to the gratitude and 
 admiration of posterity. To that gratitude and 
 that admiration no statesman possesses a stronger 
 or surer claim than Edmund Burke. 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLDi 
 
 It is not my intention in what follows to write a 
 life of Matthew Arnold, but rather a criticism of 
 his work. Indeed the materials are not at hand 
 for an essay of the former kind, as no biography 
 of Arnold has yet appeared. It will suffice, 
 therefore, if I note at the outset that Matthew 
 Arnold, the son of Dr. Arnold, the famous head- 
 master of Rugby School, was born in 1822 ; that 
 he was educated at Rugby, Winchester, and 
 Oxford ; that as one of Her Majesty's Inspectors 
 of Schools he did good service to the cause of 
 secondary education ; and that he also held for a 
 time the post of Professor of Poetry at Oxford. 
 Finally, his death, at the age of sixty-six, so 
 recently as 1888, will be fresh within the memory 
 of all. With this hasty sketch of a life outwardly, 
 at least, uneventful, I pass to the more immediate 
 purpose of this essay. 
 
 The difficulty in dealing with an author who 
 has produced so much and such varied work as 
 Matthew Arnold is to know what to select and 
 
 ' Heriot-Watt College Literary Society, February 1892. 
 
 139 
 
I40 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 where to begin. I choose to begin with his 
 poetry, for this reason : If one set out to inquire 
 what is the current idea of Matthew Arnold — in 
 what light the mass of readers chiefly regard him, 
 one would find, I think, that very few would fix 
 upon his poetry as that which constitutes his 
 chief significance in their eyes. Yet to those who 
 wish well to Arnold's fame, his poetry has a very 
 special value ; in his poetry his chief significance 
 for them does really rest. For it is perhaps the 
 only portion of his work which is genuinely 
 creative, and only work which has this character 
 can hope to live. No doubt we value his other 
 books very highly ; to us, to our generation, they 
 have been fresh and fascinating, they have been 
 inspiring and stimulating, in a very high degree ; 
 and so, I trust, they will be for some generations 
 to come. Nevertheless, they are merely critical, 
 not creative ; they belong, that is to say, to what 
 is after all a fugitive form of literature, and so 
 they cannot be regarded as safe. Time goes on, 
 new problems spring up, a new criticism engages 
 men's minds, and names that once were great 
 become as the mere shadow of a shade ; nay, the 
 very triumph of the critic's ideas acts, in the 
 end, to the detriment of his fame. But all the 
 while work which has this character of genuine 
 creation abides, does not pass, becomes a last- 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 141 
 
 ing possession of the race. So I say that those 
 who think highly of Arnold do well to put 
 his creative work in the foreground ; and this 
 creative work is found in his poetry more than 
 anywhere else. 
 
 Fortunately, when we thus fall back on Arnold's 
 poetry we fall back on something the strength 
 and excellence of which gives us good reason to 
 hope that it will so survive, that it will become a 
 lasting possession of the race. Arnold's limita- 
 tions, indeed, are many and evident. What is 
 perhaps the supreme poetical gift of all, the lyri- 
 cal faculty — the power, that is, of the free, direct, 
 spontaneous utterance of an emotion, a passion, at 
 once common, fresh, and deep — this supreme gift 
 he can hardly be said to possess at all. His voice 
 is not naturally rich and full ; his lines rarely 
 haunt one with their unique melody. He is 
 essentially a meditative poet; in him, as in 
 Wordsworth, there is an excess of the contem- 
 plative and brooding spirit over the passionate. 
 Wordsworth's influence, indeed, we could very 
 easily trace in Arnold's poetry, even if we did not 
 know from himself how strong that influence was. 
 His fine tribute to Wordsworth's memory will no 
 doubt be familiar. Speaking of the deaths of 
 Byron, Wordsworth, and Goethe, those three 
 great heroes of his, he says :— 
 
142 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 ' Time may restore us in his course 
 Goethe's sage mind and Byron's force ; 
 But where will Europe's later hour 
 Again find Wordsworth's healing power 'i 
 
 He laid us as we lay at birth, 
 On the cool, flowery lap of earth ; 
 Smiles broke from us, and we had ease ; 
 The hills were round us, and the breeze 
 Went o'er the sunlit fields again ; 
 Our foreheads felt the wind and rain. 
 Our youth returned, for there was shed 
 On spirits that had long been dead, 
 Spirits dried up and closely furled. 
 The freshness of the early world.' 
 
 Yet as strong as was Wordsworth's influence over 
 him, his culture and his humour saved him from 
 Wordsworth's great mistake — the mistake of con- 
 founding what is common with what is merely 
 commonplace. The passion of love, for instance, 
 is a common one ; — I speak without experience 
 in these matters, but I suppose we might describe 
 it as a universal passion ; — yet it is never com- 
 monplace — to those interested, and to the poet, 
 — and therefore it is eternally a fit subject for 
 poetry. A red-haired man is also common, but 
 he is not on that account a fit subject for 
 poetry. So, also, a donkey is a common and an 
 unobjectionable animal ; still one does not expect 
 the best sort of poetry to occupy itself with 
 donkeys. Wordsworth forgot this; hence Peter 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 143 
 
 Bell and The Idiot Boy, and all the rest of 
 that tiresome company, hence also their lineal 
 descendant, Mrs. Leo Hunter, in the Pickwick 
 Papers, with that plaintive little lay of hers about 
 the expiring frog. On the other hand, Arnold 
 never quite reaches the altitude to which Words- 
 worth occasionally attains ; such a line as 
 
 'The light that never was on sea or land.' 
 
 is quite out of the younger poet's power. In 
 short, comparing these two, it is quite safe and 
 quite correct to say, that of inspiration Arnold 
 has far less than Wordsworth, of culture he has 
 far more. 
 
 The bulk of Arnold's poetry, as I have indi- 
 cated, is reflective. Yet some of his finest work 
 is to be found in narrative poems like Sohrab 
 and Rustum and Balder Dead, in semi-dramatic 
 poems like the Sick King of Bokhara and 
 Empedocles on Etna. In these his classic mode 
 of treatment shows itself strongly — in the easy 
 strength of the verse, in the engaging simplicity 
 of touch, in the fine felicity of diction, but most 
 of all, in his grand austere, impersonal way of 
 treating things. We are not so much impressed 
 by particularly fine passages as by the artistic 
 completeness, the rounded perfection, of the 
 whole. The total effect is grand ; yet, precisely 
 
144 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 for this reason, it does not do to pick out isolated 
 passages. From this class of his poems, therefore, 
 I content myself with only one quotation. For 
 exquisitely clear, sweet, lucid word-painting, it 
 would surely be hard to beat this passage from 
 one of his earliest poems, Empedocles on Etna — 
 
 ' Far, far from here. 
 The Adriatic breaks in a warm bay 
 Among the green lUyrian hills ; and there 
 The sunshine in the happy glens is fair, 
 And by the sea, and in the brakes. 
 The grass is cool, the seaside air 
 Buoyant and fresh, the mountain flowers 
 More virginal and sweet than ours.' 
 
 It was that passage, prefixed by Charles Kingsley 
 to one of the chapters oi Alton Locke, which first 
 led me to the study of Arnold's poetry ; and I 
 have loved it ever since. 
 
 We enter a different world altogether when we 
 come to deal with Arnold's reflective poetry — a 
 world of doubt, of melancholy, of unrest. Here, 
 more emphatically than anywhere else in litera- 
 ture, is pictured that struggle between the old 
 faith and the new reason which plays so tremen- 
 dous a part in the intellectual life of our day. For 
 Arnold, as for so many more to-day, the old faith 
 had lost — not indeed its charm, for that remained, 
 but — its hold over his mind. He felt that if 
 Christianity was to remain a power for good, it 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 145 
 
 must be transformed ; and he did not very well 
 see how this transformation was to be brought 
 about. Hence that melancholy — that 'sad lu- 
 cidity of soul,' as he has so finely phrased it — 
 which is the dominant note in his reflective poems. 
 He describes himself as 
 
 ' Wandering between two worlds, one dead, 
 The other powerless to be born.' 
 
 Yet it is a melancholy which holds its head high ; 
 he is resolute not to falter with his reason, not to 
 admit illusions, however enticing. 
 
 ' Because thou must not dream, thou need'st not then 
 despair.' 
 
 To the promptings of despair he opposes a 
 proud resolution, an unconquerable though sad 
 serenity. He holds firmly by Goethe's great prin- 
 ciple of resolute self-dependence ; he insists on 
 the fact of the essential solitariness of the human 
 soul, on the fact that each one of us has in truth 
 to work out his own salvation. In a famous 
 stanza he declares — 
 
 ' Yes, in the sea of life enisled. 
 With echoing straits between us thrown, 
 Dotting the shoreless watery wild, 
 We mortal millions live— alone.' 
 
 Between even the nearest friends there rages, he 
 says, in one of his grandest lines, 
 
 ' The unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea.' 
 K 
 
146 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 And dwelling thus alone, we have to study our 
 
 own mind and follow its best promptings. 
 
 ' No man,' he says, — 
 
 ' No man can save his brother's soul, 
 Or pay his brother's debt.' 
 
 And again : — 
 
 ' Once read thy own breast right 
 And thou hast done with fears ; 
 Man gets no other light, 
 Live he a thousand years.' 
 
 And then, as a relief to these feelings, he turns 
 constantly to another of his great primary themes, 
 the silence of nature and its calm, 'its toil un- 
 severed from tranquillity.' One is constantly 
 coming across descriptive passages, to the full 
 as clear, simple, and lucid as the one quoted, and 
 after the weariness and languor which so often go 
 before, one rests in these passages with a feeling 
 of joy and satisfaction. 
 
 From what I have said one may gather that 
 Arnold's poetry is never likely to become popular, 
 in the wide sense of the word. It is cold with 
 the coldness of Milton's later style, the style of 
 Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. En- 
 thusiasm and passion Arnold did not readily 
 feel and he does not readily awake ; the mass 
 of readers will always probably be left cold by 
 his poetry as they are left cold by Samson 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 147 
 
 Agonistes, But to those who are readily re- 
 sponsive to the classic note in poetry, Arnold 
 comes closer perhaps than any other of our 
 poets ; and by such his memory will always be 
 held in honour. Gravity and dignity of thought, 
 a firm and sure grip of his subject, rare and 
 choice gifts of expression, an uncompromising 
 austerity of treatment, an exquisite sense of form 
 and proportion, these are never absent from his 
 verse ; they give it that tone of conscious dis- 
 tinction which marks it all ; they make it classical ; 
 they raise it to the level of an art which is both 
 fine and true. It is work, one emphatically 
 pronounces, which will stand the test of time 
 well ; in it there is nothing spurious, nothing un- 
 worthy. For Arnold, it has well been said, ' the 
 essentials were dignity of thought and sentiment, 
 and distinction of manner and utterance.' And 
 therefore, despite its limitations, his poetry may 
 surely be allowed to rank with that best poetry 
 regarding which he said that ' it will be found to 
 have a power of forming, sustaining, and delighting 
 us as nothing else can.' 
 
 As a poet Arnold was — and is — overshadowed 
 by Tennyson and Browning ; but during his 
 lifetime he was allowed on all hands to have 
 the finest critical sense among the men of our 
 time. Arnold was a born critic, and in addition 
 
148 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 he had the best possible training. His culture 
 was altogether beyond the common run, even 
 among men of letters ; the writers of Greece and 
 Rome, of France and Germany in particular, 
 were as familiar to him as those of his own land. 
 So little insular, indeed, is the general tone of his 
 criticism, that he has been called the most un- 
 English of Englishmen ; he has been said to be 
 far more of a Frenchman than of an Englishman. 
 And unquestionably this is true in a sense. He 
 had, in an eminent degree, that love of lucidity 
 and order, alike in conceptions and in their 
 expression, which characterise the writers of 
 ancient Greece and modern France, although it 
 is to be noted that his Teutonic birth asserted 
 itself in the greater gravity and seriousness of 
 his views of life. Excess or extravagance of any 
 kind he abhorred, he could not away with. He 
 felt and acknowledged, for instance, the regal 
 supremacy of Shakespeare, but he would none 
 of Shakespeare's ways ; for himself, he went back 
 and found his truest inspiration and best model 
 in the classical writers of antiquity. Now it is 
 important to bear this in mind when we read his 
 literary criticism, for it explains a good many 
 things. It explains, for instance, the slight store 
 he set by Shelley's poetry. Not only did he rate 
 it as of small value, but he actually hazarded the 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 149 
 
 prediction that Shelley's essays and letters would 
 in time come to stand higher than his poetry. 
 And if his hatred of excess and extravagance led 
 him to undervalue Shelley, it led him also to 
 overrate such a poet as Gray. ' Gray,' he said, 
 ' is one of our classics ; the scantiest and frailest 
 of our classics, it is true, but still a classic' Now, 
 although I am well aware how universal is the 
 condemnation of Johnson's estimate of Gray in 
 the Lives of the Poets, I really think Johnson 
 comes nearer the truth ; in fact, what I have to 
 find fault with in Johnson's Life of Gray is not its 
 wrong-headed judgment, but its egregious bad 
 taste. He treats Gray as if he were a charlatan 
 or an impostor, and whether Gray is one of our 
 classics or not, he certainly was not that. Macaulay 
 quotes with censure Johnson's description of Gray, 
 expressed in conversation, as a barren rascal ; but 
 really, making allowance for Johnson's way of 
 expressing himself, that epithet ' barren ' does not 
 seem far from the truth. If we bear in mind, 
 then, this tendency of Arnold's, and if we also 
 remember that he is sometimes inclined to be 
 over-fastidious, we could not have a safer or a 
 better guide to the real enjoyment of the master- 
 pieces of literature. 
 
 A safe guide Arnold generally is ; he is always 
 a fascinating and delightful one. His prose style 
 
ISO MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 is simply one of the most delightful in the range 
 of our literature. It flows so freely and so easily ; 
 it is so admirably flexible, so clear, so lucid, so 
 simple in construction, yet so fine in its effects. 
 It ranks with Addison's as the finest example we 
 have of the well-bred colloquial style of prose — a 
 style differing, indeed, from ordinary, cultured 
 conversation, having a slight exaltation of tone 
 that such conversation has not, but differing less 
 from it than it does from the mechanical style of 
 such writers as Johnson and Macaulay. It was 
 his constant command of an admirable style, in 
 conjunction with his natural sense of what was 
 fine in literature and what was not, which enabled 
 him to produce such critical masterpieces as, to 
 mention no others, the essays on Heine and 
 Marcus Aurelius in the first series of Essays in 
 Criticism, and those on Wordsworth and Byron 
 in the second series. His style is really his own, 
 in every part, even to his love of quotation and of 
 repetition. No great writer whom I have read 
 quotes so freely as Arnold ; and no great writer 
 repeats himself so often. His constant custom 
 was to take some wise and pregnant saying 
 uttered by some famous personage like Plato, 
 or St. Paul, or his favourite Bishop Wilson, and 
 to make this the text, as it were, of his discourse ; 
 to walk all round it, to amplify it, to enlarge it, to 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 151 
 
 come back to it again and again. So dexterous 
 is the use he thus makes of quotation, that one 
 cannot find it in one's heart to blame him for 
 being too prodigal in its employment. So, too, 
 his endless repetitions of himself are all in- 
 tentional, and it was in fact by dint of this 
 practice that so many of his phrases have become 
 popular and current. Still, it is a habit which is 
 occasionally irritating ; as, for instance, when he 
 repeats the phrase ' Scotch religion, Scotch drink, 
 and Scotch manners ' four times within the com- 
 pass of a single page. One cannot but remark, 
 also, in his prose the fine tone of irony of which 
 he can on occasion make so terribly effective a 
 use. His tone is perfectly courteous, but the 
 irony is all the keener because it is so perfectly 
 courteous. He is an expert swordsman, who, with 
 a bland smile on his countenance, is through his 
 adversary's body before he quite realises what 
 has happened. The very gravity and seriousness 
 with which he states his opponent's case has 
 sometimes all the force of irony. ' Mr. James 
 Gordon Bennett says that the highest achievement 
 of the human intellect is what he calls " a good 
 editorial." This is not quite so.' That is all, but 
 — poor Mr. Gordon Bennett ! — what comment 
 would be more caustic, more quietly incisive than 
 that? Again, in how exquisitely ludicrous a 
 
152 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 light he contrives to place the cry for the dis- 
 placement of the classical in favour of modern 
 languages, when he tells us that he was ' brought 
 up at Oxford in the bad old times, when we were 
 stuffed with Greek and Aristotle, and thought 
 nothing of preparing ourselves, by the study of 
 modern languages, to fight the battle of life with 
 the waiters in foreign hotels ! ' 
 
 If any one wishes a very fine example of Arnold's 
 prose style at its best, let him turn to the beautiful 
 apostrophe to Oxford in the preface to the first 
 series of Essays in Criticism. Oxford, ' the home 
 of lost causes and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular 
 names and impossible loyalties.' Or again, there 
 is that fine passage, charged with an unusual ani- 
 mation and fervour, in which, seizing on the signifi- 
 cance of Byron's work as a revolutionary element 
 in English society, he exclaims : ' His own aristo- 
 cratic class, whose cynical make-believe drove him 
 to fury, the great middle class, on whose impreg- 
 nable Philistinism he inevitably shattered himself 
 to pieces — how little have either of these felt 
 Byron's vital influence ! As the inevitable break- 
 up of the old order comes, as the English middle 
 class slowly awakens from its sleep of two 
 centuries, our actual present world to which this 
 sleep has condemned us shows itself more clearly — 
 our world of an aristocracy materialised and null, 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 153 
 
 a middle class purblind and hideous, a lower class 
 crude and brutal, — we shall turn our eyes again 
 and to more purpose upon this passionate and 
 dauntless soldier of a forlorn hope, who, ignorant 
 of the future and unconsoled by its promises, 
 nevertheless waged against the conversation of 
 the old, impossible world so fiery battle, waged it 
 till he fell, waged it with such " splendid and im- 
 perishable excellence of sincerity and strength." ' 
 
 ' The great middle class, on whose impregnable 
 Philistinism he shattered himself to pieces ' — ' a 
 middle class purblind and hideous,' these phrases 
 may fitly serve to introduce us to another side 
 of Arnold's work — his praise of culture, his plea 
 for more sweetness and more light. In the first 
 place, then, let us see what Arnold exactly means 
 by Philistinism. This he has told us very clearly 
 in the preface to his admirable book on the Study 
 of Celtic Literature. ' On the side of beauty and 
 taste, vulgarity ; on the side of morals and feeling, 
 coarseness ; on the side of mind and spirit, unin- 
 telligence — this,' he says, 'is Philistinism.' And 
 he goes on : ' Far more than by the helplessness 
 of an aristocracy whose day is fast coming to an 
 end, far more than by the rawness of a lower class 
 whose day is just beginning, we are imperilled 
 by what I call the Philistinism of our middle 
 class.' 
 
154 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 Now, I think we ought to have a notion what 
 sort of a person our Philistine is. But to make 
 quite sure, let me try to sketch his portrait. He 
 is, then, a very respectable, very serious, and very 
 stupid person, who lives only to make money and 
 achieve respectability ; who cannot, therefore, be 
 properly said to live at all. With great ideas he has 
 absolutely no commerce ; he lies entirely outside 
 the current of the ' best that is thought and known 
 in the world.' His politics are provincial, and so 
 is his religion, — provincial in their limited outlook, 
 their lack of breadth and freedom. He rarely 
 reads, and he never thinks ; but, on the other 
 hand, he usually has a balance at the bank, and 
 he always carries an umbrella. His ideas are 
 ignoble ; his whole way of life, petty, uninterest- 
 ing, even hideous. The serious business of his life 
 is money-making ; his amusements, political and 
 sectarian agitation, tea-meetings, and, at the 
 present moment, listening to Messrs. Moody and 
 Sankey. Of course he has a library ; for, after all, 
 books are furniture, and if books are not dear 
 to your Philistine's heart for their own sake, 
 furniture is. But his books are not for reading ; 
 they are to be shown to admiring friends, to be 
 carefully dusted and as carefully left unread. If 
 he reads at all, his great literary hero is the author 
 of Self Help, that great and glorious monument 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 155 
 
 of complacent commonplace, which no country but 
 our own could have produced, — that grand expan- 
 sion of what Arnold called Mrs. Gooch's Golden 
 Rule, or the Divine Injunction, 'Be ye Perfect' done 
 into British, ' Ever remember, my dear Dan,' Mrs. 
 Gooch used to say every morning to her son when 
 he was starting for work, — ' Ever remember, my 
 dear Dan, that you should always look forward to 
 being one day manager of that concern.' And 
 ' my dear Dan ' did remember it, and, behold ! he 
 became wealthy, and died Sir Daniel Gooch. And 
 then Mr. Smiles came and played Mrs. Gooch's 
 part on a grand scale ; he produced that master- 
 piece of his with the express purpose of showing 
 how, if one only reads Self Help and goes to bed 
 early, and gets up at four o'clock in summer and 
 five in winter, he will of a surety become the 
 manager of whatever concern he happens to be 
 engaged in. And verily Dr. Smiles hath his 
 reward ; for has not Self Help gone through I 
 don't know how many editions, and is it not the 
 book beyond all others best beloved of the British 
 Philistine's heart ? 
 
 This, then, is the Goliath against whom Arnold 
 waged incessant warfare. He never tired of this 
 theme. Again and again he took up his parable 
 against the narrowness, the illiberality of English 
 middle-class life. He insisted that this Philistin- 
 
IS6 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 ism, with its absorption in petty cares, its want of 
 high ideals, its complete and debasing self-satis- 
 faction, was damaging and hurtful in the last 
 degree to every side of our national life ; and the 
 grand remedy for it lay, he said, in culture — a 
 culture which should infuse more sweetness and 
 more light into the lives — the dreary, hideous lives 
 — of those around us. The culture he meant was 
 not that false sort which is so often confounded 
 with it, and which no doubt is fair game for the 
 scoffer, — it is not, I say, that false sort which 
 plumes itself on a little knowledge of Greek and 
 Latin. No, it is, in ^ Arnold's own words, 'an 
 endeavour to get at the best that is thought and 
 known in the world, to propagate that best, 
 and, by so doing, to turn a current of new and 
 fresh ideas on our stock notions and habits.' 
 That is what Arnold meant by culture, and those 
 who fully seize the significance of what that 
 means will be chary, I think, of underrating the 
 efficacy of such a process. 
 
 Still, in order that the process may be effica- 
 cious, the concurrence of the Philistine is neces- 
 sary, and this is precisely where Arnold failed. 
 That he did fail was not, however, his own fault, 
 but that of the Philistine. In the first place, 
 he did not buy Arnold's books ; if he had 
 bought them he wouldn't have read them ; if he 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 157 
 
 had read them he wouldn't have recognised his 
 own portrait ; and if he had recognised his own 
 portrait he wouldn't have cared in the least. For 
 against dulness the gods themselves do battle in 
 vain, and, luckily for his peace of mind, your 
 Philistine is dull — dull with a dulness portentous 
 and awe-inspiring. 
 
 At the same time, it would not be fair to leave 
 our friend the Philistine without saying that 
 Arnold recognised to the full his good points — 
 his honesty in walking by the best light he has, 
 his good humour, his sincere sense of the vital 
 importance of religion. And perhaps, also, it is 
 well after reading Arnold to turn, for instance, to 
 Mr. J. M. Barrie's books, so full of wise and tender 
 observations — to turn, let us say, to Auld Licht 
 Idylls. The life so admirably depicted there is 
 narrow enough in all conscience ; it has never been 
 touched with culture. If these Thrums people 
 were only wealthy, one has a presentiment that 
 they would be Philistines to a man. Yet with 
 how much of humour and pathos has Mr. Barrie 
 contrived to invest these grim and gaunt figures ! 
 But after doing this justice to the Philistine, let 
 us repeat once more that his is not an ideal life ; 
 that it is hard, that it is narrow ; and that the 
 nobler ideal is the one which Arnold sets before us. 
 
