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COMPLETE WORKS OF JAMES RUSSELL 
 LOWELL. New Riverside Edition. In same 
 style as the Riverside Editio7ts of Longfellow's 
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 LITERARY ESSAYS. New Riverside Edition. 
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MS^ 
 
LATEST LITERARY ESSAYS 
 AND ADDRESSES 
 
 OF 
 
 JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 
 
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 BOSf 6n"ANI5'NEW YORK 
 
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 Copyright, 1891, 
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 Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co. 
 
NOTE. 
 
 The publication in a volume of the following 
 Essays and Addresses is in accordance with the in- 
 tention of their author. Most of them had been 
 revised by him with this end in view. The only 
 one of them concerning which there is a doubt, 
 whether he would have published it in its present 
 form, is the paper on " Richard III." With this 
 he was not satisfied, and he proposed to revise it. 
 It has seemed to me, however, of interest enough 
 as it stands to warrant its publication. 
 
 CHARLES ELIOT NORTON. 
 
 Cambbidgb, Massachusetts, 
 16 November, 1891. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Gkay 1 
 
 Some Letters of Walter Savage Landor ... 43 
 
 Waxton 57 
 
 Milton's " Areopagitica " ...... 94 
 
 Shakespeare's " Richard III ."...». Ill 
 
 The Study of Modern Languages .... 1.31 
 
 The Progress op the World 160 
 
LATEST LITERARY ESSAYS AND 
 ADDRESSES. 
 
 GRAY. 
 
 1886. 
 
 The eighteentli century, judged by the literature 
 it produced everywhere in Europe outside of Ger- 
 many and France, is generally counted inferior to 
 that which preceded and to that which followed it. 
 A judgment of especial severity has been passed 
 upon its poetry by critics who lost somewhat of 
 their judicial equipoise in that enthusiasm of the 
 romantic reaction which replaced the goddess of 
 good taste by her of liberty, and crowned the judi- 
 cial wig with the Phrygian cap. The poetry of the 
 period fell under a general condemnation as alto- 
 gether wanting in the imaginative quality, and as 
 being rather the conclusions of the understanding 
 put into verse than an attempt to express, however 
 inadequately, the eternal longings and intuitions 
 and experiences of human nature. These find their 
 vent, it was thought, in those vivid flashes of phrase, 
 the instantaneous bolts of passionate conception, 
 whose furrow of splendor across the eyeballs of the 
 mind leaves them momentarily dark to the outward 
 universe, only to quicken their vision of inward and 
 
2 GRAY 
 
 incommunicable things. There was some truth in 
 this criticism, as there commonly is in the harsh 
 judgments of imperfect sympathy, but it was far 
 from being the whole truth. 
 
 If poesy be, as the highest authority has defined 
 it, a divine madness, no English poet and no 
 French one between 1700 and 1800 need have 
 feared a writ de lunatico mquirendo. They talk, 
 to be sure, of " sacred rages," but in so decorous a 
 tone that we do not even glance towards the tongs. 
 They invoke fire from heaven in such frozen verse 
 as would have set it at defiance had their prayer 
 been answered. Cowper was really mad at inter- 
 vals, but his poetry, admirable as it is in its own 
 middle-aged way, is in need of anything rather 
 than of a strait-waistcoat. A certain blight of 
 propriety seems to have fallen on all the verse of 
 that age. The thoughts, wived with words above 
 their own level, are always on their good behavior, 
 and we feel that they would have been happier in 
 the homelier unconstraint of prose. Diction was 
 expected to do for imagination what only imagi- 
 nation could do for it, and the magic which was 
 personal to the magician was supposed to reside in 
 the formula. 
 
 Dryden died with his century ; and nothing 
 can be more striking than the contrast between 
 him, the last of the ancient line, and the new race 
 which succeeded him. In him, too, there is an 
 element of prose, an alloy of that good sense so 
 admirable in itself, so incapable of those indiscre- 
 tions which make the charm of poetry. His power 
 
GEAY , 3 
 
 of continuous thinking shows his mind of a differ- 
 ent quality from those whose thought comes as 
 lightning, intermittently it may be, but lightning, 
 mysterious, incalculable, the more unexpected that 
 we watch fdr it, and generated by forces we do 
 not comprehend. Yet Dryden at his best is won- 
 derfully impressive. He reminds one of a boiling 
 spring. There is tumult, concussion, and no little 
 vapor ; but there is force, there is abundance, there 
 is reverberation, and we feel that elemental fire is 
 at work, though it be of the earth earthy. But 
 what strikes us most in him, considered intellectu- 
 ally, is his modernness. Only twenty-three years 
 younger than Milton, he belongs to another world. 
 Milton is in many respects an ancient. Words- 
 worth says of him that 
 
 " His soul was a star and dwelt apart." 
 
 But I should rather be inclined to say that it was 
 his mind that was alienated from the present. In- 
 tensely and even vehemently engaged in the ques- 
 tion of the day, his politics were abstract and 
 theoretic, and a quotation from Sophocles has as 
 much weight with him as a constitutional precedent. 
 His intellectual sympathies were Greek. His lan- 
 guage even has caught the accent of the ancient 
 world. When he makes our English search her 
 coffers round, it is not for any home-made orna- 
 ments, and his commentators are fain to unravel 
 some of his syntax by the help of the Greek or 
 Latin grammar. 
 
 Dryden knew Latin literature very well, but 
 
4 GRA Y 
 
 that innate scepticism of his mind, which made 
 him an admirable critic, would not allow him to be 
 subjugated by antiquity. His ?esthetical training 
 was essentially French ; and if this sometimes had 
 an iU effect on his poetry, it was greatly to the 
 advantage of his prose, wherein ease and dignity 
 are combined in that happy congruity of propor- 
 tion which we call style, and the scholar's fulness 
 of mind is mercifully tempered by the man of the 
 world's dread of being too fiercely in earnest. It 
 is a gentlemanlike style, thoroughbred in every 
 fibre. As it was without example, so, I think, it 
 has remained without a parallel in English. Swift 
 has the ease, but lacks the lift; and Burke, who 
 plainly formed himself on Dry den, has matched 
 him in splendor, but has not caught his artistic skill 
 in gradation, nor that perfection of tone which can 
 be eloquent without being declamatory. 
 
 When I try to penetrate the secret of Dryden's 
 manner, I seem to discover that the new quality in 
 it is a certain air of good society, an urbanity, in 
 the original meaning of the word. By this I mean 
 that his turn of thought (I am speaking of his 
 maturer works) is that of the capital, of the great 
 world, as it is somewhat presumptuously called, and 
 that his diction is, in consequence, more conversa- 
 tional than that which had been traditional with 
 any of the more considerable poets who had pre- 
 ceded him. It is hard to justify a general impres- 
 sion by conclusive examples. Two instances will 
 serve to point my meaning, if not wholly to jus- 
 tify my generalization. His ode on the death of 
 Mrs. KiUigrew begins thus : — 
 
GRAY 5 
 
 " Thou youngest Tirgin-daughter of the skies, 
 Made in the last promotion of the blest." 
 
 And in his translation of the third book of the 
 "^neid," he describes Achaemenides, the Greek res- 
 ciied by the Trojans from the island of the Cyclops, 
 as " bolting " from the woods. 
 
 Dry den, in making verse the vehicle of good 
 sense and argmnent rather than of passion and in- 
 tuition, affords but an indication of the tendency 
 of the time in which he lived, — a tendency quick- 
 ened by the influence which could not fail to be 
 exerted by his really splendid powers as a poet, es- 
 pecially by the copious felicity of his language and 
 his fine instinct for the energies and harmonies of 
 rhythm. But the fact that a great deal of his work 
 was job-work, that most of it was done in a hm^ry, 
 led him often to fill up a gap with the first sono- 
 rous epithet that came to hand, and his indolence 
 was thus partly to blame for that poetic diction 
 which brought poetry to a deadlock in the next 
 century. Dryden knew very well that sound makes 
 part of the sense and a large part of the sentiment 
 of a verse, and, where he is in the vein, few poets 
 have known better than he how to conjure with 
 vowels, or to beguile the mind into acquiescence 
 through the ear. Addison said truly, though in 
 verses whose see-saw cadence and lack of musical 
 instinct would have vexed the master's ear : — 
 
 " Great Dryden next, whose tuneful Muse affords 
 The sweetest numbers and the fittest words.' ' 
 
 But Dryden never made the discovery that ten syl- 
 lables arranged in a proper accentual order were 
 
6 GRAY 
 
 all that was needful to make a ten-syllable verse. 
 He is great Dryden, after all, and between bim and 
 Wordsworth there was no poet with enough energy 
 of imagination to deserve that epithet. But he had 
 taught the trick of cadences that made the manu- 
 facture of verses more easy, and he had brought 
 the language of poetry nearer, not to the language 
 of real life as Wordsworth understood it, that is, 
 to the speech of the people, but to the language of 
 the educated and polite. He himself tells us at the 
 end of the " Religio Laici : " — 
 
 " And this unpolislied, rugged verse I chose 
 As fittest for discourse, and nearest prose." 
 
 Unpolished and rugged the verse certainly was not, 
 nor in his hands could ever be. It is the thought 
 that has an irresistible attraction for prosaic phrase, 
 and coalesces with it in a stubborn precipitate which 
 will not become ductile to the poetic form. 
 
 Dryden perfected the English rhymed heroic 
 verse by giving it a variety of cadence and pomp 
 of movement which it had never had before. 
 Pope's epigrammatic cast of thought led him to 
 spend his skill on bringing to a nicer adjustment 
 the balance of the couplet, in which he succeeded 
 only too wearisomely well. Between them they re- 
 duced versification in their favorite measure to the 
 precision of a mechanical art, and then came the 
 mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease. Through 
 the whole eighteenth century the artificial school of 
 poetry reigned by a kind of undivine right over a 
 public which admired — and yawned. This public 
 seems to have listened to its poets as it did to its 
 
GRA r 7 
 
 preachers, satisfied that all was orthodox if only 
 they heard the same thing- over again every time, 
 and believing the pentameter couplet a part of the 
 British Constitution. And yet it is to the credit of 
 that age to have kept alive the wholesome tradition 
 that Writing, whether in prose or verse, was an 
 Art that required training, at least, if nothing more, 
 in those who assumed to practise it. 
 
 Burke thought it impossible to draw an indict- 
 ment against a whole people, and the remark is 
 equally just if we apply it to a century. It is true 
 that with the eighteenth a season of common sense 
 set in with uncommon severity, and such a season 
 acts like a drought upon the springs of poesy. To 
 be sure, an unsentimental person might say that 
 the world can get on much better without the finest 
 verses that ever were written than without common 
 sense, and I am willing to admit that the question 
 is a debatable one, and to compromise upon uncom- 
 mon sense whenever it is to be had. Let us admit 
 that the eighteenth century was, on the whole, pro- 
 saic, yet it may have been a pretty fair one as cen- 
 turies go. " 'T is hard to find a whole age to imi- 
 tate, or what century to propose for example," says 
 wise Sir Thomas Browne. Every age is as good as 
 the people who live in it choose or can contrive to 
 make it, and, if good enough for them, perhaps 
 we, who had no hand in the making of it, can 
 complain of it only so far as it had a hand in 
 the making of us. Perhaps even our own age, 
 with its marvels of applied science that have made 
 the world more prosily comfortable, will loom less 
 
8 GRAY 
 
 gigantic than now througli the prospective of the 
 future. Perhaps it will even be found that the 
 telephone, of which we are so proud, cannot carry 
 human speech so far as Homer and Plato have 
 contrived to carry it with their simpler appliances. 
 As one grows older, one finds more points of half- 
 reluctant sympathy with that undysj)eptic and 
 rather worldly period, much in the same way as one 
 grows to find a keener savor in Horace and Mon- 
 taigne. In the first three quarters of it, at least, 
 there was a cheerfulness and contentment with 
 thmgs as they were, which is no unsound philosophy 
 for the mass of mankind, and which has been im- 
 possible since the first French Revolution. For our 
 own War of Independence, though it gave the first 
 impulse to that awful riot of human nature turned 
 loose among first principles, was but the reassertion 
 of established precedents and traditions, and essen- 
 tially conservative in its aim, however deflected in 
 its course. It is true that, to a certain extent, the 
 theories of the French doctrinaires gave a tinge to 
 the rhetoric of our patriots, but it is equally true 
 that they did not perceptibly affect the conclusions 
 of our Constitution-makers. Nor had those doctri- 
 naires themselves any suspicion of the explosive 
 mixture that can be made by the conjunction of ab- 
 stract theory with brutal human instinct. Before 
 1789 there was a delightful period of miiversal 
 confidence, during which a belief in the perfecti- 
 bility of man was insensibly merging into a convic- 
 tion that he could be perfected by some formula of 
 words, just as a man is knighted. He kneels down 
 
GRA Y 9 
 
 a simple man like ourselves, is told to rise up a 
 Perfect Being, and rises accordingly. It certainly 
 was a comfortable time. If there was discontent, 
 it was in the individual, and not in the air ; spo- 
 radic, not epidemic. The discomfort of Cowper 
 was not concerning this world but the worldpto come. 
 Men sate as roomily in their consciences as in the 
 broad-bottomed chairs which suggest such solidity 
 of repose. ResjJonsibility for the Universe had 
 not yet been invented. A few solitary persons saw 
 a swarm of ominous question-marks wherever they 
 turned their eyes ; but sensible people pronounced 
 them the mere muscce volitantes of indigestion 
 which an honest dose of rhubarb would disperse. 
 Men read Rousseau for amusement, and never 
 dreamed that those flowers of rhetoric were ripen- 
 ing the seed of the guillotine. Post and telegraph 
 were not so importimate as now. People were 
 not compelled to know what all the fools in the 
 world were saying or doing yesterday. It is im- 
 possible to conceive of a man's enjoying now the 
 unconcerned seclusion of White at Selborne, who, a 
 century ago, recorded the important fact that " the 
 old tortoise at Lewes in Sussex awakened and came 
 forth out of his dormitory," but does not seem to 
 have heard of Burgoyne's surrender, the news of 
 which ought to have reached him about the time he 
 was writing. It may argue pusillanimity, but I can 
 hardly help envying the remorseless indifference of 
 such men to the burning questions of the hour, at 
 the first alarm of which we are all expected to 
 run with our buckets, or it may be with our can of 
 
10 GRA Y 
 
 kerosene, snatched by mistake in the hurry and 
 confusion. They devoted themselves to leisure with 
 as much assiduity as we employ to render it impos- 
 sible. The art of being elegantly and strenuously 
 idle is lost. There was no hurry then, and armies 
 still weift into winter quarters punctually as mus- 
 quashes. Certainly manners occupied more time 
 and were allowed more space. Whenever one sees 
 a picture of that age, with its broad skirts, its 
 rapiers standing out almost at a right angle, and 
 demanding a wide periphery to turn about, one has 
 a feeling of spaciousness that suggests mental as 
 well as bodily elbow-room. Now all the ologies 
 follow us to our burrows in our newspaper, and 
 crowd upon us with the pertinacious benevolence of 
 subscription-books. Even the right of sanctuary 
 is denied. The horns of the altar, which we fain 
 would grasp, have become those of a dilemma in the 
 attempt to combine science with theology. 
 
 This, no doubt, is the view of a special mood, 
 but it is a mood that grows upon us the longer we 
 have stood upon our lees. Enough if we feel a 
 faint thrill or reminiscence of ferment in the spring, 
 as old wine is said to do when the grapes^ are in 
 blossom. Then we are sure that we are neither 
 dead nor turned to vinegar, and repeat softly to 
 ourselves, in Dryden's delightful paraphrase of 
 Horace : — 
 
 " Happy the man, and happy he alone, 
 He who can call to-day his own ; 
 He Avho, secure within, can say, 
 ' To-morrow, do thy worst, for I have lived to-day ; 
 Be fair or foul, or rain or shine. 
 
GRAY 11 
 
 The joys I have possessed in spite of Fate are mine ; 
 
 Not heaven itself upon the past has power, 
 
 But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.' " 
 
 One has a notion that in those old times the days 
 were longer than now ; that a man called to-day his 
 own by a securer title, and held his hours with a 
 sense of divine right now obsolete. It is an absurd 
 fancy, I know, and would be sent to the right-about 
 by the first physicist or liistorian you happened to 
 meet. But one thing I am sure of, that the private 
 person was of more importance both to himself and 
 others then than now, and that self-consciousness 
 was, accordingly, a vast deal more comfortable be- 
 cause it had less need of conscious seK-assertion. 
 
 But the Past always has the advantage of us in 
 the secret it has learned of holding its tongue, which 
 may perhaps account in part for its reputed wisdom. 
 Whatever the eighteenth century was, there was a 
 great deal of stout fighting and work done in it, 
 both physical and intellectual, and we owe it a great 
 debt. Its very inef&cacy for the higher reaches of 
 poetry, its very good-breeding that made it shy of 
 the raised voice and flushed features of enthusiasm, 
 enabled it to give us the model of a domestic and 
 drawing-room prose as distinguished from that of 
 the pulpit, the forum, or the closet. In Germany 
 it gave us Lessing and that half century of Goethe 
 which made him what he was. In France it gave 
 us Voltaire, who, if he used ridicule too often for 
 the satisfaction of personal spite, employed it also 
 for sixty years in the service of truth and jus- 
 tice, and to him more than to any other one man 
 
12 GRAY 
 
 we owe it tliat we can now think and speak as we 
 choose. Contemptible he may have been in more 
 ways than one, but at any rate we owe him that, 
 and it is surely something. In what is called the 
 elegant literature of our own tongue (to speak only 
 of the most eminent), it gave us Addison and Steele, 
 who together made a man of genius ; Pope, whose 
 vivid genius almost persuaded wit to renounce its 
 proper nature and become poetry ; Thomson, who 
 sought inspiration in nature, though in her least 
 imaginative side ; ^ Fielding, still in some respects 
 our greatest novelist ; Richardson, the only author 
 who ever made long-windedness seem a benefaction ; 
 Sterne, the most subtle humorist since Shakespeare ; 
 Goldsmith, in whom the sweet humanity of Chau- 
 cer finds its nearest parallel ; Cowper, the poet of 
 Nature in her more domestic and familiar moods ; 
 Johnson, whose brawny rectitude of mind more 
 than atones for coarseness of fibre. Toward the 
 middle of the century, also, two books were pub- 
 lished which made an epoch in aesthetics, Dodsley's 
 " Old Plays " (1744) and Percy's " Ballads " (1765). 
 These gave the first impulse to the romantic reac- 
 tion against a miscalled classicism, and were the 
 seed of the literary renaissance. 
 
 The temper of the times and the comfortable 
 conditions on which life was held by the educated 
 
 ^ That Thomson was a man of true poetic sensibility is shown, I 
 think, more agreeably in The Castle of Indolence than in The Sea- 
 sons. In these, when he buckles the buskins of Milton on the feet 
 of his natural sermo pedestris, the effect too often suggests the un- 
 wieldy gait of a dismounted trooper in his jaok-boots. 
 
GRAY 13 
 
 class were sure to produce a large crop of dilettante- 
 ism, of delight in art and the things belonging to it 
 as an elegant occupation of the mind without taxing 
 its faculties too severely. If the dilettante in his 
 eagerness to escape ennui sometimes become a bore 
 himself, especially to the professional artist, he is 
 not without his use in keeping alive the traditions 
 of good taste and transmitting the counsels of ex- 
 perience. In proportion as his critical faculty 
 grows sensitive, he becomes incapable of production 
 himself. For indeed his eye is too often trained 
 rather to detect faults than excellences, and he can 
 tell you where and how a thing differs for the 
 worse from established precedent, hut not where it 
 differs for the better. This habit of mind would 
 make him distrustful of himseK and sterile in ori- 
 ginal production, for his consciousness of how much 
 can be said against whatever is done and even well 
 done reacts upon him and makes him timid. It is 
 the rarest thing to find genius and dilettanteism 
 united in the same person (as for a time they were 
 in Goethe), for genius implies always a certain 
 fanaticism of temperament, which, if sometimes 
 it seem fitful, is yet capable of intense energy on 
 occasion, while the main characteristic of the dilet- 
 tante is that sort of impartiality which springs from 
 inertia of mind, admirable for observation, inca- 
 pable of turning it to practical account. Yet we 
 have, I think, an example of this rare combination 
 of qualities in Gray, and it accounts both for the 
 kind of excellence to which he attained, and for the 
 way in which he disappointed expectation, his own, 
 
14 GRAY 
 
 I suspect, j&rst of all. He is especially interesting 
 as an artist in words and phrases, a literary type 
 far less common among writers of English, than it 
 is in France or Italy, where perhaps the traditions 
 of Latin culture were never wholly lost, or, even if 
 they were, continued to be operative by inheritance 
 through the form they had impressed upon the 
 mind. Born in 1716, he died in his 55th year, 
 leaving behind him hardly fourteen hundred verses. 
 Dante was one year older, Shakespeare, three years 
 younger when he died. It seems a slender monu- 
 ment, yet it has endured and is likely to endure, 
 so close-grained is the material and so perfect the 
 workmanship. When so many have written too 
 nmch, we shall the more readily pardon the rare 
 man who has written too little or just enough. 
 
 The incidents of Gray's life are few and unim- 
 portant. Educated at Eton and diseducated, as he 
 seemed to think, at Cambridge, in his twenty-third 
 year he was invited by Horace Walpole to be his 
 companion in a journey to Italy. At the end of 
 two years they quarrelled, and Gray returned to 
 England. Dr. Johnson has explained the causes 
 of this rupture, with his usual sturdy good sense 
 and knowledge of human nature : " Mr. Walj)ole," 
 he says, " is now content to have it told that it was 
 by his fault. If we look, however, without preju- 
 dice on the world, we shall find that men whose 
 consciousness of their own merit sets them above 
 the compliances of servility, are apt enough in their 
 association with superiors to watch their own dignity 
 with troublesome and punctilious jealousy, and in 
 
GRA Y 15 
 
 the fervor of independence to exact that attention 
 which they refuse to pay." Johnson was obeying 
 Sidney's prescription of looking into his own heart 
 when he wrote that. Walpole's explanation is of 
 the same purport : " I was young, too fond of my 
 own diversion ; nay, I do not doubt too much in- 
 toxicated by indulgence, vanity, and the insolences 
 of my situation as a Prime Minister's son. ... I 
 treated him insolently. . . . Forgive me if I say 
 that his temper was not conciliating." They were 
 reconciled a few years later and continued cour- 
 teously friendly till Gray's death. A meaner expla- 
 nation of their quarrel has been given by gossip; 
 that a letter which Gray had written home was 
 opened and read by Walpole, who found in it some- 
 thing not to his own advantage. But the reconcilia- 
 tion sufficiently refutes this, for if Gray could have 
 consented to overlook the baseness, Walpole could 
 never have forgiven its detection. 
 
 Gray was a conscientious traveller, as the notes 
 he has left behind him prove. One of these, on 
 the Borghese Gallery at Rome, is so characteristic 
 as to be worth citing : " Several (Madonnas) of 
 Rafael, Titian, Andrea del Sarto, etc., but in none 
 of them all that heavenly grace and beauty that 
 Guido gave, and that Carlo Maratt has so well im- 
 itated in subjects of this nature." This points to 
 an admission which those who admire Gray, as I do, 
 are forced to make, sooner or later, that there was 
 a tint of effeminacy in his nature. That he should 
 have admired Norse poetry, Ossian, and the Scot- 
 tish ballads is not inconsistent with this, but may 
 
16 GRAY 
 
 be explained by what is called the attraction of 
 opposites, which means merely that we are wont to 
 overvalue qualities or aptitudes which we feel to 
 be wanting in ourselves. Moreover these anti-clas- 
 sical yearnings of Gray began after he had ceased 
 producing, and it was not unnatural that he should 
 admire men who did without thinking what he 
 could not do by taking thought. Elegance, sweet- 
 ness, pathos, or even majesty he could achieve, but 
 never that force which vibrates in every verse of 
 larger-moulded men. 
 
 Bonstetten teUs us that " every sensation in 
 Gray was passionate," but I very much doubt 
 whether he was capable of that sustained passion of 
 the mind which is fed by a prevailing imagination 
 acting on the consciousness of great powers. That 
 was something he could never feel, though he 
 knew what it meant by his observation of others, 
 and longed to feel it. In him imagination was 
 passive ; it could divine and select, but not create. 
 Bonstetten, after seeing the best society in Europe 
 on equal terms, also tells us that Gray was the most 
 finished gentleman he had ever seen. Is it over 
 fine to see sometliing ominous in that word finished f 
 It seems to imply limitations ; to imply a conscious- 
 ness that sees everything between it and the goal 
 rather than the goal itself, that undermines en- 
 thusiasm through the haunting doubt of being 
 undermined. We cannot help feeling in the poetry 
 of Gray that it too is finished, perhaps I should 
 rather say limited, as the greatest things never are, 
 as it is one of their merits that they never can be. 
 
GRA Y 17 
 
 They suggest more than they bestow, and enlarge 
 our apprehension beyond their own boundaries. 
 Gray shuts us in his own contentment like a cathe- 
 dral close or college quadrangle. He is all the 
 more interesting, perhaps, that he was a true child 
 of his century, in which decorum was religion. He 
 coTild not, as Dryden calls it in his generous way, 
 give his soul a loose, although he would. He is 
 of the eagle brood, but unfledged. His eye shares 
 the aether which shall never be cloven by his wing. 
 But it is one of the school-boy blunders in criti- 
 cism to deny one kind of perfection because it is 
 not another. Gray, more than any of our poets, has 
 shown what a depth of sentiment, how much plea- 
 surable emotion, mere words are capable of stirring 
 through the magic of association, and of artful 
 arrangement in conjunction with agreeable and fa- 
 miliar images. For Gray is pictorial in the highest 
 sense of the term, much more than imaginative. 
 Some passages in his letters give us a hint that he 
 might have been. For example, he asks his friend 
 Stonehewer, in 1760, " Did you never observe 
 Qichile rocking winds are piinng loud) that pause 
 as the gust is re-collecting itself ? " But in his 
 verse there is none of that intuitive phrase where 
 the imagination at a touch precipitates thought, 
 feeling, and image in an imperishable crystal. He 
 knew imagination when he saw it ; no man better ; 
 he could have scientifically defined it ; but it would 
 not root in the artificial soil of his own garden, 
 though he transplanted a bit now and then. Here 
 is an instance : Dryden in his " Annus Mirabilis," 
 
18 GRAY 
 
 hinting that Louis XIV. would fain have joined 
 Holland against England, if he dared, says : — 
 
 "And threatening France, placed like a painted Jove, 
 Held idle thunder in his lifted hand." 
 
 Gray felt how fine this was, and makes his 
 Agrippina say that it was she 
 
 "that armed 
 This painted Jove and taught his novice hand 
 To aim the forked bolt, -while he stood trembling, 
 Seared at the sound and dazzled with its brightness." 
 
 Pretty well, one would say, for a ^'■painted Jove " ! 
 The imagination is sometimes super grammaticam, 
 like the Emperor Sigismund, but it is coherent by 
 the very law of its being.^ 
 
 Gray brought home from France and Italy a 
 familiar knowledge of their languages, and that en- 
 larged culture of the eye which is one of the insen- 
 sible, as it is one of the greatest gains of travel. 
 The adventures he details in his letters are gen- 
 erally such as occur to all the world, but there is 
 a passage in one of them in which he describes a 
 scene at Rheims in 1739, so curious and so charac- 
 teristic of the time as to be worth citing : — 
 
 " The other evening we happened to be got together 
 in a company of eighteen people, men and women of the 
 best fashion here, at a garden in the town to walk ; when 
 one of the ladies bethought herself of asking 'Why 
 should not we sup here ? ' Immediately the cloth was 
 
 ^ It is always interesting to trace the germs of lucky phrases. 
 Dryden was familiar with the works of Beaumont and Fletcher, 
 and it may be suspected that this noble image was suggested by a 
 verse in The Double Marriage — " Thou woven Worthy in a piece 
 of arras." 
 
GRAY 19 
 
 laid by the side of a fountain under the trees, and a very- 
 elegant supper served up ; after which another said, 
 ' Come, let us sing,' and directly began herself ; from 
 singing we insensibly fell to dancing and singing in a 
 round, when somebody mentioned the violins, and imme- 
 diately a company of them was ordered. Minuets were 
 begun in the open air, and then came country dances 
 which held till four o'clock in the morning, at which 
 hour the gayest lady there proposed that such as were 
 weary should get into their coaches, and the rest . . . 
 should dance before them with the music in the van ; 
 and in this manner we paraded through the principal 
 streets of the city and waked everybody in it." 
 
 This recalls the garden of Boccaccio, and if it be 
 hard to fancy the " melancholy Gray " leading off 
 such a jig of Conrns, it is almost harder to conceive 
 that this was only fifty years before the French 
 Revolution. And yet it was precisely this gay 
 insouciance, this forgetfulness that the world ex- 
 isted for any but a single class in it, and this care- 
 lessness of the comfort of others that made the 
 catastrophe possible. 
 
 Immediately on his return he went back to Cam- 
 bridge, where he spent (with occasional absences) 
 the rest of his days, first at Peter House and then 
 at Pembroke College. In 1768, three years before 
 his death, he was appointed professor of Modern 
 Literature and Languages, but he never performed 
 any of its functions except that of receiving the 
 salary — " so did the Muse defend her son." John- 
 son describes him as "always designing lectures, 
 but never reading them; uneasy at his neglect of< 
 
20 GRAY 
 
 duty and appeasing his uneasiness with designs of 
 reformation and with a resolution, which he believed 
 himself to have made, of resigning the office, if he 
 found himself unable to discharge it." This is ex- 
 cellently well divined, for nobody knew better than 
 Johnson what a master of casuistry is indolence, 
 but I find no trace of any such feeling in Gray's 
 correspondence. After the easy-going fashion of 
 his day he was more likely to consider his salary as 
 another form of pension. 
 
 The first poem of Gray that was printed was the 
 " Ode on the Distant Prospiect of Eton College," and 
 this when he was already thirty-one. The " Elegy " 
 followed in 1750, the other lesser odes in 1753, 
 " The Progress of Poesy " and the " Bard " in 1757. 
 Collins had preceded him in this latter species of 
 composition, a man of more original imagination 
 and more fervent nature, but inferior in artistic 
 instinct. Mason gives a droll reason for the suc- 
 cess of the " Elegy : " " It spread at first on account 
 of the affecting and pensive cast of the subject — 
 just like Hervey's ' Meditations on the Tombs.' " 
 What Walpole called Gray's flowering period ended 
 with his fortieth year. From that time forward he 
 wrote no more. Twelve years later, it is true, he 
 writes to Walpole : — 
 
 " What has one to do, when turned of fifty, but really 
 to think of finishing? . . . However, I will be candid 
 . . . and avow to you that, till fourscore and ten, when- 
 ever the humor takes me, I will write because I like it, 
 and because I like myself better when I do so. If I do 
 not write much it is because I cannot." 
 
GRAY 21 
 
 Chaucer was growing plumper over his " Canter- 
 bury Tales," and the " Divina Commedia " was still 
 making Dante leaner^ when both those poets were 
 "turned of fifty." Had Milton pleaded the same 
 discharge, we should not have had " Paradise Lost " 
 and " Samson Agonistes." 
 
 No doubt Gray could have written more " if he 
 had set himself doggedly about it," as Johnson 
 has recommended in such cases, but he never did, 
 and I suspect that it was this neglect rather than 
 that of his lectures that irked hun. The words 
 " because I like myself better when I do" seem to 
 point in that direction. Bonstetten, who knew him 
 a year later than the date of this letter, says : — 
 
 " The poetical genius of Gray was so extinguished in 
 the gloomy residence of Cambridge that the recollection 
 of his poems was hateful to him. He never permitted 
 me to speak to him about them. When I quoted some 
 of his verses to him, he held his tongue like an obstinate 
 child. I said to him sometimes, ' Will you not answer 
 me, then ? ' but no word came from his lips. I saw him 
 every evening from five o'clock till midnight. We read 
 Shakespeare, whom he adored, Dryden, Pope, Milton, 
 etc., and our conversations, like those of friendship, 
 knew no end. I told Gray about my life and my 
 country, but all his own life was shut from me. Never 
 did he speak of himself. There was in Gray between 
 the present and the past an impassable abyss. When I 
 would have approached it, gloomy clouds began to cover 
 it. I believe that Gray had never loved ; this was the 
 key to the riddle." 
 
