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LITERARY MEMOIRS OF 
 THE NINETEENTH 
 
 CENTURY 
 
 BY 
 
 GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY 
 
 » 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY 
 1921 
 

 COPYRIGHT, I 9 2 I , BY 
 HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC. 
 
 f 
 
 ^ 
 
 V 
 
 APR 30 192! 
 
 ©CU614261 
 
NOTE 
 
 I recall old Professor Child urging on me in my col- 
 lege days "writing for bread," and saying I should 
 remember "not all is for immortality, — in literature 
 there are things that are meant to die, just as there 
 are beasts and birds in nature," — words that often re- 
 curred to me while compiling this volume. It is a 
 selection from a mass of contributions to the old Nation 
 and the old Atlantic of my early years, like my first book 
 of criticism (1890); and, to quote the preface of 
 that volume (what is also true of the other reprints of 
 this edition), the papers are given with "little more re- 
 vision than was necessary to cover unimportant omissions, 
 or to combine, in one or two instances, kindred articles." 
 These papers, however, though "very young" in one 
 sense, and "very old" in another, fairly illustrate the 
 working of what is coming to be called the "old, literary 
 education" in the life of a young writer in my day; and, 
 besides, I hope they may be welcome to the lighter, but 
 still serious-minded hours of students in colleges, and to 
 teachers of literature, as a view of literary affairs in the 
 nineteenth century, though desultory, yet not often to 
 be found in such variety and compactness, nor easily to 
 be come at. And I am satisfied that my old editors, 
 Wendell Phillips Garrison and Thomas Bailey Aldrich — 
 and kinder and more loyal editors no young writer ever 
 had — would be pleased at this late gleaning from the 
 long-abandoned spring wheat-field. 
 
 G. E. W. 
 
 Beverly, October 8, 1920. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Remarks on Shelley, 3 
 
 Sir George Beaumont, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, 31 
 
 Thomas Poole and his Friends, 45 
 
 The De Quincey Family, 57 
 
 Edward Bulwer, Lord Lytton, 67 
 
 The Correspondence of Sir Henry Taylor, 75 
 
 Hay ward's Correspondence, 91 
 
 Thackeray's Letters, 101 
 
 Darwin's Life, 107 
 
 Dobell's Life and Letters, 121 
 
 William Barnes, the Dorsetshire Poet, 127 
 
 Mr. Ruskin's Early Years, 135 
 
 Carlyle and his Friends, 145 
 
 Edward Fitzgerald, 189 
 
 Hawthorne, 201 
 
 Longfellow, 215 
 
 Motley's Correspondence, 227 
 
 Bayard Taylor, 239 
 
 A Shakespearean Scholar, 249 
 
 Colonial Books, 263 
 
 Charles Brockden Brown, 275 
 
 Lucy Larcom, 283 
 
 On the Death of Holmes, 297 
 
 Lowell's Addresses, 303 
 
LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 OF THE 
 
 NINETEENTH CENTURY 
 
 
REMARKS ON SHELLEY 
 
 I. HIS CAREER 
 
 The natural charm by which Shelley fascinated his 
 familiar friends lives after him, and has gathered about 
 him for his defense a group of men whose affection for 
 him seems no whit lessened because they never knew 
 him face to face. The one common characteristic promi- 
 nent in all who have written of him with sympathy, how- 
 ever meager or valuable their individual contributions 
 of praise, criticism, or information, is this sentiment of 
 direct, intimate, intense personal loyalty which he has 
 inspired in them to a degree rare, if not unparalleled, in 
 literary annals. Under the impulse of this strong love, 
 they have championed his cause, until his fame, over- 
 shadowed in his own generation by the vigorous worldli- 
 ness of Byron, and slightly esteemed by nearly all of his 
 craft, has grown world-wide. With the enthusiasts, 
 however, who have aided in bringing about this result, 
 admiration for Shelley's work is a secondary thing; its 
 virtue is blended with and transfused into the nature of 
 Shelley himself, who is the center of their worship. To 
 reveal the fineness and luster of his character, his essen- 
 tial worth throughout that romantic and darkened career 
 of thirty years, is their chief pleasure, and in this, too, 
 they have now won some success, and have partially re- 
 versed the popular estimate of the poet as merely an 
 immoral atheist; yet, although some amends have been 
 
4 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 made for harsh contemporary criticism, Shelley's name 
 is still for orthodoxy a shibboleth of pious terror and 
 of insult to God. It is still too early to decide whether 
 the modification of the harsh criticism once almost uni- 
 versally bestowed upon Shelley will go on permanently, 
 or whether it is not in some measure due to peculiar 
 results of culture in our own time. Without attempting 
 to prejudice this question, especially in regard to poetic 
 fame, there seems to be, as the cause passes out of the 
 hands of those who knew Shelley personally into the guar- 
 dianship of the new generation, a tendency toward greater 
 unity of judgment in regard to the larger phases of his 
 character and conduct. 
 
 Shelley, as Swinburne said of William Blake, was 
 born into the church of rebels; he was born, also, gentle, 
 loving, and fearless. The dangers to which such a natu- 
 ral endowment would inevitably expose him were aggra- 
 vated by a misguided education, and by the temper of 
 that feverish and ill-regulated age in which modern re- 
 form began. He was in early years first of all a revolter; 
 he would do only what seemed to him best, and in the 
 way which seemed to him best; he took nothing upon 
 authority, he acknowledged no validity in the customs 
 and beliefs which past experience had bequeathed to men ; 
 he must examine every conclusion anew, and accept or 
 reject it by the light of his own limited thought and 
 observation; he carried the Protestant spirit to its ulti- 
 mate extreme — all legal and intellectual results em- 
 bodied in institutions or in accepted beliefs must show 
 cause to him why they should exist. He was, moreover, 
 in haste; he could not rest in a doubt, he could not sus- 
 pend his judgment, he could not wait for fuller knowledge. 
 Finding only incomplete or incompetent answers to his 
 
REMARKS ON SHELLEY 5 
 
 questioning, he leaped to the conclusion that there was 
 no answer. Had he been contented with allowing 
 this spirit to influence only his private creed and con- 
 duct, mischief enough was sure to be wrought for him, 
 error and suffering were in store for him in no common 
 degree. But he was not merely building an ideal of life 
 and formulating a rule of living for himself; he had, 
 as he afterward confessed, a passion for reforming the 
 world. He was early in print, and aspired to teach the 
 world before he was well out of his teens — took in his 
 hands, indeed, the regeneration of Ireland through pam- 
 phlets, and public eloquence, and personal agitation and 
 supervision. It is easy to dismiss this as the foolish con- 
 ceit of a boy of talent much given to dreaming. It 
 is easy, too, to dismiss his exile from his home and his 
 expulsion from Oxford as childish obstinacy, disobedience, 
 ingratitude, and presumption; but if there was anything 
 of these faults in him there was also much more made 
 evident in these first trials of his character: there was the 
 capacity for sacrifice, the resolution to be faithful to the 
 truth as he saw it. The beginning of manhood found 
 him in the full sway of immature conviction, and already 
 suffering the penalty. It is not necessary to follow out 
 in detail the development of a life so entered upon. 
 It led him to attack Christianity and to disregard the law 
 of marriage, and this is the sum and substance of his 
 offense. Yet no sign, perhaps, is so indicative of the 
 increased liberality of religion in our time as the attempt 
 which has been made to show that Shelley was essentially 
 Christian, an attempt so common and vigorous that Tre- 
 lawney felt called upon to protest against it. In this 
 spirit Mr. Symonds writes from one extreme: "It is cer- 
 tain that as Christianity passes beyond its medieval phase, 
 
6 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 and casts aside the husk of outworn dogmas, it will more 
 and more approximate to Shelley's exposition. Here, and 
 here only, is a vital faith adapted to the conditions of 
 modern thought, indestructible because essential, and 
 fitted to unite instead of separating minds of divers 
 quality"; and Rev. F. W. Robertson, from the other 
 extreme writes: "I cannot help feeling that there was a 
 spirit in poor Shelley's mind which might have assimi- 
 lated with the spirit of his Redeemer — nay, which I will 
 dare to say was kindred with that spirit, if only his Re- 
 deemer had been differently imaged to him. ... I will 
 not say that a man who by his opposition to God means 
 opposition to a demon, to whom the name of God in his 
 mind is appended, is an enemy of God ; . . . change the 
 name and I will bid that character defiance with you!" 
 A candid examination must show, however, that Tre- 
 lawney is right; there is no doubt that Shelley rejected 
 altogether what is properly known as Christianity, in 
 youth violently and with hatred, while in later years 
 he came to care less about it. At the same time it 
 is to be remembered that he had seen Christianity only 
 in those forms whose most prominent characteristic is 
 defect in charity and love, which Shelley believed to be 
 the central virtues. Probably he never dissociated the 
 Christian God from the Jewish Jehovah, and his feeling 
 towards him is well illustrated in the terrible indictment 
 he makes against him in reference to Milton's delineation 
 of Satan as one "who, in the cold security of undoubted 
 triumph, inflicts upon his fallen enemy the most horrible 
 punishment, not from any mistaken hope of thereby re- 
 forming him, but with the avowed purpose of exasperat- 
 ing him to deserve new torments." It is, therefore, 
 impossible to deny Shelley's atheism; the most that can 
 
REMARKS ON SHELLEY 7 
 
 be contended for is that in natural piety, in purity of 
 life and motive, in conscientious and unselfish action, 
 Shelley was exceptionally conspicuous. 
 
 It is here that the second charge against Shelley has 
 its place. How, it is indignantly asked, was he unselfish, 
 loving, and conscientious, when he left his youthful wife 
 to circumstances which resulted in her suicide, and trans- 
 ferred his devotion to another? Nothing more can be 
 done than to point out the fact that Shelley acted in 
 harmony with his convictions of social duty; that the 
 first marriage was the result of knight-errantry rather 
 than affection, and had become destitute of any pleasure; 
 that Shelley did not desert his wife in such a way as to 
 make her suicide chargeable to him. These considera- 
 tions do not, it is true, relieve him of condemnation, or 
 remove the really great defect in his moral perception 
 of the responsibility which rested upon him in conse- 
 quence of a thoughtless and foolish marriage. Yet it 
 is not doubtful that in his life he atoned for his error, if 
 suffering is atonement; from that time a shadow fell 
 upon him which never was removed. It is hard to find 
 heart for reproach when one, whose whole gospel was love, 
 is so cruelly entangled in the unforeseen consequences 
 of his acts that he seems to have wrought the work of 
 hatred. 
 
 What, then, under this presentation of the case, re- 
 mains to be said for that ideal character which those who 
 love Shelley believe to have been his possession? That, 
 beginning life with a theory which left every desire and 
 impulse free course, which imposed no restrictions except 
 those of his own honor and self-respect, which acknowl- 
 edged no command not proceeding from his own reason, 
 he yet served the truth he saw with entire loyalty and 
 
8 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 sincerity of heart; that, making many errors throughout 
 a darkened life, he did not strive by lightness of heart 
 or logical sophistication to avoid their penalties of misery 
 and remorse, but kept them in memory and bore his 
 burden of sorrow courageously; that by intense thought 
 and bitter experience he came at last to find the laws 
 of life and to obey them. He found how impossible it 
 is for the individual to solve the problems put before 
 him, so that he himself grew content to leave many of 
 these in doubt; found how ignorant it was in him to 
 make his own experience the measure of the conditions 
 of general human life, and attempt to reform the world's 
 motives and standards by reference to that experience 
 alone; found how little the individual counts for in life, 
 so that the youth, who with fervid hope took up the 
 regeneration of a whole nation in confidence, came to 
 doubt whether it was worth while for him to write at all, 
 and rated himself far below his friend Byron. These char- 
 acteristics are the evidence of his strength, sincerity, and 
 Tightness of purpose; and through these he worked out 
 an ideal of life and rule of living, which differed much 
 from those of his early days. No ideal intrinsically more 
 powerful in influence or more exalted in virtue has been 
 worked out by men who, like himself, found the old 
 familiar standards rationally inadequate and morally 
 weak. These are the essential elements in Shelley's 
 career, and to them his personal qualities and his daily 
 life give form and color. This, too, is the work of a man 
 framed for self-destruction, against whom circumstances 
 did their worst throughout. The marvel is, not that his 
 life was so broken in private happiness, and his public 
 work so unequal in the worth of its results, but, taking all 
 into account, that he saved so much of his life and 
 
REMARKS ON SHELLEY 9 
 
 work through his perception of the valuable objects of 
 living, and his clinging to them. 
 
 This, too, was the result of the imperfect years of 
 preparation. He had given him only the traditional 
 thirty years which belong to every genius for trial and 
 training before the finished work can be required. He 
 had just recognized the conditions to which he must 
 conform, and was only ready to begin when he died. 
 
 II. HIS ACQUAINTANCES. 
 
 It is impossible to condense Shelley's Life in a clear 
 way. One turns the pages, and owns for the thousandth 
 time the fascination of Shelley, from the first glimpse of 
 the boy, pressing his face against the window-pane to 
 kiss his sister, to the hot July afternoon when he made his 
 last embarkation, and the summer storm swept the gleam- 
 ing mountains from his sight; but no art transmits the 
 spell, and the story, clasped between these periods, must 
 be left in its integrity. Shelley lived in solitude, and died 
 before he was thirty years old; but his career involved 
 such variety of scenes, persons, and incidents, was so 
 thick-strewn with interesting episodes, and contained so 
 many perplexed passages, that it is a study by itself, and 
 requires for its mastery an acquaintance with an extensive 
 literature of its own. It were useless to attempt a criti- 
 cism, or to describe Shelley anew, but some unstudied re- 
 marks upon his fortunes in life may be ventured upon. 
 
 Must one incur the charge of being supercilious and 
 aristocratic if he acknowledges at once a feeling, after 
 reading Shelley's life, of having been in very disagreeable 
 company? Assuredly no one can rise from the perusal 
 
io LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 with a heightened respect for human nature, apart from 
 Shelley. He was born a gentleman; his innate courtesy 
 clothes him with attractiveness, and distinguishes him 
 among his associates as a person of a different kind from 
 them, in his actions and bearing; and the deference which 
 Byron showed to him, it is not unlikely, sprang from a 
 perception of this strain of breeding in him rather than 
 from appreciation of his genius or his nature. In his 
 earliest fellowship with school-friends, for whom he had 
 a kindly regard at Eton and after they went down to- 
 gether to Oxford, though Hogg plainly obscures it, there 
 is a gleam here and there of natural and equal com- 
 panionship; but this morning ray soon dies out. He 
 was, afterwards, almost uniformly unfortunate in his 
 acquaintances. His life was truly one long and sorrow- 
 ful disillusion; and in it not the least part was the dis- 
 covery of how he had been deceived in his judgment of 
 persons. 
 
 Hogg was his first example. Shelley became familiar 
 with him at Oxford, and, not content with having 
 him for a bosom friend, wished to make him his 
 brother-in-law. At that time Shelley was in the first 
 crude ferment of his intellectual life, eagerly absorbing 
 the new knowledge which came to him from his indis- 
 criminate reading, and disputing on all the usual topics 
 with vehement and unwearied earnestness, insatiable curi- 
 osity, and the delight of a youth who has just made the 
 discovery that he has a mind of his own. His thoughts 
 and letters were mostly polemical; ideal elements of 
 morality were growing up in him, and radical views of 
 conduct getting a hold in his convictions. He was willful, 
 precipitate, and heedless through inexperience; he was 
 thrown the more upon himself, and given a violent turn 
 
REMARKS ON SHELLEY n 
 
 toward rebellion, to which he was prone enough, by his 
 expulsion from Oxford, and the senseless attempt of his 
 family to make him suppress his mental and moral life 
 by denying his first dear conclusions. In this state, partly 
 from adventure and restlessness, perhaps, but also from a 
 sense of obligation, the desire to spread his gospel, and 
 by the mere favor of circumstances, he married his first 
 wife, though he knew that his sympathies were more 
 engaged than his heart. 
 
 At Edinburgh, whither the pair had gone, Hogg joined 
 them, and with him they returned to York, where Shel- 
 ley left his wife in his friend's care during a brief neces- 
 sary absence. Hogg, who appears to have been not so 
 pure as might be wished in his university days, tried to 
 seduce her; and when Shelley came back he learned the 
 facts. He loved Hogg; he was ashamed, he wrote, to 
 tell him how much he loved him ; he was grateful to him 
 for having stood by him and shared his expulsion from the 
 college; and he placed the most extravagant estimate 
 upon his abilities. What followed upon the disclosure 
 Shelley himself tells in a letter written at the time: — 
 
 "We walked to the fields beyond York. I desired to 
 know fully the account of this affair. I heard it from 
 him, and I believe he was sincere. All I can recollect 
 of that terrible day was that I pardoned him — fully, 
 freely pardoned him; that I would still be a friend to 
 him, and hoped soon to convince him how lovely virtue 
 was; that his crime, not himself, was the object of my 
 detestation; that I value a human being not for what it 
 has been, but for what it is; that I hoped the time would 
 come when he would regard his horrible error with as 
 much disgust as I did. He said little; he was pale, 
 terror-struck, remorseful." 
 
12 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 One may smile at this episode, if he be cynical, and 
 has left youth far enough behind; but for all that, there 
 is something pathetic in these sentences of boyish good- 
 ness, this simple belief in the moral principles which Shel- 
 ley had found in his first search, and to which he had 
 given the allegiance of his unworn heart; and in this 
 scene of forgiveness, still confused with the emotions of 
 first friendship betrayed, one perceives the Shelley we 
 know, though he was not yet out of his teens. Some time 
 elapsed before Shelley realized all the incident meant; 
 then he wrote, "I leave him to his fate;" and when they 
 met again in London, the old footing was gone forever. 
 
 Godwin, too, affords a capital example of a shattered 
 ideal. He was the Socrates of the young poet, and 
 Shelley, who derived the main articles of his political and 
 social creed from the radical philosopher's great book, 
 was already adoring him as one in the pantheon of the 
 immortal dead, when he learned from Southey that his 
 master and emancipator still walked the earth. He sat 
 down at once and wrote a characteristic epistle, in which 
 he expressed himself with the enthusiasm of a disciple 
 not yet twenty, and respectfully but earnestly besought 
 the living friendship and advice of him whom he re- 
 garded as the light of the new age. Godwin was inter- 
 ested, and long and frequent letters, admirable in tone 
 upon both sides, passed between them. The elder en- 
 deavored to check the irrepressible activity and eager 
 plans of the young reformer, who had no notion of waiting 
 until he should grow old before setting to work to remake 
 society; and the youth, on his part, exhibited a deference 
 and willingness to be guided such as he never showed 
 before or afterwards. The first modification of Shel- 
 ley's idea of Godwin came in consequence of their per- 
 
REMARKS ON SHELLEY 13 
 
 sonal acquaintance, as was natural; but in discovering 
 that Godwin was really an idiosyncratic mortal, as well 
 as an illuminating intellect, Shelley did not yield his 
 admiration for the sage. One can still see the unbounded 
 astonishment of the poet, which Mary Godwin describes, 
 when she told him her father was annoyed by his address- 
 ing him as "Mr." instead of "Esq." in directing his let- 
 ters. They got on very well together, however, until 
 Shelley ran away with Mary — a practical exposition of 
 Godwin's doctrines, which he, having now grown re- 
 spectable and socially cautious, did not at all relish. 
 Shelley had before this aided Godwin somewhat in 
 financial embarrassments. That philosopher was always 
 in debt; and the young disciple, who, though the heir 
 to a great property, had no way of realizing from it 
 except by selling post-obit bonds, agreed with his master 
 that philosophers have a paramount claim on any money 
 their friends might own. He was willing to discharge 
 his duty by getting Godwin out of debt, or assisting him 
 as far as he could in the matter. When he returned to 
 England with Mary he found that the philosopher would 
 not see or forgive him, and positively declined to corre- 
 spond except upon the subject of how much money Shel- 
 ley could give him. Shelley had no thought of not doing 
 his own duty, because of the conduct of other people; and 
 while he felt Godwin's hardness and inconsistency, never- 
 theless he would relieve that great mind from the little 
 annoyances consequent on borrowing money without pro- 
 viding means of repayment. He, however, was not blind ; 
 and what he learned of Godwin in the course of these 
 transactions had a destroying influence upon that ideal 
 of the man which he had formed in his first days of 
 revolutionary hope. In the second year of his life with 
 
i 4 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 Mary he told the philosopher what he thought of the 
 whole matter in a letter which one may be excused for 
 reading with peculiar satisfaction: — 
 
 "It has perpetually appeared to me to have been your 
 especial duty to see that, so far as mankind value your 
 good opinion, we were dealt justly by, and that a young 
 family, innocent and benevolent and united, should not 
 be confounded with prostitutes and seducers. My 
 astonishment, and, I will confess, when I have been 
 treated with most hardness and cruelty by you, my indig- 
 nation, has been extreme, that, knowing as you do my 
 nature, any considerations should have prevailed on you 
 to have been thus harsh and cruel. I lamented also over 
 my ruined hopes of all that your genius once taught me 
 to expect from your virtue, when I found that for your- 
 self, your family, and your creditors you would submit 
 to that communication with me which you once rejected 
 and abhorred, and which no pity for my poverty or suffer- 
 ings, assumed willingly for you, could avail to extort. Do 
 not talk of forgiveness again to me, for my blood boils 
 in my veins, and my gall rises against all that bears the 
 human form, when I think of what I, their benefactor 
 and ardent lover, have endured of enmity and contempt 
 from you and from all mankind." 
 
 The writer was that youth of twenty-three years, of 
 whom Godwin remarks that he knew "that Shelley's 
 temper was occasionally fiery, resentful, and indignant." 
 It is true that it was so, and one is pleased to find upon 
 what fit occasions it broke out. Shelley, however, had 
 undertaken a hopeless and endless task in trying to extri- 
 cate Godwin from debt, and he spent much money, raised 
 at a great sacrifice, in the vain attempt. What he 
 thought of these transactions, when his judgment had 
 
REMARKS ON SHELLEY 15 
 
 matured, we know from another delightfully plain-spoken 
 letter, written five years later, in answer to renewed im- 
 portunities: — 
 
 "I have given you the amount of a considerable fortune, 
 and have destituted myself, for the purpose of realizing 
 it, of nearly four times the amount. Except for the 
 good-will which this transaction seems to have produced 
 between you and me, this money, for any advantage it 
 ever conferred on you, might as well have been thrown 
 into the sea. Had I kept in my own hands this £4,000 
 or £5,000, and administered it in trust for your perma- 
 nent advantage, I should indeed have been your bene- 
 factor. The error, however, was greater in the man of 
 mature age, extensive experience, and penetrating intel- 
 lect than in the crude and impetuous boy. Such an error 
 is seldom committed twice." 
 
 But long before this, Shelley, though his estimate of 
 Godwin's powers, in common with that of the people 
 of the time, remained extravagant, had found out the 
 difference between the author of "Political Justice" and 
 Plato and Bacon. 
 
 If any one wonders at the extent to which Shelley let 
 himself be fleeced by the philosophical radical of Skinner 
 Street, he should reserve some astonishment for the 
 remainder of the shearers. Shelley, it is to be remem- 
 bered, was never in possession of his property, and had 
 only a small allowance at first, and a thousand pounds 
 a year after he was twenty-four years old ; he was extrava- 
 gant in his generosity, and gave money with a free hand, 
 whenever he had any, to the poor about him, to his needy 
 friends, and to causes of one kind and another which 
 excited in him his passion for philanthropy. He was, 
 consequently, in his early days, commonly in debt for his 
 
1 6 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 own expenses, and often in danger of arrest and im- 
 prisonment. When he mentioned his days of poverty, 
 in that letter to Godwin, it was not a mere phrase; and 
 though a settlement was at last made which provided 
 for him sufficiently, he was never ahead in his savings. 
 Under these circumstances, his biography at times re- 
 minds one of the old comedy, with its mob of parasites 
 and legacy-hunters. He was simply victimized by those 
 who could establish any claim on his benevolence. No 
 doubt he gave willingly, with all his heart, to Peacock 
 and Leigh Hunt and the rest, as he did to Godwin, and 
 thought it was his duty as well as his pleasure; but his 
 generosity does not alter the fact that his acquaintances 
 were very dull of conscience in money matters. One 
 begins to relent a little toward Hogg, remembering that 
 he did actually share his own funds with Shelley just 
 after the expulsion from Oxford, when the latter could 
 get no money, owing to his father's displeasure; and for 
 Horace Smith, the banker, who sometimes advanced 
 money to Shelley, and not too much, one has a feeling of 
 amazed respect. 
 
 The worst misfortune of Shelley, however, in the 
 friends he made, was to have met and married Harriet 
 Westbrook. The circumstances of their union and its 
 unlucky course and tragical close have lately been for 
 the first time fully set forth. The marriage on Shelley's 
 side was not originally one of love, but it became one of 
 affection. For two years life went on without the dis- 
 covery of anything to break the happiness of the pair; 
 but after the birth of their first child trouble arose, and 
 rapidly culminated. It is most likely that the sister-in- 
 law, Eliza, who lived with them, was the source of the 
 original dissension by her interference, arbitrariness, and 
 
REMARKS ON SHELLEY 17 
 
 control of Harriet; but, as Shelley had grown in mind 
 and character, the difference between him and his wife 
 in endowment and in taste was bound to make itself 
 felt, and to put an end to the unity of study and spirit 
 of which he had dreamed; and it is clear enough that 
 she had tired of the studies and the purposes in which 
 Shelley's life consisted, and that though overborne for a 
 time, by his influence, she was now showing herself 
 worldly, frivolous, and weak. She had married the heir 
 to a baronetcy and a fortune, and desired to profit by it. 
 In one way and another she had become hard and un- 
 yielding toward Shelley, had made him thoroughly 
 miserable, and, in the earlier months of 1814, was living 
 away from him; and he, on his side, as late as May in 
 that year, as appears from stanzas now first printed, was 
 trying to soften her. While affairs were in this condi- 
 tion he first met Mary Godwin, and he fell passionately 
 in love with her, all the more because of the long strain 
 of dejection and loneliness; and in addition to the story 
 of the dissensions that had arisen in his family, and the 
 difference of character and temperament which had de- 
 clared itself between his wife and himself, Shelley is said 
 to have told Mary that Harriet had been unfaithful to 
 him. If he did not tell her then, he did afterwards. 
 On what evidence he relied we do not know; nor is there 
 any confirmatory proof from other quarters except a 
 letter of Godwin's written after Harriet's suicide, in 
 which he states the same fact as coming from unquestion- 
 able authority unconnected with Shelley. Not long be- 
 fore his death Shelley renewed the charge, though in a 
 veiled and inferential way, in a letter to Southey, in 
 which he defends himself for his conduct in this matter, 
 declares his innocence of any harm done or intended, 
 
1 8 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 refuses to be held responsible for the suicide of Harriet, 
 and practically asserts that he had grounds for divorce, 
 had he chosen to free himself in that way. There is 
 no need to prove that Shelley was right in his belief 
 of his wife's infidelity; but if it be thought that Shelley 
 did in truth believe her guilty, that has much to do with 
 our estimate of his action. He was twenty-two years 
 old, or nearly that, and he held radical views as to the 
 permanence and sacredness of the marriage bond, as 
 also did Mary, who inherited them from her mother. 
 Their decision to unite their lives, under these circum- 
 stances, was a practical admission that Shelley's home 
 was in fact broken up, and that he was free to offer, 
 and Mary to accept, not legal union, but a common home, 
 with the expectation and purpose of complete devotion 
 one to the other, in pure spirit and for the ordinary ends 
 of marriage. 
 
 Shelley did not proceed secretly. He summoned Har- 
 riet, who had not thought of such serious results of her 
 action, to London, and told her what he was going to do. 
 She did not consent to the separation, nor does she seem 
 to have regarded it as final. Shelley had a settlement 
 made for her by the lawyers, provided credit for her, and 
 two weeks after the interview left England with Mary. 
 He wrote to Harriet on the journey, assured her of his 
 affection and his care for her, and indulged a plan that 
 she should live near them, which is, perhaps, the most 
 surprising instance of Shelley's purity of mind, and of 
 the unworldliness or unreality, as one chooses to call it, 
 of his conception of how human life might be lived. On 
 his return he saw her, and agreed to leave the children 
 with her; and when his allowance was fixed at a thousand 
 pounds, he gave orders to honor her drafts for two hun- 
 
 
REMARKS ON SHELLEY 19 
 
 dred pounds annually. She had an equal amount from 
 her own family, which had been paid since the beginning 
 of their married life. When Shelley left England the 
 second time, she was thus provided for, one would think, 
 sufficiently. On his return he lost sight of her, and was 
 anxiously inquiring for her, when the news of her suicide 
 reached him. She had put the children, of whom the 
 eldest was three years old, out to board, at a time when 
 he was ill; she had not been permitted to see her father; 
 but the circumstances immediately surrounding her death 
 are not known. Shelley, though he bore his share of 
 natural sorrow for the death of one to whom he had been 
 tenderly attached, did not hold himself guilty of any 
 wrong. 
 
 It is no wonder that in the last few years of his life 
 Shelley would not talk of his earlier days, and had a kind 
 of shame in remembering in what ruin his hopes and 
 purposes and the enthusiasm of his youth had fallen; he 
 felt it as an indignity to the nobleness of spirit which, 
 in spite of all his failures, he knew had been his through- 
 out. As we see those years, it is only for himself that 
 we prize them; and it is a pleasure to be enabled to look 
 on them free from that saddening retrospect of his own 
 mind, and observe how natural and simple he really was. 
 No one has ever had the days of his youth so laid open 
 to the common gaze, and this is one charm of his per- 
 sonality, that we know him as a brother or a friend. The 
 pages afford many happy anecdotes; but one can linger 
 here only to mark the constant playfulness of Shelley, 
 which was a bright element in his earlier career and not 
 altogether absent in his Italian life. The passion for 
 floating paper-boats, which he indulged unweariedly, is 
 well known; but at all times he was ready for sport, and 
 
20 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 could even trifle with his dearest plans, as in the flotilla 
 of bottles and aerial navy of fire-balloons, all loaded with 
 revolutionary pamphlets, which he sent forth on the 
 Devonshire coast. His running about the little garden, 
 hand in hand with Harriet; his impersonating fabulous 
 monsters with Leigh Hunt's children, who begged him 
 "not to do the horn"; and his favorite sport with his 
 little temporarily adopted Marlow girl, of placing her on 
 the dining-table, and rushing with it across the long 
 room, are instances that readily recur to mind, and illus- 
 trate the gaiety and high spirits which really belonged 
 to him, and which perhaps the Serchio last knew when 
 it bore him and his boat on his summer-day voyages. 
 This side of his nature ought to be remembered, as well 
 as that "occasionally fiery, resentful, and indignant" 
 quality which Godwin observed, and the intense and 
 restless practicality of the impatient reformer, when one 
 thinks of Shelley (as he has been too often represented) 
 as only a morbid, sensitive, idealizing poet, of a rather 
 feminine spirit. That portrait of him is untruthful, for 
 he was of a most masculine, active, and naturally joyful 
 nature. 
 
 After he left England for the last time, and took up his 
 abode in Italy, principally, it would seem, because of the 
 social reproach and public stigma under which he lived, 
 and by which he felt deeply wronged, he was not really 
 much more fortunate in his company. The immediate 
 reason for the journey was to take Byron's natural daugh- 
 ter, Allegra, to her father at Venice; the mother, Miss 
 Clairmont, went with them, and, as it turned out, con- 
 tinued to be a member of Shelley's family, as she had 
 been since his union with Mary. It is now known that 
 the Shelleys were ignorant of the liaison, both when it 
 
REMARKS ON SHELLEY 21 
 
 began in London, and afterward when they first met 
 Byron at Geneva; but Shelley had a warm affection for 
 Miss Clairmont, whose friendliness appealed to his sym- 
 pathy, and he spent much time in Italy in trying to make 
 Byron do his duty toward Allegra, and to soften the ill- 
 nature of her parents toward each other. Byron's conduct 
 in this matter was a powerful element in generating in Shel- 
 ley that thorough contempt he expressed for the former 
 as a man. But though Shelley's most winning qualities 
 are to be observed, and his tact was conspicuously called 
 forth by their negotiations in regard to the child, yet the 
 connection with Miss Clairmont was unfortunate. That 
 it repeatedly drew scandal upon him was a minor matter; 
 it was of more consequence that in his family she was 
 a disturbing element, and Mary, who had disliked to 
 have her as an inmate almost from the first, finally 
 insisted on her withdrawal, but not until frequent dis- 
 agreements had sadly marred the peace of Shelley's 
 home. Mary, indeed, was not perfect, any more than 
 other very young wives; and by her jealousies, and yet 
 more, it seems, by her attempts to make Shelley con- 
 form to the world, especially in the last year or two, 
 she tried and harassed him; and so it came about that 
 his love took the form of tenderness of her welfare and 
 feelings, and often of despondency for himself. Miss 
 Clairmont was a source of continual trouble for him in 
 many ways: she was of an unhappy temperament and 
 hard to live with; but with his long-enduring and chari- 
 table disposition, and his extraordinary tenacity in 
 attachment, and perfect readiness to admit the least 
 obligation upon him, proceeding from any one in trouble, 
 he never wavered in his devotion to her interests and care 
 for her happiness. It is a curious fact that Miss Clair- 
 
22 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 mont, who lived to be very old, manipulated the written 
 records of this portion of her life, so that her evidence 
 is of very questionable worth, though better, one hopes, 
 than that of her mother, the second Mrs. Godwin, whose 
 lying about the Shelleys was of the most wholesale and 
 conscienceless kind. 
 
 As with Miss Clairmont, so in a less degree with 
 others of the Italian circle. But enough has been said of 
 the character of the people whom Shelley knew. It can- 
 not be that they cut so poor a figure because of Shelley's 
 presence, hard as the contrast of common human nature 
 must be with him. It is observable, and it is in some 
 sort a test, that he did not overvalue them. Hogg, Pea- 
 cock, and Medwin were all deceived, if they thought 
 he trusted them or held them closer than mere friendly 
 acquaintances; there is no evidence that he felt for 
 Williams or Trelawney any more than an affectionate 
 good will; toward Leigh Hunt he had the kindest feel- 
 ing of gratitude and of respect, and for Gisborne and 
 Reveley a warm cordiality, but nothing more. Mary 
 he loved, though with full knowledge of her weaknesses, 
 in a manly way; for Miss Clairmont he had a true affec- 
 tion; and he recognized poetically a womanly attractive- 
 ness in Mrs. Williams, who seems to have represented 
 to him the spirit of restfulness and peace, in the last 
 months of his life. But at the end, his errors respecting 
 men and things being swept away, his ideals removed 
 into the eternal world, and his disillusion complete, the 
 most abiding impression is of the loneliness in which 
 he found himself; and remembering this, one forgets 
 the companions he had upon his journey, and fastens at- 
 tention more closely upon the man through whose genius 
 that journey has become one of undying memory. 
 
REMARKS ON SHELLEY 23 
 
 There is no thought of eulogizing him in saying that 
 he represents the ideal of personal and social aspiration, 
 of the love of beauty and of virtue equally, and of the 
 hope of eradicating misery from the world ; hence springs 
 in large measure his hold on young hearts, on those who 
 value the spirit above all else and do not confine their 
 recognition of it within too narrow bounds, and on all 
 who are believers in the reform of the world by human 
 agencies. He represents this ideal of aspiration in its 
 most impassioned form; and in his life one reads the 
 saddest history of disillusion. It is because, in the 
 course of this, he abated no whit of his lifelong hope, 
 did not change his practice of virtue, and never yielded 
 his perfect faith in the supreme power of love, both in 
 human life and in the universe, that his name has be- 
 come above all price to those over whom his influence 
 extends. It is, perhaps, more as a man than as a poet 
 merely that he is beloved; the shadows upon his reputa- 
 tion, as one approaches nearer, are burnt away in light; 
 and he is the more honored, the more he is known. For 
 it would be wrong to close even these informal remarks 
 without expressing dissent from the assumption that Shel- 
 ley's intellectual and moral life was one long mistake. 
 Disillusion it was, and the nature of it has been indicated 
 by the single point of his acquaintances; but a life of 
 disillusion and one of mere mistake are not to be con- 
 founded together. Better fortune cannot be asked for a 
 youth than that he should conceive life nobly, and, in 
 finding wherein it falls short, should yet not fall short 
 himself of his ideal beyond what may be forgiven to 
 human frailty. Shelley's misconceptions were the con- 
 ditions of his living the ideal life at all, and differed from 
 those of other youths in face of an untried world only 
 
24 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 by their moral elevation, passion, and essential nobleness; 
 he matured as other men do by time and growth and 
 experience, and he suffered much by the peculiar circum- 
 stances of his fate; but in the issue the substance of 
 error in his life was less than it seems. Shelley, at least, 
 never admitted he had been wrong in the essential doc- 
 trines of his creed and the motives of his acts, though he 
 had been deceived in regard to human nature and what 
 was possible to it in society. 
 
 III. HIS ITALIAN LETTERS. 
 
 The prose work of Shelley has remained in the ob- 
 scurity which it once shared with his poetry. The formal 
 essays, which concern the transitory affairs of the world 
 or themes of thought remote through their generality, 
 are valued, even by admirers of Shelley, mainly as media 
 of his spirit; the familiar letters, scattered in old books, 
 or collected only in a costly edition, and deprived of 
 interest effectiveness because those of high and enduring 
 interest have never been selected and massed until re- 
 cently, have escaped any wide public attention; even 
 the translations have been neglected. All this really 
 large body of prose, however exalted by its informing 
 enthusiasm, however exquisite in language, and melodious, 
 lies outside the open pathways of literature. It is this 
 fact which gave the element of surprise to what Mr. 
 Arnold called his doubt "whether Shelley's delightful 
 "Essays and Letters," which deserve to be far more read 
 than they are now, will not resist the wear and tear 
 of time better, and finally come to stand higher, than his 
 poetry," — a judgment which well deserved Dr. Garnett's 
 quiet rejoinder that "this deliverance will be weighed by 
 
REMARKS ON SHELLEY 25 
 
 those to whose lot it may fall to determine Mr. Arnold's 
 own place as a critic." Dr. Garnett adds that, in an age 
 when all letters approximate to the ideal set by men of 
 business, Shelley's alone, among those of his time, rank 
 with Gray's, Pope's, Cowper's, or Walpole's in possessing 
 a certain classical impress similar to that of deliberate 
 artistic work; and, secondly, that they exhibit the mind of 
 the poet as clearly as Marlborough's do the mind of the 
 general, or Macaulay's the mind of the man of letters. 
 Their two prime qualities are beauty of form and trans- 
 parency; fitness of words, sweetness of cadence, mod- 
 ulation of feeling in immediate response to thought 
 and image, all conspiring to make up perfection of utter- 
 ance, are continually present, but not through erasure and 
 elaboration. Shelley's self-training in literature, almost 
 unrivaled as an apprenticeship in its length and continu- 
 ity, more comprehensive, profound, and ardent than 
 Pope's, more vital than Milton's, had made such literary 
 lucidity and grace the habit of his pen, and he was for- 
 tunate in employing his gift upon subjects intrinsically 
 most interesting to cultivated men: upon the art and 
 landscape of Italy, or his own always high human rela- 
 tions, or his poetic moods. 
 
 In what he says of statues and paintings he shows but 
 slight knowledge of art. The keenness of his perceptions 
 and the warmth of his feelings made him particularly 
 open to sensuous effects, so that in general he worships 
 the later schools. In painting, especially, he can hardly 
 be considered a safe guide for others, because his praise 
 or censure is largely dependent on his temperament for 
 its justification: a picture which is consonant with his own 
 imagination, and stirs it, is thereby raised and glorified, 
 J)ut one whose theme would have been differently de- 
 
26 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 veloped by himself is at once made pale by contrast witK 
 the quick visions of his own vividly pictorial mind. Here 
 is a portion of his description of a Christ Beatified: — 
 
 "The countenance is heavy, as it were, with the rapture 
 of the spirit; the lips parted, but scarcely parted, with 
 the breath of intense but regulated passion; the eyes are 
 calm and benignant; the whole features harmonized in 
 majesty and sweetness." 
 
 One cannot but feel that the face which Shelley thus 
 summons up before us bears the same relation to the 
 original as what the dull-minded call his plagiarisms 
 from Lodge do to that poet's lyrics. Shelley often paints 
 the picture over upon the outlines of the old canvas; but 
 this transforming or penetrating power, as it will be 
 differently named just as one believes the given picture 
 to lack or possess what Shelley saw in it, lends such 
 passages not only surpassing beauty, but a real value as 
 interpretations of art. Much as Ruskin would differ 
 from Shelley's judgments, the two are essentially similar 
 in their mode of treatment, and in their faculty of giving 
 the equivalent of form and color in eloquence. 
 
 The description of landscape, which is another prin- 
 cipal topic, possesses even more plainly classic beauty. 
 Whether Shelley writes of nature in her wild and pic- 
 turesque scenes, or where the presence of man has added 
 pathos or dignity to her loveliness; whether he flashes 
 the view upon us in one perfect line, or unfolds it slowly 
 in unconfused detail, he displays the highest power in 
 this field of literature. This view from the Forum of 
 Pompeii, which, instead of being robed with "the gray 
 veil of his own words," seems filled with "the purple 
 noon's transparent light," cannot be surpassed as speech 
 at once familiar and noble : — 
 
REMARKS ON SHELLEY 27 
 
 "At the upper end, supported on an elevated platform, 
 stands the temple of Jupiter. Under the colonnade of 
 its portico we sate, and pulled out our oranges, and 
 figs, and bread, and medlars — sorry fare, you will say 
 — and rested to eat. Here was a magnificent spectacle. 
 Above and between the multitudinous shafts of the sun- 
 shining columns was seen the sea, reflecting the purple 
 noon of heaven above it, and supporting, as it were, on 
 its line the dark, lofty mountains of Sorrento, of a blue 
 inexpressibly deep, and tinged toward their summits with 
 streaks of new-fallen snow. Between was one small green 
 island. To the right was Caprese, Inarime, Prochyta, 
 and Misenum. Behind was the single summit of Vesu- 
 vius, rolling forth volumes of thick white smoke, whose 
 foam-like column was sometimes darted into the clear 
 dark sky, and fell in little streaks along the wind. Be- 
 tween Vesuvius and the nearer mountains, as through a 
 chasm, was seen the main line of the loftiest Apennines 
 to the east. The day was radiant and warm. Every now 
 and then we heard subterranean thunder of Vesuvius ; its 
 distant, deep peals seemed to shake the very air and light 
 of day, which interpenetrated our frames with the sullen 
 and tremendous sound." 
 
 Thus he wrote when merely passive to nature's influ- 
 ences; but when he begins to think he irradiates the 
 scene; he lifts it with his aspiration and softens it with 
 his regret; he brings it near by reminiscences of the 
 English fields and cliffs and streams; he informs it with 
 the large interests of the intellectual life; and not in- 
 frequently he concludes with a passage which, in the 
 arrangement of its images, the sequence of its thought 
 and feeling, the unity of its effect, in all except metrical 
 structure, is a poem. Many paragraphs might be cited 
 
2 8 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 which show the character of his genius as directly as 
 do his verses, and which justify the claim advanced for 
 them as having the permanent interest of ideal beauty. 
 
 The principal charm of these letters, however, as Dr. 
 Garnett says, is not artistic, but moral. It is not meant 
 to refer by this term to the practical morality of Shel- 
 ley's deeds, or to his conscientiousness, humanity, self- 
 sacrifice, or other such qualities as they are here dis- 
 played; of these there is no longer need to speak. Nor 
 is it meant simply to express the gratification one feels 
 at finding that Shelley, unlike many men of letters who 
 disappoint us by being only common mortals in private 
 life, never falls below our conception of him, indicative as 
 it is of his purity that his "unpremeditated song" does 
 not fail to reach the height of his great argument. What 
 impresses one most is rather the character of the life 
 itself, of the mind to which "trust in all things high came 
 natural," that moved with equal ease among the things 
 of beauty, on the heights of thoughts, or amid the com- 
 mon and trivial cares of household life and in the offices 
 of friendship, and knew no difference in the level of his 
 life, so single was his nature and so completely expressed 
 in all he did. In the most ideal passages, in those most 
 impersonal, one does not lose the sense of friendliness in 
 them, of the sweet human relationship which underlies 
 the telling of what he has to say, and keeps the letters in 
 their appropriate sphere. They are not rhapsodies, or 
 soliloquies, or disquisitions; in other words, the visita- 
 tions of the spirit that came to Shelley, and left record 
 of themselves in this beauty and eloquence and imagi- 
 native passion, did not isolate him even momentarily, 
 and could not sever him from his friends. Who these 
 were, we know well enough: Miss Hitchener, the blue- 
 
REMARKS ON SHELLEY 29 
 
 stocking; Hogg, the betrayer; the Williams and Gis- 
 bornes, who seem to have belonged to the class of people 
 known as satisfying; Peacock, who, with all his nym- 
 pholepsy, was a born beef-eater; Smith, the obliging; 
 Hunt, the "wren," and Byron, the "eagle," in Shelley's 
 nomenclature — the too fortunate people who knew Shel- 
 ley and whom he loved. They formed the environment, 
 which needs to be kept in mind by any who would esti- 
 mate Shelley's moral power; amid them he lived his high 
 life and made it theirs, in the case of the most, during 
 their communion with him. In a vague analogical way 
 he sometimes brings to mind the Greek gods, who, with all 
 their divine attributes of beauty, power, dignity, were 
 singular among deities for their companionableness; 
 Shelley had that divine quality of being familiar and re- 
 taining his original brightness. Toward Byron alone 
 does he show any repulsion; he recognized Byron's ad- 
 mirable qualities, but he was alienated by the latter's 
 selfishness, worldliness, and earthliness, even while he 
 kept terms of amity. Shelley's sentence on Byron is 
 most serious evidence against him, and it is now sup- 
 ported by much that Shelley could not have known; but 
 it need not be discussed here. 
 
 It is especially fortunate that the letters exhibit him 
 after his boyhood, with its false starts, its follies and 
 prejudices, its narrowness and confusion, was passed; 
 of that time we get only a noble echo in his sad remem- 
 brance, amid his seeming failure, of the lofty purpose 
 with which he had entered life, while we see the depth 
 unconfused by the tumult of his soul. In these last 
 years, it is true, the thwarting of his practical instinct 
 was ending in hopelessness; but if the earthly paradise 
 that was the faith of his youth was now fading away, 
 
3 o LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 he was lifting his eyes to the city in the heavens, and had 
 acknowledged the vanity of seeking the ideal he knew, 
 except in the eternal; he had worked out his salvation. 
 Perhaps after all we do wrong to lament his death; with 
 that tragedy, in which every thought of Shelley involun- 
 tarily concludes, his work as a quickener of the spirit 
 was accomplished. More finished works of art he might 
 have given to us; he could not have left a nobler or 
 more enkindling memory. These letters help in the 
 still necessary labor of clearing away the misconceptions 
 concerning him. In them one sees him only in the quiet 
 of his soul, and will come to a better knowledge and 
 perhaps a higher truth concerning him than is possible 
 by reading his changeful poems alone. 
 
SIR GEORGE BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, 
 AND WORDSWORTH 
 
 Sir George Beaumont appears to have been one of 
 the most agreeable of men. He had not merely high 
 breeding, but humanity of disposition, delightful compan- 
 ionableness, and the refinement that springs from artistic 
 pursuits. Haydon accuses his manners of a want of 
 moral courage. "What his taste dictated to be right, he 
 would shrink from asserting if it shocked the prejudices 
 of others or put himself to a moment's inconvenience," 
 was the fault that this critic had in mind ; but this is only 
 to class him with the men who do not think that the 
 truth is always to be spoken in society, and prefer tact 
 to an aggressive egotism. Sir Humphry Davy notices 
 especially that he was a "remarkably sensible man, which 
 I mention because it is somewhat remarkable in a painter 
 of genius who is at the same time a man of rank and an 
 exceedingly amusing companion." Southey was struck 
 by the apparent happiness of his life, and the absence of 
 any reference to afflictions or anxieties that he might have 
 experienced, and says that he "had as little liking for 
 country sports as for public business of any kind," be- 
 ing absorbed by art and nature; and, to add Scott's kind 
 words of him in his diary, that excellent judge writes, 
 "Sir George Beaumont's dead; by far the most sensible 
 and pleasing man I ever knew. Kind, too, in his nature, 
 and generous — gentle in society, and of those mild man- 
 ners which tend to soften the causticity of the general 
 
 31 
 
32 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 London tone of persiflage and personal satire. I am 
 very sorry — as much as it is in my nature to be — for 
 one whom I could see but seldom." This is a concert 
 of praise which it is a pleasure to associate with the name 
 of the man who was, chiefly, the founder of the National 
 Gallery in Trafalgar Square. 
 
 He was a friend of the artists of his time, and a 
 patron of Wilkie and Haydon when they needed aid. 
 In the latter's autobiography there is a bright account 
 of a fortnight's visit paid by these two to Coleorton, 
 Sir George's country-seat, which brings the interior life 
 there vividly to the eye, though it borrows something 
 from the unconscious humor of the narrator, who always 
 fills the scene with himself in the leading part. One 
 pauses to note a characteristic sentence of the incor- 
 rigible beggar in which he breaks out with the indig- 
 nant remark, "All my friends were always advising me 
 what to do instead of advising the Government what 
 to do for me." Sir George, however, had other friends, 
 and most noteworthy of all, Wordsworth, of whom he 
 first heard from Coleridge. Before meeting him, un- 
 derstanding that the two friends wished to live in the 
 same neighborhood, he bought and presented to Words- 
 worth the little property of Applethwaite near Greta 
 Hall, Coleridge's abode. Wordsworth never used the 
 ground for the purpose for which it was given, but it 
 remained in his possession. From this time, 1803, a close 
 friendship grew up between his family at Grasmere and 
 the one at Coleorton, grounded upon common interests 
 and cemented with mutual exchanges of kindness and 
 regard, so that it survived until the death of Sir George 
 and Lady Beaumont, herself an excellent woman, of 
 whom Crabb Robinson wrote "She is a gentlewoman of 
 
BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, WORDSWORTH $ s 
 
 great sweetness and dignity, I should think among the 
 most interesting persons in the country." 
 
 Of the two poets Coleridge was at first more inti- 
 mate with the Beaumonts. This was in 1803, the period 
 of his illness, just previous to the voyage to Malta. The 
 letters he wrote are very painful to read. The sub- 
 ject is usually the ego; and in reading the apologies 
 of the writer for treating of this ever-present theme, and 
 his observations on his own lack of vanity and the 
 danger he is in of undervaluing his powers and works, 
 one can scarcely fail to be struck by the identity in many 
 respects of the egotism of the overweening and of the 
 self-depreciating kinds. The aspects are different, but 
 the weakness has the same root. In Coleridge it was, 
 perhaps, no more than a question of the state of his 
 stomach whether his assiduous interest in himself should 
 result in intellectual pride or in self-abasement; but 
 without giving too severe a touch, it is clear enough that 
 his eye, when fixed on himself, was on the wrong object. 
 
 The letters to the Beaumonts are characterized by 
 this complaining and absorbing egotism of the invalid, 
 unfortified by patience, resolution, or even self-respect. 
 The ravages of disease in its physical aspects, the laying 
 bare of bodily conditions and symptoms of decay, would 
 be in themselves intolerably disagreeable, but it is much 
 worse to be obliged to attend at the sick-bed of the 
 mind; and in Coleridge's case the internal weakness of 
 the spirit excites the greatest pity, and this feeling nearly 
 passes involuntarily into disgust. The sensibility of his 
 nervous organization was acute. He speaks of times 
 when, as he was accusing himself of insensibility through 
 incapacity to feel, his "whole frame has gone crash, as 
 it were." Under the excitement of his emotions, he 
 
34 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 dissolves in weakness; the spectacle is not a pleasant one; 
 there is something almost ignoble in such loss of self- 
 control. When Wordsworth recited to him, if one can 
 fancy such a thing, the entire thirteen books on the 
 growth of his own mind, in 1807, Coleridge composed 
 a poem, not very coherent or noble, though with personal 
 pathos, in which he says that when he rose from his seat, 
 he "found himself in prayer." It was apparently not 
 an unusual termination to the access of emotion, and 
 it occurred more than once in his relations with the 
 Beaumonts. The mention of it, however, in his corre- 
 spondence with them, offends one, not in itself, but by 
 the manner of it; indeed, the manner of his earlier let- 
 ters is indescribable. Their sentiment is so tremulous 
 and overwrought with fever that they resemble maunder- 
 ing; they are "sicklied o'er" with mental disease, and 
 belong to the pathology of genius. 
 
 One long epistle, in which he devotes himself to an 
 analysis of his mental condition at the time when he 
 was what is now known as a Social Democrat, shows by 
 an eminent example in what ways the minds of young 
 men of enthusiasm, who have caught the contagion of 
 new ideas, commonly act, and how their tongues are 
 kept going. Coleridge and Southey were rampant 
 young radicals for about ten months, and might many 
 times have been justly thrown into jail for the use of 
 unlawful language and seditiously fomenting the passions 
 of the people. Coleridge ascribes the beginning of his 
 ramblings from the true path of respectable politics 
 partly to his intellectual isolation among his relatives 
 and virtuous acquaintances generally, who thought that 
 his "opinions were the drivel of a babe, but the guilt 
 attached to them — this was the gray hair and rigid 
 
BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, WORDSWORTH 35 
 
 muscle of inveterate depravity;" and partly, he declares, 
 it was due to the thirst for kindness planted in himself, 
 in the "me, who," he says, "from my childhood have had 
 no avarice, no ambition, whose very vanity in my vainest 
 moments was nine-tenths of it the desire and delight 
 and necessity of loving and of being beloved," — needs 
 which he found satisfied in the welcome and company 
 of "the Democrats." So he fell among evil companions. 
 On becoming an agitator upon the platform he suc- 
 cumbed to the temptations of the fluent speaker, gifted 
 "with an ebullient fancy, a flowing utterance, a light 
 and dancing heart, and a disposition to catch time by 
 the very rapidity of my own motion, and to speak 
 vehemently from mere verbal associations; choosing 
 sentences and sentiments for the very reason which 
 would have made me recoil with a dying away of the 
 heart and unutterable horror from the actions expressed 
 in such sentiments and sentences, namely, because they 
 were wild and original, and vehement and fantastic." 
 Here is a choice specimen of his eloquence, on the oc- 
 casion of a supper by some lord, to commemorate an 
 Austrian victory: "This is a true Lord's Supper in the 
 communion of darkness! This is a Eucharist of Hell! 
 a sacrament of misery! over each morsel and each drop 
 of which the spirit of some murdered innocent cries 
 aloud to God, This is my body! and this is my blood!" 
 There is one sin against society, however, which he 
 declined to commit, and he took great credit to himself 
 for his obstinate refusal. He joined no party, club, or 
 any of the radical societies, which he characterizes as 
 "ascarides in the bowels of the state, subsisting on the 
 weakness and diseasedness, and having for their final 
 object the death of that state, whose life had been their 
 
36 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 birth and growth, and continued to be their soul nourish- 
 ment." He remained outside of these entangling alli- 
 ances, a free-lance speechifier, in the condition of mind 
 of the willing martyr: "The very clank of the chains 
 that were to be put about my limbs would not at that 
 time have deterred me from a strong phrase or striking 
 metaphor, although I had had no other inducement to 
 the use of the same except the wantonness of luxuriant 
 imagination, and my aversion to abstain from anything 
 simply because it was dangerous." Such was Coleridge 
 at twenty-four years — the age at which Emmett was 
 executed ; whose death called out this long letter of rem- 
 iniscences concerning his own career as an agitator, and 
 of reflections upon the impulses and justification of 
 revolutionary orators, their temptations, errors, and illu- 
 sions. He understood the fate of Emmett with greater 
 clearness because of this little episode in his own life, 
 and it is noticeable that he has the grace not to think that 
 the young patriot's career bore too much resemblance 
 to his own; but this confession of his foolishness in 
 general, spread out somewhat magniloquently before the 
 eyes of his aristocratic correspondent, is a lesson in hu- 
 man nature well worth a moment's attention from con- 
 servative and orderly people. 
 
 Coleridge's career — if a brief digression may be par- 
 doned here — was only too much in keeping with the 
 temperament of these letters to the Beaumonts. Wher- 
 ever one comes upon it in the memoirs of the time, the 
 story is the same. Soften it as we may, that career was 
 one of those, too frequent among men of letters, that 
 can never be told, so marred by disease and by moral 
 feebleness, so full of shame and supineness and waste, 
 that it must be kept out of sight. During the years 
 
BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, WORDSWORTH 37 
 
 of his maturity he was a broken man, and knew him- 
 self to be such; from the time that, in becoming the 
 victim of opium, he lost what little will-power was orig- 
 inally his, he felt that the spirit of imagination had 
 left his house of life, and in its place was henceforward 
 
 "Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain, 
 And genius given, and knowledge won in vain; " 
 
 and in this mood of pervading despondency he seems 
 always in fancy to be haunting the grave of his dead self. 
 This consciousness of his loss, though it had more of 
 the stupor of despair than of the sharpness of penitence, 
 lends some impressiveness to his story; but this pain 
 was not searching enough to save him for himself, nor of 
 a kind to make men oblivious of those violent contrasts 
 in his life which offend our sense of Tightness. • It is 
 a morally confusing spectacle to see genius professing 
 the highest knowledge of the secret things of God, but 
 itself wrecked; and it requires something more than the 
 poet's sorrow at the withering of his wreath to reconcile 
 such an antithesis. 
 
 Then, too, although Coleridge's poetic imagination 
 undoubtedly was quenched at once, or gave out only 
 brief and random flashes in his manhood, it may well 
 be questioned whether the waste of his faculties was not 
 due quite as much to mismanagement of the mind as 
 to the palsying of his powers of effort, purpose, or 
 orderly reduction of thought. He lived in the period 
 of universal philosophers, and in his study of meta- 
 physics and theology in Germany he must have fixed in 
 his mind the habit of including the omne scibile in his 
 system. This was the more easy for him, as he had 
 in unusual proportion that false comprehensiveness 
 
38 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 which seizes on knowledge, not by all its relations as 
 it stands in the body of science, but by some particular 
 relation which it may seem to bear, truly or untruly, to 
 some preconceived idea that has been taken as the or- 
 ganizing principle of the new scheme. It is because 
 of their common participation in this method that poetry 
 and philosophy, in the old sense, approach so much nearer 
 each other than either does to science. It is plain to 
 any one who reads the topics of Coleridge's discourses 
 that his mind ranged through a vast circuit of knowledge 
 habitually, but also that it touched the facts only at 
 single points and superficially; in other words, he dis- 
 plays compass rather than grasp. In dealing with the 
 mass of his learning, he showed no lack of systematiz- 
 ing power, though it may easily be believed that in con- 
 versation with chance visitors the fine filaments of logi- 
 cal connection escaped their sight. The trouble was in 
 the original mode of elaborating the system — the old 
 Greek way of philosophizing by subtle manipulation of 
 analogies, convenient facts, half-understood harmonies of 
 this with that, arbitrary constructions, with now and 
 then a dead plunge into the unfathomable. To borrow 
 Coleridge's own distinction, this procedure is to logic 
 what fancy is to the imagination — a freak of the mind 
 partly out of relation to the truth of things. It is the 
 modern form of scholasticism. 
 
 Coleridge, however, whose speculative powers were 
 thus employed, is believed to have been a great light to 
 those who had eyes to see. What particular truth 
 Maurice and others derived from him is, nevertheless, 
 not evident. He shared the awakening power that 
 idealists possess, generally in proportion to their con- 
 sistency and the intensity of their personal conviction. 
 
BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, WORDSWORTH 39 
 
 Idealism, by the very fact that it is an enfranchisement 
 from sense, is a tonic to the mind; it quickens the 
 activity of thought and facilitates its process be- 
 cause it assumes the mastery of the universe, and makes 
 reality pliable to its hand. This may or may not be 
 lawful, but it generates a feeling of command and of 
 liberty highly favorable to spiritual development. To 
 some men impressionable on that side of their nature 
 Coleridge was the giver of this freedom, and this has been 
 the case especially with members of the clergy who are 
 closely attached to theological dogma. Such persons 
 found in Coleridge's mind the rare and curious coexist- 
 ence of fixed dogma with incessant speculation: he 
 afforded the sense of untrammeled investigation without 
 once disturbing the certainty of the prejudged cause. 
 This phantom of liberalism was a very quieting tutelar 
 genius to some educated men, who thus kept up a sem- 
 blance of thinking; but influence of this sort is neces- 
 sarily transitory. His Scriptural renderings of philosophy 
 give place to those of other theologians, who rationalize 
 on new grounds of scientific knowledge instead of Ger- 
 man metaphysics, while the stimulation that was fur- 
 nished by his idealism may be more simply and directly 
 derived from less involved and abstruse thinkers. His 
 theology and metaphysics, in pursuit of which he wasted 
 his powers, are already seen to be transient. On the 
 other hand, his criticism has articulated the works of 
 minor authors who have themselves written in a formal 
 style, nor has its influence been harmed by its frequent 
 over-refinement and fancifulness; and his poetry has 
 remained untouched by time. It belongs to the period 
 of his early enthusiasm, before he had become too dulled 
 for the breath of inspiration to kindle him; and fortu- 
 
4 o LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 nately one can read nearly all the best of it without a 
 thought of the dreary after-life of the poet, which has 
 no vital interest to any one except as an illustration of 
 prolonged failure due to many causes, but not less to a 
 lack of mental than of moral self-government. He in- 
 filtrated a peculiar intellectual life into the clergy of 
 his time, but in them it came to nothing more tangible 
 and permanent than in himself. Will it be long before 
 Carlyle's picture of the Seer at Highgate will be the 
 only supplement to "The Ancient Mariner," so far as the 
 general knowledge of Coleridge is concerned, and all 
 between nothing but the weariness of the opium-eater's 
 hiding? 
 
 Perhaps the serenity of Wordsworth's home at Gras- 
 mere gains by the miserable contrast. Thither Coleridge 
 came for invigoration ; thither, when he finally separated 
 from his wife, he brought or sent the children; and when 
 he could not or would not retire to the hospitality and 
 pleasant companionship of the household where he found 
 the feminine sympathy which he had failed of in his 
 own marriage, Wordsworth would set out to visit him 
 with moral support and cheer. A different interest united 
 Wordsworth and Sir George Beaumont; it was the love 
 of nature. Landscape was the subject of their thoughts. 
 Sir George painted it, Wordsworth poetized it; in the 
 life of both it was a permanent resource to which they 
 constantly resorted, and they liked to blend their work 
 in this solvent — the pictures of the one becoming a 
 text for the poems of the other, and vice versa. The 
 interest Wordsworth felt in landscape gardening, in modi- 
 fying wild nature, and his ideas regarding the methods 
 and aims of the art, are brought out by the part he 
 had in planning the grounds at Coleorton. Sir George 
 
BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, WORDSWORTH 41 
 
 rebuilt these, and, in laying out the winter garden in 
 particular, he had frequent recourse to the taste of his 
 friend; and as Wordsworth was that year occupying 
 the old farmhouse on the estate, the business of thinking 
 out and overseeing this work was at once diversion and 
 restful employment amid his poetic labors. He wrote 
 at great length on the subject to Lady Beaumont, and 
 laid before her an elaborate plan full of ivy, holly, 
 juniper, yews, open sunshine glades, flower-borders, an 
 alley, a bower, a spray-fountain, a quarry, a distant 
 spire, a pool with two gold-fish, a vine-clad old cottage, 
 and other things, which are artificial enough in the read- 
 ing, but in reality seem remarkably well fitted to mingle 
 the charm of cultivation with the wildness of the ever- 
 greens, and make a sheltering retreat where the life of 
 nature would linger longest in autumn and revive earli- 
 est in the warm sun. 
 
 "Painters and poets," he wrote, "have had the credit 
 of being reckoned the fathers of English gardening," and 
 he felt thus in the line of succession in the art. It is 
 most interesting to observe how he obtains suggestions 
 from the poets, and makes their Pegasus plough his field. 
 He was, of course, opposed to undue interference with 
 nature and the deformity it occasions, and also to the 
 ostentation of the wealth or station of the owner. "It 
 is a substitution of little things for great when we would 
 put a whole country into a noblemen's livery," he says 
 with spirit, and, declaring that the laying out of grounds 
 is a liberal art not unlike poetry and painting, he goes 
 on to protest against the monopoly of nature by the 
 great ones of the earth, upon high esthetic grounds. 
 "No liberal art," he says, "aims merely at the gratifica- 
 tion of an individual or a class; the painter or poet is 
 
42 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 degraded in proportion as he does so. . . . If this 
 be so when we are merely putting together words or 
 colors, how much more ought the feeling to prevail when 
 we are in the midst of the realities of things. . . . 
 What, then, shall we say of many great mansions with 
 their unqualified expulsion of human creatures from 
 their neighborhood, happy or not — houses which do what 
 is fabled of the upas tree — that they breathe out death 
 and desolation?" These strictures on the aristocratic 
 handling of land he continues for some pages in an 
 interesting advocacy of esthetic communism — still a 
 suggestive topic. This sense of the beauty and grandeur 
 of nature as a universal boon, the desire to humanize 
 the landscape without robbing it of its own essential 
 character or of the minor charms of its native wildness, 
 and a great delight in his own practical work of im- 
 proving rubbish heaps, old walls, and broken ground 
 into a winter retreat of sunshine and evergreens and 
 red-berried vines, with nooks and views fit for a poet's 
 walk, are the qualities that still give interest to those 
 half dozen letters about planting a waste acre of land. 
 On the other hand, his genius, in which susceptibility 
 to nature was so dominating a principle, seldom finds 
 expression in the prose of his letters with nearly the 
 same clearness and purity as in his poems. There is 
 one extract, however, which must be given, of a city 
 scene from the country poet: — 
 
 "I left Coleridge at seven o'clock on Sunday morning 
 and walked towards the city in a very thoughtful and 
 melancholy state of mind. I had passed through Temple 
 Bar and by St. Dunstan's, noticing nothing, and entirely 
 occupied with my own thoughts, when, looking up, I saw 
 before me the avenue of Fleet Street, silent, empty, and 
 
BEAUMONT, COLERIDGE, WORDSWORTH 43 
 
 pure white, with a sprinkling of new-fallen snow, not a 
 cart or a carriage to obstruct the view, no noise, only 
 a few soundless and dusky foot-passengers here and 
 there. You remember the elegant line of the curve of 
 Ludgate Hill in which the avenue would terminate, and 
 beyond, and towering above it, was the huge and majestic 
 form of St. Paul's solemnized by a thin veil of falling 
 snow. I cannot say how much I was affected at this 
 unthought-of sight in such a place, and what a blessing 
 I felt there is in habits of exalted imagination. My 
 sorrow was controlled, and my uneasiness of mind — not 
 quieted and relieved altogether — seemed at once to 
 receive the gift of an anchor of security." 
 
 This is not poetry, but it is from the same pen as the 
 sonnet on Westminster Bridge. 
 
 Besides this taste for landscape, a special interest 
 was taken by both friends in what poetry Wordsworth 
 was composing from time to time. Wordsworth again 
 expatiates on the "awful truth that there neither is, 
 nor can be, any genuine enjoyment of poetry among 
 nineteen out of twenty of those persons who live, or wish 
 to live, in the broad light of the world," that is, in society; 
 and again defines his aims, "to console the afflicted; to 
 add sunshine to daylight, by making the happy happier; 
 to teach the young and the gracious of every age to see, 
 to think, and feel, and therefore become, more actively 
 and securely virtuous," etc. Here, too, are the calm 
 and patient confidence in his own immortality, a serene 
 foreknowledge of how the matter would end, though 
 there are some dark spots in his prevision, as when he 
 says that "the people would love Peter Bell" if only the 
 critics would let them. It appears, too, that these poets 
 were discreet in their confidential criticism of each other, 
 and by no means blind to faults. Wordsworth notices 
 
44 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 that in Southey's verse, notwithstanding picturesqueness 
 and romance and a minor touch or two, "there is nothing 
 that shows the hand of the great master"; and Cole- 
 ridge, with all his adoration for Wordsworth, even when 
 declaring that he regarded the tale of the ruined cot- 
 tage in the "Excursion" as "the finest poem in our lan- 
 guage comparing it with any of the same or similar length," 
 could yet put his finger on the very center of weakness 
 in Wordsworth. "I have sometimes fancied," he says, 
 "that, having by the conjoint operation of his own ex- 
 periences, feelings and reasons himself convinced him- 
 self of truths which the generality of people have either 
 taken for granted from their infancy, or at least adopted 
 in early life, he has attached all their own depth and 
 weight to doctrines and words which come almost as 
 truisms or commonplace to others." 
 
 Wordsworth's last words are a farewell; they illus- 
 trate how the love of nature and enjoyment of it, un- 
 like most of youthful emotions, gain an increasing glow 
 with years, and they express his faith and life in the 
 most elementary terms: "I never had a higher relish 
 for the beauties of nature than during this spring, nor 
 enjoyed myself more. What manifold reason, my dear 
 George, have you and I had to be thankful to Provi- 
 dence! Theologians may puzzle their heads about 
 dogmas as they will; the religion of gratitude cannot 
 mislead us. Of that we are sure, and gratitude is the 
 handmaid to hope, and hope the harbinger of faith. I 
 look abroad upon nature, I think of the best part of 
 our species, I lean upon my friends, and I meditate upon 
 the Scriptures, especially the Gospel of St. John; and 
 my creed rises up of itself with the ease of an exhala- 
 tion, yet a fabric of adamant. God bless you, my ever 
 dear friend." 
 
THOMAS POOLE AND HIS FRIENDS 
 
 Whoever has read the memoirs of the Lake School 
 must have a lively curiosity to know more of Poole. Cole- 
 ridge drew his portrait in a fine passage of "Church 
 and State," as a type of strong, practical character. De 
 Quincey described him in "Autobiographical Sketches" 
 — "a stout, plain-looking farmer leading a bachelor life 
 in a rustic, old-fashioned house," with a good library, 
 especially in political philosophy, having some experience 
 of travel, and "so entirely dedicated to the service of 
 his humble fellow-countrymen, the hewers of wood and 
 drawers of water in this southern part of Somersetshire, 
 that for many miles round he was the general arbiter 
 of their disputes, the guide and counsellor of their diffi- 
 culties." Wordsworth, in a letter to him asking his criti- 
 cal opinion of "Michael," says: "In writing it, I had 
 your character often before my eyes, and sometimes 
 thought I was delineating such a man as you yourself 
 would have been under the same circumstances." 
 Poole was, besides, the valued friend of Rickman, the 
 statistician and compiler of the first British census; of 
 Thomas Wedgwood, whose career, beginning with the 
 experiments in photography which are well known, was 
 so unfortunately ended by incurable disease; of Sir 
 Humphrey Davy, and of others of the most useful men 
 of the time. Both personally and in his relations with 
 those men who felt the revivifying influence of the French 
 
 45 
 
46 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 Revolution in England, he presents an interesting figure, 
 and his memoir not only helps to complete our knowl- 
 edge of Coleridge particularly, but exemplifies in a nota- 
 ble way the characteristics of his age of reform. 
 
 Poole is the more attractive because of the humbleness 
 of the means by which he made his life remarkable. 
 He was the son of a tanner in well-to-do circumstances, 
 at Nether Stowey, in the region of the Quantock hills, 
 and was bred to that business; but he had a thirst 
 for knowledge which was perhaps encouraged in the 
 home of his uncle, a more liberally-minded man than 
 his father, where he found well-educated cousins, one of 
 them going to Oxford. He could not have neglected 
 his business very much, whatever his father may have 
 thought, by his devotion to French and Latin, since 
 he was chosen to be delegate to the Tanners' Trade 
 Convention at London while still a youth, and made a 
 favorable impression and brought away one valuable 
 friendship. It may have been at this time and through 
 the advice of the "great London tanner," Mr. Purkis, 
 that he came under the influence of French opinions, 
 which he imbibed sufficiently to alarm his Toryish cou- 
 sins as well as the country neighborhood, by shaking the 
 powder out of his hair. He was thought to be a demo- 
 crat, and the word was at that time and place a thing 
 to shudder at. How it was that he became acquainted 
 with Coleridge, it is impossible to ascertain. There was 
 a tradition that the two had met accidentally in a tav- 
 ern, when the poet was in the army and Poole had meta- 
 morphosed himself into a common workman. It seems 
 to be believed that Poole did carry out that plan of 
 becoming thoroughly versed in the details of the tanning 
 trade and acquainted with the minds and habits of the 
 
THOMAS POOLE AND HIS FRIENDS 47 
 
 workmen; but the time of this is uncertain. It is as 
 a possible adventurer in the Pantisocratic scheme that 
 we first find him connected with Coleridge. He de- 
 scribes the plan in a letter to an inquiring friend, and 
 this account is the most detailed of any yet published 
 about this famous project of settlement on the banks of 
 the Susquehannah: 
 
 "Twelve gentlemen of good education and liberal principles 
 are to embark with twelve ladies in April next. Previous to 
 their leaving this country they are to have as much inter- 
 course as possible, in order to ascertain each other's dis- 
 positions, and firmly to settle every regulation for the gov- 
 ernment of their future conduct. Their opinion was that 
 they should ijx themselves at — I do not recollect the place, 
 but somewhere in a delightful part of the new back settle- 
 ments; that each man should labor two or three hours in a 
 day, the produce of which labor would, they imagine, be 
 more than sufficient to support the colony. As Adam Smith 
 observes that there is not above one productive man in twenty, 
 they argue that if each labored the twentieth part of the 
 time, it would produce enough to satisfy their wants. The 
 produce of their industry is to be laid up in common for the 
 use of all; and a good library of books is to be collected, and 
 their leisure hours to be spent in study, liberal discussions, 
 and the education of their children. A system for the edu- 
 cation of their children is laid down, for which, if this plan at 
 all suits you, I must refer you to the authors of it. The 
 regulations relating to the females strike them as the most 
 difficult; whether the marriage contract shall be dissolved if 
 agreeable to one or both parties, and many other circum- 
 stances, are not yet determined. The employments of the 
 women are to be the care of infant children and other occu- 
 pations suited to their strength, at the same time the greatest 
 attention is to be paid to the cultivation of their minds. 
 Every one is to enjoy his own religious and political opinions, 
 provided they do not encroach on the rules previously 
 made, which rules, it is unnecessary to add, must in some 
 
48 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 measure be regulated by the laws of the State which includes 
 the district in which they settle." 
 
 Such was the scheme of colonization worked out by 
 Coleridge and Southey, the latter of whom Poole de- 
 scribes as "more violent in his principles than even Cole- 
 ridge himself"; and he adds: "In Religion, shocking to 
 say in a mere Boy as he is, I fear he wavers between 
 Deism and Atheism." The cost to each undertaker was 
 to be £125. But Poole, who was at this time twenty-nine 
 years old, accompanied this information with very sound 
 considerations as to the chimerical nature of the project, 
 which is now interesting partly as an example of the 
 French ferment, but mainly as a literary curiosity. 
 
 The lifelong friendship of Poole and Coleridge began 
 some months later, in the summer of 1794. The actual 
 day when Coleridge and Southey visited him was long 
 remembered in the neighborhood as that on which the 
 news of the death of Robespierre reached the place. 
 Poole was already a suspected democrat, and had been 
 warned that the Government had an eye on his private 
 correspondence, but he made light of it. The violent 
 expressions of his two companions on this occasion were 
 scandalous. It is reported that, Tom's cousin (the tall, 
 fair-complexioned Oxford don) being present, one of 
 them had said that "Robespierre was a ministering angel 
 of mercy, sent to slay thousands that he might save 
 millions"; and Southey in particular laid his head down 
 upon his arms and exclaimed, "I had rather have heard 
 of the death of my own father ! " But one must not rely 
 on phrases handed down by tradition. It is certain 
 that people were very much shocked, and in particular 
 the fair-complexioned don, with powdered locks and 
 
THOMAS POOLE AND HIS FRIENDS 49 
 
 precise attire, who recorded the occurrence, but not the 
 words, in his Latin diary. "Uterque," he writes, "vero 
 rabie Democratica quoad Politiam; et Infidelis quoad 
 Religionem spectat, turpiter fervet. Ego maxime indig- 
 nor" ; and after a few words more he concludes, "sed 
 de talibus satis." The sisters of the Latinist, who was a 
 most admirable man, were similarly indignant at "Cousin 
 Tom" for entertaining such friends; and the situation 
 was not improved when Coleridge, in the beginning of 
 1797, the friendship with Poole having now strengthened 
 and become most intimate, came to live in Stowey, 
 where he passed what must have been the most agree- 
 able year of his life. It was here that he com- 
 posed the "Ancient Mariner." To the young lady 
 cousins the poet, "with the brow of an angel and the 
 mouth of a beast," as he describes himself, was only a 
 bugbear, and he received from them scant respect; but 
 perhaps, as the biographer suggests, Mrs. Coleridge and 
 the baby helped to reconcile him with the humbler 
 neighbors. It was different when Wordsworth and his 
 sister, with the young child for which they were caring, 
 took the Alfoxden House near by, also with Poole's aid 
 and counsel. Stories were rife about them at once: "the 
 profound seclusion in which they lived, the incompre- 
 hensible nature of their occupations, their strange habit 
 of frequenting out-of-the-way and untrodden spots, the 
 very presence of an unexplained child that was no rela- 
 tion to either of them" — such are the reasons assigned 
 for that cloud of distrust which gathered about the poet 
 and his sister. It was now that the Government spy 
 was sent to watch them, and they were warned to leave 
 at the expiration of their year's lease, by the direction of 
 the lady, Mrs. St. Albyn, who owned the estates. It was 
 
So LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 to no purpose, apparently, that Poole wrote to her a full 
 explanation of the circumstances, and assured her of 
 Wordsworth's character. Matters reached their pitch, 
 however, when Thelwall came to visit Coleridge, and, 
 tired of a life of persecution, also wished to settle in 
 this favored locality. This was clearly impossible, and 
 Coleridge wrote to remind him that Poole could not be 
 asked to jeopardize further his reputation in the country 
 side. 
 
 The disturbed mind of the neighborhood, in view of 
 the presence among them of a nest of democrats hatching 
 they knew not what, was a passing matter. To Poole 
 himself the companionship of Coleridge and Wordsworth 
 meant an invigoration of his intellectual life which must 
 have been a stimulus of no ordinary force. At the same 
 time his practical sagacity was never once at fault. 
 From the beginning the character of Coleridge declares 
 itself as it is now well known, with all its excitability and 
 impulsiveness, and that half-frantic weakness which 
 marks so much of his correspondence. Some of these 
 new letters would be incredible were it not that, unfortu- 
 nately, there are too many others like them. Poole, 
 however, discharged well his duty as the friend whom 
 Coleridge always regarded as nearest and most faithful. 
 He was constantly serviceable. It was he who devised 
 the gift which was to be made annually from the pro- 
 ceeds of £25 contributions by Coleridge's friends. 
 Doubtless he had much to do with obtaining the Wedg- 
 wood annuity of £150, which at the time seemed to 
 insure a life undisturbed by financial anxieties; and in 
 lesser matters he was not less active. On the other 
 hand, Coleridge explains the nature of the bond which 
 united them very plainly: "I used to feel myself more 
 
THOMAS POOLE AND HIS FRIENDS 51 
 
 at home," he says, "in his great windy parlor than in 
 my own cottage. We were well suited to each other — 
 my animal spirits corrected his inclination to melan- 
 choly; and there was something, both in his understand- 
 ing and in his affections, so healthy and manly that my 
 mind freshened in his company, and my ideas and habits 
 of thinking acquired, day after day, more of substance 
 and reality." As time went on, Poole, without lessen- 
 ing his admiration for his friend's abilities, saw more 
 plainly the grave nature of his defects. He followed 
 him with good wishes and high hopes on his German 
 tour, but the winter in Malta and the months after 
 Coleridge's return must have sealed his judgment that 
 nothing of fulfilment of the expectations of Coleridge's 
 genius was now to be looked for. He was never slow 
 to give him advice, and it was always sagacious; but 
 advice was the last thing that Coleridge wanted. Poole 
 did not believe that Coleridge's ills were real. It is 
 perfectly plain that in the years during which Coleridge 
 suffered physically, and was making attempts to regain 
 health by this and that project of travel, Poole regarded 
 him as hypochondriacal, and told him so plainly enough, 
 if not in so many words. This probably occasioned in 
 part the disagreement, the coolness, in fact, which arose 
 between them at one time, and which is the blot on their 
 friendship. Coleridge resented the opinion that his ail- 
 ment sprang from mental rather than physical causes; 
 and, when an incident occurred to acerbate this feeling, 
 he broke out in a manner which Poole rightly regarded 
 as "outrageous." Wordsworth had written to Poole, de- 
 tailing Coleridge's situation, and asking if he could not 
 provide £100, for him to go to the Azores. Poole re- 
 plied to Coleridge directly, and excused himself, saying 
 
52 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 he was ready to contribute £20; and he concluded in the 
 old strain: "Coleridge — God, I hope, will preserve you. 
 It seems to me impossible to imagine that you would not 
 be well if you could have a mind freely at ease. Make 
 yourself that mind. Take from it — its two weak parts 
 — its tendency to restlessness and its tendency to torpor, 
 and it would make you great and happy. It would in 
 a moment see what is right, and it would possess the 
 power, and that steadily, to execute it." Poole was a 
 man with many calls upon his purse, for his benevolence 
 was marked, and at the time his affairs, as Coleridge 
 knew, were in an unfavorable state; Coleridge, too, was 
 then owing him £37. Yet Coleridge so far forgot himself 
 as to remind Poole of the difference in their education, 
 and to impute to him an illiberal spirit arising from his 
 regard for money. "It is impossible that you should 
 feel," he says, "as to pecuniary affairs, as Wordsworth 
 or as I feel — or even as men greatly inferior to you in 
 all other things that make man a noble being. But this 
 I always knew and calculated upon, and have applied to 
 you in my little difficulties when I could have procured 
 the sums with far less pain to myself from persons less 
 dear to me, only that I might not estrange you wholly 
 from the outward and visible realities of my existence, 
 my wants and sufferings"; and he ends with, "Let us 
 for the future abstain from all pecuniary matters." He 
 followed up this letter by others in the same strain, and 
 refused to see anything "outrageous" in these remarks. 
 The friendship survived the strain, much to Poole's 
 credit; but the correspondence grew less constant, and 
 finally ceased, except for a yearly bulletin from Mrs. 
 Coleridge until her death. Poole continued, however, 
 to be serviceable to the family, assisted Hartley through 
 
THOMAS POOLE AND HIS FRIENDS 53 
 
 college, and was always ready to fulfill his early promises 
 of help. It is clear enough, it is pleasant to add, that 
 Coleridge felt that Poole had really been his friend of 
 friends, and that Poole on his side retained undiminished, 
 however he might regret Coleridge's fate, his old affec- 
 tion for him. 
 
 We have left but scanty space for the record of Poole's 
 own life, which might well be thought better worth de- 
 tailing than the history of that friendship to which prob- 
 ably he owes his memoir. He was, as the biographer 
 reminds us, a typical example of those Englishmen of 
 his time who desired to make the most of themselves and 
 live useful lives. He was, to begin with, fond of making 
 and adopting improvements in his own business, which 
 he conducted successfully until he retired from it, and 
 at the same time he cultivated a large farm. In public 
 affairs he had shown while still young a special interest 
 in the condition of the working classes. The food riots, 
 occasioned by the war, brought the subject very vividly 
 to his attention, and he was directly engaged in the 
 work of relief. We find him experimenting in ways of 
 making cheap bread and in methods of planting wheat, 
 and in later years deeply interested in the introduction 
 of merino sheep into England. He built the village 
 school, taught in it, and was eager to forward popular 
 education. His cousin, John Poole, the young Oxford 
 don, was the founder of the Enmore public school and 
 a pioneer in the cause both by practical teaching and by 
 means of his pen. Thomas Poole also founded the 
 Female Friendly Society, for the purpose of assisting 
 women in times of distress, and organized the savings 
 bank. In brief, there was, it is said, no local charitable 
 institution that he did not originate or support. This 
 
54 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 interest in the condition of the people was the occasion 
 of his friendship with Rickman, and consequently of his 
 only public service. The two, after having met, cor- 
 responded on the subject of the Poor-Laws; and, an 
 inquiry being shortly after authorized by Parliament, 
 Rickman persuaded Poole to give some months of his 
 time to the task of receiving and tabulating the returns. 
 In this way, living in London, he was brought in useful 
 contact with many public men. 
 
 His interest in politics, both foreign and domestic, 
 never ceased to be keen, and although his early opinions, 
 which do not seem to have been extreme, were modified 
 with the course of years, he was at heart and in practise 
 a reformer to the end. He was enlisted with Clarkson 
 against the slave trade, and was one of those men who 
 would use no sugar because it was raised by slave labor. 
 Whenever one comes on the public questions of that day 
 in these pages, Poole is found to be not only on the 
 right side, but thoroughly in earnest and laborious in 
 the work. It was natural that he should end his life 
 as the leading and most respected man in his community, 
 the adviser in all local affairs, and the friend and "com- 
 mon peacemaker," as he was called, of his neighbor- 
 hood. His self-training intellectually, united with a 
 capacity for fellowship, had made him the companion 
 of many notable persons. He spoke French, and during 
 his travels on the Continent in the year of the peace, he 
 had the fortune to meet several of the distinguished 
 men of the time; but such associations had not changed 
 his original nature. He always affected a certain rus- 
 ticity of manner; his voice was loud and disagreeable, 
 made harsh by the constant use of snuff; there was a 
 rough quality in him. When he was a county magis- 
 
THOMAS POOLE AND HIS FRIENDS 55 
 
 trate and coming to the end of life, he would proclaim, 
 in what is styled an uncompromising tone, "For my part, 
 I am a plebeian. I am a tanner, you know, I am a 
 tanner." Southey speaks of him as "clod-hopping over 
 my feelings"; but in a more amiable moment he also 
 says, "Torn Poole is not content to be your friend; he 
 must be your saviour." It is noticeable, however, that 
 he had also that gift of tenderness which sometimes goes 
 with rough natures. He was an excellent nurse, and 
 was quick to come in all times of domestic trouble and 
 bereavement, and no one was more welcome. In his 
 drawer, after his death, was found among his memen- 
 toes a small packet labeled, "The hair of my poor shep- 
 herd, who served me faithfully for twenty- three years"; 
 it is a trifling thing, but nothing could be more signifi- 
 cant. He never married, and he outlived several of his 
 best friends, especially Coleridge, Davy, and Tom 
 Wedgwood; but his home was a center of cheerfulness, 
 and he was surrounded in his later years by young people 
 who had experienced his perpetual kindness. He left 
 no great thing behind him to preserve his memory — he 
 was a man of his generation only; but at the end of 
 these volumes the reader finds himself of one mind with 
 those of his friends of whom Coleridge in his character of 
 Poole says, "Not a man among them but would vote 
 for leaving him as he is." It is not often that an humble 
 life, with so much of the substance of virtue in it, gets 
 itself written. 
 
THE DE QUINCEY FAMILY 
 
 Dr. Japp is the apologist of De Quincey. The par- 
 ticular attack is the doubt of De Quincey's veracity in 
 the autobiographic details which he wove into his works. 
 Some question of the Opium-Eater's truthfulness was 
 early expressed, and Mr. George Saintsbury printed sus- 
 picions of the same sort which lost none of their vexa- 
 tiousness coming from his pen. Mainly in consequence of 
 this critic's remarks, if one may judge from the constant 
 reference to them, Dr. Japp and the representatives 
 of De Quincey published the family correspondence. 
 The exposure of private affairs, nine-tenths of which 
 have no interest whatever to outsiders, is complete. 
 The interior arrangements, both domestic and financial, 
 are laid open, and in the letters of De Quincey's 
 mother, two sisters, and two brothers every one is made 
 welcome to a not very edifying story. 
 
 The family was not a happy one. The mother was 
 unable, apparently, to win the affection of the children, 
 and they on their side were impatient of her discipline. 
 Mrs. De Quincey was a woman of much formal propri- 
 ety, attached to the Clapham sect in religious and moral 
 sympathy. De Quincey himself draws a vivid picture 
 of her as he remembers the impression she made on him 
 in early years: 
 
 "Figure to yourself a woman of admirable manners, in 
 fact as much as any person I have ever known distinguished 
 by ladylike tranquility and repose, and even by self-posses- 
 
 57 
 
58 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 sion, but also freezing in excess. Austere she was to a degree 
 which fitted her for the lady-president of rebellious nunneries. 
 Rigid in her exactions of duty from those around her, but 
 also firm herself; upright, sternly conscientious, munificent 
 in her charities, pure-minded in so absolute a degree that 
 you would have been tempted to call her 'holy' — she yet 
 could not win hearts by the graciousness of her manner. . . . 
 It is as good as a comedy in my feeling when I call back 
 the characteristic scene which went on every morning of the 
 year. All of us, for some years six, were marched off or 
 carried off to a morning parade in my mother's dressing-room. 
 As the mailcoaches go down daily in London to the inspector 
 of mails, so we rolled out of the nursery at a signal given, 
 and were minutely reviewed in succession. Were the lamps 
 of our equipage clean and bright? Were the springs properly 
 braced? Were the linchpins secured? When this inspection, 
 which was no mere formality, had traveled from the front 
 rank to the rear, when we were pronounced to be in proper 
 trim, or, in the language of the guard, 'all right behind,' we 
 were dismissed, but with two ceremonies that to us were mys- 
 terious and allegorical — first, that our hair and faces were 
 sprinkled with lavender water and milk of roses; secondly, 
 that we received a kiss on the forehead." 
 
 It is not to a son's credit to write thus of his mother; 
 but the tone shows plainly the absence of any warmth 
 of feeling, a perfect coldness and apathy of filial affec- 
 tion. It is added that Mrs. De Quincey taught her 
 children to undervalue themselves so that, says De Quin- 
 cey, "we held it a point of filial duty to believe ourselves 
 the very scum and refuse of the universe." And, to 
 add the last anecdote that fills out this unfavorable pic- 
 ture, it is related that a servant, on being asked why she 
 did not appeal to the mistress, replied: "Speak to mis- 
 tress! would I speak to a ghost?" 
 
 Notwithstanding all this, it is plain enough that Mrs. 
 De Quincey was a mother devoted to the welfare of her 
 
THE DE QUINCEY FAMILY 59 
 
 children. She had the disadvantage of having guard- 
 ians associated with her, one of whom, Dr. Hall, was 
 certainly a most unfortunate choice. Mrs. Baird Smith, 
 one of De Quincey's daughters, thinks that she was self- 
 distrustful and sought advice from her friends, the Clap- 
 ham people, and that the children felt this interference 
 of strangers as a bar between them and their mother. 
 Whatever was the reason, the result was that both 
 Thomas and Richard ran away and suffered much hard- 
 ship, and none of the others exhibit any attachment to 
 the mother. On her side, however, we think none can 
 read her letters without being impressed by her excellent 
 qualities, and in particular, in later years, by her willing- 
 ness to assist De Quincey and the rest to the utmost 
 of her means. From the time he went to Oxford her 
 purse was used for him, and after he had wasted his 
 inheritance she gave him continually from her funds as 
 much as was possible, though she insisted, with good 
 sense, on keeping the capital intact and settling it on 
 the grandchildren. She certainly lacked tact in appeal- 
 ing to the children, and she spoke her mind freely about 
 their faults, but not so harshly but that a grown per- 
 son, making allowance for her religious belief, strongly 
 colored with evangelicalism as it was, should have seen 
 and honored the motives and feelings which prompted 
 such criticism. Here is as unfavorable a passage as can 
 be quoted, written on hearing and too readily believing 
 that the education of De Quincey's daughters was be- 
 ing neglected. She offers to pay the school bills, and then 
 goes on as follows: 
 
 "I have long been too certain that you were bringing up 
 your sons in idleness, but hoping they were to be made 
 scholars and their minds taught to work, I supposed they 
 
60 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 would be kept from falling necessarily into profligacy, and 
 live by literature, but I know not where or what now to 
 hope; and, O my son, if they are all brought up in idle 
 ignorance, what but the worst can be expected? I am sure 
 of this, that a Parent with your means who does this is 
 utterly unworthy of children; but still in the present time 
 where must the wages of this bad work fall the heaviest? In 
 this time, bad as it is in many points, to bring up girls in idle 
 ignorance is only to make them victims, not prepared to take 
 their place among industrious people laboring for bread, yet 
 too ignorant to be received elsewhere! I cannot express my 
 feelings as I ought; I can only proffer my help; and if you 
 can possibly be angry to hear the truth, I too well remember 
 what you said touching my respect for the lowly virtues to 
 be surprised, though not shaken in my well-assured con- 
 victions." 
 
 This is an extreme instance of fault-finding, and there 
 is nothing in it that any one can object to, except the 
 readiness to believe that De Quincey was so derelict in 
 his parental duty; and it is allowed that as respects the 
 girls there was some color for the censure. Perhaps 
 another passage is not amiss as representing his mother's 
 tone in his boyhood. She writes to him at the Man- 
 chester Grammar School as follows: 
 
 "I plainly perceive that you have exalted one, and that 
 the most dangerous faculty of the mind, the imagination, 
 over all the rest; but it will desolate your life and hopes, if 
 it be not restrained and brought under religious government; 
 it may then be turned to the use it was assuredly given for, 
 in the pursuit of any profession, and be nobly used in the 
 service of your Maker. In a worldly sense, without you 
 bring this busy, restless power into submission to reason and 
 judgment, you are undone; you are now carried away, wholly 
 blinded by the bewildering light of your fancy, and that 
 you may never see clearer your reading is all of a sort to 
 weaken your mental optics." 
 
THE DE QUINCEY FAMILY 61 
 
 These passages serve for illustration of Mrs. De 
 Quincey's character and temperament, but they really do 
 injustice to her since they do not disclose the continual 
 anxiety she felt for her children, and her serviceableness 
 to them practically after they grew up. She repelled 
 them by her principles, too narrowly held and too rigidly 
 enforced; she did not win their trust, and appeal to her 
 against what they thought wrong in their school-life ap- 
 pears not merely to have been useless, but to have 
 brought only her strongly expressed displeasure on them 
 as unruly and disobedient. And these errors of con- 
 duct cost her their affection. It was a full price to pay, 
 and justice may now be done to her more admirable 
 traits of fidelity, self-sacrifice, and devotion to her par- 
 ental duty. 
 
 Richard was the child who suffered most from the 
 defects in his guardianship. He ran away from school 
 because he was flogged, and, on being returned and 
 flogged for this offense, he ran away a second time, 
 joined a merchant ship as cabin boy, was captured by 
 pirates on the South American coast, escaped and made 
 one of the storming party at Montevideo, and so dis- 
 tinguished himself that he was at once rated a midship- 
 man by the English admiral. He was in the action at 
 Copenhagen, taken prisoner by the Danes, and after- 
 wards exchanged, on which occasion he made himself 
 known to his family. They questioned his identity at 
 first, as he refused to meet them personally, but he 
 afterwards satisfied their doubts, and was in pleasant 
 intercourse with them till he met an early and unknown 
 death in Jamaica on a hunting excursion. He was twice 
 in England during his wanderings and was in want, but 
 he so feared his guardians that he kept himself obscure; 
 
62 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 nor did he finally disclose himself till he was safely past 
 twenty-one years of age. This persistence of Richard in 
 what must have been a hard and unwelcome life is the 
 strongest proof of the severity and lack of sympathy he 
 felt in his natural friends, and, indeed, his feelings 
 towards his guardians must have amounted to hatred. 
 In his letters he shows a pleasant disposition and the 
 intellectual tastes which characterized the family, and 
 he is altogether the most attractive of them. The letters 
 of the sisters are not of any special interest except as 
 they carry on the family story; and Henry, the last 
 brother, seems to have been rather a weakling. 
 
 The literary part of the Memorials is considerable in 
 bulk and separable from the family portion. Its prin- 
 ciple feature is the collection of letters from Dorothy 
 Wordsworth to De Quincey. These are admirable, and 
 sufficient in charm and interest to give the volumes 
 permanent value in literature. They describe, in the 
 rapid, natural, and feminine way that belonged to their 
 author's pen, the interior of the Wordsworth household; 
 and as De Quincey was especially interested in the chil- 
 dren, they are full of anecdotes and news about the little 
 ones, who were as fond of De Quincey as he of them. 
 Nothing, perhaps, is more childishly delightful than 
 "Johnny's" interpolation into his evening prayer for his 
 "good friends" — "Mr. De Quincey is one of my 
 friends"; but there are several incidents of the sort. 
 There is, of course, much besides the children's affairs — 
 about the De Quincey cottage, then in the furnishing, the 
 Green family lost in the snow, the doings of Coleridge, 
 Wordsworth's verse-writing, Jeffrey's reviews, and es- 
 pecially the Convention of Cintra pamphlet which De 
 Quincey was seeing through the press. Wordsworth 
 
THE DE QUINCEY FAMILY 63 
 
 was somewhat apprehensive of being prosecuted for this 
 publication, and Dorothy writes: 
 
 "William still continues to haunt himself with fancies 
 about Newgate and Dorchester or some other gaol, but as 
 his mind clings to the gloomy, Newgate is his favorite theme. 
 We, however, have no fears; for even if the words be action- 
 able (which I cannot but think they are not), in these times 
 they would not dare inflict such a punishment." 
 
 We should mention also two admirable letters of 
 Wordsworth to De Quincey before meeting him, very 
 characteristic and kind, and a letter of Coleridge to 
 De Quincey when the latter asked repayment of some 
 loans, in which Coleridge appears to advantage in the 
 sincere expression of feelings honorable to him. The 
 correspondence with Professor Wilson sheds light upon 
 the financial relations of De Quincey with himself, both 
 being borrowers, and exhibits the former's indulgence 
 and friendship under trying circumstances. The cor- 
 respondence of Lord Altamont abundantly justifies all 
 that De Quincey said of his association with the family, 
 and shows the peer's own character in a pleasant light. 
 
 The net result of this collection is to sustain De Quin- 
 cey's accuracy of statement, and so far to benefit his 
 reputation. At all points where he is tested by these 
 documents he is found correct. At the same time, the 
 history of the family is so exhibited as to give better 
 opportunities for judging of his position in early life, 
 and of how they discharged their obligations to him 
 after he fell into misfortune. It is perhaps well to have 
 the subject cleared up. It does not appear to us that, 
 all things considered, he was illiberally treated. He 
 took his career into his own hands with more or less 
 excuse, but he did not prosper in the undertaking. As 
 
64 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 soon as he came into his inheritance, he usea it, in part 
 generously, but altogether foolishly, and soon it was 
 gone. He wrote a long and minute history of this worldly 
 failure, and in it he discusses his hopes and the reasons 
 of his various decisions. One passage illustrates his esti- 
 mate of himself: 
 
 "I hoped, and have every year hoped with better grounds, 
 that (if I should be blessed with life sufficient) I should 
 accomplish a great revolution in the intellectual condition of 
 the world. That I should, both as one cause and one effect 
 of that revolution, place education upon a new footing through- 
 out all civilized nations, was but one part of this revolution; 
 it was also but a part (though it may seem singly more than 
 enough for a whole) to be the first founder of true philosophy; 
 and it was no more than a part that I hoped to be the re- 
 establisher in England (with great accessions) of mathe- 
 matics." 
 
 This was apparently written in 1818, in De Quincey's 
 thirty-third year. That he formed such hopes, and re- 
 tained them so long, shows the lack of judgment with 
 respect to himself and his own life which characterized 
 him. He had already fallen under the opium habit. He 
 excused himself from ordinary labor in the professions 
 on the ground of these great aims, and the fact was that 
 most of what he really accomplished was piecemeal work 
 done for the magazines to get money. His mother had 
 about £13,000, which she determined to hand down to 
 her grandchildren, i. e., De Quincey's children, but she 
 assisted him out of the income; and in this her decision 
 must commend itself to a practical mind. His uncle in 
 India also assisted him at times, but, after his retire- 
 ment on a reduced allowance of perhaps £700 a year, 
 seems to have found that sum no more than sufficient for 
 
THE DE QUINCEY FAMILY 65 
 
 his bachelor tastes. It cannot be made out that De 
 Quincey did not receive as much from the family estate 
 as was fairly to be given to him. The reproach that 
 they were indifferent to his welfare and practically de- 
 serted him has no foundation in the light of these Mem- 
 orials. Altogether, the story seems more honorable to 
 his mother than to himself, in substance, though she 
 cannot be wholly freed from responsibility for errors 
 of judgment, and for the cold demeanor in early days 
 which made the youth of the boys so unhappy both in 
 itself and in its results. 
 
EDWARD BULWER, LORD LYTTON 
 
 Sentimentality, under some one of its many forms, 
 is ever ready to fasten on literatures that have become 
 polished, and on social coteries in whose culture the 
 intellectual mode has any part; for there is a fashion 
 in gentlemen's thoughts as in their cravats and waist- 
 coats — a ruling theory, a proper temper of mind, an 
 established canon of criticism, assented to like a code 
 of manners as a basis whereon the half-savage but gre- 
 garious animal, man, may safely converse. And just 
 as there is one clique that dresses the body stylishly 
 for the parlor, there is another that clothes the mind 
 conventionally for the dinner table. In London, during 
 the years just before the Reform Bill, this species of 
 the higher etiquette was languishingly romantic, as later 
 it was languishingly picturesque; it was then like a mys- 
 tery of the illuminated, the peculiar faith, the bon ton, 
 of society. Byron was its high priest, Bulwer its 
 neophyte, and, to carry out the figure, the young Dis- 
 raeli its fanatic. Then the gilded youth had each out- 
 lived a passion, a crime, and an ambition, and as ocular 
 proof thereof wore the cast garments of Lara, the shoon 
 and scallop-shell of Harold; the maids, old and young, 
 sighed for blighted affections in preference to happy 
 love, and after dinner became lachrymose over the songs 
 of Moore in the drawing-room. Now that Gladstone 
 governs where Melbourne lolled, it seems a worm-eaten, 
 theatrical mask, whose best use in history was to be the 
 
 6 7 
 
68 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 butt of Thackeray's banter. "What sort of a novel 
 would Lady Caroline Lamb perpetrate to-day?" one in- 
 voluntarily asks himself, as he reads of her sickly flirta- 
 tions with the young-mannish Bulwer who was proud 
 one day to wear Byron's ring, the public gyve of her 
 lovers and chief sign of her favor, and sullen the next 
 at finding the romance vapor away in a fiasco. In such 
 hothouse society the precocious novelist grew up and 
 tired, and early arrived at the cynicism that tempered 
 his worldly wit, as well as at the knowledge of surfaces 
 that gave vraisemblance and success to "Pelham." All 
 this — the artificiality, insincerity, affectation, not of 
 manners, but of feeling, in a word the sentimentality of 
 the fashionable coteries affected by literature — must 
 be kept in mind in order to understand Bulwer's tempta- 
 tions, his brilliant entrance on his long career, and es- 
 pecially the sterling qualities of his mind and heart. 
 
 His autobiography, with its supplementary letters, 
 notes, fragments of novels, begins, as is common since 
 the discovery of the principle of heredity, at the root of 
 the genealogical tree. The author had much of the 
 pride of race, and he has gathered some entertainment 
 out of his trunkful of old papers; but usually the family 
 records are of more interest to himself than to his 
 readers, though all the latter, by a curious lapse of his 
 son's pen, are styled "his posterity." His material 
 grandfather, the omnivorous, silent scholar, who in Dr. 
 Parr's opinion was the first Latinist of the times, and 
 second only to Porson in Greek and to Sir William Jones 
 in Oriental tongues, was really worth description; for 
 there were strong traits and fine humorous contrasts in 
 the old bookworm, who, indeed, once attempted original- 
 ity by beginning a drama in Hebrew, but abandoned the 
 
EDWARD BULWER, LORD LYTTON 69 
 
 muse in disgust because he could not find Jews suffi- 
 ciently versed in their own language to act in it, and at 
 last, wearied with buried lore, "took the daughter of the 
 vine to spouse" in the shape of an immense collection 
 of the Spanish romances of chivalry. In the case of 
 other ancestors, and especially in his mother's love af- 
 fairs, Bulwer's own narrative is garrulous and in bad 
 taste. Of himself he says but little, although he has 
 written a good-sized book by the time he reaches his 
 twenty-third year, when the autobiography stops. 
 
 One noticeable thing in this early period is that he 
 was brought up by women. His father's death, when 
 he was still a young child, left him a mother's boy, and 
 her influence was the greater over him because he was 
 removed from the company of his two brothers, and 
 was never sent to a public school. He felt toward her 
 a deep and grateful affection; but some part of his dis- 
 pleasing peculiarities were probably due to this early 
 seclusion from the intimate observation of men and the 
 unrestrained criticism of the Etonians. He was a pre- 
 cocious child, but his mother was not a Cornelia. Obe- 
 dience to parents was, in her creed, the first command- 
 ment — upon it, as on a rock, two lovers and the happi- 
 ness of her life had gone to pieces; the second was like 
 unto it — regard for the world, respectability. Of her 
 mental caliber here is an illustration, and perhaps it is 
 also a straw to show from what quarter the wind blew 
 in the matter of Bulwer's foppishness: "The powdered 
 locks; the double-breasted white waistcoat, with the 
 muslin cravat in great bows, rising over a delicate pink 
 silk kerchief, carelessly folded to answer the purpose of 
 our modern undervest; the top-boots, shrunk half-way 
 down the calf; and the broad-brimmed hat, set with 
 
7 o LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 easy impertinence on one side the head — 'that,' said 
 my poor mother, after finishing her description, 'that 
 is what I call being well dressed! ' " When Bulwer was 
 advanced so far in childhood as to ask this guardian 
 mother, "Pray, mamma, are you not sometimes over- 
 come by the sense of your own identity?" she answered, 
 "It is high time you should go to school, Teddy"; and, 
 consequently, being nine years old, he went to Fulham, 
 and was so shocked and so homesick that he was with- 
 drawn in a fortnight, and after that was sent to other 
 schools, which he left successively, as being too clever, 
 too impetuous, or what not, until at one of these hos- 
 telries of learning he had his first, and it seems his last, 
 love affair. The story is very dimly told: a youth of 
 seventeen, a girl slightly older, walks in the green se- 
 questered meadows by the Brent, a passionate parting, 
 and then three years of repulsive marriage for the girl, 
 with death at the end, and for the boy a touch of imagi- 
 native melancholy, growing deeper and tenderer as the 
 man found he had missed wedded happiness — this is 
 all; but from the frequency and the feeling with which 
 Bulwer introduced the story alike into his earliest and 
 latest novels, it was clearly one of the marked and lasting 
 experiences of his life. 
 
 From school to Cambridge was only a matter of 
 routine; and from Cambridge, where he had made a 
 mark as a debater and poet beside Praed (who was then 
 to the university what Byron was to the world), he 
 naturally went to Paris and authorship, with an adven- 
 ture in gypsy life, a flirtation with Lady Caroline, and 
 much perfumed correspondence, half gallant, half lite- 
 rary, for incidents by the way. He had already pub- 
 lished very early some volumes of imitative verse, and 
 
EDWARD BULWER, LORD LYTTON 71 
 
 thereby had occasioned a flattering exchange of letters 
 with Dr. Parr, in one of which that learned man indites 
 thus wondrously to the versifier of eighteen: "Although 
 in our politics we differ widely, yet I feel a pure, and I 
 had almost said a holy, satisfaction in contemplating 
 the moral properties of your mind." One queries 
 whether or not the good old man felt the same "holy 
 satisfaction" when he read "Falkland," the first result of 
 these "moral properties" in literature. Pelham fol- 
 lowed, and laid the foundation of Bulwer's fame. He 
 married, published three more novels, became editor of 
 the "New Monthly," and returned to the Reform Parli- 
 ament. At this point, in May 1831, when he was twenty- 
 eight years old, the present installment of the work closes. 
 Before the reader has advanced far, he perceives that 
 the Earl of Lytton has invented a new scheme for writing 
 biography, and, if it can be kept up to a certain level 
 of accomplishment, a highly entertaining one. In his 
 lifetime Bulwer was thought to be his own hero, and 
 with this assumption his son so far agrees as to assert 
 that he used his own experiences very patently in 
 his fictions; but Bulwer probably did not foresee the 
 ease with which the process could be reversed, and his 
 novels turned into a biography by a copious use of his 
 fragmentary manuscripts. This seems to be the pur- 
 pose of his son. Bulwer is set before the world in the 
 midst of the society in which he lived, the manners and 
 characters of it being painted by his own hand, while his 
 own part of hero — Lionel Hastings, De Lindsay, Glen- 
 allan, Greville — when not sufficiently defined by itself, 
 is elucidated by letters or other ordinary biographical 
 material. In this way the work gains merely as a story 
 through Bulwer's really fine literary faculty; and he him- 
 
7 2 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 self gains as a man through the judicious and timely dis- 
 closures and comments of his son. He remains the witty 
 and brilliant man of the world, as he expressed himself 
 in his characters, and he becomes in addition a more 
 estimable man than he has been hitherto regarded. His 
 conduct toward his mother, who violently opposed his 
 marriage, and entirely broke with him on account of it, 
 thereby depriving him of her pecuniary resources, on 
 which he was practically dependent, was highly honorable. 
 He engaged himself because he thought his future wife's 
 affections too deeply interested to be rejected, and he 
 married with a full knowledge of the distressing circum- 
 stances of alienation from his mother and of limited 
 means in his household which would supervene; after he 
 had thus done what he thought was his duty — for his 
 passions were apparently not strongly aroused — he left 
 no manly means untried to obtain reconciliation; and 
 when that was at last arranged, he refused for a long 
 time the money which his mother would have allowed 
 him, because he felt that such an obligation was sub- 
 ject to misconception. Throughout the affair the con- 
 sideration of loss or gain of property seems not to have 
 weighed in his mind. He gains, too, by the mere rev- 
 elation of the industry with which, as his biographer 
 puts it, he fed the waters of oblivion through many ob- 
 scure channels. Incessant labor, downright hard work, 
 was involved in composing the hundreds of anonymous 
 articles, by means of which he made enough money to 
 pay his way, while still much under thirty, and living 
 at such a high rate that the income of the four thousand 
 pounds he owned was but a slight help. He had always 
 been diligent; his boyish note-books show an active and 
 wide curiosity about institutions, politics, and history, 
 
EDWARD BULWER, LORD LYTTON 73 
 
 as well as society. Something of his grandfather's 
 polyglot spirit had descended on him, for what his son 
 says is quite true: "Certainly no other novelist of my 
 father's own age and country has bestowed upon the en- 
 richment and elevation of his art anything like the same 
 opulence of literary knowledge." The novels themselves 
 are not better than those of his contemporaries on this 
 account, but the man himself is more highly accredited. 
 One is glad that Thackeray withdrew with frank apology 
 his satire in "Fraser's," as being written under an errone- 
 ous idea of the author's character. 
 
 Unfortunately, Bulwer's defects were those most easily 
 perceived and most exposed to the ridicule of sensible 
 men; and, besides, his youthful judgment was always 
 good. He himself, in later days, suppressed "Falkland" 
 as liable to have an immoral tendency, while still dis- 
 avowing any immoral motive in its composition. "Paul 
 Clifford," it seems, was meant to help on reform in the 
 penal code and in prison discipline. "Pelham" was mainly 
 satirical, and intended to work against the Byronic ideal. 
 Such assertions will surprise some readers, for certainly 
 it is not any ethical purpose that gives life to his novels; 
 but (to confine our remarks to "Pelham") the precocious 
 knowledge of the world, the wit, the cynicism of the first 
 disillusionment — this is the secret of their attraction. 
 It is, perhaps, more pleasing to learn of the moral aim 
 of an author when it would not be easily discovered 
 except by himself. Bulwer plainly considered that he 
 did something of consequence in rendering antiquated 
 the sentimental fashion then prevalent, of which we have 
 said he was the neophyte. As sometimes happens, the 
 neophyte apostatized. He could not, however, quite free 
 himself from the taint of the school in which he was 
 
74 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 bred, as easily recognizable in these fresh, youthful 
 manuscripts as in the novels of his first period. One 
 of these fragments, "De Lindsay," was printed years ago, 
 in 1832, in "The Ambitious Student," a fact of which the 
 Earl of Lytton seems ignorant; at least, he publishes 
 it as if for the first time. In themselves these literary 
 remains add nothing, of course, to Bulwer's accomplish- 
 ment; the libraries will have more of the same old 
 piece, that is all. Nor, however much more highly 
 Bulwer's character is rated for sense, manliness, intellec- 
 tual vigor, and moral purpose, can it be granted that his 
 early novels are substantially excellent. Even by their 
 satire, by their very repulsion from the people they criti- 
 cise, they are still essentially bound up with that society, 
 and share in the affectations, hollowness, morbid and 
 forced feeling, that characterized the literary age which 
 Thackeray, Dickens, and George Eliot have made so 
 remote from the present. Bulwer was in some respects 
 of a finer strain than his companions, but he could not 
 escape from among them. 
 
THE CORRESPONDENCE OF SIR HENRY 
 TAYLOR 
 
 There are few literary pleasures greater tnan to read 
 the familiar correspondence of men of intellectual culti- 
 vation; and when, as in the case of Sir Henry Taylor, 
 it extends over a long life, and has outlooks upon several 
 eminent groups in both politics and literature, one may 
 expect this pleasure in an unusual degree. Taylor was 
 a hard-working man in the colonial office all his life; 
 he wrote, beside other poetical works, a drama, "Philip 
 van Arteveldt," which is thought to be one of the best 
 plays of the century, and has had a continuous sale for 
 fifty years; and his social position allowed him to see 
 much of distinguished persons. The best of his life has 
 been already made public in his "Autobiography," to 
 which the present volume is a pendant, but by no means a 
 superfluous one. It is concerned more with others than 
 with himself. He entered life with the young men of whom 
 Mill and Spedding were the most intellectual, and his 
 friendship with the latter was lifelong. His own temper- 
 ament shared rather the seriousness and sound judg- 
 ment of such companions than the traditional enthusiasm 
 and spirituality of the poetic character. In youth he 
 suffered from those irrational depressions which vex men 
 of nervous organization, and of these we get some im- 
 pressions by way of reminiscence when he visited the 
 country where he passed those days. He speaks, late 
 in life, of having lost the sense of nervous enjoyment 
 
 75 
 
76 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 which he felt in the beginning of his poetic career. 
 Were it not for such touches as these, here and there in 
 the pages, we should hardly see the poet in him at all. 
 On the other hand, his mind was constitutionally prac- 
 tical, even skeptical, slow to accept and slower to be 
 fired; he says, in one of his earlier letters, that he never 
 had a devotional feeling, and he betrays no sign of one 
 in his later utterances. It was a singular mind, sympa- 
 thetic with the political economists and the business of 
 administration in which he was engaged, and, at the 
 other extreme, delighting in Wordsworth. The two ele- 
 ments, the intellectual and the literary, were admirably 
 blended, and the result was an elevated if not a great 
 life, and one of remarkable harmony within itself. In 
 one place, he comments on finding himself more an ob- 
 server of nature, perhaps from being less occupied with 
 thoughts, that he used "to love poetry for its own sake, 
 but nature for the sake of poetry"; and this shows that 
 his start was rather in a literary impulse than in an 
 inspiration. Then, too, the daily work at the desk must 
 have had its effect, and he notes that his strength was 
 thus regularly too much diverted to allow of writing 
 poetry, which he calls one of the most exciting and ex- 
 hausting of pleasures. He could not always command 
 that leisure, sense of solitude, hope, and high opinion of 
 his powers which he enumerates as the necessities of 
 poetic production. More than all, he came late to the 
 practice of the art; he wrote slowly and with much labor 
 of thought; and though his work has taken a very re- 
 spectable rank, one gets the impression that the poetic 
 spark in him smouldered rather than burned. But it 
 was not necessary that he should be a great poet, and, 
 his nature was too capacious to let him be a poet of the 
 
CORRESPONDENCE OF SIR HENRY TAYLOR 77 
 
 second rank; he was rather a remarkable type of the 
 intellectual man, with the soundest moral qualities in the 
 exercise of his mind, and it is for this that he is inter- 
 esting. 
 
 The first group with which he was brought in con- 
 tact was that of Wordsworth and Southey and some of 
 their friends. He occasionally met both of these men, 
 and through Miss Fenwick, with whom he was inti- 
 mate, he had nearer views. He presents Wordsworth, 
 on his visits to London, on his most amiable side, and 
 really makes him attractive; but Miss Fenwick's letters 
 are the more interesting. She bears testimony to Words- 
 worth's emotional nature, which may have some bearing 
 on his excuse that he did not write love-poems because 
 they would have been too passionate. "What strange 
 workings are there in his great mind, and how fearfully 
 strong are all his feelings and affections ! If his intellect 
 had been less powerful, they must have destroyed him 
 long ago; but even in the midst of his strongest emo- 
 tions his attention may be attracted to some intellec- 
 tual speculation, or his imagination excited by some of 
 those external objects which have such influence over 
 him; and his feelings subside like the feelings of a child, 
 and he will go out and compose some beautiful sonnet." 
 There are traits enough mentioned that are well known 
 — his self-confidence, heaviness, delight in household 
 praise, an old man's vanity; but as Miss Fenwick never 
 loses the attitude of admiration, there is nothing ill- 
 natured in such confessions. Crabb Robinson was with 
 the family, and she deprecates his criticism in advance. 
 She has a bit of bright portraiture of him: "I really like 
 him very well, and never cease wondering how he has 
 managed to preserve so much kindliness and courtesy in 
 
78 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 his bachelor state. He and old Wishaw are the only excep- 
 tions I have met with to the tendency it has to deaden 
 all love but self-love; but these two men seem both to 
 love themselves and to make others love them. I re- 
 member making out to my own satisfaction that Wishaw 
 preserved his benevolence through the want of his leg — 
 a want that made him feel his dependence on his fellow- 
 creatures, while it called forth their sympathy and kind- 
 ness, and all those little attentions which cultivate affec- 
 tion both in the giver and receiver of them; and thus I 
 imagined that the heart of old Wishaw was kept humble, 
 grateful, and loving. But Crabb Robinson ... I 
 thought, the other day, when I was contemplating him 
 while he was asleep (he always sleeps when he is not 
 talking), that his ugliness had done that for him which 
 the want of a leg had done for old Wishaw: it was great 
 enough to excite compassion and kindness, which awak- 
 ened his affections as well, perhaps, as a wife and chil- 
 dren would have done, and made him the kind, service- 
 able creature he is." 
 
 Taylor's sketches of Wordsworth naturally have not 
 the freshness that belongs to reminiscences of men who 
 have been less frequently described, but they have the 
 merit of directness. He reports him in London as "mix- 
 ing with all manner of men and delighting in various 
 women, for he says his passion has always been for the 
 society of women"; and Lockhart is quoted as saying 
 that when Wordsworth met Jeffrey for the first time there 
 the poet "played the part of a man of the world to per- 
 fection, much better than the smaller man, and did not 
 appear to be conscious of anything having taken place 
 between them before." Taylor himself describes the 
 old poet as "one of the most extraordinary human phe- 
 
CORRESPONDENCE OF SIR HENRY TAYLOR 79 
 
 nomena that one could have in the house. He has the 
 simplicity and helplessness of a child in regard to the 
 little transactions of life; and whilst he is being directed 
 and dealt with in regard to these, he keeps tumbling out 
 the highest and deepest thoughts that the mind of man 
 can reach, in a stream of discourse, which is so oddly 
 broken by the little hitches and interruptions of common 
 life that we admire and laugh at him by turns. Every- 
 thing that comes into his mind comes out — weakness or 
 strength, affection or vanities." But this is the Words- 
 worth that the biographies all know. 
 