 When Arnold came to deal with religion and 
 
IS8 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 the Bible, as he does directly in Literature and 
 Dogma and one or two more of his books, in- 
 directly and incidentally in nearly every one of 
 them, he started out with two propositions. The 
 first of these was that we cannot do without 
 Christianity ; the second was that we cannot do 
 with it as it is. Those of you who have read his 
 books do not require to be told how strong 
 Arnold's love of the Bible was, how fully he re- 
 cognised the fitness of its teaching to be in truth 
 the rule of our lives. Here, then, he broke with 
 those who are for putting the Bible aside alto- 
 gether as antiquated and out of date ; but when he 
 came to apply his second proposition he broke 
 no less decisively with the upholders of orthodox 
 religion. Arnold claimed for himself and for others 
 the right to deal with the Bible just as freely as 
 with other books, to submit it to the same tests, to 
 apply to it the same standards. To those who 
 find themselves able to take everything in the 
 Bible quite literally he did not address himself; 
 with them he did not seek to meddle. Nor did he 
 appeal to those who dismiss the whole affair as 
 altogether unworthy of credence, or even of serious 
 consideration. He wrote for those who, like him- 
 self, knew and loved the Bible, but who, like 
 himself again, could not bring themselves to do 
 that violence to their reason implied in taking all 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD 159 
 
 the statements in the Bible as matter of fact, and 
 who in consequence were in doubt and perplexity 
 as to their course in regard to these great and 
 sacred matters. He wrote for those who felt that, 
 in its reliance on miracles and the supernatural, 
 Christianity was on untenable ground, on ground 
 which it must sooner or later abandon, unless its 
 power over men's minds was altogether to pass 
 away. 
 
 To this great and growing class of persons 
 Arnold addressed himself. He said frankly that 
 the retention of miracles was impossible, that the 
 Bible miracles could not be placed in a class by 
 themselves, that the miracles in the Bible must 
 inevitably go the way of the miracles out of the 
 Bible, that the only effect of their retention was 
 to hinder and not to help Christianity. He 
 said, further, that a great portion of the Bible was 
 to be regarded as poetry, not as science, not as 
 matter of fact ; that, regarded as science, much of 
 its language could have for us no sense of reality ; 
 regarded as poetry, it remained grand and 
 beautiful. But popular Christianity had taken 
 this poetical language and treated it as if it were 
 scientific ; it had taken this fluent language and 
 made it hard, rigid, definite, and out of it had 
 constructed formulas, had elaborated and built 
 up creeds. 
 
l6o MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 But these creeds and formulas men were be- 
 ginning to look upon with distrust and aversion, 
 and the danger was that in the growing discredit 
 which was befalling them the grand and vital 
 realities of the Bible would be discredited also. 
 To prevent this, it was necessary, he said, to 
 abandon the supernatural, and to fall back on the 
 natural truth of Christianity — its natural truth as 
 proved by the experience of men and the history 
 of nations. The real message of the Old Testa- 
 ment was this — ' Salvation by Righteousness ' ; 
 the real lesson of the New Testament, 'Right- 
 eousness by Jesus Christ' The Enduring Power, 
 not ourselves, which makes for righteousness — 
 this, he said, was the God of the Old Testament. 
 No doubt the Old Testament writers put into 
 their conception of God more than this ; no doubt 
 they made Him what orthodox religion still 
 makes Him — namely, a magnified and non-natural 
 man. But this conception of Him as the Enduring 
 Power, not ourselves, which makes for righteous- 
 ness they had ; and this is a real and substantial 
 conception, while the other is not verifiably that 
 It is easy, no doubt, to object that this definition 
 of God is a vague one ; and no doubt that is so. 
 Only, it must instantly be rejoined that Arnold 
 would not have considered that an objection at 
 all ; for one of his charges against orthodox and 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD l6l 
 
 popular religion is that it is too definite by far, 
 where it has no right to be definite ; that it pro- 
 fesses certainty where from the nature of the case 
 certainty is not possible ; that after saying in one 
 breath that God is altogether beyond the reach 
 of our thoughts, it calmly goes on in the next 
 breath to talk as if He were a man living in the 
 next street, with the workings of whose mind we 
 were perfectly acquainted. 
 
 And so, as regards the New Testament, its 
 grand purpose is, he says, the revelation of Christ. 
 Our business is not with those speculations about 
 His miraculous birth and His miraculous resur- 
 rection, which are so vain and so idle, it is not 
 with that admiration of. His life, which is so cheap 
 and so easy ; no, it is with that imitation of His 
 example, which is so costly and ' so difficult, and 
 withal, of such immense and supreme importance. 
 The miraculous elements in the Gospels are to be 
 regarded simply as lovely and beautiful legends, 
 as accretions which inevitably grew up in that far- 
 off time round the story of a life such as that of 
 Christ — the life of One who was so far above the 
 heads even of His disciples, that they could not 
 fully comprehend or adequately report Him. 
 
 That is a sketch of Arnold's religious views, as 
 full as my limits permit. His influence on reli- 
 gious thought has been great ; it has been felt 
 
 L 
 
I 62 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 even by those who most bitterly attacked him. 
 Dogma is being discarded bit by bit ; there is a 
 growing aversion to dwelling on the supernatural 
 side in the Bible ; everywhere the personality of 
 Christ is more and more being put in the fore- 
 ground. But that such a transformation as he 
 desired to see is still necessary, is evident enough. 
 Look, for instance, at the present position of our 
 own Free Church. Those of you who have been 
 following the controversy over that precious 
 Declaratory Act, with its ' compromises ' and 
 ' holy ambiguities,' will, I think, hold very lightly 
 in future creeds, confessions, and such like docu- 
 ments, as not worth the paper they are written on. 
 Surely the Free Church will require to learn — all 
 the Churches will require to learn — that in truth 
 there is something singularly uncompromising ; 
 that in ambiguity there is nothing 'holy,' but 
 something quite the reverse. One can only look 
 with pity at the two parties in this controversy — 
 the one party strenuously striving, with evident 
 sincerity and good faith, to uphold doctrines and 
 creeds which can serve man's turn no longer ; the 
 other party trying to patch up, out of compromises 
 and holy ambiguities, something that may pass 
 muster for a year or two, something that may last 
 out their time. What can we say of the one set, 
 but that they are striving, vainly and ineffectually 
 
MATTHEW ARNOLD I 63 
 
 striving, with that current against which nothing 
 can strive successfully, the current of time ? And 
 of the other set what can we say, but that they 
 are drifting, slowly and reluctantly, but none the 
 less surely, drifting with the tide, instead of 
 striking out vigorously for themselves ? 
 
 My survey of Arnold's literary work, incomplete 
 and inadequate on many sides as I am well aware 
 it is, must now have an end ; it remains for me to 
 add a word or two as to the personality of this 
 most fascinating and engaging of writers. Many 
 are the testimonies to the charm of his conversa- 
 tion, to the grace and ease of his manners ; to his 
 deeper qualities of mind and heart — those quali- 
 ties by which all men must at last stand or fall — 
 let me call just one witness. 'Than Matthew 
 Arnold,' wrote Lord Coleridge, soon after his 
 friend's death, ' few souls ever passed away with 
 more hope of acceptance, few lives more unstained 
 have been led from childhood to old age, few 
 men have ever gone into that silent void where, if 
 there are no smiles, there are no tears, and where, 
 if hearts do not beat, they cannot be broken, 
 leaving behind them such passionate regrets, such 
 daily, hourly desire for communion which the 
 grave forbids, for friendship which Death has 
 ended.' That is the testimony of one who knew 
 him well ; it is what every one who reads his 
 
l64 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 books, and is fascinated by them, will like to 
 believe, and will find it easy to believe. To my 
 mind, the figure of this man has a grace and charm 
 which belong to only one or two in the whole 
 history of our literature — to Sir Philip Sidney, 
 to Edmund Spenser, to Joseph Addison ; his 
 memory, like theirs, is of sweet savour, his name, 
 like theirs, of sweet sound. Through all the con- 
 troversies of his time he passed with temper un- 
 ruffled, with mind unclouded and serene ; he 
 worked hard, harder by far than most men, yet, in 
 his own fine phrase, his toil was ever ' unsevered 
 from tranquillity.' And so we seem to see him, 
 with that lofty brow and look of serene triumph, 
 passing away in the consciousness that he had 
 laboured for ideals that were lofty and true, that 
 he had guided his own course well, and helped 
 others to guide their course well also, that to the 
 best of his power he had borne his part in the 
 attempt — the necessary, the noble attempt — to 
 usher in a type of man, ' more intelligent, more 
 gracious, and more humane.' 
 
A. C. SWINBURNEi 
 
 The last seven years have seen three great lights 
 of later English poetry go out one by one. In 
 1 888 Matthew Arnold, that fine genius who had 
 shed so clear and steady a radiance over wide 
 tracts of thought and feeling, died four years be- 
 fore he had attained the allotted span of three- 
 score and ten. Robert Browning followed next, 
 leaving behind him a mass of the richest poetic 
 ore, imbedded, alas ! in the roughest quartz, and 
 requiring the vigorous use of pick and spade 
 in order to be come at. Last of all, in the ripe 
 fulness of his years, but in the unabated exercise 
 of powers which seemed ever to be gaining new 
 breadth and vigour, Alfred Tennyson was taken 
 from us, with an exquisitely beautiful swan-song 
 on his dying lips. To those who value the great 
 traditions of English song, it seemed as though 
 the poetic sky was ' dispeopled now and void,' as 
 though with the removal of these three great 
 
 ' President's Essay to the Heriot-Watt College Literary Society, 
 October 1895. 
 
 166 
 
l66 A. C. SWINBURNE 
 
 figures we declined upon a race of lesser men. I 
 do not know that we were greatly consoled when 
 Mr. Traill came forward with his list of fifty 
 minor poets — an allowance of the bread perhaps 
 rather more than adequate. But when the first 
 shock of their lamented deaths was over, we 
 began to reflect with thankfulness that though 
 much was taken much was left, and that we had 
 still in our midst one or two poets not unworthy 
 to be ranked but a little below the great men who 
 had passed. Mr. William Morris, indeed, has 
 long since forsaken the banner of the Muses to 
 hold aloft the red flag of Socialism ; but Mr. 
 Swinburne remains faithful to his art, and still 
 pours out his exuberant vitality with the same 
 force and freshness as of old. It is of this singer, 
 in whom all competent judges recognise the only 
 successor of the late Laureate, that I wish to 
 write with what measure of power I possess. 
 
 It is almost exactly thirty years since Mr. 
 Swinburne dazzled and enchanted the reading 
 public with his first great poem. There are poets 
 who go from strength to strength, to whom the 
 years bring a deeper and wider vision, and a 
 richer and more significant music, poets whom we 
 begin by calling exquisite and end by calling 
 sublime ; of these, the most highly favoured sons 
 of Apollo, Shakespeare is the standing example. 
 
A. C. SWINBURNE . 167 
 
 There are others who concentrate their best work 
 within a few crowded years of their life, and who 
 in the periods on either side of this glorious 
 harvest-time produce work infinitely inferior : 
 Wordsworth will occur to every one as a notable 
 representative of this less favoured order. There 
 are poets who seem to shoot up all at once to 
 maturity, and who never afterwards rise greatly 
 above or sink greatly below the high level to 
 which they had at first attained. It is to this 
 class that Mr. Swinburne indubitably belongs. 
 If we set aside poems so obviously unripe, though 
 in parts of great beauty and abundant promise, 
 as the Queen-Mother and Rosamond, and regard 
 Atalanta in Calydon as the first exquisite fruit 
 of his mature Muse, then we are forced to say 
 that Mr. Swinburne has never . done anything 
 better, if indeed he has done anything quite so 
 perfect, as this poetic drama, which he published 
 in 1864 at the age of twenty-seven. This fact 
 would of itself absolve me from the necessity of 
 following the chronological order of his works, 
 since the sole advantage of that method in the 
 eyes of all save pedants lies in the clue it affords 
 to the growth and development of an author's 
 genius. Mr. Swinburne, besides, has been so 
 fertile that it would be impossible for me, within 
 my limits, to make much more than bare mention 
 
l68 A. C. SWINBURNE 
 
 of all his works. I must content myself, there- 
 fore, with a very general survey of his poetry. 
 This very copiousness is often urged against Mr. 
 Swinburne as a reproach ; and there is a sense in 
 which the complaint has some shadow of justifica- 
 tion. It is important, however, to see clearly what 
 that sense is. No one will be so foolish as to say 
 that fecundity in itself is other than a virtue, as the 
 sign of a s.oil naturally rich and exuberant. When 
 a writer is culpably careless, when he produces a 
 vast mass of work, much of which is slovenly, 
 slipshod, down-at-heel, we may indeed reason- 
 ably wish that he had written less, and taken 
 more pains to make it perfect. Byron in poetry 
 and Scott in prose undoubtedly lay themselves 
 open to this charge. Wordsworth, again, is a 
 poet who pays the penalty of over-copiousness 
 by being often dull, prolix, flatly prosaic. Now, 
 Mr. Swinburne can certainly be charged with 
 neither of these sins. He is copious, but he is 
 never careless ; the artistic instinct is so deeply 
 ingrained in his nature, that we may be sure no 
 work ever leaves his hand until it is as perfect in 
 its kind as he can make it. Undeniably prosaic, 
 again, he never is ; the bogs and marshes and 
 flat, shifting sands of Wordsworth's worst work 
 have no counterpart in Mr. Swinburne's poetry. 
 What, then, do Mr. Swinburne's critics mean 
 
A. C. SWINBURNE 169 
 
 by reproaching him with a too lavish prodigality ? 
 They mean that the superstructure of his poetry 
 does not rest upon a broad enough foundation ; that 
 his verse is not sufficiently informed with thought. 
 They cry out, ' O monstrous ! a ha'porth of bread 
 to this intolerable deal of sack.' They assert that 
 the magnificence of his verbal music cannot long 
 blind us to his lack of ideas, and that he drowns 
 his meaning beneath a torrent of what only the 
 impetuous rush and the splendour of the diction 
 prevent them from describing as sheer verbiage. 
 Language, the old cynical saying has it, was 
 given to man to enable him to conceal his 
 thought ; language, one of Mr. Swinburne's 
 severer critics would say, has been given to him 
 to conceal his lack of thought. Obviously we 
 are here confronted with what is one of the most 
 difficult and hotly contested questions in litera- 
 ture — the relative importance, namely, above all 
 in poetry, of form and substance. I do not there- 
 fore think any apology necessary for trying to 
 see at some length how the case actually stands. 
 Suppose, then, we put the question in this form : 
 Can we have fine poetry which is yet almost 
 wholly divorced from ideas ? 
 
 The fugitive and elusive nature of the charm 
 which poetry lays upon our minds is sufficiently 
 attested by the very fact that no adequate or 
 
170 A. C. SWINBURNE 
 
 final definition of poetry has yet been hit upon 
 by the ingenuity of poets and critics. Coleridge's 
 definition of it as 'the best words in the best 
 order' is refreshingly simple and unpretentious, 
 but obviously it does not take one very far. 
 More ambitious attempts have invariably been 
 failures more or less complete. Shelley's defini- 
 tion is one of the best : he describes poetry as 
 the expression of the best thoughts of the best 
 moments of the best minds. Wordsworth's 
 definition, ' Emotion recollected in tranquillity,' 
 characterises his own poetry admirably, but breaks 
 down lamentably when applied to poets of a 
 more passionate and less meditative cast of mind 
 than the sage of Rydal. My present purpose 
 will best be served by scrutinising a definition 
 still more famous and widely current than any 
 of these. Matthew Arnold said, and {more suo) 
 repeated till the public had got the phrase firmly 
 fixed in their minds, that all literature is a 
 criticism of life, and that poetry is a criticism of 
 life made in conformity with the laws of poetic 
 truth and poetic beauty. Well, that has a very 
 philosophical air, and we naturally look with great 
 interest to see how the critic applies his theory. 
 Fortunately, as I think, for the soundness of his 
 criticism, but unfortunately for the authority of 
 his definition, we find that he uses the term 
 
A. C. SWINBURNE 171 
 
 ' criticism of life ' in a sense so large, vague, and 
 elastic, that it ceases to have any real significance. 
 When, for example, we find him assuring us that 
 * when Keats utters a moral idea,' with the line 
 ' For ever wilt thou love and she be fair,' we are 
 forced to conclude, either that our guide is 
 making fun of us, or that the phrases ' criticism 
 of life,' • moral ideas,' have an entirely strange 
 meaning on his lips. Again, in his fine essay on 
 Keats, Arnold tells us that Keats had a magical 
 felicity in rendering the charm of nature, but 
 that for the interpretation of the moral side of 
 man he was not ripe — a declaration which one 
 of Arnold's ' plain men ' would naturally consider 
 as equivalent to saying that Keats had no criticism 
 of life to offer. Yet Arnold quotes the modest 
 remark of Keats, ' I think I shall be among the 
 English poets after my death,' and adds the 
 emphatic comment, ' He is ; he is with Shake- 
 speare.' The truth would appear to be that 
 Arnold, consciously or unconsciously, had to 
 choose between Keats and his definition, and 
 that he wisely preferred to make the less precious 
 sacrifice. My own position I must make as clear 
 as I can in a few rapid sentences. 
 
 I think then we might profitably distinguish 
 between three different orders of poets. In the 
 first and supreme order we observe the union 
 
172 A. C. SWINBURNE 
 
 of high intellectual power, profound imaginative 
 grasp on the realities of life, and serious and 
 noble feeling, with an intense love for beauty, 
 and a gift of so touching the chords of human 
 speech as to render the spell of that beauty 
 potent on our minds. Such a union is one of 
 the rarest things in the world ; when it does take 
 place we have a poet such as Shakespeare. But 
 when we descend to a lower plane, we find poets 
 in whom these qualities are no longer united in 
 perfect equilibrium and harmony. The balance 
 now leans to this side or that; some have as 
 ardent a love for the beautiful as Shakespeare, 
 but are weak on the reflective side; with others 
 exactly the reverse is the case. Let us take, for 
 example, two extreme types, and see how they 
 stand in these respects ; let us contrast the poetry 
 of Keats with the poetry of the late Robert 
 Browning. Clearly the strength of Keats lies in 
 his devotion to the principle of beauty, and in 
 his incomparable felicity in evoking the charm 
 which lies in words ; his weakness, again, lies 
 in the fact that this devotion is with him so 
 absorbing, that it occupies him to the almost 
 entire exclusion of everything else. Robert 
 Browning, however, is strong precisely where 
 Keats is weak, and weak where Keats is strong. 
 On the purely intellectual side Browning is per- 
 
A. C. SWINBURNE 1 73 
 
 haps the richest and most prodigally gifted of 
 our poets except Shakespeare — that terrible 
 Shakespeare whom we can never get behind or 
 above. In all relating to the intellect Keats is 
 a mere child by his side ; but then, on the other 
 hand, Browning hardly seems to prize beauty or 
 seek for it ; certainly he does not prize or seek 
 for it in anything like equal measure with Keats. 
 He forsakes the lute and the lyre and the 
 shepherd's pipe for the trumpet, and if he often 
 discourses with a clear, ringing and resonant 
 accent, he not seldom falls into the harshest 
 discords and dissonances. I have sometimes 
 thought of likening his poetry to a drive in a 
 springless cart over a rough, uneven road in the 
 midst of a fine country. The prospect, indeed, is 
 commanding and magnificent, but we hardly 
 think of that in the exceeding discomfort of the 
 journey. Or again, one might say of Browning 
 that he is a great poet without those qualities we 
 are apt to think of as distinctively poetical. By 
 that I mean that while by no possibility can we 
 conceive of Keats being other than a poet, we 
 have not the same assurance of certainty in the 
 case of Browning. 
 
 Well, we have made a pretty wide circuit, but 
 I think we have got something that will help 
 us in judging Mr. Swinburne. , In the first place 
 
174 A, C. SWINBURNE 
 
 I should say : ' Enjoy poetry without seeking to 
 define it ; leave definitions to the men of science. 
 But if you must have a definition, you are bound 
 to make it wide enough to include both a poet 
 such as Browning and a poet such as Keats.' 
 And next, the consideration of the case of Keats 
 leads to the conclusion that poetry may be almost 
 entirely divorced from reflection and yet remain 
 fine art — fine, if not exactly grand or sublime. 
 I think that this would hardly require to be 
 argued, were it not unfortunately the case that 
 a great many very respectable persons, not only 
 read poetry but, actually delude themselves into 
 the belief that they enjoy it, who are yet absolutely 
 deaf to the charm of its music, and absolutely 
 blind to its sweet and subtle suggestions. And 
 so when they come to criticise poetry — if their 
 criticism ever gets beyond the inarticulate stage 
 — they must weigh everything in their moral 
 scales, and introduce considerations which are 
 merely impertinent and irrelevant. 
 
 I do not wish to press the analogy between 
 Keats and Swinburne too far. On the one hand, 
 Mr. Swinburne has certainly a wider range of 
 ideas than Keats in his too brief life gave evi- 
 dence of; on the other, Keats presented the few 
 ideas he had with far more clearness and definite- 
 ness of outline. And this suggests the extent 
 
A. C. SWINBURNE 1 75 
 
 to which I can go with Mr. Swinburne's critics. 
 The defect of his copiousness is that it is often 
 hard for us to penetrate through his many- 
 coloured mist of words to the thought which 
 these hide rather than reveal, which may be a 
 virtue in a politician, but which is a vice in a 
 poet. An attempt, indeed, has been made to 
 justify this practice by analogy with the art of 
 music. Undoubtedly we may listen with delight 
 to fine music, which yet conveys no definite idea 
 to the mind. Still I think the musician has his 
 own province and the poet has his, and that no 
 charm of sound can quite wholly excuse blurred 
 outlines and vague, treacherous fogs, through 
 which we wander, ignorant of our goal, with 
 halting and uncertain footsteps. Let us, then, 
 go back to our three orders, and see how we 
 should place Mr. Swinburne. We cannot, I 
 think, rank him with those with whom a profound 
 reflective faculty goes hand in hand with the 
 noblest gifts of expression. The purely artistic 
 faculty dominates in him over the turn for reflec- 
 tion ; that is to say, he comes far closer to Keats 
 than either to Shakespeare or to Browning. For 
 good and evil alike, however, he belongs to the 
 class of artists pure and simple less decisively 
 than Keats ; he has not quite that rounded per- 
 fection of loveliness which fascinates us in the 
 
176 A. C, SWINBURNE 
 
 best poems of Keats, but he has a wider outlook 
 upon life, and a deeper sense of its profound 
 significance. 
 
 But here another set of Mr. Swinburne's critics 
 would chime in with the remark that it is not 
 the limited range of his ideas they object to, so 
 much as the wrong-headed perverseness of such 
 ideas as he has. Alike in morals, in politics, and 
 in religion he goes wildly astray. He has not, 
 they say, a ' well-regulated mind.' To those who 
 pin their faith to that latest monstrosity of sham 
 science, the theorem of the insanity of genius, 
 this will seem merely equivalent to saying that 
 Mr. Swinburne is a poet; for my own part, I 
 am a firm believer in the supreme and radiant 
 sanity of genius. I hold it to be as absurd to say 
 that every madman is a genius, as that every 
 genius is a madman. I am therefore shut out 
 from disposing of Mr. Swinburne's ethics in the 
 curt and easy way which would be open to the 
 disciples of a doctrine so consoling to the average 
 man, who, after reading the treatise on 'Degenera- 
 tion,' thanks Heaven that he is not as other men, 
 even as those geniuses. 
 
 I remarked at the outset that in point of art 
 Mr. Swinburne had never improved upon his first 
 great triumph. His changes of mental attitude, 
 however, have been considerable ; or rather, it 
 
A. C. SWINBURNE 177 
 
 would be more correct to say that at successive 
 stages of his life the motives which have impelled 
 him to the work of production have been widely 
 different. In discussing the quality of his thought, 
 it will therefore be necessary to distinguish these 
 stages. 
 
 In 1866, two years after Atalanta, Mr. Swin- 
 burne published a volume which one hesitates 
 whether to call famous or notorious, the memor- 
 able first series of Poems and Ballads. Its 
 appearance was followed by one of those acute 
 attacks of epidemic morality which Macaulay 
 satirised so pungently in his essay on Byron. 
 Mrs. Grundy, the British Matron, Paterfamilias, 
 a Disgusted Reader, and all the rest of that plea- 
 sant family, at once seized upon the volume with 
 that avidity with which, oddly enough, they read 
 everything to which the least suspicion of immor- 
 ality attaches, and immediately proceeded to go 
 into hysterics over it. The echoes of that storm 
 of insult and contumely which burst over Mr. 
 Swinburne's head have hardly died away yet, 
 which must be my excuse for making a candid 
 statement of the impression the volume makes on 
 my own mind. 
 