 One cannot help wishing that Bonstetten had 
 
22 GRAY 
 
 Boswellized some of these endless conversations, 
 for the talk of Gray was, on the testimony of all 
 who heard it, admirable for fulness of knowledge, 
 point, and originality of thought. Sainte-Beuve, 
 commenting on the words of Bonstetten, says, with 
 his usual quick insight and graceful cleverness : — 
 
 " Je ne sais si Bonstetten avait devin^ juste at si le 
 secret de la mdlancolie de Gray ^tait dans ce manque 
 d'amour ; je le chercherais plutot dans la st^rilit^ d'un 
 talent podtique si distingu^, si rare, mais si avare. Oh ! 
 comme je le comprends mieux, dans ce sens-la, le silence 
 obstin^ et boudeur des poetes profonds, arrives a un cer- 
 tain age et taris, cette rancune encore aimante envers ce 
 qu'on a tant aim^ et qui ne reviendra plus, cette douleur 
 d'une ame orpb^line de podsie et qui ne veut pas etre 
 consol^e ! " 
 
 But Sainte-Beuve was thinking rather of the au- 
 thor of a certain volume of French poetry published 
 under the pseudonym of Joseph Delorme than of 
 Gray. Gray had been a successful poet, if ever 
 there was one, for he had pleased both the few and 
 the many. There is a great difference between 
 I could if I would and I would if I could in their 
 effect on the mind. Sainte-Beuve is perhaps partly 
 right, but it may be fairly surmised that the re- 
 morse for intellectual indolence should have had 
 some share in making Gray unwilling to recall the 
 time when he was better employed than in filling-in 
 coats-of-arms on the margin of Dugdale and cor- 
 recting the Latin of Linnaeus. I suspect that his 
 botany, his heraldry, and his weather - calendars 
 were mere expedients to make himself believe he 
 
GRAY 23 
 
 was doing something, and that he might have an 
 excuse ready when conscience reproached him with 
 not doing something he could do better. He speaks 
 of " his natural indolence and indisposition to act," 
 in a letter to Wharton. Temple tells us that he 
 wished rather to be looked on as a gentleman 
 than as a man of letters, and this may have been 
 partly true at a time when authorship was stiU 
 lodged in Grub Street and in many cases deserved 
 no better. Gray had the admirable art of making 
 himself respected by beginning first himself. He 
 always treated Thomas Gray with the distinguished 
 consideration he deserved. Perhaps neither Bon- 
 stetten nor Sainte-Beuve was precisely the man to 
 imderstand the more than English reserve of Gray, 
 the reserve of a man as proud as he was sensitive. 
 And Gray's pride was not, as it sometimes is, allied 
 to vanity ; it was personal rather than social, if 
 I may attempt a distinction which I feel but can 
 hardly define. After he became famous, one of 
 the several Lords Gray claimed kindred with him, 
 perhaps I shoidd say was willing that he should 
 claim it, on the ground of a similarity of arms. 
 Gray preferred his own private distinction, and 
 would not admit their lordships to any partner- 
 ship in it. Michael Angelo, who fancied himself a 
 proud man, was in haste to believe a purely imagi- 
 nary pedigree that derived him from the Counts of 
 Canossa. 
 
 That I am right in saying that Gray's melan- 
 choly was in part remorse at (if I may not say the 
 waste) the abeyance of his powers, may be read 
 
24 GRAY 
 
 between tlie lines (I tliink) in more ttan one of 
 his letters. His constant endeavor was to occupy 
 himseK in whatever would save him from the reflec- 
 tion of how he might occupy himself better. " To 
 fuid one's self business," he says, " (I am per- 
 suaded), is the great art of hfe. . . . Some spirit, 
 some genius (more than common) is required to 
 teach a man how to employ himself." And else- 
 where : " to be employed is to be happy," which 
 was a saying he borrowed of Swift, another self- 
 dissatisfied man. Bonstetten says in French tliat 
 " his mind was gay and his character melancholy." 
 In German he substitutes " soul" for "character." 
 He was cheerful, that is, in any company but his 
 own, and this, it may be guessed, because faculties 
 were called into play which he had not the innate 
 force to rouse into more profitable activity. Gray's 
 melancholy was that of Richard II. : — 
 
 " I wasted time, and now doth time waste me, 
 For now hath time made me his numbering-clock." 
 
 Whatever the cause, it began about the time 
 when he had finally got his two great odes off his 
 hands. At first it took the form of resignation, as 
 when he writes to Mason in 1757 : — 
 
 " I can only tell you that one who has far more reason 
 than you, I hope, will ever have to look on life with 
 something worse than indifference, is yet no enemy to it, 
 but can look backward on many bitter moments, partly 
 with satisfaction, and partly with patience, and forward, 
 too, on a scene not very promising, with some hope and 
 some expectation of a better day." 
 
 But it is only fair to give his own explanation of 
 
GRAY 25 
 
 his Tmproductiveness. He writes to Wharton, who 
 had asked hun for an epitaph on a child just lost : — 
 
 " I by no means pretend to inspiration, but yet I 
 affirm that the faculty in question is by no means volun^ 
 tary. It is the result, I suppose, of a certain disposition 
 of mind which does not depend on one's self, and which 
 I have not felt this long time." 
 
 In spite of this, however, it should be remem- 
 bered that the motive power always becomes slug- 
 gish in men who too easily admit the supremacy of 
 moods. But an age of common sense would very 
 greatly help such;. a man as Gray to distrust him- 
 self. 
 
 If Gray ceased to write poetry, let us be thank- 
 ful that he continued to write letters. Cowper, the 
 poet, a competent judge, for he wrote excellent 
 letters himself, and therefore had studied the art, 
 says, writing to Hill in 1777 : — 
 
 *' I once thought Swift's letters the best that could be 
 written ; but I like Gray's better. His humor, or his 
 wit, or whatever it is to be called, is never ill-natured or 
 offensive, and yet, I think, equally poignant with the 
 Dean's." 
 
 I tliink the word that Cowper was at a loss for 
 was playfulneas, the most delightful ingredient in 
 letters, for Gray can hardly be said to have had 
 humor in the deeper sense of the word. The near- 
 est approach to it I remember is where he writes 
 (as Lamb would have ^vritten) to Walpole suffer- 
 ing with the gout : " The pain in your feet I can 
 bear. " He has the knack of sayiDg droll things 
 
26 GRAY 
 
 in an ofP-Hand way, and as if they cost Mm nothing. 
 It is only the most delicately trained hand that can 
 venture on this playful style, easy as it seems, with- 
 out danger of a catastrophe, and Gray's perfect 
 elegance could nowhere have found a more admi- 
 rable foil than in the vulgar jauntiness and clumsy 
 drollery of his correspondent, Mason. Let me cite 
 an example or two. 
 
 He writes to Wharton, 1753 : — 
 
 " I take it ill you should say anything against the 
 Mole. It is a reflection, I see, cast at the Thames. Do 
 you think that rivers which have lived in London and its 
 neighbourhood all their days will run roaring and tum- 
 bling about like your tramontane torrents in the North .'' " 
 
 To Brown, 1767 : — 
 
 " Pray that the Trent may not intercept us at Newark, 
 for we have had infinite rain here, and they say every 
 brook sets up for a river." 
 
 Of the French, he writes to Walpole, m Paris : — 
 
 "I was much entertained with your account of our 
 neighbours. As an Englishman and an anti-Gallican, I 
 rejoice at their dulness and their nastiness, though I 
 fear we shall come to imitate them in both. Their athe- 
 ism is a little too much, too shocking to be rejoiced at. 
 I have long been sick at it in their authors and hated 
 them for it ; but I pity their poor innocent people of 
 fashion. They were bad enough when they believed 
 everything." 
 
 Of course it is difficult to give mstances of a 
 thing in its nature so evanescent, yet so subtly per- 
 vasive, as what we call tone. I think it is in this, 
 
GRAY 27 
 
 if in anything, that Gray's letters are on the whole 
 superior to Swift's. This playfulness of Gray very 
 easily becomes tenderness on occasion, and even 
 pathos. 
 
 Writing to his friend Nicholls in 1765, he says : 
 
 " It is long since I heard you were'-gone in haste into 
 Yorkshire on account of your mother's illness, and the 
 same letter informed me she was recovered. Otherwise 
 I had then wrote to you only to beg you would take 
 care of her, and to inform you that I had discovered a 
 thing very Httle known, which is, that in one's whole 
 life one can never have any more than a single mother. 
 You may think this obvious and (what you call) a trite 
 observation. . . . You are a green gosling ! I was at 
 the same age (very near) as wise as you, and yet I never 
 discovered this (with full evidence and conviction, I 
 mean) till it was too late. It is thirteen years ago and 
 it seems but as yesterday, and every day I hve it sinks 
 deeper into my heart." 
 
 In his letters of condolence, perhaps the most 
 arduous species of all composition, Gray shows the 
 same exquisite tact which is his distinguishing char- 
 acteristic as a poet. And he shows it by never 
 attempting to console. Perhaps his notions on this 
 matter may be divined in what he writes to Wal- 
 pole about Lyttelton's " Elegy on his Wife : " — 
 
 " I am not totally of your mind as to Mr. Lyttelton's 
 elegy, though I love kids and fawns as little as you do. 
 If it were all like the fourth stanza I should be exces- 
 sively pleased. Nature and sorrow and tenderness are 
 the true genius of such things ; and something of these 
 I find in several parts of it (not in the orange tree) ; 
 
28 GRAY 
 
 poetical ornaments are foreign to the purpose, for they 
 only show a man is not sorry ; and devotion worse, for 
 it teaches him that he ought not to he sorry, which is all 
 the pleasure of the thing." 
 
 And to Mason he writes in September, 1753 : — 
 
 " I know what it is to lose a person that one's eyes 
 and heart have long been used to, and I never desire to 
 part with the rememhrance of that loss." (His mother 
 died in the March of that year.) 
 
 Gray's letters also are a mine of acute observa- 
 tion and sliarijly-edged criticism upon style, espe- 
 cially those to Mason and Beattie. His ohiter 
 dicta have the weight of wide reading and much 
 reflection by a man of delicate apprehension and 
 tenacious memory for principles. " Mr. Gray 
 used to say," Mason tells us, "that good writing 
 not only required great parts, but the very best of 
 those parts." ^ I quote a few of his sayings almost 
 at random : — 
 
 " Have you read Clarendon's book ? Do you remem- 
 ber Mr. Cambridge's account of it before it came out ? 
 How weU he recollected all the faults, and how utterly 
 he forgot all the beauties ? Surely the grossest taste is 
 better than such a sort of delicacy." 
 
 " I think even a bad verse as good a thing or better 
 than the best observation that ever was made upon it." 
 
 ^ This, perhaps, suggested to Coleridge his admirable defini- 
 tion of the distinction between the language of poetry and of 
 prose. It is almost certain that Coleridge learned from Gray his 
 nicety in the use of Towel-sounds and the secret that in a verse it 
 is the letter that giveth life quite as often as the spirit. Many 
 poets have been intuitively lucky in the practice of this art, but 
 Gray had formulated it. 
 
GRA Y 29 
 
 " Half a word fixed upon or near the spot is worth a 
 cart-load of recollection." (He is speaking of descrip- 
 tions of scenery, but what he says is of wider applica- 
 tion.) 
 
 " Froissart is the Herodotus of a barbarous age." 
 " Jeremy Taylor is the Shakespeare of divines." 
 " I rejoice when I see Machiavel defended or illus- 
 trated, who to me appears one of the wisest men that 
 any nation in any age has produced." 
 
 " In truth, Shakespeare's language is one of his prin- 
 cipal beauties, and he has no less advantage over your 
 Addisons and Rowes in this than in those other great 
 excellencies you mention. Every word in him is a pic- 
 ture." 
 
 Of Dryden lie said to Beattie : — 
 
 " That if there was any excellence in his own num- 
 bers he had learned it wholly from that great poet, and 
 pressed him with great earnestness to study, as his 
 choice of words and [his] versification were singularly 
 happy and harmonious." 
 
 And again lie says in a postscript to Beattie : — 
 
 " Remember Dryden, and be blind to all his faults." 
 
 To Mason he writes : — 
 
 " All I can say is that your ' Elegy ' must not end with 
 the worst line in it ; it is flat, it is prose ; whereas that, 
 above all, ought to sparkle, or at least to shine. If the 
 sentiment must stand, twirl it a little into an apothegm, 
 stick a flower in it, gild it with a costly expression ; let 
 it strike the fancy, the ear, or the heart, and I am 
 satisfied." 
 
 Gray and Mason together, however, could not 
 make the latter a poet ! 
 
30 GRA Y 
 
 " Now I insist that sense is nothing in poetry, but 
 according to the dress she wears and the scene she 
 appears in." 
 
 " I have got the old Scotch ballad on which ' Douglas ' 
 [Home's] was founded ; it is divine, and as long as 
 from hence to Ashton. Have you never seen it ? Aris- 
 totle's best rules are observed in it in a manner that 
 shows the author never had heard of Aristotle." 
 
 " This latter [speaking of a passage in ' Caractacus ' j 
 is exemplary for the expression (always the great point 
 with me) ; I do not mean by expression the mere choice 
 of words, but the whole dress, fashion, and arrangement 
 of a thought." 
 
 "Extreme conciseness of expression, yet pure, per- 
 spicuous, and musical, is one of the grand beauties of 
 lyric poetry ; this I have always aimed at and never 
 could attain." 
 
 Of his own Agrippina lie says : — 
 
 " She seemed to me to talk like an old boy all in 
 figures and mere poetry, instead of nature and the lan- 
 guage of real passion." 
 
 Of the minuteness of Ms care in matters of ex- 
 pression an example or two will suffice. Writing 
 to Mason he says : — 
 
 " Sure ' seers ' comes over too often ; besides, it sounds 
 ill." " Plann'd is a nasty stiff word." " I cannot give 
 up ' lost ' for it begins with an I." 
 
 Yet Gray's nice ear objected to " -yain -yision " 
 as hard. 
 
 It may be asked if those minutiae of alliteration 
 and of close or open vowel-soimds are consistent 
 with anything like that ecstasy of mind, from 
 
GRA Y 31 
 
 which the highest poetry is supposed to spring, 
 and which it is its function to reproduce in the 
 mind of the reader. But whoever would write 
 well must learn to write. Shelley was almost as 
 great a corrector of his own verses as Pope. Even 
 in Shakespeare we can trace the steps and even the 
 models by which he arrived at that fatality of 
 phrase which seems like immediate inspiration. 
 One ^t least of the objects of writing is (or was) 
 to be read, and, other things being equal, the best 
 writers are those who make themselves most easily 
 readable. Gray's great claim to the rank he holds 
 is derived from his almost unrivalled skill as an 
 artist, in words and sounds ; as an artist, too, who 
 knew how to compose his thoughts and images 
 with a thorough knowledge of perspective. This 
 explams why he is so easy to remember ; why, 
 though he wrote so little, so much of what he 
 wrote is familiar on men's tongues. There are 
 certain plants that have seeds with hooks by which 
 they cling to any passing animal and impress his 
 legs into the service of their locomotion and dis- 
 tribution. Gray's phrases have the same gift of 
 hooking themselves into the memory, and it was 
 due to the exquisite artifice of their construc- 
 tion. His "Elegy," certainly not through any 
 originality of thought, but far more through origi- 
 nality of sound, has charmed all ears from the day 
 it was published ; and the measure in which it is 
 written, though borrowed by Gray of Dryden^ by 
 Dryden of Davenant, by Davenant of Davies, and 
 by him of Raleigh, is ever since associated with 
 
32 GRAY 
 
 that poem as if by some exclusive right of prop- 
 erty. Perhaps the great charm of the " Elegy " is 
 to be found m its embodying that pensively sting- 
 less pessimism which comes with the first gray 
 hair ; that vague sympathy with ourselves, which is 
 so much cheaper than sympathy with others ; that 
 placid melancholy which satisfies the general ap- 
 petite for an emotion which titillates rather than 
 wounds. 
 
 The "Progress of Poesy" and "The Bard" 
 made their way more slowly, though the judgment 
 of the elect (the Swarot to whom Gray proudly 
 appealed) placed them at the head of English lyric 
 poetry. By the majority they were looked on as di- 
 vine in the sense that they were past all understai^d- 
 ing. Goldsmith criticised them in the " Monthly 
 Review," and a few passages of his article are 
 worth quoting as coming from him : — 
 
 "We cannot, however, without some regret, behold 
 those talents so capable of giving pleasure to all, exerted 
 in efEorts that, at best, can amuse only the few ; we 
 cannot behold this rising poet seeking fame among the 
 learned, without hinting to him the same advice that 
 Isocrates used to give his pupils, ' Study the people.' 
 . . . He speaks to a people not easily impressed with 
 new ideas ; extremely tenacious of the old ; with diffi- 
 culty warmed and as slowly cooling again. How un- 
 suited, then, to our national character is that species of 
 poetry which I'ises on us with unexpected flights ; where 
 we must hastily catch the thought or it flies from us ; 
 and in short, where the reader must largely partake of 
 the poet's enthusiasm in order to taste his beauties ! 
 . . . These two odes, it must be confessed, breathe much 
 
GRA Y 33 
 
 of the spirit of Pindar ; but then they have caught the 
 seeming obscurity, the sudden transition and hazardous 
 epithet of the mighty master, all which, though evidently 
 intended for beauties, will probably be regarded as 
 blemishes by the generality of readers. In short, they 
 are in some measure a representation of what Pindar 
 now appears to be, though perhaps not what he ap- 
 peared to the States of Greece." 
 
 Goldsmith preferred " The Bard " to the " Prog- 
 ress of Poesy." We seem to see him willing to 
 praise and yet afraid to like. He is possessed by 
 the true spirit of his age. For my part I think I 
 see as much influence of the Italian " Canzone " as 
 of Pindar in these odes. Nor would they be better 
 for being more like Pindar. Ought not a thing 
 once thoroughly well done to be left conscientiously 
 alone ? And was it not Gray's object that these 
 odes should have something of the same inspiring 
 effect on English-speaking men as those others on 
 Greek-speaking men? To give the same lift to 
 the fancy and feeling? Goldsmith unconsciously 
 gave them the right praise when he said they had 
 " caught the spirit " of the elder poet. I remem- 
 ber hearing Emerson say some thirty years ago, 
 that he valued Gray chiefly as a comment on 
 Pindar. 
 
 Gray himself seems to have kept his balance 
 very well ; indeed, it may be conjectured that he 
 knew the shortcomings of his work better than 
 any one else could have told him of them. He 
 writes to Hurd : — 
 
 "As your acquaintance in the University (you say) 
 
34 GRA Y 
 
 do me the honor to admire, it would be ungenerous 
 in me not to give them notice that they are doing a 
 very unfashionable thing, for all People of Condition 
 are agreed not to admire, nor even to understand. One 
 very great man, vrriting to an acquaintance of his and 
 mine, says that he had read them seven or eight times, 
 and that now, when he next sees him, he shall not 
 have above thirty questions to" ask. Another, a peer, 
 believes that the last stanza of the second Ode relates to 
 King Charles the First and Oliver Cromwell. Even 
 my friends tell me they do not succeed, and write me 
 moving topics of consolation on that head. In short, I 
 have heard of nobody but an actor and a Doctor of Divin- 
 ity that profess their esteem for them. Oh yes, a lady 
 of quality (a friend of Mason's), who is a great reader. 
 She knew there was a compliment to Dryden, but never 
 suspected there was anything said about Shakespeare 
 and Milton, till it was explained to her ; and wishes that 
 there had been titles prefixed to tell what they were 
 about." 
 
 If the success of tlie Odes was not sueli as to en- 
 courage Gray to write more, they certainly added 
 to liis fame and made their way to admiration in 
 France and Italy. 
 
 The fate of Gray since his death has been a 
 singular one. He has been luiderrated both by 
 the Apostles of Common Sense and of Imagina- 
 tion, by Johnson, and Wordsworth. Johnson was 
 in an uncommonly surly mood even for him when 
 he wrote his life of Gray. He blames and praises 
 him for the same thing. He makes it a fault in 
 the " Ode on the Distant Prospect of Eton College," 
 that " the prospect . . . suggests nothing to Gray 
 
GRA Y 35 
 
 which every beholder does not equally think and 
 feel ; " and a merit of the " Elegy," that " it abounds 
 with images which find a mirror in every mind, 
 and with sentiments to which every bosom returns 
 an echo." This no doubt is one of the chief praises 
 of Gray, as of other jDoets, that he is the voice of 
 emotions common to all mankind. " Tell me what 
 I feel," is what everybody asks of the poet. But 
 surely it makes some difference how we are told. 
 It is one proof how good a thing is that it looks so 
 easy after it is done. Johnson growls also at Mr. 
 Walpole's cat, as if he were one of the race which 
 is the hereditary foe of that animal. He hits a 
 blot when he criticises " the azure flowers that 
 blow," but is blind to the easy fancy, the almost 
 feline grace of the whole, with its playful claws of 
 satire sheathed in velvet. 
 
 Wordsworth in his famous Preface attacks Gray 
 as " the head of those who by their reasonings 
 have attempted to widen the space of separation 
 betwixt prose and metrical composition " [he means 
 betwixt the language of the two], " and was more 
 than any other man curiously elaborate in the 
 structure of his own poetic diction." He then 
 quotes Gray's sonnet on the death of his friend 
 West. 
 
 ' ' In vain to me the smiling' mornings shine, 
 And reddening Phcebus lifts his golden fire ; 
 The birds in vain their amorous descant join, 
 Or cheerful fields resume their g.reen attire ; 
 These ears, alas, for other notes repine, 
 A different object do these eyes require : 
 My lonely anguish melts no heart hut mine ; 
 And in my breast the imperfect joys expire. 
 
36 GRA Y 
 
 Yet morning smiles the tusy race to cheer, 
 And newborn pleasure springs to happier men ; 
 The fields to all their wonted tribute bear ; 
 To warm their little loves the birds complain ; 
 I fruitless mourn to him that cannot hear, 
 And weep the more because I weep in vain." 
 
 " It will easily be perceived that the only part of 
 this sonnet which is of any value is the lines printed 
 in italics ; it is equally obvious that except in the 
 rhyme and in the use of the single word 'fruit- 
 less ' for ' fruitlessly,' which is so far a defect, the 
 language of these lines does in no respect differ 
 from that of prose." I think this criticism a little 
 ungracious, for it would not be easy to find many 
 sonnets (even of Wordsworth's own) with five 
 first-rate verses out of the fourteen. But what is 
 most curious is that Wordsworth should not have 
 seen that this very sonnet disproves the theory of 
 diction with which he charges him. I cannot find 
 that he had any such theory. He does, indeed, say 
 somewhere that the language of the age is never 
 the language of poetry, which if taken as he mider- 
 stood it is true, but I know not where Wordsworth 
 found his " reasonings." Gray by the language 
 of the age meant the language of conversation, 
 for he goes on to say, " Except among the French, 
 whose verse, where the thought or image does not 
 support it, differs in nothing from prose." Gray's 
 correspondence with Mason proves that he had no 
 such theory. Let a pair of instances suf&ce. 
 
 " There is an affectation in so often iising the 
 old phrase ' or ere ' for ' before.' " " Intellect is 
 a word of science and therefore inferior to any 
 
GRAY 37 
 
 more common word." Wordsworth should have 
 had more sympathy with a man who loved moun- 
 tains as well as he, and not wholly in the eighteenth- 
 century fashion either. " Not a precipice, not a 
 torrent, not a cliff," writes Gray from the Grande 
 Chartreuse, "but is -pvegnamt with religion and 
 poetry." That was Wordsworth's own very view, 
 his ownty-downty view one is sometimes tempted 
 to call it, when he won't let anybody else have a 
 share in it. 
 
 After a journey in Scotland : — 
 
 " The Lowlands are worth seeing once, but the moun- 
 tains are ecstatic and ought to be visited in pilgrimage 
 once a year. None but those monstrous creatures of God 
 know how to join so much beauty with so much horror. 
 A fig for your poets, painters, gardeners, and clergymen 
 that have not been among them ; their imagination can 
 be made up of nothing but bowling-greens, flowering- 
 shrubs, horse-ponds, Fleet-ditches, shell-grottoes, and 
 Chinese rails." 
 
 Sir James Mackintosh says that Gray first traced 
 out every picturesque tour in Britain, and Gray 
 was a perpetual invalid. He discovered the Wye 
 before Wordsworth, and floated down it in a boat, 
 "near forty miles, surrounded with ever-new de- 
 Hghts ; " nay, it was he who made known the Lake 
 region to the Lakers themselves. Wordsworth, I 
 can't help thinking, had a little unconscious jeal- 
 ousy of Gray, whose fame as the last great poet 
 was perhaps somewhat obtrusive when Words- 
 worth was at the University. His last word about 
 liim is in a letter to GiUies in 1816. 
 
38 GRA Y 
 
 " Gray failed as a poet not because he took too much 
 pains and so extinguished his animation, but because he 
 had very little of that fiery quality to begin with, and 
 his pains were of the wrong sort. He wrote English 
 verses as his brother Eton schoolboys wrote Latin, filch- 
 ing a phrase now from one author and now from an- 
 other. I do not profess to be a person of very various 
 reading ; nevertheless, if I were to pluck out of Gray's 
 taU all of the feathers which I know belong to other 
 birds, he would be left very bare indeed. Do not let any- 
 body persuade you that any quantity of good verses can 
 be produced by mere felicity ; or that an immortal style 
 can be the growth of mere genius. ' Midta tulit fecit- 
 que ' must be the motto of all those who are to last." ^ 
 
 What would be left to Gray after this plucking 
 would be bis genius, for genius be certainly bad, 
 or be could not have produced tbe effect of it. The 
 gentle Cowper, no bad critic also be, was kinder. 
 
 " I have been reading Gray's works," he says, " and 
 think him the only poet since Shakespeare entitled to the 
 character of sublime. Perhaps you will remember that 
 I once had a different opinion of him. I was preju- 
 diced." 
 
 In spite of unjust depreciation and misapplied 
 criticism, Gray holds bis own and bids fair to last 
 
 ■'■ I need not point out that Wordsworth is a little confused, if 
 not self-contradictory in this criticism. I will add only two quo- 
 tations to show that accidents will happen to the best-regulated 
 poets : — 
 
 " At distance heard the murmur of many waterfalls not audible 
 in the day-time." — Gray to Wharton, 1769. 
 
 " A soft and lulling sound is heard 
 Of streams inaudible by day." — White Doe. 
 
 Gray probably guided Wordsworth to the vein of gold in Dyer. 
 
GRA Y 39 
 
 as long as the language which he knew how to write 
 so well and of which he is one of the glories. 
 Wordsworth is justified in saying that he helped 
 himself from everybody and everywhere — and yet 
 he made such admirable use of what he stole (if 
 theft there was) that we should as soon think of 
 finding fault with a man for pillaging the diction- 
 ary. He mixed liimseK with whatever he took — 
 an incalculable increment. In the editions of his 
 poems, the thin line of text stands at the top of 
 the page like cream, and below it is the skim-milk 
 drawn from many milky mothers of the herd out 
 of which it has risen. But the thing to be con- 
 sidered is that, no matter where the material came 
 from, the result is Gray's own. Whether original 
 or not, he knew how to make a poem, a very rare 
 knowledge among men. The thought in Gray is 
 neither uncommon nor profound, and you may call 
 it beatified commonplace if you choose. I shall not 
 contradict you. I have lived long enough to know 
 that there is a vast deal of commonplace in the 
 world of no particular use to anybody, and am 
 thankfid to the man who has the divine gift to 
 idealize it for me. Nor am I offended with this 
 odor of the library that hangs about Gray, for it 
 recalls none but delightful associations. It was in 
 the very best literature that Gray was steeped, and 
 I am glad that both he and we should profit by it. 
 If he appropriated a fine phrase wherever he found 
 it, it was by right of eminent domain, for surely 
 he was one of the masters of language. His praise 
 is that what he touched was idealized, and kindled 
 
40 GRA Y 
 
 with some virtue that was not there before, but 
 came from him. 
 
 And he was the most conscientious of artists. 
 Some of the verses which he discards in deference 
 to this conscientiousness of form which sacrifices 
 the poet to the poem, the parts to the whole, and 
 regards nothing- but the effect to be produced, would 
 have made the fortune of - another poet. Take for 
 example this stanza omitted from the " Elegy " (just 
 before the Epitaph), because, says Mason, "he 
 thought it was too long a parenthesis in this 
 place." 
 
 ' ' There scattered oft, the earliest of the year, 
 By hands unseen are showers of yiolets found ; 
 The redbreast loves to build and warble there, 
 And little footsteps lightly print the ground." 
 
 Gray might run his pen through this, but he 
 could not obliterate it from the memory of men. 
 Surely Wordsworth himself never achieved a sim- 
 plicity of language so pathetic in suggestion, so 
 musical in movement as this. 
 
 Any slave of the mine may find the rough gem, 
 but it is the cutting and polishing that reveal its 
 heart of fire ; it is the setting that makes of it 
 a jewel to hang at the ear of Time. If Gray cull 
 his words and phrases here, there, and everywhere, 
 it is he who charges them with the imaginative or 
 picturesque touch which only he could give and 
 which makes them magnetic. For example, in 
 these two verses of " The Bard : " — 
 
 " Amazement in his van with Flight combined, 
 And Sorrow's faded form and Solitude behind ! " 
 
GRA Y 41 
 
 The suggestion (we are informed by tlie notes) 
 came from Cowper and Oldliam, and the amaze- 
 ment combined with flight sticks fast in prose. But 
 the personification of Sorrow and the fine general- 
 ization of Solitude in the last verse which gives an 
 imaginative reach to the whole passage are Gray's 
 own. The owners of what Gray " conveyed " 
 would have f omid it hard to identify their property 
 and prove title to it after it had once suffered the 
 Gray-change by steeping in his mind and memory. 
 
 When the example in our Latin Grammar tells 
 us that Mors communis est omnibus, it states a 
 truism of considerable interest, indeed, to the per- 
 son in whose particular case it is to be illustrated, 
 but neither new nor startling. No one would 
 think of citing it, whether to produce conviction or 
 to heighten discourse. Yet mankind are agreed in 
 finding something more poignant in the same re- 
 flection when Horace tells us that the palace as well 
 as the hovel shudders at the indiscriminating foot 
 of Death. Here is something more than the dry 
 statement of a truism. The difference between the 
 two is that between a lower and a higher ; it is, 
 in short, the difference, between prose and poetry. 
 The oyster has begun, at least, to secrete its pearl, 
 something identical with its shell in substance, 
 but in sentiment and association how unhke ! Mal- 
 herbe takes the same image and makes it a little 
 more picturesque, though, at the same time, I fear, 
 a little more Parisian, too, when he says that the sen- 
 tinel pacing before the gate of the Louvre cannot 
 forbid Death an entrance to the King. And how 
 
42 GRA Y 
 
 long had not that comparison between the rose's 
 life and that of the maiden dying untimely been a 
 commonplace when the same Malherbe made it ir- 
 reclaimably his own by mere felicity of phrase ? We 
 do not ask where people got their hints, but what 
 they made out of them. The commonplace is un- 
 happily within reach of us aU, and unhappily, too, 
 they are rare who can give it novelty and even 
 invest it with a kind of grandeur as Gray knew how 
 to do. If his poetry be a mosaic, the design is 
 always his own. He, if any, had certainly " the 
 last and greatest art," the art to please. Shall we 
 call everything mediocre that is not great ? Shall 
 we deny ourselves to the charm of sentiment because 
 we prefer the electric shudder that imagination 
 gives us ? Even were Gray's claims to being a 
 great poet rejected, he can never be classed with 
 the many, so great and uniform are the efficacy 
 of his phrase and the music to which he sets it. 
 This unique distinction, at least, may be claimed for 
 hitn without dispute, that he is the one English poet 
 who has written less and pleased more than any 
 other. Above all it is as a teacher of the art of 
 writing that he is to be valued. If there be any 
 well of English undefiled, it is to be found in him 
 and his master, Dry den. They are still standards 
 of what may be called classical English, neither 
 archaic nor modern, and as far removed from 
 pedantry as from vulgarity. They were 
 
 "Tous deux disciples d'une escole 
 Oil I'on forcene doucement," 
 
 a school in which have been enrolled the Great 
 Masters of literature. 
 
SOME LETTERS OF WALTER SAVAGE 
 LANDOR.i 
 
 1888. 
 
 I WAS first directed to Landor's works by hear- 
 ing liow much store Emerson set by them. I grew 
 acquainted with them fifty years ago in one of those 
 arched alcoves in the old college library in Harvard 
 Hall, which so pleasantly secluded without wholly 
 isolating the student. That footsteps should pass 
 across the mouth of his Aladdin's Cave, or even 
 enter it in search of treasure, so far from disturb- 
 ing only deepened his sense of possession. These 
 faint rumors of the world he had left served but 
 as a pleasant reminder that he was the privileged 
 denizen of another, beyond "the flaming bounds 
 of place and time." There, with my book lying at 
 ease and in the expansion of intimacy on the broad 
 window-sheK, shifting my cell from north to south 
 with the season, I made friendships, that have 
 lasted me for life, with Dodsley's "Old Plays," 
 with Cotton's "Montaigne," with Hakluyt's "Voy- 
 ages," among others that were not in my father's 
 library. It was the merest browsing, no doubt, as 
 Johnson called it, but how delightful it was ! All 
 
 ^ Written to introduce Landor's letters to the readers of The 
 Century Magazine, in -which they were first published. 
 
44 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 
 
 the more, I fear, because it added the stolen sweet- 
 ness of truancy to that of study, for I should have 
 been buckling to my allotted task of the day. I 
 do not regret that diversion of time to other than 
 legitimate expenses, yet shall I not gravely warn 
 my grandsons to beware of doing the like? 
 
 I was far from understanding all I heard in this 
 society of my elders into which I had smuggled my- 
 self, and perhaps it was as well for me ; but those 
 who formed it condescended to me at odd moments 
 with the tolerant complacency of greatness, and 
 I did not go empty away. Landor was in many 
 ways beyond me, but I loved the company he 
 brought, making persons for me of what before had 
 been futile names, and letting me hear the discourse 
 of men about whom Plutarch had so often told me 
 such delightful stories. He charmed me, some- 
 times perhaps he imposed on me, with the stately 
 eloquence that moved to measure always, often to 
 music, and never enfeebled itself by undue empha- 
 sis, or raised its tone above the level of good breed- 
 ing. In those ebullient years of my adolescence 
 it was a wholesome sedative. His sententiousness, 
 too, had its charm, equally persuasive in the care- 
 fully draped folds of the chlamys or the succinct 
 tunic of epigram. If Plato had written in English, 
 I thought, it is thus that he would have written. 
 Here was a man who knew what literature was, 
 who had assimilated what was best in it, and him- 
 self produced or reproduced it. 
 