 Of other men of the time there are here and there 
 a few glimpses, sometimes given with satirical humor. 
 This is how Sadler looked at a dinner with Southey: "He 
 talked slowly, clumsily, and continually; and when he 
 stumbled in his talk and broke down, he got slowly up 
 again and tried to do better, without appearing to be 
 sensible that anything awkward had happened to him, or 
 that everybody had hoped and expected that the break- 
 down would finish him. After tea, however, he got 
 warmer and more flexible in his discourse, and at the same 
 time not so hopelessly continuous, and seemed as if at 
 times he might be agreeable, and at other times silent." 
 There is, too, a biting characterization of "my Lord 
 Jeffrey," in whose case, of course, Taylor was not with- 
 out disturbing remembrance of what the critic had been 
 to Wordsworth; but he thought him worth seeing, "in 
 order to understand by what small springs mankind may 
 be moved from time to time. There came from him, 
 with a sort of dribbling fluency, the very mince-meat of 
 small talk, with just such a seasoning of cleverness as 
 might serve to give it an air of pretension." He com- 
 pares Wilson — "a jolly, fair-haired ruffian, full of fire 
 
80 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 and talent, big and burly, and at the same time wild and 
 animated" — to O'Connell, and remarks that he had 
 "never seen two men, each striking in himself, whose ap- 
 pearance bore so much the same moral stamp." Of 
 Southey nothing remarkable is recorded; but the rela- 
 tions between him and Taylor were full of respect upon 
 both sides, and there are some letters of advice from the 
 younger to the older man, in which there is admirable 
 sense for all literary men who criticise public affairs. 
 His distinction between the different degrees of respons- 
 ibility generated by the duty of writing and that of act- 
 ing upon subjects of public concern is most important, 
 and his criticism on Southey's style, that "contempt, if 
 it is to be believed to be genuine, must be, not expressed, 
 but betrayed," is a convenient epigram for a polemical 
 writer to keep always about him. But of all this earlier 
 circle the most attractive figure is certainly that of Miss 
 Fenwick, whose virtues were of that kind which too 
 seldom sees the light. Her character, however, is felt 
 rather than observed; there is no portrait of her in these 
 letters, but very much is suggested, and one sees her 
 chiefly by the reflection of her personality from the es- 
 teem and affection of Taylor and Aubrey de Vere. The 
 latter pays a tribute to her, at the time of her death, 
 in a letter to Taylor, which is the most humane in the 
 whole series. On an earlier page he had said that her 
 moral nature was greater than Wordsworth's, and here 
 he speaks of her with such affection and sensitiveness to 
 the unhappiness of her life, and in so pure a religious 
 spirit, as to bring home to the reader the memory of a 
 high nature. 
 
 To come to Taylor's own contemporaries, none of them 
 who contribute letters to this volume impresses one more 
 
CORRESPONDENCE OF SIR HENRY TAYLOR 81 
 
 pleasantly than De Vere. He was a lifelong friend and 
 a poet besides, and he expressed himself frankly, and 
 often with fullness, in his correspondence. He was the 
 only one, Taylor confides to him, who thought as highly 
 of the latter's verses as he did himself, and there was 
 a good deal of poetic talk between them upon each other's 
 work. De Vere's mind is subtle, and yet one that looks 
 at things in the mass and as a whole ; not that he general- 
 izes, but he is continuous, a seeker after unity and com- 
 prehensiveness at once. Taylor says of him that his life 
 was a soliloquy; certainly his thoughts have the charac- 
 teristics of a mind working in solitude and largely within 
 itself. This gives distinction to his letters, and the extraor- 
 dinary refinement of his nature adds a grace which is 
 never absent, and often comes upon one in some un- 
 expected word, some minor thought, of the beauty of 
 which the writer is unconscious. It is something more, 
 however, that we obtain here a few personal glimpses 
 of him. In one place we find him "an efficient mob- 
 orator." It was during the Irish disturbances of 1847. 
 "The troops came to attack a mob of several thousands, 
 and, finding that they were in Aubrey's hands, who had 
 stopped them and was making a speech from the top of a 
 wall, the officer in command very wisely took away the 
 troops, and Aubrey brought them to reason, and per- 
 suaded them to give up their enterprise and disperse." 
 At another time he had an adventure with some men who 
 came to kill a steward whom he had refused to dismiss, 
 and in this case, too, "his invariable self-possession" stood 
 him in good stead; but his knowledge of the people and 
 their knowledge of him seem to have been the cause of 
 his success in dealing with them. In other passages we 
 find him winning a good word from Carlyle, after the 
 
82 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 battle between them (Carlyle being "furiously and ex- 
 travagantly irreverent") was over; and in general, light- 
 ness of heart goes with his serious mind and kind manner. 
 But such a man is best seen in his own words, though 
 one will readily understand the feeling that there is a 
 kind of privacy in this portion of the correspondence, 
 an intimacy with a living man, which sometimes rebukes 
 observation. 
 
 The friendship between the two poets imparts a more 
 personal element than is elsewhere to be found in the 
 volume, except where Taylor writes of his own youth- 
 ful days, 
 
 "Under the shade of melancholy boughs," 
 
 to his wife. We feel this closeness when De Vere speaks 
 of his "vexation at Alice's getting ill as the carriage 
 wound up the steep hill to Perugia, and the strange 
 touch of grief I felt at observing for the first time what 
 looked like a solid tress of gray in your hair, as you 
 stood before me at church in Naples." For the spirit 
 of this friendship we leave the reader to search in what 
 will not prove the least valuable portion of this collec- 
 tion; but before leaving the subject let us quote a short 
 passage from De Vere's own retrospect: "Although there 
 is a melancholy about the past, still the best scenes it 
 presents to our memory seem to me presented even more 
 to one's hope. They are less records of what was than 
 pledges of what may be, and therefore must be in that 
 far future that alone makes either present or past intel- 
 ligible. One knows, looking back on them, that some- 
 how they were not all that they seem to have been; or 
 rather that, though they were all, and more than all, 
 yet they were not either felt aright or understood aright 
 
CORRESPONDENCE OF SIR HENRY TAYLOR 83 
 
 at the moment." We must find space, too, for De 
 Vere's account of Tennyson's conservatism: " 'You are 
 quite a conservative/ I said to him, one day. He re- 
 plied, 'I believe in progress, and would conserve the 
 hopes of men.'" This was in 1848, and Tennyson was 
 also saying in very good British, "Let us not see a 
 French soldier land on the English shores, or I will tear 
 him limb from limb." The occasional violence of the 
 Laureate's prose, however, is not a new thing in our 
 anecdotes. 
 
 There is a good deal, in one way and another, about 
 Carlyle, the best being Taylor's remark a propos of Fred- 
 erick: "The defect of Carlyle's book is one that belongs 
 to the author, and which I once ventured to mention 
 to him — that he does not know the difference between 
 right and wrong." Some years before, in 1845, he made 
 a happy quotation with regard to Carlyle's style: "His 
 light comes in flashes, and 
 
 'Before a man hath time to say "Behold!" 
 The jaws of darkness do devour it up' ; " 
 
 and he comments on the general subject of Carlyle's 
 teaching: "I suppose that it will generally be found that 
 when a man quarrels with all the world for not giving an 
 intelligible account of the ways of Providence, it is be- 
 cause he is much perplexed at them himself." Later, 
 in 1848, he says: "Less instructive talk I never listened 
 to from any man who had read and attempted to think. 
 His opinions are the most groundless and senseless 
 opinions that it is possible to utter. ... I think it 
 is the great desire to have opinions and the incapacity 
 to form them which keeps his mind in a constant struggle, 
 
84 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 and gives it over to every kind of extravagance. Taylor 
 never formed a more favorable opinion. In 1868 he 
 compares him to a a Puritan of the seventeenth century 
 — that is, in his nature and character of mind (not, of 
 course, in his creed, if he has one); a man who re- 
 nounces argument and reasoning which every other intel- 
 lectual man of the time thinks it necessary to stand 
 upon, and trusts to visions and insights." Upon Carlyle, 
 Aubrey de Vere, too, has a good sentence with regard 
 to the democrats not being very angry with him: "The 
 Revolutionary people readily forgive his phrases in praise 
 of despotic rule, just as the Whigs forgave Moore for 
 his Irish patriotism, when they found he was contented 
 to hang his harp on the orange-trees in the conserva- 
 tories at Holland Park. Carlyle's admirers feel that his 
 works are at the Revolutionary side." 
 
 Sir James Stephens, who took the interest of an 
 elderly man in Taylor, is very welcome whenever he 
 appears in the correspondence; and so is James Sped- 
 ding, though he was not a good letter-writer. Taylor 
 characterizes the latter's mind very sharply, in one 
 place. He is speaking of Spedding's possible influence 
 in causing Tennyson's revolt from Gladstone. "There 
 is in it [his mind], however, a leaning to the contro- 
 versial, which involves, perhaps, some tincture of the 
 spirit of contradiction. If left to himself, he will con- 
 tradict himself, till he works himself into just thinking 
 and comes to a correct conclusion. But if a man like 
 Gladstone is positive and absolute and vehement, and all 
 on one side, the spirit will lift up its head and hiss like 
 a serpent that is trodden on." In connection with this, 
 and in general with the place Gladstone occupies in the 
 politics at the end of the volume, it is amusing to turn 
 
CORRESPONDENCE OF SIR HENRY TAYLOR 85 
 
 back to the year 1839, and find Taylor writing of him, 
 "Two wants, however, may lie across his political ca- 
 reer — want of robust health and want of flexibility." 
 Old Lord Ashburton is very keenly drawn, especially in 
 regard to his power of seeing all sides of a question, so 
 that he was said to be notorious for convincing every- 
 body in the House of Commons but himself, for he "gen- 
 erally ended by voting in the teeth of his own speech." 
 To this earlier period belongs, too, a parlor scene of the 
 Duke of Wellington with Miss Jervis singing to him and 
 entertaining him — just the sort of scene that one would 
 find only in a letter. Among the brightest social sketches, 
 however, is that of the scene at Lady Ashburton's table 
 when Tennyson was a new-comer at the seat of honor 
 beside her, and Taylor gave him warning: "Twenty years 
 ago I was the last new man, and where am I now?" 
 Whereupon the lady rose in defense of her constancy, 
 and ended by saying that "of course one's affection for 
 one's old friends was a different thing." Then Tennyson 
 asking " 'what time it took to make an old friend,' I 
 replied that with her five years reduced it to the decencies 
 of dry affection"; and on Lady Ashburton's again com- 
 ing to the defense of the lasting character of her attach- 
 ments, Taylor said that he did "not dispute that they 
 hardened into permanence. But what I was speaking 
 of was the case of Alfred Tennyson, and I could only say 
 that this time last year I had seen Mr. Goldwin Smith 
 sitting by her side at dinner, just as I had seen Alfred 
 Tennyson yesterday; and that I expected to see Alfred 
 Tennyson this time next year occupying the position 
 which I was told Mr. Goldwin Smith had occupied when 
 he was here last week. I had not seen it myself, but 
 it had been described to me. He came to the Grange 
 
86 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 last year, innocent and happy in the bloom of youth, 
 with violet eyes; and what he was now I had not seen, 
 but I had heard of it." Then Lady Ashburton explained 
 that a stranger is often shy, and so on, and Tennyson 
 broke in with, "Then it appears, by what you say your- 
 self, that you do not show me any particular favors." 
 She said, "Well, it is a different sort of feeling that one 
 has for a new friend and an old one; but you, Mr. Ven- 
 ables, are now almost an old acquaintance, and you can 
 say what you feel about it." "Then," the narrative goes 
 on in Taylor's words, "as Venables was beginning to 
 bear his testimony, to his infinite horror Alfred said, 
 'Why, you told me yourself that Lady Ashburton had 
 been very kind to you at first, and that now' — Here 
 Venables stopped him, speaking aside in a deprecating 
 tone, and I ended the debate by saying, 'Well, Tenny- 
 son, all I can say is that my advice to you is to rise with 
 your winnings and be off.' Venables said to Mrs. Brook- 
 field, afterwards, that Alfred was truly an enfant ter- 
 rible." This, as an example of conversation "at the 
 Grange," is not without interest, for one does not often 
 meet with verbatim reports of how the men and women 
 talked at that famous meeting-place. It is pleasant to 
 read in the next letter that "there was no pain given in 
 these passages between Lady Harriet and me," but all 
 was "light, gay, stingless talk." 
 
 Another portion of the correspondence deals with polit- 
 ical affairs, and here one finds Lord Gray, whose love of 
 justice is a most noticeable trait, and, besides Gladstone 
 in person, talk about Disraeli, Governor Eyre, and the 
 Jamaica incident, and such topics as reform of the penal 
 code, Irish affairs, constitutional changes, Bulgaria, the 
 colonial relations, and the like; but this portion of the 
 
CORRESPONDENCE OF SIR HENRY TAYLOR 87 
 
 contents is incidental and comparatively small. It is 
 interesting to observe that to a lifelong opposition to 
 field-sports and a horror of vivisection Taylor added 
 a belief in the efficacy of the lash upon criminals, and 
 in general of sharp physical punishments, though he dis- 
 approved, apparently, of employing such correctives upon 
 hardened offenders. The inconsistency, from the senti- 
 mental point of view, is solved by remembering that 
 Taylor thought out these conclusions rationally, instead 
 of arriving at them by sensitive feelings. His defense 
 of the whipping-post goes to the point of advocacy. 
 Of the persons who are to be met with, in this part of the 
 letters, Lord Gray is by far the most impressive; and 
 of the lesser men, the Elliots are most attractive. The 
 figure of Sir John Grant is one not to be met with out- 
 side of the English hunting-grounds, and it is briefly 
 drawn: "I found him in what the house-agents call a 
 'spacious mansion,' with glowing pictures on the walls, 
 presenting divers interesting objects without clothes. 
 And I found flesh in a variety of other exquisite forms 
 upon the dinner-table, and he looked a tall, large, solid, 
 substantial man, with a russet face expressing ease and 
 comfort; and I asked him what could induce him to 
 leave all this, and 'live laborious days' in Jamaica. His 
 answer was: 'I cannot tell you, for I do not know. When 
 I came from India, three years since, I found my leisure 
 altogether delightful, and came to the conclusion that 
 what I was made for was to swing upon a gate. I have 
 seen no reason to think otherwise since, and why I am 
 going to Jamaica I cannot understand!' I hear," con- 
 cludes Taylor ,"he was infinitely laborious as Lieutenant- 
 Governor of Bengal, and that he is one of the few men 
 to whom idleness and labor are equally welcome." But 
 
38 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 the life-likeness of Taylor's portraiture and anecdote is 
 well enough known from his "Autobiography." In age his 
 pen was more effective than in early manhood, and seems 
 to have been more free in comment. His remark upon 
 Macaulay's personal appearance, in connection with the 
 latter's expressing some vanity on hearing that the hand- 
 somest woman in London had pronounced his profile to 
 be a study for an artist, is an admirable example of the 
 vigor of his short sentences in latter days. "His looks," 
 writes Taylor, "always seemed to me the most impudent 
 contradiction of himself that Nature had ever dared to 
 throw in a man's face." 
 
 The correspondence as a whole is a subsidiary volume; 
 but apart from the more important "Autobiography," it 
 has a high value of its own as a collection of letters by 
 men and women of cultivation, and one feels in them the 
 presence of social tact and manners, as well as much 
 strength of mind, occasional wit, and in one case, at 
 least, remarkable grace in expression. They are a record 
 of London life, notwithstanding the fact that the cor- 
 respondents often lived in the country; for it was Lon- 
 don that united them. It is quite in keeping with the 
 tone of the book to find Taylor himself, in early man- 
 hood, so much a Londoner as to confess that "the 
 Regent's Park is more beautiful in my eyes than Venice"; 
 and he follows up the declaration by a description of his 
 evening walk there before going to bed, which redeems 
 his preference for "the most beautiful civic scenery in 
 the world." The intellectual life of London is a brac- 
 ing one, and here one gets somewhat nearer to it than 
 books often bring the reader, and finds himself always 
 in excellent company for the mind. Taylor's individ- 
 
CORRESPONDENCE OF SIR HENRY TAYLOR 89 
 
 uality naturally gives unity and a dominant tone to the 
 volume, and that is perhaps the reason why one is so 
 constantly impressed with the solidity of mind and sound- 
 ness of judgment which seem to belong to all these cor- 
 respondents. 
 
HAYWARD'S CORRESPONDENCE 
 
 Mr. Hayward, alluding at the end of his life to his 
 literary debut as the translator of "Faust," humorously 
 remarks: "Lady Blanche Hozier asked me, the other 
 day, if I read German; and it is by no means the first 
 time that the same question has been put to me." It 
 is as the author of that excellent prose version of Goethe's 
 great work, published more than half a century ago, 
 that his name is best known, though he has a reputa- 
 tion of another sort as a critic, which rests upon the 
 solid and copious volumes of his reviews. He was born 
 in 1 80 1, and, after school days, was articled to a solici- 
 tor, and in due course entered at the Inner Temple. He 
 joined the famous London Debating Society which Mill 
 and the philosophical Radicals had founded, where he 
 supported the Tory side, and in 1828 he became editor 
 of the Law Magazine, which was established to further 
 the cause of law reform. Out of his interest in this 
 subject grew some relations with the law professors at 
 Gottingen, whom he visited in 1831, and this was the 
 beginning of his extensive acquaintance on the Continent, 
 which was afterwards of great influence on his career. 
 The immediate literary result of this trip to Germany 
 was the translation of "Faust," issued in 1833, which at 
 once gave its author the position of a known man of 
 letters. Mr. Hayward remained a working lawyer, how- 
 ever, and received in 1845 an appointment to the rank 
 of Queen's Counsel; but this advancement, giving rise 
 
 91 
 
92 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 to a professional quarrel in consequence of the Benchers 
 refusing the customary election to their body, practically 
 terminated his legal career. He had been received into 
 society, and, as he was already in association with emi- 
 nent party men, he fell naturally into politics, as one of 
 the Peelites, and was a main support of the Morning 
 Chronicle while it was in the interest of that coterie. 
 His labors in journalism were signalized by his writing a 
 leading article on an important debate, on the bill for 
 the repeal of the Navigation Laws, in season for the morn- 
 ing's paper — a feat of which it is said: "It revolution- 
 ized at a stroke the whole art of leader-writing, and 
 statesmen found all at once that, with a quiet man of 
 letters sitting in a corner of the gallery with a bit of 
 pencil, they had to lay their account for prompt and 
 energetic criticism in the newspapers the next day, con- 
 currently with the publication of their own speeches, 
 instead of criticism the day after, when the speeches 
 had done their work." 
 
 The close connection with public life which Mr. Hay- 
 ward formed in the course of these years was maintained 
 by him; and, though he was never in the House or in 
 Government, his place in society, his long experience 
 and his abilities, and a certain knowledge of men, sus- 
 tained him in an unofficial position of influence. Thiers 
 made him the channel of advice during the Crimean war ; 
 and in 1870, during the former's diplomatic tour to solicit 
 the good offices of the Powers in behalf of France, his 
 first visit in England was at the rooms of his old friend. 
 Slidell, of Confederate fame, also used Mr. Hayward as 
 a means of communication in his efforts to obtain recog- 
 nition for his Government; and, in connection with this, 
 one notes a call he made on Motley at Vienna in 1862, 
 
HAYWARD'S CORRESPONDENCE 93 
 
 whom he found "more unreasonable than ever, vowing 
 that the restoration of the Union in its entirety was 'as 
 sure as the sun in heaven.' " In the changes of the 
 Ministries, especially in the days of coalition, Mr. Hay- 
 ward was en rapport with the principals, and occasionally 
 was useful in personal negotiations. It was on services 
 of this nature, in the formation of Lord Aberdeen's Cabi- 
 net, that he grounded his application for a Charity Com- 
 missionership, which failed; and it is curious to note 
 his observation on this incident: "When men work to- 
 gether for a party object, they are all entitled, in their 
 several ways, to a share in the advantage of success." 
 This is not the spoils doctrine, for which it might be 
 mistaken, but that of party reward in filling new or va- 
 cant offices as against the aristocratic system of nepotism. 
 Mr. Hayward never obtained any of the material fruits 
 of political service, though a second attempt was made 
 for him in later years. He was successively in intimate 
 relations with Lyndhurst, Newcastle, Palmerston, and 
 Gladstone, and apparently grew liberal with his times. 
 It is amusing to find him dismissing Disraeli in 1850 in 
 a couple of lines as "very nearly if not quite forgotten"; 
 and he adds, "How soon one of these puffed-up reputa- 
 tions goes down!" In 1880 he writes, "I have been 
 longing for the fall of the Disraeli Government as I did 
 for the fall of the Second Empire." He had taken his 
 name off the Carlton Club in 1870, having apparently 
 had the experience of much bad manners there, after it 
 became more a strictly political club than it was in the 
 first part of the century; and he was evidently a thorough- 
 going Liberal when he died, as we read in one of his last 
 letters, "During my long life I never remember a period 
 when the English people were less Radical than now." 
 
94 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 Ten years ago Gladstone was writing to him in respect 
 to the obstructiveness of the Upper Ten Thousand in 
 the political progress of the century, to the same effect 
 as was the language he used upon the stump. Hayward's 
 interest in politics continued unabated until his death. 
 
 In the whole course of his career he was a careful 
 and fluent writer, being reckoned the best of the essay- 
 ists of the old school; and since, in his later years, he 
 had the great advantage of treating of men whom he had 
 known all about in life, his work has a special interest 
 and value. Literature consequently shares with politics 
 the pages of this correspondence, which derives con- 
 siderable luster from the many distinguished names 
 among the signatures. At the date of the beginning 
 of the series Mr. Hayward was thirty-three years old, 
 and had already given some of those little dinners at his 
 rooms in the Temple for which he was afterward noted. 
 He gathered there intellectual men and brilliant women, 
 and in particular he exercised hospitality toward foreign- 
 ers; men so various as General von Radowitz, Louis 
 Blanc, and the poet Dupont, being among his guests. 
 He gives in one place a few instances of the ignorance 
 of one another among the eminent writers of Europe that 
 had come under his observation. Manzoni did not 
 know Bulwer by name in 1834; Schlegel, arriving in 
 England in 1832, had not heard of Macaulay; M. Charles 
 Dupin did not know of Babbage's 'Manufactures' four 
 months after publication; and Say, the economist, was 
 unacquainted with Whately's name, though Mr. Hay- 
 ward found in Say's library at the time a presentation 
 copy of the 'Lectures' "from the Archbishop of Dublin." 
 At Mr. Hayward's rooms such international indifference 
 was as likely to be corrected as anywhere in London. He 
 
HAYWARD'S CORRESPONDENCE 95 
 
 made many short, journeys to the Continent, usually to 
 Paris, and thus renewed and strengthened old ties and 
 formed new ones; but his travels dealt with persons of 
 distinction and affairs, and were fruitful only of informa- 
 tion and social alliances. The mass of his correspond- 
 ence, consequently, is wide in range of acquaintance, and 
 friendly in tone; there is in it naturally a very large pro- 
 portion of what is transitory and not a little that is trivial 
 — society and political news, the record of dinners, the 
 chances of Parliament, ministerial changes, etc. The 
 whole is a very heterogeneous collection of notes and 
 letters, light and serious, dull and entertaining, but it 
 affords a fair retrospect of half a century of London 
 life in the world of affairs and entertainment. Of the 
 substance it is to be said that it has less solid value than 
 one would have expected. 
 
 The literary portion is extraordinarily meager. The 
 best of the letters are from the sprightly pen of Mrs. 
 Norton; and the feminine correspondence in general is 
 the most pleasant feature of the volumes. Very few 
 of the letters, however, deal with literary reputations 
 either in the way of anecdote or criticism. In reply to 
 a request for material for an essay upon Rogers, Mrs. 
 Norton writes very justly of him as a small man filling a 
 miraculously large place in the world, and defines his 
 individuality by saying that tastes were to him what pas- 
 sions are to other men: "He did nothing rash. I am 
 sure Rogers as a baby never fell down, unless he was 
 pushed; but walked from chair to chair of the drawing- 
 room furniture steadily and quietly till he reached the 
 place where the sunbeam fell on the carpet." He pre- 
 ferred a lullaby to the merriest game of romps, she 
 thinks, and would have begged that his long clothes 
 
96 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 might be made of fine mull muslin instead of cambric, 
 which was capable of a thing "he loathed, starch," 
 Lady Dufferin writes on the same subject: "I never 
 could lash myself into a feeling of affection or admiration 
 for him. ... I have heard him say many graceful 
 things, but few kind ones, and he never seemed to me 
 thoroughly in earnest save in expressing contempt or 
 dislike. ... It seemed a positive pain to him to hear 
 any modern poet praised, and I remember his treating me 
 with a rudeness almost bearish because I indiscreetly 
 avowed how much I admired Tennyson's 'Princess.' " 
 She then tells the anecdote of being accidentally left in 
 the dark with him, and his jest: "Ah, my dear, if sweet 
 seventy-eight could come again! Mais ces beaux jours 
 sont passes" Besides these brief passages on Rogers 
 there is really nothing of interest in regard to the world 
 of letters, except an opinion of Bulwer's on Macaulay, 
 in which he remarks that the historian's acquaintance 
 with the world — that is, with men's actual characters — 
 was slight, and then recites what are now the common- 
 places of criticism on Macaulay (but this was in 1861) 
 — that his style excludes many of the nobler excellences, 
 being without modesty, or suggestiveness, and is, besides, 
 indebted to coarse tricks of art in color and contrast, while 
 the secret of his vogue is discovered in his relieving his 
 readers from any necessity to think. Apropos of a wordy 
 letter of Carlyle's Mr. Hayward himself writes: "I never 
 yet followed him to the authorities without finding him 
 wrong. In my 'Essay on Marshal Saxe' I have proved 
 from signed documents that Carlyle's labored account 
 of the battle of Fontenoy is essentially incorrect. He 
 is a man of genius, undoubtedly, but he has injured 
 instead of improving literature, and taste; and, as to 
 
HAYWARD'S CORRESPONDENCE 97 
 
 his conversation, if he spoke English and attended to 
 the rules of good breeding, its charm for the mass of his 
 admirers would disappear." In another place is an 
 equally brief judgment on Balzac, whom he was rereading 
 in his seventy-eighth year and found not to improve: "the 
 fineness of observation and analysis of feeling are unde- 
 niable, but his descriptions, both of places and charac- 
 ters, are tediously spun out, his plots teem with im- 
 probability, and he has a vulgar fondness for wealth 
 and rank." 
 
 These extracts practically comprise the entire literary 
 interest of the two volumes; nor are there any anecdotes 
 by the way to speak of, if we except the droll suggestion 
 of Hook to Lord Lyndhurst, who had come to a- dinner 
 with gold-laced trousers, that "to appear with all his 
 glories he should reverse his position in the chair." 
 Lord Lyndhurst appears very agreeably in the earlier 
 pages, but death soon removed him. To him is attrib- 
 uted the witticism apropos of Mme. Genlis's keeping 
 her books in detached cases, the male authors in one 
 and the female in the other, that the reason was "she did 
 not wish to add to her library" — a joke unfairly claimed 
 by James Smith. Of the correspondence with public 
 men, that of Sir Henry Bulwer (Lord Dalling) is of 
 most note. In his long and varied service he had ex- 
 perience of state affairs in many lands, and his remarks 
 are pointed, shrewd, and sensible. Writing of the 
 Ionian Island difficulty in 1863, ne illustrates his width 
 of view and soundness of principle: "The tendency to 
 resign empire is a dangerous one for an empire to fall 
 into; but if a people wish to get out of your hands, and 
 public opinion is not for keeping them, a Minister in 
 what is called, and is, a free country can have no policy 
 
98 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 of his own in the matter." And, again, of the Eastern 
 question, in the same year, he states the function of Eng- 
 land very aptly as being "to prevent no government taking 
 the place of some government, and urging and helping a 
 bad government to be better than it was." As the nego- 
 tiator of the Bulwer-Clayton Treaty, what he thought of 
 our diplomacy has some interest, and he expressed his 
 opinion very frankly on the question of the indirect 
 claims being urged under the Washington Treaty: "When 
 I had to make a treaty with them [the American states- 
 men] I took the trouble of going over all their own 
 treaties, and only using in important passages such words 
 as they had used, in the sense in which they had used 
 them. Then when they began their usual disputes 
 about interpretation, I quoted their own authority. All 
 their own newspapers acknowledged I was right." 
 Sir Henry's mode of meeting his cousins in diplomacy 
 was one of commendable safety. He exhibits solidity 
 and sense on all occasions where he is met in these letters, 
 and yet there was a vein of daring in him hardly conso- 
 nant with his caution. His characterization of Peel as a 
 state-clock which was silent till it struck the hour, is 
 admirable, as are also his observations on the inconven- 
 iences of such a political time-piece in a representative 
 Government. 
 
 There are one or two interesting communications from 
 Mr. A. G. Dunlop about Spain, in which he notices that 
 Spanish art was a temporary importation from Italy, 
 as Spanish wealth was from America, and both almost 
 to be classed as matters of chance, not national develop- 
 ment; and he contrasts the Spanish peasant with the 
 Italian, South German, or Greek people, as without ap- 
 preciation of art, not caring for flowers or trees even, 
 
 
HAYWARD'S CORRESPONDENCE 99 
 
 and staring at pictures only because they are "holy" and 
 appeal to his superstition. He adds that the Spaniards 
 are likewise without any desire for knowledge, and de- 
 clares there is no avenir for the pure-blooded race: "If 
 the Spaniard remain any longer as he is in spite of rail- 
 ways and increased intercourse, the commerce of the 
 seaboard will more and more slip away into the hands of 
 foreigners — French, German, Swede, English — and the 
 pure race (native) will fall back on the interior and 
 inland villages, hewers of wood and drawers of water." 
 There are letters, too, from Lady Clanricarde (daughter 
 of George Canning), with excellent passages on the con- 
 dition of Ireland, worth reading now as evidence of the 
 long-established, long well-known state of affairs there. 
 "It appears to me," she says, "contrary to all I have 
 seen or read that a great amount of discontent continu- 
 ing in a country should not produce serious results of 
 some sort." This concludes the list of really notable 
 letters in the department of public affairs. 
 
 Of Mr. Hayward himself one forms a conception not 
 very deeply marked. Mr. W. E. Forster says that the 
 unique characteristic of his political thought and ex- 
 perience was "the result of a curious combination of a 
 hard, worldly, even cynical sympathy with popular move- 
 ments, and ideal aspirations." He had enemies and 
 prejudices; but his strength of character seems to have 
 included independence, sincerity, and perfect courage 
 as elements, and he was undoubtedly liberalized by the 
 variety of his associations with other minds. His career 
 was laborious and honored, and one cannot but regret 
 that he left no more extensive and notable memoirs, as 
 he might well have done. This correspondence is but 
 a meager substitute. 
 
THACKERAY'S LETTERS 
 
 How much formal biography really adds to our 
 knowledge of a great literary character is a curious ques- 
 tion. Perhaps it is not modesty nor a proud and sensi- 
 tive reserve that urges a nature like Hawthorne's to try 
 to evade the biographer; nor does mere humbleness of 
 spirit account wholly for Thackeray's repeated injunc- 
 tion upon his heirs not to allow the public to view his 
 private life. Probably every man of literary genius 
 who has found expression for what was in him feels that 
 his true self is there in his works, and that in his per- 
 sonal life, with all its accidental and eccentric details, the 
 circumstances of his position and the varying moods of 
 his temperament obscure the reality, and are, more 
 often than not, misleading. A quarrel that was but an 
 incident of a lifetime becomes a long episode in the 
 book; a scandal that quickly melted away comes back 
 as a cloud not to be dispersed; an irritable letter, an 
 imprudent witticism, a blunder in some fit of dullness, 
 a piece of self-deception that was only momentary, and 
 all the thousand and one superficial matters that fill the 
 day are brought into prominence, as if they, and not 
 the spirit that underwent these crosses, were the life 
 itself. But the real man is in his books. One knows 
 that this is so in Thackeray's case. The personality of 
 the author is so blended with his characters, and makes 
 so largely the main charm of his style, that one comes 
 to know him with exceptional nearness, and to feel that 
 
102 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 there is no other reason to desire a formal biography of 
 him than to have more of the same thing. 
 
 In reading the letters which Thackeray wrote to 
 his friends, the Brookfields, one is most struck by this 
 identity of the man and the author; it affords a most 
 startling test of Thackeray's sincerity. Those who are 
 lovers of his works, thoroughly familiarized with his 
 ways of looking upon the world and his manner of treat- 
 ing the individuals who compose it, experience no sur- 
 prise at this; but they are delighted to hear the old 
 voice speaking again, and pleased to have his qualities 
 brought out in this private correspondence so plainly that 
 no one, however blind to his real nature in his novels, 
 can fail to find in the writer the kindliness, the honesty, 
 and goodness of heart which lie at the bottom of all his 
 great achievements in literature. He is to be seen here 
 as genuinely as Steele in those letters to his wife, which 
 are as charming a piece of biography as English litera- 
 ture has to show. 
 
 The collection covers eight years of Thackeray's ma- 
 ture life. It is composed of every-day notes, written 
 from the club or his lodgings about the things of the 
 hour; or of longer letters of travel, sent from some 
 watering-place on the Continent, or some country retreat 
 in England, or from Paris, whither he made frequent 
 excursions. They are for the most part entirely per- 
 sonal, and describe what happened to himself, or confide 
 the moods that visited him; and, too, they are especially 
 the letters of a novelist — the world that he sees is the 
 very same that he writes about. One may say that in 
 the passages concerning persons we read his novels in 
 the rough, his notes still unelaborated ; and we see quite 
 plainly the method in which he worked up his observa- 
 
THACKERAY'S LETTERS 103 
 
 tions, and the way in which life reacted upon his mind. 
 Such is the description of the friend of his youth, whom 
 a score of years before he thought "the most fascinating, 
 accomplished, witty, and delightful of men": 
 
 "I found an old man in a room smelling of brandy and 
 
 water, at five o'clock, at , quite the same man that 
 
 I remember, only grown coarser and stale somehow, like 
 a piece of goods that has been hanging up in a shop 
 window. He has had fifteen years of a vulgar wife, very 
 much brandy and water, I should think, and a depressing 
 profession; for what can be more depressing than a long 
 course of hypocrisy to a man of no small sense of humor? 
 It was a painful meeting. We tried to talk unreservedly, 
 and as I looked at his face I remembered the fellow I 
 was so fond of. . . . He must have been glad, too, 
 when I went away, and I dare say is more scornful 
 about me than I about him. I used to worship him for 
 about six months, and now he points a moral and adorns 
 a tale such as it is in Tendennis.' . . . Poor old Harry 
 
 ! and this battered, vulgar man was my idol of 
 
 youth." 
 
 It is worth noting that Thackeray's satire is not merely 
 that of a man acquainted with the world, not hard, and 
 incisive, and sneering only, but that of a man who in 
 his youth had "a knack of setting up idols to worship," 
 and in whom acquaintance with the world was not only 
 knowledge, but disappointment. Regret, the remem- 
 brance of better things, is one of the colors of his style; 
 it is "the principle" of which he elsewhere speaks as 
 based "on the eternal data of perennial reminiscences." 
 
 A particular interest attaches to the half dozen para- 
 graphs, scattered through the volume, in which Thacke- 
 ray expresses his convictions upon religious topics. It 
 
104 LITERARY MEMORIES 
 
 is a very simple creed, and is usually brought to the 
 surface by way of reaction against some irritating doc- 
 trine of a more stalwart church than that in which he 
 is militant. A sentence or two may not be out of 
 place: — 
 
 "The light upon all the saints in heaven is just as 
 much, and no more, God's work as the sun which shall 
 shine to-morrow upon this infinitesimal speck of crea- 
 tion, and under which I shall read, please God, a letter 
 from my kindest lady and friend. About my future 
 state I don't know; I leave it in the disposal of the aw- 
 ful Father — but for to-day I thank God that I can 
 love you, and that you yonder, and others besides, are 
 thinking of me with a tender regard. Hallelujah may be 
 greater in degree than this, but not in kind, and count- 
 less ages of stars may be blazing infinitely, but you and 
 I have a right to rejoice and believe in our little part, and 
 to trust in to-day as in to-morrow. . . . When I am 
 on a cloud a-singing or a-pot-boiling, I will do my best; 
 and if you are ill, you can have consolation; if you have 
 disappointments, you can invent fresh sources of hope 
 and pleasure. . . . By Jove! I'll admire, if I can, 
 the wing of a cock-sparrow as much as the pinion of 
 an archangel, and adore God, the Father of the earth, 
 first; waiting for the completion of my senses, and the 
 fulfilment of his intentions towards me afterwards when 
 this scene closes over us. So, when Bullar turns up his 
 eye to the ceiling, I'll look straight at your dear kind 
 face and thank God for knowing that, my dear; and 
 though my nose is a broken pitcher, yet, lo and behold! 
 there's a well gushing over with kindness in my heart, 
 where my dear lady may come and drink." 
 
 All this, however, one can read in the novels as plainly, 
 
THACKERAY'S LETTERS 105 
 
 if one will, and perceive in it the real piety toward heaven 
 and brotherliness toward man which belong to a large, 
 grateful, and honest heart, much perplexed and cast down 
 before the gorgeous presence of the Church Established. 
 But why go on to detail what every one interested 
 will read for himself? The little satirical vignettes, ma 
 cousine at Paris, the cavalier lady in the row, the 
 Continental table d'hote where he dined like "an ordi- 
 nary person," the French plays with their naughtinesses 
 and their little girls singing for the dragoons, Jules 
 Janin, the Chinaman kissing the Duke of Wellington, to 
 that "old boy's" great surprise, the old gentleman in 
 pantalets — all these one must look at for himself. The 
 unfailing interest in human life, especially in the worldly 
 stage, and in little else besides; the preoccupation with 
 the novels in hand, and their reality to the author as 
 part and parcel of the life he has lived; the just eye for 
 the visible weaknesses of mortals, and the charitable- 
 ness and self-abasement of him who recognized it all as 
 of a piece with his own humble human nature; the con- 
 stant and unwearied lovingness of the man whose Lares 
 and Penates were tenderness and humor; his generous 
 admiration — these belong to his personality, and are 
 not to be understood except in their concrete expression; 
 and the whole volume which contains these things must 
 be read, if one would understand. It is in no sense a 
 life of Thackeray; it is a better thing — it is Thacke- 
 ray living. 
 
DARWIN'S LIFE 
 
 There is nothing more useful to observe in the life of 
 Darwin than its simplicity. He was the man of science 
 as Marlborough was the soldier, and he was only that. 
 From boyhood he refused all other ways of life and 
 knowledge as by instinct, and in his maturity the ill 
 health which ends the career of ordinary men only con- 
 firmed him in his own; he was always the collector, the 
 investigator, or the theorizer. A second quality, which 
 is general enough to be constantly attracting attention, 
 is the thoroughly English character of his life. The 
 stock from which he sprang was rich in old English 
 qualities of vigor, sense, and originality; the house in 
 which he was reared offers an excellent type of Eng- 
 lish family life, and was as good a place to be born in 
 as could be desired for any son; his father's strong char- 
 acter, the influence of his older relatives, the ordinary 
 schools he attended, the smallest incidents of his child- 
 hood, even the jokes of his playfellows, belong to the 
 moral climate of the old country; and it does not need 
 the grouse-shooting, the Cambridge undergraduate sup- 
 pers, and the proposition that he should choose the 
 Church for a profession to tell us where we are. In- 
 deed, Darwin in his youth, spirited, cordial, and over- 
 flowing with health, in his early surroundings of Eng- 
 lish strength and kindness, was quite as attractive as in 
 his quieter, and in some respects narrower, working life. 
 
 He certainly won upon the men whom he met at the 
 
 107 
 
108 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 outset of his career. "Looking back/' he says, "I infer 
 that there must have been something in me a little supe- 
 rior to the common run of youths: otherwise the above- 
 mentioned men, so much older than me and higher in 
 academical position, would never have allowed me to 
 associate with them. Certainly I was not aware of any 
 such superiority; and I remember one of my sporting 
 friends, Turner, who saw me at work with my beetles, 
 saying that I should some day be a Fellow of the Royal 
 Society, and the notion seemed to me preposterous." 
 Of these men Henslow was the most attached to him and 
 interested in his success. He had not done much more 
 than work at "his beetles," but his scientific taste was 
 already the ruling genius of his life. It is surprising to 
 see how completely he remained untouched by the ordi- 
 nary influences of a university training; he thought in 
 later years that his scholastic education had been a waste 
 of time, and he seems justified when one perceives how 
 little good he got from it. His was a mind that belonged 
 to himself, self-fed, almost self-made; he lived his own 
 life, and not another's, from the start; though his taste 
 for collecting was hereditary, the persistence with which 
 he gave himself up to following it, the completeness 
 of his surrender to his one predominant talent, was his 
 own. He was, nevertheless, better furnished with intel- 
 lectual power than he appears to have believed. "From 
 my earliest youth," he writes, "I have had the strongest 
 desire to understand or explain whatever I observed, that 
 is, to group all facts under some general laws." It is 
 true that he started from some specific facts, had a defi- 
 nite, tangible problem to solve; but he felt the necessity 
 to solve it. He differed from the collector in this, that 
 his curiosity was not exhausted in gathering materials, 
 
DARWIN'S LIFE 109 
 
 but he must also order his materials; or to put it 
 exactly, must organize his knowledge. This shows the 
 great vitality of his reasoning faculty, which within its 
 special range was really precocious. The native strength 
 of his mind in this direction is also illustrated by the great 
 pleasure he derived from reading Paley's "Evidences." 
 "The logic of this book," he declares, "and, as I may 
 add, of his 'Natural Theology,' gave me as much delight 
 as did Euclid. The careful study of these works, with- 
 out attempting to learn any part by rote, was the only 
 part of the academical course which, as I then felt and 
 as I still believe, was of the least use to me in the edu- 
 cation of my mind. I did not at that time trouble myself 
 about Paley's premises; and taking these in trust, I was 
 charmed and convinced by the long line of argumenta- 
 tion." He acknowledges his inability in later life to 
 follow trains of abstract reasoning, such as make the 
 matter of metaphysics; but he was quite aware of his 
 aptitude for inductive reasoning, and does not overesti- 
 mate its influence in the composition of his great work. 
 "Some of my critics have said, 'Oh, he is a good observer, 
 but he has no power of reasoning!' I do not think that 
 this can be true, for the 'Origin of Species' is one long 
 argument from the beginning to the end, and it has con- 
 vinced not a few able men." His taste for collecting was 
 a sine qua non, but it was this power of reasoning, 
 however limited in range, that made him great; and it 
 is as clearly to be seen in operation in his formative years 
 as was the passion for collecting which was to feed it 
 with material to work upon. His vivacity and energy 
 no doubt counted much in winning for him the friendship 
 of elder men, and he possessed that indefinable but 
 potent quality of personal attractiveness: but Henslow 
 
no LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 in the beginning, as Lyell later, must have seen in him 
 that happy conjunction of tastes and faculties which 
 made his genius for science, or at least they must have 
 perceived the promise of it. 
 
 All the circumstances of his life seem to have con- 
 spired to favor this special endowment. The very fact 
 that the classics did nothing for him helped him: he was 
 relieved from the confusion caused by complex and 
 disturbing elements in a varied education; he had 
 no difficulty in making his choice; he was not after- 
 ward drawn aside by the existence of other unsatisfied 
 tastes, artificially cultivated; he had no ambition for 
 that roundness of development which is a fetich of 
 modern times; he did not fritter away his time and energy 
 in directions in which he could not excel. It is not 
 meant to hold up his luck in this respect as exemplary 
 good fortune, but only to emphasize the way in which 
 it told on his success. He was not less happy in the 
 exterior circumstances of his life, and in those things 
 which come by a kind of hazard. His appointment to 
 the Beagle was a Napoleonic opportunity, and in looking 
 back he realized its value to the full: "The voyage of 
 the Beagle has been by far the most important event in 
 my life, and has determined my whole career; yet it 
 depended on so small a circumstance as my uncle offer- 
 ing to drive me thirty miles to Shrewsbury, which few 
 uncles would have done, and on such a trifle as the shape 
 of my nose." But one ought not to exaggerate the ele- 
 ment of chance; and though Captain Fitz-roy had con- 
 tinued to disapprove of Darwin's nose, and his uncle had 
 not interfered to overcome the elder Darwin's objection 
 to the voyage on the score that it would be an unbecom- 
 ing adventure for a prospective clergyman, and on other 
 
DARWIN'S LIFE in 
 
 equally good or better grounds, yet we might have had 
 our great naturalist. The voyage of the Beagle, never- 
 theless, was the turning-point of Darwin's life. He ob- 
 tained in the course of it the first real training of his 
 mind; it brought before him several departments of 
 science in such a way that he approached them with 
 active and original thoughts, and was constantly forced 
 into an inquiring and bold attitude toward the novel 
 material he found; it gave him five years alone with 
 science, and free from any near master to whom he might 
 have formed the habit of deferring. Huxley does not 
 overstate the material advantages that this training 
 brought with it: "In Physical Geography, in Geology 
 proper, in Geographical Distribution, and in Paleontol- 
 ogy, he had acquired an extensive practical training 
 during the voyage of the Beagle. He knew of his own 
 knowledge the way in which the raw materials of these 
 branches of science are acquired, and was therefore a 
 most competent judge of the speculative strain they would 
 bear. That which he needed, after his return to Eng- 
 land, was a corresponding acquaintance with Anatomy 
 and Development, and their relations to Taxonomy, and 
 he acquired this by his Cirripede work." It is to be 
 noticed that during his voyage in the Beagle he became 
 convinced of the "wonderful superiority of LyelPs man- 
 ner of treating geology" over every other author's. This 
 is an illustration, like that drawn from Paley, of the 
 character of his mind as primarily a reasoning mind; 
 for what he recognized in Lyell was a method. It was 
 on this voyage, too, that he became ambitious; he be- 
 gan to believe that he might add to the stock of human 
 knowledge, and the stimulation of the welcome his suc- 
 cess was meeting in England was evidently keenly felt. 
 
H2 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 He put his whole heart into the work, and few passages 
 are more stirring than those which describe his zeal in 
 his first really scientific enthusiasm, after he had given 
 up his gun as of less use than his eye, and had found 
 sport, even with his fond love of it, an inferior pleasure 
 to the pursuit of knowledge; then, alone in the Andes 
 and the Southern Ocean, he came to his majority. 
 
 Mr. Huxley, in the passage cited, has noted the need 
 Darwin had for further training, particularly as a natu- 
 ralist. He obtained this by his work on the Cirripedes, 
 an eight years' labor. This concluded his education. 
 Of the value of it merely as training and to him- 
 self, Sir Joseph Hooker says: "Your father recognized 
 three stages in his career as a biologist: the mere col- 
 lector at Cambridge; the collector and observer in the 
 Beagle, and for some years afterwards; and the trained 
 naturalist after, and only after, the Cirripede work. 
 That he was a thinker all along is true enough." Hux- 
 ley says that Darwin never did a wiser thing than when 
 he devoted himself to these years of patient toil. Dar- 
 win himself does not indicate that he purposely chose 
 to do this monograph in order to educate himself, and he 
 doubts whether it was worth the time. He seems to have 
 been gradually drawn into it, and to have finished it 
 because he had gone so far. When he had done with 
 it, at any rate, if not before, he was a thoroughly fur- 
 nished man for such investigation as was to be his title 
 to lasting fame. He had come to be thus equipped by 
 the mere course of his life; by beetles at Cambridge, and 
 the Beagle, and the Cirripedes. Yet if he had planned 
 his education from the start for the express purpose of 
 dealing in the most masterly way with the mass of diversi- 
 fied details out of which the "Origin of Species" and the 
 
DARWIN'S LIFE 113 
 
 other derivative coordinate works grew, it is hard to see 
 in what way his course could have been improved. The 
 ill-health which seized him so soon was almost a blessing 
 in disguise, since it isolated him from the distractions 
 of modern London, made him value his life and his time, 
 and possibly, by the economy of his strength which it 
 necessitated, aided as much as it hindered him. 
 
 One need not follow him through the composition of 
 his books, or even through the elaboration of the theory 
 of natural selection, during the many years that it was 
 growing in his laboratory of notes. For him the formu- 
 lating of that theory was inevitable: it seems, as one ob- 
 serves him, natural enough to have been foretold of him; 
 but it followed, not from his position, which another 
 man might have occupied, but from his genius. The 
 qualities of mind which it required were not many, and 
 one understands readily why it is so commonly said that 
 all is explained by his power of observation and its vast 
 range; but it did require one high faculty of the mind, 
 and a rare one, which Darwin had preeminently among 
 the men of his time — the faculty, namely, of discerning 
 the lines of inquiry in a mass of as yet unrelated facts. 
 He somewhere says that he had found it harder, perhaps, 
 to put the question than it was to reach the answer. This 
 power is the great economizer of mental energy, in any 
 branch of investigation; it is, to the man who has it, 
 equivalent to a compass; and to Darwin it was the one 
 talent without which his stores of knowledge would have 
 been no more than a heap of unclassified specimens in a 
 museum cellar. Moral and physical qualities he had, be- 
 sides; his patience and his practised vision were invalu- 
 able; but it was the intellectual part that penetrated the 
 secrets of nature. This sense of the problem, this eye 
 
ii 4 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 for the question, was most serviceable to his success. His 
 acuteness in perceiving the importance of the infinitely 
 little, which is often mentioned as one of his distinguish- 
 ing traits, was only an incident of this larger endowment; 
 and his power to make other men useful to him, specialists 
 in horticulture or physiology, or even common observing 
 men, was only the knowledge of how to put practical 
 questions. The point is worth emphasizing, because in 
 this age of the accumulation of scientific detail it is too 
 apt to be forgotten that the thinking mind is as rare in 
 science as in other departments, and is, nevertheless, the 
 indispensable thing which makes a man great. 
 
 Here it is worth while to advert to that persistent dis- 
 cussion respecting the nature of a modern education, 
 which Darwin's experience is bound to bring forward with 
 renewed vigor. His testimony, both in the chart of him- 
 self which he gave Mr. Galton and in the account he 
 wrote for his children, is unequivocal. He says he was 
 self-taught; that his training at the university was of no 
 use to him, speaking generally, and that the classics in 
 particular were barren. He seems to be quite correct 
 in his statement; the claim that his powers of observa- 
 tion and comparison were really developed by schoolboy 
 attention to Latin and Greek terminations is purely peda- 
 gogical; nor is there any reason to question that men of 
 genius can be successful, achieve eminent greatness for 
 themselves, and do work of the highest value to society 
 without immediate obligation to those studies usually 
 called the humanities. This is nothing new. Instances 
 of self-education for special careers are to be found in 
 other walks than those of science: in war, in administra- 
 tion, and generally in active life, and not infrequently in 
 literature itself. But it is worth observing what testi- 
 
DARWIN'S LIFE 115 
 
 mony these volumes bear to the wonderful vitality of the 
 Greek intelligence. Speaking of the theory of Pangen- 
 esis, Darwin writes to a correspondent that the views of 
 Hippocrates "seem almost identical with mine — merely 
 a change of terms, and an application of them to classes 
 of facts necessarily unknown to the old philosopher." 
 Again, he writes of Aristotle: "From quotations which 
 I had seen I had a high notion of Aristotle's merits, but 
 I had not the most remote notion what a wonderful 
 man he was. Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two 
 gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere 
 schoolboys to old Aristotle. ... I never realized, be- 
 fore reading your book, to what an enormous consum- 
 mation of labor we owe even our common knowledge." A 
 more striking passage is that of Huxley's, where he says : 
 "The oldest of all philosophies, that of evolution, was 
 bound hand and foot and cast into utter darkness dur- 
 ing the millennium of theological scholasticism. But 
 Darwin poured new lifeblood into the ancient frame; 
 the bonds burst, and the revivified thought of ancient 
 Greece has proved itself to be a more adequate expres- 
 sion of the universal order of things than any of the 
 schemes which have been accepted by the credulity and 
 welcomed by the superstition of seventy later genera- 
 tions of men." Rediscovery, however, is not obligation; 
 and, perhaps, if Darwin had been thoroughly imbued 
 with the Greek mode of looking upon the universe, he 
 would not have been really indebted to it for his own 
 views; for he went upon different grounds in forming 
 his conceptions. The real question is, not whether Dar- 
 win succeeded without Greek influences, but whether 
 he lost anything because of his failure to assimilate 
 them. The answer seems plain. It is written all over 
 
n6 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 these pages, and is expressly given by Darwin in more 
 than one passage. 
 
 No words can be too strong to express the lovableness 
 of Darwin's personality, or the moral beauty of his 
 character. In his biography, it is true, he is presented 
 as the man of science; but he is seen occasionally in other 
 aspects. He was a dutiful, respectful, and affectionate 
 son, at the outset of his life. He thought his father was 
 sometimes unjust, but he always spoke of him as "the 
 wisest man he ever knew"; and there is a touching pas- 
 sage in one of his letters home, when his father had sent 
 him a note: "I almost cried for pleasure at receiving it; 
 it was very kind, thinking of writing to me." He was 
 also, in his turn, an admirable father, considerate, patient, 
 and very tender. One of his sons tells a most significant 
 anecdote of once having drawn on himself some indignant 
 exclamation, "almost with fury," and the end of it be- 
 ing that "next morning, at seven o'clock or so, he came 
 into my bed-room and sat on my bed, and said he had 
 not been able to sleep, from the thought that he had 
 been so angry with me, and after a few more kind words 
 he left me." His description of his little daughter who 
 died is of itself enough to show the extraordinarily fine 
 quality of his affections; and in general his relations with 
 his children are almost ideal in gentleness, kindness, and 
 companionableness. He was also a good friend and 
 acquaintance. In a word, in his private social rela- 
 tions he was exemplary, judged by the standard of a 
 high civilization. He was not without a sense, too, of 
 public duty. He felt strongly only upon the subject of 
 slavery, and this was largely because of his travels in 
 slave countries. He was interested in philanthropic 
 efforts to some degree, and especially in furthering 
 
 
DARWIN'S LIFE 117 
 
 the increase of kindness to animals. But he was re- 
 mote from public affairs, and led even in his sympathies 
 a life somewhat narrowly confined to his own circle and 
 his work in science. In other parts of his character 
 there is nothing to displease. He was modest and just, 
 and free from envy, conscientious to an extreme, and 
 as ready to give as to receive help in all ways. He was 
 more pleased with his fame than he acknowledged; he 
 cared deeply for the success of his theory, and was well 
 aware of its influence on his own reputation as one to 
 be classed with Newton's; he liked praise and distinc- 
 tion, though he limited his desire to the commendation 
 and respect of naturalists; but this is only to wish to be 
 approved by the most competent judges. He was fair 
 to Wallace, and exhibited the best of tempers toward 
 him; but between the lines one reads that he was nettled 
 and annoyed by the incident, and it must be concluded 
 that as he was ambitious in youth, he was desirous of 
 having his due in manhood, and valued fame. 
 
 This was a character which might well spare the 
 humanities. The fact remains that he did spare them. 
 What he lost was culture. The confession that he makes 
 of the gradual atrophy of his esthetic tastes will be long 
 quoted as one of the most remarkable facts of his life. 
 He began with a susceptibility to music, which by his 
 son's account he did not lose; with a liking for poetry, 
 such that he read "The Excursion" twice, and he would 
 not have read it except for pleasure; and he used to take 
 Milton with him in his pocket. In art he went but a 
 little way, if, indeed, he ever really had any eye for it. 
 He was religious, as an English boy usually is; but his 
 interest in belief regarding religious subjects died out, and, 
 what is of more consequence, the emotions which were 
 
u8 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 called out by it in early life ceased to be exercised. 
 There was a deadening, in other words, of all his nature, 
 except so far as it was fed by his work, his family, and 
 his friends in its intellectual and social parts. So com- 
 plete was this change that it affected even his appreci- 
 ation of beautiful scenery, which had evidently given 
 him keen delight in his youth and travels. He dates 
 this change from just after his thirtieth year, when he 
 became absorbed in scientific pursuits as his profession. 
 Something, no doubt, and perhaps much, is to be set 
 down to the effect of his ill-health, which left him with 
 diminished energies for any recreation; his strength was 
 exhausted in his few hours of work. He was himself 
 so convinced that his life had been narrowed in these 
 ways, that he says if he had it to live over he would 
 have planned to give a certain time habitually to poetry. 
 It would be too much to say that the failure of Darwin 
 to appropriate the humane elements in his university 
 education accounts in any perceptible degree for these 
 defects. In culture, as in science, the self-making power 
 of the man counts heavily; and there is such ineffi- 
 ciency in those whose duty it is to give youth a liberal 
 education from classical sources, there are such wrong 
 methods and unintelligent aims in the universities, that 
 it might easily prove to be the case that a student with 
 the most cordial temperament toward the humanities 
 would profit only imperfectly by his residence at seats of 
 learning. In spite of these reservations however, the 
 Greek culture is the historical source of what are tradi- 
 tionally the higher elements in our intellectual life, and 
 has been for most cultivated men the practical discipline 
 of their minds. But it is to be further observed that the 
 example of Darwin, if it should be set up as showing 
 
DARWIN'S LIFE 119 
 
 that Greek culture is unnecessary in modern days, goes 
 just as directly and completely to prove that all literary 
 education, as well by modern as by ancient authors, is 
 superfluous. It is enough to indicate to what a length 
 the argument must be carried, if it is at all admitted. 
 The important matter is rather the question, How much 
 was Darwin's life injured for himself by his loss of 
 culture, in the fact that some of those sources of intel- 
 lectual delight which are reputed the most precious for 
 civilized man were closed to him? 
 
 The blank page in this charming biography is the 
 page of spiritual life. There is nothing written there. 
 The entire absence of an element which enters com- 
 monly into all men's lives in some degree is a circum- 
 stance as significant as it is astonishing. Never was a 
 man more alive to what is visible and tangible, or in 
 any way matter of sensation; on the sides of his nature 
 where an appeal could be made, never was a man more 
 responsive; but there were parts in which he was blind 
 and dull. Just as the boy failed to be interested in many 
 things, the man failed too; and he disregarded what did 
 not interest him with the same ease at sixty as at 
 twenty. What did interest him was the immediately 
 present, and he dealt with it admirably, both in the in- 
 tellectual and the moral world ; but what was remote was 
 as if it were not. The spiritual element in life is not 
 remote, but it is not matter of sensation, and Darwin 
 lived as if there were no such thing; it belongs to the 
 region of emotion and imagination, and those percep- 
 tions which deal with the nature of man in its contrast 
 with the material world. Poetry, art, music, the emo- 
 tional influences of nature, the idealizations of moral 
 life, are the means by which men take possession of this 
 
izo LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 inner world of man; to which, for man at least, nature 
 in all its immensity is subsidiary. Darwin's insensibil- 
 ity to the higher life — for so men agree to call it — 
 was partly, if not wholly, induced by his absorption in 
 scientific pursuits in the spirit of materialism. We praise 
 him for his achievements, we admire his character, and 
 we feel the full charm of his temperament; he delights us 
 in every active manifestation of his nature. We do not 
 now learn for the first time that a man may be good with- 
 out being religious, and successful without being liberally 
 educated, and worthy of honor without being spiritual; 
 but a man may be all this and yet be incomplete. Great as 
 Darwin was as a thinker, and winning as he remains as 
 a man, those elements in which he was deficient are the 
 noblest part of our nature. 
 