 I approach literature with no prudish bias. I 
 dissent completely from that theory, so widely 
 current in our own country, that the supreme 
 
 M 
 
178 A. C. SWINBURNE 
 
 praise with which one can crown a work of art is 
 that it would not raise a blush to the cheek of 
 Mr. Podsnap's Young Person ; rather I think that 
 the Young Person is an unmitigated nuisance, 
 and that no work really great can be done by 
 men who have the fear of that portentous 
 phantom constantly before their eyes. The 
 nursery and the boarding-school may very well 
 have a literature of their own — from which, by 
 the way, if Mrs. Grundy were consistent, she 
 would banish Shakespeare and the Bible, — but do 
 not let us set up the ideals of the schoolroom as 
 the standard to which all artists must conform. 
 So much by way of a general confession of faith. 
 Let me say now that I do not find Mr. Swinburne's 
 tone in this volume wholly free from offence. 
 Freedom of speech is the inalienable birthright of 
 a great artist, but he must beware lest liberty 
 degenerate into licence. The tone of Shake- 
 speare's Venus and Adonis is not the tone of 
 Othello ; in the latter there is no lack, certainly, 
 of plain and blunt speaking, but this does not 
 leave even the slightest stain upon the purity of 
 one of the noblest creations of the human spirit. 
 Now, Mr. Swinburne offends, as Shakespeare 
 offends in his early poem, by dwelling too much 
 on the joys and pains of the senses. His tone, 
 indeed, is not that of gay and thoughtless liber- 
 
A. C. SWINBURNE 179 
 
 tinism ; the nod and wink and leer of the pro- 
 fessional Don Juan have no place in his pages. 
 In the reaction against the injustice with which 
 he was treated, some generous critics, indeed, 
 went so far as to say that the tendency of the 
 volume was severely moral, since if he painted in 
 vivid colours the fascinations of sense, he recog- 
 nised no less plainly, and painted no less vividly, 
 the self-disgust and bitterness in which they end. 
 So far as that I cannot go in his defence ; not 
 only would the argument justify the vilest excesses 
 of realism, but it appears to overlook the vital 
 distinction between the tone of grave moral re- 
 probation, and the tone of a^ wearied-out and 
 disillusioned sensuousness. 
 
 What justly offends us is the low conception of 
 the passion of Love. Let me quote, not from the 
 Poems and Ballads but, from one of the magnifi- 
 cent choruses of Atalanta, a passage which will 
 at once give an idea of Mr. Swinburne's poetic 
 powers almost at their highest, and of this lack of 
 recognition on his part of the higher forms of the 
 passion. The chorus is based upon the old 
 legend of the birth of Venus : — 
 
 ' What hadst thou to do being born, 
 
 Mother, when winds were at ease. 
 
 As a flower of the springtime of corn, 
 
 A flower of the foam of the seas ? 
 
l80 A. C. SWINBURNE 
 
 For bitter thou wast from thy birth, 
 
 Aphrodite, a mother of strife ; 
 For before thee some rest was on earth, 
 A little respite from tears, 
 A little pleasure of life ; 
 For life was not then as thou art, 
 But as one that waxeth in years. 
 Sweet-spoken, a fruitful wife ; 
 Earth had no thorn, and desire 
 No sting, neither death any dart ; 
 What hadst thou to do amongst these. 
 Thou, clothed with a burning fire, 
 Thou, girt with sorrow of heart. 
 
 Thou, sprung of the seed of the seas 
 As an ear from a seed of corn. 
 
 As a brand plucked forth of a pyre, 
 As a ray shed forth of the morn, 
 
 For division of soul and disease. 
 For a dart and a sting and a thorn ? 
 What ailed thee then to be born ? 
 
 Was there not evil enough. 
 Mother, and anguish on earth. 
 Born with a man at his birth. 
 Wastes underfoot, and above 
 
 Storm out of heaven, and dearth 
 Shaken down from the shining thereof, 
 Wrecks from afar overseas. 
 And peril of shallow and firth, 
 
 And tears that spring and increase 
 In the barren places of mirth, 
 That thou, having wings as a dove, 
 Being girt with desire for a girth, 
 That thou must come after these. 
 That thou must lay on him love ? ' 
 
 Five years after the Poems and Ballads Mr. 
 Swinburne sent forth Songs before Sunrise, a 
 
A. C. SWINBURNE l8l 
 
 volume in which he appears as a political propa- 
 gandist of the fieriest type. Dr. Johnson's opinion 
 of the political and religious creed expounded in 
 Songs before Sunrise would no doubt have been 
 expressed in very terse and vigorous English, but 
 one might parody the rather curious eulogium 
 pronounced by the Doctor on one of his friends, 
 and say of Mr. Swinburne that ' he hates a fool, 
 and he hates a king, and he hates a priest : he is 
 a very good hater.' It is on Napoleon in. and 
 last — Napoleon the Little, as Hugo called him — 
 that the vials of his fiercest wrath and deepest 
 scorn are poured forth ; he rarely spares him a 
 gentler epithet than worm or dog, and he pursues 
 him into the grave, and beyond it, with implac- 
 able hatred and astonishing wealth of invective. 
 The Songs before Sunrise are dedicated to the 
 glorification of Republicanism. I cannot say that 
 either the abstract idea of Republicanism, or its 
 concrete embodiment as we see it in France and 
 America, seem to me to have any great charm for 
 the mind or any great sustenance for the spirit. 
 But no matter what we think of Mr. Swinburne's 
 politics, one cannot but admit the almost terrible 
 power of the volume which has so sweet a title. 
 Mr. Swinburne's wrath expresses itself in words 
 that seem almost to burn the page on which they 
 are written. Two things honourably distinguish 
 
l82 A. -C, SWINBURNE 
 
 Mr. Swinburne from the herd of poets who have 
 sung the praises of liberty. One is that with him 
 the praise of freedom is not a mere piece of con- 
 ventional clap-trap ; the other is the cosmo- 
 politanism of his sympathy. Mr. Swinburne's 
 religious views seem to be curiously compounded 
 out of sheer Paganism and a vague Pantheism. 
 He thinks he sees the Churches associated with 
 the perpetuation of intolerable injustice, and he 
 does not care to distinguish between the essential 
 and eternal truths of Christianity and the corrup- 
 tions with which it has been overlaid. The 
 specifically Christian virtues of meekness and 
 humility of spirit are not those he prizes most, or 
 seeks to cultivate. I may say frankly that I do 
 not like or admire the bitter, clamorous, and rail- 
 ing tone in which he speaks on such subjects, 
 that I think him often wanting in reverence ; but 
 let me add, that so long a^ the beauty of holiness 
 is obscured by the pitiful ugliness of mere respect- 
 ability, so long as the Churches cling to creeds 
 in which God shows as a malignant divinity rather 
 than as a beneficent Father, they need not be sur- 
 prised if a poet of fiery and ardent temperament 
 turns upon them and rends them. 
 
 Some one once wrote a book on snakes. One 
 of the chapters was entitled 'Of Snakes in Iceland,' 
 and consisted of these words : ' There are no 
 
A. C. SWINBURNE 183 
 
 snakes in Iceland.' After my exposition of Mr. 
 Swinburne's opinions some of you may be inclined 
 to say : ' There are no ethics in Mr. Swinburne's 
 poetry.' What I think would be juster is to say 
 that he does not lay sufficient stress upon the 
 negative virtues. Without entering into the 
 vexed question of the relation between art and 
 morality, might one not suggest that the lack 
 of self-mastery, which is Mr. Swinburne's defect 
 on the moral side, is closely allied to his artistic 
 defects? Perverse and wrong-headed I shall not 
 attempt to deny that Mr. Swinburne often is by 
 his froth and foam and verbiage. Let us at all 
 events not bear too hardly upon the faults of a 
 poet dowered in such ample measure with 'the 
 hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, the love of love,' 
 a poet in whose spirit there is so much that is 
 high and heroic and magnanimous, and nothing 
 that is mean or base or cowardly. 
 
 In considering Mr. Swinburne's poetic style, I 
 shall not attempt to discuss in detail its special 
 characteristics. I should perhaps rather say his 
 styles, for what strikes one most is his marvellous 
 power of assimilating style, without, however, 
 losing for a moment his own strongly marked 
 individuality of tone and touch. In command 
 over the most widely diverse metrical forms he 
 has probably no rival in English verse. Among 
 
184 A. C. SWINBURNE 
 
 the higher and more arduous forms of poetry- 
 there is hardly one in which he has not achieved- 
 a more or less unqualified triumph. His genius, 
 indeed, is rather too diffusive for the drama, too 
 little capable of concentration and the rigid ex- 
 clusion of the superfluous. Throughout the trilogy 
 which covers the whole history of Mary, Queen of 
 Scots — that beautiful and tragic figure who has 
 cast so potent a spell over his imagination — the 
 action halts and limps, while the characters de- 
 liver speeches of unconscionable length, although 
 often of marvellous beauty. Bothwell, for example, 
 alone occupies something like five hundred 
 pages, and no fewer than sixty-three personages 
 encumber rather than fill its stage. But if his 
 plays bear little evidence of profound insight 
 into character and the secret springs of con- 
 duct, they are admirable considered as dramatic 
 poems. Often Mr. Swinburne seems, in his 
 romantic dramas, to catch the very accent of the 
 Elizabethans. Where, for example, are the pains 
 of exile described more poignantly, or with a 
 greater measure of that felicity and charm of 
 diction which we think of as peculiarly Eliza- 
 bethan, than in the lines I quote : — 
 
 ' Not deatji, not bonds, are bitterer than his day 
 On whom the sun looks forth of a strange sky. 
 Whose thirst drinks water from strange hands, whose lips 
 
A. C. SWINBURNE 1 8? 
 
 Eat stranger's bread for hunger ; who lies down 
 In a strange dark and sleeps not, and the light 
 Makes his eyes weep for their own morning, seen 
 On hills that helped to make him man, and fields 
 Whose flowers grew round his heart's root ; day like 
 
 night 
 Denies him, and the stars and heirs of heaven 
 Are as their eyes and tongues who know him not.' 
 
 If in the region of romantic drama Mr. 
 Swinburne has in some respects come as near 
 the Elizabethans as a modern may hope to come, 
 he has achieved a still more unquestionable 
 triumph in the plays which he has modelled on 
 the severe lines of Greek tragedy — the two superb 
 dramas, Atalanta and Erechtheus. What makes 
 the supreme distinction of these poems is their 
 magnificent lyrical choruses, with their rolling 
 waves of pealing sound, their exultant and im- 
 petuous rush. Mr. Swinburne has a fondness 
 for using lines longer by many syllables than is 
 usual in English verse — so long, indeed, that in 
 less skilful hands they would be unwieldy and 
 lumbering. But with him the breadth of his 
 pinions merely accelerates the speed of his flight. 
 In Erechtheus, for example, how the lines leap 
 and flash like swords in battle ! What other 
 poet could paint a battle -scene in language 
 like this, could so set before us the 'brilliance 
 of battle, the bloom and the beauty, the splendour 
 of spears ' : — 
 
1 86 A. C. SWINBURNE 
 
 ' For now not in word but in deed is the harvest of spears 
 
 begun, 
 And its clamour outbellows the thunder, its lightning 
 
 outlightens the sun. 
 From the springs of the morning it thunders and lightens 
 
 across and afar 
 To the wave where the moonset ends and the fall of the 
 
 last low star. 
 With a trampling of drenched red hoofs and an earth- 
 quake of men that meet. 
 Strong war sets hand to the scythe, and the furrows take 
 
 fire from his feet. 
 Earth groans from her great rent heart, and the hollows 
 
 of rocks are afraid. 
 And the mountains are moved, and the valleys as waves 
 
 in a storm-wind swayed. 
 From the roots of the hills to the plain's dim verge and 
 
 the dark loud shore, 
 Air shudders with shrill spears crossing, and hurtling of 
 
 wheels that roar. 
 As the grinding of teeth in the jaws of a lion that foam as 
 
 they gnash 
 Is the shriek of the axles that loosen, the shock of the 
 
 poles that crash. 
 The dense manes darken and glitter, the mouths of the 
 
 mad steeds champ, 
 Their heads flash blind through the battle, and death's 
 
 foot rings in their tramp. 
 For a fourfold host upon earth and in heaven is arrayed 
 
 for the fight, 
 Clouds ruining in thunder and armies encountering as 
 
 clouds in the night. 
 Mine ears are amazed with the terror of trumpets, with 
 
 darkness mine eyes. 
 At the sound of the sea's host charging that deafens the 
 
 roar of the sky's. 
 
A. C. SWINBURNE 1 87 
 
 White frontlet is dashed upon frontlet, and horse against 
 
 horse reels hurled, 
 And the gorge of the gulfs of the battle is wide for the 
 
 spoil of the world. 
 And the meadows are cumbered with shipwreck of chariots 
 
 that founder on land, 
 And the horsemen are broken with breach as of breakers, 
 
 and scattered as sand. 
 Through the roar and recoil of the charges that mingle 
 
 their cries and confound, 
 Like fire are the notes of the trumpets that flash through 
 
 the darkness of sound. 
 As the swing of the sea churned yellow that sways with 
 
 the wind as it swells 
 Is the lift and relapse of the wave of the chargers that 
 
 clash with their bells ; 
 And the clang of the sharp shrill brass through the burst 
 
 of the wave as it shocks 
 Rings clean as the clear wind's cry through the roar of 
 
 the surge on the rocks : 
 And the heads of the steeds in their headgear of war, and 
 
 their corsleted breasts, 
 Gleam broad as the brows of the billows that brighten the 
 
 storm with their crests, 
 Gleam dread as their bosoms that heave to the ship- 
 wrecking wind as they rise. 
 Filled full of the terror and thunder of water, that slays as 
 
 it dies. 
 So dire is the glare of their foreheads, so fearful the fire of 
 
 their breath, 
 And the light of their eyeballs enkindled so bright with 
 
 the lightnings of death ; 
 And the foam of their mouths as the sea's when the jaws 
 
 of its gulf are as graves, 
 And the ridge of their necks as the wind-shaken mane on 
 
 the ridges of waves : 
 
1 88 A. C. SWINBURNE 
 
 And their fetlocks afire as they rear drip thick with a 
 dewfall of blood 
 
 As the lips of the rearing breaker with froth of the man- 
 slaying flood. 
 
 And the whole plain reels and resounds as the fields of 
 the sea by night 
 
 When the stroke of the wind falls darkling, and death is 
 the seafarer's light.' 
 
 That is a passage in which Mr. Swinburne's 
 lyrical fire flames out in a blood-red splendour. 
 For the sake of contrast, and to give a notion of his 
 versatility, let me set beside it one or two verses 
 of a little poem which since I read it has haunted 
 me with its unique melody, its note of brooding 
 pathos, of tender and regretful reproach. The 
 poem is entitled Itylus and the speaker — I 
 quote from Mr. William Rossetti — is Philomela, 
 the nightingale, whose love, and the perennial 
 pathos of her sorrowing, reproach her sister 
 Procne, the swallow, in memory of the horrible 
 fate dealt by that sister's hand to her own son 
 Itylus : — 
 
 ' Swallow, my sister, O sister Swallow, 
 
 How can thine heart be full of the spring ? 
 A thousand summers are over and dead. 
 What hast thou found in the spring to follow ? 
 What hast thou found in thine heart to sing ? 
 What wilt thou do when the summer is shed ? 
 
A. C. SWINBURNE 1 89 
 
 ' Sister, my sister, O soft light Swallow, 
 
 Though all things feast in the spring's guest- 
 chamber, 
 How hast thou heart to be glad thereof yet ? 
 For where thou fliest, I shall not follow, 
 Till life forget or death remember. 
 Till thou remember and I forget. 
 
 ' O sweet stray sister, O shifting Swallow, 
 The heart's division divideth us. 
 Thy heart is light as the leaf of a tree. 
 But mine goes forth among sea-gulfs hollow. 
 To the place of the slaying of Itylus, 
 The feast of Daulis, the Thracian sea. 
 
 ' O Swallow, sister, O rapid Swallow, 
 I pray thee sing not a little space. 
 Are not the roofs and the lintels wet ? 
 The woven web that was plain to follow. 
 The small slain body, the flower-like face. 
 Can I remember if thou forget ? 
 
 ' O sister, sister ! thy first-begotten ! 
 
 The hands that cling and the feet that follow. 
 The voice of the child's blood crying yet, 
 " Who hath remembered me, who hath forgotten " ? 
 Thou hast forgotten, O summer Swallow, 
 But the world shall end when I forget.' 
 
 'The words of Mercury are harsh after the 
 songs of Apollo,' and with that exquisite music 
 lingering in our ears I am fain to bring this 
 section of my essay to a close. To characterise 
 Mr. Swinburne's genius in a sentence, I should 
 
igo A. C. SWINBURNE 
 
 say that as a wearer of the regal purple of god- 
 like speech, in imaginative ardour and intensity, if 
 not in imaginative breadth and depth, in pomp 
 and magnificence of verbal music, and in the 
 passionate and exultant expression of lyric fire 
 and rapture, he need fear no comparison with 
 even the supreme masters of English song. This 
 is his special merit, and this is his crowning 
 praise. 
 
 II 
 
 Full as the volume of Mr. Swinburne's poetry 
 is, he has yet found time to make many fruitful 
 excursions into the field of prose. I own to a 
 special fondness for the reading of good literary 
 criticism, finding in it a delight second only to 
 that which I take in the study of the masterpieces 
 of creative art ; and it is to this department 
 that Mr. Swinburne has practically confined him- 
 self in his prose writings. If his critical work 
 does not count for much in the popular estimate, 
 it is partly because his fame as a poet has justly 
 enough overshadowed his fame as a critic, and 
 partly because of certain faults of temper and 
 method which I shall have to notice later on. 
 The roll of those who in this country have 
 applied themselves seriously to the business of 
 literary criticism is not a long one, and the 
 
A. C. SWINBURNE 191 
 
 quantity of critical work of the highest order which 
 we possess is inconsiderable compared with that 
 which some other nations — France, for example 
 — can show. And on that account alone there is 
 reason for rejoicing that a writer of Mr. Swin- 
 burne's standing should have devoted some 
 attention to this neglected sphere of literary 
 labour. The volumes of collected essays, and the 
 separate monographs on Shakespeare, Blake, 
 Chapman, and, of course, Victor Hugo which he 
 has sent forth, constitute a very notable and a 
 very welcome addition to our rather scanty stock 
 of fine critical work. The old false and absurd 
 notion that a poet is not the best — if, indeed, he 
 be not the worst — authority on his own craft, can 
 hardly, one would think, survive the discredit cast 
 upon it by the fact that two of our greatest 
 Victorian poets, Arnold and Swinburne, stand 
 also in the very front rank of critics. I am no 
 poet, and I could not, without passing sentence on 
 myself — a task always unpleasant, and here quite 
 gratuitously unnecessary — maintain the converse 
 of this proposition, and assert that, as ' Who drives 
 fat oxen should himself be fat,' so we must look 
 only to the poets for the criticism of poetry ; but 
 of the two it is certainly the more reasonable 
 and credible opinion. Mr. Swinburne's instinct 
 as a critic seems to me by no means unerringly 
 
192 A. C. SWINBURNE 
 
 right ; but when all possible deductions are made, 
 there remains much in his matter which is 
 precious and admirable, much that is fortifying 
 and stimulating in his manner. Before examining 
 some of his critical judgments, let me say a few 
 words regarding his prose style. 
 
 When Mr. Swinburne ceases to sing, he does 
 not permit us to forget that he is a poet : unfor- 
 tunately it is often of his weak rather than his 
 strong side as a poet that his prose reminds us. 
 The faults of his prose are those of his verse, and 
 they are faults which of courseware less pardonable 
 in prose than in poetry. His diction is far too 
 riotously exuberant ; he runs up too broad a 
 canvas of words for the wind of his thought to 
 fill. He is never nerveless or languid ; on the 
 contrary his sins are on the side of over- emphasis, 
 of excess and extravagance. There is nothing 
 like a sense of humour for keeping literature 
 sane and sweet, and I am inclined to ascribe to 
 Mr. Swinburne's signal and regrettable lack of 
 the precious and saving quality those ludicrous 
 excesses and asperities into which he is too often 
 betrayed. I remember only one stroke of humour 
 in all his books, and that, I am afraid, is quite an 
 unconscious one. I refer to a passage in which 
 he speaks of himself as one of those ' who desire 
 above all things to preserve in all things the 
 
A. C. SWINBURNE 193 
 
 golden mean of scrupulous moderation ' — a claim 
 which I fear will move most of his readers to 
 derisive laughter. I give but a single instance of 
 a fault which must be either painfully or ludi- 
 crously familiar to all students of Mr. Swinburne. 
 Some unhappy and misguided mortal has ven- 
 tured, greatly daring, to insert a word in the text 
 of Shelley's poems, and Mr. Swinburne's wrath 
 bursts forth in this fashion : ' A theusand years of 
 purgatorial fire would be insufficient expiation 
 for the criminal on whose deaf and desperate 
 head must rest the original guilt of defacing the 
 text of Shelley with this most damnable corrup- 
 tion.' After this, who shall say that the Boythorn 
 of Bleak House is a caricature ? It is well to 
 know on such admirable authority what is the 
 eighth deadly sin, but one cannot but speculate 
 how the respectable Mr. Bowdler would have 
 fared had he come under the lash of Mr. Swin- 
 burne's castigation. We may admire and enjoy 
 Mr. Swinburne's prose if we read it a few pages at 
 a stretch ; if we sit long over his essays, the stress 
 and glare of his style, its cloying richness, end at 
 last by fatiguing and exasperating us, so that it 
 is a relief to turn to some writer less studious of 
 violent effects, less fond of strong and high 
 colouring. 
 
 To mark clearly and fairly faults like these is part 
 N 
 
194 A. C. SWINBURNE 
 
 of the ungracious duty of a sober critic. I have 
 been the more careful to bring them into relief, 
 because I proceed to make a claim on behalf of 
 Mr. Swinburne's prose which some of my hearers 
 may be unwilling to admit. Now that Arnold, 
 Pater, and Stevenson are dead, and Mr. Ruskin is 
 all but silent, I do not know of any living writer 
 who can match Mr. Swinburne at his best, if we 
 leave Mr. George Meredith out of account as 
 being too unequal, too freakish, and too fantastic. 
 He has not the even and equable tone of Arnold, 
 his consummate and unfailing felicity of phrase, 
 and he has not Stevenson's subtle dexterity of 
 craftsmanship, his choice and curious research for 
 the one word that will fit his purpose. Compared 
 with any of these I have mentioned, Mr. Swin- 
 burne's style seems heavy and overloaded. Yet 
 he is the master of some stops on the organ of 
 prose which it did not enter into their scheme to 
 use. In amplitude and sonorousness, in grave 
 and rich fulness of musical cadence, in pomp of 
 golden -tongued eloqence, we must, to find fit 
 rivals for him, go back to that earlier age when 
 such qualities as these were held in higher esteem 
 than the virtues of simplicity, lucidity, and direct- 
 ness, which we now look for and praise in 
 English prose. I like Mr. Swinburne best when 
 he writes in the minor key : no ear can surely be dull 
 
A. C. SWINBURNE 19S 
 
 to the subdued and restful beauty of the passage 
 on Shakespeare's Prince Arthur which I quote : 
 ' I am not minded to say much of Shakespeare's 
 Arthur ; there are one or two figures in the world 
 of his work of which there are no words that 
 would be fit or good to say. The place they have 
 in our lives and thoughts is not one for talk ; 
 the niche set apart for them to inhabit in our 
 secret hearts is not penetrable by the lights and 
 noises of common day. There are chapels in the 
 cathedral of man's highest art, as in that of his 
 inmost life, not made to be set open to the eyes and 
 feet of the world. Love and death and memory 
 keep charge for us there, in silence of some 
 beloved names. It is the crowning glory of 
 genius, the final miracle and transcendent gift of 
 poetry, that it can add to the number of these, 
 and engrave on the very heart of our remembrance 
 fresh names and memories of its own creation.' 
 To call this merely eloquent would be to do it 
 wrong: it is eloquence breathed upon by the 
 breath of a born poet. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Within the limits fixed by a high standard of 
 excellence Mr. Swinburne's taste is admirably 
 catholic. He has flung himself into the study of 
 
196 A. C. SWINBURNE 
 
 letters with that fiery ardour which marks all he 
 does, and he has brought to bear upon his task 
 not only the ripe knowledge of a finished scholar, 
 but that unfeigned love of all that has been 
 grandly or finely done in art, and that swift 
 insight into the secret of its triumphs without 
 which all criticism is doomed to failure. The 
 radical defect of his critical method is that he 
 almost invariably forces the note ; his praise 
 passes too often into fulsome flattery, his censure 
 into shrill vituperation. I do not think that he 
 often praises work wholly unworthy, or that he 
 often fails to make his repugnances at least 
 intelligible. Whether he praises or blames, he is 
 apt to scatter his superlatives with far too lavish 
 a hand. If there were a tax on the luxury of 
 superlatives — a measure I recommend to the 
 consideration of any potential Chancellor of the 
 Exchequer here present, — Mr. Swinburne would 
 find the demands on his purse rather heavy. He 
 is too apt to be 
 
 ' So over-violent or over-civil 
 That every man with him is god or devil.' 
 