 Three years later, while I was trying to persuade 
 
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 45 
 
 myself that I was reading law, a friend ^ who knew 
 better gave me the first series of the "Imaginary 
 Conversations," in three volumes, to which I pres- 
 ently added the second series, and by degrees all 
 Landor's other books as I could pick them up, or 
 as they were successively published. Thus I grew 
 intimate with him, and, as my own judgment grad- 
 ually affirmed itseK, was driven to some abatement 
 of my hitherto unqualified admiration. I began 
 to be not quite sure whether the balance of his 
 sentences, each so admirable by itself, did not grow 
 wearisome in continuous reading, — whether it did 
 not hamper his freedom of movement, as when a 
 man poises a pole upon his chin. Surely he has 
 not the swinging stride of Dry den, which could 
 slacken to a lounge at will, nor the impassioned 
 rush of Burke. Here was something of that ca- 
 denced stalk which is the attribute of theatrical 
 kings. And sometimes did not his thunders also 
 remind us of the property-room? Though the 
 
 ^ Let me please myself by laying a sprig of rosemary (" that 's 
 for remembrance ") on his grave. This friend was John Francis 
 Heath, of Virginia, who took his degree in 1840. He was the 
 handsomest man I have ever seen, and in eveiy manly exercise 
 the most accomplished. His body was as exquisitely moulded as 
 his face was beautiful. I seem to see him now taking that famous 
 standing-jvimp of his, the brown curls blowing backward, or lay- 
 ing his hand on his horse's neck and vaulting into the saddle. 
 After leaving college he went to Germany and dreamed away nine 
 years at Heidelberg. We used to call him Hamlet, he could have 
 done so much and did so absolutely nothing. He died in the Con- 
 federate service, in 1862. He was a good swordsman (we used to 
 fence in those days), and the rumor of his German duels and of 
 his intimacy with Prussian princes reached us when some fellow- 
 student came home. 
 
46 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 
 
 flash failed, did the long reverberation ever forget 
 to follow? But there is always something over- 
 passionate in the recoil of the young man from 
 the idols of the boy. Even now when I am more 
 temperate, however, I cannot help feeling that his 
 humor is horse-play; that he is often trivial and 
 not seldom slow; that he now and again misses the 
 true mean that can be grave without heaviness and 
 light without levity, though he would have dilated 
 on that virtue of our composite tongue which ena- 
 bled it to make the distinction, and would have be- 
 lieved himself the first to discover it. He cannot 
 be familiar unless at the cost of his own dignity and 
 our respect. I sometimes question whether even 
 that quality in him which we cannot but recognize 
 and admire, his loftiness of mind, should not some- 
 times rather be called uppishness, so often is the 
 one caricatured into the other by a blusterous self- 
 confidence and seK-assertion, 
 He says of himself, — 
 
 " Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art ; " 
 
 but I am inclined to think that it was Art he loved 
 most. His perennial and abiding happiness was 
 in composition, in fitting word to word, and these 
 into periods, like a master-workman in mosaic. 
 This, perhaj)s, is why he preferred writing Latin 
 verse, because in doing that the joy of composing 
 was a more conscious joy. Certainly we miss in ' 
 him that quality of spontaneousness, that element 
 of luck, which so delights us in some of the lesser 
 and all the greater poets. By his own account 
 
WALTER SAVAGE LAN DOR 47 
 
 the most audacious of men, his thought and phrase 
 have seldom the happy audacity of what Montaigne 
 calls the first jump. Father Thames could never 
 have come upon Ms stage with both his banks on 
 the same side, refreshing as that innovation might 
 have been to an audience familiar with the hum- 
 drum habits of the river. Yet he is often content 
 to think himself original when he has lashed him- 
 self Into extravagance; and the reserve of his bet- 
 ter style is the more remarkable that he made 
 spoiled children of all his defects of character. It 
 might almost seem that he sought and found an 
 equipoise for his hasty violence of conduct in the 
 artistic equanimity of his literary manner. I think 
 he had little dramatic faculty. The creations of 
 his brain do not detach themselves from it and 
 become objective. He lived almost wholly in his 
 own mind and in a world of his own making which 
 his imagination peopled with casts after the antique. 
 His "Conversations" were imaginary in a truer 
 sense than he intended, for it is images rather than 
 persons that converse with each other in them. 
 Pericles and Phocion speak as we might fancy their 
 statues to speak, — nobly indeed, but with the cold 
 nobleness of marble. He had fire enough in him- 
 self, but his pen seems to have been a non-conduc- 
 tor between it and his personages. So little could 
 he conceive the real world as something outside 
 him, that nobody but himself was astonished when 
 he was cast in damages at the suit of a lady to 
 whom he had addressed verses that would have 
 blackened Canidia. But he had done it merely as 
 
48 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 
 
 an exercise in verse; it was of that he was think- 
 ing, more than of her, and I doubt if she was so 
 near his consciousness, or so actual to him, as the 
 vile creatures of ancient Rome whose vices and 
 crimes he laid at her door. Even his in every 
 way admirable apothegms seem to be made out of 
 the substance of his mind, and not of his experience 
 or observation. And yet, with all his remoteness, 
 I can think of no author who has oftener brimmed 
 my eyes with tears of admiration or sympathy. 
 
 When we have made all deductions, he remains 
 great and, above all, individual. There is nothing 
 in him at second-hand. The least wise of men, he 
 has uttered through the mask of his interlocutors 
 (if I cannot trust myself to call them characters) 
 more wisdom on such topics of life and thought as 
 interested or occurred to him than is to be found 
 outside of Shakespeare; and that in an English 
 so pure, so harmonious, and so stirringly sonorous 
 that he might almost seem to have added new stops 
 to the organ which Milton found sufficient for his 
 needs. Though not a critic in the larger sense, — 
 he was too rash for that, too much at the mercy of 
 his own talent for epigram and seemingly conclusive 
 statement, — no man has said better things about 
 books than he. So well said are they, indeed, that 
 it seems ungrateful to ask if they are always just. 
 One would scruple to call him a great thinker, yet 
 surely he was a man who had great thoughts, and 
 when he was in the right mood these seam the am- 
 ple heaven of his discourse like meteoric showers. 
 He was hardly a great poet, yet he has written 
 
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 49 
 
 some of the most simply and conclusively perfect 
 lines that our own or any other langiiage can show. 
 They float stately as swans on the tamer level of 
 his ordinary verse. Some of his shorter poems are 
 perfect as crystals. His metaphors are nobly ori- 
 ginal; they stand out in their bare grandeur like 
 statues against a Ijackground of sky; his similes 
 are fresh, and from nature ; he plucks them as he 
 goes, like wild -flowers, nor interrupts his talk. 
 An intellectual likeness between him and Ben Jon- 
 son constantly suggests itself to me. Both had 
 burly minds with much apparent coarseness of fibre, 
 yet with singular delicacy of temperament. 
 
 In politics he was generally extravagant, yet so 
 long ago as 1812 he was wise enough (in a letter to 
 Southey) to call war between England and America 
 civil war, though he would not have been himself if 
 he had not added, " I detest the Americans as much 
 as you do." In 1826 he proposed a plan that 
 would have pacified Ireland and saved England 
 sixty years of odious mistake. 
 
 Ten or twelve years ago I tried to condense my 
 judgment of him into a pair of quatrains, written 
 in a copy of his works given to a dear young friend 
 on her marriage. As they were written in a hap- 
 pier mood than is habitual with me now, I may be 
 pardoned for citing them here with her permission, 
 and through her kindness in sending me a copy : — 
 
 ' ' A villa fair, -with many a devious walk 
 Darkened with deathless laurels from the sun, 
 Ample for troops of friends in mutual talk, 
 Green Chartreuse for the reverie of one : 
 Fixed here in marble, Rome and Athens gleam ; 
 
50 . . WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 
 
 Here is Arcadia, here Elysium too ; 
 
 Anon an English voice disturbs our dream, 
 
 And Landor's self can Landor's spell undo." 
 
 His books, as I seem to have hinted here, are 
 especially good for reading aloud in fitly sifted 
 company, and I am sure that so often as the experi- 
 ment is tried this company will say, with Fran- 
 cesca : — 
 
 " Per piu fiate gli ocehi ci sospinse 
 Quella lettura, e scolorocci il viso." 
 
 Landor was fond of saying that he should sup late, 
 but that the hall would be well lighted, and the 
 company, if few, of the choicest. The table, in- 
 deed, has been long spread, but will he sit down till 
 the number of the guests is in nearer proportion to 
 that of the covers? It is now forty years since the 
 collected edition of his works was published, prob- 
 ably, as was usual in his case, a small one. Only 
 one re-impression has yet been called for. Mr. 
 Forster's biography of him is a long plea for a new 
 trial. It is a strange fate for .a man who has writ- 
 ten so much to interest, to instruct, to delight, and 
 to inspire his fellow-men. Perhaps it is useless to 
 seek any other solution of the riddle than the old 
 habent sua fata libelli. But I envy the man who 
 has before him the reading of those books for the 
 first time. He will have a sensation as profound 
 as that of the peasant who wandered in to where 
 Kaiser Rothbart sits stately with his knights in the 
 mountain cavern biding his appointed time. 
 
 I saw Landor but once — when I went down from 
 London, by his invitation, to spend a day with him 
 
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 51 
 
 at Batli in the late summer of 1852. His friend, 
 the late Mr. Kenyon, went with me, — his friend 
 and that of whoever deserved or needed friendship, 
 the divinely appointed amicus cttrice of mankind in 
 general. For me it was and is a memorable day, 
 for Landor was to me an ancient, and it seemed 
 a meeting in Elysium. I had looked forward to 
 it, nevertheless, with a twinge of doubt, for three 
 years before I had written a review of the new 
 edition of his works, in which I had discriminated 
 more than had been altogether pleasing to him. 
 But a guest was as sacred to Landor as to an Arab, 
 and the unaffected heartiness of his greeting at 
 once reassured me. I have little to tell of our few 
 hours' converse, for the stream of memory, when 
 it has been flowing so long as mine, gathers an 
 ooze in its bed like that of Lethe, and in this the 
 weightier things embed themselves past recovery, 
 while the lighter, lying nearer the surface, may be 
 fished up again. What I can recollect, therefore, 
 illustrates rather the manner of the man than his 
 matter. His personal appearance has been suffi- 
 ciently described by others. I will only add, that 
 the suffused and uniform ruddiness of his face, in 
 which the forehead, already heightened by baldness, 
 shared, and something in the bearing of his head, 
 reminded me vividly of the late President Quincy, 
 as did also a certain hearty resonance of speech. 
 You felt yourself in the presence of one who was 
 emphatically a Man, not the image of a man ; so 
 emphatically, indeed, that even Carlyle thought 
 the journey to Bath not too dear a price to pay for 
 
62 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 
 
 seeing him, and found something royal in him. 
 When I saw him he was in his seventy-eighth year, 
 but erect and vigorous as in middle life. There 
 was something of challenge even in the alertness of 
 his pose, and the head was often thrown back like 
 that of a boxer who awaits a blow. He had the 
 air of the arena. I do not remember that his head 
 was large, or his eyes in any way remarkable. 
 
 After the first greetings were over, I thought 
 it might please him to know that I had made a 
 pilgrimage to his Fiesolan villa. I spoke of the 
 beauty of its site. I could not have been more 
 clumsy, had I tried. "Yes," he almost screamed, 
 " and I might have been there now, but for that in- 
 tol-e-rrr-a-ble woman! " pausing on each syllable 
 of the adjective as one who would leave an impre- 
 cation there, and making the r grate as if it were 
 grinding its teeth at the disabilities which distance 
 imposes on resentment. I was a little embarrassed 
 by this sudden confidence, which I should not here 
 betray had not Mr. Forster already laid Landor's 
 domestic relations sufficiently bare. I am not sure 
 whether he told me the story of his throwing his 
 cook out of a window of this villa. I think he 
 did, but it may have been Mr. Kenyon who told it 
 me on the way back to London. The legend was, 
 that after he had performed this summary act of 
 justice, Mrs. Landor remonstrated with a "There, 
 Walter ! I always told you that one day you would 
 do something to be sorry for in these furies of 
 yours." Few men can be serene under an "I al- 
 ways told you so " — least of all men could Landor. 
 
WALTER SAVAGE LAN DOR 53 
 
 But he saw that here was an occasion where cahn 
 is more effective than tempest, and where a soft 
 answer is more provoking than a hard. So he re- 
 plied mildly : " Well, my dear, I am sorry, if that 
 will do you any good. If I had remembered that 
 our best tulip-bed was iinder that window, I 'd have 
 flung the dog out of t' other." 
 
 He spoke with his wonted extravagance (he was 
 always in extremes) of Prince Louis Napoleon: "I 
 have seen all the great men that have appeared in 
 Europe during the last half- century, and he is the 
 ablest of them all. Had his uncle had but a tithe 
 of his ability, he would never have died at St. 
 Helena. The last time I saw the Prince before he 
 went over to France, he said to me, ' Good-bye, 
 Mr. Landor; I go to a dungeon or a throne.' 
 'Good-bye, Prince,' I answered. 'If you go to a 
 dmigeon, you may see me again; if to a throne, 
 never ! ' " He told me a long story of some Merino 
 sheep that had been sent him from Spain, and 
 which George III. had "stolen." He seemed to 
 imply that this was a greater crime than throwing 
 away the American colonies, and a perfidy of which 
 only kings could be capable. I confess that I 
 thought the sheep as shadowy as those of Hans in 
 Luck, for I was not long in discovering that Lan- 
 dor 's memory had a great deal of imagination 
 mixed with it, especially when the subject was 
 anything that related to himself. It was not a 
 memory, however, that was malignly treacherous 
 to others. 
 
 I mentioned his brother Robert's "Fountain of 
 
64 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 
 
 Arethusa;" told him how much it had interested 
 me, and how particularly I had heen struck with 
 the family likeness to himself in it. He assented; 
 said it loas family likeness, not imitation, and 
 added: "Yes, when it came out many people, even 
 some of my friends, thought it was mine, and told 
 me so. My answer always was, 'I wish to God I 
 could have written it ! ' " He spoke of it with un- 
 feigned enthusiasm, though then, I believe, he was 
 not on speaking terms with his brother. When- 
 ever, indeed, his talk turned, as it often would, to 
 the books or men he liked, it rose to a passionate 
 appreciation of them. Even iipon indifferent mat- 
 ters he commonly spoke with heat, as if he had 
 been contradicted, or hoped he might be. There 
 was no prophesying his weather by reading the 
 barometer of his face. Though the index might 
 point never so steadily to Fair, the storm might 
 burst at any moment. His quiet was that of the 
 cyclone's pivot, a conspiracy of whirlwind. Of 
 Wordsworth he spoke with a certain alienated re- 
 spect, and made many abatements, not as if jeal- 
 ous, but somewhat in the mood of that Athenian 
 who helped ostracize Aristides. Of what he said I 
 recollect only something which he has since said 
 in print, but with less point. Its felicity stamped 
 it on my memory. "I once said to Mr. Words- 
 worth, ' One may mix as much poetry with prose 
 as one likes, it will exhilarate the whole; but the 
 raoment one mixes a drop of prose with poetry, it 
 precipitates the whole.' He never forgave me!" 
 Then followed that ringing and reduplicated laugh 
 of his, so like the joyous bark of a dog when he 
 
WALTER SAVAGE LAND OR 55 
 
 starts for a ramble with his master. Of course he 
 did not fail to mention that exquisite sea- shell 
 which Wordsworth had conveyed from Gebir to 
 ornament his own mantelpiece. 
 
 After lunch, he led us into a room the whole 
 available wall-space of which was hung with pic- 
 tures, nearly all early Italian. As I was already 
 a lover of Botticelli, I think I may trust the judg- 
 ment I then inwardly pronounced upon them, that 
 they were nearly all aggressively bad. They were 
 small, so that the offence of each was trifling, but 
 in the aggregate they were hard to bear. I waited 
 doggedly to hear him begin his celebration of them, 
 dumfounded between my moral obligation to be as 
 truthful as I dishonestly could and my social duty 
 not to give offence to my host. However, I was 
 soon partially relieved. The picture he wished 
 to show was the head of a man, an ancestor, he told 
 me, whose style of hair and falling collar were of 
 the second quarter of the seventeenth century. 
 Turning sharply on me, he asked: "Does it re- 
 mind you of anybody? " Of course this was a sim- 
 ple riddle; so, after a diplomatic pause of deliber- 
 ation, I replied, cheerfully enough : "I think I see 
 a likeness to you in it." There was an appreciable 
 amount of fib in this, but I trust it may be par- 
 doned me as under duress. "Eight! " he exploded, 
 with the condensed emphasis of a rifle. "Does it 
 remind you of anybody else?" For an instant I 
 thought my retribution had overtaken me, but in a 
 flash of inspiration I asked myself, "Whom would 
 Landor like best to resemble?" The answer was 
 easy, and I gave it forthwith: "I think I see a 
 
56 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 
 
 likeness to Milton." "Right again!" he cried 
 triumphantly. "It does look like me, and it does 
 look like Milton. That is the portrait of my an- 
 cestor, Walter Noble, Speaker of one of Charles 
 First's parliaments. I was showing this portrait 
 one day to a friend, when he said to me, 'Landor, 
 how can you pride yourself on your descent from 
 this sturdy old cavalier — you who would have cut 
 off Charles's head with the worst of 'em? ' '/cut 
 off his head? Never! ' 'You wouldn't? I'm 
 astonished to hear you say that. What would you 
 have done with him? ' 'What woidd I have done? 
 Why, hanged him, like any other malefactor!'" 
 This he trumpeted with such a blare of victory as 
 almost made his progenitor rattle on the wall where 
 he himg. Whether the portrait was that of an 
 ancestor, or whether he had bought it as one suit- 
 able for his story, I cannot say. If an ancestor, it 
 could only have been Michael (not Walter) Noble, 
 Member of Parliament (not Speaker) during the 
 Civil War, and siding with the Commons against 
 "the King. Landor had confoimded him with Sir 
 Arnold Savage (a Speaker in Henry Seventh's 
 time), whom he had adopted as an ancestor, though 
 there was no probable, certainly no provable, com- 
 munity of blood between them. This makes the 
 anecdote only the more characteristic as an illus- 
 tration of the freaks of his innocently fantastic and 
 creative memory. I could almost wish my own had 
 the same happy faculty, when I see how little it 
 has preserved of my conversation, so largely mon- 
 ologue on his part, with a man so memorable. 
 
WALTON.i 
 
 1889. 
 
 Biography in these communicative days has be- 
 come so voluminous that it might seem calculated 
 rather for the ninefold vitality of another domestic 
 animal than for the less lavish allotment of man. 
 Only such renewed leases of life could justify the 
 writing or suffice for the reading of these too often 
 supererogatory confidences. Only a man like the 
 great Julius, who new-moulded the world and 
 stamped his effigy on the coinage of political 
 thought still current, has a right to so much of our 
 curiosity as we are now expected to put at the ser- 
 vice of an average general or bishop. "Nothing 
 human is foreign to me " was said long ago, chiefly 
 by the Latin Grammar, and has been received as 
 the pit and gallery receive a moral sentiment which 
 does not inconvenience themselves, but which they 
 think likely to give the boxes an uneasy qualm. 
 But biography has found out a process by which 
 what is human may be so thrust upon us as to become 
 mhuman, and one is often tempted to wish that a 
 great deal of it might not only be made foreign to 
 
 ^ This paper was originally printed as an introduction to an edi- 
 tion of Walton's Angler, edited by Mr. John Bartlett, and pub- 
 lished in 1889 by Messrs. Little, Brown & Co., through whose cour- 
 tesy it is included in this collection. 
 
58 WALTON 
 
 us, but firmly kept so. Plutarch, a man of the 
 most many-sided moral and intellectual interests, 
 had a truer sense of proportion, and tempers his 
 amiable discursiveness with an eye to his neigh- 
 bor's dial. And in his case the very names of 
 his heroes are mostly so trumpet-like as both to 
 waken attention and to warrant it, ushering in the 
 bearers of them like that flourish on the Eliza- 
 bethan stage which told that a king was coming. 
 How should Brown or Smith or any other dingy 
 monosyllable of Saxon indistinction compete for 
 conjuration with Pelopidas or Timoleon? Even 
 within living memory Napoleon had a prodigious 
 purchase in his name alone, and prettily confirmed 
 the theory of Mr. Shandy. 
 
 The modern biographer has become so indiscrim- 
 inate, so unconscious of the relative importance of 
 a single life to the Universe, so careless of the just 
 limits whether of human interest or endurance, so 
 communistic in assuming that all men are entitled 
 to an equal share of what little time there is left 
 in the world, that many a worthy, whom a para- 
 graph from the right pen might have immmortal- 
 ized, is suffocated in the trackless swamps of two 
 octavos. Meditating over these grievances with 
 the near prospect of a biography to write, I am 
 inclined to apply what was said of States to men 
 also, and call him happiest who has left fewest ma- 
 terials for history. It is at least doubtful whether 
 gossip gain body by bottling. In these chattering 
 days when nobody who really is nobody can stir 
 forth without the volunteer accompaniment of a 
 
WALTON 69 
 
 brass band, when there is a certificated eye at every 
 keyhole, and when the Public Informer has become 
 so essential a minister to the general comfort that 
 the world cannot go about its business of a morning 
 till its intellectual appetite is appeased with the 
 latest doings and sayings of John Doe and Richard 
 Roe, there is healing in the gentlemanlike reserves 
 of the past, a benign sense of seclusion, a comfort 
 such as loved hands bring to fevered brows, in the 
 thought of one who, like Walton, has been safe 
 for two hundred years in the impregnable strong- 
 hold of the grave. Malice domestic, treason, in- 
 terviews, nothing can touch him further. The 
 sanctities of his life, at least, cannot be hawked 
 about the streets or capitalized in posters as a whet 
 to the latest edition of the Peeping Tom. If it be 
 the triumph of an historian to make the great high- 
 ways of the olden time populous and noisy, or even 
 vulgar, with their old life again, it is nevertheless 
 a consolation that we may still find by-paths there, 
 dumb as those through a pine forest, sacred to 
 meditation and to grateful thoughts. 
 
 Such a by-path is the life of Walton. Though 
 it lead us through nearly a hundred years of his- 
 tory, many of them stormy with civil or anxious 
 with foreign war, the clamor of events is seldom 
 importunate, and the petulant drums are muffled 
 with a dreamy remoteness. So far as he himself 
 could shape its course, it leads us under the shadow 
 of honeysuckle hedges, or along the rushy banks of 
 silence -loving streams, or through the claustral hush 
 of cathedral closes, or where the shadow of the vil- 
 
60 WALTON 
 
 lage churcli -tower creeps round its dial of green 
 graves below, or to the company of thoughtful and 
 godly men. He realized the maxim which Voltaire 
 preached, but so assiduously avoided practising, — 
 hene vixit qui bene latuit. He did his best to fulfil 
 the apostle's injunction in studying to be quiet. 
 Whether such fugitive and cloistered virtue as his 
 come within the sweep of Milton's gravely cadenced 
 lash or not, whether a man do not owe himself more 
 to the distasteful publicity of active citizenship than 
 to the petting of his own private tastes or talents, 
 as Walton thought it right and found it sweet to 
 do, may be a question. There can be none that 
 the contemplation of such a life both soothes and 
 charms, and we sigh to think that the like of it is 
 possible no longer. Where now would the fugitive 
 from the esj)ials of our modern life find a sanctuary 
 which telegraph or telephone had not deflowered? 
 I do not mean that Walton was an idle man, who, 
 as time was given him for nothing, thought that he 
 might part with it for nothing too. If he had 
 been, I should not be writing this. He left behind 
 him two books, each a masterpiece in its own sim- 
 ple and sincere way, and only the contemplative 
 leisure of a life like his could have secreted the pre- 
 cious qualities that assure them against decay. 
 
 But Walton's life touches the imagination at 
 more points than this of its quietude and inwardness. 
 It opens many windows to the fancy. Its opportu- 
 nities were as remarkable as its length. Twenty- 
 two years old when Shakespeare died, he lived long 
 enough to have read Dryden's "Absalom and 
 
WALTON 61 
 
 Achitophel." He had known Ben Jonson and 
 Chillingworth and Drayton and Fuller; he had 
 exchanged gossip with Antony a Wood; he was 
 the friend of Donne and Wotton and King; he 
 had seen George Herbert; and how many more 
 sons of Memory must he not have known or seen 
 in all those years so populous with men justly 
 famous ! Of the outward husk of this life of his we 
 know comfortably little, but of the kernel much, 
 and that chiefly from such unconscious glimpses as 
 he himseK has given us. 
 
 Isaac, or (as he preferred to spell the name) 
 Izaak, Walton was born at Stafford, on the 9th of 
 August, 1593, of a family in the rank of substan- 
 tial yeomen long established in Staffordshire. Of 
 his mother not even the name is known, and of his 
 father we know only that his baptismal name was 
 Jervis, and that he was buried on the 11th of Feb- 
 ruary, 1596-97. Surely the short and simple 
 annals of the poor have been seldom more laconic 
 than this. Sir Harris Nicolas, author of the first 
 trustworthy Life of Walton, yielding for once to 
 the biographer's weakness for appearances, says 
 that he "received a good, though not, strictly 
 speaking, classical education." Considering that 
 absolutely nothing is known of Walton's schooling, 
 the concession to historical conscientiousness made 
 in the parenthetic "strictly speaking" Is amusing. 
 We have the witness of documents in Walton's 
 own handwriting that he could never have been 
 taught even the rudiments of Latin; for he spells 
 the third person singular of the perfect tense of 
 
62 WALTON 
 
 ohh'e, ohiet, separate, seperate, and divided, de- 
 cided. And these documents are printed by Sir 
 Harris himself. After this one finds it hard to con- 
 ceive what a classical education, loosely speaking, 
 would be. In the list of Walton's books there is 
 none that is not in English. It is enough for us 
 that he contrived to ]3ick up somewhere and some- 
 how a competent mastery of his mother-tongue 
 (far harder because seeming easier than Latin), 
 and a diction of persuasive simplicity, capable of 
 dignity where that was natural and becoming, such 
 as not even the universities can bestow. 
 
 It is not known in what year he went to London. 
 It has been conjectured, and with much probability, 
 that he was sent thither to serve his apprenticeship 
 with a relative, Henry Walton, a haberdasher. 
 Of this Henry Walton nothing is known beyond 
 what we are told by his will, and this shows us that 
 he had connections with Staffordshire. That Izaak 
 Walton gave the name of Henry to two sons in 
 succession seems to show some kind of close relation 
 between them and some earlier Henry. But Mr. 
 Nicholls discovered in the records of the Ironmon- 
 gers' Company for 1617-18 the following entry: 
 "Isaac Walton was made one of the Ironmongers' 
 Company by Thomas Grinsell, citizen and iron- 
 monger." That Walton had relatives of this name 
 appears from a legacy in his will to the widow of 
 his "Cosen Grinsell." On the whole, whatever 
 light is let in by this chink serves only to make the 
 abundant darkness more visible. May there not 
 have been another Isaac, perhaps a cousin, to dis- 
 
WALTON 63 
 
 tinguish himself from whom ours gave to his sur- 
 name its fantastic spelling? What is certain is 
 that he was already in London in 1619. In that 
 year was published the second edition of a poem, 
 "The Love of Amos and Laura," which, to judge 
 by all that I know of it, the dedication, must hap- 
 pily have been very soon gathered to its fathers; 
 but it has two points of interest. It is dedicated 
 to Walton by a certain S. P., who may have been 
 the Samuel Purchasof the "Pilgrims; " and in this 
 dedication there are expressions which show that 
 Walton's character was already, in his twenty- 
 sixth year, marked by the same attractiveness and 
 purity and the same aptness for friendship which 
 endeared him in later life to so many good and em- 
 inent men. S. P., after calling him his "more 
 than thrice-beloved friend," tells him that he is 
 the cause that the poem "is now as it is," and that 
 it might have been called his had it been better, 
 but that "No ill thing can be clothed with thy 
 verse." We should infer that Walton had done 
 much in the way of revision, and not only this, but 
 that he was already known, among his friends at 
 least, as a writer of verse himself. It is puzzling, 
 however, that the first edition was published in 
 1613, when Walton was barely twenty, and that 
 the second differs from the first in a single word 
 only. In the only known copy of this earlier edi- 
 tion (which, to be sure, is otherwise imperfect) the 
 dedication is not to be found. Sir Harris Nicolas 
 suggests that Walton may have revised the poem in 
 manuscript, but it seems altogether unlikely that he 
 
64 WALTON 
 
 should have been called in as a consulting physician 
 at so early an age. More than twenty years later, 
 in the preface to his Life of Donne, he speaks of 
 his "artless pencil," and several times elsewhere al- 
 ludes to his literary inadequacy. But this depre- 
 cation may have been merely a shiver of his habit- 
 ual modesty, or, as is more likely, a device of his 
 literary adroitness. He certainly must have had 
 considerable practice in the making of verse before 
 he wrote his Elegy on Donne (1633), his first pub- 
 lished essay in authorship. The versification of 
 this, if sometimes rather stiff, is for the most part 
 firm and not inharmonious. It is easier in its gait 
 than that of Donne in his Satires, and shows the 
 manly influence of Jonson. 
 
 Walton, at any rate, in course of time, attained, 
 at least in prose, to something which, if it may 
 not be called style, was a very charming way of 
 writing, all the more so that he has an innocent 
 air of not knowing how it is done. Natural en- 
 dowment and predisposition may count for nine in 
 ten of the chances of success in this competition; 
 but no man ever achieved, as Walton sometimes 
 did, a simplicity which leaves criticism helpless, 
 by the mere light of nature alone. Nor am I 
 speaking without book. In his Life of Herbert 
 he prints a poem of Donne's addressed to Her- 
 bert's mother, in which there is allusion to certain 
 hymns. Walton adds a few words which seem to 
 follow each other with as little forethought as the 
 notes of a thrush's song: "These hymns are now 
 lost to us, but doubtless they were such as they 
 
WALTON 65 
 
 two now sing in Heaven." Now on the inside 
 cover of his Eusebius Walton has written three 
 attempts at this sentence, each of them very far 
 from the concise beauty to which he at last con- 
 strained himself. Simplicity, when it is not a care- 
 less gift of the Muse, is the last and most painful 
 achievement of conscientious self-denial. He seems 
 also to have had the true literary memory, which 
 stores up the apt or pleasing word for use on occa- 
 sion. I have noticed more than one instance of it, 
 but one must suffice. In Donne's beautiful poem, 
 "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning," is this 
 stanza : — 
 
 " Dull sublunary lovers' love, 
 
 Whose soul is sense, cannot admit 
 Absence, because that doth remove 
 Those things that elemented it." 
 
 Walton felt the efficacy of the word "elemented," 
 and laid it by for employment at the first vacancy. 
 I find it more than once in his writings. 
 
 Of the personal history of Walton during his life 
 in London we know very little more than that he 
 was living in Fleet Street in 1624, that from 1628 
 to 1644 he lived in Chancery Lane, and that he 
 was twice married. Perhaps the most important 
 event during all these years in its value to his mind 
 and character was his making the acquaintance 
 of Donne, to whose preaching he was a sedulous 
 listener. This acquaintance became a friendship 
 by which he profited till Donne's death in 1631. 
 There needs no further witness to his intelligence 
 or to his worth. 
 
66 WALTON 
 
 Walton's first wife, to whom he was married in 
 1624, was Rachel Floud, daughter of Susannah 
 Cranmer, who was the daughter of Thomas, grand- 
 nephew of the martyr. By her, who died in 1640,*^ 
 he had six sons and one daughter, all of whom died 
 in infancy or early childhood. Six years after his 
 first wife's death Walton married Anne Ken, a 
 sister by the half blood of Bishop Ken. Of this 
 marriage there were three children, — one son, 
 Izaak, who lived but a short time; a daughter 
 Anne ; and another Izaak, who survived his father, 
 and died in 1719, a canon of Salisbury. 
 
 In the third edition of "The Complete Angler" 
 (1664) appear for the first time some verses by 
 Walton called "The Angler's Wish." Among 
 other blisses is mentioned that of hearing "my 
 Clilora sing a song." In the fifth edition (1676) 
 "Kenna" is substituted for "Chlora,"and the ref- 
 erence to Walton's second wife is obvious. It has 
 been supposed that "Chlora" was an imperfect an- 
 agram for "Rachel; " and that Walton, like some 
 better poets, Poe notably, had economized his in- 
 spiration by serving up the same verses cold to a 
 second or even third mistress; but he was inca- 
 pable of svich amatory double-dealing. Sir Harris 
 Nicolas, by calling attention to the dates, at least 
 makes it very unlikely that he was guilty of it. 
 The verses were first published twenty years after 
 the death of his first wife, and the name "Kenna" 
 does not appear till his second had been fourteen 
 years in her grave. Sir Harris failed to remark 
 that Walton uses " Chlora " as the name of a 
 
WALTON 61 
 
 shepherdess in an eclogue on the restoration of 
 Charles II. Confronted with this fact, the sup- 
 posed anagram turns out to be a mare's-nest, like 
 the "Lutero " Eossetti found in Dante's " Veltro." 
 Anne Walton herself died in 1662. 
 