DOBELL'S LIFE AND LETTERS 
 
 It was no fault of Sydney Dobell that the disparity 
 between the excellence of his rare natural gifts and the 
 meagerness of their literary result is so great, for the 
 difficulties which beset him made partial failure inev- 
 itable. The disastrous nature of his early education has 
 seldom been paralleled in the records of blighted genius, 
 and in manhood, when he had emancipated himself from 
 it to some degree, successive misfortunes struck down 
 and maimed his powers. His parents were members of 
 a Church which had been founded by his mother's 
 father, a free-thinking Christian of the last century, to 
 bring about a return to the apostolic practice, and was 
 thought by them to be the germ of a great religious re- 
 form. They believed that Sydney, their first-born, was 
 the chosen instrument of God for this work. The child 
 was precocious in mind and endowed with all the sus- 
 ceptibility to emotion which belongs to the poetic tempera- 
 ment. Every new sign of intellectual strength or reli- 
 gious fervor was to his parents a fresh proof of the 
 boy's divine calling, and their injudicious zeal stimu- 
 lated a development which would have been abnormally 
 rapid under the best care. His mission was instilled 
 into his thoughts when he was four years old; at eight 
 years his diary is filled with theology and his waste-paper 
 with verses; at ten he falls in love; at twelve, enters his 
 father's office and begins a life of business routine; at 
 fourteen he is prostrated with nervous fever; at fifteen, 
 
122 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 is engaged to be married, and considering the publica- 
 tion of a drama on Napoleon which he had written and 
 Campbell had read; at seventeen, we read of long-con- 
 tinued and exhausting prayer; eloquent church oratory 
 follows; at twenty he is married; at twenty- three the 
 blow falls, and he is prostrated with a nearly fatal dis- 
 ease which left him a man of broken health. The 
 history of these years is given scantily in these volumes, 
 but there are many indications of their unnatural life; 
 his father says, for example, that in his delirium, when 
 the sense of locality and the memory of faces were lost, 
 he talked rationally on moral and reflective subjects; 
 and his wife says of their courtship, in a remark of 
 blended humor and pathos, "the more we loved, the more 
 we prayed." He himself gives the clearest glimpse of 
 the nervous intoxication of his boyhood in a letter to 
 his sister, where he says, "I shall not cease to look back 
 on the four or five years preceding my illness with a 
 kind of self-reverence — as to an impossible saintdom 
 to which I would not return, but which I can never 
 equal on this side the grave. I see that I have a wider 
 mission and a rougher excellence before me; but I can- 
 not look back without a melancholy interest to the years 
 when I never thought a thought or said a word but under 
 the very eyes of God." Such experience necessarily left 
 indelible traces; the practical result of his education was 
 a physical blow, and it is easy to observe in his letters 
 after this time symptoms of lingering disease, as when 
 he speaks of having a double consciousness of locality, 
 or of being seized b}' spontaneous trains of thought of 
 unusual brilliance, but which he cannot recollect on com- 
 ing out of this state. 
 With such a mind and body he began his literary 
 
 
DOBELL'S LIFE AND LETTERS 123 
 
 career, against the remonstrance of his parents, who still 
 believed in his apostolic mission. He published two 
 dramas which have passed into literature, and a vol- 
 ume of war-lyrics. He was contemplating an epic on 
 the millennium which should be his crowning work, and 
 seems to have looked for no activity in any other field than 
 literature. But ten years of writing, study, and busi- 
 ness, added to the constant and wearying care of an 
 invalid wife, overcame his shaken constitution, and at 
 thirty-three a second illness practically put an end to 
 his career. The two invalids tried all climates with little 
 success; accident followed accident; he fell into a Roman 
 drain and injured his spine; another fall from his horse 
 nearly proved fatal; relapse followed relapse until after 
 seventeen years, "wherein," he says, "the keen percep- 
 tion of all that should be done, and that so bitterly cries 
 for doing, accompanies the consciousness of all I might 
 but cannot do," he died in 1874. 
 
 Such warping and blighting influences made Sydney 
 Dobell's public service fall so far short of his ex- 
 traordinary capacities as to amount practically to fail- 
 ure. His senses were abnormally acute, like those of a 
 savage, and this made his appreciation of natural love- 
 liness remarkably keen; his powers of imagination and 
 sympathy and his supersubtle reflective faculty com- 
 pleted his poetic endowment. The bent of his mind, the 
 surcharging of his soul with religious emotion and mys- 
 tical feeling, led him sometimes into that region of dreamy 
 poetic conjecture with which readers of the transcen- 
 dentalists are familiar, where the object, too vague for 
 thought, is grasped at through symbols, and the quali- 
 ties of the symbol extended fancifully to the unknown 
 object. This, for example, reads like an excerpt from 
 
124 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 Novalis: "What if the visible universe stand in the rela- 
 tion to the Divine of the brain to the human soul; hu- 
 manity upon its surface answering to the cineritious 
 matter; these past six thousand years a passing illness 
 of the Eternal Nature, and its scheme of salvation and 
 ultimate golden issue a process of Divine physiology?" 
 It is not often that he gets so far off his feet as in this 
 passage. Here is one of mystical suggestion, which in 
 a letter to Charlotte Bronte he says was struck out of 
 an article by the sapient editor of the "Eclectic": "Yea, 
 O divine earth! O incommunicable beauty! wearing 
 thy crown of thorns and having on the purple robes of 
 immemorial sunsets, we have parted thy garments among 
 us, and for thy vesture have we cast lots"; and he 
 is led to this O altitudo! because he has thrown down 
 his pen "helpless before this unapproachable world," 
 and the unapproachable world was merely apple-trees in 
 blossom — "the very Avalon of apple-trees that makes 
 an awful rose of dawn toward the east." Such was the 
 fervor and intensity of his poetic moods. On more 
 prosaic ground he could be sensible enough, but his prej- 
 udices were sometimes very curious. "Aurora Leigh" 
 he thought no poem because written by a woman, and 
 he held "all feminine literature to be an error and an 
 anomaly." To a sister he writes: "The passion of writ- 
 ing, especially among ladies, is the mental and spiritual 
 nuisance of this age. What the young people of the 
 day want to learn is that authorship, unless it be of the 
 very best — the best and most competent minds expressed 
 in the very best ways — is worse than useless"; and again, 
 to resist "a temptation which bids fair to stain with ink 
 the sweetest sanctuaries of life, and taint with the in- 
 evitable evils of every unnatural and abnormal gratifica- 
 
DOBELL'S LIFE AND LETTERS 125 
 
 tion three-fourths of the women of England." Toward the 
 theory of women's rights and the theory of the equality of 
 men he was extremely hostile ; but in politics, in which he 
 interested himself much, he was in enthusiastic sympathy 
 with the Liberals. We read with wicked pleasure the 
 letter in which he says he spent an hour walking in his 
 garden, and repeating "the damnation of hell" after 
 hearing that Mazzini was entrapped in Nuremberg, and 
 with amusement the account of how Victor Emmanuel 
 lost a present of one of the poet's dogs because he im- 
 prisoned Garibaldi. He had many interests — a man 
 of business all his life as well as a poet and orator, a 
 liberal as well as an aristocrat, the broadest of Broad 
 Churchmen as well as an earnest Christian, a lover of 
 horses and dogs, used to the saddle, the gun, and the 
 rod; he was the most affable as well as the most merci- 
 less of critics, and he was the dearest of friends. Vari- 
 ously developed in these and many other directions, he 
 saved much from the wreck; his private life evinces 
 throughout a refined and noble character. He was a 
 gentleman of the highest type, who made the most valu- 
 able acquisitions in life and shared them as widely as 
 he could, who united grace of action in doing a thing 
 to "the beauty of reason or feeling that causes it to be 
 done"; he used to say, "To do the useful is the tenure 
 by which we hold this world, to have done it beautifully 
 the condition of our transit to a better," and called at- 
 tention repeatedly to "that moral truth still older than 
 formularized religion — that relation between the chari- 
 table heart and the idealizing eye, which the earliest 
 Greeks unconsciously asserted when they entitled the 
 Graces the Charities." To see how these principles 
 found harmonious expression in a daily life of such pain 
 
i 2 6 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 and disappointment mitigates the sense of wasteful loss 
 which these memoirs arouse; his poetry is un wrought 
 ore, his published prose stray leaves of thought, but in 
 himself it is not too much to say he came near to his 
 own conception of the poet's ideal life: "Thou wert the 
 courteousest knight that ever bore shield; thou wert the 
 truest friend that ever bestrode horse; thou wert the 
 truest lover that ever loved woman; thou wert the kind- 
 est man that ever struck with sword ; thou wert the good- 
 liest person that ever came among press of knights; 
 thou wert the meekest man and the gentlest that ever 
 ate in hall with ladies; and thou wert the sternest knight 
 to thy mortal foe that ever laid lance in rest." 
 
WILLIAM BARNES, THE DORSETSHIRE 
 
 POET 
 
 William Barnes belongs to a most interesting class 
 of self-made men, who, with exceptional faculties, make 
 themselves marked persons, but yet rise little, if at all, 
 from their original place among the people. Such a one 
 was our Elihu Burritt, whom Barnes recalls by his special 
 aptitude for languages; such are those workingmen of 
 whom we hear from time to time by the report of some 
 Ruskin who has discovered them, who have a native 
 taste for botany or geology, or it may be poetry. They 
 are distinguished rather in their class than among the 
 intellectual group with which, had they been more fortu- 
 nately born and placed, they would have been naturally 
 associated. Barnes was an unusual example of the 
 type. He met with more success, and actually rose in 
 social station; but he had the stamp of his country 
 origin strongly impressed on him, and he never ceased 
 to be thoroughly a man of the people from whom he 
 sprang. He is of interest, also, as an excellent speci- 
 men of the sort of "original" which we appropriate too 
 exclusively to our own nation; he possessed the versatil- 
 ity, the knack, the tool-using faculty, and the mental 
 curiosity that we associate with the Yankee character, 
 and his biography has the double worth of a life active 
 in mind and in work. 
 
 He came of farmer stock in Dorset, but in his baby- 
 hood he had not the physical vigor and frame that ought 
 
 127 
 
128 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 to be the birthright of one destined to be a farm-hand. 
 It is related that some wise old woman comforted his 
 mother with the remark, "Never you mind what he looks 
 like, he'll get his living by learning-books and such like." 
 He had some schooling, and was early put at a clerk's 
 desk in solicitors' offices, where his good penmanship 
 saved him from holding a plough, and, as he spent his 
 leisure in acquiring knowledge from books, he early set 
 up a school, and throve so well that he married in 1827 
 and took a larger house for himself and his pupils. He 
 had the success he deserved, and, eight years later, finally 
 settled in Dorchester, with which place his name and 
 labors were closely associated during his active years. 
 He had already shown the variety of his tastes by en- 
 graving wood-blocks, not with much talent, but for 
 publication, nevertheless, and he had written verses in 
 the newspapers. He made himself acquainted with 
 many languages — Welsh and Hindustanee among the 
 rest — and had begun his philological studies. Being dis- 
 contented with the text-books used in his school, he 
 wrote an arithmetic, a geography, and a grammar for 
 the use of his pupils, upon what he thought better prin- 
 ciples. He became a principal founder of the Dorset 
 Museum, and took his boys out on scientific walks as a 
 part of their education, and also to get specimens in the 
 newly opened railway cuttings. He was an antiquarian, 
 too, and took a leading part in the Society which ex- 
 amined and speculated about British and Roman re- 
 mains; and, to mention a few other of his multi- 
 farious employments, be painted doors "artistically," 
 as well as drew in water-color, made boxes, invented 
 a pair of swimming-shoes which would not work, turned 
 his own chessmen on a lathe, produced a quadrant and 
 
WILLIAM BARNES 129 
 
 an instrument to describe ellipses, and played the flute, 
 violin, and piano. He had the fixed habit of bringing 
 his notions to practical forms, and is found regulating 
 the binding of his books and the margin and frames of 
 his water-colors by "harmonic proportions"; and, to give 
 one capital instance which does as well as any to put 
 this aspect of his character before us, he adopted the 
 theory that Nature never makes mistakes in colors, and 
 that her juxtapositions must be the true harmonies, act- 
 ing on which, he studied mosses, leaves, and fruits, and 
 used the tints as arranged in them in his own sketching 
 and decoration. Thus, on purchasing two old high- 
 backed chairs, he chose for their covering "a certain gray- 
 green damask, with a yellow-brown binding, the tints 
 found on the upper and under side of a beautiful lichen." 
 He had determined in the midst of all this on entering 
 the church; and in 1837 put himself down on the books 
 of St. John's College, Cambridge, as a ten years' man. 
 At the end of that time, having meanwhile been a pro- 
 lific author in the magazines and in books, he received a 
 small cure of £13 value, three miles from his school, 
 and held it for five years, walking out and back every 
 Sunday. His life went on in this way with teaching 
 and preaching, philology, antiquities, lectures in the coun- 
 try, a diary in all languages, and poems in dialect, which 
 had always been popular in the district and slowly at- 
 tracted the attention of literary men at London. But 
 hard times came to him, his wife was dead (in his 
 polyglot journal he wrote her name at the end of each 
 day's entry for forty years afterwards), his school de- 
 clined, and it was a matter of rejoicing when Palmerston 
 put him on the civil list with £70 pension. At last, 
 when his friend Colonel Darner gave him the living at 
 
i 3 o LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 Came in 1862, he found a home for his old age, and 
 congenial employment until his death in 1886. As a 
 rector he was much beloved, and went in and out among 
 his people like one of them. His daughter tells of a 
 woman saying to her, "There, miss, we do all of us love 
 the passon, that we do; he be so plain. Why, bless you, 
 I don't no more mind telling o' un all my little pains 
 and troubles than if he was my grandmother. I don't 
 mean any disrespec', miss"; and this story tells its own 
 tale. He remained vigorous until near the end, and 
 died in advanced age with the honor of the people among 
 whom he lived and the respect of those in the larger world 
 who knew his acquirements and talents. 
 
 But his biography was written because he was a poet. 
 The name philologist is also upon the title-page; his 
 philological work, however, was cumbrous, and had in it 
 elements of crankiness. It consisted of numberless 
 writings, some of which brought him £5 for the copy- 
 right, and some of which have never found a publisher 
 at all. The opera majora in these are a "Universal 
 Grammar of all Languages," an attempt at a rational 
 formal analysis of speech which shall be true of each 
 particular tongue or dialect; and secondly, 'Tiw,' an 
 analytical scheme of roots and stems. He had also 
 much at heart the reform of the English by eliminating 
 all except Teutonic elements, and restoring to it such 
 purity as the Welsh possesses; his practice of using in 
 his later books only pure Teutonic words, numbers of 
 which he was of course obliged to coin, with his habit of 
 using figure-symbols, made them unreadable. Such are 
 the traits of his philology. But his feeling for the plain 
 and expressive quality, the homeliness, of country speech, 
 to which his philological dreams were allied, is at the 
 
WILLIAM BARNES 131 
 
 root of his extraordinary success as a poet in dialect. 
 At the importunity of friends he translated some of these 
 Dorset idyls into ordinary English speech, and the vol- 
 ume had little success — quite rightly, for the charm 
 was gone. In his English verses he did not exceed com- 
 monplace. His poetic inspiration refused to flow except 
 from the living rock of the speech of the country folk 
 which had been familiar to his childhood. There is in 
 all real dialect verse a certain correspondence of the 
 feeling and the words, a fitness as inexplicable as that 
 of a peasant's costume to his body, an adjustment of 
 thought and burring inflections as perfect as is made in 
 all things by use and wont; and this is the main element 
 of their delight to the cultivated. All are reaches after 
 harmony, but here is a harmony that seems before art, 
 and comes to us like unbreathed-on nature. The pe- 
 culiar forms are easily caught and understood, and they 
 give the tang of life to the country manners which they 
 are used to describe, to the simple sentiment and direct 
 emotion which they convey. 
 
 Barnes had poetic feeling of the primitive kind, and 
 so long as he dealt with this Dorset life that was interest- 
 ing and dear to him, and used its own century-molded 
 vital speech, he wrote verses with a quality like the 
 charm of a pastoral picture or the sight of the cows 
 in the pool staring at you. These poems won him the 
 attention of some London folk — Mrs. Norton among 
 them, and a Mr. Tennant, whose letters to him are most 
 pleasant in tact and temper; and after a while Patmore 
 and Allingham became his friends, and Tennyson ex- 
 changed visits with him. It is said here that the 
 "Northern Farmer" was written under the stimulus of 
 this incident. Palgrave praised Barnes very highly. 
 
132 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 "This aged poet seems to me to stand second only to 
 Tennyson in the last half century. He has a truth 
 united always to beauty in his drawing of character and 
 country ways — a pure love of nature, such as one sees in 
 the best Greek or Roman writers, exalted and rendered 
 more tender by his devout Christian spirit. I know not, 
 also, if any of our poets have surpassed him in the 
 number of original pictures or motives which his three 
 precious volumes display." There is something of the 
 over-exquisite critic in this, but it should be said that 
 Palgrave has since explained that, in placing Barnes 
 "second only to Tennyson," he meant to class him "with, 
 not above," our other poets "in the foremost line of 
 those after Tennyson." Still, his remarks indicate well 
 enough the lines of Barnes's excellence. The Bishop 
 praised rather the influence of his life and words in his 
 community: "He has helped the people hereabouts to 
 feel what they can be and do." To write verses to please 
 Mr. Palgrave's nice taste, and to have been helpful by 
 them to the humble people of Dorset, is to cover a wide 
 reach of life, one thinks; it is a test of the singleness 
 and simplicity of poetic art. 
 
 He was always eccentric, it seems, in dress. The 
 poncho, the plaid, the flowing cassock, and silver buckles 
 served in turn, but he was especially fond of a red cap, 
 and perhaps it was a favorite color in other articles; 
 at least it flashes out finely in this sketch of him by Mr. 
 Gosse in a letter to Patmore: 
 
 "Hardy and I went on Monday last to Came Rectory, 
 where he lies bedridden. It is curious that he is dying as 
 picturesquely as he lived. We found him in bed in his study, 
 his face turned to the window, where the light came stream- 
 ing in through flowering paints, his brown books on all sides 
 
WILLIAM BARNES 133 
 
 of him save one, the wall behind him hung with old green 
 tapestry. He had a scarlet bedgown on, a kind of soft biretta 
 of red wool on his head, from which his long white hair 
 escaped on to the pillow; his gray beard grown very long 
 upon his breast; his complexion, which you recollect as richly 
 bronzed., has become blanched by keeping indoors, and is 
 now waxily white where it is not waxily pink; the blue eyes 
 half shut, restless under languid lids. I wish I could paint 
 for you the strange effect of this old, old man, lying in cardi- 
 nal scarlet in his white bed, the only bright spot in the gloom 
 of all these books." 
 
MR. RUSKIN'S EARLY YEARS 
 
 An interesting article might be written upon the influ- 
 ence of the novel upon modern autobiography. The 
 novel has, indeed, affected literature in many ways, and 
 been felt in both history and poetry; but the taste which 
 it has bred in the incidents and characters of ordinary 
 life has given a great extension to the scope of a man's 
 account of his own career. It would hardly have oc- 
 curred to our elder authors to delineate their parents in 
 the way that Carlyle drew his father and mother, or to 
 introduce into their reminiscences finished portraits of 
 any persons who had not won some distinction. Gib- 
 bon's autobiography is a capital instance of a life told 
 without the setting which has now become usual; it has 
 no such background. In the papers which Ruskin has 
 written about his early years, there is no like reserve. 
 He includes in them his family and all his relatives, the 
 home acquaintances and business partners, the clerks of 
 the firm and the servants of the house, his companions 
 and valets; the work, in other words, is conceived in the 
 new spirit of autobiography, and though he is the hero, 
 there are a host of minor characters and a crowd of triv- 
 ial incidents which in other days would not have been 
 thought worthy of record. It appeals often, like the 
 novel, to our interest in general life as much as to our 
 curiosity about Ruskin in his distinct personality. 
 
 In these pages, too, Ruskin is an ungrown youth; 
 his account hardly touches on his active career, and 
 
 . 135 
 
i 3 6 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 nowhere reaches his maturity. The formative years of 
 life are, in a sense, very important, but they are at best 
 only the preface; what the man at last became and ac- 
 complished is the matter that is worth knowing, unless 
 one is specially concerned with education; the question 
 how he was developed is subsidiary. The narrative is 
 much taken up with childish and futile things, and does 
 not show the sources of Ruskin's genius, but the con- 
 ditions under which he grew; and these were such as to 
 account more for his defects than his excellences. A 
 great part of what is told is indeed entirely irrelevant, 
 and would have been as interesting in any other man's 
 life. One or two leading topics, however, may be chosen, 
 which have most bearing on his qualities, and either illus- 
 trate his temperament, or seem to have been determining 
 factors in his character; and the principal of these is his 
 religious training. Ruskin himself lays great stress on 
 the fact that his mother made him early acquainted 
 with the Bible; she read it with him for years, and went 
 through it in course several times, besides obliging him 
 to commit chapters of it, and the Scotch versions of the 
 psalms in addition. He was, as one would say, piously 
 trained; the exercise was strenuous while it lasted, and 
 it ended only with his fourteenth year. He thinks it 
 formed and confirmed a taste for the noble element in 
 style, and that it was also morally of great effect. He 
 was an only child, and a solitary one; this, no doubt, had 
 an influence in lending solemnity to his religious asso- 
 ciations, and his beliefs were not early disturbed. When 
 he went to Oxford, the steady Bible-reading had ended, 
 and in its place, he says, "was substituted my own pri- 
 vate reading of a chapter morning and evening, and of 
 course saying the Lord's Prayer after it, and asking for 
 
MR. RUSKIN'S EARLY YEARS 137 
 
 everything that was nice for myself and my family; 
 after which I waked or slept, without much thought of 
 anything but my earthly affairs, whether by night or day. 
 It had never entered into my head to doubt a word of 
 the Bible, though I saw well enough already that its 
 words were to be understood otherwise than I had been 
 taught; but the more I believed it, the less it did me 
 any good. It was all very well for Abraham to do what 
 angels bid him — so would I, if any angels bid me; but 
 none had ever appeared to me that I knew of, not even 
 Adele, who couldn't be an angel because she was a Ro- 
 man Catholic. ... On the whole, it seemed to me 
 all that was required of me was to say my prayers, go 
 to church, learn my lessons, obey my parents, and enjoy 
 my dinner." His religious training had accomplished no 
 more than to put him in possession of the Protestant 
 tradition. It was some years after, when he was twenty- 
 six, that he was first "put to any serious trial of prayer." 
 He had been ill, and was now going home from Italy. 
 "Between the Campo Santo and Santa Maria Novella I 
 had been brought into some knowledge of the relations 
 that might truly exist between God and his creatures; 
 and thinking what my father and mother would feel if 
 I did not get home to them through those poplar avenues, 
 I fell gradually into the temper, and more or less tacit 
 offering of very real prayer, which lasted patiently 
 through two long days and what I knew of the nights 
 on the road home. On the third day, as I was about 
 coming in sight of Paris, what people who are in the 
 habit of praying know as the consciousness of answer 
 came to me, and a certainty that the illness, which had 
 all this while increased, if anything, would be taken 
 away." Two days after, he found himself "in the inn 
 
138 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 at Beauvais, entirely well, with a thrill of conscious 
 happiness altogether new." This is the solitary instance 
 of personal religious feeling in the volume, and appar- 
 ently from Ruskin's comment upon the incident, it was 
 one never repeated. To what extent his religious train- 
 ing fortified his moral fervor, besides enabling him to 
 enter into the medieval feeling in sacred art, is another 
 matter; but the tone of the passages cited show that he 
 holds mentally an attitude of superiority toward common 
 Christian belief and devotions. 
 
 A second main characteristic of his education was his 
 separation from healthy association with those of his own 
 age, the care with which he was kept from youthful 
 exercises, and, in general, the making a home-boy of 
 him. He was not at all indulged; most playthings were 
 denied him; he was taught to be proper, his faults were 
 followed by the usual penalties, and he seems to have 
 been reduced to an extremely angelic docility, so that 
 he sat for years in a quiet manner in his own niche in 
 the drawing-room, listening every evening to his father 
 reading romance and poetry to his mother, and no more 
 thinking of doing anything disagreeable than a star of 
 falling from heaven. But, more than this, the parents 
 had plans for him as a child of promise, for which the 
 sherry trade would not afford sufficient scope. Their 
 conviction of his genius was formed early and grew with 
 portentous rapidity, and his father's ideal for his future 
 was "that I should enter college into the best society; 
 take all the prizes every year, and a double first to 
 finish with; marry Lady Clara Vere de Vere; write 
 poetry as good as Byron's, only pious; preach sermons 
 as good as Bossuet's, only Protestant; be made at forty 
 Bishop of Winchester, and at fifty Primate of England." 
 
MR. RUSKIN'S EARLY YEARS 139 
 
 The ideal was not so denned as this until he was ready 
 for Oxford, but the vision of the future bishop seems 
 to have loomed up while the child was of very tender 
 years, and it was reluctantly let go. There is one rem- 
 iniscence of the disappointment here, on occasion of a 
 conversation between his father and an artist, who were 
 lamenting "what an amiable clergyman was lost in me. 
 'Yes/ said my father, with tears in his eyes (true and 
 tender tears as ever father shed), 'he would have been 
 a bishop.' " Between the idea that the child was to be 
 a great man and the foolish isolation of him from natural 
 playmates, a remarkable conceit was developed, which 
 Ruskin is only too frank in acknowledging; he heaps 
 terms of ridicule upon his childish self, and the reader 
 is not disposed to say him nay, but rather to find it 
 a great misfortune of his life that his vanity was 
 coddled in a safe seclusion from the disillusions of a 
 public school. But it is curious, side by side with these 
 comic anathemas on his boyish "High-Mightiness," to 
 come upon the mature judgments he has formed of him- 
 self, and does not hesitate to proclaim; he never learned 
 the lesson of modesty, nor did perception of his childish 
 faults enlighten him in respect to weaknesses of his man- 
 hood. He quotes Mazzini as having said of him, "in con- 
 versation authentically reported a year or two before 
 his death, that I had 'the most analytic mind in Europe'; 
 an opinion in which," he adds, "so far as I am acquainted 
 with Europe, I am myself entirely disposed to concur." 
 Elsewhere he deplores the loss in him of "a fine land- 
 scape or figure-outline engraver," but this loss he mourns 
 less than "the incalculable one to geology;" for, he says, 
 if, in Wales, his father and mother "had given me but 
 a shaggy scrap of a Welsh pony, and left me in charge 
 
140 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 of a good Welsh guide and of his wife, if I needed any 
 coddling, they would have made a man of me then and 
 there, and afterwards the comfort of their own hearts, 
 and probably the first geologist of my time in Europe." 
 It was lucky that they did not try to make him an 
 ichthyologist, at any rate. When he got the "Poissons 
 Fossiles," he saw that "Agassiz was a mere blockhead to 
 have paid for all that good drawing of the nasty, ugly 
 things, and that it didn't matter a stale herring to any 
 mortal whether they had any names or not, . . . and 
 that the book ought to have been called after the lithog- 
 rapher, his fishes, only with their scales counted and 
 called bad names by subservient Monsieur Agassiz." 
 This is a mere explosion of bad temper, but it helps us 
 to guess what sort of "a first geologist of Europe" he 
 would have been, and to reckon how he would have 
 fared pitted against Lyell. It may be doubted, too, 
 whether he would have kept very long to the manage- 
 ment of that wished-for Welsh pony: the parents did 
 try to have him taught riding, both by a groom and at 
 a riding-school, but he had too much facility in slipping 
 off, and was evidently entirely disinclined to learn. 
 
 The isolation of his childhood no doubt threw him 
 back upon himself and induced his precocity. Stevenson 
 remarked upon one virtue of the Scotch Sabbath, in 
 that it made a boy who could not employ himself in his 
 usual play think out of mere idleness, and the time 
 being a solemn one his thoughts were touched by it. 
 Mr. Ruskin's every-day life was such a Scotch Sabbath. 
 It was empty of most young interests, affections, and 
 amusements. Listening to his father's readings from 
 Scott, and Cervantes, and Byron, the boy naturally took 
 to literature in imitative verse and prose, just as he wrote 
 
MR. RUSKIN'S EARLY YEARS 141 
 
 abstracts of sermons that he had heard preached; and 
 he also took to drawing in a similarly obvious way. 
 Whatever literary or artistic talent was possible in him 
 was bound to come out under such circumstances, and 
 power of expression would grow with practice; and so 
 those first signs of promise put forth which confirmed his 
 parents' ambition for him as a piously Byronic bishop. 
 This was the compensation for what he lost, but what 
 he lost was never to be recovered, for all that; and the 
 worst of his loss, besides practical faculty and habits 
 of manliness, was the exercise of his affections. He has 
 cared throughout his life, he says — and this is certainly 
 true of his earlier career — for inanimate things, moun- 
 tains and clouds chiefly; and one reason of this is, that 
 he, to use his own words, "had nothing to love" in his 
 childhood and youth, and indeed did not love anything; 
 for his affection for his parents was not of the intimate 
 kind, and he looked on them as a part of the benefi- 
 cent universe, like the sun and the moon. This is his 
 own account of the matter; and he regrets the circum- 
 stance, curiously enough, not because of such results 
 as we have indicated, but because, when he fell in love 
 with that Adele who "couldn't be an angel because she 
 was a Roman Catholic," he did not know how to manage 
 himself. His confession of this first fit of amorousness 
 is one of the oddest things in the volumes, and indeed 
 all his references to the various maidens who attracted 
 his roving fancy, or his parents' more prudent eyes, are 
 astonishing. Adele was a bright Spanish girl, the daugh- 
 ter of his father's partner in sherry, and knew a great 
 deal more than her adorer, who fell in love with her while 
 she was visiting the Ruskins, and found the course of his 
 malady rapid and severe. He wooed her by displaying 
 
i 4 2 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 his powers in Protestant argument and romantic narra- 
 tive, and by his bad French; but she was only amused, and 
 the lover, who was still young in his teens, was discon- 
 solate in the old fashion. It was some years before he 
 recovered from the disease; and reminiscences of the 
 time seem to be disagreeable enough, for he rivals his 
 contempt for his childish conceit by his ridicule of him- 
 self as a lovesick youth. There is nothing in the story, 
 however, that excites the reader's pity; in this, as well 
 as the other cases, one fcas a pleased sense of listening 
 to much youthful confession in which there is not the 
 least seriousness. The feeling was real enough, but it 
 was "fancy," as we say, and not passion, with all the 
 unreality of sentimentalism in the traditional spring. 
 Oxford apparently cured him — change of scene and 
 something to think about. 
 
 But Ruskin is only a small part of the story; and one 
 is not sorry that this is the case, for he was not an in- 
 teresting child, and his boyhood was without the quali- 
 ties that make boyhood attractive. The scenes in which 
 he lived, however, and the people with whom he dwelt 
 are drawn by the hand of the grown man, and have more 
 of himself in them than has the manikin he then was. 
 The banks of the Tay and the humble relatives at Croy- 
 don help his narrative very much, not to mention the 
 view of the Alps from Schaffhausen, where he thinks 
 his destiny was determined for him at fourteen, or the 
 days in the Campo Santo, or the revelation of the in- 
 fernal in life that the volcanic Neapolitan country was to 
 him, in his own belief; at first sight. The journeys with 
 his parents exhibit their character very pleasantly, and 
 they were excellent persons; their devotion to their son 
 was entire, and he was at times a trying young man. 
 
 
MR. RUSKIN'S EARLY YEARS 143 
 
 The first acquaintance with Turner, and the gradually 
 increasing interest of the family, not only in his work, 
 but in artists generally, furnish agreeable passages; the 
 fortunes of the servants and other connections of the 
 family, and the sketches of the acquaintance of the 
 household who used occasionally to visit them, are in- 
 teresting in the way of episode, though the manner is 
 somewhat Carlylean, too grim, too indifferent, too con- 
 sciously superior. Oxford yields one good chapter, and, 
 as was to be anticipated in the case of a youth such as 
 we have intimated Ruskin was, it is not without humor. 
 He entered as a gentleman commoner, that being the 
 safest mode of entrance for one with his weak scholar- 
 ship, and one attractive to him and his parents because 
 he would wear a velvet cap and silk sleeves, incredible 
 as it seems that this should have been, as he says, a 
 "telling consideration," even to the largest importer of 
 sherry and his scriptual wife and heir. His aristocratic 
 mates took his measure and received him very well; and 
 his mother coming down to live in the city, to be near 
 in case he should be ill, he spent his evenings with her, 
 and apparently did not annoy any one with his frequent 
 presence elsewhere. He was fortunate enough, too, to 
 be taken up by Henry Acland, his senior by a year and 
 a half, whose rooms "became to me," he says, "the only 
 place where I was happy. He quietly showed me the 
 manner of life of English youth of good sense, good 
 family, and enlarged education; we both of us already 
 lived in elements far external to the college quadrangle." 
 And he later completes the picture of Acland's man- 
 liness, in whom he saw " a noble young English life in 
 its purity, sagacity, honor, reckless daring, and happy 
 piety," by contrasting him with himself in his own less 
 
i 4 4 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 hardy fiber, and showing at the same time the point 
 of sympathy: "In all this playful and proud heroism 
 of his youth, Henry Acland delighted me as a leopard or 
 a falcon would, without in the least affecting my own 
 character by his example. I had been too often ad- 
 jured and commanded to take care of myself ever to 
 think of following him over slippery weirs, or accom- 
 panying him in pilot-boats through white-topped shoal 
 water; but both in art and science he would pull me on, 
 being years ahead of me, yet glad of my sympathy, for, 
 till I came, he was literally alone in the university in 
 caring for either." Such glimpses of open, honest life 
 on entirely natural and wise terms are not frequent in 
 these pages, but some there are, and they help the in- 
 terest. There is a considerable proportion, too, of Tur- 
 nerian rhetoric about the Alps and Italy, of which the 
 novelty has passed away and only the diffuseness re- 
 mains; and there is something of interest in the history 
 of Ruskin's artistic taste through Prout, rejecting 
 Raphael by the way, to the Campo Santo and the Santa 
 Maria Novella, but this record is already written in 
 his earlier books 
 
CARLYLE AND HIS FRIENDS 
 
 I 
 
 In Carlyle's "Reminiscences" are etched the lineaments 
 of many persons, obscure or notable, particularly of the 
 author's relatives, and of Irving, Jeffrey, Southey, 
 and Wordsworth. Occasionally, as comment on these 
 sketches, sparse literary criticism is furnished, and at 
 intervals a random flash or two of the old fire flares out; 
 but the volume has most interest as a fragmentary auto- 
 biography, and most value in furthering our acquaint- 
 ance with Carlyle. It is an old man who is talking, 
 depressed with calamity (the moaning ay de mi! too 
 constant, too painful), garrulous, but with the secure 
 and confiding garrulity of long fireside converse. The 
 cumbersome detail, however, is not useless, especially 
 that concerning his diversely branching genealogy; it is 
 no new thing to indicate the debt of his genius to a 
 Scotch extraction, but this avuncular anecdotage marks 
 out the obligation sharply, and registers him as born in 
 the savage and brawling border-land, lately reclaimed 
 to civility and orderliness — his father, as he writes, "of 
 the second race of religious men in Annandale." But 
 his father did more than transmit to him a hardy strain 
 of blood: special traits in the taciturn, fearless, toiling, 
 half-loved, half-feared, farmer-mason — his gift of lively, 
 picturesque portraiture, his intensity of isolated emotion, 
 his somber veneration — are recognizably the son's in- 
 
 145 
 
146 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 heritance; and spiritual fraternity shines unmistakably 
 in this, which was one of his last sayings to his still 
 obscure, though man-grown child: "Man, it's surely a 
 pity that thou shouldst sit yonder with nothing but the 
 eye of Omniscience to see thee, and thou with such a 
 gift to speak!" A noble type of peasanthood, worth 
 recording in this loving sketch of him. 
 
 The ineffaceable impression left by these records as a 
 whole is of the habitual solitude in which Carlyle dwelt, 
 and of the fierceness, almost ferocity, of the struggle that 
 went on in it. Not merely in youth — "life tinted with 
 hues of imprisonment and impossibility, hope practically 
 not there, only obstinacy and a grim steadfastness to 
 strive without hope as with"; not merely in the appren- 
 ticeship time — "nightly working at the thing [Schiller] 
 in a serious, sad, and totally solitary way"; but through- 
 out active life at least, the delirious depression of spirit 
 and intensity of effort, from which youthful genius, un- 
 certain of its own faculty and of the world's opportunity, 
 is seldom relieved, haunted him. He seized upon his 
 work with a tenacity well-nigh savage, and his work held 
 him like a spell of evil. During the French Revolution 
 period, for example, he describes himself as taking his 
 daily afternoon walk, "always heavy laden, grim of 
 mood, sometimes with a feeling (not rebellious or im- 
 pious toward God Most High), but otherwise too similar 
 to Satan's stepping the burning marl. Once or twice, 
 among the flood of equipages at Hyde Park corner, I 
 recollect sternly thinking, 'Yes; and perhaps none of you 
 could do what I am at.' But generally my feeling was, 
 'I shall finish this book, throw it at your feet, buy a 
 rifle and spade, and withdraw to the transatlantic wilder- 
 ness, far from human beggaries and basenesses.' " For 
 
CARLYLE AND HIS FRIENDS 147 
 
 three years "that grim book" held him "in a fever blaze"; 
 at the end he stood leaning against a mile-stone, with his 
 face toward Annan, whither he had gone to soothe his 
 "wild excitation of nerves," his purpose to write the book, 
 though he should die, accomplished. "Words cannot 
 utter the wild and ghastly expressiveness of that scene 
 to me ; it seemed as if Hades itself and the gloomy realms 
 of death and eternity were looking out on me through 
 those poor old familiar objects." 
 
 The thirteen years of "Friedrich" were not different 
 "a desperate dead-lift pull all that time, my whole 
 strength devoted to it; alone, withdrawn from all the 
 world, and desperate of ever getting through (not to 
 speak of 'succeeding' ; left solitary 'with the nightmares' 
 (as I sometimes expressed it) ; 'hugging unclean crea- 
 tures' (Prussian blockheadism) 'to my bosom, trying to 
 caress and flatter their secret out of them!' " In such a 
 fashion, with no repose in the idea, no ease in the utter- 
 ance, he struggled on alone, except for the constant at- 
 tendance of "the desperate hope," until he got some re- 
 sponse to his questionings; not winning it by any 
 gracious Prospero serenity, but rather extorting the 
 secret by putting his own life upon the rack. 
 
 The answer, however, was sufficient for himself, and 
 has proved helpful to others. The ideal of conduct and 
 formula of excellence he reached made him indifferent 
 to the world's verdict upon his life or his works. If the 
 world judged not by his standards, its judgments were 
 hollow. At first he had not been so wholly careless ; but 
 the "conscript fathers" of literature were silent. From 
 the six copies of "poor Sartor" sent to six Edinburgh 
 literary friends he got "no smallest whisper, even of 
 receipt — a thing which," he grimly adds, " has silently 
 
148 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 and insensibly led me never since to send any copy of a 
 book to Edinburgh, or, indeed, to Scotland at all, except 
 in unliterary cases." He was thus forced to a self- 
 reliance not difficult for his nature; and so, when Thacke- 
 ray praised him in the "Times," "one other poor judge 
 voting," he thought, "but what is he or such as he?" 
 The only true criticism for him, respecting that French 
 Revolution specter-drama, was his own to his wife: 
 "What they will do with this book none knows, 
 my Jeannie, lass; but they have not had for a two 
 hundred years any book that came more truly from 
 a man's very heart, and so let them trample it under 
 foot and hoof as they see best!" His final feeling 
 towards his works and their value to the world is shown 
 by this remark on the "Friedrich": "It has now become 
 Koirpos to me, insignificant as the dung of a thousand 
 centuries ago. I did get through, thank God! Let it 
 now wander into the belly of oblivion forever!" 
 
 The world's standards were not for him; nevertheless, 
 his standards were for all the world. His equanimity in 
 applying them would resemble that of the careless gods, 
 were his humor not so undeniably atrabiliar, in conse- 
 quence of which a greater number of fools, bores, and 
 blockheads are here set down by name than would have 
 been found in one of his own little German courts. This 
 pinning of flies in a posthumous work, with a constant 
 "See! this is a fly!" — why, even the sentimental "Get 
 thee gone, poor devil!" is better stuff. As each nonen- 
 tity pops into the field of vision and collapses, there comes 
 into the mind "Jeannie's" old grandfather, and how he 
 made each new acquaintance stand up to be measured, 
 inches being infallibly indicative of worth, and one falls 
 to thinking of the futility of all standards that disregard 
 
CARLYLE AND HIS FRIENDS 149 
 
 specific faculty and opportunity even in the humblest. 
 Nor is the mensuration flawless when these tests are ap- 
 plied to the celebrities whom our author knew. To bor- 
 row his description of Wordsworth's delineations, these 
 men are seen "only as through the reversed telescope, 
 and reduced to the size of a mouse and its nest, or little 
 more." This, of De Quincey, is one of the best of such 
 pictures: "One of the smallest man figures I ever saw; 
 shaped like a pair of tongs, and hardly above five feet 
 in all. When he sate, you would have taken him, by 
 candle-light, for the beautifullest little child, blue-eyed, 
 sparkling face, had there not been a something, too, 
 which said, 'Eccovi — this child has been in hell.' " 
 Etched work, as has been observed above; the acid has 
 bitten in; the chief result is an effect. Take this of 
 Leigh Hunt, for a pleasanter sort: "Dark complexion, 
 copious, clean, strong, black hair, beautifully shaped 
 head, fine, beaming, serious hazel eyes; seriousness and 
 intellect the main expression of the face. He would lean 
 on his elbow against the mantel-piece (fine, clean, elastic 
 figure, too, he had, five feet ten or more), and look round 
 him nearly in silence before taking leave for the night; 
 'as if I were a Lar,' said he once, 'or permanent house- 
 hold god here' (such his polite, aerial-like way)." 
 Were all these sketches as admirable, there could be only 
 thankfulness for such naturalness, force, veracity; but 
 when his mind estimates while his eye sees, when he 
 mixes judgment with his drawing — in Coleridge, Mill, 
 Lamb — there is blur and error, ending often lamely 
 and impotently in grotesque results. In singular con- 
 trast with this inability of Carlyle to distribute exact 
 justice to men, either nobodies or notorieties, is his appre- 
 ciation of those nearest to him : his father, whose natural 
 
150 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 endowment, he thinks, possibly greater than Robert 
 Burns's, and his wife, who exceeded, it seemed to him, 
 "all the Sands and Eliots and babbling coterie of cele- 
 brated scribbling women that have strutted over the 
 world in my time, if all boiled down and distilled to 
 essence." In his exceeding solitariness it seemed so; 
 for what with his fever and battle, the sufficiency to him 
 of the solution he gave the sphinx riddle, his trust in 
 his standards of work done and thrusting itself on the 
 senses, life lost to his eye its true relief; all fine and 
 various proportions vanished in exaggerations and dimi- 
 nutions. In what further and worse obscurities he was 
 involved when he passed from the individual to the 
 mass of humanity, in "Latter-Day Pamphlets" and the like, 
 these records show little sign, except for an outbreak 
 about the "beautiful nigger agony" and a quaver over 
 "poor Davis." 
 
 He taught us much, but at the end he stood in a 
 tragic isolation from the men in whom the fire of his 
 thought burned most clearly. He denounced their aims, 
 he put their hopes from him; the trend of the new civil- 
 ization, with its democracies, its philanthropies, its pros- 
 perities, was, it seemed to him, downward to the pit, 
 and he sang his Tiresiad to the last. These autobiographic 
 fragments, however, do something to disclose, though 
 darkly, a unity that explains the denouement of his 
 career. So to speak, his own nature imprisoned him, 
 his own effort obstructed him, his own development 
 dwarfed him. "A haggard existence, that of his," said 
 he to Southey of Shelley. His own existence was grim 
 and gaunt, a wrestling with far other than the angel of 
 the Lord; with dark spirits, indeed, "as of a man [it is 
 his own account] shrouded since youthhood in continual 
 
CARLYLE AND HIS FRIENDS 151 
 
 gloom and grimness, set too nakedly versus the devil and 
 all men." His struggle was heroic, and fruitful of spirit- 
 ual good to men; however defective in joy, in humanity, 
 in repose, his life now takes its place among the noblest 
 of English men of letters. 
 
 II 
 
 That one day which Emerson made "look like en- 
 chantment," in the poor house of the lonely hill-country 
 where Carlyle was biding his time, may well be reckoned 
 memorable and fortunate in the annals of literature. It 
 knit together, at the beginning of their career, the two 
 men who were to give, each in his own land, the most 
 significant and impressive utterance of spiritual truth 
 in their age. Mutual respect and open sympathy arose 
 in their hearts at first sight, and soon became a loyal 
 and trustful affection, which, endeared by use and wont, 
 proved for almost fifty years one of the best earthly 
 possessions that fell to their lot. Throughout this 
 period, except for a few brief weeks, they lived separate, 
 and hence their correspondence is a nearly complete 
 record of their friendship as it was expressed in words 
 and acts. On our side of the ocean was Emerson, at 
 Concord: freed from pressing care by his competency 
 of twenty thousand dollars; serene in his philosophy of 
 "acquiescence and optimism"; working in his garden 
 or walking by Walden Pond ; discovering geniuses among 
 the townspeople; lecturing in the neighborhood, or jot- 
 ting down essays for his readers — "men and women 
 of some religious culture and aspirations, young or else 
 mystical." On the other side was Carlyle, "the poorest 
 
I S 2 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 man in London"; hag-ridden by spirits of revolt and 
 despair; wrestling with his books as with the demon, 
 "in desperate hope"; finding the face of nature spec- 
 tral, and the face of man tragically burlesque; saying 
 to himself, "Surely, if ever man had a finger-of-Provi- 
 dence shown him, thou hast it; literature will neither 
 yield the bread nor a stomach to digest bread with; quit 
 it in God's name — shouldst thou take spade and mat- 
 tock instead"; yet heartening himself with his mother's 
 words, "They cannot take God's providence from thee." 
 The letters of these two friends, so sharply contrasted by 
 circumstances and nature, must be, one thinks, of ex- 
 traordinary interest, and possibly some wonder may 
 spring up at finding the talk in them about every-day 
 matters — family, work, business, friends, and the like; 
 but the special charm of the correspondence lies in this 
 fact, in its being human rather than literary, in its 
 naturalness of speech, man to man, whether the theme, 
 in Emerson's phrase, "savor of eternity," or concern 
 the proper mode of cooking Indian meal. 
 
 There is much about "a New England book," as Car- 
 lyle, putting Old England to the blush, called it — "Sartor 
 Resartus" — and of its welcome to Cape Cod and Boston 
 Bay, which made Fraser "shriek." We are proud of 
 that; and now we can be glad to know of the money that 
 went to Carlyle from us for this and other books, when 
 he needed money, and can feel a sympathetic indignation 
 against the "gibbetless thief," whose piracies troubled 
 Emerson in his good work, even though we get a cheap 
 satisfaction in knowing that a "brother corsair" in Eng- 
 land did the like when Carlyle tried to reciprocate his 
 friend's good offices. There is much, too, about Car- 
 lyle's coming to America to lecture: details of probable 
 
CARLYLE AND HIS FRIENDS 153 
 
 costs and profits; assurances that, advertised as "the 
 personal friend of Goethe," he would, merely "for the 
 name's sake," be "certain of success for one winter, but 
 not afterwards"; congratulations that "Dr. Channing 
 reads and respects you, a fact of importance"; probabil- 
 ities of "the cordial opposition" of the university. (Ah, 
 poor Harvard! But what can be expected from a son 
 of thine who writes, "The educated class are of course 
 less fair-minded than others"?) Nothing came of all 
 this, though Carlyle did not yield his wish to visit us until 
 he was an old man. Glimpses of humorous sights and 
 things are given from the first: of Dr. Furness, "feeding 
 Miss Martineau with the 'Sartor';" of "Alcott's English 
 Tail of bottomless imbeciles" in London; of Brook Farm 
 days — "not a reading man but has a draft of a new 
 Community in his waistcoat pocket"; of Carlyle him- 
 self (a sight, one would think, to stir Rabelaisian laugh- 
 ter) at a water-cure — "wet wrappages, solitary sad 
 steepages, and other singular procedures." Nov/ and 
 then, too, they praise each other, as friends should. 
 Thus Carlyle, on reading the Phi Beta Kappa oration, 
 breaks out, "I could have wept to read that speech; the 
 clear high melody of it went tingling through my heart. I 
 said to my wife, 'There, woman! ' " But they praise with 
 reservations, as befitted their independence and differ- 
 ences. Carlyle is shy of his friend's genius as of a 
 possible will-o'-the-wisp (beautiful, but leading whither?), 
 and Emerson looks askance at the Harlequinries of his 
 "Teufelsdrockh." They confide their bereavements to each 
 other, simply, manfully: now it is Emerson's little boy, 
 "the bud of God," who is gone; and so on it is Carlyle's 
 tenderly loved mother, and at last the wife. They send 
 their friends to each other — Emerson, of course, by far 
 
1 54 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 the larger number — and they talk them over. In these 
 criticisms and characterizations is the principal literary 
 interest of the collection. Most of them are by Carlyle, 
 and they exhibit the same power as similar passages of 
 his "Reminiscences," but more wisely used. 
 
 Here is Alcott, whom Emerson had sent on "with his 
 more than a prophet's egotism, a great man if he cannot 
 write well"; whom Carlyle found "a genial, innocent, 
 simple-hearted man, of much natural intelligence and 
 goodness, with an air of rusticity, veracity, and dignity 
 — the good Alcott, with his long, lean face and figure, 
 with his gray-worn temples and mild, radiant eyes, all 
 bent on saving the world by a return to acorns and the 
 golden age; ... let him love me as he can, and live 
 on vegetables in peace, and I living partly on vegetables 
 will continue to love him!" Margaret Fuller, Emerson 
 describes as "without beauty or genius," — "with a cer- 
 tain wealth and generosity of nature." Carlyle had 
 larger language for her: "Such a predetermination to 
 eat this big Universe as her oyster or her egg, and to be 
 absolute empress of all height and glory in it that her 
 heart could conceive, I have not before seen in any 
 human soul. Her c mountain-me/ indeed! — but her 
 courage, too, is high and clear, her chivalrous nobleness 
 indeed is great, her veracity in its deepest sense a toute 
 epreuve." In briefer strokes, Miss Martineau, "swathed 
 like a mummy into Socinian and Political-Economy form- 
 ulas, and yet verily alive in the inside of that"; the 
 "pretty little robin-red-breast of a man," Lord Hough- 
 ton; Dr. Hedge — "a face like a rock; a voice like a 
 howitzer"; Southey — "the shovel-hat is grown to him"; 
 Macready, who "puts to shame our Bishops and Arch- 
 bishops." The list is a long one, and it is pleasing to 
 
CARLYLE AND HIS FRIENDS 155 
 
 notice that Carlyle recognizes and appreciates good quali- 
 ties in those of whom he writes. Two more of these por- 
 traits cannot be spared. Of Webster he writes, "As 
 a Logic-fencer, Advocate, or Parliamentary Hercules, 
 one would incline to back him at first sight against all the 
 extant world. The tanned complexion, that amorphous, 
 crag-like face, the dull black eyes under their precipice 
 of brows, like dull anthracite furnaces, needing only to 
 be blown, the mastiff-mouth accurately closed — I have 
 not traced so much of silent Berserkir rage that I remem- 
 ber of in any other man." Finally, of Tennyson, before 
 he was taken up "in the top of the wave," — "Alfred is 
 one of the few British or Foreign Figures who are and 
 remain beautiful to me; a true human soul, or some 
 authentic approximation thereto, to whom your own soul 
 can say, Brother! ... a man solitary and sad as 
 certain men are, dwelling in an element of gloom. . . . 
 One of the finest-looking men in the world; a great shock 
 of rough, dusty-dark hair; bright-laughing hazel eyes; 
 massive aquiline face, most massive yet most delicate; 
 of swallow-brown complexion, almost Indian-looking; 
 clothes cynically loose, free-and-easy; smokes infinite 
 tobacco. His voice is musical metallic — fit for loud 
 laughter and piercing wail, and all that may lie between; 
 speech and speculation free and plenteous. I do not 
 meet, in these late decades, such company over a pipe." 
 Elsewhere, with the Carlyle touch, "He wants a task!" 
 
 Year by year these letters go, and "the cleft of differ- 
 ence" grows wider between the two: Carlyle glowing 
 more intense with the heat of a dark realism; Emerson 
 becoming more ethereal in his ideality. Their mutual 
 recognition is as generous as ever, but each wishes the 
 other different. Carlyle calls for "some concretion of 
 

 1 56 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 these beautiful abstracta." "I love your 'Dial,' " he 
 writes, "and yet it is with a kind of shudder. You seem to 
 me in danger of dividing yourselves from the Fact of this 
 present Universe, and soaring away after Ideas, Beliefs, 
 Revelations, and such like — into perilous altitudes be- 
 yond the curve of perpetual frost. . . . I do believe, 
 for one thing, a man has no right to say to his own 
 generation, turning quite away from it, 'Be damned!' 
 It is the whole Past and the whole Future, this same 
 cotton-spinning, dollar-hunting, canting and shrieking, 
 very wretched generation of ours. Come back into it, 
 I tell you." Again and again he repeats his warning, 
 and calls, "Come down and help us." Emerson, on his 
 side, speaks his own discontent with "that spendthrift 
 style of yours," those "sky-vaultings," and the like, but 
 easily tolerates his friend's peculiarities, and at last takes 
 him as "a highly virtuous gentleman who swears"; while 
 to the summons to leave the mountain-tops, and "come 
 down," he replies, "I don't know what you mean." The 
 genius of each dominated him, and the world has not lost 
 thereby. In the style of the one there was the aroma of 
 Babylon, and in that of the other something of the day- 
 dawn, as they said in their genuine compliments; but 
 the two men could coalesce as little as would the two 
 metaphors. They advanced in age, and the letters grew 
 more infrequent: the fault was Emerson's. It is pitiful 
 to read Carlyle's appeals against his friend's silence, the 
 silence of that voice which was to him, he says over 
 and over, the only human voice he ever heard in response 
 to his own soul. He was wandering about his native 
 country with that "fatal talent of converting all nature 
 into Pret.ernaturalism," or standing in Luther's room in 
 the Wartburg — "I believe I actually had tears in my 
 
CARLYLE AND HIS FRIENDS 157 
 
 eyes there, and kissed the old oak table"; or he was 
 struggling with "Friedrich," and ever repeating, "I am 
 lonely — I am lonely." At the end of a long, impas- 
 sioned protest (and the passion is next to tears) against 
 the misapprehension of the phrase of "the eighteen mil- 
 lion fools," he first makes his prayer, "O my Friend, have 
 tolerance for me, have sympathy with me!" Again, 
 as early as 1852, he writes, "My manifold sins against 
 you, involuntary all of them, I may well say, are often 
 enough present to my sad thoughts; and a kind of re- 
 morse is mixed with the other sorrow — as if I could have 
 helped growing to be, by aid of time and destiny, the 
 grim Ishmaelite I am, and so shocking your serenity 
 by my ferocities ! I admit you were like an angel to me, 
 and absorbed in the beautifulest manner all thunder- 
 clouds into the depths of your immeasurable ether; and 
 it is indubitable I love you very well, and have long 
 done, and mean to do. And on the whole you will have 
 to rally yourself into some kind of correspondence with 
 me again. To me, at any rate, it is a great want, and 
 adds perceptibly to the sternness of these years; deep as 
 is my dissent from your Gymnosophist view of Heaven 
 and Earth, I find an agreement that swallows up all con- 
 ceivable dissents." But the letters remained long un- 
 answered upon Emerson's table, in spite of this and other 
 like appeals; he had forgotten his early words, "Please 
 God, I will never again sit six weeks of this short human 
 life over a letter of yours without answering it." When 
 he does write he assures him of "the old love with the 
 old limitations," counts it his "eminent happiness to have 
 been your friend" and discoverer, and may well say, 
 "There is no example of constancy like yours." The 
 fact remains: Emerson appreciated love as the com- 
 
158 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 radeship of noble minds; but of the love that clings and 
 yearns, and seeks only repose in the friend, he knew 
 not. Every syllable he ever wrote of love or friendship 
 is thought, not passion. Carlyle had the peasant's heart, 
 the heart of a simple man; learning had not dried it, 
 nor flattery hardened it, nor the charities of a fortunate 
 life lulled it. He knew Emerson's fidelity; what he 
 wanted was not the knowledge, but the sense of love. 
 He was not to have it in the fullness he desired: he 
 grew older and more lonely, and the letters fewer, until 
 they ceased, ten years before the death of the friends, in 
 the business necessary for the conveyance of Carlyle's 
 bequest of books to Harvard College, in which he took 
 great pleasure, as in "something itself connected with 
 the Spring in a higher sense — a little white and red 
 lipped bit of Daisy, pure and poor, scattered into 
 Time's Seed-field." Here it seems fit to notice, once 
 for all, the deep interest and friendliness of Carlyle 
 tov/ard America, as it is shown throughout these letters. 
 To quote but one or two phrases, America is at the be- 
 ginning "the other parish" — "the Door of Hope to dis- 
 tracted Europe." Of the subduing of the Western 
 prairies he exclaims, "There is no myth of Athene or 
 Herakles equal to that fact." Finally, at the close of all, 
 he confesses, "I privately whisper to myself, 'Could any 
 Friedrich Wilhelm, now, or Friedrich, or most perfect 
 Governor you could hope to realize, guide forward what 
 is America's essential task at present faster or more com- 
 pletely than "anarchic America" herself is now doing?' 
 Such "Anarchy" has a great deal to say for itself (would 
 to Heaven ours of England had as much!), and points 
 toward grand anti- Anarchies in the future; ... I 
 hope, with the aid of centuries, immense things from 
 
CARLYLE AND HIS FRIENDS 159 
 
 it, in my private mind." Burke's famous admission, in 
 his "Reflections on the French Revolution," that he might 
 be wrong, after all, was not more creditable to his large 
 wisdom than is this to Carlyle's deep sincerity. 
 
 The reputation of Carlyle has materially gained by 
 this "Correspondence," while Emerson remains the man 
 we have always known. As in the "Reminiscences," we 
 see again the grimness, the frightful intensity, the solitude, 
 of Carlyle's life. It is marvelous to notice how exactly 
 Carlyle's account of his states of feeling, written from 
 memory, agrees with the contemporary record of the 
 letters. But beyond what was told us before, we possess 
 now clearer proofs of his sympathy and tenderness; his 
 heart is laid bare, and we, being freed from the preju- 
 dices stirred by the praise or blame that came from it in 
 particular cases, can better appreciate his humanity. 
 His genius was of that kind which makes misapprehension 
 and hatred easy; this volume helps to show us the man 
 as he truly was, one of the noblest of men. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The Goethe-Carlyle Correspondence has the character 
 of a literary episode. It presents several aspects, all 
 of them simple. The sight of Carlyle himself in an atti- 
 tude of ordinary human respect toward a mortal creature 
 still in the flesh is in itself a pleasing spectacle; and he 
 is here to be observed in the postures of practical hero- 
 worship. To Goethe, the writer, Carlyle believed him- 
 self to be under great obligation for light upon the uni- 
 versal mystery, and for counsel in the conduct of life; 
 and to Goethe, the man, he accordingly expressed his 
 
160 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 fervent gratitude, as bright youths in similar circum- 
 stances are so often tempted of the devil to do, by 
 inditing a letter to the ruling genius of the hour under 
 whose intellectual sway he happened to be born. In 
 this case the usual unfortunate disillusion did not fol- 
 low: the "spiritual father" showed himself truly paternal, 
 smiled benignity upon the plans, fortunes, and various 
 activities of the young man; and the "grateful son," in 
 his turn, sent his tribute of translations, eulogistic crit- 
 iques, and epistolary compliments to the sage at Weimar. 
 The influence of Goethe certainly was the most powerful 
 external stimulus in the literary life of Carlyle, and the 
 friendly recognition which the latter received from the 
 great man, while still obscure and unsuccessful, was no 
 doubt a comfort, and perhaps a support; the gratitude 
 of Carlyle was sincere, and his service to the fame of 
 his master was considerable. But the relationship es- 
 tablished by the Correspondence was personal, not intel- 
 lectual; if one opens this volume with any expectation 
 of finding wisdom in it, he will come to grief; that side 
 of the connection must be sought in the works of the 
 two authors. In these letters, they express their in- 
 dividuality, not their genius; they are, on page after 
 page, men leading an every-day life. 
 