 Victor Hugo might stand for the supreme god of 
 his literary idolatry, and Thomas Carlyle for the 
 devil. To speak seriously, I cannot think that 
 Mr. Swinburne in his praise of Hugo has gone to 
 
A. C. SWINBURNE I97 
 
 work in the winning and persuasive way. He 
 should lay to heart the old fable of the Wind 
 and the Sun and the traveller's cloak. There is 
 no doubt something touching and attractive in 
 his lifelong devotion and loyalty to Victor Hugo, 
 and certainly to recommend the great men of 
 one nation to one's fellow-countrymen is a noble 
 and praiseworthy task. But it is a task which 
 must be gone about with more circumspection 
 than Mr. Swinburne has shown. Had he not 
 pitched his tone of eulogy quite so high, he would 
 not only have come far nearer the truth about 
 Hugo, but he would actually have served him 
 better with a class of readers whom his extrava- 
 gant and unmixed adulation merely wearies and 
 repels. I hope I have a becoming reverence for 
 the greatest figure in French literature, but surely 
 there is hardly a great writer whom we must 
 accept, if we accept him at all, with so many 
 reserves and hesitations, so that it requires the 
 recollection of his astonishing merits to outweigh 
 the sum of his grievous offences against art. 
 Hugo's lack of balance and measure, his love of 
 startling paradox, the frequency with which he 
 crosses the line that separates the language of 
 passion from the language of sheer rant — these 
 are faults which Mr. Swinburne consistently 
 ignores. Hugo, as I have said before, is a giant 
 
198 A. C. SWINBURNE 
 
 who must perpetually be straining upon tiptoe : 
 let me add now, that his natural stature is so 
 great that he does not require to stand upon the 
 prostrate bodies of his admirers. Mr. Swinburne's 
 praise of Victor Hugo would have counted for far 
 more in the estimate of all thoughtful readers, 
 had he not so persistently clapped the telescope 
 to his blind eye when Hugo's faults came within 
 the range of his vision. 
 
 Victor Hugo looms largest in Mr. Swinburne's 
 essays, but he is far more than a mere Hugolater. 
 His Study of Shakespeare is a noble and elo- 
 quent tribute to the memory of one in writing 
 of whom it grows hard to avoid the obvious 
 without making excursions into the irrelevant. 
 Mr. Swinburne, indeed, is perhaps the first living 
 authority on that glorious Elizabethan literature 
 which we all praise, but which so many of us 
 know so little about. He has followed worthily 
 in the wake of Coleridge and Lamb, by directing 
 attention anew to the ' large utterances of those 
 early gods.' Shakespeare Mr. Swinburne views 
 mainly on the purely poetic side of his genius, 
 a manner of approaching him which I find re- 
 freshing and salutary after the portentous efforts 
 of those German commentators who, by the aid 
 of a vast and cumbersome apparatus of learning, 
 discover all sorts of wonderful things in Shake- 
 
A. C. SWINBURNE 1 99 
 
 speare which Shakespeare never dreamt of putting 
 there. Towards the great poets, his contempor- 
 aries and rivals, Mr. Swinburne is singularly and 
 nobly free from the least taint of jealousy or 
 envy. When we are tempted to bear hardly 
 upon his asperities of temper, let us remember 
 to his credit that large generosity and noble 
 magnanimity of nature to which his tributes to 
 Tennyson, Arnold, Browning, Morris, and Rossetti 
 bear ample and eloquent witness. When the 
 late M. Taine, in one of those too frequent 
 aberrations of the critical sense which make his 
 History of English Literature one of the most 
 exasperating, as it is by far the most brilliant, 
 study of our literary monuments, set Alfred de 
 Musset above Tennyson, Mr. Swinburne was one 
 of the first to utter an emphatic protest. I do 
 not agree at all points with Mr. Swinburne's 
 estimate of the late Laureate ; I certainly go with 
 him in his condemnation of the whining heroics 
 of Locksley Hall and the unreal sentiment of the 
 May Queen, but I cannot, even at his bidding, give 
 up the Idylls of the King which Mr. Swinburne 
 nicknames the ' Morte D' Albert, or Idylls of the 
 Prince Consort' 
 
 Mr. Swinburne breathes freest in the atmo- 
 sphere of controversy ; he loves ' to drink delight 
 of battle with his peers.' In Matthew Arnold he 
 
20O A. C. SWINBURNE 
 
 encountered a foeman worthy of his steel, and 
 there is no more vigorous piece of critical polemics 
 than the essay on Wordsworth and Byron in 
 which Mr. Swinburne contested the high claims 
 put forth on their behalf by Mr. Arnold, and 
 asserted the counter-claims of his own favourite 
 Shelley. I cannot enter into the merits of that 
 great debate ; the honours of the field were pretty 
 equally distributed between the two champions, 
 and neither, perhaps, was entirely in the right. 
 I can merely express, without any attempt at 
 proof, my opinion that Mr. Swinburne's estimate 
 of Shelley is as extravagantly high as Arnold's 
 was extravagantly low, that to Byron he is in 
 many respects unjust, and that of Wordsworth he 
 writes with a measure of sympathy and insight 
 greater than I should have expected or hoped for 
 from him, considering the widely diverse tempera- 
 ments of the two men. To settle questions of 
 precedence, to act as a sort of Burke's Guide to 
 the Intellectual Peerage, is not to my way of 
 thinking the main function of criticism ; but of 
 course such questions have an interest of their 
 own. I take it that at present the star of 
 Wordsworth is manifestly waxing, while that of 
 Byron is no less manifestly waning, and Shelley 
 gains but little ground. All attempts to re- 
 habilitate Byron will, I am afraid, be utterly 
 
A. C. SWINBURNE 20I 
 
 futile ; he can never recover the place he held in 
 his own generation, although a candid criticism 
 will always recognise in him more than, to use 
 Swinburne's over-emphatic language, 'rant and 
 cant and glare and splash and splutter.' Shelley, 
 on the other hand, is so impalpable and elusive, 
 that he is perhaps doomed to be the poet of a 
 select circle of devout votaries ; but Arnold's 
 astounding prediction that his essays and letters 
 would in time come to rank higher than his 
 poetry is likely to remain unfulfilled. Of the 
 three, Wordsworth, by virtue of that power which 
 Mr. Swinburne has so accurately defined as 
 ' sublimity in tenderness,' has perhaps the surest 
 and firmest hold on the affections of that incon- 
 siderable minority of persons who take any vital 
 interest in the great achievements of art, and no 
 revolutions of time or taste will displace that 
 serene and august figure from the pre-eminence 
 he has so fairly and worthily earned. 
 
 IV 
 
 In bringing this far from complete study of Mr. 
 Swinburne to a close, I am happily able to 
 express the feeling with which I take my leave 
 of him in words fitter and more beautiful than 
 any I could write. In his charming preface to 
 
202 A. C. SWINBURNE 
 
 Men and Books Mr. Stevenson says of the authors 
 he there deals with — how admirably, the readers 
 of the volume know : ' These were all men whom 
 for one reason or another I loved ; or when I did 
 not love the men, my love was the greater to 
 their books. I had read them and lived with 
 them ; for months they were continually in my 
 thoughts. I seemed to rejoice in their joys and 
 to sorrow with them in their griefs ; and behold, 
 when I came to write of them, my tone was 
 sometimes hardly courteous, and seldom wholly 
 just.' This admission, made with so sympathetic 
 a vibration of the voice, and marked by that frank 
 and manly candour which is one of the writer's 
 most engaging qualities, I must take leave to 
 echo. Every one who essays, in however humble 
 and casual a way, this delicate business of literary 
 criticism, and whose instinct compels him to sift 
 and discriminate, must often be struck by the 
 lack of cordiality which he shows when he comes 
 to put upon paper his impressions of an author 
 who has appealed to him strongly on one side or 
 other of his nature. When he reviews his own 
 judgment, he cannot but be sensible of the hard 
 and unsympathetic nature of his medium. He 
 sees beauties which he might have praised more 
 warmly ; he thinks of blemishes which he might 
 have passed by without censure ; the fear besets 
 
A. C. SWINBURNE 203 
 
 him that after all he has succeeded in presenting 
 only an imperfect and distorted idea of the im- 
 pression which his subject has made upon his 
 own mind. In criticising Mr. Swinburne, I have 
 tried indeed in some measure to reveal his 
 beauties, but I have not sought to cover or 
 minimise his faults. Lest the obligation thus 
 laid upon me should make any one think that 
 I value his fine gifts less highly than I do, that 
 I am not duly grateful for the rich treasures of 
 golden speech with which he has enriched the 
 memories of our race, let me close upon a note 
 of more cordial and whole-hearted admiration ; 
 let me say with all earnestness and emphasis that 
 his faults, flagrant as in themselves they are, seem 
 to me slight and trivial when set against the 
 splendour of his merits. 
 
ROBERT FERGUSSONi 
 
 In some respects the undisguised and altogether 
 undisputed pre-eminence of Burns and Scott 
 among the poets of our own country has not 
 been without its evil effects. Shakespeare so 
 far transcended the other dramatists of his time 
 that when we speak of the Elizabethan age, in 
 reference to literature, we think at once of that 
 great name, and hardly of any one else — hardly 
 at all of those other dramatists, some of whom 
 would have furnished forth a lesser time very 
 creditably. Just in the same way the very names 
 of our minor Scots poets are well-nigh forgotten 
 in the fame of that great pair, Burns and Scott. 
 This is quite natural, of course ; it is natural that 
 we should not greatly care to dawdle over The 
 Castle of Indolence or The Gentle Shepherd, when 
 we might be reading or re-reading Tarn d Shunter, 
 or The Lay of the Last Minstrel. But, although 
 it is natural, one cannot help regretting the com- 
 parative neglect into which Thomson and Ramsay 
 
 ^ Scots Magazine, November 1892. 
 204 
 
ROBERT FERGUSSON 205 
 
 are falling even here in Scotland. As for the 
 poet who is the subject of this paper, Englishmen 
 never knew much of Fergusson, and it is to be 
 feared that most of the generation of Scotsmen 
 which is now growing up are likely through sheer 
 ignorance to take small account of the very 
 special claims which this poor lad possesses on 
 their respect and gratitude. For undoubtedly 
 there are special reasons why Fergusson should 
 keep a warm corner in Scottish hearts which do 
 not apply with equal or nearly equal strength to 
 the cases of Thomson and Ramsay. Thomson 
 was one of those Scotsmen for whom the highroad 
 to London has an irresistible attraction, and when 
 he went away he remained away ; in his manner 
 and choice of subjects he is perhaps the least 
 national, the least Scottish of all our poets. 
 Again, one may cherish a hearty feeling of 
 admiration for ' honest Allan,' and yet hold one- 
 self free to confess, as regards his most important 
 work, that though his Shepherd be Gentle, yet, 
 unlike the river Thames, is he also dull. 
 
 The case is different with Fergusson. His 
 poetry is worth remembering for its own sake, 
 but a peculiar regard attaches to his name 
 because of the strong influence he had over 
 Burns. The extent of that influence may be 
 at once realised by any one who takes the 
 
206 ROBERT FERGUSSON 
 
 trouble to compare Fergusson's Farmer's Ingle 
 with The Cottars Saturday Night and Fergusson's 
 poem entitled Leith Races with The Holy Fair 
 of Burns. Burns himself, with that large and 
 generous humanity which makes us so willing 
 to forget or condone his faults, was ever foremost 
 to acknowledge his debt to Fergusson. As is 
 well known, he eagerly sought out, when he came 
 to Edinburgh, Fergusson's unmarked grave in the 
 Canongate churchyard, and, poor and struggling 
 as he then was, put up at his own cost a monu- 
 ment^ over the remains of the unhappy young 
 man, whom he described, no less truly than 
 pathetically, as his ' elder brother in misfortune.' 
 But notwithstanding the generous praise of his 
 great successor, Fergusson has so strangely been 
 allowed to slip out of sight, that it is only by 
 patient search at the second-hand bookstalls 
 that one can hope to pick up a copy of the poems 
 which once stirred Scotsmen from one end of the 
 kingdom to the other. One can only wonder 
 that a good and adequate edition of Fergusson's 
 works has yet to appear, and surely no very long 
 
 ' The following is the inscription, written by Burns, on the 
 stone in the Canongate Churchyard : — 
 
 ' No sculptur'd marble here, nor pompous lay, 
 
 No storied urn nor animated bust. 
 This simple stone directs pale Scotia's way 
 To pour her sorrows o'er her poet's dust.' 
 
ROBERT FERGUSSON 207 
 
 time should now be allowed to pass before such 
 an edition is presented to the public. Meanwhile, 
 the aim of this essay is to tell shortly and simply 
 the little there is to tell regarding Fergusson's 
 life, and to say something also of those qualities 
 which have given him the high place he holds 
 among our national poets. To those who know 
 little of Fergusson such an attempt may be 
 welcome ; those who already know all that the 
 writer has to tell them may not object to travel 
 in company with him over what, if it is a familiar 
 road, is so because it is also a favourite one. 
 
 Robert Fergusson, then, was born in Edinburgh 
 on the Sth of September 1750, in a small house 
 'whose site is now, it is believed, occupied by 
 North Bridge Street.' Like most of our Scots 
 poets, he was sprung of poor parents. His 
 father, William Fergusson, a native of Tarland 
 in Aberdeenshire, had settled in the metropolis 
 four years before the birth of our poet. Here he 
 could not be said to have fallen on his feet. True, 
 he had found employment, but the sum he re- 
 ceived in return for his services was barely 
 sufficient to keep body and soul together, and 
 for many years he was constantly changing his 
 situation, never very greatly for the better. At 
 last, in 1763, thirteen years after the birth of 
 
208 ROBERT FERGUSSON 
 
 Robert, he obtained a fairly good appointment 
 as clerk or accountant in the linen department 
 of the British Linen Company; and there he 
 remained till his death. 
 
 By all accounts William Fergusson was one of 
 those honest, upright, hard-pushed men, of a type 
 happily familiar enough in Scotland, who have 
 much to suffer at Fortune's hands, but bear up 
 bravely and uncomplainingly through it all. We 
 learn further that he was not without intellectual 
 interests, and even that he had some smack of 
 culture. He took an interest in what his bairns 
 were doing with their Ovid and Horace ; those of 
 his letters which have been preserved and printed^ 
 are not at all badly expressed, and one or two 
 are lit up by a gentle sense of humour. It is said 
 that he, too, had once dallied with the Muse, but 
 any poetical tastes he may have had the stern 
 business of life must have given him very little 
 leisure to indulge. On the whole, one can gather 
 that he was a kind and careful parent, not at all 
 of an austere or illiberal cast of mind ; and one 
 naturally thinks with a sigh that had he only 
 lived long enough he would have been able to 
 sympathise with his son's peculiar genius, while 
 at the same time he might have done much to 
 
 ^ In Mr. A. B. Grosart's valuable edition of 1851, to which my 
 indebtedness is great, and is here very gladly acknowledged. 
 
ROBERT FERGUSSON 209 
 
 help the poet to guide his course better than, 
 unfortunately, the poor lad actually did when 
 left to himself. Robert's mother is described as 
 a woman of great worth and piety. 
 
 The silent struggles of Scots parents, however 
 poor they may be, to give their children a good 
 schooling, have many times been commented on, 
 and indeed they are often heroic. Robert's 
 father shared the feeling of his class ; even 
 when his income was something under ;£'20 a 
 year, he contrived — how he managed it one is 
 at a loss to guess — to spare £i, 15s. for 'school 
 payments.' Robert's education was consequently 
 well cared for. After six months spent with a 
 Mr. Philp, a teacher in Niddry's Wynd, to whom 
 he went at six years of age, he was thought fit for 
 the High School, to which accordingly he was 
 transferred. His progress under all his teachers 
 was rapid, despite his delicate health and the 
 irregularity of attendance which this caused. He 
 early grew to love books, and especially he 
 delighted to study the Bible. When boys come 
 to read the Bible, they generally pick out as their 
 favourite passages those which describe how the 
 children of Israel smote the Amalekites with 
 great slaughter, and such like, but Fergusson 
 seems to have preferred the didactic to the war- 
 like portions. Nor was he content with being a 
 
 O 
 
2IO ROBERT FERGUSSON 
 
 hearer of the Word ; he wished to be a doer — 
 and a sufferer — also, and if others failed in their 
 obvious duty, it lay upon him to point this out. 
 So, after poring over the Proverbs of Solomon, he 
 astonished his mother by asking her to give him 
 a whipping. The good woman asked the reason 
 of so novel a request. ' Oh, mother,' replied the 
 precocious youth, '"He that spareth the rod 
 spoileth the child." ' 
 
 At the High School Fergusson remained four 
 years. At the end of that time he obtained, 
 through the influence of Lord Findlater, a bursary, 
 which took him first to the Grammar-School of 
 Dundee, and afterwards to the University of 
 St. Andrews. He entered the University in the 
 fifteenth year of his age, and soon began to single 
 himself out as a youth of ready wit and genial 
 temper. Curiously enough, mathematics, rather 
 than the classics, took his fancy. Virgil and 
 Horace, he said, were the only classical authors 
 he cared to look at. The tedium of his studies 
 he relieved by playing pranks and stringing 
 rhymes. He wrote satires on the professors ; 
 gentle and genial enough in all probability, for 
 Fergusson's satire amused, but never stung or 
 festered. It is said that while at the University 
 he was at work on a more serious effort — a tragedy, 
 namely, on the life of Sir William Wallace ; and 
 
ROBERT FERGUSSON 211 
 
 the story is probable enough, for the two eternally 
 fascinating subjects which suggest themselves to 
 Scotsmen with generous minds and a turn for 
 rhyming are Sir William Wallace and Mary, 
 Queen of Scots. But poetry was only one outlet 
 for his high spirits, and Fergusson once or twice 
 got into rather laughable scrapes. There is no 
 need, however, to magnify these as some of his 
 biographers have done. The most serious of 
 them was a college row, for his share in which he 
 was formally ' extruded.' But even in this case the 
 offence was evidently not very serious, for he was 
 received back in a day or two. An amusing and 
 characteristic story is told of another of these 
 playful pranks. Fergusson had a very fine voice, 
 and in consequence was often selected to act as 
 precentor. He did not greatly care for this post 
 of dignity, and he resolved to get rid of it. So 
 one day he asked the congregation (no doubt in a 
 voice sepulchrally solemn), as if reading from a 
 ' line ' which had been handed in, ' to remember 
 in prayer a young man (then present) of whom, 
 from the sudden effects of inebriety, there appears 
 but small hope of recovery.' He was not asked 
 to act as jjrecentor again. 
 
 Fergusson had originally been intended for the 
 ministry ; but the untimely death of his father, 
 who died during his college course, leaving the 
 
212 ROBERT FERGUSSON 
 
 widow in very poor circumstances, forced Robert 
 to give up all thought of a profession for which 
 he was not, in truth, too well fitted. Even in 
 those days, when the dignity and decorous dul- 
 ness of the pulpit were not so jealously guarded 
 as they are now, a few freaks such as that which 
 relieved him of the office of precentor might not 
 improbably have brought his pastoral career to as 
 sudden a close ; and, on the whole, it is perhaps 
 as well that the risk was not run. Fergusson 
 had never looked with much favour on the pro- 
 posal to clap a black coat on his back ; still, it 
 cannot have been with very pleasant feelings that 
 he found himself, after four years' study at the 
 University, flung on the world, and under the 
 necessity of doing something at once to help his 
 mother to maintain their humble household. He 
 had a maternal uncle in Aberdeenshire who was 
 in fairly prosperous circumstances, and to his 
 house Fergusson went for a time. But an unlucky 
 incident, which has been most unduly magnified, 
 and into the particulars of which it is not neces- 
 sary to enter here, destroyed any hopes he may 
 have had of substantial aid from that quarter, and 
 on his return to his well-loved Edinburgh Fergus- 
 son looked out for something to which he might 
 turn his hand. He was not long in obtaining a 
 poor employment as a copyist of legal papers in 
 
ROBERT FERGUSSON 213 
 
 the Commissary-Clerk's office. There, with the 
 exception of a few months spent in the Sheriff- 
 Clerk's oiifice, Fergusson passed the remaining 
 years of his life. The work was a routine of 
 the most mechanical character, and the pittance 
 Fergusson received was of the poorest. The 
 ' daily drudgery at the desk's dead wood,' as 
 Charles Lamb phrased it, did not suit Fergusson ; 
 and besides, a close view of its working does not 
 seem to have bred in him any great liking for the 
 law. In one stanza he condenses the experience 
 of, it is to be feared, many thousand unfortunate 
 litigants : — 
 
 ' But law 's a draw-well — unco deep, 
 Withouten rim fouk out to keep ; 
 A donnart chiel, when drunk, may dreep 
 
 Fu' sleely in, 
 But finds the gait baith stay an' steep 
 
 Ere out he win.' 
 
 But Fergusson, despite the prosaic character of 
 his occupation, did not long allow his poetical 
 talents to lie fallow. In 1771 he began to contri- 
 bute to Ruddiman's Weekly Magazine, then a 
 well-known Edinburgh journal, the poems on 
 which his fame depends. He did not, however, 
 find his true level at the outset. His first poems 
 were in English, and the praise injudiciously 
 bestowed upon these led him to continue for a 
 while to write in a language in which it is evident 
 
214 ROBERT FERGUSSON 
 
 he could never have achieved anything worth 
 remembering. But a poet may generally be 
 trusted to discover sooner or later in what direc- 
 tion his strength really lies, and it was not long 
 before Fergusson started that vein of Scots 
 dialect in which he was to work with rich results. 
 The public, too, were quick to note the difference : 
 Fergusson's fame began to penetrate to village 
 after village, and the weekly instalment of the 
 magazine came to be looked forward to with a 
 new and eager interest, not in the metropolis 
 only, but all over Scotland. 
 
 Unfortunately, while his fame was steadily 
 growing, Fergusson was leading a life which one 
 cannot contemplate with any degree of pleasure. 
 His home was a poor one, his work was monoton- 
 ous, and the social bent of his temper inclined 
 him to make up for his daily slavery by unchecked 
 conviviality when his work was done. He takes 
 a peculiar delight in describing his potations : 
 ' he recalls,' to quote Mr. R. L. Stevenson, who 
 has written admirably of Fergusson, ' he recalls a 
 supper-party pleasantry with something akin to 
 tenderness ; and sounds the praises of the act of 
 drinking as if it were virtuous, or, at least, witty 
 in itself. It was not choice,' he adds, ' so much as 
 external fate, that kept Fergusson in this round 
 of sordid pleasures. A Scot of poetic tempera- 
 
ROBERT FERGUSSON 21 5 
 
 ment, and without religious exaltation, drops, as 
 if by nature, into the public-house.' And then 
 Mr. Stevenson has a characteristic fling at the 
 atrocious climate which has banished him to 
 Samoa. ' The picture,' he says, ' may not be a 
 pleasant one, but what is a man to do in this 
 dog's weather.' This may seem to some a rather 
 fatalistic doctrine, but surely every one will agree 
 in the force of the plea that Fergusson deserves 
 pity rathej: than blame. Life in Edinburgh at 
 that time had nothing very pleasing or attractive 
 for those of his class and circumstances except the 
 public-house parlour ; one has only to turn to his 
 poems to see that. ' O sir ! ' said Fergusson to one 
 who remonstrated seriously with him, 'anything to 
 forget my poor mother and these aching fingers.' 
 