 There is no certainty as to what Walton's occu- 
 pation may have been further than that he was a 
 tradesman of some sort, and probably, since he was 
 thirty years in amassing the modest competence 
 that sufficed him, in a small way. Whether large 
 or small is of little interest to us, for his real busi- 
 ness in this world was to write the Lives and " The 
 Complete Angler," and to leave the example of a 
 useful and unspotted life behind him. But it is 
 amusing to find Mr. Major, with that West-End 
 view of the realities of life which Englishmen of a 
 certain class feel it proper to take, arguing that 
 Walton's business must have been of a wholesale 
 character because the place in which it was carried 
 on was cramped, and moreover shared by a certain 
 John Mason, hosier. One is irresistibly tempted 
 to parody the notorious verse, and say, — 
 
 " His trade was great because his shop was small." 
 " What room would there have been for the display 
 of goods?" asks Mr. Major, with triumphant con- 
 viction, forgetting that in those days the space for 
 that purpose was found in the street. Walton's 
 removal to Chancery Lane may imply an enlarge- 
 ment of business ; and this, so far as it goes, must 
 suffice to console whoever values a man not for 
 what he is, but by the round of the social ladder on 
 which he happens to be standing. If the humble- 
 
68 WALTON 
 
 ness of Walton's station helped him toward that 
 unaffected modesty which is so gracious in him 
 and so dignified, we may well be thankful for it. 
 
 Walton seems to have done his duty as a citizen 
 with exemplary fidelity. Between 1632 and 1644, 
 when he moved out of the parish, the register of 
 St. Dunstan's in the West shows him to have been 
 successively scavenger (which Sir Harris Nicolas 
 prudently deodorizes by calling it vaguely " a par- 
 ish office "), juryman, constable, grand-juryman, 
 overseer of the poor, and vestry -man, — enough, 
 one might say, to satisfy any reasonable ambition 
 for civic honors at a time when they meant honest 
 work done for honest wages. 
 
 Walton's • first appearance as an author was 
 in an elegy, which, after the fashion of the day, 
 accompanied the first edition of Donne's poems 
 (1633). This species of verse, whether in the writ- 
 ing or the reading, is generally the most dreary 
 compulsory labor to which man can be doomed. 
 The poet climbs the doleful treadmill without get- 
 ting an inch the higher; and as we watch him we 
 are wearied with the reality of a toil which seems 
 to have no real object. Once in my life I have 
 heard a funeral elegy which was wholly adequate. 
 It was the long quavering howl of a dog under a 
 window of the chamber in which his master had at 
 that moment died. It was Nature's cry of grief 
 and terror at first sight of Death. That faithful 
 creature was not trying to say something; so far 
 from it, that even the little skill in articulation 
 which his race has acquired was choked in the gripe 
 
WALTON 69 
 
 of such disaster. Consolation would shrink away- 
 abashed from the presence of so helpless a grief. 
 With elegiac poets it is otherwise, for it is of them- 
 selves and of their verses that they are thinking. 
 They distil a precious cordial from their tears. 
 They console themselves by playing variations on 
 their inconsolability. Their triumphs are won over 
 our artistic sense, not over our human fellow-feeling. 
 Yet now and then in the far inferior verse of far 
 inferior men there will be some difficult word with 
 a sob in it that moves as no artifice can move, and 
 brings back to each of us his private loss with a 
 strange sense of comfort in feeling that somewhere, 
 no matter how far away in the past, there was one 
 who had suffered like ourselves and would not be 
 appeased by setting his pain to music. There is 
 something of this in Walton's Elegy on Donne. I 
 do not believe that he was thinking of his poetical 
 paces as he wrote it ; or, if he was, he forgets them 
 from time to time and falls into his natural gait. 
 What he said ten years later in writing of Cart- 
 wright seems true of this, — 
 
 " Muses, I need you not, for Grief and I 
 Can in your absence weaye an elegy." 
 
 I should be yielding to my partiality for Walton 
 if I called these verses poetry ; but there is at least, 
 in the eloquence of their honest sorrow, a tendency 
 to become so which stops little short of it, and 
 which is too often missed in the carefully cadenced 
 ululation of similar efforts. Here, indeed, there 
 seems no effort at all, and that surely is a crowning 
 mercy. There is one phrase whose laconic pathos 
 
70 WALTON 
 
 I find it hard to match elsewhere. It is where he 
 bids his thoughts "forget he loved me." This is 
 the true good breeding of sorrow. It may as well 
 be said here, once for all, that Walton was no 
 poet, so far as rhythm is an essential element of 
 expression. His lyrics are mechanical and club- 
 footed. He succeeded best in that measure, the 
 rhymed couplet of ten syllables, which detaches it- 
 self least irreconcilably from prose. The nearer 
 an author comes to being a poet, so much the worse 
 for him should he persist in making verse the in- 
 terpreter of his thought ; so much the better for 
 him should he wisely abandon it for something- 
 closer to the habitual dialect of men. I think that 
 Walton's prose owes much of its charm to the po- 
 etic sentiment in him which was denied a refuge in 
 verse, and that his practice in metres may have 
 given to his happier periods a measure and a music 
 they would otherwise have wanted. That he had 
 this practice has a direct bearing on the question 
 of the authorship of "Theahna and Clearchus," of 
 which I must say something at the proper time, 
 Walton had not the strong passions which poets 
 break to the light harness of verse, and indeed 
 they and longevity such as his are foaled by dams 
 of very different race. But he loved poetry, and 
 the poetry he loved was generally good. He had 
 also some critical judgment in it. Speaking of 
 Marlowe's "Come live with me," and Raleigh's 
 answer to it, he says, "They were old-fashioned 
 poetry, but choicely good; I think much better 
 than the strong- lines that are now in fashion in 
 
WALTON 71 
 
 this critical age." His simplicity, it should seem, 
 was not only a gift, but a choice as well. 
 
 Not long before the publication of a volume of 
 Donne's sermons (1640), Walton wrote a life of 
 the author, which was prefixed to them. This 
 piety was not volunteered, but devolved on him 
 by the death of their common friend. Sir Henry 
 Wotton (December, 1639), for whom he had been 
 collecting the material. Donne lost nothing, and 
 the world gained much, by this substitution; for 
 Walton thus learned by accident where his true 
 talent lay, and was encouraged to write those other 
 Lives which, with this, make the volume that has 
 endeared him to all who choose that their souls 
 should keep good company. In a preface, beauti- 
 ful alike for its form and the sentiment embodied 
 in it, after a pretty apology for his own deficien- 
 cies, he says, " But be this to the disadvantage of 
 the person represented, certain I am it is to the 
 advantage of the beholder who shall here see the 
 author's [Donne] picture in a natural dress, which 
 ought to beget faith in what is spoken." And 
 not only that, but Walton's picture too! In this 
 preference of the homely and familiar, and in an 
 artlessness which is not quite so artless as it would 
 fain appear, lies the charm that never stales of 
 Walton's manner. He would have applied his 
 friend Wotton' s verse to himself, and affirmed 
 "simple truth his utmost skill," but he was also a 
 painstaking artist in his own way. 
 
 As illustrations, take this sentence from the Life 
 of Donne, describing him after the death of his 
 wife : — 
 
72 WALTON 
 
 " Thus, as the Israelites sat mourning by the rivers of 
 Babylon when they remembered Zion, so he gave some 
 ease to his oppressed heart by thus venting his sorrows ; 
 thus he began the day and ended the night ; ended the 
 restless night and began the weary day in lamenta- 
 tions." 
 
 Or this, of the nightingale, worthy to compete with 
 Crashawe's, or with Jeremy Taylor's lark: — 
 
 " But the nightingale, another of my airy creatures, 
 breathes such sweet loud music out of her little instru- 
 mental throat, that it might make mankind to think mir- 
 acles are not ceased. He that at midnight, when the 
 very laborer sleeps securely, should hear, as I have very 
 often, the clear airs, the sweet descants, the natural ris- 
 ing and falling, the doubling and redoubling of her 
 voice, might well be lifted above earth, and say, ' Lord, 
 what music hast Thou provided for the saints in heaven, 
 when Thou affordest bad men such music on earth ? " 
 
 He had learned of his great contemporaries also 
 to turn and wind those many-membered periods 
 which in unskilful hands become otherwise-minded 
 as a herd of swine. The passage in the Introduc- 
 tion to his revised Life of Donne where he com- 
 pares himself to Pompey's bondman, and that in 
 the Preface to the Life of Herbert in which he 
 sjDeaks of Mary Magdalene, may serve as examples ; 
 and in these neither are the words caught at ran- 
 dom, nor do they fall into those noble modulations 
 by chance. And he could be succinct at need, as 
 where he says : " He that praises Richard Hooker 
 praises God, who hath given such gifts to men." 
 
 Walton tells us that he saw the Scotch Cove- 
 
WALTON 73 
 
 nanters, when in 1644 they " came marching with it 
 [the Covenant] gloriously upon their pikes and in 
 their hats. . . . This I saw and suffered by it," 
 whether in mind or purse he leaves doubtful. In 
 this year he ceased to be an inhabitant of the Parish 
 of St. Dunstan; and from that time till 1650, 
 when he took a house in Clerkenwell, he for the 
 most part vanishes. We know incidentally that 
 he was in London once in the course of the year 
 1645, and once again in that of 1647. But these 
 may have been flying visits, for there is no evidence 
 that his second marriage (1646) took place there; 
 and the statement of Antony a Wood, who knew 
 him well, makes it probable that he may have spent 
 at Stacfford, where he had a small property, the 
 years during which he cannot be shown to have 
 lived anywhere else. To a man with his opinions, 
 London could not have been more amiable during 
 the Long Parliament and the Protectorate than 
 during the reign of Charles II. to a man of his 
 morals. 
 
 The solitude of Stafford, where, to cite his own 
 words, he could 
 
 " Linger long days by Swaynham brook," 
 
 seems more suitable to the conception and gestation 
 of such a book as "The Complete Angler" than 
 London could have been to a man whose compan- 
 ionable instincts were so strong that even fish- 
 ing was not perfect happiness without a friend to 
 share it. 
 
 That the "Angler" was begun some years be- 
 
74 WALTON 
 
 fore it was published is rendered more probable 
 by Walton's saying of Marlowe's song wMch he 
 quotes, that it "was made at least fifty years ago." 
 He was likely to know something about Marlowe 
 through his own friendship with Drayton, who was 
 the first adequately to signalize the poet's merit. 
 Marlowe died in 1593, and the "at least fifty 
 years" would bring us down to the Stafford pe- 
 riod. There are passages in Walton which lead me 
 to think he may have spent abroad some part of 
 the time during which he is invisible to us. He 
 set great store by the advantages of foreign travel, 
 and gave his son the benefit of them. 
 
 It seems likely that he gave up business in 1644, 
 and it may have been at Stafford that he saw 
 some foraging party from Leslie's army which would 
 not have spared his uncovenanted chickens. In- 
 ternal evidence makes it likely that in 1646 he wrote 
 the preface to Quarles's "Shepherd's Eclogues," 
 and that he was on terms of friendly acquaintance 
 with him as a brother of the angle. He may have 
 borrowed the name "Clora" from Quarles. It is 
 true that he has put an h into it, but his spelling is 
 always according to his own lights (mostly will-o'- 
 the-wisps) ; and there are people who think crystals 
 less lustrous without that letter which may be picked 
 up anywhere in the land of Cokayne, where it 
 is dropped so often. In 1650 he published the 
 "Reliquiae Wottonianae," prefixing to them a life 
 of the author, printed in haste, he tells us, but cor- 
 rected in later editions. The "Angler " appeared 
 in 1653, and a second edition came out two years 
 
WALTON 75 
 
 later. It was while he was in London during this 
 latter year, probably to correct his proof-sheets, 
 that he met Sanderson, who was there to perform 
 the same function for the preface to a volume of 
 sermons. Walton's account of this meeting is so 
 characteristic that I shall quote it : — 
 
 " About the time of his printing this excellent Preface, 
 I met him accidentally in London in sad-colored clothes, 
 and, God knows, far from being costly. The place of 
 our meeting was near to Little Britain, where he had 
 been to buy a book which he then had in his hand. We 
 had no inclination to part presently, and therefore turned 
 to stand in a corner under a pent-house, for it began to 
 rain, and immediately the wind rose and the rain in- 
 creased so much that both became so inconvenient as to 
 force us into a cleanly house, where we had bread, cheese, 
 ale, and a fire for our money. This rain and wind were 
 so obliging to me as to force our stay there for at least 
 an hour, to my great content and advantage. . . . And 
 I gladly remember and mention it as an argument of 
 my happiness and his great humility and condescen- 
 sion." 
 
 It is exactly as if he were telling us of it, and 
 this sweet persuasiveness of the living and naturally 
 cadenced voice is never wanting in Walton. It is 
 indeed his distinction, and it is a very rare quality 
 in writers, upon most of whom, if they ever hap- 
 pily forget themselves and fall into the tone of talk, 
 the pen too soon comes sputtering in. The pas- 
 sage is interesting too because it illustrates both 
 Walton's love of good company and his Boswellian 
 sensitiveness to the attraction of superior men. 
 
76 WALTON 
 
 Much as lie loved fishing, it was in the minds of 
 such men that he loved best to fish. And what 
 a memory was his! The place, the sad-colored 
 clothes, the hook just bought, the rain and then 
 the wind, the pent-house, the tavern, the bread, 
 the ale, the fire, — everything is there that makes 
 a picture. Then he reports Sanderson's discourse; 
 and having done that, is reminded that this is a 
 good time to give us a description of his person. 
 In reading Walton's Lives (and no wonder Johnson 
 loved them so ^) I have a feeling that I have met 
 him in the street and am hearing them from his 
 own lips. I ask him about Donne, let us say. He 
 begins, but catching sight of some one who passes, 
 gives me in parenthesis an account of him, comes 
 back to Donne, and keeps on with him till some- 
 body else goes by about whom he has an anecdote 
 to tell; and so we get a leash of biographies in one. 
 It is very delightful, and though more rambling 
 than Plutarch, comes nearer to him than any other 
 life-writing I can think of. Indeed, I should be 
 inclined to say that Walton had a genius for ram- 
 bling rather than that it was his foible. The com- 
 fortable feeling he gives us that we have a definite 
 purpose, mitigated with the license to forget it at 
 the first temptation and take it up again as if no- 
 thing had happened, thus satisfying at once the 
 conscientious and the natural man, is one of Wal- 
 ton's most prevailing charms. What vast bal- 
 
 ^ Gray must have loved them too, and his Ode on a Distant 
 Prospect of Eton College was suggested by a passage in the Life 
 of Wotton. 
 
WALTON- 77 
 
 ances of leisure does he not put to our credit ! To 
 read him is to go a-fishing with all its bewitching 
 charms and contingencies. If there be many a dull 
 reach in the stream of his discourse, where contem- 
 plation might innocently lapse into slumber, it is 
 full also of nooks and eddies where nothing but our 
 own incompetence will balk us of landing a fine 
 fish. In this story of his meeting with Sander- 
 son there is another point to be noticed. Wal- 
 ton's memory is always discreet, always well-bred. 
 It never blabs. I think that one little fact is 
 purposely omitted here, namely, who paid for the 
 good cheer at the tavern. The scot was paid, to 
 be sure, with "our money," but I doubt very much 
 whether the poor country parson's purse were the 
 lighter for it. 
 
 In 1658 Walton published separately the second 
 and revised edition of his Life of Donne, with a 
 preface engagingly full of himself. I say "enga- 
 gingly full," because when he speaks of himself he 
 never seems to usurp on other people, but only to 
 share with all mankind a confidence to which they 
 had as good a right as he. In 1660 he prefixed a 
 congratulatory eclogue on the Restoration to a vol- 
 ume of Alexander Brome's Songs. In this he con- 
 trives to bring in the praise of his friend's verses, 
 and combines the tediousness of the Commendatory 
 and the Birthday styles with entire success. Never 
 inspired in verse, he becomes laborious unless 
 where his feelings are stirred to the roots, as in the 
 Elegy on Donne. 
 
 In 1662 he was at Worcester, the guest, proba- 
 
78 WALTON 
 
 bly, of his friend Bishop Morley. Here his second 
 wife died and lies buried in the cathedral, with an 
 inscrij)tion by him, simple and affectionate. In 
 that year he removed with Morley (on his trans- 
 lation) to Winchester, and there spent the rest of 
 his vigorous old age. From time to time he must 
 have visited Charles Cotton, whose father he had 
 known. We have no record of these visits (spent 
 in fishing) further than that one of them is spoken 
 of in a letter of Walton as proposed in 1676. 
 This was in his eighty-third year, and implies in 
 him that longevity of the taste for out-of-door 
 sports and of the muscle to endure their fatigues 
 which are almost peculiar to Englishmen. Cotton 
 was a Royalist country -gentleman with a handsome 
 estate, which, after sidling safely through the in- 
 tricacies of the Civil War, trickled pleasantly away 
 through the chinks of its master's profusion. He 
 was an excellent poet and a thorough master of 
 succulently idiomatic English, which he treated 
 with a country -gentlemanlike familiarity, as his 
 master, Montaigne, had treated French. The two 
 men loved one another, and this speaks well for 
 the social charity of both. There must have been 
 delicately understood and mutually respectful con- 
 ventions of silence in an intimacy between the pla- 
 cidly believing author of the Lives and the translator 
 of him who invented the Essay. Walton loved a 
 gentleman of blue blood as honestly as Johnson 
 did, and was, I am sure, as sturdily independent 
 withal. He could condone almost anything, that 
 had no taint of personal dishonor, in a gentleman 
 
WALTON 79 
 
 and a Cavalier. His nature was incapable of envy, 
 and, himself of obscurest lineage, there was nothing 
 he relished more keenly than the long pedigrees of 
 other people. While he enjoyed, he had also, I 
 fancy, not merely a sense of joint ownership, but 
 perhaps of something like over -lordship, as in that 
 winsome passage of the "Angler" he makes Vena- 
 tor say, after describing the landscape he has been 
 looking on: "As I thus sat joying in my own 
 happy condition and pitying the poor rich man that 
 owns this and many other pleasant groves and mead- 
 ows about me, I did thankfully remember what my 
 Saviour said, that the meek possess the earth." 
 But with him the more noble the ancestry, the 
 worse for their degenerous representative. A ped- 
 igree had not the right flavor for Walton unless 
 newly spiced with achievement from generation 
 to generation. In his Life of Sanderson, after 
 proclaiming with heraldic satisfaction that he was 
 of ancient family, he blows this trumpet-blast 
 against the recreant : — 
 
 " For titles not acquired, but derived only, do but 
 show us who of our ancestors have and how they have 
 achieved that honor which their descendants claim and 
 may not be worthy to enjoy. For if those titles descend 
 to persons that degenerate into vice and break off the 
 continued line of learning or valor or that virtue that 
 acquired them, they destroy the very foundation upon 
 which that honor was built, and all the rubbish of their 
 vices ought to fall heavy on such dishonorable heads ; 
 ought to fall so heavy as to degrade them of their titles 
 and blast their memories with reproach and shame." 
 
80 WALTON 
 
 It is plain that Walton, had he lived now, would 
 have made short work with an unsavory Peer. 
 It is noticeable too that he gives Learning prece- 
 dence over Yalor. 
 
 Walton had a genius for friendships and an 
 amiability of nature ample for the comfortable 
 housing of many at a time ; he had even a special 
 genius for bishops, and seems to have known 
 nearly the whole Episcopal bench of his day ; but 
 his friendship, like Lamb's, did not slink away 
 from a fortune out at elbows, and he had, I more 
 than suspect, a curiosity hospitable enough to en- 
 tertain a broken gentleman (like the Carey whom 
 he speaks of having known) if he had good talk or 
 narrative or honest mirth in him and producible 
 on demand. His friend Alexander Brome was 
 surely no precisian. But these less reputable inti- 
 mates he made welcome in a back-parlor of his 
 mind, away from the street and with the curtains 
 drawn, as if he would fain hide them even from 
 himself.^ His habitual temper sought serious and 
 thoughtful company, and he valued respectability 
 as a wise man must, his own self-respect as a good 
 man ought. But Cotton was a man of genius,^ 
 whose life was cleanlier than his Muse always 
 cared to be. If he wrote the Virgil Travesty, he 
 
 ^ In Ills Life of Hooker, liaTing to speak of George Sandys, he 
 mentions his Travels, and his translations in verse from the Psalms 
 and Job. He is silent about his version of Ovid's Metamorphoses 
 (done in Virginia), though the book was in his own library. 
 
 ^ Not yet extinct anaong his descendants. The late Lady Ma- 
 rian Alf ord, besides her social talents, had every gift that Fortune 
 bestows on the artist save that of poverty. 
 
WALTON 81 
 
 also wrote verses which the difficult Wordsworth 
 could praise, and a poem of gravely noble mood 
 addressed to Walton on his Lives, in which he 
 shows a knowledge of what goodness is that no bad 
 man could have acquired. Let one line of it at 
 least shine in my page, not as a sample but for 
 its own dear sake : — 
 
 " For in a virtuous act all good men shax*e." 
 
 Those must have been delightful evenings which 
 the two friends spent together after the day's fish- 
 ing. Well into the night they must have lingered, 
 with much excellent discourse of books and men, 
 now serious, now playful, much personal anecdote 
 and reminiscence. Perhaps it was as well that 
 Dr. Morley should be at Winchester, with all re- 
 spect be it said, and not forgetting that Walton 
 has told us he "loved such mirth as did not make 
 friends ashamed to look upon one another next 
 morning." 
 
 At Walton's request, Cotton wrote in ten days 
 the treatise on fly-fishing which was added to the 
 fifth edition of "The Complete Angler" in 1676. 
 What he says of Walton in it is interesting, and 
 the reverence he expresses for his character espe- 
 cially so as coming from a man of the world. " My 
 father Walton," he makes Piscator say, "will be 
 seen twice in no man's company he does not like, 
 and likes none but such as he believes to be very 
 honest men." It should be remembered that in 
 those days the word "honest" had to the initiated 
 ear a political and ecclesiastical as well as a moral 
 
82 WALTON 
 
 meaning. Cotton was a far better poet than Wal- 
 ton, and had a more practised hand ; yet his sup- 
 plement to the "Angler" wants that charm of in- 
 advertency with which Walton knew how to make 
 his most careful sentences waylay the ear, and his 
 truly poetic sympathy with the sights and sounds 
 of every-day Nature. Its chief value, I think, lies 
 in this illustrative contrast. 
 
 In 1665 Walton wrote his Life of Hooker, less 
 a labor of love than the others, but containing 
 that homely picture of him reading Horace as he 
 tended his scanty sheep, and called away by his 
 wife to rock the cradle. In 1670 came the Life of 
 Herbert, written, he tells us, chiefly to please him- 
 self. Some time before 1678, it is uncertain when, 
 his daughter Anne became the wife of the Reverend 
 William Hawkins, one of the prebends of Win- 
 chester, and with them he seems to have spent his 
 latter years. In that year he wrote the Life of 
 Sanderson, which, as showing no sign of mental 
 disrepair, is surely an almost unparalleled feat for 
 a man of eighty -five. Length of days is one of 
 the blessings of the Old Testament, and surely it 
 might be added to the Beatitudes of the New, 
 when, as with Walton, it means only a longer 
 ripening, a more abundant leisure to look back- 
 wards without self-reproach, and forwards with an 
 assured gratitude to God for a future goodness 
 like the past. There is, perhaps, if we conde- 
 scend to a purely utilitarian view, no stronger 
 argument for belief in a personal Deity than that 
 it makes possible this ennobling sense of gratitude ; 
 
WALTON 83 
 
 and in a time when such possibility has been so 
 largely analyzed and refined away, Walton's 
 habitual recognition of so direct and conscious an 
 obligation that he cannot resist the inter jectional 
 expression t»f it is a chief cause of the solace and 
 refreshment we feel in reading him. As we read 
 we inhale an odor from the leaves as if flowers 
 from the garden of childhood had been pressed be- 
 tween them, and for a moment, by the sweet sophis- 
 try of association, we stand again among them 
 where they grew. Here is incontaminate piety, 
 wholesome as bread. It is a gush of involuntary 
 emotion, like that first sincere and precious juice 
 which their own weight forces from the grapes. A 
 fine morning, a meadow flushed with primroses, 
 are not only good in themselves, but sweeter and 
 better because they give him occasion to be thank- 
 ful for them. We may be wiser, but it may be 
 doubted whether we are so happy, in our self- 
 reliant orphanhood. He had two pleasures where 
 we have but one, and that one doubtingly now that 
 the shadow of the metaphysic cloud has darkened 
 Nature. 
 
 In 1683 Walton published "Thealma and Clear- 
 chus, a pastoral history in smooth and easie verse 
 written long since by John Chalkhill, Esq., an ac- 
 quaintant and friend of Edmund Spencer" [sic]. 
 The preface is dated five years earlier. The poem 
 is incomplete, with this quaint note by Walton 
 at the end: "And here the author died, and I 
 hope the reader will be sorry." When Mr. S. W. 
 Singer reprinted it in 1820 he expressed his doubts 
 
84 WALTON 
 
 whether such a person as John Chalkhill had ever 
 existed, and his strong suspicion that it might be a 
 youthful production of Walton himself. But sev- 
 eral John (or Jon) Chalkhills have since been 
 imearthed; one of them (who died in 1615) being 
 remotely connected with Walton through the mar- 
 riage of his daughter with one of the Kens. Sir 
 Harris Nicolas, who rejects Mr. Singer's suspicion 
 as implying a duplicity of which honest Izaak 
 would have been incapable, droUy enough fixes 
 upon another John Chalkliill, Fellow of Winchester 
 College, as the probable author of the poem. This 
 he does with Walton's statement that the author 
 was "an acquaintant and friend" of Spenser, and 
 that of John Chalkhill' s monument in Winchester 
 Cathedral that he died in 1679, octoge?iarkis, both 
 before him. Now Spenser died in 1599 ; and this 
 Chalkhill, at least, could not have known him. 
 But if the other, who died in 1615, wrote " Thealma 
 and Clearchus," he certainly did not write it as it 
 was printed by Walton. The language is altogether 
 too modern for that, unless, indeed, he was en- 
 dowed with a spirit of prophecy that both foresaw 
 and forestalled the changes in his mother-tongue. 
 The invariable use of the possessive its and the 
 elision of the e in the past participle would be con- 
 clusive. The tone is also too modern, though this 
 is more easily to be felt than defined in words. 
 While there is nothing that compels us to accept 
 Mr. Singer's suggestion as to the authorship, it is 
 certain that the poem has been largely rewritten by 
 somebody, and this must have been Walton. It 
 
WALTON 85 
 
 has many of the characteristics of his style, — his 
 discursiveness, his habit of leaving the direct track 
 of narrative on the suggestion of the first inviting 
 by-path, his commonplaceness of invention, and, 
 what is even more suspicious, the same imperfect 
 rhymes, sometimes mere assonances, which are 
 found in verses admittedly his own. I find also, 
 or think I find, unmistakable (though veiled) allu- 
 sions to the Civil War consonant with some that 
 Walton could not refrain in his acknowledged 
 writings. There is almost nothing in it that sug- 
 gests poetry. Indeed, I remember but a single 
 happy phrase : — 
 
 ' ' in the proud deep 
 She and her bold Clearchus sweetly sleep 
 In those soft beds of darkness." 
 
 There is another passage worth quoting as ap- 
 plicable to Walton himself in his old age : — 
 
 " And he was almost grown a child again, 
 Yet sound in judgment, not impaired in mind, 
 For age had rather the soul's parts refined 
 Than any way infirmed, his wit no less 
 Than 't was in youth, his memory as fresh ; 
 He failed in nothing but his earthly part 
 That tended to its centre, yet his heart 
 Was stUl the same and beat as lustily." 
 
 And in his preface Walton perfectly describes him- 
 self in describing the real or imaginary author : — • 
 
 " He was in his time a man generally known and as 
 well beloved ; for he was humble and obliging in his be- 
 havior, a gentleman, a scholar, very innocent and pru- 
 dent; and indeed his whole life was useful, quiet, and 
 virtuous." 
 
86 WALTON 
 
 I am convinced that "Thealma and Clearclius," 
 whoever may have sketched it, is mainly Walton's 
 as it now stands, and I believe it to be the work of 
 his middle or later life. The gap of five years be- 
 tween the date of the preface and that of publica- 
 tion is hard to explain if we suppose him to have 
 been merely the editor. The hesitation of an au- 
 thor venturing himself, even under an alias, in a 
 new direction, seems a more natural explanation. 
 If he was the author, I cannot agree with Arch- 
 deacon Nares and Sir Harris Nicolas that the arti- 
 fice was very culpable, or that Walton would have 
 thought it so. The evidence internal and external 
 that he was author of the two letters from "a quiet 
 and comfortable [conformable ? ] citizen in London 
 to two busy and factious shopkeepers in Coventry," 
 published in 1680, and signed E. W., seems to 
 me conclusive. Had he attributed to Chalkhill a 
 poem as bad in its morals as "Thealma and Clear- 
 chus " in its verse, it would have been quite another 
 matter. Walton thought the poem good, or he 
 would not have published it ; and the worst harm 
 that could come to Chalkhill would be the reputa- 
 tion of being a bad poet, — not very hard to bear 
 with so many to keep him in countenance, and he 
 safe under the sod for sixty-eight years. 
 
 Whether author or editor, Walton did not live 
 long to enjoy the mystification or share the suc- 
 cess, if any there were. He wrote his own will in 
 October, 1683 ; and on the 15th December of that 
 year, to borrow the words of his granddaughter's 
 epitaph, written no doubt by himself, he died in 
 the ninetieth year "of his innocency." 
 
WALTON 87 
 
 In his will there is this remarkable passage: 
 " My worldly estate, which I have nether got by 
 falsehood or flattery, or the extreme creweltyof the 
 law of this nation." This cruelty, I have no doubt, 
 was the po^er which the law put into the hands 
 of evil landlords. On this subject Walton held 
 opinions which, if put in practice, would have 
 prevented the social miseries of Ireland and the 
 consequent political retribution which England is 
 compelled to suffer for them. This is all the more 
 creditable to him because he was by temperament 
 and principle conservative, and not only a friend to 
 that order of the Universe which was by law estab- 
 lished in Church and State, but a lover of it. He 
 tells of a pitiless landlord who was a parishioner of 
 Sanderson, and of Sanderson's successful dealing 
 with him, and adds : — 
 
 " It may be noted that in this age there are a sort of 
 people so unlike the God of Mercy, so void of the bow- 
 els of pity, that they love only themselves and children, 
 love them so as not to be concerned whether the rest of 
 mankind waste their days in sorrow and shame, — peo- 
 ple that are cursed with riches and a mistake that no- 
 thing but riches 'can make them and theirs happy." 
 
 The character of Walton's friendships and his 
 fidelity to them when prorogued by death bear am- 
 ple witness to the fine quality of his nature. How 
 amiably human it was he betrays at every turn, 
 yet with all his bonhomie there is a dignity which 
 never forgets itself or permits us to forget it. We 
 may apply to him what he says of Sir Henry 
 Wotton's father: that he was "a man of great 
 
88 WALTON 
 
 modesty, of a most plain and single heart, of an 
 ancient freedom and integrity of mind," and may 
 say of him, as he says of Sir Henry himself, that 
 he had "a most persuasive behavior." His friends 
 loved to call him "honest Izaak." He speaks of 
 his own "simplicity and harmlessness," arid tells 
 us that his humor was "to be free and pleasant and 
 civilly merry," and that he "hated harsh censures." 
 He makes it a prime quality of the gentleman to be 
 "communicable." He had no love of money, and 
 compassionates those who are "condemned to be 
 rich." He was a staunch royalist and church- 
 man, loved music, painting, good ale, and a pipe, 
 and takes care to tell us that a certain artificial 
 fly " was made by a handsome woman and with a 
 fine hand." But what justifies and ennobles these 
 lower loves, what gives him a special and native 
 aroma like that of Alexander, is that above all he 
 loved the beauty of holiness and those ways of tak- 
 ing and of spending life that make it wholesome 
 for ourselves and our fellows. His view of the 
 world is not of the widest, but it is the Delectable 
 Mountains that bound the prospect. Never surely 
 was there a more lovable man, nor one to whom 
 love found access by more avenues of sympathy. 
 
 There are two books which have a place by 
 themselves and side by side in our literature, — 
 Walton's "Complete Angler" and White's "Nat- 
 ural History of Selborne;" and they are books, 
 too, which have secured immortality without show- 
 ing any tincture of imagination or of constructive 
 faculty, in the gift of one or the other of which that 
 
WALTON 89 
 
 distinction commonly lies. They neither stimulate 
 thought nor stir any passionate emotion. If they 
 make us wiser, it is indirectly and without attempt- 
 ing it, by making us more cheerful. The purely 
 literary charm of neither of them will alone au- 
 thorize the place they hold so securely, though, as 
 respects the "Angler," this charm must be taken 
 more largely into account. They cannot be called 
 popular, because they attract only a limited num- 
 ber of readers, but that number is kept full by new 
 recruits in every generation ; and they have survived 
 every peril to which editing could expose them, 
 even the crowning one of illustration. They have 
 this in common, that those who love them find 
 themselves growing more and more to love the au- 
 thors of them too. Theirs is an immortality of 
 affection, perhaps the most desirable, as it is the 
 rarest, of all. I do not mean that there are no 
 books in other languages, and no other books in our 
 own, that invite to a similar intimacy and inspire 
 the same enthusiasm of regard. "Don Quixote" 
 and "Elia" appeal to the memory at once. But 
 in both of these there is also the sorcery of genius, 
 there is the touch of the master, as well as the shy 
 personal attractiveness of the writer. In the two 
 books of which I have been speaking, what prima- 
 rily interests us is the unconscious revelation of the 
 authors' character; and it is through the kindly 
 charm of this and a certain homely inspiration 
 drawn from the sources of every-day experience 
 that they tighten their hold upon us. Nature had 
 endowed these men with the simple skill to make 
 
90 WALTON 
 
 happiness out of the cheap material that is within 
 the means of the poorest of us. The good fairy- 
 gave them to weave cloth of gold out of straw. 
 They did not waste their time or strive to show 
 their cleverness in discussing whether life were 
 worth living, but found every precious moment of 
 it so without seeking, or made it so without gri- 
 mace, and with no thought that they were doing 
 anything worth remark. Both these books are pre- 
 eminently cheerful books, and have the invaluable 
 secret of distilling sunshine out of leaden skies. 
 They are companionable books, that tempt us out- 
 of-doors and keep us there. The reader of the 
 "Angler" especially finds himself growing con- 
 scious of one meaning in the sixth Beatitude too 
 often overlooked, — that the pure in heart shall 
 see God, not only in some future and far-off sense, 
 but wherever they turn their eyes. 
 