 To the fashion of our times there seems to be some- 
 thing peculiar in the general tone of these letters, which 
 is not altogether explained by reminding ourselves that 
 of the two persons engaged one was old, the other young; 
 one the oracular voice, the other an acolyte; one the 
 shining great original, the other a Scotch translator. 
 These differences do not account for what appears to be 
 a lack of naturalness, or at least of that openness which 
 is the charm of familiar literary correspondence. This 
 
CARLYLE AND HIS FRIENDS 161 
 
 Correspondence is very literary, but more formal than 
 familiar: the principal figure in it is the monarch of 
 literary Europe, who is also a court chamberlain; and 
 both the participants are aware of the value of ceremony 
 in adjusting human relations. The consequence is, to 
 be frank, that Goethe is undeniably heavy in his com- 
 munications, and Carlyle is preternaturally solemn, even 
 for a young Scotchman of his severe ilk. Goethe's 
 heaviness is unquestionably natural ; but, quite as plainly, 
 Carlyle is minding his manners. One rubs his eyes, and 
 asks if this is the Carlyle we know. How much he was 
 warped from his native bent it is easy to observe by the 
 contrast of the few contemporary letters to personal 
 friends which interleave the main Correspondence. In 
 them he speaks out like a man; but in reading the others, 
 and especially the earlier of them, one is reminded of 
 nothing so often as of the dedicatory epistles to that by- 
 gone worthy, over whose disestablishment by Johnson 
 Carlyle rejoiced — the Patron. As to the documentary 
 missives that came from Weimar, Carlyle himself kept 
 up a silent thinking. What does he say confidentially 
 to brother John, now on his travels, and possibly to be 
 in the actual presence of the great man? 
 
 "To a certainty you must come round by Weimar, as 
 you return, and see this world's wonder, and tell us on 
 your sincerity what manner of man he is, for daily he 
 grows more inexplicable to me. One letter is written 
 like an oracle, the next shall be too redolent of twaddle. 
 How is it that the author of "Faust" and "Meister" can 
 
 tryste himself with such characters as 'Herr ' (the 
 
 simplest and stupidest man of his day, a Westmoreland 
 
 Gerundgrinder and cleishbotham) and ' Captain ' 
 
 (a little wizened, cleanly man, most musical, most melan- 
 
1 62 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 choly)? . . . For myself, unshaken in my former 
 belief, though Jane rather wavers," etc. 
 
 "Twaddle"! But whether it was the curious testi- 
 monial of Carlyle's fitness to be a Scotch professor, which 
 he had just received, and which is the most Shandean 
 document of the kind within our knowledge, or whether 
 it was the gracious welcome given to the Herr and Cap- 
 tain blanked in such unmistakable Carlylese, that drew 
 forth this improper expression, does not appear. One 
 concludes that it was as well that "the pair," as the 
 Carlyles, man and wife, are usually designated in these 
 pages, did not make their wished-for journey to Weimar. 
 It was much better to exchange books and trinkets, and 
 live at the ends of the earth. 
 
 Yet what has been said above is only a part of the 
 story, and the least agreeable part. From another point 
 of view, this memorial of the acquaintance of these two 
 illustrious men is more attractive. It is without intel- 
 lectual value, not unnaturally; these two men have ex- 
 pressed themselves so fully in their books that nothing 
 fresh or striking in the way of thought could be antic- 
 ipated; but as an exhibition of kindness and good-will 
 on Goethe's part, and of reverence and disciple-ship on 
 Carlyle's, the Correspondence has a human interest, and 
 it serves also as a landmark in English literary history. 
 To Goethe, Carlyle was only a translator and student of 
 German literature, engaged in the active propagandism 
 of the fame and name of himself and his compatriots. 
 He praised him, indeed, in general terms, and predicted 
 a future for him; but there is no intimation that he saw 
 any original genius in him except what could be usefully 
 employed in continuing the business of translating his 
 own works and writing manuals of German literature; 
 
CARLYLE AND HIS FRIENDS 163 
 
 and the tone and matter of Eckermann's letters indicate 
 that this was in fact all that the name of Carlyle meant 
 at Weimar. 
 
 At that time Carlyle had given no sign of being capable 
 of work other than critical review, of a longer or shorter 
 kind. He was then the principal channel by which Ger- 
 man literature was being communicated to the English 
 people, and it was this circumstance, practically, that 
 made Goethe his correspondent. The latter's heart was 
 in the work of extending German ideas into other lan- 
 guages, and promoting a general intellectual commerce 
 among civilized nations, and he found in Carlyle a ready 
 and able assistant; and inasmuch as all that was being 
 done in England then in disseminating German thought 
 was a matter of interest to Goethe, it happens that 
 this Correspondence represents fairly well the historic 
 moment when the later literary influence of Germany 
 began to be effective on English soil. This interest of 
 the letters is merely incidental and for scholars; but it 
 helps us to understand the facts of Carlyle's relation 
 to Goethe, which really sprang out of his usefulness as a 
 hack-writer on the magazines and as a translator. We 
 do not have here the communion of two equal friends, 
 as in the letters between Carlyle and Emerson, or of two 
 original minds actively giving or receiving influence; 
 there is nothing of this, but only compliments, attentions, 
 and talk incidental to the German propaganda. 
 
 This being understood, it is altogether delightful to 
 observe in what kindly and intimate ways Goethe 
 varied and enriched the slight connection between him- 
 self and his practically unknown admirer, how thought- 
 ful he was, what true and natural good-feeling he showed, 
 until the acquaintance did really ripen into a warm 
 
1 64 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 mutual friendliness. This is the charming thing in view 
 of which one forgets that Goethe was anything more 
 than a pleasant and polite old gentleman, much engaged 
 in the little affairs of age, and sorry that his head could 
 no longer furnish a lock of hair for that one of "the 
 worthy wedded pair" who had sent him a lock from her 
 own; and forgets, too, that Carlyle, although still un- 
 distinguished, was by no means a youth when he was 
 writing the most decorous compositions he ever penned. 
 One enters into the spirit of it, and enjoys the self- 
 complacent, kind-mannered old poet and the meek and 
 not altogether unsuspecting Scotchman; for in no other 
 place does Carlyle appear so unmitigably Scotch as 
 in this book. 
 
 IV 
 
 Of the good and evil of modern biography the memorials 
 of Carlyle will be a severe test. Slowly he won his way 
 merely by literature to a place where he had the respect 
 of the world, the veneration of the most earnest of the 
 younger generation, and power over all the best. He 
 died; and the interest of his work, which had been as 
 real as Alexander's, as laborious as Frederick's, as believ- 
 ing as Cromwell's, has been superseded by the interest 
 of his life. This is temporary, of course, but the inti- 
 mate knowledge that men possess in regard to his own 
 human nature will profoundly modify the meaning of 
 his books to them and in the long run this change for 
 better or worse will prove the significant thing. He him- 
 self taught that character is the best light by which to 
 get an understanding of a man's work, and his biographer 
 has proved faithful to that theory. He himself author- 
 
CARLYLE AND HIS FRIENDS 165 
 
 ized the violation of his own thoughts, affections, and 
 wrongdoing, in their secretest privacy. It, is true that 
 he did it in that mood of sorrow and repentance which 
 is peculiarly liable to error of judgment, when a wise 
 friend is a friend indeed; but he did it. The seal that 
 protected his married life being once broken, other seals 
 easily gave way. There can be no question that Car- 
 lyle's literary influence has seriously suffered in conse- 
 quence; and, though our annals have been enriched by 
 the story of a life of the highest moral interest, it is 
 quite possible that the sacrifice has been too great. 
 There have been men whose nature so outvalued their 
 work that biography, while revealing their feeblenesses, 
 has honored them; there has been character so fine that 
 its illustration in the acts of daily life is a possession 
 much more precious than any other record of it orig- 
 inally meant for the public: but Carlyle's nature and 
 character, taken in the whole, were not such. His vir- 
 tues were completely expressed in his works, and for 
 the most part his biography has been a lengthening his- 
 tory of the miserable effects of his faults upon his own 
 and others' lives. Could he have characterized himself 
 with the same narrowness of heart and intellectual con- 
 tempt that he exhibited toward some men whom he knew, 
 these memorials would have furnished him matter for a 
 more biting and a more unjust description than any he 
 has been guilty of. What the features of it would be there 
 is no need to outline. That he was genuine, sincere, 
 truthful, no one will doubt; but all will remember that the 
 same qualities in that "poor fool" of a Gladstone, in whom 
 Carlyle thought all the cants of the age had become 
 convictions, are as worthy respect. He was strenuously 
 righteous; but so was Mill, in whom that virtue did not 
 
1 66 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 count for salvation in his eyes. So one might con- 
 tinue, were it useful to argue to the point that Carlyle 
 did not monopolize the manliness of England. It is not 
 strange that Froude lays stress unduly on his friend's 
 good traits, but it cannot be disguised that there is 
 much need for the exercise of charity by the reader; and 
 the proof of this is that the story touches the heart far 
 more than it illumines, or exalts, or strengthens the spirit. 
 In this narrative of the years of Carlyle's mature life in 
 London, one point is touched on that has never been com- 
 prehensively treated, and that is his relation to the public 
 questions of his own time. Froude tries to make much 
 of it, but he succeeds only in keeping up an obscure feeling 
 that the subject is there. Every one knows what Carlyle 
 thought, and there is a taking plausibility in the analogy 
 Froude finds between him and the Hebrew prophets who 
 rebuked, denounced, and exhorted the tribes that forgot 
 God ; but the likeness would hold as well in the case of any 
 vehement reformer who had not the power of the sword. 
 He prophesied destruction; and as the history of civilized 
 man has been a series of catastrophes it is quite possible 
 that his prophecy is true. At each new break in the old 
 order men hope that the kingdom of God is near at hand, 
 and we who are building on liberty, the diffusion of intelli- 
 gence among all the people, and philanthropy, indulge the 
 old belief, perhaps to no better purpose than did the men 
 who converted the nations, who brought back antiquity, 
 and who freed the conscience of Europe. We are engaged 
 in a great effort of equal dignity, and Carlyle declared 
 against us, set himself in opposition to the irresistible 
 movement of civilization, and denounced upon us "God's 
 Revenge." So once had Savonarola done with equal sin- 
 cerity, and perhaps the issue will in the end be the same 
 
CARLYLE AND HIS FRIENDS 167 
 
 to the moderns as it was to the Florentines. But in this 
 matter Carlyle exceeded the role of the prophet; he not 
 only preached that no moral regeneration could come 
 from the new expedients of politics, in a large sense, for 
 the administration of society, but he added that such 
 measures were foolish in their own worldly sphere. In 
 the first part of his message he was right — he said 
 what every prophet declares is God's word; but in the 
 second it ought now to be the devout hope of all men 
 that he may prove a babbler. Certainly, in this province 
 of his thought — in his sneers at the humane efforts of 
 his contemporaries to give manhood to all who wear the 
 form of man, to show even in prisons some kindliness on 
 the part of organized society toward the criminal and 
 vicious, to insist in practical affairs that no man can be 
 saved except by the exercise of powers that involve such 
 freedom of thought, motive, and action as may also pos- 
 sibly result in his own damnation — in all this he ran 
 counter to the spirit of Christianity. His temper did 
 belong in many respects to the Old Dispensation, to the 
 rigor and bigotry of Scotch Presbyterianism, to the 
 countryman of Knox. He was so careful that things 
 should be done decently, that acts should be right, as to 
 make it seem that his corner-stone was a belief in govern- 
 ment. He had a higher regard for authority than liberty, 
 for compulsion than persuasion, for the law than the 
 victim; but of the aims and methods, the aspirations and 
 energies, of the Christ's kingdom that cometh not by 
 force he seems to have known little. He never was so 
 profound a spiritualist as to make statecraft, as Plato 
 did, a department of man's education: to him all that 
 was "niggerism." Carlyle's convictions regarding suf- 
 frage, emancipation, prison-reform, parliamentary gov- 
 
1 68 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 ernment, and the like topics on which he was accustomed 
 to emit "geyser-spouts," as they are termed, were closely 
 connected with his more general views of the moral 
 order of the universe, the sources of greatness in men and 
 nations, and the lessons of history as he read them; 
 and to follow out these threads of union would be very 
 helpful toward an explanation of his reactionary thought. 
 Froude has not done this; he plainly respects Carlyle as 
 a political seer as well as in his capacity of "Hebrew 
 prophet," but he brings nothing to support his master 
 except a Toryish sentiment. We may fail in our effort 
 for the self-education of the race by devolving upon 
 men opportunities they may abuse and responsibilities 
 they may violate, and there are elements enough of 
 danger in our legacy from old times as well as of our own 
 making; but had Carlyle been our leader in the "Ex- 
 odus from Houndsditch," he would have taken us back, 
 very surely, to the bondage of an Israelitish code, if not 
 to the shadow of Egypt itself. 
 
 In the last forty years of Carlyle's London career there 
 is fresh illustration of his character, but no new traits 
 appear. The impression which is most strengthened is 
 that of the strange mingling of the rudeness of his orig- 
 inal nature with the fineness of the high-bred civilization 
 into which he grew. The strength of his peasant an- 
 cestry was at the core of his virtue; but as he developed, 
 and appropriated from others, many modifications are 
 noticeable: for one thing, he became tender. One be- 
 lieves he was always essentially kind; but, as in unculti- 
 vated men, his kindness had to be appealed to in order 
 to become active; it was not the habit of his daily life. 
 It is as if the softening and enriching processes, that 
 usually require the period of two or three generations 
 
CARLYLE AND HIS FRIENDS 169 
 
 to import into character the fine results of civilization, 
 had been crowded into a single existence. This is one 
 reason, perhaps, why the last years of his life seem 
 morally more beautiful, as if time had done its perfect 
 work for him. The trait which shows most plainly his 
 peasant extraction and which clung longest to him was 
 his peculiar appreciation of the charm of civility as he 
 saw it in great houses. It is the more significant be- 
 cause he seldom gives it verbal form; he may not have 
 known quite clearly his own feeling. It may seem a 
 strange, an inconsistent matter; but there can be no 
 rational doubt that Carlyle liked to be lionized, and was 
 willing to pay the price of physical misery for a dinner 
 with great people. It was not the worst of faults. He 
 would, nevertheless, probably have resented Froude's 
 description of him as one of Lord Ashburton's train; 
 and so far as his consciousness went the remark must be 
 regarded as unjust, though the fact may have been as 
 stated. However that was, he paid dearly for the epi- 
 sode of his friendship with that excellent nobleman. In 
 other matters, too, especially in the ferocity of his 
 judgments, one hears the North Briton accent. But 
 after all, the story of this life now finished is a very 
 noble one; it attaches men's hearts to a degree that is 
 marvelous when one remembers how much there is in 
 it which repels. Carlyle's life, for better or worse, is 
 now a part of his works. 
 
 Unconscious autobiography is interesting, but it is 
 seldom fair and adequate. In "The Letters and Mem- 
 orials of Jane Welsh Carlyle," one reads plainly the petty 
 
1 7 o LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 and mean details of a thirty years' housekeeping; but 
 it is only inferentially that one gains an impression of 
 the charm that, before Mrs. Carlyle's marriage, sur- 
 rounded her with lovers, and, after it, made her the 
 prized friend of men of intellect, and the refuge of all 
 mad and miserable people, and won for her, when she 
 grew old, the enthusiastic affection of her associates of 
 all ages and all degrees of talent or stupidity. She has 
 fared ill in having her familiar letters given to the world 
 just as they were written, in the raw, with all their 
 feminine confidences, which an editor with a touch of 
 the old-fashioned chivalrous feeling for women would 
 have suppressed, with their hasty account of her domes- 
 tic vexations of body and mind, their revelation of her 
 little necessary social hypocrisies, and even the heart- 
 burnings that she intrusted only to her diary. Her 
 husband, it is true, prepared the letters for publication; 
 he was led to do so by a wish to honor her, and also by 
 a feeling of remorse and a desire to do penance for his 
 ill-treatment; but he left the decision in the matter to 
 Froude, on whom the responsibility lies. It is useless 
 to lament the indiscretion and obtuseness of this editor; 
 the hero has found his valet, and the preacher of silence 
 is to have as many words made about him and his as 
 possible; it is only left to the public to be thankful 
 that the house, which is now lighted up and thrown 
 open from kitchen to bedroom, had no worse secrets for 
 disclosure. 
 
 The letters, being written by an unsuspecting woman 
 who was unusually genuine, frank, original, audacious in 
 word and act, and unconventional to a fault, and being, 
 moreover, seasoned with entertaining literary and social 
 gossip, are, of course, full of interest. Vivacity is the 
 
CARLYLE AND HIS FRIENDS 171 
 
 marked trait of the writer; but the continual reference 
 to her happy girlhood and its scenes, growing more 
 pathetic year after year, and the continual lament of 
 Carlyle in his notes — like a Greek chorus, giving a 
 kind of artistic unity to the series — lend an effect of sad- 
 ness to the whole. The life of the heroine — she de- 
 serves the name — was impressive; amid the ignoble 
 trivialities that fell to her daily lot, she kept to the high 
 purposes involved in them with great courage and self- 
 control, and with unremitting devotion. An only child, 
 reared in a wealthy and refined home, the favorite of 
 all who knew her, with many rich and intelligent suitors 
 about her, she had chosen to wed the poor and obscure 
 man in whose genius she alone believed, and, against 
 the advice of her friends, had married him, and gone to 
 the lonely Scotch farm to be practically his household 
 servant; there she had spent six toilsome years, and now 
 they had come to London, to the house that was to be 
 her home until death. These letters cover this latter 
 period, of the household affairs of which they contain 
 a complete account. Her work was less menial, since 
 they kept a servant, so that she no longer had to mop up 
 her own floors; but the tasks set her were difficult and 
 exhausting. To provide meals that Carlyle could eat 
 without too violent storming — for, as she said in Maz- 
 zini's phrase, Carlyle "loved silence somewhat platon- 
 ically"; to shield him from the annoyances of visitors 
 and bad servants; to rid the neighborhood, by ingenious 
 diplomacy, of the nuisances of ever-reappearing parrots, 
 dogs, cocks, and the like enemies of sleep and medita- 
 tion, her own as well as his; to buy his clothes, see law- 
 yers and agents, even to protest against his high taxes 
 before the commissioners, and, in all possible ways, to 
 
172 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 save his money at the expense of her own tastes and 
 even of her health ; to attend to refittings of the house by 
 carpenters, painters, and masons, while he was away 
 on his summer vacations; in brief, to spare him all the 
 ills of the outer world, to make the conditions of his 
 work favorable, and himself as comfortable as it was 
 possible for a morose dyspeptic to be, and at the same 
 time to prevent his seeing how much trouble and anx- 
 iety it cost her — such was the duty prescribed to 
 herself and done faithfully for years without complaint, 
 amid illnesses not light nor few, which were "not with- 
 out their good uses," she wrote, because she arose from 
 them "with new heart for the battle of existence — what 
 a woman means by new heart, not new brute force, as 
 you men understand it, but new power of loving and 
 enduring." In this effective practical life she tried to 
 repress some portion of her womanly nature, for she 
 agreed, verbally at least, with Carlyle's disapproval of 
 "moods," "feelings," "sentiments," and similar phases 
 of emotion not resulting in work done; but her nature, 
 being pathetically susceptible to these forbidden experi- 
 ences, often overruled her philosophy, and brought the 
 knowledge of her solitude home to her; for she had no 
 direct share in her husband's work, no marks of tender- 
 ness from him, and few words or deeds in recognition of 
 her sacrifices for him. She succeeded only too well in 
 blinding him to her own pain, which was, indeed, the 
 easiest of her tasks. Her words on Carlyle's sending her 
 a birthday present just after her mother's death are sig- 
 nificant of much that is unsaid, and contain the explana- 
 tion she gave to herself of his earlier neglect. "I cannot 
 tell you," she writes, "how wae his little gift made me, 
 as well as glad; it was the first thing of the kind he ever 
 
CARLYLE AND HIS FRIENDS 173 
 
 gave to me in his life. In great matters he is always 
 kind and considerate; but these little attentions, which 
 we women attach so much importance to, he was never 
 in the habit of rendering to any one; his up-bringing and 
 the severe turn of mind he has from nature had alike 
 indisposed him toward them. And now the desire to 
 replace to me the irreplaceable makes him as good in 
 little things as he used to be in great." This was in the 
 sixteenth year after marriage. 
 
 There was a limit, however, to Mrs. Carlyle's power 
 of self-sacrifice. Her proud, spirited, sensitive nature 
 was ever reasserting itself, persistently refusing to be lost 
 in her husband's individuality. She thirsted both for 
 expressed recognition and for expressed affection. In 
 an early letter to Sterling she writes thus: "In spite of 
 the honestest efforts to annihilate my I-ety or merge it 
 in what the world doubtless considers my better half, I 
 still find myself a self-subsisting and, alas! self-seeking 
 me. Little Felix in the 'Wanderjahre,' when, in the midst 
 of an animated scene between Wilhelm and Theresa, 
 he pulls Theresa's gown and calls out, 'Mama Theresa, 
 I, too, am here!' only speaks out with the charming 
 trustfulness of a little child what I am perpetually feel- 
 ing, though too sophisticated to pull people's skirts, or 
 exclaim, in so many words, 'Mr. Sterling, I, too, am 
 here ! ' " The recognition which she desired was abun- 
 dantly given by the men who gathered about Carlyle, 
 many of whom were more attached to her than to him; 
 and the despised "feelings" found an outlet in brighten- 
 ing various miserable lives, poor exiles of all nations, 
 unfortunate maidens, lost children, and, in general, all 
 people in affliction, who were attracted to her, she said, 
 as straw to amber. Notwithstanding the affection and de- 
 
174 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 votion of her many friends, she seems to have remained 
 lonely at heart; but she kept on with the old routine, 
 while the "French Revolution" and "Cromwell" were 
 being written, and she found comfort, if not content- 
 ment, in the sense of fulfilled duty and the knowledge 
 that she had materially helped her husband in her silent 
 way. The whisper of fame grew loud, the doors of the 
 great flew open; but when her faith in Carlyle's genius 
 was at last justified and her hopes for him realized, some- 
 thing happened that had not entered into her calcula- 
 tions. Carlyle was finding the sweetest reward in the 
 society of another woman. This was the first Lady 
 Ashburton, who was "the cleverest woman out of sight" 
 that Mrs. Carlyle ever saw, and at whose home, a center 
 of intellectual society, both she and her husband often 
 visited; but it seems that in London the wives of men 
 of genius, like the wives of bishops, do not take the 
 social rank of their husbands; so Froude assures us, 
 and Lady Ashburton made the fact plain to Mrs. Carlyle. 
 The result was, that, toward the close of a ten years' 
 acquaintance, the latter grew so jealous of the former's 
 fascination as to make herself very wretched. Miss 
 Geraldine Jewsbury, her most intimate friend, explains 
 the affair in a very sensible note. She says that any 
 other wife would have laughed at Carlyle's bewitchment, 
 but this one, seeing Lady Ashburton admired for sayings 
 and doings for which she was snubbed, and contrasting 
 the former's grande-dame manners with her own lonely 
 endeavors to help her husband and serve him through 
 years of hardship, became more abidingly and intensely 
 miserable than words can utter; her inmost life was soli- 
 tary, without tenderness, caresses, or loving words from 
 him, and she felt that her love and life were laid waste. 
 
CARLYLE AND HIS FRIENDS 175 
 
 All this she willingly endured while he neglected her for 
 his work; but when this excuse could no longer be made 
 for him, the strain told on her, and, without faltering from 
 her purpose of helping and shielding him, she became 
 warped. Such is Miss Jewsbury's account, nearly in 
 her own words. There is no need to apportion the 
 blame between the pair. The fact is that Mrs. Carlyle 
 suffered, and that, for some time after she became aware 
 of her own real feeling, her letters are less confidingly 
 affectionate in regard to her husband, and contain more 
 or less open discontent of a very justifiable kind. After 
 Lady Ashburton's death, she writes to him as follows: 
 "I have neither the strength and spirits to bear up against 
 your discontent, nor the obtuseness to be indifferent to it. 
 You have not the least notion what a killing thought it 
 is to have put into one's heart, gnawing there day and 
 night, that one ought to be dead, since one can no longer 
 make the same exertions as formerly"; and there is 
 more to the same effect, to which Carlyle affixes his note, 
 "Alas! alas! sinner that I am!" Notwithstanding such 
 plain words, which are indeed infrequent, Mrs. Carlyle 
 still guarded her husband, standing between him and the 
 objects of his wrath, "imitating, in a small, humble way, 
 the Roman soldier who gathered his arms full of the 
 enemy's spears, and received them all into his own 
 breast," on which sentence Carlyle again comments, "Oh 
 heavens, the comparison! it was too true." As time 
 went on they drew together more closely. The second 
 Lady Ashburton appeared, who became very dear to Mrs. 
 Carlyle, and was even advised by her to "send a kiss" to 
 the now aging philosopher. Carlyle himself understood 
 better his wife's moods and needs, though still imper- 
 fectly, and he was more kind in word and more thought- 
 
176 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 ful in act than of old. Thus, at last, the letters conclude 
 as pleasantly as they began, with Mrs. Carlyle's elation 
 over the Edinburgh triumph, from which her husband 
 returned to find her dead. 
 
 On the whole, in spite of appearances, the married 
 life here laid bare was not an exceptionally unhappy 
 one; nor does it seem that Carlyle's neglect of his wife 
 sprang from any moral fault, but merely from his native 
 insensibility, his absorption in his work, and that un- 
 conscious selfishness which is ordinarily induced in even 
 the best men by persistent silent sacrifice on their behalf. 
 He simply did not see, did not know, did not under- 
 stand his wife's trials and nature; but that he had deep 
 tenderness in his heart is plain, both from his works, 
 where it is shown imaginatively, and from things recorded 
 of his own acts in these volumes and elsewhere. That 
 his love was single and his loyalty entire these pitiful 
 notes amply and painfully prove. But independently of 
 him altogether, Mrs. Carlyle deserves remembrance for 
 her own sake, not merely for the work done by her as 
 a true wife, nor for the heroic spirit shown in the doing 
 it, but for an intrinsically refined and gentle nature, the 
 history of which leaves the impression that, although it 
 always remained noble and attractive, it was injured by 
 the circumstances amid which she was placed. The total 
 effect of her letters, so far as they relate to herself, goes 
 to confirm Miss Jewsbury's summary, that "the lines in 
 which her character was laid down were very grand, but 
 the result was blurred and distorted and confused." 
 
CARLYLE AND HIS FRIENDS 177 
 
 VI 
 
 The literary handling of the mortal career of Thomas 
 Carlyle has exhibited all the faults of which biography is 
 capable. It has long been understood that very few 
 men can write their own lives with veracity. Autobiog- 
 raphies are often useful because they exhibit something 
 of personal charm or make tacit confession of weak- 
 nesses and singularities, as a genuine, sincere, vigorous 
 character does in his real human intercourse; but they 
 do not serve in the place of formal and impartial narrative 
 of events and the view of personality from the outside. 
 A man in the course of his life suffers many changes; his 
 intellectual and frequently his moral point of view varies, 
 and with each decade his past takes on a new perspective; 
 he can never reproduce in imagination, still less in mem- 
 ory, what he was as he was; his identity, to risk a 
 paradox, is self-effacing. Carlyle, in writing his "Remi- 
 niscences," was peculiarly at a disadvantage; he was in a 
 mood of suffering, and he saw his past through the cloud 
 of recent bereavement, which distorted its elements. His 
 genius itself, so powerfully imaginative, and his emotion, 
 which seems to have deprived him of the saving faculty 
 of humor in some portions of his subject, were both 
 against him; and, besides, he was an old man. Of 
 the utmost value in the impersonal parts and of great 
 moral interest in all that concerns himself (so far as his 
 words are the judgment passed by a man upon his deeds 
 at the close of his career), his "Autobiography" is but a 
 small part of the material for his "Life," and is directly of 
 worth for that purpose only as it is supported by the 
 day-to-day record of documents, by the observation of 
 

 178 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 others, and by his own books. It was necessary that 
 some one else should undertake the task of examining 
 and reducing the copious materials which were in exist- 
 ence for a full biography. 
 
 Carlyle was scarcely more fortunate in his choice of 
 one to intrust this labor to than he was in his selection 
 of himself as the scribe of his works and days. Froude, 
 if one considers only the judgment of the man, showed 
 himself lacking not only in reticence and tact, but in 
 any proper understanding of the nature of the Carlyles. 
 This was a "grievous fault," and fatal to his success in 
 the mere capacity of biographer. The trouble is not so 
 much that he was indiscreet, and told more of the truth 
 than good taste and friendly devotion to a friend's better 
 self would warrant; but he made his blabbing disclosures 
 without right discrimination, and so presented and ar- 
 ranged the facts, so molded them with his own mistaken 
 conceptions, and colored them with what is essentially 
 prejudice, that they served, no otherwise than as did 
 Carlyle's own autobiographical writings, to give wrong 
 impressions. The facts are thrown into confusion by 
 the brooding of Carlyle in the one case and the per- 
 version of Froude in the other. 
 
 So much has been clear this long time, but it now 
 appears that Froude was guilty of gross negligence in 
 his editorial work, as has been brought out by the com- 
 parison of the original materials with his printed tran- 
 scripts; and he is further charged with warping the 
 narrative by giving to certain parts of it a bias unfavor- 
 able to the Carlyles, in the face of the evidence before 
 him. The only inference to be drawn is, that he was 
 equally as careless in reading and sifting the original 
 manuscripts as he was in attending to their correct 
 
CARLYLE AND HIS FRIENDS 179 
 
 publication. The case against him is strong enough to 
 convict. It is Carlyle, however, and not Froude for 
 whom the world feels concern. Both the "Autobiography" 
 and the authorized "Life" have elements of untrust- 
 worthiness in them as records of the exact truth of 
 events and as portrayals of characters. Under the cir- 
 cumstances, what is there left for a friend of Carlyle who 
 feels the injustice of this state of the case to the prin- 
 cipals involved, except to publish faithfully such of the 
 originals as may give to the public opportunity to correct, 
 at first hand, the opinions formed on the grounds of 
 Carlyle's confession and Froude's narrative? 
 
 This is the task which Professor Norton charged him- 
 self with. He attempts no narrative; he merely prints 
 seriatim letters of Carlyle. At first these are the letters 
 of a youth to two or three college mates, to his parents 
 and brothers, and to the young lady whom he was des- 
 tined to marry. They are the expression of a dutiful 
 son and brother and of an interested friend, in regard to 
 matters of family concern, his own health, his studies, 
 pursuits, prospects; they are no more than this, for even 
 in those letters to Jane Welsh which Professor Norton 
 has thought it not unbecoming to publish, with one ex- 
 ception, Carlyle is the student and not distinctly the 
 lover. He was engaged during these years either in 
 teaching school or in private tutoring, with literature in 
 the shape of hackwork slowly taking more and more of 
 his time to its special service, until in the last year he 
 was fully in the harness as a professional translator. It 
 is not to be expected that he would have much of conse- 
 quence to communicate, and, so far as intrinsic worth 
 goes, we must frankly say there is little in these epistles 
 that need detain the attention of men. It is singular 
 
180 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 that there should be so slight intimation of any formed 
 opinions; the young Edinburgher, periodically returning 
 to the folks at home, read a great deal and thought 
 about it, estimated it, wrote it out in the way of biography 
 and translation, but had practically nothing of his own 
 to say; or at any rate he did not intrust his meditations 
 to letters. His mind was not developed. Carlyle, in 
 the thoughts by which the world knows him, was not 
 there. 
 
 What was there, however, was Carlyle's temperament. 
 The native endowment of the youth stands out all the 
 clearer because unconfused with any opinions. What 
 this was is well enough understood: a quick eye for the 
 oddities of human nature; a sound judgment of men, 
 seemingly intuitive in its operation, but owing much to 
 his inherited moral perceptiveness ; ready intelligence, 
 and a susceptibility to the poetic and the grotesque in 
 man's life, so fruitful in later years; and, above all, the 
 moral sense which was the main feeder of his genius. 
 These things are to be felt continuously in his letters. 
 Something of his style is also observable — lacking in 
 brilliancy and power, but essentially there. For the rest, 
 the only other thing which belongs to the indubitable 
 Carlyle of fame is his dyspepsia. He writes of it from 
 the first with an objurgatory vigor which has more of the 
 distinct prophecy of his future in it than anything else 
 to be found in the volumes and it is abundantly manifest, 
 whether altogether because of this early and painful in- 
 fliction or not, that he was an irritable person to live 
 with, sharp-spoken, querulous, and hard-grained. He 
 was proud toward the world, discontented, and ambi- 
 tious; his own opinion of himself, happily justified by 
 the event, was fully sufficient to sustain him in times of 
 
CARLYLE AND HIS FRIENDS 
 
 i«i 
 
 difficulty and struggle of heart and hope, and he was 
 fully conscious of his superiority at all points. 
 
 His letters to his parents, and their replies, are by 
 far the most interesting; but less on Carlyle's account 
 than as a picture of Scotch life. This special value was 
 one reason why Professor Norton included so large a 
 number of the family letters. The letters to Miss Welsh 
 are mostly letters of advice respecting composition, with- 
 out any marked character, and those of them which are 
 not in the vein of "the guide, philosopher, and friend" 
 are not very significant. The total value of the collec- 
 tion, consequently, is, as has been said, not great 
 in itself. A hard-headed young Scotchman, well-met 
 among his few friends, attached to his kin, and bound to 
 get on by literature in which he had the wit to find the 
 best — such was Carlyle from the close of his boyhood 
 to his marriage in full manhood. His character, had he 
 ended then, would have been nothing to the world. 
 
 The points in which the story, here spread before the 
 reader in the original documents, differs from the account 
 rendered by Froude in his own words, relate to the nature 
 and relations of a few persons. They have no imme- 
 diate intellectual interest; in fact, the whole subject be- 
 longs in the region of world gossip, which differs from 
 village gossip only in the eminence of the persons involved. 
 It was inevitable, after Froude's publication, but it was 
 no less unfortunate, that public attention should be di- 
 verted from the intellectual history of Carlyle to the 
 special point whether he treated his wife well. The 
 moral ideals of Carlyle were neglected, the history of their 
 genesis and development fell far into the background, and 
 the question now asked was, What was his own moral 
 practice in daily life? It is a pertinent inquiry in the 
 
1 82 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 cases of all men who assume to be public teachers; it is 
 often a useful one. But in Carlyle's case it is complicated 
 by the fact that, in the particulars in which it is commonly 
 held that he failed of manliness, he seems to have been 
 unconscious of his errors at the time of committing them. 
 Defects of nature, rather than dereliction of duty, are 
 brought out in his family history; he was hard, selfish, 
 and dull in some matters, but he was too much absorbed 
 in his own life to be habitually conscious of these faults, 
 though he was aware of them momentarily from time to 
 time. His wrong-doing in these respects began early. 
 He indulged his weaknesses of temper amid his own 
 people, and often expressed contrition in words which 
 plainly apply, not to single acts, but to a general course of 
 conduct. 
 
 The main question, however, in these early years of 
 his life concerns the position of Edward Irving in the 
 group, and the circumstances which led to Carlyle's en- 
 gagement with Miss Welsh and the feelings which the 
 lovers entertained towards each other. Froude inspires 
 the belief that Miss Welsh's attachment to Irving was of 
 a deep and lasting kind, and that it remained in her heart 
 in the state of a blighted affection. This circumstance, 
 he says, Carlyle did not realize. Secondly, he intimates 
 that the marriage was brought to pass by the interference 
 of others, whose action at least hastened it; that Carlyle 
 exhibited a selfish temper in the preliminary arrange- 
 ments for a home, and showed himself in other ways some- 
 thing less than a man of sense and breeding. Professor 
 Norton controverts Froude on all these points, which he 
 treats of in his appendix. The evidence, so far as it is 
 contained in the Carlyle love-letters, is not before the 
 public; but Professor Norton, while withholding it, 
 
CARLYLE AND HIS FRIENDS 183 
 
 clearly states that in his opinion this correspondence 
 affords a view of Carlyle's and Jane Welsh's characters 
 and mutual relations "different both in particulars and 
 general effect from that given by Mr. Froude." So far 
 as Irving is involved, Carlyle, while mentioning him with 
 friendliness, has a clear eye for his foolishness, as he 
 thinks it; and Miss Welsh, Professor Norton says, came 
 to see "his essential weakness — his vanity, his mawkish 
 sentimentality, his self-deception, his extravagance verg- 
 ing to cant in matters of religion." This seems to put 
 an end to any notion that in her wedded life she compared 
 her lot with Carlyle to "what might have been." 
 
 The letters in the second portion of Professor Norton's 
 collection are in nearly all cases written to members of his 
 family, and portions of a few of them were included, with 
 many errors, in Froude's "Life." They afford a complete 
 view of Carlyle's interests, labors, and temperament at an 
 important and trying period of his life, and amply justify 
 the hopes that such an epistolary autobiography would 
 give not only a much needed correction of the false im- 
 pressions made by Froude's method of dealing with his 
 materials, but an entertaining and useful story of Carlyle's 
 growth and nature. The most striking general feature of 
 the letters is their simple and almost humble tone. 
 Froude, by selecting for publication the most highly 
 colored passages, and especially those most affected by 
 emotion, melancholy, or picturesqueness of style, made 
 his narrative altogether too high-strung. The larger mass 
 of ordinary letters is needed to give proper relief to such 
 moments of feeling. Carlyle's relations with his family 
 — and these were the most vital and intimate of his life- 
 relations — were natural and healthy; and they were in 
 the highest degree honorable to him. One would look in 
 
X 8 4 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 vain for a better example of filial or brotherly affection 
 constantly alive, conscientious, and helpful. He was 
 interested in the doings and fortunes of all, not in a gen- 
 erally sympathetic, but a specific and practical way, and 
 he knew no difference between the "Doctor" at Rome and 
 Naples and poor "Alick" struggling on his farm, under the 
 hopeless conditions and hard surroundings of Scottish 
 agriculture. He was always anxious to give and receive 
 merely personal news, shared in their ventures and trials, 
 and was ready with advice and encouragement. 
 
 The more interesting part is naturally the expression 
 of the attachment between himself and his aged and 
 pious mother, as it also exhibits character in a very 
 pure form. Carlyle's mother, indeed, with her worry- 
 ings over the children and her trust in God, her learning 
 to write from him and her painful exercise of the pen, 
 her reading of his books and articles, her limited ex- 
 perience beyond the Ecclefechan horizon, and her look- 
 ing forward to the annual meeting with her son, is the 
 most prominent character in the correspondence; and 
 whenever he writes to her, the page is brighter for the 
 beauty and tenderness of the relationship. To have 
 brought out fully the fact of this tie, which was so large 
 an element in Carlyle's human life, is sufficient reward; 
 but when to this is added the spirit of the whole united 
 family, struggling to live independently and worthily, and 
 to better themselves and each other according to their 
 opportunities, a great deal has been added to our knowl- 
 edge of the good in Carlyle's days. 
 
 Next to this undiminished and simple family affection 
 and helpfulness in Carlyle, one notes particularly his 
 kindness to those whom he could in any useful way 
 assist. He was hospitable really to any sincere and 
 
CARLYLE AND HIS FRIENDS 185 
 
 honest young man, and did not limit his interest to liter- 
 ary youths. He was willing to do a good turn by the 
 way to very humble and ordinary folk. The capital 
 instance of his kindness, however, in these letters, is his 
 attention to poor Glen, a disciple of his whose mind 
 failed. He read Homer with him — much to his own 
 pleasure, it is true, but that does not lessen the virtue 
 of the act, and he was attentive, so far as was in his 
 power, to his comfort and bettering. To Irving, too, 
 his spirit is admirable in patience and love. The victim 
 of what Carlyle most abhorred, he nevertheless was not 
 suffered to become alienated from his heart, and Carlyle's 
 pictures of the wretched condition of his friend are 
 more full of sorrow than of the contempt he must have 
 felt for the results of such a life as Irving came to lead. 
 Towards Jeffrey, also, though one perceives the gradually 
 widening rift between the two, Carlyle maintained as 
 appreciative and grateful an attitude as was to be ex- 
 pected. Jeffrey himself nowhere in our accounts of him 
 stands forth so amiably and acceptably as here. He 
 was kind and helpful, according to his lights, when 
 Carlyle needed friends, and will be so most pleasantly 
 remembered. Mill's friendship and considerate services 
 also are truly rendered, and, on the whole, one gets the 
 impression that he was a truer and more interested 
 friend than the correspondence properly shows. These 
 are the principal human elements in the letters, outside 
 of the family concerns, and they give an impression of 
 general kindliness and good-will in the air — the very 
 thing which Froude most left out. 
 
 Carlyle himself is egoistical as always; absorbed in 
 himself, in his genius and its expression so much as 
 to lend disproportion to the world of men outside him, 
 
186 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 which he always beheld with a queer distortion. The 
 keenness of his physical eye seems to have partly blinded 
 him to moral and intellectual character less immediately 
 and continually shown, and his proneness to a deprecia- 
 tory judgment disturbed his little faculty of toleration. 
 His mood was that of the prophet, and he carried it 
 to the dinner-table, where it does not belong. The diffi- 
 culty he found in obtaining expression for his genius 
 doubtless contributed to this oblique view of ordinary 
 human life. The necessity he seems under of talking to 
 himself, as a driver does to his horse, to keep his courage 
 up, is as obvious in all these letters as in any others. 
 He preached to his own soul as pertinaciously as to the 
 world, and in the same words. This strain, this un- 
 ceasing reminder to himself to fear God and respect not 
 men's judgments or ways, keeps on independent of his 
 progress. He gradually left behind the schemes of tak- 
 ing professorships and lecturing, he burned his failures 
 in literature, and came to a sure conviction as to his place 
 and work, and the fate he was subject to of staying put 
 but without finding it easier to do so without self- 
 declamation. 
 
 It is hardly fanciful to say that these apostrophes to 
 himself and "lashings" of moral feeling were to him 
 what, in another age and with other modes of the same 
 faith, prayer and "wrestlings" would have been. They 
 were his spiritual resource and the language of them. 
 But in a certain way the constant repetition of these 
 phrases and the fluency of these "communings" serve 
 an end. It was one result of the publication of his 
 opinions upon men and of his family history to turn 
 attention from his works to his life; and it is well to 
 find that the principles he preached were those he lived 
 
 : 
 
CARLYLE AND HIS FRIENDS 187 
 
 by, that they were self-derived, genuine and native to 
 his own struggles, and to observe in what way they oper- 
 ated in himself from day to day and year to year. The 
 sight of struggle in its real forms, of tragedy unsoftened 
 and unilluminated by the poetic spirit, is never pleasant; 
 hard features are as disagreeable in a life as in a face, 
 and in Carlyle's biography this element is trying always. 
 But, although in these letters all this must enter, being 
 a part of the truth, yet the value of Professor Norton's 
 work, which is that of a just friend as well as of a 
 laborious editor, is that it lowers the relief of these hard 
 lines, and shows more fully the kindliness, the fidelity, 
 and the true-heartedness of Carlyle, in which his man- 
 hood lay quite as much as in his self-rallying courage, 
 his indignation at feebleness and folly, and his unchar- 
 itableness when his affections were not concerned. These 
 volumes show his private life with those nearest and 
 dearest to him, apart from his genius, and in this way 
 ■ — which is the way of truth — serve his memory as 
 his friends would wish. 
 

EDWARD FITZGERALD 
 
 Edward Fitzgerald, without being essential to the 
 literary history of his time, has made to it the very real 
 contribution of a pleasant memory. If these letters had 
 unfortunately perished, his name would have allured the 
 imagination of lovers of literature eager to know more 
 of this shy, eccentric, modest man, the writer in his youth 
 of a poem that Lamb envied him, and in age of a trans- 
 lation that added almost an original classic to English, 
 the life-long friend of Tennyson, Thackeray, and Sped- 
 ding. The publication of his correspondence, however, 
 has dispelled the mystery and disclosed the man in his 
 tastes, friendships, peculiarities — the whole range of his 
 "innocent jar-niente life" as it seemed to Carlyle. One 
 recurs after reading these pages to Tennyson's dedica- 
 tory poem addressed to Fitzgerald — perhaps the poet's 
 most masterly piece of light verse — only to be surprised 
 at the truth of the characterization there given. There 
 is nothing in these letters so fine as the picture in those 
 opening stanzas of "Old Fitz" in his "suburb-grange," 
 with the rosy-footed doves flying about and perching 
 upon him; but there are many touches that bring his 
 temperament and life before us with a similar vividness 
 and felicity. And the rest of Tennyson's poem — the 
 vegetarianism of his friend, "that large infidel, your 
 Omar," and even the discontent of Fitzgerald with the 
 work of the Laureate, after 1842, so deftly glanced at 
 in the last lines: 
 
 189, 
 
190 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 "When, in our younger London days, 
 You found some merit in my rhymes, 
 And I more pleasure in your praise" — 
 
 all this is amplified and illustrated, with much besides, 
 just as the leisurely reader of Tennyson might wish it. 
 The memoir has this poetical atmosphere; the life itself, 
 an English country life, reminds one of what Fitzgerald 
 writes of the County of Suffolk — "Now I say that all 
 this shows that we in this Suffolk are not so completely 
 given over to prose and turnips as some would have us. 
 I always said that, being near the sea, and being able to 
 catch a glimpse of it from the tops of hills and of houses, 
 redeemed Suffolk from dullness, and at all events that our 
 turnip fields, dull in themselves, were at least set all 
 round with an undeniably poetic element." 
 
 Tennyson does not touch at all upon Fitzgerald's 
 most marked trait. He was an Englishman of the closest 
 attachment to things English. He never went out of the 
 country but once, and then to the Netherlands, where 
 he had a miserable sojourn, and he was thankful beyond 
 most travelers when he got home again. He began life 
 with this strong prepossession in an acute form. It 
 breaks out early in life, when he excepts only Raphael 
 for admiration among foreign artists, and he sums up 
 the matter on the side of art at once — "To depict the 
 true old English gentleman is as great a work as to depict 
 a Saint John, and I think in my heart I would rather 
 have the former than the latter." The most complete 
 expression of his patriotic feeling is a real British burst, 
 as characteristic as American spread-eagleism: "Well, 
 say as you will, there is not and never was such a country 
 as old England — never were there such a Gentry as 
 the English. They will be the distinguishing Mark and 
 
EDWARD FITZGERALD 191 
 
 Glory of England in History, as the Arts were of Greece, 
 and War of Rome. I am sure no travel would carry me 
 to any land so beautiful as the good sense, justice, and 
 liberality of my good countrymen make this." He 
 even writes to Frederick Tennyson abroad that he hopes 
 the English travelers are "as proud and disagreeable as 
 ever." He naturally thought the country was going to 
 the dogs. He was not a Jingoist: he thinks, on the con- 
 trary, that the world may justly resent British inter- 
 ference "all over the Globe," and piously wishes that 
 England were a "little, peaceful, unambitious, trading 
 nation like — the Dutch!" Even his taste in music was 
 affected: "I grow every day more and more to love only 
 the old 'God Save the King' style." 
 
 The point must be insisted upon because this British 
 instinct lay at the roots of his content with a voluntarily 
 restricted life. He had, besides, a bent for eccentricity. 
 He early declares that he has made a discovery for him- 
 self and is going to be "a great bear." Used though 
 the phrase is with youthful exaggeration and humor, it 
 marks the turn of his nature, and in a sense he fulfilled 
 the prediction. Of his boyhood we learn nothing, as 
 he was well out of college when he began the congenial 
 habit of writing these friendly letters, which from the 
 first are remarkable for literary judgment and are warm 
 with true feeling. He was then, however, no more than 
 a reader of books and a collector of fine poems from the 
 best writers for his private Parnassus. One confidential 
 passage gives a strangely vivid sense of how the young 
 of each generation start together. He has been writing 
 of Tennyson, who had been visiting him and keeping 
 him laughing with his "droll" little humors and "grumpi- 
 nesses," and he goes on to say that he felt a "sense of 
 
192 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 depression at times from the overshadowing of a so much 
 more lofty intellect than my own; this (though it may 
 seem vain to say so) I never experienced before, though 
 I have often been with much greater intellects; but I 
 could not be mistaken in the universality of his mind; 
 and perhaps I have derived some benefit in the now 
 more distinct consciousness of my dwarfishness." He 
 was then twenty-six and Tennyson was his junior by a 
 year. Most of what is told of his younger days comes 
 in the way of reminiscence in after life. Among these 
 anecdotes one, drawn out by Spedding's death, is very 
 lifelike. He and Tennyson visited Spedding at his 
 father's house, and the elder Spedding is described as 
 not altogether pleased at the sight of his son consulting 
 with the poet over the "Morte d'Arthur," "Lord of Bur- 
 leigh," and other pieces then in MS. Unfortunately he 
 had known Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and other 
 "poets" without esteeming them, and as Fitzgerald 
 played chess with Mrs. Spedding, and the daffodils 
 danced outside the hall-door — "Well, Mr. F.," he 
 would say, "Mr. Tennyson reads and Jem criticises; is 
 that it?" But, notwithstanding the banter, he was kind 
 enough to his son's friends. Such little pictures are one 
 of the traits of the book. 
 
 It was not long before these friends submitted to the 
 common fate and were separated by the different tenor 
 of their lives. They met occasionally, but they did not 
 live together; Fitzgerald was the only one who liked to 
 send friendly letters, and so communication lessened to 
 one epistle a year, and died out altogether. He went 
 to live in the country, in a damp lodge outside his father's 
 park, and he always had such bachelor quarters. He was 
 intimate at first with old Bernard Barton, the Quaker 
 
EDWARD FITZGERALD 193 
 
 poet, whom, we believe, Lamb advised to throw himself 
 over a precipice rather than cultivate the muse; and 
 afterwards he liked to visit with the parson, a son of 
 the poet Crabbe. Fitzgerald is described then as being 
 a grave man, middle-aged at thirty-six, not seemingly 
 very happy, though amusing at times in conversation. 
 He rose early, read or wrote standing at a desk, had his 
 dinner of vegetables and pudding, walked with his Skye 
 terrier, and ended the evening with the Bartons or the 
 Crabbes, singing glees with the children at the latter 
 house and joining the parson over his cigar. He did not 
 visit with the neighboring gentry. He describes it all 
 himself: "A little Bedfordshire — a little Northampton 
 — a little more folding of the hands — the same faces — 
 the same fields — the same thoughts occurring at the 
 same turns of road — this is all I have to tell of; nothing 
 at all added — but the summer gone." As for "Alfred," 
 he adds, "hydropathy has done its worst; he writes the 
 names of his friends in water." 
 
 But this was not as empty a life as it seems; vegetarian 
 though he was, "none could say that Lenten fare made 
 Lenten thought." He had many interests of the culti- 
 vated man. He had been fond of the theater and con- 
 cert in London, and he was still devoted to music; he 
 was a buyer of pictures, and full of enthusiasm for those 
 he liked, and he cultivated the acquaintance of Lawrence. 
 The stream of some friendship never ceased to brighten 
 the ways he walked in; and in books and nature he had 
 as large a liberty as is often conferred on a man. The 
 touches of nature are not infrequent in these jottings 
 down of his moments, and they are often exquisite in 
 feeling: "I am going this evening to eat toasted cheese 
 with that celebrated poet, Bernard Barton. ... It 
 
194 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 blows a harrico, as Theodore Hook used to say, and will 
 rain before I get to Woodbridge. Those poor, mistaken 
 lilac-buds there out of the window! and an old robin, 
 ruffled up to his thickest, sitting mournfully under them, 
 quite disheartened!" Or again, in London, he writes: 
 "I feel pleasure in dipping down into the country and 
 rubbing my hand over the cool dew of the pastures, as 
 it were." But such tender directness of description or 
 felicity in phrase is a constant quantity, and belonged 
 so much to his mind that he could not help blabbing out 
 his delight. We quote a few more lines, less for the pic- 
 ture than the style; he had put away all books except 
 Omar, but this, he says, "I could not help looking over 
 in a paddock covered with buttercups and brushed by a 
 delicious breeze, while a dainty racing filly of W. Browne's 
 came startling up to wonder and snuff about me." For 
 feeling like this expressed so well, one goes back far in 
 literary taste, and in such passages we recognize the Eng- 
 lish that Tennyson praised so highly in speaking of 
 the boat-race in "Euphranor"; it is — what so little de- 
 scription of nature now is — free from self-consciousness, 
 and not by design, but by the character of the writer. 
 
 One is prepared to hear that Fitzgerald's tastes were 
 not those of his generation in the case of many of the 
 more notable authors. The most striking instance is 
 that of Tennyson. He did not like "The Princess," nor 
 "In Memoriam," nor the "Idyls," nor the dramas; he 
 wished that there had been nothing after the 1842 volume, 
 or he seems to fancy that he wished it; the poems after 
 that date were below their author's destiny — that is 
 apparently the feeling which underlies his judgment. 
 But he expressed himself with great freedom : " 'In 
 Memoriam,' " he says, "has the air of being evolved by 
 
EDWARD FITZGERALD 195 
 
 a Poetical Machine of the highest order; ... the Im- 
 petus, the Lyrical oestrus, is gone." He asks what it 
 can do except make all of us "sentimental." His last 
 word almost is that Tennyson's genius has been injured 
 by over-elaboration. It made no difference to him that 
 other friends told him that this was perverseness, and that 
 no one agreed with him. One part of the secret has 
 just been hinted at: he worshiped — it is hardly too 
 strong a word — Tennyson's power; he thought it was 
 wasted on inadequate objects. This is the one human 
 enthusiasm of the book. If he reads of Thucydides at 
 Amphipolis, it is to burst out with, "Fancy old Hallam 
 sticking to his gun at a Martello Tower This was the 
 way to write well; and the way to make literature re- 
 spectable. Oh, Alfred Tennyson, could you but have 
 the luck to be put to such employment No man would 
 do it better; a more heroic figure to head the defenders 
 of his country could not be." He wishes for Tennyson's 
 voice to awake "Marathonian men" instead of "mum- 
 bling" over "The Princess" and "In Memoriam." He 
 longs "to take twenty years off Alfred's shoulders, 
 and set him up in his youthful glory. . . . He is the 
 same magnanimous, kindly, delightful fellow as ever, 
 uttering by far the finest prose sayings of any one." 
 There is no cooling of loyalty, one perceives, only the 
 feeling that the performance is less than it should have 
 been, the man more than his work. 
 
 This, no doubt, counts in analyzing the unfavorable 
 criticism of Fitzgerald; but it was also the fact (and 
 here lies the other half of the secret), that Fitzgerald's 
 literary taste was distinctly old-fashioned — not modern, 
 not contemporary at all, but in a strict sense was classi- 
 cal, and proceeded upon the universal canon of literature. 
 
196 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 It is not meant, of course, that he was confined to Latin 
 and Greek standards as expressed in ancient literature, 
 but to the universal standard common to all great litera- 
 ture. Tennyson met his simple and pure taste and his 
 unromantic (but not unpoetic) nature, in much; but in 
 his later and pronounced manner he offended Fitzgerald's 
 taste, both in matter and style. Other poets yet more 
 strictly bound to their times and themselves than Tenny- 
 son naturally meet with no mercy at Fitzgerald's bar. 
 He swept them — left nameless in these letters — to 
 the namelessness that these blanks foretell, with as abso- 
 lute a fiat as Carlyle ever used in similar cases. There 
 is, too, one is compelled to think, something of truth in 
 his friend's frank statement that he was "perverse." He 
 set up for a man of taste — it was the only claim he put 
 forward. He was not a genius, but he had taste, which, 
 according to his aphorism, is the feminine of genius, and, 
 being thus in his own eyes a critic by self-calling, he was, 
 as Tennyson objects in his poem, "overnice." He was 
 too much affected by the hair's-breadth lack of per- 
 fection in comparison with what was done. This is 
 somewhat overstated, but it expresses well enough the 
 element of error. After all, the main point is that mod- 
 ern poetry did not appeal to him. 
 
 This case of Tennyson is dwelt upon because it is 
 illustrative of the unfavorable criticism to be found here 
 and of its sources. It is criticism that well deserves 
 to be understood and to be laid to heart, for it will help 
 any one of real perception to a simpler and purer taste 
 in poetry. The criticism which is favorable, however, 
 far outweighs the fault-finding. Fitzgerald liked to write 
 about what he enjoyed, and he enjoyed the best. The 
 classics he read all his life with evident zest, and was 
 
EDWARD FITZGERALD 197 
 
 so seized by ^Eschylus and Sophocles that he could only 
 free himself by translating them. He fell into a study 
 of Spanish which resulted also in translation from Cal- 
 deron, of course in his peculiar style of rendering; and 
 then he began with Persian, out of which he gave us the 
 "Omer" and other pieces of interest. This was a considera- 
 ble amount of work, and, in connection with the editing 
 of Crabbe and the delightful dialogue of "Euphranor," 
 not to speak of minor matters, they show he was far from 
 being an idler in his leisure. His readings in English 
 were constant, also ; and his taste was that which requires 
 for itself "the best books." He found the tradition of 
 the past as to the value of these great works in harmony 
 with his own judgment; and at the end of his life he was 
 more and more deeply sworn to Cervantes and Sir Walter 
 Scott, Shakespeare, Boccaccio, and in general those au- 
 thors who have best drawn human life with laughter 
 as well as tears. It is interesting, finally, to note in a 
 man so attached to the great works of literature that, 
 though the friend of Thackeray, he was also delighted 
 with Dickens and with other prose-writers of his own 
 time; but in poetry he admitted only Tennyson and his 
 two brothers, Frederick and Charles. 
 
 Nothing can be said of the interesting episode of his 
 exploration of Naseby field (where he found a skull with 
 a bit of the iron heel of the conqueror in it), with its 
 sequel in Carlyle's friendly regard, which remained un- 
 broken to the end. The veering of his judgment in re- 
 spect to Carlyle is also noticeable, for at first he had 
 no good words for him. Something, too, should be said 
 of his less-known friends, and especially of the captain 
 of his lugger, whom he generously assisted, and whom he 
 thought so much of as to get Lawrence to do his head — 
 
198 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 "with that complexion which Montaigne calls f vif, male 
 et flamboyant,' blue eyes and strictly auburn hair, . . . 
 head of the large type, ... a Gentleman of Nature's 
 grandest Type, . . . made in the mold of what a Hu- 
 manity should be, Body and Soul, a poor Fisherman. 
 . . . This is altogether the Greatest Man I have 
 known." Such are some of the phrases which he showered 
 upon his Viking. There are traces, too, of a sympathy 
 with the poor in their work and their suffering, and 
 of a true sense of humble life. He was much touched by 
 reality wherever he came near it. His letters are just and 
 beautiful in expression when he mentions any matter of 
 real sorrow, any bereavement or misfortune. His heart 
 remained tender, and he was loyal to his friends. When 
 Spedding died, they had been separated twenty years, and 
 the genuineness of his feeling of loss which comes to the 
 surface in two or three letters, is a remarkable illustration 
 of the vitality of silent affection. When Tennyson came 
 to see him after an equal interval of time, it was as if 
 time had not been. His isolation from these old friends 
 is somewhat pathetic, but he was without reproach, since 
 the neglect to write was on their part. Tennyson never 
 would write letters, and Spedding was a positive man 
 given to a utilitarian rule of life, who would only write 
 when there was some definite question to be answered. 
 