 With this new-born love of dissipation he was 
 as fond as ever of practical joking. One even- 
 ing in a frolic he laid a wager that he would sell 
 a bundle of ballads. Accordingly he disguised 
 himself, took the ballads in his hand, and sang 
 Scots songs so sweetly, that a crowd soon 
 gathered round him. In a few moments he sold 
 off his whole stock, and returned laughing to his 
 companions, to spend the proceeds in conviviality. 
 
 The end soon drew near. His irregular habits 
 weakened a constitution never robust: a cold, 
 caught during the stirring scenes of an election, 
 
2l6 ROBERT FERGUSSON 
 
 such as he has described in one of the most 
 spirited and broadly humorous of his poems, had 
 disastrous results. He fell into complete religious 
 despondency, and was soon on the verge of mad- 
 ness. Once, however, he rallied, and was begin- 
 ning to be more himself, but just at this time a 
 fall from a staircase brought on an acute mania 
 which made necessary his removal to the old 
 Darien House, then the only public asylum in 
 Edinburgh. It is said that just as he was entering 
 the gates of this dismal mansion a glimpse of con- 
 sciousness visited him ; realising where he was being 
 taken to, he uttered a piercing shriek, which was 
 echoed by the unhappy inmates, and lingered long 
 in the ears of the relatives who accompanied him. 
 Fergusson's tin^e was not long in this house of 
 misery. Restless at first, thinking himself a king, 
 and plaiting a crown of straw to place upon his 
 head, he afterwards quieted down, and was quite 
 peaceable when his mother and sister came to see 
 him. ' He thanked them for their kindness, and 
 asked his sister to bring her seam and sit beside 
 him.' There was even talk of his release ; but 
 two months passed away, and Fergusson still 
 hovered in the mental twilight between lunacy 
 and sanity. When at last the release came, it was 
 to be other than they dreamed of. His mother 
 and sister were constant in their kindness. Of one 
 
ROBERT FERGUSSON 217 
 
 interview, which was to be their last, a peculiarly 
 affecting account has been preserved. ' The even- 
 ing was chilly and damp. His feet felt very cold. 
 He asked his mother to gather up the bed-clothes 
 and sit upon them. She did so. He looked 
 wistfully at her, and said, " O mother, this is kind 
 indeed ! " But again he complained that his feet 
 were " cold, cold." When they prepared to leave, 
 he entreated them to remain. " Do not go, mother, 
 yet ; do not leave me." It was the time, however, 
 for "shutting up." They parted.' Before the 
 morning came Robert Fergusson's short life 
 was spent. He died on the i6th of October 1774. 
 If anything could add to the regret at so 
 untimely a death, it would be the fact that his 
 prospects seemed brighter now than they had 
 ever been. A collected edition of the poems con- 
 tributed to Ruddiman's Magazine had been pub- 
 lished in 1773. The book had sold rapidly, and 
 Fergusson's fame might now be looked upon as 
 secure. Nor was this all. His brother Henry, 
 who had been a rather wild youth, and who had 
 betaken himself to the sea, like so many more 
 wild youths before and since, had sent home a 
 remittance, and Fergusson's home was in process 
 of being brightened up. Another generous deed, 
 of which no record of Fergusson should omit to 
 take account, falls also to be mentioned here. A 
 
2l8 ROBERT FERGUSSON 
 
 gentleman named Burnet, who had been one of 
 Fergusson's friends, had gone out to India, and 
 prospered there. With a generosity which di- 
 rectly does himself infinite credit, and which indi- 
 rectly bears testimony to Fergusson's worth (for 
 such a friendship must have been based upon a 
 very real regard), he sent home a cordial invita- 
 tion to Fergusson to join him in India, accom- 
 panying the offer with a remittance of ;^ioo to 
 pay expenses. But this munificence came too 
 late. Before the letter reached Edinburgh Fer- 
 gusson had already been laid in the grave. One 
 is pleased to add that the money was handed 
 over to Fergusson's family, to make of it what use 
 they pleased. 
 
 Such is the story of Fergusson's life — short and 
 wretched enough in all conscience, shorter and 
 more wretched even than that of Burns. He 
 seems to have been a kindly, genial soul, generous 
 in feeling, full of fun, fond of practical joking, and 
 with no worse faults than a certain weakness of 
 character and that unlucky devotion to Bacchus. 
 ' He was,' said the porter at the St. Andrews 
 University, — ' He was a tricky callant, but a fine 
 laddie for a' that.' And the homely sentence 
 sums up Fergusson's character with absolute 
 precision and fitness. 
 
 In our estimate of Fergusson's poetry his 
 
ROBERT FERGUSSON 219 
 
 English pieces do not count. 'These English 
 songs,' said Burns, ' gravel me to death,' and it 
 is easy to imagine Fergusson saying the same 
 thing. 
 
 ' No choiring warblers flutter in the sky ; 
 Phoebus no longer holds his radiant sway ; 
 While Nature, with a melancholy eye. 
 Bemoans the loss of his departed ray.' 
 
 That is a measure of Fergusson's English perform- 
 ance ; and for most people it will be quite enough. 
 Clearly, had Fergusson written always in this 
 fashion, one would not be talking of him at this 
 time of day. Indeed, if there is one thing more 
 than another specially noticeable in Fergusson, it 
 is the rich feast of the Doric which in every one of 
 his best poems he sets before us. Such phrases 
 as 'gust your gab' and 'weet your thrapple' 
 ought to be dear to the heart of every patriotic 
 Scot, and of such phrases Fergusson is full. Not 
 Burns himself has a greater command over the 
 resources of our kindly Scots tongue. If we 
 valued our poets in proportion to the difficulty 
 which the base Southron finds in reading their 
 works, then would Fergusson be elevated far 
 above Burns. Without going quite so far as that, 
 one has a certain malicious satisfaction in trying 
 to guess what one who has the misfortune not to 
 
220 ROBERT FERGUSSON 
 
 be a Scotsman would make of this address To the 
 Tron-Kirk Bell: — 
 
 ' Wanwordy, crazy, dinsome thing, 
 As e'er was framed to jow or ring ! 
 What gar'd them sic in steeple hing, 
 
 They ken themsel ; 
 But weel wat I, they couldna bring 
 Waur sounds frae hell. 
 
 ' Oh ! were I provost o' the toun, 
 I swear by a' the powers aboon, 
 I 'd bring ye wi' a reesle doun ; 
 
 Nor should ye think 
 (Sae sair I 'd crack an' clour your crown) 
 
 Again to clink. 
 
 'But, far frae thee the bailies dwell, 
 Or they would scunner at your knell ; 
 Gie the foul thief his riven bell, 
 
 And then, I trow, 
 The byword bauds, " The deil himsel 
 
 Has got his due."' 
 
 This familiar way of treating the august personage 
 referred to is, I think, very characteristic of our 
 Scots poets. And the reason seems clear. It is 
 not hard to hate the Devil, but, in spite of your- 
 self, you cannot but have a friendly, neighbourly 
 sort of feeling for one whom you call, familiarly, 
 the Deil. 
 
 Fergusson has been called the Laureate of Old 
 Edinburgh, and the title is richly deserved. 
 
ROBERT FERGUSSON 221 
 
 There he had been born, there he spent most of 
 his life, and he came, as most do, to love the old 
 grey city right well. With his quick eye and his 
 true descriptive power he' contrives to give us, in 
 a wonderfully vivid fashion, an idea of what life 
 in the chief of Scottish cities was like in the last 
 years of the eighteenth century. Auld Reekie, 
 The Daft Days, The King's Birthday, The Election, 
 Caller Oysters, Leith Races — how picturesquely 
 these bring before us the old, quaint town, with 
 all the bustle and humours of the streets, the dirt, 
 the smells, the merry din of the change-houses, 
 and the drunkenness, the cheerful, the deliberate 
 drunkenness, of its douce citizens. 
 
 Here, then, lay Fergusson's strength, in de- 
 scribing in his quietly humorous and satirical 
 fashion the city scenes he knew so well, and had 
 joined in so often. He was not without a feeling 
 for Nature, of course — witness the idyllic close of 
 that rollicking poem. The Kin^s Birthday, — but 
 he had been born among the high lands of Edin- 
 burgh, and it was of Edinburgh that he wrote 
 best. Dealing with such themes as the street 
 scenes suggested, his verse naturally lacked 
 dignity and elevation, but at least — and this was 
 much — it was true to life ; he described only 
 what he saw, always he wrote ' with his eye on 
 the object.' 
 
222 ROBERT FERGUSSON 
 
 Fergusson had neither the fire nor the pathos of 
 Burns ; love had not come to him as it came 
 to Burns, causing spontaneous bursts of song. 
 His experience was not mature ; seriousness, that 
 deep and true view of life which only the progress 
 of the years can bring, was wanting ; dying at 
 twenty-four, how could it have been otherwise? 
 But through all his best poems there runs a tone 
 of genuine humour and sarcasm, always pleasant 
 and sometimes pungent. Thus he sings satirically 
 the praises of Gude Braid Claith : — 
 
 ' Braid claith lends fouk an unco heeze ; 
 Maks mony kail-worms butterflees ; 
 Gies mony a doctor his degrees, 
 
 For little skaith : 
 In short, you may be what you please, 
 Wi' gude braid claith. 
 
 ' For tho' ye had as wise a snout on. 
 As Shakespeare or Sir Isaac Newton, 
 Your judgment fouk wad hae a doubt on, 
 
 I '11 tak my aith. 
 Till they could see ye wi' a suit on 
 
 O' gude braid claith.' 
 
 Let me conclude my quotations with one which 
 shows how sweet a strain Fergusson was master of 
 once in a while. It occurs in the Elegy on the 
 Death of Scots Music. He complains, a hundred 
 years before Professor Blackie, of the neglect of 
 our national airs, and asks — 
 
ROBERT FERGUvSSON 223 
 
 ' Could lavrocks, at the dawnin' day, 
 Could Unties, chirmin' frae the spray. 
 Or todlin' burns, that smoothly play 
 
 Owre gowden bed. 
 Compare wi' " Birks o' Invermay " ? 
 
 But now they 're dead.' 
 
 What Fergusson might have achieved had he 
 lived it is idle to speculate. He died, insane, at 
 twenty-four ; but already his work was done. In 
 his habit of dealing directly with the subjects that 
 lay nearest to his hand — dealing with them faith- 
 fully and freely in the homely tongue he so well 
 knew how to use, — in this habit he had shown 
 the way to Burns, he had marked out the path 
 which he who had the good fortune to come after 
 was to tread with a firmer, a more assured step. 
 He is thus linked with that great movement in 
 English poetry of which Wordsworth was — not so 
 much the originator as — the first wholly conscious 
 exponent. When we talk of Wordsworth as 
 having reformed English poetry by freeing it 
 from the bonds of artifice, by informing it with a 
 greater depth of thought, and ty achieving a new 
 and admirable simplicity of style and diction, we 
 talk with a certain degree of looseness. He was 
 not the first in this great work ; before him there 
 was Cowper and there was Burns, to name no 
 more than these. Cowper had right ideas ; but 
 
224 ROBERT FERGUSSON 
 
 his work, admirable as in many respects it is, had 
 not sufficient weight to stand against the work of 
 masters like Dryden and Pope, whose methods 
 he rightly enough condemned. The best work of 
 Burns, again, one might almost say his only good 
 work, was done in poems which, from the fact of 
 their being written in the Scots tongue, were in 
 great part unintelligible to English readers. The 
 moment Burns came to write in English he 
 became a slave to artifice, he declined into a 
 diction altogether infelicitous, sometimes even 
 barbarous. More than that, Burns was not a 
 conscious reformer : he worked for the new ideas, 
 but unconsciously, at least not of set purpose. 
 But by his Scottish poems he exerted an influence 
 on Wordsworth the extent of which that mag- 
 nanimous egotist was not slow to acknowledge. 
 Every one will remember Wordsworth's fine 
 tribute to the memory of the poet : — 
 
 ' Whose light I hailed when first it shone. 
 When, breaking forth as Nature's own, 
 
 It showed my youth 
 How verse may build a princely throne 
 
 On humble truth.' 
 
 And what we have now to remember is that 
 the influence thus described was passed on from 
 Ramsay to Fergusson, from Fergusson to Burns. 
 Fergusson especially it was who inspired and 
 
ROBERT FERGUSSON 22$ 
 
 stimulated the early efforts of Burns. ' Meeting 
 with Fergusson's Scottish Poems, I strung anew 
 my wildly-sounding lyre with emulating vigour ' : 
 that is what Burns himself says, and surely it 
 should of itself suffice to keep Fergusson's 
 memory alive among us. That his poems served 
 to set and keep Burns on the right path remains, 
 after all is said, Fergusson's best and highest 
 claim on our consideration; but surely it is no 
 slight one ! 
 
THE POETRY AND OTHER WRITINGS 
 OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL^ 
 
 ' Primores populi arripuit populumque tributim. 
 Scilicet unl aequus virtuti atque ejus amicis.' 
 
 HOR. Sat. ii. i. 
 
 There are few great names in American litera- 
 ture ; compared with the rich harvests of 
 imaginative work which our own and other 
 European countries have reaped and stored during 
 centuries of placid existence, the great Western 
 Republic can point only to a few scanty ears of 
 corn, garnered but yesterday, as it seems, and with 
 the dew yet fresh upon them. 
 
 It is in the nature of things that this should be 
 so, for, as the lives of nations go, America is 
 hardly yet out of her 'teens. Nor have the 
 peculiar circumstances of her history been favour- 
 able to the growth of literature and the arts. 
 Her first settlers were austere Puritans, and these 
 ' stern men with empires in their brains ' looked 
 upon the Fine Arts with mingled contempt and 
 hatred, as so many devices of the devil with 
 
 ' Written 1894. Hitherto unpublished. 
 
WRITINGS OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 227 
 
 which he snared the souls of men. The struggle 
 for bare subsistence was hardly over when the 
 infant country was called to a death-grapple with 
 her kinsmen across the seas. The triumphant 
 close of that struggle, again, was coincident with 
 the beginning of the modern commercial era, and 
 America lay for long bound in the iron grip of the 
 commercial spirit, straining every nerve to get rich, 
 wholly absorbed, it might have seemed, by the 
 stress and strain and turmoil of the modern world. 
 But a spiritual flowering-time was at hand, and 
 New England, about the middle of the present 
 century, experienced what we might almost call a 
 literary ' revival.' 
 
 Mr. James Russell Lowell was one of the most 
 brilliant and versatile of that gifted band who 
 have effectually redeemed American literature 
 from the charge of barrenness, and charmed the 
 readers of two hemispheres. It is too soon yet 
 to attempt to decide what place Mr. Lowell will 
 ultimately be accorded in the literary hierarchy 
 which includes such men as Emerson, Hawthorne, 
 Longfellow, Holmes, and Whittier, but certainly 
 it must be a high one. In mere exquisiteness of 
 workmanship Hawthorne certainly surpasses him, 
 and his influence on the thought of the time was 
 not so profound, suggestive, and stimulating as 
 that of Emerson, But he was perhaps the best 
 
228 THE POETRY AND OTHER WRITINGS 
 
 all-round man of letters whom America has yet 
 produced. Other writers may excel him in one 
 thing or another, but no one has turned his 
 talents to such good purpose in so many different 
 fields of literary labour. He wrote for fully half 
 a century ; in turn he was serious poet, satirical 
 verse-maker, literary critic, political controver- 
 sialist, and essayist on all sorts of out-of-the-way 
 subjects. And nearly every page he wrote is 
 worth reading, for all his work is marked — not 
 only by high literary excellence, but — by a 
 brilliance and verve, a robust faith in himself, his 
 own opinions, and his own country, that are 
 exhilarating and delightful. With the solitary 
 exception of Walt Whitman, he seems to me the 
 most distinctively national of American men of 
 letters of the highest rank ; his works are racier 
 of the soil than either the delicate, sensitive, and 
 shrinking genius of Hawthorne or the transcen- 
 dentalism of Emerson. Mr. Lowell, however, was 
 national in no petty or exclusive sense, and to all 
 who 'speak the tongue which Shakespeare spake' 
 his death was a loss keenly felt and honestly 
 deplored. To this country, indeed, Mr. Lowell 
 was bound by peculiar ties, and we felt that we 
 also had a share in his triumphs. As Ambassador 
 to the Court of St. James, he represented what 
 was highest and best in American society, and we 
 
OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 22g 
 
 for our part felt that we were honoured by his 
 presence among us, that we honoured ourselves by 
 paying him the highest honours in our power to 
 confer and in his will to accept. No literary man 
 could propose to himself a nobler task than that 
 of binding together the two great branches of 
 the Anglo-Saxon race, and during the later years 
 of his life Mr. Lowell did more towards that end 
 than even Mr. Carnegie, with his almost incredible 
 want of tact and taste, can undo. 
 
 It is pleasant to think that as time laid its 
 mellowing hand upon him his old asperity towards 
 England died away, and that he loved us more 
 as he came to know us better. And so.it came 
 about that when ' Trade's new Mercury ' with her 
 ' flame-winged feet ' carried the news of his death 
 over two continents, our own country and his 
 native land alike felt that in him they had lost a 
 common friend, and the two great nations clasped 
 hands beside the grave of one who had been very 
 helpful and very dear to both. 
 
 To most people both here and in America Mr. 
 Lowell is best known as the author of the Biglow 
 Papers ; as the man, that is, who brought back 
 what almost seemed the lost art of satire. He 
 was long in gaining the public ear with his serious 
 verse, but from the first the Biglow Papers went 
 like wild-fire. The success was thoroughly de- 
 
230 THE POETRY AND OTHER WRITINGS 
 
 served ; it is not too much to say that this 
 admirable work effaces everything that has been 
 done for a long time in this department ; since 
 Byron's English Bards and Scotch Reviewers 
 nothing in satiric verse can for a moment be set 
 beside this veritable tour de force. In truth, Mr 
 Lowell had all the qualifications for his task ; he 
 knew his countrymen well, he had a keen eye for 
 character, a wit at once caustic and genial, and a 
 happy turn for homely and striking images. In 
 facility of rhyme he rivals Butler ; as- a master of 
 the gentle art of punning he outdistances Hood. 
 And behind, and animating these, were his 
 thoroughgoing belief in the righteousness of his 
 cause, his deep and heart-felt desire for the 
 moral regeneration of his fellow -citizens, his 
 honest hatred for everything mean, base, and 
 cowardly. ' American humour ' is responsible for 
 some strange and monstrous births, but here we 
 have the genuine smack of the soil, and every 
 one who reads Mr. Lowell must remember him 
 with gratitude as one who did much to lighten 
 up this dull world of ours with laughter. Hosea 
 Biglow, and Birdofreedum Sawin, and the Rev. 
 Homer Wilbur — that most delightful of pedants 
 — who that has read the book can forget these ? 
 They dwell in our memory with our favourite 
 characters in fiction ; for indeed they are all 
 
OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 23 1 
 
 creations, so genuine, so life-like, that one can 
 only wonder why Mr. Lowell, who tried so much 
 else, did not also turn his hand to fiction. May I 
 confess an especial fondness for the old clergy- 
 man? With his amusing garrulity, his strange 
 mixture of pedantry and practical good sense, of 
 Yankee shrewdness and child-like simplicity, of 
 ponderous solemnity and sly, half- unconscious 
 humour, he seems to me worthy of a place along- 
 side the elder Shandy of Laurence Sterne. Let 
 no one in his haste, or in the vain imagination of 
 his heart, or in terror at the profusion of Latin 
 quotations, skip the reverend gentleman's prose 
 introductions to the poems, for they are as 
 delightful and as inimitable in their way as the 
 poems themselves. Nor should one omit to read 
 among the Notices of an Independent Press the 
 extract from The World-Harmonic-^olian-attach- 
 ment — that delightful and good-humoured travesty 
 of Carlyle, with just the requisite touch of carica- 
 ture and no more. 
 
 The Biglow Papers were published in two 
 series, the first condemning the war with Mexico 
 into which the United States entered in 1846, the 
 second advocating the side of the North in the 
 great Civil War. The subjects, then, are not such 
 as would of themselves be expected to interest us 
 greatly ; but so strong and so excellent is Mr. 
 
232 THE POETRY AND OTHER WRITINGS 
 
 Lowell's handling, that they do interest us, and 
 interest us profoundly. They throw a strong 
 light on some of the meaner aspects of public life 
 in America, and they abound in humorous reflec- 
 tions on the little ways of politicians which every 
 one can enjoy. 
 
 We have all heard of the gentleman who opines 
 that 
 
 ' A marciful Providence fashioned us holler 
 In order that we might our principles swaller.' 
 
 And we all know, or imagine we know, the sort 
 of candidate who might, in a moment of unwonted 
 frankness, unbosom himself thus : — 
 
 ' I 'm an eclectic ; ez to choosin' 
 
 'Twixt this an' thet, I 'm plaguy lawth ; 
 I leave a side thet looks like losin', 
 But (wile there's doubt) I stick to both. 
 
 Ez to my principles, I glory 
 
 In hevin' nothin' o' the sort ; 
 I ain't a Wig, I ain't a Tory, 
 
 I 'm jest a candidate, in short' 
 
 Gentlemen who have to undergo that pleasing 
 process known to the initiated as a Scottish heck- 
 ling might do worse than take a lesson from the 
 very frank and lucid manner in which this ami- 
 able eclectic explains his views on the Slavery 
 question : — 
 
OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 233 
 
 'Ez to the slaves, there's no confusion 
 
 In my ideas consarnin' them, — 
 / think they air an Institution, 
 
 A sort of — yes, jest so, — ahem ; 
 Do / own any ? Of my merit 
 
 On thet pint yourself may jedge ; 
 All is, I never drink no sperit, 
 
 Nor I hain't never signed no pledge.' 
 
 Again, how well the tendency to rest the claims of 
 public men on anything rather than the principles 
 they do, or do not, possess, how well this tendency 
 is made fun of in one of Mr. Sawin's epistles ! — 
 
 ' Ef while you 're 'lectioneering round some curus chaps 
 
 should beg 
 To know my views of State affairs, jest answer Wooden Leg. 
 Ef they ain't satisfied with that, and kin' o' pry and doubt 
 And ax for somethin' definit', jest say One Eye Put Out. 
 Thet kind o' talk, I guess, you '11 find '11 answer like a 
 
 charm. 
 And when you're drew tu nigh the wall, hold up my missin' 
 
 arm. 
 Ef they should nose roun' for a pledge, put on a vartoous 
 
 look. 
 An' tell 'em thet 's precisely what I never giv' — nor took. 
 Then you can call me Timbertoes — thet 's wut the people 
 
 likes, 
 Somethin' combinin' morril truth with phrases sech as 
 
 strikes. 
 Old Timbertoes, ye see, 's a creed it's safe to be quite 
 
 bold on, 
 There 's nothin' in 't the other side can anyways get hold on.' 
 
 But it would be to give a wrong idea of the 
 Biglow Papers if we alluded only to the pungency 
 
234 THE POETRY AND OTHER WRITINGS 
 
 of its wit and sarcasm. The Courtin' is a delight- 
 fully humorous idyll of country lovemaking, and 
 other pieces of the series rise into a loftier sphere 
 than that of pungent comment on the corruption 
 and self-seeking of Southern politicians. If a 
 keen sense of humour is an excellent corrective 
 of extravagance, it often acts as an effectual 
 damper on enthusiasm ; the humorist has usually 
 a dread of waxing enthusiastic over anything, lest 
 fools should call him mad. The Puritan strain 
 in Mr. Lowell's blood would seem to have saved 
 him from becoming a cynic or a humorist merely. 
 The fine apostrophe beginning ' O strange New 
 World, that yet wast never young ' is so well 
 known that quotation were an impertinence. 
 When we remember that Lowell lost two nephews 
 in the war, the pathos of Hosea's lament goes 
 straight to the heart : — 
 
 ' Why, hain't I held 'em on my knee ? 
 