 I have hesitated to say that Walton had style, 
 because, though that quality, the handmaid of tal- 
 ent and the helpmeet of genius, have left the un- 
 obtrusive traces of its deft hand in certain choicer 
 parts of Walton's writing, — his guest-chambers as 
 it were, — yet it does by no means pervade and reg- 
 ulate the whole. For in a book we feel the influ- 
 ence of style everywhere, though we never catch it 
 at its work, as in a house we divine the neat-handed 
 ministry of woman. Walton too often leaves his 
 sentences in a clutter. But there are other qualities 
 which, if they do not satisfy like style, are yet even 
 more agreeable, draw us nearer to an author, and 
 make us happier in him. "Why try to discover 
 
WALTON 91 
 
 what the charm of a book is, if only it charm? If 
 I must seek a word that more than any other ex- 
 plains the pleasure which Walton's way of writing 
 gives us, I should say it was its innocency. It re- 
 freshes like the society of children. I do not know 
 whether he had humor, but there are passages that 
 suggest it, as where, after quoting Montaigne's de- 
 lightful description of how he played with his cat, 
 he goes on : " Thus freely speaks Montaigne con- 
 cerning cats," as if he had taken an undue liberty 
 with them ; or where he makes a meteorologist of 
 the crab, that "at a certain age gets into a dead 
 fish's shell, and like a hermit dwells there alone 
 studying the wind and weather; " or where he tells 
 us of the pahner-worm, that "he will boldly and 
 disorderly wander up and down, and not endure 
 to be kept to a diet or fixed to a particular place." 
 And what he says of Sanderson — that "he did 
 put on some faint purposes to marry" — would 
 have arrided Lamb. These, if he meant to be 
 droll, have that seeming inadvertence which gives 
 its highest zest to humor and makes the eye twinkle 
 with furtive connivance. Walton's weaknesses, 
 too, must be reckoned among his other attractions. 
 He praises a meditative life, and with evident sin- 
 cerity ; but we feel that he liked nothing so well as 
 good talk. His credulity leaves front and back 
 door invitingly open. For this I rather praise than 
 censure him, since it brought him the chance of a 
 miracle at any odd moment, and this complacency 
 of belief was but a lower form of the same quality 
 of mind that in more serious questions gave him his 
 
92 WALTON 
 
 equanimity of faith. And how persuasively beau- 
 tiful that equanimity is ! Heaven was always as 
 real to him as to us are countries we have seen only 
 in the map, and so near that he caught wafts of the 
 singing there when the wind was in the right quar- 
 ter. I must not forget Walton's singular and gen- 
 uine love of Nature and his poetical sympathy with 
 it, less common then than now when "all have got 
 the seed." This love was not in the Ercles vein 
 such as is now in fashion, but tender and true, and 
 expresses itseK not deliberately but in caressing 
 ejaculations, as where he speaks of "the little liv- 
 ing creatures with which the sun and summer adorn 
 and beautify the river-banks and meadows . . . 
 whose life, they say, Nature intended not to exceed 
 an hour, and yet that life is made shorter by other 
 flies or by accident." What far-reaching pity in 
 this concluding sigh, and how keen a sense of the 
 sweetness of life, too ! In one respect, I think, he 
 is peculiar, — his sensitiveness to odors. In enu- 
 merating the recreations of man, he reckons sweet 
 smells among them. It is Venator who says this, 
 to be sure; but in the "Angler " there is absolutely 
 no dramatic sense, and it is always Walton who 
 speaks. A part of our entertainment, indeed, is to 
 see him doubling so many parts and all the while 
 so unmistakably himself. 
 
 Walton certainly cannot be called original in the 
 sense that he opened new paths to thought or new 
 vistas to imagination. Such men are rare, but al- 
 most as rare are those who have force enough of 
 nature to suffuse whatever they write with their own 
 
WALTON 93 
 
 individuality and to make a thought fresh again 
 and their own by the addition of this indefinable 
 supplement. This constitutes literary originality, 
 and this Walton had. Whatever entered his mind 
 or memory came forth again plus Izaak Walton. 
 We have borrowed of the Latin mythology the 
 word " genius " to express certain intellectual pow- 
 ers or aptitudes which we are puzzled to define, so 
 elusive are they. I have ah-eady admitted that this 
 term in its ordinary acceptation cannot be applied 
 to Walton. This would imply larger "draughts of 
 intellectual day " than his ever were or could be. 
 For we ordinarily confine it to a single species of 
 power, which seems sometimes (as in Villon, Mar- 
 lowe, and Poe) wholly dissociated from the rest of 
 the man, and continues to haunt the ruins of him 
 with its superior presence as if it were rather a 
 genius loci than the natale comes qui temperat as- 
 trum. In Walton's case, since a Daimon or a 
 Genius would be too lofty for the business, might 
 we not take the Brownie of our own Northern my- 
 thology for the type of such superior endowment as 
 he clearly had? We can fancy him ministered to by 
 such a homely and helpful creature, — not a genius 
 exactly, but answering the purpose sufficiently well, 
 and marking a certain natural distinction in those 
 it singles out for its innocent and sportful com- 
 panionship. And it brings a blessing also to those 
 who treat it kindly, as Walton did. 
 
 Fortunate senex, ergo tua rura manehunt. 
 
MILTON'S "AREOPAGITICA." 
 
 1890. 
 
 DuEiNG the hurly-burly of the English Civil 
 War, which made the bee in every man's bonnet 
 buzz all the more persistently to be let forth, who- 
 ever would now write to his newspaper was driven, 
 for want of that safety-valve, to indite a pamphlet, 
 and, as he believed that the fate of what for the mo- 
 ment was deemed the Universe hung on his opin- 
 ion, was eager to make it public ere the opportune 
 moment should be gone by forever. Every one of 
 these enthusiasts felt as Robert Owen did when 
 he said to Wilberforce, "What, Sir, would you 
 put off the happiness of Mankind till the next ses- 
 sion of Parliament?" Every crotchet and whim- 
 sey, too, became the nucleus of a sect, and, as if 
 Old England could not furnish enough otherwise- 
 mindedness of her own. New England sent over 
 Rogers and Gorton to help in the confusion of 
 tongues. All these sects, since each singly was in 
 a helpless and often hateful minority, were united 
 in the assertion of their right to freedom of opinion 
 and to the uncurtailed utterance of whatever they 
 fancied that opinion to be. Many of them, it 
 should seem, could hardly fail in their mental vag- 
 abondage to stumble upon the principle of universal 
 
MILTON'S AREOPAGITICA 95 
 
 toleration, but none discovered anything more 
 novel than that Liberty of Prophesying is good 
 for Me and very bad for Thee. It is remarkable 
 how beautiful the countenance of Toleration always 
 looks in this partial view of it, but it is conceivable 
 that any one of these heterodoxies, once in power 
 and 'therefore orthodox, would have buckled round 
 all dissenters the strait-waistcoat yet warm from 
 the- constraint of more precious limbs. Indeed, 
 this inconsistency, so concise a proof of the consist- 
 ency of human nature, was illustrated when the 
 General Court of Massachusetts suppressed the first 
 attempt at a newspaper in 1690, and forbade the 
 printing of anything "without licence first obtained 
 from those appointed by the Government to grant 
 the same." Williams, as was natural in one of his 
 amiable temper, was more generous than the rest, 
 but even he lived long enough to learn that there 
 were politico-theological bores in Rhode Island 
 so sedulous and so irritating that they made him 
 doubt the efficacy of his own nostrum, just as the 
 activity of certain domestic insects might make a 
 Brahmin waver as to the sacredness of life in some 
 of its lower organisms. 
 
 The prevailing Party had also its jangling mi- 
 norities whose criticisms and arguments and com- 
 plaints it was convenient to suppress, and ac- 
 cordingly Parliament, in June, 1643, passed an 
 Ordinance to restrain unlicensed printing. They 
 had so little learned how to use their newly acquired 
 freedom as to be certain that they could compel 
 other men to the right use of theirs. This is not 
 
96 MILTON'S AREOPAGITICA 
 
 to be wondered at, for even democracies are a great 
 while in finding out that everything may be left to 
 the instincts of a free people save those instincts 
 themselves, and that these, docile if guided gently, 
 grow mutinous under unskilful driving. Parlia- 
 ment was trying no new experiment, for the press, 
 as if it were an animal likely to run mad and bite 
 somebody at any moment, had been muzzled since 
 Queen Mary's day, but they were trying over 
 again, as men are wont, an experiment that had 
 always failed, and in the nature of things always 
 must fail. 
 
 Unwise repression made evasion only the more 
 actively ingenious, and gave it that color of right- 
 eousness which is the most dangerous consequence 
 of ill-considered legislation. Counsel was darkened 
 by a swarm of pamphlets surreptitiously brooded 
 in cellars and cocklofts. Fancy sees their authors 
 fluttering round the New Light on dingy quarto 
 wings and learning that Truth incautiously ap- 
 proached can singe as well as shine. Every doc- 
 trine inconceivable by instructed men was preached, 
 and the ghost of every dead and buried heresy did 
 squeak and gibber in the London streets. The 
 right of private misjudgment had been exercised 
 so fantastically on the Scriptures that thoughtful 
 persons were beginning to surmise whether there 
 were not enough explosive material between their 
 covers to shatter any system of government or of 
 society that ever was or will be contrived by man. 
 All this was the natural result of circumstances 
 wholly novel, of a universal ferment of thought or 
 
MILTON'S AREOPAGITICA 97 
 
 of its many plausible substitutes, entliusiasm, fa- 
 naticism, monomania, and every form of mental 
 and moral bewilderment suddenly loosed from tbe 
 unconscious restraints of traditional order. Tbose 
 who watched the strange intellectual and ethico- 
 political upheaval in New England fifty years ago 
 will be at no loss for parallels to these phenomena. 
 It was a state of things that should have been left 
 to subside, as it had arisen, through natural causes ; 
 but the powers that be always think themselves 
 wiser than the laws of Nature or the axioms of 
 experience. 
 
 Two formalities were necessary for the lawful 
 publication of any printed sheet. These were the 
 long-established entry at Stationers' Hall and the 
 license required by the new Ordinance. Men in a 
 hurry to save the world before night, dissident as 
 they might be in other respects, were agreed in re- 
 senting these impediments and delays, and this the 
 more, doubtless, because of the fees they exacted. 
 Milton, who had nothing in common with such men 
 except the belief in a divine mission, had in pub- 
 lishing his controversial tracts quietly ignored both 
 the rights of the Stationers and the injunctions of 
 the Ordinance. As respects the Stationers' Com- 
 pany, he should have complied with the law, since 
 entry in theirs register was the only security for 
 copyright, and he believed, as he tells us in his 
 "Iconoclastes," that "every author should have 
 the property in his work reserved to him after 
 death as well as living." It was the infringement 
 of their copyrights by piratical printers during the 
 
98 MILTON'S AREOPAGITICA 
 
 general confusion, wliicB seems first to have moved 
 the Stationers' Company to protest against the gen- 
 eral violation of the laws controlling the press. 
 Milton's tract on Divorce, published, like others of 
 his before, without license or registry, had made a 
 scandal even among those who regarded a breach 
 of the Seventh Commandment as the only effective 
 liniment for the sprains and bruises of matrimony. 
 And indeed Milton had ventured very far in that 
 dangerous direction where liberty is apt to shade 
 imperceptibly into the warmer hues of license, 
 though not so cynically far as Lady Mary Wortley 
 Montagu afterwards went in her proposed septen- 
 nial rearrangement. The Stationers seized the op- 
 portunity to denounce him twice by name, first to 
 a committee of the Commons, and then to a com- 
 mittee of the Lords. Nothing seems to have come 
 of their complaints, and indeed the attention of 
 both houses must have been too much absorbed by 
 more serious warfare to find time for engaging in 
 this Battle of the Books. Nothing came of them, 
 that is to say, on the part of Parliament, but on 
 Milton's came the "Areopagitica." 
 
 We are indebted to the painstaking and fruitful 
 researches of Mr. Masson for a more precise know- 
 ledge of the particulars which bring this tract into 
 closer and clearer relations with the personal in- 
 terests of Milton, and some such nearer concern 
 was always needed as a motive to give his prose, 
 in which, as he says, he worked only with his left 
 hand, its fullest energy and vivacity. Nor is this 
 the case with his prose only. It is true also of his 
 
MILTON'S AREOPAGITICA 99 
 
 verse in those passages whicli are the most charac- 
 teristically his own. Perhaps he himself was dimly 
 conscious of this, for in his "Doctrine and Disci- 
 pline of Divorce " he says that "when points of dif- 
 ficulty are to be discussed, appertaining to the re- 
 moval of unreasonable wrong and burthen from the 
 perplexed life of our brothers, it is incredible how 
 cold,^how dull, and how far from all fellow-feeling 
 we are without the spur of self -concernment." In 
 the "Areopagitica," he was not only advocating 
 certain general principles, but pleading his own 
 cause. The largeness of the theme absolves the 
 egotism of the motive, while this again adds fervor 
 to the argument and penetration to the voice of the 
 advocate. The "Areopagitica" is the best known 
 and most generally liked of Milton's prose writings, 
 because it is the only one concerning whose subject 
 the world has more nearly come to an agreement. 
 In all the others except the tract concerning Educa- 
 tion, and the "History of Britain " in its first edi- 
 tion, there are embers of controversy which the 
 ashes of two centuries cover but have not cooled. 
 
 There is a passage in his "Second Defence" 
 where Milton speaks of the "Areopagitica " as one 
 section of a tripartite scheme which he had thought 
 out "to the promotion of real and substantial lib- 
 erty." After giving a list of his writings on mat- 
 ters ecclesiastic, he says, "When, therefore, I 
 perceived that there were three species of liberty 
 without which scarcely any life can be completely 
 led, religious, domestic or private, and civil, as I 
 had already written concerning the first, and the 
 
100 MILTON'S AREOPAGITICA 
 
 magistrates were strenuously active concerning the 
 third, I took to myself the second or domestic. 
 And, as this seemed tripartite, if marriage, if the 
 education of children were to be as they should, if 
 there should be liberty of philosophizing, I set forth 
 my opinion not only concerning the rightful con- 
 tracting of marriage, but also the dissolving thereof, 
 if it should be necessary. ... I then treated more 
 briefly of the education of children in a single 
 small work. . . . And lastly concerning the freeing 
 of the press, lest the judgment of true and false, 
 of what should be published, what suppressed, 
 should be in the power of a few men of little learn- 
 ing and of vulgar judgment, ... I wrote in the 
 proper style of an oration the 'Areopagitica. ' " 
 
 The sub-title of this work accordingly is "a 
 speech for the liberty of unlicenced printing," but 
 it is much more than this. It is a plea in behalf 
 of freedom of research in all directions (lihertas phi- 
 losophandi), and there is in it implicitly the doc- 
 trine of universal toleration. But Milton's inten- 
 tion had no such scope as that, for it is plain from 
 what he says elsewhere that he would have drawn 
 the line on this side of Popery, of atheism, and 
 most probably of whatever was immediately incon- 
 venient to so firm a believer as he was in the infal- 
 libility of John Milton. Such was the irony of 
 Tate that he himself a few years later became a 
 censor of the press. It was perhaps with an eye to 
 this comic property of the whirligig of Time that 
 he wrote the passage just quoted from the "Second 
 Defence," in which it is implied that some things 
 
MILTON'S AREOPAGITICA 101 
 
 should be suppressed. But Milton was not incon- 
 sistent with himseK, however he might be so with 
 the principles advocated in the "Areopagitica," as 
 those who have studied his character know. He 
 is never weary of insisting on the Tacitean distinc- 
 tion between liberty and license, and in his "His- 
 tory of Britain " says admirably well "that liberty 
 hath a sharp and double edge fit only to be handled 
 by just and virtuous men : to bad and dissolute it 
 becomes a mischief unwieldy in their own hands." 
 Anfl. if consistency be a jewel, as the proverb af- 
 firms, yet it can only show its best lustre in a suit- 
 able setting of circumstances. Milton was always 
 a champion of freedom as he understood it, a free- 
 dom "not to be won from without, but from within, 
 in the right conduct and administration of life." 
 Toland speaks of him as favoring "the erection of 
 a perfect Democracy," but in truth no man was 
 ever farther from being a democrat in the modern 
 sense than he. The government that he preferred 
 would have been that of a Council chosen by a 
 strictly limited body of constituents and this indi- 
 rectly, their function being only to choose electors 
 who again should make choice of a smaller body, 
 and so on through "a third or fourth sifting and 
 refining of exactest- choice." His scheme aimed 
 at the establishment of something like a Vene- 
 tian Republic without a Doge, his experience of 
 Cromwell apparently having made any monocratic 
 devices distasteful to him. For the "rude multi- 
 tude," as he calls it, he had an unqualified con- 
 tempt, and had no more belief in the divine right 
 
102 MILTON'S AREOPAGITICA 
 
 of majorities than in that of tyrants. Undoubt- 
 edly when a man of Milton's temperament advo- 
 cated free speech it was with the unconscious men- 
 tal reservation that it should be on the right side, 
 or, at any rate, that it should be speech and not 
 jargon. 
 
 There is no trustworthy evidence that the "Are- 
 opagitica" produced any immediate effect, unless it 
 may have been indirectly by leavening some small 
 fraction of the sluggish lump of what we should 
 now call public opinion. Interests more immediate 
 and pressing must soon have crowded it out of 
 mind, and in a few years the returning flood of 
 royalism covered it, with the other prose works of 
 Milton, in a deepening ooze of oblivion. So 
 utterly must it have been forgotten that in 1693 
 Charles Blount boldly plagiarized it imder the new 
 title of " A Just Vindication of Learning and the 
 Liberty of the Press by Philopatris," in which he 
 had the impudence to quote a passage from the 
 very book he was rifling with the condescending- 
 remark "Herein I agree with Mr. Milton," as if 
 it were an exception to his general way of thinking. 
 Whether the tract in this vulgarized form helped 
 forward the cause in behalf of which it was written 
 is matter of conjecture. None of Blount's pam- 
 phlets could have had any considerable vent, for 
 when Gildon published " The Miscellaneous Works 
 of Charles Blount, Esq.," it is evident that he 
 merely bound together the several pieces which 
 made up the volume, putting new title-pages to all 
 save one of them, but leaving the old pagination of 
 
MILTON'S AREOPAGITICA 103 
 
 each. There must therefore have been enough un- 
 sold copies to serve the needs of this edition. Be 
 this as it may, Blount, by means of a scurvy trick 
 played on the licenser, Bohun, — a trick one is half 
 inclined to forgive because of its genuine humor and 
 its beneficent results, — was the immediate cause 
 of events which led to the final abandonment of the 
 licensing system. A full account of the affair may 
 be found in Macaulay's History, where the facts 
 were for the first time unearthed. Maeaulay, as 
 is his wont in dealing with men whom he dislikes, 
 blackens the character of Blount more than it de- 
 serves, and underrates his ability. He was not an 
 atheist, though, for the point of the historian's an- 
 tithesis, he ought to have been, and he certainly had 
 more than the talents of a third-rate pamphleteer. 
 He did not live to see the triumph of his cause. 
 It would be pleasant to associate Milton even indi- 
 rectly with that triumph, as we might if we could 
 suppose that the " Areopagitica " had first awakened 
 Blount's interest in the freedom of the press. But 
 in point of fact his quarrel with the licensers was 
 an old one, and he merely picked up Milton's tract 
 as he would a handy stone to throw at the dog he 
 was pelting. After an interval of forty years the 
 "Areopagitica" was reprinted with a preface by 
 Themson the poet, when it was proposed once more 
 to put a bridle on the press. 
 
 It cannot be said that the prose works of Milton 
 have ever been in any sense popular, or read by 
 any public much more numerous than the proof- 
 reader. So far as they are concerned, Milton has 
 
104 MILTON'S AREOPAGITICA 
 
 had his wish and his audience has only been too 
 few, whether fit or not. They do not appear to 
 have tempted even the omnivorous Coleridge in his 
 maturer years, though traces of their influence may 
 be surmised in his earlier prose. It is curious that 
 no notes upon them are to be found in his "Liter- 
 ary Remains," and but a single brief remark in 
 his "Table-talk," to the effect that Milton's style 
 was better in Latin than in English. I find no 
 evident signs of contagion from them in any great 
 writers of English except Burke, who has caught 
 both their qualities and their defects, unless, in- 
 deed, the likeness spring from their both having 
 modelled themselves on Cicero. Since 1698, when 
 Toland published the first edition of them in Hol- 
 land, they have been only four times reprinted. 
 Nor is this want of interest to be explained by the 
 fact that their matter is mainly contentious and 
 polemical, for they discuss questions whose roots 
 strike deeply into the bedrock of politics and mor- 
 als, and where they find a crevice widen it into 
 an irreconcilable cleavage of opinion. The reason 
 must be sought, then, not so much in their sub- 
 stance as in their method and manner. They are 
 indeed for the most part the impassioned harangues 
 of a supremely eloquent man, full of matter, but 
 careless of the form in which he utters it; rich in 
 learning, but too intent on the constant display of 
 it with the cumbrous prodigality of one to whom 
 such wealth is new. He had no doubt a manner 
 of his own, and boasts that by means of it the au- 
 thorship of his treatise on Divorce was detected 
 
MILTON'S AREOPAGITICA 105 
 
 when printed anonymously. And in his "Reason 
 of Church -government urged against Prelaty " he 
 says, "Whether aught was imposed me by them 
 that had the overlooking, or betaken to of mine 
 own choice in English or other tongue, prosing or 
 versing, but chiefly by this latter, the style, by 
 certain vital signs it had, was likely to live." 
 Time has proved this to be true of his verse, but 
 not so of his prose. For in truth his prose has 
 no style in the higher sense, as, for instance, the 
 "Religio Medici" has. There are passages, to be 
 sure, which for richness of texture, harmony of 
 tone, and artistic distribution of parts, can hardly 
 be matched in our language, but that equable dis- 
 tinction which is the constant note of his verse is 
 wanting. A sentence builded majestically with 
 every help of art and imagination too often thrusts 
 heavenward from a huddle of vulgar pentices such 
 as used to cluster about mediaeval cathedrals. 
 Never was such inequality. It is as if some tran- 
 scendent voice in mid soar of the Kyrie Eleison 
 should drop into a comic song. His sentences are 
 often loutish and difficult, in controversy he is 
 brutal, and at any the most inopportune moment 
 capable of an incredible coarseness. Let a single 
 instance from his "Reformation in England" suf- 
 fice, where he speaks of "that queasy temper of 
 lidiewarmness that gives a vomit to God himself." 
 'Jeremy Taylor is often coarse, but never to the 
 degree of disgust. Strangely enough, too, Milton 
 is careless of euphony, seeming to prefer words not 
 only low but harsh, and such cacophonous superla- 
 
106 MILTON'S AREOPAGITICA 
 
 tives as "virtuousest," "viciousest," "sheepishest," 
 even making the last two hiss in the same sentence. 
 Perhaps he is at his worst when he fancies that he 
 is being playful and humorous (dangerous tight- 
 ropes for an insupportable foot like his), and, as 
 he says in his "Animadversions upon the Remon- 
 strant's Defence," "mixes here and there a grim 
 laughter such as may appear at the same time in 
 an austere visage." Grim laughter it is indeed. 
 Too often also he blusters, and we are forced to 
 condone in him, as he in Luther, "how far he gave 
 way to his own fervent mind." It does not satisfy 
 us to excuse these faults as common to the time, 
 for Milton himself has taught us to expect of him 
 that choice of language and that faultless marshal- 
 ling of it which is of all time, and sometimes even 
 in his prose there are periods which have all the 
 splendor, all the dignity, and all the grave exhila- 
 ration of his verse. Some virtue of his singing- 
 robes seems left, as if they had not long been 
 doffed. 
 
 As a master of harmony and of easily -maintained 
 elevation in English blank verse Milton has no 
 rival. He was skilled in many tongues and many 
 literatures ; he had weighed the value of words, 
 whether for sound or sense, or where the two may 
 be of mutual help. He surely, if any, was what 
 he calls "a mint-master of language." He must 
 have known, if any ever knew, that even in the 
 "sermo pedestris " there are yet great differences 
 in gait, that prose is governed by laws of modula- 
 tion as exact if not so exacting as those of verse. 
 
MILTON'S AREOPAGITICA 107 
 
 and that it may conjure with words as prevailingly. 
 The music is secreted in it, yet often more potent 
 in suggestion than that of any verse which is not 
 of utmost mastery. We hearken after it as to a 
 choir in the side chapel of some cathedral heard 
 faintly and fitfully across the long desert of the 
 nave, now pursuing and overtaking the cadences, 
 only to have them grow doubtful again and elude 
 the ear before it has ceased to throb with them. 
 A prose sentence, then, only fulfils its entire func- 
 tion when, as in some passages of the English ver- 
 sion of the Old Testament, its rhythm so keeps 
 time and tune with the thought or feeling that the 
 reader is guided to the accentuation of the writer 
 as securely as if in listening to his very voice. 
 The fifth chapter of the Book of Judges is crowded 
 with these triumphs of well-measured words. Are 
 we not made to see as with our eyes the slow col- 
 lapse of Sisera's body, as life and will forsake it, 
 and then to hear his sudden fall at last in the dull 
 thud of "he fell down dead," where every word 
 sinks lower and lower, to stop short with the last? 
 There are many noble periods in Milton's prose, 
 and they are noble in a way where he is without 
 competitors, for surely he is the most eloquent of 
 Englishmen. But there are a half-dozen men 
 either his contemporaries, or nearly so, whose prose 
 is far more evenly good than his and above all 
 moves with a practised ease in which his is wholly 
 wanting. He prevails even with the ear less often 
 than Browne, and almost never stirs the imagina- 
 tion through the ear as Browne has the art to do. 
 
108 MILTON'S AREOPAGITICA 
 
 He is too eagerly intent on his argument to lin- 
 ger over the artifices by which it might be more 
 winningly set forth. He has been taxed with Lat- 
 inism, and oddly enough by Doctor Johnson, who 
 I feel sure could not have read any one of his 
 tracts, unless it were the "Areopagitica," for very 
 wrath. He has, it is true, some Latin construc- 
 tions and uses a few words (like "assert," "pre- 
 varicator," "disoblige") in their radical rather 
 than in their derivative meaning, but on the whole 
 his language is less vitiated with verbs taken di- 
 rectly from the Latin than that of most of the 
 writers coeval with him. The much overrated 
 Feltham, for instance, "formicates" with them, as 
 he would have called it, and one might almost learn 
 Latin by reading the "Vulgar Errors." It is 
 Milton's English words rather that seem foreign 
 to us, such as "disgospel," "disworship," "disal- 
 leige," "lossless," "natureless," or "underfoot " 
 and "lifeblood" used as adjectives. Sometimes 
 he ventures on what would now be called an Ameri- 
 canism, as where he tells us of a "loud stench." 
 But the most obvious defect of his prose is, as I 
 have hinted, its want of equanimity. 
 
 He is not so truly a writer of great prose as a 
 great man writing in prose, and it is really Milton 
 that we seek there more than anything else. He 
 is great enough when we find him to repay a thou- 
 sand-fold what the search may have cost us. And 
 when we meet him at his best, there is something 
 in his commerce that fortifies the mind as only 
 contact with a great character can. He is then a 
 
MILTON'S AREOPAGITICA 109 
 
 perpetual fountain of highmindedness. In contest 
 witli an adversary lie is brutally willing to strike 
 below the belt, and shows as little magnanimity or 
 fairness as the average editor of an American news- 
 paper in dealing with a political opponent. Even 
 Voltaire, hardened as were his own controversial 
 nerves, was shocked by the nature of the weapons 
 which Milton v/as eager to employ against Morns. 
 But when he recovers possession of his true self, he 
 is so at home among those things that endure, so 
 amply conversant with whatever is of good report, 
 so intimately conscious of a divine presence in a 
 world of doubt and failure and disillusion, and of 
 those spiritual ministrations symbolized by the 
 prophet in the wilderness, that we listen to him as 
 Adam to the angel, and the voice lingers not only 
 in the ear but in the life. Mr. James Grant in 
 his "Newspaper Press" says, drolly enough, of 
 Coleridge, that "there was to the latest hour of his 
 life a tendency, which could not be sufficiently de- 
 plored, to soar into regions of unrevealed truth." 
 It is this lift in Milton, rare enough among men, 
 this undying instinct to soar and tempt us to venture 
 our weaker wing, that gives an incomparable effi- 
 cacy to those parts of his writing in prose that are 
 best inspired. Here we breathe a mountain air 
 in which, as Rousseau says, " a mesure qu'on ap- 
 proche des regions etherees I'ame contracte quelque 
 chose de leur inalterable purete." Nay, even while 
 we are trudging wearily over the low and marish 
 stretches of his discourse, there rises suddenly from 
 before our feet a winged phrase that mounts and 
 
110 MILTON'S AREOPAGITICA 
 
 carols like a lark, luring tlie mind with it to ampler 
 spaces and a serener atmosphere. It is no small 
 education for the nobler part of us to consort with 
 one of such temper that he could say of himself 
 with truth, "God intended to prove me, whether 
 I durst take up alone a rightful cause against a 
 world of disesteem, and found I durst." And it 
 is the breath of this spirit that pours through the 
 " Areopagitica " as through a trumpet, sounding 
 the charge against whatever is base and recreant, 
 whether in the world about us or in the ambush of 
 our own natures. 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S "EICHARD III." 
 
 AN ADDRESS READ BEFORE THE EDINBURGH PHILOSOPHI- 
 CAL INSTITUTION. 
 
 1883. 
 
 After a general introduction, Mr. Lowell 
 said : — 
 
 I propose to say a few words on one of the plays 
 usually attributed to Shakespeare, — a play in re- 
 spect of which I .find myself in the position of Peter 
 Bell, seeing little more than an ordinary primrose 
 where I ought, perhaps, to see the plant and flower 
 of light; I mean the play of "Richard III." Hor- 
 ace Walpole wrote "Historic Doubts" concerning 
 the monarch himself, and I shall take leave to 
 express some about the authorship of the drama 
 that bears his name. I have no intention of apply- 
 ing to it a system of subjective criticism which I 
 consider as untrustworthy as it is fascinating, and 
 which I think has often been carried beyond its le- 
 gitimate limits. But I believe it absolutely safe to 
 say of Shakespeare that he never wrote deliberate 
 nonsense, nor was knowingly guilty of defective me- 
 tre ; yet even tests like these I would apply with 
 commendable modesty and hesitating reserve, con- 
 scious that the meaning of words, and still more 
 
112 SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD III. 
 
 the associations they call up, have changed since 
 Shakespeare's day; that the accentuation of some 
 was variable, and that Shakespeare's ear may very 
 likely have been as delicate as his other senses. On 
 the latter point, however, I may say in passing, of 
 his versification, which is often used as a test for 
 the period of his plays, that Coleridge, whose sense 
 of harmony and melody was perhaps finer than that 
 of any other modern poet, did not allow his own 
 dramatic verse the same licenses, and I might al- 
 most say the same mystifications, which he esteems 
 applicable in regulating or interpreting that of 
 Shakespeare, ^his is certainly remarkable. For 
 my own part, I am convinced that if we had Shake- 
 speare's plays as he wrote them, — and not as they 
 have come down to us, deformed by the careless 
 hurry of the copiers-out of parts, by the emenda- 
 tions of incompetent actors, and the mishearings of 
 shorthand writers, — I am convinced that we should 
 not find from one end of them to the other a dem- 
 onstrably faulty verse or a passage obscure for any 
 other reason than depth of thought or supersubtlety 
 of phrase. 
 
 I know that in saying this I am laying myself 
 open to the reproach of applying common sense to 
 a subject which of all others demands uncommon 
 sense for its adequate treatment, — demands per- 
 ception as sensitive and divination as infallible as 
 the operations of that creative force they attempt 
 to measure are illusive and seemingly abnormal. 
 But in attempting to answer a question like that I 
 have suggested, I should be guided by considera- 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD III. 113 
 
 tions far less narrow. We cannot identify printed 
 thoughts by the same minute comparisons that 
 would serve to convict the handwriting of them. 
 To smell the rose is surely quite otherwise convin- 
 cing than to number its petals ; and in estimating 
 that sum of qualities which we call character, we 
 trust far more to general than to particular impres- 
 sions. In guessing at the authorship of an anony- 
 mous book, like Southey's "Doctor" or Bulwer's 
 "Timon," while I might lay some stress on tricks 
 of manner, I should be much less influenced by the 
 fact that many passages were above or below the 
 ordinary level of any author whom I suspected of 
 writing it than by the fact that there was a single 
 passage different in kind from his habitual tone. 
 A man may surpass himself or fall short of him- 
 self, but he cannot change his nature. I woiild not 
 be understood to mean that common sense is always 
 or universally applicable in criticism, — Dr. John- 
 son's treatment of "Lycidas" were a convincing- 
 instance to the contrary; but I confess I find often 
 more satisfactory guidance in the illuniinated and 
 illuminating common sense of a critic like Lessing, 
 making sure of one landmark before he moved for- 
 ward to the next, than in the metaphysical dark 
 lanterns which some of his successors are in the 
 habit of letting down into their own consciousness 
 by way of enlightening ours. Certainly common 
 sense will never suffice for the understanding or 
 enjoyment of "those brave translimary things that 
 the first poets had; " but it is at least a remarkably 
 good prophylactic against mistaking a handsaw for 
 a hawk. 
 