 Notwithstanding this, Fitzgerald had friends who came 
 as others went, as is the way of the world, and they were 
 always scholars and gentlemen, the best of their kind. 
 Naturally, however, the tribute which will be most ob- 
 served in his memory is that of the famous literary men 
 who found him companionable in early and middle life. 
 Tennyson wrote of him: "I had no truer friend; he was 
 one of the kindliest of men, and I have never known one 
 
EDWARD FITZGERALD 199 
 
 of so fine and delicate a wit." Thackeray, being asked 
 not long before he died which of his old friends he loved 
 most, told his daughter: "Why, dear old Fitz, to be sure"; 
 and there is among these letters one from Thackeray 
 asking Fitzgerald to attend to his literary affairs if he 
 should meet with accident in America, which would be 
 a treasure coming from any man. Of the wit which 
 Tennyson mentions there is little in the correspondence, 
 but the character which won and merited the regard and 
 affection of friends shines upon every page. The 
 modesty with which he withdrew his name from the 
 public eye was probably a congenital trait, and it affected 
 his whole way of life. He grew more unwilling even to 
 go to London, finding only cleverness there, and the 
 theater or opera was less able to attract him as years 
 went on. The exhibitions, in which at one time he took 
 great interest, became a bore. Reynolds, Constable, and 
 Gainsborough are the leading topics in art, and in music 
 Handel seems to have been most congenial, though he 
 writes of the others with just judgment. His life, taken 
 altogether, was a gratification of refined tastes and a 
 simple exercise of unpretending virtues among his friends 
 and acquaintances. 
 
 Original genius he did not possess, but his apprecia- 
 tiveness of excellence was sound and true; whenever he 
 praises, one is compelled to assent. He spent the most 
 of his energy in endeavoring to render foreign classics 
 into English in such a way as to make them effective to 
 modern taste. He did not write for those who could read 
 the originals. He professed only to make adaptations 
 rather than translations, and he cut and modified with 
 a free hand. Scholars have praised his work for what 
 it strove to accomplish, accepting the limitations which 
 
200 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 his taste imposed upon it. Taste, however developed 
 and refined, is still not genius, and it must be frankly 
 acknowledged that he has not given us just what Cal- 
 deron, iEschylus, and Sophocles created. His Persian 
 translations vary even more widely from the originals. 
 "Omar Khayyam" is a celebrated work in his version, 
 but it is largely his own work, and it may be hoped that 
 the other translations will become better known, for, 
 without having the commanding qualities of Omar, they 
 are studded with charming stories in verse, and not 
 encumbered with Eastern moods of thought so much as 
 to disturb a Western mind. The two poetical speeches 
 of the English and Roman generals with their fine move- 
 ment, are also a kind of translation — from prose to 
 verse, though nearer to original composition. The dia- 
 logue of 'Euphranor' is the most considerable work of 
 his own hand, and reaches what seems to be his ideal of 
 writing — fine feeling in fine English. His name, how- 
 ever, is linked indissolubly with literature, in all prob- 
 ability, only in one work, the "Omar"; his memory will 
 always be associated with the Tennyson group; besides, 
 and by virtue of it, he will long be remembered by those 
 who prize simplicity, refinement, and moral worth above 
 the more vulgar quality of distinction. 
 
HAWTHORNE 
 
 This story of Hawthorne's home-life, his relations to 
 mother, sister, wife, and child, varies and deepens our 
 impression of his personality, while it does nothing to 
 disturb the tradition of his solitary genius. That he 
 was born among peculiar people, and bred under an 
 eminently unsocial domestic regime, is well known; but 
 in this his circumstances were not so exceptional as might 
 be thought. Madam Hawthorne, self-immured in her 
 mysterious chamber, like the Aunt Mary whom Emerson 
 describes in one of his posthumous papers, was not merely 
 idiosyncratic: she was a legacy from the New England 
 past, and in her own day and generation was not out of 
 place ; and her son, at a time when children were believed 
 to be as happy as was proper without aid from their 
 elders, and no thought was had of making companions 
 of growing lads, was left to himself and his playmates 
 much as other boys were. The family, it is true, seem 
 to have reached the highest point of uncommunicative- 
 ness consistent with dwelling under the same roof; and, 
 especially after Hawthorne's return from college, where 
 he had proved a companionable fellow enough in his 
 own set, this hermit-life within doors must have been 
 powerful to confirm the hereditary taint of solitariness 
 in him, derived from his Puritan and sea-going ances- 
 tors. Thrown back on the resources of his own spirit, 
 he let solitude have its way with him, and thus he be- 
 
202 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 came well acquainted with the gray rocks of the Marble- 
 head promontory and the lovely reaches of the wooded 
 Beverly shore, and, by the help of their silence, he made 
 imagination the habit of his mind. 
 
 Meanwhile, in another New England household, also 
 with a touch of peculiarity, was growing the woman who 
 was to take Hawthorne out of this homelessness and 
 found a family hearth of a very different character from 
 that he had known. This woman was Sophia Peabody, 
 a sister of Elizabeth P. Peabody; and the touch of 
 peculiarity that has been alluded to showed itself mainly 
 in connection with transcendentalism — a species of in- 
 tellectual measles which was then very contagious among 
 the feminine minds of the neighborhood. Sophia's 
 mother was a woman of great good sense, and her father 
 a kindly and helpful man, both of them excellent parents 
 of the softer New England type. She herself was an 
 invalid, subject to an "acute nervous headache which 
 lasted uninterruptedly from her twelfth to her thirty- 
 first year." She was an amateur in painting, more- 
 over, and she wrote a journal, and she read books: "I 
 read Degerando, Fenelon, St. Luke and Isaiah, Young, 
 the 'Spectator,' and Shakespeare's 'Comedy of Errors,' 
 'Taming of the Shrew,' 'All's Well that Ends Well,' and 
 'Love's Labor's Lost,' besides doing some sewing to-day." 
 This, in the case of a girl of nineteen, who is said never 
 to have been without pain for an hour, was a good stint. 
 She was not without enjoyment, too, in an epistolary 
 way: "I have written a long letter to Miss Loring this 
 evening," she says at the same time, "with the moon all 
 the while in my face. This is revelry!" As an example 
 of "the growth and advancement of her mind" during the 
 next eight years, her son prints further extracts from her 
 
HAWTHORNE 203 
 
 confidential papers, of which these two, written when 
 Hawthorne was falling in love with her, will suffice : 
 
 "Last night I was left in darkness — soft, grateful dark- 
 ness — and my meditations turned upon my habit of viewing 
 things through the 'couleur de rose' medium, and I was ques- 
 tioning what the idea of it was — for since it was real there 
 must be some good explanation of it — when suddenly, like 
 a night-blooming cereus, my mind opened, and I read in 
 letters of paly golden-green words to this effect: The beautiful 
 and good and true are the only real and abiding things — the 
 only proper use of the soul and nature. Evil and ugliness and 
 falsehood are abuses, monstrous and transient." 
 
 "I have read Carlyle's 'Miscellanies' with deep delight. The 
 complete manner in which he presents a man is wonderful. 
 He is the most impartial of critics, I think, except Mr. Emer- 
 son. Every subject interesting to the soul is touched in these 
 essays. Such a reach of thought produced no slight stir within 
 me. I am rejoiced that Carlyle is coming to America. But 
 I cannot help feeling that Emerson is diviner than he: Mr. 
 Emerson is Pure Tone." 
 
 While Sophia was engaged in such meditations, and 
 the romancer, having discovered his occupation, was at 
 hard labor handling coal and salt in the Boston Custom- 
 house, their fate found them out and they confessed 
 they had loved at first sight. It was impossible, how- 
 ever, that such an invalid as Sophia should be married, 
 and it was agreed that their union must wait the cessa- 
 tion of the headache that had lasted without intermit- 
 tance nearly a score of years. Love was good to his 
 new devotees, it scarcely need be said; the cure was soon 
 affected, and with the headache, apparently, disappeared 
 also that peculiar Bostonian malady already mentioned. 
 There is nothing more about "paly golden-green letters," 
 or Mr. Emerson in his incarnation as "Pure Tone." 
 
204 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 Sophia became a faithful wife and a kind mother, the 
 center of a very charming home. 
 
 It is the history of this home that Julian Hawthorne 
 has written. By the help of his father's very copious 
 notes of the sayings and doings and looks of the children 
 — Una, Julian, and Rose — and with his own recollec- 
 tions of boyhood to draw upon besides for the later 
 period, he has taken us into the intimacy of the house- 
 hold, and confided the charm and dignity and wisdom 
 of Hawthorne's fatherhood. And this he has done in 
 a narrative so instinct with tender respect and unques- 
 tioning love, so full of a frank, boyish spirit, of the loy- 
 alty that has never contemplated the King's doing wrong, 
 that the critic is constrained to take his point of view and 
 accept this biography, not as a critical and complete 
 life, but as a friendly confidence. It is, indeed, so far 
 as the children are concerned, a lovely story, whether the 
 thin tent of the family was pitched by the Concord 
 River, or the Salem wharves, or among the Berkshire 
 hills, or whatever the place of their sojourning — Liver- 
 pool, or Rome, or the Redcar Sands, or the Wayside, in 
 which the last days were spent. Some passages, of Haw- 
 thorne's own writing, are masterly. There could be 
 nothing more perfect, as mere literary description, than 
 the minute narration of the play of Una and Julian while 
 Madam Hawthorne lay dying; nothing more pathetic 
 than the scene where Hawthorne himself kneels by his 
 mother's dark bedside and takes her hand, and feels that 
 last dead strain of the cords of birth across all the strange- 
 ness of their divided lives, while the childish laugh and 
 prattle float up from the sunny yard below. And Julian, 
 in contributing to the account of his own boyhood, has 
 not injured its simplicity and health by the intrusion of 
 
HAWTHORNE 205 
 
 any after self-consciousness. From the moment that he 
 comes under cognizance as a lump of flesh to the last 
 fine scene, when he runs over from Harvard to ask a 
 favor and goes out with "light upon him from his father's 
 eyes," not knowing it was the last glimpse, he is merely 
 Hawthorne's boy who once wished that his father didn't 
 write books. But, naturally, all this is contained in an 
 account of small matters, little events, walks and swims, 
 and books by the fireside and fairy stories on the sands, 
 and not unfrequently the touch of nature is to be found 
 in a mass of irrelevant trivialities. 
 
 Yet this happy home of Hawthorne's maturity was 
 not more exceptional, for the time and social state in 
 which he found himself, than had been the case with 
 the lonely isolation of his boyhood, with which it stands 
 in such effective contrast. In each, although its pecu- 
 liar quality of reserve or freedom was accented, there 
 was only a divergence in degree from a New England 
 type. Madam Hawthorne, and all that her name stands 
 for in Hawthorne's life, belong to Puritanism; his own 
 home was in the highest sense humane; and in view of 
 this contrast it is easy to see why Julian, with his fresh 
 and exclusive remembrance of the sunshiny interior of 
 Hawthorne's latter years, should protest very loudly 
 against the not uncommon opinion that his father was 
 the victim of a certain morbidity. On the contrary, he 
 says, never was there such health, sanity, vigor — all 
 manly traits and qualities, capacities and energies. Cer- 
 tainly, by comparison with the life out of which 
 Hawthorne came, and perhaps even more clearly by 
 comparison with the Transcendentalists, the Brook-Farm 
 reformers, the prophets and prophetesses among whom he 
 was thrown, moral health and mental sanity and the 
 
2 o6 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 vigor of an incorruptible common-sense seem to be pe- 
 culiarly his possession — one is almost tempted to say, 
 his alone. When a man of his spiritual insight and sens- 
 ibility, so open to fine suggestions, so tenacious of im- 
 palpable meanings, could say of a friend like Emerson: 
 "Mr. Emerson is a great searcher for facts, but they seem 
 to melt away and become unsubstantial in his grasp," 
 the criticism goes far to reveal his own balance, the con- 
 tinence and repose of his own mind. He saw clearer and 
 deeper than the theorizers into the transcendent mystery 
 there is in the soul's life, not only because he had more 
 delicate impressions and simpler perceptions, but also 
 because his relation therewith was vital and not merely 
 intellectual, and, instead of being a subject of spasmodic 
 reflections, shared in the inflexible reality of direct moral 
 experience. He was not one of the Concord men, and 
 that fact by itself helps a good deal his son's claim that 
 he was not fairly open to any charge of crankiness. Yet 
 that there was some morbidity in his blood, a tendency 
 to certain subjects of investigation, a bent toward certain 
 moods of sentiment, a preoccupation of his mind with 
 death, evil, sin, and the fantasies of an overwrought 
 spiritual sensibility, can hardly be seriously questioned. 
 
 In the same way, Julian does not make out that his 
 father was essentially a social man. Even inside the 
 family circle, companionable as he was with his children, 
 it is to be remembered that they had scarcely reached 
 the period of full, separate consciousness in their lives 
 when he died. In his social relations with his friends 
 he was, it is true, acceptable, but it is here that the 
 biography is weakest; what is given is very meager and 
 commonplace, and there is an utter failure to show any 
 raison d'etre in these friendships — from what attrac- 
 
HAWTHORNE 207 
 
 tion they took their origin, or in what strength was their 
 bond, or in what charm they had their sweetness. In 
 his shyness with strangers there was something of pure 
 rusticity: one notices that he is always thinking what 
 he should say or what he might have replied, or by some 
 other remark shows that he is always conscious of an 
 effort in assuming the social relation with a stranger of 
 his own rank. Toward some who are associated with 
 his circle, it is plain he was far from being on open 
 terms. Ellery Channing, for example, to judge by the 
 letter of that poet's inditing, could not have been very 
 near to him, and Margaret Fuller must have been 
 grievously deceived by his silence. One would have 
 thought that the denunciation launched at Froude for 
 publishing Carlyle's "Reminiscences" with as little regard 
 to reputations as Carlyle himself had, might have de- 
 terred others from doing likewise; but now it seems 
 duobtful whether it may not be acknowledged as a lite- 
 rary canon that the laws of good breeding do not extend 
 beyond the grave, or, to put it in a still more compre- 
 hensive form, that no courtesy is to be expected of a 
 dead man. In this biography there are two character- 
 izations of the kind that are usually sealed up until the 
 year 1950. That of Tupper — the most comical and 
 diverting thing in the world — that of Margaret Fuller 
 (what is said of Count d'Ossoli is shamefully wrong), 
 show how Hawthorne's humor, secreted in his own breast, 
 helped to keep him free from the literary coteries, the 
 shams and intellectual afflictions of his community: 
 
 "It was such an awful joke, that she should have resolved — 
 in all sincerity, no doubt — to make herself the greatest, 
 wisest, best woman of the age. And to that end she set to 
 work on her strong, heavy, unpliable, and, in many respects, 
 
208 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 defective and evil nature, and adorned it with a mosaic of 
 admirable qualities, such as she chose to possess; putting in 
 here a splendid talent and there a moral excellence, and polish- 
 ing each separate piece, and the whole together, till it seemed 
 to shine afar and dazzling all who saw it. She took credit to 
 herself for having been her own Redeemer, if not her own 
 Creator; and, indeed, she was far more a work of art than 
 any of Mozier's statues. But she was not working in an 
 inanimate substance, like marble or clay; there was some- 
 thing within her that she could not possibly come at, to re- 
 create or refine it; and, by and by, this rude old potency 
 bestirred itself, and undid all her labor in the twinkling of an 
 eye. On the whole, I do not know but I like her the better 
 for it, because she proved herself a vety woman after all, 
 and fell as the weakest of her sisters might." 
 
 No, not with Margaret Fuller, nor Ellery Channing, 
 nor even with Emerson and the geniuses he was forever 
 picking up in the highway or the potato-field, any more 
 than with the politicians of the Custom-house, could 
 Hawthorne enter into absolutely free social relations. 
 One suspects that his college and his English friends were 
 more accessible to him, because they were wholly un- 
 related to that part of his nature which fed the flame of 
 his genius. That genius was solitary; and throughout 
 the long narrative of his cheerful and intimate life with 
 the children, one sees that he kept his privacy always, 
 and the witness of it is that path beneath the pines on 
 the brow of the hill, worn by his feet in his daily evening 
 walk by himself as he watched the sunset flush and fade 
 in the west. 
 
 This biography is like Mr. James's "Hawthorne" in 
 that it fails to give any history of that immortal part of 
 the man in which the world takes interest. Julian's 
 point of view is completely shown when he says of Haw- 
 
HAWTHORNE 209 
 
 thorne, "If he had never written a line, he would still have 
 possessed, as a human being, scarcely less interest and 
 importance than he does now"; and adds that his father's 
 books struck him, when he came to read them, "as being 
 but a somewhat imperfect reflection of certain regions 
 of his father's mind with which he had become other- 
 wise familiar." One is pleased, for the boy's sake, that 
 to him the genius was lost in the father, but to the world 
 it is just the contrary; and to many it may prove a 
 disappointment to find only a delightful father (not 
 wholly unique, be it added), where they had hoped for 
 some inner glimpses of a fine genius. Hawthorne, the 
 romancer, was as remote from his domestic life as from 
 the provincial civilization on which Mr. James dwelt. 
 Indeed, the latter's account of Hawthorne, not to speak 
 it profanely, seemed as if he had made a very careful 
 realistic study — a "portrait," he would probably have 
 called it — of a certain little Judean town we all know 
 of, and exclaimed, "Lo! how parochial Nazareth was!" 
 Mr. James might find much in these volumes to support 
 his thesis ; he might smile to read, for example, that Haw- 
 thorne owned no picture until he was in middle life, and 
 then, when Sophia painted him one or two, which he 
 thought very beautiful, he wrote that perhaps they had 
 better be put into mahogany frames to match the furni- 
 ture, probably (one half overhears Mr. Howells adding) 
 of the black hair-cloth variety. But Hawthorne's genius 
 was a thing apart from all that, just as it was apart 
 from his children's lives. It was of the imagination, 
 pure and simple, and had no root in culture whether 
 meager or rich; and except as his genius expressed itself 
 through art, it seems to have been as reticent as 
 Shakespeare's. 
 
2io LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 II 
 
 It may be true, as Mr. Conway remarks, that "there 
 are few authors with whom the world is more intimate 
 than the one supposed to have most shunned its inti- 
 macy." The confessions of the Note-books, the reve- 
 lations made by his son and his son-in-law, and the not 
 inconsiderable mass of reminiscences in other volumes, 
 may lead one to this broad statement; but on finishing 
 Mr. Conway's account one still finds Hawthorne's ac- 
 tual life remote, and is not a whit nearer to any knowl- 
 edge of that genius which, even in his solitary life, seemed 
 to make a new solitude of its own. 
 
 The story is in itself most depressing, mainly because 
 of the circumstances which it records. Hawthorne ap- 
 pears to have been sensible that his infelicity had its 
 beginnings in the period of his seclusion at Salem. It 
 does not seem that in boyhood or youth he was unsociable 
 or eccentric; the absence of companions, however, after 
 he left college, the increasing habit of a naturally brood- 
 ing genius, the sense that he was making no impression 
 on the world as year by year passed by, must have de- 
 veloped in him (perhaps without his taking notice of 
 it at once) the reticence and withdrawal into self which 
 were traits of his Puritan and sea-faring blood. Dr. 
 Loring's account of the neglect of him by Salem people 
 (for the city was a place of some intellectual culture) 
 is very much to the point. He was not known as an 
 author, and he was not of the sort that makes friends. 
 There was nothing extraordinary in his being "let alone." 
 The same thing would happen to-day in any community. 
 Hawthorne's isolation proceeded from himself. Nor 
 
HAWTHORNE 211 
 
 does it appear that his "shyness" was merely the attri- 
 bute of peculiar genius. Self-consciousness and pride, 
 as well as temperament, went to its making. How much 
 he prized success as a proof of manliness is clear from 
 that letter to Hillard in which he accepts his friend's 
 assistance, but calls it "bitter," and adds that "ill-success 
 in life is really and justly a matter of shame." The sense 
 of failure, as something by no means remotely possible 
 in his case, was as present to him as his shadow for years. 
 His withdrawal from literary men in particular is notice- 
 able. On the other hand, the ease with which he met 
 men of a rougher mold, the ordinary people of the com- 
 mon sort, and the pleasure he plainly took in the contact 
 with them, are not less significant. He had no need to 
 remember that he was "the obscurest literary man in 
 America" in the presence of men to whom all literary 
 men were perhaps equally obscure. He felt, doubtless, 
 also in their company that relief from the "bodiless crea- 
 tion" which occupied his mind when by himself; but the 
 point of interest is, that there was no "shyness" in his 
 intercourse with these companions. The lack of recog- 
 nition of his genius, and a manly spirit offended by its 
 lack of seeming efficiency, certainly aggravated unfortu- 
 nate tendencies in his disposition. 
 
 The extent to which society is responsible for its sins 
 of omission in the way of not at once knowing and en- 
 couraging its men of literary genius, is a question too 
 often discussed only from the point of view of the poor 
 author. There was a tendency to ascribe the difficulties 
 of our literary men in the past, to the lack of an 
 international copyright. Mr. Conway gives unlimited 
 influence to this fact in discussing the trials of Haw- 
 thorne. It may fairly be questioned, whether the un- 
 
212 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 known writer of short stories under various signatures, 
 in various periodicals, would have greatly benefited in 
 his early days by the best of copyright regulations 
 between England and America. As it was, he had 
 the kindest assistance in getting before the world, so 
 far as friends could give any. Horatio Bridge pri- 
 vately assumed the financial responsibility for his col- 
 lected volume of tales, and, so far as criticism could 
 be helpful, he had Longfellow and Hillard to plead his 
 cause with all the warmth of friendship, in addition to 
 the weight of their criticism. At a later time Fields was 
 the most stimulating and generous of publishers. Apart 
 from literature, also, Hawthorne's friends endeavored 
 repeatedly to obtain office for him, and succeeded in giv- 
 ing him custom-house appointments in Boston and 
 Salem; and when the latter was cancelled, they gave him 
 money in the most unassuming and considerate way. 
 Finally he received the Liverpool Consulate from his 
 friend President Pierce. 
 
 It is true that there is much meanness of a political 
 color in his holding of these offices, which were in them- 
 selves little fitted for him, and also that they killed litera- 
 ture in him while he held them. Mr. Conway thinks 
 there was something ignoble in the price paid for the 
 Consulate, namely, the campaign biography of Pierce, 
 and Hawthorne clearly thought it an unwelcome task; 
 but there is no inherent impropriety in a man of letters 
 writing a fitting life of his friend who happens to be a can- 
 didate for the Presidency. It may be presumed that if he 
 regards him sufficiently to own him as a friend, he can 
 find enough to praise without compromising his own 
 integrity; and if at the same time he serves a political 
 cause in which he believes, so much the more reason for 
 
HAWTHORNE 213 
 
 his doing his part as friend and citizen. It is unpleasing 
 to know that Hawthorne's opinions upon slavery were 
 wrong, but not to know that he expressed them; and 
 we cannot help thinking that it is the character of Pierce, 
 and not the act of Hawthorne, which makes this incident 
 so unpalatable to Mr. Conway. Had the story been 
 the life of Lincoln, feelings with regard to it would 
 probably be of a different sort. Hawthorne was reluc- 
 tant to write the book, and he was quite as reluctant, 
 no doubt, to apply for office, or for retention in office, 
 by the customary channels. His political servitude for 
 bread must have always been repugnant; but Govern- 
 ment did the best it could for him under the spoils sys- 
 tem, his friends were active and interested always, and 
 his publishers and editors seem to have paid him all just 
 dues. To complain that the nation did not provide 
 proper place or pension for Hawthorne, when it provides 
 them for no literary man, or that society did not buy 
 his books in sufficient quantities to support him before 
 he became famous, seems beside the point. Literature 
 is not with us a matter of national concern or of social 
 patronage; it stands on its own bottom, and, under 
 American ideas, is likely to do so. 
 
 The fact is, that the notion that the country suffers 
 some disgrace in consequence of the domestic hardships 
 and modest purse of Hawthorne and others in the pur- 
 suit of literature, is a relic of the paternal tradition of 
 aristocratic society, which made men of letters a favored 
 class, and gave them charity much in the same spirit 
 as those who would exempt soldiers from the civil-service 
 examinations. Hawthorne received the same treatment 
 as every other citizen. Mr. Conway's assumption, there- 
 fore, that the country was in some way responsible for 
 
2i4 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 Hawthorne's troubles, and should have "protected" him 
 from them, seems a fundamental error. He suffered 
 the not unusual consequences of choosing a precarious 
 and ill-paid career, the fruits of which are reaped rather 
 by posterity than by the author, but this latter fact is 
 one of the greatest inducements to it, under the form of 
 fame or of social service. Hawthorne suffered poverty, 
 but not injustice; he achieved a unique success, and 
 honor with it, at the end, and he receives from his country 
 all that he is entitled to — immortal memory. 
 
LONGFELLOW 
 
 The official biography of Longfellow is characterized 
 by its good manners. There is no line in it, any more 
 than in his poems, which the poet dying would wish to 
 blot, and this is double good fortune. Those who were 
 his acquaintances need not fear any disillusion as to 
 their place in his real esteem, and those who worshiped 
 him from afar will find no appreciable lessening of the 
 proper heroic distance between themselves and the object 
 of their devotion. At the end, it is as if one had grown 
 familiar with the study at Craigie House, had heard the 
 poet talk of his past and his books with a discreet sup- 
 pression of names not already public by virtue of their 
 owner's repute, and had listened to extracts from the 
 journals and correspondence, while all the time the doors 
 leading out of the library are kept closed. The editor 
 — and he is indeed only an editor — adopted that modern 
 substitute for autobiography which consists in a selection 
 and arrangement of papers written by the man himself 
 and connected by the slightest thread of narrative. He 
 says in his preface that this method is one by which 
 "the reader would best learn how a man of letters spends 
 his time and what occupies his thoughts." This plan 
 was rigidly adhered to, and consequently the work is 
 essentially Longfellow's diary, expanded and illustrated 
 in parts by letters, and exhibits to the public the sur- 
 face of events and thoughts in the life of a poet, in the 
 literary and social environment of Boston, who was one 
 
 211 
 
2i6 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 of the most cultivated members of the group that gave 
 distinction to the period. 
 
 The editor himself describes this life as that of a man 
 of letters; and whether or not he meant to distinguish 
 sharply between the phases of Longfellow's career as poet 
 and as scholar, the effect of the mode of biography chosen 
 is to present its subject as a scholar who wrote poetry 
 rather than as a poet primarily and always. In nearly 
 all accounts of men in whose lives the world takes inter- 
 est there are some salient points, some deeds or works or 
 incidents which have attracted attention to the individ- 
 ual ; but in telling the story in detail the biographer often 
 finds difficulty in managing those intervals in which his 
 hero's days did not differ from those of ordinary mortals. 
 It is in such portions that the much lamented "disillu- 
 sion" usually makes itself known. In Longfellow's case 
 the writing of a series of poems has drawn the curiosity 
 of men toward his personality, and if one would get at 
 the true record of his poetic life, that would be the 
 biography for which men would care most; but that is 
 a very secret matter, and hard both to discover and to 
 disclose. Moods visited him and he wrote; but between 
 these, and filling up the intervals of his poetic life, was 
 a life of letters, and it is this life of which his diary was 
 a transcript. This was easy both to record and to pub- 
 lish. Longfellow himself tells us what he thought of 
 its relative importance in his real history: "How brief 
 this chronicle is, even of my outward life. And of my 
 inner life, not a word. If one were only sure that one's 
 journal would never be seen by any one, and never get 
 into print, how different the case would be! But death 
 picks the locks of all portfolios and throws the contents 
 into the street for the public to scramble after." Waiv- 
 
LONGFELLOW 217 
 
 ing all question as to the degree of privacy to which a 
 poet's life is entitled, let us take it at once on this best 
 authority that the diary which is spread before us is 
 not the true record of a poet's soul, but the jottings of 
 what happened to him in the body, the cities he saw, the 
 men and women he met, the scenes of natural beauty and 
 childish festival he witnessed, the society he dined and 
 talked with, the books he read or wrote, and such of his 
 thoughts, sentiments, and moods as he was not unwilling 
 that the public should "scramble after." The letters, 
 both of his own inditing and from others, which supple- 
 ment the diary, will not affect the matter, since they 
 belong to the same outer region of life. 
 
 It has generally been believed that Longfellow's life 
 was, in its human relations and its social material sur- 
 roundings, very charming; in these volumes this opinion 
 is sustained by page after page of detail. Whether as 
 host or guest, as son, father, or citizen, as stranger or 
 as bosom friend, the element of urbanity pervaded his 
 character. One finds it only too easy to quote instances 
 in which his refined amiableness gave beauty to trivial 
 or even mean and intrinsically ugly incidents. This 
 social phase of the biography presents our cultivation in 
 the intercourse of life with the greatest perfectness which 
 it has yet found in any literary record ; the diary, in this 
 regard, becomes at once an indispensable part of the 
 memoirs of manners. So much is true of it in relation to 
 the entire coterie (and it was not a very small band) of 
 which Longfellow was one of the members; but beyond 
 this, some of the individuals whom he habitually men- 
 tions gain in agreeableness by what he has to say of them. 
 To take the most notable instance, it is certainly impos- 
 sible to lay down the volumes without a much pleasanter 
 
2i8 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 impression of Charles Sumner's nature than the public 
 has thus far entertained. Longfellow was not blind to 
 the grandiose quality in his friend, but he writes of him 
 so warmly, and displays his attachment in so many ways, 
 and insists so often upon the affectionate, humane, and 
 simple heart of his Herculean orator, that the statuesque 
 memory of the Senator loses something of the chill which 
 has belonged to it; and the glimpses one gets of Sumner 
 during his frequent visits to Craigie House display him 
 in an attractive guise. On the other hand, Sumner's 
 friendship seems to have reacted on Longfellow, to de- 
 velop in him an interest in politics and to quicken his 
 patriotism and enlarge his life with public sympathies. 
 The vigor and decision of Longfellow's remarks upon the 
 state of the country, the clear and certain tone whenever 
 that conflict of "the North wind against the Southern 
 pestilence" is spoken of, free him from the doubt which 
 has been sometimes indulged, that he secluded himself 
 from the great cause of his day more than befitted a com- 
 plete man. There is evidence enough in these pages to 
 show how intense and constant was his aversion to the 
 violence of politics, but in spite of that he entered into 
 the spirit of the time, and from an early period had his 
 heart in the right place. That this was in some degree 
 due to his intimacy with Sumner also seems plain; and 
 thus the withdrawal of the veil of privacy from their 
 friendship is a gain to the memory of both. 
 
 The social feature in Longfellow's life is, perhaps, 
 the leading trait of this work and its most immortal part; 
 its charm is to be felt, as the editor justly says, only by 
 the perusal of a mutitude of details as they follow day 
 by day in the record of the poet's own hand. Scarcely 
 second to this, however, is his friendship and association 
 
LONGFELLOW 219 
 
 with books. From early years his genius was fed from 
 this source; and the fortunate accident of time, which 
 made his graduation at Bowdoin College coincident with 
 a desire on the part of the trustees to found a chair of 
 modern languages, determined his fate as a poet who 
 should lean much on books. The travels and studies 
 which were undertaken to fit himself for the prospective 
 professorship may be said to have controlled his career. 
 He returned with an admirable literary culture, which 
 his later post at Harvard helped to perfect. His read- 
 ing from that time was in Continental rather than Eng- 
 lish literature, and his poetry showed its influence. It 
 is true that he derived many poetic impressions directly 
 through the eye in the course of his journeys abroad, 
 but for the most part he obtained them through the 
 foreign romantic poets and the primitive imagination of 
 the northern bards. Had he been in closer contact with 
 poetic motives in life itself, he might have been touched 
 with passion; but as he felt them at second-hand, as it 
 were, he could not lift his mood higher than the region 
 of sentiment in that considerable portion of his work 
 which deals with medievalism, or with the contemporary 
 picturesqueness which still survives in the ruins of the 
 Gothic past. In those parts of his poetry where the 
 literary influence is less obvious, it is no less potent. 
 He was a poet who was developed by books, and not by 
 experience; even when he draws from life itself, his 
 cunning is bookish. This is the impression already 
 given by his works, and his biography makes it deeper. 
 It is the "man of letters" whose history is given to us. 
 The poetic temperament, nevertheless, is very frequently 
 to be observed. The susceptibility of the organization 
 to slight changes in the surroundings; the restlessness, 
 

 220 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 the weariness, the fret of the spirit; the delight in receiv- 
 ing the impression, and the reluctance to work it over 
 into expression; the joy in the vision that comes at the 
 rare moment, and the shrinking from the labor of the 
 spell that bids it stay forever and be seen of all eyes — 
 these and the other common qualities of temperament 
 which are often as keen in those who have no faculty of 
 language, can be noticed throughout all his long life. 
 Longfellow's personality is revealed in these passages, but 
 this is merely the light and shadow of life's surface; the 
 poetic nature is deeper than that. Probably the point 
 of view under which he is viewed in his own diary is 
 the correct one, as it is the common one among critics. 
 His art, taste, and treatment present the qualities of 
 culture; and the poems of which the theme is immediately 
 from life about him are just those which cause him to 
 be called "the poet of the affections." Outside of home- 
 life, books were his inspiration; in other words, generally 
 he was sustained in the poetic mood by the beauty and 
 virtue of which he read. 
 
 Some light is thrown upon Longfellow's methods of 
 composition. He wrote with singular ease; indeed, we 
 recollect no poet of equal rank who is known to have been 
 blessed with like facility. The shorter poems and the 
 "psalms" came to him without effort, sometimes "by whole 
 stanzas and not by lines," as he says, and they required 
 little correction — usually, it seems, only the strengthen- 
 ing of a phrase, but no complete recasting. Similarly with 
 the long poems, when his subject was once settled on and 
 the work begun, he apparently ran on "trippingly," and 
 was satisfied with the corrected first draft. This shows 
 admirable mastery as well as speed, while it suggests that 
 the feelings of the poet were not excited to any great 
 
LONGFELLOW 221 
 
 energy. One notes, too, that his subjects for shorter 
 poems were frequently selected and the poems written 
 later; a practice which generally indicates the forcing 
 of a poet's talents. Another characteristic, which is rich 
 in suggestions to an analyzer of literary men, is the 
 habit he exhibits of setting down in his diary striking 
 figures of rhetoric heard in sermons or elsewhere, not 
 for the sake of the thought, but of the form. Sometimes 
 one comes upon a landscape sketched in a few exquisite 
 lines, but such entries do not seem to be notes for 
 future work. On the whole, the young poet will not 
 learn much about the craft from these volumes; so far 
 as anything can be inferred from such slight material, 
 equability marked his poetic life as invariably as it did 
 his social intercourse. 
 
 Thus this biography in nowise contradicts or modifies 
 the popular estimate which was long ago arrived at in 
 respect to the poet. It merely sustains and amplifies 
 the opinion that has been so often expressed. One is 
 not surprised by the gift of the intimate and un- 
 guessed record of a noble soul — one of those memories 
 which are shrines of the ideal life; but one reads what 
 was to be expected, a full and delightful history of the 
 external aspects of a lettered life in a refined society, 
 as it was led by a man who fulfilled his duties in the varied 
 relations of his sphere in a way that made his days 
 beautiful and his memory a humanizing influence upon 
 all who have any perception of the sources of its charm. 
 Our polite literature gains greatly by this. Nevertheless 
 these volumes are neither a complete account nor a 
 thorough study of Longfellow's life. They occupy in 
 his works a similar place to Hawthorne's note-books. 
 Autobiography is of necessity an imperfect view of its 
 
222 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 writer's individuality; it is usually invaluable, it is often 
 agreeable, but it is always insufficient. Other memoirs 
 must supplement this by showing how he seemed to the 
 eyes of others, and the scholar who seeks the genesis of his 
 poems must establish the logical connection between the 
 life and the works. Of his personality we are not likely 
 to know more — one suspects there was really little more 
 to know. 
 
 A supplementary volume is principally devoted to 
 further illustration of the last fifteen years of the poet's 
 career, when he was enjoying the fruits of his fame in 
 the formal respect of whatever persons of distinction 
 visited our shores, and in the common appreciation of 
 his countrymen, whose expressions of esteem were some- 
 times more awkward and tedious, but not of less worth. 
 
 Here the poet is seen almost entirely in his mature 
 manhood, or perhaps one may fairly say in his old age, 
 since his principal original works were all completed 
 before the period of the last fifteen years set in. The 
 scene practically does not change, the habits of life are 
 fixed, the character of the whole has complete harmony. 
 This limitation of the view gives a unity of impression 
 rarely to be derived from the entire story of an active 
 life, and the time, fortunately, is that when Longfellow 
 was most attractive. He was most dear to his country 
 as an old man, and that is the character in which he is 
 presented. His qualities, too, as a man were those which 
 age most improves — his universal kindness, his dignity 
 of breeding, his reposeful nature, could have full effect 
 only with ripe years; and one so given to permanent 
 friendships as he was, could not fail to grow happier in 
 their exercise, and more noble through them in propor- 
 tion as they lasted out time and tide. The story of Long- 
 
LONGFELLOW 223 
 
 fellow's care for his friend Greene is, in these new 
 illustrations of it, one of the delightful episodes of lite- 
 rary biography. 
 
 In the way of literature, Longfellow was employed in 
 these years upon the drama, and the simplicity of his re- 
 marks upon it are instructive, though they provoke a 
 smile. He was not efficient as a dramatist, and perhaps 
 no competent critic would claim for him dramatic 
 genius. He illustrates how far drama has drifted from 
 literature. Evidently he had not thought much upon 
 the general subject, and was but little skilled in knowl- 
 edge of its conditions or in criticism of its aims, methods, 
 or effects. One finds him saying, after reading Victor 
 Hugo: "Perhaps exaggeration is necessary for the stage; 
 I am inclined to think it is. A play, like a bust or statue 
 destined for a large room, must be a little larger than 
 life." He speaks of Fechter's Hamlet thus: "It is 
 pleasant to see anything so like nature on the stage; 
 not the everlasting mouthing and ranting." He con- 
 templated having the "New England Tragedies" acted, 
 and wrote to Fields: "As to anybody's 'adapting' these 
 Tragedies for the stage, I do not like the idea of it at all. 
 Prevent this, if possible. I should, however, like to 
 have the opinion of some good actor — not a sensational 
 actor — on the point. I should like to have Booth look 
 at them." He actually consulted Bandmann with re- 
 gard to the matter, and sets down the answer: "Band- 
 mann writes me a nice letter about the Tragedies, but 
 says they are not adapted for the stage." That Long- 
 fellow should have dreamed of having them acted, shows 
 how far out of his element he was in composing them. 
 The drama was to him a book, not an art. 
 
 Elsewhere he makes some admirable remarks that 
 
224 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 spring out of his practice of the art, always wise and 
 sometimes profound, as is this: "It is a great mystery 
 to many people that an author should reveal to the public 
 secrets that he shrinks from telling to his most intimate 
 friends." The profound thing in this, if any one should 
 not at once understand our application of the word, is 
 that he does not stop to explain the "great mystery"; 
 to him it is simple enough. But one does not often meet 
 with the humor shown in another sentence, in a letter 
 to Greene: "You cannot improve a sonnet by making 
 it more than fourteen lines long." It is strange that, 
 with such playfulness as he exhibits here and there, and 
 seems to have indulged in more easily in conversation, 
 so little expression of it is to be found in his works. 
 For this quality one must go to these volumes, though 
 there are scenes in 'The Golden Legend' in which it 
 has colored the language and occasionally touched a 
 character. The absence of the classical influences in 
 his career is noticeable. He finds in the Greek anthology 
 only "dead garlands." Of self-criticism there is little. 
 He remarks how much learning Sumner brought back 
 from Italy, where he himself had gained only impres- 
 sions; and the joy of the sentimentalist in remaining 
 unconvinced is happily expressed when he says, "I let 
 the waves of argument roll on; but all the lilies rise again, 
 and are beautiful as before." The poet writing in prose 
 is often to be observed in similar figures and sentiments, 
 and once or twice there is a brief letter — the one of 
 
 consolation "To ," for example — which is "an 
 
 entire and perfect chrysolite." 
 
 There are others besides Longfellow in these pages. 
 As we have remarked before, his life is a memorial of 
 a distinguished circle as well as of a man. This impres- 
 
LONGFELLOW 225 
 
 sion is the stronger because the view of his domestic life 
 has been practically suppressed, and he has been shown 
 only in his relations with his books and his friends. For- 
 tune favored him in both. Sumner, as before, gains 
 by all that is told of him or by him. One is tempted to 
 think that only Longfellow knew him as a man. The 
 letters of "Tom Appleton" afford much that is delectable. 
 The description of Mrs. Browning, in 1856, as "a little 
 concentrated nightingale living in a bower of curls," has 
 the old touch; but best of all is his quoting "an expres- 
 sion of Mr. T. Lyman to me years ago: 'The bother of 
 the Yankee,' said he, 'is that he rubs badly at the junc- 
 tion of soul and body' — as true a thing as ever was 
 said, and he not much of a sayer of such things." 
 

MOTLEY'S CORRESPONDENCE 
 
 The correspondence of an illustrious man, printed 
 often more because of his reputation won in some one 
 field than for the interest of the letters in themselves, 
 is an unfair test of his intellectual or social attractive- 
 ness; and in the case of an historian in whose work the 
 telling mental qualities are largely different from those 
 which give vivacity and brilliancy to impromptu letters, 
 this test works with special incompleteness. Motley 
 certainly, in addressing his wife, children, and a few 
 intimate friends, did not write for immortality. He had 
 not the point in style, the variety in interests, the copious- 
 ness of opinions which give charm and body to a collec- 
 tion of personal letters; and, although he mingled in the 
 society of famous men and fine women, and was near to 
 great events, he had not that quickness of eye and 
 literary power of brief description which could have 
 painted the historical scene before him in a picturesque 
 and enlivening manner. His methods of conceiving his- 
 tory were alien to such a task; he required a large can- 
 vas and heroic figures, and something of the breadth that 
 goes with the spectacular, before he could deploy his 
 mind and imagination. And, besides, there was so con- 
 siderable a moral element in his enthusiasms, a sense of 
 the forces of history so deeply underlying his serious 
 work, that he was to a certain extent disarmed and taken 
 at a disadvantage in the presence of the personal, the 
 immediate and fragmentary character of passing and 
 
 227 
 
228 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 incomplete events. These two volumes, consequently, 
 notwithstanding their real interest in many ways, are a 
 disappointment, if any one looks in them for more than 
 illustrations and fuller knowledge of the man's charac- 
 ter as it was in daily and private life; but if one is con- 
 tent to look for no more than this, they afford the 
 portrait of an American whom his fellow-countrymen 
 will be more proud to acknowledge after their perusal — 
 one who did honor to his country by his personal bear- 
 ing among men, by his living and thinking in ordinary 
 ways, quite as much as by his literary fame. 
 
 He belongs distinctly to a type that is passing away, 
 or at least is suffering such changes outwardly and in- 
 wardly as to be taking on a new form. He was one of 
 the Boston boys when Boston was more preeminently 
 a commercial town, with all that means on the social 
 side of life. He was educated at Bancroft's Northamp- 
 ton school and at Harvard College, and at an early age 
 went to Europe for legal study at German universities 
 and for travel, and of all these opportunities he made a 
 serious use. The first stirring of his historical imagi- 
 nation and the beginning of his fluent and ample style 
 may readily be discerned in his pleasant letters home, 
 which are what such letters from such a youth should 
 be, but have only autobiographical value. The trial of 
 his talents in novel-writing, and the reasons why he 
 selected the Netherlands as the scene of his historical 
 labors, are not touched upon in these letters; the collec- 
 tion suffers from the lack of continuity in the series, 
 both here and in later life. After his departure for 
 Europe, however, there is sufficient material to make out 
 plainly and fully the quiet student life he led, the ab- 
 sorption of his mind in his work, and the visitings of 
 
MOTLEY'S CORRESPONDENCE 229 
 
 doubt and melancholy which must attack a solitary 
 scholar before the recognition of his powers by others, 
 in judgment upon definite work already accomplished, 
 gives him confidence in himself. The publication of his 
 first volumes, from which he apparently did not hope 
 for success, settled his position as an author to be widely 
 and seriously regarded, and he set to work to continue 
 the series with a renewed energy which shows how much 
 he was invigorated by the warm applause he had received. 
 Of his labors in the workshop, however, the letters afford 
 the very slightest glimpses — they are singularly free 
 from the burden of his daily tasks, and, while we might 
 desire to see more of the student at his desk, the fear of 
 egotism seems to have haunted him to such a degree that 
 he spoke of himself and his doings, even to his wife, with 
 an uneasy consciousness, and was always glad to drop 
 the subject. His occasional separation from his family 
 and his long absence from home required him, neverthe- 
 less, to give some account of his days, and to this necessity 
 the correspondence is mainly due. 
 
 The more entertaining chapters are naturally those 
 which detail, almost like a diary of dinner engagements, 
 his association with leading persons in England, and, 
 more narrowly, upon the Continent. In London society 
 he was received with great cordiality from many, and 
 with courtesy and distinction from all. What was his 
 charm it is impossible to discover from his own account 
 of the matter, and others have not told us; but he must 
 have been singularly agreeable to have won and kept 
 the consideration of the circle in which he moved. He 
 was interested first of all in the eminent literary men and 
 statesmen of the day, and in the group which was noted 
 for kindly disposition to Americans. His portraits of 
 
230 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 these people lack condensation and vividness; he was 
 better at describing a character than a personality, and 
 consequently he has not written anything of them spe- 
 cially remarkable. It is rather the tone in which he 
 speaks than the words he uses which exhibits their im- 
 pression on him. No man is more agreeably presented 
 than the aged Lord Lyndhurst, who at the time of the 
 war wrote to him as a fellow countryman, remember- 
 ing his birth on American soil; but this characterization 
 is not made in any one passage. Mrs. Norton, too, and 
 Lady William Russell are similarly a part of the pleasure 
 which the letters give, as a picture of humane and hos- 
 pitable English life, but they are mingled with the vari- 
 ous scenes. Thackeray appears as "a colossal infant — 
 smooth, white, shiny ringlety hair (flaxen, alas, with 
 advancing years), a roundish face, with a little dab of 
 a nose upon which it is a perpetual wonder how he keeps 
 his spectacles, a sweet, but rather piping voice, with some- 
 thing of a childish treble about it, and a very tall, slightly 
 stooping figure," and without any distinction in his talk 
 more than in his white choker. Macaulay is a sick 
 man, whenever seen, with the cough which foreboded 
 the end, a blank face, and "as it were badly lighted," 
 nothing luminous in his eyes nor impressive in his brows, 
 a spacious forehead "scooped entirely away in the region 
 where benevolence ought to be, while beyond rise reve- 
 rence, firmness, and self-esteem like Alps on Alps," while 
 the eyes beneath are almost closed with swollen lids. 
 Motley, who did not wish to talk, did not find him too 
 much an autocrat of the conversation. Brougham, with 
 snow-white and shiny hair, a knobby and bumpy head, 
 furrowed with age, and a vast mouth, is principally re- 
 membered by this observer for his incredible nose, which 
 
MOTLEY'S CORRESPONDENCE 231 
 
 he wagged like an elephant's proboscis. These, how- 
 ever, are all familiar features, and even "Dizzy," as Mrs. 
 Norton describes him, "with a black velvet coat lined 
 with satin, purple trousers with a gold band running 
 down the outside seam, a scarlet waistcoat, long lace 
 ruffles falling down to the tips of his fingers, white gloves 
 with several brilliant rings outside them, and long black 
 ringlets rippling down his shoulders," would not be 
 strange except for the impossibility that the eye labors 
 under in endeavoring to retain his youthful figure as a 
 thing to be believed in. Of more interest is the sketch of 
 Maximilian just before his departure to Mexico: "About 
 thirty, with an adventurous disposition, some imagina- 
 tion, a turn for poetry," an author "not without talent," 
 who "relieves his prose jog-trot by breaking into a canter 
 of poetry; an adorer of bullfights, who half regrets the 
 Inquisition, and considers the Duke of Alva everything 
 noble and chivalrous, and the most-abused of men." The 
 Comte de Paris is better treated — "a model of what a 
 young prince ought to be in manner, in character, in con- 
 versation, in accomplishments. To be sure, he bribed me 
 by his unaffected, sincere, and enthusiastic interest in my 
 country; a more loyal and ardent American does not 
 exist than this King's son." Other royal personages are to 
 be seen on the page, always through republican eyes, and 
 usually not to their advantage, except in the case of the 
 frank and straightforward King of Holland and his re- 
 fined and womanly Queen, always the unassuming friend 
 of the best within her horizon. 
 
 To his countrymen, however, the most welcome part of 
 these volumes is not what they tell of the great ones of 
 the earth, or of the social grace and hospitableness of 
 England in its highest circles; but rather the fullness and 
 
232 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 clearness with which they reveal the unspoiled American 
 heart which, through long residence in foreign lands and 
 in the midst of aristocratic fascinations, Motley kept 
 beating in his breast. No word can now be breathed 
 against his patriotism or his entire adhesion to and belief 
 in the democracy of his own country. His sketch of Aus- 
 trian society, in which birth alone gives station, might be 
 expected to contain some comment from one whose chief 
 claim to attention was not diplomacy but literature. He 
 could not be flattered, he says, to be received as a dip- 
 lomatist when he could not be as a man. In his reflections 
 upon English aristocracy he is not less loyal to the tra- 
 ditions in which he was bred. He acknowledged himself 
 to be a spectator in London, and had no desire to be "one 
 of themselves." After stating the committal of America 
 absolutely to the future of democracy, he goes on to say: 
 "For me, I like democracy. I don't say it is pretty or 
 genteel or jolly. But it has a reason for existing, and is 
 a fact in America, and is founded in the immutable prin- 
 ciple of reason and justice. Aristocracy certainly presents 
 more brilliant social phenomena, more luxurious social 
 enjoyments. Such a system is very cheerful for a few 
 thousand select specimens out of a few hundred millions 
 of the human race. It has been my lot and yours to see 
 how much splendor, how much intellectual and physical 
 refinement, how much enjoyment of the highest character 
 has been created by the English aristocracy; but what a 
 price is paid for it. Think of a human being working all 
 day long, from six in the morning to seven at night, for 
 fifteen or twenty kreutzers a day in Moravia or Bohemia, 
 Ireland or Yorkshire, for forty or fifty years, to die in 
 the workhouse at last! This is the lot of the great major- 
 ity all over Europe; and yet they are of the same flesh and 
 
MOTLEY'S CORRESPONDENCE 233 
 
 blood, the natural equals in every way of the Howards 
 and Stanleys, Esterhazys and Liechtensteins." 
 
 And again he says: 
 
 "I don't think there is any danger of my losing my 
 American feelings and my republican tastes, and I trust 
 I can look on these scenes of exquisite and intelligent lux- 
 ury objectively, as the Germans say, without confounding 
 the characters of spectator and actor. . . . Much as I 
 can appreciate and enjoy esthetically, sentimentally, and 
 sensuously the infinite charm, refinement, and grace of 
 English life, especially country life, yet I feel too keenly 
 what a fearful price is paid by the English people in order 
 that this splendid aristocracy with their parks and castles, 
 and shootings and fishings and fox-huntings, their stately 
 and unlimited hospitality, their lettered ease and learned 
 leisure, may grow fat, ever to be in danger of finding my 
 judgment corrupted by it. At the same time it is as well 
 not to indulge too long and too copiously in the Circean 
 draughts of English hospitality." 
 
 Doubtless he was fortified in his patriotism by the in- 
 tense passion aroused by the Civil War. In all he has to 
 say of that conflict (and he has very much to say) there 
 is the touch of a burning enthusiasm, of an overflowing 
 interest, of personal anxiety and hope, of a home-felt 
 share in the defeats and triumphs of the country's cause. 
 He had the misfortune to differ from his father upon these 
 topics, and he did not permit himself to speak of them 
 to him; but in his letters to other members of the family 
 he gave full expression to his feelings. He perceived with 
 great definiteness the lines of the conflict, and especially 
 the contest of moral forces and the issues of civilization 
 involved in them. In devoting his life to the story of 
 liberty in the Netherlands he had gone to school at the 
 
234 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 fountain; and he was so grounded in the love of the ideas 
 the national cause stood for, as well as in the affection for 
 his own country which life abroad in his case could only 
 intensify, that he was bound, as by a natural law, to 
 throw himself heart and soul into the Northern cause. 
 He was able in consequence to state the question so clearly 
 and forcibly in England as to do great service there, be- 
 fore he returned to this country to be near the scene of 
 affairs; and after his appointment to Vienna he kept in 
 close connection with that body of Englishmen who, with 
 Bright and Mill at their head, befriended our interests. 
 The episode of his return home in 1861 is one of the 
 capital chapters in the volumes. He represents the scene, 
 the feelings, the confusion of the time, as a part thereof; 
 and whether at Boston or Washington, his pulse tells the 
 beat of the hour. The optimism of the nation at its first 
 awakening is reproduced in him with almost amusing com- 
 pleteness; and throughout the war the readiness with 
 which he recoiled from the depression of defeat, and the 
 vigor of his faith in our triumph, are attractive traits of 
 his character. The anecdote of his finding himself in so 
 oppressive a solitude when he received the news of the 
 fall of Vicksburg is pathetic; he "screeched it through 
 the keyhole" to his daughter; but "you," he says, address- 
 ing Dr. Holmes, "who were among people grim and self- 
 contained usually — who, I trust, were jailing on each 
 other's necks in the public streets, and shouting with 
 tears in their eyes and triumph in their hearts — can pic- 
 ture my isolation." This is the contemporary life of 
 those years still warm on the page; and many of these 
 pages are dedicated to the joys and sorrows, public and 
 private, of the time, in a way to deepen regret in our 
 minds at the memory of the unmerited trials which so 
 
MOTLEY'S CORRESPONDENCE 235 
 
 true an American heart suffered at the hands of our na- 
 tional Government. 
 
 His estimate of the men of the war is also a close ren- 
 dering of contemporary feeling, especially with regard to 
 the military hope of the hour, Scott or McClellan or 
 Grant. The most interesting of these, however, is the 
 impression he obtained of Lincoln, whom he saw only for 
 a short hour at the opening of the fight. He was struck 
 at once by the substantial characteristics of the Presi- 
 dent, and, in his case, this was notable; there is nowhere 
 any wonder expressed that a "backwoodsman" had come 
 to so responsible a place, but only gratitude that an honest 
 and true man was at the helm. He writes of him as 
 early as June, 1862, with noticeable accuracy: "I think 
 Mr. Lincoln embodies singularly well the healthy Ameri- 
 can mind. He revolts at extreme measures, and moves in 
 a steady way to the necessary end. He reads the signs of 
 the times, and will never go faster than the people at his 
 back. So his slowness seems sometimes like hesitation; 
 but I have not a doubt that when the people wills it, he 
 will declare that will." And after the assassination, recur- 
 ring to his first impression of Lincoln, he writes: "He 
 seemed to have a window in his breast. There was some- 
 thing almost childlike in his absence of guile and affecta- 
 tion of any kind. Of course, on the few occasions when I 
 had the privilege of conversing with him, it was impossible 
 for me to pretend to form an estimate as to his intellectual 
 power, but I was struck with his simple wisdom, his 
 straightforward, unsophisticated common sense. What 
 our republic, what the whole world, has to be grateful for, 
 is that God has endowed our chief magistrate, at such 
 a momentous period of history, with so lofty a moral 
 nature and with so loving and forgiving a disposition." 
 
236 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 Perhaps in all these few lines of encomium which from 
 time to time he writes upon the leading figures of the war, 
 we may discern the hero-loving imagination working be- 
 fore the facts were accomplished; but it was Motley's 
 good fortune to have nourished his mind with contempla- 
 tion of such men in the great struggle of the Netherlands, 
 and he was thus in a position more readily to appreciate 
 them. 
 
 It remains to say a word about Motley's friendship 
 with Bismarck, which is a leading topic in the volumes. 
 They were college friends, or even schoolboys, together, 
 and the tie which bound them was this early one cher- 
 ished through years by both of them. They recognized 
 the vast difference in their political creeds, but they also 
 agreed that the condition of affairs in Prussia and America 
 differed as widely as their views, and their friendship for- 
 tunately was so purely personal that opinion did not enter 
 into it as any part of the cement. Bismarck's letters are 
 almost boyish or old-boyish, in spirit, and are half rollick- 
 ing. They show the Chancellor out of his gravity; but 
 this is only to see him more near. The accounts which 
 Motley furnishes of the household arrangements and pri- 
 vate habits of the Bismarcks fill out the picture; and if 
 there is something of the German country baron and of 
 squirearchy in them, this is the homeliness of truth. Bis- 
 marck appears in a more amiable and noble light; his sin- 
 cerity is much dwelt upon, his force and grasp are rather 
 indicated than shown, but the conversation died on the 
 air that heard it. The most valuable passage is the fol- 
 lowing: 
 
 "He said he used when younger to think himself a 
 clever fellow enough, but now he was convinced that no- 
 body had any control over events — that nobody was 
 
MOTLEY'S CORRESPONDENCE 237 
 
 really powerful or great; and it made him laugh when he 
 heard himself complimented as wise, foreseeing, and ex- 
 ercising great influence over the world. A man in the 
 situation in which he had been placed was obliged, while 
 outsiders, for example, were speculating whether to-mor- 
 row it would be rain or sunshine, to decide promptly, It 
 will rain or it will be fine; and to act accordingly with all 
 the forces at his command. If he guessed right, all the 
 world said, What sagacity — what prophetic power! If 
 wrong, all the old women would have beaten him with 
 broomsticks. If he had learned nothing else, he said he 
 had learned modesty." 
 
 It may be said generally — and it is pleasant to be able 
 to say such a thing of a collection of private letters — that 
 this correspondence presents every one whom it brings 
 forward in a way to win regard for him and not to lessen 
 it. The social reminiscences, bare as they often are, are 
 pervaded by hospitable and kindly feelings, and the liter- 
 ary and political portions are without any disagreeable 
 traits, but, on the contrary, show Motley's friendliness 
 and patriotism, and a readiness to take men at the best 
 possible, which now honor his memory. It is, neverthe- 
 less, his own reputation that will be increased and en- 
 deared by these proofs of his devotion. His belief in his 
 own people, his anxiety to serve them in places of honor- 
 able ambition or in private station, and his humane and 
 sanguine temperament in the great conflict of his genera- 
 tion, his laboriousness in his studies, and his unaffected 
 friendliness with many persons of intellect, refinement, 
 and good-will, make us the more glad to know that he 
 remains, after all his disappointments, to the last line of 
 his pen unalienated from ourselves. 
 
BAYARD TAYLOR 
 
 It is so much a literary fashion to divide a man's life 
 into periods of development, although they may not in 
 reality differ from Shakespeare's "Seven Ages," that one 
 is often inclined to be impatient with such an exordium. 
 In Bayard Taylor's growth, however, there seem to have 
 been two lives, so marked was the change in his nature; 
 and he has, in fact, left two reputations in consequence 
 — one widespread and established, the other narrow in 
 its range and of doubtful permanence. Out of the still 
 farm life of the Quaker settlement in Chester County, 
 where he was cradled into poetry in the midst of a simple 
 and pure people and under the guardianship of a quiet 
 and cheerful landscape, he came at a very early age into 
 the excitement, the busy triviality, and incessant vicis- 
 situde of our earlier journalism; and having made a suc- 
 cessful stroke at the start by his first book of travels, 
 he won his way with rapidity and comparative ease to 
 the position of best American reporter of scenes and in- 
 cidents. This was what he called his service of Mam- 
 mon, and he said he hated it. But from the first there 
 was a purely literary strain in his blood, a spring of poetic 
 thought in his heart that would not be choked, and an 
 effort of his will toward artistic expression of the best 
 of his spirit. His early friends, the sponsors of his 
 baptism before the muses, were not of the choicest. 
 Rufus Wilmot Griswold was the editor to discover him; 
 but for the youth to whom Griswold was a Maecenas, 
 
 239 
 
24 o LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 the auguries were certainly of doubtful complexion; and 
 when he found his Augustus in the person of the natty 
 Willis, the odds against his making a man of himself 
 were to be counted off only by his innate virtue and 
 the vigor of his mind. It is as good, at least, as one of 
 his own novels to see from his youthful letters how much 
 he prized the first literary society into which he was ad- 
 mitted, the New York coterie of mutual admiration and 
 secret envy, of which here and there in our literary annals 
 some mention may still be found under the name of "the 
 Literati," as they called themselves. Taylor was so far 
 imposed on by it as to write of "that charmed circle of 
 artist and author life, which is the only real life of this 
 world," and he was in middle life before he described it 
 as under-bred, half-refined, and superficially cultivated. 
 Perhaps his travels, by removing him from the danger 
 of constantly breathing this atmosphere, served him bet- 
 ter than he knew. However that may have been, it is 
 enough to beget a charitable spirit in one to remember 
 that in his youth journalism was his taskmaster and 
 Willis the high-priest of his cult. 
 