 Didn't I love to see 'em growin', 
 Three likely lads ez wal could be, 
 
 Hahnsome and brave, an' not tu knowin' ? 
 I set and look into the blaze, 
 
 Whose nature, jest like theirn, keeps climbin' 
 Ez long 'z it lives, in shinin' ways. 
 
 An' half despise myself for rhymin'. ' 
 
 And the longing for 'Peace with Honour' must 
 have found an echo in thousands of hearts towards 
 the close of that long and bitter struggle, the very 
 
OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 235 
 
 memory of which is now happily fading into the 
 past : — 
 
 ' Come, Peace ! not like a mourner bowed 
 
 For honour lost an' dear ones wasted, 
 But proud, to meet a people proud, 
 
 With eyes that tell o' triumph tasted ! 
 Come, with han' grippin' on the hilt, 
 
 An' step that proves ye Victory's daughter ! 
 Longin' for you, our sperits wilt 
 
 Like shipwrecked men's on raf s for water ! ' 
 
 Here, as elsewhere, Mr. Lowell proves, as Burns 
 did before him, as Mr. Kipling is doing even now, 
 how much may be done by a man of genius with 
 a dialect seemingly so uncouth as to be unfitted 
 for the higher purposes of poetry. 
 
 The Fable for Critics, its author tells us, was a 
 mere_/i?« d' esprit, extemporised for his own amuse- 
 ment, and with no thought of publication. Edgar 
 Allan Poe, that unhappy literary Ishmael, whose 
 hand was against every man, loudly proclaimed 
 that by its publication Mr. Lowell had committed 
 an irrevocable faux pas, and lowered himself at 
 least fifty per cent, in literary public opinion.^ 
 
 ^ The ' three-fifths sheer genius and two-fifths sheer fudge ' had 
 evidently rankled. Poe's articles (vol. iv. of his Collected Works) 
 rank among the curiosities of criticism. His tone is curiously, 
 even intensely, provincial ; he is capable of humour of this school- 
 boy sort : ' Mr. M. is execrable, but Mr. C. is (jj-H i) execrable ' ; 
 and many articles deal with names now altogether forgotten. But 
 he had flashes of insight, and there are some passages fiinely 
 phrased and of remarkable discrimination. 
 
236 THE POETRY AND OTHER WRITINGS 
 
 We must agree with him in condemning the 
 rambling and incoherent plot, and the monoton- 
 ous jingle of the versification ; but the estimates 
 of American authors are brilliantly executed, and, 
 on the whole, remarkably fair and just. To call 
 it a great poem would be absurd, but it is 
 certainly as brilliant a piece of doggerel as ever 
 was written, and the riot of puns would bring a 
 smile to the face of the least risible of mortals. 
 
 I have chosen to begin my study of Mr. 
 Lowell's works with a review of his satirical and 
 humorous verse, because it is as a satirist and 
 humorist that Mr. Lowell is best known. And 
 indeed, I cannot think that those are wise friends 
 of Mr. Lowell who seek to put the Biglow Papers 
 out of sight because they draw attention away 
 from his serious poetry. They protest too much. 
 To have written the best political satire since 
 Absalom and Achitophel is after all no mean 
 achievement. At the same time I should be 
 willing to admit that Mr. Lowell's more ambitious 
 work has not, especially on this side of the 
 Atlantic, received the attention which it deserves. 
 Not that it can be claimed for Mr. Lowell that he 
 is one of the few supreme masters of the art of 
 poetry ; his place is not with Shakespeare or 
 Milton, hardly even with Dryden or Shelley or 
 Keats. He lacks, somehow, the supreme and 
 
OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 237 
 
 indefinable charm of these great masters. Indeed 
 I cannot help thinking that Hawthorne, although 
 he wrote in prose, had more of the poet in him, 
 more of the poet's instinctive sense of the magical 
 charm which lies in words, more of the poet's 
 unfailing felicity in evoking that charm, than 
 most, if not all, of his poetical brethren. 
 ' Brilliant ' is perhaps the word that characterises 
 best Mr. Lowell's work, alike in poetry and in 
 prose, and surely brilliant is not the word that 
 rises to our lips as we think of a scene from 
 Shakespeare, a sonnet of Wordsworth, or a stanza 
 of Keats. One feels, too, that Mr. Lowell's 
 brilliance sometimes degenerates into what, if I 
 must speak plainly, I should call a vicious smart- 
 ness, and genius is rarely smart. 
 
 It may be as well to give an example of what 
 I mean. In his excellent study of Dryden, Mr. 
 Lowell takes Dryden to task, justly, for the line 
 
 ' Heaven would no bargain for its blessings drive.' 
 In one of his finest poems — The Cathedral — the 
 following passage occurs : — 
 
 ' Doubtless his church will be no hospital 
 For superannuate forms and mumping shams, 
 No parlour where men issue policies 
 Of life-assurance on the Eternal Mind.' 
 
 He would be a bold critic who should say that 
 Dryden's line is more objectionable than this. 
 
238 THE POETRY AND OTHER WRITINGS 
 
 There is too much of this sort of thing in Mr, 
 Lowell's poetry, and it is surely unsatisfactory. 
 
 It would almost seem as though Mr. Lowell's 
 fluency, his superabundance of wit, often led him 
 to say things that his cooler critical judgment 
 would condemn as out of place in poetry. 
 Professor Nichol's criticism, that ' Mr. Lowell has 
 on most occasions " enough of wit," but seldom 
 " as much again to govern it," ' would seem to be 
 fully justified. He had not the haunting passion 
 of the artist for absolute perfection of form, nor 
 the restraint and rigorous self-judgment which 
 go so far towards the production of perfect 
 artistic work. Lovers of the classics may perhaps 
 think that it was this spirit which made him 
 prefer to Greek sculpture, with its stern and bare 
 simplicity, its pure and straight lines, the grandiose 
 irregularities and the occasional grotesqueness of 
 Gothic architecture.^ For music of the rarer and 
 haunting sort he is too prone to offer as a sub- 
 stitute rhetoric, doubtless of a very stirring kind, 
 but which must be ranked on a lower plane than 
 true poetry, which of all things is most removed 
 from rhetoric. In Mr. Lowell's most ambitious 
 poems the cloven hoof of the rhetorician too often 
 peeps out beneath the singing robes of the poet. 
 
 Arnold draws a very lively picture of some of 
 
 1 See The Cathedral. 
 
OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 239 
 
 Wordsworth's most pompous verses being recited 
 before a Social Science Congress. ' One can call 
 up the whole scene. A great room in one of our 
 dismal provincial towns ; dusty air and jaded 
 afternoon daylight; benches full of men with 
 bald heads and women with spectacles ; an orator 
 lifting up his face from a manuscript to declaim 
 these lines of Wordsworth ; and in the soul of 
 any poor child of nature who may have wandered 
 in thither an unutterable sense of lamentation 
 and mourning and woe.' 
 
 If for Wordsworth we substitute Lowell, and 
 for Social Science Congress an Anti- Slavery 
 gathering, the passage represents only too truly 
 what we sometimes feel in reading Mr. Lowell. 
 
 ' Not here, O Apollo, 
 Are haunts meet for thee.' 
 
 The professional critics differ curiously as to 
 the value of Mr. Lowell's more ambitious poems. 
 Thus, Mr. H. D. Traill — a very competent judge, 
 one would think — applies the epithet 'truly 
 splendid' to the great Commemoration Ode. On 
 the other hand, hear Mr. Swinburne, who speaks 
 with the authority of a master of the craft. He 
 describes it as 'a thanksgiving ode of wooden 
 verse, sawn into unequal planks, and tagged incon- 
 gruously with tuneless bells, . . . modelled on 
 
240 THE POETRY AND OTHER WRITINGS 
 
 the chaotic songs of ceremony done to order on 
 state occasions by our laureates of the Restoration 
 
 and the Revolution.' Where doctors differ ? 
 
 But Mr. Swinburne, as we know, is apt to be 
 ' over-violent or over-civil,' and perhaps the truth 
 lies between the two. The ode is perhaps the 
 most difficult of all poetical forms, if one may 
 judge from the few unequivocal successes in this 
 sort — a form also in which it would almost seem 
 that there is no half-way house between complete 
 triumph and dire and irremediable failure. Of 
 Mr. Lowell's Ode it can hardly be said to evolve 
 itself with the sure and orderly progression, for it 
 rather proceeds by fits and starts, and here and 
 there an unlucky word or phrase pulls us to earth 
 again. But not even Mr. Swinburne himself, 
 plead he never so eloquently, could persuade us 
 that the lines which follow are not fine poetry : — 
 
 ' Before my musing eye 
 The mighty ones of old sweep by 
 Disvoiced now and insubstantial things, 
 As noisy once as we ; poor ghosts of kings, 
 Shadows of empire wholly gone to dust, 
 And many races, nameless long ago, 
 To darkness driven by that imperious gust 
 Of ever-rushing Time that here doth blow ; 
 O visionary world, condition strange. 
 Where nought abiding is but only Change, 
 Where the deep-bolted stars themselves 
 Still shift and range ! ' 
 
OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 24 1 
 
 Doubtless Mr. Lowell does not always remain 
 at this high level, but the level zs high, and what 
 would become of most of our poets if we demanded 
 of them that they should always give us of their 
 best — what would become, for example, of Words- 
 worth, who is so deplorably unequal — what even 
 of Shakespeare himself? The critic must certainly 
 set himself to see what is best, and to mark 
 clearly this from what is not so good ; but he is 
 inexcusable if he is so intent on seeing blemishes 
 that he is blinded to the presence of beauties. 
 
 I should have liked to dwell at some length on 
 some of Mr. Lowell's longer poems, but the limits 
 assigned to this essay forbid the attempt. I can 
 only refer in passing to the Vision of Sir Launfal, 
 with its admirable contrast between June and 
 winter, and its fine moral : — 
 
 ' The Holy Supper is kept, indeed, 
 In whatso we share with another's need ; 
 Not in what we give but in what we share, 
 For the gift without the giver is bare. 
 Who gives himself with his alms feeds three, — 
 Himself, his hungering neighbour, and me.' 
 
 And in particular, I should have liked to analyse 
 The Cathedral, which takes the first place among 
 Mr. Lowell's more purely reflective poems. No- 
 where, perhaps, do Mr. Lowell's conservative 
 instincts come out so clearly as here, nowhere has 
 
 Q 
 
242 THE POETRY AND OTHER WRITINGS 
 
 he given such perfect expression to his love of 
 
 that 
 
 ' beautiful Old Time, now hid away 
 In the Past's valley of Avilion.' 
 
 In an age when religious doubt is regarded as the 
 
 hall-mark of intellectual superiority, Mr. Lowell 
 
 would seem to have preserved unfalteringly the 
 
 faith of his fathers. He could hardly reconcile 
 
 himself to 
 
 ' This nineteenth century, with its knife and glass, 
 That make thought physical, and thrust far off 
 The heaven, so neighbourly with man of old, 
 To voids sparse-sown with alienated stars. 
 
 Science was Faith once ; Faith were Science now, 
 Would she but lay her bow and arrows by 
 And arm her with the weapons of the time. 
 Nothing that keeps thought out is safe from thought. 
 
 The last line has the pithiness of Pope. I cannot 
 but think this a beautiful poem — beautiful in 
 thought, and beautiful in expression. 
 
 If we sometimes in Mr. Lowell's Odes miss the 
 breath of inspiration, many of his shorter pieces 
 have an inimitable freshness, fragrance, and spon- 
 taneity. The Voyage to Vinland, for example, is 
 an admirable specimen of the heroic poem, and 
 such verses as those entitled Auf Wiederscken, and 
 the poem beginning 
 
 ' O tell me less or tell me more, 
 Soft eyes with mystery at the core,' 
 
OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 243 
 
 are eminently pretty and graceful love-poems. 
 Deeper in feeling, and admirable in art, is the 
 poem Das Ewig Weibliche, the first stanza of 
 which I cannot deny myself the pleasure of 
 quoting. 
 
 ' How was I worthy so divine a loss, 
 
 Deepening my midnights, kindling all my morns ? 
 Why waste such precious wood to make my cross, 
 Such far-sought roses for my crown of thorns ? ' 
 
 Those who hold the modern formula of 'Art 
 for Art's sake' in its extremest form object to 
 Mr. Lowell's poems that they are overloaded 
 with moralising. If he sinned in this way, it was 
 at all events with his eyes open.^ His conception 
 of the poet's function was radically different from 
 that held by those who think that his highest aim 
 is merely to please the ear of the literary epicure. 
 For him the poet was no mere 
 
 ' empty rhymer. 
 Who lies with idle elbow on the grass. 
 And fits his singing, like a cunning timer, 
 To all men's prides and fancies as they pass.' 
 
 He was rather the prophet and seer, whose duty 
 it was to speak to the highest and noblest in 
 men's natures, to lift them up to a loftier level of 
 life and thought. The ideal is a high one, but 
 Mr. Lowell has left nothing behind him which is 
 ' See in the Fable for Critics his criticism of himself. 
 
244 THE POETRY AND OTHER WRITINGS 
 
 unworthy of it. He was a poet in whose favour 
 Plato might have made an exception from the 
 decree which banished all such from his ideal 
 republic. He must be very insensible to the 
 power and influence of noble poetry who does 
 not rise from the study of Mr. Lowell's works 
 with a sense of having communed with a noble 
 and reverent nature, with a deeper hatred towards 
 sin and vice, and a firmer will to hold by those 
 things which are pure and lovely and of good 
 report. And we may be confident that praise of 
 this sort is what Mr. Lowell would have valued 
 most highly. 
 
 Among Mr. Lowell's many claims to the respect 
 and admiration of the reading public, his critical 
 essays rank next, perhaps, to his poetry. The 
 department of criticism is one in which our 
 literature has, so far, been singularly unprolific, 
 as compared, for example, with those of France 
 and Germany. Mr. Lowell must certainly be 
 accorded one of the highest places in that scanty 
 band of our men of letters who have made a 
 business of criticism. He had not, indeed, 
 Matthew Arnold's Olympian air, his engaging 
 suavity of manner, his ' serene felicity of phrase,'^ 
 his gift of fine irony, all the keener because it is 
 so perfectly courteous. But on the other hand, 
 ^ W. E. Henley : Views and Reviews. 
 
OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 245 
 
 he was free from Arnold's mannerisms and over- 
 fastidiousness, and often he seems to go deeper 
 than the fascinating apostle of 'sweetness and 
 light.' I know hardly any critical essays so 
 fitted as his to inspire a just and sane enthusiasm 
 for the masterpieces of literature. He had in full 
 measure those first and most essential qualities of 
 a critic — a real gusto for good literature, and a 
 real insight into what is fine in literature and 
 what is not so fine. His literary tastes were 
 broad and catholic ; he recognised that the House 
 Beautiful of Art has many mansions. For the 
 most part his literary judgments are eminently 
 sane and sensible ; he wrote out of the fulness of 
 knowledge, with a rare and cosmopolitan culture, 
 but with scarcely a trace of pedantry. Ripe 
 scholar as he was, he bore his load of learning 
 lightly, and rarely sacrificed to the great and 
 peculiarly British Goddess of Dulness. His 
 spirits were almost boyishly high ; his delight- 
 ful humour lights up even his philological and 
 metrical disquisitions ; be his subject what it may, 
 he always contrived to be witty and entertain- 
 ing. Only a week or two before his death, that 
 eminently staid and sober journal the Spectator 
 made an almost pathetic appeal to him to be dull 
 once in a while, so that people might have more 
 confidence in the soundness of his criticism. One 
 
246 THE POETRY AND OTHER WRITINGS 
 
 may suspect, however, that Mr. Lowell could not, 
 without doing violence to his own nature, have 
 followed this sagacious counsel. For sagacious 
 it must be reckoned so long as we associate 
 dulness with wisdom, just as we look upon silk 
 hats and umbrellas as guarantees of respectability. 
 Perhaps in time we may learn to distinguish 
 between the grin of vacuity, and that smile play- 
 ing over the countenance of wisdom which men 
 call humour. Meanwhile, since the gods saw fit 
 to bestow upon Mr. Lowell a plentiful lack of 
 that precious and saving quality of dulness, one 
 may plead on his behalf that there are really so 
 very many of us who can be dull all the time 
 without any apparent effort. But Mr. Lowell 
 was not only not dull himself; he hated dulness 
 in others. Towards pretentious ignorance he was 
 mercilessly severe, hardly less so towards learned 
 dulness. No man was so well equipped as he to 
 write a new Dunciad, juster and more genial, 
 if less polished, than that of Pope. Perhaps, on 
 the whole, he did not give sufficient credit to 
 learning and industry when these were dissociated 
 — as, unfortunately, they so often are — from wit 
 and brilliance. But if he was as intolerant of Dr. 
 Dryasdust as Carlyle himself, he loved with no 
 common love the masters of the noble English 
 tongue. 
 
OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 247 
 
 As patriotic an American as Mr. Howells, he 
 did not, like that gentleman, conceive it to be 
 his duty as a critic to lay violent hands upon the 
 literary idols of the English-speaking race. On 
 the contrary, he approached their shrines with a 
 reverence none the less real because it was never 
 blind or idolatrous. One cannot help wishing 
 that in this his example had been laid to heart 
 by Mr. Howells, who would then have avoided 
 demonstrating to the world how bad a critic an 
 excellent novelist may be, if only he set his mind 
 to it, as Dr. Johnson would have said. 
 
 In the matter of style Mr. Lowell falls short of 
 the chastened perfection of form characteristic 
 of his friend Hawthorne ; one misses in those 
 brilliant pages of his that subtle aroma of style 
 which distils from almost every line written by 
 the author of The Scarlet Letter. He is as un- 
 flaggingly brilliant, almost, as Macaulay, although 
 his style is by no means so hard, metallic, and 
 mechanical. Perhaps, after all, the Spectator is 
 right in thinking Mr. Lowell a trifle too brilliant; 
 one prefers the mild and equable light of the 
 moon to the meteoric glow, the sudden splendours 
 of the lightning. Dr. Underwood — now alas ! 
 gone, he also — remarks truly that we rarely find 
 chez Mr. Lowell that ' gracious and serene simpli- 
 city ' which has so much attraction for us in the 
 
248 THE POETRY AND OTHER WRITINGS 
 
 pages of some of the masters of English prose. 
 To turn from Mr. Lowell to such writers as 
 Addison, Thackeray, and Hawthorne is to pass 
 from a gilded saloon, brilliantly lighted, and hung 
 round with mirrors, to a quietly furnished room, in 
 which the colours are toned down and the lights 
 burn low. Mr. Lowell excites and stimulates 
 more than they, but he lacks that indefinable and 
 restful charm with which they lull our tired ears 
 and quiet our restless brains. 
 
 The marks of haste, too, are on much that he 
 wrote. For a Professor, his grammar is some- 
 times astonishingly loose, as when he says, 
 ' Unless like Goethe he is of a singularly uncon- 
 temporaneous nature, capable of being tutta in se 
 romita, and of running parallel to his time rather 
 than be sucked into its current, he will be thwarted 
 into that harmonious development of native force 
 which has so much to do with its steady and 
 successful application' — a sentence for which a 
 schoolboy would taste the rod. Of thi famous 
 first line of the Traveller he makes nonsense by 
 citing it thus : ' Remote, unfriendly, solitary, 
 slow.'^ What would Mr. Lowell have said had he 
 caught any one else making two grave blunders 
 in quoting so familiar a line ? It would not be 
 easy to defend against the charge of vulgarity 
 ' ' Remote, unfriende^f, melancholy, slow. ' 
 
OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 249 
 
 such a phrase as, ' The true artist in language is 
 never spotty ' ; or against the charge of pedantry 
 the use of such 'fearful wild-fowl' of words as 
 butyraceous, eocene, paleozoic} One cannot help 
 thinking that he delights overmuch in figures of 
 speech which are not uniformly felicitous, as this 
 of Dryden : ' He is a prose-writer with a kind of 
 yEolian attachment.' The sentence which follows 
 smacks surely of the Professor rather than of the 
 man of letters : ' So powerful is this hallucination, 
 that we can conceive oifestina lente as the favourite 
 maxim of a Mississippi steamboat captain, and 
 apta-Tov /iev vSmp cited as conclusive by a gentle- 
 man for whom the bottle before him reversed the 
 wonder of the stereoscope, and substituted the 
 Gascon v for the b in binocular.' The most 
 risible of men could hardly smile at fooling of this 
 sort. A little more of this, and one would 
 suspect that the Rev. Homer Wilbur is not a 
 creation at all, but merely the professional aiter 
 ego of Mr. Lowell himself 
 
 Lastly, to bring our faultfinding — always an 
 ungracious but sometimes a necessary, task — 
 to an end, the formlessness, the disjointedness 
 of some at least of Mr. Lowell's papers mars our 
 pleasure in the reading. Arnold's habit of choos- 
 
 ^ 'So few' says Mr. Lowell elsewhere, 'has long been 
 denizened. ' And when, pray, was denizened denizened ? 
 
2 so THE POETRY AND OTHER WRITINGS 
 
 ing some striking saying, using it as text, and re- 
 curring to it again and again, savoured, it may 
 be, of mannerism, and in the end palled upon 
 one ; but at least it gave his essays a coherence 
 and a unity which are often absent from Mr. 
 Lowell's efforts in the same sort. 
 
 If the form of Mr. Lowell's essays is not abso- 
 lutely faultless, the substance is almost uniformly 
 excellent. His critical essays cover a wide field, 
 although he was not so encyclopaedic in his range 
 as that prince of critics, Sainte-Beuve. Where 
 all are so good the task of selection is difficult ; 
 but if one wished to give a notion of Mr. Lowell's 
 critical powers at their best, perhaps no better 
 choice could be made than the altogether ad-' 
 mirable papers on Dante, Chaucer, and Dryden. 
 The very collocation of these names is itself a 
 striking testimony to the breadth of Mr. Lowell's 
 sympathies ; a man who can appreciate both 
 Beatrice and the Wife of Bath has clearly 
 emancipated himself from the fetters of Puri- 
 tanism. In the way of vivid ^and picturesque 
 description Mr. Lowell has left nothing better 
 than the picture of Florence and its surroundings 
 at the opening of his paper on Dante. As befits 
 a study of such a man, the whole essay is pitched 
 in a lofty tone. ' Among the statues around the 
 courtyard of the great Museum at Florence is 
 
OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 251 
 
 one figure before which every scholar, every man 
 who has been touched by the tragedy of life, 
 lingers with reverential pity. The haggard cheeks, 
 the lips clamped together in unfaltering resolve, 
 the scars of life-long battle, and the brow whose 
 sharp outline seems the monument of final victory 
 — this at least is a face which needs no name 
 beneath it.' This is only one of many singularly 
 fine passages. Particularly notable also in the 
 same way is the contrast drawn between Greek 
 and Christian art, which recalls Ruskin at his 
 best. Of French literature through all the stages 
 of its development, from the Chanson de Roland 
 and the Roman de la Rose down to Victor Hugo,^ 
 Mr. Lowell had made a special study ; his know- 
 ledge of early French authors was perhaps greater 
 than that possessed by any other ,English critic, 
 and this knowledge he found means of turning 
 to admirable account in his excellent essay on 
 Chaucer. Chaucer, with his wide and tolerant 
 view of human nature, his unique and haunting 
 melody, his gracious ' worldliness,' his genial tem- 
 perament, half that of the artist, half of the 
 
 ^ In one of his latest volumes — that devoted to the early English 
 dramatists — he institutes a felicitous comparison between Webster 
 and Victor Hugo, noting in both the same strain of exaggeration, 
 the same love of strong effects ; both, indeed, are giants who, not/ 
 content with their natural height, must ever be standing on 
 tiptoe. / 
 
252 THE POETRY AND OTHER WRITINGS 
 
 bon vivant, was an especial favourite of Mr. 
 Lowell; indeed, in the essay on Dryden he 
 alludes to him incidentally as 'the greatest but 
 one' of our poets. Surely Mr. Lowell has in 
 this case fallen into the fallacy of the ' historical 
 estimate ' ; it is hard to believe that he would in 
 all seriousness set Chaucer above Milton. That 
 he was not, however, wholly influenced by the 
 fact of Chaucer's coming so early in English 
 literature is sufficiently proved by the amusing 
 way in which he disposes of poor Gower ; it 
 would have been only fair to recognise that 
 Chaucer also has his longueurs, although Mr. 
 Lowell would no doubt have admitted this, but 
 retorted that Gower had nothing else. In the 
 same essay one may demur to Mr. Lowell's 
 description of the Anglo-Saxon as 'having no 
 sense whatever, or at best small, of the ideal in 
 him ; . . . you shall not find a poet in a hundred 
 thousand square miles — in many prosperous 
 centuries of such.' What Mr. Leslie Stephen 
 calls the 'detestable lay-figure of John Bull'^ 
 must surely have crossed and obscured Mr. 
 Lowell's usually clear vision when he wrote this. 
 It would certainly be an altogether arbitrary 
 criticism which should attribute all the ideal 
 qualities in Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats, Tenny- 
 ^ Hours in a Library : Nathaniel Hawthorne. 
 
OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 253 
 
 son, and the rest to other than Anglo-Saxon in- 
 fluences. 
 
 The Dryden is a masterpiece ; quite the best 
 thing, it seems to me, which has been written 
 of Glorious John, — luminous, suggestive, sym- 
 pathetic, teeming with wise and witty observa- 
 tions. Nowhere else has Mr. Lowell shown more 
 thoroughly how he knew 
 
 ' happily to steer 
 From grave to gay, from lively to severe.' 
 
 ' As I read him,' he says of Dryden, ' I cannot 
 
 help thinking of an ostrich, to be classed with 
 
 flying things, and capable, what with leap and 
 
 flap together, of leaving the earth for a longer or 
 
 shorter space, but loving the open plain, where 
 
 wing and foot help each other to something that 
 
 is both flight and run at once.' 
 
 Pope naturally follows Dryden, but with him 
 
 Mr. Lowell is not quite so successful. I do 
 
 not think his essay will bear comparison with 
 
 Johnson's Life. Despite the fact that the world 
 
 seems to have tacitly agreed to say of the Doctor, 
 
 ' Let not his writings be remembered : he was 
 
 a very great man,'^ he is really hard to match 
 
 on his own ground. His vision was clear enough, 
 
 but he had voluntarily shut himself up in a 
 
 ' ' Let not his frailties be remembered : he was a very great 
 man.' — ^Johnson on Goldsmith. 
 
254 THE POETRY AND OTHER WRITINGS 
 
 dark room, the dark room of eighteenth-century 
 criticism. He was emphatically not on his own 
 ground when he essayed to criticise Milton and 
 Shakespeare ; but with Pope he was thoroughly 
 at home, and the result is a remarkable study, 
 in which his incisive and massive common -sense 
 makes up for his lack of imagination. Mr. 
 Lowell, of course, approaches Pope from a 
 different standpoint, and succeeds in saying 
 some admirable things on a subject which might 
 have seemed hopelessly hackneyed. As Dr. 
 Garnett remarks, his strictures on the Essay on 
 Man are a little hypercritical ; and, in any case, 
 it seems hardly worth while to go about at this 
 time of day to prove that Pope was not a great 
 reasoner, or a profound philosopher. This, how- 
 ever, is excellently put : ' His more ambitious 
 works may be defined as careless thinking care- 
 fully versified.' And as an example of con- 
 centrated criticism, what could be better than 
 the manner in which he sums up Pope : ' Measured 
 by any high standard of imagination he will 
 be found wanting ; tried by any test of wit he 
 is unrivalled.' We could not give this praise 
 higher in its kind than by saying that it has 
 the crispness, conciseness, and point of one of 
 Pope's own couplets. It would really be im- 
 possible in short space to sum up Pope's merits 
 
OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 255 
 
 and shortcomings more adequately and more 
 justly. Mr. Lowell's heart, however, was not 
 with Pope and his school, but with the Eliza- 
 bethan dramatists and their legitimate successors 
 at the close of last century ; his ear was attuned 
 to the ' large utterance of those early gods.' Of 
 Spenser no one has written more charmingly 
 than he. At the close of his critique on the 
 author of the Faery Queen he rises into a strain 
 of that fine eloquence of which he was a master, 
 though he used it sparingly. 'Whoever can 
 endure unmixed delight, whoever can tolerate 
 music and painting and poetry all in one, who- 
 ever wishes to be rid of thought, and to let 
 the busy anvils of the brain be silent for a time, 
 let him read in the Faery Queen. There is the 
 land of pure heart's ease, where no ache or 
 sorrow of spirit can enter.' 
 
 It would have seemed impossible to say any- 
 thing new of Shakespeare, but even in this case 
 Mr. Lowell contrives to make some good points,^ 
 although the opening statement that ' it may be 
 doubted whether any language be rich enough to 
 
 ' He calls the paper Shakespeare Once More, as though to 
 suggest that an apology were needed for a new study. Indeed the 
 vitality of Shakespeare is marvellous, considering the freaks of his 
 legion of commentators and critics. One would hardly have been 
 astonished had the patient given up the ghost while the doctors 
 were learnedly discussing his symptoms. 
 
256 THE POETRY AND OTHER WRITINGS 
 
 maintain more than one truly great poet' can 
 
 hardly be regarded as other than a paradox. His 
 
 remarks on Shakespeare's poetry — that wave of 
 
 sound breaking into a thousand clear ripples 
 
 of melody — are admirable, and his analysis of 
 
 Hamlet's character is subtle and delicate. 
 
 The ferocious onslaught on Professor Masson 
 
 rather takes away from our pleasure in reading 
 
 Mr. Lowell's Milton ; his Wordsworth, on the 
 
 other hand, is almost wholly admirable. He 
 
 pours ridicule on Wordsworth's pompousness, 
 
 his lack of humour, his, frequent lapses into the 
 
 flattest of prose. He saw clearly that much of 
 
 what is worst in Wordsworth's poetry resulted 
 
 from his failure to distinguish between what is 
 
 common and what is merely commonplace ; ^ while 
 
 on the other hand, he , gave ample recognition 
 
 to the purity and loftiness of his character, to 
 
 that magnanimous egotism (if the phrase may be 
 
 pardoned) in which he resembles Milton, and 
 
 to the great reform of which he was, if not the 
 
 originator, at least the first wholly conscious 
 
 exponent — a reform by which he freed English 
 
 poetry from the bonds of artifice, informed it with a 
 
 greater depth of thought, and achieved a new and 
 
 admirable simplicity of style and diction. 
 
 ^ A failure which is responsible for Peter Bell and his legitimate 
 descendant, Mrs. Leo Hunter, with her plaintive little lay about - 
 The Expiring Frog — one of Dickens's happiest touclies of satire. 
 
OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 257 
 
 Among still more recent writers Mr. Lowell 
 deals with Carlyle and Swinburne. The Carlyle 
 is excellent reading, but has evidently been 
 written under the soreness of feeling caused by 
 Carlyle's description of the Civil War as the 
 smoking of a dirty chimney, and we must agree 
 with Dr. Garnett that ' from the point of view of a 
 purely objective criticism it is much too severe.' 
 Carlyle's influence, both on Mr. Lowell's style 
 and on his thought, was perhaps greater than 
 he was at that time willing to allow ; his address 
 on Democracy has points of similarity with the 
 great Scotsman's teaching,^ and in the following 
 sentence from a slashing article on one of the 
 false gods of New England — James Gates Percival 
 — he seems, if I am not mistaken, to have caught 
 the very trick of Carlyle's manner : ' The meaning 
 of which proclamation was essentially this : the 
 vital spirit has long since departed out of this 
 form once so kingly, and the great seal has been 
 in commission long enough ; but meanwhile the 
 soul of man, from which all power emanates and 
 to which it reverts, still survives in undiminished 
 royalty ; God still survives, little as you gentle- 
 men of the commission seem to be aware of 
 it — nay, may possibly outlive the whole of you, 
 incredible as it may appear.' 
 
 1 But his tone is more optimistic than that of Carlyle. 
 R 
 
258 THE POETRY AND OTHER WRITINGS 
 
 Mr. Swinburne is almost the only living writer 
 criticised in Mr. Lowell's collected works, and 
 to him he is perhaps something less than just. 
 He makes Atalanta in Calydon the text for an 
 able and eloquent diatribe against such artificial 
 attempts to bring back the Greek form. We 
 may, however, agree with all that he says on 
 this head, and yet think that Mr. Swinburne 
 works best under the wholesome restraint of 
 classical models ; a restraint which seems to 
 curb somewhat that riotous exuberance of dic- 
 tion, and that inveterate abuse of alliteration, 
 which are the radical vices both of his poetry and 
 of his prose. And surely ' graceful ' is hardly 
 the word to characterise some at least of the 
 choruses in Atalanta : they are nothing short 
 of magnificent. 
 
 On Mr. Lowell's excursions into the field of 
 politics I need not dwell at any length. His 
 political attitude is sufficiently indicated in the 
 address on Democracy which he delivered at 
 Birmingham, and the lecture on The Place of the 
 Independent in Politics reprinted in his Political 
 Essays. In the former he sets himself to justify 
 democracy as not only inevitable, but on the 
 whole the only possible scheme of things for 
 present-day needs. ' It is only,' he says pithily, 
 ' when the reasonable and practicable are denied 
 
OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 259 
 
 that men demand the unreasonable and im- 
 practicable, only when the possible is made 
 difficult that they fancy the impossible to be 
 easy. Fairy tales are made out of the dreams of 
 the poor.' At the same time we may gather from 
 the other essay, as well as from The Cathedral and 
 the Epistle to George William Curtis, that he had 
 the scholar's love for the goodly heritage of the 
 past, and the natural shrinking of the man of fine 
 culture from the occasional rawness, roughness, 
 and crudity of democracy. His attitude could 
 not perhaps be better described than in the words 
 with which he paints Fitz-Adam : — 
 
 ' A radical in thought, he puffed away 
 With shrewd contempt the dust of usage gray, 
 Yet loathed democracy as one who saw 
 In what he longed to love some vulgar flaw, 
 And, shocked through all his delicate reserves, 
 Remained a Tory by his tastes and nerves.' 
 
 Nor was it without some natural misgiving that, 
 proud of the past of his country, and confident in 
 the gloriousness of her future, he contemplated 
 the corruption of American politics. ' Could we 
 only,' he exclaims in bitter irony, ' have a travel- 
 ling exhibition of our Bosses, and say to the 
 American people, " Behold the shapers of your 
 national destiny ! " A single despot would be 
 cheaper, and probably better -looking.' 'Our 
 
26o THE POETRY AND OTHER WRITINGS 
 
 leaders,' he asserts, and I am afraid the phe- 
 nomenon is not confined to America, ' no longer 
 lead, but are as skilful as Indians in following the 
 faintest trail of public opinion.' 
 
 'What we want is an active class who will 
 insist, in season and out of season, that we shall 
 have a country whose greatness is measured, not 
 only by its square miles, its number of yards 
 woven, of hogs packed, of bushels of wheat raised; 
 not only by its skill to feed and clothe the body, 
 but also by its power to feed and clothe the soul ; 
 a country which shall be as great morally as it is 
 materially ; a country whose very name shall not 
 only, as now it does, stir us as with the sound of 
 a trumpet, but shall call out all that is best within 
 us, by offering us the radiant image of something 
 better and nobler and more enduring than we, 
 of something that shall fulfil our own thwarted 
 aspiration, when we are but a handful of forgotten 
 dust in the soil trodden by a race whom we shall 
 have helped to make more worthy of their in- 
 heritance than we ourselves had the power, I 
 might almost say the means, to be.' 
 
 I must now bring my survey of Mr. Lowell's 
 works to a close, incomplete on some sides, 
 inadequate on all, as I feel it to be. The feeling 
 with which I take my leave of him I am happy 
 to be able to express in words fitter and more 
 
OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 261 
 
 beautiful than any I could write. In his fine 
 preface to Men and Books, Mr. Robert Louis 
 Stevenson says of the authors he there deals with 
 — how admirably, the readers of the volume know : 
 'These were all men whom, for one reason or 
 another, I loved ; or when I did not love the 
 men, my love was the greater to their books. I 
 had read them and lived with them ; for months 
 they were continually in my thoughts ; I seemed 
 to rejoice in their joys and to sorrow with them 
 in their griefs ; and behold, when I came to 
 write of them, my tone was sometimes hardly 
 courteous, and seldom wholly just.' 
 
 And so of Mr. Lowell I would say that if the 
 tone of my imperfect criticism is not one of 
 unmixed eulogy, if I have had to point — certainly 
 with no malicious pleasure — to imperfections and 
 flaws which impair the artistic value of his works, 
 I would not on that account be thought to hold 
 his fine gifts lightly, or to be insensible to the 
 debt of gratitude which I, in common with many 
 thousand readers, owe to a writer who knew 
 better than most how to make his readers his 
 friends and familiars. There are some authors 
 who seem to hold us at arm's-length, so that we 
 never feel at ease with them ; there are others 
 whose admirable talents extort our admiration, 
 but for whom we can feel no personal liking. 
 
262 WRITINGS OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELi 
 
 Mr. Lowell — need I say it ? — belonged to neither 
 of these classes. His large, sunny, and buoyant 
 temperament shines through all his works, and 
 we feel ourselves irresistibly attracted towards 
 a nature so rich, so prodigally gifted, and yet 
 so genial and so humane. An author of whom 
 we may say this may not have set foot upon the 
 topmost peak of Parnassus ; his place may not be 
 among that shining and glorious company — so 
 small in number, so diverse in race and gifts — for 
 whom we con6dently predict an immortality of 
 renown ; perhaps for that very reason he comes 
 closer to us who are not of the eagle kind, and 
 find it hard to breathe for long space the clear 
 and rare ether of those shining heights. And 
 surely he must be accounted both happy and 
 useful in his day and generation to whom men 
 go, as to a dear friend, alike for sage counsel and 
 for cleanly mirth. 
 
THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF 
 ERASMUS 1 
 
 In the history of the intellectual development of 
 Europe, the influence of no single man counts 
 for more, perhaps, than that of Erasmus. The 
 distinguishing characteristic of that development 
 has been the constantly increasing distrust and 
 dislike of formulae which have nothing but tra- 
 dition to rest upon, the free play of the human 
 mind upon those great problems which were once 
 so arbitrarily disposed of by the mere ipse dixit 
 of an infallible church. It is true that the 
 Reformation was the great outward symbol of 
 the breach between the old order and the new, 
 and it is also true that Erasmus held aloof from 
 the Reformation, and viewed its progress with 
 something like dismay. But none the less is it 
 the case that the spirit of free inquiry which 
 culminated in the Reformation was originally 
 set on foot by the writings of Erasmus. Indeed, 
 if he often seems out of tune with his own age, 
 
 ^ Gray Trustees Prize Essay, Edinburgh University, 1895. 
 
264 THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ERASMUS 
 
 the reason is that he is speaking to the first half 
 of the sixteenth century with the voice of the 
 latter half of the nineteenth. Erasmus was not, 
 we are often told, a great theologian. Certainly 
 he did not set himself to constriict a rigid and 
 well-defined system of theology ; but it is pre- 
 cisely because, with a wise and just instinct, he 
 shrank from all rash dogmatism, that he is so 
 significant and attractive a figure in the history 
 of religious thought. In his own day he suffered 
 the usual fate of those who practise the golden 
 mean, and who cultivate that virtue which a 
 modern critic was never tired of recommending 
 under the name of flexibility. The bitterness of 
 partisanship, however, evaporates wonderfully in 
 three centuries ; the echoes of the obloquy with 
 which he was once assailed have well-nigh died 
 down, and something like justice can now be 
 done to a man who was certainly not faultless, 
 but who can show so many titles to our sympathy 
 and admiration. 
 
 The pathetic story of the sadly chequered lives 
 of the parents of Erasmus has been told by 
 Charles Reade with rich historical colouring and 
 unexcelled imaginative insight. Here we must 
 content ourselves with a very rapid sketch of his 
 youth and early manhood. Born at Rotterdam, 
 prolpably.in 1467, the illegitimate son of Gerard, 
 
THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ERASMUS 265 
 
 a native of Tergouw, and Margaret, the daughter 
 of a physician of Siebenburgen, Erasmus was, at 
 the age of thirteen, left an orphan by the death of 
 both his parents. Either through negh'gence or 
 downright fraud on the part of the guardians the 
 little property which Gerard had left melted away 
 to nothing. To conceal their delinquency they 
 hit upon the plan of forcing Erasmus to enter a 
 monastery. He would then be provided for, and 
 no awkward questions need be asked as to what 
 had become of the funds. But Erasmus was 
 young and ardent. The four years he had spent 
 at the famous school of Deventer had inspired 
 him with an intense passion for learning ; he felt 
 conscious of his powers, and had no liking for the 
 notion of burying his talents and his ambition in 
 a monastery. But his guardians were inexorable; 
 both threats and cajolery were used, and Erasmus 
 at last, feeling his own helplessness, gave way. 
 Two years were wasted in a conventual prepara- 
 tory school at Bois-le-duc, where Erasmus com- 
 plained that he learned nothing, and then he 
 entered upon his novitiate in an Augustinian 
 monastery at Stein. Those who had thus kid- 
 napped him — the phrase is his own — cannot be 
 congratulated on the success of their project. 
 The result was to inspire Erasmus with an 
 undying hatred of monasticism. Alike in playful 
 
266 THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ERASMUS 
 
 satires and in serious appeals, he always drew a 
 black picture of the monastic mode of life. From 
 his own account it is abundantly plain that 
 Erasmus in a monastery was like a nightingale 
 in a cage. From the first, literature was the one 
 passion of Erasmus ; in his very cradle the Muses 
 had set their kiss upon his forehead. But for 
 letters his companions cared nothing at all ; their 
 tastes were coarse and sensual ; their conversation 
 disgusting or inane ; their religion merely ex- 
 ternal. The diet of the monastery did not suit 
 his delicate stomach ; fasting disagreed with him ; 
 he loathed the very smell of fish. 
 
 But deliverance seemed hopeless. Once a 
 monk, always a monk — that was the rule. It 
 seemed as though Erasmus were destined to pass 
 his life at Stein ; but when he had spent five 
 dreary years there, a fortunate chance opened 
 the prison doors for the unwilling monk. The 
 Bishop of Cambray selected him as his private 
 secretary ; the necessary dispensation was granted, 
 and Erasmus left the monastery, never to return. 
 
 All along, the darling wish of Erasmus had 
 been to go to a university in order to perfect 
 himself in his studies. After some time the 
 Bishop sent him to Paris, and promised to 
 support him there. Erasmus started full of 
 hopes and rejoicing in his newly-found freedom. 
 
THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ERASMUS 267 
 
 He did not find that Paris was the paradise 
 which he had thought it from a distance. The 
 College Montaigu, at which he entered, was one 
 of the strongholds of the old scholastic theology, 
 for which, from the first, Erasmus felt a strong 
 distaste. The discipline was severe, the fare 
 wretched, the accommodation scarcely decent. 
 The Bishop proved more liberal of promises than 
 of gold, and those pecuniary troubles now began 
 of which we hear to weariness in his early letters. 
 Erasmus had come to Paris, not only to steep 
 himself in the culture of the place, but to study 
 the great book of life. It would seem from his 
 own confession that he lived in a freer way than 
 befitted an ordained priest, and possibly some 
 rumour of this may have reached his patron's 
 ears. He supplemented his scanty income by 
 taking private pupils, and by one of these. Lord 
 Mountjoy, he was invited to England. He gladly 
 closed with the invitation. Already he felt that 
 he had exhausted Paris. He was now an accom- 
 plished Latinist, but tuition in Greek was not to 
 be had in the city by the Seine, and Erasmus was 
 casting Iftnging eyes on Italy, the seat of that 
 New Learning which was arousing Europe from 
 the sleep of the Middle Ages. But alas ! as he 
 complained, one cannot fly without wings, or 
 travel without money. In England, however, 
 
268 THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ERASMUS 
 
 Grocyn was teaching at Oxford the Greek he 
 had learned in Italy from Chalcondylas, and to 
 Oxford Erasmus went, probably early in 1498. 
 
 This, the first of his many visits to England, 
 may justly be regarded as one of the turning- 
 points in his life. His reputation was as yet a 
 thing of the future ; but his urbanity, his genial 
 pleasantry, his sparkling conversation, the wide 
 range of his reading, soon secured him a host of 
 friends. He was charmed with his reception, and 
 wrote with singular and obviously sincere en- 
 thusiasm of England and the English. He was 
 fortunate enough to be brought^ into the closest 
 contact with two of the noblest Englishmen of 
 that or any other age. In Thomas More he 
 found a man of a more transparently honest and 
 ingenuous turn of mind than himself, a man also 
 with a profounder speculative grasp, but with a 
 kindred humour, the same love of fun and sar- 
 casm, the same keen insight into hypocrisy and 
 pretence. Even greater and more far-reaching 
 was the influence exerted on his mind by the 
 character and teaching of John Colet. Erasmus 
 was profoundly touched by the noble 'simplicity 
 of Colet's life, the masculine strength of his 
 intellect, the ardour and thoroughly practical 
 character of his piety. Colet had been in Italy, 
 but he had altogether escaped the infection of 
 
THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ERASMUS 269 
 
 that semi-paganism which in Rome and Florence 
 had accompanied the Revival of Learning. He 
 was now engaged in a serious and noble effort for 
 the purification of religion, by discarding the 
 subtleties of the Schoolmen, and by taking his 
 stand on the simple and historical meaning of 
 the sacred text. The foundations of that vast 
 edifice which had been reared by the subtle 
 intellects of Scotus, Aquinas, and their followers 
 seemed to his practical mind radically unsound, 
 their abstruse speculations so much intellectual 
 effort run to waste. Erasmus eagerly drank in 
 those new opinions, and it is not too much to say 
 that there is hardly one of his books in which we 
 cannot trace the influence of Colet's teaching. 
 The monastic system he had been already taught 
 by bitter experience to rate at its true value, and 
 he was henceforth to be the uncompromising 
 assailant of the obscurantism of the scholastic 
 divines. The warmth with which Erasmus clung 
 to his friends is one of the brightest features of 
 his character, and there are no finer feats in 
 literary portraiture than the admirable sketches 
 he drew of More and Colet, so happily rendered 
 are they, so finely touched, so exquisite, alike in 
 taste and literary grace. 
 
 Two years passed pleasantly away in the study 
 of Greek and in theological discussions with 
 
270 THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ERASMUS 
 
 Colet, and then Erasmus took his departure from 
 England (1500). His English friends had gener- 
 ously made up a purse to carry him to Italy, 
 but Henry Vll.'s custom-house officers relieved 
 him of these funds at Dover, and Erasmus was 
 forced to return once more to Paris, which he 
 reached broken in health and depressed in spirits. 
 For the next six years he lived mainly at Paris, 
 with frequent visits to Orleans and the Low 
 Countries. He had still a hard fight for a living, 
 but he had found a new patroness in the Mar- 
 chioness of Vere. Erasmus never affected a mock 
 modesty ; he had a strain of that magnanimous 
 egotism which often goes with the consciousness 
 of high powers, and he was never ashamed to 
 depend on patrons for the means to carry on 
 his work. Although his literary skill and his 
 exquisite humour lend a touch of grace to what 
 might otherwise seem mere abject appeals for 
 money, the picture of him with his hat perpetu- 
 ally in his hand is not a particularly pleasant one 
 to contemplate : one would like if one could to 
 banish that vision of him as a sturdy and per- 
 sistent beggar. But any outburst of moral 
 indignation would be both unjust and inane. 
 He was, it is true, sometimes forced to flatter, but 
 he never sacrificed his essential independence of 
 thought and speech. It would undoubtedly have 
 
THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ERASMUS 27 1 
 
 been the nobler course to dispense with the aid of 
 patrons, and to be content with the garret and 
 the dry bread of the poor scholar. But if Erasmus 
 was not a Johnson, neither was he a Swift. He 
 never put his talents up to public auction ; he 
 merely accepted what was, after all, a far from 
 adequate recompense for his immense services in 
 the cause of literature and sound religion. In 
 more fortunate times for authors his all-sufficient 
 patron would have been the public ; as it was, 
 Erasmus received less for works which wrought a 
 moral revolution than a modern writer of a third- 
 rate novel which has the success of a day. 
 