114 SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD III. 
 
 What, then, is the nature of the general consid- 
 erations which I think we ought to bear in mind 
 in debating a question like this, — the authenticity 
 of one of Shakespeare's plays? First of all, and 
 last of all, I should put style ; not style in its nar- 
 row sense of mere verbal expression, for that may 
 change and does change with the growth and train- 
 ing of the man, but in the sense of that something, 
 more or less clearly definable, which is always and 
 everywhere peculiar to the man, and either in kind 
 or degree distinguishes him from all other men, — 
 the kind of evidence which, for example, makes us 
 sure that Swift wrote "The Tale of a Tub" and 
 Scott the "Antiquary," because nobody else coidd 
 have done it. Incessu 'patuit dea, and there is a 
 kind of gait which marks the mind as well as the 
 body. But even if we took the word "style " in that 
 narrower sense which would confine it to diction and 
 turn of phrase, Shakespeare is equally incompar- 
 able. Coleridge, evidently using the word in this 
 sense, tells us: "There 's such divinity doth hedge 
 our Shakespeare round that we cannot even imitate 
 his style. I tried to imitate his manner in the 
 ' Remorse, ' and when I had done, I found I had 
 been tracking Beaumont and Fletcher, and Massin- 
 ger instead. It is really very curious." Greene, 
 in a well-known passage, seems to have accused 
 Shakespeare of plagiarism, and there are verses, 
 sometimes even a succession of verses of Greene 
 himself, of Peele, and especially of Marlowe, 
 which are comparable, so far as externals go, with 
 Shakespeare's own. Nor is this to be wondered at 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD III. 115 
 
 in men so nearly contemporary. In fact, I think 
 it is evident that to a certain extent the two mas- 
 ters of versification who trained Shakespeare were 
 Spenser and Marlowe. Some of Marlowe's verses 
 have the same trick of clinging in the ear as 
 Shakespeare's. There is, for instance, that fa- 
 mous description of Helen, or rather the exclama- 
 tion of Faust when he first sees Helen : — 
 
 '' Was this the face that launched a thousand ships 
 And burned the topless towers of Dium ? " 
 
 one verse of which, if I am not mistaken, lingered 
 in Shakespeare's ear. But the most characteristic 
 phrases of Shakespeare imbed themselves in the 
 very substance of the mind, and quiver, years after, 
 in the memory like arrows that have just struck and 
 still feel the impulse of the bow. And no whole 
 scene of Shakespeare, even in his 'prentice days, 
 could be mistaken for the work of any other man; 
 for give him room enough, and he is sure to betray 
 himself by some quality which either is his alone, 
 or his in such measure as none shared but, he. 
 
 I am reminded of a remark of Professor Masson's 
 which struck me a good deal, — that one day, when 
 tired with overwork, he took up Dante, and after 
 reading in it for half an hour or so, he shut the 
 book and found himself saying to himself, " Well, 
 this is literature ! " And I think that this may 
 be applied constantly to the mature Shakespeare, 
 and, in a great measure, to the young Shakespeare. 
 Take a whole scene together, and there are sure to 
 be passages in it of which we can say that they are 
 really literature in that higher meaning of the word. 
 
116 SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD III. 
 
 It is usual to divide the works of Shakespeare by 
 periods, but it is not easy to do this with even an 
 approach to precision unless we take the higher 
 qualities of structure as a guide. As he matured, 
 his plays became more and more organisms, and 
 less and less mere successions of juxtaposed scenes, 
 strung together on the thread of the plot. In as- 
 signing periods too positively, I fancy we are apt to 
 be misled a little by the imperfect analogy of the 
 sister art of painting, and by the first and second 
 manners, as they are called, of its great masters. 
 But manual dexterity is a thing of far slower ac- 
 quisition than mastery of language or the knack of 
 melodious versification. The fancy of young poets 
 is apt to be superabundant. It is the imagination 
 that ripens with the judgment, and asserts itself as 
 the shaping power in a deeper sense than belongs 
 to it as a mere maker of pictures when the eyes are 
 shut. Young poets, especially if they are great 
 poets, learn the art of verse early, and their poeti- 
 cal vocabulary sins rather by excess than defect. 
 They can pick up and assimilate what is to their 
 purpose with astonishing rapidity. The "Canzo- 
 niere " of Dante was, at least in part, written before 
 he was twenty -five; and Keats, dying not older 
 than that, left behind him poems that astonish us 
 as much by their maturity of style and their Attic 
 grace of form as they take the ear captive by their 
 music and the fancy by their opaline beauty of 
 phrase. Shakespeare, surely, was as apt a scholar 
 as Keats. Already in the "Venus and Adonis" 
 we find verses quite as gracious in their interlacing 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD III. 117 
 
 movement, and as full, almost, of picturesque sug- 
 gestion, as those of his maturer hand. For exam- 
 ple : — 
 
 " Bid me discourse, I will enchant thine ear, 
 Or lil^e a fairy trip upon the green, 
 Or like a nymph, with long dishevelled hair, 
 Dance on the sands and yet no footing seen." 
 
 Shakespeare himself was pleased with these verses, 
 for a famous speech of ^rospero in "The Tempest " 
 has these lines : — 
 
 " And ye that on the sands with printless feet 
 Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him 
 When he comes back." 
 
 I think it is interesting to find Shakespeare improv- 
 ing on a phrase of his own : it is something that 
 nobody else could do. There is even greater excel- 
 lence in the Sonnets — "Let me not to the mar- 
 riage of true minds," and many others. The thing 
 in which we should naturally expect Shakespeare 
 to grow more perfect by practice and observation 
 would be knowledge of stage effect, and skill in 
 presenting his subject in the most telling way. 
 
 It would be on the side of the dramatist, or of 
 the playwright, perhaps I had better say, rather 
 than on the side of the poet, that we should look 
 for development. To him, as to Moliere, his per- 
 fect knowledge of stage-business gave an enormous 
 advantage. If he took a play in hand to remodel 
 it for his company, it would be the experience of 
 the actor much more than the genius of the poet 
 that would be called into play. His work would 
 lie in the direction probably of curtailment oftener 
 
118 SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD TIL 
 
 tlian of enlargement; and though it is probable 
 that in the immaturer plays attributed to him by 
 Heming and Condell in their edition of 1623 a 
 portion, greater or less, may be his, yet it is hard 
 to believe that he can be called their author in any- 
 thing like the same sense as we are sure he is the 
 author of those works in which no other hand can 
 be suspected, because no other hand has ever been 
 capable of such mastery. ^ 
 
 It must be remembered that we come to the 
 reading of all the plays attributed to Shakespeare 
 with the preconception that they are his. The jug- 
 gler, if he wishes to give us the impression that a 
 sound comes from a certain direction, long before- 
 hand turns our attention that way, makes us expect 
 it thence, and at last we hear it so. This shows 
 the immense power that a persuasion of this kind 
 has over the imagination even in regard to a thing 
 so physical as sound, and in things so metaphysical 
 as the plays of Shakespeare it applies with even 
 more force. If we take up a play thinking it is 
 his, it is astonishing how many things we excuse, 
 and how many things we slur over, and so on, for 
 various reasons not very satisfactory, I think, if 
 strictly cross-examined. How easily a preconceived 
 idea that a play is Shakespeare's may mislead even 
 clever and accomplished men into seeing what they 
 expect to see is proved by the number of believers 
 in Ireland's clumsy forgery of Vortigern. It was 
 precisely on the style, in its narrow sense of lan- 
 guage and versification, that those too credulous 
 persons based their judgment. The German poet 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD III. 119 
 
 and critic, Tieek, believed in the Shakespearean 
 authorship of all the supposititious plays, and in 
 regard to one of them, at least, "The Yorkshire 
 Tragedy," drew his arguments from the diction. 
 Now, so far. as mere words go, the dramatists of 
 Shakespeare's time all drew from the same com- 
 mon fund of vocables. The movement of their 
 verse, so far as it was mechanical, would naturally 
 have many points of resemblance. 
 
 As an example of the tests sometimes employed 
 and successfully, but which should not be too im- 
 plicitly relied upon, I will mention that which is 
 called the double-ending, where there is a superflu- 
 ous syllable at the end of a line. This is a favor- 
 ite and often tiresome trick of Fletcher's. But 
 Shakespeare also tried it now and then, as in the 
 choruses of "Henry V.," which are among the fin- 
 est examples of his merely picturesque writing. 
 
 It is possible that the external manner of 
 Shakespeare might have been caught and imitated 
 more or less unconsciously by some of his contem- 
 poraries, as it most certainly was in the next gen- 
 eration, notably by Webster and Shirley. Fletcher 
 was almost Shakespeare's equal in poetic senti- 
 ment; and Chapman rises sometimes nearly to his 
 level in those exultations of passionate seK-con- 
 sciousness to which the protagonists of his tragedies 
 are lifted in the supreme crisis of their fate. But 
 Fletcher's sentiment seems artificial in compari- 
 son, and his fancy never sings at heaven's gate 
 as Shakespeare's so often does, and Chapman's 
 grandeur comes dangerously near to what a friend 
 
120 SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD III. 
 
 would call extravagance and an enemy bombast.^ 
 There is a certain dramatic passion in Shakespeare's 
 versification, too, which we find in no other of his 
 coevals except Marlowe, and in him far less con- 
 stantly. Detached verses, I believe, could be cited 
 from far inferior men that might well pass as the 
 handiwork of the great master so far as their merely 
 poetical quality is concerned ; but what I mean by 
 dramatic passion is that in Shakespeare's best and 
 most characteristic work the very verse is inter- 
 penetrated by what is going on in the mind of the 
 speaker, and its movement hastened or retarded by 
 his emotion rather than by the ear and choice of the 
 poet. Yes, single verses, but of other men, might 
 be taken for his, but no considerable sequence of 
 them, and no one of his undoubted plays, taken as 
 a whole, could ever hj any possibility be supposed 
 to be the creation of any other poet. 
 
 It is something very difficult to define, this im- 
 pression which convinces us without argument and 
 better than all argument, but it would win the ver- 
 dict of whatever jury. If the play of "Cymbeline " 
 had been lost, for example, and the manuscript 
 were to be discovered to-morrow, who would doubt 
 its authorship? Nay, in this case there are short 
 passages, single verses and phrases even, that bear 
 the unmistakable mint-mark of him who alone 
 could ascend the highest heaven of invention; of 
 
 ^ In Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess, Amoret tells Perigot that 
 she loves him 
 
 " Dearly as swallows love the early dawn," 
 which is certainly charming, hut seems much more a felicity of 
 fancy than to touch the more piercing note of passion. 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD III. 121 
 
 that magician of whom Dryden said so truly, 
 "Within that circle none dare tread but he." And 
 it is really curious, I may say in passing, — that 
 verse of Dryden reminds me of it, — that almost all 
 the poets who have touched Shakespeare seem to 
 become inspired above themselves. The poem that 
 Ben Jonson wrote in his memory has a splendor of 
 movement about it that is uncommon with him, — 
 a sort of rapture ; and Dryden wrote nothing finer 
 than what he wrote about the greatest of poets, nor 
 is any other play of his comparable in quality with 
 "All for Love," composed under Shakespeare's 
 immediate and obvious influence. 
 
 There are three special considerations, three em- 
 inent and singular qualities of Shakespeare, which 
 more than all, or anything else, I think, set him in 
 a different category from his contemporaries ; and 
 it is these that I would apply as tests, not always 
 or commonly, indeed, to single verses or scenes, 
 but to the entire play. It has been said, with truth, 
 of Byron, that there is no great poet who so often 
 falls below himseK, and this is no doubt true, 
 within narrower limits, of Shakespeare; but I do 
 not think it would be easy to find a whole scene in 
 any of his acknowledged plays where his mind 
 seems at dead low tide throughout, and lays bare 
 its shallows and its ooze. The first of the three 
 characteristics of which I speak is his incompara- 
 ble force and delicacy of poetic expression, which 
 can never keep themselves hidden for long, but 
 flash out from time to time like those pulses of 
 pale flame with which the sky throbs at unprophe- 
 
122 SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD III. 
 
 siable intervals, as if in involuntary betrayal of the 
 coming Northern Lights. Such gleams occur in 
 "Love's Labour's Lost," and still more frequently 
 in "A Midsummer -Night's Dream;" and here I 
 choose my examples designedly from plays which 
 are known to be early, and provably early, though 
 it would be perfectly fair, since it is with natural 
 and not acquired qualities that we are concerned, 
 to pick them from any of his plays. Especially 
 noteworthy, also, I think, are those passages in 
 which a picturesque phrase is made the vehicle, as 
 it were by accident, of some pregnant reflection or 
 profound thought, as, for instance, in " A Midsum- 
 mer-Night's Dream," where Theseus says: — 
 
 " The lunatic, the lover, and the poet 
 Are of imagination all compact." 
 
 In all his plays we have evidence that he could not 
 long keep his mind from that kind of overflow. I 
 think it is sometimes even a defect that he is apt 
 to be turned out of his direct course by the first 
 metaphysical quibble, if I may so call it, that 
 pops up in his path; but these, of course, are not 
 the things by which we can judge him. 
 
 One of the surest of these detective clews is this 
 continual cropping-up (Goethe would have called 
 it intrusion) of philosophical or metaphysical 
 thought in the midst of picturesque imagery or 
 passionate emotion, as if born of the very ecstasy 
 of the language in which it is uttered. Take, for 
 example, a passage from "The Two Noble Kins- 
 men " which has persuaded nearly all critics that 
 Shakespeare had a hand in writing that play. It 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD III. 123 
 
 is Arcite's invocation of Mars. Observe how it 
 begins with picture, and then deepens down into a 
 condensed statement of all the main arguments that 
 can be urged in favor of war : — 
 
 " Thou mighty one that with thy power hast turned 
 Green Neptune into purple ; whose approach 
 Comets forewarn ; whose havoc in vast field 
 Unearthed skulls proclaim ; whose breath blows down 
 The teeming Ceres' f oison ; who dost pluck 
 With hand armipotent from forth blue clouds 
 The masoned turrets . . . 
 O great corrector of enormous times, 
 Shaker of o'er-rank States, thou grand decider 
 Of dusty and old titles, that heal'st with blood 
 The earth when it is sick, and cur'st the world 
 O' th' plurisy of people ! " 
 
 The second characteristic, of which I should ex- 
 pect to see some adumbration, at least, in any un- 
 mistakable work of Shakespeare would be humor, in 
 which itself, and in the quality of it, he is perhaps 
 more unspeakably superior to his contemporaries 
 than in some other directions, — I mean in the power 
 of pervading a character with humor, creating it 
 out of humor, so to speak, and yet never overstep- 
 ping the limits of nature or coarsening into carica- 
 ture. In this no man is or ever was comparable 
 with him but Cervantes. Of this humor we have 
 something more than the premonition in some of 
 his earliest plays. 
 
 A third characteristic of Shakespeare is elo- 
 quence; and this, of course, we expect to meet 
 with, and do meet with, more abundantly in the 
 historical and semi-historical plays than in those 
 where the intrigue is more private and domestic. 
 
124 SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD III. 
 
 If I were called upon to name any one mark more 
 distinctive than another of Shakespeare's work, it 
 would be this. I do not mean mere oratory, as in 
 Antony's speech over the body of Caesar, but an 
 eloquence of impassioned thought finding vent in 
 vivid imagery. The speeches seem not to be 
 composed, — they grow ; thought budding out of 
 thought, and image out of image, by what seems 
 a natural law of development, but by what is no 
 doubt some subtler process of association in the 
 speaker's mind, always gathering force and impet- 
 uosity as it goes, from its own very motion. Take 
 as examples the speeches of Ulysses in "Troilus 
 and Cressida." 
 
 I think these are the three qualities — sub- 
 tlety of poetic expression, humor, and eloquence 
 — which we should expect to find in a play of 
 Shakespeare's, and especially in an historical play. 
 Of each and all of these we find less in "Eichard 
 III.," as it appears to me, than in any other of his 
 plays of equal pretensions ; for although it is true 
 that in "Richard II." there is no humorous char- 
 acter, the humor of irony is many times present 
 in the speeches of the king after his dethrone- 
 ment. There is a gleam of humor here and there 
 in "Richard III.," as where Richard rebukes 
 Buckingham for saying "'zounds," — 
 
 " do not swear, my Lord of Buckingham. ; " 
 
 and there are many other Shakespearean touches; 
 but the play as a whole appears to me always less 
 than it should be, except in scenic effectiveness, to 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD III. 125 
 
 be reckoned a work from Shakespeare's brain and 
 hand alone, or even mainly, — less in all the qual- 
 ities and dimensions that are most exclusively and 
 characteristically his. This I think to be conclu- 
 sive, for, as 'Goethe says very truly, if there be any 
 defect in the most admirable of Shakespeare's 
 plays, it is that they are more than they should be. 
 The same great critic, speaking of his "Henry 
 IV.," says with equal truth "that, were everything 
 else that has come down to us of the same kind 
 lost, [the arts of] poesy and rhetoric could be re- 
 created out of it." 
 
 The first impression made upon us by "Richard 
 III." is that it is thoroughly melodramatic in con- 
 ception and execution. Whoever has seen it upon 
 the stage knows that the actor of Richard is sure 
 to offend against every canon of taste laid down by 
 Hamlet in his advice to the players. He is sure to 
 tear his passion to rags and tatters ; he is sure to 
 split the ears of the groundlings ; and he is sure to 
 overstep the modesty of nature with every one of 
 his stage strides. Now, it is not impossible that 
 Shakespeare, as a caterer for the public taste, may 
 have been willing that the groundlings as well as 
 other people should help to fill the coffers of his 
 company, and that the right kind of attraction 
 should accordingly be offered them. It is therefore 
 conceivable that he may have retouched or even 
 added to a poor play which had already proved 
 popular; but it is not conceivable that he should 
 have written an entire play in violation of those 
 principles of taste which we may deduce more or 
 less clearly from everything he wrote. 
 
126 SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD TIL 
 
 Then, again, Shakespeare's patriotism is charac- 
 teristic of his plays. It is quite as intense as that 
 of Burns ; and in a play dealing with a subject like 
 that of "Richard III." one would expect to see 
 this patriotism show itself in a rather more pro- 
 nounced manner than usual, because the battle of 
 Bos worth Field, with which the play ends, ended 
 also a long and tragic series of wars, and estab- 
 lished on the throne the grandfather of the sov- 
 ereign who was reigning when the play was put 
 upon the stage. Now there is one allusion, a sort 
 of prophetic allusion, in this play to the succession 
 of Henry VII. 's descendants to the throne; but 
 if you compare it with the admirable way in which 
 Shakespeare — I grant he was then older and his 
 faculties more mature — has dealt with a similar 
 matter in "Macbeth," in the second scene with 
 the witches, which impresses our imagination al- 
 most as much as it does that of the usurper him- 
 self ; if we consider, moreover, that in the play of 
 "Richard III." there is an almost ludicrous proces- 
 sion of ghosts, — for there are eleven of them who 
 pass through, speaking to Richard on the right and 
 to Richmond on the left, — and . if we compare 
 this with Shakespeare's treatment of the supernat- 
 ural in any of his undoubted plays, I think we 
 shall feel that the inferiority is not one of degree, 
 but one of kind. 
 
 I cannot conceive how anybody should believe 
 that Shakespeare wrote the two speeches which 
 are made to their armies by Richard and Richmond 
 respectively. That of Richard is by far the better. 
 
 1 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD III. 127 
 
 and has something of the true Shakespearean ring 
 in it, something of his English scorn for the up- 
 start and the foreigner, notably where he calls 
 Richmond 
 
 " A' milksop, one that never in his life 
 Felt so much cold as over shoes in snow," 
 
 but that of his antagonist falls ludicrously flat 
 to shame his worshippers. Compare it with the 
 speech of Henry V. under the walls of Harfleur, or 
 his reply to Westmoreland. I can conceive almost 
 anything of Shakespeare except his being dull 
 through a speech of twenty lines. I do not think he 
 is ever that. He may be hyperbolical; he may be 
 this, that, or the other; but whatever it is, his fault 
 is not that he is didl. If it were not so late, I 
 would read to you a passage from an earlier play, 
 — the speech of Gaunt in "Richard II.;" and I 
 am glad to refer to this, because it shows in part 
 that eloquence and that intensity of patriotism 
 which display themselves whenever they can find or 
 make an opportunity. 
 
 If Shakespeare undertook to remodel an already 
 existing piece, we should expect to find his hand 
 in the opening scene — for in these his skill is al- 
 ways noticeable in arresting attention and exciting 
 interest. Richard's soliloquy at the beginning of 
 the play may be his in part, though there is a 
 clumsiness in Richard's way of declaring himself 
 a scoundrel, and in the reasons he gives for being 
 one, which is helplessly ridiculous. He says : — 
 
 " And therefore — since I cannot prove a lover, 
 To entertain these fair, well-spoken days — 
 
128 SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD III. 
 
 I am determined to prove a villain, 
 
 And hate the idle pleasures of these days." 
 
 And yet in the very next scene he wooes and wins 
 Anne, though both she and Elizabeth had told him 
 very frankly that they knew he was a devil. It 
 would be a mistake to compare this betraying of 
 himself by Richard with the cynical and almost in- 
 decent frankness of lago. lago was an Italian of 
 the Renaissance as Shakespeare might have divined 
 him through that penetrating psychology of his; 
 and I have been told that even now Italians who 
 see Salvini's version of Othello sympathize rather 
 with lago than with the Moor, whom they consider 
 to be a dull-witted fellow, deserving the dupery of 
 which he was the victim. 
 
 Nevertheless "Richard III." is a most effective 
 acting play. There are, certainly, what seem to 
 be unmistakable traces of Shakespeare in some of 
 the worst scenes, though I am not sure that if the 
 play had been lost, and should be discovered in our 
 day, this would pass without question. The solil- 
 oquy of Clarence can hardly be attributed to any 
 other hand, and there are gleams from time to time 
 that look like manifest records of his kindling 
 touch. But the scolding mob of widow queens, 
 who make their billingsgate more intolerable by 
 putting it into bad blank verse, and the childish 
 procession of eleven ghosts seem to me very little 
 in Shakespeare's style. For in nothing, as I have 
 said, is he more singular and preeminent than in 
 his management of the supernatural. 
 
 I find that my time has got the better of me. 
 
SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD III. 129 
 
 I shall merely ask you to read "Richard III." 
 with attention, and with a comparison such as I 
 have hinted at between this and other plays which 
 are most nearly contemporary with it, and I there- 
 fore shall not trouble you with further passages. 
 
 It seems to me that an examination of "Rich- 
 ard III." plainly indicates that it is a play which 
 Shakespeare adapted to the stage, making addi- 
 tions, sometimes longer and sometimes shorter ; and 
 that, towards the end, either growing weary of his 
 work or pressed for time, he left the older author, 
 whoever he was, pretty much to himself. It would 
 be interesting to follow out minutely a question 
 of this kind, but that would not be possible within 
 the limits of an occasion like this. It will be 
 enough if I have succeeded in interesting you to a 
 certain extent in a kind of discussion that has at 
 least the merit of withdrawing us for a brief hour 
 from the more clamorous interests and questions of 
 the day to topics which, if not so important, have 
 also a perennial value of their own. 
 
 While I believe in the maintenance of classical 
 learning in our universities, I never open my Shake- 
 speare but I find myseK wishing that there might 
 be professorships established for the expounding of 
 his works as there used to be for those of Dante in 
 Italy. There is nothing in all literature so stimu- 
 lating and suggestive as the thought he seems to 
 drop by chance, as if his hands were too full; no- 
 thing so cheery as his humor ; nothing that laps us 
 in Elysium so quickly as the lovely images which 
 he marries to the music of his verse. He is also a 
 
130 SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD III. 
 
 great master of rhetoric in teaching ns what to fol- 
 low, and sometimes quite as usefully what to avoid. 
 I value him above all for this : that for those who 
 know no language but their own there is as much 
 intellectual training to be got from the study of his 
 works as from that of the works of any, I had al- 
 most said all, of the great writers of antiquity. 
 
THE STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES.i 
 
 1889. 
 
 Three years ago I was one of those who gath- 
 ered in the Sanders Theatre to conunemorate the 
 two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of a college 
 founded to perpetuate living learning chiefly by 
 the help of three dead languages, the Hebrew, the 
 Greek, and the Latin. I have given them that 
 order of precedence which they had in the minds 
 of those our pious founders. The Hebrew came 
 first because they believed that it had been spoken 
 by God himseK, and that it would have been the 
 common speech of mankind but for the judicial in- 
 vention of the modern languages at Shinar. Greek 
 came next because the New Testament was written 
 in that tongue, and Latin last as the interpreter 
 between scholars. Of the men who stood about 
 that fateful cradle swung from bough of the prime- 
 val forest, there were probably few who believed 
 that a book written in any living language could 
 itself live. 
 
 For nearly tv/o himdred years no modern Ian- 
 guage was continuously and systematically taught 
 here. In the latter half of the last century a stray 
 
 1 An address before the Modem Language Association of 
 America. 
 
132 STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 
 
 Frenchman was caught now and then, and kept as 
 long as he could endure the baiting of his pupils. 
 After failing as a teacher of his mother-tongue, he 
 commonly turned dancing-master, a calling which 
 public opinion seems to have put on the same in- 
 tellectual level with the other. Whatever haphaz- 
 ard teaching of French there may have been was, 
 no doubt, for the benefit of those youth of the 
 better classes who might go abroad after taking 
 their degrees. By hook or by crook some enthusi- 
 asts managed to learn German,^ but there was no 
 official teacher before Dr. Follen about sixty years 
 ago. When at last a chair of French and Spanish 
 was established, it was rather with an eye to com- 
 merce than to culture. 
 
 It indicates a very remarkable, and, I think, 
 wholesome change in our way of looking at things 
 that I should now be addressing a numerous So- 
 ciety composed wholly of men engaged in teaching 
 thoroughly and scientifically the very languages 
 once deemed unworthy to be taught at all except 
 as a social accomplishment or as a commercial 
 subsidiary. There are now, I believe, as many 
 teachers in that single department of Harvard 
 College as sufficed for the entire undergraduate 
 course when I took my first degree. And this 
 change has taken place within two generations. 
 
 ^ Mr. George Bancroft told me that he learned German of 
 Professor Sydney Willard, who, himself self-taught, had no notion 
 of its pronunciation. One instructor in French we had, a little 
 more than a century ago, in Albert Gallatin, a Swiss, afterwards 
 eminent as a teacher in statesmanship and diplomacy. There was 
 no regularly appointed tutor in French before 1806. 
 
STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 133 
 
 Tc5 5' f?5r/ ^\)o /tey yiveaL fji.ep6ira)v avdpciiruu 
 
 E<pdtae'. 
 
 I make this familiar quotation for two reasons: 
 because Chapman translates ixep6iT(x)v " divers-lan- 
 guaged," which is apt for our occasion, and be- 
 cause it enables me to make an easier transition 
 to what I am about to say ; namely, that I rise to 
 address you not without a certain feeling of em- 
 barrassment. For every man is, more or less con- 
 sciously, the prisoner of his date, and I must 
 confess that I was a great while in emancipating 
 myself from the formula which prescribed the 
 Greek and Latin Classics as the canonical books 
 of that infallible Church of Culture outside of 
 which there could be no salvation, — none, at least, 
 that was orthodox. Indeed, I am not sure that I 
 have wholly emancipated myself even yet. The 
 old phrases (for mere phrases they had mostly 
 come to be) still sing in my ears with a pleasing if 
 not a prevailing enchantment. 
 
 The traditions which had dictated this formula 
 were of long standing and of eminent respecta- 
 bility. They dated back to the exemplaria Grceca 
 of Horace. For centuries the languages which 
 served men for all the occasions of private life 
 were put under a ban, and the revival of learning- 
 extended this outlawry to the literature, such as it 
 was, that had found vent through them. Even 
 the authors of that literature tacitly admitted the 
 justice of such condemnation when they used the 
 word Latin as meaning language par excellence, 
 just as the Newfoundlanders say fish when they 
 
134 STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 
 
 mean cod. They could be witty, eloquent, pathetic, 
 poetical, competent, in a word, to every demand of 
 their daily lives, in their mother-tongue, as the 
 Greeks and Romans had been in theirs, but all 
 this would not do ; what was so embalmed would 
 not keep. All the prudent and forethoughtful 
 among them accordingly were careful to put their 
 thoughts and fancies, or what with them supplied 
 the place of these commodities, into Latin as the 
 one infallible pickle. They forgot the salt, to be 
 sure, an ingredient which the author alone can 
 furnish. For it is not the language in which a 
 man writes, but what he has been able to make 
 that language say or sing, that resists decay. Yet 
 men were naturally a great while in reaching this 
 conviction. They thought it was not good form, 
 as the phrase is, to be pleased with what, and what 
 alone, really touched them home. The reproach — 
 at vestri proavi — rang deterrent in their ears. 
 The author of " Partonopeus de Blois," it is true, 
 plucks up a proper spirit : — 
 
 " Cil clerc dient que n'est pas sens 
 Qu'eserive estoire d'antif tens, 
 Quant je nes escris en latin, 
 Et que je perc mon tans enfin ; 
 Cil le perdent qui ne font rien 
 Moult plus que je ne fae le mien." 
 
 And the sarcasm of the last couplet was more 
 biting even than the author thought it. Those 
 moderns who wrote in Latin truly nefaisoient rien^ 
 for I cannot recollect any work of the kind that 
 has m any sense survived as literature, unless it 
 
STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 135 
 
 be the " Epistolse Obscuronim Virormn " (whose 
 Latin is a part of its humor) and a few short copies 
 of verse, as they used, aptly enough, to be called. 
 Milton's foreign correspondence as Secretary for the 
 Commonwealth was probably the latest instance of 
 the use of Latin in diplomacy. 
 
 You all remember Du Bellay's eloquent protest, 
 " I cannot sufficiently blame the foolish arrogance 
 and temerity of some of our nation, who, being 
 least of all Greeks or Latins, depreciate and reject 
 with a more than Stoic brow everything written in 
 French, and I cannot sufficiently wonder at the 
 strange opinion of some learned men, -who think 
 our vernacular incapable of all good literature and 
 erudition." When this was said, Montaigne was 
 already sixteen years old, and, not to speak of the 
 great mass of verse and prose then dormant in man- 
 uscript, France had produced in Rabelais a great 
 humorist and strangely open-eyed thinker, and in 
 Villon a poet who had written at least one im- 
 mortal poem, which still touches us with that pain- 
 less sense of the lachrymoe rerum so consoling in 
 poetry and the burthen of which 
 
 " Ou sont les neiges d'antan ? " 
 
 falters and fades away in the ear like the last 
 stroke of Beauty's passing-bell. I must not let 
 you forget that Du BeUay had formed himself on 
 the classics, and that he insists on the assiduous 
 study of them. "Devour them," he says, "not in 
 order to imitate, but to turn them into blood and 
 nutriment." And surely this always has been and 
 always will be their true use. 
 
136 STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 
 
 It was not long before the living languages jus- 
 tified their right to exist by producing a living 
 literature, but as the knowledge of Greek and Latin 
 was the exclusive privilege of a class, that class 
 naturally made an obstinate defence of its vested 
 rights. Nor was it less natural that men like Ba- 
 con, who felt that he was speaking to the civilized 
 world, and lesser men, who fancied themselves 
 charged with a pressing message to it, should 
 choose to utter themselves in the only tongue that 
 was cosmopolitan. But already such books as had 
 more than a j)rovincial meaning, though written in 
 what the learned still looked on as patois, were 
 beginning to be translated into the other European 
 languages. The invention of printing had insensi- 
 bly but surely enlarged the audience which genius 
 addresses. That there were persons in England 
 who had learned something of French, Italian, 
 Spanish, and of High and Low Dutch three cen- 
 turies ago is shown by the dramatists of the day, 
 but the speech of the foreigner was still generally 
 regarded as something noxious. Later generations 
 shared the prejudice of sturdy Abbot Samson, who 
 confirmed the manor of Thorpe " cuidam Anglico 
 natione . . . de cujus fidelitate plenius confidebat 
 quia bonus agricola erat et quia nesciehat loqui 
 Gallicey This was in 1182, but there is a still 
 more amusing instance of the same prejudice so 
 lately as 1668. " Erasmus hath also a notable 
 story of a man of the same age, an Italian, that 
 had never been in Germany, and yet he spake 
 the German tongue most elegantly, being as one 
 
STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 137 
 
 possessed of the Devil ; notwithstanding was cured 
 by a Physician that administered a medicine which 
 expelled an infinite number of worms^ whereby he 
 ivas also freed of his knowledge of the German 
 tongue^ ^ Dr. Ramesey seems in doubt whether 
 the vermin or the language were the greater de- 
 liverance. 
 
 Even after it could no longer be maintained 
 that no masterpiece could be written in a modern 
 language, it was affirmed, and on very plausible 
 grounds, that no masterj)iece of style could be so 
 written imless after sedulous study of the ancient 
 and especially of the Grecian models. This may 
 have been partially, but was it entirely true ? Were 
 those elements of the human mind which tease it 
 with the longing for perfection in literary work- 
 manship peculiar to the Greeks ? Before the new 
 birth of letters, Dante (though the general scheme 
 of his great poem be rather mechanical than or- 
 ganic) had given proof of a style, which, where it 
 is best, is so parsimonious in the number of its words, 
 so goldenly sufficient in the value of them, that we 
 must go back to Tacitus for a comparison, and per- 
 haps not even to him for a parallel. But Dante 
 was a great genius, and language curtsies to its 
 natural kings. I will take a humbler instance, the 
 Chantfahle of " Aucassin and Nicolete," rippling 
 into song, and subsiding from it unconsciously as 
 a brook. Leaving out the episode of the King of 
 
 1 From a treatise on worms by William Ramesey, physician in 
 ordinary to Charles II., which contains some very direct hints of 
 the modern germ-theory of disease. 
 