 Taylor quickly enlarged his circle through the oppor- 
 tunities of travel and the readiness and freshness of his 
 instincts for fraternity. He made friends with everybody 
 he met, and one might almost say with every creature, 
 even to savage beasts. He enlarged his mind, too, and 
 on returning from his visit to the East he was able to 
 draw to himself an audience distinctly his own. Money 
 flowed in from books, lectures, and successful invest- 
 ments, and he built Cedarcroft and settled down in the 
 expectation that fortune would continue to shower gifts 
 upon him. He was soon to be ready, he thought, to 
 be a poet; he had been making sure of his bread first, 
 
BAYARD TAYLOR 241 
 
 and now he would make sure of his fame. But the 
 war came, and when it was gone there was a new nation, 
 and Taylor found he had outlived his early reputation 
 and had lost his own audience. Trouble in one form or 
 another was at hand. His manor-house on the paternal 
 acres was a millstone round his neck; and finally, after a 
 long struggle of incessant hard work at book-making, he 
 went back to his hack-life on the newspaper from which 
 he was relieved by his appointment as minister to the 
 German court and his speedy death. In the latter part 
 of his career he had translated "Faust" and written long 
 poems, and it was for these works that he cared; for he 
 had learned by experience the ephemeral nature of a 
 traveler's reputation, and he desired most ardently to 
 leave an enduring name. The mass of his writings is 
 very large, but his heart was in his poetry only; 
 the rest was what he called mere pot-boiling literature. 
 In these last years, too, there was an expansion of his 
 intellectual nature and a sharpening of his artistic per- 
 ception, due in large measure to his study of Goethe, who 
 overmastered his mind and determined the character of 
 the latest products of his genius. It was from the 
 Goethean point of view that he looked down almost con- 
 temptuously on the earlier period of his literary activity, 
 and looked forward and up to the future work of his 
 hands, the true work, which was to prolong his memory 
 among men. His death was thus, he would have thought, 
 as truly premature as if he had died in youth. Hope 
 was so strong in him that when past fifty the best of his 
 life seemed still before him. 
 
 The most prominent point in the popular conception 
 of Bayard Taylor is that he was a man of great vitality; 
 and, as is frequently the case, the people have seized on 
 
242 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 the main characteristic. The activity of his mind was 
 enormous, and it may fairly be said that it was the over- 
 flow of physical health in no small degree. But just as 
 he would say that the public did not see that he could 
 not be so good a traveler had he not been a poet, so the 
 vital force that enabled him to grasp and master such 
 masses of work would never have sustained him had he 
 not been buoyed up also by an eagerness of the spirit. 
 The trait his biography reveals on nearly every page, from 
 the days of youthful ardor to those of untiring manhood, 
 is aspiration of the most unflagging and incorruptible 
 kind. Whether Taylor succeeded or not in realizing the 
 fondest wish of his heart, to be known as one of his 
 country's great poets, there is no doubt that he always 
 was working upward to the plane of their life with a 
 high, firm purpose that grew more strong and simple at 
 each turn of his worldly fortune. It was because of 
 this aspiration that the difference between his first and 
 second period has so marked a character as to seem a 
 difference between two lives ; he left his youthful environ- 
 ment and all that it contained behind him, and rose out 
 of "the Literati" into literature. 
 
 It belongs to this strong aspiration, too, that he was 
 so avaricious of praise, hoarded up his commendations 
 from "the poets," and overvalued their meaning. He 
 was all his days hungry for recognition; he welcomed it 
 from any quarter, and repaid it profusely with his own 
 good-will. It was not vanity that made him listen so 
 keenly for applause; it was not self-conceit that was 
 bred in him by the praise he got; and yet it is not a 
 pleasant characteristic to meet with when one finds the 
 hero so anxious for the roses. It made some people mis- 
 understand and dislike Taylor in his lifetime, and there 
 
BAYARD TAYLOR 243 
 
 is in it certainly some proof that he was without the 
 assurance that goes with matured genius of high order. 
 A discomfortable doubt of his position always haunted 
 him, and this made him prize distinction of an outward 
 kind, and practically look to his friends to mint his coin 
 with their royal approval. The trait of the parvenu, 
 too, is very disagreeably conspicuous in the attitude of 
 his mind toward the great men whom he met, and par- 
 ticularly in his pleasure at being favored by Bismarck 
 and others whose worldly position attracted his respect- 
 ful admiration. It is said that we all like titles, and 
 perhaps he shared a national weakness; but it would 
 seem rather that this regard for the aristocratic was an- 
 other phase of his desire to be admitted to an inner cir- 
 cle, as if he were in some way accredited by such an 
 admission. 
 
 To meet at once a second questionable trait, he was 
 always self-absorbed, engaged mainly in his own affairs, 
 with a word now and then for others and what they were 
 doing and hoping, but nevertheless, kindly and cordial 
 though he was, essentially preoccupied with his plans 
 and deeds. He was too busy, in fact, to think about 
 other matters than his own; he had no time. Of course 
 he was not lacking in any liberality to his kindred and 
 his friends; he gave what he had — his good-fortune, 
 his hospitality, the favor of his name, the good-will of 
 his heart — everything except his thoughts. For this 
 reason his letters are concerned, more than is usual, with 
 private and temporary details — his new ventures in 
 material or literary affairs, and especially with what he 
 was going to do; for he was more attentive to the future 
 than to the present. Thus one comes about again to 
 what was the leading mark, the saving power of his life 
 
244 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 — his irrepressible aspiration, of which his deference 
 to authority and his engrossing interest in the develop- 
 ment of himself were, in part, results. It is not necessary 
 to point out how fit such a nature was to imbibe the ideas 
 of Goethe and incorporate them in his own life. 
 
 Throughout the latter part of his career Bayard 
 Taylor evidently felt much aggrieved by the fact that 
 the people judged him by his achievements in the lower 
 walk of literature. At first, when his mental horizon was 
 still bounded by a foreign landscape, he was pleased 
 to be known as the most successful traveler of his age, 
 and, if he dipped into poetry, as he could not help 
 doing, he wrote a Californian ballad. But after "the age 
 of sensations and short poems," as he called it, was gone 
 by, and especially after he had translated "Faust," he 
 sent letters to the newspaper for pay only, and occupied 
 himself with the ambition of composing, not epics, to be 
 sure, but a "cosmic poem" — one or more, according to 
 the length of his life, for there was never any question 
 in his own mind that he was inexhaustible. The ex- 
 perience he had acquired in outgrowing the bonds of his 
 early education and breaking away from the formulas 
 of Chester County life, and his observations of the creeds 
 of alien races, with the knowledge thus impressed upon 
 him as to the contingencies of religious dogma, had made 
 a foundation in his mind for a poem of philosophic scope, 
 and he wrote one or two of such a character. They may 
 have been "cosmic," but they were not popular, and since 
 his death they have not grown in esteem. Some of his 
 Arab lyrics will outlive "Prince Deucalion." 
 
 Without undertaking to decide whether Taylor's com- 
 plaint that the people looked on him as a traveler pri- 
 marily and as a poet only secondarily, was just or not, 
 
BAYARD TAYLOR 245 
 
 one may make one or two observations on his poetic 
 method. He wrote with facility, and his composition 
 was unusually rapid, but the subject, he frequently de- 
 clares, was for years in his mind slowly taking shape 
 and was at last suddenly developed. He speaks of poems 
 as of other literary work — a newspaper article or a 
 review for example — as if they could be made to order: 
 so many last week, so many to be ready by such a day 
 next month; and similarly of long poems: he will be 
 through at such a date, and there will be so many lines — 
 and this he knows before the draft is completed. These 
 trifles are straws, but they show a good deal; and from 
 them and other hints the impression is left on the mind 
 that Taylor chose his subject first and wrote about it 
 afterward, and the availability of any particular sub- 
 ject from the supply he had always in his mind, was 
 determined by various considerations other than that 
 need for expression which is the only true inspiration. 
 The great poets are more likely to name their verses 
 after they are composed, and to have the substance of 
 thought or passion before they cast about for a heading. 
 Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound" is only the "Paradise 
 Regained" of a new age — the lyric for the epic, the 
 Greek for the Jewish, the human for the Puritanic; but 
 the idea, the same Messianic one that "springs eternal in 
 the human breast." Bayard Taylor, on the other hand, 
 apparently thought of a "cosmic poem" first and of what 
 he should say in it afterward. It is also significant that 
 in his later poems he was so much given to symbolism. 
 To a genius of the loftiest order, like Goethe, allegory 
 is merely a mode of expression; the thought is thus 
 conveyed by a symbol, but the thought is far more than 
 the symbol, and is no more contained in it than an ele- 
 
246 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 mental force is contained in a single phenomenon. To 
 minds of a lower rank, like Rossetti's, symbolization itself 
 is a mode of thinking rather than of expression; the 
 symbol gives rise to the thought instead of the thought 
 to the symbol. The instrument of poetry is, of course, 
 concrete images in all cases, though not necessarily 
 visual ones; but to poets in whom intellectual power is 
 preeminent, images are a language, while to poets of 
 lower rank the images themselves are the poetry. Many 
 a time in literature we have had rhymesters who strung 
 similes and metaphors, and thought they were produc- 
 ing poems: similarly, since Goethe's time, we have had 
 thinkers, both mystic and scientific, who string symbols 
 and allegories and believe they are composing philosophy 
 in verse. 
 
 It would be unjust to say that Taylor was merely one 
 of these latter, but he helps us to understand them. 
 The mode of poetic composition he chose in "Prince 
 Deucalion" was of this kind; it requires the very highest 
 intellectual genius to employ it successfully, and he 
 failed. When he was appointed Minister to Germany 
 he was felt to be the representative of our journalists 
 rather than of our literary men, and the publication of 
 "Prince Deucalion" shortly afterward confirmed the view. 
 This last drama of his life is dwelt on because it marks 
 his line of development, and was one of the mainstays 
 of his hope of immortality in literature. He wrote much 
 better poems when his mind was not filled with such 
 large ambition. But whether his fame shall prove to 
 be transitory, and to rest still on his muscles and pluck 
 and vivacity as when he was thirty years old, the history 
 of his later career is that of a very noble effort to achieve 
 the highest, and together with it a constant and toilsome 
 
BAYARD TAYLOR 247 
 
 fulfilment of the duties of his material life as a man 
 with bread to earn. In outliving the era when reputa- 
 tions were easily won, he entered on a harder career, and 
 bore himself in it in a way to win respect from his suc- 
 cessors as largely as he won affection from his con- 
 temporaries. 
 
A SHAKESPEAREAN SCHOLAR 
 
 Richard Grant White put his hand to the plow 
 in many fields of literature, and in all he showed the 
 sturdiness that denotes yeoman stock. But, apart from 
 his special taste for music, the most of his studies sprang 
 from his love of Shakespeare. In the case of his theatri- 
 cal and philological writings this is obvious, and in those 
 which illustrate his attachment to England it is fair to 
 ascribe no inconsiderable part to the fondness which, 
 however invigorated and broadened by other traditions, 
 was primarily due to the great dramatist of English his- 
 tory and life. Essays upon words, stage-usages, and 
 matters of music, observations upon our cousins' ways 
 and customs and modes of speech, international satire, 
 and squibs of all kinds and lengths made up a large part 
 of his industrious literary life; but, for all that, Shake- 
 speare was his profession, and the principal work of his 
 hands was editorial. In some respects this choice of 
 employment was felicitous, and fell in with natural intel- 
 lectual aptitudes. He had a note-taking mind, and his 
 memory was retentive of details to an extraordinary 
 degree — a quality invaluable to an editor of texts; and 
 in addition to this, his clear-headedness, his shrewd so- 
 briety, his content with a plain and honest-seeming mean- 
 ing, and especially his contempt for the palaver of re- 
 fining analysts of the German stripe, stood him in such 
 good stead that he holds an honorable place among the 
 students who have made the critical study of Shake- 
 
 249 1 
 
250 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 speare part and parcel of the pride of American scholar- 
 ship. 
 
 The substance of his attainments is to be found, of 
 course, in the various essays, prefatory either to the gen- 
 eral work or to the individual plays and poems, which 
 conduce so much to the value of his version of Shake- 
 speare in the way of expansion, criticism, and informa- 
 tion; and in these his views are set forth with most 
 modesty, succinctness, and moderation, and his knowl- 
 edge is deployed with most swiftness and effect. They 
 form, however, only a small portion of his contributions 
 to Shakespeare literature; very much of his labor in his 
 chosen subject was off-hand work, and must be sought 
 in the magazines to which he devoted his less serious 
 moments. Such articles — and their number is legion — 
 usually present some single phase of a Shakespeare 
 theme; and no matter how dry and formal the topic in 
 itself, he makes it entertaining. For it is a distinction 
 of Mr. White's that he always interests; he has the secret 
 of pleasing. His style is wonderfully firm and close- 
 knit; his facts are cold as an iceberg and hard as a flint; 
 and he strews the mental way of his readers with the 
 native nuggets of Yankee sense. His individuality 
 counts for more than all. He was himself a character, 
 in the special meaning of the word; one of those im- 
 penetrable pieces of nature's workmanship which are 
 malleable by no external influence of culture, society, 
 or circumstance. Such persons cannot open their lips 
 without some self-exhibition; whether their solitude is 
 of the village or the study, they always speak from within, 
 and echo no man. Mr. White, who was as tenacious 
 of his peculiarities as an Englishman, stamped them 
 upon his writings; and it is due to this that when one 
 
A SHAKESPEAREAN SCHOLAR 251 
 
 reads his words it is, to an unusual degree, as if one 
 heard him speaking. When a man of this sort has the 
 gift of literary expression, he will be a readable author, 
 whatever deficiencies he may have; and this Mr. White 
 was. Indeed, when one glances over the mass of his 
 minor writing, though it belongs undoubtedly to the 
 literature that springs up and withers in a day, one can- 
 not help wondering at the brightness of its short-lived 
 verdancy. There could hardly seem to be a more thank- 
 less task than to make a new paraphrase of Shake- 
 speare's plays. It is true that poets, great and small, 
 have tried to rewrite those dramas, not seeing how deep 
 their words are graved in the living rock of English 
 speech ; but to tell their story over in prose — no one 
 would do that except for children. Yet in the half 
 dozen cases in which Mr. White tried his hand at this 
 mode of transcription, he made, if not novelettes, cer- 
 tainly most delightful sketches, which, though every 
 incident and characteristic of them was familiar to us 
 from our childhood, have the unmistakable and un- 
 rubbed newness that belongs to the magazine-mint. 
 These renovations have a use, too, more than to pass an 
 hour of easy reading: they are needed to remind us, 
 who think mostly of the action and thought of Shake- 
 speare's dramas, how much the story counts in the work, 
 and this is best shown by relieving it from its subordi- 
 nation to character and treating it in the novelist's way. 
 The "Tale of the Forest of Arden," for example, as it is 
 retold, might serve as a lesson in romantic fiction, by 
 revealing how poetry is of the essence of it all, not a 
 matter of expression, but of structure. The happiness 
 of Mr. White's renderings of Shakespeare in prose, how- 
 ever, is cited only as a striking instance of his power 
 
252 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 over the least promising material. He would strike a 
 shower of wheat out of thrice-threshed straw; or so it 
 seems. 
 
 Mr. White selected and revised some of these loose 
 articles. One perceives that Mr. White possessed a hard- 
 and-fast intellect of the sort about which there is, in 
 the favorite phrase, "no nonsense." As a Shakespearean, 
 he was himself, in the bent of his mind, one of the 
 class of American readers which he describes — "so 
 large and so diffused through society that it cannot be 
 rightly called a class, who do not know that there are 
 German critics, who have little acquaintance with any 
 criticism, to whom Schlegel is unrevealed and Coleridge 
 is but a name, and who yet read and understand and 
 love and delight in Shakespeare, and who would quietly 
 smile at the notion that 'at last' we understand Shake- 
 speare because some learned people have said very pro- 
 found sayings about his revelations of the 'inner life.' " 
 His own appreciation of Shakespeare, though so much 
 more informed, was essentially the same which belongs 
 to the people of home-keeping wits, who read their au- 
 thor in that unenlightened fashion in which the audiences 
 of the Globe listened when the text still knew no re- 
 cension except that of the pirates. His aim as an editor 
 was to restore, so far as was possible, the conditions of 
 the past; to place the reader in the position of the 
 Elizabethan theater-goer, and leave him to get the orig- 
 inal entertainment which Shakespeare had in mind when' 
 he wrote. Shakespeare meant to amuse, and in our times 
 it was the part of a loyal adherent of the master to help 
 him in his old purpose. To such a view metaphysics, 
 however acute, was out of place in Shakespeare's de- 
 mesne; was a perversion of poetry, like the science which 
 
A SHAKESPEAREAN SCHOLAR 253 
 
 botanizes upon a mother's grave. No words were too 
 sharp, no denunciations too heavy, in Mr. White's 
 opinion, for the flagellation of that school which is no 
 longer confined to German lecture-rooms, but now in all 
 quarters of criticism makes of Shakespeare a problem 
 instead of a poem. 
 
 Perhaps in this onslaught Mr. White might have 
 gained by discriminating. The fact is that the dramas 
 do afford a field for such philosophizing, whether rightly 
 or wrongly. It may have been unknown to Shakespeare, 
 but he did write a text-book of human life. By the 
 force of his genius he represented mankind, on its social 
 and spiritual side, with the reality of nature. It is the 
 excellence of his creative art that his characters live, and 
 show their souls not wholly but by glimpses, as common 
 mortals do; and thus Hamlet, for example, presents to 
 us the puzzle that any highly organized man affords to a 
 thoughtful observer, and allows of countless theories in 
 regard to his personality and motives. All life is to the 
 thinker fair game for his meditation, and in it the 
 universal spiritual laws are to be discerned, or guessed 
 at, or speculated about. It would be foolish to object 
 to any amount of philosophizing on the real phenomena 
 of character; and if Shakespeare has given us the micro- 
 cosmos of man, if the reality of his imagination is not 
 less truthful than that of actual experience, why should 
 not Germans or Englishmen use it, the more readily be- 
 cause it is a common possession, and not, like ordinary 
 instances, known only to the few who happen to be 
 spectators? Mr. White was wrong, if he found fault 
 with the Shakespeare philosophers, or denied their posi- 
 tions, simply because they occupied themselves with 
 material not originally written for such an investigation; 
 
2 5 4 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 and if he was right at all, it was only in maintaining that 
 Shakespeare knew nothing of this value of his work, 
 and cared nothing for it. Of course there has been 
 much error and feebleness and trash written by the mem- 
 bers of this critical school, as is done by incompetence 
 in all departments ; but there has been also some wisdom, 
 and it would be gratuitous, if not dangerous, to affirm 
 Shakespeare's ignorance of the worth of his work for 
 instruction. One cannot safely set limits to the knowl- 
 edge that any great author has of the various meanings 
 which his lines may convey, even if he does not, like 
 Dante, definitely declare that he has expressed a mani- 
 fold meaning in the same identical words. Wisdom as 
 well as wit often lodges in the ears that hear it as much 
 as on the lips that speak it, and its application to special 
 circumstances frequently discovers hidden truth in the 
 worn words. How many meanings, for example, have 
 Virgil's lines disclosed to those who for centuries have 
 consulted the Sortes VirgilianoB! It would be as foolish 
 to credit Virgil with these as with the famous Messianic 
 prophecy in his eclogue. The case illustrates how inno- 
 cent Shakespeare was of a good part of the exegesis forced 
 upon him by his editors. At the same time it is not 
 likely that they have so exceeded the great master in 
 wisdom that he would be surprised to find that they 
 make of him an understanding author as well as a success- 
 ful playwright. 
 
 The weight of Mr. White's objurgation, however, falls 
 less upon those who comment upon the text and the gen- 
 eral conception of the plays than upon those who reason 
 therefrom to the dramatist's life and development. He 
 himself allows the existence of periods of literary art in 
 his author, but in "spiritual stages" he is almost a total 
 
A SHAKESPEAREAN SCHOLAR 255 
 
 disbeliever. But here, too, one must discriminate, and 
 in much the same way as before. A man grows, but his 
 growth is largely unconscious. The craze to find an 
 "evolution" in all things could not pass by the prime 
 phenomena of genius; and so Shakespeare has been fur- 
 nished with one. The mistake is in giving too firm lines 
 to the progress of his mind and art. Neither the meta- 
 physical nor the literary yard-stick can be applied to 
 the "myriad-minded" one with any but a ludicrous result; 
 and the scholar who would build up Shakespeare's life 
 in the easy-going fashion of distinct and successive 
 periods is over-confident. The unfolding of his special 
 gift of expression, the apprenticeship and the mastery 
 of art, may be distinguished, from the first smooth-sliding 
 lines to the volcanic fusion of intractable speech in the 
 language of "Cymbeline." So may a similar thing be ob- 
 served in Browning, or Carlyle, or Tennyson — the mere 
 hand-cunning. And in Shakespeare's temper of mind a 
 change may be observed, plainly enough, in the succes- 
 sive plays, not taken individually, but in their totality. 
 It is the same, essentially, which the great poets exhibit 
 in passing from youth to age; so pathetic in Virgil, so 
 deadly earnest in Dante, so exalted in Milton, so wise in 
 Shakespeare. But to go further than this, and recon- 
 struct the inner life of these men, and especially of him 
 whose gift of taciturnity outrivaled nature's secrecy, is 
 another matter; and for those who do this, and would 
 seem to know Shakespeare better than he knew himself, 
 any one with knowledge of the inner life must have the 
 kind of pity that is akin to contempt. Mr. White had 
 for them unlimited scorn, and poured it forth unceasingly 
 and unsparingly. Those men who assume to know the 
 unsearchable soul of genius, and those who seek to dress 
 
256 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 the writer of pleasant comedies and tragical histories 
 as an avant-courier of Hegelianism, were foes to be put 
 to flight with all his critical weapons if he could compass 
 it. He was a partisan in the conflict, but even when 
 going to great lengths he did good work. To free Shake- 
 speare from his commentators is more of a gain than a 
 loss, for, generally speaking, they are of the sort that 
 darkens counsel. It is possible to look upon their ex- 
 planations of the doctrines of life as unfolded in Shake- 
 speare's plays, and even upon their efforts to reduce his 
 own genius to the familiarity of Rousseau-like autobiog- 
 raphy, with a most tolerant spirit; but blessed is he who 
 finds Shakespeare, though he loses them! 
 
 But did Mr. White find Shakespeare? Did he suc- 
 ceed any better than the victims of his own censure in 
 forming an ideal Shakespeare out of the materials at 
 hand on the "no nonsense" theory? What was his concep- 
 tion of the man? He lost no opportunity of insist- 
 ing that the genius we idolize was a popular London 
 playwright, whose aim was immediately to please the 
 spectators and thereby get money. If he wrote a good 
 acting play that would draw an audience and increase 
 the stock dividends of the managers, he had achieved 
 his whole purpose. In this was included his entire notion 
 of the use of the divine art and of his own life. This is 
 the substance of Mr. White's teaching, reiterated almost 
 to weariness. The theory falls in with the common idea 
 that Shakespeare was a kind of Nature's foundling, to 
 whom benevolent fairies had given the great gifts of 
 wisdom, beauty, and fortune as carelessly as if they 
 were shining pebbles, just as fairies used to do in the 
 old story-books. A few surface facts, principal among 
 them the omission to edit and publish his complete works, 
 
A SHAKESPEAREAN SCHOLAR 257; 
 
 give support to the presumed indifference to fame or 
 ignorance of the transcendent worth of his creations on 
 Shakespeare's part, which is involved in the position. 
 There are ready explanations of the facts referred to, 
 such as the nature of theatrical property in those days,, 
 and the desirability of not publishing the plays in order 
 to monopolize their acting by his own company. Giving 
 due weight to all that Mr. White urges, it seems to us 
 that it has been as dangerous for him to stop at the sur- 
 face of Shakespeare's life as it was for the anatomists to 
 probe the center. In attending to his characterization 
 of the man as a money-getter, one is reminded of the 
 ancient science that discovered in humanity a threefold 
 soul, and one thinks that Mr. White may have found 
 one of these in Shakespeare's case, and has forgotten to 
 look for the other two. In fact, it must be confessed 
 that the editor has sometimes shown a weakness of 
 poetic apprehension — that his Shakespeare is rather an 
 observer of life than a poet. This comes out strikingly 
 in his statement, for example, that Shakespeare most 
 withdraws the veil from his own personality in "Troilus 
 and Cressida," and in the character of Ulysses give ex- 
 pression to his own views of life. This drama is indeed 
 packed with noble phrases and fine wisdom, but if one 
 were to seek for Shakespeare in it, it would better be in 
 the impatience, the undisguised contempt, that the au- 
 thor shows for these wars about the Grecian jade; nor is 
 there more reason to ascribe any special earnestness or 
 directness to the words of the dialogue than in the case 
 of any other of the dramas that allow frequent oppor- 
 tunity for the utterance of universal truths in respect 
 to man's nature or life. Mr. White's use of the play is 
 merely to emphasize his notion that Shakespeare was a 
 
258 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 man of the world exclusively, or at least primarily. This 
 is a cardinal trait of the editor's Shakespeareanism. 
 There is little need for argument. The many phrases 
 of the sonnets which prophesy immortality for the verse 
 are not to be set aside as merely customary at the 
 time, or as applicable only to the more pretentious work 
 (as Mr. White thinks) of the poet as distinct from the 
 dramatist; they have the ring of sincerity too clear for 
 that, the stamp of the mens conscia virtutis which con- 
 verts a boast into the just superscription of Caesar. But 
 apart from all these minor matters of evidence, the 
 world will never believe that the man who knew human 
 life more widely and profoundly than any other mere 
 mortal that ever wrote was ignorant only of himself; 
 or that, with such acquaintance with the noble and ideal 
 ends of life, he contented himself with that one of 
 avarice or of getting on in the world which is held to 
 be among the meanest and most paltry, and which is 
 usually debasing to the higher faculties. Had he been 
 so furnished with insight, imagination, and ideality as 
 he was, so complete in earthly wisdom and so appre- 
 hensive of the excellence of human virtue, and had he, 
 notwithstanding, declined to the level of those who care 
 for their gifts and works only as means of merchandise, 
 he would have been a monstrosity so strange that nature 
 could scarce contain his deformities. This is instinc- 
 tively felt by those whose thoughts keep proportion. In 
 this matter Mr. White exhibited most plainly the limita- 
 tion of his mind. The truth which gives any color 
 to his characterization of Shakespeare may easily be 
 granted, as that he was always mindful of his audience's 
 taste, of stage traditions, of the actual conditions under 
 which he practised his art, and that he made money 
 
A SHAKESPEAREAN SCHOLAR 259 
 
 by his work and was glad to have it, and that he valued 
 social rank and position. The error lies in affirming 
 that this is the whole story; in ignoring the poetic nature, 
 the most self-conscious of all the varieties of tempera- 
 ment; and in passing by all that indicates Shakespeare's 
 regard for his art, even in the chance ways possible, such 
 as his repeated criticism on the abuses of the stage and 
 his great reform in the disposition made of the Fool. 
 In these last it was not the theatrical manager, but the 
 outraged poet, who spoke; his impatient contempt for 
 the laughter of the pit and the rant of the stage, though 
 he yielded to them as much as was needful, is the ob- 
 verse of his love for his art and the value he set upon 
 it. But these hints in regard to the qualities involved 
 in the mere existence of such creative genius, and ex- 
 pressly shown in random flashes of his work, are almost 
 superfluous. Because Shakespeare submitted in his art 
 and worldly life to the conditions imposed on him by 
 fortune, and made that submission the most marvelous 
 triumph of all literature, is not a reason for affirming 
 that he gave his assent to these conditions ; and unless he 
 did so with all his soul, the theory that he cared for 
 nothing except to get rich by catering to the apprentices 
 must fall to the ground. We must stop this side of 
 Mr. White's furthest mark, therefore, and admit only 
 that Shakespeare had the wisdom, as a literary work- 
 man, to take the times as he found them and reduce them 
 to the purposes of great art; and that, Heaven be thanked, 
 he was paid for his laborious industry, and left money 
 to pay his debts and provide for his children. 
 
 To parody the literary proverb, one might say that 
 the defects of Mr. White's Shakespeareanism produced 
 its qualities. In a field so large and various., it may be a 
 
260 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 working advantage to have limitations of outlook and 
 effort, and to take short views. The editor who has once 
 satisfied himself, as did Mr. White, that to build spiritual 
 biography was foolishness and to philosophize about 
 the inner life was futile has greatly simplified his task; 
 and if to this he adds the positive idea that Shake- 
 speare's vision was bounded by the circuit of the London 
 theater, he may well rest contented with the aim of 
 merely restoring the past conditions, and so providing 
 his readers with notes that they can mingle with the 
 crowd at the Globe as with contemporaries. Within 
 these self-imposed bounds the gifts of Mr. White were 
 put to admirable use. In the mere matter of the vo- 
 cabulary, in elucidating or restoring meanings to words, 
 he was a well-informed and trustworthy guide; and how 
 large a portion of his study was philological does not 
 need to be pointed out. Perhaps a more important, be- 
 cause rarer, service was his reconstruction of the orig- 
 inal acting, the mise-en-scene, in which his knowledge of 
 the stage was an efficient aid to his scholarship and in- 
 sight. He laments the break in the theatrical tradition 
 occasioned by the closing of the theaters under the Com- 
 monwealth, because it probably deprived us of Shake- 
 speare's own conception of how the characters should be 
 represented; but his essays upon the acting of Rosalind 
 and of Iago, for example, do more to set the Elizabethan 
 interpretation of the plays before us than anything else 
 with which we are acquainted. In fact, Mr. White's fre- 
 quent criticism on modern impersonations of Shake- 
 speare's characters, by showing how far removed they 
 are from the author's intention, makes a part of his most 
 instructive writings. 
 
 Besides the linguistic and the theatrical strands in 
 
A SHAKESPEAREAN SCHOLAR 261 
 
 the more valuable portion of his work, something is to 
 be said for the critical element in the department of 
 characterization. It was here that the editor was strong- 
 est. The conception of Iago which he develops is as 
 finely reasoned an essay as can be found in the field, 
 and his restoration of Jaques from a melodramatic fool 
 into his original sour cynicism is a piece of retributive 
 justice too long delayed. One has a special gratitude 
 for his penetration into the noble nature of Cassio, who 
 has met with little understanding hitherto, and for the 
 clear and sympathetic discovery of it to his readers. It 
 is when Mr. White applies himself to these subjects that 
 he shows the most valuable individual qualities, and 
 merits honor. They belong, however, to the detailed 
 rather than the general criticism of Shakespeare. In 
 scholarship he was, perhaps, lacking in breadth, and in 
 more than one instance, as in his discussion of the text 
 of the two quartos of "Hamlet," he argues beside the 
 point in dispute. Notwithstanding these things, the real 
 value of Mr. White's Shakespeareanism is not impaired. 
 The literary form and charm of his style, the hard- 
 headedness of his mind, the practical sense he always 
 displays, make his work, within the limitations which 
 he himself assigned it, of great positive utility; and the 
 sturdiness with which he stood for common sense, in 
 opposition to the eulogistic gush with which Shakespeare, 
 in common with all the greatest poets, is overwhelmed, 
 is something to be very grateful for. He had his pet 
 notions, as who has not? and he was a hard hitter — 
 "Let the galled jade wince!" But he spent his life with 
 his favorite author, and made of him his liberal educa- 
 cation ; would that the universities afforded so good a one ! 
 His labor was one of love, and it has the value and respect 
 
262 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 of the best work a man can do, being deficient only 
 where Nature herself had denied faculty, in this case on 
 the poetic side. He has gone over to the shelves of the 
 "great majority" of acknowledged commentators, be- 
 neath the Stratford bust, and with him go the plaudits 
 of true lovers of Shakespeare for such lifelong and honest 
 service to the god of our literary idolatry. 
 
 It is but just to add a few words of acknowledgment 
 for the vigor and brightness shown by Mr. White in his 
 work in other fields. His versatility, information, and 
 industry were very great. He was essentially a littera- 
 teur rather than an author. The keen observant power 
 of his view of English life and manners was really marvel- 
 ous, when one considers his comparatively short resi- 
 dence — or more properly speaking, vacation — in the 
 mother country; and his knowledge of England, as shown 
 in other volumes than those of travel, appears as inti- 
 mate as a native's He possessed, beside this ready 
 apprehension of facts and insight into human nature, 
 some of the qualities of the transplanted stock from which 
 he sprang, and showed them in the patience and frugal 
 independence of a self-respecting life, which may well 
 serve as a lesson in simplicity and dignity to the rapidly 
 increasing class of writers who make minor literature 
 their profession. The lack of tolerance which he some- 
 times exhibited was not that of an unamiable but of a 
 strong nature; and the insistence on some opinions which 
 he seems to have regarded as his private property was 
 the common foible of students. On the other hand, 
 genuine heartiness and an inbred courtesy may be easily 
 discerned beneath his literary exterior. 
 
COLONIAL BOOKS 
 
 The first three volumes of Stedman's "Library of 
 American Literature" cover the colonial and revolutionary 
 times down to the adoption of the Constitution. It may 
 seem surprising that three large quarto volumes were 
 required to hold what is worth preservation in a period 
 usually regarded as barren, in a literary sense; but 
 the editors interpreted the term "literature" in a liberal 
 way, and meant to present in this collection a view of 
 the intellectual life in the colonies, and later in the States 
 of the Union, without too strict a regard to that quality 
 of form and style which makes literature classic. The 
 colonial writings are for the most part interesting on 
 historical grounds: they consist of chronicles, diaries of 
 adventure, and all kinds of sermonizing; and undoubt- 
 edly, as a whole, they are very tedious, more fit for the 
 leisure of our state historical societies in their proceed- 
 ings than for general reading. The impression that there 
 is so little of real value in the colonial literature that it 
 is not worth while to search for it is widespread; and 
 in a certain sense this is true. In those days literature 
 was not practiced as a fine art in this country. The 
 books that were written, however, came very near to the 
 real life of the people, reflected their thoughts and their 
 doings with truthfulness, if not with beauty, and consti- 
 tute the record of the settlement. Literature was at all 
 events a practical art. There was as much life in ser- 
 mons then as there is in newspapers now; and in the 
 
 263 
 
264 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 tragedies of the wilderness, in shipwreck, Indian battle, 
 and pirate-hunting, in Quakerism and witchcraft, there 
 was that union of romance and reality which gives to 
 history the liveliness of fiction. One who is unacquainted 
 with the stores of our historical societies would turn these 
 pages with surprise at their riches. The first volume 
 is the American Hakluyt. Here is a chapter out of 
 that voyaging which was opening the whole western 
 world, and to us the most interesting of all because it 
 contains the adventures of the American coast; it is 
 read, too, as it came from the lips of the men who were 
 themselves chief actors in the scene, direct in speech 
 as they were sturdy in deed. There is no art in the 
 saying of their words, but the pulse of the action is still 
 to be felt in their narratives; the story is yet warm with 
 memory of joys and sorrows, the ipsissima verba of cast- 
 aways rescued against hope. One who would obtain 
 a vivid impression of what planting the wilderness was 
 could not do better than read these pages, in which ad- 
 mirable selection has brought together the best of these 
 living narratives; and as he continues, he will find the 
 entire life of the colonies, their hopes, beliefs, and cus- 
 toms, their perils and their deliverances, opening under 
 his view. The collection in the first three volumes is an 
 illustration, better than any history, of the first hundred 
 and fifty years of English life on this continent. 
 
 A considerable part of the material is necessarily 
 familiar, inasmuch as the more important events in his- 
 tory and the more striking incidents in personal adven- 
 ture are natural subjects for editorial selection; but these 
 are told from the original sources. It is unavoidable, 
 too, that the colonies of Virginia and of New England, 
 especially the latter, should occupy a disproportionate 
 
COLONIAL BOOKS 265 
 
 place, because their inhabitants left more written records 
 of themselves and came more into the ken of travelers. 
 Intellectual life was more vigorous among the Puritans 
 of the Bay than elsewhere, and the whole social system 
 felt its stimulus. From the other parts of the country 
 comes little else than descriptions of places, anecdotes 
 of warfare, and a few characterizations of men, together 
 with the famous shipwreck of Sir Thomas Gates off the 
 Bermudas, and the dolorous narrative of Colonel Nor- 
 wood's voyage and sufferings in Virginia, which is as 
 fine a story of adventure as the chronicles contain, and 
 is told in a manner to delight Kingsley or Thackeray. 
 One gets also, a glimpse of the Southern pirates, but 
 no more. Similarly, the collection affords only a slight 
 account of New York, a bird's-eye view of the trading 
 village, and a glance at its city politics, disturbed even 
 at that early day. It is New England that furnishes 
 the bulk of the matter which has come down to us, from 
 the internal troubles of the Leyden church, the landing 
 at Plymouth, the coming of Endicott, Morton of Merry- 
 mount, the hiding of the king's judges, down through 
 Quakerism and witchcraft, French and Indian wars, to 
 the defiance of Adams and Otis. This was a most inter- 
 esting period, with changes and incidents in plenty, 
 with solid characters for counsel and action, and with 
 one of the most remarkable communities of the world 
 to mold and develop. The editor's skill in so choosing 
 extracts from the mass of forgotten writings as to place 
 before us the traits of the people is a very fortunate gift. 
 It is especially matter for congratulation that he has 
 taken from the ecclesiastical record so many character- 
 izations of the leading Puritan ministers, such as Hooker, 
 Shepard, Cotton, Eliot, the Mathers, and also of some 
 
266 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 of their wives. Of the theology of the time, he gives 
 no more of the blazing kind than is needful to a full 
 idea of the sermons of the divines, while of other extracts 
 there are enough to show that if the people thought 
 much upon the wrath to come, they also sought pious 
 and godly living. Perhaps the most curious theological 
 examples are the denunciations launched by the Quakers 
 at Endicott and his fellows, in the style of the Hebrew 
 prophets: "Woe, woe to thee, thou bloody town of Boston, 
 and the rest that are confederate with thee, and it thou 
 canst not escape — thou who hast shed the blood of the 
 innocent people called Quakers, and imprisoned and 
 fined them, and taken away their goods, and they have 
 become a prey unto thee, for thee to exercise thy cruelty 
 upon them; and thou boasts in thy wickedness, and 
 'thinks thou dost God good service to brand and put 
 to death' the people called Quakers. Verily this is the 
 thoughts and intents of the hearts of many of you in 
 New England; but especially within thee, and within thy 
 jurisdiction that belongs to thee, O thou town of Boston!" 
 Of this kind of jeremiad there is a considerable amount, 
 but the extract is interesting as an example of that com- 
 mand of Biblical style to which much of the earlier 
 volumes owe what literary merit they contain. The 
 Scripture, from the time that the Bible was a new book 
 in England, was almost an English dialect; and in these 
 divines of New England one sees how invigorating it was. 
 Undoubtedly it encouraged the exhortatory style of 
 harangue, but it gave force to the utterance of the mind, 
 and from a literary point of view great influence is to be 
 ascribed to it. Wherever the style rises and becomes 
 fervid, one easily perceives the study of the Bible; intel- 
 lectual passion, high feeling of all kinds, took on this 
 
COLONIAL BOOKS 267 
 
 Scriptural expression; it was the poetry, the highest form 
 of impassioned speech, of the period. Even in descrip- 
 tions one sees its dominating influence. It is not the 
 mosaic of Biblical words that is referred to, but the 
 very spirit of the orator who pours them forth. Here is 
 an admirable instance of the manner of it; and a more 
 vigorous picture of battle, one more abundant in the 
 ancient English force, could hardly be found. It is from 
 the pen of William Hooke. 
 
 "Here ride some dead men swagging in their deep 
 saddles; there fall others alive upon their dead horses; 
 death sends a message to those from the mouth of the 
 muskets; these it talks with face to face, and stabs 
 them in the fifth rib. In yonder file there is a man 
 hath his arms struck off from his shoulder, another by 
 him hath lost his leg; here stands a soldier with half a 
 face, there fights another upon his stumps, and at once 
 both kills and is killed; not far off lies a company wal- 
 lowing in their sweat and gore; such a man whilst he 
 chargeth his musket is discharged of his life, and falls 
 upon his dead fellow. Every battle of the warrior is 
 with confused noise and garments rolled in blood. Death 
 reigns in the field, and is sure to have the day, which 
 side soever falls. In the mean while (O formidable!) 
 the infernal fiends follow the camp to catch after the 
 souls of rude nefarious soldiers (such as are commonly 
 men of that calling), who fight themselves fearlessly into 
 the mouth of hell for revenge, a booty, or a little revenue. 
 How thick and threefold do they speed one another to 
 destruction! A day of battle is a day of harvest for 
 the devil." 
 
 Such an extract is sufficient to show that these pages 
 are not without masterly style. It is interesting to ob- 
 
268 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 serve, too, in these theological portions the efforts of 
 the imaginative faculties of the mind to make themselves 
 felt, in parable and fancied dialogue, and here and there 
 one comes on that not unfrequent union of the actor and 
 the preacher which was offensive to the usually grave 
 and serious ways of the Puritan pulpit. There was one 
 preacher who enacted Christ's agony and impersonated 
 God dropping sinners into the pit. Perhaps long dis- 
 courses encouraged such sporadic attempts at variety. 
 
 Outside of this infusion of the noble language of 
 Scripture into style, there is little for the literary critic 
 to notice. In the minds of the writers one perceives 
 no great distinction, no remarkable individual gifts. It 
 is plain that piety and strength of character must have 
 sustained intellectual power in these leaders of the com- 
 munity. Jonathan Edwards was the sole example of a 
 mind of the first order in the colonies, and his meta- 
 physical analysis and closeness of logic stand by them- 
 selves, apart from all else in the collection; for though 
 Bishop Berkeley is included as a contributor to Ameri- 
 can literature, and some pages of Berkeleyism are 
 interpolated, the mind refuses to regard him as other 
 than an Englishman of the mother country. John 
 Norton, also, occupies a solitary niche, with his style 
 deeply imbued with classical example and studded with 
 the names and maxims of the ancients. He alone shows 
 the powerful influence of the old collegiate learning; 
 nor did he emulate the example of Cotton, whom he 
 eulogizes as "savoring more of the cross of Christ than 
 of human learning." In him alone are those mingled 
 strains of pagan learning and Puritanism which were most 
 happily blended in Milton. The other noted ministers 
 of the early colonists have a family resemblance, and 
 
COLONIAL BOOKS 269 
 
 their memory, as here shown, exemplifies the common 
 ideal of the "godly men" who planted the church in the 
 new soil. 
 
 In the broad view which such a collection as this 
 gives, one trait in the public spirit of the colonists stands 
 out prominently with equal eminence in both the lay and 
 clerical authors, in New England and in Virginia. There 
 were carpers, of course, restless spirits, adventurers of 
 all sorts, who had fault to find, who felt irked by re- 
 straint, and would have produced some Gonzalo's com- 
 monwealth. But, commonly speaking, they looked upon 
 this country, this wilderness as they called it, as a para- 
 dise, a land of promise and plenty, where the poor people 
 of the Old World could begin life anew. The terms in 
 which they describe the fertility of the land, the ex- 
 cellence of the climate, the speed with which comfort 
 was obtained, all the advantages of material prosperity, 
 are identical with those now associated in our minds 
 with the new West. Kansas and Nebraska were not 
 praised more in their day, nor was the opportunity the 
 West offers for the poor to build homes of plenty more 
 persistently and glowingly put forth than is the lot of 
 the planter and the colonist subject for congratulation 
 in many of these extracts. It is true there were Indians, 
 but, generally speaking, the Indians were kind friends to 
 the first comers; there were shipwrecks, such as that 
 marvelous one of Thacher and Avery on their August 
 voyage from Ipswich to Marblehead, which gave the 
 name to Thacher's Island, but such perils were excep- 
 tional. The well-being of the people at large was greater 
 than in the mother country; they were full of hope and 
 energy, and rapidly developed that versatility in ex- 
 pedients and keenness in acquiring wealth which were to 
 
270 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 be the great traits of their descendants. They prized, 
 too, from an early date, their liberties. These were 
 never left unmentioned in the enumeration of their 
 blessings. Nor was it many years before they were 
 proud of their achievements, like a Western community; 
 only that they were more prone to see the hand of God 
 in it, and to look on themselves as God's people, of whom 
 he had a special care. This was true more particularly 
 of New England. The heresies that arose among them 
 are a proof of the free action of their minds. The perse- 
 cution of the dissenters, of Anne Hutchinson and Roger 
 Williams, and the delusion of the Salem witchcraft have 
 been made much of; but however lamentable these seem 
 now, in a different age and a more settled society, they 
 were then looked on as religious disorders of the same 
 nature, relative to the commonwealth, as were the doings 
 of Morton at Merrymount in a secular way. The Puri- 
 tans believed in government, and had the English sense 
 for it, and they valued their liberties likewise in an 
 English temper. When the most has been charged 
 against them, there remains the state they founded, with 
 the public spirit that grew up with it; and the fact that 
 from the first they nursed this high hope of their for- 
 tunes, looked on the land as their own and believed in 
 it, and regarded their prosperity in a free condition as 
 God's dealing with them was one fundamental ground 
 underlying the entire revolutionary period. The Revo- 
 lution was ingrained in them by their birth as citizens of 
 the New World. 
 
 This is one reason why in the third volume of the 
 work there is no break in the continuity of the Puritan 
 spirit. A new political question had arisen, and men in 
 secular life were called to the front by it, but the tern- 
 
COLONIAL BOOKS 271 
 
 perament of the people as expressed in the new voices 
 was the same. Society had grown more varied, and 
 commerce and law were coming into rivalry with the 
 pulpit; yet the mental tone is still one of sobriety, dig- 
 nity, and a fervor which did not pass into unreason. At 
 the beginning of this volume stands Franklin, and nearly 
 all the men of the Revolution appear before the end is 
 reached. The change that is noticed is a great one. 
 One feels that the colonies, in obtaining independence, 
 have passed into the state of a true nation. Washing- 
 ton's "Farewell Address" is here, and more than the 
 "Declaration" itself, which is also here, those words of 
 Washington signal a new era. Jefferson, Adams, Madi- 
 son, Patrick Henry's famous speech, Paine, and Otis 
 admonish the reader that the question is no longer of 
 sea or land adventures, of Berkeley's or Edwards's 
 theories, of Cambridge or Saybrook platforms, but of 
 those broad matters which concern the founding of a 
 stable state. This volume is necessarily largely polit- 
 ical, and yet the selection here has also been excellently 
 made, and the nature of the contents lightened by intro- 
 ducing many letters of our public men. Even here one 
 does not come into the view of literature, in the ordi- 
 nary sense. The editor has done his best by the poets 
 and poetesses, but without any success in restoring to 
 them any of their contemporary luster, such as it was. 
 In the earlier volumes there were a few verses, all that 
 could possibly be called into service ; in this volume there 
 are many, and those which illustrate the popular songs 
 of the Revolution well deserve such remembrance as is 
 given them ; but even with Freneau, the first name which 
 yet retains a lingering reputation in the world, he cannot 
 persuade us that Poetry had yet come to the shores which 
 
272 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 Berkeley and Herbert had prophesied should be her 
 chosen seat. There is only one copy of verses, by a 
 youth who died at twenty-two, and left this pathetic waif 
 of pleasantry behind him, which has a spark of nature 
 in it, and with it the volume ends. 
 
 These volumes are an excellent and convenient 
 resume of all writings which by a liberal use of the word 
 can be called American, for the first century and a half 
 after the settlement. The extracts afford a complete and 
 abundant view of this literature in travel, history, anec- 
 dote, theology, politics, and versifying; and the passages 
 chosen are such as illustrate in the most instructive and 
 entertaining way the habits and customs, the modes of 
 thought, the lives, and the public spirit of the people, 
 so far as any record of them survives. Many of the 
 originals from which these extracts are made are rare 
 or difficult of access, and many of them also are such 
 that even a patient reader would never hunt out their 
 contents. The editor claims that the "first two volumes 
 contain a more select and compact representation of the 
 writings of our colonial divines than has before been 
 attempted." Certainly these two volumes serve the 
 purpose of exhibiting the general character of the Puri- 
 tan mind in New England admirably, and the justice 
 with which a somewhat delicate task has been discharged 
 is notable. There are few persons whom it is easier to 
 misrepresent than those divines of the old stock; but as 
 they are illustrated here by their own words, they really 
 seem to live and speak in their proper persons. As much 
 can be said, too, for the sufficiency of the tales of per- 
 sonal adventure, of Indian warfare, and of the disturbers 
 of the colonies. In the third volume, which summarizes 
 the growth and progress of the ideas of the Revolution 
 
COLONIAL BOOKS 273 
 
 and contains its greatest state papers, one feels that only 
 a part of that large mass of admirable political speech 
 and discussion is given; but the best of it has been in- 
 cluded, and so as to reflect in a lively way the times 
 and the men. 
 
CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN 
 
 The novels of Charles Brockden Brown possess only 
 an historical interest. He was the first to write Ameri- 
 can fiction, and his works had the good fortune to please 
 in London before the time of Jane Austen and Sir Walter 
 Scott; he came, too, in the period after Mrs. Radcliffe 
 and Monk Lewis, and had his genius been stronger he 
 might have had the distinction of being remembered as 
 the representative of the change of the novel from the 
 wildly romantic into a more natural type. He stands 
 just at that point of development, but he had not force 
 or character enough to rise to a position in literature 
 which should command attention beyond his own genera- 
 tion. He was born in Philadelphia. With an original 
 taste for letters, a vigorous imagination, and a wide 
 curiosity for knowledge of all kinds, a literary profession 
 was inevitable. He tried his hand at law, but abandoned 
 the study after a brief experience of it, and gave his 
 mind to the moral and political speculation then rife, 
 to the manners and customs of nations, to history, and 
 to the individuals whom he created in imagination, and 
 sent on their travels. He wrote several novels, and left 
 fragments of others. His political pamphlets, and the 
 "European and American Annals" which he wrote for the 
 American Register from 1806 to 1809, are of solid worth, 
 but are not included in his works. He died in 1810, 
 at the age of thirty-nine. 
 
 This short biography is all the preface needed by one 
 
 275 
 
276 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 who reads his writings, and it might easily be dispensed 
 with. It is not his life, which was not remarkable, but 
 his position, that throws light upon his novels. He was 
 in his time a reforming novelist. For one thing, he 
 thought it was the part of an American to use those 
 "sources of amusement to the fancy and instruction to 
 the heart that are peculiar to ourselves," and which he 
 declares "are equally numerous and inexhaustible." He 
 announced his purpose "to profit by some of these 
 sources," and in "Edgar Huntley" he tried to "exhibit 
 a series of adventures growing out of the condition of 
 our country, and connected with one of the most com- 
 mon and wonderful diseases or affections of the human 
 frame." Here we have the two characteristics which 
 are aimed at now by every tyro, truth in local color and 
 in the facts of science. That he understood himself to 
 be an innovator may be easily gathered from his frank 
 assertion of his "one merit — that of calling forth the 
 passion and engaging the sympathy of the reader 
 by means hitherto unemployed by preceding authors. 
 Puerile superstition and exploded manners, Gothic castles 
 and chimeras, are the materials usually employed 
 for this end." He for his part was going to deal with 
 facts. He was, in a word, a realist. But who would 
 have guessed it, if he had not published the notice in 
 his preface? To what "facts" did he have recourse to ex- 
 terminate and supplant those "Gothic castles and 
 chimeras" with which Mrs. Radcliffe and Monk Lewis, 
 in the van of good Sir Walter, had occupied the ground 
 of romance? To what field of the conflict, to what stage 
 of the comedy, would he direct attention, that his readers 
 might no more be cheated and fooled with entertainment 
 afforded by "puerile superstition and exploded manners"?. 
 
CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN 277 
 
 Why, ventriloquism, and sleep-walking, and the wild 
 red Indian! There is something humorous in this issue 
 of the first realistic reformer, for one cannot doubt that 
 he took himself seriously. To a later generation, 
 Brown's heroes and heroines are very far from any 
 humanity that rides in our street-cars; they seem little 
 more credible than the Nun and the Gallant they were 
 to do away with; his tales are wildly improbable, more 
 impossible than ghosts by as much as one lays aside 
 incredulity in reading of "Gothic castles." The realist 
 of to-day must peruse these novels with much mirth, if 
 he judges them by the style of to-day in men, and things, 
 and fiction. 
 
 It is hardly possible to give a true impression of the 
 general character of Brown's six novels to one who has 
 not read one or two of them, at least. They are with- 
 out unity of design; there are several stories which 
 interweave with one another in the same tale, but they 
 are not correlated among themselves; the main narra- 
 tive is not so much broken by episodes, but rather is 
 itself a succession of slightly connected events and differ- 
 ent family histories; the method, generally speaking, is 
 like that of the novel of adventure, in which it is not 
 the dramatic plot, but the exciting stages of a much- 
 checkered career, that holds the attention. The better 
 ones of the series, "Wieland," "Arthur Mervyn," and 
 "Edgar Huntley," have some special feature, it is true. 
 In one the mystery of the story is in ventriloquism, in 
 another somnambulism; and the idea of supplanting 
 supernatural by physical and quasi-scientific mystery 
 was an original and useful one, fruitful still in our own 
 days. In others the scenes of the yellow-fever epidemic 
 in New York and Philadelphia, of which Brown had 
 
278 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 himself been a witness, afford the realistic element, and 
 these are much the best done of anything from his pen; 
 but here, too, it is to be observed that he discarded the 
 supernatural only to hold fast to the exceptional. In the 
 sphere of character and action he was still under the 
 shadow of the old castle; the spectacular has given place 
 to the sensational, but in the bosoms of Constantia and 
 Jane, of Wieland and Ormond and Sarsefield, reigns the 
 very breath of romantic passion, and adventure is the 
 genius of their careers. As for the language in which 
 they address one another, it was never heard off 
 the stage of melodrama; they enter and strike attitudes 
 and have their say; one would as soon think of interrupt- 
 ing a set piece of fireworks as their speeches. The style, 
 too, is, beyond concealment, tedious. The truth is, these 
 novels are as much gone by as the Algerian pirates, with 
 whom they were contemporary; even Mrs. Radcliffe and 
 Monk Lewis have kept better pace with the modern 
 reader than has Brown. 
 
 Yet, historically, he is curiously interesting. His 
 pages reflect both a state of mind and a mood of imagi- 
 nation in which he shared only as a member of a larger 
 world of men, some of whom were destined to a better 
 fortune. It is not only the literary reformer who is 
 found in the gallery of forgotten things; the portrait of 
 the social innovator is as commonly to be met with there; 
 and in Brown we find the stamp and impress of one of 
 the most noted in his day and most obscure in ours — 
 the philosopher William Godwin. Brown was familiar 
 with his writings, as not long ago young men were with 
 John Stuart Mill's. One reads between the lines in these 
 tales the theory and maxims and speculation to which 
 Godwin gave currency. In "J ane Talbot," the hero of 
 
CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN 279 
 
 the story is the typical young man with dangerous ideas 
 — or he has that reputation in the ears of the world, 
 and particularly of the mother of the young lady he 
 would marry. Here is a sketch of the abandoned youth 
 of the first days of the century. 
 
 "A most fascinating book fell at length into his hands, 
 which changed in a moment the whole course of his ideas. 
 What he had before regarded with reluctance and terror, 
 this book taught him to admire and love. The writer 
 has the art of the grand deceiver — the fatal art of 
 carrying the worst poison under the name and appear- 
 ance of wholesome food; of disguising all that is impious, 
 or blasphemous, or licentious, under the guise and sanc- 
 tions of virtue. Colden had lived before this without 
 examination or inquiry. His heart, his inclination, was 
 perhaps on the side of religion and true virtue; but this 
 book carried all his inclination, his zeal, and his enthu- 
 siasm over to the adversary; and so strangely had he 
 been perverted that he held himself bound, he conceived 
 it to be his duty, to vindicate in private and public, to 
 preach with vehemence, his new faith. The rage for 
 making converts seized him." 
 
 In this strain the mother writes to her daughter of 
 Godwin's "Political Justice." The vigor of his influence 
 must have been considerable in the community, his name 
 must have been a standing target in society, when he was 
 invoked by a novelist to create the character of such a 
 man as Colden, even by rumor; and the fact that Colden 
 is a blameless person, quite in the style of the virtuous 
 and rather colorless philanthropist, which was then one 
 of the ideals set up for youth, ought perhaps to indicate 
 that Brown himself, who had speculated on the forbidden 
 topic of the marriage relation, was not unscathed by the 
 
280 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 malign influence, though his character remained un- 
 harmed. As reminiscences, in imaginative literature, of 
 the philosophizing temper of the year 1800, all such pas- 
 sages are worth remark. 
 
 There is, too, in the novels a pervading conception of 
 man as a creature of dark passions, which, had Brown 
 written a score of years later, would have been called 
 Byronic. Byron did not so much invent Byronism as 
 clothe this type of passion with a power and lift it to 
 a height that made it his own creation in literature; and 
 it happened fortunately for his fame that he in his own 
 person embodied it for the imagination of his contempo- 
 raries. But premonitions of Byronism, and even in- 
 complete prototypes of it, are to be found before his day; 
 and in Brown's novels there are several such passages." 
 Take this characterization: — 
 
 "A youth of eighteen, a volunteer in a Russian army 
 encamped in Bessarabia, made prey of a Tartar girl, 
 found in the field of a recent battle. Conducting her 
 to his quarters, he met a friend, who, on some pretense, 
 claimed the victim. From angry words they betook 
 themselves to swords. A combat ensued, in which the 
 first claimant ran his antogonist through the body. He 
 then bore his prize unmolested away, and, having exer- 
 cised brutality of one kind upon the helpless victim, 
 stabbed her to the heart, as an offering to the manes of 
 Sarsefield, the friend whom he had slain. Next morning, 
 willing more signally to expiate his guilt, he rushed alone 
 upon a troop of Turkish foragers, and brought away five 
 heads, suspended by their gory locks to his horse's mane. 
 These he threw upon the grave of Sarsefield, and con- 
 ceived himself fully to have expiated yesterday's offense. 
 In reward for his prowess, the general gave him a 
 
CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN 281 
 
 commission in the Cossack troops. This youth was 
 Ormond." 
 
 Crude, brutal, coarsely laid on, it is; but Ormond — 
 and we may say that his later career was all of a piece 
 with this trifling anecdote of his teens — as essentially 
 an earlier Lara. The entire atmosphere of "Ormond," 
 which is a novel of violent passion and detestable wicked- 
 ness, is pre-Byronic; and Brown's imagination, or his 
 note-book from historical reading, was inexhaustibly 
 fertile of the sort of incident instanced by the quotation 
 above. The despised masters and mistresses of "puerile 
 superstition" did not sup on horrors in more courses. 
 