 Soon after his return to Paris Erasmus sent 
 forth the first of his great books — the Adagia. 
 The description of this work as a collection of 
 proverbs and aphorisms is apt to make one con- 
 ceive a poor opinion of its literary worth. And 
 certainly in its original form it was nothing more 
 than a mere compilation. But as edition followed 
 edition, not merely was its bulk enormously 
 increased, but Erasmus contrived to introduce 
 more of his own spirit into the work. He was 
 quick to seize on the hint for an original disquisi- 
 tion, and the caustic comments on the manners 
 and vices of the time which were gradually added 
 are in his most characteristic vein. Here, as else- 
 where, he is chiefly preoccupied with the vices 
 
2/2 THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ERASMUS 
 
 of the Church, and more than once the monks 
 and divines come in for a rough handling. That 
 the Adagia answered a real need of the time is 
 sufficiently shown by the constant call for new 
 editions. The Renaissance, in fact, had awak- 
 ened a lively curiosity regarding the sages and 
 poets of antiquity, but to the great mass of the 
 people the classics were altogether inaccessible. 
 We can therefore easily understand the enthusi- 
 asm with which a book giving, in manageable 
 compass, the choice essence of those scarce and 
 coveted volumes was received by a public tired 
 to death of the arid logic of the Schoolmen, 
 and of the insipid literature purveyed by the 
 Church. 
 
 To this period also belongs the Enchiridion 
 ( 1 501 -3). For a devotional book, it lacks warmth 
 and fervour, but its counsels are eminently sound 
 and practical. Written while Erasmus was fresh 
 from his contact with Colet, it shows the impress 
 of his teaching on every page, above all in the 
 slight stress which it lays upon the ceremonial 
 and dogmatic aspects of religion. 
 
 After a second short visit to England in 1505, 
 Erasmus at last found himself able to carry out 
 his long-cherished dream of a journey to Italy. 
 Here also disillusionment awaited him. Julius li. 
 the pontifice terrible was then Pope, and was 
 
THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ERASMUS 273 
 
 ravaging Italy in order to extend his dominions. 
 In nothing was Erasmus more consistent than in 
 his hatred of war, and of Julius he always spoke 
 with extreme abhorrence. The intellectual im- 
 pulse of the Renaissance had almost died away ; 
 ^in Italial wrote Erasmiis, with epigrammatic 
 terseness, 'frigent studia, fervent bella ' ; and if the 
 moral atmosphere of Rome was not so stifling to 
 him as it was at a later time to Luther, he was 
 not blind to the deep-seated corruption which 
 underlay the fair exterior of a refined and liberal 
 culture. Rome, however, could not but appeal to 
 him on the intellectual side, and the warmth of his 
 own reception predisposed him in its favour. He 
 might possibly have settled down permanently in 
 Italy, but in 1509 great news recalled him to 
 England. Henry VII. was dead, and the parti- 
 sans of the New Learning conceived great hopes 
 of his young, handsome, and brilliant successor. 
 Erasmus caught the contagious enthusiasm, and 
 hurried back to England, with high anticipations 
 of the honours which awaited him. To beguile 
 the tedium of his journey he meditated his 
 famous satire the Praise of Folly, which was put 
 into shape on his arrival, and printed at Paris 
 in 1511. 
 
 The Praise of Folly ranks among the most 
 famous satires of the world. In this amusing 
 
 S 
 
274 THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ERASMUS 
 
 jeu d' esprit Folly, in her cap and bells, mounts a 
 rostrum and addresses her votaries — that is to 
 say, all the world. The remark of Dr. Marcus 
 Dods, that Erasmus as a satirist belongs to the 
 school of Lucian and Goldsmith rather than to 
 that of Juvenal and Swift, is true so far as this 
 example of his satire is concerned. It is emin- 
 ently witty and spirited; Erasmus must have 
 been in one of his most buoyant moods when he 
 composed it. The tone is gay and genial, and 
 the irony is remarkably well sustained through- 
 out. No class of the community escapes a touch 
 of Folly's lash. Hunters, gamblers, merchants, 
 lawyers, poets, grammarians, men of letters — all 
 in their turn are set in a ludicrous light, and are 
 all described as worshippers of Folly. But it is 
 when on the scholastic divines and the monks 
 that Erasmus bears most hardly. Of the School- 
 men he says : ' These men possess so much 
 learning and subtlety that I think even the 
 Apostles themselves would want another spirit if 
 they were compelled to engage in controversy with 
 this new race of divines.' On the monks he is 
 even harder. They are remarkable, he says, only 
 for their dirt, their ignorance, their clownish 
 manners, and their impudence. He then takes a 
 higher flight, and aims his shafts at the luxury of 
 the great dignitaries of the Church, not sparing 
 
THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ERASMUS 2/5 
 
 even the Pope himself. He had not forgotten 
 the scenes he had witnessed in Italy, and the 
 indelible impression they had left on his mind is 
 seen in his unsparing censui;e of the pomp and 
 magnificence of the Cardinals, and the lust for 
 war and territorial aggrandisement with which 
 that ' decrepit old man,' Pope Julius II., was 
 consumed. 
 
 When Erasmus reached England he found 
 Henry VIII. too much absorbed in his warlike 
 designs against France to pay much attention 
 to a mere man of letters. Instead of the rich 
 honours which he had confidently expected, he 
 was forced to content himself with a paltry pro- 
 fessorship at Cambridge. As Gibbon puts it 
 in his balanced and antithetical manner : ' Eras- 
 mus learned Greek at Oxford to teach it at 
 Cambridge.' His stipend was small ; the scholars 
 were few and poor ; the society was uncongenial ; 
 worst of all, Erasmus could not tolerate the 
 Cambridge beer, and good wine was scarcely to 
 be had. On the whole, Erasmus must have 
 thought with longing and regret of the happy 
 days spent at the sister university on his first 
 visit to England. He was voluble in complaints, 
 and when he received the appointment of coun- 
 cillor to the Archduke Charles, with a pension 
 attached, he gladly left England. For the use of 
 
276 THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ERASMUS 
 
 Charles he wrote the Institutio Principis Chris- 
 tiani, a book full of excellent, if somewhat 
 obvious, counsels, and anticipating in some re- 
 spects the arguments and conclusions of modern 
 political economy. 
 
 For some years Erasmus had been engaged on 
 an edition of the New Testament, and the time 
 had now come when this magnum opus was to 
 be given to the world. He hurried on to Basle, 
 where Froben had a famous printing - press. 
 Froben received the great scholar with open 
 arms, and a group of earnest and enthusiastic 
 young disciples gathered round Erasmus, and 
 lent him a willing aid in his arduous task. The 
 Novum Instrumentum was put hurriedly through 
 the press, and appeared in 1516 with a dedication 
 to Pope Leo. 
 
 To understand the full significance of the ap- 
 pearance of the Instrumentum. requires a strong 
 mental effort. It was the first edition of the 
 Greek text. Hitherto the sole version in use had 
 been the Vulgate, and such was the deplorable 
 ignorance of the common run of ecclesiastics, that 
 they talked as though the Apostles had spoken 
 and written in Latin, or as though the Vulgate 
 had dropped direct from heaven. To alter a 
 single word of the received version seemed to 
 them nothing short of heresy. Before the appear- 
 
THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ERASMUS 277 
 
 ance of the work Erasmus had a foretaste of the 
 puerile sort of criticism he was to expect. Martin 
 Dorpuis addressed to him a letter of strong 
 remonstrance, in which he argued in the most 
 childish fashion for the authority of the Vulgate. 
 'I adhere,' he wrote, 'to the Latin because I 
 cannot bring myself to believe that the Greek 
 codices are more correct than the Latin.' One 
 may readily imagine the smile of half humorous 
 despair which would rise to the lips of Erasmus 
 when he read this naive protest. 
 
 By the very act, then, of publishing the Greek 
 text Erasmus had taken a bold step forward. 
 But this was not all. To translate the Bible into 
 the common tongue was regarded by ultra- 
 orthodox theologians as a crime for which the 
 fire and the stake were too mild a punishment. 
 The mind of Erasmus revolted at this barbarous 
 notion, and in repudiating it his language took 
 an unusual glow and fire. ' I wish,' he declared, 
 ' that even the most ignorant woman could read 
 the Gospels and the Epistles of St. Paul. ... I 
 long to see the day when the husbandman shall 
 sing some verses of them as he follows the plough, 
 when the weaver shall hum them as he sits at his 
 shuttle, when the traveller shall while away with 
 their stories the weariness of his journey.' These 
 were, indeed, golden words, and never let us fail 
 
278 THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ERASMUS 
 
 to pay a due tribute to Erasmus for his share 
 in making possible the fulfilment of his pious 
 aspiration. 
 
 In the Ratio Veres Theologies, which was printed 
 with the first edition, Erasmus urged the principles 
 which Colet had laid down in his famous lectures 
 at Oxford. ' Read the Scriptures,' he cried, ' with 
 open eyes ; study the history of the times, the 
 character of the writer, and the circumstances of 
 those to whom he wrote. Do not place a blind 
 reliance on the Fathers : the best of them were 
 but men, ignorant of some things, mistaken in 
 others.' Only thus, he urged, could we grasp the 
 real meaning of the sacred text. His object, 
 however, was not so much scholarship as practical 
 piety. The ampler our knowledge, the more 
 vivid would be our realisation of the person and 
 teaching of Christ ; and the love and service of 
 Christ was the one great object of the reverent 
 study of the Scriptures. 
 
 The practical application of this sound and 
 historical conception was seen in the notes he 
 appended to his work. Again and again he re- 
 jected the forced and fantastic interpretations 
 which had become traditional ; he strove con- 
 stantly, with a perfectly open and unbiassed 
 mind, to elicit the real and vital meaning of 
 texts which in the hands of the Schoolmen had 
 
THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ERASMUS 279 
 
 become quite unintelligible. His success was not 
 always perfect, but he took such an immense 
 stride forward, that it is no exaggeration to 
 describe him as the father of modern exegetical 
 science. 
 
 Erasmus was now at the zenith of his reputation. 
 He was universally admitted to be the greatest 
 scholar on this side of the Alps. In Latin he 
 was unrivalled ; Budaeus perhaps surpassed him 
 in Greek erudition, but the fame of the Paris 
 savant was that of the scholar merely, while 
 Erasmus was a man of letters in the widest sense 
 of the term. He had done more than any other 
 man in the cause of learning and the belles-lettres. 
 By his edition of the New Testament he had 
 justified the hopes that Colet had long ago formed 
 of him. The dominant scholasticism was reeling 
 under his skilfully aimed blows. He had contrived 
 to steer an even keel between the Scylla of the 
 semi-paganism of Italy and the Charybdis of 
 the obscurantism of the scholastic divines. From 
 the pedantry that so often accompanies profound 
 scholarship he was entirely free ; he bore his load 
 of learning lightly, and no man ever knew better 
 how to 'steer from grave to gay, from lively to 
 severe.' He has often been compared to Voltaire, 
 and certainly the parallel holds so far as the 
 scope and range of their influence are concerned. 
 
28o THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ERASMUS 
 
 Milton prayed for an audience ' fit though few ' ; 
 Erasmus could count with certainty on having 
 the whole of Europe for an audience. He had 
 extricated himself from those pecuniary troubles 
 which embittered his youth and early manhood. 
 Popes, kings, and cardinals were all eager to do 
 him honour. He was in constant correspondence 
 with the heads of Europe — a fact of which he 
 boasts with a vanity surely pardonable enough 
 in one who owed everything to his own genius, 
 aided by an industry almost unexampled. It 
 seemed as though he might count on a happy 
 and peaceful old age, and on being followed to 
 his grave by the regret of all Europe. 
 
 Butcallnoman happy until he is dead. In 1517 
 the storm of the Reformation broke out, and 
 henceforth Erasmus lived in an atmosphere of 
 constant controversy. There can be no doubt 
 that it was he who had laid the train to which 
 Luther applied the match ; but when the ex- 
 plosion came no one was more surprised and 
 dismayed than Erasmus. The keenest observers 
 often show a lamentable lack of foresight ; but 
 the truth is that Erasmus had been lulled into 
 a false security by his dream of a peaceful and 
 gradual reform — a dream of the ivory gate, as 
 Froude has finely called it. In the light of 
 subsequent events the hope seems a singularly 
 
THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ERASMUS 28 1 
 
 futile one. We must remember, however, that 
 the favour with which his own books, with all 
 their plain speaking, had been received by the 
 heads of the Church encouraged the delusive 
 dream that they would of their own accord take 
 up the herculean task of reform. Still, one fact 
 alone might have served to undeceive Erasmus. 
 It was above all on Pope Leo, that indolent and 
 graceful epicurean, that his hopes were fixed, 
 and, by the irony of fate, it was Leo who, by the 
 shameless traffic in indulgences, gave the signal 
 for the strife. The sale of indulgences shocked 
 and scandalised Erasmus ; but ought it not also 
 to have brought home to his mind the truth that 
 corruption had so eaten into the very vitals of the 
 Church that only the knife and cautery could 
 work a cure ? 
 
 When the storm burst forth in all its fury 
 Erasmus felt himself to be on the horns of a 
 dilemma. At first he put forth all his efforts 
 to still the tumult. He pressed on both sides 
 the wisdom of moderation. Of Luther personally 
 he spoke with respect, while he disclaimed all 
 connection with his doctrines, and unreservedly 
 condemned what to his cool and critical tempera- 
 ment seemed the Reformer's violence and wrong- 
 headedness. Th^re is something, it must be 
 confessed, a little disingenuous in his repeated 
 
282 THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ERASMUS 
 
 protestations that he had not read Luther's books ; 
 at all events, the retort was obvious that surely 
 it was his business, as one of the intellectual 
 leaders of Europe, to make himself acquainted 
 with works which were everywhere stirring men's 
 hearts to their depths. But as the strife grew 
 fiercer it became impossible for him to maintain 
 this balancing and neutral attitude. At last he 
 yielded to the pressure put upon him, and, sorely 
 against his will, entered the arena against Luther 
 by the publication in 1523 of his treatise on the 
 Freedom of the Will. The book, we need not 
 doubt, represented his sincere convictions, but it 
 does not rank with his best performances. In 
 argument it was wavering and inconclusive, and 
 the coldness of its tone contrasted strangely with 
 the intense and burning ardour of his great 
 opponent. His intervention was in fact a com- 
 plete failure. He succeeded only in exasperating 
 the Reformers without satisfying the orthodox 
 party. Five years after its appearance, the Paris 
 Sorbonne passed a severe censure on his writings 
 — so little had he gained from joining issue with 
 Luther. At the same time we must dissent from 
 those who look upon his choice of so abstract 
 a subject as an act of intellectual cowardice. 
 Luther himself, it is plain, had no such feeling. 
 He justly enough regarded the theory of the im- 
 
THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ERASMUS 283 
 
 potence of the human will, with all its corollaries, 
 as the very cornerstone of his system, and he had 
 long been aware that his views were not shared 
 by Erasmus. 
 
 The difference between Luther and Erasmus, 
 in truth, went far deeper than can be accounted 
 for by any mere doctrinal disputes : at bottom it 
 sprang from a profound divergence of tempera- 
 ment. Erasmus had a cool and open mind ; his 
 horror of strife was so extreme, that he set peace 
 above truth. He had all the humane, but few of 
 the heroic virtues. Between a nature of this sort, 
 and the fiery ardour, the intense moral fervour, of 
 Luther there could be no real agreement. Be- 
 sides, Erasmus detested dogma, and it was with 
 dismay that he saw Luther pass from attacks on 
 the corruptions of the Church to the construction 
 of a new theology as rigid as the old, though in- 
 finitely purer. Fortunately, at this time of day 
 we are not called upon to choose between these 
 two great men. Both had their appointed work 
 to do, and neither could have done the work of 
 the other. If Luther knew best how to minister 
 to the diseased state of the time, it was Erasmus 
 who had first called attention to its ailments. 
 
 The incessant controversies in which the Refor- 
 mation involved Erasmus greatly embittered the 
 last years of his life. Most of these years were 
 
284 THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ERASMUS 
 
 spent at Basle, but from i5i7toiS2ihe lived at 
 Louvain, and from 1529 to 1535 at Friburg. 
 
 Darkness was now closing in around him. He 
 suffered tortures from the stone; like Pope he 
 might have called his life a long disease. One 
 by one his best-loved friends were cut off. Yet 
 such was the buoyancy of his temperament, that 
 into those sad years he compressed what to 
 ordinary men would seem the labour of a life- 
 time. Of his enormous labours in patristic and 
 classical literature, of the host of devotional works 
 which he sent forth, we have no space to speak. 
 His arduous literary toil was continued down to 
 his last hour: when death came in 1536 he was 
 hard at work on an edition of Origen. He made 
 a fruitful excursion into the field of philology by 
 an essay on the right pronunciation of Latin and 
 Greek. Nor had his old lambent humour de- 
 serted him. In 1528 he published an exquisitely 
 witty satire on the pedantic imitators of Cicero. 
 By far the most characteristic work of this period, 
 however, was the famous Colloquies, and with a 
 short account of this, next to the Encomium 
 Morice, the most popular of his works, we may 
 fitly bring this study to a close. 
 
 The first edition of the Colloquies was published 
 in 1519, but like the Adages it was long before it 
 took final shape. As Erasmus journeyed hither 
 
THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ERASMUS 285 
 
 and thither over the length and breadth of 
 Europe, dialogue after dialogue was added. 
 Sometimes the dialogues were meditated as he 
 sat in the saddle, and written down when he 
 reached his inn ; not, however, we may be sure, 
 till he had his supper and his glass of good wine. 
 They have a brisk and alert quality that reminds 
 us of the manner in which they were composed ; 
 often they are instinct with the bustle and move- 
 ment of travel in the open air. Erasmus had 
 travelled over nearly all Western Europe, and 
 wherever he had gone he had kept both his eyes 
 and his ears open. He had been brought into 
 contact with all sorts of men, from emperors and 
 popes down to drunken bargemen ajid horse- 
 cheats. To read the Colloquies is to realise that 
 Erasmus had in great measure the equipment of 
 the dramatist — the intuitive perception of char- 
 acter, the keen eye for the significant and pictur- 
 esque detail, the breadth of sympathy, the quick 
 and eager curiosity. And the result is that they 
 give us a more spirited and accurate idea of the 
 actual state of Europe than pages of arid philo- 
 sophical disquisition could do. 
 
 The Colloquies are full of plain speaking on the 
 vices of the time. The satire has as keen and 
 trenchant an edge as in the Encomium Maria ; 
 and it is perhaps all the more effective because 
 
286 THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ERASMUS 
 
 the sneer is often covert, and the vein of scepti- 
 cism hardly shows beneath the decorous profes- 
 sion of belief The invocation of the saints, the 
 folly of pilgrimages, the excessive veneration paid 
 to relics, the greed and rapacity of the monks, 
 their immorality and their contempt for learning 
 — all these topics are touched upon in the happiest 
 manner of Erasmus. In spite of their tone of 
 gay banter, the Colloquies were full of grave moral 
 lessons for the men of the time. They did more, 
 perhaps, to cut the feet from superstition than the 
 most fiery denunciation could have done. For it 
 is in the nature of violent invective to provoke 
 contradiction and reaction, while well-directed 
 ridicule insensibly saps the foundations of super- 
 stition. 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON ^ 
 
 He died too soon, who knew so well to live, 
 That sword-bright spirit, in so frail a sheath. 
 Not with head bowed beneath the weight of years, 
 But with fresh laurels clustering on his brow. 
 He fares to the far country, whence he comes 
 Never again to charm our ears with speech 
 Sweeter than honey or the honeycomb. 
 The fresh fair face of this green earth he loved. 
 And all the miracles which Nature works 
 On sea and sky, deep-bosomed woods and fields, 
 Where midst the corn the flaunting poppy stands. 
 Had yielded up their secret to his quest. 
 We mourn for one whose heart beat ever true 
 To Scotland, loved and left and hungered for. 
 And most of all our smoke-wreathed, castled city, 
 The well-loved city of his birth, which lost, 
 Alas ! too soon, her gallant, gracious son. 
 ' No stars,' he said, ' in all the vault of heaven, 
 To me so lovely as the lamps which shine 
 In fair Edina's city when the night 
 
 ^ Published in Scots Magazine, November 1896. 
 
288 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 Descends, and high in air the castle lifts 
 His huge grim mass across a gulf of darkness.' 
 Pentlands' black slopes and woods of sombre fir 
 His footsteps knew, and claimed him for their own. 
 There had he lain and gazed with musing eye. 
 Gazed on the spires, the labyrinthine lanes, 
 The houses rising high and quaintly peaked. 
 Dimly discerned through wreaths of curling smoke. 
 Such was his vision ; but his thoughts flew far, 
 And wandered in the realms of old romance — 
 Realms kingless long, but now their king had 
 
 come. 
 Scotland he loved ; but she, the austere mother. 
 Her forehead clouded with eternal wrath. 
 Her speech bitter, and her unfrequent smiles 
 Wearing no softness, thrust him forth from home, 
 To bear an exile's sorrow through the world — 
 Sorrow time heals not, no, nor troops of friends, 
 Nor all the bloom and beauty of the world. 
 For friends are many, but the name of mother 
 Belongs to one alone ; that title none 
 Might share with her who travailed for his birth. 
 And though the gladsome sun looked down on 
 
 him 
 From skies more fair than ours, and perfumed winds 
 Wrapt him in softness, and a summer sea 
 Smiled and made music round his island home. 
 No power had these upon his present pain. 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 289 
 
 For Still the sweet and bitter thoughts of home 
 Caught at his heart, and the old longing grew 
 That she whose eyes first looked in his might 
 
 gaze 
 Once more upon them, and her arms might clasp 
 Him to her flinty bosom once again. 
 And oft in silent watches of the night 
 His dreams flew homeward, and he saw again 
 Her face, furrowed and worn and scarred, yet 
 
 bright 
 To him and lovely, and his lips shaped words 
 Of tender greeting, and his eyes grew dim 
 With mists drawn from the secret springs of joy. 
 But then the dream would pass, and he would 
 
 wake, 
 And know himself an exile, who should ne'er 
 See Scotland's shore again, nor see those hills, 
 Glorious in green and purple, over which 
 The shifting shadows softly play ; those streams. 
 Swiftly down-rushing, deep and dark and troubled; 
 Those mountains, blue, and veiled with clouds of 
 
 mist. 
 Sickness he knew, and pain and weary days. 
 And nights of anguish, when it seemed as though 
 The morn would never come, nor ever sun 
 Shower gladness on the sorrowing earth again ; 
 Yet from his lips no peevish murmur broke, 
 But with a mind elate he drank the cup 
 
 T 
 
290 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 Proffered by Fate even to the very dregs, 
 Singing the while in sweet and even key 
 Of childhood's happy memories and youth's 
 Glad dreams and fair presages, and the full 
 And golden hours of ripe and perfect manhood, 
 Till, brought within the compass of his song. 
 The many-coloured symphony of life 
 Rose on men's ears and filled them with delight. 
 To those clear heights whereon his spirit dwelt 
 No taint of that sick languor floated up 
 Which broods so thickly o'er our lower world. 
 And with its venomed and malignant breath 
 Poisons the joy of being, and from life 
 Takes all its natural gladness. There he dwelt, 
 And drank deep draughts of the pure mountain 
 
 air. 
 Mingling his song to every wind that blew. 
 Feeling the full, resistless tide of joy 
 Surge through the inmost channels of his heart. 
 Happy and radiant spirit ! that could thus 
 Transmute to gold the leaden ore of sorrow. 
 Distil from bitter herbs a draught of joy, 
 And like a garland wear a crown of thorns. 
 As some rich-freighted bark, beset by waves 
 Crested with cruel foam, when clouds lour dark 
 And all the sky is waste and void of stars. 
 Undaunted holds her darkling way, and rides 
 Erect, and to the wished-for haven brings 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 29 1 
 
 Her treasure safe through storm and stress of seas, 
 So through life's storms he passed, with head held 
 
 high 
 And mind attuned to gladness, and at last 
 Dropped anchor in the peaceful port of Death. 
 
 Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty 
 at the Edinburgh University Press