138 STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 
 
 Torelore, evidently thrust in for the groundlings, 
 what is there like it for that unpremeditated charm 
 which is beyond the reach of literary artifice and 
 perhaps does not survive the early maidenhood of 
 language ? If this be not style, then there is some- 
 thing better than style. And is there anything so 
 like the best epigrams of Meleager in grace of 
 natural feeling, in the fine tact which says all and 
 leaves it said imblurred by afterthought, as some 
 little snatches of song by nameless French minstrels 
 of five centuries ago ? 
 
 It is instructive that, only fifty years after Du 
 Bellay wrote the passage I have quoted. Bishop 
 Hall was indirectly praising Sidney for having 
 learned in France and brought back with him to 
 England that very specialty of culture which we are 
 told can only be got in ancient Greece or, at second 
 hand, in ancient Rome. Speaking of some name- 
 less rhymer, he says of him that 
 
 " He knows the grace of that new elegance 
 Which sweet Philisides fetched late from France."- 
 
 And did not Spenser (^whose earliest essay in 
 verse seems to have been translated from Du Bel- 
 lay) form himself on French and Italian models ? 
 Did not Chaucer and Gower, the shapers of our 
 tongue, draw from the same sources ? Does not 
 Higgins tell us in the " Mirrour for Magistrates " 
 that Buckhurst, Phaer, TuberviUe, Golding, and 
 Gascoygne imitated Marot ? Did not Montaigne 
 prompt Bacon to his Essays and Browne (uncon- 
 sciously and indirectly, it may be) to his " Religio 
 Medici " ? Did not Skelton borrow his so-called 
 
STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 139 
 
 Skeltonian measure from France ? Is not the verse 
 of " Paradise Lost " moulded on that of the " Di- 
 vina Commedia"? Did not Dryden's prose and 
 Pope's verse profit by Parisian example ? Nay, in 
 our own time, is it not whispered that more than 
 one of our masters of style in English, and they, 
 too, among the chief apostles of classic culture, 
 owe more of this mastery to Paris than to Athens 
 or Rome ? I am not going to renew the Battle of 
 the Books, nor would I be understood as question- 
 ing the rightful place so long held by ancient and 
 especially by Greek literature as an element of cult- 
 ure and that the most fruitful. But I hold this 
 evening a brief for the Modern Languages, and am 
 bound to put their case in as fair a light as I con- 
 scientiously can. Your kindness has put me in a 
 position where I am forced to reconsider my opin- 
 ions and to discover, if I can, how far prejudice 
 and tradition have had a hand in forming them. 
 
 I will not say with the Emperor Charles V. that 
 a man is as many men as he knows languages, and 
 still less with Lord Burleigh that such polyglottism 
 is but " to have one meat served in divers dishes." 
 But I think that to know the literature of another 
 language, whether dead or living matters not, gives 
 us the prime benefits of foreign travel. It relieves 
 us from what Richard Lassels aptly calls a " moral 
 Excommunication ; " it greatly widens the mind's 
 range of view, and therefore of comparison, thus 
 strengthening the judicial faculty ; and it teaches 
 us to consider the relations of things to each other 
 and to some general scheme rather than to our- 
 
140 STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 
 
 selves ; above all, it enlarges sestlietic charity. It 
 has seemed to me also that a foreign language, 
 quite as much as a dead one, has the advantage of 
 putting whatever is written in it at just such a dis- 
 tance as is needed for a proper mental perspective. 
 No doubt this strangeness, this novelty, adds mnch 
 to the pleasure we feel in reading the Hterature of 
 other languages than our own. It plays the part 
 of poet for us by putting familiar things in an un- 
 accustomed way so deftly that we feel as if we had 
 gained another sense and had ourselves a share in 
 the sorcery that is practised on us. The words of 
 our mother-tongue have been worn smooth by so 
 often rubbing against our lips or minds, while the 
 alien word has all the subtle emphasis and beauty 
 of some new-minted coin of ancient Syracuse. In 
 our critical estimates we should be on our guard 
 against this charm. 
 
 In reading such books as chiefly deserve to be 
 read in any foreign language, it is wise to translate 
 consciously and in words as we read. There is 
 no such help to a fuller mastery of our vernacu- 
 lar. It compels us to such a choosing and testing, 
 to so nice a discrimination of sound, propriety, po- 
 sition, and shade of meaning, that we now first 
 learn the secret of the words we have been using 
 or misusing all our lives, and are gradually made 
 aware that to set forth even the plainest matter, as 
 it should be set forth, is not only a very difficult 
 thing, calling for thought and practice, but an 
 afPair of conscience as well. Translating teaches 
 us as nothing else can, not only that there is a best 
 
STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 141 
 
 way, but that it is tlie only way. Those who have 
 tried it know too well how easy it is to grasp the 
 verbal meaning of a sentence or of a verse. That 
 is the bird in the hand. The real meaning, the 
 soul of it,' that which makes it literature and not 
 jargon, that is the bird in the bush which tanta- 
 lizes and stimulates with the vanishing glimpses we 
 catch of it as it flits from one to another Im-king- 
 place, — 
 
 " Et fugit ad salices et se cupit ante videri." 
 
 After all, I am driven back to my Virgil again, 
 you see, for the happiest expression of what I was 
 trying to say. It was these shy allurements and 
 provocations of Omar Khayyam's Persian which led 
 Fitzgerald to many a peerless phrase and made an 
 original poet of him in the very act of translating. 
 I cite this instance merely by way of hint that as 
 a spur to the mind, as an open-sesame to the trear 
 sures of our native vocabulary, the study of a liv- 
 ing language (for literary, not linguistic, ends) 
 may serve as well as that of any which we rather 
 inaptly call dead. 
 
 We are told that perfection of form can be 
 learned only of the Greeks, and it is certainly true 
 that many among them attained to, or developed 
 out of some hereditary germ of aptitude, a sense 
 of proportion and of the helpful relation of parts 
 to the whole organism which other races mostly 
 grope after in vain, Spenser, in the enthusiasm 
 of his new Platonism, teUs us that " Soul is form, 
 and doth the body make," and no doubt this is 
 true of the highest artistic genius. Form without 
 
142 STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 
 
 soul, the most obsequious observance of the unities, 
 the most perfect a priori adjustment of parts, is a 
 lifeless thing, like those machines of perpetual mo- 
 tion admirable in every way but one — that they 
 will not go. I believe that I understand and value 
 form as much as I should, but I also believe that 
 some of those who have insisted most strongly on 
 its supreme worth as the shaping soul of a work of 
 art have imprisoned the word " soul " in a single 
 one of its many meanings and the soul itseK in a 
 single one of its many functions. For the soul 
 is not only that which gives form, but that which 
 gives life, the mysterious and pervasive essence al- 
 ways in itself beautiful, not always so in the shapes 
 'which it informs, but even then full of infinite 
 suggestion. In literature it is what we call genius, 
 an insoluble ingredient which kindles, lights, in- 
 spires, and transmits impulsion to other minds, 
 wakens energies in them hitherto latent, and makes 
 them startlingly aware that they too may be parts 
 of the controlling purpose of the world. A book 
 may be great in other ways than as a lesson in 
 form, and it may be for other qualities that it is 
 most precious to us. Is it nothing, then, to have 
 conversed with genius ? Goethe's " Iphigenie " is 
 far more perfect in form than his " Faust," which 
 is indeed but a succession of scenes strung together 
 on a thread of moral or dramatic purpose, yet it is 
 " Faust " that we read and hold dear alike for its 
 meaning and for the delight it gives us. And if we 
 talk of classics ; what, then, is a classic, if it be 
 not a book that forever delights, inspires, and sur- 
 
STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 143 
 
 prises, — in which, and in ourselves, by its help, 
 we make new discoveries every day ? What book 
 has so warmly embosomed itself in the mind and 
 memory of men as the Iliad? And yet surely 
 not by its perfection in form so much as by the 
 stately simplicity of its style, by its pathetic truth 
 to nature, for so loose and discursive is its plan as 
 to have supplied plausible argument for a diversity 
 of ~ authorship. What work of classic antiquity 
 has given the hransle^ as he would have called it, 
 to more fruitful thinking than the Essays of Mon- 
 taigne, the most planless of men who ever looked be- 
 fore and after, a chaos indeed, but a chaos swarm- 
 ing with germs of evolution ? There have been 
 men of genius, like Emerson, richly seminative 
 for other minds ; like Browning, full of wholesome 
 ferment for other minds, though wholly destitute 
 of any proper sense of form. Yet perhaps those 
 portions of their writings where their genius has 
 precipitated itseK in perfect, if detached and un- 
 related crystals, flashing back the light of our com- 
 mon day tinged with the diviner hue of their own 
 nature, are and will continue to be a more precious 
 and fecund possession of mankind than many 
 works more praiseworthy as wholes, but in which 
 the vitality is less abounding, or seems so because 
 more evenly distributed and therefore less capable 
 of giving that electric shock which thrills through 
 every fibre of the soul. 
 
 But Samuel Daniel, an Elizabethan poet less 
 valued now than many an inferior man, has said 
 something to my purpose far better than I could 
 
144 STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 
 
 have said it. Nor is lie a suspicious witness, for 
 he is himself a master of style. He had studied 
 the art of writing, and his diction has accordingly- 
 been less obscured by time than that of most of his 
 contemporaries. He knew his classics, too, and his 
 dullest work is the tragedy of " Cleopatra " shaped 
 on a classic model, presumably Seneca, certainly 
 not the best. But he had modern instincts and a 
 conviction that the later generations of men had 
 also their rights, among others that of speaking 
 their minds in such forms as were most congenial 
 to them. In answer to some one who had de- 
 nounced the use of rhyme as barbarous, he wrote 
 his " Defence of Rhyme," a monument of noble 
 and yet impassioned prose. In this he says, " Suf- 
 fer the world to enjoy that which it knows and 
 what it likes, seeing whatsoever form of words doth 
 move delight, and sway the affections of men, in 
 what Scythian sort soever it be disposed and ut- 
 tered, that is true number, measure, eloquence, and 
 the perfection of speech." I think that Daniel's in- 
 stinct guided him to a half-truth, which he as usual 
 believed to include the other half also. For I have 
 observed that truth is the only object of man's 
 ardent pursuit of which every one is convinced 
 that he, and he alone, has got the whole. 
 
 I am not sure that Form, which is the artistic 
 sense of decorum controlling the coordination of 
 parts and ensuring their harmonious subservience 
 to a common end, can be learned at all, whether of 
 the Greeks or elsewhere. I am not sure that even 
 Style (a lower form of the same faculty or quality, 
 
STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 145 
 
 whichever it be), which has to do with the perfec- 
 tion of the parts themselves, and whose triumph it 
 is to produce the greatest effect with the least pos- 
 sible expenditure of material, — I am not sure that 
 even this c^n be taught in any school. If Sterne 
 had been asked where he got that style which, 
 when he lets it alone, is as perfect as any that 
 I know, if Goldsmith had been asked where he 
 got his, so equable, so easy without being unduly 
 familiar, might they not have answered with the 
 maiden in the ballad, — 
 
 " I gat it in my mither's wame, 
 Where ye '11 get never the like " ? 
 
 But even though the susceptibility of art must 
 be inborn, yet skill in the practical application of 
 it to use may be increased, — best by practice, and 
 very far next best by example. Assuming, how- 
 ever, that either Form or Style is to be had with- 
 out the intervention of our good fairy, we can get 
 them, or at least a wholesome misgiving that they 
 exist and are of serious import, from the French, 
 as Sir Philip Sidney and so many others have 
 done, as not a few are doing now. It is for other 
 and greater virtues that I would frequent the 
 Greeks. 
 
 Browning, in the preface to his translation of the 
 "Agamemnon," says bluntly, as is his wont, " learn- 
 ing Greek teaches Greek and nothing else." One 
 is sometimes tempted to think that it teaches some 
 other language far harder than Greek when one 
 tries to read his translation. Matthew Arnold, 
 on the other hand, was never weary of insisting 
 
146 STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 
 
 that the grand style could be best learned of the 
 Greeks, if not of them only. I think it may be 
 taught, or, at least, fruitfully suggested, in other 
 ways. Thirty odd years ago I brought home with 
 me from Nuremberg photographs of Peter Fischer's 
 statuettes of the twelve apostles. These I used to 
 show to my pupils and ask for a guess at their size. 
 The invariable answer was " larger than life." 
 They were really about eighteen inches high, and 
 this grandiose effect was wrought by simplicity of 
 treatment, dignity of pose, a large unfretted sweep 
 of drapery. This object-lesson I found more telling 
 than much argument and exhortation. I am glad 
 that Arnold should have been so insistent, he said 
 so many admirable things in maintaining his thesis. 
 But I question the validity of single verses, or even 
 of three or four, as examples of style, whether 
 grand or other, and I think he would have made an 
 opponent very uncomfortable who should have ven- 
 tured to discuss Homer with as little knowledge of 
 Greek as he himself apparently had of Old French 
 when he commented on the " Chanson de Roland." 
 He cites a passage from the poem and gives in a 
 note an English version of it which is translated, 
 not from the original, but from the French render- 
 ing by Genin who was himself on no very intimate 
 terms with the archaisms of his mother-tongue. 
 With what he says of the poem I have little fault 
 to find. It is said with his usual urbane discretion 
 and marked by his usual steadiness of insight. But 
 I must protest when he quotes four lines, apt as 
 they are for his purpose, as an adequate sample, and 
 
STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 147 
 
 then compares them with a most musically pathetic 
 passage from Homer. Who is there that could es- 
 cape undiminished from such a comparison ? Nor 
 do I think that he appreciated as he should one 
 quality of the poem which is essentially Homeric : 
 I mean its invigorating energy, the exhilaration of 
 manhood and courage that exhales from it, the same 
 that Sidney felt in " Chevy Chase." I believe we 
 should judge a book rather by its total effect than by 
 the adequacy of special parts, and is not this effect 
 moral as^ well as sesthetic ? If we speak of style, 
 surely that is like good breeding, not fortuitous, 
 but characteristic, the key which gives the pitch 
 of the whole tune. If I should set some of the 
 epithets with which Achilles lays Agamemnon 
 about the ears in the first book of the Iliad in con- 
 trast with the dispute between Roland and Oliver 
 about blowing the olifaunt, I am not sure that 
 Homer would win the prize of higher breeding. Or 
 shall I cite Hecuba's 
 
 rov iyii fxeffov iiTrap Ixoiyut 
 'Effdefjievai wpoacpvtTa '? 
 
 The " Chanson de Roland " is to me a very inter- 
 esting and inspiring poem, certainly not to be 
 named with the Iliad for purely literary charm, but 
 equipped with the same moral qualities that have 
 made that poem dearer to mankind than any other. 
 When I am " moved more than with a trumpet," I 
 care not greatly whether it be blown by Greek or 
 Norman breath. 
 
 And this brings me back to the application of 
 what I quoted just now from Daniel. There seems 
 
148 STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 
 
 to be a tendency of late to value literature and even 
 poetry for their usefulness as courses of moral phi- 
 losophy or metaphysics, or as exercises to put and 
 keep the mental muscles in training. Perhaps the 
 highest praise of a book is that it sets us thinking, 
 but surely the next highest praise is that it ransoms 
 us from thought. Milton tells us that he thought 
 Spenser " a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas," 
 but did he prize him less that he lectured in a gar- 
 den of Alcina? To give pleasure merely is one, 
 and not the lowest, function of whatever deserves 
 to be called literature. Culture, which means the 
 opening and refining of the faculties, is an excellent 
 thing, perhaps the best, but there are other things 
 to be had of the Muses which are also good in their 
 kind. Refined pleasure is refining pleasure too, 
 and teaches something in her way, though she be 
 no proper schooldame. In my weaker moments I 
 revert with a sigh, half deprecation, half relief, to 
 the old notion of literature as holiday, as 
 
 " The world's sweet inn from care and wearisome turmoil." 
 
 Shall I make the ignominious confession that I 
 relish Skelton's " Philip Sparowe," pet of Skelton's 
 Maistres Jane, or parts of it, inferior though it be 
 in form, almost as much as that more fortunate pet 
 of Lesbia ? There is a wonderful joy in it to chase 
 away ennui, though it may not thrill our intellect- 
 ual sensibility like its Latin prototype. 
 
 And in this mood the Modern Languages add 
 largely to our resources. It may be wrong to be 
 happy unless in the grand style, but it is perilously 
 
STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 149 
 
 agreeable. And shall we say that the literature of 
 the last three centuries is incompetent to put a 
 healthy strain upon the more strenuous faculties of 
 the mind? That it does not appeal to and satisfy 
 the mind's loftier desires? That Dante, Machia- 
 velli, Montaigne, Bacon, Shakespeare, Cervantes, 
 Pascal, Calderon, Lessing, and he of Weimar in 
 whom Carlyle and so many others have found their 
 University, — that none of these set our thinking 
 gear in motion to as good purpose as any ancient 
 of them all? Is it less instructive to study the 
 growth of modern ideas than of ancient? Is the 
 awakening of the modern world to consciousness 
 and its first tentative, then fuller, then rapturous 
 expression of it, — 
 
 " Like the new-abashed nightingale 
 That slinteth first when he beginneth sing," 
 
 " Till the fledged notes at length forsake their nests, 
 Fluttering in wanton shoals," 
 
 less interesting or less instructive to us because it 
 finds a readier way to our sympathy through a pos- 
 tern which we cannot help leaving sometimes on 
 the latch, than through the ceremonious portal of 
 classical prescription ? Goethe went to the root of 
 the matter when he said, " people are always talk- 
 ing of the study of the ancients ; yet what does 
 this mean but apply yourself to the actual world 
 and seek to express it, since this is what the 
 ancients also did when they were alive?" That 
 " when they were alive " has an unconscious sar- 
 casm in it. I am not ashamed to confess that the 
 
150 STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 
 
 jBrst stammerings of our Englisli speech liave a pa- 
 thetic charm for me which I miss in the wiser and 
 ampler utterances of a tongue, not only foreign to 
 me as modern languages are foreign, but thickened 
 in its more delicate articulations by the palsying 
 touch of Time, And from the native woodnotes 
 of many modern lands, from what it was once the 
 fashion to call the rude beginnings of their liter- 
 ature, my fancy carries away, I think, something as 
 precious as Greek or Latin could have made it. 
 Where shall I find the piteous and irreparable pov- 
 erty of the parvenu so poignantly typified as in the 
 " Lai de I'Oiselet " ? Where the secret password 
 of all poetry with so haunting a memory as in 
 " Count Arnaldos," — 
 
 " Yo no cligo esta caneion 
 Sino a quien eonmigo va " ? 
 
 It is always wise to eliminate the personal equa- 
 tion from our judgments of literature as of other 
 things that nearly concern us. But what is so 
 subtle, so elusive, so inapprehensible as this folle 
 du logis f Are we to be suspicious of a book's 
 good character in proportion as it appeals more 
 vividly to our own private consciousness and ex- 
 perience ? How are we to know to how many it 
 may be making the same appeal? Is there no 
 resource, then, but to go back humbly to the old 
 quod semper, quod ubique, quod ah omnibus, and 
 to accept nothing as orthodox literature on which 
 the elder centuries have not laid their consecrating 
 hands? The truth is, perhaps, that in reading 
 ancient literature many elements of false judgment, 
 
STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 151 
 
 partly involved in the personal equation, are inop- 
 erative, or seem to be so, which, when we read a 
 more nearly neighboring literature, it is wellnigh 
 impossible to neutralize. Did not a part of Mat- 
 thew Arnold's preference for the verses of Homer, 
 with the thtmder-roll of which he sent poor old 
 Thuroldus about his business, spring from a secret 
 persuasion of their more noble harmony, their more 
 ear-bewitching canorousness ? And yet he no doubt 
 recited those verses in a fashion which would have 
 disqualified them as barbarously for the ear of an 
 ancient Greek as if they had been borrowed of Thu- 
 roldus himself. Do we not see here the personal 
 fallacy's eartip ? I fancy if we could call up the 
 old jongleur and bid him sing to us, accompanied 
 by his vielle, we should find in his verses a plaintive 
 and not unimpressive melody such as so strangely 
 moves one in the untutored song of the Tuscan 
 peasant heard afar across the sun-steeped fields 
 with its prolonged fondling of the assonants. 
 There is no question about what is supreme in 
 literature. The difference between what is best 
 and what is next best is immense ; it is felt in- 
 stinctively ; it is a difference not of degree but of 
 kind. And yet may we not without lese-majesty 
 say of books what Ferdinand says of women, — 
 
 " for several virtues 
 Have I liked several women ; never any 
 With so fnll soul but some defect in her 
 Did quarrel with the noblest grace she owed 
 And put it to the foil " ? 
 
 In growing old one grows less fanatically punc- 
 
152 STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 
 
 tual in tlie practice of those austerities of taste 
 which make too constant demands on dur self-de- 
 nial. The ages have made up their minds about 
 the ancients. While they are doing it about the 
 moderns (and they are sometimes a little long 
 about it, having the whole of time before them), 
 may we not allow ourselves to take an honest 
 pleasure in literature far from the highest, if you 
 will, in point of form, not so far in point of sub- 
 stance, if it comply more kindly with our mood or 
 quicken it with oppugnancy according to our need ? 
 There are books in all modern languages which 
 fulfil these conditions as perfectly as any, however 
 sacred by their antiquity, can do. Were the men 
 of the Middle Ages so altogether wrong in prefer- 
 ring Ovid because his sentiment was more in touch 
 with their own, so that he seemed more neighborly ? 
 Or the earlier dramatists in overestimating Seneca 
 for the same reason ? Whether it be from natural 
 predisposition or from some occult influence of the 
 time, there are men who find in the literature of 
 modern Europe a stimulus and a satisfaction which 
 Athens and Rome deny them. If these books do 
 not give so k;een an intellectual delight as the 
 more consummate art and more musical voice of 
 Athens enabled her to give, yet thej'^ establish and 
 maintain, I am more than half willing to believe, 
 more intimate and confiding relations with us. 
 They open new views, they liberalize us as only an 
 acquaintance with the infinite diversity of men's 
 minds and judgments can do, they stimulate to 
 thought or tease the fancy with suggestion, and in 
 
STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 153 
 
 short do fairly well whatever a good book is ex- 
 pected to do, what ancient literature did at the 
 Revival of Learning, with an effect like that which 
 the reading of Chapman's Homer had upon Keats. 
 And we must not forget that the best result of 
 this study of the ancients was the begetting of the 
 moderns, though Dante somehow contrived to get 
 bom with no help from the Greek Hera and little 
 more from the Roman Lucina. " 'T is an unjust 
 way of compute," says Sir Thomas Browne, " to 
 magnify a weak head for some Latin abilities, and 
 to undervalue a solid judgment because he knows 
 not the geneaology of Hector." 
 
 As implements of education, the modern books 
 have some advantages of their own. I am told, 
 and I believe, that there is a considerable number 
 of not uningenuous youths, who, whether from 
 natural inaptitude or want of hereditary predispo- 
 sition, are honestly bored by Greek and Latin, and 
 who yet would take a wholesome and vivifying in- 
 terest in what was nearer to their habitual modes 
 of thought and association. I would not take this 
 for granted, I would give the horse a chance at 
 the ancient springs before I came to the conclusion 
 that he woidd not drink. No doubt, the greater 
 difficulty of the ancient languages is believed by 
 many to be a prime recommendation of them as 
 challenging the more strenuous qualities of the 
 mind. I think there are grounds for this belief, 
 and was accordingly pleased to learn the other day 
 that my eldest grandson was taking kindly to his 
 Homer. I had rather he should choose Greek 
 
154 STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 
 
 than any modern tongue, and I say this as a hint 
 that I am making allowance for the personal equa- 
 tion. The wise gods have put difficulty between 
 man and everything that is worth having. But 
 where the mind is of softer fibre, and less eager of 
 emprise, may it not be prudent to open and make 
 easy every avenue that leads to literature, even 
 though it may not directly lead to those summits 
 that tax the mind and muscle only to reward the 
 climber at last with the repose of a more ethereal 
 air? 
 
 May we not conclude that modern literature, and 
 the modern languages as the way to it, should have 
 a more important place assigned to them in our 
 courses of instruction, assigned to them moreover 
 as equals in dignity, except so far as age may 
 justly add to it, and no longer to be made to feel 
 themselves inferior by being put below the salt ? 
 That must depend on the way they are taught, and 
 this on the competence and conscience of those 
 who teach them. Already a very great advance has 
 been made. The modern languages have nothing 
 more of which to complain. There are nearly as 
 many professors and assistants employed in teach- 
 ing them at Harvard now as there were students 
 of them when I was in college. Students did I 
 say? I meant boys who consented to spend an 
 hour with the professor three times a week for the 
 express purjDose of evading study. Some of us 
 learned so much that we could say " How do you 
 do?" in several languages, and we learned little 
 more. The real impediment was that we were 
 
STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 155 
 
 kept forever in the elementary stage, tliat we 
 could look forward to no literature that would have 
 given significance to the languages and made them 
 beneficent. It is very different now, and with 
 the number of teachers the number of students 
 has more than proportionally increased. And the 
 reason is not far to seek. The study has been 
 made more serious, more thorough, and therefore 
 more inspiring. And it is getting to be under- 
 stood that as a training of the faculties, the com- 
 parative philology, at least, of the modern lan- 
 guages may be made as serviceable as that of the 
 ancient. The classical superstitions of the Eng- 
 lish race made them especially behindhand in this 
 direction, and it was long our shame that we must 
 go to the Germans to be taught the rudiments of 
 our mother tongue. This is no longer true. Anglo- 
 Saxon, Gothic, Old High and Middle High Ger- 
 man and Icelandic are all taught, not only here, 
 but in all our chief centres of learning. When I 
 first became interested in Old French I made a 
 surprising discovery. If the books which I took 
 from the College Library had been bound with 
 gilt or yellow edges, those edges stuck together as, 
 when so ornamented, they are wont to do till the 
 leaves have been turned. No one had ever opened 
 those books before. 
 
 " I was the first that ever burst 
 Into that silent sea." 
 
 Old French is now one of the regular courses of in- 
 struction, and not only is the language taught, but 
 its literature as well. Remembering what I remem- 
 
156 STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 
 
 ber, it seems to me a wonderful thing tliat I should 
 have lived to see a poem in Old French edited by 
 a young American scholar (present here this even- 
 ing) and printed in the journal of this Society, 
 a journal in every way creditable to the scholar- 
 ship of the country. Nor, as an illustration of the 
 same advance in another language, should we for- 
 get Dr. Fay's admirable Concordance of the " Di- 
 vina Commedia." But a more gratifying illustra- 
 tion than any is the existence and fruitful activity 
 of this Association itself, and this select concourse 
 before me which brings scholars together from aU 
 parts of the land, to stimulate them by personal 
 commerce with men of kindred pursuits, and to 
 unite so many scattered energies in a single force 
 controlled by a common and invigorated purpose. 
 
 We have every reason to congratulate ourselves 
 on the progress the modern languages have made 
 as well in academic as in popular consideration. 
 They are now taught (as they could not formerly 
 be taught) in a way that demands toil and thought 
 of the student, as Greek and Latin, and they only, 
 used to be taught, and they also open the way to 
 higher intellectual joys, to pastures new and not 
 the worse for being so, as Greek and Latin, and 
 they only, used to do. Surely many-sidedness is the 
 very essence of culture, and it matters less what a 
 man learns than how he learns it. The day wiU 
 come, nay, it is dawning already, when it wiU be 
 understood that the masterpieces of whatever lan- 
 guage are not to be classed by an arbitrary stand- 
 ard, but stand on the same level in virtue of being 
 
STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 157 
 
 masterpieces ; that thought, imagination, and fancy 
 may make even a patois acceptable to scholars ; 
 that the poets of all climes and of all ages " sing 
 to one clear harp in divers tones ; " and that the 
 masters of prose and the masters of verse in all 
 tongues teach the same lesson and exact the same 
 fee. 
 
 I began by saying that I had no wish to renew 
 the Battle of the Books. I cannot bring myself to 
 look upon the literatures of the ancient and mod- 
 ern worlds as antagonists, but rather as friendly 
 rivals in the effort to tear as many as may be 
 from the barbarizing plutolatry which seems to 
 be so rapidly supplanting the worship of what 
 alone is lovely and enduring. No, they are not 
 antagonists, but by their points of disparity, of 
 likeness, or contrast, they can be best understood, 
 perhaps understood only through each other. The 
 scholar must have them both, but may not he who 
 has not leisure to be a scholar find profit even in 
 the lesser of the two, if that only be attainable? 
 Have I admitted that one is the lesser? O matre 
 pulchra filia pulchrior is perhaps what I should 
 say here. 
 
 If I did not rejoice in the wonderful advance 
 made in the comparative philology of the modern 
 languages, I should not have the face to be stand- 
 ing here. But neither should I if I shrank from 
 saying what I believed to be the truth, whether here 
 or elsewhere. I think that the purely linguistic 
 side in the teaching of them seems in the way to 
 get more than its fitting share. I insist only that 
 
158 STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 
 
 in our college courses this should he a separate 
 study, and that, good as it is in itself, it should, in 
 the scheme of general instruction, be restrained to 
 its own function as the guide to something better. 
 And that something better is Literature. Let us 
 rescue ourselves from what Milton calls " these 
 gramniatic flats and shallows." The blossoms of 
 language have certainly as much value as its roots; 
 for if the roots secrete food and thereby transmit 
 life to the plant, yet the joyous consummation of 
 that life is in the blossoms, which alone bear the 
 seeds that distribute and renew it in other growths. 
 Exercise is good for the muscles of mind and to 
 keep it well in hand for work, but the true end of 
 Culture is to give it play, a thing quite as needful. 
 What I would urge, therefore, is that no invidi- 
 ous distinction should be made between the Old 
 Learning and the New, but that students, due 
 regard being had to their temperaments and facul- 
 ties, should be encouraged to take the course in 
 modern languages as being quite as good in j)omt 
 of mental discipline as any other, if pursued with 
 the same thoroughness and to the same end. And 
 that end is Literature, for there language first 
 attains to a full consciousness of its powers and 
 to the delighted exercise of them. Literature has 
 escaped that doom of Shinar which made our 
 Association possible, and still everywhere speaks in 
 the universal tongue of civilized man. And it is 
 only through this record of Man's joys and sor- 
 rows, of his aspirations and failures, of his thought, 
 his speculation, and his dreams, that we can become 
 
STUDY OF MODERN LANGUAGES 159 
 
 complete men, and learn both wliat he is and what 
 he may be, for it is the unconscious autobiography 
 of mankind. And has no page been added to it 
 since the last ancient classic author laid down his 
 pen? 
 
THE PROGEESS OF THE WOELD.i 
 
 1886. 
 
 As at noon every day the captain of a ship tries 
 to learn his whereabouts of the sun, that he may 
 know how much nearer he is to his destined port,' 
 and how far he may have been pushed away from 
 his course by the last gale or drifted from it by 
 unsuspected currents, so on board this ship of ours, 
 The Earth, in which that abstract entity we call 
 The World is a passenger, we strive to ascertain, 
 from time to time, with such rude instruments as 
 we possess, what progress we have made and in 
 what direction. It is rather by a kind of dead- 
 reckoning than by taking the height of the Sun of 
 Righteousness, which should be our seamark, that 
 we accomplish this, for such celestial computations 
 are gone somewhat out of fashion. It is only a few 
 scholars and moralists in their silent and solitary 
 observatories that any longer make account of 
 them. We mostly put faith in our statisticians, 
 and the longer they make their columns of figures, 
 the bigger their sums of population, of exports and 
 imports, and of the general output of fairy-gold, 
 
 ^ This paper was -written for an introduction to a work entitled 
 The World^s Progress (published by Messrs. Gately & 0' Gorman, 
 Boston), in which the advance in various departments of intel- 
 lectual and material activity was described and illustrated. 
 
THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 161 
 
 the more stupidly are we content. Nor are we 
 over-nice in considering the direction of our pro- 
 gress, if only we be satisfied that to-day we are no 
 longer where we were yesterday. Yet the course 
 of this moral thing we call the World is controlled 
 by laws as certain and immutable and by influences 
 as subtle as those which govern with such exquisite 
 precision that of the physical thing we call The 
 Earth, could we only find them out. It has ever 
 been the business of wise men to trace and to illus- 
 trate them, of prudent men to allow for and to seek 
 an alliance with them, of good men to conform their 
 lives with them. 
 
 Between those observations taken on shipboard 
 and ours there is also this other difference, that 
 those refer always to a fixed, external standard, 
 while for these the standard is internal and fluctu- 
 ating, so that the point toward which The World 
 is making progress shall seem very different accord- 
 ing to the temperament, the fortunes, nay, even the 
 very mood or age of the observer. It may be re- 
 marked that Mr. Gladstone and Lord Tennyson 
 are very far from being at one in their judgment 
 of it. Old men in general love not change, and are 
 suspicious of it ; while young men are impatient of 
 present conditions and of the slowness of movement 
 to escape from them. Yet change is the very con- 
 dition of our being and thriving, deliberation and 
 choice that of all secure foothold on the shaky 
 stepping-stones by which we cross the torrent of 
 Circumstances. Is it in the power of any man, 
 whatever his age, to arrive at that equilibrium of 
 
162 THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 
 
 temper and judgment without which no even prob- 
 able estimate of where we are and whither we are 
 tending is possible? Certainly no such trustworthy 
 estimate can be deduced from our inward conscious- 
 ness or from our outward environments; nor can 
 we, with all our statistics, make ourselves independ- 
 ent of the inextinguishable lamps of heaven. We 
 pile our figures one upon another, even as the 
 builders of Babel their bricks, and the heaven we 
 hope to attain is as far away as ever. It is moral 
 forces that, more than all others, govern the direc- 
 tion and regulate the advance of our affairs, and 
 these forces are as calculable as the Trade Winds 
 or the Gulf Stream. 
 