 It is not with Byron, however, but with Shelley, that 
 Brown's name is lastingly associated. Shelley, whose own 
 early romances in the German style remain to bear wit- 
 ness to his first taste in fiction had just the right opinions 
 and emotions to live in sympathizing imagination the lives 
 of some of Brown's heroes, for at some points they 
 touched his own career nearly. That passage which 
 draws Colden's character, already quoted, might have 
 been actually written of Shelley by some of his family 
 detractors; he might have sat for the portrait of Col- 
 den as the latter is represented by his friends, also. 
 More than once, in the other novels, one comes on senti- 
 ments, personal situations, and ideals of conduct through 
 which one feels at once, if he is on the watch, the pulse 
 of Shelley beating as he reads. For example, it is one 
 of Brown's distinctions that his pages are devoted, when- 
 ever they touch on female character, to the advocacy of 
 the right of woman to equal education, and to a position 
 of equal dignity intellectually, with man. Brown ap- 
 pears to have been familiar with Mary Wollstonecraft's 
 writings on the subject, and to have adopted her views 
 
282 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 so far, at least, as the mental training of woman is con- 
 cerned. The reiteration of this doctrine, both openly 
 in the author's discourse, and indirectly in the conversa- 
 tion of the characters, was enough of itself to win Shel- 
 ley's adherence. On the imaginative side, Brown 
 touched him also in the marrow; for Shelley's tempera- 
 ment, being extravagantly romantic in his nonage, was 
 the local habitation in which Ormonds and Sarsefields 
 and their tribe thrive. Ventriloquism and somnambulism, 
 in their turn, were the kind of science Shelley studied; he 
 perhaps pursued chemistry as much with the hope of 
 raising a ghost as from any other motive; science to 
 him was only another form of that marvel which he 
 first found in the supernatural. In the poet's works, per- 
 haps the name Constantia, in the lyric "To Constantia 
 Singing," was taken from the novel of "Ormond"; but 
 further than that nothing is traceable. 
 
 These are the principal points of Brown's historical 
 interest. As a precursor of Cooper, or Hawthorne, or 
 Poe, a position that has been claimed for him, he cannot 
 be regarded; the analogy between their works and his 
 is of the slightest. He was a romancer of the old kind, 
 although he made efforts in the direction of realism; 
 he has no art; he is awkward, long-winded, and melo- 
 dramatic, interested almost wholly in adventure, and 
 save for the accident of coming first and being a Phila- 
 delphian would be without note. 
 
LUCY LARCOM 
 
 A MEMORIAL ADDRESS BEFORE THE BEVERLY 
 HISTORICAL SOCIETY 
 
 The memory of Lucy Larcom extends beyond her vil- 
 lage-borders, and is familiar in many families of her own 
 country as well as in some English homes. It was her 
 fortune to touch many lives, and the touch was not easily 
 to be forgotten. As a teacher, she had personal power; 
 as a writer, she had companionableness ; and, in the 
 closer relations of life, especially in friendship, she exer- 
 cised that intimate influence which is a peculiar gift and 
 belongs to temperament. The recognition she received 
 was, for these reasons, largely personal and friendly, and 
 it was natural that upon her death, those who valued her 
 as a part of their own lives, should gather, as they did 
 in one and another place, to hold memorial services; but 
 it belongs to our own community, of which she made one, 
 to give in a marked way public tribute to her life and 
 work, and to say that parting word of honor which is due 
 on the cessation of such a life, now finished, as it was 
 lived, in our midst. Of that life on its more personal 
 side I leave her biographer to speak ; to us, who were her 
 neighbors, her personality was near and close; but to 
 others she was an author; and for them, who are the 
 greater number, her memory must abide mainly in her 
 books ; and it is with these — their character and mean- 
 ing — that it falls to me to deal, seeking thus to show 
 
 283 
 
284 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 more clearly the value of her life, the nature of her work, 
 and the influence that now survives after her labor is 
 done. 
 
 Literature, in its pure form, is nothing but expres- 
 sion — the expression of life; in proportion as a writer's 
 experience embraces that of his own community, his 
 people and country, what he writes becomes the expres- 
 sion of the common life of all, and is therefore of interest 
 to all; and so, in ever widening scope, as the horizons of 
 knowledge and sympathy extend, literature becomes the 
 voice of a community, a nation, or, in the greatest in- 
 stances, of mankind. Lucy Larcom was not in this sense 
 a great writer, but she gave utterance to the common 
 feelings and thoughts, and especially the habitual ideals 
 of the people among whom she was reared; and, in a 
 peculiar way, she expressed New England womanhood, 
 and, in her own person, stood for it, as one of its strong 
 and characteristic types. She wrote, so to speak, from 
 the soil in which she was rooted, — from the things she 
 saw, heard and felt, just as others about her might do, 
 out of her own sensations and emotions, out of her own 
 life. Whoever has read her verses in connection with her 
 "New England Girlhood," must have observed how many 
 of her poems were memories of childhood in the town 
 whose child-world she describes. Here she was born and 
 grew up, differing from her companions, perhaps, by a 
 greater openness to the world without, and by a more 
 thoughtful intimacy with the world within, and especially 
 by having the native gift to write. She had the same 
 education as others; and the round of her days was that 
 of the whole village, lying drowsily, as she describes it, 
 between the ocean and the river, with storms in winter 
 and flowers in summer, and no events except the arrival 
 
LUCY LARCOM 285 
 
 of the stage, the home-coming of the seafaring people, 
 and the weekly sermon. It was a child's world that she 
 thus remembered; but there were elements in it that sank, 
 deep as life, into her being, that mastered her will, and 
 entered, as an inward spirit, into her hopes and labors. 
 There the needle was magnetized and the pole of her life 
 determined while, unaware, she noticed only the tides 
 washing in, the ebb and flow of the seasons of the year, 
 and the aged faces about her. From what secret of birth 
 or by what cunning of nature the poetic impulse has its 
 source, none can tell; but it is easy to discern upon what 
 it is nourished, and there were about her girlhood ele- 
 ments sufficient to wake the germ and sustain its life; and 
 these, as rarely happens, were to be continuous in her 
 thoughts and feelings. 
 
 In Lucy Larcom's verse there were three such prin- 
 ciples, formative and supporting, which governed her 
 from the beginning of her conscious life. The first was 
 the power of the sea. It has been long observed that the 
 poetry of the world has been made by the great sea na- 
 tions, Greece, Italy and England, and there is something 
 in the ocean more, perhaps, than in any other great 
 natural feature that stirs the imagination and generates 
 these vague moods that belong to the poetic tempera- 
 ment. But without going too far to find what lies near 
 at hand, it is plain that the ocean brought to the girlhood 
 of Lucy Larcom the first impression of the changeful 
 beauty and vast power of nature, the first horizon of 
 romantic and dreamy suggestion, and the first touch of 
 mysterious fate. The lives of the people were blended 
 with it, and the town took color and character from it. 
 She herself speaks of the waifs and strays of foreign 
 lands that gave picturesqueness to the streets, of the 
 
286 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 voyages always on the lips of the living, and of the watch- 
 ing and waiting in the homes along the road and the lanes 
 — "hardly a house but had its sorrow of one who went 
 and came not back." It was the same experience that 
 Longfellow recalled from his boyhood farther down the 
 coast: — 
 
 "I remember the black wharves and the slips, 
 And the sea-tides tossing free, 
 And Spanish sailors with bearded lips, 
 And the beauty and mystery of the ships, 
 And the magic of the sea." 
 
 And she saw it always, gleaming and restless and voice- 
 ful — and she dreaded it. There is no love for the sea 
 in her poems. The two best-known, the companion 
 pieces, "Hannah" and "Skipper Ben," are sea-tragedies. 
 The best single poem, as I think, — at least of this 
 class — "A Sea Glimpse" — is a land-piece, in which the 
 girl, looking out for her lover, occupies the foreground 
 relieved against the harbor-sky; it embodies the joy of 
 danger passed. The stanzas that describe "the two pale 
 sisters" of Baker's Island lights, exhaust the imagery of 
 guardianship against a perilous and betraying enemy 
 which lies in wait for prey. In every instance, nearly, 
 the sea is an object of fear; and even the boat, wreathed 
 with bittersweet, dropping along the ledges and the 
 sands, keeps well in-shore, with a shudder at last — 
 
 "Anchored in the dusk, a spell 
 From the folds of twilight fell 
 On the bay's black, star-strewn floor; 
 Awe, with that weird glitter crept 
 Shuddering through our thoughts; we stept 
 Gladly on firm land once more." 
 
LUCY LARCOM 287 
 
 This is her mood — one of dread. Afterwards, when 
 she had begun to go away from the sea-side, she acknowl- 
 edged frankly that she preferred the scenery and com- 
 panionship of the mountains, and with them she often 
 spent her summers. But the mountains were to her a 
 kind of spiritual landscape, nigh to heaven and kindred 
 with an aspiring life; they never had, however, the hu- 
 man power of the ocean, never touched the common life 
 so intimately and participated in it, for good or ill. The 
 proof is that the mountains gave her no such poems as 
 the "Wild Roses of Cape Ann." She saw the prairie, too, 
 and lived on it, but she never won its secret. None of 
 the poems are so outward — so of the eye, merely — as 
 those in which she describes it, though she gives a few 
 well-rendered bits, in "Elsie in Illinois": — 
 
 "Garden without path or fence, 
 Rolling up its billowy bloom 
 To her low, one-windowed room." 
 
 or, better still, the lines describing the husband coming 
 home — 
 
 "Coming with the evening sky, — 
 Through the prairie, through the sky, — 
 Each as from eternity." 
 
 There is the spaciousness of the prairie and its near- 
 ness to the sky in that; but such touches are rare. So 
 far as nature was concerned, she must be thought of as 
 living between the two horizons of the mountains north- 
 ward and the sea eastward, with a glimpse of the Merri- 
 mac between. In rendering the outward aspects of this 
 region she is at home, and she describes with equal power 
 the two great features of the scene, with more delicacy 
 than strength, but often with great beauty of atmosphere. 
 
288 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 The second principle, that governed in her work, was 
 sympathy with humble life. She was born of the people 
 and she remained one of them. She worked for her living, 
 first at Lowell, and though mill-life in those days seems 
 like an anticipation of girls' colleges, still it was mill- 
 life — work among the machines for a daily wage, and, 
 throughout her life, she worked, as a teacher at school 
 and then among her books as a writer ; and it was always 
 a frugal living that she earned, without superfluity, com- 
 pelling simplicity in all things — the life of the common 
 New England people. But such a life, humble and modest, 
 has a saving grace, and of it she reaped the full benefi- 
 cence. It breeds respect for others, and self-respect. It 
 constitutes a bond with simple human lives, with the 
 mass, by means of which sympathy expands and the 
 knowledge of what is fundamental in worth grows plain. 
 To be so near to others brings both opportunity and 
 power of service; and Lucy Larcom, merely because she 
 was one in this large community, won all the influence 
 she ever had. Merely as an example, she affected many 
 lives. It is impossible to conjecture how many a working 
 girl, learning of her, has derived moral strength and 
 mental impulse, and also patience, simply because such 
 circumstances had once been shared by a woman who 
 showed to all that womanhood was neither hurt in its 
 finer qualities nor cheapened in others' eyes by such a 
 life. Her poems, especially devoted to the praise of the 
 working life, are not the most successful, but their sp. it 
 is democratic and inspiriting to those who may find the 
 burdens of daily labor heavy. She was careful to pre- 
 serve her remembrance of her younger days and sym- 
 pathy with this common life; and by means of this she 
 gained her audience, which was always in the class to 
 
LUCY LARCOM 289 
 
 which she belonged; and she was understood by them be- 
 cause she used the language of their experience. One 
 curious result of this sympathy may be noticed by the 
 way. In her poems she had a habit of praising the com- 
 monest flowers because they were many and humble and 
 were content to bloom in every place. 
 
 "The weed, to him who loves it, is a flower — " is one 
 of her quotations, and she had a certain tenderness for 
 all weeds that could pass as flowers and wrote upon them, 
 like neglected children of the roadside. It calls to mind 
 one of Lincoln's great sayings: "I think God loves the 
 plain people, because he made so many of them." 
 
 The third principle in this poetry, as a whole, is the 
 moral and religious spirit of the community in which 
 Lucy Larcom was bred. It made the first impression 
 upon her, in childhood, through its hymns. She learned 
 hundreds of them — 
 
 "The long, quaint words, the hum-drum rhyme, 
 The verse that reads like prose — " 
 
 as she herself describes them; but how deeply they in- 
 fluenced her is shown by other passages of the same poem 
 in which she praises them with a fervor caught from 
 themselves: — 
 
 "The psalm-tunes of the Puritan; 
 The hymns that dared to go 
 Down shuddering through the abyss of man, 
 His gulfs of conscious woe; 
 That scaled the utmost height of bliss 
 Where the veiled seraph sings, 
 And worlds unseen brought down to this 
 On music's mighty wings." 
 
 On the other hand, the doctrinal part of the Sunday 
 service did not much engage her interest, or affect her 
 
2 9 o LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 own poetic work. It did not enter into her mind in any 
 vitalizing way. One, however, who was born with the 
 literary gift, could not escape the intellectual influence 
 in the New England sermon which constituted largely 
 the mental life of the people; and in several ways she was 
 formed by it. In particular she derived from this source 
 the habit of finding a lesson in the fall of the sparrow and 
 the cutting down of the grass, or, in other words, of 
 moralizing nature. She never seems to care for beauty 
 merely for its own sake, or, at least, such a mood was rare 
 and subordinate in her life. She sought to ally the beauty 
 of nature with some human association or some spiritual 
 meaning, and to turn nature into parables. 
 
 "The universe is one great loving thought, 
 Writ in hieroglyphs of bud and bloom" — 
 
 she says; and, in detail, the rock that makes the rill break 
 into murmuring sound becomes a symbol of the blessing 
 of obstacles — 
 
 "The happy trouble of the rock 
 That makes her life a song"; 
 
 and this is the usual method of allegory in her verse, 
 which would afford hundreds of such examples. A second 
 peculiarity, which was, at any rate, fostered by the liter- 
 ary characteristics of the New England sermon, is the 
 habit of seeking short and condensed expressions of 
 thought, like maxims or proverbs in style, but original. 
 Such lines stand out in the verse; they are quotable lines; 
 and are meant to stick in the mind. Her poems are full 
 of them. Here are one or two characteristic examples: 
 
 "Said Psyche, Pain assures me that I live!" 
 "To stifle truth is to stop her breath." 
 
LUCY LARCOM 291 
 
 "The threshold where our hopes begin to climb, is our 
 horizon." 
 
 "I said it in the meadow path, 
 I say it on the mountain stairs; — 
 The best things any mortal hath 
 Are those which every mortal shares." 
 
 All this is in a moralizing strain, and illustrates also 
 how her thoughts as well as her images were dominated 
 by the mastery of that New England spirit which was 
 absorbed in the moral life on one hand and in religious 
 life upon the other. But she did not owe her religious 
 thoughts directly to the elder Puritanism from which 
 she derived her moral and intellectual cast of mind. 
 
 These three strands, then, the sea with its poetic sug- 
 gestions, humble life with its understanding sympathies, 
 and the preoccupation of the New England mind with 
 morality and the spiritual meaning of nature, are the 
 material of which Lucy Larcom's poems are woven. She 
 thus pictures and expresses the inward life and outward 
 circumstances of the people, whose traditions she in- 
 herited and whose ideals she accepted. She was deeply 
 attracted to the soil she sprang from, and loved the land- 
 scape and those whose figures and lives were blended with 
 it; but it was the landscape and the people of the older 
 town of her childhood that she idealized in her verse, and 
 thus left a poetic transcript of it in her book which we 
 should be very grateful for, inasmuch as it gives to our 
 past, in some sense, the transforming and perpetuating 
 touch of literature, and unites us with the few other towns 
 of the country that have been thus fortunate. What this 
 older life meant to her, and how to her eyes it was made 
 up of the elements already mentioned, so blended as to be 
 inextricably one, is best shown, perhaps — to take a 
 
2 9 2 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 single instance — in the closing lines of the "Wild Roses 
 of Cape Ann": 
 
 "Thank God for those old-fashioned sea-side folk, 
 And for the home that rooted their strong lives 
 For many generations. Virtues far 
 Out-perfuming the rose, — pure souls, untouched 
 By the world's frosty standards, — are not these 
 True growths of our New England atmosphere, 
 By rarest of exotics unreplaced? 
 Strangers have found that landscape's beauty out, 
 And hold its deeds and titles. But the waves 
 That wash the quiet shores of Beverly, 
 The winds that gossip with the waves, the sky 
 That immemorially blends, listening, 
 Have reminiscences that still assert 
 Inalienable claims from those who won, 
 By sweat of their own brows, this heritage." 
 
 It was thus that in her principal poetic works she said 
 farewell to the old home. 
 
 And here I might end; but all would miss something 
 which, everywhere present in her book, has been unmen- 
 tioned. I mean the spiritual instinct in it, that element 
 which was in her far stronger than the merely poetic im- 
 pulse, overbore it, as life went on, and in the end dis- 
 placed it. The verses which she wrote in early life are 
 the most popular and widest known among her own 
 people, and they are, poetically, the best — most fresh, 
 most original, most disengaged from any ulterior pur- 
 pose beyond the simple poem itself. As she grew older, 
 the purely human, the individual and dramatic element, 
 as it is shown in "Hannah" and "A Sea-Glimpse," gave 
 way more and more to the reflective and moral mood, and 
 finally that mood itself became completely spiritualized, 
 and she ended as a poet of purely religious moods. It 
 
LUCY LARCOM 293 
 
 has already been said that this progress and growth in 
 her was not directly due to the elder Puritanism. Yet, 
 at first, she received her ideal of life from that source, 
 and to her that ideal in its practical form was the applica- 
 tion of a rather stern conscience to rather hard work — 
 a laborious life of duty as it came. But on the imagina- 
 tive side, on the side that looks for a strip of blue sky 
 over the plowed field, and the sea-furrows, she was 
 obliged to seek elsewhere for horizon and prospect. She 
 found them at last in books, — in volumes that in her 
 generation suffered a new birth out of old time, in the 
 works of Tauler, the German mystic, and Plato, the 
 Greek idealist, and others of grave and reverend names, 
 then, in the time of Emerson, much on the lips of young 
 women of growing and ambitious minds. But, in her own 
 case, she found her nearest guides in the sermons of 
 Maurice and Robertson. The least thoughtful reader of 
 her works must have been struck by her great capacity 
 to enjoy and appreciate life — mere living. The lines 
 with which she closes the full-voiced and resonant 
 "Thanksgiving Hymn" — 
 
 "For thine own great gift of Being 
 I thank thee, O my God—" 
 
 might serve as a descriptive motto of all her works, so 
 constant is the spirit of joyfulness in life that inspires 
 them. She especially sympathized with the vast ener- 
 gies of nature's vitality, and felt the contagion of it — 
 
 "Making it joy to think of swelling buds, 
 And fruit, slow-ripening on the apple-trees, 
 And young birds fledging in the robin's nest." 
 
 She felt this current in the outward world, this stream 
 
294 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 of unexhausted being, and she thought of it with Words- 
 worth's faith — 
 
 "That every flower that grows 
 Enjoys the air it breathes." 
 
 This was the world without. But the inward force 
 within herself, and in man, the life of conscious and as- 
 piring being, was even more deeply realized by her as 
 an object of awe and mystery. On the one side was na- 
 ture, on the other the soul ; but if she heard in that elder 
 Puritanism the voice of the Psalmist declaring God in 
 his works, and the voice of the Apostle declaring Christ 
 in man, they were not convincing voices which should 
 seem the expression of her own experience. There was a 
 gladness in her thoughts of life, in both of these great 
 manifestations, that needed a different atmosphere to 
 grow in, and she found it in Maurice and Robertson 
 through whom she came in contact with the most spiritual 
 and personal religious thought of the English world and 
 her thoughts then began to take on that spiritual reality, 
 that direct experience of enlightenment and enthusiasm 
 within, in which, doubtless, she was also much sustained 
 and reassured by her friendship with Whittier, whose 
 "faith had center everywhere, nor cared to fix itself to 
 form." Thus she led by herself her own life with her 
 own thoughts; and, still meditating, came finally to iden- 
 tify the energy of life in nature and in man with a spirit- 
 ual power working out its will in both. In three stanzas 
 she condensed this conclusion, and her aspiration with 
 respect to that power: — 
 
 "O Life that breathest in all sweet things 
 That bud and bloom upon the earth, 
 That fillest the sky with song and wings, 
 That walkest the world through human birth; 
 
LUCY LARCOM 295 
 
 O Life that lightest in every man 
 A spark of thine own being's flame, 
 And wilt that spark to glory fan, — 
 Our listening souls would hear that name. 
 
 Thou art the Eternal Christ of God, 
 The Life unending, unbegun; 
 The Deity brightening through the cloud; 
 The Presence of the Invisible One." 
 
 With such convictions, arrived at through conscientious 
 years of thought and growth, she could not but feel her 
 tasks in life absorbed in the one labor of endeavoring to 
 share with others the experience which was her own, in 
 these regions of truth and emotion, and so moved now 
 also by the strong influence of her later friendship with 
 Bishop Brooks, she had already entered on her work as a 
 religious guide and teacher, when her death came. Her 
 books on these themes, in prose, were more widely scat- 
 tered abroad and were, perhaps, more influential in life, 
 than her poems had ever been, and among her poems, 
 except in our neighborhood and the homes of those who 
 care for New England with special warmth, the longest- 
 lived will be her hymns and the other religious verses of 
 these last years. 
 
 Such, at least to my eyes, was the life of the woman 
 whose portrait now looks down on us from these walls; 
 and it is well that the first thus to be hung upon them 
 with ceremony, is that of one so deserving of that re- 
 membrance which it is our main object, as a Society, to 
 secure and perpetuate. It was a life well lived. And yet, 
 after all, the significant thing in it is not that she caught 
 the beauty of these fields and woods, and the sea that we 
 look on by day and night, and strove to make them 
 poetical ground; not that she praised the lowly life and 
 
296 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 the virtues that inhere in it and illustrated them in her- 
 self with simplicity and power; not that she used the 
 flowers of our wayside for parables, and shaped those 
 close-cut sentences that carry home to the heart the 
 truths by which daily life is led; not even that she found 
 inspiration for herself and friendly aid for others in a 
 life-long religious meditation; but rather that she showed, 
 in the total unity of her life and work, that the pursuit of 
 an ideal, however conceived, is the surest pledge that a 
 life shall be nobly led itself, and have greatest utility to 
 others. Her sense of the great blessing of life, of the 
 duty to develop it to the utmost of one's capacity for 
 living in mind and heart as well as in the body, gives a 
 ring to every line in which she urges the soul onward — 
 
 "Climb for the white flower of thy dream!" 
 
ON THE DEATH OF HOLMES 
 
 The death of Oliver Wendell Holmes closed many ca- 
 reers in one end. His versatility was such that one hesi- 
 tates whether to speak first of the man of society, or the 
 literary wit, or the practitioner, or the novelist, or the 
 poet. This diversity sprang rather from the different 
 employments to which he put his mind than from the 
 various richness of natural genius. It was in some degree 
 the product of the influences of the city, which operate 
 upon men of education to bring out their whole capacity. 
 He was from his breeding both academic and urban; and 
 he carried out to the end the early aims and ambitions 
 which thrive in the centers of learning and society. He 
 was one of that rare class of minds to which their en- 
 vironment is not a limitation. He harmonized with the 
 conditions of living into which he was born, with the 
 settled order of old Boston, old Harvard, and the Satur- 
 day Club; and as he made the most of them, they made 
 the most of him. The identity between himself, as a 
 literary personality, and Boston was the largest part of 
 his good fortune. He was that best sort of a representa- 
 tive of his city, a growth out of its previous society, tra- 
 ditions, and prejudices. The exclusiveness which made 
 him prefer a man of family was a part of his genius; the 
 same feeling, with a difference, made him prefer his own 
 town to the rest of the universe; and thus it was not by 
 accident, but by right of nature, that he should be the 
 official poet of Harvard, which filled a larger relative 
 
 297 
 
2 98 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 place in Boston life than in these days, and the loyal 
 laureate of his city to salute, to toast, and to bid farewell 
 to the guests whom it most honored. It would be unjust, 
 nevertheless, to refer to him now solely or mainly as a 
 poet. He succeeded quite as well in the use of his other 
 talents, and these helped largely in establishing the repu- 
 tation of his later days. The scientific element, even in 
 his books, is a constant quantity; it colors his novels and 
 often gives glow to his stanzas, and in his printed conver- 
 sations over the table it is ever at hand for illustration. 
 His wit, too, and those felicities of which he learned the 
 secret in private talk with his friends, are ingredients 
 never lacking. He must be regarded as poet, professor, 
 and autocrat at once, if one would have a rounded con- 
 ception of him, and understand what sort of personal 
 power in him it was that extended a local reputation over 
 a continent. 
 
 When one reviews his life, perhaps the most obvious 
 trait of it is its apparent lack of change. It is true that 
 his literary career did not really begin until he was well 
 on in middle life; he came forward then with a mature 
 and well-stored mind, and the great impression he made 
 was due to the self-repression which had allowed him to 
 come at last full-handed and with his thoughts and 
 manner unstaled. It would have been remarkable if his 
 literary talent had suffered any serious modification after 
 such a success so late in life. But as a poet he had been 
 precocious, and there are very many of his verses, upon 
 all sorts of occasions and in several styles, which were 
 produced in the earlier years of his manhood; and in 
 these there is the same quality, somewhat less highly 
 developed, perhaps, as in the last lines from his pen. He 
 had never attempted the modern style in poetry; there 
 
ON THE DEATH OF HOLMES 299 
 
 are no "native wood-notes wild" in his range, nothing in 
 "the pastoral line," nothing of Keats or the later ro- 
 manticists; he was from the start a poet of society, and 
 he found it convenient and perhaps necessary to continue 
 in the somewhat mechanical measures of the past, which 
 are best fitted for artificial and occasional verse. 
 
 Apart from the fact that Dr. Holmes adopted and re- 
 tained these simple and prosaic measures, one other cir- 
 cumstance possibly tended to stiffen his early choice and 
 practice into the gyves of habit. Most of his verses were 
 not merely recited, but were written for recitation. The 
 poet kept in mind the appeal to the audience necessary 
 for success, the momentary stroke, the immediate flash 
 of appreciation, the mixture of humor and epigrammatic 
 eloquence, most effective to the ear of an assembly; and 
 to secure these ends the Queen Anne forms of verse are 
 the best adapted. His employment as a poet of occasions, 
 no doubt, had its effect in accustoming him to write from 
 an intellectual and social impulse out of which the poetry 
 of the nineteenth century does not spring. There is 
 little to show, however, that he had any lyrical gift of 
 the higher order. His vigorous faculty was the intellect; 
 with it were something of sentiment and much of humor, 
 which, blending with the strong mental element, resulted 
 in poetry in which every line is masculine. The extraor- 
 dinary success which Dr. Holmes had in adhering to 
 an antiquated form of verse is due to its admirable fitness 
 to be the vehicle of his mind. He discovered this corre- 
 spondence between his thought and his measure, his oc- 
 casion and his instrument, early in his career; and to 
 the end of his days the range of his poetry remained the 
 same. It is not likely that it was limited by the narrow 
 compass of his verse forms; rather, the two coincided. 
 
300 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 The conservatism observable in his poetry was char- 
 acteristic of his entire nature. Even when he was liberal, 
 it was with a Toryish spirit. He felt strongly upon a few 
 points. He was never at a loss for a word in favor of 
 liberal theology, and one of his favorite modes of praise 
 was by means of censure of the old school. He was, dur- 
 ing the war, a strong Unionist, and his stanzas of the 
 time are remarkable now for the heat of their rhetoric, 
 aglow with the intense feeling of the hour; but he did not 
 often use his metrical gifts for controversy. On the other 
 hand, his conservatism supplied him with admirable 
 powers of resistance. He was proof against whatever 
 did not fall in with his habits of thought and standards 
 of judgment. In these there was a certain admixture of 
 tradition. Along his own lines, however, he developed 
 with steady gains of power and touch. Some of his later 
 poems rank with the best of an earlier time in literary 
 skill and in their own charm. The "Autocrat," which 
 marks the maturity of his faculties, is his richest work 
 in both prose and verse. It exhibits a mind with various 
 powers in admirable composition working harmoniously 
 and easily together. It shows both weakness and 
 strength. One would have inferred, from the handling 
 of the little romance in its pages, that there would be 
 some uncertainty and awkwardness in the author's story- 
 telling when he should come to the making of novels. Its 
 greatest attraction lies in the personality of the talker, 
 who was able under this fiction to give expression to his 
 discursive mind, to use those unexpected but apt com- 
 parisons, and to announce those paradoxes, which belong 
 to the fine art of conversation, to expose his hobbies, and 
 to exploit his scientific knowledge — in a word, to sur- 
 render his mind into his readers' hands. Dr. Holmes, 
 
ON THE DEATH OF HOLMES 301 
 
 to every one who read this volume, immediately became 
 like a familiar figure on the street; he had found the way 
 to make the acquaintance of men and women whom he 
 did not meet directly, and he did it so successfully that 
 he became at once an old friend; it is as the "Autocrat" 
 that he is still most often referred to and best known. 
 In the later volumes of the series there was the same 
 sense of immediate communication between author and 
 reader. The popularity of all these monologues among 
 men of affairs was very remarkable. The vitality, acute- 
 ness, and originality of statement, the incisive and abso- 
 lute manner, and the intermittent humor which were the 
 distinguishing marks of the author, were of themselves 
 sufficient to account for this, but something was due to 
 the rarity of the sensation. It is not often that a man of 
 mature years and such admirable social equipment writes 
 a book for the entertainment of his fellows in the same 
 spirit in which he would sit down to talk with his friends, 
 and discusses with them things in general. It requires, 
 moreover, some experience in growing old to appreciate 
 the flavor of the style. One may observe in Dr. Holmes's 
 later prose, as in his poetry, the absence of any change 
 in his quality or form. There is in his very last papers 
 an even more intimate mode of address, and perhaps a 
 mellower temper, natural to old age such as he was for- 
 tunate enough to enjoy; but this is only what years will 
 do for a good vintage. 
 
 As a man of letters Dr. Holmes has the wide scope 
 here briefly touched; but it is, perhaps, rather as a man 
 of his time that he will be remembered. Even now a 
 large part of his reputation rests upon other grounds 
 than his books. His personality counts perceptibly in 
 his popularity. He is, too, a part of the past of Boston. 
 
3 02 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 Merely to turn over the pages of his poems reminds us 
 with how large a portion of the literary life of the city 
 in his period he was in close contact. He was himself, 
 as has been remarked, an inheritor of the old Phi Beta 
 Kappa poets as a recitationist, and he is the last of the 
 line. The titles of his biographies recall his close associ- 
 ation with Motley and Emerson, and the number of his 
 elegies upon learned or literary friends is very large. 
 There are few prominent Boston names of his century 
 that are not beaded somewhere upon his verse, and his 
 tributes to them have often been noble words. With the 
 great occasions of the city, the days of the entertainment 
 of distinguished guests, he had been as constantly as- 
 sociated. Few foreigners of note were then in Boston 
 without taking his hand. In the social and intellectual 
 life of the city he held for fifty years a leading place, and 
 made his memory long in local annals. He had indeed 
 extended a local reputation over a continent; but in be- 
 coming famous he did not cease to be local. It was as 
 a Bostonian that he was known. His attachment to the 
 city was great enough to keep him there for the half-cen- 
 tury between his student days and his old age; and his 
 flattering literary and social reception in England, late 
 in life, did not tempt him to recross the Atlantic in quest 
 of fresh honors. It is not without reason, therefore, that 
 his city has been so faithful to him. Among the group of 
 literary men with whom he associated there are names 
 destined to a longer brilliancy, and their works have been 
 of larger measure; but among them there is none who in 
 life was the source of more pleasure to the social gather- 
 ings of college and city, or used his talents with more 
 faithfulness, making them serviceable within their range. 
 He belongs to old Boston now — an historical period of 
 the city that cannot be recalled without his name. 
 
LOWELL'S ADDRESSES 
 
 I 
 
 An essay is the freest, an address one of the most en- 
 slaving, forms of literary expression. The speaker is 
 subject to the moment, with all that appanage of accident 
 and circumstance which has so commanding an influence 
 in determining what words are fit then and there; and, 
 although an orator gains often from the concentration of 
 life in a memorable hour and makes it the very stuff of 
 his triumph, the man of letters seldom finds any compen- 
 sation of this sort possible to him. Such considerations 
 prepare one for what seems a lack of customary freedom 
 in some of the occasional speeches of Mr. Lowell, and for 
 a novel attitude of the author, which may be expressed 
 by saying that he does not talk with you, as he was wont 
 to do, but at you. Tact is an admirable quality, and 
 when one must observe so many and various amenities 
 as a foreign minister who enters into the intellectual and 
 social life of a great nation, it is of incalculable utility; 
 but the necessity to employ it is an inconvenience to the 
 thinker. 
 
 In the address which Lowell made before the Words- 
 worth Society, for example, his position as the retiring 
 president was evidently an embarrassment to him as a 
 critic, and the windings he makes, not, like Burke, into 
 his subject, but out of it, are a lesson how to tell the truth 
 without making a martyr of one's self, which the most 
 skilled master of literary fence might lay to heart. In 
 
 303 
 
3 04 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 the Harvard address, on the contrary, the constraint of 
 the hour was evidenced by the complete liberty of speech 
 which he sensibly accorded to himself : as one in the house 
 of his friends, he magnanimously determined to say his 
 say, irrespective of who might be critical, sure of amiable 
 tolerance if not of cordial agreement. But in an essay 
 he would not have apologized for plain-speaking. The 
 moral is this: that however successful these addresses 
 were, and however delightful in themselves, let us not be 
 flattered into believing that the man of letters can be so 
 admirable as a speaker as he is as a writer, or is ever in 
 so favorable an element as when he is composing a book 
 for the fit audience, though few, which is impanelled si- 
 lently year after year. 
 
 This warning springs from a natural jealousy for 
 Lowell's literary fame. The address, nevertheless, has 
 proved a fruitful form of expression for his later thought. 
 One would not say that he was in earlier writings char- 
 acteristically discursive, but the extraordinary fullness of 
 his mind and the restless spontaneity of its action make 
 him seem so. This copiousness was always his, and age 
 has brought a mellower ripeness and more of charm. For 
 a man whose mental wealth is so constituted, and who 
 yet has never shown a disposition to reduce and sys- 
 tematize thought, any literary form which takes the sur- 
 plusage of the mind and holds it, is sure to be serviceable. 
 These various addresses are less a reasoned criticism of 
 books or life or institutions than the overflow of an opu- 
 lent mind. The old knowledge how to quote still stands 
 him in good stead, as when he repels Carlyle's sneer that 
 "America meant only roast turkey every day for every- 
 body" by the home-thrust, "he forgot that states, as Ba- 
 con said of wars, go on their bellies." The poetic touch, 
 
LOWELL'S ADDRESSES 305 
 
 too, is as swift and tender as ever, as in the line concern- 
 ing the ancient quiet of Oxford, that "the very stones 
 seemed happier for being there," and in the dozen other 
 perfect sentences which, like 
 
 " captain jewels in the carcanet," 
 
 are "thinly placed" in the Harvard address, and of which 
 the tribute to Theocritus is one that shines in the memory. 
 But to point out such matters as these is superfluous, in 
 the same way as to review what is said of Fielding or 
 Cervantes. It is of interest, however, to inquire what is 
 the general temper of mind in these addresses — what 
 things Lowell has finally found to be of most worth in 
 literature and in life. 
 
 In the first rank stands the query, What does Lowell 
 think of America? Those who listened to him at Birming- 
 ham, when he spoke on "Democracy," heard him more 
 simply as an American than his auditors here can do: he 
 was a Minister standing for the institutions of his coun- 
 try in their eyes, and justifying them in a speech pe- 
 culiarly difficult to make because his topic was all but a 
 political issue in the practical sphere. Here the case was 
 different, and public curiosity was alive to his words 
 rather because he was the most eminent representative of 
 that group of cultivated men who are commonly believed, 
 and not without grounds, to distrust democratic institu- 
 tions and to look askance upon the power of the masses. 
 There can be no doubt that Lowell had faith in our na- 
 tional destiny, as perfect as was ever possessed by a 
 patriot aware of dangers, yet supremely confident of mas- 
 tery over them. The basis of this belief is nowhere made 
 apparent in the addresses as it lies deep in those founda- 
 tions of reverence, of trust in divine purpose, of patriotic 
 
306 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 and humanitarian sentiment, of emotions strongly stirred 
 in the war time — in a word, it lies, where alone all faith 
 is justified, in character. The address on "Democracy" 
 does not help one much who seeks the why of the orator's 
 conviction, though it illustrates the course of his thought 
 when it is exercised upon the subject of popular govern- 
 ment in general. It is not a profound and full exposi- 
 tion of the democratic principle. It has rather the con- 
 secutiveness of life than the sequence of logic, as indeed 
 Lowell himself conceived it, when he announced his pur- 
 pose to speak from "some experimental knowledge de- 
 rived from the use of such eyes and ears as Nature had 
 been pleased to endow me with." He told his Birmingham 
 hearers what he had observed in the working of his home 
 institutions, spoke of Lincoln and Emerson, who each 
 bore authentically the mold of the democratic spirit, and 
 other things of note; and he drove home this report of 
 things known to him from experience by many weighty 
 maxims drawn from the higher region of philosophy, or 
 thought applied to the general conditions of human life. 
 The sanity of his remarks is the most striking of their 
 qualities; they are altogether free from panic, a liability 
 to which is the political weakness of culture, and they 
 thus keep proportion marvelously. It is with a brief and 
 almost careless stroke that he brushes aside a whole host 
 of confusion when he says: "The last thing we need be 
 anxious about is property." In meeting the objection that 
 to arrive at truth by a count of hands is a transparent 
 absurdity, there is something like humor in his admission 
 of it, while at the same time he points out that in politics 
 it is not truth that is to be arrived at, but a working ar- 
 rangement; and the count of hands which now prevails 
 as a method of decision is rightly contrasted, not with 
 
LOWELL'S ADDRESSES 307 
 
 the balance of wisdom in that never-existing republic 
 where philosophers are kings, but with the historic 
 methods of count of pikes, count of stars and garters, 
 count of dollars. The way in which the speculative in- 
 tellect, in dealing with questions of suffrage and civil 
 equality, misses the point, through a lack of the political 
 habit of mind, was never more cheerfully exposed. The 
 maxim that it is not the Rights, but the Wrongs of men 
 that make all the trouble, is phrased and rephrased as 
 one shapes glowing metal with strokes of the hammer; 
 and no part of the rational groundwork of democracy is 
 slighted. 
 
 It is not in these matters, which belong to the past of 
 accomplished fact with us, that the most interesting part 
 of the political spirit of Lowell lies, for Americans; but 
 in those sentences which look to the future, which deal 
 with wealth and poverty, with the means of satisfying 
 desires which democracy has created, with the possibility 
 of modifying those conditions which are the source of 
 suffering and injustice to the common people, and like 
 themes. He knows the large proportion of woe and want 
 that springs from human nature, and is irremediable ex- 
 cept by the regeneration of the individual, but he thinks 
 that something of the burden on the lower orders of man- 
 kind is due to defective social arrangements. He is quite 
 sensible of the place of wealth in sustaining society, of 
 its beneficence, and of the increase of conscience in its 
 holders; but he says sharply that wealth bears those 
 burdens "which can most easily be borne, but poverty 
 pays with its person the chief expenses of war, pestilence, 
 and famine," and adds that all the vast charity of well- 
 meaning and laborious philanthropists in the expenditure 
 of money is no more than "as if we should apply plasters 
 
3 o8 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 to a single pustule of the smallpox with a view of driving 
 out the disease." The bearing of this view of the relative 
 positions of wealth and poverty under conditions which 
 admit of change, is too wide-reaching to be followed out 
 here. The whole course of thought seems to come to its 
 head in his remarks upon Henry George, whose political 
 economy he parries with a witticism, but affirms that he 
 "is right in his impelling motives"; and, not fearful of 
 words, he continues, with a disclaimer of communism on 
 the one hand and of State socialism on the other, "but 
 socialism means, or wishes to mean, cooperation and com- 
 munity of interests, sympathy, the giving to the hands 
 not so large a share as to the brains, but a larger share 
 than hitherto in the wealth they must combine to pro- 
 duce — means, in short, the practical application of Chris- 
 tianity to life, and has in it the secret of an orderly 
 and benign reconstruction." 
 
 The second point which is to be reckoned lies in the 
 literary field. It is no news to say that Mr. Lowell is an 
 idealist. It is, nevertheless, worth emphasizing; partly 
 because he is the fittest to be called as a witness of any 
 public man, and partly because he himself emphasizes the 
 fact strenuously. There is no form of the older criticism 
 that he does not use to give wings or weight, as the case 
 may be, to his words. He draws the distinction as 
 markedly now as in years gone by between the imagina- 
 tion and the understanding, and classifies authors as in 
 one or the other realm. He believes as unreservedly as 
 ever in the higher worth of the imagination, and in its 
 higher function. Coleridge, he says, taught the English 
 mind "to recognize in the imagination an important factor 
 not only in the happiness but in the destiny of man"; 
 and he does but develop Coleridge and those who fed the 
 
LOWELL'S ADDRESSES 309 
 
 mind of Coleridge originally, when he says elsewhere, 
 "The most vivid sensations of which our moral and in- 
 tellectual nature is capable are received through the 
 imagination," or, "We hold all the deepest, all the highest 
 satisfactions of life as tenants of the imagination." He 
 is careful, too, to remind us that when imagination allies 
 itself "as best it may" with the understanding, only lower 
 ends are possible to it. Again, he defines the world of the 
 imagination as "not the world of abstraction and 
 nonentity, as some conceive, but a world formed out of 
 chaos by a sense of the beauty that is in man and the 
 earth on which he dwells." He elucidates the subject 
 further by repeating once more the old idea that the 
 imagination deals with the type. Thus, of Cervantes's 
 characters: "They are not so much taken from life as 
 informed with it; . . . not the matter-of-fact work of 
 a detective's watchfulness, products of a quick eye and 
 a faithful memory, but the true children of the imagina- 
 tive faculty, from which all the dregs of observation and 
 memory have been distilled away, leaving only what is 
 elementary and universal." And if the reader has pa- 
 tience for another quotation, the character of pure litera- 
 ture — of that cast, as he would say, in the forma mentis 
 eterna — was never more nobly and exactly described than 
 where he writes of its works as "those in which intellect, 
 infused with the sense of beauty, aims rather to produce 
 delight than conviction, or, if conviction, then through 
 intuition rather than formal logic, and leaving what 
 Donne wisely calls 
 
 'Unconcerning things matter of fact' 
 
 to science and the understanding, seeks to give ideal ex- 
 pression to those abiding realities of the spiritual world 
 
310 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 for which the outward and visible world serves at best 
 but as the husk and symbol." In that sentence lies the 
 whole organon of the higher criticism. If one masters it, 
 he is a graduate of literary art, and there is no depart- 
 ment of the works of creative genius to which he does not 
 hold the key of interpretation. But a view of the art of 
 literature which is so pronounced and so frankly set forth 
 by the only critic of the highest rank that our country has 
 ever produced, does not call for more than statement; 
 one need only note the principles of his criticism, and 
 dwell on the prominence he gives to the imagination, on 
 his old-fashioned adherence to the doctrine that the type 
 is the only thing real in an exact sense, and that art con- 
 sists in identifying the individual with the type, which is 
 the peculiar faculty of genius — its creativeness. 
 
 These are the two most noticeable traits of the ripened 
 convictions of Lowell as made known in this volume 
 — the democratic and the idealistic temper in forms of 
 extraordinary purity. It is evident that he believed in the 
 gods who had fashioned his own clay, and he wished 
 their power to continue over new generations, because he 
 had experienced its enlightening and civilizing influence 
 in his own life-long culture. At the Harvard Commem- 
 oration he was defending his own masters who had 
 brought him to such happy issues of thought, and plead- 
 ing that the nurture of our youth be still intrusted to 
 those humane studies which were the fecundating intel- 
 lectual principle of modern civilization. It was natural for 
 him, it was well-nigh a filial duty, to take this view. But 
 have not four centuries of compulsory classical study in 
 our institutions of learning incorporated the immortal 
 part of the ancient culture in our general intellectual life 
 as closely as the Judean religious impulse has entered 
 
LOWELL'S ADDRESSES 311 
 
 into our common spiritual life, so that special training in 
 the Latin and Greek may safely be left to the literary 
 class as Hebrew to the clerical class? Plutarch is an in- 
 spiring author for the young and strengthening to the 
 mature; but that American whom Lowell singled out 
 as "one of Plutarch's men," and who alone of our country- 
 men could support that simple and heroic phrase, was not 
 indebted to "insolent Greece or haughty Rome" for one 
 tittle of his personal greatness. Was that very one whose 
 literary fame braved the classical tradition in that auda- 
 cious line of Jonson's eulogy — was Shakespeare so deeply 
 obliged, in any direct way, to antiquity by virtue of his 
 "small Latin and less Greek"? And as a sign of how 
 wide the stream of Virgil's speech has spread abroad, it 
 may be mentioned that Lowell quotes often from 
 Dante, but neglects Dante's master. Has not the work 
 of the Renaissance been accomplished? Our culture is so 
 permeated with the old wisdom, so articulated with clas- 
 sical canons, so informed with rationality that the new 
 birth of learning may be regarded as complete; one draws 
 on the ancient fountain-head whenever he taps a modern 
 literature, and thereby the necessity of an original ac- 
 quaintance with the classics for every man who aspires to 
 be liberally educated, is greatly lessened if not destroyed. 
 For the very few who may hope to reach any distinction 
 in refinement, leaders in culture, the men of letters and 
 of art, interested mainly only in the best things produced 
 by the spirit of man, the training by which Lowell 
 had been molded will still be needful; it is got, not in 
 colleges, but in the private study. Professors cannot give 
 it, for it is self-imposed, and, after all, it is less a disci- 
 pline than an inner growth. In what worth of substance 
 it results, in what attractive charm of manner, in what 
 
3i2 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 universal efficacy of thought, these addresses illustrate, 
 by the impression they make of both the quality and vol- 
 ume of the settled and habitual wisdom of which they are 
 so partial and fragmentary a record. They are a better 
 defense of the rights of humane study than any advocate 
 could frame. The best moral is implicit in things, not 
 explicit in words ; and in this volume there is the authen- 
 tic impress of the classical spirit — age seasons every page, 
 and yet every page is young. 
 
 II 
 
 The country may justly take pride in the temper and 
 quality of these speeches, which display national as well 
 as personal excellences, and will be the lasting record of 
 Lowell's life abroad, as a representative American. But 
 more than the variety of theme and circumstance in the 
 contents of this volume, its unity of spirit, its single- 
 mindedness, are forced upon the reader's attention: not 
 that it is characterized by sameness of idea, — on the 
 contrary, it is perpetually changeful in thought, — or by 
 any scheme or system which of itself organizes a man's 
 knowledge always in the same general lines, and is thus 
 the source of a merely formal and specious coherency; 
 nor that it has any one end in view, any defined purpose, 
 or recurring moral, or proselytizing tendency, even; but 
 in it one perceives everywhere the presence of culture 
 transmuted into character, knowledge that has suffered 
 the immortalizing change into wisdom, judgments that 
 share in the permanency of things because derived from 
 long-established traditions and the whole intellectual and 
 social habit of the race, — in brief, one sees the same 
 
 
LOWELL'S ADDRESSES 313 
 
 mind in it all, completely developed, consistent, and forti- 
 fied in its principles. 
 
 This mind is preeminently that of a man of letters. 
 Literature, in the exact sense, has been its nutriment. 
 The largest part of what Mr. Lowell has to say, too, per- 
 tains to literature. It is true that the greater portion is 
 strictly criticism, though somewhat affected in its form 
 and bearing by the circumstance that it was spoken, and 
 must be read by the ear as well as by the eye; but it is 
 more than criticism, as generally understood, because the 
 decisions do not apply merely to the special author in 
 hand, but have a wider relation to authorship itself; not to 
 books alone, but also to the spiritual life which it is the 
 office of books to quicken, strengthen, and perfect. 
 Lowell may be writing of some individual, and have only 
 him in mind; but it frequently happens that a slightly 
 accented sentence, what seems perhaps a simple remark 
 by the way, is a text for a long sermon, if the reader will 
 follow out its suggestions. Sometimes Lowell's suppres- 
 sion of this implicit homily appears to be against his 
 will. He, as a man of letters, necessarily places a high 
 value upon literary form; wisdom by itself is less prized 
 apart — to use his own phrase — from "the beauty in 
 which it is incarnated"; and for a poet to fail of this in- 
 carnating beauty, he is well assured, is a defect in the 
 very substance and tissue of genius. With the growth 
 of popular education, there has lately come an effort to 
 make analysis do the work of intuition in the study of 
 literature; because the eye cannot see what the poet has 
 embodied, it is fancied that the dissecting hand can make 
 the soul apparent; but what is thus arrived at is truth, 
 in its philosophical, not its poetic form. The method has 
 its advantages, no doubt, and one would not depreciate 
 
3 i 4 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 its worth; in particular, it is a great boon to poets who 
 in considerable portions of their work have not expressed 
 the truth with such perfection that it can be perceived at 
 first sight; that is, to poets who have failed, at times, in 
 that "incarnating beauty" which belongs to the ever- 
 living works of genius. Students of Wordsworth know 
 very well that he is often sensible when he is not poetic, 
 but his devotees are slow to recognize and acknowledge 
 the fact that at such times his poems have not the prin- 
 ciple of life in them which makes real literature survive, 
 and constitutes its reality. To think all of Wordsworth, 
 or any very large proportion of his literary remains, to be 
 literature is to confuse the mind's sense of relative values; 
 to set up a standard of meaning in place of the old stan- 
 dard of style is to abolish the distinction of prose and 
 verse, of philosophy and poetry; and to substitute for 
 the creative artist that merely percipient creature who 
 is called the Seer. Lowell made many a downright stroke, 
 in his address to the Wordsworth Society, which must 
 have seemed to the poet's more devout worshipers as 
 if their idol were having his hands and feet lopped off; 
 but the most significant word, the unkindest cut of all, 
 when one sees how deep it sinks into the marrow, is a 
 hardly noticeable sentence slipping gravely in at the end 
 of a paragraph: "There are various methods of criticism; 
 but I think we should all agree that literary work is to 
 be judged from the purely literary point of view." Who 
 would not assent to so obvious a truism? But what be- 
 comes of Wordsworthians in general, what becomes of 
 the modern sect of the Browningites, if literary work is 
 "to be judged from the purely literary point of view"? It 
 is to escape from the literary point of view and its limi- 
 tations that meaning is made the test of value, indepen- 
 
LOWELL'S ADDRESSES 315 
 
 dent of style, and the gown of the scholar usurps the 
 honors due alone to the poet's laurel. It is well to be 
 understood; the now popular method of study may feed 
 the mind, may open the inner truth of the author and 
 multiply its usefulness as thought, and no doubt does this 
 excellent service; but shall the foolish therefore imagine 
 that lucid expression is not elemental in the work of 
 genius, or that any poetry which lacks it is of enduring 
 power? A man of letters is naturally impatient of the 
 intrusion of foreign standards upon the domain of litera- 
 ture, and must at least "hesitate" his dissent, as Lowell 
 has here done. 
 
 There is a good deal in these addresses, as a whole, 
 which must be classed as dissent; for in many respects 
 Lowell stands against a rising tide. Is it to be inferred 
 that he represents the times that were, in literary criti- 
 cism and in his conviction of what nurture is best for the 
 souls of men? Certainly it is to be feared that Coleridge, 
 to whose spiritualizing influence he regards the English 
 mind as much indebted, is little read, less consulted, and 
 perhaps scarcely understood by those who rule the hour 
 among us. It would not be venturing much to intimate 
 that younger men will learn more of the great critical 
 authority of their fathers from this speech, on unveiling 
 his bust in the Abbey, than they ever knew from Cole- 
 ridge's own works. The trend of our time is toward the 
 lowlands of the understanding, so Lowell seems to think; 
 is toward the region of observation and record, toward 
 the science of what the senses report, and that portraiture 
 of the material which is comprehensively termed realism. 
 To dwell on the merits of Coleridge, to expound the 
 methods of Cervantes in creation, or, nearer at hand, to 
 point to Fielding's way, is to prefer the Old Comedy to 
 
3 i6 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 the New, in our Athens. Some one may irreverently sug- 
 gest that, though Coleridge no doubt did a good turn in 
 importing Germany, it is Russia that we need now; and 
 Cervantes, — was he not a romantic writer, perhaps? As 
 for Fielding, why, he lived long before Thackeray and 
 Dickens, even! Irreverence might go so far, for what 
 head among us but quails beneath the truncheon of 
 realism? Yet when he was over-seas Lowell told the 
 workingmen to whom he read his notes on "Don Quixote" 
 that when he entered the company of the realistic school 
 he felt "set to grind in the prison-house of the Philistines. 
 I walk about in a nightmare, the supreme horror of which 
 is that my coat is all button-holed for bores to thrust their 
 fingers through, and bait me to my heart's content." And 
 he goes on to speak of ancient worthies, like that im- 
 possible Hector, and Roland with his ridiculous horn, 
 and Macbeth in the old witch-story, and others of the 
 same kind of beings, who "move about, if not in worlds 
 not realized, at least in worlds not realized to any eye but 
 that of imagination, a world far from police reports, a 
 world into which it is a privilege, I might almost say an 
 achievement, to enter." Our irreverent critic will, per- 
 haps, not dispute the alleged habitat of these romantic 
 heroes, but as to the privilege and achievement of enter- 
 ing there he will be more skeptical. Lowell belongs 
 to the idealists, and it is too much to expect that he should 
 take a more modern view; he has been so shaped and 
 inspired by the old culture that he is loyal to it as to the 
 blood and spirit of the fathers; and the old culture is, 
 beyond gainsaying, idealistic, from Homer and David 
 down to the birth of Zola. It could scarcely be hoped 
 that a man to whom literature as it has been is the breath 
 of his spiritual being should revoke old-time judgments, 
 
LOWELL'S ADDRESSES 317 
 
 and decree anew in favor of literature as we make it. 
 Such charitable consideration will be allowed to a veteran 
 of criticism, no doubt, by the most modern school; but 
 he can hardly look for more than tolerance. Is it, then, 
 so true that to get away from our neighbors we must seek 
 Plutarch? Can one not converse with the spirit except 
 in Dante? And after all, would it be so very much wiser 
 to stay with our neighbors, and disbelieve in heroes of an 
 older type; to deny the spirit, and give our days and 
 nights to the jargon of French fish-wives and the slang of 
 the American street? Lowell observes, "We are apt to 
 wonder at the scholarship of the men of three centuries 
 ago, and at a certain dignity of phrase that characterizes 
 them. They were scholars, because they did not read so 
 many things as we. They had fewer books, but these 
 were of the best. Their speech was noble, because they 
 lunched with Plutarch and supped with Plato." There is 
 "a certain dignity of phrase" that characterizes this vol- 
 ume also, such as has not been noticeable in any American 
 book for a long time. Is not the reason, in its degree, 
 the same, and may it not be that the old culture is still 
 justified of her children? Three centuries hence, if any 
 should care to examine the literature of this decade, will 
 they not explain Lowell's preeminence, in weight, close- 
 ness, and beauty of phrase in somewhat the same way? 
 If this should prove so, the realists may well ponder that 
 admirable quotation which is so forcibly flung down be- 
 fore the feet of those who forget "the warning of Sir 
 Walter Raleigh, perhaps more important to the artist 
 than to the historian, that it is dangerous to follow truth 
 too near the heels." As a matter of minor criticism, there 
 is a passing remark upon Spanish literature: speaking of 
 the "flavor of the soil," he says, "It has the advantage of 
 
3 i8 LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 giving even to second-class writers in a foreign language 
 that strangeness which in our own tongue is possible only 
 to originality either of thought or style." Does not this 
 indicate the mistake of perspective that is made by those 
 who are loud in the praise of foreign books? 
 
 Dissents of other kinds are to be found in these pages. 
 It is not a bird-bolt shot into the air, when the critic of 
 Fielding turns upon those who find that author intolerably 
 gross with the rejoinder that "the second of the seven 
 deadly sins is not less dangerous when she talks mysti- 
 cism, and ogles us through the gaps of a fan painted with 
 the story of the virgin martyr." This sentence lays bare 
 the most offensive weakness of the esthetic school. It 
 would be ungracious to dwell only upon the points of dis- 
 agreement which the author reveals between his percep- 
 tion of what is and his judgment of what ought to be. 
 How many and various they are may be known from the 
 examples which have been cited; but were they much 
 more numerous, and the rifts of severance as wide as they 
 are profound, — which is by no means the case, — the 
 author would remain an optimist; in the midst of his 
 most destructive critical reservations he would seem only 
 a wiser, not a less sincere and reverential, worshiper; in 
 the full flow of his protest, whether against realism, or 
 the new education, or what not, he would interpose a 
 compliment of Spanish largeness, and confirm his audi- 
 ence in their conviction of the general cheerfulness of the 
 outlook. If Lowell does not readily acquiesce with all 
 the powers that be, he believes in those that are to be. 
 He will not despair of the republic of letters, or that of 
 democracy either. To his view there are apparently 
 darker clouds in the literary than in the political horizon; 
 but, however that may turn out, he is certainly more in 
 
LOWELL'S ADDRESSES 319 
 
 harmony with current thought in what he has to say of 
 our institutions and society, of the national experience of 
 democracy, and of the progressive and humanizing ele- 
 ments in our social theory than he is in his discussions of 
 education or of the laws of literary art. If his dissents 
 in the one division are instructive, no less are his assents 
 in the other. He could not profess more explicitly ad- 
 herence to the democratic principle as the basis of a 
 greater and more equal public welfare in the state than 
 any nation has hitherto known, as the promise of a pros- 
 perity to be still more widely distributed among the 
 common people, and as a means of regeneration in the life 
 of the poor. He more than adheres to the political faith 
 in which the nation is built, — his acceptance of it goes 
 to the point of advocacy. 
 
 The leading address in this volume, that on democracy, 
 is the work of an exceptionally wise and subtle observer. 
 It does not take pains to sustain democracy upon the 
 ground of its foundations in equity, in utility, and the 
 manifest destiny which history reveals to the student; 
 rather, it maintains the practical working of it against 
 objections which are deeply lodged only in the prejudices, 
 self-conceit, and fears of a cultivated class, and dwells 
 upon its inevitable success and its humanitarian spirit. 
 Lowell is not one of the weaklings of philanthropy. He 
 had such object-lessons in mania before him in his youth, 
 and the half-century in which his life had been thrown 
 had been so thick with reforms that he was not to be cap- 
 tured by any cause at this late day. He refers more than 
 once to those whose sympathies are so touched by some 
 single case of suffering that they fail to perceive the regu- 
 lative law, to those who cannot see the crime because the 
 criminal's person intervenes, and to other classes whose 
 
3 2o LITERARY MEMOIRS 
 
 sensibilities are more developed than their judgments. He 
 himself sees with perfect clearness a definitely constituted 
 world, whose conditions may be hard but are fixed, and 
 also a something which the theologians used to call man's 
 heart, the prolific source of evil, suffering, and pain; and 
 he is well aware that all human life goes on, as one might 
 say, between these upper and nether grindstones of Na- 
 ture and Human Nature; he does not look for any phi- 
 lanthropy to change this constitution of things. It is a 
 welcome sight when one whose hold is so firm on the facts 
 of human existence nevertheless suggests and apparently 
 believes that the organization of society is subject to con- 
 siderable human improvement, and not a part of that 
 order with which man has nothing to do but to submit 
 to it. The value of such suggestion and belief depends 
 upon the kind of change which the writer deems possible 
 and desirable. Lowell does not express himself very fully 
 upon the matter, but he seems willing to follow the idea 
 of democracy into its developments with that optimistic 
 feeling which has already been remarked upon. A care- 
 ful reader will observe a thorough-going sympathy with 
 the effort of the poor, the humble and homely classes who 
 do the physical work of the world, to obtain a larger share 
 of the fruits of the common toil; and also he may notice 
 a cordial disposition of mind toward the purposes and 
 spirit at least of some of those who aim at this result 
 through social changes. One should not put an undue 
 emphasis upon his words, but it is not too much to say 
 that he shows a mind open and hospitable to those re- 
 forms of the future which democracy seems to carry in 
 itself as premises contain a conclusion. 
 
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