 And yet, though this be so, one of the greatest 
 lessons taught by History is the close relation be- 
 tween the moral and the physical well-being of 
 man. The case of the Ascetics makes but a seem- 
 ing exception to this law, for they voluntarily de- 
 nied themselves that bodily comfort which is the 
 chief object of human endeavor, and renunciation 
 is the wholesomest regimen of the soul. If we 
 cannot strike a precise balance and say that the 
 World is better because it is richer now than it 
 was three centuries, or even half a century, ago, 
 we may at least comfort ourselves with the belief 
 that this, if not demonstrably true, is more than 
 probable, and that there is less curable unhappi- 
 ness, less physical suffering, and therefore less 
 crime, than heretofore. Yet there is no gain with- 
 out corresponding loss. If the sum of happiness 
 be greater, yet the amount falling to each of us in 
 
THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 163 
 
 the division of it seems to be less. It is noteworthy 
 that literature, as it becomes more modern, becomes 
 also more melancholy, and that he who keeps most 
 constantly to the minor key of hopelessness, or 
 strikes the deepest note of despair, is surest of at 
 least momentary acclaim. Nay, do not some 
 sources of happiness flow less full or cease to flow 
 as settlement and sanitation advance, even as the 
 feeders of our streams are dried by the massacre 
 of our forests? We cannot have a new boulevard 
 in Florence unless at sacrifice of those ancient city- 
 walls in which inspiring memories had for so many 
 ages built their nests and reared their broods of 
 song. Did not the plague, brooded and hatched 
 in those smotherers of fresh air, the slits that thor- 
 oughfared the older town, give us the Decameron? 
 And was the price too high? We cannot widen 
 and ventilate the streets of Rome without grievous 
 wrong to the city that we loved, and yet it is well 
 to remember that this city too had built itself out 
 of and upon the ruins of that nobler Rome which 
 gave it all the wizard hold it had on our imagina- 
 tion. The Social Science Congress rejoices in 
 changes that bring tears to the eyes of the painter 
 and the poet. Alas ! we cannot have a world made 
 expressly for Mr. Ruskin, nor keep it if we could, 
 more 's the pity! Are we to confess, then, that the 
 World grows less lovable as it grows more conven- 
 ient and comfortable ? that beauty flees before the 
 step of the Social Reformer as the wild pensioners 
 of Nature before the pioneers? that the lion will lie 
 down with the lamb sooner than picturesq^ueness 
 
164 THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 
 
 with health and prosperity? Morally, no doubt, 
 we are bound to consider the Greatest Good of the 
 Greatest Number, but there is something in us, va- 
 gula, hlandula, that refuses, and rightly refuses, 
 to be Benthamized ; that asks itself in a timid whis- 
 per, "Is it so certain, then, that the Greatest Good 
 is also the Highest? and has it been to the Greatest 
 or to the Smallest Number that man has been most 
 indebted? " For myself, while I admit, because I 
 cannot help it, certain great and manifest improve- 
 ments in the general well-being, I cannot stifle a 
 suspicion that the Modern Spirit, to whose tune 
 we are marching so cheerily, may have borrowed 
 of the Pied Piper of Hamelin the instrument 
 whence he draws such bewitching music. Having 
 made this confession, I shall do my best to write 
 in a becoming spirit the Introduction that is asked 
 of me, and to make my antiquated portico as little 
 unharmonious as I can with the modern building to 
 which it leads. 
 
 But, before we enter upon a consideration of the 
 Progress of the World, we must take a glance at 
 that of the Globe on whose surface what we call 
 the World came into being, rests, and has grown 
 to what we see. This Globe is not, as we are in- 
 formed, a perfect sphere, but slightly flattened at 
 the poles ; and in like manner this World is by no 
 means a perfect world, though it be not quite so 
 easy, as in the other case, to say where or why it is 
 not. For it there is no moon-mirror in which to 
 study its own profile. Perhaps it would be wise 
 to ask ourselves now and then whether the fault 
 
THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 165 
 
 may not be in the nature of man, after all, rather 
 than anywhere else. So far as he is a social ani- 
 mal, that is, an animal liable in various ways to 
 make his neighbor uncomfortable, it is certainly 
 prudent to remember always that, though his nat- 
 ural impulses may be restrained, or guided, or even 
 improved, yet that they are always there and ready 
 to take the bit in their teeth at the first chance which 
 offers. This might save us a pretty long bill for 
 quack nostrimis, since, though no astronomer has 
 ever volunteered to rectify the Earth's outline, 
 there is hardly a man who does not fancy that the 
 World would become and continue just what it 
 should be, if only his patent specific could once be 
 fairly tried. Quacks of genius like Rousseau have 
 sometimes persuaded to the experiment of their 
 panaceas, but always with detriment to the pa- 
 tient's constitution. We are long in learning the 
 lesson of Medea's cauldron. 
 
 The Earth, fortunately, is beyond the reach of 
 our wisdom, and, like the other shining creatures 
 of God, whirls her sphere and brings about her 
 appointed seasons in happy obedience to laws for 
 which she is not responsible and which she cannot 
 tinker. Beginning as a nebulous nucleus of fiery 
 gases, a luminous thistle-down blown about the 
 barren wastes of space, then slowly shrinking, com- 
 pacting, growing solid, and cooling at the rind, our 
 planet was forced into a system with others like it, 
 some smaller, some vastly greater than itself, and, 
 in its struggle with overmastering forces, having 
 the Moon wrenched from it to be its night-lamp 
 
166 THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 
 
 and tlie timer of its tides. Then slowly, slowly, it 
 became capable of sustaining living organisms, ris- 
 ing by long and infinitesimal gradations, symbol- 
 ically rehearsed again, it is said, by the child in 
 embryo, from the simplest to the more complex, 
 from merely animated matter to matter informed 
 with Soul, and, in Man, sometimes controlled by 
 reason. The imagination grows giddy as it looks 
 downwards along the rounds of the ladder lost, 
 save a short stretch of it, in distance below, by 
 which life has climbed from the zoophyte to Plato, 
 to Newton, to Michael Angelo, to Shakespeare. 
 During the inconceivable seons implied in these 
 processes, the Earth has gone through many vicis- 
 situdes, unrecorded save in the gigantic runes of 
 Geology, the graffiti of Pluto and Neptune, which 
 man, having painfully fashioned a key to them, is 
 spelling out letter by letter, arranging as syllables, 
 as words, as sentences, and at last reading as co- 
 herent narrative. Every one of these records is the 
 mortuary inscription of an Epoch or a Cycle, but 
 the last word of every one is Hesurgam. They 
 point backwards to such endless files of centuries 
 that the poor six thousand years of our hieratic 
 reckoning are dwindled to a hair -breadth, and our 
 students of the rocks and stars, like the drunken 
 man of Esdras, disdain the smaller change of tem- 
 poral computation, and rattle off their millions as 
 carelessly as Congress in dealing with our Na- 
 tional strongbox. Nor has this sudden accession 
 of secular wealth made them any more careful of 
 the humbler interests of their neighbors than it is 
 
THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 167 
 
 wont to make other nowceaux riches. A malign 
 nant astronomer has lately done his best to prove 
 that the sun's stock of fuel cannot hold out more 
 than seventeen millions of years. Is, then, that 
 assurance of an earthly immortality which has hith- 
 erto sustained poets through cold and hunger and 
 Philistine indifference, to be fobbed off at last with 
 so .beggarly a pittance as this? Let us hope for 
 better things. 
 
 Though these memories of the rocks and moun- 
 tains and ocean -beds seem to belittle and abbreviate 
 man, yet it is nothing so; for, till he came, the 
 universe, so far as we can explore and know it, had 
 neither eyes, nor ears, nor tongue, nor any dimmest 
 consciousness of its own being. This antiquity 
 has been the gift of modern science; and the brain 
 of man has been the hour-glass that gave to these 
 regardless sands of Time, running to waste through 
 the dreaming fingers of idle Oblivion, the measure 
 and standard of their own duration. It is the cun- 
 ning of man that has delineated the great dial-plate 
 of the heavens; his mind that looks before and 
 after, and can tell the unwitting stars where they 
 were at any moment of the unmeasured past, where 
 they will be at any moment of the unmeasurable fu- 
 ture. Though he cannot loose the bands of Orion, 
 he can weigh them to the uttermost scruple ; though 
 he cannot bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades, 
 he knows upon what eyes of mortal men they are 
 shed, and at what moment, though by himself un- 
 seen. Shut in his study, he can look at the New 
 Moon with lovers at the Antipodes. If Science have 
 
168 THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 
 
 made men seem ephemeral as midges, she has con- 
 ferred a great benefit on humanity by endowing 
 collective Man with something of that longaeval 
 dignity which she has compelled the individual to 
 renounce. He is no longer the creature of yester- 
 day, but the crowning product and heir of ages so 
 countless as to make Time a sharer in the grandeur 
 of that immensity to which Astronomy has dilated 
 the bounds of Space. And who shall reproach her 
 with having put far away from us the homely and 
 neighborly heaven of unlettered faith, when she 
 has opened such a playground for the outings of 
 speculation, and noted in her guide-book so many 
 spacious inns for the refreshment of the disembod- 
 ied spirit on its travels, so many and so wondrous 
 magnalia for its curiosity and instruction? To me 
 it seems not unreasonable to find a reinforcement of 
 optimism, a renewal of courage and hope, in the 
 modern theory that man has mounted to what he is 
 from the lowest step of potentiality, through toil- 
 some grades of ever-expanding existence, even 
 though it have been by a spiral stairway, mainly 
 dark or dusty, with loopholes at long intervals 
 only, and these granting but a narrow and one-sided 
 view. The protoplasmic germ to which it was in- 
 calculable promotion to become a stomach, has it 
 not, out of the resources with which God had en- 
 dowed it, been able to develop the brain of Darwin, 
 who should write its biography? Even Theology 
 is showing signs that she is getting ready to ex- 
 change a man who fell in Adam for a man risen 
 out of nonentity and still rising through that aspir- 
 
THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 169 
 
 ing virtue in his veins whicli is spurred onwards 
 and upwards by the very inaccessibility of what he 
 sees above him. 
 
 But I have kept Man cooling his heels too long 
 in these antechambers of his larger life. He be- 
 comes more interesting to us, and we are more will- 
 ing to admit his claim of kinship with us, in pro- 
 portion as he has entered upon a larger share of 
 his inheritance. His condition of nonage and ap- 
 prenticeship was unconscionably long; but there 
 was no escape, since it was Nature that had drawn 
 his indentures. Till he had learned to write,, what 
 we seem to know of him is hypothetical merely, 
 and he was dull at his pothooks and trammels. 
 The book which you have before you enables you 
 to see, in brief but siifficient compendium, the ad- 
 vances made by mankind in the varioiis lines of 
 human enterprise and development, which, leading 
 away from a single centre, gradually enlarge the 
 circumference of his activity and the horizon of 
 his intelligent desires and hopes. We begin with 
 Man where our records of him begin, in the rude 
 memorials of himself he has unwittingly left us. 
 Fancy and conjecture may find ample and instruc- 
 tive entertainment if they try to conceive him as he 
 was at first, — a dweller in the natural shelter of 
 caverns, fashioning, on rainy days, spear-heads and 
 arrow-tips of flint, or fishing-hooks of the bones of 
 the very prey that was to be their victim. Perhaps 
 the need of even a natural roof implies that he had 
 already learned, as no other animal has ever learned, 
 to cover nature's waterproof suit with some kind 
 
170 THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 
 
 of clothing. Next, we follow him as he emerges 
 from the isolation of Family to the wider relations 
 of Tribe, Nation, Community, State. Before even 
 the simplest of these latter organizations could be 
 possible, he must have invented language ; and this 
 could have been no improvisation. Indeed, would 
 we conceive how slow his progress must have been, 
 we have only to consider the multitude of inven- 
 tions, like the wheel, the lever, the bow, the sling, 
 every one of which a child now uses — perhaps by 
 hereditary instinct — with as little forethought as 
 if they were natural limbs. Yet all these and 
 countless others waited till a genius came along to 
 make them servants of man ; and surely Nature is 
 sparing of genius. He was a Kepler who first 
 counted the fingers of one hand; he a Galileo who 
 added those of the other, and gave us the decimal 
 system; he a Newton who divined the possibility 
 of numbering his toes also and arriving at the 
 score. By and by another great inventor devised 
 the tally, and property in flocks and herds, the first 
 riches, became secure because numerable and mat- 
 ter of record. Nay, if we consider that every man 
 we meet walking is a miracle (for it is nothing less 
 than this so to evade the law of gravitation as to 
 balance himself on one foot at every step), and that 
 every infant must give two or three years to the 
 acquiring of this art, we shall the more easily rec- 
 oncile ourselves with the prolonged periods of prep- 
 aration and training which our present civilization 
 presupposes. 
 
 Pope has fancied man a pupil of the lower ani- 
 
THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 171 
 
 mals, learning of the little nautilus to sail ; and no 
 doubt it is a fruitful characteristic of man that he 
 is clever enough to take and to profit by those nods 
 and winks that are thrown away upon the blind 
 horses of creation. These, too, — if we are to 
 suppose him to stand in need of them, — he is ca- 
 pable of expanding and perfecting till the original 
 germ be lost in the medley of variation and accre- 
 tion. This skill in emendation, this faculty of im- 
 proving on his models and achievements, is what 
 happily distinguishes him. The bee builds as he 
 began in Eden, — a perfect architect from the first, 
 — only accommodating the structure of his cells to 
 circumstances when he cannot help it. The nau- 
 tilus spreads his cobweb sail as the first navigator 
 of his race spread his. The tradition of the natural 
 caverns in which his ancestor found shelter and 
 warmth may have taught the troglodyte to burrow 
 in cliffs of softer stone; but the first tree under 
 which man sought refuge from a shower must have 
 read him a more convincing lecture on the advan- 
 tages of a permanent roof than any that Vitruvius 
 or Palladio could have furnished him. The first 
 tree-trunk he saw floating downstream might well 
 be his earliest lesson in shipbuilding; the first 
 wooden bowl dropped into the brook by a careless 
 girl might suggest to some master mind the advan- 
 tage of hollowing the log, to give it buoyancy, bal- 
 ance, and capacity. But, from the mere concep- 
 tion of shelter, man was beckoned onwards by the 
 longing to complete and crown use with beauty, 
 till, from the seed of the wattled hovel, sprang at 
 
172 THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 
 
 last, in supreme loveliness, the Parthenon and the 
 Cathedral, in architrave or arch, still filially renew- 
 ing the idealized features of the primitive ancestor. 
 The rude dugout or coracle of the primaeval mar- 
 iner has grown into a palace on the sea, a city on 
 the inconstant billows dancing, that carries its 
 sails and fair winds in its own entrails, and pushes 
 prevailingly against the very breast of the storm. 
 
 Man is the only animal that has given proof of 
 invention in the highest sense, that is, not as a 
 mere fence against the blasts of discomfort, or as 
 a lightener of his drudgery, but as a minister of 
 beauty; the only one who of Nature's chains has 
 made his ornaments, and of her obstacles the step- 
 ping-stones of his advance. Other creatures show, 
 or seem to show, pleasure in bright colors, or sen- 
 sibility to modulated sounds; but only Man has 
 combined and harmonized those into picture and 
 these into music. The eye of the ox is a placid mir- 
 ror of the meadow into which he gazes, unconscious 
 as the dull pool that images the magnificence of 
 sky and mountain or the various grace of growth 
 upon its borders. The eye of man is a window, 
 not to the sense only, but to the soul behind the 
 sense ; it has memory and desire, nor will let him 
 rest till he have reproduced and made permanent 
 some semblance of what engaged his fancy or wak- 
 ened his imagination. Even among cave-dwellers, 
 we find, scratched on the bones from which they 
 had gnawed the flesh, outlines of the mastodon and 
 of a combat of stags, — crude endeavors after art, 
 deeply suggestive, in their intention, of some im- 
 
THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 173 
 
 possible Snyders or Landseer beguiling the im- 
 pulse he could neither stifle nor satisfy. 
 
 Though he cannot create, man reflects the Cre- 
 ative Power through his sense of Form, Order, and 
 Proportion, — the abstractions by which that Power 
 is most vividly manifested. He has the supreme 
 faculty of organization. Multiply the bison in- 
 definitely, and the result is still a herd : multiply 
 man, and he organizes himself, arranging himself, 
 more or less rudely, by some process of moral 
 gravitation, in a form of polity, or groping clum- 
 sily in search thereof ; he cannot long remain mob, 
 even if he would. Other creatures are endowed 
 with that kind of crystallized reason which we call 
 instinct. In the highest types of man alone does 
 reason continue ductile and versatile, enabling him 
 to supplement or multiply his natural organs and 
 powers by artificial contrivances, and thus to real- 
 ize the dreams and fables of his remote progeni- 
 tors. We write no more fairy tales, because the 
 facts of our every-day lives are more full of mar- 
 vel than they. Other creatures have curiosity; 
 but it stops short in the vagueness of wonder, nor 
 pushes on, like that of man, to discovery. Other 
 animals stare; man looks. Many are gregarious, 
 some social, and some — as ants, bees, and beavers 
 — dwell in communities and socialize their labor; 
 man only has devised a society which, imperfect in 
 many ways and wasteful as it is, contains within 
 itself the elements of growth and amelioration. It 
 is a suggestive fact that, within the historic period, 
 no new animal has been tamed to the service or 
 
174 THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 
 
 companionship of man. Only he can record his 
 memory, and so fund his experience for the benefit 
 of his posterity; only he is capable of being bored, 
 — the sharpest spur to enterprise, to action, to the 
 contempt of life. Captaincy among the lower ani- 
 mals means superior strength and the cheap courage 
 that comes of it : among men it means brains, it 
 means, above all, character; and they have con- 
 trived, by making Law supreme, to make all men 
 alike strong. Dogs know when they have done 
 wrong, but their moral standard is the displeasure 
 of their master ; man has invented, or, at any rate, 
 developed, conscience, — the only infallible detec- 
 tive, the only impeccable judge, the only execu- 
 tioner with whom no reprieve avails. The endeavor 
 has been made to distinguish man from the brutes 
 by defining him as the only animal that laughs, 
 that has learned the uses of fire, and what not. 
 We might be tempted to call him the only animal 
 who thinks he is thinking when he is merely rumi- 
 nating. But I conceive his truer and higher dis- 
 tinction to be that he alone has the gift, or, rather, 
 is laid under the ennobling necessity, of conceiv- 
 ing and formulating an ideal; which means that he 
 alone may be the servant and steward of the Divine 
 Beauty. 
 
 In these volumes the reader will find all that he 
 can reasonably wish to know about prehistoric or 
 historic man, and about the floating globe on which 
 he dwells, treated at sufficient length by competent 
 persons, each dealing with that part of the subject 
 to which his special studies had been devoted. 
 
THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 175 
 
 He will learn how far and in what directions man 
 has advanced, how much of his inheritance he has 
 subdued and occupied, and with what results. He 
 will learn what is meant by the familiar phrase 
 that man is "the heir of all the ages," and how 
 nobly exacting are the duties and privileges implied 
 in it. He will observe how certain races have 
 been endowed with special qualities and aptitudes; 
 as, the Greeks for art, in its most widely inclusive 
 sense; the Jews, for commerce and (strange para- 
 dox) for the higher divinations of the soul; the 
 Romans, for civil and military administration; 
 our own, for polity and the planting of colonies. 
 He will trace back astronomy to Chaldaea, theog- 
 ony to Babylonia, and metaphysical speculation to 
 India. In certain directions he will find no ad- 
 vance, as in literature and sculpture, since the 
 Greeks ; in ethics, since the Sermon on the Mount. 
 He will see some races that have been seemingly 
 able to spin a civilization, as the spider his web, 
 out of their own entrails, and yet none that has 
 not borrowed, few which have not a tradition that 
 the seeds of culture were brought to them from 
 abroad. This will lead him to think how large a 
 part commerce must have had in the civilizing 
 process, and that, before commerce was possible, 
 communities must have existed of sufficient dura- 
 tion and stability to produce more than they could 
 consume, and therefore to desire profitable ex- 
 changes. It should be encouraging, then, to see, 
 as we now see, the carrier-doves of commerce 
 spreading their white wings over every ocean and 
 
176 THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 
 
 every land-locked sea. For, if they sometimes 
 bear with them the germs of contagious social evils, 
 they bear also those of good; and we should de- 
 spair of humanity did we not believe that these 
 strike a deeper and more enduring root, till they 
 crowd out their noxious rivals and occupy all the 
 soil. But if the adventurer into strange lands too 
 often carry darkness with him, he seldom fails to 
 bring back light ; for nothing is more certain than 
 that the mind widens with its wider circuit, and is 
 liberalized by contact with various races, religions, 
 and forms of civilization. It was said of old, "Men 
 shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be in- 
 creased." We have a striking instance of this in 
 the Crusaders, who, though they did not realize 
 their dream of permanent conquest, came home, if 
 not more human, at least more cosmopolitan, which 
 is a long stride towards becoming so, and unwit- 
 tingly brought with them the seeds of that freer 
 thinking which slowly conquered for Man that 
 freedom to think which was to emancipate Europe 
 and make America possible. But we should al- 
 ways bear in mind the wise saying of Goethe, that 
 "whatever emancipates our minds without giving 
 us the mastery of ourselves is destructive." And, 
 if Commerce have enriched us in many ways, both 
 spiritually and materially, I cannot let it go with- 
 out a sigh for the sentimental wrong it has uncon- 
 sciously done us in bringing about that prosaic uni- 
 formity in the costume, both of mind and body, 
 which unhappily distinguishes the modern from 
 that ancient world, to print whose obituary, one 
 
THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 111 
 
 might say, was the first employment of Guten- 
 berg's types. 
 
 If the history of the world show us Man slowly 
 rising to a higher conception and more adequate 
 fulfilment of his destiny, it also shows us the sadder 
 spectacle of empires that have perished and noAv 
 lie buried under the decay of their own monuments. 
 Worse than this, it shows us that higher forms of 
 civilization may be overwhelmed and supplanted by 
 lower forms; that some families of men, like the 
 pure negro, are incapable of civilization from their 
 own resources, and relapse into savagery when left 
 to themselves, as in Hayti. Nay, members even 
 of the higher and more self-sufficing races are 
 never beyond danger of this relapse when the 
 wholesome influences and restraints of organized 
 society are withdrawn. Examples of this are only 
 too common; as, in armies after a rout, in great 
 cities under the paralysis of pestilence, and in the 
 mutineers of the Bounty. The last instance sup- 
 plies us also with a consoling illustration of the 
 force of hereditary impulse and the value of char- 
 acter; since the sole survivor, John Adams, was 
 able, with the Bible behind him, to piece together 
 again the fragments of society into a patriarchal 
 community that revived the legend of Arcadia. 
 The fact that civilization is, after all, built on so 
 sandy a foundation as the nature of man, that it 
 is exposed to all the storms that lie in wait for the 
 fortunes of man, should make us more sensible of 
 that duty of unremitting vigilance which is needful 
 for its safeguard. 
 
178 THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 
 
 In casting tlie figure of tlie World's future, 
 many new elements, many disturbing forces, must 
 be taken into account. First of all is Democracy, 
 which, within the memory of men yet living, has 
 assimied almost the privilege of a Law of Nature, 
 and seems to be making constant advances towards 
 universal dominion. Its ideal is to substitute the 
 interest of the many for that of the few as the test 
 of what is wise in polity and administration, and 
 the opinion of the many for that of the few as the 
 rule of conduct in public affairs. That the inter- 
 est of the many is the object of whatever social or- 
 ganization man has hitherto been able to effect 
 seems unquestionable; whether their opinions are 
 so safe a guide as the opinions of the few, and 
 whether it will ever be possible, or wise if possible, 
 to substitute the one for the other in the hegemony 
 of the World, is a question still open for debate. 
 Whether there was ever such a thing as a Social 
 Contract or not, as has been somewhat otiosely 
 discussed, this, at least, is certain, — that the basis 
 of all Society is the putting of the force of all at 
 the disposal of all, by means of some arrangement 
 assented to by all, for the protection of all, and this 
 under certain prescribed forms. This has always 
 been, consciously or unconsciously, the object for 
 which men have striven, and which they have more 
 or less clumsily accomplished. The State — some 
 established Order of Things, under whatever name 
 — has always been, and must always be, the su- 
 premely important thing ; because in it the interests 
 of all are invested, by it the duties of all imposed 
 
THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 179 
 
 and exacted. In point of fact, though it be often 
 strangely overlooked, the claim to any selfish he- 
 reditary privilege because you are born a man is as 
 absurd as the same claim because you are born a 
 noble. In a last analysis, there is but one natural 
 right; and that is the right of superior force. This 
 primary right, having been found unworkable in 
 practice, has been deposited, for the convenience 
 of all, with the State, from which, as the maker, 
 guardian, and executor of Law, and as a common 
 fund for the use of all, the rights of each are de- 
 rived, and man thus made as free as he can be 
 without harm to his neighbor. It was this sur- 
 render of private jurisdiction which made civiliza- 
 tion possible, and keeps it so. The abrogation of 
 the right of private war has done more to secure 
 the rights of man, properly understood, — and, 
 consequently, for his well-being, — than all the 
 theories spun from the brain of the most subtle 
 speculator, who, finding himself cramped by the 
 actual conditions of life, fancies it as easy to make 
 a better world than God intended, as it has been 
 proved difficult to keep in running order the world 
 that man has made out of his fragmentary concep- 
 tion of the divine thought. The great peril of de- 
 mocracy is, that the assertion of private right should 
 be pushed to the obscuring of the superior obliga- 
 tion of public duty. 
 
 The pluralizing in his single person, by the Ed- 
 itor of the Newspaper, of the offices once divided 
 among the Church, the University, and the Courts 
 of Law, is ohe of the most striking phenomena of 
 
180 THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 
 
 modern times in democratized countries, and is 
 calculated to inspire thoughtful men with some 
 distrust. Such pretension to omniscience and to 
 the functions it involves has not been seen since 
 the days of Voltaire, and even he never aspired to 
 anything beyond the privilege of issuing his own 
 private notes and not the bonds on which the credit 
 of the Universe depends. The Church, the Uni- 
 versity, and the Courts taught at least luider the 
 guidance of some extrinsic standard of Authority, 
 or of Experience, or of Tradition, but what may 
 be the outcome of a world edited subjectively every 
 morning is matter of alarming conjecture. Anon- 
 ymousness also evades responsibility. But it is 
 encouraging to note that the higher type of editor 
 is coming every day to a fuller sense of the mean- 
 ing of his many-sided calling, and that the news- 
 paper itself is really beginning to furnish an in- 
 structive epitome of contemporary culture in all its 
 branches, which, if it cannot supply the place of 
 more thorough and special training, may inspire in 
 some an appetite for it, and prevent others from 
 suffering, so much as they otherwise might, by the 
 want of it. Moreover, the power to influence pub- 
 lic opinion is cumulative, gathering slowly but 
 surely to the abler and more scrupulous conductors 
 of the press, and it is observable that Wisdom 
 generally comes to stay, while Error is apt to be 
 but a transitory lodger. 
 
 Another very serious factor in the problem of 
 the future is Socialism. This, it is true, is no 
 novel phenomenon. Its theory, at least, must have 
 
THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 181 
 
 been dimly conceived by the first man who had lit- 
 tle and wanted more, and who found Society guilty 
 of the shortcomings whose cause may have been 
 mainly in himself. Nay, there is dynamite enough 
 in the New T'estament, if illegitimately applied, 
 to blow all our existing institutions to atoms. All 
 well-meaning and humane men sympathize with 
 the aims of Lasalle and Karl Marx. All thought- 
 ful men see well-founded and insuperable difficul- 
 ties in the way of their accomplishment. But the 
 socialism of the closet is a very different thing 
 from that of hordes of unthinking men to whom 
 universal suffrage may give the power of unmaking 
 Order by making Laws. Our federal system gives 
 us a safeguard, however, that is wanting in more 
 centralized governments. Should one State choose 
 to make the experiment of mending its watch by 
 taking out the mainspring, the others can meanwhile 
 look on and take warning by the result. We have 
 already observed a movement towards the intro- 
 duction of socialistic theories into both State and 
 National legislation, though, if History teach any- 
 thing, it teaches that the true function of Govern- 
 ment is the prevention and remedy of evils so far 
 only as these depend on causes within the reach of 
 law, and that it has lost any proper conception of 
 its duty when it becomes a distributor of alms. 
 Timid people dread the insurrection of Bone and 
 Sinew without seeing that unwise concessions to 
 their unreasoned demands, which include the right 
 to revive private war, will lead inevitably to the 
 revolt of Brain, with consequences far more disas- 
 
182 THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 
 
 trous to the liberties so painfully won in all the 
 ages during which man has been visible to us. 
 When men formed their first Society, they instinct- 
 ively recognized, in the Priest, the Lawgiver, or 
 the Great Captain, the supreme fact that Intellect 
 is the divinely appointed lieutenant of God in the 
 government of this World, and in the ordering of 
 man's place in it and of his relations towards it. 
 This viceroy may be deposed, as during the drunk- 
 enness of the French Revolution, but out of the 
 very crime will arise the Avenger. 
 
 It has seemed to some, and those not the least 
 wise of their generation, that the advance of Sci- 
 ence on which we so much plume ourselves was no 
 unmixed good, and that this seemingly gracious 
 benefactress perhaps took away with one hand as 
 much as she gave with the other. We are not yet 
 in a position to compute the results of its influence 
 in modifying human thought and action. That 
 it may be great none doubt who are capable of 
 forming a judgment ; and, if long life were for any 
 reason a desirable thing, I can conceive of none 
 more valid than that it might be prolonged till 
 some of these results could be classed and tabulated. 
 I cannot share their fears who are made unhappy 
 by the foreboding that Science is in some unex- 
 plained way to take from us our sense of spirit- 
 ual things. What she may do is to forbid our 
 vulgarizing them by materialistic conceptions of 
 their nature; and in this she will be serving the 
 best interests of Truth and of mankind also. For 
 it is Man's highest distinction and safeguard that 
 
THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 183 
 
 he cannot if he would rest satisfied till he have 
 pushed to its full circumference whatever fragmen- 
 tary arc of truth he has been able to trace with 
 the compasses of his mind. Give to Science her 
 undisputed prerogative in the realm of matter, and 
 she must become, whether she will or no, the trib- 
 utary of Faith. Inmsibilia enim ipsius [Dei] a 
 creatura mundi per ea quce facta sunt intellecta. 
 Whatever else Science may accomplish, she will 
 never contrive to make all men equally tall in body 
 or mind. By labor-saving expedients she may 
 multiply every man's hands by fifty, but she can 
 never find a substitute for the planning and direct- 
 ing head ; nor, though she abolish space and time, 
 can she endow electricity and vibration with the 
 higher functions of soul. The more she makes one 
 lobe of the brain Aristotelian, so much more will 
 the other intrigue for an invitation to the banquet 
 of Plato. Theology will find out in good time that 
 there is no atheism at once so stupid and so harm- 
 ful as the fancying God to be afraid of any know- 
 ledge with which He has enabled Man to equip 
 himself. Should the doctrines of Natural Selec- 
 tion, Survival of the Fittest, and Heredity be ac- 
 cepted as Laws of Nature, they must profoundly 
 modify the thought of men and, consequently, their 
 action. But we should remember that it is the 
 privilege and distinction of man to mitigate natural 
 laws, and to make them his partners if he cannot 
 make them his servants. Human nature is too ex- 
 pansive a force to be safely bottled up in any sci- 
 entific formula, however incontrovertible. 
 
184 THE PROGRESS OF THE WORLD 
 
 I should be glad to speculate also on the effect 
 of the tendency of population towards great cities; 
 no new thing, but intensified as never before by- 
 increased and increasing ease of locomutation. 
 The evil is intensified by the fact that this migra- 
 tion is recruited much more largely from the help- 
 less than from the energetic class of the rural pop- 
 ulation; and it is not only an evil but a danger 
 where, as with us, suffrage has no precautionary 
 limits. If no remedy be possible, a palliative 
 shovild be sought in whatever will make the coun- 
 try more entertaining; as in village libraries that 
 may turn solitude into society, and in a more thor- 
 ough and intelligent teaching of natural history in 
 our public schools. The ploughman who is also a 
 naturalist runs his furrow through the most inter- 
 esting museum in the world. To discuss the cohe- 
 sive or disruptive forces of Race and of Nationality 
 might tempt me still to linger, but I have kept the 
 reader quite long enough from the book itself. I 
 have barelj?^ touched on several points on which it 
 has roused or quickened thought. So far as the 
 material prosperity of mankind is concerned, the 
 review is by no means discomforting, and as I am 
 one of those who believe that only when the bodily 
 appetites of man are satisfied, does he become first 
 conscious of a spiritual hunger and thirst that de- 
 mand quite other food to appease them, so we may 
 say, with some confidence, sicut patrihus erit Deus 
 nobis. 
 
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